#firethistime

#thenewyorker #firethistime 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 https://www.instagram.com/p/CBb8N_aJb6W/?igshid=sm6j14m1g2ke

This sister Mayasa Telfair is the truth! Teaching Goddess wisdom in the fire workshop. #wombwork #BlackLoveDC #BlackLoveExperienceDC #firethistime #BlackMagickWomen

Talking Fire This Time and Survival Math and The Residue Years and the old NEP in the @willametteweek Arts section this week. #litlifeislife #firethistime #theresidueyears #survivalmath #wweek #NEP #503 #okioverdiditwiththehashtags

I have been discussing the Watts project that our cohort has been working with these last weeks with friends and family, and have received back stories about their Watt's experiences.  As I have related in class, I distinctly remember my grandmother seeing the smoke from the fires in Watts rising in the west, and how my grandfather would explain that black peoples were not allowed in Downey after nightfall; this last bit was compounded by the historical documentation that is Fire This Time, with a posted sign in Inglewood saying, " No Jew and No Coloreds are Welcome in This Town!" (Horne 34). And from my mother when I asked her what she remembers and knows about the Watts Uprising, she related that she too saw the smoke, and she knew that dangerous things were going on not fifteen miles away. She was 9 at the time, and was being told that it was "so sad that these people were destroying what little they did have." But there was no other pity or understanding of the social, economic, racial, labor, health, or housing problems that were impacting like a powder keg upon the people in Watts. And again, this was the explanation that I grew up with: "they destroyed what little they had." The introduction and first chapter of Fire This Time was therefore an immediate and helpful eyeopening reading of the breakdown of the historical components that lit the powder keg. Rather than these people destroying what little they had, which is to a physical extent very true, they were communicating in the only way that was left to them due to the different legislative and social movements around them. That they were avoided and taken advantage of, rejected by some and placed above by others in a mad dance of racial tensions, all the while attempting to keep a firm hold on their individual positions while others of their people were being shunted in and taking more away due to sheer numbers. A discussion that he brought up was in regards to some athletes that were the first black men to be allowed to play at college football and baseball. Woody Strode, a football player, was described by Honre as an exception to the rule of the tensions felt by the races in Los Angeles, saying he held "contradictory... memories" in which Strode's LA was "idyll" compared to the rest of the experiences(34). Turning back to the stories of my mother, this was much more the understanding of race relations that I grew up understanding in regards to the Civil Rights movement in California as a whole, and yet I did understand that the black peoples were not welcome at night. It is interesting that I as a child understood that the black community was not harassed when compared to the South and it's Jim Crow laws, and yet held at arms length, because "its simply was this way here."   What I had absolutely never thought of or heard was the inner discrimination between lighter and darker skinned black people; that it was so bad to the point that "[o]ne f the ironies of the 1965 insurrection is the face that not only whites but lighter blacks were attacked because of the color of their skin and what that was thought to represent" which was that the lighter skinned peoples were more easily able to get a job, were given better opportunities and were therefore an enemy (Horne 33). Horne's attention to describing that there was not a singular and binary racism in the building up of the population of Los Angeles, rather there was "[a]n expropriated Japanese-American community-- who saw blacks taking their place-- and a Mexican-American population... [who] added their own irritation to this seething racial cauldron," allows for the broader realities of racial tensions across the social map of Los Angeles to be understood, since I had never thought about the other races in regards to the black Watts riots(35). I was daunted by the politics that Horne was detailing in his introduction to the revolt because of the political games that the different organization were playing with each other to come out the dominant force. His understanding of the left and right pockets of politics across the entire area of Los Angeles, from Pasadena to Long Beach, was hard to follow at points due to my naiveté of the politics themselves, such as the rise and fall of Communism for the black communities in Southern California; my only understanding until this reading was that of HUAC and its blacklisting attack on Hollywood. I am still not fully understanding of the what all went on, but I believe this is because this was just an introductory gloss over the situation as a whole, and that more detail would be provided through the rest of the chapters. But what the reading did help with, even if I did not fully understand, was our first batch of pamphlet categorizing for our Digital Watts project; with the undercurrents and eventual forced shutout of Communism for blacks in Southern California, I was more comfortable with my curation choices. Horne's introduction to Fire This Time was both eye opening and allowed for me to question what little I knew of Watts, question the book through what I understand to be the outcomes of the riots in Los Angeles, and to be able to question my choices for our curating project. And this is now tangential but another story I received was from a fellow parishioner of my church, Kathy. She was about 12 years old, and it was the second or third evening of the riots (in her terms), and her father was being an oblivious and stubborn man. A black employee of his had left a company truck on the streets of Watts to run home to protect his family. He called his boss to let him know that he was sorry, but he had no way to protect the truck because he had to stay home. So Kathy's father packed his family into the family car and started to drive to Watts. They were stopped three different times on the way there along Imperial Highway by three different middle aged black men who told Kathy's father that he had to take his family home, no white people were safe in Watts, they should leave now. He continued until the third man finally appealed to Kathy's mother who convinced the father to turn around. And yes, the truck was destroyed in the riot.