Some stuff on my mind
It’s not just me anymore. I find myself in a global tumult where up is left and down is about face. It’s all surreal in the deepest sense in that, what the mind sees is appearing before my eyes in vivid color and in real time. What is a woman to do? The answer is what we always do- make it work. I have been watching in horror as a litany of murdered Black people crops up in the news. To be clear, I am not horrified in the general way, saying, “isn’t that a shame how that cop knelt on George Floyd’s neck so I will post Black Lives Matter on my social media page”. I am a Black woman living through this shit for the third time in my life.
In 1968, I lived between my parents and my grandparents on the South and West sides of Chicago. Granny and Big Daddy lived right next to the L on Sawyer Avenue and everyone was used to the train rattling the house and obliterating conversation in starts and stops. When Dr. King was assassinated, the West and South sides of the city blew up. My grandparent’s neighborhood went from a quaint block of brick two flats with their sunny yellow home as the center, to a desolate and violent place to be. Bars went up on the doors and windows. Granny packs a pistol on the way to church in a wrinkly paper bag. Big Daddy slept with his pump shotgun fully loaded at the head of the bed. Smoke and ashes were all down Madison and Kedzie. The stores that we used to shop at were gone and the stores that replaced them, were run by what Granny called Ay-rabs who didn’t live in there and had a lot of the same bigoted notions about Black people as White people did. The ‘hood became a food and cultural desert.
In 1974 I went to high school during the racial unrest in Marquette Park, Gage Park, and Bridgeport where mayor Richard J. Daley lived. No Black person would dare cross that threshold unless you were going to Comiskey and getting the hell out before the game ended. The local neo-Nazi crew, led by an oleaginous Frank Colin, was inciting riots against Black kids going to school in White neighborhoods. I was shocked. Didn’t this happen down South in Mississippi and Alabama already. I did not realize what a racist and segregated town Chicago was and in some places still is in 2020. I was at a private Catholic girls school and took the bus through a neighborhood called Mt. Greenwood. It was the first time I was spit at and called a nigger by a nice Catholic boy. The driver and I were the only Black people on the bus in Mt. Greenwood- a neighborhood rife with White Chicago cops and firefighters. We didn’t stand a chance. I held my breath and waited until we crossed Vincennes into the Black area.
I watched the Rodney King riots in 1991 with a weird detachment. It was across the country and it seemed a singular incident in how the news reported it. I figured that I had run the gauntlet of being Black in Chicago and had settled into Rogers Park which is still the most diverse neighborhood in the city with refugees from every global unrest and over 100 languages spoken.
2020- I am seeing things that echo the lynchings of Emmett Till. Ahmaud Arbery was jogging through his neighborhood. He lived two miles from the place that he was stalked and murdered. The man taking the video that was leaked hit Arbery with his truck and pinned him in for the murderous racists that took his life with a shotgun blast. That video was the same kind of souvenir from the post church gatherings in the South where a Black man, woman, or child werelynched in broad daylight. Pictures of people pointing and laughing. They tore at the burnt flesh and took pieces of the rags worn to the execution. It was a communal event where someone could have just won a pie ribbon. This is still happening in America. Breonna Taylor was murdered in her sleep by police in Kentucky with a no knock policy still on the books. The tipping point was George Floyd being murdered on camera in broad daylight by a racist cop with his hand in his pocket as he put the full weight of his body on Floyd’s neck. It was something that will never leave my mind and has forever brought the stain of America’s racist foundations to the forefront of our society.
So here I am. A Black woman who living these horrors since 1619 in real time.
Aunt Jemima…What Took You so Long?
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On June 17, 2020, Quaker/Pepsico decided to change the name of a long beloved advertising icon. That’s right, Aunt Jemima will no longer grace the syrup bottles, corn meal (yellow, white, and self-rising) or pancake mix in your pantries. America, Aunt Jemima has been emancipated. So the fuck what? When I was a kid, we saw Aunt Jemima products in the store, right next to Uncle Ben, and the Cream of Wheat guy. After January 1st, 1863, America kept on making money from the flesh of Black folks by keeping them commercially, economically, and literally in subservient roles. The rice people tried to tell us for years that Uncle Ben was a real rice grower leading people to believe that a Black guy was getting a piece of every dollar we spent on rice. To clarify, we mostly used Riceland that had the stereotypical Asian in a sampan hat that couldn’t pronounce L’s. Anybody that grew up in the South and grew anything in dirt, knew that Uncle Ben was the same as Uncle Remus and Uncle Tom. Black people didn’t get shit from any of these ‘relatives’ except a proclivity for diabetes and hypertension from all the carbohydrates, pork, and salt.
I grew up watching a commercial where a table full of cherry cheeked White kids and their square jawed White dad waited for breakfast. When White Mom glided into the dining room impeccably dressed with Carol Bishop makeup spackled on her face with a tray heaped with fluffy pancakes, they all chimed, “Aunt Jemima, What took you so long?” Okay, a couple things. The terms uncle and aunt were applied to older Black people who were past the sexualized phase but still useful. We grew rice and became your uncle in a white porter jacket. Wait. You do know that no one wears a white porter jacket to pick rice- right? It made people comfortable to know that a safe Uncle whatsit is cooking and not pillaging White womanhood. Uncle Remus was a happy Negro singin’ and telling stories about Brother Rabbit aka Brer’ Rabbit. He was no threat in his overalls and straw hat. Again, the White folks is safe, and it’s okay for little boys with cowlicks, bare feet, and a piece of grass in their teeth to hang out with a jovial ‘good’ Negro. Someone said something about Mrs. Butterworth. Did anybody think that the syrup was modeled on a Black woman? I certainly didn’t. She was a Mrs., like Miss Evelyn and Miss Lottie next door to my grandparents. Only Mrs. Butterworth was a spinster White woman living in New Hampshire with her special friend . We couldn’t afford syrup anyway. My mom used to make syrup from boiling sugar to pour over our non-Jemima pancakes, because we couldn’t afford that stuff either.
Okay, kudos to retiring Aunt Jemima. It is a step forward from using people of color as minstrel shills, and we can all add the permed and pearled Jemima to our Negrobilia collection. You know what took Aunt Jemima so long? She was profitable because of her desexualized and subjugated Blackness. She made a lot of money for you just like slave labor. Now go spread some of that money reinvesting in educational systems that will free the minds of those in her image. Free Uncle Ben!!