Rap of Blackpatch

Friend 1: I don’t really like what you’ve been saying about Mexicans. We are racialized. We are not white. You can’t just assign US based categories of classification to whole cultures. That’s some academic shit.

Friend 2: What’s your race then? You look white to me.

Friend 1: It’s not just about looking white. I have full Indigenous blood. I don’t have a single European ancestor. When people like you say Mexicans are white, it erases our Indigenous ancestors and culture. You’re no better than the colonizers.

Friend 2: Having Indigenous blood as you say and are so proud of, was not the pure and stable category in New Spain/Mexico that you think it is. Indigenous blood, and specifically the Mexica past was mythologized and exploited by Criollos and Penisulares and eventually consecrated through the project of mestizaje. Indigenous blood was considered weak but at the same time it could be redeemed because of this perceived weakness. Unlike Black blood which could never been redeemed. The mythos of the noble Indigenous past of the Mexica was used to secure cacicazgos, and was a legacy that Criollos used to ensure superiority over Penisulares. The African past was and is forever condemned and feared, and offered zero access to any status or humanity in New Spain/Mexico. To be frank, you sound more like the colonizers, with your obsession of purity of blood.

Friend 1: You can’t compare what happened 400 years ago with what is happening today. I’m not white. I’m Indigenous.

Friend 2: Okay. What ties do you have to any Indigenous community. You’re Mexica right? How are you contributing to the survival of the Mexica people. Besides mythologized ritualistic dancing?

Friend 1: …

Friend 2: When you go to Mexico, do they recognize you as Indigenous? Call you slurs? Are you denied access to institutions?

Friend 1: I’ve never been to Mexico. I–

Friend 2: Get out of my face you antiblack pretendian.

Follow @zacate.zacate on Instagram for more context destroying chicanismo and nonblacks

https://www.blackagendareport.com/two-black-martyrs-mothers-confront-black-lives-matter

All ‘Black Lives Matters’ has done is created a Philosopher’s Legacy, a cache of funds built on the fame of black death that is unavailable not only to the families whose members have been martyred, not only to the communities that have been ravaged by white supremacists and police, but also to, as Glen Ford points out (and which harkens back to Malcolm X’s comments about how all protests do is create more dead and incarcerated) to the countless political prisoners who have never been included in the movement in large. All Black Lives Matter has done is allowed a select few grifters and clout chasers to get rich and cozy up to power, mirroring the Amerikan state’s tactics of putting down slave revolt, of black uprising, of black liberation. Samaria Rice shows us the way in part by requiring that these betrayers be held accountable and answer the question: what is black liberation? Because it certainly is not ‘Black Lives Matter.’

There is indeed much discursive colonialism (a term learned from Katherine McKittrick– On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place + Dear Science and other Stories) happening on Twitter and Instagram especially. I think I first became aware of this phenomenon happening with pages like Working Class History, a page which, for me, does nothing more than showcase a “collection of wretched bodies.” These pages prop themselves up as omniscient because they are telling History (emphasis on capital H History) in a register that is supposed to run contradictory to the history books, to the state renderings of what has actually happened in this world. This is supposed History able to stand on its own. We of course see this in infographics too, the hundreds of pages on Instagram which do nothing more than describe, describe, describe. McKittrick reminds us that description is not liberation. No, not even when we are using the stories of those who fought for liberation. The trend is that these pages hasten to provide analysis (because analysis can only be found in a book? a published article? a twitter thread? –just speculation–). I also speculate that they do not analyze because they are invested in protecting or sheathing their ideological lenses. Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, The Left, The Working Class. These people try to conceal this because it would disrupt the purity of History, but they just end up reifying it anyway. The people who run these kinds of pages can’t NOT attach themselves to something. And the attachment to those lenses does nothing but, to think with McKittrick once more, provide arenas for “descriptive rehearsal”, as opposed to reaction to the material that is actually happening in the world, resistance, and pushing back against shit.

I say death to these pages. Death to black life being reduced only to black struggle to then be reified by The Working Class and The Left History that whites and nonblacks must tell to feel important. Death to it all.

Unfortunately, the majority of visible “radical” space and place in Southern California is dominated by the Chicanx communities and their seemingly all consuming legacies. Why is this unfortunate you might ask? Because the Chicanx identity, this hyper-manufactured faux political identity which rests on anti-blackness, positions itself in the center of cities like Los Angeles and San Diego, sucking up specifically black culture, symbols, icons, aesthetics for its own project. Like all relationships to blackness, it is an exploitative one. Now you may say, well of course blkpatch, blackness and black culture is the fuel that keeps mass culture churning along on the endless death drive forward. Every nonblack community uses black culture to prop up their specific “revolutionary” aims. Why not just let them be and keep it moving? But it is not just this with these Chicanx people down here in Southern California. It is especially the ways that they force ideas of “black and brown unity” where it does not, cannot empirically or theoretically exist. They do this, it is my theory, because they want to cover their asses when black people start coming for them (which has largely not happened down here because the majority of black people don’t give a shit about these cultural nationalist, culture vultures, as is their right). Black people do not fight the same fight as Chicanx people. Brown lives do not matter (because such a thing as a “brown life” does not exist of course, it is only there as an ideological prop because nonblack people self reify themselves into an advantageous position away from antiblackness and white supremacy out of shame and guilt and defense), and the majority of Chicanx pride and history is inseparable from the ongoingness of antiblackness. Let us examine a few places.

Here’s an example of antiblackness that has become so commonplace that pushing back against it will surely get you into heat. But blkpatch, you don’t think brown is beautiful? I surely don’t. “Brown is beautiful” can only exist because Black is Beautiful did that work in the ’60s through the non-static movements of black consciousness, black power, black nationalism and the work of the Black Panther Party. Any variation on that then is just a denigration of blackness. And black people actually moved beyond phrases like this (not the liberals), because for one, not everything that is black is beautiful or worth celebrating (the historical cases of neocolonialism after liberation struggles in Africa, neoliberals every fucking where etc. etc.), and it can easily be recuperated as we see it still is today, in phrases such as “Black Excellence. Can “Brown is beautiful,” and other cringe inducing phrases like “Brown Pride” ever go through such an interrogation as this? Of course not, because the identity of “brown” has no stakes, has no unifying principle. Brown functions as a catch all for everyone not white and not black. The minute one starts to interrogate it, it just falls apart completely. But hey, pay $30 dollars for a shirt which doesn’t acknowledge these legacies in any way.

Here of course is the defensive argument that every Chicanx person will leverage against you when you begin interrogating them about the antiblackness of their chosen identity. Chicanx pride is built on shame, guilt and envy for the struggle of black people, especially in the United States (because we know they don’t care about what happens in MX). Because of this, they must position themselves as equal to black people. They long for a struggle with no end, they long to be recognized as fruit pickers just like black people were cotton pickers. They want a slave revolt too, so badly. They want the equation to be 1:1. This speaks generally to much of the disposition of nonblack Mexican people and the ways that their nationalism has had to compete with US nationalism. They position themselves as a downtrodden people, stomped on by their neighbors to the North who (in the Chicanx imaginary) stole their Mexican land. They have to get back what is theirs. They have to overthrow the white US settlers and establish Aztlan or reestablish Mexico or who the fuck knows what they mean at this point. The black power fist becomes theirs, all struggle becomes attainable, endless, conquerable. Don’t worry about the black and indigenous people in Mexico though, who have it the worst.

We don’t know which people are being liberated in Mexico and Palestine, it is certainly not the black people. But all the struggles are the same. Free them all and the specific contradictions and struggles facing black people will magically resolve themselves. Black people for Brown liberation, hurrah! In all of these collectives present in San Diego you’ll find black people tokenized and used for modeling. Another defense. “We have black people in our collective, don’t erase their struggle.” One black person to represent us all. One black person to address “antiblackness in our communities.”

Evoke Dilla and Madlib. Nonblack crate diggers of the world. Wear your dreadlocks and play reggae which is a music of black freedom flying towards the destruction of Babylon. But it’s alright because you make a few instagram posts about how black people are the innovators of all the music you share and play exclusively in your breweries in your hood. Cause y’all are hoodrats. But the only hood you rep is Barrio Logan. Don’t see many niggas down there. But yea, our struggles are the same. Chicanx people showed up to a BLM protest. They are absolved of all critique.

I really wouldn’t give a shit about this if these Chicanx people just stayed in their hood and talked about being brown. But it’s the moment they start profiting off black struggle under the guise of fighting a common enemy that I have to push back. And as a nigga on the warpath, who has gone down to their sanctuary in San Diego (Chicano Park) with my ride or die and verbally battled these reactionaries, I can back my shit up. And if y’all reading this and want to do some verbal war again, I ain’t hiding. Just send me an invite on the gram.

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The saddest thing about reading Soledad Brother is how George Jackson recognizes that his father, Lester, is incapable of escaping the (both forced and accepted) downtrodden position of the black man, aspirations of a petit-bourgeois life, and his reification into the roles of provider and concurrent assimilation within Amerikan empire; but the way that this gets articulated and expressed is through the violent oppression of the black women in his life. While we don’t have access to the letters that his mother, Georgia Jackson wrote, only his responses to her, we can clearly see that she pushes back against his misogyny many times, and at certain times her analysis seems so full of clarity that George Jackson has to pause and acknowledge the places that she is right. But still he falls on trying to relate to his father for whom it is too late to reach, and this is the saddest thing of all. And why does he want to relate to his father so badly? Because he is a black man, like himself, and they have an opportunity to break with the positions that seem inescapable and passed down through the generations of black men in their family so that someone like his brother, Jonathan Jackson, could have a clear understanding of what it is to be a black man. But of course, this emphasis on the plight of the black man is near sighted and it is reflected in many of the errors of black revolutionary groups in the United States.

The ways that patriarchy swallows up the voices of those who have the views and clarity that could lead black people away from the Amerikan nuclear family, patriarchy, and so many of our ills is trying. And how those ideas of family get represented in who the so-called revolutionary leaders were of that time. All men, and if not men, then lightskin black women who fall into the same reactionary views as the men. What is even more fucked up to me though, is that in his correspondence with Fay Stender, a Jewish white woman who is his lawyer, Jackson seems to convey to and with her more respect on an intellectual level than with the closest black women in his life. He tells her such tender things, but more importantly, she seems to fill the a certain role left absent by his father, and that black women could never even have the possibility to fill. His letters to Stender lay out his most explicitly political views. We don’t see him, in the text, get as deep with anyone as he does with Stender (perhaps Angela Davis is a distant second). He creates a position of alienation with his family members early in the letters, referring to them as “you people” often, and calling his father a friend. The tenderness and confidence he has in his political clarity becomes expressed mainly through a white woman in this text. It’s sad to me.

Jackson then reveals the limits of the so called “black man’s revolution.”It’s time to surface the voices of black men. We have too many reactionary views that we refuse to try and break down, and which are clearly visible if you actually read the works of Jackson, Huey Newton, Frantz Fanon, Bobby Seale– every revolutionary black man. It’s everywhere in their works, and we have to learn from them or we will forever be lost. If what it means to be a black man is to get ours first, to speak over black non men: count me out.

*note: this is only based off the text of Soledad Brother. that is not the entirety of Jackson’s political being and words.

I’m currently reading George Jackson’s Soledad Brother and by way of coincidental study, a friend sent me this talk with Joy James: https://youtu.be/z9rvRsWKDx0. Joy James delivers some truth on the relationship between Jackson and the radical academic Angela Davis during that time. How the death of George Jackson really marked the end of that pursuit of revolutionary struggle and everything got commodified into reform and other sinister movements. Now, that on its own is extremely interesting to me obviously. But what was also interesting was her mention of Fay Stender, the radical Jewish Berkeley born lawyer who defended Huey Newton and George Jackson.

James asserts that Stender heavily edited the letters included in Jackson’s Soledad Brother, which, really pisses me off because these are already letters which underwent surveillance, destruction, editing, censorship through the state. But as James notes, Stender edited these letters to sanitize the words and images of Jackson so that white liberals (of which she would later be revealed to move into) could more easily digest him and all of his black rage.

So I did some light searching on Stender and found this extremely anti-black article on Stender and the night that a former black convict, and alleged member of Jackson’s Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) Edward Brooks entered Stender’s house, put a gun to her head and forced her to admit that she had betrayed Jackson, and then shot her six times. Stender pressed charges obviously (or maybe not obviously for a former radical lawyer whose focus was the black radical incarcerated) and Brooks went back to prison where he was murdered many years later. Stender, paralyzed from the waist down, had a breakdown, moved to Hong Kong, further left behind the prison analysis in favor of other political lines, and took her own life a year later.

Now, this story to me rang many, many ironies. How is it that a white radical lawyer who turned her back on specifically black incarcerated people could have been all that surprised that black anger came knocking on her door? The same black anger that she sanitized in Soledad Brother came knocking with a gun in an attempt to take her life. The fact that she worked so hard to see this black man locked away in prison without ever probably thinking about why he was motivated TO take her life (the anti-black article asserts, erroneously, that the BGF had no politics, but they were allegedly targeting movement lawyers), might be the greatest irony of all and a clear representation of so-called white radicals. White radicals are able to divest and give up on slaves when they are burnt out, while the slave continues to die in prison. So that when Jackson requests of Stender to smuggle weapons into the prison for his survival, she can refuse and keep it moving. White radicals are able to change their political lines. For the slave there is but one political line. And it is hardly line, but a force weighing down on us at every breath.

Stender served an important purpose, necessary at that time: to be a lawyer for these high profile black revolutionaries. But what does it say about the white radical’s desire to take up that position?  I feel like reading Assata really demonstrates the limits and uselessness of lawyers in many cases. Stender simply performed a job to the best of her abilities, and that was it. Or so she thought.

• Chick Corea died recently. He’s not someone who sang to me, so I won’t remember him there, but his playing alongside Keith Jarrett in Miles’ early ’70s electric groups is still killer with him on the electric piano and Jarrett on the organ. His science is Morton Subotnick, Henry Cowell shit. RIP.
• This is the last time I’ll mention this film, but yea it was pretty disheartening to Eddie Gale, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, The Watts Prophets all used in JATBM. I think criticisms of jazz snobbery or gatekeeping in this instance are unfounded. Because when those of us try to share this music online, it’s usually crickets. And when we try to share the history of Eddie Gale coming up through the legend Kenny Dorham and his following space chords and the teachings of the master Sun Ra in his Arkestra, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s circular breathing, and the invisible whip, and the tone connecting us to the ancestors, no one wants to listen to that. But now their sounds are used as backdrop to a film which used revolution as representation. And for those of us who on Youtube (yes some of us still do), we will have to be saturated with that genesis of discovery.
• Starting a listening project where I’m going through the entirety of the Strata-East discography. I’m so excited. If anyone reading this wants to join, let me know.
• I do think it’s interesting how people who claim to be marxists have no interest in actually examining their material conditions dialectically. But this is especially the case when it comes to non-black latinx types, mainly chicanos. They refuse to recognize that the material conditions have changed and that it’s no longer a matter of ‘chicano/indigenous or you’ve let the colonizer win.’ It was never a matter of that in my view, but I wasn’t around in the ’60s so perhaps that myth had a stronger foothold then. More people are recognizing the ways that the racialization of the Mexican identity is fraught with antagonistic contradictions, and is imploding upon itself in its supposed difference/sameness from whiteness/white supremacy/colonization.

Sing Mccoy Tyner, logs weighting heavy in the marsh/ Sing Kamau Brathwaite, volcano mesh its carbon thrust into oxygen/ Sing Giuseppi Logan, bird on benches applause in the downtrodden twilight/ Sing Toots Hibbert, brake of the automobile congregation in the ghettos/ Sing Milford Graves/ deep skin of the drum stretch/ Sing Eddie Gale, spaceship hovering over the brownstone/ Sing Bill Withers, butter dissolve in the grits grey/ Sing Manu Dibango, purple hibiscus rise high in the flower fields/ Sing Metal Faced Villain, eternal internal astral rhyming/Sing Cándido Camero, fingers traced in the water’s ripple/ Sing Stanley Cowell, one note holds all the notes …..