Oreo Dues, the Foolishness of Black on Black Racial Profiling
Oreo Dues, The Foolishness Of Black On Black Racial Profiling
Something I Said
Oreo Dues (Black-on-Black Foolishness)
Dwight Hobbes
Colors Magazine archives Some time back, jawing with someone about racism in Twin Cities television news, I stated the case that Lauren Green, now religion correspondent for FOX News Channel, then part-time anchor at ABC affiliate KSTP-TV, should’ve anchoring fulltime and would’ve been if she was white. The blacker-than-thou person with whom I was trying to hold an intelligent conversation began to raise hell about Green’s lack of blackness. “That boozhie princess talks like she’s white. Acts like she’s white. She’s lived around white people all her life. She even goes to a white church.” I forget this idiot’s name and legally couldn’t say it, anyway, but when I asked whether she’d ever met Lauren Green, she had to say, “No.” She fairly spat it. “I don’t have to [meet her]. I know her type.” Are you following this? An African American woman — let’s call her Sistah X – a black woman, who, herself, has been discriminated against is discriminating against an African American woman. You ought to hear Sistah X fuss about the raw deal she gets. She is manager in an office at the University of Minnesota. And she doesn’t behave how white people expect her to. I consider trying to point out to sistah-girl how she’s treating Green like white people treat her but figure she’s ain’t gon’ pay me no mind. Her white co-workers feel free to borrow her secretary when theirs have too much work to do. Without consulting her. As they normally would do with each other. Out of professional courtesy. On top of that, Sistah X’s supervisors give her secretarial chores. Like photocopying and running errands. Things they’d never think of having her peers to do. Sistah X tactfully protested, availing herself of due process. And, the more she asserted herself in doing her job the more she was seen as having an attitude problem. Her supervisors didn’t come right out and tell Sistah X to stay in her place. That’d been illegal. What they did was say things like, “You have to fit here for things to work” and “Some of”, get this, “you people have a problem with authority.” Homegirl might very well have a problem with authority. She certainly had a problem with racist stupidity. She was expected to docilely accept unfair treatment and because she wouldn’t do it got typed as an uppity – fill in the blank. She was discriminated against by a prejudiced mentality yet none of that fazed Sistah X when it come to condemning someone she never event met. A Hypocritical Axe One might assume, since Lauren Green has Caucasian features, light skin and excellent command of the English language, that Sistah X is dark with a broad nose, thick lips and sounds “black” when she talks. Wrong. The woman’s skin tone is two shades off a banana. She crisply articulates every word she speaks. Has a narrow and sliver-thin lips. In fact, she looks closer to white than does Green and, frankly, chatting with co-workers in the office, she seems pretty comfortable and would be subject to her own criticism, basically for not being niggerish enough. If anyone called Sistah X boozhie, she likely would turn the air blue cussing them out, say in no uncertain terms what they could kiss. It is a willfully ignorant, hypocritical axe she has to grind with Lauren Green. When I told Lauren Green about the conversation, her eyes glinted sharply and she looked down to the restaurant table at which we sat. “That’s unfair”, she said. “It’s also not the first time I’ve heard that sort of thing. I’ve lived with it all my life from people who don’t even know me. I’m not ashamed of being black. My culture and history are very important to me.” A few months earlier, she had performed a classical piano recital featuring compositions by several African American composers. Accompanying her was Frank Wharton, a black flautist. The gallery in which she performed held an array of paintings richly depicting African American life. This is not someone who wishes she were white. Lauren Green is hardly by herself. Many black people catch shit for supposedly not being black enough, are prejudged, dismissed as “oreos”, “toms”, “sellouts”, “wanna-bes”, you name it. Should they happen to live in a white neighborhood the assumption is that they’re ashamed of their own kind. Supposedly they want to be close to whites in order disassociate from the rest of the black race. It’s a lot of horse manure. Sure, there are a lot of black folk who think they’re white. Doesn’t mean everybody who can speak English and lives in a decent neighborhood is guilty. Fact is, you don’t have to live around white folk to get labeled and have to put up with crap. You can live right there in the ghetto where you born and deal with this foolishness. Paula G. comes from North Minneapolis, a pretty rough section of it. “There were”, she recalls, “loud fights in the street just about all the time. People carried knives and guns. It was scary. And