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The A-List 02.14.03

This week on the A-List:

1. Black Media and Valentine's Day: An Africana Roundtable
So, it's a little after 5pm on Thursday, February 13, 2003 when the A-List's editor calls us into his office, sits us all down, says: "You've been doing great work, kid(s), great work."

"Thanks, chief."

He pulls a drawer in his desk open, a locked, bottom left drawer he calls "the Africana medicine cabinet." Inside is a carton of cigarettes, a stack of Jet magazines from the late sixties, a copy of the Uganda-era Transition signed by Rajat Neogy, a souvenir baggie of stale, crusty cocaine from when he was an intern at Spy Magazine, a souvenir baggie of stale Northern Lights he stole from the offices of The Source a few years ago, his unpublished novel, two rejected magazine business plans for what he keeps swearing is going to be the "black Vanity Fair," an incomplete business plan for an African American video game company, a solid gold floppy disk from the launch party for his first internet gig ("You wouldn't believe how much money they were just giving away on the web back-in-the-day"), a liability release he makes all the interns sign, a series of angry letters from an Africana reader calling him a sell-out ("Lookit how he keeps misspelling 'social responsibility.' It's bizarre."), and three bottles of Johnny Walker -- black for when he's pleased with you, red for when he isn't, blue for the next round of lay-offs.

"Want something?"

"Uh, no, thanks," we say. "You know, we've been wanting to tell you that we really appreciate the support you've given us with the column over the last few months. Not every editor would let us write the kind of -"

"Right," he says, shutting the medicine cabinet and turning away from us to fiddle with the playlist on his ITunes. "Actually what I wanted to know was what you had planned for Valentine's Day, because I'm going to need 500-600 words about black love by midnight or else someone is going to be in deep trouble."

We like our editor, but it's always either controlled-substance-or-stick with that guy.

"Well, we were thinking about tying all the items to Valentine's Day or love somehow, and leading off with a bit about all the men and women we've ever loved. You know, the usual A-List type thing: funny, cynical, self-referential-"

"What do you mean by 'loved?' These are people you've had sex with? Are you planning to use their real names? Links to personal web pages?"

"Uhm-"

"Do we have art?"

"We-"

He waves us off. "I don't know if this is a good week for the experimental, post-black stuff. It's not testing well with the older demo and I'm having troubling meshing it with the educational and diasporic parts of the site. You know how it is. Folks want feel-good, soft-focus on Valentine's. Dating tips, how to find/keep a man, how-to pieces for building strong black marriages." He opens another drawer, pulls out a laminated poster which he unrolls on his desk. It's a Black History Month/Valentines promotional piece sponsored by a beer company called Great Black Romances of the Great Black Kings and Queens of Egypt. "Look at that. You got anything like that?"

"Not really."

"Huh." He puts his hands behind his head, knits his fingers, leans his chair back as far as it can go. "Is everything alright?"

"Excuse us?"

"Anything going on personally you want to talk about? My door is always open, you know."

"No, not real-"

We about jump out of our skins when he slams his desktop with the palm of his hand. "I'm not understanding exactly what the problem is. It's Valentine's Day, guys. Where are my goddamn chocolate-covered strawberries?"

"Well, it's just that Valentine's Day is one of those greeting card company holidays that's hard to get a black angle on."

"What the hell are you talking about? So what if it was all the greeting card company's idea? You don't love your mommies? That was Hallmark's idea, too."

"But-"

"No but. No bleeping but. There is no more pressing issue in the black community than that of finding and keeping love. Do you know how many books a day are published about finding love? How many black folks are using internet dating sites? How many people are cruising chat rooms from their work PC's at this very minute instead of filing reports or doing whatever it is people with real jobs are supposed to do? What do you think, that's just 'cause we're extra libidinous?"

"No."

"Do you know how many black spoken word artists a day write crappy uplift poems about love?" He reaches into yet a third drawer and produces a print-out. "You in the back. Read that out loud for everyone."

Just because, BLACK WOMAN
Just because, BLACK WOMAN,
Just because no one has been fortunate enough to realize
what a gold mine you are, that don't mean you shine any less.
Just because no one is been smart enough to figure out
that you can`t be topped, doesn`t stop you from being the best.
Just because no one has come along to share your life,
doesn`t mean that day isn`t coming.
Just because no one has made this race worthwhile, BLACK WOMAN
it doesn`t give you permission to stop running.
Just because no one has realized how much of a woman you are,
doesn`t mean they can degrade your femininity on BET.
Just because no one has come to take loneliness away,
doesn`t mean you have to settle for those brothers with lower quality.
Just because no one has shown up who can love you on your level,
doesn`t mean you have to sink to theirs.
Just because God is still preparing your king, BLACK WOMAN,
doesn`t mean that you`re not already a queen.
Just because your situation doesn`t seem to be progressing out of the current situation you're in right now,
doesn`t mean you need to change a thing.
Keep shining, Keep running, Keep hoping,
Keep praying,
Keep being exactly what you are already.....COMPLETE!
Just because!
-- Anonymous

"That is a terrible, depressing poem, chief."

"You're missing the point. The story isn't your aesthetic judgments of the poem or the poet. The story is the fact that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of regular folk feel similarly compelled to speak to their needs in ways that your critical vocabulary can only process in terms of dismissal. I can't hit a black woman's dating profile on a dating site from here to Timbuktu without running into that poem. It means something."

"It just means that that you and that poet are, as your friend jimi izrael once put it, cruising the Internet for some anonymous trim. That's not speaking to anything on any kind of higher plane."

"What? And your love life is an unbroken string of soul-connections and spiritual unions? You know, what poetry there is in the lives of most people is to be found in the regular details of their lives. If you were ever inclined to go out and do some actual reporting instead of just recycling stories from the web, you might discover that you can tell the entire history of black America in terms of nothing more than the obstacles set up by everyone from the earliest slave-owners to the local Department of Family Services in order to control, regulate, organize, and pathologize basic human impulses associated with love and desire and the need for basic companionship. And that's not just looking backwards in time, but forwards. While you're sitting here taking up space in my office, close to twenty percent of all black people on the planet are either infected with or at risk of infection by HIV, a disease that has had the perverse genius to make a home in the places where love, sex, shame, culture, pride, pleasure, risk and reward intersect, a disease that turns every encounter with the possibility of love into a simultaneous engagement with the possibility of death. What impact do you think that's going to have on how future generations think about love? And you have the nerve to sit up in here and tell me there's no black angle."

"First you tell us people want 'feel good' stories for Valentine's Day and now you've got us on the genocide beat."

"You know, if you whine at me one more time I'm going to take my belt off and beat each one of you to within an inch of your lives."

And what's to say, really, when your editor says that? "Okay, okay. We're on it."

"Excellent. Now think fast: what's the first thing that pops into your mind when I say 'Valentine's Day' post our little tete-a-tete(s)?"

"We got an email from Sudanese poet Kola Boof. She's the lady who says she was Osama Bin Laden's sex slave. She's going to do a reading of her work topless in Central Park. We've been exchanging email with her and she's been very charming."

"Huh."

"We're not 100 percent sure exactly what her deal is, but we're kind of developing a crush on her."

"Is she topless in her publicity photos?"

"Just about every single one."

Our editor smiles for the first time that day, his teeth white and canine sharp. "Now that, kid(s), is what I call a story."

2. Can a black female senator ever be America's sweetheart?
When she was elected in 1992 Carol Moseley-Braun made history as the first African American woman to win a seat in the US Senate. She didn't just bring X chromosomes and melanin to those august chambers, though; Moseley-Braun also packed a wide-open smile, a quick wit and a sense of style. The A-List was smitten. Sure, her term in the Senate was marred by allegations of financial impropriety, and, yes, she was defeated in her 1998 re-election bid. But we've never stopped missing her -- especially when we place her side-by-side with the newer Senate sorors, the overcoiffed and duplicitous Mrs. Dole and the long suffering Mrs. Clinton. This week news broke that Moseley-Braun is poised to file papers for a presidential run. She joins an already crowded Democratic field -- and as the longest shot among them -- but still, it does our hearts good to see her back in there. If, as SNL recently posited, the positions of US President and Vice President are filled in a manner more or less analogous to that employed by reality TV's The Bachelor and Bachelorette, then we can only hope that someone gives this woman a rose.

3. Afro-Latino A-List blues
For the second Valentine's Day in row, the A-List's more introverted, less actualized side has nothing to keep us warm with but an epic case of East Harlem blues. We moved there a year after school, in, uhm, the l-word with an Afro-Latino sorceress we'd met a fine liberal arts college, the two of us enchanted with the idea of building alternative black-on-brown unity spaces, our nose open to the possibility of sparking an East Harlem Renaissance at the turn of the twenty-first century. It's pretty cold comfort by now, but there was a time when we were so spellbound it seemed the sun rose from the Jefferson projects and set behind the Park Ave viaduct. It wasn't the (now-cliched) post-Black bohemian theme-park known as Ft. Greene -- home of Carol's Daughter beauty products and the original stomping grounds of Spike Lee -- it was better. The black art enclaves of Brooklyn, with their righteous, head-wrapped honey-dips and striving ex-Jack and Jillers, was already home, but the cross-roads of El Barrio, well, that was our very own Stateside Diaspora.

Along with learning the difference between a coquito and a piragua, between Hector Lavoe and Willie Colon, we also learned a few things we probably could have done without, chiefly how not to flinch at the sight or sound of live gunplay. Though aggressive policing had been pushing crime stats down, El Barrio was still a neighborhood where New Year's toasts might be punctuated by the staccato pops of an assault rifle and young boys sometimes celebrated the arrival of spring by testing out their new .22 pistols in broad daylight. This is why the recent publicity stunt staged by Manhattan Libertarian Party struck us as so completely insane. In order to protest a new set of laws banning the sale of overly realistic toy guns (you know, the kind that get black and brown boys shot every now and then), the pro-carry Libertarians handed out toy water pistols to children in East Harlem on the logic that "water pistols, noise makers and other plastic gun-shaped novelties are the stuff of any red-blooded American childhood." Why anybody seeking elective office would choose that particular neighborhood to stage a campaign stunt that involved giving children toy guns is beyond us, but the Libertarian party apparently didn't realize it was bad idea until an angry crowd of locals chased them out of the nabe with threats of non-fatal physical violence. We'd never endorse beating the crap out of someone over a incredibly stupid idea (there'd just be too many people to fight), but we were still glad to hear that residents and community activists -- our favorite Santera no doubt among them -- sent them pa' carajo.

4. We don't hate the South, we don't hate the South -- old, new and in-between
Even though we live in Boston, the A-List is endlessly fascinated by the land below the Mason-Dixon. But we are confused, we have to confess, by the politics there. In the most heavily black region of the country, what kind of crazy political idiot would want to bring back the Confederate flag? Actually we get why some people want to bring it back - they're stone cold racists! -- but we can't wrap our heads around the politics of it. Why would anyone be so open about their racism? Doesn't anyone, anywhere need those black votes? And don't they fear repeats of the NAACP boycotts that have already crippled convention and tourism business in South Carolina (where presidential hopeful John Edwards has reportedly stayed at friends' houses while campaigning, to avoid betraying the boycott)?

Apparently not in Georgia, where the newly elected Republican governor is set to host a referendum to reinstate the old state flag, the one that proudly displayed its Confederate side (it was replaced by the state's recently retired Democratic governor, whom analysts believe lost in part because of his decision to dump the stars and bars). Come 2004, Georgia voters can will themselves back to 1956, at least in terms of the flag they fly. As for whether the change will also herald a return to segregated schools and Jim Crow drinking fountains, look away, look away, look away... well, you unfortunately probably know the rest.

And yet, Dixieland is unpredictable. Virginia, home of the former Confederate capitol, just swore in its first black Chief Justice in the state's 224-year history. Leroy Rountree Hassell Sr. became just the fourth black chief justice of any state's Supreme Court. This doesn't rise to the level of Thurgood Marshall's appointment to the nations highest court, but in a way it's more revolutionary-and, we hope, more duplicable.

We love you, Virginia!

5. Ebola (or something just as *bleeped*-up) breaks out again in Central Africa
No jokes here, what with seventy-three deaths and counting. Ebola, the highly contagious and cruel guarantor of rapid physical deterioration and death has reportedly surfaced again in a rural swath of Central Africa that includes Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon. The World Health Organization dispatched a team to investigate and perhaps quarantine the epidemic causing widespread hemorrhagic fevers, but when pressed officials confess they aren't even sure that Ebola is their bad guy. For now they're only certain that the outbreak began in October and intensified over the last two weeks, perhaps sparked by tainted meat eaten from infected dead animals

6. Whitney beams up on Wendy Williams
As if the Diane Sawyer wasn't strange enough, Whitney's interview on Wendy Williams's radio show made us almost want to applaud Bill O'Reilly for filing a complaint with New Jersey's child welfare office. (And we mean almost as in "not quite.") The A-List is usually all excited when we hear the phrase "wild circus sex" but truth be told, this time it's never sounded sadder.

Believe it or not, we still love you Whitney. We'd just also love it if you got some real help.

7. Possible pedophiles need love, too
Back when The A-List was a little girl growing up in the Midwest, we played on an all-girls softball team coached and sponsored, if we're remembering right by a 30-something, childless man named Mr. Sours. The team -- a bunch of 12-year-old girls, all with bouncing ponytails, about half with bouncing prepubescent chests too -- were his pride and joy, and he named us "Sours' Sweets," giving us all overly-tight, mid-riff baring T-shirts to prove it! Looking back, it's only natural to wonder what was up exactly with the heavily side-burned, musty smelling, nervously huggable and constantly sweating Mr. Sours. The team took no road trips that we can recall without the aid of hypnosis, but we bet he would have obliged a tired group of "his" girls by offering space on his bed to at least a couple of us "Sweets," especially after a big loss when we really needed hugs! And why not? He did teach us to play softball and moreover and all kidding aside, he did keep his sweating, pudgy hands to himself. (As far as we can recall.) He was our Mr. Sours, and although in light of hindsight we probably wouldn't let him keep our kids over-night in the big house of his magical ranch ("Sweet'n'Sourland"?) while we slept in a locked guest cottage two towns away, we'd be lying if we said we didn't love him.

Now, another problematic lover of children finds himself under attack. In a defensive explosion after last week's 20/20 airing of the Martin Bashir interview that he feels portrayed him a bad light, Michael Jackson has arranged with FOX TV to air the outtakes from said interview, clips he claims will exonerate him of all suspicion of child abuse. Perhaps. But maybe it's just that, even on Valentine's Day, some loves are just never going to look right, some hearts are just a little too crooked.

Call us crazy, but we still love you Mr. Sours!

About the Author: Who loves you, baby?