"Let's Have a Revolution": Yummy and Tupac

CORRECTION: the name of the gang involved in the Robert Sandifer case was Gangster Disciples. The change is reflected below.

"8-year-olds gettin' found with nine-mils..."
--Mos Def, "Mathematics

It's a reminder of how America fails black children on multiple levels. Late August and early September were the anniversaries of two 1994 murders of children by children-- Shavon Dean, 14, and  Robert "Yummy" Sandifer, 11-- in Chicago. Yummy, so called because of his love of snack food, was accused of murdering Dean, an innocent bystander, on August 28, 1994, during a shooting spree that Yummy reportedly did to join a street gang, the Gangster Disciples. Days later, on September 1, Yummy was himself found shot to death, execution style, beneath a Chicago viaduct. Two Gangster Disciplines who had reportedly been harboring Yummy, brothers Cragg Hardaway, 16, and Derrick Hardaway, 14, were later convicted of Yummy's murder.

Shavon Dean

Super Predators and Bell Curves
As many newspapers and magazines noted at the time, the tragedy of a web of murder with children as the only participants demanded attention. It would be a haunting prediction of the unparalleled levels of violence seen in Chicago in recent years. But, as Gregory Caldwell's unpublished dissertation manuscript discusses, the way the media framed Yummy as a pathological figure--someone who can't be saved and must be eradicated-- was, in itself, part of the process of how subjects like Yummy are formed.

Exemplifying the tone of the coverage, the Time magazine issue of September 19, 1994, ran the cover story “Murder in miniature“ with the face of 11-year-old Robert “Yummy” Sandifer staring out from the cover. The title read “The Short,Violent Life of Robert “Yummy” Sandifer, So Young to Kill, SoYoung to Die.” The origin of the photograph is unclear, but it appears to be a mug shot. The corn row hair braiding, dark skin, and emotionally vacant face of the young Sandifer constructs a “miniature” version of the Black “gangsta” that had come to ubiquitously signify youthful Black masculinity by mid the 1990s.

For the writers at Time, “Yummy” was the latest in an ongoing mediated representation of the irredeemable Black, child or adult. Even in childhood, blackness marked “Yummy” as being beyond the power of humanity to (re)form. This is an argument that echoes the rhetoric of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in their infamous assault on the intellectual capabilities of Blacks, The Bell Curve : Intelligence And Class Structure In American Life (Herrnstein and Murray), where they argue that black children lack the cognitive abilities of white children and therefore should be discouraged from reproduction. Being born bad, impossible to socialize, a born menace, Robert “Yummy” Sandifer and children like him posed a special threat to American civil society, according to right-wing social scientists and social critics. By 1995, John J. Dilulio Jr. had developed the thesis of the “Super Predator” in the Weekly Standard article “The Coming Of The Super-Predators”(Dilulio).  

Yummy was used by conservatives to cut the social safety net and replace it with the prison dragnet, and he was used by liberals to point out the need for their social interventions in Black communities. Yummy's short life became a symbol for the pathology of street gangs, but, as Caldwell's analysis says, before we make a symbol of an 11-year-old kid, we should ask what forces shaped him. It matters that Yummy had been abused from a very young age and was likely without adequate adult supervision his entire life. It matters that crack cocaine, a drug introduced to Black communities by agents working on behalf of the US government, had destroyed his family and community. Yummy's life could serve as a reminder to stop pathologizing Black children, to understand how children could be involved in a web of murder that took the innocent life of Shavon Dean, that set Yummy up to never really live the life of a child. Instead, his case goes unremarked. And obviously, the pathologizing continues. Black pathology is the grounding assumption of laws like "stand your ground" and the school-prison connection.

Caldwell shows that even the ways we speak or write about Black children are part of the forces that shape Black children. He reminds us that subjects like Yummy don't just come out of nowhere. They are shaped by specific sets of political, economic, geographic, legal, psychological, and social forces, including the very media that comments on them and makes them out to be "Super Predators" who are born "ready to die."

The Notorious BIG's first album was titled Ready to Die and featured an image of a Black baby in diapers.

Ready to Die
People are all-too ready to say that rap music isn't just a commentary on violence in the community but is part of a "culture of violence" that is largely to blame for that violence. But they are never ready to say that non-Black commentators on Black youths are part of America's culture of violence against Black people.

That's bullshit.

It assumes that Black people have power over the contexts we are shaped in. But if being an oppressed or persecuted group means anything, it means that such power is precisely what we do not have. Consider geography as just one example. We largely live in segregated neighborhoods and food deserts, but it's not because we only want to live around other Black folks just because. These neighborhoods are also largely places of deprivation where we are underserviced by local governments, medical institutions, the private sector, and, especially, schools. And we live there because we don't possess the power to determine who we live and raise our families near. Realtors, developers, planners, and legislators largely shape the geographies in which we negotiate our lives. We make the best out of the scraps we are given. But don't get it twisted: We are given the leftovers after the corporations and circulating desires of white gentrifiers and the police have staked their claims. We live in the narrow spaces that those other sets of white interests do not desire. And these spaces are largely bad for us. They are, in fact, killing us. Ghettos, in and of themselves, are acts of violence against the people who live in them. And Black children largely grow up and live out life in these spaces.

So, when we talk about the criminal activities of Black youths, we are also talking about the contexts in which they are shaped as subjects, contexts over which they have no power, contexts that are aimed at destroying them. And when we pathologize Black youths, we are assisting that genocidal context.

Yummy killed Shavon, and the murder of a Black child must be prevented if Black people are going to survive. When it happens, it must be called out and mourned. And if a community organizes itself around anything, it must organize around threats to the survival of its members. But part of that organizing entails correctly diagnosing the problem. If we focus on Yummy as the source of the problem, we pretend that a Black child is to blame for all the ills of the Black community that set his life on the course to kill another Black child in the first place. And to blame Black youths for the conditions in which they are formed, we would have to ignore the larger structural forces of antiblack racism that make Black communities the kinds of places that produce youths who can murder other Black youths at the age of 11. Not only that, but in blaming Yummy for how he was formed, we would have to become part of the problem of antiblackness. And that is the fundamental problem.

Let's be clear: Blameworthiness is not a feature of childhood for any other group of people except Black people. We don't have to cling to the old notion that children are "innocent"-- whatever that means or ever meant. We just have to acknowledge that no other group is blamed for as many of the problems of life in modern society as Black youths are, even though no group is as powerless in modern society as Black youths are. Non-Black people who blame Black people for the problems we face-- and the Black people who echo them-- need to shut the fuck up because they are part of the problem. They've had their day. They've had hegemonic control over the media surrounding Black youths. You Google "Black youths" and most of what comes up will be about what they, the pathologizers, said about Black youths. And we are where we are largely because their commentary has been part and parcel of the apparatuses arrayed against us. In previous times, they have helped justify the 100-to-1 powder-to-crack cocaine enforcement disparities and mandatory minimums. Who knows what they'll think up next? I'm not even sure they think. Mostly, they just react from an affect of fearfulness toward Black people and Black youths specifically.

We, Black commentators who are students of Black freedom struggle, have to radically reshape our approach to describing the panoply of problems Black youths must confront before they are even born, problems over which they couldn't possibly have control. Caldwell reminds us that we have to develop an ethic for how we talk about Black life. That ethic must be part of our efforts to take back our communities.

"Stop Being Cowards and Let's Have a Revolution"

The larger media narrative routinely places Black youths as the cause of the problems they face. But within the Black community, there are forces at work attempting to reshape these narratives and encourage Black youths to enjoy childhood, educate themselves, and move to the next level the best way they can. There is a way to ethically talk about the problems Black youths face without pathologizing Black youths.

Tupac Shakur was interested in the story of Robert "Yummy" Sandifer. Shakur dedicated his song "Young Niggaz" to Sandifer "And all other lil' young niggas that's in a rush to be gangstas." Tupac hoped to discourage youths from running in the streets like Yummy did, but he did so without giving in to the larger media narrative of Black youth pathology. In 1995, Tupac also did a very significant and underappreciated interview while incarcerated at Clinton prison in New York state in which a large image of Yummy is prominently displayed behind him, seeming to gaze expectantly at Tupac and the viewer, a gaze that, as Caldwell suggests, looks like the "vacant," thousand-yard stare of an adult with post-traumatic stress disorder who is on the verge of exploding. In the interview, Tupac elaborates a larger political vision for how gangs and musicians could help the community: "Now, if we do wanna live the thug life and the gangster life and all of that, okay, so stop being cowards and let's have a revolution" (18:59).

Tupac Shakur with a photo of Robert "Yummy" Sandifer in the background

Tupac is revealing the need to connect our commentaries on Black life to the ethico-political movement to take control of our communities-- that is, to revolution, a real, fundamental change in the social order by any means necessary. "Don't support the phonies, support the real. You know what I'm saying? How can these people be talking about how they so real and they don't care about our communities?" (26:30). We need an ethics of describing Black life that is accountable to Black freedom struggle. Absent that accountability, we are part of the genocidal problem.

signs of incomplete gentrification

The dog poo bags piled up out of the garbage can scream "white people live here, " but the neglect by city services screams "Black people live here."

Assata the Unflinching

Dear President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder,

At the risk of running afoul of the PATRIOT act, we declare that we still love and respect Assata Shakur no matter what you say.

The FBI’s Aaron Ford, head of the Newark (NJ) division, announced the renewed manhunt for Assata.

Assata Shakur

Black people are in a new nadir, and Assata Shakur comes out of a tradition of committed revolutionaries who have resisted the forces that got us there. Assata is truly a political prisoner because, as Eugene Puryear says, “what changed in the recent days and weeks to now put her on the ‘Most Wanted Terrorists’ list? The FBI presented no evidence against her and revealed no terrorist plots. Assata’s real crime, FBI spokesman Aaron Ford said, was that from Cuba she continues to ‘maintain and promote her … ideology’ and ‘provides anti-U.S. government speeches espousing the Black Liberation Army message’—an ideology and message that the U.S. government has declared ‘terrorism.’” In other words, she is suddenly a “terrorist” because she has remained ideologically committed to Black freedom. 

Read more at Assata the Unflinching on The Feminist Wire...

a public service announcement from Professor Dred Scott to the true students of Black liberation

My Friends
Chains are long things.
From your sojourns of today
Until your battle plans of tomorrow
Please remember that blackness
           Travels without
Moving;
it                        crosses borders but
stays in slavery.

Ya got that?
fugitive
don't mean
free

  Plan accordingly.

Thank you.



(c) Omar Ricks 2013

Django: Disciplined and Enslaved

Oh boy. It must be Oscar season. Daily newspapers are publishing profile articles that show the difficult imaginative off-camera work that actors put into big-budget Hollywood productions. That means we can expect a menagerie of the fucked-up fantasies actors have to live out in order to get themselves into character. And in a season with at least two films pertaining to slavery, it would seem that people seeking Oscar buzz are saying too much. And ya know, sometimes I just like to sit back and listen to see what kind of shit comes out of their mouths.

Being Calvin Candie

"[T]he world has more than one way of keeping you a nigger, has evolved more than one way of skinning the cat..."--James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

Kerry Washington and Leonardo DiCaprio have been held up as models of actorly commitment to craft for their recent work in Django Unchained.

For the moment, let's consider DiCaprio, who reportedly cut his hand while the camera was rolling and kept going with the take. Anyone who has studied introductory acting in the USA recognizes this as an example of something that the guru of American realistic acting, Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski, would have called "living the part." It's almost exactly like a moment in Stanislavski's first English translation, An Actor Prepares, when the actor (accidentally) transforms his physical discomfort (the heat from the stage lights, the heaviness of his robes, etc.) and says his lines more truthfully than he did before. "Living the part" was, for Stanislavski, "the highest form of acting," the moment when the actor (the person playing the character) responds to real, genuinely felt impulses and transforms those impulses to do something that serves the goals of the character. It's not that DiCaprio's cut hand substituted for his work in developing the part, but it might have helped him go a little more ballistic and his willingness to just go with it might have helped him reach the ballistic pitch called for in the moment.

In this same vein, then, DiCaprio also let Samuel L. Jackson cuss at him to act more like a slave master because, as Jackson reportedly said about having to endure racism and the repetition of the epithet "nigger," "this is just another Tuesday for us." Jackson reportedly said this to DiCaprio to encourage him to really invest his energies in a role (Calvin Candie) that DiCaprio reportedly found abhorrent to play. Jackson was there for DiCaprio-- and, as film critic Armond White points out, for Quentin Tarentino-- in a way not so different from the way that his character, Stephen, was there for DiCaprio's: getting him to treat Black people like "niggers," and giving DiCaprio the license and support he needed. Imagine a world in which a Black person says to a white person, "Please, pleeease call me 'nigger!'"-- and remember, as Baldwin said, that this can happen in multiple ways-- and you've just thought of what a Black actor goes through on "just another Tuesday" working in a play or film telling the story of Black life and history in slavery. That is, in fact, considered a basic professional courtesy that a generous actor just does if she or he is acting opposite a white person who says things like "Buddy, I’m having a tough time with these words," as DiCaprio reportedly said. It's just what a "good actor" does. And, again, to push Armond White's point just a little further, it's also what a good house slave did. Be sure to notice, of course, that a cut hand is probably not a routine occurrence for DiCaprio, whereas being called "nigger" is such a defining aspect of Black life (circa 1858 and circa 2013) as to be "just another Tuesday" for Jackson.

And then there's Washington, who actually subjected herself to torture to such an extent that she feared for her sanity if the shoot had gone any longer than it did and, as it was, had to take the unusual move of bringing her family to the set just to get through the whole ordeal.

Now, I can't claim any insider knowledge of the Django set (although I invite actors and others to speak up about what goes on). But, speaking as a Black person who has worked professionally as an actor, I can say that Washington's willing subjection to beatings and other forms of torture in preparation for playing Broomhilda are examples of how the professional/artistic ethic of psychologically realist acting works. It is a mode of control that social theorists have called disciplining. We'll say more about that in a moment. Stay tuned...

The Only Good Actor Is a Disciplined Actor

"Being a body that desires to be seen, the black body lives on a fine line between Absence and orchestrated Presence. …Since its problem is that it exists, its efforts to justify its existence always miss their mark."— Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism

Now, I don't give a shit about the outcome of the Oscar race. What I do care about during Oscar season are these kinds of revealing off-camera profiles. Oscar season is a moment when corporate media outlets are spewing these kinds of profiles left and right. Why? Probably because the Oscars are a horse race. No, of course, actors are not horses. The work of actors is much more subjective to judge than simply observing whose nose crossed the finish line first. But observers of the Oscar race are invested in who wins to such a degree that they have little regard for the physical or psychological health or ethical integrity of those doing the work to get the win. People speak less guardedly when at the tracks, and, in the Oscar race, people divulge details about how actors work, showing that most actors do in fact work very hard. A common saying among actors goes, "The worst insult someone can give you is to tell you that you did a good job of acting." That's because acting is supposed to just look like being. If you look like you're acting, you probably need to keep doing (practicing) it until it looks seamlessly like being.

These backstage/off-screen profiles show how much doing goes into being without distracting from the illusion that what happens on screen is "real." Even the master illusionist Hollywood apparatus can afford to share little off-camera peeks at how it "makes the magic." Details that might otherwise be restricted to trade journals show up in the LA Times. Stoking interest in the horse race-- I mean Oscar race-- media outlets encourage us to think about actors as being more than just bodies. They appear as intellectual, learned, inspired, disciplined.

"Good actors" are "disciplined" actors, and for Black actors this rule is no exception. But--and this is a big but-- when you're expected to play a slave-- a nonbeing, a "nigger"-- the stakes of doing the things that help you create a being (a character) are quite different from the stakes that other actors face in building any other kind of character. After all, you are a nonbeing playing a nonbeing and expecting to be recognized as a professional for doing so-- by beings. Gaining that quasi-recognition involves subjecting yourself to modes of discipline because, otherwise, things might get out of control and you might get swallowed up by the role, or perhaps even go all Nat Turnery on that ass.

By "disciplining," I mean that, rather than explicitly punishing you, forcing you, or twisting your arm into doing something as extreme as Washington does, the protocols of professionalism routinely instruct Black actors to do this same type of thing as a model of what it is to be a "good actor." And you can't say anyone put a gun to your head and told you, "Let me whip you and lock you in a box, or else!" if you are the one who asked them "Will you please help me get into this role by calling me a 'nigger' with your mouth and your whip and your chains and your locks and your body language--on camera and off camera?" in the first place.

That's what "disciplining" means in Michel Foucault's sense of the word described in the book Discipline and Punish (1977):

[I]t  dissociates  power from  the  body;  on the  one  hand,  it  turns  it  into  an 'aptitude',  a  'capacity',  which  it  seeks  to  increase;  on the  other hand,  it  reverses the course of the energy,  the  power  that  might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection. (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, NY: Vintage, 1977, p. 138)

In other words, the disciplined worker no longer has to be beaten into doing something as in slavery; when "disciplining" is how power operates, the worker just does it so that she can be "good." She feels it adds something to her, say, a certain skill needed in acting, while at the same time it is subjecting her to the uses of powerful institutions, say, like Hollywood.

To speak of "good acting" is to speak regardless of whether it's "good" for you. And that's where Washington's concerns about her sanity become a way of talking about how our day-to-day lived experiences with disciplining mirror the contours of the antiblack paradigm we live in. I mean, why would Washington need to worry about her grip on reality if she didn't have anxiety about how close slavery is to modern-day black life?

In the backstage/off-camera context, this disciplining often bears more than a passing resemblance to slavery. For example, I once worked on a set of a cop show in Los Angeles. A gang of heavily armed off-duty cops (two white, one black) tortured my character and his partner, both of us Black Jamaican drug dealers, and forced them to drink each other’s urine out of the toilet. Between takes, as the producers decided what to do with us, I stood there and watched the three cop actors plus the white, Asian, and Latino grips, camera ops, and others (a few women but mostly men) pointing at my and my partner’s bodies. And then they did it all over again.

Of course, slave masters and overseers back in the day, like teachers, bosses, and prison guards today, knew the same thing Foucault knew: It is easier to use the slave who self-regulates and is intrinsically motivated to "be good" at something than one who has to be punished and forced into doing everything.

What Foucault didn't quite understand was how very adaptable slavery was. Antiblackness is so powerful that not only can it reconstitute slavery after the Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment as sharecropping, convict leasing, wage slavery, and prison slavery; but it can even extend unique and under-appreciated modes of slavery into the coteries of the Black elites, so that even studied, disciplined, acclaimed actors who graduate from college, speak at the Democratic National Convention and star in an ABC series and drive Range Rovers and have Louis Vuitton clothes can be enjoyed like...well, any old slave. (Remember what Malcolm X said about a Black person with a Ph.D.?)

In Washington's case (as with that of Jackson and Foxx), self-regulation is subjection to torture. For Black actors, our on-camera lives as slaves bear much resemblance to our off-camera lives. That's not because we can't get over it or because everybody goes through the same thing; it's because that's still where we as Black people are-- still getting pushed out of jobs and neighborhoods to make room for white people; still getting sodomized, battered, and shot by those who are supposed to "protect and serve"; still getting blown away by civilian white people who deputize themselves to be our overseers, vigilantes who are getting protected by the police. Being well-spoken graduates of competitive higher learning institutions does not relieve us from the demands that the slave estate has for our bodies-- to brutalize, enjoy, experiment on, and destroy our bodies. Dressing in expensive clothing does not render us safe. Walk on the set; you're a slave. Walk off the set; you're still a slave. Asking someone to subject us to slave treatment almost seems redundant, except that we are expected to do it in the name of being "good actors." Torture and discipline, abjection and professionalism go hand in hand.

Actors are taught in acting classes and directed on sets to see behavior like Washington's not as masochistic but, rather, as something that demonstrates an admirable level of "commitment" to the craft. We are taught to aspire to it. And while I've never been instructed explicitly to do what she did, I've often been told, "You know, the really committed actors are able to get over the painful legacy of slavery, imperialism, and genocide and just do the work. Those are the ones who get jobs. Do you want a job?"

Reality Check

"My pride became my affliction. I found myself imprisoned in the stronghold I had built. The day came when I wished to break my silence and found that I could not speak: the actor could no longer be distinguished from his  role."--Leo Proudhammer in James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968)

Most Black actors playing slaves cannot fly their parents to the set and get themselves mentally back in balance. Many Black actors don't have their parents, or any people who help them get back on balance. Most Black actors will play a slave, then turn around, and hit the temp job or a night shift at the diner, if they even have jobs, where their bosses and coworkers routinely treat them...well, you know...like slaves. Much of Black life isn't really balanced. If it ain't one thing, it's another. All of which is to say that, if we think of slavery as a set of circumstances in which one is defined by an external marker (say, skin color and facial features) and in which one is available to uses that abuse the body and mind for the purposes of other people's gain and pleasure, for most Black people, it is difficult to distinguish day-to-day life from slavery. "This is just another Tuesday for us" indeed.

And that's why Washington's experience and Jackson's reported words, seemingly intended to reveal something about how much they sacrificed for the craft, end up showing something that is much more revealing-- something that perhaps all of us Black folks can relate to: that whether backstage/off-camera or onstage/on camera, the life of the Black actor, like the lives of most Black people, is still unshielded from the violence of slavery. You can replace whips with pink slips. It does not change the position of your Black ass in relation to all others.

So how is it that the reality of "living the part" means losing touch with "reality" for Washington but is "just another Tuesday" for Jackson? Maybe that's a project for a comparative biographer. Several of Washington's other roles display a toughness that really can't be faked, so it's not that she's somehow less able to take it than Jackson. And Jackson, of course, has had weak moments in his life. But maybe both are true. Maybe all of it is that same aporia, the old ambivalence, the unbearable blackness of nonbeing, the oxymoron of "Black life": "Just another Tuesday for us" is enough to drive you clean out of your mind.

Republican National Convention in 105 words

"[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."
--Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Murphy translation)

NAT TURNER & GEORGE JACKSON DAY

George Jackson and Nat Turner both did their thing on this day in 1971 and 1831 respectively.