FOR BLACK people obsessed with scrubbing the hated "n-word" clean from the American lexicon, I have another suggestion: the word "positive."
Sounds counterintuitive, I know. What concept could be more antithetical to the "n-word," more cherished by black folk hoping to counter negativity and crises that seem to have reached an all-time high? As a writer, I often hear admonishments from fellow African Americans to be positive, to illuminate the good side of our story. "Positive" is often shorthand for undoing the distortions of media and history at every opportunity, filling in the blanks or fleshing out context. For black journalists, this is a more than worthy charge.
But "positive" thinking can also do damage. In its fevered quest for good news, it often becomes as narrow in its way as the "n-word." Take, for example, the flap over a Black History Month presentation at Celerity Nascent Charter School in the Crenshaw district.
The school first planned and then jettisoned a student presentation on Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black boy gruesomely murdered by Southern whites allegedly for whistling at a white woman in a small Mississippi town in 1955. As everyone should know, Till's murder was a catalyzing moment in the civil rights movement that followed.
Celerity staff and parents decided that Till's story, told by seventh-graders through a poem and brief reenactment, was inappropriate for an audience that included kindergarteners. I get that. But they also implied that the Till story as black history was not appropriate because it's so, well, \o7negative\f7.
One parent who supported the ban said there was "no celebration in the Emmett Till story." Celerity co-founder and Executive Director Vielka MacFarlane said that highlighting a murder just didn't square with the goal of the assembly, which was accentuating black accomplishment and possibility. Celerity's principal, Grace Canada, reportedly told a class of seventh-graders who'd prepared the poem that what Till did -- behavior of a kind that often turned into specious charges leveled by whites at black men to justify their lynching -- could constitute sexual harassment. McFarlane denies that Canada said this. The ironies are mind-boggling.
To make matters even more ironic, two teachers who helped prepare the seventh-grade program and signed a student petition supporting it were fired; the teachers were white and Latina. The student population at Celerity is overwhelmingly black. McFarlane won't discuss the details of the firings because it's a personnel matter.
