White folks are lactose intolerant when it comes to the truth!!
Black folks: you can’t be accepted unless you tone it down, scale it back. Nigga, filet yo’ self!!
You can’t be the “First Black President” unless you chew your words like a cow turning cud.
Don’t improvise, don’t be Jeremiah-ically real, correct, oh, hell, no.
The audacity of a delusion preferred.
White folks don’t want to know the truth and niggas who believe that this Titanic can be righted, saved, steered away from the icebergs are just as delusional as the outraged tongue cluckers on Fox, CNN and the heart-less heartland.
All they can see, the only thing they can think about is their pain, their suffering: “how dare that nigga mock OUR suffering on 9/11!!” White folks don’t know shit about real suffering, they’re too busy trimming their hangnails. They don’t dare look out from under their morally relative-intellectual blankets to see the global suffering that has been heaped on millions by their blue eyed government.
So, here comes Obama, the pretty, smiling black marionette, trying to appeal to an un-satisfiable beast, who will use tweezers and a fine toothed comb to ferret out any inconsistency, any faux paux, any racism (imagine that!) in this black man and magnify it, twist it, turn it into some kind of political pedophilia.
And he plays the game, because the prize seems desirable. But what we could really use is some of that community organizing that he constantly brags about. He talks that WE talk, while he seeks an “I” prize. We may get him elected, but I’d be surprised if WE – meaning black folks – benefit.
If you have to de-bone words in order to curry white favor – if you have to lose your black soul in order to gain the world – what’s it worth?! I’d rather be Obama’s “former” pastor and tell the unvarnished truth. I’d rather minister to the real soul’s of real black, white and green folks than engage in politically expedient, statesmen-like verbal masturbation.
How fulfilling it must be to cater to the white fantasies of a shining city on a hill, formed in a vacant land, by courageous, persecuted men who only wanted to breath free. That they could strangle the life out of and make extinct tribe after tribe of Red people, one dare not mention. Or else.
For true: If these folks can’t step up at this late date and accept that Rev. Wright speaks nothing but the whole black truth – then we’re no different from those teachers who have low expectations of our students. If that’s the case, put these crackas in Remedial Ed and leave ’em the fuck alone.
When we talk dishonestly down to the white man, we demean ourselves because all black folks know Obama’s lying, by omission. Distancing himself from his pastor – while ostensibly embracing him – makes Obama a political gumby: flexible, but without backbone. If we can’t bring the entirety of our black selves to the table, if our complaints are dismissed as the politics or rhetoric of the past when the conditions those bitter words describe are happening in this day and time; if the truth of our experience is condemned as insane, in spite of the fact that we’ve lived it; and thus chastised, we begin to bend and contort our stories and ourselves to bring our reality into agreement with that of the dominant, dictating, racist culture for some jive ass short term gain……why we must have lost our good black minds.
I’d rather leave this country, secede from the Union, live off the grid than pretend that temporizing is a form of nobility.
LUBANKAGENE FOR PRESIDENT!
“White folks are lactose intolerant when it comes to the truth!!”
This line had me on the floor lmao!
OMG that line cracked me up too, but so true…
True. That’s why I’m not a politician.
White privilege creates blindness: it prevents the development of wisdom. Black folks need to stop appeasing white folks and start claiming our own narrative.
A rule I apply in life: Anger is always the wrong tool to use when you want to get anything significant done. You want to put nails in a board. Applying the hammer to the nail with outrage, indignation and unmitigated anger will destroy the board and the nails and the hammer. Don’t tell me brother Wright is so unsophisticated he didn’t know this. This is one of the primary Christian principles. So is forgiveness. So is avoiding judgment. Brother Wright usurped the role of God in condemning the white racist. He will be judged with his own judgment.
I have endured racism all of my life, from black and white people. I have often been too black for the likes of some black women, I have often been denied jobs, promotions and other inclusion into certain cliques because I was very dark-skinned. African Americans quite often are as racist toward their own as white people are. To be too light or too dark is to be abused in many subtle ways by African Americans, what else would I expect from white people.
Still, the calm, knowing, centered approach I see in Obama is what has served me well in my own personal struggle with race.
Ultimately, dealing with the person in front of me as a human being is what works successfully.
Being kind and loving towards all people I encounter wins my friends and prevents my enemies.
Refusing to accept the limited thinking others would impose on me and my potential has kept me whole during many dark nights of my life.
That a supposedly wise and sophisticated man like Brother Wright would not know or not practice the very tenets of his faith, nor teach this in his Church suggests the real reasons why African America is in this sad pass. Black people in America need to stop using slavery to justify their refusal to come together and fix our problems. African Americans must stop dreaming that the federal government will do anything substantial to improve our lives. If we don’t do it, it won’t be done.
I was 19 in 1969. Having refused to go to Vietnam because a white friend of mine-the product of our second year of integration in Fla.-had gone the year before and come back during my senior year to tell me that black kids were being systematically butchered in Viet Nam, by being sent into the worst killing fields without support. He warned me to do whatever was necessary to avoid going, including if necessary, going to jail. I owe my life or at least my health and sanity to Bill Byers. He could have forgotten all about me but he came back, limping from injuries received when his helicopter crashed in the jungles of Viet Nam. The singular courage of this man and his love for me [you really have to love somebody to drag an injured body out of the way to find a friend] I can never repay, except to say it here that not all White people agree with the dominant culture and are quite often dominated themselves. Typically the negativity we experience from these white people is that of anybody else who exists in suffering.
In any case, because of Bill Byers warning and my religion at the time, I refused to go to Viet Nam. I ended up being tailed for over a year by the FBI and was ultimately arrested. My attorney was a 26 year old Chinese-Irish American woman. The day I walked into that office I literally fell head over heals in puppy love with a gentle, kind and committed professional who was determined that I wouldn’t spend a minute behind bars. She was absolutely gorgeous. And the shrewdest attorney I’ve met to date. She got my case heard by a judge who was a known anti-war advocate. He not only refused to send me to jail, he gave me 2 years of community service [division of Foresty, Fl.-my choice actually] and wiped the felony from my record. I owe my freedom to these two. God bless them.
During the time I spent in Croom National Forest as a ranger assistant, I was the target of a lynching attempt. There were two black males sent to this facility to work. The first lasted about six weeks, then I didn’t see him again. Today, many years later, I think he died in that forest. Days after he disappeared, I was assigned to police a sector of the public park by my supervisor who-mysteriously, because he’d never done that before-left me there and went on about his business. I was suspicious of this. Not long after some fellas came along in a red pickup with a rope, guns in the rack and looking for me. Of course, wearing the green of the service and the chocolate of my skin, I was invisible when they came to get me. I had the wisdom to listen to my intuition and not be where expected. I watched them circle around for about an hour looking for ‘that nigger boy”.
They gave up. My supervisor came back. I confronted him about the guys and told him I knew he’d set me up. Then I took it to real, reminding him that poor black people and poor white people were the same. That we weren’t enemies but had common wills to survive and common necessities to feed ourselves and our families and common enemies who were determined to keep us for cheap labor and used race to keep us from uniting against them. I made a friend of this man. He admitted what happened and protected me from those cats thereafter. Took me home to meet his family, gave me tomatoes from his garden and took me to places in that forest I would never have seen.
Racists operate from within a shallow, easily reversible set of assumptions about black people. Once we pierce this shroud of ignorance by reaching into their own humanity, even the most stubborn racist must yield. Reactions to racism are just that. Not well thought out. Shallow in the comprehension of the underlying problems and as a result fail to see the place where unity is possible.
There is a very wide chasm between REACTIONS to racism and RESPONSES to racism. This is true about everything in life. A reaction is like throwing a flaming torch into a pool of gasoline. The result is explosion and chaos. A response takes the facts in hand and proceeds to apply a well thought out plan of action to achieve a desirable result.
Just some food for thought!
K.Koje,
You represent ignorance at its best. Where do you think blacks got their hatred and distrust from each other from. Take a wild guess???
The white dominant society that they have been socialized in.
Also, we have been nice and we have negotiated for years and have gotten the short end of the stick.
The only way that they yield is if you yield. It’s obvious that you do not get it.