I’m honestly not that arrogant. I just like to call madness out for what it is. Eddie Griffin might be right: I’m insane, and that’s something to be congratulated.

Watching Black in America over the last 2 days, at the encouragement ad nauseum of practically everyone in my Facebook, Twitter, etc., I’ve been somewhat reintroduced to the idea of Blackness and how applicable my own experience is to the ideas brought on by the segments of the show. For one, if we work under the presumption that I’m strictly Black (and not a Black-Latino, or ethnically, a Dominican-Haitian-American), then people who talk to me usually lay a foundation out for my discourse, my actions, and my dress code out of ill-wrought stereotypes. Statistically and upon first review, I’m already a victim of the same discrimination that keeps a million Black men in prison, a million more from attaining the jobs or the promotion that they want, and everyone else from achieving first-class citizenry with those who consider themselves White. We are not a monolith yes, but even in our own dialogues, we tend to indicate otherwise.

The experiences I’ve had, negative and positive in this country, have led me to understand my position as a Black man. Then there are times when my skin textures, color, and facial features are not enough to validate my authenticity as a Black person. That comes from the second level of recognition of a person i.e. my culture. Everything in my exterior might suggest one thing, but the way I speak, the languages I use, the area I decided to teach at, and even my name have always come into contention. On the one end, I can’t be mad; I love gauging the reactions of everyone when I tell them what I’m called, who I date, and my usual dinner (rice and beans, if you must know). On the other hand, it’s a little unnerving to know that, no matter how the dominant culture perceives me, I neither have absolute residence in either camp.

Not that I haven’t written about this before, but someone added a new dimension to that when they asked me the following:

Are you happy with the amount of attention your blog receives?

My response: This isn’t my full time job, so yes, I’m pretty happy with my blog’s successes thus far. Could I use a little more readership? Sure. But I won’t sacrifice why I write for that.

Well, why do you think you may not receive as much attention as some of the more mainstream bloggers?

That’s hard to say, but it could be multiple reasons. It could be because of the aforementioned limits in time, having a job and such. It could be because I discuss education and not always politics or popular culture. Oftentimes, the topic of education becomes marginalized even when I believe it should be at the forefront of our discussions. Most of my commenters are educators on some level themselves. But a small part of me, the same part of me that wonders why I won’t get nominated for certain blog awards because I’m either too Black / Latino or not Black / Latino enough, thinks that it’s because of the identity I’ve undertaken and the way I’ve chosen to express that i.e. I’m Black / Latino, I’m proud, and I’m not going to pigeonhole anyone else strictly based on one part of their being, even if we stand at opposing ends of a topic’s spectrum. Thus, even in cyberspace, we mirror the real world.

Because G_d forbid you’re told by a group of Blacks that you’re only good enough for them when they need the numbers, and not good enough when you’re trying to run your own organization. Heaven knows some group of Latinos is only good when making other Latinos look good, but not very Latino when he or she’s not out in the club or when they don’t fit a certain mold. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been looked at during high school to rap or, in more recent times, slam and speak in staccato. Yet, I can’t unstrap myself from the identities I’ve chosen either. I love my dance, my food, my language, and my people.

We have a hard time looking at ourselves (and I mean all of us), and saying, “What are our prejudices?” Imagine if we asked ourselves questions like, “Why do I use some of the prejudiced statements I do?,” “How am I holding another man or woman back from succeeding in their own right?,” and “How does my presence in my community benefit how my community does?” Sometimes, the answers to those questions shocked me, and I had no one to answer but to myself. The astounding prejudice we face in this country can only be remedied once we look at ourselves and create cogent and logical arguments for why we feel the way we do. Then, we need to let go of some of our prejudices while developing pro-peace and pro-community dialogue and not develop an ego in the process.

But a series on the world’s news leader won’t reveal that. We can go over the problems and quandaries in the Black community as much as we want to, much the way we shuffle cards on a table. We can lay them all out as many times as we want in a million different combinations. Yet, the cards are still there, and we haven’t done a damn thing to take them off. Does it make us comfortable to know that the cards are still there? Even if we somehow push the card to the brink of the table, does it satiate us to just keep the card out of play than actually taking it off completely? I’m not sure, and CNN doesn’t have the answers. Neither do we just yet.

But who’ll be insane enough to work towards it? Who? I guess that’s up to you and your reflection …

jose, who understands as a math teacher why solutions are important …

p.s. - I would link you to the referring Juan Luis Guerra song, but … OK, no excuse. Here it is (”La Bilirrubina“) …

On Friday, our grade / floor celebrated Dominican Independence Day / Black History Month, through a series of performances, from song and dance to Powerpoint slides and poetry (including yours truly.) I wasn’t bothered at all by the performances or even the more pro-Dominican stance the school usually takes. It’s ingrained nationalism, and perpetuated by their insular neighborhood (Washington Heights, if you must know). What that implicitly means is a denial of their African roots, an unfortunate side effect of the white supremacist agenda of Rafael Trujillo, thus creating an identity of anti-Black or “as close to white as possible.”

Then on the flip side, I went to an event on Little W. 12th St. sponsored by La Raza (which colloquially translates to “The People”) entitled “A Dominican-Haitian Invasion”, and naturally, I was insistent on going. The mix of African dance, merengue, salsa, and zouk made for a good evening. I even got to meet the guy who invited me there (shouts to Santiago, a talented artist in his own right), and we discussed the Dominican-Haitian divide in brief. What really got to me in this outset was the anti-Dominican sentiment in the crowd, particularly because so many Dominicans were there.

I’m not often a centrist, and don’t always believe in compromise, but this, once and for all, has to have some finality. How can two countries that reside on the same island and have such a thorough history still divide each other even when so many of the proletariat look like each other? Even if that wasn’t the case, I find it annoying, especially as a descendant of both countries, that these countries can’t find a means of coexisting without continuing the ignorance on both sides. Yes, many Dominicans would prefer to curse me out than acknowledge that they have African ancestry, but there’s also the part where, during Haitian rule, many of the matters between the two sides of the island were mismanaged by the Haitian government. What will Haitians say about that? There had to be something awry for the Dominicans to beg Spain to become a colony again, and we can’t just point the finger at white supremacy.

Whatever the case, I just think about those countries’ histories, and this country’s history, too, and wonder if we’ll ever reveal to our youth more of the truth and understanding behind the revolutions that existed, and not the idealistic and grandiose images we paint for our youth, so when independence day celebrations come around, they’re not simply yelling and cheering shallowly, but at least make informed decisions about what they’re truly proud of …

Big props to everyone who visited my site yesterday. A link in the New York Magazine’s Daily Intelligencer and Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, for a good 300 hits, (best day total) ever didn’t hurt either.

Anyways, I’m in Miami, FL, now, and so far it’s been interesting. I partied a little bit last night with my family and their friends at a star-studded party (Dwayne Wade, Shawn Marion, Cee-Lo, Clinton Portis, etc.). I wasn’t really interested in much of the fan-fare outside of giving a couple of these dudes dap. I was more into just having fun and laughing at how many girls really thought they were going to get close to the dudes mentioned.

Whenever I come to Miami, I always have these revelatory conversations with my brothers, sisters, and cousins on my father’s side. It’s interesting coming to a place with such a high density of both Dominicans and Haitians. On the one hand, we enjoy each other’s company, throwing barbs at each other endlessly and ranking who amongst us is the most cocky (not surprisingly, I come in next to last). On the other hand, I always wonder what my family members are saying in their fluent Creole, the language I don’t speak despite my Haitian background.

This probably came up because one of my cousins has a ringtone for “Zouk La,” a really popular Haitian song. It struck me as odd because I had been listening to this song for years under the name “La Medicina” by Wilfredo Vargas. Holy crap, it’s more evidence that Dominicans and Haitians aren’t that far apart from each other (if at all). I let my brother and cousin listen to it on the iPod and even they seemed impressed by this interesting instant research.

But even in those actions, I still find myself having to answer to statements and questions I thought I long resolved. My answers are usually:

• No, I’m not prissy because I use big words.
• I have a good 50% chance of learning Creole if I live in Haiti for a few months, but otherwise, it looks closer to 10%.
• I don’t hold “the people” to a different standard than I do White people.
• I’m not giving anyone any leeway if they’re arguing for Bill O’Reilly.
• Just because I don’t care much for BET, Popeye’s Chicken, or Tyler Perry movies doesn’t make me any less Black than the rest of you.

Of course, those were just ideas that popped into my head. I would like to think that my actions as a teacher, poet, activist, and writer speak for themselves. The questions will continue to follow me so long as I live. There aren’t any books out there that detail my experience, or blogs I can turn to so I can discuss this dichotomy. Unfortunately, many of my AfroLatino brethren would rather choose a side than embrace their being as a whole.

And I understand that, because I couldn’t even come to terms with my Blackness because of my father’s past, but after the while, the truth seeps in. It reminds me of the first couple of chapters in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which I’m reading now. All it takes is a little simple deception and narrowing our frame of reference, thus dividing and conquering us, and pitting us against each other even within our families.

But as the merengue keeps playing in my iPod, I still find myself looking for la medicina that might cure us of our ills …

jose, who doesn’t normally post on friday …

Yesterday afternoon, I attended a panel discussion entitled “Black, Latino, Both” sponsored by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (of which I am now a card carrying member) and el Museo del Barrio, and it took place at Harlem’s Schomburg Center. The panel featured Howard Jordan, Clarence Lusane, Yvette Modestin, Angela Perez, and Silvio Torres-Saillant, who I know from my Syracuse days. While I’m not inclined to discuss exactly who said what, I do have some notes I’d like to share on a rather excellent panel meeting. I’ll definitely have to go over some of these topics again during the week, but for now, these are only some of the great sub-discussions we had at the panel. (I’m trying to take a 2-hour discussion about a topic spanning 500 years into a few paragraphs. Fun.)

- Anyone who’s read my blog for a while or even took a look at my name can pretty much gather what my identity is. Yet, that’s a challenge if you’re simply taking me at face value. Honestly, people don’t know how to act when I reveal my ethnic make-up, and that works two ways: I have an identity I’ve self-developed and people have their own perceptions of what I am. Those are not mutually exclusive of each other. To the contrary, that’s the essence of understanding the race logic: race isn’t about what you see, it’s about what you think you see. And I’ll never be “Black” or “Latino” enough until people really understand what those terms truly mean.

- Arturo Schomburg. Carlos Cooks. Felipe Luciano. Men who most people would associate with either Black or Latino, but in actuality, were Black Latinos like myself. I only knew of Felipe back in freshman year of college when I first got to meet him, and the rest of them I didn’t find out until yesterday. Unfortunately, that’s what happens when both communities fail to address AfroLatinos. The names of so many other AfroLatinos who fought for their communities were obscured by their own people, and that’s unfortunate. I know a Black Latino college student-activist back in the day who could have used those role models for community activism.

- People within a certain race are not a monolith. Definitions of what it means to be part of a race change vastly depending on place and time. For instance, Jews and Italians weren’t even considered to be White until decades after coming into this country. In the same way, Blacks and Latinos don’t just have one ideology, one perspective, or one religion. There are certain trends and connections amongst many of these groups, but we don’t all have the same interests at heart, either.

- A crucial point of discussion was the evolution of the ethnic make-up of baseball players. For the last decade or two, baseball has become an increasingly Latino sport, though it’s still marketed America’s favorite pastime. Gary Sheffield once said that, despite Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby’s efforts, there are more Latin players than Black players in baseball now because Latin players are easier to control. He elaborated by saying Latino players will get sent back to their countries if they don’t comply, so they have much more to lose. Of course, I agreed with the premise of the argument, as did many of his Latino teammates (those of whom already have their citizenships and paid the Republican Party some dues).

- In connection to that point, there was also a mention of Sammy Sosa, David Ortiz, and Manny Ramirez, men who in this country, most would identify as Black men, but when asked, they identify as Dominicans … strictly. While some people may take issue with their identification, I completely understand what these players are talking about. If you’re coming from a completely different racial paradigm than the country you’re visiting, then of course you’re going to strictly identify with your nation. As someone mentioned on the panel, it’s really easy for someone who identifies as a certain group to tell someone else what their race is, without even knowing where that person’s coming from. And that’s not always a good thing.

- Then there’s the issue of immigration, and how it relates to the American workforce. Vicente Fox once sad that Mexicans will take the jobs that Blacks don’t in this country. This is with the premise that either Blacks are lazy, incompetent, or acting too good for a broom and mop. The point disturbed me for a multitude of reasons. The government instills policies for migrant workers that makes them into nothing but rotating slaves. Corporations never have to worry about minimum wage, health benefits, pensions, or anything of that nature for workers who don’t have any rights in this country. Plus, the very people bringing those migrant workers here have agents working to tell working class communities here that immigrants from all around the world are here to take their jobs, so of course on the surface, it’s easy to diminish migrant workers as sub-human.

- Lastly, the one solution for many of our social ills is not through developing some sort of hegemony. Rather, change will come from a multicultural group of concerned citizens. I try to build those coalitions wherever I go, and the results have usually been nothing but positive.

jose, who loves to hear everyone’s opinions on these topics, not just my black or latino brethren …