Man to Man (A Conversation Between a Father & Son): A Conversation Between a Father & Son

By Jay Baisden

"Stand Your Ground!" "Stop & Frisk!" Imagine if you will, you have a son who is about to come of age. It's time for you to have "The Talk" with him, what do you say to him?
Well, typically you would tell him the basics like; "Shave with the grain, not against it", or "Look a man in the eyes when you shake his hand", or you might give him tips on how
to be financially frugal. But, what if your son was Black in America? How would that conversation go? Recent events would indicate that it's "Open Season" on young Black
men in America. Therefore, wouldn't our conversations with our sons have to be different? Even the Mayor of NYC admitted that "The Talk" he would have to have with his
"Black son" would have to be different. Exactly what would you say that would properly equip your young Black son to
deal with what will be dealt to him? Given the fact that Black men are the most hated and persecuted beings on the planet, are you even equipped to have that talk with your
Black son and properly send him off into this world? This book, "Man to Man (A Conversation Between A Father & Son)" tackles a lot of those issues a young Black man would
need to arm himself with to be prepared to deal with living in a society that by and large does not want or accept him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483697765

Jay Baisden

Jay Baisden was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1961. He attended Clara Barton and Thomas Jefferson High Schools. From there, he went on to study Accounting and Business Management at CUNY Tech in Brooklyn, NY, Averett University in Danville, VA, Delaware Tech in Wilmington, DE and the CITE school in Philadelphia, PA. He also played Varsity Basketball for CUNY Tech and Averett University and has played in tournaments in Puerto Rico as well as all over the United States. After leaving college, Jay spent many years in the Auto business, in Sales and Management, as well as in Real Estate. Through his different life's experiences, Jay has traveled all over the United States and has experienced many different cultures of people and life lessons. Those life lessons are the premise of his book, "Man to Man (A Conversation between A Father & Son)", which he plans to pass on to his son when he becomes of age and is ready for the world.

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by Jay Baisden.

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4836-9775-8

Softcover 978-1-4836-9774-1

Ebook 978-1-4836-9776-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 10/14/2013

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Contents

The Projects (PJ’s)

The Average Black Woman

The (Break Up A) Family Court

Black Men

10 of the Most Shocking Crimes Ever Committed In America

Black Men & Guns

How Do We Get There?

Mother Africa

Networking

Our Churches

Just Go To The Library

Racism

The Police

Wealth

Giving Back (To the Community)

Selling Out

The Military

Drugs

Juneteenth

The Census

President Barack Obama

White People

Foreword

None of us are perfect. In fact, I have committed more than a few of the infractions I speak about within these passages. The problem becomes when we never seem to get it, when we continue to do the same things over and over, again and again, and expect different results. According to Albert Einstein, this is insanity defined.

As a Black Man, my observations are Black specific. Yes, Whites do screw up (Boy, do they!) They commit heinous acts, and have throughout time have committed the most gruesome acts against humanity and nature that have ever been committed or thought of. They dominate the welfare rolls, but it’s considered a Black phenomenon. Yes, I Get it.

One of my biggest regrets in life is that I did not Get it soon enough.

My Second biggest regret is that I had my son about 20 years too late. I’m starting this venture exactly one day before my 51st birthday. My son turned 6yrs old one month ago. Now, as men, we expect the day to come when our sons finally beat us in that game when we are in our 40’s. I’ll be in my 60’s (If I’m still able to run by then. I’m hardly able to keep up with him now!!)

So, this book is about things I’ve observed as my son is about to go out into this world and what I’ll have to warn/teach him about. Sad to say, it’s a little more than just about The Birds & the Bees and the ABC’s nowadays. No, to grow up in today’s society, one has to be part Einstein, part Ninja, part Chemist, part Economist, part Yo MTV, have a little Estrogen & Testosterone, and be sane. (Poor kid!)

So, here’s what I’ve observed, so far. I’m going to make some people very angry, and some people will agree. Then again, these are My Personal Observations in preparation for that talk I’ll eventually have with My Son.

Chapter 1

The Projects (PJ’s)

When we think of the Projects, we immediately think of Blacks & Latino’s living in usually high-rise, low-standard buildings. Think of the opening credits on the sitcom Good Times and you’ll get the picture.

However, the Projects were not originally built for Blacks. We were actually the last group to inhabit the Projects. Here’s a synopsis and a little history of the Ghetto and how the Projects were formed:

Background and Summary

A ghetto is a section of a city occupied by a minority group who lives there as a result of social, economic or legal pressure. Many times, a particular marginalized group is made to relocate or stay in of a certain area of town that is usually less desirable or adequate than others. The word was originally used to refer to the Venetian Ghetto in Venice, Italy, in which Jews were required to live. The corresponding German term was Judengasse. The term ghetto came into widespread use during World War II to refer to Nazi ghettos that Nazis forced certain groups of people to live in.

The term ghetto is now commonly used to refer to any poverty-stricken urban area. In the U.S., rural ghetto is used to describe mobile home parks, farm labor housing tracts, and Indian reservations. Urban neighborhoods where Hispanic immigrants settled in the late 20th century, called barrios, are comparable to ghettos, because most immigrants are clustered in culturally isolated enclaves.

Ghettos are formed in three ways. First, they are created by ports of entry where minorities, especially immigrant minority populations, voluntarily choose to live near people of their own ethnicity. Second, ghettos form when the majority uses compulsion, typically violence, hostility or legal barriers, to force minorities into particular areas. And lastly, it happens when the majority race in a society is upwardly mobile, thereby willing and able to move about and pay more than the minority to live with others of the majority ethnicity and in better areas.

Ghetto is also used figuratively, in a classist manner, to indicate geographic areas with a concentration of any type of person, for example a gay ghetto or student ghetto. The word, in recent years, has also been used in slang as an adjective to describe how city-like, thug-like or low-class something or someone is.

Etymologies suggested for the word ghetto derive from getto, the Italian term for casting, as in a caste system. The Greek word ghetonia means neighborhood, while the Italian borghetto means small neighborhood. The Hebrew word get literally means a bill of divorce. A common explanation is that the word is derived for the campo gheto, an area encased by iron foundries in Venice in the 14th and 15th centuries that was used for cooling slag where Jews were forced to reside.

In the United States

The Irish immigrants of the 19th century were the first ethnic group to form urban areas in America’s cities, followed by Italians and Poles, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Irish and Eastern European immigrants in the early 20th century were actually more segregated than Blacks of that era. They lived almost as segregated as Blacks who reside in ghettos do today. Because there was no official housing segregation against most European immigrants, the second or third generation families were able to relocate to better housing in the suburbs after World War II if possible. Other ethnic ghettos in New York were the Lower East Side in Manhattan, which was predominantly Jewish until the 1950s, and Spanish Harlem, which was home to a large Puerto Rican community dating back to the 1930s. Little Italys, communities that Italian immigrants started sprang up across the country in almost every major city, and were predominantly Italian ghettos.

In the United States, between the abolition of slavery and the passing of the civil rights laws of the 1960s, discriminatory mores, which were sometimes codified in law, as a result of redlining often forced urban Blacks to live in specific urban neighborhoods, which became known as ghettos. Due to segregation laws in existence in many US states until the Civil Rights Movement and the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Black people of all economic levels had to live in ghettos in such places as southeast San Diego, south Phoenix, north Philadelphia and areas of Detroit,

How the Ghetto Became Black

Black and White segregation was, for a time, decreasing fairly consistently, but for most metropolitan areas and cities in the beginning of the 21st century, segregation is on the increase again. Despite these pervasive patterns, many changes for individual areas are small. Racial segregation in the U.S. is most pronounced in the housing market. Although people of different race may work together, they are still very unlikely to live in integrated neighborhoods. This pattern differs only by a small degree depending on different metropolitan areas. Thirty years after the Civil Rights Movement, the nation remains a residentially-segregated society in which Blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and Whites inhabit neighborhoods of vastly different quality. Cities throughout history have contained distinct ethnic districts. But rarely have they been as isolated and impoverished as the Black neighborhoods found in cities today. Racial segregation found in ghettos can lead to social, economic and political tensions.

Due to segregated conditions and widespread poverty, some Black neighborhoods States have been called ghettos. The use of this term is controversial and, depending on the context, offensive. Most of these neighborhoods are in northeastern cities where masses of Black people moved to during what was considered the Great Migration. In the period from 1914 to 1950 over a million Blacks moved out of the rural, southern states to escape the pervasive racism of the South, to seek employment opportunities in Northern urban environments, where they could pursue what was widely perceived to be a better life. Black ghettos started out well, economically. In the Midwest, ghettos were built on the high wages from manufacturing jobs. The Black ghettos of the mid-20th century appear to have been much less dangerous than those of today. However, segregation increased most in those cities with the greatest Black internal immigration. Whites felt threatened by larger influxes of Blacks in their neighborhoods so racism grew, and many White people began to look for an out.

White Flight

In the years after World War II, many White-Americans, because they were upwardly mobile and had to capital to remove themselves, moved away from the inner-cities to newer suburban communities. White Flight occurred, in part, as a response to Black people moving into White urban neighborhoods, and it was a significant cause in the spread of urban neighborhood decay. Discriminatory practices, especially those intended to preserve emerging White suburbs, restricted the ability of non-Whites to move from inner-cities to suburbs, even when some were able to afford it. In contrast to this, the same period in history marked a massive suburban expansion available primarily to Whites of both wealthy and working class backgrounds, facilitated through highway construction and the availability of federally subsidized home mortgages. It was easier for families to buy new homes in the suburbs—but not to rent apartments in cities.

In response to the influx of Black people from the South, banks, insurance companies and businesses began redlining that is denying or increasing the cost of services, such as banking, insurance, access to jobs, access to health care, or even supermarket prices, to residents in certain, often racially determined, areas. The most devastating form of redlining, and the most common use of the term, refers to mortgage discrimination. Data on house prices and attitudes toward integration suggest that in mid-20th century, segregation was a product of collective actions taken by Whites to exclude Blacks from White neighborhoods. This meant that ethnic minorities could secure mortgage loans only in certain areas, and it resulted in a large increase in the residential racial segregation and urban decay in the country. The creation of new highways, in some cases, divided and isolated Black neighborhoods from goods and services, many times within industrial corridors. For example, Birmingham, Ala.’s interstate highway system attempted to maintain the racial boundaries that had been established by the city’s 1926 racial zoning law. The construction of interstate highways that went right through predominantly-Black neighborhoods led to significant population loss in those neighborhoods and is associated with an increase in neighborhood racial segregation. By 1990, the legal barriers enforcing segregation had been replaced by decentralized racism, where Whites would pay more than Blacks to live in predominantly-White areas. Some social scientists suggest that the historical processes of suburbanization and decentralization are instances of White privilege that have contributed to contemporary patterns of environmental racism.

Despite mainstream America’s use of the term ghetto to signify a poor, culturally or racially-homogenous urban area, those living in the area often used it to signify something positive. The Black ghettos did not always contain dilapidated houses and deteriorating projects, nor were all of its residents poverty-stricken. For many Blacks, the ghetto was home. It was a place representing authentic blackness and a feeling, passion or emotion derived from having to rise above the struggle and suffering of being Black in America. Langston Hughes relays in his poem Negro Ghetto and The Heart of Harlem: The buildings in Harlem are brick and stone/And the streets are long and wide, /But Harlem’s much more than these alone, /Harlem is what’s inside. Playwright August Wilson used the term ghetto in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Fences, both of which draw upon the author’s experience growing up in the Hill district of Pittsburgh, a Black ghetto.

Ghetto Life

Chinatowns, where many Chinese immigrants settled from the 1850s onward in Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Oakland, Calif., Los Angeles and other major coastal cities, originated as racially segregated enclaves. Most Chinese-Americans no longer reside in those urban sections. But Asian immigration since the 1970s repopulated Chinatowns, even though Little Italys, Chinatowns and other ethnic neighborhoods have become more middle-class in recent times. Many have become tourist attractions in their own right.

In the Southwest, Mexican-Americans have lived in historically low-income urban areas known as barrios, which means neighborhood in Spanish, located in cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Antonio, Texas, and have struggled with issues of crime, drugs, youth gangs and family breakdown. However, middle-class and college-educated Hispanics moved out of barrios for the suburbs. The barrios continually thrived by the large influx of immigration from Mexico, this largely due to the explosion of the Hispanic population in the late 20th century. The majority of residents in these urban barrios are immigrants directly from the Central and Latin Americas.

Some ghettos have been known as vibrant cultural centers, for example, the late 19th century Paris, or Harlem, N.Y. in the 1920s and 1930s. Many Black artists and musicians, such as Notorious B.I.G., John Lee Hooker, Tupac Shakur, Nina Simone and Cab Calloway were born and raised in ghettos, and much of their music comes from their own experiences and life in those neighborhoods or their own experiences with desegregation, for example, Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam, John Lee Hooker’s Rent Blues, or Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five’s The Message all tell of the woes but also the die-hard loyalty that came with living in the ghetto. The 1970s sitcom Good Times was modeled after life in the Cabrini-Green housing projects of Chicago. The show portrays a Black ghetto family that always triumphs over adversity, but it has been criticized for painting too rosy a picture of how the ghetto really was.

In the United States and Britain, the word ghetto is often glorified in popular culture and sometimes used as an adjective to describe a certain way of dressing, speaking and behaving. Like the pejorative terms redneck, white trash and tightwad, there’s a new meaning for ghetto that may describe one’s frugal buying habits that are opposite of the middle and upper-classes’. In common lingo, it may also be used to describe a place or object that is poorly maintained or badly put together, and can be commonly heard in phrases like, that’s so ghetto, almost signifying something is trashy. However, sometimes ghetto may be used in a positive sense to portray something that is cool, ‘hood or rebellious. (1)

So as you can see, regardless of how the media would like you to think, the Projects weren’t always necessarily a Black thing, but a socio-economic thing.

Why did I start out by talking about the Projects? Because it’s where I started and it’s where I do not want my son to end up. I grew up in the Projects and I know full well of the sorrow and decay of the Projects.

If one has to end up living in the Projects, it’s a sign that all else has gone wrong and this is a last resort. However, the fact that one can grow from a child to an adult in those same Projects means that the parent has failed or just simply given up or given in to whatever the situation was that put them there in the first place.

If you are ever in a situation that causes you to have to live in the Projects, your only objective should be to get out of the Projects. However, too many of us develop what is called a Project mentality where we