 I'm sick and tired of seeing black women having to be strong in movies. I'm sick and tired of seeing them having to be warriors, having to be resilient, having to be these no-limit soldiers. I'm sick of it. I want to see black women be soft. I want to see black women be taken care of, be defended. I want to see black women in their true strength. I just got back from going to see the woman king. Shout out to Courtney Michelle. She convinced me to go see it. Like I told her, originally I was going bootleg it, but she made a good point and I went and I went to watch it. It's also partly because the bootleg was trashed. So I went to theaters and I watched the movie and I have a lot, a lot, a lot of thoughts. John Boyega, he plays the king in the movie. John Boyega is Yoruba, right? Some of you guys obviously know I'm Nigerian. Nigeria is split up into three chief ethnic groups. You have the Yorubas, you have the Auzas, and then you have the Ibo's, which I'm a part of the Ibo tribe. The Auzas are probably the largest ethnic group than the Yorubas than the Ibo's. But the Yorubas at one point were one of the most, if not the most powerful ethnic groups in West Africa. And for people who've seen the movie, they were the Aoyaw Empire. So what's ironic about the movie, you have a Yoruba dude playing the king of the Naomi, who are fighting against an empire that he in actuality is part of his lineage. He's been kind of all over the headlines because he outright said his preference are black women, a dark-skinned black woman. You have one group calling him racist. You have another group saying he's pandering. And then you have another group, it's not as loud in my opinion, saying, you know, that's what's up. As a black man who also has a similar stance when it comes to black women, I think black women are the standard internationally. I believed him. I believed him. And I think it's important for black women to hear, for young black girls to hear, black men unapologetically saying it with our chest, that yeah, y'all are the standard. Now, not saying that we turn a blind eye to their bullshit, but I think it should come from a place of recognizing what they're capable of at their healthiest. So I want to see more John Boyegas. I think that's worth paying $1,000 to take pictures with, not Chris Brown, who kicks those same women out of his VIP section. I don't know how many of you guys have seen the movie, but I'd encourage you to actually go see it. Like, cinematically, it was a great movie. Obviously, it informs the Black Panther, Dora Milaje. I didn't like the fact that this light-skinned dude was supposed to be the protagonist, and then a dark-skinned black man was supposed to be the antagonist. It was giving me Tyler Perry vibes. He says that the Dohome aren't man enough, so you had to send your women. And I posted it earlier. So I want to explain why that stuck out to me. So when I did a little bit of research into the Dohome, the idea that the Dohome Amazons, which is a name that was coined by white people to describe this female warrior group, was actually a derogatory term, right? It was to say, these women are masculine. They were a product of necessity. They were not this elite fighting force like it's being painted. They were formed because so many Dohome men were dying at war. The idea that they were front and center, and they were like, Seal Team Six, it just wasn't, it's not historically consistent. So it wasn't this idea that the women were superior to the men. No, it was, we're running out of men. Viola Davis' character said, individually, we're weak, together, we're strong. And she was saying that about the women warriors, which is the truth and historically accurate, because like I said, they weren't these elite badasses. They were known for being audacious. They were known for their courage. They were known for standing side by side with men, but they weren't known for being the best. Let's just keep it, and not to take anything away from them, but they were a result of necessity. They were kind of the equivalent of child soldiers. I don't want an environment where we have to keep needing our women to assume our rightful warrior position. Africa is a large fucking place. Nigeria is a large place, but in Igbo culture, we have pretty much three tiers of power, like kind of three checks and balances within a kingdom, right? So you kind of have the executive branch, which would be like the king and the elders. You then have the warrior branch, which is the youth of the community. They're the front line soldiers and the whole nine. And then you have the Umuada, and Umuada translates to first daughters. So those are the mothers of the community, right? So those are the wives of the elders. Those are the mothers of the warriors, right? Now, what's interesting, you know, a lot of times we talk about Africa dynamics from a white supremacist perspective of women everywhere are being oppressed. The reality is, for the most part, the elders ran shit. The elders met with the king, and they figured out what was going to happen if we were going to go to war with who and what needs to happen as far as the calendar and the market days and the whole nine. But if anybody in the community was trying to seek a higher position, guess one of the first groups that they had to get in good with? It's not the elders. It's not the warriors. It's the women. And why is that? In our culture, the first mothers are a very sacred position because not only do they control the whims of the elders, they also control the hearts of the warriors. So even the elders, they don't fuck with the mothers because they know if they go too far, they overstep and that goes back to the checks and balances. If they overstep, number one, the mothers can say, oh, okay, cool. You're not going to eat for a week. Or the mothers can galvanize and rally the youth in a way that the elders, they can't. Right? So in Africa, in African societies, there were checks and balances and not in the way that Hollywood tells us that the women were our frontline soldiers. No, that shouldn't, no, no. The homie Amazons, they're not fucking with Shaka Zulu and his men. So again, a lot of these things are strategic by Hollywood painting this picture that, oh, the backbone of the black community is the woman. So what's the man? And it goes back, it goes back to the quote from the movie, y'all weren't men enough so you had to send your woman. So we're reinforcing this, even in our boys, thinking that, oh, masculine women is actually the standard. I saw my mom suffer and do all this shit. So now I want the women in my life to take care of me. And then the women, the little girls that are growing up, they have that same idea that, oh, you know, being soft, being submissive is a poopy word. It's regressive. That's not where my strength lies. My strength lies in joining the football team and running head up with Ray Lewis. African society, the reality is we understood balance. Like there's some kingdoms that they had, you know, female oligarchs. There's some kingdoms they had females in power. But at the core of the society, when it comes to the different factors, you don't fuck with the women. 10 things everyone should know about women consumers. Number one, if consumer economy had a sex, it would be female. Women drive 70 to 80% of all consumer purchasing through a combination of their buying power and influence. So before this whole YouTube thing, I was, and before I worked in tech actually a while back, I was a mortgage loan originator. As such, I worked very closely with real estate agent. You have a five minute conversation with a real estate agent. They'll tell you if a husband and a wife walk into an open house, the husband, yeah, he's the one with the bag, you know, he's the one with the money. But at the end of the day, it's the wife that you need to convince. It's the wife that needs to fall in love with the kitchen and the bathrooms and see herself raising kids in this place. Largest consumer base is women. More specifically, this is just an unfortunate truth. Black women. So when we're seeing these movies pop up, Little Mermaid, Woman King, all these movies that are just sticking them into white people's wet dreams, it's to get their money. It's not actually empowering. Like I said, there's nothing empowering of watching our women suffer. Watching our women have to train like Navy Seals. There's nothing empowering about that. Unfortunately, I think our community in particular, we spend entirely too much time focusing on optics, focusing on what shit looks like, focusing on, you know what I'm saying, how shit makes us feel, as opposed to what it actually is. And what are the brilliance of white supremacy is, they can frame something that's actually detrimental as empowering. When my daughter's watching TV, I don't know, I want to see her, see herself in a soft character. I want her to watch a movie, not of, you know, Ariel and some white dude who's the prince, because obviously they didn't cast a black man as the prince, or the king. No, I want to see her being treated well, very well by a black man, that's what I want to see. Her being protected, not her being this strong badass that makes, you know, allows white women to live vicariously through powerful black women. No, I don't want to see that. And we fall for it, we fall for it. Black female ego fuels consumerism. Black male audacity fuels revolution, right? So I want to see black men being men, and obviously they're not going to let us do it, so we have to do it for ourselves. On Osha's video, he pretty much talked about how black men don't support things financially that we want to see more of. And obviously we know that women are the largest consumer base, but we don't talk enough about how we can strategically weaponize consumerism in our favor. The Dahomey, and this is where the FBA, non-FBA piece comes in, were a big part of the slave trade, not a big part of the slave trade, but like they were participants in it. But in the movie, they were kind of framed as being anti-slavery. And the reality is a lot more complex than that. The slave trade was such an insidious enterprise. Number one, Africans didn't know what they were selling their fellow Africans into. Slavery already existed in Africa, but it was more so indentured servitude. So it was, you know, this kingdom beat this kingdom, and we took the women, and we took the children, and we took the men, and they worked for us. But as far as shadow slavery in the Americas, they had no concept of that, because they were still like rules. And what's particularly interesting is some people who sold other people into slavery were then later sold into slavery, right? So again, this idea that we put sometimes, even in FBA culture, that, oh, the people over there were participants in the slave trade over in Africa, currently, so like my ancestors, and the people over here were victims of it, it's a lot more nuanced, and it's a lot more complicated than that, right? Especially when you consider the fact that some of our African-American brothers and sisters left the United States and went back to Liberia after the Civil War and after, I think it was like the early 1900s, right? So our histories, again, like I always say, are intertwined. Why this statement he made is really interesting to me is because I talk a lot about, even during my interviews, I talk a lot about how Black men in particular in this country have been systematically and deliberately and consistently castrated. And that has been to serve the white power structure. Again, like the most valuable Black man is a dead one or an incarcerated one to the white power structure. So there have been things done, whether rhetorically, whether literally to keep Black men down. Now, that's not to say that we're incapable of doing better for ourselves or, you know, quote, unquote, lifting ourselves up by our imaginary bootstraps. But I think the reality that we have to wrestle with is one that, like he said in the movie, your men aren't man enough so they had to send the women. A lot of the strength, a lot of the masculinity that we see from our women even today is a response to what was done to our men in an American context. And it creates this vicious cycle, right? Because you create masculine-ass women who raise bitch-ass dudes who create masculine women. It just keeps going around and around in a circle until we sit back and realize what's going on, right? So when we see, for instance, mass incarceration, that's our men dying on the battlefield. When we see the crack epidemic, that's our men dying on the battlefield. When we see a co-intel pro, when we see homosexuality in the LGBTQ agenda, that is literally like the reason the Homie Amazons were created in the first place because the men had been literally killed. Now, in an American context, it's more of a covert, more of a subtle thing. But I think that was a phenomenal point. And to go back to the solution as Black men, we should funnel our interests, our attention, our resources behind what we want to see more of as opposed to simply, and this goes to my critique of some aspects of the manuscript. And I've been critical since day one, simply just talk porn, simply just 50 episodes of why bitches ain't shit. Like at some point, we have to move past that. At some point, we have to become solution-oriented, right? God be my witness, been trying my best to articulate to the women that, yo, all these things that you think about men, it's strategic, like you're supposed to think that. And even, you know, some of the critiques about this movie, like it's going to make women continue to think that they are superior to Black men. All that is strategic. But hey, at the end of the day, if our women are going to go out there and spend their money, obviously they want to see themselves in a limelight. Obviously they want to see themselves with power, whether that's overt power, because that's the easiest power to recognize and understand. You know, so for me, I'm an aspiring documentary filmmaker. Like that's what I want to be able to do full-time. And from that, I want to branch off into even dramatizing certain aspects of our interpersonal relationships as Black people. But I can't do it by myself. If you study any research that's been done about the correlation between things people want to see politically and laws that are passed or bills that are passed, there's really no correlation. Powers to be bought. Power, powers to be taken. It's not to be complained about. It's not to be lobbied for. And I think that's where we, and when I say we, I'm not just talking about Black men as a community, that's where we drop the ball. We spend entirely too much time talking about what should be as opposed to supporting what is going to be. If that means, you know, Dr. Tia San Johnson, you like the work that he's doing with the Onyx Report. If that means O'Shea Duke-Jackson, you like the work he's doing with a Black male perspective on gossip news and celebrity news. If you like the work I'm doing here, it means supporting. So if we want to truly see change, if we truly want to see the power dynamic switch, I think the conversation about, for instance, one of the first scenes in the movie was Black women killing Black men. Yeah, we can have that conversation. But I think the next conversation should be, why weren't we at Nate Parker's movie when he was killing white people? Birth of a Nation, why weren't we at his movie? American Skin, why weren't we at his movie? When he's showing Black men saying, nah, fuck that, I'm not going. Why weren't, why didn't we support that? Although we are being pushed this idea that female power is masculine and it should be overt. Nah, female power is covert. Female power is seduction. It's persuasion. It's influence, right? And unfortunately our women have had to step into the role of masculine energy and they have wholesale kind of lost their ability to influence. You read the book, 48 Laws of Power, it talks about the most powerful person on the kingdom or in the kingdom is not the man on the throne. It's the shadowy figure behind the man on the throne because not only does he have all the influence of the throne, he's also insulated by the throne because if there's an assassination attempt, somebody's coming, you know, for the head honcho, they don't know that Gepetto has been pulling the strings all along. No, they're going to take out the king. The Lila took down Samson in the Bible. Female power is supposed to be covert. It's supposed to be subtle. It's a, we're talking about soft growth error. It's supposed to be soft. Now here's what's interesting about softness that I think we fail to understand sometimes. When you drop something that's hard, when you drop something that's rigid, it cracks, it chips, but when you drop something that's soft, it bounces. So again, men, we have to be hard because we got to bust through shit. We got to be frontline soldiers, literally and figuratively. So there is utility to our stoicism. There's a utility to our brash and abrasiveness, right? And female energy is not built to be that. It's not built to be the same. It's built to be soft and not soft in a easily manipulated or a yes man type of way. It's soft in a way that is flexible, fluid, right? And unfortunately, like I said, our women have had to assume a ministry that is not theirs. And in my opinion, they're not good at because when you look at the numbers about, you know, anti-depressants, when you look at the numbers about high blood pressure, this system of the goddess culture is killing our women. Now, again, that's not to let them off the hook for the decisions that they make in mating or the decisions that they make in planning out their future. But at the end of the day, like as black men, we got to get back on that battlefield too. And I think that also starts with what, you know, John Boyega did in saying that, you know, black women are the standard. And not just on some political shit. He said that they're just gorgeous. They're fine. They're sexy. And even for my passport, bros, you know, like I said before, if y'all are going and finding black women internationally, I don't have, I'm an international black man. I can't have a problem with that. There was a conflict within the kingdom between Viola's character who represented more so a masculine woman and one of the Queens who represented more so a feminine woman, right? Like the king had a preference for the masculine woman and kind of, you know, through the feminine woman to the side. And I thought that was interesting. They kind of show the dynamics that we talked about between like the pygmies and everybody who hates them. At the end, the king gave a speech and it was pretty much, I think he was speaking through the movie, but he was pretty much saying like we can't, we can no longer allow ourselves to be the authors of our own dysfunction. Like he was saying from the perspective of we can't continue to participate in the slave trade, but you could bring that modern day and like, yeah, we can no longer be making all this oppression porn for the ops from the world star hip hop to the, you know what I'm saying, the shade rooms, things like that. Like we are literally handing over every reason why we should be oppressed. Every reason why we don't deserve shit. Every reason why we're less than human. Now, obviously white people's agenda is clear. They're going to keep propping up LGBTQ feminism and everything else that was used strategically to infiltrate the civil rights movement. They're going to keep doing that. That makes sense. That makes business sense, right? And that's, I think that's where I'm at. Like even when I talk about white supremacy, I don't care as much about whether or not white people like us. It's never where I've been. I care about why we continue to participate in the dysfunction that lines their pockets. Because I don't, again, the art of war, I don't blame them. They need to exploit us to survive.