Blacks Against Mad Mothers

Six black students walk into a bar on a Saturday night.  Although that might sound like the beginning of a joke, this is a pretty serious example of racism, as well as the insidious nature of racism and its ability to hide in plain sight.  An employee at the bar tells the black student that their clothing is inappropriate.  The black students are told that their jeans are too baggy and the bar has a dress code.  The black students have no choice but to leave the bar.  But in an experiment to see if their race had anything to do with the decision to not let them in, one of the students exchanged his clothing with a white student.  The white student wearing the previously inappropriate jeans walked into the same bar right past the same employee.  Suddenly, without black skin to taint their appearance, the baggy jeans become acceptable.  It turns out that it wasn’t the bagginess of the jeans that was unacceptable, but the blackness that the jeans were being associated with.

This incident happened a few days ago to students of Washington University here in St. Louis, Missouri, that was participating in a senior class trip to Chicago, Illinois.  The students were trying to get into a nightclub called Mother’s Original Bar.  Representatives of the bar said security concerns and not racism guided their decision to deny access to the black students.  The bar people say gang violence was common nearby and was merely erring on the side of caution.  But it is rather noteworthy to see those security concerns evaporate when they see white students.  The bagginess of the jeans was just an excuse used to turn away students who looked naturally thuggish, code word for too black, in their attire.  The black students have filed a civil rights complaint with the Illinois attorney general’s office.  A similar complaint has been filed to the Chicago Commission on Human Relations as well as the United States Justice Department.  Click here to read more on this story at the Chicago Breaking News Center.

Obviously this is a case of race based discrimination.  By the white student donning the jeans and walking into the bar, clothing can be eliminated as the distinguishing factor between admission and no admission.  No mention was made as to whether or not the alleged nearby crime violence was perpetrated by black people or what percentage of this crime activity was committed by black people.  Nevertheless, by citing the supposedly gang violence happening nearby, the bar is trying to say that it is safe to assume that the black students may have been part of that violence and is therefore a threat and at the same time, safe to assume that white people pose no threat.  Because one or some black people commit crime, it is now safe to assume that all black people have the potential to commit similar crimes.  But by the same token, all white people are never held in suspicion when one or some white people commit crime.  That is by definition race based discrimination.  This is a first class example of racism.

But the insidiousness of this case that is truly appalling is the number of people who continue to defend such racism.  Many of the comments that accompany the article mentioned above show people’s willingness to label the black students as thuggish in appearance with nothing but the judgment of the bar’s employees to go by.  One comment says something to the effect that black honor students don’t have the common sense not to dress like thugs and yelling like simpletons for help because they are being repressed.  Another comment implies that these black people got bent out of shape and want to act like idiots.  People are quick to label black people as idiots for standing up for their rights and challenging race based discrimination as idiotic behavior.  People make no distinction between the black people who commit the alleged crime the bar employees refer to, and the black students who simply want to be accepted as equals in society’s eye.

But if these honor students learned anything is that in the judgment of many, they are not the equal of white people.  All it takes is a pair of baggy jeans to take their standing on our society down a peg or two.  All it takes is a pair of jeans that are hideous and threatening on their black flesh but at the same time are rendered benign and innocuous on wholesome obviously white skin, before they are collectively labeled thuggish and unacceptable.  Some black person somewhere is a criminal and therefore, it is socially acceptable to view them as thugs as well.  Their grades don’t matter.  Their attire doesn’t matter.  The fact that they may have never been guilty of any crime in their lives doesn’t matter one bit.  All that matters is that some black person somewhere can be considered less that socially acceptable.  And as long as that type of black person exists, all black people are cut from that same cloth unless proven otherwise.

Blatant Black Racists

One thing I find truly sad are black people who are blatantly racist.  Now I know a lot of people will say that I’m a big racist because I adhere to the idea that black people who date outside of the black race exclusively actually help to promote some of the nasty stereotypes most commonly associated with people in the black community.  Others will say that I’m racist because I think that black people should want to support endeavors throughout the black community since few of anybody else really wants to support the black community.  And yes it’s true that I can’t simply endorse some feel good rhetoric that we’re all humans or we’re all Americans and therefore we should work to support everyone.  When people in the black community can honestly enjoy the same status as other communities then we can drop is on par with other communities then we can say things are truly equal and buy the world a Coke.

But until then, as we see instances of intolerance for black people, like when famous black scholars are arrested for being angry in their own home, then it’s pretty obvious that the black community needs more help and support than others.  A lot of people will call me the racist for thinking that racism needs to be confronted and eliminated whenever possible.  Blatant racial prejudices from black people deserve special attention.

I recently had a conversation with a black men who pointed to all the financial problems hitting California during this economic crisis and lay blame squarely on the Mexican community.  This jewel of humanity held the theory that all the budget problems of California could be solved if Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would just round up all the illegal aliens and export them back to the south side of the United States’ border with Mexico.  That way, the state wouldn’t have to spend so much on education and on public healthcare and police and other social services.  All Mexicans do is take and take and take and they give nothing, or very little, back in return.

I asked if that’s the case why Texas or New Mexico or Arizona isn’t hurting.  The black man replied that those other states don’t have near the Mexican population of California.  I looked at him incredulously.  I asked if he had ever been to San Antonio or Houston.  I asked if he ever set foot in Brownsville, Texas or ever made a trip to Laredo.  I’ve never been to El Paso but I’m sure there is a strong Mexican community there.  My bottom line point was that I believed Texas is full of Hispanics on par with California.  I’ve never been to California so I wouldn’t know for sure.  But even if California did have a bigger Hispanic population, Texas wasn’t too far behind.  And I don’t know what the populations are in New Mexico and Arizona, but I do believe Hispanics are well represented in those states as well.  No other state even comes close to having the budgeting problems of California.  So chances are to assume that a large Hispanic population automatically drains financial resources is a racist statement without merit.

My associate and I go way back.  I’ve known him practically all my life.  I know for a fact that he is a social and political conservative.  I know for a fact that this particular example of blatant black racism takes advantage of the cheap day labor that having a good size undocumented or unemployed Hispanic population provides.  Whenever he needed to move something heavy or needed to clean something up in a hurry, he knows a corner where he can go and pick up as many Hispanic day laborers he needs in a New York minute.  And whenever that happens, whenever these people provide the service that people need, aren’t they making their own contribution?  True enough they are part of the cash and carry community that avoid paying their full share of income tax, but isn’t the black man who is hiring the day laborer also making the choice not to fully contribute to the tax base?  If a person takes advantage of people who do things on the down low, why complain about them and call them the bane of California’s existence

So this black man wants to take advantage of the Hispanic community that exists under the radar.  But then this same man wants to condemn these people and blames their culture for all our social ills.  They have nothing to offer except for the cheap and ready muscle he needs when he needs it.  The hypocrisy is thick with this one.

California’s budget woes are very similar to our national budget woes that stem from the belief that supply side economics will solve all our problems.  The same economic theories rooted in Reaganomics that plague our national economy were started long before in California.  There is more than enough money in California to solve their budget problems.

But the majority of people in California are so tight fisted against doing anything to help the statewide community through economic hard times that people would rather cut off their nose to spite their social services face.  Raise taxes to help the state through hard times?  Not if state level politicians want to get reelected.  There’s longevity to prolonging the economic crisis and giving people the false impression that watching their state go bankrupt is somehow looking out for their best interest.  And while all of this tight fisted, bankruptcy is better, political maneuvering is going on, we can blame it all on Hispanics.  That’s nothing but blatant racism.  Black people should know better than to make unfounded assumptions based on race.  This was nothing less than a classic example of black pots acting like racist and treating Hispanics kettles the way black pots are treated by others.

White Woman Married To Black Man…

Forget “black communities” and “white communities!” Have you ever even considered the fact that two people might be IN LOVE?! Of course I notice he’s a black man and of couse he notices I’m a white woman. Our backgrounds and upbringings are so incredibly different but that makes the relationship awesomely interesting. Our daughter is going to have the best of both worlds sice we are both incredibly close with one anothers families. Nobody but hippie RACISTS think about “weakening the black and white communities”. . . come on man it’s the year 2009. I’m not stupid, I know there are racists out there but if someone is racist they aren’t going to be in a relationship with someone of a different race just to “weaken” the other race. hahaha I’m sorry I just have to laugh about this because of how obsurd it is that you think that peoples motive when they participate in an interratial relationship is to weaken it or that they even think about that. Every black mans goal is not to bring up “strong black children.” Some men like my husband want to bring up strong, wonderful, smart human beings that are just that. . . HUMAN BEINGS! Get a grip.

Peace,
whitewomanmarriedtoblackmanwithbiracialdaughter

Thanks for the feedback whitewomanmarriedtoblackman,

You may not be stupid.  Although I have begun to develop an impression of you, I really don’t know if you are stupid or not.  But one thing I do know for sure is that you are incredibly naive to think that the black community is not weakened by black people who abandon it so quickly and easily.  I know nothing about your relationship with your black husband and I won’t pretend to know by trying to pigeonhole the two of you into the stereotypical black/white relationship.  I would like to believe that the two of you share equally in a healthy relationship that respects each other’s culture and history.  But all too often, black people who enter into interracial relationships are quick to kick their black community to the curb.

I don’t know for sure if you’re stupid or not, but I will have to question your intellect if you think my supposition is that racist are getting with black people for the sole purpose of weakening the black community.  That doesn’t even make sense to me and I wonder if you’re even bothering to read anything I write or to think about what is written with an unprejudiced perspective.

But one thing I will say is that many, and please note that does not mean all, white people who date people in the black community are enablers who are quick to encourage black people to transcend their race and join the racially generic dominant community that is predominantly white and abandon or minimize any connection or affiliation to the black community.  There was a time where black people who dated white people remained proud of their black heritage.  Now, black people who date exclusively outside the black community could not care any less about the black community.  Any association with the black community is at best superficial.

A lot of children who come from an interracial relationship where one of the parents is obviously black and another parent is obviously white don’t want to be affiliated with the black community.  Being black is perceived as some kind of anathema.  I can only guess that in this obviously mixed relationship, the parents fail to give the child any positive connection to the black community.  The child’s perspective of the black community will be shaped by a society that obviously thinks black people are of lesser value.

I remember not too long ago my woman was having this same type of exchange with a man from the black community and a woman from the white community who swore on their children’s heads that they were a loving interracial couple without a single hang up and were respectful of each other’s racial identity.  They referred to the black man as being brown skinned while the white woman was free to be white.  The man scoffed at the idea of being black because if you looked at him his skin was not black, it was brown.  When asked was the woman’s skin actually white and why they didn’t use a more accurate description for her pigmentation, the couple hemmed and hawed about how it didn’t really matter how they referred to each other.  This was a perfect example of the double racial standard that they were more than happy to live with.  Their alleged mutual respect was nothing more than the black man acquiescing to the dominant community way of life and his black community affiliation was rejected in favor of a more racially generic lifestyle that tends to point the finger at black people for saying anything about the continuing racial animosity in this country.

All too often black people looking for interracial relationships or a relationship with someone other than black are black people who have hang ups about their own blackness.  People who fall in love with people who just so happen to be on opposing sides of the racial divide are not the subject here.  Who am I to stand in the way of true love?

But brothers and sisters whose love for non blacks is inspired by a hatred of self or a hatred of the black community should not be given a pass simply because they find a willing collaborator as an excuse to leave the black community behind.  And you are absolutely correct. There are a lot of black people who have absolutely zero interest in raising children with a strong black affiliation. That happens to be the exact phenomenon which leads to a weaker black community and a strong racially generic community that heavily favors white privilege. I believe most people express the obviousness of something like this as, “DUH!”

Lastly, you find my position absurd.  I’m not surprised and the feeling is mutual.  I find many people from the racially generic dominant community like you absurd as well.  But while you are free to laugh because you believe the impact to you and yours is rather limited, the black community is in trouble.  By every social measure the black community suffers the shitty end of comparison.  Whether it is health care, employment, education, wealth, justice, representation or whatever you wish to use as a measure, the black community always comes up short.  Some of us don’t have the luxury of simply forgetting who comes from the black community and who comes from the white community.

The Human Stain Part I – The Freedom To Not Be Black

The Human Stain is a movie featuring Anthony Hopkins as Coleman Silk, a mulatto passing for a white man.  The movie starts with Mr. Silk as a college professor who makes the poor choice of using a blatant racial slur in reference to two students missing from his classroom roster who just so happen to be black.  Mr. Silk asked his class if the two names listed actually referred to students or spooks.  He is brought before the college administrators who suspect his poor choice of words as racism.  In anger he quits.  He goes home all worked up in a rabid lather and gets his wife all worked up and excited as well.  In all the excitement, his wife suffers a massive heart attack and suddenly dies in his arms.  All of this happens in the first five minutes of the show.  But believe it or not, the movie moves at a very deliberate pace.

Through the remainder of the film we see Coleman Silk in various stages of his life.  He grows up with two obviously black parents and an obviously black brother and sister.  His father was an optometrist who lost his business during the depression and had to get a job working as a waiter in the dining car of a railroad.  At this time of his life, Coleman is a promising pugilist who doesn’t have a lot of size but has a good combination of speed and strength giving him the advantage of surprise.  Dad doesn’t approve of his son being a boxer.  But dad suffers a heart attack while working the train and dies.  Coleman decides to go off to the army to get the funds for his education.  There’s a scene where he is sitting at the recruiter’s desk studying the entry form.  He is hesitating on the question of race.  He looks around.  No one knows him and no one known any of his secrets.  He marks the box indicating he was white.  The recruiter extends his hand and welcomes Coleman into the service.

We see another part of Coleman’s past.  He’s in college.  He falls in love with a girl.  They have a beautiful and very romantic relationship.  She’s white, but she’s the one.  He takes her to see his mother.  The girl is excited.  They are holding hands almost the entire way.  But when the girl sees a black woman open the door and Coleman introduces her as his mother, things change.  The white girl goes through the masquerade of pretending everything is okay.  But as they go back home, she is repulsed.  Their relationship is over.  And Coleman has difficulty dealing with the hurt of rejection.

Shortly thereafter Coleman’s back in the ring.  He’s about to fight with a good sized visibly black boxer.  Word is that he’s strong and slow.  Coleman can beat him easily.  His coach tells him to give the people a good show.  Draw the fight out and then finish the guy in the fourth or fifth round.  But when the opening bell sounds, Coleman steps to the guy and kicks his ass as if he stole something from him.  The big guy is knocked out early in the first round.  The coach is furious.  Why didn’t Coleman stick to the game plan?  Coleman tells his coach that he isn’t going to carry some nigger just so he can put on a good show.  The word nigger comes out with such vehemence it takes the coach’s assistant, who is black, by surprise.

Eventually Coleman finds another love.  Again, she is white.  This is the woman that will become his wife and who will eventually die in the scene at the very beginning of the film.  But instead of taking her to see his mother he tells his mother that he told his new young love that his mother was dead.  He doesn’t want to take a chance of losing his newfound love so in order to avoid the pain of rejection he rejects his mother.  He tells his mother that he needs to cut her, and the black part of his life, out of his life.  His mother was noticeably hurt but she was never angry.  She simply tells her son that she never thought of him as black or white but just as her son.  Coleman’s brother however is highly enraged.  He pays Coleman a visit at his apartment.  The brother tells Coleman not to ever show his lily white face at their mother’s house ever again.

I found Coleman Silk a disgusting excuse of a black man and as a person.  But more importantly, I found Coleman’s mother even more disgusting.  Coleman’s parents never bothered to imbue their son with a sense of pride in his blackness.  Therefore, Coleman grew up seeing his blackness as a hindrance instead of as something to be proud of.  When Coleman’s father loses his business as an optometrist and becomes a porter, a job befitting a black man, it wasn’t a stain on society but a stain on being black.  Coleman saw the impact of being black had on his father which is why he enlisted into the army as a white man.  When his first love rejected him for his blackness, the problem wasn’t her fucked up perception on people, but his totally fucked up perception that his blackness was his weakness.

When his mother told him that she never saw her son as white or black, what she meant to say was that she was hoping he would take the easy route.  She wasn’t exactly rejecting her son’s blackness.  She simply gave her son no reason to accept his blackness.  So instead of learning to be a proud black man or even an embarrassed black man or even remotely associated as a black man, Coleman Silk became a white man who manifested his true hatred of himself as a hatred for black people.  Thanks mom!

While the Human Stain is a work of fiction, it covers a subject that plays itself out all too often in the black community.  So many black people reject their association or affiliation with the black community at their first opportunity.  All too often successful black people work hard to separate themselves from the black community finding their own get out of blackness card.  And these days, all too often black people will say that the best thing we can do for the black community is get an education or get a successful job and leave other black people behind.  And all too often black people are in situations where they have a choice to be proud of blackness and deal with the consequence of being black or to pull a Coleman and mentally check the box that says we want to assimilate into society proper free of our ethnic baggage that holds us back.

And given an opportunity, all too often black people who make the choice to assimilate will prove their devotion to orthodox thought patterns dictated by a society where black people are regularly regulated to the back of social standards, we are quick to refer to other black people in manners that are just as disrespectful as a black man passing as a white man using the word spook to refer to other black people.  Instead of working hard to change the conditions that make it more difficult for black people we’d rather pretend we don’t see the problems as we assimilate into the racially generic whole that works so hard to make black people reject their blackness.

Road To Race Redemption

I really wanted to see the Miracle at St. Anna in the theater.  But it’s kind of hard to coordinate that kind of date with the Misses when there is a two year old to take into consideration.  We kept planning on going to see the flick.  But junior doesn’t go to sleep until eight in the evening and both mom and I are bone tired by the time he goes down.  A date on the town is out of the question and we are more than happy to just collapse in front of a television or pull out a book or fire up a laptop.  Before we knew it, Miracle at St. Anna had come and gone.

When it came out on DVD, we added it to our Netflix account.  When it arrived in the mail we popped it into the DVD player in record time.  I enjoyed it.  Black soldiers in Italy trying to represent their country and not get killed in the process.  I enjoyed it considerably.  It was good to see brothers doing more than just the same old same old from Hollywood.  We run the gamut like everyone else from the brothers who want to do right regardless of the wrong done to him, to the brothers who are selfish and looking out for only him self, or the stereotypical black behavior.

But I have to admit that the acting was pretty flat.  I thought the character Train was poorly executed by Omar Miller could’ve been done so much better.  Mr. Miller’s acting was pretty thin.  But the story was engaging and had me trying to figure out exactly who and/or what the Sleeping Man was.  I think Baba Obatala, the Orisha of the mountains, would have enjoyed it.

There was a scene in the flick that caused me some problems.  We were given a momentary flashback of these Negroid soldiers and their experience with white Americans before they were shipped out to Europe.  Five black soldiers went to a mom and pop café not too far from their army base to get some kind of iced drink or something.  The white owner told the black soldiers to come out back and he’d have them ready.  He said it in an even tone as if that was just the way it was.  Black people got served out of the back door.

The black soldiers couldn’t help but notice the white German prisoners that were eating at one of the booths.  The Germans were being escorted by white military policemen who were eating at the bar.  The soldiers made a comment about black people trying to serve their country and being treated like shit while Germans who killed American soldiers were treated like humans.  The owner pulled out his gun, told the black soldiers that he does what he wants in his place and he’d be damned if any niggers were going to tell him what to do.

The MPs stepped in to calm the situation.  They told the black soldiers to hightail it back to base.  They picked up the German soldiers and everyone left the place.  The store owner turned to his son who looked maybe ten years old and told him that’s how you handle niggers.

The soldiers left.  They got in their jeep and started back to the base.  But somewhere along the way they decided to turn around and get their floats.  The store owner was telling a couple of locals about his experience with the nigger soldiers when all of a sudden four very angry black soldiers burst through his front door with automatic weapons drawn and ready.  The two locals had their shotguns with them.  But the soldiers got the drop on them.  In a not too polite way, the soldiers told the store owner to get the drink order ready.  The store owner was much more compliant.  Suddenly he found the inspiration to address the black soldiers as sir.  The store owner’s wife was there and she was holding their son close to her.  Everyone had fear in their eyes.  The scene ended.  I guess that the men got their drinks.

Now, while it probably felt wonderful to have that store owner submit to the will of those black soldiers, I couldn’t help but wonder about the implications to other black people who might visit that place unaware of what may have transpired.  I’m sure the white store owner felt humiliated in front of his family.  He had to get even.  And instead of separating one black person from another, all black people are subject to his wrath.  The next black person who steps into his store will probably be tortured in a futile attempt for him to get his manhood back.

The two locals with the shotguns, they’ll probably find some black person walking down a road and decide to give a little dominant community retribution.  They’ll probably be more than happy to shoot a black person in the back and run back to the store owner to brag about their own act of trying to redeem their sense of superiority.

Should those black soldiers had left and bothered never to have come back?  Well, all I can say is that I know there are times I wished I could have straightened out someone who treated me like dirt.  And a person who treats me like dirt simply because of the color of my skin is somebody that really does need a good throttling from the Sleeping Man.

But ultimately, I have to admit that using force against that store owner would have only lead to more problems.  Those soldiers knew they were in the wrong when they took their weapons into that café and forced the owner to service them at the front door.  People who have such hatred in their heart just need to be left alone to deal with their own demons.  That store owner and those country locals don’t need any additional excuses to hate black people.  Don’t want my business?  Fine!  You don’t need my business.  He who lives by the sword shall eventually die by the sword.  Besides, now that I know what he’s like, I wouldn’t want to eat anything out of his nasty assed store anyway.

When Not To Take Responsibility For Others

Insurance giant American International Group, Inc. (AIG) was saved from bankruptcy with an eighty five billion dollar government bailout in September.  The bailout has since more than doubled to almost two hundred billion dollars.  And there’s a good chance it will go even higher.  The global conglomerate was rescued because of fears that its intricate web of ties with banks around the world posed an imminent risk of financial collapse for the world wide economy.

This past week, AIG paid over four hundred of its executives bonuses, amounting to over one hundred sixty five million dollars, in the very division at the heart of the company’s collapse.  This has sparked outrage across the country from people who are hurting through today’s economic doldrums.  Unemployment is growing along with housing foreclosures.  Credit markets are tightening.  People are under the pinch of this crisis.  And the very people who are at the very center of this fiscal tempest are sitting fat and happy on the government’s teat.  Talk about welfare queens.

President Barack Obama has accepted full responsibility for the conglomerate’s huge bonus payments.  Why?  Because he’s the President, and that’s how he rolls.  At a town hall meeting in Costa Mesa, California, Mr. Obama said, “Listen, I’ll take responsibility.  I’m the President.  We didn’t draft these contracts.  We’ve got a lot on our plate.  But it is appropriate when you’re in charge to make sure that stuff doesn’t happen like this.  So we’re going to do everything we can to fix it.”

Just a few days later the United States Congress announced plans to slap a ninety percent surtax on bonuses like those given to upper echelons of the AIG staff.  What a difference less than a year makes.

Last year, Mr. Obama returned to the black community from whence he came and made an appearance at the Apostolic Church with his family in the congregation and delivered a passionate speech calling for black men to take greater responsibility for their families.  To a series of ovations and hoots, Mr. Obama explained that any fool can cause a child but it is the courage to raise a child that makes a man a father.

It may be true that the black community suffers from too many fathers being absent from their children’s lives.  But that condition rings true for each and every racial community as well.  What makes the black community so different?  Too many people want to blame the disparity that plagues the black community on the black community without doing much of anything to help us reverse this alleged trend?  Is it the black community’s fate to expect nothing from Mr. Obama than feel good, blame black people rhetoric?

Last year, Mr. Obama accused too many black men of missing from the lives of their children and being the very source of problems in the black community.  That was last year.  And the black community still hasn’t seen any help from Mr. Obama.  The President accuses black men of having abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men and leaving the foundations of black  families weaker.

But rich people from the dominant community who shirk their responsibilities and lead the economy to ruin with barely legal and certainly immoral business transactions are rewarded for their malfeasance with hundreds of billions of dollars invested into their companies and the freedom to use a small percentage of those funds, a still considerable amount of money, to line the pockets of a few.

The thought of Mr. Obama using his political clout to arrange a hundred billion dollar investment into the black community?  Of course we could never allow such a thing to happen.  Black people have to pick their own community up by its boot strap.  That’s a stark contrast to the attitude that manifest when rich people are about to go under.

AIG is much too successful for us to allow them to fail.  We’ll go ahead and give them a nine figure blank check and let them spend it any way they see fit and give them more money whenever they need it.  They shirked their responsibilities?  Let’s give them a few hundred billion dollars more to help them get through their lack of responsibility crisis with a little something extra to buy their selves something special like a retreat to an exclusive spa for upper management.  They used the money for bonuses?  I’ll take responsibility for that.  In the meantime, the black community needs to straighten itself out and black men need be more responsible.

Mr. Obama, your tolerance for racial disparity couldn’t be more blatant.  You’ll proudly take responsibility for the government being duped into funding bonuses and retention payments to people who have run their company into the ground.  But you’ll keep the black community separate and unequal until black men show more responsibility for their children based on nothing more than hearsay and conjecture about black men and your own unfortunate circumstance with your father.  Too bad for the American tax payer your dad didn’t work at AIG.

Black Shows By Non Blacks

Jenji Kohan is the creator of the Showtime comedy Weeds.  She was also the executive producer for such shows as My Wonderful Life, Gilmore Girls, Tracey Takes On featuring Tracey Ullman, and the hit comedy Mad About You.  Ms. Kohan was also a writer for such notables as Sex And The City, Boston Common, and The Stones.  But what really caught my attention is that Ms. Kohan added an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to her list of writing credits.  Ms. Kohan grew up in Los Angeles, California and went to Beverly Hills High School.  From what I’ve been able to tell, Ms. Kohan is not one who has spent a lot of time in the black community.  So I found it rather interesting that she would be writing for a show about a black teenager from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania living with his well to do relatives in Bel-Air, California.

I remember trying to watch a few episodes of the Fresh Prince and I really found it difficult to enjoy the program.  Will was obsessed with the opposite sex and refused to take much of anything seriously.  I can’t remember any of the episodes with one notable exception where Will Smith’s character unimaginatively named Will Smith and the cousin Carlton Banks played by Alfonso Ribeiro, were riding in Carlton’s father’s expensive German automobile in a posh Bel-Air neighborhood at night when they were arrested for being suspicious.  The character Will Smith was familiar with being pulled over and so without waiting to be told he jumped out of the car and assumed the position with his arms splayed across the hood of the car and his legs spread apart ready for the police search.  The two were taken to jail where Carlton’s father, the honorable judge Phil Banks, played by James Avery, quotes law to the police and gets the charges dismissed.

In the final scene Will and Carlton are discussing what happened.  Carlton’s faith in the system is reinforced because he did nothing wrong and he was released without difficulty.  Will’s character doesn’t believe his naïve cousin and tries to school him.  Why were they pulled over in the first place?  Why did they have to go to jail for driving a car that was rightfully theirs?  Would they have been so quickly released if they weren’t related to a judge?  Carlton simply refused to believe, could not even comprehend, that there was a problem with the justice system.

Wow, I thought.  I may have been wrong about this show.  I watched the next episode that aired and was reminded of the oversexed behavior of Will Smith’s character.  Cousin Hillary Banks, played by Karyn Parsons, was an out of touch, status conscious, product of materialism in an almost life like, no hint of parody reenactment of the infamous Paris Hilton.  The butler Geoffrey, played by Joseph Marcell, was borderline belligerent with a quick wit that would not have been tolerated by anyone paying his salary.  And I found the show, with the exception of the one fore mentioned episode, out of touch with black people or any part of the general pool of black experiences.

The brief biography of Ms. Kohan’s work reminded me of my disappointment with television programs aimed at the general black audience.  It wasn’t necessarily from a black perspective.  White people were dictating how black people were being depicted.  With few exceptions, the main black characters of television shows are usually flawed with seriously exaggerated stereotypes of black people’s behavior.  As example, Will Smith’s character Will Smith was made to be so overly focused on sex that he made Rudolph Valentino look like a shy pubescent.

But before there was the character Will Smith there was the materialistic and wealth obsessed George Jefferson, played by Sherman Hemsley on the Jeffersons, who was made to be the epitome of a black man lifting himself up by his own bootstrap and not relying on any assistance.  There was the gold digger Sandra Clark played in such expertly buffoonish fashion by Jackee Harry in 227.  There is the belligerent maid Florence Johnston on The Jeffersons played by Marla Gibb.  There is the clownish, flamboyant, and always wise cracking James “J.J.” Evans, Jr. of Good Times.  And then there’s the infamously well known junkyard entrepreneur Fred G. Sanford of Sanford and Son played by Redd Foxx.  The only thing the characters on this show lacked was the blackface makeup.  Otherwise it would make a fine updated example of the villainously racially maligning minstrel show.

These characters, and plenty more just like them, have laid the foundation for many white people’s understanding of the black community.  White people like Ms. Kohan know how to write television shows that appeal to the majority of the racially generic mainstream American culture who are predominantly white.  Generally speaking members of the dominant community watching television must have really enjoyed seeing black people acting exactly the way people think black people act.

Intelligent black characters fully embracing their ethnicity and created in a way that is sensitive to the black experience are not regularly depicted on television shows.  And it is funny because when an effort is made to bring attention to this issue, black people defend the current system that gives us such notable buffoons as Martin Lawrence, the Wayans family, Keenen and Kal, Monique, Wanda, and the like.  People pop out of the woodwork to keep the current system as is.

The dominant culture is depicted in shows like Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Mad About You.  These are shows featuring white people developed by white people for white people.  Black culture is depicted in shows like Martin, Everybody Hates Chris, and My Wife And Kids.  These are shows featuring black people developed by white people for white people.  If you don’t recognize the difference between the two sets then people like Ms. Kohan have really done their job well.  The idea of black people freely depicting the black experience without the influence of having to adhere to other’s idea of what the black experience entails is not the common way of producing shows.  In fact, it’s pretty rare.

Doing My Part To Protect The Black Community

I opened the backdoor of the apartment building to go to work.  As I crossed the backyard to my car across the alley I couldn’t help but notice there was a small moving van parked in the alley blocking my way.   It was a drag.  It would be easier to just go the other way down the alley than to sit and wait for somebody to move the truck.

There was a loud racket coming from the four unit apartment building next door.  It had been abandoned just the week before.  Suddenly, in one weekend, the three remaining tenets moved out of the building.  Two had rental trucks and one had a moved their belongings into one of those pods you load your stuff into and somebody just haul the thing away.

In the short time it had been vacated the building has had a few of its windows broken and somebody had already took its pipes.  Somebody left a hot water heater in the backyard next to the backdoor.  It wasn’t long before somebody else came along and picked it up.  The building had seen better days.  The truck was parked in the alley behind that particular house.  Hopefully it was somebody trying to repair the house.

The guy next to the van started acting suspiciously.  He saw me and then went behind the truck.  As I passed by the truck to my car, the guy was now behind the dumpster appearing as if he was looking for something.  The people who moved out had left a lot of broken furniture and small appliances behind.  It wasn’t unusual to see somebody picking through the stuff.  I didn’t think anything about it.

But without asking the man jumped in his moving van and pulled away.  People in this neighborhood don’t do much for others.  Consideration for others just isn’t a factor.  As the van pulled away I looked back across the alley.  I had a clear, unobstructed view of the back of the building next door.  I saw who and what was making the racket next door.  Somebody was pulling one of the refrigerators out.  He was doing it without the aid of an appliance dolly.  The door jam had been kicked in.  The guy banging the refrigerator around came into the alley to see where the moving van had gone.

As I drove away I saw the van came back from a quick trip around the block.  These guys were pushing all the wrong buttons.  I pulled out my cell phone and dialed emergency.  I told the operator that two men were looting the house next door.  I gave the operator a description of the two men and a description their van.  I didn’t get their license plate.  I didn’t want to look like I was trying to study them.

After talking to the operator I called Ms. Peacemaker.  She sometimes watches me as I leave in the morning.  I wanted to know if she had noticed the men next door.  She couldn’t help but notice them with all the noise they were making.  She had called the police as well.  But she told me the two burglars had been spooked and decided to leave before the police could get there.  Oh well, we tried.

Ms. Peacemaker called me at work later that morning.  The police had knocked on our door.  The police got a report of a burglary in progress and had come by to take a look.  Beavis and Butthead left but they didn’t go far.  They were sitting and waiting for what who knows just two doors down   When they saw a police car pull up they tried to speed away with their back door wide open and a refrigerator sitting inside.  The police came by asking anyone if they had seen anyone.  Ms. Peacemaker was more than happy to help.  She called me at work to see if I could add anymore to the police report.

I have to admit that I may be the last person in the world to compliment the police.  Generally speaking I think the police are way too enthusiastic to crack down on black people for things they would turn an eye to if they were happening anywhere else.

But I have to give credit where credit is due.  These burglars are two first hand contributors to the conditions in the black community.  Instead of using their limited ingenuity to get a job or to go into the refrigerator moving business, they rather break into the buildings and cause more problems for the people trying to buy a house in the black community.

So many of the homes I’ve looked at buying have been burglarized with pipes missing and walls trashed and stairways damaged and windows broken just so somebody can steal a little metal.  This ain’t fuckin’ Thunderdome where humanity has to scavenge off others to earn a living.  And then, these people don’t even have the respect for the people of the neighborhood to keep their larceny under wraps.  They boldly go into these houses and do whatever, making all kinds of racket as if they don’t care if the rest of the neighborhood sees them or not.

I don’t like calling the police on anyone.  I don’t like seeing anyone going to jail.  But more than that, I hate to see someone working to trash the black community.  If I had to make a choice between the police and some two bit thugs I will reluctantly dial the emergency operator.  These two men didn’t consider themselves members of the black community.  They saw the black community and that house as nothing more than suckers to be fleeced.  We don’t need that kind of attitude here.

White Dog

White Dog was a movie way back from 1982 featuring Kristy McNichols, Burl Ives, and Paul Winfield. I don’t remember much but Ms. McNichols’ character, Julie Sawyer, winds up with a white german shepherd that attacks only black people. Paul Winfield plays Keys, a black dog trainer who volunteers to undo the training that causes the dog to attack only black people.

At some point in the film, Ms. Sawyer asked how someone would train a dog to attack only black people. It takes two people, white and black. Typically, the dog owner would be a white person that treats the dog well and feeds the dog. Various white people would take turns caring for the dog. The dog would learn to look to white people for its social and personal needs. The white person would then hire various black people to abuse the dog and treat it cruelly. That way, the dog learns to associate pain and fear with black people. This training starts early when the dog is a puppy so that it is ingrained in the dog’s personality makeup.

In order to undo all the fear and hatred that the dog developed for black people, Keys, a black man, had to become the only person that would care for the dog for a period of time. That way, the dog would learn to depend on black people as well and not fear black people as much. For a long time the dog stayed in a cage with no interaction with anyone or anything other than the dog trainer Keys.

The detraining didn’t work. After the long period of being inside a cage the dog was released. Not fully trusting the dog, Keys had a pistol in his hand. When the dog was released out of its cage, it was done in an open area with only three people in the vicinity, Keys, Julie Sawyer, and the Burl Ives’ character named Carruthers. The dog looked at Keys and didn’t attack. He turned towards Julie and he didn’t attack her. But when he saw Carruthers the dog went for the man’s throat and Keys pulled his gun out and shot the dog dead.

I thought about this story recently. More specifically, I thought about the black people who would be willing to take a job to be cruel to a puppy or a dog and participate in the creation of a vicious animal to be used exclusively against other people in the black community. Black people who are desperate or black people who just care too much about getting paid and ingratiating themselves to the dominant community and not enough about the impact to the black community will always be able to find an excuse to justify their shortsightedness. The lesson I learned was that black people should think more about the long term and not be participating in anything that could come back to bite the black community.

The number of black people who are willing to separate themselves from the larger black community grows by leaps and bounds on a daily basis. There is the black rap artist willing to be the front man in the music industry’s pursuit to make as much profit as possible by feeding the dominant culture’s inherent need to see a picture of black culture with antisocial and misogynistic music that eats away at the fabric of the black community. There is the black actor that is willing to play the title role on a television show depicting black people as the white man’s buffoon. There is the black person in the corporate world that is quick to submit him or her self to the unspoken corporate America standard that requires the minimization of any visual ethnic reinforcement and will look down their nose at the other black people who are more willing to wear their ethnicity proudly. There is the black child who learns from the parent that the black person should not worry about the black community and focus only on the development of his or her self.

Just like the white dog our children’s identities have been manipulated from their infancy just as they are beginning to develop their personality. Before many of our children will have had the chance to develop their own natural identity they are being bombarded with the stereotypical images of black people promoted by that rapper or the actor whose strings are being pulled by corporate America. For the most part, our children have the choice of embracing their blackness as promoted by the black rapper and actor or dumping their ethnicity and taking the persona of corporate America that claims to be racially generic but is somehow, without exception, predominantly white.

Even the professional black athlete appears to be caught up in these choices. On the one hand, you have the professional black athlete who conformed to the stereotype of gangsta rap culture and becoming the super black caricature personified by such athletes as the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick. On the other hand you can have the formerly black professional athlete who wants to minimize or eliminate altogether their affiliation with the black community as demonstrated by people like golfing god Tiger Woods and tennis superstar Venus Williams. On the surface, it appears that many black athletes must choose between embracing stereotypical black behavior and making the choice to leave the black community behind.

Now I know that there is an entire plethora of black athletes, actors, singers, corporate professionals, and others who are able to embrace their African ethnicity without conforming to what others deem is African ethnicity. Unfortunately, these black role models are not always promoted to be the examples of black behavior for the black community. But mainstream media, which has a virtual chokehold on the vast majority of the public’s attention span isn’t interested in the middle, only in the extremes.

The black community has allowed ourselves to ingest these images and we have developed into a white dog in need of corrective training. It would be wonderful if we could unplug ourselves from the culture that has so effectively programmed us. But unfortunately, we cannot get enough time away from the constant influences that have created who and what we are at the moment.

Black Neighborhood Hulks

I was watching the news on the television the other day when I saw something that truly demonstrated the degree of neglect in the black community.  A relatively young black man was standing before a judge for some offense that I cannot remember.  He was just the latest defendant in a long line of defendants that were to go before the judge.  The judge had denied the black man a chance to post bail until his court hearing.

The man became visibly upset.  He looked around like he simply could not believe what he had just heard.  He walked back to the line of defendants and without any provocation or hesitation sucker punched the next defendant in line behind him right in the face.  The guy who was punched, he looked like he was Hispanic, went down with the very first blow.  The attacker took another swing but missed, not expecting his victim to go down so quickly.  With his latest victim on the ground the attacker stopped his flailing and stood over the guy.  The bailiff, a short round black woman, ran to the first defendant, grabbed him and pulled him away from his victim and out of the courtroom.

Our television is hooked up to a digital video recorder, always recording what we’re watching, so I grabbed for the remote and rewound the scene to take a closer look.  I played it at the slowest speed possible.  I looked for some sign that the first defendant and his victim shared some kind of familiarity.  But the next defendant never looked up, never acknowledged any recognition of the first defendant.  When the man was sucker punched, he was caught totally off guard.  The attack was totally unexpected.  His inability to anticipate left him totally open and helpless.  What shocked me so much was that the attacker was so unthinking and angry about going to jail that he didn’t care about the fact that there was a room full of people, including a judge, witnessing his unprovoked attack.  Even if he was innocent of whatever crime he was being accused of he was guaranteed to go to jail for the courtroom attack.

There was no sound to go along with the video.  The angle of perspective was from a camera right over the judge’s shoulder.  At the end of the piece of tape the news program cut back to the anchor desk where the new anchors were commenting on what they had just broadcast to the public.  One of the two white anchors said to the other, “I guess he was upset”.  They both laughed.

Now there are a lot of people who probably think that this guy was just an indication of the typical always angry black person.  A lot of people think a lot of black people have a propensity to lose control of ourselves whenever we hear or see something that we dislike.  We can’t even control ourselves when we see or hear something we do like.  We are always on the verge of some kind of over the top emotional outburst.  It’s as if the entire black community has been hit with ultra G gamma rays and we’re now susceptible to Incredible Hulk like patterns of rage.

I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist or an official student of other people’s behavior by any stretch of the imagination.  My expertise of human behavior runs along the lines of the average black joe and what I experience first hand on a daily basis.  But I do believe this video actually helps condition black people into certain types of behavior as well as helps condition people to think of black people as always angry.

There was a time when I never heard a gunshot in my urban black neighborhood.  In the ultra rare instance when there was a gunshot, people were afraid and everybody took shelter inside their homes if they were outside.  People looked out their window to see if they could figure out what was happening.  People would get on the phone and call each other to try and share information.

These days there are so many gunshots in the black neighborhood the children don’t even stop their play when they hear it anymore.  The neighborhood children laugh at anybody who expresses any concern or fear or common sense.  It is a matter of bravado to ignore gunshots or, in a few instances, to even run towards the sound of gunfire.  Too many people in the black community have become acclimated to gunfire.  It’s no big deal.  This change has occurred in a span of about thirty years.

Eventually, black people becoming so upset that they will turn their anger on the first person that crosses their path will become part of the norm as well.  Instead of recognizing the fact that the man in the video was a harbinger of where things are headed, people are more than happy to sit back and laugh at the aberration of outrageous behavior that has now started to manifest in the black community, similar to the once atypical but now ubiquitous gunshot.  People will point to the black community and say black on black crime in the form of assaults is getting out of hand and the single minded solution will call for more police officers to catch offenders and more jails to punish perpetrators in a lame attempt to confront this madness.

But we never ask the simple question as to what is making people in the black community so angry that we can attack each other at the drop of a dime.  Like the news anchors on television people in the black community will adapt and simply laugh whenever we see somebody jump up and knock the shit out of the person nearest to them.  It’ll be dismissed as nothing more than another manifestation of black on black crime out of control easily solved with more cops and more jails.