Rodney Spivey Jones: On Messianic Black Bodies

This post is dedicated to the men fighting for their lives
inside the walls in Mississippi. Ashe'

Americans in general have used the Black body as an object of rhetoric to define their identity. Black people, for example, use the suffering Black body, use Black bodies in a way to force Americans to see the suffering so that you can empathize with their pain. We see this not only with Emmett Till, but we see this with the Black Lives Matter movement, with Mike Brown, with Tamir Rice.

[Scholars have suggested that] we shouldn't see history as linear, as one event following another and then the other events are in the past. [Using the word] "messianic" [is] saying that the past is constantly being resurrected. It's constantly re-emerging.

When we take the Black body as a continuum of all this history of suffering and resistance and we have the body of Mike Brown lying in the middle of the street for 4-1/2 hours, for many of the African American activists who are seeing this body in the middle of the street, they're not just seeing Mike Brown. They're seeing all the previous acts of indignity and injustice, and it's not just their personal experiences, but the entire "race." I think messianic Black bodies allows me to explain why African Americans can look at a Black body and say, "Listen, that is all of this history -- and it's me."

During the course of my research, I developed a hyper-awareness of the many often insidious ways in which society disfigures the personhood of marginalized people. I noticed the attempt of so many to lump disparate elements into the category of Blackness or some other category meant to house the unworthy, categories such as "offender" or "inmate." It is difficult to live, to function in one of these categories. You begin to feel like scurf that one cannot scrub clean from the body.

I am an "irredeemable" trapped in one of the crippling categories of the undeserving. I am reluctant to use the word anger -- in America, anger and Blackness and offender is considered a volatile mixture. But everyone, every single one of us, should see when injustice is rampant and bodies are falling and the nation is divided about whether the losses of Eric Garner, of LaQuan McDonald, of Mike Brown, of Trayvon Martin, (insert here), are worth mourning.

Mourning is not a question of race and bodies. It is a question of humanity. Let me say it plainly: the Black body is a prison of flesh and the truth is unforgiving. African Americans can no more relinquish their signifying Black bodies than they can change the history of  this nation, but they must continue to demand.
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NOTE: The above was transcribed from the Kenneth Burns documentary, "College Behind Bars," which is about the Bard Prison Initiative, a college program functioning in the Eastern New York Correctional Facility in Napanoch, New York. Rodney Spivey Jones was incarcerated in that facility until he graduated from Bard with a Bachelor's Degree in Social Sciences in 2017. He is currently located in Fishkill Correctional Facility and will be eligible for his first hearing before the Parole Board in 2022.

If We've Fallen Down A Rabbit Hole, Does It Have A Bottom?

Maybe I'm just getting old. I mean I am 71. And it happens to everybody -- until they die. And I'm still producing more than the average person I know. After all, I taught six courses to three hundred students this spring, including one that turned ten students into social change agents and ended with a performance titled "Truth Be Told" -- on speaking truth to power (with no holds barred).

The end of May, I went to Havana, Cuba, for nine days to work on organizing a conference there for sociologist/activists from all over the world to meet, learn from, and network with each other for five days in November. I've taught two more rapid-fire Intro courses online this summer already while healing a broken foot, getting over a hellified parasitic invasion I dragged back from Cuba, and recording my book on race relations so people can buy an audio edition (it's been out as paperback and Kindle editions for two years). I'm still sending money to a family I know in Haiti, to Black Lives Matter, and to build an underground hospital where women can more safely birth their babies in Syria while U.S.-provided bombs fall often and without warning from the sky.

But it's never enough when reading your Facebook feed becomes an exercise in shock-and-awe, dead bodies all over the place with no repercussions, things just getting weirder and weirder in Washington, and the police reaching new heights in horror and new lows in morals daily. The prisons have become physical and emotional pressure cookers, where men, women, and even children are being par-boiled in their own juices in a summer determined to prove that climate change is real, with or without scientists to tell us so.

So everybody I know is either stumbling through their lives in a state of numb acceptance, doing what has to be done to pay the rent, but little else. Or they're careening through a tsunami of one kind or another trying not to wind up unemployed, incarcerated, or dead. I'm trying to soldier on, but what the fuck? I mean, really, what the fuck?

What Racism Has To Do With The Cost of College

A few days ago, I posted a video of a young Black woman expressing her frustration with how Black college students are often viewed, even by each other. Today, I'm posting another video about race and higher education. It explains how White Supremacy as an ideology has paired up with public policy in the United States to gut everything public and most especially public universities.

Be careful not to misunderstand what they say at the end of the video, though. When they explain that racism in the public sphere hurts everybody, they don't mean Black students and White students are equally affected. In fact, they say quite clearly at one point that Black students are more negatively impacted by racist public policies than White students are. But when the Powers-That-Be use racism to send tuition and student loans sky-rocketing, everybody gets sucker-punched.

What they're trying to get across is that White students shouldn't let the public policy decision-makers fool them into believing that attacks on the public sphere only hurt Black people. If teachers -- and students -- form a solid front, we can stop the neo-liberal bulldozer in its tracks.

Alice Goffman: Riding The School-To-Prison Pipeline

My last post was a video of Michelle Alexander talking about how difficult it is for Black men to avoid going -- and going back -- to prison. Today, I'm posting another video, this time of Alice Goffman talking about the fact that this process doesn't start when Black males grow up. It starts whenever the police in Black neighborhoods say it starts. And because of the nature of these White Supremacist cultural norms, young Black boys and men have little if any control over whether or not they're personally chosen for the journey.

Even a child who makes good grades and tries to stay out of trouble can be swept up at a moment's notice on almost any given day, finding himself neck deep in the nightmare, regardless of his innocence. We like to believe this only happens occasionally by accident, but Goffman describes patterns and processes that are much less predictable. And it is precisely this arbitrary quality that makes life for young Black men so challenging.

The John Brown Brigade

The other day, Google sent me a signal that someone had left a comment on my post on "There's No Such Thing as Black History". It turned out to be one J. Nkomo, who wrote: "It is a sordid game, to manipulate racial tension to careerist aims in the face of unprecedented systematic anti-prejudice. The youth are embracing anti-prejudice surrounding sexual orientation, race, politics, lifestyle, gender, etc. But, in some sectors, the manipulation of U.S. racial tension might pass as legitimate academic research. Who might lick racial wounds green all the way to the bank?"

It wasn't the first time I've heard a disgruntled person (usually of color) suggest that a White person -- especially a White person in academe -- who has anything to say about racial oppression is doing so to make money off the back of the Black community, which would (according to the disgruntled person) be doing perfectly fine if all White people would just butt out. The point seems to be that no White person, educated or otherwise, could ever have any possible objective other than to make money and, most particularly, by exploiting people who suffer, even if that exploitation takes the form of appropriating the suffering in some way (such as "studying" it).

Okay. I hear you.

And you won't find me arguing that White Supremacy (with the support of the White community and most White individuals) is not the problem. It is. However, Mr/Ms Nkomo, you wrote your comment to me on my blog, so I must assume you are referring to me specifically and, since it is my blog, I get to respond. Thanks.

Questions For Those Who Fear The Truth

The other day, a student admitted to me that she's been a "Republican and a Catholic all her life" and that, everyday now, she goes home and talks about what she's learning in my class and her parents are getting upset. They ask her if they're "going to have to come down there" (to the school, I presume) to protest what their impressionable young daughter (who is at least of age) is being exposed to.

I told her, laughing, that they're welcome any time. And they are.

But today I received an email informing me that one of the professional organizations I belong to as a sociologist has recently signed a statement being circulated by the American Sociological Association. The statement was written in support of Frances Fox Piven, a well known Ph.D., social scientist, author and professor whose work related to poverty and inequality has been some of the most highly regarded in the world for decades now. No one -- and let me underscore this statement -- no one who is committed to rigorous research in the interest of understanding how our society works (rather than just accepting whatever those in power want believed) doubts the truthfulness of her writings.

But Glen Beck (the racist media mogul whose idea of rigorous research is apparently whatever hairbrained analysis he can suck out of his thumb and sell to those who drink his kool-aid) has decided Piven is "one of the most dangerous people in the world". Beck is so malicious toward this "dangerous" 78-year-old woman, he has whipped up a froth of panic sufficient to bring out the crazies he knows perfectly well he can direct to attack her.

Dr. Watkins, I Presume

One of my Faithful Readers who also happens to be one of my most Faithful Suppliers of interesting information turned me on this week to Dr. Boyce Watkins at Black Voices. Watkins is all over the internet, which is, needless to say, such a huge continent (as it were) that a computer junkie could get lost in it permanently, just going from site to site to site endlessly until hell froze over or their fingers stopped moving and their lifeless form slumped onto the keyboard when they went to that great website in the sky (or wherever). So it's crucial to have a few contributers who keep you posted about this and that.

Anyway, I've added Black Voices to my blogroll and want to steer you to catch one of Watkins' video commentaries on that site, where you will find many more. I tried to figure out how to embed the video here, but apparently they don't want that done, so I have to send you there instead. But not without adding my two cents first (or afterwards, if you like it like that).

Guess Who?

Lewis Carroll once wrote: "The time has come," the walrus said, "to speak of many things..." And today, the time has come for me to begin to step up the pace. I want to publish my books. I want to travel around and talk about the things I write about on this blog.

In the sixties, Bob Dylan sang, "The times they are a-changing" and it's true again. Only this time, they're changing in terrible ways. We can no longer pretend that everything is just somehow going to work itself out. "We have to become," said Gandhi, "the change we want to see in the world."

I'm ready. Here I come.

The Dream is Alive, But is the Hope? (Part 1)

The Dream is Alive, But is the Hope? (Part 2)