Check, Please: Black Folks and Tipping

The summer before I started college, almost 10 years ago in Baltimore County, I became a waiter. It was a rite of passage into the workforce, albeit an unglamorous one. Working in a restaurant gave me my first real experience interacting with all sorts of people in an intimate way. At the end of the day, regardless of socioeconomic class, a hungry person is a hungry person — making people unpredictable, and their tips negotiable.

Elderly people, the soup-salad-and-bread-stick thrifty types:horrible tippers. And those high-rolling suited professionals who were quick to flash their American Express cards: shamefully bad tippers.And to my kinfolk in the black community, I must say: If slavery wasn’t acceptable when we fought the Civil War … (more on this later).

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Tupac at 40: What if He Survived?

For the past month, in anticipation of what would have been his fortieth birthday, I’ve become a obsessed with Tupac Shakur — torn between the very public shape-shifter that he was who scrawled THUG LIFE on his abdomen and the relatively young man who grew up without a father, and transitioned into manhood under the harshest of circumstances.

I became curious in Tupac insofar as he represents a litmus test on whether progress has been made in terms of reversing trends in black men’s life expectancy, incarceration numbers, and on the whole, having more options for manhood beyond the archetypal Thug or Gangster or in the extreme opposite, the bourgie Negro devoid of a political consciousness.

For Tupac, and many black men, there’s little middle ground in terms of life choices: It’s life or death; college or prison; hardcore or soft; a thug or a  (insert expletive.) Contrary to mainstream media, Tupac Shakur was a complicated figure who had so much more to give the world, if only we lived in a world where black men aren’t made to feel lucky if they live long enough to collect social security.

In an unofficial survey I conducted with a group of poets and writers, culture critics, and academics, I posed the question: If Tupac Shakur was still alive, what might he be doing?

Continue reading on TheGrio

“For Colored Girls”

I was privileged to see my words again published on The Root. So many emotions are wrapped into this film. I couldn’t possibly address all of them. What I honestly attempted to do was to point out the fact that I see a trend of films coming about and getting critical acclaim about pathology in the black community. There are many schools on this. Some say, what’s the alternative don’t speak up about it? And there’s the camp that says we shouldn’t show it at all because of what white folks will think of us. I find both of these schools to be dangerous because they rarely get at the issue.

So, for better or worst, here’s an except of my piece. Thanks for reading!

“For Colored Girls,” Not For Black Men 

As a black kid growing up in the 1990s, I was in love with film. I would leave a theater and remember lines: Laurence Fishburne in 1991′s Boyz N the Hood telling his son, “You my son; you’re my problem.” I can recall the look in the eyes of the militants in the film Panther; they knew they were going to die but believed in the rightness of their cause and were committed to keeping the drugs out of the black community. I remember seeing Love Jones in 1997 and realizing what Lauryn Hill meant by “the sweetest thing I’ve ever known/was like a kiss on the collarbone.”

When I saw For Colored Girls, Tyler Perry’s film adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 play, it was painfully clear that we’re a long way from the movies of my youth, when black men were depicted as more than rapists or baby killers or degenerates. It almost feels like all of the racial stereotypes that our grandparents grew up with have been internalized and are now infecting our films.

We don’t have to worry about white folks embarrassing us in their movies, because now black people are allowed to get rich committing this kind of cultural genocide. There’s been a shift in black moviemaking, and it’s not for the better.

For Colored Girls is a mixed bag, because any adaptation largely hinges on the filmmaker’s translation. As a result, the film and the play are two very different works. In the play, there are gorgeous poems, such as the one about Toussaint Louverture, who, Shange writes, “waz a blk man, a negro, like my mama say who refused to be a slave.”

It’s moments like these that Tyler Perry keeps out of his film. The character Beau Willie’s story as a war veteran is brought to bear much larger in the play than in the film, which is a travesty. With this character especially, Shange humanized black men and pointed to a historic injustice that had been done to our veterans by the government.

Shange’s play has an all-female cast, but in Perry’s adaptation, the men are present in the film. This not-so-subtle decision makes men the oppositional force in the movie, while in the play, it is the women who are, in their own way, blocking self-actualization. 

Our movies didn’t always portray black men in this way. Not too long ago, we saw Will Smith playing a homeless single father determined to care for his son in The Pursuit of Happyness, a book-to-film adaptation directed by Gabriele Muccino, a white man.

Read more on The Root.

Teaching Soon-to-be Moms Poetry

Yesterday, I finished the last poetry workshop of my short poet-in-residence for the Arlington Public School program. I enjoyed each school in a different way. There was a funky charter school. The students didn’t have school bells. They called their teachers by their first name. They were pretty hip and very energetic. Sadly most of them giggled through my workshop.

There was something different about the workshop I taught yeaterday, though. It was a “special” high school. All of my students were teenage mothers or soon-to-be teenage mothers. I felt uneasy because I was a guy going into “their” space. Add to that, I was twenty years old when I became a father and I started to wonder what would have happened if I weren’t allowed to go to school (even though I was in college then) with everybody else. What would happen if I was segregated with all of the other soon-to-be fathers. What might that have done to my self esteem? Add to that, my being male gave me a certain privilege: No one had to know that I was expecting a child with my partner unless I told them. Women, however, don’t have this liberty.

The young women were all bright-eyed, curious, smart, and funny. They wrote missives after Lucille Clifton celebrating all sorts of things, especially the ten fingers and toes of their new borns. More so than the rest of the schools, I visited, there was a need to be heard with these young women. There were questions about my age, what I did for a living. How did I get a radio show? How can they get their own radio show? It was all very humbling.

Moreso than the writing, what struck me was how discerning they were with the poems. Their feedback was on-point. I wonder how the session might have changed if it were with a group of soon-to-be fathers. Would they have opened up? Would they have allowed language to claim them in the way that these young women did?

Before leaving I felt a sobering reality that for many of these young women, being a teenage mom is the only identity  allowed for them. Not high school student, poet, apprentice at some profession. . . And what was worse, is that there wasn’t much I could do about it as my time was up.