A couple weeks ago, I questioned the notion of whether there is any such thing as a collective Black community. I said that there are Black communities, plural, but that there is not one such entity as A Black community. But I thought about it a little more, and that’s not quite accurate either. While I still believe that what we like to call the Black community is subdivided in the same ways that America itself is divided, I think there is an element of ‘we gotta pull together in an emergency.’ We’re like Voltron.
What brought this to mind is reading this article in the Post about DC’s Dunbar High School. When people talk about how well Black folks were doing under segregation, Dunbar is held up as the quintessential example.
When I told my mother about Thomas’s mention of Dunbar in the June decision, she, too, recalled a place she called “ours” and a time when there was a sense of community everywhere, when your teachers walked to school beside you because they lived in the same segregated neighborhood where your school, your doctor and everything else was located. My mother also says it never dawned on her that black students would integrate with whites in their schools because they were receiving a great education at Dunbar, which “was all they knew.”
Which is all good, but, and this is a sofa, I probably couldn’a gone there back then. See that picture over there? I’m chocolate, bordering on beef gravy. In that particular place at that particular time? That was not what was hot.
But as the award-winning poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, who graduated from Dunbar in 1982, noted, even if there were opportunities for blacks at his alma mater, it didn’t mean that everyone was welcome. “The halls were then and are still today full of photographs of graduating classes full of light-skinned blacks,” he said.The black elite of the period enforced a well-known color caste system, according to Audrey Elisa Kerr, author of “The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor and the Case of Black Washington DC.”
So that was representative of one aspect of the Black community. Of course, as the Civil Rights Movement matured developed and matured, that line of thinking had to give way to the needs of the larger community; even the people who were complexion-segregationists had to unite with the darker-skinned folks and other parts of the community they may never have fooled with in order to achieve a larger goal. That’s why I think then, as now, the Black community is like Voltron.
Five lions. Separate. Autonomous. But when there’s an emergency? They all pull together to defeat the enemy. This is what I think groups like the NAACP count on, which is why they tend to say things that make it look like there’s a major threat from the outside. If there’s no need for Voltron to form, the lions won’t come together. It ain’t no ‘let’s form Voltron and walk around.’ Either it’s Voltron time, or it’s not. And when Voltron time is over, the lions separate and the people in them go on about their business. In some cases, it seems that all people remember is the Voltron part, forgetting the lions that make him up, and the challenge of getting them together in the first place.
The only thing is that now, most of our biggest problems are not external. They’re internal. Forming Voltron can’t fix a problem with one of the lions. So in addition to the actual problem, there’s the problem of finding a workable model for a solution. That’s why I keep seein people having marches to stop violence in the community. And I keep askin myself, who is that supposed to impress? You think thugs ‘nem gon’ be like, ‘Uh-ohh. They havin a march on Saturday afternoon. I better cut it out.’ Man, I be thinkin, ‘they lucky them dudes don’t jump out the cake and shoot up the march.’
In its day, Voltron was the baddest thing goin. But that day is over. Technology done advanced. Our model should too.
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