Day 237

My mother loves to read books and watch television programs on slavery and Jim Crow. She even decorates her home with pictures of slaves happily picking cotton and has a print of Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad by Paul Collins. If you’re familiar with the painting, just know it’s not exactly my style when it comes to decor.

She called me an Uncle Tom because I don’t like to watch programs like the ones I mentioned. I get depressed after watching those programs. There are too many of them, in my opinion, and not enough programs focusing on black folk’s accomplishments. But I digress.

In my Voices in Cinema class during my undergraduate years at UCSB, we had to listen to this jazz song (by either Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald, I can’t remember) that was about how the woman’s lover left her. The woman’s lover was a lousy human being. He used her, he cheated on her, he lied to her. It was a pretty sad song. I wish I could remember the name of it and who actually sang it. Anyways, this British foreign exchange student said the singer of the song was “clinging to her oppression” and it was like a light bulb went off in my head.

Clinging to oppression. It’s a very accurate way to describe it. The lady’s lover was a loser and yet the woman felt like she couldn’t go on living without him! WTF??

Sort of reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my Army buddies about slavery reparations. I wouldn’t want the money; she insisted on getting it. Then she went into a tirade about how she deserved that money even though she was never a slave and how she was never going to get over it (slavery).

My mother accused me of wanting to erase history. That’s not my intent by refusing to watch such programing. Have you ever seen that movie 28 Days Later? Well, the movie opens with a bunch of chimpanzees strapped to chairs and watching countless days of television with war, violence, and death. Eventually the chimps become “infected” with rage. A bunch of animal rights activists break in to the laboratory to free the chimps and the activists become infected with rage. The “rage” infected anyone who came in physical contact with an infected person.

I personally try to limit myself on the cling-to-your-oppression programing, literature, and art for this very reason. I don’t want to “infect” myself with oppression. I refuse to hijack that period in history, forge an identity from it and use it as an excuse for all my life’s failures.