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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

Tag Archives: Race relations

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

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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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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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"I'm not Racist but...", "the sunken place", A Mind of It's Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, Allison Williams, Armitage Family, Betty Gabriel, Between the World and Me, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, Catherine Keener, Chris, Coagula, comedy, Daniel Kaluuya, David M. Friedman, Film, film review, Get Out, horror, Humor, Jordan Peele, Key & Peele, LilRel Howery, Mandingo myth, Marcus Henderson, race, Race relations, Sex Slavery, slavery, Social Justice Warriors, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the black male body, Woke

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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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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Be Wary of Wackadoodles

08 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Blurb, Politics, Race

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alton Sterling, Black Lives Matter, Bloody Sunday, Blurb, Dallas Shooting, Diamond “Lavish” Renyold, Ferguson, Mass Shooting, Michael Brown, Othering, Philando Castile, Police, Political Apathy, Political Discourse, Politics, race, Race relations, Rodney King, Tamir Rice, The Other, Wackadoodles

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Be Wary of Wackadoodles.

If you don’t know what a Wackadoodle is, I’m afraid you’re mistaken because they’re everywhere, you just try to ignore them because seeing them and recognizing them is unpleasant.  Much like a pimple, or a mole on your arm that keeps growing, you try to ignore it, or else you try to lance/pop it which tends to leave you in pain.  Wackadoodles are obnoxious creatures, but what makes them so damn frustrating is the fact that they blend in with those people who are actually trying to do good things and just make sure that everybody is okay.

This Morning in Dallas Five Police Officers were gunned down by a lunatic who wanted to kill white people during a Black Lives Matter march.  Earlier this week at least three black men were shot by police.  These are tragedies and just about everyone on the face of the earth recognized this…almost everyone.

Before Alton Sterling was even cold, and before anybody could bother to ask whether or not Diamond “Lavish” Renyold’s daughter was okay, or as okay as a four-year-old child could be after watching her mother’s boy friend get shot by a police officer less than a foot away from her, people, Wackadoodles, were already screaming All Lives Matter.  Some Wackadoodles were also shouting out Blue Lives Matter.  Likewise before these men were given a chance to be recognized a victims of tragedy their names were already being sullied by News media outlets (both liberal and conservative) as petty thugs who criminals and so therefore not worthy of the bullets that killed them.

The Wackadoodles in this instance were the people who wanted to label the Black Lives Matter Movement as the ones responsible rather than the actual police officers who fucked.

This morning in Dallas during a Black Lives Matter march, a lone gunman shot five police officers because he hated white people and because he felt the Black Lives Matter movement wasn’t violent enough for his taste.  Before the cops were even named Black Matter became a paria and the talking heads at once began to draw sides.

The rest of us were trying to breath.

It’s been a rotten week, a rotten month, a rotten year, and Wackadoodles are having the time of their life.

It’s important to differentiate between the Wackadoodles and normal people however, for right now the struggle is to sift through the bullshit and find what’s real.  I’m an unapologetic supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, but before I can continue half of the readers have labeled me a “cop killer sympathizer” and probably somebody who spits on cops and calls them “pigs.”  This attitude reveals the extent of the damage Wackadoodles.  There are many sane, competent people in Black Lives Matter who want only, and I repeat only, to make sure that when black people are victims of tragedy and violence that real justice can be done and that they are no longer disproportionately profiled by police forces.

There are Wackadoodles however, that actually want to kill cops.  The problem is Wackadoodles are often chameleons.  A great example would be the feminist movement.  Despite the naysayers feminism is first and foremost the idea that men and women are equal philosophically, economically, individually, politically, etc.  The feminist movement was started because even in the 1960s there wasn’t any law on the books to handle issues like wage disparity or marital rape.  Women began to protest to try and acquire real civil liberties.  While they were doing so the Wackadoodles joined their party.  The Wackadoodles that call themselves feminists typically scream about the abolishing of all male roles and call for a woman led only society.  This is often a cartoon character pulled out by news media and political pundits and bad political satirists.  Because the Wackadoodles are camouflaged by the word “feminist” however, the women who genuinely care about making sure everybody’s equal are permanently damaged by the association.  As such when a woman says she’s a feminist, the Wackadoodle parasite poisons her argument before she can even begin.cop-protesting

Black Lives Matter began not long after Michael Brown was gunned down by the police.  While he was not innocent of any crime as we later found out, he was still an unarmed man who deserved a fair trial by jury.  He didn’t deserve to be shot.  Since the fires of Ferguson, Black Lives Matter has become an important and controversial political movement in America because they are no quiet about it.  The Black Lives Matter movement has been infected by Wackadoodles however because like feminists before them, the Wackadoodles camouflaged into their ranks.

A few individual citizens, who possess more anger than other, have assumed the mantel of representatives for Black Lives Matter and called for the death or attack of police officers.  Because film editing is easy, and because nuance is no longer part of public vocabulary, these Wackadoodles become the face of the organization while the good people who want to make sure that cops do their jobs right are left defending their movement rather than being able to actually do anything.

Wackadoodles are good chameleons, entering every political party, social club, book club, D &D click, etc. and eventually they entered government.  Wackadoodles thrive in politics because two party systems allow for othering, the process of treating people as if they aren’t human, and Wackadoodles devour this kind of rhetoric and attitude the way most of us inhale lobster or shrimp.  But beyond the surface level of government sometimes Wackadoodles infect the acting aspects of government including law enforcement.  This creates problems.  Following Bloody Sunday, the Rodney King beating, Michael Brown’s death, Tamir Rice’s death, and now most recently the death of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, Police have become the familiar monsters that people need to blame problems on.

I won’t deny that police have, in the past, always freaked me out but that stems more from my childhood and the developed lack of trust I have concerning authority figures.  No matter what, I will never condone the murdering of police officers for it is a cowardly and despicable rhetoric that only further divides us.  Part of the reason I live where  I do is because I live next door to two police officers.  Nice people who always smile and talk to me when I say hello, and the thought that someone could hate them simply because of their uniforms is repulsive.

Wackadoodles have infected the police force, and because people cannot differentiate between Wackadoodles and regular people, cops become the enemy that only leads to further violence like Dallas.

Wackadoodles are not going anywhere, and they will never completely disappear.  It’s ridiculous to ask people not to be angry, just as it’s pointless to ask people not to react to violent atrocities.  In moments of tragedy however Wackadoodles work their hardest to hide their work.  Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, Cops are killers, Cops are heroes, this divisional rhetoric serves only to fuel rather than soothe emotion.  People are people, and people are hurting, and people will continue to hurt.  In these moments however giving into anger, rather than crying and processing grief for those lives lost is only proof that Wackadoodles are good at their job.

This essay reeks of self-righteousness I know, but my effort as the writer isn’t to tell people how to live, it’s simply to act as a kind of cold shower.  People are dead, or dying, but already I’ve heard the tones and read the Facebook posts and listened to pundit after pundit tell me that X person represents everything that Group A stand for, and rather than hear somebody speak up and remind this person that life is about nuance and details and sometimes there are just Wackadoodle assholes, the people who are trying to do good work in our world, like the Black Lives Matter supporter who just wants to make sure people get justice, or the cop who doesn’t have a bad mark on her record and just wants to help her community, these people are getting screwed.

Be wary of Wackadoodles, because the impulse to join them, or believe that they honestly have any other agenda other than violence, is what got us here in the first place.

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Nigger: A White Tower Review

12 Thursday May 2016

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Academic Books, Book Review, Politics, Race

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Absalom, Absalom, Academic Book, Barack Obama, Book Review, Larry Wilmore, Light in August, Mark Twain, Merrium-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, nigger v. nigga, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Political Discourse, Politics, Public speech, race, Race relations, Randall Kennedy, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Nightly Show, White House Correspondance Dinner, William Faulkner

41hCrmG89VL._SX323_BO1,204,203,200_

“Don’t re-nig 2012.”  Imagine reading that.

I’ve written before, on several occasions, about issues of race often using my experience of East Texas as my example.  I feel this is unfortunate for my reader who begins to assume that Texas is a state filled with racist bastards who do nothing but listen to Toby Keith on repeat but only the second half of that sentence is true.  Texas is a state of fine people who, while they may at times seem cartoonish in their eccentricity, are possessed with a quality that evades description.  Texas is a beautiful state and the people are unlike any the reader is likely to meet in their lifetimes, but this essay isn’t about defending my state, because alas while I love it and live it I do have to suffer the presence of a few assholes.

I watched the words through a kind of haze.  The bumper-sticker was on the back window of a White Toyota and was just a white background with Black Impact font.  I was used to hqdefaultthe “One-Big-Ass-Mistake-America” stickers as well as the “NO” that used the cloudy “O” from President Obama’s first campaign.  Living in Texas you get used to such rhetoric because Obama is a Democrat and democrats, like communists and liberals, are ghoulish creatures that emerge from the black pit of Washington D.C. to come and devour our children, freedom, health-care, businesses, and, if we’re especially unlucky, our guns too.  I wasn’t bothered by the partisan bullshit because every asshole believes expressing his individuality through a bumper-sticker makes him part of the discourse.

I was outraged by the fact that the driver was white and seemed completely apathetic to the fact that there’s a difference between calling the President an idiot and being a racist.

It wasn’t this bumper-sticker however that lead me to Randall Kennedy’s book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.  It was actually William Faulkner.

This semester I received my second chance to read Faulkner in Graduate School, and given Faulkner-Light in augustthe fact the last book was Absalom, Absalom I was nervous as fucking hell.  I only in the last few weeks have completed the exhausted physical and psychological recovery of such a long painful affair that left me stimulated and devastated intellectually.  Light in August however was actually an amazing read, and true to Faulknerian style, the book was ultimately demonstrating the atmosphere of the post-Civil War south as a scene of internal corruption mixed with the complicated nature of race embodied in the character of Joe Christmas.  Faulkner and nigger tend to go hand in hand (he was a white man writing in Mississippi, it was gonna happen) and the first real recognition of the word struck me.  Christmas is an orphan who steals into the orphanage’s dietician’s office to grab some toothpaste when he is interrupted.  The dietician, a 26 year old woman, begins to have sex with a man until she hears Christmas coughing and when she finds him she says:

“’You little rat!’ the thin, furious voice hissed; “you little rat! Spying on me!  You little nigger bastard!” (LIA 122).

It would have been enough to just say the dietician was a white woman from the south therefore she’s racist, but I needed a paper topic, as well as a viable excuse for spending my parent’s money on yet another book.  My father’s keeping a tab.  He denies it but I know he is.  One of my other professor’s had introduced me to the book, and given my background attending a lily-white private Christian school, and then attending a public 02-073university where most of the students and faculty are white I was curious about Nigger.

Kennedy is an academic, specifically a law professor at Harvard University, and before the reader believes that that means Kennedy’s book in one of the many dense unreadable texts produced by academics I’m happy to disappoint them.  Nigger is readable and written in a way that anyone with the ability to read can approach the book and come away secure in the knowledge that they have understood the material.  Part of the reason for this is Kennedy’s careful strategy of approaching the word with curiosity along with agenda.  He says in one opening passage:

To be ignorant of its meanings and effects is to make oneself vulnerable to all manner of perils, including the loss of a job, a reputation, a friend, even one’s life.

Let’s turn first to etymology.  Nigger is derived from the latin word for the color black, niger.  According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, it did not originate as a slur but took on a derogatory connotation over time.  Nigger and other words related to it have been spelled in a variety of ways, including niggah, nigguh, niggur, and nigger.  When John Rolfe recorded in his journal the first shipment of Africans to Virginia in 1619, he listed them as “negars.”  A 1689 inventory of an estate in Brooklyn, New York, made mention of an enslaved “niggor” boy.  The seminal lexicographer Noah Webster referred to Negroes as “negars.”  […]  No one knows Slave_Auction_Adprecisely when or how niger turned derisively into nigger and attained a pejorative meaning.  We do know, however, that by the end of first third of nineteenth century, nigger had already become a familiar and influential insult.  (4)

Kennedy later goes to list how the word Nigger has become a fluid term and an almost unifying form of insult as the Irish are sometimes referred to as the “niggers” of Europe, and arabs, when described casually by bigots, are sometimes referred to as “sand-niggers.”  These are just two of the numerous examples Kennedy provides and that itself is revealing enough about the potency of the word.

Kennedy’s book is vital reading to any and all who are left puzzled to the nature of the word nigger, specifically whether or not they are really allowed to say it.  Before the reader thinks I can answer that question, allow me to clarify: I CAN’T.  I am a white man writing a review of the book and not in fact commenting on the existence of the word or my freedom to use it.  I don’t use it, but that is partly because I’ve read this book, as well as commentary and testimony by numerous African Americans, and realized that it just doesn’t hold any relevance or usefulness in my lexicon.

That, and I try to avoid being a dick to the best of my ability.

I myself recognize this conflict for writing this review is in fact a form of cowardice on my part.  A white man verbally dissecting the complexities inherent to the use of the word nigger is a needfully careful, and let’s be honest, tricky as fucking-fuck dance that leaves many impaled on their own good intentions.  Writing the word however allows some buffering, but even so, my regular use of the word can and should be questioned.  The conflict of being white is a guard against the potency of this word, and growing up surrounded by privileged white rich kids I became painfully aware of this fact.  I would hear the word from time to time, always in purely white environments, and it was clear that as long as black people couldn’t hear nobody would mind, and the larger problem was there wasn’t a word to refer to us that had the same level of bite.  Some would protest pathetically that “honkey” or “cracker” was just as bad as nigger but this fell flat and even the regular abusers of the word would recognize that that shit didn’t fly.

whiteprivilege

For the record, the only contemporary word on record that can sting a white person is the word “racist.”

Kennedy’s book doesn’t try to account or explain methods to eliminate this conflict, for ultimately the book aims to follow the use of the term in popular, cultural, and historical record.  The book is divided into three sections: the first tries to establish the history of the word, the second section observes how the use of this word has become entangled with legal arguments, and finally the third and final section covers the public fight against the use of the word and the attempted eradication of it.  It is in this third section, aptly titled “Pitfalls in Fighting Nigger: Perils of Deception, Censoriousness and Excessive Anger,” that Kennedy tackles two public instances of the word and the fight around them: the inclusion of the word in the Merrium-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, and the regular arguments surrounding Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.Webster_collegiate_11

In the first case he explains the significance of the inclusion:

Deciding whether to not or how to define a deeply controversial word is an inescapably “political” act, and claims to the contrary are either naïve or disingenuous.  The issue, then, is not whether editors shape the substance of their dictionaries.  Of course they do.  The issue is the substance of the choices made.  Some of Merrium-Webster’s critics have condemned the editors’ decision to include any reference at all to nigger.  […]  That tack, however, is glaringly wrongheaded.  Many terms that are absent from dictionaries are nonetheless pervasive in popular usage.  Moreover, so long as racist sentiments exist, they will fund linguistic means of expression, even if some avenues are blocked.  There are, after all, numerous ways of insulting people. (108)

Kennedy follows this paragraph with a smaller summation in the last line of the subsequent paragraph:

Nigger should have a place in any serious dictionary.  The word is simply too important to ignore.  (108).

twain_nwordAfter this Kennedy addresses a conflict that is about at least a century old at this point: the use of the word nigger in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  There have been entire books written about this subject, and rather than list out every position taken I’d rather just quote Kennedy because he speaks much clearer and with less pathetic attempt at humor.  Addressing the argument that Huckleberry Finn proliferates racism by using the word nigger frequently Kennedy contends that:

That interpretation, however, is ludicrous, a frightening exhibition of how thought becomes stunted in the absence of any sense of irony.  Twain is not willfully buttressing racism here; he is seeking ruthlessly to unveil and ridicule it.  But putting nigger in white character’s mouths, the author is not branding blacks, but rather 3c12065rbranding the whites.  (109).

Many authors both black and white have argued this position effectively and the scores of activists that have attempted to censor the novel have often been left revealed as people who don’t get the joke.  Having read and studied Mark Twain in depth, and having read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn this entire argument is hilarious to watch.  Yes white men use the word nigger ad nauseum (fancy-pants way of saying too much) but if you observe many of these white characters they tend to be crooks, thieves, bloodthirsty murderers, idiots, or just genuinely ridiculous fools.  It would be one thing if Twain had his intelligent characters, or morally virtuous characters spouting that word at length, but when the individuals using that word tend to be morons it becomes a dubious proposition to argue that white’s using this word demonstrates Twain trying to argue for genetic or innate superiority of the white race.  Simply put, if a murderer is using the word nigger then it becomes difficult to romanticize that vocabulary choice.

Kennedy concludes this argument later when he notes:Huckleberry-Finn_N-Word

It is undoubtedly true, moreover, that regardless of Twain’s intentions, Huckleberry Finn (like any work of art) can be handled in a way that is not only stupid but downright destructive of the educational and emotional well-being of students.  (111).

Having taught myself I understand this position because the classroom is a fragile space.  The possibility to lose students to emotion or ego is a careful balance and when teachers sacrifice the opportunity to foster real growth by relenting to the idea that something is difficult therefore not worth my, or the student’s, time then a great tragedy has ensued.

It’s at this point though that the reader may be wondering what relevance any of this has to their life.  Nigger is just a bad word and so we shouldn’t talk or write about it because it will either just make people angry or else jeopardize people’s careers.  What good does it do talking about it?

The conflict with this position is that it is defeatist, but more importantly it’s just not practical given the current political and cultural climate.  It’s been barely two years since tumblr_static_76rv7ftkky88wc8kgc4k44gww_2048_v2Michael Brown was shot, and in that space of time the United States has suffered more and more tragedy and the conversation about black/white relations in America has become a more pressing subject.  In our current atmosphere where conservatives are telling jokes about Black Lives Matter groups, and self-hating-self-aggrandizing liberals are bashing cops on twitter hoping they can be “cool” it’s easy to lose track of what the real problem is, and a perfect microcosm of this is Larry Wilmore’s half hour appearance at the White House Correspondent’s dinner.

Willmore is the host of the program The Nightly Show, the half hour political comedy program that takes place after The Daily Show, and since he took over Stephen Colbert’s spot Wilmore’s humor has tended to focus more and more on the political atmosphere for African Americans and perceptions of race in media at large.  At the White House Correspondence dinner he was introduced by the President and made a few jokes, some funny, some not so funny, but it was the last line of the evening that broke the media because before he left the stage he placed his fist to his heart and called President Obama “My nigga.”  There was laughter, some horror, but then also the President doing the same and embracing Wilmore before the man left.  NPR did a small article covering the affair and in it Wilmore laid out his artistic choice for using the word:

I’ve been called that word in my lifetime — the “-er” version — and I made a distinction between the use of “nigger” against us and the use of “nigga” that we’ve used with each other. On [The Nightly Show Monday] night, I said we conjugate the slur. …

The one in “-er” is unmistakable — it’s an attempt by white people to dehumanize and denigrate and demean black people, to make them less than human.021215-celebs-larry-wilmore.jpg

When we turned it around, it was our way of having camaraderie with each other, of taking the power out of that word, stamping [out its] ability to dehumanize. It isn’t always the easiest thing to translate to people who aren’t in that experience. … And not all blacks agree with that, and I acknowledge that. … I understand why people would be upset about it. I have no quarrel or criticism of that. … But part of it is a generational thing, and it is possibly a different way of just viewing who has the power to say what. Who has the right to be in charge of the narrative? Who gets to control what’s being said about us or how we get to say it?*

While I initially focused on the difference between nigger and nigga, rereading this article I focused more attention upon the last paragraph.  The ultimate problem with nigger is not just that white people use it, for I like some people have been in situations in which a white person may have said the word in the presence of a black person and there wasn’t a conflict, and likewise there have been moments where you could slice the tension with a knife.  It’s not just that white people use the word, it’s the way white people have used the word often to craft a rhetoric in which they are in a position of power.  This manifested in the past as whites, whether they were rich or poor, using nigger to remind black people that they were socially inferior.  In the environment of Post 1960s Civil-Rights the method of whites exerting power of their race over blacks has now morphed and often the idea of “reverse racism” has been employed to treat whites as “victims” of the real racism and Randall-Kennedy-Picthat using that word really isn’t that bad.  Wilmore received criticism from both black and white commentators for a score of reasons, but like many scrambling to alight Twain’s Huckleberry Finn on fire, most of these critics were people who just didn’t get the joke.

Kennedy’s book is an important read, and while at times his style is a bit tedious and he spends lengthy passages listing off offenses rather than digging into an analysis of them, it is still a vital read to any and all people approaching the complicated nature of race, particularly how rhetoric of said races are constructed using language.

I understand that many are bothered by the word, and many will be left more confused about the nature of the word, but the sanest way of understanding this conflict is not by refusing talking about it, or being self-righteous about it.  The best means of beginning to understand and empathize people’s emotions is by talking it out and really listening to each other.

Kennedy’s book is a must-read and he concludes it by saying:

For bad and for good, nigger is thus destined to remain with us for many years to come—a reminder of the ironies and dilemmas, the tragedies and glories, of the American experience.  (139).

Nigger isn’t going anywhere, nor are stupid, racist bumper stickers. WIN_20160510_15_35_13_Pro

If people give up talking and really listening however then the issue will continue to inspire bad memes, shit emails your uncle sends you, and more unnecessary violence.  Kennedy’s book goes the long way of just starting the conversation, and books like that are worth people’s time because often the fear of asking questions leads to only further ignorance.  Nigger will remain on my bookshelf because as a white man I cannot possibly comprehend the emotion that word inspires, and so rather than trying to ignore the problem, or protest that one doesn’t exist, I can do only what I have always done: read the book, and try to consider another’s perspective.

I’m a white man, as such my job isn’t to tell anybody what to feel or what to think about this word.  My reality is to listen and try to understand so that when other people express confusion or anger I can try and communicate what I’ve read and heard.  Kennedy’s book goes a long way then to getting the conversation started.

image_08_13_030_R07-2010

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

Below is a link to the NPR article concerning Larry Wilmore’s use of the word nigga at the White house Correspondent’s dinner in case you would like to read the whole thing:

http://www.npr.org/2016/05/03/476598311/larry-wilmore-on-breaking-taboos-at-the-white-house-correspondents-dinner

 

**Writer’s Second Note**

If you’re still wondering if you’re allowed to use the word nigger in conversation or in public if you’re white the best answer I have is…No.

Just don’t use it.

If you believe that isn’t fair remember that it wasn’t fair that your older brother got a car for his birthday and you got a computer, and I know that isn’t a great metaphor but it’s simpler than the argument that because you’re white it will be seen that your character is immediately suspect in which case as a potential employee, friend, employer, etc you pose a risk because you’re using language that racists tend to use and nobody wants to work or be around racists except other racists and so job opportunities go out the window because you’re seen as unprofessional, your wife leaves you, and your kids think you’re a racist prick, but really the only reason you should need is that for the most part because everyone in the world doesn’t know who you are you’re just some random white guy saying the word nigger, so the nuance that might be able to help you will be ignored and you’ll be left looking like a gigantic douche.

the_princess_bride_68805If you’re still bitching about the fact that that isn’t fair remember the Grandfather in The Princess Bride who played Colombo for years: “Well who said life is fair?  Where is that written?”

Before you use the word ask yourself an important question: Do you really need to use the word?  If so why, and is that a legitimate reason to use it?

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A Letter from the White Tower to Michael Brown

15 Friday Aug 2014

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Black Lives Matter, contrarian, Essay, Ferguson, Hands Up Don't Shoot, Individual Will, Injustice, Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr., Michael Brown, Missouri, NAACP, police brutality, Politics, Race relations, Tearz, Totalitarianism, Wu-Tang Clan

michael-brown-missouri-teenager

I picked him up then I held him by his head
His eyes shut, that’s when I knew he was…

Aw man! How do I say goodbye?
It’s always the good ones that have to die

Tearz, Wu-Tang Clan

My original intent was to discuss the idea of the essay and whether it still possess cultural relevance, however the situation arising in Missouri has possessed too much of my attention at the moment to continue with this enterprise. Watching the coverage, as most of us have, the images and rhetoric that have been assaulting our sensory input seems to be painting a clear picture. For every white officer of the law, garbed as if preparing for a drop into Kuwait, there correspond scenes of black protestors marching with their arms raised as if prepared for the inevitable confrontation. The film clips of tear gas and armored vehicles running through residential districts quickly follow. The arresting of the two reporters from the Washington Post was a warning sign for us all, not just because for once it seems that white people have at last deserved police attention, but because as I have said in previous essays, the moment writers are targeted we should all 1407876204002-Brown-gallery-3be on guard. Fortunately the gathering of press and civilians, of every shade of virtue, demanding justice for the senseless killing of Michael Brown has inspired enough push for justice that the lethargic police force, desperate to defend their own before recognizing the situation for what it is, have today announced the identity of the killer of Brown. Darren Wilson has yet to make a public appearance, but justice is patient.

Observing this spectacle I am confronted by the standard, and pathetically coordinated, defense of many whites that racism is only ever brought to the surface by uppity blacks. This defense is bullshit and Missouri is quickly reminding our society there still remains to this day a, difficult is too pale an adjective for this travesty, complicated relationship between White and Black America. Watching the riot’s of the previous evening I was tempted at first to locate my copy of the Autobiography of Malcom X, however I didn’t have the time to travel to the old library at my parents house and find the book. Upon reflection I decided that perhaps I was moving in the wrong direction. While active protest does have its place the men and women marching in the defense of their community and for the defense of justice in their country summon to mind a more important figure, that of Martin Luther King Jr.

Before you begin I will not make the classic, and still resonating beautiful speech I Have a Dream, but instead the Martin_Luther_King_Jr_NYWTS_4more, in my own mind, rhetorically effective Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Before I continue the analysis allow me a moment of indulgence. The death of Michael Brown continues to hit me, not because it is yet another offense in the long line of black-white relations, but because he was my own age. Michael Brown was eighteen years old and about to begin college. A young man entering into a new world, experiencing academia, meeting young women (or men) and forming relationships, pursing his degree, and trying to figure out, like we all are at this strange stage of our development, what exactly we want and expect out of life. A boy just a few years younger than myself is dead, his body laying exposed on the concrete for ten minutes while the world just watched. I have stated before my loathing of pathos, it is a poor rhetorical trick that is regularly prostituted to create sentiment that blinds the laymen to the real atrocities performed by those in power who find him inconvenient. Never-the-less, this heinous atrocity has forced me to recognize my youth, my generation, and discover that the “young-men dying” as they always are, are now my friends and brothers.

Letter from Birmingham Jail struck me, as flare’s popped on my television screen and small legions of police officers brandished weapons silhouetted against the burning streets of Ferguson, as simultaneously a manifesto for civil disobedience as well as a love letter to the African American community of his time. Rather AP_Police_Shooting_Missouri_ml_140813_1_16x9_608than burden his reader with his “languishing in prison,” in fact King’s prose almost makes one chuckle as he treats his incarceration with annoyance rather than sadness, he instead uses his time as an opportunity to instruct those participating in the cause of integration on the value of being a contrarian. His careful prose repeatedly attacks the shock that black protests inspired.

You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being […] I would not hesitate to say that it is unfortunate that so-called demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham at this time, but I would say in emphatic terms that it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no other alternative.

King is quick to turn his argument towards his oppressors and demonstrate that the situation was only created by their own actions. The argument is as effective as it is poignant. The great tragedies of society are not spontaneous; a regular study of history lesson will reveal this sad truth, they are built upon complex factors most often that of a majority persecuting or restricting a minority. King is not attempting to create pity for his cause, but instead inspire the human idea that the regular de-humanization of his people has caused a necessary shift in the paradigms of society. Blacks need free, unfettered access to society and all its benefits or else the quagmire will result only in their stunted growth as a community. This concern for human justice is the essence of contrarianism, a solid attack on the established quo.main_900

Well duh. What blacks suffered through was abominable, nobody is going to make that argument, but what good does it to re-examine it outside of history?

The good, my contester, is contained in the axiom Martin Luther King Jr writes in his letter, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Though we may feel in certain instances a desire to step aside and simply allow an injustice to pass us by, whether out of a sense of lethargy, fear, or incompetence, it is the obligation of the concerned citizen to ensure that justice is not being molested by those who enjoy the position of power. My wife follows numerous feminist and Pro-Life blogs and recently she shared one of them entitled “I need feminism because….” A counter site has emerged in which women post the anti-thesis of this argument, “I don’t need feminism because…” Looking through the dismal attempts in the latter my wife has observed a similar trend with these women, a majority of them are white. In the past certain feminist movements, whether north or south of Mason-Dixon Line I might add, were comprised mainly of white women due to racism. Black women were often ignored, barred, or placed into lower ranking positions of the movements thereby stunting their own opportunity. The recent trend of “I don’t need feminism because…” suggests that once rights have been achieved, many no longer see an issue. I am not attacking the feminist movement, for I am a participating member of it, but instead illustrating a tendency that seems rooted in a solipsistic sentiment: Once my Birmingham 1needs are met, that is all that matters.

King attacks in his essay, what seems to him, the real problem with his movement.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride towards freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Kulx Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternistcally feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advised the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”

The call to “wait” is a poisonous influence to the contrarian and based in totalitarian will. It is lethargic and seeks only to constrain the individual who recognizes the injustice at hand Michael-Brown-3so that he or she may stave off the desired confrontation and eventually abandon their willpower. The repeated call, both then and now it seems, for blacks in this country hoping for justice has often been to wait, and we have seen that while they wait, injustice has been repeatedly been committed to them. It has become a rite of passage in black communities for mothers and father to teach their sons the “proper” way to behave to police officers. They are instructed to “wait” and not inspire confrontation. As a white man I was never given this lesson because there was no need to. I understood, and still understand, the social role of the police officer is to ensure order and maintain it. I will admit that while I respect members of the police, my upraising and educational environment has created a nasty distrust of authority figures, and the image of the police officer inspires a combination of admiration and panic. But to return to the argument at hand, King’s remarks speak true to human experience. It is often noted, almost to the level of platitude, that those who refuse to choose a side are often impaled by the fence they stand on. Christopher Hitchens in his little wonderful book letters to a young contrarian perhaps noted it best that there was a reason Dante Aligheri placed one13-ferguson-missouri-michael-brown-4.w529.h352.2x of the worst punishments, not necessarily for those damned, though they certainly did have their fair share, but for those who refused to pick a side. If you’re interested, the angels who refused to favor Satan or god were chased in circles by droves of wasps that stung their flesh to the point that it would become so sick and infected that it would peel and slide off until the undecided’s would eventually be running and tripping in a slough of their own desiccated flesh. I note briefly that Dante must have been a real riot at parties.

Vivid image aside what does this really have to do with Brown? The answer to the question is, everything. King was most troubled by the idea put forward by those who were seemingly in support, that his ambitions should be staved off until society matured and recognized their plight. It was the old adage that, “time heals” all wounds. For starters King addresses this issue:

Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of good people.

Convictions cannot wait and actions will always speak louder than words. I lament the fact that I live at such a distance from those brave men and women protesting in Ferguson as I write this, and I hope this essay in some way forgives my ineptitude, it at least shows that I shall not remain silent. If injustice is to be punished, it must do so during the time in which it is committed. The success of the Watergate scandal was that men and women investigating this abuse of power refused to be bullied into silence when their elected officials committed felonies. Birmingham 2The Trial of Emmett Till, yet another black man executed in the south for ridiculous and repulsive reasons, did not wait. Even if the trial ended in the murderers being acquitted, the country recognized the situation for what it was: a travesty of injustice that would leave a permanent smear, not only on the face of this country, but for the conscience of those who would profess of the warm boon of “the South.” As a Texan, the concept of race is unavoidable. Daily I am regularly shocked and deeply offended when I hear of whites talking of “Mexicans,” (how long must intelligent people suffer before the word Latina enters the common tongue), as “parasites” and “invaders.” Attending a private school of mostly white upper class children, there were perhaps seven black students in the entirety of my high school education, I would gag on the free use of the word “niggars” and wonder about what breed of Christian this school was attempting to excrete. This collected examination leads me to my final conclusion of the Brown affair and what Letters from Birmingham Jail really mean in relation to it.

My initial viewings of the protest of Michael Brown’s murder resulted in two impressions. The first were images of suited black men, most likely representatives of the local chapter of the NAACP, marching in unison with other members of the ferguson-missouricommunity. The second was a thought, “I can only wonder how long the news will bother with this before they return to Gaza.” Fortunately and unfortunately, the violence that erupted in Ferguson on August 10th resulted in a media hunger before the collected news organizations realized a threat to their own interests. Now with the arrest of two of their own, the press seems to have a shared interest in the case. Injustice creates a brotherhood that transcends skin color. We all seem to have taken a personal interest in this case, but what troubles me most is that the efforts of reporters seems to be focused, not on the abuse of power that led to Michael Brown’s death, but the abuse of police officers upon those who are attempting to understand the injustice and bring light to it. Michael Brown is quickly being stripped of his self and humanity as the “police” become the center of this debate.

I am repulsed. I am disgusted. I am heartbroken, that Michael Brown is dead. I am not alone in this opinion. The African American Community has lost another son, and those who seek to shine the spotlight on their community are hungry to hear of the abuse heaped upon them by the police. Attacking the police force may be necessary, for this chapter of their order has certainly deserved it for their stubborn incompetence, but the pursuit of this individual injustice must be of the utmost concern. A trial and some form of prosecution must take place, without emotion, without pathos, for that would be the real victory. The African American Community in Ferguson that are exercising their freedom to protest, are the real story, for their concerted efforts are an end to the tyranny of de-humanization that continually seems to bog their community and stunt the possibility for their sons and daughters. Letters from Birmingham Jail resonate from this outburst of protest in Ferguson, because it reflects both King’s attitude that waiting is no longer a viable option for social change, and that his MLK_in_Birmingham_Jailcommunity has adopted a paradigm of extremist position as he describes in the essay:

So I have not said to my people “get rid of your discontent.” But I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channelized through the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. Now this approach is being dismissed as extremist. I must admit that I was initially disappointed in being so categorized. […] So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice—or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?

Michael Brown was about to begin school.

I do not say “wait,” and allow this offence to fester away into nothing. Instead I say, “Object,” I say to “Fight this injustice,” but do not let this young man’s humanity become the cost of public knowledge.

To a man, only a few years younger than myself, who wanted to learn, I address this essay to you, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

michael-brown-missouri-teenager

 

**Writer’s Note/CODA 9/15/2015**

It’s been a little over a year since this essay has been published, and since that time more people have died, and details about Michael Brown have surfaced.  To the reader who smugly wonders if I take back what I said in this essay, I can offer only disappointment.  Yes Michael Brown was not a saint, but he was still unarmed, and that’s all that matters.  Michael Brown deserved to be arrested and have his day in court, but he did not deserve to be shot.

As long as we attempt to besmirch the victims of abuse and murder in order to assuage some kind of collective guilt, then the discourse will remain poisoned and no progress will be made.  Michael Brown deserved justice, real justice, not a bullet.

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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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