There’s a video currently making the rounds on Facebook. In it, a young boy who might be as young as eight or as old as 12 is seated on the couch. In front of him is a man who is reprimanding the kid for having used foul language toward his mother.  

Specifically, the boy called his mother out of her name. And we know what that probably means. The child is also chastised for telling his mother what he was and was not going to do. As the man lashes out at the child, he dares the boy to treat him the way he was treating his mother. Or to say to the man what he has said to his mother. When the child does respond, what he says is unintelligible. The words of the man doing the haranguing are closed captioned across the screen for emphasis. 

Now I have mixed feelings about parents putting their grandiose disciplinary actions on social media. But that particular part of the debate is for another day. Many people were giving the man accolades for his having fronted off the young boy without using any profanity. However, I do question if the man is the father because he never once calls himself the dad. The man speaks about the boy’s mother, but never calls her his wife. To me, the man sounds like he’s an ‘intervener” doing a scared straight session with the boy. 

This kind of video is important to me because in just a little over eight months, we will begin the year that signifies the first quarter of the 21st century is being completed. And if the Black community is still having these kind of problems today and the same kind of issues were just as prevalent in the year 2000, what if any progress have we made?  

Sociologists have continuously told us about the importance of a nuclear family. So why are these issues still happening? At some point enough has to be enough! And someone has to speak truth to ignorance. 

Now the video doesn’t give us enough facts so a lot of my feelings are suppositions and assumptions. But I believe that in the last 70 years of my watching certain people raise children, you know which ones were going to go to jail, and which ones would be okay. And rare is it for those that I thought would be okay to stray from that line. And the same with those that were headed toward jail.  They usually made it! 

I don’t know what the rest of this entire century has planned for the descendants of enslaved Africans. But I do know this. Accountability is a two-way street. It is time to be mindful.