Tag Archives: hope wabuke

To Be Young, Gifted and Black

Posted on by

quevenzhane-wallis

Yesterday, the Onion sent out a tweet. It read: “Everyone seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhane Wallis is kind of a cunt, right?”

Say what?

Why would a respected mainstream media source write such a statement, even if, like the Onion later claimed, it was supposed to be an ironic joke? Why would someone think it is okay to use the word “cunt,” a hate word which, like bitch or fag or nigger is politically loaded and insulting—a curse word recognized as unsuitable for business or professional communication? And, of all people, why pick on the little 9-year-old girl, the ONLY African American given a nomination, and attack her sexually the way Black women have been attacked by a certain aspect of white America throughout history as documented by the movie about slavery that was only given a nomination (and an award) to the two white men involved, however brilliant they may be?

This is just another example of the dismissal of the personhood of women and of people of color—and the special brand of prejudice, sexism and racism reserved for those who inhabit the intersection of being a woman and being a person of color. If you need the butt of a joke—why not make it at their expense? It’s the way it’s always worked in this good old boys club.


But its 2013.
Why can’t we get past this already?


Consider Gabby Douglass and the racism that made her move training facilities from the South to Midwest…not just the act of racism but how certain media outlets then tried to made it seem the racism was all in her head, ignoring the racist incidents and and their own responsibility in perpetuating it through their discourse and lack of coverage.

Consider the Williams sisters—two beautiful talented girls who were laughed out of tennis clubs, called men, threatened with steroid tests and ridiculed as “animals” and unfeminine, too strong.

Consider the First Lady, whose body has also been critiqued unendlessly for the last 5 years as being too lesbian, unwomanly, unfeminine, ugly, too fat, too dark, too nappy…all handled by Mrs. Obama with her usual unending grace and class.

Consider another little girl: Willow Smith, vilified for not pouring toxic radioactive chemicals on her still growing body to “relax” her hair, instead choosing a succession of natural styles to show off her self-love and self-confidence in defining her own girlness, her own Blackness, her own sense of self.


So, you may ask: What does this all mean?


It means that racism, sexism and stereotypes are alive and well. That there is a box young Black women are placed in, both by society’s prejudices and our own Black self-hatred after internalizing these  prejudices. That this is unfair, this nexus of racism and sexism that twist our beautiful curly hair and brown skin and muscled feminine bodies into something to be ashamed of, rather than proud of. That the strength of these young ladies to transcend the hatred of others and rise, is remarkable. That this is the same strength that propelled them to push their talent to the top of their game, to be better and better each day until they were simply the best. That this makes us respect them more. Kudos to them.


But what about the rest of us, who are not that strong?


So many voices and other possible contributors to better our culture and society—silenced. Not to mention the dangerous effect on individual psyche and society as a whole by trying to silence and stifle the identity of our sisters. Because, to quote the great MLK Jr., “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”


Over One Month Later…Still No Justice, Still No Peace

Posted on by

On February 26, 2012 in Sandford, Florida, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black boy, was gunned down by George Zimmerman, a middle-aged man of Caucasian and Hispanic descent. But, as we know, Zimmerman was not arrested. Instead, around midnight on that night of February 26, 2012, the State’s Attorney was called in to meet the Chief of Police, and Zimmerman was let go…without a single picture being taken of his nonexistent “bruises” or the recording of key witness testimony.

Fast foward to over one month later, and Zimmerman–with a history of managing to evade convictions after arrests and a father who is a retired judge…hmm, you do the math–has not been arrested.

Indeed it has already been universally aknowledged that witness Mary Cutcher’s testimony was squelched and her reputation smeared because she did not see Zimmerman ”standing his ground” or any other sign of “self-defense.” What she saw was an out-of-control man murder a young boy.

And she has no idea why George Zimmerman is free.

 

To be Black in America, it seems, is to risk being shot at any second of any day of your life–and to know that your killer will most likely get away with it.

This is not right. This is not fair. This is not who we are as human beings in any way at all.

And it is only getting worse.

 

The vicious smear campaign launched by the Florida state law enforcement and prosecution offices against Trayvon Martin since the beginning of this case–and transmitted by certain right wing politcos and deep-pocketed allies with a vested interest in upholding the racist status quo–is growing even stronger. This campaign, citing rumors of everything from “evidence” of Martin’s alleged “attack” on the completely unbruised, completely athletic Zimmerman easily twice Trayvon’s size to “evidence of a an empty baggie of marijuana” found on school premises (never mind just how you tell an empty scrap of plastic once held pot, never mind the fact that cannabis is legal in over 16 states, on the ballot in 20 others, and accepted by nearly ever major politician–blue or red?)–are specifically designed to discredit Trayvon. This campaign is designed to make it seem as if Trayvon deserved to be shot.

And just like every time someone applied this argument to rape victims when I was in college, “this Oh, she was asking for it logic,” still makes me sick to my stomach.

 

Trayvon Martin did not deserve to die because he, like all of us, wasn’t perfect and may have acted like a 17-year-old-boy from time to time.

Trayvon Martin deserved to live because he was a human being, plain and simple.

 

Online media watchdog, The Huffington Post, affirms that new evidence has been uncovered by ABC news which is “inconsistent with Zimmerman’s recently leaked statement to police” that Zimmerman ”was in a death struggle with Trayvon” before shooting the child in the “chest in self-defense.” 

To be even clearer: This new video evidence–in which Zimmerman has no bruises, blood, or torn clothing–directly contradicts Zimmerman’s earlier statment in which he “told investigators that Martin jumped him from behind, punched him in the nose and pounded his head into a sidewalk, according to a police report first described by the Orlando Sentinal,” finishes HuffPost.

Agrees the New York Times in condemnation of Zimmerman and the Florida legal system: “It is hard to resist the thought that race matters here, for who believes that, had an adult African American male killed a white teenager under similar circumstances, the police would have taken him at his word and so declined to arrest him?”

Indeed.

But the worst slur on Trayvon by Florida’s campaign yet?

That because of an “increase in crime in Zimmerman and Martin’s neighborhood”–the accepted racist assupmtion being, of course that these crimes must have been committed by young Black boys–Zimmerman was actually in the right by being proactive and shooting any young black boy he saw, no matter what. But the problem with the ‘Law of the Pre-emptive Strike’ that Zimmerman’s generation of men has learned from our culture in recent decades is that this ‘Shoot First and ask Questions Later Doctrine’ in no way prepares you for what will happen when your stereotypes prove to be wrong.

I say it again: to be Black in America is to risk being shot at any second of any day of your life–and to know that your killer will most likely get away with it.

 

“He said this man was watching him, so he put his hoodie on,” Martin’s girlfriend said. “I asked Trayvon to run, and he said he was going to walk fast. I told him to run but he said he was not going to run.”

 

Because, as a young Black boy minding his own business who was living life and enjoying football, family, school, and his girlfriend (who was on the phone with Trayvon while he was shot and whom the police have yet to speak to!) clearly Trayvon Martin was up to no good.

Clearly, he deserved to die.

Clearly, the state of Florida is better without “another one of those #&^&#%s” to worry about, after all–or isn’t that what Zimmerman’s call to the police–when they told him not to get out his car and run after the poor boy and kill him–says…even in the highly edited version released to the public?

In this one, you can still hear Martin screaming for help in the background.

 

So, one wonders: just how much does this new campaign by the state of Florida to discredit Trayvon have to do with prejudicing the pool of possible jurors…should this case ever be allowed to get that far?

And, in the state that said the votes of black folks don’t count, a state in which the killer is still free 33 days after shooting a young black child, can we even expect a fair trial?

And how can you even trust any “evidence” by this law enforcement system–or even hope for a fair review by it’s “justice” system, which has proven to be a “system of injustice” more often than not already?

 

The state of Florida owes every single African American–every single Black parent and child–an apology for refusing to take any action against a known killer who could be extending his violence into a serial hate crime spree–if he hasn’t already. Because I do wonder if this was the first young child of color Zimmerman chose to hunt down, and I wonder, too, if these familes could sue the state for putting their lives in “grevious bodily harm” and denying them the “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?”

It worked against the tobacco companies and got something done.

Because at this point, if I was a parent Florida, I would fear for the lives of my children, my nieces and nephews. I would take my children and run. Otherwise, when their faces showed up onscreen as Zimmerman’s next victims, I would not be able to live with myself. For if, at any given moment I think about my little brother, who looks exactly like Trayvon, I will tremble in fear at the thought of someone gunning him down because of the color of his skin. And when I think of all the many people and pressures that have already tried to destroy him, my other siblings and myself because of our race…when I think of all the other countless Trayvons in America whose murders have–and still are–being swept under the rug….

I can only think of how sometimes the injustice in this world is too much to be believed.

I think, too, of what we can do to not let the disillusionment and pain–the anger and the frustration–eat away and destroy us?

 

And so we ask: Even if Zimmerman is arrested, how will Florida next bend the legal system to make sure that he is not convicted?

Because if there’s one thing the state of Florida, like a lot of other parts of America, knows for sure, it’s that Black life is of no value–that to be Black in America is to risk being shot at any second of any day of your life.

 

And to know that your killer will most likely get away with it.

 
 
 
 ****Sign the petition to get justice for Trayvon here! And, if you can stomach it, watch this news compilation on the most recent evidence the Florida police are hiding…and what has developed on the Trayvon Martin case so far. Sad, sad, times. We must “be the change you want to see in this world.”*****

02.14.12 The Brotherhood of Color: Why I Love Lin and The King…and Not Just Because Derek Fisher Does Too

Posted on by

  

The other night, my boyfriend and I were cuddling on the couch watching the Lakers/Heat game, when he noticed that the Lakers were wearing their yellow uniforms and the Heat were wearing their midnight blue uniforms.

“That’s odd,” he said.

“Why?” I asked

“Because the Heat are at home,” he explained. “Usually the traveling team would wear the darker colors—in this case dark Laker purple instead of gold—because darker colors are thought to be more aggressive on the field. And in the NBA, the more aggressive, fearful team will win.”

“But this isn’t the NBA, I said in a small voice,” this is my life.”

 

 

And there, something that has been growing since we have begun dating. My boyfriend is Vietnamese and Chinese; my family is primarily African. My skin is much darker than he is. And when we go out, I have begun to notice people watching us. Wondering.

Basically, ranging from random passerby simply staring or actually feeling the need to tell us “Oh isn’t that nice, to see that”…to Black men, very offended and offending, calling me a names, calling him names, other Asian men, impressed by him being with me; white men, the way they feel they can comment and touch me without my permission, how, to being introduced as “his boyfriend” whether through purpose or unconscious Freudian slip, they all wonder why we–a Black woman and an Asian man–are together.

I wonder if any of them wonder how it makes us feel?

I wonder, what is it about blackness that makes people want to read it as masculine? As aggressive? As dark, angry, and violent?

I wonder what Jeremy’s Lin’s success will mean in shattering these stereotypes—and I am embarrassed for my country that in 2012, with a Black man of African descent as President and a white woman as Secretary of State, we still think it’s okay to judge someone based upon how they look here in the good old US or A—and discriminate against them accordingly.

 

 

Jeremy Lin is an unbelievable athlete, plain and simple. Not to detract from his accomplishments, but any athlete with his level of skill and discipline should make it, will make it. That’s what pro sports is about.

The question isn’t of his ability. It’s that the NBA—and society—hasn’t wanted to see his ability because it would prefer to keep Asian men—and all of us who don’t fit into the mainstream power-holders-that-be’s conception of ‘normal’—into separate little boxes.  “Those of us who are not white are all brown,” my boyfriend says. “If we really thought about it and found consensus as a community of people of color, we could change the world.”

We did once. We elected a brown-skinned man named Obama.

Imagine if we keep working together and doing things like this?

 

 

Personally, I find it hard that anyone would doubt the athletic masculinity of other brown skinned men, just because, as my boyfriend says, his skin is closer to butterscotch than soy sauce, like mine is.

Maybe it’s because I am in love with my boyfriend. Maybe it’s because I understand Asian culture invented martial arts, not RZA or Tarentino…and I’d ask Jet Li to defend my life over Willis, Van Damme, or any other muscle-bound Western action hero.

Maybe it’s because the kind of person I am, the kind who only sees people, not color—and does not judge people accordingly.

Yes, there is an accomplishment in being the first of your kind. But the treatment of Jeremy Lin by the NBA and the reaction of the media to his “surprising” abilities speaks volumes to a larger, darker issue concerning the pervasion of sterotypes and racism throughout every aspect of our society: Why does the fact that Jeremy Lin is Asian American matter to his job performance?

 

 

What about being Asian means you can’t play sports?

What about being Black means that you can?

 

 

Masculinity—or “the inherent butchness of blackness” as I like to call it, is a very loaded issue in the politics or race and culture. Ask any dark-skinned women and they won’t bat an eye at this no-brainer we have been confronted with the day we are born—usually the first day we seen by someone not of our race who tells us we are different.  While you may laugh at the nurse commenting on a brand new baby’s “perfect brown skin” and “soft curly black hair” it sets an attitude that one way of looking, that one person is normal and another person is different—and it is a very slippery slope from that to treating people who look differently very, very differently as well.

Ever since I coined that phrase “the inherent butchness of blackness,” nearly 10 years ago, every dark-skinned woman who has heard me use this term has agreed wholeheartedly, completely, thankfully. They tell me I am articulating a pressure they have felt from the world their whole lives.

They tell me about the anger they felt when white America pushed this “inherent butchness of blackness,”  on Michelle Obama. The innuendo and comments that because she was strong, because she was darker, that she must be more man than woman—not beautiful, not feminine—without a need to be valued and taken care of.

They tell me about the psychological effects of having to prove you are a woman, fight to be treated as a woman, everyday.

 

 

I remember how, when I was very young and did not know better, I listened when the white man who had won the same fellowship I had won to study at NYU set me up with a white friend of his to go out on a date. How, I found out after we broke up, that this “friend” had only asked me out because my male counterpart had told him that my blackness meant I “was not the marrying kind.”

And with the exception of my boyfriend, I have found this attitude  in nearly most men—even African American men who do a lovely job of adopting mainstream cultural stereotypes—y’all know the paper bag rule never left town, right…the process of lightening a sister’s skin for print, TV and film has just made it more versatile?

Not to mention all the straight sexually curious girls, who think that just because I am dark-skinned I can be their boyfriend? When I wear heels, stockings, dresses, makeup, and am probably one of the girliest girlie girls you will ever meet?

Sometimes it still makes me feel like screaming like Sourjouner Truth, Ain’t I a woman?

This is the only reason Black women spend so much on beauty products: to be seen as feminine, and thus accorded the same right and treatment afforded to other women. Men may not understand this, but the most important thing to a woman is to be seen as sexually desirable to the opposite sex, because this means one will find love and a create a relationship and a family, the central function of being female. And the less you are seen as a woman, the less you are wanted. The less the chance that this will happen in your life.

 

 

She’s not the marrying kind.

 

 

Sometimes I think society perpetuates the myth of black female masculinity because it feeds the economic machine—economic slavery—just another way that the United States economic structure is still highly dependent upon the profit it makes from the buying and selling surrounding the black body. And if you think about how much money the beauty and the professional sports industries generate—all this money still made off of the buying and selling surrounding the black body—you can clearly see that slavery still exists in this country—anyone remember a little war that ended in 1865 with an Emancipation that was supposed to end this for good—just under a different name, and in a different realm?

Which brings up back to the NBA, perhaps the clearest example of the profit able to be made off the buying and selling of the male body.

And back to my boyfriend, and his appreciation of the positive aspects of Blackness.

 

 

“But some people say Black people are better at basketball because they are taller and more athletic,” he is continuing on, trying to cheer me up. “Isn’t that a good thing, to be tall and more athletic?”

Because of history.  Because those words live close to Darwin’s ideas of biological determinism,  the justification for the enslavement of darker skinned people for over a century. Through “proving” that people of African descent were physically stronger and less mentally evolved, Darwin claimed that whites were “mentally superior” and, because of it, justified in enslaving their fellow humans…childlike and in need of good Christian moral guidance begotten with sun-up to sun-down back-breaking labor, violence, rape, and abuse.

“But I’m not talking about that at all,” my boyfriend says. “I’m talking about how each color has its own bandwith and spectrum of attributes. No color is just one thing. There is strength in blackness. There is beauty in blackness. Just as there is strength and beauty in lightness. As in everything, a balance. It shouldn’t be affected by the fact that  American culture is very one-sided.”

“Oh wow,” I understand, impressed.

 

 

I think back to how, before I could even walk, it seems, I had my nose in a book and a pen in my hand—my mind very much somewhere else. I wrote my first novel at age 7, completed junior high in one year when I scored high enough on the SAT to be admitted to college at 13  but decided, after spending the summer studying marine biology at UC Irvine, to stay in Arcadia and fill high school with a slew of AP’s so I could play in orchestra, compete on the Constitution Team and run track with my best friend—where we still, to this day, hold 3 of the top 10 records in track & field.

My high school best friend deserves her records—she was an incredible athlete; I was not—there just weren’t enough people doing my sport. I was such a terrible athlete I fell of the stage during an orchestra concert while sitting down playing my violin! Yet all the encouragement I got from any school or authority figure—not to mention peer groups—was that I should play basketball, run track—any other sport in entire. Not until earning 5′s on every AP English Lit, Language, Theory, Humanities, and History exam as well as its straight A equivalent was it noticed that just because my skin was brown I had a brain and I was rewarded with a National Merit Scholarship and Outstanding English Department Scholarship to study film at Northwestern, the New York Times Foundation Fellowship to earn my M.F.A. at NYU, where I taught writing from the time I was 22 until a couple of months ago, when I lost my professorship after being hospitalized due to being hit and dragged by a taxi driver in New York City who did not want to carry a “Black” in his car.

But up until this day people still say to my face—just like that first classmate in Honors English freshman year—“You’re black, how can you be smart enough to be in this class. Did they make a mistake because your name sounds Japanese?

 

 

Jeremy Lin had the opposite experience. He remembers being told to leave the court and go practice his violin in orchestra, being pressured to study, be practical about his career choices. He didn’t listen because he “loved basketball” and was “competitive.” He “wanted to win” so much so that he slugged it out unsigned through training camp, low draft picks, and humiliating trades–all because teams refused to see past his race to his potential until he wound up, on “minimum wage NBA salary” sleeping on his brother’s couch in the Village, that brother himself ironically an NYU med student and socially accepted because of falling in line with society’s stereotype of Asian-American achievement.

 

 

But it isn’t about the fact that I should have been Asian-American or that Jeremy Lin should have been African-American.

Like my boyfriend says, it is about balance…about the fact that—regardless of race—people should have the freedom to be who they are and pursue their interests and abilities with support and social validation no matter identity, not shunted into different careers because “people like them” haven’t been seen to “do things like that”….because social expectations, acceptance, validation,  pressure and role models make all the difference.

I had to fight so hard to define myself…to not let myself believe I was only worth how other people saw, me, that I was not the stereotype they had created in their heads about “those Black people,” that it’s a wonder I survived.

This is what scares me. Not for myself—but for my younger brother and sister, for my future kids.

I know what it is like to have to defend yourself against forces in the world when you are still a kid, too young to discern, understand, or know who you are. Women experience this as they journey from girls into women, and first have to deal with the sexually predatory energy of much older men. At 12 or 13 no girl—even though she may have the body of a 20something, understands men and how to navigate the pressure of their watching and advances.

The same is true for a child of 4, experiencing racism for the first time—whether it be something like not being considered for the smart classes or some other life marker that will affect outwards for years to come…or simply something much less painful like being called a nigger and pushed off the monkey bars by the blonde girl who had just joined my kindergarten class in St. Paul, Minnesota.

 

 

This is what every single Black man in the NBA remembers: the difference in the way the world treated him when he hadn’t yet won the uniform versus the way it treats him now that the cloth has been given to him.

This is why, as a man, the members of the Lakers filed after Derek Fisher to shake Lin’s hand.

They remember.

They understand, more than anyone else, what it is like to have the color of your skin define how you are percieved, how you are treated–who you are able to become.

This is the understanding and respect–the grace and sportsmanship that for me, will always define the Kobe Bryant-Derek Fisher Lakers era. This, to me, is why Derek Fisher will always be the heart and soul of this Lakers lineup.

This, to me, is why I watch these phenomenal artists play this game.

 

 

So this is what I am thinking:

Imagine if every black kid who was smart was taught to look to books—this message reinforced by family, society, and media…Imagine ads by Kobe Bryant, professional doctor, writer, president, etc…encouraging reading, encouraging thinking. Imagine leagues of Black professionals working. Imagine young black kids putting their images on posters. Imagine them going to the library every day to study instead of the playground to play ball.

But people always frown, unconvinced. So I try again.

“All doctors are smart, right?” I ask

“Yes,” the person I am talking to invariably agrees.

“Okay. Imagine if I go into a hospital,” I tell that person, “and 95 percent of the doctors are Asian. Will I then think all Asians are smart?”

“No,” that person will say. “Because there is the expectation they are living up to. From society. And from their parents, who make them study/work ten hours a day.”

“Exactly. And if those kids were being told to value basketball instead, being told to/and practicing basketball ten hours a day as the only means to improve their lives, would you not see them excel in basketball?”

“But  Asian kids aren’t all tall—“

“Neither are the black kids. Its’ only that with social and cultural messages, every black kid who is tall is taught to look to basketball. Every Asian kid who is smart is taught to look to books.”

But that person will always still look unconvinced, and I won’t know what else to say.

 

 

Time passes. A few games go by.  My young man works out, plays with his dog, runs his business. I think and write and do yoga. We laugh and dance in morning before leaving. We laugh and sing when we cook dinner together at night.

We live. We are happy.

 

 

It is Friday night. We are watching Jeremy Lin score 38 points against King Kobe and his Lakers.

“I’ve been thinking about what you were saying the other week,” my boyfriend says suddenly. “About the American social perception of color, how we don’t live in a vacuum. How it doesn’t matter whether I–or anyone else who loves basketball thinks that black being thought of as aggressive is a good thing. If you’re a man you may like that, but not if you’re a woman.”

“!!!” I think.

“I understand what you were saying too, I say, about being proud of your accomplishments and strengths, despite what other people may say about them. And about the fact that each color contains a whole spectrum–whether or not the world chooses to see that. About balance.”

“!!!” he thinks.

But even as we cuddle closer, and I am thinking that this—this openness and honesty, willingness and connection to learn and be open to the other’s experience and perspectives… this is why I love him—I am wondering just, why, exactly, that the intellectual aspect of basketball has never been stressed as much as it has with the arrival of the “Asian point-guard from Harvard.”

The game hasn’t changed. It’s always been about a brilliance of analysis, strategy, and mathematics and physics…a union of discipline, spirit, and athletic ability. The only thing that is changing is the players…and now the value placed on the game, on certain aspects of the game.

 

 

And so I just have to say it: Why is basketball, like so many other achievements generated by African Americans,* valued only when adopted and represented by another country, by another race?

What is up with that?

 

 

 

 

 

*Anybody remember Elvis and a little thing called rock music? But who really wrote all those songs and did those dances before him…not just in Africa but on this continent? And who invented rhythm and blues and the other musical traditions it sprang from…again not just in Africa, but on this continent? Not to mention countless other unknown achievements and inventions? He who writes history controls our memories, our myths and perspectives…