In James Baldwin's brilliant book-length film study, Devil Finds Work [1976], he uses the tool of his prose as always to dismantle our most cherished mechanical sins. In one startling part, he discusses the role of a maid servant in DW Griffith's classically racist "The Birth of a Nation" [1915] from the early, early days of the movie industry, and he observes how this same character emerges unchanged 50 years or so later in a "liberal" movie, Stanley Kramer's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" [1967]
Baldwin's problem - and ours, to be clear - with this character is that she is nothing but an appendage of the white family she toils for, and that generations of struggle have not improved this. She is a matronly House Slave, who only seems to feel and see what the whites who hold her leash feel and see. She is without familial concerns, only the concerns of the white settlers who command her; she seems to come to us with no connections of her own. Baldwin seems to cringe when the manifestation of this strange character in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" is the one who takes Sydney Pointer's character to task for stepping outside of his place for his intentions with the white daughter and coming in disrupting the white family.
I think about this phenomenon when I think about Africans rushing to join every cause, immerse themselves into any religion, and of course take on any political issue that white-settler culture dishes to them, as long as they do not speak of Africa.
With Africa, there is a tacit understanding among too many of us New Negroes, post-racialists, African-Americans [sic] that anything associated with Africa - and our ignorance already prepares us that nothing exists in Africa before European slavers and colonization arrived - is sullied and as embarrassing as ebonics.
This is not only why we run from Africana but also run into the arms of anything emanating out of Europe, ground zero for some monstrous crimes. This is also why we as a people wholeheartedly turn our treasures, our children, over to the monsters who started this, in order for those children to be be civilized and made whole.
I'm recalling the Black male character in "Follow Me Home," [1996] a beautiful independent movie produced by the Bratt Brothers of San Francisco. The Black male character is immersed in Buddhism. Or, the Black female character in "La Mission," [2009] another brilliant independent movie, also by the Bratt Brothers, who seems to be practicing another South Asian faith rather than an African one, even a New World African one.
I cite these two movies because they are created, like Kramer's 1967 classic, by liberals - our so-called "friends"! In truth, they are reinforcing that same tacit understanding that Africa is backward, primitive, and only brought into the light of civilization by white slave traders and venture capitalists.
These characters seek awakening anywhere and everywhere but where they came from: the Christian church is, of course, a given among North American Africans. According to a Pew study, over 40% of Africans in North America identify with some form of Baptist church. Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism are in the single digits or much less. What is fascinating about this Pew study is nowhere is the acknowledgement that Africans had their own indigenous religions, which were denied New World chattel slaves; the study finds no irony that these people had been forced to adopt Christianity, and does not note why most North American Africans gravitated to the Baptist denomination over others [no white hierarchy to exclude Black membership and the Baptists took on the abolition cause early].
If Baldwin were alive, he might continue the non-evolution of the maid servant with this Pew study of a people from nowhere with no history heading into whiteness on the same leash.
But this phenomenon boils over into other areas, like activism. Like the maid servant characters discussed by Baldwin, we Africans in North America are guilty of joining anyone else's campaign but our own. Let me be clearer about this: because, our oppressions are connected, and we should be working as co-conspirators with each other to understand the complex affects of capitalism on all our communities and wage revolution to upturn it, but except when a Ferguson or BART shooting occurs and makes the headlines, the issue of the condition of Africans in North America is not an issue at all for whites.
The left - I'd argue as witnessed by its movies - does not really know and lacks a comfort in tackling the social and economic contexts of Africans in North America.
We rush to their causes even though often within these other critical movements, we as Africans in the diaspora face the same marginalization that we do in employment, housing, wages. Leftist activists treat us like their pets, like we are an appendage, and when we step out of their roles for us, they pull back on the yoke.
This isn't a pleasant thing to say. I'm supposed to only attack FOX News and the rightwing, not my "friends." But with precious few exceptions, precious few radical whites who "get it" and have marched right out of these organizations, this must be stated as the nature of our so-called friends.
If you do not believe me, look at any of the cottage industry organizations on the left and identify where their mission statement acknowledges the crimes done historically to Africans in North America and how these crimes are still in full effect.
They would respond that this is not part of their mission, and I would say "Exactly." Because just as fundamental as the human rights violations against indigenous nations of this hemisphere is the state of the Africans. Both, not surprisingly, are almost totally ignored. The reset switch for these friends do not correct the crimes of white-settler institutions on these populations, the assumption being that this really is a white country, and we others are merely making guest appearances.
Baldwin's point was pretty clear in drawing that link between an old film and a new one. The only advancement is technicolor. So many of us still in vain situate ourselves as having come from nowhere running to a white settler population which doesn't want to deal with us except as the farm animals working on their narrow agenda. Their lip service and false concern will not win us progress; only a revolution will do that. Their program will bring us 60 more years of maid servants cooing for their masters.
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