Facebook Publication Date: 11/29/22 8:11 AM
Welp.
When does–anything, really–go to plan?
Here was the intention: talk about Giving Tuesday, then pivot to conscious consumerism and agricultural medical racism (you *will* be as livid as I am), then regale you all with my story about Larry David.
All these things will happen, I promise. But not before coffee and ablutions and then more coffee, when I scroll through YouTube and indulge in the (sometimes only seemingly) frivolous. Makeup tutorials. British game shows. James Hoffmann, the sometimes absurdist, mostly visionary coffee expert.
But YouTube knows me well at this point; knows how to move my emotions and my outrage from the simmer burner in the back of my shiny stove to the power burner, whose full boil can, and one day probably will, immolate my entire house like so many burnt ends.
This time with one of the best writers of the 21st century.
Notice I didn’t say ‘Black writer’. Nor ‘African writer’.
I said: One of, if not *the* best, writers in our lifetimes. Full stop.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie took an interview in France, where she was subjected to willful ignorance, blatant disrespect, intentional misconstruing, and disregard of thousands of years of Black intellectual tradition by a white journalist asking the most obtuse questions and an MP in the front row, who eventually and obviously got up and left, who couldn’t be bothered to hide his contempt.
It started with an air quote.
Our…reporter asked Adichie about [insert air quote here] ‘African Literature’, like it’s a figment of folly, and it goes downhill from there.
But that’s not why the interview warped my brain like a cheap pot on my power burner.
Black thinkers, writers, commentators–we all, to a person, have been insulted; in my case, for the *first* time in 10th grade when Mr. Mayfield (Don, not Curtis) accused me of plagiarizing a poem over which I had agonized.
(White and white adjacent)People have asked me who ‘really’ writes my pieces, or when that fails, if I am biracial or adopted.
Our intellect as expressed in analysis and synthesis, our morality and ethics as our integrity and originality are questioned, is not a headline story. It is not an aberration. It happens daily.
Probably in the time it took me to write this sentence, it has happened, in the various places where the Black Diaspora is dispersed, at least a million times.
Disregard for our minds and our souls (a double insult, Mr. Mayfield) is a sad given. So no, it is not why I shared this with you all today.
I am sharing this because of the interviewer *herself*.
This is a good, if maddening, bookend to the short video I posted yesterday, along with my commentary and query.
In that video (find it) a Black woman sings about her treatment in her workplace.
It’s true for any workplace, be it an office, a university, a hospital, a classroom, a construction site–and an interview stage.
The interview could have gone much differently. It couldn’t though, because the interviewer couldn’t see eye to eye with the [implied air quote] ‘demi-person’ with whom she engaged.
But that would have taken more than she had.
Had she chosen attunement and alliance with Adichie, rather than alignment and collusion with what the rude and contemptuous MP and what he, in that moment represented, so much more could have been gleaned. Ms. Adichie did her best to keep the wheels on, but she was not the one with the power; she did not set the dynamic.
If you have not, find the video and click through and read the comments, then watch this video and read as many of the youtube comments as you can, pull some points, contemplate, and then comment.
Query:
As yesterday, when I asked who you would have been at the staff meeting or in the email chain–who would you have been in the audience?
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