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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Brilliant. Folks need a new model. The Voltron time are all episodes of a montage that academics and activists keep trying to invoke. They have lost their power, both in terms of their triggering action and reaction.
The biggest Voltron moment we’ve had in two decades was the Rodney King verdict, something that was essentially a symbol of an assault on black community but not an actual assault (as compared with the Crips for example).
Co-sign except for one part and that is the local marches. The Peacenicks came out of one of those if I remember correctly.
By local marches I mean the local community marches. Like marching in one area. I think something like that happened and after a few years of a community working together, a set of projects was transformed to homes owned by some of the former residents.
now when i say community marches, i’m not talkin about the ‘we gon go out and DO somethin’ type-marches, like, retake a drug house or whatever…i’m talkin about the ones where it’s mostly like a parade; they have the steppers out there, they go to some central point, some locally-known person speaks, the people go home, and the thugs come out. a march as a mobilizing effort of an ongoing plan is different.
Love this post, Ave. Your posts, in the general, are the best example of a good post idea well told.
Anyway, the Voltron metaphor is apt. My pedantic impulses lead me to blurt that there is sometimes a thin line between community and brotherhood. No, there is not a literal colossal community where we all live and breathe and funk. It’s a patchwork, with representatives all over the place.
But since we all share, to varying degrees, the same mark of universal derision from time immemorial, there is that deep brotherhood amongst most of us. It’s that sense of extended community (which, admittedly, waxes and wanes; see 70s, early 90s) that allows for the forming of a Voltron in a way that other communities cannot muster. It’s the snarl that binds.
Ave, what do you think of the idea Voltron’s been beheaded (twice) by those same hatering external forces and so lacks the bite to keep all dem other lions in line and focussed on the missions at hand?
There’s an emerging misperception a Black nation doesn’t exist because ‘we’ don’t function as a monolith. I don’t think the Af-Am community ever has. Stories of internal conflict — as the Dunbar HS asides represent — suggest ‘Black’ or ‘Blackness’ isn’t defined by one’s complexion; neither is it determined by a specific, clear ideology, e.g.; civil rights, or economic position.
A nation can be linked by a common language (Arabs, Latinos), heritage (Native Americans, Af-Ams), religion (Catholics, Jews), geography, or any combination of these and other factors. The point being nations are mediums of exchange — simultaneously permeable, diffuse, and mutable. It is for this reason Af-Ams can agree to disagree on various political issues and manage to reach consensus (approaching uniformity) on others. Similarly, our (?)direction need not focus on ‘either-or’ choices of emphasis… presuming direction is at all required or inevitable to maintain the nation.
I say it isn’t.
So, with the food analogy in mind, it should be pointed out that I’m country gravy…or a macadamia nut. As such, I’m certainly not anything more than a supportive observer of the conversation at-hand, but you know me, Avery; I saw the Voltron conversation underway, so I had to pop in to toss a “thumbs-up”. Carry on. As you were. Forgive the brief snow shower.
Nicely done, Ave. But I’m wondering to what extent the “Voltron Lions” of the Black community are seriously in cohoots with one another. I mean, each segment of the black community (let’s face facts: black collectivity is a farce) is driven by it’s own element. Rarely, if ever do you see Black America transform into a cohesive unit to challenge whatever threats exist; perceived or otherwise.
I’m just sayin…
he said, “country gravy.” *dead*
dre, i think the lack of transformation is the problem of acting as if this model still holds. to use larger america as a model, we voltronned after 9/11/01. we were voltron for a couple minutes. now, we’re back into lion status. i might even go as far as to argue that we’re more at lion status now than we had been before that. i don’t even know if we can form voltron again.
same thing goes for Us. i know we have in the past, but i don’t know if we still can, or if we would, even if we could. but that question is exacerbated by the fact that the biggest of our challenges are internal.