The Devil and Pat Robertson

"And you know, Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it.

“They were under the heel of the French, uh, you know Napoleon the 3rd and whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the Devil.

“They said, 'We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French.'

“True story.

“And so the Devil said, 'Okay, it's a deal.’

“And, uh, they kicked the French out, you know, with Haitians revolted and got themselves free.

“But ever since they have been cursed by, by one thing after another, desperately poor.

“That island of Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle. On the one side is Haiti on the other side is the Dominican Republican.

“Dominican Republic is, is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etcetera.“Haiti is in desperate poverty.

“Same island.

“They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to God and out of this tragedy I’m optimistic something good may come. But right now we’re helping the suffering people and the suffering is unimaginable.”

The televangelist Pat Robertson is quoted above from a segment of the 700 Club.

Robertson is certainly correct about one thing “…the suffering is unimaginable.” There are some estimates that the death toll could reach 500,000 in this historically marginalized society. If ever there was an example for the need of a broad education Robertson’s comments and those of Rush Limbaugh provide ample evidence. (Please see the links below for their respective comments)

There are so many things incorrect with what Robertson says that it’s not worth the effort to correct the historical record. It is in fact the rhetoric of a cursed race and people that I’m particularly interested in. Sometimes it is not the historical record that I think we should be concerned with because at times those errors can be revised but the underpinning ideologies that construct the narrative, I believe can be much more harmful.

I’m sorry if this gets a little long winded but I feel that Robertson’s comments raise some foundational questions that continue to haunt discussions around race and social justice.

As Robertson has framed it the people of Haiti had committed a fundamental wrong by making a deal with the devil to end their enslavement. And deal with the devil to end the bedevilment of their lives as slaves; I think I would make that deal as well. Now the desire to end your social death seems to me to be so compelling that I don’t understand the critique. The devil of slavery seems pretty damn bad. Taxation without representation was enough to make the former British citizens that colonized America go to war with their former brethren, but slaves’ fighting to end their slavery has to be part of a demonic plan. Robertson exemplifies a problem that continues to affect the collective thinking of the Western world and that it that all are not entitled to the very same social conditions that are taken for granted across advanced industrial nations.

Haiti has remained impoverished ever since the former slaves did what Jefferson and Washington saw as a requirement of subjecthood. They fought to be free and because they were former slaves and remained slaves in the eyes of the United States founders they were not deemed suitable to be free. The most rudimentary research on US foreign policy toward Haiti will reveal and long lasting unwillingness to bring Haiti and their democratically elected leaders into the “family” of nations.

In one sense the Haitians have been cursed, but, for having the audacity to get free. Robertson and Limbaugh make me tired and like Fannie Lou Hamer said “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

No peace to those who call the Haitian’s cursed, when in fact they are the ones pronouncing the curse. No peace to Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh when they sneer at the death of thousands.

Pat Robinson source:http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/01/pat-robertson-blames-earthquake-on-pact-haitians-made-with-satan.html

Rush Limbaugh’s transcript:http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_011310/content/01125106.guest.html

The Biological Question: Medical Science Puzzles Over Impact of Antiblackness on Health

The health care debate is raising a number of questions around race and health-- and biopower/necropower. Many of the assumptions underwriting formations of health and social entitlement programs are founded in a kind of social scientific antiblackness with which we are all too familiar. The same antiblack affect underwrites the irrational crack-versus-powder cocaine disparity, the opposition to federal means-tested transfer policies (like AFDC), and, if we go back far enough, the initial shaping of the federal New Deal entitlement programs-- especially by powerful southern Congressional leaders-- to exclude agricultural and domestic workers, job classifications in which blacks were concentrated.

Also, over the last few decades, biological and genetic arguments have been on the rise to explain "social problems" like student achievement.

Because of a recent conversation with a friend, I have been thinking a bit lately about the relationship between "the biological" and "the social." What is the appeal of such biological and social scientific explanations to discourses on race? Can the sway of "scientific" explanations be attributed to their power to explain and predict effectively? To the extent to which they tap into a certain set of affective structures widely held in civil and political society? What else might explain the adoption of, say, Prof. John D'Iulio's superpredator theory that continues to underwrite laws concerning the incarceration of juveniles? What crisis is induced, if any, when theories like superpredator theory are proven to be bunk?

Here is another breakdown of the explanatory power of both social sciences and medical sciences. Why would college-educated black American women have higher likelihood of low-birth-weight babies than both white high school dropout women (a control for socioeconomic status explanations so popular in the social sciences) AND African immigrant women (a control for the genetic explanations so popular in the medical sciences)?



Source: Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?
http://www.unnaturalcauses.org/resources_video.php?res_id=210 (accessed 8/11/09)

I'm curious about what the waxing influence of genetic and biological explanations in scientific and even humanistic discourse bodes for black bodies and blackened spaces.

First, we should remember Fanon's admonition that it is pointless to seek out what Blackness signifies (as the Negritudists had done then, as the Afrocentrists, cultural nationalists, and canon formationists do now). Attempting to do so is an attempt to engage in what Wilderson calls "the ruse of analogy"-- an analogy with whiteness. And that just won't do for blackness.

By way of illustration, in mathematical terms blackness/Africanness wouldn't be a zero or a negative term on a graph in which whiteness/europeanness was a positive term. (If it was such, Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic would work for Blacks because negation would be conceivable.) Instead, Blackness is a null set. We recall from math that even zero has a place on the graph; here we should think of a baseball player who has been at bat once and struck out during that time at bat-- her/his batting average would be 0. A null set (written as a zero with a crossbar over it) is the absence of positionality on the graph altogether-- as though the baseball player had never even been at bat to begin with.

This is the often-overlooked radical meaning of Fanon's statement:

For not only must the black man [sic] be black; he [sic] must be black in relation to the white man [sic]. Some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man [sic] has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man [sic] (BSWM 110).

In the curious way that social realities reflect back onto math, we should take note that without the concept of the null set, mathematics as we know it would be impossible. The null set in relation to mathematics, like the death-bound subject (to quote janMohamed)-- the black-- in relation to modernity, is a condition of possibility, existing as absence so that Presence may have coherent meaning. "No one knows yet who [the Negro] is," Fanon tells us (BSWM 139). Even the Negro him/herself.

Among those whose psyches are most destabilized by the unknowability of blackness are white folks. In this sense, one could read the scientific tendencies to chart blackness as hegemonic moves to make blackness signify something. The sciences become the final arbiter in chains of signification-- the Name of the Father, what Christianity may once have been.

A Very Touching Story

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/otl/news/story?id=4371874

And my reply, posted on the ESPN site:

Enjoyed this immensely. Cried. Thanks for sharing. Let's not let the narrative suture us into the safe sense that "It is enough to have good friends and a resilient spirit" individually and that massive social transformation does not need to take place. These kids were already positioned by an unethical violence that is so essential, it preceded Dartanyon's birth and Leroy's accident. That most people will forgo a structural explanation for the violence that positioned them in hypersegregated Cleveland ghettoes, schools with 40% graduation rates, near industrial train tracks, and in places where preventable birth disorders (unlike Leber's) go unchecked in the first place will cause them to romanticize what these kids have had to overcome instead of changing this society fundamentally so that more kids don't have to overcome an unethical state of nonbeing. "An edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring," said MLK, and the same is true of a social edifice that placed these kids in zones of death where, by intelligence and toughness-- but also a lot of LUCK-- they survived where others (of perhaps the same intelligence, toughness, and resilience) did not. Neither stories like this, nor the election of a black president, nor yet another Skip Gates miniseries will absolve America of its reliance on the death of black and blackened bodies in zones like that where millions of other Dartanyons and Leroys "live."

The affective connections to black suffering are deadly. With all the overcoming that blacks must do, you would think that a little Hegelian-type recognition would be in the offing. But previous experience suggests, and the best readings of western culture also suggest, that black suffering is actually a source of affective enjoyment among whites, other nonblacks, and (as my own tears suggest) blacks ourselves! Krin Gabbard illustrates this point to some degree in his book Black Magic, in the chapter on all of the "magical Negro" stories that occurred around the turn of the millennium.

"We Don't Even Have A Country": James Baldwin's documentary Take This Hammer

Thank you, to the source on this!

This is James Baldwin illustrating the concept of the (no)space of the black: that San Francisco is no different from Birmingham for the black.

https://diva.sfsu.edu/bundles/187041

And just think, this was in the relatively "hopeful" days before crack. Look at how clean the streets of Hunter's Point/Bayview are! And these brothas standing around looking all baaad while they smoke,...what,...WEED?

Affect/Politic: Mos Def and Dead Prez

A recent conversation with a friend highlighted our different aesthetic tastes for two so-called "conscious" rappers. My friend favors Mos Def. I have nooooo problems with Mos Def, but lately, I have favored Dead Prez.


Here is a summary of my understanding of my friend's concerns about Dead Prez: They are enunciating so much anger that their artistry is suspect. It doesn't really take as much talent or genius to articulate rage as it does to articulate a coherent political message.


I think I know what this friend means about the difference in the political analysis provided by a Mos Def as opposed to Dead Prez. I guess I hadn't really evaluated my reasons for enjoying Dead Prez, and my friend's comments invite me to do that.

I assume that a political analysis of aesthetics has to take account of both the intellectual content (what they say) and the affective structure of articulation (how they say it).

Given that as a framework for our discussion, there is definitely something to be said for an aesthetic that encourages inquiry in the way that Mos Def's music does. Off the top, I think of "New World Water" and "Mathematics" from Black on Both Sides as an example of this. I suppose that what I appreciate most about Dead Prez is their articulation of the affect of the "death-bound subject."

Not that Mos is not doing this; he is. But Mos performs most of his lyrics with that deadpan lyrical style and has something in the beats/cuts/instrumentation (you can tell that I don't have the conceptual vocab to describe clearly my assessment of Mos' hip-hop music theory) that jibes with a structural analysis in the *content* articulated but not in the articulation itself.

With Dead Prez, "it's real hip-hop, and it don't stop til we get the po-po off the block" in "It's Bigger Than Hip-Hop" comes to mind as an example of how the southern style they use articulates the affect at the level of enunciation. This is not to take anything away from Mos. Since I only have one solo album of his (plus Black Star), I don't know his work well enough to do that. I do suspect that his pairing with Bustah Rhymes on "Do It Now" and Talib Kweli elsewhere suggests that he is aware of his aesthetic limitations. (Bustah and Talib *do* articulate the affect I'm talking about at the level of enunciation and work contrapuntally with Mos' "laid-back" more contemplative style.) I'm going to keep thinking about this.

I know, you probably think I'm saying "Mos is too intellectual"-- which I consider to be the most unfair of the aesthetic critiques of so-called "conscious" rap. I don't think that I'm saying that. I think it has something to do with Mos' voice and this mysterious concept from acoustics called "formants"-- the wavelengths that certain singers are able to access and that have some connection to human affect that no one can really explain. It may not be something Mos can do anything about. And I love his work anyway.

Or maybe it's just that I'm from the South. Seriously. Maybe, being from the South, the affect of enunciation is more attuned to the way I'm accustomed to what I consider "authentic." This will have to be explored later, and I may have to revise all of this once I get the new Mos Def and more of Dead Prez.

Percival Everett’s “The Appropriation of Cultures"

Percival Everett’s “The Appropriation of Cultures"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdSy7LOwzHQ [UPDATED LINK]

Give it a listen.

Below are my notes about it.

The best thing that I can say about this trickster folk tale is that i received it from somebody black. That makes it resonate with the conditions under which such tales usually have found their way down through the generations in slave quarters and tenements and board rooms, etc).

On the other hand, the framing of the narrative by what sounds like a white announcer disrupts the liberatory potential of this narrative, and by the time the very nonblack seeming audience voices come in, we are back to this being a command performance for the master. The announcer says "overcome"... so, this is packaged as a narrative of "overcoming" "getting over" "making it"-- what does that mean? what ideologies are bundled with that? what do the artists who (re)created it-- the author and the actor-- mean by it? would they agree with the announcer? Okay, let's face it: I'm immediately on guard. Even if it is going to be read by Reuben Santiago-Hudson, it seems to be that this is an extension not of black culture or being but of what Hortense Spillers called "being for the captor."

The Hero (Daniel)
academic bonafides from Ivy League
excuse me, American Studies-- not African American Studies or Education or Sociology or Performing Arts or a sports scholarship recipient or any of the other narratives that have come to be so unsurprising for blacks in a university setting that they no longer instantly catalyze a state of mass (white) psychic crisis. then again, it's still understandable enough so that it's not something like if he majored in astrophysics or something more esoteric that would cause the whole brow to lift. you can see how black people would be in a field like American Studies that is so close to the humanities and social sciences. it is worthy of remark because it is probably the least radical of the relatively recent interdisciplinary (past 60 years) add-ons to the academic buffet. it is information that tells you something about the kind of character this Daniel is and the nature of the empathy he is formulated to induce/enable.

this is the perfect post-civil rights era negro! he exists in what a smarter person than i might call an asignifying oppositional relation to white expectations-- which is to say, he dances with them, ballroom style so that wherever they are, he is not. his blackness makes him asignifying; kinda like the place-name Hunter's Point, which is "black" until whites no longer want it to signify "black." then they move in. blackness is asignifying: it doesn't mean anything except a positionality in relation to whiteness. [Fanon: "not only must the black man (sic) be black, he (sic) must be black IN RELATION TO the white man (sic)" (my emphasis).] by dancing with white expectations, he doesn't seem to undermine, but rather reproduce, those very expectations. And whites can't thank themselves enough for all the things that he is able to do. They have "given" blacks their freedoms, freedoms for which whites themselves represent the standard. what is "black" in an era when there are no more "colored" fountains in south carolina? it is, as ever, whatever "white" is not. this story is about how this Daniel guy seems to be dodging the white expectations by confronting them. so, is that really "freedom"?

wow, and he's a gifted negro with authenticity: the musical performance. (before Dixie, we hear that he plays jazz standards and old slide tunes; after Dixie, he goes right into 'A' Train). this is the perfect negro, who can do all of these "black" things of which whites feel some delight in partaking, AND at the same time he can also serve as an antidote to the stereotypes that left-thinking white folks desperately WANT to jettison from their psyches but for which they keep finding evidence. whites get tired-- physically tired-- of the cognitive dissonance of saying, "I know they're not all like that," even after seeing how many of "them" ARE "like that." Daniel is already the perfect foil to their stereotypes. Maybe this is why he is loved? He is fetishized. They need him. They devour him and his authentic negro self with their eyes (scopophilia, as David Marriott calls it) and their ears. they seem to be saying, "My southern college-educated whiteness needs legitimation in the face of these old-school, OldeStyle-drinking frat boys. Come on, black man. Do something amazing. Say something amazing. I just LOOOOVE to hear you speak."

I am reminded of Stanley Crouch [ugh] quoting somebody else: (to paraphrase) American virtuosity lies in making the exceptional look easy, and this is one of the Negro's best gifts. sliding back and forth between different forms of command performance qualifies in this story as black freedom. This negro virtuosity is also one of the white's favorite fantasies of the black-- that is, until it causes them to lose "their" homerun title or "their" democratic presidential nomination.

His class status and his unproblematic class relationship with other slaves not only enable him to have some protective hedge against many day-to-day experiences of "racism"; they also save the author the trouble of having to bring up a lot of ways in which Daniel is continuously positioned as object and has not been repositioned by the money he inherited. Daniel's money, in fact, gives the author a wider array of tools to play with in suturing the audience members' empathy. Daniel's money makes it so that the author can crowd out ontological and structural continuities with slavery, because Daniel himself is able to crowd out thinking about them by his possession of an amazing house and classic car-- and, of course, the narrative has to mention all of these things.

It's interesting to see what requires a LOT of contextual explanation, and what requires very little.

The money this 23-year-old possesses is INHERITED. the money's not just his. it was amassed in the generations before his by his southern mother and aunt, who surely grew up before "the signs" came down. (he got this money "the old-fashioned way"-- one of many things that are "classic" or "old-fashioned" about him. To be 23, he's an "old" man which makes him asexual, as far as the story goes, even as he is charming and jazzy. just like the symbolic eunuch, louis armstrong, whose famous high-C's could drive white women literally swooning into traffic without his constituting a threat to white men. santiago-hudson is known for these kinds of roles. no hip-hop necessary. pleasing to the white audience. easy on their ears. if this were costumed, Daniel would for sure have a vestmentary code that was in some way suggestive of this "old-fashioned" quality about him.) the fact of this inherited money, of course, plays that aforementioned legitimizing function so that whites can pat themselves on the back for the things blacks did both with and in spite of them. Imagine that: "black entitlement" (oxymoron??)-- and no intervention of the state behind it!

but that is not my point here. my point here is that this information-- the inherited money-- needs to be mentioned and explained. it would not be believed if it were just flashed before us. a nigger with money? a 23-year-old nigger with money? a 23-year-old nigger in the eastern seaboard states (y'know, the ones that track Interstates 85 and 95, those major distribution routes for drugs coming from miami) who drives a fancy car, no less? it would require contextualization in order to be legible in the ways the author intended for purposes of empathy building. The story would not be able to move forward without this explanation.

Here's an example on the flipside. The performer's (Santiago-Hudson's) vocal selections of Dixie try to give us a taste of how Daniel must have sounded, but they don't give us a whole lot of information, they just give us a taste. almost a tease. In the very effective storytelling strategy of "leaving em wantin' more," we are left to simply *imagine* the power of the black voice, and the author and performer/director allow for the taste that we have gotten to be enough. The author doesn't spend too much time/space on this. It is known, it is a common literary trope: Niggers can sing. Unlike the supposition we are asked to make that a young nigger can have honest money and not work, we can accept a singing nigger a priori without much explanation and move on with the story.

Wow. I wonder about how strong the black presence was in the actor's audience as he performed this. hm.

This is a work of black authorial/performative fantasy-- and the fantasies are WHITE! the author frames racism as the preserve of a handful of grotesque frat boys, and poor whites, with maybe a few liberal southern white pecadilloes like the pat on the back sprinkled in for authenticity and liberal awareness that there are still some faux-pas that happen from time to time and that it's best to just ignore or play along with them and move on.

This is also part of the story's suture; it hails the audience's desire to do violence toward "those racists" and to relate to this perfect negro, whom they desire to see do well in the world; he, of course, has to be perfect in his harmless pranksterism. If he were at all angry, I wouldn't be hearing this story right now.

"Daniel didn't too much care for the slaps on the back, but he didn't focus too much energy on that"--

how interesting that the author felt the need to mention this! he would probably frame this as an example of "ignorant behavior"

it's not that this "ignorant behavior" merits no thought or energy; the author didn't say that.

the author does say that Daniel "DIDN'T" devote a lot of attention to "that"

but the author evades any meditation on whether Daniel COULD have focused "energy on that." after all, Daniel is in the Lion's Den. black rage is excised from the story because it would also very likely have found no use and no auditors in the bar that Daniel is in; but also and more essentially (especially to Daniel himself) because the regime of gratuitous violence that civil and political society can make manifest instantly on Daniel's black ass is so tremendous that Daniel is in essence forced to perform a white fantasy of the cool black jazz cat who can take the pats on the back and go back to performing for them.

claiming southern soil-- recognizing land as his-- MY ASS!!! black folk in the south don't even map certain parts of the south onto their geographies.

"gimme back my flag" he says to Pickett in his dream

vocality on Barb, Irmo-- hard rhoticity ("r" sound)-- what is the actor doing here?

"I called about the truck" he answers when travis first answers the door-- something about how his voice "darkens" here, loses some of its resonance, implying that Daniel is at least playing along with, if not completely acknowledging, the power dynamic

"He and Sara walked across the yard, got into the pickup, and waved to Travis and Barb, who were still standing in Daniel's yard as they drove away. Sara was on the verge of hysterics by the time they were out of sight. 'That was beautiful!!' she said. 'No,' Daniel said softly. 'No. That was true.'"

Curious passage. Daniel and the author both seem to be disavowing the regimes of violence that forced him and Sara to perform until "they were out of sight"

Slavery and Social Death says a lot that exposes this story as being, at best, a whimsical fantasy of how to "overcome" slave positionality, and, at worst, an enabling fantasy of civil and political society's regimes of gratuitous violence. It continues a policy narrative that the goal is to create more Daniels-- educated and castrated eunuch slaves-- to do the work of making whites feel good about themselves and helping them administer their empire.

In a sense, you can always destabilize the standard white narratives of blackness by altering its performance. Diahann Caroll and Sidney Poitier, among others, made careers of this.This is not the same thing as repositioning oneself as nonblack/Human.

This is a classic trickster narrative (Anansi, Brer Rabbit, High John the Conqueror) of the black outsmarting the Master/White. And the ubiquity of these narratives has never freed black folk.

He's still performing for the whites even in coercing them through mechanisms of class

The massive act of denial required to sing Dixie and buy a truck with the confederate flag-- i think that this is a recognizable behavior to many middle-class blacks who signify by feigning ignorance as a kind of ploy when the stakes are relatively low.

There is something dishonest about the title. Appropriating culture doesn't seem to quite fit. I mean, it's an ironic story and it's definitely an ironic title, since of course, "black culture" is usually the thing that is appropriated. But it falls kind of falls flat. I'm not sure why.

"When Whiteness Attacks," a Sister Blog from Out of Town, to Crash on Couch

About a year ago (2008), when I was first getting back into the blogging thing, I started a blog called "When Whiteness Attacks," a sort of "reality blog" about the real-life moments in which "white [i.e., nonblack] speech" manifests its primal desires (accumulation and murder) in relation to black bodies and spaces. I only squeezed out a couple of posts before reality crashed in. Maybe it was the recession and not being able to find a job. Anyway, I have since decided to let that blog crash on the couch of this blog until it gets on its feet. So I invite you to go to the bottom of this page, click on "Older Posts," and check out those couple of posts.

One post is a brief note of praise for the movie Manderlay, which we will, I hope, get to talk about. Consider this a preview.

The other post is a close reading of the bodily codes of reporters in a news segment from Charlotte, North Carolina. The news segment is embedded in the blog, thanks to youtube, so you can watch for yourself.

As always, comments/critiques/discussion/recommended readings greatly encouraged!

Enjoy!