You only know what you know
You only see what your heart will show
You only love when your soul remembers
We all come from the same December
And in the end that's where we'll go
--Prince
Yesterday morning in preparation for work, I reflected on the fact that my good friend Spence made it to the Daily Show. The night before, I had dinner with another friend whom I met IRL for the first time over steaks. The latter was a conversation that had so much momentum that we were still gabbing two hours later in the parking lot. Part of our conversation was about how I consider myself a part of my family so much more than a part of that thing called 'blackness'. And so when I thought about Spence on TV with Stewart, I wondered exactly what might I have talked about. I didn't have an answer.
As I listened to myself speak about representing blackness, I realized how incoherent I became. Nothing I could think of made sense. I was completely outside of that box, spiritually, which was different. I've always been outside of the black box mentally. By this I mean to say my communion with black Americans has always been there in spirit but my mind goes from place to place. But this particular morning, I found myself at a loss to say where the particular spirit of black America is at this moment in history. I haven't been paying attention, and I find it difficult to bother. Not because I don't care about that branch of humanity, but because I see blackness as a box that I don't live in. For me, it is a prior address.
The blackness box is problematic in that it is rather like that great barrel of metaphor. You know, crabs in a barrel are always trying to keep those near the top from escaping. But what we have, through various types of blackified successes is a barrel network, a 24/7 CNN of the blackness box. You can get it anytime, anywhere it seems. If you want black leadership, there's that. If you want black music, fashion, religion, educations, social status, there's all of that. So to extend the metaphor, the barrel has become transparent. Everything that catches the eye inside the barrel is viewed outside of the barrel and everything outside the barrel is visible from inside. So why stay in the barrel? Because it's 'our' barrel. Blackness is the distinct creation and property of the African American and the African American, is by and large determined to be black forever.
Have you heard of the Long Tail? The idea of the long tail is simple. Think of a contest in which you are voting for the top 100 X of all time. You have 10 votes and there's a 1000 people voting. If the X was Basketball, then Michael Jordan would get the most votes. Way down in the lower ranks you might find Spud Webb. (pun intended). The point of the long tail is that if you add up all the less popular stuff that still fits in the category, you end up with just as much bang as for the top 25%. The trick is to capture all of the bucks of the whole long tail and add up your bang. That's called monetizing the long tail and when you monetize the long tail, you assure that no matter how obscure and unpopular a choice might be, it's still significant if you add it all up with all the other obscure and unpopular things.
There is a long tail of blackness that has been monetized. Oh sure you can be sure that Oprah and Michael Jackson still dominate the fat portion, that hiphop and sports have the overwhelming majority of attention share. But way down the tail of that market, where just 3% of the black American population can tell Trey Ellis from Paul Beatty or Lorraine Hansberry from N'tozake Shange, it's still inwardly focused on the 'my' in 'my blackness'. But also on the functional vs the dysfunctional scale, all the petty, uneducated hot ghetto mess that the overwhelming majority of black Americans want nothing to do with - well that gets aggregated under blackness too. And there's the problem. Ultimately the answer is in copspeak: "Sir, I'm going to ask you to put your hands where I can see them and step away from the blackness."
The great irony in this is that blackness hasn't expanded. It has been a monumental failure in its Pan Africanist dreams. African immigrants to America don't want to have anything to do with that thing that blackness and black culture has become. And black Americans want little to do with Africans. They are as alien and strange to black Americans as the Hmong. The reason is because the political and historical narrative of blackness is a case of arrested development. It may go back scores of years to Harriet Tubman but it always ends up at Malcolm and Martin, Jesse, Rev Al and now Barack Obama. The 'African' part is a slave castle or two, some Kemetic glory thrown in, and Nelson Mandela for good measure. But it has very little to do with Africa itself and so black Americans are confounded (and probably should be embarrassed) by their own Afrocentric view of Africa which is as deeply tied to their own racial and political dreams as that of the average European. I mean who really knows what Nigerians think of Nigerians? And what language do they speak, that is besides spam? And really, did even Kwame Ture, nee Stokely Carmichael imagine in his wildest black American dreams that we would be meeting so many Nigerians through electronic means and dumping their entreaties into the trash? No we had no idea where blackness would go, but it didn't go very far, certainly not to Africa, nor even much into the Caribbean.
How can I say it clearly enough? Blackness is a navel-gazing dead end. Except for political historians and scholars like my good friend Dr. Spence. But then you have to ask why such a sensible and well-educated gentleman such as Spence has to sit with a clown like Jon Stewart. Well, I know the reason and it's simple. No black American TV producers. That lack could be a problem, but then that depends entirely on whether or not they point their cameras on that same old barrel.
Hmm. Let me qualify my dead-end statement, because that's only true from the perspective of advancement. You see, way back in the early 80s Melle Mel coined the hiphop phrase "..and everyone knows what you've been through.." Opposing that POV is the other chestnut '..and half that story's never been told..". Well it's been 20 years of hiphop and as a retired amateur scholar, I'd say the story's been told and Melle Mel was right even back then. If it wasn't the story of ghetto oppression, nobody would care to evoke the legacy of slavery and all that (narrow) history of the Western World vs the Negro. We know it. The only people who don't are the raggamuffin youth, who are always being born in the same places under roughly the same conditions, but still by and large with every expectation of running water, electricity and free healthcare, if not healthcare insurance for luxury healthcare. Please somebody show me where black Americans are being born at home in the ghetto and not in hospitals. Inquiring minds want to know.
My point here is that the barrel life is, as any multiculturalist will tell you, full of dignity and respect and worthy of not calling insulting names like 'peasant', the word I use around here all the time. But it's the same life of minds and spirits terribly wasted in the greatest nation on the planet. It's about being a peasant in the land of plenty - about seeing the rich and knowing less and less about how they operate, yet having the spleen and gumption to say 'fuck the police' and various other off-putting mannerisms that disrespect and take no criticism from the great American melting pot. My blackness don't take shit from nobody. Integration? You mean conformity? You mean name my kids John and Mary? You mean drive a Camry? You mean wear clothes from JC Penney's? I didn't think so.
I come across all of this thinking about something my 75 year old uncle sent me this morning. You know, off the Kwaku Network. It's an 18 minute video embedded into the video transcript of a city council meeting in Alabama. It is the heartfelt lament of people who watch 'blackness' get pwned by dark forces. And there's probably no better way of expressing this lament for those attuned to the old black narrative. The director of the video is captivated by the imperatives of the Talented Tenth, which are the good crabs at the top of the barrel extending claws down to lift the suffering up and out. Me, I've dislocated a shoulder or two in that exercise so now I only send words. Like these. In all directions at once, and not particularly at the transparent barrel, but today maybe - depends. Still I am struck by how quickly one becomes invisible when you don't try to aggregate the long tail of blackness - when you don't invoke the metaphors of black legend, suddenly you disappear. You are off the radar. When you don't invoke the spirits, the same old narrative, you become like I was yesterday. Incoherent.
I don't have anything to say about what blackness is, except the above. I have found no new orthodoxy but the old lament. "Look what you have become. Do better!" And I know the frustration of expecting a prescription and hearing none, all the while loathing the idea of wearing chinos instead of kente. If you are black and your world is black and white, why would you ever be white? Even when you know how ugly black can be? That's where I think several millions might be. In between worlds without enough confidence or FU money to experiment.
The video is just another 'Scared Straight'. And I knew in my young life that it didn't apply, but I didn't know how to critique the best black had to offer without seeming ungrateful. I had to confront the end of my blackness. And time after time I did, and I came back from invisibility to try and be another angelic crab at the top of the barrel. It's because I could think of no greater moral purpose in the world, and that lack of imagination was the manifestation of the sin of pride. Black pride to be sure. Because if you look at your own suffering and link it to the suffering of a race, then your race becomes the most long suffering and most deserving. In black America it's done with slavery and institutional racism and a host of other long tailed dysfunctions like 1 2 3. And they add up. And that aggregate blackness obscures the good stuff and everything else. Everything else on the planet.
This is the new black handicap. Exposure. We can all generate all that content we've been dying to spew since the days of black and white television. Output, output, output, a long tail of blackified trivialities that all add up, as long as they stay black. And we can sell them to ourselves. We meaning America. It's an old skin game people of all skins have had skin in.
I consider myself much more a part of my family than I do of blackness. I want to be a good Christian an order of magnitude more than I want to reperesent black America. That is not for a lack of trying, but from a final realization that it is impossible to be responsible to a segment of humanity such as black America, an America out of step with any orthodoxy but the stale, contradictory and marginal edicts of blackness. But I cannot change what my focus has made me along the way, which is partly a slave to the imperative of the Talented Tenth. If I were to ever write the book I've been promising everyone it would be about my escape from the imperative of a movement that lost its moral momentum. I hear echoes of the call every day.
I leave you with this. An old story capturing a slice of life that was once pretty much everything in my life. Spike never answered the questions. They had only individual answers. At the end of School Daze the last word was Wake Up. Maybe you've been living in a Dream.
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