On Saturday, my crew screened Wattstax, the definitive documentary of the legendary 1972 music festival in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. The festival commemorated 7 years of rebuilding from the Watts riots.
In the doc, Ted Lange, who played Isaac on the Love Boat is interviewed. He says that “up until the point that we had a riot, everybody said: ‘Those Suckas are alright.’” The consensus was that as bad as the riots were for the physical environment of Watts, they at least marked a real and sincere anger within the people that lived there. As one Chinese man said today in an interview about separatist violence in Western China, “where there is oppression, there will be resistance.”
The performances are brilliant. But that is not what made this movie so unforgettable. I think the hook is that more than any blacksploitation flick or any sit com, this document draws you in to the spirit of the times. The longer the doc goes on, the closer you feel to the people in it and the pain, and hope they are living; the easier it becomes to imagine yourself wearing a tassels, bells, a long afro, and maybe even a pink short suit, with knee-high, white, vinyl boots.
The rapport between the audience and the artist was so deep. The laughter, the knowing head knods, the call and response reminded one of a family gathering. This is especially true when Isaac Hayes takes the stage as the closing act. He leads the crowd through the chorus shouts of “Theme from Shaft.”
Everyone in the room where I was watching the film yelled out in accord. “Watch your mouth..” But we knew he was “just talkin’ bout Shaft.”
The next day, Isaac passed away. Oh dolce vita is short. RIP sir Isaac.
In this clip the Barkays epitomize the openness and progressiveness of the times. Their hair, their clothes, and their style of funk was on the cusp of dawning Aquarian age:
My one problem with this doc is that it is a textbook case of preaching to the choir. No poor person or POC will be surprised to learn that science has corroborated what we have seen played out over generations in our communities: Stress due to a lack of power and resources leads to physical illness. The real question is weather or not anyone really cares about the physical health of those who have less power than themselves.
Often in this doc, comparisons are made between the US and other rich or industrialized nations. Other nations with less stark income gaps or with more socialized public policy tend to have better health outcomes. Here is what the filmmakers are missing: the US is THE RICHEST NATION. Many people in the US believe that we got “here,” the top of the economic heap, through bloody competition and that to stay there will require even more callus attitudes about the quality and worth of human life. We need only look at the disparities that exist between those who have designed the Iraq War and those who die in it to see that better health outcomes for the powerless are considered a small price to pay for world dominance in the minds of some very powerful Americans.
This documentary draws attention to a fascinating area of public health research that charts the correlations among socio-economics, race and health. One study of thousands of British civil servants showed that the lower on the hierarchy a worker was positioned, the worse their health was. Another study showed that the amount of time your parents owned their own home during your childhood, the better your immune system will be at fighting off a cold. The explanation for this consistent link between wealth, race, and health is stress. Stress increases the level of a Cortisol in your blood stream, a hormone that increases memory, blood pressure, and generally gives you a performance boost in tight situations. But, in high and prolonged doses, Cortisol contaminates your system and essentially ages you more quickly.
I would love to see a study of how poor people explode this linkage with traditional and subversive cultural strategies. Isn’t music basically a Cortisol reducing strategy at its core. Dancing has to be a way of reducing Cortisol. Laughing is definately all about bringing down the blood pressure. I want to see the stats for how many conga drummers defy the averages for heart attack among their socio-economic peers. I wonder how many street artists are exceptions to the rule.
In his latest book, The World is Flat, Tom Friedman like so many of his neo-liberal intellectual cohorts, looks out into the future and sees a world of endless economic and technological connectivity and little more. The paradigm from which arises our most pressing global challenges is the same one from which he conjures solutions. His lack of dimensional perspective should reminds us that even the notable liberal thinkers of our day are dangerously enmeshed in the tangled web of limiting beliefs that manifest as human suffering.
Friedman’s flat world is a playing field for international corporations and corporate nations. His zero sum game has quality of life and freedom as its prize. Friedman dreams of a day when all countries, including those in the Middle East, will be able to enjoy the benefits of an open society. He believes that open societies, the fertile ground of innovation, are best created by raw competition.
The new Iraq would, if it were to ever come into being, be one of these types of countries created in the US image. Ingenuity would be the grease of the industrial wheels turning a wasteland of religious fanaticism into a paradise of private schools and shopping malls. At the same time, back home in the US, we should be creating public policy to make green energy solutions competitive with conventional ones in order to flatten our emissions and spare the world for a few more centuries.
My skepticism of Friedman is not a rejection of theoretically greater freedoms in Iraq nor is it a radical disapproval of government intervention in the global cooling effort. I do however see a grand contradiction in the idea that the American Society can kill enough people efficiently enough to persuade others to be democratic. Then, after such persuasion is achieved expect that a world full of American style consumers could somehow, in between competing on the world economic stage, come together to solve global problems like green house emissions. Friedman’s brand of now classical liberalism reaffirms the national and corporate models of power aggregation and centralization. In Friedman’s world, products can save us from immanent destruction.
Innovation powered by competition is a perpetual motion hamster wheel of death by another name. Its time to evolve human consciousness. This is something that the “smart” people of our world may unfortunately “know” too much to accept. A world of love and compassion may sound like something you do on a weekend retreat in the woods, but it seems like much more appropriate way of describing the mindset needed to achieve goals such as ending militarism, fanaticism, oppression, poverty, and environmental degradation.
Randall Kennedy is making the rounds on the book promoting media circuit on behalf of his new book Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal. I have not yet read the book but after hearing at least three interviews with Kennedy, I cannot contain my urge to weigh in on the issue of sellouts. Kennedy, in his interviews, makes some cogent arguments about the frivolity with which the label “sellout” has been bandied around within the black community. The problem I have with Kennedy’s approach is the obvious psychological component that he seems to be hiding behind a thin veil of objectivity. In interviews, Kennedy seems to lack a sensitivity to way he is perceived that seems vital for a theorist of race and identity. He obviously harbors wounds from his past created by those that perhaps mocked his academic success (his resume is incredible) or those who question positions that he takes on matters of race and law. He is unable to successfully convey any deep sense of empathy for those who may feel compelled to label someone like Clarence Thomas a Sellout. This is rigidness undermines the thoughtfulness of his arguments and sets him outside of any intimate discussion within the black community. You get the sense that Kennedy has given up on engaging his own presumed black identity and is most comfortable challenging racial identity from an outsiders perspective.
Kennedy starts all of his Sellout interviews framing the issue with a history of prominent blacks who have been accused of selling out including Frederick Douglass, and W.E.B. Dubois. Kennedy seems to see himself as one among this lineage of exceptional achievers who are wrongly put upon. What he says is that there is a long history of a brooding suspicion of successful blacks, “a fear of abandonment in the black imagination.” But egregiously, Kennedy leaves out the history of Blacks having-like any marginalized group-to try and police the boundaries of loyalty and commitment to the group goals as a way of solidifying themselves as resistance movement. There were after all, black slave owners and black overseers. Because of fears for their lives and well being blacks had to choose carefully who to share secrets with in the time of enslavement and beyond, not only in the case of secretly planned rebellions, but presumably in day to day life. Kennedy discounts this tendency to police the boundaries of blackness as pure paranoia-at least in his interviews.
What is compelling about the argument against race boundary policing to me is the challenge to the notion of “acting white.” By acting white I am referring to the conventional application of the label of white to high-achieving Blacks. Where this challenge becomes tricky is when this label gets used in more subtle ways. For example, a black kid who plays a sport that is traditionally thought of as the domain of white people might be labeled as acting white - the operative word being “acting.” By playing golf, many young blacks may see Tiger Woods as a black person who is acculturated to white norms and tendencies. Despite being as Black as Black any other black person (i.e. having the slightest indication of African decent in his phenotype), this racial traitor is acting, playing at, or aspiring to whiteness. This type of charge may carry more logical water and points to the grain of truth that race policing conveys. Being black in America is not just about genetics, it is about the intersection of genetics with the rules of a color coded class structure. The structure itself denies that anyone of certain skin tone is fully human or capable regardless of aptitude. So, when black school children talk about acting black or white they are talking just as much about class as they are about race. Arguably this policing is the result of a keen sense of social politics. It is as if we black folks are simply reminding each other that even if you proudly proclaim your blackness, your class aspirations may betray you. If you desire to dress a certain way, shun black music and other outside markers of black life, choose white partners for relationships and marriage, or embrace other aspects of white culture that were traditionally reserved for whites, you may be secretly letting your jealousy of white class privilege overrule your loyalty to your black community. This view implies that being Black requires more than genes, it requires a level of solidarity and consciousness that must be actively cultivated.
The question is perhaps not even about loyalty as it is about the mental toughness required to sustain a love of self and community through the barrage of anti-black messages that every African American must endure in their lifetime. In this sense a racial traitor, is simply a weak mind that folded beneath the pressure of institutional racism’s interrogation of Black humanity.
Kennedy, a law professor, presents a legalistic argument against racial line drawing that ignores the subtle ways in which the subjects of his case studies of black dissidents have given Blacks a long list of reasons to be suspicious of their racial psychology. He frequently mentions Clarence Thomas and Tiger Woods in his interviews. Woods lost the faith of many when he shrugged off an obviously racist insult hurled at him by rival golfer, Fuzzy Zoeller at a news conference at the Augusta National, my home town’s world famous golf club that was virtually white only until the 1990’s:
Clarence Thomas, is considered a the archetypal race traitor by many not just because of his vocal opposition to affirmative action as Kennedy has argued, but because he is possibly the single most conservative Justice on the Supreme Court, rivaled only by the radical-by-any-standard- Antonin Scalia. Recently when the court ruled that judges should have flexibility in applying mandatory minimum sentence requirements that institutionalize an unfair disparity on racial and economic lines between abusers of powder cocaine and those who use crack, it was Thomas who authored the dissenting opinion shared with only one other justice. In the cases in which even conservative whites may be able to see an injustice that falls along racial lines, Clarence Thomas seems to veer toward an irrational anti-black position. It is not imaginary paranoia that leads one to question Thomas in cases such as these. I am willing to bet that even his conservative white colleagues are a bit baffled by the man.
Here is a review by Peniel Joseph, author of Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America from the Legal History Blog
My understanding-having not read the book-is that suburban sprawl causes the increased need for cars that leads to oil dependence and the lack of green space. It also requires the intense use of land that leads to
a waste of water, the need for industrial farming that leads to the intense use of pesticides and fertilizers. Sprawl supports big box stores like Walmart and fast food. The long commute of suburbanites exhausts their time leaving little time for family meals, discussion, and civic engagement and community mobilization.
The most stunning allegation leveled at sprawl is Sedentary Death Syndrome. The package of ailments related to suburban lifestyles including obesity related diseases.
Sprawl shills, real estate and land developers, big box stores, the car industry, land use lobbyist, have a powerful voice in land use and development making it difficult to change the course of our American habitation style. However, design trumps density. Good design can compell people to live in higher density alternatives to sprawl.
No. This is not about Keith Sweat’s classic baby making jam. This is about the mind blowing deep disco track by Inner Life featuring the indomitable Jocelyn Brown of the same name. I don’t know the date of the original release but it seems to have been put down in the very early eighties. I heard it on a college radio show last night and immediately called my home boy. “You gotta turn on the radio,” I told him. I can’t remember the last time I heard a club track of any type for the first time that struck me as so significant. This track must have influenced so many producers, singers, and coke attic disco fiends. Its sexy, slow, driving pulse says “We’re gonna be up all night tonight.”
Having acknowledged the importance of the track, my homie shook me back into reality and suggested I call the radio station for the track listing. I did. Its a “Salsoul classic (you foolish amateur),” the dj divulged. So now I am faced with the task of finding this sucker. Of course, I found it on a number Salsoul comps released on cd. But, come on gods of music. Ya’ll know I gotta have that plate, that human scaled incarnation of soul, that vinyl. So, its me vs. ebay. I wouldn’t be surprised if every real disco dealer from Tokyo to London is hiding a few copies of this ish. I’m gonna find you. And when I do…I’m gonna fork over way to much money for this precious gem.
