The New Me Content of a Man's Character

Michael Whitelaw: Posted on Friday, October 11, 2013 1:58 PM

Deprive a man of any contact with the pleasures of the spirit and he'll fall completely into those of the flesh. Being Black, we are sometimes deprived of education. Ignorance keeps us poor, and when a town dwelling Black or Latino is poor, he lives in the ghetto. His wife usually has to work, and this leaves the children without parental companionship. In such places, where all of man's time is spent just surviving, he rarely knows what it means to read a great book. He has grown up and now sees his children grow up in squalor. His wife usually earns more than he. He is thwarted in his need to be the father-of-the-household. When he looks at his children an his home, he feels the guilt of not having given them something better. His only salvation is not to give a damn finally, or else he will fall into despair. In despair a man's sense of virtue is dulled. He no longer cares. He will do anything to escape it- steal or commit acts of violence - or perhaps try to lose himself in sensuality. Most often the sex-king is just a poor devil trying to prove the manhood that his whole existence denies. This is what we call the sorry Nigger. Soon he will either desert his home or become so unbearable he is kicked out. This leaves the mother to support the children alone. To keep food in their bellies, she has to spend most of her time away from them, working. This leaves the children to the streets, prey to any (sigh), any conversation, and any sexual experiment that comes along to make their lives more interesting or pleasurable. The Black man may not understand how, but he knows the only way out of this tragedy is through education, training. Thousands sacrifice everything to get the education to prove once and for all that the Negro's capacity for learning, for accomplishment, is equal to that of any other man. That pigment has nothing to do with degrees of intelligence. You place a White man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and less leisure, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to black people. these characteristics don't spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man's conditioning.Michael Whitelaw an aspiring actor living in New York, NY and studying at the Stellar Adler Studio of Acting. © 2013 !