Welcome to the #BlackBlogsMatter challenge! Throughout the 28 days of February, my posts will not (necessarily) be about HR, Leadership or Management topics.

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Have you ever seen a pile of crabs in a barrel? Inevitably, the ones toward the top are able to grasp the rim and pull themselves to safety. However, the ones under them will not allow it. They pull the crab back into the bucket to prevent them from escaping.

This happens over and over and over again. Because the crabs keep pulling each other down, none of them are able to get free. Eventually, they all give up trying to get free and end up dying in the boiling water.

There are many who argue Black people have a crab mentality and hold themselves back from advancement by pulling each other down with envy, spite and unhealthy competition.

Hateration all up and through the dancery.

The tide is beginning to turn in this area for Black Americans. The further our generations are removed from slavery thru the civil rights era, the more this lessens. It typically takes 3 – 5 generations to eradicate the crab mentality from a people. This moves slower without restitution and/or reparations as well as when systemic discrimination is not actively addressed … This is why crab mentality remains more prevalent with Blacks than the other minority groups. We still have a long way to go.

There are 2 things we can do to address the crab mentality when it rears its head:

1. Confront the mentality … Whether it is you or someone else, the crab mentality has to be addressed as illogical and untrue. Any time someone is discouraging or disparaging the success of someone else out of fear that the other person’s achievement will prevent their success, they are demonstrating crab mentality. This has to be called out as wrong.
2. Believe everyone can make it … The heart of the crab mentality is the belief that one person’s success means everyone else’s hope of achieving is ruined. That simply is not true. We can all make it. We should all make it. We will all make it.

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Tune in tomorrow for Day 14 – Black Love