Thirsty Slave Masters R Us Is Closed 4 Business! Your Hospitality Has NOT Been Appreciated

I admire Doc Rivers and his story is full of experiences about struggle, hard work, professionalism and success in a way, that perhaps will never be experienced by younger generations in quite the same. Doc Rivers comes from a generation where integration was not a starting point and Separate But Equal was just how things were, and it is that old time culture so comfortably accepted by blacks and whites that needs to be GONE. I'm not criticizing success and survival -- who would even see this essay if not for the often strong and sometimes silent leaders who have shepherded us through far larger storms of much greater danger. 

But the culture of racial awareness is full with the victim blaming sentiment of agonizing "I didn't do my job." as Doc Rivers says. Honorable to the last he heaps a huge burden upon himself requiring of himself a behavior type that our masters would never presume to attach to themselves. So often in black culture we're taught "No matter what They do, YOU have to be above all that. You have to ignore the hurdles and work out to succeed. Nobody wants to hear you complaining!" 

And god forbid you reserve your righteous anger to even one, meaningful time to point out a flagrant, habitual pattern of vitriol and you'll be told from peers, authorities and underlings alike  that YOU are the source of the problem not the outrages that are endured under some crazy narcissist.

Particularly for men and women of Doc Rivers generation and older the key to success has often been silence and unfortunate complicity to the social regime that was without doubt more powerful than they were individually. However mass protest through solidarity has brought sweeping changes before. Now we know. The culture of I Can Succeed Even In The House of Mine Enemy is disturbingly harmful and somewhat masochistic even. Why as black people do we still teach our sons and daughters - our peers of the same generation even -- "Don't let it bother you. You just do your job and right will turn out right" when it isn't always true? This headspace has forced good, sane, strong successful black men and women to stay in jobs under the command of morally reprehensible individuals for too long. 

Sometimes there's more at stake than a paycheck, title and social status. Sometimes you have to walk away. Because when management declares that the "beatings will continue until morale improves" you shouldn't really expect that your interests will be served by merely your maintainance of higher purpose. Tolerance of harmful behavior and the crazy cognitive dissonance of a delusional oligarch is capable of destroying individuals materially and spiritually and destroyed individuals become societies with grave wounds and handicaps. This kind of  harmful behavior that so many black people have taught and been taught to endure is, in its own way, as insidious as the strength in numbers  that remain among the old school, hardcore, name-calling, unrepentantly conscious slave master types who still rule America.

the culture of Don't Complain Just Succeed is some bullshit. It's because no one complained that Donald Sterling is still sitting up as the longest tenured owner. Complaining and forcing change won't win you love perhaps-- not even from you own (when was the last time you ever heard Michael Jordan EVER speak on this type subject?) But it can win progress. Complain about  intolerance until the subject is a dead horse. Dead horses don't ride no rodeos and racist old men are not running plantations no more regardless of how some folk continue to delude themselves.

Nobody's trying to shop at Thirsty Slave Masters R Us anymore, it  is not acceptable not even if you hear differently from someone of your own skin color or gender, from someone human at all. That old time religion is dead and the saints it worshipped gotta be shut down. 

Racism is kinda old, for real. Honestly I just feel sorry for him that he feels that way about African American people--- Matt Kemp