blacksnextdoor

As someone who has spent most of the last five years either ‘telecommuting’ from a PC in my bedroom, trapped in an office cubicle or staring out the windows of trains, planes and commuter buses, I am on a mission to become physically stimulated again. I spent two hours in the gym yesterday and an hour today and can’t believe how aroused I feel.  

“Now what?” I guess you’re wondering.

Ummm.  Snack on pistachios? Post something new in my blog?

What an odd thing to see Plaxico Burress paraded around in handcuffs like the most violent serial murderer when all he did was shoot himself in the leg!

Little boys and teens playing baseball and football for recreation I understand — but grown men playing games for a living I don’t — so I’m hardly Ms. ESPN.

Worse yet, those passing moments when a basketball game is on the TV in the room and I’m watching muscular black men scattering across a court in shorts and jersey combos like the kind that grace the racks in the toddler section of Kids R Us while a coach, usually a white guy in a suit sternly supervises – I’m not cheering, I’m horrified.

(And when the coach is black, it’s no more encouraging to me than a black cop or black soldier executing some misguided U.S. military effort).

Slavery is this constant reference point for just about every discussion about black people even when it’s not, so I try as a policy to avoid bringing it up  – but this said — the sports industry really does seem to be derived from the plantation business more than any I’ve seen.

Black athletes are physical property.  When they veer off those carefully scripted messages they deliver like hostages, they’re punished so severely. Take Plaxico Burress:  Head bowed in shackles for not having filed some form for a gun that as a celebrity he has good reason to own and not having harmed anyone with it but himself.

Tar, feathers anyone?

Don’t know how many of you follow http://www.thedailyvoice.com an online pub that seems to compete with the more well known The Root, http://www.theroot.com.  I rarely do, but Friday read ‘The First Black President and the Racial Mountain’ by Pamela Reed, a piece in which she defends Barack from those who insist he’s not authentically black. The piece is well written and some truth is imparted absolutely but more interesting is the message thread that evolves in response. 

None other than Sudanese poet Kola Boof who got a surge of attention in the media when she revealed she had been Obama Bin Laden’s black mistress — battles it out with Pamela Reed and the other readers with such ferocity, it is far more edgy and visceral than any basketball or football game.

Not only does Kola tear Pamela Reed a new one, but she also shreds each reader that posts a comment, to bits. The funny thing about Kola Boof is that she has identified a hole in the black whole that she fiercely deepens rather than tries like the softies of black academia, to mend.  Better yet, there’s no guy in a suit that can suspend her.  She is completely off the chain. Unlike me.  In search of greater freedom. Will report back next week. Or maybe not…