The Shea-Butter Boogie

Against the new Pork Chop Intellectuals of the Digital Age

Porkchop pseudo-intellectualism has been a huge problem in Black America for decades. In fact, in 1967 (the very year I was born) Harold Cruse essentially complained about the exact same thing in an entire book, entitled The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. A few passages stand out:

“(Black writers) are not getting down to the facts of class factors in our struggle for freedom because they are not telling the truth about whose freedom we are fighting for and who is going to do what with whose freedom once ‘we’ get it…They are lost sheep bleating to the God of Freedom for their deliverance…(T)hey analyze nothing and clarify less and less and heap confusion on top of confusion.”

“It is…an unfortunate development in Negro life that political interracialism has become so doctrinaire that certain nationalistic Negroes have been forced to resort to race hate in order to block out the negative effect of interracialism on ethnic consciousness. All race hate is self-defeating in the long run because it distorts the critical faculties.”

Above all, this one passage seems to stand out:

“The special role of the Negro intellectual is a cultural one. He should take to the rostrum and assail the stultifying blight of the commercially depraved white middle-class who has poisoned the structural roots of the American ethos and transformed the American people into a nation of intellectual dolts. He should explain the economic and institutional causes of this American cultural depravity. He should tell Black America how and why Negroes are trapped in this cultural degeneracy, and how it has dehumanized their essential identity, squeezed the lifeblood of their inherited cultural ingredients out of them, and then relegated them to the cultural slums.”

The last passage, in which Cruse references “cultural slums,” is prescient. One has to be brutally honest here in assessing precisely what has happened to Black American culture since 1967. Fifty-six years ago there still existed a Black Arts Movement (mostly a bohemian/intellectual movement) as well as a general flourishing of Black music at that time in all genres, and the Black cultural arbiters from that very year today read like a Who’s Who of African American legends (Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Ike and Tina Turner, Nina Simone, Booker T and the MGs, Aretha Franklin, Lena Horne, Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, Louis Armstrong (who had a hit at the time), Coleman Hawkins, Mary Lou Williams, Ben Webster, John Coltrane (who died that year), Alice Coltrane, Duke Ellington (still performing and deep into writing his Religious Suites), Amiri Baraka, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed (The Freelance Pallbearers came out that year), James Baldwin, John Oliver Killens, David Henderson, Calvin Hernton, John A. Williams (“The Man Who Cried I Am”), Mari Evans, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker Alexander (“Jubilee”) Joe Jordan, Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake (whose own musical comeback in ragtime was just a couple years away). After looking at this impressive (and very incomplete) cultural roster for 1967, one has to wonder just what in the hell Harold Cruse was bellyaching about when he wrote the above lines.

But one also has to keep in mind that Cruse was born in 1915 (he died in 2006) and, in addition to having studied extensively the history of American culture (from a New York perspective, chiefly Harlem) had a deep memory of the New York cultural scene stretching back at least to the Great Depression. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was, in a nutshell, the writing on the wall for the late Sixties, warning Black America of yet another impending (and far worse) “cultural slum” that the American white cultural elite was going to box them into.

And here we are in 2023. If it were at all possible to take a time machine back to the “cultural slums” of 1967, Black American culture today would look more like what it really is: some rotting dystopian hell-scape, far worse even than any Brazilian favela or Yemeni shanty-town. In fact it’s generally agreed upon these days that Black American culture is absolute TRASH.

Unfortunately, as one can see by clicking the above links, most of those declaiming the worthlessness of Black American (or Black Western) culture are themselves largely responsible for keeping Black culture in its current trashy state. They represent the more conservative wing of the Shea Butter Pork Chop “Intellectuals.” Of course they are not really intellectuals at all but a bunch of mid-shelf social media celebrities who’ve made a name for themselves gossiping (for the most part) about irrelevant shit, much of it having something to do with sex or some childish beef between one empty-headed “rapper” and another.

Politically speaking, it is rather hard to pin them down. On the far right of the spectrum you have the deranged and loony ankh-right, mostly male of course (some of them are so crazy they actually believe that child rape is something acceptable!!) — the most prominent of whom have found comfortable niches on social media flim-flamming gullible, credulous and (sadly) very ignorant black folk out of their hard-earned dollars to support the building of schools, museums, shopping malls, businesses, etc., that naturally fail to materialize on their opening date.

Further to the left, the Afropunk rejects (the true shea butter crowd), the vast majority of whom tend to come from the middle and upper-middle-classes, take up the majority of the “intellectual” space. Of course there are those “serious” public intellectuals such as Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates (whom many in Black America consider to be laughingstocks), Michael Eric Dyson and Marc Lamont Hill, the late bell hooks, etc. But to be honest, the latter crowd is largely a hangover of the Black intellectual failures of the 1990s-early 2000s. Today the “serious” intellectual space in Black America has become largely neglected in favor of Mickey Mouse bullshit masquerading as “serious” intellectual rigor, a perfect case in point being the “anti-racism” cottage industry (largely led by the Ibrahim Kendis of this world).

In reality, the “left” pork-chop intellectual crowd is largely female (and upper-middle-class) dominant, while the “right” team is largely petty-bourgeois or working class, male and tends to pal it up (during election time) with the MAGA monkeys. But one thing that both the left and the right pork-chop intellectuals have in common is their unhealthy fixation upon relationships, intellectual “rigor” be damned. (That last should be plainly obvious by their painfully bad grammar and awkward sentence structure.)

The “right” pork-chop side is dominated by Red-Pill and MGTOW ideology, predicated upon the premise that Western black women (chiefly American and Anglo-Saxon) put on too many airs and are running into the arms of some adolescent Hollywood fantasy hunk (or some decadent billionaire) over six feet tall. On the “left” side of the coin, the “swirlers” and part-time gay/lesbian (experimenting) folk have (on some occasions) taken to rejecting black men entirely as “dusty” and “trash.” In this author’s opinion, both are more or less right: none of these motherfuckers are sexy.

Why I Didn’t Like Zurich

…and didn’t even stick around to see Joyce’s tombstone

Okay. I have to admit that I do have one slightly positive thing to say about Zurich, which I had the misfortune of visiting last summer. It is a pretty little place, sort of. Not Paris pretty or even Venice pretty (judging from postcards and pics alone), but cute enough. Some pictures I took of the place last year can give you a rough idea of what I’m talking about.

Zurich, July 2022, taken by author

I didn’t see the whole town; I gave up after five hours or so and hopped on an early evening train back to Germany.

I wasn’t so much disgusted as I was simply bored and indifferent. Zurich struck me as a soulless place: smug, self-satisfied, insufferably upper-middle-class. After the third or fourth hour in that insanely expensive town (I didn’t bother renting out a hotel room for a night) I felt I’d seen enough for a lifetime.

Zurich reminded me of a grandiose shopping mall-slash-theme park for the well-heeled. From the moment I left the main station and entered the city I felt something was way off; the vibe felt wrong to me. I didn’t quite know what it was that felt wrong those first few minutes, but as I walked around the town, vainly hoping to lose myself in its somewhat vapid beauty for the next five or six hours, I found myself coming to the sad conclusion that Zurich was uninhabitable. And not just to live in Zurich (God forbid) but even for a fucking day-trip.

Zurich, July 2022. Taken by author.

Many of you reading this screed might vehemently disagree, which is perfectly fine. As the old saying goes, one man’s cesspool is another man’s paradise. If one is fine with spending 33 Swiss Francs (slightly over 34 euro in 2022) for a mediocre Syrian kebab that one can easily get in Munich or Hamburg for less than half that, be my guest. I haven’t seen enough of Munich to say anything about it (other than a lot of minstrelesque bullshit at the Hauptbahnhof last summer while escaping Zurich) — but I’ve seen enough of Hamburg to say that it is infinitely preferable to Zurich and just possibly, even Munich.

Hamburg, at least, is entertaining in a sick way. It has a huge lumpenproletariat that appears to have taken over the main bus station and at least one major park (from what I’ve observed), among other things. I’m not insinuating that alcoholics, junkies and prostitutes are something to be gawked at, as if they are walking minstrel shows. What I am saying is that in Hamburg there exists an entire spectrum of humanity that exists in some spaces there, usually out in the open around the Hauptbahnhof and in St. Georg; Hamburg’s being a seaport certainly contributes to this human spectrum. One sees all kinds of people in Hamburg; in Zurich, one merely sees a bunch of suburban schmucks drawn from every single corner of the globe, including Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.

Zurich’s racism seemed more low-key than the cruder East Berlin variety. Nonetheless, it certainly exists: it’s the “elegant” variety, where they look at you in a vaguely unpleasant way. One could easily dismiss these “racist” looks as imaginary, but when I was on the train riding from Schiffhausen (at the German-Swiss border) to Zurich I had the misfortune of locking eyes with some matchstick-sized, wannabe-supermodel-type of Asian descent. The woman saw the top third of my face (the other two-thirds shielded with a medical mask) and promptly winced in absolute disgust — thereupon setting the tone (so I felt) for what was to follow.*

Zurich, July 2022, photo by author

By my second hour in Zurich I was sweating profusely (it was extremely hot) and bored to tears. I went to a Syrian restaurant and was promptly seated next to a group of (presumably) very rich, smug and narcissistic-looking African dudes in designer sport clothes, who wolfed down what seemed like dozens of kebabs and sandwiches between them (and washed all that down with endless bottles of Perrier water and rare red wines. I merely ordered a Coke and a kebab.

The grand total for these two items was a whopping 40 Euros. The gay waiter who came out to shoo away the unbelievable clusters of flies and wasps from the little tables seemed quite agitated at the presence of Negroes seated out on the terrasse (the other diners pretended not to notice us) but like a real trooper, tried his damnedest to mask his irritation as the bourgie Africans ran up an outrageous tab and I sat there, trying to fucking eat and fighting off swarms of yellow-jackets and flies.

There were a few high points. I encountered an autistic Swiss guy (easily the friendliest person in town) with whom I had a slight misunderstanding because he wanted me to take a picture of him with his smartphone. Within the city, I found the architecture considerably less impressive than anything I’d seen in Sigmaringen, Pfullendorf or Schiffhausen, all extremely old (by German standards) Medieval towns with their original architecture more or less intact. (Unfortunately, and for some inexplicable reason, Schiffhausen is filled with buffoons and imbeciles of every known race and ethnic background. Maybe Schiffhausen is a poor man’s Zurich?)

Schiffhausen, July 2022. Photos by author. (Yes, the statuette on your right is that of a “Moor.”)

I’ve read from questionable sources (such as Quora, for instance) that Zurich has its racier side…about which I can care less. I could also care less that Joyce is buried there. (Going back down there to see his gravesite means actually means either flying down there or, at the very least, taking the train, which I am determined never to do again unless I absolutely HAVE to do it. And in that instance, somebody would have to pay me.)

The real highlight of Zurich, in my mind, was its amazing aqua-blue water. Were it not for the waterfalls and the spectacular mountains (which are even more stupendous further inland) I would have had virtually nothing to say concerning this place. It is white, middle-European blandness personified. In fact I think this whole post is me (more or less) just filling up space, haplessly babbling on about yet another neoliberal dystopia…a gilded dystopia with wings.

Zurich, July 2022. Photo by author

*Of course, that’s nothing special, since Uncle Toms and other assorted coons have a way of expressing openly what their white masters think privately. There were quite a few coons in Zurich but mercifully they all minded their fucking business: no hard stares, no wincing and half-whispered racial slurs, etc.