JAMIL SHABAZZ : Gang Members Need to Start Caring

I just attended a funeral for one of my Muslim brothers who got shot while he was building a fence around a Muslim temple. He was minding his own business. He’s got a wife at home, kids at home.

He never made it back.

Right now I have great displeasure with gang members who don’t give a damn. They didn’t know this brother, Rasheed. He had no altercation with them, yet he’s gone. He’s with God; it was his time to go.

But what about the man whose time to go hasn’t come, and he gets shot? He’s shot in the spine and can’t walk. Maybe a little girl walking down the street gets shot in the head, gets brain-damaged, when the plan was she was the one who was supposed to cure AIDS.

My whole point is: These guys don’t care. They don’t care about nothing. That’s got to stop.

In the case of Rasheed, it was a Latino gang rivalry that he got caught in. This gang stuff is carelessness. But my brother died doing just what he wanted to do. He made his Friday prayer, went out to help build the fence around the temple, and got shot. He was about 50, a beautiful person.

We’re losing. Gangs are running rampant, there’s miseducation, cocaine is the salt of the day. Youths are not winning right now. We as a people have got to realize we’re losing. Then we can find solutions. And the solutions start with the family.

Children need more direction, especially spiritual direction. They’re not God-conscious. If you’re God-conscious, how could you shoot somebody? When they shoot, they’re eliminating their own future, but they don’t know it. They don’t know if they’re shooting a brother who’s carrying around the cure for cancer, a young doctor or lawyer. There’s no respect there. The children need God. They lost it through a lack of discipline. They also lost it through education. They can’t read. When the system fails like that, you got problems.

Education is the most important priority, yet the government’s giving away money to other people. They gave $4 billion to Israel, millions to Somalia, yet schools are so overcrowded here kids go when they want to go. Going nine months then taking a vacation preps your brain for school again, but that’s gone. Even the teachers can do what they want to do. School policies should be put to the popular vote.

Busing is not the answer. There are schools run by blacks with only black kids, like Marva Collins in Chicago, and they produce real smart kids because there’s righteous competition. Competing in righteousness, there’s nothing wrong with that. Before integration, we were better off, to be honest. Before we started trying to be with everybody else, we had more black politicians, councilmen, better entertainment. We didn’t need to be bused anywhere! Why do I need to prove to a white man that I’m a man? Let me prove that to my family.

Integration hurt us. I really don’t think kids in primarily white schools have a desire to learn. If you send your son or daughter off to school against their will, they lose the desire in their hearts and in their minds to learn.

We have to be real understanding with our children. We have to talk to our children. Sometimes we lack talk. Everyone is blessed with knowledge, but God grants you understanding. This is where spirituality comes in. They should never have taken God out of schools. Kids need to be pledging allegiance to God, any god.

Somewhere in the process of black people becoming black and proud, we became too proud. Kids no longer have reverence for where they came from. They cuss out their parents, smoke weed with them! There’s a lot of animosity.

We got broken down through welfare. The government said, “We’ll pacify these people,” and it knew it was creating a system of dependency. The government’s saying “Don’t get a job, don’t do for yourself, just stay on welfare.” Elijah Mohammed said always do for yourself. It don’t matter if you sell a bean pie, sell a paper, you’re doing something for yourself. You can’t control a man who’s doing for himself. The government knows that very well. A lot of good has come out of the recent adversity. There’s a lot of talk about unity among black folks, and that concerns the government. It would rather break us apart.

But the government owes us, big time. It needs to give us some land, or something. With the hurricane in Florida, the interned Japanese during World War II, people got money as reparation. What did they give black people after slavery? Where are our reparations? The government doesn’t care because they got us on welfare.

But black people did something beautiful after slavery: We got with ourselves. We supported each other. But like I said, integration ultimately hurt us. Of course we have a basic right to intermingle, but what am I trying to prove by sitting next to a white man? Sea gulls don’t run with hawks, but they’re all birds. It’s a given that we’re all God’s creatures. I don’t have to prove that to anybody.