Category: General

I’ve found that people from other parts of the world tend to conflate what is US empire with the people living inside the US. This is not to say that those two things should be thought of separately. Of course they shouldn’t. But when people talk about “America” I don’t think they don’t really know what they are talking about. What people are you talking about? The people who say this are usually people who do not understand the way race operates in any other place besides where they live. Someone recently told me that they don’t care about the ‘cultural’ aspect of colorism, just the ‘political’ as they made a very generalized point about colorism in the US. At this point I knew I had to stop engaging, because this is a person who doesn’t know anything about the way race and blackness has functioned in Amerika. I don’t know about the American left because I don’t consider myself a leftist. I know about black people struggling and resisting in this country, and at every turn, black people have been the ones to make the connections internationally, intercommunally between what US imperialism and colonialism has done and is doing around the world with what has happened and is happening to black people right here at home. Have we had the power to interrupt and destroy that violent empire/structure? No. But to say “Americans vote for imperialists” and this is the reason why folks around the rest of the world have formed no alliances with Americans, as if that is the entire picture of what is happening in this fucked up country irks me. It’s a similar strain of thought I’ve experienced in México where people assume that just because you are from the US, that you are living a good life, when so many black people are incarcerated, in poverty, don’t have stable housing, live paycheck to paycheck, face state violence and repression constantly.

Those people aren’t interested in forming alliances because they aren’t interested at all in freeing black people in their countries or anywhere else.

Starting off Black August, I was thinking of the versus we had the fortune of witnessing earlier this year between Jill Scott and Erykah Badu, and how it rejected any kind of competitiveness under capitalism in lieu of a tidalectic exchange between two black women based in generosity, friendship. I hadn’t seen it yet, but I found currents between this exchange and one that occurred over 50 years ago between Nikki Giovanni and Lena Horne on the wonderful program Black Journal whose episodes were just made public. Giovanni sits opposite of Horne and begins the exchange/conversation with Horne with this poem:

I knew nothing of Lena Horne really, until recently watching Cabin in the Sky with my father. In an essay entitled The Mulatta on Film: From Hollywood to the Mexican Revolution, Cedric Robinson traces the ways in which the figure of the Mulatta, a sexualized threat of race mixture in the intended purity of the white social order surged after the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, until 1919, where she did not appear again until the ’40s. But even as they returned, the threat of their sexuality was “muted,” their Mulatta-ness not figuring into the plot. I was interested in this article and seeing the ways that Horne might engage with colorism and this trope in her exchange with Giovanni, but she sort of only gestures towards it: “I was made to look like someone not me. I was made to look like— I had to learn to sing and I was not allowed to imitate R&B records because they weren’t played very much and I was raised by middle class people who didn’t believe in singing the blues. And I was made to look like Heady Lamar.”

The major power of this exchange between the two for me lay in Horne’s telling of how young people are the ones who radicalized her. She says, “Since Greesnboro, as recent as that, and sit-ins, I was able to flee my establishment— stereotype because young people had freed me. And I think that since I always have been what I am inside that I’ve been able to survive. Because they didn’t really kill anything black in me.”

On Angela Davis, who at the time was still incarcerated she says: “What I’m so afraid of is that this is actually a calculated genocidal move in many instances because the threat— the kind of strength that these young people have, which may not always be comparable to the kind that our ancestors had, is so positive and so fearless that it frightens people and I don’t want to see this continue but sometimes I worry that it’s a concentrated, thought out effort to not have a young generation so strong and so beautiful.”

A hilarious bit has her talking about the time she struck a white man in Los Angeles:

“That probably was the first time I felt less lonely by the isolation that was imposed on me by the very nature of its and definitive isolation from my own people, from white people, this middle thing that I was in, had kept me very much alone spiritually too. And I got insulted, I had frequently done so, guy made me mad and I struck him violently, because I am violent in a way.—“

Giovanni playfully interjects: “You trying to say violence purges the soul?”

“No, he just made me mad and sometimes your madness just mounts into beautiful madness and I struck him and I got tons of mail and letters and telegrams from black people that said, “Hey thank you, how wonderful,” and I said, “My god, I’m not alone!” And that was in the ‘50s. And I had lived a long time without that feeling. And there’s so many young black people now that I see doing things that are revolutionizing me and the world.”

I love the way they look at each other throughout. Watch here.

There was an article published by a South Asian academic that said the following:

“Let it be said clearly: the George Floyd Rebellion is the new criterion to which all theories and politics must be held to account. Not to tenure demands, not to academic journals, not to a community of so-called scholars, but the fire and heat of the proletarian struggle. They must answer to the demands of riots, strikes, occupations, blockades, insurrections, war, and revolution. And in this regard, it must be admitted that the results have so far been a disaster. Black Marxism, Afro-pessimism, Black Anarchism, and Black Feminism have all been put to the test in this uprising, and all have failed. These theories have had little to no meaningful impact on the Black proletariat. ” A man who has flattened black life to shit he’s read in a CLR James book

 

I find this quote reprehensible, vile, disgusting. It reveals the dirty trappings of non-black people (especially academics) who are obsessed with black struggle, or rather, the idea of black people struggling. For this lost writer, one gets the sense that black struggle can only be valid in revolutionary terms by being the Haitian revolution. People like this who are enamored by the idea of black struggle as disharmonious with black life (notice how all of this language pushes towards nothing but the revolution, nothing but the black proletariat; but not black life now and after the revolution, not black people) tire me greatly. It is because this writer does not understand black life and blackness beyond struggle that they conflate the so-called disasters of the black isms they list with the fact that, to think with Kamau Brathwaite and Christina Sharpe, everything that has happened after slavery and the Middle Passage is part of an ongoing catastrophe. So the claim that these isms have failed to provide the black proletariat with anything meaningful, when we are already at the center of catastrophe at every waking moment, is insulting in its confused flattening for the sake of sounding like they know anything about what black proletarians are engaging with. Black feminism for instance has not failed because it does not exist as a fucking teleology. And this is the problem when you try to fit black life into your narrow revolutionary aims. It all has to be teleological, ending with revolution. Which, coming from the author of this quote, speaking for myself as a black proletarian, I want absolutely nothing to do with. As Ashanti Alston writes: “Every time I hear someone talk about my people as if we are just some “working class” or “proletariat” I wanna get as far away from that person or group as possible, anarchist, Marxist, whatever.”

The late Kwame Ture in a talk at Florida International University in Miami in 1992 linked unity to organization and power. He made a clear distinction between mobilization– the general characteristic of the civil rights movement of the 20th century– and organization, which in my view, was what Malcolm X was trying to achieve with the OAAU before his assassination. On the side of mobilization, to paraphrase Ture, you have people who seek to achieve unity in what they are against while on the side of organization, you have people who seek to achieve unity in what they are for. He says, “Unity is not a feeling. Unity is not an emotion. Unity is a means of channeling the energies of the people towards given objectives within principles.” Ture clearly places organization and what he calls a unity of thought (where a unity of action is linked with mobilization) on the top shelf of the vehicle and thrust of revolution, and what so-called revolutionary movements have been lacking. And one could be quite convinced by this argument. By his analysis, what we are now seeing in the George Floyd rebellion is mobilization, unity of action, I would surmise. People unified against the police, against prisons. As “defund the police” struggles to escape liberalization and make the leap to “abolish the police”, at the same time we see all over the country, these spontaneous uprisings, unified actions in which police precincts have burned, stores have been looted, the white and black proletariat unified in action towards what they are against. And they aren’t stopping, they aren’t sitting down. Contrary to how Ture would characterize these mobilizations as spontaneity followed by a fizzling out, they don’t seem to be going anywhere. So there I see a challenge to his analysis. Not to mention, organizations give way to a different kind of power, stymied by a bureaucracy in which nothing, by design can ever be sustained.

I think Ture’s analysis holds up in other ways. Lately I’ve grown disillusioned thinking back on my old self in that I ever thought such a thing as “black and brown unity” was achievable. In the ways that I’ve had this term leveraged against me, I realized over time that this relationship or imagined scenario of unity could never exist, one because it is always a matter of a power imbalance, i.e. one party needing the other to be flattened to fit into their imagined ideas of unity, and two, because a true unity of thought could never exist between black and so-called brown people. I think often of my time in Oaxaca, a state in México where, due in part to its southern location and indigenous population, there are many people who have darker skin than I. And yet, those people, without a shadow of a doubt, know for certain that no matter how dark their skin color is, they are not black, and they will never be black. Women and children laughed at me my entire time in Oaxaca because they knew: I might be a prieto, but at least I’m not a negrito. And I think about these moments of racialization and anti-blackness as a black person who has traveled in Mexico as a way of cautioning me towards the flattening projects of dis(unity) rife within México already: mestizaje namely. Nasty shit it is really, and it spreads to chicanos here in the US, who are some of the most anti-black people I’ve ever met. Black people can have a unity in action with chicanos/Mexican people, sure: against ICE and the violence of the border which incarcerates and kills black and non-black latinx people, against the police, against US colonialism and imperial aggression. But this is where Ture’s words really hit me. What if we were to start thinking about what we were for? Would we find that a black and brown unity were possible or even desirable? The majority of chicanos are FOR Aztlán and some form of cultural nationalism for instance. The majority of Mexicans are FOR the cult of mestizaje, the eugenicist death project of black and indigenous denial. And the unity fucking disappears.

Are we forever trapped in a unity in action? Can this alone be the basis of a revolutionary movement? I fear that this thinking is too binaristic, or worse, dialectical. I fear that without a unity of thought, those contradictions that the communists are always going on about are gonna catch up to everybody, and no one’s gonna know what the fuck to do. It seems that only a unity of thought can happen along class lines. A global proletariat seeking to abolish its proletariat position and overthrow the ruling class. But there is no situation in which class just exists devoid of race. And so unity seems to me a dead-end.

Friend 1: But still it’s clear as hell that we ain’t never seen a revolutionary black nationalism in Amerika.

Friend 2: That’s cause nationalism can’t be revolutionary. It always collapses on itself.

Friend 1: It’s not the nationalism itself that’s revolutionary nigga, but the process. It’s a step towards something more. Just what do you think black nationalism is?

Friend 2: Why have a revolutionary process if you don’t have revolutionary ends? Seems like a lot of niggas dying, for no reason. But niggas be obsessed with the struggle.

Friend 1: ‘Cause of the contradictions of capitalism. You can’t honestly believe everything will be resolved in one fell swoop! And ain’t you always going on about how “nothing ever ends?”

Friend 2: There ain’t never been nobody who worked out the contradictions. Resolving capitalism wouldn’t resolve patriarchy, colorism, transphobia. Look at the independence and national liberation movements in Africa in the 20th century.

Friend 1: You bitin’ off too much nigga. Just cause ain’t no one worked it out yet don’t mean we can’t. Those were revolutionary movements you know, but neocolonialism set in. They cut off the head in the wrong place and the beast grew right back but with black skin.

Friend 2: That’s what I’m saying. You think you killed colonialism and then here comes creepin’ ass neocolonialism. There’s a lot of different kinds of black nationalisms anyway. Historically. So I don’t even know which one you talking about. Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam was working out a deal with the KKK to give blacks their own land once upon a time. And–

Friend 1: You know damn well that ain’t no revolutionary black nationalism.

Friend 2: Sure, sure. But to go back to Africa. I see why they rose up and took back their land. You had settlers coming in from the shores, the people that enslaved folks from your land, inhabiting your land, controlling your resources, plundering the shit out of everything. That makes sense. But Amerika ain’t our land. This land don’t belong to us.

Friend 1: At what point does a piece of land become someone’s?

Friend 2: When you have the necessary power to sustain ownership over that land.

Friend 1: Right. So following that, this ain’t indigenous land anymore. It’s the white man’s land, but if all the niggas rose up, this would be our land.

Friend 2: And what about indigenous people?

Friend 1: So you think after we take this land, we should just give indigenous people some of it? What they ever do for us? You ever seen them niggas out there with us in the streets?

Friend 2: You can’t give what ain’t yours to take.

Friend 1: Tell that to white folks.

Friend 2: As it concerns land, the people indigenous to this land should be the ones doing that revolutionary nationalist shit, and black folks, finding common enemy in white people and US empire, should support that shit any way we can. Plain and simple.

Friend 1: And what happens after they take back their land? They ship us back off to Africa with UPS? So we can be a parasite to the African societies who hates the shit out of our American asses? Or do they allow us to stay here, so we can be ruled by a new antiblack Native regime? You ain’t convincing me much for nothing, nigga.

Friend 2: Nigga, you the one who talked about contradictions.

Friend 1: Yea, you right.

I still believe that the only Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa songs worth listening to at all are the instrumental sections, the parts where their bogus black vocals straining to be simultaneously authentic and pure irony falls away into the gratuitous shredding of guitars or white noise. Lacking the exact word to describe a kind of blackface in voice, not quite vocal minstrelsy, damn sure ain’t homage, or imitation. And I couldn’t stomach reading Clarice Lispector anymore after her short story on a Congolese pygmy woman. Notwithstanding that her rewritings are beauty, it’s not a beautiful beauty. Was disgusted when Roberto Bolaño rendered Fred Hampton’s account of Bobby Seale and Huey Newton putting up stop signs in their community at a dangerous 4 way intersection as the reductive role of “traffic cops” in 2666. But in my experience, white Latin Americans only find unity at last in their utter hatred and envy of Black Americans (and for blacks living in their actual countries, it appears to be nothing but a violent contempt). I cringe every time I read one of those white Commune Editions poets write the word “riot” in a poem. But in college I roomed with a white man who insisted it was the best poetry coming out. And I was forced to go to a reading of their (cult)ural leaders on my campus, only to nearly fall asleep halfway in, wishing I had sat in the last row like always so I could sneak out the back door into the grey air again and away from faux-revolutionary-anti-black-object-renderings-of-riots-in-which-they-might-be-the-first-to-revolutionary-suicide-if-you-really-think-about-it. Remember discovering and falling in love with the music of Joni Mitchell, soft nights in high school with the lights off only to have that supplanted by her phase in the ’70s of thinking herself an actual black man and dressing like a pimp in blackface, lights turned on voraciously. Virginia Woolf playing Ethiopian. Deleuze and Guattari’s Eastern obsessions. Nina Hagen’s African Reggae, Mark E. Smith’s obligatory niggers, Patti Smith’s rock ‘n’ roll nigger, nigger of the universe.

And this is all to say that the writers and artists who the white world, which is the fake ass universal world I now see, ensconced me with in my youth, attempted to fix me to, the ones you and your friends look up to, my former friend, can settle me no longer. So yea, you could say I’m on that shit that Fanon was talking about in the only chapter from Wretched of the Earth people seem to read. It’s ejection city baby. It’s rejection city baby. Big death.

Friend 1: I was thinking recently, my man. Say we recognize these United States of Amerika for one minute. I know, I know, but stay with me. Say we recognize it. If we did, I think “Truth is Marching In” by Albert Ayler should be the national anthem. The Village Vanguard recording of course. Came out in ’67, same year that Trane passed, but he was there for the recording of “Truth.” So in that way it’s ghostly. You know? ‘Cause the first track is for Trane. So he’s there and he’s not there. And the whole fucking conception of this nation which is not a nation but an empire is ghostly anyway, especially when it comes to black folks. Our bodies are here, but our souls are elsewhere. “Truth” speaks or sings specifically to the black American experience under not just capitalism but the entire racial civilization man. We are so intimate with dislocation as it is. That’s a harsh word, maybe fragmentation is better. The way the Ayler brothers keep lingering over that theme which has no business but to just get lost in the salt and the mud of bass, and drums. It represents and (un)presents the history of this nation through the limbs of ghosts. And ghosts are the best singers of all. You know that. New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago, New York, it’s all there. Of them but reaching much further. Under the guise of that bunk ass label the white grammar created: jazz. It’s something beyond jazz, just like we are something beyond any nation. At least, I hope. Best of all, it’s a march, but a march with no destination. ‘Cause “Truth is Marching In,” but in where? You feel me?

Friend 2: Anthems honor the nation and Ayler wasn’t honoring no fucking nation when he played that shit, but okay, let me ask you: what’s the need for a national anthem at all then. 

Friend 1: Yea but what i’m saying is it’s a national anthem which undermines the nation.

Friend 2: A useless play with words which gets us nowhere. Sounds pretty, it really does, but accomplishes nothing. 

Friend 1: Not everything gotta accomplish something nigga. 

Friend 2: Yea, but I’d rather my nothing have nothing to do with the nation.