A Couple of Challenges

As I was checking the news this morning, I noticed all these videos of blacks climbing up a pyramid stack of milk crates, then falling or getting kicked off by irate spectators. What in the hell are you people up to? I wondered out loud.

We’re watching the horrific final denouement of our 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan, isn’t that sufficient? Don’t y’all have enough dangerous drama in your lives already? Then again, one can get shot while participating in the challenge. The two activities aren’t mutually exclusive, as we can see below:

What I find so vexing is that the narratives never stay straight. Earlier in the week, we were being told that black women are exhausted.

Rest is Revolutionary😴Check out this article from the @washingtonpost about how Black women are reclaiming their time, their power, their work, and their lives through the libratory practice of rest. What do you to encourage your own restfullness? https://t.co/Qvhwsb816H

— New Voices for RJ (@newvoicesrj) August 25, 2021

This made sense. Just do this simple search: “black women fight at __________”. Fill in the blank with any location that piques your curiosity, from an airplane to Chuck E Cheese, and you can find footage of them engaging in vigorous combat while repeatedly shouting the same obscenity. Pitched battles in streets or parking lots often end with the combatants being struck by a vehicle. It looks really tiring, so I get it.

However, it was part of a broader narrative that black women are the most capable demographic in our country, and therefore we need to praise them so they can fix our problems. Nike put out a bizarre commercial proclaiming our women’s (black lesbian) Olympic basketball team a “dynasty” that made Alexander the Great look weak.

He had some success in Afghanistan, while we’re bringing our humiliating failure to a conclusion, so I guess the implication is that we should deploy these athletes to help with the evacuation? They’ll chew right through those Talibans? I’m really having trouble making sense out of this one.  

I’m not that old, but back in the day I had an old black teacher who’d been on the job since segregation. I noticed at a young age that black women had an MO:

• Threaten violence
• Exclaim that “y’all don’t know how to act right”
• Pray out loud to Jesus to help her deal with “dees chilruns”
• Make disjointed biblical quotations that may or may not fit the situation

I had an old nanny who did the same routine. Back then, black women were just black women. That was fine, but let’s face it, everybody kinda realized they had some limitations. It feels surreal to watch this campaign to have them recognized as our national saviors. It’s the narrative equivalent of the milk crate challenge and it’s probably not going to succeed.