Charles Brown
Detroit
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>>> Max Sawicky <sawicky at epinet.org> 11/16 10:10 AM >>>
> . . .
> Charles: I have long advocated that white people
> become Black. . . .
How would we do that without looking foolish?
MBS
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(Charles Brown replying to a question from Max Sawicky)
It will be a struggle, including looking foolish sometime. But then Black people have many times looked foolish trying to be white and we have stuck with it.
Black people accept a very wide range of skin colors and physical types as Black.
Of course, to start with race is a cultural/political/ historcal category. It's biological use is false and misleading (See for example, _Cultural Anthropology_ by Conrad Kottak).
Whites who would be seeking to become Black should remember that being Black is actually being both Black and white. (See Dubois' The Souls of Black Folk on the two souls of Black people). So, to be Black is not to discard all of your white culture and symbol system. African- American culture and identity is both African and American.
The most difficult aspect of becoming Black would be to internalize the contradiction of the struggle against slavery and racism. And then turn this around as an affirmative expression of the beauty of Blackness and Black power. (By the way, Stokeley Carmicheal just died).
A test of affirmative Blackness would be if the concept of Black Power feels good and not bad to you. If you do not feel fear when you think of Black Power , then you are on your way. If you feel a strong sense of beauty in seeing people, despite all of their wellknown weaknesses, then you are on the way.
This is a bare beginning. This is very abstract, because, I admit that I have never gotten much practice with it. You are correct to imply it is very difficult.
But then what is the difference between Black people and white people ? We know that it is not an entirely unbridgeable gap, because Black people have had to go in the opposite direction, learning the dominant culture enough to survive.
There's a little.
Charles Brown
____ _______ I'd call this 'feeling good' about Blackness stuff bordering on exoticization of the Other.
I'd call it fertile soil for further commodification. (as if the culture industries need any help in this regard)
I'd also call it completely blind to any sort of critical examination of where this 'blackness' comes from which is rancourous, acrimonious debate to be sure.
I'd also call it dangerous. What of Mexicano Chicano Puerto Rican Fillipino Chinese Aleutian Korean Panamanian Samoan Brazilian Etc. Dot dot dot. You get the picture.
SnitgrrRl
>>> "Charles Brown" <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> 11/16 1:19 PM >>>
>>> "K" <d-m-c at worldnet.att.net> 11/16 12:32 PM >>>
I'd call this 'feeling good' about Blackness stuff bordering on exoticization of the Other.
_______
Charles: If you are Black, wouldn't it be exoticization of the Self ? If I am Black, then feeling good about being Black is an important thing to do. It is affirmative self-creation of myself as an individual.
It is Black self-love. Black is beautiful.
Since we are all being Black in this scenario wouldn't it be making the Self an Other ? They is we typa and we is they typa thang.
A white person who can feel Black self-love has made a revolutionary breakthrough in this culture.
But as Max says, there are times when a white person would look foolish trying this. I don't recommend is without a lot of study of Black history and culture and living with Black people,living in Detroit for decades or the like.
______
I'd call it fertile soil for further commodification. (as if the culture industries need any help in this regard) _______
Charles: Commodity fetishism is reversal of subject and object. Things become subjects and people become objects. Here we have people turning into a different type of people ( the thread on which you are commenting involves white people becoming Black people)
That is not commodity fetishism.
How does your theory of commodification relate to Marx's commodity fetishism ? __________
I'd also call it completely blind to any sort of critical examination of where this 'blackness' comes from which is rancourous, acrimonious debate to be sure. __________
Charles: The blackness comes from history , the social tradition which is centered around the struggle for freedom within and from slavery and racism , and some carryovers from African culture.
The critical examination is practical-critical, that is revolutionary, after Marx in the First Thesis on Feuerbach and the last, in that we seek to change the world by action in it. We want to criticise by action guided by theory, criticise the world by practical-critical activity and struggle. As Fredrick Douglass taught, there is no progress without struggle.
This struggle for freedom is Black history and a source of Blackness. There is more than rancourous and acrimounious debate, but struggle by force of arms as by John Brown and the Civil War. As Douglass said there must be a struggle whether moral or physical or both.
_________
I'd also call it dangerous. What of Mexicano Chicano Puerto Rican Fillipino Chinese Aleutian Korean Panamanian Samoan Brazilian Etc. Dot dot dot. You get the picture. __________
Charles: No, I don't get the picture. Please reiterate.
I would say anybody who calls me dangerous I kind of consider a right winger per se. I am the safest person I know.
My position are all proletarian internationalist and in solidarity with the national liberation and freedom movements and interests of all the groups you list above. To call what I am saying dangerous is so opposite the truth that I wonder what's up with you.
Charles Brown
Workers and Oppressed Peoples of the Earth , Unite.
______________
BTW, Charles, solidarity in mourning over Stokely Carmichael. I used to love the passion in his writing.
By focusing solely on identity issues, it seems to me all a bit of cultural or identity politics. While surely cultural./identity politics have their place at times, it is also quite clear that in academic settings any attempt to understand the structural sources of oppression and, yes, the evolution of Black culture. I don't think you mean to do this, no. But in the hands of some of my colleagues it is entirely too superficial for me. You know, throw a little Black culture in her, a little Black history in there, mix and stir with unexamined everything else and--voila--you send students out in the world who think they've done their duty to racial oppression because they've read Tricia Rose's analysis of the resistant discourses of rap music. But than nothin' I 'spose.
>I would say anybody who calls me
>dangerous I kind of consider a right winger
>per se.
Yes that's right Charles I'm a crazy rightwinger. Yes, yes indeedy I am. I always just love being lumped in with the right if I criticize something. Like Carrol telling me that I'm a privatized idiote and yet Carrol hasn't read enough of me to know what he's talking about.
Exoticizing the Other--I'm thinking of bell hooks here (among others)
As for the rest, really, see me as a right winger if you'd like. It is surely very likely that whatever I am or say I am won't matter one wit. In any event, thank you very much, but I do have a quite healthy, rich, lively understanding of Black Culture and History as that's what I studied as an undergrad. Why? Because it spoke to me in a way that nothing else did. I could relate to it, you see. Oh, of course, I could know much much more and I try. But, as I said in another post, I also want upper middle class whites to, as they say, unpack their knapsacks of privilege and see exactly how they inscribe and reinscribe their class/race privilege everydamnminuteoftheday.
I am the safest person I know.
>
>My position are all proletarian internationalist
>and in solidarity with the national liberation
>and freedom movements and interests of
>all the groups you list above. To call what
>I am saying dangerous is so opposite the truth
>that I wonder what's up with you.
Well I did not know. You mentioned nothing of other cultures, only Black culture. No need to get worried about psychological states or repressed fears or anything. Really, honestly. I am much more afraid of upper middle class white guys who run things than I am of the kids next door.
SnitgrrRl
>
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