PROVIDENCE AFRICANA READING COLLECTIVE

Economically oppressed, politically marginalized, and culturally dishonored, the organizers of the Montgomery Bus Boycott could not have imagined that their passion and strength would be placed on a national stage much less become a historical watermark for struggles to come. But what is obscured, or altogether silenced, is the ways in which preceding struggles prefigured their success — or how rehashed instantiations of race continue to manifest in modernity. This presentation will (re)introduce the Montgomery Bus Boycott by placing it within a larger constellation of African American political traditions of resistance and agency. With this as our backdrop, we will reconsider the contemporary contours of racial politics.

This presentation will survey post-Civil War formations of Black self-preservation, political power, and attempts at educational advancement over and against elite white tactics of suppression. Convening at the 1955 moment of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, we will more closely examine the social and political structuring of the boycott, highlighting the details of Montgomery’s city busing statues, and Rosa Park’s arrest. This will be followed by a contemporary assessment of the ways in which race proliferates — even as our nation has elected a Black president.

Participants will gain a contextualized understanding of how the nation’s elites have historically trafficked in an anti-black politics of separation in order to prevent black and white political unity. Participants will understand political struggles against racial oppression, and endeavors by the power structure to manage those struggles, as existing on a continuum, that is, without clearly defined beginnings or endings short of liberation itself, rather than mere moments in time.

Ideal audiences for this presentation would be:

• College/University Faculty
• Teachers
• Parents
• High School and College Students
• Community Educators and Organizers

This session assumes no prior knowledge or experience and is accessible, even necessary, to those calling the U.S. their permanent home.

History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is also a compass that people use to find themselves on the map of human geography. History tells a people where they’ve been and what they’ve been; where they are and what they are. History tells a people where they still must go and what they still must be. The relationship of history to the people is the same as the relationship of a mother to her child.
~ Dr. John Henrik Clarke

Conscious memory is the prerequisite for human behavior.

~ Professor Greg Carr

As we sit in the middle of Black History Month I confess that I’ve spent the entirety of it thinking about the possibilities of how we might enter into a more progressive conversation on the topic of Black History. But please realize this month is not merely about the recognition of the achievements of African Americans, or a perfunctory gesture to insert Black faces in as missing chapters of American history. To be clear, most people, African Americans and people of non-color alike, tend to engage the month at equal levels of indifference. That said, for many, Black history in a US context, typically begins with the usual slavery narrative:

1. Once upon a time Black people were slaves…
2. Civil War, blah-blah…
3. Civil Rights, blah-blah…
4. Now we finally have a Black president.
5. The End.

My claim is a small one: 

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BLACK HISTORY MONTH, Note I., “Naming”

One of the most common (and often offensive) questions that Americans sometimes ask a newly introduced African in this country is, “Oh, you are from Africa; what tribe are you from?” Not only do many Africans regard the connotation of the word “tribe” (along with words like “primitive,” “superstitious,” and “natives”) as derogatory, but most Africanist scholars have also come to regard the denotation of the word “tribe” as both imprecise and misleading. The static connotation of the word “tribe” cannot possibly reflect the intricacies of the ever-changing social group relationships. 

The term “tribe” was popularized by colonial authorities who identified African people by “tribe” in tax records, birth certificates, and on identification cards. Western scholars writing about Africa have done the same.

Africa’s small and large scale societies are much like the clans of Scotland or the villages of Ireland and Wales whose people are not called “tribal.” More appropriate terms are societies, ethnicities, classes or simply the name of the people such as the Yoruba, Hausa or Ibo who can be distinguished from others by virtue of their different languages, kinship systems, rituals, and traditions. Indeed, the larger of these peoples are often comprised of many subcultures, each speaking its own dialect.

Source: “The African Experience” -Khapoya

[A Poem]

We change nouns into verbs. 

But they still things even when they mere words.

Is that what I heard, or is that what you said?

Are those just words, or your voice in my head?

Get out of my head! Get off my mind!

You been in there a proper long time!

“No, I cannot. I will go, and I will come.

For I am not only in your head, I also live on your tongue.”

-Marco A n t o n i o M

…the structure of Platonic discourse itself forced those who used it to accept a particular concept of social order. … In the very syntax of our speech as we learn the English language, the justification of our ‘inferiority’ is embedded, and, what is more, we accept that fact as we ‘master’ the language.

-Dr. Marimba Ani, Yurugu

I will argue the negative. I do not say it. Gently the ancestors remind me, each time I hear the phrase, never to repeat it. Yet, somehow we know this. It whispers to us, if only but in a still small voice, its malevolence. Somehow the historical memory of our past glories and present indignities inform our moral consciousness of its malevolent subjectivity. We engage in escapades of white liberality hoping to expedite the dolor and shame, telling ourselves that “these are just words; only words.” But the provenance of this instinct places it outside of us. We have learned it from another: “an” - “other.” We have learned to dismiss the shame. When and where we can no longer hide it, we deploy discursive maneuvers of misdirection. Though we so often fail at signifying, yet we must. Our colonizer has imposed his language. And with this imposition came his ontology, his ways of being for us, about us, in us. We are not what we think we are. We take flight in hopes that we shall evade his vitriolic imaging of us. And our fear is legitimate because we know that for 500 years he has made it manifest, even upon our varied and beautiful bodies.  

“That’s ghetto!” we say. This statement is truncated in the audible. It is rarely complete in its speaking. For really what we mean is “That’s ghetto! That’s not me.” We do not remember Africa but we remember the plantation. And when we left the plantation we stepped into a ghetto. But then we find the ghetto, like the plantation before it, so very hard to leave — or do I mean escape? When we live in nice places and move, we say that we “left.” When we live in ghettos and move we say that we “got out.” One does not leave a ghetto, one must “get out,” right?

G-h-e-t-t-o… G-h-e-t  to… Get to… GET TO! 

As in GET TO another place! 

But where? 

Any place is better than here!

To say that something is “ghetto” is to suggest, indeed directly imply, that it is the cultural progeny of an obstreperous and debased group. We imagine that this group, uncivilized and immodest, has taken normative codes of behavior bequeathed to them by socioeconomic superiors and bastardized them. Thus, one can look ghetto, talk ghetto, act ghetto, and conclusively be ghetto. In this way, we continue to allow ourselves to — as my indigenous ancestors would assert — speak with the white man’s tongue. The master’s language is the master’s tool. It will form for him what he has desired and work only in his interest. It was designed for this purpose. 

Like Africans “singing” in Congo Square, like African “songs” in the cotton fields of despair. In d e s p a i r. For Africans the English language has always been a New World lexicon to facilitate our soul’s expression. We have found it woefully inadequate. Yes, we have. We fight it. We use it to create our Ebonic. We play with it. We morph it. We assign our own meanings. And try as we might, the colonizer’s voice yet ricochets inside our heads like a 500-year-long echo. Like the Lion King, we have forgotten who we are; content only to be not that… that… “ghetto” thing.

Occultation of the conflicts of interest is gained in their reduction from being struggles of highly complex matrices of power to comprehensible categories of ‘natural’ difference. The overbearing motif of this occultation is the exclusion of the African from the space of Western history, and the marginal inclusion of the Negro as negativity.

-Ronald Judy, (Dis)Forming the American Canon

For Judy occultation exist as a binary. It does much more than hold two divergent ideas at opposite ends of a spectrum, rather it conceals the one to displace the other. Here essentialized African-American never escapes the ghetto in the minds of the white masses. “Ghetto” becomes a reinscription, ever recasting African-Americans into the stereotypes created for them. What is more, they are expected to fit themselves into that space.

Spacial politics, that is, a group’s perceived social ownership of corporate space, is germane to any discussion of ghetto naming. Fundamental to owning slaves was the concomitant proprietorship of their environments, thoughts, and progeny. This is why Special Field Order #15 (Forty acres and a mule) was never going to materialize. The notion of turning land over to a former enslaved population, indeed a population who just prior did not own even their very bodies, was anathema in the minds of whites — even northern whites. This is why no one flinched when minorities were losing their homes in the mortgage crisis. This is why American banking institutions made sure, very sure, that Black soldiers returning home from WWII could not take full benefit of their G.I. Bills the way white soldiers could. This is why red lining was the law of the land. White American social cosmology, as if peering through a telescope, could see no spacial bodies for Blacks, save that of the ghetto. And these ghettoized spaces become the exotic, voyeuristic playgrounds for non-ghetto dwellers. Like visitors at a zoo, they gaze upon the tiger, marveling at her strength, astonished by her grace, in awe of her dignity, stunned by her natural beauty, all the while imagining that this zoo is somehow an appropriate place for her, and that she is happy there.

…white people understand this. If you cannot understand what is like to be a tiger in a zoo, I don’t know how you eva gon’ understand what it’s like to be a nigga in America.

-Kat Williams, It’s Pimpin‘ Pimpin‘

When someone utters, “that’s so ghetto,” realize they are issuing a proxy accusation which is embedded with meaning similar to the dehumanizing colonial settler ideas Fanon talked about. The speaker, in effect, declares People of Color…

…insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality.

-Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

And when they do, simply recriminate:

-What is a ghetto? 

-Where did it come from? 

-Who owns it? 

-How is its existence perpetuated? 

-Who lives there? 

-How did they get there? 

-How do they leave?

“You say, ‘I haven’t left anything in Africa.’ …you left your mind in Africa!”
-Malcolm X

With legitimized trepidation in each step, their soiled and bloodied feet, shackled with rusting iron at the ankle, marched from maritime prisons into a new reality — indeed a prison of sorts. This alternate reality entailed not only the enslavement of their bodies, but the degradation of their culture, erasure of their language, and evisceration of their spiritual lives. In the midst of our retentions we find our Black-selves in continual moments spiritual reclamation. Was not our most precious loss that of our memory, or the knowing of how to remember? African somas, culture, and politics have, from the beginning, been the enclaves of white appropriation for both control and profit.

Management of Black existence has always fused in compelling ways with white perceptions of Black social and intellectual life. When Jim Crow minstrel performers stepped on stage, faces painted black with burnt cork, they projected an image of believable Black life mainly because white-supremacist-created stereotypes, which were by definition of their construction, infused with meanings made palatable and profitable for white audiences.

But what does blackface minstrelsy look like in the twenty-first century? In times past I have argued that it looked like commercial hip hop; I still maintain this. But the current presidential election cycle has witnessed the Republican party render to Herman Cain a national rostrum wherewith to carry out blackface-like buffoonery on a national stage. Yet, concomitant with his shameful exit we also witness the xenophobic cultural rejection of the All-American Muslim television series. And it has become apparent that the average white Republican voter is still quite comfortable seeing People of Color subjugated and subservient to political agendas that sustain the interest of a white male ruling class elite (the 1%) — and whenever this can be facilitated by a venal figure with a black face all the better.

Revolutionary Black intellectuals like Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon have long traced the provenance and explained the prevalence of white colonial ideology presented in Black face.

“In order to assimilate and to experience the oppressor’s culture, the native has to leave certain of his intellectual possessions in pawn. These pledges include his adoption of the forms of thought of the colonialist bourgeoisie.”
-Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)

Not only is it necessary that your very political presence be denounced but even your image must be sequestered and re-managed, such that it be not merely arrested, but pressed into the service of a ruling class colonial order. With the issuing of Cain and attempted silencing of All-American Muslim the colonizers have declared that the scaffolds of power shall remain unchanged, while also maintaining a normative, though imaginary, representative aesthetic of America as essentially white and Christian. The deployment of Cain and bigoted denouncement of All-American Muslim signals yet another eradication of the political interest of those othered.

From intentional Black invisibility at “Slut Walks” and “Occupy” protest, to Black exploitation in the film The Help; from Herman Cain’s minstrel politics, to the ethnocentric disdain for Muslim-Americans, the colonial Right continues to vividly display to the nation and world what their sinister vision of the role those they seek to subjugate should be in this society. As we step forward into the new year we must remain sober and mindful of the necessity to regain the memories of who we were before we became something — or someone’s – else.

Be. Love.
Violate convention.
You are the only one of your kind.
Yet. You are many.
Be. Kind.
Why? No. Why not.
You. Have value.
What if we all loved. Ourselves.
Who informed you that you were of less value.
Why. Did you believe them?
They. Lied.
Love.
Be. Your. Self.

~Marco

Like a banal refrain in American discourse on Africa they ring out: death, disease, war torn, drought, famine, starvation, etc. The list could go on but it would not matter. As the humming of a fan on a hot summer’s day, we hear the Western refrain on Africa, yet, somehow we do not. That Africans starve, that they experience famine is common “knowledge”. But what if something is true at the very moment that it is untrue?

This is exactly the case with current mainstream reporting on the so-called drought induced famine in the Horn of Africa which is threatening the starvation of millions of Africans. We are led to believe that the current drought (which many specialist attribute to climate change) and enduring “tribal” [“ethnic” is the appropriate term] conflicts are the root causes of food shortages in the horn of Africa. Nothing could farther from the truth!

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