defining we. my thoughts on capitalism: a love story and related rants

so it’s no secret that there is a default of whiteness in normative culture. that is: unless otherwise noted, people are white. i think this default can be challenged in communities that are predominantly of color on an everyday level (telling stories with an anonymous “she”), but when we engage with the popular sphere (movies, tv characters, in other words “visible people” in narratives created by others and passed down to the masses), people are – generally speaking – expected and assumed to be / imagined as white.

so, knowing this, why was i still disappointed in the white-middle-class-ness that tainted the narrative of michael moore’s capitalism: a love story? is it because he’s touted as a progressive filmmaker, and to interrogate capitalism without also challenging the normativity of whiteness is to basically suck at understanding the intersections and complexity of oppressions? a shortcoming that results in merely symbolic and short-falling attempts at being subversive. because he knows about other stuff, is he supposed to also know how to make a film that doesn’t indulge in the usual habit of seeing things through a white historical lens?

the problem i had with micheal moore’s film was that the “we” he constructed often translated into white middle class people. and this wasn’t something i can pretend was glaringly obvious, because it was mostly subtle. noted in the use of “we” and the implication that follows of who “they” were.

for example, there’s a part where he’s talking about “the good old days”. he talks about how women didn’t have to work if they didn’t want to and we see a typical blonde 50s housewife walking around straightening things up (not to be mistook for actually cleaning). i thought to myself: really michael? because last i checked this was only true for a bracket of white, suburban, middle-class, married women. working class white women and black women were working outside of the home during these good old days and they had been for decades. then he goes on to talk about how things were just better then (red flag), you know, when there were industrial jobs. we could deal with a little bit of this, he says, as we see a quick flash of black folks being hosed and/or attacked by police dogs (i can’t remember which), and a little bit of that. again: really, though?

when i brought this part of the doc up to a friend, i was reminded that it was supposed to be “facetious”. and i mean, i’m sure micheal moore isn’t trying to say that the huge problems of racism, systematic violence, etc are small worries. but even the fact that these issues, which were (and are) an inescapable everyday reality for a lot of people, could be compressed into a sarcastic flash on the screen, says something about who is telling the story, and for whom.

the fact is — all wasn’t peachy-keen for most of us. to create the impression that life was good when dick worked while and jane shopped for dresses is to basically reiterate a dominant, class-, race-, and location-based narrative that delusionally relegates a lot of people to the fringes. history didn’t look like that. period.

i’ve noticed a similar issue in children’s books, especially with this whole organizing elementary school libraries thing I’ve been doing which I mentioned in the last post. How easy it is to assume and even assign ignorant/privileged positionality within a paradigm that is obviously influenced by race (i.e. living in 19th century America). For example, author Ann McGovern has a whole series of books that depend on the default of whiteness in articulating a historical “we”. She has books like …If You Lived in Colonial Times, with questions on the back like “What kind of clothes would you wear?” “Would you go to school?” “What would you do on Sunday?” and “What would happen if you didn’t behave?”. A few of her other books are If You Grew Up With Abraham Lincoln, If You Lived 100 Years Ago, and If You Sailed on the Mayflower in 1620. The gist of all of them is like.. you would’ve dressed funny and had to use your hands sometimes. by golly, the olden days.

I’m looking at these books like, actually, if I lived in colonial times, I wouldn’t be eating mutton and porridge at a table on a terrace with my white mother and father. More likely, i’d be the other person in this picture — that person of color whose narrative has no place in a book like this directed at the general public — placing the chicken on the table. iffff i was even so lucky.

the default of whiteness is not only untrue to most people’s realities and obviously problematic on the basis that white (in)visibility necessitates erasing all other persons, but it’s also, frankly, not entertaining. if, as a creator of sorts, you claim to tell ‘our’ history, then do us a favor and tell what really happened. or, make up something completely fantastical that doesn’t depend on an already played-out assumption about who the audience will automatically identify with, and ultimately, create a new narrative.

Peter Stuyvesant: Dutch Military Leader

A good chunk of my time these days goes towards cataloguing books in elementary schools. I have endless critiques of the things children are reading, but i’ll try to let this text speak for itself.

Here’s the writing on the back of Peter Stuyvesant: Dutch Military Leader by Joan Banks with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. as consulting editor.

Peter Stuyvesant was a stubborn man. Even though he lost his leg in a battle, he refused to give up working. He became governor of the Dutch colony called New Netherland.
Peter protected the colony from Indians and captured other colonies for the Dutch. He built a hospital and began a post office. He even gave some freedom and education to slaves.
Later Peter had to give up the New Netherland colony to the English. He knew the colony could not win a fight. Read the story of a man who knew how to lead others.

Ugh. Where do we even start?

Red Flag on Nostalgia

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m around a lot of music, hip-hop, and (as seldom as possible) poetry crowds.. or if it’s just the times we’re living in — with the omnipresence of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.. or if it is a tendency of human beings in general, whenever they encounter unanticipated change and new things .. to be nostalgic.

And by nostalgic, I mean to have a romantic notion in your head of how the past was, and to want to have whatever was in the past be in the present. For example, you may hear a lot of people talk about “real hip-hop”. They’ll refer to “the good ol’ days”.. you know, when A Trible Called Quest was mainstream and hip-hop was about parties in the park and cyphers on the corner in The Bronx. They’ll say now all we have is commercialized trash and the people who are really saying something don’t get enough promotion because they can’t get signed to a major, or people won’t listen because they’re ignorant and all they want to hear about is cars, clothes, money, and sex.

Nevermind the fact that the parties during Kool Herc’s days tended to end in violence. Or the fact that 2 Live Crew and N.W.A. existed alongside Tribe and De La Soul, or that shit was complicated and groups like Boogie Down Productions had songs like “9 Millimeter Goes Bang” on the same album as “Poetry”. Also nevermind the fact that people will listen to what they want to hear, and if a bedroom beat with an already played-out “conscious” message about like.. ma’at or something on it is not going to cut it, then someone needs to step THEIR game up. don’t be bitter, be better.

I’ve also run into a lot of people who have a lot to say about their feeling that human beings don’t even really interact with each other anymore because we have all these other ways — thanks to technology — to contact one another on a surface level. These people basically feel like technology is at odds with human nature. The internet is to blame for the fact that no one writes letters to each other anymore. Text messages are the reason communication is abbreviated and cell phones prevent us from having tea or sharing a meal. Twitter lets us broadcast our lives to whoever will follow, gives us a false sense of celebrity, and also a misleading sense of connectedness to people we don’t really know. YouTube has facilitated the triumph of the soundbite and media’s need to compress everything into a quick, easily-digestible tidbit. And Facebook has eroded personal relationships altogether with wall-posts posing as a real effort to hang out with someone, and comments, “likes”, etc allowing people to be “in touch” without really being a part of each other’s lives.

comic by robert sergel

My response to all of this is: Puh-lease. As difficult as it may be to make this concession: technology is a part of life. And you can determine the degree to which it is in yours. Having e-mail is not preventing you from writing a letter, if that’s what you want to do. Twitter existing does not mean you have to join and joining doesn’t mean you have to tweet (twit?) every 5 minutes. “chillin in my car”. “pullin up to the street @jdoe is here.” know what i mean?

And in a bigger picture, things change. I’m sure when the car was invented there was some radical anti-car group fulminating about how now people will be able to get to one place to another without the deliberation that comes with deciding to go somewhere and getting there. Or that the exhaust from the cars would ruin the ozone layer and surely, it’d be the end of the world. Also, what were horses to do now? Just sit and eat hay?

The issue is not missing things, because we miss things when they’re not around anymore. The issue is not even wishing we could go back to a time when things were a certain way… The issue is wanting to transplant that time, or that thing, or person, or whatever we are feeling nostalgic about, into the present. This does not work because the present was not made for that subject/object of our nostalgia. There are new things now, but more importantly, there are new ideas to be had. Creating the future has to entail creating new ideas from fantasies, imagination, intellect, gut.

Furthermore, we often misremember things. We “remember” times we never experienced, like hip-hop’s “golden age,” and we think to ourselves that we would love that now. But we weren’t there then, and our vision is tainted by an intellectual or sentimental desire to be in the past — where things were by default, better. We “remember” when people sat down and talked to each other instead of texting, and we want that now. We want to put everything that we have experienced between “now” and “then” — internet, cell phones, pagers (?!), — into a hole and pull things from old picture frames and have them come to life to be a part of our present and future.

But I think we need to be more creative. We need to be more imaginative and inventive. Communication has been revolutionized. Broadcasting, “news”, and reality itself have all been revolutionized. I mean, you’re reading a blog right now. It would serve us well to embrace this change. To think of what will be next. Based on people’s untapped desires and fantasies, based on what we think society could use. Stop longing for the way something was, and make yourself a part of the way things are and will be. If nothing is unimaginable then anything is possible. Make the world and re-name your reality.

Work Out While I Walk?

But why?

These basically look like heelys.

Kwanzaa is Not the Black Christmas

Okay, good folks. PSA for the day – please, spread the word. Tell your kids, tell your students, peers, parents — Kwanzaa is NOT the black christmas!

I don’t know how many times growing up, when wintertime would come around, the white children would be wishing each other a merry christmas and then get to me and be like ‘happy kwanzaa!’ and I’m like ‘um’.

Also, the commercials, billboards, and everything else, in their effort to be all-inclusive, multicultural, and politically correct always throw kwanzaa into their conglomeration of otherwise religious holidays. “Happy Chrismakwanzika!”

What?

So this is my brief ‘get it right’ post about Kwanzaa. Not intended to be a comprehensive learning guide nor anything of the sort – just to give my perspective on the holiday, as someone who celebrated it growing up and doesn’t anymore.

First, Kwanzaa is not a religious holiday. It has absolutely nothing to do with yahweh, allah, parsva, oshun, or whomever else from wherever you’re coming from on the belief spectrum. It is not meant to replace, compete with, nor destroy christmas or any other holiday for that matter. Many people who celebrate Kwanzaa also celebrate other religious holidays.

Kwanzaa is more of a cultural, historical and community-building holiday. According to its founder, Ron ‘Maulana’ Karenga, Kwanzaa is intended to “give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.” First celebrated in 1966, it is a seven day holiday that begins on December 26 and lasts through the first day of January. For each of the seven days, there is a candle lit and a principle (collectively called nguzo saba) to go with it: 1 – umoja (unity), 2 – kujichagulia (self-determination), 3 -ujima (collective work and responsibility), 4 – ujamaa (cooperative economics, 5 – nia (purpose), 6 – kuumba (creativity), and 7 – imani (faith). It falls near christmas partially because that (i guess?) signifies the end of harvest and the beginning of a new planting season, and also, probably, because that’s already a celebratory holiday season when people have time off from work, are in the mood, etc.

Now, there is a whole vocab to go with the kwanzaa holiday. There is the mkeka (straw placemat), muhindi (corn placed on the mekeka for each child in the family), mazao (meaning crops, symbolized by fruits and vegetables on the mkeka to remember the earth’s abundance). The gifts are called zawadi, the wooden candle holder is a kinara, the karamu is a glorious feast, and so on and so forth (there are a few more). The word kwanzaa, along with these other names, of course, is derived from Swahili, which to many Americans, is the language of Africa.

This brings me to my next point, which is that Kwanzaa is an American holiday. It was invented by a black american man in the state of California. It is, therefore, this individual’s interpretation of African ritual, life, and so on.

Part of the point of Kwanzaa, in my opinion, is to give descendants of Africa (please don’t hit me with the ‘we’re all descendants of africa’ cowdung) and black americans in particular, a sense of connectedness to their history, and also, something to celebrate outside of the mores of the ‘dominant’ society within which they are oppressed and share a history that it hurts to remember. Now whether or not this sense of community and independence within the greater hegemonic culture of america has to come with middle class blacks gathering in public libraries in overpriced dashikis and patchwork kente hammerpants is up for debate. What do we make of it? Maybe it’s a starting place for greater awareness of ancestry, maybe it builds communities, brings families closer… or maybe it’s just black folks imitating their visions of a mythical and monolithic ‘african’ culture, learning token swahili words and walking around in ‘african’ garb in order to claim a history, home, and culture as their own. I mean, does this go back to the neverending issue of ‘home’ for displaced peoples, ‘culture’ for postcolonial societies, the controversial idea that black people in america and black people in africa are somehow the same…? that we are, or, at some point were, them?

I stopped celebrating Kwanzaa around the age of fifteen, when I learned that Karenga not only had beef with the Black Panthers (whom I was basically in love with) but also spent time in prison for torturing two black women with electrical cords, a hot iron, and some others of the master’s tools. This combined with the unsurprising fact that like many organizations at the time (inlcuding the BPP), Karenga’s cultural nationalist US Organization (United Slaves) was systematically sexist towards its female members, was pretty much enough for me to be done with Kwanzaa. For me, it represented an individual’s idyllic nostalgia, as well as the collective desire for a sense of belonging among black americans. While I loved coming together with my family and friends to laugh, share and discuss these principles that I did find important, the symbology of ‘africanness’ didn’t serve much purpose for me. it’s not that i didn’t recognize how my folks got to this country, or that i didn’t understand respecting history and ancestors and paying dues and whatnot. but i was american after all. and have been for a very long time.

So I say all this to say – Kwanzaa is an option. Some people choose it, some don’t. But whatever the case, it is not the black subsitute for christmas, and it is not a race-based celebration. So, good-intentioned white moderates — next time you see me anywhere around the cold season, do me a favor and stick to ‘have a good break’ or ‘keep warm out there,’ and I’ll do the same for you.

Daddy’s home!

(I felt weird about that ^ title for some reason.)

anyway, these made me shed a tear.

Something Is Wrong Here

More Spaghetti, I Say! by Rita Golden Gelman, Pictures by Jack Kent.

Illustrations copyright 1977

More Spaghetti, I Say! by Rita Golden Gelman, Pictures by Mort Gerberg

Illustration copyright 1993