Vision Circle

Movement 2004

For the last few years, Detroit has hosted the Electronic Music Festival during Memorial Day Weekend. And while I was able to make the first two, I didn't make it last year, and I'm not going to be there this year. But listening to the simulcast (registration required but worth it!) a few things struck me.

1. Whenever we talk about black popular culture and its contemporary effects good or ill, we talk about hip-hop. And quiet as its kept, we don't really talk about hip-hop...we talk about MC'ing. This approach neglects the role of house, techno, electro, bass, and garage in underground culture. There's a mode of blackness working within techno and house in particular that's on some other shit to be frank.

2. Yesterday I talked about Detroit and philanthropy. If I would've asked folks to name the city that gave the most, there's no way in HELL anyone (not even me) would've offered up Detroit. Just doesn't fit with our conceptions of the city. Similarly, who would've thought that musics as life-affirming and powerful (did I mention that house music is my religion?) could emanate from such blown-out spots as Detroit on the one hand or Chicago on the other?

3. The Dutch ministry of culture is sponsoring part of the festival. The DUTCH GOVERNMENT!!!!

4. I've talked about how I think we ought to be about "real political change" that is about using the apparatus of government to make life materially better for all of us. Living wages, free post-secondary tuition, you name it and I'll be dat. Thinking about the potential of cultural events and phenomenon to expand our vision of what is politically possible, maybe I need to rethink my strict adherence to this notion.

5. Damn these beats are banging.

Detroit and Philanthropy

If it isn't clear already, I am from Detroit. And whatever fire I bring to the table on issues that matter comes from my formative experiences in the 313 area code. So when I happen to read that Detroit ranks first in charitable giving of course I'm proud.

[As an interesting aside, as much beef as Chris Webber (another Detroiter) has taken over the past several years for various miscues...I also found it interesting that his Time Out Foundation gave a greater proportion of its funds to charity than any other foundation in the state of Michigan.]

But given that Detroit is 80% black...and the Chronicle report didn't focus on metropolitan AREAS but with CITIES, I think this points to a much deeper finding. For all the talk that charity begins at home, for all the discussions about 1000 points of light, and using private initiatives to end public problems like poverty, the population more likely to give is the population most likely to believe that the government should be used to stop poverty and racism. Maybe BECAUSE we come out of our pockets the most we understand that the odds of ending social ills through private initiative is about the same as the odds of fully funding NASA through bakesales (got that one from Adolph Reed, I can't lie).

While my mind doesn't necessary qualify as "great" I don't think it's a coincidence that Prometheus 6 has got some of the same ideas.

Basis for success

A couple in Tuscon, AZ, have created a public high school based on a radical proposal. Teach nothing but AP courses from 5th to 12th grade.

The story.

They say, or at least the journalist says, that to a certain extent this is an attempt to curtail the "coddling movement." Which appears to be a synonym for the self-esteem movement that took shape around the sixties. Combining a program like this with the type of work that Bob Moses is doing in Mississippi, and I think the world will either beat a path to your door....or they'll assassinate you. Not sure which. Maybe both.

Excellence

Graduation at Washington University in Saint Louis. A portion of my Senior Seminar class.

questions on berg

talking to a friend on the conspiratorial tip the other day, he noted some things about the berg video that intrigued me...but not enough that i'm interested in looking at it myself. so for those who have looked at it:

1. is it true that one of the murderers wears a gold ring on his left hand?

2. is it true that no blood appears (or very little) during the beheading?

3. is it true that there is a skip in the video?

if even the first question is true then this raises flags (and again shows how much we don't know about Islam and Arab culture in general). Because historically the left hand was used to wipe one's self NOTHING adorns it. This is why in many cultures (including some African American subcultures) it is a sign of disrespect to shake hands with the left. Even if fundamentalist Islam promotes wearing jewelry (I'm not sure it does) there's no way in hell it'd be worn on the left hand.

May 19

Quotes

I am not a racist. I am against every form of racism and segregation, every form of discrimination. I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color.

Malcolm X ,after his journey, perhaps in interview 18 Jan. 1965, in By any means, p. 158

I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion.

Today is the birthday of Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, and my youngest son, Kiserian Isaiah Leroy Spence.

Ruminations on War and Peace

So I'm at a friend's 50th birthday party, and I meet some of her partner's former students. One of them just got back from Iraq. Because he was just a hair away from having his truck repossessed, Iraq was the best thing that happened to him. But it becomes very clear talking to him that even if we believe in empire, believe that democracy can be imposed from without, there's no way in hell we can win there.

Arabic is one of the hardest languages to learn from an American standpoint. Just making the psychological shift to reading and writing right to left has to be difficult. As a result I'd gather that of the infantry responsible for much of the peacekeeping activities, less than 10% are proficient in Arabic. Of the psyops unit the kid I talked to was with, I got the sense that it was more like 5% tops.

Layer on top of that the fact that many of these kids were trained to wage war, not make peace (Rep. Kucninich has been proposing a Department of Peace for a while now...it sounds kitschy, but I'll be damned if something like that isn't needed here). So in an extremely short period of time, soldiers who've been trained and brainwashed (make no mistake, amping someone up to become a stone cold killer requires brainwashing) to view these folks as the enemy are now required to smile and wave upon every encounter.

It's clear that the segue from soldier to policeman can be a straightforward one. But being familiar with the history of relationships between police and African Americans, I can say that I'm not particularly surprised that more sophisticated versions of Detroit circa 1967 are occurring on a frequent basis.

class over!

no more teaching for 27 months. starting over again in balitmore in just 9 weeks. in between now and baltimore, i've got a reflexive photography project to work on, a book to start writing, an experiment or two to conduct. and a lot of packing to do. time to fly.

Berg

Cobb notes (quite rightly) that no one should link to the Berg video.

It's funny....I'd never even thought about seeing it. Not even for a second. Kind of like The Passion.

I am probably one of the few writers not reading blogs on a regular basis. So I have absolutely no sense of the numbers here. How many bloggers have linked to it? How many have seen it?

Out of that number...how many of them are black? I don't think black people have an "anti-voyeurism gene" at all. We're as voyeuristic as the rest of the country. I do think that black people on average have a different perspective on "real-life" violence, from the rest of America (on average). And perhaps because this type of thing is something many of us would have predicted given our (on average) distaste for Bush, many of us are like "there's nothing to see here."

As I've said regarding The Passion...no need for me to see it. I know this story. I know how it ends.

Dat Old South response

I've got a bit of time to kill, so I thought I'd respond to the recent Claremont Institute's response to the argument that the Republican Party ascended on the back of racism. While Cobb is right that it does raise questions, these questions can be answered in a pretty straightforward manner.

Take the quote below:

The myth that links the GOP with racism leads us to expect that the GOP should have advanced first and most strongly where and when the politics of white solidarity were most intense. The GOP should have entrenched itself first among Deep South whites and only later in the Periphery. The GOP should have appealed at least as much, if not more, therefore, to the less educated, working-class whites who were not its natural voters elsewhere in the country but who were George Wallace's base. The GOP should have received more support from native white Southerners raised on the region's traditional racism than from white immigrants to the region from the Midwest and elsewhere. And as the Southern electorate aged over the ensuing decades, older voters should have identified as Republicans at higher rates than younger ones raised in a less racist era.

Points to consider:

1. Over the course of time, ideologies of conservatism and liberalism map onto political parties in very different ways. The idea of state's rights (now a conservative principle) was first evoked by the DNC, whereas massive redistribution of wealth was first evoked by the GOP.

2. The Deep South and most of the surrounding states were dominated by the Democratic Party. The larger the black presence in the state, the greater the level of dominance.

3. Party ID endures over time, even as national ideologies shift. But at the same time people are also known to cast split tickets when the national and the local conflict.

4. In 1980 Ronald Reagan begins his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi with one phrase: state's rights.

While the author does well in separating the Deep South from the periphery, he doesn't quite grapple with the points above. Why would we expect GOP dominance to start immediately in the Deep South, when the Democratic Party was already deeply conservative AND deeply entrenched in that area of the country? There is a REASON why Zell Miller is a Republican in all but name.

At the same time he doesn't quite get around to talking about the ideological predispositions of the parties and how they were related to race. How does the GOP go from supporting 40 acres and a mule in 1865 to supporting state's rights come 1980? Surely they don't reflect the same ideological predispositions?

Finally what Carter and the others are arguing is that the Southern Strategy is responsible for Republican dominance...but this doesn't start UNTIL Reagan. Why doesn't the author grapple with the electoral patterns of 1980 and beyond rather than conflating different electoral eras?

I don't have so much time that I can crunch the numbers myself, but I'm betting that republican dominance begins when the deep south shifts...and that this shift occurs over the course of years as older democrats first vote republican in national elections, then gradually change their partisan identification.

Fatal Thoughts of Suicide

One of the most vivid rap tracks ever made was My Mind's Playin' Tricks On Me, by the Geto Boys. Though I'm pretty sure Esham was making underground tapes in Detroit at the time with his unique vision of what should probably be called Satanic Rap, the Geto Boys were the first to come above ground. The rhyme scheme is fair to middling, as are the rhymes themselves ("I got a child to look after...and if I die then my son will be a bastard"). But for invoking a sense of paranoia infused with horror, I don't think there is a track in any genre that captures this sense as well as the Geto Boys do.

I bring this up, because I just got word a few minutes ago that one of the parents at my son's school committed suicide.

I knew the parent probably better than any other parent. It didn't mean we were friends, but I enojoyed seeing him and would talk to him when I could. Was always at the events...always chaperoned the field trips. I don't know much at this point, but when my wife asked me if I was surprised....I said yes and no.

Yes, in that I didn't think that he would be the one, when he has a beautiful wife and two beautiful daughters to look after. And he had a humble spirit and was a genuinely good man.

But no, in that I think this is part of a trend driven by a combination of economic forces and social anomie. Home foreclosures are increasing even as loan rates hover in the low single digits. The economy is draining jobs like a sieve, but those bills are still due.

I remember asking my Public Opinion class in a discussion about political ideology, what types of myths regular folk create for themselves once they realize that their best years occurred before they reached drinking age. What was it that kept them going even as everything and everyone around them shouted GIVE THE FUCK UP! I imagine a number of folks look to their kids as their driving force.

Given what we're looking at, I don't think this will be enough. Suicide used to be uncommon among black folk. It still is...but the rate of increase is through the roof.

Damn. We've got a LOT of work to do.

Meet the Buppies

The flip side of Soweto hip-hop. Probably requires a subscription to see the whole article, but as Salon is worth the loot, I'd suggest you do it. But in case you aren't moved, here's a snippet:

Tshepo Boikanyo signs his name on the dotted line and in an instant becomes the proud owner of a $70,000 BMW. The 33-year-old lawyer, dressed sharp in a black suit, glides across the floor of the BMW dealership to ogle his new car. "I considered buying a Jaguar, but I opted for the BMW after test-driving one. And this is a black dealership, so I felt I had to bring my business here," he says. Litha Nkombisa, one of the dealership's four owners, hands him a bottle of champagne and the keys to his titanium silver 525 Coupe. "You see, they take care of me here," Boikanyo says. "It's like a second home."

The entire article can be found here.

I hate being a two handed social scientist. but I've got to do it here. On the one hand, in as much there is nothing inherently revolutionary about being poor, brothers and sisters getting their loot on in South Africa is a good thing. It is ESPECIALLY good that the brothers and sisters are South African born and bred.

But on the other, neo-liberalism can only work for the bourgie. And it usually doesn't work for very long. What is striking about this article is that there is absolutely no discussion of politics in it. E. Franklin Frazier wrote the seminal text on the African American bourgeois class in Black Bourgeioisie. Perhaps it is high time someone begin to think about what a transnational black bourgeioisie would look like?