In a sense, it’s amazing to see Black people cut one another up and down in an attempted insult like the kind you might see a racist white person do to a Black person “just because they can.” In other words, the old “chicken and watermelon” jokes whites used to and still do tell about us have found an internalized nesting place with Black people. It’s a throw-off way of ‘acting white’ in a sense in order to ridicule one another.

I had seen it before, in other Black people, but it was most publicly pervasive when President Barack Obama entered the Oval Office in January of 2009. That is when it mushroomed all over the place. I observed in horror as Black people actually internalized white supremacy and repeated, nearly verbatim, everything white racists were saying about the President. As my grandma used to say “Called him everything BUT a child of God.”

Ultimately, it made them no better than their white counterparts of the same attitude. These were BLACK FOLK — using the SAME WORDS about President Obama that bona fide Ku Klux Klan-ified racists used. And what’s worse is that they did it just to somehow PROVE they were not afraid to speak out against the President, who was, by the way, more AFRICAN-American than they were. The “Soul Patrol” went into FULL EFFECT that day.

Stand for Something or Fall for Anything

Now comes a time when you can actually stand for something bold and authentic in your own Black community as a learned person and a scholar, not as a whipped slave forbidden to read or write.

But Rashida? That’s not the name my Mama gave me. Plus, it’s about the same as listening to the folk who called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Jesus” (as in “He must think he’s Jesus”), and even listening to a little white boy, no more than 10 years or so, look at me on the streets just last year (not in the 1960s, but in 2017) and say “Happy Kwanzaa! and Happy Shaniqua Day!”

My name ain’t Shaniqua either. I can say that I wanted to reach into his little fat red fresh disrespectful mouth and pull all of his baby teeth out and use them for carving tools for his heart. The little shit.

However … I’m better than that, so I kept it moving. FORWARD.

AME Born, AME Bred …

Truth told, I wasn’t born into or under any religion. I was raised by my grandparents in the AME tradition in the deep South.

My grandmother, “Ms Blanche” they called her, was a life-term member of St. John AME Church in Fort Mitchell, Alabama, then transferred her membership to St. John AME in Columbus (GA), after her family plucked up and moved to Georgia by way of Seale, Alabama.

I was raised up AME back in the 1960s – moving here from Denver CO and then Detroit MI. Our world was turned around backward, coming down south. We had attended integrated schools BEFORE we were subjugated to segregated schools, but that is the sum total of racial oppression that some of us Black “ostrich-heads” like to deny. Those of us who prefer to burrow our heads in the sand on race matters willingly refuse to acknowledge any of it ever happened, or don’t want to talk about it. But I can never prescribe myself to that kind of outrageous ignorance, especially not in the presence of a solid historical tradition that is older than the freed slaves would be if they were alive right now.

AME BORN. AME BRED. WHEN I DIE, I’LL BE AN AME DEAD. But that was back when we used to talk and speak of Bishop Richard Allen as if he was SOMEBODY.

Today, I imagine someone, other Black people, would call him or someone of his ilk an “Umar,” or an “Abdullah,” or even a “Farrakhan” radical. It’s almost like white people who like to call all Black men “Jerome,” “Tyrone” or “Darnell” and wonder why they (Black men) have a problem with being called “boy” and having their heads rubbed like a farm pet. Except it’s US doing it to each other this time, not them.

Too many of us act like there is something wrong with the “Black shit” and as if racism simply doesn’t exist or is nothing we have to worry about anymore. [ Can you say #jaded and #sheltered ].

Even worse, the children aren’t prepared for the systemic shock they’re about to get when that “THREE AM NEGRO WAKEUP CALL” finally comes, as it does for all of us. That’s the call their parents likely haven’t prepared them for, but I used to think I had surpassed all that, too. So did a friend of mines, who said she “raised her son right,” and then cried all over Facebook in real time when he got arrested for doing nothing wrong WHILE BLACK. They had to let him go, of course, but she best be grateful he came home alive.

Kenneth Walker, late of Columbus, GA, did not–and that man had NO, ZERO, count ’em, arrest records when he was intentionally shot in the head WHILE COMPLYING WITH A RACIST ARRESTING OFFICER WHILE BLACK.

Young Sacramento Man Killed in His Grandmother’s Back Yard for Holding a Cellphone While Black

Ring. Ring. RING.

DIVERSE US

“We” (the storied ‘we’ that is) like to talk plenty of shit about “diversity”, but too many of us don’t seem to realize that white people are perfectly comfortable without ANY of us in a room.

They don’t miss our Black bottoms AT ALL, by ANY stretch of the imagination, when we are not there. They prefer that we NOT be there, especially when they are into those certain ‘clandestine operations’ that look like “Patty Pies” on top and smell like booty cakes underneath.

But we -us Black folk- are the only ones who feel like we GOT to have white people in the room, or it ain’t “diverse enough”: So, uhm, “who threw a party and didn’t invite us.”

I remember that one from my corporate America days. Every time they saw Black people standing or sitting and talking to one another, they were all up in the KOOL-AID and didn’t know the flava, like we used to say. As if we were planning an UPRISING ON MARSA PLANTATION, or something close enough.

Yet and still, we’re the only TRULY DIVERSE mofos on the planet, truth told.

We’re the only race and ethnic origin on Planet Earth that comes in all the colors and nationalities and ethnicities of the rainbow and then some. And we have the DNA genetic encoding that birthed multitudes of other nations to back it up. We are PLENTY multi-cultural without them in tow, so we should be just as comfortable with one another…even if they NEVER show up to any “barbecue” we’re throwing.

The Harriet Tubmans of the Information Age and Its Culture

Don’t get me wrong. I got no issues with “Rashida.” She is mastering her own place in a religion that is now known as the fastest-growing one there is, and with good cause.

But I have a religious PREFERENCE, not a religious PREJUDICE. I don’t pay much mind to history-revising white people when it comes to defining who I am as a Black woman in America. Also, I’m not ashamed to call myself BLACK and proud of it.

It is the SOUL and heart of the matter -not the actual skin color- that is the MAGIC OF US.

Yet, if some jaded assimilated child prefers to refer to herself as a “biracial light-skinned American,” have at it. When fascist-mongering Trump sends the Nigger Boat through town to shovel all of us off to Buffalo … Ghana, it’s coming for YOU, too, gril.

‘Light-Skinned’. Biracial – means nothing, as in “What kind of bi-racial are you? There are thousands.” Light-skinned – Mulatto, big deal so am I, though I’m darkening with age, as my genetics are coded to do. American – meaningless, because it’s not a culture, it’s a stolen country.

We had this conversation just before James Brown hit the skids with “Say It Loud,” so it’s a moot point anyway.

I have no need of the Islamic communities at this juncture in my life, but the name “Harriet Tubman” would have suited me better than “Rashida”.

If some Muslim Brotha tried to subjugate me to anything, he’d find his head in a toilet with a bully-certified “swirly” happening before he could roll.

However, I’m no “Black feminista”. I believe a “man gotta do what a man gotta do” and God put him in charge of it in the first place, but when Louis Farrakhan tells that story about the one [AND the ONLY] time he hit his wife, Khadija — arf, arf, too funny!

Beautiful Also Are The Hearts of My Black Brothers

I just read a book, not in honor of Black History Month (my Black History month lasts all year, every day, 24-7), but the book was named “Beautiful Also Are the Souls of My Black Sisters” by Jeanne Noble.

Bearing witness to a family of little Black girls being raised in a horrible household by horrible parents, two of them, it took only 30 days to discover that the lives of the little girls were totally ruined. Sad to say, I had to move out of the way and let it be what it was. In the end, there are some Black folks you just can’t help. They use you, then accuse you, and I won’t let that be the ending of my life at nearly 60 just because I wanted to help them. I don’t have much time left for the devil’s nonsense.

That said, if I were going to say something “racist” about it, it would be that that is one ‘Mama’ babymaker who really needed to keep her legs closed all NINE times, or was it 10? However, that is disparaging to the Powers That Be. These Daughters of The Lost Kind are obviously here for a reason, or they wouldn’t be.

Too many babies are left aborted and unborn for anyone to think otherwise.

I pray they find their way, but they are going to catch holy hell between now and the time they figure it all out. Unfortunately, no one can rescue them from that.

But young BLACK MEN? They see the stench of death coming. I’ve heard them say “I don’t expect to live past 25.”

Some may laugh at us “Rashidas” and even at us “Sandra Blands,” or even us “Bree Newsomes” or (they may as well say) us “Shanaynays,” but we do what we do for a reason, especially those of us who HAVE Black sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons. Pray all you want, racism is inescapable — it is a result of the fallen state of mankind.

For the Kenneth Walkers and Eric Garners and Trayvon Martins, et al et al etal, the overarching racism is not a joke and SOMEBODY needs to be mad about it in the place of the Black folks who think they are untouchable…until they aren’t. Our illustrious journalist, Ta’Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic vividly memorializes his friend, Prince – in one of his books, a Black man dead for being Black in the right place at the wrong time, a man with an impeccable standard of living and a world-class education. Gone, but thanks to the Scribes, NEVER FORGOTTEN.

Too many of our young Black males are not properly prepared for what is eventually coming.

They won’t all die from it, but they will most certainly ALL end up shocked and angry about not hearing the absolute truth from the Get-Go. Farrakhan and The Nation just happen to be a place to go where they feel they won’t be subjugated to white supremacy at a needful time, or told to go “beg and cry” their way through life like little boys when they should be BLACK MEN.

Let us just say, King David -that Black man- would have whomped the butts of his enemies, took names and asked questions later, if he ever asked any. He prayed about it and then went for the gusto…chopped off heads and all – period.

The Time and The Place in Our Culture, Right or Wrong…

I’d like to think I have a healthy respect for balance and an overwhelming love for the souls of my Black people, as did our kindred WEB DuBois and author of the same name. Or at least I have a love for TRUTH, if nothing else. I hate liars with a passion, just like God does.

Negroidal stereo-Archetypes, LOL

We have our …

“Tuck and Duck” Black folk;
our “Run and Hide” Black folk;
our “No-tep Hoteps” in Egyptology;
our “Black-fisted Wonders” of the Radical Kind;
our “Kunta Kintes” from the Plantation;
our “Uncle Clay Thomases” from the Big House;
our “Uncle Bens” from the Horse’n’Carriage Big-Dining-Room-Set House;
our “Right-fisted Feministas”;
our “White-fisted Wardells”;
our “Jealous Jennies”;
our “Burn and Sellout” Sams;
our “Quiet Priders” from Silence of the Lambs;
and our “Butt-whipping Benitas” …

We also have our “Cognitive Effect” and “Black Impact” scribes in the fields of Journalism and Filmography. They do no less than what the opposition does by catching, recording, and capturing it all in writing and on film, just “as it happens”.

I suppose if I were Joy-Ann Reid or even Michael Moore, or Coates, I wouldn’t be “as” funny, but I also won’t claim to be Mary Ann Shadd-Cary of the Provincial Freeman. I wish I were. ‘O’ and ‘how’. Google her.

Call me “Rashida,” if you please. Some impact is better than none at all. We “clique-driven Black folk” could use something outside of our internalized self-righteousness to target from time to time.

But also understand that I hung up my “Captain Save-A-Ni&&er” mask and cape a long time ago.

It is no longer flapping in the breeze, as I can not only NOT “save-a-n-word,” but I can’t even trust very many of them nowadays.

Like ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, ESPN, and CNN … all I do is OBSERVE and RECORD, just so that there is another written record besides the revisionist lies white people tend to tell in their “American” history books.

Someone once asked me what I would do if I was never paid a dime for my work.

They said, “Once you know the answer to that, you will know what you were born to do.”