Sherrylin Ifill’s “Musings for Thanksgiving Dinner” inspired me to share a comment about an excellent post-Thanksgiving dinner conversation I participated in. After rereading my comment a few minutes ago, I decided to re-publish it here.
Before our dinner guests arrived, I had predicted there would be too little political-ideological disagreement among them to enable us to spend most of our time talking politics and still hope to gain anything inspirational or novel from our conversations. Soon after some of us had begun to talk about the standard political flavors of the month, I saw nonverbal signals and overheard some comments that led me to believe a night filled with a series of easy or ambiguous political conversations would probably leave most of our guests feeling empty at the end of the night.
Being a bit of deipnosophist, I’m always prepared to entertain after dinner. So, once I had formed an opinion about where our early political conversations were going to lead us, I informed (threatened) our guests that if we would fail to create at least one challenging and memorable conversation, then I would save our evening by reciting, from memory, an eclectic selection of my favorite Shakespeare Sonnets, Yeats poems, and Prince Rogers Nelson lyrics, and then, if there would be enough time left, I might go on to read from Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler essays, or La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims. That seemed to motivate our guests to create a few very interesting and memorable conversations.
The most interesting question that we discussed was, roughly:
How would the most patriotic upper-middle-class or upper-class African Americans, Caribbean Americans, and Afro-Latin Americans think and act, and if they would think and act differently than the most patriotic English Americans, German Americans, Irish Americans, Welsh Americans, or Scottish Americans, in what ways would they think and act differently?
That question and the conversation it led us to was very interesting and memorable. After we had finished the conversation, almost all of us pledged to learn much more about African, Caribbean, Afro-Latin, and African American cultures, so we would better understand their attributes and achievements and we could do a much better job of promoting or representing the best our cultures had to offer in our social and professional lives. Most of us agreed to strive to find more and spend much more of our disposable incomes on African, African American, Caribbean American, and Afro-Latin American businesses. And, all of us agreed to read more and encourage others, especially our children and mentees, to read more exoteric and esoteric Afrocentric literature and to financially support, and encourage others to financially support, Afrocentric fine art.