damali ayo

Damali ayo (1972- ) is an American artist, best known as the creator of Rent-a-Negro. She has also panhandled for reparations, the money whites should give blacks to make up for their past crimes.

She thinks her name looks better in lower-case letters, so that is how she writes it: damali ayo.

Art for her is not about making something that looks pretty or cool, but about making people think. To bring them up short and make them question what is going on. Not art for art’s sake, but art to change society for the better.

Rent-a-Negro started out as a website in 2003, became a book in 2005 and now, in 2008, is being made into a film.

Ayo does not in fact rent out any Negroes - not that white people have not asked for such a service! Instead the website is meant to make white people laugh at themselves - and then think about their strange ideas about black people! But many of them do not get it.

Ayo often finds herself being the only black person at a party and for many of her white friends she is the only black person they know.

So she becomes like a rare bird: white people want to touch her, especially her hair - sometimes they do not even ask first but just start touching! They ask her about O.J. Simpson or Katrina, as if all black people think alike, as if they only have opinions about race and not, say, the war in Iraq.

Her white friends have used her to prove how they are not racist: “Tell them, Damali, how I’m not racist.” Or to talk to their racist grandmother.

Her mother told to stop being everyone’s Rent-a-Negro. That gave Ayo the idea for the website. White people should pay for the service she is providing!

She uses the word “Negro” because it is outdated, to make the point that the sort of white views she is talking about should be just as out of date.

As for the reparations, some whites give her money! One gave her 20 cents and then wanted a receipt! Ayo gives the money right away to the first black person who walks by. Others help her in the cause.

Ayo grew up in Washington, DC, went to Brown University and now lives in Portland, Oregon, right in the middle of Ecotopia: she very much believes in living in a more natural and earth-friendly way. She has a garden from which she gets much of her food and even medicine. She drinks rainwater and so on.

When she was little she thought Einstein and Houdini must be black because they were so cool and interesting.

She supports Barack Obama: he is by far the most honest man who has run for president in a long time.

She has not just her websites, but also a blog and a YouTube channel.

See also:

• All things Damali:
  • Rent-a-Negro
  • damali’s blog
    
  • Her YouTube channel
  • Her website
    
• Race in America
• Barack Obama

 

Adam Mansbach

Adam Mansbach (c. 1977- ) is an American writer best known for “Angry Black White Boy” (2005) and “The End of the Jews” (2008). He seems to be one of the few white American writers these days who writes about race and whiteness. Tim Wise also comes to mind.

Mansbach is Jewish, but his family was not all that religious and did not practise the old Jewish ways. Instead he grew up on jazz and especially hip hop in a white, well-to-do town just outside of Boston. He loved hip hop when it was still largely a black thing. That put him into a strange position with both blacks and whites. He became an outsider in both worlds.

The day that changed his life was April 29th 1992. He was 15 and heard that the policemen who beat Rodney King were found not guilty. How could that be? He saw the video over and over again on television of the white policemen beating an unarmed black man senseless. Who could doubt their guilt?

He was shocked that the policemen walked free, but what shocked him even more was that no one in his white town cared. No one was angry or anything. While Los Angeles burned it was just another day where he lived.

He and a teacher at school led a walkout and went to city hall to show their anger and make people maybe think a bit.

All this made him think about race, white people and his own whiteness. So years later he wrote a book about it, “Angry Black White Boy”.

It is about Macon Detornay, a young New York taxi driver. He robs his rich, white customers because of their race. Everyone thinks he is black, but he turns out to be white! He becomes famous and calls for a National Day of Apology where whites tell blacks how sorry they are for all the injustice they have done. Things get out of control from there…

Mansbach wrote the book in what he calls a hip hop style - just like Kerouac wrote some of his stuff in a sort of jazz style of prose.

Mansbach says whiteness is hard to understand because it is everywhere. That makes it hard to see. It does not stick out like blackness does. But he does understand that the way society works - from the police to the courts to the banks and so on - that it is all set up to suit whites and winds up screwing blacks.

Some things he has said:

… the legacy of black folks in America is so profound that it functions as a metaphor for all humanity.

I think that for every community there are outskirts, margins… To me, those margins are where art comes from.

Like if you don’t know Diana Ross, you might think Puffy is a genius.

The genius of graffiti is that five million people see your art.

See also:

• Jack Kerouac
• Jews
• hip hop
• Race in America
• The best American writers live north of 110th Street - not to say that he is one of the best, but when I found out about him he seemed Uptown to me and, as it turns out, he did go to Columbia.
  

 

Dawn Penn: No, no, no, you don’t love me

No no no
You don’t love me
and I know now

No no no
You don’t love me
as I know now

Coz you left me
Baby
And I got no place to go now

No no no
I’d do anything to stay boy

No no no
I’d do anything to stay boy

Coz if you asked me
Baby
I’ll get on my knees and pray boy

 

Ebonics

Ebonics (1600s- ) or Black English is what the Wikipedia calls African American Vernacular English, meaning the street English of blacks in America. Since the 1940s much of American slang has come from Black English, some of it becoming part of Standard English, like put down, corny and cool.

Ebonics is different than Standard English. Standard English is the English you learn in school, the kind you find in books. The kind I try to write in. It is universal: it is the same the world over - in America, Britain, Nigeria, Jamaica, India, even China. That is what is so great about it.

But Standard English is not “natural”. It started in the 1400s in the government offices in London. It has spread by education and books, especially the King James Bible. It was heavily affected by Latin. It did not become a common way of speaking among white Americans till the 1800s. With the rise of public education they were taught that it was good English, that anything else was bad.

It was good only in the sense that it was universal, but otherwise it was no better than any other English in terms of grammar, beauty or its power to express thought and feeling.

Black English, certainly, is just as powerful and often far more beautiful. But you cannot use it everywhere because not everyone understands it and many, both black and white, will think you lack education or even intelligence.

Black English is not an unlettered form of White English. It is not that simple.

When blacks were brought to America from Africa as slaves they spoke to their masters and each other in a very simple form of English called pidgin English. Many slaves spoke pidgin Wolof too. Wolof was the language of an old empire in Africa. It died out in America in the late 1600s, but some of its words have lived on, like banana, chigger (bedbug), yam, okay, honky, sambo, guy, bug out, hip (cool), dig (understand) and maybe even wow.

Slaves born in America knew only pidgin English. They made it into a full language known as Creole English. Unlike a pidgin, it has the full power of ordinary English.

Creole English used English words, mostly, but put them in a different and simpler order. Its way of dealing with verbs was different too. It was very much like the Jamaican patois you hear on the streets of Kingston and in some reggae songs.

Creole English became what we know as Black English. Over time it has become more and more like Standard English, something that is still going on.

Nearly all black Americans over a certain age know and understand both Black English and Standard English. Some will use only one or the other, but most will change between them depending on circumstances, something called code switching.

Ebonics made the news in 1997 when Oakland, California wanted to use it to help black schoolchildren learn Standard English. The idea was killed.

See also:

• Ntozake Shange: Betsey Brown - a book written mainly Black English that shows its power and beauty. Amiri Baraka, June Jordan and others have also written books in Black English.
  
• Reading David Foster Wallace - Wallace got in trouble with his university for telling black students they had to learn White English.
• The coon stereotype
  
• America
• English
• King James Bible (Authorized Version)
• Latin
• Haitian Creole

 

Angel Lola Luv

Melaku Fershgenet (1986- ), better known as Angel Lola Luv or Angel Melaku, is an Ethiopian-born American video vixen. Starting out in 2006, she made it to the top in just two years. She was the main video girl in “Good Life” by Kanye West and “I Get Money” by 50 Cent.

She has a pretty face, light skin, long black hair and a big, beautiful bottom. So big that it seems unnatural for the frame of her body. Anything is possible, but most likely it is not natural at all. Some have noticed her breasts getting bigger too. And some even say her teeth are not natural! And most likely neither is her hair!

She will not say how much of her is natural. She says it is better for people to wonder because it gets her talked about and therefore better known.

Her look is unnatural and, if you look at the women in black men’s magazines, it is very made-to-order.

Her booty-on-a-stick look is new. If it catches on it could become very common by the 2010s. Just like when Pamela Anderson and others in the 1990s brought in the breast-on-a-stick look, which at first looked strange but now is accepted.

There are plenty of men who will tell you she is the most beautiful woman in the world. But she is too strange looking for my tastes. And knowing that something on a woman is not natural makes it seem less good somehow.

She is five foot five (1.65 m). Her measurements are 34C 22 40 inches (86-56-102 cm). Her waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) is 0.55, which is extremely low

She was born Melaku Fershgenet in Ethiopia. Melaku is her family name. She came to America when she was only a month old, a year after Live Aid. The Wikipedia says she is part Trinidadian. She grew up in uptown Washington, DC.

In 2006 she appeared in Trey Songz’s video “Wonder Woman”. It made her name. She became XXL’s Eye Candy of the Year that same year. In 2007 she was the industry’s it girl. And now, in 2008, she is at the top, having appeared in almost every black men’s magazine as well as the videos of not just Kanye West, 50 Cent and Trey Songz but also Twista, Lloyd Banks, Young Jeezy, Busta Rhymes and others.

You can see her in this blog in the video “Beat Rock” by Tabi Bonney. She is the woman he hugs. Like Melaku, Bonney was born in Africa but grew up in DC.

Some wonder if she has gone with Trey Songz, Young Jeezy, Lil Wayne or other rappers. She is very good friends with Trey Songz, calling him one of the realest people she has met in the industry so far, but she is too busy for a relationship. She says sex is sacred. She thinks that sleeping your way to the top does not work in the long run.

She is now trying to become an actress.

See also:

• video vixens
• big bottom girls
• Tabi Bonney: Beat Rock
• WHR: waist to hip ratio
• Washington, DC

 

The pure white woman stereotype

The pure white woman stereotype was a picture that white Americans had in their heads about white women. It pictured them as being pure in terms of both sex and race. It was the main excuse given for Jim Crow, the laws and customs that kept down black people for a hundred years after they were freed as slaves.

Even today the stereotype lives on in a weakened form, making white Americans uncomfortable when they see a black man with a white woman.

The pure white woman determined how whites looked at blacks. If white women were pure, then black men were the threat. Thus the black brute stereotype, which saw black men as savages. And if white women were pure, then black women were not. Thus the Jezebel stereotype, which saw black women as easy and loose.

This picture of white women had such force that a black man could be killed just for being too friendly with a white woman. Thus the lynchings, where black men hung dead from trees.

At the heart of all this was the raw fear in the hearts of white men that black men would take all of “their” women - meaning the white women. They thought black men were better at pleasing women in bed. So they had to be stopped.

They were stopped in three ways:

1. White men kept the races apart with Jim Crow laws, laws backed up by lynchings.
2. White men made sure that most black men were kept poor. making them undesirable to white women as husbands.
3. The One Drop Rule meant that any children a white woman had by a black man would be black too.

Black men were kept from white women, but white men continued to rape black women without consequence.

So, in the name of keeping white women pure, to keep them up on that pedestal, blacks were kept down.

But white women were kept in their place too, even if it was up on a pedestal somewhere closer to the angels.

The American magazines and religious books of the 1800s told white women that to be good and pure they should leave the dirty business of running the world to their husbands. So no need to vote. They were told that making beds was much better for them than reading books, which would only fill their heads with the wrong ideas. And so on.

The Jim Crow laws came down in the 1950s and 1960s. By 1967 black men could marry white women anywhere in the country.

But even now some white people are still not comfortable seeing a black man with a white woman. White women are still held up as more beautiful than anyone and more morally upright, despite “Girls Gone Wild” and other things. And when a white woman is missing it can be on the news for days and days, while missing black women never seem to make the news for some reason.

See also:

• Race in America
• white women
• Jim Crow
• The black brute stereotype
• The Jezebel stereotype
• One Drop Rule
• The Missing White Woman Syndrome

 

Three songs from Uptown

Three songs follow this posting:

• Billie Holiday: My Man
• Suzanne Vega: Luka
• Kelis: Milkshake

They were done at three different times in three different styles of music. Two of the singers are black, one is white, But all three lived in Uptown Manhattan in New York, Manhattan north of 110th Street, and it shows.

They sing about the world as it is, as they see it with their own two eyes. Even when it is ugly and unfair - in fact, especially when it is ugly and unfair. And they sing about what they see even when it does not make any sense. They do not try to pretty it up by throwing out facts because they are unpleasant or make no sense.

In “My Man” Billie Holiday sings “He isn’t true; he beats me too” but then sings “My man, I love him so” and “when he takes me in his arms the world is bright, all right”. She has thought of leaving him but then says, “What’s the difference if I say I’ll go away when I know I’ll come back on my knees someday.”

It is like living in Uptown itself: living in a world with a big crack going right down the middle that makes no sense but you live with it somehow. The world is profoundly imperfect but you must carry on all the same.

You see the same thing in “Luka” some 40 years later. It is about a boy who is being beaten. He tries to lie about it to his neighbour but the song does not play along with him. He too is trying to live with a big crack in his life and somehow make sense of it. “You just don’t argue anymore”.

In “Milkshake”, instead of beating women and children, men are driven by lust. The women with the best bodies get their man. Again, it looks at the world as it is in all its unfairness. It has no patience for politically correct ideas of beauty that many want to believe in.

Why this love of the ugly truth? Why songs about the unfairness of life? Because in Uptown the truth is ugly and life is profoundly unfair. Yet you have to make sense of it somehow.

All this is very different from how mainstream America sees life and the world.

In mainstream America people think they can get through life clean, that if they have enough money, enough police protection, that if they build their gates high enough and strong enough, they will get through life with as little suffering as possible.

But that is the life of escape, that is the life of an overgrown child. And, in America, it is a life built on lies. It is not the life for anyone with a true heart.

Sooner or later you will suffer, then what? And when the bad times come where will you run? And when all your lies have been knocked flat, where will you hide?

See also:

• Billie Holiday: My Man
• Suzanne Vega: Luka
• Kelis: Milkshake
• Uptown
• The best American writers live north of 110th Street

 

Billie Holiday: My Man

It cost me a lot
But there’s one thing
that I’ve got
It’s my man
It’s my man

Cold or wet
Tired, you bet
All of this I’ll soon forget
With my man

He’s not much on looks
He’s no hero out of books
But I love him
Yes, I love him

Two or three girls
Has he
That he likes as well as me
But I love him

I don’t know why I should
He isn’t true
He beats me, too
What can I do?

Oh, my man, I love him so
He’ll never know
All my life is just despair
But I don’t care
When he takes me in his arms
The world is bright
All right

What’s the
difference if I
say
I’ll go away
When I know I’ll come back
On my knees someday

For whatever my man is
I’m his forevermore

 

Kelis: Milkshake

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like,
its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you,
but i have to charge

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like,
its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you,
but i have to charge

I know you want it,
the thing that makes me,
what the guys go crazy for.
They lose their minds,
the way i wind,
i think its time

la la-la la la,
warm it up.
lala-lalala,
the boys are waiting

la la-la la la,
warm it up.
lala-lalala,
the boys are waiting

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like,
its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you,
but i have to charge

i can see youre on it,
you want me to teach the
techniques that freaks these boys,
it can’t be bought,
just know, thieves get caught,
watch if your smart,

la la-la la la,
warm it up,
la la-la la la,
the boys are waiting,

la la-la la la,
warm it up,
la la-la la la,
the boys are waiting,

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like,
its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you,
but i have to charge

Once you get involved,
everyone will look this way-so,
you must maintain your charm,
same time maintain your halo,
just get the perfect blend,
plus what you have within,
then next his eyes are squint,
then he’s picked up your scent,

lala-lalala,
warm it up,
lala-lalala,
the boys are waiting,

lala-lalala,
warm it up,
lala-lalala,
the boys are waiting,

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like,
its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you,
but i have to charge

 

Suzanne Vega: Luka

My name is Luka
I live on the second floor
I live upstairs from you
Yes I think you’ve seen me before

If you hear something late at night
Some kind of trouble. some kind of fight
Just don’t ask me what it was
Just don’t ask me what it was
Just don’t ask me what it was

I think it’s because I’m clumsy
I try not to talk too loud
Maybe it’s because I’m crazy
I try not to act too proud

They only hit until you cry
And after that you don’t ask why
You just don’t argue anymore
You just don’t argue anymore
You just don’t argue anymore

Yes I think I’m okay
I walked into the door again
Well, if you ask that’s what I’ll say
And it’s not your business anyway
I guess I’d like to be alone
With nothing broken, nothing thrown

Just don’t ask me how I am
Just don’t ask me how I am
Just don’t ask me how I am

 

Letter #65

Dear Mamacita:

Happy birthday!!! Belated and all. I did not get home till midnight that night. I am glad you made it through another year.

Thanks for telling me about that show about Michelangelo and the pope. Rebecca wanted to record it too, but as it turns out she did not get a chance!

We went to Cleveland last Sunday. That is why I did not write. Ruthie got married the Thursday before to Ian.

I wrote her a letter advising her to get married. It made her cry. In a good way, I hope. Or at least in a good bad way: I said that if she does not marry Ian she will probably never get married.

It was not just me. Other older, wiser heads talked to her too. Rebecca made sure that anyone who cares about Ruthie knew what was going on.

The wedding was a justice-of-the-peace affair. They are pouring what money they have into a house of their own. It needs work, but it looks like a good house. It stands in a mixed neighbourhood built in the 1950s just beyond the edge of Cleveland. Flat, few trees, but I guess that is Ohio.

Ian’s parents did not come to the dinner. His mother had to work. She was against the marriage: she did not get married till her fourth child, so why should Ruthie be any different? A terrible woman from all accounts, but I have never met her.

At the dinner Frankie was saying stuff like “chewing is for rednecks”. He calls that little pocket on his suit jacket his “man pocket”. I told him that he would like Brazilian music if he heard more of it. He said, “I have heard too much of it already.”

Rebecca now works nights on the weekend, not during the day. Which means we can now go to church again. We have hardly been to church in five years - ever since her mother died.

We go to her Seventh-Day Adventist church on Saturday and I go to my Catholic mass on Sundays.

It has been way way too long. When I heard the preacher’s words on Saturday it was like rain falling on a cracked desert land. Or like making love for the first time after weeks or months of fighting.

That means you will probably get these letters way sooner in the day.

My obligatory two cents about Obama: I think Reverend Wright could wind up sinking Obama. Badrul and Rebecca think he is already sunk. No one should be judged by what his pastor says, but by his own words and actions. But with ABC and CNN for Hillary Clinton and Fox News for John McCain, they can make it stick.

I heard that McCain’s pastor has said some things against Catholics. Do I hold that against McCain? No. Unless McCain himself started saying those things.

Your son,
Abagond,
Sun May 4 07:04:29 UTC 2008

 

Uptown

Uptown, according to the Urban Dictionary, is the part of New York north of 110th Street, the part of Manhattan north of Central Park. That is the sense the word has in hip hop and in this blog.

The Wikipedia draws the line at 59th Street, but that makes the word next to useless: that would take in the rich white parts of the city to the east and west of Central Park. It is the sort of New York you see in children’s books, a very different world from what lies north of 110th Street.

Until the other day I never thought of Uptown as one thing, as one place. There was Harlem, of course, in the middle and then the places round the edges of it: Spanish Harlem, Columbia University, City College and the Dominican neighbourhoods beyond that.

I did not see Uptown whole: I saw it cut to pieces by language and race. That is the way I thought of it when I lived there and I think most people who live there do the same.

But when you step back, when you compare it to the rest of New York City and the rest of the country, especially when you look at the books and films and songs that Uptowners, black or white, have come out with, then it hangs together as one place.

Differences of race and language do matter - Uptown is far from colour-blind - but there is also a common experience that affects everyone who lives there with an honest heart.

They call that common experience “New York” or “the city” or “the world”, but it is in fact just Uptown that they are talking about. Because that is the New York, the city and the world they know. I left Uptown long ago but that picture of the world is still in my head.

And in that world there are hundreds of thousands of blacks who are poor, mostly through no fault of their own (yes), while down below 96th Street are some of the richest white people in the world. It is very hard to see that day after day and year after year. The world is the opposite of a Norman Rockwell painting.

And so when you hear how wonderful America is, when you see the smiling white people on television, you want to pretty much throw up. The injustice and the lies that the country is built on become crystal clear. Everything comes down to power.

You have little patience for sentimentality because in your experience it is almost always the sugarcoating for some sickening lie.

And so from out of that world comes Billie Holiday and “Scarface”, the Harlem Renaissance and the beats, “I’ll Fly Away” and James Baldwin, Howard Zinn and Bigger Thomas, “My Name is Luka” and “Milkshake”.

Spike Lee often sets his films in Harlem but you can tell he is not from there: he looks at Harlem through rose-coloured glasses that no one there wears.

See also:

• New York
• Harlem
• The best writers live north of 110th Street
• Those who have lived Uptown:
  • Nella Larsen
  • Tamara Tunie
  • YaYa Da Costa
  • Sanaa Lathan
  • Ntozake Shange
  • Jack Kerouac

 

Omotola

Omotola Jalade Ekeinde (1978- ), also known as Omosexy, is one of the top actresses in Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry. Known all across English-speaking Africa and beyond, only Genevieve Nnaji clearly outshines her.

She is probably best known for “Blood Sisters” (2003), “The Prostitute” and, the film that made her name, “Mortal Inheritance” (1996). She has been in more than 250 films. Most Nollywood films are cheap, straight-to-video affairs.

In American terms she is sort of like Toccara Jones with the acting talent of Uma Thurman.

According to this blog, she is the fourth most beautiful Nigerian actress. I would watch a film just because she was in it. She is one of those women that it is hard for me to take my eyes off of. She has an amazing body, a full African figure. Her eyes seem a bit small and far apart, but I love her face all the same. Especially her mouth and the way she moves it.

Her beauty is even more amazing when you consider that she has had four children. She had them pretty early so it was easier for her to get back to her old shape. But now that her body knows a larger size, she has to fight it, exercising every day (walking) and watching what she eats (plenty of fruit, turkey and chicken without the skin).

She says the secret to being beautiful is to love yourself. Get that right and all else will follow.

It was easy for her to get into film: not only is she beautiful but she has natural acting talent, making characters come to life. Producers wanted her in their films!

In the early days her mother stopped her from taking certain parts: she was a strict Christian and brought up Omotola that way. It seems to have stuck with her. For one thing, Omotola has been married to the same man for 12 years. That is a long time for the Nollywood set.

Her father, the manager of a Lagos country club, died when she was young. It made her more serious than most. It also made acting possible: her father would not have allowed her to act, but with him gone they needed the money.

Omotola is Yoruba, but speaks English as if it was her mother tongue. Maybe it is.

In 2006 it was discovered that film producers were paying her and other top stars huge sums of money. So they were not allowed to act in any films for a year. Some thought Nollywood would fall, but it made it through. In the meantime Omotola went into singing. She came out with one album and in 2008 is working on her second. Her first one was not so great.

Like Angelina Jolie, Omotola is a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations. They sent her to Sierra Leone and Liberia, two countries torn apart by war. The people there have seen her films and love her.

See also:

• omotola.tv
• The most beautiful Nigerian actresses
• big bottom girls
• Nigeria
• film
• United Nations
• English
• Christianity

 

The best American writers live north of 110th Street

When I was younger there were certain Americans authors that I just loved, while I had little patience for the others who were supposed to be so much better according to my English teachers.

Here are the ones I read the most: James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Jack Kerouac, Henry David Thoreau, Sinclair Lewis, Ntozake Shange, Noam Chomsky, Gloria Naylor, Erich Fromm, Edward Said, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Lewis Mumford.

Half are black, half are white. Two are foreign-born. But there is something that 10 of the 14 have in common: early in their lives they all lived in the same bit of America: Uptown Manhattan, Manhattan north of 110th Street in New York. Like me.

As far as I know Thoreau, Chomsky, Sinclair Lewis and Alice Walker have never lived there. But the other ten have, either in Harlem or at one of the universities next to it (or both):

• Harlem: Baldwin, Naylor, Hurston, Jordan, Baraka
• Barnard: Jordan, Shange, Hurston
• Columbia: Baraka, Kerouac, Fromm, Said
• City College: Mumford

Themes and ideas that keep coming up in these authors, whether they are black or white:

• Many of the things you hear about America are self-serving lies.
• If you are not careful, American society will make you into a soulless machine.
• Most Americans are cut off from their own true feelings.
• A hollow falseness lies at the heart of mainstream America.
• American society has injustice built right into it.
• America is split down the middle by race.
• See things as they are, not as everyone says they are or wish they were.
• Money and progress are not necessarily always good things.
• In the end it all comes down to power.

Of course, some of these are things you can know just by being black anywhere in America.

Manhattan north of 110th Street is not part of apple-pie America. The image of Harlem becomes burned into your mind forever. The poverty. The rank injustice of race. It is so overpowering that it can cut through the blindness of even white people. At least some of them.

So even if you have money, even if you have white skin, even if you have had the best that America has to offer, it is hard to live there and believe that America is anywhere near as wonderful as it seems on television or in the history books. Not if you are honest. Not if you value the truth. Not if you see with your own two eyes.

The big smile that has been pasted over America comes to seem like the big lie.

And the angry things that Michelle Obama says make complete sense to you. The Southside of Chicago seems to be the same sort of place. And you start to wonder if Barack Obama, who once went to Columbia and has lived in the Southside all these years, you wonder if he truly means everything he says or if he is just kissing up to the mainstream.

But at least you know he knows. You do not know if John McCain knows.

See also:

• Uptown
  • Harlem
• Apple-pie America
• writers:
  • Jack Kerouac
  • Ntozake Shange
• Barack Obama
• Michelle Obama
• John McCain

 

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1939) is an American Christmas story about a flying reindeer whose bright red nose helped Santa Claus to see his way through a bad storm so he could deliver Christmas gifts to boys and girls all over the world.

The story is the invention of Montgomery Ward, a department store. It started out in 1939 as just a colouring book and a Christmas song. Gene Autry later sang the song and it became the number one song in America at Christmas time in 1949. The story was made into a television special for Christmas 1964 and has been show on television every year since. Other stories about Rudolph have been added to the main one:

Rudolph was born at the North Pole, the son of Donner, one of Santa’s seven flying reindeer. But Rudolph was not like the other reindeer: he was born with a red nose that sometimes lit up. He was different and therefore no good.

Rudolph tried to hide his difference, but soon all of the other reindeer knew. They laughed and called him names. They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games. He jumped higher than the others, but Santa still did not want him because of his nose.

So Rudolph left Christmas Town. He met up with Hermey, another runaway, an elf who wanted to fix teeth, not make toys like all the other elves. They joined up with Yukon Cornelius, who was looking for silver and gold.

After a narrow escape from the giant Abominable, they crossed the sea and found themselves at the Island of Misfit Toys. The king of the island was a lion with wings. He would not let them stay for more than a night: the island was only for toys that no boy or girl wanted, like a boat that sank or a bird that swam.

In the middle of the night Rudolph struck out on his own, leaving Hermey and Yukon behind. He lived by himself. When he had grown up he went home but found no one there. They had gone looking for him and into the hands of Abominable. Rudolph tried to save them but was knocked out. Just as Abominable was about to eat him and his whole family, Hermey and Yukon came to save the day.

What made Abominable so mean was his bad teeth. Once Hermey pulled them out he became friendly.

Just when Rudolph and company got back to the North Pole, a big storm hit. The worst ever. Santa was going to call off Christmas. But then when he saw Rudolph’s nose, he said, “Rudolph with your nose so bright, won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?”

Rudolph was a hero. On the way they stopped at the Island of Misfit Toys and found children who would love them just the way they were.

See also:

• Christmas
• Obama at Altgeld Gardens