Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Many non-Asian American people of color indulge the common fantasy that Asian Americans as a group do not suffer from American racism. For these pitiful anonymous, Asian Americans as a group have so ingratiated themselves into White supremacist America that the phrase 'model minority myth' has become a hollow throwaway from the arrogantly underprivileged towards those they consider lucky at best, and unimportant usually.
Personally, I found this phenomena most prevalent during my Cornell days where, from my perspective, the most international and ethnically diverse Ivy League university in this nation never once encouraged intense dialogue within its student body on multiculturalism and diversity. Now, the campus operated daily with those buzzwords; even the Campus Life residence hall directors and building managers and cafeteria workers and janitors attended monotonous meetings without end designed to indoctrinate cross-cultural unity perspectives in every facet of student life, all to little effect.
'Multiculturalism' and 'diversity', like their precursor 'integration', serve one purpose: to convince young scions of the privileged and alienated majority that people of color matter enough to their personal and professional lives that basic social interaction between the races must emerge to preserve the Establishment. This interaction, social sometimes but financial usually, is literally the only way the iconic institutions of the United States of America - our imperiled dollar, our vaunted ingenuity, our inhuman military supremacy - can thrive amid the real and imagined geopolitical Katrinas of the Twenty-First Century - an international energy crisis, global warming, stateless terrorism, welfare state financial meltdown, etc. Leave it to academia to decipher Ben Franklin's handwriting on the dusty walls of our nationally forgotten past -- after a building takeover best described as a bastardized hybrid between passionate student activism and the death of liberalism itself shocks Cayuga's genius into paying attention.
The point? In balkanized liberal America, no one offers guidance on race to those the majority expects to teach. At Cornell, one on my favorite sayings was "I don't get paid to be your professional Negrologist, and I wouldn't cash that check if you offered." (I'm obviously paraphrasing; this is a family blog.) But I'm convinced - then and now - that a major reason so many non-Asian American people of color express ambivalence and/or outright contempt for the racialized plight of Asian Americans derives from the unchallenged concept that Asian Americans are all smart, wealthy, hardworking, and too polite to cause trouble. What's more, in the absence of consensus among Asian Americans on the political worth of the model minority myth, many non-Asians indulge a defensive antagonism toward Asian American politics, one that excludes Asian Americans from much of the anti-racism activism in this country.
Even in 2008, when national media covers a race story, it involves the senseless murder of an African American teenager in Los Angeles, or Newark, or Washington D.C. It involves the influx of undocumented workers from our porous southern border who wish for nothing more from this country than to work hard at backbreaking labor in exploitative plantation conditions just to provide the rest of us with cheap lettuce (and benefit from the American welfare state, of course). Race in America involves the vision of an untried and brilliant biracial Senator who offers national unity -- wearing racial absolution's summer Sean John -- to mainstream White America, and the automatically beneath contempt sermons of his respected and beloved pastor, immortalized after decades of spiritual and political service to the Chicago African American community as a frothing, rabid throwback of a forgotten era when Whites were a silent majority and Blacks like the good Reverend deserved the water hoses and German shepherds for 'stirrin' up the good Negroes'.
Mind you - nowhere in our current race dialogue can Asian Americans speak about themselves. Nowhere.
And frankly, we lose something important this way, when some people of color, usually African Americans, are always called on to discuss themselves. America defines race dialogue today as teaching White people the specific racial etiquette necessary to never under any circumstances allow a person of color to detect their individual racism or their individual benefits from the institutional racism constructed by Whites past, and to prevent any real racial dialogue at any time for any reason that any White person must engage and/or respect. When people of color employ this dynamic publicly, I consider it selling melanin, and we should never forget that the whole world lines up for this new-age auction block. Just ask Juan Williams. And Boyce Watkins, for that matter.
None of us gain encouragement to look beyond our own racial or ethnic or gendered or economic oppressions in this country. Between reality television's faux-documentary visual immediacy where Viacom cameras offer a behind-the-scenes gaze on twenty-two year old oiled, muscular Caucasoid cavemen who consume enough Budweiser in thirty minutes to piss alcohol throughout the insipid physical challenges that offer money and prestige to the moronic and pathetic, between popular music's endless parade of gaudy, half-naked thirty-plus songstresses still begging you the consumer to inject the mountains of China White necessary to believe the Duchess is only twenty-five (and could ever sing), between the ever-present U.S. Marines recruitment commercials featuring all the dirt and grime and explosions a Santa Monica sound stage can glean from wartime Tikrit footage and a Puddle of Mudd single, between the self-centered rappers who devolve Black masculinity amid urban blight into bulging muscles glistening with baby oil and meaningless beefs over money, 'hoes and clothes to replace lyrical content with insipid controversy, between the cable-news pundits who sell introverted xenophobia and unapologetic racism in a folksy Main Street cadence ripped from President Ronald Reagan himself, the master at hate-your-neighbor politics, between the Ferraro feminists who despise Sambo success in exactly that language and hate their own booty shorts-clad Obama Girl daughters in the New York Times Sunday opinion page and the Wright "revolutionaries" who bellow and scream and screech over a basic Fuck Whitey! speech so they can gather the strength to serve Missy Anne Ferraro in our modern corporate big house with the marble tile and wood-grain tables and plasma screen televisions in the slave quarters' break room -- between all the insanity living in America generates the Millennium Generation has progressed into the All About Me! Generation, and our anemic politics panic at the disco.
Progressed, not evolved. A new study lays waste the claim that all Asian Americans are wealthy enough to afford healthcare in this nation, and that Asian American healthcare concerns do not exist. Pockets of economic uncertainty derived from small business ownership have left the rates of healthcare insurance ownership abysmally low for Korean Americans, and this study provides much more incentive for Americans to elect a President concerned with slashing the exorbitant costs from our current system while we push for universal healthcare. Also, this study encourages our nation to stop treating people as if they emerge from monolithic, homogenized groups. Poverty and lack of access to healthcare exists among us all, even the so-called model minorities among us, and a concerted focus on the specific groups affected by these problems, whether inner-city African Americans, immigrant Mexican Americans, small-business owning Korean Americans or working poor Native Hawaiians, would in my opinion, go a long way towards crafting and executing needed solutions, while all of us learn to look at each other without typecasting.
And we'd better: I work for a political campaign right now, and I don't have insurance. I can't afford it.
*Originally published at Reappropriate.com
Personally, I found this phenomena most prevalent during my Cornell days where, from my perspective, the most international and ethnically diverse Ivy League university in this nation never once encouraged intense dialogue within its student body on multiculturalism and diversity. Now, the campus operated daily with those buzzwords; even the Campus Life residence hall directors and building managers and cafeteria workers and janitors attended monotonous meetings without end designed to indoctrinate cross-cultural unity perspectives in every facet of student life, all to little effect.
'Multiculturalism' and 'diversity', like their precursor 'integration', serve one purpose: to convince young scions of the privileged and alienated majority that people of color matter enough to their personal and professional lives that basic social interaction between the races must emerge to preserve the Establishment. This interaction, social sometimes but financial usually, is literally the only way the iconic institutions of the United States of America - our imperiled dollar, our vaunted ingenuity, our inhuman military supremacy - can thrive amid the real and imagined geopolitical Katrinas of the Twenty-First Century - an international energy crisis, global warming, stateless terrorism, welfare state financial meltdown, etc. Leave it to academia to decipher Ben Franklin's handwriting on the dusty walls of our nationally forgotten past -- after a building takeover best described as a bastardized hybrid between passionate student activism and the death of liberalism itself shocks Cayuga's genius into paying attention.
The point? In balkanized liberal America, no one offers guidance on race to those the majority expects to teach. At Cornell, one on my favorite sayings was "I don't get paid to be your professional Negrologist, and I wouldn't cash that check if you offered." (I'm obviously paraphrasing; this is a family blog.) But I'm convinced - then and now - that a major reason so many non-Asian American people of color express ambivalence and/or outright contempt for the racialized plight of Asian Americans derives from the unchallenged concept that Asian Americans are all smart, wealthy, hardworking, and too polite to cause trouble. What's more, in the absence of consensus among Asian Americans on the political worth of the model minority myth, many non-Asians indulge a defensive antagonism toward Asian American politics, one that excludes Asian Americans from much of the anti-racism activism in this country.
Even in 2008, when national media covers a race story, it involves the senseless murder of an African American teenager in Los Angeles, or Newark, or Washington D.C. It involves the influx of undocumented workers from our porous southern border who wish for nothing more from this country than to work hard at backbreaking labor in exploitative plantation conditions just to provide the rest of us with cheap lettuce (and benefit from the American welfare state, of course). Race in America involves the vision of an untried and brilliant biracial Senator who offers national unity -- wearing racial absolution's summer Sean John -- to mainstream White America, and the automatically beneath contempt sermons of his respected and beloved pastor, immortalized after decades of spiritual and political service to the Chicago African American community as a frothing, rabid throwback of a forgotten era when Whites were a silent majority and Blacks like the good Reverend deserved the water hoses and German shepherds for 'stirrin' up the good Negroes'.
Mind you - nowhere in our current race dialogue can Asian Americans speak about themselves. Nowhere.
And frankly, we lose something important this way, when some people of color, usually African Americans, are always called on to discuss themselves. America defines race dialogue today as teaching White people the specific racial etiquette necessary to never under any circumstances allow a person of color to detect their individual racism or their individual benefits from the institutional racism constructed by Whites past, and to prevent any real racial dialogue at any time for any reason that any White person must engage and/or respect. When people of color employ this dynamic publicly, I consider it selling melanin, and we should never forget that the whole world lines up for this new-age auction block. Just ask Juan Williams. And Boyce Watkins, for that matter.
None of us gain encouragement to look beyond our own racial or ethnic or gendered or economic oppressions in this country. Between reality television's faux-documentary visual immediacy where Viacom cameras offer a behind-the-scenes gaze on twenty-two year old oiled, muscular Caucasoid cavemen who consume enough Budweiser in thirty minutes to piss alcohol throughout the insipid physical challenges that offer money and prestige to the moronic and pathetic, between popular music's endless parade of gaudy, half-naked thirty-plus songstresses still begging you the consumer to inject the mountains of China White necessary to believe the Duchess is only twenty-five (and could ever sing), between the ever-present U.S. Marines recruitment commercials featuring all the dirt and grime and explosions a Santa Monica sound stage can glean from wartime Tikrit footage and a Puddle of Mudd single, between the self-centered rappers who devolve Black masculinity amid urban blight into bulging muscles glistening with baby oil and meaningless beefs over money, 'hoes and clothes to replace lyrical content with insipid controversy, between the cable-news pundits who sell introverted xenophobia and unapologetic racism in a folksy Main Street cadence ripped from President Ronald Reagan himself, the master at hate-your-neighbor politics, between the Ferraro feminists who despise Sambo success in exactly that language and hate their own booty shorts-clad Obama Girl daughters in the New York Times Sunday opinion page and the Wright "revolutionaries" who bellow and scream and screech over a basic Fuck Whitey! speech so they can gather the strength to serve Missy Anne Ferraro in our modern corporate big house with the marble tile and wood-grain tables and plasma screen televisions in the slave quarters' break room -- between all the insanity living in America generates the Millennium Generation has progressed into the All About Me! Generation, and our anemic politics panic at the disco.
Progressed, not evolved. A new study lays waste the claim that all Asian Americans are wealthy enough to afford healthcare in this nation, and that Asian American healthcare concerns do not exist. Pockets of economic uncertainty derived from small business ownership have left the rates of healthcare insurance ownership abysmally low for Korean Americans, and this study provides much more incentive for Americans to elect a President concerned with slashing the exorbitant costs from our current system while we push for universal healthcare. Also, this study encourages our nation to stop treating people as if they emerge from monolithic, homogenized groups. Poverty and lack of access to healthcare exists among us all, even the so-called model minorities among us, and a concerted focus on the specific groups affected by these problems, whether inner-city African Americans, immigrant Mexican Americans, small-business owning Korean Americans or working poor Native Hawaiians, would in my opinion, go a long way towards crafting and executing needed solutions, while all of us learn to look at each other without typecasting.
And we'd better: I work for a political campaign right now, and I don't have insurance. I can't afford it.
*Originally published at Reappropriate.com
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
I'd never heard of Asiance Magazine before Jenn wrote this post, and after reading Ms. Bandong's article I doubt I'll return to that site. But while I find the gross characterizations of Asian men in Ms. Bandong's piece unfortunate, I don't understand why every writer who pens anti-Asian male fluff pieces warrants a letter-writing campaign. Certainly people can pursue justice however they see fit, so long as they aren't breaking laws, but I'm a little shocked that people would increase Asiance Magazine public profile with this outcry.
Further, I'm bothered that an obvious 'chick-lit' piece warrants this controversy. I haven't read any more from Ms. Bandong outside of this offending piece, but I would hardly describe that piece as 'feminist' anymore than I'd describe HBO's Sex in the City as 'feminist'. Ms. Bandong wrote a simplistic op-ed detailing her desire for racially fueled excitement based around cultural offence toward (or cultural ignorance of) her family's traditions and culture. That's not female empowerment, or gender equality - it's just adolescent. Ms. Bandong reminded me of teenage girls who pay for tongue and belly button piercings to upset their middle class parents' hard-won suburban apple cart. Her juvenile assumptions that one could build a more exciting relationship with a person who either does not know your family's culture or could care less about abiding by their cultural parameters in their household stuck me as simply uninformed or uncaring about the family disturbances and ostracism those situations create.
And I'm a guy who did not grow up in a household where I removed my shoes upon entering. I dislike doing that now. That's not how I was raised. But when I enter someone else's home and that's what they do, I follow suit. It's their home, after all, and no one ever needed to cajole me into that small common courtesy.
The point? There are serious feminist issues in many American communities of color that minority men have yet to embrace or understand, but when people mistake whimsical dating ruminations for the Asian American answer to The Second Sex, the unneeded and dehumanizing hyperbole abounds all over. Ms. Bandong's piece has nothing to do with feminism - it involves a young woman's immature self-justifications for dating non-Asian men - justifications so below-the-radar unimportant that the minor outcry represented here makes absolutely zero sense.
Lastly - and this is what really bothers me - why can't some Asian American men admit that minority feminism can evolve? What is the problem? I don't expect Black feminists to parrot Sojourner Truth at a Tavis Smiley conference in 2008. Black feminism concerned labor issues then and now, but today's glass ceiling issues must contend with thirty years of higher education advancement where Black women outpace Black men in matriculation and graduation rates. The point isn't that Black sexism has died or that Black feminism is outmoded because by some measures Black women achieve educational and professional success at higher and faster rates than Black men - it's that Black feminism itself must and has evolved to combat other issues that harm Black people in general and Black women in particular: the HIV/AIDS epidemic that exploded among Black women in the past twenty years, for example.
So when Asian men try to assume that all Asian American feminism can be distilled into the political positions or literary licenses on Maxine Hong Kingston or Amy Tan, they pretend that Asian American feminism can't change to suit their own anti-feminist agenda. Yes, given differences in tone and debate topic, this sometimes crosses the rhetorical demilitarized zone into a sexist country where Asian females are likened to humanity's corporate pleasure providers, posable and disposable, and no one - especially Asian men - has to respect their bodies or minds.
I'm convinced that this phenomena lies at the heart of every online Asian male backlash against Asian American feminism I've ever read. To me, it's not that different from the anti-Black female backlash that Anita Hill endured when she testified against Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. On some level, it didn't matter to some professional and public Black men that Justice Thomas was at best a C-level legal mind who spent his entire career dismantling the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and New Deal Keynesian economic policies; no for some, all that mattered was that a Black man had a chance to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States of America, and that a Black woman threatened to destroy that chance. Enter knee-jerk sexism as 'defense of the race', where 'the race' devolves into an aggrieved boys' club without social constraints in it's hatred of uppity women who assert their stories and their pain. If Anita Hill were Chinese, she would have been called a SOW.
So that's the state of gendered discourse in the Asian American community today - men add porcine qualities to the sexist overkill of the phrase 'sellout whore', causing very few Asian American women to brave the sexist backlash online long enough to develop lasting institutions that nurture Asian American feminist thought. Not for nothing, but Reappropriate.com did have a sizable amount of female posters over the years; I fear the unreasonable craziness and personal attacks during repeated interracial relationship debates from Asian American men have taught many women not to comment.
And that's just sad.
Because it shows that minority sexism exists, has real consequences in the real world, and damages the range of acceptable commentary in minority communities. Denying feminism's utility matters. Antagonism toward interracial dating by Asian American women - and all the anti-Asian female misogyny and sexism that always emergent topic provides - has become the shibboleth that Asian men use to unify their community online, and this byte-sized good ol' boys networking dehumanizes and disrespects Asian women as much as any Chinese Laundry advertisement or mail-order bride webpage or Kobe Tai 'love you long time' pornography.
So no, I don't condemn Ms. Bandong. I ask her to perform the same task I ask of many of the Asian American men I've read in comments here, and on Fighting 44's and Model Minority.com.
Grow up.
Update: Jaehwan pens a response blog on the Fighting 44's site. Although I fear that Jaehwan's perspective clings desperately to the unnecessary and unfair notion that Asian American feminism is irrevocably defined by Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, his argument provides a useful and well-written counterargument to the views presented here (even if I don't agree with it), so check it out. (3/27/08, 7:33 AM PST)
Further, I'm bothered that an obvious 'chick-lit' piece warrants this controversy. I haven't read any more from Ms. Bandong outside of this offending piece, but I would hardly describe that piece as 'feminist' anymore than I'd describe HBO's Sex in the City as 'feminist'. Ms. Bandong wrote a simplistic op-ed detailing her desire for racially fueled excitement based around cultural offence toward (or cultural ignorance of) her family's traditions and culture. That's not female empowerment, or gender equality - it's just adolescent. Ms. Bandong reminded me of teenage girls who pay for tongue and belly button piercings to upset their middle class parents' hard-won suburban apple cart. Her juvenile assumptions that one could build a more exciting relationship with a person who either does not know your family's culture or could care less about abiding by their cultural parameters in their household stuck me as simply uninformed or uncaring about the family disturbances and ostracism those situations create.
And I'm a guy who did not grow up in a household where I removed my shoes upon entering. I dislike doing that now. That's not how I was raised. But when I enter someone else's home and that's what they do, I follow suit. It's their home, after all, and no one ever needed to cajole me into that small common courtesy.
The point? There are serious feminist issues in many American communities of color that minority men have yet to embrace or understand, but when people mistake whimsical dating ruminations for the Asian American answer to The Second Sex, the unneeded and dehumanizing hyperbole abounds all over. Ms. Bandong's piece has nothing to do with feminism - it involves a young woman's immature self-justifications for dating non-Asian men - justifications so below-the-radar unimportant that the minor outcry represented here makes absolutely zero sense.
Lastly - and this is what really bothers me - why can't some Asian American men admit that minority feminism can evolve? What is the problem? I don't expect Black feminists to parrot Sojourner Truth at a Tavis Smiley conference in 2008. Black feminism concerned labor issues then and now, but today's glass ceiling issues must contend with thirty years of higher education advancement where Black women outpace Black men in matriculation and graduation rates. The point isn't that Black sexism has died or that Black feminism is outmoded because by some measures Black women achieve educational and professional success at higher and faster rates than Black men - it's that Black feminism itself must and has evolved to combat other issues that harm Black people in general and Black women in particular: the HIV/AIDS epidemic that exploded among Black women in the past twenty years, for example.
So when Asian men try to assume that all Asian American feminism can be distilled into the political positions or literary licenses on Maxine Hong Kingston or Amy Tan, they pretend that Asian American feminism can't change to suit their own anti-feminist agenda. Yes, given differences in tone and debate topic, this sometimes crosses the rhetorical demilitarized zone into a sexist country where Asian females are likened to humanity's corporate pleasure providers, posable and disposable, and no one - especially Asian men - has to respect their bodies or minds.
I'm convinced that this phenomena lies at the heart of every online Asian male backlash against Asian American feminism I've ever read. To me, it's not that different from the anti-Black female backlash that Anita Hill endured when she testified against Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. On some level, it didn't matter to some professional and public Black men that Justice Thomas was at best a C-level legal mind who spent his entire career dismantling the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and New Deal Keynesian economic policies; no for some, all that mattered was that a Black man had a chance to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States of America, and that a Black woman threatened to destroy that chance. Enter knee-jerk sexism as 'defense of the race', where 'the race' devolves into an aggrieved boys' club without social constraints in it's hatred of uppity women who assert their stories and their pain. If Anita Hill were Chinese, she would have been called a SOW.
So that's the state of gendered discourse in the Asian American community today - men add porcine qualities to the sexist overkill of the phrase 'sellout whore', causing very few Asian American women to brave the sexist backlash online long enough to develop lasting institutions that nurture Asian American feminist thought. Not for nothing, but Reappropriate.com did have a sizable amount of female posters over the years; I fear the unreasonable craziness and personal attacks during repeated interracial relationship debates from Asian American men have taught many women not to comment.
And that's just sad.
Because it shows that minority sexism exists, has real consequences in the real world, and damages the range of acceptable commentary in minority communities. Denying feminism's utility matters. Antagonism toward interracial dating by Asian American women - and all the anti-Asian female misogyny and sexism that always emergent topic provides - has become the shibboleth that Asian men use to unify their community online, and this byte-sized good ol' boys networking dehumanizes and disrespects Asian women as much as any Chinese Laundry advertisement or mail-order bride webpage or Kobe Tai 'love you long time' pornography.
So no, I don't condemn Ms. Bandong. I ask her to perform the same task I ask of many of the Asian American men I've read in comments here, and on Fighting 44's and Model Minority.com.
Grow up.
Update: Jaehwan pens a response blog on the Fighting 44's site. Although I fear that Jaehwan's perspective clings desperately to the unnecessary and unfair notion that Asian American feminism is irrevocably defined by Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, his argument provides a useful and well-written counterargument to the views presented here (even if I don't agree with it), so check it out. (3/27/08, 7:33 AM PST)
Thursday, December 06, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/06/AR2007120600569.html?hpid=topnews
Gov. Romney's speech answered nothing, and hid in our Constitutional freedom of religion protections in order to justify his silence. He basically told evangelical Christian Republicans 'I share your values, let's not quibble on the details'. Perhaps that would work for many of them, since they'd rather have a Pastor in Chief than a President who's intellectually curious enough to interrogate the frailties of many evangelical public policy proscriptions.
Basically, any GOP candidate who shouts 'I share your values; let me beat Hillary Clinton and/or Barack Obama!' will find GOP primary voters willing to listen. Romney made that point to those people with his lines opposing a 'religion of secularism' but if one doesn't happen to be a GOP primary voter, Romney's speech presented more uncritical patriotic fluff with a sprinkling of salty Holy Water.
Bottom line: Nothing I saw today convinced me that Gov. Romney would lose the GOP nomination. As a African American atheist who votes Democratic, Gov. Romney does not share my values, and probably doesn't want to. But at least with atheism, one thinks critically about established beliefs. Gov. Romney offered no detailed explanations on Mormonism, and that makes him both a useful GOP Presidential candidate and a terrible option for the highest executive office in our country.
Gov. Romney's speech answered nothing, and hid in our Constitutional freedom of religion protections in order to justify his silence. He basically told evangelical Christian Republicans 'I share your values, let's not quibble on the details'. Perhaps that would work for many of them, since they'd rather have a Pastor in Chief than a President who's intellectually curious enough to interrogate the frailties of many evangelical public policy proscriptions.
Basically, any GOP candidate who shouts 'I share your values; let me beat Hillary Clinton and/or Barack Obama!' will find GOP primary voters willing to listen. Romney made that point to those people with his lines opposing a 'religion of secularism' but if one doesn't happen to be a GOP primary voter, Romney's speech presented more uncritical patriotic fluff with a sprinkling of salty Holy Water.
Bottom line: Nothing I saw today convinced me that Gov. Romney would lose the GOP nomination. As a African American atheist who votes Democratic, Gov. Romney does not share my values, and probably doesn't want to. But at least with atheism, one thinks critically about established beliefs. Gov. Romney offered no detailed explanations on Mormonism, and that makes him both a useful GOP Presidential candidate and a terrible option for the highest executive office in our country.
Monday, September 24, 2007
After reading a recent post on Racialicious.com by founder Carmen Van Kerckhove on September 21, 2007, I Can't Wait to 'Feel the Noise', I wrote the following response. The comment didn't appear on the Racialicious site (probably a technical error because of its length) so I have reproduced the comment here.
For context, watch the following preview:
Next, Carmen's commentary:
I know what's worse. The undeniable fact that Black male entertainers like Omarion routinely appear in moralistic minstrel shows greenlit by Hollywood to consume African American entertainment dollars by devolving Black masculinity to complicated precision dancing and/or baby-oil drenched Mandingo warrior swagger clearly presents a more disgusting problem than an uncritical throwaway reference that dehumanizes a Black man by calling him a 'tiny little magical dancing machine'.
I can't say that I care very much right now, though. I read Racialicious.com because it focuses on racist symbolism in popular culture, the very phenomenon with which so many supposedly liberal, supposedly anti-oppression people have trouble.
In their defense of the mainstream, these faux liberals offer the point that obvious fiction can't possibly tell us much about ourselves, so if John Q. American sometimes enjoys watching hip hop movies with hypersexualized thugs who sport shiny nickel-plated Glocks and scantily clad women of color bouncing their rounder portions, then maybe market forces dictate the only useful morality.
Racialicious.com opposes such cynical logic, and I've always respected that. So, after reading this post, I felt confused. Carmen, you rightly discuss the obvious formula in these Stomp the Last Dance or Die Tryin' flicks, but your attempt to characterize Omarion as a skilled dancer immediately conjured images of immense physical skill masked in blackface, and cast Omarion as a copasetic Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, skilled and subservient, whose fantastic entertainment forces forgetfulness of his personal political plight.
Omarion is not a machine. When we see acrobatic dancing from Black men, its all too easy to dissect the skill from the humanity, and focus on the skill alone. I find that dangerous, and believe that it only increases the gulf of racial difference that posits African Americans as the Other.
Maybe the real problem here remains the fact that entertainers like Omarion, Chris Brown, and Usher appear so happy to dance for mainstream audiences that cooning becomes an inevitable result for the American viewer. Every time people catch Chris Brown's genial smile during a performance - no small feat considering the rambunctious bouncing and epileptic jerking - I wonder if they mentally shade burnt cork and firetruck red Max Factor on Brown's broad smile. Perhaps people view Black male physical skill as something otherworldly and superhuman, so that Black male physical skill in general becomes something designed to entertain only, like a plastic toy from Mattel.
I don't think it matters though. It doesn't take much to remember the humanity of the Negro entertainer, and frankly, we have to. To lose that focus devolves athletic Black entertainers from shining examples of human focus and training to mechanical animals bred for mainstream merriment, and that's just a little too Dixie for my tastes.
For context, watch the following preview:
Next, Carmen's commentary:
Tiny little magical dancing machine? ....Yesssssssssssssss!
I can't wait to Netflix this. Long-time Racialicious
readers will know how much I love movies with multiple dance-offs. But this movie looks extra-special because it stars that tiny little magical dancing machine, Omarion!
(My dream dance-off would be Omarion vs. Chris Brown. Omarion would crrrrrrush him.)
It must be so effortless to make these movies, since they all follow the exact same script.
A young man gets into trouble at home, so his parents send him away for a change of scenery. He sees a hot girl and is immediately infatuated. But even though she clearly wants him, she doesn't want to leave her evil boyfriend because he's powerful and handsome.
The troubled young man gets involved in the subculture (stepping, marching bands, breaking) of this new environment but fumbles, humiliating himself. He finds out about A Big Event (competition, tournament, talent show) that will allow him to redeem his honor.
After a montage of him training, interspersed with him flirting with the girl, the movie culminates with The Big Event. Just when you think he's about to lose, he delivers a crushing blow to the Evil Handsome Guy, winning his dignity and the girl! Woohoo!
I know what's worse. The undeniable fact that Black male entertainers like Omarion routinely appear in moralistic minstrel shows greenlit by Hollywood to consume African American entertainment dollars by devolving Black masculinity to complicated precision dancing and/or baby-oil drenched Mandingo warrior swagger clearly presents a more disgusting problem than an uncritical throwaway reference that dehumanizes a Black man by calling him a 'tiny little magical dancing machine'.
I can't say that I care very much right now, though. I read Racialicious.com because it focuses on racist symbolism in popular culture, the very phenomenon with which so many supposedly liberal, supposedly anti-oppression people have trouble.
In their defense of the mainstream, these faux liberals offer the point that obvious fiction can't possibly tell us much about ourselves, so if John Q. American sometimes enjoys watching hip hop movies with hypersexualized thugs who sport shiny nickel-plated Glocks and scantily clad women of color bouncing their rounder portions, then maybe market forces dictate the only useful morality.
Racialicious.com opposes such cynical logic, and I've always respected that. So, after reading this post, I felt confused. Carmen, you rightly discuss the obvious formula in these Stomp the Last Dance or Die Tryin' flicks, but your attempt to characterize Omarion as a skilled dancer immediately conjured images of immense physical skill masked in blackface, and cast Omarion as a copasetic Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, skilled and subservient, whose fantastic entertainment forces forgetfulness of his personal political plight.
Omarion is not a machine. When we see acrobatic dancing from Black men, its all too easy to dissect the skill from the humanity, and focus on the skill alone. I find that dangerous, and believe that it only increases the gulf of racial difference that posits African Americans as the Other.
Maybe the real problem here remains the fact that entertainers like Omarion, Chris Brown, and Usher appear so happy to dance for mainstream audiences that cooning becomes an inevitable result for the American viewer. Every time people catch Chris Brown's genial smile during a performance - no small feat considering the rambunctious bouncing and epileptic jerking - I wonder if they mentally shade burnt cork and firetruck red Max Factor on Brown's broad smile. Perhaps people view Black male physical skill as something otherworldly and superhuman, so that Black male physical skill in general becomes something designed to entertain only, like a plastic toy from Mattel.
I don't think it matters though. It doesn't take much to remember the humanity of the Negro entertainer, and frankly, we have to. To lose that focus devolves athletic Black entertainers from shining examples of human focus and training to mechanical animals bred for mainstream merriment, and that's just a little too Dixie for my tastes.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
No excuses. I stopped writing here because of my ego. I never translated my writing style into hypertext. I'm cutting off comments. For all feedback, email me at jlamb1313@gmail.com.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
I got this Indian squaw the day that I met her
Asked her what tribe she with, red dot or feather?
She said: "All you need to know is I'm not a ho
And to get with me you better be Chief Lots-a-Dough."
-Jay-Z, "Girls, Girls, Girls", The Blueprint
Southside I'ma ride till the gas gone
I wish I could call Jesus up on the phone
Like "Lord, I'm still burnin' from the slave trade
Can't reproduce cuz our folks got AIDS..."
But black folks is killin' black folks, not gays!
I spray the AK and pray; why were you late?
-David Banner, "Crossroads", Certified
Peruse the sistagirl blues over at the celebrated minority feminist blog Blackademic these days and parachute into pockmarked, dystopian terrain, another acrimonious battleground cast in midnight dawn where brother clobbers sister to enforce his ideological hegemony within the darker nation and sister lacerates brother to assume her moral omnipotence over the Black body politic. Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee's honored and respected African American gender equality proves a distant detente amid the Black community's historically uncivil war of the sexes. Today, African American HIV infections spiral exponentially.
Every modern African American creative outlet betrays this divide. Faux gangster G-Unit troubadours boast Pyrrhic victories over Buffie the Body's absentee inhibitions in ghostwritten gutter anthems featured on urban airwaves to promote Black nationalist hedonism over fertile black soil, all to shock and awe Bill O'Reilly Americana, too moral and upright and Christian to welcome Mandingo masochism into the American mosaic. Hip hop instigates intra-racial sexual ownership, commodifies the conscious chattel slavery of Black women by Black men for global human consumption. The revolutionary Snoop Dogg fleshes out Stokley Carmichael sexual politics: the only position for women in hip hop is prone.
Outside of the promotion of healthy female body image to the global village (only in comparison to the Mary Kate Olsen model), hip hop exploits Black femininity for Soundscan and Rolling Stone, devolves the conscious daughters of Mary Church Terrell and Mary McCloud Bethune into broken crack addict songbirds and quasi-masculine twisted sisters. Today's around-the-way girl smiles awkwardly, bobs her head to the latest Ciara & Jazze Pha club banger. Her caramel mocha cheek's razor-thin pink scar tissue twists sympathy from practiced conservative cynicism. She's survived gang initiation and gang rape, juvenile hall and teenage pregnancy. Her once athletic, lithe, vibrant Black body now betrays post-partum stretch marks and purple-pink Kaposi's sarcoma lesions. I can't return her smile. Hip hop abandoned this poor Black child, the promiscuous anonymous sex positive feminists never consider.
Hip hop's causal listening casualties attest to its crass consumerism, apathetic amorality, and syncopated sexism. Of course hip hop hates women -- hip hop hates everything. Young Jeezy, the portly Snowman whose t-shirt memorabilia and Dr. Seuss lyricism glorifies Southern street-level cocaine transactions, interests Columbine's children in new-age Negro nihilism for Island Def Jam Music Group's benefit. Marketable immorality will not respect women, especially African American women, a demographic so patently defined by popular culture that authentic sistagirl femininity rests upon the capable shoulders of executive producer Kelsey Grammer. Girlfriends across America impose chemical warfare upon their follicles; they perm and tease and fry their kinky ethnic gifts into processed perversions of Nicole Kidman and Keira Knightley, yet any rapper who calls any sista a bitch for any reason in any song unmasks as a irredeemable misogynist, ignored by decent people everywhere.
NYOIL proved ill prepared to defend his creativity against charges of sexism and misogyny. His controversial YouTube offering, "Y'all Should All Get Lynched", delivers an audiovisual middle finger directed toward today's hood rich hip hop headliners, and critiques with blunt naivete so-called musicians who mass market elementary off-color English end-rhyme to socialize and stereotype self-defeating behaviors into youthful African Americana for global profit. NYOIL does not produce theme music for Disney. The video abounds with Dick Cheney candor; near the end I wondered if this underground offering would link Lil Kim's gaudy sexuality with mushroom clouds. But Black feminist attacks against "Y'all Should All Get Lynched" for misogyny parallel conservative Christian attacks against Fahrenheit 9/11 for unbalanced journalism. Simple shit cannot soothe one's personal agenda. This video displays an angry rant, an audiovisual op-ed, a YouTube diatribe. The new millennium Madd Rapper bellows a simple scream in solidarity with the downtrodden and the insane, the shadowy alcoholics and broken obsidian who dot the Manhattan avenue and clutter the Georgian trap. How many Blackademics would he care about?
Repress nausea; witness the rage of a worthless class. NYOIL's "Y'all Should All Get Lynched" speaks directly to the undifferentiated Black masses, to admonish rap celebrities who waste their powers of persuasion sliding credit cards between voluptuous caramel buttocks, an African American Express Kanye West never expected but probably enjoyed. In turn, online Black feminists admonished NYOIL for anti-melanin misogyny, for pseudo-conscious intra-communal division of Black people through throwaway sexism. One could make the cliche 'crabs in a barrel' reference, but what's the point? As long as various African American constituencies bludgeon each other with Louisville Slugger wedge issues worthless electoral anachronisms like 'the African American vote' or 'Black Power!' or 'We Shall Overcome!' will continue to dissolve the collective philosophical and cultural underpinnings of politicized Blackness. Your skin doesn't matter if your people don't exist.
That's the problem with wedge issues: they all matter, and should matter to all. Misogyny kills people. Sexism breeds date rape and domestic abuse, encourages unhealthy promiscuity and rising single parenthood in the Black community. Poverty persists in urban Black enclaves in part because today's sexist Black machismo disregards male responsibilities of economic production and child rearing, thereby strangling the traditional nuclear family within African Americana. Even without Senator Rick Santorum histrionics, the most radical feminists of color must admit this sad phenomenon currently aerates Black 'lifting as we climb' propaganda, not to mention African American community safety, public health, and buying power. Therefore, African Americans should never devolve misogyny to throwaway language in underground rap, especially when the obvious thesis of this example in part decries the prepackaged misogyny that's killing Black people. Deal with the real: misogyny means more than simple hatespeech.
And make no mistake, NYOIL's "Y'all Should All Get Lynched" presents simple hatespeech, in every sense. Still, his Negro proletariat solidarity bleeds through what amounts to the most frighteningly cynical anti-African American oppression tool reclamation project since Sean Combs' "Vote or Die!" white T's. To recast lynching as justifiable homicide to combat the American commercialism that consistently posits the Black man as narcissistic sociopath and the Black woman as nymphomaniac whore shatters the strongest Christopher Meloni constitution, but before radical Black feminism raises its nappy Tracy Chapman dreadlocks, one would think that lynch law's impossible misappropriation here could be addressed, at least.
You'll never find NYOIL on the cover of Essence. Still, his elementary school polemics clearly identified mainstream hip hop's racist dehumanization of Black women as an immediate developmental concern for African Americana's vulnerable young women. To overlook this fact in order to pepper NYOIL with acidic criticism disrespects only the Black feminist, and characterizes her as a self-interested rabble-rouser ignorant of all logic and reason outside her personal agenda, the uneducated African American anarchist African Americans logically ignore. (La Shawn Barber, we salute you.) Must radical Black feminists offer more fiction than fact like conservative hitwomen Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter? Real academics raise public debate into human thought's more complex realms, and the radical Black feminist perspective must preserve this vigilance in its interactions with the diverse Black community.
Because when we desire angry Black women, the cultural signposts abound. Hit reality television often centers today around an Omarosa Manigault or a Tiffany Patterson (Flavor of Love's New York), whose obnoxious, angry, egotistical, megalomaniacal personalities forge controversy and resentment from all other people. Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice and media mogul Oprah Winfrey, arguably the two most powerful and influential African American women on planet Earth, exist more as constructed White institutions rather than flesh and blood human beings. Dr. Rice travels the world to broker toothless examples of executive American impotence while Darfur bleeds out and Iraq flatlines. Unmask our brilliant Black American Princess and reveal Sally Hemings' postmodern sophisticate redux, who patiently waits to conform to her ignoble master's latest unendurable request. Oprah's syndicated White feminism casts Ms. Winfrey as America's Mammy without pretense. Instead of passe cocaine rehab, White celebrity today buys an hour on Oprah's couch, so Tom Cruise, Jennifer Anniston, and the Dixie Chicks wax illogical about their overblown media controversies with Mammy Winfrey, everyone's favorite best friend. If Oprah couldn't buy and sell these cream cheese Caucasians, Madonna might've asked her to breastfeed her adopted Malawian baby.
We end where we begin. Hip hop, patently racist, sexist, and homophobic, appeals as rebel music to privileged Americans unwilling to grapple with the personal-as-political costs of true rebellion. However, those who challenge the new world disorder of globalized prejudice must prize substance over style, and survival over semiotics. Jay-Z's scantily-clad video vixens contribute to their own racial and sexual disrespect, but the abysmal rates of sexually transmitted disease transmission in the Black community present the more damaging Black community crisis. Hip hop will hate women tomorrow. Unless radical Black feminists prove willing to interrogate all these concerns with reason and research, they devalue themselves and their perspectives, and resemble all the other useless, shiftless coons with whom they disagree. Sistas with education must exude the rugged individualism to analyze and interpret problems without clouding their judgment with personal bias and hidden agendas; otherwise, every radical Black feminist representative resembles the overweight quadruple-bypass candidate Ms. Peaches, who fries that chicken like the Pied Piper of clogged arteries and unrepentant minstrelsy. You hear me?
Asked her what tribe she with, red dot or feather?
She said: "All you need to know is I'm not a ho
And to get with me you better be Chief Lots-a-Dough."
-Jay-Z, "Girls, Girls, Girls", The Blueprint
Southside I'ma ride till the gas gone
I wish I could call Jesus up on the phone
Like "Lord, I'm still burnin' from the slave trade
Can't reproduce cuz our folks got AIDS..."
But black folks is killin' black folks, not gays!
I spray the AK and pray; why were you late?
-David Banner, "Crossroads", Certified
Peruse the sistagirl blues over at the celebrated minority feminist blog Blackademic these days and parachute into pockmarked, dystopian terrain, another acrimonious battleground cast in midnight dawn where brother clobbers sister to enforce his ideological hegemony within the darker nation and sister lacerates brother to assume her moral omnipotence over the Black body politic. Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee's honored and respected African American gender equality proves a distant detente amid the Black community's historically uncivil war of the sexes. Today, African American HIV infections spiral exponentially.
Every modern African American creative outlet betrays this divide. Faux gangster G-Unit troubadours boast Pyrrhic victories over Buffie the Body's absentee inhibitions in ghostwritten gutter anthems featured on urban airwaves to promote Black nationalist hedonism over fertile black soil, all to shock and awe Bill O'Reilly Americana, too moral and upright and Christian to welcome Mandingo masochism into the American mosaic. Hip hop instigates intra-racial sexual ownership, commodifies the conscious chattel slavery of Black women by Black men for global human consumption. The revolutionary Snoop Dogg fleshes out Stokley Carmichael sexual politics: the only position for women in hip hop is prone.
Outside of the promotion of healthy female body image to the global village (only in comparison to the Mary Kate Olsen model), hip hop exploits Black femininity for Soundscan and Rolling Stone, devolves the conscious daughters of Mary Church Terrell and Mary McCloud Bethune into broken crack addict songbirds and quasi-masculine twisted sisters. Today's around-the-way girl smiles awkwardly, bobs her head to the latest Ciara & Jazze Pha club banger. Her caramel mocha cheek's razor-thin pink scar tissue twists sympathy from practiced conservative cynicism. She's survived gang initiation and gang rape, juvenile hall and teenage pregnancy. Her once athletic, lithe, vibrant Black body now betrays post-partum stretch marks and purple-pink Kaposi's sarcoma lesions. I can't return her smile. Hip hop abandoned this poor Black child, the promiscuous anonymous sex positive feminists never consider.
Hip hop's causal listening casualties attest to its crass consumerism, apathetic amorality, and syncopated sexism. Of course hip hop hates women -- hip hop hates everything. Young Jeezy, the portly Snowman whose t-shirt memorabilia and Dr. Seuss lyricism glorifies Southern street-level cocaine transactions, interests Columbine's children in new-age Negro nihilism for Island Def Jam Music Group's benefit. Marketable immorality will not respect women, especially African American women, a demographic so patently defined by popular culture that authentic sistagirl femininity rests upon the capable shoulders of executive producer Kelsey Grammer. Girlfriends across America impose chemical warfare upon their follicles; they perm and tease and fry their kinky ethnic gifts into processed perversions of Nicole Kidman and Keira Knightley, yet any rapper who calls any sista a bitch for any reason in any song unmasks as a irredeemable misogynist, ignored by decent people everywhere.
NYOIL proved ill prepared to defend his creativity against charges of sexism and misogyny. His controversial YouTube offering, "Y'all Should All Get Lynched", delivers an audiovisual middle finger directed toward today's hood rich hip hop headliners, and critiques with blunt naivete so-called musicians who mass market elementary off-color English end-rhyme to socialize and stereotype self-defeating behaviors into youthful African Americana for global profit. NYOIL does not produce theme music for Disney. The video abounds with Dick Cheney candor; near the end I wondered if this underground offering would link Lil Kim's gaudy sexuality with mushroom clouds. But Black feminist attacks against "Y'all Should All Get Lynched" for misogyny parallel conservative Christian attacks against Fahrenheit 9/11 for unbalanced journalism. Simple shit cannot soothe one's personal agenda. This video displays an angry rant, an audiovisual op-ed, a YouTube diatribe. The new millennium Madd Rapper bellows a simple scream in solidarity with the downtrodden and the insane, the shadowy alcoholics and broken obsidian who dot the Manhattan avenue and clutter the Georgian trap. How many Blackademics would he care about?
Repress nausea; witness the rage of a worthless class. NYOIL's "Y'all Should All Get Lynched" speaks directly to the undifferentiated Black masses, to admonish rap celebrities who waste their powers of persuasion sliding credit cards between voluptuous caramel buttocks, an African American Express Kanye West never expected but probably enjoyed. In turn, online Black feminists admonished NYOIL for anti-melanin misogyny, for pseudo-conscious intra-communal division of Black people through throwaway sexism. One could make the cliche 'crabs in a barrel' reference, but what's the point? As long as various African American constituencies bludgeon each other with Louisville Slugger wedge issues worthless electoral anachronisms like 'the African American vote' or 'Black Power!' or 'We Shall Overcome!' will continue to dissolve the collective philosophical and cultural underpinnings of politicized Blackness. Your skin doesn't matter if your people don't exist.
That's the problem with wedge issues: they all matter, and should matter to all. Misogyny kills people. Sexism breeds date rape and domestic abuse, encourages unhealthy promiscuity and rising single parenthood in the Black community. Poverty persists in urban Black enclaves in part because today's sexist Black machismo disregards male responsibilities of economic production and child rearing, thereby strangling the traditional nuclear family within African Americana. Even without Senator Rick Santorum histrionics, the most radical feminists of color must admit this sad phenomenon currently aerates Black 'lifting as we climb' propaganda, not to mention African American community safety, public health, and buying power. Therefore, African Americans should never devolve misogyny to throwaway language in underground rap, especially when the obvious thesis of this example in part decries the prepackaged misogyny that's killing Black people. Deal with the real: misogyny means more than simple hatespeech.
And make no mistake, NYOIL's "Y'all Should All Get Lynched" presents simple hatespeech, in every sense. Still, his Negro proletariat solidarity bleeds through what amounts to the most frighteningly cynical anti-African American oppression tool reclamation project since Sean Combs' "Vote or Die!" white T's. To recast lynching as justifiable homicide to combat the American commercialism that consistently posits the Black man as narcissistic sociopath and the Black woman as nymphomaniac whore shatters the strongest Christopher Meloni constitution, but before radical Black feminism raises its nappy Tracy Chapman dreadlocks, one would think that lynch law's impossible misappropriation here could be addressed, at least.
You'll never find NYOIL on the cover of Essence. Still, his elementary school polemics clearly identified mainstream hip hop's racist dehumanization of Black women as an immediate developmental concern for African Americana's vulnerable young women. To overlook this fact in order to pepper NYOIL with acidic criticism disrespects only the Black feminist, and characterizes her as a self-interested rabble-rouser ignorant of all logic and reason outside her personal agenda, the uneducated African American anarchist African Americans logically ignore. (La Shawn Barber, we salute you.) Must radical Black feminists offer more fiction than fact like conservative hitwomen Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter? Real academics raise public debate into human thought's more complex realms, and the radical Black feminist perspective must preserve this vigilance in its interactions with the diverse Black community.
Because when we desire angry Black women, the cultural signposts abound. Hit reality television often centers today around an Omarosa Manigault or a Tiffany Patterson (Flavor of Love's New York), whose obnoxious, angry, egotistical, megalomaniacal personalities forge controversy and resentment from all other people. Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice and media mogul Oprah Winfrey, arguably the two most powerful and influential African American women on planet Earth, exist more as constructed White institutions rather than flesh and blood human beings. Dr. Rice travels the world to broker toothless examples of executive American impotence while Darfur bleeds out and Iraq flatlines. Unmask our brilliant Black American Princess and reveal Sally Hemings' postmodern sophisticate redux, who patiently waits to conform to her ignoble master's latest unendurable request. Oprah's syndicated White feminism casts Ms. Winfrey as America's Mammy without pretense. Instead of passe cocaine rehab, White celebrity today buys an hour on Oprah's couch, so Tom Cruise, Jennifer Anniston, and the Dixie Chicks wax illogical about their overblown media controversies with Mammy Winfrey, everyone's favorite best friend. If Oprah couldn't buy and sell these cream cheese Caucasians, Madonna might've asked her to breastfeed her adopted Malawian baby.
We end where we begin. Hip hop, patently racist, sexist, and homophobic, appeals as rebel music to privileged Americans unwilling to grapple with the personal-as-political costs of true rebellion. However, those who challenge the new world disorder of globalized prejudice must prize substance over style, and survival over semiotics. Jay-Z's scantily-clad video vixens contribute to their own racial and sexual disrespect, but the abysmal rates of sexually transmitted disease transmission in the Black community present the more damaging Black community crisis. Hip hop will hate women tomorrow. Unless radical Black feminists prove willing to interrogate all these concerns with reason and research, they devalue themselves and their perspectives, and resemble all the other useless, shiftless coons with whom they disagree. Sistas with education must exude the rugged individualism to analyze and interpret problems without clouding their judgment with personal bias and hidden agendas; otherwise, every radical Black feminist representative resembles the overweight quadruple-bypass candidate Ms. Peaches, who fries that chicken like the Pied Piper of clogged arteries and unrepentant minstrelsy. You hear me?
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
This guttural, anguished scream against the obvious minstrelsy of modern rap offers few solutions and scant hope. In fall 2006 an African American advocates lynching to counteract the unceasing coonery of top selling rap artists like the Ying Yang Twins, 50 Cent, and Jim Jones -- no, I can't believe it either. Any person of color who advocates lynching in any form, for any reason, either does not understand the utter inhumanity and soulless depravity of the original American terrorism, or has already become so detached and so desensitized to his own melanin that his perspective exists outside the barest extremities of unreasonable speech. To lynch is to hate with passion, to kill without remorse, to pillage and slaughter and dismember others based on your hatred of their shared intrinsic identity, and to expect general praise and communal accolades from your fellow Americans amid the bloody greenery of your sociopathic escapades. Before online celebrity sex tapes and baseball, lynching was America's number one pastime, a favored activity John Q. Public never truly laid down. Even today, African Americans endure domestic hate crimes in larger number and proportion than any other group -- no African American should, in my opinion, willfully support lynch law, in any sense, period. NYOIL's cynical suggestion posits lynching as conscious African American uplift, and deserves unceasing scorn and consistent derision for such confused racial solidarity.
For those so battered and bruised by persistent anti-Black (yet all-American) racism that their soft ebony skins glisten purple with the agitated sweat of revenge and shake randomly with the nervous tics of vindictiveness, burning down the master's house with his own kerosene may appeal. There's something underdog, subversive, counterculture (and therefore, cool) about the double agent protagonist for the African American urbanite of my generation, bastard children of James Bond and Tony Montana. What is the ubiquitous Black phrase "from corporate to ghetto" if not an open acknowledgement of our silently disarming disingenuousness? We identify with the stealth sniper, the silent killer, because decades of post-Civil Rights Movement social programming convinces the most reasoned and reasonable among us that the sensible next step toward that bright, black utopia called "There" in the Black community involves the forced injection of our best and brightest into all institutions of education, capital, influence, and power in modern American society. Affirmative action, repugnant though it may remain for those privileged Black thinkers who can afford to wax philosophical about the indignities of matriculation and hiring decisions based on factors outside simple merit, continues to command nigh-total support in the Black community because we can never shed our plantation two-face. "We wear the mask that grins and lies," wrote Paul Laurance Dunbar in 1896, and frankly, as NYOIL's boorish consciousness points out, our mascara's running.
It's so utterly repugnant, his video's concept of lynching as community uplift, so unbelievably bad that one must assume the artist himself simply does not recognize the import of his chosen diction, does not understand the unmitigated hell of the lynching. Lynching can not be redeemed or recast to serve the interests of Black people; like the original American hatespeech -- nigger, it will always remain a tool of anti-African American antagonism, beyond misplaced reclamation and earnest colorblind casting. Real anti-racist action innovates; useful pro-Black creativity always offers something new and untried and never before seen. The sit-in, the teach-in, the boycott, the protest march, the prayer meeting, the voter registration drive, the impassioned poetry of radical ideologues and the building takeovers of student status quo antagonists -- all these African American Civil Rights Movement innovations outline the modern social movement playbook every emergent minority group currently utilizes to redefine freedom for their members and force recognition of their specific agendas into our attention deficit disordered pop up populace. Black people wrote the original identity politics playbook. African Americana exudes creative resistance without self-hate; the literary genius of James Baldwin and the moody artistry of Miles Davis, the compelling humanity of Sidney Poitier and the rhetorical supremacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. provide profiles of the exceptional, but not the exception. We are both beautiful and Black; we learned this with bitter tears and inexpressible sacrifice, hanging from the poplar trees of Billie Holiday's America.
