Black and White

I loved this post. So often one reads or hears the noise around us, and something about someone bothers us. We don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about what that something is, because—let’s face it—there’s plenty else around that does get us pissed off, where we do know what that something is. But now and again, a Ta-Nehisi comes along and puts the finger on that elusive something, and the relief is palatable.

There are many, many tribes of whiteness in America which I don’t particularly understand. I didn’t get how some white people go off to expensive colleges and then spend their friday nights, french-kissing a keg of the world’s cheapest beer, until they’re rendered unconscious. I remember the first white parties I went to, in my early twenties, and I was shocked to see people standing around clutching plastic cups, music playing, but no one dancing. It took some time for me to get blue-collar comedy. I’m still not up on cucumber sandwiches–but judging by the diabetes rates here in Harlem, maybe I should be.

We all have our prejudice, but every time I’ve ever mistaked that prejudice for some sort of insight, I’ve paid for it. I learned to like going to parties standing around at actually “talking”–I didn’t have to worry about some dude forming a Soul Train and forcing me to do my pitiful rendition of the Reebok or the Cabbage Patch.

Before, I started reading Andrew, I thought all gay people liked the HRC, sort of how a lot of white writers think all black people like the NAACP or Al Sharpton. You live and you learn I guess. I want writers to stop assuming that they know who we are, that black people are so simple as to be summed up in the latest Henry Louis Gates’s latest missive (or Ta-Nehisi Coates missive, for that matter). I want writers to stop wishing that Barack Obama will teach us how to act.

Go read the full post.

~ by Sonia on June 17, 2008.