WE BLACK MEN ARE GOOD!

A couple of weeks ago I ran into I ran into an old retired professor friend of mine who I’ve always loved and respected. Whenever we see each other, we always talk about how students nowadays are not as engaged in politics, and how they have a different level of respect for their professors, and also how they have higher expectations of themselves. As usual I agreed and probably threw some random statistic that was swirling around in my big head at her to explain, possibly, how we found ourselves in this situation. I recently mentioned a murder in my building (something I’m still trying to figure out two weeks later) and how it really didn’t surprise me that this happened within the confines of my “nice” building.  And then she made the jump to talk about Black-on Black crime and “why it’s always the Blacks against Blacks.”

Lately, I’ve grown weary have to explain my hyper-Blackness to people. Dammit, can I just be?

Meanwhile…………the main story line for Black males in this country is you are under a certain age is that you are guilty until proven innocent and that you are automatically presumed less than and are required to defend your humanity and your citizenship at all times.  Remember the conversation regarding the Seattle Seahawks Richard Sherman as it relates to race? Throw in him being a brown skinned dude, with dreadlocks, and he was loud as hell.... that made him a threat?  Richard Sherman’s loud mouth to the wrong white dude could have easily gotten him killed just as Jordan Davis’ loud music got him killed….literally!

This has also to do with the problem white society has with historically Black colleges and universities.  Nobody has a problem or even cares about historically Black public schools…the Thurgood Marshall’s, the Martin Luther Kings, the Adam Clayton Powell’s,  and Frederick Douglass elementary and high schools that occupy our dark inner cities. Wonder why there have never been questions about the need for their existence?  Likewise, nobody questioned the need for the Mormons to create Brigham Young University or why Jews send their children to Brandeis. But let somebody talk up for historically Black colleges and universities, then suddenly all hell breaks loose in this supposedly post-racial society and you’re accused of being a reverse racist.

BUT PLEASE NOTE THE PATTERN HERE……
Now, all of a sudden, there’s a problem with Black colleges: historically Black colleges and universities; why do you need Black only television networks: Black Entertainment Television; Black power movement; Black liberation theology….it’s the fact that it says Black. Tell the truth, it makes some white people uncomfortable, no matter how liberal they say they are, to see us Black people self-identify as Black. I’m Black.  Deal with it.

It’s bothersome as hell to me because no one person raises an eyebrow on St. Patrick’s Day when everybody of Irish heritage comes out of the woodwork. Even still beyond nationalities, no one raises a funk about folk of Latin descent celebrating their own, but as soon as the actual word “Black” has to be attached to a name, a title, or anything then suddenly society shifts the narrative placing a negative association to it, and if it is a Black male, criminalizing it. This shit is illustrated by my old professor friend when I disproved just that because you see Blacks on the news committing crime doesn’t mean whites aren’t.  She didn’t even want to accept that as even a possibility, only wanting to focus on the fact that these were violent crimes, murders and drug related crimes. She even said to me, “well hasn’t it been long enough” when I attempted to trace some of these problems back to Reconstruction.  Really, I didn’t even know where to start.

I don’t feel the need to defend my gender, my race, my ethnicity, or my Blackness.  I shouldn’t have to hear victims family members automatically go into defense mode when a Black boy gets killed.  It’s something fundamentally wrong when young Black boys have to get two “The Talks” when being raised in this country.  While white boys are being told about the birds and the bees by their parents, Black parents are telling their Black sons about how to act when pulled over by the police, or how to be unassuming when you walk into the store so that you don’t get accused of shoplifting just because you “look” suspicious.  My black skin alone makes me a suspect.

Let that sink in for a moment: my black skin automatically qualifies me as suspicious when I walk into a store.

When I started riding the bus by myself for the first time, one of the first things my mother told me was that I need to be careful how I carry myself because I was big enough that people might think I’m older than what I really am.  That was my mother’s code word for saying “You’re a black kid who’s 11, but you could pass for 15 and people may automatically criminalize you for no reason just because you’re a Black boy”, in 1968!  This is a reality for many Black folks in this country. This is a second America that white privilege has wondrously insulated many from having to ever visit or live. Hum?

I am Black and beautiful–at the same time.  To be Black in this country is being seen as “other” at best, and “less than” at worse, but ultimately such a self-identification automatically marginalizes our existence. But I ask the question, why do we live in a country where being pro-Black is seen as being anti-anything else?  Why does one’s self-determination, self-identification and self-definition as Black become something negative and even criminal at times?

This is what racism has produced.  Systems were in place for so long that there is no author of racism.  None! There is no wizard behind the curtain operating the levers on some of this de facto racism. While I do honestly believe there are members of the 1% that make these power play moves that directly affect us Blacks when it comes to for-profit management of the education system as well as the prison industrial complex, and the likes of the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch’s owning large news media, they are merely responding to the sentiments that many white people hold. They feed on those fears to generate large profits from the fear-mongering.(FOX NEWS)

The parallel with the character Radio Raheem and Jordan Davis are almost scary!  Radio Raheem, the character from Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” through a series a  unfortunate events ended up killed by the police in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood on a hot summer day because he didn’t turn down his music.