This phrase, Not Black Enough, has been mentioned a few times within the last 6 months. First to Obama and lately to Michelle Williams from Destiny's Child.
But what does it mean? Can you actually be not Black enough? What does "enough" look like? Is it about skin tones or attitudes? I remember hearing this about Obama and thinking, that's the dumbest thing I ever heard. What were the standards used for that judgment? Because he didn't grow up in the hood, or that he seems so far removed from what some folks think Black is?
I'm only scratching the surface with this subject because you can go in so many directions. However, I think some this notion still stem for the grade school stuff. For some of us, if you were a little bit smarter, never got in trouble, and had at least two white friends, you wasn't Black enough. Now, if you're different from the media status quo of "Blackness", you're not Black.
If you stop and think about it, it's silly and it shouldn't have any weight. But it does, it almost hurt Obama in his early stages of his campaign. I feel that some people are still using this as a score card for culture. I don't want to believe that the "Black enough" notion is pertaining to the stereotypes of our culture, but I sometimes, I think it is.
I think some of us are afraid to look beyond what we see on BET, any Tyler Perry things, or in our neighborhoods. If we step outside of the box are we committing a crime? No, we are committing one if we don't step out of the box. I just don't want to be "Black enough", I want to be "More than enough". I want to take it to the next level and challenge things. That's what life is about, right? Living, Learning, Evolving.
2 comments:
When I was a teenager, I was called a coconut because I was brown on the outside but white on the inside... I didn't speak Spanish, hated spicy food and thought that immigration laws SERIOUSLY needed to be looked at.
Thankfully, my skin color lightened gradually over time and I am just as white on the outside as I am on the inside!
Just kidding.
But, you get my point.
Oloca comedian, radio and TV personality (and comic book collector) Brian Copeland did a one-man show called "Not a Genuine Black Man" -- it became the longest one-man show in SF history. It's briliant. Title comes from a letter he got from a listener...anyway, he talks about his life growing up in the most-racist town in CA. He had an abusive father, who beat his mother and the kids and then walked out on the family...twice. At one point, about midway through the show after a very confrontational incident he, as a small boy, had with his father, he stops and says: "No one ever told my father he was not a genuine black man." I almost cried at the power and clarity of that statement...
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