How Black Was My Reading List, How White Was My Statue?
By Justin
Desmangles
“Any time you find the
government involved in a conspiracy to violate the citizenship or the civil
rights of a people, then you are wasting your time going to that government
expecting redress. Instead, you have to take that government to the World Court
and accuse it of genocide and all of the other crimes that it is guilty of
today.”
Malcolm X, “The Ballot or
the Bullet”, April 3, 1964
Republicans
and Democrats agree on most things and the thing they agree on most is that
they, and they alone, should run the country. The mesmerizing media machinery
that churns amplifying their differences is a multi-billion-dollar industry. So
persuasive is its affecting charisma, many Americans believe the two parties to
be at each other’s throats most waking hours. This is especially true during an
election year, which increasingly seems to be stretching its calendar
thirty-six months. But when it comes to the social degradation, economic
exploitation, pre-mature death, and mass murder of Black lives throughout the
world, there is common ground. Much of that ground can be found in Africa,
where the most radical expansion of U.S. military power on the continent was
led by Barack Obama under the aegis of AFRICOM. There is not a car on the
American road that has not filled its tank a hundred times over with Nigerian
blood. A fact long true before the 21st century. Ask Ken Saro-Wiwa. More
recently, the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo over coltan — the
essential ingredient in smart phones, laptop computers &c. — has left millions
of Blacks dead in recent decades, with reporting stateside at a minimum as not
to disrupt tech-heavy stock markets. The oil and mineral wealth of Africa is
the burning that fuels Europe and America, without which there would be
neither. This is also increasingly true of China, which of late has
successfully usurped its Western competition in controlling extraction of these
resources in numerous countries, leading to proxy wars and terror.
During the
cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s, the American Left and what was left
of it identified with anti-Imperialist revolutionary struggle in Africa, as
well as in South and Central America, the Caribbean, and Asia. In his speech
“Beyond Vietnam,” April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. was clear and sharply
focused on the necessity for this international approach when dealing with
problems created by American imperialism at home.
"A true
revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty
and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see
individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia,
Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the
social betterment of the countries, and say, 'This is not just.' . . . This
business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes
with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of
peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields
physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with
wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend
more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching
spiritual death."
Malcolm X
had been making similar points upon his return to the U.S. after meeting with
African presidents and prime ministers, months before his assassination. Following
the deaths of these leaders, efforts to dissuade and distract American Blacks
from this type of international strategic thinking have become pervasive in
popular culture. Since then, the self-hating grotesqueries of Black images in
Hollywood and the art world have been celebrated as breakthroughs and an
ever-growing list of firsts. Firsts first held probably by someone passing for
white or in-the-closet, so who’s zooming who? Nevertheless, for observers of
geopolitics and globalization (read global warming), the facts both Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X emphasized in their shared, mature, strategic
vision remain the same. The treatment of Blacks in America at the hands of our
own government, whether it be state, local, or federal, constitutes an international
human rights crisis, one whose only solution lies in the solidarity of its Black
victims throughout the African world and its diaspora. Ironically, it is a
human rights crisis of such extraordinary dimensions, similar ones have been
used as a pretext towards justifying sanctions against other countries, often
leading to invasion and regime change by the U.S.
The
generation of Black American artists, writers, and educators who heard the
message calling for unity among all African people took it up as a vocation.
Inspired by an earlier generation’s manifesto, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” by
Richard Wright, and essays such as Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain,” this new generation sought to manifest the civic potential of
the arts in Black political and economic life, as well as social. The use of
oratory combined with music and dance was particularly effective, reaching its
apotheosis in the work of Ntozake Shange. Organizations such as the New Federal
Theater, Umbra, Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Black
Artists Group, Watts Writers Workshop, and Black Arts Repertory Theatre and
School all sought to raise consciousness within Black America of its abiding
ties to the continent and its struggle for self-determination.
Today by
comparison, many contemporaries are faking the funk with poems that don’t sweat
or smell and talk only in polite company. The conservative individualism
exemplified by Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray and their less talented progeny have
taken root as nasty weeds choking a garden. Houston Baker laid it out with his
American Book Award winning study Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have
Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era. A glut of MFAs can be counted
on to declare themselves a renaissance every few years and nowadays corporate
media is starting to underwrite their marketing. Appending the prefix Afro to
just about everything you can think of in branding, rebranding, and consumer campaign
hustle is now accepted. Tokens with two books are routinely gassed-up with
bizarre and sometimes freakish comparisons to American literature’s pantheon of
gods. Meaningless cartoon phrases like “instant classic” drip haphazardly from
the mouths of people who damn well know better. Do we need an Afro-Futurist
without so much as a glance at the future of Africa? For those writing and
directing in the Marvel Comics Universe, the answer in dollars is yes. When former
Secretary of State Tillerson made a diplomatic tour of Africa to ink long-term
agreements with various governments across the continent, the big story that
week here was Wakanda. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who as a journalist beat all with the skill,
clarity, and prodigious research of pieces like “The Case for Reparations”
(June 2014) and “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” (October
2015) now comes on like a detective whose been bought off the case. Writing for
Time magazine this year, Ibram X. Kendi tells us Black artists today
“got the Black Judge out of our heads. We refuse to carry the race on our
shoulders.” Well, whose shoulders does Kendi think he’s standing on? Anyone
want to mention Sisyphus to the author of “The Hill We Climb”?
Amiri
Baraka’s last shot fired on the way out was a bullseye, taking down Charles
Rowell’s anthology Angles of Ascent. Baraka’s skill at going upside many
heads at once left his enemies bruised, battered and scarred. “A sharp class
distinction has arisen, producing a mini-class of Blacks who benefited most by
the civil rights and Black Liberation movements, thinking and acting as if our
historic struggle has been won so that they can become as arrogant and ignorant
as the worst examples of white America. It is obvious, as well, looking through
this book, that it has been little touched by the last twenty years of
Afro-American life, since it shows little evidence of the appearance of spoken
word and rap.”
On May 26,
2020, America woke-up and discovered it was a monstrous vermin. A familiar
story, it needed to recapture what was human about itself. Without time to read
Kafka, new book lists would have to do. Ones that would please the public while
remaining unread. Corporate America jousted with itself, trying to outdo the
outdone reading trendy bromides on how to placate Blacks. Pay-walls were taken
down and social media prompted people to educate themselves. Victors of the
colonial wars feigned shock and dismay at the details of the battles they had
won, the missing and mutilated they themselves had murdered. There was a lot of
talk about forgiveness and its ugly cousin forget. Some folks started singing
and saying we were all sinners, others shouted to turn that record over. But
what did not come up in the near endless stream of lynching postcards turned
video clips, the humiliation as entertainment, the noble guilt as torture, was
that the rites and rituals of murdering Blacks with impunity are inexorable
from the American global empire.
Sacramento, CA., March 21, 2021
This essay was composed for A Gathering of the Tribes magazine, issue number 16, edited by Ishmael Reed and Danny Simmons, to be published Winter 2021-2022
Photo image of Element Statue by artist Erwan Vaquet
