“Black is the color of my true love’s hair” carries the famous parody with it – “Black is the color of my love’s true hair.” With this shift of one word, the sentence and sentiment changes.
With the shift of one word, we move beyond a parody’s fondness to a blunt instrument known best in its negative form – propaganda. Replacing “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter,” there is the continued attempt to disappear a specific subculture of many subcultures.
Black is an evocative description of a creative beginning. James Weldon Johnson’s “Creation” begins with an inaccuracy of G*D stepping out on space before there is space. There is a better accuracy describing such a moment –
Darkness covered everything
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.
Risking the loss of an anthropomorphic arm to a yet unnamed crocodile, G*D is said to smile light into existence and beckon, “Bring forth!” Whereupon all manner of life assembled.
Described as “lonely still,” G*D’s next act is born out of a deepening loneliness yearning for something closer than simply light and multiplying things. Blackness is again entered—this time from the bottom of a clay deposit. A close encounter of the first order was released and kneaded into a mirror, more than dim, blacker than nano black – darker than Carlsbad after the tourists are gone. A non-reflective mirror holding ever- more-creation continually present.
Black is the color of G*D’s true image. This is not the imaginary category of race, but the making of way when there is no yet-way.