(ThyBlackMan.com) Entrepreneurship is typically not something that you’re taught in school, it is something that good parents build into the souls of their children. In a way, you can compare it to being able to grow your own economic food, instead of depending on someone else to feed you. It gives you freedom in the event of disaster, or in the case that you decide that you simply want something better out of life than enduring the stress of doing work that you actually hate.
Think for a second about just how vulnerable you are when you depend on someone else to give you the things you need. In fact, imagine if your family needed food, and the only person supplying the food was your worst enemy. The food wouldn’t come for free, nor would it be easy to obtain. Your enemy would feed his children long before he chose to feed yours. The cost for obtaining the food would be high, and you would only be fed if you did what your financial master told you to do.
In the scenario I just described, you would either be stressed out or hungry. You would be without dignity. You would be disrespected because no one respects a man who has to beg in order to feed his family. You wouldn’t be truly living your life, you would only be surviving and waiting to die. Even if you were to receive everything you needed, there is a very good chance you would be MISERABLE.
That’s where black people are in America when we depend on White America to feed us. We get jobs with big corporations and then get angry because they subject us to discrimination. We wonder why our unemployment rate is twice as high as whites, yet virtually no government official has tried to help alleviate the problem. We express outrage that economic inequality has not
dissipated since the 1960s, yet we continue to pursue the same weak, tired and ineffective economic models.
When you gain the ability to create jobs, you don’t have to beg for them. When you run your own enterprise, you don’t have to worry about racism. Instead, you have the ability to do what you want, when you want, and not feel that you’re trying to become comfortable under somebody else’s roof.
When I learned to run my own business, that’s when racism effectively disappeared from my life. Of course, it still exists in some situations, like when dealing with police, trying to obtain financing or obtaining white customers. But when it comes to my day-to-day existence, I am constantly marveling over how stress-free my life has become. I get to take freedoms for granted everyday that some of my corporate friends can only dream of. I can say what I want, do what I want, work when I want, and make my own money.
In fact, my new life after working for somebody else was such an improvement that I usually don’t care if I make a little less money than I expected. I was just happy to get off the economic plantation and go to work each day feeling like a MAN. You really can’t put a price on freedom.
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.