Evidently I write best at three in the morning.
Anyway, today I'd like to talk about the popular image of black folks, and the general "black culture."
The major way the popular view of American blacks has changed is to grow more extreme, if you look at it this way: in the 1970s, the popular image of black people was of pimps who dressed in outlandish Zoot suits, wore gold rings inlaid with diamonds, and drove at least one low-riding Cadillac. This Cadillac was very often purple, lending more credence to the notion that black folks - particularly black men - perpetually existed way outside the acceptable norm.
Now, what do I mean by the "acceptable norm"? I mean anything that fit into the idea of what a human being "should be," as commonly defined by pop culture and advertising. (I'll discuss the massive negative impact advertising has on minorities in another post). Advertising and pop culture were then (perhaps almost) completely dominated by white men, and in many cases they still are, meaning that society as a whole is generally dominated by white men.
However. Now that is changing. More and more black people are establishing their own businesses - record labels, fashion lines, various other types of companies -
This is just in time to potentially do something about the contemporary view of black men as pimps and/or gang-bangers, hooked on some sort of cocaine and owning 12 guns and even more tattoos, and of black women as sluts and hookers. I say that this advancement in business comes at an opportune time because it could present an image of black people that is not inherently linked to violence: the violence of slavery, the violence of Jim Crow, the violence of drugs and gangs.
The trouble comes when black folks try to fit in with the dominant white culture. Why should we participate in a system that is inherently discriminatory toward us? In my opinion, black folks need to focus on creating a distinctive culture. Some would say we already have one, in rap and simply in the way lots of people present and see black people as living. But I'm calling for a black culture that is not founded on rape culture, drug culture,* or white folks' image of black economics. I'm calling for a black culture rooted in our history.
American blacks are the only people in the world who do not have their own culture. The Chinese sure do, as do the Saudis and the Irish and everybody else. Furthermore, these people even have their own language. We have forgotten whatever ancestral language we had when our fore-bearers were torn from their homeland. Now we have a language of socio-economic and political oppression, of violence, of struggling to demolish the legacies of something that humanity should never have allowed to exist.
Some might say that I'm being "divisive." But I'm merely asserting the idea that one of the rights of any group of people is to have their own, self-identified culture, one that is based in their shared experience and not founded on any outside influence. Instead, American blacks have our image thrust upon us by people antagonistic to us.
We are more than this image.
Yes, violence is absolutely part of our history, but we must give it its due and move past it. We should be focusing on the positives in our history - the beauty of Fredrick Douglass and Malcolm X's passion, the fierce gentleness of Dr. King, the fire of Angela Davis. While these individuals certainly had their faults and flaws, they proudly self-identified as black - or Black - and that made them part of something bigger - and perhaps better - than themselves.
*Note: This is obviously not to say that all black men are rapists and drug addicts. I am simply saying that many men (sometimes inadvertently) participate in rape culture, and that lots of rap is strongly connected with drugs and sexism.
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