In her recent piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “When The Lights Go Down: Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative”, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah brilliantly argues that Lamar is a direct descendant of Richard Wright, that he is in fact a rare young writer “quietly committed — like Morrison — to telling stores about the community most familiar to him.”

She writes:

“What makes him important is the way in which the autobiographical good kid m.A.A.d city is so novelistic and so eloquently anchored in the literary blues tradition of which Ellison wrote. Lamar is equal parts oral historian and authorial presence, and more than many authors writing today, he has captured all of the pathos and grief of gun violence, poverty, and the families who carve their lives out amidst all of that chaos.

Lamar has offered up his hymnal for a lost generation, a defense for the black family, and in his jumpy prosody, his shell-shocked sensitivities, his clipped memories, and recorded conversations, he has produced “a novel from life” that single-handedly revives the long lost, suppressed literary tradition of young, working-class black boys on fire, with pens smote in hell, telling us how they become gifted, tenderhearted, black men — something we have been missing even though no one seems to notice it.”

And she puts forth the astute observation that a class-based schism between black writers and black readers is the real reason the marketplace teems with urban lit titles:

As some literary black authors struggled to find a culture of readers who looked like them, their would-be readers seemed to be thinking the inverse of the question: where are the literary writers who are writing stories that sound like mine? The post-racial generation had created their own disconnect, and the authors of urban fiction were vampiristic. They saw a void and filled it — cheaply, but they filled it.

They became the writers who were still speaking to black and Latino Americans who were slipping through the cracks, a group of people the new literary generation seemed reluctant to acknowledge as an audience or as subjects. And their failure to do so is what makes work that deeply and realistically deals with class (like the fiction of Z.Z. Packer, Junot Díaz, Edward P. Jones, the reporting of Jelani Cobb, the early music journalism of writers like Bonz Malone and Touré, the theoretical work of Tricia Rose and Greg Tate, and the poetry of Thomas Sayers Ellis and Nikky Finney) so necessary — and it is also why Lamar’s project is more relevant than ever.

You can read Ghansah’s full critique here.

And consider supporting the Los Angeles Review of Books, a non-profit cultural site that has — in this world of shrinking literary criticism — taken a revolutionary stand for “curated, edited, expert, smart and fun opinion written by the best writers and thinkers of our time.”

Additional links:

• Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah OFFICIAL
• Los Angeles Review of Books
• Kendrick Lamar OFFICIAL

@racialicious @harshawalia

This post originally appeared on Racialicious.com, and is reposted here with that site’s permission. Above photo: Candles at the Vigil. Photo: Overpass Light Brigade via DailyKos.

By Guest Contributor Harsha Walia

The Oak Creek Gurudwara is my brother’s and frequently my parent’s sangat. Over the years, they have described to me how, with deep love and commitment, the community came together to build the Gurudwara. How every week the Gurudwara provided a refuge, a sanctuary, a sense of home, a sense of belonging from the isolation of being an accented brown-skinned immigrant living in Wisconsin. When I heard about the shooting at Oak Creek Gurudwara, I happened to be facilitating at an immigrant and refugee youth camp. Dozens of young middle-school and high-school aged racialized immigrants and refugees from Latin America, Asia and Africa were describing being taunted and bullied at school, feeling discriminated against by their teachers, the hardships of systemic poverty, daily fears of detention and displacement, and feeling like “unwelcome and unwanted parasites.” As young people in British Columbia, Canada they were articulating an experience of racism similar to that which my family faces living in the Midwest of America.

While these murders were abhorrent, they were not ‘senseless’. The ad nauseaum suggestion that the killings were senseless attempts to construct the shooting as random and without logic, when in fact racist hate crimes operate through the very deliberate and precise logic of white supremacy.

The local Sikh community in Milwaukee had been raising concerns about racial harassment, targeting, and violence for at least the past year. The Sikh Coalition has reported more than 700 incidents of anti-Sikh hate crimes in the U.S. since 9/11. One of those was 49-year-old Balbir Singh Sodhi, the first post 9/11 hate-crime fatality. He was shot five times on September 15, 2001 in Mesa, AZ and his murderer Frank Silva Roque admitted that he killed Sodhi because he was dark, bearded, and wore a turban. White supremacy is fostered, cultivated, condoned, and supported–in the education system and mainstream corporate media, from military missions to the prison industrial complex.

The crimes of white supremacists are not exceptions and do not and cannot exist in isolation from more systemic forms of racism. People of colour face legislated racism from immigration laws to policies governing Indigenous reserves; are discriminated and excluded from equitable access to healthcare, housing, childcare, and education; are disproportionately victims of police killings and child apprehensions; fill the floors of sweatshops and factories; are over-represented in heads counts on poverty rates, incarceration rates, unemployment rates, and high school dropout rates. Colonialism has and continues to be shaped by the counters of white men’s civilizing missions. The occupation of Turtle Island is based on the white supremacist crime of colonization, where Indigenous lands were believed to be barren and Indigenous people believed to be inferior. The occupation of Afghanistan has been justified on the racist idea of liberating Muslim women from Muslim men. Racialized violence has also always targeted places of worship–the spiritual heart of a community. In Iraq, for example, the US Army accelerated bombings of mosques from 2003-2007 with targeted attacks on the Abdul-Aziz al-Samarrai mosque, Abu Hanifa shrine, Khulafah Al Rashid mosque and many others. And so I repeat: the patterns of hate crimes have a sense, have a logic, have a structure – they are part of a broader system of white supremacy.

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, notes that the 40-year[-old] Army veteran and gunman Wade Michael Page was the leader of a racist white-power band End Apathy. Potok further details Page’s involvement in a number of other white power bands and his attempts to purchase good from neo-Nazi websites. Media reports also note that Page was a psychological operations specialist in the Army, responsible for developing and analyzing intelligence that would have a “psychological impact on foreign populations.” While racialized cultures and religions are consistently held to task, the culture and system of white supremacy is never scrutinized by the state or media. What breeds white power movements? Who funds white power groups? How are people recruited into neo-Nazi groups? What is the connection between white supremacist groups and state institutions like the Army? These are the questions that will never be interrogated because whiteness is too central, too foundational to the state and to this society to unsettle.

White supremacy, as a dominant and dominating structuring, actually necessitates and relies on a discourse that suggests that hate crimes are random. Otherwise, whites might just have to start racially profiling all other young and middle-aged white men at airports or who are walking while white. Whites might have to analyze what young white children are being taught about in schools and in their homes about privilege and entitlement. Whites might have to own up to and seek to repair the legacy of racialized empire, imperialism, and settler-colonialism that has devastated and continues to destroy the lives and lands of millions of people across the globe.

Whites might actually have to start distancing themselves from white supremacy.

To my Sikh sisters and brothers: this incident is yet another reminder of what it means for us to be racialized as Others and as eternal Outsiders. No matter how hard we strive to be “hard-working, tax-paying model minorities,” our bodies and lives and labour will always be rendered disposable and expendable. We are and have been deliberate targets much before 9/11. The turning back of the Komagatamaru and the experience of the Ghadr Party on the west coast are our most salient reminders. So perhaps it is time to stop attempting to assimilate into white supremacy, to stop capitulating to colonialism and empire, and to take a stand against oppression. We cannot see and name ourselves as ‘accidental’ victims of Islamophobia, which suggests that somehow Muslims are more “appropriate” targets of racism. While racism and its impacts often paralyze us, we must channel our collective grief and outrage as a space for alliance and solidarity with other racialized communities–with Muslim communities bearing the brunt of Islamophia, with Blacks who disproportionately endure police violence and over- incarceration, with Indigenous people who are being dispossessed of their lands and resources, with non-status migrants who have been deemed illegal and are facing deportation. Striving to be more desirable within an oppressive system–that is built on our social discipline and compels our obedience–will never set us free. What will set us free is our collective liberation and thriving as the proud brown people we were meant to be. Chardi kala.

Harsha Walia is a community organizer and writer based in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories. She has been involved in anti-racist, feminist, and anti-imperialist organizing for over a decade and can be reached at @HarshaWalia.

Big profile on Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison.  Check it out:

As a student, then an editor, then an author and academic, Morrison fought unapologetically for the importance of considering racial politics in literature and of bringing marginalized American forces and shameful American secrets into the cultural mainstream.

Full piece is here. Haven’t read it yet.  I just wanted to post this Chuck Close photo of her.

The #TrayvonMartin case continues to be a heartbreaking reminder of the inequities in our justice system.  As of this writing, there have still be NO charges filed against George Zimmerman (above, right).  Where is justice?  No one wants revenge, only justice.  We want something to serve as a reminder that you can’t recklessly take someone’s life and then hide behind some flimsy “Stand Your Ground” law, especially when the person who lays dead weighs 100 pounds less than you and was only “armed” with ice tea and Skittles.

The case is troubling on a bunch of levels.  Not least of which is this: What are we supposed to tell our sons? I mean, we are supposed to be raising children to respect the rule of law.  We want them to have faith that our system of justice is fair and applies equally to all people.  More importantly, we want them to believe–even if experience and history has told us otherwise–that everyone will get a fair shake.  Unfortunately, Trayvon’s death exposes us as liars.

At any rate, there has been a lot of good coverage and commentary.  I’m sure there will more as this story develops.  In the meantime, I wanted to share some good pieces that I’ve come across today, in addition to Charles Blow’s NY Times commentary.  Here goes

• VIDEO: Jasiri X — “Trayvon”. The Pittsburgh MC and activist continues to use his art to raise awareness about issues of social justice, this time the focus is on this senseless killing. Bravo, brotha. (h/t Mark Anthony Neal for the heads up)

• In her piece, Trayvon Martin, The Long Walk To Justice, and Compassion Fatigue, Farai Chideya argues that it’s important not to tune out the horror of this tragedy, nor should we let it push us towards acts of unfocused anger.
• Loop21.com: Tara Jefferson writes An Open Letter To George Zimmerman as the mother of a brown boy.
• TheRoot.com: Genetta Adams wonders how slowly the wheels of justice would turn if the roles were reversed in her piece What If Trayvon Martin Were Standing His Ground?
• Mediaite.com: Frances Martel rightly suggests that The Killing of Trayvon Martin Is Not A Black Problem. “It’s an American problem.”
• GlobalGrind.com:  Kudos are also in order for its editor-in-chief Michael Skolnik, who puts things in context for any white person who doesn’t understand what all the hubub is about.  His piece is aptly titled White People, You Will Never Look Suspicious Like Trayvon Martin. And, yes, in case you’re wondering: Michael is white.
• The Today Show featured an interview with Trayvon’s mother, who flat-out says he was killed because of “the color of his skin”.  I saw it first posted on Roland Martin’s site, so go here for the link.
• The Crunk Feminist Collective: The intellectual go-in happens in this piece Re-Nigging On The Promises: #JusticeForTrayvon.
• TheNation.com: Mychal Denzel Smith, in his piece Justice For Trayvon Martin, asks some pointed questions.  For example, “Does self-defense require a warning shot?”

UPDATE: It was just announced that the FBI and the Justice Department have opened an investigation.

@charlesmblow

You live your life, doing your best to live fearlessly, but there’s some fears that are never fully expunged.  You see, my son is 12 years old.  Since the beginning of this school year, he’s been afforded more freedom.  He rides the New York City subway by himself.  He goes to hang out at friends’ houses.  He meets friends at the basketball courts up the block from our place.  But there’s this concern that always arises when he’s late getting home or when he doesn’t answer his phone. It’s a fear that the city has swallowed him up.

So, when I read stories about Trayvon Martin (above), it absolutely wrenches my heart.  Have you heard this story? 17-year-old Martin leaves the development he and his father were visiting to take a walk to a nearby 7-Eleven.  He volunteered to get his 7-year-old brother a snack.  On the way back, he’s spotted by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, who’s toting a 9mm handgun.  Zimmerman thinks Martin “looks suspicious,” follows him, and an altercation ensues. It all ends with Martin dead from a gunshot wound to the chest.

Did I mention he was carrying an iced tea and a pack of Skittles?

Did I also mention that his happened on February 26 and that Zimmerman has yet to be arrested or charged? 18 days.

Did I mention that I’m pretty certain what would’ve happened if it were a white guy who was killed by a black neighborhood watchman. . . ?

In his New York Times op-ed, Charles Blow writes:

As the father of two black teenage boys, this case hits close to home. This is the fear that seizes me whenever my boys are out in the world: that a man with a gun and an itchy finger will find them “suspicious.” That passions may run hot and blood run cold. That it might all end with a hole in their chest and hole in my heart. That the law might prove insufficient to salve my loss.

That is the burden of black boys in America and the people that love them: running the risk of being descended upon in the dark and caught in the cross-hairs of someone who crosses the line.

He closes with the following:

One of the witnesses was a 13-year-old black boy who recorded a video for The Orlando Sentinel recounting what he saw. The boy is wearing a striped polo shirt, holding a microphone, speaking low and deliberately and has the heavy look of worry and sadness in his eyes. He describes hearing screaming, seeing someone on the ground and hearing gunshots. The video ends with the boy saying, “I just think that sometimes people get stereotyped, and I fit into the stereotype as the person who got shot.”

And that is the burden of black boys, and this case can either ease or exacerbate it.

So, yeah, this is one fear I can’t seem to shake.  But it means that action is needed.  First and foremost, we need to make sure the justice system works for everyone.  That means staying vigilant and demanding justice.  And, as New Yorker Nicholas Peart wrote, we need to make police departments end “stop and frisk” policies, since they only seem to be directed at black and brown youth.

Read the full op-ed piece here.

SIGN the petition to bring George Zimmerman to justice.

As the father of a 12-year-old African American boy, this op-ed by Borough of Manhattan Community College student Nicholas Peart (pictured above) really hit home.  In it, he talks about the unprovoked “stop-and-frisks” that he’s been subject to by NYPD, and the effect that it’s had on him.  Quite frankly, it’s depressing: In 2011, in the midst of an historic presidency by an African American, black and Latino males are still subject to a deeply discriminatory and dehumanizing policy of be targeted simply because of the color of their skin.  Here’s one of these times, it would be nice to claim some “white privilege.” I mean, I’m sure none of my white friends will have to have a conversation like we had with my son, i.e., the “how-you-should-interact-with-a-cop” talk.  But don’t take it from me. Here are Peart’s words:

For young people in my neighborhood, getting stopped and frisked is a rite of passage. We expect the police to jump us at any moment. We know the rules: don’t run and don’t try to explain, because speaking up for yourself might get you arrested or worse. And we all feel the same way — degraded, harassed, violated and criminalized because we’re black or Latino. Have I been stopped more than the average young black person? I don’t know, but I look like a zillion other people on the street. And we’re all just trying to live our lives.

And this:

We need change. When I was young I thought cops were cool. They had a respectable and honorable job to keep people safe and fight crime. Now, I think their tactics are unfair and they abuse their authority. The police should consider the consequences of a generation of young people who want nothing to do with them — distrust, alienation and more crime.

According to the ACLU, the number of stops by NYPD has been increasing since 2007.  In 2010, there were over 600,000 stops.  For the first six months of 2011, there were over 362,000 stops.  If this trend continued, that would put the 2011 number over 700,000.

So, it would be naive of us to think that our living in Park Slope will insulate our son from this.  Especially now, as he travels more places by himself and with his friends.

In the meantime, I’m grateful to Mr. Peart, who has put a human face on these statistics and who has, through this piece in the Times, brought the issue to a wider audience.

Read the full  op-ed here.

@M_P_Jeffries

Wellesley College professor Michael P. Jeffries offers his take take on rappers Drake and Childish Gambino, aka Donald Glover.  While they both have manage somewhat to steer clear of hip hop’s dominant masculine narrative, neither are as successful at it as they could be.  Here’s what he recently wrote on The Atlantic’s site:

Standing at different stations of success, neither Drake nor Glover embodies the stereotypes of rap music superstardom or expectations of black authenticity. Their strategies for negotiating these expectations are different, yet eerily similar, and vital for understanding connections between racism and sexism.

Read the full article on TheAtlantic.com.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that, if you’re African American, you’ve probably been around or involved with at least one conversation–and maybe heated–about Lee Daniels’ film, Precious: Based on the novel Push by Sapphire.  Our house has been no different.  So, to all the POVs out there, I offer this from my wife, Bridgett Davis.  A journalism professor, she comes to this discussion also as a filmmaker, a novelist and a blogger.

Why don’t I like the film Precious?

There are certainly a lot of reasons to like it. It’s both powerful and unforgettable. It’s beloved by critics. People I respect have championed the film. It’s marching its way to an Oscar nomination for its African-American director. It prompts debate and heated dialogue. It’s the film of the season.

So what’s my problem?

No, I’m not concerned about airing our dirty laundry, or worried that people will think all black folks are like the ones in the film.  My concern is more visceral. I don’t like the film because I don’t like being manipulated — certainly not so blatantly.

This manipulation began with the novel PUSH. Its author Sapphire readily admits that Precious is a composite character. In other words, she’s a construct meant to “speak to” all the abuse that any girl in the ghetto has ever suffered. She’s a type. Rather than make her real, i.e., flawed, Sapphire made her someone who can elicit from us only two emotions on the same continuum –sympathy and pity.

Humanity is complicated. Would Oprah have loved Precious so much if she’d been more like Oprah herself, who had a baby at 14, which she says resulted from sexual abuse and its “resulting promiscuity”? Would she still have claimed to see Precious everywhere, even “waiting for the bus as I’m passing in my limo”? Or, what if Precious had been more like Sapphire, who supported herself as a young woman in New York by topless dancing and prostitution? Those who devote their lives to working with sexually abused young women will tell you that girls like Precious often are indeed promiscuous.

But then, that more complex portrayal would have messed with Sapphire and director Lee Daniels’ s agenda. Back to that in a moment.

After we’re made to feel sorry for poor Precious, we’re allowed to assuage our pity vis-a-vis a fairy-tale redemption; we walk out of the theater feeling either surprised or proud that we could “feel so much” for a girl who should be unlovable given how she looks. As someone who grew up with three obese sisters, I’m here to tell you that you can love a fat, dark-skinned girl. And she doesn’t have to be the brunt of outsized abuse to be worthy of that love. Nor does she have to be an angel. Indeed, in the film the teacher Ms. Rain’s intervention would be far more profound if Precious had been more of a challenge to deal with. It takes a lot to care about someone who’s difficult to help, who makes you work at it. And it says a lot about someone who makes that effort.

As I watched the film, I kept waiting to see myself in one of the key characters. But you can’t really — unless you see yourself in the perfect Ms. Rain or the beleaguered social worker. Everyone else in the movie is a stand-in for a rash of complicated pathology: the mother is a stand in for all the dysfunction of ghetto life; the father is a stand-in for all sexual predators; Precious is a stand-in for all abused children and women. Who’s human here? Who’s genuine? And where do we as audience members get to enter? Honest cinema leaves us changed by the end credits because we have to ask ourselves tough questions: What would I have done in that situation? Are those pieces of myself I recognize up there? Have I been guilty of similar transgressions? When you can’t enter a story, when you can’t empathize with any of the flawed characters, then you don’t have to feel uncomfortable about your own culpability.

Here was a chance for many black mothers to see parts of themselves in Monique’s character. A ride on a New York City subway or a Saturday spent in Brooklyn’s downtown Target reminds us all that many black women spew angry invectives at their children — from cursing to name-calling. But those mothers can comfortably judge Precious’ mother from a distance because they don’t let their men rape their daughters in full view, don’t sexually molest their own girls, don’t throw down their newborn grandsons. They can say, “That’s not me.” And so, they  — and we — get a pass.

Ditto for black men who molest children or who participate in gang rapes or date rape. Even a man who rapes his girlfriend’s daughter can distance himself from the monstrous evil father in Precious because, hey, he doesn’t rape his own daughter from the time she’s three months old until she’s sixteen, giving her two babies.

And so the thing that film can do so well, force us to reckon with our own fallibility as human beings, gets bypassed in exchange for horror-flick shock value. Pitting an evil monster against a helpless victim is scary, but it’s not imaginative, and it’s not original, and it’s certainly not brave. Bravery is found in ambiguity, as in the film The Reader, in which a former Nazi prison guard is conveyed with such texture and richness that you have complicated feelings about her, even as you discover that she sent women prisoners to the gas chamber.

Meanwhile, caught up in our wave of emotions for Precious, we suspend our disbelief. Questions go left unanswered. What girl as old and as big as Precious endures repeated rape by her father? (Who, by the way, doesn’t even live in her home?) What makes her, by that point in her life, lie on her stomach and take it? What girl as old and as big as Precious never turns the abuse outward and becomes tough, hardened or viciously self-protective?

I’ll tell you what girl: one who is a device for a larger goal. What is this story’s larger goal? Let’s step back and look at it: Who abuses Precious? Who lets it happen? Why does she let it happen? And who saves Precious? Remember, this film is a fiction adapted from a fiction, so every choice made is done so for a reason. X was chosen over Y for a reason. Twin underlying messages run through this film like a low-grade fever. One is that black women value their worthless black men over their children. The other is that salvation and protection can be found in lesbians, who don’t rape you or abuse you or impregnate you  — and offer warm, loving home environments to boot. Did Precious have to be abused so badly in order for that point to be made? Agenda cinema, anyone?

Skilled filmmakers can make you think what you’re seeing is real-life. That’s something cinema has over all other art forms, its verisimilitude. Yet the best filmmakers know how to make you feel what you’re seeing is not just “realistic”, but resonant.

This film works mighty hard to make sure I feel a certain way. And because of that, I don’t trust it.  For all its gritty “authenticity”, Precious just doesn’t feel true.

Additional link:

• Official Precious site

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