Every day it seems that more and more issues arise to separate the Black Race. Our oppressors are salivating knowing that they’ve done their job. The seeds of ignorance that they sowed have germinated and are growing like weeds, twisting their way around every beautiful flower in the garden of Life. These weeds of destruction must be stopped and the only way to do it is to resist our Crabs in a Barrel mentality.    

I’m sure that a lot of Black people all over the world have pondered the question of why the Black race is so dysfunctional at some time or another. There are numerous answers to this question but the most common excuses are based on our cultural, religious, and regional differences. There is one self-deprecating answer to this important question and I’ve been hearing it since I was a child. That answer is that Black people are nothing but Crabs in a barrel.

Most people do not understand the term Crabs in a Barrel. I’ve even heard people on social media questioning the term, saying that it makes no sense because Crabs don’t live in Barrels. In order to understand the term, you have to understand it’s origin. The term “Crabs in a Barrel” is a derogatory term that describes the behavior of a bunch of Crabs that have been captured and put into an open Barrel for storage before being cooked or sold for food.

Unlike Fishes that can be killed and kept for several hours before cooking, Crab meat quickly becomes toxic after a Crab dies so if you kill them, they must either be immediately frozen of cooked. Once inside a Barrel, Crabs naturally will try to climb their way out but since they don’t have the intelligence to work together, all they do is pull each other down as they try to climb up the sides of the Barrel.

Several correlations can be drawn between the state of the Black race and Crabs in a Barrel. The 1st similarity is that we do not understand the situation that we are in, in terms of containment. Some of us who were taken from our natural habitat, were brought as slaves into a different habitat or metaphoric Barrel. Black people in Africa were colonized and separated into groups based on colonial boundaries. That is another metaphoric Barrel.

The 2nd similarity is that we do not truly understand the consequences of the situations we are in and how it will eventually result in our demise. Our situation can even be compared the boiling Frog scenario. It has been shown that when a Frog is placed in a pot of water on a fire, the Frog will instinctively adjust its body temperature to cope with the rising temperature of the water in the pot. It does not know that at some point it’s coping mechanism will fail and it will die.

The 3^rd similarity is that we do not seem to have the capacity to work together for our own good. Outside of instinct there is a mental ability known as Foresight and it is a trait that most Black people have long been accused of not posessing. The Dohgon were one African tribe that saw the demise of the Arab and European invasion into Egypt and migrated into isolation in West Africa.

I said all that to get to the point of my argument, which is that Black people need to resist our Crabs in a Barrel dysfunctional mentality. Social media is the driving force of the information age but while social media has so far been a great tool for opening Black minds, allowing for the unlearning of generations of colonial indoctrination, social media has become a perfect place for the Crabs in a Barrel mentality to thrive.

I consider dissenting political views and spiritual beliefs to be fare gain but when it comes to hating other Black people because of their nationality, it goes too far. I’m now seeing many Black people who have no care for racial unity, gaining enormous following on social media. These people are actively sowing seeds of disunity between Black people of different nationalities and it makes me wonder if they are Agents on a mission.

We’ve all seen the results of xenophobia in Rwanda, and South Africa but the social divisions that those situations caused will be nothing compared to the hate that is building up between a new group of Black Americans, now known as FBAs, and Black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. If you don’t know, FBAs claim to be indigenous Americans and don’t have any genetic connection to Africans. You can find FBAs all over social media these days claiming many outlandish things including the lie that DNA ancestry is fake.

I have just one question for any FBA leader; if you, as a Black man in America, ever gets accused of raping someone and the only way to exonerate yourself is to get a DNA test, will you refuse it because, as you say, it’s all fake? I know why you are engaging in this type of deranged behavior that is akin to the deranged behavior of your white supremacist neighbors. They’ve indoctrinated you with their psychopathic behavior so you believe that you can alter reality by hammering square pegs into round holes.

Schools perform psychological assessments on children starting in kindergarten. They do so to assess cognitive abilities so that they can determine if a child will need extra attention outside of the regular curriculum. They can also tell if a child possesses aggressive or psychopathic traits. One basic tool that schools use is a Peg Block Toy in which a child is instructed to place geometric pegs into the spaces that they fit.

If a child cannot understand why a square peg will not go into a round hole, then obviously, that child will need help in managing reality. If the child persists in trying to force a square peg into a round hole and even gets angry about it, then that child is psychopathic. Recently, I watched a video on YouTube in which a Black man was claiming that America is really Egypt. He even attempted to give written and logical proof based on the history of Napoleon and early American exploration.

The worst part about the whole thing was that there were hundreds of Black people commenting saying that this guy was doing a great job revealing the true history of Black Americans. In investigating him further, I saw that his channel was filled with mis-information based on one purpose and that was his hatred of non -American Black people. To me, this is the perfect example of a Crab in a Barrel psychopathic mentality. The sad part is that he is not alone in sewing dis-unity within the Black community.

There are Crab in a Barrel Black people all over the world. Some continental Africans don’t like Western Blacks and are actively working to keep us out of Africa. There is xenophobic hatred between continental Africans and there is xenophobic hatred between Caribbean nations, American Blacks, and Africans. Some of this hate is because we do not respect one another but most of the hate is because we don’t like to see other Black people prosper.

We are happy knowing that everyone is in the same Barrel of desperation, not realizing that if enough Black people makes it out of the Barrel eventually one of those people will have the conscience to come back and help the rest.