Dare to Have an Extraordinary Life – Dig out that “Chip”!

Received a note and this pic from E, a longtime reader the other day. She has been a reader of my site for about 7-8 years. She is a wise young woman with the best of reading tastes. LOL  It always helps any of us so much to be able to access and communicate with likeminded others when we’re on any path in life. This is why I’ve written so many articles urging African American women to join or form a network of likeminded others. A network like that is a form of wealth!  So, she keeps me posted about what’s going on in her life.

Evia, hope your April is going well.  I have enjoyed my time so far out here and my dip into boarding school life.  My husband has been working in LA since January so I am hoping to find a position closer to there at a well-regarded day school.  Small town life is restorative,  and the town is lovely and quirky, but I would love to be closer to the big city and bright lights, restaurants open late and CULTURE!  I have attached a selfie we took as the ice plants bloomed out here last month. Gosh, California is beautiful.

I think I recall E telling me she’s a graduate of one of the Ivies. She is now loving her job as a  teacher at an exclusive boarding school. I’m so happy she has stepped out of the “ordinary” for an African American woman and is having an extraordinary life.

I loved the piece you wrote about the black woman in the country video.  Too often black women are scared (or scared AWAY by unhelpful others) from trying anything outside of what is ‘ordinary’ for black folks, whether that is skiing or other activities and vacations, certain art or cultural events, certain classes, certain schools, certain areas of town  cities, states or countries.

 This is why so many black women go to college and major in… social work, then graduate and move to … Atlanta, then go on all expense paid trips to… the Dominican Republic.

  I am only the second black woman EVER to join the faculty of the boarding school (founded in 1889) where I now teach. The school has a hard time recruiting black students to come here because, despite the financial aid offered, the parents are often nervous to send their kids to a place away from home where they are expected to ride horses daily and apply to the most selective colleges. Meanwhile, there are kids here whose parents send them from South America and China.  There are tremendous resources here; as you know, a school like this can change the trajectory of a kid’s life! Anyhow I have never let being the ‘first or only’ black woman somewhere affect a great opportunity.

 Attached below is a piece I read on one of the blogs I like to read.  The author’s premise is that to have good self-esteem you need to have a range of interests and activities.  That way if one thing isn’t working out, your whole sense of self doesn’t come crumbling down.  It makes perfect sense to me.  Too many black women have their ENTIRE identity wrapped up in a ‘black community’ that no longer serves them well. http://markmanson.net/diversify-your-identity

Most of the time, African American women need to throw away just about everything they think they know about life in order to live extraordinarily. In some cases,  it’s easier to do that because some of us are simply wired differently, so we will naturally move into extraordinary lifestyles. In other cases, we have to dare to have an extraordinary life. And then do it.  I’ve not saying it’s always comfortable to do this. Sometimes, you’re going to feel like a fish out of water. But the rewards are SO worth it. And if you have children, the rewards are about 10,000% worth it because you will have changed the course of your children’s and descendants’ lives. Forever.

Over the years, I’ve heard from so many African American women who are attracted to my views on black women taking advantage of their numerous options in all realms of life. My views are refreshing, even revolutionary or scary to some of these women because many young black women are still being presented by their family and usual social circles with few, typical, limited options in life. But it sometimes shocks me that even many of them who have had an opportunity to break away from the ordinary, will deliberately choose to  go back to having a suffocating, subpar life. Yes, I’ve often heard from black women who are graduates of practically every ivy league school in the country by now and other colleges/universities. Some of these women have 2 or more degrees. Some are licensed professionals in heavyweight fields. Some make large incomes and live in posh surroundings, but they STILL make similar choices, especially in the mating realm as the black woman who never left the ghetto (not saying all black women came from there). It’s common to read about and hear from some of these women. Their downfall is that they choose to allow a subpar male to hitch himself to them or they gravitate to this type of male. They get ‘hooked on scraps.’ Sometimes, they believe they’re supposed to help him in some way.

*Sigh* Who was it who said: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

I know for a fact that the majority of young black girls are still not getting the right, self-empowering message. I read sites where black women writers will seemingly be on the verge of giving their mostly black female readers a message of 100% liberation, but at the last second, they pull back.  The typical young black girl or woman in 2016 is NOT getting the ’empower yourself first and foremost’ message that I got when I was growing up. Many African American women are afraid or hesitant to say certain things that were freely said to me and other black girls when we were coming of age.

How could this be? I wonder. Obviously, the message that these women have been getting in these past several decades is not working for them. Still, they consume and act on these failure prone messages. Sometimes, this seems like a sci-fi movie where no matter how far you drive, you still keep coming back to the same point in the road.

My greatest fear is that my granddaughter could very easily end up back at this same point in the road. “Shudders*  People will say to me, “Oh, Evia, that couldn’t ever happen to your granddaughter!” It certainly wouldn’t happen to my daughter, but this is my granddaughter I’m talking about. I’ve taught my son, her dad, well, but he’s a man. Will he be able to clearly hear/see the poison in the messages aimed at black girls/women, point it out to his daughter, shape her mind to avoid it. I know my youngest son can’t figure out why black women even pay any attention to the message.

We’ve greatly underestimated this life-blighting message that typical African American women are getting, but we can certainly see the impact of it. It’s a highly adaptive message that alters itself quickly, when needed,  to precisely hit its target.  It is actually diabolical. Just look at the millions of black women in this society who are on a failure prone path. It’s because they’re listening to that empty or poisonous message that’s seducing them in that direction.

One cause of why these women are unable to extricate themselves from this path is the type of male that these women choose as the subject of their experiments.  It’s not the fault of the males. These women are choosing their subjects or allowing these subjects to hitch a ride. That chip controls that.

For ex., I attended the book-signing a few years ago of a black woman author who had written a book on relationships. When she learned that I was a writer of articles about interracial relationships, she pointedly said to me, “I have a lot to give a man. So, I’m saving myself for a good black man.” I didn’t say anything to her. We just looked at each other. LOL

I usually hear from these women a few years into these relationships. Some have had a child or two, and their lives are spinning like a twister. They’re confused, dazed,  can’t seem to figure out how they got into the situation or why they’re with that kind of subpar man, or how to get away. I think they write to me because they need someone to tell them to listen to the little intuitive voice that tells them to “escape.”

This is not about the race or ethnicity of the man. This is largely about vetting, but a woman has to be able to encounter enough men in order to vet a variety of them and choose the best one for herself. However, if all goes well, sometimes the first or second man vetted may be the one chosen. We all know that due to sheer numbers and historic and political reasons, more so-called good men of the marriage material type exists in certain groups than in others. For ex., due to the huge numbers of Nigerian men who mostly all tend to be very aggressive educationally and career wise, and are marriage minded based on their cultural background, I was able to meet and vet a variety of these males in NYC who were interested in me, a woman who shared many of their key values. I met and married one of the many I’d vetted. That was my first marriage.

You may wonder why an African American woman who has had the good fortune to attend an ivy league university and mingle with men from all over the world would take on a subpar man as an experiment.  I encounter many NON-African Americans who just cannot understand this. Well, it’s due to a programmed chip that’s been embedded in an AA girl’s brain, typically when she’s young, and it’s been nurtured and reinforced by other black women and men from the black collective. That chip urges her, nags at her, tells her she’s a selfish, terrible person if she doesn’t become a social justice warrior to help whoever and whenever, and fight for the cause.

Think about what that black woman author said to me. That’s a part of chip-talk. So, I wasn’t about to try to dialogue with ‘the chip.’ LOL

It would be entirely different if these black female social justice warriors had stable lives with loving mates, supportive families, and comfortable incomes to support them through the negative aspects of their social justice activities, but barely any of them do.   We’ve seen all too often how some of them end up homeless, or worse, later on. Look at the departed social justice warrior, Sandra Bland, who was left to die in a jail when she couldn’t get anyone to bring a relatively small amount of money ($500) to the jail to bail her out. Horrendous! So, she expired there, all alone. People will say that they didn’t know she would die there, and that nothing should have happened to her even if she was a warrior.

But what should or should not happen has never changed reality.

Likewise, a typical black woman soldier is trained to be naïve. It’s absolutely critical for her to be trained to be naïve because no critically thinking, shrewd black woman would ever be a soldier for the black collective in the first place, since support will be fleeting or non-existent. And the reciprocity is also non-existent. None of us can last for long without reciprocity, so I’ve beaten that drum relentlessly.

LESSON to all of you black female social justice warriors: If you’re going to be a soldier, EXPECT TO BE SHOT AT.   Know that as a soldier, you’re always going to be shot at and sometimes going to be shot down. So, make sure that you’re soldiering for a cause that has produced a support network for you– SUPPORT that will immediately run to help you, to pick up your pieces. Sooner or later, you will need it.

I know some people will say I should urge black women not to be soldiers in the first place, but as we’ve seen, it’s a waste of time telling many African American women that, due to that deeply embedded chip. Therefore, my words are nothing. I think any of us could point a loaded weapon at some of these women and they would ignore it order to answer the call of that deeply embedded soldier chip. Lol  I can’t even watch the news and see their antics anymore. It’s a very unflattering view of African American women and it’s so failure prone on so many fronts. African American women badly needed to dig out their chip!

I tell ya, if you get a chance, track down the old movie: The Manchurian Candidate. Some African American women are the epitome of the Laurence Harvey character. They can’t help themselves.