I'm Not Boohab

I don't feel like going in to work this morning. So I'll write this essay and then go to work.

Some dude wrote the following:

Given the fact that were it left up to white conservatism, there would have been no civil rights legislation and blacks would still be official second class citizens, why are black people like Cobb so offended by liberalism and multiculturalism?

Maybe they actually enjoy being slaves.

Despite the fact that this argument fails Syllogism 101, it is a common error. Common enough so that imagine that I must address it head on. Of course that wouldn't be very Cobbian. I have to jump up in the air and shoot it from above, drop a diversionary bomb to the right of it then sneak around behind it and melee it, assassination style. That's what a weekend of playing Halo does to your mind.

Once upon a time, I was Boohab, aka 'The' Boohab. And the boohabian imperative was to be a persistent black object. To go everywhere on the internet and throw down the provocative hardline on race. Interestingly enough, when I was doing that during the mid 90s, the biggest complaint that blackfolks gave me was that I was spending too much time among whitefolks. The fact that I had an in-your-face confrontational attitude with whitefolks on the internet was completely offset by the perception at the time, that the Web itself was a domain of white privilege.

During that boohabian period, I was mostly progressive. But progressive politics were not an end in and of themselves, it was just suitable armor for attacking white liberals and white conservatives. My allies were people who called themselves progressive, and I took some special comfort at befriending the white 'race traitors' online, although in person two-thirds of them gave me the creeps. I must say however, I remain quite impressed by one of the dudes who resembled nothing more or less than a craggy, barrel chested Harley rider from the Vietnam era as we paused for a moment of silence atop a mountain which marks the grave of Owen Brown, son of John Brown.

I think that typifies the lengths I would go to in order to gain allies in anti-racist struggle. It is from that length and distance I find myself perplexed at the insults thrown at me, now that I'm wearing different gear, hiking a different mountain.  When I spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how race operated in America, I learned pretty much everything there is to know. The trick was putting it all in perspective, and that is the gift I have received by dint of researching and arguing my positions in public. In the end, after about 4 years of doing the Boohabian thing, I killed off that personality and handled other business. And yet I retain the wisdom of those years while I don't express it overtly as I rather imagine some dudes would like me to do.

I did compile a list of books that pretty much encompassed what any race warrior would need to know. I've got it around here somewhere. OK here. Hmm. That doesn't seem like much. In fact, it doesn't compare with my list on black mental liberation. Well, anyway that's all water under the bridge.

When the Washington Post did its study on black men (everybody has to study black men, for some reason), I wrote that the most difficult thing about being a black man in American society was precisely that study. Nobody takes black men as they are. And the more you individuate yourself, the more you deviate from a set of stereotypical ideas, the more people question whether you are indeed a black man. This is not a disabling problem. We all just deal with it. But it is this sort of problem that haunts black men who write about race and don't end up chanting with the crowd.

Speaking of which, I should suggest you read White Flight Friday. That's one part of my Rodney King / LA Riot story. What I remember is being called to the stage at Times Square and invited to pump up the crowd with some angry rhetoric, it's the second time I failed at that. The first was a union rally at the Shrine Auditorium, but that's another story. Everybody says they want intelligent sophisticated black men until they have to deal with the uncomfortable feelings of actually dealing with one. I'm not your Ken doll.

So part of the difficulty in being a free man, aside from the obvious economic difficulty, is being responsible to yourself and managing other folks' expectations. For me the answer has been putting on the masks of a writer on a mission. I know it pisses people off that my current gear is about Conservatism, and they struggle to find out where the 'black man' is underneath all this Cobbian verbiage. But I can't assure anyone that the black man they are seeking to find is going to be there. I can only tell the truth about what I'm doing and where I've been.

So what must be especially troubling to some is that I've been on the race man's path and worn a hole in it, and now I'm done learning, instead I'm shooting from a somewhat disinterested hip. I'm one of those people who does not believe that African America's fate lies in its ability to negotiate race relations. I've assessed all the racism in America and I find it insufficient to stop blackfolks. It just slows some of us down and it's damned inconvenient. So I dismiss a lot of racism. Nobody died. There's only so much care a reasonable person can afford, and I shed my tears long ago. So I'm not going to re-boohabify myself or my writing. Considering my path and prospects, I should add 'ever again'. Race relations is a bore and an unproductive bore at that. There's only two ways to come to that conclusion, one is having climbed the mountain and forgotten half the details, the other is to take it on faith from someone who has.

I climed the mountain but I'm not a serial climber. I'm off to greener pastures. If you want the details of where I've been, check out that old part of my website.  I'm not mad at folks who get me wrong. I think they're merely impatient. But I can't be running backwards to satisfy their shallow desires.