This week's Sunday Long Read comes from author and Tulane professor Bernice McFadden, as she discusses getting a seat at the table in life, and how difficult that is just to be present in the halls of power for Black women in America.
I discovered through DNA testing that my first maternal ancestor in the United States came from the country in Africa now known as Cameroon. This Cameroonian ancestor was a member of the Bamileke tribe — an ethnic group which originated in Egypt.
The table and the chair were invented in Egypt around 2500 B.C. Egypt is a country located in Northeast Africa and not in the Middle East as people have been misled to believe. Do you find it ironic that gaining a seat at the table has become a metaphor for the advancement into spaces that are historically and predominately white and male and generally resistant to Black and female representation?
Recently, Black people and women have been crashing those homogenized parties, bringing with them their own chairs or filling vacant ones at those proverbial tables.
Some of the gatekeepers feign acceptance of the racial modifications of these platforms, while others have no qualms conveying their disdain or outright outrage at the presence of a Black person at said table. For example, on Jan. 25, 2012, Jan Brewer, the former governor of Arizona, stood on the airport tarmac and chastised, like a child, one Barack Hussein Obama — a Black man who was, at the time, the sitting president of the United States of America. Moments later, when Brewer was asked about the incident she said, “He was a little disturbed about my book.”
Other gatekeepers are covert with their contempt, preferring to close their arms around unwelcomed Black people in an insincere embrace as they sink a blade into their backs.
I have a longtime friend. She and I are BFFs and are as close as sisters. She is white and Filipino, and we have been friends since 1979, when we first met at our mostly white boarding school in the rural Pennsylvania town of Danville.
We are both the eldest of four children, both raised in two-parent households.
For most of our relationship, race was not a topic of discussion. However, that changed in the early 2000s when she came to New York to spend a weeklong holiday with me. She’d spent the day in Manhattan, catching up with friends and taking in theater. Over dinner that evening, she shared that she’d had an extra ticket for the play she’d seen but hadn’t considered inviting me because she assumed I wouldn’t be interested in a staged production that did not have Black characters.
That statement stalled me. I asked if she thought that because I was Black, that my interest lay only in Black-centered entertainment?
She said yes.
I was stunned by her misconception of me and Black people on the whole. I asked if she, a biracial woman living in America, was only interested in European and/or Filipino art? She confessed that her interests were indeed diverse but couldn’t explain why she presumed it did not hold true for me or others who looked like me.
I explained that contrary to what she’d been told, Black people are not a monolith. I told her that we are diverse in every conceivable way.
This was the conversation that set us off on a journey about the myth of race, systemic racism, and what it’s really like to be Black in America.
Consciously or unconsciously, people treat you differently because of being Black, and asking folks to examine their own biases rarely works, because people don't perceive acts as biases. The same goes for gender, for how people treat women, and when you're a Black woman, this is a constant hurricane of being othered, being gaslit, and being shamed for even mentioning it.
America has lifetimes to go, it seems, before we get to any sort of real parity, but there's one political party absolutely dedicated to preserving white supremacy, and it sure isn't the Dems.
Well, most of the time.
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