Black People Have No Pride: Introduction

People often ask why did all of the progress stop after the 70s? Why did we lose our pride then? How did all of these problems suddenly crop up? It's amazing how Blacks did a 360 from being pro-Black to being what we are today, in such a short period of time. It's not just that we stopped being pro-Black. We lost any and all self-respect that we had.

Is there any other race that belittles itself to the extreme that we do? I don't see white people running around and calling themselves honkies and crackers. Asians don't call themselves chinks. Black people are the only people who use terms that were meant to dehumanize us as if they were badges of honor, or worse, we use them to disparage other black people. We have no problem degrading black women. When Malcolm X said in the 60's that "The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman, the most unprotected person in America is the Black woman, the most neglected person in America is the Black woman." I wonder if he would have thought the Black people would be perpetrators of this in 09'.

Furthermore, we've just stopped caring when people disrespect us. Starting since 2008 with Tropic Thunder, blackface has seen a revival, and this time Black people are laughing right along with the white. We think that our portrayal in Transformers is acceptable. When we laugh at "comedy" such as the Cleveland's and the Madea movies that make a mockery out of black ignorance, the joke is ultimately on us.

I believe that these and the majority of problems in Black America stem from an overall lack of respect for ourselves--it's beyond self-hatred. I don't even think this problem came so much from slavery, but from assimilation into white culture and from adopting white values. I'll be examining this in my next post, but for now, let me know what you think. What was the biggest cause of our overall lack of self-respect?