Rant #3,085: Black and White

I am sure that you heard that New York legislator George Santos is now, finally, under a House Ethics Committee probe into his background, the lies he told to the public to get elected, and most importantly, how he has handled his finances.

They will eventually get him on the finance side oft things—how he got his money and how he distributed it—and within time, he will be forced to resign.

If there is any other verdict, it will demonstrate that the House of Representatives cannot police its own—Santos or anyone else, Republican, Democrat and Independent—and it will send out a horrid message to a public that is already enraged about its politicians and the bypasses they receive for ridiculous behavior.

We have learned through this case that you can lie all you want to the public about just about anything, but when the lies also include how you handle campaign money, you are entering into another area altogether.

I told you this weeks ago, and I also told you that Santos will come out of this pretty well in due time.

I guarantee that a little while after he resigns, one of the news networks will pick him up as a commentator, he will be offered millions to write a book about his experiences, and that book will become a best seller, leading to a movie about his life.

You couldn’t make up a work of fiction about someone who did what he did, and anyway, this case proves the axiom “truth is stranger than fiction” without a shadow of a doubt.

Now that I handled all of that in the first part of today’s Rant, I am going to talk about a subject that only came into my brain after I wrote yesterday’s entry, about the changing of words in classic novels, and how some people are so thin-skinned today about just about everything.

I am going to take you back to the year 1968, one of the worst years in our country’s history, when two of our leaders, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, were both assassinated at the height of their powers.

I was just 11 years old during this year, too young to fully grasp what was going on but old enough to know that there actually was something going on in my world.

I was in fifth grade, going into sixth grade, during that year, when my family and I lived in Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York, a still relatively new mixed-race neighborhood smack dab in the middle of Jamaica, one of the oldest and most established black neighborhoods in the nation.

At 11 years of age, you are kind of in the middle—you have one foot still in childhood, and the other foot is inching up to your teenage years.

I vividly remember that year for all of its craziness, and I also remember that year for one song in particular as part of this discussion we are having.

James Brown was a fixture on radio during those years, with hit after hit after hit coming out and his music being played incessantly on the airwaves on both traditionally black stations and white AM radio.

He was thought to be a leader of black Americans, with his success that stemmed from his music … and it just so happened that during those years, he did not live too far away from where Rochdale Village was.

In the fall of 1968, just in time for schools to open and me, personally, moving up a grade in school, Brown came out with the anthem “Say It Loud-I’m Black and I’m Proud,” which ended up reaching the Top 10 on Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles Chart soon after it debuted.

Without going that deep into the lyrics, the song was what we would call “black empowerment” today, urging black youth of that time period to be proud of who they were and to never look back.

Here are some of those lyrics:

“Look a’ here, some people say we got a lot of malice
Some say it's a lotta nerve
I say we won't quit moving
Till we get what we deserve
We've been booked and we've been scorned
We've been treated bad, talked about
As just as sure as you're born
But just as sure as it take
Two eyes to make a pair, huh
Brother, we can't quit until we get our share
Say it loud,
I'm black and I'm proud”

Brown lived nearby, and his promoters passed out big buttons for the black kids to our community to wear, and many wore these buttons, proclaiming “Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud.”

These buttons were distributed to the kids who lived outside the development and who went to the same schools we did; I honestly do not remember any of the black kids who lived in the development wearing these buttons.

Anyway, the kids who had them wore them to school, and oftentimes when us white kids would walk by them with their buttons hanging from their shirts and their jackets, we would get punched for having the “nerve” of being there and walking past them with their buttons proudly dangling from their clothing.

It wasn’t all the kids with the buttons who did this, but we knew to avoid those kids who took those buttons as a reason to punch us.

I am sure that this was absolutely not the intention of Brown when he composed the song, but that is what happened during those days at P.S. 30.

At the time, answer songs were very popular. These songs pretty much were what they were advertised to be, that being knockoffs of the original song, but from a different viewpoint.

So you had answer songs to Roger Miller—“King of the Road” became “Queen of the House”—and there were answer songs to whole load of popular songs done by the likes of Gary Lewis and the Playboys to the Monkees.

So yes, there was an answer song to “Say It Loud-I’m Black and I’m Proud, and if this song was released today, people would get hysterical.

The song was called “I’m White-I’m Alright” by Vic Waters and the Entertainers, a nondescript all white 10-member show band based in Tampa Bay, Florida, that caused not a big noise, but a whimper, with this answer song to Brown’s big hit.

The song never charted, pretty much came and went without much fanfare, although it has emerged on a number of blue-eyed soul compilations in recent years.

Again, without going into the lyrics that deeply, you have not lived until you hear the lead singer emote the following:

““I’m light, white and out of sight.
I ain’t tan but I can jam.”

Unlike what we would think in today’s world, this answer song had nothing to do with white empowerment, with white supremacy, with whites being better than blacks.

It was simply an answer song that actually honored the original with its lyrics, basically stating that “white boys can sing funky” too.

So the band might have been a bit tone deaf to what Brown was stating in his song, but they meant no harm, and their heart was in the right place in sort of a funny, strange and funky way.

You can find this song and of course, Brown’s song on YouTube.

Give them each a listen, and you will firmly see that we aren’t in 1968 anymore, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Once again, I have a very early appointment of Monday, so the next time I will speak to you is on Tuesday.

Have a great weekend, and please think of my son, who has his dental surgery tomorrow.

Nothing else matters to my family and I but the success of this surgery, so let’s all keep our fingers crossed that everything is copacetic and that the outcome is a good one.

I will tell you all about it on Tuesday.