In ancient African religious systems, Ibeji (an Orisha, from the Yoruba and the Ifa) is known as the deity of twins, while Ma’at (from Egypt) was the goddess of, among other things, balance. This book, a memoir of a talented, troubled attractive young woman who falls in love with an equally troubled man whose voice and lyric reverberated around the world, tells a story that screams for their intercession. If these gods did act, they chose to abruptly end the dualities that circled around them like cocaine and marijuana: when Marvin Gay Sr. murdered his son in 1984 with the gun the son had purchased, it almost seemed like either an evil or heavenly release of all of the tension, anger and depression that had wafted around the singer.
Whether it fashions itself thusly or not, and whether the authors admit it or not, “After The Dance: My Life with Marvin Gaye” is a supplement to Ritz’s 1985 stellar biography, “Divided Soul: “The Life of Marvin Gaye.” The emotional divisions introduced by Ritz 30 years ago are laid bare by Marvin’s ex-wife, Janis. Serenity vs. paranoia. Love vs. fear. And ultimately, conflict into love and clarity into a warped sense of being. Discord, turmoil and competition were necessities for Marvin Gaye, a man who competed with his own domineering father for his mother’s love, competed with other Black recording artists for chart dominance and public adoration, competed with other men to win Janis back when he lost her, and even tried to seriously compete with Muhammad Ali in a charity boxing exhibition. He was a man who, according to Janis, believed that “perhaps misery and conflict make for great music. Perhaps without misery and conflict my well would run dry.” And, like the first Aquarian, what was the water he was bringing? “To get people to see below the surface of reality.”
The entire book is awash in 1970s post-Civil Rights Movement euphoria. Music, television and performance made gods of men and women, flawed human beings who were openly worshipped and adored. Marvin Gaye was the first Motown artist to break free of the company’s strict formula; to demand artistic freedom. He became his own Black Power Man, with his own studio, his own musical ideas and with his own family separate from Motown—the one he created with a young teenage girl he saw while in the studio. He sang a song to her, this surface ingénue, who was, and perhaps would always be, his premier acolyte. They were almost instantly conjoined by sensuality, by spirituality, by pain and the promise of enjoying, and finding home in, the new freedoms available.
In this book, the Gayes are twins of pain, cycling through, and back to, their dysfunction. Their marriage, Gaye’s second, eventually ended in the early 1980s (“The struggle to stop struggling was finally over”). Artistically, Marvin Gaye was on a comeback. Unfortunately, he did not have the chance to exorcise his personal devil—the one that had his name on it, written by his own hand—even though he knew he had to give it up. His father’s sick need to win their competition dominated, and a talent stilled, existing forever in a musical loop, a skullcap covering his head like a crown.
Marvin Gaye represented African (-American) people’s joy and pain like few artists in the 20th century. Janis Gaye’s story emphasizes all of the edges of the disjointed souls these drama junkies occupied and shared with each other, grasping for an elusive peace while naturally plotting ever-accessible turmoil. It is the story of a couple who needed love, and found it, but failed to create a life that belonged only to themselves, because ultimately, even when it was just the two of them, there were just too many sides to satisfy.
NAME: Katea Denise Stitt TITLE: Interim Program Director, WPFW Pacifica Radio in Washington, D.C.
How did you find out about this letter? What was your reaction to it?
My good friend and Jazz historian, William Brower, forwarded the letter to me.
How does it feel to know that Malcolm X knew your father (“they all know me well,” he said in the letter), and that he was one of his favorite artists?
My immediate, visceral reaction was the smile, a huge smile, followed by a bit of melancholy in wishing I could have had discussion about Malcolm X with my father. I was thrilled to read it, not only because he speaks so warmly of my father, but his thoughts on the significant role of music, and that of the musician, were immensely moving. And, of course, the intimacy of a hand-written letter!
Did your father ever tell you that he knew “Detroit Red” and/or Malcolm X? Was it unusual or usual for him to talk about who he knew? And if he did, what did he say about Red/X? Did he tell you about his reaction to Malcolm X’s assassination, 50 years ago this month?
He never told me about knowing Malcolm X, although he did mention The Nation, and Elijah Muhammad, in terms of proper diet, living, etc. He would reference the book “How to Eat to Live” when discussing health with us. He often talked about his friends and contemporaries. Folks like Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, of course, Dexter, Sonny Rollins, Don Patterson, Nancy Wilson, Amina Myers, Milt Jackson, Stan Getz – they were all great friends. Some would come to the house when they were playing town, or sometimes he’d take us to see them perform. While he never spoke of Malcolm’s assassination, my father was progressive and kept abreast of political happenings, especially as it pertained to African Americans, so I’d assume that he was saddened and deeply troubled.
What did you tell your children about this letter, their grandfather and Detroit Red/Malcolm X?
Well, I have a 13 year old daughter, Johanna, and we talk about her grandfather all the time. She is pretty open and receptive, thankfully. I asked her to read it, and share her thoughts with me. She had questions about the other musicians referenced, and who Malcolm was, etc. At the end of our discussion, her words were, “That’s really cool, Mom!”
Did you bid for the letter?
No. I was not aware it was being auctioned. That said, I would hope that whomever possesses it would gift or loan it to a museum where the public could see the actual document.
What is your opinion of what Malcolm X said about music (and your father) in the letter? “Music, Brother, is ours—it is us—and like us it is always here—surrounding us—like the infinite particles that make up Life, it cannot be seen— but can only be felt—Like Life!!! No, it is not created—but like the never-dying Soul—eternally permeates the atmosphere with its Presence—ever-waiting for its Master—the Lordly Musician—the Wielder of Souls—to come and give it a Temple—mould it into a Song. Music without the Musician is like Life without Allah…both being in need of the house—a home—The Temple — the Complete Song and its Creator Sonny & Milt Jackson played together up in Flint, Mich.”
Again, it was so profound, and so deeply personal. It felt a bit like eavesdropping to read it. Music is Life to me, a very sacred experience – I feel this way about all good music, regardless of genre. I completely empathized with this sentiment. To have him refer to my father, and Jazz, no less, in that way is mindblowing to me!!
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X and this fall marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Autobiography. You’re an interim program director at a Pacifica station that plays jazz, so this kind of thing must be very important to you. From your view as a manager of an on-air art forum, what should we remember about Malcolm X AND the artistic vision exemplified by your father, that he praised so well?
Malcolm X is one of my heroes, particularly after his pilgrimage to Mecca, but really, all of Malcolm. To show how you can change your life, and how your transformation to help and uplift others – a constant lesson and challenge for humanity. Through the letter, we get a different glimpse of Malcolm as a cultural icon and thinker, in addition to a political one. His comparison of the Creators of The Music to Life and Allah really speaks volumes as to what Jazz, Great Black Music, if you will, means to us as a people, as a society – national and globally. Simply put, Jazz is sustenance for the soul – beautiful! All of the creators of Jazz, and all music of a higher vibration, empower us to expand our minds, and access a higher spiritual experience or sensibility. This is indeed what we try to do with Music at WPFW. By the way, on February 20th, WPFW will present Malcolm and the Music, based, in part on this letter. I hope folks will listen and certainly offer feedback.
Did you know about this Ahmadiyya movement Malcolm is talking about? If so, what do you know about it? Was your father part of it? Did you know any jazz artists that were a part of it? What did he think of it, and what did/do you think of it? (And is Malcolm referring to something specific to your father when he talks about a “temple” and a “complete song?”)
Unfortunately, I only know the little I’ve read about it, and I don’t know if my father or other musicians were a part of it. I don’t think his words there are specific to my father, but speaking more to The Musician as a key to Life and Liberation – or as he says “…the Wielder of Souls.”
Now, feel free to add or say anything you want below–to answer something I didn’t ask! Someone you want me to try to fit in the article.
It was just wonderful to experience a part of Malcolm X that is not heralded enough in my opinion – his deep love for, and commitment to all humanity. HIs understanding of an interconnectedness, not on this plain, but as a spiritual experience, through music. Certainly, it gave me a new and wonderful perspective on how deep and far-reaching my father’s contributions to music were, and still are.
If he were alive today, Langston Hughes would have tried to write this book review as quickly as possible. He had bills to pay (and loans from friends to pay back), so he leapt into the plays, novels and short stories he had to write. Meanwhile, an ever-mounting pile of correspondence awaited him to sort and answer—which he did, often into the late night and early morning.
Luckily for Hughes aficionados, that lifetime’s worth of letters were regularly shipped, from 1940 until his 1967 death at the age of 65, to Yale University’s James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of American Negro Arts and Letters. (The idea for the collection was Carl Van Vechten’s, the man history identifies as the white champion of the Harlem Renaissance.) It’s from that massive Hughes output—thousands of letters that date back to 1921, letters that eventually filled 671 boxes—that the reader can see the artist at work.
In this book, which mightily struggles to be more than a work ledger, Hughes is almost constantly at work, writing anything from quickie children’s books to newspaper columns to his two autobiographies, 1940’s The Big Sea: An Autobiography and 1956’s I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey. Sadly for the general reader but semi-happily for Hughes, the master poet had a near-obsession with writing a successful stage musical, which would have given him the financial security that eluded him his entire struggling-against-being-a-vagabond life. His attempts to fight being fleeced by racist white producers and playwrights are as tedious as they are outrageous.
Hughes kept everything that interested him. He followed Black newspapers and magazines with great care, and kept track what those periodicals were saying about Black artists, especially him. Periodicals were Hughes’ lifeblood: he sold many short stories, poems and essays to Black magazines such as The Crisis and Phylon and white magazines such as Esquire. Irony abounds in Negro life: Hughes’ Chicago Defender Op-Ed column hit book and stage musical paydirt for with his creation of the character Jesse B. Semple(“Simple”), but The Defender, now having access to cheaper, white columnists, wanted to cut the little he made from it.
With the exception of the musical producers and, not insignificantly, the McCarthy witch-hunters who tried to destroy him in the 1950s, these collective letters display a man’s need to be loved and needed by everyone. He is always attempting anthologies (especially for Africanwriters) and is ceaselessly encouraging his fellow scribes, especially younger ones that he proudly claims as his discoveries, like Margaret Walker (Alexander) and, later, a young Alice Walker (“She is really ‘cute as a button’ and real bright…Mine is her first important publication [and her first story in print], so I can claim her discovery, too, I reckon,” he writes to Bontemps in 1966). For the most part, he holds back his anger and his hurt, and tries to put a positive spin on almost everyone, even the younger, angrier writers—James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones—who criticize him in his later years. The personal outlook matches the professional persona well, since Hughes had to depend on the largesse and kindness of many, many friends and associates in order to survive. The letters are his day-to-day-reality-as-performance, but his romantic life, his sexuality, his personal needs are permanently off-stage, not for even semi-public consumption.
Rampersad’s high biographical standard continues to hold. The annotations alone—of people, places end events that populate Hughes’ almost-countless adventures and misadventures aroundthe world and around New York City—make it worth the time it takes to go through his life, one thought and one year at a time. The introductions to the chronological sections show the trio of writers at their concise, detailed best.
This book can be read on its own, but it is the perfect companion to either of Hughes’ autobiographies, Rampersad’s two-volumebiographical magnum opus, or even just a collection of the artist’s poetry. It’s not too obvious to say it is a fantastic addition to the bookcases filled with Hughes’ writing and Hughes scholarship. It is a must for those who want a peek behind the curtain of a Black artist, but don’t need to see too much.
*******
APRIL 11th UPDATE: An earlier version of this review was printed inside here.
Does this mean an updated “We Are The World” response? Huhdoesithuhdoesithuhdoesit???? LOL! 🙂 Does the 25th anniversary Haiti one (below) count against that happening?
…….but I did feel this season felt a little more uneven than normal. It could be that it took me the whole season to adjust to the new Doctor. And boy, I said I wanted a darker Doctor, but instead I got a dark season. The good episodes were really good, Coleman showed she deserved to be the star of this season, and Season 8 was different, I’ll give it that. With more than 50 episodes into the “Nu Who,” the 50th anniversary, etc., maybe I’m suffering from “Doctor Who” fatigue.
I thought this was amusing!
NOVEMBER 18th UPDATE: This was funny, and GREAT!
And once again, “Children In Need” gets the sneak preview of the Christmas Special!
Writing about Newark, N.J. is always a profound thing for me, even when it’s something as small as that Root Q+A. As I’ve said before: Newark is its own ghetto, not the ghetto section of a major American city. (So if you sing and dance, you gotta cross the river.) Standing for it is not like standing for, say, more historic places like the southeast ward of the District of Columbia or Harlem or the Southside of Chicago or most of Detroit. The difference is (white) people care about those places (or at least acknowledge they exist!) because they are major parts of a larger, prestigious white whole. Because of that geographical, historical and cultural fact, your very relative, conditional worth in those areas is already assumed. Newark, in constrast, is only worth, say, a major book if (and only if) The Washington Post discovers something it finds interesting, or a privileged white boy wants an adventure in order to understand something.
So when a native who has privilege and talent chooses to work hard to earn the respect and trust of and, subsequently, status from people who have none of the third and never will, it’s significant. Folks in my home ghetto don’t get rewarded for serving each other. (No one even sees them, because, as part of the New York City metropolitan area, they live every day in the shadow of the most prestigious ghettos in the world. Quite an oxymoron, I know!) And when those Newark servants die, they don’t get remembered by The People Who Remember. They only get loving memorials by folks who, from the outside, are themselves not deemed worthy of memory.
I wrote the following essay and transcribed the subsequent, and untitled, presentation from Dr. Vicky Gholson for a book I haven’t published yet. Gholson was 64. (Those who want to contribute to her funeral costs, please go here.)
G IS FOR……
“The artist is involved in creative processes which foster independent thought and action. He or she is feared by those who have no command of these processes…The problem is between those who control the creative process and those who control the money. The latter would rather destroy the former than co-exist.”
(Photo by Yvette Marie Morgan. Used with permission.)
When you are young and read a lot of books and watch a lot of documentaries, you think that all the amazing people in life have come and gone before you showed up. That you’re too late to see something really special with your own eyes. Something powerful, and true, and maybe a little idiosyncratic. I had to move away from the New York metropolitan area and read hundreds of books, many of them by or about geniuses, to realize that I had seen one, and knew her quite well. Vicky Gholson, Ph.D. Vicky of the Village of Harlem. She has had me confused, confounded and amazed for 25 years now.
She is a product of Harlem—the real one, the one that was unquestionably the Capital of Black America, of Garvey, and Malcolm and Hughes and Baldwin and Hurston and….. And how do you follow all that up? By staying true to who brung you, who loved you and taught you into being. For her it was “those activists from Cuba, Panama, Alaska…those who had shed blood and sacrificed for my people….They take first position of my life.” She means that. Harlem is her root; the tree of Black America’s fruits—activism, jazz, learning, growing. She has been around the world, but she refuses to culturally leave the block. She can talk with intellectuals but is not at home with them. Like an old-school Japanese businessman who purges himself of Western influence when he arrives at his doorway, she removes herself of all that doesn’t come from her when she returns to the village. Her personal growth does not depend on outside influences and outside approval. She is herself alone, but is not alone and not lonely, because she has embraced and fortified the family she has always had.
Hughes lived for poetry. Baldwin lived for fiction and his family. Dr. Gholson lives for teaching and learning. It is at her core. She examines, cajoles, critiques and points forward, but at core she believes the purpose of interpersonal communication is to preserve and revive personal and community values and to decontaminate the African(-American) intellect. As a media specialist, she sees the psychological damage done to African children by mass communications (“a multi-billion dollar attack”), and fights back with her entire life. She has spent her career pushing for higher levels of consciousness, but warning that reaching there requires a higher level of responsibility, a higher level of give-back.
What do geniuses do? What are they like? From my reading, geniuses go their own way; have great accomplishments, have their own era. So for almost 40 years after receiving her doctorate in Mass Communications, Dr. Gholson has lived her life naturally. It could be characterized as an artists’ life. She paints and speaks and produces murals and renovates her brownstone with her own two hands (she was making many statements by doing that) and sculpts and produces radio documentaries and writes screenplays and works in film production and… And she does all of it on her own terms, and accepts the consequences of that. Communication and community come from the Latin “commis,” meaning “a common sphere.” She makes sure her art—her sphere—can reach the common sister or brother. She fights to retain the integrity of Harlem against Columbia University and its expansion beyond so-called “Manhattanville.” She has a community garden for senior citizens. She hosts a block party for The People nearly every summer.
“The set-up has to be designed for our kids. We know what makes them happy, and we know what confuses them. We know what causes them pain, and we know what makes them want to know more…We’ve got to begin to create forums where folks from generation to generation come together. As technology has expanded, so must we in terms of a collective effort.”
She has always sought to connect generations. In 2012, she is balancing holding down the historic fort while walking with the new. The technology to implement her doctoral dissertation—on experimental learning among generations—is finally here, but now she, like all of us, has to fight the dehumanizing aspect of the tech. Power dispersed to The People or The Powers That Be more concentrated, more in control, than ever? Her board game, “Harlem USAll,” was designed years ago to try to bridge generations, to force people to share information, history and culture in ways that will stick. She is trying to generate an internal impact greater that the mind control alphabet of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and on and on. It is her way of lighting the candle instead of cursing the whiteness. She had explained all of this to us, decades ago, when we were mesmerized by mid- 20th century toys—radio, TV, newspapers, etc. The principle was the same. You (African) cannot afford the distraction. You cannot afford the detachment. The stakes are too high in a world in which the African’s former (?) captors own all the brainwashing tools, all the “programming.” Now we are addicts in a iPhone world of individual-based distraction, soon to be multiplied across generations.
“I have not played the white game, I have not played the Black game…Art must replace formula. This will not happen until the true spirit of creativity replaces the Almighty Dollar, craftspeople replace staffers, opportunity replaces The Ol’ Boys Club and humanity replaces stereotype. We have no choice but to become involved in helping to create such a transformation….”
How free does a person, particularly a non-white person, particularly a non-white female, get to be in America? Hughesroamedthe world but never had a damn dime. Baldwin, too, traveled lonely roads before buying a home in France and occasionally occupying it. Dr. Gholson has not had the housing problem; elders, children, students, artists drop in, say hello to “Mom” (her mom), and Mom then searches the house for her.
When you decide to defy America and capitalism and take the ultimate freedoms—to keep your own counsel, to use and own your own intellect for your own purposes and, ultimately, the freedom to lease yourself—you are labeled, on a good day, a maverick and a nonconformist. (Nonconformists are just folks who have made the discovery and nurturing of their own identity central to their maturation process.) Harlem has produced many examples of such nonconformists. Baldwin tried to find himself through the world from the perspective of his church, rejecting the brainwashing but embracing the language, the symbolism, the love ethic. Hughes, like Baldwin, loved the Harlem streets, but needed to see all the world’s streets and all people living there. So Baldwin leaves scores of essays and novels that made the reader identify with his inner conflicts and challenges. Hughes’s smile hid his rage, so you have to read carefully his poems and his Autobiographies, the latter of which are really journalistic travel-adventure tales with the undercurrent of anger between the pages.
Dr. Gholson is the freest person I know. She is at constant war with other’s cynicism, which she feels is the easy and lazy way out of confronting what Cornel West continuously calls the tragicomic nature of the African-American experience . She is angry at ignorance. And elitism. And yes, racism and the other isms. She is impatient that so many people have to grow up—as in, realizing they are not the only residents on Earth—before they can listen to her and allow her to change their thinking into something more conducive to their true nature. (See, because the best nonconformists have not only examined themselves, but, more importantly, accepted themselves, they are a little ahead of the curve.) This makes her sound as impatient as she is. She understands and rages at the unfairness at all of the resources belonging to those at the beginning of the adulthood process. So her talents are occasionally leased to The Alphabet Boys, but not at the expense of herself. There exists, then, a permanent impasse, one she accepts with as much honor as she can muster against the dishonorable. She knows she is representing people who won’t get to say the things she does, people she correctly sees of at least equal worth to those holding the titles, degrees, pacifiers and rattles.
All of the energy within Dr. Gholson can be hard to take by the uninitiated. So nonconformists like her—who challenge your very being if you are not comfortable enough with yourself—are often on the outside looking in. It helps, though, when, like Baldwin and Hughes, you are a public artist. Hughes wrote poetry and read it in front of audiences, and penned a newspaper column for The Chicago Defender. Baldwin wrote essays and made his life into a living missive, one he was constantly articulating out loud. Dr. Gholson is a public artist who has a favorite expression—as in, mediation of the Spirit World between her, her audience and the Ancestors. It is the presentation of entertainment. She absorbs it like trees suck in carbon dioxide. Entertainment to her—particularly entertainment produced by Africans—is the quickest and most powerful connection to the Source of All Things. So she knows the history of entertainment and its social and political development. She views its necessary deconstruction as essential to balance the ego and the prism of the intellect. (Reality-checking the intellectual and celebrity life of paper and pen, camera and mike is a priority to her.) She points out that since any and all gifts come from the Ancestors and the Universe, not you, being selfish and self-absorbed is out of the question.
Home must be Harlem for her, because anybody that free will have great difficulty in finding shelter of any kind, particularly at today’s psychic rates. So she is a living reality check, making sure you are in your right mind, because she is determined to live and die in hers.
“People keep trying to make me into a senior citizen. And I’m not having it!”
Baldwin was openly lonely, even publicly so. Hughes loved being the life of the party to hide his inner loneliness. But Dr. Gholson believes in the “we” taught to her by those who were alone, not lonely. They were alone because they said “No” to the forces that would sweep them into alien-ating success. The kind of success that separates you from the block and makes you want to hate your people because, in Baldwin’s words, “they failed to produce Rembrandt.” So now, one decade before the centennial of the Harlem Renaissance, Dr. Gholson is somewhere doing the Electric Slide in the middle of her block, in the middle of her block party, in front of the house she built up from the inside, smiling and making sure that everyone understands that we are not alone, still all of us in this together.
Dr. Gholson has given me permission to use as her response to my essay an excerpt of her opening comments from the “Media and Social Activism” panel, part of the 2012 Manning Marable Memorial Conference at Columbia University. The panel was held on Sunday, April 29th, at Riverside Church in New York City.(Note: This panel was the only one at the conference set aside for critics of Marable’s deeply problematic Malcolm X biography, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.”) Aside from Gholson, the panelists were Dr. Lez Edmond of St. John’s University, a member of the “brain trust” of Malcolm X’s Organization for Afro-American Unity, and Dr. Jared Ball, a radical journalist and media activist, radio show host and associate professor of the Department of Communication Studies at Morgan State University. Herb Boyd, a well-known journalist, scholar and historian, moderated. To see the full panel, go to Saswat Pattanayak’s site, radicalcamera.com, at this hyperlink: http://radicalcamera.com/manning-marable-conference-video .
Thanks, everybody, for coming out this afternoon. I’d just like to start by saying that the fact that the organizers of this conference gave credence to this panel, I’d like to congratulate them. At no time should we as a people use methodologies to silence those who critique the family. That should never happen. The discourse between all of those who participate in the struggle is extremely important. What we cannot allow is for outsiders to determine who the stars are. That is criminal.
And that is part of the reason that we find our constant evolution, our native intellect—our youth being assaulted in a multi-billion dollar attack by media—that is the reason our progress is constantly interrupted. It’s interrupted out of fear. It’s interrupted because there are people who cannot understand how we think, and why we come to certain conclusions. It is why and our genius is written off and put into tracking systems, based on who can apply or not apply cognitive skills appropriately—“appropriately” being European standards. It is why when we reach certain social levels, we are not allowed to talk about race. It is why we are not allowed to celebrate our accomplishments and celebrate our people.
So today I want to be very clear. These are my statements. And my statements come from the manner in which I was reared. I was reared by family—my immediate family. I was reared by all my mentors in my Harlem community, from which I grew. I was reared by activists who came from Cuba, from Panama, from Alaska, and they all looked like me. I am reared and mentored by those who have proven, shed blood and sacrificed for my people They take first position in my life. I make no apologies, none whatsoever, for those who want to be a part of my life, and my family’s life—my total family’s life.
But you prove yourself when you enter a family, and you know when to step away when members of a family are discussing business. And it on us to make sure that those lines are clearly defined.
Why am I saying that? Because it is to be understood why Brother Marable’s work would skyrocket into a Pulitzer. Because his base, at the end of his years, was here at Columbia University. An institution, originally King’s College, which rewards the containment of anything that is not for the perpetuation of the standards that this country was established.
So let’s us be very clear. And let us not go after each other. We criticize, because out of the criticism, out of that intellectual struggle, comes a higher level of consciousness. And, therefore, we reach a higher level of responsibility of what we have to give back.
Let me mention a little bit about give back. We are under a multi-billion assault in terms of mass media. Anyone who realizes that needs to begin to say that out loud. It is not a normal attack; it is a psychological attack. Mass communications, as we know it, comes out It comes out of the military in this country. That is how it was created. It was created for three reasons: one, to wash money, two, as propaganda and psychological control, and three, to mold—not to influence—public opinion. Once we understand that, then we can qualify our anger when those around us receive money and rewards for the production of those products which we know are in direct contradiction to the existence of our people….
Mass media and the development of mass communications in the academic system of this country is a very pivotal place for us to look at. It has assisted in polarizing the academic, the scholar and the researcher. It has developed in a way so that the children in a mass public school system can be undermined and, therefore, be taken out of the natural appreciation for the work that goes into nurturing a people intellectually and psychologically. A multi-billion dollar attack that begins during World War I. It creates a whole psychology industry, and this industry has influence on mass health, particularly mass public health, in this country, as we know it. Those were jobs that never existed before.
And that’s what we have to begin to look into that, in terms of creative economies that come out of mass education. Let me give you an example. You take psychologists and you put them together with Madison Avenue. You create a Children’s Television Workshop, which happens over a cocktail conversation. You make it the Number One learning experience for children, for three to four generations. But, in doing it, irresponsibly, you utilize every marketing technique that Madison Avenue uses to sell product. Thereby, you have created three generations of children who, of course, are going to:
Gravitate towards electronics, which bombards the central nervous system;
Be attached to material possessions via the electronic medium, and
Be removed from of the history of ethnic populations.
That sounds a bit heavy. I know some of you are thinking, “How could you throw Big Bird under the bus like that?” But where “Sesame Street” excelled, and brought three generations now of children into learning, electronically, at the same time, because we did not put the checks and balances in, we now have three generations of people who are crass materialists. And the responsibility of that falls on the home, the community and the nation at large.
It is not an accident that we have a generation of children who are not test takers. That’s not an accident; it’s been programmed. And that’s okay! It’s okay to not being able to take a standardized test. But the responsibility to the adults in the scholarship population now is to devise tests to retrieve information in the same way. As people of color, we know this from Day One because we are oral and visual learners. To repeat information that has been given to you is in contradiction to the manner in which we have been brought up as a people. So, therefore, our people have had to learn how to take standardized tests. In order to be truly responsible, we have to figure out how to construct the instruments that will allow us to calculate what has been learned and what has not been learned. And we have to start soon.
Mass education and mass media are the two primary means for which we nurture our young in our country…..and it’s the one struggle we have not been able to penetrate. There is no reason with the enormous amount of intellectual capacity we have, the people we have put through colleges, the people we have who have received outstanding achievements, that we don’t have our history in the public and private school systems, from pre-K through college.
Our children will learn it, hopefully, if our communities are not decimated, because you cannot teach everything in school. So when the community fails, it does not support the parents (or whoever has playing that role to the young people in a community) in the nurturing of children.
The reason I say that is to say to our academics, the scholars, to all who have achieved on the higher education level: In order for us to sustain and protect themselves as a race of people, those kids are going to have to learn and respect the accomplishments, and the discipline behind them, of what has taken place before them. And there has been a multi-billion dollar construct to be able to dismantle every single intellectual discipline that’s necessary for them to be able to do that. And I just want to start there. Because I do believe that we need to focus on where our struggle is. And it is with our kids.
Drums in the Global Village 