I have been reading an article at the Atlantic by Ta Nehisi Coates, called White Americans don't Realize How Black They Are.
The other day, while trying to take a nap, I heard music, I could distinctly hear the sound of horns, and I yelled out, "Hey, who is playing my music?".
Silence.
Then they came in and my oldest told me that she had heard Get Down On It, Kool and the Gang, at a hip hop dance workshop, then she says, "Hey I didn't know it was your music, but the instructer did say it was old hip hop style.
I had to laugh.
Here is a snippet from the article that Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes from:
It struck me almost at once, if only in the music I heard all around me - and then in so many other linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, spiritual ways: white Americans do not realize how black they are. Even their whiteness is partly scavenged from the fear of - and attraction to - its opposite. Even something as stereotypically white as American Catholicism, I discovered to my amazement, was also black from the very start. (Yes, those Maryland slaves. If you've never been to a Gospel Mass in an ancient black Catholic parish, try it some time.)
From the beginning, in its very marrow, this country was forged out of that racial and cultural interaction. It fought a brutalizing, bloody, defining civil war over that interaction. Any European student of Tocqueville swiftly opens his eyes at the three races that defined America in the classic text. Has Buchanan read Tocqueville? And that's why it seems so odd to me that the election of the son of a white mother and a black father is seen as somehow a threat to American identity for some, when, in fact, Obama is the final iteration of the American identity - the oldest one and the deepest one. This newness is, in fact, ancient - or as ancient as America can be. The very names - Ann Dunham and Barack Obama. Is not their union in some ways a faint echo of the union that actually made this country what it is?
That some cannot see Buchanan's cartoon as a travesty of history remains America's tragedy of self-forgetting.
Ralph Ellison, who wrote "Invisible Man", has been highly criticized for some of his quotations and opinions on Blackness in America, however, I do like this quote:
America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's 'winner take nothing' that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many -- This in not prophecy, but description.
Ralph Ellison (1914 - 1994)
Source, The Invisible Man
I love music, and because of that life long connection to that world, I can honestly say that I haven't met a white musician yet, who thinks, <span style="font-style:italic;">oh I can't play in a band with that guy, he's Black</span>, in fact, the world of music is one place I can think of where there is love, respect, and kinship, without regard to the color of skin or ethnicity.
Last summer, my family took a trip to Atlantic City, we stayed in a large, popular hotel. What I noticed was, there was just about every color or ethnicity you can think of represented in that hotel, I even heard languages that I could not recognize. Yet we all slept together, ate in the same restaurants, swam on the same beach, and played craps together, and it was kumbaya in real time.
One thing that white people seem to be unable to grasp, white privilege, I wish there was a way for some of us white people to just get over that aspect, even if you pretend you accept the premise until it becomes more clear, and try to focus on how we are one nation, many people with a shared history. I don't say this about privilege to discount it's horrible effects, but I do wish to think of ways to get more white people to grasp their humanity, to work together for all the things that all of us Americans want and need. It isn't about losing our America, but rather, getting back what belongs to all of us.