By Doni Glover, Publisher
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I Am Black Wall Street
Unapologetically Black: Doni Glover Autobiography
Thursdays at Midnight on WEAA 88.9 FM
(RANDALLSTOWN – June 16, 2022) – I love how we show up for a party. We do it better than anybody else. At the drop of a dime, but we prefer time to get our outfits together! We look good. We smell good. We feel good. Shit! We are good! “You can’t tell me nothing”, sings Kanye.
You name the hottest venue and we’ve been there. The swankest get-togethers by the most in-crowd dude in the game, oh yeah. We are there! We know the spot. We even know the manager.
What? We work hard and so, when we get a chance to go out, we are not going to miss it for anything.
And it really doesn’t matter where a person lives. Lyft and Uber settle any transportation challenges with the tap of a finger. COVID got everybody all jacked-up, so, what the hell? We’re going out tonight and have a ball!
Meanwhile, as we’re getting our all-white outfits together, our schools and our streets are off the hook. Funerals have been normalized as dirt bike riders run loose and we turn our heads or worse yet, we applaud it. And who can blame them?
We haven’t seen new recreation centers. We see a couple of new schools but they are so far away that our kids don’t seem to attend them like before. Bike lanes got North Avenue piled up with traffic as a whole lane has been devoted to imaginary bikers. Somebody has a vision for my community and it doesn’t seem to include or involve me or my input.
I wonder if that topic might come up at the all-white party. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve partied with the best of them, but while we are partying it up, life, as we know it for Black people in Baltimore, is shrinking.
I get moving to Owings Mills. What I don’t get is abandoning Grandma’s house. I get moving to the county for the perception of better schools, but if we didn’t go to PTA meetings when we lived in the city, what changes when we move to the county?
My point is that the struggle hasn’t stopped just because we’re doing better financially. We may have the finer accouterments of life today, but we can never fail to forget the struggle it took for us to get here as a people and what efforts it will take to keep it. If we haven’t noticed, there is a strong anti-Black and anti-brown movement afoot by right-wingers across this country who will even scale the walls of the Capital to get their way.
There can be 1,000 more mass shootings in America, God forbid, but you can bet all of the tea in China that they are not giving up their machine guns. Why? Because of America’s original sin. You see, many people feel guilty. Why? Because many help perpetuate these diabolical/systematic/institutional attacks on Black people still today – from redlining to credit checks to insurance rates to flat-out discrimination. Why? Fear and greed and the inability to love.
That’s what I hope to talk about at the next all-white party. I swear I do.
But I know. I’m way too serious.
Yep! The fact that 1 in 8 students in the Baltimore City Public School System had their grades changed is no reason to be alarmed. Right now, “E’rybody in the club getting’ tipsy!”
On a positive note, kudos to the concerned citizens of Baltimore County who showed their support for Dr. Darryl Williams, the county school superintendent. Huge props to Tony Basemore and Dr. Cheryl Pasteur for their priceless efforts to represent our people. THANK YOU!