http://www.feuilletonjones.com/ en Copyright 2008 Sun, 17 Feb 2008 09:04:01 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss metalabel.com, and we sell music online for independent artists. I'm putting my money where my mouth is. I think we can do it better than any corporation, and certainly better than any other online distributor, and I think we'll have greater social impact, too, because we're coming with the right attitude. But of course this takes pretty much most of my time nowadays. I work a full-time job, too! It's gonna be a long time before I can write again, I fear.]]> http://www.feuilletonjones.com/022008.html#000011 http://www.feuilletonjones.com/022008.html#000011 Amiri Barksdale Art Criticism Class Struggle Communism Pop Culture Spectacle Sun, 17 Feb 2008 09:04:01 -0500 We used to live in Third Ward, Houston, Texas, on North MacGregor, right by the bayou. One time in spring 1985, my mother was really in a mood. Somebody had told her something that pissed her off, and she was going on and on about pride in your heritage. I said something or other, I don't remember what, and she said, "Boy! Don't you ever forget that your people come from kings and queens of great and glorious kingdoms! Don't you ever let anybody disrespect you!" I took this firmly to my 11-year-old heart. Later that summer, I was outside playing, and somebody said something about my hair, which was probably nappy. I think it was Pumpkin, this meathead cock-diesel high-yellow football-playing kid who was always trying to pick a fight with me. He had a fresh skin fade cut with a sharp part in the side, and he was fondling his natural-lacquer-finish wood natural-bristle brush, which had been specially treated with a bleach and hot water bath to make it soft so he could brush his fuzzy scalp all summer and have slick waves by the start of the school year. I never got a stylish haircut in those days, and I was kinda jealous, so I got up on my high horse. I had been thinking about what my mother said, and on the basis of my last name and what I knew about word origin, I said, "Shut up nigger! My people were kings and queens back in Scotland!" http://www.feuilletonjones.com/012007.html#000010 http://www.feuilletonjones.com/012007.html#000010 Amiri Barksdale Race 1985 afrocentrism ancestor.worship houston humor names pumpkin race scotland third.ward Tue, 30 Jan 2007 13:59:38 -0500 Nigger, please. Eleven days when two Toms "ran our country" is the marker of a great new day? The "crowning moment in our history"? That niggers weren't signing their hosannas means it's time for the "ascended blacks" to cut the niggers loose? I agree we have a nigger problem, and you're part of it. That nigger problem is the result of long and well-studied efforts at oppression, lots of which has been internalized by craven, cringing, self-hating, mind-twisted niggers like yourself running around trying to sell this bullshit to white people. I can go down a long list of niggers like you, and their common denominator is precisely their lack of what you call accomplishment. You all never seem to last or contribute anything meaningful over the long term. Not even anything as meaningful or helpful as the cheapest, most exploitative of the civil rights relics. (Like you, I'm thinking of Al Sharpton here, always ready to back the Dems in a tight spot where race is concerned. But at least he's still able to offer an insightful and realistic look race and class in America today, as he did during his 2004 presidential campaign.) Let alone anything requiring sustained "intellectual expansion and physical toil," like, say, building a university, like the Booker T. Washington you would hold up as an example. You should stick to making mass entertainments, because you're a middle-class idiot and your "ascension" is bullshit. What is the content of your ascension? American middle-class-hood? An overvalued mortgage? Two cars? Two-hour commute? Stultifying office work? Extortionate prep-school or college bills for the chillun, cause the public schools are shit? Or the hope of one day being a Rice-like apparatchik? This is hardly the stuff of life-saving dreams. It's precisely the lack of worthy realistic ambitions that makes the illusions of the gangsta life or the NBA so fatal. The empty world you money-grubbing "ascenders" have helped to create is why life remains poor for us all--you included, let alone the poor black people. No, the kids don't have any better ideas, and, like most human beings in limited and impoverished circumstances, usually lack the vision requisite to hitch one's will to glorious endeavor in spite of all obstacles--but they envision very clearly the raw deal and unlikely prospects you and your Republican friends have contributed to causing over the past, say, 35 years of real-wage shrinkage, union-busting, flexibilization, religious fundamentalism, budget-cutting, deindustrialization, the nasty Ayn Randian atmosphere of brutality and selfishness, etc., etc. But I don't see you writing about any of those things. No, of all the things to pick a fight about, you pick niggers. After all your budget cuts, how many poor black kids really have a chance to "ascend" in the public school system, that being what it is? (This question is important only if you're concerned with the inculcation of the best of the bourgeois virtues: science, critical thinking, art. I suspect your "ascension" has more to do with houses and cars, though.) People, especially kids, see this setup and they make bad decisions. In any case, are there enough college places for a prospective army of ambitious high-achieving blacks? Enough middle-class jobs? Hell no. Kids figure that out, too. Especially the jobs part. "Work hard, niggers, and one day you too can cover up crimes against humanity committed in imperialist wars like Vietnam, like that hero of the people, Colin Powell!" Fuck you. You think your "ascension" means you're not a nigger? Your boys and girls in the Bush Administration were perfectly willing to walk Powell out to the end of the branch on Iraq, and then hang him from it at the end of the first term. Ask him about it when you get off his dick. If he still has one. Think on that, chump. (That is, if this isn't just a satire. ’Cause I'm ready to believe all kinds of crazy shit about niggers like you.)]]> http://www.feuilletonjones.com/112006.html#000009 http://www.feuilletonjones.com/112006.html#000009 Politics Pop Culture Race airplane.crisis al.sharpton black.conservatives bush.administration china colin.powell condoleezza.rice esquire.magazine hanna jesse.jackson john.ridley nigger race Tue, 28 Nov 2006 20:07:54 -0500 these in Houston, who dared to block the streets in front of the fanciest mall in the city (nearby is the posh River Oaks neighborhood, home of the late Ken Lay), are quite a significant source of struggle in the US recently. This Houston strike is an extension of the Justice for Janitors struggles, like the success in LA/Long Beach in 1999. Then there was the 2002-2003 supermarket strike in southern California, where the grocery workers were significantly (though not majority) Latino as well. And who can forget this spring's national Day Without a Mexican, with the one-day near-general strike in meatpacking, hospitality, schools, etc? Perhaps it is some of the fighting spirit of the teacher's union and popular assembly in Oaxaca, and the summer demonstrations for democratic rights violated in the election, and I would bet that there is some such tradition in play, but whatever the source, it shows rapidly rising confidence on the part of these people. I used to live in Houston. In fact, I lived there from 1982 to 1992, and in 1983, I lived in north Houston, where all the Mexicans stayed. We lived there so long that I even learned a little bit of Spanish. But later on, as I grew up, we moved away, and I only saw Mexicans at a distance, like the fellas in the backs of pickup trucks going to work construction. Like the guys who I used to see at the corner-convenience-store and Home Depot shape-ups every morning on the way to school. They didn't strike me as particularly militant. Nor did the women I would see on the bus every day in 1995, me on my way to a job I really needed a car to get to, and them going quietly to the rich white neighborhoods to cook and clean during the day. Besides that, I don't think I ever saw anyone handcuffing themselves across the streets in Houston, ever. But today... The transition began sometime after civil rights, but by the 80s, in Houston, at least, Mexicans had almost completely replaced blacks in this sort of low-wage service job, like housekeeping, janitorial services, country club staff, etc., etc. "Intimate services." So, for at least 20-odd years, this segment of the working class in the South/Southwest has been developing what it takes to produce actions like this. In one of the most hostile environments at that. The SEIU has other interests than those of the workers, and I suspect that the broader political orientation of these heavily Mexican immigrant workers down in the South is still passionately contested. By the church and the Republican Party, for instance, or by middle class leaders of various sorts, etc. This could, for instance, turn into some sort of bolstered machine politics, or some other sort of "integration strategy." But now, it looks like this segment of the US working class is ready to swing a big brown foot up the ass of the capitalist class. And I like that, holmes. I like that.]]> http://www.feuilletonjones.com/112006.html#000008 http://www.feuilletonjones.com/112006.html#000008 Amiri Barksdale Class Struggle Marxism Politics Race blacks chicano class.struggle houston labor latino los.angeles mexicans oaxaca politics race strike texas unions Sun, 05 Nov 2006 09:57:02 -0500 feuilleton is a type of essay. Usually cultural, like a book or arts review, but drawing on a wide range of knowledge, interests, and impressions; but it's not really a success if it remains purely "cultural." Around the turn of the 20th century, in fact, they were usually pretty political. Of course it's a pseudonym. But closer to the truth than many things. You know how in the 70s all the black parents wanted to name their children something exotic and foreign... well, actually not much has changed there! I always thought it was an interesting phenomenon, and wanted to pay tribute in some small way, to acknowledge both their efforts to set our generation apart, and our difficulties in living with such a heritage. I mean heritage in all ways possible. There's a lot at stake, and not only linguistically. They passed us a piece of the struggle in this way, made it a part of our daily lives in this way, and what did we do? How many of them knew the struggle was not only a race struggle? How did we respond? I know how I am responding: I hope to shine some light on some of these questions here. Seeing as how my last website went defunct about 3 years ago, and I have been piling up papers ever since, I figured now is a good time to put them back online. Part of the fun is seeing how the writings change over the years. I have stuff going back to 1997! And I have stuff coming up to today (this post included). Shortly I will be posting a longer piece, another movie review or two, and maybe a couple of book reviews. Meanwhile, check it out!]]> http://www.feuilletonjones.com/102006.html#000007 http://www.feuilletonjones.com/102006.html#000007 Amiri Barksdale Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:14:35 -0500