Lost Coherence

Illtra-left politics: Left communism, Black abolitionist and materialist feminism, Afro-Pessimism, and the Black Radical Tradition. A reading and discussion group for Black ultra leftists, antagonists, internationalists, and comrades. This group was founded by two working class Black female discontents against the insufficiency of everything existing. We initially formed to examine left communist materials alongside materials related to "identity politics" because we recognized none of these methods to be sufficient alone in envisioning a future communism. “Once their rage explodes, they recover their lost coherence, they experience self-knowledge through reconstruction of themselves; from afar we see their war as the triumph of barbarity; but it proceeds on its own to gradually emancipate the fighter and progressively eliminates the colonial darkness inside and out. As soon as it begins it is merciless. Either one must remain terrified or become terrifying—which means surrendering to the dissociations of a fabricated life or conquering the unity of one’s native soil. When the peasants lay hands on a gun, the old myths fade, and one by one the taboos are overturned: a fighter’s weapon is his humanity.” ―Jean-Paul Sartre from Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth

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“Here, in this place, we are flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs, dances barefoot in the grass. Love your flesh. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love our flesh.”

—Baby Suggs, Toni Morrison’s Beloved

[lostcoherence]

RIP Toni Morrison

[aiminoes]

Heike Becker: “Global 1968” on the African continent

Africa should not be left blank on the map of scholarship that seeks to understand 1968 in a global perspective.

[jmjafrx]

Kelley – “We Are Not What We Seem”: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South (1993)

Robin D. G. Kelley, “We Are Not What We Seem”: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South, The Journal of American History, Vol. 80, No. 1 (Jun., 1993), pp. 75-112 Source: “We Are Not What We Seem”: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South on JSTOR (x)Filed under: Black Life x […] via Diaspora Hypertext, the Blog http://ift.tt/2lhjhzE

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All Black Everything - Journal #79 February 2017 - e-flux

To my mind, abolition, as it has been unevenly developed within the internationalist black radical tradition over several centuries now, “is the interminable radicalization of every radical movement,” most especially its own. It is that which radicalizes all others because it radicalizes itself as its most essential activity. The slave’s cause is the cause of another world in and on the ruins of this one, in the end of its ends.

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[andthentheyweredead]

Election 2016: Where Do We (the Left) Go From Here?

I was never going to write anything on this election. Mostly because what needs to be said has been said already by more attuned black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian-American intellectuals, journalists, and writers. But it appears I have to say something. And like often, what I have to say is more of repudiation of an underlying subtle interpretation, a small corruption that leads to a larger corruption if you will, than anything new.

So, finger-pointing, I really have no problems with this, as long as the finger is pointed in the right direction. The finger should not be point at the working class, or people of color, or 3rd party Presidential candidates. It’s somebody’s fault. A political party, one of only two in fact, loses the White House and the Senate and it’s no one’s fault? Oh, okay.

Let me start by reminding people that this is entirely normal. There is nothing more American than white supremacy. Modern movements of marginalized communities, such as Black Lives Matter and NoDAPL, are inheritors of over four hundred years of black and indigenous resistance. The brashness and vulgarity of Donald Trump tarnished the veneer off the system and that is why more people noticed the rotting corpse in the closet. But this is nothing new, the system has already been normalized.   

Many on the Left have recognized this election wasn’t about economic anxiety and it wasn’t about sexism, it was about race. I say this not because economic issues and sexism didn’t play a part for some people but these were not its supreme unifier. Sex and economic class is not what Trump supporters, overall, share with each other.

I believe the Democratic Party, being the Democratic Party, will learn little or nothing from this loss. Or rather they will learn the wrong lessons, or maybe the right ones if we’re talking about winning elections, but the wrong one if we’re talking about bettering the lives of people of color, immigrants, the poor and the working class. Likely the lesson Democrats will learn is to be more business friendly, more focused on white people, essentially more like the Republican Party whose tail they’ve been chasing since Ronald Reagan. The basic lesson everyone should learn is that a system that can legitimately return Donald Trump as its elected Imperialist in Chief is not a democracy. Unless by “democracy” we mean “rule of rich, screw the blacks, Latinx, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, Muslims, and while we’re at it let’s not try to solve hunger, homelessness, health inequality, or economic inequalities because we love capitalism more than justice and equality”.     

Opponents will argue that fascists, homophobes, and racists can change and I agree. But that’s their journey. My journey is to survive. My journey is, to paraphrase Toni Morrison, to get free so I can free someone else. And it’s hard to do that when you have to argue with some random person everyday over your humanity and your right to life. From my perspective if calling a racist a racist shuts them down then so be it, they weren’t ready to not be racists. 

Now there is a role for political education of both fascists and non-fascists but that is not everyone’s role. In order to teach students have to, at some small level, be willing to learn. Before they can be taught a new way fascists and non-fascists have to question themselves. Self-doubt opens windows, windows become doors. Eventually they can walk through and someone will probably be helping them. But that someone will not likely be me. If that is you, I applaud you. You are doing essential work. We all have a role to play. There is no need for us all to do the same work. This is the duty of the white Left in the West.

Changing minds is a beautiful thing but it is a slow process and we have to live in this world. I think of Dr. King in his Letter from Birmingham Jail in which he states “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This ‘wait’ has almost always meant “never’.” It would be nice if people of color could live before time conquers our bodies. Too many people have been waiting for far too long. I suspect the “change minds” argument is also from a worldview that perceives the arch of the moral universe to bend toward justice. This relies in a theory of history as a linear progression, that things will always get better, which I think is naive.

What should the Left do? Organize as antifascist, yes, of course but organizing against fascism will not defeat fascism’s pillar: white supremacy. The thing the Western (white) Left needs to recognize is that it is, by the simple nature of being largely white and in the West, white supremacist. As philosopher Charles Mills states “white supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today”. White supremacy is a global system, it permeates the global political system, it is the global political system. And anyone who knows anything, or at the very least follows me on Twitter knows everything is politics, even neutrality. There is no exceptions, whether you are white, black, Asian, Latinx, or Indigenous, you are living under white supremacy, it’s a global political system. And whether you are white, black, Asian, Latinx, or Indigenous you are, by the political education of the system of white supremacy, racist. The Left, especially the white Left, must accept and then confront its white supremacists tendencies. There is, as former Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would say, no alternatives. This is not a negotiation. Communism, socialism, social democracy, libertarian socialism, whatever your post-liberal capitalists dreams are, they are all impossible without the white Left recognizing the monsters that were born and are living under their bed. A movement that does not recognize this is not a movement worth supporting because in the end we will end up not far from where we’ve started.

The history of the labor movement in the U.S. is filled with patterns of black-white solidarity, only for the white majority to betray the black minority. As Bob Dylan sang on the message from politicians dividing the people “you got more than the blacks, don’t complain. You’re better than them, you been born with white skin”. But let no one convince you that the white people in general, including the white working class, do not benefit from white supremacy. Some in the labor and socialists movement will try to diminish the role of racism in the U.S. and say that it’s fundamentally about class. But in U.S. there is no difference between class and race. The process to which one becomes a race, in which one is racialized, is all about denying a group social and economic access. And once racialized, they become a permanent underclass.

Black people, Asian people, Latinx people, and Indigenous people will continue to fight racism and global white supremacy as they always have. But it is not their responsibility to save the Western Left. Nor do I believe they can save it from the cancer not of their making. As Charles Mills says white people “take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political”. As we can see now the people who voted for a white supremacist, are largely white from across many classes and sexes, and still argue the election was not about identity politics. In fact, they argue the Left’s insistence on identity politics is why white people voted for Donald Trump, because whiteness is not an identity.

Everyone is shitting their pants and complaining of how “divisive” the election was, like politics isn’t suppose to be divisive. Can’t we just get along and be a racists nation together? It’s divisive because these things matter. Politics is life and death. How many people has the strike of a pen killed? The Pope recently condemns the “epidemic of animosity” with Trump’s election, like the Catholic Church hasn’t killed a few with its support and participation in racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, colonialism, and adulation of capitalism. Where have you been Francis? Others complain the country is so “divided” and needs to “heal”. Yes, it needs to stop being racists, that’s the best medicine. I need to keep reminding you this because “come together” is a political speak” for “calm down, there are no skeletons in the closet. Blacks and Natives love us, it’s their fault they’re disenfranchised. We love the gays. Etc etc”.

The question some on the Left need to ask and are asking is “where do we go from here?”. Some are arguing for the election of a more left-liberal Chairperson to run the Democratic National Committee. Someone like Keith Ellison, member of the U.S. House representing Minnesota’s 5th congressional district. However, the solution can not be found in “history’s 2nd most enthusiastic capitalist party”. It will end in tears and disappointments, it always does.

There is no alternative. It’s either confront white supremacy or accept fascism until people of color are no longer content in being a raisin in the sun, and they explode, right in white people’s faces. I bet they will claim they never saw it coming.

[lostcoherence]

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The papers we have chosen for this book were written by a large number of poor and petit-bourgeois black people—the damned—poor students, poor unemployed young women and men (the street bloods), workers in low-paying dead-end jobs, and women welfare recipients. With few exceptions, the black liberation movement has been controlled by middle-class blacks in their own interest. This book may be the first time that poor and petit-bourgeois black people have described the full reality of our oppression and our struggle. We have tried to speak in the name of countless others who have been denied the privilege. Please let our individual names pass away and be forgotten with all the nameless like us—and those too who went before and yet in reality made it possible for us to speak today.

[lostcoherence]

There should be no shock at the success of White Nationalist revival. A fog of liberal-progressive panic seeps across the closest quarters, oddly individualizing what some inhabit as a normal and collective disposition of familiarity with emergency under conditions of constant bodily and spiritual duress. In the living room, kitchen, office, school, cafe, park, dorm room, gym, and library there is a steady-sad din: How did this happen, Why such hate, There are so many of them, What will happen to our country, Will I be threatened, My uncle and neighbor lied, What does the world think of us, I do not feel safe, What do we do now, Who will protect those people from them, How could this happen my god my god…

Wrapped up in the noise, it is worth reminding that this alleged descent into new chapters of state-induced racial and sexual terror is not reducible to the serial reprehensible (though completely unsurprising) tweets, assaults, and grandstanding of the new President-Elect. There are some who understand, because their wisdom is inherited, that the terror he embodies is both long-standing and carried in the thrust of a Civilization’s futurity. This guy was always here, he is the persona his predecessors possessed but disguised so well (though you never fooled me, you assholes), and many of those in the throes of liberal-white-people-panic know this deep down because their revulsion to him is driven by a hatred of the intimate, the familial, and maybe the same.

I must admit: i suspect some of them are incapable of seeing and feeling past themselves, their own bodily integrity, this isolated moment in a long, long history. The way they are spinning into prescriptions of how and why “we must resist” this particular abhorrence not only domesticates the liberal white riot, it threatens an infiltration of imagination in dislocated quarters that are accustomed to their negligence and generally thankful for their absence. The white misery desires multicultural company. Some of the ones panicking in public (online, on mic, on screen) are ready to tell the rest of us what to do, how to feel, and when to move—when in truth, if they felt so motivated, they would realize that their greatest contribution might be to shut the fuck up and get out of the way, because there has been some well thought-out, beautifully imagined, wild shit going on for years now, and some of it entails anticipation of their demise along with—because they are part of—the abhorrence.

[lostcoherence]

Study Shows Young People Of Color Remain Optimistic About Their Future, But It’s Time Black Folks Consider Pessimism

The light of a free Black future exists, but it will take real, difficult, and frightening work. It will take acknowledging the darkness, first. It will take a substantial measure of pessimism.

[lostcoherence]

Poor Meme, Rich Meme — Real Life

One of the greatest tasks of blackness as collective being has been to hold itself together in something like cohesion, to exhibit some legible character. This cohesion only becomes necessary, perhaps, as the collective being is made visible to nonblack society. When considered on its own, in what to some are the shadows, this collective being is allowed to expand and contract at will. But when society shines a light on it, what is atomized and multiplicitous hardens into the Black.

[lostcoherence]

In 1973, the year the women's movement won an important symbolic victory with Roe v. Wade, reports surfaced that twelve-year-old Minnie Lee Relf and her fourteen-year-old sister Mary Alice, the daughters of black Alabama farm hands, had been sterilized without their or their parents' knowledge or consent. Just as women's ability to control reproduction moved to the forefront of the feminist movement, the Relf sisters' plight stood as a reminder of the ways in which the movement's accomplishments had diverged sharply along racial lines. Thousands of forced sterilizations were performed on black women during this period, convincing activists in the Black Power, civil rights and women's movements that they needed to address, pointedly, the racial injustices surrounding equal access to reproductive labor and intimate life in America. As horrific as the Relf tragedy was, it fit easily within a set of critical events within black women's sexual and reproductive history in America, which black feminists argue began with coerced reproduction and enforced child neglect in the period of enslavement. While reproductive rights activists and organizations, historians and legal scholars have all begun to grapple with this history and its meaning, political theorists have yet to do so. Intimate Justice charts the long and still incomplete path to black female intimate freedom and equality--a path marked by infanticides, sexual terrorism, race riots, coerced sterilizations and racially biased child removal policies. In order to challenge prevailing understandings of freedom and equality, Shatema Threadcraft considers the troubled status of black female intimate life during four moments: antebellum slavery, Reconstruction, the nadir, and the civil rights and women's movement eras. Taking up important and often overlooked aspects of the necessary conditions for justice, Threadcraft's book is a compelling challenge to the meaning of equality in American race and gender relations.

[lostcoherence]

Intimate Injustice, Political Obligation, and the Dark Ghetto (Winner, 2015 Okin-Young Award)

[Tommie] Shelby depicts a world of presumably male adults and adolescents unencumbered by sexual, reproductive, or caring obligations. Like many liberal theorists before him, Shelby describes residents who do not appear to participate in the system of social-reproductive cooperation. They manifest no concerns about the needs of the young, the elderly, or even their own daily sustenance. Because this gendered system of social cooperation goes unremarked in Shelby’s account of dark ghetto conditions, there is no mention of the impact that racial bias and overall unfairness, past and present, have on those who assume caregiving responsibilities. Shelby devotes no attention to the manifold ways that residential segregation and disparate racial geography compound current social reproductive unfairness. Nor does he consider how past and present social reproductive unfairness affects individual residents’ capacities to refrain from violence.

In Shelby’s account, there seem to be only older and younger male dark ghetto residents—economic actors all—and police on the street. Each young man is free to choose, and fully capable of choosing, his relations, affiliations, and the nature of each of his discrete interactions each day. In making these choices, he confronts only the choices between joining the formal economy or the parallel one, upholding norms and adhering to nonviolence or turning to deviant economic interactions. He can also decide whether to engage in violence or refrain from doing so. 

Shelby’s account of racial constraints, like his discussion of a male-focused parallel economic sector, envisions life on dark ghetto streets without women. His vision of the inner city as a space of economic actions and transactions ignores other significant racialized systems and constraints that contribute to a sense of alienation and nonbelonging—and indeed that have powerful effects on the cultivation of individual capabilities, including the capacity to choose. When women’s lives in the dark ghetto are taken into account, new terrains of injustice become visible.

[surrealistnyc]

The Great Camouflage: Suzanne Césaire

She was “beautiful as the flame of her thought,” to her daughter Ina. Her husband the poet, intellectual, and mayor of Fort-de-France Aimé Césaire wrote of her: “Ingenuous flames you who lick a rare heart.” André Breton, interned in Martinique on the way to New York, described her femine beauty “which has never appeared to me more dazzling than in a face of white ash and ambers.” Suzanne Césaire burned. And she could write: “Martinican poetry will be cannibal or it will not be.”

Breton’s introduction to her came about by way of a chance, wartime encounter. Having left Marseille with Jacqueline and their daughter Aube, in late March, 1941 on a filthy and overcrowded ship, they arrived in Martinique only to be held in a camp by the Vichy authorities. On a day when he was allowed into Fort-de-France, he records:

“This town itself held onto nothing; it seemed deprived of its essential organs. Trade, all conducted in shop windows, took on a disturbing, hypothetical character. Movement was a little slower than necessary, the noise too clear, as though coming through the stranded wrecks. In the pure air the continuous ringing of a distant alarm bell.

"It was in these circumstances that I chanced, while buying a ribbon for my daughter, to thumb through a publication lying in the haberdashery. Unpretentious in appearance, it was the first issue of a review entitled Tropiques which had just appeared in Fort-de-France.”

Surrealism was already there to greet him. The following day Breton met Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, and Suzanne noted her impressions of him in a piece which appeared in the third issue of Tropiques. She writes of the “freedom to do and undo” and took from him the demand for freedom. Two years later she wrote that “far from contradicting, diminishing, or diverting our revolutionary feeling for life, surrealism shored it up. It nourished in us an impatient strength, endlessly sustaining this massive army of negations.”

Among the essays she wrote, “The Great Camouflage” stands out with its historic vision of Martinique—sweeping change is signaled from the start in a cyclone hurtling across the Antilles. She writes of the arrival of new authorities:

“On the beach there were some ‘metropolitan functionaries.’ They were landed there, without conviction, ready to take off at the first signal. The new arrivals are hardly adapting to our 'old French territories.’ When they lean over the malefic mirror of the Caribbean, they see therein the delirious reflection of themselves. They dare not recognize themselves in this ambiguous being, the Antillean. They know that the métis have a part of their blood, that they are, like them, of Western civilization. Of course, it is understood that the 'metropolitans’ are unaware of the prejudice of color. But colored descendants fill them with fear, in spite of the smile exchanged. They were not expecting this strange bourgeoning of their blood. Perhaps they would like not to respond to the Antillean heir who shouts, but does not shout out "my father.” However one will have to deal with these unanticipated boys, these charming girls. One must govern these unruly people.“

Misrecognition and miscegenation are elementary to the great camouflage. And Césaire claimed her right to a position in French culture as the cannibal these metropolitan functionaries wouldn’t admit they saw—she certainly possessed a consuming intellect.

In any case, despite the camouflage, the Vichy powers made publishing Tropiques a hazardous enterprise, banning it for a period before their withdrawal in 1943. And under the corrupt powers ruling the island, all of the editors faced the threat of imprisonment if not worse. After the war, she taught while Aimé Césaire won an the election for mayor of Fort-de-France on the communist ticket and was also elected deputy to the French National Assembly. He used this position to improve the status former colonies, transforming them into departments equivalent to those in mainland France. Suzanne went on to publish her play Aurore de la liberté and returned to France in 1955 to teach literature.

Sources

The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941-1945) / Suzanne Césaire, edited by Daniel Maximin, translated by Keith L. Walker (Wesleyan University Press, 2012) "On the beach…” quoted from p. 43.

“A Great Black Poet: Aimé Césaire” in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings by André Breton, edited by Franklin Rosemont (Monad Press, 1978) “This town itself…” quoted from p. 230.

Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, edited by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley (University of Texas Press, 2009)

Martinique Charmeuse de Serpents by André Breton and André Masson, Ouevres Complètes, vol III (Éditions Gallimard, 1999). This title has been translated into English by David W. Seamon as Martinique Snake Charmer (University of Texas, 2008)

Tropiques: 1941-1945, Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 1978

[lostcoherence]

The history of freedom in America arguably began not with slave owners like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who called for a limited, racialized vision of anti-imperialist freedom, but in the Caribbean with the revolution in Haiti and with broader struggles for freedom from colonialism (which continued with the emergence of 20th-century US colonialism).

[thisisbobbylondon]

The world is outraged and I’m just numb.

I feel no more upset or sadden than I did a month ago. The news of cops killing another black person is no longer news, it just is.

There is a sense of pity that I feel from other non-black people, like I’m a character on a reality show as if my venting and pain is a production for others to consume.

Black resistance has become twitter hashtags that now everyone feels comfortable to use. Yes, say black lives matter three times fast and purify yourself of all your internalized anti-blackness and white supremacy!

Temporary awareness means people have finally had enough! Yes, lets take action, yes lets march in the streets, then people get arrested, organization co-opts, and energy is filtered into respectable politics. The movement fizzles until the next Cops Gone Wild video is released and we start all over again.

–I wonder how many fraternities stream the police murders and laugh, how many people watch it with enjoyment, ooh look they just released the uncut version, hell ya put that shit on the wide screen!

Every media outlet cover page reads Black Lives Matter. Media institutions that usually ignore our voices love moments like these. So much click bait. Let this be the moment you let your ONE token black staff writer shine.

So much profit in black death, we are not seen as human. Black people stay exploited, during grief, during pain, and in death.

Our suffering is entertainment, our coping is your entertainment, our resistance is YOUR entertainment.

And like a sitcom that has been on for too long there is predictability in both our action and inaction. Movement politics are as corrupt and opportunistic as state politics. The longer you stay involved the more cynical of people and their intentions you become. This is often written off as being jaded, but I think cynicism is an undervalued trait.

I guess I’m just over it all. What does it do, what has it done? As much as I think action is needed I know that it will lead to nothing. I know it’s not something I’m supposed to talk about or even say out loud. But, I do not owe anyone optimism. I fluctuate from nihilism and moments of hope.

Consider this the B-side, hopefully something out there will inspire me to write the A.

[lostcoherence]

Brexit demonstrates the Left’s failure on Race issues

In an article on race and British cultural studies, Roxy Harris noted that the field’s founders – E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams – ignored “the place of black and brown British subjects in the national polity”. Thompson’s classic 1968 study, The Making of the English Working Class, for example, while covering “topics such as the liberty of ‘the free-born Englishman’” was silent about “the part played by the Empire, the slaves, plantations, the East India Company and so on”.

These great theorists of British society were race-blind.

But it seems that little has been learned from this partial and parochial view of British social and economic history, especially in the writings of a small but vocal group from what we will refer to as “the white Left”.

[lostcoherence]

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