NAACP honors Donald Sterling


NAACP Los Angeles Chapter

Something people have never quite understood from me is my take on race relations. I'm a Black woman growing up in the South. I would rather someone call me N-word to my face and "friend" behind my back than to call me "friend" to my face and N-word behind my back.

See...what you call me to my face won't hurt me...after all it isn't what YOU call me, but what I answer to that matters. However...if you are the architect of deception and cutting a shine in my face while working my demise behind my back...WE HAVE A PROBLEM.

I believe everyone holds biases and prejudices. That being said I give a special kind of side-eye to people who claim to be post-racial or colorblind. Child PLEASE! This is especially true when it comes to the issue of interracial-dating. Usually the colorblindness is subjective and it only applies to the person the colorblind person is sleeping with on a regular basis. Take Clippers owner, Donald Sterling, for example...he sees his half-black mistress as a lily-white woman. 



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So you're going to tell me that V. Stiviano
passes as a White woman? 
*RECORD SCRATCH PAUSE*

Naomi Campbell side-eye
To top that, the dude is set to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP. My morbid sense of humor allows me to find that absolutely hilarious.

All that said...I'm not outraged by any of this. Nope. Why should I be? The only way I would be outraged is if I had higher expectations. I don't.

I've been around enough different folks to know that this is nothing abnormal. (In the sense of its prevalence not saying it should be accepted.) Back in the day I took a sociology class that was about Black-White relations. In that class there was one White girl, one Hispanic girl, one Jewish guy, one Black male athlete and me. Out instructor was Hawaiian-Puerto Rican-Black mixed.

I was almost always on an island by myself in that class. Everyone (except the instructor) was a champion of colorblindness... I was not...am not...never will be. In that same class, the colorblind folks got the shock of their lives when the Jewish guy said his father does not hire Black people, and the White girl (who happened to date Black guys) said she saw nothing wrong with that.

I, on the other hand, sat smugly with an "I told you so" look on my face. Let me stop lying. I verbally said: I TOLD YOU SO! 

Surely it didn't matter that these folks could date, sleep with, or even marry a person of another race...they could exception them from that race and still hate, dislike, or discriminate against their lover's race. On top of that...they saw nothing wrong with it. The White girl had a special disdain for Black girls. I'm sure her Black boo played a part in that...in the same way I see guys do today who date out BECAUSE they can't stand or have been  hurt by Black women. Or the Black women who lead a march into white-knight-ness and curse every Black man along the way.

I also see it in how some people in interracial relationships try to assimilate morph themselves completely into the race/culture of the person they are dating. I find it offensive and downright disrespectful. If you cannot be accepted as you are...why would you want to be with a person who tries to change you so deeply?

FOR EXAMPLE

Another story from college (many of these stories come from that era...because I simply don't deal with some of this foolishness in my grown up life)....

I worked at The Limited and my manager happened to be an upperclassman at my university. She was cool and we got along well...until she got too comfortable one day and said something crazy to me. She was "seeing" this guy on the football team...who happened to be bi-racial. She and I would chat about him from time to time. His mother was White, but wanted him to date a Black girl.

Apparently he wanted to date a Black girl too...and tried to turn my manager into one...or at least that was the feeling she got. She went off on this rant one day about him forcing her to tan, change the way she dressed, talked, and acted, and  throw some twists in her hair.

So she says to me, "If he wanted to date a black girl...why doesn't he just date one?! I'm sick of him trying to dumb me down!"

Dumb? And that's when I got fired...

Just kidding. LOL

Actually it gave me an opportunity to express something to her I had been waiting on. She felt superior to Black girls because he had chosen to be with her and she ate up all the bullish she was being shoveled and could not wait to tell me...(the only Black chick in the shop) all about it when things were going well.

One thing people will tell you is, though I have many flaws, I always treat people on an individual basis. I don't care what your viewpoints are or how you feel. I'm always going to treat you like a human being...unless you utterly piss me off. Besides...I quite enjoy seeing the un-sugar-coated side of people. It allows me to know what I'm dealing with and how to handle it.

That being said...I'm not up in arms over Donald Sterling...he told HIS truth...you'd better be leery of the folks who keep telling you lies. Think about what he said...Blackness, in his view, is of ill-repute and unacceptable. So much so, that he had a meltdown when his half-black mistress posted a picture of herself with MAGIC JOHNSON, of all people, on Instagram...LOL

Yes...this is absurd, but hysterically funny to me. So many people spend so much time denigrating blackness and the smear campaign has been going on since before the first slave ship hit the coast. These feelings of blackness being  unacceptable is as old as the US itself. Something so pervasive cannot get magically washed away. I have been unapologetically BLACK and loving it my entire life. Anyone who knows me...black white or purple...will attest to that fact. 

In his heart of hearts, Donald Sterling really believes that blackness is a scourge and he's trying to save his mistress from it. If we are really in a post-racial society...why is there still a fear of blackness? Further...don't try to turn this into a generational thing...people my age have this fear as well and continuously try to save folks from what they feel is "bad blackness". Some of this altruism you see from folks is more or less "YOU ARE INFERIOR BECAUSE YOU REFUSE TO ASSIMILATE" more than anything else.

Too often every ounce of non-majority-ness a person has is washed away if they want to find success among some people. That's all Donald Sterling represents...plain and simple.

I could go on for days about this...maybe I will put it in a book.



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