Friday, October 12, 2007

How they see us...or how we really see ourselves?

All in the name of entertainment, or gettin' paid? Sort of the way murderers and dealers go free because we don't want to "snitch." What a courageous folk we've become...waiting on white yuppies to gentrify a neighborhood before the scum are removed when we could have done it ourselves. Oh and our intellensia like Prof.Dyson (who's over here at Georgetown now) justifies it all with beautiful lyric poetry on Bill Maher's HBO show as he says "white people are the orginal gangstas," and cites Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton's duel in Weehauken NJ with flintlock gatts as an example. Yeah I agree they were. They are. So? Think of the murders in cities every day, and this bamma spectacle above, and tell me we can't stop it tomorrow if we wanted to, white folks or no.

17 comments:

Lisa said...

I agree with you! I think we have too many people out there making excuses! That doesn't mean we side with these racists who indeed group us all like this.

On the other hand, look at this Columbine wannabee in Pennsylvania:

"Michele Cossey, 46, bought her home-schooled son, Dillon, a .22-caliber handgun, a .22-caliber rifle and a 9 mm semiautomatic rifle, authorities said."

Yet we don't judge all white boys and white moms as these country bumpkins and freaks.

Anonymous said...

Sometimes I don't know whether to cheer you or reach through cyberspace and smack you silly. I guess that's how you plan it? ;-)

The Fabulous Kitty Glendower said...

Now if you could just tell me how to get my husband to stop watching these shows when he happens to have a week day off (this past Monday, Columbus day comes to mind). I want to pull my hair out. And no one can bother him when he is watching either. The latest is Judge Christina. UGH!!!!!!

The Fabulous Kitty Glendower said...

That is 10 minutes and 36 seconds of my life I cannot get back.

OH-MY-GOD!

Suicide for sure.

Anonymous said...

Wow!

Wow!

We are our own worst enemies. We don't need white people to keep their boots on our necks, we doin' a fine job all by ourselves.

Now we have 6 or 7 of his children left to be raised by multiple, tired, single mothers while he rots in jail ('cause he on his way back right after that confession!), and only the streets to give them an example of how to make something of their lives.

So, when white people think we aren't worth hearing, aren't worth opportunity, aren't worth respect, what leg do we have to stand on with more jokers out there like him getting airtime?

Lord, put a hand.....!

Chicama Vineyard said...

Michael Dyson tends to overstate things in order to entertain, and I think that turns as many people off as it rallies. When did he become a Hoya?

tchaka owen said...

I'd rather buy my children handguns than have them sit around watching crap like the video clip. It's the same BS type people who show up on Maury, the judge shows, Springer et al.

Guns are a part of culture in various parts of this country and they aren't the ones shooting each other. Michele Cossey made news only because it's sensationalism for the media. Most of WV, KY, TN, MT, ID and some other states are laughing right now.

Unknown said...

Oh the power of hormones! did sbd actually father a child with such a person. Oh wait 6 times? What is the state of black america you ask? It has already gone to hell in a hand basket.

Anonymous said...

Chris -

Again, I have to disagree with one point in your blog entry. The reason white folk flock to our communities now, at least my gentrified Fort Greene neighborhood, is that Black folk DID clean up the Crack Era mess that is the Reagan-Bush legacy. Just when we made our historically Black neighborhood a wonderful place to live again, in they came. In droves. Please see my own blog entries:

"The Biggie Smalls Way or The Great White Way"
and
"3 Black Men Lose $1.3 Million to White Development Under Eminent Domain."

There's enough foolishness to go around across cultural lines, but Maury and Judge Joe Brown have little if anything to do with our displacement. The real issue is white manipulation of Black dollars.

Eisa
www.EisaUlen.com/blog

Anonymous said...

But white folks aren't watching these shows, although they might have heard the two self-anointed black book "experts" on NPR refute Terry McMillan's spontaneous outrage over "ghetto lit." The experts explained that white literature is not judged by its trashy, anti-intellectual pulp counterpart, so it'd be racist to do so for black literature -- even as the Entrepreneurial Black Literary Establishment enters a gloat-free zone over the National Book Foundation's nominination of Mr. Rampersad's takedown of Ralph Ellison. It would be culturally insensitive to say that Mr. Rampersad "lowers the bar" since his native vernacular culture includes a novelty dance called the limbo (as well an ideophonic musical instrument, the steel drum, whose derivation would even satisfy Toni Morrison's sentimental requirements for Black Art: "The major things black art has to have are these: it must have the ability to use found objects; the appearance of using found things; and it must look effortless."

The chairperson of this year's NBA nonfiction panel is also the subject of the title essay of Stanley Crouch's "The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity," a bad essay in an otherwise good book. He's not "articicial" because he appreciates black literature. No, he's artificial because he followed the Seattle Supersonics for one season and wrote about "race" from his own perspective (which is the only way he could write about it), and it just drives Crouch craaazzy that a professor of English would admire Gary Payton's yammering, trash-talking style of play. He also accuses him of simplifying something called "the black-white equation" by neglecting to mention that he's Jewish. But those distinctions were lost on Herb Boyd, whose completely predictable review in BIBR included the following words of approval for Crouch's support for Michael Jackson in his feud with Tommy Mottola: "If Crouch can find it in his soul to sketch more impressions such as this, perhaps the race committee will consider renewing his card." I don't know anybody that uses the term "the race card."

Christopher Chambers said...

Who's afraid of the Big Bad Crouch? Not moi. Though he is frighten-looking I think the man's a genius and folks need to drop their agendas (the same agendas, just a different approach, for which we pillory those scumbags in Fox News or a legion of head in the bootiehole wingnut blogs).

I will have to check out the NPR thing re: Terry. Thanks, sunrunner. You do this blog proud though I don't always agree with you...

rikyrah said...

I began to be through with Dyson when, watching C-Span one day, I saw him, on a panel, spend his precious time, defending 'the right' of Black folk to use the word ' Nigger'. He was using his PhD to sit up there and DEFEND the use of the word 'Nigger'.

I was too thru.

There is nothing in Hip Hop that Dyson won't try and explain away. Nothing.

Instead of calling them out for the Minstrels that they are.

Instead of chastising them for collecting their 300 pieces of silver as they sell us out with their complicity in our Global Dehumanization. Since Birth of a Nation, there has been a concerted effort to dehumanize us as a people. But, up until Hip Hop, WE had always been the ones pointing the finger and saying - ' THAT IS NOT WHO WE ARE'.

This is the first time, where you have entire groups of Black folk, willing to go front and center, with no shame, in Dehumanizing us on a GLOBAL scale.

But, you gotta give them credit - they're such good hustlers, that their Ultimate Sambo Shuffling Selves have actually convinced sizeable chunks of ' The Community' that they are ' down'....that they are in the 'Field'.

And Dyson tries to find $3.00 words to explain it all away.

Christopher Chambers said...

P.S. I heard Karen Grigsby Bates' story on NPR. First of Troy Johnson should know better. Just because street lit authors "hustle" (what a word) their "product" (whoa...yet a another pregnant word...) well...do I really need to go on, Troy? It reminds me of the program directors at raw, uber commercial hip hop stations who listen to classic jazz in the cars and have to hide it! Nevermind that white people do not have to navigate this universe and yes, can write about a buttefly who dreams of becoming a rabbi in 1904 Warsaw, but hey. Troy won't bite the hands that feed him, and neither will Calvin Reid. That's is a human response. And it's so easy to hide behind being human.

So the minstrel show goes on and on...

Anonymous said...

When will we have to guts to stop this: "A disc jockey has canceled his plan to allow light-skinned black women into a downtown club without a cover charge after angering civil rights activists and Internet bloggers who had heard about the promotion.
Ulysses "DJ Lish" Barnes, 27, said Friday he had received telephone calls and e-mails from people threatening protests and lawsuits.
"I apologize to whoever I offended," said Barnes, who described himself as a dark-skinned black man. "I made a mistake. I'm not perfect."
The "Light Skin Libra Birthday Bash" planned for Friday was a three-faceted event in which light-skinned black women, all Libras and people attending a club guest's birthday party were to have been admitted for free, he said.
Two upcoming Friday-night promotions that would have given "sexy chocolate" and "sexy caramel" women free admission to the club based on their skin color also were canceled, Barnes said.
"It was a bad idea. I admit that I was wrong," he told The Associated Press on Friday.
The club regularly attracts hundreds of men and women of all colors, he said.
Barnes said he began promoting the "Light Skin Libra Birthday Bash" about three weeks ago but started hearing from angry people after a copy of a promotional flier was published on the Web site MediaTakeOut.com.
Additional complaints from black activist and author Pearl Jr. and by representatives of the Rev. Jesse Jackson led Barnes to decide to cancel the promotion.
"Some people are telling me negative promotion is good promotion," he said. "I don't want to be in this position."

tchaka owen said...

Nabila, that has to rank among the worst promotion ideas I've heard. Of all the potential ideas this DJ finds a way to divide people! Sigh.

plez... said...

what a waste of oxygen... i can only pray that this 40-year old crack head is jail playing a Maytag for an assortment of inmates rather than polluting the streets of Little Rock with his presence...

...i can't say this is how I view ourselves, because i ain't part of whatever those two buffoons attribute themselves to. as far as i'm concerned... that's a THEM issue... there is NOTHING that i can do for THEM and THEY have nothing to do with me!

Yalegirl said...

I wonder why it is that the behavior of certain segments of the black population supposedly speaks for or casts a shadow upon the rest of the black population. Is it that black people have adopted a mentality that the behavior of one black person reflects upon us all, or is it that we think whites views things that way?? You do not hear whites worrying that a white drug addict on TV or others misbehaving badly reflects upon them all.

I think we should avoid the mentality that we as blacks are like a group of small children who are afraid that the bad behavior of one of us will get us all into trouble by some teacher we don't want to be punished by or whose rewards we desire. Just as there are people in all states of life amongst whites, so to are they among blacks. That individual on the court tv show no more reflects who I am as a black person than Brittany Spears to a white colleague of mine. Why should we adopt this incorrect mentality? Who are we trying to impress?