blacksnextdoor

So, Barack and Michelle are sweeping through Europe like the black John Steed and Emma Peel. Can’t you see Michelle next in a spandex cat suit with those dangerously arched eyebrows, brandishing a swishy sword?

Watching the rage filled crowds with cries of ‘eat the rich’ on the streets of the UK, I was — as always worried at how routinely life goes on stateside even as we lose our homes, jobs, savings.  If American democracy has a pulse, guess it’s reflected in those poll numbers always flatlining our TVs.

Good thing we have a leader that can passionately emote. Barack’s press conference at the ExCel Center following the G20 summit was unbelievable.

I almost didn’t pay it any mind because I had a million things to do, but Barack drew me in. Made me listen. 

I am slightly ashamed to admit this but it’s official: I adore our President the way some women adore certain Hollywood actors and sports stars.

I love Barack and Thursday just took my enfatuation with him to new heights because it felt so much like an intimate chat between the two of us that had nothing to do with my eyes or lips or any of that nonsense former significant others have narrowed me down to to distract me from the missing bigger picture. 

He discussed the plans he was making with heads of state around the world to protect my financial stability from any future funny stuff.  He spoke in behalf of me as a woman with her own distinctive interests that he was appointed and ready to defend – oh with such deep throated sincerity by the way — but whose range of opportunities he was expanding on globally in as much as the rest of the world was ready to meet us halfway.

The opposite of inspiring, that morning I had ridden the subway in a car with just a few people doing a reverse commute away from Manhattan, two of them a younger but not quite young black man and woman. The woman was pregnant, just showing, her hand unsurely on her rounded belly the whole ride.  

The man had this ultra diesel sitting posture, legs and elbows spread wide, meticulous corn rows spilling down his shoulders that some woman, perhaps the one sitting beside him had toiled over for who knows how long.

Everything about him spoke of this sense of entitlement that trumped the worried looking woman next to him as well as their unborn child. At one point when the woman who apparently was not his wife mentioned that she didn’t want her child to have a different last name than she did, he slung his big, strong arm around her small, frail shoulder and gave her a lecture on ‘not caring what other people think’ the whole time he asserted ownership over her emotionally and physically, masterfully disowning her socially and economically.

You didn’t need a crystal ball to know that this woman’s future as a mom was going to heavily rely on state help, state enforced child support payments and maybe even a phone call or two to 911.

When the two of them stepped off the train, an elderly woman next to me rolled her eyes in the air at what we had both witnessed, not because we had never seen such a thing before but because we had both seen so much of it, see so much of it every day.

I understand that Mr. Wonderful may have not grown up in a home with a father who was kind to his own mother or had had no father around at all, but what I don’t understand is a masculinity so trifling it’s at odds with its own legacy which is what that woman and child under the right conditions offered him.

Anyway, see Beyonce’s new film Obsession with a white female homewrecker as the fave scapegoat for the stressed out sexual politik of black men and women — or grab the one you’re with to waltz in the romantic  glow of this long overdue first couple of ours, Barack, who also grew up fatherless yet models a manliness that’s as graceful as it is strong, and Michelle, a jazzy dynamo confidently exemplifying the virtues of being a black wife and mom for all the whole world to behold!

Despite everyone obsessing over Barack’s appearance on Leno, I think Michelle ‘shovel ready’, planting veggies around the White House was the far more provocative political moment of the last few days.  

If the country has come to characterize Ms. Obama as someone accessible and unpretentious, perhaps watching her toil over a patch of land around the White House was pushing things.

Yes, black folks should garden but there was something about watching her, our black first lady, digging and planting in what did not look like a yard as much as a field,  that was difficult — even as I applaud her efforts to lead America into a Green era.

Equally as interesting was her appearance at a DC public school where she attributed her success as a student in the black Chicago of her childhood to ‘talking like a white girl.’

I’m sure if Ms. Obama had been able to elaborate in less of a controlled setting, a really interesting discussion about black versus white English would have spun out because the Obamas – like most black people and even some whites who use black English to varying degrees, switch back and forth between both.

I believe Ms. Obama’s message to the young black audience she was addressing was that there are certain skills you have to acquire to make the transition from the margins into the mainstream though to some it may have seemed that she was advocating imitating white people as a program for self-improvement which I’m fairly certain she was not.

The whole subject of how black folks talk in America is weighed down by very neurotic identity issues. If I wanted to be morbid, I could recount stories of being ridiculed back in my own school days for the same reason as Michelle Obama, but the fact of the matter is you adapt.

 At 48, I now speak all kinds of ways.

I switch codes so much, I don’t even know what the real way is that I speak anymore – though when I’m in the company of certain African-American women there’s an expectation that I use a very specific black female voice – you know that cynical song that the black female character in every commercial and TV show has to sing with her hand on her hip and one eyebrow raised –  that I’m afraid for so many reasons just doesn’t work for me.

In fact, recently, during a first time business meeting with another black woman, when she instantly referred to me as ‘girl’ and then ‘chile,’  instead of her breaking the ice with me, what she did was make me doubt that I should be taking her seriously.

I’m  middle-aged, gray haired, in no way a child or a girl and find it unfortunate that so much of what passes so proudly  for black English, including that infamous word thrown around in every other rap song, is just an exercise in self-deprecation.

A few summers ago, I got in a cab in Harlem with a Guinean driver named Alpha, an intense guy who could switch from English to French to Spanish to even Russian not because he had some great passion for learning the world’s languages but because he had had to become versatile to survive.

Similarly, Black people in America are going to need to embrace a much more complex sense of self.

That said, may a patch of organic collards sprout somewhere in the Obama garden. Because this new paradigm could be as easily served by just seeing the greens in Green.

I don’t know about you, but when I find myself suddenly staring at the ceiling in the wee of hours of the morning, I reach for the remote and watch Oprah. I have no idea when exactly she’s on EST time, but there she was beside Tyra Banks Friday morning sometime before dawn using Chris Brown and Rihanna’s troubling relationship as a case study of sorts.

Wow, I never cease to revere how she’s taken a tacky forum like the talk show and transformed it into something between a temple and a town hall that not just Americans but people all over the world – she’s huge in Saudi Arabia – depend on for moral direction and advice on how to live whole, fulfilling lives.

As for Tyra, post modeling, she has bloomed into even more of a femme fatale — as unbelievable as it is that she could have become more of a tigress than she already was but I think there are all these dimensions to her that modeling didn’t let her explore that she’s leveraging.  

I mean she’s basically cleaned up the down and dirty Rickie Lake time slot and audience in a way I didn’t imagine possible, is actually guiding a demographic  of younger women that Oprah doesn’t reach, into a more stylish, informed femininity that does however — positive aspects  aside — seem to be embedded in too many accessories!

Anyway, I know not a single song by Chris Brown, have very little familiarity with what he does. I have observed him once or twice on a TV in my teenage nephew’s bedroom that always seems to be tuned to BET and my impression of him right off the cuff was that it’s unnatural for a young man that age to smile so sweetly, so it comes as no great surprise to me that he has a hellish flipside.

As for Rihanna, I know her music a little better, though I would like to mention as a disclaimer that I feel like an ancient Greek discussing a fight between Zeus and Hera somewhere up on Mount Olympus when I attempt to wrap my head around a celebrity couple’s argument in a Lamborghini en route to the Grammys .

Oprah and Tyra did their best to take Rihanna’s bite marks and bruises and turn them into a ‘teaching moment’ for the young girls nationwide who have seen this whole awful drama unfold and may have needed help processing it, especially in light of the fact that Chris Brown and Rihanna are apparently still dating.

The problem I had with the whole discussion was the way young men were discussed or —  weren’t. They never got past being ‘they’ and ‘them,’ and hovered over the whole discourse in a way that could only be felt as problematic.  At one point when a girl in the audience brought up the possibility that Rihanna may have gotten physical with Chris Brown first and that Rihanna’s reconciliation with him may have been evidence of her complicity in the violent nature of their relationship, the point that a boyfriend can only restrain a violent girlfriend was made without addressing the issue of violent girlfriends.

Something’s missing.

For starters, there’s no male version of Tyra to help young men work through this discussion.

As for the the absence of nurturing role models for young black men on the home front and in our neighborhoods, that’s best illustrated by Tied To Greatness, an idea of Alex Ellis, a black designer, amongst other things, who visits schools in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago to teach young black men how to groom themselves for success.

To date, Mr. Ellis has given out around 2500 ties to young black men who have never undergone such a basic male rite of passage as being taught how to knot a tie.

Hello!

Aren’t our sons one of our community’s greatest resources? 

The week in review. Let’s see. Well, it seemed to include lots of honking horns. Squealing brakes.  Me dangerously strolling through it all like a ghost.

So many questions I grappled with. So, so many especially around myself as I relate or don’t to other black women.

For starters, there are only about four other black women that ever ride my daily express bus. Each morning, In that dim modular space between point A and point B as I ignore the other passengers on purpose and vice versa, I have always noticed a certain tension between us. It’s as if we’re breaking a taboo by not all sitting together in one designated area of the bus.

It finally happened and the other night I found myself in Manhattan in the bus queue with one of these other black women. I’m shivering and pogoing up and down as I tend to do when I’m cold and I notice her eyes flash with amusement when she says: are you cold?

I state the obvious when I tell her that I’m freezing. She seems taken aback. I’m left feeling like a game show contestant that just gave the wrong answer. Then another one of the black women who I see from time to time on the bus appears and the two of them jump into a dialogue with lots of happy ‘girl,’ ‘chile,’ and eye rolling even though it seems a bit tongue in cheek.

Once on the bus, the two sit side by side and continue talking and I wonder what it was about me being demonstrably cold that may have been so odd.

Then there’s a young woman about twenty years younger who I find myself beside on a sofa at a casual after work gathering.

During my first attempt at small talk with her, I couldn’t help but notice that her deep brown face was almost completely lost inside tendrils of silky Barbie hair. In fact she was completely trapped inside a web of artificial hair and thick make up and even spoke in a tiny Barbie voice that couldn’t possibly have been real.

I’ve noticed that the great rapper, Lil Kim, has become a Barbie doll of late too. Anyway, I inquired into what she did, and after she had responded, it was not at all clear to me what it was she actually did which is often the case these days in this complex business environment but I had a strong feeling by the way she was speaking that she was trying to make a certain impact and what she actually said didn’t matter. It was all in the delivery.

I dare to peek through the thickness of her disguise at one moment and it’s like looking into an unlit room where you sense someone hiding. I tried to break the ice once more, but her Barbie tones grew more shrill like a radio when it’s broken or seagull emitting signals of distress and I moved onto another area of the room.

Then, there’s my favorite aunt. I stopped by to visit her and raid her photo albums the other day. She has the oldest family albums in the family and I love to go through them and talk to her about different relatives, share stories that the photos evoke, but this trip I wanted her to let me leave with photos and make copies of them for myself which I didn’t think she’d agree to – she’s always kept these albums in impeccable condition and very well guarded.

But when I finally got the nerve to stop browsing and ask her, she not only encouraged me to start making copies of whatever I liked, she also mentioned she was thinking of leaving her photo albums for me ‘to manage’ when she passed because she thought they meant the most to me more than anyone else and I couldn’t believe she felt that way or express how honored I was.

Anyway, another high point last week was an email exchange with the daughter I would’ve had if I hadn’t had a son, Carmen. Carmen is currently in Senegal teaching – she has interesting observations on being a black feminist woman in a patriarchal society like Senegal that I would like to hear more of — not only is she an ambitious communicator – she speaks four or five languages – she’s travelled as much as she’s been able and is just wonderful in every way and very easily shares her thoughts with me whenever I need to pick a younger, more agile brain.

I wanted to know if she thought that black college students should study abroad as part of their whole career and personal development scheme or if it was just a luxury for the wealthiest white students and she of coursed confirmed my belief that black people be active players in globalization and that it’s a great thing to encourage our kids to achieve fluency in a second language, travel.

Very grateful to be part of a nurturing network of other black women. May it grow, though the politics and dynamics of black femininity still often leave me out in the cold…

Bisous….

Trying to ease up the stranglehold of media, I search for truth at odd angles or look the wrong way on purpose.

The oddly unimportant news that Jimmy Carter’s bicycle was stolen gave me some relief from all Obama’s breathlessly euphoric pre inaugural coverage. Maybe it’s just me, but I can only handle so much spine tingling and so many goose bumps before I want to press the stop button at least for a moment.    

Bizarre but not unimportant has been the miracle plane landing on the Hudson. I got my eyewitness account from none other than Robin Roberts of Good Morning America who seems to have watched the plane’s descent from her apartment balcony.  Even with my tendency to distance myself from the crowd, I too am part of the Robin Roberts Fan Club.  How could I not be?

As I shuffle around my mirror in the morning, stealing peeks at the TV, like a pot of bubbling coffee somewhere close by, she blends right into my whole domestic daydream.

I hear chatter that she’s a closeted lesbian.  The criteria to be a straight woman seem to grow more narrow every day. Nor  does she pass the equally small minded  ‘black enough’ test.  Sooo tall, sooo  vulnerable.  I’m most fascinated by how her struggle with cancer has reinforced her femininity, transformed her in fact into this subversively glamourous force despite the rest of us.

Most anticlimactic event of the week:  Bush and that…that…you know what, Condoleeza, saying good-bye.  Does anyone really care? Did she ever exist down here on the same planet as the rest of us?

This is a woman who  – and I don’t care how much money as a consultant and speaker she makes in the private sector moving forward – will always be despised and remembered as nothing more than a nasty…well..you know what I’m trying not to say.

The way Bush trotted her about like some modern day Ota Benga, (the Congolese man exhibited at The Bronx Zoo in 1906) inviting the rest of us to join him in marveling at her ability to speak Russian and play piano.

It’s not clear that Condie spoke more than limited Russian and as for the leverage with the Russians her presence in his administration was supposed to have brought us – where is it please?

Just like McCain’s ‘maverick’ myth fell apart during this campaign as we observed his wife, Cindy, henpeck him during interviews and the Republican party pull him in a million different directions, Condie’s  having been friends with one of the girls murdered in the Birmingham church bombing didn’t cushion us from her bitter political agenda.

I have never seen anyone confuse unpopularity with expertise the way Ms. Rice did.  Will we ever forget her scowling defense of her administration’s mishandling of September 11?  Never an apology to the families, nothing.

Her subsequent global war on terror has been an empty spectacle.

Condie, the dominatrix marionette.  Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Anyway, refreshing doesn’t even come close to describing Michelle’s arrival on the scene.  Such style, warmth, candor, intelligence.

Yes, I’m emotionally ill-equipped to handle all the delirium of this upcoming inauguration, but I m ever so grateful to be experiencing this momentous change – and ever so relieved.