It's a cold ass day in the empire of language. We could easily explain that by the fact that it is January. I'm just outside of Washington, D.C., the seat of the greatest empire on earth. Down at the Capitol the men and women who run this great country are issuing edicts of power to shape and transform the world. There are mounds of paper and servers running all day everyday. There's a constant whir of the wheels of the machine humming up under everything we know. The machine runs and giant units press hot and cold into the world, depending on what they choose.

Today is a cold day. It almost seems that way everyday for those living in the black. There's a little heat in the Free Black Space, but what does it mean when the cold wind blows? We huddle just a little closer together, blow into our hands. Say, "Damm, it's cold as shit in here!", and that makes us a little bit warmer.

So Scholastic pulled the book written by Ramin Geshram and Vanessa Brantley-Newton. The title of the children's book was
A Birthday Cake for George Washington. Like the country and the empire of language, the book struggled to present a portion of history connected to slavery while remaining "positive." The inability to reconcile black history with the narrative of the country is a systematic problem burrowed into our DNA. It is a matter of the cultural codes of the cognitive. Here at Free Black Space we have recently produced quite a few posts on children's books and the empire of language. Books introduce children to the cognitive codes found in the empire enabling them to learn the necessary skills needed to navigate the culture and society. Here at Free Black Space we are not news. We just giving up approaches to help black folks process the depressing repetitive nature of "the same old news" that keeps coming at us. A happy slave is old news. It's me in high school thirty some odd years ago, having a conversation about how slaves would have been worse off if they had not been enslaved. God forgive them for they know not what they do.

I don't know much about Ramin Geshram, but apparently she's a chef whose got folks from Trinidad and Tobago. Don't know about Vanessa Brantley-Newton. She appears to be a Simon and Schuster author who has created a few books in series. One should check the article by Christopher Myers, son of acclaimed author Walter Dean Myers for another perspective on this topic. It's called "The Apartheid of Children's Literature"the Apartheid of Children's Books. The Free Black Space Blogs Cargo Billups Goes Looking for Lips, Seven Books for Black children You Have to Have, and Empire of Language for Children, were posted before the Scholastic fiasco and focus on black children's literature. The point here is we have experts in the field of children's books who wouldn't be down with the happy slave narrative. In almost religious fashion, the happy slave does not reconcile with the inner conviction of many expert writers and scholars. Scholastic's publication of A Birthday Cake for George Washington suggest how this conviction may be viewed by the larger society. Industry professionals may imagine the author who will not write the happy slave narrative is not a happy slave. The black audience can change that, but the book has already been published. The protest and response is expensive and takes much more time than simply publishing the authors who keep our ideas in mind. Conviction about how blacks are to be portrayed often exists outside of the mechanics of industry. The way white folks think about black folks, incorrect or not, is a fundamental part of the empire of language. People make money catering to the whack ideas about black folks, whether they are true or not. It is like slavery all over again. As an idea slavery is whack, but its promotion makes people lots of money.

As Myers states in his article, publishers often don't publish certain books because they operate in a market where white readers may not buy a book with black characters in it for their white children, but often the issue runs deeper than this. A year or so back, I remember a New York Times article about black poetry quite a few black poets threw their hands up about. I had received an e-mail from a prominent poet the day before expecting the publicity, which was followed by disappointment. In spite of the credentials of The New York Tiimes, they seemed to get quite a few things wrong. Black writers in the empire of language often go unpublished. The justification is usually a question of craft. Supposedly we go unpublished because we can't write. The explanation is like a happy slave narrative. When someone don't publish it, treat the lack of publication like the lot of being a slave. Master knows best. Contrast this, with how many times you see a piece of media that gets us wrong. Gets our history wrong, gets the intimacies of our life wrong. The issue here, is that whites can't get us wrong and still do everything right. There seems to be no greater negation. Sadly, within the empire of language it is far too common. Check your feed today and process how much of the news is really not news-nothing new, but the same old.

It's not uncommon. I can't help but think about the recent huff and puff over Sean Penn's interview with El Chapo. A few of my friends had to hip me to how suspect it was for Penn to send a proof of the article to El Chapo. Apparently, this breaks journalistic protocol. My naivete shows how unedcuated I am. Countless newspapers have few black folks on staff. Much of the information I read about black folks seems to be oddly repetitive. Our get over narratives, our up by our bootstraps, our angry protest, our once was lost, but now I am found. I confess, I have begun to imagine journalism and literature as an eye of the needle only certain blacks can pass through. The guardians of the needle are white publishers and editors who often know little about our history, culture, and literature. I imagine they get us wrong quite frequently because the discipline and craft are suspect. I am often perplexed by how in spite of their often getting it wrong, how excited we become when we achieve some success via those channels, as though our absence does not render their judgment faulty. As for Chapo and Penn, the proof seems to reflect how anyone would respond to the request of a billion dollar man capable of sending hit men to your house. It is practical, as practical as whites publishing something about a happy slave. The question is not simply that they got it wrong-really they got it right, they was about to get paid off a lie.

I mean who signed off on the happy slave? Obviously, the author and the illustrator did, but who else? Those are the same folks who when they see your manuscript throw it in the slush pile and send you a rejection-maybe cuz you writing for black folks who don't buy enough books. All craft is balanced by the existing cognitive structures of the empire of language. A chef, a slave, George Washington, black illustrator, and a birthday cake just before Black History Month, is like Ta Nehisi Coates, a riot, Baltimore, reparations, and Black Lives Matter. We like to imagine it is only about the literature-only about the work. We sound like slaves. The truth is how literature as event and capitalist venture is engineered in the empire of language. Best selling books are written and engineered. The error here is not that black folks were offended. The book wasn't for us anyway. You could buy if you want, but you wasn't the market anyway. We ain't banging in the indstury like that. The book is a crossever chef book about George Washington and a slave that would make whites folks feel good to learn about George. The slave is a prop for the real story about George. The slave is like you at your job as a diversity representative who allows folks to feel like they are living out the true vision of founding father's who owned slaves. If you go home, tossing and turning at night, cuz you ain't happy; its partly because you sposed to be a happy slave. The book hits home. The happy slave is not a historical trope-it's an active way of viewing blacks.

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Somebody might think you is a happy slave.

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The metaphor of the happy slave is a perfect place to begin to understand the empire of language. A happy slave is something that doesn't really exist except in the empire of language. If you black you might take your knowledge for granted. This is normal in the empire. What you know that is rarely expressed is the place where the history presses you into the straightjacket of the history not history. All these educated black folks now, strangely verify that once we didn't have no knowledge. It is simply not the case. Part of what made the slave unhappy was that we wasn't buying the bullshit going from the empire. We knew different.

Talk of craft in the empire of language and the publishing industry is subverted by the bad metaphors that abound in the English discpline. The father and mother of all bad metaphors in the English discpline is the representation of black as negative concept that is somehow connected to the skin of certain people.

The identification of this metaphor is simple and profound. For we tend to think of racism as something that involves thought, when in fact, folks who make use of the dark skins negative metaphor can't help but be racist. The only thing that saves you from most racist metaphors is slave consciousness. You know there's no happy slave first and foremost cuz you ain't happy about slavery. Never, not even on the day after Christmas. Some metaphors/many metaphors allow us to to stop thinking. Metaphors can easily operate like floodgates and allow one to mix thoughts with feelings and emotions under the guise of the metaphor's sense. That is what we are dealing with here. How a happy slave can make metaphorical sense to a streamlined production chain in a major corporation that makes billions of dollars.

A finely constructed metaphor can easily make one feel overwhelmed by the connections created by the engineer. One can easily take the associations for granted. In this regard there is a certain innocence in racism we have yet to decode. All the violence and murder done in the name of racism are negative and one should be punished; however,the perplexed, I didn't know what I was doing approach is honest. The metaphor of you being a nigger, or happy slave, works in conjunction with a certain consciousness. The cure might not be better arguments, but better metaphors integrated into the fabric of society.

Those who buy into some happy slave thought are not thinking it through anymore than you think through the relationship between your transmission, engine, and ignition when you start your car. No doubt this suspension of thought is dangerous, but it is part of the way metaphors can work. The great metaphors suspend thought, but then require an undoing that can easily take a lifetime. One returns to them with more developed consciousness and sees their genius again and again.

Happy slave is simply a bad metaphor. Even more dangerous in a society where people rely on their conscious thought in spite of their constant reversion to racist reactions. Metaphor's explains partially how clear thinking people still show up making whack associations. The metaphor is the science of the empire of language. A good one can free your mind, and a bad one can enslave you. This point requires meditation and highlights the role and responsibility of the author. It helps us focus on the quest of the black writer to create concepts that reconcile our consciousness with the existing codes of language in an empire that has relegated us to the bottom rungs of the binary. The task to create new metaphors that actually acknowledge the truth of our conditions is difficult but worthy. For once put into operation they allow us to get more work done and operate with a higher level of conceptual effeciency.

The metaphor is a cognitive block, capable of triggering the impulsive. An encounter with a clear metaphor can empower or confuse. One leaves the metaphor imagining that the linking of elements make sense. The question is what sense? Happy Slave reconciles perfectly with a racist sense. The fact that the book went through production without getting flagged for it, is simply a sign of how much sense it makes in the empire. You thought you knew didn't you?

Truth is white folks can't help themselves. And truth be told, neither can blacks. The dark skinned folks employed are just like countless others at their jobs admiring their success. The approval process is enough to make many Negros turn off their brain. If you read the work of Elijah Muhammad and attempt to move beyond the pronouncement of "the Negro hates themselves," you are missing the point. You must contemplate Elijah as you would the Dalai Lama. Most will find that assertion ridiculous. The Dalai Lama represents centuries of learning, and Elijah-he's just a poor flawed man from Poolesville, Georgia. But if you contemplate it, you understand that our self hatred is impulsive and built into the codes of language, the cognitive blocks of the empire. Even if you don't hate yourself, you must understand the logic of someone who does hate you. This confusing principle is a beginning cognitive block. There's some child on the edge of a playground right now getting the children's version of this lesson; but there's really no supporting logic for it. There's no way to be really be a happy slave. That we hate ourselves, or that the cognitive blocks of language require we create some type of logic to explain a logic saying we are worthy of hate is whack. Somebody has to say we are taught to hate ourselves. It has to be recorded; and it can't be casually dismissed. It cannot be forgotten If you study Malcolm, you should know that this cognitive shift is at the foundation of his development-impossible to extract from the work he did afterwards. For years he believed in Elijah and what he said. The average intellectuals believes in white folks more than any other code or system created by blacks. The average negro believes in white folks more than logic. It is sadly one of the reasons there are few Malcolms. How many times have you stomached the conceptual idea that you are worth less than white folks? How many times have you been forced to imiagine that your negation is an almost needless detail in a conversation before you revert back to your job of making money or getting your work done. Stay focused now. You can't change that. But perhaps you should.

Enter the happy slave. It's a metaphor that works for someone who doesn't know African American history, which happens to be most of the country. The notion of slaveholders is no more lighthearted than Cosby's rape of women. It is not a needless detail that exists in relationship to their other activities, but one that reflects a morality capable of indicting everything else they did. If you don't think so, try hiring some slaves or engage in the practice in your life and see if it doesn't dramatically change your trajectory. In this day and time, hopefully you will got to jail.

The point is slavery flaws the cognitive framework for remembering the history of the country. You attempt to imagine that negation of the country's history is too harsh a position. You wanna say forget the founding fathers and bite your tongue, only to find out that your silence gives rise to the notion of happy slaves-a thing that never really existed.

Free Black Space