Unformed Musings On Race
After seeing a really interesting show on PBS about stress and relaxation, I want to study Kundalini Yoga. It's the Yoga that's always had the biggest appeal to me, for the same reason that Kung-Fu is the martial art that interests me the most. Presence of animals.
Any Yoga will get you bending and stretching and breathing and meditating, but Kundalini will get you to uncoil the snake that's at the base of your spine. There's a snake at the base of my spine? Neato! What kind of stripes and spots will it have on its back, once I can uncoil it? I dare hope it isn't coiled around an even larger sex drive. I have trouble keeping the one I have satiated, even when I had two lovers.
I think it's Kung-Fu that has styles like Praying Mantis, Tiger, and Drunken Monkey. If I learn Drunken Monkey, does it mean I learn to grow a tail strong enough to hang myself out of trees with? I hope so.
The heat has me in a haze, and I've been doing some thinking as a result of things I've seen and read. I'm starting to make a formal study of Hip-Hop culture and music. It absolutely thrills me to learn that Hip-Hop was never a "black thing", despite what some of the more racist Hip-Hop artists say. Breakdancing would've been a passing phase through the African-American community: it was Latino dancers who made it stick. And though few white faces (besides the Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice, Eminem) showed up as Hip-Hop stars, there were plenty of behind-the-scenes white players who acted as midwives to the Hip-Hop movement. Especially Jewish men, for whatever reason.
It makes me feel good to hear that, it makes me feel unashamed to be fascinated by this culture, as if it were alien. It isn't. In my neighborhood, people blast Hip-Hop from their cars. They tag billboards a block from my house. They do rap battles at the community center down the street. I'd been turning deaf ears to all of it . . . and then Eminem happened, and I started to listen.
Reading this book (Hip-Hop Nation, I think, though I haven't seen it for a few days) and watching a PBS special about the illusion of Race . . . and catching a few minutes of "The Essence Awards", where African-American artists are applauded by fellow members of their race . . .
I'm starting to thing that Race is a Premodern* concept. A construct that served older political agendas well, but whose time is long over.
Race has been deconstructed before, by Feminists and others. It's seen by an entire camp of Feminists as a ridiculous notion, as artificial as Class in, say, Victorian England.
But it's wrong to just throw it out the window. You can't just say, "We're all human!" and expect a love-everybody, call-everybody-your-sisters-and-brothers culture to emerge. I think that you can't knock down fences without building other ones.
I think it's time to redraw the lines in the sand. I'm not sure how, or to what, but I'm thinking of it.
(The Faery-Winged Feminist on one shoulder is yanking on my ear, telling me to rework and publish my offering to Young Sexuality before undertaking this effort. But I'll keep both pots simmering on my back burners, and see what bubbles up.)
* Leave it to me to come up with an elitist concept inside of the all-inclusive Postmodernism. I've had this word in my head for a few months now, to describe people still obsessed with Truth and other Wild Goose Chases. I don't expect people to all be Postmodernists, but you'll have to forgive those of us who are to smile a bit at the frenzied tail-chasing the rest of you are doing. PK puts the Haughty Hat back up on the shelf and sprinkles some dust on it.
Any Yoga will get you bending and stretching and breathing and meditating, but Kundalini will get you to uncoil the snake that's at the base of your spine. There's a snake at the base of my spine? Neato! What kind of stripes and spots will it have on its back, once I can uncoil it? I dare hope it isn't coiled around an even larger sex drive. I have trouble keeping the one I have satiated, even when I had two lovers.
I think it's Kung-Fu that has styles like Praying Mantis, Tiger, and Drunken Monkey. If I learn Drunken Monkey, does it mean I learn to grow a tail strong enough to hang myself out of trees with? I hope so.
The heat has me in a haze, and I've been doing some thinking as a result of things I've seen and read. I'm starting to make a formal study of Hip-Hop culture and music. It absolutely thrills me to learn that Hip-Hop was never a "black thing", despite what some of the more racist Hip-Hop artists say. Breakdancing would've been a passing phase through the African-American community: it was Latino dancers who made it stick. And though few white faces (besides the Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice, Eminem) showed up as Hip-Hop stars, there were plenty of behind-the-scenes white players who acted as midwives to the Hip-Hop movement. Especially Jewish men, for whatever reason.
It makes me feel good to hear that, it makes me feel unashamed to be fascinated by this culture, as if it were alien. It isn't. In my neighborhood, people blast Hip-Hop from their cars. They tag billboards a block from my house. They do rap battles at the community center down the street. I'd been turning deaf ears to all of it . . . and then Eminem happened, and I started to listen.
Reading this book (Hip-Hop Nation, I think, though I haven't seen it for a few days) and watching a PBS special about the illusion of Race . . . and catching a few minutes of "The Essence Awards", where African-American artists are applauded by fellow members of their race . . .
I'm starting to thing that Race is a Premodern* concept. A construct that served older political agendas well, but whose time is long over.
Race has been deconstructed before, by Feminists and others. It's seen by an entire camp of Feminists as a ridiculous notion, as artificial as Class in, say, Victorian England.
But it's wrong to just throw it out the window. You can't just say, "We're all human!" and expect a love-everybody, call-everybody-your-sisters-and-brothers culture to emerge. I think that you can't knock down fences without building other ones.
I think it's time to redraw the lines in the sand. I'm not sure how, or to what, but I'm thinking of it.
(The Faery-Winged Feminist on one shoulder is yanking on my ear, telling me to rework and publish my offering to Young Sexuality before undertaking this effort. But I'll keep both pots simmering on my back burners, and see what bubbles up.)
* Leave it to me to come up with an elitist concept inside of the all-inclusive Postmodernism. I've had this word in my head for a few months now, to describe people still obsessed with Truth and other Wild Goose Chases. I don't expect people to all be Postmodernists, but you'll have to forgive those of us who are to smile a bit at the frenzied tail-chasing the rest of you are doing. PK puts the Haughty Hat back up on the shelf and sprinkles some dust on it.