People-of-Color-Blindness: A Lecture by Jared Sexton

Quote of the Week #10

I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life. And I mean that literally. For me, literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/know is. It is an affirmation that sensuality is intelligence, that sensual language is language that makes sense. My response, then, is directed to those who write what I read and to those who read what I read--put concretely--to Toni Morrison and to people who read Toni Morrison (among whom I would count few academics). --Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory"

Where do I start? Last week the US government murdered Troy Davis and as I write this the government is showing no signs of collapsing in the near future. As I look for signs that Black folks are about to engage in organized confrontation with a nation state that is determined to render us civically, socially, and physically dead I see none. I wonder have we slipped into a delusional fantasy, a fantasy that is based on nostalgia for the 1960s and 70s when it seemed that revolution was in progress.

I know that the radical groups of the 60s failed for their not-so-radical practices, but what I long for is the affect that created a sense that the bullshit that is part of the fabric of life today was on its way out. There was a feeling that the racist, sexist, anti-Black power structure could not continue to rule. I thought by now we would be past lynching Black men and instead we have a Republican party whose base is cheering the deaths carried out by the governor of Texas. I can only believe that they think the majority of those killed in Texas were Black.

I wonder if I’m paranoid when I wonder if the Tea Party is against Obama’s healthcare plan because it will allow some Black people to live longer. I don’t see any sign of liberation in the future nor do I see the vast majority of Black folks being willing to acknowledge the political climate that exists in relation to black folks. For example, in Michigan Republicans want to take food stamps if you own a car worth more than $15,000. This echoes "welfare queens in Cadillacs." In the meantime Black Detroit and Saginaw with its larger numbers of Black folks will be starving. Any of the progress made financially is being wiped out by a recession with no end in sight and right wing policies aimed at eradicating us.

I thought the murder of Oscar Grant would be the last straw for Black folks. We are subjected to racial profiling, targeted for prison, and murdered by police who spend less than 2 years in jail if any time at all as in the case of Sean Bell. In light of a rapidly increasing onslaught against Black folks I thought by now we all would be giving much more consideration to the words of Dhoruba Bin Wahad., Bin Wahad wrote in response to the 2005 execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams:

Tookie Williams was executed to send a clarion signal to African youth that redemptive militancy is unacceptable - only rejection of your social history and complete surrender to the myths of white America could possibly save your life. In this sense, his execution was a commentary on the cowardice of many of today's Black leaders - who want to be both patriots and champions of Africans in America. This is the age of American empire, you can't be both.

I thought by now the realization that we can’t be patriots in a nation that is hell bent on destroying us would be forcing a strident voice to emerge from even the Black bourgeoisie. I’ve been wondering for years now what will it take to force those of use that believe that we are privileged to take a stand. Will we just quietly die?

I’m not longing for the conditions that brought about the militancy of the 1960s and 70s. I wish there would have never been a need for George and Jonathan Jackson. I wish we could have passed through the era of confronting the police and all that that has done to organic Black leadership without the damage. I wish Assata Shakur could walk free among us in the country where she was born, but she can’t. And as long as none of those wishes can't be true I have some others. I wish Black folk across the US would become unruly. I wish we would challenge every white, Asian, or Brown person on their anti-Black racism. I wish we would never give anyone a pass when they hate on Black folks, including other Black folks. I wish we would plot, conspire, sneak around, lie to the enemy, find ways to undermine white supremacy and the agencies that support it. Agencies like the public schools, public hospitals, police, prisons, and universities, the agencies that kill us. I wish young Black folk would talk to old Black folk and find out what they know. I wish old Black folk would talk to young Black folk and find out what they know. I wish every Black parent would raise their child to be a solider in this struggle, our Black struggle to be free of an enemy that cannot contain its murderous desire to destroy us. Teach them to love Black folks with all of our flaws.

I wish Black folk in the academy could learn to love those niggas in the hood. I wish the niggas in the hood could learn to respect what those niggas in the academy go through and find it in their hearts to teach what the struggle is. I wish we could all Black stand together and stand strong in the face of our murderous enemies and wage a beautiful struggle, a war motivated by love for Black folk. In Struggle!!!

Quote of the Week #9 -- In Relation to "The Help"

"No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk." -- bell hooks. Marginality as a site of resistance, in R. Ferguson et al. (eds), Out There: Marginalization and contemporary Cultures. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1990: pp. 241-43.

"The Help" Costs Too Damn Much, or Notes on an Intra-Master Discussion

I just saw "The Help" and will probably read the book. While I agree with some that it is very important that people know the stories of how black women domestic workers experienced what I would call an updated form of slavery, there are a few things I noticed that lead me to believe that this film, despite being marketed something relevant to the dilemmas of black and white women alike, is really engaged primarily with the ethical dilemmas of white women. It is a discussion among slave masters about how to, in Fanon's words, "be nice to the niggers."

This film chooses to introduce the stories of the black women domestics through the medium of a white woman's story of redemption. In that regard it is a lot like "Cry Freedom," in which another white director shared what almost all black South Africans already knew about apartheid through the story of a white liberal man's suffering, dilemmas, risk, and transformation, and even "Fried Green Tomatoes," which, like "The Help," is also about a young white liberal woman who is something of a misfit in her segregated landscape but who graciously uses her privilege to protect the grateful groups of black people who would otherwise be without an advocate whose voice matters in the storyline.

Questions of Oscar-worthiness aside, there is a cost to sharing black narratives in this way, i.e., by channeling narrative of black suffering through the filters of the very people who cause the suffering. The devil is in the details that are included and those that are excluded.

For instance, there was nothing at all in the film about the relatively routine experience of sexual violence from white males (boys and men) that black women domestics experienced. (There is, however, the hint of domestic violence from black men--of course.) I hope the book mentions something of that glaringly obvious omission. Have you read it? Does it?

Also, we should note that the losses that the white women experience are ones that we actually see. In film and theater, things that we see (as opposed to things we are told about) tend to have a stronger effect on us, so when the film shows us the white women's suffering but doesn't show us the black women's suffering, we can tell for whom the film is really asking us to feel. There is that cost again. We hear in ample detail about the suffering the white women experience-- note, for example, the way we see Celia Foote's class-based exclusion from the middle-class white women's bridge circle-- while we do not see what Aibileen's (Viola Davis) loss of her son really looked like and we rarely come back to it. We do not go through that journey with Aibileen the way we go through Celia Foote's struggles with exclusion or through Skeeter's struggles with feeling like an outsider because of her politics.

One might also argue that the dilemmas we see of the white women ought to be of lesser weight than those that we do NOT see of the black women since one's class and one's politics are relatively changeable features, while Aibileen's loss of her son was because of something that is not changeable (blackness). When Yule Mae (Aunjanue Ellis) is arrested and the cop bludgeons her, we almost see it, but the camera cuts away just in time and we hear a soft sound. Graphic depictions of violence are often unnecessary. But we do SEE the suffering of the white women depicted amply. So it's almost like the film, much like the era it describes, participates in silencing black women's voices.

Indeed, the overall mode through which this film addresses the history of black women in neoslavery is as a comedy. Remember what Saidiya Hartman says: “When history is emplotted in the comic mode, its mode of historical explanation tends to be organicist and its ideological implications conservative.”

We can see some of this conservatism in how the black women characters never radically challenge the order. While Aibileen certainly changes in some important ways and has a faceoff toward the end that she might not have had in the beginning, the personal journey of the story centers mostly around the white women. Even Minny, powerful as she is, remains basically the same. Yes, these women were and are brave and strong for surviving what they did. But we already knew that. So who is this film really being told by and for? The story soft-pedals the black women's suffering and dampens their bravery by channeling it through the white woman's narrative.

Finally, the film shows racism as a matter of interpersonal relationships, no structures of power. Racism, when it appears in the film, comes from unsavory white women. Racism appears to be a personal fault that one can choose to perform or not to perform, as with Charlotte Phelan's (Allison Janney) firing of Constantine (Cicely Tyson).

I say all this to say that I don't think the end justifies the means. I don't think the cost of telling these narratives through the voice of a white woman is worth the violence that it does to black women's voices.

the gaze

A metaphor.

I'm posted up in the library for a minute.

The white dude who walks through the stacks to see that nobody is eating in the study rooms came walking by. He has caught me once before. I'm not eating anything this time. (Sometimes, you have to eat or you won't be able to study, and, in a study room, that's pointless.)

But, meanwhile, the Asian dude in a study room right across the hall from me is eating a big-ass, sumptuous sandwich wrapped in shiny aluminum foil and he has a couple of plastic bags out on the table, bags that look like they might contain fruit or pastries or something. He ain't even trying to hide the shit.

But, there, the white dude just walked by for a second time, and both times, because he was looking my way, he missed the other dude. Twice.

There's a metaphor in that. They are so busy policing us that they can't see what is just a few feet away from them.

Nigga can't just study.

Nigga can't just write.

Nigga's gotta be on the lookout for the ways peckerwoods try to criminalize us all the time, anticipate the shit from time to time and head it off before some funk happens. Try to notice patterns. It doesn't mean I'm going to stop breaking the rules. But it is important to take note so we know where we stand in all of this.

And there it just happened again while I was writing that last sentence! A white girl just went walking down the hall with a brown paper lunchbag in hand. Now, if we're not supposed to have food in the library, it doesn't just mean we aren't supposed to eat food in the library but, rather, it signifies a ban on the substance entirely.

Gotta laugh the shit off. But, again, the nigga is the point of focus, no matter how brazenly the peckerwoods are breaking the very same rules. Always.

Five hundred years later, what else is new? Back to the slave.

people, get ready...

loving, righteous black revolutionary soldiers, too many of us are dying before we really get to fight back.

the matrix of an antiblack society has us. it has us doing its genocidal work on ourselves. we are dying of largely preventable diseases like heart disease and diabetes because we are surrounded by unhealthy food that also happens to comfort us in a brutal world. we are losing our minds from stress, alcohol and drug abuse, and smoking because we live in hostile environments where even our friends among the police, peckerwoods, and uncletom-ass negroes assault us at every turn. we are wasting away from obesity and lack of exercise because we can't find or afford safe places to exercise. we are depressed and we are angry. we are killing each other and ourselves. we are facilitating the genocide.

now, don't think i'm telling anyone what to do. depression is an honest response to living in a country that is not our country, no matter how much we have done to build it, no matter how much we do every day to sustain it, whether we want to or not. anger is an honest response to living with neighbors who aren't neighbors, loving lovers who aren't loving, doing for countrymen who do us like they do.

i have had my share of weeks and weekends (and even longer periods) when being black in an antiblack world had just taken so much out of me that i didn't feel that i could go on. we have all been slapped with such disrespect and scorn that the only reasonable responses were either implosion or rage. so please don't think that chico doesn't understand how and why it happens. and it happens to us all. we often cannot afford to admit this because it sounds like we are making ourselves out to be victims, but i think it is true.

no, chico is not here to judge. chico is here now, encouraging you, asking you to be ready.

get up and move around for at least 20 minutes. every day. there are good workouts that you can do in 20 minutes. even if we don't go to gyms or nightclubs, any of us can find a private space, put on some headphones, put on some really upbeat songs that get us moving (like Jill Scott's "Golden" or Cee Lo's "Jam" or Joan Armatrading's "Everyday Boy" or Vonyse's "Ain't Got No Someday" or Lucinda Williams' "Happy Woman Blues" or Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddamn" or Tupac's "Picture Me Rolling" or all kinds of Beethoven or Louis Armstrong or whatever gets us moving), and groove freestyle to them for 20 minutes a day. we can do that. you can do that. and some really fit folk can do something like this here in 10 minutes:



there are good, healthy meals that you can make in 10 minutes with very little preparation.

and if you ever need human contact and can't find it anywhere in your immediate "real" world, just write something here on cosmic hoboes. we are not counselors. but we are an online community. we can share our stories.

we have to stay healthy in order to keep fighting. the point of afropessimism is to understand black life and its relationship to the world-- so that we will be prepared to change them. afropessimism is an analysis, not a cure. it implies a cure and opens the way for a cure. but it is not a politics. all it really involves is listening-- a really careful listening to each other and ourselves, a careful listening to the symptoms of life in an antiblack world. symptoms written on the body and the psyche and the geography and the community and our relationships to ourselves and to each other. we are not just here to sympathize from afar. we must empathize intimately. and we must organize. and we will respond and respond decisively.

cuz the depressing, angering truth is that they can kill us all at any time. at some level that most of them don't even know, they want to kill us all. we are kept alive, as all slaves and neoslaves are, only to the extent that they think that they might be able to use us. contained, scorned, ravaged by global capitalism. or serving and grinning.

but they can't kill us all without the hell we gonna bring em. we know that it doesn't get better until we fight. and if the world is going one way but we need it to go another, well then either the world can listen to us or else we are just going to have to fight the world itself.

but having to fight takes its toll.

so please, please, please, do something that you can start today. take some time to take care of yourself.

take some time to eat right.

take some time to get a good night sleep.

whatever weight you are, keep moving. and if you already moving, move some more. move with someone.

talk with someone. listen to someone.

have fun.

and get ready...

Quote of the Week #8, or, Obama "Ain't Got Time to Sit Down With Your Monkey Behind"

I found the following quote in a recent article by Jonathan Capehart in The Washington Post and it was originally from a recent radio segment by Steve Harvey on The Steve Harvey Morning Show (reproduced above by way of YouTube video).

The really important nugget here is "and just plug yourself into the already existing system — which ain’t gonna change just ‘cause you want it to". That is the telltale sign of a negro accommodationist ethical framework. It assumes that black people's critique of those leaders who are recognized within the white supremacist electoral system is less effective toward black freedom than would be our support for the policies of those leaders. Something is better than nothing. One of our guys (usually, it seems) got in the door, so let's support him. It is a salvage mentality-- the idea that black people have anything to lose-- the sine qua non of the black middle class. Check it out.

"He is not the President of The Hood. He is the President of the United States. But if you look at what he’s pushing, no one could benefit greater than our community. Healthcare? Who is lacking in healthcare overwhelmingly than anybody else? Who is that? Who is lacking in education overwhelmingly than anybody else? And who—who do you know could stand a tax break above anybody else? So all you gotta do is fit yourself into the equation and you’ll see that he’s doing everything he can. But, it’s not for us. It’s for the American people. And the moment we quit saying, 'Us,' 'Gimme gimme gimme,' and just plug yourself into the already existing system — which ain’t gonna change just ‘cause you want it to — then we can move on with this thing. The man is doing a great job."
--Steve Harvey

The debate started by the above comments appears to be descending quickly into a kind of measuring contest-- a contest measuring the practical outcomes for black people from all of these highly important people driving around on buses. After receiving a critical letter from Smiley, Capehart backed off of his blanket concurrence with some of Harvey's name calling, but then quickly turned to a five-city jobs fair by the Congressional Black Caucus and said that West and Smiley showed no similar concrete outcomes for their poverty bus tour. Why Capehart seems to think that Smiley and West have a beef against the CBC's job fair seems to me like a diversion.

I want to take a detour, and look at the battle lines here. Steve Harvey is an important voice and presence for millions of black people, and, before his above-quoted segment descends into faux-churchy Amos-and-Andyism, he is making some points of which black folk who are interested in struggle should take note. Let's listen closely to him and break down what he's saying:

1) Obama's political leadership is "pushing" health care, education, and tax increases on the wealthy-- all things that can benefit the poor.
2) Black people, being disproportionately poor, can benefit from such pushes.
3) Black people should therefore support Obama's political leadership.

See if you think I have fairly stated Harvey's argument, but if I have done so, then check this: The conclusion does not follow from the premises.

"Pushing"
For one thing, where is the "push" in the "pushing" that Harvey says Obama is doing? Obama has failed to hold the line-- let alone push it-- for the poor on those very things Harvey says that Obama is "pushing." There is no public option in the health care plan, although the health care plan requires that people purchase health care from wealthy private sector firms. So I guess in a sense, there has been a push, but, in an ironic sort of judo-like reversal, the energy from that initial push by Obama has been absorbed and transformed into the ability of massive corporations like Kaiser and Cigna to pull funds from the pockets of a now downwardly mobile black middle class, and the black poor are still being pushed into the emergency room health care plan. The privatization of education continues apace and the increasing inequality of the wealth needed for a good education is accelerating under Obama. Black parents are being arrested for lying to get their children a better education than they would otherwise have received. Harvey mentioned nothing about jobs programs (a job fair is not a jobs program) and neither does Obama mention one in any serious way. We shall have to see to what extent Obama pushes to raise taxes on the wealthy, although his allegiance to corporate interests thus far does not make for promising prospects on that count.

The Devil in the Details
But Harvey is also failing to acknowledge a number of things that should lead us to doubt the idea that black folks benefit when issues of poverty are addressed. The first thing he forgets is history. Within the United States alone, we have many historical examples of policies that were ostensibly for the benefit of black people and that marshaled the support of black people but that turned out to be written in such a way that they excluded black people. The devil is always in the details. One such policy is known to us as Jim Crow. A number of historians have remarked how, in the wake of Reconstruction, blacks voted for white populist politicians throughout the South who, upon election, then proceeded to disenfranchise the very blacks whose votes helped assure their victory. Howard Rabinowitz's Jim Crow in the Urban South shows how the collection of policies known as segregation itself was pushed on black people as something that would be of mutual benefit to blacks and whites. (For whites, the benefit was a public sphere largely cleansed of the presence of socially equal black people in schools, hospitals, dining establishments. For blacks the benefit was that they would have access to civil society at all. The sense one gets is that black people faced a genocidal non-choice: "Take these amenities of civil society on the degrading, segregated terms on which they are offered, or don't take them at all." There's that salvage mentality again, and, of course, that's not much of a choice.) Segregation was not what black people believed it would be initially. We are led to think of segregation as purely a function of the force of white supremacy over an outnumbered and outgunned black population. It was that fundamentally, but it was also more than that. Black people actually voted for leaders who turned on them. The "existing system" of which Harvey speaks has been-- and remains-- much more treacherous than Harvey is prepared to admit.

Repeatedly, and in various ways, the USA has attended to its poor while excluding black people, and black leaders have resisted in ways that did not fundamentally call the "existing system" into question. For example, the Social Security Act of 1935 passed Congress by excluding, at the behest of southern legislators, several disproportionately black groups like agricultural and domestic workers. These exclusions remained in place until the 1960s. Another thing that has never really been made right is the exclusion of blacks by trade unions. The Democrats built a coalition based on organized labor, but have never seen fit to make those unions equitable places for the vast majority of black people. In fact, many blacks are, to this day, ambivalent about unions because unions have been ambivalent about or hostile towards blacks. The so-called Treaty of Detroit in the 1950s, the set of agreements that guaranteed union members living wages and benefits and served as the foundation of much of the modern white middle class, won concessions for union workers that were shared only with those blacks who could get union jobs. It wasn't until the federal government stepped in and forced the hiring of blacks, through short-lived policies like affirmative action, that blacks began to share in the concessions that unionism won. And by that time, the late 1970s and early 1980s, unions were being shut down and many whites (even union members!) were voting to severely restrict the scope and force of unions, and capital was withdrawing jobs of any kind (union or not) from predominately black areas.

Pimping
And so it seems we have been here before. Harvey is disingenuous not to acknowledge that Smiley and West are attending to this sense of betrayal that black people feel, even if one thinks that they are also pimping poverty. Pimping black suffering and pushing for black people are both possible and popular pastimes for black leaders, just as it is possible that Harvey has something intelligent to say about black life even as he himself pimps black people's humor (our desperate need to laugh) to buy our allegiance to the state.

In a way, perhaps this incident is a microcosm of the crisis of black leadership-- all too many pimps critiquing each other as pimps-- ambassadors to the lap of white desire, brokers who calibrate the amount of black suffering, without ever really attempting to end it. The finger-pointing internecine Battle Royal for the title of HNIC itself also caters to white genocidal desire.

Harvey needs to be reminded that blackness is not a subset of class. Fitting ourselves into "the existing system" is impossible because blackness is not inside of the existing system; it is its own thing. So just because leaders claim to push policies that advance the interests of the poor does not mean that they are advancing the interests of black people.

Harvey is right that black people should not expect to have a monopoly on Obama's attentions. In fact, we probably shouldn't expect to hear from Obama at all. Obama cannot afford to be seen as too close to us because the rest of America feels so far from us. Obama is not a leader of black people in anything except a symbolic and perhaps an ethical sense. He is a symbol of black people's ability to succeed within a white supremacist paradigm, if and when the nation (or the world) has use for him in such a symbolic role. In this sense, his leadership is to serve as an ethical role model for a certain idea of how black people, and especially black leaders, ought to behave. (This symbolic role-- similar to that of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Clarence Thomas-- is meaningful for some black people, although it really should not give black people nearly the amount of comfort that folk are wont to take from it, cuz it really only means that there is yet another way in which we can remain slaves without chains.)

Obama's function for the USA is different from his function for black people. Obama answers to the USA, and, especially, to capitalist white supremacy. We, on the other hand, are property of the USA, and, especially, of capitalist white supremacy. Harvey is right to say that Obama's hands are tied by his being the leader of the USA. This indeed is the price black people pay for Obama's symbolic value. Once he becomes the symbol of the USA, he cannot be the symbol of black people. Black people can tack some of our own affective investment onto that role that Obama plays for the USA, cheering him on even as his energies are deployed to sap our will to resist a systematic and often subtle genocide, but he's not playing the role for us. He does not answer to us. He will not stop playing the role if we tell him that it is hurting us. And he certainly will not bite the hands that feed him. Black consent is irrelevant not to him specifically but to the USA and its genocidal project. Obama serves on the terms that the USA project needs. He has bigger fish to fry. In Harvey's words, black people, Obama doesn't have "time to sit down with your monkey behind," so "just plug yourself into the already existing system — which ain’t gonna change just ‘cause you want it to." Sounds like The Matrix. In other words, be content with framing your black interests as those of the poor. Don't try to get a black president to assert the interests of black people. After all, as one of the hosts on The Steve Harvey Morning Show says, if he acceded to your demands for a black agenda, even black people would be "disappointed" because that would damage his legitimacy (with white people). You can't win. It's "utterly ridiculous."

Framing the Problem: Toward a Black Agenda
This type of accommodationist thinking is very common in our churches, mosques and other institutions like the world of policy makers and academics. But why should we settle for it? Is this really the best deal we can get? What would it mean to formulate a politics around black people's interests as black people (rather than as poor people), or even simply our consent? This is not to say that black people would be the only politically enfranchised interests. But it is to say that black consent has never been an essential component of the USA, has always been irrelevant to the USA-- except when we have taken to organized campaigns of struggle that have posed the same ontological threat to the USA as it poses to us. The deeper problem Harvey faces is a problem of thought. He is not thinking hard-core. This is also a problem that Smiley and West have: a failure of the kind of radical imagination that was the hallmark of Harriett Tubman, George Jackson, Nat Turner, and Assata Shakur. We have to think beyond what Harvey, Smiley, West, Capehart, and Obama are thinking and want us to think. The grip that the black middle class has on the mantle of black leadership has to be humiliated and ended because they cannot handle the truth of black life and stay black middle class. This critique is not personal. It is structural. Despite their best intentions, the black middle class as such will fail black people every time because its members will always succumb to the salvage mentality that makes them middle class. They will always feel that they have something to lose, and, as long as they do, they are acting as middle-class black leaders, not as black leaders. They will not be fit to lead the kind of revolution that black people need. They cannot be the historical agents of their own liberation.

It is clear that the radical potential of the phrase "All people are created equal" cannot be fulfilled within the current order. And yet how would the political order look if, rather than being written by slaveholders who were appropriating their slaves' complaints for freedom, the founding document of modern nationhood had been written by the slaves themselves? Would the notion of a right to health care as a synonymous with the right to life be such a radical or counterintuitive idea? Would taxation arouse such ire as a forced gift from the "hardworking" to the "undeserving poor"?

Black leaders critiquing themselves could be a healthy thing. When Harvey calls for Smiley and West to explain why they haven't had a poverty tour before Obama's re-election campaign, Harvey could be asking a good question: How do we explain the ongoing structural poverty forced on black folks and the sporadic interest the black middle class takes in truly addressing it? If we explored this question unflinchingly, we might be able to figure out what black life means, and what it would take to change the meaning of blackness and Africa in the modern world. This could be a healthy debate, that is, if it were not being done within such predictable parameters as we see in the Harvey & Capehart versus Smiley & West thing. The teasing and name calling. The remarkable inability to question the role that modern slavery and neoslavery play as one of the premises of black privation. The refusal to think in terms of a slave rebellion and the tendency to think in terms of reforms (however radical or conservative). What Smiley and West share with Harvey, Obama, and others is a desire to fit into the "existing system" without radically interrogating what that system is and why black privation seems to be so central to it. It is called antiblackness. And what is that? A lot more attention needs to be paid to that question, and to why fitting into that "existing system" is impossible for black people. Thinking of the opposite of Harvey's "existing system" is not the same thing as counseling hopelessness. It is thinking of the end of the world, something black people do everyday when we imagine what freedom would be like. And it is something for which we should all find time, before it's too late.

A Primer on "Libidinal Economy" in Relation to Black Folks

NOTE: This will be the first of a series of postings breaking down some key concepts from Frank Wilderson's important book of black political theory and film, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (2010, Duke University Press).

People who are interested in struggle need to understand the "libidinal economy." Coalition politicos like Al Sharpton like to tell us to put the unique experiences of black folks in the backseat to the interests of poor folks more generally. Such politicians expect us to submerge our interests as black people on the assumption that if poor people in general benefit from a political concession, poor black people will share equally in such benefits. Such politicos will continue to ignore the repeated evidence that a lot of nonblack people hate black people, even if doing so costs them money. If someone tells you that the problems black folks face are really just the problems that poor people face, they are telling you to ignore the libidinal economy. They are telling you that the political economy of capitalism is more important than the libidinal economy of antiblack racism.

What is "libidinal economy"?

In Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (2010, Duke University Press), black political theorist Frank Wilderson highlights the distinction between political economy and libidinal economy (p. 9):

Jared Sexton describes libidinal economy as “the economy, or distribution and arrangement, of desire and identification (their condensation and displacement), and the complex relationship between sexuality and the unconscious.” Needless to say, libidinal economy functions variously across scales and is as “objective” as political economy. Importantly, it is linked not only to forms of attraction, affection and alliance, but also to aggression, destruction, and the violence of lethal consumption. He emphasizes that it is “the whole structure of psychic and emotional life,” something more than, but inclusive of or traversed by, what Gramsci and other marxists call a “structure of feeling”; it is “a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias capable of both great mobility and tenacious fixation.”

What does all this mean?

Let's interpret this elaborate definition and get to how it thinks of "economy." When we think of economy, we usually think of something having to do with money. Wilderson uses the term political economy to refer to economy in the ways that we usually think of it: the ways people exchange materials and decide on how things are valued. Economy doesn't just mean the economy in the sense of the stock market or banks, but also any means of determining whether something is worth doing or possessing based on how much capital and labor power it yields. In struggle, we see over and over that money talks and bullshit walks. Economy has to do with what they value moves people to act. Economies are therefore very important to political action.

But can there be an economy that exchanges something other than money or capital? Yes.

To understand "economy" as Wilderson and Sexton use it, we have to think of economy in a more general way as things of all kinds that we can trade or save. You can accumulate not only cash or material items, but also fears and desires.
Certain people accumulate more fear (the black athlete) and desire (the blonde cheerleader) than others.

The term libidinal economy refers to the systems of exchange and valuation for fantasies, desires, fears, aversions, and enjoyment. Economy is about exchange and accumulation. Everyone feels fear and aggression, but where is it directed? The libidinal is about both people's desires, fantasies, and pleasures AND their phobias, fears, and violent consumptions. A libidinal economy has to do with which groups a subject is attracted to, which groups it is willing to form alliances with, and which people it is willing to provide affection to.

Where can we see this libidinal economy? How can we illustrate this distinction?

The libido is the collection of things like phobias and desires that are unconscious and invisible but that have a visible effect on the world, including the money economy. Some examples:

We see libidinal economies at work any time there is a response by state that is out of all proportion to the material effects of any practice they are regulating.

The USA incarcerates three million people, despite the fact that doing so has an adverse impact on US financial security. Hence the libidinal economy of the fear of black and brown people (who together comprise the overwhelming majority of inmates) trumps the political economy of the cost-benefit analysis of maintaining prisons.

Let's take another example of the powder- versus crack-cocaine distinction, in which the same drug is punished differently at the federal level. Because the two drugs are chemically identical, there shouldn't be any distinction between how their use and sale is punished. In 2010, the law made it so that these two drugs were punished the same, although the Obama administration isn't in any hurry to make the abolition of this distinction retroactive so that the mostly black and brown people who are locked up because of it will get released. But the legal abolition of this distinction is not essential for us to look at. What is essential is why that distinction was made in the first place. Wilderson's work suggests that, for civil society, black people pose a threat that has nothing to do with the chemical content or the social and cultural effects of crack. Simply by being associated with black people, crack is seen as 100 times more threatening than is powder cocaine. The financial and social costs of locking all those black and brown people up and the financial and social costs of allowing all those white people to go free and continue to sell does not really matter to civil society. What the powder- versus crack-cocaine distinction shows is the desire to contain the threat that blackness symbolizes. This is the mark of libidinal economy.
Cops, soldiers, firemen are considered sexually desirable because they become the heroes of civil society. The Oscar Grant shooting. Amadou Diallo was a victim of a extreme kind of violence because of the phobias that converged on his body. What is the exchange? Civil society has an anxiety about crime, and crime is always attached to black in urban areas. Police don't have to get a monetary award, but they get the gratitude of civil society. How does this play out in ways that don't have to do strictly with money? The desire for them may not show up in the amount of money they make. Cops get rewarded for their aggression. When the cop slammed dude into the glass at BART. Prison guards, thought of as having the toughest beat on the planet. They get rewarded for being the last line of defense against George Jackson.
Oscar Grant was an accumulation of aggression and phobias. Why are the black people Prince George's County, Maryland, segregated from white people in their same socioeconomic bracket with the same kinds of high-value real estate, and the same kinds of political-economic values? Living around white people has a value that cannot be explained in strictly monetary terms.
AFDC benefited mostly white single mothers, and enjoyed a long history of support from 1936-the 1960s. It initially excluded black people. By the 1960s, when black people started getting it, attitudes changed toward it, making it seem like it was undeserved and a drain on national prosperity, and by 1984, when Ronald Reagan referred to "welfare queens in Cadillacs," it was clear that AFDC was "a black thing." In actual statistical terms, it was still used mostly by white women. But once it became associated with poor black women, it was seen as in need of drastic, radical reforms.

But is this "libidinal economy" really that important?

Frank Wilderson is using the distinction between a money economy and an economy of desire over and over again throughout this book. Wilderson talks about this by talking about the difference between word and deed. This is not the hypocrisy of the system. It IS the logic of the system. So Europeans tried to resolve the lack of labor power by passing laws that reduced homeless white people to the status of slaves. In the end, however, they never really enforced these laws. Wilderson quotes David Eltis, an economic historian, who says that the costs of settling the "new world" would have been significantly reduced if Europeans has simply enslaved other Europeans. But, Wilderson points out, "what Whites would have gained in economic value, they would have lost in symbolic value; and it is the [symbolic value] which structures the libidinal economy of civil society." In other words, the symbolic costs of Europeans enslaving other Europeans would have been too great. Instead, they went to Africa for their slaves, even though the financial cost of doing so was much, much greater.

The radical left doesn't make this distinction. Cornel West and Tavis Smiley say they want to organize a new Poor People's Campaign, but they won't be able to explain why this is a failed project from the start. This is because they won't think about the aspects of coalition building that have nothing to do with money or the lack of money. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the so-called "Reagan Democrats" were poor and working-class white people, many of them in unions, who voted overwhelmingly for Reagan against their own economic interest. The white left mistakenly thinks about the Reagan Democrats as people who were duped. They view them as an example of what Marx called "false consciousness" and they see it as their duty to inform the white poor and working class of why they should vote left. But there were all kinds of signs that white poor and working-class folks simply hated black people and didn't want to live anywhere that there was a large community of black people, even if those black people are of the same or higher socioeconomic status. The Reagan Democrats were excited by Reagan's antiblack rhetoric of law and order, a rhetoric that was in response against the activities of the Black Liberation Army, Weather Underground, Black Panthers, and Black Guerilla Family.

Marxists think a person is in a state of false consciousness if her political or social interests go another way than her material or financial interests. If you adopt this view, then you probably think that the Reagan Democrats just need to be educated correctly about what they have in common with the black poor and working class. You have to think that their hatred of black people is somehow "false" simply because it runs counter to their financial interests. But this would be to ignore their interest in maintaining white supremacy and antiblack racism. One of the things white men would lose would be access to black bodies for sexual pleasure and amusement.

These examples are not just isolated cases of false consciousness, ignorance, media manipulation, or some mystical thing called "prejudice." They are all of those things, but they are also something much, much greater that any student of struggle needs to be aware of. These examples reveal the contours of an economy of desires that is not primarily concerned with money. It's not that the political economy isn't also antiblack. In fact, both economies are antiblack.

A comrade just reminded me of something: Wilderson's idea of libidinal economy has legs. It can be applied to other forms of discourse—like comic books.

letter to a mentor, about mayor bloomberg's plan to aid black and latino men

doc, well, we're agreed that bloomberg isn't doing reparations and that reparations is a non-starter anyway. in my last email i brought reparations up as a sarcastic figure of speech. you are partially right that anyone could make a valid claim for financial and other reparations based on past suffering, but, more to the point, there is no reparation sizable enough to compensate for the "demolished subjectivity" of being the slave of both state and civil society, as black people are worldwide and as native peoples are in various parts of the third world. as fanon says, the best thing that could happen (for the slave) is the end of the world, something that is not on the reparations movement's agenda, as far as i know (they want to preserve the world so that they can own a piece of it), and soros and bloomberg own the world so they don't want it tarnished, much less ended.

but after i said,"I doubt that the plan is intended to help black and latino men study to become political theorists," you replied that "there are no jobs for political theorists anyway."

i disagree. black people need political theorists.

collectively we need to be theorists of the political conditions that put us in the bad situation we are in. so if by "job" you meant "work" in marx's definition-- an activity from which a capitalist can extract profit-- then i agree with you that there are no jobs for political theorists. i think, however, that the state of black life right now derives from a failure on the part of our leaders to correctly do the (usually unpaid) job of theorizing the problem. and so, insofar as black people are being genocided en masse-- most recently by black presidents and executives-- there is a lot of work for political theorists of black life. if we ignore the "help wanted" ads in the news papers and just read the signs all around us, black life is screaming for help from every quarter-- every street corner and hotel room and bedroom and barracks and board room and sanctuary and security housing unit. black people want to be free. and it is going to take all of us correctly theorizing the problem that got us here in the first place. that is job one. and until it happens, none of our actions will move us further along than where we are now. and because they don't want us to really move beyond where we are now in relation to them-- i.e., at their mercy-- neither bloomberg nor soros wants that money to go toward any kind of training of black and brown people's minds that might really change the state of black and brown life.

you are not alone in what you say. many people say that prisoners in the 60s and 70s were reading too much hegel and mao. i, on the other hand, think that reading (and debating) theories of subjectivity is what many radical leaders did right. they were able to organize radical movements precisely because they were able to help people get really engaged in theorizing the politics that underwrote their subjectivities. by beginning to correctly frame the problem, they wrested their self-definitions away from a state and civil society that defined them as criminals from birth, and as a result, in a manner of speaking, they began to aim their guns in the right direction.

it's the same radical potential that you unleashed (in me, at least) when you had us reading the federalist papers closely in your constitutional law course way back when. i think that you understood that if a group of black students could cultivate the tools to make a thorough and critical analysis of liberal humanism and how we are not a part of it, we could also begin to ask not simply "how can *I* [as such] be incorporated into it?" but, more importantly, "why are *WE* [as such] not a part of it?" and, of course, the next question, by implication, is "if we are not part of it, is that exclusion an *inherent* part of capitalist liberal democracy, and, if so, how can we undo capitalist liberal democracy and build something truer to the radically democratic potential to which modern liberal democracy ultimately failed to live up?"

i think i have arrived at an answer to those questions. capitalist liberal democracy will fail to live up to its own radical possibility always.

from my perspective, blacks right now are learning that they can be incorporated individually into liberal democracy. insofar as they distinguish themselves from the mass of other blacks and are useful to liberal democracy's sense of itself as both liberal (in various senses) and democratic, liberal democracy can use them. this is what has directed most of the policies that have been called successes in relation to black folks (desegregation, affirmative action, laws against discrimination). these successes have also been short-lived, easily reversed, and have not generally been widespread in their reach.

but, and this is my big concern, no one who can be called a leader of black people is pushing us to ask the question of why blacks as such cannot be incorporated into capitalist liberal democracy. we now have well over 100 years of civil rights struggle and social policy execution to look back on. those projects have sought precisely to incorporate blacks into liberal democracy. we now know that, even when antiblack racism has proven ruinous in a material economic sense (based on a cost-benefit analysis), capitalist liberal democracy has repeatedly found an affective (emotional) justification for excluding blacks. the sentiment is something like the one that massey and denton noted in a 1985 study of michigan democrats: "not living with blacks is what makes a neighborhood a decent place to live" (quoted in american apartheid, 1993, p. 94).

massey and denton might have done better to attribute this sentiment not just to a focus group but more generally to the ongoing irony of black life. what is this irony? the world is rich with it. take your pick: the funds used to build the modern capitalist liberal democracies of the world derived directly or indirectly from african slavery and the genocidal exploitation of native peoples of the third world; on the founding document of capitalist liberal democracy, the words "all men are created equal" were penned by slaveholders because blacks (unlike women, same-gender-loving people, working-class people, and other subaltern groups) were not (and at some essential level are still not) considered human (and whatever other exclusions were implied in that originating statement of the USA, and other similar statements, there were no other exclusions from the very notion of the human); and no irony quite equals that of hegel, who said that the inhabitants of sub-saharan africa were uniquely outside of history and were not included in the movement of spirit toward its inevitable telos of freedom.

no one who can be called a leader of black folks can really be said to be thinking unflinchingly about what this affective prohibition against incorporating black people really means. what it really means is that liberal democracy cannot live up to its own most radical potential because, while it will find room for women as such (excluding black women), same-gender loving people as such (excluding black same-gender-loving people), and people of various abilities and socioeconomic strata (provided they are not black), it needs black people to signify what is outside. it needs to excrete, abject, and reject blacks. capitalist liberal democracy needs to warehouse and slaughter blacks until we are needed or until we can be replaced by some other, proxy niggers. it needs us to go away. we need leaders who think about these things unflinchingly before they act and ask that we follow them. our leadership right now consists of what my friend has called "race managers," calibrators of black rage, individuals who have been conditionally incorporated, often via programs like those that bloomberg and soros now advocate, into the service of the genocidal structure and who are accountable for the protection of that genocidal structure, not of black freedom.

bloomberg and soros and others will never be able to bear blacks having a place to think such things through and develop ourselves into leaders who analyze these realities unflinchingly and can act accordingly, nor will they ever fund such places. they will fund places for the conditional incorporation of certain black and brown people. that condition is that one prove that she or he can be helpful to capitalist liberal democracy's project of warehousing and killing all but the shining few black and brown folks, who, like themselves, can be incorporated into the genocidal project.

so a $130 million literacy and jobs program is fine and important, but it is no more than the slaves of modernity are owed from billionaires and especially from the government of one of the richest cities on the planet. it is certainly less than any one of the people who will use it is owed, because what slavery and genocide have taken away cannot be given back. i am glad that people will have opportunities. but i know that the ethical sense that motivates this action is more like a police action than a coup.

on fielding a revolutionary offensive

The primary goal is to assemble a power base void of centralized leadership. This is not to say that there won't be leadership roles and leaders who push the agenda forward. The fundamental nature and structure of such community bodies should always reflect the basic mantra "one person can't stop the flow". This is for several reason only two of which i will explore in this communique. First and foremost recent activities within the so-called "movement", on the part of repressive agencies such as FBI and local law enforcement, have illustrated to us the danger of having identifiable leadership. We've seen fist fights lives threatened and guns drawn. All of these dysfunctional a-political acts have contributed to creating an environment in which we are all vulnerable to COINTELPRO neutralization. The confusion is what agents of repression thrive on. If we continue at this rate true revolutionary spirits will find themselves in cages or coffins. This is not only a serious threat to our success as a class engaged in class struggle but a threat to the very lives of those who engage in this struggle. The second phenomena I want to address is this celebrity-ism. There are elements within our struggle who seek to create and manipulate political celebrities. Family members who've lost lives to police violence are routinely targeted by organizations and individuals with opportunistic agendas seeking to feed their egos with fame and underhanded hate speak. Family members of historical political leaders and revolutionaries are targeted as well albeit to a lesser degree. Through theses individuals war is waged on our efforts. The puppet master is often underestimated or down right invisible to the naked eye. Confronting these forces has proved disastrous as well. This fire that's burning in our house must be suffocated. We must not fan the flames or allow it the air it needs to continue. There is a lot of personal beef and hearsay going on in the bay area concerning those involved in this struggle it must end in the most expedient fashion. The legitimacy of an organization should be based on the work they do in a specific place rather than being based one what "celebrity" is in a particular organization. Malcolm X as well as the Republic of New Afrika have outlined for us that any revolution that takes place must be based on and grounded in first and foremost the land which a particular people occupy. We most form collectives and community bodies based on the neighborhoods that we occupy rather than being based on a city or territory defined by the colonial regime. One of my teachers once taught me that to prevail in the game of chess i had to shift my focus from moving and taking the pieces to a broader perspective of controlling the squares on the board. If every piece holds down their square or their field of squares than victory becomes that much more attainable. It's time for us to hold down our squares and stop focusing so much on high profile pieces.

The Post Modern Kitchenette

Well we have officially entered the age of the Post Modern Kitchenette. For Black people migrating to the North from the South during the Great Black Migration the kitchenette came to symbolize the transition from living under the threat of lynching by peckerwoods with guns to living under the threat of murder by the police in the confinement of a single room apartment. While those poor Black folks from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Arkansas, in fact all of the Deep South, took the risk to strike out for the “Promised Land” for a chance at freedom, what the vast majority of them found was the cramped space of the kitchenette.

The kitchenette was most often a single room apartment, similar to what we might call a studio apartment today, however the kitchenette usually only had a hot plate and maybe a food cooler, thus the kitchenette and not kitchen. For the courageous Black folks that had the skill to escape to the North (I say escape because whites would arrest and lynch Blacks attempting to leave the sharecropping plantations) found themselves living sometimes 9 or 10 people to a kitchenette. The kitchenette was little more than a prison cell that people were overcharged for. Black folks in the North didn’t have white people lynching them in the public square, instead they faced a racist apparatus of Civil Society in everything from the hiring boss on the loading dock or business agent at the local union hall to the policeman on his beat. The current economic crisis is making the return to life in the kitchenette inevitable for Black folks.

We may have thought those days had passed, or at least some of us may have, but the economic downturn will do what the White Supremacist of the World have been longing for. And that is to put Niggers in their place. The poverty and oppression associated with kitchenette made it possible to contain Black folks without having to put them all behind prison wall, not that they wouldn’t, but the kitchenette made containment more cost effective.

Some of us have never believed we had made it to anything like freedom. Those of us who worked on construction sites, loading docks, or anywhere that is not part of the official state, knew that in the mind of working class peckerwoods little had changed since the sharecropping era. No matter how much skill and no matter what the law says the rules of the American game are set by the peckerwood. Now once again the peckerwood is on the rise through what Obama is calling a compromise deal on the Debt Ceiling. With this deal we will see not only the continued closing of economic opportunity for Black working class, which is the vast majority of Black folks, but a coming crisis that we never thought possible after the election of a Black President.

The kitchenette is coming for those it hasn’t captured yet. The new economic reality has made it possible to see that type of confinement reemerge. The economy that leaves at least 20% of Black folks unemployed will have most of us living in what can only be called kitchenette conditions. If we are not behind the prison wall then we are captured or waiting to be captured and brought back to a Nigger’s place in the Obama era of US politics. Hard times have been with Black folks ever since we got here, but, in an era when we have lost the collective sense of our struggle we are about to descend to a whole new level of hell.

Let’s remember that we do not have any sort of coherent radical Black movement. We may be working to get one, we may be getting the word out about our oppression and the ways this has come about, but we do not have a movement and we Black folks are not on the move. What we have is East v West funk, North v South funk, and Black people prepared to murder another Black person for the pettiest reason, so some of us, perhaps most of us, have no sense of the hell that is coming when these Tea Party peckerwoods get done beating the anemic white Left and Obama down. It’s time to plan; it’s time to understand that what is at stake is more than has ever been before. The policy that Obama signed into law will leave us in a condition akin to what Belgium did in the Congo or South Africa after Apartheid, we will be blamed for our on destruction and there will be no civilians.

Day Dreaming and I'm Thinking of US

I’ve been reading memoirs of African American men from the 1960’s and 70s, Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown, Soledad Brother by George Jackson, Bad by James Carr, and thinking about the ways so much of the experiences they describe are the same today. It seems as if time is frozen on the one hand and magical on the other. I don’t me magical in the sense that suddenly out of nowhere a savior comes in the form of a benevolent creature and saves us. I mean the sinister magic that makes time repeat, the lived experience of the Black is the same today as it was yesterday, last week, last year, the last century, the last president. I’m reading and watching the ways that Black folks are dying while watching Barack Obama justify policies that will only accelerate the deaths of young and old Black folks and I feel as if I’m caught in a cognitive fog. How can it be that so much trouble is visited on the lives of Black folks and yet I’m watching a Black man sign the death warrants of poor Black folks? I feel a distortion, I feel a distortion in my thinking, my vision is confusing me, I’m focused on the wrong thing, I’m giving too much attention to the death cries of the “Truly Disadvantaged.” I’m telling myself I need to be more pragmatic, I must find a way to put my mind at work on the problem, I need to be helping the Black folks that aren’t in the position of having the education that I do… They must learn new ways. New ways, what would that look like? I must not resist the overwhelming force of a capitalist political economy and find a way to adapt, find a way to freedom in the marketplace… And then I remember that not so long ago my body stood on a block and was exchanged for so many, hogs, bales of cotton, votes, votes? I remember what a political science instructor told my class “No one ever voted themselves free.” No one is going to vote us free? The marketplace is where I’m bought, sold, exchanged for votes. Now the magic is making me repeat the questions of the Black men who came before me, "For where does one run when he's already in the Promised Land?"

Brown, Claude. 1965. Manchild in the promised land New York,: Macmillan. p.8

Quote of the Week #7

To SFPD: Fuck the police.
--black people everywhere

Quote of the Week #6

"People kill me talking about niggers is lazy. Niggers is the most hard-working people in the world. Worked three hundred years for free. And didn't take no lunch hour."
--Holloway in August Wilson's Two Trains Running

Quote of the Week #5

"There cannot be relations of power [as opposed to domination] unless subjects are free. If one were completely at the disposition of the other and became his thing, an object on which he can exercise an infinite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of power. In order to exercise a relation of power, there must be on both sides at least a certain form of liberty."
--Michel Foucault, The Final Foucault (quoted on p. 55 in Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self Making in Nineteenth Century America)

Quote of the Week #4

“They were called the Black Panthers for Self-Defense, and that word ‘self-defense’ is all I needed to hear. It’s what the elders kept telling me. Who’ll defend the black man if he won’t defend himself? The hair stood up on my neck when Bunchy read me a line from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison: ‘Live with your head in the lion’s mouth.’ Bunchy said, “Even better, be the fucking lion!’

Geronimo Pratt

Quote of the Week #3

[Blackness] is the explicit outcome of a politics and thereby available to historic challenge through collective struggle. But it is not simply a description of a political status either, even an oppressed political status, because it functions as if it were a metaphysical property across the longue durée of the premodern, modern, and now postmodern eras. That is to say, the application of the law of racial slavery is pervasive, regardless of variance or permutation in its operation across the better part of a millennium.
-- Jared Sexton, "People-of-Color Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery". Social Text 103. Vol. 28, No. 2. Summer 2010

Quote of the Week #2

This is a photo of Rex Jarrett, member of the Multiracial/Biracial Students Association (MBSA) at University of Maryland, College Park, taken from the New York Times web site. That's right. This brother identifies as "multiracial." You shouldn't refer to him as a mere black, like many of us are. Mr. Jarrett lists his identity as "black/German," thereby justifying his membership in MBSA. I can hear you saying, "That's some bullshit," or maybe that was just me. But maybe we should ask whether this isn't so unreasonable. Lots of us do things to get away from our blackness-- things like buying something we can't really afford because it's something black people don't usually get, ordering fish instead of chicken, not being seen to purchase or eat watermelon, straightening our hair, pursuing a PhD, dating/marrying nonblack people because at some level, we think being with them will make things easier on us. No judgment. Escaping blackness is the only thing that many people have to prove they are alive. And, who knows? Maybe that move away from blackness is really all it takes. Maybe if we all abandoned the category of blackness, the structure of antiblack racism would have no choice but to deal with us "as people." After all, Fanon did say, "Simple enough. One has only not to be a nigger." Maybe it really all just starts with a wack, incongruous mixture like "black/German" appended to one's name. (I say incongruous because "black," which was not an ethno-national identity last time I checked but a racial one, gets paired with "German," which, of course, is an ethno-national identity.) Okay, seriously, though, I'm not doubting that Mr. Jarrett does have German ancestry. Lots of black people do. But that's the point: Why the need to assert oneself as something other than "just" black when blackness is already a category of people of many different ethnicities and genotypes? I mean, really? What might be a good reason to start an organization just so that people can say to each other, as a couple of commenters on the New York Times article said, "I have tan skin, millions of freckles, brownish lips, curly reddish brown hair with reddish/brown eyes with gray flecks and high checkbones. You can't tell what I am except maybe Latina - I've been asked am I Egyptian, Morrocan, Middle Eastern, Palestinian, Tunisian, Lebannese, and the list goes on" or "I am multi-racial/ethnic Austrian/Hungarian/Bohemian/German=dad/Mexican-Spanish-with Moorish influences-SW American Indian=mom. so I have European/N African and Asian-American Indian genetics"? The truth of all that is not reason enough to say it, and I'm not buying those who say that there is nothing suspect about the impulse to do so. There has to be more that's going unsaid, something that shows up in the kinds of slippages in logic that make one identify oneself as "black/German." Hortense Spillers has an idea about this in the Quote of the Week below.

We very much doubt that the fury here is that there are not enough boxes on the census form, or a deficit of classificatory items, or the prohibition to check more than one, or even the thwarted desire to express racial pride, but, rather, the dictates of a muted self-interest that wishes to carve its own material and political successes out of another’s hide. To that degree, these celebratory, otiose gestures are very American!

Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's, Too"
writing critically about the multiracial movement, as discussed in a series by Susan Saulny of the New York Times.

Spillers knows what time it is. People don't get riled up about what to call themselves unless something else beyond mere names is in play. By Saulny's own admission, the multiracial census option only resulted "after years of complaints and lobbying, mostly by white mothers of biracial children who objected to their children being allowed to check only one race." So Spillers is right to say the following in the last few sentences of her article:

Students at Maryland, or anywhere else, for that matter, have every right to freely associate on whatever basis they wish. They may even do so stupidly, but it strikes my mind as the rankest of vanities that in this new century the herald of mixed-race is taking us backward into the latest avatar of the reification of race.

Jared Sexton says it differently:

[Multiracialism's] target is not race per se, since multiracialism is still very much a politics of racial identity..., but rather the categorical sprawl of blackness in particular and the insatiable political demand it presents to a nominally postemancipation society.

"The sprawl of blackness"-- that's what people are really upset about. I wish they would just say that so we could get on with it.

People will call themselves what they want, and what I think doesn't matter. In an ethico-political sense, what matters is how we align ourselves to address the unique constellation of problems that constitute blackness. To that degree, what I am really asking of Rex Jarrett is where he stands when the police start shooting us down in the streets. They already have.

Quote of the Week #1

Note: Quote of the Week is something new for us cosmic hoboes. I will post a new one every week unless others post one before me. And please feel free to post a new quote any time, to explain or not explain the quote, to use pictures or not. My hope is that these quotes will help us to focus or refocus on the ideas that inspire, anger, and challenge us.


That said, check this out:

Conditions [in Mississippi] were so desperate that even NAACP leader Medgar Evers seriously considered the idea of guerrilla warfare in the state. Both Medgar and his brother Charles were deeply impressed with Jomo Kenyatta and the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in 1952. "Talk about nonviolent," Ruby Hurley said of the young Med- gar, "he was anything but non-violent: anything but! And he always wanted to go at it in Mau Mau fashion." In her memoir, For Us, the Living, Medgar's wife Myrlie recalls that "Medgar himself flirted intellectually with the idea of fighting back in the Mississippi Delta. For a time he envisioned a secret black army of Delta Negroes who fought by night to meet oppression and brutality with violence." Evers went well beyond mere fantasies of a Mississippi Mau Mau; he and his brother Charles actually began to stockpile ammunition for a guerrilla war. Their father eventually discovered their plans and quickly put an end to the nascent rebellion. [citation omitted] Now Charlie Sims and the Deacons were preparing to resurrect Medgar's dream of a secret black army in the heart of Klan country.

from The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement by Lance Hill (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 181-182.
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The quote above, along with the book of which it is a part, is interesting to me for a number of reasons. One reason is that it undermines the thesis that what we call the civil rights movement was built fundamentally on nonviolent protest. This is not important solely for academic purposes. It is important because the civil rights movement is the template that many modern movements follow and that most left so-called allies of black freedom struggle urge blacks to follow. The quote disrupts the spiritual glow that surrounds the philosophy of nonviolence as practiced by black leaders. "Nonviolence," says the author, Lance Hill, on page 8, "was ultimately a coalition-based legislative strategy cloaked as religion."

Indeed, most civil rights historiography imagines black civil rights leaders as upright but humble people who "won" by moral suasion, leaders who even dared to urge the biblical proportions of suffering heaped upon their flocks of black people, confident that black people could handle it. Consider Martin Luther King's 1958 statement: "Bomb our homes and threaten our children; send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities and drag us out on some wayside road, beating us half dead, and we will still love you. But we will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer."

The above quote is one of many moments in this book that challenges us to reevaluate the lessons we take from our past heroes. No less a figure than Medgar Evers, often taken as one of the poster boys and martyrs of the nonviolent civil rights movement, knew better than the things that those teaching history--and those using the civil rights movement as a model-- will tell us about him. It is as if the leaders after whom we model our movements led only through force of rhetoric, coalition-based organizing with liberal whites, "faith," and "love." In other words, the dominant historiography would have us believe that by seeming to issue a demand in a way that was nonthreatening to white people, blacks not only won but won the most important civil rights that ushered them into full citizenship. The historiography will tell you that it was violent youth of the mid- to late-1960s, typified by the Black Panther Party, who ruined the color-blind, nonviolent movement for African Americans to gain full citizenship. Convenient as the dominant historical narrative is for those who are dominating, Hill's little-known history points out that something different was going on beneath the surface image of nonviolence.

The national civil rights organizations had to either distance themselves from or turn a blind eye toward local affiliates who responded in kind to daily violence from civil (KKK) and political (police) society. Moreover, when the leaders of the national organizations needed protection, they sometimes relied on elements within their networks of affiliation who were not bound by nonviolence. "During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one visitor to Martin Luther King's home was alarmed to find an 'arsenal' of weapons and discovered that King himself had requested gun permits for his bodyguards. Yet publicly King adamantly opposed any open, organized armed self-defense activity."

The final reason I will share for choosing this quote is that it helps to clarify why violence is not the opposite of the philosophy of nonviolence. The willingness to be violent when needed is the opposite of a philosophic and otiose binding of one's fate (and the fates of one's loved ones) to a single tactic (or, indeed, a religious article of faith) called nonviolence.

Have a good week!

Missing

Just read this.

How are empathetic victims constructed? What attributes about them make them less capable of producing empathy? Why do the few media outlets that mention Phylicia Barnes mention that she is/was an honor student with no history of police problems? Would she be less worth searching for or mourning for if she were not those things?