Tuesday, February 03, 2004

We're three days into February and I'm already feeling the burden of representation. Before the end of the month, people who'll swear on a stack of mayonnaise-and-cheese sandwiches that they aren't racist will somehow manage to ask one out of three African Americans why this country doesn't have a White History Month. After all, fair is fair.

Hey, knock yourself out, Biff. A lot of black people I know would be willing to donate 28 days of insincerity, earnestness and condescension to the cause. T.S. Eliot once said that April is the cruelest month. If only he had consulted black folks, he might have been persuaded to give February a second look.

February, how do we love thee? Let us count the trials.

Michael Jackson promises not to dance on top of SUVs to a beat provided by the Nation of Islam at his next court appearance for child molestation.

Janet Jackson, with Justin Timberlake's help, may or may not have purposely exposed her right breast to an audience of 130 million during the halftime show at the Super Bowl. For the record, I believe Janet's insistence that it was an "accident." Doesn't everyone wear a conveniently placed metal solar nipple medallion while lip-synching songs decrying illiteracy?

Kobe Bryant's lawyers want jurors to forget that their client is a multimillionaire athlete and to imagine the Scottsboro Boys sitting contritely in the dock during the trial.

Oh, and the Godfather of Soul just got busted. Again.

To the extent that Black History Month has become an orgy of self-congratulation and empty homilies on racial self-esteem, its emphasis on celebrities past and present has led to a showcasing of narcissistic behavior and a devaluation of meaningful intellectual accomplishment all year round.

Whose idea was it to elevate black celebrities as role models, anyway? Athletes, entertainers and politicians don't "represent" anyone who isn't already rich. The idea that the masses of black people need "representing" to skeptical whites is profoundly anachronistic anyway. Who cares about white approval? This isn't 1956.

Think about it. After Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, the list of modern black "history makers" that generate any excitement among black or white youth is a Who's Who of Grammy nominees and potential parole violators. Ignorance about meaningful black achievement is evident on both sides of the racial divide.

At the rate things are going, Biggie and Tupac will soon join Thurgood Marshall and Sojourner Truth in the pantheon of sepia-tinted profiles on school bulletin boards in February. Is this what historian and educator Carter G. Woodson had in mind when he came up with Black History Week in 1915?

For someone who disdained sentimentality as much as he did, it's safe to say Woodson would've been appalled by the cult of personality that has overtaken a very specific mission to celebrate black excellence.

Next month, R. Kelly, fresh from his recent arraignment on 21 counts of possessing child pornography, will probably stroll across the stage of Universal Amphitheatre to accept an NAACP Image Award.

This is the logical outcome of a politics of celebrity that couldn't exist if the nation's most prominent civil rights organization weren't flirting with intellectual bankruptcy.

Could there be a worse candidate for an Image Award than R. Kelly? Is the NAACP so desperate for "hipness" that it would sacrifice nearly a century's worth of progressive action for a few seconds of dubious "street cred?"

Maybe we should skip Black History Month and the NAACP Image Awards for a few years while this nonsense sorts itself out. The alternative can't be any worse than the uncritical embrace of mediocrity we have now.

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