The American Race

Reinventing The Black Racial Wheel

According to this very fresh piece of NPR reporting,  the "black is beautiful" Negritude consciousness movement building just below the radar in parts of Latin America has a new beachhead, especially for teens and young adults: Reggaeton.

What's interesting to me is that "blackness" infused in this very popular fusion of dancehall reggae, rap/hiphop and several Latin styles could very well be a bridge to would be Afro-Latinos in the United States. Barely 3% of US Latinos identify themselves as black, despite the fact that a great many more would appear to be of at least as much African descent as the average self-identified black American.

Puerto Rican reggaeton star Tego Calderon

challenges Latinos' black "unconsciousness"

God knows Latin America needs to come to terms with this truth: African heritage is the third leg of their racial/cultural stool. One speaker in the story tells of confronting a "black" Dominican policeman standing near the border with Haiti holding a big stick "to beat the blacks" who might be crossing the border. The confronted with the truth that if he was there to beat blacks he should start with himself, he insisted that he wasn't black, he was Dominican.

This denial, a clear inheritance of the Spanish colonial past, is the basis for a pernicious intranational/intraethnic racism in many Latin American societies. The further away you are from "pure" white, or the closer you are to Afro or Indio, the lower your class of citizenship.

The piece suggests black consciousness will deliver Afro-Latinos from their oppression. But going through the looking glass to emerge somewhere in 1969, at the start of the black consciousness/black power movement here, will not bring the true healing that is needed. And while it could have a strategic political impact in some Latin countries, I don't think it actually plays to the US Latino political reality.

As I've said many times, nobody comes here from Latin America to be part of a racial minority group, especially not the black racial minority group. It's one thing to wake up in, say, the Dominican Republic, realize that the vast majority of your countrymen are a shade of brown, not pink, and rethink your aspiration toward whiteness.  It's quite another to wake up in the still 74% white US and be persuaded to discard your identification of upward mobility with whiteness.

Moreover, it's just plain dumb. The axle of the wheel being reinvented is the 19th century "one drop rule". It's a formulation that I believe will not (and does not deserve to) make it past 2020. Afro-Latinos in America, like the rest of us, are going to have to find their way past this false black-white dichotomy, to land in a place where culture, nationality and ethnicity exist in separate planes and so-called race is beside the point.

They Might Be Black . . .

Full disclosure: in recent months, since a little before the Pennsylvania primary, I've become one of the loyal viewers helping  MSNBC's Countdown With Keith Olberman trounce Fox News in the ratings.

The angle (as a former journalism prof I'll reserve judgment on calling it a slant) from this segment from last night is one reason why.

Lookout for the money quote, at about 3:34 into the piece:

Is that what this is? It's not that the Republicans want you to be afraid of Barack and Michelle Obama because the might be terrorists, but because they might be black.

What grabbed me was this: the incipient Obama backlash, casting about for a cover story for racial resentment, may be "shocked, shocked" to report that American pop culture has decidedly browned all of a sudden, and that Obama and his wife may be adepts.

Where were they when Budweiser made the world safe for average white guys (like the ones putatively still torching for Hillary Clinton) showing each other love with an ostentatious "whasssuuuup" in public places?

(Better yet, where were they when my book on this new reality, American Skin, hit the stores in 2002?)

I'm not going to dwell on this here. But it's hilarious watching Obama totally confuse the incumbent political zeitgeist—especially as reflected on Fox—just by being who he is.  But it is also funny, in a sad way, to see how willfully some folks want to cling to ignorance of the truth about who we  have become  in the last 20 years, and who indeed we have always been.

Black To The Future, Again

What more can be said about two African-Americans coaching in the Superbowl this Sunday?

Well, maybe I’m dreaming, but it feels like a party like it’s 1999— and not just because Prince is doing the half-time show.

Really, it’s more like the mid-90’s, when it began to seem normal for iconic black firsts to happen every other day. I won’t bore you with the dates (it’s Friday and I don’t feel like fact-checking, anyway). Let me just drop some celebrity first names: Tiger, Venus,  Vanessa, Michael (Jordan, of course) and Colin.

And a few Fortune brand names kept up by black CEOs: American Express (Ken Chenault), Time-Warner (Richard Parsons) Merrill Lynch (Stanley O’Neal).

And Oprah.

Of course, this is America and things change, fast. Except for occasionally popping up to swat Kevin Bacon’s waste basket shots in Hanes commercials, nobody has seen Michael this century. A few other brothers who reached the pinnacle of major greasy corporate poles quickly slipped into ignominy or, worse, anonymity.

Today, even black columnists say there's only one problem with a white player  getting his third consecutive National Basketball Association “Most Valuable Player” award this season: another white player may  deserve it more!

Ok, Steve Nash is really Canadian and Dirk Nowitzki is from Germany. But you know what I mean (and Nash has my vote!)

In Rock We Hope

Hats high to Rob Fields at "Marketing Pop Culture" for bringing the value to the already meaty New York Times piece ("Truly Indie Fans" 1.29.07)  on a new wave of black rockers.

For me, Rob's last graf says it all.

What the White People Saw

I'm psyched to hear and read all the hype heaping on Terence Howard with the opening of "Hustle & Flow" this weekend.

But I'm freaked about how the only reference the mainline reviewers have made to Howard's previous work is the movie "Crash". Ironically, I never heard of "Crash". But I was mesmerized by Howard's performance in the excellent 1999 film that nominally starred Taye Diggs. Howard was more than first among equals in a rock solid supporting cast including Nia Long, Sanaa Lathan, Harold Perrineau Jr. and Morris Chesnut. Armed with lethal foreknowlege that no other character has, he manipulates the reuion of old friends for a wedding like a master puppetter.

I wasn't immediately wild about "The Best Man," but I could not get his work out of my mind. The film has since grown well with me, standing out as brilliantly as it does from the horde of run of the mill "black flicks" that closely followed it into the new century.

More another time on this genre of movies in which all the characters, but none of their conflicts, are black.

Does the "Best Man" amnesia reflect the truth about just what films white people—or media crits as proxies for white audiences—have seen? Even black journalists, like  Lola Ogunnaike in the New York Times  and Ed Gordon on NPR's News & Notes seem to have slept on it.

All the stories I've noticed insist that with "Hustle," with  it's Sundance and Jon Singleton backstory  and hip-hope bona fides, will put Howard on the map of the universe, as known to white people. The arbitrary nature of  such official "crossover" declarations really irk's me. I mean, how do they know what everyone knows?

Oh well. Congrats in advance to you, Terrence, and all associated.

And if half the hype on "Hustle" pans out, we can all one-up our film buff friends with... "Terrence? Man, I knew he was coming six years ago...didn't you see "The Best Man"?

Will "Trollz" Chase The "Bratz"?

At times, the competition for the attention of preadolescent girls looks like something of a downward spiral on the moral values - not to mention taste - front. After MGA Entertainment swept the field with its naughty-almost-nasty Bratz in 2001, Mattel responded last year with a trampy line of its own famous dolls, called My Scene Barbie. Now, Mr. Heyward and company are entering the fray with a multimedia product that is not exactly wholesome but that steps back from the sexual precipice.

--------from “New Babes In Toyland” (NYT 1-4-05) about the new “Trollz” line of fashion dolls.

Ok, it’s hard to dodge the trampy slap on “Bratz”. But that didn't stop Santa from dropping a poster of  Yasmin under the tree for my six-year-old daughter. Face it; there’s no escaping the propaganda of neo-pubescence aimed directly at our girl children’s little psyches. As far as the minimum waist, maximum rack and unnaturally long legs with a bump goes, Barbie is the least of a parent’s worries these days. Even the cartoon good-girls--like Disney’s “Kim Possible” are drawn a little bad. At least one of the three Beverly Hills High hotties on “Totally Spies” (Cartoon Network) get hot and bothered about some guy on every ‘mission’. Yes, one of them is black, but it’s still hard to escape the impression that the world of my brown child’s preadolescent fantasies (yes, they seem to start as early as six these days) belongs to white blondes.

That’s why I’ve always been partial to “Bratz”. Whatever else you can say about their looks they’re not doing anything to keep traditional white girl-ness in vogue. And, as has been widely reported, they’ve been slamming their big wedgie shoes in Barbie’s narrow ass at the cash register for four toy seasons.

So why do we need Trollz?

Los Oldies But Goodies

Live, From Newport Beach, Ca.

A syndicated R&B/Soul oldies radio show is taking requests and making dedications tonight from all over southern California....and for some reason Las Vegas. The host reminds us that, as ever, the most requested song is “Always And Forever,” by Heatwave. The inevitable nuptial first dance anthem makes one jones for a happier time, when pop was merely derived instead of synthesized.

Heatwave, a late-70’s disco-soul group, may represent the average of this late-night audience’s taste. But the standard deviation runs from ‘60’s basement blue light specials like the Dells’ “Stay in My Corner” to Smokey Robinson 2nd (or was it 3rd?) comeback jams like “Agony & Ecstasy” (1975). The longer I listen, the more I risk reliving every agony and ecstasy I’ve had between about 1965 and ........ last Saturday; it's Sade’s torchy “By Your Side”.

Ooooh, ahhhh, and ouch: Now you got me "Goin' In Circles" over Karen C. in 1969 all over again. But I can’t turn it off. That’s primo old-school radio, working me off the clock like WalMart.

But what really gets me are the names, places and shout-outs in between the records.

The OJ Resurrection

Be amazed, but not surprised at the ‘moment’ of the 10th anniversary of the Nicole Brown Simpson murder and its aftermath.
You remember Nicole: the white wife that O.J. was acquitted for killing?
The ‘moment’ may seem to last about 36 million seconds. Then, on or about October 3, 2005, exactly 10 years after the initial acquittal, the media will reach its own verdict: a decade is long enough to really crown it the “trial of the century,” albeit the last century. Court TV is already working the myth of their creator.
And for that O.J. will finally be more than acquitted; he will be completely recycled, certified fit for respectable media .

Years ago last century, I told anyone who’d listen that O.J. didn’t just escape the death chamber. He made off with enough in debased celebrity coinage to keep him in Bruno Magli shoes and on the media menu of less fussy consumers, for life.
O.J., the gift of iconic idolatry that keeps on giving. And to think: until that fateful day in June, '94, we thought we had it all, culturally speaking.