The signfier and sign: “We Support Our Police” vs Black Lives Matter

Over the last couple of months I have seen numerous “Black Lives Matter” signs in Vermont. I have also seen several “We support our police” (WSOP) or “We support our local police” signs, sometimes in directly opposing lawns. The “we” and “our” reminds me of Frederick Douglass’ use of “your” in his “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July“. By using “your” Douglass is denoting possession of the national day of independence. The day of independence did not belong to him nor to the enslaved, and thus nor did the country. Conversely WSOP, doing the work of the police for them, by using “our” is denoting the police belongs to them not to people who oppose the police, even if they living in the same town and pay the same taxes. Even if the single police departments in these small Vermont towns of 5,000, 10,000, 30,000, 40,000 people swallow up 20-30 percent of the municipal budget. I say WSOP is doing the work of the police for them because the devil does not need an advocate. The police have advocates in every political office, the strongest unions in the country, and pro-police propaganda on every television network in the country. The police in the United States have the domineering information message system that would make a totalitarian state blush.

Those with “We Support Our Police” like the organization ACT for America claim they do “not condone injustice or racism at the hands of some members of the law enforcement community, we do support law and order and we support the vast majority of the police force who work hard to keep our community safe!”. These opponents of police accountability set up “law and order” and the “majority of the police force who work hard to keep our community safe” as directly opposite to those who want to end police brutality. Without even realizing it they’ve set up the assumption that Black Lives Matter members and supporters don’t want to be safe. Never mind that they are literally protesting the act of being unsafe in their own communities, in their own countries because the police make it unsafe for them. Even the father of Michael Bell Jr., who was shot by Kenosha, Wisconsin police in the back of the head in his own driveway for the crime of potentially speeding and running a stop sign said he supports police. In polling, black people often express disgust at police racism yet support more funding for police. So it should be obvious that even victims of police brutality have an incomplete understanding of policing as an institution and practice and still committed to a system that has no interest in protecting them. Everyone wants “law and order” but as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes remembers once in a while law and order is mostly just about order. In The End of Empire episode of The Red Nation podcast native scholar Kim Tallbear remarks how natives living on the U.S. side of the border are far more invested in the settler state and its global war machines than those on the Canadian side. I would argue this pattern holds true for black Americans even more so because except for very small minority of black separatist, Afro-Americans have nearly always desired incorporation into the settler colonial state. Possibly, the two are enacting a Hegelian master-slave dialectic, each trying to get the other to recognize it.

The “we support of troops” signs support imperialism and colonialism, even if the people putting up those signs are ignorant of both of those terms. Blind imperialism is still imperialism and just as deadly. Comparatively the “we support our police” signs support police brutality against black and indigenous people even if the people putting up those signs claim they are not racism. The phrases “I’m not against black people” or “I do not condone police brutality” is in direct contradiction to the ontological, epistemological, historical, ecological, sociological construct of “we support our police”. You can not be antiwar and a soldier because making war is what soldiers do and you can not be pro-police and anti-police brutality because brutality is what police do. You don’t have to be anti-police necessarily, you might think a little brutality is justified sometimes, but pro-police and anti-police brutality is simply trying to have your cake and eat it too.

In episode 244 of the Goin’ Off podcast Rap Critic and Mues interview rapper RA Rugged Man. In one part RA Rugged Man remarks he knows many people who have never looked favorably upon police before Black Lives Matter. These individuals hated or had no interest in the police but when black people are protesting the police all of sudden they’re in favor of more policing. The point being that they don’t really care about the police they just don’t like black people. In a post-civil rights age with cell phone cameras where it has become inappropriate to be openly racist the ability to signal racism with things like the “we support our troops” or “we support our police” has become the primary language of white supremacy. The current ideological and ontological construction of policing in the United States is designed to murder and incarcerate poor people, especially black and indigenous people of color. And any support of that ontological construction of policing is the support for more dead citizens.

There is always stages to racism and denialism. Many liberals/conservatives, like ACT, might accept that there is racism within law enforcement and while they’ll deny it eventually they choose the police over black and indigenous lives. The MIT Librarian that called out a funeral home for flying a “We Support Our Police” flag stating it was akin to supporting the killing of black people without trial has far better grasp of the situation than people like ACT for America. The problem has never been a few bad cops, the problem has been (1) white supremacy and (2) the entire idea of police is designed to control poor and marginalized people. From the beginning, in any country, the police are tools of political elites to enforce control over labor and property. The police do enforce the laws, but with the aid and direction of the prosecutors offices and courts, they decide which laws to enforce and who to enforce them on. As it is said, it’s not a criminal justice system it’s a criminal legal system. Then finally there’s straight up white supremacist denial like The Blaze (a conservative media company) which argues that black people just complain too much and there’s no systemic racism. The Blaze is articulating the fascist end result of white supremacy and epistemological violence of data; that the death and poverty that black people receive is directly related to them being lesser beings, it’s biological and can’t be help. Fascist like The Blaze can be ignored or rather, must be ignored because you can not win arguments with fascists in “the marketplace of ideas”. The BPD in Burlington, Vermont arrest black people 4 times as often as white people (the black population of the city is around 5%). The fascists would argue that black people get arrested more because they commit more crimes. They deny of course the fact that “crime” is invented category. When opponents start pulling out countervailing statistics they only intent is to confuse you. They are trying to gaslight people against what is common knowledge; systemic racism is real.

Ben Shapiro is a Witless Asshat–Why Does He Exist?

Back in the day– a couple of month ago– when I was on Twitter nearly all the time I took a sort of nihilist or maybe rather defeatist joy at making fun or at least attempting to make fun of Ben Shapiro. Making jokes to hide the pain of existing in racist white supremacist state, if you will. For those who don’t know, Ben Shapiro is man who is an editor or writer for a digital rag called Brietbart or was it the Daily Wire. Whatever it is he has a certain currency in the intellectual vacuum of the conservative dark web directly adjacent to mainstream media. But as you might be able to tell, I can’t stand the guy. Ben Shapiro has the intellectual capabilities of decaying raw shoe leather. His presence and the continued reproduction of his words and works by the news media and the overly conservative American political pundit class severely damages their own little remaining integrity and intellect. This post was written in haste as well as in jest. But mostly it was written due to, even though no longer being on Twitter or Facebook, I continue to see the remains of Ben Shapiro’s comatose intellectual blathering all over the interwebs. This is a man who, like Donald Trump, has never said anything of value. You would not have lived a lesser life if you went your whole life never have known this man existed or heard a single world he ever uttered. Likely, your life on the whole might have improved.

One might be tempted to compare Shapiro with the Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlsons’ of the world. But those two know who they are. They’re openly white supremacist brownshirts who spew verbal diarrhea every time they open what for them passes for a mouth. The problem is that everyone else, of which I mean the white intellectual and capitalist class (or what passes for intellectualism on American television), refuse to admit what Bannon and Carlsons admits for themselves and their viewers.

I’d argue Ben Shapiro shares a lot more in common with Donald Trump, a man Shapiro claims to not support. Trump and Shapiro share the intellectual capacity of a gnat. Although I hesitate to be so harsh to the gnat. The gnats ancestors didn’t invent a system of racial patronage to benefit white people then pretend to not to understand what everyone else is complaining about. Or who knows. Maybe Donald Trump, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon call up their slime sucking gnat friends for a pub crawl on the weekend and discuss the always imminent but never actually happens threat of “white genocide” while drinking fermented piss water.

Maybe the closest actually comparison is Bill O’Reilly, another racist white man who, since having several books published under his name I begrudgingly must admit must be able to read words and maybe even put together comprehensive sentences all by himself. Yet O’Reilly, like Shapiro has the really world analytical skills of a post suicide Adolf Hitler. This is man who on his national broadcast television show, of which he had before getting fired for being an absolute tosser of the worst sort, said to a black professor that he “looked like drug dealer”. Do I know that Bill O’Reilly got fired by for an absolute tosser? No, nor to actually care. I know Bill O’Reilly is an absolute tosser. If I saw Bill O’Reilly walking by the the side of the road I might accidentally run him over. Nothing of value will be lost. I’m not generally a betting man but I am willing to bet good money that Billy O’Reilly would say “I’m not a racist”. That’s practically a quote even thought I don’t know if he’s actually said it on tape. That level of denial and lack of self-awareness is all very Ben Shapiro.

One of the most pointless conversations is trying to convince someone who thinks police brutality is not a problem or who thinks racial inequality is not real that both of these issue are indeed a real and a problem. The only reason not to believe police brutality or racial inequality is real and a problem is that you are a racist who believe police killing black people is good and that poverty is is natural condition of black people. I can state the fact that five of the largest landowners in the United State, who are white, own more land than all black Americans combined. Or that white Americans own 98 percent of all the land in the United States. But Ben Shapiro thinks systemic racism is made up by black people because they’re whiny communist bitches controlled by democrats or if it exist there’s nothing that can be done about it. Lets just ignore the racism involved in accusing an abused people of making up their own abuse. In the area of domestic or intimate-partner-violence what Ben Shapiro is doing would be called gaslighting. Since all politics is body politics, that comparison might not be too far off. Luckily no black person listens to Ben Shapiro except to laugh in pain and dream of pissing on his face while he has a recurring wet dream about being taken seriously as person. Maybe that’s just me though.

I despise Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and the Proud Boys etc because they are dangerous mercenaries of injustice. But in many ways I despise people like Bill O’Reilly and Ben Shapiro more because you can’t argue against that level of stupidity and they continue to have large audiences. No amount of information like what I stated above would make a difference because reality doesn’t matter. A general principle I live by is whatever your beliefs and ideologies your policy should not result in the production and reproduction of harm. A basic comprehensible idea is black people are just as much people as they are and desire all the rights they have and want but this basic level of humanism is beyond the ability of Shapiro. Bannon and Carlson don’t need to acknowledge this because they’ve already accepted what they advocating for calls for the eradication of everyone who is not white. O’Reilly and Shapiro are in denial because they’re just that incompetent. They’re not even in conversation with you. They in their own conspiracy where the moon landing was faked by geocentric members of the Illuminati controlled New World Order on the grassy knoll and Black Lives Matter is a fascist movement funded by a Billionaire Holocaust survivor because black people not being summarily executed by the police would be unAmerican. Pass out the lynching postcards.

Film Review: Queen and Slim

Note: This was originally written for my account over at Letterboxd.com

I heard far more about the ways this film didn’t make a lot of sense way before I ever saw it. Now that I have watched it it makes sense that Lena Waithe is partly responsible for the story because its representative of the new crop of young creators such as Donald Glover, Justin Simien, and Waithe, herself. Anyone who has watched any episodes of Lena Waite’s Showtimes television series The Chi will recognize the similar tonely styles. The best way I can describe it is as woke-blaxploitation.

Many of the new crop of young black creators, I believe, are more often seen and written about as the next generation of Spike Lee but in actuality are probably closer to the next generation of John Singleton and the Hughes Brothers. This is not to diminish them, there is really nothing to be sad about being compared to John Singleton. Unless, of course, your not all that crazy about seeing a lot of new John Singletons and the movies they would create. Personally, I would rather see more Barry Jenkins, Dee Rees, or Terance Nance. However, the new creators are often more focused on the The Message than The Medium which often results in the case Glover of saying nothing over well produced visuals or in the case of Waite reproducing the blaxploitation genre and suggesting there is meaning simply in the representation. Or finally, the case of Simien or Kenya Barris running out of ideas after the first movie/tv series and just doing the same thing over and over. As Jess Row explains very well in his book White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination about the inability of white Americans to comprehend race within their literature; representing what exists is not insight. I have my problems with Spike Lee but I’ve never though his work was redundant. 

All those cultural and artistic styles converge in this film. It’s very stylized and cares very much how things look and feel but also wants to be meaningful and socially relevant. And there is the problem for me. You can tell a brilliant Bonnie and Clyde type story about a couple of black people accidentally becoming icons of revolution and also be a love story but you can’t sacrifice one for the other. In this film the revolutionary icon is sacrificed for the love story which itself isn’t very complete. The result is the juxtaposition of scenes that don’t make a lot of sense and sometimes are downright offensive or gross. Such as the sense of the two main characters having sex juxtaposed with a protest in their honor. These two things do not go together thematically. 

The list of things that don’t make a lot of sense is nearly endless. For example, literally every single person they meet recognizes them immediately and decides to either help them or not tell the authorities. This means the police catch up to them by pretty much just doing actual police work which is kinda of funny for some reason. But more importantly I just can not imagine random people being able to recognize random ass black people even if they’ve been posted on national TV. I don’t mean to suggest that all black people look alike. But I can’t tell most people, white or black, apart and I’m a black person. Another issue is was it made no sense for them to go to Florida if they were trying to get to Cuba. I’m not an international smuggler but I think it would be easier to get to Mexico and then on to Cuba or even another South American country like Venezuela. These countries all have relatively close relationships with Cuba and it be a lot easier to get to. The contrived plan to escape the United States makes its sound like the filmmakers twisted the plot that way because they needed to end in climatic shoot out at an airfield.

Overall the cinematography in this film is great, well edited, the dialogue is sharp, its ultimately meaningless because they’re not rebels, not really, and they’re just barely lovers.

Book Review: “Race for Profit” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

In a previous piece reviewing another book on white supremacy, white conservative backlash to social welfare, and public health in the United States I remarked that “in the long run, the white wage is negative”. I would like to add “in the short run, however, the white wage is extremely profitable to white people and inexorability damaging to black people”. Keeanga-Yamathtta Taylor’s “Race for Profit” is a relatively short (it runs about 260~ pages) but incredibly dense book on how the U.S. Federal government colluded with the private real estate industry, the private lending banks, and the mortgage banks to rob black people of a national promise to make available adequate housing for the nations poor. A significant portion of the book is about how the Federal government of the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations, were so ideological committed to the ideology of capitalism they were unable to recognize that it was capitalism itself, with support from local and national government, that invented and sustained residential apartheid in the United States. These men and their administrations could not understand how expensive it is to be poor. 

“Representatives of the Nixon administration, including George Romney [head of HUD], portrayed the collapse of FHA-assisted low-income homeownership as an indictment of “big government”. These observations were hardly benign; they were spun into a larger campaign intended to undermine the system of urban social welfare that had been built over the course of the 1960s as a result of the convergence of the civil rights and Black insurgent movements.

This campaign was not just an attack on black working-class families; it was part of larger effort to undermine the central premise of twentieth-century governance: the social contract. The expectation that the federal government had a responsibility to create a floor through which no citizen could fall was forged through mass protests in the 1930s and again in the 1960s. In the absence of that pressure and of the postwar economic expansion that made it possible, the ruling elite repositioned itself to restore lower expectations and lower living standards.”

After Reagan became president in 1980 he and his administration reinforced the central failure of the HUD act and the federal governments programs to provide housing for low income Americans. That central failing was the federal government’s reliance and trust of the private capitalist system. In tasking the federal government to retreat from its active role in encouraging private mortgage banks, lending banks, and real estate companies to invest in poor working-class black communities and individuals Reagan stated the “genius of the market economy, freed from the distortions forced by government housing policies and regulations that swing erratically from loving to hostile, can provide for housing far better than Federal programs”. Reagan, like Nixon and Johnson, failed to understand that the private economy was structurally racist against black people and that government policy of refusing to enforce its own equal protection i.e. the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as well as the 1964 Civil Rights Act exacerbated racism in the private economy. Nixon and other conservatives rewrote white suburban and white real estate workers racist hostility to black families as economic choice not segregation as a matter of policy. Nixon and other conservatives, as well as many liberals, failed to appreciate the complex system of economic and social racism that keeps black people as permanent underclass. Poor people are poor because they are unable to accrue wealth. Outside of specific conditions of the economy such as deindustrialization of many Western economics starting in the 1970s, poor people are unable to accrue wealth because they unable and denied the opportunity for well paying jobs. This more true generally for black Americans who have higher unemployment rates than whites and are denied the protection from the criminal-legal system, denied access to credit, and due to institutional racism denied access to generational wealth. Black people are kept as a permanent underclass due to cyclical system of the same racist capitalist system that Nixon and others instructed would provide them with adequate homes. This ostracizing of black homeowners into majority black neighborhoods keep black families from growing their wealth since home value is largest source of generational wealth in the U.S. 

“As a result, to this present moment, homes owned by African Americans are worth less than homes owned by white people. Black majority neighborhoods are still viewed less favorably than white majority neighborhoods. indeed the distance from Black communities continues to factor into the superior value of white neighborhoods. Segregating African Americans into deteriorating urban neighborhoods while simultaneously denying those communities access to resources that could be used toward development created as an economic disadvantage for black people that was impossible to overcome”. pp. 260

Thus, white supremacy, as matter of government policy secures for white people wealth by positing blackness as negative. White homes and thus white wealth is artificially inflated because a racist real estate industry and racist government establishes a positive value to whiteness. 

The 2008 Wall Street financial crises was difficult for all working-class people but it was absolutely abysmal for black American homeowners. To this day black Americans are fighting for fair housing and fighting their own government to honor its own laws. 

In the Long Run The White Wage is Negative: A Review of “Dying of Whiteness” by Jonathan Metzl

The main problem I had with Dying of Whiteness was that Jonathan Metzl gave white people too much credit. Metzl argues that many conservatives white Americans in Missouri, Tennessee, and Kansas were honestly concerned about government overreach, security, and that racial resentment wasn’t the only reason for the anti-healthcare and austerity backlash. The problem is American society is racist right now. The system is structurally racist now. So even if conservative where concerned about the size of the government being against programs which disproportionately improve the health and economic well-being of poor people and predominately people of color is racist. Racism is not about about who you intended to harm. Racism is who you actual harm. 

“You don’t have democracy for white people because of the presence of black people who have to be contained” – Professor John H. Bracey

Class and race are like the two snakes of caduceus winding around the staff of society. In the section on the collapse of the Kansas education system during the hyper-conservative Brownback administration Metzl asks what health affects correlated with the reduced funding toward public education in Kansas. Metzl repeatedly shows the Black and Latinx students suffer greater reductions in education scores and graduation rates during the first 4 years of Brownback’s program to gut Kansas state investments in social programs. But the reason why Black and Brown students suffered more than white students were they started at very different places. Math scores for white students fell to an all time low of 11% below basics in 2015 while they were 29% for Latinx and 43% for Black students. State funding of K-12 education, through the formula Kansas used to distributed resources from wealthy communities towards poorer communities, acted as somewhat of an equalizer. Metzl asked “Sixty years after Brown [vs Board of Education], was the system becoming inherently separate and unequal once again?”. But the system was never equal. School segregation is worse now than ever. Brown vs. Board of Education didn’t solve the problem of white Americans hoarding power and resources.

The Republican party’s political objectives is to “scare white women to death with black men. [To] Keep black men as slaves. [To] keep white women powerless. It’s the cost of racism to white people. We are slaves , but you can’t come out of the house either”. – Professor John H. Bracey

When it comes to public funded health care in the United States, whiteness kills. It kills not only white people, especially white men, it also kills Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people of color. The white wage is attributed to W.E.B. Dubois statement that white people receive a “psychological wage” in exchange for defending whiteness even though they do not benefit equally from largeness of white capitalism. This is easier expressed by Bob Dylan’s song Only a Pawn in Their Game as in “you have more than the blacks why do you complain?”. Jonathan Metzl’s argument is essentially that the wage of whiteness is essentially negative; the benefits of whiteness is a bargain that eventually bends back and stabs white people. The argument is not perfect as even the poorest white family has tens of thousands of dollars more wealth than the poorest black family. In America, even with great inequality between white people, the inequality between white and black people is far greater. White people have all the land and all the money yet they are the ones with racialized political movements such as the Tea Party, Gun Rights, and Pro-Police Brutality. In the long anyway, the white wage is negative as it makes everyone less healthy and unable to deal with collective problems such as climate change due to illogical fear white people have of non-white people. Ultimately Dying of Whiteness is a book white people, especially conservative white people, need to read. It will not be very useful to people of color.

Film Review: Luce

Directed by: Julius Onah
Written by J.C. Lee & Julius Onah

The fundamental conflict in Luce starts when a young man’s essay based on the work of the anti-colonialist psychoanalyst from Martinque, Frantz Fanon, is interpreted as a sign of deviancy and as a potentially terroristic threat to the school and others. The film spends very little time exploring or articulating the work of Fanon or colonialism other than to use it as way of saying “don’t be like that radical black man who advocates violence against his enemies”. Julius Onah, who also directed The Cloverfield Paradox, and the screenwriters ignore Fanon’s work as an advocate for libratation of colonized people. As Angela Davis said in the film The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 “When someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible, because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.” Fanon wrote that in the eyes and systems of knowledge of Western colonizing countries the colonized subject is a “non-being”. And thus as “non-being” their only response to their subjugation is to wage a one sided struggle against it, violent or otherwise (Thorn, 2018). In misinterpreting Fanon’s work Luce does a disservice to its characters and to its audience. Which brings into focus who is the film actually catering to? It does not seem to exist to legitimize the anti-colonial struggles of people of color nor does it seem to exist to legitimize the struggles of minority students within the white supremacist education system in the United States. Instead, it tries to thread a very fine line which reads as legitimizing an American liberal middle class ontological view of the world which is antagonistic to liberation for working class people of color.

Capitalist education are sites of proliferation of bourgeois knowledge. Where do these middle-class ideas such as bourgeois respectability, acceptability, and the propensity of the colonized subject to revert to violence or the ideas that violence is always illegitimate come from? As the philosopher Karl Marx wrote in The German Ideology “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” In Cape Verde and GuineaBissau, for example, needing local allies to rule its subjects the interest of the Portugese colonial state resulted in the entrenching, protecting, and enhancement of the cultural influence of the indigenous ruling class of Cape Verde and Guinea Bissua (El Nabolsy, 2019). Luce’s protection, entrenchment, and enhancement of the American dream and liberal ideas Americans have about America is the expression of Marx’s statement. The exceptional individuals; the Zuckerberg, the Barack Obama, become evidence of the greatness of America while America is in fact a nightmare. The empire does not tell an honest history of itself. It is how it survives. The wealth of America hides the poverty of America. Those who complain about America; black people, indigenous people, anti-colonialists, become the enemy of America. The empire reenforcing the history that helps it survive. 

Luce Edgar, the title character, is an icon of modernism and America. Luce centralises the idea of objectivity, individualism, and reason as the best way to solve conflicts. The notoriously cryptic philosopher and professional racist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel claimed that the thing which defines modernity from other epochs is “the axiological importance assigned to an individual’s ability to choose what to do with their lives” (El Nabolsy, 2019). This is also very much the idea of America. In America people are free to be who they want to be. Or at least that’s what Luce says. But you also believe it too, especially watching as an American, every cultural production and educational product is fabricated to explain and reexplain to you how America is unique among nations in the ability to grant its inhabitants a second chance. Never mind that anyone can “start over” anywhere. What people mean when they say this is in America is you can leave behind your history. Of course this liberation from one’s past is only available to some. A brown or black immigrant is always a brown or black immigrant, always an outsider. What ever was going on in the place you came from, that is not important, the only thing important in America is capitalism. What people mean when they say this in America is you can reinvent yourself, be yourself as long as you have money and the means. Money and means are easier to find in America, it is the center of capitalist empire afterall. Where does money go when its not working? To the banks and corporations in America of course. Never mind that with money and means and an immense amount of luck, you can reinvent yourself anywhere. Luce, as a character, is the archetype of the mythology of America as the land where greatness is possible and the ideology of modernism that primacy personal autonomy and centralizes humans as makers of their own histories and identities. After all, he is young man who survived war in Eritrea and overcame post-conflict PTSD to become his schools most iconic individual, destined to do great things.

Luce is a film with so many different conflicts its as if it was created by a student of anti-colonial theory, intersectionality, and feminism while also being created by someone who failed every class on those subjects. The film hides its true narrative behind twisting PSYOP walls of obfuscation that would make Shonda Rhimes blush. It is explained he is a refugee from Eritrea and was adopted by Amy and Peter Egars from a refugee camp as small child. The timeline is little muddled as Luce is between 16-18 years old and the Eritrean War for Independence ended in 1991. So its unlikely he was in a refugee camp in Eritrea during the war but the film does not explain what happened to him other than to say he needed several years of therapy to get over his trauma. As a person who was adopted from Somalia I felt I shared a lot with Luce and the emotions surrounding him. Without exploring his integration into America I am hesitant to believe Luce would so easily turn away from his past and his Eritreanness. No matter how difficult that past might that past offers information on where he comes from. It is evidence that he comes from a place with history and a people with his. It is proof he was born. Without that past, in America he has to make himself into a being from scratch alone. Luce plays with the fact that within America blackness itself is inherently transgressive. This is not too dissimilar from Fanon remarking that colonialism had so extensively corrupted white French people’s minds that just being present as a black person near them resulted in white French people verbally assaulting him (Thorn, 2018).  

The colonized does not come into being until introduced to their inferiority by the colonizer. As Fanon states “If he is a Malasays it is because the white man has come, and if at a certain stage he has been led to ask himself whether he is indeed a man, it is because his reality as a man has been challenged. In other words, I begin to suffer from not being a white man to the degree that the white man imposes descrimination on me, makes me a colonized native” (Fanon, 1967, pp. 88). The colonizer demands the native bring themselves into his own ontological and epistemological world. After being told he is a parasite and has no use in the world the native “will quite simply try to make [themselves] white; that is […] compel the white man to acknowledge [them]”. Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Mask while some colonized subjects reject their colonizers others respond to their subjugation by trying to be more like their colonizers. By entering into history as Westernized African or Asian, the colonized subject expects the colonizer to recognize them finally as a full person. Of course, he does not. 

Luce Edgar’s teacher Harriet Wilson exemplifies Marx’s description that the function of “educational institutions in industrial capitalism was essentially to reproduce existing class and other structures of inequality across time” (Springer & Benjamin, 2019).  Luce Edgar, Stephanie Kim, DeShaun Meeks, and other characters experience constant racial microagressions related to their identies as non-white people, as women, and the expecations as well as the responsiblities people with those identies have to other people with those identities. Essentially, there are two related but contrasting groups within in Luce; one is adults and all the ideas and expectations they have on their children contrasted with their own expectations on themselves about their responsibilities as parents and or teachers, the other is the students and their ideas and expectations about who they are. In a world of linear time, where a misstep or mistake in the present or past can dramatically effect the success or failure of an individual in the future, the adults are hyper focused on “doing the right thing” and not “ruining” or “breaking” their children. At the same time Octavia Spencer plays the sole black teacher that is not the sports coach, and her character Harriet Wilson has already experienced the expectations or lack of expectations society and its institutions have for black and non-white bodies. Amy and Peter, Luce’s white parents. and Harriet Wilson are so use to thinking within the ideological confines of acceptable middle-class white American ideas about modernity and success within the capitalist America that they are unable or unwilling to consider the colonial subject Fanon was talking about. If a person’s identity is a function of their history, then at same time a person with ahistorical view of their own history is unable to recognize the reality of their own world. The irony of people who radiate fervent reverence to America’s mythical foundation and American nationalism while denigrating violence as a method of liberation from an oppressor escapes the parents, the teacher, the principal, as well as the student. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called America “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” he was confronting America’s love of colonialism and its love of colonial violence. Not only was the United States “using massive doses of violence to solve its problems [in Vietnam], to bring about the changes it wanted”, violence is the way the United States came into being (King, 1967). America is often though as a colony, but not the way African countries or Asian countries were and are colonies. America was a colony which liberated the colonizers from the administrators of their colonization project. America did not and has not sought to liberate its colonized black populations or its indigenous populations, to do so would be against its survival. As such, it would be reasonable to understand a nation which was not only born as a racist colonial project but who’s citizens were the agent of that racist colonization project would not recognize the rights of brown or black people to be free like them. 

El Nabolsy, Z. (2019). Amílcar Cabral’s modernist philosophy of culture and cultural liberation. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 1–20. doi:10.1080/13696815.2019.1624155 

Fanon, Frantz. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks (Markmann, C.L., Trans). New York, NY: Grove Press, Inc

King, M. K. (1967). Beyond Vietnam. Stanford University: The Martin Luther King, Jr.

Research and Education Institute. Retrieved from https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/beyond-vietnam 

Springer, D., Benjamin, J. (2019). Groundings: A Revolutionary Pan-African Pedagogy for Guerilla Intellectuals  In D. R. Ford (Ed.), Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education. (pp. 210-225). Boston. Masseshecuts: Brill Sense. 

Thorn, O. [Philosophy Tube]. (2018, Apr 27). Intro to Hegel (& Progressive Politics) [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgNt1C72B_4

Film Review: Birds of Passage

Directed by: 
Cristina Gallego & Ciro Guerra
Written by: Maria Camila Arias &
Jacques Toulemonde Vidal

The godfather like family saga of directors Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra Birds of Passage takes center-stage in the narrative. The desire to have a family and the cultural requirements of having said family participates a series of events which eventually destroy all that has been built. On the outside the film is about a growth in marijuana exportation to the USA that begins the violent origins of drug trafficking in Colombia. In pursuit of wealth and power Rapayet and his indigenous family get involved in a war to control the business within their tribe that ends up destroying their lives and their culture. Birds of Passage  has a lot in common with Jayro Bustamente’s Ixcanul. The back of the DVD cover describes Ixcanul as “a dreamlike depiction of the daily lives of the Mayans living on a coffee plantation at the base of an active volcano”. In actually Ixcanul is actually not really about the “daily lives of Mayans” as much it is about social control of women and capitalist inequality; since the widowed man the young Maria suppose to marry is the owner of the plantation. Like in Birds of Passage , no one asks Maria what she wants. And like with Birds of Passage  in the background is the history of Spanish colonization and theft. When a Maria becomes pregnant due to another man, Pepe, she and her family is punished by being forced to leave the plantation which also contains the house the live in. In another film Maria might have been social chastised for being willful and making her own choices. But Maria’s mother and father do not. In Ixcanul feudalistic relations from the Spanish speaking society limit and control Maria’s family. In Birds of Passage  Rapayet tries to control capitalist relations and everyone loses to white Spanish speaking Colombians.

Another reviewer might focus heavily about the drug trade within Birds of Passage  and its Faustian trade-off between wealth and death. To me however, the drug trade is the least interesting parts of the film. Birds of Passage , beyond being a narrative of how a two families destroyed each other in their quest for wealth and power, is also about how traditional systems are incapable of dealing with the conflicts of modernity. It is about how traditional system of governance and control can not be grafted on to capitalist systems of production. Attempts to do so will result in elimination of the traditional system of governance.

I will explain this with two examples. Within the Wayuu tribe, as with all nations, there are customs and rules which control and contain intertribal and intratribal behaviors. Rapayet and Martinez (Rapayet’s wife’s mother) threatens this from the beginning by dealing with the Spanish speaking Colombians. The danger starts as Rapayet deals with his hard playing Spanish speaking Columbian friend Moisés, played by Eudcadorian footballer Jhon Narváez. They then threaten these customs even further by getting involved with the Americans. The arrangement, in which one family grows the marijuana and another family sells it to the Americans who look like CIA makes both families very wealthy and powerful. This allows the families to buy weapons, to build concrete houses, to buy trucks, to get electricity, to build indoor pools in the mountains.

When the families had disagreements with each other they relied back on the old traditional methods of conflict resolutions. They would send messenger or family representatives that had special protection from harm according to cultural customs. When harm was done to one member of family a debt would be paid in goats or cattle to the other family. At some point the families become too power and their conflict too significant for the traditional methods of conflict resolutions to solve. At this point obedience to cultural customs start to fall apart. As a result the tribal elders gather to restore reverence to the system they all relied on to get along and keep the peace. But its too late. The traditional conflict resolutions system was designed to ameliorate conflict between small groups of people. By the time the conflict become intratribal it was too late to do anything about.

This dynamic of modernity destroying traditional mechanism for conflict resolution made me thing of traditional conflict resolution system in Somalia, especially the traditional system of customary law called Xeer. Like all things Xeer was designed before modernity, before capitalism, the machine gun, and before globalization. It was designed to contain relatively small problems in relatively small geographical territory. As with the Wayuu, the traditional conflict resolution system of the Somalis was unable to save them because modernity destroys all things in its pass that do not move with it.

Film Review: The Last Black Man in San Francisco

Directed by Joe Talbot
Written by Joe Talbot, Jimmie Fails, and Rob Richert

It is a real miraculous act of art when a material captures a geographical place or appears to capture a place; embodying within both its history and its culture.  For Baltimore it was The Wire, for New Orleans Treme, and Queen Sugar for Louisiana. Capturing a place means this series or this film could not happen anywhere else or if it did it would be a very different series. Comparatively, Escape of NY in 1981 was followed up with Escape from LA in 1996. Though I love it The Taking of Pelham One Two Three could be made in any city with a underground metro system. The act is a miracle because so many series and films fail in their attempts. Donald Glover’s Atlanta tells me nothing about the city its named after. Brooklyn Nine-Nine tells me nothing about Brooklyn. Monk told me very little about San Francisco. Sure, these are all TV shows but if TV shows, with their higher budgets and longer time frames, fail so often to do it, that’s just more evidence why it’s a miracle of art when a film can do it or appear to do it. A lot of “capturing a place” films try to do so with characters, try to establish the Boston accent or the NYC character. But often these attempts fail to establish place because while place defines people and vice versa it does not translate well into the silver screen. Portlandia is said to capture Portland, Oregon, but as you travel you see weird and eccentric people everywhere. We are not as dissimilar or special as we claim. This all to say that The Last Black Man in San Francisco implanted in my mind an image of the city of San Francisco as real place with its own rich and complicated history. It made me imagine all the people that have moved, lived, and struggled there. To see San Francisco as a stoic monument to the passage of time and the short lives of humans. To imagine the buildings full of ghosts of San Franciscans past who left a part of them behind in the concrete jungle of the city. But the core story of The Last Black Man in San Francisco is that nothing is forever; even a city dies. And when it dies it takes its people with it. They can no longer stay in the new city that will grow in its place. If they do they would be out of place. The memory of their old home would kill them and only result in a longer slower crueler death for the city as it fades into history and memory.

I watched Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco in a nearly empty theater in Burlington, Vermont at mid-day on a Thursday. I was immediately struck by how Joe Talbot confronted the stereotypes of the black male in Hollywood productions. Often in Hollywood productions there is a dichotomy between two opposing images; the gangsta and the intellectual. Never can these two identities manifest within the same bodies or if so only within white bodies. Now an intellectual is not someone who is scientifically literate or is an academic or speaks like an academic. An intellectual is simply someone who things about life. An intellectual is as Somali-Canadian hip-artist K’Naan Warsame described of the Dustyfoot Philosopher:

“…the one that’s poor
Lives in poverty but lives in a dignified manner
And philosophizes about the universe
They talk about – they talk about
Things that well-read people do and they’ve never read
They’ve never been on a plane but they can tell you
What’s beyond the clouds”

K’Naan, For Mohamoud (Soviet), Dustyfoot Philosopher (Album)

In the spring of 1963, KQED, a studio that provides northern California with public radio and television programming, sent its mobile unit out with author and activist James Baldwin. The result was a poignant documentary on economic inequality, race inequality, and how Afro-Americans are not citizens in the USA. The documentary was called Take This Hammer and it can be streamed for free here. America’s problem has always been that it was created upon a crime which was then was retold as a lie masquerading as truth. Any honest confrontation with that lie and with that crime would destroy America at its core. America is that lie and is that truth. As can be seen from conservative responses to the black civil rights movement in ’60s and ’70s as well as conservative responses to black and latino civil rights calls today, one of those crimes is that America is capitalism. The problem with a crime being the foundation of anything is that you can never adequately confront the problem without undoing the entire enterprise but you can never solve anything either because the cause is the entire enterprise. This contradiction is ameliorated by general denial of the problem and or wide spread social amnesia. Problem? What problem? I don’t see a problem! Why do you hate America?

“And everyone, everyone, every white person in San Francisco pretend they haven’t got a Negro problem. Everywhere I’ve been in this country, you talk to a white person who says race relations are excellent. And I’ve yet to find a single Negro who agrees with that” – James Baldwin in Take This Hammer, 1963

The Last Black Man in San Francisco deals with the contradiction of American racism and American capitalism somewhat directly but mostly indirectly. The main character, Jimmie Fails, who its played by Jimmie Fails, is obsessed with his childhood home not because its a house but because his grandfather built this house in San Francisco after moving West out of New Orleans. Within this house is the story of a black family “making it”. As with the narrative of the Bordelon family’s Louisiana sugar cane farm, built on or near land their ancestors worked on as slaves in Queen Sugar, within this house is the wildest dreams of Jimmie’s ancestors. Within this context of inter-generational struggles and absent mothers and fathers and economic inequality is the ghost of the racist Japanese-American internment policy, which cleared out housing stock in San Francisco and other parts of the country which allowed Afro-Americans to purchase cheap homes and move out of the hyper-racist south. In its cruelty the arch of universe bends back on its self. Once it expelled Japanese-Americans by explicit racist policies and calls it national security, now it expels Afro-Americans by implicit racist policies and calls it capitalism. 

The Last Black Man in San Francisco struggles to tell a story about gentrification. Or maybe its not a story about gentrification at all. Maybe that its just what film critics and viewers interpret the narrative to imply. Either way, the problem with narratives about gentrification, which the more explicit Blindspotting struggled with as well, is that gentrification only expresses itself as racial inequality but its actually an important function of how market capitalism is suppose to work. Gentrification is not merely the product of broken systems or bad politics or racist policies, it is an inherent product of the process of capitalist reproduction. The same narrative dynamic was expressed in season 1 of HBO’s post-Katrina show Treme when characters learned that the government had little intention of repairing some of the poorer wards or reopening the public housing projects mostly inhabited by poor Afro-Americans. The characters ask ‘what would New Orleans be without black people’ and there I believe lies the problem with much of the gentrification narratives. These narratives interpret the problems of gentrification through cultural and social lends when gentrification is primarily a economic one. And a structural one on top of that. But because the economic narrative is less emotional and revolves around the municipal, state, and federal commitment to capitalism it makes for far less compelling television or films. How do you tell a story about what you are losing if the reason you are losing it is because of the system everyone including yourself have accepted as part of your personal as well as your national identity? If you truly want to solve the problem of people getting priced out of neighborhoods they’ve lived their entire lives in due to increases in property value as a result of investments by governments and corporations then you need to take land and housing out of the market. But no body ever talks about taking land and housing and making them public and not private property. You would be telling a story in which you advocate for the destruction of the very ground of which you stand on. At best the people demand “affordable housing” without ever asking ‘affordable to who’. And so the capitalist mechanism of creative destruction continues running like well oiled machines, destroying old neighborhoods and building new ones. The movie maker makes more films where, without criticizing the system, they tell the story of how capitalism can only solve its problems by move them around geographically, everyone shells out $10 tickets, we shed a little tear, and we move on.

Film Review “Spider-Man: Homecoming”

Directed by: Jon Watts
Written by: Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Jon Watts, Christopher Ford, Chris McKenna, and Erik Sommers

I have been sitting on this film review for some time. To be honest I’m not even sure I want to write this. So I’ve just resorted to presenting this review with bullet points. That’s right I’ve gone full Buzzfeed.

• First time Peter Parker on his first airplane. Says something. I don’t know exactly what tho
• Everyone saying how attractive Aunt May is is annoying
• Happy Hogan, Stark’s point man and Head of Security, and Parker’s contact for Iron Man never listens to him
• He doesn’t get the girl
• Ganke is a Lego nerd and it is awesome
• Peter is bilingual, more of this in movies please
• Donald Glover as the lazies gangster ever, must have been the easiest bucks Glover has ever made
• Film starts: when I was a kid I use to dream cowboys and Indians. I’d say that’s too American. Thinking here of James Baldwin quote, as black person that come to the relaxation at some point that you are the Indian, and as we know from the movies, the Indian always loses.
• The entire plot of the movie is about the working class man losing. He bought trucks, and a crew with families. He could lose his house. Clean up company is partly owned by Tony Stark. So essentially Iron man breaks things and then gets paid by the government to clean it up.
• It’s a film that makes you root for the villain. He states [working class people] build their [rich people’s] roads, fight their wars, but they don’t care about us. People like Stark do whatever they want.

In the next movie I get to be a child soldier, oh boy oh boy!

• Peter Parker is not a “hero”, he freaks out and panics in the face of mortal danger. He is just a kid with amazing powers.
• The villain, apropos name Vulture, swoops in a steals high tech objects from the gov’t and Stark Industry. He was a scavenger before, cleaning up the mess on the side of the road. Empathetic, good villain, good actor.
• Interesting with all the poor people of color he still thinks Bruce Springsteen as the working-man’s artist. Which to me always represented a certain kind of working man i.e. white, a man, and in traditional masculine industries like automotive, logging, or mining.
• An important part of the film is when the relationship and trust between Tony Stark and Peter Parker breaks down due to a supposed mistake on Parker’s part. Iron man calls the FBI but didn’t tell Park that he called the FBI. So the whole ferry thing still on Tony. How is Parker suppose to know that the situation was being handled when Stark and Happy continue to ignore him.
• Peter: “I am nothing without the suit”, Stark: “If you are nothing without the suit then you should not have it”. This would have been unnecessary if Parker built his own suit like he was suppose to.
• Its a real plot conveniences that the father of the girl he likes is his mortal enemy. Sure its comic book cliche but its because its been overdone its doesn’t feel right anymore 
• There are a few interracial couple: Parker and his crush, Ganke and Parker

 NYC public transit is so bad you need to be Spider-man to get to school on time 

Over all Spider-Man: Homecoming is very enjoyable film. In fact I would say its one of Marvel’s best. The Tom Holland is great and likable as Peter Parker. The only bad thing I have to say about Tom Holland is that because he is so young I feel it basically means that Marvel has no future plans to bring Miles Morales into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

A Stranger in the Kingdom (Film Review)

Written by: Jay Craven
Directed by: Jay Craven & Don Bredes

A Stranger in the Kingdom is a 1999 film directed by Vermont writer/director Jay Craven based on a 1989 novel by Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher and is an adaptation of a real event which happened in region of the state of Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom in the 1950s. The Northeast Kingdom is located, well, in the northeast corner of the state and to this day is one of least developed part of Vermont. The film describes it as a place where “there is no law”. The basic story is in the 1950s a small town hires a new church minster. The town is shocked when the black Rev. Walter Andrews, played by Ernie Hudson, moves with his son, Nathan, to northeastern Vermont from Boston for the job. But he is far more shocked when the former army chaplain is accused of adultery and murder. 

This story of the black minster in an extremely white town is actually a side-story which dovetails with story of a young Quebecois women. A couple of local losers trick a young Quebecois women, by the name of Claire LaRiviere, into traveling to Vermont under the rue that there is young man in the village who would like to marry her. In actually there’s an old man who just wants her to do all the house work for him. 

“Since I’ve been here I have seen shit that’ll turn you white!… wait…sorry…wrong movie”.

There is an element of stranger in a strange land narrative to the story as Andrews and his son have to get use to a different, more rural, kind of living. But fundamentally A Stranger in the Kingdom is based on a true story of racism in an environment of hostile whiteness. Now hostile whiteness and racism are not the same thing but they are related. Hostile whiteness is a display of displeasure toward people of color not just their absence, though their absence is can also reference a hostility. Immediately after arriving at the village the Andrews are greeted with racist slurs of “monkey paw” and other verbal indignities. So even though the Andrews are technically free to be in the village and there are no structural institutions or authority denying the pastor from taking up his job, the Andrews are constantly harassed and made to appear as spectacles to be gawk at. If you ever wonder about liberal (or conservative) indifference to racism there is no better example then the villagers reaction to this harassment. The villager do nothing. 

A Stranger in the Kingdom tries to invent history and diversity and thus make the story of this lily white area more complex. One way it does it is by the introduction of Pliny Templton, a fake former slave who moves to Vermont and starts its first academy. The town, however, just can not stop themselves from excising good old racist colonial grave robbing and has his skeleton in a barrel or something. Not sure why the writer or the film needed to do this when they have the actual real Lemuel Haynes, who fought in the American War of Independence, was the first black man in the United States to be ordained as a minister, and worked in Vermont for many years. Personally I think Haynes story; being born of a white mother of some status and an African/African-American father in 1753, being sold as indentured servant, fighting in the war, becoming the first black minster, marrying a white school teacher, raising 10 children in upper New York state/central Vermont, is a far more interesting story. Or maybe just include some Indigenous Vermonters and their history in the region. The film also presents an underlying meta-narrative on the freedom of women. Not only do the women characters not let the men run around they are simply smarter. Except maybe for Claire. She moves from one home to another unsure of what she wants and unable for some reason to return to Quebec. The film really does a disservice to her character. Part of this might be that it makes he appear to much older and treats her like an adult when she she’s probably around the same age as the Minister’s son Nathan, who everyone treats as a boy.

“Hold it there kid, I need to get in one more n-word before this film ends”

I am going to spoil the ending here. It’s been out for some time guys, get over it. While watching this film I kept thinking of other films. Specifically the 1959 film The World, The Flesh, And The Devil and 1963’s Free, White and 21. Even though she is actually 17, which makes the actions of most the men in the film even more gross, the attitude behind these films and the issues they discuss fits with A Stranger in a Kingdom. Because while Walter Andrew is being run through the ringer of the Kingdom’s kangaroo court and while every man except Walter tries repeatedly to get into this young girls dress none of the white people can imagine one thing. That she had sex willing and that she had sex willing with Nathan, the Minister’s son, repeatedly. No one imagined that she might prefer the young black man as lover. If the story was trying to present us with a narrative of a young free women then why wouldn’t she be free to choose who she has a relationship with. Why does she need to hide it. The story never asks that. Once I again I kept thinking this story would be better from a different point of view. So much of the film focused on what the white men wanted what they want to do to her or for her. The only man seems to care for her and gives her places to stay out a Christian duty is Minister Walter Andrews. And is accused of murder for it. But we never got what she wanted. While she is the victim, this is not her story. I would have found her story and why she moved from Quebec and why she choose Nathan to be her lover far more interesting. Why wasn’t their relation, the one she actually had centered, why was the rapey behavior of the towns only lawyer presented as legitimate romance. In the end A Stranger in a Kingdom fails everyone. It fails Nathan, it fails Walter, focused too much on the racist towns people, the racist cops, and the racist attorneys, and most of all it fails Claire.