The Tide is Turning

Watching the NBA awards on TNT tonight.

It is almost entirely black.  The hosts, the award recipients, everything.  It is a show about the NBA, but really it’s a show about the ascendency of black culture, black power, black relevance and black celebrity.

It’s not a great show.  It's like any other awards show….boring, self-agrandizing, etc. etc.  and that is the point.  Millennials couldn’t care less about other award shows. A lot care about this one. This is a kind of a big deal.

Black culture is without a doubt the dominate arts culture in America.  It’s not even close.  When I was younger, smart people would say that black culture was ascendant.  It is no longer ascendant.  It's here. It is what every kid wants to grab hold of and make it their own.

I was also recently watching a documentary about the Lakers Celtics rivalry.  One of the subtexts of the story was how hard it was for Boston to sell out the garden in the 1970s and early 80’s because of the amount of black players. 

It seems ridiculous today, but in less than a generation we’ve gone from a hegemony of black athletes being a loss-leader to the absolute need for black celebrities/athletes/leaders being associated with a brand.

Baseball was America’s past time.  Baseball is fast becoming irrelevant.  Basketball and football, two sports than need black athletes just to open the doors are so much more popular.  Baseball is a white sport and is associated with old men wearing non-ironic hats.

Baseball today only gets by because of history and weather.  Baseball only exists because of summer days, beer and an homage to your old man.

American industry used to worry about products and services being too closely associated with black people and black culture.  Now if you want to attract white kids and Hispanic kids and Asian kids and middle eastern kids to a mass-market product, you HAVE to use black culture and urban hip hop culture to market it or it will never get out of R&D.

 

 

Actually, it's good news

Positive.

There have been a spate of racial and predjudical things happening lately.  White people calling the police because black people are doing things that seem (to the callers) wrong or illegal or menancing.

We know these things happened because we have cell phone video that goes viral on social media. Social justice guardians like Shawn King and there to make sure the terrible deeds get told.

A month or so ago, a woman in Oakland called police on two black men having a BBQ.  She said it was illegal. And so she called the cops.  It exploded.  The video that the two men, and others shot, went viral.  It evoked screams on white privildge.  She’s now called "BBQ betty. " She is now a meme.  She was mentioned not once, but twice, on Saturday Night Live.

Others have happened as well.

Some see and hear about these transgressions and get upset and depressed.  They believe they represent a certain amount of backsliding of our society toward pre-civil rights racism.

I see it differently.  It fills me with hope.

Now, there are so many people – white and black – who are itching to expose this racism. They are poised – cell phones at the ready – to record injustice and, much more importantly, share it with a receptive world.

Indeed Trump won the presidency and many horrible things have happened, are happening and will happen. But the arc toward justice is etched in the hard stone of history.  We will get through this era, because so many people are upset and so ready to dive in.

True, we are and have always been a reactive society. We do not tend toward being proactive. Instead, something bad or untenable has to happen before we act. That is not ideal, but it does work. We see the horrible hatred, fear and ignorance of the moment and we jump into the fray
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White people who want things to remain the way they were – where they were unquestionably at the top and they didn’t have to change their ways or their ideas – are getting smaller. They are still very large in number, but each year and each decade brings more people who are either of an ethnic or sexual identity that is ready to topple the existing order. Sure, there are plenty of young bigots, but there are more young people who simply don’t see the value in it.

Right now, to paraphrase the great Hunter S. Thompson, is where we just might be able to see where the wave crests and begins to roll back on itself.  Where the old ideas of racial denial and sexual repression are permently exhiled to the minority.

Never foget…Trump is a 71 year old man, who talks like it’s 1976.  His base is much older than the other side. Congress is old. Both sides.

Millenials grow up with black and brown people.  Their heroes are black and brown people.  They’ve already had a two-term black president.  They believe that overt racism should be punished and shamed.  They arent’ afraid of immigrants.  They grew up with latino and black celebrities almost outpacing their white colleagues.  They don’t fear losing a job to a Jose or a Jamal. They only fear losing a job to a C-12312 processor or robot.

They know that everyone has to think globablly.  They are totally used to consolidation and continually corporatization.  They know that in a few decades, it won’t just be companies that merger, it will be nations. 

They know the wave will roll back on itself.