#28. St. Patrick's Day

Murphy: Yeah, it's St. Patty's Day, everyone's Irish tonight. Why don't you just pull up a stool and have a drink with us?

So says one of the brothers from The Boondock Saints, a cult favorite that presupposes vigilantes would be greeted with fanfare and adulation in crime-ridden America.

Nothing is more fear inducing to Black people than a congregation of white people gathered in Bacchanalian revelry, partaking in a copious amount of inebriants and indulging in alcoholic induced straight talk.

And no day invites more white people to indulge their inhibitions than St. Patrick’s Day, a celebration universally recognized for its incomparable debauchery.

White people gather to celebrate the exploits of some long dead Catholic saint, who is of little consequence save for the annual festivities of the drink in his long dead honor. Though it is still a holy day of celebration, St. Patty’s Day is a theological only in the sense that being worshipped is booze, not some Saint.

What exactly is St. Patrick’s Day, and whose name graces this date reserved for insane amounts of alcohol consumption? :

Saint Patrick's Day (Irish: Lá Fhéile Pádraig) is a yearly holiday celebrated on 17 March. It is named after Saint Patrick (circa AD 387–461), the most commonly recognized of the patron saints of Ireland. It began as a purely Catholic holiday and became an official feast day in the early 1600s. However, it has gradually become more of a secular celebration of Ireland's culture.

It is a public holiday on the island of Ireland (both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland) and widely celebrated by the Irish diaspora in places such as Great Britain, Canada, the United States, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and Montserrat.

A holiday in honor of a dead white male isn’t worthy of admiration or celebration. Blasphemy, as even in the waning days of Pre-Obama America every effort to curtail any implicit celebration of whiteness was near complete with the swift removal of Washington’s Day with the generic replacement of President’s Day.

Only Martin Luther King (a saint in every sense of the word to Black Run America) is worthy of celebration, however the types of drunken merriment in his honor might include a Compton Cookout or a Ghetto Party, unsavory propositions for the ruling elite.

St. Patrick’s Day is thus a cause for great alarm for Black people; the prospect of large groups of white people associating in pub crawls in formerly derelict neighborhoods where gentrification has decreased the acreage of what constitutes “the hood” posing unbelievable danger to Black political power.

Though they may be Disingenuous White Liberals, the scarcity of Token Blacks in the groups of green-clad white revelers is cause for deep dismay among Black people. Is it because Black people instinctively find anything with the color green (whether it is greenbacks for the future or for making it rain) nauseating and offensive?

No. Black people find St. Patrick’s Day a parade of whiteness, a date that greatly perturbs them for the joy white people derive out of an authentic celebration of cultural (or dare we mention it?), racial pride in being Irish.

Name another day that white people can enjoy their roots and celebrate them with parades, beer, shots and pinches (for those who dare defy the color-code of the holiday)? You can’t, and Black people are generally aware of this:

A green-clad man said: “Happy Saint Patrick’s Day” to which the brother responded “Yeah, you know, just trying to not get beat up.”

It’s kind of like that for black people on St. Patrick’s Day.

364 days of the year, I’ve got no problem with the Irish. But I don’t mess around and leave my house on St. Patrick’s Day. I’m too old, I’m too black, and no longer willing to risk bar brawls on a holiday. Don’t worry about me, I’ve still got Cinqo de Mayo and Purim and a host of other holidays that I can use to hide my alcoholism.

I don’t want to rain on anybody’s good time. If you love St. Patrick’s Day, keep right on loving it. No worries. Just don’t expect many of your black friends to join in the fun. As a “friend” told me on SPD-1996: “Everybody’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. Except you, Elie, ’cause you’re black.”

Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day would be the finest admission of a desire to Act White, forcing Black people to boycott the holiday for fear of expulsion or punishment.

Worse, St. Patrick’s Day is a time to enjoy the Lord of the Dance, an Irish inspired dancing routine that always out-steps the best choreographed routine from a Black fraternity or sorority.

More importantly, Black people have the misfortune of constantly searching for the elusive pot of gold that has yet to be located, despite the well-intentioned efforts of Black would-be alchemists and Leprechaun hunters.

The television show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia pointedly illustrates the absurdity of the day and the fear Black people have in anything green or visually identifiable as Irish. A bar consultant is helping the owners of Paddy’s Irish Pub generate a more diverse clientele, and he recommends removing everything Irish:

Terrell: Nothing scares gays and black folks like Irish crap.

To the point and succinct, so we include St. Patrick’s Day in Stuff Black People Don’t Like, for the audacity of white people to celebrate their heritage is a cardinal sin only reserved for every other ethnic group in America, save white people.

Pride in ones heritage is a healthy trait in all racial communities save white people, where this odd declaration of love for ones people is diagnosed as a gross pathology on par with cancer.

Plus, Boston is viewed as a city where Irish life flourishes, and the hatred of forced busing by whites there still lingers in Black minds.

St. Patrick’s Day offers the surreptitious celebration of ethnic pride for white people, albeit disguised as a mere festival of booze.

Black people pass on that “everyone’s Irish on St. Patty’s Day” line from white people, because they know the truth. Now, you do to.

And you thought white people loved Larry Bird because he was just good at basketball.

#298. Being Out-Stepped

Black people are routinely pegged as the preeminent dancers on the planet, for their incredible rhythmical skills are constantly on display through film, television and well, this.

Movies such as Save the Last Dance illustrate this point, as a naive white girl finds the dancing ability of Black people to the push she needs to excel at ballet.

Dancing though, as historically known in the Western tradition, is of little to no use to Black people and they find acceptable dancing constricting and unacceptable to their cultural norms. Black people excel in originality when it comes to dancing and have created a form of dancing that's authentically Black - stepping:

Stepping or step-dancing is a form of percussive dance in which the participant's entire body is used as an instrument to produce complex rhythms and sounds through a mixture of footsteps, spoken word, and hand claps. Though stepping may be performed by an individual, it is generally performed by groups of three or more, often in arrangements that resemble military formations.

Stepping may also draw from elements of gymnastics, tap dance, march, or African and Caribbean dance, or include semi-dangerous stunts as a part of individual routines. Some forms of stepping include the use of props, such as canes, rhythm sticks and/or fire and blindfolds.

The tradition of African American stepping is rooted within the competitive schoolyard song and dance rituals practiced by historically African American fraternities and sororities, beginning in the mid-1900s.

If you have attended a major university that has even 10 Black people enrolled there, then chances are you have been regaled with a "step-show" before. Black people, especially Black fraternities, partake in stepping as a ritualistic exercise that has roots in Africa.

The uniformity displayed by step-team members in the choreographed clapping, stepping and dancing routine is a sight to behold and chanting that takes the form of ululations is but an added bonus in any stepping display.

But the cross-over appeal of stepping is an unavoidable reality that must know be discussed, for films such as Stomp the Yard and the MTV show America's Best Dance Crew have broadcast a formerly all-Black activity to the entire country, which have had the destabilizing effect of integrating the team dance activity.

Remember: anything that is all-white must be integrated, yet anything that is all-Black must be preserved in an all-out effort to maintain the street cred of that activity. Daring to integrate an all-Black activity is an exercise in futility, yet daring to integrate is an endeavor that is greeted with congratulatory and laudatory language.

Stepping is a Black thing, an opportunity to "keep it real" and is an authentically Black exercise in dancing that no white person would dare emulate until now:

Stepping, which is deeply rooted in the tradition of historically Black Fraternities, has moved into the mainstream. At the Sprite Step Off, a traditionally white sorority with all white members, Zeta Tau Alpha won the $100,000 prize. Bossip was in the audience and they agreed that Zeta Tau Alpha “brought it.”

This can be considered of another example of how Black culture becomes mainstream and becomes appropriated by Caucasian people and becomes a greater part of American culture as a whole.

This upset victory by white girls daring to integrate an all-Black activity has sent shock waves through the stepping community everywhere:

On Saturday, I accompanied AG Entertainment’s Alex Gidewon to the Sprite Step Off Challenge at the Civic Center. The best part of the evening for me was the car ride there and back. We pulled up to the Civic Center in a CL65 AMG with a turbocharged V12 engine that reached top speeds in 6 seconds. The car took my breath away. All I can say is I want one!

Anyway, step show host Ryan Cameron (WVEE) said “Steppin’ is for erybody.” Well, it’s not for me. I was bored out of my skull for the 50+ minutes that we were there. Back in my college days, steppin’ was an entirely different art form than what you see today. Now it’s more lights, cameras and action than fancy footwork mixed with military precision.

So is it any wonder that an all white girl crew from Arkansas took 1st place in the majority black competition? The women from Zeta Tau Alpha’s Epsilon chapter electrified the crowd with a dazzling step routine that clocked in at just under 9 minutes. They won cash scholarships and other prizes. MTV2 will air the step show at 3 pm on February 28 and March 7.

Stepping, an authentically Black activity that once was reserved for only Black people to practice discipline in rhythmic movement, while simultaneously clapping their hands in unison, has now been infiltrated to a point where a team of white girls from Arkansas could usurp the Sprite Step-Off Challenge 2010 title and supplant all Black teams beneath perfectly choreographed routine.

This loss is being taken hard by Black people and stepping-purists everywhere, as step-hardliners view this as a direct assault against their authentically African tradition.

Stuff Black People Don't Like includes being out-stepped, for there is absolutely nothing sacred anymore if a bunch of white girls from Arkansas can out-step Black people and claim the Sprite Step-Off Challenge.

Stepping has been integrated, which makes its no longer indigenous to the Black community and no longer an activity that can be deemed exclusively and authentically Black. Stepping has been polluted with the stain of whiteness and can no longer be deemed a "keeping it real" activity, although it did offer an interesting, intimate look at Black culture when it was an 100 percent Black enterprise.