| I have nothing but respect for our young people and what they’re doing.
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| My thing is, we as adults did not stand strong
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| and on our square to bring our young people through this process.
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| I know, I was the young person
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| that had to fend for himself on the streets of New York.
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| I know what happened, with our young people,
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| I say, «Look I ain’t mad at you»,
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| know no matter what I hear,
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| I know that you are moving through a process
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| because they are attempting to destroy the community so they’re using you.
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| They are buying you out.
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| But we as adults, get to buy them back.
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| I’m ready to compete with anybody for our young people’s minds.
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| And what we have to is change the paradigm of how we’re interacting with them,
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| deal with them from a heartfelt place where they can understand.
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| You see because whether you realize it or not,
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| it’s you they’re shooting in the streets.
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| You, young brothers, they’re the ones that are being shot.
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| And so with this entertainment or with this music,
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| maybe I don’t like what I hear,
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| maybe that I don’t like some of the words I hear,
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| maybe that I don’t like the direction,
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| but I think they’re doing a pretty good job considering that we,
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| as men, the adult men,
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| did not cover that when we should’ve covered that.
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| And protected them when we should’ve protected them.
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| And brought them up that so when we see an artist acting in a most
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| inappropriate way,
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| «Where is the father in this?»,
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| «Where is that male mentor that can be there?»,
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| We, as black men, must take on the responsibility
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| as the honorable Elijah Muhammad told Malcolm
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| is that a nation is only as strong as its weakest family.
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| And we have got to create nations.
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| We have to create relationships between the African man
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| and the African woman that create some valuable function. |