“Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

-Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Black people, both during and after the slave era, have been compelled to build, creatively and often improvisationally, a family life consistent with the dictates of survival. Yet because the Afro-American family does not reflect the norm, it has repeatedly been defined as pathological in character and has been unjustly blamed for the complex problems that exist within the Black community - problems often directly attributed to the social, economic, and political promotion

-Angela Davis, "Slaying the Dream: The Black Family and the Crisis of Capitalism" Women, Culture & Politics

There was none of this walking about, plugged into the Borg. Children and parents weren’t manipulated into communicating through cable wires or satellites, and there were no commercials calling the movement away from community - progress then. The live “show” in the neighborhood and in our homes was the reality.

Some women, like one of my aunts, “did hair” in the community. Other women, like my mother, baby sat for the neighbors’ children. They didn’t need an associate degree or a license then. The ladies of solidarity were an autonomous contingency of women who dominated the neighborhood catholic church and school with their decisions about church proceedings and school curriculum. To my knowledge, they were just concerned parents and not “education specialists.”

Parents and grandparent, like my grandfather, walked children to school and walked the halls before the classroom doors closed. Women worked in offices downtown and others received “checks” [Public Assistance] and volunteered at the school’s center where children had skating nights when the adults didn’t have bingo nights. On Saturday mornings, we had Brownie, Girl and Boy Scout meetings. There were chess tournaments and basketball games in the afternoon. Some Saturdays, too, it was a treat to shop at the neighboring Catholic Charity department store for used appliances or books or at Wieboldt’s discount store downtown for trinkets that cost less than a dollar. We all had our own bats and balls and tennis rackets and balls for soft ball and tennis games on Sundays. My mother’s sister was one of the best hitting coaches in the neighborhood. Everyone attended the Bud Billiken Parade to cheer on the best high school marching bands in the same Washington Park where men like my father, a beef boner, supplied the meat and barbequed it while women served homemade cornbread from picnic baskets.

Every child belonged to every adult and even the “lady on the corner” at night would report to a parent about a “stray” child out past curfew. The winos at the el stop knew when to expect children back from the movies downtown. Ice Jacket, in his black leather jacket, was our silent resident “thug,” the brother of the quiet girl, “Miracle Child,” and son of the woman upstairs that my grandmother made sure had enough sugar or rice. All the windows of apartments and homes had an elderly “spy” behind the curtains. All phone calls between teens were monitored by a parent sitting nearby. Police tactical urban units and government surveillance weren’t needed to keep “order.”

My grandfather’s boss, the landlord, bearing gifts at Christmas and Easter, sat for dinner at my grandparent’s dining room table. At home, I was “young lady” and in the neighborhood I was “Mr. Priestley’s grandchild.” My grandfather, a janitor of five buildings in the neighborhood, Mr. Hector the newspaper man at the corner, the “lady on the corner,” our elderly neighbors, our shoe, fried chicken, A&P groceries, soda fountain, “dime” discount, and hardware store merchants, our priests, nuns and lay teachers, the ladies of solidarity, precinct captains, and older children, assured us that all was safe and well in our neighborhood. We were a generation that didn’t need Mr. Rogers to sing about the neighborhood or neighbors then. It wasn’t the reality everywhere in Chicago, but it was for most of us on the Southside.

I knew we were colored, Negroes for a while, until high school when the older teens and young adults said to say Black. James Brown said Black, “I am Black and I am proud.” Stokely Carmichael said Black, and we tussled with the older adults who said Negro and we finally talked back and said Black! Things were going to be better in our community because we said Black, because we were learning to connect with other Blacks outside our community, even outside the U.S.. We didn’t know anything about “tuning out” or “dropping out.” We were too excited about tuning in to new attitudes about ourselves and our community.

Our parents, grandparents, teachers, and neighbors breathe life into our voices. They gave us permission to speak among them while Black Movement trained our thought to recognize our individual selves in the other, in our collective being. Our maturity depended on this progression of body, soul, and voice.

Then something happened to our neighborhood, our community. I can’t imagine what these people would think now if they were alive - my parents, grandparents, Mr. Hector, the “lady on the corner,” the winos, the nuns, priests, the merchants, the landlord, the elderly neighbors, the ladies of solidarity, even Ice Jacket. Some kind of “shock and awe” show came in from the outside, to be sure, but something happened, too, that allowed the disaster into come in our back yard.

Today, the white power structure, the imperialist hegemony deems the very word “race” to be outlawed. The very word “race” is equated with the word “n-----.” Don’t utter that word; don’t utter the word “race” and all will be well. The imperialists mean to bleed any discussion, or worse, cultural identity with Blackness among Black Americans. They are asking us to take the rhythm, cadence, and the message of liberation out of our sermons and speeches - don’t sound like Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton or Rev Jeremiah Wright - sound like a Black political candidate or sound like the “hyper-articulate” Condi Rice. How we speak to each other and what we say to one another is under attack. Be not Black but American - meaning WHITE, middle-class - and the “race” problem will go away because - what will be left in the message of those who speak to our Black American experience?

What is within a people who fear so much, who are so threatened by the other that they will demand - DEMAND - of us to speak, but remove the blood running in our veins first. Speak, but remove what connects you to each other and to each other’s experiences in Amerikka and to our Ancestors. We are now asked to repudiate our own BLOODLINE. To denounce and reject ourselves as so much “incendiary” language and so much “angry” flesh. The audacity! This message is delivered by willing surrogates of imperialism.

“Afro-racism” is yet another infamous image tossed up to the American public in order to silence any opposition from the Black masses, the Black Left. “Afro-racism” means what? It means that the imperialists are scared again and they need a distraction - a convenient and familiar distraction from the American public’s attention on the slaughter of Iraqis - the Black Americans. Our Blackness is once again used as a distraction to take attention away from the Empire’s domestic and foreign policies, from the over 100,000 dead (liberated?) Iraqis, from the half-trillion spent pursuing the deaths of other people in a “pro-American” campaign. “You are either with us or against us.” The problem with America is Black Americans. They aren’t with us and, therefore, not AMERICAN enough! They still find white hatred and intolerance a problem! How dare they!

Prejudice, maybe. Maybe some Blacks hold prejudices as do most people. But racism is systemic and institutionalized. It requires the force of power we as Black Americans don’t have, no matter how many times Condi Rice shops at Ferragamo’s. Her consumerism furthers the power of imperialism; it doesn’t erase the power needed to enforce systematic and institutionalized racism. The image of Condi Rice flying off to another shopping spree isn’t progress! It isn’t a worthy substitute for those Black women who pulled a community together against all odds and all forms of disruptive tactics.

Another white can’t determine if a fellow white is racist or not. The latter would have to be observed in interaction with Blacks, Browns, Reds and with Iraqis at three in the morning! That Iraqi or Chicano will recognize racism through that slight gesture or that LOOK or that dismissive chattiness we encounter daily lives in America.

Say, “We are good.” “YOU ARE GOOD.” Say, “We are liberating you.” “YOU ARE LIBERATING ME.” And they are ringing our collective necks and pulling the rope tighter.

I had no way of knowing then that white people outside our community were scared of us when we said we were Black. Some of us were young and perhaps naive and maybe, too, innocent in that we were ignorant of the “innocence” of a larger community surrounding us. We listened to what Cornel West called the prophetic messengers within and without the community whose goal was to “stir up in us the courage to care and empower us to change our lives and our historical circumstances” Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism. We didn’t know that this courage to care and empowerment to change our lives and circumstances would be acts of disturbance in the status quo, so feared, so hated from without in that world of “innocence.” We didn’t know that that “innocence” was (and still is) the norm.

What happened? White fear happened again. When some of us lost our focus and adapted to this absurdity and fear, we lost our sense of communalism, and losing sight of that community (for glittering trinkets), we lost our footing in the battle against racist imperialism.

We can’t be a little capitulating, a little pregnant with the benefits and goals of imperialism reeking of racism and expect to maintain our humanity. It’s not a little bit monstrous; it’s monstrous to repress a people and yet continue to ask that we, Black Americans, engage in the repression of ourselves. Censor yourselves now! Distance yourself from the EMENY within your neighborhoods, your community--within you! Be ashamed to be BLACK!

Don’t throw our Ancestors, our ancestry to the wolves. Understand that what we know of white America, what we have experienced as a collective people, enslaved and exploited, is the real threat. And unlike other people of darker hue and different religions, we know this: it’s fear that makes some white Americans so violently aggressive and others so passively accepting of this aggressive perspective toward Black Americans. It’s this knowledge and our traditions of resistance here - in the belly of the beast - which Americans fear. As one of our prophetic messengers once said, “In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity.” (Rev. Martin Luther King, Beyond Vietnam and Casualties of the war in Vietnam, 4 April 1967).

We must maintain our tradition of communalism, and hold on to our theology of liberation, and hold on our narratives of liberation. This is the promise we made to our Ancestors, our bloodline, to oppose imperialism and its many campaigns of assault.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

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