The Good Life

So yo, dig this...one of my crew back in Orlando wrote an interesting column for the Sentinel last month on interracial dating/marriage. Her name is Jemele Hill and she wrote the column in response to a news story that came out about a white basketball player named Rex Chapman. The short of the story is this: Chapman apparently had a thing for sisters, he liked their curves and the way the swerve. But he went to Kentucky University and in Kentucky, home of my main dude Kyle Hightower (another one of the Sentinel's finest), that's a no-no because it's backwards like almost all of the southern states. And in the south, a "no-no" means more than an ill look or a dissapointed shake of the head like my dude Common spit about. Na homey, in the South, an interracial "no-no" means potential harm. Kentucky administrators apparently told Chapman, who was the biggest star in the state at the time, that they'd like for him to cut the cocoa out of his diet.

Well Jemele uses this story as the basis for her column. Before you read it, maybe you should know a little something about Melly. First off, she's a black woman and she's a COLUMNIST...and she's not even 30 yet. It kills me everytime I think about that. What I like about this column is how Jemele took the Chapman issue and flipped it to discuss the most pressing, sensitive and fracticious issue which is the "Good Life", black men with white women. I'll give you my reaction to the column later, but for now I'll let the black woman tell it.

Preach Melly...

Orlando Sentinel (Florida)

May 22, 2005 Sunday

FINALSECTION: SPORTS; FLORIDA; Pg. C3
HEADLINE: Chapman deserving of applause
BYLINE: Jemele Hill, Sentinel Columnist

BODY:The news that former Kentucky basketball player Rex Chapman was admonished by school officials for dating African-American women likely only registered a mild chuckle among most African Americans.

Chapman is one of those white athletes that garners special status in the black community, like Larry Bird. Because of Chapman's street game, well, he was loosely considered one of us.

It's clear that Chapman's Equal Opportunity dating didn't play big with some Wildcats -- the Emancipation Proclamation probably didn't, either -- but it's not usually who a white guy dates that makes everyone uncomfortable.

Tiger Woods, O.J. Simpson and Barry Bonds -- that's another matter.

All three are black men who have married white women -- a color combination that provokes both black and white people to resume our pre-Civil Rights era selves.

Last January, the FBI investigated threatening letters sent to high-profile interracial couples. The FBI said the letters were specifically meant to discourage black men from dating white women. One target was Miami defensive end Jason Taylor, who is married to a white woman.

And Terrell Owens' infamous Monday Night Football skit with Desperate Housewives actress Nicollette Sheridan didn't receive an extraordinarily high number of viewer complaints because the acting was bad.

It was the image of black skin on white skin in a very suggestive manner. Put Tom Brady in that skit and there's no FCC involvement, and the skit is considered sexy, but still acceptable. Indianapolis Colts Coach Tony Dungy wouldn't have gone on a tirade and said, "I think it's stereotypical in looking at the players, and on the heels of the Kobe Bryant incident, I think it's very insensitive."

Bryant, as you know, was accused of raping a white woman, but the charges were later dismissed.

The root of our discomfort with black athletes and white women is multi-layered, but it's a result of both sides allowing statistics and fear to play on prejudices.

For African-American women, every time we see a black athlete with a white woman we feel like the Bellagio in Ocean's Eleven -- as if something just got hijacked from us.

That sentiment seems twisted, but it's based on the fear that all the good black men are marrying white women.

In 1963, married couples headed 70 percent of black families. In 2002, that number plummeted to 48 percent.

The 2000 Census figures show the husband is black in 73 percent of black-white couples. Aside from the black women Chapman dated in college, the majority of black women remain closed to the idea of dating outside of their race.

Of the black women who are married, more than 90 percent of them are married to black men.

So if a white woman marries a black man, it's not about love being colorblind. It's another black man who won't head a black family. With a disproportionate number of black men in prison, black women start feeling like they have a better chance of hitting the lottery than finding a black man to marry.

When black people rank their favorite athletes, who they marry can either add points or take them away.

Grant Hill is popular because he's generally considered a good guy and a good player, but he's even more highly regarded among African Americans because he married Tamia, a black woman.

Interracial relationships don't just make black people uncomfortable, either. Several conservative whites have expressed concern over the high rate of interracial relationships because they have this crazy fear it will lead to end of the white race. H. Millard, a columnist for the ultra-racist New Nation News, wrote, "Call it what it is: Genocide and the extinction of the white genotype."

Hey, it was just five years ago, South Carolina's Bob Jones University dropped a ban on interracial dating.

Chapman should be saluted for speaking out against his former university and having the guts to date who he wanted despite what officials thought about it -- and in Kentucky of all places.

But real progress won't be made until there is no worry about who white men date or who black men choose.

CONTACT: Jemele Hill can be reached at jhill@orlandosentinel.com.
LOAD-DATE: May 22, 2005

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My reaction: First off, let me explain the "Good Life".

Back in the Fall of 1998, me and some of my favorite funny people made a home movie called, "Whip Whop Y2k". It was a comedy written, directed and produced by yours truly, with great help from the cast. It was basically a collection of outrageous skits set in various places in urban Buffalo that, when analyzed in hindsight, had a couple powerful messages in it. The characters were classic and I'll post a blog given a retrospect about the movie now viewed thru my adult eyes. But for now consider two of the main characters, Crusty Pinestine and Walker J. Suckatoe. So I don't get too bogged down, I'll save the in-depth character analysis for another blog and get right to the creation of the term "Good Life".

Long story short, Suckatoe -- a ladies man and neighborhood pimp -- finds out that Pinestine -- a former gangsta turned drug addict -- is his father in a Skywalker/Vader style revelation. One day, Suckatoe goes to his father's crib to kick it with him, trying to establish a relationship and finds his father OD'd off that killa stuff (the OD scene is hilarious, timeless and powerful...in a home movie kinda way). Suckatoe then breaks out into a pimp-ryhming eulogy that made absolutely no sense. But his classic line was, "Oh Daddy why'd ya have to go?! I was gonna give em the Good Life. Get em a white wife." It was an instant classic, but didn't become part of the crew lexicon until I took the video to DC in '99 for Howard's Homecoming and showed it to my dudes in DC. My man Tony thought that line was dope and about a year later, when we saw some black athlete with his typical white woman on his arm, Tony just said three words, "The Good Life" and we all cracked up.

Like I've explained before, so many backwards black men think marrying a white woman is the pennacle. Malcolm X talked about it in his autobiography and I touched on it in a blog I wrote about KG.

In J's column, she doesn;t really go into the thought behind it, but moreso the reaction and I agreed with her for the most part. Although I do have a few reactions...

• On no day in any hood did Rex Chapman get a hood-pass. Maybe he did in Kentucky, but nowhere else. He was never that dope. And neither really does Bird. We all saw Do the Right Thing right? Spike summed it up well. Most black people looked at Bird as a white man that, although he was a nasty ball player, still got too much credit because he was white. Isaiah Thomas, who was an idol for many in my generation and fav of the old heads, agreed with Dennis Rodman when Rodman made a similar statement. And Isaiah was a lil nigga from Chicago.
• I wish she would have brought up the "lynching" of black men for looking at a white women and the forbidden-fruit factor.
• I agree with the comment about respecting athletes more when they marry a black woman...it shows they're not drunk off that American Kool-Aid. And Grant Hill was a perfect example. I have this thing about black ball players that attend Duke. Duke is the evil empire to me. The college basketball version of the KKK. So I always viewed black ball players coming from Duke as sell-out punks. And most of them were. I hated Grant, but when I saw he married that sexy Tamia, whom I brush my teeth with, I admit he garnered a couple ounces of respect and admiration...because I'd have thought Julia Roberts before Tamia.