SOUNDTRACK: LENNY KRAVITZ-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #52 (July 20, 2020).
Few people are as cool as Lenny Kravitz. Look at how amazing this room in the Bahamas looks. Listen to how good his voice sounds (both when he’s singing and when he’s speaking). When he speaks between songs he sounds otherworldly.
This Brooklyn-raised bohemian rock icon brings us to his home and tropical paradise in Eleuthera in the Bahamas for this visually alluring Tiny Desk (home) concert.
The set begins with the wonderful “Thinking Of You.” The guitar sound(s) of this song are just amazing. Between Craig Ross’s acoustic echoing notes and Lenny’s strums the room fills with warm echoing guitars. Midway through the song Bahamian native Yianni Giannakopoulos plays a chill lead guitar with expressive wah wah. I hadn’t heard this song before, and it’s really terrific.
After wrapping an evocative rendition of “Thinking of You,” a touching song he penned in 1998 about his late mother, Lenny Kravitz imparts what’s really weighing on him during this historic time. “In the midst of all that’s transpiring on our planet right now,” he says, “it’s a blessed time for introspection, more importantly action. … What side of history are you standing on?”
For “What Did I Do With My Life?”, Lenny and Craig step outside (under palm trees) to play this questioning ballad. Ross gets a really good electric guitar sound out of his acoustic guitar. Over the course of the song as Lenny asks the title question, it grows more intense with him searching for an answer.
And it’s only fitting that he ended with “We Can Get It All Together,” a message about the power of unity and oneness.
For this final song, all three players are back, this time in front of an expansive (stormy?) sky. Once again Craig’s acoustic guitar sounds huge. And this time Yianni’s electric guitar has a Middle Eastern twang to it.
I often forget how much I like Lenny’s music. This was a great reminder.
[READ: July 20, 2020] How to be an Antiracist
This book has been on the top of everyone’s recommended lists for being proactive about understanding systemic racism.
There’s a lot of reasons people might have for not reading this book. I’m not talking about people who are racist and simply would never read a book like this, but about decent people who think they are doing their part. Maybe they’re afraid of being preached at or of being told they’re doing things wrong. Or maybe they feel that they can’t handle a book that seems especially intense.
I had some of these concerns myself before reading this book. But I can say that if you have those fears or concerns about reading this book, put them aside and jump in.
Ibram X. Kendi is not writing this to make you feel bad about yourself. He is not here to tell you that you are bad and should be ashamed of yourself.
He is writing to tell his story–his realization that racism is a cancer that is eating away at the country and that we can all work together to change things.
He is also writing to talk about antiracism. Antiracism is a fairly simple idea, but it is very hard to achieve. Indeed, his first point is to undo accepted ideas of racism.
When trump says racist things and then denies them by saying he’s the least racist person that you ever met, those denials are part of a normal, racist pattern: “When racist ideas resound, denials that those ideas are racist typically follow.”
He wants to get you to rethinking the term racist. The opposite of racist is not “not racist” it is antiracist. What’s the difference?
An antiracist endorses racial equality and believes that problems are rooted in power and politics. An antiracist confronts racial inequalities.
A racist endorses a racial hierarchy and believes that problems are rooted in groups of people. A racist also allows racial inequities to continue.
There is no in between safe space of “not racist.” In fact “not racist” is a mask for racism.
But he wants you to understand that “racist” is not a pejorative word–it is not a condemnation or a slur. It is a description. And by turning a descriptive word into a slur, it freezes us into inaction. It’s similar to how people who say they are color blind and don’t see race are actually not seeing racism and fall into racist passivity.
He also wants to make clear that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. You can be racist one minute and antiracist the next. Each moment of action determines what–not who–we are.
And just to let you the reader know that he means it, he tells you right from the start that he used to be racist most of the time. He is no longer claiming to be “not racist.”
but more importantly, he is no longer being manipulated by racist ideas to see that racial groups cause problems. It is important to not think that one person represents an entire race of people. No Black man represents all Black people. And the sooner we get past that–in policies, in ideas and in behavior–the sooner we can move into an antiracist frame of mind and encourage antiracist policies to take hold.
This book follows Kendi’s growth as a person. His life story is fascinating. You can see him grow and change as a person as he learns and adapt to the people around. He admits the racist ideas he held and acted on and the way his mind was opened to changing those ideas.
In addition to his own life, he explores the history of racism. He calls out the first documented example of racist attitudes. Gomes de Zurara wrote a chronicle of Portuguese King Henry’s trip to Africa–the first time someone went to Africa with the intent of enslaving dark-skinned people. Previously, slaves were different races, but Gomes de Zurara grouped all peoples from Africa into a single race to create a hierarchy. And once he created the idea of a race, he had to fill it in by describing all people in that race the same way–naturally, he said they were lesser than his own race.
Seeing fifteenth and sixteenth century racist passages written out is pretty shocking. But what’s even worse is seeing how those idiotic and nonsensical racist ideas have traveled through time and that people still believe them today.
Kendi examines racist ideas through the lens of biology, ethnicity, culture, behavior, color and class. And what I really liked about the end of the book was that he says that racism is linked with gender and sexual discrimination. Because you cannot be antiracist if you believe that women are inferior. Nor can you be antiracist if you believe that homosexuality is wrong. Homophobia and sexism cannot be separated from racism. Early medical treatises about homosexuality were often written by people who also believed that people of color were inferior. People with power will look for anyone to scapegoat.
This history and explanation of how systemic racism has been put in place is interwoven with his own life. Things get very personal–his wife is diagnosed with cancer. He is diagnosed with cancer. And every word of his personal journey makes his ideas all the more powerful.
He imagines treating racism the way you treat cancer–not trying to hide it or pretend it doesn’t exist, but by attacking it with antiracist policies that “shrink the tumors of racial inequality.”
It’s a tough fight but he leaves us with hope. Despite the fact that racism is a fast-spreading cancer in our society, remember that
race and racism are power constructs of the modern world. For roughly two hundred thousand years, before race and racism were constructed in the fifteenth century, humans saw color but did not group the colors into continental races, did not commonly attach negative and positive characteristics to these colors and rank the races to justify racial inequality, to reinforce racist power and policy. Racism is not even six hundred years old. It’s a cancer that we’ve caught early.
It’s only when you give up hope that you are guaranteed to lose.
Read this book.
You will learn a lot and it will change the way you see the world.
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