Racial

A conversation on Facebook veered a little off track when a Friend who is white presented evidence to prove that women and girls all over the world have been treated worse than black people in the U.S.A. We didn't let it slip into a game of "Oppression vs. Oppression." We talked through it, and I shared this with her, to give her a sense of the gender/race experience from my POV.

All my life, when I've moved about town, the county, the state, the nation, and the world -- whether walking into a room, an office, a restaurant, a gallery, a theater, or a bookstore, whether alone or with others -- any feelings of anxiety, self-doubt, fear, and consternation I have felt, no matter how small, have been foremost stoked NOT by the thought that the people there might treat me coldly because I am woman, BUT by the awareness that they were highly likely to treat me coldly because I am black.

Write No One Out of the Story: On Massacres and Memories

Those who are questioning some folks' postings about past U.S. massacres -- on natives' lands and in black towns, for example -- should know that these postings are not meant to dismiss the Orlando shootings as insignificant nor to incite a game of "our persecution was worst than yours." The postings infer that the media should stop referring to Orlando as the worst massacre in U.S. history because that claim is open to challenge.The farther we get from the past, the deeper we, Americans, bury it, until we have no memory of it, until it is no longer talked about, until it is declared never to have happened. If we can say this thing did not happen, then we can pretend THOSE PEOPLE VICTIMIZED NEVER EXISTED, NEVER LIVED, AND DON'T MATTER.

It is frustrating and painful knowing you were there and that you made a contribution when the history books don't mention you at all. This rewriting of history has been deliberately done by governments and wealthy classes, and perpetuated by masses of hateful and/or unread people. There is a great need in America to set the historical record straight, and to keep setting it straight, or some people surely will write other people straight out of the story. It has happened more often than it has not.

http://www.blackpast.org/aah/new-orleans-massacre-1866

Handling Our Heroes with Care: On Ali

There is a theology, if we may call it such, that asserts something like this: No one person's death is any more significant than another's – regardless of your social, political, or economic status on the national or global stage. No matter the height or brightness of your star, when you dead, you done.

I don't argue with this, in the whole. Yet, taking it apart a bit, or looking at this thinking from another angle, it must be said that everyone has touched someone, affected someone, moved someone. 

Even newborns who live but moments. Even people who've committed vile acts against other humans. Every person's departure from this planet causes a shift – in feeling, in consciousness, in will, in purpose, perhaps in the actions of others. 

Someone shared with me today their anger and frustration at hearing Muhammad Ali's death brushed off with this narrow theology, a message that went something like: "Cassius Clay was just like the rest of us. We all gotta go sometime." 

End of quote. End of him. That's all, folks! So long. Farewell. Goodbye. Moving on. 

I take issue with this theology for a number of reasons, but I'm striving to make a point in brief: We cannot responsibly and accountably – as leaders, teachers, influencers, motivators, advisors – talk about Muhammad Ali's death without talking about HIS LIFE! 

Muhammad Ali LIVED before he died. He opened up his life to scrutiny and the possibility of destruction to resist a warring ideology he found to be abstract, unjust, and inhumane.

The details of how he lived are objectionable to some people, indeed. However, that he lived in a way that mattered to black people and oppressed people the world over is undeniable and very important. How he lived is proof that we can be different from each other yet still help each other, cheer each other, give each other hope. His life is an example that we can stand up for other human beings, those whom we don't know, even when governments threaten and attempt to destroy us for doing so. That's what he did. It is documented.

If you're going to preach about him and leave that out, why are you talking?

Bad: On Ali

I was into sports big time, but not into boxing. Ali, though, was more than "sports." For black people all around the world, Ali was a symbol of Bigness, of moving from the shadows, the corners, the depths, even from the warmth of our own communities, and onto Their turf without changing Our stride -- moving with an aura of self-knowledge and self-affirmation that said to the other Americans: I am a Black Man. This is where I live. Deal with it. Many black men moved through the world as Ali did, only on a much smaller stage and in dimmer light. Bad, bad men!

The Central Park Five ... or, Don't Play God ... or, I Have Brothers

For the second time, I am watching the recounting of the sickening conspiracy against these black children. Again, my spirit is twisted, squeezed, nearly drowned. I have to slow my breathing ...

I am hating the people who did this to them, the NYC law enforcement establishment, and more specifically, the persons who set them up, victimized them, used them -- and the people who made those people, who helped them write this horrible script, who taught them to avenge crimes against white women at any cost, even the lives of children. God, go on blessing Kharey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana Jr.