I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: clipping.-“Chapter 319″/”Knees on the Ground” (2020).

On June 19, clipping. released this excellent track, “Chapter 319.”

clipping. has often released music that is harsh and unpleasant (great, but not “pleasant”).  This song, removes a bit of the musical harshness to focus on the vocals.  It’s still abrasive and cacophonous, but it’s meant to be heard by a lot of people.

After a sample, Daveed Diggs raps over a rumbling bass line.

Left, right, left

How long can we holler when it ain’t no breath?
You keep killing fathers without no regrets
Then keep on countin’ dollars ’til it ain’t none left
So the streets gon’ keep on marching like
Left, right, left

The middle of the song adds some complicated drums and effects but the focus is the lyrics:

This march a foot in yo fucking throat to choke out
The whole assumption that you are here to protect … us
This government doesn’t respect … us
And somehow they seem to expect … us to accept
The power a piece of shit millionaire president wants to project

Diggs raps in a normal flow and then adds some remarkably fast verses.  But the spotlight comes with this section, repeated twice.  It is not the chorus, it is more of a hook, with the music pausing at the full stop.

donald trump is a white supremacist / full stop
if you vote for him again, you’re a white supremacist / full stop

Full stop.

The other song on this release is called “Knees on the Ground” which was originally released in 2014.

The fact that lyrically it could have been written in 2020 is a succinct testament to systemic racism in four minutes.

Six thumps that sound like someone pounding on a door are the only sound bedsides Diggs’ lyrics (and some sound effects).   The pounding is unnerving as you can imagine who is on the other side.

An intense middle section has this quickly rapped verse:

Brown boy sitting on his knees with his eyes shut
Hands behind his head fingers woven pinkies up
Saying he ain’t even doin’ nothing what you want T
hey threw him on the ground when he called them all punks
Retro blue and white Jordans tongues out
Over the black jeans cuffed just the right amount
To make them bunch by the calves how he like
Just ran out of boxer briefs so he wearing tighty-whities
With a white t-shirt and the breeze catch it just so
Pressing it tight against his chest so the red hole
Is getting wider and the blood is soaking in the fabric
And pooling on the ground he looks down automatic
And the dark pavement gets darker when it’s wet
He’s losing balance slow with his hands on his head
So his face hits first and his eyes go dead
And the air is sucked out of the world with his last breath

Then the pounding comes back for another verse.  The chorus has some eerily quiet echoing chords as he recites:

Keep your knees on the ground where they belong.

It ends with noise and static.

Proceeds from the sale of the song go to organizations for racial justice.

[READ: July 20, 2020] Stamped

This book has been on the top of everyone’s recommended lists for being proactive about understanding systemic racism.

I didn’t quite understand what the subtitle meant by a remix, but the acknowledgements explain that Kendi wrote his book Stamped from the Beginning as

a history book that could be devoured by as many people as possible–without shortchanging the serious complexities–because racist ideas and their history have affected us all. But Jason Reynolds took his remix of Stamped from the Beginning to another level of accessibility and luster…that will impact generations of young and not so young people.

Reynolds is a multi-award-winning author of books for children.  He is also a teacher.  He knows how to write a compelling story.

I haven’t read Stamped form the Beginning, but this remix is outstanding.

Clearly the original book is packed full of details–the serious complexities.  The remix is also full of details.  However, the information is accessible and amazingly, kind of funny–a lighthearted approach to a serious topic.

The book ii broken into five time periods 1412-1728; 1743-1826; 1826-1879; 1869-1963 and 1963-today.  In each section we see a defining moment and the aftermath of such a thing.  But consistently throughout these years it’s clear that racism has played an enormous part in all of ours lives.  Everyone has been affected by it, whether you think you have or not.

This book also works as an introduction to the thinking of Ibram X. Kendi and his ideals of Antiracism–as opposed to Segregationists and Assimilationists.

Segregationists are haters–people who hate you for not being like them.  Assimilationists are people who like you because you are like them.  Antiracists love you because you are like you.  But remember, people cannot be neatly tagged with one of these labels.  Sometimes throughout the course of a day your attitude may reflect one or more of these positions.

This book introduces us to the world’s first racist. In 1415, Prince Henry of Portugal planned to capture the main Muslim trading post on the tip of Morocco.  Why?  Jealousy.  Muslims had riches.  It was a simple robbery.  Plus the Portuguese were capturing Moorish people during a war that the Moors didn’t want to fight in the first place. The Moors became property.

But that wasn’t the racist part–people were often capturing others and enslaving them.  The Spanish and Italians were often enslaving eastern Europeans.

The real racist was Gomes Eanes de Zurara the person who told the story of Henry’s exploits in The Chronicle  of the Discovery  and Conquests of Guinea.  He said the Portuguese saw this attack as missionary work to civilize and Christianize the African savages.  He effectively turned Henry into a minister for god rather than a thief.

European race theories followed.  Aristotle wondered if the heat of African made Africans inferior.  George Best determined that Africans were cursed based on a biblical text that Ham was over sexual on the ark and all of his descendants would be dark–branded for their crimes.

This led to invented hierarchies.  Aristotle believed that Greeks were superior to non-Greeks.  The Puritans took this idea but put Puritans at the top: Puritans were better than Native Americans, than Anglican people who weren’t Puritans, than everyone else who wasn’t a Puritan, and especially better than African people.

When Harvard University was founded, the Greeks, including Aristotle, were placed at the center of all learning so this forced and false hierarchical idea was taught as part of higher learning.

Some other crazy but damaging ideas through the years: Africans volunteered to be salves so they could be baptized and therefore saved.  Another theory proposed that perfect brains belonged to White people and they deteriorated the further from white skin they got.  Another proposed that Africans were born from a different Adam–a different creation story and therefor a different species.

Although this is all horrible, there were people who stood up against slavery even back then.  The Mennonites in Germantown PA were a Christian denomination who were being killed for their religious beliefs. They equated oppression by skin color with oppression due to religion. This was the first proclamation that could be called antiracist.

But they couldn’t stop fundamental racist laws and tenets from being put in place.  These prevented Black people from doing much of anything.  Black people were classified as livestock; Blacks couldn’t hold office; property owned by slave was sold but white indentured servants who were freed were given fifty acres.

In the next chapter we meet Thomas Jefferson probably the first person in the world to say “I have Black friends.”  He was a mass of contradictions.  He was friends with Native Americans and Black people (even though they were his slaves).  His father was a slave owner, but Jefferson was studying antiracist ideas. When he became president he wanted to put an end to slavery even though he owned slaves.  He was pro-slavery and anti-slavery at the same time.

Phillis Wheatley was one of the first Black women to demonstrate that Blacks were just like Whites.  She was not a slave because she was a daughter, not a son.  She was homeschooled an by 12 could read classics in Latin and Greek as well as English.  By 15 she’d written a poem about wanting to go to Harvard (which as all male and all white).  She was even tested by 18 white male scientists to see if she could really be that smart.

People thought that maybe she was intelligent because she was never a slave. They posited that slavery makes you savage (this is a racist idea even if it cones from a good place).

Eventually Phillis Wheatley’s book was published in England (never in America) and her work was used to argue against American slavery.  (England gave up slavery long before we did).

Chapter Six shows a quick recap of racist ideas (so far) that will be repeated in various ways throughout history

1. Africans are savages because Africa is hot, and extreme weather made them that way.
2. Africans are savages because they were cursed through Ham, in the bible.
3. Africans are savages because they were created as an entirely different species.
4. Africans are savages because there is a natural human hierarchy and they are at the bottom.
5. Africans are savages because dark equals dumb and evil, and light equals smart and White.
6. Africans are savages because slavery made them so.
7. Africans are savages.

Chapter Seven is one sentence:  Africans are not savages.

There were abolitionist movements in American history.  William Lloyd Garrison spoke out against slavery.  He helped get the “new Phillis Wheatley” into the public eye.  That person was Frederick Douglass.  He fled to Great Britain to write his manifesto The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave.

Then came Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  It portrayed Black men as weak, but it also strengthened the abolitionist movement because it projected that Black men are docile as salves and also make the best slaves to god.

The book continues with the complicated life of Abraham Lincoln and how his position on slavery was more or less thrust upon him.

And W.E.B. DuBois who became the Black king of assimilation: If I’m like you, will you love me?  DuBois got into Harvard (which was all white) for a post-graduate degree and even spoke at his graduation. But he was obsessed with keeping up with White people.   However, later in his life he turned away from Assimilationist ideas.  Indeed when the NAACP wanted to become an organization of “refined” Black folks, DuBois fought against it.

The amazing thing to see is how the aggressively racist ideas continue long into the twentieth century–a time that seems like it should have been more enlightened.

In 1948, Harry S. Truman urged Congresses to pass the Civil Rights Act.  Many whites left the Democratic party because of this.  I guess politicians are always racist.  Others formed what they called the Dixiecrats who ran a man named Strom Thurmond for president.

Strom Thurmond? The most outwardly racist elected official I knew of in the 1990s had been in politics for 50 years?  How do racists get so much power?

Even the passing of the Civil Rights Act, while an important piece of legislation gave White people an excuse.  White people could say that racism was over.  Of course, if all of the law enforcement people were White, what would compel them to enfiorce this law.

The final chapter introduces us to Angela Davis who fought with Malcolm X and continues to be a powerful force.  Her personal story is fascinating.  It’s amazing that she was so dangerous, that she frightened politicians up and down California (and showed early on what a racist Ronald Reagan was).  We also meet Stokely Carmichael who believed in Black Power.  He summed up Black Power as: Black people owning and controlling their own neighborhoods and futures, free of white supremacy.

What racist white people and the media heard was: black supremacy.

Does this sound familiar?  BLM says Black Lives Matter.  Racist white people and the media hear: Only Black lives matter.

The Black Panther party for Self Defense was founded Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale created the ten point platform (paraphrased here)

• Power to determine the destiny of our Black community
• Full employment
• An end to the robbery of the Black community by the government
• Decent housing
• Real education
• For all Black men to be exempt from military service
• An immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people
• Freedom for all Black prisoners
• For all Black people on trial to be tried by a jury of their peers
• Peace, and Black representation in the United Nations

Then came Richard Nixon.  See if this sounds familiar.  Nixon figured he could attract the White people who were afraid of …everything Black:  Black neighborhoods, Black schools, Black people.  So he demeaned Black people in every speech and praised White people.  How?  Through code words like ghetto, urban, undesirables, thugs.  By appealing to white suburban women.

Then I learned something about Ronald Reagan that I did not know.  I have never liked him but wow I had no idea he was this bad.

Angela David was a powerful Black Woman at UCLA.  She was educated and tough and she took no crap.  So Ronald Reagan, governor of California, had her fired from UCLA.  The California Supreme Court overturned the firing, but Reagan looked for other ways to harass and get rid of her.

Check out this story about Angela Davis

On August 7, 1970 Jonathan Jackson walked into a courtroom in California’s Marin County.
He was holding three guns.
He took the judge, the prosecutor and three jurors hostage.
He freed three inmates who were on trial.
He led the hostages to a van parked outside.
Police opened fire.
The shootout took the lives of the judge, two inmates and also Jonathan Jackson.
He was seventeen years old.
A week later Angela Davis was charged with murder.
Record scratch. Repeat.
A week later, Angela Davis was charged with murder. Because police said one of the guns Jonathan Jackson used was actually hers.

Holy crap.

Reagan’s war on drugs was obviously a racist war.  The Anti Drug Abuse Act gave a minimum five year sentence for any one with five grams of crack (the amount typically handled by Blacks and poor people) while the mostly white dealers of powdered cocaine had to be caught with 500 grams to get the same sentence.

The worst part is that everybody believed in this stereotype of crack dealers and crack babies and of bad black families (cue The Cosby Show).

Even Bill Clinton, often labeled the “first black president” did some inescapable things with his three strikes law–giving hard time to three offences which made a huge increase in the prison population and made people say that Back people were naturally criminal.

There have always been people to fight back, but every time someone fights back the other side fights back too.  And that’s what we see now in cities like Portland and Kenosha: things get worse and worse while racists are in power.

Reading this book (which is a quick and easy read) will put some massive perspective on what’s happening now.  It will have you marveling at how trump is just taking a page from the racist playbook that has been used for ever.  His is just harsher, meaner, and more explicit.

Read this book.  Then vote him out.