Armed With the Truth, We Are More Able to Fight!

The inferiority of black people is a lie manufactured by white people whose success is dependent on the subordination of blacks. This is the stark truth Derrick Bell presents in Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Rather than consider the injustice that all are subject to, Bell argues black people  are scapegoated and fixated upon, so that whites who have failed to rise to stature might have a subordinate class to  condemn and feel superior to. The mechanisms  of America are predicated upon these lies and as Bell reveals, it will never change. Bell uses the decline of black civil rights, the increase of unemployment and the phantom, not easily discernable racism that is operative in the United States hiring practices as evidence of his theory. He argues that black people will always see this mercurial pattern of progress and regression  because, “ blacks are objects of barter for those who while profiting from our existence, deny our humanity” (Bell, 11).  Consequently, black people will only profit from policy f it behooves whites people and when it does not, the rights of black people will be trampled upon.

Circumstances seem bleak as unemployment in the black community continues to rise and opportunities for progress become increasingly slim. Black existence and black life hang dangerously at the will of white advancement. Such a system must villianize the subjects it seeks to oppress for the psychological distance necessary to continue such injustice. Bell’s lifting of the white psychology that made slavery possible is chilling, yet even more chilling is his assertion, that this history must be a constant reminder of what white people are capable of.  Bluntly stated, white people in America are willing to deny the humanity of black people so that they might be considered righteous. This psychology puts into context the heinous shooting of Oscar Grant and the subsequent slap on the wrist given to the police officer that shot him. In a world  dependent on Black subordination and the criminalization of black people to maintain this subordination, white men will always be given the benefit of the doubt when transgressing upon a black man because black people are not entitled to rights, not even the right to life.  In these hopeless circumstances what is a black person to do?

We can find a new place to live, as the blacks of the potential refuge of Afrolantica wanted to do? We can live and persist knowing the truth about America and focus our attentions in more realistic goals for equity? We can brazenly struggle and resist knowing what we are up against, finding the virtue of struggling against injustice as Cone calls for in God of the Oppressed? Bell offers that we have one duty, and one duty alone: that of not renouncing our freedom through our choices (Bell,  xiv). This suggests that the revolution necessary is not external, but internal. Like Franz Fanon who inspires much of Bell’s work, a resistance based on the perception of the oppressed, choice, and truth seem to be what Bell is calling for (Bell, xiv).  Bell argues, “Beyond struggle lies potential to perceive more clearly both reason and the means for further struggle” (Bell, 12) Essentially participation in resistance begets the ability to persist in struggle.  But  one has to wonder what are we struggling for? If racism is permanent  is the struggle for our own sanity? Our own survival or actual change? Bell argues the struggle is for meaning. Bell says that progress begins with truth and acceptance of the real predicament black people find themselves in, and then engagement and dedication, which manifests itself in service (Bell, 198).  This amounts, I imagine, to a change within those who are oppressed, but does it stop white people from killing without cause, or avoiding punishment when they do? I believe the answer is yes. Service, changes a community. It holds them accountable to one another and prepares them to fight for each other regardless of the outcome.

The problem of so many black people today is that we wrongly believe that we are entitled to freedom. While this may be the case, these are not the rules America is playing by. Paulo Friere teaches, “Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift.  It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. It is not an ideal located outside of …[the individual]; nor is it an idea, which becomes myth. It is the indispensible condition for the quest for human completion]” (Bell xiv). Bell recounts this as the quest for meaning. Such meaning gives us the strength to fight, relief from the terror of being stalked and gunned down, and the capacity to desire and fight for more, rather than waiting for it to be given to us.  Through the revelation of truth we are armed with the will to fight and our attentions are focused on the source rather than the symptom of injustice. 

A posture of boldness creates an opposition to the powers that be, so that when the blatant disregard of black life is manifest the community is out in force, ready to struggle, sacrifice and fight regardless of the consequences. The truth of the permanence of racism is an important truth that needs to be told. It frees black people from the illusion that white people will change without a demand. It reveals the truth of the stronghold we call racism and its benefits to those who feign concern about its injustice. Moreover  it arms black people with the truth that there is really nothing to lose, but our humanity and dignity to gain. As those subordinated by white America for their own status and benefit, black people must get up and fight, because everyday their lives are at risk.  I wonder how/ if the new campaign to humanize black people in film will affect the regard for black life? I see lots of white people going to movies in droves, crying at the end of Fruitvale station and Twelve years a slave, but that blindness James Cone speaks of in the Cross and  the Lynching Tree persists when it comes to making real policy and legal decisions that demonstrate real concern. Perhaps if we abandoned our self-delusion and embraced the difficult truth that white people benefit and perpetuate racism in the maintenance of their own status, we might be able to fight more appropriately. Only in recognizing the truth of our situation can we fight to resist it. Let us die resisting!

Trayvon, Oscar and Sean On My Mind

While reading The Cross and the Lynching Tree, I couldn’t help but think back to this summer and the anger, frustration and sense of hopelessness I felt after the Zimmerman verdict was announced. A young black man on his way home was killed by a white looking Hispanic man because he seemed suspicious. We all know the painful details of the circumstances surrounding the murder of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent trial of George Zimmerman, but what I remember most was the haunting feeling of vulnerability and concern for the black men I called father, brother, friends and lovers. What was proven to black people once again, in the new millennium, in case we thought the election of the first black president had elevated our status as people, was that black life would always be tenuously held at the mercy of those who more resembled honorable whiteness.  Those with black skin would always be considered less worthy of honor and justice and more susceptible to violence at the hands of the “righteous.” I wonder what a study comparing incidents of depression, violence and drug and alcohol abuse among blacks before and immediately after the Zimmerman verdict was announced would reveal?

The trial and its racially polarizing effect on the country were fascinating phenomena. What seemed a clear-cut case--a man killing and unarmed innocent boy--was considered complicated, because while he was unarmed, the innocence of the boy could not be assumed, in fact proof of innocence became the prosecuting attorney’s burden, because the boy was black. This is no doubt a result of the criminalization of black men, an age-old agenda of a resentful American public who have still not reconciled the freedom of blacks in their mind. This same inability to see black life as sacred and worthy of justice led the jury to acquit George Zimmerman and for many in the white community to celebrate with painfully familiar revelry to those that participated in the lynching of black people on the Sabbath. Cone speaks of the spiritual blindness of white people, even those who are markedly Christian in other matters. In his discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr, Cone remarks, “Niebuhr has eyes to see black suffering, but I believe he lacked the heart to feel it as his own. Although he wrote many essays about race, commenting on a variety of racial issues in America and in Africa and Asia, the problem of race was never one of his central theological or political concerns” (Cones, 41).  Tying Niebuhr’s neglect of blacks specifically to lynching, Cone offers, “During most of Niebuhr’s life, lynching was the most brutal manifestation of white supremacy, and he said and did very little about it” (Cone, 45). Such disregard suggests that even Jesus could not heal white people’s inability to see the value of black life.

With no spiritual advocate that could penetrate the racism of those in power, or so it seems, how did black people of the past generations people deal with the kind of trauma my friends and I experienced this summer, everyday? The feelings of despair, fear, anger and defenselessness had to have been stifling to their ability to live. Cone writes, “Hope in black possibility, in the dream of a new world, had to be carved out of wretched condition, out of a world where the possibility of death was always imminent” (Cone, 15). This state of fear and hopelessness can give rise to a great many catharses. Of course there was and is the church, the place where blacks believed the could be “wholly themselves,” but as the years rolled on and the conditions of black people to some degree remained the same, it is understandable that many black people would abandon their faith and seek alternative means of relief and release. Cone’s treatment of the juke joint was particularly interesting to me, because of its similarities to today’s hip hop culture. A space where black people could lament through the blues, and dance and laugh in celebration of their embodiment and existence beyond the gaze of white people, the juke joint offered refuge, merriment, if only for a short while, and made meaning in their lives as a result. Cone argues, “Dealing with nearly four hundred years of ongoing suffering in African-American history is enough to make any black person lose faith and roam around in a blues-like way, trying to make meaning in an absurd world of white supremacy” (Cone, 28). The juke joint, and the blues blacks engaged in served as a space and practice of defiance, and a stubborn refusal to be defined by white supremacy (Cone, 28). In the nineties, Cornel West spoke of the great nihilism that plagued the black male community. This sense of hopelessness and meaninglessness was the result of inner city neglect; where resourceless, the spirits and livelihood of black people died a slow death. Hip hop emerged as an art form, much like the blues that offered escape, defiance and self definition, but like the blues, this movement rarely provides any organized political resistance (Cone, 28).

In the midst of injustice and oppression, historically black people relied on more than just faith to maintain their sanity, however as time passes the secularization of relief and release increases. Today many black people’s place of worship has become the club or hip-hop in general. Confounded by theodicy black people are in a crisis of faith and have taken a YOLO (You only live once) approach to existence. The juke joint mentality has now spilled over into every day life through the social segregation of a post civil rights generation, who expected more from America, and rest in the ubiquity of Black music and its symbolic power. Unfortunately, the revelry that the juke joint and now hip hop culture offers is the least productive in the pursuit of progress.  Moreover it has supplanted the church as the means by which black people maintain sanity and obtain the ability to endure. Consequently, in an effort to gain some psychological distance from culpability on the part of whites, and hopelessness and fear on the part of blacks, Christianity, and the message of the cross is engaged less and less frequently by both communities in issues of racial discord.  The Cross and the Lynching Tree suggests that both black and white people can glean hope and healing from a comparison between the lynching tree and the cross. For black people it provides a sense of solidarity and meaning in that as the black community has suffered, so has Christ, and through his suffering he transvalues human values, turning them upside down and making sovereign the kingdom of God in an unjust world (Cone, 35). For white people it is a remedy to their spiritual blindness. Cone says every time a white person lynched a black person they lynched Jesus. Recognizing the injustice of unmerited killing through the story of Jesus’ passion and correlating the sacredness of Jesus’ body to the bodies of the black men and women who were systematically lynched in righteous indignation ought to solicit repentance from white people and make way for the possibility of reconciliation between black people and white people.

Even My Conditioning Has Been Conditioned

I know we are talking about sexual gender relations in the church, this week, but bare with me for a moment, there is a method to my madness. This week I was confronted by a tremendously astute, articulate, serious Kanye West. His interview with Jimmy Kimmel has been circulating the internet this week and I, ever the sucker for an opportunity to watch the performance of hip hop culture off stage, consumed these newest images ravenously.

Like the anger I felt from James Baldwin’s words in Notes of a Native Son, West’s words made the ever-present rage of the black man oppressed by his skin and his culture palpable. But more than that in a rare moment of intimacy, Kanye connected with Kimmel’s audience and dare I say the millions of viewers who caught it later via the web. For the fist time, Kanye made some highly cogent assertions about being the black man from hip hop culture in a world of old money. Despite the maybachs purchased, the fashion or the millions of records sold, Kanye could not get an audience for his more grown up aspirations of having a high end fashion label. Instead he is getting his dose of the “We don’t serve blacks here” refrain that littered the pages of Notes of a Native Son. None of the many designers he served as a walking billboard for, for all of these years consider him equipped to have a seat at the business table. Yet perhaps the most striking comments he made were about self-love. He essentially expressed that he is considered crazy because black people are taught not to love ourselves, and that to do so is to be considered crazy and even in some ways dangerous. Bell hooks herself couldn’t’ have picked a more appropriate contemporary example to illustrate her essay, “Loving Blackness as Resistance. Indeed Black people are taught to view ourselves through the white normative gaze, a lens of hate. This is perhaps the most dehumanizing aspect of racial oppression and according to Marcia Riggs it affects our relationships with one another, especially relationships between black men and women. 

Though Riggs focused more on the church, considering more people know the words to Lil’ Wayne’s “Rich as F*-$” than the stories of 10 classic bible figures or the old church songs in the new African American hymnal, it seems more relevant to consider the state of sexual gender ethics in hip hop, black men’s newest holy institution, where they can experience respect, authority and control. Bell hooks makes specific inferences to hip hop in her essay eating the other, where she speaks of hip hop as one of the newest ways black men and women achieve cultural and spiritual transcendence. Yet when I investigate the catalogue of self-loving Kanye, I find the same dynamic of domination, exploitation and commodification of women. In one of his more recent songs, he tells a woman she has to “crawl before she balls” (translated beg before he spends money on her.)

Despite his supposed love of self, Kanye like so many other black men are caught in a faulty understanding of themselves, masculinity and power imposed upon them through socialization into our racist patriarchal society. As Kanye laments, he cannot seem to achieve the respect he desires in the white world. Industry owners are willing to commodify his blackness, but they are unwilling to engage it as equal or worthy of esteem.

The church has historically been the place where Black men can experience respect and control they do not experience in the world, more recently, Hip hop has become the new space of black male respect and domination. Consequently, this has become the black community’s sacred space. Oppression has caused use to believe that hallowed spaces are spaces in which we experience power, but power at the expense of our neighbor, at the expense of ones brother or sister is never benevolent and therefore from a Christian perspective corrupt. Consequently, sins the black community has endured have become the same behavior it emulates, because not only has self hatred been impressed upon us, but an ethic of domination has been so inscribed in our psyches that we don’t know how to operate on any other paradigm.

Accordingly you see the same disrespect, and stifling of women in hip-hop as you do in the church. And like the women of the church the women of hip hop acquiesce to their position because they cannot see anything more in themselves or pander to the mythology of mainstream society as a means of survival. In this society, you are no one until you have the ability to dominate another; and those who experience oppression want so very badly to improve their social standing, is it any wonder sexual gender domination is the order of the day in hip hop? Furthermore, why are we surprised when hip-hop artists, like the black church, are deemed less credible because of their problematic sexual gender ethics? I wonder if other alternate understandings of black identity exists in the world and how their sexual gender dynamics are different as a result? Surely one has to love themselves before they can love anyone else, particularly those who are bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh.

Here is an article written about Kanye, on the politics of black self love.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/hnigatu/in-defense-of-kanyes-vanity-the-politics-of-black-self-love

Niggas in Paris

“One would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed in opposition. The first acceptance, the acceptance totally without rancor, life as it is, and men as they are: in light of this idea it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent. For the second idea was equal power: that one must never in ones life, accept these injustices as commonplace, but must fight the with all one’s strength.”  [1] - James Baldwin

 “I am where art meets commercial, the sweet spot between the hood and Hollywood, having a conversation with Karl Lagerfeld and Jay-Z within the same hour. When we're in Paris dressing all crazy at fashion shows, we listening to Jay-Z. Jeezy in Paris, that's what it is.” – Kanye West

Young black and wealthy, Kanye West and Jay-Z take Paris by storm. They dominate the music scene representing a black identity of self-determination and hyper visibility. They move with authority, seizing the adoration of screaming French fans and the respect of the market which mimics their aesthetics, including language, body comportment and fashion. The black man has finally been deemed worth of celebration.  Or has he? While many in the black and white community look to artists like Kanye and Jay-Z as evidence of the changing racial landscape, when compared to James’s Baldwin’s account in Notes of a Native Son, it is clear “Niggas In Paris'” politically hallow performance of power is simply the new iteration of the world’s fascination with the nigger, and Kanye and Jay-Z’s acceptance of a role shaped by racist understandings of black identity.  They are indeed “native sons,” in every way Baldwin deplored the term, unleashed upon the public via the hip-hop music scene.  Though Baldwin asserts, The world is no longer white, its black citizens assimilate, participating in response to white supremacy that pervades their experience, even in the midst of individual wealth and fame, and often to their own detriment.

Armed with power as ambassadors of capitalism and the influence it provides, Kanye and Jay-Z play the part America has taught them to play- the role of the nigga, concerned with “money, hoes and clothes,” and ecstatic to be chosen to do so. With microphone in hand and the opportunity to give whatever manner of message to the world, these men betray the art form which Baldwin states has been the faithful medium in which black people could tell their stories, and instead tell the story given to them by a racist culture, labeling themselves as niggers. Preoccupied with appearance, flaunting their wealth, and believing these accouterments give them license to abuse women, ‘Ye and Jay make themselves synonymous with the ghost of Bigger Thomas—Niggas to be reckoned with. Have we not yet moved beyond these trivial and destructive desires? Unfortunately as products of American society and capitalism we have not. Even many in the black community celebrate these kinds of displays as genuine proof of “the evolution of the negro.” However, these images maintain the stagnation of black progress, and demonstrate that collectively, white people will only celebrate black men in the position of  “nigger.”

The nigger, celebrated when he has enough money to be a consumer of white products, and influential enough to peddle white supremacy in black face (see Jay-Z reppin’ for Tom Ford), is still considered inferior on American soil. While he can be used to boost sales in the market, he is not considered worthy of partnership in the market.  The black man unable to attain hip hop status proves even less successful. Though he may be lauded for his “swagger,” he remains inferior in the eyes of white America, which keeps him unemployed, undereducated, ridiculed, incarcerated, targeted for violence by the police, preyed upon by banking institutions, kept under surveillance, and assumed the worst of, making him so full of hopelessness, bitterness and rage that every relationship that he has is compromised by this oppression, including his self concept.

Kanye and Jay-Z’s freedom to listen to rap music while traipsing through Paris, while white onlookers become enraptured and escape into their difference, can be likened to Baldwin's experience of white people desiring to run their hands through his woolly hair, their desire to shake their bums to the seductive beats of hip hop are comparable to, them touching Baldwin's hands to see if in fact the black might come off. All of it speaks to the spectacle of blackness. It does not speak to a change in the minds of white people about the status of black people. It is simply those of the dominant race wanting to exploit blackness for their own fantasies. This fascination with black culture does not improve the life of the common black man. If anything it further distances him from real relationship with those who wish to apprehend the pleasurable aspects of his experience. Moreover, the idea that someone who looks like him has “made it” makes him hungry for the same kind of success, which he attempts to imitate through the performance of consumerism, bravado and misogyny, further isolating him in bitterness, assimilation, and dysfunction.

But Kanye and Jay-Z are not solely to be blamed.  The public offense of one’s country of origin refusing to see him as human or equal is enough to make the most tenderhearted person bitter, hopeless and hating.  Despite their legitimization as Americans on European soil, the realities of the many black men seen as a problem in their own hometowns remains unchanged, and that European vacation where they might be privileged with “the truth of their Americaness” is the stuff of fantasies.  Their reality is weighed down by the American sense of blackness—the inferiority, savagery, and domination that many have adopted as the truth of their existence.

This distance is the preparation Baldwin speaks of that preserves black people in the midst of being despised, but at what cost?[2] Adoption of an identity that does not belong to them—A two dimensional representation of the thoughts, essence, feelings and existence of blackness? Broken relationships between fathers and sons, public displays of violence, the demeaning of one’s female counterparts for the privilege of feeling a taste of the abuse and domination that you too have been a victim of? This is not abundant life. Rather it speaks to a sense of shame and an adoption of the view of white society that blackness is in fact less civilized, less sacred, less worthy and an acceptance of its ways.  This protective armor of bravado betrays its wearer, revealing him behind the clothes, the bitterness, the rage, or the demeaned women as no more than a helpless pawn muttering in the darkness, “Who am I?” Baldwin contends, “one of the reasons people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they sense once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with the pain.”[3] Contemporarily the hatred with which Black people wrestle manifests itself in two ways –rage and assimilation. They accept the identity American society has constructed for them to avoid the discomfort of fighting against injustice and because they have bought into the notion that their identity is unacceptable. Neither is an appropriate strategy for survival. As Baldwin says, “bitterness is folly,” yet so is attempting to play the white man’s game in black face.  In many ways both responses yield to a paradigm in which white supremacy is real, ultimately surrendering to one’s own destruction because such a paradigm always maintains the inferiority of blackness.[4]

In order for black people to begin thrive, they must challenge the narrative impressed upon them. This fight, Baldwin says, begins in the heart, keeping it free of hatred and despair. This means functioning outside of the racist system of domination America pushes as the means to power and asserting for themselves a new system of worth. But art, especially music that promotes that kind of alternative message never has the influence of the hot beats white music companies can procure, or the access they can provide.  These songs and their lyrics, as  “Niggas in Paris” mocks, have little meaning, but they get the crowd going. Unfortunately, it is "going" in the same old direction.

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[1] Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son, Bantam Books :1964, p.95

[2] Ibid, 89

[3] Ibid, 85

[4] Ibid, 95