Nonwhite
Manhood in America
Race Culture Limits Freedom &
Speech
By Rudolph Lewis
Malcolm X
In his eulogy, Ossie Davis gave an exacting
name to that phenomena that caused such a variety of Negroes
(especially non Muslims) to be attracted to the person of
Malcolm X, namely, “manhood.”
Of course, in his eulogy, Davis becomes appropriately
poetic and bedrocks all subsequent altar building for the fallen
hero, by calling him our “Black Shining Prince.” Naturally,
few of us could fully flesh out the notion of Malcolm’s
majesty.
Malcolm, like Martin and Nathaniel, seemed
oblivious to the fears of common men. This fearlessness, this
daring, like Bruh Rabbit, Signifying Monkey, High John the
Conqueror, as well as John Henry was deep-seated in southern
Negro culture, flying high above terrorism and brutal repression. Malcolm was only one expression of a native,
indigenous need and desire and appreciation of resolute
manliness, in the presence of massive odds.
Malcolm expressed, exuded in body and words,
in public (for white people to hear) what at righteous times
Negroes only dramatized among themselves. It was a daring and a
revolutionary stance, revealing, it ran counter to all
expectation of public Negro speech.
Malcolm developed a “style to follow.” That
outrageous style related a particular vision of America
developed through poverty, violent repression, criminality, and
the black nationalism of Elijah Muhammad, within whom Malcolm
felt “true manhood” resided, that is, a fragile old man, a
mystic of great humility and defiance to America’s
centuries-reign of white supremacy.
A Stagolee, a hustler by training and career,
Malcolm preferred simplicity and directness. He discarded or
diminished in his public sermons that which he found useless,
namely, Elijah’s mysticism and humility, and with great
scorching arrogance emphasized Elijah’s defiance and black
“racialism.” His style was one of bitter sarcasm, laughable
exaggerations of the hypocrisy of race in America, global
analogies of manly responses to white racial repression.
As a humorist, a social critic, a
rationalist—Malcolm cleverly led us to devastating
conclusions, e.g., defiance to all corrupt authority, racial or
otherwise. He could have gone into showbiz like Chris Rock. He
was sufficiently self-educated to speak intelligently at all
levels of society, including matching wits with the very glib
and subtle James Baldwin, yet another daring style of black
manhood.
So there are these other traits—Malcolm’s
discipline and denial, his determination, his rise against the
odds, his persistence and his willingness to risk all for black
liberation in the face of threats against him and family, his
vision to enlarge the human family. It is Malcolm’s racial
tone of defiance, rather than these manly traits, that too many
Malcolm is remembered.
The black shell without inner substance.
Malcolm gained his spurs by making scathing
and often unfair attacks against Negro leadership, including Dr.
King. For Malcolm all that existed outside of the Nation of
Islam and its program fell short. That was Malcolm’s reality
and answer and Malcolm’s manly response to race in America,
namely, a Black separate nation. Black Independence. And
possibly a nebulous Pan-African socialism..
Malcolm’s answer was no more reasonable
than Martin’s philosophy of love and nonviolence, and his
ethical appeal to the consciousness of America. Malcolm’s
manhood, for me, was no more vital and enlightening than that of
Martin, despite whatever protests Ossie may have had on his
ranking. Of course, his smiling militancy was the rage of the
time in some quarters. Malcolm concluded that the March on
Washington gained nothing. Mocked it. Viewed the most respected
Negro leaders as traitors to the cause. That is the problem with
the bestowal of sainthood, so many chinks that cannot be ignored
by skewed praise.
So what are academics, politicians, pundits,
and corporate execs loving in Malcolm, today? Malcolm like
Martin has become institutions (supported by organizations and
money that Malcolm would have despised), and thus Malcolm has
become comfortable, conservative, corporate (a business
opportunity), a Republican. As Amin Sharif, has writtem, “Malcolm
is dead!” His integrity and dignity have been scattered to
the winds that one can barely hear his sarcasm toward black and
white hypocrisy.
Jack Johnson
Defining black manhood has always been a
great enterprise in America, at least, since the 1660s when
Englishmen began to codify Africans as slaves by nature, and as
primitives with the the potential to flower under Christianity
like Stowe’s Uncle Tom, so exaggeratedly Christian that even a
pious Baptist like John Brown scorned to pay homage to such
imaginative claptrap and sterility.
Jack Johnson wanted his epitaph, people to recall, "I was a
man."
For most Americans black manhood is defined
at a distance—by the evening news, by sitcoms, and, lately, by
documentaries. The violent brutal Negro remains a hit, along
with Steppin Fetchit and other clownish comics and oversexed
athletes with over-sized shoes. Documentaries, however, possess
the notion that we are getting the “truth of things,” the
real deal, the real McCoy. Most of us, however, lack schooling
in the Uses of Media and Media Criticism and how filmmakers use
film to shape how we think and how we should think. That is,
most of us are subject to thought manipulation without giving
thought to the poisons our consciousness digests by these shapers
of image and story.
PBS offers us Ken Burns’ Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise of Jack Johnson,
which Amin Sharif’s calls a “courageous
undertaking.” Why is it courageous to tell a story
about a black boxer, long forgotten and disregarded? Of course,
the story is titillating, daring, threatening white American
taboos. Kobe Bryant, booed at the 2005 All Star Game, is not the
first black man challenged and demeaned because of liaison
with enterprising white women, nor "The Juice" freed
on a rhyme. Jack Johnson also seized the pleasures and
advantages of power and wealth, seemingly thoughtless of the
outcome.
And
he paid the price. Doubtless Ken Burns, as Sharif reminds us,
should be praised for bringing such a controversial figure as
Jack “The WhoreMonger” Johnson into our living rooms and
bedrooms. The classical way of dealing with such scoundrels and
violators of white propriety, such men as Jack, is to kill them
off, like in The Birth of a Nation" or “The Long Green
Mile”—in the latter, the "nigger" violated white
children and a white woman, he had to die, even though he tried
to save their lives. And how very convenient he desires
his own death, a body realizing its unworthiness of God's
miracles!
Burns
documentary ostensibly ends with Jack Johnson’s glove
shielding his eyes from the sun’s white rays, he on his back,
defeated. White Supremacy thus restored by the fists of Jess
Willard. Anti-climatic is Johnson’s submission to America’s
prison system and the twenty or thirty remaining years of his
life. Jack took it all in good humor. But, of course, it was all
down hill in his post-prison years. The flame of vitality,
wealth, and fame died on the canvas, the dragon of black
sexuality symbolically destroyed.
Every artist must limit his subject and
focus. One cannot say everything. But, like Amin Sharif, I sense
a “lacking” in Ken Burns’
Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise of Jack Johnson.
There’s something amiss, as if the story was not fully
told, or rather easily told, to a white middle-class
(Hollywood-inured and anemic) audience.
Maybe, as commonly explained, it is the black man’s
“touchiness,” an irrational element so ubiquitous America
has created a corporate prison industry to restrain such
indignation.
Good
white Americans still praise Gone with the Wind, in its
day, our reminder how much Birth of a Nation is yet
adored, at times for its effective techniques and then for its
assertions of a God-ordered world—whites
on top and blacks in their place of service. That is how the
South still wants to recall its past—all
is well in the best of all possible worlds. Here whiteness is
beautiful, extraordinarily innocent, pure, noble, and generous
in its rewards, bountiful for those willing to play to go along
with the fiction.
Ken
Burns’ use of W.E.B. Du Bois’ term “unforgivable
blackness” is deceptive. For the core story of Jack Johnson's
life asserts only peripherally his “blackness.” Johnson
challenged the defining power of whites to define “black
manhood.” That was his true battle, and at that he was a
slugger to the end. The white girls were a sideshow to the real
drama of his existential struggle for his balls, not the main
stage of Johnson's imagination or sympathy, as Styron tried to
recast what he viewed as a self-hating Nathaniel Turner of
Southampton County.
In
America since the 1660s white
America’s best men have restricted and attempted to define
“black manhood” by law, custom, terror, incarceration,
deportation, and murder. Thus after Jack’s defeat Ken Burns
has little concern for Johnson’s life, for his lifestyle can
no longer be used as a political threat, intentional or
unintentionally. In a London letter response to his own slave
Benjamin Franklin said that he could tolerate him fairly well if
he looked upon him with one eye and hear him with one ear. This
white male uneasiness with black manhood (or lack of it) has
appeared lately with the brawl in Detroit and Randy Moss, in
effect, telling the opposition's fans to kiss his ass.
But a
man is not dead until he dies. Ken Burns focused, however, only
on Jack Johnson’s public life and how it challenged white
America’s civil religion of White Supremacy. As Amin Sharif
points out, Burns displaces or diminishes the needed context for
an informative discussion of the history of governmental,
institutional, and conspiratorial efforts to make black men less
than white men and their repressive acts to freeze them in
positions of dependency.
In
effect, Ken Burns has no more insight into black manhood or its
struggles than William Styron. Neither knows or sympathizes with
the existential reality of black male repression in America.
Ward Churchill
Ward Churchill is an American Indian
professor at the University of Colorado who wrote a "gut-wrenching"
essay about the 9/11 tragedy on the day that it happened and
posted it on the internet. As a result of his academic
questioning of the narrative of government power, he has been
threatened by UC, the government of Colorado. and by the
denunciation of a corps of pundits and politicians. The networks
refuse to let him speak or explain himself for fear he may be
infectious.
Churchill asks us to consider the attacks on
the Twin Towers and the Pentagon as other than through the lens,
the mantra of the corporate media (and its wealthy talking
heads) as acts “senseless” and “attacks on democracy.”
In short he asks us to humanize the 9/11 tragedy, to place it in
the political history of America's political and
military engagement of Iraq and other countries and other
peoples. From the Gulf War to Bush’s War on Iraq, Churchill
claims that over a half million Iraqi children died, and another
half million adults as a result of US surgical bombing of water
and sewage facilities in Iraq and then the subsequent isolation
and stifling of Iraq's economy, by restricting the sell of its
cash resource, oil.
Churchill argues the Saudi terrorists indeed
had a purpose and that they made use of Pentagon tactics and
that their justification for the death of civilians was in line
with State Department’s rationale of “collateral damage.”
Fallujah was destroyed and we Americans have shed not one tear
for the people of Fallujah and their conquest by American
marines. Churchill refuses to let America off the responsibility
hook, to allow the free reign of smug conservative politicians
and pundits to shape all public thinking into a jingoistic and
sentimental “support for the troops,” American democracy and
the rule of law.
The Mideast Muslim response in the form of
al-Quaeda and its attack on the monetary and military centers of
America are not altogether surprising and unreasonable, for
Churchill, his remark reminding us of Malcolm's statement on the
assassination of JFK. As
Churchill describes it:
|
All of those chickens came home to
roost [on 9/11], because there had never really been a
response in-kind in all that entire grisly history. It
was sort of manifested in the symbol of those twin
towers at the foot of something called Wall Street. And
Wall Street takes its name from the enclosure of the
slave compound for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. So
now there's a bunch of those ghosts, too. All the
symbolism is confluent [at Ground Zero] . . . |
Churchill
does not justify the devastating attack of 9/11 nor the death of
men, women, and children unconnected with the exercise of US
global power. But those Twin Towers “technocrats” like
Eichmann and his “technicians of empire” (corporate lawyers
and execs, the export trade managers) are they not part and
parcel of the apparatus of US global military and political
repression? Are all these too eligible for the status of
collateral damage? Does not Arab Muslim "manhood"
require even of well-educated and reasonable men to stand and
fight for Muslim culture and independence, without interference
of American military and financial largesse, by any means
necessary? Are such men monsters?
Because
of such sharp questions, American media and politicians have
sought to isolate Mr. Churchill, threaten his employment, and
some conservatives have called for charges of treason and his
death. All of these terror attacks on Churchill’s character
and comfort and none are shocked by such rabid responses in an
America which vaunts its freedom of speech (and academic speech)
and assembly. But our ideals and promoted freedoms have always
been for a precious few and for those of the demos who
are willing to walk in lock step with their betters. Ward
Churchill refused to play follow the leader, like those
hillbillies in Abu Grahib.
We
wonder how many of those who love Malcolm are willing to stand
in defense of Ward Churchill. How many black politicians and
pundits now ready to build altars for Malcolm will defend
Churchill’s right to be a gadfly in the sterile and
self-righteous atmosphere of American politics and its emphasis
on war and greed? Surely, Malcolm would embrace Churchill
in his efforts to enrich the American dialogue, and his
unwilling integrity to be satisfied, like so many immigrants,
with being an honorary white man.
*
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 |
My Life and Battles
By Jack Johnson
African American historian Gerald
Early refers to Jack Johnson
(1878–1946), the first African
American heavyweight champion of the
world, as “the first
African-American pop culture icon.”
Johnson is a seminal and iconic
figure in the history of race and
sport in America.
My Life and Battles is the
translation of a memoir by Johnson
that was published in French, has
never before been translated, and is
virtually unknown.
It covers Johnson’s colorful life,
both inside and outside the ring, up
to and including his famous defeat
of Jim Jeffries in Reno, Nevada, on
July 4, 1910, in one of the iconic
ring battles of the early twentieth
century. In addition to the fights
themselves the memoir recounts,
among many other things, Johnson’s
brief and amusing career as a local
politician and provides portraits of
some of the most famous boxers of
the 1900–1915 era. |
Johnson comments
explicitly on race and “the color line” in
boxing and in American society at large in
ways that he probably would not have in a
publication destined for an American reading
public. The text constitutes genuinely new,
previously unavailable material and will be
of great interest for the many readers
intrigued by Jack Johnson.
In addition to providing
information about Johnson’s life, it is a
fascinating exercise in self-mythologizing
that provides substantial insights into how
Johnson perceived himself and wished to be
perceived by others. Johnson’s personal
voice comes through clearly—brash, clever,
theatrical, and invariably charming. The
memoir makes it easy to see how and why
Johnson served as an important role model
for Muhammad Ali and why so many have
compared the two. With a foreword by
Geoffrey C. Ward. Translated from the
French by Christopher Rivers
*
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|
Unforgivable Blackness
The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson
By Geoffrey C. Ward
Johnson (1878–1946), boxing's first
black heavyweight champion, was a
lightning rod for controversy in
early 20th-century America. Even
many of his fellow African-Americans
resented his unapologetic dominance
of the ring and steady succession of
white girlfriends and wives, viewing
his behavior as a setback to race
relations.
Ward (A First-Class Temperament)
depicts the fear and resentment
Johnson spurred in white Americans
in voluminous detail that may
startle modern readers in its
frankness. Contemporary journalists
regularly referred to Johnson as a
"nigger" and openly advocated his
pummeling at white hands, though
ample quotations from supporters in
the Negro press balance the
perspective. |
 |
Ward first
documents the obstacles the boxing world threw
in Johnson's path (including prolonged refusals
by top white boxers to fight against him), and
then probes the government's prosecution of the
champ under the Mann Act (which banned the
interstate transport of females for "immoral
purposes") for taking his girlfriends across
state lines. Ward brings his award-winning
biographical skills to this sympathetic
portrayal, which practically bursts with his
research—at times almost every page has its own
footnote. Though the narrative drags slightly in
Johnson's declining years, the champion's
stubborn, uncompromising personality never lets
up. Even readers who don't consider this a
knockout will concede Ward a victory on points.
Photos—
Publishers Weekly
*
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|
|
Lynchsong
By Lorraine Hansberry
I can hear Rosalee
See the eyes of Willie McGee
My mother told me about
Lynchings
My mother told me about
The dark nights
And dirt roads
And torch lights
And lynch robes
The
faces of men
Laughing white
Faces of men
Dead in the night
sorrow night
and a
sorrow night
1951
Source:
AmericanLynching |
* * *
* *
 |
Writer Lorraine Hansberry's
sober eulogy of the death of Willie McGee weighed heavy on the
hearts and minds of the American Left. On May 8, 1951, a crowd of
five hundred lingered outside the courthouse of Laurel, Mississippi,
to witness the execution of yet another black man convicted for
allegedly raping a white woman. His 1945 lightning trial resulted in
a guilty conviction delivered in less than two and a half minutes by
an all-white, male jury, setting off a heated five-year legal
struggle that drew national headlines. Despite an aggressive appeals
defense team who attempted every legal maneuver in the book, the US
Supreme Court ultimately chose not to intervene. With the legal
lynching of the Martinsville Seven in February, Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg's conviction in March, followed by the execution of McGee
in May, 1951 was a bad year for Left-leaning lawyers (Parrish 1979;
Rise 1995). Most discouraging, national news sources like the New
York Times and Life magazine red-baited the "Save Willie
McGee" campaign and—as Life reported—its "imported" lawyers (Popham
1951a; Life 1951). Few felt McGee's passing with as heavy a heart as
his chief counsel, thirty-one-year-old Bella Abzug. |
Before Abzug became a representative in
Congress and a leader in the peace and women's movements, she confronted the
Southern political and legal system at the height of the early Cold War.
Retained in 1948 by the Civil Rights Congress (CRC)—a New York-headquartered
Popular Front legal defense organization—the novice labor lawyer honed her civil
rights . . .
Source:
https://Litigation-Essentials.LexisNexis
* * *
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 |
Debt: The First 5,000 Years
By David Graeber
Before there was money, there was debt. Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it. Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy. Economist Glenn Loury /Criminalizing a Race
|
* * * * *
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
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 |
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
* *
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
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Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
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Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
updated 28
March 2008
|
