ALICIA BANKS
Radio Producer, Talk Show Host, DJ, Columnist

ELOQUENT FURY 

REVOLUTIONARY AFRICAN TRUTH   

EXPRESSLY FOR RADICAL INTELLECTUALS WHO SEEK KNOWLEDGE
(*******WARNING: HAZARDOUS TO NEOCON DELUSION*******)  



KILLING EMMETT TILL...AGAIN

I am often wounded by the things I read in Essence magazine. I wish I found less Revlon and more Revolution in its pages. I am pained by its proliferation of Black gay men’s voices and the comparative silence of Black lesbian voices. I am disturbed by the eurocentric lesbianism of editor Linda Villarosa and the absence of afrocentric lesbians like myself.  I am often angered by too many features like “How to Love Black Men”, when clearly what we NEED are more features like “How not to be Abused by Black Men”, “How to Love Yourself”, or “How to be More than His Baby’s Mama”...

Yet, NOTHING in Essence has ever WOUNDED me as deeply as a recent feature (November 1997) penned by John Edgar Wideman entitled. “The Killing of Black Boys”. I quote:

“...The same urge may have prompted me to carry around a white girl’s picture. No doubt about it, possessing a white girl’s photo was a merit badge for a Black boy. A sign of power. Your footprint in “their” world....Any actual romance with a white girl would have to be underground, clandestine, so a photo served as a prime evidence of things unseen. A ticket to status in my clan of brown boys in White Shadyside, a trophy copped in another country. I could flaunt in Black Homewood...

Okay, Emmett Till. You so bad. You talkin’ bout all those white gals you got up in Chicago. Bet you won’t say "Boo" to that white lady in the store.

Like a magician, Emmett Till pulls a white girl from his wallet. Silences everybody. Mesmerizes them with tales of what they’re missing living down here in the woods...points to the prettiest girl, the Whitest, fairest, longest haired one of all you can easily see...Emmett Till says she is the prettiest, anyway, so why not?

...J W Milam...says “Well, when he told me about this white girl he had, I just looked at him and said “Boy, you ain’t never gone see the sun come up again"...whatever enabled Emmett Till to stand his ground, to be himself until the first deadly blow landed, be himself even after it landed...

I ask my wife Judy, who is a flesh-and-blood embodiment of the nightmare J. W. Milam discovered in Emmett Till’s wallet, what she thinks of when she hears Emmett Till...

Black man, in my bed, laying beside a pale, beautiful, long-haired woman rubbing my shoulder, a woman whose presence sometimes is as strange and unaccountable to me as mine must be to her...What I say when I lean over and speak one last time to Emmett Till is I love you. I’m sorry. I won’t allow it to happen ever again.”

Wideman’s article BEGGED many questions deep within my African female soul: What do Judy and Wideman think of when they hear white supremacy, Black women, and self love? I  would ask Wideman: How do you think marrying Judy or penning serenades for white girls does anything more than bind you to your twisted eurocentric fantasies about the ghost of a suicidal  young boy?

Wideman assumes that Emmett would have remained as sexually white supremacist as himself. Malcolm X was once very much like Emmett, a young thug obsessed with white female flesh. But, Malcolm lived and grew to become a sacred revolutionary afrocentric legend. What motivates Wideman to feign clairvoyant license and predict that Emmett would not have done as Malcolm? How dare he assume Emmett may not have become another shining Black prince, royalty like Malcolm, rather than an offensive court jester like Wideman himself.

Wideman and Essence owe me and all of my sisters an apology for this second slaughter of Emmett Till. This repulsive tribute to white women, masked as a eulogy, haunts Emmett’s memory. He was a foolish child clowning on vacation in Hell. He had not yet become the “O. J.-ish” demon that Wideman emulates and reveres.

Lost “brothers” like Wideman do the African race a favor by marrying white women. We are spared their inferior spirits and genes simultaneously. Wideman has NO right to project his own inferiority upon the stolen life of Emmett Till!!!

Emmett died due to defiantly whistling at a white woman. As his death broke his mother’s heart, how many little Black girls’ hearts had Emmett broken? How many of them had he cruelly ignored or flagrantly degraded? How many had he rendered invisible because they did not look like the white girls in his wallet? How many little Black girls in the country that summer had swooned over the cute boy visiting from the city? Only to find that they had no photos that Emmett would deem worthy of inclusion in his wallet-sized shrine to white beauty? How many Black girls may Emmett have apologized to, someday...?

I reserve my sympathy EXCLUSIVELY for Emmett’s mother. She lost her son to brutal, cowardly, racist, rabid white DOGS. Her pain must have been intensified by the revelation that Emmett was willing to die for little girls who looked NOTHING like her.

Why are so many brothers STILL willing to die for their passions for white flesh? White men never traded their lives so willingly as they raped Black women for centuries. Like those racist rapists, many of the white women these Black men adore are also RACISTS. Droves of white women married to Black men have NO Black FEMALE friends and abuse their Black in-laws. (i.e. O. J. and Nicole, read "I’m Not Dancing Anymore" by Terry Baker)

For every Sharon Stone, there is a Brad Pitt. For every Playboy bunny, there is a Chippendale hunk. For every Victoria’s Secrets ad, there is a Calvin Klein briefs ad. For every Superman, there is a Lois Lane...If most Black women can defy the mind control of white supremacist imagery, why can’t more Black men do the same? As renown womanist author Bell Hooks has stated, too many Black men refuse to politicize their penises. Why should Black women suffer this depravity, disrespect, and rejection in silence?!

There are those who will hate me for my unconditional honesty. There are those who will dismiss my sister pain because I am a lesbian. There are those who will slander my valid protests because I am afrocentric. Yet, all sisters share the same wounds. Many Black lesbians are O.J. in drag. And, no one who tells African truths is ever popular in this racist, deluded world.

I mourn the racist injustices of a legal system that has ALWAYS criminally devalued Black life. I mourn the freedom of the KKK animals named Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam who murdered Emmett. MOST of all, I mourn the ONGOING murders of the spirits of Black women by the John Widemans and Emmett Tills of our world.


For more information on the eternally brave and beautiful sheroe Mamie Till and her beloved son Emmett, read her superb tribute and memoir:

DEATH OF INNOCENCE: THE STORY OF THE HATE CRIME THAT CHANGED AMERICA
by Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson


Read the haunting confessions of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, the rabid and racist dogs who abducted, beat, tortured, and murdered Emmett Till at:

THE SHOCKING STORY OF APPROVED KILLING IN MISSISSIPPI
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/sfeature/sf_look_confession.html

&

Read the entire history of this legendary lynching at:

THE MURDER OF EMMETT TILL
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/index.html


1997 - AB


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