Tag Archives: racial

You think you have me all figured out


A man tells me he knows me,
has me all figured out.
He has got me all encapsulated
in a little box
Man, I don’t even know me,
so how do you?

So please just shut up
just shut the fuck up
Telling me I shouldn’t see color
Shit man, I can only be blind to color
once the world allows me to be blind to it.

I am black, I am a brown, I am white,
whatever shade you would like,
whatever hue, whatever tone,
please ascribe.
Define me, ridicule and deride me,
you will never know the true me
beneath my skin let alone
what’s in these old bones I call my home
because you haven’t held them
and walked in ’em
feeling the full weight
of ’em.
You haven’t begun
to figure me out
But you will one day
as will I.

by Philip Wardlow

Hey, I like Brown Rice too! – My opinion on racial inequality in regards to media


brown_rice_vs_white_rice

l loved seeing  the 50th Anniversary for the March on Washington. I will say my equality wish is for it  to be present in television, movies,writing, and comics. Hell, I will settle for commercials for now.(sighting the latest Cheerios stupidity a few months back – look it up on YOUTUBE if you don’t know what I mean)

I haven’t seen equality surface yet in media..not really. Yeah sure , you have one little token character here or there in television or movies…but nothing really substantial. I just think its ingrained in our psyche to see a character or story played out as a Caucasian.  Imagine a black British James Bond, Doctor Who,  or  Edward  from Twilight , heaven forbid, (but yeah we got a Native American in there!)

Hell, I’m half black and I write consciously seeing  my main character be it a man or woman as white…how messed up is that. I have to consciously think of my characters differently when it comes to race. It just comes naturally to think of them as white. And that’s the whole point. It comes natural to us as a society because it’s all we know.

We grow up with a social media targeted majorly to one race. So each new generation thinks that is the norm out in the world. They become comfortable with it and everything else is alien. So that “alien” is just a filler or sideshow to pull in once in a while to say a line and go about your merry way or get killed off (case in point Walking Dead..great show btw) .

Now they are making some  slow progress, don’t get me wrong.  In the Ultimate Universe  version of Marvel they killed off Peter Parker and have made Spiderman a black boy (even though his last name is Morales, what’s with that.)  The Nick Fury from that Marvel world  is also black (and it carried over to the Avengers movie with Samuel Jackson…I bet you guys didn’t  know he’s been white in the normal Marvel world since forever)  Anyways, what I am trying to say in my own roundabout way is that there are many little facets in society that affect our overall perception of what’s really going on in the world. These facets mean a lot because they add up. Media is just one of those facets I would like to see evolve.

I think  back to the ridiculous movies and commercials and news  footage from the forties & fifties when television and media  took off. It painted an America as super wholesome and super gleeful and happy to be alive every moment of the day.  When people behind the scenes were hiding their bigotries, true sexual tendencies, alcohol dependencies or spousal abuse they endured on a daily basis.

Then the sixties came and everything changed because they realized the world was bigger than there own little world they lived in, in  there own little isolated neighborhood, and they were forced to reflect on what was right and wrong from civil rights to the Vietnam War.  And it was all played on what? Yep, television.