Heavy Mentalist

I am pondering the names that black folks are called in the US, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the words Nigger, Black and African-American might as well be interchangeable. Why? Because we did not determine any of those terms to be our collective phenotype identifier. Now I know full well what the term nigger means, so nobody email me about that shit, but I’m saying, of the many terms that have been used to identify *us*, I don’t believe any of them were chosen by *us*. We weren’t even Africans to begin with, because by most historical accounts the inhabitants of that continent did not name it that either! Some attribute it to the Greeks, some to the Romans, and Afropop.org has a very interesting thread about it. In some histories it is even suggested that the African continent was originally called Asia, hence the term Asiatic.  Continue reading...

It’s true what they say: what goes around comes around, and when it does damn it smacks like a brick.

It occurred to me recently that a lot of folks who proclaim to be activists, whether in verse or actual, um…action are still wearing diamonds, and lots of them. For example, Puff, the “Vote or Die Guy” rocks boulders while Kanye, the great *liberator* of Hip Hop this year (whatever), says in his song “All Falls Down”:

Drug dealer buy Jordans, crackhead buy crack/ And a white man get paid off of alladat.

Funny, since mostly white hands also run the diamond industry, at a cost of thousands of black lives and limbs a year. Folks who wear diamond studs might as well have a black arm hanging off one ear and a black child’s foot suspended from the other.

I just finished watching this biopic on HBO about poet Slyvia Plath. I’d heard a lot about her but never studied any of her work. Now I see what the fuss is about. Her work is amazing.

It’s remarkable how much we are alike. Frustrated moms who write. And her husband I think was a real bastard. Mine is not a bastard, but everyone who knows him knows that he can be a little difficult.

I feel sorry for her, but I don’t pity her because I think pity is negative.I just feel a lot of what this movie says she felt. Sometimes I just don’t know how much more I can take, though I don’t think I’m quite ready to stick my head in the oven. Yet. Women really have to make more progress, especially in rural areas. It’s very hard for people from the city who’ve had access to mass transit all their life and other amenities that come from city life to understand what it’s like to live in the rural south. But back to Sylvia Plath. I would like to read her novel, The Bell Jar.  Continue reading...

This weekend I attended part of the Hayti Heritage Center’s four day Spoken Word & Hip-Hop Festival. I was invited to speak on two panels on Saturday, and when I arrived in Durham for the festival I ran into two people I hadn’t seen in almost ten years, Umar Bin Hassan and Abiodun Oyewole of The Last Poets.

The last time I saw them was at a Last Poets concert in Raleigh, I think in 1995. At the time my roommate was this dancer and African drum artist named Ayinde whose dad was the group’s original drummer.

So at the concert, I was near term with my eldest, and was embroiled in a heated argument with my man at the time, who subsequently left me, nine months full, there by myself at least an hour away from home.

After he left, I can’t remember exactly how I met Umar and Abiodun, but I distinctly remember them offering me a ride home, and Abiodun touching my cheek in what I believed was some show of support, as I was near tears.  Continue reading...