That we all Identity Default to Black. Which is one of the fundamental problems of establishing both equality and equity in Western society.
There was recently a poll of at least 100 people and 93 of them said they identify as Black. Which means that for pollings’ sake and the news article, 93% of people who are able to, or want to, identify as Black.
I teach workshops, classes, etc. and let’s say in a hard polling—-half of my students over the years have been Black/African American, as I’ve worked for very racially specific organizations with essentially Black or African American in the name. There’s nothing wrong with that but I consider it along a continuum. A continuum of progression. Nigger, Negro, Colored, Black, Afro American, African American, Africanist—-a progressive continuum for the past few hundred years.
But one of the challenges I have raised in these rooms—-where it gets very clannish (pun) and pro-Black, and people vent their Black Rage and anti-White sentimentality—-which I would defend is necessary for evolution if vented as an effort towards movement—-is okay?—— now what?
See my grandmother wasn’t Black. She looked light skinned/toffee colored “Black” but she wasn’t. She was actually half Narragansett Native, part White and a smidge Black—-even to regulate her and others to this recipe card divisiveness—-was her leg more White than her Native arm, were her breasts Blackish—-is disgusting but we still use slave/chattel measurements for people.
But I digress…
In that room, several of them, when the men start to rally and stamp and holler and hoot all of their enmity and upset and talk about “Them”, I often, whether teacher or student-participant——raise my hand and ask—-What about my grandmother? She helped raise me, she was instrumental in educating me along with my parents, she was more emotionally detached at first—-she grew up in a very Protestant home, so demonstrative emotions, like hugging and kissing, weren’t deeply expressed, but she changed as she got older, she was also very Patrician in her manners/expectations—-even naming her last child, my mother, Patricia, and she was the first person I came “out” to at 12——asking if I weren’t straight would she love me and she said it didn’t matter.
So when the room gets all pro-Black and such—-I Bring up that I’m not “entirely” by racial recipe card “Black. My grandfather was also from the West Indies but by way of the United Kingdom—-so technically ,he didn’t fall into an Americanized Black either. Though they met in a boarding house in Harlem, I can imagine that some of what they bonded over, my grandparents, was that she was from a middle/upper middle class family from Rhode Island with a full Narragansett father and nearly White mother—-which is why she looked slightly tanned but had long raven hair—-and he from the UK. My aunt cut it, her hair, and it never grew back—-my aunt Shirley seems to have done lots of destructive things like that, including forcing my mother onto a bed and performing an abortion on her when she was 16—-that destruction was her skill for years.
But again, I digress.
My father was from Louisiana, so yeah, he was “Black” but my mother kind of, sorta wasn’t, entirely and she was a shade lighter than my grandmother and several shades lighter than me——her skin translucent sometimes like my grandmother’s.
My father and mother met when he came here for college, he at Pace and her at Baruch, but they weren’t entirely “Black” by some measurements—-simply for being in college. They were also studying things that weren’t of absolute Black cultural focus——political science, psychology, dance and involved in yes, political organizations geared towards Black liberation, but those organizations, the Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army, were on the fringes of “Black Identity” in the 1970s. Many people don’t remember or obviate that through the 1950s and 1960s over 90% of Black Churches refused to host MLK, considering him a race agitator, preferring instead to believe that things would get better, slowly through segregation. Many Blacks still believe that. Not the ones who need to fly on airplanes or have life saving surgeries at good, non-segregated hospitals, or to call the police when someone is breaking into their homes or keeping them prisoner in a basement or serial killing them—-no then, we really don’t want the veil of segregation. Especially when those paychecks and direct deposits hit. Or those school bells ring. Or even fresh, good food makes it way to neighborhoods throughout the country that are mixed—-we don’t want segregation then.
But I digress, yet again……
Social Class
Years later when they married, my parents, and were raising me, I remember my father showing me his American Express card and using it—-a symbol of some sort of capitalism and at the same time crossing a line. Years later after our first co-op, I helped pick out our second home in the Pennsylvania mountains and then years after that, hipped my mother to buying her third home in North Carolina.
I offer this brief real estate history as sort of an overview to the multiple new cars, mink coats, trips, jewelry, duplex apartments and such, that I grew up surrounded by and in. We were never “poor”—-not by what people assign to Black people.
I point this out because sitting with Black folk, this is often where we diverge, and my parents purposefully created this divergence. I was encouraged to read and write (prolifically, start a national business as a teen, travel throughout the city of NY by myself, sit in high class restaurants with them—-it was often easier to have me meet them after work and tag along than find me a babysitter.)
I was also admonished not to eat certain foods with my cousins in their homes when visiting—-to this day I’ve never had scrapple or chitlins——because my parents were trying to I think both break and distinguish me from some “Black” elements. That included education and entrepreneurship. Even as an aside to this day, going through a storage room I keep in Manhattan, full of family furniture and my own stuff, I have hundreds of books from my mother and father’s library.
As a teacher, when on Facebook—-honestly, it’s what I'm looking at in the background of pics and videos—-are there books, is there art on the walls?
(I also note how many Black people are doing what are essentially minstrel acts online——the Black men dressed as women, or singing or dancing——I notice this fulfilling of stereotypes in such a broad cyber way and understand why Black folk and others alike, think these stereotypes of Black folk.)
But again, I digress a bit.
What I do think though, and bring up in workshops and classes, but not too much—-because of Malcolm X——is that it wasn’t Black people who named/nominated themselves as Black people whether in Africa, the UK, or here in the Americas. It was what we designate as White people—-initially the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, etc..
For language sake, say, we were designated the Cunt People. And had centuries of bondage and enslavement as the Cunt People. And then got legally and socially free. And called ourselves the Cunt People, as our enslavers had named us—-would that be psychologically healthy?
See, I’m going to throw out one of my deep dive racial theories here: A lot of the internalized ills of Black people have to do with internalizing being the Cunt People……I mean, Black people. You can’t have hundreds of years of a denigrating label thrown at you and then on Tuesday, after a well attended march, be the GOOD Cunt People. You can’t re-absorb CUNT as a good thing to be labelled. Because that would be a form of self-immolation.
Which is where I think Negro—-eeeeh, not quite—-but certainly Afro, African, Africanist—- comes from—-a way of distancing from the labelling of enslavement and connecting to the origin of being.
But I suspect, the mass defaulting to “Black” sort of swept through the community, the Zeitgeist, the media, the world, and Black stuck like tar on well….people.
My Malcolm X point?
I often would think this in meetings, where there would be dozen of men, yes, some disenfranchised, where I would ask my grandmother question——how do I align to simply ONE culture/racial construct when I was raised, and raised well, by many, including the one “we” are opposing?
I’ll tell you why I minimized my attendance, allegiance, and even friendships with those organizations—-they had no answer.
Hold that thought.
It is difficult for Black people to reconcile (and I suspect White people, as well) how deeply entangled (and inextricably entwined with one another we are—-biologically). See Race was designed by originally 13 rich gentried colonists to disperse (thousands of people) a hundred years worth of peasants/indentured slaves here in America. Which is why we count 400+ years from the 1600s when the first “slaves” were brought here—-before that we were all mixed and mixing, as the gentried and the indentured servants—-who were free people but with really long employment contracts. We were separated by class—-from the 100+ years we all existed here in America, until the 1600s. The problem was there were so many of the indentured class that they were essentially pushing for what we know today as unions, rights, better wages.
How to divide a mob?
You favor one group over another by designating skin color is a difference in humanity/human rights. Very simply the 13 gentried rich men said that if you were “White” you could own, and kill darker folk——it being illegal for the darker folk to own, sell or kill lighter folk.
Which immediately broke up the union.
And immediately put one at odds with the other and therefore allowed them to legally ship in other darker folk and designated them as less than and chattel. You align people to your human rights violation by not violating ALL of them—-and skin/melanin was a great demarcation to use to separate. Honestly, if you were on the privileged/favored side would you risk your life, your family’s lives, your standing in the community, your relationships….for them? Race is about subjugation of Black people in America but it is also about the underpinning of survival, prosperity, profit and social acceptance for White people.
Most folk don’t know the origin of RACE (which is about demarcation/separation or its metastasizing into racism (which is more about capitalism and class)—-but there you go. It was a way of delineating social classes and controlling them all, by rich folks. The rest has simply been reinforcement of that mentality and rule through law, legal-social and financial controls.
Race, and its utility racism, are not a ephemeral gas or toxic sludge—-it is more like a lasagna. Layers upon layers upon layers—-which is why it seems endlessly deep, when say voting rights are established, there’s a clean water issue, or a job issue or a school issue—-each year for hundreds of years—-first the gentry, and then the privileged individuals, labelled White—-had to fix or obviate or truncate or defeat some opposition to their rule/control—-ultimately positionality. Race is about which position you’re in within the larger construct of society, which is why race is a social construct(-ed barrier).
America’s greatest weakness and weapon is one in the same—-the legal system.
(Which takes us to the racially ironic, when the Chinese, brought here as indentured servants, took the whole country to task/court—-to the Supreme Court—-because they’re White (skinned)——right? So they shouldn’t be designated to rights of the non-Whites, right? Then the Irish, Jews and Italians and others started seeping through Ellis Island, but American history digresses. Oh, the Supreme Court shot down the Asians essentially saying the yellowish hue to their flesh made them Yellow people—-and now you see the careful, careful meticulous slicing of hairs or flesh-melanin done by the legal system to justify it’s dominant class.)
Soooooooooooooooooo the Black consensus decision is that I digress or self-label based upon——-lasagna?
Bluntly, I’ve often said, in public, in forums, in groups—-it’s both stupid and deeply masochistic, to call yourself what your enslaver called you. (The Cunt People.) Point One.
As a second point—-there might seem to be nomination power in it—-I am Black and proud——but Black is the code word for “discrimination, party of one, please”——so why hold it? Why hold so fervently to it?
And a third point, just to get the soup boiling—-when did race—-if we choose to abide by it—-become static? Who told you or others that they could concretize millions, tens of millions, billions of people, just because the person next to the thing, previous generations before them had? Have you ever THOUGHT about race? What it means to racialize people? It means you’re agreeing to racism. Which is why it is so pernicious—-because we all keep making deposits into its account.
And broadening that to the microscopic of me—-who is not entirely “Black”, why accept that?
Why do we accept Blackness?
And maybe even more darkly, why haven’t we learned, say, from the Nazis towards—-nearly everyone else—-if you accept someone’s negative nomination of you then you change intrinsically in their eyes, definitely, but in your own, subtlety. Noting that what the Jews were called by the Nazis, is not in their self nomination, you ever notice that? And the Nazis called them lots of things, words, derogatory meanings—-Cunt People—-they called them essentially that for YEARS. Decades. Soon as that situation was over, Jews were free, and they said “Oh, no, never again.”
Never again takes on a deeper, more complex meaning, yes?
(I would offer that Black people, pointedly in America—-have no “Never again.”—-no stance of refusal to ever be subjugated or oppressed again. We have more a stance of—-”you know that was wrong, right? Don’t do that again——please. It hurts.” We appeal to the morality of our oppressor, and sometimes to the legal constraints, and are often dissatisfied with its’ outcome.)
My Malcom X point—-and lesson from his death—-shot by a Black man, on orders from a Black man on further orders from a Black leader, who was taught by a White man ((prophet?)——Know your history, kids) is that even the disenfranchised will rally against their own to maintain the status quo of say lasagna.
See those, up the Nation of Islam ladder, not including Fardd who was long gone by then, who ordered Malcolm killed, had a vested interest in Blacks remaining….well, Black—-and directedly pointed at opposing or in oppositionality to Whiteness, as a person, construct, lasagna. I offer this as my own protection—-when in those rooms, 6′2, handsome, over 200lbs.—-I suddenly felt small, vulnerable, because I saw the cognitive dissonance that I had just raised in 50+ Black men’s minds.
(cognitive dissonance-the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.)
What I was doing, in my deep question about Identity reconciliation—-was I was cutting through the lasagna to the pan, glass for some, metal for others, at the base.
Suddenly all the Black folk, realized that as they were yelling and rallying against White oppression as a false modality imposed—-they were standing in a false modality of Blackness and a falser modality, a social construct, of the concept of racialization, at all.
Oh, shit. (I’m sure Malcolm had a similar thought when he too realized he’d poked the cognitive dissonance of Black folk…and the Nation of Islam.)
They looked at me with an enmity that I firmly believe got Malcolm gunned down.
(What Malcolm is the lesson of, much as I’m sure Jews, particularly learned about formerly friendly, loving German neighbors—-is that people are well——people…human. And if you poke at their beliefs that they have predicated their social, religious, or even racially constructed beliefs upon—-their identity—-they tend to not quietly ponder and reshape their beliefs, investigate history and casually imposed thought forms…..they tend to kill the questioner. Even the Black ones. Even other Black designated folk.)
So what I believe is the most misunderstood thing about Black people is that they are one, free and two, though there was a 93% waving poll, know who they are.
In fact, I’ll press farther, designating yourself as Black is essentially making fashionable jewelry out of your chains and calling yourself a high end Vogue model. I mean, if I were to stretch to say some White folks sitting in a room, who know history—-I bet a good chuckle would be garnered from the fact that they can trace designating a people Black and we still calling ourselves that. Perhaps a Jew or two in the room talking about the psychology of shedding your oppressors nominations to change psychological esteem as a people.
So then what should they call themselves, and what do I call myself?
I often offer to students that if you want to dismantle racism, a brick at a time—-start checking Other on all forms—-we’re supporting racialization—-a false construct when we self-designate to constructed racial boxes. Here in NYC they’re starting to include in health papers cultures/ethnicities——where are you from as identity (ethnicity)—-which is truer and more honest, to identity.
As for myself, I see it as evolution, dropping the repressive imposed labels and designations. Yes, I know, I see, I feel how YOU (society) designate me. That I cannot “change” beyond my own skin—-in your limited projection. (Another construct.) But I can see myself differently….and honestly that sort of parallaxing self-view, imposed directly by my parents, grand and great, has shifted how I see ALL people. I understand the layer of White people in the lasagna, their confusion and biases and learned helplessness to dismantling the pasta and sauce and cheeses, of discriminatory hegemony they are baked into.
To those who will detract because they believe the internet or social media is simply binary Agree or Disagree—-one, you’re missing the evolutionary availability to grow from discourse with others (me) and ideas that might be different or even contrary to your own. If my ideas and thoughts upset you—-what I offer in workshops and classes is to do a Systems Check:
- Can you still feel all of your nether regions—-crotch, groin, anus?
- What about your nipples—still attached?
- Check your phone, have there been any alerts that after reading this several of your nearest and dearest have been executed?
Then this is a thought, a series of thoughts, an assemblage of thoughts as theories and opinions that you may not have but they cannot harm you. Unless your assembled thought system, belief system, racial ideas——are built on sand, fragile. If this little diddy can strike you so hard that you’re apoplectic then that says something about you and your beliefs. Instead it should be maybe like a beacon, a flashing light, some ways ahead of your thoughts, on the highway of thinking. You might consider your own thinking like a car, moving towards the light, considering other lights on the highway. But please, don’t consider it an attack. I’ll think less of you for not…thinking, evolving.
Because by letting go of “Black” I had to do something, something (r)evolutionary—-that I can’t take total credit for—-as I credit Toni Morrison with defining Africanist, she also posed the question I have worked at assiduously in the past, and will throughout my lifetime: Without race, who are YOU?
Race, racism, I have come to know is a mental illness. A neurosis, an anxiety, a psychic transmission of paranoia, xenophobia, anxiety at the Other. (And yes, as the speaker, I am implying about many others, as the audience, listeners, target, to infer, what I suspect about their mental state. Which completely upends the idea of what is misunderstood about Black folk, huh? Now you and I are tasked with doing some work, really applying thinking skills, critical thinking, transformative thinking to the very foundational idea of race……..because of my grandmother, Dorothy, she who taught me to think before I simply believed.)
Ms. Morrison posed it to White people, but in this case, in my life, in society, I must pose it to myself and answer it. Who am I if I am not conveniently able to shroud myself in the false construct of race, of Blackness?
I would then challenge you to sit with yourself—-not with someone else suggesting how to construct race, a hegemonic idea, and ask yourself—-Where did I get this belief in race? How does it service me?
Don’t defend it, don’t clean it up, simply chart it and you’ll find the origin of your evolution and then in that charting, drawing that line that may zig or zag, you’ll see—-that it can expand farther because you’ll see the hand(s) holding the figurative pen, creating the lines.
I’m in the 7% who have some other ideas about their identity then, yes? Maybe they weren’t excluding in a rejection sense “Blackness” those 7 folk who said no, that doesn’t fit me. Maybe they were consciously simply including their grandmothers in their lips, eyes, mind, histories, skin color, thoughts as I do every time I look into a mirror?
#KylePhoenix
#TheKylePhoenixShow
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