Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 419

James Baldwin’s #WhiteHistoryWeek: “As long as you think you’re white, you’re irrelevant”

Between the late-1940s and the mid-1980s, in novels, essays, films, plays and poems, James Baldwin (1924-1987) engaged the complexities of race and the human condition in aggressive and always-shifting terms. After countless, often surprising, permutations, near the end of his life, in 1986, he announced a radical idea: “White History Week.” Before we get to that week, we need to cover a little ground. Stay tuned.

Rewind. Baldwin’s association of whiteness and American-ness with perilous, if at times seductive, delusions goes back the earliest moments of his career as a professional writer. At the close of “Too Late, Too Late,” his 1949 review of seven volumes of sociology and history for the left-leaning Commentary magazine, the writer who’d not yet become “James Baldwin” signaled the perils of an American—a term at the time that presupposed a certain assimilation into “whiteness”—identity. Concluding his piece, he wrote: “What is happening to Negroes in this country has been happening for a long time, and it is something quite logical, inevitable, and deadly: they are becoming more American every day.” As he moved from his origins in poverty through early years broke in Paris writing home—to a poor family—for money and into his fantastically successful and politically charged—and dangerous—career, his early sense of the perils of whiteness/American-ness would twist, morph, expand; it would do just about everything but disappear.

Having scaled the literary mountain during the 1950s, Baldwin’s most famous single book, The Fire Next Time (1963)—first published in the November 17, 1962 issue of the New Yorker—turns upon a complex, chess-like debate over dinner with then National of Islam leader, Elijah Muhammad. Baldwin relates the conversation in nuances finally painting himself into a corner by recounting Muhammad’s question: “And what are you now?” As an American literary writer at the time, Baldwin finds that he can only answer the personal question of “who” he is. “What?” was social, historical, a question beyond the literary. Against Muhammad’s gauntlet, Baldwin scripted his now-famous literary persona’s realization that his craft would have to expand, an expansion—by the way—that his critics in the American school of literary craft still haven’t been able to digest.

As for the Nation of Islam’s version of “what” it was all about, though Baldwin treats Elijah Muhammad as a worthy conversant in his narrative of realization, he also made it very clear it wasn’t a narrative of conversion. In Life magazine a few months later (May 24, 1963), beside of photo of himself outside a storefront mosque in Durham, North Carolina, he said: “The Black Muslims serve one extremely useful function: they scare white people. Otherwise they are just another racist organization and the only place they can go is to disaster” (83).

The question of “what” must be dealt with, yes, but one must absolutely not adopt the particular or structural insanities of existing racial and sexual discourses and mores. Baldwin’s way of mixing deep, subtle human nuances and quick, brutal (his term) if often angular, racial realities—and by turns his acknowledgment of the banalities of human brutality countered by nuanced and subtle racial intimacy—continued to present readers and listeners with challenges throughout the 1960s.

Often music provided Baldwin the best—if not the only—route he could trace through the blizzard of complexity across eras of personal, local, national and global tumult and turmoil. Amid the late-1960s fury over Black Power much of which he thought dangerously “American,” Baldwin advocated a version of “black power” that eluded the paucities of white power, principal among them the concept of color itself. Baldwin’s version of possibility was always tuned closely to the unheard—or heard yet unremarked—elements of black music. Riffing on his thought from the late 40s above, in his 1967 essay, “Anti-Semitism and Black Power,” he wrote: “I would rather die than see the black American become as hideously empty as the majority of white men have become.” If remarked for what they were almost saying, he thought, the voices in the music could liberate the face of black power from its American (read: white) mask in the mirror: “There is a sense in which it can be said that my black flesh is the flesh that St. Paul wanted to have mortified. There is a sense in which it can be said that very long ago, for a complex of reasons, but among them power, the Christian personality split itself in two, split itself into dark and light, in fact, and it is now bewildered, at war with itself, is literally unable to comprehend the force of such a woman as Mahalia Jackson, who does not sound like anyone in Canterbury Cathedral, unable to accept the depth of sorrow, out of which a Ray Charles comes, unable to get itself in touch with itself, with its selfless totality.” He wrote that in an address to the World Council of Churches in 1968 while living in California working on a film version of Malcolm X’s life that he, privately, was modeling after what he heard in Aretha Franklin’s album Aretha Arrives (1967). Baldwin’s version of Malcolm didn’t make it to the screen in the late 60s, but listening to, say, Aretha’s “I Wonder,” now, one hears how her sound guides the version of Malcolm Baldwin sifted into No Name in the Street (1972) “the truth about Malcolm: he was one of the gentlest people I have ever met” (CE 410). Black history. 

In the 1970s, Baldwin increasingly referred to himself as a “poet.” In A Rap on Race (1971) he told Margaret Mead: “Now in the 20th century we are going to find only two terrible facts: the fact of prose, on every single level from television to the White House, and the fact of the hope of poetry, without which nobody can live” (187). While his best “poems” would always take shape in forms that looked like paragraphs, his often bafflingly complex feel for issues of race, self, sex, and history in the 1970s was a matter of graceful, overlapping fluctuation. In The Devil Finds Work (1976), he scripted one such lyrical passage:

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which robes one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes. (537)

In his 1979 essay, “Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption,” he argued that music presented the possibility of converting a history, even a—as he contended all histories were—brutal history, into something with which one could work, or play. Or, even wear:

Music is our witness, and our ally. The ‘beat’ is the confession which recognizes, changes, and conquers time.

Then, history becomes a garment we can wear, and share, and not a cloak in which to hide; and time becomes a friend (Cross 124).

But, people who insisted on thinking of themselves and each other as white—though, as he said repeatedly of the United States, “this country is only white because it says it is,”—had some serious “what” questions to confront in the eyes of themselves, each other and the world.

In a 1979 speech in Berkeley, Baldwin made the provocative statement, “Insofar as you think you’re white, you’re irrelevant.” He then intoned, “We can no longer afford that particular, romance.” This could sound simply chauvinistic and the duality between racial bluntness on the one hand and the supple complexities of identity on the other—to the extent that anyone has attempted to think about it—still confuses even Baldwin’s most attuned readers. His final novel, often derided when acknowledged at all by the literary establishment, Just Above My Head (1979), effectively had no white characters at all. In it, he deals with the dangers and importance of “loose garments” for the wearers of which garments—now at the dawn of the Reagan era—white people’s clutching of thick, racial cloaks in their suburban cul de sacs was irrelevant. Discussing the novel with Mel Watkins for The New York Times Book Review, in 1979, Baldwin said:

Well, first, there are few white people in the novel. But it was unconscious. It just came out that way. It perhaps reveals something that is happening to me. It’s difficult to get at, as yet. I think the whole concept of race has had its day. Ultimately, to be white is a moral choice. It’s obviously a very deliberate challenge to people who think they’re white to re-examine all their values, to put themselves in our place, share in our danger. . . In any case, [key characters in the novel] realize that white people are irrelevant to their lives, at least provisionally. Not because they’re white, but because of the choices that they’ve made. At the very bottom, it’s now the choices we make, we no longer depend on the choices they make. Even they can’t depend on the choices they make. . . They must get back in touch with reality. They can’t avoid it, if they want to live.  can’t avoid it if they want to live (36)

For Baldwin, by 1980, it was clear that “whiteness” was, in fact, a “state of mind” attained only by people who had amputated their connection to their living inheritance and hid themselves in places they imagined were “safe.” Then, talking with Watkins, as if to clarify his terminology, an explicit trace of which is there in his thought at least since the early 60s, he added:

I’d like to say that when I say “white” I’m not talking about the color of anybody’s skin. I’m not talking about race. It’s a curious country, a curious civilization, that thinks of it as race. I don’t believe any of that. White people are imagined. White people are white only because they want to be white. . .(36)

In Baldwin’s mind, and in ways rooted directly to the cultural politics of the Freedom Movement in the United States, black people had instigated a profound—if partial and always internally conflicted—reassessment of their history and identity, and were situated in the contemporary world in a way that reflected a revolutionized conception of who was who and what was what. For one thing, during the years between 1955 and 1975, at least, and since, black people, in the United States and elsewhere, had changed their image in the eyes of the world and, most importantly, in the eyes of themselves and each other. This work wasn’t perfect, wasn’t over, wasn’t unified; but a profound price had been paid and a real shift had taken place in ways so drastic and nuanced that, at times, it’s difficult to measure.

Which brings us to White History Week in the 1980s. For Baldwin, white people, as a group, had refused to take up the question of “What” they are in the eyes of the world—to say nothing of themselves and each other—and therefore remained frozen in attempts—across the political spectrum—to keep what they thought they possessed: the power to see and not be seen, the power to be and not be present. So, here we pick up Jimmy Baldwin, looking tired and even a little bored, on December 10, 1986, addressing the National Press Club in Washington DC. But, even in the belly of the media-beast, the pleasure he took in and the energy he derived from engaging people occasionally flashed to life. From a point of view he called, lyrically and with his New Yorker’s accent twisting the last word in the phrase, “the view from here,” he concluded his brief remarks. Read from today it might be important to emphasize that Baldwin was addressing a world absent the Internet:

We are living in a world in which everybody and everything is interdependent. It is not white, this world. It is not black either. The future of this world depends on everybody in this room and that future depends on to what extent and by what means we liberate ourselves from a vocabulary which now cannot bear the weight of reality.

A few minutes later, taking questions, he returned to the theme: “This never has been and never will be a white country. . . and the vocabulary which we are avoiding has got to deal with that.” But, as Baldwin knew, it would take persons—people for whom the notion of who they thought they were and the question of what other people thought they were had something to do with each other—to deal with that. With Baldwin’s patience visibly thinning and sweat appearing on his forehead, a member of the audience asked a question about “race relations” that seemed to suggest they’d heard nothing he’d said (either that afternoon or since 1949). After a long pause and several deep breaths and imitating his performance patience audiences had warmed to in the early 60s, Baldwin said: “Well, it’s a very difficult question to answer seriously because, well, the question is sincere but it’s posed in such. . .” at which point the veneer dissolved another version of Jimmy Baldwin told the audience:

Let me. . . you know. . . what I would like to do, what I would really like to do? It’s an idea which maybe we could take hold of in this room. I want to establish, a modest proposal, white history week. [and smiling] Because the answer to these questions is not to be found in me, but in that history which produces these questions. It’s late in the day to be talking about race relations, what are you talking about!? And as long as we have ‘race relations’ how can they deteriorate or improve? I am not a race and neither are you. No. We’re talking about the life and death of this country. And one of the things, I’m not joking when I talk about white history week, one of the things that most afflicts this country is that white people don’t know who they are or where they come from. That’s why you think I’m a problem. But, I am not a problem your history is. And as long as you pretend you don’t know your history you’re going to be the prisoner of it. And there’s no question of your liberating me because you can’t liberate yourselves. We’re in this together. And, finally, when white people, quote unquote white people, talk about progress in relation to black people, all they are saying and all they can possibly mean by the word progress is how quickly and how thoroughly I become white. Well, I do not want to become white I want to grow up and so should you. Thank you.

White History Week, in James Baldwin’s mind, at least, would be an endeavor whereby people who think of themselves—and also whom the world thinks of—as white would address their irrelevance—some call it privilege—to the world of actual experience going on around and within them—and in a strangled way between them—everyday.

Sure, but not quite just that simple, if that was simple.

Rewind for just a moment. In 1967, in “Anti-Semitism and Black Power,” addressing the Black Power ideologues, Baldwin wrote: “Why, when we should be storming capitols, do they suggest to the people they hope to serve that we take refuge in the most ancient and barbaric of the European myths? Do they want us to become better? Or do they want us, after all, carefully manipulating the color black, merely to become white?”

Fast-forward to now or somewhere just beyond it. Above we’ve seen but possibly haven’t exactly remarked that the ways of whiteness aren’t exactly dependent on skin color—or maybe that “whiteness” is really the tracking of human reality that depends upon skin of any color. We’re not sure exactly but, it’s somehow rooted, or better, routed in the way what was modern—autonomous, rational, self-interested—became the target of resistance—collective, non-white, non-male, non-straight—en route to whatever came next—ever-partial, diffused and ironic when present at all, uploaded, unrooted—but no one can put their finger on it. In ways to which Baldwin’s work maybe the best single guide, at least one American poet, Lybian-born Khaled Mattawa, gets this. His book Tocqueville signifies brilliantly on the longings for “whiteness” by people of whatever color, worldwide:

You’ve got to admit that we’re all white people now. Everybody that got killed in that war is White, all got killed for Whitie. Even the people in China are White people now. That’s what a lot of these brown or yellow conservatives are really saying, and even they don’t realize what they’re getting at. They’re saying race doesn’t matter because they’ve become White. (43)

So, following Baldwin beyond Baldwin and then following Mattawa back toward him, maybe, White History Month has a channel for us all. Stay tuned.

#CaptionThis: What was Madonna pointing at?

For some odd reason, last weekend, this striking black and white image by photographer Terry Kane of pop singer Madonna  ”tour(ing) a UN millennium village in Mtanga, Malawi, in 2007″ illustrated a Financial Times book review of ‘The Tyranny of Experts’ by William Easterly and ‘The Idealist’, by Nina Munk. Madonna is not mentioned in the piece at all which you can read here. In any case, we were struck more by the image and posted it on our Facebook page, where we asked readers to #captionthis. We promised that we’d feature a few of your responses on the blog, so here they are. Feel free to add more in the comments: 

Seán Burke: You can put my self-importance right over there.

Joseph Miller: That’s where I want the two of you to perform Hakuna Matata

Andriannah Mbandi: Can i get a piggy back ride across to over theeeere?

Jane Bennett: (Medem to gardner) Lapha, lapha and lapha….

Belinda Dodson Oh look! It’s a baby in the bulrushes.

Ryan Justin Cummings: Right there is where Lupita Nyongo’s parents bequeathed her to me….

Katie Ubax Carline: And there’s the crate with my clothing donation: camo trousers and a pair of combat boots for the whole town!

Chantelle Hammer “So Africa is right over there” jaaaa there”

#WhiteHistoryMonth: When Marlon Brando brought up Native American rights at the Oscars

In March 1973, Marlon Brando won the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in “The Godfather.” Before the live broadcast of the ceremony Brando indicated he would not turn up at the ceremony and refuse the prize if he won. He won. Brando had asked Shasheen Littlefeather, a Native American media activist, to go on stage and give a speech about the portrayal of Native people in Hollywood films. In this video you can  see what happened at the ceremony. Basically Ms Littlefeather was not able to give the full speech (no surprises, some attendees in the audience booed her), but afterwards handed it out to journalists. Some media ran it in full the next day:

For 200 years we have said to the Indian people who are fighting for their land, their life, their families and their right to be free: ”Lay down your arms, my friends, and then we will remain together. Only if you lay down your arms, my friends, can we then talk of peace and come to an agreement which will be good for you.”

When they laid down their arms, we murdered them. We lied to them. We cheated them out of their lands. We starved them into signing fraudulent agreements that we called treaties which we never kept. We turned them into beggars on a continent that gave life for as long as life can remember. And by any interpretation of history, however twisted, we did not do right. We were not lawful nor were we just in what we did. For them, we do not have to restore these people, we do not have to live up to some agreements, because it is given to us by virtue of our power to attack the rights of others, to take their property, to take their lives when they are trying to defend their land and liberty, and to make their virtues a crime and our own vices virtues.

But there is one thing which is beyond the reach of this perversity and that is the tremendous verdict of history. And history will surely judge us. But do we care? What kind of moral schizophrenia is it that allows us to shout at the top of our national voice for all the world to hear that we live up to our commitment when every page of history and when all the thirsty, starving, humiliating days and nights of the last 100 years in the lives of the American Indian contradict that voice?

It would seem that the respect for principle and the love of one’s neighbor have become dysfunctional in this country of ours, and that all we have done, all that we have succeeded in accomplishing with our power is simply annihilating the hopes of the newborn countries in this world, as well as friends and enemies alike, that we’re not humane, and that we do not live up to our agreements.

Perhaps at this moment you are saying to yourself what the hell has all this got to do with the Academy Awards? Why is this woman standing up here, ruining our evening, invading our lives with things that don’t concern us, and that we don’t care about? Wasting our time and money and intruding in our homes.

I think the answer to those unspoken questions is that the motion picture community has been as responsible as any for degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing his as savage, hostile and evil. It’s hard enough for children to grow up in this world. When Indian children watch television, and they watch films, and when they see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds become injured in ways we can never know.

Recently there have been a few faltering steps to correct this situation, but too faltering and too few, so I, as a member in this profession, do not feel that I can as a citizen of the United States accept an award here tonight. I think awards in this country at this time are inappropriate to be received or given until the condition of the American Indian is drastically altered. If we are not our brother’s keeper, at least let us not be his executioner.

I would have been here tonight to speak to you directly, but I felt that perhaps I could be of better use if I went to Wounded Knee to help forestall in whatever way I can the establishment of a peace which would be dishonorable as long as the rivers shall run and the grass shall grow.

I would hope that those who are listening would not look upon this as a rude intrusion, but as an earnest effort to focus attention on an issue that might very well determine whether or not this country has the right to say from this point forward we believe in the inalienable rights of all people to remain free and independent on lands that have supported their life beyond living memory.

Thank you for your kindness and your courtesy to Miss Littlefeather. Thank you and good night.

*GASP* Daily Mail’s found out about Lupita’s Dark, Sexy past

Breaking News from the Daily Mail: Lupita Nyong’o can play a sexpot onscreen, and not just roles that call on her to look downtrodden and enslaved. In an article with a title that leaves little to the imagination (“Before she was famous: Lingerie-clad Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o juggled two men in sexually-charged Kenyan soap opera”), the Mail Online’s reveal infers that Nyong’o, whose “exotic beauty and heart-wrenching portrayal of tormented slave Patsey in 12 Years a Slave catapulted her into stardom” is hiding the dark secret of her sexy past as a soap actor in “Shuga, a sexually-charged MTV Base Africa soap opera in which she juggled two men.” Call the Oscar Police!

First of all, this is not a secret. Anyone could google Lupita’s bio and find references of “Shuga”–which first aired 5 years ago–and you can watch all the episodes online on Vimeo. Second, there’s no shame in an actor getting their start in a soap. Many, many Hollywood people did: Demi Moore, Kevin Bacon, Christopher Reeve, Meg Ryan among them. Who cares? So an actor does sex scenes on a hot soap. Sex scenes are the bread and butter of soaps – and soap actors do sexy love triangles and fraught boardroom table sex every week.

However, Daily Mail insists that this is News You Should Know: in Shuga, Nyong’o “played ambitious go-getter Ayira, who sleeps with her boss at Maverick Advertising,” and yes, also her boyfriend; she does some steamy scenes in showers, and on the boardroom table. She runs about in lingerie and knickers, juggling school and a part-time job, all the while supporting her mum. In a lapse of judgement, she has sex with her boss without using a rubber. This storyline then develops into something far more serious: her character deals with facing an HIV+ diagnosis, and the show goes on to illustrate that she lives with HIV; that there is life and living to do.

All of this is eventually acknowledged by the Daily Mail “writer” – after a series of still shots where Nyong’o is seen in various states of undress. The writer does finally admit that “The show’s numerous steamy sex scenes proved a great way to raise HIV/AIDS awareness, and by the third part Ayira discovers she might have contracted the deadly disease.” Erm, I thought the whole point was to take the focus away from the “deadly” and move us towards the understanding that HIV’s like any other chronic illness that one can live with, if one has access to proper treatment?

Mostly, the “article” is an image-heavy/minimal writing summary of the soapie series, attempting to out Nyong’o as a pretender to the Oscar Throne. Its investigative journalism tactics go something like this: see! Nyong’o was a Bad Girl on TV. On Low Culture African MTV. So don’t go putting her on the pedestal reserved for Very Special Black Persons. And oh, the horror! She isn’t the 21st century’s version of Grace Kelly that you think you know and adore! (BTW, Grace Kelly was no white-gloved virgin: it’s well-documented that she pursued her costars and directors – Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Ray Milland, Bing Crosby and William Holden among them, many of whom were married or attached – long before she married Mr. Prince of Monaco.) If you still don’t get the message, the writer adds that “The Miu Miu model…used to have a labret piercing.” WTF is a “labret” you ask? A lip. Lupita had a lip piercing. As do ½ of my students.

So is Nyong’o now sullied because instead of being a demure, “serious” actor, she’s been a sexpot in a sex-plot heavy health/awareness drama? All this breathless rhetoric outing Nyong’o as a pierced vamp is about relegating her to the position of black sex object, removing her intellect, formal training, and talent. Her integrity and character are in question, according to the obvious nudge-wink inferences made here. It’s like she can’t play both roles — gracious person of strength, and sexy vamp (and I stress play; after all, Nyong’o is acting in both the soap and the film that made her world-famous, rather than being “herself”, whatever and whoever that is).

Note to the Daily Mail: Lupita’s been seen by millions as hot stuff long before she got the “gracious black woman” role on the red carpet, and you all decided to exoticise and fetishise her blackness.

#WhiteHistoryMonth: When Salazar met one of Lumumba’s murderers

History books and popular accounts of Portuguese colonialism are bi-polar: it was kinder and gentler (full of frolicking racial mixing), or more violent and corrupt than other colonialisms. In fact, I heard it just the other night at a dinner party from a hyper-educated colleague who never fails to stun me with his ignorance of all things African (and his insouciance in speaking about the continent and dynamics there despite not knowing).

But sexual expediency (i.e., lots of white male settlers and few female ones) shouldn’t be taken as softening the blow of structural violence. Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism reminds us of the double-edged sword of colonial violence. We are all less for it.

António Oliveira Salazar founded Portugal’s New State dictatorship in 1933. Some historians like to argue over whether it was fascist or not. And these days, some Portuguese remember him fondly. He presided over the late colonial administrations in Portugal’s African colonies.

In their book Angola 61 Guerra Colonial: Causas e Consequências O 4 de Fevereiro e o 15 de Março (Alfragide: Texto Editores, 2011) Dalila Cabrita Mateus and Álvaro Mateus had this to say about Salazar and the Acto Colonial (Colonial Act passed in 1930 but a key part of Salazar’s 1933 constitution, which made the colonies part of the Portuguese empire):

In the first place, the doctrine of the racial superiority of the colonizers, for whom the colonial expansion would be a right for the racially superior, destined to dominate. ‘We should keep on more efficiently and better organizing the protection of the inferior races,’ said Salazar in 1933. And in 1957 he repeated: ‘We believe that there are races, decadent and behind, if you will, that, in relation to whom, we have the obligation to bring to civilization.’ Otherwise, in practice, he behaved like the most common racist. Franco Nogueira [a Portuguese minister and diplomat] remembers that, in June 1965, during a secret visit of Moïse Tchombé to Lisbon, Oliveira Salazar confided in him: ‘I liked the man. Look, we should promote him to being a white.’ (pp. 26-27)

Image Credit: Visualizing Portugal.

Louis Vuitton’s ‘Out of Africa’ fantasy

Using locations in Africa as backdrops to sell clothes and bags is nothing new – especially bags and clothes that certain class of travellers and outdoorsy people like to call “gear”. As in “stuff necessary to show you’re ready for hardship.” Sometimes, though, the mythology referenced, re-ignited, and re-iterated in newly romaticised packaging is so…well, moronic that we have to do yet another post on the same old-same-old. And Louis Vuitton’s new campaign gets AIAC’s Out of Africa Fashion Campaign award for this quarter’s mash up of Discovery Channel fodder, Hemmingway’s “Snows of Kilimanjaro”, Lawrence of Arabia, Out of Africa, and the opening scenes from The English Patient.

On the campaign’s website, we’re told French fashion editor and (general Vogue empress) Catherine Roitfeld described this mélange as an evocation of “two intrepid travelers embodied by models Karen Elson and Edie Campbell,” who are “accompanied by three Louis Vuitton bags: the Speedy, the Keepall and the Neverfull.” And apparently, they worked “without any prefixed ideas.”

What do we get in the video?

A model in floppy black hat, black sleeveless sundress, prancing about on a sand dune, carrying Louis Vuitton tube bags. She is alone on the pristine, sands (ominous music rolls as the sad drifts in feathery finery), leaving only her tracks. Suddenly, for an unknown reason, she flops down on the sand. Maybe she’s dehydrated, because she omitted to pack water in those bags. The bags do look rather empty – like the ones you bring home from the Macey’s, full of tissue. (FYI, dear model! Exposed desert sand is super hot! You really shouldn’t just flop down and burn your bum.) These chicks are going to burn. Isn’t there any SPF 70 sunblock in the Neverfull LV bag?

Cut to a close up of the ubiquitous LV-logo on a suitcase, a model in a black bikini top on a motorcycle. Possibly an Enfield. We also get a couple of slim, tall women, all decked out in beaded couture, walking along a savannah-like scene with giraffes in the background. And a white-shorts-wearing woman followed by a somewhat-disinterested cheetah (sister, the elephant grass will cut your legs!). Then someone leads a very tame zebra somewhere … to the cooking pot? We don’t know. The models may be hungry for protein. There’s more: lion cubs, playfully following one of the models. The cubs are so enamoured that they chase her like African children in Facebook-posts of My-Two-Week Service-Trip-to-Africa are wont to do. Where is the cubs’ mum?

Ah, of course, a cruel black poacher killed her, and this nice, willowy, white woman (having recently divorced her cheating husband) has come to rescue them. As if the entire imagebank of Africa from old film footage hadn’t been loudly pointed at, there’s some black and white film with Grant’s gazelle, a model waving about an old-timey-looking camera, and a lion cub chewing at one of the LV bags (I tell you. African babies. You try to rescue them, and they native-innocently destroy your valued things).

In case all this unsubtle mining of colonial-fantasy Africa failed to get you romanced up enough to plonk down $1,500 on some bags that you’ll just carry on the subway, we hear a mellifluous American-accented woman’s voice: “Return to a time when travel itself was a destination.” Then we hear, “There’s no such thing as a destination, because the journey never ends.” As the music rises to a crescendo, we hear some other nonsense that only those with the privilege of an EU or American passport will believe: “never ask for directions; don’t believe in borders; dare to move frontiers.” It’s the white, male fantasy, sold to women in the name of new-wave feminism.

Some obvious questions: why are we already “there” at the destination of Africa, if the travel (movement) is the goal? Aren’t we supposed to focus on the journey – both the physical and psychological journeys? Right. This is a call to “return” to a utopian moment when white people did what white people do: go to Africa. Take the Limoge and the designer bags and escape Shit-Gone-Wrong at home. Hunt stuff. Take stuff. Have an ill-advised affair. Fly a plane, crash a plane. Write about it. Act out fantasies of power. No questions asked.

Look: I’m not saying that LV or anyone else shouldn’t use African locations as backdrops – there’s some spectacular places, and even more spectacular African-born models that one could employ. But package Africa as a romance – a location empty of people, on which the Euro-American self may, uninhibitedly, further ego and self-formation – that’s a problem for obvious reasons we’ve reiterated in post after post.

This Just In: you all didn’t “dare” to move frontiers – you created frontiers where there were none, and made it so that only a few (you) could move about freely. And now, people who can barely afford to pay rent feel they must own a piece of cheap cow skin and become human billboards for LV, without a pay cheque for doing that labor – all so that they can advertise to the world they’ve arrived at that mythical destination: capitalist fantasyland.

#WhiteHistoryMonth: Aimé Césaire on Europe

I’ve been reading Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. He puts it all plainly. In the flurry of theory, tangles of citational prose, and the demands for refereed this, that, and the other that ping throughout an academic’s daily grind, such clarity is bracing. And welcome. I’ll be assigning the whole text to my undergraduates next year:

And I say that between colonization and civilization there is an infinite distance; that out of all the colonial expeditions that have been undertaken, out of all the colonial statutes that have been drawn up, out of all the memoranda that have been dispatched by all the ministries, there could not come a single human value. (p. 34)

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism: and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and ‘interrogated,’ all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery. (pp. 35-6)

At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler. (p. 37)

#WhiteHistoryMonth: What Britain did in Kenya

The following is the full text of a letter written by David Larder, who served in Britain’s colonial army in Kenya, to the Guardian newspaper last year, following the court settlement which saw the UK government pay out £2,670 to each of the 5,228 elderly Kenyans judged eligible for compensation for atrocities committed in the 1950s. The UK government still refuses to apologise for what it did in Kenya. That’s one reason David Larder’s letter is worth reading.

I doubt if all the secrets of the Kikuyu uprising will ever be known. Young soldiers were brainwashed into believing they were fighting in Kenya for our glorious empire. Sixty years ago I was there as a 19-year-old national service officer. I am delighted that the government has given some token compensation for Kenyans who suffered torture (Britain’s brutal past exposed, 6 June). I still suffer from memories of the British apartheid system there and numerous instances of arbitrary killing and brutality by British forces, Kenya police and Kenyan African Rifles. In reality we protected land-grabbing British farmers and enriched UK companies.

Young troops were encouraged to shoot any African on sight in certain areas. Prize money was offered by senior officers for every death. The brains of one young black lad I shot with no warning (by orders) landed on my chest. He had no weapons, only a piece of the Bible and part of an English-language primer in his pocket. Before I burned his body near the farm where he had been working, I was ordered to cut off his hands, which I did, and put them in my ammunition pouches, as we’d run out of fingerprinting kits. Of course, he was recorded as “a terrorist”. I was told to shoot down unarmed women in the jungle because they were carrying food to the so-called “Mau Mau” – a word they never called themselves.

The whole of this Kenyan tragedy was predictable. Although Kenyan black troops had fought for the British in the second world war, they were rewarded with their land being taken away, no press or trade union freedom, suppression of political movements and slave-like conditions of work, which I witnessed. Yes, some black Kenyans did turn on others for not rising up against such indignities. But many of those who were killed were local chiefs and their supporters, who had co-operated with hugely rich white farmers. However, the revenge killings by the colonial authorities were totally disproportionate – with bombing raids, burning of villages and the forced movement of thousands of families onto poorer land, in the name of “protection”. Very few white people were killed by Africans.

But it wasn’t just the black people who suffered. I remember telling my company commander that a young soldier whose medical records showed he was only fit for clerical work should not go on a military exercise. I was laughed at. He was forced to go. After three hours’ steep climb through jungle, he died in my arms, probably from a heart attack. Because I remonstrated, I was ordered to take a donkey and carry his body, which kept slipping off, for nearly a week to deposit him at HQ on the other side of the Aberdare mountains. His mother was told he was a hero who’d died on active service.

I was sickened by my experiences. I disobeyed orders and was court-martialled and dismissed from the service. I actually thought I was going to be shot. Stripped of my uniform, I was told to make my own way home. Then I wrote to Bessie Braddock, the Labour MP, and was put back in my uniform to fly home in a RAF plane. After campaigning around the country for Kenyan independence, I received new call-up papers, because I had not finished my national service. I then decided to stand trial and become the first British man allowed to be registered as a conscientious objector against colonial warfare. History has proved me right. With these expressions of “regret” by our foreign secretary, I now feel vindicated for being pilloried as a “conchie”.

Ruud Gullit and the Struggle for South African Freedom

They called Ruud Gullit the Black Tulip, a name that suggested at once both his elegance on the field of play and his identity without. For Gullit was more than just a footballer, he was a symbol, and one that meant a great many things to different people, not just in his native Netherlands. As a footballer, he was one of the greatest: three Dutch Eredivisie titles, three Italian Serie A titles, two European Cups, a Ballon d’Or, and even a European Championship, his country’s first and only major honour, and one delivered under Gullit’s captaincy. To football fans, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, Gullit was a phenomenon, a genius. To some, he was even, in the words of George Best, ‘better than Maradona.’ He was the total footballer.

But, again, Gullit was more than this. It was not for no reason that the late Nelson Mandela praised him as ‘a source of tremendous inspiration for young people, not only in Holland or Europe, but throughout the world.’ More than a footballer, he was a musician (although not anywhere as accomplished in the latter field as he was the former). And more than a musician, he was a voice.

Upon receiving the Ballon d’Or in 1987, Gullit dedicated the award to Madiba: ‘This,’ he told a world in which the anti-apartheid struggle had yet to fully take root, ‘is for Nelson Mandela.’ It was an extraordinary gesture. ‘In Italy,’ he recalled in an interview with The Times, ‘that made a big stir. There wasn’t such an activism about apartheid over there.’ On another occasion, he likened the reaction in Milan to a ‘storm’. The press, he said, did not take too kindly to another footballer talking about politics. For Gullit, though, this was not politics at all. Rather, ‘it was just a human decision.’

And it was a decision for which Mandela and his comrades were always grateful. In 2004, Gullit met with three of Mandela’s Robben Island cellmates. They told him that they ‘couldn’t believe’ what he had done almost 20 years earlier, and were sure at the time that the award would be withdrawn as a result. For these men, after all, ‘injustice was a normal part of life.’

Mandela’s praise for Gullit was even more effusive: ‘Ruud,’ he told him, ‘I have a lot of friends now. When I was on the inside, you were one of the few.’ These were words, said Gullit, which eclipsed even the proudest moments of his football career. And for a player as wonderful and as decorated as he was, well, one can only imagine how great his joy must have been upon hearing them.

Still, just as interesting as the gesture itself is the road towards it. And the vehicle used on Gullit’s journey was not football, as one might expect, but music.

Of course, as a footballer playing in the 1980s and, to a lesser extent, the 1990s, Gullit experienced racism on the field. While at Feyenoord, even his own manager would label him ‘blackie’ after criticising the player’s work rate. (Thijs Libregts, the manager in question, defended himself unconvincingly by claiming that this was only a nickname.) At the same club, during a preseason friendly against Scottish Premier League side, St Mirren, Gullit was racially abused on the pitch for the first time. He recalled it being ‘the saddest night of my life. The Scots booed me because of my colour. I was even spat on.’ In Italy, with Milan, the abuse was sometimes even worse, curva upon curva greeting the presence of Gullit, Rijkaard and co. with monkey chants.

But it was music—reggae music—that was responsible for making Gullit aware of the anti-apartheid struggle: ‘I was into reggae music, and a lot of us sang about Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko. So these people were like icons for me. They fought for a cause that was enormous.’ Thus began Ruud Gullit’s transformation from the Black Tulip to Captain Dread. He had worn dreadlocks since his Haarlem days, since his debut as a 16-year-old libero. It was a core part of his identity: a nod to his Surinamese heritage, certainly, but also to his taste in music. And in 1984, Gullit duly scored a modest hit with ‘Not the Dancing Kind’, a reggae song in which he speaks over a beat:

Say, all you people there

Are there some of you of the dancing kind?

I say

Are there some of you of the dancing kind?

Now sing up!

Marley, he was not.

In 1987, though, the year of his Ballon d’Or triumph, Gullit really was immortalized in song (as if he needed it) by the Dutch reggae band Revelation Time. They released a single, ‘Captain Dread’, to celebrate his historic captaincy of the national team, his love of their genre, and, of course, his dedication to Mandela. It opens as follows:

He runs like lightning

Thunder when he kicks the ball

Don’t try to stop him

Natty dreadlocks go past them all

Captain Dread

Captain dreadlocks at the ball

Captain Dread, natty dread

Bongo natty dreadlocks in full control, yeah

Later in the song, we hear:

He’s the first black captain

Of the national team

And, most tellingly:

He fights against apartheid

And likes to hear reggae music

He fights for equal rights

In Rhodesia, Revelation time!

Much better.

“Captain Dread” by now was in Milan, and around this time became, in no small part due to his musical exploits, a symbol of the Milanese anti-racism movement. As John Foot reveals in Calcio, his masterly history of Italian football, Gullit would appear in concert throughout the city, most notably in the immigrant club, the Zimba. In 1988, he would even team up with the aforementioned band Revelation Time (themselves named after a Max Romeo album) to record a no. 3 single. ‘South Africa’, as its title suggests, is an anti-apartheid song, and a powerful one at that. Here, despite his calling the Ballon d’Or dedication a ‘human’ rather than a political decision, Gullit became expressly political. He played bass and lent his voice to the track, and would perform it wearing a plain black t-shirt with one simple message, in white and in capitals, written upon it: ‘STOP APARTHEID’. The lyrics, meanwhile, owed much to Peter Tosh’s earlier anthem against exploitation, ‘Downpressor Man’. The song went:

You went down in South Africa land long time ago

To eat from their fruits, the silver and gold, yes

You wanted to be a rich, young man

But the worst part of the story is not often told/

‘Cause you fight them (fight them) and you catch them (catch them)

And you put them in chains (put them in chains)

You judge them (judge them) and you kill them (kill them)

With laws that you made (with laws that you made)

South African downpressor man

You better go where you coming from

‘Africa,’ Revelation Time and Ruud Gullit croon, ‘must be free.’

Captain Dread was now more than but a footballer, more than a musician. Here was a man who had endured terrible abuse, yet had become the best player in Europe, if not the world. But here was also a man who spoke and sang about grave injustice, a man who dedicated his greatest personal honour to the imprisoned leader of the anti-apartheid movement—and at a time when it was unfashionable to do so. Here was a symbol. He was not a reggae icon, of course, nor a political one. (Listen to ‘Not the Dancing Kind’ for convincing proof of the former, and see his morally dubious move to manage Terek Grozny, in Chechnya, in the case of the latter.) But he was Captain Dread, and as Captain Dread brought hope to people across the world.

Ruud Gullit’s is a tale of talent on the field, but also, in this instance, a commitment to justice, to ‘what was right’, off it. Nelson Mandela recognised that. Perhaps football fans should, too.

All together now:

Captain Dread

Captain dreadlocks at the ball …

12 Years a Slave: A view from the Other South

A grossly detestable subjection of one human being by another, slavery was a structural guarantor of white control of blacks in the Americas. It was to whites in that part of the world and other parts of the world including the Cape Colony in South Africa, what colonial subjugation and apartheid would later be to whites in the rest of Africa. There is no longer slavery in the Americas. However, white supremacy is still around, not only in the United States but also in many recently colonized societies. On what structural ropes then does white supremacy hang today? Even then, does it still need an institutional apparatus of dominance for its continuity?

Slavery, like apartheid, was constituted through certain relations between the white master and the enslaved black. What struck me about 12 Years a Slave is its visual explication of how these relations are established, enforced and sustained throughout the period of the protagonist’s illegal bondage.

Solomon Northup is first captured and then forced to accept his slavery by the slave breaker, that ignoble character whose job it is to minister violence upon the resistant black body the intention being to break its spirit, to instill the identity of the slave in the captured man or woman’s psyche. On the pain of being thoroughly thrashed, the captured man or woman is forced to accept a slave name. The more he or she resists, the more the whip eats into his or her skin. But even without resisting, the possibility of more extreme violence always hangs over the slave’s body and psyche.

In one of the film’s early scenes, Solomon is ‘given’ a new name. He tries to resist but is thrashed with a paddle. When he says his ‘new name’ while being ravaged, Solomon speaks his slave identity into being. The new name is meant to initiate the captured slave into a violent and dishonorable existence. The paddle and the uttered words are meant to establish the master’s conquering of the slave’s body and mind.

This has parallels with petty apartheid in this other south of Africa, when black people were coerced to reply to the name ‘Jim’, ‘John’, ‘Miriam’, ‘Mary’ and so on; names that were meant to kill their spirits and dismember the memory of their identities. On being renamed, the slave’s being is denied — he or she becomes what Hortense Spillers refers to as “being for the captor”.

The relations of slavery are discernible in the rites of naming, the desire for total control and white slavers’ suppression of fear of the black through violence. All of these factors show that slavery was very much a means to maintain a paranoid white supremacy that inadvertently admits the humanity of blacks by perpetually displaying the desire for suppressing it. That naming, as a rite of passage into slavery, was also used in the colonial and apartheid systems shows that slavery is one institution or system among others that have underwritten white supremacy in our age.

In spite of being forcibly called Platt, Solomon does not wholly absorb this subjection. He walks about proudly and even his bodily posture shows it and attracts suspicion from his captors. Such pride shows that he does not completely accept his non-status as a slave. Split between conditional acceptance of his subjection (when he believes one of his slavers is a man of conscience because he is not harsh on his slaves) and utter rejection of it (when he sees himself, and not all other ‘niggers’ as unworthy of slavery), his consciousness is not at rest about his identity.

Indeed Solomon’s education and standing in the North give him a slight advantage over his fellow untutored slaves in the South. He is able to accomplish skilled work for his masters, work that no ordinary slave could do.

Even so, it is unfortunate that in the film, the victimized blacks are generally victims and very seldom drivers of their own agency. When one of them, a man called Robert, speaks of resistance aboard a boat, his ideas are targeted at the ‘better slaves’ who were ‘free men’ before their calamity. He speaks with disdain about the other slaves who were born and bred on the plantation, observing that they did not know how to resist and refers to them as ‘niggers.’ This introduces the discourse of intra-black class divisions and attitudes, where some blacks define themselves against others that might not be so fortunate with accessing education and property. The problem of intra-black hatred is itself an offshoot of white supremacy that made of Africans, inferior ‘niggers’ who could only achieve humanity with the attainment of an elusive whiteness. It appears then that white supremacy does not entirely rely on institutionalized systems for its continuance; it also needs ‘free’ blacks to banish the rest of the black world into a state of unfreeness.