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White Tower Musings

~ This blog will be an attempt to explain the significance of various works of great writing, the authors that create them, and some effort to understand correlations between great writing and contemporary events.

White Tower Musings

Category Archives: Race

Hatari!  Hatari!: John Wayne’s Adventures Through Africa and the Problems of Colonialism

09 Thursday May 2019

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Film Review, History, Politics, Race, Uncategorized

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Tags

"Dark Continent", Africa, Animals, Blackface, Bruce Cabot, colonialism, Elsa Martinelli, Film, film review, Giraffe, Hatari, history, Howard Hawks, imperialism, John Wayne, racism, Red Buttons, Rhino, wild animals

Hatari 12

I mean they just let the black guys handle the ostriches while they watched and laughed.  I’m not saying it’s openly racist, it’s just kinda messed up.  Those birds are huge, scary, and they bite and it’s kinda-super-fucked how Kurt just gave up halfway through.

I’ve written before that growing up John Wayne was something of a personal hero of john wayne true grit 1mine, and that relationship became complicated as I got older and realized that John Wayne was…complex. 

Racist, I mean racist.  The dude was just racist. 

It’s for this reason I no longer idolize the man, but I do recognize that, since I spent most of my childhood watching his movies, I can’t ignore that a fair amount of my consciousness is built around his films.  Mom and Dad always had his movies playing at night when they went to bed. I’ve never been a good sleeper, and in fact I usually wound up making a palette and sleeping on the floor of their bedroom instead, and while they would snore or rumble the way parents tend to, I would watch those movies over and over again until sleep would eventually take me.  There were usually three I could rely on dependably: Rio Bravo, El Dorado, and Hatari.  The last one always had a special significance for me, largely because it was set, not in the old West like the other two, but in a far more magical and mythical place to my young mind: Africa.

I’ve been wanting to write about Hatari for some time, largely because growing up Africa was always a bit of a mystery to me.  Being part of the generation that was brought up on Hatari 10VHS Disney collections of original animated films I remember The Lion King and how it created this perception that Africa was a continent largely of incredible beauty and wild animals, and Hatari only added to this sense of wonder.  Watching the film as I usually do once a year I’m still pretty spellbound as there are shots of John Wayne riding the front of an old beat-up truck lassoing zebras and giraffes and the camera shows these creatures reacting honestly to their capture.  Whether it was rhinos, monkeys, water buffaloes, leopards, or even baby elephants Howard Hawks last major motion picture inspired me to learn more about the wild animals that populated the continent of Africa because they were foreign and wonderful.  It also didn’t hurt that I lived twenty minutes from a zoo which was not only free to the public, it also had most of the animals I watched in the film.

Reflecting on it though, I’ve begun to reassess my love of the film.  I’m not saying that I’ve abandoned it completely. Hatari is still a beautiful movie that I watch every year.  The cinematography is breathtaking, the characters are fun, the music is a sumptuous collection of jazz, and more often than not there are actual scenes in the film which make me laugh.  What I can’t get past though, is the implied racism of the film.Hatari 8

Hatari is about a group of American and European contract workers and adventurers who literally capture animals for zoos.  As the film was made, and is set in the early 60s, there is no tranquilizer guns and so Sean Mercer (John Wayne Himself) and his crew have to wrangle and capture animals using only ropes and battered second-hand automobiles.  The film begins with their attempt to capture a Rhino, and during this attempt Little Wolf “The Indian” (long-time Wayne co-star Bruce Cabot) is gored in the leg.  The crew manage to rush him to the hospital where he’s saved with a blood-transfusion by a frenchman named Charles Maurey who eventually becomes part of the crew.  Not long thereafter an Italian photographer named Anna Maria D’Allesandro (played by the rapturous Elsa Martinelli) joins the crew to take photographs of the crew capturing the animals.  From this point onward Hatari becomes, like many Howard Hawkes movies, more of an exploration of the characters and their relationships than an actual plot.  Sean and D’Allsesandro, who eventually goes by Dallas, fall in love and the reader is also entertained with a love triangle between Pockets (Red Buttons), Charles, Kurt, and a young woman of the crew named Brandy de la Court.  And along with these character arcs the reader is given scene after scene of the crew capturing wild animals with nothing but ropes, crates, and willpower.Hatari 5

From afar this summary doesn’t appear to give much in the way of revealing the problems in the film, and in fact if one watches the characters themselves they’re entirely likable people.  As a viewer I love these characters and I love watching them work towards their goal, and I love watching them fall in love.  But the problems begin to appear when one looks at some of the small moments in the films that can go unnoticed.

As I noted at the start, at one point in the film the ostriches they have captured get out and so the crew has to capture them again, however in the film the only people doing any of the work are the local Africans who are often chased and attacked by the birds Hatari 13while the host of the crew, again all of them white Europeans or Americans, are laughing and enjoying themselves.  In fact at one point Kurt, who began helping them stops, and Louis asks him why he he gasps laughing saying: “I better let the boys do it.”

THe use of the word “boy” to describe the Africans is problematic.  Even if the reader is not American they’re sure to at least catch this moment and will probably have the same reaction I do now, which is usually a small “twist” followed by a small repressed gurgle.

Another moment, earlier in the film, is when Kurt arrives to take Brandy to the hospital.  On the compound there are many native African people who cook and clean for the crew, one of them is named Argo.  He is, for the record, the only black man in the film who receives any sort of meaningful line.  Kurt is shuffling through the main hall telling Argo about the attack, looking at the floor.  When Argo asks how bad Little Wolf is hurt Kurt says plainly, “I don’t know.  Make me some coffee would you?”Hatari 7

No please.  No eye contact.  Just an order.

These are small moments, but they contribute to a larger whole.  Perhaps a more obvious moment is the scene of actual blackface.  Dallas, during the film adopts several baby elephants whose parents have either died or abandoned them and a local tribe decides to honor her by welcoming her as a member.  They take her back to their village and the reader eventually discovers that they’ve covered her face and arms with clay to make her appear black.  Sean and the crew laughs and the following exchange is offered:

Dallas: [Dressed as a Warusha] I don’t think it’s very funny. They want to shave my hair! They want to take my clothes off and there was a man in there.

Pockets: Why, he doesn’t speak any English.Hatari 2

Kurt Muller: You are now a member of the Warusha Tribe.

Sean Mercer: And they’ve given you name. Mother of Elephants. Mama Tembo! Well you’re supposed to dance with them.

Watching this scene today, I honestly cringe.  It was probably funny at the time, but today I just can’t not see that we’re supposed to be entertained by the blackface which is the punchline of the scene.

At this point then my contester emerges.  Well then so what?  This sounds like a racist old movie about white people being dicks to Africans.  How could there possibly be any relevant entertainment or art in such a movie?  Why should I watch an arguably racist film.Africa

To this I would argue, because it is an arguably racist film.  But also an interesting one, largely because it has an element of colonialism that could be explored.

The Africa in Hatari is a not a “Dark Continent,” but that doesn’t mean that colonialism has been completely abandoned either.  The white Europeans and Americans that the reader watches and follows aren’t plundering the land of its diamonds, gold, or ivory the way the Europeans and Americans had done in the past, but that doesn’t mean Africa still doesn’t possess wonder and wealth.  Instead it’s the natural wonders, the animals which still inspire Western imagination that are being captured and sold to zoos.

Watching Hatari I’m struck by the fact that the native Africans help Sean Mercer and his crew capture giraffes and water buffaloes, the implication being that they’re somehow profiting from this venture, though probably not in the same level as the crew.  There’s Hatari 11an implied idea that in this continent of wild and exotic beasts, white people can still find adventure and exoticism that they can’t necessarily find in their own homelands.  They can also find, in their own way, a sort of wealth and domestic comfort.  Africa, its animals, and in some ways even its people, become a backdrop for the Europeans and Americans who are looking to these native creatures and seeing personal opportunity, rather than a chance to help native Africans.

It could be that I’m looking too deeply in this film for some kind of troublesome narrative, but I don’t think I am.  The implication of the narrative, and the small moments scattered throughout the film, contribute to a conclusion that Hatari is yet another in a long line of colonial narratives that paint Africa as a continent where fortune can be had, and adventure is to be gained by those willing and/or able to pursue it.  And that, unfortunately, is a racist narrative.  Africa is a complex continent with a rich history and a developing sense of itself in the aftermath of European colonialism, and as the peoples of that continent begin to rebuild their cultures and histories, narratives like “The Dark Continent” can hold the culture back.Hatari 4

I’m not saying that a film like Hatari should be wholly condemned.  It’s still a beautiful film, with shots that can leave a modern audience who are tired of bloated CGI effects stunned and amazed.  But the realities of contemporary existence, and the complexities of the actors who starred in such films, demand that the reader take a moment and ask themselves, is this movie a healthy presentation?  Or is it plagued  by the biases and unintended prejudices of its makers.

I’ll leave the reader to make up their own mind. 

As for myself I still love watching John Wayne lasso a giraffe while hitched to the front of an old truck and yelling at Pockets when they drive through a river getting him soaking wet.  Though I will say that I agree with my little sister who pointed out the problems of the last quotes directed at Dallas when she first arrives:

Luis Francisco Garcia Lopez: My name is Luis Francisco Garcia Lopez, and I don’t wear pajamas.

I don’t think Luis would have survived long in the #MeToo era, but then again he’s a Mexican man so I suppose it’s a wonder he was able to get any actual dialogue in this movie.

Hatari 14

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes from Hatari were provided by IMDB.com.  Though for the record I’m bothered by how few quotes there actually were.  I think I used all of them actually.

 

**Writer’s Note**

Having taken an African History course in college I have a basic understanding of the complexities inherit of that particular field.  A traditional approach to history, or at least a more Western approach is the reliance of written records to substantiate claims.  This is one of the reasons why African History has become a controversial topic in historical dialogues largely because the traditions and histories were oral traditional and the few people who had those histories memorized were, well, killed, or else enslaved.  Because of this historians working in Africa today are steadily trying to rewrite the history of their continent and regions.

In the interest then in giving a more nuanced view of the history of Africa I would point you towards this video by Blue of Overly Sarcastic Productions who provides a nice overview the topic while explaining some of the pitfalls of the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk3iOqKOD7g

I’m also going to post a link to his review of Egypt, because, don’t forget, Egypt is in Africa.  Yeah.  Too many people forget that shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3hJHmomKvc

I’m also going to leave a link to Extra history’s video on the Zulu Empire.  I haven’t disappeared into Extra History as much as OSP, but I have watched their reviews on Genghis Kahn and it’s amazing.  Definitely check these guys out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZLGKFWlRzY

Finally, I thought I would share this, it’s the soundtrack to Hatari.  Regardless of your opinion of the film what should never be denied is the fact that this film has a beautiful soundtrack.  And I’m not just saying that, the AFI says so too.  Check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4KuowE2WdU

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My Saga of Saga: A Science Fiction Masterpiece about Breast-Feeding in Public and Being Born a Crime

03 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Comics/Graphic Novels, Literature, Politics, Race, Satire/Humor, science fiction, Sexuality

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Alana, Apartheid, apathy, body humor, Born a Crime, Breast Feeding, Breasts, Brian K. Vaughn, Comics, Fiona Staples, Ghus, graphic novel, Hazel, Humor, interracial relationships, Landfall, Let women breast feed in public damn it!, Literature, Love, Love Story, Marko, Marko and Alana, Othering, Parents, People like to fuck, Petrichor, Politics, race, Race relations, racism, Rape, Saga, science fiction, Sex Criminals, Sexual Exploration, Sexual Fantasy, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, The Stalk, The Will, Trevor Noah, War, Wreath

 

gettyimages-530682505-shifting-monashee-alonso

The only other woman I had ever seen breastfeeding was my mother.  I remember stumbling in on her feeding my little sister a month or two after she was born and then promptly shutting the door and going back to the living room to watch Swat Cats.  This time it wasn’t my mother needlessly hiding herself away in her bedroom (though she might have just needed to be somewhere quiet and my near-constant Swat Cats Breast_anatomy_normal_schememarathon probably wasn’t what she needed) but was in fact a member of the graphic novel book club I’m a part of.  The woman was unforgettable with her purple hair and Nightmare on Elm Street t-shirt, but what struck me was, while I was delivering my usual lecture, this time on the graphic novel Saga, she actually lifted up her baby, opened her shirt, and held her child up to her breast.  I had never seen anyone breast-feed in public before, and seeing it sitting right next to me, I wasn’t entirely sure why anyone would ever have a problem with- it.  The kid was hungry and it wasn’t affecting me personally, so I carried on explaining why I thought Saga, which was also decorated with a breast-feeding mother, just wasn’t an interesting book.

My attitudes towards breast-feeding in public remain the same, let mothers feed their children damn it, but I’ve softened towards Saga.81+Sf+bNqUL

There was a woman who used to work at the library who I considered a close friend, and that’s why it hit me pretty hard when she announced that she was leaving the library for one in Dallas.  I understood that her reasons were a combination of desire for better pay as well as to be closer to her boyfriend, but I have trouble finding people who seem to like me so I was pretty bummed.  The only real sort of solace I had in the whole thing was that, because she was leaving, that meant that I would be the only person in the library who really knew the graphic novel section, and so, once my supervisors approved, I became the one responsible for shelving the graphic novels.  This task is one that, to say I’ve warmed up to it is putting it mildly, I fucking love it.  Pushing my green cart to the second floor I take a good 15 minutes a day just to rearrange the shelves, prop up new books for patrons passing through the area, arranging the tipped over or worn books up to their proper place, and while I am shelving I almost always find a fantastic book I want to read.  One of them was Saga and, while I admit a moment ago I didn’t find the book terribly wonderful the first time I read it, looking at Marko and Alana on the cover there was the same impulse there always is, a little kid who read Calvin & Hobbes over and over and over again saying, “Check it out, you got a library card!”

I grabbed the first two volumes on my way back down to help a woman send a fax.Saga_Ghus

There’s too much of Saga to try and tackle all of it in just one essay, and I’m not even looking at just the first volume.  While I’m writing this I’m currently on Volume six, and I’m positive by the time I finish this essay I’ll probably be at the last volume, (it’s up to eight right now) and become one of the I’m sure millions currently devouring this book every time it hits the shelves.  I’ve also finished all of Sex Criminals so if I start appearing peaked it’s because I’ll be sucking comic-book writer’s dicks for new issues.  My other real challenge is the fact that Saga is beloved, or, put it another way, Saga is the comic book that people who hate comics read.  Being friends with the owner of Ground Zero Comics (though I suppose I’m being charitable he may not consider me a friend at all and now I look foolish) he’s often talking about his patrons who come in trying to their wives, girlfriends, etc. into comics, and while the first option is almost always Sandman Vol 2 The Doll’s House, Saga is the series he almost always cites as the second option.

It’s not hard to see why, given the fact that the series is written as one long emotional melodrama, and I don’t mean that pejoratively.  Rather than superhero comics which are often defined by physical gods fighting the forces of evil in tight outfits and experiencing their own sort of melodramas (nobody ever really dies and there’s always a brother Fiona Stapleswho’s supposed to be dead but who turns out to actually be alive or a clone or some shit), Saga is drama about family centered in race, specifically race mixing.  Alana and Marko are people from different cultures, different races which are war with one another.  Marko is from Wreath, the only moon of the planet Landfall the homeward of Alana.  Marko’s people practice magic, whereas Alana’s people tend to gravitate more towards science and technology.  Because war, meaning total destruction of each other’s planets, could potentially destabilize the orbits of their worlds the cultures have moved their war to other planets thus involving a wide variety of peoples in this conflict and creating universal destabilization.  Marko becomes a prisoner of Landfall’s coalition where he meets and falls in love with Alana.  And because people in love have a tendency to fuck, Alana becomes pregnant which is where the series actually begins. 

The first page is memorable for a variety of reasons:

Saga_1

Allright, in all fairness, there’s really just one reason why this page is so striking: too many people forget that when babies are born they aren’t born with any original bacteria in their intestines to help with digestion.  Because of this humans evolved so that it was common for a pregnant woman to void her bowels during labor so that the bacteria in her feces would introduce bacteria into the baby’s body.  Now breast-milk is also a common way for mothers to transfer this bacteria, thus offering me another opportunity to remind my reader that breast-feeding is more important than your Saga 2discomfort, but it should be noted that pregnant women also tend to poop because, well, shit’s happening.

But that first line, carefully outlining Alana’s reddened face is an important one because Brian K. Vaughn frames the narrative of Saga as first person narration in the veing of  Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Saga is the story of a woman named Hazel who is the product of an interracial union narrating her life story to her audience.  She introduces herself, not as a person, not as an individual ego, but more of an idea.

This is how an idea becomes real.  But ideas are fragile things.  Most don’t live long outside at the ether from which they were pulled, kicking and screaming.  That’s why people create with someone else.  Two people can sometimes improve the odds of an ideas survival…but there are no guarantees.  Anyway, this is the day I was born.  (1-4).

Vaughn’s writing style is something I’ve had plenty of opportunities to explore and study and that’s largely because of my friend TJ.  As I’ve noted in several of my previous essays, he’s the founder of the local Graphic Novel Book Club that meets bi-weekly at Ground Brian K. VaughnZero Comics, and because of this prestige position he gets to decide which books are read in the group.  We’ve read quite a number of books over the years ranging from Understanding Comics to Transmetropolitian to Sandman to Fun Home, but many members have observed that, in the last year alone, we’ve read close to six or seven of the man’s books and this has lead some to label us the “Brian K. Vaughn appreciation society.”  There is some disagreement upon this suggestion largely because we’ve also read plenty of Jeff Lemire.  The coming war between the Vaughnites and Lemirians is coming and I’m not sure how many lives will ultimately be lost.

But this is just a way of saying that reading Saga is much like reading many of the other Vaughn books and the man has a real tendency to build up his spaces.  Saga is not just an intimate love story between Alana and Marko, it’s an opportunity to observe countless saga-book-lesson-copyspecies and peoples, all of whom are impacted by the war between the two races.  The reader is sometimes bombarded by this enormous amount of oddity, and while the first time I was overwhelmed by this treatment, as time in the story progressed I became more and more used to the oddity of the humanity.  And this I believe is its own sort of method. 

Race is very much biological, your DNA will always determine your physical characteristics as well as plenty of facets of personality, but race is also rooted in cultural and individual psychology.  Observing someone’s physical characteristics and observing difference is not racism, it’s only when one allows those observation of differences to form bias that the corrosive quality of racism manifests.

A racist is ultimately formed by a subculture that educates them that differences in physical characteristics such as skin color, or more abstract qualities such as language or nationality, are an indication of lesser worth.  Saga 7What’s incredible then about the graphic novel Saga is that, much like the Star Wars and Star Trek films before it, the reader is constantly exposed to individuals of different races and species intermingling without too much concern that such interactions are taking place.  The reader is able to see the physical differences, and encouraged to just accept these characters as people.  Whether it’s the Prince Robot IV and his television head, the floating ghost specter with half a body named Isabel, the half spider half human freelancer known simply as “The Stalk,” or my favorite character Petrichor a MTF transgender woman from Wreath.  Saga encourages the reader to see that race is biological, but that racism is ultimately just the social construct because regardlessSaga 12 of physiology, anatomy, or whether you’re a pothead actress made out of moss, people are people, and their qualities are what ultimately define them.

That would have been my end to Saga were it not for the fact that recently I’ve begun a new routine.  With the rightful fall of Charlie Rose, my morning breakfast routine has been shaken up dramatically because I used to watch interviews and eat.  I’ve now taken to watching Seth Meyers, The Daily Show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and of course The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.  This later one provides me with some news of the day and some means of maintaining my sanity as I watch the current administration do its…let’s say thing.  I like Colbert, he makes me laugh, and he gives me something to think Saga 3about when I’m shoveling my eggs, donuts, and tea down my throat as I get ready for work.  Most recently however he interviewed Trevor Noah, complimenting him about his time on the Daily Show, revealing to the world that Noah had a brief appearance in the film Black Panther, and then asking him about the issue of race.  It was during this last conversation that Noah reminded me about his eloquence, but then also about the larger narrative of racism in South Africa.

And during this interview Noah pointed out that, ultimately, his existence voided the larger racist narrative.  If one race in power argues that race-mixing cannot produce offspring it voids and ultimately destroys the racist narrative to begin with.  This shouldn’t have been such a powerful observation, but hearing him express it as such made me pause and really dwell on that statement.  It also made me go back to his biography and look through a few of the passages.

273B9DAC00000578-3023806-Loving_Trevor_Noah_with_his_mother_Patricia_The_three_year_old_w-a-1_1428088845110Noah’s memoir Born a Crime doesn’t just mirror Saga, it could almost be its own spin-off.  Noah imbues his life story with plenty of wit and humor, but constantly throughout the book he is able to demonstrate a real intelligence about the farce that was the governmental race policy of his home nation.

He writes in one chapter:

In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn’t merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent.  Race-mixing proves that races can mix—and in a lot of cases want to mix.  Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.  (21).

Looking then at Saga this is most certainly the case because Vaughn and Fiona Staples, the illustrator who deserves an entire essay to herself, show the family as constantly on the run from the two central organizations of their homewards who see their union as not just a threat to the larger war effort, but to the very war itself.  The war between Wreath and Landfall is a racial war, it’s a war founded on the idea that the two races not only should not intermingle and interbreed, but that they cannot.  Alana and Marko, and by extension Hazel is a rejection of that system.  Its proof that the war is, ultimately, bullshit.

Noah’s biography goes on to note the length to which apartheid was ridiculous and cruel:Saga 4

Laws were passed prohibiting sex between Europeans and natives, laws that were later amended to prohibit sex between whites and all nonwhites.

The government went to insane lengths to try and enforce these laws.  The penalty for breaking them was five years in prison.  There were whole police squads whose only job was to go around peeking through windows—clearly an assignment for only the finest law enforcement officers.  And if an interracial couple got caught, God help them.  The police would kick down the door, drag the people out, beat them, and arrest them.  At least that’s what they did to the black person.  With the white person it was more like, “Look I’ll just say you were drunk, but don’t do it again, eh? Cheers.”  That’s how it was with a white man a black woman.  If a black man was caught having sex with a white woman, he’d be lucky if he wasn’t charged with rape.”  (22).

There’s a brief moment in Saga when Prince Robot IV is being briefed by a Landfall intelligence officer about the couple and the subject of Alana’s consent is mentioned.  Alana’s pregnancy is observed and Robot IV says rather plainly,

“Love child?  Surely he forced himself on her.” (24)Saga 5

And this is, ultimately, everything.  The narrative of the war and the races has become so ingrained in the zeitgeist, so embedded into the universal culture of Saga that two people of Landfall and Wreath falling in love and conceiving a child is not only inconceivable, it’s repulsive.  There’s also the fact that throughout the text Marko’s people speak a language that often appears to be some sort of slavic tongue mixed in with Spanish which makes the theme of racism all the more potent.

Hazel as a character is an idea and a material reality for her very existence is a crime.  Saga as a work of art then is not something that is just relevant it’s historical pertinent.  Often the charge against graphic novels is that they are too fantastic, too hyperbolic, or else that they are too much like a melodrama or a soap opera.  My argument against this charge is that while Saga is all of these things, it still manages to consistently say something about humanity which that we are more than the petty and paltry divisions which are used to allow suffering.

Rape camps, racism, sexual slavery, transphobia, and murder for hire are all concepts which are explored in the Saga Series, and while many would prefer that it didn’t exist,Saga 8 all of these concepts are realities that are still plaguing society.  Saga doesn’t just create a new world, fill it with quirky languages and science fiction creatures for the sake of delving into high fantasy; the book is an effort to touch and explore that which is most human.  Love is ultimately a biological imperative based in chemistry to get us to reproduce, but looking past this and seeing how we allow it to create meaning in our lives the story of Hazel is a Saga_15story which, as Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime demonstrates, is an ongoing narrative.

People like to fuck, and people like to fall in love.  Regardless of a person’s sex, gender identity, race, or nationality everyone has the capacity to love another human being.  And this idea is powerful because love allows more than just two people to come together and find one another.  People comes with families, friends, associations, organizations, creeds, and personal ideologies all of which expose each person of the relationship to new ideas and people which expand their world.

Talking about Saga, and watching that woman breastfeed beside me, was a chance to observe other people, to explore a new way of thinking, and listen to other people’s opinions about what the book meant to them.  In a period and time when it feels more and more like human beings are looking for excuses and reasons to “other” each other (pardon that pathetic string of words) it speaks to the power of a book to ask its reader if those differences are really so profound that we can’t find some excuse to recognize another person’s humanity, and maybe see them as somebody we’d like to know, or fuck, or even love.

144ed48ce994d3f0d8f1f95fbf98f9bb--girls-kissing-girls-lesbians-kissing

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from Saga Volume 1 were taken from the paperback Image copy edition.  All quotes cited from Born a Crime were cited from the first edition hardback Spiegel & Grau copy.

 

**Writer’s Note**

I really wanted to cite Trevor Noah directly in this essay but it just didn’t work out that way.  So instead here’s the original interview from The Late Show.  Please enjoy, and please remember to take the time to appreciate that they got Trevor Noah to be an A.I. hologram in the movie Black Panther.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC6V4gLAat4

 

***Writer’s Note***

I didn’t get a chance to do it here, and maybe hopefully at some point I’ll have time to write a long treatise, but having now read the entrety of the Saga series run published thus far, my absolute favorite character, after Ghus, is Petrichor.  I don’t know whether or not it’s because she’s beautiful or else because she’s hysterical, but I adore her more than anything in the world, and I admit with no shame whatsoever that I have the individual issue with her on the cover in my bookshelf.

Saga_Petrchir
Saga_Patrichor

Patrichor is BAE.

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Can You Fool the White Wizard?

27 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Art, Biography, History, Politics, Race, Writing

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Art, biography, Black Klansman, glasses, history, Joshua Jammer Smith, KKK, Ku-Klux-Klan, original photograph, Police, Politics, race, Ron Stallworth, still life, tea, Undercover Investigation

Can You Fool the White Wizard?

23 August 2018

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Dying Deer with Stolen Bodies: Industrial Racism and Get Out

20 Wednesday Jun 2018

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Film Review, horror, Race, Satire/Humor

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Get Out 8

It must be rape so regular as to be industrial.  There is no uplifting way to say this.

—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

 

The Fruit Loops are colored and therefore they have to be in a separate container from the milk.  I’m really, really disappointed in myself for not getting that even after my second viewing of Get Out.

It’s important in this life to understand what your strengths are, where your passions are most likely to shine, and how you can use these gifts and talents to help you in this life.  It’s just as important to understand what your weaknesses are.  While I wouldn’tGet Out Poster 2 consider my familiarity with cinema to be one of my weaknesses, and I’m hardly a neophyte to the field given how much I’ve written and studied in the subject, I’m real enough to know when I’m speaking with someone who has a far more nuanced perspective.  Such a person is my friend TJ.  I’ve known TJ for about four years, we were originally introduced when a mutual friend recommended that I join a graphic novel bookclub TJ had started up, and he’s quickly become one of the closest friends I have.  I love having a friend and co-worker who has an educated opinion about comics, but it’s in film that the pair of us tend to have the most extended conversations.

These conversations are always revealing to me, largely because TJ’s comprehension of cinema tends to be more that of a cultured aficionado.  He knows the language, economics, and soul of cinema, and so when he proposed starting up a movie group for the Library it was no surprise that the list of films we started off with included movies such as Pan’s Labyrinth, The Seventh Seal, The Godfather, and of course Get Out.  This last film was probably the one he was the most passionate about, and that passion was so infecting I went out and watched the film, watching it a second time recently for the group.Get Out 13

This experience was illuminating.  There’s a wordless quality to Get Out, because even though I had already watched the film once, I was physically trembling as Chris walked back to the house while the family and “the help” smile at him as he slowly made his way inside.  And it must needs be said that I was yelling at the television, “Motherfucker getout of the GODDAMN HOUSE!” Much to the chagrin of my wife who has had to become used to me talking at movies rather than just silently enjoying them like a normal, sane human being.

Get Out is a film that has no real counter-part largely because there’s never been a film like it.  Jordan Peele of the comedy duo Key & Peele is the director of the movie and often refers to it as a horror-comedy-documentary-thriller, though even this title is somewhat misleading because there’s nothing terribly funny about Get Out.  There are parts that are funny, and scenes that left me literally rolling on the floor desperately trying to breathe, but as a whole the film tackles through hyperbole, and some science fiction, the reality of being black in the United States, and thus before I even begin I really need to address something.

If it hasn’t become apparent, I’m white.Photo on 5-10-18 at 8.44 PM #2

But not only am I white, I am an upper-middle class white man who’s parents bought him a house when he went to graduate school and who sent him to a private Christian school when he was growing up.  I’ve watched literally every episode of Frasier, and I have an educated opinion about the music of Frank Sinatra, the writing of Vladimir Nabakov, and the film career of Gene Kelly.  I am whiter than a Polar Bear fighting Wes Anderson with ice spears during a goddamn blizzard.  I also write essays for a blog entitled “White” Tower Musings, which has, on a few occasions, been mistaken for White Power Musings.

I am white as fucking white, and therefore trying to communicate the complexities inherent of the African American Male experience should be called into question.  The good intentions of those trying to appear and sound “woke” can be a bit of a problem, to the point that people who are white and refer to themselves as social justice warriors can be part of the larger problem of racism that they are supposedly trying to fix.Get Out

For myself, I am not trying to be anything other than what I am, some asshole with a shitty blog.  But, before my mother slaps me upside the head and before my wife can get to me, I’m also a writer, and someone who tries to understand a wide variety of people by actually listening to people’s grievances and perspectives.  Let that define my ethos in this larger conversation in its own way.

Even if I cannot understand having my body fetishized, when I was compiling notes for TJ’s meeting on Get Out I couldn’t shake off this idea of “the body” and how Chris’s entireGet Out 3struggle through the film was entirely centered in this problem.  The very opening scenes of the film involves a black man walking through a neighborhood before he is abducted.  His body is captured before the film opens and one of the first scenes the reader gets of Chris is his body while he’s shaving and he cuts himself.  Chris, as the reader observes in the film, is a young photographer who’s dating a white woman and the film follows the pair of them as they drive up to the country (the region is never specified but it really shouldn’t matter because white people are crazy wherever you go) to see Rose’s parents.  On the way to the house, while Rose is driving and the pair of them are discussing Chris’s friend Rod and Chris’s habit of smoking, a deer collides with the front of their car.

The scene itself is a jump scare, but it passes quickly.  What is important however is that, once the pair of them are out of the car Chris hears the deer and walks into the woods toGet Out 14see it still breathing with a large hole in it’s chest.  The scene is powerful as the reader watches the deer, wondering if it’s supposed to be an omen of what’s to come, whether the deer mirrors Chris, or if the entire scene is just used to create an early scare and build up the tension in the audience.  The sensation of watching Get Out is more or less summarized in this small scene because, as I noted to my friend, virtually every element and component of Get Out is connected to something else.

Looking at Rose’s Father’s reaction to the story of the dead deer this becomes apparent.

Dean Armitage: You know what I say? I say one down, a couple hundred thousand to go. I don’t mean to get on my high horse, but I’m telling you, I do not like the deer. I’m sick of it; they’re taking over. They’re like rats. They’re destroying the ecosystem. I see a dead deer on the side of the road and I think, “That’s a start.”

The phrase “they’re taking over,” is one that is often equated with the sentiment ofGet Out 10“there goes the neighborhood,” which itself is connected to actual expressions by white racists when black families would move in.  What’s taking place in this scene however is a double play because while Dean Armitage is saying this about deer, and mimicking racists, he’s trying to present himself as a man who is open minded but clumsily being racist.  Throughout Get Out Peele has the family portrayed as Northern Progressive Liberals, the kind of people who enjoy their white privilege but who also profess dedication to helping African Americans who are “disadvantaged.”  This is probably best exemplified when Dean is talking to Chris one on one:

Dean Armitage: If I could, I would have voted for Obama for a third term.Get Out 15

This is a difficult issue because racism is something most people assume manifests in the form of hoods, burning crosses, and, of course, southern dialects.  But the problem with this perception that racism is only racism when it is obvious and violent distracts from the more subtler racism that actually manifests in day-to-day reality.  Racism is often a chameleon that changes it’s shape shifting into little things like microagressions.  When Dean tells Chris that he would have voted for Obama for a third term it’s implying that he thinks that Chris thinks that Obama was a great President when he knows absolutely nothing of Chris’s political opinions or persuasions.  Peele isn’t just using this to make an empty statement about racism, he’s trying to demonstrate that this simple act of subtle racism distracts Chris from the real reality.  Dean Armitage, like the rest of his family, are trapping Black People and taking their bodies from them, but because Chris is always shown the smaller little acts of racism he eventually falls for the trap.Get Out 7

Get Out does an incredible job of showing then how Social Justice Warriors, or people who claim to be woke, can cause just as much problems as the actual racists themselves.

But the dying deer and it’s destroyed body is what keeps me centered in Get Out because I’ve written about this mess before.  My most popular essay to date is the one I wrote about the Mandingo Myth, the bullshit racist philosophy that states that black men are inherently more physically powerful and sexually salacious as white men.  This is an idea which is partly the key to the success of my essay, as everyday reveals someone typing in “Gay Black Cock” or “Monster Black Dick Worship” and thus finding an essay about Imperialism and racism.  As is always the case, the success only proves the point.

Looking at the book A Mind of it’s Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, David M. Friedman laid out to me the real racism of this idea.

Whether the black penis really is larger than the white one is an unanswered, and maybe unanswerable, question. (It is highly unlikely any reputable scientific organization will fund a definitive study anytime soon.) What is a fact that manyGet Out 6people, white and black, believe is larger. What is also true, and probably more important, is that many of those white people believe that “larger” black penis has a major—read: “dangerous”—cultural meaning. (125).

This is best put just a couple of pages later when Friedman says it simply:

To really kill a black man, you had to kill his penis. (128).

This isn’t an entirely unfounded idea.  The idea of slavery, specifically sex slavery is a element that keeps returning throughout the entire film.  Rod, Chris’s friend, regularly references this idea as Chris describes Rose’s family and their behavior, and as the plot unfolds Rod eventually discovers the Armitage family out vicariously through Chris.  When his suspicions are confirmed he tries to report his conclusions to the police providing one of the funniest scenes in the film:

Rod Williams: [to Detective Latoya and two other detectives] Then he sent me some weird pictures. I’m like, “Ah man, that’s Andre Hayworth.” This dude’s been missing for 6 months, right? So I do allGet Out 5 my research, you know, ’cause as a TSA agent. You know, you guys are detectives. You know, I got the same training. We might know more than y’all sometimes, you know, ’cause we are dealing with some terrorist shit, so… but that’s a totally different story. So look, I-I go do my… my detective work, right? And I start putting pieces together. And see, this is what I came up with. They’re probably abducting black people, brainwashing them and making them slaves… or sex slaves. Not just regular slaves, but sex slaves and shit. See? I don’t know if it’s the hypnosis that’s making ’em slaves or what not, but all I know is they already got two brothas we know and there could be a whole bunch of brothas they got already. What’s the next move?

[after a few seconds, the three detectives look at each other and burst out hysterically in laughter]Get Out 9

Detective Latoya: Don’t ever, ever say that I don’t do nothing anymore.

[still laughing]

Detective Latoya: Oh, white girls. They get you every time.

Despite the humor of the film Peele has noted numerous times in interviews and face-to-face Q&A sessions that there is nothing remotely funny about the subject matter of Get Out, calling the film a documentary rather than an outright comedy.  This is a fair point given the recent events which have taken place in the United States over the last four years.  Despite the public face of the Obama Presidency there are still significant race problems in the United States, all stemming from the fact that there is a fear of the Black man’s body.  Young black men are being desired, feared, worshiped, fetishized, and often butchered all because the United States cannot seemingly have a real and nuanced conversation about the difficulties of racism.  There is this unfortunate notion that because the United States has had a black President that racism is somehow over.  Apparently nobody informed the Klan, or that guy on Facebook who always responds to racism comments with “I’m not racist, but…”. Racism is not something that will end, it 5102013194389merely changes.  Peele’s film allows the reader to see then how the racism has changed, yet ultimately remained the same.

Get Out is a film about the body of black men and how they are being destroyed and stolen by people who cannot, or will not, recognize them as human beings.  The secret society that the Armitage’s are a part of are bent on taking the bodies of black people and “unlocking their potential.”  The idea, ultimately, is that black people should not be allowed whatever gifts they possess because they are clearly being wasted pushing and advancing the lives of black, rather than white, bodies.  And while I was doing all this thinking and mental pontificating I couldn’t help but think back to another landmark book which has garnered recent accolades for discussing the very same issue.

download1Ta-Nehisi Coates in his landmark book, Between the World and Me, reflects on the death of a friend who was shot by a policeman and the entire book is written as a series of letters to his son.  Coates addresses his son directly noting the position of his body in the culture:

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.  Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest.  And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random mangling, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape.  It must be rape so regular as to be industrial.  There is no uplifting way to say this.  I have no pride anthems, nor old Negro Spirituals.  The spirit and soul are the body and the brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why they are so precious.  And the soul did not escape.  The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings.  The soul and body that fed originalthe tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden.  And the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stove wood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn.

It had to be blood.  (103-4).

The body and the brain are what makes a man, and the most horrific idea of Get Out is not that the body can be stolen, but that the body is stolen while the brain is maintained.  Ultimately the Black men, and women, who are captured by Rose and her family are not just destroyed, they are stolen.  Coates is able to show his son that the black body is one that has been consistently abused and turned often into some kind of industrial product,Get Out 12and while the Marxists would latch onto this in order to explain deeper notions of hegemony and economic domination, what is at heart in all of this is the idea that people are not allowed the agency of their own bodies.

The Coagula, the organization or the secret society that the Armitage’s are a part of, are built on the idea that blacks do not have the right to make their own destiny.  Their bodies are, ultimately, just tools for white people to advance their own interests, and by the end of the film Chris is lucky to escape with his life.  It should be noted that the original ending of the film ended with Chris being arrested and locked up for the murder of Rose’s family, and, while this ending would be accurate to the life of many black men in the United States, Peele was far more effective in giving the audience a catharsis.

Get Out is a film about how the black body is caught in a system in which it often cannotGet Out 4win.  While there is some Victory in Chris escaping, and killing the entire Armitage family as he fights his way out, there is still the deeper implication that even if he escapes there the lingering question of the victims.  Upon finishing Get Out again recently I asked my friend this question: what happens to the people who were stolen?  There was no answer to this question and in fact I don’t have one.

Being a white man I cannot process the reality of having my body fetishized, feared, desired, or appropriated by others.  My flesh and bones are just that, meat and hard foundation.  They are not wrapped up in discourses of alienation and power-imbalance, which is all a fancy-pants way of saying, as I did before, I’m white as fucking white.  And so processing a film like Get Out is difficult because I can understand the fear only from the perspective of an observer.  But if I can make the case for Peele’s film, Get Out is vital and important because of the constant attention to the body.  A Black man can’t seem to Get Out 16win in this society, and even if he does it comes at a great cost.  Chris will never be the same after this experience, the reader is able to see that as the car drives away and he stares detached out into the forrest.

Rather than just accept the ending as a victory, it’s important to remember that it’s also a defeat.  The systems of racism that divide people continue in spite of the apparent surface where white people can praise the first black President and suggest that they are woke and accepting and understanding of the complexities inherent of the African American experience in America.  Black bodies are still being commodified and worshipped and fetishized and feeding a system that profits from their exploitation.  Yet in the face of this Get Out succeeds in actually addressing the problem in a way that doesn’t feel patronizing or self-righteous, and it offers it’s audience some catharsis in the face of the history and tragedy.

The deer may lie on the side of the rode, it’s body burst by the unfeeling car, dying with no one to seemingly care, but if Get Out offers anything to the reader it promises that someone is seeing the violence and is willing to say something about it.

Get Out 2

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes from Get Out were cited from IMDb.com.  All quotes from Between the World and Me were cited from the Hardback Spiegel & Grau edition.  All quotes from A Mind of it’s Own: A Cultural History of the Penis were cited from the hardback The Free Press edition.

 

**Writer’s Note**

Get Out is a film that, I might be biased about, but I legitimately think is incredible, and fortunately I’m not the only one.  As always I like giving my reader extra reading to build up the experience and so here are several reviews of the film for them to enjoy:

http://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/get-out-review-jordan-peele-1201968635/

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/get-out

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/review-the-giant-leap-forward-of-jordan-peeles-get-out

https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2017/nov/17/get-out-golden-globes-race-horror-comedy-documentary-jordan-peele

http://junkee.com/get-out-white-woke/102624

And here is an article published in The Atlantic focusing on the use of eyes and cameras in the film, something I’m ashamed of myself for not writing more about.  Enjoy:

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/03/in-get-out-the-eyes-have-it/518370/

 

***Writer’s Note***

Because I’m a Key and Peele Fan so I just had to share this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldMb_TZtq0c

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An Abscence of Peaches

02 Saturday Jun 2018

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Art, History, Literature, Race, Still Life, Writing

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Art, Barracoon, coffee, glasses, history, ivy, Joshua Jammer Smith, Literature, Oral History, original photograph, race, slavery, still life, Writing, Zora Neale Hurston

Barracoon

An Abscence of Peaches

18 May 2018

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Check Your White Privilege White Tower Musings—DAMN, This is America

15 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Film Review, Literature, music, Philosophy, Race, Satire/Humor, Writing

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"This is America", America, Between the World and Me, Black Body, Black Male Body as commodity, Black Men, Black Sexuality, Black-face, Childish Gambino, DAMN, Film, film review, Gun-Violence, Kendrick Lamar, Mandingo myth, Mass Shooting, Minstrel Show, music, N.W.A., Pulitzer Prize, race, Random Violence, Rap, Rock and Roll, Satire, Ta-Nehisi Coates, White Privilege, Woke, Writing, Wu-Tang Clan, XXX

Childish Gamb

It’s not a place

This country is to be a sound of drum and bass

You close your eyes to look around

—XXX, Kendrick Lamar & Bono

 

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.   

I can’t stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

-America, Allen Ginsberg

Gambino.America.MAIN_-1920x1080

He guns down the choir with a machine gun and says “This is America.”  It’s a moment that hits me in my gut because it’s stylized violence before I remember that it’s actually happened.

I really do in fact, despite my claims, have several friends.  I know that as a writer and an introvert I’m supposed to say that I have no friends, but I do in fact have people in my life that I care a lot about.  True many of them are coworkers, but they’re also people I have a lot in common with.  Some are queer like me, almost all of them are readers, and almost all of them enjoy music of some sort.  And outside of work I have a gathering of people who, while they no longer live in my home town of Tyler, I’m still close to.  One of these friends is my brother Josh Grijalva.18033223_1945210082376663_8569107665547197131_n

He’s not a biological brother, but this motherfucker and I am joined at the hip.  When you wrap your arms around somebody for dear life at a Slipknot concert that’s fucking family.  I met Josh several years ago as I was just starting college, and I didn’t know his actual first name for close to a year, when I found out he was also called Josh I felt like a dumbass.  It didn’t matter though because over the next few years the pair of us bonded over Heavy Metal, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Creative Writing (he was the mad-poet genius and I was the cold soulless prose-ist).  Josh taught me a lot about life, and after his mother died I tried to be there for him as much as I could, and it’s one of the great fucking tragedies of my life that the guy lives up in Dallas, but we still talk off and on and this relationship has, in it’s way, still been one of the best relationships in my life partly because Josh Introduced me to Kendrick Lamar and Childish Gambino.

Rap wasn’t a genre of music that was played in my house growing up.  My parents were teenagers of the late seventies and early seventies so I grew up on Aerosmith, Blondie, AC/DC, Boston, Madonna, and the Eurythmics.  Along with this there was plenty of Rat Pack: Louie Prima, Dean Martin, Ella Fitzegerald, and of course Frank Sinatra.  It wasn’t that my parents kept me from Rap growing up, it just wasn’t part of their world, and because parents tend to raise their children according to their own values and interests and aesthetics, I grew up being bottle fed by the Rock-Gods rather than the Rap pioneers.  I don’t hold my parents at fault foro0800060812932993417this, but this absence of rap also seemed to follow the pattern of “whiteness” that was my upbringing.  

There weren’t many black people around growing up.  I attended a private christian school where there was only one African American student in my class, and by the time I graduated there was only two.  The only black people I ever interacted with were the janitors and custodians of the school or our church that dad worked with (he’s an exterminator so he tended to work with the staff).  My social life was pretty much nonexistent and I was an introvert who preferred staying home playing video games and reading comics.  This is just a long way of saying that I lived in what some would refer to as a “lily-white” world or privilege and so approaching an essay about two rap songs is a difficult proposition because before I’ve even begun I have to address my whiteness and my privilege.

Josh Grijalva has steadily introduced me, over time, to great rappers like N.W.A., Wu-Tang Clan, Kendrick Lamarr, and Childish Gambino.  Each of these people or groups has opened me to a new world of music and now I know the important truth that Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nuthin’ to fuck with.  And that I need to “fight the powers that be.”  Josh was a great teacher because he offered me suggestions for music, and in my effort to understand my white privilidge and consider the experience of the African American community I’ve discovered a lot of incredible artists I never would have encountered in my childhood.02-Childish-Gambinos-This-Is-America-screenshot-billboard-1548

I never grew up around the threat of gun violence, and so watching Childish Gambino shoot a man through the back of the head and declare that this is America is at first shocking and jarring, but the last few years are a quick counter to this.  

This is America is a song that has become a new discourse largely because of the video, and as I discussed the short film with one of my fellow co-workers, who for the record taught me the word “woke,” we both agreed that the song is great but the video is work of art that manages to convey far more than the lyrics.  If the reader looks at the first start of the song they might not observe too much significance.  Childish Gambino has just shot a man, who at the start of the video was simply playing the guitar, through the back of the head and the song starts:

This is America (skrrt, skrrt, woo)
Don’t catch you slippin’ now (ayy)This is America Gif

Look at how I’m livin’ now
Police be trippin’ now (woo)

Yeah, this is America (woo, ayy)

Guns in my area (word, my area)
I got the strap (ayy, ayy)
I gotta carry ’em

A rapper singing about the need to carry guns for the sake of his own protection in the neighborhood he loves in isn’t anything new.  In fact groups like N.W.A. pretty much made it an industry standard.  What makes the words so powerful is the way in which Childish Gambino presents it.  Throughout the entire video the man is shirtless, wearing just a pair of pants, and while he is not out of shape by any means, as he dances about the man is never presented as a kind of sexual ideal.  In fact throughout the video onethis-is-america gets a sense of the man’s vulnerability.

This is America follows Childish Gambino as he sings and dances through a large warehouse that is populated by him, a group of dancing African American school children, and then humans that are always moving about in the background usually fighting, looting, burning the many parked cars, or else attacking the few clearly African American characters in the background.  Gambino becomes this surreal figure as cars are burning, people are looting and burning, and the man is smiling and dancing about.

And this very act has led some to observe that one of the most striking aspect of the videoBlackface THISare the implications of blackface performance tropes.  Gambino is constantly dancing through the film, making jerking motions and contortion his face randomly.  The bent elbows, the erratic facial twists, and the near cakewalk on top of the car near the end of the video all call back to minstrel shows where white performers would done black face paint and behave in cartoonish representations of African Americans.  I’m not the first person to observe this similarity, in fact many of the people who watched this film have observed how Childish Gambino uses a pseudo-minstrel-show persona throughout the video to distract the viewer from the violence and mayhem taking place in the background behind him.  This reference to a morbid form of entertainment continues the body narrative because ultimately the black man’s body is observedBlackface TIAin objectified ways to the point of being a commodity.  While the world behind him burns Gambino is a mock-minstrel reminding the viewer that black men like himself have been used and destroyed, while a shallow cartoon has distracted people from
seeing the real travesties that plague American society.  Why see the violent conflict that afflicts real people in our society when there is, in Gambino’s own words, a “fitted” and “pretty” person “on Gucci.”  Why bother to see the violence in the haze when there’s a funny cartoon dancing right in front of you?  Isn’t that far more entertaining? 

It’s when the man shoots the quoir with the AK-47 that the video seems to take the turn that it does.  Gambino appears through a door and dances to the quoit singing the lines:

Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, tell somebody

EverlastingKindheartedGiraffe-max-1mbYou gon’ tell somebody

Grandma told me
Get your money, Black man (get your money)
Get your money, Black man (get your money)
Get your money, Black man (get your—Black man)
Get your money, Black man (get your—Black man)
Black man

And at once Gambino produces the rifle and guns the choir down.  It’s a quick act, not drawn and not dramatized.  In fact if you blink you’ll almost miss it.  The gun fires and the bodies drop and once again Gambino declares This is America.  The dramatic quickness of the act, and the way it changes the tone of the music instantly the reader is left wondering what the fuck just happened.xoFCtzg

I’m not the only blogger who has commented on the dramatic violence of This is America, in fact the internet seems to have become, since the video dropped, just one long discourse about what the violence means, what the popularity of the film suggests, and whether or not Gambino was right to even create it.  In the face of all this discourse I run the risk of becoming just another voice in the white haze, and in fact I probably will.  What more can be said when so much has been said?  As per usual I turn my focus back to myself and see what the video means for me, or what I focus on and that in fact is not the violence but the very end of the film.

Gambino is seen running through the warehouse in the dark and Young Thug, one of the collaborators for the song begins singing gently:

You just a black man in this world
You just a barcode, ayyThis is America
You just a black man in this world
Drivin’ expensive foreigns, ayy

You just a big dawg, yeah
I kenneled him in the backyard
No probably ain’t life to a dog
For a big dog

As throughout the film Gambino reveals a real vulnerability, specifically his body.  He’s a black man being chased through the dark by white shadows as the world declares that he’s just a barcode.

It’s not violent like the early scenes.  There’s no cop cars burning.  There’s no acts of random violence.  Instead there is just the vulnerability of the man’s body, and the look of terror in his eyes as he has to flee.  It’s clear if they catch him they’ll destroy his body, and on some level it’s implied that the destruction will take more than that.  Over the course of the video Gambino has tried to make his body into something more.  A black man’s body is something painfully relevant and important because it’s something that’s vulnerable; it’s something than can be destroyed or stolen or appropriated.

Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks about this in his usual magnificent way in his book Between the World and Me when he address his young son:download1

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.  Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest.  And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random mangling, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape.  It must be rape so regular as to be industrial.  There is no uplifting way to say this.  I have no pride anthems, nor old Negro Spirituals.  The spirit and soul are the body and the brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why they are so precious.  And the soul did not escape.  The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings.  The soul and body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden.  And the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stove wood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn.

It had to be blood.  (103-4).

Many people online have pointed out the symbolism of almost every aspect of the video.  Whether it’s the references to Minstrel shows, the implication of viral violence, the ignoring of violence that is all too apparent, the references to actual gin violence in america, of the references to the “sunken-place” from Get Out,  This is America this-is-america-2promises so much opportunity to explore violence and the problems facing the black body in American Society.

I’ve watched This is America at least ten times, and each time I see more and more of this symbolism, but more and more all I can really observe is the vulnerability on display.  The body is something that is exposed to all of this violence, and while Gambino manages to escape this destruction around him, the implication at the end is that no one is truly free from it.

Which of course brings me to XXX and DAMN.

There was an ambition that really was a dream in the early years of my training as a writer.  I wanted to win a Pulitzer.  The writers I admired had won that award:damn-kendrick-lamarHemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner.  And so my young brain interpreted the winning of that award not as something that meant one had really said something with their art but just a real recognition that your art was legitimate and culturally recognized.  I’ve since abandoned the ambition that I will ever win a Pulitzer because I’m a realist and some dude with a blog, but I still follow the award and it’s winners because the books that win it do tend to say something significant about the culture and the zeitgeist.  It was too my great joy when I heard that Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN had won the award because I love the song XXX.

DAMN is an album I downloaded as soon as the library bought a copy and I’ve inhaled it ever since.  It’s not just that it’s unlike any rap album I’ve bought to date, it’s just a truly exceptional album for the way that it feels of it’s time and place while also making something that will last as a true cultural document.  DAMN is the first rap album ever to win the P{ulitzer and listening to XXX it’s not too difficult to understand why.  The song digs into the problems of gun violence in the United States, while also digging into Lamar’s self.

He sets up the story as a friend informs of the death of his son:

Yesterday I got a call like from my dog like 101

Said they killed his only son because of insufficient funds

He was sobbin’, he was mobbin’, way belligerent and drunk

Talkin’ out his head, philosphin’ on what the Lord had done

He said: “K-Dot, can you pray for me?KLamar Live

It’s been a fucked up day for me

I know that you anointed, show me how to overcome.”

He was lookin’ for some closure

Hopin’ I could bring him closer

To the spiritual, my spirit do no better, but I told him

“I can’t sugarcoat the answer for you, this is how I feel:

If somebody kill my son, that mean somebody gettin’ killed.”

Tell me what you do for love, loyalty, and passion of

All the memories collected, moments you could never touch

And after Bono sings his haunting chorus that feels like something out of a Jazz-roomCelly This is Americabar, Kendrick continues reflecting his pain outward and trying to understand it in the larger cultural context:

Hail Mary, Jesus and Joseph

The great American flag

Is wrapped and dragged with explosives

Compulsive disorder, sons and daughters

Barricaded blocks and borders

Look what you taught us!

It’s murder on my street, your street, back streets

Wall Street, corporate offices

Banks, employees, and bosses with

Homicidal thoughts; Donald Trump’s in office

We lost Barack and promised to never doubt him again

K Lamarr Live 2But is America honest, or do we bask in sin?

Pass the gin, I mix it with American blood

Then bash him in, you Crippin’ or you married to blood?

I’ll ask again-oops-accident

It’s nasty when you set us up

Then roll the dice, then bet us up

You overnight the big rifles, then tell Fox to be scared of us

Gang members or terrorists, et cetera, et cetera

America’s reflections of me, that’s what a mirror does
I can never understand fully the realities of being a black man, and the trials and pain and cultural weight that comes with it.  I’ve observed this repeatedly here on this siteCG Danceand in these essays, and while it feels repetitive to keep acknowledging my whiteness I do not believe that the sentiment loses any of its significance.  I am not a black a man, I am a white man who lives in a state of real privilege.  It’s not just that I’ve had economic advantages that have helped me live a comfortable life, I’ve also had educational advantages, and the privilege of living in a world that wasn’t plagued by violence.  I had the privilege to grow up not having to worry about what people thought about my body, or at least in a way where I didn’t have to worry about whether my body was perceived as a threat.  

Privilege as a word has fallen into a precarious position because there is so much debate about what the word actually is.  Privilege is not about absence of pain, misfortune, or absolvence.  Privilege is only and ever the reality in which an individual has some advantage that others do not.  The time and space to write these essays is a privilege, one that many people in this world would love to have.  The ability to not have to worrythe-undefeated-gif-sourceabout how one is going to get to work is a privilege.  The freedom to not have to worry about finding money for a child’s school payments is a privilege.  And now having to worry about whether your body is going to be objectified in positive or negative ways is a privilege.

That reality, living that reality, is a privilege.  This is America and DAMN shook me because they both reveal how much of a privilege that reality is.

Looking at myself in relation to these cultural events is the best way I have to write something that feels relevant about them.  Rather than just observing the symbolism contained therein, these are works of art and therefore it’s vital to understand theirThis-is-America-Donald-Glover-4relevance to the self.  What kind of man am I if I observe that there’s gun violence in my country and leave the observation at that?  What kind of citizen am I if I ignore the very real threat of violence against a portion of the population simply for the sake of my own comfort?  Art, when it is created with a concern for aesthetic and message can impact human beings in incredible ways.  Every time I watch This is America I have to wonder how much I agree?

The death of the choir is so dramatic and spontaneous.  The people didn’t even see it coming because the person who performed the act was someone right by them, dancing along to the music.  And in a moment their lives were gone.  It’s a disturbing, almost absurd reality that’s easy to dismiss as just a video.  But all too quickly the reader can check their phone or laptop and be reminded that such events have unfortunately become rather common.

The man dances on, the world burns behind him, and we all miss the violence for death riding by with a police escort.

childishgambino

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from This is America came from genius.com.  All quotes cited from XXX were sourced from azlyricks.com.

 

**Writer’s Note**

This video is too important to miss.  If the reader hasn’t seen it yet take the time to watch it.

 

 

***Writer’s Notes***

I’ve also included some links to articles about This is America and Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer win.

https://www.buzzworthy.com/references-from-childish-gambino-this-is-america/

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The Case for Reparations: A White Tower Review

25 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Essay, History, Literature, Politics, Race, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

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American Exceptionalism, Between the World and Me, Bill Maher, economic disparity, economic disparity between blacks and whites, economics, Essay, Federal Housing Administration, GI Bill, history, Home Owner’s Loan Corporation, HR 40, Jim Crow Laws, National Sin, Politics, race, Real Estate Redlining Racism, Redlining, slavery, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, The Beautiful Struggle, The Case for Reparations, We Were Eight Years in Power, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, Writing

Photo on 3-1-18 at 10.53 PM

I don’t watch television. That’s honestly how I get so much reading done. That, and I come from a position of privilege of which some I can promise is based on my whiteness.

Somewhere in between discovering that Corner Bakery sells the best coffee I’ve ever had, scoring a full-time position at the Tyler Public Library, taking care of washing the dishes and doing the laundry, spending time with my family, and starting a new blog dedicated to posting photos of left-over plastic from BOB the Library’s 3-D Printer, I somehow managed to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book. We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy isn’t the first of Coates’s books that I’ve taken the effort to read. In fact this year alone I’ve read his other books which include the first volume of his Black Panther series, Between the World and Me, and his headshots_1507036441820.0memoir The Beautiful Struggle. All of these books eventually came through the book drop at the library, and each time that they did I would scramble to pick them up and read them.

It wasn’t just that I wanted to read these books because I had heard the name Ta-Nehisi Coates before and knew that he was quickly becoming a public intellectual that was worth reading to understand the public discourse. I picked up any book written by the man because his words were scored by an incredible conviction and beauty. Every time I pick up a book or essay by Coates I know that I am reading a writer who believes in every word he puts on the page, and pays careful attention to the arguments he’s crafting with them. And to be honest the last writer who I honestly believed had that same attention to detail was Christopher Hitchens. I don’t like to add the title of “great writer” to many people I read because that would ultimately cheapen the title, but I have no hesitation in saying that I believes Coates is a great writer.atlantic-reparations

As usual though I’m ashamed to admit that I was aware of his presence in the zeitgeist and culture before I actually took the time to read him. The first time I had ever even heard of the man he was appearing on Real Time with Bill Maher in promotion of his essay that had recently been published in The Atlantic: The Case for Reparations. My wife and I had recently moved into an apartment in my in-laws garage, we were just married and needed a place to live before graduate school started up, and every night at dinner they usually had the television on. Coming from a home where people sit and talk with the television set off and in another room there was a culture shock element, but I watched the show paying attention to the interview because I had heard of the controversy that this magazine article had caused. Coates wasn’t a black man pointing out that slavery was a vice and a black mark on the United States cultural history, he was arguing that the United States had a moral obligation to not only acknowledge the reverberations of slavery, but to try and actually atone for it.

I also remember Bill Maher teaching Coates the old joke about black men caring more about their Cadillacs than their houses.

coates

This was my introduction to Coates, and while I recognized there was a brilliant mind that was worth reading, I was dealing with the new territory of being a newlywed, beginning graduate school, and starting this blog which, at the time, was pretty much one long series of kiss-ass articles about Christopher Hitchens and George Orwell. My regular reader will note that times have changed and now I only really kiss Christopher Hitchens’s ass. As such Coates was left largely unread, and unappreciated by me until early this year when I picked up Between the World and Me, and I recognized that the man was possibly one of the greatest writers since James Baldwin, a writer whom Coates download1has been compared to numerous times and fittingly so.

While I do have every intent to get around to reviewing that book, after finishing We Were Eight Years in Power I recognized how important The Case for Reparations was, not just for Coates’s cultural legacy, but for any reader who recognizes humanity and the importance of bridging the gaps that can sometimes form. It’s not too much to write that the United States is plagued by it’s own cultural sins in terms of slavery and the steady abuse and genocide of Native American populations. Yet frequently the experience of an American citizen who opens up this conversation is one of either quick dismissal or outright anger. Coates himself notes this early on in the essay as he notes the immediate and anticipated rebuttal of this argument:

Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past twenty-five years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.” (178).reparations_02-845

If the reader has ever actually discussed such a matter with friends or family they may have had such a reaction. Thanksgiving was a time in our nation’s history where people would gather and eat and celebrate just being together, but as of the last six decades it seems that tradition has largely been replaced by correcting your grandfather about what a transgender person actually is, and listening to your aunt discuss the dangers of GMOs and the importance of “healing crystals.” Reparations does not get the same amount of air-time that these “sexy” issues do, but when Coates’s article was published it created a bit of a storm in the public largely because many people felt threatened or vulnerable even if they had no real stake in this argument.Slavery Reparations

And this habit and feeling is best explained by Coates just a few paragraphs later.

That HR 40 has never—under either Democrats or Republicans—made it to the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy? (179).

I anticipate the reaction of some of my regular readers, Why are you bothering with this liberal, self-loathing bullshit. Coates’s article does nothing but further tarnish the image of the United States as a nation of possibility. Yes there have been troubles that have faced certain portions of the population, but what good does it do bemoaning the events of the past?

This is a difficult question at first to answer, largely because it reeks of a kind of national and personal solipsism.american-exceptionalism

The recent debates which have taken place over the removal of Civil War statues that bear the images of Confederate generals and soldiers has sparked debates, not just on FOX News, but all over the United States and no one is entirely free of it. If you are a person such as myself who lives in a small town in East Texas you’re sure to encounter at least one or two such persons who feels compelled to inform you that removing statues is akin to erasing history, which is amusing because such people usually tend to be the kind of people who go into a library and never check out a book where actual history is recorded. For my own part I’ve tried to stay out of these debates largely because I want to avoid the headache, but the one position that I’ve clung to, which I do not mind American Exceptionalismshouting out into the infinite white noise that is the internet is that any argument which bothers to actually dig into the actual discourse that is history is worth consideration. And Coates’s article does just that.

Coates follows the economic trends of a few individuals in Detroit, observing how African Americans became the prey of predatory real-estate deals that left an entire generation screwed out of any kind of reasonable mortgage. Coates observes the general trend in the city of Detroit alone in order to observe a larger trend in the history of the United States which was that African Americans typically were denied or deceived from achieving economic prosperity and some of the points made in the article shocked even me. Perhaps the most pernicious was the reality of the G.I. Bill, the government provision still in effect today which allows veterans to receive finincial benefits for college 0eca9-screen2bshot2b2015-02-082bat2b7-32-252bpmeducations.

The oft-celebrated GI Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country’s insistence on a racist housing policy. Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with White officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book The GI Bill that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.” (187).

This passage was difficult for me to read the first time, largely because I grew up in a house where stories about World War II were as common as stories about Ronald tumblr_myuv88qhMw1rqscijo6_500Reagan beating the Soviet Union using only his wit and his Iron Man technology which he built with his bare hands. In hindsight I’m pretty sure my dad was over-emphasizing Reagan’s engineering skills. But the stories of World War II were always stories about heroes, and young men overcoming great odds to defeat the forces of real evil. It seems fitting that a narrative built on “othering” should blow up in my face and reveal, not a “Greatest Generation,” but a generation of people who benefitted economically at the expense of others.

The GI Bill was one of the greatest economic boons in American history, and an entire generation of African Americans were denied access to it because FDR needed to secure a political legacy.

At the same time the GI Bill was opening doors for millions of Americans the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation along with the Federal Housing Administration began opening loans which were dramatically reduced from previous mortgage rates thus allowing the possibility for lower income families to purchase homes and thus create a new standard of living. It became not only possible for United States citizens to buy homes, it becomes part of the national rhetoric. The key to success was not just gainful employment and finanicial success, owning a home was a sign that one was living the “american dream.” And as my reader can surely guess, this too was denied African Americans as Coates points out.concise_history_ampersand

That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might includes madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.” (188)

Coates is careful to remind the reader that this redlining was supported by the federal government, and thus another in a long line of economic obstacles was praised as an overwhelming success by New Deal supporting liberals. It’s strange to me how many progressive friends of mine who still praise the New Deal and FDR as some kind of Chicago.CBL.protest-abeacon what happens when government works, yet Coates article, along with mountains of historical discourse have largely revealed the New Deal to be one lord line of fuck-ups and FDR to be an adulterous egomaniac.

But nevertheless this passage, much like the one actually shocked me the first time I read it because I had never been taught that. No teacher had ever mentioned the fact that African Americans were outright denied access to reduced mortgages, though it was something I had assumed given my knowledge of the “white flight” which helped create the culture of suburbia.

These discoveries illuminate something about the education I received, namely that the complexities inherent to the African American experience was something that was largely ignored or white-washed. I read books about the Civil Rights movement and reparationsslavery, and so I was given the general outline of the travesties that blacks my home country have been subjected to, but the nuances and details were largely ignored. And this negation of details leads me to a deeper conclusion about my country, which is that there is an unwillingness to really atone for what has been done.

This isn’t just my observation, because Coates to make this point far more eloquently than I can.

And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collectively biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering Alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.
Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill gotten and selective in its distribution. (202).

He goes on in the next paragraph saying,education

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking abut is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. (202).

Every nation has their own sin, and every nation has their own regrettable action. This isn’t a truly original thought for other writers better than me have expressed it far more clearly than I ever could. Recognizing their sin however has allowed these nations to move forward, and while it hasn’t by any means erased the evidence or awareness of their sin, it has allowed for a deepening understanding the failings in their humanity. reparations-3The perception of perfection or moral superiority is a dangerous concept for a people to internalize because it allows for the possibility of “othering” other people. When any group believes themselves naturally superior and drafts a cultural rhetoric which justifies atrocity, or worse, freedom from responsibility then tragedy is soon to follow.

The United States is not immune from this trend because our history, our real history shows this to be true. Whether it was the consistent abuse and eventual genocide of Native Americans, the abuse against Irish immigrants during the 1800s, the general xenophobia against jews which has never truly abated in our culture, the institution of Slavery followed by the establishment of Jim Crow laws followed by the barbarity of Mass incarceration, the internment of the Japanese following Pearl Harbor, the manipulation of hispanic Americans during World War II which culminated in the atrociously named “Operation Wetback,” the massacre of Wounded Knee, and while I 9.+Coates+Quotecould probably spend an entire page listing out the offenses of the United States this list is meant only to affirm one central point: the United States is not an innocent nation. There is blood on our hands, and for some reason no one really wants to acknowledge it and offer some kind of atonement.  There is more an impulse to argue, “yes it happened, let’s move on,” which in itself is yet another form of denial of the issue.

This might just be the trend of history working against us, and it might be that the United States will never even consider reparations. This to me however would be a tragedy because it would suggest a real emotional insecurity of this nation which, supposedly, the greatest country in the world. The sign of a mature person is one who is willing and able to acknowledge their faults, it’s someone who can admit when they’ve fucked up and offer a real recompense. There have been signs that this nation can and would do just that, but not to the extent that was really necessary.

Coates article isn’t just a fascinating portrait of one of America’s lasting sins against a portion of its populace, it’s a real meditation about the nature of the democracy that many praise and enjoy. He is observing that it’s easy to enjoy the benefits of a democracy when you’re the privileged party, but then offers Temple of Libertythe question of what kind of democracy is it when that same group negates the reality that their success is coming at the expense of others? The Case for Reparations is not about arguing for a simple pay-off the African-American community, because money is an empty gesture. The health of a democracy is measure by the maturity of it’s populace to understand what a real equality is, and so looking at The Case for Reparations I observe not just a beautifully written essay about the differing economic levels of blacks and whites, but a real call for Americans to recognize their past and deepen their emotional understanding of their culture’s past.

Coates offers up just such a summation near the end of his article:

An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders. (207).

Finally sitting down to read The Case for Reparations was a marvel to me because with every word I recognized that Coates had established himself as a definitive and consequential voice in the body of American Letters. Reading this essay I realized how privileged I was to have the economic benefits that I did, and I considered how many white people I had met growing up who had been part of a long tradition of wealth. And Ta-Nehisi-Coates-640x480at first while I intend to explore this notion of privilege, the larger concern for the health of a democracy seems far more, if not equally, relevant. I’ve watched in just the last few months how my country has become more and more divided over the issues of the past and race, and it seems, at first, like any kind of hope for a healthy and reasonable conversation is next to impossible.

In the face of this reality I admit with no hesitation that I feel afraid everyday. Each morning comes with it’s own sorts of challenges, and the conversations seem to be getting more and more outlandish and violent. It behooves one to hope that there is space for a real conversation like the one The Case for Reparations opens up.

All it takes for democracy to fail is for people to feel that their voice has no place or relevance. All it takes for a democracy to implode is for people to stop talking because they’re afraid of discomfort. The important conversations about this country’s past are not going away, and so I am, in spite of everything, inspired by The Case for Reparations because Coates reminds me that the voice of individual citizens to argue about the nature of their democracy isn’t just a matter of the past, it’s a constant ever-changing discourse. What kind of democracy would we inhabit if we stopped trying?

original

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*
All quotes taken from The Case for Reparations were cited from First Edition, hardback copy of We Were Eight Years in Power as published by One World Books. If the reader would be interested in reading the full article however they can follow the link below to The Atlantic’s home webpage where the essay is posted. I highly recommend it, even if the reader is still unconvinced by my review, and even if they disagree with Coates’s argument. It’s worth taking a few moments to consider this essay and it’s place in the larger discussion of race in the United States.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

 

I’ve also posted a video below where Coates discusses his article.  There are many like it, and YouTube’s A.I. being what it is it should provide you links to other videos where he discusses it.  Unless your browsing history is different than mine in which case, I don’t want to know.

 

**Writer’s Note**

I’ve included below a few essays which explore Ta-Nehisi Coates as well as the argument about Reparations.  Enjoy:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/ta-nehisi-coates-and-a-generation-waking-up

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-reparations

And because I’m me, I’m also including a link to Adam Ruins Everything where he talks about the racist history of Redlining and how this has helped created wealth disparities between blacks and whites in the United States.

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Yellow

07 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Art, Race, Satire/Humor, Still Life

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Tags

Art, Essay Collection, glasses, Humor, Issa Rae, Joshua Jammer Smith, original photograph, race, still life, tea, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl

Misadventures

Yellow

4 June 2017

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Django Don’t Rhyme With Siegfried: Tarantino’s American-German Fairy Tale

25 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Academic Books, Film Review, History, mythology, Politics, Race, Satire/Humor

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"D'Artagnan Motherfucker!", "I like the way you die boy", Academic Book, Alexander Dumas, Broomhilda, Calvin Candie, Candy Land, D'Artagnan, dehumanization, Django Unchained, Dr. King Schultz, Fairy Tale, Film, film review, German Legend, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Historical Accuracy, history, Human Body, humanity, Humor, Jaimee Fox, Jane Tompkins, John Wayne, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mandingo Fighting, myth, mythology, N-Word, Nigger, Politics, Quentin Tarantino, race, Race relations, racial slurs, racism, Revenge Story, Satire, Siegfried, slavery, The Gaurdian, West of Everything-The Inner Life of Westerns, Westerns

splash_780-1352

I’m pretty sure John Wayne would hate Django Unchained, but only because Jaimee Fox looks fine-as-hell in those glasses.  John Wayne could rock jeans and a bandanna…and that’s pretty much it.  Sorry John.

The first image or memory I have of Django Unchained was seeing it opening day, which was Christmas.  Apart from the snowstorm that damn near killed me as I drove home in my piss-for-shit 95 Ford Truck that had no heater at the time, I distinctly remember being the only person in the theater, apart from a family of African Americans to my item2.rendition.slideshowHorizontal.ss03-foxx-django-costumesright, who were laughing.  I just remember that family laughing because most of the rest of the theater were white people who gave me nasty looks as I was walked out of the theater.  I just couldn’t help it.  There’s something about watching a group of white men complain about not being able to see through their hoods that’s just pathetic and hilarious.

And because I’m feeling indulgent, why not just quote the scene directly.  Big Daddy a plantation owner, and part-time Colonel Sanders impersonator, has tracked Django and Dr. King Schultz with a posse of men to lynch the pair of them.  Before they ride in to attack them they plan their attack and the conversation eventually takes place:

Big Daddy: [instructing raiding party] Now unless they start shooting first, nobody shoot ’em. That’s way too simple for these jokers. We’re gonna whoop that nigger lover to death! And I am personally gonna strip and clip that gaboon myself!

[puts on bag] dcc0bf3fea707aca4e49d1b2d926dfa8

Big Daddy: Damn! I can’t see fuckin’ shit outta this thing.

Unnamed Baghead: We ready or what?

Big Daddy: Naw, hold on, I’m fuckin’ with my eye holes.

[rips bag]

Big Daddy: Oh. Oh, shit.

[takes off bag]

Big Daddy: Ah, I just made it worse.

Unnamed Baghead: Who made this goddamn shit?

Other Unnamed Baghead: Willard’s wife.

Willard: Well, make your own goddamn mask!

Big Daddy: Look. Nobody’s sayin’ they don’t appreciate what Jenny did.

Unnamed Baghead: Well, if all I had to do was cut a hole in a bag, I coulda cut it better than this!

Other Unnamed Baghead: What about you, Robert? Can you see?

Robert: Not too good. I mean, if I don’t move my head I can see you pretty good, more or less. But when I start ridin’, the bag’s movin’ all over, and I – I’m ridin’ blind. 14697-MTdmODNkMTJlMg

Bag Head #2: [rips bag] Shit. I just made mine worse. Anybody bring any extra bags?

Unnamed Baghead: No! Nobody brought an extra bag!

Unnamed Baghead: [raiding party is discussing their bags] Do we have to wear ’em when we ride?

Big Daddy: Oh, well shitfire! If you don’t wear ’em as you ride up, that just defeats the purpose!

Unnamed Baghead: Well, I can’t see in this fuckin’ thing! [takes bag off] I can’t breathe in this fuckin’ thing, and I can’t ride in this fuckin’ thing!

Willard: Well fuck all y’all! I’m going home! You know, I watched my wife work all day gettin’ thirty bags together for you ungrateful sons of bitches! And all I can hear is criticize, criticize, criticize! From now on, don’t ask me or mine for nothin’!

Big Daddy: Now look. Let’s not forget why we’re here. We gotta kill a nigger over that hill there! And we gotta make a lesson out of him!

Bag Head #2: Okay, I’m confused. Are the bags on or off?

Robert: I think… we all think the bag was a nice idea. But – not pointin’ any fingers – they coulda been done better. So, how ’bout, no bags this time – but next time, we do the bags right, and then we go full regalia.

[all agree] django-unchained

Big Daddy: Wait a minute! I didn’t say ‘no bags’!

Bag Head #2: But nobody can see.

Big Daddy: So?

Bag Head #2: So, it’d be nice to see.

Big Daddy: Goddammit! This is a raid! I can’t see! You can’t see! So what? All that matters is can the fuckin’ horse see? That’s a raid!

These scene in particular drew the most laughs, and thinking on it later I wondered why the only people laughing was that family of black people and myself.  But reflecting on it django_unchained_ver9I suppose I understand.  There’s a lot of dialogue which surrounds the film Django Unchained and a lot of it has to do with history.

If the reader has never seen Django Unchained it’s a film about a former slave who is rescued by a mysterious German dentists named Dr. King Schultz who is in fact not a dentist but a bounty hunter.  Schultz saves Django because the man used to work on a plantation where three of his bounties used to work as well.  The pair of them track the men down, kill them, escape the afore quoted inept posse, and during a conversation they decide to save Django’s wife who’s been sold, as they discover, to one of the largest plantation owners in Mississippi Calvin Candy.  The two men draft an elaborate plan to rescue her, which ultimately fails, and costs Schultz his life.  Escaping chains once again Django fights through and slaughters everyone in his path and finally saves his wife from Candyland.

When the film was released Quentin Tarantino suffered all manner of bad press for the free and prolific use of the word nigger in the film.  Spike Lee made his usual Huckleberry-Finn_N-Wordappearance on the “Fuck Tarantino” program, and people on Facebook got into really nasty arguments about who’s allowed to use the word “nigger” and when and in what context and then someone said “reverse racism” and everybody who liked their brain left the room before that bullshit polluted their frontal lobes.  And when the issue of Slavery and historical accuracy was thrown down, I like most people tuned out.  Not because there wasn’t an argument to be made, but because I had already assured myself that this interpretation was the best reason to enjoy the film.  I enjoy Tarantino movies period and will regularly defend the man’s work.  But since I’ve seen the film around ten times since it came out I’ve realized more and more than this argument can only go so far.  Tarantino movies tend to be hyperbolic in terms of violence and persona and sometimes plot structure, and within the film there is another, and I’d argue far more interesting, analysis that few people really discussed.1138856 - Django Unchained

Django Unchained is a fairy tale about racism.

After Django and Schultz have defeated the Brittle Brothers and Big Daddy’s posse, the two men are having coffee and beans in a rocky valley, and while they talk Django mentions his wife Broomhilda and Schultz tells him the story of Siegfried:

Dr. King Schultz: Well, Broomhilda was a princess. She was a daughter of Wotan, god of all gods. Anyways, Her father is really mad at her.

Django: What she do? thumb5

Dr. King Schultz: I can’t exactly remember. She disobeys him in some way. So he puts her on top of the mountain.

Django: Broomhilda’s on a mountain?

Dr. King Schultz: It’s a German legend, there’s always going to be a mountain in there somewhere. And he puts a fire-breathing dragon there to guard the mountain. And he surrounds her in a circle of hellfire. And there, Broomhilda shall remain. Unless a hero arises brave enough to save her.

Django: Does a fella arise?

Dr. King Schultz: Yes, Django, as a matter of fact, he does. A fella named Siegfried.

Django: Does Siegfried save her?

Dr. King Schultz: [Nods] Quiet spectacularly so. He scales the mountain, because he’s not afraid of it. He slays the dragon, because he’s not afraid of him. And he walks through hellfire… because Broomhilda’s worth it. 7b8fa84698f80f0b7ea4ca074d0824d9

Django: I know how he feel.

Watching the movie for the first time I failed to see how Tarantino was using this scene.  I simply chocked it up to the man’s recent fascination with Christoph Waltz.  Inglorious Basterds for me was a bit of a let-down the first time I watched it, but that was only because I was a Tarantino Junkie and had heard his original idea for the film.  In place of a quad of black commandoes fighting across Europe I got a two-and-a-half-hour dialogue piece complete with film and lots of subtitles.  Still, the redeeming element of the film was Waltz and his performance of Hans Landa.  When Waltz returned in Django, it was just a continuation of the German aesthetic.tumblr_inline_nz1qe2riEW1qlr65v_500

But like I said before there’s more to this passage because it ultimately reveals the creative goal of Django Unchained,  which is to create an American fairy tale about slavery.

I think it’s a mistake to make the argument that Django is “historically accurate” as a film.  There are numerous elements which satisfy historical reality (such as the headwear slaves were sometimes manacled with and bullshit eugenist views which I’ll talk about later), however people in the past typically didn’t bleed explosive corn syrup.  The regular splash and sploosh of blood erupting in geyser like quality is Tarantino’s usual hyperbolic cinematic style and reveals his love of B-movies.  But the main reason I reject this argument as the sole interpretation or defense of the film is that it limits the plot by history which often can be anti-climactic to narrative structure.

The reason Django becomes the character he does is because Tarantino is making 51gxLM4ThAL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_
a Western, and as I’ve explored that genre before in numerous other essays, it’s important to understand how Westerns operate.  I’ve said it once before, several times, but Jane Tompkin’s book West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns is a wonderful book because it lays out the skeleton of the Western genre, how it operates, who established it, why it continues to appeal to audiences, and finally what is the creative goal of it.

In an early passage she explains the general outline of the western:

First of all, in Westerns (which are generally written by men), the main character is always a full-grown adult male, and either outdoors—on the prairie, on the main street—or in public places—the saloon, the sheriff’s office, the barber shop, the livery stable.  The action concerns physical struggles between the hero and a rival or rivals, and culminates in a fight to the death with guns. djangounchained In the course of these struggles the hero frequently forms a bond with another man—sometimes his rival, more often a comrade—a bond that is more important than any relationship he has with a woman and is frequently tinged with homoeroticism.  There is very little free expression of the emotions.  The hero is a man of few words who expresses himself through physical action—usually fighting.  And when death occurs it is never at home in bed but always sudden death, usually murder.  (38-9).

Now I can anticipate the reader’s reaction immediately:  Django doesn’t exhibit any of these last qualities.  In fact he doesn’t even die.  This is a fair point, however if you observe the quote in it’s entirety you’ll see that Tarantino’s movie matches this skeleton because ultimately Django is a physical creature who isn’t defined by his introspection.  Django Unchained seems to break this structure because he’s principally motivated to save his wife Broomhilda, however Tompkins notes that women typically receive this treatment in westerns when she notes:Django_Unchained_gun_broomhilda

Westerns either push women out of the picture completely or assign them roles in which they exist only to serve the needs of men (39-40).

Broomhilda never really manifests much of a personal character other than the fact that she’s Django’s wife.  And while this certainly means Django Unchained fails the Bechdel test, it simply follows that it is in fact a Western.  Django fights through the power structure and bodies of Candy Land in order to save his wife, literally spraying the white walls red with blood, until he’s overpowered and sent back, temporarily, into slavery.  All this death only further Tompkins arguments about westerns:BzOoI

For the Western is secular, materialist, and anti-feminist; it focuses on conflict in the public space, is obsessed by death, and worships the phallus.  Notably, this kind of explanation does not try to account for the most salient fact about the Western—that it is a narrative of male violence—for, having been formed by the Western, that is what such explanations already take for granted (28).

But that just leads me back to my original argument.

Tarantino movie is remaking the genre of the western by blending it with the fairyfile_571274_django-unchained-trailer-10232012-105713-tale, myth, of Siegfried.  Fairy-tales, much like myth, are stories that are purposefully hyperbolic in order to explain phenomena in the world.  Zeus and Thor are non-scientific means explain lightning, and likewise the story of Siegfried is designed to explain the absurd state of being in love.  One of the best examples of the fairy-tale is George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm which, when it first published, had the subtitle of “A Modern Fairy Tale.”  In Animal Farm Orwell was using the structure of the fairy tale to tell a modern story about the terrors of Stalinism, but also of political corruption in general.87afc1ebb0cf3a9aeab45356ba6fd402.jpg

In Django Unchained, the fairy tale is exploring the history of violence and race, but instead of simply reminding the viewer about the travesties of slavery, the story is told so that instead of remaining victims of oppression black people overcome the violence by becoming the hero of a traditionally white genre.

Django becomes a mythic, or fairy-tale hero, charging into the fire that is the Candy Land plantation, pretending to be a black slaver, watching a slave named D’Artagnan being ripped apart my dogs, listening to Calvin Candie’s long lecture about the mental feebleness of blacks, killing dozens of field hands in Candy Land being captured, killing his captors, and returning to kill every last living member of Candy Land before blowing it up.  While all of this is the usually Tarantinoesque hyperbole it follows point-by-point the struggles of Siegfried’s struggle.

The Dragon may be a slave owner with bad teeth who believes in eugenics and drinks rum from a coconut, but the hero faces it nonetheless because, as Dr. King Schultz noted before, Broomhilda’s worth it.

jamie-foxx-django-and-christoph-waltz-dr

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

And then just a final note about one crucial element of the film.  Consistently in Django Unchained, there are shots of white surfaces being sprayed with blood.  First it’s the cotton of Big Daddy’s farm being sprayed with Ellis Brittle’s blood, Big Daddy’s white horse being sprayed with blood, and finally the white walls of Candy Lands interior being sprayed with blood of the various field hands who die trying to kill Django.  As before I’ve heard arguments about how this is historic symbolism for how “white power” was “stained” by the blood of Africa Americans.  I like this argument, and I stand by the idea that in the humanities you can make any argument you want as long as you support it with evidence.  However, as I’ve noted before, Django Unchained is not historically accurate the way 12 Years a Slave was.  The Tarantino factor has to be accounted for.

django-unchained-bloody-cotton

There is certainly a gratuitous element to it, but I’d argue that this constant staining imagery is just another way of building the “fairy-tale.”  Often myths and fairy-tales pay attention to the body, blood, organs, etc.  And so blood being such a precious fluid that it is, it’s being used to demonstrate what the hero is willing to perform and sacrifice in order to get back to his wife.

 

 

 

**Writer’s Note**

I didn’t get a chance to use it in the review, but this small exchange between Dr. King Schultz and Calvin Candie remains one of my favorite dialogue pieces simply because it made me realize a fact about an author I’ve loved all my life and never knew:

Calvin Candie: White cake?000101

Dr. King Schultz: I don’t go in for sweets, thank you.

Calvin Candie: Are you brooding ’bout me getting the best of ya, huh?

Dr. King Schultz: Actually, I was thinking of that poor devil you fed to the dogs today, D’Artagnan. And I was wondering what Dumas would make of all this.

Calvin Candie: Come again?

Dr. King Schultz: Alexander Dumas. He wrote “The Three Musketeers.” I figured you must be an admirer. You named your slave after his novel’s lead character. If Alexander Dumas had been there today, I wonder what he would have made of it?

Calvin Candie: You doubt he’d approve?

Dr. King Schultz: Yes. His approval would be a dubious proposition at best.

Calvin Candie: Soft hearted Frenchy?

Dr. King Schultz: Alexander Dumas is black.

 

 

***Writer’s Note***

Maybe it’s indulgent on my part, or cathartic, but there’s something about watching Django burst into the house of the slave catcher’s shouting “D’Artagnan, motherfuckers!” And shooting them all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOZz_jNAjcI

Although I’ll also note there’s just something about watching a former slave whip the field hands that made him watch as they whipped his wife with their own whip before shooting them that is just…well it’s just fun to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA1IXnXVmPI

 

****Writer’s Note****

While I was polishing this essay I found a review from The Gaurdian of the film.  Enjoy:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jan/17/django-unchained-review

 

quentin-django-unchained-4-hours

****Writer’s Note****

Finally I just wanted to leave the reader with some extra material.  Here’s an interview with noted African American studies scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr and Quentin Tarantino shortly after Django Unchained was released.  Enjoy:

http://www.alternet.org/culture/quentin-tarantinos-fascinating-interview-henry-louis-gates-jr-racism-and-n-word-django

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Black Or White Or Purple Or Noah, What Matters is Your Mother

14 Sunday May 2017

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Biography, Book Review, Feminism, History, Masculinity Studies, Politics, Race, Satire/Humor

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Africa, African History, Apartheid, biography, Biography as Craft, Book Review, Born a Crime, Born a Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood, Father-Son Relationship, fathers, Feminism, history, Hitch-22, Humor, Jim Henson: A Life, Jon Stewart, library card, Masculinity Studies, memoir, mothers, Politics, race, racism, Racism is not logical, Satire, sex, Sexual politics, Sexual Rhetoric, South Africa, The Daily Show, Tolstoy, Trevor Noah, Tyler Public Library, violence, What Mothers Give Their Children

Library Card

I’m pretty sure my mother is using me for my library card.

Ever since I started working for the Tyler Public Library my eyes have opened to the pettiness of local government, and the pain that can sometimes be public service.  The Tyler Library is a significant one: we have one of the few full time Genealogy/Local History rooms that is open full time in East Texas.  Along with that we serve a wide variety of people who come in looking for books, DVDs, access to computers and the internet, and a regular series of public speaking events in which people come to listen and watch professionals talk on topics ranging from Rose growing to the future of tyler_tx_public_library_img_0495Nuclear Arsenal Diplomacy on the international stage.  The problem with the library, like almost every library I’m sure, is funding.  Because only the city of Tyler’s taxes go to fund us, people who live within the county but not the city have to pay a membership fee.  My reader may be wondering what this has to do with my mother or Trevor Noah’s wonderful autobiography Born a Crime.  I’m sorry, I like to talk, but I’m getting to it.

My mother lives in Smith county but she lives in a small town called Noonday which barely caps 400 people.  She then, like many people in Smith county, complain about the fact that their tax dollars are being taken but they still have to pay to use the library.  In her defense, she understands the money situation since I’ve explained it to her, but often I have to smile and carefully explain to patrons that the county refuses to pay us and therefore we have to charge a fee to stay in the black.  Few people really understand this because of the unspoken maxim that I agree with in principle:  Libraries should be free.*1711_0hi

But my mother likes to read and I like my mother, she’s got good taste in music and pays my cell phone bill, so I decided to arrange a system in which I would check out books that she wants to read and loan them to her.  The system has worked so far, but as I noted from the start I think she’s enjoying this arrangement because every time I see her she’s asking for another book.

This little anecdote though does serve a purpose because as I noted before this essay is my response to Trevor Noah’s autobiography Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood.  I didn’t know about Trevor Noah at all until he got in trouble for an offensive tweet, and to be fair that was really only because he was taking over for Jon Stewart on 29780258The Daily Show and people were looking to disrupt the institution at this supposed moment of weakness.  Stewart left, Noah began, I stopped watching for a while.  It wasn’t that he wasn’t funny, it just that he was new and I’m one of those obnoxious people who has to settle into things slowly.  Still I enjoy The Daily Show and Noah himself has begun to really demonstrate that he’s made The Daily Show into his own and so I’ve become a regular watcher again, and in fact, in the last few months I’ve come to adore Trevor Noah as a comedian, and even more as a writer and Born a Crime is largely responsible.

I checked the book out from the library (my desk is literally right next to the New Books area) and read the first two chapters knowing instantly that my mother would love this book.  I know it sounds ridiculous or absurd to suggest that I have anything in common with a celebrity (especially one who’s seemed to have a far more interesting and eventful life than I have), but reading these first two chapters I realized that Trevor Noah and his mother had a relationship that mirrored the relationship my mother and I have.  A strange closeness that fortunately isn’t Oedipal.

I told her to read just the first two chapters.

I didn’t get the book back for a week.Trevor Noah

Noah’s biography took me completely by surprise because I’ve read the autobiographies of comedians before, and most of them, if I’m being charitable, aren’t worth reading.  It’s not that they aren’t funny, it’s just that most of them are just opportunities to track their individual development and show where they’ve come from.  I know there’s merit and real humanity in such works, but the problem is too often these books are also just a chance to rap and ramble about everything and anything that comes into their heads.  Noah’s book is different however, because his story chronicles not just his awkward puberty and childhood, it also tackles the issues of race, political corruption, domestic violence, crime, and poverty while still managing to be entertaining and well written.  Trevor Noah’s very existence was a crime because, growing up in South Africa during apartheid, being the child of a black woman and a white man, he was a crime against the state.

Noah’s book often explores the sheer absurdity of apartheid in small segments between the chapters of the book.  One passage which is one of my mother’s favorites, discusses the labeling of Chinese South Africans as black.  He explains:White Area

Apartheid, for all it’s power, had fatal flaws baked in, starting with the fact that it never made any sense.  Racism is not logical.  Consider this: Chinese people were classified as black in South Africa.  I don’t mean that they were running around acting black.  They were still Chinese.  But unlike Indians, there weren’t enough Chinese people to warrant devising a whole separate classification.  Apartheid, despite its intricacies and precision, didn’t know what to do with them, so the government said, “Eh, we’ll just call ‘em black.  It’s simpler that way.”

Interestingly, at the same tie, Japanese people were labeled as white.  The reason for this was that the South African government wanted to establish good relations with the Japanese in order to import their fancy cars and electronics.  So Japanese people were given the honorary white status while Chinese people stayed black.  (75).273B9A1C00000578-3023806-image-a-3_1428088867566

I still can’t read this passage without cracking up.  The stupidity is just mind-boggling.  Then again the United States Constitution originally labeled black people as three fifths of a human being so I suppose it’s important to remember that racism is a worldly stupidity rather than just a regional one.

One of the joys of reading Noah’s biography is the fact that, as a comedian, his retelling of one of the most truly despicable institutionalized race segregationist policies never becomes dramatic, hyperbolic, or soul-crushingly depressing.  Instead of levelling on and on about the atrocities of apartheid, Noah tries constantly to present the small absurdities in his life while observing how they would relate to the wider national community.  And in this right, I would argue, Noah succeeds far better in demonstrating the ineffectiveness of apartheid, because while concerted political efforts were what ultimately brought down such an odious system, it’s the power of subverting the institution through laughter that a real victory is achieved.

If you can laugh at something, it’s difficult to take it too seriously.

There so many levels to Noah’s biography in terms of race.  One of the most prominent is also one of the hilarious and tragic scenes in the book.  Noah describes his early infancy when his mother and biological father tried to take Noah outside for activity.

Where most children are proof of their parent’s love I was the proof of their150928133752-trevor-noah-daily-show-granny-mckenzie-pkg-00003302-large-169 criminality.  The only time I could be with my father was indoors.  If we left the house, he’d half to walk across the street from us.  My mom and I used to go to Joubert Park all the time.  It’s the Central Park of Johannesburg—beautiful gardens a zoo, a giant chess-board with human-sized pieces that people would play.  My mother tells me that once, when I was a toddler, my dad tried to go with us, and I ran after him, screaming, “Daddy!  Daddy!  Daddy!”  People started.  He panicked and ran away.  I thought it was a game and kept chasing him.  (27).

This passage is funny upon first reading, but by the second or third time I’m reading it I wonder (while still laughing) the pain of not being able to even be seen in public with your child.

Before I start the maudlin crap though I really do want to acknowledge how well written this biography is.  I’ve observed before that it can be difficult to find truly great biographies.  A.N. Wilson’s Tolstoy is always the first that comes to mind, Che: A 51ty6xJ8PlLRevolutionary Life by Jo Lee Anderson comes next, Jim Henson: A Life by Brian Jay Jones (Also look up his George Lucas), Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens, I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai, and recently I’ve begun Life by Keith Richards.  This list may seem to contradict my statement before about the scarcity of truly great biographies but in fact it only reinforces it.  These books are products of a careful craft (pardon the alliteration) that tries to leave the reader with a real sense of the person under discussion, and rather than try to chronicle every detail of a person’s existence, it instead tries to offer the heart and personality in all its beauty and flaws.

Reading Born a Crime I feel like I know Trevor Noah’s personality, rather than just his facts.

And if I can offer one last sentiment, what is beautiful about the book for me is how much I come to recognize that the pair of us do have one thing in common: we grew up under strong women.  The impression of Born a Crime that lingers for me is how Patricia Noah helped shape Trevor into the man he became.  One quote is enough to see this because I return to it over and over again:xnbaypa

I grew up in a world of violence, but I myself was never violent at all.  Yes, I played pranks and set fires and broke windows, but I never attacked people.  I never hit anyone.  I was never angry.  I just didn’t see myself that way.  My mother had exposed me to the books she never got to read.  She took me to the schools that she never got to go to.  I immersed myself in those worlds and I came back looking at the world a different way.  I saw the futility of violence, the cycle that just repeats itself, the damage that’s inflicted on people that they in turn inflict upon others.

I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love.  Love is a creative act.  When you love someone you create a new world for them.  My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her. screen-shot-2015-03-27-at-8-25-19-pm After that she never raised her hand to her children again.  Unfortunately, by the time she stopped Abel had started.  (262).

This passage is beautiful to me because it perfectly summarizes the home I was raised in, or at least the philosophy that governed it.  Both of my parents grew up in homes where physical abuse was not controversial, it was just a common means of discipline.  I was raised by parents who disagreed with that idea, who instead wanted their children to see that violence doesn’t check anything, all it does is inspire more of itself.  Violence becomes a kind of cancer eating at the people who perform it and suffer from it until there’s nothing left.  If anything, this passage seems like the most important in the entire book because ultimately this biography centers on Noah and his mother.

The relationships between mothers and sons can be complicated, because if men profess too much admiration or devotion to them the accusation of Oedipus complex becomes a loud prison sentence.  Anyone who needs much evidence of this simply look to the “Martha” controversy trevor noahs grannyof Batman Vs Superman.  But mothers are important for a young man’s development because she becomes the first relationship.  Mothers, the good ones anyway, teach their sons emotional strength and then eventually how to interact with the world.  They teach them the proper ways to speak and act towards women.  They teach them about the importance of family.  They teach their sons love, and what that word really means against the supposed images and representations of it that crowd the media.  This last lesson is important, the most important, because as Noah’s biography demonstrates that love is what helps develop people into the individuals they are and instills in them their ideals and moral constructions.

I had a wonderful mother who encouraged me to create and love rather than destroy.  That guidance has led me to where I am today.  Likewise, Noah had a loving mother who suffered and endured a pain that would break most people, but through it all endured and taught her son that essential quality.

Born a Crime isn’t just a story about racism, it’s a testament to a mother’s love for her son.  And his success is only further proof that she probably deserves some kind of official “Mom of the Year” award, because you don’t get shot in the head and live through that and not receive any kind of accommodation.  Spoilers.

273B9DAC00000578-3023806-Loving_Trevor_Noah_with_his_mother_Patricia_The_three_year_old_w-a-1_1428088845110

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

Since writing this essay one of the library staff explained, rather effectively, that nothing in life is “free,” and in fact if you look at the way libraries work since their founding, they are most certainly not free.  Books, internet access, and DVDs don’t magically appear from thin air and so libraries have to receive fuding of some kind, usually from taxes and grant funding.  I’m writing this out because this attitude of “Libraries should be free” is bullshit and it needs to stop being perpetuated.

 

**Writer’s Note**

All quotes from Born a Crime were taken from the Spiegel & Grau First edition hardback copy.

 

***Writer’s Note***

For the record I don’t mind if my mother uses my library card.  Shegave birth me and continues to support me financially, philosophically, emotionally, intellectually, etc., and reads whatever I write here.  She also, from time to time, recommends great books.  So thanks Mom, you rock.  Love you.

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Smith How Hiram Really Died and What Came After HOWL How People Become Atheists How to Make Love like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale How To Talk to Girls At Parties How Unpleasant to Meet Mr. Eliot HR 40 Hubris Huckleberry Hound Hugh Hefner Hugh Jackman Human/Robot Love Story Human Beings Perception of Reality Human Body Human connection Human Developement Human evolution human exploration Human Ideas are Grander than any Religion humanity Human Memory Human Narcissim Humbert Humbert Humor humors Hunger Games Hunter S. Thompson Hurricane Lolita husbands and wives Hyena Hymn to Intellectual Beauty Hypersexualization of Female Breasts I'm almost positive the song Tribute is the song they couldn't remember but I realize that's a controversial position I'm Going to Go Back There Someday I'm Not a Racist But... I'm Tired I've Been Down That Road Before I, Claudius Icarian Games Icarus Ice Cream that ISN'T Ice Cream Ida Tarbell Idealism identification Identity Identity Crisis Idris Elba If a woman is upset it's not because she's on her period it's because you're being a dick If they ask if you want Pepsi throw over the table throat punch the shit out of them and then proceed to burn that motherf@#$er down If you're reading this pat yourself on the back because you can read and that's awesome ignorance I have Measured Out My Life in Coffee Spoons and K Cups I know too many Michaels I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings I Like It Like That I Like it Like That: True Stories of Gay Male Desire Illuminated Manuscripts illusion Illusion of choice I Love Lucy I Love Lucy Mug I Love Penis...Mug iMac Imaginary Time imagination Immanuel Kant immigrants imperialism Imposter Complex Impressionists In Bed with David amd Jonathan incest Incorporation of images in Pedagogy Independence Day Independent Comics Indie Fiction Individual Initiative Individual Will Industrial Nightmare industry infidelity Infinite Jest Infinite Jest Blogs Infinite Possibility Infinity Informed Democracy Inherit the Wind Injustice innocence vs ignorance In One Person Inquisition insanity Insects Inside Out inspiration integrity intellectual Intellectual Declaration of Independance Intellectual masculinity Intellectual Parent Inter Library Loan internet interracial relationships Interview Inu Yoshi invert Invisible Man Invitation to a Beheading Ion IOWA iPad Ipecac iPhone ipod IRA I Racist Iran-Contra Irish Breakfast Tea Irish history Irish Writers I Ruck, Therefore I Am Isaac Asmiov Isaac Deutscher Isabel Allende Isabella St. James Ishmael Islam isolation Israel Issa Rae It It's an Honor It's illegal in the state of Texas to own more than six "realistic" vibrators It's time to adopt the Metric System in America for crying out loud It's truly truly difficult to find good coffee and by good coffee I mean the type that leaves you feeling as if you've actually tasted something beyond human understanding close to the furnace of all Italy Ivory Tower of Academia ivy I wandered lonely as a cloud I Want a Wife I Was a Playboy Bunny I Will Fight No More Forever I work at a Public Library J.D. 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