Today, right now, on WJFK, CBS SPORTS RADIO, 106.7 THE FAN -- the misinformation and the confusion being spewed by the ignorant jock former football player is astounding.
At this (3:20 PM -- 2-22-13) moment, he and his co-host, are talking race as it concerns the Washington Redskin's controversy over the team name. The pure ignorance of his own black history, coming from the jock's own mouth, blows my 54 year old Negro mind. His grasp on Black history is as twisted as a Jasmin branch in a hurricane!
I refuse to give him a total history lesson on his own Blackness. All Black people have to come to terms with being Black as it relates to their own individual situation. But, there are truths in all history that are not up for speculation, or off the cuff ignorant hyperbole! Even when a Black man says it!
Lavar Arrington -- you need to study your Black history. You are doing yourself, and people who are ignorant of the truth, a real disservice by spewing wrong facts to the WHITE public!
Today you declared that Black people continue to re-brand themselves. You made that statement in relations to the branding of the Washington Redskins football team. Here is your ignorance, Sir...
The Federal Government of the United States of America officially coined the term African-American in 1977 -- the year I was a senior in high school in Killeen, Texas. I distinctly remember the fact that ALL the Black adults I knew were mortified that the Federal Government declared that "BLACK" people -- remember the term, "I'm black and I'm proud!" -- were now to be officially deemed African-American on the federal census, thus making African-American a legal term!
We were pissed about that for a decade... but time has faded and now most of us simply capitulate!
The same goes with Spanish speaking people with the word "Hispanic!" That word was created by the federal government to denote Spanish speaking people in America. I'll let a Spanish speaking person enlighten you about that heritage of that word.
I was a Negro up until the the 1960's when some Negros decided that it was time for Black Power. Then I was a Black man... called that by the police and the militant few in the Negro community. As the Black Power movement gained steam, the Feds suddenly put a federal halt to that momentum by calling us African-American... because African-American sounds so much tamer than Black!
Also, right about that time, in abject spit in the Fed's face protest, Black men began to embrace the word "NIGGER" as their own personal fuck-you to parts of America, which had tried to practically exterminate them for two decades!
Get your facts right, Arrington. You are by no means a historian -- of Black History! Making shit up off the cuff as you are bullshitting your was through your 5 hour shift at WJFK is stupid and dangerous. Impressionable white people hear the Black jock telling them Black history... without checking the facts is as dangerous as me walking up to you and slapping you in your face!
You don't want me slapping you in your face! I don't want you spewing ignorance about my black people out into the public!
Now what, Lavar Arrington? What are you going to do? Read a black history book, or two, I hope!
And, by the way... here is my personal take on my ancestry: I am an African slave, right off the boat from up the Cape Fear River into Fayetteville, North Carolina in around 1710! I am also Choctaw Native American from out in the fringes of the white man's settlements, hunted like a savage bear because of the shape of my home, the furs and jewelry I wear, the relationship I have with the spirits of the forest and the color of my skin! And when my slave ancestor escaped, Hector, and mated with Mattie, the two bloods became as one.
My great grandmother died 35 years ago -- at about 99 years old. My grandmother died about 12 years ago -- at about 80. My Mother is living -- in her 70's. And all of them are beautiful Native-American and African mixed women who have the look of Native beauty. And I can assure you of this -- none of them would approve of a white man calling them REDSKIN!
Ronald Lee Jones
arjayuniverse@gmail.com
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