JamesLambJr.com

Pressure

2008-07-05T17:01:00.000-07:00

Killer Mike. Ice Cube.

Painful, unflinching truth. Pay attention.

Can You Afford Insurance?

2008-04-09T06:50:00.000-07:00

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

Grow Up.

2008-03-26T10:55:00.000-07:00

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)

No Jack Kennedy

2007-12-06T08:38:00.000-08:00

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.

Stomp the Last Dance or Die Tryin'

2007-09-24T03:00:00.000-07:00

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:

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!

Tiny little magical dancing machine? ....

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.

Ahem.

2007-04-26T02:06:00.000-07:00

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.

The Revenge of C. DeLores Tucker

2006-10-31T21:30:00.000-08:00

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?

Minstrel Music

2006-10-25T00:26:00.000-07:00

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.

The Love Below

2006-06-20T09:40:00.000-07:00

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

The Nigger Syndrome

2006-02-05T22:10:00.000-08:00

I'd forgotten what it was like to feel attractive. Without foolish false modesty, or Kanye West compliment gropes, somewhere after my Prince Charming first contact amid a University dance studio, I relinquished all sense of personal sexiness, all concepts of individual desirability to a dimly recalled fantasy state, past-perfect, ethereal, cloudy, an odd flash of memory already faded, yellow, dim, gone. I know why. To be devoted to real love requires total concentration, complete selflessness; you need to give as instinct all of yourself to another, faster than reflex. And I am in love in an imperfect world, where my relationship, along with my integrity, tolerance, and sanity are under constant attack.

And I am a Black man.

Within the first three months of my connection with Angel, I learned that I would never be good enough for her, according to the world around us. African American/ Asian American pairings were never common at Cornell, or anywhere else, and everyone regarded us as an oddity, a carnival sideshow, an interracial Bobby and Whitney without the substance abuse to explain our impossible union. We were never meant to last, according to the prevailing wisdom, what 'they' say, or any Delphic oracle your modern world wishes to consult. Mike Lowry, voice cracked with grave concern years later, once told me that the two of us were supposed to meet, hook up for a while, have innocent, wondrous sex, and break up before life got complicated. How could we coexist, an angel and a demon, a princess and a pauper, Beauty and the Beast? Wear rose-colored Lens Crafters; from the outside, gaze upon your perversion of our scene. Watch Angel swoon under primitive, predatory pheromones, surrender her nubile body, her agile mind, her unblemished spirit, to the criminal Cro-Magnon clad in midnight leather and grim, black combat boots, a real life Vandal Savage. From your tyrannical third-person vantage point, omnipotent and cruel, as far removed from reality as taxation without representation, stare as the petite Chinese daughter, pristine, innocent, pure, tragically serves an indefinite term of indentured sexual servitude, brutal, bloody, alone, shanghaied by the maniacal Melanin Manson, the latest receptacle of a demented psyche's antisocial fun. Rip her silk blouse, snatch the jade pendant. Bruised butterscotch breasts betray debauchery through submission, reveal sadism and suffering and sadness. Hear shrill screams. Close wet eyes. Irradiated by unrefined, unrestrained, unconscionable, unforgivable Blackness, the kidnapped, stolen, helpless Angel struggles against an unbreakable mental sorcery designed to undercut her common sense, your common protest -- the only future I can possibly provide involves poverty, pain, and early death. Social ostracism, financial meltdown, cynical victimhood transfer from my genes and my words, taint all I contact with ruin and disrepair and hate, a reverse King Midas iced out in conflict diamond-encrusted spinning G-Unit bling specially ordered from Jacob the Jeweler. I am a Black man. All my love hurts.

Human hydrochloric acid, the Modern American Black Man represents Death. His corrosive disposition towards his country, his community, his culture, his own people, unravels the worn and scorched Stainless Banner Betsy Ross sowed. No, that's not a typographical error; whether thirteen stars or fifty, for many Black Americans the Stars and Stripes and the Southern Cross interchange easily. Ask Mississippi's David Banner for natural disaster details. The Modern American Black Man murders; syncopated Smith and Wesson snare drums and high velocity hot lead hi-hats deliver hardcore street backbeats for disaffected American cherubs thirsty for casual homophobia and commonplace misogyny, shaken, not stirred, with a crunk juice chaser. Uncle Sam's deserved curse resides within Uncle Tom's Cabin; the modern American Black man shoots his fellow man for pocket change after he jacks his fellow man for pocket crack. Yes, it's 2006, and we'll still rob you in Compton and blast you in Miami. The Modern American Black Man respects power through violence, because power through violence remains the base method his country, his community, his culture and his own people choose, with every police harassment first encounter and unlawful drug search and warrantless wiretap and faux speeding detention and mistreated emergency medicine gunshot wound treatment and outsourced manufacturing job and student loan interest rate increase and Hollywood pimp glorification and bombastic Establishment-authorized Black civil rights demagogue and state sponsored, ratings approved syndicated reality television show, where ebony males flee through boarded, dilapidated federal housing projects with speed and fear and failure to escape burly, mustachioed over-forty municipal super-soldiers with thick, red-haired forearms, bloody black steel nightsticks, barking Glock nine millimeters, and single-minded determination to serve the public trust and protect the innocent with feigned amnesia coupled with Sean Penn charisma towards any pesky American Civil Liberties Union-patrolled law that impedes their righteous vengeance and furious anger -- this is what Americans choose to eliminate their nigger problem. Beat Black bodies. Rip Black flesh. Break Black bones. Protect us, Officer Volpe. Broomsticks not included.

Real life does not include a user's manual; no Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth achieve necessary relevance in modern African American life, regardless of lapsed Wu Tang affiliate Killer Priest's impressively innovative poetic license to kill microphones or later-day Black Buddha Bishop T.D. Jakes' excessively egotistical media presence. The sad truth is that most people, especially African Americans, require a guiding mental principle, a personal grand unified theory to productively interact with American life given its damaging contradictions. Whether consciously aware of these prevailing themes, most people need a standard, a rock, the ability to judge and be judged by something rational and logical and honest and sensible. Whether popular morality or organized religion or personal spirituality garnered from intense individual reflection and contemplation, most people need to believe in something. Given this, the Modern American Black Man's easy distrust toward justice, open antagonism toward order, plain hatred of peace strikes a mortal wound within our horrified body politic. Unchecked, the Modern American Black Man infects Lady Liberty with acquired innocence deficiency syndrome, atrophies our gallant George Washington greatness, neuters nobility bought with industry and conviction and sacrifice in conflicts foreign and domestic. Ironically, some insist there's no connection with the rampant social construction of the Black man as serial rapist, perverse and frantic, obsessed with Missy Anne's hairless, moist, pale, pink vulviform, lightly dusted with Johnson's Baby Powder, and the sociopolitical rape liberal Black men force upon mainstream American political thought, with dry phallic thrusts of radical speech and non-lubricated black leather revolutionary fisting; the Issac Hayes produced soundtrack meticulously blends the choked sobs of widowed Black schoolteachers for absent human freedom and the twisted grimaces of incarcerated Black scarfaces at unnecessary inhuman injustice. The vilified Kanye West, inarticulate and unintelligent with clashing baby blue Ralph Lauren dress shirt and nuclear holocaust yellow orange Akademics sweater provides the perfect sleeper candidate for nationally broadcast Black rage over the Hurricane Katrina debacle; Rolling Stone offers his next assignment as your next Jesus of Nazareth. African American opportunism need not lead America to ignore serious public policy problems within Black America, but remember, the prevailing wisdom characterizes Black masculinity, regardless of form or shape, as Death. No one goes out of his way to help the Grim Reaper with his homework.

It must be understood: for years, I considered myself repulsive, sickening, ugly. Ugly, by design; ugly, without end; ugly without the possibility of parole. To live as a person or color in the United States of America one must contend with omnipresent standards of beauty believed natural by their palefaced beneficiaries and thought desirable by all audiences, target and otherwise. Everyone absorbs relatively similar media input, including but not limited to the negative, divisive social programming that justifies rampant inequality, generational poverty, conspicuous consumption and hate. I am a Black man, in America: if I didn't hate myself I'd be insane. What I did not consider before was that self-hate occurs without explicit or conscious reflection most of the time. Internalized revulsion for one's basic identity can be more damaging than the critical eye most people use to gaze the mirror image, the self within. One of my most vivid childhood remembrances involves sitting on the large bed in my parents' room somewhere around age seven, eyes bright and brown and tortured and bloodshot, a bawling victim of some forgotten racial slight this inconsequential child could neither combat nor defend against. Perhaps some White teacher refused my rightful grades to promote her White students, or some fellow White classmate spat some racial slur at me he learned at home; I know those incidents happened later. What I'm certain of, is that whatever the conflict, it was racial, because I never forgot the question I asked my patient, saintly mother. Mommy, what's so good about being Black? Taken aback, she detonates, livid with pro-Black indignation toward her wayward charge, warns against the inferiority cumulonimbus she spies within my internal atmosphere. Sorry Dr. King, but Funtown is still closed to colored children.

Twenty-four years into this chaotic sensory input overload called real life, I realize our collective central nervous system transmits malicious software to all plugged into wesciv.net, the Western Civilization network, and this self-replicating stereotype shareware sickens the concentrated melanin masses to benefit their lighter counterparts. Notice the genius present -- past anonymity, beyond witness protection, no one, living, dead, or persistent vegetative state, is to blame for the Category Five catastrophe caused to patients infected by modern racism's network borne viruses, whether physical, political, or financial. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can not exist for the sick and the dying, the venal and the insane. No purple lesions, no persistent cough, no discoloration of the urine or feces whispers this condition, speaks my sickness. I have that Nigger Syndrome. Pray its in remission.

In layman's terms, the Nigger Syndrome results when a Black man (or anyone, really) internalizes the demeaning public prejudices our world broadcasts about him and everyone like him, when he believes with religious certainty the disgusting bigotry and debased hate our irrational human condition manifests for another's profit. No matter how extreme innovation and independence diversify modern media, most Americans expose themselves to a narrow oligarchy of irresponsible, materialist, anti-intellectual, social Darwinist, misogynist, anti-minority synchronizing socialization cast as reputable, reasonable mainstream media input. My fellow Americans, speech is not free, thought is neither independent nor critical, and just because the United States Constitution illegalized the Transatlantic Slave Trade in 1807 and domestic American chattel slavery in 1865 does not mean you don't invest in human capital. Frankly, with increased economic specialization into varied, fast proliferating, insular micro-sectors in our professional classes, supported by the modern corporate university's capitalist-driven endowment competition complex, the United States relies with exponential necessity upon general media input to corral the American body politic into a traditional sociopolitical order recognized by America's middle class and manipulated by America's elites -- no small task for Brian Williams at NBC Nightly News and Steven Spielberg's last big-budget Tom Cruise blockbuster and Steve Jobs' I-pod digital music revolution. Racism works, let's face it; to manifest and distribute the impossible nationalism required to unify three hundred million plus American citizens, some illiterate, some multilingual, some apathetic, some reactionary, some pious, some heretical, our mass media, our collective central nervous system, utilizes prejudice. And it works. The paltry tribalism that abounds on segregated prime-time television and the opinion-editorial pages of our newspapers of record only serve to color the planetary environment into uncomplicated Crayola pastels, devoid of all specificity or complication or passion. We no longer only watch the flickering letterbox full of Must-See situation comedies, we live them; reality television typecasts imitation life in the latest buffoon burlesque of the human experience, concocts inhuman automatons like Omarosa Manigault Stallworth, sparks a laugh track among real people in real places. Today, everyone's scripted.

Perhaps that's the reason Melanin Manson exists, perhaps the end result of an abbreviated lifetime of racist slights and racist moments, of racist liberal pity and racist conservative vitriol, of racist little children who openly compare my slim six foot one African American frame, with burnt sienna skin and hair of lamb's wool, to prehistoric hunter gatherers waxed from antiquity in a constructed African savanna on a floor of New York City's Natural History Museum, of racist parental units who propose sibling celibacy when language differences mistranslate their apocalyptic nightmare pornography fears involving their adult daughter's nighttime festivities, of countless racist first contact situations amid Clorox seas of cellophane people within my age demographic where the Abercrombie first distrust the Negro they don't know, then smile nervously at the unknown entity's risque humor, and then laugh uncontrollably at every comment or sound said Negro emits, regardless of humor or logic, even if he's simply asking for directions to the nearest bathroom! -- perhaps the checkmate, the endgame, the climax of our ongoing Maybelline minority morality play involves living with a disease instead of killing what ails. We manage symptoms while the real cancer multiplies unopposed, embrace quality of life rather than real living. Do you know the link between Michael Jackson and Robert Kelly, between Tupac Shakur and John Allen Muhammad? At some point in their lives, someone treated them like a nigger, and they believed that treatment was just. So in a world where they drink pain for crimes of birth they can't change, odd life choices, open perversion, self-destructive thug nationalism and psychotic domestic terrorism display respective variance in the Modern American Black Man's coping mechanisms. My suggestion? End the therapy; begin the healing.

I am a Black man. There are no niggers here.

The Ghetto

2005-12-01T02:10:00.000-08:00

I hate the Ghetto.

I always have. Coming home, I mutated into a six foot one inch Whitley Gilbert, so snobbish and judgmental that I want the entire Black community of Portsmouth, Virginia placed under strict quarantine. I realize many of you immediately channel Michael Eric Dyson at these words of frustration, but the nappy dreadlocks and barely glued tracks and plastic nails and unkempt beards and sagging pants and booty shorts and coarse language and unplanned pregnancies and gaudy makeup and narcotics sales and firearm violence and police brutality and general apathy overwhelms even the most compassionate conservatives among us. And believe me, my friends, I am liberal. I will not absorb the soft bigotry of low expectations concerning my racial brethren's unresolved socioeconomic plight.

I reject elitism, discard optimism. We free thinking African Americans must apply both our logic and our solidarity toward our sisters and brothers who work and play in local low-budget strip clubs, where the scantily-clad sex workers display stretch marks and cigarette burns along with their sienna pancake nipples and landing strip pubes. Dear Precious, the auburn-skinned temptress voluptuous with double E-cup breasts and a butterscotch behind so fat even Cherokee fears her pornography assets require upgrade, eagerly requests seventy dollars from your best friend for her thirty-five minute lap dance, where you are unsure who molested who yet utterly convinced no one will face prosecution, and informs you she's studying for her Masters Degree in Accounting at respected Old Dominion University. You want to praise her determination; yet can't believe her upwardly mobile pronouncement. Besides, your dark brown eyes struggle to focus on her light-gray contact lenses, hope to avoid her haphazardly re-applied showgirl G-string, left-of-center, tossed on too tightly, revealing most of her shaven womanly cleft. Topless and talkative, energetic and erotic, Precious flashes her winning worker's smile; sound escapes your notice. A strong shoulder slap from your friend shatters your reverie. Precious offers her talents to your horny human form. You don't like strip clubs. You don't respect ghetto strippers, forced by inner-city economics to secure enough Federal Reserve Notes by any means necessary to provide Similiac and Pampers and cable television to the youthful progeny they shouldn't produce. You dislike the primitive, new-age Neanderthal sexuality that your race-gender-age demographic displays without moral confusion or public inhibition. You realize that only your infinite capacity for hate prevents you from taking Precious' offer. Not your infinite love for your life partner, not your human fear of sexually transmitted disease contraction, not your financial straits. You haven't seen your Angel in a month, and your heart, mind, and body miss her. You have no serious belief that you can contract an STD from a simple gyrating posterior upon your Dockers-covered khaki crotch. Your best friend will cover any payment you can't make. You leave the club.

The Ghetto deserves criticism as long as the Ghetto saps my very soul. Temptation is not an island, it's oxygen. We require both to survive and feel human. The Ghetto however, degrades human interaction with its constant, chosen civic flirtation with poverty-line pop culture. Small business entrepreneurship, the backbone of upward mobility for ethnic and political minorities since Thucydidies, should be supported by all Americans, but I cannot ignore that Ms. Trang's nail shops and Ivan Draco's Guns & Ammo drains purchasing power from the African American community. We spend outside ourselves and later wonder at our own poverty. Further, human creativity, silenced through hip-hop commercialism, atrophies amid the unceasing reverberation of trap rhetoric and dope boy imagery. In high school, I befriended drug dealers and drug users, knew teenage mothers and incarcerated students. Cornell presented memory soma; my absence made my heart grow colder. Forgetfulness is bliss, exile divine. Today, the stark street-level reality of life in economically downtrodden Black Suburbia impedes any and all Mother Teresa compassion for the Coon Calcutta that surrounds my parents' home. Unless one works at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, or stays the course in Iraq for George W. Bush, petty criminality emerges as one's vocation of choice. All those hoop dreams and hood tournaments amount to less than the broken asphalt that housed them once your second child in two years is born and your hours have been cut back at the Gwaltney meatpacking plant. The Ghetto we all know and some love promotes death to Black America; funerals for the barely alive and sadly immature dot the gray urban landscape, populated by a middle-aged and steadily graying integrated African American professional ruling class, self-centered Christian capitalist, who attend the morning services of their children with dripping tears and loud lamentations. Choked sermons and punctuated eulogies ring horror and sadness and death over bountiful bouquets of family flower arrangements, fuchsia and lavender and rouge and white, while humbled homies wait in the surreal cathedral to say a final Boyz II Men goodbye to a fallen comrade they've already avenged with the heatseeking hollow-point homicide of another young Black man. It's 2005; Young Jeezy is more culturally relevant than Rosa Parks, no matter what Oprah says.

Yes, I'm Whitley, petty bourgeoisie, and I deride the Ghetto. I'm no better than these people; I'm not superior to these people, but I do not respect these people. Life is not an ongoing episode of BET Uncut. Ali and Big Gipp will not provide country narration amid natural Negro teats and ashy Black knees while the shaky Handicam nine millimeter manned by Lil' Pookie at Freaknik treats your optic nerves to ever-bouncing, always shaking bare Black asses and overweight, potbellied Black men with flashy, jewel-encrusted cups and shiny, jewel-encrusted teeth who treat their expensive custom cars and Jacob the Jeweler medallions and Pitbull Kennels canines better than they treat Black women. In every Disco Inferno, the Black woman burns at the stake. No one forces a tip drill to take an African American Express up the ass, but remember that Ghetto Approval requires inhuman commodification. Respect, or love, or compassion for the Ghetto requires a level of intellectual clemency I refuse the political felons within my community. Black anti-feminism, Black homophobia, Black racism, Black anti-intellectualism, and Black poverty emerge from and are produced by the Ghetto to some definable capacity, and now that it's once again a living, breathing social antagonist in my life, my hatred knows no bounds. The neo-Talented Tenth reject the Africana Studies plea to return to the universal 'hood to assist those we leave behind for exactly this reason: We hated the Ghetto just as much as the Ghetto hated us before we left, and we do not belong if ever we return. On the bitterly cold streets of Portsmouth, where street prostitutes and street pharmaceuticalists exchange monies before dawn to provide momentary sensory overload to the American proletariat, I walk among the damned, exiled by education, ostracized by originality, the displaced collegian touring urban blighted alleyways and substance abused addicts in a personal fact-finding mission like Rep. John Murtha on the gritty streets of Baghdad. It's a different world, the one I ran from.

Back on the Block

2005-11-16T15:30:00.000-08:00

I've missed my blog.

I thank everyone who is still reading this site; I understand that my post absence has not helped. My short, quick, Portsmouth, Virginia public library PG-13 explanation? My parents are sick. I flew home two weeks ago to find my father suffering from complications of triple-bypass heart surgery and my mother hospitalized from a shattered knee. I spent four days last week where the only people I spoke to face to face were confined to hospital beds, with various medical technologies and tubes hooked up to their aged flesh. Sirens wail, numbers flash, and electronic signals constantly monitor the utter frailty of human life.

It was my executive decision to return home. My sisters are busy with their own lives, as they should be. My younger sister assisted my parents when my father had the major surgery, and my older sister has been helping out the family since time immemorial. I chose to assist now. I was not prepared in any sense for the ramifications of that decision.

I hate Virginia. I've always considered myself from the Old Dominion, but not of the Old Dominion. In the past six years since I started college, every weekend or short visit to my hometown bleeds difficulty and heartache, shattered friendships and omnipresent ostracism. Virginia is my own personal hell. I'm enveloped, saturated, drowning in the guttural, gun-barrel, ghetto mentality of every Southernplayalisticadillac wannabe musician and each curvy, busty, voluptuous, bottle-blond, sedentary, collard green, fatback, cornbread-fed big booty Brenda with three children under age five, freshly manicured nails from Ms. Trang's and more fake hair than the floor of the Waldorf-Astoria penthouse suite during eleven A.M. checkout when Shawn Carter awakes Ms. Knowles with a sweet shoulder kiss after a rambunctious night of passionate, athletic, fresh-to-def lovemaking.

Yes, my friends, the Roc is in the building: the crack rock responsible for the walking dead who appear on my parent's suburban streets at three in the morning as I return from Virginia Beach clubs, the diamond rock reducing all my demographic to materialistic, petty bourgeoisie, desperate for the recording contract or the lottery winnings that will transform their minimum wage weekdays and marijuana haze, strip club weekends into a permanent Young Jeezy video, replete with butter pecan Ricans half-naked, feeding grapes on command and dark-skinned apartheid refugees nasally singing their nursery rhyme hooks. Hell, that's probably attributing too much to the C-student Black P-Town multitude - since youth imagination was the first casualty of war in urban Reaganomics' Iran-Contra, since community pillars leave ethnic enclaves as integration benefits the educated, since no one in my hometown really cares if Tim Kaine beat Jerry Kilgore with a wink and a nod from Governor Mark Warner (D-VA), let's be honest. All we want today is Laffy Taffy.

D4L, with the new album Down For Life, detonated the urban music scene with their annoying, distasteful, anti-intellectual, and downright ignorant improvised explosive debut Laffy Taffy. Ladies and gentlemen, coonery has been digitized for your i-Pod enjoyment. Down here, that simple synthesized bassline pops on, and within the first three notes the dance floors are filled with the bouncing breasts and popping posteriors of every sista in the club, dancing with reckless abandon the syncopated simpleton shake of absentee Negro respect. I'd love to find some redeemable creative quality to this excuse for popular music, but I can't. I hit the wall, stand motionless, and wait for the new Three Six Mafia hit to come on. To be real, I'd love to love my people, but I hate to watch my people hate themselves. But no one cares; everyone's too busy. My people get rich or die tryin', and the morgues always have more room. I've seen the hospital beds we leave behind.