Black on Black

Adult memoir/manifesto

     If I had the clout to make one book required reading for my fellow whites every year my 2023 choice would be Daniel Black's Black on Black.  It's definitely an eye opener.  It isn't easy reading for even those of us who have spent years thinking about race issues.  Which is why we need to read it in this time when powerful people are hell bent on white washing what our children can read and learn.

     Daniel Black is a professor of African American studies and a novelist who has now turned his formidable writing talent to nonfiction.  In this powerful collection of essays he holds forth honestly and personally on a number of topics quite pertinent to race relations.  He constructs his chapters from a solid combination of experience and research based back story.

     The trial and massacre of the Black body starts off with a moment most of us can recall: the agonizing wait for the Derek Chauvin verdict.  It should have been a no brainer.  I mean he was caught on film slowly and deliberately strangling George Floyd.  But his conviction was not guaranteed.  And when he actually was Black felt a joy he described as ephemeral.

     "We knew this conviction wouldn't change America fundamentally.  It wouldn't alter the system of Black suspicion and murder that has characterized this country from its beginning.  It would not mean that police would stop killing us.  The Chauvin decision simply allowed us to exhale for a second."

     The rest of the chapter explores the history of America's domination and destruction with no fear of consequences of Black bodies.  In the case of Emmett Till even murder wasn't enough.  He was mutilated so badly his mother didn't recognize him.  It's like heaven forbid Blacks feel entitled to equality, agency, or even personhood.

     Black dedicates a chapter to Ava Duvernay's retelling of the tragedy of the Central Park Five.  Five teenage boys were convicted on flimsy evidence of raping a woman jogger and served years--years when they should have been navigating high school and young adulthood instead of surviving life behind bars--until the real rapist confessed.  

     Two incidents that tied in with this theme--the willingness of whites to consider Blacks guilty--happened in my early parenting years.  A guy drove to the hospital with his dead wife.  He said the killer who also shot him was a Black guy.  He'd actually killed his wife and shot himself to look like he was also a victim.  They rounded up and interrogated all the Black men.  A woman drove her car with her three little children (who drowned) into a lake and said a Black man did it.  You can guess what happened.

     The chapter that jolted me the most is the one that writes integration off as a failed experiment.  It wasn't something Blacks really wanted.  And we know it wasn't what most whites wanted.  The movement when it happened was one way.  Blacks integrated white schools and neighborhoods.  People didn't even consider that maybe white kids could be integrated into Black schools.  That it was totally off the radar says something.  And during the whole mess a lot of thriving Black owned and Black patronized businesses went under and Black neighborhoods were destroyed.

     "Still, I assert that integration was not a bad idea in theory.  In fact, it was a noble prospect, a social inevitability, which needed to come.  What should've happened was the empowering of black social spaces first so that everyone--black and white--saw the value of black people and their institutions before forcing them to uphold the sanctity of whites and theirs."

     And those are only a few of the topics Black deals with.  If whites come to the book with an open mind and ability to tolerate discomfort it yields up a lot of food for thought.

On a purrrsonal note, I am angry that powerful people like a certain Florida governor are pushing schools to once again whitewash all curriculum, eliminating anything that might make white children experience discomfort.  It's white tears on steroids, putting the feelings of the privileged ahead of the impact of our crimes.  As for pretending that we're all post racial now and that mentioning race is now racism, that's the perfect way for making sure needed change never happens. (Jules)

We cats are not racist.  (Tobago)

A great big shout out goes out to the writers who speak truth to power.

Tobago and Jules Hathaway 

     

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