(Stix Chat – by Dr. Leo Croft)
There’s a running joke in America — one that Black folks deliver with a smirk, a side-eye, and a sense of proud detachment: “Black people mind their business.” It’s almost a superpower at this point. You see a fight break out in a Walmart? We mind our business. Someone’s arguing loud enough to start earthquakes in the parking lot? We mind our business. Aliens could touchdown in aisle five asking for directions, and we’d still mind our damn business.
It’s a trait so ingrained that it’s become cultural shorthand — a way to distinguish us from the nosy Karens of the world or the self-appointed citizen cops who just have to insert themselves into everything. And don’t get it twisted — there’s a beauty to it. A wisdom. A knowingness about survival and choosing peace over pointless chaos. A quiet understanding that not everything deserves our energy.
But the older I get — and the deeper I dig into our history — the more I realize this wasn’t just something we chose to be. It was something that was engineered into us. Programmed. Conditioned. Hardened by centuries of survival instinct crafted through blood, terror, and psychological warfare. Because in the brutal system that birthed Black America, minding your business wasn’t just good advice. It was a matter of life and death. And the effects of that conditioning didn’t die with emancipation — they mutated. They evolved. They slipped into the marrow of our culture, invisible but powerful. And today, as proud as we are of our ability to mind our business… I have to ask: At what cost?
Slavery’s Psychological Warfare: Teaching Survival Through Silence
When people think of slavery, they picture the chains, the whips, the auctions — the brutality that was loud, grotesque, and undeniable. But the most powerful tool of slavery wasn’t the whip. It was the war waged on the mind. Enslavers knew that physical control could only get them so far; fear wears off, resistance eventually rises. So they built something more sinister — a system where Black survival itself was tied to silence, compliance, invisibility. To live, you didn’t just need strong hands. You needed the instincts of a ghost.
Punishments weren’t handed out equally — they were strategic. A Black person who ran away? Punished publicly. A Black person who spoke up about injustice? Punished publicly. A Black person who got caught learning to read, organizing, or even gathering in ways that made whites nervous? Punished publicly. But a Black person who kept their head down, stayed silent, minded their business? They might not have been free, but they lived to see another sunrise. That lesson burned itself into memory with each crack of the lash, with each execution meant not just to destroy one person, but to teach everyone watching. See nothing. Say nothing. Stay alive.
And over generations, this silent code became more than just fear — it became cultural DNA. It wasn’t discussed openly; it was taught through the sideways glance your mother gave you when you asked too many questions around white folks. It was baked into the warnings whispered between family members about who you could trust, what you should never say, and when it was safest to disappear into the background. We learned early: survival didn’t belong to the loudest. It belonged to the ones who learned to shrink themselves just enough to not be seen as a threat.
This wasn’t passive either — it was deliberate social engineering. Enslavers wanted us fragmented, cautious, distrustful even of one another, because true rebellion requires two things: communication and trust. Silence killed both. So minding your business wasn’t just a way to stay safe; it was a way to stay disconnected. A divided people are a conquered people, and silence built walls where there should have been bridges.
And as sick as it is to say, it worked. So well, in fact, that long after the physical chains rusted away, the mental ones stayed polished and strong — gleaming like a grim inheritance we didn’t ask for but still carried in our blood.
Minding Your Business: Survival Skill or Silent Cage?
At first, minding your business was armor — plain and simple. It was a survival tactic sharpened by necessity, taught by blood memory. But over time, something shifted. What started as a shield slowly hardened into a cage. It became so natural, so deeply woven into how we lived, that we stopped seeing it for what it was: a reaction to trauma, a tool forced into our hands by centuries of brutality. Instead, we began to wear it like it was our nature — like it was who we were at our core.
Somewhere along the way, minding your business stopped being about surviving a master’s whip and became a badge of honor. It wasn’t about fear anymore — it was about pride. About not getting caught up. About being unbothered, untouchable, smarter than the fools who got themselves mixed up in trouble. The lessons our ancestors had whispered in fear became jokes we shared at cookouts, memes we posted online, cultural code words for knowing better than to stick our necks out when chaos erupted. We forgot the origins, but we remembered the posture.
And that’s the trick of generational trauma: the pain mutates. What started as raw terror morphs into culture, into tradition, into “just the way we are” — even when the original threat is gone or looks different. We didn’t just mind our business because we were wise. We minded it because, long ago, there was no other choice if we wanted to survive another day. But in a world where survival no longer demands silence in the same way, that instinct can backfire. It can keep us isolated when we need unity. It can keep us quiet when we need to speak up. It can convince us that retreat is wisdom even when the moment demands courage.
Psychologists call this operant conditioning — behaviors shaped by reward and punishment until they become automatic. Enslaved Africans were punished for visibility and rewarded, in a grim sense, for invisibility. Over generations, that conditioning seeped into every corner of our lives until it became almost impossible to tell the difference between wisdom and fear.
So we mind our business. We protect our peace. But sometimes — and this is the hardest truth to swallow — sometimes we also protect the systems and cycles that are slowly bleeding us dry. And the saddest part? We don’t even realize we’re doing it. We think we’re just being smart, when in reality, we’re carrying out a survival program written centuries ago by people who wanted us broken and silent.
How It Shaped Generations (Real-World Examples)
By the time the chains came off and the papers declared us “free,” the deeper chains — the ones laced around our minds — were already doing their job. And we didn’t even realize it. We passed the lessons on like family heirlooms, handed down not out of malice, but out of love and fear — the only tools we had to survive in a world that still wanted us dead, disappeared, or destroyed.
You could hear it in the warnings our elders gave us. “Stay out of grown folks’ business.” “Don’t be running your mouth.”“Don’t ask too many questions when you don’t know the whole story.” They weren’t just casual pieces of advice — they were survival codes, polished smooth by generations who learned the hard way that curiosity could get you killed. In their eyes, minding your business wasn’t just smart. It was noble. It was righteous. It was how you showed respect for yourself, for your family, for the unseen dangers lurking around every corner.
I remember growing up hearing the sharpness in my grandmother’s voice whenever neighborhood drama erupted. A shooting, a fight, a cousin locked up — the instruction was always the same: “It ain’t none of our business. Pray for them and keep it moving.” And in that tone was a lifetime of hard-earned fear — a knowledge that poking your nose into the wrong thing, even with good intentions, could drag you into a nightmare you might not walk away from.
Even outside of danger, the mindset shaped everything. How we dealt with conflict in families — bury it, don’t talk about it. How we handled injustice at work — swallow it, keep your head down. How we treated political betrayal — sigh, grumble, and keep moving, because “speaking out don’t change nothing anyway.” Over and over, we taught ourselves to shrink away from confrontation because somewhere deep in our bones, we still believed that speaking up would make us a target — and targets don’t survive long.
And yet, even as it protected us, that silence cost us. It cost us community, because silence breeds isolation. It cost us healing, because you can’t fix wounds you refuse to talk about. It cost us justice, because injustice thrives when the good-hearted are too scared to testify against it. And worst of all, it cost us unity — because the walls we built to protect ourselves became the walls that kept us apart from each other.
Our strength has always been legendary — but what we rarely admit is that our silence, born out of necessity, sometimes starved the very spirit that was meant to make us unbreakable. We didn’t just mind our business — we became so good at it that, sometimes, we forgot what was worth standing up for.
The Double-Edged Sword Today
The instinct to mind our business didn’t die with our elders — it lives and breathes in us today. And like most things passed down through trauma and survival, it’s a double-edged sword. On one side, it’s a mark of deep wisdom — the ability to move through a world stacked against you without inviting extra chaos into your life. It’s why we’re some of the most discerning, quick-reading, danger-spotting people on the planet. We learned how to survive every type of storm — economic, political, social — because we knew how to assess risk without needing to run our mouths about it. That skill is real. That skill is sacred.
But on the other side, that same instinct can gut us when we need to act. Because sometimes, survival doesn’t mean staying silent. Sometimes, it means raising hell. It means putting yourself on the line for the truth. And when you’ve spent generations teaching yourself that silence equals safety, even righteous anger starts to feel like a threat. Even justice can feel too loud, too dangerous, too exposed.
You see it when a Black woman is assaulted in public, and nobody steps in. You see it when corruption runs rampant in our neighborhoods, but folks shake their heads and mutter, “That ain’t my business.” You see it when political systems strip away our rights and elders tell the young ones, “Just stay low and pray about it.” You even see it in the everyday moments — when we see another Black man struggling, clearly spiraling, and instead of reaching out, we cross the street, put our heads down, mind our business, and walk on by.
And what’s wild is that it’s not because we’re heartless. It’s because somewhere deep in the bloodline, we were taught: If you involve yourself in someone else’s fight, you’re inviting danger into your own house. It’s not apathy. It’s not cowardice. It’s generational programming whispering in our ears that even when the world is on fire, the safest thing you can do is look the other way and keep moving.
But here’s the thing about survival tactics: they have an expiration date. What saves you in one era can kill you in the next. The very silence that once shielded us has, in many ways, become the silence that suffocates us. It protects predators. It isolates victims. It allows injustice to metastasize until it becomes so normal we barely notice it anymore. And worst of all, it steals from us the thing we need most to break free — each other.
Because if survival taught us anything, it’s that alone, we’re vulnerable. But together, we’re a tidal wave.
And if we keep minding our business when our business is survival, is justice, is the protection of our children, our elders, our future — then we’re not just minding our business anymore. We’re minding our own destruction.
From Minding Business to No Snitching: How the Programming Evolved
Somewhere along the way, that old survival code evolved into something even sharper — and even more dangerous. What began as “mind your business” under slavery slowly mutated into the street-level gospel of modern Black America: no snitching. And if you trace the bloodline honestly, you’ll see it’s not an accident. It’s the next logical step in a survival system that taught us from the cradle that opening your mouth was a good way to end up broken, dead, or disappeared.
Originally, the silence made sense. Back in the days of slave catchers and lynch mobs, talking to the wrong people — especially white authorities — could cost you your life, or your entire family’s. Protecting your own meant keeping quiet, even when injustice burned right in front of you. In the Jim Crow era, it wasn’t safe to trust police, politicians, or courts. They weren’t there to protect us; they were another arm of the machine that wanted us erased. So silence wasn’t betrayal back then — it was protection.
But trauma doesn’t always stay in its original lane. When the external threats shifted, the silence stayed. Only now, instead of protecting us from external enemies, it started protecting the wolves among us. It protected abusers. It protected gangsters preying on their own communities. It protected the predators who made Black women and children easy targets because they knew damn well nobody would say a word.
We didn’t even realize we were reinforcing the very thing designed to destroy us. We mistook inherited fear for loyalty. We mistook silence for solidarity. And somewhere along the way, we started teaching it to ourselves as if it were a badge of honor instead of a scar. “Don’t be a snitch.” “Handle it in the streets.” “Don’t bring the law into Black business.” All of it sounded like pride — but underneath it was still the same old ghost of terror, whispering through the bloodlines.
And now? Now it’s killing us in ways our ancestors couldn’t have imagined. Women afraid to report violence because “nobody likes a snitch.” Families shattered because nobody will talk about the uncle who’s been touching kids for years. Communities terrorized by a few bad seeds because nobody dares say their names. Mothers burying sons, knowing damn well somebody saw something — but silence reigns supreme.
We didn’t invent no-snitch culture. It was designed for us, centuries ago, in the fields and plantations and courtrooms where survival meant staying quiet and invisible. We just carried it forward, long after the plantation gates rusted off their hinges. Long after survival demanded a different kind of bravery.
The sickest part? The system didn’t even have to keep enforcing it. We started doing it to ourselves.
And every time we refuse to speak up, every time we let silence shield the guilty and bury the innocent, we’re not just minding our business — we’re minding the business of white supremacy. We’re helping it finish the job.
Where We Go From Here: Breaking the Silent Code
The truth is, the silence that once saved us has outlived its purpose. It no longer protects us — it isolates us. It no longer shields us — it sabotages us. And if we want to heal, to rebuild, to finally become the people our ancestors prayed for under blood-soaked stars, then we have to break the code they were forced to live by. We have to choose a new path — one built not on silence and survival, but on truth and connection.
That doesn’t mean throwing away the discernment our people earned the hard way. Being wise about what battles to pick is still sacred. Protecting your peace is still necessary. But minding your business can’t mean abandoning your people. It can’t mean closing your eyes to pain, or turning your back on injustice just because it’s easier. The time for shrinking is over. The time for “staying out of it” has passed. Now, our survival depends on something much harder: showing up.
It means speaking when it’s uncomfortable.
It means calling out harm, even when the person doing it looks like you.
It means protecting Black women, Black children, Black futures — not just when it’s convenient, but when it’s messy, dangerous, and hard.
It means rejecting the poisoned loyalty of “no snitching” when it protects predators instead of the innocent.
It means teaching our kids that real strength isn’t silence — it’s standing in truth even when your knees are shaking.
Because if we don’t, we’re not just minding our business — we’re minding our extinction. We’re handing the next generation the same broken survival playbook we were handed, knowing damn well it was written by people who wanted us divided, docile, and defeated.
Breaking the silent code starts small. It starts with telling your nephew that no, he’s not weak for speaking up. It starts with comforting the neighbor who’s scared to testify. It starts with refusing to let trauma raise our children while we hide behind old slogans. And slowly, those small acts of courage start knitting a new kind of survival — one based not on fear, but on fierce, unapologetic love.
Our ancestors survived slavery. They survived Jim Crow. They survived every dirty trick this country could throw at them. They survived so we could have the chance to do something they couldn’t — not just survive, but live. Fully. Loudly. Together.
We owe it to them.
We owe it to ourselves.
We owe it to every Black child not yet born who deserves to grow up free — not just free from chains, but free from the ghosts of chains still rattling inside our heads.
The question isn’t whether we can break the code.
The question is whether we’re finally ready to be free.
