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
Last fucking chance?
All input encouraged.
Even from them peckerwood KKKkossers.
Later…
AG
Did I have anything to do with getting you to drop your Hillary routine?
I have NOT “dropped my Hillary routine”, Booman.
I wrote quite clearly:
That was what I said, what I am saying, and what I WILL be saying.
She offers the best, closest and most likely the safest port in this storm. And if Barack Obama ever hopes to hold the office of President of the United States, he had damned well better check out her action with the movers and shakers, because she expresses things in just about as far left a manner as they are liable to support.
Where she REALLY stands?
My gut feeling?
She is an unreconstructed Alinskyite who is looking for more effective ways to get there.
A pragmatic leftie.
WHAT A CONCEPT!!!
Has she made too many promises?
Could be.
We shall soon see, I think.
Am I totally wrong?
Is she really a bloodthirsty America-Firster out to bring the hammer down on any who oppose us?
Sue me.
Because even if she is, she is still the only viable candidate to take us out of RatLand. At WORST, there will be a DemRat feeding frenzy in DC that will put all plans of further warmaking back a year or two.
I can deal with that.
And please…remember her husband’s Presidency. Six years of relative success before his power to get things done got caught in his fly.
Like I said…no change here.
Sorry to disappoint you.
Later…
AG
Man the genius of the Nicholas Brothers dazzled everyone then and still with their dancing-it was beyond dancing.
“…their dancing-it was beyond dancing. “
Yes it was…
AG
Hi Arthur, I just bought tickets for the 9PM show at Birdland. I hate the idea to have to sit still at a table and just clap my hands once in a while (for$30).
Dancing allowed?
Awwww…I could’a got you in!!!
This Sunday?
Well…sometimes some people dance. But there is no dance floor.
I’ll be there.
Email me and I’ll tell you which one I am.
Look me up.
AG
Mr. Gilroy,
It`s strange that, reading about your first introduction to music, you didn`t even know what “color” they were, brings me back to when, upon meeting the first black person I had ever seen, along with all my friends at that time, didn`t know he was black either.
In a very backwoods little town in northern Quebeque in the mid fifties, the baseball club hired an out of town pitcher. All the other players were nonpaid mill workers. This guy was terrific & we all tried to emulate his pitching & he was all our best friend. We never even knew he was black, because we didn`t know the difference. I might tell you that one of our childhood friends at the time was called “Whitey”.
We were all white but he was an albino, so when we met the ball player, we all figured he was the opposite of Whitey, who was our friend, so it was no big deal at all.Years later when I found out that they were all ‘lazy good for nothings” did I come to realize how the world really was. The loss of innocence was brutal. You loved the music regardless of their color, because you could hear it, we loved this man regardless of his color because we couldn`t see it.
BTW, I`m still waiting for when you come to play in LA, so I can take you up on your offer from some months ago.
I was just there May 16 + 17, playing the Mingus piece Epitaph at the Walt Disney Theater and giving a masterclass at Cal State Long Beach.
I KNOW I mentioned it here…
Later…
AG
P.S. It wasn’t my first introduction to music, though.
The mid to late ’50s were a strange time in American music. Mainstream American rock ‘n’ roll stations played Fats Domino, Little Richard and Dinah Washington back to back with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash.
I caught the blues with my homework.
Bird just finished the job.
Thanks Mr. Gilroy,
I guess I`ll have to check everyday to see if you post your schedule. I was a regular at “The Lighthouse” in Hermosa beach & got to know Rudy Underwiser, the owner, to the point that I didn`t really have to pay to see the wonders of music. He used to be in business with Shelly Mann at the “Mannhole”
Years before that I spent a lot of time at “The New Penelope” in Montreal.
My friend Charlie Biddle, a bassist, I got to know before he opened “The Black Bottom” in Montreal. He died last year I think. He used to play with Nelson Simon, a jazz guitarist who always surprised me whenever I saw him. I got my blues & jazz mojo from listening to an old short wave radio my brother got for christmas in 1955. It was sort of a special radio, because he got it from a widow whose husband died with her son, as they rescued a few kids going over the falls. It seemed like we could hear into “beyond” with that radio.
Maybe we could get him to post it as a diary, like every month or quarter or so….
Houston’s not exactly a musical hotbed any more, (though we don’t suck for zydeco) but we’ve still got a few folks who know one end of a horn from the other….
If I thought that simply electing Obama would trigger a sea change in American racism (for the better, mind you), it would override any other consideration for me. I’m not sure I believe that, though.
We’ll see how the primaries start to roll along. If Edwards drops out, and it comes down to Obama vs. Clinton, I sure as shit am not going to be voting for Clinton.
I’m kind of leery of voting for women or minorities just because they’re women or minorities. How many female prime ministers have there been in the UK, Israel, and Pakistan since Thatcher, Meir, and Bhutto? Not every crack in the dam threatens the established structure.
What concerns me most about this election is that there isn’t anyone running for president that gets me remotely excited. My great fear is that the final choice will be between some NSDAP, er, GOP looney tune and that unprincipled opportunist, Hillary Clinton.
I’ll go to the polls and hold my nose, but really, I’m pretty sure that will exhaust my ability to believe in America anymore. Then I’ll see if I can still pass in Europe.
#1-I think that there are many more reasons to vote for Obaba than just his race. And many of those reasons are because of what his race has taught him about America.
He is a smart man. And a VERY gifted political speaker.
Watch him.
No matter what his race…he is the real deal.
He is slippery, of course. But in all the right places.
The right places to get elected.
#2-Hillary Clinton? An unprincipled opportunist?
I don’t think so.
She is better than that.
Joe LIEBERMAN is unprincipled opportunist,. How can you not see the difference?
Yes, she IS an opportunist. As must be any successful pol.
But A PRINCIPLED one.
Watch.
AG
really liked racism, even as a youngster because it seemed to me that those who held such beliefs were like people building a card tower and climbing up it. They had to keep those lower cards FIRMLY in place (ideas of class and race and gender) so that they and the whole structure didn’t fall down. I thought, myself, that if they just would examine their belief system a whole lot they might have a better structure to start with. But even though I think I have pretty good instincts wrt prejudice I haven’t ever had the ability to express it the way you have. Thanks AG.
I think it is a measure of how we have created such an Aegean stable that both a black guy and a white woman are out polling the gop field.
There is a good piece about Obama at Black Agenda Report:
You know…the real, functioning black communities of this country died a nasty death at the hands of forced desegregation and the government blind-eyed (at BEST) crack epidemic. I was there. I WATCHED IT HAPPEN. The art I practice was an integral part of those communities, and as they died, its base died. (I am a jazz musician.)
In the years preceding segregation, quite self-sufficient middle and working class black communities ABOUNDED here. Inside of what were called “slums” sometimes.
Yes, times were hard and segregation was an abominable thing. But the spirit of the people who suffered those indignities soared to meet the challenge. To the point that in the ’60s and ’70s (after the so-called youth movement did what ALL youth movements do…got old) the black community in the shape of both radical movements and the MLK Jr. types of efforts WAS THE ONLY POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS DOMESTIC THREAT TO THE HEGEMONY OF THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE COME TO BE KNOWN AS “NEO-CONS”.
So naturally…they got taken down.
First the head…MLK Jr., Malcolm X, and sympathizers like RFK and JFK as well…and then the body. Forced into schools that did not give a shit about them and inundated with the nastiest drug ever unleashed on mankind, in my MORE than just theoretical opinion. Cocaine in its flat-out worst form. Crack.
Barack Obama has no other CHOICE than to work from the inside, because brother…there ain’t much outside left!!!
Go check out Harlem some time if you want to know the end of that plan. Gentrified to within an inch of its life.
The CAPITAL of creative blackness. What the founders of the movement…people like like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright…sometimes referred to as “negritude”.
And baby…they were not referring to Fifty-Cent.
Bet on it.
What practical choice does a black activist HAVE today?
Start a ghetto-based Black Panther movement? V.2? Crips and Bloods for Peace and Dignity?
A Million Man March on DC? Ain’t happening.
C’mon.
So this guy does his thing as best as he can, and now that he is actually GETTING somewhere…admittedly through compromise and elision, because what other fucking chances do ANY of us have when confronted by the Corporate Monolith as it now stands other than self-immolation, running away to join a functioning resistance somewhere else (‘Cause there ain’t none here. Not that I can see, anyway. You got one? HOOK ME UP, MOTHERFUCKER!!! Hook me UP!!!), running away to somewhere “safe” and poking our heads as deeply into the ground as we can get them to go or total surrender…
So he actually manages to hustle his way to the top of the so-called “opposition” party and actually says some daring things. Like telling the execs in Detroit TO THEIR FACE that they have had their heads up their asses for forty years and it is no fucking wonder that Asia is kicking our collective asses…and some group called “Black Agenda” calls him out.
I know a great jazz musician…Rufus Reid, one of the REAL bass players…who was instrumental in starting perhaps the finest college-level jazz education system in the country at William Paterson College just outside of NYC. Here is what he would say whenever some young, untested hotshot would diss an established player.
“Well, youngblood…you go out and do it. Come back in about twenty years and THEN we’ll talk.”
Yup.
Come back in about 20 years…if indeed we last that long…and then we’ll talk. Because this guy has some staying power, I think.
If I am wrong?
Sue me.
Later…
AG
Your remarks about what forced desegregation did to black communities are very interesting and a take that I had not run across before.
I have no doubt that you are immensely more tied into black culture and society than I am, but I still can’t help feeling that when progressive black bloggers say that Obama is all about his appeal to whites and corporations and not about doing anything significant for blacks, these bloggers know what they are talking about.
I really can’t understand why you are so excited about Obama, knowing black people as well as you do. Obama doesn’t come across at all as black to me. He doesn’t even talk like a black. Clearly, he is a white man’s black, like Colin Powell—the kind whose parents do not come from America.
“He doesn’t even talk like a black.”
Nice, Alexander.
So I suppoopse if talked street…which I sure as hell can, and I am NOT black…he’d be more acceptable?
Maybe THEN he’d get to be President, eh?
I can hear it now.
Sometimes I wonder why I keep trying here.
AG