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.

Black Codes in Brown

Damn. Should I be showing up on the daily to support the hunger strikers in front of California Hall who are protesting the Arizona law and demanding that University of California take a stance on it and acknowledge the connection it has to who gets laid off from the job? I always forget that I can't just represent myself in a rarefied antiblack environment like academia. I represent probably 25 or 30 thousand niggas. In fact, I go up every day because I keep hearing black people around here talking about dropping out, talking about not feeling like their work in academia is "doing" anything. So, as the percentage of black people goes down, those of us who remain are left to take the heat for what more and more black people say and do. Time was when I was just three fifths-- now I'm damn near 33,000-- oops, there goes another-- 35,000.



"We could all be Latino"-- "What makes someone profilable?"

"Employers choose the people whom they will pay the least."

"How do we work together?"

"'We did this [civil rights activism] and we don't want you getting none of ours.'"

Hm. Nobody is really asking what "Latino" means, and what "black" means. If Jared Sexton's Amalgamation Schemes is to be believed, "Latino" is essentially an antiblack container of various phenotypic blends of settlers, Indians, and slaves.

"Forge alliances"

"In Mexico we're very racist. People of dark color... are not considered as good as white."
This is very helpful to hear from one of the Latina panelists, and it confirms Tanya Hernandez's observations in an insightful 2007 column in the LA Times.

"The whole creation of whiteness...the idea of whiteness was created to justify slavery."
hmm... we need to split certain hairs here

going to the restroom after a nice lunch

17 April 2010
7:15pm

Dear Mr. Davies,
I am a regular diner at the Crossroads Cafeteria, and I have always been treated with respect by the staff. At least 3 times a week, I find it a great place to study and eat. I am writing to tell you of an incident--apparently not the first-- that has forever soured me about this cafeteria and Cal Dining.
At approximately 1220 today, I was walking to use the restroom. I had finished my meal, dropped off my dishes in the dish room, and, to avoid the Cal-Day crowd of students and visiting families amassing at the exit, opted to go out of the dish room the way I had come in since there were no people entering the dish room at that moment.
I was walking up the stairs on my way to the restroom when Mr. David Campos, one of the managers, walked speedily up the ramp adjacent to the stairs, confronted me on the stairs, and, without asking any questions, said that he had seen me enter the cafeteria illegally. He demanded that I go stand in line or else he was calling the police. He seemed so certain of what he (thought that he) had seen that at first I didn't even think he was talking to me. I have often seen Mr. Campos around the cafeteria and attempted to say hello to him, and initially didn't figure him for one who would treat me with any disrespect. Also, because of the noise and the commotion of my fellow diners, I had not actually heard his question (a witness I talked with later confirmed for me that Mr. Campos had said, "Sir, you have to stand in line or else leave."). Giving Mr. Campos the benefit of the doubt, I asked him to repeat what he was asking me. He then gestured to the door and told me to just leave or he was going to call the police. I tried to calm the situation by asking him if he had me confused with someone else. I told him that I was just trying to go to the restroom. I told him calmly that I had already eaten. Each time he interrupted me before I could explain to him that I was there entirely legally. I tried one more time to signal gently to him that I was just going to the restroom. He blocked my path, pulled out his phone, and began dialing. I assumed that he was indeed dialing the police.
Even if he was not actually calling the police, I realized that he was clearly trying to intimidate me out of the cafeteria. I was more or less paralyzed as to my options. How do you reason with an unreasonable person who wields his authority wildly-- who goes from zero to calling-the-police with blinding speed-- and all in front of families who are forming their first impressions of Cal Dining? To make such a scene out of an uncertain--and ultimately wrong-- accusation struck me as the work of an irrational person. At that moment, it dawned on me that I was one of very few African American diners. It seemed to me, based on similar treatment I have endured in other places, that Mr. Campos had singled me out to be treated like a criminal, refused to hear me out, and proceeded to initiate my contact with the criminal justice system, based on little, if any (and wholly incorrect) evidence, because of my race. This is what ultimately made me decide that I had to take action. If I had been able to reason with Mr. Campos, even after those initial accusations, you wouldn't be reading this complaint. In a matter of nanoseconds he had threatened me with arrest, and inside of 20 seconds, he had begun the process of trying to have me arrested. Inside of 20 seconds, I had gone from being someone who has never had a problem with this cafeteria to someone will never come here again without thinking of how I was humiliated in front of people I know and how I almost got arrested for taking the most direct route I could find to the restroom. I don't think this is any kind of way to treat anyone-- an employee, co-worker, intern, or customer.
What saved me from Mr. Campos' imaginative accusation was that I remembered that my card had been scanned when I entered. I assumed that even if the greeter didn't remember my face, I might at least be able to get some kind of receipt to prove that I had paid. I told him I would go ask the greeter to prove that she had scanned my card. I pulled out my wallet, flashed the card his direction, and then began to go toward the greeter whom I hoped would treat me with even a modicum more of respect than Mr. Campos had. Mr. Campos saw my card. He put his phone away as quickly as he had drawn it. He walked away without apologizing to me in any way.
I decided I was not about to be intimidated out of a cafeteria that has until now been one of my favorite places. After finally being allowed to use the restroom, I informed Michael Laux of the incident, and he said he would address the situation. He gave me his card. I don't know if you have heard about this from other students before, but I understand that this is not the first time this has happened with Mr. Campos. I am writing to you to ask why this kind of behavior is apparently being tolerated, to inform you of this incident, and to ask what action you intend to take to make sure this doesn't happen again. Is this the behavior of an individual, or is such behavior actually systemically tolerated or even encouraged? I am going to be at UC Berkeley for at least another 4 years. There are lots of places I could spend my money for good food and a place to do some of my schoolwork. I do not intend to eat at a place where I have to be worried about being treated like a criminal. I am certainly prepared to adjust my dining environments in accordance with this need, as would any self-respecting individual.
Mr. Davies, you need to understand that Mr. Campos was totally out of control and not professional in his handling of this incident in any way. I'm sure that your managers must have advised him before now that a professional would have approached a customer of whom he was suspicious while remaining aware that (a) he might be wrong and (b) there are other customers around. Accusations risk alienating not only the customer one accuses but all the customers who can hear-- especially when threats of calling the police are being thrown about wildly. A professional might also have asked if a suspicious customer could prove that she or he had entered legally. After such proof was provided, a professional would issue a sincere apology. Of course, everyone, even a professional, makes occasional mistakes. At the least, Mr. Campos’s professionalism should have impelled him to issue even a small apology. That Mr. Campos was unapologetic is very telling about the kind of conduct Cal Dining tolerates from its managers. Mr. Campos's behavior was less like that of a professional and more like that of a predator or a prison guard. He pounced without thinking about the consequences of his behavior. Indeed, I consider such behavior unacceptable but unsurprising in a prison guard, but unacceptable and very surprising in a Cal Dining cafeteria manager. I sincerely hope that you will take immediate action to address this apparently repetitive problem.
Respectfully yours

An email unsent to a friend

This is an email that has been sitting in my Drafts box for months now. I ended up not sending it in response to my friend because I didn't want to damage our friendship.

We are in the privileged position in academia to think about blackness as a site of ontological negation, whereas other black people do not do so or cannot afford to do so except in really candid moments. What dynamics does this privilege and this disparity, combined with the particular project of researching antiblackness, introduce into relationships? How do we deal with the conservative and analogizing impulses on which friendship is built? Self acceptance is both a refusal to radically challenge certain elements of the status quo in oneself AND also fundamentally necessary to forming any relationship with other people. Analogic impulses are essential to empathy, but, with whom can we identify absent these impulses? Black folks? There are very few of us in academia, and I venture to say that many are not into viewing themselves as fungible objects.

Anyway, I'm sharing this response to a friend-- a response I never sent. I thought it might be helpful to think through how the labor of thinking about blackness as a site of ontological negation threatens, deepens, frames, reverses, interrupts the personal politics of friendships, relationships, and family.

In response to:
XXXXXXXXXXXX@XXXXXXXXXXX.XXXXXX wrote:
> Please view and distribute widely.
> http://vimeo.com/3658572
>
>> I decided to forward this video. It is something all young people of today
>> should see. They have no idea what the past and the struggles of the past
>> were all about. Just watch this, please....it is so full of the truth!
>> Feel free to pass along to those you think can help us make a difference in
>> our community as well as could benefit from this.



Hey, my friend.
hmm...thought provoking video. Many reactions to it. Thank you for sharing it.

I'm not sure I'd show it to young people I used to teach in LA schools, however, because it still ends up blaming black people-- in this case, for not taking individual responsibility for being close enough to Jesus. That's not what I want my students to learn, and yet that is implicitly how it explains our present condition. It's what Pat Robertson did when he said that Haitians are dying by the tens of thousands because they "signed a pact to the devil" in order to win the Haitian Revolution in 1804. (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pat+robertson+on+haiti&search_type=&aq=f)

Also, as a historian, I'm bothered by its early use of images of dreadlocked Jesus as the way that Africans "always had their god." Christianity was one of the modes through which blacks were made to "hate their black souls" and aspire to be white. It writes African animist faiths and Islam wholly out of the picture (not that those faiths weren't/aren't antiblack). But Christianity has been/is particularly antiblack and has consciously and unconsciously encouraged us to be so as well by depicting Satan as a "Dark Lord," even as it has acknowledged the error of explicitly depicting Jesus as Aryan.

(Check this article out: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/health/16skin.html?pagewanted=all)

Finally, there's so much that is right about the analysis that this sets up. It's great that it critiques the ways blacks have adopted the various names (especially "nigger" and "nigga") we have been given and have accepted. Basketball and the hip-hop industry, and the crabs-in-a-barrel mentality in the classroom and even the critique of gross materialism-- these are all on point.

But its "Lord of Darkness" has his timeline wrong. Black use of the term "nigger" to refer to other blacks is not a new thing, nor is it wholly separate from our acceptance of the other names we have accepted (like Ricks) or from the ways we are continually remade as black when white people do what they do. In other words, the history this filmmaker asks us to teach our children says that in the beginning, there were Africans who were kings and queens, then there was slavery when white people abused black people who stood meekly by, and then, somewhere around Richard Pryor's time, whites stopped doing it and black people took over and started doing it to themselves. Blacks today, for this filmmaker, are simply damaged goods who are doing it to themselves and the damage has been done. It is not done. The damaging continues. This very video participates in that damaging.

In line with the neoliberal doctrines that take oppression out of context (history, politics, etc) and place it squarely on the shoulders of the individual (as if that was how the oppression got there in the first place), this video operates schizophrenically by at once acknowledging that America was the devil's idea (the BEST part of this video, near the beginning) and then saying that blacks' blaming of whites and environment is counterproductive. Huh?

While it's true that blame is not a sustainable strategy, it is also true that no black politics can begin without acknowledging frankly and painfully the ways that whiteness and blackness remain linked as a damaging relationship. That is, in fact, all that they are. What would whiteness be if blackness wasn't a position of degradation? Whiteness is not a culture by any definition I know. Conversely, what would blackness be if whiteness wasn't a position of value and life? Blacks have many cultures-- southern US, Haitian, French, Ethiopian, Ghanaian, etc.

It's a bit too forgiving of the ways white power and antiblackness continues to operate. What it should do is work to politicize the people it calls degraded. It's not doing that.

on the Position Harnessed to Death (PhD)

a white woman in alabama
a harvard phd
bio
logist
just killed three other phds
two of them black

was there a
"racist motive"?

i don'tpretendtoknow
i pretendidon'tknow

i learn this yesterday
where i am now?
i have washed ashore
a hotel vista
where crashing waves against mansion-topped bluffs
ease seamlessly with the soaring shrill of mcdonnell-douglas f14 fighter jets

an academic wine party where "borders"
can only mean ports, bridges, and fences
things negated when performed
no one speaks of borders to richmond california
precious few tell of the blacks of mexico


Does anybody in the academy want to hear my "black shit"
being piled higher and deeper in a dissertation?

Is a Ph.D. going to render me any safer from
the bullets that I magnetize anyway,
whether from a brotha who's watching me
get out my car
whose too-much interest hungering from somewhere behind his eyes
i somehow recognize, although i've never lived in poverty?
or the cop who pulls me over on my bike
on suspicion of
car theft?

i don't know

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