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

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!