America's Integral Blindness: Why There's No Point in Going to Texas Again
A Brief Reflection on Contemporary American Anti-Black Racism
This essay was actually written in 2020, shortly after George Floyd was murdered. It was a response to Senator Booker’s speech on the death of Mr. Floyd. I’m publishing it now because…well, the essay has only gained in relevancy since I wrote it. I used to write a whole lot of essays like this back in the late 2010s for my Wordpress blog but for reasons immediately explained below, I slowed down.
It has been very difficult for me to write this essay because — truthfully — writing about this subject is redundant. It is also painfully infuriating. I had been trying to begin the article for months and kept getting delayed by yet another catastrophe — whether in the news or in my own personal life. At one point, I became overwhelmed and set my pen down with a whirling head. I had run out of things to say. Why bother? I asked myself.
“It takes a long time to realize that you can’t — that there’s no point in going to the mat, so to speak, no point in going to Texas again,” James Baldwin said to Quincy Troupe late in 1987, a few weeks before he died. “There’s no point in repeating this again. It’s been said, and it’s been said, and it’s been said. It’s been heard and not heard.”
Indeed.* I could forget about this intellectual foppery altogether and just do like so many thousands and thousands of other posters on social media are doing all over the world at the moment, which is just simply SAY THEIR NAMES — the names of the dozens, if not hundreds, of black people who lost their lives at the hands of American cops.
I won’t do that. Not because I’m a chickenshit “coon,” but because the immense body count of blacks dead at the lands of law enforcement — and when I say “law enforcement” I also mean those violent white and pro-white bigots (some of whom are black) who are not cops — would, if carefully tallied up since 1619 (or 1444?), would have me counting for the next fifteen years. The true body count is in the billions.
Even compiling yet another list of grievances of ours against this white fascist state would be a waste of time, since the list keeps growing by the hour. Just a few moments ago (and right after getting info about the death of David McAtee in Louisville, Kentucky, the details of which are beyond sickening) I have just heard about the death of James Scurlock in Omaha, Nebraska, at the hands of Jake Gardner, a fascist who owns a nightclub/bar called The Hive. (Gardner was not arrested, of course.) 22-year old Italia Marie Kelly was shot in the back of the head while leaving a Walmart in good ole Davenport, Iowa: once again, no arrests were made.
On the other hand fat, silly, sexually frustrated white women (your feminists) keep reaching for their fucking cell phones every time somebody says the word “black.”
We already know what these kakistocratic clowns have done. We do not need to go on YouTube and look at all these imbecilic, hysterical white fascists and pro-white donkeys (like this pathetic octoroon Antonio Batista) calling the cops on five and six-year old black children for selling lemonade. Or going on wild tirades at the sight of a black man walking quietly through the park. Or a black man reading his book in his own fucking car. Or a black woman undressing in her own fucking bedroom, or drinking out of a water fountain, or bird-watching, or buying a hat, or whistling or just plain fucking breathing. The American people are so utterly depraved that such trivial things actually constitute crimes in their deranged minds — if they can be said to actually have minds: they certainly have no hearts, much less a soul. (In one ludicrous case, an elderly white male literally foamed at the mouth for nearly an hour simply because a woman (obviously not white) was wearing a Puerto Rican t-shirt.)
For me — actually, for all of us, it’s too late. The national guilt trips over George Floyd are a tad disingenuous coming from above. Nothing is really changing in that stupid country. Nobody in America is really moved by the recitation of the names of the slaughtered. TIME magazine can depart from its usual trivia and shed crocodile tears for them (by framing these names within their iconic red boarders) but in all honesty, discussion time is over.
After four centuries, America is still debating with itself, still trying to decide whether or not African people are actually human beings. There is no point whatsoever in telling these fucking clowns that merely jogging through a white neighborhood as a black person are NOT grounds for murder. Of course the white murderers had been planning to take Ahmaud Arbery out for some time; that’s how these dumb bastards are when it comes to dealing with Africans. They are absolutely no different than the Boer redneck settlers in Apartheid South Africa (or their Israeli equivalent on the West Bank) who see “natives” and “coons” as target practice. And they are still getting away with the dumb shit: who has been arrested for killing David McAtee? (Note: after McAtee was shot, his body was left to rot in his own restaurant for over 12 hours.)
The violence and mayhem that we now see on America’s streets are not manifestations of “black savagery” or “leftist agitators.” This is what Donald Dumbfuck and FOX News would have us think. Even the squares of CNN and MSNBC know better than to say anything so stupid. This anarchy — even that committed by black gunmen — is really European. Black people are merely giving this anarchy and violence back to the people who foisted it upon them in the first place.
As Africans, we are completely fed up with paternalistic assholes telling us how we should express our outrage. Enough of outsiders who think they know more about us than we know about ourselves. You do not know shit about who I am, nor do you want to. I see it writ large in that stupid, smug look you wear on your face whenever I come within earshot of you. You haven’t heard us when we spoke of our own plight; you didn’t hear my mother, nor my father nor my brother nor any of my cousins (not to mention my great-grandfather), and you most certainly will not consider anything I have to say. You’re willing to walk in my shoes, all right — but which shoes? The shoes I dance in, or the shoes I work (or go looking for work) in?
Our contempt for American (read: Western) hypocrisy knows no end. We know it better than just about any other group in the U.S. save for the Native American. We should no longer waste our time with foolish white liberals exhorting us (like they did poor Baldwin and Ellison) to “master our rage” — as if we were nothing more than clueless pickaninnies who perpetually need the guiding hand of an adult white — the obvious implication being that we are incapable of being adults, of thinking for ourselves.
You liberal clowns, with your sanctimonious hand wringing and smarmy, glib cant urge us to “stay calm” and chide us for “excessive displays of rage,” are no different. Like the Nazi, you are horrified at the very idea that an African can actually be a man. THAT is the single gravest threat to the American established order: the recognition of the essential humanity of the African — as opposed to clinging to the safe fantasy of The Negro.
With the scales falling from our eyes, we now see this “African-American” or “American Negro” identity for what it was always meant to be: a compromised and safe identity, specially designed for us to function within a hostile society. The compromise was our own fucking humanity.
Every now and then we were allowed moments of defiance, a few socio-political cake walks as a safety valve…the same way that a child will occasionally bite the hand of his parent, knowing full well that without the parent, the child is lost. The parent (white), of course, is pathologically narcissistic. The child (Negro) must do whatever the parent demands since the aims of this parent are not for the child to grow up and take the parent’s place, whether to usurp the parent or to function alongside this parent — but for the child to endlessly cater to the whims and needs of the parent/narcissist.
Mainstream Americans are so hopelessly blind and so insufferably self-righteous that rather than give up their precious blood-sucking neoliberal death machine — the end-stage of capitalist development — they have allowed their own country to fall flat on its collective ass. They have been doing this for decades. They have repeatedly degraded, poisoned, and ruined everything around them. They have destroyed the very ecology of the nation and the planet at large. (The Fukushima disaster was actually made possible by the wisdom of General Electric, an American concern.)
They have repeatedly trivialized and vulgarized every single culture on earth in addition to our own. Real, good black music always deeply disturbed them, so they co-opted New Orleans and turned it into cheap “Dixieland,” reduced the elegance of Scott Joplin’s rags to disgusting “coon songs” designed to reinforce in the minds of humanity that the creators of this music were still just a bunch of “shines” — Negroes, in other words.
Hip hop, which was once a complete culture in and of itself (rapping, DJing, graffiti art and breakdancing), is now de facto Nazi propaganda masquerading as “drill” music. This trash is so lethal that if I had to choose between the disgusting “coon shouts” of 1899 and this poison, I would gladly take the fucking “coon shouts” — one literally could not do worse. (The coon shouts were not in any sense realistic depictions of black life at all.)
And yet one has to ask oneself why on earth do Americans put such a premium on celebrity junk and all-around cultural trash? You might ask why single out America when the entire world is flooded with celebrity junk and trash. But all this international trash has its origins in America’s expendable (and utterly tasteless) junk culture. Why a “junk culture,” anway?
Junk culture is like junk food — easy to make and easy to digest. Light-hearted stuff for weak bellies and light minds. Very, very few Americans can confront anything truly human, any cultural product with any real emotional depth. For some reason beauty seems to horrify them; they love to associate such things (like elegance, for instance) with “faggots,” yet another fantasy concocted by a sick Puritan Anglo-Saxon culture horrified at anything that does not dance to its ponderous tunes. Emotional depth to an American has always been just cheap, corny sentimentality, like some dumb-ass episode of One Life to Live: Americans are good at that crap. But high culture is scorned unless it is ancient enough not to be current and threatening — like Chaucer, for instance.
We all know that any white man or woman pulling any of the same stunts that got either Trayvon, Eric Garner, Floyd or Stephon Clark killed would have gotten off with no more than a warning, or possibly less. In April of 2020 a bunch of fat, toothless, gun-toting rednecks fed up with the Covid-19 quarantining decided to storm both the statehouses of Michigan and Wisconsin. The tepid response to such belligerent strong-arming — in stark contrast to the hysterical, macho cowboy antics of the National Guard in cities all across America today — spoke for itself: therein lay the message for all of us who are black and live in that stupid country.
It is a space for white people to function in, not for us. It’s a place built largely by us but for them. The money that is passed around (largely in the upper echelons of that society) is their money, with their faces on it and rests almost entirely in their banks for their consumption, not ours. This, in spite of what is written on the law books in America, for all of us who know anything about America know that what’s on paper (especially when it pertains to black people) doesn’t mean much. This is old news.
The new news is that now that the Negro is dead, New Africans no longer have the luxury of pretending otherwise. Many still imagine that they do, unfortunately; these deluded Black folk will learn the hard way that the option of “shucking and jiving” is very rapidly disappearing. Black people no longer have the luxury of pretending that the United States (even in its present-day incarnation) was ever constructed to accommodate any of their dreams, hopes, wishes, desires or anything else of that nature. It was not. There is simply no place wherever that the African American can function as a human being in that pathetic joke of a “society.” They may think they do but they do not. And it is becoming more painfully obvious with each passing hour.
A few days ago Oscar Jimenez, a reporter with CNN, was arrested by the fuzz for merely reporting on the mayhem in Minneapolis. So apparently a black Latino (x) reporter just doing his job (and admittedly for the establishment press) was far more of a threat to the established order of American “things” than some gun-toting redneck in the Michigan statehouse. These gun-toting, anti-covid “activists” were and are nothing but a bunch of whiny thugs, home-grown terrorists who spend their waking hours plotting for the up-coming race war (a war which, quite frankly, many of them really don’t have the balls to fight in real time) — but in the eyes of this Orange Pussyhole, they were just fine. They were “very fine” individuals who just so happened to be annoyed with having to wear face masks to protect themselves from a deadly pandemic (which, as it turns out, did not affect their racial demographic nearly as much as it affects ours). Not that he gave a shit. “LIBERATE WISCONSIN!” the fat fuck tweeted some weeks back, in an effort to get these white thugs to freak out and kill all “normies.”
That didn’t happen; none of them had the balls to pull off something so audacious. The sickening video of Officer Chauvin (who actually knew Floyd personally) coldly and sadistically choking the life out of a 46-year old man seemed to snap something in the collective Afro-American mind. Floyd pleaded to the officers that he was dying; Chauvin continued to choke the life out of Floyd. “Mama, mama,” Floyd cried, as some one nearby actually chided Floyd for attempting to fight the cops. “You can’t win this one, brother,” the other man said.
Whatever George Floyd was attempting to do with an allegedly fake 20 dollar bill doesn’t matter. The bill was not fake. The man nearby chiding Floyd for a mistake he didn’t make was a classic study in Negro Stockholm Syndrome. There was no reason in hell why Floyd should not have ripped that cop’s balls out had he been able to in such a position; he would have had every reason to. Chauvin did not see Floyd as being much more than a cockroach. In pressing his knee up against Floyd’s neck he clearly thought he was disposing of vermin. He was very smug, self-satisfied and proud about what he had done; I suppose that he still is.
The other four fuzz — including chickenshit Officer Yao — were equally heartless and unfeeling. Their faces registered no emotions, no humanity. They were just carefully doing the job that their great nation had assigned to them: keeping the niggers down and if necessary, rubbing them out. Like the killing of Arnaud Arbery, the killing of Breonna Taylor (in her own bedroom, no less), the killing of Eric Garner, the lynching of Emmett Till and just a few days ago the obscenely casual killing of restaurant owner David McAtee, George Floyd’s murder was carried out as a lesson to uppity niggers (like yours truly, Philip Lewis) that no matter what you think or even what you actually are, we who are not black don’t give a fuck: as far as we are concerned, you are (and always will be) nothing.
“You’ve been beaten,” James Baldwin once said in an interview, “and it’s been deliberate. The whole society has decided to make you nothing. And they don’t even know that they’re doing it.”
That’s because — as I myself wrote 25 years ago — this “society” has been making blacks nothing for so long that it comes natural to them, like eating, or breathing. That is why they don’t know why their doing it. And that is why this latest slave revolt has the “society” so flummoxed.
“Since you are nothing — and all because you are black and (as they keep insisting) ugly, stupid, dirty, child-like, hypersexed, ignorant, violent, irresponsible, diseased, a beast (to quote both Rimbaud and Charles Carroll) — you should not waste your time trying to crawl above your properly designated station in life — designated by us, of course. That’s why we non-blacks become so pissed whenever we find your black ass in our precious non-black spaces. We already know you even if we have never seen you. We know you because we know The Negro.
“The Negro is filth, a bag of dirt. We might fuck with that bag of dirt like we’d fuck with some good coke or weed but there are limits, you know — the dirt belongs across the tracks, and it should stay there.
“We’ll knock you in the head with a baseball bat, chuck a spear at you, shoot you down, cut your fucking balls off. You filthy niggers and jungle apes (we non-blacks think), you know who you are: you, the Supreme Court Judge, you, the Congresswoman, you the writer, you the plumber, you the pianist, you the restaurateur — whatever or whoever the fuck you are, all you coons look alike to us. It was no accident that the song was so popular in America 127 years ago and no accident that before and since that time, that basic premise in the mainstream American mind has remained constant and unwavering. That we have made sociopolitical and economic concessions so you can function in our spaces does not mean that we really want you there: we’re just putting up with your kind.
“Since the events of May 25th we non-blacks have grown ever more furious at what has happened — not to George Floyd naturally, nor to Breonna Taylor or that other black guy who got bumped off (we can’t remember them all, can we??) — but to The Negro. We look around and find him growing scarcer and scarcer as the days roll on. We still find him, though, and often IN SPADES (see, I made a joke!!) — but he is somehow not the same. What happened?”
What happened, Uncle Sam?
This: the national racial soap-bubble burst. The Negro’s rapid demise can be attributed to the fact that he really died many, many years ago. As a flesh-and-blood human being, the Negro simply never existed at all.
For decades the white, racist kakistocracy has attempted to prop up the rotting corpse of this pathetic Scaramouch, this dancing monkey who as we all know too well was not, is not and never will be us. Sambo (one of his many, many other names) never really existed as a person. He was merely a character that we were forced to play on the stage of Western civilization for the past five hundred years. A centuries-old pantomime necessary to stave off starvation, beatings, rape, torture, humiliation, castration and a bunch of other nasty things.
To justify such obscene brutality against Africans, and to mollify whatever feelings of guilt he might have for robbing the African of his humanity, the European further quashed his own humanity. It is no accident that from the late 1400s onward Europe became an increasingly dark, reactionary and war-riddled continent. From the beginning of the 19th century Europe has been in a moral, cultural, spiritual and political free-fall. The same clowns who brought the world the Trans-Atlantic slave trade also gave us the Holocausts of 1500s America, of India (where over a billion people perished under the British crown), of the Congo, of Namibia, the Pacific Islands, the Jews, the Romany, the Hugenots and even, God forbid, Ireland.
Somehow, we need to break away. In our case, the blood-soaked four century old nightmare we’ve been forced to endure must come to an end. That is the only way Stella and all the rest of us will truly get our fucking groove back.
For the clueless, let me remind you as to why the Senator even needed to give such an absurd speech.
Senator Booker, it’s time to burst your bubble. The answer to the above question is, quite simply, no. White America does not see us, sir. They never did, and never wanted to. In fact I would even take it several steps further and say that until very recently we hardly even saw ourselves. Why? Because too many of us persisted in seeing our own black selves through the jaundiced, bigoted and reactionary eyes of our white murderers. (That’s why we love to call ourselves “niggers” and why we even have something called Candace Owens.)
No, Senator, white America never cared too much for seeing New Africans because it would have been bad both for their business interests, and for the stability of this so-called “Great Experiment” of theirs — this massive historical fraud they call the United States of America. We were invisible, sir. We still are invisible. But what you have wrong is your insistence that this white blindness is a failure on the part of white people to live up to the ideals of this American “Experiment.” Nope. Totally wrong. This white blindness (and our subsequent invisibility) is an integral part of the American Experiment. It is entirely by design.
Petershagen, June 2020
*And from what I’m hearing about Texas at this very moment, Baldwin’s words are more than prescient. Fuck that crazy place.
Revised April 9, 2023