“If Ma failed, then we failed, and she never wanted us to feel that.” The nature versus nurture debate has always been a topic of discussion in the field of psychology, but the idea of failure must be given to us at birth and as humans we learn throughout our lives the definition of failure and the conditions of success. To a mother I could imagine success is watching one’s kids live a life just a notch above their own, or living in relative prosperity, maybe a few grandchildren. But failure is something that must be so much harder to define. 

To see one’s children turn to drugs and forming a crippling drug problem is a failure, seeing your child commit horrible crimes because they can’t see the forest through the trees, is a failure… but there is no way failure stops success. In the text the author talks about a sense of community, and more than ever the local community is the most powerful tool in reaching success. The community will get your children off drugs and offer reform for their crimes.

 Then you can say that you reached success with the help of your community. Whenever another black soul is taken from earth, it’s the community that weeps, not just the individual. When the news says the system is systematically racist, we have failed as a community. But why do we want to protect our children from this pain? 

After all, this problem that we have on our hands is not bound to a single generation. How come we don’t actively take steps to teach our children that in order to succeed we need to build community with one another? Ahh yes, I almost forgot, the reason they didn’t learn that is because the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell… that fact really helps the black boy who just got pulled over for the first time. That fact really helps the officer that was improperly trained. But that fact did not help the outcome of what you guess can happen next.