“Hey! They told me they call you a nigger when you ain’t around!”
It’s 6am and I just came home from the most epic of nights. Manhattan, Brooklyn and some stops in between. As I was about to upload the day’s video footage I read a comment from ctorre telling me to respect the gangsta of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. becuase he wrote some academic book on the trickster – The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism
The trickster character is prevalent in most mythology as the character at the crossroads pointing in several directions all at once. The signifying monkey was supposed to be a guide to gauge your moral and mental capacity in order to decide your fate. Professor Gates sure could have a used a signifying monkey in his house the evening he got pinched. He has been looking down from the ivory (ivy) tower for so long he forgot that he got in there as a janitor.
Here’s some blurb on Gates book that tells me he should have owned the filter in his brain to keep him from talking sideways shit to a man with a gun in his home…
“Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself. Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey whose myths help articulate the black tradition’s theory of its literature, Gates uncovers a unique system of interpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. His critical approach relies heavily on the Signifying Monkey–perhaps the most popular figure in African-American folklore–and signification and Signifyin(g).”
If he had really studied ZORA NEALE HURSTON’s incredible novel ‘Their Eyes Were Watching Gods’ he would have realized that his battle was in another place at another time. I still don’t believe this professor has any inkling what the majority of Black males have come to understand as the normal police procedures but we will see whet lessons he develops from this experience. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Black males are inmates in prisons across this nation for non-violent crimes.
Can we get these men a signifying monkey?
