Uppity Negro Network™

Must have a lot on my mind, three posts in one night. 

I guess I’ve been missing these memo’s lately, like the one my host mother informed me about–you know the one where “hip hop come out of the prison culture” or that the neighborhood around Howard University is a bad neighborhood.  So, per the “New Yorker” cover of Barack Obama dressed in a turban I guess being Muslim has now taken the place of being black.

I wonder how former Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke felt back in 1966 when he was elected.  I mean, were there people randomly running around saying “Well ya know he’s black…” similar to the fools running around about Obama saying “Well ya know he’s a Muslim…” despite the Jeremiah Wright debacle.  Honestly, FoxNews is the only news outlet (wait, do they even do real news in the first place) that has even remotely equated the Muslim faith with Obama.  I mean, I’m sure they were quite happy to show that picture of him in his turban when he had visited his father’s native country of Kenya.  And let’s not forget E.D. Hill’s (who still has a job) comment about the “terrorist fist jab.”

I mean, this picture took everything negative and put it in the picture.  I wholly invite everyone to visit The Black Snob  and AverageBro (thanks for making me part of AverageNation) to read my comments that essentially say that I couldn’t care less about the satire present in the picture, but I guess it dawned on me that they took everything that’s a negative.

This wasn’t simply enlarging the ears, or making the impish grin as they do with George W. Bush, but I guess now, as it’s dawning on me, it’s the fact that all of these things are seen as negatives in the eyes of (white) America.

1. The afro on Michelle Obama.  Again, another memo I didn’t get–so having an afro is a negative, lemme keep that in mind.  Apparently this country associates wearing natural hair with something that is not normative.  Well, even I say that,  the norm is that most black women that I encounter, their hair is not natural; there is some sort of straightening agent that’s in the hair. 

Well, aside from it not being the norm, apparently it’s an outright negative.  I guess it conjures up some civil rights image of militant Negroes marching in streets and demanding equal rights under the law.  I guess seeing an afro gets certain white folk quaking in their boots.  I’d go out on a limb and say that somewhere down in the recesses of most white people’s brains that it does in fact cite some fear in unsuspecting white adults. 

Let me push it a little farther.

When I had an afro in high school, it was cool with the white kids, they wanted to touch it of course, but they had not (yet) been acculturated yet to think of having natural hair as a negative.  Clearly the artist of this cartoon sees it as such.

2. The heavily armored gun that Michelle is wearing.  Oh, so now she’s definitely channeling her inner Angela Davis = Angry Black Woman.

3. The garb that Barack is wearing is associated with the Muslim faith.  So, if you’re not a WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) then you’re on the outside: just ask the members of Trinity United Church of Christ.  The Bush Administration has done a “heckuva job” with associating the Muslim faith with that of terrorism.  I might as well go ahead and add the Clinton administration and the Bush (41) and Reagan and Carter, Ford, Nixon, Kennedy, Eisenhower and back to Truman administrations.  Let’s remember that the U.S. was quite in favor of an Israeli state, against that of the Islamic prescence that was already there.  Islamic nations declared war on the new state of Israel in 1948 almost as soon as Israel was recognized as a Republic by the U.N.

And seeing as how the collective American psyche has severe short term memory and outright amnesia when it comes to events that happened more than a month ago, let me remind the readers that in the Clinton and Bush administrations, they were quite effective in letting media spin the horrific events of suicide bombers that I personally remember happening with startling frequency around 1997 and 1998.  It was around this time that the American public became aware of Al-Qaeda and jihad and the words “militant” and “Islamic” began to get linked together.

4. Clearly they have a picture of Osama (or is it Obama) hanging over the fireplace. Every liberal in this country is quite aware that this cowboy of a fool who is our current president got on national television saying that we, the American military, we’re going to “smoke him out.”  This one, I kind of chalk up to randomness, I don’t really see any deep and dark subliminal message other than trying to make the Muslim faith a negative.

I said this from jump as a teenager and I first heard the name Osama Bin Laden, I don’t speak Arabic and I don’t know anyone who does–why, oh why, are we trusting media with proper deciphering of the Al-Jazeera news stories?  I mean, we saw Bin Laden walking around with an assault rifle, okay, that’s part of the culture, much like it is in other countries of civil unrest, but who’s to necessarily say that the one we know as Bin Laden is this same guy who’s been associated with all of these terrorist plots.

5. And we see this country still has a problem with burning the flag.

Below I have some pictures of other “New Yorker” covers and I’d love to see the comparisons between the current cover that’s warranted this post.

So, is this a bad cartoon because it is oversexualizing the female and placing the man in the position of sexual aggressor?

Black man and white woman in the bed--need I say more?

Hmmm...should blacks be concerned because the black guy in the front looks too menacing?

I’d love to hear your comments on this, and also your comments on these other covers of the New Yorker and just how does this current cover measure up with other covers over time.

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL

Yes, there is a theme that has been consistent in what I write, more so in my comments on other people’s blogs.  Most times I offer anti-intelligence as the reasoning behind people and their actions.  To drive the point home, it’s really their reactions.  Those who try their best to engage in critical debate and critical thought, and push themselves to read a book (read a book, read a muh—– book) usually are the one’s who either a) are the first to take serious action or at least b) make a calculated reaction to any particular situation.

As I’ve said in my other posts, the youth group I was with visted the Eliza Shirley House on Arch Street in Philadephia and the other groups visted various Salvation Army shelters, food banks, thrift stores to sort through donations, and other homeless shelters dealing with kids and adults with mental illnesses alike.  It was my job, seeing as how I was the adult leader for this trip, to lead group discussion at night with our group.

Before I say what occurred in the group discussions, I’d like to pause here and say that euphemisms have effectively killed serious and meaningful discussions about flashpoint issues; euphemisms merely pour fire onto a fire that very well may be out of control.  Case in point: Our group was to have a night of “cultural exchange” with Greater Exodus Baptist Church on North Broad Street and I guess since I’ve been black for so long, I figured that this was a black church.  I mean, my friends and I make jokes about the names that black churches come up with, especially the storefront ones that may be associated with some off-brand Holiness denomination.

I guess calling it a “cultural exchange” was a mixture of anti-intelligence, in my opinion, and a combination of just being culturally unaware.  I say culturally unaware because it seems that by not calling it a “black church” but going into depth about how the service and modes of worship may be different than what this group is used to, somewhat diminished that which is the Black Church as an institution.

When we came back to group meeting that night, after the youth were more than impressed and pleased with the service, I just mentioned, kind of in passing, not to harp on the point, but that vocalness of the parishoners in response to a prayer, a song or the preacher was what was known as call-and-response and I proceeded to say these exact words that “it was born out of the Black Church–” and immediately my host mother (yes, the same one who said “hip hop was born out of the prison culture) and my partner in this internship proceeded to tell me that I was wrong “because I attended a church just like that back home and there were not just black and white people there….”

And, then Militant Negro knocked on the door.

I paused and started saying “Call-and-response was born out of African–” as I began to walk to the door and peep in the peep hole debating if I wanted to answer Militant Negro’s knocks.

And these two ducks interrupted me again, my host mother being a bit more vocal saying “You can’t say that this is only a black thing because….”

This time Militant Negro  did a loud holler out to Angry Negro and both of them started beating on the door because, by now I was really ready to read ‘em.  I  am studying this in seminary; I  have been a member of a black church and the Black Church from birth; I know this stuff like the back of my hand–in fact these two women are lucky that I haven’t taken Church History I and II and African American Church History I and II at school yet because history is a pet subject of mine, and then I woulda started quoting dte and whatnot, an it woulda been a Michael Eric Dyson on my part–mass murder of white intelligensia.

Instead, I didn’t open the door, and stayed my good ol’ Uppity Negro self and just started for the third and final time that “Call-and-response was born out of the Africa and from the Black Church…”

I was pushing the racial envelope in the discussions because a good majority of the people that we were encountering in the shelters and homes were people of color.  And anyone familiar with East Coast cities knows that everybody from the tip of South America, north through Central America and the Caribbean find themselves immigrated to larger cities. 

These were the people we encountered.  Along with your garder variety white person who may be classified as poor white trash, and clearly grew up poor right alongside all the other darkies.

Editors Note:  Aint it interesting that poor people more or less share the same fate from a crappy government, be it on the local, state or federal level, yet and still their are distinct delineations on the basis of race that still place those from the white race on top

I’m not going to lie, but I was honestly shocked that these youth actually had opinions about them being from the suburbs versus that of growing up in the city.  And these were real statements and questions that they had.  I think the problem is that, people from this particular culture that I’ve found myself alienated in, by choice of course, I applied for the job knowing what I was getting into, is that they never push themselves to the level of uncomfortability; they rarely stretch their thinking past face value.

Another case in point: my host mother has just convinced herself that the neighborhood around Howard University is just the worse neighborhood in the world.  I couldn’t help but roll my eyes when she first told me that.  I mean, she went on and on today about a non-fatal shooting in Adams-Morgan today and I’m like–OMG, these surburban folk, white and black have a TOTALLY whacked-out view of what it means to live in the city.  (I could take a niiiiiice digression about the images that are portrayed through media, be it TV or print, but you already know where I stand on these issues.) I have convinced myself, rightly or wrongly, that these youth would not have had as frank of a conversation about “call-and-response” or even felt comfortable to ask me about where I stand as a black young man from the city on Barack Obama.

I am convinced that we are raising another generation that will coddled with euphemisms yet again, and they will fail to have the tools necessary to deal with many of our social ills, not just in this country, but in the world.  We cannot be afraid to call a spade, a spade.  I think it is imperative that we be truthfully radical because while attending a black church is in fact a “cultural exchange” it’s just not radical enough to change anything.  Not saying that every black church is like Greater Exodus, I know that for a fact not to be true, but, it still broadens a perspective. 

I urge those who read this post to first start reading.   Even though I have a proclivity for Michael Eric Dyson, he doesn’t have to be your premier choice, but I definitely recomment him.  And even with what you read, challenge it, ask the author rhetorical questions, don’t take it for face value.  Secondly, pick up a newspaper.  Well, you can go online and read it, but it still usually gives more information than what the talking heads on TV are going to say.  You’d be shocked at the number of obscure articles that Mama Uppity has found over the years in the Chicago Sun-Times that would help support numerous conspiracy theories.  Thirdly just ask questions.  Too often people get afraid at offending people; stop worrying about people’s feelings, they’ll get over it in due time.

Hell, just stop being dumb–as Bishop Owens said this morning at Greater Mount Calvary: “Elevate your mind!”

So do you think that this is seriously a problem in this country?  The absolute failure to cricicize intelligently the social and economic ills of this country or have I totally missed the boat on this one and making a mountain out of a molehill?

Also, I’d like to hear the longest and most ridiculous church names that you see driving down the street.

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL

This is actually a topic I’ve been dying to write, but I figured that it would take some time and that I had a lot to write about it, so bear with me as I gather my thoughts about this particular subject.

It was Summer 2006 and I was finishing up at Fisk University my alma mater and they made me take this one course that I hadn’t taken at Dillard.  It was some English course that even the professor was trying to figure out why was I taking her class.  I wrote a paper about James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” and wrote about the importance of the second and third stanzas.  It seems that only those of us who have attended the HBCU’s and sang in the concert choir know those second and third verses, thanks to the Roland Carter arrangement.

It was in this paper that I wrote about “African-Americans” and various struggles and grappling with the text so and so forth.  So, I wrote “African-American” in an attempt to formalize the paper.  In doing so, I hyphenated the phrase.  She handed back my paper and gave me a B+ on the sole basis of hyphenation.  I asked her what the deal was and shesaid “I don’t live a hyphenated existence.”  And her words have stuck with me today.

I mean, I was a smart 21 year old who knew what she meant, and I definitely stopped hyphenating it in her class, but everytime it came for me to write “African” and the word “American” together, I consciously stopped hyphenating the two.  It is such a matter of consciousness for me that when I read it in print, I cringe and I usually stop and ponder what are the writers true feelings about this particular construct of categorization.

This is a very touchy subject for those of us who are descendants of slaves.

Many of us don’t use “African American” hyphenated or not because they are quite clear that “they don’t know nun bout Af-ica.”  Or some will just be brazenly ignorant and say “I aint no Afi-can!”  Well, I’ll say that I think the designation is almost necessary particularly for those of us living here in the Americas.  By saying that one is European American, Asian American or Native American it clearly states that one is living away from the place of origin.

I will NEVER honor an Afrikaans individual as an African American.  They are still European Americans.  Living in South Africa, or even born in South Africa, they’d be nothing more than European Africans.  Frankly, I get insulted when I hear people joke about that.  I’m sorry, but heritage, and my culture and my existence is not something to be laughed at nor diminished to the musings of satire or jokes.  When I hear of those descendents of Dutch imperialism align themselves with African Americans I can always hear Mama uppity’s voice saying that whenever reparations for those who are descendants of African slaves here in this country come to fruition, those fools are gonna be reaping the benefits thereof.

This all brings it to the question of why do those of us who are descendants of slaves get caught up in this debate over identity?

Those who self-identify as Black and only Black (yes, I started capitalizing for the sake of this post) have a tendency to call those who use African American as a predesignate, “uppity” or “bougie” or “stuck up” and those who call themselves African Americans probably have a higher tendency to look down on those who self-identify as black.  Often using the lame argument of “well, I’m not black, I’m brown” and when they see someone with very dark skin they say “Now that’s a black person.  They so black they blue and purple.”

Wow, we really don’t know who we are.

Yes, this all goes back to slavery and the days where 90% of the black population lived in the segregated Jim Crow South at one time, and we’re still seeing the aftereffects of such thought processes passed down through the generations.  Too often we forget that how we process information is a direct result of how we’ve been socialized and been acculturated from our country of origin.  The form of slavery in which European imperialists imposed on the Africans here in the Americas was one of the most brutal forms ever documented in world history.  Their form of chattel slavery was new, seeing as how they stole men, women and children, much from those on the West African coast and enslaved them.

Editors note: To all the fools that would love to make the comment that “Many of the Africans sold their own people into slavery” and think its the best comment and the most intelligent comment that would promptly shut down the reparations debate, or somehow quell the conversation about slavery in this country–here’s why you’re wrong.  Again, the type of slavery that many of those on the West African coast practiced was more akin to the European version of indentured servitude.  Please don’t misunderstand, the owning of another human by another human in whatever is unconscionable, however, the chattel slavery and the diluted genocidal effects of slavery that were instituted by Europeans, and the inherent racism that was associated with slavery in the Americas was not practiced by that of the Africans.  Moreover the small number of West Africans that were sold into slavery pale in comparison to the raping and pillaging that the Europeans did not only to the people themselves but to the physical land by taking gold and other natural resources leaving that area devoid of that which had previously sustained life.

Somehow those that think the “Africans sold other Africans into slavery” is an argument that somehow removes blame from Europeans and places it on those from the Ibo, Ashanti and Fante tribes of West Africa needs to get a friggin history lesson.  I will NOT entertain any comments that do not intelligently debate this issue.  Please post with caution.

End of editors note.

Well, I guess all of this incessant rambling is borne from the fact that while I was on Creation Fest (a few posts back) somehow me and youth moved to a topic about politics and when asked a question, I try my best to stay out of the quagmire of euphemisms lest these youth can politely dismiss what I say.  So, some how we got on nationality and the kids were saying the various countries that their parents were from and one of them, as if it were natural asked me “What country are you from?”

Well, when blacks among blacks ask this question, we usually just say “Where ya people from?” and the normal answers are (as I begin to list the formers states of the Confederacy) Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, some Floridians, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina and Virginia–THAT’S IT!

You’ll rarely hear the border states such as Missouri, Kentucky or Maryland.

So, as you all are dying to hear what my response was, I’ll hold the suspense a bit longer, lol.

It was at this moment that I began to see myself as a minority in this context.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been quite conscious that I’m dealing with white people, I’m not sure how conscious they are of my blackness (although after this last week and me walking around with a “Black History: To Be Continued….” shirt on, I’m sure they got the picture), but that I’m beginning to get a glipmse of what it means to be a lone black man in a white world.  Now I’m beginning to know why many black professionals, men and women, come home and are TOTALLY stressed out.

I’m sick and damn tired of code switching.  Code switching is that wonderful that blacks have done since slavery that allows us to speak in our own vernacular amongst ourselves, but that unique ability to “talk white” when we get around white folk.  I’m just sick and tired of having to do the “talk white” thing and not having enough black people to break up the monotony.  I feel that I have break down my own feelings and decipher them before they come out of my mouth in order for those around me to understand what I’m saying.   The irony is that I’m not 100% all the time and every once in a while, something slips out and I spend much of the time explaining the significance of that cultural event.

Here’s a case in point.

My host mother (yes, the one that said “hip hop is from the prison culture”) told this story of how in Philadelphia all of these “Southern black women” at a senior center were sitting around playing some card game and how all of them had on their church hats and pearls and how they were sitting around cackling because one of the older men in the room was making old lecherous man remarks to one of the women. And then when one of the women responded, he got up trying to run away from her in his walker.  Now my host mother was laughing uncontrollably telling the story, and in the midst of the laughter she said how it had to have come straight out of a movie.

I wanted to tell her, ” —-, that’s just like at our family reunion.”   And I doubt she’s ever seen one of Tyler Perry’s movies.

Or even having to explain what an HBCU is to my co-workers.

So in the midst of meeting all of these wonderful women at the Salvation Army Eliza Shirley House on Arch Street in Philadelphia or playing with the neighborhood kids in the Fishtown neighborhood, proabably mostly of Irish Catholic descent, I was quite aware of my Black African American standing.  There was one other girl who was black in another one of the groups and there was another young man who was about my skin color in our group, but he’s of Surinamese descent (just ask Obama what does that feel like to be of darker color, outwardly identified as black, but without the same heritage of millions of other African Americans).

“Black” rolls off of my tongue easier and “African American” is much more PC, however don’t let the PC status fool you. The reason for removing the hyphen is that my Africanness, which comes first is not dependant nor defined by my Americanness. 

My Blackness stands alone.

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL