blaqobin

by wspj | 7:21 P EST | 08.23.17 | Filed to: “racist bullshit”

“I waited at the counter of a white restaurant for eleven years. When they finally integrated, they didn't have what I wanted.” - Dick Gregory

Before we give the owners of a hip restaurant in Detroit’s revitalized Corktown neighborhood, now formerly “Katoi”, a round of applause for scrambling the letters in their insensitive restaurant name, remember this: you cannot change racism with a name. More than a label of shame for White people, racism is about the lived experiences of non-White people as we navigate and survive systems of economic, systemic, physical, and psychological violence. By any other name, racism still feels the same; it still stings, still haunts, and still signals to Black and Brown bodies an unwelcome even unto death. 

The word “katoi”, a sometimes reclaimed insult or slur directed at trans people in Thailand, has caused residual pain for quite some time as an adopted name for the Corktown establishment. A recent article in the MetroTimes presents lengthy accounts by concerned community members to get the restaurant owners to give a shit. The result, until now, has been defensiveness, condescending explanations, indifference, and dismissiveness. After the MetroTimes piece, the Detroit Free Press reported the restaurant’s announcement that it is going to open under the new name.

But before we run off thinking that a sudden change of name represents a sudden change of heart, don’t forget the restaurant’s fight against calls for compassion in the first place; don’t forget their fight to keep the name.

And more ominous is that the pneumonic indistinguishability between the two names serves as an apt metaphor for the ways in which White Supremacy always survives the semiotic fluidity of language, or more importantly, the ways in which White Supremacy survives by the very fluidity of language itself. White racism builds the kinds of structures in which everything and nothing can change at once, in which the pieces are only every re-arranged. 

It is, in fact, the business of White Supremacist racism as an historic enterprise to not only profit from Black and Brown pain, but to also profit from putting Black and Brown bodies in the position of having to go through more pain to point it out, repeat it, say it louder, and repeat it some more, say it more angrily, say it more nicely, say it again and again; "please stop profiting from our pain". Sadly, of all the kinds of appropriation that Whiteness could franchise, it is the appropriation of mourning, of death, of abjection, of victimhood, and yes even the somber nature of survival that allows Whiteness to disorient a bystander into reading a calloused Whiteness as an impossibly compassionate one. I can’t help but to think to myself that there’s a perversion in my own thinking that Black and Brown people are made to “repeat” claims of injury for the sick pleasure of those who stand defiant in the face of heartfelt appeal. It is the business of White racism to remain steadfast in the face of non-White suffering. Among non-White peoples, most marginalized, mimicked, and ultimately maimed and made to suffer are those are live at the margins of their own marginalized communities-- more than anyone, these are trans people, gender queer, gender non-conforming or simply non-binary people. Often, because of the silencing of queer folks in communities of colour, the suffering of queer people of colour is the best business for White Supremacy to be in. All the while claiming to care, it is here that Katoi has found it’s “niche”, in the franchises of White Supremacy as an enterprise, wherein folks of colour routinely find themselves caricatured.

But how... 

...can such a fundamental disconnect where compassion normally fills the gap--such an indifference and intransigence-- be transformed over night, even by fires literal? It cannot. Not even by another name. 

But Why?  

As much as it is the business of White racism to enjoy non-White pain, it is also the business of White racism to go by other names, i.e. "alt-right", "New Detroit", "irony", "allyship misunderstood", "conservatism", "southern heritage", "color-blind", “National Football League”, “Grand Old Party”. Whatever it is, White supremacy always goes by new names, because White supremacy and it’s racism have many, many lives.  

Throughout modern history, White Supremacy has travelled the world, learned (to the barest functionality) nearly every language, studied and re-drawn maps in Earth's every corner, going by so very many names, some silly-sounding and some severe: "apartheid", "Jim Crow", "The New World", "The East Indian Trading Co.", "The West", "The Negro Problem", "The Native Problem", “New England”, “Spanish America”, “America”, “Rhodesia”, “French Indochina”... the list could go on to encyclopedic lengths. But under so many names, White Supremacy has lived with such replicable simplicity. What is always at play in White racism is the ability to profit from any name, accumulating currencies, both social or fiscal. White ventures may adopt non-White names for trends-sake but are also in turn congratulated for changing those names after a long struggle that looks to climax only in the eventual risk of lost profits. After all, the potential loss of profits is why colonialism fell, why the Confederate states gave their lives and why they eventually gave up, why European-dominated countries end 15-year wars of aggression only to start them back up again, and why they wage them in the first place. More than one restaurant or a name, White supremacy’s racism is a complementary axis in the coordinate of economic gluttony. More fundamental to White Supremacy than any neon sign is the dollar sign. The owners of Katoi will always know that the bottomline in their conversations about what to do about the MetroTimes article was... the bottom line.

For White supremacy, the changing of the name is even less than a cosmetic shift; it is a layer of signage even more thin than a new coat of paint. For White Supremacy to be in the business of name changes speaks to an adaptability, an elasticity, the flexibility of the social and political structures of White domination which ensure that the politics of a society built for White dominion and sovereignty never have to transform, but merely (even in the merest ways) to shift in shape. Like Takoi’s language of other-planetary expanse, White racism is a science fiction as well as fantasy; through ever-changing names, White racism shape-shifts to preserve an agenda unmoved: the exploitation of an Other simultaneously real and imagined.

As the quirky Corktown building that was nearly burned to the ground from the inside is pieced back together, the unchanged structure and nature of a restaurant that profits off a culture deemed unworthy of understanding and care, the repetition of this structure under a new name shows the semiotic and strategic hollowness of names in a world of structured power. Through the act of renaming, a shifting language can sneak old systems into what is thought to be an era of the new. In systems of power and domination the ability to change names, whether of restaurants or streets or neighborhoods, is both hollow and hallowed.

In an era when White racist ways of being, ways of political existence, when White racist social orders and etiquettes take on so many nicknames, remember the lifeline of the project that is Eurocentric domination, that is White supremacy, that is the simple idea that White people matter more, and never forget or lose the ability to identify the systems that are built to confirm such ideas of White superiority in the material world.

“Katoi”... “Takoi”... It makes no difference, because after so long, after so many reminders, it took public exposure to stimulate action on the part of restaurant management. And this why the essential words, a now seldom spoken phrase of talismanic importance, hold such a mystique; this is why White racism in America announced itself for so long as “White Power”. In White supremacist society, White (and White passing and White adjacent) people hold power, take power, and abuse non-White people with power, and only change these behaviors when the larger system and systemic positions of power-- economic, political, or social power-- are at stake. 

Let this be a reminder, to people in community who care about being good people and who demand that their neighbors do too, that no matter what name White Supremacy calls itself, we must call it out. We must apply the kinds of pressure that not only make White racism uncomfortable, but do so in ways so overwhelming that they threaten to rupture in an irreversible, unrecoverable and foundational way the very systems of White power that take name, symbols, and words, and fashion out of them weapons of psychological and spiritual violence.

by wspj | 3:01P EST |05.04.16| Filed to: “Globalized Black Consciousness”

Felipe Luciano of the Last Poets breaks down the divisions that break up Black consciousness on terms of colonial conditioning

Dear Black people, whether Latinx or not, 

Treating Latinx cultural identity as a distinct racial identity, a racial politics--e.g. Black people calling Black people (whether others or themselves) Latinx and not Black simply because they have wavy hair, light skin, and speak Spanish-- is like Black people from Palmer Woods or Hyde Park or Westchester (or any other affluent and “fair-skin preferred” space) who have wavy hair and light skin and and speak English calling themselves "Germana" simply because they speak a Germanic language that they inherited from their European colonizers. Yet, depending on where certain Black people are born, many think of their hair and skin as signs that they aren’t Black and such a fiction is hard to shake when everyone in your family is identified in this same way. But how can someone’s place of birth or language erase their heritage?

Treating Latinx identity as a singular racial identity is anti-Black, whether this is how we self-identify or how we identify other Black people. But Blackness, something global and diverse, survives the violence of colonial borders.

Black is Black is Black is Black. 

A lot of people who are reading this are Black and only think they are not Black because of centuries of intentional and effective programs in colonial anti-Blackness targeted at coopting Black bodies into anti-Black oppression, by giving them alternative identities into which to opt instead. 

The gag is though...

Blackness has long been painted on, painted over, twisted, curled, hot combed, cussed, percussed, repercussed, repeated, rinsed, washed, mashed, mixed, maimed, but always comes out Black. Black don’t come out. Black cannot be stained. No matter how you work it, Blackness can’t be worked out, because Blackness has always outworked the world. 

Black is, even when Black ain’t.

Black Is, Black Ain’t is a pathbreaking documentary on the multiplicity of Black identity by the legendary Marlon Riggs

“Latinx” means a lot of different things, culturally, linguistically, politically, historically, and includes many different identities. The problem is not someone claiming multiple identities- that is as inevitable as it is beautiful (as seen in the work of Gloria Anzanldua on mixedness and multiple selves). The problem is not even in pointing out the different experiences between and among Black and indigenous peoples- that is as realistic a project, as it is revelatory. 

The issue arises for Black consciousness and Black liberation when we base an exclusive, exclusionary, or excluded identity (”Latinx” in some cases) on an intentional and primarily forced colonial "mixing" policy (mestizaje) and use this identity to deny Blackness or Whiteness (when they obviously historically apply both as political-historical and cultural realities). Such obfuscation is colonial thinking in action. For Spanish colonizers, the purpose of mestizaje was to erase unwanted identities and to forge nationalist identities that were defined by their relationship to European identity, to Whiteness, and to military and state power over economies. Using a hybrid identity like “Latinx” to deny Blackness is how Whiteness works to implement anti-Blackness: it forces Black people to only identify on the terms that are permissible in colonial, White-dominated geography, only with relation to Whiteness, not each other

Entire continents and subcontinents of Black and indigenous people identify primarily with a term that centers Rome and Romantic European language and thinking (i.e. that which is Latin). And yet, all of the reasons for defending and restating Latinx identity as a racial reality as opposed to being a product of colonial cultural erasure do TWO things repeatedly: 1.) exclude 'visibly' Black African and Indigenous American peoples from the hybrid cultures of Central and South America or only include them on the condition that they prioritize speaking Spanish over being African or Indigenous AND 2.) insults Blackness as somehow not diverse, even though Blackness is an extremely diverse and dynamic set of lived experiences that include many languages, many religions, many locations, many looks, feels, many textures, many sexualities, many gendered personalities, many dances, musics, politics, histories, stories, instruments, hopes, fears, many prides, many reclaimings, many shames, many denials, many self-hatreds, many failures, many more triumphs... 

To say that one Blackness is more Black, that other Blacknesses are marginal, to say that people who are African descended aren’t Black is historical erasure and serves a colonial agenda of dividing Black people, erasing people’s Blackness, and rendering those who remain as “Black” a small minority of intended political insignificance. To say that people who are African descended aren’t Black, and to say that people from Arab countries, from Asian countries, and those who are indigenous to the Americas, being colonized in very similar ways, and factoring and fitting into very similar, even paralleled, colonial economies with relation to Whiteness don’t occupy a political Blackness at least, if not an “other-worldly” and parallel-universe kind of Blackness in their part of the world is historiographically naive at best and is at worst in line with the colonial school of thought which holds race to be biologically real and always defined by Eurocentric standards of appearance (e.g. “Black people can’t have straight hair...” or “All Black people look West African”...)  Moreover and finally, beyond the weakness of rooting Blackness on one “kind” of appearance, or language, or cultural expression, to say that a group of Black people aren’t Black because “the experiences are different” insults the diversity of Blackness as a set of many beautiful, individually and collectively lived experiences.

The experiences of African people with anti-Blackness at the hands of people claiming a mixed identity or even non-racial racial positioning (the position of Whiteness) gives rise to valid feelings of concerned that normatively African looking people need to separately and wholly considered as “more Black” or to center Black people who are most usually targeted for anti-Blackness, but anti-Blackness targets us all. Junot Diaz talks regularly about the ways that Dominicans who do love their Blackness are regularly lumped in with a stereotype of Dominicans as all anti-Black and more anti-Black than other Latinx peoples. Denying the Blackness of these people only compounds anti-Blackness. How can we punish Black denial by denying more Black people? Ironically, one of the most powerful tools in combating anti-Blackness among African-descended populations is forcing people to fight anti-Blackness as a self-hatred, forcing people to reflect on their Blackness, and the African-ness of their culture and to begin help victims and survivors of erasure to re-identify with Blackness and its political realities. To respond to anti-Blackness by being positioned against certain Black people on the basis of stereotypes, generalizations, and fear is to attempt to combat anti-Blackness with anti-Blackness, and such is a foolish gesture that has plagued Black people now for centuries, and has played very easily into the colonial hand. 

At a crucial level Whiteness relies heavily on de-racialized Latinx identities to operate in its war against Blackness and Indigeneity. Reifying Latinx as a primary identity in which someone can act upon a landscape of racial politics without being politically located lets White people off the hook simply for being born in the Americas and speaking Spanish. Whiteness is a construct based upon power given to someone relative to their ability to fit Eurocentric beauty norms and willingness to comply with such a system of power. Many Latinx people must be made to account for and take responsibility for their Whiteness. Latinx identity does not erase Blackness or Indigineity, and cannot conceal White power or even White supremacy either.

The people who lose out most when we reinforce colonial geographies in defining Blackness are always those who are most marginalized in multiple spaces. Denying Blackness on the terms that someone speaks Spanish is foolish coming from someone who speaks English-- they are both European tongues. Denying Blackness on the terms that someone speaks Spanish, or someone’s being from the Caribbean as opposed to being from California, also erases the experiences of institutional and state racism faced by African bodies in Central and South America (and the Caribbean), in Europe and around the world; this exclusionary move denies their poverty, denies police brutality, denies ghettoization, and worst of all denies them solidarity with those Black people around the world who share those experiences of material abjection and pain. Regardless of our different experiences of Blackness and how we’ve come to Black consciousness, we need to hold each other accountable for how we treat other Black people, be honest about how we’ve related to Blackness and systems of White domination in our lives, and manage to center the marginalized among us as Black people without forging another Black identity through further marginalization.

by wspj | 5:58 P EST |04.03.16| Filed to: “Abolition”

*Content includes discussion of sexual assault, imprisonment, and police brutality*

by wspj | 5:58 P EST |03.22.16| Filed to: “Deconstructing and unlearning maleness” Content:  Sexual Assault, Gas-lighting, Misogyny 

Dave Chappelle’s new Netflix special cuts right to the quick, and so will I.

Without spoiling much of the joke with a flat explanation, Chappelle does a bit about rape wherein a superhero has to rape women to save lives. Many (mostly men, of course) claim that it is meant to be complex or sophisticated, but it only defies a settled sentiment that

rape is not funny.

Ironically, arguments that Chappelle’s bit is “just” a joke ignore the fact that many in ethnic nationalist movements have justified sexual assault and the violation of women’s freedom with the argument that they are saying the life of their nation, saving their people, and preserving the future of their legacy, by not only forcing themselves on women, but forcing those women to give birth. How can it be just a joke and imply the same justification for devastating violence those who are not joking at all and does so at the expense of those who suffer?

My father used to retell to my brother me a powerful fable about jokes and compassion. These kids caught a frog and were going to drop it in hot water to see what would happen for fun. They were laughing and asking the frog “why don’t you laugh, it’s just a joke”. Shocked they were though that the frog replied, “what is joke to you, is death to me”. 

It is in this spirit—of the person of objectified body interrupting the violence of silence and erasure by speaking out—that one of my friends on Facebook intervened powerfully on the back-and-forth about Chappelle’s vitriolic jokes and the feeble attempts to defend Chappelle’s poor taste: 

I can only really ask the question of men and male-passing/-privileged people (which does NOT include trans-women, please and thank you): 

How do we tell women "get over it; it's just a joke"? We don't know what "it" is. We haven't survived "it". We don't know how "it" feels. "It" doesn't haunt us in our sleep.

Moreover, far too many people use “comedy” as a poor excuse for poor taste, for taking the stage and throwing compassion out the window. Remember how Dave Chappelle responded to Michael Richards’s vicious, genocidally anti-Black tirade, saying he wanted to be mad as a Black person but that the comedian in him knows Michael just had “a bad night; hang in there!” We’ve accepted “comedy” as a special designation to avoid scrutiny and that false “priestly” caste of comics ultimately serves as a cloak for hate speech.  First of all, you should be funny, and if a huge swaths of people don’t find you funny, you’re just not that great. Chappelle has certainly seen better days from the stage where he once held audiences awestruck in the palm of his hands.  Second, and more important, in a postcolonial context, as people seeking liberation from oppression, we need to understand what “jokes” and “humor” really entail as performance and practice. We need to devise a style of theatrics and performance that is very different from the “Hellenic and Romantic” legacy of “comedy”. 

The word “comedy” comes from the Greek and Latin for “merry-making verse” or a poem that ultimately has a happy ending for the crowd. This too is where “jocus” as a “word-play” comes to mean “joke” in a generic sense, any playful or performative speech. Historically in Greece and Rome, the theatre was a male dominated space and stories were told to inspire happiness from a “male” perspective. Men determined what a “happy ending” was for the poet and judged accordingly. Happiness is relative and is generally in a collective sense defined by those with power over the discourse, the public formation of ideas. However the long arch of Eurocentric history (that many believe in erroneous retrospect begins in Greece) it was violently interrupted in the colonies of the Caribbean and in the Americas, by a people seeking liberation from Europeans. 

For some time now, I’ve been researching and writing about the use of double-speak, duality, and patois/“ebonics” in performance and religious practice as a liberation-seeking disruption of plantation and colonial life. Jean Genet (a queer, poor, White French author) proposes a hypothetical masquerade that mirrors such heritage in The Blacks: A Clown Show where the use of laughter is used to seduce the structure of power and ultimately to indict them, thrusting on them a moral and real confusion that the oppressed use to seize their liberation. 

From an indigenous Black cultural perspective, we can understand what humor/jokes really are as a historical, spiritual force in the post-/colonial world and how that is very different from the European tradition of "comedy".

Too often, when operating in a commonly pre-scripted problematic capacity, Men and white people don't use "humor". Very often, people with privilege and power don't actually tell "jokes". Men and white people laugh at people who survive systemic violence and demand that the survivors laugh too. It is rather forceful, brutish, one-dimensional, and simplistic; I don’t feel this thing, so it’s funny, now laugh with me. 

But, humor etymologically is fundamentally linked to irony, intelligence, wit, and enlightenment. "Hum"- refers to a persons fluid insides, and is abstracted out to mean a soul/person, someone who feels deeply. This is related to how we get the term “human”. Humor is a quintessential trait of being awake on the inside. 

While some say joke comes from "jocus" we also know the word "joke" shares a convergeance with the word "juku", to "poke" or "stir" something; the juku (stirring or poking) was often done by "jupe" (or duppy) which is the sighting of or appearance of an ancestor or someone from the land of the dead (e.g. Baron Samedi, an orisha, a drunken guardian of the grave, often seen laughing hysterically), who were thought to be on plantations to play pranks and tricks on the members of the master’s house, to instill fear in them, and ultimately to liberate the oppressed from the structure of violence and exploitation. For someone to be laughing at lived pain and making light of the suffering of other people is not to be a soul awake at personifying depths, and thus is not "humor". Laughing at suffering that is perpetuated at present is not helping to inspire or assembled any maligned people for liberation, and thus it is not a "joke". Jokes, in the postcolonial world, are played on the master’s house. The use of clever and complex performance, that “poking” and “stirring” and “playing with controversy, with danger, with fire, and with the spirit world” was vital to the obeah-inspired maroon rebellions of Jamaica and likewise vodou was essential to the the eventual world-historic liberation of Haiti, by the enslaved Africans there. During ceremonies of thanksgiving to ancestors or to the spirit-realm, many in the Caribbean and West Africa would blend seamlessly the sound of singing and hysterical laughter, the unbridling and unchaining of a joy that was otherwise impossible in a life lived in daily depression. The drum, the clapping, and the singing would conceal and laughter meant to call from the depths of the soul out to the world, reminding people that the soul is immortal and that a spiritual people would have the last laugh. 

But when we are being conditioned to laugh at one another for the pleasure of a wider society, to make fun of people that society hates, then we are being used and our spiritual complexity as people seeking a deeply soulful joy is being suffocated. We can’t just think about humor as a self-gratifying consumption, but instead as an exercise in intelligence and complexity that digs into the heart of what it means to be a person, a soul, a feeling being, and not an object, of entertainment, no less. 

Edouard Glissant, Martiniquain author, poet, and philosopher writes about the opacity of performance as an act of spiritual power and revolution

When we love one another in the face of exploitation, marginalization, and oppression, we will seek a more inclusive comedy and a more collective “merry-making” that takes into account more perspectives and lived realities in seeking a “happy ending”. Statistics and percentages, as well as no shortage of anecdotal and experiential evidence shows us that when men alone decide a happy-ending, we be definition remove from possibility the reality of joy, mutual or reciprocal pleasure, or at a base level, consent. For that reason, jokes have a secret, a hidden power than can either give life to rebellions or possibly re-inspire violence against the oppressed. We have to be mindful who is at the butt of jokes, who is being poked, and scrutinized, especially when it’s a joke about a persistent pain at play, even our own.

The kinds of laughs that Chappelle was seeking will not liberate us, as they do not dig deeper grooves into our souls; they do not layer the personhood survivors, but objectify them in pursuit of a concept of pleasure or happyness as defined by a society filled with hate for women and for Black bodies. Women, especially women of color who are twice marked for subordination as members of a “female” or “child-like” (inferior/“complimentary”) racial caste and made to perform a gender that corresponds to European ideals of femininity, are marked for sexual violence at birth. Black bodies, as a gendered racial class, are always violently “femaled”, subordinated by intrusion and assault, commonly of a sexual nature (prisons are full of survivors of violent sexual assault and the similarity of stop-and-frisk to street harassment is uncanny). Comic quips about sexual violence that do not target male psychosis, toxic and violent performances of masculinity, or generally do not target oppressive systems of power in addressing pain aren’t “jokes”, they are scorn, are mockery, are the violent outpouring of White, male psychosis, of unresolved shame, bitterness, pre-conditioned rage, hate, contempt and ultimately the desire to preserve power, onto a staged economy of performance. If we find it hilarious, we don’t need to defend Dave Chappelle; he’ll be fine. We need to examine our relationship to toxic, socially conditioned psyches. Only then can we get in touch with a real sense of humor, one that digs into that fleshy fluid on the inside and makes us persons, not objects; rediscover the sense of humor that digs deep grooves of feeling, and leaves traces and tracks of empathy; relearn the intelligent power of complexity that pokes at the system of power, pokes it ceaselessly, until it is ready to really be confronted in full. 

Laughter and joking having a mystical and transcendent nature, why would we want to carelessly wield such a powerful weapon, especially toward ourselves?

Bernie Sanders | by Gage Skidmore 

As awesome and exciting as he was to me, Bernie Sanders is not a candidate for President of United States, anymore. As a candidate for President of United States, seeking the Democratic Party nomination, Bernie Sanders failed. For a number of reasons, Bernie Sanders lost the nomination to a terribly uninspiring opponent in Sec. Clinton, but his most staunch supporters will only make room for one reason: “the establishment”. Sanders supporters-- among whom I am one (I gave him way more money than I could afford)-- claim at an impressively consistent and tireless volume that everyone has their political heads in the ideological sands of neoliberalism and elitism; of course, that is, everyone else. 

But the clever trick is betrayed by its own irony: Bernie Sanders was not challenging the Establishment, even if he was challenging the Establishment’s preferred candidate; Sanders was seeking the Establishment’s welcome and approval. Those are very different things. Strategically, he needed to run in the Democratic primary, to gain visibility and credibility before a broad audience. His strong showings and unexpected wins in tough primaries weren’t even the strongest things about him; his rallies, his impassioned pleas, his focused policy points were.  And still, Bernie Sanders and his organization was also among his greatest opponents, but his core supporters will never acknowledge this in earnest, revealing that they and that foul taste they leave in the mouths of everyone to whom they talked down were perhaps Sanders’s greatest challenge of all.

Cognitive dissonance is strong among Sanders stalwarts, as it is with most religious types. “Everyone else is fooled, but me”, they say. “Everyone else is susceptible to capitalist ideology”, they proclaim, in line at Whole Foods with a bill nearing $180, and the cashier hasn’t even rung up the duck-fat butter, yet. 

Their argument expanded lays out in a splendid circularity that is sure to amaze the more scrupulous analyst or theoretically agile mind. How can it be that Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump is proof of her weak candidacy but Sanders’s loss to Clinton is no such proof of Sanders’s own weaknesses? “Oh but the Establishment plotted on Sanders!” And James Comey’s shady ass announcement? One-sided email hacking and Russian interference? “Those are excuses!” Blaming the Democratic establishment is not? 

Wading through VICE segments as “research” or baseless claims that marijuana criminalization is the primary cause of mass incarceration, despite evidence that mass incarceration dates as far back as debt-plantations, or data that shows most people are in state or federal prisons for violations other than drug-related offenses (of course the War on Drugs is racist and is a failure)... it becomes obvious rather quickly, while foolishly chatting in line at Whole Foods, who lives in a world of pre-frame-worked ideological fantasy, and who is direly curious about a political way forward. The blame is partially on me for thinking that I, with my 7 dollars worth of groceries (had to put everything else back), could have a conversation with someone with an entire BASKET of food at Whole Foods about the urgent need for a revolution led by the poor. 

I gave Bernie Sanders so much of my hard earned money. I cut back on necessities to give him money. Then I would speak up to volunteers and staffers (whose stipends I had surely supported) only to be dismissed as unrealistic.

The sad irony of dismissing Black radicals as unrealistic is that our reality persists long after Sanders’s, no, our dream of winning in the Democratic Party was pissed away so effortlessly at the convention. 

From early on I’ve said to other Sanders supporters in discussion or at events that Sanders needs desperately to attract a broader, and yes, a different core base. Sanders’s support was and still is wide-reaching and diverse. Too much was spun about the “whiteness” or “maleness” of Sanders’s backers for dubious rhetorical reasons. At most Sanders event you saw plenty of young, Black women, queer Latinas, working mothers wearing the Fight for 15 shirts, or older Black guys who still lovingly refer to Malcolm X as “Brother Malcolm” (I do, too). There were all kinds of people backing Bernie Sanders, but there was that base of people, as with many campaigns, who could ask their parents for money, get in a car their parents bought them, and drive around the country caucusing, organizing, and taking coveted positions in campaign offices. These folks and their wide networks of friends are overwhelmingly middle to upper-middle class people and are overwhelmingly White. 

Moreover, as time wore on, these Sanders stalwarts, the campaign core, proved to be overwhelmingly and at times unbearably annoying, condescending, arrogant, smug, disrespectful, and yes unknowingly racist and at times, in their inability to just listen respectfully, palpably anti-feminist. 

As we struggle through the first few months of the unsurprising disaster of the Trump Administration, many are taking the time to make a very important point to Democrats in particular: you did this when you screwed over Bernie Sanders’s campaign, deliberately, blatantly, obviously. Democrats, you did this.

I wish everyday that Democratic party leadership feels the vast depths of shame and guilt they deserve for their sabotage of Bernie’s campaign. I laugh now knowing of the shameless kind of people who populate the political arena as a profession and hope headlines revealing Sanders is now the most popular politician in the US sting them at the core. 

But too few of the people making this point are willing to turn the reflective into the reflexive. 

Bernie Sanders in the South Bronx March 31st 2016 by Michael Vadon | by Michael Vadon

The Democratic party absolutely undermined Sanders. But so did he, with his shallow view of cultural and identity politics that, right or wrong, did not resonate with more traditional Black folks, who still view race as the issue in politics. So did he when he forced Black Lives Matter (BLM, or as I like to call it now, the Black Liberation Movement) to interrupt his early rallies instead of centering them and their massive coalition in the first place. So did his condescending and dismissive supporters who are still missing the point that Hillary Clinton being a vastly imperfect candidate does not mean that Sanders was the perfect candidate. 

What if the way you talk to people also undermined Bernie Sanders? What if the fact that, even since the election, Sanders has scheduled and aggressively pursued the kins of townhalls in Appalachia that he still hasn’t had in Atlanta, what if that kind of preference for rural Whites also undermined Sanders? When his MSNBC townhall was mysteriously cancelled by the National Guard in West Virginia, he said “poverty will be discussed”, but I suppose only if we don’t talk about why some people experience higher rates of poverty and how certain people living in poverty are owed reparations? What if being undermined is not a good enough excuse for not overcoming? And why do so many people on the far-Left not like critique-- is it because of a palpably elitist and college-centered ethos among many self-proclaimed socialists?

There are too many people on the Left, who when they know they are right, start to pursue our ideology with a fundamentalist zeal. We turn political consciousness into religious dogma, batting away any questions or alternative ideas without batting an eyelash. We get in line. We follow the script. We, just like everyone else, are instictively attracted to pre-established formations. We too constitute a Sanders Establishment. We undermine challenges. We put our heads in the sand. We make excuses for our candidates’ vast weaknesses. We even attack people who raise points of concern the way Sec. Clinton attacked Black Lives Matter protestors at her events. 

Sanders rally interrupted by Black Lives Matter activists who were booed and insulted by the crowd.

Do you remember when folks had the audacity to suggest that TaNehisi Coates was being paid to shill for Clinton simply for saying that Sanders needed to get his understanding of racism in America together and get it together fast? Do you remember how unintelligent, unscrupulous, petty, and out-of-line they looked when it turns out Coates was planning to endorse Sanders all along? Was that you? What the hell is the matter with you? Who do you think you are? You sho’ ain’t no TaNehisi Coates, I can tell you that!  And the irony of it all is that Bernie Sanders is by far one of the most conservative and pro-status quo “socialists” I’ve ever seen in the public sphere. TaNehisi Coates calls for vast abolitionist reforms and reparations that even Bernie Sanders isn’t radical enough to get with. Whose problem is that? I’m guessing it’s the problem of the failed candidate who only got 44% of the millennial Black vote, coming primarily out of urban centers where Sanders’s policy points-- free college, universal health care, expanded public goods, and wage increases-- are overwhelmingly viewed favorably as a matter of principle, and where socialism is view favorably by a distinct majority (55% of Black people, young and old) and is an increasingly popular idea; where Hillary Clinton’s promises rang far more hollow than her name recognition alone. When 56% of Black millennials coming out of urban areas where your primarily policy points are already widely popular still vote instead for the other candidate, you have to take account of your organizational failure in losing voters that on principle and political philosophy were already yours. Let’s face some facts, as uncomfortable as they may be, as grey as they may wash our otherwise Black-and-White, good-guy-bad-guy narrative, Democrats aren’t the only folks on the Left who need to learn about grass-roots organizing, about outreach, about listening, about making an inspirational case for a candidate instead of just trying to shove them through the electoral process. 

Sanders was not the first candidate to be undermined by their party's establishment. From all accounts, Clinton was also the expect shoe-in in 2008, with an early delegate lead. Stalwart republicans and the GOP establishment did everything in their power to undermine Donald Trump, including hiring foreign agents to dig up dirt on him. Sanders was not the first candidate to challenge a well-oiled machine. Sanders was not the first candidate and his was not the first campaign to face unimaginable obstruction. Sanders’s campaign never faced the odds that Abolitionism, that Civil Rights leaders, that the Black Panther Party faced. Sanders was not the first underdog. 

Bernard Sanders is not above criticism. Neither are his supporters. Neither is Glenn Greenwald. Sanders was one of three leading imperfect candidates in 2016, and he was still by a mile, wholeheartedly my favorite. But the fact that folks go beyond the necessary conversation about the popularity, merits and necessity of socialism in America and the stubborn insistence on a failed agenda by the Democrats, to go so foolishly far as to incubate Sanders’s campaign from self-reflection, despite the fact that he chose to endorse Clinton and to limit himself to the Democratic Party is just another illustration of the various off-putting things about many far-Left elitists. 

If you can’t name any Black activists from the past 100 years other than Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X, you’re likely to hold up Sanders as one of the greatest organizers in American history, but you also sound stupid. If you don’t live poverty, don’t be preaching to people who know what it’s like not to have anything simply because they also want to talk very seriously about police brutality. Let me be very frank, if you can’t sell your ideology in the ghetto, you ain’t shit to me, where grassroots activism and where proletariat-led organizing is concerned.

Bernie Sanders is now a lifetime politician who has achieved near-saint status in the eyes of those on the far-Left by repeating philosophical ideals and political ideas that got Black activists of a previous generation sidelined, assassinated, or imprisoned. Bernie Sanders's use of the MLK legacy and imagery but inability and unwillingness to organize as robustly in cities and urban centers with a focus on their particular class issues is a reflection of his very own establishment ideology that reads "They need to understand how their lives fit into my class politics" as opposed to a truly inspiring class analysis that says "how can my ideology and my class politics work in the lives of people with particular needs". Until folks who spend a lot of time complaining about the Democratic Establishment can also deal with the problematic establishment tendencies in Left-wing, Whole Foods elitists, many of whom it seems are gonna call on Sanders’s holy name even to his grave, we are only ever going to be complaining, not organizing a massive ground swell from the hinterlands and the hood alike to break down the doors of the cathedrals of power. Until we can look in the mirror and ask, “how can I improve my message” and “how can I make my message more equitable and inclusive”, we won’t build a coalition that can crush the Establishment, we will just be whining for the rest of our lives about how unfair the Establishment has been to us. 

by wspj  | 5:58P EST |02.02.16| Filed to: “Why Lord...”

“Bruh, you’re not from Chicago, you’re from Evanston!” (which is across the street)

I saw this video when it first went up and now people are passing it around because it is on the surface funny. But in the age of Trump threatening to send a federal paramilitary into urban centers where he thinks things are “out of control” (imagine the irony of Trump calling anything or anyone out of control), as if places like Detroit and Chicago are not already under the deadly grips of federally funded and militarized police forces puts “funny” into perspective. If you’re tempted to pass this video around for laughs, consider the following:

First of all, you're spreading a video of a token Black conservative Pro-Trump Republican strategist, Gianno Caldwell, shutting down activist, Richard Fowler, who criticized Trump’s reckless threat to the people of Chicago, on the basis that he (Caldwell) is from "the South Side" as if the South Side is the only place Black people in Chicago live. On FOX News, no less, Caldwell’s boisterous “bruh” reeks of a performance for a White-wing audience, all to rebuff legitimate critiques of federal-level intrusion.  

After all, Richard Fowler lives in Evanston (across the street), so how dare he speak on Chicago in national politics? Right? But somehow Trump can speak with authority about what Chicago needs. Sure, maybe Fowler should have said “I’m from right outside of Chicago” or “I work in Chicago” but it’s funny how this particular phrasing is only demanded to win arguments. Whenever Chicagoans want to brag, bringing up the likes of films like “Home Alone” or “Ferris Bueller”, or a rapper who lives in the suburbs, then all of a sudden the “Chicago-proper-only” rule goes out the window.

Second, in general, folks should stop saying that Black folks from the near suburbs aren't living the Black Chicago experience.

Many of the same people who are quick to tell Black people from near suburbs that they aren’t from Chicago wouldn't walk around the South Suburbs, or Bellwood, or Maywood, or West Evanston with that iPhone 7 at night. Tragically, they’re bagging bodies and “doing numbers” in the ‘Burbs all the same; we all know it. The “Wild 100s” go well beyond Chicago’s city limits and they aren’t called wild for nothing. Suburban cops are driving around in repainted CPD cruisers with the same heavy-handed tactics as the CPD itself. So we need to stop being petty and be real when the conversations are serious. If you live across the street from Rogers Park, you're very possibly more in touch with reality than if you live in Ravenswood or live in a Kenwood mansion. So stop it.

For decades now, since the rise of a neoliberal economic and social policy, as public housing was shutdown and neighborhoods leveled for developments, Black people have displaced from their homes in Chicago and many have forced to moved to suburbs. Many have been displaced by the mere threat of violence and attempts on their lives. Denying the common experience of Black people in a region only helps to isolate us and minimize the racist policies of regional governments and minimize the injustices that we are struggling to end.

Mr. President, welcome back to driving...  while Black. Here’s what you’ve missed for the past 8 years. A letter to the President. 

by WSPJ | Fri 23 Dec.16 | 10:17 EST | Just sittin’ here thinkin’

Dear President Obama,

Welcome back to the real world. You’ve joked in several interviews this year about returning to civilian life, noting prominently that you’re returning to the road, as a driver.

Welcome back to the road.

The idea of you driving again is a funny and subtle reference to the perks of the presidency, but that tension alone is so much deeper than jokes can soothe.

Recently, for the cover of an upcoming edition of The Atlantic, Ta Nehisi Coates led a mildly fractious, and as always beautifully-penned, reflection exercise for Black America: “My President Was Black”.

What a poignant statement, a truth, that now was, is, and always will be.

And the reality itself is poignant— your presidency was its own statement of truth: “yes we can.”

But the irony of the perks of a personal driver, round the clock security, the inhabitance of the world’s most famous mansion, and your world-historic legacy, which was cemented the November before you were even sworn-in, is bound up in your Blackness, an unequivocal and unshakable truth. Where racism is concerned Mr. President, you’re Black, and only Black.

You see, despite the contemplation of your “genetic Whiteness” by Coates, and in (a very powerful and moving) response by Tressie McMillan Cottom, your Blackness is a zero-sum truth in racial reality. Whiteness, as you, once a student of critical race theory, know very well, is a powerfully constructed myth, an ideological fiction, and a political technology. Whiteness is not an organic culture and certainly not an experienced personhood, but the precise erasure thereof. Blackness is on the other hand the lived experience on the margins of Whiteness, of being managed by White ideologies and systems. As you, and these other more recent biographers, have delved into your intimacy, familial and otherwise, with White-identifying (“European”) people, what has been displayed is not the charity of some White people, but (even in the theoretical weakness of your biographical accounts), what has been exposed is that all of White society, even the most charitable ‘White’ people have a say in the dignity with which Black people live. Such a truth is also unshakable, unequivocal, and fundamentally inhumane.

Mr. President, with respect to racism, you can only be Black in White society.

And this is what has been so very odd about your ascent to the most prominent position of power in the world and all of its included perks— a society built for your marginalization, management, and potential murder, catered to you, but to what extent? Was your plate placed before you with the same pride that your staff would afford other presidents? Did some of your drivers call you a nigger in their heads just to see how it felt? If, God forbid, some wild-man made an attempt on your safety, would your Secret Service respond to their training as agents or as Americans, or a nefarious combination of both? Perhaps, you see where I’m going with this.

Mr. President, not only was your house build by slavery, for the past 8 years, so was your job. So was your decision on whether to halt or ignore the Dakota Access pipeline; just as your decision to support Saudis in their unscrupulously ruthless assault on Yemeni civilians; just as was your decision on whether or not to take seriously the policy propositions of Black Lives Matter as a movement. As President of the United States your power over the life and death of marginalized people is a power historically uninterrupted. Never has America, as a White society, an exploitative capitalist patriarchy, relinquished such power.

But as you must relinquish this power, you return to everyday life in a country that you argue is much better than it was when you found it. But soon you may find out that this is yet untrue for Black people, because you, Mr. President, no offense, are Black. And although you restored secret service protection for former presidents (smart move), you’ve pointed out, you will once again have to drive a car. If you drive, you will drive while Black. 

As video upon video was released, showing the too often fatal peril of driving while Black, each time you answered as a President of a country founded by hate and now soothed by the myth of great change and not as a Black person. I get the sense that you forgot that you would yourself have to drive again.

Many feared attempts on your life as President when you were elected. I always thought that fear naive, because it’s obvious that the highest likelihood of you being gunned down by a racist madman exists while living as an everyday Black person. As you return to the real world, I fear for your safety now more than ever. I thought and hoped that eulogizing 9 people who were slaughtered, one of them assassinated as an elected official, while praying, after welcoming and praying for their would-be murderer would awaken that sense of collective urgency if not simple self-interest in you, but you seem to be under the influence of a most powerful illusion, that the hate you faced was particular to the Presidency. To the contrary, the hate that so many Americans have for you is particular to Blackness, and your intellectual and academic record suggests you very well know this.

Mr. President, like many political failures, you’ve held fast in disavowing any blame for the election of Donald Trump, but you were vital in Trump’s election in both ways that are your fault and ways that are not.

By being elected President you roused and embolden a racial anger that only grew in fury over the past 8 years— this is a fundamental hatred for Black life and a complete disgust at the sight of Black pride and success. But by keeping so few of your promises to Black and Brown, working class, and otherwise marginalized people who rallied around you, you inspired a new apathy in many Americans that could do little to outweigh White rage.

You fell victim to a fatal flaw in many well-meaning Black people: You spent more time trying to appeal to the better in White people than you did focusing on igniting the best in “the rest” of us; you’ve spent more time trying to appeal to a “mainstream” America, than looking out for yourself or your daughters. Now, you return to a world full of anger and apathy that you in part made.

You have to return to the very roads where much civilian blood has been shed. If you ever waive your Secret Service protection, you may see reality in a world you helped make. Sure, most police will recognize you. Some may ask for a selfie. Hell, you might even consider making yourself a special license plate that says, “don’t bother pulling me over, I used to be the President”; but, many police also endorsed Donald Trump and many ridicule Black Lives Matter, not only as a movement, but as an idea. Many police (the kind that shoot unarmed teens 16 times or use vile slurs) inevitably dream of reminding you of your blackness. Surely you know this. The hate spewed against you by so many also wears badged uniform.

And if ever a cop, who does not recognize your car(s) or one who does recognize you for worse, stops you or your amazing wife or daughters (who in most chance encounters will go unrecognized), I pray in all sincerity that such a sick karma as that which could make even you a victim of America’s war on Black bodies would be a million times more forgiving to you than America itself ever could be. I hope that luck and the inevitable weight of your family’s fame and unending charm always falls on your side, because no matter what perks you’ve enjoyed, you’re still Black. 

And what is charm or fame after all? Many police blamed their shootings of Black civilians on the darkness of night, on the indistinct appearance of Black people in general, or on preemptive and primal fear. You’ve spoken on the complexity of the conditions that surround police shootings, bolstering the exaggerated police narrative of ‘honest mistakes’— knowing this, you too have reason to fear police. As you return to the road, as a driver, as a Black body, President Obama, I fear for you now, more than I ever have, because something tells me that in Trump’s America, it is fear foremost that will connect us, and bind us in a most terrible embrace. I fear for you now, because while Presidency is temporary, you are always Black, on any road, at any time of night.

by WSPJ | 9:33A EST |22.12.16| Just waking up in the mornin’, gotta thank God

[...] The failed regional mass transit proposal in November’s election counts as the latest chapter in Detroit’s sad transportation story. This outdated  narrative reads something like “Detroit’s automotive inclinations stifle public transportation”. But the failed proposal reveals more complex depths to Detroit’s struggle for independence and economic growth. [...]

The Problem: “Detroit must lead-- Not follow.”

Conventional understandings lay blame for Detroit’s transportation underdevelopment at the feet of “The Big Three″, Ford, GM, and Chrysler. But they aren’t tasked with governing life in Detroit; the City of Detroit is. The City of Detroit should take responsibility and action. 

Beyond a culture of cars, the failed regional mass transit proposal continues a history of suburban intransigence--a cultural and political unwillingness to work with the city--and Detroit’s own dependence on the suburbs. Detroiters overwhelmingly voted for mass transit, because you can’t drive the major streets of our city everyday, seeing people walk on sidewalks, for as long as the sidewalks last, and not understand the need. Yet Wayne County suburbs and Macomb and Oakland counties voted “no”, because they don’t trust Detroit’s public sector, they don’t need public transportation enough, and too few see the region as a cohesive whole.

But why should we rely on outlying municipalities for goods that we need?

Detroit is a major American city. Detroit is home to Michigan’s most robust commercial and cultural assets. Detroit is Michigan’s social and cultural capital. Detroit is the giant, here. But when Detroit dreams economic progress and proposes projects long overdue, we find ourselves in the subordinate position, needing suburban approval, coded in the language of “regional partnership”. We’ve sold off valuable assets and turned over control of public goods (which had been carried theretofore by Detroit taxpayers) to suburbs and the State. So often does Detroit lose out to its neighbors, one might think it’s by design.

Studied accurately, history confirms that Detroit’s dependency is by design.

After Detroit’s popular uprising in 1967 and the resulting White flight, divestment from Detroit in the name of “regional partnership” has been thorough, if not systematic. If Detroit has its own political dialect, “partnership” means “suburban permission”. For by leaving Detroit and taking with them much needed tax revenue, Southeast Michigan’s middle-to-upper class not only bet on Detroit’s failure, but also fixed the game.

In rebuttal, many will point to rampant corruption in Detroit-- case after case of bribery, money laundering, and kickbacks-- but each exposé of Detroit’s political corruption has implicated not only Detroit officials but wealthy suburbanites looking to take advantage of a cash-poor city. Now, to finance public works, we have to turn to that very same class of wealthy suburbanites who left Detroit and beg to fulfill our hopes of a world-city reborn.

But if the failure of the regional transit proposal teaches us anything, it’s that until “partnership” means “partnership”, we have to grow up as a city and figure out how to function on our own.

Detroit and Detroiters lose millions of dollars every month (potentially 1.8 billion per year!) in economic growth due to a lack in efficient public mobility and connectivity. In a city where economic underdevelopment is the problem, Detroit has to build its own transit infrastructure. Not only build a robust transit infrastructure that serves everyday residents of Detroit, (not just projects that serve the shopper, the visitor, or the desired newcomer, and yes, I’m talking about the quaint little QLine choo-choo), but we have to also build the independent financial infrastructure to sustain services. Public transportation is a massive investment and data and extensive research show that it yields massive economic returns. Instead of counting our “woes and no’s”, we need to seize on the “yes” that Detroit voters stamped on public, mass transit and push Detroit into a more socially, economically, and even environmentally sustainable future. 

Detroit must lead, not follow.

Part 2: Detroit Is Ready For Mass Transit... Let’s Just Go! 

November’s result gives Detroit a green light for public transportation. Detroiters are ready to stop working so hard (walking and driving everywhere) and to start working smart and working together. So how can it work for us? 

After decades of talk, Detroiters still wait for buses in a city populated in pockets. Dominated by politics, transportation discussions fuel discord and despair; plans to grow mass transit live fast and die young. But for all the doubt and disappointment, we now have ample reason to hope: originally seen as a massive loss, November’s failed regional proposal was actually a thumbs up from Detroit on its own public transit. And Detroit’s public transit is already mapped-out, just waiting to be redeveloped as a vibrant system (...think Lion King’s little Simba singing “Oh I Just Can’t Wait to be King”). Optimism isn’t foreign when we think both realistically and boldly.

Realistically, Detroit’s transit system does not need to compete with any other city’s and it frankly does not need to amaze us; it only needs to move us, to replace backed-up commutes and connect communities to commerce.

So how will Detroit’s new mass transit look? As with any development strategy, Detroit’s leadership has to think through basics with a determination to act:

1.) Identify need(s); 2.) Outline opportunities for growth; 3.) Locate and map assets ; 4.) Plan to grow assets into need-areas; and 5.) Build financial infrastructure to sustain growth (i.e. city millage, bonds, and tax increases on high traffic venues and companies).

Simple enough. But x’s and o’s aside, change in Detroit rests on a new worldview that challenges civic and political cultures in Detroit.

First, inclusive transit development relies on community organizing and organizers, not politicians, to lead and ask insight-driven. In order to move people, those who specialize in meeting and motivating people must lead the charge, so that the people can hold stake.

Secondly, we have to change the tone of our conversations and even our planning. Too often, we focus problem-solving conversations in Detroit on the problem, and not the solving. But with an Asset-Based Community Development model (ABCD), we disrupt deficit mindsets and inspire actionable planning. Detroit can make huge strides for loyal and longtime residents, by re-orienting and optimizing pre-existing infrastructures and assets. 

Let’s ask “where are the opportunities in our obstacles?” It’s not just feigned optimism; it’s a fundamental, cultural shift in our accepted modes of operation from focusing on lack to thinking about leverage. 

For starters, if the ballot tally tells us anything, it’s that Detroiters are willing to pay for change; Detroiters actually voted for the tax increase. Detroiters who can afford to pay slightly higher taxes now recognize that their businesses and organizations benefit from increased mobility and connectivity. But beyond individual burdens, big companies and high traffic commercial ventures have to pay their share, because they benefit most. Detroiter’s articulated belief in public transit is already a huge asset, because now we can act on plans. 

And we already have a framework. For as much as DDOT leaves wanting, Detroit has a bus system, with commonly-known routes, timed schedules, and loyal (sure, mostly reliant) customers. A bus system is a vital asset; a major city positions their bus system as an indispensable glue in broader transportation systems. In Chicago or New York, where train systems are robust, buses go where trains can’t, carrying commuters cross town and connecting communities. Bus systems are key to effective mass-transit. Detroit has that.

Our bus system is a building block that, if used most effectively, can serve as the blueprint for a more robust and vibrant transit system and can set in motion the financial infrastructure to sustain a system into perpetuity. For example, more efficient and trustworthy bus systems pay not only for themselves, but can pay for new train lines. Efficient bus systems raise funds for new, more on time, and reliable buses. And nuanced approaches to data from pre-existing systems lay a foundation of information for newly re-designed systems. 

So then the question is not how to get mass transit in Detroit, but how we best grow and use it:

1. Public transit makes a city more accessible to its people, so transportation itself must be accessible. We have to grow public transit into the lives of Detroiters.

Which communities rely most heavily on buses? Where are the most accessible stops for them? Are stops safe-- warm and well-lit? Where are people going? Where do crowded commutes slow down? How close are high-traffic areas to pre-existing bus routes? How close are those commercial centers to pre-existing bus routes? The the answers to these questions should be plans.

2. A responsive transit system intervenes on unnecessarily long commutes with opportunities to take express buses from key intersections, like Grand River and Southfield, 7 Mile and Livernois, Woodward and Davison or Jefferson and Van Dyke, right into Downtown, Midtown, or cross town. These express buses can normalize routes that can eventually become train lines. 3. Public transportation takes people to resources. Many cities have free Park-and-Ride facilities near popular shopping centers; we should too. This is good for commuters and for commerce. And it’s easy to map these assets. Anyone familiar with mass transit systems knows if you ride for long enough you cam see trends-- where everybody gets on or off and whether people have shopping bags or book bags. We need to study people-patterns to meet needs.

4. We need transit cards. Yes, transit cards.

Though they seem unimportant, transit cards mean your system works, and more importantly, your city works. That an overwhelming majority of Detroiters do not have a transit card shows just how little public transit works for Detroiters. Upon the planning, the promise and implementation of an strategic transportation renewal, the City of Detroit should build a website where people can load-up money; we should install machines at stops where you can load up money; we should mail every known household (let’s say) 4 transit cards, and if we really want to get ahead of ourselves Detroit transportation administrators should build an app that encompasses all these functions.

In a major city, a transit card is an essential part of life. It should have our fingerprints all over it. It should be a part of our monthly budgets (which will hopefully grow in a growing city). A transit card is a constant. But it’s also just a card; and the passing idea of a transit card and how easy it would be to get something so small and simple in the hands of every Detroiter encapsulates just how far and how close we are to being not just the Motor City, the city that moves the world, but a world-class city, a city that can move itself.

by wspj | Mon Dec 5.16 | 9:36 CST | ‘bout to take the dogs to the park

On the Historical Origin of the Real Opioid Epidemic

Racism proves suicidal. Presumed reasonable, self-governing, and safe until they ask for help, many White folks have been allowed to kill themselves in the streets with opioids, neglected by a government obsessed instead with racialized images of drug use. But the opioid phenomenon, coursing through the veiny streets of American cities and towns, is a manifestation of an older mechanism meant to the dull the experience of pain inevitably caused by Capitalism and elitist exploitation. 

Karl Marx’s (and Max Weber’s and Alice Walker’s, and James Baldwin’s and even David Walker’s) observation that religious institutions and ideologies function as opium for suffering people applies even to those institutions and ideologies that aren’t so obviously religious. One such theology used to ease the pain of people who suffer materially is Whiteness. 

More than a social cause of the current crisis of opioid addiction, historically, Whiteness is itself the original opioid epidemic. “White” communities have long suffered dependency on the myth of being unconditionally superior to others, to dull the pain of their own class oppression. Saved in racial kingdom, people are reborn as White, with new power and glory over bodies of darkness.  

All throughout Europe and the Americas, lower class people, whose jobs and opportunities for compensation fluctuated with real consequences for their survival, were allowed to leave mainland Europe or large cities to work on colonizing and slaving ventures. Otherwise lowly people could go own land, exert extreme power over Others, and be titled a nobility they could never dreamed in their places of home. ‘Europeans’ at large enjoyed a new global acceptance as White people.

Assigned a mythical identity of Whiteness, by being equipped with material power to oppress people who were viewed as non-White, people are allowed to feel better about their subservient social positions. The pain of being poor and even hungry is lifted by the close proximity to and political and physical power over non White bodies, for whom poverty or hunger has not been even the tip of the iceberg. The power to judge life-and-death over every Black passerby, through false accusation and the gruesome force of lynching, equip Whiteness with a theologically redemptive purpose. Whiteness transforms everyday people into “White” people, innately closer to God and ultimately functioning as God relative to non-White people. 

But hardly God-like Whiteness seeks to mask poverty and the pain that stems from lack, through the psychological illusion of being better off than one really is, by contrast. True to its opioid function, Whiteness as a refusal to see one’s own suffering is suicidal. Throughout history, all over the world, White people refused to drink from fountains, even in their thirst, unless the fountain said “White” above it. Perhaps there was lead in one and not the other. But in racial illusion, as any capitalist ideology, people embrace pain by numbing it.

A historically fabricated idea, requiring as much blind faith and dutiful adherence as the idea of joy delayed unto Heaven, Whiteness interrupts the painful alerts of one’s reality with the false sensation of some higher place of existence, through the looming question, “what if you were Black, a slave; what if you were one of them; this isn’t so bad; it’s actually kind of nice.” 

Nodding off into intergenerational submission and slumber, many poor, working class, and middle class people have often been seduced into solidarity with their oppressors. Many have discerned this deception, instead organizing for liberation in collaboration with those struggling for Black, Indigenous, Queer, Women’s, Veteran’s liberation and more, but the opioid epidemic of Whiteness is much older the pharmaceutical industry’s unscrupulousness with Percocet. The numbing effect of perceived supremacy through constructed identity is a political concoction with a long shelf life.

“Rusted Whiteness”, by Kristaps Bergfelds

It is a ceaselessly recurrent feature of the domination of poor people in America, that poor White people are forced to choose between engaging some revolutionary coalition for liberation or enjoying immediate reprieve through marginal advantages over non-White people. As economic intervention Whiteness embodies a thin but widespread layer of social privilege.

Conditional immunity from the structure of violence upon non-White bodies is the only “reward” poor White people get and it isn’t much reward at all. White privilege doesn’t actually put food on the table; it doesn’t grant basic, decent health care; and it doesn’t afford any personal dignity; it’s an advantage rooted in the absent experience of a systemic violence that no one  should be made to endure in the first place. Whiteness then is a political illusion which converts a glass not even half empty into a glass relatively more full by putting Black suffering on highly visible display. The high of Whiteness is fleeting, temporary. Rendered helpless then to challenge any elite, the poor who cling to Whiteness also seal their own fate. For them too poverty is an experience defined by pain.

by wspj | Thurs May 12.16 | 9:36 CST | ‘bout to go for a drive

“I wish my momma had swallowed me.”

“I’m not listening to you because you’re a faggot.”

“I’m gone come back and blow this bitch up.”

“Mr. Jackson, I didn’t mean that. Do you have money for bus fare?”

“Mr. Jackson, I don’t understand why my momma birthed me but then cusses at me every morning, all morning.”

“Mr. Jackson, I love you, bro.”

Rage recognizes rage, and I know Azealia Banks's very well. It is like my own. But I have learned that it is not mine alone. 

Teaching and coaching in America’s most violent neighborhoods introduced me to the rage that kills over disagreements, the fear that shoots in crowded parks, and the cries for love that are often laced with defensive profanity.

Banks has the dysfunctional anger-management of a survivor uncared for. She threatens because she always feels threatened. She’s almost always coping with something much bigger than the situation at hand. Her disproportionate reactions are more than proportionate, if you walked in her shoes, if you lived her life, if you were locked in her mind.

Harm.

Azealia Banks has done a lot of harm on social media. Azealia Banks live at harm’s limit. She exists because her mother couldn’t bash her head hard enough to kill her. That’s all. Banks does a lot of harm, because without healing, that’s all she has left.

This is going to be very simple, without much lofty analysis.

Too many people are ready to throw away Azealia Banks.

Too many White people who participate in the reproduction of a society that makes rage-filled, harm-readied Black youth inevitable are ready to disavow Azealia Banks as individually uncivilized instead of understanding her as a reflection of Western civilization.

Too many moralists are quick to assess Banks through the limited lens of right and wrong as applied to actions in a vacuum; what does your morality say about judging people without stepping into their shoes or doing a basic search of their biography?

Way too many self-styled ‘woke’ Black folks are now repeating Hillary Clinton’s vicious ‘94 Crime Bill language in calling for the punishment of Azealia Banks without any contemplation or compassion.

“We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we need to bring them to heel”.

Can we say with honesty and pride that we object to the prison-industrial complex which is premised on the notions 1.) that Black people deserve dismissal when they will not comply with norms, 2.) that society has not wronged us and harmed us drastically, and 3.) that ultimately it is society that needs protection from us and our angry youth, not the other way around and yet allow our desire to coldly exile Azealia Banks into social death to go unexamined?

Too many of us use the word “nigga”, but refuse to understand Azealia Banks as a queer woman of color whose disregard for the pain that her use of the word “faggot” causes people stems from the pain of rejection by the very LGBTQ community she offends; our erasure of her from that community in our critiques repeats the cycle, it doesn’t complete it with resolution, much less healing.

Healing.

It’s what we need. Not everyone has the capacity, the energy, the feeling of safety, or the resources to serve, help, organize, educate or empower people who will curse at you for offering advise or threaten you for getting too close. But just because we don’t have the answers to the problem at hand does not mean the person caught up in the problem needs to be thrown away.

We cannot buy into the notion of the “super-predator”. Azealia Banks has not been nurtured, reared, or guided in a complete or loving way. She exudes pain. She has not attempted to hide it. Courageously she has cried publicly about the pain of being a Black kid growing up in Harlem or Bronx or East New York wondering why you were born, why you feel so inadequate and neglected, and why no one will recognize your struggles or your situation. Boldly she has confessed that she doesn’t have all the answers; after all she got money before she’s fully grown up. Openly she flaunts her flaws.

For it, she is shamed, in unfair standards that hold a relentless fire to her tweets—off-hand remarks on social media— but the same standards permit the mourning of David Bowie, who for a year pretended to be a Nazi and worse was accused on more than one occasion of sexual assault. Azealia Banks is not afforded the charming allowance of a rock star’s belligerence. Why?

She is a Black woman from humble starts. She will be “classy” or she will be cast aside. She’s given no choice.

It’s why when so many so-called radicals took delight in the fact that a young Black star’s PR team (no matter how bare) thought it a perfect opportunity for publicity to butt into an adult conversation that was already laced with profanity apparently unfit for a 14 year old on a school night (of all nights) and incite the inevitably excitable Azealia Banks. Our joy was in an impossible triumph, one black woman over another, in a rumbling contest of mutually assured destruction between warring young Black femme bodies. 

Blood Sport.

Black women fighting is a blood sport and a gladiatorial display. Black women fighting to the death is now a multimillion dollar televisual industry that is mostly permissible as a “fight-to-the-death” exercise because no one cares if Black women die, physically or metaphysically. Think Housewives of Atlanta. Think Love & Hip Hop. 

How can we delight in Black women warring? How can we share this moment with glee? How have we participate in the colosseum’s call to “finish her”? 

I understand Banks is wildly imperfect. She was abandoned and survived vicious abuse as a child in a community that is itself abandoned and abused. Now what shall we do? 

In the end, the question is plain as it is curt: do we love Black youth unconditionally or not? Not all of us have to individually love every young Black individual unconditionally, but surely not all of us can delight in such an undignified display of young Black rage before the White gaze as if it was the evening’s entertainment (I guess it was) and still complain about the reduction of the Black body to a unruly thing fit for policing and governance.

Surely, we cannot figure ourselves lovers and radical Black lovers at that and not think, much less express, in the end, that Azealia Banks is an example of the healing that we all need as a people marred by neglect, abused in abjection, assaulted by a society that simply does not check up on Black girls.

We cannot love Black youth and not love Azealia Banks. We cannot love Blackness if we throw away any Black youth with a wild disregard for etiquette or well-policed language, because enraged Black youth far outnumber Banks. We cannot dismantle White Supremacy and simultaneously delight in the demise of those among us whose lives, whose senses of safety and self, and whose ability to function in the world has clearly itself already been dismantled by White Supremacy in which Black life is an event of perpetual violence.

by wspj Wed May 11 | 10:47 CST | in bed 

It has grown apparent that membership to the self-styled “BeyHive”, a group of endlessly loyal fans of Beyoncé, requires a fundamental contempt for and hatred of Beyoncé.

Irony.

Unconditional love is supposed to be the opposite of hate. But it is also easy to confuse unconditional love with what I call “one-conditional love”. One-conditional love is that love which is unconditional on one condition: that you remain more-or-less the same, or that you at the very least grow at a pace or ease with which the “lovers” are comfortable.

Any and all who attempt to grow Beyoncé are attacked forcefully by the BeyHive, violently repudiated, their reputation scrambled around in thick mud, with one’s name ultimately being only uttered in the manner of an insult or disdain.

"bell hooks."

It is impossible to detect the love in bell hooks’ words— even when she called Beyoncé a terrorist— from the position of one-conditional love, because sincere love, no matter how tough, always grows an individual, pushing them beyond their perceived limits to a place so much more whole than where you began that only someone who loves you could deem it a project worth the labor.

Labor.

bell hooks is not a Public Relations specialist. She does not exist to strengthen the public image of any icon in the economy of signs. Neither do you. You’re a consumer. You consume Beyoncé. You claim to love her, but you don’t know her. Not if you won’t let her grow.

In fact, if Beyoncé is to be a stagnant object for consumption, then you have shared more intimacy with a can of coke—touch, smell, taste, sound— than you have with Beyoncé, even from the best seats in the United Center. You consume Beyoncé. You enrich her, surely. But you consume her. And I believe she enriches you as she has enriched me, but only if we let her grow and become, only if we help her grow, become, as she does us. We can’t push our artists to their full potential if we ourselves as fans refuse to be pushed. 

She is powerful. She is brilliant. She is creative. She is bold. She is independent. She is stronger as an artist now than she was before. 

However, if you let the BeyHive tell it, she can get no better. And that’s an ironic hate (more on that later). 

As fans in this game of capitalism, we are not worshippers in a pure sense. We are here to consume Beyoncé, not to dialogue with her, not to push her in uncomfortable ways, but to make excuses for her and defend her against change, in the way that one defends and maintains property. 

“Colorism? What’s that? Capitalism? Gotta eat!”

Everything we say we despise in others finds refuge from the rigor of our critical thought in the personae of Beyoncé, not because we love her, but because we need her to be our rock, our steady, our constant; upon Beyoncé we place the burden of perfection, such that we refuse her any chance to benefit from the critiques that we direct at everyone else in the world without hesitation.

In our twisted and self-serving niche of exceptionality, Beyoncé is treated like a can of Coke. Perfect. But Consumed. And Inanimate. 

This is the irony of love as a close relative of hate. 

In an obsession with an individual—even a passionate and devoted acceptance of them for who they are— the obsessed not only says as a turn of phrase that an individual “couldn’t get any better”, but the obsessed ironically, selfishly and unknowingly-hatefully refuses to allows the object of obsession to get any better.

Calls to “bow down bitches” or to get in “formation” have clearly been heeded, but the inability to disobey or second-guess betrays any purported “loyalty” as actual satisfaction with Beyoncé as a mere inanimate commodity. 

An object: If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. But people grow. Which is she to you?

In Formation, who is submitted to whom?

5 years ago, Beyoncé was spouting post-racial hogwash to Piers Morgan. 4 years ago, bell hooks excoriated her for her repeated rendition of visual Whiteness in popular representation and for embodying in her media choices an unconscious capitalist much like the rest of Hollywood, including Emma Watson. 

The difference? The rest of Hollywood does not enjoy the protection of the BeyHive. bell hooks was talking to us. And yet, showing what it mena sto multidimensional and dynamic, courageously willing to transform, instead of worrying about what has been said to Emma Watson, Beyoncé was inevitably listening to critique.

And as a result the Beyoncé of today is woke, more woke than ever, wide awake. Maybe it was Chimamanda's TED Talk in which she inevitably cites bell hooks. Maybe it was simply the energy of the social moment in which the marginalized masses are growing more vocal in discontent and in which the discourse on feminism as an absolute necessity for human rights is growing more robust. But whatever the cause, Beyoncé is growing, despite the BeyHive's premature satisfaction with her as a product. 

Beyoncé is re-imagining herself through a more radical Black feminism and it’s beautiful. Lemonade is stunningly beautiful. Beyoncé is finally being called a terrorist by FOX News and is striking matchless fear into the hearts of men thinking about stepping out on their marriage. Beyoncé has grown, changed, and benefitted, clearly from challenges and difficulty, not from presumed perfection.

Against BeyHive’s subtle wishes, Beyoncé changes. Beyoncé can handle tough love, even if her consumers cannot.

It’s time for the BeyHive to reflect. 

As individuals in an economy that reduces persons to products and casts their images as icons of the inanimate, we have to ask ourselves some tough questions.  

If given the choice in the matter, would the BeyHive let Beyoncé grow at all? Or would we fend off any and all constructive critique of her art as if it was a destructive attack on her person? Is the BeyHive trying to actually protect a person they don’t know or keep them caged for their own consumption? Is that “love”?

And do we have anything to offer Beyoncé or are we just content to feast on her and defend her like a precious object? Is that love? Will we let her grow? Will we help her grow? Can we, if we ourselves growth refuse? 

W.S. Paul Jackson |May 1.2016| 5:02 CST 

Blackness and the will to organize around Blackness as a performative identity, as a vast and loosely related set of shared experiences, and as a material political culture, as the historical consequences of people's resistances and survival is not problematic, even if it is employed, utilized, weaponized, or analyzed problematically.

Blackness does not belong to those who identify it, identify with it, nor to those who reject it. Blackness as a blank canvas on which to re-create lost realities, lost wealth, lost questions, lost trains of historical, cultural, and creative thought cannot be possessed lest the possessor is willing to also be possessed. Blackness as construct, concept, and creative space is not so much in our care as we are in its.

Blackness is not carried on the body, but is a means by which bodies manage to carry themselves, beginning with interminable realities and materialities about the political and economy space in which we've come to be. Blackness is what happens when we will to be, whilst the world wills that we not. Blackness is a self-determination, resting on ancient over-comings, while conceptually always already starting from scratch.

Blackness is drag. Blackness is a drag in which those who so choose are momentarily empowered, temporarily liberated, and permanently energized to persist in being their true selves, for themselves, and for those others they willfully or unconditionally love.

Blackness is performative. Blackness is conceptual. Blackness is creative. Blackness is elastic. Blackness is undefinable. Blackness is merely a conceptual space that takes dank and near demolished spaces-- project buildings, abandoned buildings, whole ghettos, dead-end streets, viaducts dripping rusty muck, broken down playscapes, Basketball courts without nets, inner-tubes all the way from the Caribbean, cleaning jobs on the Upper East Side, busted up warehouses that can still accommodate turntables and speakers, religions that contradict themselves, storefront buildings, empty lots-- and makes spaces for individuals who have been violently defined and confined by the state and its supportive society, space for those people to breathe at last and even sometimes at once.

Who dares to contest or problematize that?

Again, Blackness is performative. Blackness is conceptual. Blackness is creative. Blackness is elastic. Blackness is undefinable. Blackness is of course constructed in many ways for different positions and purposes. Blackness is always already contestable and personal and political and in the making, in progress, in process.

And yet, so is the 'agent', the 'actor', the 'individual', the 'self'. And so, Blackness has been so helpful to so many actors, individuals, and selves as they seek to become. Blackness has the thankless job of being both invisible as an inspirational catalyst when in it our breathtaking individualities we find and yet being totally to blame under the hyper-visibility of erratically percussive spotlights when we are smushed down as nameless numbers under the standard issued boot of the local Police Department.

Many have pushed beyond Blackness as an essential-ness or a defined or even definable Being. Many have insisted that it is now permanent. I see the merits and limits to both understandings. But none have given it the intimate analysis that it deserves in actually saying the simple, "I've lived around people who are treated like me, I've lived with people who treat people like me the same as me for being who we are in their eyes, and I know that for me to be treated better, people like me must be treated better too." We declare this candidly not because we trace to the same tribe or because we listened to all the same music, not because no one ever questioned our Blackness, but simply because all questions about our Blackness or our basic being came back to the enduring question-- "Who are you and why do you matter to me"-- and such a question is only possible in a humanist modernity where "all are created equal" for those who are excluded from "all". We understand Blackness as that contestable site of impossible tension in racial modernity-- that it is both that thing which makes us visible and 'real' to the world that at the same time wishes to erase us from visible, audible, tangible, legible possibility, that is that Blackness is both the product and process of our life and our death. Are we wrong to in that existential context respond?

Blackness is drag. It is put together out of pieces found in recovery bins, garage sales, hand-me-downs, thrift stores, and the products of occasional splurge. It is a unique reflection of the subject who seeks to be seen, known, and found in it. It does not limit the subject, even if in seeing it, some see limits (which are really limits of their understanding), and even if fad emerge within it to impress upon some by some or by others that a mode of unity may produce a new energy or direction of creative flow.

Why isn't Blackness understood in this limitless way by those new Black scholars who love to focus on its organizational and historical limits? What's militant about Blackness as drag, the non-uniform dresscode of a liberating and pulsating underworld? What's critical about failing to see drag, Blackness, and Blackness as drag as both simultaneously soothing and exciting to both militants and queen mothers alike?

To date, all of the arguments for post-Black agency, for more multiple performativities, for individualisms, and for self actualizations fail to overshadow the fact that Blackness has always been about the collective, strained, and strengthened experiences of individuals finding themselves in the midst of non-consensual governmental groupings. Blackness has always been agentive, resistant, active, individual, and self-affirming, in that individuals, actors, selves have located and actualized within the context of their material and political reality.

Far too often, the victims, people who've been identified as Black, are blamed in responding to their oppression for participating in their oppression. Most problematic in this has been ironically the nouveau class of Black intellectuals who rightly push beyond old dogmas about Blackness as a guide or parameter for Being, but slip into repeating old conceptions of race that subtly assume that 'race' is only thought into being or is only an 'experience' of the Being or the person, when in fact we are all living in material and physical realities within systems and structures of governance.

The state does succeed in segregating, in unifying, and captivating persons in manageable ways, so we do come into being with shared lived experiences within. None can speak for the other. Diversity, multiplicity, free extensities and intensities persist, and none of that relies on an overpaid academic to articulate.

Black people all over, everywhere you go, know they are individuals, who think for themselves, who account for their own personal survival, and who have complexities that could never be contained in sociological categorization. Blackness or any honest and realistic conception thereof has never claimed that any thing else was true, or even possible.

[Black] people are people with all the creative uniqueness and personal experiences of any-- where it fits Blackness is simply an asterisk, an essential footnote in all of our personal and unique stories that says "on top of all of this, it took a hell of a lot of struggle, resistance, pain, honor, enduring, and spiritual persistence for me to be here and I lift that up and I glorify that for those who did not make it and those who will make it because of me."

by wspj

Bambu’s album cover; huge political statement

With a pedestrian understanding of the important role of Asian Americans in history, it seems ridiculous that universities in the United States might have Classics departments to focus on not-yet-European antiquity, while ignoring Asian American contemporary histories. But this begs an even larger but more pedestrian question: why is it that diversity in hiring and admissions practices are considered the ivory tower’s response to historical and structural inequalities, but institutions that are designed to educate don’t extend ‘commitments’ to equal representation in demographics to equal representations in departments and course offerings?

The answer may be more nefarious than we think. The problem with personnel diversity is that the progress often stops at faces, names, ‘backgrounds’. Personnel can easily be selected based on complicity in colonial thinking, beliefs that affirm the power structure and blame its victims, but on the surface give the appearance of a shift in commitments and investments for a university, or really any institution. So often universities insist on limiting the study of minority communities, because then mainstream history, sociology and American studies departments, who often reduce those vast histories to ‘units’, can tell our stories through their lens, even if it’s the one or two minority professors per department charged with that quarter’s task. 

Yet, the many histories of Asian-Americans, both contemporary and not-so-contemporary within the context of racial domination and violence in America, exemplify why solidarity and self-study is so important for true progress.

Despite the suffocating narrative of East Asians as a model minority in America, the exclusion and oppression of people on the basis of perceived or real Chinese, Japanese, Korean descent illuminates some of the darkest and most damning chapters in the long and yet unended history of White Supremacy as a government policy. While it is routine to dismiss the histories of slavery, Jim Crow and COINTELPRO as belabored critiques, highlighting just how expansive White Supremacy is in shaping America’s modernity not only does justice to those whose suffering has been silenced and restores us to the full-powered capacity of solidarity as people of color, but also removes the burden of being ‘lone survivors’ from those who are often given absolutely no benefit of well-meaning doubt. It is not just us, it has happened to them, too. 

Store featured in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing 

Whether we are talking about “migrant workers” who would be called economic refugees if they were from Europe, refugees created by this country’s imperial activities, or those who were placed in interment camps more than once or people who have no choice but to live in squalid poverty in New York’s Chinatown, economic exclusion, exploitation and the scourge of segregation aren’t limited to Black people. While Black bodies have become synonymous in America with delinquency, dishonesty and danger, White Supremacist ideology stutters, stumbles and eventually settled on silent ignorance when forced to rectify its own stereotypes of hard-work, honesty, and harmlessness for Asian Americans with the realities of poverty, structural marginalization and resulting violence in Manhattan’s very own ghetto, Chinatown. 

And though Black bodies, cultures and affects (accent, attitude and ideologies) are often exploited and traded on through non-negotiable hyper-visibility-- Black History month being a time when many Black people have to answer questions, give presentations, and make White people feel less racist-- histories of violence, domination and exclusion against Asians are not only rendered silent and invisible, but almost unimaginable. The hypervisibility of ‘Asian exceptionality’, which doesn’t actually manifest in deserved leadership positions or respectful representation in the media, means that we can hardly think of Asian Americans within the context of non-Whiteness and domination through state violence, but the history of Asians in the United States has been marked by state-sanctioned violence every step of the way. 

Immigrant family in NYC Chinatown in the 80s 

Many people make passing reference to the interment of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, but few people pay attention to the fact that there were 10 camps in 7 states where Japanese Americans were forced to remain for 4 whole years, abandoning properties they inhabited and out of which they ran businesses, giving up generational wealth, by executive order of the President, himself. Not only did the President mandate that Japanese Americans be detained for 4 years, but the Supreme Court held up the constitutional validity of this structurally violent program. The histories of force sterilizations, forced labor on railroads, and segregation in America are not unique to one population of non-White people, but are unique to non-white populations and studying the history in this critical and accurate disallows rebuttals that rely on stereotypes about any one group for victim-blaming; a multi-ethnic and more robust understanding of the history of non-Whiteness in America rightfully and finally puts the responsibility of racial violence in the United States where it belongs, on populations and systems wherein people think they are supreme, because they are White. 

by wspj

Regretful and worthless read. WTF. Gimme my m*********** time back. 

Triggering seems to be "everyone's favorite word" now days, right? But why? And why does it really seem to be everyone's favorite concept to shit on?

Has “trigger warning” culture gone too far or do people with privilege and power take way too much wiggle room, too much leeway, and too much "time to grow". What does it mean for someone who has power in a system of violence to "take time to grow"— who is still being hurt during such a time? Simply, what are  the odds that someone who thinks trigger warnings are ruining campus cultures is just a hopeless asshole? 

1. As much as "triggering" is used as a language for people to rightfully clarify and communicate the boundaries of their psychological safety (particularly after having survived trauma/violence), the idea of unregulated discourse and dialogue as "growth" is used just as much for people to express their privileged desire to “learn” from conversations that are genuinely hurtful to others. “Growth” or “Inquiry” are university administrators favorite words to give people with privilege too much time to linger in the middle ground between a complete asshole and someone who is trying. But what is being “learned” if people who are marginalized are excluded from participation by a prevailing indifference toward their sense of safety?

When not infantilizing people mature enough to know the limits of their mental health, the kinds of people who attack survivors of trauma for being forthcoming and direct about their comfort zones (in a world that failed to keep them safe in the first place) typically argue that they are entitled to terse conversations for their benefit. Not only entitled, they are often privileged to not have been subject to the level of violence that others have, so, they have the privilege of hardly being unphased by graphically evocative dialogue. Ironically, most comments on “triggering” don’t say that we should religiously avoid triggering, but argue simply that we should care how other people feel and be a bit more diligent in how we deal with survivors.

Think about it: who gets to acknowledge their survival or trauma or violence? What kinds of survivors do we acknowledge and affirm? When July 4th rolled around everyone seemed to be on board with the idea that we should be understanding of veterans of America’s armed forces and their potential struggle with sudden, random bangs. In fact, people went out of their way to call and notify their neighbors of fireworks. We rightly do not ask veterans what they survived so as to determine if they have a “right” to have PTSD or if they are “going too far”.

Turns out PTSD exists, just not for marginalized classes. 

On the other hand, when victims or survivors of sexual violence say that activities, ideas or comments trigger flashbacks, fear, or intense anxiety, we quiz them, condescendingly pushing back, we want to make sure they actually survived something that we think is awful enough to merit our concern. What’s the difference? Is it the maleness of nationalism that allows us to understand and empathize with soldiers who’ve been sent to fight wars and experience “real” trauma or is it the nationalism of maleness that causes us to exclude women’s experiences as invalid, deeming violence against women as unreal, and disregarding the idea that trauma might be something that is associated with our activity as ridiculous. 

In a world where people get to tell others what they should endure and how spaces should actually impact them— everyone would be subject to duress and simply have to “deal with it” and could not call attention to it without being shamed. Such a world would invariable thus belong to those people who are far less likely to experience violence or trauma as survivors; such a world would thus belong to those with the power to violate and traumatize. It seems then that the attack on the idea of PTSD as the result of sociopolitical violence is shaped by exactly those people we should all be neutralizing, not the other way around. 

2. The male gaze is powerful and often takes control of our decision making faculties away from our ethical consciousnesses. So a survivor of some violence, who has dealt with a trauma differently for example, can now pen an article shaming others who have not for their difficulty and thus leverage status as a survivor against other survivors. That is the male gaze: choosing to see the world through the perspective or lens of that mode of thinking typically associated with those who are indifferent to the suffering of others, particularly at the expense of women and particular at the expense of women who’ve survived violence, regardless of the identity of the person doing the male gazing. Sometimes, we even shame ourselves. But guess what? Just because you can survive your own calloused indifference doesn’t mean others can or should have to.  Ultimately, many, men and women, survivors and non-survivors, have decided that conversation is more important that the experiences of certain others. We decided, somewhere along the way, that “space” for privileged people to grow is more important than spaces for people who are subjected to systemic violence to breathe. 

But does society have time for Men, White society, Cis or hetero (any privileged) people to decide that they've found an ethical and fair way forward?

When we are shaped by and invested with power and privilege in an unfair system, we hurt people all the time; and not helplessly either, but because we would rather not do the work of forging through the density of a dominant identity back into the clear landscape of just being a very basically good person. But what is a good person and what are those simple steps that are going to help us grow into that person?

The question is not meant to make it seem complex— it's quite simple, actually.

3. “Being a good person” is not important. One has to accept that when talking about participation in a common and systemic hurting of other people, it's not about being a good person in your eyes, or anyone else's eyes; it's about being good to people. There's a huge difference. Being a good person, lives only in the realm of idea, but being good to people lives in the world of material, where people feel and are hurt, are harmed.

Even if I am not hanging gross banners from a frat house or whistling at women on a train platform, I am male-bodied, male-read and I project masculinity in my personal performance-- as such, I embody and resemble a systemic violence. I resemble the system of violence against women, in part because I've been reared and raised by this society to represent it and in return to reap rewards. So too for White people, for example. You embody and resemble a system of violence and no matter how many times you remind people of the obvious, that you didn’t own slaves, throw rocks at MLK, or shoot Black people for being on the wrong side of town, you can look like a walking micro-aggression, you can signify another disrespectful and disheartening comment, and with even an overwhelmingly arrogant facial expression make people who don’t have the power or the benefit of the doubt in this society feel as though they are unsafe around you. You may not care, but then we don’t have to care either when you protest being called an “asshole”. Turnabout is fair play. 

But if we want to be different or make a difference, we've got to make drastic, swift personal and psychological revolutions around the way we live, and simply stop doing some of the things we've grown comfortable with doing; more importantly, we need to jump head first into a life of caring how other people feel. 

4. Often when checked on comments or jokes I've made that make my friends uncomfortable, unhappy, of feel unsafe, I simply rehearse the response I’ve learned in liberal ‘dialogue’-centered spaces; I've learned to rehearse the appearance of "listening", but so often I still haven't heard whats being said from the subjective experience that I’ve unsettled. It's no good to be quick to cite some idea or nuanced theory about “censorship” or about being post-race or post-gender, when you're doing so to absolve or alleviate guilt. "Rehearsed listening" is a stylistic maneuver that we perform to seem like understanding and "good” people; but hearing to understand is something you do when you want to be good to people, not just seem like a “good person”.

Listening is not as important as hearing and understanding. If I were being good to people, and not focused on being thought of as a good person, wouldn't I prioritize hearing and understanding over how I’m perceived?

It's bad enough to people have to tell us when we are being jerks, when we are being gross, or when we are being hurtful; it's even worse when we don't take into consideration that our society tends to paint people who call attention to injustice as "the bad guy". Often this “bad guy” shaming takes place when the argument is put forth that this person is shutting down a “productive” dialogue—  productive for whom? That question is so essential. Someone may be shutting down a productive dialogue (may even be doing so problematically), and maybe the conversation does need to continue, but that doesn’t mean the style of conversation doesn’t need to transform or that the person should not have care for their safety affirmed. 

When we say that a conversation or a dialogue doesn't hurt us but “helps us” and thus shouldn't matter that it can hurt anyone else, we are saying that our perspective is the only one worth hearing in the conversation and that our feelings are all that matter. That's a huge problem. Not everyone needs to have the conversations that we think we need to "grow" or should have to go through the conversation yet again. Your growth or your idea of growing is sometimes not something that should burden people who live that reality everyday. You don't decide if you’ve hurt people and if you don't want to hurt people, listen, hear, and understand.

5. When someone tells you something triggers them, they are actually doing the hard work for you, letting you know that they've experience things that you have not (because you aren’t them), even if you've experienced something like it. Just because you too have survived violence doesn't mean your reaction has to be everyone else's. Just because you’ve triggered someone doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong but if you decide that the course of the conversation is more important than someone feelings, isn't that consistent with the original violence— that this person's feelings don't matter? And exactly who is being taught by our conversations if people who experience violence are again violated by the conversation? And isn't there a way to have a productive and even candid conversation, if it is so important, and not shame someone because they struggle to participate in it?

Frankly, I don't think the world around us has time to wait for us to "grow" or "get it". I need to be someone who is good to people, now, yesterday, right away, because in the end, in systems of power and violence, we hurt people. I will never be perfect, but there are some very basic, principled things, like listening, hearing, understanding, and not wanting to hurt people that I have to commit to embodying right away, considering that my embodiment and resemblance of male violence and domination are always already at play.

by wspj 

“In character and temperament, the typical African of this race-type is a happy, thriftless, excitable person, lacking in self control, discipline, and foresight. Naturally courageous, and naturally courteous and polite, full of personal vanity, with little sense of veracity, fond of music and loving weapons as an oriental loves jewelry" - Frederick Lugard, “Dual Mandate” 

“Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.... I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race... ” - Cecil Rhodes 

Popularly loved, Cecil the Lion, recently slain by Minnesota dentist, Walter Palmer.

Many have remarked that the outrage directed at the Minnesota dentist, Walter Palmer, who paid $50,000 to kill a popular and beloved lion in Zimbabwe, Cecil, is unparalleled relative to the slaying of innocent people of color throughout the Western world and in America in particular (women and trans people with particular silence). People worldwide are not paying enough attention to the #BlackLivesMatter movement or to the discovery of mass graves along the US-Mexico border, but are taking time to issue death threats on Yelp  to the dental office of Cecil’s killer from London, Paris and Seattle alike. 

Truly, the relative amount of outrage and attention that Cecil the Lion’s death is getting is both perverse and very appropriate, especially within the critical contextual lens of anti-colonial thought. Cecil the Lion's death elicits reactions that the death of other non-white bodies, equally unwarranted, do not receive. However, in the colonial life, compassion comes at a cost that we regularly pay. And colonized bodies are always colonized in varying ways. All being policed through violence, the plight of Black men gets attention that Black women do not and Queer or Trans People of Colour are hardly mourned at all. 

But we should ask ourselves, of what value is it in the colonial world of White supremacy, for the dead (whether or socially or actually dead) to envy the dead? 

The murder of Cecil the Lion is after all another case of White male domination over sovereign non-White space, terrain, and body (as body). It is perverse to care about one murder and not the other, one instance of White male supremacy and not the other; as such it would also be incomplete to not see how an American going out of his way and paying $50,000 to go to other people’s countries to kill protected and endangered beings is an old colonial exercise of White male power over other lands. More simply put, while we should very much point out White liberal inconsistency, we shouldn’t go so far as to envy Cecil (he is after all dead as a box of nails) because his life, like so many of ours, was confined to an governed and highly policed area, the perimeter of which was literally marked out by the eminent possibility of death.

Cecil the Lion is mourned for the very same reason that he had no rights to begin with. "Animalia" is a political class seen as permanently innocent because persons belonging to this class (which is rendered legible by biological species discourse) are seen as devoid of decision-making capability-- what could an "animal" ever do to deserve death? The only warranted death of a member of the Animal class then is self-defense or self-preservation more generally and when it is understood that this person, in this case Cecil, is "harmless" or was being harmless at the time of the 'non'-incident, the death is viewed as an act of unwarranted and morally repulsive supremacy by an offender. Cecil’s killer, Walter Palmer, expressed remorse, of course with the belief that he has in fact unnecessarily asserted himself into the cosmic conversation between life and death. Where lions are concerned-- killing is almost always unnecessary, because “we live here and they live there; leave them alone” (Joseph Conrad suggested the same thing about Africans in Heart of Darkness). 

Police who kill Black people with impunity almost never apologize nor see public outcry from people worldwide. It reveals the perverse way in which, in liberal politics, ‘animals’ elicit compassion that non-White people don’t. Yet, in considering why Cecil is mourned the way he is, one must realize that to pine after the compassionate attention that Cecil’s death elicits is to envy a status as one totally and permanently unable to think for self, unable to function in political life, and thus living under the care of custodial persons. Cecil lived as an apolitical subject of the state, with no rights but those rights given to him by those who subjugated him, with care. Cecil is loved because of his perceived inferiority, adored for his “stupidity”, embraced for his alleged lack of intelligible contemplation, observed/preserved for his “instincts” and mourned for the loss of his permanent innocence. Cecil is mourned because Cecil could never be respected, mourned for the same reason that he was killed. Animal rights then are the application of ‘human rights’ to beings who still, in that context, have no rights outside of protection by those who can give and take away those rights at will. Could it be that Animal rights work in the same way that Human rights do in the colonial world? What then separates Human rights from Animal rights or what separates the Human from the Animal?  

Before we examine Animalia as a political class(es) consider the ironic fact that Cecil was named after  Cecil Rhodes, the colonial/colonizing father of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe, Cecil’s home) and the granting founder of the famous Rhodes Scholarship. It calls to mind the idea of “humanizing” or assimilating this lion into a human-ness through the ritualistic practice of ‘naming’ both “children” (another political class) and “pets” who are thereby being readied and soon ready for human life and for human-ness, a life of communication, collective protection, and development into responsible members of human-governed space; this is after all, the narrative trajectory of the project proposed by colonial administrators like Cecil Rhodes, Leander Jameson, Frederick Lugard, Theophilus Shepstone, and David Livingstone. 

Cecil's namesake felt very much that the likes of Walter Palmer (whose English name would have excited the chauvinistic Rhodes) was not only entitled to the land and life of Cecil the Lion but the lives of the people who live in Zimbabwe. So, it is as outrageous to kill Cecil the Lion as it is to name Cecil the Lion after someone who would think nothing of his death or the death of his African caretakers and then turn around and mourn that death. In the same year, a statue of Cecil Rhodes was torn down and the lion who bore his name was cut down. Still, colonialism, the terrains of its compassion and the power to decide who deserves compassion and who gets to even have compassion for others stands tall. And yet, the killing of Cecil the Lion and remorse for it are both very appropriate in the colonial context. After all, Cecil Rhodes never expressed outright hate or disdain for Africans, but instead expressed a compassion and admiration for their utility as a pet-like entity in the colony, saying:

“I think the natives should be a source of great assistance to most of us. At any rate, if the whites maintain their position as the supreme race, the day may come when we shall all be thankful that we have the natives with us in their proper position.”

Cecil Rhodes, Cecil the Lion’s name sake, colonial founder of what is now Zimbabwe and even British South Africa; owner of 2 million Africans by census on behalf of the Crown of England.

Animalia is a political class of those persons deemed far beneath the realm of politics, belonging to the care-taking mechanisms of the state and conservationist apparatuses. Post-colonial philosopher and an originary of fundamental Critical Race Theory, Frantz Fanon, looked at the divisions between political classes in colonial society as so deeply rooted in the assumptions of biological discourse that he considered colonialism to be the demarcated power difference between one “species” over another. Fanon goes on to articulate the very close relationship of familiarity between the species wherein the one needs the other in a relationship imposed by the colonizer through the power of the colonizer to exercise either life altering movements or authorize death over the colonized. 

In this case, the entirety of Cecil’s life in conservation was based upon humans agreeing not to kill him. Walter Palmer is known to lure ‘animals’ off their conservation sites so that he can avoid penalty. Consider then the close relationship between reservations and conservation spaces as emerging out of colonial governance and space-making, both often called “reserves”, for indigenous populations to preserve their way of life and to keep them from White authorized spaces of “governable political life” (as was argued by Hendrik Verwoerd on September 3, 1948 in a speech on the policy of Separate Development about ‘Bantu homelands’ established with the founding of South African Apartheid). The same governance of space, as terrains for alternative species and ways of life, define apartheid globally. When a non-White body is away from that reserved space, “a ghetto”, “a reservation”, a “homeland”, they are eligible for any manner of policing violence, even and especially unto death. 

Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians from their land in 1948, the same year Apartheid was made policy in South Africa, looks eerily similar to the Trail of Tears in part because in all three instances mentioned here “Reserve Spaces” (i.e. homelands, reserves, reservations) to which non-White bodies were confined and as the only places they were safe from immediate, summary execution like Nature reserves where Cecil the Lion lived are central to the political order of that day. 

Non-White bodies have been hunted over the years, murdered, placed in zoological display, and exploited for labor. Reflecting upon this history, in the rare instance wherein that occurs, many see no controversy. "The past was the past." Using bodies for labor, killing them for self preservation, and their potential as threats make slavery, indigenous genocide, and colonialism a non-issue. But that is in part because non-White bodies are always wedged between the semblance of "Humanity" as whiteness and Animalia which is a principle measure against which to configure non-Whiteness. 

The decline of the era of formal colonization in the mid-20th century around the world came with the expansion of human rights. Prior, Europeans invented a racial conception of humanity as an act of self-reflection/-preservation and opposition to the exploitable world around them. While formal colonization declined with the expansion of human rights to a global conception, the power dynamics did not shift; non-White persons were made to appeal to power, to mourn us, feel for us, and thus protect us from the very violence that controls our lives. After all, who usually bestows human rights and upon whom? And that was the colonial world, which human rights disassembled, we are told.

But now? Now, whereas Walter Palmer’s killing of Cecil in Zimbabwe was seen as offensive only because it was “unnecessary”, the mysterious death of Sandra Bland, the killing of Eric Garner, the killing of India Clarke (decades after the killing of Marsha P Johnson-- a hunting game of trans people unabated) are deemed necessary. Always, fundamental to a modern definition, “humans” have every right to kill “animals” when they feel threatened or need to control an otherwise out-of-control body. The racially and sexually inclusive concept of “humanity” and the racially and sexually demeaning notion of Animalia are complementary thoughts that work together to work against non-White, non-Male, non-Hetero persons. Where you are out of place, you are policed in the way that animals are-- controlled and confined, “for your safety and for ours”,  and can be killed when you pose a threat. But at the same time, as a morally deviant kind of human you are not innocent at all and are therefore responsible for your own death. We are configured as animal humans-- ungovernable and thus must be controlled via death-- and as human animals, rational and scheming enough to be held accountable, never innocent, always worthy of blame. 

The recent murder of Sam Dubose that has resulted in unusually swift charges against the offending officer highlights a new and emerging reality which redoubles the Black body onto that of the likes of Cecil the Lion. The use of a notion of behavioral innocence to critique the killing of a Black person simultaneously justifies the killing of all those who do not seem innocent or who are not proven innocent by something as clear as a video documentation that the killing was done unnecessarily of a body who was in his domain where he was supposed to be and was proven to have been harmless. Without such excruciatingly clear proof of Sam Dubose’ pleasant nature, compliant participation in the officer’s ‘investigation’ and his legal innocence in the matter, we would hear nothing but aspersions about his activity, his assumed menace, his alleged physical assault of an officer or worse, his refusal to comply. 

Sandra Bland, who is dead because she was driving while Black in a Texas county. She died in a cell much like anti-Apartheid activist Steven Biko, who too was blamed for his own death for struggling with police officers and interrogators

Unlike Cecil the Lion who is thoughtlessly killed in the way that he was thought to thoughtlessly live, non-White bodies in the era of ‘human rights’ require justification for their killing, but the justification is always already in place in colonial modernity. We have only ever had two options-- assimilate to humanity and selflessly plead to embody the perfection of whiteness to be considered people and abandon any non-White existence in our bodies and submit ourselves totally to the decision of compassion from everyday citizens in White society or to plead to embody the perfect innocence of Animalia and be totally under the care and control of White society. As of now, we are tasting the horror of both realities. 

Caught between Animalia and Whiteness, we have no where to go on this matter. All are “animals”, but some are more elevated than others, with more rights, and more power; some animals are White. To strive for humane consideration, non-White bodies have to assimilate because to be Human is to be White, to be accountable for decision making, and to be subordinated by the power structure in which "humans" place themselves permanently over non-humans via contractual complicity to “behave” in a rational, self-governable, and respectable way or in which humans submit themselves to the protections of ‘human rights’ by the very political entities that exist to violate human rights. It is clear then that “human rights” are simply “animal rights” as those who are “human” bestow “human rights” on those who previously had to be deemed unworthy of “human” consideration and rights. As such “animal rights” are incomplete because “human rights” are in the colonial context, impossible. 

To strive for “humane” treatment is to sell out Cecil on the terms of his life and death, asserting that we too are in fact better than animals and that animals should be subordinated, but not us; but then we simply argue that we are better than we were once thought for we were once thought of as animals. Yet on the other hand, to accept that Cecil can be mourned but that Sandra Bland, India Clarke, or Eric Garner cannot be is to accept that even in a biological discourse of species and in liberal ‘animal rights’ politics, we are beneath and between both Humanity and Animalia. 

Left to our own devices, we might be left alone, but to what end and at what cost? And if it were so simple, wouldn’t it simply be so? 

When Europeans arrived in indigenous lands-- we were another species, who needed to be cared for, protected, used, owned and even loved, like horses or oxen or lions, and as the compassion of the European grows so does the expanse of protection, our rights, and even the allowances of our venturing into “human”, “political” life, even into the White House. Remember the last time someone mentioned President Obama’s presidential pet? Perhaps, they are still obsessed with this idea that the White House, for the next 18 months is inhabited by pets. The rest of us, are not house-broken, but beasts of the field, 3/5 humans and we only count, when it’s time to count votes. 

by wspj

“To Pimp a Butterfly” Album Cover, notice how seeless it is for artists to imagine liberatory moments absent of women’s leadership-- that is so imaginary it is totally divested of the reality of organizing movements going on right now. 

Re: "For Free? Interlude" on Kendrick Lamar's new "To Pimp A Butterfly". This album is full of incredible art and music, but I'm growing tired of skits on albums that depict Black women as rough, mean and calloused gold-diggers who are just looking for a baller and/or trying to take a dude’s money. Black women always get painted that way. But Black women have been raising our community, grinding, (sadly) setting their personal dreams aside, making ends meet for all of us. Since when did Black women become the enemy?

A bunch of people pointed out the male dominated album cover and I thought maybe the album will contain the kind of perspective that the cover did not, but this interlude/poem and the revamping and revitalization of the same old, hateful "hoochie mama" vocal trope is much worse; it's the equivalent of a minstrel, shuck and jive 'coonin nigga'. It's not fair, that as Black men, whether we are attracted to Black women or not, attracted to women or not, many of us feel as though we have to constantly use women as foils to our dignity or stepping stones in our pursuit thereof. We have femme voices in our backgrounds and backdrops, we talk, sing, rap about women constantly, and the music industry uses the typified 'female' body as a visual currency more than any other; so, why can't we yield to a non-male perspective, or more complex narratives more generally? This is exactly what Toni Morrison says about the American literary imaginary, which is rife with the experience of black bodies, references to black people, and imagery allusions to blackness but keeps them in a critical silence, violence, and total nothingness of forceful mis/representation at an incredibly intimate distance. Many artists, Black men, are perpetuating this un/artistic White supremacy upon Black women via the un/creative imaginary.

It's hard to resist the synthesizer genius, the production, and the musical mesmerizing. You have to nod your head. You have to feel and even move. I even appreciate Kendrick being bold enough to record a song wherein he's crying into a microphone-- but there even in that move is raised up a convoluted push back against normative maleness, wherein Black men are finally allowed to cry in public or publicly, but the cries of Black women are further silenced and privatized, like the scene in 12 Years A Slave wherein Solomon tells Eliza to quiet her mourning, because it is useless as if suffering is only worthy of acknowledgement if it meets our 'nationalistic' goals as a people. So it is even OK for a Black man to have a complex manhood, but we won't even acknowledge the simplicity of Black women as dignified, even in all of the experiential complexity, economic entrapment, and domination by moral double-standards. It's complex because we understand that art is psychic and psychological-- things are going on inside of us of which we aren't even entirely aware ourselves and when we create and consume, that provides the most unique opportunity to catch ourselves in the act, to evade our filters, invade our facades and intervene on our moral undercurrents in the deepest, rawest expressions. In fact, art is complex in that very way: art interacts with the elements of taste and visceral enjoyment, in ways that can both stimulate critical thought but also enforce a highly stressful dissonance with our ethical knowings-better.

Photo from Erykah Badu’s “Bag Lady” Promo

All-in-all, it is essential for us to use Kendrick's album and the critical acclaim it is inevitably receiving as a chance to intervene on problematic, even if progressive, re/formulations of masculinity, manhood, and male reflection. "Manhood", if anything worth preserving, reflecting upon or becoming, can not rely on the avoidance of the "wrong kind of women" in pursuit of the "right kind of women". It doesn't matter if she's sister or a mother-- why would anyone want to hinge a ‘come up’ on the constant put downs of another being? That's what white supremacy does. Is that what we are on? Rappers as resistant artists (many of whom are raised exclusively by their mothers and supported by various women all along the way) have a duty to tell the truth about those who put their lives on the line to make sure that they could even live to be ‘men’. At the very least, artists have a duty to tell the truth. I really appreciate Isaiah Rashad, for example, keeping it all the way real about how his father's shortcomings continue to cripple him in his shortcoming as a man who battles threatening mental dysfunction. If we are frustrated or feel disrespected in society, can we not take it out on the only people in this world who ride or die with or for us?

This is why Hip-Hop can no longer be seen as a "priesthood". It is up to us as consumers and critics to understand that Hip-Hop not only 'needs' a non-male perspective but has been in many ways always been reliant upon women as producers, creators, and artists. We need to highlight engage and understand Azaelia Banks, Missy Elliot, MC Lyte, Erykah Badu, Janelle Monae, THEESatisfaction and many others from a more complicated and even in a simplistic light of dignity and recognition.

by wspj

Does anyone remember when the galaxy revolved around the earth?

Color may be the single most controversial phenomenon in the modern world. Even when we set aside the seemingly heavy topic of skin color, folks can’t seem agree on what color textiles are and when we agree generally, one person's red is not the same red that someone else sees. In offices, living rooms, and in fitting rooms everywhere, the argument about green and blue hues has been raging long before the dawn of the infamous striped dress. For the longest time (since I saw a TV special on colors as a kid), I have been preaching to politely attentive ears that many more people are 'color blind' than we think and that colors are very much relative to circumstance, physiology, communication and perception. Years later, I realize that I’ve actually been on a thought-campaign to show how the relativity of color perceptibility can teach us a lot about relativity in discourse and the pursuit of truth more generally.

The basic premise relies on the little known fact that 'color blindness' and ‘color sight’ are varied and are largely relative experiential phenomena. In fact, as anecdotal evidences indicate, in many cases one has to learn that one is ‘color blind’ through the experience of color disagreement or the simple inability to see certain (maybe even only a couple) colors in the way that one’s kindergarten teacher does (in some cases just the simple inability to communicate what it is that one sees in a way that agrees with others). However, something deep rings out from within the overt simplicity and insensitivity of the term ‘color blind’, which can largely be understood as seeing or perceiving certain (and various) colors differently than the majority of the human population: isn't positionality relative to a ‘norm’ the standard by which society categorizes people in general anyway? (Go to any website that explains color-blindness simplistically and see if they can do it without relying heavily on the word "normal" to describe how a majority of people might see things).

(Photo blogged originally at Swiked)

'Colors' are not a 'real' phenomenon on their own-- it is the optical result of the interaction between an objects visible material composition and light exposure, an optical event which our eyes then process. So someone's how one's eyes process light in different ways determines exactly what they will see with respect to color, and sometimes what they will see at all. In fact, it is understood that prior to the interaction and involvement of certain levels of light intensity, what is green might appear clearly red, what is yellow might appear clearly blue, and so forth. So if in fact the only thing that is clear in the world of color is that it boils down to physiological and circumstantial perspective, why do we argue about colors? Why do we feel like our normality is threatened when we discover that we see something differently?

(Photo credit: Haylibros)-- For years Nietszche's work has been used to unsettle the notions of certainty and truth as ideological products of social and culture power/authority

The tendency and desire to assert that what you see is reality can play out as fun and silly, but also represents a common philosophically folly. The fact that someone else sees a dress’s color differently simply means that sight itself is not a means by which to establish any idea of ‘objective’ reality or centralized ‘truth’, but we often don’t even see things this way. Belonging to a group, experiencing things in a way that is cohesive with that group and enforcing that experiential cohesion is a manifestation of a group-oriented survival drive where difference appears to threaten each group-reliant individual. The social media debate about the White House aid’s dress is about much more than a dress and even more than the science of 'color'; this is about how we deal with perception, reality (or truth), how we communicate with one another and how we deal with discovering that other people see the world differently, whether how they see colors or think about the afterlife. A dress worn by a White House intern is teaching us how to deal with the reality that the only reality we can really share is the one we are open to learning about from others.