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Yeah, well, not for nothing did Harry Belafonte call Colin Powell a HOUSE SLAVE . In this incredibly lucid article, San Francisco Times writer Bill Maxwell writes: Black history is filled with characters, real and fictional, who served the house of the master for personal gain and power. In modern times, such service is condemned when the master is seen as the enemy of black peoples principles and aspirations. The Bush administration, as represented by the tactics of Attorney General John Ashcroft, for example, scares many non-Republican blacks. And blacks working for the administration are seen as house niggers who are aiding and abetting bad policies. They help give the impression that the administration is racially diverse and that blacks support these bad policies. What Colin Powell serves is to give the illusion that the Bush Cabinet is a diverse Cabinet, made up of people of color, Belafonte said. He is a house slave who has been ordered to get with the program or go back to the field. This is the best explanation so far as to the delusion the current administration has created with its two house negroes. After all, if Colin has the light skin to make you forget his negritude, Condolezza has the education and social cachet that makes her whiter than most white people. I am the product of house niggers and free blacks -and being a light skinned, highly education black Puerto Rican woman, I know how the game of passing is played. To the chagrin of my white mother, I have called myself la negra since time immemorial. She wanted me call myself a brunette -quite an understatement even with the lightness of my skin and the occasional beat with a blower til its dead straightness of my hair. What is most interesting about the Bush and Rice affair is that very few people want to talk about it. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice carry their race as a kevlar vest against attacks from both ends of the racial spectrum. Whites pat themselves on the back for having a great example of integration in the White House. Heck, to the delight of many white Republicans, they can boast that Clinton, in his 8 years of presidency, could not equal at all this kind of racial harmony. Then there are the many blacks whod rather look the other way and claim that any powerful black person is better than none at all. What is important to remember in this discussion is that both Powell and Rice are part of the generation of blacks that grew up with NO COLOREDS signs on most public places in this country. My father was completely traumatized by the experience of coming to this country, from Puerto Rico, as a celebrated former Olympic medalist and folk nationalist hero and basically be treated like a dog. NO PETS ALLOWED right underneath the NO COLOREDS ALLOWED, as my father would say. That they have compromised their politics for personal gain and power is a small price to pay, if the reward is a place on the NO COLOREDS counter. Thats why it is absolutely refreshing to hear Harry Belafonte go after Powell. For many whites Belafonte the calypso singer / actor of his age but for many of us blacks who either lived or were born of the Civil Rights Movement, Belafonte was one of the activists, front and center. For him, but not for David Letterman : Top Ten Questions Youre Afraid To Ask Condoleezza Rice .
As to the black younguns, the one I most like for his penchant for going for the jugular is Aaron McGruder. Then there is also this hilarious editorial cartoon from the The Black Commentator . I find it hard to believe that the Bush/Rice relationship is not an affair. This hemisphere, founded on the enslavement of mostly Amerindian and African peoples there were white slaves, but thats topic of another post, has many people like me who come from the kind of relationship that we are witnessing in the White House. Interestingly enough, he had an education, had actually been a baseball player and was able to move to the US to work as an ironworker. On the contrary, utter poverty was assured because, the incentive for abolishing slavery in Puerto Rico which was the last country in all America to abolish it, by the way was purely economic. The upkeep of slaves was proving to be too costly at a time when Spain was pulling out of the Americas and was drastically cutting subsidies to plantation owners. So the strategy was to not acquire any more slaves and basically hire the newly freed labor as indentured servants -in effect, indentured servitude was a wildly popular way of keeping generations of Spanish laborers bound to the plantations and haciendas. In Puerto Rico, you were sometimes better off being a slave than a laborer. At least food, housing, health care and basic education were mandated by law for all slaves. Anyway, oral family history had it that my grandfathers side of the family had had property at one time but lost it when the Americans took over the island in 1898. I always took this with a grain of salt due to my fathers notorious grand-standing. But my great-aunt, Tia Carmelita, remembered the old house and once in a while reminisced about the old times. Still, she never spoke of how her mother had a house or of who her father was. To Do: Archival Work of family History Enter my friend Jose Alvarez Perdido. I went to high school with his brother and he had invited me a party at his house. Actually, he did not invite me, he coerced me into going to this party. Well, once I get there, he not so much introduces me but kind of throws me against this woman who was, well, totally wasted and making a fool of herself. I get him one of my WTF looks and he and his brothers start laughing and saying, Cmon, dont be shy, introduce yourself to C She really wants to know you. Since they knew I was not a lesbian, I was trying to figure out what the hell this was all about. Now, C was trying to be proper in that hyper-polite way that righteous drunks are, nags me about my not telling her my nombre cristiano. And thats when the party came to a standstill and C snapped into full sobriety. The detail here was that she was a tall, blonde woman with greenish-blue eyes and a markedly Spanish profile. And she was not from the Sabaters of Mayaguez who were siblings of my great-grand father but she was indeed, my 2 cousin. She was a great-grand daughter of the same Sabater as I Now, I knew that my side of family were the slaves of the hacienda. The story in my family went that the Sabaters sold-off the hacienda and returned to Spain Canarias never to return. But as CR Sabater started to relate the story of her family, we had one of those intense eye-opening experiences that come once in a lifetime. She also grew up knowing very little about the other side of the family. It was true that they had had slaves in her family, but they were made to believe that none carried their last name. Or, as she liked to put it, the official story was that my great grand-father was a devoted husband and upright citizen of his community. In the same breath she added, THAT SAID, my grand father had stories upon stories of his fathers adventures in womanizing. It was due to his womanizing that several of his children remained in the island -they were not part of the official family. Still, what took my breath away was the one story she says her father would tell over and over again about how his father had fallen so madly in love with a negra casera a slave housekeeper in his youth that it almost brought him ruin. As CR Sabater told me, Carmen my great-grandmother was part of the staff in the house and Sabater fell madly in love with her.
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