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!

I was over the sink, washing dishes the other day when of all things, I wondered how Mariem was doing.

Mariem was a fiery Latina Republican who I worked alongside for TWO, I repeat TWO years which included the last very fierce campaign for President in which her ugly world view was this inescapable background noise in the office I tried in vain to block out day to day.

She’d quote Karl Rove and Sean Hannity after reading the latest headlines on her computer screen, turning a professional space into her own personal right wing podium, in these sudden hostile outbursts, egging on the politically like minded around her to join in the most miserly, bigoted, cynical little tete a tetes that would make smoke fume from my ears.

When I couldn’t take it anymore, I complained about her during a meeting with a couple of higher ups. Instead of them showing the slightest bit of interest, they recited clichés about team spirit that left me wondering  (like I always do before I quit a job), if my financial stability was as important as my mental health.  

One night, upon leaving the office, Mariem appeared in front of me on the street and began to rant and rave about how much she distrusted upper management, hated our company. When she was done venting, she offered me her hand and clasped mine as if we were comrades in some worker’s revolution.

From that moment on, every day at noon, she’d ask me if I felt like having lunch together. She’d ask with a grimace as if she expected me to ignore her or say ‘no,’ which for a while I did. One day, I decided to join her and the next thing I knew, it became a regular routine.

Was it a cheap thrill? Were we re-inventing or betraying ourselves? How was it possible that I was able to sit with such an evil witch at small tables for two every day and enjoy my salad?

One answer may be that Mariem’s cell phone chats with her sister had the same intensity and tone as those with mine. Sometimes, in fact, when she’d end a super hyper sisterly chat with Lorena, it would seem as if the same breathless confidence would continue between us and vice versa.

We were both inspired and moved by this similarity without ever really acknowledging it, our lunches often becoming this super personal time in the course of the very impersonal business day where I could expect Mariem to insist that ‘I eat some steak or a burger for my anemia’ or coerce me into sharing a red velvet cupcake with her lest she eat a whole one by herself and risk getting fat.

How the hell in my journey into myself, did I find this…this…reactionary McCain Palin supporter? Was there any benefit in this strange exercise?

During this time, I remember an African American friend of mine in marketing at one of the famously liberal New York publishing companies, telling me that she had white co-workers who wore Obama buttons on the lapels of their jackets but never uttered so much as a ‘hello’ or ‘good-bye’ on any given day at the office.

Anyway, I no longer work in the same office as Mariem.  My last days, I was unable to take a minute more of the morbid, venomous, racist critiques of the Obama administration that would sporadically rise up from her desk and spread throughout the room like some toxin poisoning everyone within reach and I recall not so much as uttering a word to her in parting.

Were the contradictions of our friendship error messages we ignored or was there something natural at the core of it  that our clashing political interests obscured?

Still, as much as I fondly recall dashing through the streets of Manhattan shoulder to shoulder with Mariem, laughing, if I ever see that witch again, I’ll keep things simple and exclude her from my view.

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.