Are we willing to change to save our children?
Enoch Muhammad works with young people. To serve them parents must first change themselves, he says.
by Naba’a Muhammad, StraightWords.com
Nothing can be more important in the New Year than saving our children in the face of threats from within and outside our community. Mental health challenges, failing education, violence, unemployment, police abuses, poverty, housing insecurity and other pressures erode family and community, often leaving our babies vulnerable, feeling neglected and forgotten.
Enoch Muhammad, of Chicago-based Hip Hop Detoxx, has been working with young people for more than two decades. He shared some important lessons on what we must do to save our children as we enter 2025.
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He starts from an interesting place: Parents must first change themselves.
“We can’t do the work of reeducating, retraining our children until we get rid of the shame and guilt that we have as adults. So we can have the ability to forgive self, knowing that the Most High Allah is the oft-returning to mercy and the forgiving. When we engage in that process, it allows for us to begin to loosen up those knots in our hearts and our minds so we can do the necessary steps to work with our children and help to save our children,” said Brother Enoch as he is known.
“The Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught first self, then others,” he continued. “Let me look at me first. What is it that I have to engage in the salvation process so I can do a better job calling the Almighty to help me be more involved?”
Key to the success is atonement, principles introduced during the 1995 Million Man March by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, he added. It allows parents to reflect on themselves, change themselves and make amends for shortcomings and failures in the lives of their children.
In work with three-year-olds to high schoolers, he has seen the disconnect between children and parents. Children are feeling alone with no one to talk to or even do homework with, he said.
Parents need to examine themselves and how they spend time, whether social media or otherwise after stressful and long days, he said. Cut back on that time, spend it doing something with your children, Brother Enoch advised. The point is to rebuild frayed relationships and strengthen existing relationships.
Hip Hop Detoxx is a 501C3 public health organization with programs to help maximize critical thinking, conscious listening, healthy lifestyle choices and minimize behaviors and thought processes that lead young people into incarceration. Its work started in 2002 with Chicago Public Schools. The group officially launched in 2006.
Hip Hop Detoxx started with a focus on cultural arts, physical and mental wellness and entrepreneurship—the first four elements of its programming. Their work includes summer and year-round programs. Hip Hop Detoxx offers the Males to Men program for boys and Rhinestones to Diamonds program for girls.
Hip Hop Detoxx also works with staffers from varied institutions and parents to increase effectiveness with children, students and youth clients. Adults needed to be rejuvenated because of burnout and that was before Covid and the shutdown, Brother Enoch said.
In 2025 and in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the Million Man March, Hip Hop Detoxx is planning and organizing a major Males to Men Seminar Oct. 16 in Chicago. “We want to revive the idea and the ideals of the Million Man March,” Brother Enoch said. “Because right now we don’t have functioning communities, we have trauma centers. And that’s why it’s so difficult for us to have the impact on a consistent basis because we treat our trauma centers like they’re functioning communities and they’re not. Therefore, we have false expectations which appear real.”
The Million Man March principles—atonement, reconciliation and responsibility—can produce not only operational unity, “but allow us to be able to have sustainability. We have not only everything we need, we have the ability to connect with each other and not only speak straight words, but have straight actions behind those straight words,” said Brother Enoch.
Leading up to the event, we are strategizing and organizing to produce sustainable activities, he added. “We all can engage so that we can have a socioeconomic, psychosocial, political impact that will affect us holistically way beyond Oct. 16, 2025.”
Brother Enoch seeks men and women who want to help with organizing, fundraising, planning, logistics and marketing. If you want to join this powerful effort, text Brother Enoch at 773 563 4315, and provide your phone number or email address. Just say you want to help.
Naba’a Muhammad, award winning Final Call editor, is host of “Straight Words With Naba’a Richard Muhammad, Bj Murphy, and James G. Muhammad,” which airs live Tuesdays, 9 p.m. to 12 a.m. Central Time, on WVON AM 1690 Black Talk Radio Chicago and is livestreamed at the iHeart Radio app and WVON.com. Get more of his writing straightwords.com.
