Erasing the Erasure

Beyond the music, the dance moves, the videos, and merchandise, you learn that something else good about Mike Jackson was how he served and continues to serve as such a rich topic for thoughtful cultural critics to delve into a range of ideas about black history, expression, and life.

I mentioned Stanley Crouch's 1987 comment in a previous post. And just recently still reading the Village Voice, I came across Greg Tate's Man in Our Mirror, where he draws on Jackson's life to expound on some larger issues when he writes that:

Black Americans are inherently and even literally "damaged goods," a people whose central struggle has been overcoming the non-person status we got stamped and stomped into us during slavery and post-Reconstruction and resonates even now, if you happen to be Black and poor enough.

And, he follows saying, "As a people, we have become past-masters of devising strategies for erasing the erasure."