Reflections of an ignut college student in White Supremacy Academia

 Marvin X and his Muse Fahizah Alim; she inspires the poet

 plato Negro at his Academy of da Corner, 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland

 Poet Samantha Akwei and Tarika Lewis

 Poet Samantha Akwei

Oh, God, have mercy on me, for I was deaf dumb and blind but thought I could see. I was a college student at San Francisco State College/now University. I was in the cafeteria playing bid whist when Brother Edward came to save us with Muhammad Speaks. Oh, Allah, please have mercy on me for I rejected your angels sent to save me. We cursed Brother Edward, told him to git the fuck out our faces with that Muhammad Speaks bullshit, we spit on him, though he could have retaliated with Karate but he humbled himself to save us deaf dumb and blind college students who thought we knew everything but didn't know shit, not a goddamn thing. But Brother Edward persisted, humbled by the knowledge he had from the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

No matter how much we cursed him, spat on him, ridiculed him, he persisted with the truth until we submitted and in the end we did. Some of us joined the Nation of Islam, others joined the Sunni movement of Waritth Din Muhammad, some became Shi'ite. But Brother Edward was the evangelist.

And so today, we honor and praise Brother Edward, Nation of Islam soldier, who saved us deaf dumb and blind intellectuals, who knew nothing but thought we knew everything. Thank you Brother Edward and all the FOI who came on campus to save us deaf dumb and blind students.

--Marvin X

I've been listening to Wish I, a CD of an interview of Marvin X on KPOO-Radio in San Francisco. Though I been checking out Marvin for a season I never been with him in the flesh and never heard his voice except on the page, and in cyber-communications. And from reports by Kalamu ya Salaam. The Wish I CD affirmed how I imagined him and how I tried to characterize him in my review of his book of poetry, Land of My Daughters.

 

Funny, outrageous, challenging Marvin X is on the same tier as Amiri Baraka and Kalamu ya Salaam in putting on an entertaining program. For in "Why I Love Lesbians,"  Marvin says, "In their hatred is drama / I love drama." Marvin's first love is theater; he is poet and shaman, skilled in manipulating the passions like  the preacher in the pulpit, or the Harlem soapbox orator, or the barbershop orators found throughout the black community. In his Wish I Could Tell You the Truth--Essays, Marvin X has created a book that mirrors the orature in bull sessions, ubiquitous in black speech and poetry, in the barbershop.

That is, Malcolm X ain't got nothing on Marvin X. Still Marvin has been ignored and silenced like Malcolm would be ignored and silenced if he had lived on into the Now. Marvin's one of the most extraordinary, exciting black intellectuals living today--writing, publishing, performing with Sun Ra musicians, reciting, filming, he's ever engaging, challenging the respectable and the comfortable. He like Malcolm dares to say things, fearlessly, in the open (in earshot of the white man) that so many Negroes feel and think and speak on the corner, in the barbershops and urban streets of black America.

Discourse by exaggeration and humor has its place in serious intellectual enquiry. Everybody don't have to wear the nerdy mask and inky cloak and speak in the autocratic tones of academia. Marvin's dramatic style and political approach could not be tolerated at the University since Ronald Reagan forced him out of the California university system, which signaled the castration of black studies at white universities. 

In short, Wish I Could Tell You the Truth is one of the most daring, innovative, entertaining group of "essays" I ever had yet to read. In a true sense this book is a literary replication of the barbershop experience. The street rap. Yet much more sophisticated, informed, daring, philosophical. And it is sheer arrogance and snootiness that he has been ignored or overlooked by PBS, CNN, and FOX. And by black literary societies and colleges. Because his thinking is dangerous, and his simple courage is infectious. And anybody who's heard him know that Chris Rock and Amiri Baraka ain't got nothing on Marvin, once he gets to improvising. Marvin is a truth teller, and just as funky as James Brown.

Wish I Could Tell You the Truth is, too, an intellectual and philosophical autobiography. Boswell has nothing on this  journalistic foray, that sweeps the planet in its thinking. Marvin is a storyteller. Like Abby Lincoln, Marvin's voice matches the story he tells. He ain't no Cornel West. With Marvin you cannot separate the story from the voice, one reinforces the other. Though everyday speech is in Marvin's writing, his writing is artistic writing and different from his oral performances. Marvin is no linear thinker and so you have to take him in in the all in all, between the covers, you got to read him fully to appreciate truly what he has achieved as an artist and as a man.

The tone of Wish I Could Tell You the Truth is established in a forty-page autobiographical note beginning with his birth during an age of war, the impact of broken family life, youthful love, exposés, going on to his academic career, antiwar activism, criminal on the run, hustler, civic reformer, and revolutionary. This autobiographical section is primarily episodic and expressionistic rather than linear and analytical. It is Marvin's expertise as storyteller that carries us forward for his views are often surprising and shocking. Marvin don't pull no punches when lives are involved.

"Negroes see me and they get on a skateboard," Marvin observes. "I don't have no  money, I ain't got no bank account, I ain't got no job, and I ain't had  no job in twenty five years, you understand, I don't have no power but the word, and Negroes run from me, scare to death, they scared, Mama . . .  but they ain't scared of doing whatever the white man tells him. Going to Iraq, dying like flies . . . won't die for a purpose. . . . dying on the streets of America. . . . for no purpose, at all . . . they learn all this from the white man, really. Because that's how they think. Bush think there ain't no consequence to his actions. . . Bush always needs another cowboy . . . but he don't understand . . . the Indians are coming . . . THE INDIANS ARE COMING . . . they coming for you . . . the Ancestor Spirits of the Black Man and Woman are coming for you, Mr. White Man, unless you clean up. . . . you understand."

Now this kind of speech scares Black Academia in the company of their white colleagues. And the white professional does not want to endure his female colleagues squeamish in their chairs because of Marvin's voice. But Marvin is a radical advocate of free speech, "Don't sell me no sheetrock, for my pipe. . . . Give me some love, give me some truth. It does not matter whether you black or white . . . the weapon of today is consciousness, not color . . . we been trained to be warriors . . . God was training us for war . . . but they [we] don't have the right word, the right directions . . . turning them into constitutional slaves."

Well this kind of nationalist speech would make a Martin Kilsonsquirm. There's no place in the academy and black studies programs for nationalists like a Marvin X or an Amiri Baraka or a Kalamu ya Salaam. Three of the most extraordinary men (writers, artists) of our time alienated, separated, barred from the Academy, and the "accepted" (the "pragmatic activists") embarrassed by their presence and speech. 

In his response to Reverend Eugene Rivers' "Beyond the Nationalism of Fools: Toward An Agenda for Black Intellectuals" (Boston Review), Kilson argued we don't need "a new-mode Black nationalist discourse issue . . . . For me, all variants of Black nationalist modalities have spent-their-load, as it were, whether here in US, in the Caribbean, or in the many African states where it is fully bankrupt." So Marvin has nothing a Kilson can respect, unworthy of his intellectual attention or recommendation. 

Marvin and Baraka have "spent their load"!!! Is that the real deal? Or just the Academic Black Ball. But this kind of autocracy within black political discourse and acts and educational arenas should have been dispensed with yesterday. Here's a matter in need of serious consideration. If the Du Bois Chair at Harvard is going to be the Chair for Black Humanities and the political, social, and cultural arbiter of Black Life and Culture, shouldn't we black folks have something to say who sits in the Chair? 

Baraka had more books, more scholarship than Skip Gates, more organizational skills, he was  more representative of the sentiments of black youth and Du Bois, an activist scholar, par excellence. But we didn't have a hand in it, we folk, because white money is more persuasive, than dedication and sacrifice, and even community shaming. If we were truly a nation we could by vote choose our representatives and leaders. We wouldn't have to wait for good white people to choose them. Let's vote for our Idol.

So Marvin writes: "The activist scholars were long ago removed from academia as a threat to Western scholarship and community liberation. Safe, qualified negroes were brought in who would control the natives and have them chasing rocks in Egypt rather than stopping gunshots in the hood by providing alternative consciousness. . . . Black studies was not about degrees, but the liberation of a people . . . . the community would be better served giving consciousness to dry bones in the hood."

But Strong Men keep on pushing, despite isolation, alienation, and banishment. There ain't no stopping Strong Men, says Sterling Brown. And Marvin is a nationalist with a global consciousness. But our primary "mission is self and community development, not esoteric journeys to the Motherland to discover much to his dismay and utter disappointment that he is not an African but a pitiful American mutation, a mongrel, in short, a white man in black face, a disconnected  descendant, even worse than ET because he can't call home even when he gets there." 

But it is "even more important that he makes peace with the trees and swamps and bayous of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, then perhaps the ancestors in Africa will accept him and assuage his mind . . . better . . . connect with the ghetto blacks he . . . earnestly desires to escape." We are schizophrenic (you know, Du Bois' "double consciousness"). Negroes "got ten different personalities . . . negroes know  how to act. . . Tom was a killer, he had murder in his heart."  So for the dope gangs, we need to "make peace with them, teach them to make peace with themselves." But we also have too many black celebrities, like Crouch, Cosby, and West, "cultural police for the black bourgeoise," destructively "Beyond the Ignorance Zone."

So, you see, Marvin is refreshing. He's a Liberator. He has freed up contemporary black public speech, primarily controlled by the hip hop industry, Hollywood, the communication industry, and educational factories like Harvard and black public schools. He's like no Muslim you have heard speak. And this is odd for the usual impulse is to think of Muslims as limiting speech and especially the speech of women. For he knows the "light don't come on if you don't turn the switch. . . . Flip the switch on, dummy . . . you got to put on the armor of God and you can walk through the valley of shadow and death. . . .  I had the armor of God  on me when I was out there, when I was out there in the projects, on crack."

War, religion, and cultural ethics are the steak of Marvin's extended discussion. Wish I Could Tell You the Truth is thus cultural criticism at its best. "In the Name of Love," Marvin explains, "Love ain't love if it cuts too deep." For many Marvin probably cuts "too deep." It's a book that would frighten a Tavis Smiley or a Jesse Jackson or a Skip Gates. Though he says he's a Muslim, on reading Marvin you can only guess he is a Muslim. He don't pray five times a day and he don't ascribe to some of the cultural practices of some Muslims and thus he has made a call for a "Radical Spirituality."

The slave religion cultivated by black mega-preachers and Saudi-supported Islam are better understood as a "religion box." Marvin continues, "But we know the people have been hoodwinked and bamboozled, therefore it is the mission of the truly spiritually conscious to step to the front of the line and represent, not hide in the closet and let the masquerade continue." Marvin is wary of religious institutions that exist for the priests primarily. "We have been told to seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all things, yea, even political and economic things will be added unto ye."

Marvin is against imperialist wars, e.g. Iraq and Haiti. He was a Vietnam-era anti-war activist on the run, from Canada to Central America. And he takes position on Israel that no black academic would dare take, no black elected official would allow pass through his lips. "Israel is the number one problem in the Middle East. Israel is no less a fascist, nazi, apartheid state backed with the money and armaments of America. Israel is the only threat to peace in the Middle East." 

Whether Israel is the "only threat" my political sympathies do not extend so far. What's troubling is Israel is beyond criticism, if you want to win public office in America. And our 800 public black officials and academicians know how their bread is buttered. And as it used to be with our black mayors, there is no full criticism, but rather a mumbling, hypocritical silence. Nationalism is okay for the Jew, but not the American Negro, for they ain't got no guns and capital, and certainly, thank God, they ain't nuclear.

So in the spirit of Marvin I'm gonna call on and thank God, Allah, Jesus, Jah, Jehovah, Buddha, Karl Marx, and Lenin, and call on the Ancestors to bless you with a copy of  Wish I Could Tell You the Truth. Don't run from Marvin, give him an ear. The brother got truths you need to hear, that will clean us up. Liberate the captive. Build a new black world, real free zones. And he's got some lies, too, but it's all good. Contrary to Kilson's view, life is still in black nationalism. For Marvin Black is White and White is Black. He ain't fearing being fired, he says what he wants to say. . . . Praise God in the name of Love.

Note: Wish I Could Tell You The Truth is out of print. 

*   *   *   *   *

Wish I Could Tell You the Truth

Essays by Marvin X

Contents

Chapter One: Tale of an Angry Old Man	12
Chapter Two: Manifesto of The University of Poetry	52
Chapter Three: Toward A Radical Spirituality	73
In Search of my Soul Sister	75
Terrorism in the World Post 9/11	83
On Cecil's Brown's "What Happened to My Black Studies?"	84
Has Nature Turned Against America?	87
America, the Fire This Time	89
Black Studies, Treading Water	90
Beyond the Ignorance Zone	91
Bush, Last American Tragedy	92
Farrakhan's Final Call	94
Mass Murder in the Middle East and the Peace Movement	95
Michael Rode His Boat Ashore	97
Minister of Poetry Brings Tears to Sacramento	97
MMinister of Poetry Replies to Dr. Julia Hare	99
War in Iraq	100
Of Spiritual Things	104
Chapter Four: Crazy House of the Negro Book Tour	107
Open Letter to the Poets of Detroit	109
Human Earthquake Rocks New York City	110
Marvin X, Sonia Sanchez and the Crazy House Band	112
Live in Philly at Warm Daddies	113
Speaks to the Gullah Nation, South Carolina	114
Human Earthquake Hits Houston, Texas	116
Call for General Strike at Reparation Rally	118
Chapter Five: Of Myth and Rituals	121
Hero/Shero Defined	123
Islam Needs a Martin Luther	124
End of World Innocence	127
Hug a Thug: The Education of Ptah Allah-El	128
Throws in Poetry Towel	132
Mass Murder in Fresno, CA	133
Life in Social Movements	135
What Is Life and Why Are We Living	136
Of Men Beast, Ancestors and Nature	137
Black Woman's Tit Knocks Out America	138
Gay Marriage and Black Liberation	139
New Nat Turner	142
Happy New Year, 2003	146
Twisted Route of Peace March	147
Chapter Six: Reviews and Blues	149
Film Review: Ray	151
Book Review: How to Find a BMW by Julia Hare	154
Book Review: America's Still the Place, Charlie Walker	161
Book Review: Somebody Blew Up America, Amiri Baraka	163
Movie Review: Gospel of the Game, James Robinson	169
Book Review: Wounded in the House of a Friend, Sonia Sanchez	174
Drama Review: Pantalos and Collard Greens	`179
Drama Review: Invisible Chains	186
Movie Review: Panther in Africa	190
Chapter Seven: Blackness and Nothingness	194
Am I Black, Am I White	200
Black Bourgeoisie Defend Their Own	202
The Meaning of Black Reconstruction	203
Black Reconstruction, Week Two	205
Black Reconstruction, Week Three	207
Negro Psychosexuality in the Post Crack Society	209
Black Muslims as Fifth Column in US	211
VIP Nigguhs and Rape	212
Powell, the Running Dog, Raps	213
Fable of the Horse, the Cow, the Bull	215
Power of Prayer	217

Wish I Could Tell You the Truth is available from Black Bird Press, 11132 Nelson Bar Road, Cherokee CA 95965, 19.95. Or email Marvin -- mrvnx@yahoo.com 

Ras Messenger replies to Marvin X on Multiple Wives and Unlimited ho's (sex workers)

Hetepu Bro MarvinX,

It was good to read your story regarding the fact that you publicly stated the obvious fact that in  2015 Alkebulan ( Afrikan) males who are serious and can look after multiple wives MUST be given the opportunity to do so.

In my opinion this would seriously cut down on the current state of play or players, i.e., one is married yet you can go out and have multiple female friends or in some cases multiple boyfriends ( so called downlow brothers  who are married to females yet have sex with men).

What is required now is for Alkebulans to take responsibility of our home and relationships and do not allow the Vatican ( who are homosexuals ) to dictate how the  Original Man should live on planet earth, especially since there is a massive exercise taking place as you read this to effeminizee our males through eating junk foods which contain dangerous levels of the female hormone  estrogen, in addition those unfortunate sons in prisons who allow themselves to be 'sexing' other males- quite outrageous..

Alkebulan males are under threat from the shitstem in every way, yet so called lesbians and gays' can get married or even in some cases have a man and a woman, yet straight up  men are unable to have multiple wives--this is quite nonsensical and unacceptable!

The same parasite priests,  bishops and other psuedo religious hypocrites will quote x y or z of the basis instructions before leaving Europe ( bible). These same scribes and Pharisees are the ones who will marry these people same gender loving people or trans-sexual people.

In my humble opinion,  we cannot allow any one to tell us how we are to live our lives, particularly when it comes to multiple wives.
Let's put polygamy into practice regardless of whether any state /government says it'slegal or not. We are not animals; we are men and are able to define for self and others what we need to do. Let the devil take back his nonsense.

Love and Light 

Raa

Marvin X replies to Ras Messenger

THE PROBLEM IS THAT MEN (WHITE AND BLACK) ARE NOT ORGANIZED FOR THEIR RIGHTS/RITES (SUN RA WOULD SAY) AS OUR GAYS,LESBIANS AND TRANS-SEXUALS. 

THEY CAN NOW GET MARRIED BUT YOU CAN'T HAVE MULTIPLE WIVES OPENLY, NOR CAN YOU VISIT A SEX WORKER BY MUTUAL AGREEMENT. AGAIN, MARCUS GARVEY SAID GET ORGANIZED, THE WORLD IS MOVING AGAINST ALL UNORGANIZED PEOPLE. A MILLION MEN MARCHED BUT DID NOT GET ORGANIZED AFTER THE FEEL GOOD SESSION. 

DURING WWII THE POLISH JEWS WERE FIGHTING EACH OTHER, BUT WHEN THEY DECIDED TO UNIFY IT WAS TOO LATE, THE GAS CHAMBERS AWAITED THEM. IF WE DON'T JUMP OUT OF THE BOX IN A HURRY, WE MAY SUFFER A SIMILAR FATE. 

THEY MAY PUT THE CONFEDERATE FLAG IN THE MUSEUM, BUT IT IS THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF ALL THOSE WHO SUFFER FROM THE ADDICTION TO WHITE SUPREMACY, NORTH AND SOUTH, BLACK AND WHITE, THAT MUST BE PUT INTO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY!

HERE IN THE BAY AREA OF SAN FRANCISCO/OAKLAND/BERKELEY WHERE I LIVE, WHEN I VISIT SAN FRANCISCO AND SEE THE GAY/LESBIAN FLAG FLYING UP AND DOWN MARKET STREET, I BOW DOWN TO THEM FOR MAKING US BOW DOWN TO THEM WITH HONOR AND RESPECT WHEN WE SEE THEIR FLAY FLYING. BUT I DON'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THE CONFEDERATE FLAY OR GAY FLAY, I WANT TO SEE THE RED, BLACK AND GREEN FLYING DOWN OAKLAND'S 14TH STREET, FROM MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. WAY TO ALICE STREET, I.E., THE BLACK CULTURAL DISTRICT. 

FLY YOUR FLAG AND LET THE WORLD KNOW YOU ARE A NATION OF PEOPLE, INDEPENDENT AND SELF SUFFICIENT. AFTER ALL YOUR VALIANT HISTORY IN OAKLAND, YOU MUST BE A PROUD PEOPLE. YES, IN TRUTH, YOU SUFFERED A MILITARY DEFEAT DURING THE 1960S. LET'S BE CLEAR ON THIS. THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY ONLY HAD PISTOLS AND SHOTGUNS, WHILE WE SUFFERED THE FULL FORCE OF THE US ARMY, MARINES, NAVY, AIR FORCE, FBI AND ITS COINTELPRO, SNITCHES AND AGENTS PROVOCATEUR. 

WITH MOST OF MY FRIENDS DEAD, INCLUDING HUEY NEWTON, ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, SAMUEL NAPIER, ALONZO BATIN, AMIRI BARAKA, ALPRINTICE BUNCHY CARTER, AND SO MANY OTHERS, MY OLDEST DAUGHTER ASKED ME RECENTLY, "DAD, AFTER ALL YOU'VE BEEN THROUGH, HOW AND WHY ARE YOU STILL ALIVE?" ANOTHER DAUGHTER HAS RELOCATED TO GHANA AND SHE SAYS, "DAY, IT'S TIME TO LEAVE AMERICA."

NOW THE OLD BIBLE TELLS US  WE MUST LISTEN TO THE CHILDREN. AT THREE YEARS OLD, MY GRANDSON TOLD ME, "GRANDPA YOU CAN'T SAVE THE WORLD, BUT I CAN!"

IN CONCLUSION, CONSIDER THE TIME. THE QUR'AN SAYS: BY THE TIME, SURELY MAN IS LOST, EXCEPT THOSE WHO BOW DOWN AND EXHORT ONE ANOTHER TO PATIENCE AND TRUTH. AND SOLOMON TOLD US THERE IS A TIME FOR EVERYTHING, A TIME FOR LOVE, A TIME FOR WAR....

--MARVIN X

Catch the wild, crazy ride called the Marvin X Experience

for information, stay tuned to the Black Bird Press News

www.blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com 

 

Ufa, Russia: BRICS meet (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa_

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Russia's President Vladimir Putin with Prime Minister Narenda Modi, left, in Ufa, Russia on Wednesday. Ufa hosts SOC (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summits.

The BRICS summit in Ufa comes at a crucial juncture in India’s Internet diplomacy.

BRICS leaders are gathered in the Russian town of Ufa for the bloc’s annual summit, and Internet governance is high on their agenda. The summit comes at a crucial juncture in India’s internet diplomacy. Last month in Buenos Aires, at a conference organised by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad offered an “Indian vision for the Internet”. ICANN is the organisation that manages the Domain Name System, which serves as the backbone for all technical and commercial activity in cyberspace. In his recorded message, Mr. Prasad declared India would move away from state-led approaches to governing the Internet, preferring instead a mechanism that co-opts the private sector and civil society into the policy-making process. India’s embrace of this model – called “multi-stakeholderism” – was followed at home by the launch of the “Digital India week”, which underlined the enormous political capital that the Narendra Modi government has invested in technological solutions to governance. The Buenos Aires declaration, however, merely stated New Delhi’s position: in Ufa, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his delegation will be queried extensively by their interlocutors on the consequent cyber strategies India will pursue. 

Modi’s Russian hosts, in particular, are concerned by the developments of last month. Having long considered India as a traditional ally in mooting a prominent role for governments in cyberspace, Russian diplomats in attendance at ICANN were caught off guard by Prasad’s statement. Ahead of the summit, Moscow has circulated a zero draft among BRICS members that devotes substantial space to Internet governance. The Russian intervention is unlikely to make it to the BRICS communiqué in its current avatar, given disparity in views among the grouping’s members. Those differences, however, do not diminish the unique role that BRICS can play in calling out deficiencies in the present system, especially as it relates to the monopolistic hold US businesses have over the Internet. 

New Delhi, a late entrant to global cyber-politics, should steer clear of the ideological discourse that currently clouds the Internet governance debate. Pegging countries as defenders or detractors of “Internet freedom” does little to identify their core interests. In contrast to India, all four BRICS constituents will head to Ufa with clear motivations. A successful summit in Ufa will be a shot in the arm for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s continued efforts to defy Western attempts at political isolation. On the cyber front, Moscow is concerned about sanctions on civilian Internet services and software that the United States has imposed in the Crimea. ICANN being a California-based corporation subject to US laws, has had no option but to comply with these sanctions. At the summit, Russia would want to highlight the consequences of unilateral US control of cyberspace.

China, for all the noise around its home grown, self-sufficient Internet, has been among the most active participants in international cyber negotiations. Last week, China’s top cybersecurity official Lu Wei attended the inaugural council meeting of the Net Mundial Initiative in Sao Paulo, where he spoke of the need to “safeguard the normal order of the Internet.” Not only did Lu engage the Initiative – a discussion platform co-hosted by Brazil, ICANN and the World Economic Forum that India has cautiously stayed away from – but he also took Jack Ma, founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, with him to the event. Jack Ma was elected co-chairman of the council. The Communist Party may be the final arbiter of Internet policies in China but it is clear that Beijing sees “multistakeholderism” as a diplomatic tool to promote its own businesses, which are vying with American Internet giants in global markets. 

Brazil, a leader in Internet diplomacy, has highlighted the legal and political concerns associated with ICANN’s incorporation in the United States. “The legal status of ICANN should constitute an indispensable element” of any proposal to transition key DNS functions to the global community, the Brazilian government has argued. For its part, the US recently courted a state visit by Dilma Rouseff in an attempt to defuse the still-simmering controversy surrounding the Snowden revelations of US snooping on the Brazilian president. At the summit, Brazil will attempt to steer the BRICS position to neutral territory, while espousing the cause for greater “internationalisation” of Internet policy-making. 

South Africa may not enjoy the same profile as its BRICS counterparts on cyber policies, but it remains a pivotal player in the G77 group of developing economies. During recent consultations hosted by the United Nations, South Africa spoke for the G77, and highlighted the important role of governments in articulating Internet policy. 

Where does India fit in this equation? By endorsing the “multistakeholder” line, New Delhi has suggested it is willing to play by the rules the US has set for governing cyberspace. To follow up, the Modi government must convey two important messages to its American interlocutors. First, that “multistakeholderism” does not mean business as usual - India’s support for US-centric institutions will be conditioned by their utility to domestic Internet companies and users. ICANN’s policies on auctioning domains, protection of digital trademarks and copyrights, and access to the WHOIS database of registered sites must be reviewed to reflect developing country concerns. Second, the US government must nudge its Internet corporations to establish a credible information-sharing platform with the Indian government to identify potential cybersecurity threats. The BRICS summit offers India a megaphone to relay yet another message. New Delhi will play ball with the US, that message should read, but will not hesitate to shake hands with those countries that seek a “de-monopolisation” of critical Internet infrastructure.

(Arun Mohan Sukumar is a lawyer and journalist.)

Black Bird Press News & Review: Marvin X at University of Chicago: Sun Ra Symposium Roundtable Discussion

Black Bird Press News & Review: Marvin X at University of Chicago: Sun Ra Symposium Roundtable Discussion

Review: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Between the World and Me

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book is a monumental work about being black in America that every American urgently needs to read.

By Jack Hamilton -slate.com

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me checks in at a trim 152 pages but lands like a major work, a book destined to remain on store shelves, bedside tables, and high school and college syllabi long after its author or any of us have left this Earth. In recent years, Coates has staked his claim as one of the premier American essayists of his generation, a prize-winning correspondent for the Atlantic whose 2014 cover story “The Case for Reparations” was the most widely discussed piece of American magazine writing in recent memory.

Between the World and Me was originally slated for an October release but was recently bumped up to July 14 in the wake of last month’s white supremacist terror attack in Charleston. The timeliness is grim, but a book like this will always be timely—not merely because its concerns are shamefully perennial, but because it is a work of rare beauty and revelatory honesty. Between the World and Me unfolds as a six-chapter letter from Coates to his 15-year-old son Samori, prompted by his son’s stunned and heartbroken reaction to last November’s announcement that no charges would be brought against Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. The framing device is an explicit homage to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, a similarly compact volume published in 1963 that begins with a prefatory essay titled “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.”

Between the World and Me is a love letter written in a moral emergency.

Baldwin’s “Letter” runs just a few pages and is a work of ferocious urgency, words of anguished wisdom imparted from an elder (“I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times,” he writes in the opening line). Between the World and Me, in contrast, is not so much a work of counsel as a lovingly, painstakingly crafted inheritance, a reflection on fatherhood that often feels like a spiritual sequel to Coates’ first book, The Beautiful Struggle, a memoir of his childhood in Baltimore that focused heavily on his own father. If The Beautiful Struggle was Coates explaining his father to himself, Between the World and Me is Coates explaining himself to his son, and, in doing so, explaining as best he can what it means to be black in America.

Much of this happens through snapshots of Coates’ life, both prior to fatherhood and during it. Some of these moments are immense and tragic, such as the murder of Coates’ college friend Prince Jones at the hands of police, an event that, Coates writes, “took me from fear to a rage that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.” Others are more quotidian if still wrenching, such as a brief and heated confrontation with a middle-aged white woman who shoves a 4-year-old Samori at a movie theater. Still others are warm and joyful: every description of Samori’s mother, for instance, or a fantastic meal shared with a new friend on Coates’ first trip to Paris. 

One of the formative moments of growing up is the realization that our parents are human, that raising us isn’t a predetermined rubric of orders and obligations but rather an ongoing and confusing process on their end as well, full of actions and decisions that are racked by fear and doubt and love. Between the World and Me makes this revelation public, and spectacularly so (hopefully Samori Coates is less easily mortified by his parents than most 15-year-olds). And yet Between the World and Me is not really a book about Samori Coates, or even Ta-Nehisi Coates, but rather everything around them, the “world” of the book’s title. “Black people love their children with a kind of obsession,” writes Coates to his son. “You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made.”

Between the World and Me is a love letter written in a moral emergency, one that Coates exposes with the precision of an autopsy and the force of an exorcism. Taken as a whole the book is Coates’ attempt to sever America’s ongoing romance with its own unexamined platitudes of innocence and equality, a romance that, in the writer’s telling, “persists by warring with the known world.” In Between the World and Me this collective delusion is known as “The Dream.” The Dream, writes Coates, “is perfect houses with nice lawns. … The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.” The Dream is wrought from a legacy of white supremacy so entrenched it nearly conceals itself, and Coates’ book is a call to awakening. As such, it joins a tradition that stretches back at least as far as Frederick Douglass and runs up through Barack Obama’s Charleston eulogy just two weeks ago. The richness of this tradition is a formidable thing, and its duration and continuing urgency do not speak well of this country.

Coates is frequently lauded as one of America’s most important writers on the subject of race today, but this in fact undersells him: Coates is one of America’s most important writers on the subject of America today. This distinction might sound glib but is worth making, not least of all because Coates repeatedly informs us that he isn’t much interested in “race” as a subject of reflection in itself. “Race is the child of racism, not the father,” he writes—while race is a fiction of power, racism is power itself, and very real.

It’s also worth making this distinction because for many white Americans the word race simply translates to not us, an invitation to defensive disavowal and aggrievement. Consider the amount of times that Barack Obama has been accused of “injecting race into the conversation” or “playing the race card” simply by making reference to his own body, as he did in the aftermath of the killing of Trayvon Martin. Or the inability of politicians and talk show hosts to describe the actions of Dylann Roof for what they were, a terrorist act committed on the imagined behalf of people who look like him. Or the way a statement like “black lives matter” becomes shouted over with “all lives matter,” a mass of people feeling insufficiently loved by people they fear. To paraphrase an essay Coates wrote for Slate in 2008, many white Americans now treat “racism” like it’s a racial slur directed at them.  

Between the World and Me is, in important ways, a book written toward white Americans, and I say this as one of them. White Americans may need to read this book more urgently and carefully than anyone, and their own sons and daughters need to read it as well. This is not to say this is a book about white people, but rather that it is a terrible mistake for anyone to assume that this is just a book about nonwhite people. In the broadest terms Between the World and Me is about the cautious, tortured, but finally optimistic belief that something beyond these categories persists. Implicit in this book’s existence is a conviction that people are fundamentally reachable, perhaps not all of them but enough, that recognition and empathy are within grasp, that words and language are capable of changing people, even if—especially if—those words are not ones people prefer to hear. Coates has written a book about immense and ongoing failures of humanity that is a triumph of humanism in itself, a book that renders the injuries of racism brutally near and real.

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates.

 

The “open letter” is the most overused mode of contemporary writing, a one-sided conversation with someone famous in which the performative bypass of audience creates an aloof sort of anti-intimacy. The open letter form of Between the World and Me, on the other hand, is entirely in the service of intimacy, a window into parental love, the first and most fundamental intimacy all of us encounter.

Throughout the book Coates employs similar concepts so primal as to be indisputable. Among the most powerful of these is the human body, which Coates mentions relentlessly. He invokes the body as the fundamental unit of human existence and also explores the ways that white and nonwhite bodies have functioned in the building of America. This starts with the book’s opening sentence: “Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body,” as Coates recalls a TV anchor’s skepticism to his claim that America was “built on looting and violence.”

As a descendant of slaves, Coates’ sheer presence on her show would seem to be evidence of this. Recounting his adolescence, Coates describes his awareness that “Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body.” Still later he writes of our “sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and lucrative investment for Dreamers.” “Black life is cheap,” Coates grimly observes, “but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value.” Throughout his book Coates writes about the theft of physical bodies, from slavery up through the prison-industrial complex, and of bodily agency itself, the lack of safety perversely wrought by constant surveillance, when those sworn to protect you imagine themselves as protecting other people from you.

Time functions similarly. At one point, reminiscing on his son’s toddlerhood, Coates ruminates on the longstanding parenting adage that black children must be “twice as good to get half as much.” “It seemed to me that our own rules redoubled plunder,” writes Coates.

It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered. The robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in the moments we lose. It is the last bottle of wine that you have just uncorked but do not have time to drink. It is the second kiss that you do not have time to share, before she walks out of your life. It is the raft of second chances for them, and twenty-three-hour days for us.

This is a beautiful passage whose beauty works in service of its political heft, and vice versa, as images of romance are converted into objects of loss and siege. To be white and live in the Dream is to live in blissful absence of these fears, and yet Coates’ aim isn’t simply to unsettle this absence, but to force his readership into confrontation with presence, with empathy for those whom the Dream denies.

Between the World and Me isn’t a perfect book, and given Coates’ prominence and a general tendency in contemporary culture to take shots at whoever’s reaping acclaim at a given moment, there will surely be critiques, and some will have merit. For starters, while Coates has been quick to credit feminist theory with inspiring his interest in the body, this is an inescapably male-centric text—let’s hope we might soon see a book of similar profile and prestige published with an eye toward daughters (or even nieces; The Fire Next Time isn’t passing any Bechdel Tests either). Furthermore, given the extent to which the menaces of “illegal immigrants” and “Islamic terrorists” have been used to stoke the fires of white fear in the 21^st-century U.S., Coates’ analysis of the contemporary American racial imagination may strike some as overly black-and-white.

Each month, the Slate Book Review picks a great new comic and asks its cartoonist to illustrate the articles in that issue. From touching all-ages memoirs to artful short stories to sex-positive buddy comedies, the comics featured in the Slate Book Review offer a perfect pocket history of the past few years in graphic literature. Read 'em all!

But Between the World and Me isn’t a work of scholarship, or theory, or journalism, even if it bears the influence of all these things in the way great nonfiction should. The book will certainly continue the comparisons between Coates and Baldwin, but the differences between the two are instructive as well. The Fire Next Time is a fiercely present-minded book that prefigures what would come to be known as the New Journalism: references to contemporary politics abound, and Baldwin’s meeting with Elijah Muhammad is recounted in vivid, reportorial detail. History is largely left in the background, and there’s little mention of other writers, living or dead. By its end the book is basically a sermon, as the title suggests, Baldwin’s voice exquisite and thunderous, equal parts preacher and angry god.

Coates doesn’t really write like this (no one does). Coates is more teacher than preacher, a polymath whose breadth of knowledge on matters ranging from literature to pop culture to French philosophy to the Civil War bleeds through every page of his book, distilled into profound moments of discovery, immensely erudite but never showy. In this respect Between the World and Me bears the mark of a more recent literary elder, Toni Morrison, whose slim volume Playing In The Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is one of the most brilliant explorations of racial thought and American writing ever published. (For what it’s worth Morrison contributes a blurb to Between the World and Me in which she, too, likens Coates to Baldwin.) Morrison is of course a renowned teacher herself, and as any high school or college literature instructor will tell you, few books on Earth teach as well as hers.

I found myself thinking a lot about teaching and teachers while reading Between the World and Me, and not just because I’m one myself, at a university founded by one of America’s most famous slaveholders. I first read The Fire Next Time as a junior in high school; it was pushed on me by an eccentric but thrilling English teacher who told me that it was the greatest essay ever written. I still remember him vividly, because he was the kind of teacher who made me read books like that and who talked about writing in that way. He died a number of years ago, but I wish I could give Coates’ book to him. Instead I’ll give it to my own students and, if the time comes, to my own children as well.