Chess vs. Checkers

There are voices, among them a group of African-American pastors representing 34,000 churches, that are not happy with President Obama's choice of Judge Merrick Garland to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. My question to them is simple: are you playing chess or checkers, cuz it looks to me like President Obama is busy at chess while y'all are playing checkers. Worse yet, y'all ain't snatch a single piece from your opponent yet, far less get a king. And you trying to talk about the Prez's game? Please!

The National Black Church Initiative, is a group representing 15 denominations and some 15.7 million congregants. Rev Anthony Evans, the organization's leader, expressed disappointment in the nomination, saying “President Obama has intellectually assaulted the collective Black psyche with his pick of another White male who he believes is qualified.  Obama continues overlook qualified, and indeed overly qualified, African American women jurists to serve in the nation’s highest court. This comes despite the fact that African American women have consistently supported him in office" Emphasis mine. [The entire article can be seen here.]

While I certainly understand the frustration, I think the criticism is a little overblown. Obama "intellectually assaulted the collective Black psyche"? Really? That's where we're going with this? I really have to ask: where were these pastors and their millions of congregants (sometimes known as voters) when the President needed them in 2010 and 2014? If we had the President's back so hard, why we ain't show up to vote in the midterms so that he could retain the majority in the Senate and House? Maybe, just maybe, if we had showed up, he'd have the power now to get a more solidly liberal jurist on the bench. While we were playing checkers and worrying about what our next move would be, the president was thinking five or six moves ahead. He knew this was a possibility. We should have too. I guess he should have reminded us in the run up to '10 and again in the run up to '14. But why should he have to? This is our democracy. We know what's at stake. None of this is new. Why somebody gotta tell us what is on the table? It's Thanksgiving. We know the meat is going to be turkey. Well, it's election season, the Supreme Court is in the balance. Take it as a given, like the turkey and the dang green beans. 

As people of color, we are entirely too comfortable making demands of President Obama. What demands do we make of ourselves though? Where were we when the president needed majorities retained in Congress? Did we show up in large numbers or did we, as Democrats are wont to do in off years, stay home eating popcorn hoping someone else would show up and get it done? Who were we waiting for? Godot? He's not coming!

Voting in presidential years is great but the president can do nothing alone. That's how this democracy business works. There are three branches of government which ensures that he/she is unable to act unilaterally. That's a good thing - keeps tyranny at bay I hear - but it means that we have to show up. Every time. 

Without a solid majority or a workable minority and some crossover support, the president is wholly at the mercy of his/her opposition. When we failed to show up at the polls, we left 'our guy' twisting in the wind. I would have thought that the outcome of the 2010 election and the subsequent gridlock would have taught us something. Ha! 2014 rolled around and we did the same darn thing!

We claimed to want what the president was selling, but when the time came to buy, we failed to place an order. How exactly did we think the president was going to deliver if he didn't have the requisite votes? And now we rage when he selects a nominee for SCOTUS who might pass muster with the raging right? What else is he to do, pick someone they can reject out of hand? That's what you do when you're playing checkers folks. The prez is playing chess, so he picks someone many of the Senators have already found more than capable and practically dares them to reject him. Now he can turn to the population and say, "Well, I tried. Maybe they are as unreasonable as you've come to believe."

As for the left, if we don't like Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court that is just too darn bad. Did we vote? Did we call a friend about voting? Did we talk to anybody about GOTV activities? And as far as these pastors are concerned, did they remind their 15.7 million congregants that voting is a solemn responsibility? Did they remind folk of the promises still to be kept? If the answers to these questions are no, no, no and no then please, just hush up. I feel your pain, but I ain't feeling your anger. You ain't earned it. You've got to show up or shut up. That's how it works. You don't get to complain if you didn't do your part trying to affect the outcome.

And setting aside our talk of SCOTUS for a moment, can we just look at the lower court for a second? While we were sleeping, the president has been working assiduously at the business of making the lower courts look more like America. I know! I know! Lower court appointments are neither as visible nor nearly as sexy as a SCOTUS spot, but we do what we can, when and where we can. President Chess Master has done precisely that. Given that most cases never see the inside of the Supreme Court, maybe we're better off with lower court appointments where most of our cases will actually be heard? SCOTUS is nice, but many a consequential decision comes out of those lower courts.

SCOTUS hears about one percent of the cases that apply for hearing. One percent. So if we're more concerned about how seeing a familiar brown face on the bench than we are about the look of the lower court where we are more likely to be heard, we're definitely playing checkers when the president is valiantly trying to teach us how to play chess.

I'm with the President. I wanna play chess. Maybe I'm not ready for Kasparov but at least I'm playing the right game.

Chicken or egg?

The widely-held belief is that slavery is America's original sin and the cause of its racial animus and strife. I think that is wrong. I think that's a simplification that allows us to avoid culpability for our behavioral choices. I think if we force ourselves to remember that before there were slaves there were Native Americans who also didn't fare particularly well when they encountered Europeans, we have to come to a different conclusion about that original sin.

So what's really the cause of the animus and what's the real original sin? Which sin really came first, the chicken sin (slavery) or the egg sin (racism/white supremacy)? Given that America's troubles with slaves came after America's massacres and broken faith with Native Americans, I am forced to conclude that it cannot be the chicken (slavery). It would seem to me that massacres of the First Peoples; the creation of slavery into perpetuity; Jim Crow; the KKK; and the use of domestic terrorism in the form of lynchings and cross burnings, all these things are but effects. The cause of animus and strife is supremacy and supremacist thought.

There is a fix available to us, but I fear that it is a fix that may never occur. The fix won't occur because while Native people have had to evolve to survive; while people of color have had to evolve to survive; while immigrants have had to evolve to survive; while Jews, Italians, Catholics and the Irish have had to evolve in various ways (many of which have involved distancing themselves from aspects of their origins), the White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority has not. Majority status has rendered such evolution unnecessary but it is necessity that mothers invention (and evolution). The fix is to evolve. No spiritual, social or psychological evolution has been required of the majority up to this point.

Owning, or having been politically gifted with since the 1600s,  the wealth and the land, the assets that produce wealth, and having access to the politicians who control everything else, has precluded the need to evolve. Economic power is supremacy.

Owning or controlling the means of educating - or miseducating - the populace has also been a critical aspect of maintaining the illusion of supremacy. Every move towards teaching and exposing the populace to the hard, ugly and blood-soaked truths of American history has been as effectively put down as a poorly-planned rebellion and some well-planned ones too. Control of thought and learning is supremacy. Being ever the victor, the savior, is supremacy.

But here we are in 2016 and the world has changed. There's no controlling access to information, neither is there any controlling demography. Either of those changes alone would have shaken the Earth's foundations and America's complacency on matters of race but both? Simultaneously?

Faced now with looming majority minority status, the multiple challenges of necessary rapid psychological evolution; speedy acceptance of the much-reviled 'other'; and public acknowledgement of the viciousness of minority status, are causing a very public national nervous breakdown which we can call a drumpf.

Drumpf: noun, a national condition akin to a psychotic break, which comes as a consequence of 400 years of refusing to acknowledge the full truth of your history.

Sanders: noun, the partial cure for a drumpf?

All jokes aside, the only cure for what ails us is evolution. No time like the present.

󾌴󾌴󾌴󾌴

Meme this

Some years ago, a man I'd just met and with whom I'd been chatting quite aimiably for a longish time said, a propos of nothing at all, "When you speak I feel like I should bow." Bouche bée, I chuckled more than a little embarrassed, and we muddled on. This wasn't a job interview and I've never seen him again, so it was no skin off my nose. When the same reaction is had by someone who's interviewing you though, there is skin off the nose, MINE. Plenty skin.

How does one fight anothers' perceptions when such perceptions prevent you earning a living? Is this discrimination by another name, discrimination of yet another type? I take my partner's advice regarding my liberal use of $10 words (and $20 sentence constructions, I would add) to heart but there's not much I can do about what you perceive when I show up and open my mouth.

Listen this ain't new to me. I got this in primary school from at least one teacher and in secondary school from another three or four teachers trying to 'put me in my place'. Oddly, I didn't get it at UWI, but did see flashes of it both at Vassar and GWU. I typically ignore these events and these people and play my own game. This rounds however, I am flicking tired and frankly, I'm running out of time to get back on track.

Memes about ignoring how others see you or what others think of you abound ($10 word?) but I ain't see no meme that tells you wtf to do when someone who's interviewing you is having issues with your you-ness....or in my case, my language and my flicking accent. Sweet Jesus. Wtf you do about that? Meme that nuh. Ah need some help.

I have no expectation that I'll get every job for which I apply, neither have I any expectation that everyone I meet will love or even like me. But this ain't that. Or is it?

It's taken me a month to put words to what happened with that job in a couple of months ago. The would-be direct supervisor wanted to hire, they who would have been my colleagues said, "Hell no." Wtf do you do about that?

Deaf & blind

Over the last several days, I've been trying to marshal my thoughts around Caitlyn Jenner coming out (pun quite unintended) for Ted Cruz. I've had to struggle with this for a while because the last thing I want to do is to bash her in some unseemly fashion. That hope aside, I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm probably going to stumble here anyway. Still, here I go........

It took me a while to get to the point where I had any understanding of transgender issues. The whole "who I am inside my head" notion was one that, I am not ashamed to admit, I took a while to comprehend. My journey began with Chelsea Manning, currently serving life in prison for exposing secrets to Wikileaks. I expressly recall writing something on my page about her and pausing, taking a breath, and then writing the pronoun her. The truth is that that pause and that breath made all the difference in the world. I still don't understand it entirely, but I get that one's anatomical gender is not necessarily the same as one's gender expression. And then, last week, when I heard Caitlyn Jenner suggest that she could be Cruz's trans-bassador I really did not know what to do with myself.

Ted Cruz ain't nobody's LGBTQ ally. I think I can say that without fear of contradiction. Quite the opposite in fact. Cruz, as a Southern Baptist, is pretty clear how he feels about transgender issues. So when Caitlyn says that he's her guy; when Caitlyn says that she opposes gay marriage, I feel myself slipping right back to square one and wanting to misgender a person and call them outside their name.

The conclusion I've drawn is this: privilege is like an infection. It starts off so slowly that you don't even know you have it. Next thing you know, you've got a full blown raging fever and you have no idea why you're laid up in bed with a damp cloth on your forehead. You're sick. You didn't see it coming but you know you can't do a damn thing but fight and hope that it passes. This is, I think, what's happening with Cait.

Cait, before she was Cait, had access to every privilege American society can provide. She was White, male, athletic, well-known and rich. And she was all that before she was a Kardashian.

What her words about Cruz tell me is that Caitlyn is not yet awake to the reality that Bruce's privilege as a White male, is different (WAY different) from hers as a White wealthy, well-known, trans female, which is different still from the space inhabited by a trans female of a different socioeconomic class or race.

We always knew that White male privilege was a real thing, but what Cait's words about Cruz remind us, or perhaps show us clearly for the first time, is that the blindness and deafness to others' circumstances and experience of the world is also a real thing and that privilege is blinding and deafening.

That Caitlyn is unaware of Cruz's antipathy to her needs as a transgender person comes as no surprise to me. Cait is a celebrity. Were she to throw a fundraiser for Cruz, I'm pretty sure he'd attend....and take her money too. And then, as President, he would champion legislation that limited her rights, because God....

That Cait is ignorant of the fact that government - whether you like it big or small - has a role in securing her rights as a human being, is also entirely unsurprising. As Bruce, all the government did, all day every day, was pander to the needs of such as he. That is the nature of this system. Every benefit gained by any group other than White males, has had to be fought for. Cait's predecessor persona never had to fight for equal pay; access to the ballot box; equal consideration for jobs. None of that. As Bruce, she woke up and the world was at her feet. As Cait though, things don't work quite the same way. For Cait, government action or inaction is going to impact her life a whole lot differently. But again even as Cait, she is insulated from reality (which differs significantly from the 'reality' portrayed in her TV shows), and I'm not sure that 'her girls' are in a position to school her. How many of them live the lives of poor, unseen, unheralded trans people, struggling daily just to survive....or stay alive?

Prior to 2015, Cait lived like a king. The world was an oyster, in which she was entitled. She didn't choose to step into her trans-truth as an unknown teenager or young woman. She didn't try to navigate the world as a trans person without name recognition and money. She has done it now when she has various advantages not available to others making the same journey and yet she manages to be completely, blissfully, wonderfully unaware of these advantages.

Deaf and blind. She sits on the front porch of her life calmly sipping mint juleps and doing the equivalent of supporting sharecropping cuz she ain't got no share to crop; supporting Jim Crow, cuz she ain't neither Jim nor his crow; believing in separate but equal because her separate is equal. What a lucky girl she is our Cait!

Kardashian notoriety & money protect her from some of the worst effects of Cruzian rhetoric against people such as she and that's why she can, without blinking an eye, say that she's standing with Ted.

I'm going to hope that at some point, the blindness will pass, her sight will be restored and she will begin to hear the stories of heartbreak and hardship the sisters and brothers outside her circle face. That's the best I can hope for. 


Editing on 4/26/17 to add
The blindness doesn't seem to be passing. In spite of everything, including unwinding transgender protections for students, Cait's a big Trump fan. I give up.

Electoral Politics 101: Deception is the Cornerstone of Electoral Politics

Electoral Politics 101

Lesson 1: Deception is the Cornerstone of Electoral Politics

Electoral politics is, at its heart, a transactional process. The basic transaction is that candidates promise to provide constituents with goods, if elected, and constituents choose between these offers and trade them for their electoral support. It seems simple enough, but there are several important complications within most electoral economies.

The greatest of these complications is that, in most instances, to win a majority of electoral support, candidates must appeal to constituents who have divergent, if not competing interests. For example, in the context of the current United States Presidential election, that means simultaneously appealing to immigrant Latino voters who favor immigration reform, and to non-immigrant voters who oppose immigration reform. It means simultaneously promising African American voters changes to institutional racism, while appealing to White voters who deny that institutional racism exists, and may even imagine that they are the victims of reverse racism.

This leads to the primary practice of political candidates during election campaigns.

They lie.

No, seriously, it's not just the ones you don't like.

As a general rule, politicians make simultaneous promises to competing constituencies that cannot all be true. If they make promises to two competing constituencies, they are necessarily lying to at least one of them. If this strategy works, both constituencies offer their electoral support, and they win elections. However, there is an obvious inherent weakness to this strategy - both constituencies must believe the politician, at least up to the point of their successful election. If either (or both) constituencies come to believe that the candidate is lying, they will no longer expect delivery of the promised goods, and will therefore seek those goods from other candidates. Unvarnished lying is thus unlikely to work, so politicians employ other tactics to mask their primary deceptions.

Tactic #1 is that politicians are vague.

Rarely do politicians provide clear, well-articulated positions on anything. They repeat vague slogans, which pundits refer to as "talking points", but rarely do they delve into the substance of their promises, let alone their plans for accomplishing same. Sometimes this is because they don't have a position or a plan, such as in the case of the entire Republican Party and its obsession with repealing Obamacare. Seriously, seven years in and they STILL haven't offered a single viable plan for the replacement, but are asking people to trust that they have one. Somewhere. Hilarious.

But I digress.

Within the context of an electoral campaign, politicians deftly avoid detailed descriptions or explanations of their promises to provide goods, because detailed plans can be examined, contested, and worse yet, held up as proof of fraud if they are not fulfilled after the election. And that latter problem is tied to the primary motivation of incumbent politicians - re-election. But that's another subject for a subsequent discussion.

They also use these vague statements to avoid being held accountable for conflicting promises during the course of a campaign. When constituency X accuses a candidate of making a promise to constituency Y that seems contradictory to promises previously made to constituency X, vague statements allow the candidate to say, "I never said that."

While being vague frees politicians from the responsibility of specific promises, it also means that they must find ways to convince their target constituencies to give electoral support in exchange for promises that they never explicitly make.

Tactic #2 is that politicians use innuendo and suggestion to imply promises.

Candidates make broad, vague statements and allow the constituents to unwittingly fill in the blanks. They appeal to what various constituencies want, without ever saying directly that is what they will give, by simply alluding to those issues. For example, on the Democratic side of the current election, both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton assert that institutional racism must end. This implies that they are promising to end institutional racism, but were either to win the Presidency, they could accurately say that they never made such a promise, which is just as well, since doing so would require the deconstruction and reconstruction of entire economic, political, judicial, educational, and cultural systems.

These primary forms of deception are overwhelmingly the norm for electoral politics, and are employed to some degree by virtually all candidates.

Within the current electoral cycle, there are only three outliers to this norm, whom I will name here, as this leads to at least one of the reasons for my personal preference in the Presidential contest.

1) Lindsey Graham. In Trinidadian parlance, Lindsey Graham "have no cover for he mout'." He spits out EXACTLY what he thinks, and more often than not, calls it exactly like it is. It's not surprising that he made an early exit from the Republican contest. He told the constituents the unvarnished truth about his party and about the other candidates, usually with scathing wit, reminiscent of the late Paul Lynde. Much of the GOP's constituency simply could not abide his break from Republican mythology, especially because at some level they knew he was telling the truth. The Republican establishment could abide his truth telling even less, so there was no way he was getting funding from any of the traditional backers.

2) Donald Trump. While Trump certainly is vague in his proclamations about making America great again, building a wall, and winning so much that we all get tired of winning, he also tells a lot of boldface lies, and a few unvarnished truths.

Trump's assertions about his financial worth, his refusal to settle lawsuits, the success of all his business ventures, and his commitment to Christian values are all demonstrably false. They are not just false in the usual he-said, she-said way, but in the "here's a court judgment to the contrary" way. This makes his ascendency among Republicans fascinating, because blatant lying generally gives voters reason to doubt the trustworthiness of any promises made by a candidate. Clearly, his constituents are drawn to some other promise, which is where Trump is more in the traditional innuendo and suggestion camp. I would argue that his primary implied promise is to restore the social order of White supremacy with de facto racial segregation and White domination. He hasn't said this directly, but White supremacists, including David Duke, have heard the innuendo loud and clear, and they are smelling what he's selling. That too is a subject worthy of its own discussion.

Even more interesting is that Trump, who routinely displays a pattern of pathological lying, also tells some hard truths. He has unrepentantly called out the Bush administration for inviting the US to dive headfirst into the cesspit that was the Iraq war. He has asserted that there were no weapons of mass destruction there, and that the Bush administration willfully misled the public in order to enter the war. These are all verifiable facts, but they are at odds with the official Republican Alternate Universe narrative. Trump remains unharmed by these offensive truths, which further suggests that the goods his constituents are seeking have little to do with Republican orthodoxy.

3) The third outlier to the typical strategy of election by deception is Bernie Sanders. As already noted, Sanders does imply a promise to fix the problem of institutional racism, which, if he is serious, would earn him the opposition of a much larger swath of the country than his promise to fix the rigged economy already has.

Notwithstanding that implied, and I believe impossible-to-fulfill promise, Sanders steps around the problem of appealing to multiple constituencies in a very different way than most politicians.

First, he identifies the majority of Americans as his target constituency - the middle class, working class, and the poor. In so doing, he draws on common economic ground, rather than the ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual markers of social fissure by which most other politicians identify their constituencies. The difference is that Bernie only has one constituency - we the people.

The remaining minority - the uber riche, the massive corporations, and banking institutions - he clearly marks as NOT his constituency. They are the enemy of his one and only constituency, and he therefore is not obligated to promise them a blessed thing. As a result, he has no dilemma, and no need to lie to either group.

It also means that Bernie has not had to shape, craft, and modify his message over and over, whether in Congress, or on the campaign trail. He has not been "pulled to the left/right" in his campaign rhetoric over the course of time. He is saying what he has always said, unlike traditional politicians who are engaged in the art of deception, and must therefore constantly rearrange their message to imply the promises that they think constituents want to hear.

Of course, that also means that the identified enemies and their allies, who include much of Congress, all the other candidates, and the corporate media, have no compunction about waging all out war on Bernie Sanders. The efforts to discredit, dismiss, and erase his remarkable gains and rapid advance from unknown to credible Presidential contender are to be expected. In a perverse way, these attacks even serve as endorsement of Bernie's commitment to his only constituency.

In summary, politicians lie, mostly by making vague statements to imply promises that they are unwilling or unable to fulfil, in order to gain the electoral support of constituents about whom they do not actually care.

Except one.

‪#‎FeelTheBern‬

Again with the damn Kumbaya

So this happened......

Family goes to Drive Thru somewhere in America. They take too long at the order window, and the guy in the next car yells out, "Hurry up you f*cken n*gger!" In response, the family being abused, pays for the abuser's meal.

I read that and had to take a breath. And then I had thoughts, many, many thoughts.

I saw a 60 Minutes episode on death row exonerations a few weeks ago. There was this one guy who had been held on DR for nigh on 40 years. He was on 60 minutes with my personal social justice warrior hero Bryan Stevenson who had fought (for years) for his client's release. Great story. The victim - the exoneree - was full of forgiveness for the criminals - the officers of the court - who had knowingly put an innocent man on death row.

The following week, as they always do on the show, they read letters to the show, and someone wrote how wonderful it is that this victim was so forgiving. The writer waxed on about how marvelous it was that the victim could forgive and carry on with his life and blah blah blah. 

I was not moved. I was not impressed. I won't be singing Kumbaya nor do I recommend others do so either.

I've had cause to ask this question before and I am asking it again today: in all this orgiastic forgiving that Black people are doing (remember the families of the Charleston Nine, just days after their loved ones were massacred?), is there an equal or greater orgy of changed behavior among perpetrators? Because if there is, I seem to be missing it. Before you answer, I invite you to consider the data: extra-judicial killings of POC by the agents of the state; the acts of violence incited by the candidate and perpetrated by his followers on the campaign trail; and the numbers of people of color parading thru court rooms everywhere in this nation even as I type, many of them charged with crimes trumped up by officers of the court. [If you don't believe me that charges are sometimes made up out of whole cloth, please read this stream of tweets]. 

We LOVE to celebrate these expressions of Black grace. but here's my question: when do Black folk get to be on the receiving end of that same grace? Give me a date please, I'll put it in my calendar. The very next day, y'all will hear a chorus of Kumbaya ringing out from my throat but not a second before.

What this is, is folk doing their do, acting all vile and taking the forgiveness and carrying the hell on as if ain't nothing have to change with their behavior because see, they forgave me! This take-the-forgiveness-and-remain-unchanged MO is not an individual problem, it is a societal problem. It explains why there are so many folk who if you just barely scratch their surface, the most fetid stench of supremacist thought pops out.

I am here to tell you that I am not here serve as salve to anybody's conscience. I am not here to pretend that my forgiveness means squat to you. You looking to me for A Balm in your own personal Gilead? It ain't me. 

Behave like a human being, treat me like a human being and we can talk. Until then, somebody else gon' have to sing that Kumbaya for you. I am otherwise occupied.In the interim, pay for your own damn meal.

It's not rain

For the last couple of days on my FB page, my friends and I have been going back and forth about the Nina Simone biopic due out later this year. We are not happy. It may seem whiny of us to both complain that #OscarssoWhite and at the same time, kvetch about the casting of Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone. Saldana is black after all so where's the problem? As I see it, there are three problems and each of them makes us squirm or wiggle a little in our seats. Something about that casting just doesn't quite feel right and I think I know what it is.

The first problem is erasure, which leads us to #OscarssoWhite situations. The second problem is colorism, which leads to the casting of Zoe to play Nina, a woman she simply doesn't resemble and the third, I think, has to do with respect and honor.

Erasure
We don't exist. It's really that simple. TV and movie producers would have you believe, from the world they present to us on screen, that we simply do not exist. Cleopatra? Elizabeth Taylor. Moses? Charlton Heston. The Last Samurai? Tom Cruise. The King of Siam? Yul Brynner. And on and on the list goes.  This year's Gods of Egypt? Egypt...you know, the country in Northern Africa? All but one of the gods are White because Black gods don't fill theatres, I guess.

When Viola Davis pointed out last year that it's really difficult to win hardware for roles that don't exist, she wasn't lying. You can't win if you're not even in the competition. You can't win if you're invisible, erased.

Until producers, writers, casting directors and others who have the ear of the money men (and women) start standing up for more diverse casts, Oscars will remain white, we will remain invisible. We cannot open the door for ourselves, we don't run things. Someone must open it for and to us. That's not affirmative action, that's diversity and inclusion, a whole other thing.

Colorism
This is probably the worst kept secret in Black America. We complain that White folk don't give us any love, but frankly, we don't give each other much love either.

Zoe Saldana is a woman several shades lighter than the character she has been hired to play and while complexion ain't everything, this is Nina Simone we're talking about. Nina Simone's daughter loudly expressed her dismay (that's putting it mildly) at Saldana's selection. She wasn't focused on complexion per sé, but the likelihood that the chosen actor could convincingly portray her mother.

As we were discussing on my page yesterday, so much of Nina's Nina-ness had to do with her look, her presentation, her unapologetic blackness that to cast a woman who just doesn't embody those traits is tantamount to betrayal. Many are the beautiful, talented, dark chocolate actors who could well have embodied both the letter and the spirit of Ms. Simone's character without need for black face or prostheses. Saldana may well execute the role effectively, but many of us will look askance at her much the same way we looked cross-eyed at Ms. Taylor's Cleopatra or Mr. Cruise's Last Samurai.

Honor
For forever, people of color have been cast aside, dismissed and disregarded. The result of that is that we honor our own. We insist on it. I may have my issues with Michael Jackson, but I honor his talent and gifts. I may have my issues with Kathleen Battle, but I honor her talent and gifts. And so it is with those of us who beat the odds and rise to worldwide, nationwide, citywide, hell, block-wide recognition. It's what we do.

In pursuit of that aim, we expect our people, the people we revere, to be treated with more than a mere modicum of respect. The rage, horror, sadness that some of us feel at this casting is no less than the rage, horror, sadness we felt when Joseph Fiennes was named as the actor chosen to play Michael Jackson in an upcoming British comedy.

Don't piss on us from a height and expect us to believe that it's rain. It's not rain and we know it and we will express our dismay at being 'rained' upon loudly.