I’ve had a bone to pick with afro-centricity for quite some time now, but last night pushed me over the edge. So the tale goes like this: we’re at Notre Dame for a poetry slam for the regional college union something-or-another. I’m the only person from Purdue there; the other people there are from either UofI Champaign or Western Illinois University. As slam poetry goes in some regions, most of the other participants are black save for one who is a white female (mind you, in Seattle, the poetry slam I went to was predominantly white. It was also the queer slam, so I don’t know if that had anything to do with it. Many of the schools participating were in close enough proximity to Chicago that they get a lot of black students).
The themes of the night were essentially, “I am black.” and “I am Christian.” Let’s take each of these are separate moments for now. The affirmation of the poets’ blackness was pretty constant. Then afterwards was a lot of what that means to the poet, usually something along the lines of oppression and trying to attain some sort of freedom from it. Here’s where my problems with afro-centricity come up. Liberation, it seems, lies in 1) self-determination, some kind of individual realization that “I am not oppressed” and through that denial of oppression, one has been freed, and 2) teaching and educating those who are still oppressed that they too need to be freed in this manner. Now here’s what I’m not against: I’m not against the realization that we all have the ability to be free and creative beings. I’m not against education. I’m not against freedom. But to think that liberation is something on personal level is absurd. Afro-centricity has, instead of focusing on the “afro” structure of life reminiscent of African sociality (“ubuntu” is a popular idea used these days), indeed retreated into some kind of liberal individualism, the same individualism that clings to capitalism as liberation (which, I may add, is rather acceptable to afro-centrists. Take the examples of the black-owned businesses. Black-owned bookstores. Black CEOs. Getting further in white man’s liberal society is wholly within the bounds of being an afro-centric). Secondly, the notion of “educating” other black people about the limitations of the life they’re living — pulling them up out of the bondage of their own minds — is vanguardism. It implies that liberated black people exist outside of oppression, and now they need to help other blacks get out too. This is perfectly exemplified by a print that my sister and her husband own. It’s a black man holding his arm down over a white wall at the top of the image, with a black arm reaching up coming from the bottom. I fought with my other sister about this picture, saying that there is no way that the black man on top of the wall could exist there. My mom agreed with me, although for her the reason was more so because she is a Christian, implying that liberation isn’t through other humans, but only through the divine.
Which brings me to my second point — Christianity. Okay, this is huge issue and I’m not going to attack Christianity head on, especially since there are some forms of Christianity that have liberatory potential. I’ll just say a few words regarding the poets’ appropriation of it. A lot of them were saying they had found Jesus and this is what set them apart from other blacks. Now that they had found Jesus, this was their salvation, and now there’s a responsibility to spread the word. This is rooted in the evangelical Christian tradition that swept the South in earlier American history, and by proxy, spread to the American black. In the context it was used in last night, it served to perpetuate the same kind of black vanguardism I spoke about earlier. This doesn’t happen solely with Christianity, though. This has happened with the Nation of Islam and continues today in many of the Muslim hip-hop artists today (Mos Def, Talib Kweli, etc). Another peculiar feature of this kind of black Christianity is it’s divestment in the self, as in giving all self to God and nothing else. Which… puts it at an odd juxtaposition of the liberated self above. I could be wrong on this topic, but it’s something that I thought of last night as odd. I suppose the bottom line is that the same kind of Christian logic that was used to justify slavery and exclusion of other races seems to have heavily influenced the black use of Christianity in attempting to become unoppressed.
As a counterpoint, what I’d like to see more of in the African-American culture is a kind of secular, inclusive community power. This was the kind of power garnered by the Black Panthers years ago, something that was seen as so much of a threat to the (in)stability of capital the US labeled it a terrorist organization. White society doesn’t get scared when blacks have businesses. It doesn’t get scared when blacks are divided amongst themselves because some label themselves as liberated and label others as in bondage. It gets scared when there are real community organizations challenging the tools of “the master’s house”. It also doesn’t get scared when allies of blacks combat oppression by depreciating themselves and apologizing for being not-black (this is what the white girl from UofI did in her last poem. This is a tactic heavily owing to post-modernity’s notion of identity. See the last section of this article in News & Letters: “NEWS & LETTERS, February – March 2007 – Anti-sweatshop struggles”).
This kind of thought it throughly imbued in black slam poetry and so-called “progressive” hip-hop. There needs to be a real movement and resurgence to change that. I’m working on that when I write. To conclude, here’s a few lines from a slam poet named Da’Shade Moonbeam:
I am raising my pen in protest against them
Let my voice shatter their foundations
and my fist decimate the structures that represent
their
revolution
And I’m not against revolution
I’m all for radical change
But the pseudo-radical revolutionaries
of the bourgeois world talk
as if they believe the struggle is solely
theirs
Like they have a problem acknowledging the fact
that we are all connected
by our struggles
So until the connective aspects of the revolution are accepted,
And the work of these revolutionary poets acknowledges it
I say
Fuck a revolution
Filed under: Activism, Philosophy, Politics | 2 Comments
I think you hit the nail on the head here. There is something about the Black Panthers that really scared white America, and that means they were doing something right. You’re 100% right it was their idea of community that did it. Even if every African-American in the country became “liberated” overnight, America wouldn’t change much structurally. But if everyone became a Panther, well, you’d have straight up war.
Oh lovely.
Activism against predjudice AND poetry.
Fun.