Dr. Alfred Martin
Appearances
It's Been a Minute
Thin is back in, but did it ever leave us?
So particularly for Black people in the United States, we have always been understood as outsiders. And so we're scavenger hunters in many ways. We pick up the crumbs. Because crumbs are broadly construed all that we get anyway. And then through those crumbs, we make ourselves a whole meal.
It's Been a Minute
Thin is back in, but did it ever leave us?
With comfort, it is about the things that we can retreat into and not have to necessarily worry about the rest of the world. Because we have, as we know, racial battle fatigue, and there's a way that we like to be able to engage with media that we can actually... enjoy and not think about the politics of representation. So that is typically where my work around cross-racial fandom comes in.
It's Been a Minute
Thin is back in, but did it ever leave us?
So at its core, all media has to be what we call polysemic. That is to have multiple ways that you can understand it. And because of that, and because of blackness is what I call bilingualness, and the ways that we both have to understand ourselves and our culture, but we also have to understand whiteness and white culture.
It's Been a Minute
Thin is back in, but did it ever leave us?
And so part of what we are able to do is approach texts, and then we actually find ways to make them make sense within our frameworks of Blackness.
It's Been a Minute
Thin is back in, but did it ever leave us?
there's a way that we sort of take our cultural competencies and we map them onto something like the Golden Girls so that it can feel resonant for us, even if it wasn't for us. Black folks tend to read these shows and think about, for example, intergenerational living situations. So a number of Black folks grew up with their grandparents as well as their parents in the home.
It's Been a Minute
Thin is back in, but did it ever leave us?
There are also ways with something like the Golden Girls that Black people understand the ways that they understood. They were not friends. They were not roommates. They said they were sisters. And Black folks, we are always talking about, oh, that's my sister. That's my aunt. That's my cousin.