Category: Black Lives Matter

Harriet Tubman, Twitter, and Freedom

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San Francisco’s City Lights Books invited Dr. Clarence Lusane to speak about his new book, Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, with moderator, Justin Desmangles. As I watched the livestream on November 21 of this year, the symbolism of Tubman awakened my memory. The cover of Dr. Lusane’s book reminded me that an image of Harriet Tubman had once been my profile picture on twitter.

Although I might have forgotten my selection of images for social media, the reasoning and emotions behind the choice were very present. In July 2018, I craved an image that symbolized freedom for my twitter profile pic. Nia Wilson had just been murdered and her sister, Lahtifa, stabbed while they, along with a third sister, Tayisha, waited for a train at an Oakland subway station. The stabbing murder forced me to consider how Black people in the U.S. still were not free. Eighteen-year-old Nia Wilson, a Black woman, was killed by John Lee Cowell, a twenty-seven-year-old White man. Cowell had been on the same train as the sisters prior to the stabbings. And despite his expressing in court his anger about being punched by a Black woman a week prior to the stabbings, and despite his having called another Black woman the N word on a city bus as he fled the crime scene, the murder of Nia Wilson was never ruled a hate crime. For me, the physical and emotional injuries inflicted on the Wilson family, along with the seemingly countless murders of Black people that filled social media from the deaths of Trayvon Martin to Sandra Bland to George Floyd highlighted the colonial nature of Black life in the U.S. The same political and economic forces that had labelled us less than human as they drug us through the Middle Passage, that had forced us to work in bondage with, to date, no compensation, and that had deemed us second-class citizens under fascist Jim Crow were still operational.

Before choosing the Tubman pic for my profile, I’d had so many profile names and pictures during my fourteen years on the social media site that I can’t remember them. After the murder of Nia Wilson, I’d chosen Tubman because as both a runaway and an abolitionist, she symbolized freedom. Freedom from the white supremacy ingrained in capitalism, freedom to be Black and a woman, freedom to make choices about how the Black community in the U.S. chose to live, freedom to find liberatory spaces.

During my years of Twitter usage, I witnessed how the site had been instrumental in several political movements during the early part of this century – the Arab Spring, the Indignados in Spain, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and EndSars in Nigeria. I’d later seen counter-revolution stifle the Arab Spring when authorities began policing social media and jailing activists. In Nigeria government officials froze the bank accounts of protestors or chased them into exile. And in the overdeveloped West, authorities silenced some activists while global capitalism proved itself capable of incorporating liberals from the Indignados, Occupy, and BLM movements into the status quo of electoral politics or career activism. These were activists who had failed to base their protest on the most radical of political demands.

Prior to the Musk takeover of twitter, I’d thought of the social media site as a space where leftists could not only keep up with political developments, but also engage in conscientization and grow in leftist theory. I’d seen the joking statements made by twitter users who said they came to the site as a liberal and ended up an anarchist. Given the political space in which we found ourselves, it’s not surprising that twitter attracted Black activists. It has been a space in which Black nationalists, Pan Africanists, feminists, leftists, and radicals could converge to share ideas and battle in ideology. If Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X advocated the termination of colonialism and human degradation by any means necessary, then twitter appeared one means of doing so.

While I was aware of the contradiction of using a capitalist site like twitter as a leftist political space under the helm of Jack Dorsey, I, like countless others, am even more aware of this insurmountable irony under twitter’s new ownership. Musk’s reactivation of rightwing accounts has resulted in some liberals and radicals abandoning the site. If people haven’t quit the site altogether, many are using it less as they drift towards other social media alternatives. More importantly, other activists are more determined to do up-close organizing on the ground with marginalized and oppressed communities.

Harriet Tubman was the last profile picture I used that wasn’t my own. I didn’t remove the Tubman image because I felt that the circumstances that led up to the killing of Nia Wilson no longer existed. The needs of Black people in the U.S. and those of the global Black community are more urgent than ever. Nor did I do so because of my demoralization with leftist politics. While respecting people who choose not to use their own names and likenesses, I simply reached a point in which I wanted to acknowledge and embrace the legacy of Harriet Tubman while representing myself. I remain committed to radical liberation in the West and the termination of a political economy that underdevelops Africa as it extracts the continent’s natural resources and labor on the cheap.

Absent African American History and a History of Frederick Douglass

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On my most recent travels to Washington, D.C. I didn’t cross the Anacostia River to visit the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site which was the home of the former slave and iconic abolitionist, orator, and writer.  My time in the city was then little and winding down, and my frustration ran deep as the locale which loomed large on tourist maps beckoned me.  Yet the sun was setting, and I and my travelling entourage were tired, hungry, and thirsty.  Of course, I knew of Frederick Douglass, and I had read some of his texts but not in the context of other African American thinkers and African American social philosophers.  I knew of Frederick Douglass in the American context of the grand scheme of U.S History that is Founding Fathers, War of Independence, Abolition, Civil War, Civil Rights unto the present.  In that context he is undeniably a hero.  The hero.

In my current reading of the text Creative Conflict in African American Thought–a text published in 2004 and written by history professor Wilson Jeremiah Moses–I have had the opportunity to place Frederick Douglass in a historical context with other African American thinkers including Alexander Crummel, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey.  Mine is an opportunity rarely afforded African American youth given that our K-12 education system teaches of historical giants such as Douglass (when at all) within the grand scheme of U.S. history and as colonial appendages to the broader culture. During my own education before attending college, I don’t recall in depth studies of African American thinkers other than Martin Luther King.  It took my own efforts as a teen to scour then extant L.A. bookstores and find the writings of Angela Davis, Sonia Sanchez, Malcolm X, etc. In the U.S. it isn’t until one attends college that one has access to a wide range of African American thought.  Indeed, American universities are the vanguard of research on African-American history and culture with their researchers and professors distinguished by an enthusiasm, passionate curiosity and analysis that rarely reaches secondary education.

Euro-American popular culture disparages history, and as a people living in a colonial situation in the United States, our living experiences in many cases mimic White Americans while simultaneously being antithetical to White reality.  Euro-American culture erases the blundering of Natives, forgets its own indentured servitude, and disregards the manner in which European and “white” non-European immigrants to America changed ethnic-sounding monikers to Anglo last names while, at the same time, this dominant culture professes a belief in never-ending progress based on bourgeois ideals. Given White Amnesia regarding history, it is not surprising that as Black Folk we don’t readily refer to our history in the United States within an African-American context.  Not only do we not refer to the specificities of our U.S. history, we fail to put ourselves within the larger African diaspora that includes not just primogenial Africa but Blacks living in Europe and our distant cousins through enslavement throughout the Americas.

Frederick Douglass is full of history and fuller still within an African-American context wherein one sees him not only as an abolitionist, but as an assimilationist as well.  A man of recognized mixed ancestry (born of the enslaved Harriet Bailey and a White father who would not recognize him), his predisposition was to view Whites as superior.   He was not an advocate for Black racial pride nor ethnic solidarity and saw little use for Black institutions.  He was indeed a follower of bourgeois conventions.

As African-Americans we act out our foremothers and forefathers frequently and regularly.  The dominant culture would have us be only Frederick Douglass.  Yet without acknowledgment we have our rebellious Angela Davis cerebrations, our unrelenting Malcolm or high-road Martin agitation, our Booker T. desires to start a Black Business, and our Du Bois integration frustrations that lead to yearnings of donning Ankara African fabric and returning for good to the African continent.  Yet rarely are we put into that cultural context.  As high school students we aren’t consistently afforded this mirror to look at ourselves.  As writers we often fail to put Black Americans within the context of Black thought and its developments.  And we most certainly cannot expect White America to do this for us.  The result is a lack of recognition and awareness about how African American thought develops, how it turns on itself, and how it regresses.  History is alive.  It is under the surface of everything we do.  It urges to manifest itself.  As writers and educators, it is our duty to hear its call and reclaim African American history from under the mantle of alienation.

 

Blatant Brazil

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“Blatant Brazil”

Esteemed Brazil:

(Police, Army, Militias)

There were less blatant ways to kill Marielle Franco.

 

Foremost being before her African ancestors made their captured voyage to shore,

they could have simply jumped ship into the depths of the Atlantic as seaweed carcasses,

and her seed would have never settled in your soil.

 

Or her forebears could have been the first to rebel like Haiti and world capital and

empire could have slowly sanctioned her off, starved her and blamed her for her own

hunger.

 

In our times you might have choked her father for trespassing on any public street and

left her whirling to organize protest against his murder only to die breathless with no

beating heart.

 

You might have given her child a plastic gun to play with in a park and rushed in

annihilating both her and her offspring.

 

Finally, you could have stopped her car for a traffic violation, hauled her to jail to accuse

the accused of hanging herself.

 

Instead Marielle Franco was shot while driving Black, assassinated along with her driver

Anderson Pedro Gomes.

 

Her only defense the votes that made her a Council Member.  Her voice that rallied

against racism, oppression, and injustice. Her mind that analyzed and made

connections.

 

Brazen Brazil:

(Police, Army, Militias)

Our Loss.

Your kill.

 

 

Eric Garner, Alton Sterling and Controlling Black Bodies in the Americas

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ERIC GARNER, ALTON STERLING AND CONTROLLING BLACK BODIES IN THE AMERICAS (a text in three parts)

 

“Detroit’s black day laborers gathered at an informal outdoor labor market on the city’s periphery, known to local whites as the ‘slave market.’  The large ‘open air mart’ thrived between the 1940’s and 1960’s on Eight Mile Road…” (Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis)

 

Eric Garner (part I)

 

In 1770 the Municipal government of the Louisiana Territory then under Spanish rule stated it was permissible in the Territory for the Europeans to trade tobacco for African slaves.  On July 17, 2014, in the formerly-liberal now neoliberal bastion of New York City, money capital of the overdeveloped world, and once the prime destination for Blacks leaving the Reconstruction South, there was no law permitting a black man to sell individual tobacco cigarettes on the street, indeed, based on city legislation, it was strategically inconceivable and legally impermissible for a black man to do so, and it was an activity for which Eric Garner would be killed given that the police department since the mid-1990’s was fixated on what it called quality of life in the city so when a group of African-American and Latino men had the idea of selling cigarettes that they would buy from nearby states or the Indian reservation at prices cheaper than those of New York City in order to sell on the streets, especially to people similar to themselves, who, in this case, would be people going to the welfare office nearby, and for whom, the one cigarette those customers purchased might ironically indeed have been a momentary improvement in their quality of life, both alleviating stress and bought at a cheaper price, well, the New York City police did not see it that way and after the call they received from the apartment manager who, adding his complaint to the hundreds that had been made regarding this particular area because he felt pushed to his limit with the group outside his Staten Island apartment building whom he described to police as selling cigarettes and drugs on the streets, surely the mention of the word drugs would arouse the attention of the police who were familiar with this particular group and specifically with one 43-year-old man named Eric Garner, impossible to miss at 6’2”, 395 pounds, a husband and father of six who had already been arrested twice the same year because his selling of cigarette loosies was not in accordance with state tax law.

The fact that Mr. Garner was known for buying ice cream for children in the area was  inconsequential as was his history for being a type of referee amongst the group of men with whom he hung around who would at times get into their own brawls, and the reality of Mr. Garner, a husband and father of six, working in a trade that he had made part of his livelihood was likewise irrelevant, but the fact that Eric Garner was himself breaking up a fight between his buds that day proved fatal because the plain clothes cops focused on him and this time it was Garner they wanted to arrest for selling cigarettes, and despite the big man asking that they not touch him, they proceeded in any case, with one particular cop grabbing the huge Garner, who suffered from various health conditions, by the neck and tackling him down to the ground in a chokehold, pressing his face to the cement, handcuffing him, and leaving him on the ground where Garner made his now famous pleas stating, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” eleven times, all of which were recorded on the phone camera of one of Eric Garner’s friends, but the cops ignored his pleas because somewhere in their training or due to the dozens of arrests they had made at this same spot or most likely because quality of life mandates did not include the life of someone who looked like Mr. Garner and who worked in the informal economy, they concluded that his pleas for help were fake which might be the reason that instead of Eric Garner receiving a professional group of medical personnel to attend him, he was sent what appeared to be five fake medics one of whom walked around carrying the oxygen that was never administered to the patient who suffered from acute asthma and who died after the cops succeeded in being the catalyst for Eric Garner’s cardiac arrest.

The Americas (part II)

The tragedy of Alton Sterling was to have been born in a state that historically more than one European country had fought to the death for – not only death amongst Europeans – the deaths of the original Native American inhabitants of the land and the African slaves imported as property.  Louisiana, as the former center of colonial slave trading in the United States, was contested ground not unlike my birthplace of California.  They are both states in which the presence of more than one colonial European power resulted in a fight for geographical dominance and economic and military control.  One of the most pernicious and exploitive forms of domination was European ownership of black persons transported from Africa as slaves.  Although the Portuguese initially had exclusive access to the coast of Africa and thus the exportation of our ancestors according to the Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494[i], the French, Spanish, and English would feud amongst themselves and with the Portuguese in order to gather the labor they needed to found and exploit the new lands they sought to conquer in the Americas.  European enslavers attempted to gain dominion over enslaved Africans by branding them according to their place of origin, this being important since enslavers placed a preference on peoples imported directly from Africa.  The Europeans sought to curb the Africans’ exposure to revolutionary ideas which they deemed more prevalent in the Caribbean holding islands than amongst Africans imported directly from the continent.[ii]  While the Europeans placed a premium on the skin brandings they put on Africans as property, they, for the most part, ignored the scarification the enslaved had put on themselves to indicate their particular African cultural identity.

The English-speaking slave traders kept rather meticulous records of sales of the enslaved, the Spanish are noted for having kept some; yet, the French kept very little data regarding sales of African slaves.[iii]  Their memorandums may have been scant, but the French administered the largest slave population of any colony in the territory of Saint Domingue which we now call Haiti.  The French domination of Saint Domingue lasted from 1659 until the years of the slave revolt ending in 1804.  Saint Domingue had a population of 800,000 slaves toiling in the cultivation and production of tobacco, cotton, and coffee as well as the monumental sugar trade that supplied 40% of that product to Europe.  With more than a thousand shipping vessels, over 20,000 French sailors, and more than 500 ships in its port at any one time, the Europeans considered Saint Domingue the “Pearl of the Antilles.”  Always wary of a coup d’état, the French would avoid importing slaves to Louisiana during the years 1729 to 1731 because the enslaved were rebelling in the Territory during those years.  And later Charles IV would block importation of slaves from the French Antilles to Saint Domingue as the Haitian revolution got under way in 1791.[iv]

The presence of the huge population of French sailors in Saint Domingue could not have been more horrific for women. “Colonized women were frequently positioned in the colonies and under slavery as concubines, mistresses, or sexual servants.”[v]  The scholar Kempadoo describes in her writings how militarized masculinity demands heterosexual sex on a regular basis.  When the French sailors of Saint Domingue did not resort to having sex presumably amongst themselves, they would rape the females from the Native or African populations.  How else to explain the emergence of Creole slaves — a new category of enslaved that was “specifically barred from…commerce” for importation to Louisiana as early as 1777[vi], again due to the preference for slaves imported directly from Africa whom the Europeans hoped to manipulate.  Black women were not only dehumanized by the Europeans placing them in the role of having to fulfill the sexual desires of the sailors.  Throughout the Americas, they were considered breeders whose “wombs were incorporated into plantation economies to increase the size of the slave population.”[vii]

The English had a monopoly on the barbarity of the slave trade by the 18th century, having surpassed both the French and the Spanish in the trafficking of human lives.  After the slave revolt in Saint Domingue during the years of 1791-1803, the Europeans moved some sugar production to Mississippi.  The Louisiana Purchase, in which this territory was transferred from French to Spanish, back to French, and finally to U.S. hands, was a manifestation of how the United States, a former colony itself, had now gained the ability to recolonize.  The incorporation of the territory which contained the largest slave market caused political anxiety amongst the political power brokers in the North. Their concerns were appeased by designating black slaves as 3/5 of a person in the U.S. Constitution, thus avoiding having the South gain excessive electoral representation.

Another colonial power that formerly controlled black lives in Louisiana was Spain. And how did the Spanish maneuver to restrain their African populations?  The Spanish designated Cartagena in present-day Colombia, as the former slave trading center of Spanish America; thus, it was the sister city of Anglo-American New Orleans.  While Anglo-American slavery was noted for being brutal and French slavery in Saint Domingue was so deadly the enslaved lived just a few years, the Spanish in their largest slave market of Cartagena are noted for having “difficulties with transportation, (an) unimaginative government, (and) powerful and myopic vested interests”[viii] all of which affected the degrees of mercilessness the Catholic Jesuits, landowners, and mine owners could impose on their African slaves. France and Spain were both Catholic countries, and the Catholic church took the position that slavery was a contract and that the slave was a human being with family rights.[ix]  While this may have been one of many laws on the books dating back as far as 1348 in Castilian legislation, it would be difficult to enforce in Colombia because of the shortage of priests to implement it.  And its application was uneven in other geographical locations of the huge Spanish American empire.  Despite their Catholicism, the French were barbaric slave owners in Saint Domingue known for working slaves to death in just a few years.  If preservation of the family unit is used as an indication of respecting the humanity of African slaves, we know that in Anglo-American slavery separation of family members was the norm.  Colombia’s rate of nuclear family units amongst slaves was anywhere from 37-60% depending on the region.  Peru and Brazil, both Catholic countries, discouraged family units amongst slaves where only 10% lived in nuclear families.  The Bahamas and Jamaica, on the other hand, are noted for having 54 and 70% of slaves respectively living in nuclear family units.[x]

Other characteristics regarding the lives of the Africans enslaved in the region now called Colombia was a life expectancy of 30 years, a mortality rate of 50%, with women giving birth to an average of 5 kids, and having, statistically, more than half die at an early age.  The ratio of men to women in the late 1700’s in the Colombia region was 109:100, which contrasts markedly with South Carolina at 180-250:100.  A particularity of Colombian slavery is the notion that the enslaved did not have to toil for the enslavers on Sundays and Catholic holidays.[xi]  This fact is important because it would allow for increased rates of manumission given that African slaves toiling in the gold mines in areas like Choco, or laboring on farms could work on Sundays and keep the profits from their work for themselves.  Retaining the profits of their labor should have allowed for increased rates of manumission given that the enslaved would be able to then purchase themselves or other family members.  Yet records indicate that the Spanish rarely disclosed the laws regarding manumission and even when the enslaved were aware of the laws, some masters refused to grant freedom.  Thus, records for the late 1700’s show that the region of Cali granted only 87 manumissions and Buenaventura, 7.  The goldmining region of Choco is distinct in having a 75% manumission rate, but this is also connected to the depletion of the gold mines in that area.[xii]  By 1785 the colonial powers in Colombia, by way of their dominion over and regulation of the lives of African slaves, had depleted the gold mines of Choco, although slavery would not officially end across the country until 1851.

Alton Sterling (part III)

“In a setting black women referred to as a slave market at Roosevelt Road and Halsted Street (Chicago), they (black female domestic workers) haggled daily for work, just as their counterparts did in New York’s ‘Bronx Slave Market.’” (Christopher Robert Reed, The Depression Comes to the South Side)

 

Six years, take it or leave it, six years of being an acquaintance to the owner of the Triple S Food Mart who said that Alton Sterling never got into any fights and was popular amongst the store’s shoppers who referred to him as the CD Man, with his table of cd’s and dvd’s in a cardboard box on his table propped up outside the store while playing music for his customers to both sample and lighten the load of their workday, known for extending credit to his customers who might pay him a portion of the price of the cd and return later to pay him the rest.  Alton Sterling with his cd business still extant after Tower Records filed for bankruptcy in 2006 and the Virgin Megastores’ closure in Europe and America in 2009; yet, Sterling, still the CD Man in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on July 5, 2016, despite the digital age of downloads and apps, a black man once again caught up in the whirlwind of 21st -century global capital – a tempest which at its worst functions like the bighead carp eating algae and detritus at the bottom of the Mississippi River, looking for consumables in an era when capital had deemed the music cd dead and America had opined the black working class of no regard and the black underclass, irrelevant. Here was this one African American male, father of five, selling cds in the open air in a country that had considered it more acceptable that he sell himself for labor, a country where blacks have ironically functioned as both profit and profit makers, and where independent black enterprise has always been suspect and has not been given support causing blacks to be on a tempestuous tour of the country for several decades now looking for living arrangements starting from the South after Emancipation and fleeing to the North, Midwest, and out West, currently regions subject to gentrification, especially in the major cities, where wealthy international elites buy condos and lofts in formerly abandoned downtowns presently undergoing transformation and forcing blacks, browns, working people, and the elderly to compete in their old neighborhoods with those same absentee-owner/renter elites and with middle class American whites trying desperately not to feel the crunch.

The CD Man, 37 years old, a registered sex offender, which no mom, family, or community can condone, had previously been arrested for carrying a gun and being in possession of marijuana in Louisiana which is not Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, Washington State, nor D.C. where marijuana is now legal, and sentenced to five years; thus, he had done time, and now engaged in his business, sole proprietor, his presence contradicting the myth that blacks are more tolerable solo than in a group – a group that can incite anxiety amongst fearful whites like the hundreds of Haitians languishing today in Tijuana having fled Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, worked in Brazil, and due to that country’s economic downturn, migrated, some on foot to the U.S.-Mexico border, where they now sit, wait, and dream the dream of entering a country which centuries ago deemed black migration en masse to the U.S. useless and which now perceives the individual black person, especially male, as a threat.  And that fateful call of the homeless man, perhaps upset that Sterling would not give him money, so he calls the police to tell them that Sterling is carrying a gun in open-carry Baton Rouge, and the two cops respond to that call ready to snuff the life out of this black man as they straddle and tackle him to the ground, during which shots are fired, and the cops emerge alive.  Alton Sterling dies to his kids, dies to their moms, dies to his customers, dies to the homeless man who used his phone to call the police, dies to the bystanders who used their phones to record the killing, dies to open-carry Baton Rouge, dies to America’s former largest slave market of Louisiana, dies to the open arms of the jails and prisons which like the rest of America is confounded about what to teach, which services to provide, job opportunities to avail, housing to rent and sell, what the future looks like for working and underclass black America, a thorn in its side since the days of freedom.

 

 

[i] Thomas N. Ingersoll, “The Slave Trade and the Ethnic Diversity of Louisiana’s Slave Community,” Louisiana Historical Association, Spring 1996, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4233285

[ii] Thomas N. Ingersoll, “The Slave Trade and the Ethnic Diversity of Louisiana’s Slave Community”

[iii] Thomas N. Ingersoll, “The Slave Trade and the Ethnic Diversity of Louisiana’s Slave Community”

[iv] Thomas N. Ingersoll, “The Slave Trade and the Ethnic Diversity of Louisiana’s Slave Community”

[v] Kamala Kempadoo, “Women of Color and the Global Sex Trade: Transnational Feminist Perspectives,” Indiana University Press, Spring 2001, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40338451

[vi] Thomas N. Ingersoll, “The Slave Trade and the Ethnic Diversity of Louisiana’s Slave Community”

[vii] Kamala Kempadoo, “Women of Color and the Global Sex Trade: Transnational Feminist Perspectives”

[viii] David L. Chandler, “Family Bonds and the Bondsman: The Slave Family in Colonial Colombia,” The Latin American Studies Association, 1981, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2503127

[ix] David L. Chandler, “Family Bonds and the Bondsman: The Slave Family in Colonial Colombia”

[x] David L. Chandler, “Family Bonds and the Bondsman: The Slave Family in Colonial Colombia”

[xi] David L. Chandler, “Family Bonds and the Bondsman: The Slave Family in Colonial Colombia”

[xii] David L. Chandler, “Family Bonds and the Bondsman: The Slave Family in Colonial Colombia”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Consulted

 

Baker, Al, David Goodman, and Benjamin Mueller. “Beyond the Chokehold: The Path to Eric Garner’s Death.” New York Times 13 June 2015.

 

Berlinger, Joshua, Nick Valencia, and Steve Almasy. “Alton Sterling Shooting: Homeless Man Made 911 Call, Source Says.” CNN 8 July 2016.

 

Chandler, David. “Family Bonds and the Bondsman: The Slave Family in Colonial Colombia.” Latin American Research Review 2 (1981): 107-131. JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/stable/2503127.

 

Ingersoll, Thomas. “The Slave Trade and the Ethnic Diversity of Louisiana’s Slave Community.” Louisiana Historical Association 37 (Spring 1996): 133-161. JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/stable/4233285.

 

Kempadoo, Kamala. “Women of Color and the Global Sex Trade: Transnational Feminist Perspectives.” Indiana University Press 2 (Spring 2001): 28-51. JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/stable/40338451.

Cool Black Friend

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“Cool Black Friend”

By Audrey Shipp

 

“Nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’

You gotta have somethin’ if you wanna be with me”

 (“Nothing from Nothing,” Billy Preston)

 

“You ain’t got to be rich to talk to Gucci, but you got to be part of something

 Ain’t nobody play no pro ball or nothing? Ain’t nobody got nothing?”

(“At Least a M,” Gucci Mane, Mike Will Made It, Zaytoven)

 

At nine-percent of the city’s population and falling, living in multifarious communities throughout the City and County, Blacks in L.A. have numerous opportunities to be the “Cool Black Friend.”  Opportunities abound on city streets, on school and college campuses, in the workplace, on Hollywood screens, in the music industry, and at the club.  Possibilities are plentiful amongst a myriad of ethnic groups but especially amongst the power majority – White/Euro-Americans, whom as Michael Eric Dyson correctly notes, Blacks have been “reading” for centuries for our own survival–and amongst Latino communities of Mexican and Central American heritage who are the majority culture in once overwhelmingly-African-American South L.A.  Having created the philosophy of cool on U.S. terrain, and having created that framework despite the nothingness of their former condition as chattel property, there is little wonder that Blacks are selected as the Cool Black Friend.  An anomaly, perhaps, given that the deculturalization process for the enslaved involved the “uprooting from land” and targeted the elimination of language, cultural practices, and family ties.  Yet Black history in America is a history of resistance and the creating of something out of nothing.  Railroads invisible to the eye.  Churches in a land that denied them literacy and the bible.  Schools and universities before their freedom was even granted.  Resistance to empire — an acumen for the precise where and when in political movements — that white Liberals cling to today.

In the nation at large, and following the era in which African Americans were forced to take up European musical instruments and play for their enslavers, the Cool Black Friend has existed in music since the era when Whites visited segregated black clubs in locations such as Harlem or Chicago’s South Side.  For the visitor, these excursions were undoubtedly a positive if one had a black connection who could facilitate entrance to a musical venue.  And today, if a non-black musician or singer performs a type of music with African rhythm or African-American intonations, it is advantageous to be chums with a black performer who can give you credence.

Sports abound with Cool Black Friends.  We see this especially on university campuses with huge endowments and top tier sports programs where the student body may be comprised of few African Americans, but the sports team has a large number of Cool Black Friends leading the university to NCAA victory and its resultant monetary gains for coaches, administrators, and the like while excluding the players themselves.  High five to the Cool Black Friend when he or she scores.  Professional athletics are more of a mixed bag, depending on the sport.  Cool Black Friends generate billions of dollars in stadium expansions, advertising, broadcasting, and ticket sales, especially during finals when corporations and the wealthy might buy out front row seats at market price for five thousand dollars (or resale $50K) to watch Black athletes take the spectators’ team to a win.  High five on that.  Yet some sports, such as football with its 70% black players, 25% black quarterbacks, or tennis which has consistently and sporadically (to use an oxymoron) had a lump in its throat regarding the assertive, pro-black, female athleticism of Venus and Serena Williams, or golf which tried to play the token card with Tiger Woods but had to do so only half-heartedly given that athlete’s ambivalence about his own political power, show no interest in white liberal chumminess.

In some cases, having sex with a Cool Black Friend can result in the creation of the longest-running reality show to date in the U.S.  And even though the relationship that spurred that sex tape may sputter and fizzle, the Cool Black Friendship may be seen as a winning formula if the celebrity and her insecure entourage have no marketable talents of their own.  Thus, the formula must be repeated and replicated because, of course, Black Americans have a history of creating something out of nothing.  Aren’t these the people who following Nixon’s questioning their ability to survive another 500 years in the U.S., who after that same President’s statement in the 1970’s that they would only survive if the best ones were inbred, and amidst allegations in the 1980’s of CIA support for Central American counter-revolutionaries that led to dumping cocaine into the hood to fund the Contras and further destroy the black family while fueling the street-to-prison pipeline, turned the dregs of that historical experience into a musical genre?  Trap Music aside, some black friends are simply an insinuation.  By getting butt implants or pumping up one’s lips, it’s possible to allude to a Cool Black Friend 24/7, even when he/she may not be in one’s presence.

In the United States, which has raced with Russia in building approximately 15,000 nuclear weapons, the detonation of 100 of which would block the earth’s sunlight.  The U.S. with the world’s largest number of incarcerated people, 40% of whom are Black, although Blacks are only 13% of the population.  The U.S. which is 5% of the world’s population, yet uses 24% of its energy and is ranked the second largest carbon dioxide producer. A country comfortable with the notion that white wealth is 13 times that of Blacks and Latinos. Yet, living in the Empire, and aware of the disproportionate distortions of day to day life, when Blacks shout, “Black Lives Matter,” “All Lives Matter” is, at times, the rejoinder of Euro-Americans.  With the latter, in this instance, showing scant knowledge of how call and response functions, the question to be pondered is where in the makeup of the Empire is the message “All Lives Matter” being communicated.  Whites live in the Nation.  Blacks, overwhelmingly, live in the Empire.  Even though news networks, public relations firms, and advertisers have recently put their own spin on the word “matter,” so that mileage, insurance, and happiness “matter,” the original proclamation endures.

In these circumstances and during his two terms in office, perhaps President Obama was the ultimate Cool Black Friend.  His presence allowed the United States to look progressive, as if it had overcome its racial differences, as if tolerance were the norm.  He brought Black cool to the nation and the imperial Oval Office. In a geographical world region founded on settler colonialism, Obama inherited the continental — North, Central, and South American — desire of political leaders to have it both ways – to pillage while appearing benign.  In the U.S., the liberal establishment clung to its belief in a palatable nation in which we could maintain our wasteful, consumerist lifestyle, hopefully come together as one, bridge the inherent conflict in maintaining a huge military budget, while supposedly being a beacon to the world of harmonious progress.  In his role as President, Obama had to set the course for both the nation and the empire, but like many imperial leaders, he overlooked the plight of some of his colonial subjects – amongst others, Blacks themselves, who, as inhabitants of the Empire, were seeking a liberator and have scant need for Cool Black Friends because we are our own Cool Black Friends.