“Hey, We’re Here”
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I just so happened to have a recent copy of The New Yorker laying around the house. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommennd that everyone reads the New Yorker’s profile with scifi/fantasy novelist N.K. Jemisin.
Midway through the profile, Raffi Khatchadourian does a brief overview of the topic of race as it related to two of Jemisin’s African American ancestors in the scifi genre; specifically Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler. And then...I read this...
Just before winning a Nebula for her tenth novel, Butler sat for an interview with Charlie Rose, who asked, “Are you trying to create a new black mythology?”
“No,” she said. “I am telling stories that interest me.” She spoke a little about what that meant, but Rose persisted: “What, then, is central to what you want to say about race?”
She replied, with a dismissive sting, “Do I want to say something central about race aside from ‘Hey, we’re here’?” She recalled a panel she had been on, in 1979, with another writer. “He thought that it wasn’t really necessary to have black characters in science fiction because you could always make any racial statement you needed to make by way of extraterrestrials,” she told Rose. “If he was trying to start trouble he certainly succeeded.” Butler later wrote a withering response to the writer’s comment, in Transmission magazine: “Science fiction reaches into the future, the past, the human mind. It reaches out to other worlds and into other dimensions. Is it really so limited, then, that it cannot reach into the lives of ordinary everyday humans who happen not to be white?”
(Fast forward to ~5:40 for the Butler/C. Rose exchange.)
A couple of things here.
My initial reaction to Mr. Rose’s question, “Are you trying to create a new black mythology?” was: Well, what’s wrong with the old black mythology? Where did it go? I could just as easily substitute Greek, Hindu, Aztec, Cherokee, American, Taoist; pick your culture, and I would say the same thing.
In another clip of this very same interview, Ms. Butler rightly says something to the effect that religion is something that societies, even secular ones, create something called “religion.” (Personally, I would substitute the word “mythology” for “religion” but Ms. Butler was specifically talking about religion at that point.) A specific people’s/culture’s/nation’s mythology is a essential part of who a people are and what they will become. A people’s mythology evolves over time, experience, and circumstances— all people’s.
Like Ms. Butler and, I think, Mr. Khatchadourian, I was more than a bit irritated by Mr. Rose’s second question and I’ll tell you why.
I don’t open my black eyelids in the morning and lift my black head off of the pillow and my black ass off of the mattress and put my black feet on the floor. I don’t vogue as I walk over to rainbow decorated Afrocentric coffee pot to get my first cup of coffee. (I will admit, though, that my first cup of coffee in the morning has to be black….hmmmmm...)
Some months ago, I was back in Detroit visting my family and a relative of mine was talking to me and the subject of being gay came up...yet again. It always does when I’m around this particular family member and, finally, I had to say, “Dude, I haven’t talked this much about this subject since the last time I was here.”
Yes, I’m black and gay and I know it and I accept it and when I walk out of the door in the morning for whatever reason, I had better damn well be aware that being black and gay quite possibly will have something to do with the varied interactions of those around me.
But...right now I have a bit of a junky house. Granted, I may cut on some Anita Baker as a cleaning soundtrack but...there is no black way of cleaning out the fridge. I don’t do gay sweeping and mopping.
Or, along the lines of what Ms. Butler might have suggested, sure, being black might (or might not) have to do with the raw material of the story that I tell, but it also may have nothing to do with my desire to tell a story: any story.
That desire comes from simply being a human being.
And saying, “Hey, I’m here.”
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The fight for equality is ongoing, but the Human Rights Campaign (HRC)—the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) civil rights organization—continues to honor those doing the work. Ahead of its 19th Annual HRC Greater New York Gala on Saturday, Feb. 1, the advocacy organization has announced it will be awarding one of two 2020 HRC Equality Awards to Slave Play playwright and 2019 Root 100 honoree Jeremy O. Harris.
Harris, 30, is also co-writer of the highly-anticipated Twitter-inspired film, Zola and a consultant on HBO’s groundbreaking hit Euphoria, among other projects in development (including an HBO pilot of his own). He will join fellow playwright Matthew Lopez (The Inheritance) in receiving a 2020 Equality Award. Also set to receive honors are award-winning actress-singer Kristin Chenoweth, who will receive the Ally for Equality Award; PVH Corp., which has earned the HRC Corporate Equality Award, and activist and supermodel Naomi Campbell, who will be honored with the Global Advocacy Award.
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The Daily Beast has learned of several incidents in which Post management warned reporters about their tweeted opinions on topics unrelated to their beats or discouraged reporters from publicly sharing information about personal experiences.
One such internal spat, involving star reporter Wesley Lowery, caused a stir in the Washington Post newsroom last year.
Multiple sources familiar with the events told The Daily Beast that last year, Post Executive Editor Marty Baron privately clashed with Lowery, a national correspondent who was part of the paper’s team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of police shootings. The subject in question: Lowery’s tweets.
Last year, Lowery posted a series of tweets questioning why a New York Times retrospective about the Tea Party failed to note how the early-2010s conservative movement was “essentially a hysterical grassroots tantrum about the fact that a black guy was president?” (The Times eventually added the racial context to its piece.)
The tweets were apparently enough to set off Baron, who along with Managing Editor Tracy Grant told Lowery that his tweets violated the Post’s social-media rules and threatened the newspaper’s credibility. In a subsequent meeting, explained to The Daily Beast by two Post insiders, the top editor at the paper told Lowery that he had made overtly political statements about the Tea Party, and had maligned the Times in the process.
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No country has more to lose from President Donald Trump’s decision to expand the travel ban than Nigeria.
Starting February 22, Nigerians will no longer be able to obtain visas allowing them to immigrate to the US permanently. They can still travel to the US on temporary visas, such as those for foreign workers, tourists, and students. But for the large Nigerian diaspora in the US, the policy could erode their deep family and cultural ties to their home country, Africa’s most populous nation and one of its economic powerhouses.
Nigerians make up by far the largest population of African immigrants living in the US, numbering about 327,000. Cities with thriving Nigerian communities will be particularly hard hit, including Dallas, Chicago, Baltimore, Atlanta, Phoenix and Houston, the latter of which has the largest Nigerian population outside Brazil and Africa.
Even more Nigerians have been choosing to settle here permanently in recent years: In 2018, the US granted Nigerians almost 14,000 green cards. By comparison, citizens from other countries included in the expanded travel ban were granted a combined total of fewer than 6,000 green cards. It’s also one of the top sending countries for foreign students, with almost 13,000 Nigerians students coming to the US last year.
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A new exhibition, “Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women of Louisiana,” that explores issues of inequality and injustice will open at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York City.
According to an emailed press release, the show features work “from more than 30 artists who created new pieces based on the personal stories of 30 formerly and currently incarcerated women,” who have been named the “persisters.”
“I want for everyone who comes to the exhibit to see us through the art and to understand what brought us here,” said persister Dolfinette Martin. “I’m a human being and my crime isn’t who I am. It doesn’t even begin to explain who I am.”
The exhibit seeks to build awareness around incarceration by focusing on an often overlooked demographic. Across the nation, women’s state prison populations grew at more than double the rate of men’s over the past 40 years, according to a 2018 Prison Policy Initiative report. Says Museum Director and Exhibition Curator Monica Ramirez-Montagut at Newcomb Art Museum in Louisiana, where the exhibit was prior to the Ford Foundation:
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Miles of shoreline that once protected and nourished the Gullah-Geechee are eroding, subjected to harsh storms that have damaged the delicate coastal ecosystem of South Carolina’s Sea Islands. In 2018, when Hurricane Florence caused flooding in Cheraw, contaminated soil containing elevated levels of cancer-causing PCBs from an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site flushed into people’s homes. Bacteria-rich pluff mud that makes up the state’s saltwater marshes could potentially aid in the cleanup, but the marsh grass is waning, and it can’t hold the soil in place. So it washes away.
It’s a straightforward statement of fact that climate change is among the biggest imminent threats to humankind—and Black communities such as those in South Carolina are going to take a disproportionate hit. Contamination, sweltering days, and rising sea levels that drown out the low country are among the issues that have made South Carolina “somewhat of a hot spot in terms of environmental issues,” said Brenda Murphy, the president of the state’s chapter of the NAACP.
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