White Folks Need to Mind their Own business

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]foundational black American women aren't the number one baby mamas in America.

[00:00:05]White women are, but you never hear about that. Right. Right. But anyway, family, let's go ahead and and and close with clarity. The reason this entire conversation started is because of this young lady right here. Okay.

[00:00:18]>> The other people fail to realize is hood prom and baby mama culture are like this. You can't have one without the other. You can't have hood prom or the baby shower stuff or the gender reveals or anything like that without baby mama culture because the reason why the dresses are so extravagant in the cars, in the show, in the presentation is because this is the closest these girls will ever get to being a bride. In the black community, I'm sorry to say it actually. No, I'm not because it's the truth. Especially in lower inome households, there's not as as much of an emphasis on family anymore. These kids aren't getting married. They're going to be baby mamas and baby daddies. So, they're never going to have a wedding.

[00:01:02]These girls are never going to walk down the aisle. Some of them probably will.

[00:01:06]>> Now, you I want you to notice something before I get you notice how when she kind of caught herself when she said lower income households.

[00:01:14]As an attorney, I can tell you the reason she caught herself like that is because she comes from a lower income household. You understand what I'm saying? That's that's where she's coming from. She's she comes from a lower income household. Mostly she can't afford to do the things she's complaining that black people shouldn't do. And that's the problem. Psychology tells you a lot. Body uh movement tells you a lot of the way people's eyes move.

[00:01:40]That's where it comes from. But nevertheless, let's go ahead and close this with clarity. The reason this entire conversation started is because that little white lady decided to look at black American culture, specifically foundational black American culture, a specific celebration, and explain it to us like she was some kind of expert. She saw young black people dressed beautifully, families showing up, communities gathering, cameras rolling, cars pulling up. Instead of instead of seeing pride, effort, ceremony, and joy, she call it hood prom in a derogatory way. She tried to put a diagnosis as though it was dysfunction. And that's not the issue. Not prom, not dresses, not sendoffs, not money. The issue is jealousy of outsiders who keep walking into black American life, purposely misinterpreting what they're looking at and then trying to teach us what our own culture means.

[00:02:42]She wasn't asking questions. She wasn't assigning motives uh uh uh taking black visibility and reframing it that as if it was pathology. That's all she was doing. So, let's explain what black American culture actually is.

[00:02:57]Foundational black American culture is not some accidental collection of slang, music, food, clothes, dances, and celebrations. It is a survival system.

[00:03:09]Culture properly understood is not just about aesthetics. It I it it it's accumulated intelligence of a whole group of people over time. It's how a group remembers. It's how you adapt.

[00:03:25]It's how you protect. It is I I it's how you organize. It's it's how you transmit values from one generation to the next.

[00:03:33]It's how it's it's disciplined behaviors. It's how you absorb trauma so you can keep pushing. It's how you convert suffering into identity. Culture is a protective mechanism for a people.

[00:03:46]It's a strategic framework. It is a survival blueprint.

[00:03:52]It's a system that gives people cohesion, distinction, institutions, and competitive longevity and uh longevity in a hostile environment like the one we had to develop in in this racial cast system here in the United States. And that's the key. See, black American culture was not created in a comfortable zone. It wasn't engineered, it it was engineered under pressure. It came out of enslavement. It came out of uh degragation degra deg degradation and it came out of Jim Crow laws. It came out of racial terrorism. It came from convict leasing and where people could be snatched up and thrown away in prison. Same thing you see happening right now. It came from redlinining and segregated schools. It came from underfunded neighborhoods. It came from mass incarceration.

[00:04:41]It came from constant exclusion and and constant surveillance. And that means when outsiders look at black American culture, specifically foundational black American culture, they may want to reduce it to being ghetto, allowed, or excessive, or irresponsible.

[00:05:01]But that's because they're not doing an analysis. They're they're they're revealing their ignorance. Soul food, for example, is not just food, was it?

[00:05:10]It's the memory of scarcity.

[00:05:13]It's the memory of scraps. Chicken feet, hog malls, pigtail, chitlins, which is the inner guts of a pig.

[00:05:27]Collard greens.

[00:05:31]These are the leftovers. This is a throwaway. This is the refues. It was given to black people and we created cuisine with it.

[00:05:41]We had ritual. We had flavor. We had community. We had continuity.

[00:05:46]Black music wasn't just entertainment.

[00:05:51]Why you think they call it soul?

[00:05:55]Black music is an oral archive of our people, our spirituals, our blues, our gospel, our jazz, our soul, our rock and roll, our R&B, our hip-hop. It's grief turned into sound. It's protest turned into rhythm. It's memory turned into a global language. Black fashion is not vanity.

[00:06:18]It's an aesthetic. It's resistance.

[00:06:21]is taking what the world marks as poor, as southern, as working class or as disposable and imposing beauty status and swag on it black church, not just church. Is it?

[00:06:37]It was a command center. It was a schoolhouse. It was a political base. It was it was a communications network and the moral engine of our liberation family.

[00:06:49]how we talk or what they call uh African-American vernacular English or slang or whatever Ebonics, man.

[00:06:58]They try to dismiss it as ignorance.

[00:07:01]It's a code.

[00:07:03]It's rhythm. It's humor. It's compression. It's double meaning. It's social intelligence.

[00:07:11]It's cultural memory.

[00:07:15]You understand?

[00:07:19]That's not random expressions. These are survival technologies. This is how we survive.

[00:07:32]That's why hood prom matters.

[00:07:36]Prom in this context is not merely a dance. It's not merely an event sponsored by the school. It's public recognition of completion.

[00:07:46]It's a community saying, "Baby, you made it." And that matters because black people were were once legally denied literacy. We were denied equal schooling. We denied full access to public education. And then and then underfunded even when the schools existed. So when black a black child reaches the end of that high school, that celebration, it carries historical weight. It it's not just fabric and makeup or cars and photos and music.

[00:08:15]It's people celebrating access to education after generations of exclusion. Let me remind you that generation X is the first fully free black generation that this country has ever had.

[00:08:32]We are still fresh out of oppression.

[00:08:40]So you see a family celebrating survival through a system that was never designed to treat our children as as precious. It it it's it's a public reward to inspire other black children to want a prom for themselves, to inspire them to graduate from high school.

[00:08:57]So the outfits matter, the sendoffs matter, the community shows up because the celebration is not just about looking good. It's about recognizing what's good for us as a people and what it took to get there.

[00:09:15]It inspires other parents to stick with it.

[00:09:20]Keep supporting your child. Keep waking them up at 6:30 in the morning. Keep making them do their homework. It's hard.

[00:09:27]You know that. All the parents out there waking children up, getting them out to bed, making sure they had clothes and being here on time and being there and going to those function and showing them support. That also inspires other other inspires parents cuz they get to say one day my son or daughter is going to be at the prom and I can be the parent standing next to him.

[00:09:50]But see, here's the thing that that's what culture does. That's a culture that is functional and it has its priorities straight. We reward education. We reward freedom.

[00:10:05]And the same logic AC applies across black American life. When black families celebrate someone coming home from prison, outsiders, you see that as prison like that dude got an armed robbery charge. He been locked down 15 years.

[00:10:20]But see, black people understand the weight of freedom in a country where the criminal justice system has historically been used to control black codes uh uh black bodies through black codes.

[00:10:31]Whether we talking about slavery to the convict leasing to vagrancy laws to mass incarceration, when black people hold homecoming services, even funerals, people from the outside think, "Oh man, the funeral shouldn't be joyful.

[00:10:47]This is disrespectful to the dead.

[00:10:50]But black people understand that mourning and the celebration can coexist because death, suffering, and endurance and faith and release have always been linked to our historical consciousness.

[00:11:01]Death does not represent punishment for people who came up out of slavery where they had to deal with abuse day in and day out and mental abuse and social abuse and and sexual abuse and degragation. Re death represents freedom.

[00:11:18]That's why it was celebratory.

[00:11:21]When black people hold cookouts, we ain't seen our families in years. Some people you ain't seen since the 1980s and 90s.

[00:11:30]The music is loud. We barbecuing.

[00:11:34]Our families were once sold apart, leased apart, m had forced to migrate apart to escape the Jim Crow South, incarcerated apart, and still found ways to gather, remember, and reconnect and rebuild. These celebrations are are aren't evidence of a broken value system. They're evidence of a historically informed one. So, when someone from the outside of the culture looks at all of that and says, "Well, why are they doing this?" The answer is simple. because it belongs to us.

[00:12:05]Because it means something to us.

[00:12:07]Because we don't need permission to celebrate our milestones and we don't need permission to celebrate in our own language with our own style and our own cultural framework. The problem is not that black people celebrate. The problem is that black joy makes bigots uncomfortable when it when when when it refuses to be small and quiet and apologetic or easy to control.

[00:12:33]What are y'all celebrating for? We doing everything we can to keep y'all down.

[00:12:38]See, black celebration gets reframed as a problem because some people can't process black joy as joy. A prom becomes a hood prom or a ghetto prom is really what they want to say. A graduation becomes wasted priorities. A homecoming uh becomes glorifying the wrong things.

[00:12:56]A funeral becomes too celebratory. A cookout becomes ghetto. And the event I is is not the issue. The interpretation is the issue. That's why we have such joyous celebrations in the black church.

[00:13:11]That's why we're singing and dancing and jumping and shouting and clapping and testifying and crying and laughing and dressing up in our best clothes. It wasn't just about emotion. But white folk don't understand that. This wasn't about uh uh uh uh theatrics. You know what Sunday represented during slavery?

[00:13:30]Huh? Sunday. What does Sunday represent during slavery? It represented your day off.

[00:13:37]That's what it represented during slavery. Even well after slavery.

[00:13:43]Sunday was the only day black people had any real break from labor. It ain't only time they could kind of get away from white folk. So the church became more than worship. It became a release. It was like a vacation.

[00:13:57]It was the one place where we could stand up and be upright. We could speak as loud as we want. We can sing.

[00:14:05]We can move our bodies. We can express our pain. And we were doing it in the name of the Lord. But Master didn't see that. But we were releasing.

[00:14:15]You understand? You know how good it is to feel to shout. You got white people paying somebody so they can go shout in the woods and and liberate white just screaming at trees. You see that? You see these [clears throat] video, white women just screaming AT YOU, [screaming] SCREAMING AT TREES.

[00:14:32]You understand the music, the call and response be black folk able to get together more than one at a time. They wouldn't even let us congregate more than two people at a time. So now we all could get together with our whole family and call and response. The whole people shouting and dressing up, feeling good.

[00:14:53]You see, this was us taking a small window of time and turning it into a full cultural sanctuary. And for people denying control over their own bodies and their own labor and their own families and their own future, Sunday worship became a place where they we could reclaim dignity and beauty and emotion and community and our humanity.

[00:15:16]And the singing and the jumping and the shouting and the holland was not just random. It was a release of all that stress and fear and grief and pressure and anxiety people had carried all week.

[00:15:29]It was also preparation for the coming days because it wasn't going to get no easier on Monday.

[00:15:34]They had to go back out there in them fields and back out there with that uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh damn uh uh uh white man on the horse with with with with the damn whip back out there pulling hundreds of pound labor labor.

[00:15:54]This is back out there.

[00:15:58]Church gave them strength. Church refilled them. church reminded them that they were human beings and still loved and still connected and still alive. It wasn't just church. It was a freedom practice.

[00:16:10]And see, you can't understand black culture by standing on the outside. Cuz see, from the outside, somebody might see people dressing up for church. Why they dressed like that? Why they overj sing aloud and shouting and crying and dancing and thinking, oh, that's just a motion or a performance.

[00:16:26]But from the inside of the culture, you understand the history behind it. The gathering itself was freedom, even if only for a few hours.

[00:16:35]And that's why outsiders misread things like hood prom, which they want to call ghetto prom or black funerals or the cookouts or the church services or the homecomings from prison or why we see they they see expression.

[00:16:53]And I'm going to let y'all go soon. I know I'm long with it, but this is important. Okay? They see us in how we express ourselves, but they don't understand the history that created it.

[00:17:03]They can't feel the history. They don't have that soul. It's not written in their DNA like it is ours. And when you don't understand that history, you end up calling what you perceive to be a culture as dysfunctional. And then there's the deeper cultural question.

[00:17:20]Where did that black American culture come from?

[00:17:24]And I've gone over this over and over again. It it where did it come from? It came from a forced separation from Africa.

[00:17:35]Forced proximity to a racial cast system here in America both in the north and the south for and the west everywhere. Forced adaptation under antilack racism and and and and a and a power structure that wanted to exploit and use see foundation. I want to be clear with something. I want y'all to understand something. Foundational black American culture is a distinct culture. It's a distinct people. We had our ethnogenesis here.

[00:18:06]We are we are an amalgamation of many different ethnicities or racial phenotypes. We can go from my color to pitch black and still have the same foundational black American ethnicity or lineage.

[00:18:22]See, it's not this what this is not it's not simply African culture preserved intact. It's it's it's not a defective version of African culture either. Nor is it an offshoot of African culture. Nor is it an offshoot of white culture.

[00:18:41]It is a new world culture formed in America under American racial conditions in an American environment, American uh uh uh uh cultural environment because of a uniquely American struggle.

[00:18:56]Many behaves associate associated with black Americans were shaped not by biology, not by some pure African inheritance, but by environment, by class, region, southern culture, historical proximity to to to to poor white people. Even the important point is this. Culture is not race and behavior. It's not blood.

[00:19:22]Culture is learned. It's culture evolves. Culture adapts. Black Americans were stripped of whatever tribe we were, language, homeland, kinship system, and we still created a culture powerful enough to shape the modern world. Th that's why the insult that we have no culture collapses under its own ignorance. FBA foundational black Americans don't lack culture. We created one of the most influential cultures on the earth that produced things like jazz and blues and gospel and rock and roll and R&B and hip hop and street wear and sneaker culture and African uh vernac uh AfricanAmerican vernacular uh vernacular uh uh uh speech.

[00:20:09]We create the whole civil rights movement, how to deal with oppression.

[00:20:13]We create a a language.

[00:20:16]We we we we came up with protest strate struggle uh strategies that are copied.

[00:20:22]Black church politics, soul food, comedy, dance, athletic style, global cool, global swagger, global masculinity, global femininity. All of that has our thumbrint on it. It has our DNA print on it, our DNA embedded in it. People all across the world imitate the sound, the walk, the language, the rhythm, the clothes, the jokes, the confidence, the pain, the joy. They imitated in Tokyo, London, Lagos, Paris, Toronto, Soul, Johannesburg, Sa Paulo, everywhere, but then they turn around and pretend not to know where it came from. And this is why we have to be careful with these outsiders who who claim expertise over black American life. Whether it's a white tick tocker commenting on what she perceives to be a hood prom and what's dysfunctional or an African or Caribbean immigrant or African uh African uh uh American even one of these teachers at these Ivy League universities criticizing foundational black American culture.

[00:21:36]They don't know.

[00:21:39]They wouldn't know. They didn't grow up in the culture. Even there's a lot of FBA that don't know. They so far removed from foundational black American culture. They people moved to Chicago or Detroit or New York back in the 1950s and60s. They ain't been down here. They don't know.

[00:21:59]They they don't even have relatives that they they got a little white girlfriend and they don't know their mama white, daddy white, whatever. They don't know.

[00:22:08]But yet they're teaching in these universities. They're on the internet proclaiming that they do know.

[00:22:14]They don't know the culture.

[00:22:19]Cuz see, there's plenty of people who say we don't have a culture along with these online critics and these so-called academics. They even talk about how dysfunctional it is. And the pattern is the same. They want access to the culture without accountability to the people who made it. They want the music.

[00:22:36]They want the history. They they want the slang without the struggle. They want to dissect it. They want to write books about it. They want to make uh stories about it and movies about it.

[00:22:45]They want the style without the scars.

[00:22:47]They want the creativity without the context. They want to mock it while it while it's black and then rename it when it becomes profitable and then sell it back to the world as is something they discovered. They mock it, they shame it, they rename it, they steal it, they profit from it.

[00:23:07]It's the same game repeated over and over again. Let me say this, man.

[00:23:12]Let me say this very clearly.

[00:23:16]Leave black people alone.

[00:23:22]Let me say that again. Leave black people alone.

[00:23:27]And that's not saying black culture can't be studied. That's not saying black culture is beyond critique. Is is we have our issues.

[00:23:37]And I'm not saying that black people are part perfect, but because you need to leave us alone because you're not qualified to enter into a culture you don't understand while ignoring the conditions that produce it. You're not allowed to strip it of of its history and then pronounce yourself qualified to dismount diagnose it. You're not qualified to look at our survival rituals and call them pathological. You're not qualified to look at joy and call it irresponsibility. You are not qualified to look at a community celebrating a child's milestone and pretend you're seeing cultural collapse. What you're seeing is people who were never supposed to make it making it anyway.

[00:24:29]So foundational black American culture is the culture of people who had to build family after family separation.

[00:24:38]We had faith after spiritual violence.

[00:24:41]We had music after forced silence, education after anti-iteracy laws, beauty after dehumanization, humor after trauma, institutions after exclusion, and joy after centuries of being told joy was not ours to claim.

[00:24:59]That's not primitive.

[00:25:02]It's not random. And it damn sure ain't just hood. It is sophisticated because it had to be.

[00:25:10]It's expressive because silence was imposed on us. It is loud because eraser required that we speak up very loud and these people go get rid of us. It's stylish because dignity had to be asserted publicly.

[00:25:25]It is communal because isolation was used as a weapon against us. It's celebratory because survival itself became sacred. So the people who keep trying to explain back to us who we are to ourselves, stop.

[00:25:44]Study before you speak or don't study at all. Listen before you judge or just shut up. Learn the history before you diagnose the behavior. And if you can't do that, then simply leave black people alone. Leave our children alone. Leave our celebrations alone. Leave our men alone. Leave our women alone. leave our culture alone because what you call excess we know as memory. What you call dysfunction we know as adaptation. What you call a hood prom we know as a young person standing at the edge of adulthood surrounded by family covered in style carrying the weight of ancestors who were denied their very education. That child is now completed and that's not a problem.

[00:26:32]That's black culture doing exactly what it was built to do. Survive, affirm, protect, remember, adapt, and win.

[00:26:44]This is Uncle D. And as I always said this time, I'm out.