Blackademics Do the Dozens

Blackademic A: Your mother is morbidly obese.

Blackademic B: Really? Although my mother and I are quite close, I was not aware of that. How morbidly obese is she?

Blackademic A: Ah, now that’s an excellent question; I’m so glad you asked that. Your mother is so morbidly obese, or “fat” if you would, that apparently she jumped out a window and was stuck in midair. Apparently.

Blackademic B: You don’t say. My mother?

Blackademic A: Well, that is what I was told. Although I do admit, if she is so obese one wonders how she could of managed to “jump” at all.

Blackademic B: Indeed. Also, assuming that my mother is so horribly obese, so incredibly heavy that her girth distorts the very laws of gravity in its wake, one wonders how she could have managed to fit out of the afore mentioned window in the first place. And again, I see my mother quite regularly and I must admit that I never noticed she had an eating disorder. But it is possible that I’m too close to the subject to make an objective observation.

Blackademic A: That would seem to be the most logical explanation. Perhaps you could repeat the experiment, when the opportunity presents itself.

Blackademic B: Perhaps.

"What You Swatting At?"

This is the video that has been looping in my head all week. It's crass, to some offensive, and I have not been able to stop laughing at it for years.

Like all great satire, it points out the absurdity of its target by taking that target's intellectual underpinnings to their logical extreme. Here the target is European-America's Reconstruction era fantasy of slavery, epitomized in the still vibrant corporate brand names of Aunt Jemima pancakes and Uncle Ben's rice. Of course, on our shelves today Aunt Jemima has been modernized to look like she could be the Secretary of State, but no one has forgotten her recent slave scarf past. In the video, see how Aunt Jemima busts into her husband's commercial with her huge smile and pile of pancakes, eager like the race traitor she is to coon it up for white America, as personified by the camera. It is all of black America that yells back at her, through Morgan, to shut up.

While satirizing one corporate icon, this Saturday Night Live sketch smartly links that attack to the same white supremacist notions about American chattel slavery that were also presented in the movie Song of the South: that slavery was an idyllic state for African Americans, who lived in childlike simplicity in the loving care of their captors. It is still rather stunning how many white Americans cling to that notion, that fantasy, and refuse to acknowledge the toxicity of the ideological roots behind such notions. Cut and paste this link to visit a Song of the South fan site to see an example of this: http://www.songofthesouth.net/ . They seem to me much like children nostalgically clinging to a worn out, now hazardous toy. It is from this movie that the clip takes its art direction: the perpetual sunsets, the flushed coloring, and of course the animated Disneyesque bluebirds fluttering on Uncle Jemima's shoulders. The latter leading to the funniest line in the piece, "What you swatting at?"

Black Writer Complains of Being Ignored

No, it’s not me. It’s this guy. Langston Hughes knows rivers, and Alvin Aubert knows that the Norton Anthology of African American Literature screwed him over:

Your new compendium was touted as the big one and this is definitely not about sour grapes—its [sic] too far gone for that anyhow seeing as how the damned thing's already out; all the same, why in hell didn't any of you see fit to include anything of mine in your landmark new canon-making omnibus; could it be you just don't know how damned good I can be or that I even exist?

I have never read a word cuz has written before today, but if his poetry is anything like this letter, he officially has a new No.1 fan.

I don’t know what I love more: that he is openly indignant about his failure to appear in the Norton Anthology, or that he can’t believe that they’ve never heard of him or didn’t consider him important enough.

I understand. When you work your whole life on a body of work, you want that work appreciated, saved for future generations. Not getting into the Norton is like not making it onto Noah’s ark.

Of course, the typos that infest this thing are an argument against his inclusion in itself. A winning argument. That said, dude has a real voice. I mean, every time I read this I can’t help but I read it out loud, while doing an impression of Redd Foxx.

Alvin Aubert, you are a Lord of the Niggerati!