AMERICA IS BLIND BY DESIGN

“Do you see me?”

Well?

Do they see us?

A better question should be: do these people even want to see us?

Senator Corey Booker seemed on the verge of tears as he pleaded on the Senate floor for white America* to actually recognize him as a human being. It was deeply impassioned, highly moving–I have to admit that I almost shed a tear–yet in the long run utterly unnecessary and even pointless.

“America,” Senator Booker cried, “I love you. Do you see me? Do you see me? Do you know my experiences? Do you know the failings of our ideals?”

“Being Black in America is to know that a misunderstanding, that an implicit racial bias that an interaction that should be everyday and routine can become a moment that your life is turned upside down, your body becomes broken or you are killed. It’s why so many Black Americans scream out: ‘Do you see me? I do not have your equal justice under law. Do you see me? I do not have justice for all. Do you see me? I matter. I matter. Black lives matter. Black bodies matter. America, I love you, do you see me?”

Senator Booker, the answer to the above question is, quite simply, no. White America does not see us, sir. They never did, and never wanted to. For them to truly “see” us would be bad both for their business interests, and for the stability of this so-called “Great Experiment” of theirs–this massive historical fraud they call the United States of America.

But what you have wrong is your insistence that this white blindness is a failure on the part of white people to live up to the ideals of this American “Experiment.” Nope. Totally wrong. This white blindness (and our subsequent invisibility) is an integral part of the American Experiment. It is entirely by design.

In actual fact, the historical erasure of the African from Western Civilization (and from humanity) laid the very basis upon which American “Democracy” became a possibility. Who the hell else was going to pay for this White Man’s democratic paradise, but our own black bodies?

Senator, this is not hyperbolic bullshit. This is a stone, hard fact. It is precisely what it is, and nothing more or less. Otherwise, Ralph Ellison would never have had to write Invisible Man.

Sir, we are visible to this bloody country only so far as white assholes (and their colored flunkies) see us (benignly) as window-dressing or (more dangerously) as threats. In their sick, depraved minds, we are worse than escaped monkeys from a zoo. This is precisely how the white American views a so-called “African American” who turns up in some fucking white space. This is not hyperbole; this is fact. The death of James Scurlock in Omaha, Nebraska, at the hands of Jake Gardner, a fascist who owns a nightclub/bar called The Hive, is proof positive of that. (Gardner was not arrested, of course.)

We are not permitted to function in their spaces, sir. Period. The laws of the land don’t mean shit as far as we’re concerned. That is how the fucking country is set up. That is why your white countrymen keep on fucking it up. They don’t want real democracy in the United States. They definitely don’t want Socialism, unless it’s National Socialism (of course).

White America will embrace every single thing under the rainbow before they even think about looking an African directly in the face. If they had the option of actually nuking their own shit (or, God forbid, even the world) they would do that without even thinking about it. America has already gone fascist; it has been fascist since its inception, and long before the first bullet was fired at the Boston Massacre in 1770. All this insanity, all this blatant stupidity, spinelessness, cowardice and brutality has been implemented simply to avoid dealing with the reality of New African humanity.

There’s a reason why these whites and coconuts are so hopelessly blind. For white people to deal with the implications of George Floyd’s death, they would have to deal with his humanity. They can’t. Which largely explains why Mr. Floyd (along with Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Terrence Crutcher, Tamir Rice, and countless others) is dead. It also explains why it was so easy for a monster like Officer Chauvin to so casually choke the life out of this man. Officer Chauvin, like untold millions and millions of white Westerners, simply did not see George Floyd as a human being. PERIOD.

The minds of men and women like Officer Chauvin have not evolved since the end of the 17th century. The European settlers in North America at that time saw Africans as no more than beasts of burden. Their descendants have not changed. Let’s not kid ourselves, though: these whites know good and goddamn well that George Floyd was not a cockroach. These whites simply have to lie to themselves repeatedly concerning the truth of what a Black person is. Too cowardly, too close-minded and spineless to deal with the bare, blunt realities of human life–the main reality being that a Black person’s life has precisely the same value of a white person’s life–these white bigots have had to retreat into a fantasy world. (Call it Disneyland, if you want, because Disney is bigger than fucking Epcot Center.) The sad part of all this is that the rest of the world is being forced to share in this white man’s political, social, sexual, cultural and moral fantasies.

One of the white man’s most infamous fantasies is something called The Negro. The white man concocted this Negro to justify enslaving, dehumanizing and killing Africans. Enter most of your fucking “philosophers” and “thinkers,” among them Voltaire, who judged “Negroes” to be not much better than apes. (The Negro Ape trope was actually stolen from the Persians and Arabs, long-time white skin fetishists and brutal slavers in their own right.)

The more “humane” European “thinkers” (like Arthur Schopenhauer or Jean-Jacques Rousseau) found this reasoning to be too extreme and decided that the African was not an animal, but a harmless child of nature. Simple, child-like, rhythmic, emotional, sexual and above all, primitive, a noble savage. (The same logic was used on the Indigenous American, which naturally did not prevent his genocide–and at the hands of the very same people who called him “Noble.”)

In America, the Founding Fathers made a moral compromise in their beloved Constitution and decided that the African actually was not an ape–but was not entirely a man, either. So Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Company decided that the African was merely 3/5th of a man. (No question as to what they thought of African women: we already know.)

Because the whole business of reducing Africans to mere commodities had severe moral repercussions, the African gradually had to be ignored or silenced altogether. On the plantations, the African was silenced with a whip or with his tongue being cut out. In the world of letters the African was marginalized altogether and bigoted white men spoke in his place. The image of the African began to shape up along the same dumb tropes, time and again–the image of the savage cannibal, the buffoon, the gorilla, while talk on streets of London, Paris, Dresden, Leipzig, Philadelphia, Charleston, Amsterdam, Madrid and other Western cities complimented the world of letters.

The African, thus shorn of his humanity, became a Negro. And not just one kind of Negro but several kinds, both benign and deadly.

The benign negro (comparatively speaking) was a simple, primitive being devoid of intellect,¹ only good for laughter, music, sex, and some groovy good times. You know, the funky, down-home darkie, a creature never to be taken seriously by anyone and only to be seen in his properly designated social space–on the vaudeville stage (preferably in blackface) and in a nightclub or bar, sax in hand, wailing out earthy, primitive music for whitey to get drunk or high to. Or in a whorehouse.

The deadly negro was but the flip-side of the benign, comical negro. This was the negro whom whites labeled bete noire in French and a black buck in English. The mean, brutal, bloodthirsty, coked-out nigger (according to white fantasies) looked and acted like an ape. He wanted to rape and kill white women and destroy white property. In the real world this so-called “black brute” generally did not resemble the fantasy image that white perverts had of him, but he was a “brute” just the same: not because he committed crimes (he generally did not), not because he “raped white women” (he usually was not interested) but because at bottom, he was impatient with his inferior status in Western society and wished to function as a human being.

Here we have it, Senator: two flip sides of the same coin, the coin of a white, Apartheid Western world. The last bit of currency left over from the Civil War and indeed the oldest coin in circulation. It was minted in 1619.

White America will not see African Americans, but it will see the Negro. The Black person must not only present himself as an inferior being; he or she must also function inwardly as an inferior being. The African must hold his true feelings in check, eliminate any sort of behavior or appearances that will trigger white (read: anti-African) outrage. This Black person must stay out of white spaces, out of white institutions, out of white textbooks, out of white neighborhoods, out of white pictures, out of the halls of white culture save for those rare exceptions where an individual or group of Africans functions precisely in those ways that Westerners find “acceptable.”

“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian,” W. E. Burghardt DuBois writes, “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he does not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he believes—foolishly, perhaps, but fervently—that Negro blood has yet a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of self-development.”²

As a person, the Negro does not exist at all. We never had anything in common, really, with this “Negro,” this ridiculous social pantomime we’ve been forced to play out on the stage of Western history; we’ve only acted as monkeys, coons, Uncle Toms, Aunt Jemimas, bucks, jezebels, niggers, nig-nogs, minstrels, Sambos and other such foolishness to keep from ending up with knees on our necks, like George Floyd. The real tragedy is that far, far too many of us have taken this Negro pantomime for our true selves.

Education and learning (for Africans) had to be discouraged for a reason. Anti-intellectualism, religious quackery, the jock mentality and blatant stupidity (brilliantly manifested in contemporary “hip-hop”) was actively encouraged by the dominant white society as a way of keeping the old myths of The Negro alive in the African mind. I call it policing the black mind–for unless the black person actually sees himself like his white cohorts see him, the Negro cannot be said to actually exist.

“In the colonial context,” writes Frantz Fanon, “the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values. In the period of decolonization, the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them and throw them up.”

Meaning what? Meaning that–in order for the African American to learn to truly love himself again, he has to jettison the Negro in himself. And by rejecting The Negro, by default, he is automatically rejecting America. He must reject America. That is how it is, Senator Booker. You just can’t love America. Not only does it NOT love you, at bottom you CAN’T love America any more than an abused child can love a gaslighting, narcissistic parent.

Our white “parent” demands that we keep on laughing, singing, dancing, crying and being stupid little monkeys no matter what the parent does to us. The white “parent” (aka Uncle Sam) does not want you to grow up. We are forced to placate this “parent” by playing the roll of “good boy”–The Negro.³ It is a profoundly unhealthy relationship. It is making us mentally and physically sick. Nothing else can explain our high homicide rates, the chaos of our neighborhoods, the flagrant domestic abuse, the alcoholism, drug abuse and the obscene “hip-hop” culture that has grown up around all this dysfunction. Nothing else can explain the utter fucking stupidity that is “mumble rap” culture. These are all the expressions of a sick, lost, confused people–lost, because we are still tethered to a society that literally FORBIDS us to be human beings.

All of the above is not “Africa” in the least. It is certainly not “America.” It is European Colonialism on steroids.

Sir, it is not possible to function in a society that is hot-wired to think that our mere existence is a crime, and whose entire foundations are built upon our Black selves being perpetually nothing. By any moral standard, this is completely unacceptable.

It is impossible to function even in a so-called “liberal” and “multiracial” society that is so thoroughly anti-African American that an entire dictionary (running to hundreds of pages) can be compiled from all the various slurs used to denigrate us, or even the color black. (Even the word “denigrate” is problematic: what the fuck does it mean to “de-nigrate” somebody? Or “blackball” or “blackmail”? What the fuck is a “blackguard”?)

As for the “conservative” element in this so-called “society,” no comment: their willingness to commit treason to “make america great again” speaks volumes.

Today (after a lull following World War Two, the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall) all the old horrors of the old, reactionary Europe are returning in full force. Those Europeans who are snickering over the demise of America barely realize that they are also snickering over the death of Europe. They have forgotten precisely where “America,” Europe’s concept of the Other Hemisphere (aka Turtle Island) actually originated. Whites worldwide are “pissed off” not because of “mass immigration” of “niggers” from Africa and the Middle East, but because the Negro they created in desperation has ceased to exist.

Is it any wonder that your average white Western Joe and Jane seem to be stumbling through the wreckage of their own ugly cities like doped-out zombies, incapable of emotions, devoid of humanity? Or that nearly everything they try to produce in terms of art, architecture, academia, fashion, music, etc., is so appallingly mediocre? Or why their socio-sexual relations are so deeply contaminated with flat-out narcissism? To destroy us, the Westerner had to destroy himself.

Why in the hell are we demanding love and acceptance from people who have no love in them?

Cory Booker, like W.E.B. DuBois before him, speaks of hope. “(It) is essential,” he says, “but it is not enough.” No shit: it was the most right thing he ever said in that speech.

“This is the end of (the African American’s) striving,” DuBois continues: “To be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, and to husband and use his best powers.” The only problem being of course is that the “kingdom of culture” in America today is actually Disneyland. I can talk for days about the sheer vulgarity, triviality and mediocrity of Disneyland. Disneyland is Kitsch-on-wheels. We don’t need to work with fucking Disneyland. Disneyland and The Hood are part and parcel of the same benighted space. There is utterly no hope whatever in finding our collective selves–let alone connecting with other people–in such a space. We need one of our own. “Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world,” Michael Chabon once wrote, “it’s just not their fantasy.”

*

On second thought, maybe everything that I have said so far in this article is unnecessary. White Americans do see us, Cory Booker–as bulls-eyes for their fucking arrows.

And they don’t love us, either: they love the Negro.

Unfortunately–for them, anyway–the Negro is dead.

*

POSTSCRIPT: FOR DUMMIES

TL;DR

1. Senator Cory Booker pleads before the Senate to pass the fucking Anti-Lynching Bill, which should be a no-brainer. Unfortunately Rand Paul, the libertarian Repug, jams the passage of the bill on bullshit pretexts.
2. Senator Booker then tells The Senate, “America, I love you. Do you see me?”
3. America refuses to see New Africans except as they wish to see them–as clowns or murderers.
4. Not only does America refuse to see New Africans as they are, they demand that New Africans see themselves precisely as white Americans see New Africans–as Negroes.
5. The Negro is a racist, dehumanized concept of the African which justifies his captivity.
6. The Negro is the only type of Black person the American white wants to deal with 90% of the time.
7. The only way Black people can function in American society is to function as “Negroes.”
8. The only way to function as a Negro is to act stupid, repulsive, clownish, unintelligent, inferior, infantile. White America prefers this because this is how they see Black people.
9. White America prefers a black “thug” with no brains to a Black professor who is “woke” and knows his own worth. Why? Because the “thug” doesn’t know his own worth, generally speaking. That is why he is so proud of being a “thug.”
10. Therefore, those Blacks who are not self-hating are forced to pretend as if they are Negroes. Re: Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and “We Wear the Mask.”
11. The conflict of having to pretend to be a Negro and being oneself often leads to severe mental disorders, even making some blacks homicidal, racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.
12. A Black person cannot live in American society without being appallingly unhealthy, either in mind or in body. Witness the deterioration of mainstream African American culture and the high levels of obesity among African Americans.
13. In order for Black people in America to live like human beings without fear of dying from walking through a park, eating their lunch, entering a bar, breathing, selling water, drinking water, trying to buy cigarettes (like GEORGE FLOYD), or just being in your own bedroom (like Breonna Taylor) or sitting on a bench in your own neighborhood, they have to get rid of this current joke of an American system and construct a viable system of their own. American Democracy works, all right–JUST NOT FOR US.
14. The only way to get rid of this rotten society is to take to the streets. Right here, right now.

 

*note: this includes all non-whites who think of themselves as being white, or who suffer from that dreaded mental illness called “double consciousness.”

¹David Walker’s Appeal: See the inconsistency of the assertions of those wretches–they beat us inhumanely, sometimes almost to death, for attempting to inform ourselves, by reading the Word of our Maker, and at the same time tell us, that we are beings void of intellect!!!! How admirably their practices agree with their professions in this case. (Boston: 1829.)

²W.E.B. DuBois, “Strivings of the Negro People,” The Atlantic, August 1897.

³Hilton Als: “For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don’t like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they’re babies. Eventually, you direct that anger at yourself–it has nowhere to go.” “A Pryor Love,” White Girls, McSweenys, 2014.

 

 

 

Cry, the Benighted Country: No More Gifts or, “Which Side are the Savages on?”

“This letter is a gift for you. Bear in mind, though, that some gifts can be heavy to bear. You don’t have to accept it; there is no obligation. I give it freely, believing that many of you will throw the gift back in my face, saying that I wrongly accuse you, that I am too sensitive, that I’m a race hustler, and that I blame white people (you) for everything.” George Yancy, “Dear White America,” New York Times, Dec. 24, 2015

I’m sorry, but statements like the above make my eyes hurt. I see exactly what the author intended in writing his open letter to White America. What I don’t understand is why he felt he had to write it.

Between this letter and the massive wave of police terror afflicting black and brown (and, apparently, young white) people in the United States, absolutely nothing is new. The only thing that has surprised me is the speed with which the scales have fallen from our eyes concerning America these past two years. In spite of a black President, in spite of the enormous contributions that African Americans have offered to those United States, we are still considered somehow inferior, unworthy of the same respect shown people who are not black. Even our own elite conspires to keep the bulk of us at the bottom of the world’s racial totem pole: by refusing to invest their hundreds of billions in poor black communities, by refusing to educate those of us who are semi-literate (or worse), house our homeless and keep the drugs off the streets and the gangsters from destroying the lives of our children. Better yet, our elite has never once given a thought to creating industries that can offer employment to millions of African Americans; instead they hoard their money somewhere on some little island in the Caribbean, and blow it on dope, hookers, fancy cars and McMansions. Meanwhile, everyday black people keep getting casually gunned down–if not by cops then certainly by thugs from within the community and racist scum from without.

I repeat: none of this is new, save for the cell phones recording it.

 

I have heard–and in some cases witnessed–horror stories involving the police wherever I’ve been in the United States. One of my older brothers, who is autistic, was brutally beaten by P.G.County Police about 20 years ago. My youngest brother, who doesn’t have a criminal record, was pulled over by the police for kicks and called “boy,” among other things. When I was a student at Howard University, I overheard a story about a young pregnant woman (in D.C.) who was body-slammed on the sidewalk by an irate rookie cop; the two drunks (both black) who were telling the tale were laughing about it. My mother spoke of an incident in the 80s in which a cop literally rode upon the back of a black “suspect” as one would ride a horse–in broad daylight. At Howard, the campus police could be as thuggish and corrupt as the police off-campus; in fact, campus police once casually brutalized a fellow student who turned out to be the son of Andrew Young. (As a side note: decades earlier, an uncle of mine was lynched in Depression-Era Florida by a mob of rednecks; my father witnessed it first-hand.)

I witnessed one loathsome incident back around 1992. It was directly in front of the Martin Luther King Memorial Library, ironically enough. There was a drunken black man being collared on the ground in front of the library being taunted and tortured by a black DC cop. I referenced this incident in my previous novel, “NATE,” published in 2006. The only people who had stopped to stare at the incident were blacks and an occasional white; everyone else kept passing by, I wrote, unmoved, unconcerned. It was true.

Many years later and I would find a cop in front of our door in Langley Park, Maryland, after my mother called to report a racist incident being perpetrated by our Latino neighbors. I recall talking to the cop and he appeared to be trying to say two things at once—the first thing being the words which could be heard and the second carefully couched whispers under his breath. I realized what the cop was telling me under his breath: fuck your mother. He said it more than once. It was a white cop with a Latino partner.

Naturally, I didn’t fall for the bait.

After that incident, and a number of others, I became convinced that a lot of the police brutality incidents were in fact carefully (and perhaps subtly) provoked by the officers themselves—they knowing full well that they are policing communities full of desperate, despairing, angry, divided, bitter people. And for sheer spite and a petty sense of their own omnipotence, these rogue cops continued to subtly and overtly push people around.

George Yancy wrote an article for the New York Times in December of 2015. The gist of the article was a plea—yet another—on the part of Black America to White America. After three centuries of such pleas on Black America it does not bear repeating what the gist of this plea is. We already know it, or should know it.

I have read many of your comments. I have even received some hate mail. In this letter, I ask you to look deep, to look into your souls with silence, to quiet that voice that will speak to you of your white “innocence.” So, as you read this letter, take a deep breath. Make a space for my voice in the deepest part of your psyche. Try to listen, to practice being silent. There are times when you must quiet your own voice to hear from or about those who suffer in ways that you do not.

In other words, it is the same old hoagie sandwich in a new wrapper. White America, I really am a human being. White America, accept me as your brother. For I really am your brother. I bleed like you. I eat, drink, vomit, defecate, urinate, copulate, walk, talk, sing, dance and even die like you. In fact, I may even be related to you.

The sad part about this plea is that—like countless other attempts on the part of black intellectuals to gain the ear of White America—it passed unnoticed, unheard. George Yancy shouted his self-effacing and mock-eloquent words into a massive white void where nothing of substance gets heard, anyway. It is hard to be heard above a sea of racial slurs, fat demagogues, ringtones and auto-tuned, Stepinfetchit gangsta rap.

What if I told you that I’m sexist? Well, I am. Yes. I said it and I mean just that. I have watched my male students squirm in their seats when I’ve asked them to identify and talk about their sexism. There are few men, I suspect, who would say that they are sexists, and even fewer would admit that their sexism actually oppresses women. Certainly not publicly, as I’ve just done. No taking it back now.

In my opinion, Mr. Yancy is demanding far more from White America than what it can possibly give. His plea is couched in abstraction and riddled with clueless idealism. I would assume that Mr. Yancy is not a stupid man, and not half as blind as he makes himself out to be. I say “blind,” because somehow Yancy conflates his sexist tendencies with the overwhelmingly oppressive power of a racist state which, as it turns out, is the most powerful nation on earth—a state that can literally erase him at the slightest whim, with not a tear shed, and with the flimsiest of alibis. Yancy confuses his having been “fed a poisonous diet of images that fragment women into mere body parts” with America’s massive adult entertainment industry, which actually provides such sexual malnourishment to hundreds of millions around the world.

Meanwhile, Michael Eric Dyson has a few choice words of his own–his own “gift” to White America, one could say–concerning America’s KKKiller KKKop Mania.

 You hold an entire population of Muslims accountable for the evil acts of a few. Yet you rarely muster the courage to put down your binoculars, and with them, your corrosive self-pity, and see what we see. You say religions and cultures breed violence stoked by the complicity of silence because peoples will not denounce the villains who act in their names.

Yet you do the same. In the aftermath of these deaths, you do not all condemn these cops; to do so, you would have to condemn the culture that produced them — the same culture that produced you. Condemning a culture is not inciting hate. That is very important. Yet black people will continue to die at the hands of cops as long as we deny that whiteness can be more important in explaining those cops’ behavior than anything else.

You cannot know how we secretly curse the cowardice of whites who know what I write is true, but dare not say it. Neither will your smug insistence that you are different — not like that ocean of unenlightened whites — satisfy us any longer. It makes the killings worse to know that your disapproval of them has spared your reputations and not our lives.

You do not know that after we get angry with you, we get even angrier with ourselves, because we don’t know how to make you stop, or how to make you care enough to stop those who pull the triggers. We do not know what to do now that sadness is compounded by more sadness.

Oh, well. Dyson says here what has been said countless times before, from Douglass to Baldwin to Ishmael Reed. The white majority response to such remarks has always been the same, their reprisals  only slightly softening with each passing decade. But from day one the overall intent of the white majority towards Blacks in the U.S. has been unwavering.

The intent is to keep the niggers corralled. Keep the niggers in their proper place. Keep the niggers from freaking out—or, to be more precise, to keep African Americans from fully recognizing that when they bleed, it is no different than when a European or a Euro-American bleeds; that like any other people on the planet, they have a right to their own outrage and moral indignation, and that they have the human right to redress and ultimately correct the injustices heaped upon them in any way they see fit.

But the African American is not an abstract concept that can be manipulated and defined by entertainment execs or U.S. senators or alt-right demagogues or Tom Wolfe. The African American is a human being, and demands to be recognized as a human being. The African American is not “different,” deep down. All we “want” is what everyone else wants—to live, no more or no less free as anyone else on this planet.

“Which side are the savages on? Where is barbarism?”

If your average white American bled like the black American bled; if the average white American lived merely one week in the body of the average black American; if the average white American were forced to live just for five months as a Native American in the bowels of the Oglala Reservation, or a Puerto Rican in Spanish Harlem, or a Salvadoran in Langley Park, Maryland, the entire country—and not just white Americans—would be screaming for a bloody revolution. The rest of the country would fall in line with the rebellious white man without a second thought, because in America—even today—whatever any white man says is elevated far above what anyone else has to say. The white American’s views of reality are held as the laws of the universe, and this unfortunate fact has led hundreds of millions of people around the world to embrace the neo-coon Rap culture, to beat niggers and firebomb mosques, or to take a fat, ignorant thug like Trump seriously.

In fact, it took far less abuse from England to rouse the American colonists to revolt against the British crown. And it is considered not only just, but necessary, for a Ukrainian, or a Chinese, or a Romanian, or an Egyptian, or a Libyan to take up arms against a corrupt regime. Of course one must remember that the American mass media takes great care in defining precisely which Egyptians, or Romanians, or Libyans are actual “revolutionaries” and which ones are simply “terrorists”; and those of us who understand the U.S. media know damned well that all too often, those freedom fighters designated as “terrorists” are those who are fighting for interests not compatible with those of the U.S. Government, or U.S. economic interests.

“They require of me a song,” James Baldwin once said, “less to celebrate my captivity than to justify their own.”

How the Black Lives Matter Movement fits into this remains to be seen; judging by the rough treatment they receive at the hands of American police, and their demonization in the American mass media, one would think that the aims of BLM are precisely in opposition to those of the American State. Actually, in a real sense, they are: for the American State—judging by its bloody record alone—has never given serious consideration to the civil rights or the human rights of African Americans. The 13^th, 14^th and 15^th amendments to the Constitution have been repeatedly violated in cases too numerous to mention here.

But I doubt this new movement’s ability to implement change in America. I have the gut feeling that BLM is essentially a controlled opposition, funded and directed by the same oppressive force it appears to confront. Maybe I’m wrong. But I have noticed a glaring difference between BLM’s reaction to the death of an African-American, no matter how socially dubious–and that of a non-black. When Dylan Noble, an unarmed, emotionally disturbed 19 year old white man, was casually killed on June 25th by Fresno, CA police, BLM was mum. They were equally silent when, in the previous week, six Latinos–Anthony Nunez, Fermin Vincent Valenzuela, Vinson Ramos, Melissa Ventura, Pedro Villanueva and Raul Saavedra-Vargas–were gunned down in cold blood by “America’s Finest.” Tactically, this is as mindbogglingly stupid as it is racially divisive. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I feel that there is an ugly method in such madness from this new movement–if one can call it a movement.

Whether BLM will up the ante by striking at the heart of American racist oppression–that is, the American economy–remains to be seen. Their hearts appear to be in the right place. But at my age–and having seen a previous (and much milder) pro-black surge in the late eighties to early nineties–I know that these kids are barely making a scratch upon the behemoth of racist oppression in the United States. The “Black Lives Matter” movement is howling into that same white void–the void of white noise–that Dr. Yancy and Dr. Dyson shouted into, and with the same result: stasis.

*

Black America has given enough “gifts” to White America. Pick virtually any era and one can find such “gifts” in abundance. Our own bare, black asses were “gifts” from Africa, by which both Northern and Southern slave-owners used to build the very foundations of the American metropolis; indeed, much of the White House and the Capitol was built by slave labor. (And let’s not mention Crispus Attucks and Benjamin Banneker.) In the 1890s, at the beginning of the “Nadir” of race relations in the United States, Americans were given the gift of Ragtime—the first truly American musical art form. (Naturally, Native Americans mght dispute this, with good reason.) For decades after that the “gifts” came and went: Jazz (via King Oliver, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, etc.), The Negro Renaissance (via Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, W.E.B. DuBois and too many other names to mention here), and innumerable inventions such as the golf-tee, the light-bulb filament, the ironing board, the gas mask, mobile blood banks, the internet, the cotton gin, ice cream, the potato chip, and food which was actually edible and a way of speaking English that didn’t stink of England. And a new way of comprehending reality–particularly among black intellectuals–that offered a spiritual alternative to the colonial cultures imposed upon the rest of the world by Europe. Hip-hop was but one of the manifestations of this new spiritual reality.

I, myself, and many of my artist friends who are black, have offered our own gifts to America; some of us have pleaded and continue to plead with white America to recognize our humanity. I, for one, never bothered and will never bother to plead my humanity to a group of people who, collectively speaking, always thought of me and my life as a bad joke. I personally don’t see the point of giving anything to such a people. America, at this stage in history, is not worth the trouble. It persistently demands of Black America that we “like” them. Unfortunately, in America these days, there doesn’t seem to be very much to like. I don’t need to waste my time tallying a laundry list of America’s ills, since the reader can find these details elsewhere, and in abundance.

America is not the center of the Universe. There are certainly other nations on earth where a creative black person can apply his or her genius, talent and drive. White America imagines that we have no memories and no history; they are wrong. They have almost always been wrong about the world, and most particularly about their own countrymen. They have never known us, anymore than they have known themselves, or anybody else on earth. We already know what our past gift-bearers have gotten in return for their “love” of America.

No: it’s too late. Worse, actually: it’s over. Done.

*

When Frederick Douglass declared in his Fourth of July speech that the crimes committed against black Americans* would “disgrace a nation of savages,” he was not being hyperbolic, but stating a simple fact. The worst crime committed by these white American savages has not, ironically, been these countless lynchings, beatings, burnings, brandings, castrations, rapes, nor scorched-earth pogroms such as Wounded Knee or Elaine, Arkansas (where up to 600 blacks were butchered in 1919). It has been the outright insistence that the African American—particularly the African American—be “happy” in the face of such systematic dehumanization.

“They require of me a song,” James Baldwin once said, “less to celebrate my captivity than to justify their own.” The African American was told to smile when getting raped and to tap-dance after being castrated; and to add insult to injury, the narratives of such sickening racist brutality were either denied outright, dismissed as “paranoia” or, still worse, carefully re-shaped to appear as comedy. It makes one ask the question that Jean-Paul Sartre asked, in his well-known preface to The Wretched of the Earth, “which side are the savages on?”

 

*Douglass could have just as well mentioned Native Americans, or the Chinese or even the Irish.