This is a call to action for all my fellow African-American brothers who are in the struggle, working dead end jobs, clocking in and out of the slave plantation day by day, that was constructed by the sick, twisted illusion of the "American Dream".
It seems the African man is always behind in the economic race in global society. Instead of investing, we buy five pairs of Jordans, a pair of rims, and a Rolex. And we probably buy the majority of it with credit cards.
We turn up at the club before we turn a page of a book.
We're the first in line for a deal on some new clothes, but we're nowhere to be seen in the line of a bookstore.
We can recite every single lyric, verbatim, of an ignorant rapper, but we don't know our current credit score.
This is why we're always broke, always the consumer instead of the producer; always the slave, busting our ass on the white man's plantation, fitting into a system that wasn't built for us, yet we barely own any systems ourselves.
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I was reading "The Business of the 21st Century" by Robert Kiyosaki last weekend. In the book, he mentions his well known Cash Flow Quadrant, which illustrates the four different financial quadrants a person can be in:
1. Employee
2. Self-Employed
3. Big Business Owner
4. Investor
How many of us, including myself, can really say that we are big business owners or investors?
The first thing that we as African people have to do is to break illusions that have been systemically built around us and for us.
How many mainstream rappers today actually have a positive message in their lyrics? Yeah, the beat is fire, but the lyrics ruin the song, in my opinion. I decided for the first time in my life to just shut the radio off on my daily commutes in the car. It's been about a month, and honestly, I don't miss today's hip-hop. The message is normally garbage, because it promotes bad habits that are keeping us broke and stupid in the first place. Silence is golden.
How much bullshit do we buy just to look like we are what we aren't?
How many times have we gone begging someone else for a job that could give two shits about hiring us? It's no secret that employers tend to hire their own people first. Everyone besides us seems to understand the importance of creating jobs that can be given to your own people.
The only way to resolve this problem is to educate ourselves on how finance works, how money flows, and how not only to duplicate systems that are already working, but to also create new systems and leverage them into financial assets.
Instead of spending $100 at the club, spend it on books that will teach you how to own the club property.
We will never be able to liberate ourselves if we keep giving a shit about status, good looks, and egocentric reputations that mean absolutely nothing in the end.
The first group that you were ever born into was your family. Lately, I've been thinking about my family, and how I could help them, after all that they've done for me. I've been thinking about what it means to be a man, and one of the things that I discovered is that a man is able to take care of his health, support his own people, and navigate through life with complete confidence in his ability to build assets that create wealth for him.
I don't want my dreams to be enslaved in my mind, I want them to be free in the real world.