(Video above: Rickey Smiley goes on a must-hear rant on his syndicated morning show)
Alabama native, world famous comedian and nationally syndicated radio host Rickey Smiley went on a must-hear rant Thursday morning, demanding his adult listeners do a better job mentoring the next generation on how they should act.
Several notable excerpts can be found below, and the full video is above.
On being polite and doing things the right way:
I don’t care where you from – you need to be polite! Some people just don’t know how to be. And I need everybody, every mother that’s out there listening right now; I need for you to Google etiquette stuff for your daughters. Young ladies out there don’t know how to sit, don’t know how to sit at a table and eat, don’t know how to dress, don’t know how to be. A lot of kids don’t know how to be because the mothers don’t know how to be. And that’s fine, cause if you don’t know how to be then the information is out there. And I go on Google myself, because when I’m trying to teach my daughters what to do and how to eat I Google it, and we sit down and we practice eating. I fix a salad, I say “let’s practice eating properly, using proper table manners.” That ain’t the way white folks eat, that ain’t the way white folks speak, that doesn’t mean you’re “acting white.” We’re talking about doing things the right way.
On dressing for success and being decent:
We lived in the projects. We were getting dropped off in the projects, but when you see us out, man we had our suits on and them shirts and ties. Go to school dressed for success. Nobody knew where we came from; nobody saw that long walk home in the projects. You’ve got to want to be something. You don’t have to be a product of your environment… Yeah, you live in the projects, but the projects don’t have to live in you. Look how we be fighting at Chuck E Cheese, somebody fighting at the cemetery, posting all these fights on Facebook, and World Star celebrating all this kind of stuff – celebrating guns and shooting folks. But you’re out there laying in the grass crying when somebody kills somebody in your family.
What are we doing? What are we doing? Ain’t no decency, ain’t no order. We’re just out of order. You can’t blame the white man for this. You can’t blame nobody for this. Can’t blame nobody. It’s you, it’s you’re choice.
On not making excuses:
Let me get into the psychological part of this. Listen up, this is deep: You can sit up here and go to a counselor and say you’re doing all this stuff because your daddy wasn’t in your life, or your daddy dead, or your momma dead, or your momma was on crack, or your momma wasn’t in your life, I had to stay with my grandmomma, we didn’t have this… That ain’t nothing but an excuse! Because guess what? All of us are messed up. You got momma and daddy issues, Brett don’t you got momma and daddy issues? Gary got momma and daddy issues, Beyonce got momma and daddy issues. Everybody in this room got some kind of momma and daddy issues.
But guess what? When you get in that damn car, and you get to a red light, guess what you got to do? When you get to that red light, you have to stop. So the police pull you over and say, “Why you run that red light?” What are you going to say? ‘Well my momma wasn’t in my life, and my daddy abused me…’ You’ve still got to abide by the rules and the regulations and the laws! So don’t let no counselor get all up in your business and get all up in your head, making you use all the stuff as an excuse to do wrong. Cause that’s what they’re doing now. An excuse is building bridges to nowhere, creating monuments of nothingness.
And while we’re at it, let’s watch the best Rickey Smiley standup performance of all time: “White marching bands vs. Black marching bands.”
