This? Is a God dream? dispatches from the revolution, #3
Kanye West insists on giving me a migraine in the year of our Rona 2020.
A few years ago, I watched the ESPN 20 for 20 documentary series on OJ Simpson. I was a child when OJ was acquitted of murdering his then-wife, Nicole Simpson, so I didn’t understand the importance of the trial in the same way I didn’t understand why all the Black people around me were so fired up about the whole thing. I just remembered it happening in my periphery, something the adults talked about loudly, almost shouting at one another as if ready to provoke an argument.
I was left mostly stunned upon my first watch.
I hadn’t understood the significance OJ Simpson held in my community and the significance was, well, significant. OJ is a product of American history: He grew up in a housing project in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood — where a one Z/Yuck now owns a home, thanks to gentrification — was recruited by USC, had an incredible career as a running back, including playing in one of the most important football games in the 20th century as a junior at USC, and thus, successfully, became a white man as a result.
Well, as closest you can get to being one as a Black person, anyway.
By the time OJ was hauling ass in that bronco, live reporting of the chase interrupted the 1994 NBA finals (first time, ever), and the country had cut its teeth on the fresh milk of proto-reality television — the twenty-four-hour news cycle had not existed prior to that infamous car chase. OJ’s trial would go on to be one of the most publicized trials in the history of the country: the trial of the century, one which had played out throughout the course of this country’s history, for centuries now: white woman alleges harm by Black man; Black man found guilty by a jury of not-peers with a decision in less than ten minutes; Black man swiftly, publicly lynched lest any other negras get any bright ideas.
Except for this time, a white woman ended up actually factually dead. And this time, Black folks were determined there would be no lynching, not no mo’. The paradigm has shifted. By my fourth watch, I found myself deeply disappointed, primarily in the Black jurors — many of whom were Black women who are disproportionately vulnerable themselves to intimate partner abuse — who described their reasoning for casting not guilty votes, despite the evidence, as needing (and ultimately, securing) a ‘win’ for the community after years of extreme repression dealt by the State security forces of Los Angeles.
The final straw which lit the kindling was the death of Latasha Harlins, after the televised Rodney King beating, again by State security forces in Los Angeles. The 92’ LA rebellion followed thereafter and, three fresh years later, the memory of that rebellion hovered over the entirety of the trial due to the assumed certainty that the city would burn if a guilty verdict was returned. What wounded me was how deeply discarded Black people felt by their country, that they would side with a murderer just to feel some semblance of control over their lives.
It concerned me, especially, that my community could not see exactly who this man was — a willing and amenable traitor — or worse, recognized fully who and what OJ was and still rocked with him.
The master’s tools.
At the first saplings of fame, he divorced his first wife — a Black woman who came from the same projects OJ did. In his discarding of her, he was also discarding his Blackness, which to him amounted to poverty, powerlessness, constant threat of violence and extreme lack. Whiteness, in turn for OJ, was wealth, narcissism as identity, evasion of pathology, elitism, overabundance at the cost of others, legal impunity for participating in violent acts and, most importantly, power and lots of it.
It concerned me that, perhaps, we have spent far too much time observing and mirroring our oppressors, that we might be finding ourselves walking down the dark corridor of becoming that which despises you, and in that way, OJ’s mistake was always that he confused his proximity to whiteness to somehow being able to weld the power of whiteness, as a Black man. Where OJ fucked up was when he was bearing witness to whiteness behind closed doors, and observed some of the ‘liberties’ provided thanks to ideology — sexual violence, intimate partner violence, exploitation, predation, all without legal interference or threat of criminalization — he just assumed that applied to him too because he had become, effectively, white.
After all, a very important and rich white man said OJ had ‘white’ features. He’s not Black, he’s OJ.
You see, Juice wasn’t thinking about the fact that any ol’ State security force can arrest a Black man for domestic abuse whenever they feel like it, but how often do you get to be the security force that catches the current representative of the race for the murder of a white woman? It’s the sort of once in a lifetime, once in a generation supremacist bragging right to be the patrol that caught the most dangerous n*gg*r the United States has seen since Nat Turner. Mark Furman certainly thought so.
Where OJ really fucked up was he was actively forgetting he was Black.
I’ve been thinking a lot about other Black men who also made the unfortunate mistake of forgetting, or purposefully discarding, their Blackness for a shot at approximating whiteness, at their own demise. I could not help but think of West, who is married to the woman whose family basically invented reality television by virtue of their direct connection to the spectacles that became the chase and trial of OJ Simpson: Robert Kardashian was both one of OJ’s defense attorneys and a close, longtime friend.
Both men have also weaponized their Blackness to curry necessary, escape-chute level favors within their community, as a sort of fall-back in case the scam at hand with doesn’t pan out or, in case, shit gets greasy. Ye employs his Blackness when it best suits him, at moments where he would be indelibly tied to the history of that defining time. For obvious instance, when he uttered the phrase “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” during a live broadcast of a celebrity ‘relief concert’ for New Orleans, recently flooded after Hurricane Katrina due to shoddily built levees (thanks A*my Corps of Engineers!).
Ye’s participation in the relief concert was, in retrospect, the debut of ‘the Real Kanye’, as we would discover later, the Katrina comment would just be one in a long and questionable list of incidents playing to West’s penchant for acting a whole ass in front of cameras, for the ‘gram. But like every other Black person in America having watched my government drown a city of my people — a city full of actual American culture that wasn’t subsequently raised in a revenge-or-spite-fueled massacre and, thus erased from the collective memory — I felt spoken for, and everyone else heard and saw that shit, too!
We could, now — because of that bullhorn — demand that quiet part be said aloud: this country drowned a city full of Black people because genocide is always an option here, and that fact would be inevitably tied directly to the people’s historic memory, never to be forgotten. Forgetting is a central tenant of this American Experiment and it is essential to the maintenance of supremacist ideology. What we choose to forget or, are told to forget, either by omission, intentional obscurity or flat-out erasure shapes what we collectively remember of an event and how accurately we are able to recall said event, even after time has passed and the news cycle has, inevitably, moved on.
I could not forget witnessing a city full of people who looked like me, drowned and drowning for no discernible reason; the clear recognition of the purposeful mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee breach is what radicalized me. It’s likely why the purposeful mismanagement of COVID-19 has subsequently contributed to radicalizing what feels like the entire country.
Four months after watching Kanye West tell America about herself on television, I was in the backseat of my dad’s 4 Runner, listening to Mos Def’s Black On Both Sides on my 1st gen iPod, as we raced down I-95.
Destination: New Orleans.
I’ve been filled with nothing but gratitude for the youngin’s currently radically reshaping our society by way of protest and civil disobedience. I was fifteen when we drove into New Orleans from Ft. Lauderdale, coming up the winding freeway cutting through the city, headed towards a Rainbow/PUSH organized protest to help advocate for voting rights for displaced Black Orleanians who were being culled from voting records because of their natural disaster-induced displacement.
I remember having my face pressed against the cool glass of the car window, and immediately finding my breath caught in my throat, as I saw ‘HELP US’ written out by the removal of roof shingles, on a mid-rise apartment that was, by my account, five or six floors tall.
I knew Black people had been stranded on top of that building, surrounded on all sides by over twenty-five feet of floodwaters turning to toxic sludge and ballooning bodies that resembled them when those bodies still had life in them. Even staring right into the open mouth of death bravely, no real sense of concern for their right to life was ever expressed in action, and as such, whatever innocence I had about my country was gone the moment I saw those words on that roof.
The rest of the weekend was as consequential: my family and I bumped into Julian Bond in a Walgreens near the convention center. John Legend performed at the weekend rally, the only Black entertainer to show up in support of the protest. William C*sby was a whole dickhead to my mom in public (and just about every other Black woman I observed him interacting with. Never saw it for him after that.)
I met Rev Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson (both of whom I followed a year later back to Lousiana, this time to ‘small-town’ Jena, where nooses were found after some high schoolers got into a fistfight. The Black kids were going to be charged with attempted murder for throwing hands. So, twenty-thousand of us showed up to see what was trill.) which, at this point, is a fucking rite of passage as a Black person in America.
I made my first photographs of protest, and of how my country constantly fails Black people in hugely devastating, irreparable ways. I met folk who had separated from family because they had no choice but to, people who were on the Cresent City connection bridge where National Guard wouldn’t let Black people escape into a neighboring majority-white town, Gretna. In a separate but mirroring incident, State security forces of New Orleans murdered two Black people on the bridge while maiming and traumatizing a few others. An action encouraged weeks prior, of course, by the racist governor at the time. State security forces in New Orleans attempted a cover-up but, in a rare feat, did not succeed.
I walked up that bridge, that connection to the crossroads.
I stood on that bridge in silence with thousands of other Black people, mostly survivors of the levee breach. I experienced, for the first time in my young Black life, the power and the powerlessness of collective anguish from relentless trauma. People told me they saw the bodies of neighbors floating blocks away from where they actually lived or that folks burned car tires to get the attention of helicopters who just flew past them, over and over again despite the news reporting any and all fires as being primarily destructive, signifying ‘looting’ and ‘lawlessness’, but not desperation and the urgent need for care and comfort.
A lot of people shared the same story about having heard an explosion or a boom, as it was more frequently described, near the 9th ward, some said the 17th street levee — a historically Black community in New Orleans, just a few weeks prior to the hurricane making landfall, and everyone in town knew the Corp of Engineers shoddily built the levees, leaving the city perilously vulnerable to the sort of freak hurricanes climate change was starting to brew up. The levees had been purposefully blown up in the late 1920s during the Great Mississippi Flood, so who's to say it didn’t happen again?
I took in the mass devastation all around me and New Orleans looked as if it was just shaking off the dust of a nuclear disaster. What I saw reminded me of the war zones I’d seen on television and in magazines like National Geographic: the pile-up of flooded cars piled in straight rows, underneath the city’s underpasses; the stark quiet of death, driving through New Orleans East, another predominately Black community just outside of city limits; people breaking down in the middle of sidewalks, struck suddenly with waves of grief and re-triggered trauma of surviving when others didn’t.
It made no sense to me, just a handful of hours away from my home state, other Black people could be suffering to this degree.
I was one of a sprinkling of people with a camera, which is to say, at fifteen when I was protesting so Black people in New Orleans could have their voting rights reinstated to vote in probably the most consequential election the city has seen in recent history, and there was almost no national media presence to document the moment — Black empowerment isn’t allowed to be broadcasted publicly lest us Negroes get ideas in our heads about liberty and freedom, and what is owed to us by our fellow countryfolk.
I actually had Kanye running for President on my 2020 bingo card.
My partner and I were sitting around listening to music on our couch like we typically do these quarantine days, and I had a Thought, which I immediately thought I should not have thought it at all, but it was too late — the thinking had already been done — so I blurted out, “High thought: what if Kanye runs for office…as 45’s VP?!”
He looked at me, jaw unhinged in sudden shock, then shook his head somberly as if confirming to me the thought was rooted in some (speculatory) truth.
See, I haven’t forgotten about Ye’s meeting at Trump Tower.
There are actually a lot of things I haven’t forgotten about as it regards to Kanye, most especially his deep dive into misogynoir after the simultaneous dissolution of his engagement and the untimely passing of his mother. Or that Rhymefest been had that negro’s ticket! Or that we/I got duped by a middle-class negro raised by an English professor in a Chicago suburb.
Kanye is the exact kinda negro we clown in Chicago for claiming to be from the city despite having grown up in the suburbs. My father is from the Westside, from a neighborhood known as Lawndale, or the place where the discriminatory housing policy, Redlining was perfected. My dad gets it honest. He is from and of Chicago.
Part of the reason there is such a deep distinction between being from a (Chicago) suburb and being from (the city of ) Chicago is because the material realities of both places are wildly different. Suburban kids don’t have PTSD from having 50 of their schools closed down for no reason, or having their primary form of transportation closed off during a volatile and violent summer, all in the same fucking year. Suburban Black kids who have mastered the art of approximating whiteness to make white people feel safe around us aren’t being constantly surveilled by the state security forces of Chicago while simultaneously navigating blight, disinvestment, and a secret torture camp where Black people are kidnapped and sometimes ‘disappeared’ on Chicago’s Westside.
Ye, a dude from the suburbs catapulted to success interpolating the defeats and the sufferings, the stereotypes and caricatures (and subsequent pathologies) of the Black people around him, with Black women most notably bearing the brunt of his bullshit, into an approximation of what Ye thought a monolithic Black experience felt and sounded and remembered like. We are not a monolith, but we do have a lot of practice being pandered to as such.
Using the familiar (and this is what we mean when we evoke normalcy; we want familiarity, what we already know) — a deep love and pride of Blackness as transmitted through music (one of the collective creoles of the diaspora), speaking to the tradition of the griot, the archival collective Black memory made flesh. We mistook Kanye for a griot because we have forgotten the role of a griot, because we were made to forget so we could learn to remember, instead, celebrity.
Fanon has a very specific name for Black folks with cultural power and visibility and capital (these folk include the likes of capitalists (unlimited money/pursuit of money makes you free), incrementalists (change takes time, being longsuffering will make you free), and assimilationists (trading ‘up’ into Whiteness will make you free), these are the folks who have been able to bypass their supposed “hereditary” fate of being born into the bottom caste to gain occasional and situational access to the fruits and ‘freedoms' of being free, white and beholden to no one.
In the WOTE, Fanon calls these folk ‘affranchised slaves’, or slaves who are individually free, so their caste is not free as a whole, yet they/ye have achieved a semblance of liberty by means of wealth and it’s a subsequent class status which, sometimes overrides the negative benefits of being bottom caste. Fanon expands on these ‘affranchised slaves’, saying,
“…the leader [of the nationalist party] keeps his distance with regard to [that] violence…at best, he shuts himself off in a no man’s land between the terrorists and the settlers and willingly offers his service as a go-between; that is to say, …he himself will be quite willing to begin negotiations [between the oppressed, the weaponized terrorists who further the ends of the settler, and the settlers themselves],” - The Wretched of the Earth, pg. 62
Part of the reason I could not let go of the images of West at Tr*mp Tower was because I wanted to know what sort of a deal Ye cut for himself, and this is not only because Ye is not the first Black entertainer to cut deals with a wild shitty president or act as ‘representative’ of the race for the purpose of being a beard for a racist — if he hangs out with Kanye, he can’t be r*cist! He likes some blacks, but especially one of your very best! Your genius! — and maybe a little more than a cover, if shit swings south.
And you know, Shit always swings South.
I understand, now, why this country organizes itself by region: each region has it’s own specific epistemology, or what we know to be true and collectively agreed upon as capital-T ruth, varies depending on where you are in the United States. In the South, the collective epistemology is this: what we know to be true is an ideology (supremacy, segregation) based on a conspiracy (Lost Cause) which is also based on what we also know to be lies (race, genetic/hereditary differences between humans), so, therefore, lies are the Truth. Easy. Lies are also my (American) opinion, so if you call me a liar for telling lies, I’m going to tell you to get out of my country, liberal/commie/activist/l*fest/n*gg*r. Easy.
This also means, however, that anything or anyone who willingly volunteers falsehoods, unreality, and deceit — all of the named wildly attractive to the indoctrinated psyche — as their moral orientation will inevitably attract all manner of folk who honestly believe lies to be the truth because they are actively creating a shared, external reality in which lies actually are considered to be true. This is echoed in the rapid spread of delusional and/or conspiratorial thinking as a regional, Southern ideology to national, American ideology, and that paradigm shift occurred through the covert spread of television propaganda, to foment the idea that a society in which there are two separate, aggrieved races, who lived separately from one another is natural and normal; how it should be and that the grievance somehow disappear if those ‘races’ are separated.
And voila! Segregationist attitudes are now being seeded in the psyche. Thanks to segregationists we get a more modern permutation of supremacy, one not reliant on Lost Cause, which by the 50s and 60s was looked upon with derision — so as not to get clocked as a racist — until remodified as the ‘abstract’ Southern strategy, better known as speaking in code to appeal specifically to white racists to win elections for the presidency and other public offices.
The existence of a malignant ideology paired with banal propaganda —segregation of the ‘races’ is natural, why else would we observe a “natural” occurrence of social separation; positioning racial discomfort abstractly by introducing the purposeful, improper use of language like ‘false narrative(s)’, ‘communist/socialist take over’, ‘social issues’, ‘activists’; and finally, creating new code to be shared among the code talkers to replace the 'compromised’ old code, such as using search engine names to represent non-white groups so no one is any the wiser — in order to activate, agitate, and exploit white racists to win an election or pass racist policies. This also aids in the expert maintenance of the sort of ‘tensions’ that allow for the easy elimination of Black Americans when white folk wanted to be soothed, saved and prioritized, even if their lives and wellbeing are not directly risk.
I know its hip to say things like 43 was an idiot but at least he wasn’t 45, but its actually just ahistorical as all fuck to make a statement like that. 43 was an idiot, but that idiocy does not render him any less capable of evil, nor does it negate the actual evils he participated in and gave credence to as the leader of the supposed free world. Kakistocracy is the leadership (and purposeful mismanagement) of a government in the hands of the most incompetent, corrupt, and despotic villains a society has to offer.
In other words, it means our country is currently being mismanaged by the absolute worst we have to offer in human beings.
This is true of 43’s admin and of this current administration, and just about every single administration this country has survived by the skin of its teeth. Under 43’s leadership, we got armed conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq (first wars Millennials were sent off to fight), which preceded the faux togetherness and “unity” of the country under the shameful banner of Islamophobia and xenophobia in response to the trauma of watching people jump to their deaths to escape burning buildings pierced by commercial airplanes.
Just how have we forgotten about the war crimes our gov’t committed there?
Or that Guantanamo set the precedent (and necessary exposure for introducing the mass dehumanization of a new, hunted Other) for the concentration and torture camps and the secret security forces who run those camps, today? Nothing about what I just said smacks of idiocy, instead this speaks to a deep intelligence about how to manipulate a populace for your specific ends but, playing dumb (or using a dummy) —because Americans have zero understanding of how intelligence works or that there are multiple intelligences — is a really good way to get away with crime in this country, and getting away with crime is just a longer way of saying you’ve succeeded in the American system.
Ever since that first visit to New Orleans, I’ve pined to return to see the city in some semblance of normalcy. I was able to do just that last October while working on a commercial book project. I was deeply unsettled by the number of white people — majority transplants, many more tourists —galavanting around a graveyard of a city. I could not separate the images I saw of Black bodies, bloated with water and decomposition, gently floating down what I assumed would have been a street or sidewalk, with the physical place I was currently inhabiting. The city felt just as heavy as it did when I first met it.
There were homes in the 9th Ward, completely taken over by kudzu vine, never claimed likely because the owners perished decades ago or could not afford to both return home and rebuild. There were recovery markings on buildings in Treme, almost fifteen years old now. People still missing — no, they aren’t missing, they’re dead. Too many of them. So many of them. I’m now thirty-two and there still has been no answer — spoken aloud publicly — no accountability, no actual number of lives lost (the “official” toll is 1,464 people but how is that possible with an entire city underwater for over five days? In a city with a population of almost half a million people?), no actual recovery, nothing.
All there is loss — loss of culture and history, loss of community and family, loss of the sense belonging at home, loss of a place to confidently call home, and it’s because of all this compounded loss, that I revisit Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke documentary with some regularity, not only because I really enjoy Spike with his griot cap on, but because the documentary provided an actual answer for the abandonment of the Black people of New Orleans. The one that was owed to us by our government. The one that was owed to, specifically, the displaced Black people of New Orleans who have still yet to return, and likely never will, after suffering such an immense trauma.
When the Levees Broke is an exceptional documentary because of both the breadth and depth of experiences covered by first-person accounts and because the documentary reveals to us a narrative that wasn’t shaped by the State and it’s PR firms (American news media). One of the accounts that helped to shape the survivor-centered narrative has been heavy on my mind recently: the chaos and destabilization caused by the breached levees allowed for white supremacists to initiate an attempted massacre on the vulnerable Black population of New Orleans by way of militia violence. The account Lee collects is from a Black man who was shot at point-blank range with a shotgun by a white racist. The Point Algiers militia was a group of 15 to 30 supremacists who formed in order to stop “looters and anyone who didn’t look like the belonged” and play vigilantes in the middle of one of the greatest tragedy’s to hit this shithole country. The militia wasn’t formed to offer aid nearby, vulnerable neighbors, but to hunt as if at a Big Game reserve. One of the self-identified militia participants excitedly tells Lee that he was “blasting n*gg*rs” if they came into Algiers.
Stop me if any of this is sounding familiar.
This important oral history around a potential modern, race massacre is documented for all time in that documentary. It wasn’t incidental to the current trauma Black New Orleanians were facing, that terrorism was integral to our trauma. Spike knew that and he wanted his viewers to know it, too. White racists are very good at turning national chaos and destabilization into permission to target, traumatize, intimidate and ultimately kill Black people, so of course, the reporting around militia was neatly de-fanged in news media across the country. It was ‘an incident’, not a series of incidents and certainly not a concerted, intentional effort to murder Black people were behind the formation of the militia. So, we all forgot about it, just like we were supposed to.
The deejay keeps playing the same song, and I’m getting tired of it.
Ye, who wrote a song about having beef with Gap when he worked there in his pre-celebrity life, just signed a ten year deal with the Gap, no longer a ‘slave in fashion’ now that he’s the Master. He abandoned a charity org he started in his own mother’s name in an attempt to honor her legacy. Ye is also a known apologist of abusers and shows a propensity for keeping around him violent and depraved misogynists (remind you of anyone we know?).
Ye made a big stink of meeting Trump and declaring him a “kindred” spirit (something about dragon energy?) because he was still stinging from his presumed rejection from the country’s history-making, first Black president. Say what you will about astrology, but we all know Gemini’s are the keepers god-tier grudges if only for the opportunity to get even. You don’t think Ye felt a way about other elite, affranchised slaves being warmly welcomed into the fold of the Ultimate Negro? Being, yet again, overlooked and not properly fawned upon for his presumed genius and importance to the race! This is the wounded psyche of a malignant narcissist at play, Fanon would call Ye’s behavior a ‘colonial mental disorder’ — a mind made disordered by the introduction of a colonialist, supremacist ideology.
We let men like OJ and Kanye West bait and switch us so often, it astonishes me.
It’s a reaction to our collective, unresolved racial trauma and it’s directly a byproduct of our elders having had their leaders and ‘representatives’ hunted and killed by state security forces or ‘vigilantes’, or they were forced into exile where they remain to this day or have died, or were so completely psychologically broken, there is nothing to rehabilitate or restore, or just died mad young from the supremacy of it all.
Ultimately, these men saw themselves as white, as having achieved the final ends of assimilationists: being absorbed into whiteness.
Whiteness isn’t biology, it isn’t genetic.
Whiteness is a function of and end result of ideology, which is built upon a series of skewed values, oriented away from shared humanity and towards false beliefs, ideas, unfounded theories derived from created pseudo-sciences (conspiracy theories around/about the sciences) like hereditary “race” and eugenics or a caste organized society; the assumption of absolute power in a society granted only to whiteness, often under the guise of divine directive and presumed genetic superiority.
None of these faulty ideas equates an actual identity, instead whiteness functions in the same way political party functions: your political party says nothing about your politics but reveals everything about the orientation of your moral and ethical compasses — that’s if you even have spent the time building either compass as it is a feat under the crush of indoctrination.
To aspire to whiteness, to approximate whiteness, to seek constant proximity to whiteness as a formerly colonized person and/or as bottom caste is to say that the ideology that guides your rational, relational world is the pursuit of total and absolute power, at any costs, by all and every means necessary, and especially by means of cruelty eliminating great swaths of your own species.
That total, final obliteration of the rational, relational mind due to the ideological take over of the psyche is best illustrated by the Peelian conception of the sunken place — what does it look like when you have lost your mind, which is to say what does it look like when you aren’t in control of your own thinking because your oppressor possesses your mind; shaping your mind to become a trap of insecurities, erasure, unresolved traumas, excruciating racial fatigue, a constant vigilance to prove and quantify your humanity, so other humans who have indoctrinated themselves into thinking you are not human have no reason to cause you harm (reasons, however, are incidental to your harm, always).
There are so many parallels between OJ and Ye, it feels like divination.
At a pivotal point in after acquittal, OJ expresses that he had, in fact, thought about killing Nicole at some point. He wrote a book about how he would have gone about it. West opens his 2018 album, Ye, with a song titled, I Thought About Killing You. It reads, on it’s the face, like provocation and shock-for-shocks-sake…. until one phrase catches my ear, “just say it out loud to see how it feels,” and this is when it stops becoming provocation and crosses over into something more sinister because that lyric is a call to action. The “song” goes on to encourage the examination of delusions and intrusive thoughts. It has crossed my mind on many occasions that Ye could end up living out the same fate as OJ Simpson.
After all, they both share in common the exact delusion in the exact sphere of influence and power (ya know who else Ye and the Juice got in common…), during periods of historical importance that end up helping to illustrate what the soul of the nation looks like at a given, pivotal moment. There seems to be an easy regularity to this behavior, this colonial sickness. James Brown and Sammy Davis Jr. pulled the same shit with Nixon! Fucking tricky dick! The “we can’t directly call Black people n*g*ers or activists’ commies so we will just criminalize the shit they do and make sure to evoke Law and Order whenever we’re doing some wild racist shit.” That Nixon.
They set the stage for Ye.
How do you do something like that, as a Black person? Or rather, how far down into the mouth of the sunken place of supremacist indoctrination do you have to be in order to throw your entire community under the bus? What is the cost of being the only one in the room? How much does it cost to disappear yourself?
Another way of saying it: just how much does it cost to save one’s self from the final genocide of your people?
I’d like to see some receipts.
This month’s newsletter was written in two sittings because I have actually been working on this essay since Ye dropped Life of Pablo. I am going to make the first draft of that essay available to paid subscribers, soon. I’m not very certain of how or when I will go ‘back to work’, primarily because of the plague but also, because, I was praying for a moment of mass learning as I’ve always wanted to be a community teacher. Writing this newsletter, doing research for the ethnography I am currently embarking on, and having really deep conversations that lead to moments of teaching and learning has set me on fire at a molecular level.
I’m curious: if I were to offer some teach-in/learn-in sessions around visual literacy, identifying ideological shifts, how to accurately read and identify propaganda in media, ect for paid subscribers alongside more resource lists and playlists, would you subscribe for $5 bucks a month to get that sort of stuff? Lemme know!
I’ve been listening to this Spotify playlist I made, the new vanguard, cause this new vanguard, I’m the new vanguard! Are you part of Noname’s Book Club? You should be! I’ve been reading Amiri Baraka’s Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music. While doing research for an in-progress ethnographic project, I read twice, Isabel Wilkerson’s god-tier essay on America’s caste system. It will literally shift your perception right into the shared, relational reality. If you’ve seen that wild video of a white woman going frighteningly feral (that is what I mean by ‘activated and agitated’), ramming herself into a glass door and thought to yourself, is this a zombie movie? [insert meme here], then I highly recommend giving Pontypool a watch this weekend.
Finally, I am officially looking for paid writing opportunities so if you see sumthin’, say sumthin’, bew. Wear your masks, drink water, take your meds and stay yo ass in the house! Also: You look cute today, and I think you’re wonderful. xo ~ O