there’s a party at the crossroads…

A few months back this earworm invaded my mental mind and prompted me to post it as a stub. Today, it’s my writing prompt as I re-read Pygmalion and think about the code/switch.

For the uninitiated, here is a sampling of X-Clan’s tome to the complexity of black identity in the black and white imagination:

Let me tell you about blackness,
Grits and cornbread how can you act this?
I exist on a plane, where the jar is my brain, I’m livin’ to retrieve
cells,
Antenae my stick, picture bigger, made of liquor, figure,
The pull of the trigger goes zoom not boom,
Not a bunch of sissies, but saviors braver,
The red, black, and green,
It’s just so much more than red, black, and green,
You ask what I mean, but yet the sundial shades on lights and dreams,
Watch too late, oops, upside your head!
You drop through abyss like lead,
Where you goin’, what’s your speed, what’s your pleasure, what’s your
need,
Trees to branches, roots to seeds, forwards, backwards many
degrees,
Questions answers, what’s the sum?
We have come.

To me, this track is brilliant. From the sample from One Nation Under A Groove juxtaposed against lyrics that challenge our collective definitions of blackness. And all of this swirls in my brain as I sort through Esquire’s latest ‘gems’ with Jay-Z (‘Jay-Z is black black. He is old-school double-dark-chocolate-chunk black. He is black the way Labatt is blue. He is not white black, Barack black, like our president.’) and Rod Blagojevich (I’m blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment’), and Michael ‘King Code/Switcher’ Steele (‘Brother’s still here’), Joan Walsh’s take on conversations that African Americans feel are privy only to ourselves, Michael Dyson’s latest nonsensically verbose rant on Obama (‘President runs from race like a black man runs from a cop’), to the formerly known as first black president Bill Clinton’s impression in 2008 of then Candidate Obama (‘A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee’). Ugh. Le Grand Sigh.

These newish developments follow a month long obsession and speculation of Tiger’s true ethnic allegiance, supplemented with vapid commentary from liberals comparing him to both Obama and Rodgers.

Over coffee yesterday with another friend, we talked at length about the legacy of racism in our language and its displacement. There seems to me to be a need to develop a mature discourse about these matters. Thinking about Joe Biden’s gaffe (‘He’s [Barack] clean and articulate’) and Harry Reid’s gaffe (‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one’) and how African-Americans ‘code/switch’– changing our language and its inflections depending racial or class situations– creates an opportunity to look at our language, our ideas about race and American identity. Reid’s dated usage of words grates nerves for certain. However, it shows a keen sense of awareness about the political realities in 2008, even now. Even if we as African-Americans don’t believe that 70-year-old white man can comment on points we’ve argued in private. Yet, there are certain words that trigger serious racial animosity, if not nightmare for African-Americans. The ‘negro’ box on the 2010 Census Form, included.

Our popular culture wants to have a conversation about blackness. To that, I say, ‘We have come.’