Field Negro posted a fine article here recently called White Kossacks & Black People.
The white blogosphere has him (or her) pissed off.
Me too.
Only I AM white.
And I have some other takes on the whole black/white matter in general.
Coming from the somewhat privileged position of a white man who has been deeply involved for over 40 years in arts that have their roots in non-white cultures. As do most of their major practitioners as well.
Read on.
(Leave some time. It’s long.)
Mr./Ms. Field Negro…
I occupy that rarest of positions in American society. I am a white man who has spent his entire working life in a black and latino dominated field.
Specifically, NYC styles of jazz and Afro-Cuban music.
Many of my major teachers and supporters have been black and latino.
Short of being a high-level pro basketball player or some number of hip white baseball players, being a jazz musician is about the only position in this society where such a thing can happen.
And I am here to tell you that the black/white schism is deeper than ANY PERSON OF COLOR WILL EVER REALIZE. Not on an immediate, experiential basis they won’t.
Y’see…I really CAN pass.
As “white”.
Because I am.
So here I am at 14 years of age and I hear this music. My mother innocently and kindly brings home a couple of records because I’ve got the flu. To cheer me up. They have pictures of instruments on them and I play in the school band. No pictures of people on the records, just instruments. Because…well, maybe you’re not old enough, but there was a time when black people did not get their pictures on records that were going to be sold outside of what were called at the time “race record” areas, because…well, YOU know why, if you’ve ever had trouble hailing a cab in broad daylight on the corner of 53rd St. and Madison Ave. in NYC.
So I hear this MUSIC!!!
Bird and Diz, Mingus, Bud Powell and Max Roach at Massey Hall in Toronto. Recorded in the early ’50s when Bird was beginning to try to take it out even further than where he had already been taking it for 15 years. And the other record? J. J. Johnson with Max Roach, Paul Chambers and Tommy Flanagan.
Pure chance. Into the motherload.
This MUSIC!!!
End of story.
Beginning of story.
40 years later…still trying to get there.
So…I didn’t know that there WERE “black problems” at 14. Didn’t even know for months that the people who were playing this music…I found some on late night AM radio, Symphony Sid on WADO Radio out of NYC, and nearly flunked out of school because I’d stay up all night listening with an earplug and a little transistor radio under the covers….WERE “black”. Sid didn’t mention it. He was a white Jew working for Italian mobsters.( I found this out firsthand many years later. Bet on it.) HIS job was to be the white face on the black music.
So it goes.
Since then…a short rundown of the people with whom I have played extensively (and written for, in some cases) would include…ohhh, the Ellington Band, Thad Jones, Charles Mingus, Tito Puente, Chico O’Farrill, Gil Evans, Lee Konitz, Machito, Celia Cruz…the NYC works.
Still at it.
And I was…gradually, as befits an outsider entering a secret world that exists on a pay-as-you-go, meritocratic, either you can play or you can’t basis…accepted into the non-white worlds that gave birth to and supported these musics.
But of course…ah kin always put on mah baseball cap, plaid shirt an’ jeans and wander into any redneck bar in the nation with no immediate fear of getting my ass kicked. (I’m good with dialects. Brooklyn, Maine OR peckerwood. I can fucking PASS. For a while anyway. More than long enough to come out with some information about where people stand.) I can put on my Dockers and a nice shirt and do the same in any middle class white gathering as well. I happen to speak good academese too, so the edumacated upper classes don’t see the proverbial nigger in a woodpile when I walk into their little conclaves.
In short…I got the RUN of the place.
The perfect spy.
And here’s the intel, Field.
Aside from styles of expression…I mean, they no longer CALL a spade a spade, if y’know what I mean…ain’t NUTHIN’ changed.
Nor will it in any immediately foreseeable future.
I am sure that this is not news to you.
But read on.
BREAKING!!!
I got yer “news”.
Right HERE!!!
Y’know why it’s not going to change?
Because white people are NOT “racist”.
Not really.
They are classist.
Proof?
OK.
They have been “racist” to…
Jews
Irish
Italians
Puerto Ricans
Blacks
Poles
Germans
And every OTHER goddamned group of original gansta po’ people.
Until…
Until those groups learned how to pass. To pass through, into the other side of the mirror.
Where the money is.
Which means…as it has in EVERY majority-ruled culture, be it White/Black, German/Jewish, Japanese/Korean, Mexican/Indian, Finn/Lapp, Hutu/Tutsi or any other such system in the history of the human race…that the minority MUST ASSUME THE IDENTITY OF THE MAJORITY IN ORDER TO GET OVER.
Got physical markers that make that passing shall we say…difficult?
UH oh.
In America, this has come to mean:
If you brown (or any other color that might mean that you just stayed out in the sun a little too long) stick aroun’.
An’ if you black? Step back!!!
Why has America so warmly reacted to Tiger Woods and Barack Obama?
Because they have (at least outwardly) assumed the trappings of white America, and they have EXCELLED AT PLAYING HERETOFORE ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY “WHITE” GAMES WHILE THEY WERE AT IT.
I have witnessed HORDES of white businessmen watching Tiger Woods play golf and hawk Buicks with nary a racist thought in their little bean heads.
The same ones who would automatically and with no consciousness of their intent suspect a minority worker or potential house buyer of inferior talents and abilities.
‘Cuz Tiger’s made it already.
He is through the looking glass.
Bet on it.
Jews? Italians? Irishmen?
They just changed their names (if it was convenient and necessary at the time), changed their act and then stepped right on through the mirror.
Lots of Hispanics, too.
It really isn’t ABOUT “race”, Field Negro.
It isn’t even about difference, unless you consider the difference in financial standing.
It’s about class.
Every culture needs a scapegoat to clean the shithouse. They find a minority that can be easily identified, one that does not have too much power to be messed with, and there it is.
In the Indian caste system…it was the untouchables.
In Japan? It’s the Koreans.
Still.
Bet on it.
Here?
Need I say more?
Who’s cleaning the shithouses these days?
Yup.
If you want this situation to change…
Well, y’got several bad alternatives.
1-A total collapse of the system. One where EVERYBODY’S on the same side of the mirror. And the mirror is broken. THERE’S some equality for you.
2-A total surrender by minority people to the fucked up value systems that are driving this country towards total collapse as we speak. Ain’t gonna happen, except in individual Tiger Woods-type cases. The majority will not allow it to happen. Who’d clean the shithouse? Besides…it just ain’t right.
Malcolm knew, 50 years ago.
It just ain’t right.
Or…
3-A Barack Obama Presidency or even VICE-Presidency.
Yeah.
I know.
But it’s not ABOUT “you”.
It is about all those white people.
And their clouded little minds.
They have been hypnotized into an unconscious and perfectly formed mindset of white supremacy, and unfortunately, only FURTHER hypnotism is going to change that situation.
What IS a “President”?
Really.
In this lovely Information Age.
As we have seen for almost 8 years now…he is just a talking head. A hypnotic device that can be used to put a certain percentage of the people to sleep.
OTHERS do the work.
He’s the front man.
OK.
Now take Barack Obama.
First of all…he is NOT a front man.
Or if he is, he is the most articulate, courageous front man that I have ever seen. Shucking and jiving? Yes. That’s his JOB. He is a national politician. But shucking and jiving with some originality and class. Throwing out some real information with the tap dance. He is the Nicholas Brothers of this particular dance form. (Are you hip to the Nicholas Brothers, any of you? Check them out. Danced their ASSES off in the ’30s and later, in mainstream Hollywood films. Incomparable as dancers, and they never Tommed once. Not an OUNCE!!! Heavy.)
Second…just his picture on the news for 4 years with the words “President” or “Vice-President” underneath it would change more clouded white minds than any other occurrence short of a miraculously universal skin color change to a good, rich mocha brown.
These people aren’t “bad”, most of them, Field. Not even the Kossaks. (Yup. Ain’t THAT a name to choose!!!) They don’t beat their wives and children, most of them. They are going to hell with the BEST of intentions. Sleepwalking right into the inferno.
And NOTHING is going to wake them up. The media is NOT going to change or disappear. The only thing that can be done is to change the content of the media.
THE SUBLIMINAL INFORMATION THAT IT CARRIES.
And this image
repeated literally millions of times on TV sets and front pages across the nation?
New info, bro’.
New info.
Look at this face.
You think that this young boy didn’t see some shit?
Bet on it.
I do not think that he can win the nomination this time. The Clinton forces have it pretty well locked up barring a real Hilary meltdown, and cool as SHE is under fire I doubt that will happen. But he CAN become Vice-President, and I fervently hope that he does. Because he has the goods; he has seen the shit from both sides, and he has real political talent.
He could quite conceivably be in national office for sixteen years, Field!!!
Imagine THAT.
Let us pray.
Otherwise…
Business as usual.
And you and I BOTH know where that’s headed.
Same place it’s been headed for a number of centuries.
More shithouse cleaning.
Until of course the brick shithouse gets blown away.
As do all good shithouses, eventually.
Usually when they are no longer cleanable. A state that the US is rapidly approaching, in my not so humble opinion.
At which point the shit will REALLY hit the fan.
Want to be here then?
I don’t.
Shit’s gonna hit EVERYBODY if that happens.
Bet on it..
Obama For President!!!
VAYA!!!
Later…
AG
