How Black Was My Reading List, How White Was My Statue? By Justin Desmangles

 

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