I'm Only Black Half the Time

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson came out with a NYT op-ed today that gets at the heart of my ambiguous relationship with the black community. Go ahead and read it. It's short, I'll wait.

So you see the problem? Black people are incarcerated in absolutely unacceptable numbers. Drug laws, mandatory sentencing, and a lack of rehabilitation have led to a culture of imprisonment, and when I think about this, the side of me I feel most strongly is black. And pissed. Those convicts are my cousins and uncles and it makes me think, against my better judgment, that this is a country of moral and charitable destitution and little else.

But, as Patterson points out, there is a second part of the equation. Black men are actively fucking things up. They are pissing where they sleep. Like kicked dogs, they turn the humiliation of a stifled life onto their women and children and compound a problem already festering with poverty, racism, and the pervasiveness of habit.

A strong caveat here. My dad is a black man has never been abusive, physically or verbally, towards anyone. And he was a present dad. Even after my parents' divorce I saw him three days a week until I went to college. Black men like this - loyal, hardworking fathers - I'm not talking about these men. I'm talking about those other motherfuckers.

I didn't grow up in a black neighborhood and I tend to steer clear of anyone who uses the word "bitch" too liberally - so, like most of America, what I know of the motherfuckers comes from hiphop. And hiphop tells me that the motherfuckers hate women. They don't come right out and say it. They sing ballads they claim to be love songs. But what they really love is sex, and it is a rare rhyme that acknowledges any part of a woman not meant for reproduction. And living in New York ghettos I've seen how how this music pervades not just every car, stereo, and iPod, but the very eyes of the men as they watch women walk down the street. And this makes me feel very, very un-black.

The problem, of course, is in allowing the motherfuckers to define blackness. But how could we not? The ghetto is where the interesting stories are, where death and war and basic human struggle are played out so starkly. How could we expect the media to cover black high school graduations while people are being shot around the corner? Why would black professors be held up as symbols of black culture when rappers wear so many more sparkles? How could black women be praised for their minds when we already spend so much air time praising their asses? Until black culture is publicly acknowledged, from within and without, to incorporate more than only the most impoverished black stories, how can I, in my privileged, educated world, feel more than an intellectual connection to my supposed people?