What a Black Man had to do in Racist America

 What a Black Man had to do in Racist America

This is a question that we all face in one way or another. What does a woman need to do in a man’s world? What does an immigrant need to do in the land of majority natives?

Muhammad Ali is being buried today, June 10, 2016.

The death of Muhammad Ali compelled me to think of his experiences and the experiences of other Black men. Ali is a hard person to write about as he was to say the least multi-faceted.  It is a condition that our alienation from the society in which we live forces itself onto us.

I liked Sonny Liston in 1964. He was a Philly fighter and I thought he would beat the crap out of the loud mouth self-promoter known as Cassius Clay.  Clay to a certain extent reminded me of the buffoons that Black men had played in the movies in order to survive in a racist society.  It was quite a shock when Clay beat Liston. Buffoons were not supposed beat Philly fighters.

When Clay changed his name to Ali, he seemed to have intentionally alienated himself forever from what is now called the mainstream.

Ali joined a group that was calling for separate societies for Black and White folks. 

Almost everyone else, in the mainstream, was called for an integrated society. He had this continuous contradiction in his life, as he had White friends and worked with White people in the boxing industry.

He was able to maintain this contradiction better than other Black men, especially with his talent for boxing. It was this ability that made him important to Black people. How to be defiant in a racist America without being beaten down to levels of great indignity.

We Black people admired him for this reason. In the bosses’ America all working people which are the majority of Black people live under the fear and threat of impoverishment for speaking out of turn or speaking truth to power.  We only have to look at MOSAIC to see this.

Almost every Black person in the City of Worcester knows this and have to some extent made compromises or sacrificed our dignity.  Some of us have gone silent. Some of us pretend to love the boss. Others continue to fight against racism and economic injustice.

When Ali lost his ability to speak as a result of his illness, he could no longer defy the system of racial and economic injustices that all working class people face. It was during his last years of relative silence that bosses in American began to express their love for Ali. 

I know that Ali was a charitable man and did good for humankind. Most of all he gave us hope and an example of defiance of the powers that be without being beaten into shame and poverty.

He did it his way.