The majority of brothas and sistas will agree as a whole, our priorities is messed up and not focused on progress. This is due to part of our so-called Black leadership who engaged in ego-reinforcement and operating under a complete selfish agenda. This article is our first attempt to help establish brothas and sistas to understanding our priorities and the path to take towards real progress.
One of the things I see is many of our people are motivated for change but kinda stuck and frustrated. We just don’t know how to get started in the right direction. The other brothas and sistas around us know what needs to be done like create our own jobs, focus on the global economy and reduce negative media programming but don’t know how to move forward. We never had modern Black leadership savvy and sophisticated enough to help guide us and that is why this article is written. Let’s accept that fact right here and right now and agree to move forward.
There are two hierarchies we brothas and sistas should consider to recalibrate our goals and our path to progress and propensity and a life of fulfillment and happiness. The first hierarchy is the Maslow hierarchy of needs which is something the African-American community had tried to do top-to-bottom instead of bottom-to-top. The second hierarchy is the hierarchy of the hustle, how we need to stack paper from creating a foundation from the ground up to the real goal of having money, power and respect.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
I believe the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is pretty valid and a solid theory and proven itself over time and time again. The problem within the African-American community is we have focused too much on the top-tiered of creating a phony sense of self-actualization and esteem instead of focusing on the foundation cores of physiological, safety and love and belonging. Everything negative going around us in the Black community prove this point that we did not lay down the foundation.
We got African-Americans running around with strong egos, strong viewpoints, pride, claims of being independent and full of swagger but ain’t got no capability of getting their own food on their table and making sure their water supply is safe and incapable of creating an environment that encourage true love and belonging. The worst part is a majority of these ego-filled cats don’t even know how to back up what they say and just posture a mean mugging position. What happened to us when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans where we had no basic infrastructure setup to supply ourselves with food, water and shelter and screaming for FEMA to help us is proof-positive we ain’t got our foundation in the African-American community.
Let’s go through the Maslow hierarchy of needs from the bottom to the top as it was meant to be and cover how we brothas and sistas need to progress.
Physiological. These are all the physical things that keep us alive and we would basically die if we didn’t have it. This is food and water and our health and reproduction capabilities. That means learning how to hunt or grow your own food, preserve your own food, have a water testing kit and ability to pull from a man-made water reservoir like a well if natural water is not ready available. It bugs me when someone refers to someone else as a “survivalist” in a snarky tone as if they are a “non-survivalist” and proud of that, somehow. I won’t even go there as a brotha who hear a Black woman say she don’t know how to cook and she think that is funny or cute or a sign of independence.
Safety. We need to feel comfortable in our surrounding meaning we can sleep good at night. Sleeping good at night means we don’t harbor fears and worries. Many of our fears and worries are due to insecurity such as financial insecurity, personal insecurity from crime and violence or outlook insecurity as to not knowing where we going to be at years from now. The way we deal with insecurity is to focus on certainty – truly understand and being honest and real about our current environment and our current surroundings and our current situation. If we are broke, if we live in a crime-infested community, if we got piss-poor tech skills and only speak one language, then we need to be honest about our current situation and then address those matters so we can be more comfortable and feel secure we doing something about it.
Love and Belonging. This is the feeling of being validated by someone and also belonging to a bigger entity than your personal ego. We want people to think we’re special and we feel good knowing they love us and we also have a clique to claim we are part of. Many of us think we have love and belonging and then what we do is lie about it to others, lie about it on Facebook and lie to ourselves when we really feel alone and know we are around a bunch of shallow phonies. For the past 20 years our people have focused on “relationship drama” perpetuated by the likes of Michael Baisden and Tyler Perry. Our people need to go back to fighting for real love, real friendships and real sense of community.
Esteem. When we learn we are actually special individuals driven by an internal purpose God given us to fulfill and have a place for right here and right now, we develop esteem. We don’t brag about who we are to others or try to prove who we are to others. Because we already know who we are to ourselves and that is what matters at the end of the day. What I just stated is nice rhetoric because if we don’t have any of the hierarchies below such as handling our food/water/sex game, being safe and around true love and true belonging, then we are fooling ourselves if we think we have esteem without the previous foundations. Esteem is the result of the lower hierarchies being fulfilled, anything other than that is nothing but a false belief.
Self-Actualization. Once we have all of the lower hierarchies established – doesn’t have to be perfect, but just established and acknowledged we trying to make it happen, then we realize our true relationship with God and realize God gave us the ability to pursue bigger and better things. Many of us believe we can achieve self-actualization being a sellout and end up empty and unfulfilled. Selling out – it doesn’t work that way and when we reach this stage, it’s due to us already proving to ourselves we are well-rounded and ready for whatever. This is the stage many brothas and sistas pretend so hard they are at but ain’t. Only when we establish the foundations can we truly claim this top level of the hierarchy of needs.
Hierarchy of the Hustle
Now, in addition to fulfilling our hierarchy of needs, our people have to establish money, power and respect and make that the goal from now on. None of these fake Black leaders running around are about helping us brothas and sistas stack our paper so as far as I’m concern, screw them. Regardless of these fake Black leaders, we need to be realistic at our current situation and establish a path for brothas and sistas to create wealth to get the money, then get the power and then get the respect knowing we doing for self.
I created a hierarchy of the hustle for us brothas and sistas that is the most realistic path to economic empowerment in our community. We have to start from creating business operations, to fulfilling business operations to leveraging our assets to capital markets. I implore every brotha and sista to try their best to understand what I’m about to lay out because this is the only true model we going to have to pursue to do for self and continue on a path to progress.
E-commerce. Starting e-commerce operations as the foundation hustle takes little capital and requires little resource. The hard work and real work is the ability for brothas and sistas must be willing to learn and take what they learn and put it into action. E-commerce is not only online cataloging; it can be paid/sponsored content or information services. Brothas and sistas should focus on online-based business angles first and foremost because mistakes can be cleaned-up, the workflow can be researched and improved in real-time and profits are usually fast and furious if the e-commerce operation fulfills a real demand and real need. In fact, every child and especially you should know how to build and operate an e-commerce site.
Retailing. Operating a physical store in the 21st century is not for the light-hearted, especially in the Black community. However retailing needs to be established in order to create an economic ecosystem in the Black community to support job creation and civic contribution. This is not optional, retailing is a foundation and we need commercial zones in our communities to create a consumption economy to recycle our money among ourselves better. Understanding e-commerce is important first foundation because retailers will have to work with data and compete with online sites to stay profitable and viable when operating as a brick and mortar business.
Distribution. When we understand what products Black consumers really demand through operating retail stores, then we can intelligently know how to managed those goods and services from a supply chain basis. No offense but Black consumers do not want negative, self-hating media and shallow materialism – that’s what non-Blacks been telling us all these years what we want. That’s why we brothas and sistas have learn what our really people really want and know for sure by serving our customers directly. Black people want consumer goods like any other group, not sports apparel, materialistic luxury and negative media which is what being forced upon us. At that hierarchy, we source products directly from manufacturers to our retailers and setup African-American international hubs in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tokyo, New Delhi, Costa Rica, Accra to ensure we import what our people really need and control the supply chain. Unlike these big box retailing White-flight suburbs, almost every African-American urban metro was originally designed 100 years ago to accommodate distribution channels, trucks and warehouses – we need to take advantage of that.
Production. Once we know how to sell to the consumer and distribute the goods where the demand is at, then we can accurate create our own products and source raw material to assemble products. We build our manufacturing processes and estimate market data collected from the previous hierarchies understanding what to sell and where to distribute it. We can build things by hand first – we can make handmade clothing and assembled material because it will have added value like German engineers hand build the Mercedes AMG engines or British hand building the Rolls Royce. Then we can automate manufacturing processes to establish mass production to start competing with China and other nations and serve our community directly as well as export goods, creating a strong economic base and GDP in our communities. Then when a young brotha want to create their own line of shirts, then they not only have an infrastructure to manufacture but jobs are created and a community develops a local economy.
Securities. Now we got e-commerce web sites, got retail operations, got distribution channels and making our products we have assets that others would like to invest in and we capitalize on that by going public. But do you actually trust those Wall Street financial bigots that been holding us back all this time to actually IPO us and capitalize our success at this stage? I don’t think so and at this stage – f*ck them as we have the money, power and respect to leverage who we are to capital markets. We create our own exchanges and work directly with worldwide investors who have respect for what we built up and got going. We create real African-American self-made mogul titans and powerhouses billionaires and at this point, nobody can’t tell us nothing – we own and we have empires and we got real money, real power and real respect on the worldwide level.
In Order to Move Up Further, Sometimes You Have to Go Back Down to Basics
As of the publish date of this article and the date you read it, all previous ineffectual rhetoric written by anybody claiming to be a Black leader or a Black empowerment is now obsolete and irrelevant. You should no longer respect or acknowledge these characters because of the obvious. We all know why we are in the current recessive state we are in as African-Americans and we now know what we need to do to proceed to recalibrate our people to enjoy prosperity and happiness for ourselves, our community and our future.
The current African-American status quo for some strange reason bypassed establishing all of the foundational hierarchy of needs and ran straight to esteem and self-actualization. This is why we have so many brothas and sistas out here chasing fame and fortune instead of creating a foundation. It is the core of all these talking heads, ineffectual Black leaders and crazed Black nationalists nutjobs. It is also why our urban communities are in extreme decay and deteriorating into open Black-on-Black violence due to not having a foundational structure.
For this reason alone, nobody should be following any Black leader or reading any more Black doctrine because they are all ego-based and have no true foundation – word is born. Us brothas and sistas need to focus on creating our foundations and build up a base so we can have something real to base our esteem and self-actualization upon – that is our mission and what you brothas and sistas really want to do and go from this point on.
As of the publish date of this blog article, all so-called Black leaders and so-called Black empowerment doctrine are considered obsolete and ineffective and I’m declaring this and cats got my back on this. Of course, we ready for whatever these other ego-driven cats are about because we ain’t going to stand for non-progress anymore in our communities. Only cats who based their lives following others and only see to reinforce their ego will continue to support the failed rhetoric of these failed Black leaders – just let these other characters run their mouth and just die off. You and me on the other hand got a real mission to accomplish right here and right now.
Our mission is easy – we need to start on the foundation levels and establish them. See, in order to come up, we have to go down and build out the foundation to support us when we are at the top. That is very hard for any “advanced civilization” to do and the number one reason other great civilizations fail and collapse real hard. Because people of that “advanced civilization” became too “proud” to do foundation work like agriculture and construction. That is work illegal immigrant doing Black folks no matter how much they lie, ain’t willing to do. Illegal immigrants doing foundation work are a clear sign America is not willing to work on our foundation and is the clear writing on the wall of impeding and inevitable economic collapse.
African-Americans are going to have to learn how to create and inspect our own food and water and start eating right, not this fried crap or that junk they serve up in Chicago Black communities that poison the mind and body. We have to create bigger and better than community gardens – that’s a novelty joke. We need to address the food desert problem in our communities and make sure good food is being brought in and we have an understanding on how to eat right to maintain a high quality of health and wellness. Hydroponics and aquaponics comes into the picture at this level as well as creating our own fresh water supply.
In addition, we going to have to focus on creating safe communities to build our base level hustles and empires and I’m not going to publish how we need to deal with Black-on-Black crime – just have to make it happen if you know what I mean. But most important, build real organic relationships where we can respect each other without the involvement of our personal pride and egos. This is our generational mission and what we have to do right now. I don’t think it will take long to establish these foundations and teach our kids these foundations, we just have to get started.
Then when it comes to the hustle for power, all of us need to focus on Internet-based businesses first. Everybody should know how to at least create an e-commerce based business from scratch and make mistakes and be able to get down the basics of processing orders and fulfilling orders and building up a customer base. Doesn’t matter if we are sending invoices or accept credit card payments, we all have to learn this skill. Everybody should know how to run a business and we know the public schools ain’t teaching our kids how to do for self so that means everybody who is Black need to operate an e-commerce site and know how to conduct and complete a financial transaction.
Once we establish the basic foundations then we brothas and sistas know our kids will have something to build upon. Even though our post Civil Rights predecessors in the Black community weren’t ish but talk, ego and grandstanding, the least our current generation of African-Americans can do is have something real for us and our future generation to build upon. That’s our current generation mission and I hope you now realize why Dream and Hustle is focused so much on the basic foundational and easy stuff on this blog even though we are very advanced in technology. We got to get our foundation established before we can do anything real with empowering ourselves, our people and our future. Let’s start doing it for them.