A good friend from L.A. called me yesterday railing about TWO CAN PLAY THAT GAME with Vivevca Fox and Morris Chestnut. He said it was "atrocious". [His word]. He said it was "everything tragic and self congratulatory and base and cynical and VILE." [His words, again]. He then jokingly said, "Keith, what are we going to do about YOUR people.

Well! The brother had a lot of his mind.

Last night. At around 10:30. A very large SUV pulled up in front of the brownstone across the street. And out poured at least twelve people. All African-American [or Carribean-American]. Let's just say they were all of African descent. And as they poured out of the SUV, music blarred from their speakers. Not the blare that happens when you're traveling and you have music pumping to complement your mundane and/or pointed conversations, but this was a blare that would wake the dead who would rise up from their graves in a Queens cemetary and come to Brooklyn to beat your ass. IT WAS THAT LOUD. After ten minutes of this, a woman who I believed was the grandmother, came charging from her house screaming for them to turn it down. The three 20-something young women who danced near the stoop, blonde wigs swinging, continued dancing. The elderly woman, the grandmother, at least 75 years old, was ignored by all. She then opened the door of the SUV and DEMANDED for them to turn down the music ASAP. It went off. With reluctance.

But as soon as the grandmother walked away, one of the blonde young women screamed for a seven year old boy to turn it back up. And he did. And it blarred. And they danced as they swung glow sticks in the air.

I think the picture I'm painting is clear. The reason why I'm painting the picture may not be.

I'll explain.

I do not associate the behavior of others with my own behavior. I do not believe black people are monolithic in cultural, social or educational perspectives. The TWO CAN PLAY THAT GAMERS is not my experience. The young folks blasting music against their grandmother's wishes on a quiet block of tax payers is not my experience.

However, I did grow up on the outskirts of a mid-sized midwestern city. I did grow up near two horse farms, a mall, a lake, streams, creeks, General Electric and a cow pasture called Trillium Trails. I attended Mass every Sunday, and when we attended my father's church, I'd sit and listen to the minister preach his fire and brimstone sermon.

My mother encouraged intellectual and creative conversation, but she did not tolerate insubordination. [There was a period in my teen years where everything she said unnerved me and I was quick to let her know]. I played tennis, golf. I roller-skated, swam and ran on my high school track and field team. I loved flag-football; although basketball held an air of "black boy grooming" that sent red flags all up and down my soul.

I am a product of a few different migrations within the black community. My father's family came to Ohio in the 1940s; my mother's family were in Ohio and Kentucky as early as the 1700s. My maternal grandfather's family came to Ohio in the 1920s [not for work, but for the Veterans' Hospital that offered the best care for World War I vets, which included my granddad's uncles, Lennis and Arthur.

I'm simply saying: for people of color [people of African descent] to be lumped into the same general conversation about black people... To pretend to understand black poverty, or black wealth, or black single parenthood, or black folks who refuse to eat pork.... is unfair and ridiculous.

What ties black folks together in the New World is that we all had ancestors who were brought across the Middle Passage against their will. But our experiences since then are vast and wide and complex and distinct and individual and regional and cultural and religious and just plain human.

It's certainly a struggle and a challenge to live in this world as a person of African descent and demand your complex humanity, but it's a challenge I obviously signed up for when I stepped foot through my mother's birth canal and sat up in the world.

Black folks are just not black folks. Black folks are human beings with varied experiences and many different ways to interpret these experiences.

Until next time,

Keith