Minor Meditation: Conservative Capitalism IS an Ideology!

Forced to post this reply to a crazy person who has no ability to self-reflect (let alone reflect on why he thinks the way he does) at this site when I realized that some people still think that we all crawled out of the sludge or God placed us in the garden (or however they think we got here) and we all had Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in the amniotic sac with us.
Hey ya'll!: Capitalism is an ideology, a belief system, just like anything else!
Sigh:

"The proper conservative view is we’re all equals, trading (or not) by our own decisions, right or wrong. People may end up trading in ways you and I dislike, but the general principle of freedom is valued more than imposing a specific moral view." -Antioch

Antioch here is unfortunately making an argument that wouldn't hold a feather let alone water! To argue that enforcing a Conservative/Republican agenda is to NOT force people to do as you wish is a false tautology! You are still very much forcing people to do as you wish, AND it is also forcing a moral code on everyone to boot! To situate the value and worth of a person as involving trade is already to steep yourself in an ideological tradition that not everyone adheres to, and which has very flawed moral underpinnings!

The only thing is, we're starting to realize that the moral crap that we have sunk ourselves in does not provide for any sort of viable future if we do not include healthcare for everyone. For Antioch to argue he doesn't want to be forced to pay for "those other people" (you know, like they're not neighbors, citizens, with whom we share the same water sources and food producing fields...) is the same as saying that people are not being forced right now to die and suffer and acrue debt due to inadequate or nonexistent healthcare!

Oh, you don't wanna pay for it now, but we'll ALL be paying for it in the future alright. We'll be paying when something far worse than swine flu shows up and we don't have enough doctors or adequate healthcare. We'll pay when we don't have a citizenry who have had consistent healthcare all their lives to shore up their immune systems, so America gets hit with a superbug and becomes the black hole into which no one will go or invest money because We Let People Die here.

Now Antioch, that's not a moral code that makes any sense at all.

Minor Meditation: Your Body is Not Yours

After I don't know how many comments, touches, and untold amounts of attention paid to my breasts by people of both sexes, I get it. I'm not in Puerto Rico anymore, where no one cares if its hot and you wear a tank top because its hot all the time - how lucky was I to live in a place where it was strange if you were covered up? But that's all Over. Any newfound comfort with my larger, non-traditional self that I may have learned there must be unlearned now because I am back on the mainland and my body is not mine. It belongs to the man picking up garbage, the bartender at the bar, supposed friends who feel instantly at liberty to poke and/or comment, the Black men who think they own me because my skin is brown, the gay male friend for whom women and breasts are a freakish oddity, and, well... anyone else. 

My choices are to stay fully covered up at all times like the overweight, busty girl I know myself to be, or suffer the "minor" violations and assaults, daily harassment, that we women know are our lot....

I am so tired.

I will stay fully covered up from now on.  

Exhausted White Womenhood....

There has been a lot of drama recently over the women of Jezebel whose drunken claims to the right to be raped, accept it as your fate, not report it, and assume if it happens again, who cares, were publicly declared a while ago on a late night TV talk show.  This in a battle with a woman writing at DoubleX, which Aunt Jemima's Revenge brought to my attention. So you don't have to read literally dozens of pages of angry bickering between the drunken hordes and (proud) whores or sluts as they call themselves over at Jezebel and the angry old guard at DoubleX, here's the the Jezebel's general argument: 

As the new feminist guard, they should have the right to full sexual liberation with no judgement. They can go home with whomever they want, do whatever they want, drink until they pass out, and engage in the same behavior men have allegedly been enjoying since time immemorial. They don't believe in age of consent laws, and at one point threw doubt on the claims to rape made by a 13year old girl against Roman Polanski since his giving her drugs was not the first time she had had them, and she was an aspiring actress after all. And since her mother arranged things, she had to know at least a little what was going on and went along with it... 

Very, very disturbing; and the tip of the problems is when you consider that these women are only speaking for themselves. They really imagine that what they are advocating for is what everyone should do. This is problematic not the least because of all that they do not even know they are ignoring - namely women of color!

Just when I think Feminism as a movement is realizing that you can't even think about any of the Issues (empowerment, sexual liberation, equality, etc) without considering against what these ideas are pushing, you get a mess like this! The establishment of liberty, in whatever form, in discussions of "Feminism" which are really about liberty for White women, cannot exist without the downtrodden quality of and regard for Black women! Mainly because in this country we know what we want to have based on what black women have been denied for so long!

This lends a very perverse element to these women's complaints at Jezebel. For, if what they want is the right to wild, wanton sexual lives, then we know at least in part, this is a throwback to the perception that Black women were/are endowed with some inherent super-sexual nature. We've all heard the arguments: That's why so many slave owners slept with their black female slaves. Not because it was rape, but because the women wanted it.  They were luring those men away from their wives. 

bell hooks talks about this phenomenon in Ain't I A Woman, and if you read her work, the way these women are shaping their demands is really sad. To want to be raped - as one of the Jezebel ladies did, so she paid someone to seem to take her by force - is to want a subjugation and oppression this country was once exposed to on a daily basis. White women's aspirations to be pulled from their pedestal and used as a sexual object is a desire that has roots going a very long way back.

What is even more perverse is that these women are unaware of this! They have needs and desires that they do not understand. They invoke or desire violence that, while not at all connected any true or universal sense of female empowerment, it is tied to the subtextual notions of American liberty: 

Basically, with so much actual freedom and control over the lives of millions in America, what White consciousness now requires is to be abused as those brown bodies were abused. The only missing "liberty" or "freedom" they now need is the right to suffer pain, degredation, daily  oppression, neglect and cruelty. That is why these women really 'want' to be raped. 

Much more to be said about this. But for now, this is depressing enough.

Minor Meditation: The Republican Bus

If you click the blog title, you can read the piece that my words were inspired by and are in answer to. 

However, this is the exerpted text which I am focusing on:

"Bloomberg:

Republicans are getting inspiration on how to rebuild their party in the U.S. Congress from an unlikely source: White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

California Representative Kevin McCarthy, the chief recruiter for House Republicans, said he wants his party to select candidates based less on ideology and more on their chances of winning. The goal, he said, is to seek out prospects who are ethnically diverse, female, less partisan and even supportive of abortion rights. So far, these efforts are more concept than reality."

To all this I say:

Oh, poor, poor Republicans!  

We - the diverse, the women, the fabulously attuned to the multiple currents of ideology and exisitence on the planet - Don't Want the Republican ride to where we're going! For too long your bus service has been late to the diversity stop, completely lacking in provisions for the sick and infirm (those lovely anti-universal health care arguments), and constructed for only one race's historical luggage!  

Plus, your buses don't stop in poor areas or ethnically diverse areas, you hate when I bring my meditation pillow on board (only crosses and bibles allowed), my friend has to pretend that the man next to him is just his bible study partner and not his love, and as an academic I don't make enough money to pay the fare!  

But WORST of all, you claim to believe in it, but the list of rules on the bus, that Constitution thingy, you know that everyone's bus has? Well on your bus line, it only applies to a select group! You don't want everyone on the bus to enjoy the same priviledges that you do! And this will not work!  

So, thank you very much, I'm flattered. But i will stick with my current service.

Minor Meditation: String Theory

Of all the pleasant thoughts to start out the day, of all the moments to reinforce Buddhist teachings of calm, patience and acceptance, mine came from a history channel special on the theory of Parallel Universes:

In some Universe, Hitler met some really gorgeous woman who loved his art work. After the war instead of being rootless, he went back to her and they shacked up somewhere for years in the German countryside. He painted, she milked cows, he carved the cabinets for the kitchen, she smoothed out sheep's wool into yarn to make sweaters. And never once did he think about world domination while playing with his daughter whose hair was deep, dark brown - like her mothers.

In another Universe, after serving during world war II, James Earl Ray decided not to return to the states. Instead, reveling in the different opportunity-rich feel of Europe as compared to the poverty he came from in Illinois, he settled finally in Italy. He worked for years on a family farm dedicated to Olives, Figs and Pignolia. Eventually, he married the lovely daughter of the farm owner's sister, and spent the rest of his years happy in a sea of rich red wine and sunflowers.

In yet one more Universe, my grandparents are still alive. Upon reaching their 40s and 50s and staring into the sweet young faces of their children, they decide to change habits. Stick to the diets doctors gave them cutting back on the good rich foods and recipes they brought with them on their Great Migrations out of Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Georgia, and Tennessee. And they lived and lived... To see past their 60s and 70s. 

In a final Universe perhaps I never was, or was in a different form, or am in a partial piece. Perhaps in the 1300's the Bubonic Plague left Europe empty, clean, and dry. And instead of the  transatlantic genocide which spawned my meztizo familial line, I exist partially in a woman walking a lush forest path in what we know as central Rwanda - which has never seen a genocide or a person with White skin and blue eyes. Or maybe I exist partially in a Carib Indian  woman who sits on a beach in what we know as St. Johns,  watching her child play in the surf. Worried about sharks in a foot of water as only mothers can.

Why any of this?

Because on the subatomic level, when you get too far down for general contemplation, things are... fuzzy. So fuzzy other universes are possible. Down there, atoms are unstable. Particles vibrate. Things, electrons, move when you look where you expect them to be; they anticipate your observation. And the particles that make everything up? Well, they can be in more than one place at once.

And so can we.

So today, I am on that beach in St. Johns, and the String Theory that makes me Me? Well it's a bit of Redemption Song and Canon in D and My Little Brown Book - and its vibrating slowly, along with the surf.

My Mother Channeling Bert Williams

Walking through some store in Mexico a few years ago, very small and tight a space, a sales girl decided I, as darkest person in the store, looked suspicious. Not the granny with the giant handbag huddled in the corner, or the two teenagers with backpacks, Nope, just me. 

They apparently do not have shows like Punk'd or Candid Camera in Mexico,* then she would have known what was up, because as she followed me, when I knew she was, I began to walk faster. Leading her around in circles that would sometimes loop back on her and cut around. Coming to abrupt halts so she would run into me, eventually dropping things or knocking them off the shelf to slow her down. Ah, what fun.

Did I mention this was in a store about 16x16 feet? Yes, about the size of a small/medium living room. Did she ever catch on? I don't know. What I do know is that my friends never laughed so hard in public and I had a lot of fun channelling Ada Issacs Menken (see brilliant Daphne Brooks book Bodies in Dissent for info about Menken). 

Do not get me wrong. This being followed is tiresome, to say the least. It is, as Fred Moten so wonderfully noted when I saw him speak recently, and I paraphrase, "One of those things you are forced to deal with by being Black. Being Black is a series of uncomfortable incidents that remind you of context and your very Skin." He's so sharp.

I do not remember the first time I was followed or knew someone who suffered what I call the  "Black Trailing Behavior" I have heretofore described, but the times it got "rough" are as clear as day!

> My three Aunts - Teachers, Business Owners, Executives - were followed, grabbed, and searched in the back of a NY&Co store in upstate NY. Caught up in the shock and incredulity a Black person instantly feels at how a situation goes from pleasant to evil and invasive in the blink of an eye, they did not resist as one would fully expect them to, if you knew my family! These regal Black women in their late 30's and early 40's allowed their bags and things to be searched by White store associates in their 20's making $6.50/hr, in a dirty back storeroom that reeked of old coffee grounds and that particular stale-ish smell rooms get when they are infrequently visited or cleaned. After, of course, finding Nothing amid the expensive leather purses and shopping bags, they simply let them go! Still in a daze, my wonderful Aunts wandered out the doors and home. Only to break later under the knowledge that bearing/clothing/deportment aside - they were always just Black.

>My three friends and I. First year of college, so excited to be brilliant women on the rise.  We took off one Friday from the library in search of new togs for the season. In some random shop in the mall (perhaps another NY&Co - I have never had a good experience in that store!), in our happiness, when a young 20-ish White girl comes up to us and asks "Where are the earrings that were here?!?" pointing at some random open spot beyond arm's reach of any of us on a rack of hundreds of cheap, already peeling earrings.  Again, shocked into near incoherency, we Literally Do No Understand her question - "What?" She asks again. We say who knows! Off she storms. It takes us long minutes talking to each other to realize that, despite the number of White customers nearer to the rack than we and despite our relatively pulled together appearance, We must be the ones that took some phantom pair of earrings because at the moment we were the only Black ones in the store! Seriously Angry we asked for the manager only to find out (shock of shocks!) that She Was the Manager! I have always hated that lie. We dropped whatever we were going to buy on the floor and left. Again reminded that, regardless of where we were in school, we Are Black.

>And the final one for this post - in Kmart of all places! My Mother and a much younger version of myself. Of all people to be followed, My Mother! Very down to earth and accessible. But also So Bougie! To get off topic for a moment of humor: when I wanted to go camping like the other little Brownie-Troop girls (all White) in my suburban NY neighborhood, My Mother said "No dear. Only homeless people sleep outside." Hysterical! But that's what you think when you grow up in the Bronx as she did! But I digress.

Anyway. She, as always, dressed to perfection with an expensive handbag (teaching me subconsciously the bad habit of irresistible adoration for fine leather purses that I carry with me to this day on my arm & on my credit card) and a pulled together outfit. I am certain I was dressed the same - it wasn't until I could dress myself that pictures took a slide towards the awful. 

I don't know when she knew we were being followed, but like a gazelle on a game trail, she knew a hyena was drooling close by and threatening her baby! So with Gazelle-like Grace, she had been leading this glorified-dog on a tour of the store, up and down aisles, through the same section four times in a row. In her red apron, the sales girl must have been so upset to have been given this task! Now I realize too that is why My Mother looked so happy and smug - her deft turns and humor laced slips, like Bert Williams in vaudeville glam! Dropping a roll of paper towels there, knocking a T-shirt down here - juggling Me, Blackness, and Vanity/Pride like a Pro! 

Now I know why we never got the toilet paper or toothpaste or whatever we had gone in for! We had been marked for trailing and at some point she had realized we Are Black.

Now Please Don't Get Me Wrong!!! I am no elitist, my bougie tendencies do not extend to judgements based on attire or appearance! I really do believe in the parable that says you should give help to anyone because it might be Jesus coming to the door dressed poorly seeking food. And I believe that you never know where you will find the face of God, and thus grace for yourself. So what you are wearing should NEVER determine treatment! I know it does, but dressing a certain way should not exclude you from or entitle you to harassment!! Just as a certain skin color should not do anything similar either! 

Then why do I tell these stories, dwelling lovingly on leather handbags? (Aside from my aforementioned Addiction - really its a sickness.) I do so for the people who continue to tell me its all in our heads. That Black people make these things up by always looking for Race. 

Looking for Race, Looking for Race, Looking for Race!! If I had a quarter for every time someone told me Blacks were just "looking for race," like Race was a freakin' shoe under the bed we needed to wear to an appointment, or a dime we dropped under the machine while buying some skittles, I would be able to retire to an island next to Oprah's in the Caribbean!!

These folks seem to think that we enjoy feeling harassed. That we get some thrill out of it! Now, I believe this belief of theirs in "Joy in Social Subjugation" is tied psychologically to a need among an oppressive group to feel what they are doing to the oppressed - a type of Projection for you Freudians out there - but that is for another post.... Or a book.... ©!

For those who think we Want harassment and seek it in every altercation I say Bahhhh! I point to the countless stories of broken hearts, tears, depression, angry letters to company headquarters, and swears to never shop in such-n-such a place again! I point to Black women in particular, across a spectrum of earning potential and class status - from my Daycare Center owning Aunt to Oprah - who want very, very much to believe in the dream of us all blending together, and expanding outward to live fully realized, non-raced lives. 

And yet, in Moten's terms, must continually be confronted by the discomfort of being pushed back into ourselves forcefully. Of realizing that skin trumps so very much. Skin trumps everything. 

Thank God for the humor! If not for My Mother's comic turn in my childhood, anger over the injustice might have overtaken me by now. If not for laughter, where would we be?

So Thank You Mom - Happy Mother's Day!!!

So post your comments, share your stories, lord knows there are millions. This is a space to let it out so it can stop coming back and killing us as high blood pressure and heart disease!

(*random generalization used for comic flow and not meant to be taken literally or as a slur against Mexico. And yes I am footnoting a Blog post for the second time. its that serious over here in Academijikistan.)

Minor Meditation: Allegiance

I do not understand most people. Why it is nearly impossible for people to look at an ideology or theology or whatever, and select what works to believe in and neglect what does not! 

This goes out to Black Christians throwing full allegiance behind the conservative republican movement without giving another thought to anything that they are doing. In fact, they support everything! Even when it goes against common sense, intelligence, the truth, or their faith!

Because YES, the conservative Christain Republican movement does in fact do many, many things that I am certain the God of the judeo-christian book we call the Bible is really, really pissed off about.  

You know, him being the Diety that advocated against judging others. 

The same God who told you as puny human to share the word of God with others, but don't go thinking you are HIM and acting against others in any physical way. 

The God who told you to chill out since all will eventually be judged by Him, so let folks alone! 

Yes that same God who in a dozen or more verses advocates for tolerance, patience, and love. 

He is NOT in fact the God of the religious right who would make certain against all other considerations that you are Born; but that makes equally as certain that if you go against Man's laws they will put you to Death. 

NO. God stands not in allegiance with them.

God in fact stands in allegiance with those who follows his guidance concerning love, peace, prosperity shared, and honesty/integrity earned. He does not believe in political parties but in intelligence and tolerance.

So, please: Think for yourself! Take what works. Leave what doesn't!

If you are in fact a Black person or person of Color who chooses to become a Republican because, after winning the American craps game of economic success you now "have something to conserve," and get invited to the Easy Life Buffett, examine at your plate. Don't swallow the whole animal without looking closely at what you are eating - That's how you end up choking on the hooves!

Minor Meditation: Literary Emotion

I have been told twice this semester that Toni Morrison's writing is depressing. This angers me quite a bit since these people can only find her depressing if they have not read any literature written in the 1800's or early 1900's about race relations in America. 

Specifically those written by White authors in whose imagination I see nothing to recognize of anything I know to be true about Black people. And in whose ink stained grasp, those same people become hollow stereotypes, steeped in ignorance, foolishness, hopelessness. Folks with no choices and no future.

In Morrison's world, though not always pretty, the voices sing! They serenade! And at the end, I feel such joy that someone who so loves herself and people of color has taken on the task of representing their reality - because she does a wonderful job at that!

I Am... Will Smith

I am meditating on why I Am Legend makes me cry.

I realize I am in danger of becoming maudlin or depressing in all of my posts, but hear me out - there is hope here I promise!

When I first saw the movie, I felt a deep and abiding sense of unease and confusion. Why was I so sad? More than an identification with Will Smith - who does resemble my brother and father in personality, intelligence, wit, charm, and looks - it was the way the story sunk into me in ways most if not all reviewers failed to touch upon... Was this an inabilty of theirs to see beyond the Star? Beyond the glitz of the production? A refusal to see the world through the eyes of a Black Man Hero who is also a brilliant scientist? (Many reviewers took issue with him as a scientist - they obviously haven't seen my hot brilliant brother, but I digress) But, reviewers would I am sure say to me, everyone knows that Smith is no longer Black, no longer "race-ed" but exists in the extra-critical world of the Star Product. Does he? Do any of us? Halle Berry's Oscar turn in a film where she is a horrible mother who beats up her child and reviewers loved it... was that race-less?

Why is Smith so compelling? Its the look in his eyes. As the camera draws close, invasive, penetrating, and in violation of his private moment, you read so much of fear, exhaustion, despair, and hopelessness under the gloss of the Star. He is a man fighting against impossible odds all alone. He saw his wife and child killed, circumstance has taken away anyone that might help him, and now he just wants to give his life a meaning worth living for. To cure the disease and give humanity a future. 

Does everyone know this film? Some background:

The Plot: What was to be, and appeared to be, a cure for cancer has turned the country into a zombie-like race of extremely photosensitive animal like hordes who have killed anyone who did not at once fall prey to the illness. Smith is a doctor/scientist who worked on the 'cure' and is now working, alone for years in an empty city, on the antidote to the disease.

The Undercurrent: After he kiddnaps one of the diseased, a White Woman, to try and cure her in his laboratory, a horde of pale/White men and women lead by an alpha White male, stalk a Black man through the streets of NYC.

At one point, the string him up through an elaborate trap from one foot for several hours.

Reading race into the movie or reading race out of its set up? I don't know. 

But the idea of a Black man chased, strung up and brutalized is... The story of a Black man in America feeling so alone, crying at his inabilty to make the positive change he wants to, and at one point begging a manequin to talk to him, say anything, recognize him as human, a person, deserving of recognition... This plot is one far, far too familiar.

In his basement laboratory, under generator produced light, Smith is at once Ellison's Invisible Man and yet the hypervisible center of our vision our concern our identification. I can hear my professors exclaiming that I read too much into a star vehicle. But it is there.

Perhaps reviewers failed to connect and the Oscars failed to come calling - as I truly felt they should have for so nuanced a performance that masqueraded as summer Hero worship fun - was that we are still unready as a country to deal with what we have done to so many thousands who have been lynched. Chased down by hordes of thousands and killed for public entertainment. The country cannot face the fact that so many here feel the same way as Smith's character in the film - alone and hunted, ignored and ultimately doomed, adrift and traveling through cities, towns, spaces where they must constantly live in fear. 

Avoiding dark places where the pale ones would do you harm.

I promised hope and I shall deliver: in the end, he discovers the cure!**Spoiler Below** 

He solves the problem and saves humanity.

But still I cry. For my brother, my father, and the many thousands imprisoned or dead as a result of nothing more than mellinin. For the feeling of helplessness we all often feel.

It shouldn't be called I Am Legend. It should be called simply I AM. A request for humanity... at least.

**Of course, they eventually kill him as reward for his discovery. Thus the Black man must die for the country to be saved. Sorry, I guess it is depressing in the end....

Minor Meditation: To Grieve

...you grieve in a trip, a fall, a slippage and a slow inclined slide (though there may be no physical movement, just that of your self through memory)... 

this eventually leads to a stand-still.
you wake up no longer moving. 
the dream of falling - over. 

you eat something, do something, move outside, breath, and try not to slip again...

The Marrow of Tradition

Crying this morning. 

Against my academic training. Against my alleged distance from materials which I subject to critical scrutiny. Against my supposed temporal distance from matters which happened a "long time" ago...

Words: I love the connection of long to time - of a distance measurement to a sensation which we observe only peripherally. I mean, truly, time is that which we see out the corner of our eye, but which, upon turning seems to have disappeared. Like a ghost. Like an illusion. Like a floater in our eye that was not there when we were ten, but now drifts through at will, across the mundanity of our day to remind us that there is a world within us to complement the one without, and it too is decaying.

I love that 'Long' is so very indeterminate. That it means different things for everyone and lies as a space between, a mediating revolving phantasm that spooks each of us differently. Long the day, long the hour, long the minute. Long the pool, long the miles.... we accept language so whole heartedly for so skeptical a species!!! Why we accept that Long and Time belong together is a mystery to me, although we are also lazy.

 

But I have become esoteric.

This novel, this text, has made me cry. I have not cried like this since I fully merged with the words while reading Octavia Butler's Kindred, and realized to the depths of my own marrow, that were I born a few centuries earlier, my life would have been one of indescribable horror, pain, degredation, violation, oppression, and sadness only balanced by the inescapable knowledge that life is, at least, brief. 

Brief and perhaps balanced by something better on the other side....

The Other Side. Something Better. Not an Opiate of the masses. But a belief and an inextricable part of what allows us to continue rising each morning and breathing when there seems no reason to. Better - than here, than now. 

There must be! 

Because we all know, can feel in the flow of our blood from veins to arteries that the Planet's guiding principle is Balance. Our bodies continually seek balance, our environment (through all we try to eradicate that balanced functioning, Nature tries), heck, even the most simple laws of nature - of hot flowing into cold flowing into warm flowing into hot into cold... filling spaces and seeking equilibrium. 

All that We Know seeks Balance. 

Except, it seems, us.

Therefore, if Now is an indescribable Horror of Pain, there must be an Other Side of, if not pleasure, than Equilibrium and comfort... right? Please? There must be because the seeking of balance is what the very planet we walk on seeks. So how can there not be a Balance for the Human Spirit?? Even if it lies beyond what we can know in these tortured bodies. There must be. And so religion is not false, but fundamental. Not misleading, but a guide to avert annihilation. A beyond that is possible... right?

But the pain of the Now is profound. And marrow deep.

So, I cry. 

The book - yes the Marrow of Tradition is a book - is about a North Carolina town where the only successful coup of a legally elected government on U.S.A. mainland territory has taken place. The story of a massacre of Black citizens by White in the wake of the changing face of the city - a city that was quickly balancing out as Mama Nature of course, would have it.  These White citizens disrupted that fast approaching balance through their hate and fear, and by violence, by slaughter. Eventually destroying all Black businesses and driving over 2,100 Black citizens to flee in fear.

My love/hate relationship with academia revealed: If not for so many scholars pushing through the quagmire of these stories, this history alongside me, I would throw the book away. 

Why I Don't Know What I am Talking About

One of the saddest elements of life may be that you can love something dearly and hate it at the same time. Such is my relationship with graduate school. 

These lofty ivory/ivy coated walls are deceptive. Holding out the offer of advancement and enlightenment, they locked my shackles as I smiled and drank the punch.  However, they are not dedicated to enlightenment, but to a speciously reflective, deceptive brilliance meant to drown out all other lights. 

A light that blinds. A light that erases, effaces and ultimately dissolves. Until all that is left is the light without... and the emptiness within - or so they want you to believe. What unbalance that comes from being told that all within is false? If only you would bathe in the light...

* * *

I am an Academic in training. A dedicated worshiper at the alter of Intensive Reinterrogation of Old News.  Committed to a life of the mind, creative discussion, innovative theorizing. Unfortunately for me, I am also a woman of color. This means I do not know what I am talking about.

In a recent meeting to plan for next year, two White males and me, I was told repeatedly that the work ivy league professors (whom I studied with during my masters degree) have been doing for 50years does not exist because a young, White, male, Harvard undergrad-trained fellow grad student, does not know of it. I was informed that none of the experts and professors in the field - all or mostly people of color as well - know what they are talking about either! We are all entertaining some grand delusion that we can know anything about this Lesser cultural environment that Whites may not know instinctively already. This cultural world that exists below the surface of White normative culture in their minds, but alongside it in actuality. 

How many times after you repeat the same information, and remain ignored, before you crack?  I don't know.

Do I attempt to discuss 18th Century French poetry with authority? Do I tell people who have masters degrees in the subject that they are somehow wrong? Or simply ignore their assertions and cautioning as to my thinking about it? Nope.

How many times after you repeat the same information, and remain ignored, before you crack?

There is a belief among many that there is a lesser quality or value of the Lives and the Lived Experiences of people of color in America. This "Less" means that everyone can have access to knowledge about it. This knowledge requires no work, no effort. You pay nothing to have it. You give up nothing in its acquisition. The Knowledge simply IS, and as an IS, you can pick it up anytime anywhere. Like garbage from a street corner. 

And it is to be handled equally as casually. As ruthlessly. As carelessly.

Like me.

Sometimes I don't know why I bother.

Wel, Come On In...

Welcome - I like words. I love language.

You will quickly understand this about me should you visit often. I adore the way words become speech become language... The way they roll from my tongue/lips and into Meaning, a dangerous terrain indeed. How every word is a house of many rooms with different implications and timed desires. Masquerading sweetly in ink or pixel.

For example, welcome - the background noisy-ness of the word, the diffident bragging, the overconfident issued command - truly a word to battle other words for right of way! Wel, Come. As in, I could take you or leave you, but now I take and call it cordial.

But why this play with words? Why here at all? The Point?

Because:

The costs of some types of public speech are too high. But the costs of charged silence, apparently low, accrue interest rapidly.
Reflection - visual or mental - does not ensure understanding.
Often the ones closest are least likely to understand.
Everyone needs their "Hard Harry," even little colored girls.
Your truth is real though all call it false.
Your experience valid though all call it perception.
Your days are tactile though all see you as without feeling.

Ultimately, because the consistent Denial from without can drive you so deeply within yourself that the only thing to be done is repeatedly explode - and this is my blast radius. My mine field. My failed bomb squad attempt. The disastrous power-sharing negotiations following a thousandth coup attempt.

And So, The Tinted Vent, a space of Color to trouble Black & White ideas - proposing warm Color as an alternate to... the Nothing.