black – Susan X Jane

Donald Glover wasn’t content to just reawaken our childhood trauma on Thursday’s episode of Atlanta and then round out his triple threat credentials hosting and as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live.

He had to remind us what kind of threat he really is in his Sunday morning video release of This Is America. This dark minstrel-show video is more complex than a Kanye West history revision, swinging wildly from Bo Jangles shuck and jive to a roleplay of America’s dark chaos.

The video starts with the sound of light Caribean guitar played by a barefoot man in linen pants–a moment of black joy and happiness. Childish Gambino jerks to life to the music, contorting to adopt the tune like a demon taking possession of the black body. The happy tune is short lived as a stalking shirtless Gambino mercs his diasporan brother, menacing “This is America” to the throb of heavy bass. He adopts the famous pose of dancing Jim Crow when he pulls the trigger: this is the black experience in America, our connection killed, our bodies possessed by the leering dark energy of American supremacy, turned into shucking zombies. This is probably what it looked like when Kanye lost his mind.

The new Jim Crow two steps with South African school children against a backdrop of increasing chaos. The stereotypical images of blacks dancing and singing ‘cars, clothes, hos’ are hip hop’s most marketable products. Against the backdrop of hundreds of years of oppression, rappers that preach the prosperity+bitches gospel reinforce the slavery-era idea that blacks were greedy, lazy bucks, undeserving of freedom or justice. Simultaneously, they lull listeners into focusing on a little cash instead of economic justice, a little flash instead of freedom These are the kind of images mass media loves to reproduce–and ship worldwide: they support hegemonic thinking about blacks and keep everyone sipping the white supremacy juice. A twin set of school children dance in the back under the rain of a red money gun. Jim Crow is for the kids

Speaking of the prosperity gospel, a choir preaching “get your money, black man” sings in a room removed from the chaos. Jim pops through a door to join them in joyful worship–for a moment–before mowing them down with an AR-15. He punctuates his shots again with, “This is America.” The scene calls the Charleston church shooting to mind. It also reminds us that as black people, buying into capitalism as a way to salvation is a dangerous business: “Don’t catch you slippin.”

Throughout the video, the background is increasingly populated with people running in all directions. black people and white people, cops, people wielding sticks or bats. The direction of the actions isn’t clear–who is chasing who? Is this an uprising like Baltimore or a street war like Charlottesville? Like the news on any given day, it is hard to make sense of the chaotic images broadcast salaciously without context.

Above it all, young men in white masks bear witness, cell phones out. “This is a celly. That is a tool.” They sit above the chaos watching and recording. Below the school kids circle Jim Crow while the apocalypse’s horseman rides through on the white horse of death (is everything apocalyptic? [yes.]). With cars burning and police and people rioting, it is Jim Crow’s hand extended like a gun that sends everyone running, the scene dropping into silence as he nods off high on America’s heroin, violence.

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His dance is brought back with a couple quick puffs on a joint. He perches atop a car doing his best Michael Jackson. Scattered around is a field of cars. These are not your usual rap-mobiles. There are no spinning rims or chrome kits. Instead, the cars call to mind the hundreds of cars we have seen pulled over in police shooting videos. Sandra Bland’s car, or Samuel Dubose’s–cars that belong to working people just trying to get through the day without being turned into a statistic by the state. Jim Crow dances among the graveyard of cars, with just his linen legged brother, hooded head and guitar restored and a sister wavering sexily on the hood of a Philando Castile look-a-like car.

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Even the black man that dances possessed through a wasteland of black pain, shucking and jiving to the gospel of white supremacy, mowing down his brethren, is not free (take note, Kanye). The video ends with our Jim Crow now terror-stricken, running from the faceless unfocused chaos he was dancing above. He is no longer funny or silly or swaggy, his face full of raw fear, his body pumping all his energy towards surviving. Judging by our present state of affairs, he’s not going to make it.

The video gives us a lot to examine. Childish Gambino has created this layered stew worthy of reflection and not just reaction–so what do you take away? Some have written that he is condemning black America for embracing shallowness while massive problems loom in plain sight. Others have said he is pointing to a cycle of violence and numbness as we try to mumble rap our way past problems we can’t ignore. I think both of these analyses put too much burden on black America alone to do the heavy lifting of eradicating white supremacy.

To lay white supremacy at the feet of black people who like to have a good time is also to deny black people their humanity. In the last few years, I have seen activists go so hard that their life energy was depleted like a phone charge. We plug ourselves into pop culture to get a boost, a little levity to remind us why we fight, a little art to remind us that to be free is to take joy where you can find it. The trick is to plug into pop culture that fills you up to fight another day, and these days black excellence is giving us plenty to sup on. Childish Gambino’s song and video are another in a long line of important work being created by black artists–Cole, Lamar, Kweli, and Buddy and Caleborate, and Beyonce, and Solange, and, Joyner, and Vic Mensa and on and on.

Yes, yes, the commodity factory of American media keeps pumping out crap-get-money-fuck-bitches-rap. You don’t have to eat that fast food. You shouldn’t let the fast food being produced by corporations define what hip hop is or isn’t. Don’t be fooled: there is always conscious rap happening. Sometimes it is harder to find than others, but it has always been a part of hip-hop, and more broadly black culture. In every era, the rebellion leaders and freedom fighters also consumed the pop culture of their day. In other times as in our own, artists and seers showed us the way through their painting, writing, singing, and dancing. Let’s not let each new track make us declare consciousness is now alive, now dead. Let’s just sit in the complexity. Let’s acknowledge that our world is not binary.

America is this– forcing all experience into a simple dichotomy of good and bad, violence and justice, joy and chaos. We have to tease out what the relationship between these elements is–where is the cause? which is the side effect? who loses and who loses more? This Is America juxtaposes our country’s many masks so that we can see the complexity of moving through this world. The video is a Rorschach test, the video sows both shame and sympathy, letting you grow whichever you choose. It is we who must do the choosing: not just for this video, not in the abstract but at this moment. To get beyond the binge/purge cycle that devours black life, we have to rise above the choice to devolve into the chaos America allows for or to rest in the embrace of the joy and lightness that we need sometimes to survive. To do both, to be all that humanity can be–this is America.

It always starts with the question, first in the eyes, hesitating on the way to the lips but determined to come out: what are you? Every mixed race person say amen. For as long as I can remember, people have puzzled over my features, my hair, my skin color to piece together my race. The question, and the response we arrive at together has more to do with the questioner than you may think. And that interaction tells us more about race in America how far we’ve come and the morass ahead.

At the risk of dating myself, as little background is necessary. I was born in November 1969– a child of the summer of love in Boston, when only a few years later the bus riots would mar forever this city’s already checkered racial history. I was adopted as a baby, but adoption then was a different animal. A closed adoption, like mine, meant that my (now adopted) parents never met or knew anything about my birth parents–other than the fact that one was black.

Trans racial adoption was uncommon then, and the story is one for another time. Suffice it to say, I grew up in a white family in towns with almost no diversity at the time I was growing up there. Identifying my race was not as simple as hauling out the family album or even looking around at my community. Most of the time, this is how we decide what race we are. We look at Mom and Dad and do the math. Simple.

Except its not so simple. If you look like you might be walking the line between two race you have probably been asked the question on more than one occasion. From the time I was little, people asked. The question itself is an indicator of the times: in the 70’s the question was whispered, or more often sneered by nasty children in the playground. in the 80’s it was asked with curiosity, or occasionally a spark of interest in the days when light skinned was in; in the 90’s when the best berries were blacker it was a test of authenticity. And now in an era when we debate the end of race, being asked my race reminds me that race, and racism, isn’t going anywhere.

For some mixed race people the answer becomes one of complex math–a half this (which half?), a quarter that (leg piece or breast meat?)–where the family tree is examined and loyalties to each side are weighed. Sometimes, back up family and community members are referenced to break any stalemate. For others, embracing all parts of their lineage is the key, living as a testament to the dream of a land where all people live together, integrated fully and culturally complex.

More often than you would image, people argue with the answer you provide. How often have people thrown the white mother card on President Obama? Rarely is it said to spark an honest conversation of how race is constructed. Mostly it’s said in a snarky way, or a weapon to shoot at the authenticity of his blackness.

People squint their eyes and appraise your flesh–how light is white? How much brown equals black? but it doesn’t stop there. They weigh your words–talking white or just educated? they judge your body–are your hips black in nature? they question your knowledge of perceived black culture. In addition to judge they play other roles as well: now fashion blogger, now genealogist, next professor, sometimes confessor.

Free from a pedigree and family tree, I find people more likely to debate my racial identity with me. I think this tells us that race is not just about what we think we are but is also significantly about what society says. The conversation reveals how we divide people into racial categories: do you really think you’re black? but you’re light skinned, so you’re not all black. How did you decide you were black? how do you know that you’re not (insert nation here)? Do you even know what you are? Over the years, I have been called a mulatta (stubborn mule!) a half bread, mixed, light, red, mutt, black bitch, nigger. The names, they also are like a timeline of race in America.

When I was little–maybe 4–I was watching Bugs Bunny with a friend of mine. We were watching the episode where Bugs is being chased by a witch doctor . To escape Bugs put plates in his mouth to make big lips so he can blend in with the African ladies passing by. My friend looked at at the TV and then pointed to me.

“That’s what you are.”

I was shocked. But I wasn’t. I had seen the way my friend looked at me mirrored in the eyes of of other children–and adults. The easy way that my friend made a connection between the fake African stereotypes on the TV and me puzzled me. I had been unaware of my race until then. Later I wondered what everyone could see in me that made them know I was different when I looked so normal to me. My journey from that afternoon watching cartoons to here—not so coincidentally teaching about race and media–has been a complex conversation about race with my environment. Through my teen angst, my reeducation into a wider historical narrative, a hundred conversations that start with the question and not a few ~~moments~~ ~~years~~ decades of deep introspection, I can tell you one thing I have never been: white.

You see, race is a social construct, and one that has only been around for a few hundred years. Race, as a marker of identity, was created to structure power relationships–most markedly between whites and enslaved blacks, then later blacks suffering under Jim Crow, and even today blacks struggling with systemic racism in our post Obama age. Beyond black and white, race decided who has to go to the Japanese interment camps, who was forced onto reservations when the slaughter was over. Race decided who could own property, who could marry, who could move into a neighborhood and who could go to school where. Still today with the voting rights act being dismantled race is a factor in who can vote and who has to show their papers, please.

You may have noticed that it didn’t matter how light your skin or your lineage, race is decided in the halls of power. The categories of race do a poor job describing the human and a great job describing the lines of power and privilege. Ask one of the 6.5 million american who are mixed race, 1.8 million alone who identify as black and white–we are a living testament to the fuzzy lines that mark race in America. The math doesn’t make sense. What looks like a solid divide in those check boxes on forms is a wide foggy boundary, a gray area that mixed-race people navigate every time you ask them the question.

The journey is not over. America is marching slowly but surely to a tipping point where white will no longer be the majority. You can bet that the construct of whiteness will make us pry privilege from it’s cold dead hands. Like all times when race was used as a tool to divide working class and poor whites and black, we see racial rhetoric and racial tension on the rise. We see overt systemic racism in all our systems. We see anger between people in the streets.

We African Americans with light skin, brown skin, mixed race, never-white-enough-skin walk the front lines in these battles. We are the lie of race being a real way to divide people. We are the truth of the race that is human, all of us mixed from our birth in the womb of Africa. We are victimized by systems of privilege that clearly label us non white. We are the witnesses to all the ugliness too scared to confront our darker sisters and brothers. We sit in the rooms when they think we’re not there, forced to confront the casual racism that happens behind closed doors. We are questioned by both sides–papers, please–as we navigate the borderland between the poles of black and white.

We, too, are black.

So for my black brothers and sisters, and others from different mothers in the struggle, don’t forget that racism is a tricky animal that takes more than one shape. Don’t assume that life light-skinned is carefree. We, too experience racism, which can be compounded when the people who understand that pain best won’t acknowledge it might be happening. To dismiss our lived experiences with race is to perpetuate a divisiveness that is part of our painful past, but not bred in our blood. Race is a recent construct, but all people of the African diaspora share deeper, older roots, roots that matter to all of us, no matter where we landed or what shade we bore. We are family, and we need to be…..and you know, it’s never a good look when your charges of racism are summarily dismissed just because of the color of your skin.

To our white allies, respect our right to self identify. Respect our right to be black. Judging my blackness by my shade ignores the long and complex history of race, and my lived realities of which you are wholley unaware. If you want to ask the question, do it with respect and listen with an open mind, not a snap answer.

Dear Starbucks, this counting exercise definitely didn’t help…like at all

And to America, race isn’t going anywhere. Seeing systemic racism isn’t enough. We need the political and social will to make fundamental changes to how we treat each other in the halls of power, not just in the ~~Starbucks~~ streets. As long as systemic practices reproduce racism, it will always be with us, no matter how many of us wish it away. Having an uncomfortable conversation isn’t enough; We need to act in ways that dismantle racism at its core.

There are no easy answers, and there isn’t one way. Culture is complex–ask one of us, we know. We definitely do not have all the answers but we stand in challenge to race as usual. We live past the coming tipping point We don’t know what lies ahead to end racism, but those of us in the fog are finding a way to move forward, ever forward.

Tag: black

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