I wrote this article in 1995, JBonéy

Day In, Day Out This Same Old Voodoo Follows Me About

Living as a black man in America is unique. As you read this, and if you are white, try to imagine waking to the fact that your entire day is going to be governed by the hue of your skin. North, East, South or West the black man is constantly, often not so subtlety, reminded of his blackness. As a Security Officer employed at Danville Regional Medical Center, dressed in full regalia, with three visible signs of identification, why am I still asked upon arrival, "Are you a guard"?. After calling for and requesting a guard for an escort to the Parking Lot whom did this white woman expect, the tooth fairy?.

Could this elderly, wrinkled person see?. If not, how could she drive home?. Meekly I would escort her to her vehicle initiating small talk, hiding my indignation, even wishing my antagonizer a good night. Would she ask my white counterparts, Danny or John Payne the same stupid question?. Many times I wanted to answer, " No lady, I'm just dressed in this outfit since it's only six months before Halloween". On extremely cold nights I gave thoughts to wearing my hooded coat with a ski mask but abandoned the notion so as not to be party to a fatal coronary. In fact, I would remove the hood despite the severity of the weather.

In my New York home town how many times have I, in satorial splendor, had a white woman double clutch her pocketbook as I entered the elevator with her?. Consider the case of a senior editor of Ebony. He, elegant in dress, manner and speech, lives in an expensive high-rise. As he waited at the curb, a matronly white handed him her car keys. Would you trade places with him on a rainy night trying to hail a cab?.

Obsession , n, the state of beset or actuated by the devil or an evil sprit.

"It obsesses everybody," declaimed my impassioned white friend, "even those who think they are not obsessed." He stated these facts to me. " My wife was driving down the street in a black neighborhood. The people at the corners were all gesticulating at her. She was very frightened, turned up the windows, and drove determinedly. She discovered, after several blocks, she was going the wrong way on a one-way street and they were trying to help her. Her assumption was they were blacks and were out to get her. Mind you, she's a very enlightened person. You'd never associate her with racism, yet her reaction was that they were dangerous."

"Is race always on a black person's mind from the time he wakes up to time he goes to sleep? Wouldn't that drive a person crazy?" This middle-aged insurance man keeps repeating. I remember my answer. " We are already crazy. Being black in America is like being forced to wear ill-fitting shoes. Some people adjust to it. It's always uncomfortable on your feet, but you've got to wear it because it's the only shoe you've got.

Some people can block it from minds, some can't. When you see some acting docile and some acting militant, they have one thing in common, the shoe is still uncomfortable. Unless you go back to the roots and begin to tell the truth about the past, we'll get nowhere. If someone would rape my daughter in front of my eyes and sold my daughter and I'd never see her again, sure I'd go crazy. And if I didn't get any help to raise another child, with my insanity, I d pass that along. The brutality that the next generations went through, it was enough to drive them mad. So our foreparents have been driven mad. It reflects itself in black hatred, too."

If I was feeling good and wanted to have my morale lowered, all I had to do was to drive to Seventh Avenue and look at the throngs of unemployed youngsters in their weird dress, trying to hang on to some individuality. Can't read or write, looking mean at each other. You see kids hanging around, hating themselves as much as they hate others. This is one thing that contributes to the ease with which gangs kill each other. "Another nigger ain't nothin'."

A favorite modern-day parable of Martin Luther King concerned ten drunks. One was black, the other nine, white. "Look at that black drunk," says the indignant observer.

The insurance man concludes: "I don't know where the story will end, but we are all kind of messed up."

It may be true, muses Lerone Bennett, Jr., a black historian. "But I still have hope. Know why? Given the way we were forced to live in this society, the miracle is not that so many families are broken, but that so many are still together. That so many black fathers are still at home. That so many black women are still raising good children. It is the incredible toughness and resilience in my people that gives me hope."

Just this thought: One of my co-workers considers himself fair and liberal, yet I've watched him allow white persons to go through a normally locked door and denied blacks the same access. Every time he sees a black youth walking along the other side of the street he radios another guard to "watch for suspect approaching you" forgetting entirely that this suspect could be on his way to his home a half block away. We are, after all in a black neighborhood.

Affirmative action began when the Kennedy administration ordered companies doing business with the government to root out discrimination in their ranks. Now the phrase refers to a wide range of steps taken by colleges, corporations and government agencies to help minorities and women.

The Germans and Irish came first. Then the Italians and the Poles. White ethnics were Chicago, really. In New York only the sequence of white arrival was different. In the Big Apple, the Irish led the others and filled many of the open and waiting jobs. They walked the beat, collected the trash, built the city. But Chicago's most contorversial migration happened later, during and after World War II.

Hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks, fleeing enforced segregation, moved in. And Chicago, after absorbing so many other newcomers,resisted. The stage, familiar in cities both North and South, was set: standoffish whites and shut-out blacks. Most regions kept African-Americans out, closing off contracts and patronage jobs. Then came another era, one first of civil rights, later of quotas and set-asides. And blacks tried to regain lost ground--sometimes at the expense of whites. How often does it happen that a minority person is promoted in the Police Department and works with or close to a person whose own promotion has been put aside in favor of the quota?. You can bet that officers will began to turn against each other.

*When Vance Kimber made sergeant in 1985, a white cop approached him and said, "you ve got my stripes." Kimber, a 10-year veteran of policing the city's toughest housing projects, shot back defiantly, " I earned it." One white official remembers seeing a black sergeant hesitate before making a crucial decision at a crime scene. That led other white cops to taunt him-- to his face--as a "quota sergeant."

*Frank Lumpkin, a retired steelworker, has seen it all, from the Great Depression to our current troubles. "This whole business of affirmative action was no problem at all till the jobs run out. It's no big thing when you're on the job. If the lion and the deer is both full, nobody attacks. It's only when the lion gets hungry, he really fights for the thing.

"Affirmative action" has become an explosive phrase as well as an idea. The president vetoes a civil-rights bill because he's against "quotas." Respected journals sound the righteous battle cry: "Reverse racism." Ben Hensley makes no public pronouncements on the subject. He's from Harlan County, Kentucky. He's driven buses and trucks, and is now a chauffeur for big-time executives.

"When I worked in Nashville as a helper on a delivery truck for Fred Harvey, a black fellow was working with me. He was older and had been there more years than me. They gave me the job driving and I became his boss. He knew the area better than I did, had to tell me where to go. I don't know how many guys he trained for that job. I always wondered ‘bout it, but never mentioned it. He didn't either. This was 1954. I never owned any slaves but I profited at that black fellow's expense. I think it's very fair to have affirmative action. For hundreds of years, the black people have had negative action. So they're not starting even."

Me and a man was workin' side by side

Here is what it meant;

They were payin' him a dollar an hour

They was payin' me fifty cents

Sayin'; If you're white, you're right

If you're brown, stick aroun'

But you black, get back, get back

We have become to use the term "redneck"......Remember the Edwin Markham poem? `Bowed by the weight of centuries/He leans upon the hoe/ And gazes on the ground.' As he so leans and gazes, this parching, searing midday sun turns his neck red. Racist?

As long as you holler " Black Power"or "White Power," that's fine with them because you're never coming together. Dr.King was knocking a dent because he was pointing a finger not at race, but at who was in control. He was getting at it. Skinheads and White Aryan youth as well as unimformed blacks toss these terms around never knowing it's real meaning. The power was bloc voting and working together as a unit, not as fighting or violence.

" I began to seek knowledge about power," says Little Dovey. "Who's got it? Who's benefitting from keeping people separated? If you keep us divided, we will continue to fight each other, while the one has all the pie for themselves and we scuffle over the crumbs. He can't eat it all by himself."

On affirmative action. The Republicans hope it will drive a wedge between liberal Democrats and swing voters.

Ward Connerly owns precisely half of a land-use consulting firm in Sacremento, California. His wife, Ilene owns the other half. Connerly is black; his wife is white. " If I were to own, say, 51 percent, we could make a very nice piece of change," he says. Connerly & Associates would then be a minority-owned company. White contractors hoping to do business with the state of California and needing to meet affirmative-action guidelines would come courting.

In fact, they do now. "They ask me to be their minority partner," Connerly says. "Look, I was born in Louisiana. I remember drinking from `colored only' fountains. That was degrading. But this is almost as bad. I won't be defined as an ` affirmative action' businessman. I want to be judged by the quality of my work."

As a memcer of the University of California Board of Regents, Connerly has proposed a measure to abolish racial preferences in the state university system. He hopes for a vote this summer. His effort is one of several, the beginning of what may be a historic turning point.

Affirmative action- the accepted, if not precise, short-hand for ethnic and gender -preference programs has insinuated itself into every aspect of

American public life and most of the private sector as well. Personally I think it is time for a death knell. Time has come for black people to stop waiting for or even trying to use this out-dated method. It really isn’t necessary anymore.

Most recently in the N.B.A. a player was man-handled into standing for the playing of the National Anthem. In these United States there is none more patriotic and American than myself. Please ponder some of these thoughts with me. I see no real reason for playing the Anthem at sporting events.

The custom originated at a time when we, the nation was at war. It was to provide the necessary demonstration of patriotism. Today the playing is an exercise of hypocrisy. In all my attendance at games, even at high school level, the boors cannot wait until the end of the playing before the clapping and cheering begins. It seems they’re cheering that the Anthem is over and that they can sit down.

A further hypocrisy occurs when N.B.A. games are on national television. On these occasions the anthem is played some 15 or 20 minutes before the game begins, when only about 20 % of the crowd is in the stands and before the national telecast has begun. Apparently the N.B.A. is so concerned about the anthem that it chooses not to telecast it’s playing during nationally televised games. Instead they play a few profitable commercials. This country is supposed to be about freedom- freedom of expression.

Critics of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf  insisted that he show respect for the flag and the men and women who gave their lives to preserve freedom. Yet these rights include freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the right to protest without fear of punishment. To demand that Abdul disregard his beliefs and stand and keep silent mimics the tyranny and fascism those men and women fought against. If the anthem belongs in sporting arenas, why is it not played before all entertainment events? We should rise at the movies, the theater, etc. And if athletes must prove their allegiance to this country before going to work, perhaps all of us should stand every day before we begin our jobs.

Elementary School Days * No More Gizzards * No, You Didn't * For The First Time

Life In The Garment Center * Jack's Black Queen * Those Were The Days

New York, New York * Dad * Post Office Blues? * DS or BS?

The Hookers of Hunt's Point * SanMan * Amazing

Views of a Black Man