The Bird in Hand
Review by Chitown Kev
The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
by Toni Morrison
Knopf, 349 pp., $28.95
In a 1985 essay titled “The Dilemma of the Black intellectual,” Dr. Cornel West pronounced that Black America had produced only one “great, literate intellectual”: the (now) Pulitzer Prize winning and Nobel Laurete, the late Toni Morrison. At the time, Dr. West based his assessment on Black intellectual achievement that arose within what he called an “organic” tradition that raised the level of black intellectual activity to the “richness, diversity, and vitality of the traditions of Black preaching and Black music.” One can quibble with the contents of Dr. West’s various categories of black intellectual activity (as I do) and even accepting for Dr. West’s ideal of an “insurgency model” of a black intellectual as an “critical, organic catalyst,” I would still include W.E.B. DuBois and Ralph Ellison in that black intellectual pantheon that Dr. West reserves only for Ms. Morrison. Nevertheless, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, a collection of Morrison’s essays, speeches, and commencement addresses spanning from 1976 to 2013 affirms Dr. West’s (early) assessment as prophecy and demonstrates that Morrison’s sharp mind and intellect and heart remained undiminished.
The opening section of The Source of Self-Regard , titled “Foriegners”, is largely a collection of various speeches and lectures mostly centered on what would seem to be a surprising topic for Morrison’s purview: globalization. Yet “Moral Inabitants,” a response delivered in a symposium organized at the University of Pennsylvania by James Baldwin in 1976, shows not only that Morrison was engaged in the subject of “globalism” for decades but that her views and arguments on the subject began from what might be considered the margins and “quiet rooms” of the academic discussions of globalization from a historic perspective: the slave trade; the operative word being in this context, I think, trade
“...the fact that the Historical Statisitcs of the United States is pretty much like what the contours of academic scholarship are now and have always been: the equating of human beings with commodity, lumping them together in alphabetical order—when even the language used to describe these acts bends and breaks under that heavy and alien responsibility”
As Morrison moves to the late 20th century’s manifestations of globalization and its discontents: the mass movements (and the losses) of peoples, languages, customs, and ultimately, the loss of a sense of morality, identity, and self that culminates in the commodification of peoples, of spectacle with an instantaneous and global reach, the loss of privacy, disease, war, and at its most extreme, ethnic cleansing and genocide, Morrison depicts globalization not as some new phenomenon of well-meaning or philanthropic “globalists” but as a seeming eternally recurring process shepherded by the “elites” of the time with little or no thought to the consequences; processes and consequences that no amount of “noblesse oblige” can stem. Morrison’s vision of of this process leaves for a bleak and desolate world, indeed, and she looks to art as being a necessary guide out of that darkness.
From the opening essay of The Source of Self-Regard, “Peril,” Morrison sees the role of art and artists generally and writers, specifically, as a “necessity” to stave off chaos or even “the perception of chaos” and, ultimately, “to stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to” by giving voice to “truth,” even under the threats from “the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for [my emphasis] a comatose public.” For example, in “Wartalk”, a 2002 speech delivered at Oxford University, Morrison notes that after World War I, the language of war changed from “the elevating quality of warrior discourse,” elegies for the war dead, and a “beauty and force only rivaled by religious language” to being diminished and, ultimately, replaced by the language of “non-violence”; a “compelling language” that Morrison describes as “robust, rousing, subtle, elevating, intelligent, complex.” I would hold that this is true even in 2019 in the midst of the current administration and the rise of white supremacist violence (which has always been with us) and in the middle of a complicit media more focused on spectacle and “palace intrigue” than in delivering truth; in fact, in a speech to the Newspaper Association of America delivered in 1994, Morrison tells the American press, to their face, that they are complicit in the racism in larger society by brilliantly tracing media “race talk” and encoding back to the theater and entertainment worlds of “minstrelsy.”
Of course, Morrison has a lot to say on the subject matter of race and sex, racism and sexism in The Source of Self-Regard, whether it’s the significance of Harriet Tubman suing for her wartime backpay or the step-by-step guide from the “first solution” to any sort of “final solution” or an analogy between the Cinderella story (the Grimm Brothers version) and modern feminism. There’s a bit of republished material in this volume, including her eulogy to James Baldwin and her Nobel lecture. There’s meditations on writers like William Faulkner and Gertrude Stein as well as some of her own novels (some of the material I recognize from Morrison’s 1992 collection of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark). Because most of the work here is published speeches and addresses, I found myself reciting large passages which enabled me to better catch nuances in Morrison’s complex language that don’t always translate on the page. Because the volume is arranged according to subject matter and not chronologically (even within the three individual sections), I found myself turning back and forth, making sure that I caught changes and evolution in her thought. But even given the deep deep intellectual and lyrical nature of Morrison’s novels, I have to admit that I was delightfully surprised, a little, at the sheer range and breadth and depth of Morrison’s thinking; no way would Dr. Martin Luther King possibly be disappointed with this lady (as Morrison, herself, feared) this titan of African-American letters and American letters and world letters.
And now...the bird is in our hands. For sure.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Rob Mathis was ready to make an offer on the house—a grand 5-bedroom home sitting on 22 acres in the small town of Holton, Michigan. But during a recent tour of the property, a quick rundown of the home’s decor put Mathis and his wife, Reyna on edge: A NASCAR-decorated garage housing two Confederate flags, Confederate placemats (imagine loving the the Dixie flag so much you can’t even stomach eating your boiled chicken with looking at it). Oh, and on top of all that—the home belonged to a cop.
It was all so on-the-nose that Mathis found himself wondering, “Wouldn’t it be funny if this was a Klansman’s house?” he said in an interview with MLive.
Then he and his son went into a bedroom and saw, mounted on the wall behind a vanity, a framed, yellowing, whole-ass KKK application.
“Application for citizenship in the invisible empire: Knights of the Klu Klux Klan” the empty application read.
“We have to get out right now,” Mathis told his son, immediately leaving the home. “I just felt so violated.”
Where did the cop, identified as 48-year-old Charles Anderson, get the application? Who knew the KKK had an application process? Was anyone ever rejected? Do you get one (1) standard issue white sheet during onboarding? Where does one even find an antique KKK application in Michigan—and, most saliently for a motherfucker trying to sell his house—why would you leave it up on display?
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In 2018, #FreeMeekMill trended as a call to action on Twitter when supporters of Robert Rihmeek “Meek Mill” Williams gathered at the Philadelphia Criminal Justice Center to demand his release from detention. Friday (August 9), the new docuseries “Free Meek” hits Amazon’s Prime Video and explores Mill’s fight for freedom.
The five-part series examines what happened after the Philadelphia rapper’s 2017 arrest for probation violations sparked outrage. “A re-investigation of his original case explores allegations of police corruption as Meek becomes the face of a justice reform movement,” says a series synopsis.
“This guy got locked up at 19 and been on probation for 11 years. So many people we know have been through this same thing,” executive producer Jay-Z says in the series. “It’s just that Meek has a voice, because he makes music.”
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Here it comes: your regular reminder that Simone Biles is the most dominant athlete alive—and, at 22, the Greatest Gymnast of All Time.
Biles made history again this weekend at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in Kansas City, Missouri, where she became the first person ever to land two twists and two somersaults coming off the high beam.
Here it is:
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Thirty minutes west from Cap-Haïtien, a city in the north of Haiti, tawny sand beaches fringed with coconut palms are blocked by a high barbed-wire fence. It looks like a prison, except that inside are a 800-metre zip line, floating bouncy castles and a line of several hundred jetskis. Steel-drum music pumps from a 225,000-tonne ship rising 20 storeys from the turquoise sea.
This is Labadee, a beach run by Royal Caribbean. Its name is a riff on Labadie, the name of the typically poor Haitian village next door. Though the resort is actually on the second-largest island in the Caribbean, the cruise giant markets it as a “private destination”. And in a sense they are not entirely wrong. Since its inauguration in 1986, passengers who come ashore have not been subject to customs or immigration controls. Extras, such as the signature “Labadoozie” cocktail, are paid for in us dollars, never the Haitian gourde. Haitians not employed by Royal Caribbean cannot enter.
Caribbean countries striking deals with firms to open exclusive resorts (with or without customs checks) are “a growing phenomenon”, says Jim Walker, a lawyer based in Miami who deals with cruise liners. In 2015, Carnival opened the $85m Amber Cove in the Dominican Republic; this year, Royal Caribbean will open CocoCay in the Bahamas after a $250m renovation. A third of the 30m people who will cruise in 2019 will go to the Caribbean.
For cruise companies, the benefits are clear. Customers—and their money—are kept in one place. And the experience can be tailored to fit nervous travellers. Dillon Mangs, an expatriate resident of Labadie whom Royal Caribbean contracts to run shore excursions, says he tries to showcase Haiti’s culture without dampening holidaymakers’ spirits by exposing them to too much reality. One excursion is to a mock Haitian mountain village, complete with a Vodou show.
Is it a problem that cruise companies have such privileges? Some worry that the deals firms strike with governments are lopsided. To keep cruisers on side, Caribbean countries are “basically giving away parcels of land”, says Ross Klein, of the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Governments which demand too much find the ships go elsewhere.
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In Nyangatom, on the plains of the Omo River in southern Ethiopia, they call 2015 the “Year of China.” Around then, a bridge was built from there to Kangaten, the district capital, and cccc (for China Communications Construction Company) appeared in giant blue lettering on the riverbank.
A few years earlier, a telephone tower had been erected at the edge of town. Then a two-lane highway constructed by a Chinese company started to unfold through the valley, toward the beginnings of a sugar factory and a vast irrigated plantation. The Year of China, locals say, was a period of development like nothing that they had ever witnessed. It was also the moment the river stopped flooding, and their world was altered forever.
More than half a million people depend on the lower Omo, which uncurls through southern Ethiopia, and on Kenya’s Lake Turkana, into which it flows. For millennia, the inhabitants of the Lower Omo Valley have survived on the fruits of the annual flood. When the river swelled, it brought fish upstream from the delta; when it receded, it left verdant soil for growing sorghum and maize, and rich pastures for grazing. Home to eight distinct ethnicities, including the Nyangatom, and to three of Africa’s main language groups, South Omo exemplifies the label Italian scholar Carlo Conti Rossini in 1937 gave Ethiopia: a “museum of peoples.”
But not for much longer. In 2006, hundreds of miles upstream, the Ethiopian government began constructing Africa’s tallest and arguably most controversial dam, known as Gibe III, with the help of a Chinese loan. The dam has the capacity to increase national energy output by 85 percent. It has another, more far-reaching, purpose as well. By regulating the river’s flow, it will feed the continent’s largest-ever state agricultural program, the Kuraz Sugar Development Project (KSDP)—almost as large as the total irrigated land area of neighboring Kenya. Together, Gibe III and KSDP represent the pinnacle of the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front’s (EPRDF) development ambitions. But by ending the Omo’s annual flood and, as a result, rupturing the fragile ecosystem on which the valley’s tribes depend, the project also raises a troubling question: Can the imperatives of a national economy ever outweigh the rights of a small minority to preserve its traditional way of life?
The government has long argued they can. In the past decade, it has embarked on Africa’s grandest infrastructure-building program, much of it financed by China, stacking up roads, dams, housing, industrial parks, and railways at a dizzying rate. State spending has powered economic growth of between 8 percent and 10 percent every year from 2004 to 2014, among the fastest in the world. But it came with a heavy social cost, triggering in recent years mass protests against land grabs, evictions, and home demolitions.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY’S PORCH
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.