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#Nixonland: Selection of New Model Minority Book Club

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My fascination with 60’s era politcs stems back from a class in high school titled American history from 1960 to the Present. Thank you Mr. Lee.? Heady stuff for a 16 year old.

Ta-Nehisi recommended that I read Nixonland as a way to wrap my head around how the modern Republican party became the party of both business and of? working class angry whites who vote. And how the Democratic party came to be the party of Black folks, of unions and education.

Because I am also interested in what happened to Black people in urban settings in the 1980’s I realized that learning more about Nixon and the ’60’s would help me understand how we got to 1985.

Get Nixonland and lets read it together. A few of you have already started(@tkoed @skippcoon) and that is hella fresh.
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The author @rickperlstein has reached out to me/us via twitter which is hella fresh.

If you have discussion questions about the book leave them in the comment section.

In addition, I am getting ready to post “20 Things I Learned from Reading Nixonland.”

#ummhmm.

On Dating a Giver

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^^^ #NomNomNominaction

For Josephine & For T.dot.

Oooh, Uh Ohhh Dropped your knot, scooped it up put in my sock… ~e. badu

I turned around and I realized that I am dating a giver.

Someone who never lets my IPA get too low,? who makes sure the waitress brings my water with no ice, who understands that I am a monster until I have that iced coffee in the morning, someone who sent me? a text message last week that said “groceries bought.” #ummp.

This was hard to do at first.

I enjoy my freedom.

As women we are socialized to get with the most affluent, attractive person that we meet.? So when all the niceness was getting thick, I was like wait, does this mean I am WITH this person now?

I thought about it, and I have decided to enjoy the attention AND maintain my autonomy.

For me to enjoy this kind of attention, at my own pace and keep my freedom is new and I often don’t know what I am doing. When I admit that though, I remind myself that I am a human being and that I don’t have to be perfect.

I mean, I spoke at the Black Arts Festival in Philly in May and the man came down to meet me and then coordinated his ticket so we could leave Philly together. Who does this? Really?

Him: Yeah, I’ll come see you. Let me know.

Me: You gone come all the way to Philly to marinate with me?

Him: Yeah, just let me know.
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#Ummp.

A month ago, speaking to Court Bear, my dating coach and sister, about my desire to run she said, unlace the sneakers, stay still and enjoy it.

It felt good to hear her say that. I mean, the only reason to run from a person treating you nice is because you are scared they are going to leave.

And because I KNOW that I don’t control outcomes, me running would only hurt myself. Not very vulnerable or fearless either.

Speaking to Josephine about it, we were discussing what it means to be desired and just cared for on g.p. and how odd it can feel because as women in general and Black women specifically we are socialized to put everyone else first; Our momma’s, our children, our partners, our jobs.

Never us.

So to be on the receiving end of some care is both comforting and challenging.

Its comforting because its nice when someone makes a snack that YOU like, that YOU can’t wait to eat. Not eating on some obligatory steez, but on some, I REALLY LIKE THIS, nom, nom, nom, and MORE nom.

Its challenging because it has forced me to think about what kind of treatment I have accepted in the past, and the kind of treatment that I will require in the future. There is also the challenge of not comparing how one person treats me versus another, in terms of levels of consideration while dating. I can’t help it sometimes tho’.

You date a giver before?

Were you the giver?

You run? You stay?

How did it feel?

White Husbands and Black Maids: from Drylongso

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Gimmie a Break on You Tube, for a refresher on Black maids

I read Drylongso by John Gwaltney while working on The Crack Project. Drylongso is an ethnography of? Black people in North Eastern cities in the late seventies. Ironically, The Graduate (the man for whom I played number two a few years back//that was fun, and he is now my friend) recommended that I read it.

I am glad that I called him and asked for his help (he is a historian) as reading Drylongso helped me to conceptualize why oral histories are really a powerful and important tool for documenting the lives of Black people.

But for introductions to the individual chapters, and a fourteen page introduction,? the book is? mainly testimony straight from the people that Gwaltney interviewed.

Gwaltney sums up his intentions with writing Drylongso when he says,

…I share the opinion commonly held by natives of my community that we have been traditionally mispresented by standard social science.

…This is not therefore another collection of street-corner exotica but an explication of black culture as it is perceived by the vast majority of Afro-Americans who are working members of stable families in pursuit of much of the same kinds of happiness that preoccupy? the rest of American society.

…far often than not, the primary status of a black person is accorded by the people he or she lives among. It is based upon assessments of that persons fidelity to the core black standards. the categories “real right” and “jackleg” cover the spectra of statuses…

Rereading this book over the last week, I was moved by how Black women theorized racial relations between them, white men and white women.

Now, quiet as it’s kept, these white men try to rule their wives like that too. And if they can’t beat them, then they toles them with nice things. If my husband had encouraged my children to go out here and treat some woman the way white boys have tried to treat me, I would leave or he would have to leave. But that’s because I do not need a man to feed myself. White women don’t, either, but they think that they do, so they just put up with all this stuff that they should not stand for. Now just like I have to get out here ad hit it, they could too…

I have worked for many white women and most of them did not have the sayso any more than I did. Not as much as I did sometimes. If I had been the kind of woman that they might find in bed with their husbands, there wouldn’t have been anything that mot of them could do about that commonness but maybe? get their husbands to fire me. Now, that won’t work with black women because Black men don’t have anymore than we do. How I’m gone boss you if you got just as much as I got? ~Nancy White

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I thought her comments about race, and white women, work and power were incredible.

“How I’m gone boss you if you got just as much as I got?”

The assumption here is who ever got the dough, has the right to dominate. Which if you have been reading my blog for the last month, is Patriarchy 101.

We rarely talk about the the connection between Black and White people,? the power relationships that arise when it comes to work and labor.

In fact, prior to the 1960’s most Black women worked as, nurses, nanny’s and maids, as that is what society saw them as being naturally fit to do. With integration and the creation of affirmative action, Black women were able, and all women for that matter were able, to attend school in larger numbers and obtain fancy jobs, sit down jobs, city jobs, academic jobs.

Have you ever been a nanny or maid? for a family of another race?

Have you ever hired a nanny or maid of another race?

How did that work out?

What do you think of Ms. White’s comments?

Amadou. Sean. Lovell. Oscar. Aiyana

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Photo Courtesy of Thomas Hawk @ Now Public

(Young African American man, hand cuffed in police car, January 2009 after Oscar Grant Murder Protest in Oakland, I wish I knew his name.)

Amadou. Sean. Lovell. Oscar. Aiyana.

Oftentimes, when it comes to personal violence and race and structural violence and race, I turn to other writers, better writers who can capture how I feel.

Baldwin understood? and articulated the purpose of the police, arguably better than anyone else I have read.

This is all I can offer today on the Oscar Grant verdict, protests, looting and subsequent media coverage.

I hope that it helps.

Similarly, the only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive. None of the Police Comissioner’s men, even the best will in the world, have any way of understanding the lives led by the people they swagger about in twos and threes’ controlling. Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent the entire day feeding gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and what that worlds real intentions are, simply, for that worlds criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place. The badge, the gun, the holster, and the swinging club make vivid what will happen should his rebellion become overt….
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…there are few things under heaven, more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people. He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country; which is precisely what, and where, hie is and is the reason he walks in two’s and three’s. – from Fifth Avenue Uptown

And here is another quote,

The projects in Harlem are hated. They are hated almost as much as policeman, and this is saying a great deal. And they are hated for the same reason: both reveal, unbearably, the real attitude of the white word, no matter how many liberal speeches are made, no matter how many lofty editorials are written, no matter how many civil rights commissions are set up. – from the essay Fifth Avenue Uptown

One one hand a Mehserle verdict was a slap on the wrist. On the other hand, white police, historically, have rarely been charged with? nor found guilty of killing Black people, unarmed or otherwise.

Amadou. Sean. Lovell. Oscar. Aiyana

Baldwin? “They represent the force of the white world.”

Thoughts on the verdict?

*note. it wasn’t until I began to look for photos for this post that I found myself crying inconsolably. It’s a combination of working really hard, lack of sleep and seeing these images of uncut Black rage.? The pictures made it real.? Feelings of survivors guilt. I do my part, and I am grateful for all of the gifts that I have. Looking at these images reminds me that I escaped a real serious East Oakland fate. I am a human being. How could I not feel something. I am from Oakland. How can I not feel something?

The Job of Black Writers

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Me + Baldwin @ a beach in Long Island, Summer ’08.

I Love Baldwin and it seems that every summer I return to his collection of essays published by the Library of America.

What is the job of Black writers? The work?

Baldwin addresses this in the essay “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel.”

I like this quote because it gets at how writing is profoundly rewarding and often a Sisyphean task as well.

The importance of a writer is continuous;?? I think it’s socially debatable and usually socially not terribly, but that’s not the point; his importance, I think, is that he is here to describe things which other people are too busy to describe. It is a function, let’s face it, it is a special function. There is no democracy on this level. It’s a very difficult thing to do, its a very special thing to do and people who do it cannot by that token do many other things. But their importance is, and the importance of writers in this country now this is, that this country is yet to be discovered in any real sense…

Baldwin doesn’t say that this is the job of Black writers, but in reading this it certainly made me think of it in these terms.
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Black people are richer than ever before, financially. More Black men and women are in jail than ever before. We also have a Black president.

As media, and the rest of our lives moves online, I am mindful that most of the popular Black websites are concerned with the lives, affairs and misery of the Black famous rather than using the space to cultivate what Dayna Cunningham calls Black voice.

Black people have continually forced the United States to live up to being the democracy that it claims to be.

What happens when Black people who are media savvy are not primarily concerned with cultivating Black voice during a time of great change?

If everything that is digital is free, and as books become digitized, what will happen to Black writers ability to sustain themselves and how will this impact Black people?