No matter how disciplined a youth is, could he really hold off completely? Could he resist his sexual nature until he’s 23 years old? Or is it the American way for the young to abort all the babies they create up until the time they are eligible to marry, have completed their studies, and are qualified to work? Reality says no. So the block was bursting with chaos. Everybody’s fucking everybody. Nobody’s married. Nobody claims responsibility. Nobody’s respected.

I was trained to control my anger. Yet my training seemed to be failing me now. I stood, boiling yet frozen in that same spot, remembering a line from a book my Sensei once gave me called ‘The Art of War’ ... the line was “WAR IS DECEPTION”. I kept saying the line over and over again in my head to calm myself down...War is deception, I thought to myself. No sense in being sloppy. Think through shit, control your anger,make a tight plan, and execute it.

Umma and I already knew that we had to move off our Brooklyn block. We talked about it often and had a plan. We were saving up to buy a house with our cash. We agreed that until we had enough money to pay for the house in full we would remain on our Brooklyn block working hard and saving our profit. No tricky realtor with tricky fees. No mortgage bankers or bloodsuckers who a person had to pay for thirty years of their life. No astronomical interest rates that switched up in the blink of an eye and after the shake of two hands. No more monkeys in the middle, loans leases or debts.

We made quiet money,Umma and me. It was strange to us how an American salary was so much more than a Sudanese salary , yet American workers remained poor. It was strange remembering how Umma’s employees back home earned so much less but had so much more. Swiftly we realized that a salary here meant next to nothing. We needed to have a business of our own.

Declaring racism a public health crisis entails linking the effects of racism with the crushing chronic stress and poor health it causes. A difficult task in a country like America whose foundation and wealth has been built on, and sustained by, anti-Black racism. “When you use the R-word (racism), people run-Dr. Georges Benjamin (executive director of the American Public Health Association). “They think, no I’m not a racist” and that’s because they only understand it in the personalized racism bucket; they don’t understand structural racism.” Racism extends well beyond name-calling and overtly bigoted acts.

Living in Brooklyn I had seen guns being aimed and triggers being pulled, and shots being fired, and gangsters and thieves and pimps and shootouts , but nothing was scarier than this woman’s hatred and disregard for human life. Why couldn’t she understand what Umma was going through? She was a woman too. Then I decided that she was really nothing but an empty shell with a booming voice and hole where the heart is supposed to be...later I found out that the monster lady was not even a nurse. Somehow someone in America had given out colorful medical jackets to the most uneducated, untrained people in the world and left them there to care for the sick and newborn...Umma said we would have to take good care of ourselves and my newly born sister Naja, to make sure that we all remained healthy. Otherwise, Umma explained, we would fall victim to the “American hospital”, which should be called the “American morgue’.

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The way I looked at them was if you don’t have no real business, no real money , no real plan, no real power, why should I join you? Should we get together and split nothing nine ways? I mean, I come from a country where men fight over gold, oil, diamonds, and land. Now I live in a country where niggas fight over nothing.

Nick Canon’s response to allegations of anti-Semitic hate speech...

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This episode is sponsored by

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Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/blisb/support

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