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Thursday – Juneteenth
Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Primer for Blacks” (1980) is a wonderful poem for celebrating Juneteenth, the day chosen to celebrate the end of slavery in the United States. While acknowledging that many African Americans are defensive about their skin color and may even believe that “it’s Great to be white,” Brooks counters by telling her Black readers that they must “perceive your Glory.”
Doing so is not easy given the way that people can internalize racism, but Brooks is out to fix that. It requires committing to Blackness and realizing that “the world Black has geographic power.” After all, you can find Blackness everywhere and in a full range of hues, from rust-red to milk and cream to tan and yellow-tan to deep-brown to middle brown to high-brown to live and ochre. After all, if a single drop of Black blood makes one Black, as the American slave states contended (“O mighty drop”), then Blackness “pulls everybody in” and “stretches over the land.”
Brooks teels her readers that the primary object of her huge and pungent (sharp and stimulating ) project is for them “to Comprehend to salute and to Love the fact that we are Black.” This, she says “is our ultimate Reality,” and if her readers embrace the fact that they stand on this “lone ground,” then “meaningful metamorphosis” and “prosperous staccato” will arise, both for the individual and for the group as a whole.
Brooks’s primer, therefore is directed at all Blacks who are self-shriveled with self-hatred and self-doubt. (It is a beginner’s manual, after all.) Once they concede the “gaunt but marvelous” truth that they are in both outward appearance and foundational reality Black, then they like her will perceive their Glory.
Primer For Blacks
By Gwendolyn Brooks
Blackness
is a title,
is a preoccupation,
is a commitment Blacks
are to comprehend—
and in which you are
to perceive your Glory.
The conscious shout
of all that is white is
“It’s Great to be white.”
The conscious shout
of the slack in Black is
“It’s Great to be white.”
Thus all that is white
has white strength and yours.
The word Black
has geographic power,
pulls everybody in:
Blacks here—
Blacks there—
Blacks wherever they may be.
And remember, you Blacks, what they told you—
remember your Education:
“one Drop—one Drop
maketh a brand new Black.”
Oh mighty Drop.
______And because they have given us kindly
so many more of our people
Blackness
stretches over the land.
Blackness—
the Black of it,
the rust-red of it,
the milk and cream of it,
the tan and yellow-tan of it,
the deep-brown middle-brown high-brown of it,
the “olive” and ochre of it—
Blackness
marches on.
The huge, the pungent object of our prime out-ride
is to Comprehend,
to salute and to Love the fact that we are Black,
which is our “ultimate Reality,”
which is the lone ground
from which our meaningful metamorphosis,
from which our prosperous staccato,
group or individual, can rise.
Self-shriveled Blacks.
Begin with gaunt and marvelous concession:
YOU are our costume and our fundamental bone.
All of you—
you COLORED ones,
you NEGRO ones,
those of you who proudly cry
“I’m half INDian”—
those of you who proudly screech
“I’VE got the blood of George WASHington in MY veins”
ALL of you—
you proper Blacks,
you half-Blacks,
you wish-I-weren’t Blacks,
Niggeroes and Niggerenes.
You.
The poem reminds me of Lucille Clifton’s “my dream about being white,” which seconds Brooks injunction to embrace one’s Black costume and gets at what Brooks means by “prosperous staccato”:
my dream about being white
By Lucille Clifton
hey music and
me
only white,
hair a flutter of
fall leaves
circling my perfect
line of a nose,
no lips,
no behind, hey
white me
and i’m wearing
white history
but there’s no future
in those clothes
so i take them off and
wake up
dancing.
Happy Juneteenth.
