This diary is sparked by my remembering that once I bought my mother a novel I had liked. She was a voracious reader of fiction, so I thought it would be a cool present. She didn’t thank me. The only thing she said was something to the effect “I don't like to read about black.” The novel had some black characters. I no longer remember what the name of the book was.
It’s as if black and white America are parallel universes simultaneously occupying the same space but the one is mostly ignored by the other. It seems to me that the media and the American public tends to utter a collective yawn when things related to Africa, African culture and African Americans come to attention. Sure, there are exceptions: we like being entertained by black talent in music and sports. But what about black talent in literature, journalism and politics? It seems to me that black lives don't matter to so many because black America doesn’t matter to them. It’s as if black America is an inconvenience like bad weather or coming down with a cold. My point is that it’s not just malevolence that black lives don't matter, it’s also indifference.
I do not know why this is the case. For long media has been concerned with who watched what commercials and who bought newspapers, presuming they were white. But it has to be deeper than that. I’m speculating that majority culture is willfully ignorant and media has for generations responded to that.
Many white Americans will know there’s a remarkable black astrophysicist often in the media, but how many will know his name? How many Americans out of a hundred will know of a recent rave review of a black woman’s novel in the NYT Book Review?
It goes deeper than indifference to African America. There is an indifference to Africa, a lack of awareness that it is a large and important place. For example, when is the last time you saw a story about the growing middle class in Kenya? The place has a lot of problems, but it’s doing far better than Venezuela or Cuba or Iraq or Cambodia. Have you heard about other success stories in Africa such as Botswana and Namibia? Do you know that Christianity in Ethiopia has endured for 19 centuries and along with Armenia is the oldest Christian nation?
When is the last time you saw CNN cover the violence in Nigeria? Brutal terrorist fundamentalists kidnapping several hundred schoolgirls got some coverage, but do people know or care that Boko Haram is as nasty as ISIS and every bit as dangerous? Do you know Nigeria is a nation of nearly 180 million people? Have you seen any coverage of the projected African population of four billion by century’s end? Have you heard that the Chinese and others are buying up large areas of African farmland and why that is important?
Do you know that the long and brutal wars in Angola and Mozambique may have taken a million lives each, and that the recent wars in Congo (once called Zaire) may have taken between five and ten million lives? Or that American governments and American corporations over many years engaged in as much subversion and maintenance of dictators as we did in the Middle East? In Angola American energy corporations were paying mercenaries to guard oil installations against subversion sponsored by the American intelligence community. That ironic and gory history is like the rest of recent African history—mostly ignored. Not because it is unknown but because who would be interested?
Why this is so perplexes me. Is largely ignoring the reality of a vivacious culture a form of guilt or denial? My tentative conclusion is that the literary theory of the “gaze” has some explanatory power here, in the form of a dominant white gaze.
Okay, end of my soapbox for this afternoon. But damn it, black lives matter. Black culture matters. Black history matters. Africa matters. The separation is artificial and created mostly by indifference. Black lives are American lives. Black culture is American culture. It’s about time for the ignorance to end.