AB is busy fighting for his professional life this week, billing 12-14 hour days for a d-bag customer, staying in a 3rd rate hotel down by the river, and subsisting on Red Bull and endless bowls of Honey Bunches of Oats. I have a deadline to reach by EoW… or else. Let’s just say that blogging, while therapeutic and all that good stuff, is not high on my list of stuff to do right now. It beez like that sometimes.
I hope you guys understand. I’m sure you do.
It’s still technically the holidays, because when I left home my neighbors still had their Christmas lights not just up, but still ON. Although it seems pretty triflin’, maybe this is typical suburban behavior, so that to me says Christmas. And Christmas to me says fruitcakes. And you know what fruitcakes say… Regifting (and diarrhea).
If you folks enjoy these fine posts as much as you occasionally claim to, buy a damn shirt or mug or something cause I just might really, really, really need the money very soon.
With no further adieu, The AverageBro Rewind.
Channelling Your Inner Nigga™ – My magnum opus of bloggdom, a masterpiece which came waay too far ahead of this blog’s popularity curve, and still has a puzzling, big fat ZERO comments. Go read this, and for the love of all things precious, leave a comment.
The AverageBro Broken English Hall of Shame – AB’s list of not-quite-slang, but far from King’s English terms he’d love to see disappear.
AverageBro Is A SellOut – Did you know AB.com has it’s own store chock full of cool stuff you can buy to support
a Jamba Juice and iTunes habitthe starvin’ chill’rens in A-ka-fra? Buy some stuff and make the world a better place. If things on the Day Job keep up at this rate, AB just might need to proceeds to pay his mortgage.Take The AverageBro Challenge™ – Real talk. Read it, and do something.
Enough Is Enough Better Stay Off Debra Lee’s Petunias - The often imitated, yet seldom duplicated BET post that sparked a million internet copycats and swagger jacks.
‘Could Mr. Right Be White?’ - The AP’s Assault on Black Marriage – Because mindless chatter about interracial dating is always Blogger Gold™, and because the article’s author ripped me a new one somewhere in the comments. Also, my first AB CyberStalker staked her claim here. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the same person as the AP reporter, so let’s just say I touched a nerve or six with this one.
Enjoy the show, folks. And pray for focus, steadfastness, and a stable Oracle database for your boy. I need every break I can cop between now and Friday.
[It's the holidays, which probably means you guys aren't working, much less checking blogs. So, in the spirit of Christmas, AB.com is re-gifting some of the posts that took AB from an obscure office worker with a blog to an obscure office worker with an award winning blog in less than 6 months. Plus, you get added DVD Commentary!]
If there’s ever a post that I’ve written that I wished more people read and commented on, it would be the August post More Black Men Are Dying In B’More Than Baghdad…. Yawn.
Black on black crime is definitely the biggest problem facing our community. Murda Has Been The Case since the Reaganomics fueled crack epidemics of the mid-80′s, and while things slowed down a bit during Clinton’s 8 years (mostly because Negros were being locked up), that proved to be little more than a temporary illusion.
The past 8 years of Bush Two have bought murderback to the tune of an 8,000/year clip. It’s amazing that we can ship thousands of soldiers and billions of dollars halfway across the world to fatten the coffers of defense contractors fight a senseless war, while black men kill each other like a PS3 game on the daily.
Equally puzzling: nobody seems to care much. While we’ll load up in buses to go defend a 6-on-1 beatdown, the daily carnage that rips the heart out of out communities goes on with nary a protest.
I don’t pretend to have the answers to all this, but that doesn’t mean you and I can’t do anything to help. I advocate working with kids, whether via coaching youth sports, tutoring, or mentoring, largely because I feel like most adults can’t be helped. If there’s any change that can be made, it’s at a 1-to-1 level with kids no later than middle school, while they can still be kept in check with threats of physical harm they’ll still listen. As a mentor/tutor and youth bball coach, i practice what I preach.
Do you see the results of your work immediately? No. Can you control the parents and the home environment that the kids return to? No. But can you be a small part of the solution as opposed to continually jibberjabbering about the problem? I do believe so.
I just hope more of Black America realizes that we all have an obligation to help out, especially if we’ve “made it out” or been fortunate enough to have never “been in”. Change doesn’t happen quickly, but it also doesn’t happen when you’re not doing anything to help.
Peep The Series:
More Black Men Are Dying In B’More Than Baghdad…. Yawn.
[It's the holidays, which probably means you guys aren't working, much less checking blogs. So, in the spirit of Christmas, AB.com is re-gifting some of the posts that took AB from an obscure office worker with a blog to an obscure office worker with an award winning blog in less than 6 months. Plus, you get added DVD Commentary!]
If there’s ever a post that I’ve written that I wished more people read and commented on, it would be the August post More Black Men Are Dying In B’More Than Baghdad…. Yawn.
Black on black crime is definitely the biggest problem facing our community. Murda Has Been The Case since the Reaganomics fueled crack epidemics of the mid-80′s, and while things slowed down a bit during Clinton’s 8 years (mostly because Negros were being locked up), that proved to be little more than a temporary illusion.
The past 8 years of Bush Two have bought murderback to the tune of an 8,000/year clip. It’s amazing that we can ship thousands of soldiers and billions of dollars halfway across the world to fatten the coffers of defense contractors fight a senseless war, while black men kill each other like a PS3 game on the daily.
Equally puzzling: nobody seems to care much. While we’ll load up in buses to go defend a 6-on-1 beatdown, the daily carnage that rips the heart out of out communities goes on with nary a protest.
I don’t pretend to have the answers to all this, but that doesn’t mean you and I can’t do anything to help. I advocate working with kids, whether via coaching youth sports, tutoring, or mentoring, largely because I feel like most adults can’t be helped. If there’s any change that can be made, it’s at a 1-to-1 level with kids no later than middle school, while they can still be kept in check with threats of physical harm they’ll still listen. As a mentor/tutor and youth bball coach, i practice what I preach.
Do you see the results of your work immediately? No. Can you control the parents and the home environment that the kids return to? No. But can you be a small part of the solution as opposed to continually jibberjabbering about the problem? I do believe so.
I just hope more of Black America realizes that we all have an obligation to help out, especially if we’ve “made it out” or been fortunate enough to have never “been in”. Change doesn’t happen quickly, but it also doesn’t happen when you’re not doing anything to help.
Peep The Series:
More Black Men Are Dying In B’More Than Baghdad…. Yawn.
[It's the holidays, which probably means you guys aren't working, much less checking blogs. So, in the spirit of Christmas, AB.com is re-gifting some of the posts that took AB from an obscure office worker with a blog to an obscure office worker with an award winning blog in less than 6 months. Plus, you get added DVD Commentary!]
I’ve been a frequent critic of BET on this blog, but life is seldom all black and black, so I can also acknowledge when they get it right, although this seldom happens.
To that effect, here’s just a sprinkling of the many BET-centric posts that put AB.com on the map this year.
Peep The Series:
The 3rd Annual Festival of Negro Nonsense (BET Hip Hop Awards) Recap
Maybe Debra Lee Was Right After All
Better Programming? Don’t BET On It: The Sequel
BET Sucks and Enough Is Enough! Protest: Revisited
[It's the holidays, which probably means you guys aren't working, much less checking blogs. So, in the spirit of Christmas, AB.com is re-gifting some of the posts that took AB from an obscure office worker with a blog to an obscure office worker with an award winning blog in less than 6 months. Plus, you get added DVD Commentary!]
Blogs can accomplish many goals. Some are here to purely entertain, which is fine of course. Others, educate, which is necessary. I try to swing both angles here at AB.com, because I think balance is always a must.
To that effect, one thing I like doing whenever possible is dispelling commonly held myths, which I refer to sometimes as Grand Hu$tles. There’s so much bad information out there, that I never want to add to that problem. When this blog first started, that meant a crapload of links in every post, because I was darn near obsessed with not spreading misinformation. This proved cannibalistic, because it usually moved traffic away from my site, which is never a good thing. So, over time I’ve wised up and kept links to a minimum.
Still, some of my favorite posts have been those clearing up urban legends and assorted hu$tles. Here’s just a few.
Peep The Series:
Non-Urban Dictates, Tavis, Tom, and Other Tales of Urban Lore
Are There Really More Black Men In Jail Than Yale!?!?
Multi-Level Marketing is a Grand Hu$tle
[It's the holidays, which probably means you guys aren't working, much less checking blogs. So, in the spirit of Christmas, AB.com is re-gifting some of the posts that took AB from an obscure office worker with a blog to an obscure office worker with an award winning blog in less than 6 months. Plus, you get added DVD Commentary!]
A few months back, my wife had a particularly bad incident at a local grocery store, and called to tell me about it. I wasn’t in the midst of a great day myself, so this ended up being blog material, in the form of the very controversial post, The Welfare Mother In the Mercedes Benz (aka: F**k Giant Food). The post gained some steam around les Internetes, even landing on a few conservative political sites, uplifted as an example of why the welfare system doesn’t work (WTH?). I won’t even bother regurgitating the story, I think you just have to read it to understand.
In retrospect, I made some mistakes in the post. I perhaps made it too personal by mentioning too much about my wife, her car, and our home. Some commenters clearly took offense with this, lobbing insults at my wife (for being pampered), me (for being too materialistic and bourgeois), and even the baby (for needing organic food). There was a somewhat surprising pattern to the comments, it seemed to be that men agreed that they’d be equally pissed if their wives were treated like that, while women thought my wife and I were being too snooty.
I think that by focusing too much on my wife’s accomplishments and appearance (particularly her looks), I painted what many saw as an elitist portrait of your typical welfare recipient, by implying that my wife should in no way be mistaken for one. I’m pretty sure this is what undermined my overall point, which was that nobody should be assumed to be one. Again, live and learn.
Many of you have asked what happened since then. I simply forgot to provide a followup before now, but long story short, the store manager (a black woman) called and issued an apology, acknowledging that the store policy wasn’t being consistently enforced. Instead, some cashiers did so when they chose, and this certainly could be seen as biased. However, it was a store policy, and would not be altered. My wife accepted her apology, but we haven’t returned to the store. Turns out another store, just down the street, sells the babyfood for less anyway. Call it even.
I do hope the overall point of ‘not just letting stuff slide’ got through, but I can understand why it didn’t, given how I rolled out the story. Again, rookie mistake, but I still hope you can take that one to heart.
After all, whether you say anything or not, you’re still sending a message.
Just in case you have no idea what this is all about, peep the original post and its followup comments.
The Welfare Mother In the Mercedes Benz (aka: F**k Giant Food)
[It's the holidays, which probably means you guys aren't working, much less checking blogs. So, in the spirit of Christmas, AB.com is re-gifting some of the posts that took AB from an obscure office worker with a blog to an obscure office worker with an award winning blog in less than 6 months. Plus, you get added DVD Commentary!]
When the Jena Six story began gaining momentum around the blogosphere earlier this year, something about the whole thing just rubbed me the wrong way. While I certainly agreed that the sentence levied against the six young men was unfair (murder? c’mon.), something also said it was a little silly to have thousands marching for an incident so trivial in the grand scheme of things.
My AverageBro Blogs Live! From Jena, LA post was a ground breaker, because it amounted to a career best day of hits (2,500!) and also marked the first time my blog was being picked up by bigger sites. At the time, it also accounted for a record number of comments, and it also is when I coined the now much-copied phrase DriveBy Activism. If there’s any single post that “put me on the map”, this would be the one.
The next day, I followed up with Jena Six: The Day After, which in retrospect was a mistake. I made a rookie blogger faux pas by taking comments too personally and launched into a defensive “you don’t know me” stance that probably undermined my point, as AverageSibling told me repeatedly. I guess I also realized that if I was going to keep lobbing criticism out there, I’d better be willing to take the hit. Lesson learned.
I still stand by everything said that day: Yes, Jena was indeed a travesty of justice, but so are the 8,000 black men killed each year, mostly by other brothers. While this is indeed protested, it’s always on a small scale, and only temporary at best. And of course, the media doesn’t cover these things.
But if the only way we can come together and rally is when white people commit a crime against blacks, while ignoring our own self-imposed ills, it’s no wonder we stay losin’.
Peep the Jena Series:
AverageBro Blogs Live! From Jena, LA
Those Jena Six Kids Are Starting To Get On My Last Damn Nerve
