• Kemba Smith Gets a Biopic – “Although the government acknowledged that Smith never sold or took drugs, “she was charged with conspiracy to distribute crack and was sentenced to 24 years in prison.” In 1999 she was featured in Glamour Magazine, which described how she came to be char
• Young American Indians Find Their Voice in Poetry – “While Nolan and his teammates do not hail from the gritty urban surroundings that are often a breeding ground for slam poetry, where poets are judged on both performance and writing, their team is drawing national attention for its decidedly American Ind
• Living Up to Her Name Despite the Hurdles in Her Path – NYTimes.com – “Her father has 23 children, 9 with her mother, Harrison said. Her sisters have names like Graceful, Empress, Princess and Muun. An older brother is named God Goldin Zig Zag Zig Allah.” –> That makes me really happy. (Really!)
• The American Scholar – The Disadvantages of an Elite Education – “The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society?s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some oppor

• University Television Ads Depict White Dominance, Study Finds – "The researchers found that the overwhelmingly majority of the students and alumni depicted in the advertisements were white, with minority members generally being depicted only as token members of larger groups. The common image of a group of students st
• What Created This Monster? – "The Federal Reserve not only taken has action unprecedented since the Great Depression ? by lending money directly to major investment banks ? but also has put taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars in questionable trades these same bankers ma
• Gays fear an influx of hate – "The tragedy has exacerbated tensions between Sacramento's gay community and the region's booming population of Slavic evangelical Christians, whose most vocal congregants in recent years have mobilized on the streets and statehouse steps to protest homos
• The Mind of a One-Woman Multitude – Erykah Badu – "As she floated in the tub (?I always go all the way underneath the water and try to hold my breath a long time,? she said), she had a revelation: ?Different thoughts kept coming into my head. The first thought was, ooh, I wonder if my hair gonna be
• Boy?s Killing, Labeled a Hate Crime, Stuns a Town – "Hundreds of mourners gathered at a church here on Friday to remember an eighth-grade boy who was shot to death inside a junior high school computer lab by a fellow student in what prosecutors are calling a hate crime."
• Many blacks worry about Obama's safety – "They watch with wonder as Barack Obama moves ever closer to becoming America's first black president. And they ask themselves, their family, their friends: Is he at risk? Will he be safe?"
• Postpartum Depression More Likely In African-American And Low-Income Women – ""Women who are poor already have a lot of stress, ranging from poor living conditions to concerns about paying the bills. The birth of an infant can represent additional financial and emotional stress, and depression negatively impacts the woman's abilit
• The Republican Democrat – "But now the candidate who should be as familiar as anyone with "the Chicago way" — given that he's actually from Chicago — is on the receiving end of some less than polite politics, and more than a few progressives don't like what they're seeing. Barac
• The Triumph of Narrative – "Though we may or may not have reached the end of the unexpected upsets and dramatic reversals of the primaries, much less the general election to come, there is no doubt that of all the people who ran for president this year, Obama has run the smartest a
• Biracial, but not like me – ""Dreams From My Father" is the story of Obama's personal evolution from parochialism to a universal humanism. It's also the story of how a man blessed with a powerful analytical mind developed emotional intelligence along the way. Obama's tortured interi
• A Suburb Looks Nervously at Its Urban Neighbor – "For many outsiders, the attack on Mr. McDermott is seen as comeuppance for a community that seemed smug about its wealth, security and racial diversity. ?I wonder how much ?tolerance? the ?progressive,? snooty, pseudo-intellectual limousine lib
• An Unjust Conclusion – "During nearly a month of testimony Manso had seen the defense chip away at the state?s case?the contaminated crime scene, the spotty crime lab testing?and when the verdict was read he heard gasps from hard-bitten reporters in the balcony. How could
• Jurors testify about claims of racism – The Boston Globe – "The three jurors contacted McCowen's lawyer, Robert A. George, who is not related to the juror, days after the verdict to say that an atmosphere of racism permeated deliberations. The three jurors filed affidavits and largely hewed to them yesterday, wit
• Outsourced Wombs – "We, however, can hear the imperious tone, so much more audible in radio than in the troubling print reports that have surfaced lately on Indian surrogate mothers? ?wombs for rent.? And we should care about how things sound."
• Men shoot themselves in tattoo attempt – "Two men trying to trace a loaded .357-caliber Magnum as a pattern for a tattoo accidentally shot themselves, the Otero County Sheriff's Department said Monday."
• None of the Above: Books: What I.Q. doesn?t tell you about race – "The lesson to be drawn from black and white differences was the same as the lesson from the Netherlands years ago: I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person?s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in."
• In Marseille, Rap Helps Keep the Peace – "The Marseillais have plenty of explanations for this disparity, aside from the obvious one that the poor areas here aren?t segregated on the city outskirts, as they are in Paris ? but it is hip-hop, as much a source of local pride as the town?s soc
• A Midnight Service Helps African Immigrants Combat Demons – "Those other churches might argue that such a focus on witchcraft is a relic of Africans? old beliefs, a dangerously pagan preoccupation. But scholars say this is Christianity made profoundly African. Spiritual Warfare considers itself Pentecostal, and
• The Web Users? Campaign – "In the new and evolving online world, the greatest momentum goes not to the candidate with the most detailed plan for conquering the Web but to the candidate who surrenders his own image to the clicking masses, the same way a rock guitarist might fall ba
• The New New Philosophy – "But now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually think and say about our thought experiments. The newborn movement (?x-
• On campuses, students struggle with racism, ethnic tensions – "The tensions, says Daren Graves, an assistant professor of general education at Simmons College, mirror a nationwide movement opposed to political correctness that's occurring in response to the advances of the civil-rights movement."
• White May Be Might, But It's Not Always Right – "Unfortunately, this line of questioning reinforces one of the most persistent myths in America, that white is always right. The myth reflects an enduring double standard based on "white" and "black" explanations for social problems. And it assumes that "
• 33 ways to say 'black' and 'box' – "The concentration of works that deliberated, deconstructed or dabbled in notions of identity gave Moniz pause. "I was shocked if not dismayed," she admits. "I wasn't thinking about blackness at all. Except that the artists were black.""
• A Separate Union, of Athletes, for Athletes – "The news media response to Taylor?s murder was disturbing, and should have been sobering to all professional athletes. Several commentaries rehashed Taylor?s past transgressions, expressing no surprise that Taylor died a violent death."
• The Geography of Hate – "And the number of hate groups, according to the annual count by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has shot up 40 percent in recent years, from 602 groups in 2000 to 844 in 2006."
• In Gaps at School, Weighing Family Life – "But whether it is a parent?s fault or the societal pressures on the parent, the results are hard on the child: The average scores for black and Hispanic children on reading and math assessments at the start of kindergarten are 20 percent lower than for
• Europe dream turns sour for African migrant youth –
• Is Hello Kitty Turning Feral? – "?I think Sanrio has become somewhat more liberal in its licensing strategy,? he said. ?You won?t find Hello Kitty pitching hunting rifles or malt liquor, of course, but the brand has moved into more daring areas such as ladies? evening and nigh
• Mothers Scrimp as States Take Child Support – "The collection of child support from absent fathers is failing to help many of the poorest families, in part because the government uses fathers? payments largely to recoup welfare costs rather than passing on the money to mothers and children."
• Effort to Limit Junk Food in Schools Faces Hurdles – "But that intense corporate involvement, along with exemptions that would allow sales of chocolate milk, sports drinks and diet soda, has caused a rift among food activists who usually find themselves on the same side of school food battles."
• Penny Foolish – "Yet the company has adopted a far more activist approach when the issue is the well-being of livestock. In March, Burger King announced strict new rules on how its meatpacking suppliers should treat chickens and hogs. As for human rights abuses, Burger K

Celebrating 100 posts puts a lot of pressure on the post. I keep feeling like I should write about something VERY important. Obama and Huckabee are ahead in the polls; Iran is getting harder to invade; Chavez lost his vote; fucking Don Imus is back on the air. And so it goes.

But then, suddenly, I came across a link to this story over at Sex Like Men: “Is Hello Kitty Turning Feral?”

I’m saved!

After all, why go important when you can go VERY important? Umm, in an inverse sort of way. And though I surely bear a stronger resemblance to my beloved Chococat, this article about about the unexpectedly risque Hello Kitty “shoulder” massager combines two favorites: Hello Kitty and feral women, both of which I’m prone to writing about.

You know, between the close readings of moments critical to transforming ideas about race, class, and gender and the occasional sputtering of rage against random machines. And the occasional statement on world-making. And shilling for Obamas.

(Okay, actually, that list of favorites should probably include three items, but that’s probably too much information.)

Yay! All done.

Melvin Dixon,

A Visitation of Spirits

Well, this morning I was greeted by a story on crimes against the LGBT community in Newark, NJ, “In a Progressive State, a City Where Gay Life Hangs by a Thread.” The story is by Andrew Jacobs, who’s on the Newark beat at the NYT. It’s not a terrible story, and it does a nice job of outlining a broad picture of options for the lgbt community in lower and working class communities of color in Newark.

The story got me thinking, though, about how difficult it is to talk about sex and race– especially when we barely have language for sussing out race and class. So what happens when, as in most cases, we need to talk about all three at once? Often, it seems, we latch onto the one that best serves our own needs, a need fed by our perceptions “what counts” and “what matters.” But, again, what does this mean for the possibility of

understanding and transforming our social world? And how do we thus honor the lives of those whose death’s motivate such transformations?

As the title suggests, the narrative of the aforementioned NYT story emerges out of a contrast between gays’ lives in Newark and in other parts of the state. The article gets a little murky at times, as it conflates anti-gay bias as a class issue–as a result of a lack of resources for the community in a famously poor city, and as a race issue–as a result of the anti-gay bias endemic to black and Latino communities.

Don’t get me wrong, it is striking that over the past few years our attention has been repeatedly drawn to Newark, and there is something particularly compelling that these crimes against gay POC have taken place in the shadow of the most gay-friendly bastions. But does the fact of proximity mean that there is a larger story here about resources for the poor, and how there is more at stake than we imagine, or is it a story about intolerance in communities of color? Is it a story about insides or outsides? Or, if the answer is both, where do we locate responsibility for change?

I do think that in coverage that comes in the wake of such events, I’m thinking specifically of Sakia Gunn’s murder or of the Newark lesbians case, we often see media and legal establishments unable to deal with the chimera of race, class, and sex, unable to address one bias without enlisting the aid of another. Were the men who killed Sakia Gunn homophobic because they were black, or because they were “street”? Were the lesbians who fought an attack on the streets of Greenwich Village “just” thug chicks from Newark, who shouldn’t have been there anyway, or were they gay women, fighting back against street violence?

Or, if we are to believe reports that the Newark schoolyard killings were also anti-gay crimes, as well as (?) the murders of Shani Baraka and Rayshon Holmes, then there is a sense of hiding the hate crime (hat tip to Kenyon Farrow, who has links to more good posts on this; also a story in The Washington Blade.) It’s like there is a sense that if this were to emerge as an anti-gay crime, then the event would lose meaning as a watershed urban crime– thus also losing its status as a catalyst for both grassroot and governmental action in Newark.

Blue Jersey (“all the news that slips from print”) has put it best,

There are well-meaning and deeply caring people who don’t want any of this public. And they are right to be concerned that talking about this publicly may put the families through additional pain. This is a delicate situation involving young students, and it makes the decision to write this a very difficult one. In the end, because of the possible implications, remaining silent isn’t an option. We need to talk about this.

While it’s important to respect the wishes of the families in their time of grief, it’s also important to determine with certainty whether this was a crime based on sexual-orientation. The challenge we all face is to get to the bottom of things and to ensure these tragic events aren’t repeated. To do otherwise is unthinkable.

We still have vulnerable young people whose freedom we are honor-bound to safeguard. They live in the city of Newark and in every town, city and suburb in this state. How can we ensure they have every chance for a long, free life if we do not do everything we can do now to understand all that happened to Terrance, to Dashon, to Iofemi and to the fragile Natasha. And why.

Indeed. Pursuing the circumstances of their deaths in ultimately about honoring their lives in all their possible meanings. Theyy are listening for their names.

As Judy Shepard, mother of Matthew Shepard, stated soon after Sakia Gunn’s murder in 2003:

It is as if we are living in two Americas — one that tunes in to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy but turns a blind eye to the injustices gay and lesbian people still face.

“It is evident that with progress comes inevitable attack by those who are threatened by our work. In 2003, more than 30 cities and towns reported crimes against gays. Most of them do not garner national headlines like my son’s murder did. Sakia Gunn, a 15-year-old lesbian, was fatally stabbed in Newark, N.J., on May 11 this year. F.C. Martinez, a Navajo, transgender 16-year-old, was murdered in a hate-motivated attack in 2001. The list goes on and on…

(Curtsy for the quote above to Professor Kim, who also has a post on the differences in media coverage of the Shepard and Gunn stories, and a chart thereon.)

I’m sure you’ve caught wind of Doris Lessing being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

But to be honest, I am just posting the picture because it is awesome. Seeing Lessing, old and on her porch, reminded me of the story Toni Morrison told in her own Nobel speech.

It begins, “Once upon a time there was an old woman.”

Here it is if you would like to read. You can also go to the Nobel site and listen to it. (Lessing, of course, is not up yet.):

Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise.” Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures.

“Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise.”

In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement.

One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.”

She does not answer, and the question is repeated. “Is the bird I am holding living or dead?”

Still she doesn’t answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive.

The old woman’s silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter.

Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. “I don’t know”, she says. “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”

Her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility.

For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised.

Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird-in-the-hand might signify has always been attractive to me, but especially so now thinking, as I have been, about the work I do that has brought me to this company. So I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency – as an act with consequences. So the question the children put to her: “Is it living or dead?” is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue; no counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.

Underneath the eloquence, the glamor, the scholarly associations, however stirring or seductive, the heart of such language is languishing, or perhaps not beating at all – if the bird is already dead.

She has thought about what could have been the intellectual history of any discipline if it had not insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of time and life that rationalizations for and representations of dominance required – lethal discourses of exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded.

The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a misfortune. That it was the distraction, or the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower’s failed architecture. That one monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven would have been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives period. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven as post-life.

She would not want to leave her young visitors with the impression that language should be forced to stay alive merely to be. The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here,” his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the “final word”, the precise “summing up”, acknowledging their “poor power to add or detract”, his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.

Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?

Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way in which we are like no other life.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

“Once upon a time, …” visitors ask an old woman a question. Who are they, these children? What did they make of that encounter? What did they hear in those final words: “The bird is in your hands”? A sentence that gestures towards possibility or one that drops a latch? Perhaps what the children heard was “It’s not my problem. I am old, female, black, blind. What wisdom I have now is in knowing I cannot help you. The future of language is yours.”

They stand there. Suppose nothing was in their hands? Suppose the visit was only a ruse, a trick to get to be spoken to, taken seriously as they have not been before? A chance to interrupt, to violate the adult world, its miasma of discourse about them, for them, but never to them? Urgent questions are at stake, including the one they have asked: “Is the bird we hold living or dead?” Perhaps the question meant: “Could someone tell us what is life? What is death?” No trick at all; no silliness. A straightforward question worthy of the attention of a wise one. An old one. And if the old and wise who have lived life and faced death cannot describe either, who can?

But she does not; she keeps her secret; her good opinion of herself; her gnomic pronouncements; her art without commitment. She keeps her distance, enforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space.

Nothing, no word follows her declaration of transfer. That silence is deep, deeper than the meaning available in the words she has spoken. It shivers, this silence, and the children, annoyed, fill it with language invented on the spot.

“Is there no speech,” they ask her, “no words you can give us that helps us break through your dossier of failures? Through the education you have just given us that is no education at all because we are paying close attention to what you have done as well as to what you have said? To the barrier you have erected between generosity and wisdom?

“We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only you and our important question. Is the nothing in our hands something you could not bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don’t you remember being young when language was magic without meaning? When what you could say, could not mean? When the invisible was what imagination strove to see? When questions and demands for answers burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing?

“Do we have to begin consciousness with a battle heroines and heroes like you have already fought and lost leaving us with nothing in our hands except what you have imagined is there? Your answer is artful, but its artfulness embarrasses us and ought to embarrass you. Your answer is indecent in its self-congratulation. A made-for-television script that makes no sense if there is nothing in our hands.

“Why didn’t you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the sound bite, the lesson, until you knew who we were? Did you so despise our trick, our modus operandi you could not see that we were baffled about how to get your attention? We are young. Unripe. We have heard all our short lives that we have to be responsible. What could that possibly mean in the catastrophe this world has become; where, as a poet said, “nothing needs to be exposed since it is already barefaced.” Our inheritance is an affront. You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we are stupid enough to perjure ourselves again and again with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?

“You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly – once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

“Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.

“Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow. How they knew from the hunch of the nearest shoulder that the next stop would be their last. How, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then sun. Lifting their faces as though is was there for the taking. Turning as though there for the taking. They stop at an inn. The driver and his mate go in with the lamp leaving them humming in the dark. The horse’s void steams into the snow beneath its hooves and its hiss and melt are the envy of the freezing slaves.

“The inn door opens: a girl and a boy step away from its light. They climb into the wagon bed. The boy will have a gun in three years, but now he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from mouth to mouth. The girl offers bread, pieces of meat and something more: a glance into the eyes of the one she serves. One helping for each man, two for each woman. And a look. They look back. The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed.”

It’s quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into the silence.

“Finally”, she says, “I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done – together.”
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1991-1995, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1997

But this time, apparently, someone has gone too far, Mellencamp. Or as McMillin put it to the AP:

“The town of Jena has for months been mischaracterized in the media and portrayed as the epicenter of hatred, racism and a place where justice is denied,” Jena Mayor Murphy R. McMillin wrote in a statement on town letterhead faxed on Friday to The Associated Press.

He said he had previously stayed quiet, hoping that the town’s courtesy to people who have visited over the past year would speak for itself. “However, the Mellencamp video is so inflammatory, so defamatory, that a line has been crossed and enough is enough.”

I have to say, I think Electronic Village‘s headline on its own Mellencamp/Jena story puts it best (thanks AfAm Political Pundit):

“Lyrics Anger Jena Mayor More Than Nooses Ever Did”

Mellencamp’s video, meanwhile, is pretty interesting as a memory exercise, stringing together a series of highly recognizable images associated with slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement. I must say, at first I had wished it could work a little harder, though I’m not sure what “harder” would look like. But it is especially good in the way it historicizes Jena as contemporary event in a long chain of other events, and that is actually extremely important.

After all, many of the video’s images are “recognizable,” but would they have been “remembered” without the song? Thank you, Mellencamp, for reminding us to remember.

The song’s opening lines, “An all white jury hides the executioner’s face / See how we are, me and you?” are also quite compelling, if only because in today’s world it is especially brave to ever consciously racialize anything, particularly race. I hear in these lines Down with Tyranny‘s claim that “Many of [Mellencamp's] most inspired songs are patriotic in the finest sense of the word, celebrating the inclusiveness and unity that brings people together,” for such coming together is impossible in the absence of responsibility.

And that is not to say that Mellencamp, or anyone white for that matter, is supposed to take responsibility for the events that took place in Jena, Louisiana. But, at the same time, if you have even a nascent sense that the Jena 6 case is about something bigger, for instance the pervasiveness of racism, particularly in relation to the justice system, then you must indeed take responsibility for acts done in your name. There is an eerie splitting in the first line of Mellencamp’s song; the jury is not the executioner, but they, consciously or unconsciously, give him harbor, give him safety in their blindness to their own “all-whiteness” and what that might conjure–to themselves and to others.

I am reminded of something I was thinking during the Tintin controversy earlier this year, which I read as being as much about complicity as it was about empathy. As I said then, this isn’t only about you as a white person, it is also about me as a black person. And if you imagine that we must both live in this country as people, then my feelings should be important to you.

Feelings. There is a vague tenderness in the second line, “see how we are, me and you?” Who doesn’t want to stay out of harm’s way? Who ever wants to think badly of himself, or to see some uncanny potential in one’s own actions– to recognize harm that might come regardless of intention? Who wants to be that small or to feel such powerlessness?

We are small, and I include myself in this. But we can be bigger, which is why singing and blogging and marching and talking and thinking are so important. Even though every act might not necessarily lead to an immediately palpable result, it is important to shake our bodies and voices, to remind ourselves and others that we are agents, for better or for worse.

Mellencamp’s attempt to reveal the executioner’s face also reminds of another famous protest song, Bob Dylan’s anti-war song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”:

Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin’ back out ‘fore the rain starts a-fallin’,
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’,
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’,
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

Here is the Mellencamp video, followed by the lyrics. Mellencamp has also released a statement on the video, which you can catch here:

“Jena”
Written by John Mellencamp

An all white jury hides the executioner’s face
See how we are, me and you?
Everyone here needs to know their place
Let’s keep this blackbird hidden in the flue

Oh oh oh Jena
Oh oh oh Jena
Oh oh oh Jena
Take your nooses down

So what becomes of boys that cannot think straight
Particularly those with paper bag skin
Yes sir, no sir we’ll wipe that smile right off your face
We’ve got our rules here and you must fit in

Oh oh oh Jena
Oh oh oh Jena
Oh oh oh Jena
Take your nooses down

Some day some way sanity will prevail
But who knows when that day might come
A shot in the dark, well it just might find its way
To the hearts of those that hold the keys to kingdom come

Oh oh oh Jena
Oh oh oh Jena
Oh oh oh Jena
Take those nooses down

Oh oh hey Jena
Oh oh Jena
Oh oh Jena
Take your nooses down

Take those nooses all down

(c) 2007 John Mellencamp

The article offers his take on the currently-raging debate over King Tut’s complexion, which is taken as a signifier of his (and therefore Egypt’s) links to Sub-Saharan Africa and is also taken as bearing on the matter of whether Egypt should be understood as “African” or “Middle Eastern.”

(Whatever. Everyone who has ever seen a Hollywood film knows that the ancient Egyptians were white, just like Jesus! You can click the head for a pictorial history of Tut, and if you haven’t heard this story, background reports are at the end of this post.)

This week’s hoopla actually started in 2005, when a major museum exhibit was accused of whitewashing Tut’s image. The exhibit featured “new” images of Tut popularized by Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, who in 2005 led a team of anthropologists and forensics experts France, Egypt, and the United States. Just this week, Hawass declared:

“Tutankhamun was not black, and the portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilisation as black has no element of truth to it,” Hawass told reporters.

“Egyptians are not Arabs and are not Africans despite the fact that Egypt is in Africa,” he said, quoted by the official MENA news agency.

As you can imagine, that one didn’t go over too well.

There is plenty to say on all of this, for instance how we pick and choose when and what race signifies, or how even what counts as racial is subject to similar ebbs and flows and desires.

This new Tut-tutting also points to a fundamental ambivalence in the African-American cultural tradition. Before the rise of Afrocentrism, our main relationship to ancient Egypt was in the allegorical essence we distilled from the book of Exodus. In that story, my friends, Egypt was on the wrong side of righteousness. (I am reminded here of Black Woman‘s take on this week’s events: “I’m actually kind of relieved about this news. I always feel a bit guilty around Passover time like my people had something to do with the oppression of Jews. Looks like Black folks are off the hook!”) Further, if indeed Egyptians are some kind of hybrid people (and I know that technically almost everyone is some kind of hybrid and blah blah blah, but please bear with me), but if they’re hybrid people historically located at a geographical crossroads, do they still count as “black,” in the 90s kente-cloth sense that the protesters mean it? After all, if Barack Obama isn’t “black enough,” what does that mean for ol’ King Tut?

But I am being silly, for I really do get it. Something about Hawass’ comments, in their focus and intensity, went right under my skin. And that is why I am so appreciative of this Stephen Barnes piece, which really elicits a deeper sense of what is at stake. I can’t quite reproduce its overall tone in a quote, so I really recommend reading it and its comments, here.

Here is the gist of it:

If you don’t think Tut was black, fine. But don’t think black intellectuals who claim he was are doing anything other than what people have done since the beginning of time. The hunger of blacks to see themselves in history is not a radical revisionism but a core human need.

In a Jules Feiffer cartoon, two intellectuals, one white, one black, sit across the table from each other. The black man says: “You have your history. White history. Written by white men, to promote white power. We want our history. Black history. Written by black men, to promote black power. Our demand is separate but equal lies.”

I’ve never forgotten that cartoon. It contains a basic truth: Everyone wants to think the world revolves around him. Many indigenous peoples have a name for themselves that means, simply, “the people,” and the mythology of many groups in the world suggests that God created them first, loves them best, and created everyone else later . . . and less.

Indeed.

Isn’t it interesting how, on the one hand the Obama and HClinton candidacies supposedly signal a new day for America, but at the same time all this ugliness can’t help but seep out around the edges?

Admittedly, I don’t have much faith in Romney, but I did expect better from John Edwards, before the Esquire thing (see below).

First, of course you’ve seen this: Mitt Romney posing with a sign that reads “No to Obama, Osama, and Chelsea’s Moma.”

Now, I’m all for poetry. I even harbor a genuine soft spot for prosody in general. And I must say, the sign is quite genius in its use of thematic regression, using “osama” to shine some radical Islam/terrorism on Barack Obama, and “moma” to shine some black on Hillary Clinton. Lead-footed American genius!

But really, Mitt. Show some class, not your ass.

Romney:

I don’t look at all the signs when I’m having pictures taken.

But, then, an unexpected touch of poetry:

There are a lot of jokes out there. I’m not responsible for all the signs I see.

Sigh. That’s one way of putting it.

Meanwhile, also at CNN, a second headline, “Elizabeth Edwards: Can’t make John ‘black’ or a ‘woman’”. Apparently:

Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, is gaining attention for recent comments on why her husband may receive less attention from the media – and campaign cash — than the two leading Democratic candidates.

“We can’t make John black, we can’t make him a woman,” said Edwards…

Oh but if you could…

Wendi Muse, writing on the Edwards’ cover at Racialicious:

Sound dystopian, doesn’t it? I think some people have an unrealistic expectation that wealthy white male political, economic, and social dominance will come to an overnight halt now that the babymakers and the coloreds have been given rights, and, God forbid, a few also happen to be gaining considerable support as they campaign in hopes of becoming the next titleholders for presidency of the United States, but anyone with half a brain could look around and see that the equality apocalypse is a loooong way off.

Yes, it is all very subtle and more than a little bit sinister, hiding behind irony and a new self-conscious sense that, if you know what you should say about race or class, then of course it’s okay to say it…

Top Posts :: last 30 days

1. Michelle, my belle.*
2. Miss Mexico’s…Harvest Gown?*
3. Video of Obama on Wilson, making connections
4. Megan Williams torture suspects get court date
5. Not an emergency, ma’am: witnessing Edith Rodriguez’s death*
6. Ian Johnson, racism, and “social baggage”
7. Pabst Beer at the Gyna Colleges
8. A Genarlow Wilson primer
9. The executioner’s face; or, “Me and you” in Jena*
10. without grace: Sakia Gunn and the Newark Lesbians case

(okay, technically, posts on Miss Universe, “I didn’t forget,” and feral women should be the top posts. But since my stats show so many image hits for “Adriana Lima,” “shaved head women” (Miss Tanzania), and “Kirsten Dunst’s teeth,” I’m taking them off the list!)

* = personal faves

09.26.07

Top Posts :: last 30 days

1. Video of Obama on Wilson, making connections
2. SYTYCD Goes to War!
3. Pearl? Jolie? It’s all Mighty confusing
4. Michelle, my belle.*
5. Obama on Scooter Libby and Genarlow Wilson
6. x like a girl; Or, don’t ever be sorry*
7. Miss Mexico’s…Harvest Gown?*
8. Megan Williams torture suspects get court date
9. without grace: Sakia Gunn and the Newark lesbians case
10. Feral women, both ways*

07.24.07

Top Posts :: last 7 days

1. Yep, apply liberal mud for good blackface
2. Pearl? Jolie? It’s all Mighty confusing
3. A Genarlow Wilson primer
4. ummm, uh-oh
5. x like a girl; Or, don’t ever be sorry*
6. Genarlow Wilson Appeal :: updates
7. Video of Obama on Wilson, making connections
8. Feral women, both ways*
9. Will wait: A Mighty Heart
10. some thoughts before the Wilson trial,
11. Miss Mexico’s…Harvest Gown?*

Top Posts :: last 30 days

1. Can’t wait: “Hey…Shorty”
2. Jordin Sparks’ Weight Statement + Dreamgirls *
3. A Genarlow Wilson primer
4. Pearl? Jolie? It’s all Mighty confusing
5. x like a girl; Or, don’t ever be sorry *
6. Yep, apply liberal mud for good blackface
7. Feral women, both ways*
8. Hot ghetto masses
9. Not an emergency, ma’am: witnessing Edith Rodriguez’s death *
10. Video of Obama on Wilson, making connections
11. without grace: Sakia Gunn and the Newark

* = personal faves

07.17.07

Top Posts : last 30 days

1. Jordin Sparks’ Weight Statement + Dreamgirls *
2. Can’t wait: “Hey…Shorty”
3. A Genarlow Wilson primer (updated daily)
4. x like a girl; Or, don’t ever be sorry *
5. Not an emergency, ma’am: witnessing Edith Rodriguez *
6. Maya Angelou endorses Clinton
7. Hot ghetto masses
8. without grace: Sakia Gunn and the Newark
9. Pearl? Jolie? It’s all Mighty confusing
10. Feral women, both ways *

Top Posts : last 7 days

1. A Genarlow Wilson primer (updated daily)
2. Video of Obama on Wilson, making connections
3. Obama on Scooter Libby and Genarlow Wilson
4. x like a girl; Or, don’t ever be sorry
5. Tintin, nostalgia, and the question of harm
6. Pearl? Jolie? It’s all Mighty confusing
7. Can’t wait: “Hey…Shorty”
8. Hot ghetto masses
9. without grace: Sakia Gunn and the Newark lesbians case
10. Can’t Wait: “When Women Rule the World”
11. Yay! Kiri Davis + more “Hey Shorty”

* = personal faves