GRACE JONES
Kalamu ya Salaam's information blog
GRACE JONES
Jazz has inspired a great many things, and a great many things have inspired jazz, and more than a few of the music’s masters have found their aspiration by looking — or listening — to the divine. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they subscribe to traditional religion. As befits this naturally eclectic music that grew from an inherently eclectic country before it internationalized, its players tend to have an eclectic conception of the divine. In some of their interpretations, that conception sounds practically all-encompassing. You can experience the full spectrum of these aural visions, from the deeply personal to the fathomlessly cosmic, in this four-part, twelve-hour playlist of spiritual jazz from London online radio station NTS.
“During the tumultuous ’60s, there was a religious revolution to accompany the grand societal, sexual, racial, and cultural shifts already afoot,” writes Pitchfork’s Andy Beta. “Concurrently, the era’s primary African-American art form reflected such upheaval in its music, too: Jazz began to push against all constraints, be it chord changes, predetermined tempos, or melodies, so as to best reflect the pursuit of freedom in all of its forms.”
This culminated in John Coltrane’s masterpiece A Love Supreme, which opened the gates for other jazz players seeking the transcendent, using everything from “the sacred sound of the Southern Baptist church in all its ecstatic shouts and yells” to “enlightenment from Southeastern Asian esoteric practices like transcendental meditation and yoga.”
It goes without saying that you can’t talk about spiritual jazz without talking about John Coltrane. Nor can you ignore the distinctive music and theology of Herman Poole Blount, better known as Sun Ra, composer, bandleader, music therapist, Afrofuturist, and teacher of a course called “The Black Man in the Cosmos.” NTS’ expansive mix offers work from both of them and other familiar artists like Alice Coltrane, Earth, Wind & Fire, Herbie Hancock, Gil Scott-Heron, Ornette Coleman, and many more (including players from as far away from the birthplace of jazz as Japan) who, whether or not you’ve heard of them before, can take you to places you’ve never been before. Start listening with the embedded first part of the playlist above; continue on to parts two, three, and four, and maybe — just maybe — you’ll come out of it wanting to found a church of your own.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
>via: http://www.openculture.com/2016/09/the-history-of-spiritual-jazz.html
I Do Not Protest, I Resist
Like most writers, figuring out how to economically support myself is a major problem. I have worked as an editor, as an arts administrator, and as the co-owner of a public relations, marketing and advertising firm. I have freelanced on projects ranging from $10 record reviews to commissions from publishers. Economy necessity is a major influence on what I write.
I have written commercials whose messages I personally reject like a radio jingle for a Cajun meat-lovers pizza when I don’t eat red meat. Of course, like many others, while I try to steer clear of major contradictions, I have done my share of hack work.
Doing what one must in order to survive is one major way in which the status quo effectively shapes us. As a writer, money making options are surprisingly limited. We all know and face the wolf of survival. There is no news in that story.
But wolves run in packs, and survival is not the only predator. There is also our own desire to succeed—I remember reading about “the fickle bitch of success” and wondering why was success described as a “bitch.” I have my own ideas, but that’s a different discussion.
Success is a very complicated question. We can easily dismiss “selling out” our ideals for a dollar, but what we can’t easily dismiss either in principle or in fact, is that we all want our work to reach the widest possible audience. On the contemporary literary scene, reaching a wide audience almost requires going through major publishers. Participation in the status quo makes strenuous demands of our art to conform to prevailing standards, one of which is that the only overtly political art worthy of the title art is “protest art”.
Capitalism loves “protest art” because protest is the safety valve that dissipates opposition and can even be used to prove how liberal the system is. You know the line: “aren’t you lucky to be living in a system where you have the right to protest?” Without denying the obvious and hard won political freedoms that exist in the USA, my position is that we must move from protest to resistance if we are to be effective in changing the status quo.
The real question is do we simply want “in” or do we want structural change? Most of us start off wanting in. It is natural to desire both acceptance by as well as success within the society into which one is born. But, in the immortal words of P-funk President George Clinton: “mind your wants because someone wants your mind.” Those of us who by circumstance of birth are located on the outside of the status quo (whether based on ethnicity, gender or class), face an existential question which cuts to the heart: how will I define success and is acceptance by the status quo part of what I want in life?
While it is simple enough to answer in the abstract, in truth, i.e. the day to day living that we do, it’s awfully lonely on the outside, psychologically taxing, and ultimately a very difficult position to maintain. Who wants to be marginalized as an artist and known to only a handful of people? Given the choice between having a book published by a mainstream publisher and not having one published by a mainstream publisher, most writers (regardless of identity) would choose to be published, especially when it seems that one is writing whatever it is one wants to write.
Without ever having to censor you formally—after a few years of rejection slips most writers will censor and change themselves—mainstream publishers shape contemporary literature by applying two criteria: 1. is it commercial, or 2. is it artistically important. Either will get you published at least once, although only the former will get you published twice, thrice and so forth.
Unless one is very, very clear about one’s commitment to socially relevant writing, even the most revolutionary writer can become embittered after thirty or forty years of toiling in obscurity. As a forty-seven-year-old (this essay was written in 1994) African American writer, I know that if you do not publish with establishment publishers, be they commercial, academic or small independents, then you will have very little chance of achieving “success” as a writer.
I sat on an NEA panel considering audience develop applications. One grant listed Haki Madhubuti as one of the poets they wanted to present. I was the only person there who knew Madhubuti’s work. I was expected to be conversant with the work of contemporary writers across the board. But how is it that a contemporary African American poet with over three million books in print who is also the head of Third World Press, one of this country’s oldest Black publishing companies, was unknown to my colleagues? The answer is simple: Madhubuti is not published by the status quo. He started off self publishing, came of age in the 60s/70s Black Arts Movement and is one of the most widely read poets among African Americans but all of his books have been published by small, independent Black publishers.
Too often success is measured by acceptance within the status quo rather than by the quality of one’s literary work. That is why we witness authors proclaimed as “major Black writers” when they have only published one or two books (albeit with major publishers) within a five year period. There is no surprise here. My assumption is that as long as the big house stands, “success” will continue to be measured by whether one gets to sleep in big house beds.
This brings me to the subject of protest art. The reason I do not believe in protest art is because I have no desire to bed down with the status quo nor do I have a desire to be legitimized by the status quo. Instead, my struggle is to change the status quo. For me protest art is not an option precisely because in reality protest art is simply a knock on the door of the big house.
There is a long tradition of African American protest art, especially in literature. As a genre, the slave narrative emerged as an integral part of the white led 19th century abolitionist movement. One major purpose of the slave narratives was to address Christian senses of charity and guilt—charity toward the less fortunate and guilt for the “sin” of supporting slavery.
But even at that time there was a major distinction to be made between abolitionist sentiments and charity work on the one hand, and, on the other hand, active participation in the armed struggle against slavery, which included participation in the illegal activity of the underground railroad and support of clandestine armed opposition. This meant fighting with the John Browns of that era or joining the throng of insurgents storming court rooms to “liberate” detained African Americans who had escaped from the south and were then ensnared in the web of the Northern criminal justice system which continued to recognize the “property rights” of Southern slave owners.
While the issues of today are no longer revolve around slavery, the distinction between protest and resistance, between charity and solidarity, remains the heart of the matter at hand. To protest is implicitly to accept the authority of the existing system and to appeal for a change of mind on the part of those in power and those who make up the body politic. To resist on the other hand is to fight against the system of authority while seeking to win over those who make up the body politic. “Winning over” is more than simply asking someone to change their mind, it is also convincing someone to change their way of living.
In the 50s and 60s a debate raged among Black intellectuals about “protest art”. Ironically, one of the chief opponents of protest art was James Baldwin—”ironically” because over the years the bulk of Baldwin’s essays, fiction and drama can be read as a “protest” against bigotry and inhumanity, as a plea to his fellow human beings to change their hearts, minds and lives.
When Baldwin started out he wanted to be “free” and to be accepted as the equal of any other human being. He did not want to be saddled with the “albatross” of racial (or sexual) themes as the defining factor of his work. Yet, as he lived, he changed and began to voluntarily take up these issues. I believe life changed him.
The reality is that we can not continue to live in America with the social deterioration, mean spiritedness, and crass materialism which is polluting our individual and collective lives. We are literally a nation of drug addicts (alcohol and tobacco chief among our drugs of choice, with over-the-counter pain killers and headache remedies running a close third). We are suffering horrendous rates of violence and disease. There is a widening economic gap at a time when many of our major urban centers teeter on the brink of implosion: aging physical infrastructures such as bridges, sewer systems, housing; corrupt political administration; and increasing ethnic conflict. Something has got to give.
My position is simple, we live in a period of transition. We can protest the current conditions and/or we can struggle to envision and create alternatives. We can plead for relief or we can work to inspire and incite our fellow citizens to resist. As artists, we have a choice to make. Indeed, there is always a choice to make.
Protest art always ends up being trendy precisely because the art necessarily struggles to be accepted by the very people the art should oppose. Ultimately, protest artists are, by definition, more interested in relating to the enemy than relating to the potential insurgents. This is why we have protest artists whose cutting edge work is rejected by neighborhood people.
Yes, neighborhood people have tastes which have been shaped by the consumer society. Yes, neighborhood people are parochial and not very deep intellectually. Yes, neighborhood people are unsophisticated when it comes to the arts. But the very purpose of resistance art is to confront and change every negative yes of submission into a powerful and positive no of resistance! Our job as committed artists is to raise consciousness by starting where our neighborhoods are and moving up from there.
Resistance art requires internalizing by an audience of the sufferers in order to be successful. The horrible truth is that every successful social struggle requires immense sacrifices, and the committed artist must also sacrifice—not simply suffer temporary poverty until one is discovered by the status quo, but sacrifice the potential wealth associated with a status quo career to work in solidarity with those who too often are born, live, struggle and die in anonymous poverty.
We think nothing of the millions of people in this society who live and die without ever achieving even one tenth of the material wealth that many of us take for granted. We think nothing of those who are literally maimed and deformed as a result of the military and economic war waged against peoples in far away lands in order to insure profit for American based billionaires. Somehow, while the vast majority of our fellow citizens are never recognized by name, we artists think it ignoble to live and die without being lauded in the New York Times.
But if we remember nothing else, we should remember this. Ultimately, the true “nobility of our humanity” will be judged not by the status quo but by the people of the future—the people who will look back on our age and wonder what in the world could we have had on our minds. Protest is not enough, we must resist.
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—kalamu ya salaam
When Jackie Robinson broke the Major League color barrier seventy years ago, it was a triumphant step forward. It also meant the inevitable end of the proud Negro Leagues, sending hundreds of African American players looking for new opportunities across the border.
It’s mid-September and a championship is on the line. Through seventeen innings, game five of this best-of-seven series has offered high baseball drama for the shoulder-to-shoulder fans in attendance. On the mound, a jelly-armed Leon Day – the future Hall of Fame pitcher who started the game and is still going – just saw his team, an enviably skilled squadron of black players, take a tenuous 1-0 lead in the top of the inning. Leftfielder Robert Lomax “Butch” Davis scored on a hard single and now Day has his mind set on finishing things. He’s already worked out of a bases-loaded crisis in the eighth, then in the fourteenth inning, a sharp throw home from second base, nailing a speeding runner, bailed Day out. After all that, Day doesn’t want to let down his manager Willie Wells, who was ejected from the game in the tenth inning for relentlessly arguing a call at first base. Another future Hall-of-Famer, Wells departed the field with a police escort, and only after the chief umpire finally threatened him with forfeiture.
But in the bottom half of the seventeenth inning, Day notches three more outs to secure the championship. After jolly handshakes and hugs on the field, there’s a party at the team hotel a few hours later.
This all happened in 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers. That landmark moment gave black ballplayers a chance to join the Majors, but it also meant the inevitable decline of the Negro Leagues in the United States. Founded in 1920, the Negro Leagues were an association of teams owned and managed by blacks. Rosters featured black players, as well as Latinos with skin complexions too dark for Major League team owners to tolerate. Once Robinson was ushered into the Majors, those same owners began plucking the Negro Leagues’ best talent for their own teams – though only a select few, top-notch black ballplayers were chosen, so as not to deny work to an excessive number of whites.
“The Negro Leagues were employing a lot of guys,” says Bob Kendrick, President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, “but with the integration of our game, a lot of older players lost their jobs.”
Black fans followed their stars, attending an increasing number of Major League games. The Negro Leagues toiled, and though the last teams held out until the mid-1960s, many baseball historians and former players consider 1950 – when the Negro National League folded – to be the last year of high-quality play in the league’s proud history. However, that last great Negro Leagues season of 1950 did not include slick pitching from All-Star Leon Day or shrewd strategizing out of Willie Wells. Instead, the two celebrated a championship that mid-September evening with the Winnipeg Buffaloes of Manitoba, Canada.
“People don’t really think about what happened after Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, beyond that the race barrier disappeared and the Negro Leagues started to decline,” says Leslie Heaphy, a history professor at Kent State University who has written and edited six books on baseball. “Well, what were all those players doing? They didn’t get a chance to play in the Majors, so many of them – way more than people think – went up to Canada.”
Most Americans know little about the rich baseball history of Canada. The first-ever recorded baseball game played on North American soil may have actually occurred in the small village of Beachville, Ontario in 1838 – one year before Abner Doubleday purportedly formalized baseball’s rules in Cooperstown, New York, and nearly forty years before the first organized indoor ice hockey game took place in Canada. Over the next few decades, amateur and professional baseball leagues popped up around Eastern Canada. (In 1914, a nineteen-year-old Babe Ruth hit his first professional home run while playing a road game in Toronto.)
Meanwhile, the western prairie region of Canada was gradually being settled, spurred on by the Dominion Lands Act, which, similarly to the United States’ Homestead Act, provided land to settlers for a small fee if they agreed to develop and improve upon it. U.S. citizens – both black and white – caught wind of the deal and flocked to the region. Jay-Dell Mah, who co-wrote a book with Barry Swanton titled Black Baseball Players in Canada, says, “Tons of baseball leagues started to form, just about everywhere you went, all through the prairies.”
Canada’s black population was still miniscule, but as Western Canadians became baseball-crazy over the next few decades, African American ballplayers went north during Negro League off-seasons to play in exhibition games and tournaments – a practice called “barnstorming” – usually against all-white local teams. Years before Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers, Canadian team owners would pay extra to Negro League stars like Hall-of-Famer Satchel Paige, who pitched in Canada several times, to join their teams for high-stakes tournaments.
Mah, who remembers no black families in his hometown when he was growing up in Lloydminster, Saskatchewan, says, “Canadians got used to integrated play pretty quickly.”
Back east in 1946, Jackie Robinson played one season for the Dodgers’ minor-league affiliate, the Royals, based in Montreal, leading the league in batting. The Montreal fans’ love for the sporting trailblazer was most apparent after the last game of the year, when the Royals won the league championship. A hoard of gleeful fans chased Robinson through the Montreal streets, from the ballpark to the team hotel. “It was probably the only day in history that a black man ran from a white mob with love instead of lynching on its mind,” Robinson’s friend Sam Maltin wrote the next day in the Pittsburgh Courier.
Four years later, Willie Wells’ Winnipeg Buffaloes reveled in their own championship, the first in the history of the ManDak League. Short for “Manitoba and Dakota,” the ManDak League was founded in 1950, and was initially comprised of five teams: the Buffaloes, the Brandon Greys, Elmwood Giants and Carman Cardinals, all from Manitoba, and the Minot Mallards out of North Dakota.
The Buffaloes’ party, thrown at a deluxe hotel in Downtown Winnipeg, on the dime of their cigar-chomping, white owner Stanley Zeed, saw nine aging Negro League veterans – averaging 35 years old – celebrate with black up-and-comer teammates, taking advantage of the opportunity for baseball seasoning up north. The only other white folks directly involved with the team’s day-to-day operations were two trainers, the secretary and the batboy.
The Buffaloes’ youthful players “Butch” Davis and John Irvin Kennedy were eventually signed by the MLB’s St. Louis Browns organization, finding spots on minor league teams. Kennedy later became the Philadelphia Phillies’ first-ever African American player in 1957. Twenty-four-year-old Buffaloes outfielder Joe Taylor also played four seasons in Major League Baseball, breaking in with the Philadelphia Athletics in 1954.
With home games at Osborne Stadium in Winnipeg, which according to Barry Swanton had vast enough wood-plank stands to seat about five thousand, Zeed saw to it that the Buffaloes made a good living. Like the other Canadian team owners, he had to if he was going to lure the players north. According to Barry Swanton’s The ManDak League: A Haven for Former Negro League Ballplayers, 1950-1957, players earned between $300 and $1,000 a month, comparable to what they would earn in America. “Like in the States, Canadian owners simply wanted to put the best team forward,” Leslie Heaphy says, “and they were very willing to look anywhere.” Dr. Layton Revel of the Center for Negro League Baseball Research says during this era about five hundred African American ballplayers found their way up to Canada, where teams like the Buffaloes were so well-funded that – in contrast to the Negro Leagues at that time – players above the border “didn’t have to worry about their team folding or getting their paychecks on time. They just worried about playing baseball.”
Author Kyle McNary, who wrote a biography on Negro League and ManDak League star Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, says his now departed subject told him the ManDak schedule, with four or five games a week, was far less taxing than that of the Negro Leagues, where players were expected to don their spikes seven or eight times a week. In his late forties and early fifties during his time in Canada, Radcliffe appreciated the lighter workload. “He got extra money as player/manager in Canada, too,” adds McNary.
Ron Teasley, a Detroit native who played for the Dodgers organization in the minor leagues, and the New York Cubans of the Negro Leagues, says he earned some of the best money of his career with the Carman Cardinals in the Great White North. “With the Dodgers I think I was paid $150 a month,” he says. “With the Cubans it went up to maybe $300, but I came up to Canada and it was $600.” That’s nearly $6,000in today’s money. Teasley adds that he also enjoyed free home-cooked meals at a boarding house.
Though not many ballplayers of that era are still living, author Jay-Dell Mah, who served as a batboy for teams in Saskatchewan before publishing the definitive website of Western Canadian baseball history, says Teasley’s memories of acceptance and inclusion were echoed by virtually all his fellow players of color. (During this era, Latino players with both light and dark complexions signed with Canadian teams as well.)
Nat Bates, who played two seasons in Western Canada before embarking on an extensive career in California politics, wrote in an email that Canadian fans were “very friendly and receptive to American athletes.”
Mah says black players, sometimes seven or eight at once, would pile into a sizable car and drive hundreds, even thousands of miles into Canada to play. On other occasions, all-black teams from the U.S. would go north as a group to play. Revel and Mah recount the time that one team, the Eagles of Jacksonville, Florida, boarded a bus to the small Saskatchewan town of Indian Head, where they became the Rockets. In the summer of 1950, they took home a $9,000 purse after winning a tournament there.
“They loved it,” Mah says of the black ballplayers’ trips north. “They felt it was a breath of fresh air because they didn’t have to sneak into the back door through the kitchen to get something to eat at a restaurant.”
“The race issue was so very different,” Heaphy says of America’s northern neighbor. “They didn’t have the history of slavery like the U.S., so they saw [blacks] simply as ballplayers.”
Some of the Canadian locals even treated the players as virtual extended family. In a letter to author Barry Swanton, Lyman Bostock – the first baseman for that 1950 Buffaloes championship team, who was good enough to also go barnstorming on a team organized by Jackie Robinson – recalled the hospitality of a woman they both only remember as “Mrs. Whiteside,” who would have players stay in her Winnipeg home. She’d wash their clothes and bake them pies to eat on road trips. “They couldn’t believe that this white lady did all that,” Swanton says of the black players. “She was a real sweetheart.” Modie Risher, who before he passed told Mah that the one season he played in Lloydminster was “the nicest year I ever had in baseball,” also said he remained lifelong friends with a local family, the McLeans, after meeting them while shopping. As the story goes, Rod McLean, then a little boy, was standing next to his mother, staring at Risher. Suddenly Rod said, “Momma, look at that black man. Doesn’t he have a beautiful tan?” “His mother was a little halfway embarrassed,” Risher continued. “The next thing I knew the father called me and they had me over for dinner that Sunday, and from then on [we were] in contact every year.”
Ron Teasley says the people of Carman, Manitoba “were just wonderful,” although much more reserved than their American counterparts. He recalls one game in which he was manning third base, and after an opponent smacked a base hit with runners on first and second, he corralled a relay throw from the outfield, just as the lead runner crossed third. Teasley quickly turned around and tagged him out, but the trailing runner hadn’t stopped. Teasley flipped around again and nabbed the second runner too. “I thought, Wow, what a play,” Teasley recalls, “and I looked at the crowd and…nothing. There was no applause.”
“Double Duty” Radcliffe told McNary that their reception wasn’t always so welcoming. “Anytime you’re the only black person in town,” McNary says, “you ran into some stuff. Was it like Jackie Robinson [with the Dodgers] with forty thousand people screaming at you? No. But 3,500 screaming at you is still pretty bad.”
Still, McNary says Radcliffe told him that Winnipeg, where he played for the Elmwood Giants, “was better than most places” in the U.S. when it came to how fans treated black players.
As team owners looked to outdo their rivals, the level of play in Canada soared. “You may be a professional team from the United States, but you didn’t just go up to there and beat the crap out of everybody you played,” Revel says. “It was competitive baseball.”
By most accounts, the quality of play in Canada at this time was roughly equal to the high levels of America’s minor leagues. But after the 1957 season the ManDak league folded, and soon so did the majority of Canada’s modest baseball organizations. Mah thinks this occurred because of a loss of interest as, like in the U.S., more people acquired cars, TVs and radios, offering Canadians more options for entertainment.
Despite all the attention Jackie Robinson drew, the Major Leagues in America lagged far behind the Canadian leagues when it came to integration. It was 1959 before each Major League Baseball team boasted even one black player. That year, Elijah Jerry “Pumpsie” Greene suited up for the Boston Red Sox.
Back in 1951, the season after Leon Day and Willie Wells each raised a glass in victory at a Winnipeg hotel, a seventeen-year-old “Pumpsie” Greene wore the uniform of the Medicine Hat Mohawks in the Western Canada League.
“People don’t realize just how extensive the ball-playing by African Americans up in Canada was,” Leslie Heaphy says, “and how important it was for them to have a place to go.”
>via: http://narrative.ly/the-secret-history-of-black-ballplayers-in-canadas-great-white-north/
Claudia Rankine was born in 1963, in Jamaica, and immigrated to the United States as a child. She attended Williams College and received an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University. Since early in her career, she has crossed the lines of genre, creating books as unified projects rather than loose collections, peeling back the surface of the moment to get at the complexities underneath. She is the author of five books—Nothing in Nature Is Private (1995), The End of the Alphabet (1998), Plot (2001), Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), and Citizen (2014)—and has collaborated on a series of videos with her husband, the filmmaker John Lucas, some of which infiltrate her writing in the form of transcriptions and images.
I met Rankine over three Fridays in July at her home in Claremont, California. It was a tumultuous period: our first conversation took place the week of the police shootings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and in the suburbs of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the ambush killing of five police officers during a rally in Dallas, Texas; the third, the afternoon after Donald Trump’s speech accepting the Republican nomination for president. These public topics wove through our discussions, explicitly and implicitly, as they often do in Rankine’s work. Long a professor at Pomona College, Rankine was preparing to move across the country for a new job, at Yale University; in her dining room, the sideboard was covered with piles of books on race and whiteness, for a course she was developing.
Rankine has won numerous prizes, including a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Citizen, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Just a few months after we spoke, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, which she plans to use to found the Racial Imaginary Institute. (The name comes from a book of essays she coedited last year.) In conversation, she is thoughtful and focused, speaking softly, with an edge of urgency. “How do you get the work to hold the resonance of its history?” she wonders. It’s a question that occupies the heart of all her books. That the history to which she refers is both personal and collective is, of course, the point.
—David L. Ulin
INTERVIEWER
You’ve spent the past two years on an extended speaking tour for Citizen. The book came out in 2014, during the protests in Ferguson. Recently, we’ve seen police shootings of African American men in Baton Rouge and suburban Saint Paul and five police officers killed during a rally in Dallas. What’s your sense of where we are?
RANKINE
If we go back to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, there was a feeling, at least for white people, that suddenly they were seeing into black lives and how these lives played out in encounters with the police and the justice system. People were shocked. Then we saw the lack of indictment. In a number of other deaths, we saw that videotaping doesn’t affect the course of justice, which we knew from the beating of Rodney King. Then we saw what happened in Baton Rouge, we saw what happened in Minnesota. Now you get to Dallas, and we have created somebody like a Timothy McVeigh, a veteran who is clearly triggered by what he’s been seeing in the news. In McVeigh’s case, it was Waco, Texas, and with Micah Johnson, it was the killings of African Americans, the videos of these deaths. He’s not interested in Black Lives Matter protests. He’s interested in retaliation.
INTERVIEWER
Citizen addresses these issues directly. It is literature as an act of public engagement. And yet, poetry—all writing—begins as a private act between the writer and her material. What is the relationship, for you, between these two modes?
RANKINE
The relationship between public engagement and private thought are inseparable for me. I worked on Citizen on and off for almost ten years. I wrote the first piece in response to Hurricane Katrina. I was profoundly moved by the events in New Orleans as they unfolded. John and I taped the CNN coverage of the storm without any real sense of what we intended to do with the material. I didn’t think, obviously, that I was working on Citizen.
But for me, there is no push and pull. There’s no private world that doesn’t include the dynamics of my political and social world. When I am working privately, my process includes a sense of what is happening in the world. Today, for example, I feel incredibly drained. And probably you do, too.
INTERVIEWER
You make work in private, but once it goes public, readers make it their own. They define the work—and, by extension, you—in terms of who they are, what they want or believe.
RANKINE
In the case of Citizen, I willingly moved toward that engagement. It felt like the first time I could actively be involved in a public discussion about race, in a discussion that, to me, is essential to our well-being as a country. It wasn’t simply about publicizing the book, it was about having a conversation. It was also an opportunity for me to learn what others really thought and felt. The responses were various. One man said he was moved by a reading I gave and wanted to do something to help me. I said I personally had a privileged life, which I do, and that I didn’t need his help. What I needed was for him—this was a white gentleman—to understand the urgency of the situation for him and to help himself in an America that was so racially divided. It wasn’t about him coming from his own position of privilege—of white privilege—to take black people on as a burden, but rather to understand that we are all part of the same broken structures. He said, I can take what you’re saying, but you’re going to shut down everybody else in this audience. And all of a sudden I was like, What? I thought you wanted to help me! To remove him from the role of “white savior” was to attack him in his own imagination. A white woman, a professor, told me that what I was calling racism was really bias against overweight black women. You might think they were just a defensive man and a crazy professor, but again and again I was coming up against what was being framed as understanding and realizing that it was not that.
INTERVIEWER
And yet, both of those people would likely describe themselves as well-intentioned, even allies of yours.
RANKINE
They came and they engaged. I have a lot more patience and curiosity than I used to for following those arguments, for seeing where they will go. Often somebody will be interrupted by another member of the audience, who will jump in to shut that person down. This either comes out of an intent to protect me or else they’re just impatient with a line of thinking they don’t agree with. I don’t know. But one of the things I do know is that you’re not going to change anybody’s mind by shutting them down.
INTERVIEWER
You talked about some of this in your keynote speech at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, especially the expectation that poetry should be relatable to a white audience. That’s a fallacy, and it starts with the audience, not with the poets or the poetry. It renders our relationship with language defensive—“I’m putting up a shield of language as a way of protecting you from all the things I don’t want to engage with.”
RANKINE
That’s what makes writing challenging and interesting. How do you get the work to arrive at readers in a way that allows them to stay with it and not immediately dismiss it? It’s something I think about, because I know I’m also writing for people who don’t always hold my positions. It’s not that I think white people are my only audience. It’s that I think of America as my audience, and inside that space are white people as well as people of color. Some white people still believe that white privilege and white mobility are the universal position. If a writer has a different experience of the world, the work is no longer seen as transcendent or universal. So as I’m moving around in a piece, I am hearing all those voices in opposition.
One of the things I do know is that you’re not going to change anybody’s mind by shutting them down.
INTERVIEWER
The voices of the audience?
RANKINE
Voices I have encountered, yes. For me, working on a piece is like playing chess. You’re moving the language around to say to somebody, Yes, I know you’re possibly thinking this, I know this is a possible move for you. I’m going to include it here so you don’t think that I haven’t been listening. An example would be the Serena Williams essay in Citizen. That essay was dependent on the fact that a reader could go to YouTube and look up the moments I referred to in her life. I didn’t want anyone who disagreed with my take on events or remembered them differently not to have a chance to access the moments for themselves. It happened, in an interview in Boston, that a gentleman said to me, I am a real tennis fan and I don’t remember any of these things happening. The actual footage was easily obtainable by searching YouTube. I could have talked about the stress of racism on a body differently, but I needed examples that were available to the reader as raw data. I didn’t want anyone to take my word for anything.
INTERVIEWER
“If you don’t believe me, look it up.”
RANKINE
That’s not a bad way to work, or to be in the work. I spend a lot of time looking things up, doing research. I am always curious what I missed because I was looking right when I should have been looking left. I think it’s important for Citizen that many of the moments in it are researchable. Without that, its credibility as a mirroring text would be lost. It took longer to collect incidents of microaggressions from friends and colleagues than it would have to simply use my own experiences, but it was essential to me that it be a collective and researchable document.
INTERVIEWER
You call the Williams piece an essay. How did it develop?
RANKINE
In Citizen, there are episodic pieces structured around microaggressions, which are set in conversation with more scandalous and murderous accounts, such as the pieces addressing Hurricane Katrina, Trayvon Martin, or stop-and-frisk in New York. But my challenge as a writer in the Williams essay was, How do you show the effect of all this injustice on a human body? On an actual somebody? And how is that somebody read by the public? I didn’t want it to be a traditional lyric because I wasn’t trying to create an internalized consciousness for Serena Williams. I was talking about an invisible accumulation of stress in the body, so I had to show how it worked over time. I needed a form that would allow me to do that, and so I ended up with the essay.
That said, it’s a lyric essay, not an essay essay, because it was written to fit into Citizen.
INTERVIEWER
A lyric essay in the sense that it can abandon the strict logic of argument for something more intuitive or emotional?
RANKINE
Yes, and it utilizes many of the techniques of poetry—repetition, metaphor, elision, for example. I love finding the lyric in nontraditional spaces. Often when I teach my poetry workshop, I will take essays or passages from fiction or a scene from a film and list them among the poems to study. The “Time Passes” section in the middle of To the Lighthouse is an example of a lyric impulse. Others might be a passage from James Baldwin or Homi Bhabha or an image by Glenn Ligon or a song by Coltrane.
INTERVIEWER
Let’s talk about how this works in Citizen. On the one hand, we’ve got Serena in a lyric essay. Then there are the passages at the beginning, those short pieces written in the second person—the girl who doesn’t want to sit next to the woman on the plane because she’s African American, the coworker who mistakes her for someone else and then refers to it as “our mistake.” Those, too, are lyric moments. Traditionally, we associate the lyric with autobiography, but here the second person opens up the writing so that it becomes a collective experience.
RANKINE
When I first sit down to write, these movements are all intuitive. Just this morning, for example, I was listening to the recording of the shooting of Philando Castile in Minnesota, and the little girl, the four-year-old in the backseat of the car, says, “It’s okay, Mommy, I’m right here with you.” I wrote it down. That will be the beginning of something. Every time I watch that video, my eyes tear up, my throat closes. I hear that little girl, and I am transported to a place beyond my intellect. I’m no longer thinking about the policemen—I’m experiencing that child and her utterance. When a moment enters me that profoundly, I know I can wait to write because I’ll forever be in dialogue with the moment. That part of the process I don’t interfere with. I will be surprised and ready to begin when her voice makes its way into a piece.
INTERVIEWER
And you might sit on that line for . . .
RANKINE
Months. Or a week. Or a day more. Or years. Once it’s on the page, I feel like that’s when the writer shows up. Right now her voice just accompanies me. In terms of Citizen, the initial drafts were in the first person. But I didn’t think it was effective, nor did I think it was structurally honest, because many of the accounts were not actually my experiences. Even though I employed the first person in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely to weave together disparate situations, in this book I wanted the opposite. I wanted the disparate moments in Citizen to open out to everyone rather than narrowing inside a single point of view. Only when I employed the second person did the text become a field activated by the reader, whoever that reader is. That’s what you want—for the text to be as alive and mutable as possible.
INTERVIEWER
Much of Citizen is about the black body. This is part of what Serena represents, and something similar plays out across the other narratives. There’s the man, for instance, who knows he is going to be pulled over, so he opens his briefcase on the passenger seat. That anxiety builds up in the body.
RANKINE
The key is that the anxiety, the stress, isn’t a narrative. It’s what interrupts the narrative, what stalls mobility. It’s an invisible sensation that requires adjustment by the body, beyond the space of words. As a poet, I want to use language to enter that space of feeling. I’m less interested in stories. That’s one reason I write poetry. Often when people are speaking with me, I feel what they are saying is the journey to how they are feeling. I mean, it’s not that I’m not interested in what they’re saying, but I feel like what they’re saying is a performance. In many conversations I realize that the thing that’s being said is really not the point at all, there’s this subterranean exchange of contexts, emotions, and unspoken signals. I think a lot about how white dominance is part of this invisible and unmarked dynamic.
INTERVIEWER
Sometimes, what is being said is at a perpendicular angle to what is really going on.
RANKINE
Exactly. The question is, How do you get to an authentic emotional place? I’m often listening not for what is being told to me but for what resides behind the narrative. What is the feeling for the thing that’s being told to me? One of the reasons I work in book-length projects, instead of individual poems, is because I don’t trust the authenticity of any given moment by itself.
INTERVIEWER
The individual poem falls prey to the same narrative contrivance—
RANKINE
Of the novel, yes. Its trajectory is on an arc of time. Instead, I feel that what happens formally in Citizen, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, and Plot is an obsessive circling of the subject. Many positions are inhabited relative to a line of inquiry. It’s like one of those mirrored rooms where the spectator sees the same thing repeated in different variations and from different angles.
INTERVIEWER
So in Citizen, those second-person vignettes form a series of slightly different but similar interactions. And part of the effect is that we feel it in the body.
RANKINE
Didn’t feel it the first time? Here it is again. We don’t get there by saying it once. It’s not about telling the story, it’s about creating the feeling of knowing the story through the accumulation of the recurring moment.
INTERVIEWER
Immersion as opposed to narrative.
RANKINE
That’s why, in this case, narrative is irrelevant in a certain sense. It could be these ten stories or it could be ten other stories. I tried to pick situations and moments that many people share, as opposed to some idiosyncratic occurrence that might have happened only to me. For example, many black people have been in a situation where they’ve been called by the name of the other black person—at the office, at the party, in the room. The stories are many and the emotion is one.
INTERVIEWER
The one that sticks with me is when the second-person narrator is jokingly called a “nappy-headed ho” by a friend, because it’s a failed attempt at intimacy. The speaker is reaching for connection in some way.
RANKINE
When I heard that story, I found it fascinating. It’s a matter of perception, of course, but as my friend was speaking, I thought that person wished to belittle her because they felt ignored. It could be because she was late, simply that. Some people go ballistic about being kept waiting. I also thought the “nappy-headed” utterance could be an attempt to say, I was anxious to see you. Why were you not anxious to see me? But because whiteness sees itself in a place of dominance, suddenly the racial dynamic comes into play. One benefit of white privilege is that whiteness has an arsenal of racialized insults at the ready. Like, I was anxious to see you and I’m white so I will put you in your black place. I didn’t say any of this when my friend was telling me the story, but it struck me that maybe this woman liked her. You know, liked her. When I listen to people, I’m constantly thinking, Why do you remember this moment over everything else? And what exactly was the moment trying to say to you? As people of color, we can hear, we can feel, when the language is weaponized against us.
As people of color, we can hear, we can feel, when the language is weaponized against us.
INTERVIEWER
These small moments, they stick with you.
RANKINE
They’re what stabilize and destabilize us. As a writer, I’m trying to draw those small moments into the larger moments. For the Hurricane Katrina piece, I was interested in what got said around the abandonment of all those people. We know the storms came, that people were abandoned, some of them drowned, they were left in the stadium without food or water. But when you have somebody like Barbara Bush touring a Houston relocation site for Katrina victims and saying, “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them,” those are the moments I find gut-wrenching. You have a woman saying, “You know, I didn’t want to turn on the lights, everything was so black, I didn’t want to shine a light on that.” I mean, somebody actually said that. Or Wolf Blitzer said, “These people . . . are so poor and they are so black.” He actually said that. I can’t forget this. I made a structure to hold the utterance because I couldn’t forget. In these moments, black people are not seen as people. The same way you do not shoot somebody with a four-year-old child in the backseat unless you don’t see people.
Darren Wilson—the officer who shot Michael Brown—volunteered that when he saw Brown what he saw was a “demon.” He also said, “When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.” I don’t think he could have been any plainer in expressing what was in his imagination. Projections of his imagination were being laid upon the body of this eighteen-year-old. But nobody investigates that. Nobody says, Hey, let’s take Michael Brown out of this situation. Nobody asks, Why are you a policeman, if stereotypes, bias, and projections are informing you when you go into situations with people of color? Not long ago I was at the Ohio Reformatory for Women. Eighty percent of the inmates were white. Where and when do we see that reality represented? These women do not exist. Whiteness cannot support evidence against its own privilege, so these women are invisible.
INTERVIEWER
How much of your thinking about these questions goes back to the theorist Judith Butler? You’ve long been interested in her work.
RANKINE
Years ago, I went to hear Butler give a lecture. I’d always read her work, and I was very excited to see her speak in person. Her talk reiterated much of what I had read in her books, but then someone in the audience asked, Why are words so hurtful? The entire audience was ripped into attention. Everybody wanted to hear that answer. The response was something like, Because we are addressable. And the way we demonstrate our addressability is by being open to the person in front of us. So we arrive, we are available to them, we expose ourselves, and we give them the space to address us. And in that moment of vulnerability and exposure, we are not defended against whatever comes.
This has informed so much of my thinking, in life and in writing. I’m working on a theatrical staging of Citizen right now and I’ve been exploring that vulnerability of address whenever the characters interact.
INTERVIEWER
So although I’ve never met Serena Williams, I have an opinion about her, she is addressable to me.
RANKINE
There’s an illusion—and I think it is an illusion—that we have access to her body, that we are free to say what we want about her, as if it will never reach her, or other black women. All the racism around black women’s bodies has landed in the person of Serena Williams, even though, on a certain level, it has nothing to do with her.
INTERVIEWER
Does that ever give you pause? You had not met her when you wrote Citizen.
RANKINE
I had not met her when I wrote Citizen. But in a certain way, I could say I didn’t write about Serena Williams. What I wrote about was the public’s response to Serena Williams, the things that have been said about Serena Williams, and the way she has been treated unfairly inside the sport of tennis. In that sense, I don’t think I’ve ever actually written about her.
INTERVIEWER
How addressable are you?
RANKINE
I was in London doing a taped program for the BBC. During the Q and A, there was a white gentleman, apparently quite well-known across the water, who raised his hand and said to me, I really liked your book, but I liked you better in your book than I like you here. It wasn’t a question. I said to him, Well, I think the real question is, What did you want me to perform for you? What performance were you expecting that you’re not receiving right now? He didn’t answer. I would have liked for him to answer. You can never quite access the image in people’s minds that you are being compared with. People often say to me, I expected you to be angry. Why aren’t you angry? Or they’ve read the book and feel the book isn’t angry, but it says what they feel, so they’re curious how one can say exactly what they feel without saying it in a way that’s angry. This is coming from African Americans as well as white readers. I think people forget that white people are just people, and that we’re all together inside a system that scripts and constructs not just behavior but the imagination.
INTERVIEWER
The imagination first, don’t you think? The imagination dictates the behavior.
RANKINE
Right. Ours is a structural and institutional problem. It’s complicated because of the vast amount of privilege white people are allotted inside the system, but nonetheless we are a society, and if people are walking around feeling fearful based on the imagination, an imagination put in place by a white-supremacist understanding of the world, that’s a problem for everyone.
INTERVIEWER
The End of the Alphabet deals with many of these issues. This is a book about someone going through or having gone through trauma, deep pain, or dislocation. We never know exactly what the dislocation is, but the source isn’t important, what’s important is the experience. It highlights the tension between narrative and moment as overtly as any of your books.
RANKINE
When I set out to write that book, I specifically wanted to address the question, How do you write about the feeling of devastation that we all share? You meet people and you know they’ve had some kind of traumatic loss, something destructive in their lives. You intuit that without knowing their story. You don’t have to know anything about them, you just know. I thought, Why can’t I write a book that is less concerned with narrative but centralizes this feeling beyond it? The narrative could have been twenty years ago, it could have been the Holocaust, it could have been anything, but the feeling of past trauma is communicated by whoever is standing in front of you—that’s what stays real.
INTERVIEWER
It’s like muscle memory.
RANKINE
It’s like a muscle memory that is not private. That’s the other thing that’s interesting to me—it’s not private, it’s shared.
INTERVIEWER
How do you mean?
RANKINE
In the sense that I can feel it. I know that sounds kind of out-there, but I feel, when I meet somebody and they have had a kind of trauma—I don’t have words for it, but I feel like I know that person in the room. When you arrive at the moment where they tell you what they’ve experienced, it’s just the words being put to the feeling. But you already knew—you knew it by their eyes, you knew it by something. I wanted to write a book that was beyond what usually gets communicated in language.
INTERVIEWER
So the title refers to these limitations of language?
RANKINE
Yes. Beyond the narrative, beyond the storytelling, beyond the anecdotes is another world of feeling so buried and dark and crippling that it needs its own genre. Poetry! We have Robert Lowell’s attempt to do that in “For the Union Dead,” but that is what you might call a psychoanalytic reading. Then you have somebody like César Vallejo, who will write a poem that says, I feel miserable today as César Vallejo, and nothing can account for the misery of César Vallejo. I am paraphrasing. It’s that unmarked and unnameable place I was interested in entering in The End of the Alphabet. The book doesn’t have an arc, it just is. How many ways can you articulate the sense of nothing?
INTERVIEWER
As we were saying earlier, your work often moves between voices and tenses—first person, third person, present, past—as if to blur the specifics of the self.
RANKINE
I think this is because from the beginning, even in Nothing in Nature Is Private, as a black person in the United States, I was always myself and a black person in the United States, you know? I was simultaneously myself personally and also myself historically—
INTERVIEWER
Your interior self.
RANKINE
My interior self, but also myself as Claudia, who moved from Jamaica, grew up with my parents, the little dramas in my life. And then, I was also the Claudia who understood that part of the way in which she lives in this country is determined by the color of her skin. What is possible for me, what is open to me, what gets said to me, what doors close when I’m approaching—all of that.
INTERVIEWER
Does the fact that you were born in Jamaica, that you came to the United States as an immigrant, complicate those things?
RANKINE
It brings in other layers to consider. When you come to this country as an immigrant with your parents—you know, that’s also crucial, because you’re seeing the world through their lens initially—it affects everything. I remember my mother telling me, You can’t trust these white people, I don’t care if so-and-so invited you over to their house, you’re not going. She had spent her entire life in Jamaica. This was her first time out of the country, and she was very suspicious of the motives of white people. We lived on Harper Avenue in the Bronx. I went to Cardinal Spellman High School, which at the time required uniforms. When I started, they had scoop-neck frocks, but there were these older, cooler uniforms that had bands that connected to the skirt. There was a family at the end of the block whose daughter had gone there, so her mother said to my mother, Your daughter is going to Spellman, my daughter graduated and I have some uniforms. Would you like them? I did want them, because they were the old ones, but my mother said, No, thanks. Later, I asked, Why didn’t you take them? And she said, Why didn’t she come to my house and knock on the door and give them to me? Why is she taking them out of the back of her car and acting like we don’t live two doors down? For her, that was a form of insult—polite people would have said hello and had a conversation before handing over the uniforms. I always regretted not getting those uniforms. They seemed so much chicer.
INTERVIEWER
Your parents came to New York for economic opportunity?
RANKINE
Yes. They worked in hospitals. He was an orderly and she was a nurse’s aide initially. It’s a cliché, but he worked two jobs, so he was doing nine a.m. to five p.m. and then, I think, ten p.m. to six a.m. or some such. I don’t know how, but he ended up buying buildings in the Bronx and becoming a landlord. By the time I started high school, we owned our own home at the very northern end of the Bronx. When he bought the house, it was like A Raisin in the Sun. Within two years, it went from a completely white neighborhood to a completely black neighborhood. You could see it happen—every day I came home from school, there would be another white family moving out. I don’t think that, as a child, I knew the language around white flight, but certainly I knew the transition was happening. I could see it.
INTERVIEWER
How much do you think this contributed to your sensibility, your way of thinking about the world?
RANKINE
I’ve always been interested in justice, but this might have had something to do with the dynamic inside our household, because my father—he was a piece of work. I think my sense of injustice started then.
INTERVIEWER
He’s no longer living?
RANKINE
No, he passed away. But he was frustrated. Who wouldn’t be if you were working two jobs, if you were a black man in the United States? It was the 1970s, and, as I think is often the case, a lot of his stress got taken out once he got home.
INTERVIEWER
Is this when you began to think as a writer?
RANKINE
In the sense of being interested in the dynamics of charged situations, of trying to figure out how language—because in his case it really was language, if you stayed silent you were usually okay—became a trigger. I think I never lost that. But it is also tied to having come here as an immigrant and a young child and being put in a situation where you have to pay attention—vigilance, that’s how I would describe it. You have to have a sense of vigilance even in your private spaces. I didn’t start writing until I got to college, but from the beginning I was trying to see how I could write in ways that were . . . not greater than me, but that were not autobiographical, let’s put it that way. You have to remember that I was in graduate school during the Language poetry movement, but that I also came out of an orientation that was based on autobiography, so these two modes started to come into conversation during that period.
INTERVIEWER
You were at Williams as an undergraduate and Columbia as a graduate student.
RANKINE
Yes. I studied as an undergraduate with the phenomenal Louise Glück. Louise could probably trace her roots as a poet back to Lowell and Berryman. Much of what I was reading in college was part of that tradition, but Louise was also trying to push the mythological up against the autobiographical. She complicated the confessional impulse. She was not interested in excess. That was useful for me. In graduate school, I read Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and Gertrude Stein. I thought about the limits of autobiography. As a black person, it’s difficult not to understand that you are part of a larger political and social dynamic, but those writers made me pay closer attention to the materiality of the language itself. For white people, part of their privilege is that their positionality is never under threat, so the language appears to have more mobility, if you don’t care about its investments.
My question was, How do you keep the intimacy of the language that is afforded the first person in the meditative, introspective lyric, and yet make it democratic and aware of its political investments? That’s why, in The End of the Alphabet, I put aside narrative, and it’s one of the reasons I wrote the book as a book rather than as individual poems. I was no longer interested in writing poems that built toward a story or that accounted for time in any linear way. I was seeing how far I could get simply with the ordering of words.
INTERVIEWER
What about the expectation of confession? You write, in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, “Because Oprah has trained Americans to say anything anywhere . . . no longer does my editor see confession as intimate and full of silences.”
RANKINE
The autobiographical impulse grew out of a push against the modernist universalizing of the “I”—no one wanted to be Auden or Eliot anymore. Lowell, James Wright, Amiri Baraka, and Adrienne Rich—they all rejected their early work for a more authentic and accountable use of the first person. For Lowell, just saying “I” was enough. For Baraka, saying “I” as a black man meant even more. These poets were saying, I don’t want to be the universal “I.” I want to stand in the truth of my particular positioning. The same is true of Adrienne Rich. One of the things for me about reading Rich as a college student was that she was overtly and clearly addressing the female body, female identity, and female possibility, and I remember thinking, This is very close to what I would say about these things—but not exactly. And that was it. The next semester I signed up for writing classes.
INTERVIEWER
So your decision to write began with a connection to Rich, but also a disconnection, or distinction?
RANKINE
Right. In order to have it say what I needed, I was going to have to do it myself. Now it seems full of hubris, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was pragmatic. You know, black women are nothing if not pragmatic, because their whole existence in this country has been about negotiating a life without the fantasy of external support. It was Malcolm X who said, “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.” If anyone had taught Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, or Nikki Giovanni in my college literature classes, I might have begun in a different place.
In any case, it felt as if Rich had opened up a line of inquiry I needed for my own development as a person, beginning with feminism. She and James Baldwin together—because I was reading Baldwin at the time—began to give me language to speak.
INTERVIEWER
So Baldwin had a similar impact, as an essayist?
RANKINE
I think so, because inside the African American writing community, the same kind of drama was going on. You had Du Bois’s notion of what should be presented to the white world and how you should do that, and on the other hand, you had people like Langston Hughes who were not writing for any one gaze, who could write across class lines.
INTERVIEWER
And could appropriate so-called low forms, such as the blues.
RANKINE
Exactly. Baldwin comes out of that tradition as well. We see the same thing with Jean Toomer. He’s somebody who refused to perform blackness and because of that couldn’t write after Cane, which is a masterpiece. The implications of who was going to read his work, and who he’d have to be for that audience, crippled his production. I think it’s something all those writers had to think about.
INTERVIEWER
This brings to mind Rich’s notion that silence is poison.
RANKINE
That is probably the most important aspect of Rich’s work for me, the idea of silence as a poison. I think that’s where I started with Citizen, with the sense that you should speak out because if you don’t, it’s going to harm you.
INTERVIEWER
And yet, we now live in a culture that has embraced confession uncritically, for its own sake—as a first-person gloss on everything.
RANKINE
A first-person accounting. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat—all of it is about, I am here, I’m eating this, I’m standing in front of this, I’m seeing this, I’m with this person. It’s all right if that’s how someone finds their way to a public voice and a sense of community. The question for me is how to retain the intimacy of autobiography and still speak to the generalities of existence. In my books, there isn’t one answer. For Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, the use of the first person was very necessary.
INTERVIEWER
Although it’s a mistake to assume that this first-person narrator is you.
RANKINE
Some people had trouble with that idea, that the first person could be a structural position unconnected to any particular self.
INTERVIEWER
And then they felt it as a kind of—
RANKINE
Betrayal.
INTERVIEWER
Because you had deceived them?
RANKINE
In their opinion. The text does say that the “I” is a construct. At no point does it say, This is nonfiction. In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, because it contains so many disparate narratives and travels across such a range, I needed an engine that pulled everything together while still allowing things to shift like a gear shift, and that was how the first person was intended to function.
INTERVIEWER
Like Citizen, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely takes on a wide array of narratives. There’s the political narrative, there are several overlapping personal narratives, there’s the question of loneliness, there’s an extended meditation on death.
RANKINE
There were stories told to me by friends that I wanted to include. I had a friend whose sister had lost her children. There were stories of people dying that I heard twice removed. I was in their company but as the partner or friend of somebody else who was visiting. The first person let me maneuver seamlessly through these different lives.
INTERVIEWER
Throughout the book, you appropriate images or bits of information, such as a list of pharmaceutical companies or the Google search bar. That device seems to have its roots in Plot, where you use language to describe what might otherwise be images—the paintings the protagonist makes, for one.
RANKINE
I’ve always been very interested in the visual. The visual is capable of doing things text can’t do. It never occurred to me in Plot to use actual images, although as I was working, I wondered, What does she do, this character I’ve created? And I thought, She’s a painter! So I decided I could put the space for her work in the book. I’m not sure if that idea made it to the final version of the text. Looking back, it does feel like with each book I wrote, I was taking baby steps toward an inevitable relationship on the page with the visual, but each time it felt risky. By that, I mean unconventional.
INTERVIEWER
What caused the shift, the decision to integrate actual images—and not only images but also screen grabs, bits of data—into the body of the text?
RANKINE
You begin to see things as possible by reading other peoples’ work. A big influence on me was Charles Bernstein. I remember reading works of his that were just lists, and I had this fantasy that if I had a house with a foyer, where you walked in and had to move through it to get to the main rooms, I would have a recording of Bernstein reading his poem “In Particular” playing on a loop. I carried that desire, that image, around in my head for a long time, and I’m sure it allowed for the use of images, because as Bernstein was listing these people—“An Indian fellow gliding on three-wheeled bike / An Armenian rowing to Amenia / An Irish lad with scythe” and so on—I was seeing them.
INTERVIEWER
Your books, taken together, trace their own sort of movement. In Nothing in Nature Is Private, you’re feeling out the territory, with a variety of poetic forms and subjects. Despair or dislocation becomes a theme in The End of the Alphabet, although we don’t know exactly what the crisis point is. In Plot, the crisis sharpens, revolving around life and birth—the narrative center is a woman reluctant to give birth to a child who is already growing inside her. Then, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely pushes that internal despair to some kind of political engagement, and Citizen traces the desolation of public life.
RANKINE
That’s accurate, I think, although this shouldn’t suggest I knew what I was doing. I think that Plot is the most autobiographical because it’s a book I wrote before I was pregnant, almost as a way to think about what it means to be an artist and to be a mother. We see that in To the Lighthouse, and I was also interested in Bergman’s films, which sometimes show a reluctance toward parenting on the part of the male characters, based on a reluctance to replicate their own childhoods. So all those things were floating around.
INTERVIEWER
Perhaps the most surprising turn in Plot comes at the end, which is written from the point of view of the child. It becomes a reconciliation, or conciliation in any case. “One has to be born,” the child says. You shift persons here, not just grammatically—the actual protagonist becomes someone else.
RANKINE
My favorite part of Plot is all the definitions of plot, the idea that the thing that buries you is also the narrative of your life. It is important that the story include the product of the story. So let’s say I was talking about my mother and myself, which I wasn’t or maybe I was, who knows, but let’s say I was, then the child’s voice functions as a recuperative gesture to the struggle that preceded it, which is not to say the child won’t have the same struggle—
INTERVIEWER
Or that the mother will be redeemed.
RANKINE
Right, just that the life is not the thing to be refused.
INTERVIEWER
All of that is only seen in retrospect, anyway, at which point the details appear inevitable. We read it in terms of cause and effect, whereas we all know this is not the condition of being alive.
RANKINE
Yes. There have been devastating moments, and there will be more devastating moments, but there will also be a life. I gave a reading in New York not long ago and somebody, a young black man, said, I read Citizen and I want to know why there aren’t any hopeful moments in the book. And I said, The book is full of people living their lives, and even if it focuses on the interruptions to those lives, around the interruptions there are still lives. That, I think, is important to remember. So that’s why bringing in the voice of the child represents a restorative moment. That was the intent of the afterword.
There have been devastating moments, and there will be more devastating moments, but there will also be a life.
INTERVIEWER
The End of the Alphabet is your densest book. Then there’s a real shift toward transparency between Plot and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. How conscious were you of that?
RANKINE
One of the things I wanted in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely was for the language to be transparent. I didn’t want people to have to stop to think, I don’t know what she means by that. I wanted it to feel simple, accessible, even conversational. As a writer, this was the challenge—How do you get the ideas of, say, Butler or Lauren Berlant or Derrida or all the reading you’ve done, all the thinking you’ve done, inside seven sentences that say, I saw this thing and it made me sad? And how do you do it in a way that the research material is not effaced, that trace elements are still present? That seems always to be the challenge—to create transparency and access without losing complexity.
INTERVIEWER
What about the shift, or expansion, of poetic form to include, or even become, prose?
RANKINE
When I was working on Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, I started working in paragraphs. I was still utilizing repetition, metaphor, all of the poetic techniques and devices available to me. They were just applied to the sentence, not the line, the paragraph, not the stanza. But when I handed the book in, my then publisher said, This is not a poetry book. And it wasn’t just them. I remember a male poet who came to my house—I was living at that time on 116th Street—we went for a walk in Riverside Park and he said to me, As your friend, I want you to know that Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is garbage. It’s not good. I’m telling you this as your friend.
INTERVIEWER
This was based purely on the form?
RANKINE
The form. It’s not poetry, I don’t know what this is, but it’s not very good. I had to get a new publisher. This turned out to be a good thing because it forced me to say, You know, you could be right, but if it’s going down, I’m going with it because it’s what I mean. In those moments you just say, Whatever. Thank you very much for reading. That is what I’ve got. And not only is it what I’ve got, it’s what I mean.
I also got a letter from an editor who had been a fan of Plot and asked to see new work. I sent the new work and he replied, I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I can’t publish this. Again, I thought, Okay then—I didn’t send it to you, you asked for it. So that’s how Don’t Let Me Be Lonely began its public life. After Graywolf took it, many of those people who criticized it came around. The editor who had rejected the pieces for his journal sent me a nice letter saying something to the effect of, I was cleaning out my office before classes started, and I came across your poems. I read them again, and boy was I wrong. Which was very kind of him to have done.
INTERVIEWER
The moment of thinking, This is what I’ve got, and not only that, but this is what I want, this is what I mean—it seems essential, transformative.
RANKINE
People often ask the question, When do you know that you’re finished? And I think that’s when I know, when I’ve said what I mean. It might have taken me ten years or five years or two weeks, but that’s what I mean. For now.
One of my favorite sounds in the world is the voice of the late comedian Bernie Mac. I often think of an early performance of his, on the nineties standup showcase “Def Comedy Jam.” The routine, slightly less than six minutes long, is songlike in structure—after each cluster of two or three jokes, Mac yells “Kick it!” and a snippet of cheesy, drum-heavy hip-hop plays. Between these punctuations, he affects poses that would fit as comfortably within a twelve-bar blues as they do on the dimly lit Def Jam stage: sexual bravado, profane delight, sly self-deprecation, dismay and gathering confusion at a rapidly changing world. “I ain’t come here for no foolishness,” he says toward the beginning of the set, his double negative signalling playfulness and threat in equal measure. “You don’t understand,” he says again and again, sometimes stretching “understand” into four or five syllables. Then, with swift, hilarious anger, like Jackie Gleason’s: “I ain’t scared of you motherfuckers.” The “r” in “scared” is barely audible, and the subsequent profanity is a fluid, tossed-off “muhfuckas.”
Bernie Mac is, in other words—and this is the source of my love—an expert speaker of Black English, which is the subject of the recent book “Talking Back, Talking Black” (Bellevue), by the linguist, writer, and Columbia professor John McWhorter. In the book, McWhorter offers an explanation, a defense, and, most heartening, a celebration of the dialect that has become, he argues, an American lingua franca.
McWhorter’s début as a public intellectual came twenty years ago, when a fracas erupted over a proposal to use Black English—then often called Ebonics—as a teaching tool in public schools in Oakland, California. The idea was roundly ridiculed. Ebonics, people said, was simply a collection of “slang and bad grammar”—not nearly enough to make a language. The TV talking head Tucker Carlson, in a typically nasty flourish, called Black English “a language where nobody knows how to conjugate the verbs,” McWhorter recalls. The pungent reaction baffled linguists, who had long appreciated—and begun to seriously study—the “languageness” of Black English and other informal speech variants, such as Jamaican Patois, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole. McWhorter, who is black, was then teaching at nearby U.C. Berkeley, and he had a long-standing scholarly interest in black speech. He became—by dint of his race and his physical proximity to the uproar—the most prominent authority on the validity of Black English as language.
Since then, McWhorter has built a career outside the academy as a quirky populist, committed to defending linguistic novelties often derided as erroneous or as harbingers of slackening standards. He sees in such innovations evidence of the only constant in language: its endless mutability, and its corresponding ability to surprise. He hosts Slate’s popular linguistics podcast, “Lexicon Valley,” and, in another recent book, “Words on the Move” (Henry Holt), writes acceptingly of such trends as “uptalk” (the tendency to end declarative sentences with the upward lilt of the voice that usually accompanies a question) and the peppering of “like” throughout the speech of younger Americans. McWhorter brooks no condescension toward the Valley Girl. “Americans,” he laments in “Talking Back, Talking Black,” “have trouble comprehending that any vernacular way of speaking is legitimate language.”
“Talking Back, Talking Black,” then, is a kind of apologia. In five short essays, McWhorter demonstrates the “legitimacy” of Black English by uncovering its complexity and sophistication, as well as the still unfolding journey that has led to its creation. He also gently chides his fellow-linguists for their inability to present convincing arguments in favor of vernacular language. They have been mistaken, he believes, in emphasizing “systematicity”—the fact that a language’s particularities are “not just random, but based on rules.” An oft-cited instance of systematicity in Black English is the lastingly useful “habitual ‘be,’ ” whereby, Carlson’s quip notwithstanding, the formulation “She be passin’ by” contains much more than an unconjugated verb. That naked “be,” McWhorter explains, “is very specific; it means that something happens on a regular basis, rather than something going on right now.” He adds, “No black person would say ‘She be passin’ by right now,’ because that isn’t what be in that sentence is supposed to mean. Rather, it would be ‘She be passin’ by every Tuesday when I’m about to leave.’ ” A mistake to untrained ears, the habitual “be” is, “of all things, grammar.”
However logical, examples like these have failed to garner respect, because to most Americans grammar does not inhere in linguistic rule-following generally but in a set of specific rules that they have been taught to obey. McWhorter offers a couple of typical directives: “Don’t say less books, say fewer books,” and “Say Billy and I went to the store, not Billy and me went to the store.” This narrow notion of grammar has amounted to a peculiar snobbery: the more obscure and seemingly complex the grammatical rule, the more we tend to assert its importance and to esteem those who have managed to master it. “People respect complexity,” McWhorter writes. His smirking and somewhat subversive accommodation to this Pharisaism is to emphasize the ways in which Black English is more complex than Standard English.
One of these ways—the truest, I should add, to my own experience of the language—is the use of the word “up” in conjunction with a location. Hip-hop fans might recognize this construction from the chorus of the rapper DMX’s hit song “Party Up (Up in Here)”: “Y’all gon’ make me lose my mind / Up in here, up in here / Y’all gon’ make me go all out / Up in here, up in here,” etc. McWhorter, playing the tone poet’s patient exegete, scours several instances of the usage, settling on the idea that in this context “up” conveys the intimacy of the setting it qualifies. The sentence “We was sittin’ up at Tony’s,” according to McWhorter, “means that Tony is a friend of yours.” This is an artful and convincing reading, and McWhorter carries it out in an impishly forensic manner, proving his thesis that, in some respects, Black English has “more going on” than Standard English. The latter lacks such a succinct “intimacy marker” as Black English’s “up,” and someone who studied Black English as a foreign language would have a hard time figuring out when, and how, to deploy it.
The passage on “up” is characteristic of McWhorter’s strengths as a writer. In the years that he has spent popularizing ideas hatched in the halls of the academy, he has honed a friendly prose style. Some of the sentences in “Talking Back” seem designed to enact its author’s loose, democratic approach to English, and to language more broadly: sentence-ending prepositions sit happily together with uses of the singular “they.” This intelligent breeziness is the source of the book’s considerable charm. It also helps McWhorter slide past the aspects of Black English that cannot be so cheerily explained.
McWhorter’s easygoing recounting of the Ebonics affair, with its emphasis on his ecumenical approach to language, elides the way in which the episode served as an opportunity to broadcast his somewhat stonier views on black American life. McWhorter opposed the Oakland proposal—a fact that he scarcely makes clear in “Talking Back, Talking Black.” He told the story more fully in “Losing the Race,” a best-selling jeremiad published in 2000, which argued that the familiar litany of black American troubles—low academic achievement, the absence of upward mobility, and so on—were due more to cultural deficiencies like anti-intellectualism and a “cult of victimology” than to institutionalized racism. The support that some black leaders expressed for the Oakland proposal was, in McWhorter’s view, evidence of their misguided sense that “the main issue” was “not evaluating an educational policy but defending black America from racist abuse.” Black English is perfectly legitimate as language, but its use in schools wouldn’t help black students, he wrote in 1997, because, among other problems, “inner city backgrounds do not prepare many children to be receptive to education in school.”
McWhorter’s stance in “Losing the Race” won him fame as a commentator on race and society, and got him classified alongside an increasingly—but, in retrospect, fleetingly—visible cadre of black conservatives, including the economist Thomas Sowell and the writer Shelby Steele, with whom he frequently agreed on such matters. McWhorter, though, was an otherwise conventional, if slightly old-fashioned, liberal Democrat; he’d arrived at sociology’s doorstep with a bouquet of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s ideas just as they were beginning to wilt. He didn’t deny the persistence of racism—he still inveighs against mass incarceration and the drug war—but insisted on the reality of post-sixties progress, and implored his fellow black Americans to reach out and grab their country’s newly extended hand. This thinking has slipped further out of fashion in recent years, as smartphones around the country have delivered the bad old news about blacks and the police. McWhorter’s response to the radicalism of the younger generation, notably embodied by the Black Lives Matter movement, has been an exasperated resignation. He writes about race less regularly these days, and, when he does, it is often to dismiss the new mood as a kind of cult, long on shibboleths and pieties but woefully short on methods for bettering the lives of black Americans. (A 2015 article that McWhorter wrote for the Daily Beast was titled “Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion.”)
Early in “Talking Back, Talking Black,” McWhorter brings up the legacy of racism, only to reject it as an adequate explanation for—or tool in arguing against—the derision levelled at Black English over the years. “Surely racism plays a part in how Black English is heard,” he concedes in the book’s first chapter, before claiming that “the speech of Appalachian whites is condemned to an even greater degree.” He offers this latter assertion—doubtful, by my admittedly anecdotal lights—without a hint of evidence. He is unimpressed by, and wary of, the “sociopolitically charged argument” that “to criticize a dialect is to criticize its speakers.” McWhorter fears that its chief result is to make people—white people—“clam up.” Better, with evangelistic hopes like McWhorter’s, to root around for the language’s exceptional qualities: “up” and all the rest.
The most energetic but also the most frustrating section of “Talking Back” is a short treatise on the word “nigga.” McWhorter takes the customary care in distinguishing the word from its uglier, older cousin, “nigger,” but he pushes the distinction further than most: for McWhorter, these are not simply two separate English words, let alone two pronunciations of the same word; they are, rather, words that belong to two different dialects. “Nigger is Standard English and nigga is Black English,” he writes, matter-of-factly. “Nigga means ‘You’re one of us.’ Nigger doesn’t.”
This interpretation helps to explain the odd power that “nigga” wields over blacks and whites alike when said aloud. Richard Pryor’s use of it in his standup act in the seventies was radical not simply because street lingo had made its way onto the stage: Pryor had swung open the door between alternate cultural dimensions. Blacks suddenly felt at home—“up in the comedy club,” somebody might have said—and whites relished the brief peek into a room they rarely saw. Something similar happened, and keeps on happening, with hip-hop, many of whose practitioners use the N-word as a kind of challenge to white enthusiasts. It’s become a familiar joke: when the music’s loud, and emotions are high, who dares recite, in full, the lyric that eventually alights on “nigga”?
That “nigga” is not only one of our most controversial words but also one of our funniest is revealing, and worth puzzling over. McWhorter doesn’t allow himself the pleasure. The word’s power—and therefore its coherence, its licitness as language—is impossible to understand without a glance at the history of race-rooted subjugation in America. The emergence of Black English is owed in part to straightforwardly linguistic factors: McWhorter convincingly cites the phenomenon of recently enslaved adults straining to learn a new language, plus a syncretistic importation of vocal gestures picked up along the trail of forced migration. But it also developed as a covert, often defiant response to the surveillance state of slavery. Grammatical nuance, new vocabulary, subtleties of tone—these were verbal expressions of racism’s mind-splitting crucible, what W. E. B. Du Bois called “double consciousness.” As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has written, black vernacular is a literary development as well as a linguistic one. “The black tradition”—from ring shouts to Ralph Ellison—“is double-voiced,” Gates writes, in the introduction to his seminal study, “The Signifying Monkey,” echoing Du Bois. The humor associated with black language play—with jokers like Pryor and Bernie Mac—directly descends from this multivocal tradition, and from the trouble that made it necessary.
This polarity—between a tragic sense of the world and the ability to make of it a kind of punch line—might help to unshroud, if only slightly, an enigma at the heart of McWhorter’s book. In a chapter on what it means to “sound black,” he is able to isolate several aspects of the “blaccent,” as he calls it—a tendency, for example, to clip certain vowel sounds and luxuriate in others. But he concedes, in the end, that elements of black speech remain mysterious. All of its facets come together in a manner that can seem inexpressible, a point he illustrates with an essentially artistic analogy: once, watching a group of young black girls execute a dance routine, he noticed something off—inarticulable, but off—in the moves of the one girl who had grown up mostly around white people. Something beyond rhythm; something like style.
Whatever this quality may be, it operates as well on Sunday morning as it does on Saturday night. Consider the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. His rich, swooping Baptist cadences, almost musical in tone, have become part of the American soundscape. His rhetoric was a breakthrough by way of synthesis. He had an unmistakably black sound, a sound that had been forged over centuries in the privacy of segregated worship, but he fitted it, often, over flawless Standard English syntax that straddled in its rhythms the Constitution and the Bible. He sometimes sounded like an Otis Redding cover of Abe Lincoln or the text of a Psalm.
Think of the concluding passages of his most famous speeches: “I Have a Dream,” “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” Forget the words. King’s shudders and vibratos, half-shouts and glottal stops have become a synecdoche for the ongoing struggle for American freedom. They remind us: black talk has—at high cost, to often beautiful effect—become a moral language, too. ♦
>via: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/the-case-for-black-english
She fell in love with cycling, but was tired of never seeing anyone else who looked like her on two wheels. So she did something about it.
Throughout May, National Bike Month, our People of Interest series is spotlighting New York cyclists who are breaking the mold and making a difference on two wheels.
“My community has a lot of problems that are institutionally heaped upon it that may never be resolved,” says Courtney Williams, a 32-year-old African-American woman who lives in Brooklyn. “But we still have a need to take care of ourselves, and I know this sounds really hippy-dippy, but bicycles are these magic machines that can kind of cure all.”
Williams, who works in business planning and development counseling, is on a quest to bring the joy of those magic machines to more people in communities of color. “I just want people to experience the joy that I feel when I’m on a bicycle,” she says. “I don’t want people missing out.”
Cycling is so woven into Williams’ life that it takes three bikes to accommodate her needs: one for long-distance rides; a twelve-speed for locking up on errands and short trips around the city; and a pretty sky-blue cruiser for when she wears dresses. But not long ago, she didn’t bike at all.
Growing up in Gary, Indiana, Williams liked to ride, but it eventually fell by the wayside. Then she looked out her window one day, a year after moving to New York in 2009, and noticed a new bike lane running through her Brooklyn neighborhood. She got a bicycle – a heavy steel framed one that was too small and not very good – and started riding. The next year she did the forty-mile Tour de Bronx, a sightseeing ride that draws thousands every year and ends with a party at the Botanical Garden. That affirmed that she could handle distance, and left her with the urge to venture out beyond the Bronx. “I didn’t know where I wanted to go, but I knew I was going to go places,” she says, sitting at the Pillow Cafe on a recent afternoon near her home in Brooklyn.
But she didn’t want to do it solo. Over the next few years, she became a regular in the city’s cycling scene, going on rides with advocacy groups like Transportation Alternatives and We Bike NYC, which promotes women in cycling. She also came across Black Girls Do Bike on Facebook, which looked promising but didn’t have any local rides in New York.
Any time she’d see a black woman anywhere on a bike, Williams would go up to her and ask, “Do you know there are other black women on bikes like you?” The response, she says, would always be: “I thought I was the only one.”
Meanwhile, she was learning from her excursions, and saw that a lot of the people on these rides had buddies. “And I was like, ‘where’s my buddy?’” she recalls. “Then one day I just decided, ‘I’m going to make this happen.’”
Williams asked Black Girls Do Bike if she could organize a New York event, got a green light, and in May 2014 ten women showed up at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn for her first ride. Wanting it to be purposeful, she took them to a bike fair in Park Slope, and for the next two years, led two rides every month for the BGDB New York chapter. “It became my second full-time job,” she says of the volunteer planning, promoting and riding. “I made sure everything was seamless. My approach was to create a one-hundred-percent-sincerely welcoming environment,” one in which no one would get left behind.
To boost “rider development,” she noted which women were having trouble and followed up with them to help. She would also offer instruction during rides, showing the novices how to signal and when to change gears. She offered both long and short rides, and took participants to women-centric bike events like CycloFemme, an annual global ride for women on Mother’s Day, as well as to non-biking female empowerment events like the Women in Comics Convention in the Bronx.
Joneé Billy, who is 32, lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and works in community development, first met Williams two years ago and was impressed when she came across her leading a huddle of women. “She took command,” says Billy, who was new to cycling herself, “and that’s what drew me to her.”
Billy went on many of Williams’ Black Girls Do Bike rides, which she describes as “safety first,” but also “lighthearted and fun,” and eventually became a leader. She says Williams “pushed me and other ladies like me to do more, to venture out and seek other opportunities,” whether taking an intensive bike maintenance class or doing something they didn’t think they were physically capable of – like bicycle racing on a velodrome track, which Billy says will be her next step. “She motivates ladies to do whatever the next level is for them, to accomplish that goal, and then to step it up,” she says.
Maudene Nelson, a 67-year-old cycling enthusiast and nutritionist who lives in Yonkers, just north of the Bronx, also appreciates Williams’ leadership. “I know there are women who’ve been influenced by Courtney’s role in encouraging all of us to be mentors,” she says, “and I credit her for having created the environment for the rest of us to help others get into cycling.”
Williams’ rides were open to whoever wanted to join. But the point for Williams was to ride with people like her, as she puts it, and to create “a safe place for black women to feel relaxed about their particular needs and concerns about cycling.”
African-Americans were systematically excluded from cycling for a long time, as with other sports in U.S. history, and ended up doing it less as a result. That seems to be rapidly changing. According to a 2013 report by the League of American Bicyclists and the Sierra Club, from 2001 to 2009 ridership among African-Americans doubled, despite the lack of representation in advocacy groups and the lack of cycling infrastructure in communities known as “transit deserts.” A number of minority cycling groups have sprung up in recent years all over the country, including Red, Bike & Green, a collective founded in 2007 and aimed at creating a black bike culture; and the National Brotherhood of Cyclists, founded the following year by a network of affiliated black cycling clubs. In 2011, a group called Black Women Bike: DC was formed and two years later the national Black Girls Do Bike was born on Facebook. There are many more.
Last year, Williams ended her time with Black Girls Do Bike due to disagreements over how it was being run and decided to apply her talents to starting up The Brown Bike Girl, a bicycle consultancy. Her goal is to “grow other leaders of color,” she says, along with more cyclists. “I’m there to directly work with a brother and sister who loves cycling and wants to start their own club or initiative or whatever iteration of cycling they want to bring to their community. I’m here to help institutions and individuals who want to do that. There’s definitely a need for it.”
Looking ahead a year or two, Williams envisions running bike club organizing 101 workshops, and those resulting in many new bike clubs for people of color. She also hopes to work with nonprofits to support campaigns in underserved POC neighborhoods. “Everything is on the table,” she says. “People with the power – this includes average Joes and Janays who need to recognize the power in themselves – just need to reach out, be serious about bringing more people to the fore, and we can put our heads together and work it out. Sky’s the limit.”
Williams recalls a recent chat about her cycling advocacy with a black man she met in the park one evening: “He was like, ‘Why do you want black people to cycle so much? Is it just because you like it?’ And I was like, ‘Yes! That’s exactly it! I have found something that’s very good for me, and if it’s good for me then I know it’s good for other people.’”
She cites the mental and physical wellness that cycling promotes, which would be a boon for black communities that face higher levels of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, as well as the pure joy it brings to her.
As she moves into this next phase of her bike journey, she is pleased to see that some of the women she helped motivate over the past few years, like Joneé Billy, have moved beyond her circle.
“I feel like a lot of my women have outgrown me or surpassed me,” Williams says, “because they’ve started going to other clubs and are participating in other cycling opportunities that they didn’t know about before because they weren’t part of bicycle culture.”
And that, she says, was just what she had in mind.
>via: http://narrative.ly/courtney-williams-is-on-a-mission-to-get-black-women-to-bike/
Another Pepper Shrimp recipe Chris? Yea, it’s definitely one of my weaknesses when it comes to snacking. We’ve gone though about 4 different styles of pepper shrimp to date, but I must admit that this one is my absolute favorite. And to be quite honest, it’s not only super easy to make, it’s also super-quick to put together. On it’s own as a snack, as a side to fried rice or stir fried noodles or on sandwiches, you’ll love this shrimp recipe. You can be the BOSS when it comes to how HOT you make it.
You’ll Need…
1 lb medium shrimp
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/3 teaspoon salt
1 heaping tablespoon corn starch
2 scotch bonnet peppers
3 cloves garlic
3 scallions
2 cups veg oil (for frying)
2 tablespoon veg oil
Peel, devein and wash the shrimp.Drain dry and coat with the black pepper, salt and corn starch.
This will cook very fast, so I’d recommend preparing the other ingredients in advance. Finely chop the garlic, scallions and scotch bonnet peppers. Be mindful that if you include the seeds from the peppers it will increase the heat level and kindly do yourself a favor and wash your hands with soap and water immediately after handling such hot peppers.
Heat the oil for ‘frying’ on medium/high. Since the shrimp is coated with the cornstarch they may tend to stick together. Fry for a minute or so and set aside. DON’T over cook!
In a new pan heat the 2 tablespoons of veg oil on a very LOW heat and then go in with the other ingredients. We want to gently allow the flavors of the garlic, scallions and scotch bonnet to come together. Cook on low for 3-5 mins, then add the cooked shrimp and toss well to coat. Since it’s important that we don’t over-cook the shrimp, as they heat through you can take the pot off the stove.
Serve warm for the best flavors.. if reheating, I’d recommend doing so in the oven and not a microwave. As mentioned above, this is my favorite pepper shrimp recipe to date and I’m very positive you’ll be a superstar when you serve this up with some cold beers.
“The Renaissance in Africa”:
While the Renaissance has been regarded as a purely European phenomenon centered on a largely homogeneous ethnicity, recent scholarship has deconstructed this one-sided historical narrative and acknowledged the important role played by Africans from the mid-fifteenth century onwards in reshaping the Mediterranean into a cross-cultural and multi-ethnic space rich in African-European cultural exchanges and intellectual collaborations. Together with the rediscovery of ancient classical culture, the Renaissance also reflected the development of new techniques, theories and cultural innovations brought by Africans from all over the continent following intercontinental navigation through new trade routes opened by the Portuguese between Mediterranean Europe and the west coast of sub-Saharan Africa. With contributions grounded in music, literature, history, architecture, and visual media, this panel explores how African-European cultural exchanges shaped Africa in the early modern period with a focus on cultural production, performance and ethnic encounters. Interdisciplinary papers might consider how and why composers, artists, patrons, musical and art works, and cultural practices crossed African borders and cultures, and with what effects, whether aesthetic, generic, dramatic, political or social. Possible themes are the circulation, mobility and displacement of musical culture; intercontinental encounters across borders; the significance of African-European artistic traditions and differing types of influences; intertextualities; intercultural dialogues and transcultural performance practices; links between music and art and African-European politics; reception history, conceptions of Africa and intellectual attitudes to black culture in relation to constructions of European whiteness.
Please send by June 1, 2017 to colejanie@gmail.com :
*Individual paper title, not to exceed 15 words
*A 150-word maximum paper abstract
*A 300-word max 1 page CV in paragraph form
*Keywords (general, not specific)
*AV requirements
Sincerely,
Dr. Janie Cole (University of Cape Town, South African College of Music), Discipline Rep for Music at RSA
For more information on the conference visit the website here.
THE HOPPER POETRY PRIZE
The Hopper, a literary magazine from Green Writers Press, is open for submissions of full-length manuscripts to its 2017 Hopper Poetry Prize. This contest is open to poets with an identified interest in the natural world and whose work explores issues tied to our ever-changing environment. The winning poetry manuscript will be selected by the editors of The Hopper in collaboration with Dede Cummings, publisher of Green Writers Press, to be published by Green Writers Press as a collection in the spring of 2018. The winning poet will also receive $250 in prize money.
The competition is open to all poets, regardless of publication history. Publication is contingent on the poet’s agreeing to the terms of the publishing agreement.
There is an entry fee of $25, and manuscripts may be uploaded via Submittable. Please follow these guidelines in preparing your manuscript:
1. Submissions must be original, book-length poetry manuscripts written in the English language. Translations are not accepted.
2. Poets may submit several manuscripts, but an entry fee must be paid for each submission.
3. The manuscript must be a minimum of 45 pages and a maximum of 90 pages in length. All manuscripts must be paginated. Each new poem must start on a new page.
4. When formatting the manuscript, please make it legible. All documents must be typed/word-processed. Please select a standard typeface (such as Bodoni, Garamond, or Times New Roman) in at least 12-point type. Manuscripts may be single-spaced, double-spaced, or 1.5-spaced.
5. The Hopper Poetry Prize reserves the right to reject any manuscript for any reason.
Schedule of Proceedings:
March 1, 2017–July 1, 2017: Submissions open
July 2017: Deliberations
July 31, 2017: Winner notified
August 1, 2017: Winner announced
Fall–Winter 2017: Editing and designing of book
Spring 2018: Book published