Damn “NIGGA” Damn!

by today's Urban Chameleon contributor Black Man formerly known as Nigga

Surreal the trip had been already. I found my self here in South Africa surrounded by self-proclaimed “coloreds” and my homie from the “D” in an upscale restaurant in one of Cape Town’s finest dining establishments. We were discussing the frustration of coloreds and black s alike in South Africa at the fact that Mandela had not done more to punish South African whites as he took power. Many South Africans of the browner persuasion felt that they had been sold out. They felt like African Americans would not have stood for such a passive take over. They cited the rhetoric of Malcolm X and the resumés of revolutionaries like Huey Newton and Angela Davis with the thoroughness of the deepest Afro-American history scholar. They put the African American civil rights struggle on a pedestal and languished their own leaders’ inability to be as effective, as aggressive, as revolutionary.

My man and I asked many questions and learned a great deal about our South African sisters and brothers over bottles of South African wine and faire. Our bellies and minds full, we paid the bill and prepared to exit, my homie and I nearly running, because we still could not believe that a meal of that quality could cost so little. Surely the waiter would be after us to let us know he’d made a mistake and forgot to charge us the proper amount.

As we walked to our car a black South African man approached. Clearly the brother was homeless. His hustle was watching the cars parked along this dark but busy street ensuring that cars were safe from the rash of smash and grab robberies that occur often in cities like Cape Town where “the haves” have in great abundance and the have nots, well, you know.

He overheard my man and I talking and his eyes lit up.

“Hey! You guys are American!” he said excitedly.

“Yes” we affirmed, “What’s up brother?”

“Oh wow!” he said giving us dap. “You guys are the real, the real NIGGAS”

My homie and I looked at each other is shock. “Nah b. We brothers.” I said coolly.

“No man, you guys are the REAL NIGGAS. Like for real.”

“No man. We not niggas, we brothers”

“No, its ok” he assured us, “You’re real niggas. Not like these guys from West Africa that come here and think they niggas, you guys are the REAL NIGGAS. I want to be a nigga like you too!” he said with a big smile.

We continued to object. “Listen man, we NOT NIGGAS. We brothers. You can be my brother” my homie said as relaxed as possible.

The man’s face stayed frozen in an excited, yet naïve smile. He seemed to want us to affirm his “nigga’ status. Our “colored” friends joined in, they had picked up on our defiance of being called niggas in the middle of a Capetonian street,

“No, Nigga is a compliment”, they said. “It's a term of endearment. Its not what you think.”

I was floored. Were these not the same people running down the Civil Rights movement as though they were being voiced by Skip Gates? The surreal had become even more real.

“Yo, being a nigga is NOT cool. Its not a compliment” I said as calmly as I could

I could see the confusion of a thousand hip-hop songs, stand-up comedy sets and exploitative black movies crashing all around. Nigga is so much a part of black American dialect that sometime we say it without realizing it. We only hear it when it rolls off of a foreign tongue (literally or figuratively).

Our friends and the homeless man are probably still confounded to this day. Afterall, their use of the word nigga in relationship to my man and I was a means of identifying with us, their American brothers. Truly for them the word was a term of endearment and a gesture to show their affinity towards all things Afro-American.

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The Oreo Barbie

Urban Chameleon Fun Fact

Didjuknow that Mattel once tried to release the Oreo Barbie?

Now question to you- is the first thing that popped into your head the cookie or the derogatory term directed at a Black person for "acting" white?

from wikipedia

In 1997 Mattel joined forces with Nabisco to launch a cross-promotion of Barbie with Oreo cookies. Oreo Fun Barbie was marketed as someone with whom little girls could play after class and share "America's favorite cookie." As had become the custom, Mattel manufactured both a white and a black version. Critics argued that in the African American community Oreo is a derogatory term meaning that the person is "black on the outside and white on the inside," like the chocolate sandwich cookie itself. The doll was unsuccessful and Mattel recalled the unsold stock, making it sought after by collectors.^[19]
















Are Black people too deep sometimes? Seriously it's a question I'm putting out there...

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Does the term “Oreo” always haunt the Urban Chameleon?

by today's Urban Chameleon contributor

Growing up living in a predominantly Black neighborhood and commuting to an all white neighborhood where my parents sent me to school I definitely experienced the “confused years.” I was considered neither Black nor white enough. I can remember clear as day the first time this little Black girl from around the way, whispered “Oreo” at me under her breath after my mom shouted out the window for her to put down a toy of mine she was mishandling. The connection? She was embarrassed and felt the need to taunt me. I can also remember the white girls at school telling me that I was not like the “others.” Cut to 20 years later- same sh*t different century

I was recently out to dinner with a friend of mine who came to meet me after wrapping up his last day on an acting job. He was telling me how the white people on set asked if he was from the suburbs. We both busted out laughing knowing that his designer John Varvatos shirts, slip on suede shoes and pronunciation of his “i-n-g-s” is what was throwing these folks off. But we both knew this Harlem-ite, reformed drug dealer, damn near high school drop out whose version of anger management growing up was to shoot different kinds of guns off the rooftops of the projects was NOT from the suburbs. However, his second identity was born when he was accepted to Yale on a drama scholarship and for the first time had to exist amongst white folks. What was at first an uncomfortable (to say the least) adjustment for him to make eventually turned into him mastering the ability of being an Urban Chameleon-but now what? What did that mean? Especially if white people are STILL so curious to know where the hell you’re from.

The reality is- it doesn’t matter where you’re from. At the end of the day it comes down to where people think you’re from and you can choose whether or whether not to correct them. He said that he enjoyed eventually telling them folks that he grew up in the projects in Harlem – it was his attempt to shake up their perspective of what they think they know about one particular group of people. It’s then that I realized that being an Urban Chameleon is a state of mind where hopefully you are no longer confused as I once was growing up- where you’ve experienced enough worlds that you’re the one that’s now clear.

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