The underlying issue is that by the ‘90s White America had learned the Lesson of America’s Race Issues – as the synthesis to the thesis of Jim Crow and the antithesis of 60s-80s upsetting of settled order – as “black people can be just as capital-W White as the Irish, if you give them half a chance”
The question, if the choices are either nationalism or empire, is,
What’s just about the weakest form of nationalism you can get away with, plus a modest safety margin?
Honest answer: 1990s American suburban “white” nationalism.
Not like KKK stuff, but sorta the stuff @kontextmaschine alludes to when he talks about his childhood. AKA 10 years downstream of this.
“We might not be perfect, but at least we’re not those inner-city freaks” and unity around not being those freaks coupled with “And then some of the inner-city freaks manage to avoid being freaks and we should help them ‘get out’ and become one of us by shedding the inner-city freak bits”.
And that was definitely horribly racial in a post-Civil Rights, but also “Wow, a giant very definitely black rape mob came and raped my sister before burning down our house in 1967” sort of way, so I say white, but also those quotes actually have meaning.
Especially because by the 1990s, even the *black* middle class was giving up on black-ruled cities by voting or movement outwards and the last big voter fraud case in this country was Chicago saying “At least we’re not Detroit, we will have white leadership”. And really good chunks of my highschool experience were dealing with the fact that the ~2002-on migrants were doing crimes in my lovely leafy suburb and also starting fights in the hallways.
Seriously I got into programming because I couldn’t eat lunch in the cafeteria anymore, but my physics teacher let me do my homework in Java on the school computers in his classroom instead.
I mean a lot of it was that the suppression happened in the previous decade and the 90s golden age were cruising off that harvest, no longer even having to try hard to uphold it (that getting parsed as a rejection)
That 90s suburban dreamtime, alternative rock, irony, multiplex Will Smith, that was pretty much based on a constriction of the imagined polity to a white mass middle class, overseen by ascended Boomers who had grown up imagining that as the society they were angling to oversee anyway
When I was a kid one of the local unaffiliated TV stations played reruns of What’s Happening, this sitcom about black 70s inner city… but basically okay life.
Working class “worries about money” but not like, destitution, and “urban crime” kind of an extension of “juvenile delinquents”, Sharks and Jets, Wet Bandits-ass stuff. It was a black neighborhood in the city but not like, what “inner city” meant by my day.
Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”, like, streets is tough, that was about something novel in 1982
so gold works as an universal trade medium because anyone you trade with knows they are in network with someone who is in a network with someone who wants to do a trade in a way finite national-specific mediums don’t work for
so color works as an organizing principle of society cause even if “race isn’t real”, if you can get any given bunch of illiterate randoms and ask “hey, that guy over there in the medium distance, in low light and regardless of how he’s attired - is he white or black?” and have them all reliably come to the same answer, you can do things with that classification
When the NAACP was founded few of the founders would meet a brown paper bag test, they were “black” under the “One Drop Rule” but not visually distinguished, a common literary figure was the “tragic mulatta” who “passed” as white until her heritage was discovered or revealed
Growing up I always associated Sunday, the beans-franks-n-cottage-cheese dinners we had, NFL games on TV, and the military recruiting ads on them - “Be All That You Can Be”, the Marine fighting the balrog, etc.
Thinking back made the connection that those United Negro College Fund (”because a mind… is a terrible thing to waste”), Fresh Air Fund, Big Brothers/Big Sisters ads in the 80s/early 90s were “now that you’re in a good mood seeing a bunch of (college graduate!) Negroes as ‘your team’, maybe help them out of the ‘urban crisis’ ghetto?”
My aunt took in a Fresh Air Fund kid in the summers, a program to get black youth out of the purposeless urban school break into the country (LA’s overcrowded “tracks” year-round schooling similarly prevented all ghetto youth from being unoccupied at once)
In his 20s he went to prison for a while, then later he showed up to family events quite charming, after all the “dindu nuffin” meme is based on the fact that even urban black criminals challenging the law and social order are experienced as pleasant and prosocial by their families
A History Of Black Cowboys And The Myth That The West Was White
Brad Trent, “Ellis ‘Mountain Man’ Harris from ‘The Federation of Black Cowboys’” series for The Village Voice, 2016
A quick internet search of “American cowboy” yields a predictable crop of images. Husky men with weathered expressions can be seen galloping on horseback. They’re often dressed in denim or plaid, with a bandana tied ‘round their neck and a cowboy hat perched atop their head. Lassos are likely being swung overhead. And yes, they’re all white.
Contrary to what the homogenous imagery depicted by Hollywood and history books would lead you to believe, cowboys of color have had a substantial presence on the Western frontier since the 1500s. In fact, the word “cowboy” is believed by some to have emerged as a derogatory term used to describe Black cowhands.
An ongoing photography exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem celebrates the legacy of the “Black Cowboy” while chronicling the unlikely places around the country where cowboy culture thrives today. Through their photographs, artists like Brad Trent, Deanna Lawson and Ron Tarver work to retire the persistent myth that equates cowboys with whiteness.
Deana Lawson, “Cowboys,” 2014, inkjet print mounted on Sintra, courtesy the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery
One notable example of this erasure manifests in the story of Bass Reeves, a slave in Arkansas in the 19th century who later became a deputy U.S. marshal, known for his ace detective skills and bombastic style. (He often disguised himself in costume to fool felons and passed out silver dollars as a calling card.) Some have speculated that Reeves was the inspiration for the fictional Lone Ranger character.
Most people remain unaware of the black cowboy’s storied, and fundamentally patriotic, past. “When I moved to the East Coast, I was amazed that people had never heard of or didn’t know there were black cowboys,” photographer Ron Tarver said in an interview with The Duncan Banner. “It was a story I wanted to tell for a long time.”
Ron Tarver. “Legends,” 1993
In 2013 Tarver set out to document black cowboy culture, in part as a tribute to his grandfather, a cowboy in Oklahoma in the 1940s. “He worked on a ranch and drove cattle from near Braggs to Catoosa.” Another artist, Brad Trent, shot striking black-and-white portraits of members of the Federation of Black Cowboys in Queens, New York, an organization devoted to telling the true story of black cowboys’ heritage while providing educational opportunities for local youth to learn from the values and traditions of cowboy life.
Kesha Morse, the FBC president, described their mission as using “the uniqueness of horses as a way to reach inner-city children and expose them to more than what they are exposed to in their communities.”
Trent’s images capture how much has changed for black cowboys, who now dwell not only on the Western Front but on the city streets of New York and in rodeos held in state prisons. Yet certain values of cowboy culture remain intact. For Morse, it’s the importance of patience, kindness and tolerance.
Ron Tarver, “The Basketball Game,” 1993
Brad Trent, “Arthur ‘J.R.’ Fulmore, from ‘The Federation of Black Cowboys’” series for The Village Voice, 2016
Ron Tarver, “A Ride by North Philly Rows,” 1993
Brad Trent, “‘Mama’ Kesha Morse from ‘The Federation of Black Cowboys’” series for The Village Voice, 2016
Ron Tarver, “Concrete Canyon,” Harlem, 1993
So much more needs to be said on this topic.
RDR2 kinda subtly made this point, that Blazing Saddles was doing a 70s riff off the Western-movie-as-midcentury-(White-)national-myth, the actual unsettled western frontier was where a lone black man as a pillar of a mixed-race society would be least remarkable
Wesley Yang made a good point on the context of the NYT’s 1619 thing and Coates bringing up reparations again and a renewed focus on slavery and “the awokening” in general.
That as new streams of immigration make America less white, they simultaneously make it less black, or at least less Negro – the nation formed in slavery in America.
And I could see that, a felt sense of danger that if slavery and blackness aren’t deeper written into the national narrative, then to the degree these new arrivals are assimilated to America, it’ll be again be to a specifically white America, with blacks left on the outside, like with the “white ethnics“ before.
But it hangs up on that nation thing. Like, if you don’t want the American narrative to just be the White nation’s story, okay, but the rightists that bluecheck shitsnots say are “telling on themselves” are right, the Black nation’s story as proposed is one featuring the White nation as an enemy, or at least Pharoah’s people, where it is featured at all.
Though I mean what were the White nation’s alternatives on offer? Well, the traditional one up to 1970 was “it was a damn shame that the White nation split and turned against itself in the waste of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and a great glory it was able to reunite”.
The upgraded one was “it was a damn shame that the White nation enslaved the blacks, but a great glory it freed them and invited them to join the White nation, thus resolving that plotline”
Which I suppose was still the promise when I grew up, the narrative as I learned it was
The Civil Rights Movement Was A Great And Glorious Thing (by which they mean the ‘50s part) but
The ‘60s Went Too Far Sometimes (by which they include the Civil Rights Movement) then in
The ‘70s [INAUDIBLE] so in
The ‘80s we remembered we were Americans, dammit, which means by
The ‘90s we couldn’t wait for blacks to escape the violent, inner-city ruin in which they had always lived
so. I mean, I put it like that to render the rejection sympathetic and understandable, but I grew up with that whole 90s colorblind “black people can be Whites too!” thing, I liked it, it seemed like it was working for a while, at least in the spheres I noticed, and when complaints became audible it felt like they could be classified and addressed as failures to live up to the ideal.
I dunno, the 90s dreams of “women can be guys too!” and “goyim can be secular Jews too!” aren’t doing too great either. Maybe there was just a strong enough monoculture with high barriers that things had to be made to work back then. Maybe the 90s utopian “the internet will lower barriers and give everyone a voice!“ thing was true but in a monkey’s paw way and the thing we thought we were celebrating as that was an early stage where it built a culture more tailored to the already-set. I dunno. I have no solutions.
So as someone who vastly prefers taking in information as text than as audio or video I’d been a little dismayed with the way the internet’s energies turned lately, I never “got into” YouTube and honestly resent untranscribed podcasts
But I did these days have an interesting new experience where the internet made something timebound video into a readable form, and that’s been “watching” the Surviving R. Kelly documentary as, I suppose, Black Twitter livetweets their reactions on the #SurvivingRKelly hashtag
I appreciated it better than last decade’s form of TV “recaps”, either the first-wave amateurs or the later entry-level writers of the magazineblog era. Which, at some level had to be about the recapper’s voice, or focus at least
Whereas these individual tweets in chronological order, in different voice but kind of in conversation with each other, usually a quote – or a labeled reaction, like “his brother tho: [reaction gif]”. It feels somehow less intermediated video-as-text, like I’m getting the narrative and arc and pacing of the underlying material itself, but in a text-novel-form, hitting the high points without the connective tissue.
(Like how people say a book adapted to a movie they cut stuff but no even if there’s less dialogue and plot points can you imagine if they described every single thing in frame in every setting and every action the actors performed? It would be insane. Picture worth a thousand words, you know.)
Anyway one thing I remember from college in a few different classes, it used to be typical to talk to your friends, and talk back to the performance, at the theater, and how training the audience out of that became a real class distinction preserved in the way black audiences related to performances in movie theaters
(I suppose there’s a similar class distinction in the energy in the pews in black and Pentecostal churches, or sporting events)
While also invoking that classic wypipo food comes out of an actual pragmatic tradition, like, “potato salad with walnuts and raisins” is a dish that can be made entirely out of foods that can be preserved through the long winter of northern latitudes, two of them particularly energy/flavor-dense “treats”
Actually you know what’s a classic American farm laborers’ treat, a bountiful sweet food that comes ripe in high summer when the living’s easy and there’s no competing harvests, something that (before they bred the taste out to make it thick-rind crisp enough to stand refrigerated rail transport) wouldn’t be exported to distant markets but enjoyed in local feasting, in a way that got associated with black agriculture?
Anonymous asked: Do you ever watch cable tv and see an old movie or show like “Lethal Weapon”, and realize with sad, wistful nostalgia that the next generation will not know such apolitical, feel-good interracial action-buddy entertainment or the strange truce between black and white masculinity that football was the foundation of? That that era where action and comedy cinema especially were defined by such simple masculine *fun* is gone forever?
Richard Linklater has literally made it his life’s purpose to make sure the memory of that early-80s interracial truce on the basis of earnest, earthy, fun-loving American clear-sky summer day masculinity is not forgotten
Anonymous asked: i realize it's not so much your type of music, but i feel like there's a take in the whole "extreme hardcore rappers who are also metalheads and weebs" phenomenon that's the big new wave in rap (although the ones who've gotten mainstream from that scene like 69 and xxx aren't as much metalheads or weebs as, say, zillakami)
Yeah I’ve been noticing that from a distance, but I really don’t follow pop music enough anymore to parse it – like, all these Despacito jokes seem to work on the conceit that the song’s unavoidable, but somehow I have
I don’t understand what this is about but I remember the big new wave in rap of ten years ago hanging out on Newgrounds talking about how cool Naruto is, so the only thing I’m surprised by is that it took this long
yeah during the ‘00s the iconic “rowdy black youth” went rapidly from like gangsta to skate punk to mall katana and I think if someone had bothered to write this into our national narrative we’d be in a better place today
