Since my brother Doc is a retired LAPD officer, I know more than the average Joe what cops go through. I know how rewarding and how thankless such a job can be which is especially thankless in an environment of political partisanship and mob psychosis. I say this because I very specifically remember telling people who were mad crazy about issuing body cameras that it wasn’t going to make an important difference. People who hate police will just have excuses to hate them more when their prejudices are conveyed by video.
My argument was something to the effect of the fact that the long running show ‘Cops’ probably had tens of thousands of hours of video on the cutting room floor. Who was going to watch all that video? Crowdsourced evidence? Don’t people have any idea how differently people see movies already? Don’t people have any idea what editing of video can do? Don’t people understand chain of custody? Body cams are no magic bullet, they’re a volley of shot.
Many people close to and far from me have told me that upon the death of George Floyd, they had to rethink their citizenship. It is a regrettable sentiment; I take them at their word. Similarly, I have heard all over the place that a new era of racial reckoning was at hand prompted by some fraction of an hour some white cop stood on some black neck. The fraction and the name of the cop are not emblazoned in my memory but what I do remember most is that George Floyd entered into the dubious new pantheon of black American martyrs.
In reciting the list of some of these household names I am brought to mind of those days long past in which I tried to scratch out some measure of dignity for the Negro Race by reminding my readers that they didn’t represent. I knew that I was doing battle amongst a crowd of critics who had their own vision of that race and what kind of narratives were good for it. Even at my worst, I knew to let things settle before making any declarations. It’s one thing to be wrong, it’s worse to be impatient and wrong, basically like everyone who showed up in the streets to pat themselves on the back and flip off the first responders. I used to call them The Coalition of the Damned. Their heroic representatives of the Negro Race included Shaquanda Cotton, Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin, The Jena Six, Michael Brown, Latasha Harlins, Mumia Abu Jamal, and all of the major media figures who testified on their behalf and made money and names for themselves in the process. Remember the Negro Race is that caste of Americans whose primary concern is the reasonable assumption that their liberty is denied by default. I don’t know any such Negroes, but lots of people assume there are about 46 million.
There’s a long history of black radical politics. It has a checkered record. I can remember going back to early 80s. I had an ANC poster on my bedroom wall. I was a big fan of Thabo Mbeki, so I remember what it was like to be young, angry, righteous and black decades before people in that new parade even knew they were black. Well, before we in America knew who they were and how much blacker they became in the context of that knowledge of their victimization. Still, there was black radical politics before that as well. My family was into it, but on the intellectual and literary side. So I, in particular, was susceptible to literary intellectuals like Kimberle Crenshaw and Derrick Bell, Cornel West and Toni Morrison at the beginning of the 90s. I had the disposable time and income of a young urban professional. If I had only read such black Americans, there’s no telling where I might be today - or perhaps I would be easily pinned as those who swam in the wake of Bell.
The crossover of that afro-pessimism to the American Left was something of a surprise. The fall of policy wonks like Randall Robinson, David Bositis and Abagail Thernstrom and the rise of intellectuals like Audre Lorde, Molefe Asante and Jawanza Kunjufu marked a shift from the practical towards magical realism as intersectionality, Afrocentricity and batshit conspiracy wove their spells on higher education. Of course I’m not being charitable, but honestly I’d even take Larry Ellison over the lot of them. Or just Ralph Ellison. But probably most of all Stanley Crouch because by the time I was unleashed from the foolishness of cool pose black youth culture I was ready for grown up shit. I kept getting pitched Lenora Fulani and Marcuse and Friere. Fortunately I could read. I mean really read dense, sensible and well-written stuff. I knew how to take John McPhee seriously and T. Coraghessan Boyle not so seriously. I could laugh along with Ishmael Reed without mistaking his wit for some black holy grail. All the while a little Malcolm Little in my head told me to distrust the socialists who showed up in the hood on MLK Day telling workers to unite. At the same time I reckoned that every Bernal would have a Lefkowitz I had to keep my distance from academic fraud and frisson. After all, I was not studying political science or social science but computer science. My logic had to compile and much of this Left stuff did not. Much of the stuff that passed for black radical politics was a baby bounced on the knee of great white Marxists. I didn’t realize how dangerous that connection would be at the time, but I sure didn’t want to be duped like Paul Robeson.
Still better to be Paul Robeson or the lost and forgotten Bayard Rustin than to be Eric Garner. I wanted some small measure of black renown as a writer, but not to have a protest t-shirt be my legacy. Let me represent something world historic if I represent anything at all. I figured I’d rather stay anonymous than become famous for something stupid. I discovered I preferred writing in English than in C. Longer legs, I’d say. Shakespeare > Ritchie. Hell even Bob Dylan > Kernigan. So I kept writing in the form that eventually evolved into these prose stylings, with a well-curated pedigree I have duplicated into the cloud. I should burn a CD now that I think about it. Nevertheless I have gotten quite enough signals from my readers over the years to know that I have altered their trajectories for the better. I prefer writing for people than for systems. Ca suffit.
I’m used to being anonymous and invisible. It’s often a virtue, not simply of necessity or chance. For those who would sustain The Struggle, there is always the necessity of being out there in the streets, keeping Whitey on the hook. The drudgery of surviving on the thin, poison gruel of racial combat bores me to tears and makes me sick as well. I feel a bit sorry for those who have fueled themselves on the tears of resentment. They worked their fingers to the bone for St. George and all they have to show are bony fingers. How did they forget Rustin? How did they not even know? Perhaps they watched too much TV. Perhaps they listened to too much Yellow Back Radio without breaking it down. Perhaps they cried too long when Dave Chappelle initiated his eight minutes and forty six seconds of silence. Perhaps they have guesstimated that there are only a few proper ways to be black in public. Perhaps they just don’t know any better.
Either way, I’m not working to preserve the dignity of the Negro Race. I’m not here to praise St. George, nor to bury him. That’s already been done to death by the mainstream. There’s some measure of disgusted satisfaction I have in watching this uncivil bitchfight. None of the combatants know how to shoot straight and the only automatic weapons they have are their pieholes. It’s the bourgeois Left vs the bourgeois Right in a 15 round rhetorical pillow fight brought to you by the Nazi Lowriders and the Black Guerilla Family in partnership with the usual suspects of the interwebz. That’s the revenue generating end of it anyway. 50 cents of attention from 175 million adult Americans with too much time on their hands. Every day.
So here’s the buried lede. It’s a documentary called The Fall of Minneapolis. It’s not a Prince movie. It’s all that body cam stuff that the crowd wanted, edited properly I guess. I don’t have to watch the whole thing - I have nothing to walk back. I said St. George wasn’t worth it. I said Michael Brown wasn’t worth it. I said the lot of them weren’t worth it.
This then falls under the categories of Discovery and Humility. I think it gives people who genuinely wanted to rethink their citizenship to reflect upon the premises of that rethinking. So this is one for you to share, because you know somebody like that too.
I don’t hate to say I told you so. But I told you so before Obama was President.
Same as it ever was. Racial reasoning is always a mistake.
24 “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. 26 But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. - Matthew 7:24-26
As with the "lost causers", there is no foundation to their narrative beyond the sand of their words and the opioid of their ideology. The winds of time make the truth emerge and blows away the sand of obfuscation and ideology to be replaced by actual evidence. Our time as individuals may grow inevitably shorter, but the truth stands beyond the scope of our lives because it is real, regardless of whether we live long enough to see it emerge. I place my faith on the rock of what has actually happened.
Truth telling...at its finest. Pleasure knowing you.