Oprah: The real constant gardener

After I put the boy wonder down for a nap, I watched Oprah's Leadership Academy Special. I TIVO'd it on Monday night since I was planning a night out and about. When news of the Academy first broke on a message board that I frequent, the reviews were mixed. Many people were faulting Oprah, not for anything that she was doing, but for her comments about the lack of motivation children in this country have towards their education.

But the differences are astounding in comparison. Children here do take education for granted. In our own community, a good student is often ridiculed and alienated. Been there, been that. While in other ethnic groups, a striving student is heralded and applauded, ours are put down by our own. If that's not eating the mentality you have been spoon fed and embracing it, I don't know what is. At this point, we don't even need Oppressors because we are doing such a fine job of imitating them ourselves.

Our children use rappers as role models. They want to dress like them and live like them, but they fail to realize that without education, most of those rappers are one hit wonders that eventually fall back to the same run down streets they came from. The rappers that rise beyond that and become moguls happen to have educations behind them. They understand marketing. They understand how to manage their money. They understand the principles of business. I wonder why these moguls don't spend their time teaching children those things instead of trying to sell them $80 t-shirts? Well, I guess because they didn't take the Master's level classes and don't understand how their actions today will affect them tomorrow. Perhaps they are too busy buying up slices of the Hamptons to care about reinvesting in their own communities. They are probably too concerned having a weave fitted to care that the distribution line of that hair is now entirely an Asian chain and are too absorbed in their own image to be concerned with the fact that there are no Black owned business in Black neighborhoods anymore. Something has to change somewhere.

I don't fault Asian business owners for seeing an opportunity and taking hold of it with the hair care industry. I fault us for still buying into Eurocentric beauty ideals and demanding those products and not giving a damn who sells them as long as we get them. Just another reason why I don't wear a weave and yet my hair is still down my back and my crown and don't frequent those types of "beauty" supply stores. I don't get manicures unless I can develop a reporte with the stylist. I don't fault an Arab business owner for seeing an opportunity and taking hold of the local corner store markets. I fault us for not keeping our own stores in business, for walking further to bigger stores owned by other people and giving them our dollar, allowing that small mom and pop shop to go under. It starts with a little bit of selling out and ends up with a lost generation.

We have lost something. Our parents were raised by our grandparents who knew what it was like to struggle. They knew what it was all about. They fought so fiercely to have the very things they had and our parents appreciated it. At some point, our parents flipped the switch. The message they gave us was "I sacrificed so you don't have to," and we just kick back and enjoy the fruit of their labor, getting fat, watching MTV, remote in hand and waiting for our dinner to be delivered. I'm guilty as charged, but I recognize it and it disgusts me, so I try to change it. A little bit at a time...where I can.

Oprah is doing the world a great favor by empowering these young girls. She is planting the seeds for a brighter and stronger Africa for generations to come. Do we have that here? Who is doing that here? Maybe we all should be.