Don’t call me whitey, n word...
Sly Stone, king of psychedelic soul, funk, rock, rhythm and blues
Thus began the lyrics of the immensely popular, music-climate-altering 1969 hit song by Sly & the Family Stone. Well, not really, but…
The 1960’s were turbulent years, politically, culturally, socially. Summed up in that one song is the history of this country reduced to its commonest denominator—racism: “White”/”Black”=US History. The abiding legacy of slavery is continuing racism and de facto slavery. What else was Jim Crow? Or our current criminal/prison system? That the Washington D.C. based football team has been stubborn about changing its name reveals an enormous depth of callous disregard for the legitimacy and respectability of the true and First (as in Native) Americans, indigenous peoples who were systematically slaughtered, poisoned with foreign diseases, and robbed of lands that were rightfully theirs. And referred to by a derogatory epithet as offensive as the N word.
The ‘revolutionary’ lyrics of the hit tune, sparse yet resoundingly clear in its rhythmically driving chorus, propose all at once a threat, a demand, a plea, a summons to do the right thing—to respect one another. They were and continue to be radical. Tension runs high. Which is one reason it sounds silly in ‘politically correct’ language. PC is another double-edged sword, like ‘colorblindness’ (written about briefly in a previous post) that, among other things, seeks to remove the ‘edge’, to push everyone back to a bland and homogeneous center, away from the true status quo. When you censor someone, you remove a barometer for detecting what is off kilter (different, divergent). While a student at UCB in the mid-60’s, I was called the N word by a group of young ‘white’ men. I was shocked and offended, but I knew something was terribly wrong. When the body is in pain or is running a fever, it is trying to tell you that something is wrong. PC is a masking of symptoms.
The war on drugs is a war on people of color. If that were not so, there would not be disproportionate percentages of brown and black people behind bars. ‘White’ people don’t commit fewer crimes. More often than not the system exempts them from due punishment. Those who commit crimes that reach far and wide, tearing through and destroying the fabric of our supposed democracy, are the European American guys on Wall Street and the hoodlum CEO’s and otherwise executive management of corporate America. The religious rightwing Tea Partiers and other reactionary factions own a share of that pie. This country was built on genocide and slavery. Both prevail until this day. They are an evil that continues to morph and multiply as fast as a common bacterium.
When a veteran sideliner like myself starts once again to bristle and growl, something is supremely wrong; there has been for way too long. I was a righteously “angry black woman” in the 60’s until things seemed to have started to change. But change was little better than smoke and mirrors. Then came along Allan Bakke in the 70’s who started shouting reverse discrimination. How reprehensible. Again I was incensed. I put him in the same sack with William Shockley (a faculty member at Stanford while I was there), the engineer-turned-racism-apologist with his IQ tests that measured nothing but the assimilation/regurgitation of European American culture. They would fail miserably an exam biased in favor of African American culture which is arguably equally as rich and far more diverse.
Runaway Slave Gordon. From the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, “Photography changes the way we record and respond to social issues,” by Frank H. Goodyear, III, assistant curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, suggests how mass produced and widely distributed images helped the abolitionist movement.
I’m a fan of the witty and funny feminist, Ellen DeGeneres. However, I recently caught a video clip in which she stated that she does not see color. Sounds admirable. But if you don’t see color, then how can you see me? Because, unlike “beauty” which is only “skin deep”, behind ‘color’ sprawl the deep rooted keloids and ancestral history of a people chained in cruel and immoral bondage for three hundred years. If you don’t see me, you don’t see my history and the way it is different from yours.
Political correctness is censorship. If we all truly learned to respect one another, there would be no need for this form of censorship. Frankly, I’m not really sure how effective it’s been. And it is not much more than a bit of trivial travesty, a minuscule bandaid that has been placed on a crater-sized, still festering wound. Nowadays, people hide behind social media usernames and avatars to hurl the N word more frequently than ever. Perhaps someone has done a study on that. I certainly have not. Some people are offended by the use of the N word under any reasonable claim, even artistic license. At a staged reading of my first play, Blood Types, an acquaintance, an African American man, was highly offended by how often it was used in dialogue, dialogue that was authentic in its portrayal of the dramatic circumstances.
Nigger. There, I said it. A loaded firearm. A hand grenade. A smart bomb. A drone.
Black people prefer ‘niggah’ as part of a coded language that is not respected but routinely borrowed from by the hipper subcultures. It is a way of claiming ownership. When black people use the term, it is full of all kinds of meaning but hardly ever of racist venom towards one’s own. Many blacks are still struggling with internalized racism, the self-hatred beaten into and implanted in black minds by the European colonizers, the violence of the whip and the pit, the threat of the cauldrons and nooses, and the silent assault of Christianity. If others found us so horribly inferior and ugly to behold, how might we escape that image? That bondage? There is the saying that if you can’t lick ’em join ’em. Righteous mind-fucking. Even above physical trauma, brainwashing is the omnipotent and ultimate weapon.
Do you think Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman, called him a nigger before he executed him? Probably not, because he has been brainwashed into thinking he is not a racist. He doesn’t have to use that word; he has a deadlier weapon—Florida law. So goes it for Johannes Mehserle in the Oscar Grant homicide case, and Michael Dunn, executioner of Jordan Davis, although the latter was only sentenced for attempted murder. This is how American ‘white’ men handle their ‘internalized’ fear of black men who never took a whip to them, or hanged any of them even in effigy, or dragged any of them behind a car until within an inch of their lives, who more often than not commit black-on-black crime in the black neighborhoods and ghettos they seldom leave? Perhaps for a perceived retaliation for centuries of brutal violence and servitude? A preemptive strike? Go figure. It’s called white privilege (see what scholar Tim Wise has to say about white privilege in this video of a presentation he gave at Google called “White Like Me”). Like Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis was only seventeen years old. What would have been the outcomes if the roles had been reversed? In our hearts, we all know the truth.
I’ve known European Americans—and, yes, “some of my best friends are ‘white'”—who thought they were not racists because they never used the word nigger. Nor would they allow themselves to think it. Nor allow their children. Yet, when I was in the master’s program at CSUH in the 70’s, I had a boss who, when I casually shared with her that my middle brother had dark red hair and that his nickname throughout high school had been “Strawberry” (context: she, her husband, and their four children were all redheads) due to the fat trail of Irish blood on my father’s side—by way of Scandinavia, I’ve only recently learned through 23andme—she literally said to me, “Yeah, you all say that”.
This woman was certain she was fond of me (and I had no doubt that she was) and had my best interest at heart when it came to supporting me during the process of applying to the PhD program at Stanford. Yet, she did not ‘see’ me. Effectively, she had denied the enslavement—and quite likely rape—of my ancestor(s). Her retort cut to the quick. I refused further communication with her except for what was necessary in the workplace. She’d asked another coworker/friend what the matter was with me. She could not understand how her response had been offensive, nor did she ever offer an apology, at least of understanding; she could not because she could not.
What’s going on in Congress as I write is a shameful and shameless display of blatant racism above and beyond Republican Party intolerance and ignorance, ‘white’ men who just cannot stomach the fact that they have a ‘black’ boss, and would rather bring down the country than allow him to do his job. In an article by Mark Morford titled “The Best Worst President Ever” and published in SF Gate, he writes:
The bottom line seems obvious: Much to the GOP’s bitter revulsion, it turns out a calm, intellectual black man really can run an entire country – certainly far better than an inarticulate Texas bumbler, and even in the face of what is easily the most obstructionist, hateful, acidic and often downright racist Congress in modern memory. Quite an achievement, really.
The harsh realities that govern us today have governed in the past and will govern in the future. Such is the nature of the beast.
Until the continuing evil effects of slavery are recognized, truly redressed and repaired, the word ‘nigger’ will always be around to offend…
Just Writing Around 