"To be Black in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in rage almost all the time."
–James Baldwin
Dearest Michael,
Do I open with the threat that had anyone within arm’s reach said anything disparaging about you in the days and weeks after your death, my nigga, I would’ve put a foot so far up their asses they'd feel it right up to the moment diggers of graves shoveled dirt onto their coffins? Would you believe me if I told you that I would’ve welcomed the subsequent police officers and the handcuffs and the nightsticks, and yet still I would’ve shouted to wide-eyed onlookers, blood spilling from my battered jowls, “He was my friend!” But of course I am no killer. So perhaps I should open this note as fiction writers do, with a simple and direct testimony devoted to character and conflict and voice: "He had run for so long through my veins that I now know I never would've made it out of my shitty sliver of the Bronx without his ballads and badass moon-walking."
And then there was the sparkling glove. The glistening gerri-curl. The high-water jeans and white socks. Altogether you were like a hybrid of silk and sandpaper, and your presence to me, and to the world, rang of streams of hot elegant rain poured upon us all from a thunderous sky. To say nothing of your precious voice, which announced to so many of us soft spoken and artistic and nerdy outcast brothers from my hood that we, too, were meaningful entities within the glorious web of inner-city Black Men. But later, as I grew, this: black beauty was murderously disputed by evening news and Hollywood blockbusters; and then I’d learned, for the first time, the word castration; and I’d seen, for the first time, video of black bodies burning and hanging from thick oak trees, and beneath their smoldering feet, little white children with mutilated souls giggling at the charred flesh—I was even more grateful, then, for the presence of your rough pop-hit-lilts in my life, Michael.
Despite the horrible truth of the above sentiment, I exited the inner-city a product of that gargantuan metropolis of eight million beating hearts, and entered a predominantly white and rich private school in upstate New York, armed with an impenetrable motto: never take shit from no one. It was a mantra I had to wield in order to withstand—though I failed so many times—the absolutely stunning and dizzying acts of deliberate and unconscious racism I experienced for three years at that educational institution. I shielded myself as best I could so that I could also, then, harness an energy to properly love myself in order to properly love another human being. All the while trying to make sense of the centuries old excavation into the deep earth of what it meant to be Black while in plain sight of a few thousand white people. Well, I never finished a degree at that school, and some seventeen years later I found myself at a bar chatting with one of those white cats who had, you know, strangled himself with an addiction for underground Hip-Hop. When I admitted that I had no fucking clue of the rap artists he’d named who were keeping it real by staving off commercial record company vultures, he said to me, “Man, what kind of black person is you?!”
Make no mistake, Michael, I prayed, at the time, to be the best teacher I could. I prayed for continued publication and winning awards as a writer. I also prayed for a good golf swing and the good treatment of animals; I prayed the Yankees would win another pennant; I prayed the woman I loved would forever love me. But it was all I could do not to take this white cat by the scruff and slam his face repeatedly into the iron mesh table between us, all the while chanting—in the same fervor of giggle as those white children might have while ruined bodies swung in the air above them—we are a diverse people, we are a diverse people! Instead, I kept my cool and said, “Do you know anything about The Blues or R&B? Do you know Erykah Badu or Tracy Chapman or Cassandra Wilson or Muddy Waters or Teddy Pendergrass?” (If being black means anything at this exact moment, it means having to correct white people—of whatever ilk—about the kinds of music they think we ought to be listening to based on the color of our skins).
He fell silent and sipped on a tall can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, wholly dissatisfied with my rebuttal, and staring at me as though everything he thought he knew about black people had been reinforced because I was just some Uncle Tom, sell-out, little white-boy-faking-it-black—just for shits and giggles. I wonder now, Michael, if you had been more forceful, more successful in setting straight a number of these kinds of cultural fools—if you had been able to put those lost cats properly in their place—would you have resisted the bleaching cream and the surgeon’s knife raised to your face?
Maybe that’s an unjust question to pose, brother. Especially now that you are no longer here—but you are very much still here—to speak on behalf of your human agony. Which, at this point in our American history means, quite frankly, racial agony. It killed me how so many white people arrived at your guilt for, as was alleged, messing with little boys as easily as slipping on slippers or uttering nigger or swallowing chicken nuggets. So many rushed to chant, he must've done it because he's a fuck up racial freak. As though they didn’t already know imageries of whiteness have dominated the planet for centuries, and long before you ad-libbed, just look over your shoulders, honey! or spun around on penny loafers. As though their guilt-filled nightmares about the color of their own skins hadn’t already revealed the ruthless, vicious, and often fatal dance between being simultaneously Black and Human. Had they been stripped down to their swinging cocks or shaved pussies by the lawmen who came after you, I wonder how easily would there be an admission that they are the sole beneficiaries—they are the children!—of the mother of all mantras so many black and brown folk on this continent have forever been scorched by: white rules all.
Michael, I still search for what it is that rules me, and I question the merits of such an exploration every day of my life, brother. So, who am I to say anything about the relationship between you and this northern America where your spirit lingers like the genetic dominance of melanin and the birth of interracial babies? I apologize for sounding bitter; I suppose it’s because you’re dead and I will only ever know you in song, never as a man. I wish we could’ve been friends so I’d know what sad love songs you threw on after the first time had your heart broken. So I’d know what kind of movies you watched on rainy Sunday afternoons when it was far too depressing to go outside. So I’d know how tall you were or if you liked sports or if you kept a journal or wrote poems for no one’s eyes but your own. So I could know what kind of middle-of-the-night-food you craved after a night out boozing—did you booze?—with those who were actually your friends.
I sometimes permit myself to imagine that we were as close as white on rice, thick as thieves, and I picture myself dropping by your place unexpectedly (as friends sometimes do), carrying a plate of my famous chicken cacciatore and a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin. Let's get fucked up, dude, it's Friday, I say, and for the next several hours we eat and drink and listen to music and talk about the power of white supremacy and old times, and every fifteen minutes or so you playfully admonish me for stepping outside to smoke a cigarette. Once the bottle is finished and the music playlist begins to repeat itself, I crash on the couch like an old friend and you head upstairs but warn me that you won’t be able to sleep. And I say, Man, just turn the light off and close your eyes.
Sometime in the night, though, I bolt upright, stricken with a swollen fear
like when I was a boy and thrown from sleep by winds that forced snapping
tree limbs to sing like gunfire. So now I cross the living room and climb
the stairs, and at the top I call out to you—once, twice—before turning
down the corridor to your bedroom. When I push through the door,
I see you sprawled out on the floor next to the bed, and I know
that, while I’d slept, you might have stared at your reflection
in the bathroom mirror while brushing your teeth and deplored
the effect of our country’s history carved in your face. I fall
to your side, then, and shake you—once, twice, and then
a third time for good measure, for I am your friend—
before realizing the irrevocable truth of the moment.
Crying, then, I embrace you, praying the psychic
power within my beating heart will perform
a miracle, and like a fellow victim
and warrior in this current
pathological racial war, I sing
to you, Michael, as I have
done so many times since
your passing, you are not
alone, you are not
alone, you are not
alone, my nigga.
Sincerely Yours,
Professor Afro
8.30.2010
A Letter to an Unforgotten Muslima
Dear Amina,
A tale could be told of our union when you were eighteen and I was twenty, full of drama and plot twists and all the intangible grey matter of the heart that clogs up the space between infatuation and love. Such a story—one that would require being spoken out loud, orally passed from ear to ear, era to era—would certainly include how we smashed to death terminological difference: Me with my scattered and reckless and arbitrary spirituality, and you with your disciplined and rational and historical devotion to Islam. I’d like to think that I seduced the Moroccan-American girl you were with my black-boy-from-the-inner-city-kicking-ass-and-taking-names-at-a-white-upper-class-college mojo. Especially when you pretended to lose your diamond engagement ring given to you by the parents of a quiet and passive and dutiful boy from North Africa who your own folks had selected to one day be your man—on the night I first put my mouth on yours.
In truth, you had selected me because I liked to raise hell about racism and injustice and the lie of fulfilled dreams so many pale and brown faces were living right under our noses. Long before we stole away from the Natalie Merchant concert on campus—our hot, damp palms clutched together—and marched across the quad of that ridiculous educational institution to my dorm room so I could be your first, I dreamed of you, Amina. In your dorm room. On your knees. Praying to Allah. Asking him for prudent guidance as you defied the Qur’an, bought the Merchant tickets, and whispered to me during the opening band, and amid the sea of white student bodies, I am ready. You kept the ticket stubs in your wallet during all those fearful years after you lost our baby, after you swallowed those sleeping pills, after I transferred from that school—during all those fearful years you worried not Allah but your family would smote us from the earth if they ever heard just a sliver of melody of the first movements of our tale.
And as lovers you chose me a second time, and no longer because I was two years older and “wiser,” but because I confessed one night into the wild flourish of your dark hair my parents’ drug addiction—the effects of which I carried like a pistol pointed at my moribund heart—and we were, finally, nigger and sand nigger unified at that educational institution which offered few examples of our kind of narrative. I had never lived among white people, but you had, and when I railed toward the deep end of my anger, which was laced with so much sadness, you prayed for me. You prayed for me on those evenings I tried to convince you of the joyous tastes of Goldschlagger and marijuana, both of which you vomited onto the linoleum of my dorm room floor as if you were a religious vampire unable to consume anything but halal, my body, and the word of God.
And yet you prayed for me when we watched Mississippi Masala—the movie forbade to you by your parents because it was about a young black man and Indian woman who fall in love—and clutched my arm and held your breath, for it was the first time you’d ever seen a sex scene, and one whose actors’ skin tones—brown against darker brown—matched ours as they fucked in cultural defiance and splendor. And yet you prayed for me on those late nights before your 8 a.m. Chemistry class when I came to your room drunk and high and you pulled the door open wearing pajamas of glorious, red silk that made you look like a monk for ailing angels or for a black boy in pain—garbs you let fall, without inhibition of regret, from your shoulders and hips, onto the floor, where hours before you may have knelt, faced Mecca, and recited Qur’anic passages before laying down to sleep with the knowledge that I was somewhere on campus carrying on with willing and curious and scientific white girls.
And yet you prayed for me even still when, after years of working two jobs in order to aid your family’s survival while sending me cash for light bills, for birthday gifts, and round-trip bus tickets from Columbus, Ohio to Tampa, Florida you finally, at twenty-seven, wrote the letter I’d always known would arrive: My parents have found me a nice man who I will marry, so you and I can never speak again.
Even then, as you tell me these days, you prayed for me, prayed for my well being, my prosperity, and for the love I ruined that you finally let go of in order to have three miraculous children, lives you created from your own delicate and armored womb of desire and long life. Yes, we should have married, but neither of us was ready for that level of defiance, but what I do know is this: even as I hear your voice over such an ineffective tool as this cell phone, the bass and cadence of your loyalty to the notion of our lost love—if no longer the memory of it—still has the power to seduce old wounds to heal—the way a god urges one to close her eyes, kneel, and whisper words she has faith can save a boy’s, and now a man’s, life.
A tale could be told of our union when you were eighteen and I was twenty, full of drama and plot twists and all the intangible grey matter of the heart that clogs up the space between infatuation and love. Such a story—one that would require being spoken out loud, orally passed from ear to ear, era to era—would certainly include how we smashed to death terminological difference: Me with my scattered and reckless and arbitrary spirituality, and you with your disciplined and rational and historical devotion to Islam. I’d like to think that I seduced the Moroccan-American girl you were with my black-boy-from-the-inner-city-kicking-ass-and-taking-names-at-a-white-upper-class-college mojo. Especially when you pretended to lose your diamond engagement ring given to you by the parents of a quiet and passive and dutiful boy from North Africa who your own folks had selected to one day be your man—on the night I first put my mouth on yours.
In truth, you had selected me because I liked to raise hell about racism and injustice and the lie of fulfilled dreams so many pale and brown faces were living right under our noses. Long before we stole away from the Natalie Merchant concert on campus—our hot, damp palms clutched together—and marched across the quad of that ridiculous educational institution to my dorm room so I could be your first, I dreamed of you, Amina. In your dorm room. On your knees. Praying to Allah. Asking him for prudent guidance as you defied the Qur’an, bought the Merchant tickets, and whispered to me during the opening band, and amid the sea of white student bodies, I am ready. You kept the ticket stubs in your wallet during all those fearful years after you lost our baby, after you swallowed those sleeping pills, after I transferred from that school—during all those fearful years you worried not Allah but your family would smote us from the earth if they ever heard just a sliver of melody of the first movements of our tale.
And as lovers you chose me a second time, and no longer because I was two years older and “wiser,” but because I confessed one night into the wild flourish of your dark hair my parents’ drug addiction—the effects of which I carried like a pistol pointed at my moribund heart—and we were, finally, nigger and sand nigger unified at that educational institution which offered few examples of our kind of narrative. I had never lived among white people, but you had, and when I railed toward the deep end of my anger, which was laced with so much sadness, you prayed for me. You prayed for me on those evenings I tried to convince you of the joyous tastes of Goldschlagger and marijuana, both of which you vomited onto the linoleum of my dorm room floor as if you were a religious vampire unable to consume anything but halal, my body, and the word of God.
And yet you prayed for me when we watched Mississippi Masala—the movie forbade to you by your parents because it was about a young black man and Indian woman who fall in love—and clutched my arm and held your breath, for it was the first time you’d ever seen a sex scene, and one whose actors’ skin tones—brown against darker brown—matched ours as they fucked in cultural defiance and splendor. And yet you prayed for me on those late nights before your 8 a.m. Chemistry class when I came to your room drunk and high and you pulled the door open wearing pajamas of glorious, red silk that made you look like a monk for ailing angels or for a black boy in pain—garbs you let fall, without inhibition of regret, from your shoulders and hips, onto the floor, where hours before you may have knelt, faced Mecca, and recited Qur’anic passages before laying down to sleep with the knowledge that I was somewhere on campus carrying on with willing and curious and scientific white girls.
And yet you prayed for me even still when, after years of working two jobs in order to aid your family’s survival while sending me cash for light bills, for birthday gifts, and round-trip bus tickets from Columbus, Ohio to Tampa, Florida you finally, at twenty-seven, wrote the letter I’d always known would arrive: My parents have found me a nice man who I will marry, so you and I can never speak again.
Even then, as you tell me these days, you prayed for me, prayed for my well being, my prosperity, and for the love I ruined that you finally let go of in order to have three miraculous children, lives you created from your own delicate and armored womb of desire and long life. Yes, we should have married, but neither of us was ready for that level of defiance, but what I do know is this: even as I hear your voice over such an ineffective tool as this cell phone, the bass and cadence of your loyalty to the notion of our lost love—if no longer the memory of it—still has the power to seduce old wounds to heal—the way a god urges one to close her eyes, kneel, and whisper words she has faith can save a boy’s, and now a man’s, life.
6.30.2010
Kiss An Other Before You Talk Shit About Race
Now that Barack Obama is President and all racism is dead across the land, the modern day African-American experience—being Black—means that you have to listen to white people tell you just how black you aren’t. If nothing else, this means that race in America—in the United States and across the fucking globe for that tragic matter!—is still a very fucked up thing—so disastrously schizophrenic that white people who have snorted commercialized and commodified black culture (or fucked or got drunk with the one black friend in their lives that wasn’t me)like so much cocaine, or crushed Aderal, really believe they’re in the moral position to judge the validity or authenticity of those people around them who, for instance, interracially date, listen to Melissa Ethridge, or don’t sound like they’re speaking some contemporary, stylized version of hip, down-with-it Jive.
I can’t stomach white people—or any of the rest of you multi-colored, ridiculously misguided sons a bitches—who claim to appreciate or adore or even love black culture but clearly cannot stand black people.
I really don’t know what’s worse: white people telling black people how black they are or not or can be or should be or will ever be, or black people telling other black people the same ridiculous bullshit—yet neither of those two groups of racial dictators have the guts to fuck or flirt or finger or kiss one another or engage in a little traditional “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” Or even just talk to one another like the racial human beings they are and forever will be.
Part of the reason the profoundly ignorant tout themselves as harbingers of enlightened information is because—well, they’re profoundly ignorant, so that’s why—but also because to face one’s ignorance leaves one vulnerable to another human being—vulnerable enough that the other human being will see their soul—flaws—shortcomings. And when it comes down to race, partly the reason most white people and black people don’t climb into bed together—which is just a prelude to climbing toward the altar—is because if they did, they’d both discover just how white and black neither of them really are—and they’d have to deal with each other as human beings, would have to deal with each other's naked human bodies, which so many of you are clearly not prepared—or even willing—to do.
I can’t stomach white people—or any of the rest of you multi-colored, ridiculously misguided sons a bitches—who claim to appreciate or adore or even love black culture but clearly cannot stand black people.
I really don’t know what’s worse: white people telling black people how black they are or not or can be or should be or will ever be, or black people telling other black people the same ridiculous bullshit—yet neither of those two groups of racial dictators have the guts to fuck or flirt or finger or kiss one another or engage in a little traditional “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” Or even just talk to one another like the racial human beings they are and forever will be.
Part of the reason the profoundly ignorant tout themselves as harbingers of enlightened information is because—well, they’re profoundly ignorant, so that’s why—but also because to face one’s ignorance leaves one vulnerable to another human being—vulnerable enough that the other human being will see their soul—flaws—shortcomings. And when it comes down to race, partly the reason most white people and black people don’t climb into bed together—which is just a prelude to climbing toward the altar—is because if they did, they’d both discover just how white and black neither of them really are—and they’d have to deal with each other as human beings, would have to deal with each other's naked human bodies, which so many of you are clearly not prepared—or even willing—to do.
"Wet Your Hair for Me": An essay excerpt
You motherfuckers don't know shit about this, and I'm here to teach you. It's been over a year since my last post--but break's over, niggas! Class is back in session, ya dig?
“The hell is this,” my girlfriend Brandy asked me, extracting a strand of dark blonde hair from the furry topside of the blanket that engulfed my dorm room mattress. We were eighteen year old freshmen from the Bronx attending separate colleges in upstate New York. It was a Saturday night and I was writing an English paper longhand and she was lying in bed reading a novel. Brandy held the lock between her fingers like it was a dirty sock. I had on a pair of nonprescription glasses which I snatched off like I’d seen actors do in the movies, and lied: I told her Sam, my white roommate, had thrown a party in our room the weekend before while I’d been visiting her at her school, and god only knows what kinds of crazy shit had gone down.
Brandy found a dozen more hairs in the coat of the blanket, which she compiled like dead spiders in one of her hands. “Unbelievable,” she muttered after she was done with her search and walked over to the window. A violent gust of cold air swept into the room when she slid open the glass, reached out, and turned the guilty palm face down. I closed my eyes and traced the descent of dead, ghost hairs as they drifted like wiry feathers to the snow covered ground below.
“The hell is this,” my girlfriend Brandy asked me, extracting a strand of dark blonde hair from the furry topside of the blanket that engulfed my dorm room mattress. We were eighteen year old freshmen from the Bronx attending separate colleges in upstate New York. It was a Saturday night and I was writing an English paper longhand and she was lying in bed reading a novel. Brandy held the lock between her fingers like it was a dirty sock. I had on a pair of nonprescription glasses which I snatched off like I’d seen actors do in the movies, and lied: I told her Sam, my white roommate, had thrown a party in our room the weekend before while I’d been visiting her at her school, and god only knows what kinds of crazy shit had gone down.
The truth was that Brittany or Jennifer—two girls I’d been sleeping with at the time—had shed as we lay next to one another in bed.
“It’s not weird,” she said, flicking the lock on the floor as far away from my side of the room as she could. “It’s disgusting.”
Brandy set her book aside before climbing from beneath the blanket and drawing her hand slowly across the blanket in search of other strands lodged in the thick, tan mane of the comforter. But the blanket is not to blame. It originated from Japan, shipped from an Air Force base where my oldest sister Natasha was stationed. The blanket was roughly 8x5 and had a smooth, silk underside that felt like the back of horse; its topside was Sasquatch thick. It weighed as much as I did and had a singular purpose: to protect me against the first feral and wicked winter I was experiencing in upstate New York.
Perhaps my skin is culpable, which ached constantly on that campus, in that small, cramped dormitory that was fifteen minutes away from the state school Brandy attended. There were women, though, who lived much closer, on floors above mine. Ones who had grown up with the vile weather and were trained to speak its language. Ones who descended those few flights of stairs to my room and whispered warm remedies to my bruised flesh while we fucked beneath a sister’s gift that is not to blame.
Brandy found a dozen more hairs in the coat of the blanket, which she compiled like dead spiders in one of her hands. “Unbelievable,” she muttered after she was done with her search and walked over to the window. A violent gust of cold air swept into the room when she slid open the glass, reached out, and turned the guilty palm face down. I closed my eyes and traced the descent of dead, ghost hairs as they drifted like wiry feathers to the snow covered ground below.
12.17.2008
Little Red Love Machine: Memoir Excerpt (for the ladies, god bless...)
I grew up in the 1980's Bronx with an imagination so fat and frenzied, God could have made two little boys out of me, and here is what I remember of that life:
My mind, I know now, had a mind of its own, and everyday both functioned to unveil Creston Avenue—the street I lived on with Mommy and my older sister, Asia—the way the block ought to be, not the way it actually was. To a lesser boy, a gushing fire hydrant drenching kids in the street seemed ordinary, but to me was a small gargoyle shooting acid from its mouth, hosing down enemy bodies.
Usually, a shirtless, older boy, whose back had been reddened the color of the devil by the sun, transformed the gushing stream with a soup can into a narrow, powerful beam that he used to pin helpless boys and girls like rags against buildings and driver-side car doors. Or he’d swing the pole of toxic water like a bat—smacking at shoulders, heads, and ankles with precise aim—flipping kids oddly through the air, their gangly frames sprawling and contorted as they crashed to the ground as though they’d been sideswiped. Still, the girls and boys danced in and out of the relentless current, filling the air with the brightness of their white teeth and reckless, joyful cries. But I wasn’t fooled, for I--two full boys in one--knew what would, soon, truly take place: their smiles would melt into sagging, fleshy frowns, and their bodies would disintegrate into wide puddles of smoldering blood and bone.
(stay tuned for more excerpts of Professor Afro's childhood)
My mind, I know now, had a mind of its own, and everyday both functioned to unveil Creston Avenue—the street I lived on with Mommy and my older sister, Asia—the way the block ought to be, not the way it actually was. To a lesser boy, a gushing fire hydrant drenching kids in the street seemed ordinary, but to me was a small gargoyle shooting acid from its mouth, hosing down enemy bodies.
Usually, a shirtless, older boy, whose back had been reddened the color of the devil by the sun, transformed the gushing stream with a soup can into a narrow, powerful beam that he used to pin helpless boys and girls like rags against buildings and driver-side car doors. Or he’d swing the pole of toxic water like a bat—smacking at shoulders, heads, and ankles with precise aim—flipping kids oddly through the air, their gangly frames sprawling and contorted as they crashed to the ground as though they’d been sideswiped. Still, the girls and boys danced in and out of the relentless current, filling the air with the brightness of their white teeth and reckless, joyful cries. But I wasn’t fooled, for I--two full boys in one--knew what would, soon, truly take place: their smiles would melt into sagging, fleshy frowns, and their bodies would disintegrate into wide puddles of smoldering blood and bone.
(stay tuned for more excerpts of Professor Afro's childhood)
11.04.2008
"I Don't Want Them to Kill Him": Alas, Poor Barack
I got up this morning firmly convinced that I would vote for Barack Obama. I got dressed, brushed my teeth, washed my face, walked my dog, took a few practice swings with my 7 iron (a club that has been treating me well on the golf course of late), did my hair and drank 32 ounces of water firmly convinced that Barack Obama was my man.
I am a gambling man, and I am superstitious, so as I walked to my designated precinct I chose to listen to U2's live version of "One" featuring Mary J. Blige who makes a beautifully clinched fist out of a song that is already a delicate hand. Listening to this song would, undoubtedly, help Barack Obama - the man whom I was firmly convinced I was voting for - win the election and make songs like this symbolic of change in America. I had my racial unity mojo working, my imagination was pumping, I was thinking positive, aligning the inner, ethereal, spiritual Professor Afro with Barack Obama and his endeavor to become, among other things, the first Negro President this country has ever seen...
There was barely a line at the precinct; within five minutes of showing up at the place, I was behind a voting window ready to do my part for Rome.
And then I thought, They're gonna kill him.
I called a friend and said, "Give me one good reason why I shouldn't vote for McCain."
Sure, the total tonnage of reasons I have not to vote for McCain could stunt a team of oxen in its place, but I wasn't looking for the same ol' chicken mcnugget excuses - I was having a fucking breakdown in the bottom of the ninth. I was afraid for Barack's life. I am afraid.
My friend offered a reason why I shouldn't vote for McCain. It was a good one: "If you vote for McCain and he dies, Palin will be President, and then we will all die..."
But that wasn't good enough. And I said, "Why would I want Barack to be President? They're gonna kill him. Why would I do that?"
"He made the choice to run for President," my friend said. "You can't take that into consideration."
"That's bullshit," I said. "If my vote truly counts, then why would I want him elected? So they can shoot his black ass?"
"You can't think about that," my friend said.
But it was all I could think about standing at the voting terminal. Why would I send someone I respect across a bridge that has a likelihood of collapsing, just so it can prove to future generations the importance of crossing bridges?
So, instead of Barack's name, I selected McCain's. The question was never whether not a black man could do the job of President, but whether white people would get over themselves enough to see past the color of their own skins and the color of another's skin, and those skin colors in historical relation to one another, and to love themselves enough to love someone who didn't look like them, in order to vote a black man president?
We have all been complicit (rightfully or wrongfully so has yet to be tallied) - in answering that question with a resounding Yes!
I have never been one to champion the righteous goodness of voting. In fact, that America has survived this long without being blown off the face of the planet - either by ourselves of someone else - has always been evidence enough to prove that voting don't really mean shit. But after Bush's first four years, I took my ass to the poles; and now that his last four years are coming to an end, along with being swept up in the philosophical notion that is "Barack Obama," I arrived at the precinct to cast my individual vote.
But none of those son of a bitches who I've argued with over the years about the merits of an individual vote versus the gargantuan capitalistic machine that requires not your fealty to its dick, just that you keep it shoved in your mouth no matter what, foreshadowed the crisis that afflicted me when I actually had to make the physical decision to raise a finger and touch the screen, to cast my powerful, personal vote for a black man to be president of a schizophrenic country that hasn't yet earned the motherfuckin' phrase, we are all the same, although we've uttered it so much it has long since lost its luster.
They're going to kill him. The thought was choking, and seemed as real to me, then, as had been my prior decision to vote for Barack. I checked the box for McCain. I had to. How could I not? It seemed obvious to me: in our rush to make history, in our rush to pretend that Barack is a human being first and a black man second (what the fuck does that mean?), in our rush to anoint this a new era of hope and change, we'd forgotten history: people like this get killed!
Hell fuckin' yes I was voting for McCain. The power of my individual vote hit me in the chest like a blow from a sledgehammer. I suddenly felt like I had the power to send a man to his death, just because he was black and I was black; just because he preached hope and change (two notions that can't exist, and have never existed, without someone getting his head blown off), the same as I'd done in the classroom for the last 10 years; just because he'd made a life from staring the ridiculous American racist bullshit scene in the face.
In the end, I revised my vote and chose Barack.
I had to, right? Of course I did.
I said out loud, "What would James Baldwin do?" And then I said, "Fuck that shit, I ain't James Baldwin, I'm Professor Afro, my own man, I have my own mind. I'll vote for McCain and stand atop the highest point in the city and with a bullhorn let all you niggas know who I voted for and why, and kiss my ass (black) if you don't like it."
But it was no use. I am too tied to history. When I got 'Baldwin' tattooed on my arm several years ago, I did so because the man had touched the sense of god in me, and, like him, I'd always been serious about raising hell over inequality, and gaining enemies and making people feel uncomfortable because of it. When I left the precinct and hit the street for home, I threw on my headphones and began to cry. I couldn't really believe it what was happening to me: what the hell was I crying for? Was it Annie Lennox's sorrowful ballad "Why" spilling into my head and heart, or my active, necessarily dramatic sense of the moment that made the tears come?
Maybe. But I also think it was the whole of me being indicted in that moment I had to make a choice. I thought of all the people who were killed because they were good people. I was crying because I'm sick and tired of people saying things like "well, if they're shooting at you, you must be doing something right."
I'm tired of points being proven about the complexity of the human condition - about the true "colorlessness of humanity" - within the image of several men standing on the balcony of a hotel, each with their arms stretched out and pointing off into the distance at a gunman, and at an evil, that will never be found. But I have to give my nigga Barack a chance to be a hero, and unlike the comics, sometimes heroes don't make it out of the blaze. I was crying because I'm an American and I'm so fuckin' tired of that being true...
...of our heroes.
10.23.2008
Willing Suspension of my Black Ass: Where the Fuck Are All the Black People in The Lord of the Rings?
Now, imagine this: Morgan Freeman playing the role of Gandolf...
So, if you're watching The Lord of the Rings and not thinking where the fuck are all the black people, then there's something wrong with your imagination.
And your soul.
My soul, however, is fully intact: When I was 19, I wrote the following in a journal I'd been keeping everyday since I was 15:
"Sometimes I wish everyone was alike - everyone. Somehow I believe things would be more different, possible better. If everyone looked basically the same, acted and spoke and walked the same (and especially thought the same), views of right and wrong would be as simple as...as black or white.
"But because we are all cursed with a nagging individuality, finding answers to complex problems is almost impossible. If we were all the same, generalizations would be acceptable and, thus, people’s feelings wouldn’t get hurt. Answers would be clear. Different strokes for different folks wouldn’t matter. Everybody would see things with a blinding clarity. And those looking for what was right and what was wrong would know exactly where to go. “Soul Searching,” the disease that it is, would be cured" (date: 94980. 5918; p.142-143).
I haven't changed much since I was 19 other than I no longer create forced pauses in sentences with the use of ellipses (a ridiculous grammatical punctuation) in an attempt to set up epiphany with a drum roll. But the young man in the above lines informs the man now, and there are days (this is not one of them) that I do still dream we were all alike and looked "basically" the same.
Ironically, this is the same argument ridiculous white Americans (racists?) use to justify why there aren't any black people in The Lord of the Rings: what does it matter, they say, we are all the same. Well, most of you mofos don't act like it, so that's the first fuckin' problem; and, secondly, if I'm expected - as were so many others over so many years - to make the imaginative leap of intertwining my brown, human heart with that of Froto-fuckin'-Baggins' hobbit heart and his struggle with the ring (which is to say nothing of how I contorted my imagination over Luke Skywalker's ass), then I expect to see - at the very least! - a couple two-three black hobbits mixing it up at the Shire.
Some also argue that the The Lord of the Rings wouldn't be historically accurate if there was a black person in the cast, that the stories center around European, not African, folklore. Unless I'd been paying more attention to how to fry chicken or effectively wear my jeans sagging beneath the curve of my ass as a boy during "All the Living Things on Planet Earth" class - can someone explain the historical accuracy of a fucking Elf? Or a Hobbit. Or a Dwarf. Or whatever the fuck Gollum is? These creatures are not white people. They can't be. Because, well - they're creatures! That's why they call them creatures.
Perhaps a better inquiry than the title of this blog would be why I don't have a hard time suspending my disbelief when it concerns white actors brilliantly portraying the roles of an androgynous, emotionally unstable Elf, a Dwarf who overcompensates for deep height and sexual insecurities by wielding an ax, or the ring-addicted, anorexic gnome who suffers from a multiple personality disorder that sends him bouncing back and forth, like a crack-head tennis ball, between slave of the Ring and master of the Ring. "No, no," Peter Jackson might have said on casting day, "We must honor Tolkien and use white actors for these critical roles!"
Okay, that was low down. I take it back. I dig white people (specific ones) a lot.
What I really mean to say is this: If you put a black person in a hobbit outfit, give him/her some fake, hairy feet, a couple of pointed ears and an English accent, who the fuck among us couldn't make the imaginative leap to think Hobbit? My fear – and one reason why there aren't any black people in The Lord of the Rings movies – is that too many of us would say, "Wow, there goes a black hobbit." I only have an issue with the comment if it doesn't inevitably lead (sooner rather than later) to the next comment: "Ah, fuck it. A Hobbit is a Hobbit is a Hobbit." My fear is that the white imagination hasn't evolved enough to the point where they can see themselves - and allow their children to see themselves - within the lives of people who don't look like them.
If it has evolved, then dammit, I wanna see a couple two-three white people get just as pissed off as I am, grab hold of the nearest white motherfucker you can, and demand an answer to a very simple question: if we're all the same, where the fuck are all the black people in The Lord of the Rings?
Because if y'all niggas don't start asking questions and demanding answers - well, we're just not gonna be your friends anymore...
We ain't gonna play with y'all no more and we damn sure ain't inviting y'all over to our houses. And when, and when the aliens finally come to Earth, we gonna tell them all about you and how you be treatin' us, and then we gonna leave you here all alone and go back with them to their world! And when you be still over here all lonely and missin' us and stuff and wishin' you had our hands to hold, we gonna be on that other planet makin' fun of you! And you gonna hear our laughter like an echoing roar rolling through the universe and straight stabbing you in the heart. And even if you find a way to find us and y'all be cryin' about how sorry y'all is and stuff, it still won't matter. Cause we won't even talk to you when you pass us on the street or sit across from us at a cafe. And if we do speak, it'll only be to say, "Psst, you had your chance and you messed it up. So there!"
So keep it up, white people - y'all niggas know which ones I'm talking about - and see what'll happen if you don't put us in your movies. We won't let you be the same as us no more, and then where will you be?!
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