Some years ago I read a book that seemed to suggest that the strong black woman was inevitable because black women have always had to take the lead, starting in West Africa. In The Black Woman, edited by La Frances Rodgers-Rose, the editor says Continue reading
Every society has myths that either makes the society famous for being archaic or heroic in a supernatural way. Whether folklore or tradition, many myths become so entrenched in society that they are hard to distinguish from reality. What’s more is people unknowingly perpetuate myths, and, unfortunately, continue a cycle of abuse in the process.
From my tirade about how my countrymen are treating President Obama you can probably tell I have been thinking about the United States a lot lately. And though this is the land of opportunity and I’m so glad to have been born here, I realize that the country’s foundation is uneven. For instance, on one slab the United States was built on Judeo-Christian values and on another slab it was built upon the backs of enslaved Africans. That’s an uneven foundation because Jesus Christ does not approve of the type of slavery that our ancestors experienced. Certainly there are other events that have contributed to our country’s foundation being uneven, but the promotion of Christian ideals while promoting something opposite of a Christian ideal is a standout contradiction for me. Anyway, when your foundation is unstable, there’s going to be a lot of quaking going on, literally and figuratively, both of which we now see happening in the United States. To call more attention to this uneven foundation and the quaking it’s causing, I want you to let my literary love speak to you through his poem “’Tis of Thee”:
You are oversized, you are overrated, you are overblown,
fat and filled with hardened rocks.
You are sick and stumbling like an old man without
a stick in the mud.
You make me sick to my stomach, and I am sad
that I have to look at you.
You have eaten too much garlic
And drunk too much beer,
And built too many empty churches.
You are fat with starch and lies.
Your steeled cities range like malignant cancers across
The belly of your land.
Your sons race death in metal machines that
defecate poison into the air.
Your ideas are machine made,
your values operated by machines
your truths nourished by machines,
your history written by machines,
your language sounds like millions of coins jingling
into an empty barrel.
Your heroes are dead.
Your wars are massacres.
You are an overkiller,
oversexed, overripe, overrotten.
You are a sinful old man who has no repentance
in his heart,
a lecherous old winebelly vomiting blood.
You are a murderer of your sons
and a raper of your daughters.
You are cold and filled with death.
Few flowers grow from your gardens
and the snow and the ice shall be your grave.
You are a despiser of black and misunderstander of white.
You are a mystery of yourself and a hater of that.
You once were a star that blazed,
but now you are overcivilized, oversterilized, oversated.
If you were a barren tree in my garden
I would come and cut you down.
By Henry Dumas
From Knees of a Natural Man
Copyright 1989 by Loretta Dumas and Eugene B. Redmond
Published by Thunder’s Mouth Press
This may surprise some people, but I didn’t vote for President Barack Obama. I didn’t vote for John McCain either. But who I voted for is not the issue. Who’s in office and the respect due that office is. I have been utterly appalled at the blatant disrespect for the President and the office. I expect hecklers on the campaign trail but not from among US representatives or gay rights activists and to heckle the President in the middle of a presidential speech. Whether you are a Democrat, Independent or Republican, heterosexual or homosexual, you are obligated to respect President Obama and the office of the President of the United States of America.
Why is respecting Obama and his office so hard for some people? I especially don’t understand the disrespect coming from gays, with Obama being their greatest presidential advocate. Well, some people, like my girl Kim, say the heckling is based on racism. No other reason for the disrespect makes sense to me. Thinking about Obama’s political experience had me thinking about the experiences of other African Americans and politics, and what I found, as many of us know, is that race is always a factor. And too often people inject racism—“a terrible cancer eating at our hearts” to borrow the phrase from poet Nikki Giovanni, in the equation under the guise of family values and patriotism. I am pretty traditional in some of my views, but enough is enough. We can disagree without being disrespectful. Consider Giovanni’s take on Abraham Lincoln, blacks, and American politics in her poem “The American Vision of Abraham Lincoln AT THIS MOMENT” and let me know what you think about the poem and my view.
My bookshelf is peppered with them: dusty books on racial reconciliation that often scream for me to clean and read them. They sit among my favorites: books on spiritual warfare and women’s discipleship, Nikki Giovanni poetry and all things James Baldwin. But the racial reconciliation books sit there, tucked away with little chance of speaking to me and helping me to integrate my life. They remind me of my relationships with the non-black women that I have known: With Stephie, Denise, Gina, Laura Kim, and Laila, I was excited about the connection, but then something happened and the newness became a thing of the past. My relationship with Stephie is the best example of this.
We met during a rehearsal for the Saks Fifth Avenue Teen Board fashion show we were in. She just started talking to me, and we hit it off. Stephie was funny and fashion conscious and our conversations flowed freely. To be honest, I thought she was a light-skinned black girl because she had dark curly hair and a deep tan. I don’t remember when I found out she was white, but it didn’t matter to me. We had bonded and Stephie became my first white friend. This was the summer of 1984.
For the next few months, we talked for hours on the phone and made plans for a sleepover that winter. Her mom agreed that I would spend the night at their home, but the elder’s conversations with me revealed a change of heart. She warned me that I would be the only black person at Stephie’s high school basketball game and told me that I would probably be uncomfortable. And she wanted to know what “special foods” I ate, expressing her inability to cook something other than what she was used to cooking. In spite of her attempts to deter me, I went to her home in her nearly all-white town.
The basketball game was snowed out, so Stephie and I hung out in her room and chatted like we did on the phone. This time she occasionally included her mom in the conversations. “Mom, look at her Guess Jeans. Aren’t they nice?” “Mom, she has a Coach purse.” I felt uncomfortable being on display, and that discomfort continued when at dinner her mom asked me what my parents did for a living and a host of other questions about my family and lifestyle. Breakfast the next morning was comfortable, but I felt antsy again when Stephie blurted out “You have a big house” as they pulled into my driveway after bringing me home. They met my family, glanced around the house and then went on their way. That was the last time I saw Stephie in a social setting. After our sleepover she would sneak to call me because “my mother said I couldn’t be your friend.” When her mother caught her sneaking to call me, all our contact ended, and though I have my suspicions, I am not quite sure why.
So like my books, for years I have shelved any potential relationships with non-black women. The pain of rejection has been too great. But those books have been screaming to be cleaned and read. And because I met Natalia Powers I might just do that. You’ll have to read the next post to find out who she is.
Copyright 2010 by Rhonda J. Smith