Now What?
So, everyone's discovered the genocide. What's next?
Part one is lunch - the mAiN eVenT. Probably a handful of thoughts that I’ve managed to convince myself are connected. I’ve probably also managed to convince myself that you can relate. I fear that sometimes neither will be true. So treat it like lunch. Feast on it all now. Or maybe some now, some later. Or toss it & order Chinese instead. Here goes.
I got a phone call from my boy this past Tuesday. White dude, my age. In the six days that had transpired since I’d seen the video of George Floyd’s lynching, it had grown increasingly difficult to accommodate white voices in my cypher. I knew many of them were well-intentioned, but it was really a self-preservation thing. Like, whatever the fuck it is, not now.
But finally, on day six, sitting in the park casually working on a Montauk Pilsner, I set my predisposition free. So when my boy called, we had a conversation. I didn’t regret it.
I’ve had a lot of conversations with a lot of white people over the years about racism. To most of them, it was this faraway concept. Not that it didn’t exist, but it didn’t rise to the level of importance that they felt they needed to do something about it. Most of them would agree that something had to be done, but rarely did they themselves feel compelled to spring to action.
In some cases, the culprit was rampant ignorance. I could always acknowledge ignorance in that regard, but I had little patience for it. American Racism is a particularly in-your-face brand, not some niche sociopolitical issue that you need to read some hacker’s manifest to understand. Pretty much everybody, at some point, has seen a group of Black nannies pushing strollers stocked with little Todds and Amys. I don’t know that I’ve ever, in my adult life, seen the reverse. That should terrify everyone. Or, at the very least, make them want to ask a question or two. And asking the right questions is how you attack ignorance at its root.
This particular conversation went differently than the majority of my previous ones. I could sense a level of hysteria in my homie’s voice that I wasn’t used to. An intense tinge of what-the-fuck. Not only at how devastating it still is to be Black in 2020, but at how casually his peers and the brands he’d previously been involved with were reacting. I joked with him that if he was losing his shit, imagine me. Imagine us.
We need more people to lose their shit. We need more fucking hysteria.
It was hilarious to watch the social media posts roll in during the aftermath of Floyd’s lynching. Truly. I alluded to how much like clockwork the response to Black death and trauma is in the media in “Genocide by Design”, and over the last week, society made me look like a prophet. I’ve been predicting New York Jets division championships for the last eight years, so obviously my foresight isn’t like that. But you didn’t need to be Albus Dumbledore to know that shit was going to go like this:
(It’s 2020, Substack. Why can’t I use emojis? That eye-roll joint would’ve been a perfect one-character paragraph.)
In every corner of the internet, there was some black-background-white-typeface (just reading that is cringe) graphic about how some company stood with Black people. Except, they really didn’t. The producer Kenny Beats subsequently Twitter campaigned on Spotify not featuring any Black artists on its official Dance playlist, and how the curator of that playlist has been uncomfortably silent.
DANCE. LMAO.
Kith… I don’t even have the words.
Republic Records, and other record labels alike? Think about how insulting it is that it took George Floyd for them to say… Hey, that “urban” term has been obviously coded and racist for a while. Let’s not? I used to work for a media company that swore that it was looking for a more appropriate alternative to the term. They only told me that because I was Black. I walked into a meeting a few weeks later to look at updated company materials and not only had the term been used again in its mission statement, it had been highlighted as a point of emphasis.
These knee-jerk reactions to what happened to Floyd bothered me. Past the hypocrisy of what it took for these statements to arise, were we all expected to suddenly believe that these companies, many of whom relied and continue to rely on systemic racism for their profit margins, suddenly had Black folks’ best interests at heart? Because of a cute little Canva?
Rightfully so, the Twittersphere took notice of this trend, and started demanding that in place of those graphics, companies post their faculty rosters.
We all knew that wasn’t happening. That’d be like walking the loaded gun you used to kill someone into a police precinct. Way too self-incriminating.
That said, the sentiment was spot-on. How dare you declare that you stand with Black people, and you care deeply about Black lives, when you don’t treat the ones in your own jurisdiction with half-an-ounce of fairness and compassion? How do you think this all gets turned around? Are you waiting on some executive order to begin that work? Or does it matter to you enough that you’ll do it when no one’s watching? When no one’s dying on camera. When social media isn’t demanding that you have a conscience.
This is how those statements should have read:
We honestly haven’t done shit in decades about the rampant racism that governs society, and in some cases, our company. If anything, we’ve aided and abetted it by being lackadaisical about our core values, our hiring processes, and the way we socialize people and virtues in the media. 500 police killings (that we know about) later, we’ve realized that in order for things to change, we have to change first. And here’s a step-by-step plan on how we’re going to do that.
The brand that came out and said that would’ve gotten my and my family’s money for generations to come. Black or white-owned.
This weekend, I protested with my sister and a couple friends in Brooklyn. I felt some of the same discomfort I felt looking at the IG graphics.
If you’re not familiar with Brooklyn’s transformation over the years, I’ll try to explain quickly the relevance of Flatbush to this conversation. For Brooklyn natives, Flatbush is a point of pride. If you take the Manhattan Bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn—which many New Yorkers understand to be a journey from insanity to relative sanity—you have to touch Flatbush upon arrival. It’s the only street that truly runs from end-to-end in the borough; you can hop in a cab near Barclays Center and wind up at Kings Plaza mall in the deep ends of Flatlands (you’ll see why they called it “flat lands” when you get there) 30 minutes later. The southernmost province of the county. You won’t even feel like you’re in New York anymore.
And for many years, you could only go so far south down Flatbush before you stopped seeing white people. For a long time, once you’d hit that Grand Army Plaza intersection, you’d seen your last pale face. (If you’ve ever been to First Saturdays at the Brooklyn Museum or the main entrance of Prospect Park, you’ve been to Grand Army Plaza.)
Over the last decade, that’s changed significantly. At first, just a few brave souls. Maybe they couldn’t tell from the Zillow description that they were in largely uncharted territory. As the years progressed however, an unmistakable pattern developed. It wasn’t before long that you could ride all the way past central Flatbush intersections like the ones at Rutland Rd., Church Ave. and Foster Ave. and still see clusters of white folks, many of them young professionals frequenting coffee shops and brunch spots, driving up the value of their neighborhoods—whether they knew it or not—to the point that the people who grew up there would soon struggle to afford staying there.
Marching down Flatbush Ave. was a thrill on Saturday, amongst some tens-of-thousands of people chanting the names of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, outwardly showing the disdain to the NYPD that Black people have held for decades. But I gotta say, part of me felt weird about it. I knew for a fact that I was standing beside people who would leave this protest and return to a way of life that completely countered the point of this agitation. Many of these white folks had definitely contributed to the systemic displacing of the scores of natives that simply cannot afford to live in Kings County anymore, from the labor market to voting. Or done far too little to demand from their communities that equality be a priority.
We need more information about what’s to be done about that. It’s not just about how the government and police state can be held more accountable. It’s about how we plan on dismantling society and social norms as we currently know them to accommodate basic human rights that have been denied for centuries.
That’s going to require a lot of uncomfortable conversations. A lot of bridge burning. A lot more hysteria. We need more fuck outta here. You know how Beyonce ended up with adidas? There weren’t enough negroes at the Reebok meeting. Lunchin’ wouldn’t lie to you. More of that, please.
Start asking the tough questions. The ones you probably thought about one night over a third glass of red and brushed out of your mind as an overreaction. Or an overreaching thought. Like, why are NBA players mostly Black while its coaches are mostly white? Why is the percentage of Black owners in sports where Black players are the stars some barely-there figure like 1%? How come there are so many white people in leadership at record labels that profit largely off of Black music? How come Black people are the ones almost exclusively employed by fast-food restaurants in places where there are also high concentrations of other races? How come, just generally in society, the ‘higher’ you go, the less Black people you see? And why the fuck are kids pledging allegiance to the flag?
Black people: we need to get even more vigilant. We need to start monitoring with whom we spend our money. How are they taking that money and reinvesting it into the community? How are they assisting in the fight for equality? What do those faculty rosters look like? If your restaurant doesn’t have enough Black people working in it, we’re not going. Existing in white spaces doesn’t prove a damn thing to anybody. Either they go out of their way to help fight the disenfranchisement that gave them that prime piece of real estate, or they take a chance sinking or swimming without the Black dollar. There will have to be exceptions, of course. Surviving in capitalism is a dogfight of its own. But for this period to truly be as transformative as it currently feels, we have to make tough changes to our own habits as well. Some convenience is the least we can sacrifice. The other extreme is our lives.
Coronavirus had already done away with the preexisting idea of “normal.” It’s likely that we never go back to that again. The worldwide protests will double down on that premise. There’s no way in hell that we can go back to anything that “used to be” a certain way once this period has evened out and the social climate returns to a more dormant state. No. Way. It won’t be possible. Not if anything’s going to really change.
Start losing your shit if you haven’t already. Every day, lose your shit about something. Then channel that energy into some action and see what happens. Let’s just… see?
finish your breakfast.
the essentials. these will rotate every issue. not necessarily new stuff. good stuff.
Freddie Gibbs, “Babies and Fools” f/ Conway The Machine
One day, out of a whiskey bar perched on the Amalfi Coast will stumble a frightfully bearded, hidden-eyed character mumbling unintelligible lyrics to himself. A young couple posing for a photo will capture him in the background. Through squinty eyes that evening, it’ll be my face they see. And the mumbled lyrics would have been Conway’s verse on this song.
Stream: Apple Music / Spotify
George Floyd a.k.a. Big Floyd, “Sittin’ On Top of the World Freestyle”
I’d seen rumblings that George Floyd had a significant relationship with the Houston hip hop scene at the time of his death, but this deep dive from Pitchfork made it obvious just how much of a figure he was. DJ Screw, the late Houston legend and mixtape pioneer, wasn’t known to just hand out personalized tapes. You had to show that you had real talent to earn one of those. Big George Floyd cut one of his own, though, in addition to a slew of other one-offs, guest spots and supplementary material. Including this “freestyle,” on which he raps the third verse. The talent jumped out.
Jay-Z, “Adnis”
This is Lunchin’ 003 and it’s my first direct Jay-Z recommendation. If you know me even in the slightest, you understand that this has been a timely lesson in self-restraint. I feel like I’m allowed to serve up this reminder. Many Jay-Z tracks qualify as under-appreciated, but even in the age of the digital Stan, “Adnis” has managed to get swept under the rug. It is one of his smoothest songwriting jobs in recent memory, and the genuine inquisitiveness in his voice will make you stare out of an open window.
din.
like, fin? like… final words. but, din? like… dinner. works in my head. *MJ shrug*
Looting — My favorite poem of all-time is written by Langston Hughes, and it’s called “Warning.” In it, he warns of the day that the “sweet, docile, meek and kind” negro decides not to strive to be an upstanding member of society. To seek revenge and not just equality, as the recently-popular social media adage goes. I remember vividly a conversation I had with a professor once, who openly mused about the notion that some white people, the conscious ones at least, live with a quiet fear that the general Black population will have a collective awakening about just how much trauma they’ve had to bear, and literally burn everything to the ground. Everything. Be glad that institutionalized racism has prevented many Black citizens of this country from understanding the true extent of the wrath brought against them by racism. Be glad that the ones that do know are suffice to be more Martin and Baldwin than Christopher Dorner. Be glad it’s just some insured storefronts that need rebuilding.
Stay safe.
I was born here almost sixty years ago. You’ve always told me it takes time. It’s taken my father’s time. My mother’s time. My uncle’s time. My brother’s and my sister’s time. My nieces and my nephew’s time.
How much time do you want? For your… progress?
—James Baldwin
