Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part V

Lately I've been thinking a lot about American slavery.  Not quite sure why, perhaps it's where the mind goes when reading or listening to commentary about the 1963 March on Washington.  Perhaps it is, as I alluded to before, being in Myrtle Beach and Pawley's Island in the summer.  The other day a friend related a story about the lives of her forefathers.  She is a Yankee, a tribe that I hadn't encountered with any frequency until I moved here.  Her family has probably been here as long as Europeans settled these lands.  In her youth she read a history of her ancestors' town (located in the lobster's tail of Massachusetts).  It was published shortly after the Civil War (in part to make sense of the newly re-ordered Republic) and she found it remarkable for the book's candor about the North's complicity in chattel slavery.

The history's foreword tells a story about a slave named Pomp who one day walked to the water's edge with a parcel of food, laid the parcel down and then hanged himself facing the sea.  He had brought the food for the journey home and he faced the sea because home was across the vast Atlantic.

Back in the mid 1990's I created The Negros Burial Ground with composer Leroy Jenkins.  It was inspired by the discovery of the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan.  In order to write the piece I researched 17th through 19th century New York history.  Prior to manumission (in 1829) New York benefitted from not only the sale of slaves, but the owning of slaves in the city and country.  It wasn't like the antebellum South with its plantations.  A farmer may have had 2-3 slaves, an affluent urban householder a few more.   Armed with that knowledge I wrote a libretto that was fueled by my imagining the lives and deaths of enslaved Africans in New York City, and contemporary victims of police violence (Michael Stewart, Eddie Perry, and Eleanor Bumpurs).  They became wanderers in the Land of the Dead struggling to go home.

To make a long story short, a shitstorm ensued.  (I'm here to tell you that the best colon cleanser ever is sheer unmitigated terror.)  Were it not for the courage and vision of The Kitchen's Laureen Amazeen and John Maxwell Hobbs, of my collaborators Leroy Jenkins (now deceased) and the playwright and director Dominic Taylor, this work would never have been seen.  And in its totality it is a beautiful thing.  We were never able to mount a fully staged production.  What we presented at The Kitchen was an oratorio version.  I am grateful for that.

The poem that follows in my next post was the lyric for what became "What Did Thy Do to Thy Master?"  I read it today and can't help but think of Trayvon Martin.  Selah. 

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part IV

Remember, I said that I was almost finished.  From one of my favorite blogs, The Phil Dyess-Nugent Experience, There's No Riot Going On.  He's uniformly brilliant in his analyses of American culture, literature and politics.  I don't get there often enough.

And, from a humane perspective, and it dovetails with the work our own West River community is doing, a commentary by Michel Martin, on NPR's Tell Me More an audio essay entitled Is It Time To See Each Other's Tears?

Word.
 

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part III

I'm almost finished.  One thing that saddens me is that as we've turned into an almost entirely secular culture, the voices speaking about the morality of actions exits, or at least merely whispers in, the public square.  In it's place is legalistic hair-splitting, high school debate tactics deracinated of any purpose other than to dominate an opponent.  Amy Davidson posted a thoughtful piece, What Should Trayvon Martin Have Done?, and for me the most valuable byproduct of it is a post by someone tagged theoutsider that comes as close to anything I've read so far of looking at what happened from a moral dimension:

OK, there are a lot of things that bother me about this case, but the thing that's getting to me the most right now is that a lot of people, when talking about how Martin behaved or should have behaved, are talking about him as though he was a fully-fledged adult. I don't personally believe he was a helpless innocent child, but he was also not a fully-grown man. And the reason I find this so irritating is because there are so many laws - not just in America but in many countries - which are predicated on the idea that until a person reaches a certain age (16, 18, 21, whatever) they are not allowed to do certain things largely because they lack the capacity to make good judgements in certain situations. It is assumed (sometimes correctly) that most people cannot make responsible judgements about things like alcohol, driving, sex, smoking, and enlisting until they reach a particular age.

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part II

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Trayvon Martin and the Irony of American Justice.  For me it's this:
 

That conclusion should not offer you security or comfort. It should not leave you secure in the wisdom of our laws. On the contrary, it should greatly trouble you. But if you are simply focusing on what happened in the court-room, then you have been head-faked by history and bought into a idea of fairness which can not possibly exist.

The injustice inherent in the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was not authored by a jury given a weak case. The jury's performance may be the least disturbing aspect of this entire affair. The injustice was authored by a country which has taken as its policy, for the lionshare of its history, to erect a pariah class. (n.b.: emphasis mine)  The killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is not an error in programming. It is the correct result of forces we set in motion years ago and have done very little to arrest.

 And, for the record, yes, OJ was guilty as hell.
 

 

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet

When I turned on the radio this morning one of the first things I learned is that George Zimmerman had been acquitted.  I was not surprised.  Long ago I learned that criminal law -- either prosecutorial or defensive -- has little to do with ethics.  I was about to say justice but even that term is loaded.

After have read a few of the past days' postings and the subsequent comments I stopped.  There is very, very little more to be learned from the immediate commentary and too many people commenting think they know 1) exactly what happened and 2) that they passed the Florida bar and are qualified to practice law.  But here are a few, I'll call them psychosocial, thoughts: 

1. Males fight.  And fights escalate.  The presence of a knife or a gun changes the dynamic and it allows one of the fighters to become more aggressive, or at the very least turn defense into disproportionate offense.  When that occurs, 2 things happen:  a) one of the aggressors de-escalates so much so that both parties internal "threat" switch is turned off, or b) extraordinary physical harm and/or death happens to the unarmed fighter.
2. Black males are the King-Kong of the American landscape.  And we all know it.  Charles Stuart knew it.  Susan Smith knew it.  Both used that knowledge to great effect.  Extreme examples, I know, but there was little or no initial skepticism of their claims in each instance that black men had been the perpetrators of the crime because it seemed so plausible.
3. A 17 year old kid is dead.  With an acquittal of the man who killed him, how do you possibly square that circle in a moral universe?

Slapstick is to Violence as Vigilantism is to Policing