End-of-the-world Amerikkka is crazy on ice, and far from heaven.And Black people (African Americans, Colored People, Knee-Grows, whatever we are this week) are unfortunately no exception. Americans have long enjoyed our tradition of being the mongrels of the other nations, from the Puritains to the Pilgrims, to the hordes of Europeans and Asians and Latins and latter day (non enslaved) Africans, to everyone else who has come here seeking freedom, money, power, or land. There is nothing wrong with that; it is in fact our strength as a nation, but in the process Americans have not been able to make up our minds whether we wish to assimilate, maintain some national identity left over from 'The Mother' countries, or create some brand new hybrid identity informed by both origins and present circumstances. The more cynical and crazy among us seek in fact to do all three, in turns, or all at once, and on top of it try to sell everybody the dogma of this schizophrenia. On the commercial level this 'marketing' of dogma can be seen on late night television in the form of self help and new identity infomercials wedged between the "Girls Gone Wild" ads and the 900 sex line ads that haunt the insomniacs targeted by the schizos. Short of reading books (since books essentially don't exist anymore in Americans' consciousness), Black Americans rely on bits and pieces of mediated identities that float out of context through the cultural ether. One of those mediated identities is the 'wankster', of XXL Magazine street-cred fare: chav, gangsta, thugg, cooker rollin on 40's, rollin 40's, and sucking down 40's (its the urban trinity of forties: 'wadup doh, my nigga, what you gettin all up in my grill fo? What you frontin fo? Want me to chase yo punk ass home with the chrome? Whassup, Yo? Oh, snap, Dawg, them skeezuhs in yo crib fuh rill. Fo schizzle my nizzle-nigaaa!") Since Snoop Dog has reportedly taken lately to leading Black women around on leashes like pets (or is that slaves?? Damn!), it is perhaps understandable that some young Blacks are reacting to the dire culture of criminal values and thuggery emerging from the Black working class and the Black lumpen proletariat, by re-fashioning a morbidly idealized version of the 'Black Pride" movement of the 60's and 70's. Too often, they naively do so not understanding that the "Black Pride" Movement was about more than Black 'self esteem', but was a small part of a totality of interconnected Black arts, politics, cultural, intellectual, spiritual, and even geopolitical movements ('geopolitical' in the sense that Blacks from King to Malcolm, to Baraka, to Jayne Cortez all recognized our relation to our brothers and sisters in Palestine--Yasir Arafat, Cuba--Che Guevara, Vietnam--Ho Chi Minh, Egypt--Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghana, where WEB DuBois died and where Kwame Nkrumah led the second wave of Pan Africanism). The younger generation also tends to forget, those who still live and walk among us: Xam Wilson Cartier, Gail Jones, Leslie Reese, Vievee Francis, Kofi Natambu, Greg Tate, Lisa Jones (Yeeeuuuh! Leroi's daughter, in-duh-hawsss, dawg!), Quincy Troupe, Calvin Butts, Yusef Komunyakaa, and...well, you get it.As an elder I certainly do not begrudge revitalized cultural nationalist movements, however flat and lacking in scope and complexity they may be, particularly in the face of the culturally bald and fascistic, frightening and nakedly misanthropic cynicism that has emerged from among some young Blacks (50 Cent, and Ja Rule, Snoop Dog, Z-Ro, Ghostface Killuh, rick ross (yeah, I meant to put the name in small letters), TI, Fat Joe, etc.) it is no surprise that young people not well mentored in the political, cultural, economic, and psychological complexities of Black 60's and 70's cultures would reach out to easily accessible and admittedly ubiquitous media misrepresentations of those cultures. All I'm saying is, I refuse to pull my grandfather's dashiki out of the closet and actually wear that ugly shit again, even if the slam poets ARE bringing that ugly shit back in the name of "Afrocentricity". I'll wait for the Nehru Jacket to come back around. I liked the lines and the understated colors better...It takes a long time to actually READ, STUDY and LISTEN TO the giants who created and lived out the culture young folks are now imitating. It takes TIME and WORK to familiarize ones' self with Angela Davis, Ntozake Shange, Caryl Phillips, Rita Dove, the UMBRA writers such as Steve Cannon, Tom Dent, Al Haynes, Lenox Raphael, David Henderson, Norman Pritchard, Lorenzo Thomas, Ishmael Reed, and with Abby Lincoln, Archie Schepp, Baraka, Harold Cruise, Calvin Hernton, Max Roach, Philly Joe Jones, Askia Muhammad Toure, Larry Neal, Ed Bullins, Archie Schepp, Ron Milner, Gil Scott Heron (why was he on that 'race track in France' to begin with, young brothers and sister? Huh?), Sonia Sanchez, Haki Mad buti (I know it's really Maduhbuti, but I like to clown on Don L. Lee/Haki since I saw him in Detroit at Wayne County Community College), Dudley Randall, Clarence Major, Alice Walker (yeah, you do know Alice Walker, but read her BOOKS, young Knee-grows, ALL of them, including "Third Life of Grange Copeland--you ain't read it, you ain't know? Then shut up about Alice Walker--you don't know her, Baby Girl. Don't say you even know "Color Purple" if you ain't read it. READ it--don't just look at the 'movie').Young Blacks who have cleaved to a recycled version of Black cultural nationalism (the corny ass 'slam poetry' and the kinte, and the African names, and Shea butter, and matted, ill kept dreadlocks, and mythologized, inaccurate idealizations of the continent of Africa; the crass, knock-off, African baskets and sculptures adorning their start up apartments full of cowrie shells, and brass objets du Baux-Arts hanging in their windows) do at least provide an alternative to the cultural detritus that fuels these men who tattoo themselves like slaves and go bare chested to show off their slave brands, and wear their pants around their thighs like prison sissies advertising their sexual availability to other men (that's where the pants around your thighs look comes from, you know--prison culture; that, and slavery on the plantation when Black men were not allowed to pull their pants up or walk straight, as a white man would) The resurgence of certain corny, reductive, mediocre cultural nationalist dogmas of the past is twisting the heads off our Black, younger generation like bottle caps. Everywhere is the evidence that young Black folks are crazy, like Lil Kim, or are lonely in their sanity like India Arie ("Better People", Yeah, India!), or isolated in their hope for clarity (Jill Scott), or tortured by self hatred which is not even their own but is recycled from the 1970's.Dig: there is a definite re-emergence of what was in past ages certain Asian types, among some present day lower class (the class I come from, trust me) young Blacks: one of those types is the Mandarin (ghetto fab, gum-popping young Black sisters with long fingernails, stylized, drawn-on eyebrows, heavy makeup, eye shadow speaking a clipped, queer sub language of dropped vowels and sped up locutions that pour out in a half whine--and this is a cultural constant; it can be traced back through several historical epochs, the time of the Chinese Mandarins being only one--elite, lazy, sheltered, and entitled). The other type is the Sumo/Samurai (SOME Black brothers who embrace a mannerist, alienated, overly symbolic body-sense which turns them into shambling, rocking constructs, as if they stand outside of themselves watching themselves walk while walking; stiff, every gesture stylized and symbolic of the performance of hyper-intensified manhood; emotionally distant, emotionally inexpressive, and contemptuous of weakness--such as the weakness of the elderly and of children, neither of whom they feel obligated to protect or nurture).Hey, I don't know. Maybe its just me. Maybe this all comes off as me 'hate-in' on The Youth.One thing I do know is that the ultimate responsibility for the callowness, cruelty, misogyny, and misanthropy of The Youth lies with MY generation (in our forties and fifties) who did not take seriously enough our obligation to pass on knowledge and culture but spent our adult lives CONSUMING and clamoring into the middle class, seeking petty bourgeois identity rather than purpose for our lives. We were the direct inheritors of the generation which led the civil rights movement, desegregated society, made the Voting Rights Act reality, stopped the war in Vietnam, founded the revolutionary black nationalist movements, and created Black feminism. Those phenomenal people were our older brothers and sisters, our mentors, even our teachers---when they were through changing the face and the essence of Amerikkkan Kulture to make it truly American Culture, they settled down to teach in the universities, in the colleges, and in the public schools. Just as a coda to their activities, they created, from the ground up, our modern national network of community colleges, and instituted, through protest and radical political action, the Black studies and ethnic studies programs and departments at universities all over this country in order to institutionalize the change they had struggled and bled, and died for. How's that shit for energy! Talk about "The Greatest Generation"!One of the meanings of the "Heaven" mentioned in the title of this blog entry, one of the many meanings, is the determination lately of White people to claim that there has been some sort of transformation in 'race relations' in Amerikkka because we have elected a left centrist, Israeli Lobby fearing, drag his feet when it coes to prosecuting torturers Black male president. This myth, like all the other myths and lies that drive Amerikkkan Kulture in its last days. Yet we all know certainly (and even self deluding White people know) that the Klan is offering no roses to Michelle Obama anytime soon. In the final stages of the 'big comedown' Amerikkka's psychoses grow, spread, and proliferate like viruses, like fungus. No surprise: we are now a debtor nation, a torture state, a failed democracy (has Al Franken taken that senate seat yet? Or is democracy still in court in Minnesota? And what about Ohio and Florida? Have the Diebolt machines that helped to overturn two elections been eradicated yet from our electoral system?)We are a bankrupt economy of Third World status.Black people are no exception to the rule, and getting back to my original topic, The Black Youth mean well, and Lord knows they have unimaginable demonic forces to contend with (Rush Limbaugh on the one hand and Ghost Face Killuh on the other!) but they often get things bass akwards, partly due to my own generation's venal, selfish failure to put a sufficient amount of our energies into teaching, passing on knowledge, standing up and making noise and risking people not 'liking' us; in short, our utter failure, too many of us anyway, to do all the things the generation before us did as a mater of course. Note an interview of Bobby Seale done by Kam Williams, to be found at http://www.kamwilliams.com/2008_07_01_archive.html:KW: What do you think of the New Black Panthers? Their philosophy strikes me as being totally different from yours.BS: Thumbs down! They hijacked our name. They do not represent what we represent. Our program was about all power to all the people. We had a progressive program… a relevant humanistic program… a true human liberation program. I have no time for the so-called New Black Panthers. We have invited them to three different Black Panther reunions, and every time they act stupider and stupider. I’m tired of them and have not time for them. It’s gotten to the point where we believe that their leadership is nothing but government operatives. They spout stuff that we were not about. The rank-and-file New Black Panthers probably don’t even know this. It’s like a COINTELPRO operation. I think the leadership is working for the government to spout a bunch of black racist remarks and attitudes, saying they support Al-Qaeda and that sort of crap. I’m very skeptical. I feel for the young brothers who don’t know this is what’s happening. They should get out of that group. They act so silly and stupid. For instance, they took that famous picture of me and Huey standing in front of the original Black Panther Party office, and cut my head off and replaced it with Brother Khalid Muhammad’s. In other words, they want to hijack our reunions. They’re arrogant, and I have no time for that. So, I told them, “Don’t talk to me. And don’t try to act bad, just because you’ve got some little pistols under your coats there, because if you jump up in people’s faces here, they will defend themselves.” In fact, I said, “Your damn leadership ain’t nothing but a bunch of CIA a-holes.” That’s what I believe.KW: Yet, I always see some spokesman for them on Fox.BS: Fox News never calls up Bobby Seale to articulate a stance in opposition to right-wing conservatives. To me, giving the New Black Panthers a platform on Fox is a subtle tactic to scare people. As far as I’m concerned, any extremist organization whether it’s Al-Qaeda, the Ku Klux Klan, or any other a-holes who indiscriminately murder and blow-up innocent people, need to be routed out and dealt with. If they claim to be fighting for human liberation, they’re liars, because when you start killing indiscriminately on that level, you have totally stepped outside the civility of what human liberation is all about.Fox News, BET, Puffy Daddy Waddy, Rap Music, Slam Poetry, consumer culture, etc., etc., all these things are an aspect of the fall of Amerikka in the Fin Du Monde Times. The Bible speaks of little boys riding their bikes in the dead of winter, of grown women with two foot tall 'hair-dids' of grown men who look only three feet tall because their shirt tails reach down to their ankles and their pants are where their knees should be. The Bible speaks of The End Times, when old practices are risen from their graves, still stinking of embalming Shea Butter, and visited upon the children of the Fathers who sinned (Black people are once again claiming to be descended from 'Afrikan Queens' and 'Afrikan Kings' when they ought to know damn well that some Afrikans were simple leather chewers and ditch diggers, as has been the case with every other culture in human history that produced both 'kings' and commoners). The Bible speaks of people speaking in tongues, and of a child who will lead the way--50 Cent, perhaps--over the edge and into the oblivion Amerikka has so carefully earned and cultivated and that Black Amerikkkans have helped this country to cultivate by participating in every illegal war of aggression Amerikkka has waged. The Bible speaks of Rap singers roaming the blighted landscape with the chests laid bare for all God's people to see the Mark of the Beast (Death Row Records). Some speak of 'The Silence of God' in these, America's Last Days, but I say you can find rick ross right in there standing next to Kanye West--rick's pants are around his ankles, and Kanye's got on his glasses with the blind-slats on them, both looking straight up biblical. They say God is dead. I say read your Bible, and listen to his silence.I think that's in Deuteronomy.
I was saying to my dear friend Patricia yesterday, as we were reading some comments posts out loud to each other and laughing: "Wonder what Ulysses will have to say?" And the very next comment ("The Furor Over Puffy Daddy Waddy") was you, and you sounded pissed. She said, 'Damn, they done got the Buddha pissed--their stuff MUST be raggedy."
Which is to say, we both respect the hell out of what you write, and I feel okay about this post since you vibe with it, Ulysses, though I am stung--but still laughed at the truth of it--by your comments on the two impresarios, Terry and Wille--
"I have to acknowledge the beneficial contributions of, at the same time I stay angry with people like Terry Blackhawk and Willie W. Williams, who at the same time help us to discover and nurture emerging literary and visual arts talent, then usurp and re-articulate their student's experience or struggle to nudge them towards an outdated rage."
Terry still owes me a copy of a tape she made of a reading I did at the DIA back in 1993, and I was pissed about it for yeras until the sheer weight of age pressed that old plaint out of me--plus, she became my daughter's poetry teacher in the latter few years, and so what can a Brother say? I was pissed similarly at Village Voice for YEARS because of a kill fee they owed me from 1989, but then Greg Tate told me, "forget it--they everybody a kill fee," which he probably doesn't even remember saying because it was so long ago. As for Willie, no comment. I love Willie, but I just can't think of a single thing to say that would outweight the bull'seye you hit with that (smile).
Please keep responding to my writing, Man. As the Republikkkans like to say, 'You really GET it".
Yep. I don't want to be the responsile party for a lot of shit, myself. I keep telling my univrsity employers that when they demand to know why I won't go along with the program on so many things...we can criticize the youth and all, but when we EXPLOIT them that's when Dante dusts off a special circle in hell for us...
How'd you manage to get half of Broadside Press in this one with our post Negritude influenced cultural-ist political jazz artists is amazing to me.
I believe a lot of what is written today should be read aloud, recorded and given some standards based production value, just not by the original writers. If slam / open mic / spoken word were an introduction into literature, instead of people learning to read, write and express themselves at sixteen or twenty six, being a path to monologue performance, it wouldn't be so annoying. I take issue with the immediate gratification principle, of letting the masses play critic. Something just rings of hurling chunks of cheap bread, cheap cakes or cheap thong panties into the cheap seats for masses to enjoy watching their former friends and relatives being dressed up as gladiators and dragged into the arena to be the opening act for the theater.
Sometimes I just want to throw Xerox copies of what I've penned into a room with my e-mail address attached to the paper and wait for a response. We don't know how to critique, because we don't how to articulate our thoughts and we don't want people critiquing our emotional reactions to events or conditions. I have to acknowledge the beneficial contributions of, at the same time I stay angry with people like Terry Blackhawk and Willie W. Williams, who at the same time help us to discover and nurture emerging literary and visual arts talent, then usurp and re-articulate their student's experience or struggle to nudge them towards an outdated rage.
I'm with the Nehru jacket, but warrior / poets (doers) are far too glorious for most of us.
Building a peace and defending it to allow people to construct a culture is abstract.
It's funny, when I wore dredlochs and ran coffee shops on WSU's campus, I challenged a few young men to compare "The Art of War" and "The Prince" to Some Donald Goings books. The comparisons to our pop / sub-culture, victim cum nobleman / marketing icon is so sad. I'm coming to a belief that the underlying statement many of our people are making is: "I know I'm a harlot and if you love me, you'll pimp me or at best keep me in your harem".
Because most of us tend to openly express a desire to contribute little more than entertainments, enforcements of "the rules", [there are a lot of young "black" women, presently seeking careers in law enforcement industries] or to capitalize from the hand to hand trade of someone else's product, talent or flesh for money.
The NBPP is such a sad little joke. I can't imagine them handing out lunches or little books. And that's all I really want them to do. But I find them ready to fight patrons outside the only half way well stocked grocer on West Grand Blvd and refusing to take anyone to or even inform anyone of a place that provides what anyone required and is more to their liking.
"Well if this take away from my spins
which will take away from my ends
then I hope it'll take away from my sins
and bring the day that I'm dream 'bout
next time I'm in the club
everybody screamin' out
Jesus Walk."
-Kanye
Today is the day that barren women are called blessed.
I hoe it's the end of an age and not La Fin du Monde.
I don't want to be in the responsible party for that shit.
https://theblacklist.net/
Comments
Which is to say, we both respect the hell out of what you write, and I feel okay about this post since you vibe with it, Ulysses, though I am stung--but still laughed at the truth of it--by your comments on the two impresarios, Terry and Wille--
"I have to acknowledge the beneficial contributions of, at the same time I stay angry with people like Terry Blackhawk and Willie W. Williams, who at the same time help us to discover and nurture emerging literary and visual arts talent, then usurp and re-articulate their student's experience or struggle to nudge them towards an outdated rage."
Terry still owes me a copy of a tape she made of a reading I did at the DIA back in 1993, and I was pissed about it for yeras until the sheer weight of age pressed that old plaint out of me--plus, she became my daughter's poetry teacher in the latter few years, and so what can a Brother say? I was pissed similarly at Village Voice for YEARS because of a kill fee they owed me from 1989, but then Greg Tate told me, "forget it--they everybody a kill fee," which he probably doesn't even remember saying because it was so long ago. As for Willie, no comment. I love Willie, but I just can't think of a single thing to say that would outweight the bull'seye you hit with that (smile).
Please keep responding to my writing, Man. As the Republikkkans like to say, 'You really GET it".
Yep. I don't want to be the responsile party for a lot of shit, myself. I keep telling my univrsity employers that when they demand to know why I won't go along with the program on so many things...we can criticize the youth and all, but when we EXPLOIT them that's when Dante dusts off a special circle in hell for us...
Peace-in.
R
How'd you manage to get half of Broadside Press in this one with our post Negritude influenced cultural-ist political jazz artists is amazing to me.
I believe a lot of what is written today should be read aloud, recorded and given some standards based production value, just not by the original writers. If slam / open mic / spoken word were an introduction into literature, instead of people learning to read, write and express themselves at sixteen or twenty six, being a path to monologue performance, it wouldn't be so annoying. I take issue with the immediate gratification principle, of letting the masses play critic. Something just rings of hurling chunks of cheap bread, cheap cakes or cheap thong panties into the cheap seats for masses to enjoy watching their former friends and relatives being dressed up as gladiators and dragged into the arena to be the opening act for the theater.
Sometimes I just want to throw Xerox copies of what I've penned into a room with my e-mail address attached to the paper and wait for a response. We don't know how to critique, because we don't how to articulate our thoughts and we don't want people critiquing our emotional reactions to events or conditions. I have to acknowledge the beneficial contributions of, at the same time I stay angry with people like Terry Blackhawk and Willie W. Williams, who at the same time help us to discover and nurture emerging literary and visual arts talent, then usurp and re-articulate their student's experience or struggle to nudge them towards an outdated rage.
I'm with the Nehru jacket, but warrior / poets (doers) are far too glorious for most of us.
Building a peace and defending it to allow people to construct a culture is abstract.
It's funny, when I wore dredlochs and ran coffee shops on WSU's campus, I challenged a few young men to compare "The Art of War" and "The Prince" to Some Donald Goings books. The comparisons to our pop / sub-culture, victim cum nobleman / marketing icon is so sad. I'm coming to a belief that the underlying statement many of our people are making is: "I know I'm a harlot and if you love me, you'll pimp me or at best keep me in your harem".
Because most of us tend to openly express a desire to contribute little more than entertainments, enforcements of "the rules", [there are a lot of young "black" women, presently seeking careers in law enforcement industries] or to capitalize from the hand to hand trade of someone else's product, talent or flesh for money.
The NBPP is such a sad little joke. I can't imagine them handing out lunches or little books. And that's all I really want them to do. But I find them ready to fight patrons outside the only half way well stocked grocer on West Grand Blvd and refusing to take anyone to or even inform anyone of a place that provides what anyone required and is more to their liking.
"Well if this take away from my spins
which will take away from my ends
then I hope it'll take away from my sins
and bring the day that I'm dream 'bout
next time I'm in the club
everybody screamin' out
Jesus Walk."
-Kanye
Today is the day that barren women are called blessed.
I hoe it's the end of an age and not La Fin du Monde.
I don't want to be in the responsible party for that shit.