Golden Jubilee
On this day in 1957 independence leader Kwame Nkrumah announced to the people of Ghana - and the world - that their "beloved country is free forever."
Technorati Tags: Ghana - Kwame Nkrumah - independence
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Southern Gothic
Click on me for video clip
Technorati Tags: black white dichotomy - Al Sharpton - Strom Thurmond - McCallum Tarry
Friday, February 16, 2007
My Day Job
StoryCorps Griot is a national oral history project that is designed to collect the stories of African Americans. An airstream trailer outfitted with a soundproof recording studio will travel around the country for the next year to reach out to nearly 2,000 families. Yesterday, I welcomed the press to its Atlanta launch.
WABE's Senior Vice President John Weatherford introduces me.
Weatherford and I standby as Griot's first interview participant Reverend Chuck Barlow tells the audience about his work in the community.
Reverend Barlow, Barlow's sister Cheryl, and WABE Board member Kevin Ross listen in.
Photos courtesy of David Barasoain
Technorati Tags: StoryCorps Griot - oral history - WABE 90.1 FM - Atlanta
Monday, January 15, 2007
MLK Enlisted in Iraq Anti-War Effort
Slipping in middle eastern music and photos of our soldiers currently abroad (look closely at the end), Alex Therrien produces a 9 minute MLK video that actually is a film against the Iraq war.
Technorati Tags: - MLK - Vietnam War - Iraq War
Monday, January 01, 2007
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Act Three - Transformation Pt. 2
Understood within the history of fluctuating racial categories in the pre-Jim Crow era, the failures of the Civil Rights Movement, contemporary color tensions within the “black” community and my own personal experiences (and probably that of many other “light-skinned” blacks) make far more sense.
Once the new industrial economic system had been fully established, and the latest wave of European immigrants were fully assimilated into “whiteness”, the American elite was prepared to concede to a change in race relations. The Civil Rights Movement was this change and it reintroduced the two color line system into American society. The integrationist and separatist factions within the 20th century’s “black” leadership have actually represented the interests of two different groups, biracials and blacks respectively. The gains of the integrationist led Civil Rights Movement ultimately only served biracial’s interests, along with those blacks that managed to attain middle class status during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods.
The black integrationist MLK, who himself married a biracial, led the charge. Although the tactics were often economic, the ends effectively called for the reintroduction of a two color line system that also held blacks at the bottom economically. The American elite answered with the legal reinstatement of rights enjoyed by some biracials pre-Jim Crow, and the end of the One Drop Rule. However, the structure that kept blacks at the bottom of the economic ladder remained intact.
When MLK began to challenge this economic order with his Poor People’s Campaign, in effect advocating for black advancement, white liberals (many belonging to ethnic groups that had just passed into “whiteness”) waned in support. MLK moved ahead anyway and was promptly assassinated.
Since then the integrationist black and biracial leadership has mostly moved into the mainstream and left blacks to fend for themselves. Hip Hop – a music and culture describing the ghetto experience – was born out of this split. Except for the nascent Black Power Movement that fizzled out in the early 70s, Hip Hop has allowed blacks for the first time to represent themselves and their struggles in their full humanity. (Unfortunately this is in danger from corporate takeover and stereotype propaganda) Some biracials have been making attempts to reject the One Drop Rule and self define as well. And the drowning of New Orleans may be influencing Louisiana Creoles to reclaim their culture and assert their mixed racial identities. The wild card in all this is biracials who continue to one drop themselves. Whether One Drop Rule will continue to serve the socio-economic interests of blacks or biracials, if it ever really did, is being put to the test with this latest wave of immigrants. Time will tell.
- These series of posts are dedicated to the ‘finest woman in East Elmhurst’ of her day, my mother Kathlean Elizabeth Barnes. I am bold because she could not be
Technorati Tags: One Drop Rule - Creoles - hip hop - Jim Crow - Civil Rights - immigrants
Act Three - Transformation
When biracials were forced onto the black side of the color line (i.e. the Jim Crow period) they brought with them the capital inherited from two centuries of prior middle class status, which propelled them into the black upper class and the black leadership of the 20th century. This prior middle class status was not the middle class we think of today, but the legal class of people who were literally in the middle. Not Africans with no legal rights to anything and not Europeans with legal rights to everything, but Afro-Europeans who depending on the colony they were from had different levels of legal rights.
In French Louisiana biracials could own slaves, hold real estate and be recognized in court. In Spanish Florida biracials could do all that and intermarry with whites. In the British colonies biracials had varying degrees of legal status at different periods until, for reasons unique to the British situation, miscegenation was outlawed and the color line was introduced. French and Spanish biracials could teach themselves how to read and write, and along with British biracials learn skills as craftsmen and artisans. African slaves, on the other hand, were relegated to hard labor and denied education often times upon pain of death. Freed slaves quickly joined the ranks of their biracial cousins; however, in French Louisiana biracials resisted their entry into Creole society.
In the illuminating text Wealth And Democracy by lifelong Republican Kevin Phillips, the economic factors that led to the Civil War are laid out in detail. The Northern industrial machine outstripped the Southern slaveocracy in all economic indicators except for wealth itself. Slaves were worth $2-$4 billion to the Confederacy. The loss of slaves, and by extension the end of their agriculturally based economy, would mean financial ruin. The North, although quite wealthy from the budding industrial revolution, did not have the resources to compensate their ceding Southern cousins if they were to free their slaves. So war ensued.
Predictably, when the South lost it plunged into total economic collapse. The US govt. exacerbated the problem by imposing heavy taxes on the vanquished to pay off Northern war bonds and pensions for Union soldiers. Wars cost money and the victors usually don’t pay for it.
Followed by a postwar deflation that lined the pockets of bondholders, this wealth transfer according to Phillips “enabled the United States to achieve in four decades what had taken the United Kingdom nearly a century” – namely its position as the world’s leading industrial power. Over the next 80 years poor European immigrants flocked to the country’s industrial centers for a chance at a new life, and blacks and biracials migrated north in hopes of escaping the South’s economic depression.
The new capitalist industrial class now found themselves in the same position as their British colonial precursors, i.e. with a workforce comprised mostly of people of European descent – American whites, European immigrants and biracials. Taking a page out of the Virginian colonial playbook, a race-based divide and conquer strategy was legally imposed nationwide to control exploited workers who might otherwise form coalitions along class lines. American whites and European immigrants on one side, biracials and blacks on other. Jim Crow and its partner in crime One Drop Rule were born.
- These series of posts are dedicated to the ‘finest woman in East Elmhurst’ of her day, my mother Kathlean Elizabeth Barnes. I am bold because she could not be.
Technorati Tags: immigrants - One Drop Rule - Creoles - biracials - Our Kind of People
Act Two - Journey Pt. 3
America began flirting with the One Drop Rule in the 1830s, with the concept of passing predictably following suit. The French and Spanish had been bought out in the preceeding 30 years, giving the British license to impose their race and class sensibilities on the entire region. Freed Northern slaves, who were often themselves biracial, also embraced the One Drop Rule but as a way to foment ethnic solidarity and fight prejudice. The first American novels about passing, Clotel and The Garies and Their Friends, were actually writen by blacks not whites.
America's most famous 19th century "black" abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, was one of the first casualties of Northern white and black collusion on One Drop Rule. Douglass, the son of a slave woman and an unidentified white man, desired early on to be recognized as half-black and half-white. White and black abolitionists alike refused. The white Garrisonians who kicked off his lecturing career exposed their paternalism, and by extension their refusal to see his whiteness, when Douglass traveled to Britain with his anti-slavery message. Black abolitionists ignored his newspaper The North Star until he actively courted the black leadership and their agenda in its editorials. According to Douglass biographer Benjamin Quarles, black abolitionist James McCune Smith would say this to white abolitionist Gerrit Smith of their contemporary:
You will be surprised to hear me say that only since his Editorial career has he seen to become a colored man! I have read his paper very carefully and find phrase after phrase develop itself as in one newly born among us.
Douglass' launch of The North Star would trigger his break from the Garrisonians, and put him firmly in the camp of black abolitionists. This "black" Douglass, considered by some as the progenitor of modern African American thought, is the one America reveres - not the one who tried to reconcile American society to his biracial identity.
- These series of posts are dedicated to the ‘finest woman in East Elmhurst’ of her day, my mother Kathlean Elizabeth Barnes. I am bold because she could not be.
Technorati Tags: Frederick Douglass - passing - One Drop Rule
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Act Two - Journey
One of the prevailing myths of American slavery is the impermeability of the color line. Most Americans of all races believe that only Africans were slaves, only Europeans were masters, and any mixing between the two was rape pure and simple. The existence of New Orleans Creoles gives lie to this myth, of course. I suspect that 20th century Americans, especially blacks, have always felt uneasy about this because rather than hide in shame for sleeping with the enemy many Creoles proudly claim their mixed ancestry. Not too many tragic mulattos to be found here.
But travel further down the rabbit hole Alice, like I did, and you will find that reality is far more complex then that. Dig more into the history of the Spanish on our shores and you'll find that Africans and Europeans occupied each tier of society, albeit unequally. The British colonies, too, had both European and African landowners and laborers during the 17th century. To understand how this is possible, one must first understand how the management system of slavery actually works. History and molecular anthropology PhD candidate Frank Sweet explains that:
Not only was it necessary to deter runaways by making examples of those caught, but it was also vital to deter revolts by keeping on hand a traditionally large buffer class of armed yeoman. The challenge faced by colonial rulers was that the buffer class had to be roughly as numerous as the colony's forced labor population, and the forced laborers themselves were its only possible source. Like it or not, every New World colony lacking sufficient yeoman had to transform at least half of its forced laborers into landed yeomen if it was to survive.
The Spanish, by taking the place of Latin America's indigenous aristocracies, implanted their rule into pre-existing stratified societies so there was no need to recreate a yeoman class. In the Caribbean and North America, they simulated the French who intermixed with their African slaves to create a yeomen class of Creoles. In contrast, the British conquered lands that lacked indigenous empires so the Spanish tactic could not apply. And unlike the French, the British slave population initially consisted of more Europeans than Africans.
Unable to birth a biracial class of yeomen in time to control their erupting slave revolts, the British employed a race-based divide and conquer strategy that doomed African slaves to eternal servitude and graduated newly freed European indentured servants to yeomen class status. Reinforcement in the form of anti-miscegenation laws grew in severity until laws banning interracial marriage altogether were passed, and then spread from colony to colony in the British territories.
In 1705, Virginia passed history's first law defining blackness: a person with one or more great grandparents who were African - called an octoroon for having one eighth fraction of black blood. Taken together with the 1662 partus sequitur ventrum law that defined slave status through matrilineal descent, biracials still continued to be born, but at considerably slower rates of miscegenation. More importantly these two laws combined meant that, unlike the French and Spanish systems where color and class necessarily correlated, white or lighter colored skin only mattered if one were free.
- These series of posts are dedicated to the ‘finest woman in East Elmhurst’ of her day, my mother Kathlean Elizabeth Barnes. I am bold because she could not be.
Technorati Tags: slavery - Creoles - biracial - color line - miscegenation
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Act One - Awakening
They say falling in love changes your life. However, I never expected it to change the world. A little over a year ago I met and fell madly in love with a New Orleans Creole. A near replica of my late mother in looks, he charmed me completely with his genteel manner, fun-loving spirit and dedication to Creole culture.
As he and his family began to accept me into the fold and share their traditions with me, I began to examine my own history – and lack thereof. What was so different about these people? Other French Creole friends of mine, New Orleanian and Haitian, also shared family bonds and traditions that were far more cohesive than my own. I suspected that it had something to do with the French connection and set out to find just what that thing was.
Frankly this connection didn’t surprise me so much, as France has enjoyed a kind of favored nation status within the African American arts community for its acceptance of our greatest artists when our own country did not. But the link between the French and Africans here in our own country I think is less well known.
One upside of Hurricane Katrina, if there could be one, was the reintroduction into the American mainstream of New Orleans’ unique centuries old tradition of race mixing. The inference of course is that plenty of miscegenation had been goin’ on, and not just of the white master raping the black slave variety that lurks unresolved in the imaginations of contemporary Americans, both black and white.
Creoles are a special bunch because they are heirs to an atypically enlightened view of interracial relationship that was squelched by the Louisiana Purchase and did not have a resurgence until after the Civil Rights Movement. If the French and the Africans could love each other under those circumstances, then maintaining familial unity over petty internecine rivalries must be a no brainer for their offspring.
I was about to leave it at that when I learned that the Spanish controlled Louisiana for a period of 40 years (1763 - 1803) before ceding it back to the French - who then sold it to the Brits (Americans) a year later in the Louisiana Purchase. Interestingly enough it was actually under Spanish rule that the gens de couleur libre grew from 3% to 20% of the total population of New Orleans. Turns out the French weren’t so damned special after all!
Why didn’t I remember any of this stuff from my US history classes? Intrigued, I decided that I would need to dig deeper. Maybe Virginia, where my family hails from, had more complex race relations during its pre Civil War period, too.
These series of posts are dedicated to the ‘finest woman in East Elmhurst’ of her day, my mother Kathlean Elizabeth Barnes. I am bold because she could not be.
Technorati Tags: New Orleans - Creoles - Hurricane Katrina - France - miscegenation - Haiti
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
A Reflection on Our Reflections on Slavery
This evening I attended an opening reception for the NY Historical Society's exhibit Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery. Kara Walker, Willie Birch, Whitfield Lovell and Betye Saar were among the many talented artists whose work was presented. It was like most other art openings - a mix of the high class, the art set and a few politicians here and there. It was mostly pretentious in its make up, but some interesting and well-meanging folks were there nonetheless.
What was different, however, was the surreal mix of this business as usual behavior with the somber works on display. Lifeless silhouettes hung from branches against a plain white backdrop. Frederick Douglass' matter-of-fact description of how he came to name himself as a freed man sat ensconced in a glass case. The haunting cut-out image of a slavemaster's sexual taunting of a young slave girl laid bare all its ugliness. The whole thing was disturbing.
But what was most unsettling was my experience at the simulated slave ship with two well-to-do, older black women. The three of us waited patiently as an Hispanic gentleman entered the cylindrical wooden tomb. Of all the entrants we had watched up until this point, he had been the first to actually close the door behind himself. He spent what seemed like an eternity in there, when finally one of the two ladies knocked and opened the door. He came out obviously not ready to end his experience, but we entered anyway. The space was quite small, yet still large enough for the three of us to stand somewhat comfortably together. One more would have been just enough to make us feel like sardines in a can...or slaves on a ship. (But no one was really interested in that experience. We were the first to go in as a group, making it possible to replicate that kind of constriction. But still not enough to truly feel trapped.)
As our eyes adjusted to the light, we could see the the reflection of the objects hanging outside through the tiny hole at the center front of the cylinder. The women chattered on incessantly about the light, the space, etc. Then one commented to the other, "my goodness isn't this just fabulous?" Blithely affirming, the other responded, "why yes it's just like the bowels of a slave ship!" I began to feel dizzy. I told the two women that it was too much for me and immediately turned for the door. The near total lack of light was disorienting, especially after twisting so quickly. I couldn't find that handle fast enough to get outta there.
I looked around for my white co-worker who invited me to the opening, and found him edging toward the exit. He commented on how the whole thing was so unsettling. All the chatty interaction seemed incongruent with the gravity of the subject matter. He would need to come back for a more private viewing to fully appreciate and respect the work. I agreed, and then wondered how my two partners in the "bowels of the slave ship" didn't as well.
Technorati Tags: Frederick Douglass - Kara Walker - Slavery in New York - New York Historical Society
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
If Your Hands Are In the Dish...Part I
"If your hands are in the dish, people do not eat everything and leave you nothing...."
Adinkra symbols have been popularized among black Afro-centric artists and intellectuals largely because of Haile Gerima's Adinkra-titled indie film Sankofa. Music heads will also recognize Sankofa as Cassandra Wilson's ethereal ode to African identity and self awareness on her rootsy 1993 masterpiece Blue Light 'Til Dawn. The popular West African symbol is also the moniker of an underground Hip Hop artist hailing from Fort Wayne, Indiana, as well as a favorite rap group among North Cack's Chapel Hill locals.
Not knowing otherwise one might think Sankofa, which literally means "return and get it", is the only semiotic form of wisdom the Akan people of Ghana had to offer. But the ubiquity of this particular Adinkra may have more to do with the Africans on this side of the pond than anything else. As the only group of people who in their entirety were forced to come to the Western hemisphere, the prerequisite for our arrival was the erasure of our languages, religions, histories and cultures.
This breakdown of identity has meant that blacks have had to wage a battle for individual self consciousness simultaneously with a collective struggle against white supremacy in all its forms (slavery, Jim Crow, urban renewal, gentrification and now globalization). In reality, these two struggles are really flip sides of the same coin as white oppression of blacks (and all other peoples of color for that matter) has always contained political, economic, social, cultural and psychological components.
During legal slavery our struggle against white oppression often took the form of self consciousness as artistic expression. With no legal rights, no right to civic participation and no right to ownership even of oneself, African slaves only had art, if that, as a means of self determination. A significant example is that of New Orleans' Congo Square, where slaves were legally permitted to gather, sing and dance, as well as trade goods.
This self consciousness as struggle was famously characterized by actor Levar Burton in the landmark 1977 TV mini-series Roots. When the newly imported slave Burton refuses to answer to the name Toby, he is savagely whipped by his master. The master repeatedly asks Burton what his name is, and Burton replies Kunta Kinte. With every refusal to acquiesce, or rather with every affirmation of his African identity, Burton receives a lash. It is the expression of his African identity in and of itself that is a threat to the white master’s control. In the end, however, the beating is too much for Burton. He relinquishes control of his identity to the master, calling himself Toby.
The scene, then, becomes an apt metaphor for the limits of individual black self consciousness alone in the fight against white supremacy. It took the collective action of runaway slaves to create the Underground Railroad, and the coalition-building of freed slaves with whites to further build upon the abolitionist movement. And finally, Africans took a decisive roll in gaining their collective freedom by fighting in the Civil War. This is not to say, though, that Africans didn't resist enslavement from the get. Contrary to popular American myth African slaves ran away, fought back and even commited suicide to avoid or escape from bondage. But the end of legal slavery was only possible through collective resistance.
Fast forward 100 years to another decisive stage in the history of the Struggle. Although the strategies and ideologies may have been different for each group, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements both combined African American self expression with collective struggle in the fight against white supremacy. Along with the sit-ins and freedom rides were the freedom singers. The literary giant James Baldwin debated the efficacy of non-violence with Black Power leader Malcolm X. The play Home on the Range by Black Arts Movement writer Amiri Baraka was performed as a benefit for the Black Panther Party. Black Art and activism worked in concert to move Black people onward and upward. Even with the eventual (some say inevitable) assasinations of the Movements' flagship leaders no one can question that significant gains were made for black people in this country, and that the Civil Rights Movement ultimately won out over the Black Power Movement for the direction in which black people were to go.
Our history bares out that Sankofa – self consciousness, self awareness or self determination – is guaranteed only when accompanied by collective action. Enter Wo Nsa Da Ma A - the Adinkra symbol meaning participation, democracy and pluralism. It comes from the aphorism "Wo nsa da mu a, wonni nnya wo", which literally means "if your hands are in the dish, people do not eat everything and leave you nothing". It is the combination of Sankofa and Wo Nsa Da Ma A that has propelled us from chattel slavery, through Jim Crow and into the post Civil Rights era.
So where are we now? We live in a period of plenty of Sankofa and very little Wo Nsa Da Ma A, and my how it shows. Integration, otherwise known as assimilation for America's immigrant groups, has rung the dealth knell for black politics and collective action in this country. Although none of the Civil Rights activists could have possibly desired it or known that integration was going to kill black community, it most certainly has. The question is why?
Mainstream white America's unending refusal to acknowledge the structural racism endemic to our society makes it possible to continue to blame black pathology on our plight. This of course has always been the case and always will be until the bubble of white privilege is burst. Let's just say I'm not holding my breath. According to white folks then, and more and more blacks, the problem is us. But that isn't a satisfactory answer, since if black pathology has always been a constant why now are we experiencing the breakdown of our families, the acrimony between black men and black women and the mass incarceration of our men on scales that did not exist pre Civil Rights?
If I had a dime for every time I heard a black person tell me that slavery destroyed the black family I'd be living in a penthouse on 5th Ave. The fact is, though, that despite the enormous obstacles placed on African slaves most couples married and stayed with the same spouse until death and most children were raised in two-parent households. The situation is far more dire for the black family now of the post Civil Rights "liberated" generation. Isn't it far more likely that the values of the larger society we have integrated into have had a negative effect on us as individuals and as a community?
More in Part II....
Technorati Tags: sankofa - slavery - Cassandra Wilson - Haile Gerima
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
