Intergenerational Dysfunction is a hard row to hoe

The white south was so dependent on slavery ideologically and culturally that it nearly completely ignored finance capitalism, manufacturing, technological innovation, industrial innovation and the legal and wage labor benefits and tools that come along with them. The very same elitist cultural forces that kept Black people ignorant and illiterate (in an academic sense) kept large swathes of poor white people ignorant and illiterate and more or less incapable of taking advantage of economic innovations in the North and the rest of the 19th century world. If for no other reason than a mistake by white pre-1860 leadership of that magnitude white folk today should not look back at that time as ‘glory days’ even if they took the horrors of chattel slavery out of the equation. But defeat and the anger and resentment generated by it, do dangerous things to people’s sense of priorities.

Similarly we find angry undereducated white men today (January 6) storming the capital because they feel left out of the progress that has occurred because their white southern ancestors completely ignored the macroeconomic, technological, political and industrial trends in the North and the rest of the world. In the meantime, they have watch talented ninjas, towel heads, spics, slant eyes, Jews, Mormons and Pope and Mary worshippers (sic) take firm and secure advantage of opportunities and powers they don’t see aggregating to themselves anymore.

And so they are carrying Tiki Torches and yelling at the top of their lungs ‘Jews will not replace us’ which I’m sure an innovative improviser would periodically insert varying races, ethnic groups, religions and gays won’t replace them either which until the advent of invitro fertilization wasn’t even ever considered an option. That’s how absurd it is. The only white men that feel like they are being replaced is the poor, often southern, high school or less educated and likely rural ones. Very interesting in that it’s probably not a coincidence those factors correlate.

As you see these same cultural and racial fault lines are rearing themselves again and between ninjas trying to take down statues and ‘white wash’ history as though our pronouncement and judgement on history aesthetics or anything else will stand the test for future generations when they read about our lives and opinions in books and see them on documentaries. When future generations read and learn about times we consider the present today but which they will regard as the past very soon, do you know for certain what lenses they will be looking at us through. Are you so naïve and arrogant as to think that our present human society hit a magic marker and everything we think on sexuality, technology or anything else will represent a standard of human excellence from here on out to eternity? That is my muthafuckin problem with liberals.

Everywhere, and I mean everywhere indigenous languages are disappearing we historians and oddly enough, many oddball liberals consider it a negative and lament the fact these languages have less than 30 users and are in danger of disappearing. We lament the destruction of cultural artifacts from thousands of years ago. We don’t make distinctions as to the political persuasion of those artifacts, we want to see them for what they are as scholars and archaeologists. But no, not ninjas and the crazy assed white liberals that empower them. I’m a Christian and monotheist and I believe in the bible based religions and forms thereof but at this point as a historian and academic, I wonder what Canaanite religion was like; I wonder what happened to the idols that were at the ancient Kaaba before Muhammad purified it; I wouldn’t have wanted to be there but I think it’s is good for history to see the monuments of the Inca even if they were practicing human sacrifice of varying sorts. I’m not arguing right or wrong I’m just saying strictly from an academic perspective, it’s good to know and shows mercy. The liberals are so hypocritical. Not a one of them is trying to cancel culture the Inca, even though they practiced human sacrifice! The only reason they haven’t turned their attentions to them is because 1) look what contact with Europeans did to them (they are victims and liberals love victims) and 2) they got wiped out as a functional culture and now Disney has to make cartoons about them for white folk to give a damn about what European contact did to them. Not coincidentally Native Americans find themselves in a similar situation; the only kind of Native American history while folk want to deal with is the cartoon ‘Pochahontas’ version where she falls in love with the white man in the end, like all good natives do.

Let the ninjas and Americans alive in America in 2080 make their own decisions about what is on Stone Mountain. What give us the right to take it away from them? Is it because we think we are 100% right; we must be right; and we are vain enough to think we are right so much that we sandblast Robert E Lee off Stone Mountain and rename Grady Hospital and High School. Let the dead bury their dead! Let future generations write their history with the actual monuments in their sights not some politically sanitized version of what they wanted history to say circa niggerdom 2021.

God didn’t give us a spirit of fear where we walk around looking for micro-insults and bad service at restaurants or malls so you can scream and holler racism. Who the hell as an individual or race got an award for having the ‘thinnest skin’? Don’t accidentally serve ninjas wrong or even give them anything special in acknowledgement of their historic hardships. Either one can be interpreted by the ninja at hand as condescending and a microaggression. If you overlook him and seat a white family before them it’s because he’s Black; if he as your waiter assumes you want the economy meals and offers you the 2 for $20 menu for your 4 kids and two adults you get offended and think he’s lowballing you because your Black. Thin skinned. I can’t go around looking for what the fuc other people are going to do wrong to me. I got to focus and concentrate on doing me; doing my thing and making it and the people and processes involved the best they can be.

All I want to do is make good art individually and in the knowledge that politics is art on the community, local, state and National scale. Politics as economics, culture and polity is a people’s Art. Thus defined, the ‘artistic’ treasure that they will leave their descendants and impact the world needs to be of as high a quality as humanly possible. The stakes are high. America is an armed camp now. Guns and bullets are selling out. We got to chill. Families and communities are unstable. Violence is rife and America either has international enemies that would love to see us chaotic, disorganized and weak….or friends who will eventually realize that how bad Trump treated them is not an aberration or anomaly and will come to see the world in geopolitical terms of what they can gain from American weakness, chaos and disorganization.

Niggerdom I offer you this, maybe we can’t exactly trust white folk like that, but we can trust them enough not to abandon the American system in good faith….or not depending upon how one looks at Jan 6. For arguments sake let’s argue that you are right in your anti-white rhetorical and operative ideological bents. Do you trust the Russians more? Do you trust the Chinese more? The Chinese middle classes and elites don’t even give their kids domestically produced Chinese baby formula and prefer importing western brands. Do you think I’m going to rest my pharmaceutical and industrial capacity on them? Do the Africans these days trust the Chinese?

You think Imma trust our current foolish crop of Black elected officials either? Perhaps they are easiest symbolized and articulated by the idea that literally just this weekend Feb27-Mar1, 12 people in Atlanta got shot. In the middle of a Black on Black crime wave ninjas are hollering about defund the police? Poor Keisha is hollering bout turning the jail into a community development, outreach and arts center. This kind of insane liberal humanism is exactly why Atlanta City government couldn’t figure out what to do with Federal Government AIDS housing money (other than empower and pay a nepotistic and/or sycophantic committee and its staff to look into the matter) and ended up looking incompetent. Atlanta City government couldn’t figure out to do with the money but it is the gay capital of the south? They couldn’t figure out what to do with the money and the AIDS rate in Atlanta rivals and even exceeds what it is in some African countries? And we’ve had Black mayors, city councils and bureaucracies for 50 or so years and the Atlanta University Center for over 100. And them ninjas couldn’t pull something together? Notwithstanding actually doing something reasonable with the funds, Keisha has transvestite reading hour though. That’s a hell of a trade off.

Part II: Gavotte Pista III (Bourgeois Black Professionalism)

Every once in a while I find it necessary to prove to Black people that our leadership (usually read Black elected officials but I mean the term inclusive of much religious and religiously themed leadership as well) literally doesn’t know what the hell they are doing! I honestly thought a leadership that maintains the contradiction and hypocrisy of chanting ‘defund the police’ in the middle of a Black on Black crime wave would be self obviously incompetent. But I don’t hear enough people complaining about leadership dumb enough to ask for something they know full well is untenable (at least in the present circumstances).

You can’t run politics like that and Keisha trying to turn the city jail into some kind of ‘Help Center’ like ‘Weezie’ and ‘Helen’ from the old Jefferson’s Sitcom a ‘Black on Black’ and general crime wave is fucking ridiculous. I’m sick of white liberals and the Negroes they engender and empower acting like if they wish for and fantasize about a socialist elysian fields utopian dream long enough it must magically appear. 12 people got shot a couple weekends ago in Atlanta and this kind of mother hen approach to crime is nuts. It is exactly why Buckhead is willing to tax themselves privately to fund its own “security teams” which of course should be looked at as precisely what it is, a prelude to declaring cityhood.

There was enough evidence that Black Elected official leadership is nearly completely incompetent and bankrupt during the S. Fulton debacle which I describe elsewhere. Negroes didn’t even have an authoritative or organic name in mind but they took oh so much pride in the fact all the leadership is Black. Their photographs were on the cover of National and local publications. They made their rounds on the local and national media news cycles. Now they fight in public spats and are a far cry from the promise and hopes for good governance they had when they split out from under Fulton County. Furthermore come on guys, if we complained for generations that white people didn’t represent us in leadership and then we turn right around and don’t represent them is that wise…or just creating resentments you can’t always bank on being able to control (Jan 6).

Good governance is not a damn photo shoot! It’s not simply a statistic or nominal and titular power! To the extent any power exists the key is to transform it into good governance not photo shoots, feel good sessions and going around hugging folk like Oprah. What liberal fantasy land told Keisha that instead of relieving jail overcrowding at Fulton County she should create another government program and bureaucracy to to run it like some kind of community development organization? Does that work as fast as private investment? What is altogether worse is that we have not learned the lessons we should have from these kinds of situations when they have occurred in the past.

We of Negritude in metro Atlanta have not learned those lessons in 50 years controlling the mayor’s office, school boards and general bureaucracy. We should be ashamed that folk from all over the world are calling this the ‘Black mecca’ and when their children get here and go to public school they are receiving somewhat less than a ‘Black Mecca’ education. When they interact with the city bureaucracy, much of it (and to be fair its not a bad necessarily) but it is not a ‘Black Mecca’ experience. So there are some public, academic and professional responses to that exceeding my skill set.

With the time I have remaining in this essay, I want to address the most recent example of Black Elected Officials more interested in photo ops than cleaning up bureaucratic operations; more interested in bone headed political choices fueled out of 400 years of anger and resentment than economic and political realities. This is and will prove to be destructive not only to us as African Americans but the entire American enterprise, which I hear the Afrocentric peanut gallery holler now about revolution and ‘by any means necessary’ but most of them Negroes is lying and for practical purposes they know full well that any kind of revolution that takes place that happens to close Kroger and Walmart tomorrow ain’t necessarily helpful. Furthermore if them ninjas was bout revolution they would be bout it but they ain’t, they bout talkin bout it. The proof is in the pudding. If you wanted to do it, you would have already done it. Them Muslims want they 55 virgins…….what do you want…..right that’s what I thought, Walmart and Kroger to be open tomorrow because you got to feed them children. Plus, you joaning Christianity and religion in general but I don’t see you putting aside your ‘habits’ because it’s depending upon the white man’s filthy lucre!

Whether that revolution is televised or not our radical Negro Revolutionaries want to get up at 2 in the morning tonight and in between looking at porn, looking at videos from their accepted list of internet sensations, railing against Christianity and southern Black culture they are posting ‘revolutionary statements’ on their and other people’s twitter feed. Get the fuck outa here. You Facebook and Instagram revolutionaries. It’s a revolution for uninformed revolutionaries. We don’t teach history anymore. Hollywood values have crept into academic and popular cultural history and we think it’s more important how well we tell it (or don’t tell it) than the fact it actually existed, happened and was nuanced, complex, organic, interconnected and woven into a lot of functionalities worthy of detailed investigation. Or just get on TV and say ‘Your Fired’.

All of my Afrocentric friends take pot shots at the Black church. They think just cause they got a new narrative theology and they don’t feel they need the Black church anymore, they can tear it down and build their own monument to themselves with the bricks they canibalized, and make themselves look bigger. But they tear it down only to realize far too late in horror that they built their own house on the same exact foundation and by destroying it and using it’s bricks to build a monument to yourself you end up weakening your house’s foundation. By taking cultural and theological potshots at the Black Church you are weakening and destroying your own foundation.

You distinguish yourselves by being anti-Christian, thus you built the persona of your movement on being anti-Christian. But 80% of your converts you canibalize from the Black church. How does that logic run? How is it they make such good “insert your new fangled religion or a historical version of American Islam and its offshoots”? You talk bad about where they came from but them they precisely make good converts because they got ‘home training’ and they are using to tithing so zakat is perfectly reasonable. They are used to singing in the choir and evangelizing so the idea of doing Dawah in jails and in the streets they are good at. They are used to sitting under a leader and yes, you joan them for sitting under some Cadillac driving preacher and then you exploit them for yourselves and have them sitting under a Cadillac driving Imam or Minister so and so. I’m not joaning. Many of my best friends are variations of these religions, I’m merely discoursing from the standing point of a lot of shit I have to take from them unnecessarily and what I believe Christianity’s response should be to it.

I have nearly the same problem with atheists. Who is crazier, the one who believes in something that doesn’t exist, or the one who has built a career, a life and a persona arguing against something they presume not to exist? Seriously, which one is crazier. “If it doesn’t fit you must acquit”, or rather in this case “if it doesn’t exist just ignore it!” But no, a la Christopher Hitchens you go around the world and build an intellectual monument and write treatises all to prove something that doesn’t exist, doesn’t exist…..right?

But let us get back to Black politics before the damn breaks on my mediocrity. But even my mediocrity is thorough and when it does shift into mediocrity it’s still better than what passes for a lot of prose and fiction today. Believe it or not the purpose of this essay was to describe some of the issues surrounding Dekalb County talking about their new ‘Dream Team’ of judges; and by ‘Dream Team’ they mean all Blacks and mostly female. And it’s as idiotic and stupid as South Fulton’s exultation of their version of their ‘Dream Team’. I want to point out some reasons.

You cannot be against racism and then turn around when you get in power and be racist and exult in it at the same time. When White folk didn’t have us in any positions for most of this nation’s history they thought they had a ‘Dream Team’ too. Now every white man that gets fired (and you will see this more and more and we might be seeing in the case of Fulton County’s election officer) will say it was reverse discrimination and they essentially fired him because he was White. Do you know what it really means for a Black woman to stand in front of public media and news outlets all over America and say she is confident she got the very best people for the job? It is as ludicrous as it was 70 years ago when all White segregated judges stood up there with their 100% all White staff and said they got the best people for job. They are equally ludicrous and preposterous and the idea we Ninjas do that kind of shit basically means we need to be looking for the white backlash.

Damn, hire one white dude. Let him be your token. Don’t create an all Black situation. You know these ‘patriots’ according to their interpretation of their history is that they get upset about ‘taxation without representation’. Dekalb County has a significant white population that is not being represented. Then you are going to be offended when they split off and try to incorporate like many places in North Fulton. All cause you you’re politically naïve and short sighted. Y’all ninjas think y’all know what’s best for Dekalb County even though significant portions are white and like Buckhead and North Fulton, white mainstream North Dekalb pays more into the County coffers than Black South Dekalb. SO now y’all done gone off and pulled an OJ Simpson level antagonization of the white man. I know y’all are thinking my position is somewhat reminiscent of the slave fearing retribution for angering the master. Whether it sounds like that or not my position is purely strategic if for no other reason than it should be common sense not to antagonize somebody you are dependent upon at least until you are no longer dependent upon them and even then there may be political and religious reasons for still respecting them enough to at least not antagonize them. These are just common courtesies between civilized individuals correct?

“Jews will not replace us,” they were heard to chant. When I first heard it I thought it was the oddest and surprising chant I’d ever heard. Talk about grievance politics! White men arguing they will not be replaced is like Western European and American Civilization arguing they will not be replaced. Who is replacing you? The Chinese, the Indians and the Russians? Jews and uppity ninjas? And of course therein lies the real grievance of poor white people. They are angry at upper middle class and elite white people because they feel that instead of putting them on, they putt on foreigners, gays, uppity ninjas etc. Elite corporate whites, upper middle class, largely liberal whites are not being replaced and poor white folk see the handwriting on the wall. It is poor uneducated whites that are being replaced with the minority of the week whether that is interpreted as uppity ninjas, the Latinx folk, gays or Asians. It is white anger and resentment at their own displaced against foreigners and uppity ninjas. This fear of being replaced is as powerful as it is absurd.

Nevertheless this notion of being replaced is a powerful notion and then add on top of that not only do ninjas get control of Dekalb County which in and of itself is fine, ninjas use their power to create all Black administrations and leadership. And guess what, that is what the far right has been telling poor uneducated white folk for years, that as soon as ninjas get a little power over you their going to take over and put their own in. And I didn’t need Qanon to tell me that, just a little of that Nietzschean closet psychology. Between Obama and white folks having to take credit for microaggressions which to be frank, I offend my muthafuckin mama accidentally by the shit that comes out of my mouth, does it mean I don’t deserve a job because I as a white man call you colored and don’t know which part of LGBTQIA you precisely fit in and it has made you feel uncomfortable. So now everybody in America has a grievance based philosophy (*even the white man) and everybody wants to wring and beat the Federal Government and Judiciary to a bloody pulp trying to get what they want. We have the one Federal Government Nanny state that we demand says “I can’t deny anybody and have to protect everybody”. There is a difference between guaranteeing the freedom of and “protecting” everybody. Please understand that! There is indeed a difference between guaranteeing the freedom of and “protecting” everybody. No matter who got what in the past we can’t fuck up in the future.

Furthermore where egos are bigger than intellects the white folk of Dekalb County can make the argument that they are not being represented by the government they pay taxes to. The majority Black citizens of Dekalb County have decided that they know what is best for the white citizens of Dekalb County and that includes an all Black judiciary. These Black people are not only telling you what you need but what you are going to get. White folks justified repressing us before by first saying we didn’t have the intelligence and intellectual ability for high public responsibility. Disabused of that notion, the new reason was if you let one in they will come in and they will take over and when they take over you will not have a voice, i.e while Buckhead, North Fulton and North Dekalb have varying forms of separations schemes from their southern urban counterparts.

Let people have a stake. That’s what it means to rule for stability and durability. We can’t look at power like it is a zero sum game; like when we get it, political power’s most important function is to be a vehicle to address 450 years of slavery and oppression. Whether that can be an aim or not (that is, recompensing the past), the first aim is good governance or by default you will not be ‘ruling’ long. You can’t go around preaching Black and brown people need to be represented, gays need to be represented, the handicapped need to be represented, and that’s how white folk should run their stuff, but when you get in power you run your stuff all Black without them being represented at all. The blowback and the white pushback isn’t the biggest problem, the biggest problem is Black people’s hipocrisy before God. That is a worse problem.

We aren’t even smart enough to learn white folks greatest lesson which is to keep a couple stereotypical token white people on staff. Get you a country white boy and treat him good. Nominate him to varying boards and committees; he will defend you at least against charges of reverse racism! Just the mere fact that he is there will do this. It worked for white folk for decades. 100 executives and 3 ninjas. 3000 students and 13 ninjas (not including the 15 on the basketball team). For years white folk used these kinds of ratios to defend the idea that they were not discriminating against ninjas. But we don’t even have enough sense to get us a token white boy, Asian or Latino.

It’s like Gary Owen is the proof that it’s not that white comedians can’t be funny to Black audiences. Dave Chapelle et al has the joke about their white friends. If you can get some, or one or two it’s not a bad thing. According to Dave however, just don’t go to sleep around them. I’m here to do due diligence on my job not solve historical race problems and the minute you get out of that professional mindset in this competitive economy, you are making your own life hard. You don’t have time to work on anything but winning, improving, making more efficient, being faster, harder, stronger, quicker; you don’t have time for anger and resentment, solving 450 years worth of psycho-angst or closing jails with the idea that you are going to create ‘The Help Center’ like ‘Weezie’ and ‘Helen’.

And I repeat. Intergenerational dysfunction is a hard row to hoe.

Part 2

I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life (intellectually and politically). I’m looking at the ‘Dream Team’ of judges in Dekalb County. If a white man picked all Black anything and called it a “Dream Team” basketball connotations arrive and of course here is a white man calling a team of ‘educated Negroes’ the “Dream Team” deeming them by micro-aggression with assumption that ‘all ninjas’ can and do play basketball and therefore understand basketball metaphors and love watermelon and chicken.

Come on guys, do you see the absurdities of our positions sometimes? Notwithstanding the ways in which white conservatives use MLK Jr quotes, I still find it somewhat hard to believe that MLK Jr with his ‘Dream and everything’ would find all Black judges (in counties with a significant population of ‘others’) any more correct than ‘all white’ judges or all Latino judges or all Asian judges or all Christian judges, married judges, or yes even all straight judges.

Because they are all Black does not mean a damn thing if the general society and culture can’t increase the economic productivity of Black communities; thus stabilizing families, expectations and outcomes. Black elected officials can’t help playing the ‘shell and pea’ game with poor Black people. You can’t ship em’ somewhere else, then invest heavily in the new white mainstream shit with tax breaks and other incentives for the white hipsters, tech companies and their families that bungee jump and do rock climbing and need muthafuckin fancy bike lanes. Get the fuck outa here. For in the meantime all you have done with the former Negro residents is ship them somewhere else, just as they are, just as poor, just as broke and just as uneducated but on another ‘side of the equation’ (town). And Black elected officials be wanting a pat on the back for how good they are at the ‘shell and pea’ game. We gotta do better y’all. We gotta do better.

Black bourgeois and elite professionalism must be a standard that exists in and for its own sake; not just because we are code-switching and ‘shape shifting’ to fit into certain mainstream cultural and legal categories. It’s not that a Black man or woman sounds white when they talk that makes it a good or bad thing; it’s what the fuck is coming out of their mouths that makes it a good or bad thing! It’s not that a man or woman is a mulatto that I object to, it’s when they avoid ‘niggerdom’ that I get a swelling feeling in my soul and physically like I used to get when I played outside linebacker.

The mentality on defense is that you are defending your goal, which you don’t want ‘the enemy’ (the opposing team) to violate and enter securing them points. What is at your goal; your territory; your homes; your womenfolk; your children; you being on defense are the only thing standing between them and loss and destruction and you must not be willing to cede an inch of territory uncontested. You may lose tactically and you may lose strategically but you can’t give your shit away for free!

And I’ve noticed all my life that the white mainstream world is forever sticking some mulatto of the week in our ninja faces claiming that this is the most talented ninja they could find? Really, Trevor Noah, Halle Berry and yes Obama are the most talented ninjas in America and they just magically happen to be mulattos. Let me add because it’s timely, Meghan Markle is supposed to be the one of us ‘worthy’ to marry a prince? But niggerdom, watch the lick they have hit us with now; white folk have begun substituting ‘brown people’ in general in order to assuage their general debts off what we in niggerdom wholly deserve! This of course delights the Negro fake assed bourgeois professional elites to no end but it doesn’t mean shit to we nappy headed, peezy headed, big nose, big lipped, big legged, big ass, big hips and big thighs ninjas. We never got our ‘shot’ at glory before white folk and black elites started substituting everybody and they grandma and they transvestite granddaddy.

Long before they really gave a Black woman credit for having a ‘big Black ass and a pretty smile’ they gave J-Lo and Kim Kardashian all the good press! Tell me when I’m lying saints. I might be oversimplifying but I ain’t lying! Y’all, how they stick these folk in front of us to do everything but give us the credit and the glory we deserve for being us and surviving what they fuck they put us through the past 450 years in the western hemisphere.