Vision Circle

Do their religious attitudes make them any less lovable to you or the SOMEBODIES whose love they seek to engender?

Having dropped a track of sexual orientation politics into the mix, I'm curious to know what your peeps think about, and much more importantly, how they - act toward - homosexuals in their interpersonal community?

This attitude does not affect my love for them. It does affect my ability to have substantial relationships with them. If my kids were stuck in Virginia and needed to stay with someone until I could get them, and that stay included a Sunday...I'm not sure I'd call on them. And while I think your general comments on the lack of white-style homophobia in black communities are right, there are three reasons why I think gender and sexual issues should be grappled with fiercely:

1. "Murkan" style attitudes on religion are playing a more important role in our life and in diasporal life in general. The most conservative christians now are found in two places--America and Africa. In as much as these attitudes bode ill for sane gender relations we have to do a lot of hard work in order to create buffers against them.

2. The gender gap between eligible black men and women is growing. This asymmetry produces conditions ripe for mistrust, and mistrust makes it difficult to organize.

3. Gender attitudes and attitudes towards homosexuals and other stigmatized groups are literally UNHEALTHY. HIV/AIDS is growing in black communities not because of Down Low behavior but because of concurrency--people in the joint getting infected in the joint and spreading it once they get out. Because brothers and sisters are all twisted about sexuality issues (even though they aren't quite as twisted as whites) we don't really deal with this in a healthy manner. And we die as a result.

Oh...
Hellll no!

1. The beauty of a psychological approach is that it depends upon the semiotics of the host system it seeks to subvert. The black civil rights movement *succeeded* precisely because of its use of a principled assault on behaviors inconsistant with expressed principles and beliefs. It disrupted established aggregate behaviours by producing massive cognitive dissonance

2. Um..., how many mass media organs of gender propaganda are under the autonomous editorial control of black folks? To me brother, every single instance of starved, liposucked, lip-puffed, breast implanted duppy fembot is an instance of the purest misogyny I can imagine. MJ and his insane sister LaTOYa are the only black women I've go in for this okey dokey nonsense to date. Yet and still, I don't see anybody taking condenast to task for its overt pathologizing of women throughout the anglosphere...., but that's just me.

3. Then shouldn't the discussion focus on the political 3rd rail of the prison industrial complex and the war on drugs (black men) instead of politicization of gender/sexual orientation issues?

I'm still EXTREMELY hard pressed to see anti-misogyny, anti-gay, anti-anything-but-black as materially and substantively allied with the cause of black partisanship.

Call me old-fashioned, but I would let my chirrens stay with your peeps over the summer including on sundays and not fret for a moment over whether they were being taken care of in the nurturing/guardian sense of being *taken care of* that I value first and foremost. Any old *isms* that my chirrens might be exposed to over the course of that sabbatical would be easily erased in the more uppity atmosphere they would return to after a summer in antebellum Virginny...,

In reverse:

4. We disagree. And I'm surprised that we do. They love their family (and ME as I am family)...but they do not love black people. In fact they feel the opposite. As a result in many ways their family is dysfunctional. I know a number of sane folk in Virginia I could shack them up with.

3. The War on Drugs is important, as is the prison industrial complex. But sentiments about gender and sexuality severely impact our ability to deal with the consequences of those policies. We have to deal with both.

2. You are absolutely right...and wrong at the same time. There are people, BLACK people, who both critique the actions of the mass media and the actions of black people at the same time. Again we have to deal with both. In the case of rap artists we have to look at the choices they are making and the effect of these choices on our kids. You want to side with Condenast over my daughter? Fuck you.

1. The Civil Rights Movement was successful because of a number of factors...among them the fact that it pointed out inconsistencies in white American attitudes. But even as it was successful it distributed resources within the group unequally. And that's what I think that Neal is trying to get at.

and a lack of racial morality

stuck like a splinter in my mind...,

Did you interogate their beliefs sufficiently to determine whether this notion of racial morality is informed by a protestant or orthodox ethic?

If the former, then I got's to say "hell no" too...,

If the latter, then they're quite right.

You are the only black orthodox Christian I've encountered. From our discussions I could PROBABLY parse a similar argument from orthodox theology, but I'm not sure. Suffice it to say that ALL of my conservative relatives are influenced by a conservative protestantism that has much more in common with oral roberts than anything else.

My thesis that *blackness* equals special interpersonal communion is drawn from the orthodox belief that syneidesis or conscience/spirituality is equivalent to the extent of one's ethical interpersonal communion with others - is where that parallel was drawn.

I believe that within the body of blackness there self-organized a form of racial syneidesis that reached an apogee and was squandered in the post civil-rights apostasy of materialism and *integration*, which was nothing so much as loosening of access controls on consumption and material acquisition. Since nothing approaching a truly integrated society has emerged from the civil rights movement, I am of the opinion that the loss of substantive organic competencies and failure to develop equivalent or better alternatives has left us in a net deficit position culturally...,

I didn't imagine that your peeps were closet Tewaheds, though that would make some cool-assed speculative fiction given that many rastas were/are and that I believe my exemplar George Schuyler - may well have been. What I was asking about was whether they were like many an old-head I know that laments the passing of high black culture, particularly the easy and universal group affection, support, and ethical high-regard that defined normative high-black culture. I think the only exceptions to this normative standard would have been criminal and siddity negroes - but the old ladies I know recount how even criminals formerly had higher regard for women and children.

On the question of the issues that we choose to confront politically, I genuinely DO NOT believe that sexuality and gender issues matter to the normative majority of black folks in America. I am unaware of any substantive history of gender and orientation oppression within the black community.

I suspect that the deafening silence I will hear in response to my respectful questions about that history and those data will bear out my contention - those voices and those issues were marginal then, and they remain marginal now.

I am convinced that these marginal issues have been imposed on contemporary black cultural and political thought and life as hegemonic blinders to keep us focused away from more fundamental political and cultural issues. I believe that if we squander our energies dealing on the margins of what effects the big bell curve of black folks, in the present climate of political consciousness, then Jesse Lee Peterson and his foul ilk will win many more hearts and minds.

Not making sexuality and gender issues my political priority is not the same as being adversarial toward these issues. Not surprisingly, however, that is not the way my relative disinterest in these issues has been generally interpreted. Thus I must simply remain stridently heteronormative in my world view and political praxis, confident in my ability to not oppress anyone, but unwilling to squander scarce political capital on marginal advocacy.

Oh. You're asking if they were cut from Crusian cloth. The answer is a resounding HELL NO. That I can deal with. They don't believe a black high culture exists. If they tilted just a little bit more I could see them being John Birchers. They wouldn't know the value of race based cooperation, initiative, and loyalty, if it bit them. That's ok. I love them to death. But again, I wouldn't trust my kids with them, and I definitely wouldn't work with them.

The problem with making too much out of the pre-Civil Rights era culture is that we end up romanticizing a period in which not only were black people catching hell, black people were subjugating other black people in the name of "race respectability" that ended up subjugating blacks without means, or without the right stylo. And while this does not hold a candle to the types of subjugation white supremacy lays on us (there simply are no black matthew shephards that i am aware of) it is still crucial we deal with these issues.

Now I know that in your case this just isn't your thing.

I can roll with that.

black people were subjugating other black people in the name of "race respectability" that ended up subjugating blacks without means, or without the right stylo

siddity and criminal DO HAVE and HAVE ALWAYS HAD a great deal in common - psychologically - when you get right down to it.

to tell you the truth, i've always had an easier rapport with the classic crimeys - I think they're braver souls.

I'm going to look forward to being incrementally informed by one or another of my best educated, best trained cohorts, as to why I need to shift from a perspective of marginal political neutrality to one of marginal political advocacy...,

i think that health angle is going to loom large. to go back to rap, i'm damn near positive that the images kids are getting from the stuff that passes for rap music is exerting a heavy influence on their policy preferences and on their ideas about women. it's the video equivalent of getting cancer through second-hand smoke. and i'm thinking the corporate influence on rap is so pernicious that underground rap and underground rap videos have exactly the same themes. black men aren't being hurt by this stuff to the same degree that black women are. and because the rap artists literally (w)rap themselves in crystalized conceptions of blackness, black women are put in a delicate position of going against "the race" to defend themselves.

Which brings us full circle around to my primary critical target - the perpetrators of the divide and conquer boondoggle which pits the Essence magazine arm of Time Warner against the Rhyme and Pose minstrel show of Warner Music Group

I would be far less inclined to consider an independant expression of condemation of misogynistic Rhyming and Posing illegitimate. However, the irony of Essence magazine or BV as the vehicle in which a politically marginal point of view is advanced - strikes me as wack. What did Chris Rock say about these lyrics and the women who uncritically dance to them? "to the windows, to the walls, till the sweat drips off my balls, skeet, skeet, skeet!"

My concern is that the way in which the issue is presently framed, and, the organs in which the framing is being done, amount to nothing so much as consensus engineering for fun and profit by a media conglomerate which seeks to play marginal black political interests against the normative middle for the sheer lucrative spectacle of it all.

Where are the cries of outrage against Time Warner for staging this entire phooking spectacle? I'm almost inclined to give C. Delores Tucker and that crowd more dap for independant guardianship than this set of mercenary hypesters.

Parson's afrostocratic overseeing of this artificial *beef* exemplifies the way in which black siddity and black criminal elements have psycho-historically overlapped to the detriment of the normative black middle. My contention to you is that this pop cultural bread and circus is not reflective of or widely manifest in the community that I know.

Lacking deep historical acumen, and relying on the empirical report of my own subjective experience in my midwestern community, I'm left wondering whether this whole issue is something real within the broader black political culture, or, is it confined to NYC intellectual redefinitions of black male dysfunction?

Since WMG and Essence alike stand to handsomely profit from simultaneously promoting and condemning misogynistic Rhyming and Posing (RaP) - could this whole pov on the margins of black political life be something substantially made up and peddled by the global media publishing interests whose systematic complicity in manufacturing consent has been fairly well documented?

Does the marginal political view reflect a particular sensibility which the publishers of this cultural pornography would like to prioritze within black cultural life and political thought above the core issues meaningful to the majority consensus?

Or, is it just so much virtual, commercial Fiddy/Game hokum which just happens to kick us dead in the ass?

I remember Vibe's complicity in the East-West conflict that took both Tupac and Biggie's lives. This is somewhat similar in that this can be used to bolster Essence's bonifides at a time not that long after it was sold out. I don't like this at all.

But let's not conflate this with C. Delores Tucker's deal, which was nothing more than an attempt to get her own record label that ended up not quite going the way she wanted. This beef started when Spelman women took it ON THEMSELVES to put the fire to Nelly, and Nelly balked. Given the new political context in which people are simultaneously powerful enough to use media to send messages out to millions of people with a keystroke, yet politically neutered to the point where they feel they have to call in "leaders" to mediate political disputes, what happened with Essence is unfortunate but part and parcel of newjack mediated politics.

Somebody is affronted because of their race. They hold a media event. The antagonist responds unfavorably. Somebody calls a black leader. Leader rails against antagonist. Cuts a deal with antagonist. Says all is well. Rinse and repeat.