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
Shall we dance?
Or talk, at least?
Tips, too.
Later…
AG
Funny, I was just looking at bell hook’s book, Where We Stand: Class Matters (Routledge 2000) yesterday, which she prefaces with:
Kudos on opening the conversation. I suspect — & it’s just gut hunch — that personal crossings/meetings of the gender & race class divide are much more common & easily accomplished than that of class which deeply divides us all. And as you poignantly tell, sometimes that divide is simply unbridgeable despite one’s best intnetions. Realities that reach way beyond the personal.
bell again:
I.e., two of America’s great myths are operative: the bountiless cornucopia of growth & progress, and the Great Individual who reaps the inevitable rewards of ‘hard work.’ With all the struggles any of us who weren’t born spoon-in-mouth go through to get wherever-it-is-we-are, it’s no wonder there’s protest & denial when it’s suggested social & structural causes might be at play in one’s ‘success.’
Many of the neighborhoods in Sacramento can be broken down by race — though it’s never ‘quite right.’ Too much integration. Class segregation though, holds up to divide & rule.
Nice work, AG – thanks.
Arthur, my own life expeiences validate the reality you write of here. These personal experience and time time lived with, and in the midst of the urban Native American commmunity, and later, the Mexican American ocmmunity, literally ripped away the layers of delusion I didn’t even know I was laboring under for most of my life in my white world.
As a women, I know well the price I’ve paid for the imbedded sexism in this country. But now I also understand better the “that look” on the faces of peole like those Stephen ran into.
And I have a glimpse, anyway, of understanding how it feels to face the flip side of it all, when others I really wished to draw closer to, could not and/or would not allow this. Only now, it was my own white skin covering the “wall that could not be climbed”.
I believe, as a country, we have barely begun the process toward genuinely valuing “others” equally. I think it is going to take a very long time to get there, because it truly IS an individual, inside out process for those who have lived whole lives mostly with others like themselves.
I have found it one of the most difficult things I have even undertaken: to delve deeply under my own never before questioned cultural conditioning, to isolate and challenge my own unconscious racism and all the other kinds of “other-isms” I found in there that I wasnt even aware of, because everyone around me had the same ones.
The good news is, it is possible to do, and I think, even as the right is trying to drag us all backwards, there are so many of us who ARE open to the opporunities to free ourselves up from from whatever “programming” is separating us from others.
Steven DID go out to those area, and his eyes WERE open to what he saw when he did, his mind WAS open to exploring it, learning from it, writing about it here, where others could read it and think about and write about it too.
Every time any of us can go that far and share it with outs, it ripples outward and that just has to be good news.
No offense taken.
All of the strongest people I know and respect are poor people. And the most reality based people I know and respect are (basically) non-mainstream people; those who haven’t succumbed to the lure of denial in order to legitimize the exploitation of others as a primary means of elevating their own standards of living.
I find it ironic that you characterize Steven’s experience as perhaps a flawed view of the African-American community’s overall status, yet you, as another white man, claim to speak for them as well – holding up your view as being more correct.
When I was younger, I worked for a reggae magazine down in Kingston, Jamaica. I spent time with regular people – sometimes I was the only white person I’d actually see for days – and I never presumed I could know what was in their minds solely by looking at their collective past.
I did see a people who exhibited extreme contrasts: an overwhelming number of Mercedis (the likes of which I had never seen before) contrasted with the plethora of minibuses in which people were packed in like sardines. Frenzied traffic that made your head spin, while in person – outside of their vehicles – were the most laid back people I had ever seen. Absolutely crushing poverty admidst the most spiritual group of people I’d ever run across. And not the fake religiosity – but the type of spiritual power that lifts one up above all material circumstances.
Had I just observed their faces, I may have only seen ennuie. When I observed them living I saw much more than that. And, when I spoke to them, I found varied perspectives. There was not a monolithic mantra – nor did I expect there to be.
Now, the African-Americans share a very painful past, but wouldn’t it be a disservice to them to proclaim that the looks on their faces or their mannerisms observed would carry forward all of that pain all of the time?
They’re simply people. Their race doesn’t matter.
I suspect if you went into any impoverished area in America you’d come to the same conclusion. But don’t let that blind you. What may seem to be resignation or a lackluster attitude may simply be a reflection of how hard it is for anyone to survive in today’s world. I have seen that same face on middle-class white women in the suburbs. What am I to make of that? And why would I assume that their class or race would make them any less susceptible to the pain of daily living? Or perhaps their looks are not of pain at all, but of being awake in a population that tends to sleep its way through horrors? It could simply be realiztion. It could be that they’ve just suffered the loss of a loved one or that their spouse left them. But, since middle-class white women don’t carry the collective burden of a past frought with slavery and discrimination of the type suffered by African-Americans, I am willing to consider alternate reasons for the way they look.
Why would I not grant that to African-Americans? Why would I assume that the way they look on any particular day has to do with being put down by ‘the man’? Who knows? Maybe they’re just tired of being poor like so many of us are. Maybe what is in their faces is a resignation that whatever God they may choose to believe in has thrust on them a higher purpose – that of being mindful of others in similar circumstances. Maybe they hadn’t had breakfast yet, for that matter.
I hope I’ve made my point that impressions made on what we think might be going on are only that – impressions. On any given day, we cannot know what is going on in someone’s mind unless we ask them. And to assume that we know the collective mind of a group of individuals at any time is to reinforce stereotypes is it not?
I’ve gone on long enough.
Before I read this diary, I’d made an entry on my blog: Sunday Food For Thought – A Leaderless Revolution about revolutions. It’s time to stop waiting.
While I agree with most of your substantive points I find calling for a “cultural revolution v.2” to be in really bad taste- along the lines of calling for a “holocaust v.2”. Mao was a bad man and hundreds of thousands of people, including the poor, were slaughtered in the original version of the cultural revolution.
While issues of class (as sublimated into race) are the elephant in the room of American politics I have to believe that we can deal with those issues without killing a whole mess of people. Call me a softy.
I have had this conversation before.
Here is the long and short of it, as far as I am concerned.
I do not know what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution. Not really. Only what the media told me. I DO know that:
1-The United States has no business criticizing any regime in history for brutality. Take the squalor of the inner cities and the ruined lives that have come of it and project it back over four centuries of national and international racism (and in the case on the indigenous population of North America, literal genocide), and the “hundreds of thousands of people, including the poor”, that you believe were slaughtered in the original version of the Cultural Revolution pale into relative insignificance.
2-i do not know that Mao Tse Tung was a “bad man”, and brother, neither do you. You only “know” what you have been told to know. Perhaps had Mao Tse Tung NOT started that movement, China’s last 40 years would have been a story of complete disintegration and eventual dominance by the United States and/or Russia.
Or maybe it would be approaching a point of total, media-enforced fascism.
Oh.
Wait a minute.
That’s US!!!
Sorry.
Nevermind.
3-i am not at all sure that the classes who rule this country today…including at least the upper-middle, managerial/overseer class and the truly rich…will relinquish their hard-won dominance in the United States without the application of deadly force. (See my sig for more on that. I am not the first person to come to that conclusion. Nor will I be the last.) I wish that this were not so, but that is what I am seeing. Perhaps Mao tse Tung wished it were not so, too. Or…perhaps he was a homicidal, megalomaniacal monster. Or…maybe the truth lies somewhere closer the middle of those two extremes. I simply DO NOT KNOW THIS.
I AM faiirly sure of one thing, though…
China is poised to become the big dog in the room for the beginning of this century.
BECAUSE of what Mao did?
In SPITE of it?
I again do not know.
Most likely…once again…somewhere in the middle.
One thing is for sure..our own stables need a thorough cleaning. If it takes a Herculean stable-pissing to do so, all I can say is:
“Let the rains begin.”
Later…
AG
Because he believed in human sacrifice on the altar of idealism. Just like Hitler, just like Stalin, just like Pol Pot, just like George Bush.
Do you realize that your defense of Mao sounds just like a Holocaust deniers defense of Hitler? “You weren’t there, so how can you really know?” Well how can you know that people aren’t inherently bad and require a media controlled quasi fascist environment like ChimpCo is delivering right now?
History is history and unless you are a total nihilist with contempt for your fellow man, such as Leo Strauss and his neocon progeny, you should be willing to believe in some form of objective reality. And that objective reality is that Mao’s policies led to the deaths of millions, period. You say this is now justified because China is now in a place to be the “big dog” and mistreat its neighbors as its neighbors have mistreated it in the past? Well how about India- they’ve had their problems (Kashmir, Sikhs, etc.) but managed to come along nicely without intentionally slaughtering massive portions of their own population.
I’d prefer to make demands as Ghandi did, or in the words of John Lennon:
You ask:
“Well how can you know that people aren’t inherently bad and require a media controlled quasi fascist environment like ChimpCo is delivering right now?”
Sadly…on the evidence of most of the history of mankind…that is EXACTLY what people “need”.
In the sense that if the universe is perfectly balanced and that is what they have GOTTEN….elitist control of the masses by whatever means necessary…that is what must happen.
99% of the time.
I fight for the 1%.
The 1% that moves us forward.
The past is the past, and NONE of us who were not there have the slightest idea what happened. OR why.
History is a crock of shit, written by those who have been officially approved by the temporary winners to buttress their own positions. NOTHING more.
Maybe Mao’s idea simply ran out of his control.
Or maybe he was just another mass murderer who got off on the carnage. Jerking himself off while millions died.
I DO NOT KNOW.
And neither do you.
But I DO know that the idea of having the privileged middle class and above go and live with the suffering lower classes until they get some re-education is a GREAT idea.
And I FURTHER know that the fat and happy will by and large NOT do this willingly.
You sig reads “If you seek peace and fulfilment rather than wealth and power you must take up the reins of government or else you will be ruled by tyrants.“
How do you EXPECT to “take up the reins of government” from tyrants WITHOUT millions of deaths?
Where is the difference between say the people who promoted American Independence, Gandhi and Mao? Except of course in scale.
Not in their “tactics”, but in their RESULTS.
Because in all three efforts…many died.
And whether you die sitting in lotus position, working in a rice paddy or charging up Bunker Hill…you have still died as the result of a a TACTICAL choice that was made with the (at least apparent) strategic goal of human freedom.
Now…you CAN say that the Founding Fathers or America were elitist, white, male oppressors. I certainly would, and I would have said it then too. And gotten my ass thoroughly kicked for the privilige, most likely. Just like today.
You can also say that Gandhi was a passivist fool who caught a bullet in his brain for his troubles and caused the deaths of millions in the Islamic-Hindu battles that produced Pakistan and Bangla Desh.
You can say that Mao Tse Tung was a mass murderer, too.
You can play the Hitler card, if you so desire….although comparing the most successful anti-imperialist revolutionary leader in history to the equally most successful racist/fascist is really stretching it, in my opinion…but the bottom line here is that the United States NEEDS a cultural revolution.
A revolution in its culture.
Which is the subject about which I was writing.
And all of this palaver about Mao Tse Tung is the purest of typical “liberal” bullshit.
“He used a bad WORD, teacher!!! TWO of them!!! “Cultural Revolution” is on the NO SAY list!!!”
NOWHERE did I say that we have to line up the middle class at the point of a gun, take their possessions away from them, send them to live en masse in the projects and execute those who object.
Although on further consideration, given the current state of affairs that is probably about the only way that said middle class WOULD dirty their lily white hands with a dose of the reality that supports their tranced-out, DisneyWorld lives.
But that is not going to happen, here.
Instead, what IS going to happen…what is happening as we speak…is a massive worldwide economic shift (Enforced by arms when and where necessary) that is going to redistribute the wealth of the world in a more egalitarian fashion.
Because them injuns got repeating rifles, now.
Atomic ones.
And our fat middle class will soon enough find themselves in much the same position as their long-suffering servant class.
I got yer Cultural Revolution, right HERE!!!
How are your precious fucking mass media suburbs going to look when gas hits $5.00 per gallon?
White people will be moving INTO the projects.
En masse!!!
i can’t wait.
Here comes the neighborhood!!!
And you have the audacity to quote the BEATLES!!!???
The ESSENCE of the middle class, do-nothing dream?
“We’ll just…well we’ll just complain and sing and the magic yellow submarine will come to save us.”
Notice. please…the political position of the two countries where they worked their magic, these “Beatles”. These no-playing motherfuckers (a jazz technical term) with a gift for simple, catchy melodies.
Talk about your mass murder!!!
Give me a break.
And dream on.
Maybe that yellow submarine will come to save YOU.
For the rest of us…the only salvation is going to lie in the accumulated wisdom of the poor.
Who WILL eventually inherit the earth.
Bet on it.
AG
P.S. Do NOT call me “dude”.
It is a term that so stinks of false middle class bonhomie that I can no longer stomach its use.
Dude.