Wednesday, January 26, 2011

the national need for Black pathology to be displayed absent any appropriate context or history in order to justify the dominance of the Settler


All one of my Black female students would say after seeing Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls was, “Who would want to be us?” It was really this question that finally made me go see the movie and having gotten to it so late let me just say this about it: Ishmael Reed is right. Lionsgate Films has found a partnership with a nominally Black man to make anti-Black films which are made for and marketed to White audiences. And worse even than the pro-Nazi propaganda films preparing Jews for death camps twice now in back-to-back films, this one and Precious before it, this team has depicted Black people engaging in the ultimate taboo of incest. This is all done to preempt any attempts at raising popular criticism of structural inequality or from ever popularly asserting the humanity of Black people at all.

The film is of necessity anti-Black. It focuses blame only on Black men and women and completely absolves White supremacy and capitalism as permanent structures of violence waged against their victims. The only good Black man in the movie is a New York City police detective which as an anti-reality cinematic trope is only outdone by the broader two hours of non-stop psychic abuse waged against Black people. One trauma after the next; from rape, to incest, to babies dropping from windows. And, like Reed has said of their previous releases, Lionsgate and Perry have again come through to satisfy the national need for Black pathology to be displayed absent any appropriate context or history in order to justify the dominance of the Settler, the Master, of White society itself.



Jared Ball, "For Colored Antagonisms"

24 comments:

  1. Can you (or any of your readers) recommend any UK-based black political/cultural commentators/bloggers?

    You may not be the best person to ask, but I don't know where the hell else to look...

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  2. Reed's not right about everything though:
    http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/black-pundits-rally-around-the-president/#comments

    And isn't the book on which this is based supposed to be a feminist play of sorts?

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  3. I should add, at least not about Pacifica. And I can't help but detect a bit of homophobia and sexism in his initial view of Precious:
    http://thisislikesogay.blogspot.com/2009/07/playing-queer-card.html

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  4. I found JL Samboma this the other day:

    http://www.ebeefs.com/beefs/malcolm-x-black-liberation-and-pan-africanism-ii.html

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  5. Jenny, how shocking Reed is not right about everything. You probably should avoid any future encounters with his prose and stick to Bukowski and Celine so you can feel ideologically safe.

    Yes, FCGWHCSWTRIE the film is based on a classic feminist play by Ntozake Shange, and is an immensely famous work in the US where you come from. Funny you should not be familiar with it.

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  6. (Samboma is from Sierra Leone but lives in London.)

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  7. Yes, I'm aware of that, I was just wondering if this mean Ball dislikes the original play for the same reason he disliked the film.

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  8. you realize Ishmael Reed was a major champion of Shange and a big influence on her work?

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  9. Where'd you hear that? Reed does seem to brag about himself a lot, granted.

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  10. Furthermore even if he does support her and Terry McMillan, he still seems to have a problem with "black feminists"

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  11. i guess you have not read any of either's work. how very surprising.

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  12. "Jenny, how shocking Reed is not right about everything. You probably should avoid any future encounters with his prose and stick to Bukowski and Celine so you can feel ideologically safe."

    Jenny, what the FUCK do you expect to GET from this low-class CUNT?
    (that was for YOUR cunt, ms. edge, you fuckin SLUT). Are you just some 'M'? This trash is so alarmist she told me to move to Canada if I wanted to do any more consensual dicksucking and assfucking, and also that the Tucson massacre 'worried her about the future of leftist people of colour', even though it had nothing of the usual White Male Supremacy business, just the usual neoliberal scum, which she is on her fucking inherited scum swag, stolen just like the rest of the New York Hymie Establishment.

    She never washes, even when she goes to the opera, but her fair-haired sycophant Michaela, has a positive ENCYCLOPEDIA of Laurie Penny fucking BULLSHIT. Arpege thinks I'd fuck Michaela's JOB once I knew her identity, but I'm not that kind of guy=--I felt very successful when she agreed to do situps in preparation for a career as a Continued Prick-Tease, a very delicate SINOPOP art.

    JM, are you just a fake troll Arpege writes? Probably, and Ms. Edge too. Truckload of Asshole Cunts, and probably the Vietnamese will get her sex changed, since she said our 'friendship' was over if I wouldn't show Arpege respect. Who with any brains at all would show this rotter any respect? Admittedly it took me too long to realize what a fucking ugly hag she is, and every now and then it's fun to tell her she'll be arrested, because I SUPPORT RED-BAITING OF FILTH LIKE HER. The rednecks are usually disgusting, but they're right about this CUNT.

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  13. I read For Colored Girls. Patrick, are you a sockpuppet for Qlipoth or something?

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  14. I read For Colored Girls. Patrick, are you a sockpuppet for Qlipoth or something?

    LOL, good comeback, I'll vow.

    Oh god, I hope Arpege can find Micheala Edge some UK Bleugs of Colour...that will solve the Tucson murders and the foul use of words like 'prayer' by Obama in his Tucson speech, which insulted all Jews, even Luke Ford, a clever bleuger of Semitism, who also celebrated Susan Sontag's death, describing her as 'hateful Lesb'an Jewess living in NYC'...until she perished, thank the goddess (that was for Erica Jong's cunt.)

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  15. The chubby chetnik got bored of you (hilarious tiff BTW), so you're back here?

    Is it possible you could go and get a life? This time without sucking as much air out of the biosphere. I'm sure some EDL chatrooms would love your tired, desperate, racist, castration-anxiety bullshit.

    Try not to bore them with your tedious blosgosphere gossip. It makes my laptop yawn, and they've been known to 'hurt their own' when they get bored.

    Keep your mouth shut at the right times and you may even find the love and attention you so desperately, tiresomely crave.

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  16. That was adressed to 'P.J.M.' in case anyone didn't realise.

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  17. "It makes my laptop yawn, and they've been known to 'hurt their own' when they get bored."

    YOU would know. I do so hope yours is acting up tonight...or tomorrow...sort of like that television in Naomi Watts' 'The Ring', or was that Naomi Klein-Wolf that had the walk-out TeeVee. Maybe yours will get the colic?

    "Keep your mouth shut at the right times and you may even find the love and attention you so desperately, tiresomely crave."

    No thank you. Anything you might promise would simply be the usual tainted swag. Tell me, do you do Twitter? That could be a wonderful source of desperate attention I might get if you put it back on.

    Thank you for your time and pirouettes.

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  18. I looked up EDL, and the only one I wanted to join a chatroom about was the Edelman Defense League. She's dead though, and taught Boris Bloch the Schumann Piano Concerto at NYJew.

    And yet, I was interested in one other possibility, it had great musical and colour possibilities: 'Electricite du Laos', which is appealing to me, even though Eastern, you'll be glad to know. There's an Emerald Buddha in Vientiane, but you're only concerned with proving that OWEN HATHERLEY writes 'sinopop' racist tracts.

    Oh my cod, I just remembered! The great auteur MICHAELA EDGE wrote a complimentary sentence about OWEN HATHERLEY, but I can't remember what it was about. Probably because Hatherley turned on Laurie Penney or something else Zizekian. I don't know how she'll get along with Arpege in the lifeboat outside the Titanic after thay-att. Arpege wears anti-Israeli dresses, so she can't hide as the one innocent male underneath 'er skirts.

    Thank you, Ms. Edge, I am so grateful for the love and desperation you give me. Now, I'll be back in just a little while, now honey...it's been snowin' a lot he-ah, but I got to go to the Rite-Aid anyway for over-the-counter narcolepsy-inducers.

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  19. "get a life"

    Trying to remember the other one of the last couple of decades that's that pitiful, thought of it today. Not 'go for it', or even 'gobsmacked', but I'll think of it, just for you.

    Don't think we haven't noticed that you regularly appear at the 'chubby chetnik's', so what's holdin' yer up? I haven't grovelled to Michaela's love-handles enough?

    Give me a few minutes, I'm sure I'll have that other embarassing phrase, it's not as good as 'she can't even find it to fuck', though. You can wait, I gather?

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  20. "The chubby chetnik got bored of you"

    Le's us pray togethuh, Ms. Edge, that she did so. I do have some superstitions about this machinic desire business, not to mention that the Resident Troll is always there with new and atrocious efforts to inflict it (she's a troofer too, so you'd like her, except she talks about 'meaty Fat Girl farts'. Har de har har, you hag.

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  21. patty, respect, overrated.


    rather than this shreiking, why don't you say what you thought of black swan? references that seem to be overlooked in the discussions are all about eve and opening night - two films about great beauties aging. it's like a life epoch adjustment back for youthb culture - now the aging into middle age is simply too unsightly, for ho'wood, so we have just a kind of delayed puberty, that is a very masculised vision really of the girl's transformation, unstoppable time. and there's a hermaphroditic transformation suggested on top of everything else.

    Raven Quickskill in flight to canada wonders: Curious. Even in the Confederate anthem there was a belle fading away and losing her color. What was this fascination with declining belles in the South? What was the South all about?

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  22. "rather than this shreiking, why don't you say what you thought of black swan?"

    NO. You're just a troll, just like the one you sent out to check me out, and whose 'friendship' was determined by total bullshit of the sort you promulgate. Like I said, what I discovered was just that he might as well have his sex changed, so little does he value masculinity. No wonder he ended up with vileness like you, and no wonder people begin to feel like real racists and misogynists after the unbelievable filth you spew. Of course, your remark was condescending anyway, but the best thing is that YOU, not me, saw such a stupid movie, which, of course, was 'racial'. You're just a professional 'niggerlover', as the rednecks used to say. Strange how those words don't sound ugly now that I've met you. Go to hell.

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  23. "patty"

    Yes, YOU. COW PATTY = MEADOW MUFFIN

    Cow Patti by Jim Stafford

    From the bad lands came the killer
    He lived by the knife and the gun
    He’d cut you just for standing
    And shoot ya if ya tried to run
    He was big as a tree and did as he pleased
    And everything he did was bad
    And they said if you was to kill him
    It’d only make him mad

    From the good lands came the cowgirl
    Patti was her name
    She was hot on the trail of that killer
    On a moped she called Flame
    Coz the killer had killed her daddy
    Just for spittin’ in the road
    You only had to kill her daddy once
    To get that gal P.O.’d

    Chorus:
    Yippie eye eh Cow Patti
    Yippie eye eh Cow Patti
    She rode into town to find the man that killed her daddy
    Yippie eye eh Cow Patti

    The killer hit town at daybreak
    Ate the door of the local saloon
    He started to drink you could tell
    He was thinking there’ll be a showdown soon
    Patti hit town in a cloud of dust
    Ol’ Flame was buzzin’ like a saw
    And the whole town got quiet as a church
    When the killer stepped out for the draw
    Forty shots rang out
    Forty people fell
    Patti and the killer missed each other
    But they shot that town to hell

    Chorus

    The killer took a step towards Patti
    Said it’s time I gunned you down
    But he slipped in something that was layin’ in the street
    And was shot before he hit the ground
    Yes, the killer slipped and it cost him his life
    And Patti said as she roared out of town
    You gotta watch your step
    When you know the chips are down

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