On Kente Cloth and Caucuses:
I probably shouldn’t be as mad about this as I am. The world is on fire. What does it matter that some very white politicians wore some Kente cloth to show solidarity? The stoles were a gift from members of the Congressional Black Caucus. It might look just as bad had they declined to wear them. At first, I laughed at the whole thing. The picture of them kneeling is pretty cringe but the other photo where Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are doing their best 90’s hip hop album cover impersonation is priceless. Seriously, it’s solid gold. The god of ironic detachment to which I pray demands satisfaction. It demands that I wear it as a tee-shirt or change my social media profile pic to the photoshopped version where Pelosi is sporting a Jackie Brown afro and Schumer has Kid N Play hair.
But I am mad about it. I’m low key kind of furious and believe me as we approach the middle of the worst year of my lifetime I did not expect a photo of some congress people cosplaying as a “A Different World” reunion to be what has enraged me the most. To understand my anger, first we have to talk about what exactly Kente cloth is. And I’m not talking about its historical origins as a fabric for Ghanian royalty. I’m talking about its role in Black America. Kente cloth is not a real part of Black American culture, it is a signifier of culture. It’s a post-it note that says “insert culture here”. Kente has no real tangible connection to the history and lives of Black Americans. It’s purpose is to lay claim to a culture that was beaten and bred out of us over generations.
I completely understand why Black people wanted to make Kente cloth a cultural signifier. The vast majority of the elements of culture we have constructed for ourselves are rooted in either oppression or resistance, most often both. Rap music and Jazz, soul food, AAVE, these are pieces of a genuine culture that we made by ourselves for ourselves. I love being Black. I love our culture. But these things are responses to an existence of unrelenting suppression and marginalization. I can understand the drive to have some elements of culture that don’t reflect the scars of white colonialism and supremacy. Kente is a call to the homeland that we were stolen from, to the idea of an existence forged solely on the terms of Black people. A self determined history and identity.
It’s just not real.
I’m not Ghanian, I’m not African. I’m Black. I don’t mean to criticize those who seek connections to a homeland other than the one forced upon our ancestors. But my homeland is Blackness and that is enough for me. I don’t need the signifier of a better, purer heritage. Ours is the culture of survival. Our story is not the story of kings and queens, noble warriors and spiritual connections to the sacred dirt. Ours is the story of the beautiful struggle. The rose grown from concrete, the diamond formed from the same pressure that would burst pipes. Ours is the story of swagger in the face of death. Our culture is counter culture, our identity is resistance. Black Power yall. It's ugly, it’s gorgeous, it's painful and it’s wonderful. It’s the synthesis of these contradictions and the formation of something much stronger than mere signifiers and cultural post-it-notes. This is the reason I say “Black” instead of “African American”.
Oh and did I mention that the country in which we formed this magnificent culture wants us dead.
Blackness is not one thing. It cannot be summed up in the cultural fabric of a peoples who are just as foreign to us as Norwegians would be. But the Congressional Black Caucus had other ideas. “The significance of the Kente cloth is our African heritage, and for those of you without that heritage who are acting in solidarity,” said Karen Bass, the leader of the CBC.
Thanks for that Karen!
Now if it was up to me I would hand out Run the Jewels tee-shirts as a symbol of solidarity. But even so, it wasn’t specifically the Kente cloth that made me mad at the whole situation. No, what pissed me off was that the legislation that was introduced and the inspiration for this sartorial solidarity was yet again another collection of topically applied half measures and solutions based on a false premise. The democrats goal in their policing reform bill was increased accountability. Making choke holds illegal, a national database of police misconduct, funding for implicit bias training, community policing and increased dialogues between cops and neighborhoods.
Otherwise known as all the things that Minneapolis had already been doing since 2015 and was not enough to stop Derek Chauvin from putting his knee on George Floyd’s neck until he died.
And for this the CBC decided to dole out honorary blackness. Naw, homie. I ain’t with that. If Kente is going to represent African American heritage, and if that is really that important to our identity maybe let's not drape it over the architects and purveyors of the very system of injustice people are getting beat down for protesting. Simply because now, in an election year, they claim to want a kinder and more accountable form of occupation. See, it's not Pelosi or Schumer or Hoyer wearing the cloth that gets to me. It’s that the Black people who are ostensibly supposed to be our representatives and leaders are in reality an integral part of these oppressive systems and they get away with it because they drape themselves in signifiers of Blackness. If it's not Kente cloth than its stories from the civil rights movement in the sixties or sharecropper parentage. These things are meant to be unassailable, certified bonafides of Blackness. Who am I to question Kamala Harris’s commitment to criminal justice reform? She was bussed to school! Never mind her glee at the thought of putting black mothers in jail for truancy.
It is here that the Kente cloth stops being a signifier of a culture lost and becomes a coverall for the sake of maintaining liberal order. The same liberal order that routinely takes our lives for its maintenance. There is no solution to this state violence that does not involve the disruption and permanent transformation of the society that relies on it to function. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have no serious interest in any project of disruption and transformation. They have achieved the status they have through this order not in spite of it. Regardless of what they would have you believe or even what they may believe themselves. They are the abject failure of representation and identity politics in the flesh. They are not on our side.
Earlier this year the members of the CBC and their spokespeople took aim at the group Justice Democrats for backing a primary challenge to one of their ranks, Rep. Lacy Clay of Missouri. The CBC accused them of, if not outright racism, at least racial insensitivity for targeting a person of color for a primary fight and removal from congress. The only problem with this accusation is that the person that Justice Democrats backed, Cori Bush, is also a Black person, and more importantly she is a Black Lives Matter activist in the state that murdered Michael Brown. Obviously no one expects the CBC to endorse a challenger to one of its members or even deny one of their members an endorsement. But that is a far cry from insinuating that fighting for a BLM activist to win a seat in congress over a less progressive incumbent is a racist project.
The Congressional Black Caucus’s definition of what constitutes racism in the electoral sphere becomes even more confusing when you factor in that in 2018 they endorsed admitted white person Michael Capuano over Ayanna Pressley in a majority Black district. This year they endorsed melanin challenged incumbent Elliot Engel in NY over Black educator Jamaal Bowman. They did this after the news broke that Engel had not set foot in his majority Black district for the entirety of the Coronavirus pandemic and several days before George Floyd’s murder sparked mass uprisings and protests around the world.
Perhaps this quote given to The Hill about primary challengers from CBC member Rep. Gregory Meeks explains it best:
“It just seems strange that the social Democrats seem to be targeting members of the Congressional Black Caucus, individuals who have stood and fought to make sure that African Americans are included and part of this process…"
The operative phrase there would be “African Americans are included and part of the process”. Being included and part of the process doesn’t mean changing the outcome of the process. It doesn’t mean that we get to rethink the role and function of policing with respect to its roots in racism and oppression and its ubiquitous presence in the lives of marginalized people. It just means a certain select group of Black people….excuse me African Americans…...get to take an administrative role in perpetuating these systems of oppression. The goal being that these systems can be tweaked and adjusted as so to forestall the violent release of tension that is the natural result of societal inequality. The CBC serves a purpose. It exists to give legitimacy to a purposely unequal system. It exists to enthusiastically co-sign a crime bill that codified the lavishly expensed military-style occupation that people are now violently resisting.
And in return they get to be a part of class that the police exist to protect from the rest of us. At least in theory. As the great and tragic philosopher Kanye West once said; “Even if you in a nigga in a Benz you still a nigga…..in a Benz”. The neoliberal order that gives them their social purchase can very easily slide into a neo-fascisitc one that could take it all away. And that is key to remember here. The Congressional Black Caucus has no interest in material justice, they are merely seeking a new equilibrium of the old order so that something that might threaten them does not rise from the chaos. The rest of us go do die for the maintenance of their order. That’s not solidarity. No matter how much Kente cloth you drape over it.
Real Solidarity Forever.