DebraDickerson.com - Blogs - Harmed and Dangerous

For Black History Month, Natasha's 4th-grade class was studying the Middle Passage, the route slave traders took from northwest Africa across the middle Atlantic to the Caribbean and North American. Natasha's teacher gave her students a lesson in sympathy and empathy, assigning them to imagine they are slaves on a ship and to write a letter home describing their journey on the middle passage.

When my wife told me about the assignment, I felt ambivalent. Teaching children to sympathize and empathize with victims of inhumane treatment is a noble goal, but I'm not certain how you accomplish this. I know that mean kids enjoy the descriptions of the suffering of victims with whom they are to empathize and sympathize, but then few kids are as mean as the ones I've worked with. Mostly, I can't stand to think of my Natasha chained in a slave ship, and I'm not sure I want her to think of herself as a slave. Then again, if Natasha had not been given this assignment, I never would have seen the "free spirit" revealed in the letter she wrote.

Dear Kaitia,
I am captured and I am going to America. It is very bad here. I am sitting next to our countries worst eneme. It is real hard. We keep on fighting, when we could be trying to get out. When ever we go to the top, we kill one white man at a time. Now there's only the captan. We will kill him, throw him overboard and take over the ship. We will be able to go back to Africa. But first we will have to find the key and unlock the shackles and chains.
I'm sure I woun't die. I eat all the food they give me. If people don't want their food, they give it to me. But all we get to eat is boring old oat meal. When we get home I woun't want to eat oatmeal for Monday breakfast.
Well, se you in about a month.

Natasha, it turns out, had no intention of remaining in slavery, not even for the purposes of the assignment. I'm so proud of her, and of her rare combination of attributes. She's really as sweet as she could be. And she's got empathy and sympathy. After all, it wasn't just herself that she intended to free. But if you try to take away her freedom, she will kill you and feed your corpse to the sharks!

The legacy of slavery is real, but not without absurdity. What could I do but laugh when I read my sweet little girl's plan to "kill one white man at a time"? Of course, Natasha knows I'm not a slave trader, but she also knows that if she were a slave and I happened to be on that ship, only our skin color would matter. So there's your absurd legacy of slavery: 400 years after the initial journey across the middle passage, the 8-year-old daughter of a white man (and black woman) who refuses to imagine being enslaved, must imagine and write about killing one white man at a time. After I stopped laughing I peeked into Natasha's room and saw how angelic she looked. That got me laughing all over again.

Natasha's confidence that she could bamboozle the ship's white "captan" was also delightful and amusing. Would it surprise you to know that, working in a prison, I am familiar with a few groups who hate white people? All these groups have in common a deep-seated belief that white people can trick them at will. In fact, one such group (the "Five Percenters") calls technology "tricknology," claiming all technology is a trick used successfully by whites to control blacks. Natasha, in contrast, is undaunted, confident that she could kill off the Captan's entire crew without arousing his suspicion. I imagined the final entry in the Captan's Log:

The mysterious disappearance of my crew continued this morning. I was alarmed when my trusted First Mate of all these years, Peg Leg, did not serve me tea upon my awakening. Methinks perhaps the men are playing a game of hide-n-seek, but I cans't imagine why I hast been unable to find them. Nonetheless, I remain confident that on this day, I shall discover the answer to this mystery.

'African-American' Becomes a Term for Debate. SILVER SPRING, Md., Aug. 27 - For a moment, the Ethiopian-born activist seemed to melt into the crowd, blending into the sea of black professors, health experts and community leaders considering how to educate blacks about the dangers of prostate cancer. But when he piped up to suggest focusing some attention on African immigrants, the dividing lines were promptly and pointedly drawn.

"'Scuse me, do you have a book called 'How to Sex a Balla Out of His Mind and His Money'"?

I have complicated reactions to that city. My first few visits I couldn't see anything through the images of snarling dogs and screaming children and water hoses and shattered stained glass that popped up everywhere I looked. When the ghosts finally died away, I decided that I loved Birmingham. Or her bones, anyway, because she is a depressing girl. On my last visit, in old downtown, just two or three blocks from new downtown’s little cluster of glittering glass towers, the streets seemed deserted even at lunch hour. It wasn’t frightening, just sad. I walked over to Sonny Boy and didn’t pass a soul on the sidewalk. Eddie Kendricks Memorial Park was deserted. I was the only customer in the barbershop I ducked into on Fourth Avenue, the old heart of black mercantile life here.

Above the echoing streets, though, is breath-takingly preserved turn-of-the-century architectural detail: arches and friezes, terra cotta and tile, beautiful brickwork, huge multi-paned windows. An adaptive re-use paradise, if there were any takers. (There are a few, apparently. The loft dwellers above Morris and Second Avenues North must have lovely views of the mountains that gently cup the city. Still, block after block goes wanting.) If this space were in Atlanta, it would have been snapped up years ago. But, then, if this were Atlanta, these gorgeous buildings probably wouldn’t be standing. They'd have been torn down long ago in the name of Progress, and downtown Birmingham would feature just as many ugly concrete and gray glass skyscrapers as Atlanta does. As it were, though, Birmingham froze herself in the icy wastelands of virulent segregation. Thawed, she has not quite come back to life.

Last night I attended a book signing for a talking head turned mystery writer. It was held at the home of an immensely (and inexplicably, for my money) popular fiction writer. I was along primarily on a nosiness tip, as I am way too snobbish to read any of these sassy books. In a room at the front of the fiction man’s sumptuous townhouse, small clutches of dashing and impeccable gay men whispered in subdued animation, eyes darting from one trapping of the lush life to the next. Through the kitchen, in a room at the back of the house, several nervous knots of straight women – clearly Members of a Book Club – perched on the edges of chairs chewing cheesy spinach and sighing about all the pretty virility on the other side of the house.
I, neither fish nor fowl, sidled along the fringes of both groups. Meaning mostly that I stood at the kitchen door and got in the caterer’s way. I nibbled grapes and glanced around the walls and muttered to myself, “If I had this kind of money, the first thing you would be saying was ‘did you see that Radcliffe Bailey!?!?!?’” If I were paid like this, up in my house, the second thing would be, ‘you know this is Sheila Bridges all day long.’ In other words, I hated.

The mystery writer was signing books downstairs, and we thought we could nip in and grab one and tip on out, but no, they were stacked on his desk with about 35 ample sisters between me and them, all requesting personalized messages, snapping digital photos, and offering plot summaries of their own works-in-progress (‘Okay, quickly, well, it’s set in Atlanta, and it involves four girlfriends, and one has a sorry husband, and one has a boyfriend on the down low, and my working title is Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody’s Home. Starring Boris Kodjoe and Gabrielle Union.’) So perforce I stand in the line, but refuse to sign a mailing list, and when I get to the mystery writer, I waive the personal, and he scrawls something that is illegible except for “M.D.” at the end, which is in block print. And what does that have to do with anything?

I stare at him as he jots down his email address, which also contains a reference to his degree, and I think, ‘Aren’t we over this?’ It’s one thing for my uncle to send me personal mail addressed “Attorney Lisa H.” He came through in a day when black doctors and lawyers and judges and so forth were hen’s teeth, and maybe five black folks had sat in a Harvard classroom, and the whole damned community – nation-wide – was proud to death, and you were featured in Ebony, and the honorifics were indelible marks of singular accomplishment. But in 2004? In Atlanta? Where, if you swing a cat, you’re bound to smack 25 black doctors? (And 25 more will rush in to render aid? Plus 25 black lawyers to sue?)

Surely, the good doctor, when promoting his mysteries, doesn’t need to remind us quite so nakedly that we’re getting a double dose of black intelligentsia. With so many smart black folk unbound, do we need to flag ourselves anymore? I don’t mean take accomplishment for granted. But just maybe get a little more comfortable with it. A little less self-conscious. Put it in its place. The M.D., the J.D., it’s yours to keep, boo – and owning it ought to be the most natural thing in the world.

I'm taking two of my players home after softball practice. It's Nee-nee and The White Girl [see: White Girl, below] . (I'll call her Rebecca, which is not her real name, but her real name -- appropriately, in her peers' eyes -- is a very "white" name. Like Rebecca.) They are chattering 'hood gossip in the backseat, and I am not listening, but I hear this:

Rebecca: Don't say that. Martin Luther King, uh, I think he died so y'all wouldn't call nobody the n-i-g-g-e-r word. 'Cause that's what white people called blacks in the '60s.

Urban Provisions is the first and only little home décor and furnishings shop in my gentrifying town. An older black woman stopped in one day and asked Ben if this was where you could get help with your ‘lectric and gas. He said, “No, ma’am.” “Well, it say Urban,” she huffed, and stepped back out.

As Ben was telling me the story some hours later, the same woman poked her head in the door and beckoned us outside. She and her husband began pulling old family portraits out of their backseat. They were for sale. One was a framed commemorative newspaper (50th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation) depicting Abraham Lincoln, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass. It was in bad shape. The best of the lot was a large, well-preserved, beautifully framed photographic portrait of two women. The husband said they were his great-grandfather’s sisters and insisted they were Siamese twins. (After some grime-wiping and hard squinting, I could see that, unless splitting zygotes cling shoulder blade to clavicle, this was not the case. They didn’t even look much alike.) The great-granddaddy was named Willie Brown, and he lived near Edison and Morgan in Calhoun County, Georgia.

I asked the husband what he wanted for the portrait, and he told me to name a price. After some internal dialectic, I named $100. He said I ought to at least give him $125. I said, “Wai’ min’te, now,” and he caved. “I got to pay bills,” he explained, and I rode my bike up to the bank to get his money. I told Willie Brown’s great-grandson if he ever wanted to get his people back to stop by the store and let Ben know. The wife said, with finality, “We ain’t gon wont ‘em.” She had other pictures to hang now that these were out of the way.

I collect portraits of black people. The older, the better; I go for those in original frames with original glass. I have paid a lot for some and a little for others. I know the provenance of a few, but most have entered posterity in forlorn anonymity. One hundred years after the photographer’s bulb burst in their stoic faces, these stiff brides and babies and black-suited gentlemen regard me in tight-mouthed silence. Had they already bitterly foreseen their eternity in a stranger’s dining room? I am guiltily aware of my lack of kinship with these ghosts.

How does this happen? How do such prizes manage to break loose and drift away from their moorings in some proud, hardworking, veil-lifted family? I do know, of course, for I’m the one hoarding my family’s remaining sepia-toned snapshots – none as grand as the Brown twins – protecting them from the indifference and disdain and desperation of my cousins. For them, family exists only three-dimensionally, in the here and now. Sentimentality may be unaffordable. Maybe I tether these unknowns, give them a nice, black, ancestor-worshiping home, to make it up to my own, whose frames warped irremediably on back porches, their fragile, charcoaled images rotting in country sheds or shredded in the buck teeth of Philadelphia cellar rats. Are any of mine hanging dusty in the dimness of some junk dealer’s lair, pawned for baby’s shoes?

Collards and cornbread. That’s what we had. Collards and cornbread and creamed potatoes and sweet tea. Ben’s Uncle Tommy cooked up the midday meal – they call “dinner” what I call “lunch” – as his Aunt Faye talked us around her fabulous garden. Ben and I, after a luckless morning yard-saling, had pulled up in his mama’s sister’s driveway because it didn’t seem right to just pass by without stopping. Aunt Faye was out puttering around and saw me before she saw Ben, but her face never betrayed it.

Aunt Faye and Uncle Tommy are 70ish. Native Southerners. White folks. Normally, when I assemble those descriptors, I think, if not “Selma,” then surely “Birmingham,” or possibly “Montgomery.” I never think “Won’t you stay for some dinner?” or “big, old hug.”

I’m leaning hard on 40. Brown v. Board of Education didn’t all-the-way arrive in my hometown until 1970, the year I started school. I can remember the first time a white person ever visited our house when I was growing up. I was home from college. A boy stopped by to see my sister. The neighbors noticed. When I was in law school, one of my friends (read: "surreptitious lover") spent the night at our house before we headed to the Outer Banks. My parents were gracious, but we all (except him) knew it was weird. A white person was sleeping in a bed in our house. When I was in my early 30s, home for Christmas, I visited for the first time the home of one of my closest childhood friends. One of my closest school friends, I should say. ‘Cause I had school friends and home friends, and I bet you can guess the difference. In June, one said good-bye to the school friends and didn’t much think about them (or what they were doing on their side of the tracks) until September.

Anyway, all this to say, I have only recently – say, in the last decade – begun to know white people intimately. So when we pulled into Aunt Faye’s driveway – well, Ben’s my good friend, but his family? One never knows in this neck of the woods. I was poised for anything, I thought. Anything but an invitation to sit down at the kitchen table for a wedge of Uncle Tommy’s skillet-made cornbread, a glass of sweet tea, and a dose of humility.

To read her interview on Electronic Urban Report, the free-est woman on the planet right now is "Soul Plane" actress Mo'Nique, who is stridently proclaiming her right to eat watermelon and holler 'nigger' in the name of comedy. I, on the other hand, am bound in chains, as I cannot decide whether I can bear to see the movie, which I fully expect to be shamefully hilarious.

My dilemma is not only "if" but "where." The Magic Johnson theatre nearby promises a minimal white crowd, which would reduce my self-consciousness and allow me to indulge in maximum stereotype recognition. On the other hand, it concurrently promises a maximum black crowd, and nothing annoys me more than trying to take in a movie through the screams, guffaws, backtalk, and dinner-eating that characterize theatres in the 'hood. What's a sista to do?????

One of my (softball) players – let’s call her Nee-nee – missed practice the other day because she was running from the, as she put it, po-po. Some boy hit her when she wouldn’t give up her cell phone, and she called the law on him, but when po-po arrived, she acted brand-new and claimed she didn’t know what the problem was. When po-po said maybe I ought to just run you in, she took off and stayed on the lam all evening. She told me this the next day when I asked her if all that clicking I heard from my backseat was her text-messaging. She confirmed that it was. (Do I need to say that sponsors paid Nee-nee’s $50 registration fee because her mother said she couldn’t afford it?)

Nee-nee rides another player for talking white. The “white” girl, who has informed me that she takes Honors English, says “screet” and “scraight” and “axed” in the harsh, choppy, consonant-swallowing accent prevalent in her neighborhood. I cannot imagine what makes her white, other than that she seldom curses, actually likes school, and fervently wants to escape to college. She is clearly a teacher’s pet type. Nee-nee believes that being “ghetto” (her word) is the sine qua non of life. She does not want to go to college, but she does want to be a lawyer. When I tell her I'm one, she yells, "How much money you make?" The "white" girl hisses her disapproval: "You caint ask no grown-up they personal business like that." Nee-nee turns to me, coolly, "Well, den, you can bail me out."

Maybe I need to explain why my interaction with my players is so vexing....

Despite my current repositioning, I am still very much black-identified and deeply value my upbringing in a small-town, working-class Southern setting. (My own household wasn't working-class, but my larger community generally was.) I see myself as one who "knows" children like the ones I coach. The sting, then, comes from the realization that they don't see me that way, and they're honest about it. My blackness is of little note to them, because I'm "white." In that sense, they are more emancipated than I, because they fully understand that accidents of melanin are just that. I am obviously trying to have my cake and eat it, too, and am setting myself up for small pains. Even as I try to convince myself that I know these kids, I am astounded at the gulf between my value systems and their own, and it's not merely a generation gap. Can we ALL be black? In what meaningful way?

Well, my book tour finally ended. I was on the road from the end of January thru the end of April and I thought I wouldn't survive. I understand now why bands on tour do drugs. I think I'm still married, but I'm not sure. If I were my husband, I'd have packed up the brats and left. Wudda taken me weeks to notice. My three year old gets hysterical if I get up for more coffee, thinking I'm going to the hated "airport". My 7 month old sleeps a total of 20 minutes when in daycare when I'm gone. She sleeps 6 hours a day, then from 7pm to6 am when I'm not. But it's cool, 'cause I'm not entirely sure those are my kids, they look so diferent, but I'm too tired to do the math. They'll do.

So, hopefully, I'll be posting more.

Their teachers are black.
Their principals are black.
Their school superintendent is black.
The fire and police chiefs are black.
The city council is majority black.
Their mayor is black. (And female.)
Their state congressional representative – hell, their U.S. rep – is black.
Their hometown is waaayyyyy majority black.
Their hometown abuts Atlanta, which is also way majority black and has a black, female mayor. In fact, it’s had black mayors for 30 years. It is sometimes even called the Black Mecca.
(Just to set the stage.)
My friends and I coach a girls’ softball team. The girls are 12, 13, 14 years old. The going is rough right now. In this city of 40,000, we can’t find enough adolescent girls to make up a proper team. They have better things to do than spend 3 or 4 afternoons a week with some foreigners. I have lived here for 5 years, I am black, I am a female, I am a Southerner, but I am not confused – I’m foreign. After one girl charged another one with talking like a white girl, I said, “Well, what in the world am I?” The girl bit on a grin and stayed silent. Another turned from her cell phone long enough to murmur: “White.” So much for modeling roles. And that stung a little bit, fully conversant as I am in black vernacular speech. But I understand her. It’s “white” just to describe one’s code-switching, isn’t it?

a black friend from back home recently asked my sister "how's your sister doing?" She knew damned well he meant me, the one who left St. Louis on the first thing smoking, but just to be evil, she said innocently, "which sister? I have four." He replied: "the white one."

Yours in IncogNegritude,

Debbie the white girl. I mean 'white' girl.

I’m sitting in a scheduling meeting for little league softball. While we’re waiting for everybody to get here, Soul Coach #1 breaks out a styrofoam box and pulls forth – of course – a big, ol’, greasy chicken leg. “Fried” immediately fills the room, as does the sound of her smacking. The couple other black folk in the room seem unperturbed, but I want to fall through the floor. I’m reminded of my favorite passage in Invisible Man, where the narrator, having resisted a pork chop breakfast as a shameless badge of his southern-ness, is later offered a buttery, baked yam. As he bites into its sugary goodness right there on the sidewalk, he reflects: “Why, you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked.” The vendor remarks, “I can see you one of these old-fashioned yam eaters,” and the narrator replies, “They’re my birthmark. I yam what I yam.” That’s me. And what I love, by God, is not fried chicken, but black folk. But I haven’t quite learned the narrator’s lesson, ‘cause I still wince when my yams show out in the street.

But on a lighter note, my sister put my 7 year-old niece on the phone 'cause she just had to talk to me. Breathlessly, she pleaded, "Pllllleeeeeeassssse get married soon." When I asked her why she was so pressed about that, she told me she needed a new cousin. (I think she's finally understanding that her mother has shut it down at one child.) I laughed and told her if I got married she'd be the first to know. After she got off the phone, I thought how refreshing it is to encounter a black child for whom that sequence of events is normative.

What is Afrofuturist Art? Don't ask me, ask Cinque Hicks. If it isn't strictly representational (you know, little black velvet Elvis's and dogs playing poker), a sister gets very confused.

I’m on the MARTA train going home with my customary good book in my face as shield and protector. A piece of paper is suddenly thrust into my sight line, and, sotto voce: “CDs, DVDs, three dollars.” I mumble no thanks, and the hustler moves on down the aisle, but not before I apprehend – with a start – this man is white! As I jot this strange fact down, the elderly man beside me starts to fidget. He’s maybe 80, white, dressed in a neat golf sweater and snap-brim cap, and, at the next station, I slant my knees to let him pass. He heads not out of the car, but back. To the other white man, Subway Hustler, who is chatting with somebody about a bootleg copy of Tom Hanks’ Ladykillers. He’s sort of giving a review. Granddaddy perches near him, and asks a question, and I strain to hear their conversation, but all I catch is this: “I would go with J-Kwon.”

Don't you just hate it when white folks act all transracial? And why can't I find Ladykillers on amazon.com?

My thing came down this morning, so I was in Barnes & Noble satisfying my jones. I managed to keep the take down to three books, one a history of the Creek Nation. The saleswoman glanced at me and said, “Oh, are you part Creek?” And I said no. And she said her family is – of course – part Cherokee, and “We don’t teach our children that heritage is genetic, not what society says.” I think her point was: don’t get it confused, she is not really all-the-way black. And who am I, who am not black 7 or 8 days out of 10 lately, to quibble? Though when I’m not exactly black, when I’m done with it, I’m not white or Indian or Hispanic or some other “race.” I’m post-it. Post-black. Somewhere claiming my freedom to be and do and say as I please, without genetics or society or heritage or what the hell ever dictating my aesthetics, my politics, my relationships.

Zora Neal Hurston: "I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief." Apparently, she still is. I just love, purely love, when Negroes go on oh-so-nonchalantly about how hard it was to make their hair stand up "like that" back in the Afro days. I guess its just my hair that will stick out straight enough to hang Christmas ornaments from.

I spent a little time last week chatting with H.C. “Chris” Porter, a photographer and painter who creates stunning portraits of residents of Jackson, Mississippi’s poor black neighborhoods. I first encountered Chris’ work some years ago at the now-defunct Atlanta Festival of Arts and thought, “God, who is this brother? This is incredible.” And then the artist stepped up to greet me and was no brother at all. H.C. Porter is a woman. And a white one. She limns the daily lives of her Millsaps Avenue neighbors – boys playing basketball, a man cleaning fish, a woman tending her garden, a girl perched on a chair at the laundromat. Chris’ work is beautifully luminous, deeply respectful, and she catches hell for it from black folks who question the “right” of a white woman to create such loving work. But freedom’s for white people, too, and Chris – born in Mississippi the year Medgar Evers died – knows it and rejoices in it.

White folks are just doing this to get even. I spent the years from 1977-1990 or so watching white people's faces turn red when I showed up for appointments and the like with all this melanin. They don't really love or take us seriously. Do they?

You're always asking me what I'm reading. I’m not long ago finishing Randall Kennedy’s Nigger. (I know I’m late. I had to wait for the soft cover. I have an aversion to paperbacks that extends even to library books.) Kennedy, of course, made me reflect upon my own two times – in my southern life of some length – being called a nigger and assess the damage. (Of course, I’m talking about being called nigger by a white person. I could not begin to count otherwise.)

The first time, I was 12, it was the Bicentennial, and I had left North Carolina for summer school in the Berkshires. (Behind some serious sacrifice by my parents, don’t trip.) I don’t know how the beef started, but next thing I knew Rob Silverstein, a Jewish boy from Long Island, was screaming “nigger” down the stairwell at me. I was shocked and certainly angry. (And not too young to appreciate irony.) Was I slain, though? Not hardly. I reported the incident to Wesley Carrion, one of the few black teenagers around, and he scared the shit out of Rob like I asked him to.

Second time was not too long ago, and I was sitting in the car place waiting on some brake work when the side door opened and an enormous white woman in a Krispy Kreme uniform, a Flannery O’Connor kind of white woman, pushed through. I watched in rude, slack-jawed fascination as she crammed a dozen bags of hot fries and cheese doodles into various folds about her person. As she turned to leave, she caught me staring and snarled, “Nigger, what you looking at?” I was astonished. I was embarrassed. I sucked in my breath and – burst out laughing.

‘Cause isn’t that generally the case? It’s not your doctor, your lawyer, your office mate calling you a nigger. It’s not the mortgage broker or the insurance man. It’s the brokest down of the broke-down, who takes in your straight teeth and square heels, your good grammar and careless laugh, and comes for you with the last scrap of artillery in the arsenal. And, really, really, you are way beyond bullet-range.

I got a "Negro, Please!" [note: we invented this feature yesterday. In it, we imagine black folks writing in, as they call in to Tom Joyner, and admit to frontin' on racial issues when they know they know better. Like.... ):

Deb, I need some advice. I'm a first-year at Harvard Law School. First semester I didn't speak to black folks, and my old white school chums didn't speak to me. Second semester I came back wearing a kufi and raising hell. I spearheaded a sit-in to protest the lack of black faculty. (We really need role models!!!) When a handkerchief head named Lisa H. protested, I spat, "There is no good time for revolution!" Problem is, errrr, maybe the timing is a little off. We're sitting in Tuesday, and finals start Wednesday. I really need to study for my Contracts final. I mean, if I'm going to get on with the best firms, my grades have got to be tight! What to doooooooo????????

I have failed the test. Several, actually. When I first heard the news that nine members of a family in Fresno, California had been murdered, it never even occurred to me that the suspected killer would be black. (Actually, maybe I get a passing grade for not even wondering.) Then I see him on the evening news, and I just groan. I want to be true to my post-blackness by not cringing about his blackness, but I couldn't help it. Some part of me still clings to the tired (and empirically beaten down) myth that black folks just don't do crazy shit like this. Collectively, we may murder dozens daily, but we are neither mass murderers nor serial murderers. Even after John Allen Muhammad and Lee Malvo. (My dad once said that we couldn't be serial murderes because it took too much planning. We plot it out, mess around, phone ring, get distracted, look at our watch, hustle on down to the killing ground, victim done left. That's terrible, but funny.)

So I failed that little test, but the bigger test is the measure of my shame for the actions of people I don't know, have no influence over, or responsibility for. And I felt it. Not a lot, but some, viscerally, just because both Marcus Wesson and I are black. And that tells me that what white people think about black folks is still occupying way too much space in my head. And it also tells me that I am still trying to take on other people's shit, still trying to mother the race, when I neither caused these folks' problems nor can affect them.

I failed the test this time, but I understood the questions, and I see where my logic went wrong. Freedom ain't easy, but I'm determined to pass the course.

As for Black Cindy being down - you think it might be sabotage? You know, some New Afrikan that don't want your word getting out. :-) And speaking of your word, I was talking about you to a friend of mine who was at HLS when you were. She reminisced fondly about the way you took it to BLSA, but admitted that she had enough "old paradigm" in her to wish that you hadn't aired [your disagreeent with its 'blacks-only' policy] in a "white" forum. I said, "Girl, come on now. How else you gon tell the truth? You got to go through whitey's paper. 'Cause black folk will shut your ass down the minute they finish the first paragraph. Your shit will not see the light." (Yes, I curse just that much. It's shameful.) If it ain't race-polishing (an artform perfected by Ebony magazine) or race-raging .... We had a good, sorrowful laugh about it.

Have you seen "The Passion of the Christ"? There are many things I could say about it, but only one that hasn't been said. I found myself distractedly fascinated by the number of black folk milling about in the crowd, watching the scourging or jeering along the parade route. It caught me off guard in conflicting ways, and I never figured out whether I was happy about Gibson's inclusion of these Aethiops. It invoked so many of my VOOPs (Vestiges of Old Paradigm.) I didn't spring from the womb at the End of Blackness, so I still flinch sometimes at involuntarily thoughts like, "Lawd, are they gon pin the crucifixion on us, too?" and "Well, damn. Why couldn't black folk have any of the speaking parts?" And, of course, Jesus was still way too white for me....

I suffer with the VOOPs, too, don't give me so much credit. In The End of Blackness I call it Stupid Defiance, defending something, or refusing to admit something, just because of the hay white folks might make out of it. I just typed a few examples of which I'm guilty, then deleted them because I'm too stiffnecked to 'give' whites any more than I already have. OK, that does look as stupid in print as I thought it would. Why, oh why do we still care?

Hey, I just thought of a new feature -- Negro, Please -- in which black folks write in, as they call in to Tom Joyner, and admit to frontin' on racial issues when they know they know better. Like....

Post Card No. 1. Hi. I changed my name from Charles to Abbabatunde when I was 18. I'm 50 now and no one can spell it! They never could! My mail goes to the Motherland and back before getting to me. But I can't change it back because.....I don't know...I just can't. Help me.

Post Card No. 2. Yo, Deb. I started playing golf with the boss, you know, just to help my career. But you gotta help me Deb -- I love it! I kee p trying to front about how 'they should put some public housing up in here' but that's just a lie. My handicap is getting lower and lower and the plaid pants are starting to look fly to me. What do I do?

Hi Debra,
I am a psychiatrist who is responsbile for clinical services at [a major Northeastern] Medical Center, and my personal narrative is in many ways similar to your own. While I do not see exclusively African-Americans in my clinical work, I do see relatively high percentage of us, and I am often struck by how much feelings of racism is identified as the major barrier to individuals improvement and/or success even when there is demonstrated evidence of awful decision making and repetitive patterns of self-destructive behavior. After recently reading a review of your book and seeing you on C-Span, I decided that I wanted to say hello and offer my strongest support for your book The End of Blackness. I have not heard anyone articulate so clearly how much we- African/Americans-continue to enslave ourselves by holding so tightly to white folks' racisim.I am concerned that you may not be exactly embraced by the black intellgencia and viewed as "conservative"; however, I must say that this is one of the most progressive books that I have read. So in the vernacular of the day "You go girl!!"

For many years I knew something was very wrong with the way I looked at the world, and I never knew what it was or how to put my finger on it. I listened to your interview on the CBC radio (in Canada) with Paul Kennedy about your book "The End of the Blackness" and I was absolutely blown away. I have recently begun to look at race through a different lens because I fell in love with the enemy - a white man. We are now engaged to be married and it was this very relationship that made me question my "loyalties" to the black race. In my youth (or when I was younger because I'm 28 now) I was the one who shouted the loudest about black men and women "selling out" when they dated and/or married white men and women. I believed wholeheartedly, that it was our duty as black people to not let the white man bring us down and divide us. So when I unexpectedly fell head over heals in love with a white man I also felt an overwhelming guilt that I was abandoning my black brothers and people and defecting to a race that had raped and pillaged our people. In listening to you speak animatedly about your book, your life and your children I realized that my obsession with race and the guilt I felt (especially in the beginning of my relationship) were a product of my own misconceptions of what role race truly played in my life. You're right - race is the least of my worries when I have to pay rent and put food on the table. I want to thank you for giving me a new perspective on the role race is to place in my life, and funny enough, it's my white mother-in-law to be who heard your interview and told me that I should listen to you because she admired and respected what you had to say. I have a great respect in the work that you're doing with the College Summit program that you're running in the States and I am very interested in running something similar here in Canada. I know you said that you don't have a chance to read all of the emails you get, but I'm hoping someone else will read this and know that I'm blessed to have been able to hear about you and your work and I hope that I can get more information on the College Summit program so that I can work within my community to provide a similar service to inner city youth who are looking for other avenues in life. Thank you for your time and words of inspiration, they have changed my life.

Joanne D.

Note: I DO NOT run College Summit. I merely assist them in a very small way in the wonderful, tireless, 24/7 work that they do. Please, please check out their website and try to help them too. They have the same strange idea about fighting racism that I do -- arming minorities to defeat it rather than endlessly caterwauling about it. Silly, huh?

How are you? I read the following and thought it relevant to your labors:

Notable Achievements: A Black History Month Note (ok, so I didn't get it posted in February--dd)

We all know about MLK, Marcus Garvey, and the other famous, more
prominent black figures in history, but what about the less famous ones
who have made, arguably, as valuable contributions?

Cheryl "Peaches" Delaney of Englewood, NJ, was working the night shift
at a McDonald's in 1974. The 16 year-old high school junior had just
been severely reprimanded by her manager, one Arnold McFarland, over her
Afro hairdo being unprofessional. McFarland gave her an ultimatum of
wearing a clown hat or being fired, and Delaney, working to save money
for cosmetology school, relented and wore the clown hat.

Hours later, she noticed several of her classmates at the drive-through
window, on their way to a party. Luscious Jones, Fred Williams, Eddie
James, and Derrick Smith were riding in a green AMC Pacer. The four of
them ordered four hamburgers, and were going to split three orders of
fries and two Cokes.

Peaches, filling the order, noticing that McFarland (the manager) had
taken his nightly thirty-minute bathroom break, had an epiphany. She
locked eyes with LaWanda, who was on fries, and Fat Sam, who was on the
register and in a blur of motion, they stuffed 4 jumbo bags with every
single hamburger, cheeseburger, french fry, cookie, and other item they
could find, accepting $1.01 from Luscious Jones as payment.

I don't know how you do it. I have a bad shut-people-out habit that limits my engagement with the truly stupid or illogical. Combined with a fuck-you philosophy that often gains the upperhand, I seldom find myself debating these issues. Mostly, my like-minded friends and I sit around bitching and moaning about this foolishness. It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't truly just love black people so much. I feel as buffeted as you must.

Things are especially disheartening right now, given all this gay marriage amendment foment. A local paper ran a photo of a little black girl holding a placard that read "Man + Man = Destruction of Human Life!!"

(B) Man + Gun = Destruction, Man + Crack = Destruction, Man + Woman + Abused Children = Destruction.

Have I ever seen black people riled up and snatching their kids out of school to march at the state house about black-on-black violence or drugs or teenage pregnancy or poor schools or any of a million other ills besetting the community? No, but, by God, we can whip up the froth behind those gays!

Thought you might like to meet one of the race's leaders....

With the support of Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin (read: black), State Senator Kasim Reed (read:black) has drafted legislation to create an independent authority to oversee and expand Atlanta's park system. For any number of reasons, the idea is not sitting well with many city council people (read: black).

Councilman C.T. Martin apparently believes a new park system would benefit white folk and deprive black ones. When asked why Franklin and Reed would go along with any such scheme, Martin said some black people "carry water" for whites. He went on (according to newspaper columnist Colin Campbell) to dredge up the "history of parks" in Atlanta, noting that Mayor William Hartsfield [40 years ago] filled pools with cement rather than allow blacks to dip a toe. On a roll, Martin went on to crown Franklin as the Champion of Gentrification, and to warn that "Slavery's not that far away. Black people had some land, and it was taken away from them.... We're still poor. We've still got some kind of foot on our necks." There followed some demands for reparations and apologies.

Is this real? Slavery's not that far away from whom? A century and a half after the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments; 70 years after the last ex-slaves passed on to their rewards; 50 years after Brown, nearly 30 years since Atlanta had its first (in an uninterrupted string of) black mayor(s) -- and slavery is not far away?

I don't know about the foot on our necks, but some of us need a foot up the ass for this kind of irresponsibility. Even if it's true that Hartsfield filled in the pools (but I'll have to check, because I don't believe a thing Martin says), what does that have to do with parks today? (Or is enjoying the great outdoors not a black thing?) By the same logic, black children in Prince Edward County, Virginia, would be sitting at home today, willfully ignorant, because, you know, "you have to know what white people did with the schools in 1961."

Anyway, hope this email finds you well and enjoying, perhaps, a bit more breathing room now that February has expired and with it brought all interest in black folk to a screeching halt. :-)