In response to a post on a friend's FB page. This about have Blacks done 'any' better since the Obama era. Well I couldn't help, but grind out another sermon on the matter.
Having been a Colored person in good standing for some time now. I have to say we're as fucked now as we ever have been. Oh sure a few perks here, and there. I mean I can stand in the front of the bus with everyone else instead of comfortably sitting in back, and can get dragged into jury duty.
Other than that, and the odd sitcom here, and there...we're fucked.
I fear we always will be too. I sit, and watch as other brown ethnic groups happily climb past us on the ladder. Our problems are a tad unique what with being the object of this republic's Original Sin.
There's a weird hate/guilt thing about us.
White folks feel kinda twitchy morally about us, but let the police deal with it.
"Hey com'on" they say. "I have Negro friends,...eh in a way...sort of." Yeah I have white ones too who on the whole have shown their true color when the shit hit the fan. That is with the gleeful exception of my Jewish, Queer, and Commie white pals. They stood their ground. Mostly because the guns are pointed at them too.
I said before not only are we despised, but because of the unique, and extreme nature of our persecution, second only to the actual Genocide of the Native folks, we hate, and despise ourselves. Witness the hair straightening industry, and our slaughtering each other by the thousands each year.
So not only are we getting death, and destruction from outside, but we're doing a hell of a job on ourselves.
You'll recall how a black honor student was murdered in a school yard to the cheers of damn near the whole school.
His crime was trying to be white. ...by excelling academically.
We hold our ignorance, and poverty as virtues now. The same way poor whites hold their ignorance, and guns as holy. So yeah thanks Obama for being there, but it ain't made a shit's worth of difference for most black folks. We remain except for our tiny middle class...fucked, and seem happy to stay that way.
To be continued till shit gets better...for everybody.
"Collect the Whole Set!"
Stay Tuned.
A while back I watched an interview where Morgan Freeman says to Morley Safer or Bill Moyers or somebody, "I'm going to stop calling you a white man, and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man." Meaning, can we just forget about this whole racial identity trip altogether? Maybe this country's not capable of it, but that's the kind of world I'd like to live in: where nobody cares what ethnic group you belong to, and the topic is of little interest to anyone except a tiny handful of ethnographers.
ReplyDeleteThe Romans didn't give a shit about race. If you were a good soldier, you got promoted, became a commander if you really excelled. If you didn't, your military career went nowhere, no matter what your color. Theirs was an awful society in many ways, and founded on slavery - but not race-based.
I've read suggestions by at least one student of history that the notion of social hierarchy based on skin color was systematically concocted by the colonial (white) ruling class, and refined over time. Their big concern was to make sure that indentured servants from the British Isles - who often got an extremely shitty deal - did not make common cause with black slaves, whose interests they might otherwise have recognized as similar to their own. Ultimately, the rulers succeeded in bamboozling them with a proto-Nazi racial ideology, with the rotten results we know today.
I haven't done the research to back up this hypothesis, but I'm inclined to believe it, and in truth I want to believe it. The world does NOT have to be this way.
Z
P.S. - At this point in our history Presidents, very much including Obama, are merely puppets for Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex, and not much of anything else. He might as well move the Oval Office to Madison Avenue. So the symbolism thing is of limited value, if any.
ReplyDeleteCare to guess how excited I'd get about a gay President? Oh Whoopee, a stroller-pusher in the White House - our dreams have all come true!
Z
P.P.S. - If we *must* have identity politics, then they should bring back Black Is Beautiful - none of that skin-whitening cream BS. Maybe even some more blaxploitation flicks. Is there some way we can have it both ways - nobody cares much about race, but a geriatric Richard Roundtree gets a shot at the Oscars?
ReplyDeleteZ