For the past couple weeks I've been indulging a guilty pleasure - no holds barred textual street fighting. It's what invariably happens when I go to visit a sleeply little listserve with an established pecking order and protectionist orthodoxy. Think Vin Diesel's character in Knockaround Guys, and you have a pretty clear picture of what I'm talking about. I'll watch the list flow for a minute, identify the toughest poster(s) - whose self-appointed job it is to enforce aggregate status quo by challenging and discouraging potentially upsetting ecclexia.
Posting something certain to draw a response from the local toughs, I then proceed to share with these hapless rubes (it's always doods too) the hard-earned monstrousness I've amassed over the course of the preceding 2000 textual brawls.
Just like your local divey tavern, listserves exist for socialization, validation, and transaction. Both lurkers and active posters alike are embarked on individual quests for *something*. Whether the urge to socialize, or, the basic shameful human primate propensity for rubbernecking gory altercations, the listserve ecology hosts no innocents - just experience and objective gradients running the gamut from newbie to seasoned regular.
My objective is twofold, first, I enjoy the mayhem. If I ever even attempt to say otherwise, I'm lying like a dog. Second, and more importantly, I long ago discovered the developmental value of friction. Basically, if you put somebody's beliefs and ego to the test, they'll either duck and fold, or, actually step up with their A-game and yield some deep thought you'd otherwise never hear in a thousand years of *civil* conversation. THAT is the scarce and precious commodity I'm trawling lists to harvest in the first place.
Ideally, the fight isn't staged simply to wreak devastation. Rather, the goal is to call out the resident champion of an aggregate pov and elicit from that individual the ideative first fruits of the collective he exemplifies. Every Fallujah I've left in my wake is a zero-sum game both literally and figuratively. [and a superb illustration of the absurdity of neocon mentality and policy to boot]
Having temporarily abandoned my afrostocratic haunts in favor of a little good old red-state neocon slumming and brawling - I'll admit I've left a few Fallujah's scattered across the digital countryside. I thought I was embarked on yet another one until yesterday, when a pitched battle finally resulted in pacification of a sizeable enforcer clique and a tentative detente with its champion. Make no mistake, it wasn't "hail and well met" it was straight up ugly and savage until the bell rang and my adversary said "no mas".
After vetting my old school conservative credentials, this individual shared the following gem with me - A Guide to the White Trash Planet for Urban Liberals. It is an eye-opening view into the next big job for Americans of good faith.
Not only must we Work hard on increasing and enriching the level of interpersonal engagement within our own communities, the next evolutionary push will have to involve education, outreach, and socialization - interpersonal communion - with and among the masses of the poor, white, and pissed. This will not be easy. But it is most definitely necessary.
Not only will this enrich both our respective communities, it will comprise a bulwark against the genuinely evil predations that the backers of the present administration have in store for America.
The Full Blown Oprah Effect, Reflections on Color, Class, and New Age Racism really drove home to me the necessity of enlarged, renewed, and full engagement on multiple fronts for any genuinely interested in seeing America politically work its way back out of the regressive nosedive that the neocons have engineered. We have all GOT to Work toward being on the same side, or, we will all surely lose.
"Covert racism may actually be deepened by these civil rights victories and by related partial black upward mobility into the middle and upper classes insofar as those victories and achievements have served to encourage the illusion that racism has disappeared and that the only obstacles left to African-American success and equality are internal to individual blacks and their community – the idea that, in Derrick Bell’s phrase, “the indolence of blacks rather than the injustice of whites explains the socioeconomic gaps separating the races.”
Denise,
Why do you say on the one hand that you have nothing against Oprah personally, and on the other that she and her ilk need to be kept away from our people?
Gates is doing what that ultra-feminine revisonista, John McWhorter, did... LIE.
is just slaying me...,
so tell me what you really think about that wannabe nocturnal poundcake thief and afrostocratic critic of the failed morals of low-born kneegrows who don't hold up their end of the civil rights bargain, you know who I'm talking about, the pudding man himself, Dr. Huxtable?
Final question, what if Oprah is actually right? Tell me why Oprah wouldn't make a GREAT president of the United States? If you track down that discussion thread and its links, you'll see this question received a fair amount of deliberation within the brotherhood.
Of course Cobb had preemptively made a liar out of me by identifying THE potential chimeric huckleberry...., Though we've all heard calls to draft her for the position, I've seen no indication of interest on her part. I imagine, however, that if Oprah would or could run for president, we'd really be onto something, wouldn't we? Oprah is an extraordinary binnis-woman who has mastered the media and interpersonal relational style that American women favor, and, truly and magnificently succeeded on her own in a Galtian quest which no American men dare disrespect.
All that, and unlike the current and prior two scrubs who laid up in the White House, she did it without any hand up from popi's friends, or hookups from nasty auntie Pamela.
Here's the quantum thread collapse [epiphany] that occured to me on the road to Damascus.., unless America figures out how to meritocratically embrace the attractions of an unimpeachable black candidate like Oprah Winfrey or Colin Powell, with all the requisite stateswoman/gangsta cred required to silence any and all detractors, AMERICA WILL FAIL!
Here's the rub. It's not about what an Oprah or a Colin might personally bring to the office, they're superstars without a doubt. Rather, it's about what the POTUS exemplifies about the collective American unconscious that matters here. Until and unless the American collective unconscious evolves considerably beyond its current state, it's simply not fit to imperially preside over the rest of the world in the manner Cobb describes here.
Posted by: cnulan at February 26, 2005 01:41 PM
We've known and understood for a long time how Black progress is seen in the negative in this country.... We, too, should understand the inner workings of racism in a racist society. We, should, therefore utilize Our inner bullshit detectors to negotiate around racism and it's perpetrators, especially it's Black perpetrators.
Personally, I have nothing against Oprah. Oprah lost me, less than a year after she was on air - that was back in the day when We were so proud of anybody or anything Black on t.v. that We made it a community event... and We do know how to support people - and We still know how to ask for Nothing in return. A couple of years ago to now, I have watched Oprah, maybe, 5 times, I mean, in her world there are no Black writers...except Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, and there was only one Black Family that deserved to have their home renovated, and she couldn't even go to that house, she sent her serial flunky Gail. Something is wrong. Maybe Black folk really don't own their own homes.
We don't write books and surely must not read any.
Oprah said that the comically unfunny Chris Rock was the best comedian ever, ummn, and how did he do that? He called Us Niggers and made a public plea to join the KKK, ummn?
I remember when Oprah said on Charlie Rose that "Beloved" flopped because Black people did not support it[her]. I was pissed - why should We support her?
I'm middle-class according to societal constructs, grew up in such a construct, and I have never felt any strain with my fellow brothers and sisters who may be poorer. I know many Blacks who are considered upper - classed, some who are considered rich - still I have never felt any kind of strain.
Yet, I am told of all these stresses between me and them, that are being perpetuated by Negroes?
This is just another "Acting White" moment. Gates is doing what that ultra-feminine revisonista, John McWhorter, did... LIE.
When Rich Blacks don't face the same racism and the same obstacles then We can talk until then...
Posted by: deniseinside at February 26, 2005 12:50 PMI want to know these people: Oprah, Gates, Elders, McWhorter, Parker, Williams, and the Posterboy of African American Republicanism JL Peterson. . . and keep them away from my people.
As soon as the cancer is out, We will once again begin to thrive.