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Kareem Yes sir, I'm aware of the foundations of the modern police departments of the United States and their origins as slave "patty rollers" and patrolers as well as their current official status as protectors of property and property owners. I guess having grown up in a Black city (Detroit) and seeing so many AfroAmericans in positions of power like Mayors, judges, police officers, and lawyers, ect.....it gave me a different perspective on the police than a lot of AfroAmericans from other parts of the country. i didn't grow up in the ghetto but in one of the many working class Black neighborhoods in Detroit so most of the police we saw WERE AfroAmerican and for the most part only got on the silly negroes who WERE actually committing crimes and being violent. Not to say there were no corrupt Black cops, but that wasn't the norm. Most of them were like "Officer Smitty" of Sanford and Son, lol. Coleman Young who was Mayor of the city at that time FORCED a more even and balanced police department and didn't allow Caucasian officers to patrol the city by themselves. In a sense he SHELTERED his AfroAmerican citizens from the vicious racism so many other AfroAmericans around the nation experienced. Even the concept of AfroAmericans having a hard life and stuck in the ghetto was FOREIGN to me as a kid because I saw AfroAmericans living in the hardest slums of Detroit AS WELL as in the nicest mansions and all points in between. It wasn't until I got old enough to start traveling myself and seeing how MOST AfroAmericans lived around the country and what they went through that things like NWA and other rappers were talking about began to make more sense. You didn't see Black men on the street homeless or begging in Detroit when I was a kid! I didn't see it in Chicago where we used to go. The first time I saw that shit was in Ohio....lol. Now you see Black men around the country homeless and begging. As far as more AfroAmerican police officers and even more AfroAmericans in the military......... I think that if we are in able to achieve not just the grunt positions but also the positions of POWER in these institutions.....then the good will outweigh the bad. During the riots of the 60s a lot of dust being kicked up was coming from the AfroAmerican men with military training fresh back from Vietnam. If they had never went into the military, they wouldn't have known what little they DID. As long as we LIVE in this society I think it's best to seek power in it at ALL levels for our own security and survival.

I don't want to advertise on Troy's site like this, so I'll be vague. We started the black version of LegalZoom back in 2016. Since I'm not a lawyer and neither is my mentor/uncle who started it, we CAREFULLY crafted the disclaimer on the site to ensure we're not "practicing law without a license." We help people represent themselves in civil and criminal cases, which is your right pursuant to the Sixth Amendment and affirmed by Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806 (1975). We write research and write all the briefs, and write out simple instructions as to advancing your case through the system. Like you said, some settle very quickly when the Defendants see a well-argued, pro-se petition or complaint. We wanted it to help black folks. But truth be told, most of our clients are white who have enough money to afford a paralegal, but not a lawyer. I mean, we're not going to turn down the business. And there have definitely been some "wild" lawsuits we've helped them file. Their family court stuff is even crazier. But we have/had some interesting cases with black Plaintiffs too. We had a case very similar to this last year. Of course the details have to be confidential. But even I was surprised that a MAJOR company with a carefully-crafted terms of service paid off one of our clients just to go away. We charged them a flat rate to research and prepare their briefs, then take a small percentage of any settlement. Everyone was happy in the end. Essentially, if black folks want a shot at justice, we have to do it ourselves. That's what our little company tries to do. I mean, we've had to turn down potential black clients because they want everything free, which is unrealistic. They don't understand that we costs about 80% less than what they'd pay a lawyer. But that they have to put forth a lot of effort as well to prosecute their own cases with our help. Once we had a few white clients, they spread us via word-of-mouth. Now that little company and its revenue basically keeps all our blogs alive.

Absolutely we should, along with your suggestion of dual citizenship. We built this country. This country would not exist without us. We especially built the Confederate states. Our land here wouldn't necessarily be "sovereign." We would be a state like Utah where they make laws based on Mormonism. We could have 2 U.S. Senators and several representatives in the U.S.House and our own state legislature, our own police, our own education system, etc. We can always complete the project of "Liberia" that Russworm and Cornish started after the Civil War for our sovereign land on the Continent. We could also just use DNA and figure out our ancestry. I did mine and learned I'm 79% from a nomadic tribe in Burkina Faso. So I'd get my dual citizenship there and start businesses there. The rapper Akon said it best - the possibilities are endless in Afrika because everything is so "old." He said that he would never have been able to get into the energy business in the USA because the big oil and coal companies would have never allowed it. She told me all about my great-great grandmother (her mom), who was born into slavery. Her name was Magnolia Thurman, meaning she was probably raped at some point by Strom Thurmond's ancestors. She said her dad was killed for trying to escape. She also knew of her grandmother (my great-great-great grandmother). But she was sold from a plantation in Rome, Georgia and my great-great grandmother was separated from her mom and never from her again. It was quite gut-wrenching to document. Funny you mention that. I've got about 155 pages of my novel about this already done! Since I know I'll never see it in real life, I can use my creative juices to live it in a book. Who knows if I'll ever finish it. I started it almost 8 years ago. But its fun to escape into the words.

I will be reading this one

I thought it only fitting to leave a departing message since I've contributed a lot comments to the culture, race & economy forum. It appears the conversations here have deteriorated into hateful and fearful rhetoric, zero-sum comparisons and nothing good comes from those ideas. So, I bid this forum adieu. I'm signing off here but not AALBC's readingblack.com