Jesse Williams & The Protection of Black American Culture

“Just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real” - Jessie Williams

Jesse Williams delivered an awe inspiring speech on Sunday night at this year’s BET Awards. He touched on a variety of issues that plague the Black community from White supremacy to patriarchy, to appropriation. He captured eloquently and passionately how this country has mined both our intellectual and cultural experiences for profit simultaneously failing to protect us. While I deeply appreciated the shout out to Black women, I wanted to praise Jesse for highlighting that Black American culture is indeed a tangible thing.

With the emergence of social media we have seen the Black Lives Matter movement expand globally. Born after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. While BLM is not the only organization bringing awareness to the global phenomenon of anti-Blackness, it is a phrase that has proven to be controversial for many reasons.  “Black Lives Matter” became a political statement, the idea of calling oneself Black became political also, but for Black Americans, or traditionally called African Americans, Black is far from political, and it represents a cultural connectedness the descendant of North American African slaves can only experience.

 Descendants of chattel slavery in the U.S. are unique because of the sheer brutality and terror that was inflicted on its victims. Black Americans were stripped of all cultural connections to their native lands and given a new religion and customs. Since our forced transport here, we have managed to take virtually nothing and create something new, inventive, and life changing. When we were left with scraps of pork and produce we created Soul Food that is still time honored in our families today. From the coded Negro spirituals that aided our ancestors in sending messages via song, proved to be origins of Gospel, Blues, Jazz, Rock & Roll, R&B, Disco, and Hip Hop.

The breath taking creativity of the Harlem Renaissance gave birth to the beatnik style of the 50s and 60s which later gave way to Hippie culture which is present day hipster culture. Jesse Williams articulated the frustration of serving as the cultural bread and butter in a land that attempts to erase us at every front. The Civil Rights movement set the foundational blueprint for many groups to find their own liberation. Yet we as a people are still being brutalized, victimized, and marginalized every day.

Today, the United States has become a melting pot of cultural identities. The immigration has muddled the fine line between slave descendant and American born Africans. Stating that Black is a strictly political construct erases the numerous scientific, cultural, and economic contributions that Black Americans have made through the decades. African Americans (1st or 2nd generation African immigrants born here in the states) have their individual tribal or national traditions to fall back on, West Indians and Caribbeans have a similarly prideful traditions to illustrate, Black Americans are left with decades of attempts to shame us for being Black.

In 2016 we see the mainstream emergence of nail art, colorful hair, colored contacts, and plastic surgery that grow non-Black women’s lips and butts, long standing identifiers to what we previously called ghetto, is now trendy and fresh.

“We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo. And we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment, like oil, black gold. Ghettoizing and demeaning our creations, then stealing them, gentrifying our genius, and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit.” -Jesse Williams

They told us we were Niggers, then they called us Negroes, to later call us colored, we decided that we were Black. That you could strip us of everything that makes us whole and complete but we will prevail with something of our own creation. Hip Hop is global, it touches every corner of the world and it started right here in the United States among Black Americans trying to articulate the pain of being a creative genius in a country that refuses to recognize your collective greatness unless your skin is devoid of color.

Do not tell us Black is for everybody, when I can see through my family history, and the collective history of our ancestors that Black was all we had. Black was never political, it was proclamation of a people telling the world, you don’t get to tell us who we are, we get to tell you who we became. Thank you Jesse for articulating these thoughts so beautifully. Someone needed to say it. 

Numbed Blackness

This morning I walked past a crime scene. I paused for a second while crossing the street with my daughter to take in what was going on. News cameras already on the scene it didn’t take long before I realized that I was standing on the outskirts of a murder investigation. I got the all too familiar chill up my spine and said a small prayer, hoping it wasn’t someone I know. My daughter of course sensing the energy of the moment asked me, “What happen?” I could only reply, “I don’t know but it isn’t good.” Death comes and goes in our life. We see it everyday in the media, we know it’s an inevitable part of life, and we know we all will come face to face with that dark angel eventually. Even with knowing all this, tragedy doesn’t come easy.

I tried to push that dark scene to the back of my mind and push through my day, but in the midst of a silly argument with a loved one a text message came through from my cousin informing me a close friend had died. We spoke his name so frequently and often, the news just didn’t seem real. I swore she was lying, swore she was mistaken, but even worse I knew before she said it that I had seen the police standing solemnly over his body this morning. I knew I had been on the scene of a double homicide that was circulating on my Facebook newsfeed with two nameless victims. This one had a name, and this time it was someone I had met and shook hands with before. This time, my family was asking the frequently repeated question “Why him, why did it have to be him?”

This was not the first death and unfortunately I’m sure it won’t be the last. There are many boys/men who made me laugh, comforted me on late night phone calls, pissed me off, and expressed unrequited affection that would exit this realm far too violently and far too young. In the last 10 years I’ve lost friends, family, or acquaintances in a variety of different ways. Drug overdose, motorcycle accidents, murder victims, suicide, and diabetes. The single most devastating fact of all of this is my experience is typical. It is just as much of the Black experience as family BBQs and soul train lines. Untimely deaths are normal in our community, so much so that we’ve become numb to them.

While sitting at my desk in my cubicle, I began to cry, I wanted to leave, to take a step back and get a chance to breath. Although I wasn’t close to this young man, my family was and they were in pain so therefore I was in pain. I wanted to take the rest of the day off to go and sit with her. To hug her and tell her everything would be ok, or more importantly not say anything at all and let her just vent her frustrations. But I was dead in the middle of my workday, and this tragedy was not close enough to me to justify a hasty exit. I had to stay and finish out the workday. How could I explain to my superiors the heaviness of Black death.

How do I explain that the same day Jamar Clark’s murderers were declared innocent, that  two separate loved ones would have to deal with the weight of accepting the death of a close friend or lover? How can I tell her how their pain ultimately affected me, and made me feel a sense of loss and hopelessness? How do I express that not only are my brothers dying at the hands of police but also at the hands of my brothers?

Death is so familiar to my community, all across this country, that we tuck its effects neatly in our back pockets. We deal with it in public as passively as we shoo away a wandering fly. We drown our sorrows in drugs and alcohol to prevent from facing the reality that on any given day it could be our brothers, uncles, fathers, cousins, sisters, mothers, or friend lying on that sidewalk with a sheet covering them. We are literally numb to the most brutal parts of life, because we have to be. I have to commute an hour and half to work tomorrow and still put in my best effort when I get there. I have to check on my loved ones via text to make sure the weight they’re carrying isn’t too heavy. I have to smile and appear as unaffected as possible. Not because I don’t feel or can’t grieve but because life does not mourn fallen Black soldiers. We have to create that space when we have time, and even then we need to make it brief.

I will say prayers for both brothers who were lost today. Both whose lives happened to touch two people on totally opposite sides of my life. I will shed some tears and let my daughter see that emotions are not weak. But I can’t help but wince in pain when I hear my cousin say, “I’m afraid to go to sleep tonight because I don’t want to be alone with the reality that he’s really gone, he’s gone and they took him from me.”

(As written March 30, 2016)