In the words of Cedric the Entertainer, “I’m a grown-a$$ man, dawg!”

As a grown man, I am tired of this whole “stop snitching” garbage. This whole “G-code” thing has continued to mean that:

1. A lot of black folks, including little kids, are being shot and killed.
2. Murderers are going on to kill more victims.

I am also sick of unsolved murders going on in our communities. Granted, sometimes people don’t come forward for fear of retaliation and, let’s face it, that fear is warranted. But, there are some who think that by not “snitching”, this lends them the same “credibility” as other so-called thugs.

Perhaps, it is this that motivates Cornell Dews. For years, Dews has worked with kids to help them to understand that the gangster imagery they are seeing in popular media is a visual lie being pumped to them as a reality.

So, to answer the “Stop Snitching” clothing craze, he created the “Stop Lying” t-shirt. This is aimed at the studio/video gangsters who are feeding nonsense to our kids and promoting the notion that black people condone criminality.

“The idea (for the shirt) was birthed from working with my children,” Dews told me for a column I did in the Baltimore Sun. “So many people are lying to them.”

They’re not only lying to our children. They’re lying to themselves. Dews said he has heard guys he grew up with brag about doing jail time he knows they didn’t do, because they were on the streets at the time they claimed to be behind bars. Dews is especially miffed by those “gangsta” rappers who brag about their lives spent in poverty-stricken urban slums.

“Some of them grew up in better neighborhoods and went to better schools than I did,” Dews told me.

The truth is, few rappers probably grew up in a neighborhood as rugged as the one where Dews grew up. He graduated from and lived within walking distance of Lake Clifton High School in East Baltimore, which was briefly renamed “Gunshot High” after a number of shootings in the 1990s.

Also within walking distance of his old neighborhood is the house where the Dawson family lived when they were firebombed to death four years ago this month. Angela and Carnell Dawson, along with their five children, were killed; they had offended neighborhood drug dealers by telling them not to sling drugs on or near their steps in front of their children.

Those drug dealers had a name for the Dawsons: Snitches. You can now understand why Dews has a problem with the term “Stop Snitching” and with anyone who wears a “Stop Snitching” T-shirt or cap. Anyone who does is, in essence, saying the Dawsons got exactly what they deserved. It betrays a mindset that says crime is a cultural imperative for black Americans.

So, as soon as I can get my hands on one, I’m buying this shirt!

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