Urbanworld/VIBE Film Festival

You no doubt know about Sundance and maybe about Tribeca, but if you really care about Black images on the big and small screens, then you should find a way to support this effort, now in its 11th year.

There’s still time this weekend to check out some wonderfully engaging and thought-provoking film at the AMC 34th Street Theater (312 W. 34th St., between 8th and 9th Avenues in Manhattan). In my circles people are constantly complaining about the depiction of Blacks or the absence of Blacks on the screen. This festival showcases independent film that covers the range from serious to silly. Many of the films are about Blacks, but there are also films that cover others on the edges of recognition in this urban environment.

The website for learning about the schedule is: www.urbanworld.org. Some of the board members of the sponsoring organizations are Samuel L. Jackson, Danny Glover, Rosie Perez and Debbie Allen.

Beyond the festival, look for the films. Demand the films!

Here are descriptions of two:

DIVIDED WE FALL
Driven to action by the murder of a turbaned man in her community, a college student drives across America in the aftermath of 9/11 to discover stories that did not make the evening news. From the still-shocked streets of Ground Zero to the desert towns of the American West, Valarie Kaur’s inspiring journey uncovers remarkable stories of hate, violence, fear, and unspeakable loss – until she finds the heart of America halfway around the world.

761st

The 761st Tank Battalion became the first African-American armored unit to fight in WWII. Requested by General George S. Patton, they assisted in heavy combat during the famous Battle of the Bulge. Despite this, they faced racism at home and death overseas, fighting a war for many freedoms they did not enjoy back home in America. This is their story.

Disparaging Blackfolks in the Language of Your Choice

Why do so many people feel so free to dehumanize Black people and use racial slurs to promote their own aims? Why does this come so trippingly off the tongue – whether in Germany or China or the United States?

In Canada recently, a Black family purchased a brown leather sofa. Upon its delivery, the 7-year-old inquisitive girl in the family noticed that its color was described as “nigger brown.” Who can make up this stuff? Read the story that ran in the Toronto Star and that is now making its way around cyberspace:

Racial Slur on Sofa Label Stuns Family
http://www.thestar.com/Article/200265

This comes not long after the revelation that a German military training film was told conscripts to imagine that they were shooting Blacks in the Bronx. This is how the Associated Press reported the incident:

“The clip shows an instructor and a soldier in camouflage uniforms in a forest. The instructor tells the soldier, “You are in the Bronx. A black van is stopping in front of you. Three African-Americans are getting out and they are insulting your mother in the worst ways. ... Act.” The soldier fires his machine gun several times and yells an obscenity several times in English. The instructor then tells the soldier to curse even louder.”

Why do we permit ourselves to be such easy targets of racial stereotypes that even an over-the-hill radio jock can casually label a dignified and disciplined team of women basketballers, most of them Black, “nappy-headed hos”?

Whenever people say that if Black people can use such language and convey such attitude a la mode then why can’t people who are not Black, then make it clear that not all Black people permit this. As I said in a discussion at a Society of Professional Journalists meeting a week ago, some people find use of such historically demeaning terms “liberating,” but with me the only thing liberating about such usage in my presence is the liberating of my fist upside someone’s head when they even dare to call me the N word or even a “nappy-headed ho.” Not that I mind the acknowledgment that I wear my hair in the natural style, but that I don’t condone that plus the implication of promiscuity as a default definition of Black womanhood.

Nor do I tolerate hearing kids in my Harlem neighborhood who are not African American casually calling each other “nigger.”

In a recent trial in New York, a defendant – a white guy who’d grown up around Blacks and Latinos – argued that his use of the N word while walloping a Black guy was not indication of a hate crime. He had pronounced the word as “nigga” – a hip hop version of “my brother” or “my friend” or whatever. If he had used “nigger,” then that would have been the measure of racial contempt.

Pity the fool!

But didn’t too many of us open the door to such thinking? This is now global when even someone who can barely speak English and knows nothing of African-American history can feel as free as a Klansman to treat us as scum of the earth.

Back in Canada, the father of the 7-year-old, “explained the origins of the word to daughter Olivia, telling how it was a bad name that blacks were called during the days of slavery in the United States.”

We’d all be so lucky if use of that word had ended in 1865!

Let's Stop This Vicarious Guilt

I read that some Korean Americans are afraid that they will somehow all be tarred with what Seung-Hui Cho did at Virginia Tech earlier this week. One woman said that upon hearing the killer of 32 students and faculty members was Asian, she said something like, "Please don't let him be Korean!"

I know that prayer. I've said it any number of times when something horrendous happens. "Please don't let him [or her] be Black!" I've said.

But I've come to realize that I'm not responsible for evil acts of other Black folks. I feel no racial guilt that a Black man named
Robert Williams apparently raped, tortured and tried to kill a Columbia University student who lives in my neighborhood in Harlem. If all that's been reported about him so far is true, this con is scum. This is how The New York Times reports what the NYPD Police Commissioner has said of what happened after this man forced his way into the student's apartment:

"Over the next 19 hours, [Commissioner Ray] Kelly said, the man tied the woman to her bed with computer cables and taped her mouth closed, raped and sodomized her repeatedly, burned her with hot water and bleach, slit her eyelids with scissors, and force-fed her an overdose of ibuprofen or a similar pain reliever.

"At one point last Saturday afternoon, Mr. Kelly said, the assailant took the woman’s A.T.M. card, withdrew $200 at a bodega on West 141st Street and returned to her apartment. A few hours later, he set fire to the woman’s futon and left her, unconscious, to die, Mr. Kelly said. She woke up to the smell of smoke, used the flames to melt the cable that bound her to the bed frame, and escaped, Mr. Kelly said."

Those of Korean ancestry -- whether citizens or legal residents or visitors -- need feel no special guilt about Cho. Nor should misguided avengers hold them accountable.

But all of US should empathize with Cho's family. Sun-Kyung Cho, his sister and a State Department contractor, said on behalf of the family: "We are humbled by this darkness. We feel hopeless, helpless and lost. This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn't know this person. We have always been a close, peaceful and loving family. My brother was quiet and reserved, yet struggled to fit in. We never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence."

This “Blood” Cherokee vs “Black Cherokee Freedmen” Issue Won’t Go Away

The Cherokee Nation, that rump group of Native Americans who are more proud of their White heritage than their Black heritage, voted to expel Blacks from the nation. That means they have to share $$$$ coming to the tribe via US government and gaming enterprises, with fewer people.

Among the many who have spoken up about this is the Congressional Black Caucus, which, according to the Associated Press, is asking the federal government “to weigh in on the legality of a vote by the Cherokee Nation earlier this month to revoke citizenship from descendants of former tribal slaves."

This from the AP: "Saying they were 'shocked and outraged,' more than two dozen members of the Congressional Black Caucus signed a letter to the Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs questioning the 'validity, legality, as well as the morality' of the March 3 vote.

"'The black descendant Cherokees can trace their Native American heritage back in many cases for more than a century,' said Rep. Diane Watson (D-Calif.). 'They are legally a part of the Cherokee Nation through history, precedent, blood and treaty obligations.'”

Read what Mike Shelton, a member of the state legislature in Oklahama, says about how the Cherokee Nation is marching on the wrong trail: http://www.muskogeephoenix.com/opinion/local_story_070192128.html





St. Patrick's Day

The united states of us requires effort.

I have heard so many people say that they have no knowledge of what St. Patrick’s Day is all about except that it involves Irish people and drunkenness. There is much more to St. Patrick’s Day than that.

I have heard so many people say that they know nothing about Black History Month because they are not Black. Or they don't understand Chinese New Year because they are not Chinese. Or they ignore Columbus Day because they are not Italian.

I have heard so many people presume that Thanksgiving is about turkeys and football, but don’t realize the religious base for it. Or don’t see a commonality of purpose in celebrating Thanksgiving and Kwanzaa or Easter and Passover.

If the US in the United States are to truly be that, we need to reach beyond our limited concepts of from whence we’ve come. Even if that means rejecting some of that which our parents or teachers have burdened us with.

I have heard too many people say that Christianity is Catholicism and that’s it. As a good and faithful Baptist, I try to explain Protestants to them.

I make a point of expressing my Irishness this time of the year and using the opportunity of the holiday to generate discussions – in pubs no less! – about the connections between Blacks and Irish in this country. The Irish were considered the “niggers” of the British empire and then, after a few decades here, considered themselves to be White. Google the Draft Riots for a start. A lot of people of Irish backgrounds ended up in the antebellum South and a lot of us are their descendants, whether acknowledged or not.

In this nation, with all our resources, there is no excuse for not knowing more about our neighbors and workplace colleagues.

I am proudly Irish this weekend – and am preparing to cook my corn beef-and-cabbage luncheon for friends of any hue and religiosity – after an Irish breakfast at one of the nearby firehouses in Harlem.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

So Does THIS Make Obama "Black Enough"?

As you know, I reject this litmus test that some Blacks have for Obama or any other Black person seeking the US presidency -- that is to say, Were your forebears slaves?

Obama's mother, a White Kansan, and his father, a Black Kenyan -- and a healthy dose of ignorance, of course -- are the bases for raising the "Black enough" question.

So guess what? Obama is still showing how our racial identities are all mixed up and should be irrelevant as a determinant of whether one is worthy of our votes. It turns out that some of his mother's forebears OWNED slaves. So, I ask, does that make him Black enough? It's a connection to slavery!

Professor Ron Walters, a political scientist, said this to the Baltimore Sun, which ran the story as a major front-page "exclusive": "The twist is very interesting. It deepens his connection with the experience of slavery, even if it deepens it on a different side of the equation."

Check this out in The Baltimore Sun:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/politics/bal-obama0301,0,789030.story?coll=bal-home-headlines

Here's another article, from the New York Daily News, that suggests that Obama's family tree might also contain Quincy Jones. Does THAT make him Black enough?

A spokesman for Obama said: "It is a true measure of progress that the descendant of a slave owner would come to marry a student from Kenya and produce a son who would grow up to be a candidate for president of the United States."

So Al Sharpton Is Discovering the Roots Beneath the Hairdo!

The New York Daily News and the Rev. Al Sharpton are making a big deal -- as in a multiple-part series -- about the Rev's learning a few days ago that some of his ancestors were once owned by some of the kinfolk of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond.

Well, wow!

Anyone who knows the history of this country knows that that is no big thing.

Most Blacks in the US, myself included, can trace some part of their family tree to some White folks -- and vice versa if Whites are so inclined. I do now have older White people considering me a "cousin" or somehow in an-as- yet-to-be-defined way, kinfolk. I've even been graciously hosted by White people on a visit to the remains of an Allison plantation in North Carolina where some of my folks toiled and some of their descendants still live. In South Carolina, there is a city called Aiken, named for White folks from Ireland whose family in South Carolina and in Georgia owned some of my ancestors. I've got a bill of sale for Ike Aikens -- spelling was always a matter of who was doing the writing -- the grandfather of my 103-year-old grandmother, Ethel Mae Aiken Moore, still ruling the roost in Conyers, Ga. I know so much about the White Shipp lineage that I sometimes hear from the White folks about getting started with their genealogical searches. (A bit of trivia: the "S" in Harry S. Truman, the president, was apparently SHIPP.)

After the death of Thurmond, a notorious racist as he built his political career but repentant towards the end, it was officially acknowledged that he had fathered a Black daughter some 70 years before and had, in his own typical-of-the-old-South way, supported her through college and beyond.

As I have said many times before, we are all mutts. A little dab of this, a little dab of that -- and that makes us all the more American.

Perhaps the presidential odyssey of Barack Obama, a true African American because of his White American mother and his Black Kenyan father, has us more attuned to issues of racial identity. Think of this: The only certified descendants of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson, the president, and his Black slave/concubine/mistress Sally Hemings is a WHITE family in Staten Island, N.Y. The putative BLACK descendants haven't been able to convince those who need to be convinced.

To understand how all of this is ridiculous when defining ourselves in the 21st century, take a look at a booklet done by the late J. A. Rogers called "The Five Negro Presidents." It was published in 1965 and is available online and in Afrocentric bookstores. Based on the way Blackness in the US was defined as any knowable or rumored genetic connection to a Black person, however meager, Rogers came up with five; to his list, others have added at least one more. So neither Jesse Jackson nor Colin Powell nor Barack Obama would, truly, be a first.

And, of course, we are ALL Africans, if you believe the scientists who have traced all living humanity to that continent. The Rev told the News this about the discovery of his supposed connection to Thurmond: "It tells you who you are. Where you come from. Where your bloodline is."

I beg to differ: This information may tell you something about your bloodline, but it can never tell you who you are.

Remember Malcolm X Today

He was murdered 42 years ago in New York City by Black people. At whose behest is still debated, but Black men fired the shots in the Audubon Ballroom. Malcolm's been dead longer than the 39 years he walked and spoke among US. As is the case with Martin Luther King Jr., as time goes by, his image becomes less radical than it was as he lived. He's an image on a piece of headgear or a T-shirt. He's the name of a street in Harlem that we denizens still call Lenox Avenue.

Let's remember the radical, non-conformist, in-your-face and media-savvy Malcolm "by any means necessary"!!!