Jack & Jill Politics

This post piggybacks off the post below about the new Coon Show on BET – Hot Ghetto Mess.

I know this is OT, but on the left side, under news, you have a notice about Stephen Carter’s new book-New England White. Now, considering that his first book – The Emperor of Ocean Park, was a NYTimes Bestseller, and a part of the Today Show Book Club, with twists and turns, and all the little tidbits that a bestseller has…

Riddle me this – why wasn’t it turned into a feature film?

College professor turned best-selling novelist…doesn’t the media eat stories like that up? So, why hasn’t this book turned into a film?

Could it be because they couldn’t find a way to turn the complex Black characters in the book into shucking and jiving coons? That the Black folk in his book aren’t the ones that Hollywood wants to remotely admit exist?

Look at something like ‘ Hot Ghetto Mess’ in all its minstrelsy, and how it can get on the air AND BE PROMOTED, like Flavor of Love, and whoever the nightmare spinoff woman was, and giving Minstrella Monique that show ‘ Charm School’…

And something like Carter’s book can’t find its way onto the big screen, or even onto the small screen in mini-series form?

One has to wonder why.

Why is couldn’t be adapted for a mini-series by BET or TVOne?

WHY we can’t get complex portrayals of Black people on our screen without them being attached to someone not Black?

Like the Modern Day Minstrel show in music, seeing this garbage on television, and watching the same type of hucksters shuck and jive about why this is ‘ educational’, and not a continued perpetration of our community’s dehumanization, is disheartening.

A Coon Show is a Coon Show – plain and simple.

And watching Coon Shows take over Music, Television, and now publishing- with ‘ Street Lit’- is enough to turn the stomach. I read fiction by Black folk about Black folk because I want to see our HUMANITY. Not our degradation. And, the same lameass excuse that we were given about gangsta rap – ‘ it’s the voice of the streets’, as if that’s ALL WE ARE, just doesn’t cut it. Didn’t cut it back then, doesn’t cut it now.

When will those who produce the Coon Show, step up to the plate and admit that they are producing it for the money? It’s the perpetrating that they actually give a rat’s ass about the community that disgusts me most. Those that get into the entertainment business, accept responsibility for what you deliver to the community. We don’t have the luxury of you hiding behind ‘ freedom of artistic expression’, when said expression is literal POISON to us.