Ideas

Today I finally had an emotional reaction to Obama’s victory. I saw years of human indignities - slave ships and food troths, “yassum”s and “nassir”s, second hand books, and broken down buildings - thrown instantly into relief. I cried for my ancestors who endured these indignities. Then, something I have heard many times rang true for me in a way it had not up to that point. It struck that the power of this moment is not just the political victory, nor is it an identification with the person, Barack Obama himself. It is, more than anything, the power of the Barack Obama symbol.

The strength of this symbol is rooted in contrasts. Growing up brown and other in the US gives one access to powerful form of vision. This vision is personified time after time in the wise Black characters of countless American narratives such as the Oracle in the Matrix. This vision manifests itself in many cultural forms and is probably most widely recognized in its incarnation as the Blues or Soul music. Obama mixes this vision with a kind of confidence that, if unchecked, might be interpreted as entitlement. One wonders if this confidence is not, at least in part, owed to having a white parent. The tension of these insider/outsider statuses culminated yesterday in a moment of resolution. The promise of America and the reality of our internal ethnic tensions, the rhetoric of democracy and the history of oppression, resolved themselves in the person of Barack Obama. This resolution came to life in his face during the pauses between phrases of his acceptance speach.

E pluribus unum. From many one. Obama, the symbol, reflects a longing for shared humanity, for ever increasing inclusiveness. If one were to rewrite the creation of the Obama symbol as an ancient myth, one might imagine him as being built from the scraps of human remains left on the ground after a long war. Humanity, having torn itself apart, only to be reassembled, and reanimated, but this time more deeply connected than before.

Obama is arguably the most powerful living symbol on the globe right now. His global appeal is not too far removed from what Michael Jackson became during the Thriller era. In the cases of both mythical figures, it is important that they hail from the US. Both represent the longing for a post-tribal geo-politics in the age of US dominance. Both represent the hope for global relationships that rise above the racial and political narrowness of the US’s imperial bullying from Slavery to Mexico, from the Philippines to Vietnam, from El Salvador to East Timor.

At the same time the symbol of Obama is threatening. If taken seriously, the Obama symbol is a challenge to find a way to live with the un-live-with-able. There are the cliche divides that he implies must be bridged, black/white, Muslim/Jewish/Christian. But then there are the more nuanced identities that he threatens as well. Green party democratic socialists must learn to work with neo-liberal centrists. Peace activists will need to find common ground with the militant. Obama has managed to become a symbol through his ability to remain vague and impartial to a wide breath of political identities without seeming to pander or speak out of both sides of his mouth (though many would say he did just that in his speech to APAC, the conservative Jewish lobbyists).

By exploring what hopes dreams and shared values the symbol of Barack Obama has activated, we be more able to realize the dreams that have been penned on a flawed political system and on Obama, an extraordinary but imperfect man.

An influential cultural figure here in the bay area vexed me with his facebook status this week. In fact, it was the day after Obama was elected. It was also the day after this influential cultural figure threw a celebration that I attended in which the full force of Obama mania was uncorked.

On the day after so much history was made and so much redemption was obtained, this was the facebook status I saw: “I’m not waiving any m__f__in American flag…suckas…”

First of all let me acknowledge that I do not fully know what was meant by this declaration. Based on what little I know about this guy, he seems intelligent and well informed. There may have been a joke implied. Perhaps biting sarcasm was intended. Perhaps a thorough political analysis erupted into a flaming one line critique.

However, this guy is well-known in the Bay and he is not African American. More interestingly - and maybe this is the part that makes me the most wary - he is a hip-hop artist, a maven of Black music and culture. Here we are, a day after arguably the most significant milestone in African American history since the March on Washington, the day after, at this very DJs party, anthems like “Poppin Champagne” were re-purposed for celebrating a political victory, and this guy seems to be calling those of us relishing the moment “suckas.”

This was irresponsible no matter what was intended. I have heard every rhetorical device in the world used in the defense of the contradictions that dog hip-hop music. The talk of violence and misogyny has been described as the result of a “realist” aesthetic or a poetic catharsis. The commercialism that has increasingly shaped and been shaped by hip-hop has been written off as a symptom of a larger American moral failure. Some, including myself, have even argued for the idea of a sort of Taoist acceptance of the instinctual appeal of outlaw narratives and ego-maniacal, hyper-sexual persona especially in a repressed, left brain dominated society like ours.

So, if you need to brush off your shoulder, lean back, throw some bows, or whatever. I get that. Pose for the camera phone, pop your bottle. Its a guilty pleasure. A small concession for the stresses of everyday life in the modern world and especially everyday black life in the still anti-Black modern world.

Clearly, the dude who posted this facebook status, agrees with me that sometimes you just have to let your inner jiggy free, surrender to the song, even go as far as picturing yourself as the limo driven, all powerful gangsta portrayed in the songs lyrics. So how the hell is it that this guy cannot understand why after hundreds of years of grappling with all the cynical arguments for a mono-culture of violent, inhumane capitalist oligarchy that is premised on the fractioning of Blacks to 3/5s of human, we black folks are quite proud of Barack Obama thank you very f___in much.

We are not under any illusions - at least no one I have spoken with - that racism will disappear in 4 years or that American policies will reverse hundreds of years of violent oppression. We are simply enjoying a little “Come up.”

My homie hipped me to this video of investigative reporter, Michael Ruppert letting the CIA’s dirty secret out about dealing crack.

Study addresses underlying cause of the Black exudus from San Francisco:

San Francisco’s black population has dropped faster than that of any other large U.S. city’s.

Read the article

The resistance of the civil rights generation to Barack Obama’s candidacy reveals a generational divide in African-American politics.

Read article

I used to believe that children were our future until I read this piece:

The son of Colorado GOP Senate candidate Bob Schaffer is causing his dad a little embarrassment on the campaign trail this week.

Nineteen-year-old Justin Schaffer publicly apologized for putting up posters on his Facebook page including one declaring “Slavery Gets Shit Done.”

Also among the Facebook page additions are some that mock Barack Obama, painting him as Muslim, an elitist, a homosexual, terrorist and comparing the presumptive Democratic candidate for president to the cereal-box character “Count Chocula.”

Read the article

Update (Just minutes after the original post)

The more I look at the mix of messages on this kid’s facebook page (masculinity = violence, sexual aggression, intoxication; white supremacy; anti-black-brown-woman-gay-poor etc.) The more I realize that he epitomizes the dilemma that America has. This country was born in white supremacy, and a tautological belief in God’s sanction of an authoritarian white male rule. The older Schaffer is simply the grown-up version of this ideological framework: Low-taxes, corporatism, religious chauvinism, sanctity of marriage etc. Many of our national “debates” are simply elaborate schemes for veiling a real power struggle between white male rule and the rest. I have been considering ideas such as libertarianism and free-marketism out of intellectual integrity. I can not help but feel that these ideas contain logical kernels on which thoughtful people are relegated to chewing, while the real power struggle goes on behind the scenes or through nefarious means such as direct mail or voter fraud. We are still living in a time of war.

Does this mean that the revolutionary left is on the right side of the “debate.” I don’t think that is always the case. To simply subscribe to revolution ignores the real issue. Revolution is often a vision of inversion in which power is stripped from one party and turned over to the rightful owners. But you don’t need to read post 60’s French philosophy to know that power corrupts. The real issue is a personal one. The real issue is a spiritual one. It is a matter of human beings learning who they really are or destroying themselves.

I am not decrying debate per se. I just wish we could see through the “debate” we are ostensibly having in this country about “issues” and get to the real discussion about who the hell we really are as human beings and weather or not we can share resources. Or must we forever struggle in tribal wars.

I am hugely grateful to those whose penetrating vision allowed them to see through this rouse, but who when it was the most prudent course of action played this game of politics in order to obtain greater safety and even justice for those of us who would otherwise live our entire lives at war with those in power or enslaved by them.

Had a very productive conversation with a friend tonight about race. The conversation was sparked by his ambiguous feelings toward the almost all white crowd that attends the Art Murmur in downtown Oakland. Oakland from its beginnings has been a city of diverse ethnic backgrounds, from its Meso-American founding family, to the African American porters who who worked on the railroad. Now in an act of demographic inversion, parts of Oakland are changing complexion. This does not mean Oakland will become all white eventually. But, like many American cities, white middle class folks are displacing darker working class folks and shifting the demographics profoundly.

But my friends discomfort grew less from the sociological implications of the white throngs descended on “The Town” and more from the emotional tug of war that he experienced as a black man navigating the and adding to it. He felt a revulsion at the obvious imbalance. Here the low rents have afforded upstart artists to open spaces and create opportunity. And for every opportunity created, it seems that less room will remain for those brown people whose presence determined the low rents in the first place. But not all the white people are bad people. In fact, my friend (this really was not me but an actual friend) could not remember running in to a bad person the whole night. The people he happened to interact with turned out to be cool. Whats more, looking back, he realized that not all of them were “white.” Some of them were East or South Asian, Arab, Persian, Latino (my friend is a Black Latino).

So whats the big deal then. Gentrification is a reality of mobile capital. Money, like water seeks the lowest ground. Where there is rent and space to be exploited, there the money will go. So, what if the people who come with it happen to be less dark then the people who once lived there? What is the difference?

Here is where the discussion got kind of juicy. I hope I can put this stuff into words because these are ideas that I have had trouble wrapping my head around in the past:

The issue of race and racism in this country is only indirectly tied to the fake genetics of race. Most of us know the spiel on race as bunk science. There is actually less in common among some people of the same race than some others of different “races.” Well, to add to that, in the 21st century race is not always functioning around genes. Why is it that my friends memory of this crowd at the art walk is one of “white people.” Not all of these people were white. The answer is that the crowd was “White” in the modern sense. “White” is not a race, but it is rather a role, a position. To be “white” is to be a dominant colonizing force. Racial whiteness since its creation in the middle of the last millennium has always been tied to a colonial movement whether its the Slave Trade, the genocide of Native Americans, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, or any number of supremacist projects. But, “whiteness” has roots that go even deeper than that. Whiteness has come to stand in for a conformist mindset. One that rules and attends to rulers. Race was one way to bolster “whiteness” and bring it into the view of human consciousness. As time goes on, the color of the skin and the width of the noses of the people identified as white becomes less and less important. What stays the same is the position of “Whiteness.” This archetype lives in the collective human unconscious now as a cold dominating self-preserving force that lacks concern for others and will even sacrifice its own well being for power (Just look at the health of many of the most powerful white men on earth). To the extent that one is white, one should be able to gain power.

This is why, race politics in the 21st century are so tricky. When a foul is identified along raceial lines, the response is for those in power to point at all of the exceptions to the rule that undermine any tidy explanation of racism. Colin Powell, Condelezza Rice, and now Barack Obama, are posters for those who would argue that racism has ended. If they can rise to positions of power in white institutions than anyone can. Question: if Lil’ Wayne was a Russian language specialist with unmatched aptitude for military planning and a deft feel for the nuances of Middle Eastern diplomacy, but he still dressed the same, do you think he would have a chance at being appointed secretary of state?

In the case of the art walk, the crowd was fulfilling the role of the white colonial. They could have all been Bangladeshi art students wearing skinny jeans and sporting bed-head and they would have still seemed somehow “white.”

This point may be obvious to some, but it is important for contextualizing certain other conversations that rarely benefit from the separation of “whiteness” from people with European ancestry. When we discuss racism in America in the 21st century, we are mistaken to argue that racism exists in the same way it always has, as a form of psuedo-scientific dehumanization of non-white genotypes. No, now racism is an economy of cultural currencies. If you can talk “white” and act “white” you arguably have a much better chance of avoiding the snares laid by old school racism. The marginalization of poor black people for example happens as much as result of cultural gulfs as it does because of policies or hate group activities. This for me is the implied message of contemporary rap culture. The rappers who get paid these days are the ones who can convincingly prove that they are not “white.” The less “white” the better. The outlaw whose low hanging jeans and gold teeth make him completely unmistakable as not being white is the winner of the pageant. This explains the appeal of black rappers for young white kids. Even white kids can identify if only unconsciously with the resistance against the perennial harshness of “whiteness” as it exists in the collective unconscious.

This relationship to whiteness is complicated though. White and non-white folks also identify “whiteness” as the dominant position. Therefore, there is also a sort of lust that “whiteness” compels.
I once met a guy at an art opening who helped to build one of the most famous hip hop clothing brands. He said that white kids want to dress like the black kids from the inner city, but also, black kids want to dress like the white kids from the suburbs. His company strives to sell to both needs. When I was growing up Izod and Ralph Lauren were the brand of choice for black kids. Ad rap ascended, white kids began dabbling in black gear. Puffy jackets, backward caps, earings, and gold seemed to be the tipping point. Its seems that we all want to have the power of “whiteness” without being associated with cold, detached, conformist persona it evokes.

How does this play out internationally. Well I have a theory (no surprise there). I have been slightly obsessed with the growing talk about the BRIC nations: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. These rising giants are on course to eclipse American hegemony in the next 20 - 50 years, maybe sooner. Here is my assessment in light of my theory “whiteness” as a disembodied way of being. China, wants to be white. That is why the Chinese combination of capitalism and centralized government makes sense. The goal is dominance (motivated by very real fears of instability). India wants to be “white” as well. Indian prosperity is being hailed as a end in itself rather than a means to something more in line with the thousands year old history of the civilization. Consumerism is running rampant in the major cities and the voices of difference are drowning in a sea of jingles. Russia feels that it is more “white” than America. Russians can boast an actual proximity to the caucus mountains. No wonder there is a constant threat of neo-Nazi activity there. Russian politics are as brutal and cold as a Siberian winter. Brazil is therefore the most interesting new power. With leftist but practical leadership Brazil seems to have a healthy dose of anti-Americanism that - if you squint your eyes - looks like an aversion to “whiteness.”

These gross generalizations obviously do not describe the character of any people group and certainly do not describe real people. But, this is one way of describing the position of the countries in a racialized world. What we must realize is that race is no longer about genes. Race is a game that we all play whether we want to or not.

Staple Crops founder, artist, designer, culture jammer, Tahir Hemphill, is nothing if not irreverent. His latest project, the Hip-Hop Word Count, is one of those insidiously smart comments on culture that leaves you-ironically-speechless. What can you say when you find out that the reading level needed to comprehend Lil’ Wayne’s “I’m Me” is that of a 9th grader. Not that this is a huge suprise, but it is a cold reminder that the very stuff that we claim so vehemently as culture (as if to throw it in the face of those who would question it) can not be separated from the sociological trends that have come to define the tricky overlapping identities of the hip-hop generation. [An aside: I'm not sure how the ___ to spell "hip-hop." Sometimes I use a hyphen, sometimes I run it together] This generation is hard to define: youth dominated, commercialized, mediatized, black and sometimes brown or white, sometimes poor, but emulated and repackaged by the rich. We suspect that we are getting dumber every time we find our head nodding to the Soldier Boy, but Hemphill is sick enough to demand proof and hold it in our faces.

I bet if you ask him, he would not admit to taking pleasure in this act of iconoclasm. Hemphill is much more interested in the aesthetics usually. He resists the reactionary critique, the Dead Prez style rhetorical slam. Instead, like a good child of the post-modern era, he engages his reality with all of its overlapping economic, social, and artistic systems. The word count brings out this overlapping-system-view of the world by forcing two far flung systems together that are usually housed in separate buildings on any college campus. In this case, the cold, technical rigor of linguistic analysis is wrapped tightly around the bold, improvisatory fire of hip-hop’s super MC’s. The combination makes a fool of both. The only one left standing with a Cheshire cat grin is Hemphill.

To drive home the point that nothing is sacred, Hemphill has unleashed the word count on energy policy speeches by the two presidential candidates. This move does a lot of things at once. First of all, by roping the candidates into the hip-hop word count, we are reminded how much MC’s and candidates have in common. They all want to convince us of their street cred. Meanwhile, they want to remain larger than life. From XXL to CNN we are being sold on a cult of personality. Secondly, we are forced to think analytically about words. Words, even though they are so damn cheap, still matter. The speech writers and ghost writers know this. But its easy to forget in the midst of scarfing down your daily media diet. Thirdly, we notice that the two political speeches score only slightly higher than the average rap lyrics on the word count. This fact brings the necessary balance to a project that might seem opportunistically snide at first. It also made me think that it won’t be long before we start seeing rappers running for office.

Pamela Shephard’s new web project Snap Judgments is a brilliant ode to personal style. Snap Judgements is featured on the hip group blog, Infinite Critique. Shephard collects impromptu photos and bios from New Yorkers that catch her eye on the street. Each day she posts a new subject and the viewer is encouraged to look at the photo and express whatever comes to mind without the benefit of any biographical information. The next day, the real bio of the subject is posted along side a new photo and the process starts over again.

Our reliance on our ability to judge people based on appearance is unarguable. As the world urbanizes and the amount of people we encounter each day grows for the average human, this tendency becomes at once a necessary skill and a dangerous compulsion. I remember getting off the train after commuting from Midtown Manhattan to Brooklyn feeling drained like I had watched a half hour of MTV with my face mashed against the screen. The art of checking out strangers and arranging them logically in your mental universe is taxing and can become isolating.

By sharing the experience of voyeurism, Shephard allows us a moment of freedom from the calculated and stilted nature of urban people watching. We are in this instance, allowed to stare and more importantly we are allowed to judge. The truth of this person will not be suppressed forever beneath the pile of prejudices that cloud our vision. Each of the characters is redeemed in the end when find out not only what Shephard’s “assumptions” were, but the “absolute truth.” Shephard is clearly aware that truth is not absolute. The truth in this case is a negotiation between the viewer and the viewed that writes a story and makes both better for its telling. We find out for instance that Terry’s “favorite cigar is a triple maduro camacho” or that “mother actually had a dream of a witch pointing to an ocean…which she registered as a sign that she needed to get over her fears of water.” No. None of that “What is your number one style tip?” clichisms for Shephard.

I once heard a lecture by literary theorist Rey Chow who proposed that Freud’s unconscious was misunderstood as an invisible layer submerged below conscious activity that-like the tip of an iceberg-is only a decoy for what lies beneath. Chow’s unconscious lives on the surface and is only hidden from us by our lack of attention. Pamela’s attention to detail seems to confirm this idea. She sees a realm of communication that is completely out in the open for anyone with eyes to see. For her, style is not the cover of the book, it is an intricate and irreducible conversation spoken in the language of texture, color, and shape.

To check out Snap Judgments go to Infinite Critique and click on fashion. Click on the title of any of the SJ subjects.

I caught most of a pretty incredible replayed audio of a lecture given by Julian Darley of the Post Carbon Institute. After reading Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy, this talk was a sorely needed bit of meat added to the bones of a vision of the planets uncertain future.

“>Go here for more on Darley.