When Our Icons Go Home

Muhammad Ali passed late Friday night.

Prince departed this life last week.

We lost Natalie Cole and Maurice White from Earth, Wind & Fire earlier this year.

Phife Dawg from Tribe Called Quest lost his battle with diabetes recently.

Kobe retired and Barack is moving out of the fishbowl in a little over seven months. I know they’re still living, but a piece of me died when I wrote this sentence.

2016 is starting to really suck…and let us not entertain the very real notion of a Trump presidency.

We keep losing our great Black heroes of all stripes, shapes, and temperaments. Yet, our heroes get the “transcended race” tag upon death as if their lives were too radical while they were breathing. Does that label mean that they were palatable to white people in the end in a twist of American revisionism that strangely never admits to its own transgressions? Or when sin is confessed, the nation takes a page from black American Christianity for a posthumous forgiveness of mistreatment only to lionize the tidbits that fit its larger – and often paler – narrative?

"Transcended race" is a declaration that Black people generally make you uncomfortable, but not this one, at this distance, at this time.

— jesseWilliams. (@iJesseWilliams) June 5, 2016

Recall the first verse of ‘90s rock group Creed’s “What If?” best known for its prominence on the Scream soundtrack.

I can't find the rhyme in all my reason
Lost sense of time and all seasons
Feel I've been beaten down
By the words of men who have no grounds
Can't sleep beneath the trees of wisdom
When your ax has cut the roots that feed them
Forked tongues in bitter mouths
Can drive a man to bleed from inside out

-      Creed, “What If?”

If you think I’m wrong, watch the whitewashing begin with Brother Muhammad all week long.

As much as we nurture and love their blackness as well as our own, white America inevitably finds a way to wash off a celebrity’s blackness. If you don’t believe me, look back to Michael Jackson’s accidental death from overdose and the subsequent funeral on television in addition to royalties profited from said demise. Or Rick James. Or even Stamps’ very own Maya Angelou. What was essential to being in life is simply cast away as gauche in death, like blackness is a white undershirt that goes into the dirty clothes hamper at the end of the day.  Therefore, African-Americans are the venture capitalists who seed, develop, and cultivate our talents until they are bought off by the larger group to watch those diverse gifts peel off one by one to a universally acceptable station America has taken ownership of. One example of this is how our children remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. not for his stand against the Vietnam War or his political mastery against the then-status quo segregation policies enacted nationwide but for the “I Have A Dream” speech that they hear and eventually memorize in elementary school only to dismiss the many complexities of being black in the Fifties and Sixties.

If all you know about Dr. King is that August 1963 speech or from Ali the catchy one-liners during his boxing prime, then you are part of the problem. Put some respeck on our icons’ names. I ain’t gonna say it no mo’.

We want to share our genius with the world at large (see my Black History Month postings via social media throughout February on Facebook, Google +, and the blog, and the #BlackFact hashtag on Twitter) and if you really think about it, 13 percent of the American population has made some very significant impacts to improve life for all of us in one way or another. Yet, we are expected to transcend race in a manner that leaves our blackness as a footnote in life that we have had to overcome as if it were something negative. You don’t hear about how Antonin Scalia had to get past his Italian-American heritage after a lifetime of dismantling every ounce of black advancement, achievement, and success on the Supreme Court or how David Bowie so often cited Michael Jackson, Prince, and Luther Vandross as inspirations for his edgy British rock music or even how trap queen Nancy Reagan became a perceived model First Lady even as she told us to Just Say No to drugs in our childhood days as her husband President Ronald Reagan moved weight across Central America into our inner cities and ghettoes and listed South African great Nelson Mandela as a terrorist as he inexplicably defended apartheid! Instead, they were simply accepted at face value for who they are. Their sins are inevitably washed whiter than snow and we are none the wiser for the longer-term impacts of their own decisions no matter how damning they become.

By the way, you can keep OJ Simpson, Clarence Thomas, Raven-Symone, Stacey Dash, Omarosa, and this iteration of Kanye West although I miss the Yeezy that gave us Through the Wire, Gold Digger, Good Life, and So Amazing.

I can’t wait to see how y’all whitewash President Barack Obama’s good name and legacy in the years after his family has long moved from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Ditto for golf fans giving Tiger Woods the love he rightfully deserved after adding so many zeroes to their favorite professional’s winnings and media promotion.

In America, blackness has been the eternal other since the 1620s when the first Africans landed in Virginia and were more successful than their European – and Indian, in some cases – compatriots. To millions of people, it is unthinkable that we could actually be the mainstream and whiteness a mere tributary due to decades of the innumerable abuses we have suffered and continue to suffer subliminally such as colorism (the idea that light-skinned is better than dark-skinned, hence #TeamLightSkinned or #TeamDarkSkint).

Before lead singer Scott Stapp got strung out, Creed wanted to take you Higher:

Can you take me Higher?
To a place where blind men see
Can you take me Higher?
To a place with golden streets

-Creed, “Higher”

Being a black icon means we have already conquered internal demons to achieve our way. What the words “transcend race” mean is our own overwork is appealing enough to white America to sit back and say wow even if the compliment is seen as backhanded in a posthumous existence. What needs to be transcended is the ideology that values white privilege that simultaneously erases blackness to see the black celebrity as he or she is, warts and all. Once that release of “why must everything be about race with you people?” mindset occurs, that transfiguration will be a successful one. Then – and only then – will the black celebrity be remembered for all of his or her humanity including blackness and not just the parts white America conveniently chooses to ignore.

When our icons live their truth, they are castigated for their moral stands. In death, those stands are lauded in interfaith ceremonies as if the populace had permission to cut-and-paste their lives. For anyone to say that Brother Ali was a credit to his race completely missed the point of what he was all about as well as this posting. Was he loved after he won the gold medal in the 1960 Olympics following which the city of Louisville declined honors, or did white America adore him only after Parkinson’s disease took away his mind and ability to speak clearly save one last rebuttal toward Donald Trump about Muslim contributions to the United States of America?

Whether or not our black icons are justly respected for their positions and decisions, they are our heroes – and in the cases of a few, remembered as goats who deservedly should be rewarded based on their actual contributions to this world.

Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth. – Muhammad Ali