The Spoils of War

One of the few reasons I can say I am glad to have discovered WN later in life. I didn’t know about or read any of the political ramblings of the mainstream. I started in WN, then started to read about political thought, and holding their stuff up to our light. Whatever I ‘knew’ , I knew from TV, and school, but definitely had doubts about TV, and disagreed with a lot of the stuff in school. They regarded me as some kind of throwback, or religious-though I wasn’t- or somehow I had bought into the ‘system of female oppression’ because I never had aspirations to be a CEO or even a manager. I knew without knowing, that they were all full of *&^%.

Growing up, I don’t know when I first heard of the N word, it probably was in grade school. There simply wasn’t anyone to say it to for one, and when I first heard it, can’t remember if it was actually to a black, or about a black- but of course figured that it has something to do with black, because no one else had been called that. I knew that it was mean but thought it was along the same lines as calling someone ugly or retarded or “your clothes suck, you’re poor”, but I knew it wasn’t exactly like that, because although  my clothes did suck and my parents professions famous for not making any money, and I got my ass kicked regularly by ugly dyke girls a grade lower than myself- I knew it was something else. I don’t think I understood about race period then, and just thought it was another insult, but that it was unique to blackness, like all fat kids were called fat. Later of course I found out it was worse than ‘fat’. It wasn’t until I was almost thirty however, that I found out about calling a black ‘boy’ was an insult, even if that particular black person was an actual boy.

It must have been before I learned about slavery, but even then I cant remember if in grade school the N word was said in any context. This was not a private school, this was not a prissy school by any stretch. I came away with the feeling that if you were called a name like this, it was based on some kind of truth, and to say it out loud was just being extra mean, just as you wouldn’t point out a stranger’s flaws. “Mommy why is that lady in a wheelchair?” “Shhh that’s not nice, we’ll talk about it later”. So I knew being called that meant some kind of real problem, because of the seriousness with which it was treated, but unsure exactly what the problem was.

Reading Pitts only convinces me that we can only transcend what we are, or what we are born to, to a degree, even if it looks different on the outside -better car, house , etc..
Pitts sits up on his perch, in his gilded writer’s cage and sings his latest tune , which took him a long time to come up with, and prob was jacked from an anti forum : “Well, if Neo-Nazi’s hate me, I’m doing something right” .

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.pitts01jul01,0,7250602.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines

and yet..there still lies within him this sense of looking for approval- at the same time has that ‘chip on the shoulder’ sassy runaway Negro attitude, like he is trying to go for the wry, depressive humor of what I call the “W.O.N.” (Wise Old Negro) , the character someone like Morgan Freeman would play; misunderstood, suffering gathered from horrible experience, the Old Negro who has weathered his fair share of knocks but has come out without bitterness…. you know the role. I mean, come on, there aren’t very many roles for them to play-
Morgan Freeman as Pitts: (Pitts actually wrote this, see link)

“I grew up in the slums of Los Angeles and started college at 15. I won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, and have been married to the same woman for 26 years. I’m also nice to children and play a mean game of Scrabble. I feel a little like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.They say you can tell who a man is by looking at his friends. Which is true. But I believe you can also tell by looking at his enemies. Apparently, I have managed to make enemies of haters, bigots and other low, pathetic men.
I must be doing something right.”

I imagine Pitts sitting on his porch , smoking a pipe. ” Well, I’ll tell ya son, back in the day when I was cominn’ up, there weren’t any Negroes who knew what a book was fo’ , saves throwin it at your little brother’s head, or burnin it for heat …The White man complainin about his chillun gettin theyselves killed? Well, cry me a river…” I think I like it better in my imaginary movie, with Morgan Freeman as the great-grandson of sharecroppers, than this Pitts, writing an unsympathetic ‘review’ of the vicious and depraved murder of two White kids.