Why Blacks are the soul of this nation
Why Blacks are the soul of this nation
Plus: Jesus, and a Tube
vol. 4 issue 24
Greetings,
Three things.
Number one: Jesus and me
Initially, I was at a loss to explain why, despite my expressed invitation to Christian evangelicals earlier this summer to please tell me why you love Jesus, not many of you have offered commentary on what I post.
And yet, the number of subscribers to this publication has increased by about 20% since I initially issued the invitation, and so have the number of “shares” of my posts. So, it seems I am making folks think.
Which is good, because that is my favorite thing to do with words. That, and describe what makes humanity beautiful. However, I am in no way interested in making you think I am “right” about anything.
To that end, I really do want to know what you all think, but perhaps I haven’t been explicit enough in stating my own beliefs.
My beliefs tend to shift, sort of like the tide, as I am exposed to new ideas. This often leads to the old ideas washing away. Sometimes, I treasure both, like rare shells snatched from beneath the crashing waves.
Still, I do have a magnetic North. Here it is: I don’t believe there is ultimately any separation between anything in the cosmos, except time. And time is merely a linear device that allows us humans the luxury of reflection. We’re all part of one divine consciousness. What that consciousness is exactly, I will never fathom in my current state of puny but glorious humanity. But why should that stop me from celebrating that we live in an ensouled universe?
As such, I seek love, peace, and tolerance, primarily because these states of being are practical, but they also feel good. Killing and maiming and harming and shaming in Jesus or God’s name…that’s not love in my view. That’s a commitment to a paradigm of hierarchy where you have to constantly justify why you get to have special treatment. Bah. You’re not better than me. I am not better than you.
Where Jesus is concerned, just this morning, from the unlikely source of a preacher’s-kid-turned-astrologer (not that being an astrologer negates his status as a preacher’s kid), I heard a poignant evocation of Jesus’s role as a bridge between god and humans. The comparison between Jesus and Ganymede, Zeus’s cup bearer, grabbed me and made me feel quite tender toward Jesus.
So, before I abandon this experiment, I will share my personal conclusion from the data collected: Jesus's message is crucial, but singular acceptance of him is not.
Number two: Down the Tube(s)
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R, Ala.) — wait — maybe this makes three things into three-and-a-half, because I feel compelled to interrupt myself in order to point out that increasingly, the names of newsmakers in the Mondo Bizzaro land that is our national political scene, seem oh-so-literal.
The name “Trump” is just a baseline. Others come to mind. Take former member of Congress, Anthony Weiner (D, NY). His own member is now a weener for the ages, sexted into the annals of history.
We also have Lindsay Graham (R, SC). A gram is small. Well, there you have it: a wee homophone, good for a smirk.
And then there is Mr. Tuberville. Ville is French for city, or town. It depends upon the size. A tuber is an enlarged, fleshy organ. You can look it up. That’s just the botanical definition. “A rounded projection or swelling” is what the American Heritage Dictionary of English calls a tuber, adding that “tubercle” is just as correct, although not as common, even if it is more fun to say. There are also urban, aka “street”, definitions of tuber as well. All of them relate to the word “root”, which as a transitive verb, in street lingo anyway, requires a tube to accomplish. So, our man from Alabama is also, conceivably, also a man from Tube Town.
That tracks.
Let’s call him the Tube, for short.
Anyway, back to item number two: the Tube recently declared at a MAGA rally:
“[Democrats] want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that. Bullshit! They are not owed that.”
Reparations? In political discourse, that is a word with specific connotations about black americans
, but the Tube drops it midway through a loosely hung argument about border crossing, illegal drugs, disrespected police, and pro-crime Democrats.The Tube’s train has gone off the rails. The media want to make you mad about it, but that’s so they can make money.
I am interested in clarifying what he said as a public service.
Is the Tube careless or does he lack care? Let me see if I can approximate two possible tracks of his thinking.
Carelessness: “Whoops, I forgot to finish the predicate of that ‘sentence’ and explain that Democrats want reparations, but I do not agree that we need to address how it was that when slaves in this country were emancipated, they did not get what was promised to them, that in actuality, every time they were promised one thing, a new way of breaking that promise was devised and made into policy or practice, and this has led to routinized deleterious effects on their descendants.”
Lack of care: “Tweeeeeeeeeeeet. Here’s me blowing my dog whistle to rile up the MAGA nation I’ve helped train to hate anyone who thinks black american descendants of slaves are owed anything. Isn’t it nifty how when I blow like this, we don’t have to worry about that discussion on our infidelity to truth and democracy? (And hush up you there, girl with the typing clickety-clack fingers!)”
You can decide for yourself which it is. Watch the minute-and-a-half long C-SPAN footage of his tirade I have linked below since corporate media does not appear to want to show you the whole clip, at least not that I can tell.
Senator Tuberville Says Democrats Want Reparations for People Who Do Crime | C-SPAN.org
Notably, what’s missing from most coverage I have seen is the bit in the Tube’s tirade about a secret cabal being “pro-crime”.
Well on that, the Tube and I have ridden similar trains of thought recently. Only, my train went in the opposite direction:
They fear death so we die instead (substack.com)
Here was my connecting train:
Willingly, consistently traumatized: (substack.com)
And if you like side trips, here’s a bonus itinerary video of some interviews you might want to hear. It’s fairly short, too:
Number three: Blacks are the soul of our nation
This is something I’ve had on my mind for a while but needed the time and space to sort it out clearly enough to make it succinct. Props to the Tube for accelerating my thought process.
Why I am addressing it at all is because a patron subscriber – and commenter! – recently challenged me to explain why I claimed that black americans are the soul of America.
How I came to that conclusion was because: a) my son, a musician whose work is heavily influenced by Kendrick Lamar and Frank Sinatra (it works), successfully made the argument to me once by way of musical examples and b) after contemplating how whenever I travel internationally, what tends to be depicted abroad as quintessential “american” culture — jazz, tap dancing and other Broadway razzamatazz, rap and HipHop, basketball, soul food — is directly related to the creativity and ingenuity of black americans.
(The other common theme is the cowboy, but that has been so thoroughly appropriated by politicians that it’s hard to convince non-historians that in fact, cowboys on the frontier were more often black or indigenous than they were white.)
The realization got me thinking about how there seems to be an inverse relationship between freedom and creative output: the less people have of the former, the more they will generate of the latter.
My interlocutor suggested that the soul of the nation rests with the Indigenous, however. I argued instead that the original peoples of this continent are the keepers of the soul of the land where America is located, but it is Blacks who maintain our national soul.
Part One was originally for patron subscribers only, but I unlocked it for this discussion.
I chose to break my argument into two parts because I am trying to avoid so many TLDRs (“too long, didn’t read”) in my archives, but I hope you read both, because then you will have the complete thought, including why and how the embodiment of the soul of the land is essential, and why not everyone is adept at doing it.
But as a study aid, here is how I defined nation, soul, and spirit in Part One.
Nation:
A nation is not a country. A nation is not a land. A nation is a collection of people who are inspired (have the will) to achieve a certain aim, or to uphold certain beliefs.
The Navajo Nation, by way of example, exists in the minds of its people, regardless of the land boundaries imposed upon them by the US government.
Soul:
Soul as a universal force holds the infinite blueprints of each of us as individuals. Like any cell and its DNA code, soul (little “s”) when incarnated into form relies upon a harmonized will to live and to express itself according to that code.
A soul is both eternal in that it is connected to something greater and infinite, and temporal in that it never forgets its code and the promise contained therein for the creation of something material in the here and now.
But that “harmonized will” can only function if the sprit is intact.
Spirit:
Spirit is the centripetal force that carries the soul’s mission forward. Spirit’s power hinges upon will, not promise. In other words, spirit goes out into the world when the embodied soul has been inspired by a choice to do so.
Part Two: Defining ‘freedom’
To understand my complete argument, I need to define “freedom”. As a word, “freedom” is so abused, it’s difficult to identify when we actually experience it.
For example, “freedom isn’t free” is a popular phrase. But this bit of jingoism, designed to shame us into supporting war at all costs and for any given reason, only works because we have for so long now (since the advent of Reaganomics) placed the concept of “free” primarily within a consumer context, not one of citizenship.
In that way, “free” is simply the opposite of “costs something” rather than a human right of expression.
“Freedom isn’t free” is therefore just shorthand for, “If you want to keep consuming, war is justified.”
And that is only appealing to us because we have been hypnotized into believing that freedom equates with living in a country that has a “free market”, and that requires us to believe that a free market actually exists.
Some of you might want to argue that point about the mythical free market, but I don’t want to. It’s not germane. And really, I have spent four years turning that little jewel under all glints of light as publisher of docu-mental. The archives are there if you care to look.
What is pertinent here is that in the opening lines of the document that directly addresses freedom in our nation, there is nothing about commerce. It’s about what should be common sense and self-evident. There is no price point mentioned. There is no, “and we will spatula a can of whup ass all over your face if you get in the way of our right to do whatever the hell we want.”
From the preamble of our Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What an eloquent statement of our national ethos. It succinctly describes a collection of many different individuals choosing to live their lives according to how they see fit in accordance with whatever animates their respective sense of fulfillment, which was the 18th century way of denoting “being right with one’s god”.
Freedom then, as described in our national blueprint, is agency. It’s not the price of something. It’s simply knowing your own heart and mind and acting accordingly.
If your heart and mind tell you to stomp all over someone else’s rights, we have a justice system for that. Again, no mention of commerce.
Agency is a cornerstone of democracy, which I think is impossible without an ethos as stated plainly in our erstwhile national motto, e pluribus unum — out of many, one.
It’s a non-hierarchical world view that empowers all.
While hierarchies might be necessary for triaging levels of government intervention, or triaging anything for that matter, as a national motto, “out of many, one” is unsustainable if you’re going to equate freedom with commerce.
In that case, you need better-thans, not equality.
Conveniently, last century, during a time when Congress was filled only with white men, our original motto, redolent as it was with democracy, was supplanted with the top-down thinking of “In God We Trust”.
There went the explicit connection between creative intent and freedom.
Which reminds me that another acceptable definition of freedom is lack of restrictions. The Tube talks about Democrats wanting “control” of his audience’s — what? I don’t know. Stuff, I guess.
Control restricts freedom. That much I do know. So, if I follow the Tube per his intent, then Democrats want to restrict the freedom of his audience, which if you watch the video, is primarily white men, at least that’s who fills the camera frame.
However, I have watched the clip of Tubes six times now, and I am still unable to understand what actual risk there is to anyone’s freedom.
There’s just not an obvious connection between enemy control over these folks and a risk to their individual agency. So, Tubes must be referring to their freedom to consume.
A-ha! Freedom isn’t free, in other words. I get it now. So, now there’s gonna have to be a fight. Tubes is fired up about that idea. He even curses!
When we use our systems and institutions to substitute commerce with democracy, even if we make God the CEO, and then we routinize this switcheroo, then it’s not freedom as our founders intended.
It’s a cage.
If, as I have already stated, a nation is defined as a collection of people who are inspired to achieve a certain aim according to a harmonized will, and America’s ethos explicitly describes the right to exercise one’s individual agency, with harm to none, then who among us has been the most consistently in alignment with this ethos, and at the earliest?
Hint: It is not the US Chamber of Commerce.
It’s black americans.
Who in this country has been at the vanguard of protecting and promoting civil rights, which are what flow naturally from the ethos of individual agency as imparted to each human by God, as opposed to so-called “consumer rights” which are arbitrary and slanted toward profit?
Hint: It is still not the US Chamber of Commerce. Cut that out.
It’s black americans.
Blacks in this country historically have also been the most restricted, chained, caged, and segregated by other americans, who have systematically sought to deny them the right to enjoy their own creativity and resourcefulness.
But, okay. Assuming Tubes is right that freedom is the unfettered right to the ownership of things, then isn’t it interesting that the people who historically and literally have been for sale in this country, including by the very authors of the Declaration of Independence, are black americans? Who was on the “winning” end of freedom in that equation?
(As an aside, much of the language of the Declaration of Independence, was actually inspired by indigenous people — specifically, the Iroquois, who had been practicing democracy on this continent for all their people, including for women, before we showed up with our Greco-Roman notions of equality predicated on men being in charge.)
This is also from Part One of my argument:
The soul offers a promise, the will of the spirit carries out that promise. Notice the interplay of fate (the original promise) and choice (we must make a choice to act) in that equation. A nation is a collection of people who have a will to act in service to a common notion.
So, while indigenous people in America — and anyone else who wasn’t privileged by the use of the word “men” in the preamble (which referred only to the white men who wrote it) — have all suffered from the perversion of what the word freedom actually means
, captive and enslaved Blacks were the ones whose bodies literally were used to build nation that audaciously declared itself to be free, while their souls and spirits were abjectly denied the fruits of their obviously immense ability to create.That’s why I reckon it is black americans’ souls that collectively form our national soul, shaped around the promise of freedom. Not the freedom Tubes wants for his apparently oppressed audience, but the freedom the founders described and defined for us all.
Please do leave your comments, pro or against. Like I was getting at in item #1 above, I figure my thoughts are “right” like poems are right, not “right” like facts are right. But that’s okay because poetry is never a bad place to start when considering policymaking. You can learn more about that in this video interview I did with poet and policy analyst E. Ethelbert Miller, recent recipient of the Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award.
Peace,
Whitney
I use a little “a” when I talk about being american because I just think we get too heated and arrogant when we claim to know what it even means. One day, I might return to observing it as a “proper” noun with its derived adjectival propriety, but not today.
Health insurance plans are an excellent example of this. The marketing emphasizes our “freedom to choose”, but we are choosing from limited options predicated on a “need” for something that were we actually living in a humane society, we would have access to anyway, and which never quite seems to match what we do actually need, but what the “science” says we will need.
When I was a health policy reporter, I saw that lie spun so many ways, it convinced me that nearly every one of our federal lawmakers knows there is no such thing as a truly free market when it comes to health insurance, making their number one priority in healthcare reform to use their power and privilege to distract you from understanding that, too. Here’s an example of how that plays out.
I think all americans have suffered, including white men, from this perversion. How much more vibrant would all our lives be if we didn’t think we had to conquer life in order to live it with assurance that our basic needs would be met?
Whoops. Sorry. :/
Hint: It is not the Chamber of Commerce. xoxoxoxoxo