the Only Constant

the Only Constant

A couple of months ago one Rev. Joseph Lowery delivered the Benediction quoted bellow following the inauguration of President Barack Obama:

'Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. Say Amen'......"

While I would note that he may rightly be charged with usurping a ceremonious act, a ‘benediction’ bracketed with pious clauses- as a soap box for a political agenda; others would charge him differently.  One blogger went so far as to say the following:

Black is NOT asked to get in the back you victim card playing ass. Obama is half black, HE WAS JUST ELECTED PRESIDENT. The Secretary of State under George Bush was BLACK. Colin Powell... BLACK. Oprah Winfrey, one of the richest people IN THE WORLD- BLACK. NEWSFLASH creep, being black is not what it once was, time for Whitey bashing is OVER.

"White" did, I am sure, vote the same as you EN MASSE in this last election Rev. Lowery. This kind of APPROVED talk is NOT moving American forward. You know he had to get this benediction approved.....not to mention the crowd approving it clearly through their raised voices. Disturbing.
                                                                     - Jenn of the Jungle

Wow.  There are a good number of curiosities brought up by this overly capitalized epithet.  First, our blogger does not believe that Black is “asked to get in back”.  We can hope that Jenn has a sense of metaphor and apprehends the use thereof in this case.  If not we’ve identified half of her problem interpreting the statements made.  But because she seems to believe that Black is not asked toward the metaphorical social back we can give her one big not a fucking racist point.  Why?  Because this generally indicates that neither does she ask darkie to get in their place nor do other whites feel alright about doing so in her company.  Good job.

Immediately following this she slips up a bit.  Why is Obama half Black and Colin Powell just plain Black.  Colin ain’t exactly Mr. Nubia.  Just the inference of ‘half black-hood’ is a throw back to the biologically based racial construct- see also Eugenics.  ‘Fraid we’re gonna have to take back that not a flaming racist point.  Sorry Jenn.  But hey, at an even zero you’re still in the black.

The primary issue at hand here is really the idea that things have changed; that we’re not like that anymore.    Sadly not everything has changed for the better.  As a matter of fact if one were to take all of the slave narratives available, and the share cropper narratives, Southern and Appalachian folk music,  American Black novels, poetry of the “Harlem Renaissance”, motor city blues all the way to modern day Jessica Care Moore, Saul Williams and Taalam Acey what vision of change would be generated?  Well I once had a history teacher, an older White woman in a predominantly Black very poor school, who had done just that.  She just took excerpts from source material like that listed above to make the case that nothing had really gotten much better for Black people in the United Sates.  I’ve grown up my whole life on the crackly moaning of black people against twanging banjos and howling Hammond organs.  The stories don’t change much overall.  In many ways they describe a situation that gets steadily worse.

It should considered that slaves are an investment which must be taken care of and share croppers are cheap and replaceable.  Most Black people live in geographic and social situations that are deeply rooted in the company store model, and have no visible path to freedom.  The Blacks that most white people get to interact with, like Obama, do not come from Black communities, or like many others they come from a split cultural background giving them a broader outlook, resource base and some social edge.  Hence, we have the perpetuation of the house nigger model.  The few like Oprah Winfrey do not in the slightest represent the situation of Black people or the opportunity available to them.  The idea that every Black person can work in entertainment, virtually the only legal ‘out’ Blacks are readily given access to, is preposterous and insulting.  When the history of Blacks in entertainment and even the modern reality are closely examined we do not see many examples of real liberation from circumstance coming from that route.  What we see is self-abuse and self-deprecation for the pleasure of the spectatorial public.   

The drug scene has been disproportionately cruel to people of color in the United States.  Blacks constitute fifty-four percent of the incarcerated population for drug related offenses while only representing thirteen percent of the overall population.  Anyone believing that this is because Blacks are more heavily involved in drug trafficking should go to a prison and take a poll of the people there who have ever seen the deck of a sea faring boat or flown an airplane.  There is no evidence to show that black are involved disproportionately in either the provision or consumption of illicit substances. 

The fire that Black folk have found themselves in has evoked a good deal of fond frying pan memories.  While the ways in which life has gotten better, ‘easier’ would be more apt , have a lot more to do with the ‘March of Progress’ than any actual decrease in overall social xenophobia.  Also, Blacks may enjoy sic a bit or reprieve from racial pressure due to the newly found whipping boys: Hispanics, Arabs and Muslim.

The idea that one can look at the outliers alone to plot a development in the access that Blacks also yields very little fruit.  There were Black elected officials in the U.S. while there were still slaves (in the formal sense) picking cotton all over the South.  The U.S. already had a rich history of Black scientists and engineers well before any sit ins were held at Woolworth’s.  Thurgood Marshal was sitting on the Supreme Court while Stockely Carmichael was being thrown in jail again and again for trying to register Blacks to vote.  It is not a part of the mechanics of racism to make an airtight seal around all things of color.  Racism is a generalized net.  It’s functions are a mass pressure not at all a certain containment.  There have always been Blacks who received treatment as equal to Whites.  There is even a word for it, tubaab or toubab- one who makes White Mans money.  These days the term is used more loosely to denote anyone from an African born White to a non-African born Black or someone who doesn’t speak the local language.  A tubaab was at one point a Black African who was hired on to be a part of a slaving operation.  On the other side of the Middle Passage another term developed “house nigger”.  While to be called a house nigger holds similar connotations as being called a tubaab the position itself does not actually imply the direction of ones loyalties or the caliber of ones moral fiber.  There were certainly cases of slave rebellions in which house niggers were involved.  The term implies merely that one is fairer of skin and works in the big house (usually a white one).  Sound like anyone we know.

In general, though, house niggers were treated favorably and rewarded for any perceived loyalty to the master.  So, many times the house niggers would, as best as we can see from history, have much greater loyalties to their captors than field niggers.  The relevance here is that we have arrived at a situation wherein Jenn of the Jungle would have us make a judgment on the socio-economic access available to all Blacks based on the prestige of the most aggrandized house niggers.  Well that’s just damn insulting.

The life of Blacks, the substantial nature thereof, is not a secret.  It is expressed which great eloquence by well known artists.  James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, Taj Mahal, Muddy Waters, Bell Hooks, and Boots Riley are some of my favorites.  There is nothing about the plight of Blacks that has been unique.  When I first read of the lives of the poor folk of Lebanon in the intimate prose of Gibran and the way in which the poor preyed upon each other, upon themselves, I saw my own people.  Again in reading about the peoples struggles in the Black Hills, in County Cork, in Okinawa, in the West Bank I have found that there is nothing that is unique about the dispossession of Blacks.  And there is nothing about dispossession that is getting any better.

-the Lorax