1. Intro
2. Black Legends
3. Rest In Peace
4. You A Nigger Too
5. The Fear Of A Black Man’s Dick
6. I’m Blessed
7. The Truth
8. Realise
9. Just Memories
10. This Way (featuring Jay-Z)
11. Kisses & Hugs (featuring Kelis)
12. Based On A True Story (featuring The Game)
13. Take A While
14. Nigger
15. Publicity (bonus track)
"Affirmative Action...blacks...blacks...blacks...blacks...blacks...blacks...blacks...blacks...racial preference...blacks...blacks...blacks...Italians...blacks...blacks...blacks in the 12th grade at the level of 8th grade whites...blacks...blacks...blacks..."
I wanted to e-mail you about what was being discussed last night at the black men of lawrence gathering. Mostly, I wanted to discuss the education thing. Derrais and myself were discussing what your associate was saying about the youth and we agreed that a drastic difference between your generation (or at least his) and our generation is that the black community had more control over the school system. One of the greatest sacrifices that black people made to facilitate integration was selling their children to the machinations of a white dominated educational system. Rather than the school board having to answer to a black majority, the schools now have to answer to a white majority. The white majority never did--and still doesn't--care about or desire their children to learn black history. Derrais and my experiences both attest to that reality. I would assume that it is no better anywhere else in the midwest, and probably worse as you approach inner-city schools that are controlled more directly by the state. I think that No-Child-Left-Behind is a part of that. By having a federal program that decides what kinds of information a student must know in order for the school to be accredited, the schools are pressured even more to ensure that the black students assimilate. Since the black students are not interested in assimilation, drop out rates are only more likely to increase.
I asked Derrais how much black history he had in his youth, and it appears to me that if you asked all of the more advanced black students to find a commonality that explains their status as academics in contrast to their dropped-out counterparts, you'd probably find that most of us had parents that were engaged in our education. Furthermore, and most importantly, they taught us black history where the school system didn't. I contend that, either it is job of the black community to demand that some alternate history and racially respectful curriculum be added in the school systems--or at least the black community provide that black history base to their pre-pubescent child's home life.
I think an important way of developing the black youth, would be to create a short book list of "must-reads." A list of books that will give black children the kind of background that they need to love themselves and respect what they are learning. The only book that I'm certain of is the Autobiography of Malcolm X, which should probably be read during the middle school generation. I think that a brief black inventors book should be a part of the elementary school period. Also in high school should be the alternative history of the United States, such as Howard Zinn's People's History or something along those lines.
To me it seems that black youth fail to embrace education because it is white washed. They teach that the Greeks invented math, science, and philosophy. They teach that everything of value in our lives is white. I guarantee you that no more than 1% of black youth know that math, science, and philosophy was originally taught to Greeks by Africans. Even fewer think of Egyptians as black--because they are consistently presented as white. Astronomy is just as African as it is European. They don't teach that the Mayan calendar included eclipses--which means that astronomy existed in the "New World" at least a 1000 years before Columbus. The school system is denigrating towards minoritized histories. Whiteness is treated as fact, and imperative. Black youth have nothing to love about themselves, and even less to love about a school system that teaches that for white students but not black students.
Think of it this way. How do white people learn their identities? How do black people learn their identities? White people learn it everywhere, and all the time. Black people have to search for it. If black people are inundated with sensory information that tells them that the nature of blackness--authentic blackness--is criminality, ignorance, and irrelevance, and no one is correcting that sensory information, then it should be no surprise that the black youth are on the purely survivalist level. Why should they develop beyond that; they've been told their whole lives that they should aspire to nothing more than survival.
As I said in my last e-mail. Black people have all of the skills necessary for success, it is merely misplaced energy. When black people are doing for self, you can see the abundance of talent, focus, determination, dedication, and discipline that we all inherently have. When black people feel like they're not benefiting from their efforts--like white-washed schools--you can literally watch their energy turn from enthusiasm to exasperation. Then, when they are punished for their disinterest--because the whole of society tells them they should be interested in whatever it is that white society is inundating them with--they are traumatized.
My generation is only one generation removed from social revolution. Our heroes are at most ten years removed from the Civil Rights Movement. We only know the aftermath of those efforts. What black people really need is to take a cold look at the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement and see how much has changed. I can say, and see, that while the laws have changed, little else has. Even the laws are getting reversed--into de facto forms of archaic Jim-Crowism.
Watch the supreme court decisions in regards to integration, affirmative action, and civil rights legislation. Ask yourselves, how much of Martin Luther King's work is sticking around? School integration? White flight fixed that, and the supreme court is ending it now. Affirmative Action? George Bush and congress have taken care of that--but the supreme court got first bite. Civil Rights legislation...such as the Voting Rights Act? How many of us actually vote? Not enough to matter as a political block. Our voting has been destroyed by gerrymandering, gentrification, the electoral college, and direct bigotry. To my generation, we don't see the glories of the Civil Rights Movement. To us, it was nothing more than a failed black unity movement...cause we don't even have unity.
My point is, your generation saw it all. You saw the good, ran with it, and in-between all of your success--the rest of us slipped through the cracks. While the black middle class rose, the black lower class fell. The black youth that you are concerned with are not (necessarily) the children of the black middle class. They are the children of the people who DID NOT benefit from the Civil Rights Movement. They are the second generation of integration losers. Our grandparents were farmers, and ghetto residents. We felt the sting of the neo-conservative movement; and the bitter loss to the neo-liberalist movement. While the black middle class shakes their head at the losses and changes. The black lower-class is racing through the ghettos keening with their guns, tears streaming down their hardened faces, wondering where hope went.
I'm sending you a set of song lyrics attached to this e-mail. It's a song by the Hiphop group Dead Prez. The song is titled "They Schools." It's uncensored because I think it's important to our understanding of their perspective. I honestly don't think that any of the black youth comprehend their problem on the level of Dead Prez--many of them probably FEEL that, but are incapable of comprehending or articulating what's wrong in their world. I'm also giving you a link to something I wrote called the "Black Student's Manifesto." I wrote it a while ago when a childhood friend of mine insinuated to another friend of mine that being an AAAS major was anything but worthwhile. It only speaks to the idea of black identity. Hopefully some of this helps to make sense of the perspective and problem of black youth today. It's no easy task that you're pursuing. You're not only battling against the hardened hearts of black youth, but in order for you to reach them at all, you must be willing to put up a fight against the white majority who might be the foundation of your income. To win this fight, you must have a healthy fear of the battle.
Black Student's Manifesto
I hope this wasn't too long. I wasn't thinking very linear. But I hope it helps some. I'll drop by your office sometime next week.
Chris
I pledge allegiance
To the salvation of the nation
The end of brown incarceration
To the death of assimilation
I swear my dedication
To equalitarian integration
Even if it means separation
Cause I will neither hate
Nor wait
On any caucasian
For my emancipation
My soul's vexation
Is false representation
Borne of ofay media motivation
H.E.R. commercialization
A product of capitalist dollarization
My persistent dis-representative spiritual taxation
Will only turn this slow burn
Into a cultural conflagration
My small ax
Will fight back
Without the slightest hesitation
I embody individualization
But have never forgotten my communal originations
Though you attempt my homogenization
I will not fall prey to your monolithic presentations
Force fed criminal acculturation
And societal dreg inebriation
I will not be your photo negative imitation
Nor your self-indulgent propogandation
Through our collective demonization
I will uproot the very foundations
Of your glorified civilization
Not liberal but independent
Revolutionary 'til we finish...
~Complex
A friend of mine, when he found out that I was an AAAS major, asked, "So did Chris become the typical African-American Studies major?" My response was, "there's an AAS archetype/stereotype?" Apparently so. Or at least I suppose so. I'm not upset by that, because that requires an admission of a black intellegentsia--somewhere--that whether he agrees with the premises of that intelligentsia, he has to acknowledge its existence, thereby acknowledging me as a member of the "talented tenth." (Did I forget to mention that my friend is a moderately conservative, white Republican?) Anyway, so I thought to myself, if I were the one who told him of my major, what would he have said to me? I think he would have asked something along the lines of "why?" So here it is:
I can't imagine surviving as a black person in America without at some time or another examining my identity. White people don't share that anxiety. There is no question of whiteness--despite the existence of whiteness studies, which is an attempt to problematize whiteness in the same way that blacks have problematized their negrescence--it is an accepted fact. There is no standard of whiteness. Despite thousands of years of art, cultural development, and recorded history, whiteness is maleable and virtually transcendent of the racial signifier that is "white." Blackness doesn't have that. Not in America at least. When I go to class, I learn about the triumphs of western civilization. My classes glorify the tyrannical nature of western expansion. The enlightenment is seen as an era of intellectual growth; as opposed to the period that produced western racism and dogmatic white supremacy. The Greeks created philosophy; rather than Greek philosophy being a product of Greek conquest in Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia. We laud western civilization in American schools rather than critique it, more often than not. The western world is designed to reaffirm the whiteness of every white person that is fully immersed within it. Which, to me is...okay(?). I'm not complaining about the fact that white civilization actively promotes and affirms white identity. What should I expect? But when white people hear my major and ask me, "what are you going to do with that?" My first thought is, "how can you believe that an active, scholastic, search for identity is an impractical endeavor?" The successes of white students over black students in America just might be, in part, a result of an undefined identity. A certain dissatisfaction with whom one is and can become. True, white people can REdefine their identity; but the fact is, it has been defined once--if not numerous times--already. Black people do go to college to learn, but every adult will admit that college is just as much about education as identity assimilation. It is designed to put you in a successful frame of mind. To mold you into a confident, intelligent human being. And I find it sad and oppressive to think that so many people don't understand the importance of tracing my...identity.
Here is a compelling metaphor. A black man in America is a human on Mars. Sure, presuming that Martians are humanoid, a human could get along on Mars. You could learn Their history, Their culture, assimilate to the way They do things; but that won't get You through the day. At the end of it all, you still have to come to terms with the fact that you are not a Martian, but a (wo)man. And that that reality must be realized, recognized, and accepted by the Martian world for you to be comfortable living there. If Martians wore boots on their ears (and I don't mean earrings) and expected you to assimilate, you might not like it. But given 400 years, you wouldn't think twice about it. There would be a loss, that once discovered, would have to be unearthed in its entirety. You must be developmentally satiated to survive life in a foreign environment.
I know...I'm an "American." I was born here, I live here, and I'll probably die here. But the fact is nobody has said what that means. And if they did, I wouldn't agree. I don't like dogmatic definitions of identity factors. While I may be American by birth, we still haven't had a president who looks like he could be related to me. When I make moves to pursue my future, I do it through people who see my skin color first--and my work and ideas second. When the world thinks about Americans, they know that there are black people--hell they know there are indigenous people, but they imagine white flesh. Part of the reason they integrated the military during Vietnam is because the Viet-Cong wouldn't shoot black soldiers. (Divide and conquer?) Imagine sending segregated black troops into an occupation in Africa. Who would the black soldiers sympathize with? Am I an American? By the text book definition yes. Am I an American in reality...not yet. With problems like white flight, privilege, supremacy, I'm at an integrative loss. I can't integrate into a society that doesn't want me as me. I can't assimilate into a society that tells me that assimilation equals glorifying the past of their forebears--but mine were immaterial, inferior, and primitive. For all of your intellect, Chris, I'm more afraid of you than admirous of you. I would rather shun you than compete with you. The world I live in DEMANDS me to find me. If I can't learn it the same way that white people learn their identity--everywhere--I'll learn how black people learn their identities--anywhere.
I once wrote a blog entry about the town I'm living in. It was a rant. I referred to it as: "A petit-bourgeoisie society with a 1960's hangover."
My point is, after Reagan, America resigned revolutionary actions to the past. Post-Reagan politics have been about portraying America as THE model of democracy and success, even if we can't get our domestic stuff straight. It's not that our politicians our liars...it's that they're in politics. They don't work for what they believe in, they work to get re-elected.
Politics isn't a convocation anymore, it's a business--not a calling.
In the first generation after America's "founding" the "founding fathers" had jobs! Politics was their pasttime. They practiced politics part time, and did other stuff full time. America didn't have full time politicians who were paid gross amounts of money to debate crap that's not really very debatable. How do you argue against universal healthcare...really. Other than the fact that it's a socialist program in a quasi-democratic state (which isn't mutually exclusive despite the ignorance of many Americans), why would anyone be against it. The only answer is because capitalism comes before democracy. America has been, since its inception, less about what is right than about the right dollar.
Take the 3/5 clause in the constitution for example. The only reason it exists is because they didn't want southern cash to take a hit. Many of the "founding fathers" owned slaves, which they released upon their deaths. One of them, Madison, was adamantly against slavery. If it had been up to him, everyone would have been free after the "American Revolution".
My point is, C.R.E.A.M. applies to politics just like it does our lives. America is a fucked-up-repugnant nation because we have misappropriated our energies. We are the wealthiest nation because we put energy that should be given to our neighbors into ourselves. We've sold the soul of the nation for money, and there's no sign of change. We decided that revolution belongs to other countries, with "dictators," like Iraq, Iran, North Korea, countless African nations, Cuba, and Venezuela under Hugo Chavez...but we're controlled by a post-Reagan legacy of dictatorial manipulation. We're taught to believe that we HAVE TO vote democrat or republican. We're raised in families with ties to one or the other. We pay them! our politicians, to be partisan rather than American. And it's all b******t.
I'm ranting on your blog. Ignore me anyway. I'm a "Black Nationalist" revolutionary type. The media doesn't like what I have to say anyway. And you do whatever the media says right?
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