My CAAM Badge Exhibits Why I Quit Your “Black Organization”

So what happens to us students of Cheikh Anta Diop is that the Black African reality of ancient Egypt becomes a matter of fact. It is no longer an item of “passionate debate” which is really very often masked as “please white guy validate my existence.” Little do these Afro-newbies know is that they are effectively asking for the so-called “white guy” to commit cultural suicide. You are therefore investing in a relationship based on inequality where “white guy” has to deprecate himself (and his ancestors) every time he talks to you. When you are an egocentric Negro—effectively identical in design to the “white guy” (the Negro is just painted a different color)—such relationships based on inequality is not a problem. This is very similar to putting a woman up on the patriarchic pedestal. It is an abomination to see such a self-described African man acting like such the stereotypical patriarchic girl.

But I digress: so what happens to us students of Cheikh Anta Diop is that the Black African reality of ancient Egypt becomes a matter of fact. When we examine the artifacts left behind by these people even a fool sees excellence, science and attention to detail. So when I look my old ID badge (shown above) from The California African American Museum (CAAM), there is no excuse or explanation for me to support the product you see pictured. There is far more African excellence in a lowrider than in this ID badge. The crisp, clean, white oversized t-shirt of a brown kid who can barely keep his pants over his waist is superior to this work. I’m not going to play Sherlock Holmes with you too long but here are some flippant deductions just looking at this badge:

• The person who made this badge did not give a fuck about making this badge. They did not have to know me personally: they looked at the dark face in the photograph and saw the word “volunteer” and promptly slept through the whole process.
• The badge was made using an oral tradition and phonics. The badge person did not receive anything in writing with my legal name printed on it. This implies that there is no automated system in place to properly process badge data—or that this system is easy to bypass by lazy employees.
• My first name spelled as “Bryant” tells me that the person is older—she probably came of age in the 1950s or earlier. A younger person is more likely to misspell my name with “Brian.” This person is probably female based on my observations of the administrative (office) staff at The California African American Museum since before 2003.My most daring and insulting assertion is that the person making the badge assumed that I would happy with just anything with the CAAM name on it. She must be right because I took photo of my prize. My daring goes further and says that she would not have made such blatant mistakes when she understood that a so-called “white person” was involved—especially when her “supervisor” regards this matter as important. To me, this is the appropriate time to say that the CAAM logo itself was designed by a Euro American. How an African American museum could fail to locate a person “of color” that is an artist to perform this task is just pathetic.

To CAAM’s credit, their web site as of 2003 and earlier had “minorities” involved in the design and production process. In fact, my company was paid to redesign the site in 2003 and (as of this writing) some of the details of this project are recorded in “Songhay System Web Sites” (but I can’t wait to drop these references so I can’t promise that CAAM will be mentioned there indefinitely). It is important that this relationship is mentioned because the badge shown above symbolizes this relationship. It is not just a one-time mistake but an indicator of a deeply rooted culture of casual disrespect and permissible incompetence.

It is important to understand that the people at CAAM were not ‘trying’ to disrespect me. (They would certainly do that now after reading this public Blog post—assuming they would ever find this.) They were just operating within their natural-man-made boundaries. This is the way their organization be. And once my instincts are triggered the message becomes clear: in order to improve this organization, one is faced with “the challenge” of changing the foundational core of adult human beings from a position of unrecognized authority. This is different from professionals who work by policies or a mission statement (that they actually respect)—when such living by writing is in effect you have an organization that allows change by design. CAAM had no such design when I tried to work with them. So CAAM may be “proud” of the African in “African American” but I fail to see how they are living by any organizing principles of traditional, pre-Columbian African wisdom—let alone the “modern” European/imperial functional structures.

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