on neil labute's "the cast system"

first, let's just get out the way labute's glib discussion of the history of racism in this country... just the way he talks about it reeks of such white boy privilege and entitlement that i almost can't even take him seriously... but of course, his whole argument is based on entitlement... and from such a cocoon of resource and privilege that it's laughable... because truth be told, both he and we know that he and his ilk have the resources and privilege to do whatever they want... so, what's he complaining about...

second, i have to say, and i know this isn't exactly PC... but the feeling i got when reading this... was just Wow... can't we have anything? really, can't we just have anything w/out your need to co-opt our shit? i mean, really... for the last couple of years, all we've been hearing is how joss stone is the re-incarnation of black soul... almost every critically acclaimed film about people of color made in the last 10 years (and beyond, for that matter) has been by white people... and i'm not just talking about Dreamgirls (mainly cause i think it sucked, but that's another story)... from Quinciera to Tsoti, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Whale Rider, Our Song, Raising Victor Vargas, Girlfight, etc... need I go on... and all this is the age of so-called equal opportunity... it's not enough to co-opt our bodies, our neighborhoods, our style, speech or music.... you must assert your right to the very stories we tell to save ourselves... Lorraine and August were speaking to black folks about specific experiences based on a historical, social past and present, ie. the black experience in America... to attempt to disconnect the body of the work from the bone structure its based on, it's nonsensical...

The fact that he's relegated the whole basis of racism in America to "something that doesn't really matter anyway," means that he doesn't understand what Lorraine or August were talking about in the first place... and if that's not the best reason, why he has no place being anything more than a paying audience member at any production of their work, I'm not sure what it is....

label: signifier

x,

who would you be without your label... i wonder... i tried to stage a divorce with mine a while ago, and soon found i had a bit of a war on my hands... i didn't expect it... it started out as simply a thought experiment... like what if the label is a crutch, something we lean on a little too much to explain our phobias, our quirks, and the other shit we just can't seem to do like "normal" people... i thought if i divorced mine, perhaps it would be freeing... perhaps, it still could be...

who would you be without your label... i know you never claimed to ascribe to them much, but i know you do in your heart and mind...

i have to admit, without mine, i don't know who i am... i've wanted to be a writer since i was 11 years old... i listened to my mother's well meaning words--"writers starve..." and tried to become something else... i tried other things... other starving vocations.... photography, and film.... some practical computer programming... but still wrote... fragments, snatches of poems in the back of a notebook or a stray envelope... and tried my hand again at this part or that... abandoning it every few years, and returning to it in the years that followed...

not sure what to do with that part of me that wants to "take it seriously..." and make it available for human consumption... part of me wants that... i always saw myself as someone with her name imprinted on the cover of book, but could never actually visualize the book... isn't that weird... i always saw myself as someone who other people would read, though i hoard my work so fiercely... yet, i'm not sure what to do with that idea...

what does it mean to divorce the writer in me? to admit i'm a hobbyist who may never be the writer i imagined... it scares me to death... i don't know who am i without it... i don't know how to explain myself to myself.... it's not that i need it as the identifier for the hi-my-name-is conversations... in those, i rarely mention it... why would i? it's new york, everybody's a writer or a filmmaker these days.... but to myself, in my own story, in the way i make sense of myself in the world... who am i without those two syllables? how do i explain my set-apart-ness, the parts of me that never really belong anywhere... how do i explain the quirks, the weird underpinnings, and abnormalities... the non-existent relationships and strange trajectories of my teenage and college years... it made sense as part of an artist makeup, but without it, it just feels sad... like the loner, wallflower mute that shows up from time to time is me after all... no explanation or redemption song to bear... no savior second chapter to bring it all home and sew it up neatly after the last commercial break...

but perhaps, there will be... i remember what this poet said at the end of this piece i was editing... she said, "i'm just writing this thing so i won't die..." and so we're all just writing to save ourselves... and we're the fortunate ones, if our writing is such that can save someone else, too... that doesn't make us better, it makes us blessed.... i always have to go back to Hyde on this.... the gift in circulation is an amazing thing...

and i guess that's the thing... we want too much to be saviors, because we're in so in love without saints... we know it was reading shange or toni cade at the right time that i kept so many of us from jumping out of windows... but that's easily forgotten... too often, we become too goal-oriented.. not that there's anything wrong with goals, but we're trying to cross T's and dot Y's for all the wrong reasons...

let me remember.... i'm here as spirit... i don't need to be this or that... i don't need you or anyone else to think me something more than i am.... i am just this manifestation of God, as you are that, and he that, and so on... i don't need this label anymore than i need the idea of hell to make me right my wrongs... all i need is to honor the place where God/the Universe resides in me... and it so happens that more often than not, it likes to reside here in me.... where words meet each other, and spread on the page in these large connected communal maps that become texts... and because He/She/It shares with me that way, i know that the gift must move... and the sooner i can make it not about me, the sooner i can get out of the way and let the gift do its own through me...

i'm open....

-me

where brooklyn at?

i came to new york to seek the dream... i moved to brooklyn to find my tribe... the human instinct is much that of the television show "Cheers" variety... to find the place you belong, where those who look like you and share a similar vision are commonplace, instead of the outsiders you tend to be in the communities you grew up in...

in my mind, brooklyn represented this arts, intellectual mecca of black and brown folks, fueled by both hip-hop and the critiques of hip-hop and surrounding popular culture... i remember reading greg tate, asha bandele, and even joan morgan back in college and feeling some kin to the this new (to me) young, black intellectual space they were defining in the world...

attending school in the height of the puffy area, the bohemian intellectual was out of style... everyone was pursuing this newjack form of jiggy-dom... different from the classes that came before with their bourgeois aesthetic, what was hot was more flashy, more street... though the classist, capitalistic values were the same... welcome to the intellectual wasteland... where "money, power, respect was all you need in life"...

so, of course, i thought brooklyn "the place to be"... my older brother thinks so also, but for entirely different reason... when he came to visit, it was to see the brooklyn of hip-hop lore... to see these streets that bore so much weight on the music and culture he loved... and the images of hip-hop icons like Jay-Z and P Diddy adorning the buildings and billboards made Times Square an almost holy space... like Jay's face on the side of the building was some kind of affirmation of him as a young black man of this music, of this culture, of similar life circumstances... we are here, goddammit... and that's all hip-hop has been about... we are here, goddammit... and we won't be invisible... i will be as loud, in your face, as repulsive as i damn. well. please but i will not be ignored...

but it's about home too... what we represent and who we identity with, and the geography that defines us... as the streets change and pieces of bed-stuy, crown heights, and flatbush go the way of fort greene and crown heights, there are a bunch of migrants looking for home... and those of us... artists who move here, trying to find a way, are just in search of some stretch of land that will claim us back... that will feel connected to us and so entrenched that that part of our history becomes almost inseparable... like orwell's paris or langston's harlem. you can't separate biggie from brooklyn or spike from bed-stuy...

geography leaves its mark even on transplants and nomads... and we choose our destinations in hopes of attaining the marks we desire... where do you want to live is akin to asking who do you want to be?

smile for me daddy: a response to hollabacknyc

Hollabacknyc.blogspot is a new blog dedicated to raising consciousness around street harassment in New York City. It encourages women to post stories and cell phone pictures of their harassers with the idea of creating a web archive that empowers women. Yet, in their initial stages, they found themselves in a bit of a racial quandary. At first, their policy was to publish submissions unedited, until activists of color complained that quite a few submissions had racial undertones and that this subsequently reinforced the notion of men of color as “sexual predators.” The editors then decided to delete any statements regarding the race of the offender and asked that new contributors not include race in their accounts. In the stories that followed, explicit mentioning of race was left out, but a number of racial signifiers still managed to find their way into the texts .

Yet, what’s most interesting about the whole scenario is that rather than deal with the racial and class implications of their “evidence of experience” approach, they quietly sidestepped the issue. In giving the accounts primacy without any kind of analysis, they ignored the ways in which ideologies affect our version of “truth.” In some respects, the possibility that any type of unwanted attention, even without aggression or disrespect, of a white woman by a man of color can and most often times will be deemed harassment by the nature of ideological circumstance. For example, in one account, a woman charged that a black man flashing his grill of gold teeth at her from across the room was harassment. Now, who’s to say whether it was truly a leer or if the spatial location and other factors contributed to making her feel uncomfortable, but we can’t ignore both the racial and class factors that allow this to be classified as harassment under the helm of “evidential experience.”

Joan Scott warns:

"When experience is taken as the origin of knowledge, the vision of individual subject (the person who had the experience or the historian who recounts it) becomes the bedrock of evidence on which explanation is built. Questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as different in the first place, about how one’s vision is structured—about language (or discourse) and history—are left aside."

As such, hollabacknyc reproduces the same old trope, with white women as primary victims and men of color as the primary victimizers, without any interrogation of the 'excess' that surrounds these exchanges.