Remember a time when Katt Williams used to be funny?
Seemed like a long time ago, doesn’t it?
Williams was even less funny last week when he went on a bizarre rant in response to a heckler at a show in Arizona. More troubling was the pseudo apology by the oft-arrested comedian, an apology he later recanted.
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Williams wants us to believe that his personal life is separate from his comedic life, that the abuse as patriotism he shouted should be excused, because it was performed in character. I’m not buying it and neither should you.
Williams’ behavior is deeply troubling, especially when you take into consideration the tensions between Black and brown folks in California who maim and kill one another other over the most trifling things beyond their control: territory and skin color.
Williams isn’t alone in misinformed rants: Black folks have been feeling a certain way about Mexicans for a long time, as if we’re better than Mexicans. Can’t say I know a Mexican who feels a certain way about me or any other Black folk and my Spanish is near great.
Do both groups have terrible ideas about one another? Yes. Do we need to be informed about our shared history? Yes.
My heart was saddened last week when I witnessed a West Indian man call a Mexican a wetback. This was a day or two before Williams went on his rampage. This was on Fulton Street & Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, one of New York’s crossroads of the world. The scenario triggered a memory of an event I also witnessed as a teenager: my mother belittling a Mexican man she’d hired to cut our lawn.
What I witnessed was a conundrum of class and race abuse. I was ashamed of my mother then, as I am ashamed of Williams and that West Indian man last week. Personally, I can’t understand why anti-Mexican abuse is so easily accepted and condoned, especially by folks who have been abused themselves. Perhaps if we were aware of the role Mexico has played in our history, we wouldn’t be so quick to be xenophobic.
Here’s a brief lesson courtesy of Luis J. Rodriguez, whom I will generously quote:
Mexicans did fight for California. In fact, the one major battle they had with Anglo forces invading California they won, with horses and lances, just outside of Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the decision to turn the state over to the United States was made in Washington D.C. without the input of the people involved.
In fact, there was a whole war that Mexicans fought to stop the illegal invasion, which, lest Mr. Williams forget, was being pushed by the slave-owning interests in the United States. It was Southern slaveholders who ignited the war to rip Texas away from Mexico when Anglos refused to accept Mexico’s laws against slavery.
Mexico had abolished slavery in the early 1800s, way before the Emancipation Proclamation; Mexico even had at least two African-Mexicans as presidents some two hundreds years before Barack Obama was elected president in this country.
The main catalyst for the Mexican war was the refusal of Mexico to return black slaves–believed to be more than 10,000–who had taken the southern-route of the “underground railroad,” crossing the border to a free Mexico. In Mexico’s governing assembly heavy debates on the issue ended up with the majority supporting these slaves, allowing them to own land, to farm, to become part of the Mexican social fabric.
Mexicans were willing to die so blacks could be free.
And if you don’t believe Mr. Rodriguez, I suggest you visit a library, or look at the work of Ayana V. Jackson and Marco Villalobos, who documented the descendants of African-American slaves in Mexico in their project El Negro Mas Chulo.
Read Mr. Rodriguez’s entire article here.
–Cacy Forgenie
