Kyle Phoenix Answers: African-Americans: How do black people feel about Quentin Tarantino "blacking it up" when he's talking to black people?

Historically, particularly in entertainment, there are artists who through association and creative development, cross or race cross, and are “acceptable” or pulled into Black orbit and acceptance. Marlon Brando, Shelly Winters, many British artists—-Amy Winehouse, because they are authentic or oddball in a way that is authentic. What Black people are measuring when we look at White people is transparency and authenticity. Can we trust you? We often quiz each other on other White people as good, okay, problematic. There’s a whole sub-communication going on about White throughout POC.

A fellow student asked me about Pulp Fiction several years ago, worried that he was White and was aligning to a deeper racism by so thoroughly enjoying the film. I had enjoyed it. But he was very specific about how the rampant use of the word nigger and the social and ideological issues of race and class being problematic, putting him at a dissonance to enjoying the form but concerned about the enjoyment of such a form. He was also worried about how I would perceive him as he was White.

At a certain point, a certain sphere of people, Black people we see art, authenticity—-did you get it right? Frank Sinatra in The Man With the Golden Arm. It’s no coincidence that the intersection of jazz/music—-emotionality art—-is where we find and accept White people who are truly transparent, and again, authentic.

Quentin is an oddball. Not in a bad way. But you can see he’s a brainiac, he’s not a classically handsome man, he grew up poor, he immersed himself in shitty video store clerking job and absorbed it as autodidact education in filmmaking then hustled his way to success. He even has an absentia father who showed up when he hit it big. He’s the epitome of a hustling nigger. Or better yet someone who but for melanin has experienced life similar to a Black man in America. Black people can see that authenticity, probably more in person but definitely in his films.

My personal favorite is Jackie Brown. I relate too much to Jackie Brown and I have vague memories of Pam Grier in her first heyday and she looks like family members. I would say it’s one of my Top 10 films, if not in the 5. But what Tarantino did was he got what it means to be a Jackie brown, twisting it from Elmore Leonard’s original male, White character into the struggle of a Black woman—-having to negotiate a life of good, bad and no choices. Black people know that Jackie Brown, feel that Jackie Brown. So when language is tossed around, we know what would authentically flow in those Black people. We also know, because Street Life is layered into the Black American Experience know that world is not sanitized of complex usages of words, phrases, context, and meaning.

So when we see a film created by a White guy that so deftly pulls that all together, we recognize real. He gets it. He may be lighter skinned than us but he knows some of the essences of those worlds and therefore of Black people through not just observation. This is what White people don’t understand—-we can tell which one of you are authentic and not. We often politely don’t even bother to entertain it (cough—-SuperBowl Justin Timberlake cough what the fuck was that whole Prince thing—-I didn’t even watch it once I saw a curtain with an image. I didn’t watch it because I respect prince too much to entertain some tomfoolery.) because there’s appropriation and then there’s authenticity.

Yes, some White people have earned and get a pass. I would also think other Black people, like we commonly pass along validation of good or bad, help to validate him as okay. So if Samuel L. Jackson who will not tolerate a motherfucker and Pam Grier who will hurt a motherfucker, say he’s a cool, living, real motherfucker—-he’s good.

He might be problematic in a racialized context but he’s invited to the party and we’re not going to freak out when he uses the word nigger because we’re going to know that he knows context, tone, a situation that dictate the meaning of the word. Which is very interesting because there aren’t many English words that are so flexible to be both loving, damning and inflammatory. The word nigger is a lot of the appellation or questionability around his identity, creativity, etc..

Smile, Kyle
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White People Are Ruining Racism! by Kyle Phoenix

I'll start out by saying that intermittently I don't watch television for long stretches of time, like a year or two.  Then I'll be stuck somewhere or on a long summer vacation or visiting family and stuck in a guest room somewhere....and I'll screen the televised landscape.  I abstain from TV basically because it warps reality and that warping changes the morality and perspectives of the watchers.  Some television is conscious to try and not have that warping effect but it's a very narrow bandwidth, particularly as there are now hundreds of channels available.  To that point, so much availability means that people with the resources and access to be on television will be and that invariably means within a Western context---more White people.

The secret people of color don't tell White people is that we have two thoughts about you.  Like when we're standing and you're talking and as a White person you say something---something so far from left field that we have to decide the value/power distribution in our relationship to figure out whether to correct you or just save this for when we talk to another person of color to tell them---"Do you know what one of them said?"  People of color practice a form of racial duplicity in that we don't always say or explain or tolerate some racialized things internally but blank face, nod politely, "ignore" or deflect some of what is said.  Of course it's not working and really in no way progresses racial progress and understanding but we've had to do it for hundreds of years to insure survival so we'll be doing it for a few more until the numbers balance out a bit better and we can afford to be publicly oppositional whether we're a janitor or a CEO.

However White people (throw up your arms in exasperation---because this is generally how we emotionally feel about them---kind of like seeing your dumb cousin coming up the road with another one of his insane projects made from rats and peanut butter) act out racism in new and inventive ways.  Doing so messes up the social groundwork of getting past this mental illness or neurosis based on skin color.  This new White fueled racism is when a White person does something racist or says something or tweets something or mentions something that happened 15 years ago when they used the word nigger.........and before people of color can get to the site of the racial outbreak to work it out---OTHER White people jump in, identify it and administer repercussions.

Let's start with Paula Deen.  I like the Food Network because I like to cook and eat.  I've seen her show a few times and found her to be funny, a great cook; and after seeing a few interviews with her about having overcome her fear of leaving the house after years of being a shut in by accepting the death of everyone she knew including herself---I thought she had some depth; she was a TV show I could watch whenever the odd time struck.  Then she got deposed in a civil suit and they asked her some questions and it all came out---using the word nigger, Gone With the Wind dinner parties with Black men dressed up as the help and how it looked so nice to her, and the fact that she admitted that there had been a time in her life when she'd been less racially tolerant and enlightened. 

Somewhere in all of this there were TV interviews, accusations, her Food Network show got cancelled and basically there was this push to run her granny ass out of town on a rail.  When I peeked around the edges of it, I realized that lots of natural truths were being ignored and I think her public breakdowns had to do not only with entitlement and privilege assailed but also that she honestly was being honest...and thought that honesty was what was being asked of her.  That honesty is part of her social psyche so she thought she was being "good".  And if I step out on a racial branch I can see how Gone With the Wind could not only be a favorite film of hers, a modality and lifestyle she'd childhood/fantasy want and with monied friends similar to her, access and recreate.  Actually when I heard the bits and pieces and then the clarifications and the further explosion of ire, I thought to myself---honestly---because I like the fun words "What the fuck else do you expect a non-college educated, non-diversity educated, non-married to a Black man, White Southern woman her age to fantasize about as a childhood fairy tale?  Have you seen the fantasy episodes of Designing Women?"

White people fantasies that are time period specific are going to include the dilemma of Black people in America---there's no where for us to time travel to before 1970 that doesn't include overt racism, the word nigger, servitude and an existence legislated largely by the whims of White people.  Which is why there are no time travel movies with Black folk....and the ones that we are in (Star Trek, etc.) we're real careful about prior to 1970.  It's easy to cover up Spock's ears---Uhura was never taken on those away teams----say to 1940's Germany---thought logically her communication skills and social fluency would've helped.

That Imus guy said something about some nappy headed hoes playing basketball and he got busted in the chops and now most recently some Duck Dynasty hillbilly/ZZ Top looking daddy said Black people were happy pre-Civil War.  Taken out of context or with context control, I suppose there were some bright spots of happiness for Black people prior to the Civil War---not at everything and every condition but we made love, basked in sunlight, took a swim, read a book (illegally, sure), had a nice meal, enjoyed farming---there were other human experiences for us beyond just being lashed as slaves and singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot until we uniformly stopped at the signing of the Civil Rights Act.

But my ire at the ire over him and all the foolish fallout---is we forget that until recently we could identify boneheads and assholes and dummies and stupid comments without having to light torches and suspend folk.  Ok, so far we've got an old White woman from the South saying some old White stuff from the South and a hillbilly with a slightly skewed perception of racial history and the overall enjoyment of various people throughout time.  I know---the end of the world as we know it.

Then some chick tweeted about going to Africa and not worrying about getting AIDS then added her lack of worry was over the fact that she wasn't Black, ergo less chance of infection.  She worked in Public Relations and of course got fired so fast that one has to wonder if she was essentially pissed at her job and tweeted this to quit.....and get infamous/famous at the same time.

Yet statistically on the surface her statements are insensitive but in another context, true.  The CDC hasn't launched that worldwide initiative to stop bottle blonde White women from spreading HIV in America nor Africa.  They're the smallest demographic of HIV infected, right after intravenous drug users...another irony.

I keep seeing these continuous racial guffaws, context driven statements, faux pas, hot messes, foot in mouth-ness and I thought okay, this is a great chance for us to say---"ok, s/he said this and in talking to them what they meant or how they meant it was and the way to clarify, understand and rectify that thought and it's proliferation..."

But what's started to happen instead is before we can get a Racial Black (or in a pinch Latino/Asian/Native American) Specialist in there to raise our hands, shake our heads and try to both contextualize this and minister to the folk as an individual and the masses as a whole---White folk jump in and crucify the sonsofbitches.

I mean rabidly.

They cancel shows, pull sponsorship, fire people from decade long employment, run them out of town, burn them in effigy and throw THEIR hands up in abject frustration and disgust.  Think of it like you're Store Security and you catch someone stealing something and you slap the shit out of them.  Then they leave.  And you go on about your day.  While it might frighten the other customers, the Thief hasn't stopped being a Thief---they just got slapped.  What their human inclination to do is is NOT get caught again so their thievery goes underground.

White folk are creating a new Racial Underground Railroad.

This draws me to a For Colored Girls.......... by Ntozake Shange choreo-moment.......Somebody almost run off wit alla my stuff & I waz standin there lookin at myself. The whole time & it wazn't a spirit took my stuff. Waz a man whose ego walked round like Rodan's shadow. Waz a man faster in my innocence. Was a lover I made too much room for almost run off wit alla my stuff & didn't know I'd give it up so quik. And the one running wit it don't know he got it. My stuff is the anonymous ripped off treasure of the year. Did you know somebody almost got away with me? Me in a plastic bag under their arm, me danglin on a string of personal carelessness. I'm spattered wit mud & city rain & no I didn't get a chance to take a douche.

I get that White people are trying to in justice (and guilt) clean up White folk messiness....and I'm kinda appreciative.  But it's like they clean up the mess before we get a chance to learn from the mess or teach from the mess. Instead of learning not to do it again or what was wrong in the first fundamental place, White people sweep it up so fast, castigate the offender that White and yes, even people of color, don't' learn exactly what the messiness was, where it came from, how it metastasized.  

The argument is that "they should know better."  

And you know what---they don't.  

Just like your FICO score is a mess, your momma got knocked up out of wedlock, your father got too drunk, you crashed the car, your ex did the same exact thing to you that they explained they'd done to their ex and your grandfather had an affair, you caught a sexually transmitted disease---just because we should know better, doesn't mean we do.

Learning doesn't happen by osmosis.

And sadly in defense of White people they profit from a hegemonic system based on White supremacy and entitlement but they didn't personally construct it as the individual that they are now.  (They drive the car that they didn't build.)

I'm not saying White people are dumb or stupid or ignorant or so lost in their entitlement that it would be an improvement to quantify them as routinely, lovingly and often, having their heads firmly up their asses when it comes to social dealings...but I am saying that...you know...it takes effort and learning for them not to default to the above.

To further my metaphor, in many ways individually, they are children driving cars that their forefathers constructed, not realizing how big, unwieldy and dangerous it is.

But the bigger problem is this White Race Mafia that thinks they're fixing the problem folk by shutting them down before we can have a discussion on just what the fuck happened.  Why?  Because then White folk with racist thoughts go underground, they go into a duplicitous mentality towards people of color.  We don't allow them to talk about their confusions, their mis-contextualized thoughts, their questions---remember they profited and managed racism but as anyone who's ever worked anywhere with a manager knows---your manager has a plan, an idea about how things should go but there's a whole different reality when it comes to the reality on the "floor".  They manage something that they aren't completely, generations past the architecture of, aware of the intricacy of the design.

White folk need Special Education.  

The kind of psycho-social Special Education re-training in the 21st century that only aware and engaged people of color can help administer.  When they co-opt racial justice and edification, stealing our stuff essentially, we're in for more madness.  Because race then becomes the guilt assuaging bunny rabbit for White folk to root out in each other but never their own selves.

Because here's what didn't happen in all the above incidences....other White people didn't admit that they too had said, done or thought those things.  

The biggest question for me in the whole Paula Deen drama was WHOSE party was she talking about having been at and WHO was sitting at that table?  Probably, predominantly a bunch of White folk who didn't get crucified like she did...and if we want to shift how they appreciate or desire those kinds of parties, we need them to understand the problematic concept of it.  But we never got to THEM because we were watching Paula Deen roast.  And honestly, when I think of the racial problem makers, it's not chubby White girls with visions of being Scarlett O'Hara with their own Butterfly McQueen's in attendance----it's the audiences that universally call that one of the best films of all time (coincidentally I've never seen it)----the silent majority in the audience.  That's who's warped perceptions we have to worry over.  The audience that accepts that overt racism on one hand and celebrates it as terrific entertainment and then destroys White people who act out racial stuff.  White people are consuming themselves and I would argue people of color are being drag into a false sense of racial progress.

And as history has taught us just because there are a few blood soaked bodies on crosses in the town square doesn't mean crucifixion is a good thing.

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Race: Django's Unchained But You're Not by Kyle Phoenix

I got a flurry of what do you think? and can you believe it? emails this past week while on vacation all around the Quentin Tarantino film Django Unchained starring Janie Foxx.  First it was about the film and then it was about the merchandising, specifically the action figures that came out.  First off the film is wild and fun and violent and hilarious and poignant, I've seen it twice.  There's the play on racial humor and horror and the righteousness of vengeance and retribution woven through the fable of Broomhilda (Brunhilde) the German opera/folktale/myth.

But it's not a film that Americans---Black, White, Puerto Rican---can deal with.  Americans aren't healthy enough nor self-reflectively honest enough to deal with it.  Django Unchained is the graduate level course and most of America is still mentally trudging through middle school trying to wrap its' collective head around     the perplexing conundrum of separating racial solidarity and genuine criticism towards the President.  What do I mean by this?  America has never dealt with slavery.  America moved through it, outlawed it, wagged it's finger at it and marshaled the moral strength to castigate the word nigger but has never dealt with slavery.  What do I mean by "dealt"?  South Africa dealt with apartheid and how to move beyond it with reconciliation councils that went from township to township and every citizen was obligated to attend to listen and express their pain, White and African, from the brutality and pain of apartheid.

It's made pointedly clear within the first 5 minutes of the movie, illustrated deftly with the casting off of a shroud that Django is no longer a slave.  Yet the criticisms of their being a Django action figure choke on there being "slave dolls".  He's not a slave.  No, really go watch the first 5 minutes of the film.  The character struggles to adjust to his internal freedom matching and not matching the varying degrees of slavery that exist around him in the 1850's South.  But he's not a slave.  He continues through the movie on a quest to free Broomhilda from slavery and throughout it though he has to get morally, socially and violently dirty even when captured and possibly on his way back to slavery he uses every weapon in his mind, pocket and environment to not return to slavery.  He's not a slave.

Yes, I know I've repeated that several times.  Why?  Because that's America psychic schism---whether you're pink or brown---once a nigger slave, always a nigger slave.  White people believe it.  Black folk believe it.  Latino folk believe it.  There might even be some Asian people who believe it.  And that's the fundamental problem of why we as human beings in America can't handle Django,  The film has a metaphor of the reaction of White and Black people to seeing Django riding a horse with shock, anger, virulent madness, disbelief, revulsion, sexual interest and confusion because that's how America has trained itself to see Black people, pointedly Black men, even more directly, Black men who make no qualms about whipping White men, shooting White men, outsmarting White men,  having bloody vengeance upon White men as outrageous.  As outrageous as say a billionaire donning a cowl ad deciding from his perch of the noblesse oblige what justice should and shouldn't look like in his fiefdom.



While I'm there, and this has been a thought for a while, maybe it has to do with mass shootings around America by children upon children (and those committed by adults everyday), but there is a madness in movies.  We go and sit in dark theaters to watch people kill each other.  In fact we cheer and celebrate celebrities for this aberration.   I was thinking while watching the previews for several movies that the casualness with which heroes and heroines kill in the movies is technically psychotic.  We're watching, studying, idolizing psychopaths armed to the teeth killing cops, armed security, unarmed security, innocent bystanders, the "enemy", the bad guys, monsters.  We're gorging ourselves on a diet of psychosis.

But back to the nigger slave dolls.  Yes, the word nigger is hurled back and forth like oxygen in the movie.  But then I live in New York City and teach everything from children to adults.  I've heard nigger so much that I have forsaken it as anything unless we're really talking about the origins and usages of that word.  Kind of like fuck.  America has a long memory but a short attention span.  We've launched into this fearful diatribe about eradicating nigger, removing nigger, abolishing the word nigger but why?  I would submit it's a way to make White people comfortable and for Black people to move past a label/categorization that's not supportive of evolving freedom.  Even the word itself has diametrically different, maybe not opposing, ends for White and Black people.  (The Latinos, Asians and Native Americans hurling nigger back and forth we'll just have to put in the category of children who pick up bad habits from the people around them.)

Honestly, White people, deeply infused with America'a long memory know that this slavery shit is like a rumbling cancer that has slowly infected the entire system of this land through the delivery system of racism.  Black people have always known it has and would and some, not all, some are trying to evolve into freedom.  Freedom isn't something you can just don and ride off triumphantly, it's a long process, perhaps even a 200 to 400 year process.  Chemo can often take longer to flush out a disease than the disease took to manifest.  Who knows.  Some would argue that having a half Black (African---which if you come to 125th Street in Harlem you'll quickly learn the difference between) President is the pinnacle of freedom evolution.  It's not.  When we have presidents and they happen to be female or Latino or Asian or half African or completely Black then we've made true progress   Until then I would submit that we've made incremental aberration change.  Change is only supported by consistency not merely appearance.  But I digress....


So I'll throw up another point.  Black is projected.  White people hundreds of years ago needed a way to classify the Other from them for social, financial and mental/emotional reasons which is why you have Black, Latino, mulatto (from mule), quadroon (a fourth Black blood), octoroon (an eighth blood), and so on.  Number one, that was really the dragon eating it's own tail.  The very classifications show a level of social insanity to keep isolating people by arbitrary measurements to explain away, justify and mitigate racial mixing.

And why was there racial mixing?  Because you can't put one group of people, with absolute power and no television, smack dab in the center of lots of beautiful brown people who have no rights but are buxom and robust and sinewy under the hot sun and not have forcible creeping, dalliances  fantasies entertained,  rapes, true love, distorted Sally Hemmings love, passionate embraces and just human rubber part curiosity.  So when you call yourself or others even "Black" we're perpetuating a negative racial designation that was created to identify and control not celebrate.  Black is the new nigger.  (Peep this there's only a few people, Africans who are really so dark as to fall under Black and yet because we must, African Americans hold onto Black.  Much like the rape victim holds onto the fact that they were on a date therefore it couldn't be rape.)

Now all this racial confusion, madness, history, drama, conflama and media violence psychosis goes into a dark theater and tries to reconcile itself against the Pollock-like whip-lashing strokes and artistic hurlings of Quentin Tarantino.

Baby, you can't even get out of slavery in your own head, how you gonna do it at the AMC theater?

Because of the interruption of freedom evolution African American people (and I include Latinos in this too.  When they know their history and genetic history they understand that they are just more diluted African Americans who got a new language imposed on them too in their slavery times.  It was sort of a racial/slave bonus round for our current Latinos from the French/Spanish.) weren't given free reign in art.  Bear with me.  This all ties together.   When you go see Batman you accept that a White man has the right to be a vigilante.  When you go see Jack Reacher, you accept it.  Even when you watch Terminator you accept it.  But the Blackened people of America don't have that right do they?  Because it's revolting IMPOSSIBLE.  I often muse on time travel films, when would I travel to as a Black man?  There is no time in American history when you were allowed to be Black and vengeful.  Say like a General Custer or General Lee or a John F. Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon to Carter to Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush to Obama ALL ordering and engaging America in military actions spiraling from policy to politics to racism to vengeance.  No when.

But when was the last time outside of an S&M Dungeon have you seen a Black man take the lash to a White man?  Wait, wait, how many times have you seen a White man shoot a Black man?  Go even deeper, how many times have you seen a White man shoot a monster/alien that was brown?  Or even directly black?  Where does that leave a psyche to what is okay for White men and not for Black men?

There's a doll.
Yet there was no uprising at the Terminator doll and go back to the movie and see how many innocent police officers and innocent bystanders he killed in pursuit of the Connors.  What about Die Hard (and I happen to like Bruce Willis) did you protest those dolls?  What about Superman and Batman?  Of course not, because even in FICTION/ART niggers are still slave niggers ad should abide by plantation rules of narrow identity.  Narrow identity says you can't love so the concept of Django having a wife and being willing to turn the South upside down to liberate her is something that we've never seen in a movie before, a man rescuing the damsel in distress.
No, that's completely new.
Or a Western with gunslingers and bounty hunters killing the criminals with ready triggers and rifles.
Nah, that's never occurred in cinema before.
Nor has there been a man who has had to go undercover and be cruel towards those like him to liberate himself, his wife and even the slaves at the end---nah, not a single movie has used that theme before.
Okay, what about racial/misogynistic/foul/gruff language being hurled about by men and women in the history of cinema?
Nope, movies have been squeaky language clean for over 100 years.

Oh, wait, he's a nigger in America.
And by default if you're a nigger you must be a slave and by deeper default if you're a slave you must take care of, comfort, not oppose, pray for the cruel White people and hope that circumstance and dear sweet Lordy Lord brings vengeance upon them.  Because being a figure, a symbol, even in fictionalized art of bloody vengeance, punctilious power and manhood for a Black man is well----anathema to the American way.

See how that long memory and short attention span are America's unique way of keeping a nigger in a double-blind?


Only when you put him into the slave nigger category can you look at the art and say it can't commercalized, consumerize, action figurize itself.  What you're saying is that a nigger, fictional or real, doesn't have the right to be any part of the lily White psychotic milk you've been guzzling down from Casablanca to Indiana Jones to Star Wars to the Matrix to Batman to Spider-man to the Hobbit (chock full of minorities!).  You want your milk, cake and to consume it without anybody who doesn't match the table cloth to be part of irreproachable fury, indignation, anger, romantic hero tales back to the Ramayana or Tristan and Isolde or Coptic Christianity or Hannibal or Vesey or Toussaint or even to the first Western revolutionary, the imperial Anacoana.   People of color, colored folk, brown as the ground who were pushed, beaten, tested and tried to the point of being willing to wreck all kinds of natural havoc upon White people.  Because we all know niggers are not allowed the full range of human expression, right?  Right?

You might want a hero.  But box office receipts show who America believes its' heroes should look like and what they should be allowed to do.  Interestingly enough the question is in these wants are you White, Black, Latino, Asian or Native American (the 5 racial categories here in America.)  You want a nigger.  And when you realize how much, no matter what color you are, you want a nigger to remain a nigger, the racialized school system makes sense, Native people on tiny reservations, multi-colored ghettos  illiteracy and 60 million in poverty makes sense.  You want a nigger....even if you're technically one.

Now me, and perhaps some others, we're evolving towards freedom and we can separate fiction/art from reality---much as people are able to do when they see any of our delightful White action heroes and don't leave the theater screaming when they see a White man or doll.  (Well, maybe we all tense up a little bit in our heads and sphincters---I mean look at the statistics of who goes major ballistic and wants to take the whole neighborhood, household or school with them....I'm just saying....)  I will finally submit though that having been bred to be niggers who are slaves and slaves who are just niggers and being only a generation or two away from slavery, some Black folk get nervous.  They get nervous at what White people will think of them if they talk about race in a normal level voice (watch this amongst your brown friends---how they hush down the word White or say "them" as if we all don't know the racial truth with our eyes of who's a what) or avoid the thought of say a nigger being on a horse metaphorically speaking.  Or worse yet having a gun.  Or even more insanely shooting White people.

But I would throw in that White people don't worry about this because they know there's only one Django per 10,000 Black men so the majority will keep the minority down.  (Ironically enough, this is brought up by Monsieur Candie played by Leonardo DiCaprio though his villainous character goes at why Black people, who outnumbered White slaveholders a hundred to one, didn't lash out, rise up, go on a bloody rampage.  Of course there wasn't time to mention Haiti or the 39 other slave revolts that occurred in the United States as well as the dozen that occurred on the open sea.  Pssst.  We did not go into slavery easy.)



I bought a doll to play with and one for my son too and I have some other fun dolls:  I've got a Che, a Toussaint, a Malcolm, a Carmen, a Carver, I even have a Troi doll to remind me to have empathy.  But I also have an Anacoana to remind me of the duality of that your own people might be too dazzled to listen to good sense the moment before they're slaughtered.   I have a bullwhip and a righteous gleam in my eye and a non-hushed tone when I talk/teach about race because the White people know they're White and it's the perpetuation of being the comforting nigger when we hush tone for them.  They'll be fine if they're a little uncomfortable passing by me as I chatter along in public.  There are some of us who would would raze lands and people in bloody, righteous vengeance if provoked or for our loved ones.  I know of the vengeance I speak of.  Yeah, about 1 in 10,000 by my count too in agreement with the film.  The ways brown folk, especially men, seek to maintain niggerdom is legion and for another article.  I've sadly learned to watch my brown people, I've watched them whether they've come to help me or cheat me or criticize me for being simply being free in mind, body and spirit.  Because after all, as we learned on February 21, 1965,  it was a Black man who sent a Black man that shot Malcolm.

Enjoy!!!
Thank you for reading,
Kyle Phoenix
Email: kylephoenixshow@aol.com
Website: http://kylephoenixsite.com/
Blog: http://kylephoenixshow.blogspot.com/2012
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