"July Had Tried to Kill Them"
“July had tried to kill them. First it tried to burn them. Then it tried to suffocate them. And finally, when neither of those things was successful, it made the air thick like water, hoping they would drown. It failed. Its only triumph was in making them sticky and mean—sometimes, toward each other.” — Robert Jones, Jr., The Prophets
Hello Family,
Please forgive me, but this is going to be one of those long newsletters. I had a lot to think and talk about this go around because there is so much going on.
But before we get to that: How are you? In spite of everything, I hope that you are enjoying your summer if you are in the Northern hemisphere and enjoying your winter if you are in the Southern.
Let me tell you what happened to me a couple of weeks back.
I was walking back from the grocery store, minding my business as I was listening to music through my headphones (I think “The Pleasure Principle” by Janet Jackson was playing) before my cousin called me. It was a pretty nice day—warm, sunny, with a light breeze—and I guess I must have been smiling while we were chatting, which made this brother sitting by the curb of the sidewalk ask me:
Why the fuck you so happy?
I thought he was joking, so I kind of laughed a bit. But then I recognized that for him, it was a very serious question. He went on:
Walking down the street smiling and shit! For what? Who you on the phone with? Did they give you some money or something?
I didn’t stop smiling, but I continued to walk on, not wanting to unnecessarily escalate the situation. I asked my cousin:
Did you hear that?
Yes, she said. Then added: Was he drunk?
She was suggesting that it might have just been a mind-altering substance talking. He did, in fact, seem to be intoxicated. But I’ve been around enough people with an alcohol addiction to know that sometimes alcohol can function as a truth serum.
When I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about what that man said. About how my happiness disturbed him so badly that he felt bold enough to confront a complete stranger on the street about it. What must his life be like? What must he be enduring if someone else’s happiness offends him? What would such an inside-festering wound lead him to do? Or not do?
I started interrogating myself, too. Did I have a right to be happy? To smile in the face of everything going on in my neighborhood, in the city, in the state, in the country, in the world? On top of all of that, a few days later, the skies over Brooklyn turned an ominous orange due to forest fires in Canada. Wildfires on the East Coast; snowstorms on the West Coast. It’s wild how Catastrophic Climate Change has switched our weather patterns and there are still people denying, for self-serving reasons, what is now undeniable. What was there to be happy about?
Ultimately, I concluded that if I did not hold on to my own joy—however fleeting, however microscopic; if I did not sometimes wear it proudly, publicly on my face and allow it at least some room in my heart, then I was, in essence, admitting defeat to the forces that would like nothing more than for me to surrender; forces that rejoice at the prospect of me assisting them in making my own life and the lives of others as miserable as possible before we are persuaded to take each other out on their behalf.
I thought back to something—a truth, I believe—that I wrote in The Prophets:
Tiny resistances were a kind of healing in a weeping place.
That is what I believe my smile and my happiness are: a tiny form of resistance; a kind of healing. Despite all of the energy expended by the powers-that-stole to guarantee my imminent destruction, here I be: finding moments to escape their treachery and dodge their tyranny to fully remember and fully embrace who I am and who I come from such that my lips can’t help but part and frame my teeth with love. As long as I’m alive, there is a chance to do something that eases, that improves, that inspires, that loves.
I’m still thinking about that man on the street. I hope he finds the peace that eludes him.
And that is also my wish for the whole world: May peace fill the many voids such that all human beings can be bearers of kindness rather than agents of suffering.
Ášę.
Events
I had the great fortune of being invited to participate in the 5th Annual Schomburg Center Literary Festival. I had such an extraordinary time that I almost can’t put it into words.
To begin, much of the festival takes place outdoors. And so not only do you have the benefit of taking in the sunshine, but you also have the chance to interact with Harlem residents and other visitors who are at the festival, or people who are just passing by because they live in the area and/or are out running errands. There was a palpable community vibe that just elevated the experience.
I got to chat with my baby-brother-from-another-mother Danté Stewart about his work, including his debut memoir, Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle.
One of the greatest moments in my life happened when I got to meet and witness the testimony of 109-year-old Ms. Viola “Mother” Ford Fletcher and her 102-year-old brother Mr. Hughes Van Ellis, two of the three survivors of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. I can’t tell you what that experience was like other than to say that it was HOLY. Ms. Fletcher will be releasing her memoir, Don't Let Them Bury My Story: The Oldest Living Survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre in Her Own Words, on August 15, 2023. Be sure to pre-order your copy.
And speaking of holy: I was also in conversation with the amazing Jafari S. Allen (There’s a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life) and Samiya Bashir (Field Theories). I was read an excerpt from the “Bel and the Dragon” chapter of The Prophets, the part where the character Kosii is trapped during the Middle Passage and he is cursing his captors:
A curse. A curse upon you and all of your progeny. May you writhe in ever-pain. May you never find satisfaction. May your children eat themselves alive.
But it was too late and the curse held no meaning because it was redundant.
While reading, the otherwise bright and sunny day gave way to an exceptionally strong and sustained gust of wind that had everyone under the tent shook, as though I were evoking something in the Universe or casting a spell. It even had Samiya comment immediately afterwards: “As he was reading, a whole windstorm came though.”
What a moment!
Last year, I attended the Miami Book Fair virtually and the video is now available for public viewing.
I finally got to meet the one and only Roxane Gay and the first author published under her publishing imprint (Ani Kayode Somtochukwu, whose debut novel is called And Then He Sang a Lullaby) at their talk at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn.
Also at the Center for Fiction, I was invited to speak openly and honestly with the Center for Fiction Fellows. Big shout out to the director of the program, Randy Winston for the invitation and thank you to the fellows for their questions. And please be on the lookout for the following incredible writers: Sara Aboulafia, JP Infante, Diana Kole, Emmanuel Lachaud, Sabrina Helen Li, and Jiaming Tang. Remember their names, FAME! :)
David Santos Donaldson and I were in conversation at the Bureau of General Services - Queer Division (BGSQD), located inside New York’s famous The Center. BGSQD is one of the few bookstores in the country that exclusively carries books by LGBTQIA+ authors. David and I talked about everything from growing up at the intersection of Blackness and queerness to publishing later in life. We had an amazing time thanks to our hosts Donnie and Greg (aka “Marie”), and the beautiful audience that showed up and showed out. I hadn’t been to The Center since like 1990. It was so different. Talk about an HGTV makeover!
I early voted in Brooklyn back in June. In my district, the only candidates up for election were for the civil court judges position.
I know a lot of people feel like “voting doesn’t matter” in regard to the causes and conditions of marginalized people. And I understand why people feel that way, given the performance—or the lack of performance; or more precisely, the vindictive performance—of government and politicians. Despite that, I vote in every single election. Sometimes, I even write-in “no confidence” when I believe the candidates lack the compassion, dedication, experience, intelligence, and patience required to lead. I do my research on all of the candidates to see where each of them stand on the issues important to me. And it’s such a shame how difficult they make it to find the political stances of these people running for elected leadership positions.
I vote in every election because I know presidents appoint judges. I especially vote in local elections, where we vote on who the judges, city council members, mayors, and such are. I’ve seen firsthand how the wrong person getting elected can have a direct and lasting deleterious impact on the living conditions of me and my neighbors. One person in one election can be the difference between, for example, treating drug addiction like a war on people or treating it like a health crisis in which people need help.
Not to shame anyone, because yeah: the whole system does suck. It’s completely corrupt. It’s entirely stacked against the marginalized. It’s violent. You’re not wrong. But both/and, not either/or: “Voting doesn’t matter” until mayor after mayor launch directed attacks against those who suffer injustice most. “Voting doesn’t matter” until a mayor wins the election and allegedly begins to run his office like a mob organization focused on the enrichment of him and his friends rather than the health and safety of the citizens in his city.
“Voting doesn’t matter” until a cruel, racist, anti-queer/trans judge gets appointed or elected and commits to using her power to oppress all of those she deems beneath human consideration. “Voting doesn’t matter” until the candidates who seem to be puppets for billionaires and corporations win and make sure that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. “Voting doesn’t matter” yet they use every weapon in their arsenal to make sure you don’t have access to polls, that your vote gets thrown out, that you remain apathetic about the process, and that you are terrified to even try.
“Voting doesn’t matter” until it does.
And by then, it’s too late.
All tea, but no shade.
Features
It was a humbling experience to discover that The New York Times included The Prophets on their list of “The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature.” My novel is featured alongside the work of legendary luminaries like James Baldwin, Essex Hemphill, and Audre Lorde, as well as my brilliant contemporaries Jericho Brown, Torrey Peters, Danez Smith, and Bryan Washington. A hearty thank you to Roxane Gay and Edmund White for finding special value in my work.
Excerpt:
Gay: For my part, I think Robert Jones Jr.’s “The Prophets” is undersung. When I read it, I gasped many times. It’s about two gay men who have a loving and generous relationship during the slavery era. It’s one of the only books I’ve read about enslavement where the enslaved people not only hated their circumstances but were openly defiant — poisoning their enslavers, vengeful in ways that I think all of us understand and would love to see more of. Nobody’s just like, “I’ll get through it,” the way you see in a lot of enslavement narratives.
20. “The Prophets” by Robert Jones Jr., 2021
Same-sex love assumes grave risk in Robert Jones Jr.’s first novel, set on a cotton plantation in Mississippi nicknamed Empty. There, two enslaved teenagers, Samuel and Isaiah, go about “working, eating, sleeping, playing” and making love “on purpose.” This last qualifier is remarkable within the sexual economy of Empty, where men and women are forced to propagate for the benefit of their master’s work force and, frequently, for his personal pleasure. When a fellow enslaved person — seeking to protect his wife from such brutality by currying favor with the owner — begins sermonizing the Christian gospel, he draws attention to Samuel and Isaiah, who in the eyes of others blend “into one blue-black mass, defined by the mistaken belief that it was a broken manhood coating their skin.” Taking many of its chapter names from books of the Bible (Deuteronomy, Judges, Psalms), the novel rotates among several perspectives, including that of a woman named Sarah, who remembers her birthplace “deep in the bush” of Africa, where gender was chosen and names assigned based on “how your soul manifested.” These overlapping narratives portray a system in which “everything that was learned had to be transmitted by circling the thing rather than uncovering it” and love becomes an act of resistance. — R.C.
White: I reviewed that book — it’s great.
Gay: He works in the vein of Baldwin, but also in a vein that’s all his own. I think it’s important to emphasize that we shouldn’t necessarily be looking for people to step into the shoes of other queer writers.
It was heartwarming to learn that Anne Rice’s son, author Christopher Rice, included The Prophets, as well as Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me, on his list of nine must-read works of LGBTQ historical fiction.
Interviews
My participation in the Schomburg Center Literary Festival lead to an interview with one of our local news stations, NY1/Spectrum News, which I gave alongside Magogodi oaMphela Makhene (author of Innards) on Juneteenth. It was my first live television interview. It was nerve-racking, but also a lot of fun because the station’s staff was so kind, helpful, and welcoming, and Magogodi is a fantastic interview partner.
It is always a blessing to get to chat with Danielle Moodie, one of the, if not the, most astute political minds on the planet. And she regularly goes in, on her podcast Woke AF.
And it is also always a pleasure to be able to speak to Maiyisha Kai. She’s the host and creator of The Grio podcast, Writing Black.
What I Heard
These songs are currently on repeat in my playlist:
“Under The Moon And Over The Sky” by Angela Bofill
“Quimbara” by Celia Cruz
“Anything” by Lee England, Jr.
“Front End” by Jidenna featuring Roman GianArthur, Gardens, and Villa
“Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” by Franz Liszt
“Lipstick Lover” by Janelle Monae
“Smoke” by Victoria Monet featuring Lucky Daye
“It’s A Party” by Busta Rhymes featuring Zhané
“Without” by Sampha
“Some Of Your People” by Aliah Sheffield
“Back Up Against The Wall” by Nicole Wray featuring S.A.S.
What I Read
If there are two things that Americans couldn’t give two shits about, it’s the arts and education.
’s “For Whites Only: Affirmative Action” really gets to the heart of the matter regarding The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Affirmative Action decision:But the rot of this decision does not end there. The court, in its ruling, also sidesteps the impact of a decision on gender. Likely in part, because statistically, White women have been the most significant beneficiaries of affirmative action programs and policies. Though, white women have also historically acted as one of affirmative action’s staunchest opponents.
As
outlines, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson went all the way in with her brilliant, blistering dissent; especially in this part where she peeps the apparently racist majority’s game in allowing military schools to be exempt from their anti-Affirmative Action decision:The Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom (a particularly awkward place to land, in light of the history the majority opts to ignore).
In other words: Black and Brown people should continue to be cannon fodder for American colonizing and pirate expeditions, but they should not be allowed to be artists, healers, or thinkers. It’s giving very blatant antebellum realness.
As my sister-friend, author and attorney
, pointed out: while we’re over here getting caught up in the media spectacle of Brown v. Thomas (the white gaze loves nothing more than instigating, amplifying, and getting its giggling life from intracommunity division), we’re taking our eye off of the ball in terms of the white supremacist origins of these decisions. Jamila reminded me: Chief Justice Roberts wrote the insidious, disingenuous, and un-rigorous anti-Affirmative Action opinion for the majority. And it was a white man, conservative legal strategist Edward Blum, who has been waging a war against Affirmative Action (not to mention the Voting Rights Act) for over 30 years and finally got the former pet project to the Supreme Court to get his ultimate sadism satiated. As Jamila said:“We need to move past these conversations about Clarence Thomas as an ‘Uncle Tom’ and start really analyzing these laws and these decisions—and the Supreme Court as an institution—in the ways that they need to be scrutinized.”
Jamila and I are of one accord: Let the Ancestors deal with Brother Clarence. We have other, more important work to do.
As Ancestor Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, speaking at The New School on February 6, 1964:
Negroes are human, not superhuman. Like all people, they have differing personalities, diverse financial interests and varied aspirations. There are Negroes who will never fight for freedom. There are Negroes who seek profit for themselves alone from the struggle. There are even some Negroes who will go over to the other side. These facts should distress no one. Every minority and every people has its share of opportunists, traitors, freeloaders and escapists. The hammer blows of discrimination, poverty, and segregation must warp and corrupt some. No one can pretend that because a people may be oppressed, every individual member is virtuous and worthy. The real issue is whether in the great mass the dominant characteristics are decency, honor and courage.
P.S. Peep game: The abolition of Affirmative Action is an extremely popular American position. Whether Left or Right, liberal or conservative, straight or queer, rich or poor, white Americans (especially) wanted that shit gone.
It often seems that Black people have no allies, no accomplices, no comrades, and, as it turns out, no witnesses. So we must be our own. Those of us in “the great mass” anyway…
NBA legend
covers what’s been going on in the country since Roe v. Wade was struck down by the conservative (read: white supremacist) majority of the U.S Supreme Court. Surprising absolutely no one:“The states that were the quickest to enact abortion bans are the same states with the worst rates of maternal mortality.” — Mini Timmaraju on The New Abnormal
And literally, just as I’m typing up this newsletter, at this very sentence, The Supreme Court ruled that it’s legal for public businesses to discriminate against LGBTQIA+ people. This opens the door for anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination in other sectors of public life. The majority opinion was written by Neil M. Gorsuch, a rich white cisgender heterosexual man who has very little in common with the poor white folks who think that this decision is going to get them a front row seat in their fictious “No Blacks, No Jews, and No Gays” heaven.
The anti-LGBTQIA+ case was brought by a white cisgender heterosexual woman named Lori Smith, reportedly based on a hypothetical situation, not a real one; which is wild because the Court is not supposed to make rulings based on speculation:
In 303 Creative v. Elenis, amateur web designer Lori Smith asked the court to grant her the right under the First Amendment to refuse service to gay and lesbian couples due to her Christian religious beliefs. But Smith’s request was wholly speculative. She had not been hired to make a website for a same-sex couple and, therefore, had never refused such work. In fact, she’s never made a single wedding website.
Despite the underlying claim being totally made up, the court sided with Smith’s religious liberty argument. In a 6-3 vote, the court’s conservatives ruled that a civil rights law in Colorado that bars anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination violated Smith’s First Amendment speech rights. In doing so, they made it much easier for businesses to discriminate. A new wave of litigation further expanding discrimination is likely to follow.
Equal protection under the law, which was never true in practice, is now no longer true in law, either.
Got DAMN! Another one and another one and another one. I’m punch drunk:
Student loan forgiveness is dead. The opinion was written by Chief Justice Roberts, a rich white dude.
Ooh, white supremacists play the long game, baby! They will wait generations to see the seeds they planted sprout, reach maturity, and bear fruit. And we’re not talking bushes. These is redwoods! They make chess moves 50 years in advance. What we think of as offhand remarks in a majority decision or a dissent are really setting the stage for their impending takeover. They are more committed to tyranny than most people are to liberation. Trump was literally their trump card. He stacked the Supreme Court and courts around the country to ensure that for the rest of our natural lives, marginalized people will be the canaries in the coal mine exposed to suffering (some voluntarily!) so that the privileged don’t have to be.
To strike back against this onslaught, we must also strategize for the long term. Helping the people and organizations fighting these battles is vital. Volunteer or donate to:
The Legal Defense Fund
I read a New York Times article about how Goodreads commenters pre-bombed Cecilia Rabess’s debut novel, Everything’s Fine. The book is about “a young Black woman working at Goldman Sachs who falls in love with a conservative white co-worker with bigoted views.”
Commenters found the premise offensive and started leaving one-star reviews on Goodreads even if they hadn’t read the book.
“It may look like a bunch of one-star reviews on Goodreads, but these are broader campaigns of harassment,” Rabess said. “People were very keen not just to attack the work, but to attack me as well.”
Listen, I am against book banning and censorship—even if I find a book’s subject matter offensive. I have other choices, you know? Perhaps I won’t read the story in question. Perhaps I will read it and offer a thoughtful analysis/critique/rebuttal. Maybe I’ll read it and find that it’s exactly what I thought it was and be angered. Maybe I’ll read it and discover it wasn’t what I thought it was and be surprised. Maybe I’ll buy a copy just make origami birds out of its pages. Maybe I’ll just throw it in the trash. (My limit to free speech is hate speech or speech that encourages violence and suffering, particularly against vulnerable people and populations.)
Regardless, what I will not do is insist that the book be removed from shelves or try to stop the book from being published simply because I personally find it reprehensible. Because that is what right-wing conservatives do when they find something unlikeable. They attempt to strip away the actual civil, legal, and human rights of living people when they are afraid of or disgusted by a perspective. Really, they are offended by their own history. So they want to invent a new one and savagely erase the real one. I am not, in any instance, interested in emulating that despotic behavior. When I disagree with a point of view, I meet it with counterpoint and rigor, not suppression and imprecision. When I know something is a lie, I keep speaking the truth.
I can’t be the hypocrite conservatives/white supremacists are more than willing to be. Otherwise, I’m giving people permission take away books that I find essential to living and loving—books that give me the language to name my existence and my oppressors—but that they find abominable; books like The Bluest Eye or Giovanni’s Room.
To expose the hypocrisy, somebody in Utah challenged the Holy Bible and asked that it be removed from public schools because it contains: “incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide.” Conservatives are, of course, gagging because their own unjust law has been used against them. It’s all good when it’s the books they want to ban, but when a book they stan for is on the chopping block, then suddenly they talking about a concept they can’t even spell, much less understand: freedom.
Quite the slippery slope, right? And I’m not trying to slide down because I know of the fascist horrors that await me at the bottom.
Jennifer Baker snatched plenty wigs and gagged for plenty eons with her latest essay, “Black Women Are Being Erased in Publishing” via Electric Literature:
On August 29th, 2022, after 19 months and 18 book acquisitions, I was informed that my position as senior editor at Amistad “was no longer necessary.” (Imagine being told your role was unnecessary less than two years after being assured of the necessity to nurture more Black editors.) One of the first things I thought upon hearing those words was erasure. Erasure as colleagues reached out congratulating me on a new job. (They’d been told I was “leaving” and not that my company account had been disabled five minutes after logging off the virtual meeting in which I was let go). Erasure came to mind when my authors, and their agents, told me they hadn’t heard a word from anyone at the company until I publicly announced my departure two weeks later. And it felt like erasure in the extreme when I saw how quickly I was removed as “editor” and others were given credit for the labor I’d put into editing, and advocating for, the books I had acquired. I was effectively erased because, like Kendra Rae, the narrative about my sudden departure from Amistad had been woven by others, and not by me.
Jennifer Baker’s debut young adult novel, Forgive Me Not, will be released on August 15, 2023.
You know how anti-Black people are always going on and on about how “Black people protest police violence, but not the intra-community violence” that sometimes occurs?
Not only is that an attempt at digression and distraction (no one ever talks about or pathologizes white-on-white crime), but it is also a lie non-Black people tell themselves in order to feel superior to Black people and justify horrors like the prison industrial complex.
The New York Times article, “What Happened When a Brooklyn Neighborhood Policed Itself for Five Days” breaks down what has been a tradition in Black communities for a long time but only ever gets the tiniest bit of media coverage—which gets ignored by anti-Black people so that they can continue slandering Black communities.
From The New York Times:
Residents had complained that officers had become aggressive, grabbing men off the street to arrest them for minor offenses. The neighborhood was reeling from the 2019 shooting of Kwesi Ashun, a T-shirt vendor with paranoid schizophrenia, killed as he swung at an officer with a chair at a nail salon.
Inspector Anderson asked residents what the department could do to engender trust.
Among them was Dushoun Almond, a jocular and self-deprecating man who goes by the nickname Bigga.
Mr. Almond, who runs Brownsville In Violence Out, said Inspector Anderson realized that sometimes all that is needed to keep the peace is a person with credibility — not necessarily a badge — telling someone: “Get out of here. You’re bugging.”
“Members of the community see themselves in Bigga,” said Jeffrey Coots, the director of the From Punishment to Public Health initiative at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The group works closely with the Brownsville Safety Alliance, conducting surveys about the initiative and tracking its progress.
“This is someone who is like me, who understands me and is calling me out on the fact that I’m out of pocket a little bit,” Mr. Coots said.
Coming out on July 4, 2023 is Aliyah Bilal’s Temple Folk.
A groundbreaking debut collection portraying the lived experiences of Black Muslims grappling with faith, family, and freedom in America.
In Temple Folk, Black Muslims contemplate the convictions of their race, religion, economics, politics, and sexuality in America. The ten stories in this collection contribute to the bounty of diverse narratives about Black life by intimately portraying the experiences of a community that resists the mainstream culture to which they are expected to accept and aspire to while functioning within the country in which they are born.
In “Due North,” an obedient daughter struggles to understand why she’s haunted by the spirit of her recently deceased father. In “Who’s Down?” a father, after a brief affair with vegetarianism, conspires with his daughter to order him a double cheeseburger. In “Candy for Hanif” a mother’s routine trip to the store for her disabled son takes an unlikely turn when she reflects on a near-death experience. In “Woman in Niqab,” a daughter’s suspicion of her father’s infidelity prompts her to wear her hair in public. In “New Mexico,” a federal agent tasked with spying on a high-ranking member of the Nation of Islam grapples with his responsibilities closer to home.
With an unflinching eye for the contradictions between what these characters profess to believe and what they do, Temple Folk accomplishes the rare feat of presenting moral failures with compassion, nuance and humor to remind us that while perfection is what many of us strive for, it’s the errors that make us human.
What I Saw
I took my mother to see Diana Ross at Radio City Music Hall. Ms. Ross is one of my mother’s absolute faves! It was supposed to be a surprise, but I slipped and talked about it during my conversation with David Santos Donaldson and my mother was watching the livestream and heard. LOL! David was at the concert as well. Oh, and we saw Tyler Perry and Gayle King in the audience. :)
Reggie Bailey and Akili Nazuri of
continue to have must-watch literary discussions and interviews. Here they are in conversation with David.I was introduced to the work of a young Black comedian from Mississippi named Niles Abston. This brother is funny as fuck in the tradition of truthtellers like Moms Mabley and Richard Pryor. I’m serious when I say that he is brilliant and subversive and implicating and politically astute. He’s legit the funniest comedian I’ve seen in a very, very long time. He’s going to be huge. I’m happy to be able to witness his ascent. This talented brother is on tour. Be sure to check him out when he’s in or near your city. You can find his tour dates: HERE.
One of the saddest things I’ve seen in a long time is the PBS American Masters documentary, Little Richard: The King and Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll. The way Anti-Blackness and anti-queerness, which are really two sides of the same coin, combined to torture Ancestor Richard is the stuff of legend. His influence on music is both ignored and undeniable. After watching this, you’ll understand just how criminally disrespectful, not to mention white supremacist, it is to refer to Elvis Presley as “The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” You will witness the travesty of Pat Boone remaking Ancestor Richard’s music, bleeding all soul—which is to say, all art, which is to say all Blackness—from it. You will see white artists—everyone from The Beatles to The Rolling Stones—attempt to mimic Ancestor Richard and gain more access, more popularity, and more resources by being, literally and figuratively, pale imitations of him. And you will realize how three pathological bullets (Anti-Blackness, anti-queerness, and gender policing) wreck the psyche of their target yes, but also sully the humanity of the people pulling the trigger, unbeknownst to them.
The documentary did not spend much time talking about Ancestor Richard’s influences, which included Clara Ward and the Clara Ward Singers, Esquerita, Billy Wright, and the Inventor and Godmother of Rock ‘n’ Roll herself, Sister Rosetta Tharpe (it didn’t mention the last three at all, in fact). That seemed intentional to me; like it was attempting to hide the Black—and, let’s keep it an entire stack, Queer—roots and traditions that have and continue to make U.S. music the most popular in the world.
This is the story of whiteness, quite frankly: whether in the halls of academia, the halls of museums, or the halls of music, Black genius is stolen, diluted, and repackaged for racist audiences with a hankering for something bland and mediocre that they can pretend is excellence so that excellence seems much more attainable for them than it actually is. This is a remnant of antebellum slavery, in which Black people ourselves were stolen, and our greatness and humanity repurposed for plantation production. Perpetual thieves. As they say: the apple never falls far from the tree.
And it could not be white supremacy and anti-queerness if it did not attempt to covet these art forms and demonize them at the same time. Before they co-opted and tainted them, they demonized the blues, rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, punk, disco, and hip-hop.
I don’t know about anyone else, but whatever their intentions, after watching this documentary, I can never look at white rappers/singers (whether Christina Aguilera, Justin Bieber, Eminem, Madonna, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, or whomever) rapping/singing Black music in the same way ever again. Even if I personally enjoy their music, I cannot escape how apparent it is that there is a whole machine—and a complicit constituency—dedicated to making sure blackface remains a perennial and lucrative enterprise. (And just in case someone did not know, just about every form of music indigenous to the United States was originally conceived, invented, and developed by Black people.)
Long live Little Richard: The King and Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll!
Me, my husband, and a whole posse of the literary homies (22 folks deep!) went to go see This Land Was Made, a remarkable play by Tori Sampson.
My husband and I are addicted to a Nigerian soap opera called Wura. There’s a really progressive and tenderly rendered queer storyline on the show. Unfortunately, the show is on the streaming service ShowMax, which isn’t available in the United States. But there are some episodes/excerpts available on YouTube.
And this one is more of a “what I think I want to see.” Y’all know I like horror films (though not the gory or torture-y ones). And this one looks like it might actually be terrifying. A24 rarely misses (I wasn’t feeling Hereditary like most people were and I thought It Comes at Night was completely disappointing. But everything else snaps).
Talk to Me currently has a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. If you get scared while watching the trailer, blame Deesha Philyaw. She sent this shit to me and Kiese Laymon. LOL!
Yikes. Okay. So I can’t end this newsletter on that note. LOL! So here’s a inbox cleanser:
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Be safe out there, Family.
Hate is taxing. So love each other, okay?
Blessings upon blessings,
Robert