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.
--------------------

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?

Fela Anikulapo Kuti -- keeping us together

Fela came up in conversation recently. I've added links for you to listen to over time; you can find more on youtube.

I grew up with Fela on the mind-even when army men would point guns and humiliate us, they could not beat Fela out of us. Fela was in contact with revolutionaries in the US, some of whom were Panthers, and was also performing in the '60s.

http://www.fela.net/bio/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usnznJZ0XvA (Fela Kuti on Colonial mentality)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfR3JteUjAQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPIZBcb6hQI&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX_Sk53HUXo&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7IRa9dCyFc&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9S0T0eCdy4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdV1V4vPPLI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4AA6EuZe-k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWgkFRU0uLc&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw6hvabRveg&feature=related

Fela sings some songs in pidgeon english. I've added translation for some words to get the full effect.

'wayo' - he who plays around too much/he who's a shady character/cunning
'nyash' - ass
'quench' - squash
'wan' - want
'dey' - is
'no be' - it is not
'wetin' - what is that?

...

Affirmation by Assata Shakur

Affirmation
by Assata Shakur

I believe in living.
I believe in the spectrum
of Beta days and Gamma people.
I believe in sunshine.
In windmills and waterfalls,
tricycles and rocking chairs.
And i believe that seeds grow into sprouts.
And sprouts grow into trees.
I believe in the magic of the hands.
And in the wisdom of the eyes.
I believe in rain and tears.
And in the blood of infinity.
I believe in life.
And i have seen the death parade
march through the torso of the earth,
sculpting mud bodies in its path.
I have seen the destruction of the daylight,
and seen bloodthirsty maggots
prayed to and saluted.
I have seen the kind become the blind
and the blind become the bind
in one easy lesson.
I have walked on cut glass.
I have eaten crow and blunder bread
and breathed the stench of indifference.
I have been locked by the lawless.
Handcuffed by the haters.
Gagged by the greedy.
And, if i know any thing at all,
it’s that a wall is just a wall
and nothing more at all.
It can be broken down.
I believe in living.
I believe in birth.
I believe in the sweat of love
and in the dire of truth.
And i believe that a lost ship,
steered by tired, seasick sailors,
can still be guided home
to port.

Hegel, Disney, and Parenthood

A colleague was giving a talk the other day on her dissertation project about black people in World's Fairs. She was giving a PowerPoint presentation in which she mentioned how Walt Disney envisioned Epcot in Orlando, Florida, as a "perpetual World's Fair," in the sense of bringing "the world" to one place. She had pictures of herself posing in the different national culture parts of Epcot-- Norway, Mexico, Japan, China, the UK, Canada, etc. Epcot even has outer space represented.

But, my colleague said, there is no part of Epcot for sub-Saharan Africa (although Morocco is represented). For the Africa exhibit, you have to leave Epcot and go to a different Disney theme park. Which one? Animal Kingdom.

She hastened to point out that it wasn't just the animals of Africa that were represented in Animal Kingdom. She was able to watch live performance by some lively African dancers there. Culture, as opposed to animal "instinct," is considered to be one of the defining elements of humanity, even though, of course, many would dispute the assumption that nonhuman animals don't have culture. But even African *culture* was of the Animal Kingdom.

I'm not suggesting that you get up in arms and write a letter to anybody to "fix" this "problem." Rather, I think that this is useful to our analysis of what might be a more fundamental "problem" to be "fixed," if we just observe it and listen to it just as it is. After all, we can imagine what someone might say if Disney purported to represent the world without including national cultures of Europe and Asia-- "Unthinkable!" We can read this omission of Africa not simply as a mistake or a lapse, but as an omission that is *not* unthinkable. In other words, it doesn't throw our thinking about the human world into crisis when we see Africa represented as not being a part of it.

See for yourself:

http://www.wdwinfo.com/maps/epcot.htm

Googling Africa and Epcot online yields several hits, including an "Associated Content" article that gives no sources and tries to explain that this absence owes to the funding structure Disney used (asking countries to foot the bill for their own representation--African countries being, the author suggests, perennially too poor and unstable to represent themselves financially). But, of course, the author doesn't bother explaining why Africa shows up where it does (Animal Kingdom) while the other countries-- and outer space-- show up as nations representative of the human world.

The common sense around Africa, it seems, places it outside of "the world." It's part of the animal kingdom.

Another colleague of mine had this to say:

Think about all the movies about global plagues or the apocalypse. Africans either don't exist in the world or are the source of the plague (i.e. within nature). I recently saw 2010 and Africa entered into the movie as a place for the white nuclear family to go and start over again after global meltdown--no africans in africa, just resources.

Nothing particularly surprising, given that this is Disney/Hollywood we're talking about here. (Tarzan movies: nuff said.)

But when I consider how long Epcot's been around, how popular it is among the tourists all over the world, and the political consciousness in effect at the particular time during which it has been in existence, I wonder how many visitors have questioned this omission, even while enjoying it. Modern parenthood seems like it would afford little time and few incentives for such questioning while in Orlando, considering that the purposes of the trip include the enjoyment of a few moments of vacation away from the dreary 8-to-5 job, the edification and entertainment of children, and living within the budget. Still, how many parents would be up in arms if a teacher explicitly said "the culture of Africa is not of the world of human nations but is, rather, of the Animal Kingdom"?

I just distilled the reading of Epcot's exclusion into a statement of the implicit thinking. Mark how similar that explicit (hypothetical) statement is to this actual one from GWF Hegel, almost 200 years ago:

“At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it—that is in its northern part—belong to the Asiatic or European World.… What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World's History" (GWF Hegel, The Philosophy of History, Introduction).

Hegel's dismissal of Africa in the introduction of his Philosophy of History would be of no real consequence were it simply the stray prejudiced opinion of an otherwise notable thinker and teacher. But I think many of us know (and more of us should know) that Hegel means quite a bit more than that. Philosophy of History-- shorthanded as the dialectic movement in which two competing opposite ideas (or people) clash and the result yields a higher synthesis of the two-- shows up as the scaffolding of diverse people whose work has affected the human condition, from Marxism to the civil rights movement, from Social Darwinists to Paul Wolfowitz (one of the architects of the Iraq war). Would their thinking have been different if they had included Africa? I don't mean if they had included Africa as a case study, per se. I'm asking if the exclusion of Africa and Africans (or the inclusion of Africa as outside of humanity) somehow affects the other side of the equation-- one's ability to think about those who are included. If Toni Morrison was right when she said that the presence of a fabricated idea of Africa and Africans was crucial to the sense of Americanness from which major writers (like Cather, Melville, and Hemingway) wrote, is there any reason to think that fundamental exclusion of Africa as part of the world of human nations doesn't write itself into the things that modern movements, policies, and thinking can take for granted-- let alone how children visiting Disney's "perpetual world's fair" understand the concepts "world,""nation," "humanity," and even (for black children) "family" and "self"? Is the human world defined in opposition to Africa? If not, Africa certainly shows up that way in the modern imaginary quite often.

I would love to know your thoughts or insights, whether you're a parent or a philosopher (professional or not), or both or neither. If you've been to Epcot, do you have different information on this? Has this exclusion ever shown up in clear ways in the talk or behaviors of children you've known (including yourself)? Did you already know this stuff? Do you think it's worth caring about?

Again, I'm not advocating anything or asking people to sign on to anything or contribute money or write letters to Disney. Do that if you want to, but I don't think that it will change the unthought of Africa to which I'm referring. This is just a genuine question.