Monthly Archives: April 2011

The Case for Multiple Narratives Part 2: Transformation Through Innovation

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In The Case for Multiple Narratives Part 1: Performing Blackness I explained how a packaged and commodified Blackness masquerading as a myriad Black stories is performed by Blacks and non-Blacks in the United States and abroad.

This part offers up a couple of solutions I see to transform this trend towards eradicated narratives. I see it happening in two ways simultaneously.

First thing we must do is to create and teach others to create the stories we need. This is where Afrolicious, Mambu Badu and a number of other individuals, organizations and institutions who are already doing this come in. Not only should these stories have the diverse Black audience as its target, but also they must be dynamic, innovative, relevant and engaging. Most importantly, they must be everywhere.

There’s no question about the power images have over the way we perceive ourselves. I can tell you “Brown is beautiful!” until the sun comes down and rises again, but if you only see White narratives being told and Brown narratives merely hinted at, my words will fall flat. The combination of Brown images and great design and PR must be deliberate and subversive. The more Brown images there are, the more diverse this narrative of Blackness becomes.

We already have the talents and skills we need to set things in motion. We have the filmmakers, the illustrators, the designers, the teachers, the scientists, the essayists, the writers, the coders, the ad agencies, the critics, etc. We just need to connect them to each other on and offline. We need local, regional and national organizations that will provide the support and networks needed by smaller Black owned outlets to get their content to the people that need to get it.

This brings me to the next part. The internet has been a great way to gain and share knowledge and it continues to be a great piece of infrastructure. I personally could not live without it. But we need to leverage it to distribute these stories to American Blacks. This is where innovation comes in. With the right funding and business models, we can create the systems that will feed content right into the hands of our young people.

As the Internet is becoming increasingly mobile, we need innovation in the devices that are able to carry the Internet and in ensuring the Internet is available and accessible to American Blacks. It’s not okay to have corporations feeding off our mobile activity only to distort our stories and misrepresent us to ourselves. If we want to compete with them, we’ve got to be innovative.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. Pretty soon I’ll launch my contribution to this effort in the form of a wiki for American Black media on Afrolicious. But what do you think? Am I completely off base? Are there any other ways we can turn this trend around? I would love to hear your thoughts!

~aod


The Case for Multiple Narratives Part 1: Performing Blackness

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(This is a post adapted from my tweets over this weekend. Many thanks go to @dascruggs for aggregating them for me on Keepstream)

If you look at any of the most popular Nigerian hip hop music videos of the past two years, you’ll notice the curious similarity to American Black culture. Except for one thing.

The culture that is commodified and exported as “Black Culture” from the United States is actually not.

Instead, what we see as Black culture is a performance of something abstract and far removed from the reality of American Black stories. This is not new. In fact it’s a natural evolution of blackface and minstrelsy in the United States. What is represented to the rest of the world is a mockery of the American Black struggle. And, as such, all Black people everywhere must negotiate around that crude stereotype of Blackness, consciously or unconsciously.

What’s curious about this performed Blackness is the performer. Who performs this modern blackface? Well, Korean, South Asian and Mexican boys in SoCal. The Nigerian hip hop scene. And, yes, Black folk, too.

Hold up. Black people perform Blackness?

Yes. Remember, it’s exported Blackness. Whatever comes to your mind whenever you see the term “Black person” or read the names “Niceysha Johnson” and “Tyrone Brown.” That’s how subtle this mimicry is. It’s got the originators of cool adjusting their entire demeanor to become this product.

I mean, Black people and others at the margins make things look good. You ever see a Black man walk? He’s had swagger since the earth began! You ever hear a Black woman laugh? Nations were created from her altos and tenors.

I digress.

Exported Blackness is rude, arrogant, saggy pants, weavy-haired women. It was ‘gangsta’ then it was ‘bling’ now it’s ‘swag’ if you’re keeping up. And along the way Blacks were complicit. There’s no letting anyone off the hook here. We are the best preservers of a stereotype that consistently robs us of our deep histories. So, not only does this packaged and commodified Blackness misrepresent American Blacks to the rest of the world, it also misrepresents American Blackness to American Blacks.

As my sisterbear @Mdotwrites would say, “It’s bugged.”

When I realized that American Blackness was a misrepresented phenomenon, I was free to shake off the pressure to act and talk a certain way. I was free to “sound white” (because whiteness is a performance, too) and I also freed myself of the task of trying to catch up on an entire canon of Blackness I missed out on as a daughter of immigrants.

And I began to see the way Blackness was performed not only by Black Americans, but by others at the margins. The Vietnamese boys who called each other niggers in San Jose. The Korean and Mexican boys who would never kick it in the Black LA hoods of the late 1990s but would use Black slang to communicate amongst themselves. The Nigerian hip hop videos of the past few years. Nicki Minaj’s barbies. Tyler Perry’s Madea. Performance. Straight up.

We know there’s no black owned media that can vouch for our myriad voices. And since we don’t own or control any distribution channels, we have no say over what stories are told in film, in music, in the news, in the courts… anywhere. If you scroll through the shows featured on Hulu‘s front page on any given day, you’ll notice the disturbing lack of Brown faces and the overwhelming whiteness of 21st century mainstream culture.

It becomes clear that Chimamanda Adichie’s danger of a single story was also relevant to the American Black experience. This American Blackness, as exported to the entire world, is nowhere near the nuanced Blackness of our everyday lives.

What, then, can we do to transform this? Stay tuned for The Case for Multiple Narratives Part 2!

In the meantime, do you have examples of Blackness performed? How do you perform it yourself? Am I wrong; is there a major Black-owned media outlet in the United States?

~aod


SIJI – Ijo or How My Mother Taught Me To Dance

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When my siblings and I were younger, my mother would teach us to dance to Sonny Okosun. She would say “Move your feet first! Okay, now your knees.  Now use your bottom [boh-TOME]! Okay, your tummy. Soldiers! [she meant shoulders, of course] And your head!”

That’s how Siji tells the story in his song, Ijo.  Peep the video below and visit his site for more visual and auditory goodness!  Thanks to @blacklooks for putting me on!

SIJI – ‘Ijo’(Official Video) from SIJI on Vimeo.