(ThyBlackMan.com) According to TMZ, boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. is a part time weatherman, making it rain in one strip club after another. His latest financial flirtation took place at a club in Miami, where he reportedly dropped $100,000 into the thong of any woman within a 100 yard radius. Of course Floyd’s generosity received media coverage and perhaps even admiration for those who think this kind of thing is cool. I get it Floyd Mayweather Jr. , you’re rich….maybe that’s what some rich people do.
Floyd also got my attention during a radio interview when he was complaining about those who expect him to give back to the black community. Bringing up the continent of Africa (you know, that place with hundreds of millions of black people, many of whom have children that are going to die this week of starvation), Floyd Mayweather Jr. asked this really “deep” question: “What has Africa done for me?”
The radio host during the interview, perhaps enamored with the fact that Floyd was giving her his attention, just nodded along in agreement to whatever ridiculous thing came out of Floyd’s mouth. That’s what happens in our culture: We automatically believe people are deep and important just because they’re rich and famous. That’s why our community is an absolute train wreck, especially since we have shows like Love & Hip-Hop dictating the structure of black relationships.
Floyd hasn’t always been able to make it rain and has, in fact, overcome some hard times on his way to the top of the financial pyramid.
“When I was about eight or nine, I lived in New Jersey with my mother and we were seven deep in one bedroom and sometimes we didn’t have electricity”, Mayweather told The New York Times. “When people see what I have now, they have no idea of where I came from and how I didn’t have anything growing up.”
So, my primary thought when I hear about Floyd Mayweather feeding stripper thongs with tens of thousands of dollars is “Why brother, why? Don’t you realize you’re a role model and kids are watching your every
move?”
Part of the reason that black kids are quick to line up for hours to buy overprice, virtually worthless d Air Jordans is because the media inundates them with images of their favorite celebrity wasting money instead of investing it. They hear rappers telling them that when they get money, they should spend it up. Their growing young minds are bombarded with messages that teach them to do everything in their power to stay poor for their entire lives.
While white kids are being inspired by brilliant entrepreneurs like Elon Musk (who is planning a mission to Mars) and Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, our kids are being exposed to Lil Wayne, 2 Chainz and other corporate-sponsored clowns. Yes, buffoonery works well for the chosen few, but the side effects are disasterous. Most of the kids watching Mayweather won’t be able to recover financially like he can (since they don’t have a lightning-fast jab to pay the bills), but will end up standing in the unemployment line wearing $250 sneakers and wondering “what the f*ck happened to my life?”
We owe it to our kids to teach them how to do better. Our children are a product of the adults around them. Right now as adults, we are not doing a very good job. But the truth is that, the reason we’re doing a horrible job of teaching our children productive wealth-building strategies is because white-owned corporate media has consistently taken the most ignorant of us and given them the biggest platforms. This is NOT by accident. It is a deliberate strategy to keep us in the stupid box.
In Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Mayweather was born, there are literally tens of thousands of young black children just like him who aren’t going to be fortunate enough to find a white man who will pay them to knock people out. They don’t have Floyd’s amazing skillset and are instead going to end up in the back of a police car, in the morgue or in the unemployment line. Some of them are going to bed hungry every night and will hit the age of 18 without being able to read.
Do you ever wonder how many of those boys Floyd Mayweather Jr. could have helped with the $100,000 he dropped on the strippers in that night club? A better question (since Floyd has a right to waste money like the rest of us) might be this: Has Floyd ever gone into community centers around the country and repeatedly tossed around hundreds of thousands of dollars for young, intelligent girls, or does he only spend that kind of money on women who twerk for a living? What message do we send young women when we are willing to pay big money to see them shake their butts, but could care less when they build their brains? I’d love to hear Floyd’s answers to those questions.
Dr. Umar Johnson, another black man who loves to fight, isn’t a physical fighter like Mayweather. Instead, he’s an intellectual warrior, fighting against the oppressive forces that a racist society is using to destroy black people in America. Dr. Johnson is trying to raise $5 million dollars to build a school for boys. Unfortunately, because Dr. Johnson isn’t selling Air Jordans or tickets to a comedy club, he’s having a hard time getting black people to give anything. We have wealthy black people who will gladly invest in the perpetuation of economic slavery, but will invest very little into the education of black children.
Also unlike Floyd Mayweather Jr. , white people are not in the least bit enamored with Dr. Johnson. Floyd teaches black people to be irresponsible, Dr. Johnson teaches them to control their own destiny. Floyd teaches black people to define themselves as shallow, mindless entertainers; Dr. Johnson teaches black men to be strong and intelligent. Floyd teaches black men to be purely physical specimens with almost no depth to their character; Dr. Johnson teaches black men that you’re meant to be more than a big, black buck throwing footballs and dribbling basketballs for entertainment.
In other words, Dr. Johnson is a dangerous black man, and Floyd Mayweather Jr. is the one who makes white folks comfortable. Those in power will gladly pay for a black man to box, buy drugs or get a gun, but they will never pay for a black man to become intelligent and self-reliant. That’s supposed to be our job, but we’re too busy teaching our kids how to be sellouts.
Since Floyd Mayweather Jr. is so generous with his wealth, I’d love to see him make it rain on Dr. Johnson’s school (or other equally worthy projects, to the tune of several million dollars, not chump change). Is putting money into a stripper’s thong more important than educating future black leaders of America? I don’t necessarily fault Floyd for not seeing the err of his ways, but I become deeply concerned with how many black people actually agree with him.
Floyd Mayweather Jr. is not entirely to blame for his financial ignorance. He didn’t create the culture that has trained some black men to believe that they should spend their time giving all of their money right back to the same racist institutions that have robbed their ancestors over the last 400 years.
It’s not his fault that American media will much more readily pay a black man for behaving like a bufoon than a scholar.
It’s not his fault that Floyd Mayweather Jr. will be protected by the powers-that-be if he promotes ignorance to black people, but if he were to promote empowerment and education, he’d probably be killed. After all, the courts proved in 1990 that the government murdered Dr. King right after he began to speak forcefully on black economic empowerment. Intelligent black men are a threat to national security, which is one reason that ignorance is so prominently promoted in mainstream media.
I’m completely sure that with the $105 million he earned this past year, Mayweather is helping someone, somewhere. I mean, even strippers get hungry too. He can probably spout off a few little projects where he gave $10,000 for this or $50,000 for that. That’s a nice, cute charitable contribution that tends to shake off people like me who believe that celebrities can try harder.
But my secret hope is that Floyd and others like him will realize that the black community consists of millions of people who’ve allowed you to stand on their shoulders. Black celebrities are like elected officials, given support from countless people in their community, many of whom are struggling every day.
The black community is the one that gave you life, and the one that supported you when white America wanted to put you into a casket. Any man who can take so much from a community and give almost nothing back is not a man at all. Instead, he will always be a dumb little boy, eternally committed to the kind of blindness that keeps a people enslaved.
I don’t expect Floyd Mayweather Jr. to get any of this, and he’ll probably hate me for challenging him. Instead, I am appealing to those who are seeking a better life for our people and realize that if we don’t learn to engage in the act of intelligent economic empowerment, we will always be doomed to fail. The truth about the revolution of black economic thought is that, as many of us leave America’s economic plantation in the quest for independence, some of “us” are going to get left behind.
We cannot remain silent while psychological poison is being spread to our children. The stakes are just too high.
Staff Writer; Dr. Boyce Watkins
Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition. For more information, please visit http://BoyceWatkins.com.