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[transient-dreamer-blog]

Help unlock Big K.R.I.T.'s new #Cadillactica music video at http://zip2.it/cadillactica

[transient-dreamer-blog]

This text is the product of a project undertaken by Greg D. Kowalski as part of a directed study at Rhode Island College under the Black Studies program.

Abstract: In his now classic text ‘Blood in My Eye,’ George L. Jackson writes, “All revolution should be love inspired.” This directed study, and honors project by extension, will plumb the depths of Jackson’s remark by critically interrogating the ethical dimensions of Black Power and the cultural, ideological, and political interventions influenced by such a conceptual revolution. This project is meant to serve as a contribution to the insurgency and urgency of/for fresh paradigms within Sociology departments matriculating students in the study of the meaning of “race” in society. Moving beyond the rubrics of class struggle or economic exploitation, this project seeks to bring “the critique of anti-blackness,” what is designated as ‘afro-pessimism’ in Black studies, to the forefront of conversations about “race relations” in Sociology. By delineating and pushing the logic of Marxist thought (conflict theory) concerning issues of race and racism, particularly Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, this project will highlight the severe limitations of conflict theory while working intimately with the conceptual framework of Black Power, demonstrating the promise and explanatory power of Black studies in untangling tyranny in “a penal democracy.”

[transient-dreamer-blog]

MuFucka, Hope Y'all Amused: Natal Alienation, State Violence and Social Critique in "Cartoon and Cereal"

I wrote an essay on Kendrick Lamar's song "Cartoon and Cereal" ft. Gunplay.  Check it out. Here's an excerpt:

While Lamar displays public support for victim-blaming discourses on antiblack violence in 2013, his past performances did not make such claims, perhaps because they occurred prior to his public rise.  I say this to say that past discourses, while they weren’t as public to the extent that his BET speech was, were focused upon the “ethics of violence”[1] which his expression spoke; one such discourse took place in the song “Cartoon & Cereal,” which takes on multiple meanings in the context of black suffering, gratuitous violence, and police power which are regular markings of normative existence in centers of urban captivity, places where the state is omnipresent but seems barely there.

[1] Woods, Tryon. “Beat it Like a Cop,” 29. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1qH-9nw7lrNcmF3eVhVQjZCUzg/edit?usp=sharing

[transient-dreamer-blog]

I might have feelings about justice, for example I feel that the killing of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer was unjust; and that the verdict in the case (involuntary manslaughter) is also unjust. But justice is not a register that I trade in as a theorist. And perhaps not even as a politico. I am interested in ethics, which is to say that I am interested in explaining relations of power. You might say that both of my books are arguing that the existence of the world, meaning the existence of the modern era, is unjust. It would be hard to find a corner of justice within an unjust paradigm, unless you made a provisional move away from explaining the paradigm. As regards the first part of your question: I believe in the spirit world; that is to say I believe that the African ancestors are still with us and can be consulted from time to time. But I would not try to calibrate the gap between what I believe and what I can explain. I don’t think that would be useful.

Frank B. Wilderson, III "Wallowing in the Contradictions" Pt. 1

[transient-dreamer-blog]

Reparations suggests a conceptually coherent loss. The loss of land, the loss of labor power, etc. In other words, there has to be some form of articulation between the party that has lost and the party that has gained for reparations to make sense. No such articulation exists between Blacks and the world. This is, ironically, precisely why I support the Reparations Movement; but my emphasis, my energies, my points of attention are on the word “Movement” and not on the word “Reparation.” I support the movement because I know it is a movement toward the end of the world; a movement toward a catastrophe in epistemological coherence and institutional integrity—I support the movement aspect of it because I know that repair is impossible; and any struggle that can act as a stick up artist to the world, demanding all that it cannot give( which is everything ), is a movement toward something so blindingly new that it cannot be imagined. This is the only thing that will save us.

Frank B. Wilderson, “Wallowing in the contradictions”, Part 1 (via likestepsonthemoon)

[transient-dreamer-blog]

From the Facebook event:

A Black person is killed every 28 hours by a security guard, police officer, or deputized White body in the United States of America(1). In a purportedly “post-racial” era, in the wake of historical and monumental civil rights activism, many thoughtful observers have noted that over time we have not experienced a diminished state of racist institutions, systems, and practices but rather quite the opposite: White Supremacist state structures have undergone unprecedented growth and strength. One aspect of this growth is the frequency of violence (excessive forced) used on unarmed Black youth; youth that, in spite of their perceived innocence, the justice system offers no protection for.  This student-driven lecture and discussion of extra-judicial gratuitous violence will examine the cases of anti-Black state violence in the murders of unarmed Black youth: Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, and Aiyana Stanley-Jones. Evidence and analysis will be presented while offering practical solutions for resistance on and off-campus. Critiques of Whiteness and White Supremacy will be offered. These critiques will allow for us create a platform for imagining new, as well as recognizing past and current, forms of resistance, and inspiring action against state violence.  Presented by Greg Kowalski and Andrea M. Sterling  Sponsored by L.I.F.E. (Live. Inspire. Fight. Educate!) Where: Roberts Hall Alumni Lounge—Rhode Island College When: 4-5:30pm; Wednesday, October 9 __________________________________ 1) Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report on the Extrajudicial Killing of 313 Black People http://tinyurl.com/keu22ko

[transient-dreamer-blog]

i say this all the time but if dismantling white supremacy is not a core pillar of whatever work you are doing then you need to figure that shit out and fix it

[transient-dreamer-blog]

And just to prove to you how much we despise little black girls, Joel Rstein has reminded us not to forget Aiyana Jones: “Voice of Detroit has a recent article on the trial http://voiceofdetroit.net/2013/06/09/family-describes-military-rai...

[transient-dreamer-blog]

Frank Ocean comes out

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Nicki Minaj comes out as Bi and straight up makes it look like she's eating Cassie out in her music video

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Beyonce, Jay-Z and Kanye West come out in support of marriage equality

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Numerous LGBTQI+ identified Rappers exist

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Macklemore: When I was in third grade I thought I was gay because I could draw,

Tumblr: OH MY FUCKING GOD WOW THE FIRST TIME EVER ANYONE IN HIP HOP SUPPORTS GAY PEOPLE BLACK PEOPLE ARE SO HOMOPHOBIC WOW WHAT AN AMAZING SONG I LOVE SAME LOVE

[transient-dreamer-blog]

“Every year white people add 100 years to how long ago slavery was. I’ve heard educated white people say, ‘slavery was 400 years ago.’ No it very wasn’t. It was 140 years ago…that’s two 70-year-old ladies living and dying back to back. That’s how recently you could buy a guy.”

Louis C.K. (via 30thcenturyboy)

Sylvester Magee, the (probable) last American born into slavery died in 1971.

The last living child of former American slaves, Mississippi Winn, died in 2010.

Slavery in the territory that is now the United States lasted more than 330 years. We will be 330 years removed from slavery in the year 2195.

(via jordynbesty)

[transient-dreamer-blog]

http://www.atlawblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Jackson-v.-Deen-et-al.-Complaint.pdf

Never again tell the lie that she’s losing sponsors because she used the N-word once during a robbery. The complaint is 33 pages long, incredibly detailed in that way you get when someone is documenting one terrible day after another, and lays out exactly what kind of toxic environment exists under the auspices of Paula Deen & her family. Sexual harassment, assault, battery, racism…this case has it all.

[transient-dreamer-blog]

READ THIS

They Came Before Columbus

https://anonfiles.com/file/ee14411741f1f9f5b1f753bb50c822b8

[transient-dreamer-blog]

Slavery and the Cult(ure) of Anti-Blackness: an essay on reading Beloved

I wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book's population - just as the characters were snatched from one place to another, from any place to any other, without preparation or defense.

Toni Morrison, Beloved, xviii

In understanding or comprehending the institution of amerikkkan slavery it is important to know and remember that Transatlantic/Transmeditterean slavery irreparably transformed relations between human beings, their ontology, and the comprehensiveness of capital (private property).  The uprooting of Africans and the commodification of their bodies, their work, and their subsequent freedom, broke open history in such a way that Human Beings have been thrown into an inescapable hell of unresolved horrors, unmitigated terrors, incentivized by material rewards of flesh and wealth and power.  Chattel slavery is the only system of dehumanization, extermination, reproduction, domination, subjugation, death, violence, and terror in Human history that has, for all intents and purposes, been managed to remain a fluid, yet stable, element of modern civilization.  Its tragic continuity, or what Lewis Gordon and Jared Sexton call the afterlife of slavery, is one aspect of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved that I have identified.  My reading of Beloved deepened my understanding of the comprehensiveness of the effects and ripples that racial slavery had and has in a so-called Post-Emancipation world.  Beloved speaks on the power of systems of racialization and the well-documented horrors (both mundane and spectacular) that mark the lived experiences of Black people in amerikkkan history.  This tragic continuity is an aperture that is diligently analyzed and examined, lived in, loved in, lost in, an opening into a world whites do their best to not see - only seeing as much as they are willing, or told, to see. 

Beloved has its many moments of enjoyment, triumph, and victory - not to harp or focus singularly upon the light that gives birth to its shadows.  But attention must be paid to the place from which the rays of oppressive light shine, so as to find its source, and snuff it out, if the object is to plunge the two worlds into darkness: the white world and the Black world.  

Morrison firmly holds her reader within the context of white supremacy, and its constitutive cultural, political, and economic institutions.  Whiteness is always the unspoken backdrop, looming in the ether like dark matter, manifesting itself in the myriad (re)memory and rehashing of all of the despicable acts practiced, all of the violations, the disappointment, and having no other choice but to settle...which drive Sethe to take the reins, as she attempts to shine a looking-glass into the face of the White World which took everything from her.  

Thus there is no equilibrium in the mise-en-scene as Morrison takes the reader frantically across and between space-time, abducting the reader's ability to comprehend the situation unfolding by way of the narrative.  What this does thematically for the novel cannot be understated.  Take not for granted the fact that the structure Morrison so deliberately obliterates and excludes from the narratology can be taken as a cryptic message.  Not cryptic in the sense that it is coded (Morrison explains the reason for the anachronistic anti-structure of the book in the Foreword in the First Vintage International Edition, June 2004) but cryptic in the sense that (white) amerikkkans are ideologically, epistemologically, and ontologically unconditioned and oblivious to this message by default.  Morrison's deliberate exclusion of a certain compassion for the reader needs to be taken seriously, a certain plea-for-sanity to readers to get the picture, to pay attention, to stand against the injustices of the world.  Morrison wants the reader to engage critically with their own internalized anti-blackness which the narrative structure of the novel is designed to unsettle and disturb.  Ideological complacency should be the enemy and object of scorn for those interested in freedom - and whiteness is a key culprit in perpetuating injustice past to present, globally.  

Remembering for Toni Morrison is integral, as the text of the afterlife of slavery is constantly replaying in the present and going unrecognized and unacknowledged.  The cancellation of this reality pre-empts anger over its injustices, and thus the possibilities for creating conditions to critically engage with and dismantle our structures of antagonism (political and cultural systems that reconstitute antiblackness and white supremacy).  The whites responsible for the creation and sustenance of the slave trade shrouded themselves in benevolence: as so-called Enlightened Servants of their white God and their White Jesus, yet they were the ones who justified the pain inflicted by way of Christian Humanitarianism, the ones who reaped the material and psychic rewards of its production; the coffers of gold overflowing in the Vatican and the industrial and infrastructural development of the kingdoms of Europe and the incomprehensible, foundational greed and inhumanity of chattel slavery and its continuity make freedom today a ruse of whiteness, and a far-off dream to Black people who do not want to sell their souls to entertain the white masses by way of winning their Affection. 

Beloved is an alternative.  Beloved does not bemoan victimization, nor does it synthesize Blackness with Victimhood.  Beloved screams creative resistance to whiteness.  Morrison relentlessly drives into the reader's mind that slavery was not a system of forced labor - it is and was a system of turning bodies into goods in a global economy run by white people.  Because slaves' bodies were the property of white people and continue to be imagined to be so through cultural artifacts like 2013 film "The Purge", it was common practice to force slaves to procreate, for slave-masters to use sex as a weapon of subjection.  In "The Purge" the male head-of-household spends much of the film fearing that a Black man who has 'invaded' his home by way of being let in by their son will rape and kill his white daughter and wife.  By the end of the film the Black man, a homeless veteran serviceman, proves his loyalty to the white family that inadvertently saved him from being "purged" by a gang of white yuppy students headed by a beady-eyed Aryan in a Catholic school uniform.  The message of the film romanticizes and fleshes out the liberal post-racial fantasy of whiteness' preservation and Blackness' submission to new forms of domination.  Justifying acts of gratuitous violence against Black people requires merely updating the systems by which Black people are dominated - reform.  

Amerikkkan political, cultural, and social common sense, when it comes to the making and maintenance of all policy, all property, is anti-black at it's core.  And if its authorizers do not work at dismantling the ideological, and onto-epistemological structures built within them (which were built without their consent by the seemingly external social force of race-making institutions, and the productive apparatuses of state and civil society), then there is deliberate complicity with an ordering of the world that stratifies human beings into a caste-system created over a thousand years ago.  See the world with blinders on, and blindly you navigate its course.  

When the mise-en-scene of Beloved is such an uncanny representation of the antagonisms of Black life in amerikkka today and bears such insidious identification with our current socio-political structuration (eg page 176-177 when whites try to take Sethe's children to "raise them properly" and ponder its resemblance to the current juvenile justice system of capture and punishment without crime, DCYF and social work apparatuses) how can the premise that our civilization is a just one stand against all of the evidence significantly substantiating the opposite premise? 

Do not trust the world.  

[transient-dreamer-blog]

Over 1000 Attend Kimani Gray’s Wake

Over 1,000 people attended a wake for 16-year-old Kimani Gray over a period of six hours on Friday evening in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatlands, just shy of two weeks after the teenager was fatally shot by two NYPD officers. Attendees included City Council members Jumaane Williams, who represents Kimani’s district, and Charles Barron as well as City Comptroller and mayoral candidate John Liu. They joined family members, friends, classmates, and those who didn’t know “Kiki,” but wanted to show their support.



Kimani was hit by seven bullets, three of them in the back, by two plainclothes NYPD officers on March 9th in East Flatbush. The circumstances of his death remain unclear, as the police department’s version of events differs greatly from an eyewitness’s account. Community members and activists from throughout New York City have held several vigils since the shooting, some of which have turned chaotic, including the trashing of a Rite Aid on one night, and another night that resulted in 46 arrests. 



The NYPD claims the two officers repeatedly told Kimani to freeze, after which he pointed a gun at them. They then fired 11 shots, seven of which hit the teenager. An eyewitness told the New York Daily News, however, that Kimani hadn’t pointed a gun at the officers, and later told the Village Voice that one of the police officers stood over Kimani and shot him when he was on the ground.

The media was not allowed inside Caribe Funeral Parlor, where the wake was held, and photographs were prohibited inside the building. But several mourners described Kimani, whose family decided to have an open casket, as looking “peaceful.”

“He looked peaceful, but not ready to go,” said Will, a fitness trainer who had been inside for the wake. He described the scene as thick with emotion as a montage of home movies of Kimani growing up played on a screen. He also said that he and other members of the community were going to continue to plan events to honor Kimani’s memory. “We’re not gonna stop until justice prevails.”

[transient-dreamer-blog]

"According to the state, no suffering warrants rebellion; although 'freedom from tyranny' is one of its hallmark phrases. Perhaps what is explicitly meant, but only implied, is that no black suffering warrants rebellion."

- Joy James, Black suffering in Search of the "Beloved community": Political Imprisonment and Self-Defense

[transient-dreamer-blog]

Police brutality is redundant. Business ethics is an oxymoron. Conscious consumerism is a farce, and a very profitable joke. Conscientious capitalism is a marketing ploy. Ethical food is a an oxymoron. The rest of the world is starving to fucking death and you can't think of anything to do but reframe your shitty culture, which will always rely on the death and maiming of "Othered" (human) beings. You kill your soul and mine in the everyday process of being a being for a captor. I kill my soul a little every day to make life work for you and everyone else. Too bad because life would be nice if we weren't dead beings. I am dead. We are dead. Fuck the world. I want to live! I am available for children's parties.

[transient-dreamer-blog]

There's more than one kind of death and if you think that the physical kind is the worst of it, take a look at any family in a community plagued with drug addiction, impoverishment, decay, and disrepair, and tell me that there is no hell on earth and then tell me that it's their fault so I can falcon punch you in the face.