Let's not forget Malcolm X was killed. Martin Luther King, Jr. too. We could imagine them as black bodies fallen on the timeline of history; but that seems, even for the least radical of us, to be some gross reduction.
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Free Black Space seems more important than ever, and Free Black Space is different than the Black Lives Matter. The differences are obvious and then wear down to a series of subtle distinctions.
For starters, Free Black Space is an internal movement. It is about community and where and how black Folks gather. It is about the sophisticated internal conversations black folks have about the shape of the world, what's trending, and the capacity for internal power.
That our lives matter and all lives matter should be obvious; but in defense of Black Lives Matter it is clear distinctions are made. Black folks are murdered too often. Not just by the police, but also by each other.
But Free Black Space has been clear. Our minds matter too. What we say. What we think. What we feel. What we write. What we articulate.
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Only white supremacy as a grand wizard of superhuman power seems to cast a shadow of the mind that exist in black folks.
And yes, it is the human mind.
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Free Black Space also recognizes that most forms of external movement that get at blackness are tactical, as compared to essential. Activism can trend, but rarely changes internal dynamics.
In fact, activism is often a haze of internalized energy externalized.
I mean if all the white supremacist in the world disappeared a lot of black folks would still hate themselves, get their hair pressed, kill each other, and run around talking about European culture as though it came from god.
And even if we didn't do any of those things, we would still be killing folks, using drugs, raping, being mad, whatever. A dangerous part of the analysis of white supremacy is the way it pivots on the external enemy, and in that way reinforces our belief in heaven/hell, us vs them ideas.
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The Free Black Space cipher eliminates the contradiction. It ain't heaven, but it is balance. You can't use white power in a Free Black Space cipher. Knowledge is not limited to degrees, weird quotes, and references to the known world. Folks is at the least mystical, and on may levels smarter than that.
I'll say it another way. Teaching white people to be anti-racist in a Free Black Space is easily recognized as game. Those old black history heroes banged in a Free Black Space all the time. Malcolm and King for instance, had to deal with black people everyday. Managed affairs with them, depended on people who were like them to manage complex organizations and solve complex problems.
It might be best to look at them as the black people who now work for white people, working for black people and not getting paid as much. At the least, there are as good as, if not better than, the most sophisticated corporate strategist, and Essence, Forbes list black folks we are familiar with.
It is hard to imagine, but real. It is only the illusion of white supremacy that makes us imagine black intellectualism dramatically increases in close proximity with white people. We can be certain, success, and access to capital do; but the rest is up for debate.
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America seems to be beyond a black revolution at this point. An integrated approach to social change is cool, but chances of black people ending up on the back of the bus are high.
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Recently, I have referred to the black body as a mascot of activism. George Floyd's murder functions like an earthquake in American history. The thawing ice on the river is dangerous to walk across.
George Floyd's body somehow becomes his voice. Perhaps the heart of white supremacy is that brutality and violence give Western Logic the ability to predict phenomena. To spend years talking about the black body, and then to see George murdered, makes us imagine the trope is actually reality. Throw in an intellectual class trained in white institutions of power, social media, a pandemic, and a market economy of blackness, and we appear to be living a history we can change if we would only think differently.
Unfortunately, we seem to be downloading the same ideas. In Free Black Space, the hustle is god. Folks rarely bang you up about how you make a living. We be like, if it works for you, it's all good. Free Black Space is physical down to the moment. You get respect for being there. We be like, well, you might say something about white folks, or travel round the country lecturing, but you here with us. Shit, there are crack dealers and murderers in the room, folks who went to prison, honest day working black folks who do whatever it is they can do to get by. It's all good.
But freedom may be different. Substitute social change if you are outside Free Black Space.
Freedom might be the holiest thing black folks got. Bigger and better than Jesus. Folks will jump back, and that's cool; but freedom-our freedom hazy between laws and eternal law is the eye of the needle towards higher consciousness. Because, if the highest consciousness transcends ideas of right and wrong, being black literally requires you to do that.
You gotta meditate on it for a minute, maybe even a couple of years. But it's real. It's true.
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I resist most capitalist critiques because I come from Free Black Space. Folks need jobs, housing, protection from police brutality, education, and all the bells and whistles of citizenship. Money is required. Folks who make money selling social change, and twisted versions of blackness, critiquing capitalism fascinates me. Folks who believe in Ivy League training critiquing capitalism amaze me.
Everybody know money is god here.
Free Black Space ain't no different.
But freedom is a different thing. Freedom is arguably the most sacred concept black folks have. In that way we are as American as any other American. And we love the idea of freedom because we know it is somehow different for us. There is American freedom we got, still trying to get; and then there is a freedom we seek that is almost cosmic. The second is the freedom our ancestors was trying to get. It is a freedom somewhere in the future that moves on some time line we haven't really stabilized. Sometimes we appear closer, other times we appear to be farther away. It is a freedom that we seem to own because it doesn't always match up with the American freedom.
One of the things about George Floyd is his body speaks more than his mouth and ideas. Remember Malcolm X Speaks. The idea is radical. Malcolm as a black body is a dangerous reduction. Marable's Maclolm X: A Life of Reinvention could be almost any American, American institution, or American hero. Italian Mafias becoming iconic, Europe's tired, poor, and weak becoming white, colonialist becoming revolutionaries, drug dealers becoming billionaires.
In one of the Free Black Space early posts, I had the chance to interact with Robert Pinsky as part of a Frederick Reads program. For those who don't know Pinsky, he served as Poet Laureate of the U.S. for many years; and spent much time promoting poetry in the public arena. As I prepared for the reading, I found out he spent considerable time discussing Malcolm as an American in his first book, An Explanation of America. Though I use the word discussion, to be clear, he portrayed Malcolm as an essential American.
God bless him. It is either Stephen Henderson, the esteemed Howard University Scholar whose Understanding the New Black Poetry, seemed to best capture a craft before that MFA craft; Ethelbert Miller, the guardian elder of D.C. poetry; or Sekou Sundiata, the spoken word master, who told me that in the seventies all the black poets had to have have a Malcolm X poem.
It may be now all the poets have to have a George Floyd poem.
Malcolm was easily as iconic as George Floyd, and Malcolm spoke in Malcolm X Speaks.
Another side note. I talked to an old student today. He is an amazing guy who has six children. He is also a High School teacher. He had posted on social media a question about what books he should teach his children. He is prepping for the on-line semester and charting his trajectory.
I should also say, I ain't really into books like that anymore. I could even argue, I am the book. If the African proverb is real, that when an old person dies in Africa, a library burns- a lot of people I know, many who ain't even reading like that, are the book. One step further, and interstellar on George Floyd, my practice of Taiji makes my body the book too. My body is the text. My relationship with my body is as sophisticated a reading, and as nuanced and detailed as any masterful work of literature. My body is like the Bible-I be reading it everyday. So I am not down with text worship. Books, yeah, they cool; but I'ma Free Black Space guy-so I ain't tripping on em like that.
Anyway, he's got Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Emerson, and a couple of folks on the list. No Malcolm, no George Jackson, no Stockley Carmichael. I understand, but his reading list is hip; but there's no George Floyd on it. I mean what is the literary equivalent of George Floyd. George Floyd Speaks. What would he say. The question challenges the current moment in a way that might be unsettling to some. Whiteness studies, black intellectuals in white institutions of power, and the body of George Floyd. A prize winning book that makes Malcolm into less than noble, followed by the nobility of a "black body."
I have not really dealt with George Floyd much in detail. I stopped after I saw a news report with a man who looked like he was in his thirties, being interviewed with a woman, who said she had to tell the boy, that man they killed in Minnesota was his father. Unfortunately, I stopped taking things seriously after that, and focused more on his murder.
What's telling about my student's list is the clear range and sense of the academic and the literary. I recommended a black male voice speaking about freedom, liberation, and blackness in society. It may not be time for that.
And to return to Pinsky, his look at Malcolm as an American is one of the most radical things I've ever seen a white person do. Looking at Malcolm as an American is even deeper than transcending white supremacy. It's some eye of the needle shit. I asked him that day, if he had ever heard of another white poet including Malcolm X in a poem. He was Poet Laureate at the time. He said, "I'll get back to you." The polite no.
Think about that. Everybody black writing a Malcolm poem in the sixties and seventies, but the white poets wasn't in the everybody. Shit, Amiri Baraka changed his life after the death of Malcolm X. Malcolm X get debunked, like he was a two time hustler, who invented himself in the name of race-and somebody getting rich now after talking about how they can't protect their son, or selling the idea of diversity and inclusion to billion dollar corporations?
George Floyd Speaks. Somebody tells you how they changed their life after George Floyd died. How do you take that?
It's fascinating. If folks were doing that fifty years ago with Malcolm, now we doing it with George Floyd?
The issue goes back to Pinsky. It is a rare White American who can find the significance in the black American that transcends race. Americans are just good folks. Wanna eat good food, hang out, whatever; but we also love our ideas.
The original idea is get over here. Second idea is get some shit, more than what we got. Third idea is hard work, freedom, and big ego that makes us think we did everything on our own. Next comes race, guns, and all the other stuff. You might even throw in Christianity somewhere before or after three.
Truth is white folks and black folks are the same on most of those things. Poor Black Americans given race as the piece of the empire they in charge of, and now that's about to become white studies. Shit, Covid will be over, and black bookstores will be stocking more books on whiteness and anti-racism.
Pinsky looked at Malcolm that way. He's rare in that. Maybe the only one. Intellectual smart black folks do a Malcolm takedown before anyone; but maybe Malcolm's heart is the heart of America.
Refine rhetoric, create solutions, upward mobility, quest for freedom, speaking truth to England-oops I mean power.
The trade in race has all these things. It is not really about freedom at this stage. It is one of the reasons George Floyd's body is so important. We seem to agree on there is nothing else to say, and then move off into the vast lands of our divisions.
If George Floyd spoke truth to power, we might judge him differently.
