From The "A Nigger Moment" File

If you’ve been reading BLOOD & INK on a regular basis (and if not, then whyain’tcha?) The you’ll have noticed that from time to time I’ll post something here that has been written by one of the most extraordinarily talented artists it’s been my pleasure to work with; Sean E. Ali.

Sean has a habit of writing these amazingly perceptive and on point essays on his Facebook wall that should be read by a wider audience. But Sean is truly a modest man and resists all my suggestions that he should start a blog or something where these thoughts can saved and savored and not lost in the blur of Facebooks posts.  Sean’s a deep thinker who truly has something worth saying about some very important societal topics affecting all of us today.

Fortunately he has a friend like me who has no shame at all in reposting his insightful words on his own blog.

Okay, I’ve run my mouth far too much already. I now turn the floor over to Mr. Ali…

So let me get this straight...

The people upset most that the President used the word "nigger" in an interview...

...are the very people who have been calling him that in one form or another since '08...

...or wasn't Cornell West using it to describe the President's avoidance of the subject he was confronting when he used the word...

...or are people of color who use it as a part of their daily speech when referring to themselves or people they know who think that tossing a bunch of different vowels and consonants on at the end somehow makes the word something other than what it was?

Uh huh...

If that ain't a "nigger moment", I don't know what is...

For the record, I'm going for the Queen's English version of that word which denotes an "ignorant person"...

The word long before it was a racial slur was used to describe a lack of intelligence, an ignorance of things that were obvious.

In short, there is no positive spin for the word.

Sorry, Chris Rock, I know you want to resurrect it after the NAACP did that whole symbolic burial thing, but really it's not the kind of word that meant "Freedom" in Swahili, it's still ignorant even when it's not racial.

For the youngsters and the hip hop community and those folks who think they are down when they use it as a greeting or expression of friendship.

It isn't. It never was no matter how many times you add "az", "uh", "a", "ruh", or whatever else you come up with, you're still calling someone ignorant, you're still insulting someone's intelligence even when race isn't a factor...

But when you do it to one another and then lose your minds because someone who isn't you or yours uses the term...

...then it's racial and stupid, and you're a hypocrite.

If the word is wrong, it's wrong all the way around. You can't pick and choose the moments it's okay to speak a slur or insult, because it's a slur and an insult all the time. You can dress it up if you like, but it is what it is all the time...

At least the President used it as a proper example of the ingrained nature of racism in American culture and the difficulty of erasing nearly six hundred years (if you take in the total time of Africans sending their own to the Europeans who then bound them over into slavery overseas to well, now) of racial inequality in a weekend when it's got that large a head start, is an accurate assessment and summary of what he said.

And FOX Newsertainment wants to act like what he said was somehow the most horrible thing ever uttered by a president...

....despite their long track record of profiling people of certain ethnic groups and hiding behind the new "nigger" trigger word of "thug"...

All of you need to take a breath and listen to yourselves before you start jumping on someone else for using the EXACT SAME WORD YOU USE AND REFUSE TO LET GO OF in a context that offends you...

...probably because what was said is true.

And how Black people can sit around demanding the removal of the Confederate battle flag and not abandon the use of a word which is linked to that flag and that era like a guy with a burning cross and a white hood on his head is one of those things I'm not understanding...

Maybe the Johnny Reb isn't the only thing that needs to be left in the past...

Something to consider, friends.

Originally posted on Sean's Facebook wall June 23erd, 2015

875 Words (More or Less) About Getting Caught Up In Researching

See, research used to be a whole lot harder back in the day before the Internet. I know there are a whole bunch of you right now clutching your hearts and staggering around like Fred Sanford exclaiming; “No…no Internet? What did people do all day long?” I could tell you but that’s another essay for another time. This one here is about my ruminations and musings on the pitfalls of doing research.

Way back in the 1980s in order to do my research for whatever I was working on at the time what I would do is set aside a day (usually Saturday) to go to my local library and spend the morning just researching. At that time I lived in Ebbets Field.

Which was only a nice little thirty minute walk to the library on Grand Army Plaza. So I got my exercise as well. Once the research was done I treated myself to the rest of the day off.

So now we fast-forward to the Internet Age where I can now simply Google any information about anything at all and do my research in my pajamas in the comfort of my home because now the library comes to me. And that’s a good thing. Maybe too much of a good thing.

Let me explain: the current project I’m working on is set during World War I during what was one of the most important conflicts in the history of warfare: The Battle of Cambrai. Cambrai is a town in France that is distinguished due to the fact that it was first time tanks were used in large numbers in combat successfully. Now, I know as much about The Battle of Cambrai as I do about the dark side of the moon. But that’s where things get interesting.

I go ahead and Google up The Battle of Cambrai and there’s a whole lotta good articles and information on the battle. I breathe a sigh of relief and dig in. The trail of research even leads me to YouTube as there’s a goodish number of documentaries from the History Channel about The Battle of Cambrai. I’m encouraged now, y’see? I hungrily absorb everything I’m learning and putting into the story as now I feel much more confident being armed with dates, names and maps to give my story a solid foundation.

So what’s the problem?

I re-read the first three chapters of the book and it occurred to me that what I had actually done was bury the story under the weight of the dates, names and maps. So intent had I been making sure I had the historical stuff right I sacrificed doing the stuff that I know how to do: dialog, characterization, action. Y’know…the stuff I had been asked to do on this project as that was the reason I had been engaged to work on it in the first place.

And I’ve always been the guy who preached that if facts got in the way of telling a good story then throw the facts away and don’t worry about it. But I didn’t do it this time and after some time I had it figured out as to why I wasn’t doing it. These weren’t my characters and this wasn’t a setting I had chosen. My confidence wasn’t holding me up on this one. And usually my confidence level is ridiculously high. But not this time. This time I felt I needed the facts to prove that I knew what I was doing.

And after a couple of days of burning up brain cells meditating about the situation it got through to me that I did know what I was doing. I was asked to write an action packed pulp adventure full of derring-do, thrills and chills. I hadn’t been asked to write a historical fiction novel ala John Jakes. The historical stuff of World War I and The Battle of Cambrai was just the backdrop for the story.

So what did I do? Why I scrapped the first three chapters and rewrote them, of course. But this time I only used just as much research as I needed to move the story along and that’s all.

So what’s the moral of this story? I guess it’s not to let research get in the way of having fun writing. Unless of course you actually are writing a historical fiction novel and in that case it’s of primary importance that you stick to the facts.  Or maybe the moral is that since research is so easy to do now that it’s way too easy to get caught up in research for research’s sake and convince yourself that you’re doing research when you’re actually entertaining yourself swimming in the sea of research.

But you’ll be glad to know that once I got through trudging through that bog, the novel proved to be a lot easier to work on and it’s going faster than I thought it would. What novel is this you ask?

Well, if I told you that now then I wouldn’t have a subject for us to talk about the next time, would I?