‘Something I Said’ Archives
Something I Said: September ’23
Black Women Changing the Narrative on Film By DWIGHT HOBBES Dwight Hobbes Perception may not be all but it is important, and black girls need to perceive as positive a self-image as possible. Not that they are any more special than anyone else. They just face their own set of circumstances. You’ve got reality shows about as far from real life wives as here to the moon, attitudinal self-absorbed glamour gals who think they do the world a favor by breathing. You’ve got dumb as a bag of rocks ghetto-style gals on stereotypical sitcoms. At length, entertainment media has a serious lack of role models that inspire personal strength. Those that come along are few and far in-between. For instance, The Woman King is based on Africa’s actual amazons, never mind Wonder Woman. They comprised the Agoji, an elite Dahomey fighting force formed in the early 1700’s. No sooner was it released than nay-sayers carped that it wasn’t wholly accurate. King Ghezo, unlike his [...]
SIS: George Floyd – A Closer Look
By DWIGHT HOBBES A article in the series: Something I Said Dwight Hobbes His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Viking Press - 2022) is a strong, Pulitzer Prize winning read by Washington Post staffers Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa. One cannot read this book with your mind already made up. The authors neither fit Floyd for a halo nor do they demonize him. Without letting him off the hook, they place the man in compelling context, calling Houston’s and Texas’ criminal justice system out for their part in his unwitting, hellbent self-destruction.Nothing is simple about enduring institutionalized racism, particularly the truism, White folk are responsible for racism, but, we are accountable to deal with it. Like a lot of African American parents, Larcenia warned her son George that he was born with two strikes against him. Some of us make that third strike count. Most don’t. Viking Press George Floyd was a decent sort, [...]
Something I Said: The Ku Klux Klan in Minnesota
By DWIGHT HOBBES Dwight Hobbes Mention the KKK and your next thought probably is its history of hunting, harassing and hanging black folk. However, it didn’t start there – at least not in Minnesota. African Americans simply became these terrorists’ preferred target (a black woman, Beulah Mae Donald, it turns out, bankrupted the organization in court). Before black people, Elizabeth Dorsey Hatle’s The Ku Klux Klan in Minnesota (The History Press) documents, it was Germans. That would eventually include Catholics, Jews and just about everybody who wasn’t them – working class Protestants.Newspapers like the Waseca Herald, Anoka Herald and Owatonna Journal-Chronicle helped things, along with Hollywood propagandist hit film, The Birth of a Nation, (originally titled The Clansman) aiding the cause. Which, importantly, selective law enforcement and slick politicians insidiously empowered. Earle Brown, for instance, qualified on both accounts. As Hennepin County Sheriff, he [...]
