just a bit more on racial monoculture [update: just a lot more], this time more policy-substantive. the democratic party (extremely more if sanders is elected) is the party of the welfare state, and as the dems annexed all black political activity, black 'leaders' turned the whole demographic, practically, into little but defenders of government benefits. the dems really tried to annex king, and they are doing it still. (joseph califano: selma was lbj's idea.) jesse jackson was part of the democratic establishment long before he ran for president, though it's not like he was going to get the nomination in any event. a great rhetorician at his best (unbelievably repetitive at his worst), but that was a pretty mild program he was pushing by the 80s, even if the huge dreams were still sort of half-inhabiting the words. i picture the response of some of the figures i mention below to the 10,000th repetition of "i AM somebody": well, i never doubted that for an instant. but you sound like you need reassurance on that all day. ok now that you're somebody, who are you and watcha gonnna do? wait, i'm not absolutely sure you are somebody; don't lose whatever somebody's left in there, man. me? i am going to go kick the white man's ass. they've still got you, i mean in 2016, and it looks from here like you don't even want any alternatives.
i hope to really unwind this argument one day, but i think an honest look at the history of the late-20th and early 21st centuries will show that the actual effect of the welfare state has been, first of all, to freeze racial and economic hierarchies into permanent immovable institutionalized structures intended to persist forever. also, it is actually the site of incredible "unconscious" racism: even just the pose of 'we must help y'all' is a marker of utter power inequality. but then, the whole thing is administered without consultation of the people it seeks to remake/save/re-enslave: it is our diagnosis of your pathologies, taken without consultation. well, why would we consult with you on this? you're so uneducated, so addicted, so criminal, and so on. you remember slavery, don't you? it was a generous program to bring civilization to savages, language to people who just chattered like birds, and protection to the vulnerable. booker washington: "We went into slavery pagans; we came out Christians. We went into slavery without a language; we came out speaking the proud Anglo-Saxon tongue."
some of these things i have said many times. look at what malcolm said about what welfare did to his family. or sister souljah. it's worse now, if that's possible. and dependence is powerlessness in the most concrete continual way. that was also one of the powers of slavery. i feed you, in my generosity. contradict me and you will starve.
the housing programs are maybe the very clearest place to see this, but it is everywhere. i swear, we will bulldoze your neighborhood, move you to a disgusting high-rise racial reservation without any connection to any viable economy, lock the door, and then come back ten years later and be surprised at how the thing looks. look at how these quasi-people live! we'll have to save them again, because we are so good and so generous and so not racists. . then we'lll implode it and build another one. you know that site down by the tracks that the chemical company abandoned? that would be a cost-effective spot. no one is going to buy it anyway. that was a liberal program for racial uplift, y'all, but the whole thing has this structure, and racism/classism underlies every move, specifically because the liberals, progressives etc doing it are doing it as they congratulate themselves for not being racists. really, astonishingly, they can introduce race-based policies that look for all the world as though they are trying to accomplish black isolation, impoverishment, and cultural destruction, and defend them on anti-racist grounds.
what is the answer to racial uplift? education! let's force their children under compulsion into some of the most useless, dysfunctional, and dangerous institutions the united states has ever seen (son, i spent years interned in the washington, dc, public school system. the way you're defending education as the answer strikes me as a little...abstract. why don't you try doing a couple of years in there and then get back to me?) there, we can jam white culture into their heads. they'll fill out the same little bubbles as our kids, and then we'll be equal. oops what has gone wrong? don't tell anyone, but i think there might be biological differences in iq (i actually do know some white people, so if you're wondering what a white person, almost any white person, might let slip to another white person or entertain in their secret white soul...). school choice? nonono we are liberals. you are not going anywhere. maybe compulsory pre-k! studies show, etc, until it's implemented. maybe if we caught them at birth and kept them institutionalized...indefinitely, we could fix them. on the contrary, progressives need to be fixed by them. but where are the black voices demanding that?
funny how much uplift/integration keeps looking like cultural destruction and direct subordination. some sort of coincidence, i guess. our best progressive thinking got you here. i guess we'll just keep on agoin? y'all seem to support it. let me ask you this. have we left a single child behind? we said we wouldn't and stuff. everybody said that every day for years, as though the phrase were a disease, until something else focus-grouped better, which was also when it started to sound sarcastic, no matter how apparently sincerely you said it. it's amazing how we yap. we really don't care about the truth whatsoever. i think y'all kind of know that; it's been hard to miss. keep it uppermost in your mind when the progressives come grinning at you again in the primaries.
you can comfort yourselves, as you vote over the next century for white and beautifully-integrated whiteish progressives: they are just about to get it right this time! they have a new approach. a new wave of educational reform is coming that will make it all work for you. and then another.
the racism of a trump and the racism of a hillary are different racisms, or different psychological syndromes, but neither one is going to be helping free anyone of anything; both assume effortlessly the normativity of bourgeois white culture. i have to say that the fact that the white left has annexed the entire black vote for that is a crying shame, and i'll say again that you should consult the malcolm in your head on this. or better: calling marcus garvey: you are needed again.
well, and why would we consult you if we've got 90% of your vote without consulting you?
one thing i'll point out: in the arts, african-american culture is far superior to white culture, and has remade the art of the world. the music and dance is obvious; you can't even have 20th century european classical music without jazz, not that that is any sort of flowering of anything. african music has been influenced for a century by african-american music. (true somehow i'm folding jamaica into this. there is a constant interaction politically and aesthetically between north american and caribbean diaspora cultures.) but i'm talking about all the way along. asking me straight for greatest novelist of the 20th century? i am returning zora neale hurston (by the way, i'll also pick her high in the draft as a political thinker, an essayist, a memoirist, and an anthropologist. #1 essayist? baldwin.) oh i guess i could go all graffiti, but when you start to peel back the layers of african-american traditions, you will find it everywhere: black power colors, images of malcolm. whose slang is the right slang? whose language are we actually speaking? look at the clothes people are wearing anywhere in the world, dude! this came from the most-oppressed 10% of a provincial nation. it's one of the most astonishing things that has ever happened. (the best analogy i can think of is when a band of middle-eastern peasants invented a mode of spirituality that people are still trying to practice millennia later.) we should acknowledge our superiors; i am utterly serious. they should be designing standardized tests for us.
bear in mind the words of eek-a-mouse: i walk, i talk, but i don't crawl on my belly like a reptile.
petitioning for benefits all day for decades is...servile. are you listening, ta-nehisi coates? provisionally, i'm going to include advocacy of affirmative action, at least in some configurations, under this category. its effects are...complex.
i know this whole thing is really bizarre, but it's reached the point where it seems like a white person has to remind you of some of this. i mean, you know, farrakhan's people might sort of still be out there or something. but remember when garvey was smacking dubois, malcolm martin on these sort of grounds? who is left to do that now? where is clarence 13x, fuck is bob marley? where is khallid muhammad? where is stokeley carmichael, eh? where is the noble drew ali, robert athlyi rogers, leonard howell, where is public enemy, where is amiri baraka? zulu nation, are you hovering around out there somewhere, waiting for the call? you think they were welfare-state liberals or something. for heaven's sake. don't make me unleash immortal technique on that ass. you're not ready.
[the white race is not monolithic. the stuff we've been listening to? a lot of it is made by multi-racial artists or in various multi-racial/ethnic/national configurations, like adrian sherwood at the mantrols for dub syndicate, dre for marshall. actually there are other ways of integrating stuff. we are actually naturally integrating wherever we are not hagridden by progressives. one problem is, when there's a progressive around, no one can speak freely, which makes it profoundly hard to connect. that no one should speak freely: that is the actual whole progressive program for truth and reconciliation. well, the whole thing depends on them not becoming conscious of themselves; they want a gassy cloud of hooey all around them; they demand to hear only euphemisms. they call that justice. the arts people usually stop much caring about race. they're more concerned with whether you've got flow. i am not talking about arts institutions, which are hyper yet counter-productively aware of race in that progressive way. i am talking about working artists.]
right they all had their drawbacks. well, there might have been some anti-semitism and sexism, for example. on the other hand, there is a lot of truth and power and bravery there. i understand; he's not talking to me, though he is roundly abusing people like me including me. i respect that. i started to think of some of these folks as role models somehow, ok? but however i thought about anyone, where are today's black nationalists, advocates of black power, black identity, black arts, black truth? where are the black leaders who don't care what i think about them? at least these people weren't capitulating. we are shooting your children in the streets.
i think 'black lives matter' sounds sort of pitiful. i hear a bit of a wheedle in it. it's pretty damn minimal. even if we don't know that, or act like we don't, surely you knew that? that wasn't a question for you before, was it? it isn't something you needed to tell yourself, is it? obviously, this is not my job, so i could just ask a question, what do you need to say to one another, now? it's not going to be khalid. but it had better not merely not be khalid. what i'm saying is that you had better not let it be our job to fix you. in the tradition from which you come, there are many models of self-reliance, real pride with something actually to be proud of besides better dependence; there is power and autonomy and intelligence, creativity and identity that isn't just a negative image of the thing we stamped you with. i can't tell you how to find that again, or what it needs to look like now. but lord, you can't just keep voting like this.
