The questions ranged from the silly to the serious.
“Is it OK to call you black or do you prefer African-American?”
“Do black people cook with a lot of grease, like in ‘Big Momma’s House’?”
“Why does the Army have more black people in it than the general population does?”
For moderator David Muhammad and his five panelists Wednesday night, this was exactly what they had been waiting for. This was “Ask a Black Dude.”
This is the second year that “Black Dude” has been part of Black History Month at Emporia State University. Its roots were in a sketch of the same name by Dave Chapelle that Muhammad happened to be watching with his friend Derrais Carter.
The sketch itself wasn’t that memorable. But the name stuck with them.
“We said, ‘Why don’t we have a panel where the students can ask anonymous questions?’” said Muhammad, a student at Emporia State. “It worked out really well last year, so we decided to bring it back this year. ... This is a chance for people to get out and break down stereotypes.”
The greasy-food myth, by the way, was one of the first to be shot down.
“I’m a healthy person,” said panelist Willie Banks, who said that when he cooks, he usually prefers a chicken breast and rice.
“I don’t cook,” panelist Lorene Booth said. “But my mom does and she doesn’t cook with a lot of grease. It is a huge stereotype.”
The military question took a little longer to hash out. Panelist Anthony Whetstone, whose father served in the Army for 28 years, said that poor people of any race tend to be more likely to turn up in uniform as a way out.
“In the ’hood, they don’t have a position of authority,” Whetstone said. “The Army will give that to them. There’s guaranteed pay, you get the barracks, you get the mess hall. A lot of underprivileged people don’t have that. ... It’s not always that the recruiters go to impoverished areas. Sometimes the people in those areas seek out the military because it’s a good choice.”
All the questions were handwritten and collected over the past two weeks. Some drew surprised laughter, such as the person who wanted to know “Why are black people always late?”
“We not late,” Whetstone said, laying it on thick. “Y’all just set things too early.”
Booth noted that it can be easy to unconsciously buy into a stereotype like that.
“The older I got, the more I’d start saying ‘I’m going to this black event, I might as well come late,’” she said with a disbelieving smile. “‘If the party’s set for 3, I might as well show up at 4:30.’ We feed into our own stereotypes.”
Some were questions that had more to do with self-respect, asking why some black people felt they had to dress like thugs, or wear “grills” (tooth jewelry) or call each other “the n-word.”
Panelist Terrell Matthews admitted he used to use the word until about two years ago, when he started thinking things over at a conference.
“You can try to reason it out,” he said, “You can try to ‘take it back.’ But there’s always somewhere to take it from and you have to deal with that.”
“You have to realize that what you speak not only affects yourself, it affects other people around you,” Whetstone agreed. “You can speak blessings into your life or you can speak curses into your life. You have to be careful.”
As for more polite names, Banks and panelist Jeanice Johnson said they preferred African-American. Whetstone, who is part Asian, said he didn’t particularly care: “You can call me black, Korean, Hawaiian — it doesn’t matter because I know what I am.”
Some questions even drew some discussion after the panel was over, such as a question about the number of unwed mothers among black women. Both Johnson and Booth suggested poverty might be a reason, with Booth adding that some women wanted to have children just so someone would love them. But afterward, one black woman in the audience said she had just decided to “be a woman about it” and have her baby rather than get an abortion.
“I’m graduating in May with two degrees and a minor,” she said. “It’s life. Things happen. We grow and progress and we get over things.”
And some questions struck directly at their university experience. One person wanted to know what kind of effect it had, seeing so few black teachers and professors.
Booth, the only panelist in the group who was originally from Emporia, said that for years she was the only black person in her class at school. At first, she said, she thought about going to a predominantly black college as a result.
“I thought that I needed to see black professors and black students doing good things,” she said. “Then I thought, ‘I don’t need that so long as I’m doing good things.’ A school like this needs people like me to serve as examples and show that I can do well.”
Johnson’s experience was the reverse — her old school district in Kansas City, Mo., had a larger black population than she found in college. Emporia proved to be a good experience, she said. At the same time, she could understand why the country needed more minority professors.
“It disturbs me,” she said. “You’re supposed to be looking up to these people, and if a lot of the people you see are white professors, you may start telling yourself ‘Man, I can’t do that.’”
It’s an important thing to come to grips with, Muhammad said.
“You have to understand that the world is not all black,” he said.