I would make a small wager that the woman driving this car, her ancestors don’t even come close to having been from Nubia. Somewhere throughout time, being “Nubian” had less to do about actually having ancestors who lived along this tiny region in the Sudan, than the fact that the Sudan happened to be in Africa, so it happened to apply to all of those who were of African descent, and then it turned into being a term to replace the word “black.”
The funny thing? It’s easy to accuse me of simply going to Wikipedia to find this information, but the thing is that I did a report of the Sudan back in grade school, and I actually did remember the region of Nubia. The capital of the country is also Khartoum, but that’s besides the point.
Anyway, two things went through my head when I saw this car in front of me. It reminded me of an episode of Family Matters, one of the late, late seasons when the show had already jumped the shark thrice over, and was one of those episodes where it was Ste-fan Ur-kel, the suave and charismatic version of Jaleel White, was laying down the game on Laura. And since this was Stefan v2, he wasn’t a dick and actually cared about Carl’s health, but he was oozing the romancing onto Laura, who was buying it, but I remember he dropped a line while handing a flower to Laura, that it was for “my Nubian Queen.”
Nubian Queen? I mean everyone knew that Steve Urkel was a maniacal stalker when it came to Laura Winslow, but how does he know that she’s of Nubian descent? Ancestry.com didn’t exist back then, and frankly “Winslow” doesn’t exactly sound like the family name of someone who might have migrated across the Atlantic on slave ships of yore, either. Even back then, when I was littler and fatter, I was like “that’s racist!” at ABC’s TGIF programming that thought they got one over us naive viewers.
And naturally the second thought I had was, what about this is actually acceptable? What if a white person put “ARYAN KING” or something like that on their car window? What if I decided to put “INCHEON EMPEROR” on my back window? Clearly this is another one of those double standards, at least in Atlanta, where it’s perfectly acceptable for black people to boast about being black while nobody can really call them out on it.
Another funny thing about the whole thing is that it’s not affixed to anything itself. It’s just a little placard that was placed back there, which makes me wonder if HIS MAJESTY chooses to put up her title up at her own discretion, and since this was taken on a Saturday, during the weekend, I’m sure it’s okay for her to become queen again, because I sure as shit wouldn’t want my co-workers seeing this shit up on my parked car in the parking lot while I’m at work. Not so royal then, are we, HIGHNESS?
