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!
As a high school student, I had a very distinct relationship to “Black Friday.” I don’t remember ever using the term, “Black Friday,” though. I just knew it was the day after Thanksgiving and I could make extra money, even if I wasn’t the legal age to work. There were two jobs I held throughout high school after Thanksgiving: 1) wrapping gifts at the mall; 2) designing chalkboards and glass windows for shops and stores. That was the money that bought my or my mother’s coat that year or our Christmas dinner. At 16 and 17, it was the most I could do to help out my mother whose pittance of a salary barely kept the lights on (and many times, didn’t keep the lights on… winters in Ohio with no electricity is NO JOKE!) If I had internet way back when and could have easily accessed photos of Macy’s windows, I would have pimped myself out for every willing store owner/manager to transform their space to replicate Macy’s displays. Them rich fools woulda let me too.
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!
“Black Friday” signaled WORK for me; consumption was for OTHERS— something that I associated with rich, white people. Consumption was, for me, whiteness and squandered wealth. And white folk were the only people who I ever saw with that one thing that gave you big purchasing power back then: credit cards. I am convinced today that credit is the reason we see so much more shopping than when I was a child— and credit debt today is an equal opportunity deployer (I actually put a coat in layaway a week ago, wanting to catch the sale on the item. I was the only person on line. I was shocked to even see a store with layaway, the way that I remember my family buying things long ago.)
Needless to say, I had never gone “shopping” on a “Black Friday” til this week (I didn’t make any actual purchase). Everyone looked like they drank the kool-aid! In contrast, everyone that I knew in my youth had to work the day after Thanksgiving. I don’t recall anyone waking up at 3am to go to the mall before their jobs. While I certainly don’t ever wish to return to the economic poverty that characterized my youth, I find immense value in having never understood myself or Christmas in terms of conspicuous consumption. We would do well to remember that we have not always been or ever needed to be neoliberal subjects and hyper-consumers. We seem to have forgotten the wealth in spirit and mind of a people who never hesitated to remind a young girl that her creativity and talent were worth more than dollars, that you and the holidays are always about so much more than the people who can buy you.
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. 
I once had to mediate a complaint against a teacher who failed a student’s paper because it was plagiarized. The student had lifted entire segments of each page from websites and the professor had a policy against this on his syllabus. The student insisted that the professor was actually implementing his policy only with her because he disagreed with her political beliefs. That’s a difficult thing to prove so she was out there on a limb with that one. Because she was contesting her final grade (she was insisting on an A and that a B+ was the lowest grade she could ever accept) and not the plagiarism, I had to read the plagiarized paper and her corpus of work (most often lifted from other sources). Her writing was stunningly weak, riddled with the most anti-black racism I have ever read from a college student, and strangely misinformed all at the same time. In one section of a paper, the student wrote a rather lengthy diatribe against affirmative action and used, as her evidence, that Columbia University’s undergraduate student population is 40% “black”…”Colored” is what she called them. She argued that Columbia had accepted all of these unqualified “Colored (i.e., black)” students over the white valedictorian of her class who was denied admission. I was confused, to say the least, and thought she meant a different Columbia than the ivy league institution housed in New York City. Columbia’s students are 40% black? When the hell did that happen and why ain’t I workin there? Thass that hotness right there. I did get excited for a minute when I read her words but then realized that I was being foolish for listening to such a foolish student. That just ain’t what Columbia has EVER looked like! She did have a (cut-and-pasted) section from Columbia’s website in her writing. The charts, graphs, and language did, in fact, show that Columbia was reporting 40% of its undergraduate student population to be OF COLOR (the majority population in that number is Asian). I was astounded that the student clearly did not understand and had never really seen the term “of color” before. She seemed to think it was referencing those old Colored Vs. White drinking fountains where “Colored” meant black. Her white male professor looks like the first person who actually confronted her ideas and writing ability and she saw him as a race traitor of the John Brown variety, insistent on lynching him! It would be funny if it weren’t so damn tragic. There are no surprises here though. This was a Christian, conservative white female at a Christian, conservative white-run college who had attended a Christian, conservative white high school. Imagine my surprise though to hear the exact same language from SOPHOMORE students of color at a “minority-serving” public college who attended predominantly Black and Latin@ public schools! They too had never heard the term “of color.” The same white political continuum operates in how they have been educated.
Like always, I had students say things like they don’t think they are or can ever be intellectuals because English is not their first language or because they have an accent. These are actual quotes from last week’s class. And, of course, I have students, young black women, who unpack a discussion after class rather than in class because they don’t think they have a voice that people will hear… they will just be cast as that loud black girl in the corner again. That’s a quote too. Despite my early onset of racial battle fatigue, I realize that I need to sharpen my critique on the privileging of decontextualized grammar instruction. I don’t centralize grammar instruction in my course so for many folk, this means that I do not teach it all. If I thought grammar would alleviate the social and educational injustices that my people face (or even impact the students of color who I have described here), I would do it all day long. But at what point in my people’s history did a grammar lesson ever resolve systemic oppression, institutional racism, and education inequality? I mean, really, who thinks this simplistically? If all black folk needed was a grammar lesson for equality and social mobility in education, don’t you think we woulda BIN done that? There is a real vile disrespect happening in this construct.