Suicide is Painless:The Crisis of Black Male Suicide

You had to be shocked or else feel a sense of revulsion after hearing the news of the Abraham K. Biggs, Jr. suicide, reported Sunday, November 23,2008. If not, then I suggest you immediately detoxify from your Play Station and Xbox and stop playing Grand Theft Auto; because like the others who watched Biggs kill himself, you have a major problem.
If you didn’t hear about the story, these are the facts: Biggs took an overdose of pills while broadcasting streaming live on the website Justin.tv. This tragedy gets uglier, as hundreds, watching by webcam, urged him to take more drugs, while others debated whether he had taken enough.
The Biggs self-immolation generated 1,379 related articles on the Internet. Protests ensued, as many felt the caldron call to push for Internet censorship. Even comparisons were being made between Biggs and Kitty Genovese, a woman who was also a victim of a violent ending, stabbed to death in Queens,New York, 44 years ago while onlookers did nothing to stop the brutal attack. Psychologists have named this effect: the Kitty Genovese syndrome.

I think psychologists, social scientists, and other mental health professionals might be on to something in making a case between the webcam viewers who egged on an obviously troubled Biggs, and the neighborhood that heard Ms. Genovese’s incessant screams for help and did nothing.

As it relates to the crisis of black male suicide, our society is no better than the rapacious cyberspace peeping toms who watched a human being kill himself. As a matter of fact, we might be judged worse. Statistics provided by the Florida A&M University’s counseling services tell us that suicide is the third leading cause of death among black youth, after homicides and accidents.

According to Florida A&M, a firearm is the primary weapon used in 65 percent of all black male suicides between the ages of 15 and 25.

What is lost in this disturbing story is how a major mental health crisis is growing in the black community and nobody seems to care. In the last 20 years, suicide rates among young black men between the ages of 15 and 19 increased a whopping 114 percent. You wonder if this problem existed among young white males, someone would be calling for a major congressional hearing to urge Congress to pass legislation to fund suicide prevention programs for this “important ethnic group.”

However, the ignorance of this crisis is not just the sole responsibility of white America. The black community needs to step up to plate and take responsibility for this crisis. Like the AIDS pandemic, suicide is slaying “the young, gifted and black,” while we deny in spirit the critical need to address this issue.

Mental disorder and depression are viewed as signs of weakness in the black community. Counseling is eschewed like annual physicals. Furthermore, it doesn’t help that a mere 2.3 percent of all psychiatrists in the United States are African American.

So what can be done to intelligently combat this growing nihilism among our youth? Dr. Alvin Poussaint suggests the first thing to do is to become acquainted with the signs leading to potential suicide:
• Irritability
• Changes in appetite and sleep habits
• Chronic fatigue
• Social withdrawal
• Lingering sadness

If these signs exist for a noticeable period of time, ask a mental health professional to diagnose the problem. It’s better to be safe than sorry. This is a crisis that is too critical to ignore.
If you need further information contact suicide prevention, you could be saving the future of a community that is on the verge of destruction.

Cure For Post election Madness

Now that the election is over, I can take a deep breath, relax and get away from the incessant, addictive news Babel which had my wife screaming at the TV like she was at a prize fight. Not only do I no longer have to hear my wife’s rants, but also the loud supercilious war of words articulated by talking heads and political pundits that, when you get really down to it, are just as dumb as the rest of us.
After this election chaos, my mind returns to those halcyon days of my childhood, when I didn’t have to worry about who would be the next president of the United States.
During the presidential campaign, I saw a spoof of Obama that had me laughing like crazy. It was on the cover of Mad magazine. I remember being introduced to this publication by my late uncle Chet. My uncle was a Mad magazine fanatic.
I used to be haunted by images of Alfred E. Newman, that gap-toothed, goofy-grinning icon all over my aunt and uncles’ home.
Seeing that Mad magazine cover boy had me thinking what Howdy Doody would look like if he were on crack.
The Obama satire brought me back to the days when humor was far removed from political and racial connotations. One could tell a joke and not be crucified before the press and the court of public opinion.
So if you are bored and suffering post-traumatic election disorder, let Alfred E. Obama tickle you out of election brain fatigue.
Long live Mad magazine.

Obama Win= History

389 years after our African Ancestors came to these American shores in chains. 232 years after the American Revolution. 145 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. 54 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, which ended legalized segregation. 45 years after the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. And 40 years after the assassinations of both Robert Kennedy and Dr. King, America has done what no one thought could ever happen in their lifetime: elected its first African American president.
Who would have imagined Barack Obama would become the leader of the free world?
Who could imagine that a man of color would be known as “the most powerful person on the planet?”
As I heard the news, I desperately tried to hold back my tears; but to no avail, as the levees of my soul broke like the levees in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina. I cried like a baby hungry for his mother’s milk. I could not believe the election of an African American was possible, or even a reality in my lifetime.
Now I can tell my children without fear or hesitation, that you can be whatever you want to be —even the president of the United States of America.
Let us keep the new president in our thoughts and prayers as he leads our nation to the change we all desperately need. Check out the transition website at Change.

Go Ahead Sister Cooper!

If you ever needed inspiration and motivation to vote in this very paramount presidential election, look no further than to an 106 year old woman of substance and style named Ann Nixon Cooper.
I saw her yesterday on the CNN weekend interview with host Don Lemon. My heart, was as the old folks in church would say, was "Strangely moved.”
Mrs. Cooper was born in Shelbyville, Tennessee, 1902; which was 39 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and 37 years after the 13th Amendment, which made slavery illegal in the United States of America.
Ann Nixon Cooper is said to have known the giants of American history who are not only considered great African Americans, but great Americans period. Such notable’s like W.E.B. Dubois, E. Franklin Frazier, Benjamin Mays, and John Hope Franklin, were part of Ann Nixon Cooper’s social network.
If you lived as long as Mrs. Cooper, you’ve seen the slow but steady transformation of America into a nation that has nearly achieved its ideal of “liberty and justice for all.”
That’s why this story of a woman excited about voting for the first president of color is so powerful.
Just in case you might have forgotten, America was not always a pleasant country that respected and protected the rights of African Americans. Mrs. Cooper lived through the years between Jim Crow Segregation and Civil Rights. For her to live to see the potential next president of America to be a Black Man, is tribute on how far our nation has come.
Her story must inspire those of us who stand on the shoulders of her suffering and resilience.

While viewing Mrs. Cooper’s story, I thought about my late grandmother Mrs. Sallie Mitchell, born 1915 in Greenville County, South Carolina. Like Ann Nixon Cooper,she grew up in the times of Jim Crow. When she was alive, she told me stories about the “old south.” It was her hands callous through picking cotton and cleaning floors on the “other side of town,” which gave me spending money while I attended Oakwood University in Huntsville, Alabama

When November 4th comes around, I’m going to cast a vote in her memory and in the memory of others who did not live to see this day like Ann Nixon Cooper.

Vote or Die

As of this writing ,there are twenty-seven days to the presidential election. While the latest Gallop polls have Obama ahead, nothing is to be taken for granted. In light of the nightmare presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, Americans must be vigilant more then ever.Words like election protection,voter purging, and pole security should alert us to the potential of voter disenfranchisement.
In light of these realities, there is a website you should check out. Steal back your vote is an informative website that empowers voter's to avoid the potential pitfalls that might result in disenfranchisement.
For a small donation, one a can receive in comic book fashion, information that"aggressively investigates the Hanky-panky Republicans have already road-tested in the primaries to steal your vote in November."
I think it's worth checking out. Don't you?

Christian Scott: A Lion in A Hurricane

New Orleans, the birth place of Jazz, has produced, arguably, the greatest trumpet players that ever graced the history of America’s version of classical music. Such notables from the Crescent city would make a Jazz enthusiast rise from the dead: Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Wynton Marsalis, Al Hirt, and Terence Blanchard—to name just a few.
Well, New Orleans has done it again with the latest Jazz phenom : Christian Scott
I first encountered this music prodigy, reading an article in Jazz Times (September’08), about New Jazz Visionaries. Shortly afterward, I purchased Scott’s latest CD: Anthem. Listening to Anthem gave me a feeling I haven’t had listening to Jazz in a long while. The best way I can describe it, is like this— it was Miles Déjà vu.
Personally, I longed to have some Jazz figure capture the spirit of rebellion in their music like Miles Davis. I mean as far as I’m concerned, if you going to be a successful Jazz artist you’re going to have to have at least two elements: creativity and defiance.
Christian Scott captures both of these qualities brilliantly .On the Anthem CD, Scott’s trumpet blows a sound that invokes images of a young Cassius Clay, aka Muhammad Ali, speaking with poetic brilliance—truth to power— to those who back in the day, were threaten by Ali’s intelligence and manhood.
Christian Scott has given resurrection life to Jazz again. It’s Jazz with an attitude: angry, arrogant, iconoclastic, and political. Christian Scott has also shown his maverick spirit; merging Jazz with Hip-Hop; by adding a member of X-Clan, Bother J, on the final song —Anthem (post Diluvial Adaptation) — a eulogy that captures the psycho-social reality of Katrina and beyond.
I can imagine some Jazz purists would see Scott’s cross-breeding of Hip-Hop and Jazz as blasphemy—a transmogrification of sound—like they did when Miles merged psychedelic rock and Funk with Hard Bop.
However, Jazz purists need not worry; Scott has plenty on the Anthem CD for them to celebrate.
The young man has not forgotten his roots. I think you be satisfied and excited as I was to hear the swing of a young lion blowing in the power of a New Orleans hurricane.

From G's To Gallantry

Last Sunday, I was engaged in my usual, sometimes typical, lazy-day sporting event: channel surfing. During this period of relaxation, I came across a program I had been viewing since its premiere.
The program is called From G's to Gents. From G’s to Gents is a MTV reality series conceived by Jamie Foxx that pitches the idea that 14 gangsters would be willing to change their lives and become gentlemen. Hosted by Fonzworth Bentley, the self-styled gentlemen’s gentlemen of hip-hop, From G’s to Gents is in my opinion, an exemplary lesson on meeting the psychosocial needs of urban manhood.
As fate would have it, I watched the final program where the winner was chosen to become a bona fide member of Bentley’s "Gentlemen’s" club. I was beyond amazed to see transformation from such men who called themselves The Truth, Pretty Ricky, D-boy, and J Boogie.
The winner, of the right to join the "Gentlemen’s Club," was Creepa, a roughneck, who came from an unpleasant place called Miami Gardens, Fla. This young “boy from the hood,” dressed in a $1,000 suit, gave a heartfelt speech which testified of his conversion.
Creepa had been completely indoctrinated in the Fonzworth Bentley school of etiquette. Creepa was so committed to secure the title of "Gentleman," he surrendered his braids for a clean-cut look, and threw away his "gold grill,"( gold teeth ), just to show how serious he was about this achievement.

When Fonzworth announced that he was the winner (a guy named Shotta was the other finalist), Thaddeus aka Creepa broke down and cried on the shoulders of his mentor.

I must confess, I cried too.

I cried, because Fonzworth Bentley is a hero. That’s right, a hero. When the male role models of some inner city youth are: gangster’s, ballers, rappers etc, here is a man doing it the right way,making class, manners and proper parlance attractive to young men who are stereotypically not associated with such things.

I cried, because I saw the emptiness of the “gangster lifestyle” in the willingness of a small group of roughnecks willing to leave a life that brings no positive returns.

I cried, because G’s To Gents showed me that anyone can be successful if given the proper mentorship and guidance. And more than anything, inspite of the ongoing diatribe on the state of urban youth in America, mentorship is the key, in my thinking, that can stem the tide of nihilism in the ‘hood.

Finally, I cried, because From G’s To Gents should have been on BET.

In The House,
KJ