Deesha and I have another great guest blogger to help us observe and mark our 32 Days of Black History blogathon. Christopher Chambers is a bestselling fiction author, a professor at Georgetown University, and blogger (Nat Turner's Revenge). His upcoming works include The Darker Mask (graphic anthology with Gary Phillips and Walter Mosley), Yella Patsy's Boys and Amos n' Andy. When you're through reading Chris's words, please take a moment to browse Deesha's 32Days posts, as well as those of blogathon participants Tami; Inkognegro; Christina; and Chris.
"Journalism is History's first draft."
Now Journalism--ethics, truth, standards, objectivity, professionalism--is all but dead. Replaced with "info-tainment," rank punditry, lurid and silly ratings- grabbing craveness. Stupid rules. Sex (and I don't mean real sex, but adolescent porn notions of sex) sells. If it bleeds, it leads. So much for History this Black History Month.
And if Journalism is History's first draft, what is art, reading--books? Books, I'd say, are Culture's legs. Maybe not its heart or backbone or brain. After all there's music, dance, visual and fine arts. Yet Culture stands on the written word, the record of dreams, aspirations, yearnings, fears, triumphs, disappointments. What is our legacy going to be for Black History Months to come?
Sadly, it is stuff being peddled and controlled by huge white-owned media companies, packaged as "literature" or memoirs. A memoir of Barbara Jordan, or Michael Jordan, or Ralph Bunche is a memoir. The Video Vixen--bestselling author and name-dropping ho' to rappers and sports stars--no that's just porn and gossip. "Superhead" she calls herself, as middle aged church ladies and young women who'd be better off reading guides on money management and paying for college gobble up (smile) her tips on fellating yet another "rap mogul." Then we come to fiction. "Ghetto Lit," Street Fiction. And sappy romances. And "mama I want a thug but my baby needs diapers" parables. And cheesy melodramatic soap operas, rife with cliche heroines and villains and backstabbers...
...whew I'm out of breath!
No big deal? At least our people are reading in an age of declining literacy? Wrong. This is our legacy, our contribution to our story...to history. We have young people who think this stuff really is history, or real literature or true heroic tales. They a story speaks to them as if a soap opera is a documentary. As if Tyler Perry's House of Payne is The Wire, or are interchangeable. I have likened this stuff to Twinkies, to cake. These are treats. Brain candy. Dessert. To be eaten only as a treat, as a reward or after dinner sweet once you've dined on a sumptuous main course, or a new adventure in food. But no, we have allowed ourselves--and these huge corporations have become the pushers--to flip the script. Candy, dessert, the brain candy becomes dinner. It displaces dinner. It marginalizes dinner. The result? What happens when you eat to much junk, too much tasty candy. Your teeth rot. You are fat, bloated. Eventually you may very well die if you don't change, as you spin the healthcare system out of cost-control taking every expensive medication you can afford. Yet all it takes is a balanced diet, some exercise. But sadly, that seems too much to ask of folks. And so we enter more Black History Months a little fatter, brains numb with candy.And we loose voices of art, of literature. Of history as vivid, breathing, evolving. Instead, history is a marketing gimmick. A product. A cliche. Something sweet to gorge on, or something to be used by hucksters and demagogues. No big deal, eh? Think again.
So what to do? History--our History--and our Culture is rife with debates and ideas. We must debate with maturity and a lack of bravado this issue of this crack or Twinkies for the brain in our books. We must find alternatives for these legs of Culture and writers of History to find an outlet. More publishing venues owned by us. More awareness and education for our young people. Scholarships, fellowships. Parents who care enough to have their kids read. Adults who care enough to avoid the brain candy and enrich themselves first. Notice here my solutions lend toward the personal, the spiritual, for unless Bill Gates or Bob Johnson or Sumner Redstone of Viacom or the hedge fund managers and foreign investors who really own Simon and Schuster or Random House suddenly have Ebenezer Scrooge epiphanies, nothing structurally is going to change soon.
Nevertheless, in the end, all History, all Culture, is personal, and it can change if we show the will to change it. That notion is was African Americans' gift to the United States. That was in our literature, our Jazz, our Blues, our synthesis that gave us all strength and hope. Don't believe me? Go read it in a good book--you'll see.
Great post! I still remember the first time reading through some of the greats like Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston. Of course there are still some great ones today like Toni Morrison. To true that culture is preserved in books. Thank you for the enlightening post and I will have to pick up one or more of those books.
Troy
Posted by: Troy at February 21, 2008 10:18 AM