First things first, I am a Quentin Tarantino fan. This should not be interpreted to mean I stan for the guy. I remember seeing Pulp Fiction in high school and falling in love with it. Subsequently I went out and to dig up Reservoir Dogs and have since followed most of his catalog. I have to admit he’s an excellent film maker with some deeply problematic politics around race and gender. I can analytically separate the two, but figuring out if I really can or do like Tarantino is a whole ‘nother conversation.

Second, Self-Determination is probably one of the most important things to me. When asked my politics I often simply respond, “self-determination.” The classic definition associated with the Kujichagulia is, “To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.” I think that what you are called matters (don’t believe me? just say Dumi “isn’t your real name” and see what my response is). I believe that defining our condition, our responses to oppression, and creating our path is the height of our political and spiritual potentials.

So now onto Django Unchained.

When I first heard of Django Unchained I thought two things, “ugh oh, Spike Lee’s not gonna like this” and “I loved Inglorious Bastards, I wonder will it be like that?” Well on both cases I was right. With good reason, Spike Lee is concerned that Tarantino’s portrayal of slavery will be off-mark and that Tarantino’s general regard for Black people is questionable. After all, for hundreds of years when White men have loved the word Nigger or Nigga so much we’ve been right to question their affinity for Blackness, today is no different. I think Django Unchained was much like Inglorious Bastards, comical, gory, and decontextualized enough to be watchable by all without the pesky feelings of guilt or animus.

The major problem is that Tarantino is Tarantino. Witty, irreverent, violent, and hyper-masculine in a film that could (note that I said could not should) be treated with more care. Tarantino has never been interested in carefully addressing an issue, instead he’s an over the top film maker (in my non-film critic opinion). He has been heavily influenced by Westerns and Blaxploitation and Django Unchained is just that – a Western Blaxploitation film. I think its strength and weakness lie in this fact.

I love a number of Blaxploitation films (Coffy is my favorite) but I have to acknowledge as potentially liberating as they could be, they fall far from the mark of actually letting us speak for ourselves, determine our path, and create the world that we want. In classic Blaxploitation fashion Django is a bad nigger and is almost a bad nigga (word to R.A.T. Judy). In all senses of the word he is spoiled property, lawless, dangerous to the order around him, but still held in by that world. When Django draws his gun someone White is gonna die, it’s just that we know it’s only going to be “the bad” White folks. While Django is the best shot in the West you never think he’s going to shoot his white partner Dr. Shultz and Tarantino writes the other Black characters as too stupid to shoot anyone but who they are told to shoot (I’m sure one of those brothas on that chain gang would’ve freed themselves and Django from the jump).

I have seen a split response (though definitely not 50/50) on Django among my friends in looking over facebook, twitter, and in casual discussions. There are a lot of folks who saw Django and loved it! Some of my more radical leaning comrades said it was brilliant and sweet song of revenge for our enslaved ancestors (yeah, some folks were that dramatic! I’m sure subsequent discussions will likely drag them back from these hyperbolic reflections). Another cadre has decidedly said the film was unfulfilling, obsessed with “the n word”, and another liberal White fantasy about slavery and its (dis)contents.

I think both are equally right and wrong. The first group misses that Django is as programmed and scripted as any “Black liberator” in a Blaxploitation film. He does nothing that is beyond his own personal interests and has no connection to his community other than saving his and his wife’s butt. Look at Django’s dialogue with others who who are enslaved, sparse yet telling (even in the final two scenes). When Django speaks white folks listen because of the gun and Black folks listen because they’re (in Tarantino’s imagination) too dumb to do anything else. Django Unchained is not about creation of maroon colonies, it’s not David Walker’s call to arms, it’s not Harriett Tubman’s “freeing a thousand slaves and could have freed a thousand more if they knew they were slaves.” It’s a portrait of a super human bad nigger who gets revenge and his prize (yes, women are prizes in this tale).

Django however is a tale about manumission, about breaking Southern race rules, and limited-justice being served. The film is written in such a way that in 2 hours and 20 minutes the audience rarely has to contemplate the ills of slavery as connected to their legacy or inheritance. Instead, you get the “privilege” of a far out tale without the icky feelings of contemporary inequities. I didn’t expect Tarantino to really do “the peculiar institution” justice, but I was amazed at how he could deal with many elements of slavery without making viewers grapple with racial memory or reconciliation (the dog scene largely being the exception).

All in all, Django is a good movie, but it’s not a movie about actual self-determination. Django “settles some scores” but never really “rights the wrongs” of the institution of slavery. Admittedly that’s a tall task for a movie, but don’t we go to movies to see the impossible if not the improbable? Django Unchained is so important because as Salamishah Tillet pointed out there are so few popular movies that wrestle with slavery and in a moment of racial amnesia we can identify with Black individual success but collective Black progress is left unturned.

In fact, I think there will be more Djangos–good films with kick ass characters that speak to a racial past– but I dream of the day that we (Black folks) are able to write ourselves into the pages of slavery’s past with the vibrance, diversity, genius, and power that we actually exhibited. As Anna Julia Cooper told us, “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.” We need more griots who understand our lives across gender, class and sexuality. Telling our stories is difficult work, but people of African descent has specialized in the impossible and done it against all odds. I guess we’re simply being called to create ourselves anew, but more fuller whether in movies or in our daily lives.

At the close of each

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It’s Black History Month and as both a professor and a lover of Blackness, Black things and Black people, I want us all to study up. Just make sure you don’t enroll in The Willie Lynch School of Social Research. Now some of my pro-Black, head wrap rocking friends who are very passionate about Black history 28-29 days a year are nodding their heads right now because they’re familiar with Willie Lynch and think I’m about to berate folks for taking up his ways. These are the alumni of that school I so desperately want to shut down.

For those who are unfamiliar, there is a notorious letter- “How to Make a Slave”- that was said to have been read by a slaveholder named Willie Lynch on the bank of the James River in 1712. The document explains how slaveholders should keep the various enslaved Africans of their plantations at odds with one another to ensure that they are never able to revolt and to keep the psychological chains on their “property” as tight as the physical ones. The colloquialisms used and the improbability that someone would have ever presented such a plan that effectively predicted the long-term effects of slavery (for example, our issues with complexion) have long been used by scholars and researchers to refute the authenticity of the document. But you can still find copies of it and even films devoted to explaining how it manifested in Afrocentric bookstores across the country.

The Willie Lynch myth is just one example of the lazy “research” we tend to do online about our community, forward to others or, worse, try to convince our children of. If we want to Black history to be known, felt and understood, we as adults have some work to do! Read more

– M1 of Dead Prez on the song “Malcolm, Garvey, Huey”

This week I’ve been peeking in on Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ musings as he re-reads the autobiography of Malcolm X. Coates has done us a great service by sharing his reading of Malcolm’s life as told by Alex Haley, but this service can easily slip into a disservice. Malcolm on one hand has been deified and on the other hand demonized. We must humanize Malcolm, like all the figures in the African Diasporic canon, but we must do it with a particular degree of care and context.

Thus far Coates has posted three entries: “Black Men are Watching Every Move I Make“, “She Had Broken the Spirits of Three Husbands” and “Confronting Valhalla’s Humanity” all of which I received with resonation and reservation. This post is to illuminate my reservations. Most of us are familiar with figures like Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, and Marcus Garvey as icons. In our history, each of them has become flattened, polished, and made rigid caricatures. Ironically, this is something all three would deeply object to, but this is often the consequence of canonizing. In breaking apart these images though, we must go deeper than just problematizing these brothers, we have to contextualize them.

In “Black Men are Watching Every Move I Make” in the closing Coates states, “I don’t say that to clean Malcolm X. I don’t buy the image of him as a complete convert to integration–nor do I need it, anymore than I needed it for Grant or Lincoln.” When I read this sentence my first thought was, “Malcolm as an integrationist isn’t cleaning it a pure whitewashing.” Coates, like many revisionists of Shabazz’s legacy, passively suggests that integration became a part of his worldview after returning from Mecca (Hajj). Of the many lies perpetrated about/against Malcolm, this is probably one of the most consistent.

Hajj served to reorient Malcolm’s thinking about race, but it did not make him an advocate of integration. He remained steadfast in his non-support of integration. On the day he was assassinated he was to deliver a speech on the OAAU that included him saying, “We consider the word “integration” a misleading, false term. It carries with it certain implications to which Afro-Americans cannot subscribe. This terminology has been applied to the current regulation projects which are supposedly “acceptable” to some classes of society. This very “acceptable” implies some inherent superiority or inferiority instead of acknowledging the true source of the inequalities involved.” X was not an integrationist. X died a Pan-Africanist. X died a nationalist. His travels throughout Africa and the “Middle East” in 1959 and his Hajj in 1964 were watershed moments, but were not 180 degree turns. While many suggest that he created great distance from the Nation of Islam and their beliefs around the racial order of the world, careful students will come to a different conclusion.

The second piece that Coates offers is “She Had Broken the Spirits of Three Husbands.” In this post, Coates takes Malcolm to task on his discussion of and attitudes towards women. Undoubtedly informed from his misogynistic hustling past, the excerpts presented show a cold and shameful side of Malcolm. I can recall just last year re-reading the Autobiography and many of the passages Coates selects stood out to me as well. I wondered, “If Malcolm is our model of Black masculinity and this is perspective on Black women, where does that leave us?” As someone who is very serious about the operation of gender oppression and privilege within the Black community, I too struggled to understand where Malcolm was. While the Autobiography represents a summative work, it is not a complete story. In fact, if we look at Shabazz’s work in with the Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU) you see a man who was growing and struggling around gender. In William Sales’ book “From civil rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity” we find Malcolm pushing to systematize and expand the role of women within the OAAU. He felt concerned that the gender oppression popular in his other organization Muslim Mosque Inc. was unduly sabotaging the liberatory work of OAAU. He began to make statements like, “Africa will not be free until it frees its women.” Yet these sentiments were nestled along side a profound distrust for women, which Coates captures in his excerpts. Between the popular image, Coates’ excerpts, and Sales’ analysis we get a fuller and better Malcolm, one that we can look to critically and lovingly.

Malcolm X is undoubtedly one of the most profoundly debated people of the African Diaspora (Sidebar- I’m anxiously awaiting Manning Marable’s book on X). Numerous volumes have attempted to capture that man in various stages, but not surprisingly all falling short. After all, who can truly capture human life in a few pages, a play or a film? But what I learned from reading the Autobiography, from reading beyond the autobiography, and being blessed to sit at the feet of elders who knew and worked with X is that there is a danger in simplifying the complex.

When Dead Prez says, “study Malcolm, Garvey, Huey their life is like a movie” I almost feel as if they’re reeling us in to find a deeper level of truth. The movies that depict all three of these men are often too narrow and too clean to capture their fullness. This fullness includes good, bad, and ugly. If you study them your learn strains of misogyny and feminism run through them all. They were not perfect; they were people. People who brilliantly taught us how to help our people rise while simultaneously showing us their personal limitations. Their vilification in mainstream media has led many to deify them within Black culture. Beginning the process of re-reading Malcolm, and I believe this applies to most known Black political figures, must come from a place of information if it is to lead to transformation.  If we are not informed and transformed, our people get no better. And after all, isn’t that what Malcolm was about?

“To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves” is often commonly articulated as the definition of Kujichagulia. For many this principle has been all about identity and selecting names, memorizing phrases from different African cultures, and suggesting Pan-Africanism is the ideology we must take on. But all this still seems to miss part of the boat when it comes to Kujichagulia. In fact, many take this principle as a call to develop our individual identities rather than determining the direction of our community. For so many, the process of developing a strong Black identity or African centered identity is a highly personal one. You struggle with who you are, where your people are from, what you and your people have contributed, so inevitably it starts with one questioning their relation to the greater whole. Finding answers to these questions can lead to an identity, but not necessarily self-determination.

I recently had a conversation with a teacher who works at a local school, by her account, that features a very visibly Afrocentric staff member who talks often of African greatness, rattles off facts of the civilizations of Kemet, and floats regally through the halls. The teacher’s qualm with the staff member was plainly, “he treats the families at the school and the staff members like shit.” This narrative is one that I have heard all too often when it comes to the development of an identity. The idea that one can identify with the greatness of the past, but one fails to identify with the contemporary reality of Black people. It is great to be able to look at the pyramids and talk about African greatness, but can you look outside your window at the brothas on the corner too and see that greatness?

As a college professor, sometimes I find myself frustrated with students who are developing answers to who I am, but these identities are not tied to who and where we are as a people. Put another way, too often a romantic view of the past leads us to underestimate the value of our people in the present. Knowing where we are in the present, valuing it and challenging it, builds the path to self-determination. Kujichagulia demands that we take seriously our identities but that these identities must be linked to needs of the community and deeds that serve the community. It is this seeing beyond the “me” or the “i” to the “we” is what links identity and community. Identity without community is as useful as a word for which no one knows the meaning. Identity and community give us the core for determining the next directions our people should explore. No matter our allegiance to the past, we must be also be aligned with the present conditions of our people, if not, then self-determination will be centered on the “I” and not the “We.”

*The question of “and then what?” was really brought to me by the Boogiemonsters on this classic joint.

Charles was a young guy, not much older than me having just finished up his MFA from Howard. When I walked in the first day it was clear he was soft-spoken, a bit reserved, and awkward in a way. But these features somehow drew me to him. Though he was the most junior on the faculty, I can say that I honestly took his critique more seriously than any other instructors I had during my artistic training. I took him seriously because I felt his love for producing art that was present, past, and future tense at once. He became my favorite professor in Art at Spelman because I felt “he got me.” Charles got me because he made art that was loosely yet well crafted, that was hip-hop/not hip-hop, that was political/non-political, that was racial/post-racial, that engaged the audience, that said fuck you to the audience, that critiqued the participants, that loved the participants. His work represented the reality of Black masculinity in this country: coherent contradiction. In sum, he produced the work that I had dreamed of producing since I was a teenager and continue to dream of today. Whenever I heard ruminations of artists that were on the cutting edge or emerging from the Atlanta scene I always would feel a bit pissed that his name was not mentioned (he was not only tied into the Atlanta Art scene but was also part of its life blood), but also I felt a bit of pride because he was the best kept secret, you know “the next big thing”. Those were my dreams, I’m not sure they were his.

The reality is that I wasn’t the closest to Charles, but he had a huge impact on my life. I never got a chance to see Charles again after I finished at Morehouse but we emailed me a couple of times after college to check in. His work was always dope to me and a couple of years ago I even worked extra hard  to steal an image of his site for a blog post (yeah, if you’re reading this from the ancestoral realm, you caught me, but I didn’t put in on a tee shirt of nothing like that, chill!). Each time I saw his updates on shows and installations I was “proud” of the work he was doing. To be honest, I’m not sure he would have accepted the “proud” thing, especially since he influenced me way more than I influenced him. Not to mention, in my experience, he was the kind of dude to shirk off praise and quietly throw a middle finger to affirmations that were half-earned. And if you know me, I appreciate that sincerely. He left a mark on me that I carry with me to this day in my own work in sociology and beyond. He really showed me you should take you work seriously and not seriously at the same time. He taught me if you can’t create it and destroy it, laugh and cry about it, then it probably ain’t worth doing. Thanks so much for walking with me briefly on this plain Charles and I look forward to you spreading your wisdom on all of us from that great beyond.

This is one the backdrops from his backdrops project, probably one of my favorite things he did (hopefully the links will get fixed so you can share his work).

Here are some links to reflections on Charles Huntley Nelson

Fahamu Pecou (where I learned of his passing)

AJC

Atlanta Examiner

Item 2, this Saturday, Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star again! That’s right kids, Black Star reunion at Times Square. I’ll be there, because I missed the Reflection Eternal reunion and would much rather see Black Star come together again. Here’s a reminder of the dopeness!!

Alright, back to grading and writing. And don’t worry, I still have some in-depth posts on deck, but two of them may turn into more than just blog pieces, so I gotta see who those shake out. So check back soon.

hattip to Drew Citron

What would our communities look like if we concentrated on contributing positively to each other lives, rather than concentrating on accruing financial capital? Basically, the desire to make money often takes precedent over our ability to contribute to each others well being. One of the consistent themes that I hear these days is “when I was growing up, we didn’t have much but we made due….” These types of narratives hinge on the idea that community has existed in the presence of few financial resources and may even be strengthened if we play our cards right. When we had little, we gave a lot to keep all our boats afloat. One of my favorite anthro books (don’t tell anyone) is All Our Kin by Carol Stack. It really outlines how cooperative economics need not hinge upon how much money you have or how much your neighbor has. As the financial crunch hits Black folks the hardest, we’d do well to think of economics beyond financial capital and work on social capital and cultural capital for the uplift of our community. After all, I know that kwanzaa credit card looked hot, but I doubt it will contribute to our collective transformation.

*Yes, I feel off the daily post wagon, but I’m going to finish out the principles of Kwanzaa because this is a year round thing, not seven days!

Naming: What’s in a name. If you’ve been visiting my blog, you’ll see that I post under the name Dumi. Dumi is not a nickname, it’s my name. Sometimes people ask me, “What’s your real name?” To which I will respond, “Dumi Eyi di yiye.” As they look on with bewilderment I remind them that I am called by many names, but all serve the same purpose. Dumi was given to me by a council of elders in an African rites of passage and means, “I am the Northeast wind, pushing, cajoling, and inspiring greatness in myself and others.” My surname is Eyi di yiye, which means, “We set the standard this time.” I often go by Dumi, because it calls unto me to live up to the meaning of my name as well as affirms to me that I am on the path to doing the work that is necessary for myself and my people.

Creating: I’m old school in my belief that we, people of African descent, are some of the greatest creators on the planet both historically and contemporarily. And I don’t just mean, we created the Nile civilization, so we’re great, I’m talking about things as recent as Afrofuturism, we are truly amazing. But beyond the artistic, I often wonder what will we need to create to transform our reality? I stress our creation, because the revolution will not organically occur, all revolutions and revolution inspired changes come from hard work which, for our people, usually come from mental and spiritual work. This is difficult to conceive when the worlds’ financial markets are in crisis, the world is war-torn, and people’s spiritual work consists more of proselytizing than loving reflection. This year I will be pushing to create things, both material and immaterial, for the transformation of my community in the area of education.

Speaking: In the past year, I’ve been blessed to get into multiple spaces: universities, tv, radio, etc. to share my perspective. From a number of folks I’ve been asked, “aren’t you scared what you say, will get you in trouble?” Well, no. In reality, what I say 9 times out of 10 is what most of my people are thinking and feeling, so I feel comforted knowing that I can contribute to the process of adding to the stew of Black voices in the public sphere. Does that mean I’ll be perfect in my commentary, scholarship, or blog rantings? Absolutely not, it is my goal to stimulate thought and thoughtfully respond to critique. All our our voices and thoughts contribute to fabric of the social world, so I look forward to my words and perspectives to be sharpened by my allies and enemies in the struggle.

Those are just some thoughts I’ve been having on self-determination. I know it could mean so many things to different people, what are you thinking?

“Rosa sat so Martin could walk, Martin walked so Obama could run, Obama ran so our children can fly!”**

This message, while inspirational, demonstrates the ways that one of the most historic and powerful presidential runs ever gets looked over, if not just downright ignored. In 1972, the campaign of Shirley Chisholm broke both the gender and race barrier in American presidential politics, but her campaign is still relatively unknown. Let me start this with an admission, I knew that Chisholm ran in 1972 but I had no idea about the discourse she pushed, assassination attempts, and what was certainly more than a symbolic run. At the close of the summer, I got to watch the documentary Chisholm 72- Unbought & Unbossed at Sundae Sermon. As I sat on a hill watching Shirley Chisholm challenge historical figures like George Wallace, George McGovern, and Hubert Humphrey, I was amazed at her vision, inspired by her bravery, and humbled by the ways we leave her out of history. That is a living example of why we need herstory, particularly within the Black community.

The film, by Shola Lynch, brilliantly transports the viewer into the political terrain and turmoil of 1972 politics. Watching primary footage of candidates eerily disturbed me as I heard the same rhetoric batted around 36 years later. In fact, while John McCain was still a P.O.W., Chisholm was the original maverick. She was the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress. Chisholm was the first serious female presidential candidate and she had a platform that explicitly spoke to the interests of Black people throughout the United States. Born to Bajan parents and raised in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, Chisholm formed political alliances with the Black Panther Party, National Organization for Women, pushed the Democratic party to the left as they grappled with the development of splitting factions, and was founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus (though the CBC couldn’t get their act together to endorse her… gender politics as usual).

Chisholm’s campaign was absent from our discussions of Black presidential candidacies as we deferred to Jackson’s runs as the foundation for Obama’s run. In reality, had Chisholm not ran, neither Jackson nor Obama’s campaigns would have been able to achieve what they did. As we celebrate the historic election of Barack Obama, I pray that we do not wash the memory of Chisholm from our already tattered ledger. Her run, her work, and her vision laid the foundation, and her words still are relevant,

Prejudice and hatred built the nation’s slums, maintains them and profits by them …. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free.

*The title of this post is an adaptation of a line from Biz Markie in “Nobody beats the Biz.” He said, “Reagan is the pres, but I voted for Shirley Chisholm.”

**The first variation of this I heard was at the 2008 Black State of the Union by Rep. Cleo Fields. There is a lot of internet debate about its origins, so I thought I’d link to the youtube here.

But really what does it mean to live in a place where the poor and the rich meet, but never really meet? NY is gotham city, it is the place where race, class, and reality have to come together, but somehow never do. It’s almost a dream world. As I thought about this, I could hear the Blondie and KRS mash up (yeah, we didn’t call it that when it came out but that’s what it would be called now) Step Into a World. The airy vocals of Deborah Harry of Blondie, the chanting and braggadocio of KRS collide to capture a sound clash. But it’s the clash that’s beautiful and slightly cacophonous, full but empty? It’s all there, but something is missing. In many ways, it’s almost like the 80s in redux.

While it’s easy to talk about progress and distress, in reality, people are at the center of these battles between development, renewal, and changes. In many ways the only thing left are our memories, but what happens when memories fade? What happens when the place you want to take someone to remember is no longer there? How do we create new memories? Can we really even “create” memories?