Steven D recently posted a fine diary here called Why I Woke Up to the Reality Of Stolen Elections.
In it he described an experience he had as a white Democratic organizer in a black Cincinnati project.
Meanwhile, I am in an upper-middle class suburb of Chicago with a totally racially mixed band of musicians playing masterwork music of two of the finest composer/arranger/orchestrators ever to write in the jazz idiom, Oliver Nelson and Quincy Jones. Living in a first class hotel with a bunch of men…and women, too…many of whom came up hard on the black streets of de facto segregated America, sitting in the bar and the coffee shop and the vans taking us to the festival and in the rehearsal hall, uninterruptedly laughing and goofing on the whole scene when not playing.
As EQUALS.
In a meritocracy where we have each earned our position by years of achievement. Regardless (or to some degree, for the white guys, in SPITE of) our race or original cultural influences and alliances.
And reading that part of Steven D’s diary got me to thinking.
I PLEASE do not want this to be considered in any way an attack or criticism of Steven. It most emphatically is not. It is simply an observation of how things are by someone who has been lucky enough in his life to be able to live in a broader culture than do most white Americans.
A report from the REAL front, if you will.
Read on…
The saddest part of this whole diary?
Which is also both the real root of America’s troubles and decline and the secret to its only possibility of recovery?
These lines.
Many of them had the look of people who knew something I didn’t, something important, but what that something might be I couldn’t tell. It was almost as if as if they were amused by our determined little effort to get out the vote, three white people adrift in the kind of place we rarely saw on TV, much less visited in real life. A washed out, dilapidated landscape of dead grass, broken glass and buildings a monotone shade of tan that resembled military barracks more than a place raise a family.
It’s a hot day, I told myself. And this is a despairing place to live. Worse than any place I’d ever called home. Worse than any I’d seen since my days as a cab driver in Denver. I told myself their attitude was shaped by that, not by what we were asking them to do. After all, they all told us they’d be voting for Kerry.
Referring to JFK’s assassination as having been in retaliation for the many attempts on Fidel Castro’s life, Malcolm X said “He never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon.”
Well, Malcolm’s chickens CONTINUE to come home to roost, and until America expiates its original sin of racism…completely and for all time…they will eventually destroy this country.
In another thread here (Frivolous Friday Open Thread) I fairly lightly touched upon the foolish tragedy of mainstream White America not having valued the jazz tradition as an absolutely invaluable and precious cultural artifact.
It is deeper than that.
We almost seem to need some sort of reverse Cultural Revolution here. Some visionary Mao Tse Tung figure to say “OK. That’s about enough of THAT shit!!! Y’all got to go live in a ghetto or barrio for a few years and see what is REALLY up here.” What saddens me most about those lines I quoted above is not the description of the living conditions in those projects. Nor is it (totally wrongly understood, by the way) the interpretation of the attitudes of the people that Steven D encountered.
It is the fact that he…and literally hundreds of millions of other white Americans..live out their entire lives without being allowed to partake of the unvarnished wisdom of America’s hereditary underclasses. The people in the ghettos of America know damned well what is up. When it is literally YOUR ass being repeatedly whupped for no good reason other than the fact that you are needed as slave labor and happen to carry a marker on your skin that makes it convenient to isolate you as a designated loser, whatever veils you may be carrying fall from your eyes in one quick motherfucking hurry. Bet on it. The “certain weariness”, the “wan smiles and stooped posture” that he saw were more due to the absolute certainty of the people he was meeting…a certainty born of literally thousands upon thousands of encounters with lower middle class and above white people…THAT HE WOULD NOT UNDERSTAND A GODDAMNED THING THAT THEY HAD TO SAY if they were to be frank with him.
What he saw was their PITY FOR HIS IGNORANCE.
This is not a criticism of Steven D, and I hope that he does not take it as such.
It is just how things are, and barring an occasional totally accidental escape from this position such as my own (I am a white jazz musician, born and raised in the middle class suburbs of Long Island in a totally ’50s/’60s segregated situation, inexorably headed for white Irish lawyership, and only the twin accidents of musical talent and being given an instrument to play at a very young age that lent itself to playing jazz bumped me out of that position.), there are almost NO white people who EVER get to hear the story direct from the horse’s mouth, on the other side of the mirror.
Those same people that Steven D met?
At the all-black laundromat or bar or family gathering or barbershop around the corner?
AIN’T no wan smiles or stooped posture or weariness going on.
They CRACKIN’ on the scene.
Those who hade not been totally defeated and descended into a state of drugged defeat, anyway. Which is a miraculously whole LOT of people, given the conditions under which they and their immediate forebears have been literally forced to live for about 300 years.
I do not know what to do here. The gulf between the races is SO wide that even after 40 years of creds, I find myself having to re-establish my trustworthiness with black people time and time again. When I was a young and obviously committed jazz musician…20, 21 years old and on track to understanding and emulating such players as Miles Davis and John Coltrane, living in perhaps the only truly integrated social sub-system of the time, the jazz musician culture…I had a black roommate who was also a musician. We shared adventures that would make your hair stand on end. Henry Miller and William Burroughs had NOTHING on us, I will guarantee.
And yet one day, right out of the sunny, cold blue sky as we walked down Newbury St. in Boston, this man looked directly at me and quite plainly stated that he would never, EVER be able to completely trust a white man.
Although I did not show, it, this was a VERY heavy and painfully received piece of information. This guy was not a hater. He had not even paid very heavy dues growing up, insofar as ANY black person can escape paying those dues in America. He was not stupid; he was not a negative soul…quite the contrary…and he was not bigoted.
He was just telling me the truth. As he saw it. And I have seen the PROOF of that truth in a thousand conversations with black people who are my peers, my colleagues, my models and my friends. In a slight hesitation, a quick involuntary jerk of the eyes, a fleeting fight-or-flight physical posture.
It is just…there.
Steven D begins his diary with the statement This is a long story about a long journey.
Well, every journey begins with a first step.
And the two or three or four or five Americas have not even really STARTED their journey towards each other.
I catch hell every once in a while on these blogs for insisting that if we want to change America, we have to change ourselves first. Particularly in how we consume media and “entertainment”. For saying that the subconsciously received societal memes that are implicit in the media presentations that we all in one way or another consume on an almost hourly basis are what is holding us back from progressing towards a better world.
Well…racism and sexism are the two MAIN memes that we are digesting.
No matter that there are “female” and “black” and “Asian” and “Hispanic” talking heads, characters in the ongoing series that Americans laughingly refer to as “life”.
Fact is, those talking heads are not saying SHIT!!!
Oh, there is the occasional Richard Pryor who surfaces with some of the truth of the matter, but in the classic 164 to 1 ratio that American corporate media uses to minimize any change, those people are soon blown away by the sheer mass of competing bullshit that is thrown like Roger Clemens fastballs right down the eagerly waiting, wide open gullet of mainstream white America and directly its soul.
A year or two in the Jefferson projects on 115th and Lexington Avenue, a few trips on the Basie band bus, residence in South Central LA or East St. Louis for a while would close some of those gullets for GOOD, I will guarantee you.
Not as visiting Democratic recruiters, nor as cops or welfare workers or charity organizers or bosses or store owners or tourists or urban re-settlers or as any one of the other 2000+ goddamned roles white people generally assume when on their good-hearted missions visiting the precincts of the damned.
As PEERS.
As equals.
As students, willing, able and eager to learn.
Until then…nothing is going to change.
The information that is literally necessary for change is available. Right there, in that black or Hispanic family gathering at the beach or on the lawn at the park right next to you. But you presently cannot walk through the mirror to get to the other side unless you don your superhero outfit first.
Questing Dem.
Concerned middle class white person.
Etc., etc., etc.
And just as soon as they see your getup…the curtains come down.
Cultural Revolution, v.2.
An idea whose time has come.
Opening soon at your local theater of social war.
If you are DAMNED lucky.
Later…
AG
