Wogs of the Future

Woke 2.0

I’ve been thinking about black diversity starting with Jazz. Now I just tried again and no I still cannot stand Don Cherry. Nor have I ever liked or been impressed with Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra or Alice Coltrane. Henry Threadgill? Fuggetaboutit. Ornette Coleman? Not a chance. Now my dear old dad feels the exact same way about Wynton Marsalis and Louis Armstrong, but that’s because he thinks they both play entirely too much music that bourgie white people like. Yeah, actually.

So his dissent from some aspect of black culture is something like mine because we both think each other’s reasoning is suspect. So I engaged the following thought experiment. What if such cultural tastes among black Americans became a deeply philosophical, political and generational thing? I mean on the order of the real socioeconomic gap between those black Americans for whom marriage is a sacred institution and those who believe it is an another symptom of the ever-oppressive white supremacist patriarchy? What if indeed.

A Facebook reel woke me up splitting my sides this morning, riffing off an old Key&Peele joke in which a black teacher calls roll on the first day of class and cannot pronounce the new Negritude names of his students. { Quart’Knee : Courtney, Shady’Nasty : Sh’Dynasty }

Now it’s hard for me to determine whether or not the Ivy Cabal is capable of a sustained suppression of the sort of reality that kicks the woke mind virus into an irretrievable death spiral. But who knows? The future can rhyme as well. So let’s throw a bit more conspiratorial spice into the experiment. The future of black Americans who enjoy Wynton, Sowell, Marriage and the USMC decide once and for all to respect Christian ethics and so give their children Christian names as well as the middle names from generations past. Plus, we have absolutely no problem with intermarriage. Kinda like me. On the other hand, the future black Americans who are the scions of defenestrated DEI officers who take their own parents’ exorcism like the second wave of Jim Crow decide to take Afrocentrism to a new hilt. They decide to be racially pure, name their kids in an Islamo-Hotep style, and go all in against the international conspiracy to oppress, in identification with all colonized people. They double down on the irony of the Negro renaming to the previous slur ‘black’; they are the New Wogs.

You and I know that the ideological seeds for this revolution lie about here, there and everywhere like beertabs on the beach in 1970. And just like the production values of the 1973 film Soylent Green, there are absolutely intelligent, well-mannered wealthy people who have a complete grasp of the situation. There will be no accidents or coincidences. These Wogs are not Topsy. They will have been nurtured along their path by allies in The Struggle. Who knows if it’s Marxism or Islamism or Neo-Putinism that farms this new generation? I mean somebody is producing the videos they watch, sewing the clothes they wear and catering to their every demographic distinction. Maybe its the Ivy Cabal, maybe it’s the next generation of the children of Tates, Kardashians, Wests, and some Gangnam style gangsters. Who knows which exact fissures lets in the gas of chaos? There will be apologists for it, just the way there still are for 9/11, 10/7, 1/6 and the next 25 seasons of mostly peaceful protests.

Still, I’m thinking about a future black America that will have no reason to be designated ‘black’. I’m not thinking about myself, but I’m thinking of my old [black] friend Colonel P. who flew jets for the USAF and retired from service to go flying international jumbos for United. Like me, he probably saw no new black bosses in his chosen profession 20 years in. He did nothing special for the black or non-black consumers of his services across the country and around the world. He just got there by merit, luck, hard work and self-control. It’s not rocket science. Nobody is particularly dumbfounded by an American pilot of African descent, nor of a American programmer of African descent. We only stand out when somebody is trying to score some rhetorical points. Maybe the Colonel flies like Sun Ra, and maybe I code like Henry Threadgill. Maybe by 2035 we’re all bored, sick and tired of being associated with what the New Wogs will have become. The point is that we won’t be them, and they won’t be us. We will be as separate and distinct as Snoop Dogg and James Earl Jones.

It has been a long time since I paid attention to anything labeled ‘Afrofuturist’. Maybe because the New Wog Aesthetic is now what I think the future of Negritude is. I used to think along the lines of Colson Whitehead and Ishmael Reed. I calculated that there was a rarified path along which an elite brotherhood of black Americans would rethink a new kind of magical realism into the vast wasteland of whitebread Babbitry. Now that I think about that brief period in my life when I bounced to the odd beats of Steve Coleman (who was halfway to Henry Threadgill) there was room in my head for jazz that it was impossible to dance to or even swing to. I entertained visions of Afrolantica Rising and calculated that Derrick Bell’s struggle at Harvard was emblematic of the diffusion and suppression of a massive creative potential latent in that elite brotherhood, frustrated as we were everywhere we code-switched.

I calculated wrong.

I couldn’t sustain the oppositionalism. I couldn’t continue to follow the programmatic jukes of an elite brotherhood whose arcane protocols were impenetrable to the black masses. I finally had to relent and understand that the Public Enemy moment had been reached, and it was no more potent than the enduring legacy of Chuck D. It could only bring the noise for a moment. It was like listening to the story of how Spike Lee finally got to direct the Malcolm X film despite the sinister machinations by the the Joos of Hollywood. In the end, all we got was nostalgia for rebellion. And merch.

And Air America Radio and Janeane Garafolo.

I could link so that people might know that Garafolo was associated with Jello Biafra who has about 257,319 likes on his Facebook page entitled Alternative Tentacles and that he was a performance poet for the Dead Kennedys. But. I imagine that you can figure out that if any of that persists on the interwebz, that it is by dint of a countercultural movement which brings tingles to the nethers of the Ivy Cabal. They are my enemy. My perceived enemy anyhow. I wouldn’t want to lead you down that dark alley where there be monsters. Even I don’t know how monstrous. They are better off forgotten.

Forgotten is where the Afrofuturists and New Wogs will be after their Chuck D moment.

Radio stations, I question their blackness,
They call themselves black but we’ll see if they play this.

That’s the difference between rap and jazz. Jazz masters may be self-destructive, but actual musicians they only neglect the ones that love them. P Diddy on the other hand built an empire of coerced seduction of the sort that must inevitably end up in criminal court. Thank god for criminal court. But to elaborate on the italicized quote, the racial appeal is plain. The call to rebellion is clear. The necessity to kick Professor Griff to the curb is how it ends in tears. There’s always a Professor Griff. That’s the point of the oppositionalism: to codify black suffering as necessarily hostile. It takes Genius to sustain such an intellectual vanguard, and repeat the lie enough times so that you say things like “Rap is not actually misogynistic, look at Sexyy Red”.

But perhaps in the next America, to be fair, the New Wogs will moderate their pessimism, forswear militant oppositionalism and become merely transgressive in fashion sense. They may be only as hostile as people who play guitars upside down. But they’ll never play Gospel. Ever.

Divide and Liberate
I don’t question anyone’s blackness. I acknowledge that blackness exists in today’s postmodern semiotics as an ironic symbol of both power and powerlessness. I reserve a small amount of pity for those yokels who believe their destiny to be black in a blackness whose connotations they cannot control. For example, nobody nominally black who actually loves or marries somebody nominally white has any power to change the tenor of black politics in America. Black politics in America is always tied to anger, rebellion, grievance and struggle for power. It always has to threaten Detroit 1967.

I am somewhat oblivious to blackness outside of that of my family, and I don’t police disagreements within my family. Some of us are vulnerable to populist black politics, some of us are not. That doesn’t mean we have any measure of control - we (those of us who care about politics at all) take the good with the bad. This is very much unlike those of us who care about jazz. We have no patience with that segment of the practice which offers no joy. Rather we dedicate ourselves to those radio stations that play what we want to hear. We add to our collections without bending to dictums to politically correct our preferences.

It should be obvious to my readers that as a founding member of the Foundation, I have an interest in black intellectual, aesthetic & cultural diversity. I maintain this interest only because the aegis and scope of ‘legit’ blackness has been artificially constrained. In one way that constraint is a consequence of the inability or unwillingness for most Americans to distinguish race from culture. It’s a uniquely American problem. I figure Europeans and Africans at least do each other the favor or dealing with ethnicity over that of race. Asians maybe not so much. What do I know? But most significantly my interest is piqued by the strange amplifications of the significance of race in the wake of the populism in politics, the Progressive identitarianism of Woke and the canonization of the likes of {Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Mumia Abu Jamal} and of course George Floyd as official avatars of black masculinity. I blame the Ivy Cabal, destroyers of the Humanities. I blame the insecurities of Peasant America, the insouciance of Genius America, and the blackmailing circle jerk of Ruler America.

The only thing that can break this commitment, aside from my own affluent insouciance, are the inevitable liberations that will come from black America reckoning with its own class, ethnic, religious, political, aesthetic and cultural differences. Yet this reckoning is held in abeyance by a superstitious belief that black rage can and will destroy America and occasionally must be called upon in threat. My [black] Nigerian friends have no such burden. Still I hear T. Coates is back on the scene, crispy and clean, serving up ammunition for the black power machine. Because Israel is the New Jim. Crow that is. And we all know how to aim at the crow. And we all know how to listen for the correct sort of megaphone in our symbolic and philanthropic battles for moral hygiene. Start with this paywall. It’s complicated, but it’s not, right? Race hatred and colonial exploitation explains it all. Always has, always will, right?

Then again, I dislike Coates, but that’s another story. The crux of it is that blackness got away from me. Not that I had any choice in the matter. I didn’t sell out my career in IT to become a writer in New York, much less the definitive chronicler of The Black Experience as told by an authentic. God bless Anatole Broyard. Nevertheless, I cannot pretend that I didn’t once want to be a properly brilliant flash in the black literary pan. Alas for me, there is only so much symbolic analogizing I can muster from ‘a legit black perspective’, and not much of that dovetails with the above mentioned hostility and grievance. I’ve got too much family love to pretend I’m homeless in America.

What works for me is this, graceful I hope, sidestep from race into ancient philosophy having nothing to do, so far as I can see, with the dark continent. It came organically. Not as another elite calculation. And so I am liberated from the various style and content police who ‘know’ what [black] literature is supposed to be. I may be cut from a big black timber, but I am my own lumber and I am arranged into my own architecture. This is the premise of liberty. I expect that enough people will see that and be more bold on their own paths and not go back to hugging trees in the dark forest.

With all due respect to Snoop Dogg and James Earl Jones, up until the Civil Rights Movement only extraordinary strivers had figured out how to escape the Negro Problem. Those two Americans were accelerated by the pop of the pop bottle when the legal lid was taken off around about midnight in ‘64. The rest of us have seeped out slowly, always reminded for better or worse, where we done come from, boy. (Even those of us from New England) The trick of liberty is to recognize that you can be a drip, a river or evaporate at your own discretion without reference or obeisance to your prior condition of ignorance, servitude or oppression. You can learn that even drafted into the Man’s Army when you land in France. You can learn that reading books in a prison cell. You can learn that on your knees on a prayer rug, or sipping sherry in an Eames chair with Monk playing on the McIntosh. The point is that you come to your own self-determination on your own terms. You may even forget to color it black, or refuse to. That’s up to you.

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This essay was written primarily listening to Archie Shepp. I had him listed with Henry Threadgill as a New Jazz practitioner without listening. About halfway through writing, I decided to give him a listen and I realized that I made a mistake in that categorization. In fact I have two of his albums in my digital collection, Looking at Bird and Goin’ Home. I recommend both.