Archives 2002

First, I want to thank the editor of this very honest newspaper for giving me an opportunity to share some words with its readers. I wanted to write about the recent controversy raging in New York over the statue rendition of the three Caucasian fire fighters hoisting the American flag at the site of the World Trade Center. 

Apparently, an artist is making a sculpture to serve as a memorial on that tragic site, but in his sculpture, he changed the image making one Black and one Latino. White firemen are upset at the change, which misidentifies the true history of the event. I emphatically agree with the firemen and urge the artist to hold true TO history if he is going to use an image FROM history. 

The problem once created can take hundreds of years to correct. I know from experience. That is what that nut, Michelangelo did to me several hundred years ago. Decent artists, but when he drew me, he took all the melanin out of my likeness! Anyone who sees me knows that my feet look as if they were burned in an oven and my hair is like lamb’s wool. My hair is that nappy stuff Ludacris or even like some of the good people over in Cabrini Green I met the other day. Good people. Didn’t have much to eat, but they shared with me, a stranger just the same. Reminds me of some of my family in Nazareth.

Anyway, there isn’t just one fake rendition of me floating around. It’s so confusing, sometimes I have to look in the mirror to remind my own self what color I am. Sometimes, I see a photo of me with blond hair and blue eyes, sometimes brown hair and hazel eyes, and sometimes my hair is as red as the rapper Eve’s hair is on occasion. With a haircut they look just like the precinct captain who arrested me the very first day I returned to earth. It makes me want to call my own name in vain.

It’s painful and that’s why I stand with the firemen. Don’t change the color of history! Keep the three firemen White and keep me as Black as Bill Dukes in Menace II Society, when he said, “You know you done #@!%%$ up, right?”

Jesus of Nazareth