ETHOS

By Chloe Wayne

I’ve been meaning to write this for weeks. And I’m not referencing our tacky-ass lack of posting (due to final exams and such…stupid college kids), I mean that I haven’t been able to find the words.

As the fifth anniversary of Nina Simone’s death passed a few weeks ago, I struggled to catch the slippery sentiments afire in my brain, but failed to string them into anything longer than…What happened to activism in popular culture like that? Where are public figures who have grown weary of simple philanthropy and tired liberal rhetoric?

Nina Simone – Mississippi Goddam

I long for a new “Mississippi Goddam” (take a listen– link is above). The piano pulses and agitates as urgently and frenetically as Simone’s exhortations; it’s difficult not to believe a torrential one-woman apocalypse will be wreaked upon America if she does not get her way.

Today, how many people know that Simone risked her musical career and livelihood several times to headline benefit concerts—for the likes of SNCC, SCLC, and the NAACP among others—for free? When popular cultural memory remembers Simone, musical masterpieces such as “I Want a Little Sugar in my Bowl” and “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” come to mind (Common recently sampled the latter on Finding Forever).

But what about “Pirate Jenny” on one of her live albums, In Concert? The narrator, a poor black female laborer, imagines counter-violence against her oppressors, “deciding whether they should be killed ‘now or later.’ In a powerful whisper, devoid of any musical accompaniment, Simone offered her protagonist’s answer: ‘right now’” (Ruth Feldstein, “I Don’t Trust You Anymore”). I cannot think of any 21st-century pop culture figure who has put forth such an explicit, angry, radical attack on the status quo.

Speaking of radical icons of the African-American musical tradition– Flava Flav, I spit on thee! May the destruction of a thousand locust plagues descend upon thy being (just kidding….sort of).

Gag me with a fork.

But on a real tip—and I know it’s been said countless times before this—how dare you exploit white America’s still-raging appetite for Black minstrelsy so that you (and now that disgusting thing New York, argh!) can sit pretty on your stack of pennies as the 12” of history is chopped and screwed—to take language from the art form upon which you defecate—by the reruns of your filth? History repeats itself with every 22-minute episode that reeks of the commodfied coon, the blood money used to sell each one of the show’s commercial spots. And thanks to you, the (r)evolution of the Black public image has slowed to funeral elegy pace.

Granted, you always were PE’s breath of non-politically-charged air, but this??? How ironic that you are the perfect metonymic representation for all the fools whose personas diametrically oppose the symbol that was your call to fame: Public Enemy, golden purveyor of hip-hop’s revolutionary voice (“J. Edgar Hoover, and he could’ve proved it to ya / He had King and X set up / Also the party with Newton, Cleaver and Seale he ended / So get up, time to get em back!…It takes a nation of millions to hold us back!”).

How ironic that it is now a nation of Flava Flav’s– along with our daily apathy– that holds us back.

We all complain about the relative political apathy of today (and, no, the Obama fan club is not sufficient evidence to the contrary) and lament the absence of “change-oriented” conversation. We all wore black shirts the Monday after the Sean Bell verdict as a symbol of protest and joined Facebook groups called “R.I.P Sean Bell-Our justice system need to be reviewed N renewed!!” We march and sing when particularly egregious injustices and transgressions occur, but what do we do in our everyday lives? Emotions are fleeting! Anger is not enough—if we do not manifest it in our daily actions, what will change?

Imagine if this happened….every day.

I posit that historical memory has something to do with all this—every schoolkid is taught that Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were the dual (and dueling) gods of 20th-century Black resistance and freedom. We replay the “I Have A Dream” speech over and over again, and recite Malcolm X-ian aphorisms until they ring empty as the “Pledge of Allegiance.”

It seems that we’ve accidentally been led to believe that these are the tools to fruitful activism and revolution (related: great reading on this in Adolph Reed’s Stirrings in the Jug). And I do not intend to minimize the GOLIATH achievements of either man, but I gotta wonder– perhaps there would have been a different outcome had we all been made to watch more videos of the thousands of people who went into the proverbial trenches everyday, formed relationships with members of the community, and amassed the numbers that forced change upon our land.

What happened to the days of radical action? The term activism is now vapid as those who believe in the “microwave movement” formula—in other words, that:

Subversive Rhetoric + Anger + a Malcolm X poster = REVOLUTION

Mathematically speaking, Che Guevara T-shirt = Malcolm X poster

If I sound angry, I don’t mean to. In the interest of being self-critical, let me say that I do far less than I could (should?) to affect tangible change in the world and of the institutions and structures that sanction continued inequality and injustice. And I dream of writing books and romanticize that whole “pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge” thing, but I struggle almost daily with my vision of becoming a thinker whose words and ideas are cloaked and muffled by the walls of academia.

Certainly, academics who specialize in the study of oppressed peoples have no obligation to enrich public political discourse—nor do everyday people have any obligation to take interest in what goes on in academia—but I cringe at the thought of how many important conversations go unheard by the public at large, conversations that could stimulate discourse among the real movers and shakers of history: everyday folk like you and me.

My friend (and fellow blogger…gotta love shameless plugs) Eric is the only person I can name off the top of my head who has participated in community organizing for years and spends much of his time better equipping himself to “fight the powers that be.” There are others, to be sure—many others, who speak and do activism in their daily lives—but the dearth of people who come to mind is just one indication of the extent to which resistance and collective concern have regressed.

Now I’m about to be a hypocrite and do something that usually annoys me; I’m ending a complaining rant without any attempt at solution. I do not have the answer, but I will always believe that change lies in our hands—not those of a charismatic politician, and not in thoughts and angry words.

What is difficult about change, however, is precisely that—we can’t quite put our finger on what it is or entails. It’s so large and elusive, making it difficult to find its midwife. So either our visions of it sit stillborn without the proper tools to birth it, or we abort them for lack of hope and direction.

We don’t have to think so large though, nor so much about finding a master plan— wrote Frantz Fanon, “The struggle for national liberation is not a question of bridging the gap in one giant stride. The epic is played out on a difficult, day-to-day basis.” In other words, it’s as simple as doing on a day-to-day basis, and it’s hard as hell, but without it…we’ve got nothing.