I heard some lyrics in a rap the other day which stuck with me. I think they were one of the hiphop soundtracks in one of the XBox games I play, but I can't remember which. The lyric went something to the effect that chances are that the real messages aren't going to get on CD. The basic effect of the lyric was that consciousness rap is not surviving in the hiphop market.
It reminded me of our alter calls to black cultural production in the 90s. If you get a chance, check out the film Strange Days with Angela Bassett. In the Rodney King, early multicultural political days, I was on the side of the aisle that said that we were on the verge of a new consciousness - that black flavor was going to transform us and deliver a clarion call, unignorable, to social justice. Now I think perhaps I was hanging around too many college students. But do check out the vibe of that film. I haven't seen Crash, but I think it would be a good comparison - expectation to reality 10 years later. Because I believe in Crash, we have come to accept a more or less permanent caste to the black race.
I say this as one who has found some lighthearted pleasure in the exploitive gangsta stereotypes expressed in games like 'Saints Row' which are almost completely without heart.
What I want to express here is the challenge I think black culture faces as an expository vehicle and as one capable of sustaining change. This morning, for a number of reasons I found myself perusing the 'Blaack' Pages of San Diego - trying to find a working website for Jack & Jill, The Links and or 100 Black Men. What I noticed were any number of remedial organizations, not one of which I clicked on had a working website, but that was just my experience this morning.
I think that I am rethinking black organization, and I don't know what to expect. On the one hand, I am satisfied that a adequate number of African Americans are making the progress to be expected of an emergent community. The Civil Rights Movement was a success and did its business properly - the legal basis of racist discrimination has been destroyed and there is no backsliding on that. But the cultural incentive to move beyond a legal level playing field has pretzelled in on itself. In other words, while I find the aims of the Urban League to be admirable of raising those working poor to the solid middle, I wonder where everybody else went. It's as if the latticework of black struggle stops at American average. The only place you find strong black networking is where a substantial number of blackfolks are living in substandard conditions, a permanent substandard that is perfectly acceptable.
Remember my Nikki Giovanni poem?
i used to dream militant
dreams of taking
over america to show
these white folks how it should be
done
i used to dream radical dreams
of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers
of correct analysis
i even used to think i'd be the one
to stop the riot and negotiate the peace
then i awoke and dug
that if i dreamed natural
dreams of being a natural
woman doing what a woman
does when she's natural
i would have a revolution
Maybe it's not a revolution after all.
What if racism were to end? What if we assumed that it already ended. I mean the last two high profile 'police abuse' controversies on college campuses were not directed at blacks. They were at Middle Easterners (I think). They were at Brown and now UCLA is all in a tizzy. I should take a moment to remind people that in our culture we respect and obey the police because we know they are working to protect us, but this is a multicultural lesson some hyphenated Americans choose to disregard. So they're learning that lesson the hard way while a loud coalition finds another way to not study the hard sciences and call what their doing relevant to society. But I digress. The question at hand is what does black culture suggest you do once you have attained freedom and equality? It is a question nobody seems to want to ask or answer because the permanent presumption is that the playing field has never been, and never will be made level.
Even I know the old time religion asks not.
Lord, you don't have to move my mountain
But give me the strength to climb.
And Lord, don't you take away my stumbling block
But lead me around.
That's all about the Struggle. But what do you do when you've laid down your sword and shield, down by the riverside? Is there nothing but balm in Gilead? Are we supposed to just light up a joint and say we've done all there is to be done? It's a difficult question to ask of The Black People, because we all accept the notion that we are not free, that we are not realized, that we are not cured, that we are not saved. If the Black People are thus incomplete, then our message is not to be trusted, our struggle has to be continuing...
I think we ought to know better, but that's just me being siditty. That's me being typical Talented Tenth, bourgie and otherwise unimpressed with the lot of y'all 'Bama cousins.
LaShawn Barber writes:
The condition of black Americans as a group (high illegitimacy rates even at higher income levels, unstable families, disproportionately high crime rates, underachievement, etc.) won’t improve until a critical mass of that group understands and vocalizes the truth."
And Harry Jackson Jr preaches:
"Marriage and abortion are not 'wedge issues.' If black families disintegrate any further, we may slip into a negative population-growth mode. More dangerous than that, our community may implode if we do not stabilize our marriages, our children, and our extended families. The wedge issues, if examined closely, become racial bridge issues. Today, fatherlessness is destabilizing families of all races. We want morality with purpose and public policy that embraces both personal righteousness and social justice. The entire body of Christ can decide to make a moral stand. It may take years for us to get to our final destination, but we must begin the journey now."
How is it that the entire import of this message has been a wholly 'owned' subsidiary of the Conservative movement - the very people most ostracized from black communities? How is it that the cultural end of the movements of the 60s have ended up defending spoiled college students who don't have the good sense to come in out of the rain, talking smack to cops like they wanna be Ice Cube?
How is it that we can't even get the black family right? Add whatever qualification you find appropriate to the last use of the word 'we'.
There is no Racism Index and there will never be. Blackfolks organically lack the organizational infrastructure. I'll complain about that more later, but there is no black Knights of Columbus, and I'm particularly pissed about that in light of Alpha Phi Alpha's failing efforts to get the MLK Memorial funded. But like I said I'll complain more about that later. But there is an unemployment index and there is a poverty index, and there is an entire and large infrastructure primarily staffed and funded by white liberal Democrats, Socialists and Leftists of all stripes that provide a racial accounting of all manner of economic doings.
The power of black culture to move those numbers is severly challenged. I wonder if it has the juice. I know it lacks the direction. This sounds controversial, so let me restate it. The power of black cultural production. This conversation is far from over, but I'm going to throw out a bone, which is provocative and true.
Blackfolks bought too much into the white liberal hippie sentiment of the 60s. The same attitude that sought to make things right for blacks was also saying that everything was wrong with America and that their parents and the families they came from were wrong. The significant core of the Left allies of blacks in the 60s and 70s were countercultural and revolutionary. And those are two qualities that were never useful to the uplifting of the black family.
When racism is no longer a mountain, and even when it is nothing more than a stumbling block, blacks who reject conservative and common sense rules about marriage and family as the central tenets of black culture will continue to fail. Those who cast their lot with this revolutionary, gangsta and relativist post-modern bullshit, those who continue to blame the Man for not making a level playing field and not delivering 40 acres and a mule, will continue to sing sad sorry songs. And I think perhaps they will always have the ear and attention of those groups founded by white liberals and their best black friends, who will attend to the Struggles of those forever destined to abandon responsibility for their own destinies. They will always have some black organization trying to grandfather them into the middle class.
I hope black organizations grow and mature beyond such remedial and uncharitable charity work. I hope their think tanks go beyond excuse making and racial demographic traffic. I hope they move towards excellence rather than merely support and sometimes achievement. It's hard to say if they will or they won't. What's not hard to say is that they're not right today, because they are sustaining superstitions of the 60s in black communities coast to coast. They are providing aid and comfort to disproved notions and trying to twist black culture into something it might be now, but never was supposed to be.
Recent Comments