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Champagne Sharks 020: The Man-Not feat. Dr. Tommy Curry

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(BEC Media)

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVTKe9hRWkg)

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It is, because that’s where the subject lives as theorist, consumer, grocery shopper, got-to-pick-up-the-mail-now, let’s get to the bank. That subject is really living in the everyday. The question for me is how do you talk about or think about those different beats or rhythms through which you live your life. In other words, there is a doing and then there is a contemplating the doing. Those are two kinds of emphasis in the life of the same subject. There is the standing in relationship to an event, anticipating an event, and then there’s a getting a perspective on the event. One lives in the everyday and that’s one of the reasons why I’m a little concerned that our discussions about internationalism have made it harder for us to focus on the everyday. There might in fact be a global village, I can email or call someone right now, I can certainly go to Canada and instantly exchange money and vice-versa. All the trade agreements have made us a little closer to each other in the world across barriers of languages and cultures. But, I live my life everyday with a postal system, a system of currency, a certain set of neighbors, a certain kind of foodstuff and food culture.. There are certain people that I think about and call up. I live in a national culture, in the everyday world. So how do you think about that in relationship to Homi Bhabha’s “escalator” that he introduces in The Location of Culture. (see: Homi Bhahbha. The Location of Culture New York: Routledge, 1994) The notion of hybridity and ambiguity is a very powerful notion, it has a certain glamour and sex appeal, but I don’t live on an escalator. I mean at some point, I land. Theoretically that might not be interesting but that’s what happens and so that reality has to be worked into the theoretical configuration, or we are misleading or perverting what actually happens. I live in one culture at a time, I might speak several languages or idiolects in it. The post-colonial and the post-modern have a way of always moving the discussion somewhere else. But you take the “local” with you, whatever your “local” is, into these various cultural and theoretical zones. A lot of this comes back to what you actually do on the ground, in the everyday. What I’m suggesting is that it is one thing to make pronouncements in public spaces about fraternity, brotherhood, liberty, and justice. But it’s another thing to come back where you live and to make that a part of your practice. The disparity between those two things is what we call hypocrisy, and observing it makes me realize that I don’t like my own lapses, I don’t like other people’s lapses, even though we know we have to live with them. It’s a way of making people responsible beyond the pressures of their own rhetorical commitments, and the realization that commitments have to be something other than rhetorical; they have to be practical or praxial, in the sense of a practice. That’s what I see missing in our discussions today about race, gender, class, sexual preference. We talk a lot of stuff about openness and plurality and diversity and so on, but what’s the practice? What is the actual practice between one subject and another, between one leftist and another? There are troubling conclusions you have to draw about the generation of the ‘60s and its actual practices, what we actually do when we get home or when the television cameras are not there. You can’t believe that Clinton ought to come out more strongly for children’s rights, one asserts out of his mouth if you don’t take care of your own children. Women should have access or rights, but you don’t treat your women colleagues very well, the women around you, and the same relating to men. What’s the practice? The question is: Is there a place in theory today for us to to be critical of various gaps or lapses or aporias in the theoretical?

—       Hortense Spillers

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Two Americas.

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When I worked the California election polls, the leading poll worker said at the presidential election in 2012, a poll worker refused all black men and women from voting. He told them they were at the wrong voting precinct and turned them away. Though they could've asked for a provisional ballot or not trusting the white man and asking to view the list of names themselves then they would've saw it. But I know that isn't the point. But, I'm not sure what to do with this info.

Let’s talk about this via email. tjcurry@tamu.edu

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"You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a 'nigger'."

James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook”, The Fire Next Time

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Logic was manipulated to give intellectual credence to the system of slavery. Someone formulated the argument for the inferiority of the Negro in the shape of a syllogism: All men are made in the image of God; God, as everybody knows, is not a Negro; Therefore the Negro is not a man. Academicians eventually climbed on the bandwagon and gave their prestige to the myth of the superior race. Their contribution came through the so-called Teutonic Origins theory, a doctrine of white supremacy surrounded by the halo of academic respectability. The theorists of this concept argued that all Anglo-Saxon institutions of any worth had their historical roots in the Teutonic tribal institutions of ancient Germany, and furthermore that “only the Teutonic race had been imbued with the ability to build stable governments.” Historians from the lofty academic towers of Oxford, like Bishop William Stubbs and Edward A. Freeman, expounded the Teutonic Origins theory in British intellectual circles. It leaped the Atlantic and found lodging in the mind of Herbert Baxter Adams, one of the organizers of the graduate school at Johns Hopkins University and founder of the American Historical Association. He expanded Freeman’s views by asserting that the Teutonic Origins theory really had “three homes—England, Germany and the United States.” Pretty soon this distorted theory dominated the thinking of American historians at leading universities like Harvard, Cornell, Wisconsin and Columbia. Even natural science, that discipline committed to the inductive method, creative appraisal and detached objectivity, was invoked and distorted to give credence to a political position. A whole school of racial ethnologists developed using such terms as “species,” “genus” and “race.” It became fashionable to think of the slave as a “species of property.” It was during this period that the word “race” came into fashion.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Where Do we Go From Here: Chaos or Community (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 77-78.

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Ironically, traditional Judeo-Christian morality is a perfect vehicle for genocide, slavery, and territorial expansion. As a logical progression from biblical example, expansion and imperialism culminated in the United States with the concept of Manifest Destiny, which held that it was the colonists' inherent right to expand and conquer. Further it was a duty, the "white man's burden," to save the "natives," to attempt to convert all heathens encountered. Protestant Calvinism provided a set of ethics that fit perfectly with the colonists' conquests

Jonathon Jackson, Jr. "Foreward," in George Jackson--Soledad Brother

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Dr. David Ikard & Dr.Tommy Curry Black Male Feminism Debate 9/20/2014

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I get Huey's book, The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon. I lie down, unconscious of my family's presence, my mind totally absorbed by the Party and politics, eager to absorb the lessons of what Huey calls "the black bible."

David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, "This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party," 120.

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Politics is war without bloodshed. War is politics with bloodshed. When the peaceful means of politics arc exhausted and the people do not get what they want, politics is continued. Usually this ends up in physical conflict, which is called war and is also political. Black people are not free because we lack political power. Historically, Black Reconstruction failed after the Civil War because Blacks had neither political nor military power. The masses of Black people at the time, nevertheless, were very clear on the definition of political power. It is evident in the songs of the time; on the Day of Jubilee we'd have forty acres and two mules. This was promised Black people by the Freedman's Bureau, and, as far as the Black masses were concerned, this was freedom.

Huey P. Newton, "A Functional Definition of Politics," in Huey P. Newton Speaks, 147-149.

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Negroes with Guns by Robert Williams had a great influence on the kind of party we developed. Williams had been active in Monroe, North Carolina, with a program of armed self-defense that had enlisted many in the community. However, I did not like the way he had called on the federal government for assistance; we viewed the government as an enemy, the agency of a ruling clique that controls the country. We also had some literature about the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana, the state where I was born. One of their leaders had come through the Bay Area on a speaking and fund-raising tour, and we liked what he said. The Deacons had done a good job of defending civil rights marchers in their area, but they also had a habit of calling upon the federal government to carry out this defense or at least to assist them in defending the people who were upholding the law. The Deacons even went so far as to enlist local sheriffs and police to defend the marchers, with the threat that if law enforcement agencies would not defend them, the Deacons would. We also viewed the local police, the National Guard, and the regular military as one huge armed group that opposed the will of the people. In a boundary situation people have no real defense except what they provide for themselves. We read also the works of the freedom fighters who had done so much for Black communities in the United States. Bobby had collected all of Malcolm X’s speeches and ideas from papers like The Militant and Muhammad Speaks. These we studied carefully. Although Malcolm’s program for the Organization of Afro-American Unity was never put into operation, he has made it clear that Blacks ought to arm.Malcolm’s influence was ever-present. We continue to believe that the Black Panther Party exists in the spirit of Malcolm. Often it is difficult to say exactly how an action or a program has been determined or influenced in a spiritual way. Such intangibles arc hard to describe, although they can be more significant than any precise influence. Therefore, the words on this page cannot convey the effect that Malcolm has had on the Black Panther Party, although, as far as I am concerned, the Party is a living testament to his life work. I do not claim that the Party has done what Malcolm would have done. Many others say that their programs arc Malcolm’s programs. We do not say this, but Malcolm’s spirit is in us.

Huey P. Newton, “The Founding of the Black Panther Party,” in Huey P. Newton Speaks. 

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In a sense, these sessions at Bobby's house were our poLit.ical education classes, and the Party sort of grew out of them. Even after we formally organized we continued the discuss ions in our office. By then we had moved on to include not only problems but possible solu tions. We also read. The literature of oppressed people and their struggles for libe rati on in other countries is very large, and we po red over these books to see how their experiences might help us to understand our plight. We read the work of Frantz Fanon, particularly The Wretched of the Earth, the four volumes of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and Che Guevara's Guerrilla Warfa re. Che and Mao were veterans of people's wars, and they had worked out successful strategies for liberating their people. We read these men's works because we saw them as kinsmen; the oppressor who had controlled them was controlling us, both directly and indirectly. We believed it was necessary to know how they gained their freedom in order to go about getting ours. However, we did not want merely to import ideas and strategies; we had to transform what we learned into principles and methods acceptable to the brothers on the block. Mao and Fanon and Guevara all saw clearly that the people had been stripped of their birthright and their dignity, not by any philosophy or mere words, but at gunpoint. They had suffered a holdup by gangsters,and rape; for them, the only way to win freedom was to meet force with force. At bottom, this is a form of self-defense. Although that defense might at times take on characteristics of aggression, in the final analysis the people do not initiate; they simply respond to what has been inflicted upon them. People respect the expression of strength and dignity displayed by men who refuse to bow to the weapons of oppression. Though it may mean death, these men will fight, because death with dignity is preferable to ignominy. Then, too, there is always the chance that the oppressor will be overwhelmed.

Huey P. Newton, "The Founding of the Black Panther Party," in Huey P. Newton Speaks. 

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Subverting the construction of subordinate black womanhood, however, was the empowering visual rhetoric of female resistance in illustrator Emory Douglas’s self-described “revolutionary art.”% Best known for his Panther cartoons of pigs in police uniforms, as early as March 1968 Douglas created back-cover, two-color, poster-like images of women brandishing guns or knives that romanticized Panther women as warriors Douglas also drew a wide range of portraits showing poor black women resisting authority in everyday life, such as a middle-aged matron singing, ”I just want to testify/I’m not going to sit around any longer / I’ve got freedom on my mind.” Douglas believed art should raise viewers’ consciousness about oppression. His Panther illustrations included the three elements Gamson lists as elements of collective action framing: injustice, agency, and identity. Curator Sam Durant describes Douglas’s art as “a visual mythology of power for people who felt powerless and victimized.” The newspaper’s imagery was a striking contrast to popular culture stereotypes of black women as self-sacrificing mammies, sexual objects, or emasculating matriarchs. Douglas’s illustrations of everyday women represented what Deborah King calls the ”multifaceted nature of black womanhood.“60 They broadened and strengthened the organization’s group identity. Douglas lent dignity to the women he drew, with their jaws set and eyes looking forward. A 1972 illustration was a striking version of Dorothea Lange‘s iconic Depression photo, “MigrantMother.” Images of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman graced a 1978 back cover, a connection to black women’s long history of resourceful resistance. In the Panther‘s early years Douglas mentored the party’s first female member, Matilaba (Joan Lewis), who also drew black women carrying guns. Matilaba’s poem in a November 1968 issue indicated that not all Panther women were content simply standing behind their men. It began “Revolutionary brother /And a / Revolutionary Sister / Work/ Hand and Hand /Together /As a / team … They have reached the level / Whereman-woman/Hangups don’t exist … .”- By 1969, Panther frames of women began to catch up with Matilaba’s sentiment. In the May 4 issue,June Culberson publicly challenged the party’s restrictive gender views. Culberson asserted, ”[O]ur role is to fight in and participate in this revolution on an equal footing with our men.’’& Behind the scenes, some Panther men were even beating up women, a topic that was publicly taboo. A key turning point in public policy occurred on July 5, 1969, when the Panther published a letter from Cleaver instructing Panther men to treat Panther women as equals. Readers took note as the newspaper was the main vehicle by which leaders disseminated party policies and instructions. The letter was prompted by murder charges filed against member Ericka Huggins. ”The incarceration and the suffering of sister Erica [sic] should be a stinging rebuke to all manifestations of male chauvinism within our ranks,” Cleaver wrote. He recommended mandatory disciplinary action against those who “manifest male chauvinism behavior.” He concluded, ”[Tlhe liberation of women is one of the most important issues facing the world today.“

Linda Lumsden, “Good Mothers with Guns: Framing Black Womanhood in the Black Panther, 1968-1980,”  Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 86 (2009): 900-922, 904-905.