Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Sunlight bleeds between the bedroom window blinds; Sunday morning blinks into hazy focus. Wine-colored sheets, wrinkled and warm, shamelessly expose illicit elements of my burnt sienna frame. Everything is still. My body contorts around my love, clings without desperation around her voluptuous curves, her sun-kissed flesh. My curious vantage point, momentarily obstructed by her long ebony hair, spies her comfortable, satisfied expression. I shift. She murmurs. The public political combat between Fareed Zakaria and George Will on ABC News' This Week on the possible short-term anti-Latino anti-immigrant legislation for congressional Republicans can wait. The angel beside me presents the only Heaven I'll ever know.
I'm more known for my hate than my love; cast as the irascible iconoclast, my criticism here and elsewhere often meets opposition more emotional than rational. Case in point: Loving Day. I couldn't believe it: a holiday designed to uplift, support, and celebrate the Supreme Court precedent that legalized interracial marriages nationwide, Loving v. Virginia. My instinct lampoons this piss-poor excuse for human mirth and merriment, until I noticed the Washington Post's recent article on the newfound celebration. Then, shock overpowered reason. True, Loving v. Virginia altered society, crushed the artificial prohibitions between heterosexual participation in the institution of marriage in the United States, and expanded everyone's freedom of association. American free choice won it's day in court. Still, a holiday to support this most obvious of political victories appears to my mind, superfluous. Loving Day exposes the triumph of superficial exhilaration over superficial differences, bases the feel-good identity politics of orthodox left-wing multiculturalism over the Homo sapiens necessity to question other people's behavior. We judge lest we be judged alone.
Loving Day asks a modern American population traumatized by stolen elections, incompetent institutions, failing foreign policy and a worthless war President, a population always reluctant to further integrate its disparate sociopolitical demographics (each clamoring with violent desperation for the general public to both understand and fulfill their needs and wants, the national eureka improbable to enact and impossible to force) to revel in the miniscule but growing population segment that makes interracial interaction either a daily choice or a natural occurrence -- the interracial relationships and mixed-race American citizens -- just because basic fairness dictates their existence.
Honestly, anything that further congeals and politicizes the mixed-race community deserves accolades. I'm utterly disgusted with the Tiger Woods effect, where mixed-race Americans find their personal political narratives annexed by politicized monorace minority groups, self-interested and egotistical, who rip and slash and claw each other in order to claim total public rights to various mixed-race celebrities like soulless movie studio executives who hover over disaster victims with promises of lucrative payoffs to soothe the lingering psychosomatic effects of Oceanic Flight 815. Bizarre parallels to ancient one-drop rule discrimination abound, yet African American race imperialism claims such public luminaries as Halle Berry, Dwayne Johnson, Soledad O'Brian and Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL). When Black people deny self-determination to nascent minority groups, we should not allow surprise to mute the needed rebuke; without pulling everyone's ghetto pass, it remains possible to leave the race's crackhead desperation for professionally successful and morally invulnerable role models to Black youth intact and discard the excess pressure every new public figure with partial genetic connection to the African Diaspora must face as a Molotov condition of their genes and their celebrity. While I found the "Cablinasian" designation a clumsy gaffe, I can respect its independent thought and individualist candor. If Loving Day helps forge a new mixed-race political consciousness, a postmodern multidentity politics, then one useful pot of gold may be found at the end of the rainbow.
But I'm neither lucky nor charmed; when Teresa Heinz Kerry self-designates as African American, and Sen. Obama appeals to Democratic audiences of all stripes and ideologies as "the future of the party" without significant Senate accomplishment or outlier policy proscriptions, armed only with biography and charisma, my consistent cynicism realizes that modern American transracialism regards all sociopolitical racial definitions as fluid at best and pixelated usually. In a global village where all melanin is Max Factor, no Sen. Hillary Clinton tribal wisdom will provide cultural context for the mixed-race community, or anyone else. First Twenty-First Century maxim: Define yourself, or die.
Hence my overall gripe with Loving Day -- to present interracial relationships as legalized Jubilee masks today's multifaceted, complex prejudices against and obstacles toward interracial couples, and pretends that all the battles are won and all the wounds healed. Landmark Supreme Court decisions are not musical codas; they crescendo change, raise our discontent decibel until our harmonious discord shatters tradition and deafens discrimination. Our anthems of liberation are as of now unsung. The mainstream cherry-picks lighter and brighter multiracial Americans, that long-legged alabaster human art with high cheekbones, full lips, Nordic noses and anime eyes bred by design for an exotic Vogue photoshoot in midtown Manhattan, to add, quite literally, a dash of color to your favorite Wonderbread sitcom or that rambunctious reality show where the seven strangers on a deserted Indonesian island eat mutated caterpillars and steamed goat testicles while they parachute from their billionaire businessman benefactor's private plane replete with fresh grapes, Cristal, three sensual, half-naked, busty Dominican goddesses named Sophia, Marisol, and Persuajon, and a discredited hip hop mogul signature dancing for spare change, to find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start getting shameless. In the real world, tokenized multiculturalism renders inter-minority coalitions obsolete.
Of course we can't unify: our prejudices and proclivities define our cultural backgrounds, we delineate Self from its distance from the Other. Bias contours, hate borders. The amorphous require the outlines, and refuse the bloody artistry required to draw the identity demarcations themselves. Loving Day asserts the false premise that those political and cultural boundaries that cleave difference to characterize cultures simply don't matter, that the wicked wisdom of Jim Crow and Jim Bean that lynched Emmitt Till and erased Rosewood, Florida no longer makes residence in the hearts and minds of John and Jane Q. Public. The Loving Day website that organizes community barbeques and support parties for interracial couples and mixed race progeny boasts several Hallmark testimonials from persons quick to share stories of personal enrichment through interracial copulation, people who believe they literally fuck away their forefathers' bigotry. Reality bites. One can't discuss Loving Day realistically without a clinical recall of the reasoning behind anti-miscegenation laws in the United States: foreign control of Black male sexuality by the American ruling class, White slaveowners and displaced serfs alike. Remember. Recall the iron chains, evoke the bloodied whips; smell with historical olfaction the dank, diseased cargo holds heavy with sweaty, musty, moldy funk. Vomit. Block away the cries of the dying and the damned. Ignore the torn flesh. Disregard the infected sores. Ride the relentless waves, swallow your gnawing hunger. Remember revenge. Survive.
American chattel slavery conceptualized the African American man as sexual dynamo to prevent the mixed-race offspring from White mothers and slave sperm donors to gain legal parity with full European settlers. However, in today's hypertext hybridism, where identity manifests more malleable than high-definition bitmap images, an intra-racial insurgency challenges White Anglo-Saxon Protestant control over Black male sexual identity and free choice, and emerges from the formerly downtrodden and dispossessed Black woman. Reborn as college-educated, determined professional extraordinaire from rambunctious around-the-way girl clad in tight, low-cut DKNY spaghetti-tees, battered Boss blue jeans and black leather jackets, Mary J now considers a fundamental element of the good life the personal creation of a meaningful, committed, and loving marriage to a professional yet moral Black man, that produces respectful, educated Black progeny, with all the associated joy and struggle and camaraderie expected. Her sister Omarosa chafes; the masculine myths about their brothers inflate both their market share and their massive egos, and reduce formerly decent, hardworking, innocent young Black boys into low-budget Kanye Wests' with so much superheated helium under their wooly cornrowed craniums that even their conflict diamond encrusted Jesus Pieces and platinum grills from Jacob the Jeweler and Paul Wall won't impede their arrogant anti-gravity. Drive slow, watch these eligible Black men sell stereotyped sex to the highest bidder, notice new-age minstrels who capitalize from buffoonery and racial blasphemy. Please do not judge; if your home was where the hatred is, you wouldn't wait to touch the sky either. No matter; the college dropout welcomes Pamela Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith with open Schwarzenegger arms and black Trojan Magnum boxes. His latex gold crinkles with eager anticipation as these gregarious Girls Gone Wild discard the white cotton and inhale the white powder, willing to provide ecstasy hopped up on ecstasy. So what if this tan Talented Tenth misses a lecture on post-Civil Rights Movement cultural nationalism in African American Political Thought with Imam Amiri Baraka at eight-thirty A.M. in Cornell University's Goldwin Smith Hall; these buxom blonds blow bomb cock! I'm sorry, Ms. Jackson; it's a seller's auction block you can't afford.
Don't ask why. Black male sexuality remains inherently pornographic. Whether immortalized in still photography by National Geographic or Hustler, Americans reflect on the Black male's on-demand sexuality as gaudy and racist and indecent, crafted to provide sensory pleasure for their private enjoyment. Brothers plunge and strain and ejaculate their sour spunk into randy receptacles, entertain the masses with money shots and anatomical excess. Again we copulate without control. One can rewind and play our astounding intercourse at one's whim, marvel without sensitivity at our demonic stamina, our unconscious reverberations. We cannot love, only lust: the African Adonis, an anatomically correct automaton who sweats and grinds and strokes for your benefit, blessed with bodies black and brutal and true, boasts defined obsidian musculature devoid of grey matter. Mechanical animals who rut via remote, Black men often confront Black women whose fervent antagonism towards interracial relationships distills into an elegant ebony hand frosted with sensual fire-truck red nails that reaches for the bitter chastening rod James Weldon Johnson warned about; the Sony soul-controller of Black sexual choice caught between the playful mock conflict of a new-age Thomas and Sally, lightly misted with tropical sweat, pungent with post-coital pheromones, who battle with half-committed insolence over definitive controlling influence over Black male sexuality after long, torrid bouts of raw, unencumbered, unprotected lovemaking so spontaneous neither partner can be sure where consent ends and coercion begins. Resist anachronism; don't call it something new.
We end at the beginning. All interracial relationships expose the best and worst about the human condition amid Western civilization: we never learn to accept difference, no matter how intimate, no matter how beautiful. Our mundane humanity absorbs daily sacrifices and quiet indignities that deny culture and burn identity; interracial love only exacerbates such stress. Any assumption that interracial relationships erase racism prove incorrect; if anything, the emotional proximity affords new reasons to hate. Furthermore, all interracial relationship participants fall prey to the bizarre exoticism that fetishizes racial difference in the West; stereotypes that characterize people as submissive or bestial or spicy or aggressive exist regardless of the scented candles that surround your bubble bath, the aromatherapy wafting past your wet brown nostrils, the dexterous, slow, meticulous massage your dutiful boyfriend applies after his careful washing of your worn, soft flesh and your most mysterious arenas following that laborious laboratory day of endless PCR tests and repetitive DNA retrieval. Your love does not matter to another's hate; you forget this at your peril alone. Remember, all the controversy that surrounds interracial relationships emerges from those outside those struggles who believe they stand to lose from these natural realignments in the natural order. The model minorities massacre all those who defend the Asian American female's right to free association because their misogyny assumes that negative media input deconstructs all Asian American men from the brave and the bold to Long Duk Dong and William Hung, comical Asian masculinity misrepresentations whose suggestive monikers reinforce the stereotypical Asian male lack, not possible phallic overconfidence. Angry Black women exhale their frustrations over jungle fever without considering that some Black men simply do not care about Black women, period. (Not that hip hop is any indication, of course.) Sure, Black male progressivism may combat sexism and misogyny both in the workplace and in the community, in the club with 50 Cent and in the church with T.D. Jakes, but that's a holistic, macro-level project for these brothers, not concerned with dissecting women into arbitrary groups. The point is to live and learn from others' hate, not to ignore vitriol with immature blinders to continue childish ignorance. Interracial interaction is a political act, subject to all manner of reasoned discourse and unflattering criticism; Loving Day wishes people would practice libertarian laissez-faire politics, deny all responsibilities the individual owes the general population outside of physical and economic safety, and just live and love with barbeque sauce and George Foreman grills and fifth-grade remembrances of those who fought to marry under God and country before it was popular. I disagree. We can develop the love below without the offer of the mind above as sacrifice.
If we really love one another, we do not have a choice.
Related:
Loving Day & Loving Day, Part 2 by Reappropriate.com
Village Voice Interview with Ken Tanabe
Mrs. Williams on Loving Day
Happy (post-)Loving Day! from A Tangled Web
Loving Day Recalls a Time When the Union of a Man And a Woman Was Banned from ActingWhite.com
...a job a million girls would die for. from WilliamBruceWest.com
Interracial Relationships And Marriage: Ironies from Booker Rising
I'm more known for my hate than my love; cast as the irascible iconoclast, my criticism here and elsewhere often meets opposition more emotional than rational. Case in point: Loving Day. I couldn't believe it: a holiday designed to uplift, support, and celebrate the Supreme Court precedent that legalized interracial marriages nationwide, Loving v. Virginia. My instinct lampoons this piss-poor excuse for human mirth and merriment, until I noticed the Washington Post's recent article on the newfound celebration. Then, shock overpowered reason. True, Loving v. Virginia altered society, crushed the artificial prohibitions between heterosexual participation in the institution of marriage in the United States, and expanded everyone's freedom of association. American free choice won it's day in court. Still, a holiday to support this most obvious of political victories appears to my mind, superfluous. Loving Day exposes the triumph of superficial exhilaration over superficial differences, bases the feel-good identity politics of orthodox left-wing multiculturalism over the Homo sapiens necessity to question other people's behavior. We judge lest we be judged alone.
Loving Day asks a modern American population traumatized by stolen elections, incompetent institutions, failing foreign policy and a worthless war President, a population always reluctant to further integrate its disparate sociopolitical demographics (each clamoring with violent desperation for the general public to both understand and fulfill their needs and wants, the national eureka improbable to enact and impossible to force) to revel in the miniscule but growing population segment that makes interracial interaction either a daily choice or a natural occurrence -- the interracial relationships and mixed-race American citizens -- just because basic fairness dictates their existence.
Honestly, anything that further congeals and politicizes the mixed-race community deserves accolades. I'm utterly disgusted with the Tiger Woods effect, where mixed-race Americans find their personal political narratives annexed by politicized monorace minority groups, self-interested and egotistical, who rip and slash and claw each other in order to claim total public rights to various mixed-race celebrities like soulless movie studio executives who hover over disaster victims with promises of lucrative payoffs to soothe the lingering psychosomatic effects of Oceanic Flight 815. Bizarre parallels to ancient one-drop rule discrimination abound, yet African American race imperialism claims such public luminaries as Halle Berry, Dwayne Johnson, Soledad O'Brian and Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL). When Black people deny self-determination to nascent minority groups, we should not allow surprise to mute the needed rebuke; without pulling everyone's ghetto pass, it remains possible to leave the race's crackhead desperation for professionally successful and morally invulnerable role models to Black youth intact and discard the excess pressure every new public figure with partial genetic connection to the African Diaspora must face as a Molotov condition of their genes and their celebrity. While I found the "Cablinasian" designation a clumsy gaffe, I can respect its independent thought and individualist candor. If Loving Day helps forge a new mixed-race political consciousness, a postmodern multidentity politics, then one useful pot of gold may be found at the end of the rainbow.
But I'm neither lucky nor charmed; when Teresa Heinz Kerry self-designates as African American, and Sen. Obama appeals to Democratic audiences of all stripes and ideologies as "the future of the party" without significant Senate accomplishment or outlier policy proscriptions, armed only with biography and charisma, my consistent cynicism realizes that modern American transracialism regards all sociopolitical racial definitions as fluid at best and pixelated usually. In a global village where all melanin is Max Factor, no Sen. Hillary Clinton tribal wisdom will provide cultural context for the mixed-race community, or anyone else. First Twenty-First Century maxim: Define yourself, or die.
Hence my overall gripe with Loving Day -- to present interracial relationships as legalized Jubilee masks today's multifaceted, complex prejudices against and obstacles toward interracial couples, and pretends that all the battles are won and all the wounds healed. Landmark Supreme Court decisions are not musical codas; they crescendo change, raise our discontent decibel until our harmonious discord shatters tradition and deafens discrimination. Our anthems of liberation are as of now unsung. The mainstream cherry-picks lighter and brighter multiracial Americans, that long-legged alabaster human art with high cheekbones, full lips, Nordic noses and anime eyes bred by design for an exotic Vogue photoshoot in midtown Manhattan, to add, quite literally, a dash of color to your favorite Wonderbread sitcom or that rambunctious reality show where the seven strangers on a deserted Indonesian island eat mutated caterpillars and steamed goat testicles while they parachute from their billionaire businessman benefactor's private plane replete with fresh grapes, Cristal, three sensual, half-naked, busty Dominican goddesses named Sophia, Marisol, and Persuajon, and a discredited hip hop mogul signature dancing for spare change, to find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start getting shameless. In the real world, tokenized multiculturalism renders inter-minority coalitions obsolete.
Of course we can't unify: our prejudices and proclivities define our cultural backgrounds, we delineate Self from its distance from the Other. Bias contours, hate borders. The amorphous require the outlines, and refuse the bloody artistry required to draw the identity demarcations themselves. Loving Day asserts the false premise that those political and cultural boundaries that cleave difference to characterize cultures simply don't matter, that the wicked wisdom of Jim Crow and Jim Bean that lynched Emmitt Till and erased Rosewood, Florida no longer makes residence in the hearts and minds of John and Jane Q. Public. The Loving Day website that organizes community barbeques and support parties for interracial couples and mixed race progeny boasts several Hallmark testimonials from persons quick to share stories of personal enrichment through interracial copulation, people who believe they literally fuck away their forefathers' bigotry. Reality bites. One can't discuss Loving Day realistically without a clinical recall of the reasoning behind anti-miscegenation laws in the United States: foreign control of Black male sexuality by the American ruling class, White slaveowners and displaced serfs alike. Remember. Recall the iron chains, evoke the bloodied whips; smell with historical olfaction the dank, diseased cargo holds heavy with sweaty, musty, moldy funk. Vomit. Block away the cries of the dying and the damned. Ignore the torn flesh. Disregard the infected sores. Ride the relentless waves, swallow your gnawing hunger. Remember revenge. Survive.
American chattel slavery conceptualized the African American man as sexual dynamo to prevent the mixed-race offspring from White mothers and slave sperm donors to gain legal parity with full European settlers. However, in today's hypertext hybridism, where identity manifests more malleable than high-definition bitmap images, an intra-racial insurgency challenges White Anglo-Saxon Protestant control over Black male sexual identity and free choice, and emerges from the formerly downtrodden and dispossessed Black woman. Reborn as college-educated, determined professional extraordinaire from rambunctious around-the-way girl clad in tight, low-cut DKNY spaghetti-tees, battered Boss blue jeans and black leather jackets, Mary J now considers a fundamental element of the good life the personal creation of a meaningful, committed, and loving marriage to a professional yet moral Black man, that produces respectful, educated Black progeny, with all the associated joy and struggle and camaraderie expected. Her sister Omarosa chafes; the masculine myths about their brothers inflate both their market share and their massive egos, and reduce formerly decent, hardworking, innocent young Black boys into low-budget Kanye Wests' with so much superheated helium under their wooly cornrowed craniums that even their conflict diamond encrusted Jesus Pieces and platinum grills from Jacob the Jeweler and Paul Wall won't impede their arrogant anti-gravity. Drive slow, watch these eligible Black men sell stereotyped sex to the highest bidder, notice new-age minstrels who capitalize from buffoonery and racial blasphemy. Please do not judge; if your home was where the hatred is, you wouldn't wait to touch the sky either. No matter; the college dropout welcomes Pamela Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith with open Schwarzenegger arms and black Trojan Magnum boxes. His latex gold crinkles with eager anticipation as these gregarious Girls Gone Wild discard the white cotton and inhale the white powder, willing to provide ecstasy hopped up on ecstasy. So what if this tan Talented Tenth misses a lecture on post-Civil Rights Movement cultural nationalism in African American Political Thought with Imam Amiri Baraka at eight-thirty A.M. in Cornell University's Goldwin Smith Hall; these buxom blonds blow bomb cock! I'm sorry, Ms. Jackson; it's a seller's auction block you can't afford.
Don't ask why. Black male sexuality remains inherently pornographic. Whether immortalized in still photography by National Geographic or Hustler, Americans reflect on the Black male's on-demand sexuality as gaudy and racist and indecent, crafted to provide sensory pleasure for their private enjoyment. Brothers plunge and strain and ejaculate their sour spunk into randy receptacles, entertain the masses with money shots and anatomical excess. Again we copulate without control. One can rewind and play our astounding intercourse at one's whim, marvel without sensitivity at our demonic stamina, our unconscious reverberations. We cannot love, only lust: the African Adonis, an anatomically correct automaton who sweats and grinds and strokes for your benefit, blessed with bodies black and brutal and true, boasts defined obsidian musculature devoid of grey matter. Mechanical animals who rut via remote, Black men often confront Black women whose fervent antagonism towards interracial relationships distills into an elegant ebony hand frosted with sensual fire-truck red nails that reaches for the bitter chastening rod James Weldon Johnson warned about; the Sony soul-controller of Black sexual choice caught between the playful mock conflict of a new-age Thomas and Sally, lightly misted with tropical sweat, pungent with post-coital pheromones, who battle with half-committed insolence over definitive controlling influence over Black male sexuality after long, torrid bouts of raw, unencumbered, unprotected lovemaking so spontaneous neither partner can be sure where consent ends and coercion begins. Resist anachronism; don't call it something new.
We end at the beginning. All interracial relationships expose the best and worst about the human condition amid Western civilization: we never learn to accept difference, no matter how intimate, no matter how beautiful. Our mundane humanity absorbs daily sacrifices and quiet indignities that deny culture and burn identity; interracial love only exacerbates such stress. Any assumption that interracial relationships erase racism prove incorrect; if anything, the emotional proximity affords new reasons to hate. Furthermore, all interracial relationship participants fall prey to the bizarre exoticism that fetishizes racial difference in the West; stereotypes that characterize people as submissive or bestial or spicy or aggressive exist regardless of the scented candles that surround your bubble bath, the aromatherapy wafting past your wet brown nostrils, the dexterous, slow, meticulous massage your dutiful boyfriend applies after his careful washing of your worn, soft flesh and your most mysterious arenas following that laborious laboratory day of endless PCR tests and repetitive DNA retrieval. Your love does not matter to another's hate; you forget this at your peril alone. Remember, all the controversy that surrounds interracial relationships emerges from those outside those struggles who believe they stand to lose from these natural realignments in the natural order. The model minorities massacre all those who defend the Asian American female's right to free association because their misogyny assumes that negative media input deconstructs all Asian American men from the brave and the bold to Long Duk Dong and William Hung, comical Asian masculinity misrepresentations whose suggestive monikers reinforce the stereotypical Asian male lack, not possible phallic overconfidence. Angry Black women exhale their frustrations over jungle fever without considering that some Black men simply do not care about Black women, period. (Not that hip hop is any indication, of course.) Sure, Black male progressivism may combat sexism and misogyny both in the workplace and in the community, in the club with 50 Cent and in the church with T.D. Jakes, but that's a holistic, macro-level project for these brothers, not concerned with dissecting women into arbitrary groups. The point is to live and learn from others' hate, not to ignore vitriol with immature blinders to continue childish ignorance. Interracial interaction is a political act, subject to all manner of reasoned discourse and unflattering criticism; Loving Day wishes people would practice libertarian laissez-faire politics, deny all responsibilities the individual owes the general population outside of physical and economic safety, and just live and love with barbeque sauce and George Foreman grills and fifth-grade remembrances of those who fought to marry under God and country before it was popular. I disagree. We can develop the love below without the offer of the mind above as sacrifice.
If we really love one another, we do not have a choice.
Related:
Loving Day & Loving Day, Part 2 by Reappropriate.com
Village Voice Interview with Ken Tanabe
Mrs. Williams on Loving Day
Happy (post-)Loving Day! from A Tangled Web
Loving Day Recalls a Time When the Union of a Man And a Woman Was Banned from ActingWhite.com
...a job a million girls would die for. from WilliamBruceWest.com
Interracial Relationships And Marriage: Ironies from Booker Rising
