"How to act Black" week. Part 1.

This week will mark the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. To coincide with that, every blog entry this week will feature a Youtube video of a white person learning how act “black” or “street.”

Confused? This quote from James Baldwin’s “An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis” should help shine a small light:

“[A]s long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name...They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in our black church) in their sins —that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us. “

Each entry includes a white television or movie character taking advice from a black friend on how they can shed their whiteness and connect with the inherent coolness or knowledge that comes with being black folk. Amazingly all of these shows were produced before (as comedian Bill Maher says) America had a black friend in Barack Obama.

At this point the best advice all of America can take in relation to the quagmire and boondoggle in Iraq comes from a black friend they were slow to give a Myspace add to, let alone take seriously: Martin Luther King, Junior. As he protested the war in Vietnam in the years before his death, Dr. King warned of “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism”--issues still relevant for the continued occupation of Iraq. In “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” Dr. King eloquently called upon all those seeking change in American foreign policy and daily life by saying, “We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible,” while warning of an America where some believed they had “everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them.”

And yes, a "creative method of protest" can include a rant before a funny Tracy Morgan bit.

Comments

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much for this. today was a really long day... in the midst of it, I was talking with some folks and I was trying to articulate a similar point as the James Baldwin quote, but was doing a bad job. I really needed to read. Thanks!

[Blaine]

"Like you rushin' to the doctor to get cured!"