"The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
Walt Whitman could drop a mean sixteen. He was also a Liberal. I don’t mean that as a compliment either. On subject of slavery, Whitman was staunchly opposed to the institution. But not because he recognized the humanity of the Africans being kidnapped, tortured, and exploited for profit. No, Whitman was worried that the expansion of slave labor would reduce opportunities and wages for white workers. Which it certainly did, but don’t worry too much about those poor white laborers. They became cops and border patrol agents. He was against the abolition movement. Not because he disagreed with their cause, but because he thought they were too extreme in their demands for change.
I mean you have to admit, #abolishslavery is a terrible slogan.
We should talk about Ice Cube.
However before we do that, we should talk about Hip Hop. When we talk about Hip Hop, we should be clear that Hip Hop is not rap. Rap is a pillar upon which the larger structure of the culture known as Hip Hop is built. The culture of Hip Hop was born in the 70’s but it came of age in the 80's. A decade in American history that was indelibly shaped by the man who was its leader for eight out of those ten years. Ronald Reagan.
The 80’s are known as a time of economic growth and excess. For some. Well specifically for some white people. Hip Hop grew up at the other end of that spectrum. The part of America that was kept far away from the public image of smiling bankers and Wall Street traders. Hip Hop was the collective response from people rendered separate from legitimate society through material and cultural barriers. It was a rebellion of poetry.
Poetry that ended up getting people paid.
It’s only natural for rebellions to take the shape of the thing that they are rebelling against. The leaders of revolutionary militias tend to drape themselves in military regalia and medals. The reason for this seems obvious. By adopting the artifice of the kind of authority that is deemed legitimate, revolutionary leaders assert their own legitimacy in reshaping the social order they seek to upend.
But there is another reason why revolutionaries do this. When a societal outgroup assumes the aesthetic of the privileged class, those in power consider it a mockery. It makes them very mad. Because when a Fortune 500 CEO drops the price of my college education on a wrist watch, it’s more than a sartorial choice. It’s a cultural signifier within our American social order. That watch means that the person who wears it has succeeded. They worked hard, they made smart choices, they sacrificed and as such they have earned the right to inhabit the upper echelons of society. When a rapper spends that same amount of money on a platinum necklace and pendant containing a gaudy amount of diamonds, it is a subversion of that idea.
And that’s how “Swag” was born.
Black artists were always money makers in American pop culture. For the longest time, seminal Black contributors to Americana were exploited. Their art was packaged by white label owners and managers for white audiences and too often the Black artists were left with a fraction of the profit they had produced for their work. Hip Hop sought to reject that part of history.
Reaganism extolled the virtues of hard work and entrepreneurship. Qualities that are principal to the particular extrajudicial import/export and sales industry that thrived in the parts of town where Hip Hop took shape. Reaganism vilified Hip Hop culture despite it being everything that Reaganism claimed to value. The most successful rappers were the ones who understood that they needed to play the game of American capitalism to survive. They marketed themselves. They kept a watch on their money and made sure deals were fair if not titled in their favor. This was both a claim to legitimacy within the American social order and a mockery of it. Uneducated Black boys from the hood should not be able to get that rich.
Ice Cube is a revolutionary. NWA is one of the most subversive and revolutionary musical projects in history. There is no #ACAB without “Fuck The Police”. Along with fellow revolutionaries like Public Enemy and Rakim they performed defiance and defined a new opposition to American white supremacy. They aesthetically rejected white hegemonic norms while succeeding at demonstrating the stated virtues of whiteness. Hard work and business savvy. It makes total and complete sense that Ice Cube would try and negotiate with Donald Trump as part of a revolutionary project.
In April of 2016 Cube said this to Bloomberg News:
"Donald Trump is what Americans love. Donald Trump is what Americans aspire to be -- rich, powerful, do what you wanna do, say what you wanna say, be how you wanna be," the rapper-actor said about Trump's appeal. "That’s kind of been like the American dream. He looks like a boss to everybody, and Americans love to have a boss."
I’d say he fucking nailed it. In the world Ice Cube came up in, you have to negotiate with people whose hatred of you is obvious. And if you can come out ahead in those negotiations then that is the ultimate payback. Many rappers, especially the ones who enjoyed sustained success or were able to expand their brands and become successful businesses unto themselves, see mastering capitalism as the most effective way of fighting racism. Racism is often defined as prejudice plus power. Wealth is power. When Black people are able to attain enough wealth it negates the power aspect of racism and allows us to brush the prejudice part off our shoulders. In order to build this kind of wealth in a capitalist system one must be willing to make deals with people you don’t like and walk away from deals that don’t serve your interests.
You can have honest criticisms of Ice Cube’s willingness to try and make a deal with a racist con man but making deals with racist con men is how one makes it in the entertainment business. You can have honest criticisms of his attempt to leverage the Black vote against democrats in return for a commitment to his “Contract with Black America”, but you should also be honest about just how little the Democratic party has reciprocated the fervent loyalty shown to it by the Black electorate.
Black America is not a monolith. We are unified by a common struggle to find liberation and a proper place in society, but we all have different ways of interacting with that struggle. Black liberation as conceived within our community has been socialist and labor oriented, spiritual, militant, pragmatic, capitalistic and business orientated. There are reactionary Black people, there are communist Black people. There are those who want to make the system work for them and there are those who want to burn the whole thing to the ground. We can be all of these things at the same time or none of these things when it suits us. This is the sum of Black American politics. It is large. It contains multitudes.
However, the larger politics of neoliberalism has worked tirelessly to flatten these multitudes into one particular cultural signifier. Allegiance to the Democratic party. For a Black person to not support the Democratic party let alone vote for a Republican is the ultimate transgression. Nothing short of treachery to their race. As Black person in America your first political responsibility is to vote for the Democrat. All other political priorities must be secondary. Such is the threat to Black people from the Republican party.
People like Candace Owens, Diamond and Silk, and Larry Elder are enthusiastically condemned and derided in Black political spaces. They are political grifters looking to make a buck but for Black people politics is much more than a conceptual exercise in debating resource distributions and the application of power. For most of us, it’s literally a life or death struggle. I can empathize with the anger expressed at Black Republicans even if personally I’m not eager to engage in their rhetorical pillorying. Public Black conservatives are playing games with people's lives.
But there is something that worries me about the acute vitriol expressed toward figures like Candace. Their political excoriation can often take the form of racialized invective. The same words and ideas that were used by white people to ground our collective psyche into the dirt we were once forced to till. Words like “coon” and “uncle Tom” are used unironically. Accusations of “dancing for massa” are readily bandied about. The Black people who support the Republican party cease to be individuals, flawed and vulnerable to bad ideas. They become deformed representations of the reductive image of what Blackness is supposed to be. An image where, as far as politics is concerned, to be authentically Black is to vote for Democrats. And while I agree that in our current context the most strategic and pragmatic electoral action for Black America to take is to vote against Republicans, this dichotomy based on party lines is extremely troubling.
I cannot say that I have never engaged in some bashing of Black conservatives. I cannot say that I will never do so in the future. I am a leftist. I will call a trash opinion a trash opinion. And perhaps I wouldn’t feel so troubled by the way Black conservatives are treated if I hadn’t been on the receiving end of similar treatment for being a Black supporter of Bernie Sanders.
As I said earlier, I can understand the vitriol expressed toward Black conservatives who put their personal profit or lucrative grift ahead of the collective concerns of Black America. They are actively helping to promote an ideology that has only ever sought our destruction and expulsion from society. I’d rather attack systems and not people but I get it. However, the rage expressed at Black leftists and Bernie supporters was not based on any opposition to the project of Black liberation. Socialists started the modern project of Black liberation. If anything the rise of a nascent, labor oriented left should have been seen as a potential homecoming for Black politics. But instead people like Killer Mike, Briahna Joy Gray, and Nina Turner were met with derision and their Blackness questioned if not outright erased. I, your humble correspondent, was accused of dancing for my white massa Bernie in my attempts to advocate for his candidacy and criticize the Democratic party apparatus that seemed so dead set against it.
Ice Cube’s “Contract for Black America” is in no way a reactionary conservative document. It’s a bit too market focused and capitalist for my tastes but it has some very good policy contained within its pages. Things like criminal justice reform that involves releasing non violent offenders from prison and expunging all cannabis convictions. Baby bonds that go some way towards leveling the disparity in generational wealth that propels the racial wealth gap. There is a jobs guarantee and he even name drops Modern Monetary Theory. The problem people had with Ice Cube isn’t that he had a plan for Black America. It’s that he didn’t show enough loyalty to the Democratic party while trying to get it implemented. And this is a very real problem for the project of Black Liberation if the only engine we are allowed to use is the Democratic establishment. I’m not going to go through all the times the Democrats have sold out Black people in the name of political expediency because it is a long list and deserves it’s own article. Suffice it to say the Democrats have not offered any serious material support for dismantling white supremacy in the six plus decades they have been the official political party of Black people.
The democrats are more than capable of offering cultural signifiers. They have plenty of stock in the brand of woke. And unlike other leftists, I am unwilling to entirely write off the importance of culture in attempting to change social orders. However, the Democratic flavor of anti-racism is almost entirely cultural. We can have all the Black Panther movies we want (which is dope) but we can’t have universal health care. Any material aid given to Black communities must be filtered through byzantine structures of means testing and corporate partnership. Too often it benefits the already wealthy much more than it does the poor.
Democrats have done such a thorough job of demagoguing against collective action and socialist policy and promoting the same entrepreneurial values espoused by the Reaganism of the 80’s that it should really come as no surprise that some Black people would be swayed to try out the original flavor reactionary conservatism of the Republican party instead of the diet option offered by the Democrats. And we should be honest, there is a certain amount of appeal in the idea that one can control their own destiny. That the machinations of systems and institutions can be overcome by one's own individual effort. Some people don’t want to think of themselves as a victim.
For this Liberalism has no answer. In their narrow conception of practical anti-racism, the performative wokeness of the Democratic party combined with the Republicans commitment to dog-whistle racist rhetoric should be enough to make the choice clear. But for a little more than half of white America and a small but growing number of minorities, racism is either justified or just not that big a deal.
And that’s where the pessimism sets in.
So let’s talk about what’s making Liberals so sad in part three.
Solidarity Forever.
oh god, don't leave me hanging. this is fire.