every day i'm hustlin'

I’ve been doing a little research lately. Especially since I have wasted too much valuable blog space talking about the fatuous shit fools do. Namely black men in the entertainment industry – particularly hip hop stars. Not all, but enough to call them out for the feculent stupidity the perversely purport to be reflective of being real. Check this out: At the University of Michigan, the 2005 entering freshman class included 443 African American students. At Iowa State University, the 2005 entering freshman class had 311 African American students. The University of Kansas had 152 African American Freshmen enroll this past Fall. Also, this past academic year, at the University of Washington, there were 118 black freshmen in a class of nearly 5,000. This represented the lowest number since 1999 and was even less than when they first started letting African Americans attend the University of Washington. Lastly, among the University of Colorado’s 30,000 students there are fewer than 450 African-Americans inthe freshman class.

It took me a while just to find some of these schools. The information is somewhat hard to get since many school only list aggregate data for all undergraduates by ethnicity. But none the less, we can see that there is a problem here not to mention more than 70 percent of new students in freshmen class that are African American are women. This mean that African American males are not going to college. I wonder why this is the case? Strike that I know why. We focus so much on material things that we are not taught any more that the only real material is hard work and what we can do with our minds. I remember my folks telling me it was important to study and learn to read because a long time back in the days of slavery, one was killed or maimed for doing such.

We need to reinforce as best we can the importance of education. I remember when I got my PHD and went back to the cut, and told my boys that I had a PhD. they said “who would give you a phd, nigga you a mephis nigga.” I had to tell them that I earned it and still they eventually believed me but said “they don’t want to give no nigga like you a PHD.” I knew what they meant. Like they were saying I was to well respected and had a history of dirt, for any white institution to award me a doctorate for I was just the kind of person their system was designed to destroy - just like my boys saw themselves. I learned of this first hand when I was one of 3 African American Male professor level faculty at the Emory university Rollins School of Public Health out of more than 400. Our success as a community depends on education belive it or not and not hustling, selling drugs, how man dames we fuck, or who makes our watches or the kind or rims we have on our cars. We must do this to expose the world of the diversity within our community such to successful deal with the challenges that confront our community.



If we don’t, then there will be no diverse work force, nor future leaders to represent us or worse, no professionals (physicians, Lawyers or what have you) coming back to serve our needs in our neighborhoods because other folks wont. They may exploit the economic potential but they wont be focusing own the needs of the community as we do because they will not be of that community. So folks, give me a hand and lets start promoting this war we are in that seems to like for us as people, and especially as young men of African descent, to seek internment in a correctional facility more so than in a school or university. I guess until then, every day I will be hustling.