I saw a Tee shirt on Instagram that said NAH. Rosa Parks – 1955. I was greatly impressed at how pieces of history were gradually and steadily being integrated into popular culture. Maybe I was going to get this Tee shirt and probably also attempt to help artists or visual experts work or draw inspiration from the long and bitter struggle for freedom over the years both in Africa and America for the negro….
perfect segue for talking about how reading James Baldwin had had so much of an effect on me. His Fire Next Time was brimming over with double negative structures. I mean, the most apparent reason for the excessive use of this structure was remotely tied to the admittance of the hopelessness of the nigger’s situation…
The word independence in Africa and the word integration (in America) are almost equally meaningless; that is, Europe has not yet left Africa, and black men here are not yet free – James Baldwin
It was a double negative life for me the whole week. Dinner with my Botswana people was fun…but for some reason, I couldn’t shake off the analysis of the relationship dynamics between white and black people. We’d come far and I knew people were now more sensitized and maybe exonerated of all racial bias….but then, wasn’t the subtle slave master, dominant dominee (if you like ) relationship still present somewhere? even in the most subtle way?… So this happened to me.
Previous weeks ago, I had a misunderstanding with a peer over something as basic as filling a tub with water. The peer was white and I wondered if her ‘concern’ for how I filled the tub was due to anything linked to my lack of logic or simple common sense. I was livid. I wasn’t about to allow myself be micromanaged over something as basic as filling a tub with water. Had post-coloniality left me sensitive to the point of extreme cynicism?
The tub of water was my no…
Rosa Armstrong 