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.