Lost and Unbound

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                           Lost and Unbound

In this age of efficiency, Americans love to place everything from high-tech commodities to each other in neat, convenient boxes with easy to say names and one-size-fits-all utility.  This, of course, is human nature and par for the course in such an over-worked, multi-tasking, fast-paced society such as ours.  Who has time for complexities?  Our marketing plays on this susceptibility to catchphrases, simplistic jingles and boldly visual advertising.  The rule seems to be: the shorter, quicker and more to the point you can be—the better.  And who are we if not consumers?  It is in this environment that we become increasingly comfortable with referring to and identifying with the racial/ethnic descriptions: Black, White, Latino, Hispanic, Asian, Other, and God forbid you should be an “other.”

          

-->Don’t get me wrong, this is not a judgment and it is nothing new.  However, I believe that it is more important now in this truly globalized era, two generations removed from Jim Crow and all that that meant for all of us, that we pause and think about this packaging of people.

            Let us first remember when this idea of categorizing people in such a way began to catch fire.  From the African-American perspective, it is no coincidence that we label ethnic groups the way we do commercial items.  Spanish and Portuguese slavers shipped Africans to their territories in the New World including Florida during the 16^th Century much the way trucks haul loads from factories to warehouses and somehow identifying Wolof, Mandingo, Malinke, Bambara, Papel, Limba, Bola, Balante, Serer, Fula, Tucolor from Senegambia or the Teme, Mende, Kisi from Sierre Leone, or the Golo, Vai, or Baolo from the Windward Coast, etc. seemed like a mouthful and too difficult to differentiate.  These human commodities were given the Spanish word for Black—Negro. 

            Though British slavers interchangeably used their own labels: Africans, Blacks, and Coloreds—the anglicized word Negro stuck for a mighty long time.  Through the Black Pride movement following the Civil Rights movement, the antiquated 400-year-old label died in polite Western culture in the 1970s and thus we have, with some grumbling, settled on being called Black.  Is the term African-American also being used? Sure, but honestly, how catchy is that?

            Today everything is short-handed to fit our texting need, thus, so is our language and our story.  The art of story telling dies in this environment.  With that an entire culture is vulnerable to being lost and as Marcus Garvey put it in a far different time “A people without the knowledge of their past origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”

Conversely, even in the time it takes to say the words African-American, a short, simple story is told.  The story, though unique to every person who claims this identity connects one’s lineage to the continent of Africa.  The seemingly benign label Black does not make the same connection.  It is more of a crude description of one’s skin color just as it was when Spanish and Portuguese slavers labeled their captives Negro.  Through the use of the word Black, there is no acknowledgement of one’s true heritage, only pigmentation and when you don’t know who you are and from whom you’ve come, it is only natural to take on the associated characteristics of Blackness howejhver they appear to an individual.  It could be through Hip Hop music and their videos, the news good or bad, other media platforms, or maybe most effectively through localized representations (neighbors, family, schoolmates, etc.).  This process can have a variety of results.  It is too dependent upon too many variables.  It calls for one to piece together a collage of images, words, dialect, etc. to create a patchwork of a person.  One learns to adopt mannerisms, fashion, and behaviors simply deemed Black.

            You could say that this analysis is too deep and over-thought but I would direct you to the autobiographies of Malcolm X, Richard Wright (Black Boy) and Barack Obama, to name a few, to see this practice take place in the young men’s lives.  These were not simply coming of age stories, they were coming to terms with Blackness in America stories as well.

            I conclude with a grave fear I have for our children or the 21^st Century.  Certainly there are several others of my generation with profound and sound knowledge of the African American Experience in totality.  However, I fear this knowledge is being lost rapidly.  I fear that many deem the tragedies and most of the triumphs as being irrelevant to modern “Blackness.”  Without knowledge of from whence we came and how exactly we’ve come to be where we are then how can we ever represent ourselves in a light that respects the sacrifices of our ancestors and projects a dignified if not unified image to the world?  Is this too lofty a goal? 

            I do not expect a radical change in the course of things and I do find hope in modern triumphs of individual African-Americans i.e. the election (and hopefully re-election) of Barack Obama as President of the United States.  But, I also think it only proper to use the term Black with any consistency when you know what it means to be African-American.  That history, raw and unadulterated is more important to learn now, for the sake of our future, than it ever was.