Not long ago, Tavis Smiley did something I would not have expected, which is rare. He announced that he was discontinuing his annual State of the Black Union conferences. These have been powwows where the Usual Suspects are invited to make the usual points: roughly decrying racism while genuflecting to the radical idea that people are responsible for repairing their own culture too. They have had black conservatives sprinkled in for “balance,” to be sure, but we all know the drill.
For Smiley to actually allow an end point to this series was bracingly honest – he admitted that these days there are so many more outlets for black discussion that an annual event like that one was redundant. It was a gesture rather than an action.
I should have known that wouldn’t last, I guess. Now, Smiley is convening, basically, another State of the Black Union conference – but this time, in opposition to black leaders who understand that President Obama cannot put forth a “black” agenda as opposed to one that helps suffering Americans in general.
So what Smiley is suggesting, I take it, is that Obama is supposed to propose and shepherd into fruition programs designed to help the black poor but not the white poor. There will be more resources allocated to help the black poor than the white poor – because while a high tide lifts all boats “the boats didn’t sink at the same time” – in other words, we are to base this argument on history. And – Obama is supposed to get legislation of this type past Congress as currently configured.
Really, people – this is kabuki. It’s also small-spirited: who can call themselves representing black people, progress on race, and the unity of humanity by urging that Barack Obama narrow his focus on poverty to the poverty of “His Own People”? Oh, of course no one espouses ignoring non-black poverty entirely – but the point is meaningless. Upon what grounds can we urge that black people even get lots more help, in America in 2010?
But more to the point: who sincerely thinks anything concrete could come out of this “discussion” anyway?
I do know what will come out of it. I’ve been doing the race thing in my spare time for ten years now and it gets me to thinking – what has changed since then? A lot – but it’s hard to say any of it has had anything to do with these eternal panel-style discussions, whether hosted by Smiley or not. They are so similar to one another that an anthropologist would readily designate them not as dicussions but as rites: everybody goes through the same motions in the same ways – but it’s unclear exactly what God is being appeased, or more mundanely, what purpose is being served.
The first event like this I did was ten years ago now, at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The last one I did was two months ago in Houston. Both were broadcast by MSNBC – and I was struck by the extent to which they were the exact same event even beyond the shared network.
The discussion hit almost all of the same themes – if reading transcripts with the participants’ names effaced (because since 2000 some lights have faded while others have come to the fore), the only way you would know that one event was in 2010 and the other was in 2000 was the discussion of Obama (in 2000 the space for that was taken up by Whether Hiphop is Bad). Both discussions were led by a game but slightly bemused white host, Brian Williams in 00, Chris Matthews in 10. In both, there were two tiers of participants, some up on stage and others seated in the front row of the auditorium and urged to stand up and speak two or three times as the spirit moved them (in 00 I was one of them; ten years later I get to be on stage). Both discussions came down to assailing racism while also speaking up for responsibility, the combination of which seems to strike many as “deep.”
Based on my experience, I’ll take a guess as to how Smiley’s We Count! The Black Agenda is the American Agenda will go. I know I’m going out on a limb here. Stay with me, this is a little complex: I venture that a major thread of the discussion will be the observation that although we have a black President, racial disparities persist in America. Never mind that the number of people attending or watching the event on TV who won’t already be aware of this could barely fill a minivan.
And then some other dependables at events like these – speakers and the audience will respond with especial fervor to points made with, at the finish, an edgy intonation conveying a streety brand of indignation. The actual content of the utterance will be of minor importance. I have heard black audiences whipped up by this aspect of melody alone when what was said was leftist, conservative, in the middle, or utterly nonsensical – sometimes I suspect it would work if somebody read from a phone book.
There will be a token card-carrying conservative who gets jeered. In 2000 I was mystified that Dinesh D’Souza participated; two months ago I was similarly baffled as to why Leslie Sanchez was interested. Afterwards, the word in the lobby and green room will be that the event was “great,” a “real discussion,” and so on. Everyone will go back to their hotel rooms and fly out the next morning to go back to whatever they usually do. And the discussion, “great” though it supposedly was, will cause not the slightest change in the life of a single human being anywhere on earth.
The question is: what purpose will this discussion serve? Really, what will the goal be? I’m not interested in recreational speculations as to Smiley’s possible ulterior motives, nor do I think anyone is morally wrong to participate in such events or to seek the exposure. But if the idea is that the event is to serve some higher purpose, if the idea is that the event is important in any real way, what purpose can it serve?
It’s time to start asking this question about these “summits” and “discussions.” I’m going to wait for a year after this “discussion.” A whole year – that’s long enough to expect at least some intimation of results. In March of 2011, late March to be precise, I am going to evaluate whether We Count! The Black Agenda is the American Agenda has had any effect on the lives of black people.
I’m going to be as fair as possible. Obviously I have a suspicion how this is going to come out, but I’m going to go at it from a scientific frame of mind. I’m going to do my evaluation putting myself in the mind of someone who wants to show that there was an effect. That will include that I will allow evidence that something is going to happen even if it hasn’t yet – as long as it can be shown pretty clearly that the We Count! “discussion” people had in Chicago a year ago was a part of the reason why.
And if I can really find some effect, I will broadcast it, right here. If the discussion these people have actually helps determine what happens in the White House, I will openly admit it and go from there.
But if I find no such evidence, then I will suggest a moratorium on these black panel discussions, by Smiley or anyone else. Frankly I already do, hereby, make said suggestion. CNN should let the annual specials go. Race-related organizations seeking to publicize themselves should focus their panels on something besides “America in the Obama Era” – i.e. take a look at sincerely constructive ways of helping black people in America as we know it. Media people should stop pretending that these panel affairs are news.
I would suggest letting them go for five years at least – to give people a chance to think some new thoughts, to let the routines too many now do at these events practically by rote a chance to fade in the mind.
Otherwise, why waste the poor interns’ and production assistants’ time making them do detailed pre-interviews with each of the participants that massively overshoot the level of detail the discussion will entail? Why spend the money to rent the space or to buy the food? And – why distract people into the always tempting notion that talking with an edge is, itself, an action?
Might not some of the people enthusiastic over “events” like these ask themselves: Do you feel that if you are not part of a “black agenda” then you don’t have an agenda at all? Do you feel a kind of emptiness at the thought of regarding yourself as just American? No, I am not sounding a corny note about how we’re all just people – see my support of using black American rather than African-American. But is there in these people perhaps a discomfort with the idea of advocating for poor blacks by advocating just for the poor? Do they feel that this leaves them unrooted? Do they feel that nothing has really happened if there isn’t a sense of “payback,” even if things happen?
If so, we need to have panels about that, because that is a serious problem – and will get no one anywhere at all.
In any case, I do feel confident enough in my suspicion as to whether this event will affect anything real to make this suggestion. Shouldn’t they just have a party?
I mean it. It should be the kind of party where, as at many family reunions, there’s a microphone somewhere to the side of the band where people go up as they please to introduce themselves. Each person invited to this “discussion” could say their name and then say some tart things about racism, Clarence Thomas, or the failed legacy of Brown v. the Board of Education with edgy, percussive intonation and whip everybody up. It’d make for great television.
All anyone would be expecting from it, whether participating or watching, would be entertainment – which would be, at least, honest.
So the bloom is off the rose. President Obama’s Grant Park oration now seems as antique a moment as Ronald Reagan telling us it was “Morning in America.” As glorious as it felt at the time, it was longer on drama than substance.
Just why, with the state of the nation as it is now (and was then), did we suppose that anyone could “bring us together”? It was, I always thought, an unspoken idea that Obama’s “diversity” somehow enhanced his substance, his Mensch-liness. We were to think of him, as a member of a group suffering discrimination and especially as one also half-white, as a stand-in for the conscience of the nation, tempered into a kind of wisdom by the wells of strength required to endure abuse.
Well, what with the Tea Partiers calling for his head on one side and lefties feeling burned on the other, I guess that didn’t work out. Yet that doesn’t mean that the Obama presidency, just because it won’t be about drama, will offer nothing to inspire. Change can happen slowly and in fact usually does. That renders it neither less interesting nor less important.
Example: Obama is well on his way to becoming an Education President in the true sense. No, all of America’s public schools will not be turning into lushly funded academies churning out bright-eyed, civicly-engaged, readaholic yet well-rounded Übercitizens anytime soon, if ever. But great stuff is happening.
It’s happening both in and beyond Washington, and the real “coming together” that needs to happen is between these things – something much more plausible than a nationwide rebirth of nonpartisan ideology.
Take, for example, the National Center on Education and the Economy’s plan to have eight states experiment with allowing public school students to graduate after tenth grade upon finishing clearly stated requirements, and to then go on to community college. The states will have pilot schools using this program just two autumns from now.
The first benefit here is that it will allow students who don’t want to be in school to get out sooner. Let’s face it – a great many will always not want to be in school. Book learning is not everybody’s cup of tea (chalk it up to Multiple Intelligences if you prefer). Or, imagine this option in crummy schools almost no one would want to stay in any longer than necessary. The fourth season of The Wire, for example, is commonly received as an earnest depiction of the plight of inner city kids in lousy public schools. Well, if so, imagine an alternate universe where some of those kids could be directed to study for some board exams and get out of there two years early. No, their poverty would not have to bar them from help studying -- think of the services available to poor New York kids trying to place into top public schools, and what an easy sell funding them would be for philanthropists (such as the Gates Foundation, who are bankrolling this tenth-grade-and-out experiment).
But then there’s more. If students are to graduate after tenth grade, this inherently requires the formulation of a definite and viable curriculum for students to have mastered before moving on at the tender age of 16. Those who choose this track will have a concrete task before them of studying for the board exams.
Clearly having to give a tenth-grade education so much more bang for the buck will require better teaching than the average American public school student gets today. As it happens, this dovetails nicely with the growing clout that improving teacher assessment has gained over the past year in education circles. Nobody will be writing any songs about it or exclaiming about how they didn’t expect to see it in their lifetime, but something big is happening.
For one, Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top program includes funds for teacher assessment. And then, right on time, American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten has actually openly come out in favor of stressing teacher assessment. She would say, one suspects, that she has never been against it -- in a speech a month ago she cited a poll of teachers showing that 69% agreed with prioritizing teacher assessment over union concerns. But this is a different language from the one that Weingarten has been talking until recently. There is a sea change afoot here, one not belied by any polite, parenthetical statements from Weingarten or anyone else along the lines of “Of course I think it’s important to evaluate teachers, but ...” We all do the parenthetical to be polite all day every day.
And on top of this, the old idea that teacher assessment is a mysterious business largely due to elements of chemistry and charisma unsusceptible to valid measurement is falling apart. Teach for America has been doing survey work on their own teachers over the past twenty years – ones whose work in the trenches of tough-nut inner city populations makes them perfect subjects of analysis – and has identified what makes for a good teacher (this Atlantic article was especially good on this).
All of this together could signal a paradigm shift – i.e. the way history really happens. The Tea Partiers may make for better YouTube, but I’m more interested in this stuff. Race to the Top, in general, may not be perfect, but last time I checked, No Child Left Behind was no good because it focused too much on just reading and math, shunted too much attention to “teaching to the test,” and wasn’t enforceable.
Race to the Top is an attempt to get at these problems – handiest is going from NLCB’s “if you don’t improve, you might get shut down” to RTTT’s “if you don’t improve you don’t get any extra money.” If providing a carrot along with the stick is considered common wisdom on Iran, surely the argument applies to schools.
It’s also easy to miss what’s special about our own times once the novel becomes normal. Think about how otherworldly it would have sounded just ten years ago that any Presdiential administration would commit itself, no matter how effectively, to narrowing the test score gap between black and white students? I recall a time when it was considered fresh and wise to object to calling attention to that gap at all (“..because what are we ‘implying’ ...?!?!” the questioner would pose).
And finally, the NCEE experiment can serve as a needed wake-up call to America about the value of community colleges, and more specifically, vocational training. One of the most ironically damaging aspects of the GI Bill in the 1940s was the notion, now so deeply entrenched in the American soul as to seem not an opinion at all, that four years of a liberal arts education at a university is a default experience for people after high school, and that to not do this is opt for, or be saddled with, the lowlier fate of “Not Going To College.”
In this era when we so often bemoan the plight of uneducated young men, it is high time we returned to championing vocational education as America used to – and once again the Obama Administration is on it, with its plan to put 12 billion dollars into community colleges. Speculating over whether Sarah Palin will run for President or how much the Tea Partiers don’t like Obama and why has a certain oomph, to be sure. But in the long run, what will be much more important to the fate of America will be a new awareness that learning how to fit a house with central air conditioning is as worthy a pursuit after high school as getting a BA in English.
Mark Tucker, the head of the NCEE, nails it: “We’ve looked at schools all over the world, and if you walk into a high school in the countries that use these board exams, you’ll see kids working hard, whether they want to be a carpenter or a brain surgeon.” If we really believe that Yes, We Can do anything – or if we really want to at least try to do anything – we must shed the tacit notion that we are doing something by intoning “Manufacturing jobs are shrinking and we have to get these people jobs.” The intonation should be “We must shunt people into community colleges and other vocational training institutions to train them for the jobs that exist” (and, I would add, the more that will exist when our current economic morass clears). The new funding for community colleges, and a plan like the NCEE’s, gives concrete reason to try thinking in these new ways.
There is an opportunity here for American education to be better than it has been not only over the past forty years but, really, ever. In downplaying what’s special in our present we romanticize the past as well. Here is Betty Smith in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (a novel that really does still kick) on what public school was like in Brooklyn a hundred years ago last year, when dropout rates were rampant just as they are now – the grandpa who speaks staunchly about how rigorous his education was back in the day is often leaving out how many of his classmates weren’t around by graduation.
Brutalizing is the only adjective for the public schools of that district around 1908 and 1909. Child psychology had not been heard of in Williamsburg in those days. ... Few teachers had the true vocation for their work. They taught because it was one of the few jobs open to them; because they had a long summer vacation; because they got a pension when they retired.
I could have pulled that journalistic trick of opening this piece with that passage and doing a “Last week in Baltimore? As a matter of fact, that was written way back in ...” Little has really changed. Can we do better than that? Lately, despite distracting noises of other kinds, there is all reason to think that Yes, We Can.
The figures from the American Community Survey just in are more than crunched numbers. They suggest that this might be a good year for a certain term now familiar in American parlance to be, if not consigned to history, reassigned.
Namely, as of now, almost 1 in 10 black people are foreign-born. About 1 in 30 are from Africa. Which means that they are--you see where I’m going--African American in the true sense. Certainly a truer sense--true as in making sense--than Tracy Morgan, Donna Brazile, Jesse Jackson, or Mo’Nique.
Back in the day--1970, to be exact--there were only about 10,000 African-born people in the United States. I kind of remember that: By that time I, even living in a populous Northeastern city, had met a single African. And it was a novelty--the accent, the clothes, what we would today call the sheer “diversity” of the man.
Last year the number of Africans here topped a million, and we could use that as a numerically convenient time to let go of the conceit we have gotten used to over the past twenty years, that black people born here are ethnically hyphenated people of half “African” ancestry.
It just doesn’t go through. The black American does not look back on a childhood in the African “old country.” The black American speaks English natively, not Twi or Hausa (and in truth, it’s possible that not a single slave brought to the United States spoke Swahili). Barely a black American alive today knows anyone who ever even knew a slave born in Africa.
It’d be one thing if it were a hundred years ago and lots of black people still had parents who had been born into slavery and grandparents who actually “spoke African,” as it was sometimes put. But this is a very different time.
A possible objection, I imagine, is that native-born blacks are African in a “different” way than actual African immigrants--but this would be a feint rather than an argument: clearly, the proper formulation, if we are to put it on the table, is that native-born blacks are African to a much lesser extent than African immigrants. In truth, a black man from Jacksonville has more in common with a white one from Tucson than he does with a man three years out of Senegal.
And I would argue that native-born blacks are so vastly less “African” than actual Africans that calling ourselves “African American” is not only illogical but almost disrespectful to African immigrants. Here are people who were born in Africa, speak African languages, eat African food, dance in African ways, remember African stories, and will spiritually always be a part of Africa--and we stand up and insist that we, too, are “African” because Jesse Jackson said so?
After all, most of us don’t feel meaningfully “African” in the least. Sure, we’ve gotten used to saying “African American,” but it has become a kind of frozen expression, like, indeed ice cream (we don’t think about it being “cream of ice” when saying “eyescream”) or even knee-l (the word kneel has knee in it--did you ever think about it)?
Or maybe we feel a certain sense of pride from that “African” part--a sense that we are not degraded versions of shiny, happy white people but something else, entire, distinct, and unassailable. “AFRICAN.” And the term “African American” even has a nice weightiness and rhythm about it.
Well, it’s time to leave actual Africans to enjoy that.
For example, how “African” is, say, Oprah compared to a Caribbean American? We have heard much this week, for example, about the fundamentally African substrate of Haitian culture, and the truth and meaning in that is clear from even a superficial familiarity with that nation. Many of the slaves first brought to Haiti spoke a language of Togo and Benin called Fongbe, in which you put the articles after nouns: the table is wema o “table the.” In Haitian Creole, the words are from French but the syntax is a lot like Fongbe: the table is tab-la. Haitian Creole is one part French and one part African. For real. And it sounds like it.
In what was termed “Negro English” two Saturdays ago, the table comes out as – well, the table.
But still, why can’t we all be “African American” anyway? What has always worried me about it is an issue of pride. The notion that we do ourselves a favor by pretending that we are part “African” after four hundred years of cultural development right here in America implies that what we have done here isn’t inspiring enough. Among black Americans in 2010, true black pride does not call itself “African.”
I, for example, don’t know where my African ancestors came from, and quite honestly I’m not on my way to turning in a cheek swab to find out anytime soon. It was too long ago--if my genes trace back to, say, Ghana with a bit of Nigeria mixed in, it would have nothing to do with the first John Hamilton McWhorter, who was born a slave near Atlanta. I, for the record, am the fifth John Hamilton McWhorter, the tail end of a story that began in Atlanta, migrated to Philadelphia, and is now living on in New York. An American story.
My openly bisexual saxophone playing great-grandmother didn’t know from Benin. My great-aunt who was still running up the steps of the now-defunct North Philadelphia train station in her nineties did not speak Yoruba (and in fact spoke a solid, crisp “Negro dialect” I recall fondly). My grandfather didn’t set up his printing shop in Lagos. My parents made my life possible far, far from Angola. I am not “African American”--I am black American.
Yeah, black will have to do. We just saw how hopeless “Negro” would be, and “colored” is cute but could theoretically apply to anyone not Caucasian. Black was fine before, and it’s fine now. And let’s not even get into incidents where white people born and raised in Africa get into trouble for calling themselves African American when they move here--cases like an especially disturbing case from last summer (a white Mozambiquean was assaulted for calling himself African American).
“He’s supposed to just understand!” some think--but how well do any of us, white or black, understand the usage of African American under current circumstances? Is there, really, anything to be understood?
I suggest there is something that needs to be changed -- to avoid future cognitive dissonance (including lawsuits) as well as foster pride in our black American heritage right here.
I haven’t used “African American” in print since 2004 except in ironic quotes or to refer to the term itself. I urge other writers to consider joining me.
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To rake Harry Reid over the coals about his “no Negro dialect” comment will bring to mind the Biblical passage about trying to take a speck out of someone’s eye when you’ve got a log in your own. Pretty much all of America black and white feels exactly the way Harry Reid does about the way black people talk – and aren’t even worried about saying it out loud.
First of all, we need not pretend that by “Negro dialect” Reid meant the cartoon minstrel talk of Amos n Andy. After all, why would Reid, a rational human being under any analysis, be under the impression that any black person talks like Uncle Remus, much less be surprised that one of them does not? My guess is that he said “negro” in a passing attempt to name Black English in a detached, professional way, randomly choosing a slightly arcane and outdated term. Or, consider that Negro English was what scholars called “Ebonics” until the early seventies. Reid likely caught wind of that terminology -- he's been around a while, after all.
Second, yes there is a such thing as Black English. Sometimes one hears a claim that Black English is the same as white Southern English. We must always beware of stereotyping and be open to the counterintuitive, but here is an instance where we can trust our senses: there is a “black sound.” It’s not just youth slang: it’s sentence patterns – Why you ain’t call me? (not a white Southernism, notice) – and a “sound,” such that you’d know Morgan Freeman was black even if he were reading the phone book. The combination is what we all feel – with uncanny accuracy even without seeing faces, as linguists have found – as “sounding black.” Of course not all blacks speak Black English or have The Sound, and those that do (which is most) do to varying extents. But they do. That’s what Reid meant, we all know it, and it’s okay to know it.
Third: Reid’s comment suggests that he associates Black English with lack of polish and low intelligence, okay. But before we burn him in effigy for it or ask “What’s that all about?” as if we don’t know, let’s admit that most Americans feel like Reid does. He wasn’t being a benighted “racist” holdout; he was speaking as an ordinary American person. We have caught him in nothing we don’t most of us feel ourselves.
It’s a love/hate relationship we have with black speech. On the one hand we associate it with emotional honesty, vernacular warmth, and sex – Marvin Gaye would not have had a hit with “Why Don’t We Venture to Consummate Our Relationship?” or even “Let’s Have Sex” instead of “Let’s Get It On.” Yet it’s not a dialect – a sound – that we associate with explaining Greek verbs or cosines or engaging in complex reasoning. Black English sounds cool, and even hot, and maybe “sharp” – but note that sharp is what you call someone who you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be smart ... and who you don’t actually think is all that smart.
That’s a shame because Black English is as systematic as standard English, and what we hear as “mistakes” are just variations, not denigrations. Try telling a French person that double negatives are “illogical.” The “unconjugated” be in a sentence like Folks be tryin’ it out is used in a very particular way to indicate habits rather than current events, making explicit something that standard English leaves to context.
But in the real world, it’s very hard to hear it that way. You can get a sense of it with linguistic training or curling up with books like these by Stanford’s John Rickford and U. Mass Amherst’s Lisa Green, but otherwise, Black English will always sound to most people like mistakes, in all of its warmth. As we also feel about Southern “hick” grammar – race is not the only factor here. In both cases we spontaneously demote a dialect born in illiteracy. It’s a weird intersection: speech born in illiteracy is not “broken.” The most “primitive” society’s languages are the ones that are the most complicated; often the backwater dialects of a language are harder than the standard – out in the sticks in Bulgaria there are often three ways to say the instead of one.
That’s all very nice, but real life is that Harry Reid hears black speech as lowly. But – so do black people as often as not. In 1996 during the Oakland Ebonics controversy, black people were laughing as loud as anyone at the idea that “Ebonics” is “a language.” Or, over the transom recently I got a copy of a presentation that James Meredith, who was the first black person admitted to the University of Mississippi and caught hell for it physically and emotionally, nowadays gives to young black audiences. On the first page, Meredith spells it out:
BLACK ENGLISH LANGUAGE
PROPER ENGLISH LANGAGE
Which one do you use? Most people in this room use a lot of Black English and a little Proper English.
Anyone who wants to become an intellectual giant must learn and use a lot of Proper English and as little Black English as possible.
I am not going to argue with anyone about the matter. You can do what you want to do.
However, I will tell you that anyone who continues to use a lot of Black English will never become an intellectual giant.
So, Meredith would surely hear it as a plus that Obama has no trace of what a man of his years likely has been known to call, in all seriousness, Negro dialect.
Fourth: Reid’s feelings about Black English are likely couched in a thoroughly compassionate position. Here’s a guess, based on what I have heard countless people of all colors say:
“Black people use bad grammar so much because they were brought here as slaves and denied education. The bad grammar holds on today because too many blacks still have bad schooling, and they pass it down the generations. They would be best off if society allowed them the education and opportunities to get rid of their bad grammar. It’s not their fault.”
There are all kinds of things that are off here, if we are inclined to go pointy-headed. Humans can be bidialectal as easily as bilingual and can speak standard as well as Black English (which Obama does, and as Reid acknowledged); the dialect is now felt as a cultural hallmark within a richly ambivalent yet loving sense of its being "ungrammatical," albeit often unconsciously; and so on. But most of this is for seminars. Back to, as always, real life. I know so very many black people who would agree with the above hypothetical quotation from Reid -- many of them deeply dedicated in assorted ways to black uplift. Are they immoral? Do they hate their own people? No – upon which we can give Harry Reid a break.
Fifth: We have to really listen to what Reid said instead of getting carried away over the tangy, backwards flavor of the one word “Negro.” In mentioning that Obama doesn’t speak in “dialect,” Reid acknowledged something many blacks are hot and quick to point out, that not all black people use Black English. Okay, they don’t – and Reid knows. He didn’t seem surprised that Obama can not sound black when he talks – he was just pointing out that Obama is part of the subset of blacks who can. He knows there is such a subset. Lesson learned.
Indeed Reid implied that black dialect is less prestigious than standard, such that not speaking it made Obama more likely to become President. That is, he implied what we all think too: Black English is, to the typical American ear, warm, honest -- and mistaken. If that’s wrong, okay – but since when are most Americans, including black ones, at all shy about dissing Black English? And who among us -- including black people -- thinks someone with what I call a "black-cent" who occasionally popped up with double negatives and things like aks could be elected President, whether it's fair or not? Reid, again, deserves no censure for what he said unless we're ready to censure ourselves too.
Inevitably there will be reminiscences of Joe Biden’s comment about Obama being “articulate.” I’m less politic on that term as applied to black people who have no reason not to be articulate. A recent favorite: someone writing me a letter about one of my Teaching Company set of lectures on linguistics praised me for “enjoying yourself up there so confidently speaking standard English” – as if I have to take a deep breath and “wield” standard English and feel like I'm a pretty special fella for being able to, with my “native” ghetto inflections and expressions turning up in my speech when I’m tired.
But this isn’t the same thing. Reid implied that Black English is lesser than standard English and that it’s therefore good that Obama doesn’t use it in public. This is not about whether black people have to sweat to speak standard English; it’s about whether Black English is as good as standard English. Most of America black as well as white is at the exact same point in understanding vernacular speech and its proper evaluation as Reid is.
For which reason most of America should leave him alone about this and move on.
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So very “2004” by now – the days when the kickoff question for an interview on black issues was whether you agreed with the views of Bill Cosby. What was interesting was how many black people actually did – those who had a major problem with Cosby’s new tack were mainly a writerly contingent, itchy to see someone so prominent arguing against the tacit but potent assumption that there needs to be a second Civil Rights revolution.
This crowd have never had a satisfactory riposte to what’s on the paperback of Cosby and Alvin Poussaint’s book Come On People: “When you have people tell you, ‘You can’t get up, you’re a victim,’ that’s when you know that it’s the devil you’re hearing, no one else.” Yet what with certain other race-related events having taken the stage since 2004, one would be pardoned for supposing that Cosby’s no-nonsense speeches were yesterday’s news and that now he’s just sitting at home. By no means – it turns out Cornel West isn’t the only black authority figure of a certain age making rap CDs.
It’s part of an ongoing effort Cosby has been making to reach out to the younger generation, through Facebook, Twittering, and so forth – but more interestingly, by trying to foster group discussions of the issues he started talking about in 2004 – centering around the tragic but unavoidable fact that a people can only fix themselves from within.
Cosby spares us his own delivery on the CD, State of Emergency, which would likely not strike modern hip hop fans as having the requisite “flow.” Instead, State of Emergency filters Cos’ ideas through “The Cosnarati,” a rapper crew who have fashioned the notions into rhymes and produced them with a fine sheen. No one would mistake the CD as a product of Timbaland or Kanye West, but there’s nothing hokey or fake about it.
Overall, it’s not what you might think. What makes Cosby’s challenging stance such potent stuff – and what riles that writerly crowd so – is that say what you want about him, you can’t tar him as “inauthentic” or “not really black.” No dissing him as having grown up (shudder) middle class, he has no white wife to call him out about, he has been on the classic Civil Rights side for decades, he’s not an academic and so can’t be classified as “too intellectual to understand real people,” no Hawaii, No Indonesia – he’s black America’s grandfather.
As such, the CD is as much about what ails black people as what to do about it. Get this note, even, about the cover art, which is said to symbolize:
the humiliation that innocent black men and/or people are subjected to when they walk into a store and are subsequently followed and watched. The creatures in the bush are fearful in the presence of the little boy who has an innocent curiosity – and is oblivious to their presence. The bush represents prejudice and incredulity stemming from persistent negative stereotypes of black people as anarchic and immoral.
And the songlist includes things like “Why?” questioning the injustice of things in a vein similar to Jadakiss’ rant of a similar cast some years back, “Runnin’” about how ghetto black men are too busy escaping to be able to sit still and tend to much of anything, and “Perfect World” about an America with bodegas full of fresh food, everyone dying a centenarian of old age rather than murder, empty hospitals and all movies getting good reviews (I’m not sure I get that last one, but still). Cosby gets it – his point is not that no one has anything to complain about.
His point is just that these things can’t be excuses. Too much “conscious rap,” as I have argued in many places, is “conscious” largely of what’s wrong, and contains a message, unstated but obvious, that listing and commenting on what’s wrong is, in itself, activism. The statement of the frustration is considered an action in itself, with further engagement beside the point (and not as thrilling). One of the saddest things I’ve ever read was the story this week in the Times about Native American young men unaware of a life path to take who are modelling themselves on inner city gang members, ending with one guy whose main ambition is to be a rapper and express his frustration – he hands the interviewer “Ever since birth, I been waitin’ for death...”.
But we will never hear from him again -- if only someone taught this kid to put his energy into something real. Which is not charismatic restatement of what makes things hard. “But it’s supposed to be a call to action,” fans object. Okay: when has that worked in the 30 years of rap’s history?
Cosby and the Cosnarati are looking for some real action. “Please listen to the words. We worked hard, very hard, to tell you about the State of the Emergency,” Cosby tells us in the liner notes. The idea is that groups will have LISTENing parties and then Discuss in a constructive fashion. So State of Emergency includes tracks like “Get On Your Job,” acknowledging the obstacles but speaking the ultimate wisdom. So, not “Get On Your Job” the way The Boondocks’ pitiless black-hating Uncle Ruckus character would say it, but one starting with where a guy might live. A sample, delivered rapid-style:
Lookin for a way out, doin’ it right,
Thinkin out loud what to do wit my life
Got to get a job that pays me well,
Got two kids, can’t seen to be fail
Lookin in the paper, fill out a app
Vacation and what after dat
All a boy do play video games
BET watch videos an’
Talk wit a girl, talk on the phone,
Go to da school, walk her home,
Dis is what dey talk about
The way back when, now walk it out
But he can’t pay for a pair of kicks
Known dis girl since she was six
Can’t get rich by chillin with chicks
Now you stressed, what feeling is dis
Girlfriend wanna go shop in the mall
You still in your Mom’s house watchin the walls
Ask for twenty bucks, ask for fifty,
How embarrassin, she’s laughin wit me.
...and in the wake of this, Get On Your Job. It’s not like you haven’t made some effort – but you have to try harder. You only go around once (plus the ladies will like you better).
The CD should be useful as a kind of pre-arranged venting, an immediate catharsis. The CD states the usual litany of ills – important, but in itself as meaningless as half a sentence – and then a discussion could be about that second half of the sentence: what now? It should also be a calling card for Cosby and Alvin Poussaint’s book, which I wrote up not long ago here as one that more should be reading, where solutions are outlined more concretely than the rap format allows.
This is it, folks. It really is. As of that night two Novembers ago, the time when America made any pretense of being on the heels of some new Great Realization about what ails black people ended. No, I’m not being pessimistic, I’m being realistic: the history books will record Obama’s election as both the beginning of a new era and the end of an old one. Latinos have more premarital pregnancies and equally scary dropout rates. Tell the Native Americans in the article I mentioned that they don’t have it as bad as black kids in Chicago. People of all hues are losing their jobs and houses all over the country. Plenty people have A Dream today, and they all deserve equal attention.
Black people with A Dream need to get the Cosnarati’s CD (and the copy of Come On People that comes with it) and let a 72-year-old man and his crew point us to the future. Or – remind us that we are already in it.
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For all of the aching desire a certain crowd have had in 2009 to show that America post-Obama isn’t “post-racial” – and golly, I wonder if anybody really ever thought we were – the Tiger Woods business of late is a ringing indication that we’re well on our way to it.
It’s one of those hideous little episodes making minor headlines this week that will be forgotten by the media next week. 15-year-old Vada Vasquez of the Bronx is in a coma with a bullet in her brain, after being caught in the crossfire when a group of Bloods took aim at 19-year-old Tyrone Creighton (and succeeding; he’s in the hospital, too).
The Bloods went after Creighton at the behest of friends of a man in Rikers who suffered a beatdown by Creighton’s two brothers in Rikers with him. The shooter was allegedly little 16-year-old Carvett Gentles, “baby-faced” as the stories are terming him with the regularity of a Homeric epithet.
You never know which ones of your pieces are going to get around. Last week World Affairs published an essay I wrote exploring whether it would necessarily be such a horrible thing if only one language were spoken in the world.
I write that within a context: of the 6000 languages on earth, it is estimated that only about 600 will exist a hundred years from now. The big languages are edging the tiny ones, and even the medium-sized ones, out. In recent centuries, this has been first because of active extermination--Native Americans were often forbidden to speak their home languages in school--and later because of “globalization”: children raised in a city by migrant parents are unlikely to learn the language their parents spoke back in the village.
To strike a note I generally avoid, I am offended. And by a cartoon. Has anybody noticed what a patronizing mess Seth MacFarlane’s new The Cleveland Show is?
Cleveland is the pudgy, mild-mannered drawling pal of Family Guy’s Peter Griffin, who now has, in the parlance of the grand old days of the seventies television spinoff, “his own show.” And indeed, the whole notion of the show is in quotation marks in a sense. The premise, for example, is willfully as hokey as those of the old-time spinoffs (“Mary’s friend Phyliss moves to San Francisco to live with her ex-husband’s parents ...”).
While this year has become best known as the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, it was also forty years ago that the first African-American Studies department was established, at San Francisco State University.
Forty-one fall semesters later, there are hundreds of such departments. Has what they teach evolved with the march of time?
At a Christmas party in 2004, a cousin asked me "Do you like Medea?" For a minute I was a confused, since it didn’t seem to be the occasion for sharing our impressions of Greek mythology. But it turned out she was talking about Madea, the massive, loudmouthed, pistol-packing black grandmother who Tyler Perry performs as in drag in a series of "chitlin' circuit" touring shows.
Perry sells DVDs of the shows on line, and ten minutes after my cousin put one on I was hooked. I’m not alone. Madea was the biggest new phenom in black
I used to try to read every book that came over the transom. That didn’t last long, but there are always those amidst the flow that grab my attention, and among them, a few that really stick with me. Lately I have been struck by three.
