I hung out with some friends of mine and their 5-year-old boy. Now I know what they mean when they say kids shouldn’t be around for grown folks business, cuz this little boy was all in the business. But the one thing I could not be mad at is the ideas this child was starting to form about his self and the world. He said "I’m gonna vote for Obama!" when we told him that Obama probably wont be able to run for president by the time he can vote he said "Obama can vote for me then, I’m gonna be president". I almost cried yall. Please keep our young black men off the endangered species list and give them more options than robbing people of their possessions and their lives.
As I promised here is an excerpt from James Baldwin's essay "My Dungeon Shook" found in his book "The Fire Next Time"

...The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to asipre to exellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and who you could marry...Know whence you came. if you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go...I said that it was intended that you perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man's definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality...we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from a sturdy, peasant stock, men you picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said "The very time I thought I was lost, My Dungeon Shook and my chains fell off."

D. Woods
Independence Day... coming soon
missdwoods.com