The Black Bourgeois Guide to Post-Modern America: A 'Street' Conservative's Hilarious romp through Post-Civil Rights Era American Politics

By Von Gneisenau

The Black Bourgeois Guide to Post-Modern America. A hilarious romp through Post-Civil Rights era Black Culture, Politics and Economics. A critique of Black 'woke' Liberals and 'so-called' Black Conservatives

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bourgeois Post-Pavilion Publishing
• Release date: Jan 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218136345

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The Black Bourgeois Guide to Post-Modern America

The Black Bourgeois Guide to Post-Modern America

The Black Bourgeois Guide to Post-Modern America

A 'Street' Conservative's Hilarious romp through Post-Civil Rights Era American Politics

Von Gneisenau

Bourgeois Post-Pavilion Publishing

Publishing Information

Bourgeois Post-Pavilion Publishing

Published by Bourgeois Post-Pavilion Press

Atlanta, GA

©Bourgeois Post-Pavilion Publishing 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Members of educational institutions and organizations wishing to photocopy any of the work for class room use, or authors and publishers who would like to obtain permission for any of the material in the work, should contact Permissions, Bourgeois Post-Pavilion Publishing of Atlanta: [e-mail]

ISBN: 979-8-218-13636-9

Dedication Page

Dedicated

…to my grandparents

and

…all humanity’s parents, the best team the world has ever known (genetically speaking); Proto-Adam and Eve. An African man and an African Woman (in no particular order). Poured out of Africa populating and ‘civilizing’ along the way in loose groups of extended families; surviving dramatic geographic and climactic shifts; undergoing natural genetic changes due to environmental conditions, along the way creating physical racial differentiation. Each and in every case creating God(s), music, art, dance, commerce, industry specific to the geography and historical trends.   

Staff Officer Von Gneisenau

Atlanta

SwabbHaus 2022

 Offices of the Metro Atlanta Black Bourgeois Association

Table of Contents

Section I: The Art of Fugue

1. De Rigeur Bourgeois Black Politics

2. Apparently Niggers Have Too Much Attitude: Notes on Black on Black Crime part 247

3. Reggae and the West

4. Wizards Warlocks and Warnocks

5. Wizards Warlocks and Warnocks pt II

6. Have you seen or read the new Russian spy thriller

7. Black Bourgeois Industrial heft and Heavy Industry

8. Where is the Black Church

9. Diagnosing the psycho-social-existential malaise of post-modernity

10. Notes From the Culture Wars

11. Freedom is an unsecured credit card

12. Why American White men don’t think they can jump (or dance)

13. Black Man Summer Camp(s) and other myths

14. Black Bourgeois Aristocracy

Section II: Gavotte

The new Debate on Phone Chargers, wall sockets and printer cables -

The Question of Black Bourgeois Professionalism -

A Trip Down the Atheist Rabbit Hole (or does this hole have a weird smell for some other reason) -

No Disrespect to Actual Epileptics -

Black Christian Existentialism -

The Most Embarrassing thing to Happen to Black People -

Hurt People, Hurt People, Hurt Nations do too -

Abortion and the Crisis of Legitimacy –

Rodney the Rooster Speaks: A True Story

Gasper Fights Back From the Grave: A Truer Story

The Literal Kung Fu Panda and his shocking enemy

Section III: Pavane

Black Bourgeois Love -

It’s not a Mental Health Crisis it is an Existential Crisis -

Do You Like Organic Fruits, Veggies, Men and Women and Children

Occasions when the Optics (symptoms) are worse than the disease

Warnock vs Walker and the fight to be HNIC on their respective Plantations

How do you know you Live in a Decadent Society   

The Problem with Children’s Fun Centers

A dissenter United Methodist’s attempt at General Conference Satire

Go Pelaton Team! Please Go!

A University of Georgia Victory and the Triumph of the old Antebellum South

There is Always an unemployment problem on the Plantation

Section IV: Etudes

Meghan tragic mulatto Mammy, Oprah Post Modern Mammy

Soon the woke radical feminists will cancel ‘time’ 

There is no plantation like home 

Ode to Goodie Mob: Too Many Niggas Inside 

The Archetype of the Evil Stepmother and Gabrielle Union 

You and Your Children Are Accessories to White Liberals – Nothing More, Nothing Less

In an Effort to be fair to Kanye and other crazy ass niggas 

The Greek Freak and the Entitlement of Athletes 

The Roman Colosseum is on TV Cable, Satellite and Social Media 

Sunny Hostin Goes Berserk 

The Empress and the would-be Woman MSNBC TV King 

Call me Oprah, Tyler, Lee, Ava & Geena: Let’s get this movie done!

The Deeply Ingrained Archetype and why it’s hard for Republicans and Conservatives to be Funny 

 The FOX(ES) have holes but the Son of Man hath nowhere 

Epigraph

The education of the individual is not decisively important for the community, but the education of all educated men and women together is vitally important for the polis, for it makes them into men and women of real ability who do everything properly. They are also capable of beating the enemy, which Sparta counts the supreme test of arete. For it is culture that produces victory, not victory culture; in fact, victory often produces unculture. A victory that increases hubris in man is a Cadmean victory, where more is lost than was won; but there has never been a Cadmean Paideia.

Jaeger, Werner. Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture Vol. III. New York, Oxford University Press, 1944.

The Art of the Fugue

1.

MUSIC

a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.

2.

PSYCHIATRY

a state or period of loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.

1

Fugue

1 De Rigeur Bourgeois Black Politics

I feel bad about the necessity of attacking Stacy Abrams. It‘s not personal. It‘s based on a kind of Nietzschean logic of inevitability. One must find an opponent worthy of oneself. Thus I do not attack Stacy for her mediocre romance novels (well not really). I do not attack her for being the Lizzo of politics (there is certainly nothing wrong with that). I’m not attacking her for her sexuality (or lack thereof). I’m attacking her as a scion of the Southern Black bourgeois for her politics. I’m attacking this brand of Post-Modern Black neo-liberalism that sees itself as a mere adjunct of the Democratic party. It is dangerous to African Americans and complicit in our dysfunction. Imagine the Black political elite, Black elected officials and their base thinking with a straight face that gay rights and gay teachings in middle and high school health classes and social studies are more important than the fact 70% of our children are reading and doing math below grade level, or fighting like animals in the hallways and cafeterias.

Imagine a Black political elite and its servile Black base thinking social justice rights for women and feminism is more important than stopping Black on Black violence. I’m not arguing women’s or LGBTQIA rights aren’t important, just asking whether we can quit killing each other first. Imagine a Black political elite and Black base that thinks it’s a magic coincidence Black women have a higher rate of abortions (proportionate to their percentage of the population).  For Stacy the issue is not investigating why this is the case but actually promoting abortion as a solution to economic and social problems. Thus the freedom to have legal safe abortions (which I support) is more important than asking why Black women are choosing abortion at higher rates than nearly any other racial demographic? Perhaps it’s the poverty but Latino women are usually just as poor. Perhaps it is the result of Catholicism in Latin America? Who knows, but liberal Black political elites and their base don’t seem to be asking, just fighting for more abortion rights because their Democratic socialist-atheist masters told them so.

Now let’s do some objective work with Stacy. Her commercials are terrible. Let me remind you, she has been the CEO, the CFO and COO and thus she says she can handle being Governor of Georgia. Note she did not name these companies. Suffice it to say I’ve been the CEO, CFO and COO too and no one gave a damn! The last job I applied for was with a linen and laundry company. Needless to say, I did not mention my experience as CEO, CFO and COO of a company (obviously my own) or some other failed or failing company. I would have been somewhat embarrassed to mention it. It‘s like applying for a job on the grill at McDonalds and letting them know you have a degree from Harvard. It begs the well what are you doing here question. Whenever I see that commercial of Stacy‘s, I feel all Georgia voters are asking themselves the same question I am asking Stacy, but in more dramatic language. If you were the CFO of Google/Facebook/BP etc., would you run for governor of Georgia or be working for some bullshit non-profit company that no one knows by name as CEO, CFO or COO. As rich as Stacy has become since her initial run for governor does anyone really think Stacy would be working for a non-profit or interested in public sector work if she was one of those E-Suite titles in a real Fortune 500 Company?  Or as I suspect, does Stacy see running for and possibly becoming the governor of Georgia as a ‘come up’. I’ll let the reader do the math. Back when Stacy was CEO, CFO and COO she couldn’t pay her taxes but now having been all of those titles, she wants Georgia voters to think her qualified for running the entire state of Georgia!

Stacy, Stacy, Stayceee. I’m amazed by the sheer incompetence. Stacy has told us she prefers Star Trek to Star Wars as though this is a qualification for governor of anything but a regional science fiction fan club or running for president of the student body in high school. Stacy has also told us she likes to cook home cooked meals for her family as if that is a qualification being governor of Georgia. She has told Georgians everything but what White people really want to hear. For that matter it is the question I as a Black man with a family am curious to hear from Stacy too. Why the hell should White people think Stacy Abrams has the answer to their problems when she damn sure doesn’t speak to nor does she do anything about the problems of Black Georgians, unless you limit your critique to voter rights, LGBTQIA rights, feminist rights, abortion rights, assault weapons bans and space nebulous social justice issues in general. But not our children shooting each other at the mall…but not Black women weeping and wailing about their sons and daughters as in desperation they’ve called the police (the man) on their children 30 times and been let down, but Dickens and the liberal Black elite think midnight basketball is going to help.

How can a woman argue she is qualified to be a governor that can fix things for all Georgians when she can’t fix the problems for Black Georgians (problems she is much more familiar with)? Apparently, she can’t fix the Black-on-Black crime problem we niggers have in our own backyards, but she wants to go down the street to the White area of town and tell them what the fuck is wrong with them? How can she fix Georgia schools and the schools in her backyard are statistically substandard and inferior? How can she invigorate and globalize Georgia industry at that scale but can’t do shit for nigger economics whether it’s a result of her various tendencies toward socialism or because she doesn’t have any real economic growth ideas.

I need to pause in my critique because the matters I’m about to get into will be touchy and sensitive. If you accused me of resenting Stacy Abrams because I am jealous of her success, I would allow you to make that argument and take it as a possibility. Nevertheless I‘m too good a writer to ignore opportunities such as this to belittle the current Black political elite. It is because she’s the champion and presumptive woman-king of the Black left that I critique her, not simply because she is Stacy Abrams. Kamala Harris 2024……echo, echo, echo, echo…crickets, frogs and other sounds of silence. Kamala has fired more aides and staff assistants than Naomi Campbell, Meghan Markle, Aretha and Mariah Carey have in their entire careers all added together and multiplied exponentially. The aides Kamala didn’t get a chance to fire usually quit citing a ‘toxic’ work environment. What? I thought with female personnel in positions of power the toxicity in the American workplace would just disappear; especially with #Blackgirlmagic women doing the bossing! Even the AKAs are saying they don’t think she’s the right choice to run for the Presidency in 2024 and resign themselves to praying for her instead of actively pushing her candidacy. From the turmoil on her staff, to being given responsibility for the border crisis, to ignoring the border crisis, to getting taken off the border crisis, to gaffes worse than Joe Biden she‘s done it all. The irony is that one of the reasons she was brought on the ticket was to help ‘ole Uncle Joe’ in the communication department as a younger hipper voice. Some of her gaffes and over plays are worse than Joe’s (and he has the excuse of his age). From Latin America to reassuring European allies that our commitment to NATO and the Ukraine in the wake of Soviet aggression on a level the world has not seen since World War II, she has failed. Who do we send…Kamala Harris? And the only rationale behind the whole thing of Kamala as VP going to the Border during a geo-political hemispheric population shift in the Americas and going to Europe during a civilizational proxy war with Russia is that it is #Blackgirlpowertime? And, the only thing justifying Pete Buttigieg dealing with serious airline industry issues during a polar vortex 2022 holiday season as transportation secretary is that it is #Gaynonbinaryfamilylovingtime! And the communities they represent need to be given positions so that the government looks more like a diverse America?    

Don’t get me wrong, Kamala could have risen to the occasion and been ‘that nigger’ (to use a phrase) but she didn‘t. And how would the Europeans be reassured by such a thing. It might even be considered an insult to send poor Kamala. America sends to men and women who have memorized Churchill speeches as babes and run in the same diplomatic circles as De Gaul, Kohl, Mitterrand, Thatcher…..’some mulatto nigga wench’ of the month you elevated for political reasons as if that is supposed to inspire confidence in the wake of Russian aggression? And the insults don’t end there. Everyone thought how ridiculous it was that Trump made Ben Carson HUD secretary…only for cool Joe to name Buttigieg labor secretary. He nor his husband knew shit about being a secretary unless it was a plot device on gay porn. And both of them were dumb enough to do it (meaning Ben Carson and Pete Buttigieg). Who the fuck wastes their time in an area outside of their area of expertise.

In men naked ambition is a character flaw. In women it is perfectly excusable. Remember when Stacy Abrams wrote an editorial in one of the major papers touting her foreign policy experience (just like her CEO, COO, CFO experience). Trust me, Stacy would have proved to be just as incompetent and inept as Kamala was in such international diplomatic circumstances. Both were ambitious in a way that because they were Black women and it was #Blackgirlmagictime, was encouraged but in anybody else would have looked presumptuous and silly. But if you treat her as silly and presumptuous it‘s because her critic is a racist sexist pig. No, it‘s because I don’t trust any ambitious upstarts male or female. It is not for no reason that Caesar himself whispered quietly that ‘Cassius has a lean hungry look’. There are male and female Cassius’ with lean hungry looks that care more about who they think they deserve to be than who they are.

I didn’t want to write this essay. I do not take it lightly to be seen to be attacking Black women or a Black woman. I do not take it lightly to be on paper calling any Black woman ‘a wench’ considering our history. But I keep reminding myself of how field slaves would feel if instead of the master himself or the White overseer telling us we have to work additional hours because it’s harvest time, the master sends his favorite ‘female house nigga’ to tell us, imagining that the pain of the additional hours will ‘go down’ better if we field slaves heard it from a nigga or a ‘mulatto’ house slave that won’t be in the field with us anyway. But in this one thing I am expressly convinced and that is that I do not want this brand of Black socialist-atheist liberalism to be in the ascendancy in Black political thought. I do not want generations of Black kids thinking that in order to win or ingratiate themselves into the dominant class they must support the gay lifestyle, support socialism, need reparations or need white feminists to tell Black men how they need to think about themselves. Black men don‘t need queer eyes and metrosexuals to tell us we need to redefine over 3 million years of sexual evolution, over a million years of primate evolution and over 300,000 years of human evolution since we incompetent apes swung out of the trees and started becoming ‘human all too human’. And 10,000 years of religious evolution and canonical monotheism. Really, because Stacy thinks they are wrong, they are wrong?

I will not go any further because trust me I am more libertarian than conservative in terms of my political approach to others and their behavior(s). But why contradict the apparent bi-polarism. Male-female definitions presuppose everything in between, right? That is to say a kind of dialectic at work. But these neo-Marxists like AOC who argue $200,000 a year isn’t enough and wear dresses to fashion week with some Marxist slogan, love working diabolical dialectics when it comes to the approval of socialism. These same neo-liberals like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, et al and yes Warnock, Obama, Stacy Abrams and Ossoff would never live in your working class or Black poor neighborhood and would never even think for one minute about sending their children to school with yours. They are not signing up their children to go to playdates with yours. They’d never live in the same neighborhood as you unless your type was moving out and the community was gentrifying. But they tell you they represent you and that they are leading you. All you are accomplishing is working the political will of feminists and the LGBTQIA community. Stacy, Warnock, Keisha and the Black political elite have cast the whole of niggerdom’s lot in with the Democrats and that agenda. You have gotten paid with money, prestige and position of power to do so. You are complicit in Black underdevelopment and dysfunction. A new leadership is necessary. Black Bourgeois Leadership.

Recently in the news Stacy’s campaign has come under scrutiny. There are documented stories of the money she wasted in her 2022 bid for the governorship of Georgia. What makes that fact all the more tragic is that by all standards, she ran such an effective campaign the first time…only to realize that far from #Blackgirlmagic and #Blackgirlpower being a supernatural inherent endowment, like all other humans, you and the sistas that ran ‘Black Lives Matter’ and got caught up for lavish lifestyles still are ‘human, all too human’.   

2 Apparently Niggers Have Too Much Attitude: Notes on Black on Black Crime part 247

As you might guess, I often think of Niggerdom. It’s then I remember that as in the life of individuals so the life of nations and groups of peoples. It is about choices. In the Elvis biopic Colonel Tom Parker was neither a Colonel nor even a born American citizen. He made a choice to reinvent himself in America. Many immigrants do. This has been harder for Negritude because of our historical slavery and the fact it was conditional upon our physical differences from Whites (as opposed to vagaries of intellectual or skill definitions which can be learned and appropriated). This shows you how bankrupt post-modern ‘woke’ notions of identity and sexuality are because at no point in a slave’s life could he ever escape his bondage by arguing his core identity was not as an African American but as a gay person. Furthermore, when said gay slave exclaimed to the master and overseer that he didn’t identify as a man and thus should not be relegated to the field to do men’s work, I doubt if any slaveholder was sensitive to his concerns.

Are we to now hold historical figures accountable for not being as smart (which they read as sensitive) to what they think in the vanity of their post-modern imaginations people are supposed to be sensitive to? Really? Do we want anybody in the future, liberal or conservative historians to do that to us? In post-modern politically correct culture, we disregard people if they harbored racist, sexist, transphobic views in their past but what will the vanity of the imaginations of people 50 years from now say that what they believe then is so sacred and correct, they discount everyone in history (including us) whose views didn’t line up. What if your grandchildren were forced to disown you and deny you because it turns out you wrote an email in 2023 that suggested something they do then in the name of right to be wrong. So they strike you off family records because you cracked a nigger joke or gay joke. Thus they write off every achievement and deny your humanity because of certain opinions you held 50 years ago that haven’t weathered the test of time well. Clearly liberals can’t be naïve enough to think that everything that they think is 'right' and 'politically correct' today, will be thought so 50 or even 100 years from now. Jesus said ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. Can we cut past persons some slack? Damn. Why are you arguing with dead people (tear that Confederate statue down)? This is not to say we should not critique persons from history or any part of their lives, it is just to say we can’t wield history with knives to cut unpleasant things out of history and sand blasters to take unpleasant memories off Stone Mountain. We (and future human beings) need to see the panorama of human history, its summits and its depths and you don’t get that by erasing monuments. Unfortunately, that is how angry and resentful Black people and their liberal Feminist/Womanist and LGBTQIA friends practice the study of history.

We African Americans profess to largely be Christian or in a religion derivative of Judeo-Christian precepts and if not comparable, similar. We’ve been looking at Harriet Tubman bio pics and how she was called Black Moses. For generations the Black church has used Negro Spirituals, field songs and cries, work songs and certain White mainstream hymns we were exposed to that spoke to us, and we appropriated them early and often socially, culturally, theologically and philosophically. Nat Turner, Mary Mcloud Bethune, the Atlanta University Center all were religiously motivated and Southern Black culture internalized the story of Moses and the of the Hebrew slaves and God leading them to freedom and the promised land.

Thus it should be painfully obvious to self-respecting post-modern Negro leadership that one way in which we differ from the ancient wisdom is that the ancient Hebrews or any other of the former slaves that worked for Egypt and Egypt’s glory never argued Egyptian statues, pyramids or heroes should be torn down (In Egypt) because the Egyptian Kings and Generals conducted military campaigns against the Hebrews, Nubians and many other peoples and/or enslaved them. What would the world look like if Moses had only led the children of Israel in protest to 'tear that pyramid and sphinx down' and been satisfied if Pharaoh had given him a job in the Egyptian empire only 2nd to Pharaoh? As a matter of fact, to Moses and the Hebrew mind (with a little handwringing, browbeating and bully pulpiteering from Moses), the last thing they wanted to do was forget that they were had been slaves, as though to live oblivious to the fact they were slaves means you are free from it. What in the devil kind of Negro leader, leaders and leadership organizations are encouraging the removal of Confederate statues, monuments and personalities?

What an angry resentful thing to do…there let me tear down your statues and you better let me do it or else I’m going to protest and tear it down anyway and call Ben Crump (who has recently released a new documentary on his life), to sue the brakes off you and call you a racist just because you like Robert E Lee. Read history Negritude. There are a lot of reasons to like Robert E Lee. Perhaps he was fated to be on the wrong side of history, but are you? Might you be on the wrong side of history as well in some aspect of your life? Are you sure? People can be likeable and on the wrong side of history. People can be likable and valued even though you don’t agree with them on everything. That is how damn nuanced life is. What destroys our ability to have a nuanced version of history and understanding it to the best of our capabilities is because of importunity, we are looking at history through the lens of anger and resentment. This is why niggers go around with schools where 70% of the students are reading and doing math below grade level (which automatically means you are doing science below grade level), but the parents and every nigga organization are worried about the fact that the school is named after Robert E Lee or early 20th century racist Henry Grady. So our 'woke' Black political elites want to name it after an aging Civil Rights era hero or heroine before he or she dies because that is damn sure easier to do than increase test scores in Black schools. Or they are worried that exposing their children to 'White' things at all, even ancient 'White' things that have the reputation as being ‘good’ or ‘elevating’ in some way is a disservice to you and your children, as in your children are so weak that simply exposing them to Shakespeare, Goethe and Voltaire makes them feel bad about themselves. The same niggas will practice Yoga and Chinese martial arts, idolize the original Wu Tang, Bruce Lee and the Italian mafia and watch action movies with pro USA themes religiously and be the first people in line at the theatre. But they don’t want their children to read Shakespeare and be accountable for having read it by taking a test because the test is racist? Letting your child watch Tom Cruise as the Last Samurai and in Mission Impossible 12 times each doesn’t count as propaganda, but your child reading Shakespeare does?  

Yep, what a legacy; naming a failing school where 70% of the students do everything below grade level after an aging decrepit Civil Rights era hero or heroine. After graduation through the coupling of the dropout rates and the ‘social passing’ phenomena nearly all of them are quickly and relatively quietly left behind. What causes this misappropriation of priorities is looking at life through the lens of anger and resentment, which to the ‘woke’ crowd is their very modus operandi. And yet as compelling as that is I don’t think my average Negro reader (and they are nearly all Negroes mind you) really sees clearly how angry and resentful we of Negritude are primed and dog whistled to be. It is very easy to stir up Negro sentiments against White people and look for old 50- and 60-year-old ways of satisfying this anger…protest, protest, protest.

That is why Ben Crump is a very, very successful lawyer. I’m still waiting for him to represent a victim of Black-on-Black crime and get them some justice, but I suspect my predilections will be unsatisfied by his majesty Ben Crump (Esquire Attorney at law). However, I think I have an idea how Ben Crump could be motivated to represent the family of a Black-on-Black crime. If the police didn’t show up because it was a Black neighborhood and thus Crump could sue the police for NOT coming because of institutional racism and the devaluing of Black life, he would do it. Crump would subpoena 911 records to prove that at the same time the Black-on-Black crime was committed, the Atlanta Police Department prioritized a call to Buckhead to get some old White lady’s cat out of a tree. We are primed for it. We know the sound of the dog whistle too, just like Trump’s base. Jaybo got shot in the back! His only crime was running from the scene and refusing to stop. His hands were up…you know the chant hands up don’t shoot! Only we’d never think of marching through the projects and low-income areas of Atlanta chanting there are women and children around don’t shoot! That is how angry and resentful we are against White people. Damn Black on Black crime, we’ll deal with it later.

We are so angry and resentful we’ll ignore the beam in our own eyes presently to examine the historical splinters and currently perceived beams in other people’s eyes.  Nay, we are so angry and resentful when Black politicians and pseudo religious leaders say we need more police and to get tougher on crime we believe it, even though last year they were chanting ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Defund the Police’. But if a White politician says the very same thing in arguing the ghettos need more police and more law enforcement in the very same language, we call it a lie from a racist pit in hell and sign of inherent or latent racism and it must automatically be directed at us.

I have family from the country, deep country. My great aunts and uncles and older cousins and relatives thought nothing, literally nothing of making comments about people’s lifestyles or weight to their faces. Oh, Jezebel, (oh Maybell) it has been so long since you been up north in the big city, you done got  plump (cause you had 3 kids and 2 different baby daddy’s) and proceeds to pinch you all night every time she sees you, sneaking up on you in the bathroom and pinching your fat ankles under the stall. My city relatives get offended. They have learned in the city to be offended and sensitive about your lifestyle(s) and weight. In the country it’s just a fact, not an inhibition in certain clothes, professions, or romantic situations. So all of a sudden some of my cousins begin resenting Uncle Joe because in his 77 year old male mind the only way of giving a woman a compliment is to say aloud how plump she’s gotten….which is to say to the ancient male mind (and not coincidentally many African and Caribbean men as well) healthy.

But intergenerational city living and beauty and sexual standards piped in from other cultures come in and now calling a 16 year old girl plump and healthy is enough to send her to the psyche ward trauma unit, psychoactive medications and therapy for the rest of her life….because a 78 year old man in dirty pants and smelling like ‘hint of urine’, dustiness, mustiness and old man smell told her she was plump and healthy. In the name of making our children stronger and affirming and inspiring them into perfect pictures of themselves (usually parental perfect pictures of our 2.5 picture perfect over achieving upper middle class children living in a house straight out of Home and Garden we’ve absorbed from the post-modern world) we’ve created just the opposite. Like weakened immune systems our children and post-modern children in general have weakened egos and spirits so dependent on external approbation and approval (because of lack of family approbation and approval) that the slightest misinterpreted remark sends the child in paroxysm of self-doubt? This is post-modern parenting. What is altogether worse is that we have so addicted our children to ‘likes’ on social media for feelings of approval that when a negative comment comes in, on a pic your child never should have posted in the first place, you have to take your child back to the damn therapist, psychologists and up his or her anxiety meds. Instead of fundamentally critiquing this, we ‘sacrifice our seed’ to the technological god ‘Molech’.  

When my cousin got traumatized and the family told Uncle Joe of the pain his inadvertent remarks caused, he got traumatized and stopped talking because he couldn’t figure out what he said that was so offensive. So in his mind he was better off just not saying anything.  In a sense this discounted his experiences because Uncle Joe grew up in the rural post-depression era...nobody was fat! Let him tell it, it was the 50’s before anybody got fat and nobody around him and in his circle, could afford to be fat then because they were all still poor. He was 27 before he owned his own pair of shoes. And indeed, in times like that, the healthiest and most surprising thing a woman could be because times were so hard was plump.

So now let me wrap this anger and resentment piece up. Is it possible to just be angry and resentful at white people or might I make the argument this generalized anger and resentment in Black people (associated primarily with historical racism) spills over into Black families, Black community life and our individual lives. And yes dearly beloved niggerdom, it is as a result of the trauma and tragedy of slavery and what it took to maintain it on us for an extended period of time. But we cannot continue to live in and with all this anger and resentment. It wouldn’t even be 100% right or even 25% right if it were only directed at White people. The problem is that the anger and resentment is not limited to political displays and protests against White people. We bring it into our homes. Ladies and gentlemen, the rift between Black men and women, baby daddy’s and baby mamas we see every day. It is largely misappropriated anger and resentment. 70% out of wedlock births when as recently as the 1950s the Black marriage rate was the same as the White marriage rate; between 54% to 64% of all people were married (or had been) during and before those times. Is it any wonder our society is falling apart. Hmm, the sowing of enmity between the man and the woman in the post-Eden environment. Public Schools were safer and more stable then when marriage rates were higher, and I believe high marital rates translate to stability in the schools as well today; and mind you in the 50’s this was without police in schools and metal detectors. Were that not enough anger and resentment seeps into our communities and reactions. Two young women get shot, one in from of her child over an argument over too much mayonnaise.

It wasn‘t an argument over mayonnaise it was what happens when an armed, angry and resentful person feels disrespected….The Black on Black crime problem is only indirectly a result of systematic and historical racism. My argument and the idea here is this attitude of no forgiveness when it comes to Whites has led to a fostering of this idea that nobody, not your 78 year old uncle Joe, nor a nigger on the street arguing with you over a parking space has a right to disrespect you and you must stand up and take your rights at the barrel of a gun. It is your right. The beastie boys had a song called ‘Fight for your right to party’. That is exactly what America is doing en masse only it is a Civil War.       

3 Reggae and the West

Many reggae musicians are casualties of the new sexual revolution in which the LGBTQIA lifestyle is encouraged. What contemporary mainstream culture doesn’t understand is that we have to look at it like an African retention. Even now as the United Methodist Church wrestles with the issue, White theological conservatives only ally has been the Global Methodist Church in what was formerly known as the Third World. In that sense, sexuality itself and a conservative view of it is an African retention. Usually, so called ‘woke’ Black liberals celebrate African retentions. Now they dismiss African retentions in the west because they are inconvenient to the new situation…and our new White liberal masters. In that however, many Afro-Caribbean cultures and African descended communities in South America evinced the same conservatism regarding sexuality and the answer is not to dismiss them as being ignorant and poorly educated like the LGBTQIA community does when they are questioned about why they have such a problem with gay rights in the Third World. The truth is that it (Third World sexual conservatism) is a function of African culture and when that African culture spread throughout the developed world. The fault line is precisely those diaspora communities of the South America, the Caribbean and African America. 

In our times the fault line has been reggae music which has been just as hyper sexualized and masculinized as Hip Hop. "Woke' liberals dismiss the fact that as the traditional signs and symbols of manhood were taken from Black men during the experience of slavery, hip-hop and dancehall reggae overcompensated in promoting the sexual powers of the Black men in these musical arts. The prominence of Jamaican music (ska, rocksteady, dance hall, etc.,) and stars such as Bob Marley, Ninja Man, Super Cat, Shaggy (who works quite often with white mainstream superstar Sting), has left it open to criticism from Feminists/Womanists and the LGBTQIA communities. You don’t have to agree with African retentions, but you must respect them. There are other commonalities. Important are improvisation, call and response, emphasis on competition (same as jazz, jam sessions or cutting sessions). In reggae these ‘competitions’ are called 'sound clashes'. Different djs/mcs rap against (dis each other's skills) and toast each other over more or less standard beats. African American music shares that feature as well (or rather it used to) with reggae and other music that have significant African retentions. All of that is an African retention just like conservative African notions of human sexuality. The one thing liberals can’t accuse traditional African societies of is not having a long time to think about it. Clearly the Africans come from civilizations and roots far deeper than any liberal western democracy. They’ve seen human sexuality longer and the fact that they’ve come to a different conclusion than post-modern white mainstream liberal Feminist/Womanist LGBTQIA persons is seen almost like a neo-neo-colonialism where enslaving Africans and diaspora Africans, giving them your language and culture wasn’t enough, the few African retentions they have you want to deny them! And you will punish the reggae artist crazy enough to reflect an African retention in his music that he is not with ‘batty boys’.

But all is not well in that hallows eve of African retentions, even I as a bourgeois Black conservative must admit. ‘Nuff dj fe kill by gunshot’ and from dancehall to rap the lyrical competition and competitive urges I mentioned earlier often end in beefs and gun play. Obviously every Black American of a certain age knows the issue between Biggie and Tupac’s cliques and crews. But the same tendencies have been going on in dancehall and reggae for just as long. Peter Tosh died a violent death. I’ll never forget watching on video an awesome ‘sound clash’ between Supercat and Ninja Man and at a certain point many of Ninja man’s followers felt Ninja won and said as much. It got so testy Supercat pulled his gun on stage and pointed it in the crowd. This violence, while I am making these kind of arguments about sexual retentions, perhaps may be just as much an unfortunate retention and the key is to keep the competitiveness of it without the violence.

It gets out of hand like ‘Biggy’ and Tupac. Yet how can Black people disrespect each other and claim they are not going to let anybody diss them on wax or paper, when White people, Asians and Latinos would prefer not to send their children to school with ours or live in our communities and tell us to our faces by 'voting with their feet'. Or wait, maybe that is precisely the reason most Black people disrespect other Black people, because everybody else does! Self-respect places certain demands on person and his or her relationship to the community. White flight is not a magic coincidence, it is a sign of what they think of us. It is them voting with their feet. Why is it important to kill a sista because she put too much mayonnaise on your sandwich when in your face white people literally disrespect you and your children, don’t send their children to schools with too many of you and would prefer not to live within any near proximity of you. You tend to bring violence and degradation, and lower the property values. Anger and resentment, Yoda told you these lead to the 'darkside'. You think somebody owes you, be it God, fate or your former slave masters or some ersatz version of either one of these necessary to the times. Come now grasshopper.    

Another Part (I wrote for another publication that I will add here. Be forewarned, I repeat myself…but nearly all musics with a strong African retention use ‘repetition’ and call and response so there…)

Many reggae musicians are casualties of the new sexual revolution where the LGBTQIA lifestyles