What does it mean to be black? Ever since President Barack Obama’s rise to political superstardom, many people in both social and political circles have questioned this. The issue reappeared recently with new comments emerging from Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich criticizing Obama’s ethnicity. In “Game Change,” a book by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, Reid described Obama as a light-skinned African American with no “Negro dialect.” Keeping with the theme, in the February issue of Esquire, Blagojevich declares himself “blacker” than the president because he lived close to a black community and “saw it all.”
Comments like this aren’t uncommon in the black community. Every day we’re being attacked with images and ideas that portray the “authentic” black person, but all in all, what does it exactly mean to be black? According to some, you must be a certain shade of color, you must talk in the “Negro dialect” or “ghetto speak.” You must listen to a certain kind of music or you have to have lived in a certain part of the town or city where you were raised or dress a certain way. The sad part about this is that some of these images are self-imposed. The mass media began to project this image and we helped to continue it. You hear it in casual conversation. Friends, co-workers or even family telling someone “they aren’t black” or someone else is “blacker than them,” as if there’s this universal standard of blackness and they’re failing to meet it. We’re trying so hard to distance ourselves from the other races that we’re tearing each other apart from the inside.
Some of our ancestors were brought by slave ships to the United States. We had to develop our own communication skills to survive the mental and physical abuse. Some of the results were closer to “white” and some weren’t. After slavery, we were all displaced around the U.S., adopting traits based on where we lived. Fast-forward to today: we are all infused with different cultures from both the U.S. and various parts of the world, ethnic and social. As another example, in the movie “Black Is, Black Ain’t,” the director uses gumbo as a metaphor for blackness. The overall message being that there is no real universal recipe for gumbo, people throw in whatever they want in it for their personal preference. The same can be said for “blackness.” There are many different experiences from the course of our history that contribute to being black.Reid’s and Blagojevich’s comments ignited outrage across the nation, but perhaps we need to reevaluate our self-imposed meaning on what it is to be black.