Today I walked to the store and I looked at all the businesses that were in my community. I saw delis, I saw Chinese restaurants, I saw liquor stores, I saw chicken spots, I saw a bunch of business that were own by other people that don't look like the people that inhabit the area. My job requires me to drive a lot and Brooklyn has changed so much. The rent went up, everywhere you look people are buying or selling million-dollar houses. Skyscrapers are being built every year, but who's benefiting off this change? Are the people that live in this community benefiting from the gentrification of Brooklyn?

I started to think to myself what type of legacy do I want to leave for my future children. I am a product of the crack era. My mother did drugs just like many other people of color. The drugs that were sent into our community destroyed the neighborhood’s infrastructure. Drugs destroyed our communities, our bodies and our children's future. I say this because a lot of the children that come from the crack era had to create success for themselves. Our parents were too busy doing drugs and avoiding their responsibilities. So, they passed down an inheritance of poverty. Our parents didn't leave us property, they didn't leave us stocks, they didn't leave us a college fund. You know what they left us, pain and a lot of adversity. You see if you talk to people, which I did, they will tell you that back in the 70's a lot of people of color had businesses. We controlled our communities, our schools, and we worked together to make our community better. When Crack hit black communities, we started focusing more on getting high then running our community. The government then introduced the war on drugs and that led to over 2 million people of color being incarcerated from the late 80's to this present day. You know that there was a wave of Gentrification in the 70's and 80's as well in Brooklyn. White people left Brooklyn and went to other places around New York. The first reason was at that time certain white people didn't want to live in the same area of people of color. The second reason is the neighborhoods started to get too bad, and the white people that stayed left. Neighborhoods lost their value and Brooklyn became a place where people looked down on you, if you said you were from Brooklyn. Brownstones in Brooklyn were going for $100,000, those same brownstones are now worth millions of dollars.

You see drugs played a big role in distracting our parents to pay attention to the wrong things. Instead of saving, they spent their money. Instead of investing, they rented. Instead of passing down a mindset of wealth, they passed down a mindset of poverty. A lot of my friends could have benefited from the gentrification of Brooklyn, but a lot of my friends didn't know anything about investing in property because neither did their parents. So, we missed out on an opportunity that could have made so many of us financially free. At 32, I learned that success is created through a mindset. People of color suffer from poverty, gentrification, oppression and mental slavery because we choose not to love and respect one another. We don't support each other. We don't treat our women like queens, and we have a “we can do it by ourselves” type of attitude. If we want to create a better world for our children and future children, we must first identify all our bad habits as a collective race. The new illiterate of the 21st century will not be people that can't read and right. It will be people that can't learn and then unlearn. In 2016 people of color spent a trillion dollars on things they didn't need. We buy cars, expensive bags, we spend 100's of dollars in the bar every week. We pay for expensive vacations, but we don't invest in ourselves nor do we invest in our community. We tend to just complain without action. We judge other people for either not having enough or having too much. If we took a minute, we would realize that we have everything we need inside of us. 

This is my opinion. All people should be free and have equal opportunity to be able to bring their dreams to life. An injustice to one of us must be an injustice to all of us. The world is big and although we are all human beings we all have different point of views, different religions, different problems and we must find a common ground. For people of color, I believe that we will continue to suffer and be conquered if we continue to stay disconnected and not respect and love one another. People of color’s biggest downfall is that we were convinced that we needed to be saved. This country has never had our best interest in mind. We were the first stock in the country and we built it for free. Every poverty-stricken area in America was created by design, remember that there cannot be a bottom without a top. Extreme wealth only exists because extreme poverty exists. This country has killed millions of us; people of color have been being exploited since its inception. Nothing was given to people of color, our ancestors fought and sacrificed their lives so that we would have the freedoms we have to day. I speak about the problems of people of color because I am a person of color. I know that my people are amazing on all levels and when people of color come together and fight we put on for all people. In the Civil Rights Era, people like Dr. Martin Luther King help get bills passed like the voting rights bill, the immigration bill and civil rights bill. These bills didn't just help people of color, it benefited people of all ethnicities that were dealing with discrimination and the backlash to slavery and Jim Crow.

I will end this by saying people of color need to start taking back their communities. Every business within our community doesn't have to be owned by a person of color but must benefit the community in other ways then just providing the community with a service. The businesses that take away and destroy the community are the hundreds of delis that we have in our community. We have hundreds of Chinese restaurants. We have thousands of liquor stores. We have hundreds of fast food restaurants that sell us fried chicken and a bunch of food that is unhealthy and that is contributing to a lot of unhealthy eating habits. Question these businesses make enough money to pay their employees, pay the rent for their space and provide for their families. Why don't people of color have hundreds of business that provide our communities with employment opportunities and create businesses that can help people within the community succeed and take care of their families? People of color are one of the world’s top consumers. We love to spend our money with the oppressor rather than use our money as a collective entity and rebuild our communities ourselves. We can't just keep complaining about why the same people that oppressed and enslaved us is the first place are not helping us create success and financial freedom. That's never going to happen, we must create it on our own and that will only happen when people of color come together.