July 27, 2020
Pentwater, Michigan
I started writing this about a month ago, then got sidetracked by...nothing, really, except the everyday rhythms of my isolated existence, which isn't so bad, and not as isolated as all that. Just safer, and with a mask. Anyway, it's time to finish.
Well, what's a poor blogger to do? The shit that's happening, on a purely objective level, beats anything I could say about it. And that's not even including the social media spins and distortions, the yammering by the all news channels, left and right, and the ostensibly more objective reporting in newspapers, assuming anyone reads those any more. It's a world turned upside down, and it didn't just happen when the virus started, or when the demonstrations against police brutality started.
Nobody knows, of course, how it's all going to play out. The virus has made a surge in the wake of the obviously ill-advised loosening of the social restrictions put in place a couple of months ago, led by no advice or bad advice from the top of the government. Will individual states finally unite to enforce the wearing of masks in public, probably the simplest, cheapest, and most effective way, along with social distancing, to limit its spread? Or will right-wingers, bored students, and "fun-seekers" simply ignore its existence and take their chances, putting millions more in danger. Who the fuck knows?
One thing I do know is that the demonstrations in the cities have begun to die down and become nothing but background noise and political talking points, all in just a few weeks' time. That's what always happens, because very little substantive change will come about from them. Sure, statues will come down and flags will change, which is great, but the disappearance of these painful and ugly symbolic reminders of the past in which we fought a civil war over white supremacy as an avowed national purpose will not erase the reality of ongoing modern white supremacy--politically, economically, and socially. People always forget these paroxysms of social outrage at the institutionalization of racism, and it rises and falls in waves. In the words of the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, "History teaches, but has no pupils."
We may take a few more timid steps toward improving our system of organized urban police brutality, but ultimately, nothing will be done to improve the lot of African Americans, because they are stuck in a kind of perpetual neutral gear when it comes to progress, and they're stuck at the bottom of the ladder. Let me repeat that: Black people (today the word "Black" is capitalized--again--as a weak token of respect) are STUCK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE LADDER. And when I say Black people, I mean hometown, born in the USA, descendants of enslaved people. New people come into the country, get discriminated against, work their asses off, and start climbing that ladder. It usually takes a generation or two or three, but it happens. Irish, Jews, Central Americans, Asians, East Africans--you name the group, they've always improved their lot after a few years of tough going. But not the African Americans, no matter how hard they work. They just stay down on the bottom rung and get stepped over by others. Every single time. Right now the LAPD has at least as many Latin cops as white ones, and they're still just as brutal to Blacks as they ever were, and Blacks are still as unrepresented as they ever were.
This is awfully pessimistic, you might be saying. Haven't we made some progress since, say, the 1950s? Well, yes we have, of course. We got one decent, liberal, socially-committed Black justice on the Supreme Court, in Thurgood Marshall. That was progress. Then he died and was replaced by Clarence Thomas (because after all there can't be more than one Black person on the Court), a guy so conservative as to make most of his white fellow-conservatives look like progressives. And in the 1960s we got Black people on television playing characters other than maids and butlers and buffoons. We got Bill Cosby as a spy, and Cicely Tyson as a social worker's secretary, and Diahann Carrol as a nurse (still somebody's handmaiden, but what the hell), and a few other decent parts for Black actors. Then, as their presence became greater and more accepted, there arose another, more obvious role choice for Black actors, namely, being criminals. Suddenly in the 1970s parts for Black pimps, drug dealers, drug users, prostitutes, thieves, and smooth con artists became plentiful, and continue to be plentiful up to the present day. Hence, thugs as role models for all you Black boys and girls growing up out there in TV land. Hollywood said, in effect, "Here, Black people, here are your parts, come and get them," as if scattering dollar bills over a manure pile. Then, over the next several decades, there were a few Black cops, often bent, and a few Black laborers, and of course there was the Cosby show (with him, ironically, as an obstetrician), and Denzel Washington as a doctor on St. Elsewhere. But there was also the "reality" show Bad Boys, which featured cops taking down shirtless brothers trying to escape out the back windows. And there was that absolute gem of a situation comedy, Good Times, where a family of Black people in the Chicago ghetto was headed by a long-suffering, eye-rolling matriarchal mammy and a feckless put-upon semi-bread-winning dad, but whose lead actor was the goofy shucking and jiving son J. J., thus reducing a show ostensibly about the realities of Black folks struggling in a white world into an updated version of Amos and Andy. Oh, and let's not forget the succession of shows starring Black boy/men with medical conditions that kept them little and cute and harmless, while being adopted by wealthy white people. And who could forget the Black version of Archie Bunker embodied by George Jefferson? Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander, lest we have to suffer with the burden of thinking that only white men are bigots. All that added up to what white America really wanted to see--white altruism mixed with Black hopelessness, venality, and clownishness.
Okay, you say, but what about Sesame Street and The Electric Company, two shows aimed at young kids that sought to present Black people as positive instructors and role models. Yes, you're right, they were good. But eventually they were replaced by cartoons (among them the notoriously self-abnegating Fat Albert), because, after all, how much positivity about Black people can our culture endure without an offsetting adjustment?
Fine, you answer, but didn't we finally elect a Black man as president--not once, but twice? Yes we did. His skin was brown, sure enough. However, he was not the descendant of slaves, no sir. His father was a Nigerian graduate student who eventually went to Harvard then back to Africa, leaving his son to be raised by others, just as we would expect any Black man to do. His mother, who raised him, was as white as my mother was. We elected him because, well, it was time to get that issue out of the way, and, more importantly, because he could talk white to the whites, and with a little bit of studied slang, could talk Black to the Blacks. But would we ever elect a Jesse Jackson or a John Lewis? Would we elect a take-no-prisoners Stacy Abrams? Hell, no, not in my lifetime. Too Black. And following hard on the Obama years came the horrifying "offsetting adjustment" I mentioned above. Very soon, mark my words, the Democratic vice presidential candidate will be Kamala Harris, a woman who does indeed look pretty brown. But she ain't no Maxine Waters, no ma'am. She's the child of college professors, and she scrambled up from the mean streets of Berkeley, no less. Her mom is east Indian, for Christ's sake, and her dad is from Jamaica--probably the descendant of slaves, to be sure, but not OUR kind of slaves--you know, the ones who picked cotton for the massa down in Alabama.
Oh, and let's not forget the movies of the 21st century--the Century of Enlightenment. Here Hollywood has made some adjustments, agreeing, probably reluctantly, to give the Black folks some movies of their own, that might just teach whitey a thing or two. Take Selma, about the historic and terrible civil rights march over the Edmund Pettis Bridge, featuring the late John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. Out of all the American black actors available, and no doubt willing and able to take the part of King, who do they pick? A god damned Brit--an Afro-English child of the empire named David Oyelowo. And there are numerous other examples of this, where Africans or British blacks get the parts that should, by rights, go to African Americans. Coming soon to a theater (or movie channel) near you will be a biopic of Aretha Franklin, starring the lovely-voiced songbird Cynthia Erivo, handpicked by Ms. Franklin to play her. Is she from Detroit? Is she from Atlanta or LA? No, she's from London, and had to learn to talk like an African American, not for this part, mind you, but for the part of Harriet Tubman, which she also played. Sweet Jesus. Because, after all, there are no African American women out there who can sing and who need work in the movies. Hell no.
Are you beginning to get the picture? No matter how fucking hard American Blacks try, they will always lose out to someone else. In education, in employment, in stature as political representatives. Only in basketball and football and music do we allow them to exist, for our amusement. When whites eventually become a numerical minority in this country, probably in this century, it will not be African Americans who are in the majority. In all likelihood there will be no outright majority of any one group, but Latins and Asians will, if they choose to coalesce politically, be the dominant force. And African Americans will be right where they are today, taking shit, shoveling shit, eating shit. Do you think the Latins or Asians are going to treat them any better than the whites have just because the whites aren't in the majority? Will they give a shit about them, any more than the Cubans or Puerto Ricans care about their Black citizens, or the Latin cops of LA care about the Black folks there, except as convenient moving targets? And consider this: when this tipping of the ethnic balance happens, which group--the Asians, the Latins, or the whites--do you think will (still) have most of the money and the real power?
I've cherry-picked the evidence I've used here, but I challenge you to contradict it with anything hopeful to the contrary. There's a new book out by Frank B. Wilderson III, an autobiography called Afropessimism, in which he articulates this view, only on a worldwide basis, and with lots of personal information and suffering I'm not competent to convey. I'm going to read it, and if I need to modify this post, I will do so.
Until then, folks, don't get your hopes up,.
