Raw African Black
Raw African Black
Oreo Dues, The Foolishness Of Black On Black Racial Profiling
Something I Said
Oreo Dues (Black-on-Black Foolishness)
Dwight Hobbes
Colors Magazine archives Some time back, jawing with someone about racism in Twin Cities television news, I stated the case that Lauren Green, now religion correspondent for FOX News Channel, then part-time anchor at ABC affiliate KSTP-TV, should’ve anchoring fulltime and would’ve been if she was white. The blacker-than-thou person with whom I was trying to hold an intelligent conversation began to raise hell about Green’s lack of blackness. “That boozhie princess talks like she’s white. Acts like she’s white. She’s lived around white people all her life. She even goes to a white church.” I forget this idiot’s name and legally couldn’t say it, anyway, but when I asked whether she’d ever met Lauren Green, she had to say, “No.” She fairly spat it. “I don’t have to [meet her]. I know her type.” Are you following this? An African American woman — let’s call her Sistah X – a black woman, who, herself, has been discriminated against is discriminating against an African American woman. You ought to hear Sistah X fuss about the raw deal she gets. She is manager in an office at the University of Minnesota. And she doesn’t behave how white people expect her to. I consider trying to point out to sistah-girl how she’s treating Green like white people treat her but figure she’s ain’t gon’ pay me no mind. Her white co-workers feel free to borrow her secretary when theirs have too much work to do. Without consulting her. As they normally would do with each other. Out of professional courtesy. On top of that, Sistah X’s supervisors give her secretarial chores. Like photocopying and running errands. Things they’d never think of having her peers to do. Sistah X tactfully protested, availing herself of due process. And, the more she asserted herself in doing her job the more she was seen as having an attitude problem. Her supervisors didn’t come right out and tell Sistah X to stay in her place. That’d been illegal. What they did was say things like, “You have to fit here for things to work” and “Some of”, get this, “you people have a problem with authority.” Homegirl might very well have a problem with authority. She certainly had a problem with racist stupidity. She was expected to docilely accept unfair treatment and because she wouldn’t do it got typed as an uppity – fill in the blank. She was discriminated against by a prejudiced mentality yet none of that fazed Sistah X when it come to condemning someone she never event met. A Hypocritical Axe One might assume, since Lauren Green has Caucasian features, light skin and excellent command of the English language, that Sistah X is dark with a broad nose, thick lips and sounds “black” when she talks. Wrong. The woman’s skin tone is two shades off a banana. She crisply articulates every word she speaks. Has a narrow and sliver-thin lips. In fact, she looks closer to white than does Green and, frankly, chatting with co-workers in the office, she seems pretty comfortable and would be subject to her own criticism, basically for not being niggerish enough. If anyone called Sistah X boozhie, she likely would turn the air blue cussing them out, say in no uncertain terms what they could kiss. It is a willfully ignorant, hypocritical axe she has to grind with Lauren Green. When I told Lauren Green about the conversation, her eyes glinted sharply and she looked down to the restaurant table at which we sat. “That’s unfair”, she said. “It’s also not the first time I’ve heard that sort of thing. I’ve lived with it all my life from people who don’t even know me. I’m not ashamed of being black. My culture and history are very important to me.” A few months earlier, she had performed a classical piano recital featuring compositions by several African American composers. Accompanying her was Frank Wharton, a black flautist. The gallery in which she performed held an array of paintings richly depicting African American life. This is not someone who wishes she were white. Lauren Green is hardly by herself. Many black people catch shit for supposedly not being black enough, are prejudged, dismissed as “oreos”, “toms”, “sellouts”, “wanna-bes”, you name it. Should they happen to live in a white neighborhood the assumption is that they’re ashamed of their own kind. Supposedly they want to be close to whites in order disassociate from the rest of the black race. It’s a lot of horse manure. Sure, there are a lot of black folk who think they’re white. Doesn’t mean everybody who can speak English and lives in a decent neighborhood is guilty. Fact is, you don’t have to live around white folk to get labeled and have to put up with crap. You can live right there in the ghetto where you born and deal with this foolishness. Paula G. comes from North Minneapolis, a pretty rough section of it. “There were”, she recalls, “loud fights in the street just about all the time. People carried knives and guns. It was scary. And the people were always after somebody for selling crack.” Like most adolescents, in her teenage years she craved acceptance. From her knucklehead neighbors whose parents let them run the street ‘til all hours in the company of God knows who. She began following a bad example, staying out late, drinking, smoking and sniffing. Soon as Mom got wind of it, that was the end of that. Paula had her nose put to the academic grindstone. “Mom taught me to value education. None of my friends liked school and they didn’t like me when I started to. After I wasn’t getting in trouble and doing drugs, they started calling me names. ‘Oreo’. Stuff like that. It’s sad. Because I didn’t hang out in the street for very long, because my mother taught me to value something and to be somebody, my friends turned their backs and said I was trying to be white. As if only white people want some good out of life.” She left her friends behind and didn’t look back. “They didn’t like me to be myself, because I was different from them. How that means I wanted to be white, I’ll never know. I wasn’t trying to be white, I was just being me.” In her early 20s, Paula was able to leave the area and promptly did, getting work as a bank receptionist and a part-time job nights as a janitor. She got herself an apartment – in a decent building in a decent neighborhood that, yes, all happened to be mostly white. She welcomed neither drug traffic nor rowdy, ignorant street behavior. She told what friends she was still in touch with that could come to her home as long as they respected it. They could not come in smoking dope and raising hell. Again, she got bad-mouthed. Those friends talked to the other friends. “It wasn’t said to my face, but people would come and tell me what was being said behind my back. Things like, ‘Well, if she’s so ciddity, let oreo be by herself up under some whiteys.’ Why was I wrong because I wanted my home – that I paid rent for, where I paid the bills – why was I an an oreo because I wanted my house respected?” Years later, Paula G. would spot former acquaintances, roaming the streets, raggedy and scarred, looking like something the cat wouldn’t bother to drag in. Those who hadn’t been in trouble with the law, were well on their way to getting there. And the gossip still kept getting back to her. Looking back on it, she shakes her head. “They’re like crabs in a bucket. One tries to crawl out and others would rather drag him back in than climb out after him. I’m sure they’d've been very happy to see me lose what I had and have to move back into some rundown rattrap. Well, I got out of the ghetto and don’t have any intentions of ever going back.” Mary Broussard dark-skinned, soft-spoken, moved from New Orleans to Minneapolis. “Back home”, she says, “people teased me as a child for speaking too correctly and told me I talked like a white person. Because I tried to be polite and because I spoke too well, they criticized me for trying to act white.” Broussard carries herself with a reserved demeanor. It doesn’t sit well with certain individuals in her apartment building who regularly loiter in front of the stoop, drinking beer and “convasatin’”. They’re there when she leaves for work in the morning, they’re there when she gets home at the end of the day. If a one of them earned a legal dollar she’d be surprised. But her behavior is wrong. It was wrong, back home, when she worked at a New Orleans hospital, assisting the nursing staff. Coworkers got on her case for being correct. “Work is not a place to play. I keep my social life and work life separate. The others would congregate in hallways, goofing off and talking loud. I didn’t do it. I did my job. And since I didn’t hang out with them and instead went for lunch and coffee with people who seemed more serious about the workplace. I was told I think I’m better. And, yes, that I think I’m white.” Failure to meet idiotic expectations is punishable by derision. Tonya Bailey was development manager The Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. She’d attended Washington University in St. Louis, minority student population about 10% — including Hispanics, Native, Asian-American and black. Bailey had never been much of one to run with the herd and, accordingly, did not join a black sorority at Washington U. “I didn’t want to join AKA (Alpha Kappa Alpha), she recalls. So, people figured I was a race traitor. Just because I wouldn’t be part of, of all things, a Greek sorority. I’m sorry, but I wasn’t going to let membership in some in-crowd decided my identity. To them, that meant I didn’t have the first idea who I was.” Didn’t help that she had a gossiping roommate, one who didn’t like it that Bailey was dating a white boy. Whether the roommate didn’t believe in dating white or was just mad because he didn’t see her first is up for grabs. Point is, homegirl picked at Bailey about him and, then, “had it on the grapevine that I thought I was above other black people. People listened to this girl. They figured, if she roomed with me, she had to know. Nobody spoke to me. They just assumed.” Bailey says those days, “taught me to be careful not to judge other blacks.” Gerald Beckles grew up in Central Islip, a Long Island, N.Y. suburb. The neighborhood was made of blacks who had made something of themselves. A pharmacist, a landscaper, more than a few folk holding down a good paycheck at Central Islip State Hospital. Gerald’s dad had left a rough section of The Bronx to raise a family in peace, quiet and safety. Gerry was not permitted to run the streets or use foul language. He carried himself like a courteous, well-bred young man. That was on Ferndale Boulevard, a nice stretch of land along which black folk had no problem being civilized. A mile or so away was Carleton Park, a real niggervile of congested, dilapidated housing. There lived the roughest, toughest black teenagers in town. Some of the dumbest, too. Lucky if they could read their names, let alone a schoolbook. They went to the same high school as Gerry and missed few opportunities to mess with him. It was always about him wanting to white. “My father sent to me to school to do good. Was it my fault I good the best grades? Was it my fault practically all the other students in the accelerated classes were white?” Beckles wound up going onto and graduating University of Notre Dame. “If those kids had spent less time calling me names and more time getting grades, they might be somewhere in life today. Most of them, I hate to say it, are in jail, dead or on crack. I don’t wish bad on anybody, but they made their choice.” This black-on-black stereotyping doesn’t deny its victims good jobs or nice housing. It’ll never become a civil rights issue. It does, however, make people pay senseless dues.
About the Author
Twin Cities Daily Planet articles archived at www.tcdailyplanet.net/profiles/dwight-hobbes. Dwight Hobbes has written for ESSENCE, Reader’s Digest, Washington Post, Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press, City Pages, Mpls/St. Paul, MN Law & Politics, Pulse of the Twin Cities, Twin Cities Daily Planet, Women & Word, San Diego Union-Tribune and Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder (where he contributes the commentary column Something I Said). He’s spoken his mind over National Public Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, Blog Talk Radio’s UNOBSTRUCTED and KMOJ in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Was regularly featured as guest commentator on NewsNight Minnesota (KTCA-Minneapolis/St. Paul) and Spectator (Minneapolis Television Network). His monthly column “Hobbes In The House” in MN Spokesman Recorder speaks to domestic abuse and rape. His plays are Shelter – produced at Mixed Blood Theatre by Pangea World Theater, Dues – produced by Mixed Blood Theatre, University of Southern Illinois in Point of Revue, selected for Bedlam Theatre’s 10-Minute Play Festival and published by Playscripts, Inc. You Can’t Always Sometimes Never Tell – produced by Theater Center Philadelphia, Long Island University, reading at The Kennedy Center and published in the anthology CENTER STAGE, In the Midst – produced by Long Island University, starring Samuel E. Wright. Hobbes spoke on the panel “Farewell To August Wilson” at the Guthrie Theater, broadcast on Conversations With Al McFarlane (KFAI, KMOJ). Singer-songwriter Dwight Hobbes recorded the single “Atlanta Children” (BeatBad Records) and gigged 10 years in the Long Island/NYC area, including The Other End, Kenny’s Castaways and My Fathers Place. He fronted the Boston blues band Midlight. In Minneapolis, Hobbes opened for David Daniels at First Street Entry, James Curry at Terminal Bar, sat in with Yohannes Tona, Alicia Wiley at Sol Testimony’s Soul Jam, The New Congress at Babalu, Willie Murphy at the Viking Bar and Wain McFarlane & Jahz at Lucille’s Kitchen. Dwight Hobbes still drops in at the occasional open mic around town. www.myspace.com/dwighthobbesmusic
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