Make heritage an inspiration, not an excuse

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By ELIJAH GOSIER

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 7, 2001

As such shady nooks do in many cities, an umbrella of trees on 16th Street S in St. Petersburg long ago became a place where people come to trade lies and the news of the day, often muddling the difference.

From midmorning to midnight and beyond, the shady lot was an alternative to loneliness, a place where, for a few moments -- or many hours -- the people who come here could forget that this was the best their day would get, that when they left here, they were not going to a better place, to a pleasant home with dinner on the table and a loving family seated around it.

Places such as this once commiserated with suffering slaves and gave birth to insurrections and escape plots. Such places once spanked breath into the blues and were stepping stones across treacherous centuries of suffering.

Such places have their roots in Africa, where griots, artful storytellers, established the oral tradition that still lives as a critical part of their descendants' lives.

Such places, such gatherings, are part of the heritage of black Americans.

But such places also often greet the morning littered with liquor bottles and crack pipes, and sometimes with the disoriented bodies of those who used them still loitering nearby.

Sometimes prostitutes meet their customers there and don't travel far before they render their services. Sometimes arguments get loud and profane and become fights.

That's what Darrell Rouson saw on 16th Street. In an area recently landscaped with palm trees and a manicured median, amid the beauty of a centuries-old tradition being followed, Rouson saw ugliness.

A lawyer, crusading recovering crack addict and president of the local NAACP branch, which has its offices in the same area, Rouson contacted the owners of that property to persuade them to rein in the immoral and illegal activity there.

Their response, drafted by their lawyer, questioned Rouson's motives. He felt his appreciation for African tradition was being questioned.

The charge -- not being sufficiently Afro-centric -- carries the same sting today that being called an Uncle Tom did 30 years ago.

Rouson was irate, then amused.

"Immorality is not in the African tradition," he said.

The owners have since cleaned the area and trimmed the trees, eliminating the shade and with it, Rouson estimates, 70 percent of the problem.

The improvement surely pleases residents on neighboring properties, who will now be able to sit on their porches and not see people urinating publicly or engaging in sex acts. But cutting a few limbs doesn't address a broader problem at the base of the skirmish:

For many black Americans, if a behavior can be traced, or attributed, to African roots, then the behavior is okay, appropriate, somehow justified or excused as inexorably driven by heritage.

The critic of such behavior risks excoriation as non-Afrocentric. The behavior consequently is validated by the silence of intimidated critics and ratified by overzealous Afro-centrists who contrive African influence in every action black Americans take. The result is that some negative actions are painted as not just virtuous but as duties demanded by loyalty to ancestors.

The case is made at many levels, from the superfluous to the sublime.

One woman, faced with the gentle suggestion that she might be using too much makeup, responded: "African people are very decorative." With one simple declaration, she had elevated her clown-inspired face above the question of her overuse of makeup to the nobler pursuit of her heritage. She had channeled the exchange so that it was no longer possible to tell her that the makeup made her look silly -- a difficult enough task -- without insulting her ancestry.

The discussion would not have been advanced by reminding her that Yoruba women "decorate" themselves with scars by slashing their faces, that others employ other methods, such as extending their lower lips with saucer-size discs.

The point: We are not prisoners to our heritage, but products of it. We cannot avoid being influenced by our past, but we can moderate the degree and direction of that influence. We can choose to emulate those aspects we consider positive and reject those that are not.

We also need to remember that sometimes there is a reason tradition becomes fond memory rather than current practice, why heritage becomes something to honor and appreciate in ways other than emulation, that sometimes, things done in the name of adherence to even the noblest of tradition turn out to be nothing more than perversions of it.

The bottom line is that black Americans have a heritage they can rightly be proud of, learn from and, in many cases, emulate. But all of that, and any of that, must be done within the context of the present.

That present, no matter how much we may wish it to be different, stares in the face of some stark circumstances. Black Americans are in jails and prisons in record numbers, dying of AIDS at a faster rate, setting the pace for children out of wedlock and fatherless homes.

Some of that is attributable to systemic unfairness. Most of it is not. Much of it is a direct result of losing sight of heritage and tradition. Respect for elders and property is African and black American heritage, but no one is called an Uncle Tom because he steals a car or shoots his neighbor. Appreciation and unity of family are black tradition, but no one is accused of not being Afrocentric for giving birth to a child without first getting married, or for failing to support his children. No one is called either for promiscuous behavior.

Those values are aspects of their heritage that black Americans need to preserve. Those are the values that made the walk through centuries of adversity possible.

But they're disappearing in the distance.

Much of what's left is little more than fashion statement.

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