Monday, September 24, 2012

Frederick Douglass Aint No N*****



Imagine someone calling frederick douglass a nigger... that's so mind-blowing on so many levels. and to imagine what it was like to be frederick douglass and to be called a nigger.. not even really, bein' called a nigger as "the problem". more the fact that he was niggerized. nigger, as in the verb. all day long, every day, all night. when he slept, when he ate, when he worked, when he had little snatches of joy, he was niggerized.

yeah. that's interesting that today, the noun "nigger" is highly problematic. the noun. personally. i don't trip on it so much. it's a word. an artifact. we live in america. folks get to say what they want n all. it's not really against the law.

in part, to deny the power of the word and also to honor the fact that what it used to mean is so different from what it used to mean... but then, there's the problem of the scars and those who are from previous generations, many of which, don't want to hear it.

life is too short. time may be relative, but we all know that life is short, owning largely to the fact that when it's over, that's it, and the fact that the day that our lives are over, every comes.. at all, gives a realness to the fact that life is short.

to continue with the point, if the universe is 15, 18, 20 billion years old... and our share of that, is a sliver. so, i don't try to spend too much of my sliver of time trippin' on "nigger" the noun.

but that was frederick douglass' reality. it wasn't his choice to trip on it, or ignore it, he just had to deal with it. douglass embraced the reality of his situation and fought to make truth out of that reality. to represent the reality, which was, there never was no nigger's in america. it was a fucked up nightmare imposed upon us.

and god bless the african spirit that never accepted it. never laid down with it.

but we've had to, so many of us had to live that reality. to never move outside of that reality, to come from homes, neighborhoods, communities, from families that are still living with the detritus of the whole nigger legacy. it goes on and on and on. it will probably take at least another 200 years for america to get real with it's obsession with enforcing that history.

so, it just kind of blows me away that one of the greatest men in the history of america had to live a legacy that was imposed. not that he was alone in that to any degree whatsoever.

but this isn't some angry thing, it's just to appropriately express a little amazement at the irony of frederick douglass' situation.

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