I don't think I can handle
she go channel to channel
cold looking for that hero
she watch channel zero.
--Public Enemy
(from the accumulating memoir)
This morning I'm finally on the beach and spending some time over at TCoates blog at The Atlantic. The subjects, rethinking the rethinking on torture and interrogation, and liberal interventionism. I'm about done with that for the morning but as I was writing, Public Enemy's 'Fight the Power' came on my iTunes and it reminded me of Coates' defenses of hiphop as an intro to critical thinking. I liked the song, but I loved the instrumental version called Powersaxx which featured Branford Marsalis.
I used to, reverse the lyrics back in the day when I was working at Xerox. Instead of 'Fight the powers that be', my angle on black power was 'Be the power that fights'. I recognize how much that put me out of synch with several elements then as now. Not to say I haven't become more sophisticated but there is that basic consistency. Reflecting on the time brings to mind the position I was in at the time which was controversial. I was a Corporate Negro, or so I was percieved by my brethren from the hood. As a member in good standing with the Talented Tenth, I was to be in place in Corporate America as a conduit of guilt money back to the hood. It was OK that I was supposedly an Affirmative Action hire, so long as I could expand community relations and get the boys in the hood more jobs.
What I did was not so much of that at all. Instead I went both upscale and downscale. On the upscale side I assisted in traditional fundraising among my peers for money to be sent to the United Negro College Fund. On the downscale side I participated in various afterschool tutoring programs.
It was during one of those tutoring programs, a night school class at Inglewood High School, that I ran into my own stumbling block. (Expand on this). Long story short, I simply didn't have the patience to be an instructor, and I still don't. But even more daunting was my feeling of complete and total frustration and futility. We were teaching CP/M or DOS. We were suggesting that the future of those kids would be in technology that was already past. There was a reason the kids were struggling and not making much progress - these technologies were stupid and would soon be obviated. But like many good intentioned people, we had already sold the educational fetish of 'computer literacy'. Still we were twisting fingers and arms around stonecutting tools for the sake of a trade that would shortly be obviated by the printing press. What were the chances I could get a decent computer with Unix or a PASCAL language compiler in front of these kids? Zero. I couldn't stand it. I walked.
It never was the machine, and today it still isn't. It's the writing. It is the storytelling and the framework of communicating something logical which is the essence of computering. The science of course is about methodological approaches to determining was is computable, given a Turing / Von Nuemann universe, and some rigor about the most efficient ways of processing what is computable. Already I'm quite surpassed by the toolsets of realtime gaming, and all those kids surely have cellphones more capacious than the entire network of fileservers at the Xerox El Segundo campus. I myself ran the largest file service on the non-research network at Xerox and that was about 900MB in 1989. Technologies change, what people need to know doesn't. But that's something you don't get to know until you have a bit of it.Knowledge and the wherewithal to see what is lacking in the lives of your fellows.
I came to understand some of the foolishness ascribed to the promise of the Talented Tenth. And I understood finally how limited our blessing was. I mean we represented something real to those on the outside. The Affirmative Action debates were all about proportional representation and our proximity to the hood was considered something of an affront. We were, in the role monkey circus, to represent the best and brightest but also to bear the shame that we were sellouts unable to truly serve our brothers. So an engineer working in a 95% white organization was supposed to both politick for Affirmative Action that would turn that same organization 12% black and represent the attitude of Fight the Power as well.
You might be able to see the conundrum here. But I already knew and acknowledged that there was not only one Black Community. After all, I was a Corporate Negro, somewhat elevated over the College Boy, who in turn was supposedly superior than the Homeboy from around the way. But we all listed to Public Enemy and watched Spike Lee movies. Still, I didn't have much to reconcile. I liked being an arrogant me. It suited my purposes to have quite enough black people around so that I wouldn't have to bear the burden of representation. I didn't want to be a role monkey, but I did want my place in the hierarchy. See it mattered if you went to a junior college or a four year. It mattered if you went to a state university or one of the elite schools, and it mattered in the black world if you pledged one fraternity or another, whether you listened to Wynton Marsalis or Newcleus.
I liked Public Enemy. It completely changed my mind about hiphop, as did Digital Underground some time later. But what I liked most about it was that it was so super bold. When Ed Lover and Dre finally got on Yo, I was very happy. More room for a brother like me. I could see the social capital of black people increasing and knew that it was not solely mediated through what I used to call the Coretta Scott King Seal of Approval. In 1986 I ranted, riffing off the character from 'A Soldier's Story' about the modern-day role monkey circus ringmasters: Sergeant Waters Strikes Again
Isn't it kind of frightening that the neighborhoods craved for so long by ghetto dwellers aren't that great. Leaves you hollow doesn't it? So what does preparing for professionalism really prepare one for? It seems to me that if there were a such thing as a fulfilling career, one would wish they could do it constantly. Plus they wouldn't always expect everybody back home to appreciate it. But how many professionals will tell you today that they honestly love their work? The black engineers and scientists will come; they will be naturals like Guy Bluford was.
E.A. Bouchet: PhD Physics, Yale University 1886.
Where are the black artists, musicians and writers coming from? Who is giving today's black youth that kind of motivation? What about historians, soldiers, bartenders, carpenters, farmers, architects, chemists and candy store owners? Who ever told a black child that he could grow up to be a great grocery store owner? It seems to me that we have got far too many narrow minded ideas about what is good for black people. Why must our 'innate responsibility' make us put a Jesus Blessed NAACP kissed by Coretta King stamp of approval on everything?
Around that time, for what it's worth, I came upon an idea that has stuck with me, and it was an aversion to the term 'senseless violence'. Being deeply immersed in black culture having stayed in my own city all this time and close to many black worlds in schools, on the party scene, at churches, at work, and with community organizations, I was readily aware of all the distinctions and similarities blacks made among themselves in Los Angeles, both sensible and ridiculous. It was a rich tapestry of nuance for me. Even on the brutal end of gangbanging, a dynamic that may probably never be properly abstracted, although I very much respect Jervey Tervalon's "Understand This" I had some cultural literacy that let me know there was sense to be made of a great deal of violence. Blacks, as full human beings, had life or death gripes and they carried out justice of their own sort which is no different from any other in the streets of the world. The fact that the System hadn't saved us was evidence that it couldn't - there was no other justice and in some places I'm sure there is none. I understood that black people were living and dying by black swords for black reasons. Not that these reasons were inexplicable or that there was some mysterious 'black thing' that nobody else could understand, but that there was ever a lack of willpower in any white liberal effort to understand, or black nationalist desire to explain. It wasn't senseless, there was just no money to be made in making perfect sense of it. Everybody had their story and they were sticking to it.
So I recognized it was the case all over. My black world was never impenetrable, you just hadn't read the right book or been invited to the right party. And another song comes to mind as I think about it. The World is a Ghetto. And that idea stays with me as well. I'm still living in my own little nasty world, as Vanity would say. I'm perfectly comfortable in it and love sharing it as a writer. But I look back at the dissonance between fighting the powers that be and being the powers that fight, these imperatives thrust at me and my reaction to them and I recognize the power of being an honest individual. As Lionel Ritchie says, 'Everybody finds their own road, somehow, some way, some day.'
So back in 1989 as I was going through the third or fourth edition of 'The End of My Blackness' my favorite Public Enemy song became "I Can't Do Nothing For You Man".
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