It Always Comes Back / It Never Changes

     . . . . El V did The World That Made New Orleans Zoom birthday party last night, though as the party giver and her husband, whose birthday it was, are in California, it was afternoon in their backyard for them, and for their friends in their backyards.

It was so good -- for them, for him and thus for me.  Different faces and voices! A chance to talk about something else!  Things felt almost normal again.  This came after the horrors that Wednesday, and yes, mostly yesterday too, were.  I was just sick from it, and then yesterday I was sick from being sick.  The Zoom party pulled me back together. I slept pretty good then, last night.

Every time it seems we're plateauing it gets worse. And again, it is black bodies, black voices, black courage, who are out there, saying and doing what must be said and done, while I remain comfortably in our privileged white isolation.  History continues to go round and round, returning to where it begins.

But, hey, the stock market soars, so all's right with somebodies' world, and so what that the cops who wail on those whose worlds are not all right, and never have been, that's just how it has been, always has been, and always shall be, amen, because it stand between 'Them and the only thing that has value, that we value, OUR PROPERTY.  Never forget that for long periods what was meant by "a man of virtue" was, "a man of property." Property = virtue.  After all Our stock market and Your economy are not one and the same.  [ Current Reading Aloud is Riot. Strike. Riot. (2016) by the insufferable Joshua Clover.  It's stuffed with political economic theory, which he pontificates provocatively, sometimes erroneously, but always with a lively mind.  Like so many works that are published right before a momentous event and change, one cannot help but speculate fruitlessly as to how he might have written it if writing it right now.]

How can one be an historian, an historian of US history and slavery, and not be sick to her stomach? We're right back to where we were in the 1950's, the 1920's, the 1890's, the 1870's and all the years before that to 1619. Mirroring the 1850's this racial hatred too is the wielded means and the presented motivation for a coup on the nation.

So, since we wrote a book about the history of this from the beginning of it in our nation, up until that successful effort to go to war to take over the country for the benefit of the Slaveocracy haters, a group of pastors have asked us to do a Zoom discussion with their congregants about the material in The American Slave Coast, next Wednesday -- a current version of 'getting out of the house'.

     . . . . Here is an interview and photos with our friend K up at Jumel Terrace. It begins with a Forward by the interviewer,  that says better what I am feeling these last days better than I do, and who, being African American, has far greater moral authority and reason to feel and say it:

"I am so tired...."

...The black community’s determination and ingenuity to thrive and prosper in the face of adversity should be seen as nothing new – but it’s the continuous road blocks of systematic racial oppression and suppression that feel very, very old... 

Our dear friend is living right there, in the center of the Harlem Renaissance; his neighbors are their generation of black intellectuals and artists, as were their own parents and their neighbors, going all the way back to before the 1920's. They tend to meet most days and hang out, arguing, discussing and exchanging views, on his front stoop.  I.e. he lives in a real neighbhood, a real community, unlike us, down here which is dead fred, now that the real estate developers drove out our community for the sake of businesses that catered to tourists almost exclusively -- and now there are no tourists, and not even the NYU students.

The truth is – and Thometz knew it – was that he wasn’t going to be selling any of those books, at least not to any walk-in customers in 2015. He saw the bookshop as his own protest, to challenge and confront passersby about race. Situated in a historically-black neighbourhood, he was also aware of the difficulty for locals to accept the idea of a white man owning and selling rare books about black history. “I’m not naïve, I know that there are some people in the neighborhood talking about me saying ‘this white guy thinks he knows everything’. But you know, I understand that. The white people, I don’t understand as well.”

     . . . . This, from today's LRB daily email offering from their archive; the year it was published (2000 -- another age!) I requested the anthology for Christmas, and which shows that even Churchill, in the darkest days of WWII, sought out inspiration from black writers.:

...The Harlem Renaissance has been overlooked in many accounts of American Modernism, but the new Norton Anthology of American Literature gives it a good deal of space....

     . . . . As addendum to our adage from the song we wrote way back in the 1980's, and el V's band performed at CBGB's  "When The Plague Hits the City," -- everybody's disaster is somebody's good luck --  this has been good for book biz, which so very often denies black writers space and support, even while profiting from their suffering.

To paraphrase, my agent was pushing back a meeting necessary for the completion and timely release of my book — which is about how black people can apply the lessons we derive from traumatic experiences to our careers — so that white people could reflect on how to help black people. I countered, insisting that our meeting take place as scheduled because black people’s lives are in danger, and I shouldn’t have to sacrifice momentum on a book written for black people because white people are performing empathy.

     . . . . Everything about the action, thinking, language, rhetoric and behavior of white supremacists and racial injustice never goes away because we, as a nation of white people, cover it up comes back, Part the Umptyth -- shades of the Slaveocracy surveillance and control of the Post Office, monitoring and confiscating and burning any materials that even contained the word, 'slave' -- including novels, and not just Uncle Tom's Cabin, that screed penned by satan.

Law Enforcement Seizes Masks Meant To Protect Anti-Racist Protesters From COVID-19

The masks, reading “Stop killing Black people,” were meant to quell the spread of the coronavirus, which has disproportionately affected Black Americans.

... The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) spent tens of thousands of dollars on the masks they had planned to send all over the country. The first four boxes, each containing 500 masks, were mailed from Oakland, California, and were destined for Washington, St. Louis, New York City and Minneapolis, where on May 25 a white police officer killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old handcuffed Black man, setting off a wave of protests across the country.

But the items never left the state. The U.S. Postal Service tracking numbers for the packages indicate they were “Seized by Law Enforcement” and urge the mailer to “contact the U.S. Postal Inspection Service for further information.”

And, then, you know, Rand Paul, blocking the anti-lynching legislation in the Senate -- Rand Paul who is such a despicable person his neighbor tried to kill him.  Anyway, shades of the entire history of the USA -- even FDR didn't even dare try for anti-lynching law -- too politically dangerous for him, as he continuously explained to his wife, Eleanor, who just as relentlessly kept pressuring him to do it.

The First Lady lost that battle, but she never gave up her war for equality and against systemic injustice.  We can't give up either. It is our job, our obligation, and, as John Quincy Adams declared, "my moral duty as deemed by Almighty God."