Ta Nehisis Coates in his much lauded work Between the World in Me, travels to France.  The journey itself is the journey into internationalism, predictable, naïve, and to be expected.  For the subtext of the work is Baldwin, who too traveled to and lived in France.  France as a racial wonderland within the domain of Western Civilization is a predictable internationalism.  Many blacks have traveled there.  War veterans, writers, jazz musicians, and others became expats in France.  In Yin Lutang's The Meaning of Life he contrasts the Chinese, Japanese, and European nations with a series of chemistry like notations.  The French in this context have  R2D3H3S3.  R stands for Realism, D for Dreams, H for Humor, and S for Sensitivity.  Compared with the Germans whose presentation is R3D4H2S2 or the British who are R3D2H2S1.  Yutang, who was once nominated for the Nobel Prize and also Harvard educated, seems to perfectly bridge the Chinese and Western World in his literature, though he regrettably, for the Chinese, wrote in English.  His opinion should not be taken lightly.  Safe to say the French ranking of sensitivity, in his opinion, is the only one that ranks the same as the Chinese.

       

We might want to ask the Northern Africans or Algerians in particular what they really think of French freedom, and it may be a long discussion that takes us down pathways we are not familiar with.  In Coates' defense one cannot put everything in such a short book.  The absence of such a complicated parallel or critique of France in Coates' work is more a question of narrative integrity than oversight.  It is the same narrative integrity required of most stories blacks tell.  From within the Empire of Language even the most radical thoughts must operate within the limit.  A story about oppression and mythical freedom and France is a crafted narrative that serves the empire well.  An inclusion of France in the narrative taps into the nostalgia of black expats.   If anything Coates clearly reconciles and separates himself from the internal tropes of black History and Africa as mythic past.  But France too is mythic past, just much more recent and Western.

Within the empire of language, the written word must operate within the limits of the white imagination.  Perhaps that is why the white gaze is discussed like a demi-god.  If the white gaze is in real-time, the white imagination is the kingdom you step into when you graduate.  Nevertheless Coates escapes not to escape.

It is good to begin with Coates, as I have often on Free Black Space,  because he is extremely successful and his success gives us insight into the codes of the West while at the same time seeming to expand them.  It is also good to begin with him because he is real time cutting edge like Trump, like China.  In this case, his journey to France in the midst of his travels though the difficult terrain of black history with its brutality and violence represents the limit of African American internationalism.

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I head to the Starbucks every morning.

It's my habit.

Years ago, I remember a famous African American journalist talking about financial management and rather flippantly saying that you gotta decide whether you wanna drink your cup of coffee every morning or buckle down on expenses and get your economics in order.  I didn't laugh then, but I laugh now.  It's the cheap economics of black comeuppiism.

In between 2006 and 2010 I lost or expensed over 845K of my close to a million dollars in wealth.  The experience was nothing short of catastrophic  Lose that much money and  it seems to seep into your blood.  Maybe not, but at least it will kill your sense of buckle down and tighten the belt.  Afterwards, my cup of coffee became one of the things I could afford.  I didn't get caught up in the two or three bucks a day after all that money.  I figured, if I lost that much money, the coffee wasn't too expensive.

My Starbucks habit carried perfectly  to Wuhan where the price of the cup of coffee is just about the same.  Twenty-six  RMB for a brewed coffee.  It's the cheapest thing on the menu.  Translated into American dollars that's a little under four dollars.  So it is a little bit more expensive for China.

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One doesn't discover China. Discovery is trumped here.   You cannot discover a country that claims a five thousand year continuous history.  You may contest the assertion, but you cannot tell them that you precede them. Or rather, you can suggest it, but no one will believe you.

Discovery is a false and bogus thing.  Ask Columbus and the fake holiday we still get off.  People were here like the Chinese were there; and the Chinese memory cannot  be trumped.

The discipline of the current African American scholar suggests clear analysis, craft, and research method gives rise to remedy.  More than often it attempts to pivot a celebrity success or academic award to hope for the rest of us.  It is the flip side of the Trump blindside.  If all that craft mattered someone like Trump could never be elected by the Right.   In Marc Gallicchio's, The African American Encounter with Japan and China, he discusses the African American internationalism inspired by the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905.  The Russian defeat inspired African-Americans towards an internationalism that categorized the Japanese as a non-white ally capable of combating white world supremacy.  Gallicchio is clear about the limits of such internationalism; and though he does not indict African Americans for being naïve, he implies it.   African American internationalism is an extension of our national view of politics.  Gallicchio clarifies how racism simplifies our world view.  We tend to admire or not admire other nations based on whether they are racist or not.  Hence, the commonly asked question, "How do they treat you in China?", or the concern with the Chinese in Africa.  The truth  of racism marginalizes the quest for a black internationalism.  Our view within and without the borders of the country is racist-centric and nationalistic, independently of whether we proscribe to a nationalism (black) or not.  The truth of China stretches beyond racism, partially because it is not the nation we reside in.  "Made in China" is as important for the black intellectual as is Chinese racism.  "Made in China" challenges us to think about the economics of the modern world being as definitive as the racism we encounter.  Even if the Chinese were clearly racist they would be as hard to boycott as Ford, Mercedes Benz, the British, or any of the other exclusive brands we desire.  .

And one doesn't imagine Chinese freedom within the system of European codes.  Google ain't there, Yahoo hard to get at, and state censorship, the oppression of women, and Human Right's Abuses, are some of the few things Americans know about China.    "Made in China" worker slave sweat shop style used to be much more imaginable, but things change.   High speed rails that exceed the American limit, or the rate of construction that defies American dreams, space programs, and forward thinking in renewable energy, challenge the American and Western limit.  Just a few years ago, an American executive with gloss in his eyes told me fifty percent of the cranes used to construct high rises were deployed in just two Chinese cities: Beijing and Shanghai.  Unpredictable and amazing.

Most Americans are much more clear about the negatives of China, though the negatives may work to our advantage. If China didn't have the atomic bomb they could be easy target for harboring weapons of mass destruction and become a toppled regime that led to another "established" Western democracy.  At the least, the miraculous rise of China over the last few decades has protected them from such.  In other words, the West is fond of imagining if a country doesn't live up to its sense of freedom, democracy, and justice and is non-European, their success is doomed.  Internationally, the West writes the myth upon world history that democracy and its political philosophies are somehow essential to the success of some of the most prosperous countries in the world.   This myth has served China well and seems to mask the many successes the country has produced in the past few decades.  If anything China is unpredictable, because it seems impossible to excel without the philosophical structure of the West.

I must also say here, that one of the strange things about American freedom, is the way African Americans, who are symbol of the contradictions within the country, lack an international perspective(one that is even more pronounced in the East with exception of martial arts films and Bruce Lee) and  seem to be experts on the freedom of other people in the world. In our "ghetto of ideas" we play the role of the sophisticated witness who knows oppression because we have been afflicted so.   This marginalized, authoritative position, is really an extension of the market economy of blackness' In some ways, the reductive assessment of other's freedoms as a substitute for any genuine knowledge of the culture, transcends the boundaries of the left, right, and the African American.  We imagine the bottom line on anybody's  country is how much freedom they have.  Though one may not say it publicly, the Hijab most likely serves as a symbol of the absence of freedom on the left, as much as it does on the right.  The difference being, one fears it and the other imagines there is absolutely nothing to be feared, because the oppression is so obvious.

Though the metaphors of China imagine a veil that cast a darkness almost as dark as Africa, the hijab is more distant.  Chinese folks most often wear Western clothes and seem "normal."  The little boy says "hello" in perfect English and I wonder how does he know.  And there in the veil is an agency the West seems reluctant to grant Africa.  The mysterious in China is now like similar to the quilts and songs African Americans used to hide our culture and quest for freedom in plain view.  We are African as an adjective to American, and the gaze into China makes it evident.   Like Americans we gaze into the international with the same shades the rest of the culture  has. Defiance of the limit, or a more nuanced perspective is easily categorized as useless idealism or absolutely irrelevant. 

Another point of reference in China is the question of safety.  The term "China Safe" tests the boundaries of the Western imagination, though the notion of a gunless society makes it quite obvious.  Again, those from the Left and Right will imagine one does not feel safe in China without the guns.  Perhaps some do not, but I did.  After about three months, as I settled into a late night walk from a bar, I realized the chances of me being shot were so slim, that I need not think about it anymore, ever, at least while I was in China. Indeed, it seemed a bit of Western propaganda, that the absence of guns and "freedom" put me more at risk in terms of my "true freedom" in China, than  the presence at home.

Matters were clarified for me, when sometime mid trip, I received a call from home that my wife and daughter had been robbed at gunpoint in Southeast Washington.  I am all too proud that my daughter purchased her first property there.  Yet, for all the Southeast nostalgia, the robbery seemed to be part of the landscape.  Years ago, when my family lived in Capitol Heights just over the D.C. line, we were robbed and used to the sound of gunshots in the night.  A joint task force of the National Guard, the Maryland State Police, Capitol Heights and Prince George's County Police would often set up on the corner of Central Ave and Eastern Avenue.  Our house was on a hill and if I looked out from the window at the top, I could see the glow of the military lights they pulled into place in order to light up the night and eliminate the darkness down at the corner of Central and Eastern Avenues.  The presence of violent crime was a part of our lives, though we seemed lucky then.  More witness than victim, but also victimized by being witness.  It is hard to hear gunshots at night or drive past a dead body and constantly be certain of ones safety.

The tension doesn't exist in China, but then again, I was a foreigner.  I was not an Ughyer or a member of Falon Gong, or one of the minorities. But then again in America with the incarceration rate of black men, many will say, whatever black man I am, is different from the black man incarcerated.  Indeed, Americans know more about Chinese oppression than Chinese anything.  Please do not take my comments as insensitive.  They are no more insensitive than tax paying in a country where the prison population is disproportionately black or going to work on a day Freddie Gray is murdered.  The 1.6 billion in China may be as sensitive to what we view as Chinese oppression as we are to America's many and mostly unjustified wars.  At times our American righteousness is laughable.

China can be like the metaphor of the African jungle as deep, dark, and mysterious without the binary of blackness conjuring up some negative.  To reference the Tao even the West knows they don't know.

China exists with 1.6 billion people and thousands of years of history.  Either you know or you don't know.  If you get involved you learn.  It is really that simple and different and resists the traditional foreigner narrative.  Even colonialism seems to be a time period within the history of the country as compared to the destabilization of the whole culture that has transformed it into something else.