That old adage, “bad children are the fault of the parent,” is both tired and untrue.
Just like children, parents are developed, they are cultivated; they are only as good as they are educated, trained, allowed to be. People don’t just have a switch inside them that turns them from children, to adults, to parents; it is all connected. An oppressed people, with inadequate resources, under unrelenting racial attack, who come from a history of unyielding degradation, who have been deprived of all the elements needed to live dignified lives, to develop to their full potential will not have healthy children, adults, elders, or parents. It would be absurd to just put the condition of our children off on the individual parents.
We cannot produce good parents until we produce good communities, we can’t produce communities until we have functional African institutions, we can’t have functional African institutions until we have control over the needed resources to fuel our society and to independently feed and employ ourselves, we can have any of that until we begin to aggressively and actively oppose the global system of White Domination. It’s easier to put the African Condition off on individuals or even individual family units, but that is in no way the source of the problem, nor the ultimate solution.
Bad parenting is a symptom of a larger problem, we need to go to the core of the issue and stop chasing the superficial elements. My dad was a felon, my mother, a drug addict; yet I’m a responsible husband and father. I grew up with dudes who had dutiful parents who afforded them every opportunity, who monitored and guided them; yet they were lost to the streets. Parents are just one element that shape us, but if we don’t control all of the elements, being good parents/or bad ones, is just a crap shoot. We need more stability, and we need to control more than our little homes, our isolated neighborhoods, we need to have power over more than communities or towns; we need nationhood, hell, we need continental control, and a Global African Order.
The way to a unified and free African Diaspora and African continent is incremental, and multi-generationl; but we cannot embark on the path until we me make the decision, as a people (at least 15-20%) of us, to focus on the grand picture, and make bolder moves, together. The only good African parent, is the Revolutionary African who unites with others to reclaim a dignified place in the world for All African Children.
