"I may not get there with you." -- MLK
In his last speech, Martin Luther King Jr. gives us a final promise - that we will get to the promised land. I think I'm living there. I think that having gotten there, I have disappeared from the radar of the ghetto.
But seriously, what I'm going to do is have my own super exclusive club for one. I'm going to call it Allmuseri. Only people who understand Allmuseri can be in Allmuseri. It's not easy to explain, but I'm working on that piece today.
When I say that 'I got there', what I mean to suggest is that I let my natural curiosity and scientific bent, take me where all of my blackness studies led. By the time I finished reading all the books and listening to all the music, I ended up different.
People who knew me in LA before I moved to NYC may recall some of the beach parties I used to throw for the Urban League crowd of folks we used to be - paragons of thoughtful urban professionals. Then I started reading Toni Morrison and hanging out with history professors at UCLA and videotaping cops and listening to lectures with Michael Zinzun. I was never afraid to go there. Then I started performing at poetry slams and hanging out with Quincy Troupe and eating lunch with Michele Wallace and investigating the political origins of the Crips.
I did all that stuff before I went to NY, after Rodney King but before the Riots, it's just that when I broke up with my old girlfriend and shaved off my Ron Brown look, I disappeared from the social scene we used to share.
I liked race raising and how I got from the LA Council of Black Professional Engineers to the Brooklyn Moon Poetry Collective is an interesting story. Maybe there's an autobiography in me after all. But I never backtracked, and I never will. Everything I know comes from knowing, trying, testing, checking, spewing, listening, re-integrating. I don't expect that it's all going to make sense until they're teaching my book at the college level.
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