alias Bruce.

Racial torture, libraries, and poems.

This is National Poetry Month, a time when – like Black History Month and Earth Day – corporate culture blinks for a moment at realities it generally ignores. Still, a glimpse can reveal plenty. This month, in one of the main windows of the downtown public library in my town of Baltimore, the poem on display is "If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God" by Joseph Ross, which won the local Pratt Library system's 2012 poetry prize. The poem has to do with the 1955 torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. If you're sketchy on the details, here is Ross's explanation of how Emmett's mother, Mamie, electrified the world by displaying her son in an open casket:

Mamie Till’s decision to bury her son in a casket with a glass top was a momentous one. In her words, she wanted the world “to see what they did to my boy.” In 1955, Mamie Till sent her son Emmett to live with relatives in Mississippi for the summer. One night, he was dragged from his uncle’s house, beaten to death and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was found downriver some days later. The image of her son’s beaten and distorted body were broadcast around the world. In the view of some, this murder was seen as the beginning of the civil rights movement.

Emmett Till, as I've mentioned, was not only brutally beaten but tortured, including having one of his eyes gouged out. As it happens, a few years ago I met and interviewed Emmett Till's cousin, who was in the same bedroom with Till the night that white men burst into the house and took him away to murder him. I will never, ever forget it.

Here is a photo of how you'd see Joseph Ross's poem if you walked past the Baltimore downtown library this month:

Photo: Robert Waxman

At a time when today's American brown shirts want for government's sole job to be the killing of infidels and the punishing of scapegoats, it's good to see a public library acting like a public library. My thanks to my friend Rachel for pointing this out.

There's a false rumor going around that the infamous Koch Bros are paying George Zimmerman's legal fees.

There are plenty of reasons to boycott Koch Industries, but not this bogus claim, which gives ammunition to those who want to trash liberal credibility. What is true is that Koch supported an organization that supported the creation of Stand Your Ground laws, although there is no direct link between Koch and the Florida law. See Snopes on this.

The Tulsa shootings. And a little deep background.

The Tulsa shootings have "hate crime" written all over them. This has yet to be established legally, but circumstantially it is generally agreed, for obvious reasons, that it's likely.

Two suspects are in custody and are expected to be indicted for murder and shooting with intent to kill. Local authorities, and black citizens, have so far been notably restrained in their public statements about two white men going on a murder rampage in a black community, which is interesting when you consider the likely public explosion if two black men were to drive through a white community and shoot five white strangers within a matter of minutes on Easter weekend.

Showing restraint under brutality, of course, is a learned trait in black communities that goes back to slavery and Jim Crow.

Tulsa, in fact, has a spectacularly bloody history when it comes to white attacks on black communities. Neither the CNN story nor the NYT account mentions this -- which is interesting in itself -- but Tulsa was the scene of one of the deadliest white-on-black racial mob massacres in American history in 1921. From Wiki:

The Tulsa Race Riot was a large-scale racially motivated conflict, May 31 - June 1, 1921, between the white and black communities of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which the wealthiest African-American community in the United States, the Greenwood District also known as 'The Negro Wall St' [1] was burned to the ground. Aerial fire bombing of black residential neighborhoods was reported. During the 16 hours of the assault, over 800 people were admitted to local hospitals with injuries, more than 6,000 Greenwood residents were arrested and detained at three local facilities.[2] An estimated 10,000 were left homeless, and 35 city blocks composed of 1,256 residences were destroyed by fire. The official count of the dead by the Oklahoma Department of Vital Statistics was 36, but other estimates of black fatalities have been up to about 300.[2]

The events of the riot were omitted from local and state history; "The Tulsa race riot of 1921 was rarely mentioned in history books, classrooms or even in private. Blacks and whites alike grew into middle age unaware of what had taken place." [3] In 1996, the state legislature commissioned a report, completed in 2001, to establish the historical record. It has approved some compensatory actions, such as scholarships for descendants of survivors, economic development of Greenwood, and a memorial park, dedicated in 2010, to the victims in Tulsa.

But don't make the mistake of thinking that today's horrible news about the shootings is just about Tulsa. The Tulsa murders draw together things that are going on at multiple levels in neighborhoods nationwide: White-panic Florida gun laws and the killings and hatred they let loose (see the armed neo-Nazis from Detroit who recently decided to patrol Sanford, Florida in proclaimed defense of white citizens); a corporate monarchy and its recession pummeling the brains of many whites into a paste of blind rage; a reactionary and fascist white "restore the homeland" movement (aka the Tea Party), with theocracy and vicious racism just beneath its surface, now being treated as a mainstream political force.

More soon.

Update on the Trayvon Martin killing:

CNN reports that George Zimmerman's attorney has now declared that the Florida stand your ground law doesn't figure in the case, and that his client will argue straight-up self-defense. The stand your ground law, the lawyer says, applies primarily to people being threatened in their homes, while Zimmerman, he claims, has a broader case for self-defense.

This seems a curious stance, since all the readings of the law I have seen, such as this one, clearly describe it as applying anywhere a person has a right to be, whether a public or private place. As such, stand your ground appears to offer Zimmerman's best chance at avoiding or beating prosecution. If a burly adult who actively chases a slender unarmed 17-year-old and then shoots him can't claim self-defense under the Swiss-cheese stand your ground law, how in the world is he going to make that claim under the traditionally more stringent standards of conventional self-defense?

It may be that Zimmerman's lawyer is retreating from the sheer public odiousness of a stand-your-ground defense, now that even the two Republican sponsors of the infamous Florida law are saying that the law doesn't protect Zimmerman and are calling for his arrest.

So, just as the law's authors are distancing themselves from him, perhaps Zimmerman's attorney is trying to distance his client from this now globally-detested law. Especially since Zimmerman is already a widely reviled figure, with public outrage spreading and unfavorable media coverage everywhere.

You could think of it as a lawyer in a rickety house hustling his client into the next room as the ceiling collapses.

At any rate, it looks like a desperate move by the attorney, and it may not be his last.

Not that there isn't a feasible chance that Zimmerman will get off, with or without a trial. But if he does, it may make the Rodney King riots look like a Sunday parade.

BTW, here is an interesting piece detailing a variety of cases in which Florida's stand your ground law has been used to fend off criminal charges for homicides in which the killers would otherwise likely have been indicted.

And here is a fact you personally need to know: although Florida was the first to enact a stand your ground law, similar laws have since been adopted by at least 25 states – that's half of America – including Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas. Think about that the next time some stranger pushes a confrontation with you.

Dissecting the killing of Trayvon Martin.

On the night of February 26, Trayvon Martin, a black 17-year-old walking back to the home of his father's fiancé in a gated community in Sanford, Florida after having bought Skittles and an Arizona Iced Tea at a nearby convenience store, was shot to death by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Zimmerman, who is a white Hispanic, claims self-defense, despite a 911 recording in which Zimmerman apparently chases Martin on foot against the instructions of the 911 dispatcher, and another 911 recording in which a voice later identified as that of the unarmed Martin repeatedly screams for help before being silenced by a gunshot. The Sanford Police Department has filed no charges against Zimmerman.

All hell has since broken loose. The Sanford City Commissioners passed a no-confidence vote on the local chief of police, and he has subsequently taken a temporary leave after a (white) constituent reportedly sent an email telling him he "deserve[d] to be shot down like a dog" for neglecting the killing of Martin. Activists from Al Sharpton to the NAACP's Ben Jealous have descended upon Sanford. The U.S. Justice Department has opened an investigation into the shooting. Protest demonstrations are roaring, and growing, nationwide. More than 1.6 million people, as of this writing, have signed a Change.org petition calling for the arrest of Zimmerman. President Obama and every major Republican presidential contender have spoken about the case. Corporate media – in their single-sensational-event-driven way – are on a feeding frenzy. Outrage is approaching what a friend of mine calls a potential "Emmett Till moment" -- a possible tipping point in awareness and rage over blacks being killed with impunity.

Let's take a quick look at the two ingredients of the Trayvon Martin case: race and guns.

RACE
A central defense offered by George Zimmerman's family and his lawyer is that he is not a racist because 1.) he is a Hispanic who knows the meaning of discrimination, 2.) he has mentored black youths, and 3.) he welcomed and befriended a black female newcomer to his neighborhood. All of this, if true, tells us exactly nothing about how Zimmerman would regard an unknown young black male on the street. We do have some other clues, though: A Miami Herald reporter who reviewed Zimmerman's history of neighborhood watch 911 calls said, "What you see there is a pattern where every time George Zimmerman sees an African American who he doesn't recognize, he calls the police." Racism has a funny way of exempting some from its fears – non-threatening women and clearly needy students, for example – while leaping to fight-or-flight mode in the presence of an unknown young black male in a hoodie. Racial prejudice is also an equal-opportunity illness: today's police and vigilante cultures have plenty of participants of color – blacks, Hispanics, Asians – who are ready and eager to profile by race. Ask me, or any of millions of other law-abiding black American males, about our experiences with police of all colors.

Whether or not George Zimmerman is a conscious racist in his heart means nothing. What matters is what he did. Which leads to the second issue in the Trayvon Martin case.

GUNS
Florida's so-called "stand your ground" gun laws – recently-passed legislation that allows ordinary folks to carry concealed firearms and to use them, without retreating, whenever they feel threatened -– are what made it possible for Zimmerman to feel empowered as a civilian to kill the unarmed Martin with a semi-automatic handgun. The Sanford Police Department's explanation for its lack of action on the case, in fact, has been that without a witness they have no evidence to contradict Zimmerman's claim that his killing Martin complies with the stand your ground law. Without this law, a neighborhood volunteer of questionable judgment, like Zimmerman, would not be legally carrying a handgun with which to lethally judge when he felt "threatened." Without this law, the Martin case would have been, at worst, a fistfight culminating in a lawsuit -- instead of a killing.

Even proponents of Florida's stand your ground law, though, are distancing themselves from Zimmerman. That is because, against the instructions of a telephone dispatcher, Zimmerman reportedly got out of his car and pursued and confronted Martin. His breathless chase, in fact, can be heard on one of the 911 recordings. One of the stand your ground bill's co-sponsors told CNN after the Martin shooting, "Quite frankly, anyone who steps out in a pursuit in a confrontational mode with a firearm? That's not a self-protection act. You've initiated something."

But the law is what put the gun in the hands of an amateur like Zimmerman and made him feel free to use it. Such laws are among the latest symptoms of an American firearms fetish whereby panicked citizens can suckle at the nipple of a warm gun. The United States is becoming the laughingstock of the industrialized world for its reckless embrace of access to firearms. What, after all, is some heavy-breathing neighborhood watch schlump doing with a gun in his possession while he roams the streets? Like Alabama's recent draconian anti-illegal-immigrant law, which now has many of that state's businesses in open revolt as their crops rot in the fields and their Hispanic former employees go into hiding, Florida's wild-west gun law is revealing its consequences.

Trayvon Martin paid for this law, and for the public paranoia and police collusion it enables, with his life. Others have as well; the number of Florida homicides ruled "justifiable" has almost tripled since the law took effect. The bodies continue to stack up.

We'll see where this goes. One thing is clear: As has happened so often before in so many places, it will take a concerted and ferocious national shove for Florida lawmakers to awaken to reality.

The Jim Crow side of "cosmopolitan" Europe is showing more than ever these days,

as reflected, for instance, in an exchange of comments (including one by yours truly) in response to Steve Hynd's post at Agonist.org about the motivation underlying European treatment of North African boat people.

Many Europeans are showing their true colors about "those people" in a manner similar to that of the many white Americans for whom a Rick Santorum's hateful preachings offer self-destructive solace.

What goes unnoticed in both Europe and the United States – in addition to the sheer distractive value of demonizing poor brown people instead of CEOs and their hired political representatives – is the actual origin of the wave of northward immigration from Africa and Mexico: the dysfunction of neocolonial economies that starve their citizens for the benefit of European- and American-based commerce. Europe likes to forget that its colonial carving up of previously stable African nations and economies is the direct precursor to their current states of disaster. And the U.S. conveniently ignores the key role of dire Mexican poverty and political chaos in enabling American banks' benefits from the American-bound drug trade and American commerce's pleasing profits from Mexican maquiladoras and cheap illegal immigrant farm and service labor.

It's the same scheme on both sides of the Atlantic: diverting the anger of the working classes by encouraging them to kick the goose that lays the golden egg for the rich.

Here is the exchange from The Agonist, in which I have substituted the word "Person" for all names except my own: 

Germany When I lived in Munich in the 60s and 70s the Germans were extremely xenophobic. Munich had about a 15% Turkish population. They did all the grunt jobs the Germans wouldn't do - sound familiar? The Germans/Bavarians hated the Turks. I'm sure they would have sent them all back except they didn't want to do the shit jobs they did. Of course they could never become citizens of Germany but then neither could Americans. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:00pm

Probably still similar. I have a friend who recently moved to Germany. She is American, of German extraction, and speaks German. Blue eyes, blonde hair. She was still treated as an outsider at her first job in the countryside. She reports it's better in Munich. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:05pm

OK I too have blond hair and blue eyes and spoke German. I was treated very well in Munich. Of course I worked with the Bavarian State Police and many of them were friends so that might have had something to do with it. It was strange but the Bavarians had a fascination with black GIs and frequently befriended them. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:30pm

Anecdotally... To be African-American in Europe (France / Germany) is not the same as being African-American here. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:35pm

Damn straight. Ask Jack Johnson, Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, the Tuskegee Airmen (of whom my Dad was one), the entire generation of post-bop black jazz musicians, or virtually any black American artist who has spent time there. In my travels as an African American in France, Germany, and Italy some years ago, I found some fascination with me (one night when I walked into an arty Berlin bar an entire line of young hipster women stood and invited me to light their cigarettes for them, and it wasn't because I'm some irresistible hunk). I also found, though, that my American-ness counted (often negatively) more than my skin color. And, most tellingly, I saw an entirely different set of wickedly racist rules applying to Turks and North Africans. In Germany Turks were the niggers of the culture -- persecuted, abused, and ridiculed (it's the first place where I ever heard "Turk jokes"), and in France North Africans were widely hated and sometimes even killed by mobs. This was years ago, mind you, but if anything it appears that Europe's post-colonial race hate is showing more than ever now that the recession is slamming The Motherland. –Bruce A Jacobs March 14, 2012 - 10:01pm

A thought about the role of black American religion.

A black ex-slave
likes to feel
there is someone in charge
who is not
a white ex-slaver.

The other night, at a jazz gig I played

as a drummer in a hot trio at a tony club, the club owner got very drunk -- something I gather he often does.

In the middle of a set in which we three musicians played our asses off for a packed and appreciative house, the bar owner walked up to the stage and, while everyone watched in shock, he launched into a long, loud, drunken rant about how the band was playing way too loudly and it was screwing up his business and it was all my fault. Me. The drummer. He stood squarely in front of me and my drum set. He shouted in my face that all of the volume problems started with me, and his patrons upstairs needed to make conversation, and the band sounded like a train running through the building, and he was the boss and I had better do something about it.

In a room where the audience had been giddy with our performance, you could suddenly hear a pin drop.

The rest of the details don't matter. Suffice it to say that I was both cool and blindly furious, and the crowd sided with the band, and the drunken club owner ended up making a meaningless apology, and I'll be damned if I'll ever set foot in his cursed little club again.

This is part of the turf that a jazz musician walks: Having the most intense art form that America itself has ever produced relegated to gin mills where people yak and drink too much; having this country's most creative musical intellectuals (and I'm not talking about myself, but about jazz musicians at the very top of the art, who as a threat to white superiority still face a certain stubborn denial and disrespect of their role in the culture) treated as mere entertainers.

Sure, I, or we as a band, may have been playing too loudly for the conversational upstairs crowd who felt our playing through the floor. But what is John Coltrane's music -- we played the seminal "Giant Steps" that night -- doing in a bar where a sloppily wasted white tavern keeper feels entitled to publicly lecture hard-practiced black jazz musicians? Why was the club owner trying to humiliate me when he could easily have avoided the spectacle with a private conversation? And who the hell was he to even play cultural critic in the first place? What is such compositionally and improvisationally brilliant music doing in a speakeasy, anyway? What was I doing there?

That's the problem with being jazz musicians in the United States. We have our hands on something that the dominant culture feels it can't afford to fully recognize: black creativity that is part Beethoven and part shaman. Over the decades, we have cleanly played our hand with our former slavemasters, seen them and raised them, upped the cultural ante on what they feel is their very best, and their response at the table has been a sullen silence, eyes averted, with the occasional self-comforting and inherently racist outburst about our being too primal for their company.

Talk about dysfunction and ingratitude.

This is precisely why Europe and Japan -- having less of a vested interest than America in undervaluing the breakthrough Afri-Euro aesthetic of the Louis Armstrongs and Josephine Bakers and Aimé Cesaires -- remain magnets for black American artists who want to be seen for who we actually are and for what we actually do.

Meanwhile, here on the 2012 American plantation of cultural production, it's still too often pearls before swine. But there is also this: the mere fact that this awful nightclub story isn't my typical experience as a jazz musician, and that the crowd stood with we musicians against the drunken owner, and that jazz and its audiences manage to thrive from corner bars to Lincoln Center, says a lot about the loving indestructibility of music and of humanness in the face of even the most wickedly pervasive machinery.

[2/8/2012 12:30pm EST: I re-edited the final paragraph to better express all that I see and feel here.]

A fellow musician mentioned the other night

that it's a bad idea for musicians to "listen with their eyes."

What he meant was that when we decide how creative or talented or worthy of respect a musician is on the basis of their received recognition by an audience or their image among connoisseurs, we make bad decisions. The only true way to know what you hear in the music is to listen to the music.

I like the way he put this. It's true for musicians, but it is also true for poets, readers of novels, sports fans, theater folks, painters, voters -- anybody who needs to have the clearest take they can manage on someone's contribution.

This isn't always easy. Sometimes huge popularity is -- wrongly -- a signal to us that someone is a hack. And sometimes obscurity is damn well deserved. It's all subjective, of course, but it's still complicated.

Take the hugely successful 1960s/70s rock band Grand Funk Railroad. They were a spectacular sensation among teenagers who wanted their music loud, brash, self-righteous, and infused with pot smoke. (I know. I was there.) Writers who "knew" music (a timelessly common condition among critics who know how to listen but not how to play) trashed GFR in print with bloody fury. And they were often right. Frontman Mark Farner did suck as a guitarist and was largely full of shit as a writhing, shirtless, pseudo-philosophical rock poet. The band did play to counterculture teenybopper clichés. Producer Terry Knight was in fact a slickster whose GFR album cover concepts and band marketing rivaled the product packaging of Alka Seltzer and Shake & Bake.

But Grand Funk Railroad rocked its ass off -- mostly because monster bassist Mel Schacher and drummer Don Brewer were among the first big-time white rhythm section players to understand a basic foundation of black R&B: when you synchronize the bass line with the bass drum, you get the funk. You create the gut thump. Go back and listen to vintage GFR, and you'll hear a white band that picked up on part of the seismic essence of James Brown and other funk pioneers. These white boys heard the underlying real shit, and they rendered it well enough in coliseums to drive thousands of bodies into a frenzy. Sure, like a lot of groups, they had help from ganja, acid, and Madison Avenue. But Grand Funk Railroad was and always will be a classic ass-kicking band, no matter how many armchair virtuosos cursed them in reviews of their albums and concerts.

That is why, when I listen to musicians who I believe thoroughly suck, I try -- sometimes successfully, sometimes not -- to listen beneath that for something I need to hear. And it's why some musicians, far more accomplished than I, try to do the same thing when they listen to me.

I'm making changes

to this blog.

You may have noticed it's been more than two months since I last posted. I'm just not into continually opinionizing right now. There is an entire online culture that opinionizes in the continual present tense: "Here is what I think about what just happened in (insert political entity here)." I don't see it doing us much good. Certain things are true, and they will remain true until we act to change them, and until we do, opinionizing once a week about the same truths is like shouting at each other weekly that the sky is blue.

Truth: The United States is a corporate monarchy in which the state has been purchased in service of monopoly capitalists.

Truth: Elections will remain a sham as long as private money is allowed to dominate them.

Truth: Privilege and continued combat among we non-plutocrats -- by race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability and other distinctions -- is the best divisive tactic the ruling class has at its disposal. If not for this, we'd have stormed the Bastille long ago.

We know these things. What we need to do is change them. There is more than enough repetitive stating of the obvious already. That's one reason I'm changing the blog.

Another reason is that my life has grown. I'm a working musician, a perfoming poet, an author working on my next book, and a person like you who walks around seeing and hearing stuff I sometimes want to share because it helps me become more aware of life, period.

So you'll see a lot more here than you've seen before. Sure, it will include political opinions, but it will also go further.

I can't tell you yet where this will go. But in the coming weeks you and I will both start to find out.