Known as alternate history, it is a well-flourishing literary and film genre. The genre’s basic premise is to go back to a historical event, posit a different outcome and build a world with characters and plot based on that alternative timeline. This genre is not to be confused with dystopian future tales that often create or assume a not-yet event that throws the world off of it’s current course.

A quick search for alternate history literature in Amazon or even Google shows that the American Civil War and World War II are the two most popular niches in which people write both fiction and non-fiction. Historians always play the “what if” game in non-fiction tomes focusing on one battle or one decision made by a war general. The sheer number of books and articles teasing out the “what if” hypotheses has shown that the consuming public has a voracious appetite for this. Currently, Amazon Prime is producing “The Man in the High Castle,” based on a novel of the same title that is an alternate history dependent on the United States and the Allied powers losing World War II with Nazi Germany occupying the eastern half of the United States to the Rocky Mountains and Japan occupying the Pacific coast. And as much flak as he received, Quentin Tarentino’s “Django Unchained” was not just a box office smash, but also critically acclaimed fictional telling of a one-man slave revolt in the antebellum South. Even I went to go see the movie twice! Less critically acclaimed, but equally as important to this essay, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer” featuring a machete-wielding, vampire-hunting Harriet Tubman was certainly a movie that fell into the genre of alternate history.

I’ll admit, there’s a personal fascination to this as a genre. Much like the consuming American public, the “what if” fascinates me. Especially the “what if” around slavery and the potency of a real Confederate States of America. These are things that have relevance in a day and age where discussions around race, white supremacy and racism are rhetorical mine-fields for people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Not to mention the political connections of the current White House to alt-right operatives that closely have aligned themselves with white supremacist ideology and organizations, the way the United States uniquely engages in race both historically and currently continues to hold our collective fascination.

If I had to guess, I think the gist of pushback that HBO received from this wasn’t a result of people being against the genre, or even specifically black folks not having the collective willful imagination to ask “what if” on such as divisive topic, nor even that the two black co-producers didn’t get equal billing as Joy Reid points out, but rather it was based on this history of how films and TV shows centered around race set in the historical past–alternate histories or not–have been ingloriously handled. More often than not, many of these historical  and contemporary (re-)tellings, fiction and non-fiction, are based on the gaze of the white liberals characters. These movies rely on a white savior narrative that highlight the moral bravery that the one white person had in the face of racial injustice, especially on behalf of the persons of color. Think of Skeeter in “The Help,” or Jake Briggance in “A Time to Kill,” where they are fictional stories created on the horror of race, but still centered around the valiant and triumphant stories of the white central character. Parenthetically speaking, the vigilante justice of Carl Lee Haley in “A Time to Kill” seems even less plausible in 2017 than it did in 1996–even after an O.J. Simpson trial and acquittal!  While on one hand, I agree that it’s worth telling the story of white folks who weren’t rabid racists, since they did exists, it’s usually told in a way that subordinates the story of black folks. It provides a point of sympathetic entry for well-meaning whites in contemporary audiences at the expense of the narrative of blacks. Given that Hollywood has been absolutely obtuse over centralizing black narratives over the years, the stories told in “12 Years a Slave,” “Hidden Figures” and “Fences” can hardly make up for the last nine decades of filmmaking in this country.

While movies like “Django Unchained” and “Get Out” that focus heavily on black characters, they function as “must see” movies to watch rather than “can’t wait to see movies” akin to “The Fate of the Furious” or another Marvel comic release. “Django Unchained” and “Get Out” are two well-known and recent movies that challenge that abscond the white savior narrative and allow black characters to save themselves against white antagonists. While yes, Schultz character in “Django” did have soteriological characteristics, I’d like to think the final scenes of with Django blasting any and all white people to kingdom come should account for something. And certainly with “Get Out,” every white person with a speaking role functioned as an enemy of the central character, Chris, who survived as the credits began to roll. Even writer, producer and director Jordan Peele said that “the ending needed to transform into something that gives us a hero, that gives us an escape…”

But these movies provided a type of dual representation, something that most movies aren’t able to do. On the one hand, black audiences cheered at the end of “Django Unchained” and “Get Out” for seeing not just the moral victory, but the realised victory of a black face on screen. Based on that simple fact, one could even argue that both these films dabble in the genre of Afrofuturism providing a revisionist history that shows preference for black characters. That makes it all the more easy for white audiences  to disassociate from the evil white characters because it was just a movie; a kind of anti-representation. Many white liberals watching those two movies would never identify with the Calvin Candies of the world. Or the Armitages, even though they would have voted for Obama a third time.

I would allege that the fear expressed by the likes of Joy Reid and Roxane Gay are worries about are there a certain type of white people who watch a show like “Confederate” simply to scratch the itch of what if or watch secretly wishing it was reality. There is a fear that a show like “Confederate” becomes a type of white existential pornography, hoarded and passed around in secret white-only social groups that quietly express glee and mirth that such representation still exists. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Peele said

Slave movies can be amazing, but it is interesting to me that the industry and this country have found a certain safety in the American slave narrative — I think because these films take place a long time ago, there is a certain protection and we don’t have to face current issues of racism

And for black folk, that’s a scary prospect. Is the lady at the DMV who serves you or your co-worker on a work team possibly one of the ones who falls into the  “I wish this was reality” ideological camp? Given that the stories of white municipal officials sending racist emails to one another is a recurring theme suggests that black folks may be operating in work and communal spaces where deep-seated racial resentment is real. Or the fact that a mayoral candidate in St. Petersburg, Florida publicly stated that blacks received reparations in the personhood of Barack Obama and that black folks need to “go back to Africa” in 2017 presumes that there are many white people who believe these ideas, but know better than to say them aloud. Especially concerning the racist interdepartmental emails in Ferguson, Missouri between a former municipal court employee and a police officer, the subsequent Department of Justice investigation connected the racial bias displayed in the emails to the outright discrimination of black citizens of Ferguson. These are real and founded fears. Far too often, for black people, the boogeyman is very real.

If I had HBO, I’d watch it. More because of my affinity for the genre than anything else. But, as an American consuming public, we need to be aware if we watch and read things like this for the sake of an intellectual exercise or do some of us tacitly wish for an alternate reality.

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Most sane people are able to admit there’s no real way to say definitively that Sanders would have beat Trump in a tête-à-tête, but there was a particular resignation amongst the Democrats who held their nose, pragmatically voting for Hillary Clinton in hopes of keeping Trump out of the White House at all costs. For many, this wasn’t about making the decision to participate in electing the first woman to the presidency, but really about a clash of ideologies. Many Democratic voters were miffed at how little the party’s establishment reached out to Sander’s supporters. Unlike how Obama reached out to Clinton in 2008. While the numbers bear themselves out–Clinton did win the nomination fair and square–once the emails of the DNP were leaked it was clear that throughout the primary, every lever was moved to make sure Clinton secured the nomination.

I would submit that Sanders was Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill of the party’s establishment. The fact that Clinton almost didn’t make it out of the primary should have been a testament to just how fractured the Democratic voting base truly was and still is. In a primary race with only three candidates, and quickly two, the Democrats didn’t have an authentic primary. Not in a real sense at least. For a total of eight years, the Democratic party planned for Clinton to succeed Obama. There was no plan B. There was no alternative. For what it’s worth, the decisive way in which the Republicans nixed the establishment candidates early on, such as Jeb Bush, it effectively secured a political base for Trump. That didn’t happen for the Democrats. Clinton’s victory was much more of a split victory. Trump secured 45% of the delegates and the next closest contender was 20-percentage points away. Meanwhile, between Clinton and Sanders, the point spread was only 12-percentage points.

In the Obama era, Democrats grew accustomed not just to his politics, but his actual star power. The celebrity nature of Obama far outweighs the supermarket-checkout-line-tabloid-worthy headlines that the Trump administration seems to make on a near daily basis. And without that positive star power, the Democrats seem to be chasing the wind. Enter Kamala Harris. Anointed by Obama when she was elected attorney general for the state of California, Kamala Harris successfully ran for the U.S. Senate in 2016. Harris was a small bright spot in the dimness that was the Democratic defeat nationwide at both the federal and state level of politics. About the only post-mortem conclusion that the Democratic party arrived at with the piercing clarity was that they cannot pull off a win of any kind without Obama’s name on a ticket and that the Clinton dynasty as we know it was finished. Or so we thought.

This summer, Harris was reported to have met with some party insider’s who are close companions of the Clintons in July and that has fueled rumors about a 2020 presidential run. Fundamentally, this is problematic. The posturing of poaching a candidate who’s a freshman to the Hill this early is putting the cart before the horse. Not only does she need to be focused on the work she was elected to do, the Democrats and the American public are far too out to see who will emerge naturally. Despite conventional wisdom, Clinton did not emerge organically as a candidate, but was forged in the fires of the party establishment. So seeing Harris meet with the same establishment that crafted a Hillary Clinton candidacy is a sure-fire way to turn off those 43% of primary votes whose political ideologies are more closely aligned with that of Sanders.

While the Republicans are fractured publicly, the Democrats need to acknowledge that there are internal fractures amongst themselves too. One of the post-election narratives that emerged was that vast sections of the country were not ready to elect a woman to the presidency. The oft quoted statistic that 53% of white women voted for Donald J. Trump was cited as evidence of this. While I agree with this approach in a meta-sense, as far as national politics are concerned, I have a deep disagreement with those who agree with this line of thinking and use it as a weapon against supporters of Bernie Sanders. I would allege that the men and women who supported Sanders supported him because of his democratic socialist ideology, not because Clinton was a woman.

This line of thinking in and of itself causes some unnecessary divisions because it’s only telling one side of the narrative and not inviting the other side for discussion. To even suggest that Rep. Maxine Waters, another Democrat from California, should run for office is absolutely absurd. The vacuum of leadership vacated by Barack Obama, and more importantly, the Clintons as a unit, meant that the public face of the party became Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California. If Schumer and Pelosi are the faces of the Democratic National Party then, they function as the final death rattles of a political establishment. They’re elder statespersons who tend to be intractable in their approach to politics in the face of a populist candidate who got elected because of the unpredictability of his tweets. In essence, the Democrats showed up to a gun battle with a knife, got shot by the Republicans and are still trying to stab their opponent from fifty feet away because they’re convinced the knife is still a lethal weapon.

The Democrats have been asleep at the wheel for the past eight years, smug over being the party that elected the first black president. Meanwhile, the numbers don’t lie: only 16 out of 50 states have Democratic governors; accounting for Nebraska’s unicameral system, the Democrats only control 31 out 99 state legislative houses, resulting in 17 states with a GOP veto-proof majority in their statehouses. If the Democrats are focusing on the White House and completely ignoring state houses, again, they’re bringing a knife to a gun fight.

Harris may throw her hat in the ring, and she might be the heir apparent by 2020, but in 2017, the Democratic party needs to be going back to African American neighborhoods where turnout returned to pre-Obama levels this last election cycle, and going to rural white American counties and sitting and talking to people and telling them why coal will never come back. In fact they’re trying it and calling it the Better Deal. Obviously hearkening back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal (something I advocated the Democratic party should have done in 2009), it does lay out a slightly more progressive plan seeming to engage the ideologies of Sanders and even Sen. Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts, but it still has the stench of party establishment drenched all over it. It’s ideological teeth lack the bite because it fails to address the concerns levied at the Democrats feet in 2016: mass incarceration combined with police brutality, universal health care and affordable college. The Better Deal is as if the Democrats got together and decided to construct a bigger knife and bring it to the gun fight because a bigger knife will make it more deadly. At this rate, the Democrats are poised to resurrect Walter Mondale from retirement and run him again in 2020.

There are dozens of grassroots organizations that have sprung up in the last six years that publicly demonstrate where liberals and progressives stand on these socially divisive issues. Prominently the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matters awareness campaigns have shown just how popular these ideologies truly are. While I have personal issues with the “too woke to vote” anti-establishment sentiments that seem politically impractical for many of their stated goals, they do symbolize the disenchantment of potential voters. Failing to connect those dots is, again, bringing a mere shank to a gun fight.

I knew something was cataclysmically wrong when Sen. Schumer, in a press conference, seemed overtly self-congratulatory at his ability to add the suffix “-er” to the word MEAN on a red poster board with black letters. It was a direct quote, with his own augmentation, in a way to campaign the ill-effects of the House bill known as the American Care Act of 2017 designed to repeal and replace parts of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. This was the best the Democrats had to offer in response. A 68-year-old man with a magic marker. Aloof and out of touch. He lacked the passion that so many have felt on the ground since the election of Trump. Yet, this was the leadership of the Democratic party.

In order to be a viable party in 2020, the Democrats needs to do old school grassroots mobilization, of which that entails engaging with community organizations already doing the work that they say they support. But, oops, that would require the Democrats to actually have a platform aligned with progressive populism. Which currently, the Better Deal is not. Hypothetically, if the Better Deal did have a clear progressive platform, the mobilization of the policy platform, I would argue, needs to happen on the state and local level. The Democrats need to be flipping state houses at the legislative level and slowly begin eating away at the House of Representatives, and put out a hope and prayer they can gain control of the Senate with 51 members and let the presidential candidate chips fall where they may.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing suggesting that they’re strategizing that way. In the meantime, Democrats needn’t be reminded that Nixon wasn’t impeached until his second term. As far as I’m concerned, as of now,  the knife-wielding Democrats are powerless to stop the strong possibility of a second term of the gun-toting Donald J. Trump.

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It was 2004 and social media as we know it didn’t exist. The black blogosphere was still in its gestational phases, and online dating for black folks was relegated to hook ups on Black Planet websites and college students who discovered the joys of flip phone cameras to plaster their MySpace pages. And then Oprah Winfrey invited an author by the name of J.L. King who wrote the book On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of Straight Black Men who Sleep with Men to her show and the phenomenon of the “DL black man” was brought to light. At the time, even for me, it fixated my interest because, well, I was in college and some of what became fodder for young minds was evident on the college campus, but it reinforced to yet another generation, the millennials, that “Black men aint shit.” I got into countless arguments and conversations in dorm rooms and at the cafeteria at Fisk during my senior year with black women who said, almost verbatim, “Half of y’all aint shit and the other half of y’all are gay.” I blame Oprah for this.

Only through age and some sense of wisdom that comes with it have I realized that Oprah is not the progenitor of this conversation, it’s something that has been going on for quite some time. But, Oprah at the time that she said it had the weight of pop culture behind it. No longer was it something that was discussed on three-way phone conversations, no longer was it something that black church women tsk tsked about at the afternoon church dinner, it was something worth displaying for the whole world to see on the big screen.

Filmmaker, producer, actor, director, writer and all-around cinematographic maven Tyler Perry found his niche in writing stage plays that was the right mix of comedy, drama and black churchified frivolity. Even prior to J. L. King appearing on Oprah’s show, Perry had received ticket-sale success from the chitlin’ circuit by the turn of the century. While getting his start with stage plays in the 1990s, his box office success came in 2001 with “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” which was eventually turned into a movie and introduced his famous Madea character to the wider world. By this time, Oprah had already invited Perry to her show and his inspirational story of being homeless and pouring his life savings into his work was a success story Oprah glommed on to. It was no turning back for either one of them.

“Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” to say the least was not cinematic greatness. But no one was necessarily expecting it given that it was Perry’s first feature length movie. However, it set the foundation for Perry’s characters throughout his later productions. (I want to list some of the movies that I’m speaking about for the sake of making a larger reference point: “Why Did I Get Married?,” The Family That Preys,” “I Can Do Bad All By Myself,” Daddy’s Little Girls”) Most of these movies took stereotypical and archetypical images of black women and placed them into characters that some times fit and some times didn’t. And more often than not, they didn’t. But still, his movies were box office success. Without fail, if a Tyler Perry movie was released, he was going to make his money back in box office sales that was spent on production, and usually with profit. Perry found the right mix of black buffoonery in the Madea character, and finding ways to dispense platitudinal wisdom, making sure that Cicely Tyson or Maya Angelou had speaking roles, so that a wide range of black folks–and white looky-loos–would show up at the box office. It is worth noting that behind all of this Oprah Winfrey was walking directly to the bank.

Oprah’s success model, as she noted herself, changed when she saw the tide of daytime talk show moving away from the Morton Downey, Phil Donahue and Jerry Springer model of confrontation, and moving toward inspiration. At least there was a glimmer of hope that you can be success by appealing to the American public’s higher angels rather than their lust for displays of violence. Oprah rose to the top. By herself. She owned and operated her brand. Her race aside, it’s still a marvel that she was able to do it. The poor black girl from Kosciusko, Mississippi actually made it. Part of me thinks that she backed Tyler Perry as a result of criticism at the time that she, as a black woman in this country was 1) not a real Christian and 2) wasn’t really black.

Seeing the sea change from confrontational to inspirational, Oprah was not shy in having people on her show that spoke of spiritual transformation in decidedly non-Christian ways. Note, not necessarily un-Christian ways, but through modes that would speak more to philosophical metaphysics than through Christian theological methods. This was superbly expressed throughout many of the books that she selected for Oprah’s Book Club, almost culminating with author Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth in 2008.

Similarly, Oprah had one of the most damning ontological charges levied against her: that she wasn’t black. Most of her in-studio audience were white women. And frankly, very few television shows across the board become number one solely off the viewership of black viewers; even “The Cosby Show” was made number one because the majority of viewers were white (honestly, I think “Empire” on Fox might be one of the few if not only that’s been able to do this). And Oprah received a lot of criticism through the Oprah’s Angel Network, the charity arm of her vast empire started in the late 1990s, for donating to schools in South Africa and seemingly turning a blind eye to the poverty and schools in her backyard of Chicago. It seemed as though Oprah started going out of her way to build homes and do for black women in visible ways on her show. One of the most famous clips of Oprah building a house for a single black mother made its way to the movie “Ocean’s 13.” All of that combined, I speculate, fueled Oprah’s alignment with Tyler Perry, but she didn’t stop there. And neither did Perry.

As The Oprah Winfrey Show was wrapping up in 2010, she announced the launch of her own network, OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) in 2011. The network predictably struggled, but has essentially found its footing in the present. But the network was buoyed by, wait for it, sit-coms and drama productions by Tyler Perry. Perry had already produced “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne” for Atlanta-based networks and then for TBS, but later worked out a deal for scripted shows for the then-new OWN network. “Tyler Perry’s For Better or for Worse” was picked up by OWN after cancellation on TBS, and “Love Thy Neighbor,” a sit-com and “The Have and Have Nots” a soap opera-esque drama were specifically designed for OWN. Essentially, the writing and depth of the characters is flat. The one-liners of the sit-coms appeal to niche brand of entertainment that edges up to shuck-and-jive adjacent; the drama shows are melodramatic: imbecilic in one line, stark histrionics the next. All the while employing the same tropes of black women and black men. What do I mean by that? Many of the Perry characters singularly embody a trope. Where one single woman is the Mammy character, one single man is the Buck, and one single woman is the Jezebel, so on and so forth. It’s a failure to understand not just the complexity of humans, but unique complexity of black life in America.  All of which, seemingly is supported by Oprah Winfrey of all people.

I think when I had this revelation, connecting all of these problematics of Perry’s characters throughout the years to Oprah, it was a bit disturbing. I wasn’t so much concerned about how Perry portrayed black women, usually because they obtained some type of moral victory in the end, but I couldn’t help but wonder Was this how Oprah viewed black men? Obviously, this is all a theory, pure speculation, but I can’t help but imagine Oprah sitting… wherever someone as rich and wealthy as Oprah sits… disconnected from so many parts of black life positing what she wants to green light as far as production. I don’t have a vantage point into the lives of the rich and famous enough to honestly know how these decisions get made and ultimately carried out, but its worth noting that this, this connection from understanding the black man as this sexually violent DL man–or just “ain’t shit”–was perpetuated by Oprah! She had him back on the show and some of that dichotomous rhetoric was tampered, but as everyone knows, it’s no point in closing the barn door once the horse has left. Also, without going down the rabbit-hole of Lee Daniels and his artistic interpretation of black life, it’s no secret the projects in which Oprah decided to align herself with post-2004 certainly flattened and narrowed the concepts of black masculinities to the point of detriment to the larger conversations that happened on morning talk-radio and even at the family reunions.

By 2017, our concepts on sexuality and sexual orientation seem light years beyond what I understood in college and what the collective country has understood. Even though we all know, it bears repeating just how unfathomable it would have been in 2004 to imagine that same-sex marriage would be legal and that it would exist as a mandate from the Supreme Court. Our conversations on sexual orientation and sexuality have grown to include transgender individuals, again something we couldn’t imagine. Yet, our conversations around black male sexuality, sexual orientation and black masculinities in general seem to be moving at a glacial pace. For black women, there’s elasticity around being attracted to both women and men; concerning black men, to be attracted to both men and women is simply to be “gay.” Granted, this is not helped by the ankh-left and the more Hoteppian perspectives of current black culture that seem to ascribe to an idea that homosexuality was something introduced by the “white man” to destroy the black family, it’s also a real undercurrent in black culture. This was exposed in Issa Rae’s “Insecure” television show on HBO when one of the ancillary characters noted that he had had a sexual encounter with another man and the black woman was absolutely repulsed. The double standard was real. While “Insecure” was clearly trying to force the conversation and challenge the narrative, Perry’s Oprah-supported productions of nearly a decade enforced so many bad cultural norms around heteronormative patriarchy and tragic Christian values that I can’t help but wonder do we owe our slow collective progress around black masculinities to Tyler Perry and Oprah?

MATURING BLACK MASCULINITIES

Growth and maturity happen for all. Irrespective of age. The so-called light bulb moment can happen at 15 or even happen at 105; the genius of wisdom is able to dispense even unto death. Jay-Z released his latest album 4:44 and in an eponymous track, he spoke of his own maturity directly related to his relationship with his now wife, Beyoncé. On the track “4:44,” he apologizes for the ways in which his own immaturity hurt her, but in a slightly later-released video clip, he plunged a bit deeper into the recesses that fueled his immaturity. On a documentary-style 11 minute clip of who’s who of black male celebrities, Jay-Z hosted a discussion around black masculinity and the “invisible wisdom” that had been dispensed on to them as black men living in the American empire. Will Smith spoke of the wretched advice he received from an elder, not his father, on how to interact with women that spiraled down a drain of absurdity culminating in the u-bend of a violent display that seemed lifted from a 1940s Hollywood gangster movie. Kendrick Lamar spoke of the “hardness” that he was taught to have; Anthony Anderson stared off into space lamenting his emotional selfishness; Jesse Williams displayed impassioned anger at how he had been reduced to words in innumerable think-pieces.

Perhaps, just perhaps, we’ve entered an age where we can discuss the complexities of black manhood. Maybe even Oprah has progressed herself. As Ava Duvernay has produced and director “Queen Sugar,” a story of three siblings struggling what it means to carry on their father’s legacy as a sugar cane farmer in the rural South as well as manage their own personal lives, there’s a glimmer of hope around telling the narrative of black masculinity that isn’t toxic, that isn’t flat, that isn’t one-dimensional. And the fact that Duvernay is able to do it without compromising the central narrative of the black women as well seems to be a feat unheard of before. And all of this is on the OWN network. Specifically (spoiler alert somewhat), there are three (and-a-half) black male characters, Ralph Angel (one of the siblings), Micah (the son of one of the siblings), Hollywood (the beau of the sibling’s aunt), and Blue (Ralph Angel’s grade school son), and all of them have the stinging portrayal of reality. These are complex black male lives that are much like the black men who we all encounter on a daily basis. As Ralph Angel vacillates between protecting his son’s agency to play with a Barbie doll and still call Micah “soft” illuminates a complexity and depth that I’m not convinced Tyler Perry could ever pull off and one that Lee Daniels wouldn’t be interested in advancing.

Ralph Angel’s character is where many American black men are existentially. Negotiating just how emotionally vulnerable do we want to be and how emotionally vulnerable do we need to be. We play the game of navigation at our jobs, with our girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses, live-ins, with the people at church and sadly even on the street: how do we manage our authentic selves and people’s perception of us. Some would argue that’s what it means to live in modern society. That may be true, but when the perceptions are almost wholesale negative that makes a difference. If the perceptions of black men are “half of y’all aint shit and the other half are gay” what does that do to the trust and communication of a relationship between a black woman and a black man? Or even that black men have a predisposition to violence–how does that effect a black man who’s 6’2″ and 220lbs and he chooses to be impassioned in a meeting at work and all of his colleagues are white?

We can’t undo what Oprah did 13 years ago, and unfortunately we can’t unsee all of the Tyler Perry movies and him running around in drag as what should have been a cartoon character on the Disney Kids network (think Suga Mama’s character from “The Proud Family”) and what that’s done to how we see black women and also how we see black men. My only hope is that as black cultural art forms on TV and the silver-screen seemed to rise to greatness under the Obama-era (think: “Moonlight,” “Hidden Figures,” “Fences” and “Get Out”), I hope that the divergence that the likes of Barry Jenkins of “Moonlight” and Duvernay with “Queen Sugar” have provided will be the new norm.

Finally, I hope more black men are encouraged to do what Jay-Z did: sit around with each other and talk about their emotions. And not at the barbershop. The performance of black toxic masculinity needs to be shed in order to have a real conversation. One where we can bear our souls to each other. I watched “Footnotes of ‘4:44’” and I wished I could hand each of them a referral to see a therapist. All of them spoke with a vacant look in their eyes, staring off into space as much of them, like Ralph Angel’s character, simply lacked the vocabulary, the blueprint, with which to construct an emotional structure of their own lives; just pieces of their soul scattered on the ground of their life lacking the tools to put it back together. It seemed as though the only forethought most of them had was that those pieces were theirs, and that it should be a way to put it back together (or simply construct it to begin with), but no one had showed them the way. Ever.

My hope and prayer is that somewhere, somebody is doing the work of making sure that black men know that they are enough.

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I read this post and proceeded to climb up the intellectual mountain from which that question was generated–for whatever reason, when I wake up sometimes my mind brings a piercing alacrity to a thought–and I realized that there was a marked shift in how I personally discussed things and in how I engaged in this subjects in and around Black Lives Matter. In fact, I discovered that there were more than one lessons that I had learned throughout these last couple of years. These lessons have affected not only how I operate in social media circles, but ultimately in my real-life interactions with white people, but also other black people.

It’s okay to speak up and speak out even if it’s not popular.

I tweeted that on January 12, 2015. I remember dreading that I felt the need to tweet that, but it was true observation. I had a serious criticism of the “leaderless leadership” model simply because I didn’t see how it would translate well into organizing on the street. And better yet, organizing for what goal? Central to my criticism was a seemingly lack of policy attached to the BLM organizing platform. Grassroots organizations such as BLM typically coalesce around a particular outcome that’s policy based: education reform or legislation at a city council or statehouse. Because I couldn’t connect those dots, I was slow to join the bandwagon. In fact, I actually had some questions about the general direction the bandwagon was moving. Questions that needed answers before I got aboard.

My questions didn’t come without a pitiable price. Or at a price meted out by social media. I remembered for the umpteenth time, that social media isn’t the place to ask questions of hashtag movements. The flattening of the conversations doesn’t give me much latitude to ask what I thought was a pretty foundational question; one needed for movement building. I began to see Black Lives Matters as a massive awareness campaign, but not a movement. I penned a blog piece in June 2015 saying a s such, but it was an unpopular point of view. Eventually, I moved into silence.

Silence is death for someone who engages in the life of the mind. People my whole life have told me that I’m unbridled when it comes to speaking my mind. Usually I tell them that I still say only about 10% of what’s on my mind, which gives them a picture that my mind is full and I think a lot. When I talk slow it is me trying to navigate between being true to my thought and sentiments, trying to find the vocabulary that is acceptable to the hearer and navigating do I want to hurt this person’s feelings in order to make my point, or are their feelings worth compromising how I truly feel. Sometimes that calculus is too hard for me to engage, and I opt for the frustrating silence. This is a silence that’s full of death. It’s as though a piece of my mind goes into atrophy when I’m forced to be silent.

It was unpopular to levy criticism at Black Lives Matters and  then-president Barack Obama, so I chose silence over criticism. And for that I need to apologize to myself. I wasn’t living up to my true authentic Self by denying my Self the right to speak my informed opinion. I was more worried about what social media thought of me; how I could make sure a status received likes or a tweet received retweets. The lesson I’ve learned is that I should have continued to be as bold as I was on January 12, 2015 when I tweeted into the ether and no one retweeted or liked it. But more importantly, I didn’t care if anyone did. It was a truism for myself, and that should always be enough.

Stay agitated. 

This is probably the most difficult one for me. Favoring brevity, to be an agitator in this country means to sacrifice the philosophical and at times tangible creature comforts of American life. The lights, the water, clean air, the easy accessibility to food… I can go on. You get my point. We, who believe in freedom, need to constantly stay in a state of agitation. The moment we rest is the moment we’ve capitulated.

One of the worst phrases that came out of the Black Lives Matter project was “woke” and all it’s familiar derivatives. “Wokeness” became synonymous with one’s blackness. That is to say, if you weren’t “woke” you weren’t really black. I rather despise ontological tests of one’s blackness especially when it’s related through the medium of social media. It became a quick and easy way to dismiss a black person’s thoughts; if they weren’t “woke” then you could dismiss their argument. Essentially, the phrase “stay woke” became interchangeable with “stay black.”

Well, you could have just told me that, right?

I’d rather advocate black folks to stay agitated. Not to the point of looking for problem just to be the center of attention, but to be vigilant about the deeper analysis at play and finding the courage to speak truths that empower rather than speaking your truth for the sake of self-aggrandizement.

Never be “too woke to vote.”

Hotepping won’t save black America. It never has and it never will. As I said, part of my criticism with the larger Black Lives Matter project was its failure to be policy minded. That is to say, nationally, it never did the job of connecting voting to political outcomes. The closest it ever came was in the pig-sty that is Chicago politics. Riding the coattails of the Black Lives Matter wave, Chicagoans voted Kim Foxx as the Democratic party nominee for Cook county state’s attorney. This was after the tape of a Chicago police officer killing the unarmed black teenager LaQuan McDonald and the state’s attorney office being slow to investigate and charge the officer. This was a clear cut case of a body politic connecting a desired outcome (a state’s attorney courageous enough to prosecute a police officer) with a needed triggering action–voting.

Unfortunately, this example exists in a singularity

Viral videos surfaced on social media left and right with black people saying that they weren’t going to vote in 2016. And Black Lives Matter never organized a national get out the vote campaign. To my knowledge, there was not a single Black Lives Matter supported candidate from municipal to federal elections in 2016. With all of the nascent rumblings of young black people, you would have thought that black millennials would have flocked to the polls in record numbers and there would have been a record number of blacks who decided to run for office, even if it was for dog catcher in their city council district. But it seemed that Black Lives Matter was more interested in mounting philosophical and non-policy based challenged to Hillary Clinton and too disinterested and dismissive of Bernie Sanders which effectively told hundreds of thousands of young people that the political process was worth divestiture. That it was okay to be “too woke to vote.”

And then Donald Trump won.

There’s always a deeper analysis.

I recently listened to a podcast hosted by Princeton professor Eddie Glaude and produced by Princeton’s African American Studies department, and he interviewed his mentor, Cornel West, professor of public philosophy at Harvard–his second round there. In the midst of the anthropological and ontological shade that only West could throw at other black colleagues of his, he stuck to his guns about his criticism of the Obama presidency. Specifically the ways in which Obama, as president, continued to perpetuate the “rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer” dynamic when it came to economic bailouts of Wall Street, as well as the human rights ethics around drone strikes. He also, poignantly noted that we will eventually have to deal with the fact that a “black lives matter” campaign was generated under the nation’s first black president. This is a deeper analysis that most people don’t want to delve into. It’s much more popular to relish in the representation of blackness in the White House–the hip rhetoric of Obama, the images of Michelle dancing, BET hosting a farewell bash in the actual White House. But Black Lives Matter taught me there’s always a deeper analysis.

That is to say, this battle, maybe even the war, as it’s laid out is not going to be fought with hashtags as bows and arrows. Twitter assassins cannot and will not move the levers of power in this country; Facebook screeds are but a fart in the high wind of market forces. Social media, most times, doesn’t allow for a deeper analysis. That deeper analysis comes when you log out and actually talk to people. When you get in their face and have a conversation. Part of what I think doomed Black Lives Matter as a movement was that we saw many people on bullhorns at marches taking Twitter hashtag musings and trying to translate that to real people. And it fell flat.

I will always commit to a deeper analysis. Not for the sake of trying to be “the deep one,” but for the sake of making sure we’re thinking this thing through all the way. Black people will never get justice if we’re half stepping our analysis of the situation. If we’re more interested in the person occupying the seat of power rather than the invisible sourcing of the power, we will stay losing.

My life is more than a hashtag.

About the only time I invoke the written words “black” “lives” and “matter” is to make a hashtag. Twitter appropriately created a permanent emoji of black fists across the color spectrum–light skinned to dark skinned–that accompanies that hashtag. In a real sense, Black Lives Matter has been reduced to a hashtag. I look back at that tweet from January 12, 2015 and I wonder was ever even more than a hashtag. At times it felt like it was. Like it should have been. Like it could have been. Could it have been more during the Baltimore uprising? More at the death of Walter Scott? The shooting at Mother Emanuel AME church? The election of Donald Trump?

I am reminded that I am more than a hashtag, and I am more than what I choose to write and say. My words point to bigger meanings and ideas; things that are greater I. That is to suggest, my criticism in the face of popular opinion or my reasons for voting are all more than just words to read on a screen, or 140 characters to scroll by and retweet on a timeline. My black life matters not because an organization says so, but because I say so and the real and lived community I live in affirms that.

The post Lessons I Learned from Black Lives Matter appeared first on Madness & Reality.

“I move that Hillary Clinton be selected as the nominee of the Democratic Party.”

These words formally ended the broad based political revolution that Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, had campaigned for so viciously.  Just like that.  In fact, Sanders’ political revolution ended the moment he failed to secure enough delegates.  His words as an acclamation for Hillary to be the nominee were more for show than anything else; an attempt to assuage the utter disappointment that persons are feeling about Sanders’ loss.

As I have listened to reports from commentators over the last few days, there has been a noticeable aghast towards the scores of “Bernie or Bust” people who aren’t happy that Hillary Clinton is the nominee for the Democratic National Party.  There are countless interviews of delegates at the DNC this week who have expressed tangible disgust towards Clinton as they lift up the ideals of Sanders.  The roundtable panel this morning on NPR’s The Diane Rehm show offered a tone of disdain as these delegates and others, citing that in 2008 how the party quickly unified around Barack Obama.  What this analysis does is fail to recognize the strong differences in which the country has found itself in eight years later.

For starters, the economy isn’t on a major decline.  As noted, the DNC is doing a great job of showing just how great America is in contrast to the dystopian fear fest that the Republican National Convention seemed to put on last week.  With unemployment at relatively low levels, a Brexit vote that hasn’t seemed to rock the American economy, a stock market that is higher than ever, gas prices have remaining relatively low and stabilized even in the summer driving months, the country is not emerging from the depths of a struggling Bush administration like it was eight years ago.  At that time, much of the electorate just wanted stability.  It wasn’t a time in which populist movements focused on ideals, but rather focused on stabilizing the economy.  Lest we forget, when Obama took office in 2009, the economy had not reached its nadir.  To compare the wants of Sanders supporters to Clinton supporters in 2008 reeks of bad political memory at best, and journalistic bias at worst.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, in my opinion, Ferguson hadn’t happened yet.  While racial incidents have never stopped happening in this country from its inception, one would have to go back to the Rodney King incident and LA Riots of 1992 for the last time that a sustained conversation about race happened nationally.  And since that time, the ways in which we talk about race have shifted dramatically.  Reconciliation is now a bad word.  The notion of white privilege is a common theme discussed.  Hell, even a serious conversation about reparations has happened in just the last two years!  And the influence of technology through social media has democratized voices in these conversations in exponential ways that denizens of 1992 could not even fathom.

When Bernie Sanders’ supporters are still struggling as to vote for Clinton in November, this post-Ferguson lens is one through which they are undoubtedly looking.

Sanders was the first candidate to embrace Black Lives Matters, not Clinton.  Granted he had to be brought there, but he got there quicker than Clinton. For millennials watching, this was a major bellwether for what a future political candidate could look like.  For a generation that seems rather interested in tearing down the system rather than working in it, Sanders offered some glimmer of hope that maybe there was a political candidate worth voting for.

I write this as the news that not one single police officer who had custody of Baltimore resident Freddie Gray will be held legally responsible by our criminal justice system.  For many in this country, black and white, Asian and Hispanic, old and young, rich and poor, across the sexual orientation spectrum, this is the evidence that the system does not work.  One famous refrain of Sanders was that the system is rigged.  The system is so rigged, that he, a self-avowed Independent, had to join the Democratic party just to have a fighting chance.  Against hard evidence that Freddie Gray was healthy prior to his arrest, and due to injuries he sustained while in custody, he died, yet not one single officer will suffer any legal consequences is simply an unconscionable state of affairs.  This is the system that Sanders was running against.

Whether people expected him to do something tangible when it came to indicting and sentencing police officers who either shoot and kill unarmed black men, or allow black citizens to die in their custody is a debatable subject.  But it was clear that Sanders knew that this system existed and that it was consequentially unfair to vast segments of the American populace.  Clinton, on the other hand, implicitly and continually puts forth a rhetoric that the system does work, it just needs reform and she’s the candidate for it.  What many commentators miss who have been glib about Sanders’ supporters not immediately coming to the fold, is that Clinton–and her husband Bill–aren’t just saying the system works, but they are the system itself.  For a couple that has been front and center when it comes to national Democratic party politics for 25 years, there’s no denying that they are the one’s who pull the strings and puppets on stage perform as directed.

For a disillusioned millennial generation, Sanders was a candidate many wanted to vote for.  And in the memory of most under 35 years of age, Barack Obama was a candidate in which many wanted to vote for.  I say this as opposed to the fact that George W. Bush was a candidate liberals and progressives voted against.  And that candidate who had the dubious classification of being “the lesser of two evils” was the unmemorable John Kerry.  The recent politics of the last 35 years have shown us that the party that wants their candidate to be vote against the other candidate, often don’t win the national election.  This cycle, the emergent mantra from converted Sanders supporters has joined that of long-term Clinton supporters: to not vote for Hillary is to elect Trump.  I can’t imagine a more depressing feeling to have when walking into a polling place.

November is still three months away.  Who knows what statements Trump might make before then.  You can hardly call them gaffes because they’re so intentionally incendiary.  Again, even in the writing of this, I received the CNN update that Trump called for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.  I read this and realize my English vocabulary fails me searching for a word or phrase the capture the inane absurdity of that which is Donald Trump.

Clinton has major work to win over Sanders supporters and it is her job to do so.  Sanders did what he was supposed to do in his speech earlier this week at the DNC, as well as speaking for the Vermont delegation during the roll call vote effectively ending his campaign for a political revolution.  Clinton meanwhile has to muster what she can to tell Sanders’ supporters that she can and will, at least, radically reform the system.  This is in light of yet another email scandal that closely affects Clinton: we have evidence that the Democratic party machine was ultimately not fair to the Sanders campaign and that preferential treatment was given that ultimately negatively affected that campaign.  These are facts.  They are indisputable.  The irony is that Clinton has a problem with being seen as trustworthy while Donald Trump’s trust has yet to be questioned, yet the lies that proceed from his mouth are as numerable as the stars in the sky.

For revolutionaries, anything short of a revolution is a defeat.  To be happy that this is the most progressive platform that the DNP has presented at a convention is acquiescence.  And revolutionaries don’t acquiesce.  Granted, just exactly how revolutionary these supporters truly are is questionable even by my own definition of revolution, but I appreciate their gall and intractability on the issues.  We don’t get those progressive types that often.  Most Sanders supporters can give substance as to why they’re so doggedly against Clinton and why they hold such progressive political opinions.  The mirror image, however, is robotic like responses that often end in “…because he can make America great again.”

In a world where a black man can effectively be murdered by No One, a serial killer who has a body count as high as this country’s age, maybe we deserve Donald Trump.  Maybe our penance for having a rigged system is that we get the booby prize of a Donald Trump presidency.  I certainly don’t want that to happen.  But if as a country we lack the political will power to effect change for the least of these, then what other alternative do we honestly have.

The post Bernie Sanders, a Post Mortem appeared first on Madness & Reality.

1. Justin Timberlake and (some of) Black Twitter

To be succinct, the issue was around charges of cultural appropriation.  Here’s a news story so that I don’t have to rehash the details again.  A comment on my Facebook page the day after the awards illuminated the fact that in the midst of the conversation people were having on social media that there was a conflation of what constituted cultural appropriation and what was just simply imitation.  Frankly, I thought the response to Justin was stupid.  It seemed as though people were using that as an opportunity to drag him publicly for the “wardrobe malfunction” with Janet Jackson in 2004 because it was a pre-Twitter era.  It was petty and ultimately misguided.

For starters, charging Justin with cultural appropriation when he did a collaboration with Jay-Z on his last studio album, “20/20 Experience” and that collaboration was a chart-topping song is just horrible cultural critique.  Mistaking his innate talent as a musician and a singer for cultural appropriation is misguided.  Combined, the narrative created was that Justin Timberlake was stealing black music and making a profit.  To which the obvious question is what qualifies as black music? (I’ll come to that later.)

To round this out, Black Twitter, thankfully, was divided on whether to drag Justin or not.  There was a sizeable crowd who didn’t see the point, and didn’t join in.  Even today,R&B singer Tank took the opportunity to offer another perspective not just from within the music industry, but also someone who undecidedly is black.  However, as the Monday morning news reported, it was the collective Black Twitter.  Therein lies some of the problem with how narratives are created.  Black Twitter is no more monolithic than black folk in real life.  But it was clear that the Pharaohs of Black Twitter were running the show.

2.  Who are the Pharaohs of Black Twitter?

I’m convinced they are the people that hand out Black Passes.  The Black Passes are those things that white people can apply for to get you invited to the cookout, church services and other black cultural events–like family reunions and HBCU homecomings.  The Black Super Pass is the executive level pass you get when you can perform parts of black culture and maintain your coolness while doing it.  For example, Vice President Joe Biden has a Black Super Pass because he’s just as badass as Obama, and his wife probably makes a decent enough green bean casserole to show up to the cookout with.  Black Super Passes are usually only given out to celebrities, namely musical ones: Eminem by virtue of being from Detroit is a prime example, and Justin Timberlake’s regular Black Pass was upgraded to a Super Pass when he did the collaboration “Suit and Tie” with Jay-Z and his music was getting routine play in black clubs and on urban radio outlets.

These Pharaohs of Black Twitter, you see, are the same people that sit on the board that issues and revokes Black Passes and Black Super Passes I’m convinced.  Apparently, they operate on the model of engaging in theessentialism debate of what blackness is.  The glaring contradiction is that these same popes will use the “race is a social construct” argument when engaging in anti-white racism conversations, but rely on the ontological argument when it comes to common cultural understandings.  The irony is that the same way blackness can be assigned to white folks and revoked is much of the same way that levels blackness is assigned and taken away from other black folk–as seen fit by those that shape the narrative.

3.  Is Jesse Williams black enough to make that speech?

This is a dumb question to begin with, but it was out there.  The answer is yes he is.  To that point a white person could have made that same speech in the same arena–it was stuff that needed to be said.  This is more to debunk the Hotep line of thinking that says his white mother invalidates him from saying what he said.

4.  Is Jesse Williams too light-skinned to make that speech?

This is another dumb question.  One in which I refer you back to the second paragraph of #2.  Dumb the question may be, it does illuminate some of the real intra-racial issues that still exist in the black community.  The way we selectively privilege rears its ugly head.  When a brown skinned or darker skinned person makes a statement about being disadvantaged, abused, ignored, or not considered attractive in anyway because of their skin color, and a light skinned person comes back and says “but we’re all still black,” it’s the intraracial equivalent of saying “all lives matter.”

Listen…

6.  What is this Black music Justin is allegedly stealing?

I’m still waiting for folks to illuminate this to me too.  I think, yet again, this was an instance in which the Pharaohs of Black Twitter opened Keisha’s Box (the black cultural equivalent of Pandora’s box) and unleashing repressed pissivity around the columbusing activities that white folks routinely get into on a regular basis.  The true ideology behind cultural appropriation is when white culture adopts, or spreads the news about an ethnic cultural habit–a restaurant, a hairstyle, a fashion style–and then turns around and sells it not just to American culture as new.  But by virtue of black, Hispanic and Asians being a part of American culture, it’s a literal taking of ethnic culture and selling it back to the same ethnic group as a new discovery.  Hence the moniker of columbusing.  The v-blogger Almonte exposes this one pretty well.  It’s a classic case of white culture “discovering”  an ethnic food item, and presenting it back as something novel.  It’s NSFW because of the language, but definitely worth the watch to get the point.

The only music that I’m willing to call black in a true sense is jazz and blues.  Simply because they are recognized as uniquely American in creation and originated outside the purview of the white gaze in the American South, a feat unto itself.  That is to say, blues and jazz weren’t improvisations or blends of another musical genre, nor were they the next iteration in a similar genre.  Most music doesn’t operate that way.  Tank illuminates that in the link I posted in #1. It’s always a sampling from something else. The original charge from the tweet

Is Justin an imitator of black musical styles?  Sure.  I don’t think anyone denies that, nor himself.  Undoubtedly, if ever asked about his musical influences, I’m quite sure he’s going to list black artist one of which would probably be Michael Jackson and Prince–person’s who’s blackness has never been questioned, right?

7.  …and speaking of cultural appropriation, can black folks be guilty of doing so?

Yes.  Yes we can.

The Love Life of an Asian Guy pointed out just how that works on Facebook following the BET Awards.  I actually had my head down and heard more of the Fat Joe song with French Montana and Remy Ma.  I was too busy tweeting that Fat Joe needs to be renamed Medium Sized Joseph now.  But he illuminated through satire and wit the ways in which Asian culture had been appropriated on that stage through the eyes of an Asian American.

And black folk need to own that.

Irrespective of what the Pharaohs of Black Twitter would have you to believe, the balance of power amongst second culture groups (black, Hispanic and Asians in America) to oppress others shifts like a bowl of water balancing on the end of a stick depending on context, timing to who’s holding the proverbial microphone and occupying the stage.  In that particular moment, the black performers on stage culturally appropriated Asian culture and sold it to a black audience as new and inventive art.  No, it didn’t have the same wide-reaching affect as when Miley Cyrus decided to twerk and suddenly a word and associated dance that had been in black dance clubs since the early 1990s became a new dance craze, but the performance of cultural appropriation was very much the same.

8.  Is it cultural appropriation if black folk give it away?

Nope.  It’s not.  Our yeses need to be yes and our nos need to be no.  Here’s a classic example of when “we give it away.”

In all fairness, much of the black media consortium side-eyed this whole thing.  But first you need to understand the weird double standard that exists.  For starters, the Try Guys got a Black Super-Deluxe Pass from a group that supercedes the power of the Pharaohs of Black Twitter and this group is formally known as the Popes of Blackness.  Now you have to understand a Black Super-Deluxe Pass is temporary, it’s never permanent unless you marry a black person, even though you can apply for one (for the record George Lucas and Robert DeNiro still haven’t gotten through all the red-tape get their application processed).  So, the Try Guys got this Super-Deluxe Pass to do this.  And the double standard is that–wait for it–

–even some black people don’t have this pass.

Maybe this was the unheard of Max Super-Deluxe Passbecause many of us know, even as other black people we aren’t invited to step with black Greek letter organizations (BGLOs), let alone sit on their benches and plots on campus, nor wear paraphernalia.  Just ask Laila Hathaway, someone who embodies black culture to the utmost, how it felt when she was ridiculed for wearing the fraternity letters of her late father.

The trouble comes when you suddenly see white people performing step moves that many who are in and around black Greek culture would automatically associate with the given BGLO.  Methinks it wouldn’t be completely fair to accuse legitimately ignorant white folk of cultural appropriation.  The same goes when so-called blackdances are created such as Hit the Quan, Whip/Nae Nae, Bobby Shmurda’s two-step or Drake’s Hotline Bling two-step, The Dab or any of the other numerous dances in recent memory are performed by white folk in the innumerable YouTube videos, it’s not cultural appropriation when other individuals are imitating what they see in popular culture.  Miley Cyrus’ twerking rose to the level of cultural appropriation because white gazers at white media outlets decided to turn back around and sell it to the public as something new and novel.

See the difference there?

9.  But Jesse was just perpetuating decades old ideas that black folks are victims and can’t do better for themselves.

This is more for the straggling white folk that find this site and actually believe that this is a valid question.  If you truly believe that, I also have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.  If you honestly believe this, then I’m sure you know who Tomi Lahren the perennial-Fox-News-auditioner is and I have this sweet gem and treat for you:

It’s not worth my time to dissect this, but please know, black folks spending their time on Justin Timberlake dragging on Twitter while this woman was let off the plantation should make us pause and reconsider what we’re really discussing here.

Hopefully this answered some of the more nuanced questions around this topic.  There wasn’t just one single thing to talk about, but multiple things all at once.

The post Understanding Jesse Williams, Cultural Appropriation, & Blackness appeared first on Madness & Reality.

As someone who lives well outside of the BeyHive, it’s just always intrigued me what about celebrity, and specifically Beyoncé’s, that attracts so many people and people so passionate.  When she performed “Flawless” the word “FEMINIST” as a sign as big as the stage was illuminated and Nigerian writer Chimimanda Adiche provided a voice-over from her essay “Why We Should All Be Feminists.”  Mostly what fueled this curiosity about Beyoncé’s celebrity isn’t that people are talking about it, but it is often who is saying what about it.  For the first time in my recollection, I saw the black public intellectuals of the day proceeding to create the meaning out of her artwork, and begin the process of parsing lyrics and images all across the span of black consciousness.

Making Meaning ex-celebritas

Celebrities from time immemorial function as the target of unadulterated glorification to unmitigated hate.  And this celebrity is not relegated to the world of art–music, literary or visual–often times its in the political realm (think Barack Obama, to Hillary Clinton, to Donald Trump and even other international leaders), sports figures or even when it comes to celebrity preachers to prominent activists.  In the case of Beyoncé, her celebrity has transcended some of the realness that many of our other celebrities have.  In the way that Oprah, and the behemoth that Harpo Studios became, was someone we invited into our living rooms for 25 years, or even Barack and Michelle Obama truly have embodied what it means to be America’s First Family, Beyoncé is not real like that.  Beyoncé is tangibly intangible.  She inhabits what postmodernity would call a type of hyperreality existing beyond our reach in many ways.  She rarely gives interviews and rarely offers commentary in the way that many other artists have chosen to wade into the political arena or take a stand for various causes.

The phrase of ex-celebritas is a play on the theological notion that tribal deity YHWH (Yahweh/Jehovah) of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament created the world ex nihiloor “out of nothing.”  In the sense, much of God’s sovereignty is attributed to the idea that meaning was made out of nothing.  Applying that same knowledge, as a society we create meaning out of celebrity.  And as we do that, we ascribe meaning to people, places and things that may not have endeavored to have such meaning.  As two of my blog essays back-to-back focus around the image of Beyoncé, a first ever, it’s not hard to automatically see that in turn we ascribe meaning to the individual celebrity too.  It’s as if there is a reciprocal dance between the two poles of creation and projection in which one party might not be a participating member.

When clergy of the early Church, prior to the fourth century, supported the creation of icons, it was literally artists and patrons of the church creating the holy in their own image and then in turn giving meaning to that icon.  The finished artwork had zero agency in what it was fashioned to look like, and then had to be subjected to the interpretation of others.

In that way, Beyoncé is an icon.

The historical genesis of an icon is inherently theological and of Greek origin.  Icons at the beginning of the first millennium of the Common Era were considered holy images either as a painting or wooden images.   So yes, as Beyoncé’s celebrity has risen to that of an icon, it is accompanied with a particular type of sacredness.  Celebrity, as a concept, usually invokes meaning that is secular, but for Beyoncé, her image has become sacred for many–especially black women.  It should come to no shock to anyone as to why she is iconic to so many black women.  One might would have to go back to Diana Ross to find a black woman celebrity who has the wide-reaching appeal of a pop-star outside of the black music world.  This is not to discount musicians like Janet Jackson or Whitney Houston, but beyond the shadow of a doubt, Beyoncé has surpassed these women in many ways.  To put it another way, Beyoncé functions as a text.  Text, as a word, comes from the Latin textere which means to weave.  That suggests that much of who she is and what we say she stands for is in turn personified in who she is.

Canonizing Beyoncé as Sacred Text

The first time I ever entertained the idea of Beyoncé as more than a pop artist was watching the now-canceled Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC on a Saturday morning and I heard the conversation that enthroned her as a feminist.  I remember at the time as I was wrestling with my practical definition of feminism because so much of my conversation with black women were offering such different variations of not just a working definition, but what constituted feminism: who could effectively be called a feminist and what were considered feminist practices. But even more specifically I was hearing a divergence of conversations about black feminism.  Actually, a former student of mine helped me out when she offered up Patricia Hill Collins understanding of having a “unique angle of vision” to suggest that Beyoncé’s entrée into [black] feminism may not, nor is required to look like everyone else.

For me her self-titled album Beyoncé was the marker that put Beyoncé in the stratosphere.  It was an unknown and midnight album drop that immediately got the burgeoning Black Twitter collective further established in its presence online while much of Black America was still reveling in Obama having been re-elected again.  She and her husband, hip hop rapper and mogul Jay-Z, were getting invites to the White House by now.  She was just that big.  That meant that whatever she said or did was worthy of being canonized.  But, ever the smart businesswoman, Beyoncé kept her interviews to a minimum–if any at all–and her pregnancy was all but a private affair even after the birth.  This meant that all the public had was her music–lyrics and music videos.

While Beyoncé’s music is obviously R&B, it’s also pop music.  And pop music usually doesn’t lend itself to grand lyrics or lyrics with deep messaging; it tends to be in relatively surface and spell out exactly what it means.  The depth of hidden meanings rests in sexual innuendoes such as “watermelon” and “cigars on ice” or downright explicit.  Think “surfbort.”  Nevertheless, her lyrics have been parsed by some as if they were found on the Dead Sea Scrolls and contained the key to unlock ancient lost languages.  And it doesn’t stop there.  The music videos themselves are part of the sacred text, where everything is thought to have a hidden meaning that must be unlocked.

“Y’all haters corny with that Illuminati mess”

The fact that so many people think that Beyoncé is part of the Illuminati has led to her actually incorporating a response to that in her lyrics.  A YouTube search would prove that there are no limits to those who operate in the world of conspiracy theories and people who have too much time on their hands.  Aside from claims of being in the Illuminati, there are YouTubers who have called her an agent of Satan.  Not metaphorically, but literally.  While I’m sure those that have created videos as such would never refer to Beyoncé as “sacred” anything, I would argue that they see her as a text of sorts, and one in which they have ascribed meaning.  In the way that some may see her as a black feminist, others see her as part of the Illuminati and a Satan worshipper.  Yet the Hoteps see her as anOshun, an orisha from Yoruba culture. Go figure.

Harris-Perry, now in a role as an editor at Ellemagazine, published a call-and-response dialectic that I think highlights to just what level Beyoncé operates as a sacred text for so many people, with so many unique angles of vision.  Even if you don’t agree with the meaning being made, one has to admit and acknowledge that serious thought and more so, serious devotion has been given to this.  It is cult-like.  Cultic practices, even with their negative connotation, do appropriately describe what often functions as a religious following.  In the way that hip hop teens and children of the 90s quote Tupac and Biggie with a cultic religiosity, there is a new generation of women of all ages who will quote Beyoncé for years to come.  And even more so, reference her videos.

The early years of Beyoncé with Destiny’s Child produced music videos at times only two steps removed of the days of the video vixens that populated the majority of hip hop videos of the 1990s and early 2000s.  And again, as she moved into a solo act, we began to see her, in effect, grow up and mature into an adult.  An adult with sensitivities and proclivities appropriate for her age.  We saw progression.  However, with rappers reaching middle age, some artists resist the notion of evolution, still trying to hold fast to their so-called “glory days.”  Certainly after her marriage to Jay-Z, her pregnancy and perhaps just the reality of just being over 30 years old, her videos took on distinctive artistic qualities.  It was clear that these music videos were not meant to be seen as part of the same textural fabric as videos produced by Rihanna, Keyshia Cole and whatever else the cadre of urban hip hop has devolved to with the likes of Future, the Migos, 2 Chainz and Fetty Wap forming the group of Poor Unfortunate Souls from Ursula’s garden in Disney’s The Little Mermaid.  From her fashion choices, to the choreography, to the way she wears her hair and even the costumes and design of the backup dancers all form text the same way one looks at sentence structure–complex sentences to simple ones–from parallel structure to verb tense to help form an image of the author who’s composed it.

In theological circles, the science of exegesis is far from perfect and more often than not one performs eisegesis.  Ex- being the prefix for “out of” in this case, meaning what does one “pull out of” the text.  The opposite being what is being read into the text.  What put me at odds with a few professors in seminary was my proclivity to stand “in front” of the text and provide what’s called a reader’s response to the text.  I’m very much okay and interested in what is being read into the text because we are the sum total of our experiences and to act as if we can so easily divorce ourselves from them in order to give a so-called pure interpretation is naive.  Instead, I’d rather admit the bias up front and still offer a transparent opinion.  So when it comes to the best of what one can even assume as pure in this context, is what what is known as the author’s intent: in what way did the creator of the text intend for the text to be interpreted.

Icons and Iconoclasm

I’ll admit, up until this point in the essay I’ve been trying to keep my bias at bay, and I’m sure I’ve not done such a good job, but in all intellectual transparency I want to admit that I do have one.  Part of the paradox of Beyonce is that her icon status seems to have created a type of bullet-proof veneer that insulates her from criticism.  For quite some time, I find myself interested in critiquing the critical, not simply because I want to disagree with people but partially because I understand that as individuals and as a society we are motivated by a multitude–much of which we fail to recognize or at least admit out loud.  For what it’s worth, I appreciate Harris-Perry saying unabashedly that she’s part of the BeyHive because it contextualizes her response.

Another part of my bias, again in intellectual transparency, is that I’d like to think myself to be an iconoclast–at least one in the historical sense.  In response to the icons that the Church had fashioned in their own image, the Eastern Church (not the Western Church that eventually became the modern day-Roman Catholic church under Constantine) began practicing the physical tearing down and destruction of the holy icons.  For me, I consider this to be deconstructive work that attempts to make meaning of those that make meaning.  In other words what’s driving people to create a sacred text out of Beyoncé.

Finally, what has been a driving force of my bias, wrapped in this particular personage of Beyoncé, is the ways in which I see many people cherry-pick and self-select the Gospel of Beyoncé.  Often times when I hear [legitimate] critiques of hip hop writ large toward black men and it’s prevalent misogyny and mistreatment of women in both lyrics and videos, the sourcing of those texts–lyrics and videos–span the entire career of many of the artists.  However with Beyoncé, it’s as if her first song, video and performance was “Flawless” because that was considered her declaration as a [black] feminist.  As big of an icon as she is, I consider it intellectually irresponsible if those that ascribe meaning gloss over the fact that when she was with Destiny’s Child she was someone who wanted a man to pay her “Bills, Bills, Bills” and presumably she was going to “Cater to [him]” and without a doubt she thought it not robbery to define black masculinity when she said he would be a “Soldier.”

Those songs were my introduction to Beyoncé as a young black male in high school and eventually in college.  And I shall never forget my professor in my Introduction to African American History at Fisk University, declaring from the front of the class that Beyoncé, not Destiny’s Child, was single-handedly setting black women back with the song “Cater to You.”  Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but feel excluded from the “soldier”-motif created simply because I was a college student, not the token roughneck of the ‘hood.  In much the same way that feminist theologians reject Pauline passages of 1 Corinthians because Paul doesn’t affirm women preachers, and the way that black liberation theology rejects Paul’s letter to Philemon considering the enslaved man Onesimus or the haustafeln passages throughout the New Testament epistles because of their reference to “slaves obey your masters,” I think its perfectly fine for us to not hold Beyoncé to old lyrics, but I think we have to acknowledge that it’s part of the corpus of her text.  By most accounts, we’ve shuffled off this proto-Beyoncé in favor of a deutero-Beyoncé in which we apply reader-response eisegetical techniques for the sake of society’s meaning making.

Notwithstanding white gaze toward all things Beyoncé, I am interested in the narrative that doesn’t emerge as the dominant narrative.  I wrote about this to some extentlabeling part of that narrative being shaped by the black syndicate media in my previous blog essay about her and Kendrick Lamar.  Let me say up front, I’m not interesting in hearing black men co-sign together in favor of mounting some anti-Beyoncé campaign for the sake of retreading white masculinity blowhards, but rather the notion that perhaps Beyoncé’s angle of vision is cast more toward capitalism than activism.  Again, my bias is heavy when it comes to conversations around capitalism and that’s often informed by my personal politics.  At what point does the dominant narrative allow questions around the way that we make all things fit into a positive narrative around Beyoncé and instead offer serious criticism to the merchandise that capitalized on the perceived activism around the “Formation” music video and Super Bowl performance; the exorbitant prices of ticket sales for her world tour; the Ivy Park line of clothes not including plus-sizes.  These are all minority reports that get shoved into the same dust-bin of forgetfulness of proto-Beyoncé.

Just a quick walk into any Roman Catholic church building and any non-Roman Catholic church building, one immediately sees the images of the sacred and the holy fall away.  In most modern megachurches, at most one singular cross may hang from the center and the brilliant stage lights cast beams onto blank pulpits and altars, walls and windows in which the parishioners are free to project their own meaning.  While it was a breaking away from what was to become the state-corrupted and sponsored Roman Catholic church, it was also a breaking away from tradition and ultimately spawned many other reformations itself.  The creation of each new denomination and tradition–Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist–all let us know that there is room in which a multiplicity of meanings can be had.   When Martin Luther tacked his 95 critiques on the church door at Wittenburg, and it was the beginning of an iconoclastic movement.  This breaking away is more commonly referred to as the Protestant Reformation.

The Beyoncé Re-“Formation”

I paid $17.99 for the Lemonade album on iTunes because I refuse to get Tidal for a plethora of reasons.  And this was my first ever Beyoncé album or track purchase.  I bought it because I saw it as engaging contemporary culture.  And I must say, even from a musical point of view, I was quite pleased with what I heard.  I felt it showed the broad range of Beyoncé’s vocals as well as her choreographic skills.

However, it was sensory overload.

If you read that to mean overkill, then allow me to expound because that’s certainly not what I mean.  Overload in the sense that there was no rest for the weary; the metaphorical imagery was legion.  Having not just a theological, but a God-centered spiritual approach to the album, I don’t at all feel qualified to offer what would look like a comprehensive response to everythingthat transpired in the midst of the 65 minute visual album not even one week after its release.  In the video, there were interludes that weren’t included in the tracks, where Beyoncé through voice-over intoned words that vacillated between prayers of supplication to jeremiads and laments all the way to a theology of anger and frustration displayed as prose that had mystical and transcendent qualities that surpassed orthodox spirituality.

I personally can’t answer why Beyoncé is just that important to halt just about every news story about Prince’s death which was a pretty damn big deal.  But let’s magnify this a bit: the typical news cycle has shrunk to about 7 days, and Lemonade didn’t even give the death of Prince the opportunity to last a full news cycle.  This leads me to believe that within a week’s time, the country will have moved on beyond this.  In fact, as I type this, it’s an election night–and a deciding night in which Bernie Sanders will undoubtedly watch the nomination slip from his fingers permanently, and the GOP will effectively haveto have a contested convention in order to prevent Trump from being the nominee.  Even as I conclude this blog essay, I’ve turned away from the immediate topic at hand: the Gospel According to Beyoncé.

This gospel message that society has projected onto Beyoncé–made in our own image–is a message we have made her have.  I’d rather us own the fact that we culturally make meaning and ascribe to persons and ideas and sometimes even physical artifacts like buildings, paintings and sculptures.  Perhaps I’m being repetitive at this point, but admittedly no more repetitive that “I slay/okay.”  Projecting meaning, whatever meaning that is, onto Beyoncé is fine, she’s a celebrity, an icon, but we ought not be pedantic enough to release ourselves from responsibility of that meaning and in turn beatify her as though these thoughts, these notions, these meaningsfrom the Almighty and Sovereign Beyoncé.

My hope is that in the cobbling together of this gospel sacred text, this re-“formation” of Beyoncé, that we put together a complete text.  One that includes the frayed edges, the blended fabrics and even the attempts to weave pieces together that we know weren’t originally intended to be together, but it works together for the good of someone who needs disparate parts to make a whole.  I’m not interested in a sanitized Beyoncé; one that erases her work with Destiny’s Child in favor of someone who baptized in the waters of cause célèbre.

What can’t be taken away from Beyoncé is that she has empowered a third-wave of feminism–especially black feminists and womanists–with a new text from which to draw a type of femignosis in which to create meaning.  She also has required us to rethink the ways in which we see the production of black music–as entertainment or activism, and she certainly falls in the Oprah category in which we become free to question the ways in which blackness requires a certain type of aesthetic when it comes to what do you do for the race.  Remember in 2012 when Harry Belafonte openly questioned the motives of both Jay-Z and Beyoncé and Hova actually dropped a diss lyric against Belafonte?

As I did read through the call-and-response dialogue from Elle, one male college students notes that the visual album made his girlfriend cry and that was the first time he had seen her cry.  And I get that.  I’m not interested in disconnecting or demystifying the possibility of emotional or intellectual liberation that may come as a result of performing a type of lectio divina around this last project, but ultimately I believe that it’s more about the individual illuminating their own liberation.  But perhaps the woven text(ure) of Beyoncé is just the blank canvass in which liberation is possible.

If nothing else, Beyoncé lets us know that there can me more than meets the eye when a bottle of hot sauce can really be Hot Sauce. Swag.

The post Made in Our Own Image: The Gospel According to Beyoncé appeared first on Madness & Reality.

I’m not even sure if the phrase “the black blogosphere” is appropriate anymore to denote that which is the conglomerate of black social media commentary, Black Twitter, news websites dedicated to African American culture (think HuffPo Black and NBCBlk as well as The Root or The Grio) as well as independent websites (think For Harriet and Very Smart Brothers).  For the sake of this conversation, I’d like to call this black syndicate media.   This is to differentiate it from American mainstream media (cable news outlets, as well as the big three networks of CBS, ABC and NBC).  In much the same way that American mainstream media generally focuses on one particular angle to tell the same story without much variation, the black syndicate media often does the same.   While it may be counter to what American mainstream media in very apparent ways, the same group ethos emerges along with a dominant narrative and thereby a singular group conscience.  If you also read groupthink in the midst of that, you would be correct.  Such is the narrative around Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar.

I don’t want to take up time, space and words rehashing the litany of back and forth critique and responses on the two, but it is worth revisiting the dots I’ve connected from the moment that Beyonce released her single “Formation” until the subsequent days in which Kendrick Lamar performed the mashup of “The Blacker the Berry” and “Alright” from his album To Pimp a Butterfly.  The beginning dot for me was a 3 hour conversation with one of my best friends two days after “Formation” dropped and already after the Super Bowl halftime show.

While Black Twitter was beside itself, I dropped my obligatory tweets but was trying to focus on reflection rather than reaction when it came to my thoughts on “Formation.”  My friend called just in general and he and I eventually discussed–at length–the music video.  He had connected many pieces of southern culture that he recognized that I just didn’t see.  Partly because of my own biases about the South (that’s for another blog), the fact that I’m from Chicago and also that I personally, don’t consider New Orleans to be the South culturally–an argument he didn’t buy based on his visits, despite the fact that I’ve lived there for a combined six-and-a-half years and have very close family that live all throughout south central and south eastern Louisiana.   It was the first moment in which I offered up criticism of “Formation.”

By the next day, as the euphoria of the video had dampened, there were legitimate and weighty think-pieces coming from New Orleans natives flat out accusing Beyonce of cultural appropriation not just of New Orleans, but specifically of the tragedy that was Hurricane Katrina.  It was at that moment I realized that some of those images were triggers for me inasmuch as it did force me to mildly relive the awesome tragedy that had befell the city.  If my Facebook timeline of New Orleans natives reposting those contrary think-pieces were any indication of the whole, it was clear not every black person was 100% ecstatic about “Formation.”

While I was fine with the bits of what could be misconstrued as cultural appropriation, I was having legitimate problems with the uninterpreted images she displayed.  While the American Negro gothic on the front porch to the antebellum costumes inside the house were presumable nods to Southern culture,  the B-roll images of New Orleans, an empty swimming pool and a parking lot didn’t exactly scream southern anything to me.  Much less revolutionary.

Beyonce was catapulted into black revolutionary status (and I’m still trying to figure out what qualifies one as such) following her Super Bowl performance specifically.  The back-up dancers came out in what was to be perceived as Black Panther-esque fashion, and this was supported by the fact the dancers took a post-performance picture that made it to the internet that was clearly meant to invoke the Black Panther Party and the likes of Rudy Giuliani saw it as a nod to the Black Panthers and therefore Beyonce was suddenly anti-police.  Notwithstanding the gaze of white onlookers into a culture they know nothing about nor desire to, Beyonce had single-handedly captured the imagination of black feminism, black womanism, black youth, black radicals and millions others under the umbrella of commercial pop culture.

Many of those in black syndicate media dubbed this the “Blackest Black History Month Ever” because of Kendrick Lamar’s performance as the Grammys just this past Monday night.  Suddenly, the immediate comparison of Beyonce and Kendrick’s performances erupted in a fight as to who was more radical than the other.

It was at that moment I wanted to tear my hair out.

This is a silly fight.

I had currently been reading The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race by Willie Jennings and he was making the larger case for the systematic ways in which Europeans created the scale of whiteness by which everything was to be measured.  In the first chapter he historically showed the ways in which indigenous people native to places that were not Europe used the land–the actual physical and geographical land–as the basis for which everything was measured and how essentially Europeans, by taking the land, replaced whiteness with the land.  Ultimately, that also means the basis for identity is shifted.  In much the same way much of African American culture is familiar with the so-called white standard of beauty, that base of whiteness is the rubric by which everything else is measured.   The opening quote at the top of this piece echoes clearly when I watch the ways in which black folks twist and turn in order to shape their own identity as a way to attempt to respond to oppression that is white supremacy.  Jennings also says:

The issue of identity now invokes a universe of modern conceptualities, some of which are respected in academic circles as new healthy convergences of multiple scholarly fields and interests, others of which are denounced as faddism, this is, creating undisciplined anachronisms running roughshod over historical periods and peoples.

I wonder at what point have we, those that participate in the black syndicate media, done nothing more than recreate the system of rhetorical oppression in the ways that we divorce ourselves from discourse on the sake of performing identity politics?

Beyonce and Kendrick don’t need to be compared to one another.  And certainly not on the basis of one being more revolutionary than the other.  For starters, Kendrick is a rapper and the nature of that genre has historically lent itself to being radical and revolutionary in ways that pop-music has not.  Rap has a very long history of being counter culture and pop music is just that: popular music reflecting  the complacency of culture not the dissatisfaction with culture.  Secondly, the body of Kendrick’s music is much more full of cultural criticism and the typical misogyny both of which are a part of the rap genre.  With songs like “Swimming Pools” and “Dying of Thirst” you get both heavy cultural criticism, themes of nihilism as well as the notion of redemption and some theology in the midst (middle of the album, a neighbor has Kendrick and his friends recite a prayer for Christian salvation) not to mention his “Backseat Freestyle” in which he does both cultural criticism and simultaneously makes a nod to his “wifey, girlfriend and mistress.”  Meanwhile Beyonce’s body of work as far as popular songs includes “Bills, Bills, Bills,” “Soldier” and “Cater to You.”

In all fairness, Beyonce has contributed to pop culture in ways that Kendrick has not, and by her being a black woman is revolutionary and radical in its own right.  With catchy pop songs such as “Run the World,” “Love on Top” or “Single Ladies” just to name a few, it is indicative that her star so greatly outshines Kendrick and is more than enough for me to say that it’s not fully fair to compare the two.  Both occupy their own lanes and in their own rights, both are wildly successful.  Personally, I do think that, much like the Washington Post’s Jeff Guo who wrote “Beyoncé waited until black politics was so undeniably commercial that she could make a market out of it,” is correct, but does this create a closed canon on black political and cultural possibilities of an individual or celebrity?  Maybe.  Is Beyonce’s “Formation” a form of black cultural appropriation for the sake of capitalist gain?  Perhaps.

What bothers me the most in the midst of this is the ways in which many of us are doing identity politics.  This way says that because she is Bee-yawn-say then she is above and beyond criticism–and that’s not how this works!  For every criticism that “Formation” was mediocre at best or of lyrics that repeat the words “slay” and “okay” multiple times, there was the counter criticism that Kendrick engages in misogynistic lyrics.  One of the most recent Salon articles, from black syndicate media, pointed this out concerning Kendrick and also brought Kanye’s “Gold Digger” into the foray to discuss the ways that Kendrick is somehow getting a pass for his lyrics while Beyonce is being overly criticized.  In all fairness, if the entire corpus of one’s work is on the table, then so is Beyonce’s work even when she was with Destiny’s Child.  The ways in which she fully engaged in patriarchy were on full display when asking for a man to pay her “Bills,” refashioning the troubling image of black masculinity in “Soldier” and flat out capitulating to men in “Cater to You.”  It’s this type of one-sided discourse that is troubling to me, and I go back and see the words of Willie Jennings reminding me that this is bigger than us.

Much like the American mainstream media, the black syndicate media has a short memory.  We collapse narratives often.  Beyonce and “Formation” exist in a vacuum as if there was not a Beyonce before, and the only way we interpret the present moment is through or current fascination.  Same with Kendrick.  But again, since black syndicate media is a carbon copy of the larger mainstream media, we will move from this moment in the next two weeks or less.  Think-pieces have their place for immediate reaction, but the ways in which we sit and reflect about these things have gone the way of the dodo bird.

Kendrick Lamar did for me in my black maleness what Beyonce seemed to do for many black women.  However, I never saw Kendrick as a savior, I never needed him to be the way others may have (or still) need that image of a powerful black woman who slays her opponents.  But what I did need from Kendrick, I got.  I got someone who proudly spoke of his male body from a place of self-love and self-worth, and not from a place of dominance in which his body was a tool in which to violently oppress other black women.  One of the most powerful lines in hip hop music for me right now is from “The Blacker the Berry” which says “my hair is nappy, his dick is big, his nose is round and wide.”

When have black men had the permission to say that aloud and in public?

In much the same way that black women have found a new liberating voice at this dawn of the 21st century, there are many black men in this country who are are also in-process, if you will, as to figuring out what that looks like for them as well.  Fact of the matter is that the goal posts of blackness seem to change from day to day depending on which think-piece you read or which person on Twitter you follow.  The by-product of moving the goalposts is that those who are doing the moving are exerting their power over others, requiring the rest to go through extreme lengths to make the “goal.”  It also creates a type of identity orthodoxy where in the matter of weeks or months one is forced to rethink and reframe their own identity narrative because the moving of the goalposts require this to be linear work rather than something that is messy and more often than not complicated.  Black Lives Matter and Baltimore mayoral candidate Deray Mckesson was known for his phrase “I love your blackness–and mine,” perhaps as an attempt to acknowledge the ways in which blacknessdoesn’t have to look the same for each person.  As a bit of a rebuttal, I’d proffer that my blackness is complicated, and so is yours.  Sometimes one’s perceived blackness doesn’t operate in a linear way; some times all of the dots actually don’t connect.

Recognizing how heavily I’ve been influenced to move beyond ontological blackness, this particular spat fueled by the black syndicate media is a case-in-point of the problems that exist in the ways that we do blackness.  The way it’s portrayed in the opinion minefield that is Twitter and Facebook, to identify with Beyonce means you are a mindless bot that ignores the ways capitalism feed her pop-culture status, and to identify with Kendrick means you probably harbor Hotepian ideology and have a secret man-crush on Umar Johnson.  Both of which are gross generalizations that ignore the nuances and contextual complexities in which most of us live by.  When we do this in the black syndicate media spaces, it employs the same logic that white conservatives use requiring Muslims to denounce ISIS at every chance they get or the way that blacks in public spaces (from professors on a panel discussion, to black political commentators on the evening cable news channels) are required to denounce anyone from Jeremiah Wright to Louis Farrakhan.

The ways in which we do identity politics, in which we do blackness is most often a response, a reaction even, to the furtive ways in which white supremacy have invaded our everyday lives.  Even to the reality that our use of English as a language of communication is imbued with the sin of white supremacist conceptualization; we use the oppressors language to describe our own oppression.

I write this two weeks after “Formation” debuted and a week after the Grammys where Kendrick performed, and neither of these two are in the headlines even remotely.   I write this still because I believe in reflection, an exercise that I wish more practiced. But much like the dodo bird, resurrection has not come for it and I wonder is that the ultimate fate of intentional reflection.  What does it mean for the spirit and the psyche when every utterance is reactionary?

I feel the need to be bold enough to say that the ways in which we interpret the information disseminated by black syndicate media need to be questioned more heartily.  My ultimate reflection throughout all of this is that the ways in which we do blackness, the essentialized and narrowing qualities thereof, is quickly getting in the way of us being black.   True to my own claim, there may be a beginning dot for this line of reason, but my complicated and complex logic is far from a straight line, it meanders all over the place and I’m unsure of exactly where it ends.  For one to discount my meandering logic and emotions around this because it’s not linear would be to not allow room for complexities and complications in the midst of being human; can people not evolve?

I long for the day in which we will not be judged by the content of our Twitter retweets and Facebook likes, but rather by the quality of our critical thinking.   Alas, that day may be farther off than we’d like it to be.

The post Beyonce, Kendrick and Me appeared first on Madness & Reality.

The year 2012 was significant for black male masculinity on several fronts, far too many to discuss here, many of which were around how black men were entering public conversations about black women and black male privilege in social media spheres, to the way that black urban fashion had shed much of its nascent hip hop bagginess trading it in for fitted and skinny jeans, Obama was running for re-election, same-sex marriage in black religious circles was a hot-button topic as the president came out in favor of it, more and more young people were freer to talk about sex and sexuality and at the same time the demographic remained woefully ignorant as new concepts, phrases and theories around this topic were conceived almost every other week.   For the sake of this piece, first (1) I’d like to specifically highlight the fashion aspect because it’s so readily outward; it functions as a extension of one’s self be it conscious or even more intriguing when it’s subconscious, in the personhood of Russell Westbrook.  (2) Odell Beckham challenges our notions on how black men are allowed to enter not just conversations about sexuality but what is displayed in black male-to-male physical contact.  (3) Cameron Newton, ultimately, I think is the most complex because he embodies both the unique respectability performances of Westbrook and Beckham, but after his post-game presser ultimately does what many black men are simply afraid to do in public–even our beloved Obama: to be angry.

It has been fascinating to see how these young black men have performed in the spotlight over the past eight years.  Westbrook was drafted in 2008 and landed at the new Oklahoma City Thunder expansion team and as the Thunder established themselves as championship worthy, we suddenly began to have conversations that had absolutely nothing to do with the metrics of sports, but actually fashion.  In 2012, Westbrook famously came out in red glasses, and wore form-fitting clothes that depending on the eye were extremely fashion forward or just simply tacky.  For me, that was the hallmark of a new era of black men in sports.  Famously, the then current NBA commissioner, David Stern, had implemented the dress rules about what athletes could and could not wear as they arrived for games.  The authoritarian flexing of autocratic power reminisced of the perennial slave-master relationship that has often been used to describe the relationship to players and their, well, owners.

Russell Westbrook

The reason I chose Westbrook as opposed to some of the other NBA players who have an avowed predilection for fashion is because Westbrook is among the more famous ones and that pedestal on which he sits makes him a different kind of target and ultimately he’s required to wear it different.  Below are a mere sampling of clothes that Westbrook has worn:

When I wrote about this phenomenon in 2012 it was still relatively new and I was merely joining the chorus of those who had much of the same observations I had.  Nearly four years later, where’s the commentary on this very same topic?  It’s mostly silent.  Why?  Because it’s been normalized.  And not just normalized, but actually celebrated.  From Westbrook’s first appearances in loud and garish fashion up until now, this country has seen same sex marriage as the law of the land, we’ve been introduced to transgender(ed) persons and we are outright challenging the norms on gendered clothing.  It’s one thing when Jaden Smith, the 17 year old son of famous actors Jada and Will Smith, is seen wearing what archetypically would be seen as women’s clothing, but it’s another thing for a grown man like Westbrook to even challenge sexuality norms by wearing form fitting clothes.

For me, Westbrook redefines black male masculinity by being comfortable in his own body and exercising personal agency in the physical extensions thereof–the clothes he chooses to wear.  What’s key in all of this is his own ability to define for himself what’s comfortable for him.  Its the metaphorical equivalent of talking softly yet carrying a big stick.  For him, his fashion is his big stick.  He doesn’t need to announce that he’s swagged out because everyone sees it and knows it.  By him exercising his personal agency it offends the sensibilities of many–black and white–who have sought to keep him in a certain category and in turn, the redefinition occurs.  Westbrook’s star power as an athlete now serves as a archetype of many black youth who no longer have the image of a Michael Jordan or Scottie Pippen wearing oversized suits with shoulder pads so sharp you could split a hair on the corner of it, but rather that of black man who isn’t afraid to show off his physique–in form fitting pants, shirt and blazer–for whomever may look.

One’s masculinity in the hip hop era from the late 1980s through the early 2000s was often dependent on just how oversized one’s jeans were and how oversized one’s shirt was.  The number of XXXL shirts that were sold during that era has yet to be calculated.  The insular norms of the established African American culture associated this fashion with inner-city gang culture and the violence often times accompanied hip hop culture.  This is to say that to dress like that was to be a “thug” and many of the same racial profiling charges that blacks accuse whites en masse for were also committed by other blacks as well.  It manifested itself in respectability politics that said “pull your pants up” and “why are the clothes so baggy.”  The irony is that now, many of the same folks who passed judgement on baggy clothes will see those in fitted jeans now, and through a lens of judgment they will tsk-tsk amongst themselves and ask are they gay.

Odell Beckham, Jr.

Odell Beckham, the wide receiver for the New York Jets ups the ante for challenging what it means to be black and male in this country.  More than enough think-pieces have been written about this as the conversation reached a fevered pitch in the middle of the 2015 season.  However, I think few, at least the ones that were circulated widely, went far enough as to suggest that Beckham’s image had the leveraging power to redefine something as major and complex as black masculinities.  Beckham, as a case study, is more about how African American culture has chosen to see Beckham, not so much the larger American culture.

His biggest “offense” was that he was found guilty of engaging what’s colloquially known as suspect behavior.  There have been a long list of euphemisms to describe anything that didn’t fit into a particular sexuality norm of a given community.  The gossip website Bossip posted a mashup of Odell Beckham in social media pictures full of these alleged suspect moments with him dancing with various teammates and old friends, multiple instances of pictures as benign as selfies with another man, all the way to seeing him shaking his head at something (none of us know but the perception is that he was looking down at a teammates butt and shaking his head and moving along), this was all suddenly worthy of a wide swath of social media (namely Black Twitter) calling him gay.  The internet was ablaze.  The conflagration, however, went more in his defense than not.  The only ones who were hell bent on calling Beckham gay were mostly those who were of the “hotep Negro” persuasion and who frequently attend Umar Johnson lectures and seminars.  The conversation around Beckham was further flamed when actual charges of anti-gay slurs by the Carolina Panthers players surfaced.  Even though no one officially came forward, not even Beckham himself, to address the anti-gay slurs, the mere rumor of them and subsequent news stories by reputable outlets about the possibility of slurs was yet more fuel to the fire around Beckham’s sexuality.Almost all of the conversations around Beckham have been written and voiced by black folk.

And what I never saw dealt with in the numerous think-pieces and blogs is the fact that we, as black men, don’t know how to publicly embrace male-to-male physical touch.  I really think it’s that simple.  Outside of familial relationships (fathers, sons, brothers and uncles), to see another black man interact physically with another is gay.  To use Riley Freeman’s character from “The Boondocks” contextual application of gay, this word in this context contains all of the homophobia and slur-like qualities of prejudice and bigotry as well as the sheer ignorance of someone who simply doesn’t have the vocabulary to express feelings of discomfort and novelty at something that is unfamiliar.  I’m not sure what’s more depressing: the fact that black male interaction–dare I say intimacy–is so rare that it’s a novelty or the fact that my people don’t have the vocabulary to express their emotions making it easier make someone the Other.  In reductionist terms, to use the word gay in this context make one worthy only of a fictional cartoon character who’s seven years old.  Somehow the stigma of being physical with another male outside of a contact sport like football or one that has a lot of physical contact like basketball is simply seen as gay.  That’s it.  Nothing more in-depth to it than that.  As if the capacity to explore deeper is wholly non-existent.  It is inextricably linked to the fact that black men don’t talk about feelings, that black men historically have not been affectionate towards their own sons, and that ultimately black men need to make their boys “man up” and “be a man” even when they’re barely potty trained.

Thankfully, that old model of parenting is dying with the last generation that passed it down. This dogged death-grip some within the black community have on pushing a traditional black masculinity is smothering us.  Beckham seemingly doesn’t give a damn.   I wonder in part what does his growing up in New Orleans have to do with that.  The gender binary has been challenged in the streets of New Orleans for at least a generation dating back to the time of Beckham’s birth.  While bounce artist Big Freedia has some household recognition, she is merely one of many in New Orleans who are extremely well known in the southeastern Louisiana region.  Although Beckham went to a parochial school in the city, undoubtedly he was influenced by New Orleans culture and going to school 45 minutes away at LSU he was still under the sway in which black men in New Orleans interact with each other.   Without going on too much of a tangent, New Orleans was the first place I ever saw heterosexual black men dance with the use of their butts and it was considered social acceptable.  This was directly due to bounce music and its influence in local culture.  It also brought gay and straight folks together in social settings and clubs where it would be almost unthinkable in other black urban locales.  Rather than just give kudos to Beckham and his own liberation (which we should), the redefinition doesn’t just hang on his personal agency, but it rests rather in the performance of it and how the public perceives it.  It’s almost as if he dons white boy drag and New Orleans bounce.  To be fair, I’m assigning these qualities to Beckham and these are mere speculations from an outside observer, but it’s almost as if he picks and chooses some of the qualities of white maleness that are attractive and he put them on, grabs a set of crayons, adds dat BEAT, colorizes it in a unique New Orleans and African American cultural aesthetic and makes it uniquely his.  Blogger Rafi D’Angelo wrote that

White men are allowed a greater range of expression before they are automatically considered gay. The boys in Marvel movies are always flirting and nobody cares. Matt McGorry can say his male co-star has a pretty mouth and nobody cares. Channing Tatum “vogued” and nobody cares.

Hopefully, the use of the word drag does a bit more than just conjure up images of men in women’s drag at disco clubs in the 1970s, but also recollect the ways in which we dress up the parts we choose to wear in our lives.  So while drag is usually reserved for clothing and how said clothing articulates one’s life, we can see drag in how we perceive one’s masculinity performance and how they choose to act in public.  With Beckham still outwardly displaying tenets of African American culture–being ontologically black–does this mashup of African American cultural nods (the way he dances, the dances themselves, how he wear his hair) with this possible New Orleans bounce aesthetic and white boy drag, he inhabits, to put it differently, in a queer space.  And that’s okay.  Being in that queer space doesn’t make Beckham gay or same-gender loving, but it does put him in a rarified space that not many people accept.  However, the very next question should already be forming: to what extent has Beckham normalized this queer space, thereby not making it queer but rather mainstream?  I still think the jury is out on that one, but I do think that, like Westbrook, having such fame does give one the image-power to force a significant type of redefining of black masculine space.

Cameron Newton

When it comes to the black male masculine aesthetic, Cameron Newton, quarterback for the Carolina Panthers, breaks the rules when it comes to respectability politics.  Primarily, he’s just too big.  He’s too bigand black.  In much the same way that Tamir Rice and Michael Brown suddenly had these superhuman and overly grown and larger-than-life physical characteristics, Newton’s physical existence has the power to offend and challenge sensibilities.  Seeing America’s professional sports athletes, such as a Newton who stands 6’6″ and 245lbs, wearing fitted designer pants and suede slippers does not jive with our accepted image.

As Newton and subsequently the Carolina Panthers steamrolled their way through the regular season and playoffs.  His on-the-field celebrations drew the ire of the losing teams’ fanbases and those who stand outside of African American and hip hop culture had their senses assaulted as they watched Newton “dab” his way to the Super Bowl.  It climaxed when a soccer-mom decided to say Newton was an unfit role model for the youth of America.  It immediately following that letter-to-the-editor that the dab, this singular dance move, was politicized.  What gravity does one hold where a dance move becomes a form of social resistance against respectability politics?  It was yet another reminder that much of the black physical body is political: our hair has the ability to make political statements before we open our mouths, and our skin color has the power to make us instant criminals in the sight of many.  All of the mainstream media conversation about Newton in the games leading up to the Super Bowl and certainly the Monday-morning-after conversations surrounding him told me everything I needed to know: this was never about football nor his athletic abilities.

I had been wrestling with this particular triumvirate of black male professional athletes, all who are younger than me–the age gap between Beckham and myself is enough for him to have been a student of mine in the college adjunct classes I’ve taught–and just how they have chosen to be black men, define masculinity and manhood in such a public arena.  I’ve wrestled with this because while only four years separate Westbrook and myself, at times the ways in which they perform African American culture in what author M.K. Asante, Jr. says is post-hip hop, the separation gap seems to be by an entirely different generation even unfamiliar to me at times. I struggled because it seemed that this three in particular had affected how I saw black men acting different, dressing different and knowing that for hundreds of thousands of young black boys in America, those three are held in high esteem the way Dr. J and Kareem Abdul-Jabar functioned for my older cousins.  All up until yesterday, I was frustrated at these thoughts rolling around in my head.  I wasn’t sure how I felt and interrogating my mind and feelings weren’t leaving me with much to work with. It wasn’t until I saw the video of  Newton getting up from the post-game press conference, sullen, and well angry that it clicked for me: whether intentional or not, Newton told us it’s okay to be angry despite the gaze of others.  And that that was something worth talking about.

Respectability politics functions so that others are pleased.  (Others in this context is not to be confused with The Other.)  The reason I say othersplural is because in just the same way that Rob Lowe could tweet that Newton isn’t being a role model or Bill Romanowski referring intentionally to Newton being a “boy” in a tweet that went ’round the world, there are just as many black folk saying that his behavior in the post-game moments were unacceptable.  Referring to him as a “sore loser” or being “unsportsmanlike” are fine in situations where everything else is equal, but in a league where one’s fashion sense gets questioned in the same press conference as questions about throwing interceptions and opening up a passing lane tells us that all things aren’t equal.  Those are all respectability norms.  Some of which we almost universally are okay with, and other times we aren’t; some times it works for our advantage, some times it doesn’t.  Whether it be because another Broncos player was talking loudly in the chaotic space that was the post-game presser or because Newton’s emotions got the better of him, he chose to wear his emotions on his arm even though respectability dictates otherwise.  Just ask Obama.  Even when someone to his face called him a liar, Obama still kept his cool.  Newton on the other hand visibly was rattled.  Frustrated, I’m sure.  Angry, no doubt.  And that’s fine.  Those are all human emotions.  I don’t think the NFL requires its players to sign a contract that asks them to be perfect and lay aside every human emotion they have.

Many forget the cloud of foolishness under which Newton entered the NFL.  One of the positives of Newton was the fact that he had this clean image sans tattoos and piercings.  The owner, Jerry Richardson, was so caught up in appearance that even when Newton alluded to growing out his hair, his owner emphasized how nice his hair looked short.  Only Newton and Richardson know just how much his starting QB position straight from the draft was dependent not on his athletic ability but whether he looked the part.  Resisting fashion norms, it seems, has the power to reify normative aesthetics and sensibilities to the point of redefinition.  Owning clothes was about the only piece of property enslaved Africans on North American shores had any agency over and all of the post-slavery history has shown that black Americans have consistently had their own unique style of clothing that consistently challenges Eurocentric standards of beauty for both women and men.

As final thoughts go, I’m not even sure if we, as black men, are the point of transcending our ontological settings as black men.  Too often many of us grew up wehre manhood was something you became by being masculine and doing socially ascribed masculine things such as going to work all day and “bringing home the bacon.”  It also allowed one to be violent if necessary, by “doing what had to be done.”  It also meant never showing emotion thereby reducing love to things you could to for others through caretaking and provision and not through emotional support.  It even meant not acknowledging physical or mental weakness foregoing mental health.  For many of us black masculinity was all about being a man while focusing on things to do rather than persons to be.  Far too few of us saw mutual black male-to-male love in the form of friendships and familial bonds and the display of black male self-love usually looked to much like arrogance, pride and domination.  What many of us did see was a lot of white male patriarchy historically mimicked in past generations displayed as dominance over another male and certainly dominance over black women–both of which had largely terroristic and violent capabilities.

What I see in the trinity of these three black men, Westbrook, Beckham and Newton, is an image of black men who love themselves and (presumably) love the partners that are in their respective lives.  The redefinition of black masculinity is best displayed in an ethic of self-love and self-care.  Irrespective of the labels of “white boy drag” and “queer” and “performance” and “aesthetic,” seeing black men produly love themselves is a redefinition because I’d contend, historically, as a whole, we never loved ourselves.  We were never taught to love our bodies, our voice and our righteous minds.  Instead we learned how to be celebrated.  By adolescence, it was no longer cool to even tell you mom “I love you” if you were in front of your other 11 and 12 year old friends.  Do you know what that does to a black male psyche in these yet-to-be United States?

This trifecta of black men, whether subconsciously or intentionally have made a permanent step forward toward that point of transcendent racial and social norms.  Black men have to begin to embrace this change.  When we hold onto these anachronistic notions of manhood, what are we really holding on to?  The times, they are a’ changin’ and the more stubborn we choose to be the more and more ill-prepared we are making our sons.  There’s a whole new generation of black women who aren’t putting up with this shit anymore, so who will our sons marry then?  Much of what justifies some of these old ways of doing things are rooted in a plantation culture that was birthed before the Great Migration, so why do we think it should work in a world where Twitter, Facebook and a myriad of dating apps are at the fingertips of the 12 year olds we give smart phones?  No, I’m not expecting a major call to arms or a revolution, but I am expecting us to do better one person at a time.  We have to get to a point where we get past America; always finding the next post- movement.  Staying static is lethal.  Going backwards is suicide.  The American brand of oppression has addled our minds.  We don’t think straight and every approach requires shape-shifting to even attempt an answer who’s reach is perpetually to short, filling a glass that can never be filled and casting out one rope trying to save the masses.  Transcending American won’t happen overnight, and it would be useless to require an immediate change because that would result in more frustration.  While one dab of paint in another does not automatically make a new color, the composite characteristics, nonetheless, have been irreversibly changed.  We’re not there yet, but with each step there is a new quality that is added and a new hue is rendered–one dab at a time.

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Eddie Glaude, Jr. is an associate professor of religion and African American Studies at Princeton University and his previous two books very much followed the academic path of converting a dissertation into a book and a second book on his current research topic.  This third book, however, is a book that is meant for the public beyond the nominal sense of which the other books are publicly available.  One of my close friends had mentioned that Glaude was coming out with a book last December and I told him, “It’s already on Amazon pre-order.”  To date, Democracy in Black is the only book that I’ve ever pre-ordered, and I’m glad I did.  I didn’t know quite where he was falling with the book–academic or not–and it was clear by the first pages, sans footnotes, that this was a book intended for the masses.

The book began and ended with the events in Ferguson with the backdrop of the Age of Obama.  The temporal intersection of these events has been one of those topics that not many people have written about yet.  2016 promises to be a year in which publications by black authors will undoubtedly tackle the topic.  Glaude, in 2016, provides a particular perspective on the Age of Obama that previous years and previous authors could not: there is no need to hope for what Obama can be.  While some may color it as cynical, I chose to read his analysis of the Obama years as one of stark reality, one through the lens of recognizing what he has termed the value gap.

Admittedly, once I read Glaude ticking off the statistics of just how bad it is to be black in America I rolled my eyes.  I remember saying to myself, “I already know this stuff.”  I also found myself wondering was this approach for me or for my white brothers and sisters who may pick up this book.  This led me to more internal questions: do the white people who read this book already know this stuff–hence them picking up the book? or are random ignorant white people going to pick up this book and be transformed because they understand the concept of the value gap?  Nevertheless, I kept reading.

Glaude does what many black folk do at dining tables every weeknight, through text messages to other black friends and co-workers after a microaggression at work, over Christmas dinners and certainly at beauty-shops and barbershops across the nation: attempt to properly diagnose what the hell is wrong with this country.  I would surmise, part of this is from the idea that we can’t fix the problem (more like problems) without properly addressing the root concern.  My bookshelf is filled with books from the last seven years from seminary and forward that have attempted to do that.  The bookshelves of my parents house that have Haki Madhubuti, Frances Cress Welsing, Lerone Bennett, Toni Morrison, Cornel West and Lerone Bennett are similarly filled with people who have conceptualized the same issue surrounding how white supremacy was part of the founding of American democracy and the ways that the outgrowth of race and racism have so unequally disaffected black America.

Mid-way the book, Glaude switched to doing what I considered to be great cultural criticism.  The front half of the book was established along the lines of social science analysis, heavy in statistics and replete with stories that gave a human aspect to the numbers while the back half seemed to be more reflective of his lived experience.  And anyone who is familiar enough with my writing knows why I found the second half much more engaging.  Among that which I enjoyed the most was his treatise on HBCUs in the context of black institutions as free spaces.

Without these organizations and the forms of black politics they facilitate by providing what social scientists call “free spaces”– spaces where folks learn self-respect, public skills, and the value of civic engagement–we lose one of the crucial ways to close the value gap.  These institutions enable a political vision of American democracy without white supremacy.

Glaude also held the president of the United Negro College Fund’s (UNCF) feet to the fire, Michael Lomax, for his accepting of money from the Koch brothers.  One of the quips was acknowledging the rock and hard place that the venerable institution find themselves stuck in-between by not accepting the money.  Echoing the famous UNCF quote “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” he retorted that “And a soul is a terrible thing to sell,” upon accepting $25 million from the Koch brothers.  This ability to play the rhetorical dozens–or in more contemporary terms to shade people–in book form provided some anecdotal wisdom that is part of African American life and culture here in this country.

With a book published in the final full year of the Obama presidency, it disavows the reader from any notion that Obama will do anything different in the ultimate year of his lame duck-ness and Glaude is keenly aware of this.  The cultural critique he asserts about the Age of Obama is one of the best I’ve read so far.  And to that point, I appreciate the redemption of Cornel West in the midst of this.  Again, Glaude plays social scientist and political scientist and connects dots on the black politics in the 20th century in ways we don’t see in the mainstream media and perhaps in ways which modern black politicians aren’t even aware of themselves.  As he closes out the book, he offers three ways in which we can have a revolution of value.  The serendipity of highlighting the esteemed Rev. William Barber, II as an embodiment of a revolution of value was not missed as Barber’s book calling for a “third reconstruction” was released the same day as Glaude’s.  Finally, Glaude actually offers a real, tangible and actionable response to all of this:

We need to do something that bold.  Something that will upset the entire game.  In 2016, we should call for an “electoral blank-out.”  We vote in the national election for the presidency of the United States, but we leave the ballot blank or write in “none of the above.”  This isn’t your standard call for a third-party candidate or an independent black political thrust.  Nor is it a rejection of our sacred duty to vote.  Exercising the franchise is sacred….  Elections are important, but they are hardly the work of democracy. For too long we’ve been sold a bill of goods that this person or that one will do what we need, if only we can get them elected.  This promise wants us to believe that voting is democracy.

The emboldened text is my emphasis and the italicized one is direct from the quote.

I can appreciate the imagination it took to cobble the disparate pieces of black America–the designation Glaude uses in the book–and bring them together in a sense that didn’t fall into the habit of making black life reductionist and singular.  I think there were moments in which he might have in one section and didn’t in another, but I would argue that that’s indicative of the way most black people live and operate their lives; some moments require them to be black for the whole and other moments they are merely one of many.

For much of the book, Glaude takes this diagnostic approach which I get, but I’m not sure if I agree that it’s the best way to address race in this country.  I get it because it’s familiar.  It’s what I grew up hearing from all of the great centers of African American culture that is the South Side of Chicago and beyond, but I got older and suddenly the disillusionment of life settled in and I’m not sure that’s the best approach.  For me, I could easily see white liberals grab onto the concept of “value gap” as the new catchphrase for understanding black malaise in much the same way whites seemingly co-opted Ta-Nehesi Coates’ notion of “the struggle.”  For many, it was just an intellectual play-thing, a transfixed curiosity, only to be discarded once the next black person offered a new idea.  Coates, for all of his righteous indignation, didn’t require white folk–or black folk for that matter–to do anything!  To use Victor Anderson’s notion, I do believe that there needs to be a transcendent move beyond ontological blackness, and for much of this book, it didn’t read as though Glaude necessarily believed in that notion.  However, after the mid-way point as he begins putting forth cultural critique, he writes

If we are going to change how we see black people, white people–and only white people can do this–will have to kill the idea of white people.  It is the precondition of America’s release into a different democratic future.  If we don’t do this, we condemn ourselves to whatever tragedy awaits at the end of our current path.

I couldn’t agree more.  Moving beyond ontological blackness almost certainly requires the dismantling and disavowal of ontological whiteness.

For the first time, I live tweeted this book.  Which I’m not sure is  sacrilegious to a text or not, but old methods and sensibilities be damned.  As a result, one of my friends who pastors a church in Kentucky asked would this be a good book his church could read.  And I answered yes.  This was a good book to read while snowed in over this extended weekend, and a relatively quick one.  Quick in the sense that the readability has a wider swath than some of the more academic books that have been published on similar topics.

The book closed on the events of Ferguson, fitting the protests and marches of Black Lives Matters not as the continuation of Selma–something that so many tried to do–but as the springboard to a new envisioning of democracy, “a democratic way of life without the burden of the value gap or the illusion that somehow this country is God’s gift to the world.”  This is a democracy in black.

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