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.

Connected

It seems I know these people. Don't many of us feel that? I've worshipped in Charleston.

All my life I've known the vibe of an A.M.E. Church on a Sunday morning. We call ourselves a "connectional" denomination, the "sons and daughters of Richard and Sarah Allen." I've leaned on that connection when traveling to different U.S. cities.

I'm just rambling here. This post isn't intended to be demoninational-ist, if I may coin a phrase. I've just been feeling that connection today -- to my grandmother Gray, my great aunts, my Sunday School teacher ... the liberationist history of the A.M.E. church, my brothers and sisters and friends in Charleston.

Are Future Teachers Fooling Themselves?

The headline read: "College Students to Veteran Teachers: Quit Telling Us to Avoid Teaching." You will find the link to that story below. Here is my reply to the college students:

Good! This is exciting, and not unlike the idealism, energy, vision, and hopefulness of other generations of new (not necessarily young) teachers. These young adults are, however, preaching to the choir if they are aiming their resistance at working teachers. It is the mind and the vote of the general public they should be trying to influence. 
The hypocrisy of boards and policy makers and the disrespect they have for the profession are way out of control, driving public education toward a crash and burn. These political bodies' negativity toward our profession implants feelings of powerlessness among educators and stirs misunderstanding and apathy among the public. If you, future teachers, are not taking that seriously enough, you, too will crash and burn sooner than you think. 
Schools are workplaces. When the pedal hits the metal, teachers must navigate not only such regular nuisances as supplies distribution, equipment repair, and facilities maintenance, but they also must negotiate workplace politics and power games. They must maintain equilibrium amidst co-workers, including administrators, with varying degrees of competency levels. Sure, dedicated teachers of any age are most exhilarated by the actual teaching, the engagement with students, the witnessing of learning taking place! But these same teachers, no matter how hard they resist it, are worn down by bureaucracies and insensitive voters. 
Young employees in any field are quick to judge and dismiss older workers -- so what's new? Stick to your advocacy for students, but let no one convince you that it is less important than advocating for yourself, your colleagues, and your profession. You will be a 30-year-old one day. You must earn a living -- an adult's salary, a livable wage. Loving teaching is never enough. The profession requires you to step all the way inside it, not with theory but with full application. Your workday never ends. 
Will you want to sacrifice a fair and decent living at the same time? Teaching will try to pull a fast one on you, tell you that you are a special kind while compensating you with a minor fraction of what the textbook salesperson makes. That question is something you won't want to put far into the back of your mind.

"College Students to Veteran Teachers: Quit Telling Us to Avoid Teaching." 
http://news.yahoo.com/college-students-veteran-educators-quit-telling-us-avoid-224350002.html?bcmt=comments-postbox?bcmt=1427457427834-8906cfab-9985-4bd7-ae59-d633173fb779&bcmt_s=u#mediacommentsugc_container

"Empire," A Rock Around Our Necks

Last week, the Fox network show "Empire" continued to gain popularity, breaking its previous weeks' records. This is the headline I saw in an online magazine: "Empire’ Ratings Hit New Demo & Viewership Highs In Final Numbers – Update." (link below)

Just moments before coming across this story, I watched a Fox News pundit pumping viewers to tune in to his interview with Wisconsin's governor scott walker (lowercase intended). So, one minute I'm watching a Fox-head declare scott walker the forerunner for the Republican presidential candidacy, and a few minutes later I'm reading about Fox's big score with "Empire" -- at which point, I am scratching my head.

Taraji P. Henson, Terrence Howard, and Lee Daniel ("The Butler") must be over the moon! And who else ... who else, I wonder? 

Why, Rupert Murdoch, of course!

When, oh, when will my people start putting our money where our mouths are? African Americans have a long, long haul ahead of us. It's a tiring thought, so tiring. We think we don't. We think we have arrived. Yet, we've set in motion our own future, with our laissez-faire engagement with government, politics, and power. 

Here's to the radical thinkers on whose boldness and courage we will rely. I hear them on WPFW often. Years later we will build monuments to them, no doubt, celebrate their conscientious stature and brag about their heroism, about how courageous and prophetic they were. One group among us, the rich and famous whom we call our nobility, will be counting their money ... while Ferguson burns on. 

I'm not alone in my concern. The link to a critical commentary of the show, by Boyce Watkins, also is below.

"Empire’ Ratings Hit New Demo & Viewership Highs In Final Numbers – Update"
http://deadline.com/2015/02/empire-ratings-rise-up-lee-daniels-danny-strong-fox-1201381970/

"Dr. Boyce Watkins: Why I Refuse to Support the Coonery of the Show 'Empire'"  http://financialjuneteenth.com/dr-boyce-watkins-why-i-refuse-to-support-the-coonery-of-the-show-empire/

King and the Dream: A Brief 11th-Grade Lesson

Following are three reflections that took up space in my head today, the 86th birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. The first I posted to Facebook early this morning. Some folks commented on the post, which prompted the second reflection. The third was screaming to get out during 2nd and 3rd periods with my 11th-graders.

(8 a.m.) I'm still on the fence about seeing "Selma." As historical FICTION and not documentary, there will be scenes and lines that are, simply, made up. Films like this make us believe we are seeing wholly accurate re-enactments. Only the actual footage of that March day can really put us there. Generations, including my own, that were on the tail end of the movement or came along years after are prone to be misled by this type of depiction. It seems so real, so true. Among the criticism is the movie's downplaying or degrading of SNCC. So ... is knowing something better than knowing nothing, even when that something that you know is incorrect and/or misleading, not factual? Is there such a thing as sort of factual? Is that okay?

(7 p.m.) I find myself wanting American blacks to stop looking to be entertained all the time. That's been sort of my understated mission as a teacher, to get students to start thinking for longer periods of time, to develop those thoughts, to begin to feel the spark of energy when original insights pop into their minds -- their own ideas! -- and when they ask a question no one has asked. My 9th-graders used to see me setting up the LCD projector and ask: "We watching a movie today?!" After a while, they came to know the answer: "Oh, that's right, Ms. Matthews shows docuMENtaries." I've wondered about it at times. But my students are never disappointed, whether they realize I see it or not. They discover every single time their capacity to learn something, to see something in a new way, to go, in their minds, beyond where they'd ever been. They feel good about themselves.

(8 p.m.) It was my honor today to show my students the entirety of the "I Have a Dream" speech. We watched excerpts of two other King addresses, but I started with the March on Washington. I wondered this morning if they'd ever heard it or if all they knew were the famous buzz words that project interracial nirvana. A couple of my students actually said, when I asked what they knew about the speech, that King's message was that he wanted black and white children to be able to play together. Alrighty then. It was this level of understanding that I wanted to dig into and elevate, if possible. Actually, I was certain that it was possible, once they saw King deliver the full speech and heard him in other speeches, one from 1967 and the "mountaintop" address. The students were watching and listening closely. They were enthralled. They saw King the human, King the "frustrated," as they said, King the "tired," King the "aggravated," King the "fed up," King the uncompromising. I just wanted them to leave school today knowing more of the whole picture, more of the complexity of the movement, of King, more of what had been at stake, that it was a living time, not just still pictures and monuments. I don't want them to hear "I have a dream" in the same way any more. I want them to see why it's still relevant. Why the necessity for civil rights advocacy still is pressing.

Selma, Lord, Selma

I'm going to see "Selma" the film soon. Eventually. I suppose.

Many of us will take young people to see it, I'm sure. May I suggest we not rely solely upon this one source to teach our children about Selma and the civil rights movement? Looking at many sources will give children, and all of us, a more thorough understanding of the movement, and will allow us to examine the events, people, issues, and ideals from different perspectives.

I want to pitch this book for young adult readers. Published around 1980, it was written by two women who were girls in Selma during those consciousness-raising days. They closely watched, wide-eyed, at what was happening around them. They asked questions of the adults, they sensed the urgency and importance of what their parents and neighbors were doing, and they wanted in! This recollection of the Selma story will give young adults a sense that they, too, can provoke change. It will make apathy a shameful and wasteful experience.

Yes, there has been a Disney movie produced based on the book (with Jurnee Smollett). Yet ... there's nothing like getting inside of a story as you do when you read it. There are many stories on, many accounts of, the civil rights movement that we should read. Hollywood depictions, even when they are worthy, give us limited, very narrow, and misleading views of a subject. We surely don't want to rely on Disney to tell this people's history. That can be more dangerous than knowing nothing at all.

This was one of the first books I reviewed when I started my work in public libraries as a Young Adult Services Specialist. I have never forgotten the voices of Sheyann and Rachel. Read it, and share it.

Black Friday ... It's On!

Yes, we can ... do this! Gotta shop? Suggestions, anyone? 

BZB's Gift Show is back at Shiloh Family Life Center, with a slew of independent, African-American vendors from all over the country. 

They won't have aluminum foil, dish detergent, and bread, true. Hmmmm...

I'd pick Giant and Safeway over the Wal-Martons any day. Employees have a voice, through their union. Giant gets a good salary report, too. 
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Giant_Food_Stores/Hourly_Rate

For grown-ups not getting full support from their parents, Target isn't a choice employer. It has a great look and fantastic marketing (and neat stuff), but its labor practices are no better than Wal-Mart's. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ralph-nader/target-walmart_b_4254981.html

Costco has a conscientious attitude toward paying people salaries that are appropriate for  ... people! http://www.businessinsider.com/costcos-simple-strategy-2014-9

The change we seek in our society has to start not within our collective conscience, but within each individual conscience. Thinking ....

http://www.thenation.com/blog/191193/decoding-demonization-marion-barry#

Wal-Mart Workers' Push-back: As American As It Gets

Wal-Mart's Walton family, the Wal-Martons, is a monument to greed and inhumanity, the personification of "selfish." There are those who are scoffing at these protests. Why scoff? Pushing back is just as American (more American?) as corporate greed. 

Some people say the Wal-Martons have earned their right to be filthy rich and detached, to control their wealth any way they want. "Their right" ... an overused and misused expression. A throwaway term. Who granted the Wal-Martons this right? No, they did not earn it all by themselves.

I view the Wal-Martons as thieves no less conniving than Dick Cheney. Americans become gullible in matters of wealth and fame, other people's wealth and fame, that is. These workers are smart and bold, and not fooled in the least by wolves claiming to be sheep.

See this story from Bloomberg -- "How Wal-Mart's Waltons Maintain Their Billionaire Fortune"  

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-12/how-wal-mart-s-waltons-maintain-their-billionaire-fortune-taxes.html

Lucy: Why I'm Tired of Seeing White People on the Big Screen

Olivia Cole 
HuffPost Entertainment
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivia-cole/lucy-why-im-tired-of-seei_b_5627318.html
Posted: 07/28/2014 2:46 pm EDT Updated: 07/30/2014 1:59 pm EDT

I'm tired of seeing white people on the silver screen.

First, let me note that I am white. I am a white woman who goes to the theater to see probably a dozen films (if not more) in a given year, a white woman who readily consumes TV shows and series and often blogs/tweets about them. I love film. I love what Hollywood could be, but I must say that I don't love what it is, and that is a machine generating story after story in which the audience is asked to root for a white (usually male) hero over and over and over (and over) again. I'm tired. I'm tired of directors pretending that white actors are the default and that people of color are a distraction when it comes to filmmaking. I'm tired of black women in Hollywood being relegated to roles of slaves and "the help" over and over again. I'm tired of films convincing themselves that they are taking on something fresh and new, the likes of which the world has never seen, but in actuality adhering to tired tropes and stereotypes.

One example that comes to mind is Avatar, a "groundbreaking" film about aliens and humanity, which, underneath it all, is the same old White Savior story. But more recently is Lucy, the film starring Scarlett Johansson in which a woman named Lucy evolves and is able to use 100 percent of her brain's capacity after she unwittingly ingests a massive amount of drugs.

Lucy is about what humankind could be -- it's about possibilities. As Lucy's brainpower grows stronger and the volume of knowledge she is able to access increases, she delivers monologues about how little humans understand about death, existence, and the universe, mediating on time and history. The film likes to think of itself as reimagining everything that we think we know about humanity, and presents to us their vision of what the most evolved woman on earth looks like:

A blonde white woman.

See, I just can't get right with that.

You see, I was an anthropology major in high school and by the time I was 16 I'd learned all about Lucy (Australopithecus), the collection of bones found in Hadar and thought to have lived 3.2 million years ago, one of the oldest hominids we know of. Lucy the film doesn't try to hide how cute they thought they were being by naming the supreme evolved being in their film "Lucy" -- they show an ape-like creature crouched by a stream to illustrate just how far human beings have come, and say as much in the opening lines, depicting vast cities built up to show our progress. The original Lucy was not really an ape, though. She had small skull capacity like apes, but her skeleton shows she was bipedal and walked upright like humans. Hadar, by the way, is in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia.

So I guess what's sticking in my craw is the assertion that while human life originated in Africa -- a detail the film neatly skims over, placing the ape-like Lucy that Johansson sees in North America -- somehow the way we imagine the most evolved human being is blonde and white. Even more, when Lucy gets surges of knowledge in the film, her eyes flash brightly blue. Because blue eyes, we all know, are the universal symbol of superiority, right?

How is it that in a film whose premise rests on the idea of reimagining the past, present and future, we still end up with a blonde white woman with flashing blue eyes as the stand-in for what personifies evolution and supremely fulfilled human potential? At one point the Ape-like Lucy and Evolved Lucy meet face-to-face as Evolved Lucy does a bit of time-traveling. Their fingers touch, and we see them deliberately posed to mimic the famous Creation of Adam painting, and in that moment I saw what I suppose we were supposed to see: humanity at its beginning, and then humanity at its end, at its most perfect. Blonde, white and blue-eyed.

I can't accept that. I can't accept that there was only one black woman in the entire film, who delivered one line and who we never saw again. I can't accept that the bad guys were Asian and that although in Taiwan, Lucy's roommate says, "I mean, who speaks Chinese? I don't speak Chinese!" I can't accept that in Hercules, which I also saw this weekend, there were no people of color except for Dwayne Johnson himself and his mixed-race wife, whose skin was almost alabaster. I can't accept that she got maybe two lines and was then murdered. I can't accept that the "primitive tribe" in Hercules consisted of dark-haired men painted heavily, blackish green, to give their skin (head-to-toe) a darker appearance, so the audience could easily differentiate between good and bad guys by the white vs. dark skin. I can't accept that during the previews, Exodus: Gods and Kings, a story about Moses leading the Israelite slaves out of Egypt, where not a single person of color is represented, casts Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton to play Egyptians. I can't accept that in the preview for Kingsman: The Secret Service, which takes place in London, features a cast of white boys and not a single person of Indian descent, which make up the largest non-white ethnic group in London. I can't accept that in stories about the end of the world and the apocalypse, that somehow only white people survive. I can't accept that while my daily life is filled with black and brown women, they are completely absent, erased, when I look at a TV or movie screen.

I can't accept that. And I can't accept that when we think about the potential of humankind and what our brains are capable of doing and thinking and feeling, that people of color would be absent from that imagining. I can't accept that. And I won't. I'm tired of seeing people that look like me crowding screens both big and small: I am not what the world looks like. Hollywood, stop whitewashing characters. Give us more films like this year's Annie. I'm no Lucy -- like everyone else I'm only using a tiny amount of my brain's capacity. But you don't need to be a superhuman logic-machine to see that Hollywood has a major problem with depicting people of color, and it's time to actually reimagine what the world can and should be.

--

Olivia Cole writes a blog at oliviaacole.wordpress.com and published her novel,Panther in the Hive, in 2014.

Remember, She Was Bold

I hope we don't remember Maya Angelou as a mere celebrity. What is that? Nor as some sainted statue. Not haughty, nor the possession of exalted institutions. Let's place her with the other truth tellers and freedom fighters, where she belongs, with Sojourner Truth and Harriett Tubman, with Ida B. Wells, Josephine Baker and Ella Baker, Mrs. Hamer and Shirley Chisholm ... all of them and the many, many more; the fathers and sons and brothers, including her friends and teachers Malcolm and Martin, and the many, many more; and the ones whose names only we know, the ones who reared  us, guided us, educated us, showed us to value kinship, to build strong ties with good people, to be the (wo)man in the mirror, asking: "Who am I to be blind, pretending not to see their need?" (Yeah, threw in MJ.)