Quincy Troupe on Black Renaissance Noire departing NYU, controversial jazz critic Stanley Crouch

 

Quincy Troupe in Conversation with Justin Desmangles, Sept. 26, 2020 

Quincy Troupe has been among the most frequent guests on my radio show over  the past twenty years. The following transcription is excerpted from a two-hour  conversation covering a vast array of topics, largely focusing on his body of work  as a poet and his forthcoming collection Duende: Poems, 1966-Now (Seven Stories  Press). For this issue of Konch, the editors and I have chosen to focus on two  points of great interest in the recent history of American art, the departure of  Black Renaissance Noire from New York University and the death of controversial  jazz critic Stanley Crouch. 

On the departure of Black Renaissance Noire from New York University 

Justin Desmangles: When I was describing your poetry as creating the vision for  the possibility of real freedom, I was thinking of it as integral to all of these other  traditions that inform your writing. Because if you’re listening to a Quincy Troupe  poem, or you’re reading a Quincy Troupe poem, and you’re not moving your  body, if you don’t have some boogie or some stomp or some shuffle or some  bounce, you’re not hearing the poem! In order to really hear the Quincy Troupe  poem, you have to boogie your body. You have to be able to step lively. The music  that is in the poetry is the practical form of real freedom. The possibility of that  imagination moving the body.  

That wellspring of wisdom is also what informed the way that you shaped and  moved and created the very supple Black Renaissance Noire, which under your  leadership as editor expanded the range into all these other sensuous  presentations of art.  

You recently announced to your friends and colleagues that there was a  departure of ways coming between you and NYU [New York University] and Black  Renaissance Noire. Could you speak to us about that?  

Quincy Troupe: Sure. This is the way it was explained to me. You know, I have an  office down there that I never go to, so I said, let somebody else have it. I can  work really well at my place, I have everything at my disposal. I got everything. So 

I said, just give it to somebody else. I think that rubbed some people the wrong  way. “This guy, he ain’t even going to take the office.” You never know what rubs  people the wrong way, but somebody told me that.  

Anyway, Manthia Diawara hired me because of the fact that he loved Code magazine so much.  

JD: Oh yes. 

QT: He was my contributing editor. He’s from Mali. He used to provide stuff for  Code, so when Code stopped, when I moved back to New York, he said “Why  don’t you take over Black Renaissance Noire?”. And that’s what I did, I took it over  and I said, “Well you know, I am going to change it. I just want to let you know  that.” He was one of the one’s who started it, he and Walter Mosley and Clyde  Taylor. He said, “That’s what I want you to do, that’s why I am hiring you, because  I know you’re going to change it.” [laughter] “I know it’s going to make a lot of  people mad, but I think it needs to be changed.” I said, “I am going to bring in  some white people and everybody else.” He said, “Do it, I am giving you free  reign.” So that’s what I did, I felt empowered at Black Renaissance Noire, I could  do what I wanted. He said, “I trust your judgement, your editorial judgement and  what you will do. I really do, I think it’s going to be remarkable.” So I said, “O.K.,  man!”  

And so, I pissed-off a lot of people because I started to change a lot of stuff. I  remember this guy who was one of the old editors. We had a meeting early on,  maybe in the second year or so, and he came in, he was mad. He was mad with  me because of the fact that I had made some changes and had rejected  somebody that he had brought in. So we were sitting there . . . and I liked the guy,  I liked him a lot . . . he says “Why did you do that, why did you do that?” I said,  look at my title. He said, “Wha-wha-what?” I said, “Look at my title, it’s Editor-in Chief. Editor-in-Chief means I make the decisions.” I learned that when I was  doing Code with Larry Flynt. It’s my decision. “If I don’t like it, it’s going,” I said, “I  have no guilt.” I have no guilt about stuff like that. He said, “But I, I just . . .,” and I  said, “Look man, I just told you, I have no guilt so this is useless.” 

JD: Let me save you some time!

QT: Yeah! “Look, I’m not going to do it, man. I’m going to do what I want to do.”  “Well, I’m going to quit then.” I said, “Hey, man that is your choice. I like you,  man, but I am the Editor-in-Chief and you’re not.” [laughter] “You’re a  contributing editor, I am the Editor-in-Chief, O.K.? Manthia told me that’s what it  was and I take that stuff seriously.”  

In the end what I do is what’s going to come down on me. It’s not going to come  down on Manthia, it’s going to come down on me. And so anyway, that went on  for a while. Then Manthia left and he said “Quincy, I don’t want to be involved  with the magazine anymore. I am a university professor and I want to travel more.  You can call on me or Clyde or Walter when you want to, but Deborah Willis is  going to take my position.” I said, “Well, I know Deb,” and he said, “Well you  know she has a kind of different take on stuff.” O.K. I didn’t know what that was,  and so she took over his position.  

He had been telling me that there were some mysterious white professors in the  administration who were jealous. That is what he said. They admitted that it was  a great magazine but they were jealous, they were envious because they were  getting asked about me all the time and they didn’t like that. I understand that  kind of stuff so . . .  

JD: This is something that has happened a lot to you.  

QT: Yeah, it happens. So one day, Deb calls me up and says “We’re going to have  to make some changes with the magazine.” “What? What do you mean?” She  says, “Well, they think we ought to do things like this . . .” “I’m not doing it, what  do you mean?” She says, “Well, they think we should do things like this.” I said,  “I’m not going to do it. I am just not going to do it.” She said, “Well, maybe, I  guess we’ve reached a parting of the ways.”  

Hey, it was like that, it was just like that. You know what I mean? JD: Wow, this is Deb Willis talking?  

QT: Yeah, Deb Willis, but then I found out it wasn’t even her. She was told to do  that.  

JD: I see. 

QT: She said to me later, “Well, I didn’t want to do that, see, but the higher-ups,  they wanted to do it.” She says, “I teach here,” you know, “I got to get along with  these people.” I said, “Hey, it’s your decision. This is what I want to know,” I said,  

“since you’re going to cease publishing the magazine, can I take it with me at  some opportune time and take it off campus. Maybe get money and start it over  again with somebody else.” “Oh, yeah,” she said “You can do that, you can do  that.” 

Well, that’s what I am going to do. That’s what is going to happen. I am going to  own it. 

JD: That’s great.  

QT: I am going to have control of it. I am just going to let it go for a while and then  we are going to do it. I just have to get the money together first. I have some  people. I had NYU behind me. That is a lot of money, we were coming out three  times a year. It was costing some money to do that magazine like it was done. So  we’ll see. If not it will just have to be gone. Maybe we can do a big one every year.  

JD: Like an annual.  

QT: I can be a contributing editor and somebody else can be Editor-in-Chief if we  raise enough money. So that’s what happened. I know Deb is sorry now, she is  really sorry it happened because she is catching grief.  

JD: I’ll bet.  

QT: People call me, they call me up, “What happened, what happened to the  magazine?” I say, call Deb Willis, and I give them her number. And so she says to  me, “Quincy, could you please stop giving my . . .” I said, ”No, I am not going to  take the blame. I had nothing to do with it.”  

JD: Let me ask you this. In recent years the United States has openly embraced  fascism and a lot of the trends that have been taking place in so-called higher  education have reflected that. Some of the most far-right think tanks in the  United States have exerted extraordinary control over curriculum on America’s  college campuses and universities. Groups like the Manhattan Institute, the  Heritage Foundation, and the Hoover Institute out here in California. 

Do you suspect or do you know that the decision coming through NYU vis-à-vis  Black Renaissance Noire has illustrated part of that larger trend? Is that fair to  say? 

QT: I would think so. I don’t know. I had thought about it because it just came all  of a sudden. I don’t even know the people who pulled the trigger, I don’t even  know who they are. They’re shadowy people. I never met them. If I did meet  them, you know, they were very nice to me, you know what I mean?  

There was a provost there who loved the journal. A gay white guy and he was  married to a black gay guy. He was the provost, he loved the journal. He started  teaching again, he wanted more freedom, they said. And this woman took over.  She was the one who executed it, you know. Her name was Parker or something  like that. I never met her. I asked for meetings when I heard all this stuff was  about to happen. She would never meet with me. I don’t know what happened. I  just know the decision was by some higher-ups.  

Some of those people in the English Department, they were jealous and envious  of the journal because everybody was talking about it. They were talking about it  with great esteem. [The English Department] was pissed-off. Somebody said,  “Why he’s not even down here, he doesn’t even come to his office.” [laughter]  What does that have to do with the product? 

JD: Exactly. There was something about Black Renaissance Noire, especially for  younger readers who are not necessarily immersed in the culture, that opened up  worlds within worlds for them. In other words, it became a medicinal substance  for people who were otherwise in triage. I think that is part of the move that is  being made here by these shadowy higher-ups. They’re trying to cut off the flow  of medicine to people who need it.  

QT: Right! Right! That’s what it is. That’s why I am glad they are going to allow me  to take it and do something with it.  

JD: That’s the best news I’ve heard all day. 

On the late jazz critic Stanley Crouch 

QT: I was a Jayne Cortez’s house one day and Stanley [Crouch] was talking this  shit, man, and I said, “Shut the fuck up, Stanley.” 

JD: Serious.  

QT: He said, “What?” I said, “Shut up. If you don’t shut up I’m going to smack the  shit out of you.” 

JD: There you go.  

QT: Stanley used to always bully people.  

JD: That’s right.  

QT: He said, “You going to do what?” I said, “Say it again, say it again.” He said it  again. I knocked him out. I didn’t knock him out, I knocked him on the bed with a  right cross. Buh-ow! [laughter] On the bed. Jayne said, “Oh my god!” And Mel  Edwards started laughing. [Stanley] never said nothing to me ever again.  

He would bully people, Stanley.  

I’d say, “Stanley, Stanley.” He’d say “Yeah, Troupe what is it?” I’d say, “Don’t go  there, man, I might have to clock you again.” And Stanley and I got along to the  end. Because I used to tell him, that shit you talking about is stupid.  

You were talking about it earlier [the up-front, plain-spoken style of the Midwest].  K. Curtis Lyle and I moved to St. Louis from Los Angeles. He still lives there and I  told Curtis, “The difference between you and me, we are both intellectuals but  how you express yourself is kind of like California.” Now Curtis is a big guy, he will  knock you out, but he’s always trying to get around it. He told me one day, “Now I  understand how you are, since I lived in St. Louis so long.” They’ll just clock you,  they’ll shoot you, [laughter] they don’t think about it.  

JD: It’s that same Blues impulse that you hear in Richard Pryor, you can hear it in  Miles Davis. You can hear it in a lot of artists that come from that area.  

QT: That’s right, that’s it, man. Point blank.  

JD: Point blank and no filigree, no adornment, just right there.  QT: No filigree. [laughter] 

JD: Plain as moonlight in the forest and if you can’t dig it, fine.  QT: Fine.

JD: I am glad that you brought up Stanley though because I find him to be very  troubling. In as much as he seemed to spend a career just going which way the  wind blows, and he became a professional assassin for his bosses.  

QT: Yes.  

JD: In other words, the New York literary establishment would hire Stanley to  abuse and punish Black men whom they felt got out of line. I for one am very  confused at the praise that is being heaped on him in death because this was a  man who committed the most egregious of sins. Betrayal of the spiritual tradition  that brought him into existence. In fact, there are very few people that he didn’t  betray. Even his mentor Albert Murray, the man who co-signed for Stanley. He  betrayed him too.  

QT: Right. I don’t know if you saw it, but they had a notice of his death on  Facebook and I wrote a piece . . . everybody was, like, oh shit! I talked about it. I  said Stanley was brilliant. I knew Stanley from the time we didn’t have no money  in Watts. You know, we were running around together. He was out there with us,  the Watts Writers. He was going with Jayne Cortez.  

I watched him slide down that slope. I saw him just sell himself out. I said that in  that piece. He was avaricious, he was evil, you know what I mean? 

Let me tell you this one story. I remember when he loved Miles Davis, I mean  absolutely adored, loved. We go in to a club one night . . . I’m from St. Louis,  Miles is from East St. Louis . . . I saw Miles standing over there against the wall  with this woman. Beautiful woman. He always had beautiful women. Stanley said,  “Hey, man, that’s Miles Davis, I am going to go over and say something. We’re  going to go over and say hello.” I said, “I’m not going over there, Stanley. Miles  don’t want to talk to you, man.”  

JD: Exactly. 

QT: I said, “Miles don’t want to talk to you.” He said, “Well, I’m going over and  saying hello, man.” He went over there to talk to Miles Davis, saying, I’m so and so  and so and so, I’m Stanley Crouch. Miles said, “Fuck you motherfucker, get the  fuck out of my motherfucking face.” Just like that. Point blank, boom! 

Stanley, he was upset. Up until that point he had written nothing but real praise  about Miles. The next week in the Village Voice he wrote a piece putting-down  Miles Davis like a dog. Just because he got cursed out. I called him up, I said, “That  is some chicken shit stuff that you just did, man. You know goddamn well you love  Miles Davis. The reason you wrote that piece was because he cursed your ass out.  Talking about how he can’t play?” I said, “Are you a fool? Just because he cursed  you out, he can’t play, huh? You’re the only one who believes that, you and Albert  Murray. Don’t bring that shit to me, man, I know you. I know you. I’m not one of  these crazy people or them white boys that you hang-out with. They don’t know  you like I know you. You’re just chicken shit.” He would tiptoe around me after  that.  

All that stuff that he was writing, attacking all these writers, people, musicians  and everything. It’s just bullshit.  

JD: It is.  

QT: It’s just crazy.  

JD: He was remarkably in tune with the Reagan era. That is when he really rose to  position over there in New York. By following the new conservative trend of  Ronald Reagan. A lot of people don’t like my saying that, but it is true.  

QT: It’s true. It is absolutely true. I was there! I watched him make those moves.

Originally published in Konch, Fall Issue, October 14, 2020

(l-r, Calvin C. Hernton, Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, Quincy Troupe, photo by Eugene B. Redmond c. 1981)

UNCLE SAM PLAYS THE TRUMP CARD

UNCLE SAM PLAYS THE TRUMP CARD

by Justin Desmangles

“'Tis dangerous to take a cold, to sleep, to drink; but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety. The purpose you undertake is dangerous, the friends you have named uncertain, the time itself unsorted, and your whole plot too light for the counterpoise of so great an opposition.” – Hotspur, Henry IV, Act 2 Scene 3, William Shakespeare

“This is NOT a time for penny-pinching or horse trading on the Hill.” – White House economic advisor Peter Navarro, February 23, 2020, memo to the President warning of an impending 2 million deaths in the U.S. from corona virus.

I had been wondering what they dug out of Reinhard Heydrich’s grave last December; I guess this virus may have been it! Having just read The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick’s dystopian sci-fi masterpiece in which the Nazis emerge as victors of World War II, the name sounded familiar. In the novel, set in the Bay Area, Dick places Heydrich quite high in the order of things, as well he would have been had he not been assassinated by Czech Resistance fighters. The real Reinhard Heydrich was the principal designer of the proposed “final solution” as well as the organizer of Kristallnacht. A man whose infamous cruelty was so severe it was both feared and admired by his Nazi peers, he was also rumored to have Jewish ancestry. Contemporary admiration for his ideas led his followers to resort to grave robbing at the end of last year. Who is to say towards what ritual purpose these actions may have been put? Among certain secret societies, fraternal orders, even wealthy occultists, there would be a great demand for such a substance as previously contained in that grave. Haven’t heard a lot from Skull and Bones at Yale lately. Maybe some of the folks in the Federalist Society could find some Johnnie Walker for a round of congratulations? They can send the bill to A.L.E.C., Americans for Prosperity, or maybe Freedom Works. I am sure Dick Armey’s pension can handle it.

Nazi intellectuals and law makers had great admiration for American domestic policies concerning race and ideas of racial hygiene and were not shy about saying so prior to the U.S. entering the war (see Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, James Q. Whitman, Princeton University Press, 2017). They, too, looked out at the world and saw “shithole countries,” to quote Donald Trump, rather than places where people lived. Forced sterilization of undesirables was especially attractive to them, a policy which remained active in the United States well into the 1970s. The factory-like settings in which Germany would implement their version of these strategies resemble nothing so much as their American cousins in the prison system. Replete with often lethal, illegal medical experimentation on prisoners. Had Heydrich lived to ascend to Germany’s Chancellorship, as many believed he would, I am sure he would have approved of the Trump-Pence junta and its handling of the coronavirus thus far. Particularly the lines of class, race, ethnicity, education and income levels so clearly demarcated by its lethality. To put it country-simple, the right people are dying.

Dean Baquet would probably be the last to admit it, right after David Remnick, but a great many of their wealthiest readers scan headlines like “BLACK AMERICANS BEAR THE BRUNT AS VIRUS SPREADS” (lead story, front page, The New York Times, April 8, 2020) and breathe a quiet hallelujah. The impulse leading toward the genocide of non-white people in the Americas is not only alive and well, it is thriving and growing in strength. Though that impulse began many centuries ago, too many of its key features are with us today in stark and undeniable ways. The elaborate construction of concentration camps along the southern border, tens of thousands of children being held at subsistence level, barely alive, the violent breaking apart of their families as public spectacle. All of these details would show themselves as familiar to any serious student of the history of these continents north and south, going back to the earliest settlements by Spanish, French, Portuguese and English colonists. Their mirror images in the present become obscured only by the fact that collectively we put those events in a sentimental, seductive past, rather than accepting their hideous, grotesque reflection of now. Our greatest palliative in the process of this un-remembering, dismembering today has been access to the narcotizing excesses of so-called media. As the poet Bob Kaufman accurately reported in his now classic “Heavy Water Blues”, “Television, america’s ultimate relief, from the indian disturbance.” Can the Navajo draw such a distinction with its near past? Can any indigenous tribe that has survived unto the 21^st century? Surely the rampantly rising infection rates among immigrant workers in Wisconsin’s meat processing plants reveal the centuries old motive for this violence.

Cut to commercial. Real Uncle Tom scene, Ben Carson singing Water Boy on a small riser at the end of dark room under a single spotlight, a tiny scrim behind him on which is projected a waving confederate flag.

Voice over: Stop the war of northern aggression, give generously to the Strom Thurmond Foundation to End Miscegenation.

Fade-to-black

Camera zooms out to reveal a Heidi–type character, smiling, arms extended a la Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, twirling atop green rolling hills.

Voice over: Yearning to return to her regular pogroming, Erica bought futures in pork bellies last week. She has faith in Tyson Foods and so can you.

Next we see the fat winking face of Mitch McConnell fill the screen like so much pink gelatin, “With so many channels to choose from, why have one point of view?”

And now back to our regular pogroming . . .

The American presidency has always existed in moral twilight. Presidents lie, it is important that they do so in order to keep their job. Even those who audition for the role often start by telling a lot of lies in public to see how much traction they can gain coming into the race. No president as far as we know has lied as much as Donald Trump. His bilious regurgitation of insults, exaggerations, half-truths and outright deceptions is unparalleled by any measure, save for his heroes in professional wrestling. Rowdy Roddy Piper, indeed. But I’ll tell one thing he is not lying about, the number of Federal judges he has appointed to the bench. Other than Ronald Reagan, no president has seated more of these immeasurably powerful lifetime appointments. This extraordinary ordinary fact is a vivid example of what can go wrong when a country stops paying attention. A lot of America’s self-appointed intelligentsia at the papers-of-record and the jibber-jabber-jaws of cable news have taken porn stars, errant penises, and illicit payoffs to be more worthy of their commentary than federal judges. Charismatic advertising, you know. Because as long the news-gathering model for reporting is based on advertising revenue, they will continue to do so. Beguiling and bewildering their audiences for the cheap thrill of pretending they are the monsters they so despise. The desire for power among those who don’t have it and the misconceptions that brings is more haunting than the Ghost of Christmas Past but with much less conscience.

We interrupt this pogrom with a special news bulletin. Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a presumed death by suicide, was discovered impersonating Elvis as a contestant in a south Florida karaoke bar. Claiming to be the winner of the contest when detained by local officials, Mr. Epstein reportedly said that he was without an agent and willing to work at scale.

Next on Fox, Kitten on a Hot Mic, Becky Misandric spews mutilated Marxism before uncorking wine bottles with her teeth, a trick she learned at Socialist summer camp in the hills of Berkeley, California.

The Confederacy was a declared enemy of the United States. Maybe that is the message from these crowds flying Stars and Bars, carrying big guns and screaming that the country be re-opened. They remind me of the religious flagellants from an earlier plague, some even have the same taste in headgear (see Francisco de Goya’s painting A Procession of Flagellants.) These masochistic zealots were famously portrayed by Ingmar Bergman in his icy tour-de-force The Seventh Seal, a meditation on God’s silence in the face of atrocities. Like the new breed of flagellants, they believed if they got the whipping over with, inflicting violence on themselves and others, their God might show them some mercy. Last I checked, God don’t let you pick your switch, but that’s them. People who laugh at the malapropisms and misspellings of these new flagellants do so at their own peril. It’s not funny. Fascist authoritarian governments have always had a tenuous relation with these kind of rabble-rousing provocateurs, they are as necessary to white supremacist terror as clean sheets are to the Klan. It can all go to Hell of course when these people mess-up, kill, or intimidate the wrong person. They’re largely bunglers who have been known to bite the hand that feeds off at the elbow, sometimes even turning their former leaders upside down with entrails hanging out. The trouble in dealing with these death cult ecstatics is tell-them-off too well and they may like you just too much. As has been seen at these demonstrations, they’re just getting riled up, spoiling for the fight and terrorism that comes later. But why would a country allow people carrying guns to fly the flag of its declared enemy in front of state houses and government buildings?

The only good __________ is a dead ___________. You’re an American, so you can fill in the blanks with live ammunition.

Advertising psychology plays its experienced role as dramaturge, the golden rule being that of tricking the customer about the product. Why not be Jekyll when you can play Hyde and seek on the weekend? Political theater? The governor of California, a thespian by choice, has communicated far more effectively for having partnered with a professional actress. Don Jr.’s main squeeze is the governor’s ex-wife, also trained in the theater arts. Her beaux has been performing much better on camera since she stepped in the picture, he even passes as an author on Amazon. Donald Trump for his part continues the traditions of Vaudeville. Still visible in the popular culture are the techniques of the traveling tent shows of the 19th century. There’s Skip Gates swabbing celebrity DNA and telling them they were Cleopatra. Trump’s rebarbative motifs are borrowed from the top-ten hits of European fascism. Vituperative, cruel, heartless, the words come easy. Venom lolls off the tongue, joining a river of bile. His imperious gaze reflecting fits of pique that his authority be questioned at all. Standing at the lectern with the world chomping at the bit, ready to restore ratings with the latest bilge. Having sewn chaos in the garden of democracy, he now reaps a harvest in the Electoral College. Women vote for him, their sons admire him, even grandpa’s got his blood up again. “Dad called a man he didn’t know a nigger at the grocery store in front of a security guard and the security guard laughed!”

Much in the style of Don Rickles, Trump performs the politics of the 19th century too, an era of obsession among his underwriters at the corporate level. “Those damn Civil War amendments, 13 and 14, you heard of them, well get rid of them!”

Mass incarceration of African-Americans is re-enslavement, a process beginning in the immediate wake of the emancipation provided by the 13^th amendment (see Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II Anchor Books, 2008). As I have written elsewhere in this magazine (“Just Us and Jeff Sessions”, Konch, Spring Issue 2018) the elimination of the 14^th amendment’s guarantees of citizenship and voting rights is the center piece of the agenda promoted by the Trump administration’s first Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his former aide, now presidential advisor, Stephen Miller. Lee Atwater would have been proud of these guys. American liberal and progressive political thinkers often begin with the premise that the state and its authority have a moral and ethical right to exist. The murder of innocent blacks at the hands of police is viewed with the ironic distance of a malfunction in an otherwise purring engine that works for everybody. Drive it long enough and it will take you where you want to go, local and express.  But the murder and destruction of non-white people by state authority is not an accident that calls for a tune-up, it is an essential constituent of American life. A set of religious rites and rituals that inform long standing traditions of Western domination. As Susan Sontag has famously written, “The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al, don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.” (“What's Happening to America?” Partisan Review, 1967).

Front page, above the fold, a lead item, two of the four journalists who published the aforementioned New York Times piece followed up on May 11, 2020 with “Questions of Bias in Virus Care Haunt Mourning Black Families.” Above the headline is an image of the empty hall of a high school in northern Germany, its doors flung open to better circulate the air free of viruses. The article details the impact of anti-black racism on American public and private health care systems and their long history of abuse, neglect, illegal experimentation, and premature death contextualizing our moment of genocide. The acceleration of African American deaths due to coronavirus infection has been reported on in the European press as well, “African Americans have died at a rate of 50.3 per 100,000 people, compared with 20.7 for whites, 22.9 for Latinos and 22.7 for Asian Americans. More than 20,000 African Americans – about one in 2,000 of the entire black population in the U.S. have died of the disease,” (“Black Americans Dying of Covid-19 at Three Times the Rate of White People”, The Guardian, May 20, 2020).

Can we talk about those concentration camps now?

Of course collecting data is a problem, some would say the problem. As Althea Maybank, chief equity officer at the American Medical Association, has made clear, “We’re not collecting the stats on race and ethnicity we desperately need,” reminding us that “Fewer than a dozen states have published data on the race and ethnic patterns of the pandemic,”(“The Pandemic’s Missing Data”, New York Times, April 8, 2020). In other words the numbers reported above by The Guardian are likely much higher.

More on that missing data question. In January of this year the National Archives announced that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was free to destroy documents related to the sexual abuse and death of undocumented immigrants. Included also are detainee’s complaints detailing violations of their human rights. This maneuver on the part of the National Archives also extends itself to the destruction of records by the Department of the Interior, dealing with such subjects as endangered species, unsafe drinking water, even domestic oil exploration.

Heydrich and his admirers have done themselves proud. As Upton Sinclair would say, it’s a jungle out there.

This essay was composed on May 24, 2020 and first published June 10, 2020 in Konch 

C.D. Wright's Letter to Ishmael Reed Seeking Employment at Before Columbus Foundation, August 28, 1979

Dear Ishmael Reed,

I sold the printing equipment in July and moved myself and the Lost Roads inventory to SF this month. Since I have been here I’ve had the flu, the blues, the hives, and a stopped up head. Now that’s all clearing up and I am ready to go back on line, finish my manuscript, continue with Frank’s work, and with Lost Roads, as well as, with some kind of employment. The latter being why I am writing to you. While I am aware the job I aspire to probably doesn’t exist, I’m still applying. As the publisher/editor and sole staff member of Lost Roads I’ve acquired some skills I’d like to put to use: I’ve learned the fundamentals of offset printing, done the typesetting, layout, camera work, stripping, plate burning, design, type and paper selection and ordering, silkscreening; coordinated distribution, edited manuscripts, handled correspondence, written grants, filled out legal forms, tax forms, done the mailing and the billing, etc., etc. I’ve spent my free time perusing the California literary scene, and the only one that makes any damn sense to me is the activity around Before Columbus, Y’bird, and Reed, Cannon and Johnson. With all those irons in the fire – even if all the printing and design work is jobbed out – you still have to maintain some semblance of a staff. Don’t you? If not maybe you have a lead or two for me. After three years as a grad assistant, two years on a grant, and a year running LR I am spoiled – I just don’t want to work for a fool. I want to work for who I want to work for – else I just don’t care what happens. I go to pot.

I have a standard resume if you want to see it.

And I have time at your convenience if you could talk to me about this.

I move into an apt this weekend but won’t have a phone for a few weeks. A message can be left for me at 552-5464 or a card at the LR p.o. would do. Meanwhile I may keep trying to reach you at Before Columbus.

My thanks, appreciation, the best,

CD

CD Wright

cc/cdw

Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination (July 2, 2017)

(July 2, 2017)

http://kdvs.ucdavis.edu/archives/2017-07-02_4530_320kbps.mp3

This afternoon in the 5 o'clock hour, I am joined by Vaughn Rasberry for a discussion of his book, Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination

Vaughn Rasberry studies African American and twenteth-century American literature, literature of the African Diaspora, postcolonial theory, and philosophical theories of modernity. In 2016, Harvard University Press published his first book, Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination, recipient of the American Political Science Association's 2017 Ralph Bunche Award ("awarded annually for the best scholarly work in political science published in the previous calendar year on ethnic and cultural pluralism.") His book questions the notion that desegregation prompted African American writers and activists to acquiesce in the normative claims of postwar liberalism. Challenging accounts that portray black cultural workers in various postures of reaction to larger forces--namely U.S. liberalism or Soviet communism--his project argues instead that many writers were involved in a complex national and global dialogue with totalitarianism, a defining discourse of the twentieth century.

During World War II and the Cold War, his book shows, the United States government conscripted African Americans into the fight against Nazism and Stalinism. An array of black writers, however, deflected the appeals of liberalism and its anti-totalitarian propaganda in the service of decolonization. Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, C. L. R. James, John A. Williams, and others remained skeptical that totalitarian servitude and democratic liberty stood in stark opposition. Their skepticism, Race and the Totalitarian Centurycontends, allowed them to formulate an independent perspective that reimagined the anti-fascist, anti-communist narrative through the lens of racial injustice, with the United States as a tyrannical force in the Third World but also as an ironic agent of Asian and African independence.

His article, "'Now Describing You': James Baldwin and Cold War Liberalism," appears in an edited volume titled James Baldwin: America and Beyond (University of Michigan Press, 2011). A review essay, "Black Cultural Politics at the End of History," appears in the winter 2012 issue of American Literary History. An article, "Invoking Totalitarianism: Liberal Democracy versus the Global Jihad in Boualem Sansal's The German Mujahid," appears in the spring 2014 special issue of Novel: a Forum on Fiction. In 2015, he published a book chapter, "JFK and the Global Anticolonial Movement," in The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy. He has another book chapter, "The 'Lost' Years or a 'Decade of Progress'? African American Writers and the Second World War," published in A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).  

For Black History Month, he published an op-ed essay, "The Shape of African American Geopolitics," in Al Jazeera English. 

An Annenberg Faculty Fellow at Stanford (2012-14), he has also received fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

Vaughn also teaches in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and the programs in Modern Thought and Literature, African and African American Studies, and American Studies. 

Sunday 7/02/2017 @ 3:00PM - 6:00PM

< < PAST PLAYLISTSUPCOMING PLAYLISTS > >

Artist	Song	Album	Label	Comments
Sonny Stitt	The String	Only the Blues	Verve	October 11, 1957
Ben Webster	Jive at Six	King of the Tenors	Verve	December 8, 1953
Bud Powell	Bud's Bubble	Bud Powell Trio	Royal Roost	January 10, 1947
Bud Powell	Off Minor	Bud Powell Trio	Royal Roost	January 10, 1947
AIRBREAK
Gigi Gryce	Nica's Tempo	Gigi Gryce Quartet And Orchestra	Savoy	October 15, 1955
Miles Davis	Swing Spring	Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants	Prestige	December 24, 1954
Thelonious Monk	Skippy (alternate take)	More Genius Of Thelonious Monk	Blue Note - Japan	May 30, 1952
Thelonious Monk	Hornin' In (alternate take)	More Genius Of Thelonious Monk	Blue Note - Japan	May 30, 1952
AIRBREAK
Sarah Vaughan	I'm Glad There Is You	Sarah Vaughan	EmArcy	December 16, 1954
Sarah Vaughan	You're Not the Kind	Sarah Vaughan	EmArcy	December 16, 1954
Sonny Clark	I Didn't Know What Time It Was	Sonny Clark Trio	Blue Note	October 13, 1957
Sonny Clark	Little Sonny	Sonny Clark Quintets	Blue Note - Japan	December 8, 1957
Betty Carter	I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire	The Modern Sound of Betty Carter	ABC-Paramount	August 1960
Betty Carter	Remember	The Modern Sound of Betty Carter	ABC-Paramount	August 1960
AIRBREAK
Barry Harris	I Didn't Know What Time It Was	Newer Than New	Riverside	September 28, 1961
Barry Harris	Make Haste	Newer Than New	Riverside	September 28, 1961
Kenny Dorham	Beautiful Love	Matador	United Artists	April 15, 1962
Kenny Dorham	Prelude	Matador	United Artists	April 15, 1962
Carmen McRae	If You Could See Me Now	Bittersweet	Focus	c. 1964
Carmen McRae	Here's That Rainy Day	Bittersweet	Focus	c. 1964
AIRBREAK
Ted Curson	Antibes	Plenty of Horn	Old Town	April 11, 1961
Vaughn Rasberry in Conversation with Justin Desmangles	Vaughn Rasberry in Conversation with Justin Desmangles	Vaughn Rasberry in Conversation with Justin Desmangles	Vaughn Rasberry in Conversation with Justin Desmangles	Vaughn Rasberry in Conversation with Justin Desmangles
Pierre Dørge and Walt Dickerson	Tai-Gong	Landscape With Open Door	SteepleChase	c. 1979

Just Us and Jeff Sessions: Evidence

Just Us and Jeff Sessions: Evidence

by Justin Desmangles

"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." ~ Frederick Douglass, If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress (1857)

In February of 2007 I was arrested for crimes that I did not commit. Despite my innocence, I was held for seven weeks at San Francisco County Jail - San Bruno, waiting for a bail hearing. The District Attorney’s office made an offer. They would dismiss the felony charges against me in exchange for a guilty plea to a misdemeanor, sending me back to jail for the year. There was one problem, I wasn’t guilty of anything. Despite the fact that a felony conviction would lead to a lengthy prison sentence, I refused the D.A.’s offer and spent the next ten months fighting my case. It destroyed my life, but I had my freedom in the end.

Despite what one sees on television and in the movies, juried criminal trials are rare in America. Typically, a person arrested will be charged with the maximum penalties available to the arresting officer. A simple jay-walking could be blown-up to obstructing traffic, adjusting your arms while handcuffed could become resisting arrest. Police always exaggerate far beyond the reality of the circumstances they encounter when detaining someone. Making a case for the D.A. to easily win is part of their job, they believe, and D.A.’s rarely if ever lose.

Here’s how it works. The police ramp-up accusations of wrong-doing that are so egregious, carrying such intimidating punishments, that the D.A. will offer a plea bargain somewhere in the middle. Most defendants, not all but most, take the plea bargain as commonsense, being instructed to do so as they often are by legal counsel. My decision to fight for my freedom is almost unheard of in the contemporary criminal-justice system, with success falling below single digit percentiles.

Whether you are for or against mass incarceration of Blacks and Latinos, the factors leading to it are invariably the same, racial profiling, prosecutorial misconduct, and disproportionate sentencing. There is also a profit motive to keeping millions of Blacks and Latinos locked up, which I will get into a bit later in this essay.

Racial profiling has all but been legalized by directives emerging from the Justice Department under Jeff Sessions, endorsed heartily by Donald Trump, aided and abetted by a market-driven U.S. culture industry. The flames of irrational fear are continuously being fanned high by official statements coming from federal, state, and local law enforcement around the country. Mainstream film and television broadcasting throw gasoline on that same fire by surreptitiously presenting images of Blacks, Latinos, and increasingly Muslims, as those of virulent criminals. It is important here to remember that Jeff Sessions was one the earliest and most powerful supporters of Trump’s bid for the presidency, with one of Trump’s earliest institutional endorsements coming from the Fraternal Order of Police.

Sessions and the F.O.P. had a long wish list beginning January 20, 2017, and they expected results. The F.O.P. went so far as to issue a set of policy directives to the incoming administration the previous month in the form of a press release titled The First 100 Days. Despite whatever nonsense corporate news has drummed-up about dissention between Trump and Sessions, they’ve been getting those wishes fulfilled.

Trump has enjoyed playing the role of political Santa Claus with many of the most backward and criminal money-men in the Republican Party, rolling back and rescinding every Obama era rule and regulation possible.

Here are a few examples. In late February, 2017, Sessions directed the Justice Department to end Federal oversight of America’s police departments proven to have internal cultures of racial prejudice and abuse. The strategy had been implemented by the Obama administration to fight racial profiling and hold violent officers accountable. This in the wake of innumerable examples of brutality and murder that had gone unpunished. That same week, Sessions dropped any objections on the part of the Justice Department to a Texas voter-identification law that had been understood by the Obama administration as an unconstitutional violation of voting rights. That Texas law had been crafted in 2011 by the Republican Party to further negate the potential votes of Blacks and Latinos, as well as left-leaning young people, in their state. The Obama administration had been pursuing the case against Texas since 2013. As the New York Times correctly observed that month, “Under the Trump administration, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department is expected to undergo the most severe shift in philosophy of any other section under the Trump administration, and Mr. Sessions appears to be quickly meeting those expectations.”

By the second week of March in 2017, Sessions had asked forty-six Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys in the Justice Department to resign. At the end of that same month, Sessions released a memo directing all those in the Department to immediately review activities and investigations “including collaborative investigations and prosecutions, grant making, technical assistance and training, compliance reviews, existing or contemplated consent decrees, and task force participation” to verify that they were in compliance with the Trump administration. The review of consent decrees was specifically meant to derail Federal investigations of existing police corruption, specifically in Chicago and Baltimore.

Returning to the aforementioned question of minimum sentencing and the radical expansion of the prison population as a result, it should be remembered that it was Bill Clinton who championed such measures well over a decade previously. In his administration’s capitulation to the so-called Gingrich Revolution, Clinton sponsored the Crime Omnibus Bill, subsequently incarcerating more Blacks and Latinos than the previous two presidents, Reagan and Bush, combined. During his wife’s second failed bid for the White House, the former president would apologize for the insistence on minimum sentencing, underlining it as a mistake and the root cause of racially biased mass incarceration. The Obama administration had worked to end the rules that bound judges to impose such draconian measures, as they had indeed proved to be invariably racist.

By May of 2017, Sessions was directing Federal prosecutors to seek the maximum sentence possible in all cases, charging defendants with the most severe crimes available to their circumstances, overturning the Obama administration’s previous directives. That July, Sessions reversed yet another Obama era rule, dramatically reinstating property seizures, such as cars and money, of those accused or suspected of a crime, even if the charges did not necessarily end in a conviction. Later that month, Trump told police gathered in Long Island for a speech on illegal immigration not to worry about injuring suspects during an arrest.

By the end of summer, Sessions, with Trump’s support, was redirecting the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to investigate race-based preferences in college admissions. Preferences he viewed as possibly criminal. That September, Sessions defended far-right activists, including Neo-Nazis, as exercising free-speech as protected by the constitution. Before the year was out, Sessions would revoke 25 legal guidance documents used by the Department of Justice since 1975, saying they provoked “confusion.” Just before New Year’s Day, Sessions would reopen the legal doors to potentially enfranchise debtor’s prisons nationally for the poor and indigent.

All of which brings us to today. At the end of February this year, the Supreme Court reversed an earlier 9^th Circuit Court ruling, Jennings v. Rodriguez, thus making it legal to detain immigrants indefinitely. This decision followed hot-on-the-heels of Sessions abolishment of an Obama administration rule barring Federal contracting with the private prison industry. It is no secret that this these for-profit private prisons are the main artery through which ICE channels those it detains. Many thousands of those detained are children, all are kept in deplorable conditions with little of the oversight one finds in government-run facilities. The private-prison industries are also a major source of funding for Republican candidates throughout the country.

As if to open the doors further for this money-making venture disguised as law-and-order, in early March, Sessions made a rare visit to California’s capitol, Sacramento, to announce litigation against the state’s “sanctuary cities.” Sessions delivered his remarks at the 26^th annual Law Enforcement Legislative Day hosted by the California Peace Officers' Association, saying “California, we have a problem. A series of actions and events has occurred that directly and adversely impact the work of our federal officers. For example, the mayor of Oakland (Libby Schaaf) has been actively seeking to help illegal aliens avoid apprehension by ICE. Her actions support those who flout our laws and boldly validate the illegality. There's no other way to interpret her remarks. To make matters worse, the elected Lieutenant Governor (Gavin Newsome) of this state praised her for doing so. Bragging about and encouraging the obstruction of our law enforcement and the law is an embarrassment to this proud and important state. . . . In recent years, California has enacted a number of laws designed to intentionally obstruct the work of our sworn immigration enforcement officers--to intentionally use every power it has to undermine duly-established immigration law in America. . . . California has also claimed the authority to inspect facilities where ICE holds people in custody.”

Trump followed up soon after, using his weekly address to all but declare war on California, imploring congress to cut-off Federal dollars funding any municipality that supports “sanctuary” policies for immigrants. Trump stated unequivocally, “The State of California is sheltering dangerous criminals in a brazen and lawless attack on our Constitutional system of government.  Every state in our Union is subject to the laws and Constitution of the United States – including California.  Yet California’s leaders are in open defiance of federal law. They don’t care about crime. They don’t care about death and killings. They don’t care about robberies. They don’t care about the kind of things that you and I care about.”

Soon after, an official spokesman for ICE in California, James Schwab, resigned in protest, citing both Sessions and Trump’s exaggerations of the threats posed by immigrants in California. Speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle, Schwab said, “I quit because I didn’t want to perpetuate misleading facts. I asked them to change the information. I told them that the information was wrong, they asked me to deflect, and I didn’t agree with that. Then I took some time, and I quit.”

While the threat of so-called illegal immigration to the United States has most certainly been exaggerated by both Sessions and Trump, their very real threats to California cannot be overstated.  Unlike the Eastern states, or even those of the Mid-West and South, California was never entirely settled. These new threats are attempts to do just that in classic circle-the-wagons settler fashion. In point of fact, the 19^th century was all but half-way over before California even joined the Union. Its status within the Republic has always occupied both the center and the absolute margins, socially, politically, economically, culturally. The Trump-Sessions junta in American politics should not only be supremely resisted, it should be destroyed. California is the only state with the power to do so with a democratic super-majority, leading the nation as it has in the past.

As it stands, another Obama policy upended by Trump at the behest of the F.O.P. and enthusiastically embraced by Sessions, is the continued arming of local police forces with military-grade arms and equipment. Gifts from Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. As all of the above changes continue unabated, it will not be long before we see more and more of this type of equipment being deployed by local police forces, as we did in Ferguson, MO. and Baltimore, MD.

ICE and the Justice Department are spoiling for a fight, particularly in Oakland, California and the greater Bay Area, as they made excruciatingly clear in the early weeks of March, 2018.

In the late 1940’s, the jazz standard, Just You, Just Me, was transformed by Thelonious Monk, becoming the original composition Just Us, later titled Justice, and finally known as Evidence. I think he had a point. Without evidence there will be no justice, and without either, it will stay just us, and if we’re not careful, each one of us will be left saying “just me.”

(this essay was originally published March 22, 2018 in Konch)