Big Ups to Karl Marx and Angela Davis


The Black family house model has to be the most intimate institution of oppression for Black youth. I’m not being melodramatic with this one; especially, when the house model is regulated by contributions to capital, or money. To speak, to suggest an opinion, to participate in discussion, a young person must invest capital. Chores, labor given value by individual parental capitalist systems, can’t be exchanged for paying light bills. So we see this unfold in the Black family household as the condition by which materials—house ownership, checks and dollar bills—determine consciousness, the existence of a valid perspective. In other words, Black kids get in the attitude of survival and introversion, as opposed to an attitude of construction and communication, due to the house model.

Domination of youthful criticism, and therefore youthful thinking, has been a problem with Black family life for quite some time. My parents and grandparents have not stopped making everything answer to a bill. You disagree with curfew? Where’s your money for rent? Evaluation of an argument presented to the landlord, the parent, comes last; maybe, it will never come. Their position as the only bodies, of the household, interacting with the material world—the world of ComEd, ATT&T, employers, etc.—affords their dominance. The real laborers do not have to listen to you because they own the conditions of voice, a house! We walk with shame, because, ironically, our parents have internalized a structure (Capitalism) that keeps racism, sexism, and classism as one big family.

My generation is the offspring of youth that grew up and forgot the failure of a capitalist Black family house model. It breeds nothing but pretentious nearsightedness and burned bridges. Ultimately, one must wonder how colored people can escape capitalism when they have made it a schematic for family structure. Folks want us, Black youth, to stop filling prison systems and start giving a fuck; and they need a word from a messenger: stop throwing your materialism at us and listen.