blacksnextdoor

This morning, I woke to a bird singing outside my window. The song was about love and rebirth. It had nothing to do with share prices or consumer spending. I was so relieved.

The bird’s subversive solo inspired me to eat breakfast under the veranda outside my kitchen. I ate a bowl of mangu topped with grilled onions and fresh lemon juice, cracking into a lemon seed as I chewed, welcoming the bitter taste in my mouth as it joined with the seductive sense of a Sunday on the cusp of Spring.

Unfortunately, my reverie was broken at the gym while on the treadmill soon after. Watching This Week With George Stephanpoulous on the monitor in front of me, instead of turning the damned thing off, I read the captions below George Will’s weasley face with a grimace.

Mr. Will mocking Obama’s ‘Stock Broker in Chief,’ routine last week when the President admittedly with some sheepishness recommended Americans start buying up stocks since there are some great deals out there if you have a long term perspective.

I’m really done with the tension between Barack and Wall Street. Done. Absolutely done, in fact with the tyranny of numbers over my day to day life.

This is the last great domain of racism. The Stock market as an echocardiogram of the American heart that does not respond to Obama, that is broken by ‘minorities who couldn’t afford to own homes but bought them anyway,’ that proves that blacks don’t stimulate intense economic desire, only paralyze it.

(Oh, such deep, deep despair I feel at the possibility that the worrisome market activity of Americans with black skin may not arouse the most rapturous investment outcomes. Sniff. Sniff).

Sarcasm aside, I didn’t feel Obama’s recent foray into being national financial advisor. If I want to get the latest casino gaming tips, there’s no shortage of it elsewhere.

What I appreciated most about our President’s rise onto the political stage was the humanity he brought to Washington. The Republicans would have us believe there is no VALUE to being alive that is not monetary.

Their ‘Patriotism is consumption,’ ‘greed is good,’ ‘nothing matters but the numbers’ message has brought the fear of a permanent winter where the sun doesn’t come out anymore, the warmth doesn’t return, flowers and fruit no longer blossom because they’re besides the point.

The point is the most narrow definition of profit.

So please, please, monsieur le President, don’t pander to these trading floor gangstas.

Your legacy will be defined by how well you’re able to execute the inspiring promise of your campaign which was never to be able to pick winning stocks for my portfolio but to inspire a dialogue between the races that is as enlightening as intimate and yes, inspire collaboration where before we had only bombs, improve human and ecological health care, motivate Americans young and old to be part of community projects that nurture our neighborhoods  and our urgent need to be more than spectators in sports stadiums.

Obama, perhaps not Elizabeth Alexander – but more poetry please – and support for the poetic, aesthetic, non-commoditized.

If fresh clay and paint, the sound of violins, flutes, and cellos would return to the hallways of our local schools, President Obama, an homage to you would resound more prodigiously than the most arrogant closing bell. Anyway…you get my drift…

In faith & solidarity

Jen Jefferson/Blacksnextdoor

It rained yesterday, all day. I took that as an omen to stay indoors, sip tea, and watch a couple of films, most notably Sembene’s ‘Xala’. I’m sorry to say that I only know Africa so far from the point of view of Casablanca and Marrakech, two cities where I’ve spent profound moments wandering alone. When I watch Sembene films, I bathe in the dust, sand, and sun of each scene, smirk at the familiar cadence of Wolof — yes, I’ve heard that cadence all my life in the black voices around me whether I’ve been in Handsworth, Harlem or St. John’s Antigua — and amongst other things, I improve my balance.

But I’m not going to talk about ‘Xala’. If you haven’t seen it, you must. I’m going to rapidly run off three recent personal experiences that lead me to believe that it’s a really good time for black people to be improving our balance number wise and in general. 

The first is a presentation by Executive Vice President of Sponsorship and Corporate Development of The Africa Channel, Mark Walton, that I dashed in and out of a few weeks ago. Mark, An African American businessman with an exceptional bio: MBA from Yale, ten years in sales and marketing roles at CBS, founding partner of KJM3 Entertainment Group who distributed and promoted Julie Dash’s, ‘Daughter of the Dust’ in 1992 etc. etc. made a very exciting case not only for ‘The Africa Channel’ brand itself as it continues to rollout through the US cable market but a case for how Africa should be portrayed moving forward. Poverty, starvation, and disease are all most Americans associate with Africa. Africa Channel is introducing Americans to the fullness of Africa. Its cities, cuisine, music and culture of its growing middle class.

Then there’s a forum where Alan Greenspan presented that I attended about two weeks ago. Typical business gathering. C-level attendees, mostly white men. Mostly white men, except for me, a couple of white women, and a group of Nigerian bankers who had flown in from Lagos. The Nigerians are becoming more and more visible at these New York events I frequent. ”Awash in oil money” as they’re whispered to be, they attract a lot of attention.  An associate of mine is filling most of his sales pipeline these days with pending business from Nigeria. “My Nigerians” he lovingly calls them. (There’s so much irony at play here. This same associate, a bigot who dismissed the Queens neighborhood where Sean Bell was murdered as a ‘ghetto,’ without a pot to piss in if not for a sub-Saharan account base).  

Then there’s this upcoming election. October has been the month where I’ve grown to believe for the first time that Obama could very well win, at which point, the most powerful leader in the world would be a black man. Hmm. So now two and a half questions arise.

If it’s true that a black family who earns the same as a white family, can still have a lower financial net worth, are black people getting closer to eliminating the intangibles that enable this kind of disparity as we make such positive traction into the mainstream?

Does a more positive image of Africa, an emerging African economic power and a super intelligent, (and cute) African-American President steal the fire away from the hard luck narrative with which black people are most strongly associated — and to what end?

In ‘Xala,’ the black businessman whose life the camera moves around, steals rice from the poor, washes his car with Evian water and scolds his daughter for not responding to him in French, yet he prides himself on being part of a Senegal that is free of French exploitation.

Meaning: Blacks who are successful will have to strive to be more than successful — make a stronger effort than anyone to include those at the proverbial table who have been methodically excluded from it — or we ourselves will have no legs.