blacksnextdoor

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.