In a comment on my recent diary about the lack of attention given minority issues on the blogs (Anti-Immigration? No. Simply Racist), Bootribber AP asked this magic question regarding my statement “The Black culture is in disarray, and it is KEPT that way by the PermaGov.”:
Or are you referring to fucked up jail/prison sentences?
So I answered.
And it seemed to me like maybe some other people here might have some use for what I said.
Read on if you are interested.
“The Black culture is in disarray, and it is KEPT that way by the PermaGov.”
If you really want to know, AP, that statement is from the school of believing that the PermaGov decided that the ongoing black culture in the late ’60s/early ’70s was the single most threatening part of the society regarding the aims of said PermaGov…which are basically elitist in content and fascist in practice…and literally flooded the ghettoes of America with drugs in an attempt to simultaneously disarm that threat and keep a permanent underclass in place so that they would have untouchables who could be forced to do the shit work of society at slave wages.
Plus simultaneously make a nice profit, of course. And maybe arm some anti-freedom fighters in Central America/prop up some warlords in various Third World countries as well. Win/win/win/win/win/win/win as far as THEY were concerend.
And they were quite successful in the attempt.
For several generations, much of the flower of that society has now either been drugged out into total helplessness/death or confined in prisons because they went totally nuts when they saw what was going down at about the age of 10 and couldn’t handle it.
We tend to forget today how highly functional and honorable large segments of that society were throughout the entire period of segregation/early Civil Rights movement times, and how well it was working. As evidence of that I submit that it had produced an artistic culture that was as strong or stronger than any other in the history of the country, that leaders were arising who understood the power of their people and were being successful in harnessing that power for the good of those people, and that the level of organization among the Black population was rising at the same rate as was its level of anger and frustration. When that anger overflowed after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, it damned near shut down this country. Soon after…crack appeared. Better drugged out than dangerous, and there were always the wetbacks to do the shit work.
And the church-based, well functioning Black urban middle class cracked under the pressure. I was there, AP. I SAW IT HAPPEN. And I have had endless conversations about it with older jazz musicians…Black AND White…men now well into their ’80s who lived through the process. Up close and personal. People who played with Count Basie and Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus. The flower of THEIR culture and time, a culture and time that offered precious few outlets for truly gifted memebers of the Black race in America.
I was there myself at the tail end of it in places like Indianapolis and Harlem, in Atlantic City, in Roxbury. And in smaller towns like Freeport and Roosevelt, Long Island as well. An outsider who was privileged to be IN the culture to some degree, but with eyes that saw from a different perspective than those of someone who was truly OF the culture. I saw it happen. When I entered that culture…say 1960 when I first started going to primarily Black jazz clubs and sitting in…every Black neighborhood, small city and large, had an ongoing social system that worked. It was informal and largely based around churches and meeting places like barbershops, bars and restaurants, but it goddamned well worked, given the segregationist social conditions under which its members lived.
Read almost any of the Easy Rawlins novels by Walter Mosely to get a good sniff of what was up then. Mosely lived through it and has the talent to sketch it out really well. He is often considered a “mystery writer” but he is SO much more than that. Mosely is a great historical novelist who uses the mystery/crime genre as a way to sell books, and reading Easy Rawlins on one side of the collapse/Socrates Fortlow on the other (“Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned”) is the best substitute for actually having been there that exists, as far as I am concerned. Plus the great non-fiction book “Black Like Me”, by the white writer John Howard Griffin who in 1959 dyed his skin brown and walked through the mirror of segregation into the other side in the pre-“civil rights” segregated south.
Now?
That culture is gone, gone, gone. Largely shattered into competing shards of projectized, ghettoized, media-poisoned poverty and upwardly mobile, let’s get the fuck away from these drugs and gangs suburbanized middle class wannabes.
PermaGov 1, America 0.
So it goes.
Please explain?
That’s about the best I can do.
Hope it’s sufficient.
If not…I leave you with the words of the great Harlem pianist Fats Waller, who when asked to define swing, said “If you don’t know…I can’t tell you.”
Black Zen.
Yup.
Later…
AG
P.S. And FUCK Clarence Thomas and Bill Cosby.
Fuck ’em BOTH.
is an integral part of that Black culture. It was put on the piano by barroom/whorehouse/rent party pianists…truly amazing one man bands, most of them…who often worked for whatever their audience deemed appropriate.
Me too.
AG
P.S. Recommendations are nice, as well. I really do want to make these topics important ones on these blogs, and every time one of these diaries lands on the rec list, that’s another couple of hundred (More? Less?) people who get a chance to learn some American History 101 that is NOT taught in the revisionist classrooms of America.
Rec away…
The permaGov as you call it flooded the ghetto in the 1960s-1970s with easy welfare for single mothers. That was the first drug that first destroyed black culture. The other necessary ingredient was the liberalization of sexual freedom for women which was perpetrated by Jerry Falwell and James Dobson (just kidding). Both drugs were “pushed” by the liberal agenda of the time, of which I was and I guess still am a backer.
Drugs were brought in through other privately backed sources. The crack epidemic was largely an late 70s to early 90s phenomenom where I lived.
AG,
I need you to clarify something for me, if you will.
About the emergence of crack into black neighborhoods. Specifically Freeport and Roosevelt. Along with a clarification of your timetable, which doesn’t jibe with what I saw. Seeing as I was born in Freeport, and lived there till I was 18-19 years old, I think I have a pretty clear picture of what was going on there in the late 70’s, to mid 80’s. When I left Freeport for good in ’85, there was zero crack available that I ever saw. And although I lived in south Freeport, I did hang with the Puerto Ricans and other Latinos, north of Merrick Road, and the Blacks, north of Sunrise Hwy, up into Roosevelt. The only thing anyone was smoking was weed. Blacks, whites, latinos, and often together. Plenty of white kids dropping acid though. The first time I saw, or heard about crack was when I moved to south Florida in ’85. A totally new thing on the market. In fact, at that time, it was the Haitians that were selling it, not so much using it. The users, by and large in those early days of crack, were white kids, and younger adults, also white. No one I knew in Freeport, or anywhere else on the Island had heard of, or used crack.
So, in the larger context of your claims in this diary, maybe my observations aren’t that important. But crack arrived long, long after the murder of Dr. King. And there were no people, of any color, that I saw in Freeport, or other towns on LI smoking crack, in any appreciable amount. And like I said, the initial users were mostly white, buying from the Haitians in Florida. Not exactly African Americans.
I was there AG. I saw it.
As far as Freeport goes now, it’s a pretty mixed bag of races, from north to south. Blacks and Latinos have bought houses down in the south parts of the town, that were traditionally white nieghborhoods. Now, it’s true that lots of racist white families sold their places and moved away when this started happening, but I think that by and large, Freeport is more integrated than not. It might not be by choice, as far as some whites are concerned, but it’s true all the same. And as far as I know, Freeport is still a thriving Village, as it always has been. Sad news is that there’s no Texas Ranger chili burgers to be had anymore…up north at the original place, or down on Woodcleft Canal where the second place was ;o)
I left Long Island in 1962, never to return as a resident. My reference to Freeport was from pre-1962 times, when I would go with an Italian friend of mine who was also a musician to have dinner at his Italian grandmother’s house (The MEATBALLS!!!) in the then rapidly changing neighborhood in North-ish Freeport (right by the stadium where they had stock car races and 4th of July fireworks) and then sit in at a Black bar nearby where there was often a jam session.
Sorry if my post was unclear.
Crack hit the streets in which I was living…NYC…in the mid-to-late ’70s, I would say. As the heroin epidemic waned.
10 years later…Destruction City.
Dunno much about Freeport.
My family moved away, and I am rarely on the South Shore anymore.
AG
.
I just went back to review my post.
Freeport, Roosevelt and a great Westbury jazz club named “The Cork ‘n Bib” were the places where I was first exposed to a living Black culture in the flesh as a mid-teenager. I was both surprised and fascinated to see what was essentially an extra-mainstream culture working so well with almost no input from the societal forces upon which I had been raised. Everybody knew the drill, and given the unavoidable limitations of institutionalized racism, it worked just fine.
Iran/Contra was the first public whiff of what had been going on for years before, first with heroin and then later with cocaine + crack. That was the mid-’80s. With the enthusiastic cooperation of second and third generation Mafia people who were only too glad to make money off of AND simultaneously harm the darker competitors in the low end job markets, drugs were used to pacify Black and other minority neighborhoods for decades. In the 1950s and well into the ’60s, for example, drugs…even marijuana… were almost UNKNOWN in the white suburbs OR white ethnic urban areas. Simultaneously the heroin problem was serious in minority neighborhoods. Why? How? Well, you either have to say that the residents of thoise neighborhoods were somehow weaker/stupider/had more more criminal tendencies than the white people…a stance that I reject totally…or that they were literally TARGETED by the powers-that-be for a form of pacification. I see no other alternatives. Heroin pushers were a dime a dozen in the minority neighborhoods of NYC while simultaneously 20 miles east if a dealer had set up shop in the white suburbs the full force of the law would have descended upon him faster than you could say “Are you holding?”
This backfired eventually during and after the mid to late ’60s when drugs hit the suburbs as well, but even then…you didn’t see hordes of nodding junkies or cracked-out street thieves walking up and down the not-so-mean streets of Great Neck, if y’know what I mean. OR Baldwin/Freeport/Roosevelt/Merrick/Bellmore.
But Bed Stuy?
Harlem?
Fuggedaboudit!!!
That is what I was aiming at there.
Later…
AG