I realized, somewhat late, that the Washington Post is linking via Technorati to blogs commenting on its latest anthropological study on the rare and wiley 'Black Man'. And so I am writing in general response:
The most significant problem with being a black man in America is very relevant to this series. It is that no matter who you are as a black man, your image is not under your control. Any time some university study, or major media report, or controversial court case arises, everyone in America is ready, willing and able to change their (shallow) opinions of black men.
Rather than maintain some decent and stable communications with black men, or black people, Americans are always hoping for some willing proxy. And so we have a series of a few black men, and a few ideas about black men, always and forever subusititing for real relationships with real black men.
It doesn't matter if the proxy is positive or negative. It doesn't matter if it's Mike Tyson or Tiger Woods, Cornel West or Tookie Williams, OJ Simpson or Colin Powell, Michael Jordan or Michael Jackson. There's a constant lottery going on about who is black and who is a black man, and what that 'thing' represents or is all about.
And so it is true in 2006 what was true when James Baldwin said it two generations ago:
All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact - this may sound very strange - you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
So I would suggest that everyone who has dropped by for a moment to update their black man image software try to get out to blogs and find out what it's like to read what a real black man is thinking and writing EVERY DAY. After all, we are the source. And no newspaper or university study is ever going to know as much about us as we know about ourselves.
All of your abstractions are worthless. We are what we are.
I am going to make some serious effort to bump up my traffic here, through more disciplined use of Technorati and better re-routing of all of the stuff that goes to the original Cobb site. I'll also do some advertising. Meanwhile, it is encouraging to see that Google is double listing many of my archives as I continue to get about 1500 page-views a day between both sites.
Aside from all that, this is a perennial rehash of the fundamental gripe of 'Mystery of the Black Blogger'. Who gets to represent?
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