I fear everyday for my black people.

I live with constant worry of where, when and who will be the next young black person to die needlessly and whether the death will result from a black-on-black crime or police brutality.

I look at African-Americans of my generation and can’t help but be saddened by how far we’ve drifted in comparison to our ancestors, who held on to each other realizing that only by doing so they would survive.

Now I wonder, how did we become this broken?

We have hatred towards our own people; we would rather kill another black person for being too successful, fight and spread malicious lies about one another because of the self-hate. We despise each other, refuse to patronize black businesses or encourage others in our communities.

According to Tampa Bay Times, there has been a 2 percent increase of black-on-black crime since 2008, for 2010-13 about 92 percent of blacks who were murdered were killed by other blacks.

I’m not talking about standing up for our people only when someone has died. I’m talking about always being there; I want our people to have that unconditional love for one another again.

I’m not saying we do not love each other at all, but we could definitely love our race more than we do. There are not any stats I came across that show we don’t love ourselves, but it’s quite evident from the way we communicate, dress, products we buy, who we support etc.

I want that old school classic love, I want us to support black businesses. I want us to encourage our youth and give them those values that we onced lived by. But most of all, I want us to stop killing each other over senseless things like jealousy, envy or hate.

“Black equals bad and we must kill them.” Whites trained us to be our own worst enemies and kill our own people. So far we’ve been doing a great job at showing others that our lives do not matter.

I recently watched a documentary called “Hidden Colors” by Tariq Nasheed that exposes how we have become ignorant and what we thought was true about our history. We have been brainwashed by the media and the white man that being black is bad. We are trained early on how we should classify ourselves in society. To them we have no place in this world. They tried to rewrite and wipeout our history of who we really are; we are the original kings and queens of this world.

How can we change our minds about ourselves after being taught for so long that we are thugs, criminals, uneducated, unwanted, unlovable, lazy and so much more? For one, we can look at our history and see how united and dependent we were of one another in order to get through slavery.

Even through the pain they had to endure, our people still found joy and laughter and fought for each other, not against one another. We can take that as an example of unity and apply it to our generation.

Remember that we are the original kings and queens of this world; our ancestors built pyramids; we are imitated by our full plump lips, our natural curvaceous bodies, and other races even get tans to have our beautiful melanin skin color but our race is still the most hated, at the same time.

Can we wake up, my people? Can we care about one another again?