Oppression, Racism and Other Happy Things

[Ebony]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., Nethilia De Lobo <nethilia at y...> wrote:
> Hmm...
I actually had a friend whose mother would not buy her
> white Barbie dolls because she hated white people and
> couldn't understand how I could own so many dolls of
> various races. 

While I don't agree with the sentiment and certainly not 
the "hatred", I understand what's behind the doll thing.  I had a 
long post to explain this... but I closed the window and lost it.  
For best results, the following essays are highly 
recommended:  "Migratory Subjectivities" by Carol Boyce Davies and 
*especially* "Material Girl:  The Effects of Postmodern Culture" by 
Susan Bordo.

While I own dolls of all different races and always have, I do 
understand how important it is to raise a girl with a healthy self-
image.  That means not only giving her toys of varying skin tones, 
but also of various body shapes.  After all, who looks like Barbie in 
RL?

I get along with white people better than I
> ever have black people, mainly because they don't give
> a damn that I'm smart and don't aspire to spend my
> life complaining about how Da Man keeps me down and
> then go pick up my welfare check. 


When I was younger, I used to secretly think this way... that's why 
I'm glad I had a Reality Check:  1)  I became a teenager/young adult 
and began to work and learn within mainstream society, in situations 
where I was the "only" or "one of the few" and 2) I attended a 
historically black university. 

This taught me two things.  First, the idea that if you are "smart" 
and black doesn't mean that you are going to be automatically 
embraced by all of mainstream white society or feel very comfortable 
there. Even if you desperately want to.  Even if you ingratiate 
yourself to the point of looking rather foolish.  Whenever you forget 
what you look like, seems like there's *always* that person behind 
the register or in the police car or in some other power position 
there to remind you.  Always.  After a while, I've found many middle-
to-upper class blacks get tired of that sort of "yanking".  We 
pretend it doesn't exist a lot, but it does.

Second, there are plenty of blacks who value education and learning.  
I met a lot of them from all over the nation and the world at my 
university.  This did wonders for my self-image.  I love my undergrad 
institution, support it, and am encouraging interested students here 
in Detroit to attend FAMU and schools like it.

I wanted to share my experiences this summer traveling to the UK with 
a bunch of American college students from all over the country, but 
the post got eaten!  Suffice it to say that I plan to write a series 
of essays from the notes I took.  It was *definitely* an eye-opener.  
Summary:  Compared to the UK and the bit I saw of France, America is 
interesting.  To say the least.

> Sometimes I think
> people delibrately keep themselves down--there's a
> girl who I grew up with, who saw her mother chose
> drugs over her family (the youngest was born with
> crack in his system), and slept around (her 8 children
> all have about 6 different fathers (I shouldn't talk,
> as me and my sisters have different fathers and me and
> my brother have different mothers, but we're spaced
> out over about 18 years)), and yet, instead of
> accepting her scholarship and going to college, she
> lays around the house, with different men and smokes
> all day. And she's two years younger than me. 

I think that this description is not symptomatic of race per se; it's 
symptomatic of class.  My father's parents and sibs all fit the above 
description... my paternal aunts had babies too soon and my uncles 
are in and out of prison.  My mother's parents were of a different 
class... her sister and brother went to Michigan and Stanford 
respectively.  My grandparents own quite a bit of property.  My 
grandfather owned his own business.  So in my grandparents' eyes, 
although they loved my dad my mother married "down"... and my 
grandmother is always warning my sisters and I not to let history 
repeat itself.

According to the latest census, the majority of African Americans in 
2000 were in the working to lower middle class, not below the poverty 
line.

I was going to end my e-mail here.  But I guess the next question 
would be, "Then why do blacks want reparations?"  The answer for me 
would be that not all of us do... last month the topic came up at a 
family gathering and the consensus was twofold (translating!  :-D):  
1)  If you're sitting on your behind waiting on a check, then you're 
going to be waiting for a very long time.  2) Reparations would be a 
denigration of what our ancestors suffered.  There isn't enough money 
to pay for the havoc the slave trade wrought not only in the 
Americas, but in Africa.

The two arguments against reparations that do annoy me are 
these:  "There are no slaves alive" and the related "I never enslaved 
anyone."  The first shows that the person has no knowledge of 
American history between the end of Reconstruction and WWII and the 
LEGAL STATUS of blacks during this time period.  It isn't like the 
those formerly enslaved could have actually walked into a U.S. court 
between 1880 and 1939 and demanded compensation for their labor... 
the Jim Crow South was quite a bit like apartheid in South Africa. 

And then the "I never enslaved anyone" thing makes my teeth hurt.  I 
never picked any cotton or chopped sugar cane, either, but the fact 
remains that the class structures that are in place in America today 
are indicative of what went on in the past.  My great-grandfather 
owned his own business in Alabama and it was torched to the ground... 
my grandfather owned his own business and it was swindled away from 
him on trumped-up charges.  There was no legal forum where they could 
ask for a redress of grievances.  Tell me, how many times *do* people 
have to start over?

Who cares about money?  I'd much rather mainstream America shake off 
its collective amnesia that seems to be getting worse by the year.  I 
laugh a lot when I read or watch the news.  It seems as if the media 
wants people to eventually think that the "perpetual urban 
underclass" was teleported here from another planet.  To expect a 
people devastated to recover from 400 years' worth of collective 
blows in 40 short years is sheer arrogance.  All things considered, I 
find it surprising that we've been able to survive, thrive and 
contribute to the American framework in the way that we have.

To finish this off, I think that some want reparations because 
there's this feeling that *something* has to be done en masse within 
black America.  From 1619 to 1865, we looked toward freedom... from 
1865 to 1964 we looked towards being regarded as citizens of the 
United States with full constitutional rights.  Since 1964 you've had 
the desolation of the urban centers via drugs... and in the wake of 
drugs, you have poverty and despair.  (This is why hip-hop is not a 
deliquent art form... it's a dystopian one!  What kind of music do 
you expect these kids to create, folk tunes about the blooming 
countryside?  Please!)  The reparations movement is highly misguided 
IMO, but at least it is acknowledging that things are still not as 
they ought to be.

Nethilia, I look around my family and my old neighborhood and I get 
frustrated sometimes too.  Be encouraged.  And don't give up on those 
you know who are like that... they need someone like you around more 
than you know.

--Ebony AKA AngieJ