I did a lot of babysitting as soon as I hit my teens. From early October to December 24, I exploited the fiction of Santa Claus as much as possible. While I understand many people’s animosity and hesitation with this concept, it made my babysitting days so much easier. You can really work that fiction to get kids to behave. A recent lecture by Dr. Nteri Nelson filmed by Paul Gibson, however, has helped me to reach deeper understandings of the ancestral connections that have drawn black folk to Christianity, celebrations of Christmas, and Santa Claus and other holiday emblems.
Given the African American draw to Christmas and our Black Buying Power, it seems like the endless Christmas animations, the Hallmark movies with their messages about love/family/rebirth, the window displays, the Santa Claus images and look-alikes, the flying angels everywhere, the traditional children’s stories, and all this Christmas paraphernalia wouldn’t all be so damn white. Last year, on Black Friday and Cyber Monday alone, African Americans spent more time browsing online for toys than any other group. It seems like a good capitalist would capitalize on all that and do a full-blown black-up of all children’s marketing. But capitalism is not logical and it is never just about making money.
I recently watched the movie, The Perfect Holiday, where Morris Chestnut was a shopping mall Santa who enchanted three little kids and their mother (played by Gabrielle Union; the added bonus as Terrence Howard as a rat, evil dwarf, etc). Morris Chestnut is one Santa no one would need to make me believe in! Clearly, capitalists don’t care about black people’s dollars; otherwise we’d see family movies like this everywhere. Instead, this year’s blockbuster will be a black man dressing up as a black woman who then dresses up as Santa (i.e., Madea) for a 2013 Christmas Coon Extravaganza. The images that we see and don’t see of black people during these holidays are not motivated by the economics of neoliberalism alone; these economics are nested quite snugly with maintaining a white lens and a white world, a reality 100s of years in the making given the history Dr. Nelson provides us. Like I said, if it was all about money, BLACK WOMEN would be the center of all marketing campaigns since we are the ones with the most buying power. You know something deep is going on when NO ONE tells you this. I am not suggesting that buying power and wealth are the same thing and that black women and communities have wealth in the United States. It just seems telling to me that American consumerism functions according to a logic that deliberately omits black faces but exploits their cultures and dollars.
Outside of home, friends, and family, the many white intellectuals, scholars, teachers, and so-called “educated” people who I work with still won’t get— don’t want to get— why black folk focus so much time and energy on constructing positive images of ourselves and releasing all the negative. Truth is, we don’t have time to worry about these people who don’t want to understand this. They just aren’t worth it. This December, however, I am doing what I often do when I am looking for images and concepts that DON’T destroy black children and families when a dominant white image/mindset completely saturates every turn you make: I turn to African American children’s literature. Beginning with this year’s Cyber Monday, this black woman is spending her ancestral time/energy and her Black Buying Power looking for African American children’s literature that offers real and soul-sustaining Black lenses and belief systems about this time of year. I’ll share my favorites in the coming days and weeks.
This year, my mother (who moved in with me after she lost her job in the recession) wanted to experience Black Friday in New York. In particular, she wanted to take advantage of a foolish sale at JCPenney. In New York City, this means going down to 34th Street across from Macy’s. It was an A.W.F.U.L. experience. I am not being bah-humbug here: there are times when the holiday windows and decorations in NYC simply inspire me. This year’s Macy’s display bored me to tears though. The tech wizardry of animated, interactive snow falls was underwhelming. So I did what was only right: I shared my misery with everyone around me, talking VERY loudly about how stupid and boring the Macy’s windows were. In truth, this is a deliberate tactic because my mother will get so embarrassed, she will want to leave— this is exactly my purpose. I did even MORE loud-talking at JCPenney. The worst part of these outings is the inevitable visit you will need to make to a public restroom but I will admit that I had fun irritating my mother here too. I simply yelled out: it staaaank up in here… damn, girl, what you eat for Thanksgiving? This bathroom is on FIYAH! 
Every gift that I was I ever paid to wrap, which came with very nice tips, came from a wealthy white customer. There was a stock set of designs that customers could choose, but if you added some flair, then you had a steady stream of tips and folk willing to pay. All I had to do was practice on newspaper at home and then roll out some funky color combos at the store. On weekends, I could count on taking home the $40 the manager gave me along with another $30-$50 in tips, depending on the number of customers. My family would have a fit if I didn’t wrap our gifts as beautifully as I had for them rich white folk. Needless to say, I got good at it and still have a reflexive habit to look at a gift’s wrapping and figure out the design. If you ever get a gift from my mother with a nice bow, it is one that she has saved from a gift-wrapping I did for her— she recycles. I doubt that the people who paid for my wrapping ever saved it the way my family does though. My family enjoys the wrapping as much as any gift, especially if it matches their favorite colors, outfit, or home decor.
The store owners and managers who hired me to do their windows and chalkboards were also white. I got good with those chalkboards too. For small signs, I could do a sketch at home and then knock that out in half an hour. That gave me $20. For larger signs, I wrapped the edges of the chalkboard with an intricate design and left a heavy, easy-to-touch-up border; that way, there was plenty of room in the middle of the board to write daily specials and wash the board without having to re-do the design. That gave me $40. Different customers got different genres: snow scenes were for non-religious settings; bows, gold, silver, and all kindsa razzle/dazzle was for the wanna-be sophisticates; variations of a St. Nick’s toy factory were for the Christmas die-hards. I could even do mangers and angels if you wanted to make people remember church. Words-only jobs were the best though: super-easy and really fast!
AfroDigital Consciousness (ADC) was a term that I thought was brilliantly defined at ABEC and captures exactly the kind of ideal that goes beyond what schools intend for us. ADC= SPIRIT+ COMMUNITY+ TECHNOLOGY (“Ego-Tripping 2.0″ is an interconnected notion inspired by the opening performance at ABEC that included a reading of Nikki Giovanni’s “Ego-Tripping.”) ADC is multi-sensory oriented and steps into our practice and spirit. ADC creates community instead of destroying it. ADC means you play the game better… because you are on another level. 
