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Xavier Adams

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Solutions Set in Stone

by Xavier Adams
written by Xavier Adams

In the present dialogue concerning the question of black progress, there are relentless demands for instant, final solutions: advocates who, in the moment of impassioned suffocation, cling onto any course of action professing to guide light on the dark path forward. At the heart of this plan lies solutions caught in the stone’s gaze of finality defined by its singular, definite, course of action to achieve progress. 

What grandiose solutions! But it must be asked: what significance can such solutions bring about? Undoubtedly there is much to lament about in the modern political arena, but–acknowledging that such an arena inevitably shapes our thoughts and actions without the futile attempt to rise above history–such politics calls for solutions that are grounded in the dynamic river of scientific knowledge: a river so tentative, calling for continually revisions accompanied with a multitude of perspectives as to evade the stone’s gaze of finality. Without endorsing a naive, outdated faith in an imagined linear progress of science–one only needs to recall the river’s rapids subordinating the black body–black progress depends upon a cultivation of scientific knowledge. 

Just as there is no singular, definitive, ultimate answer in scientific knowledge, there is consequently no singular, definitive, ultimate solution insofar as solutions to black plight depend on scientific knowledge. The stone’s gaze–disconnected from the river’s rapids and experience–will undoubtedly fail to achieve anything meaningful in the modern political arena. As science unfolds according to a process of historical shifts of continuities and discontinuities, so do answers to black progress. 

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OpinionPolitical Education

The Theater of Political Pessimism

by Xavier Adams
written by Xavier Adams

While reflecting on the upcoming 1956 election, W.E.B. Du Bois pinned the following:

“In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no ‘two evils’ exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.”

The repudiation of the primary channel for political change coupled with the lack of a definitive alternative path: Du Bois’s message amounts to an image of pessimism that Afrikans acquainted with the American political theater are disposed to. Opposed to the hopeful optimist who would readily subscribe to the offered channel of political change, Du Bois takes on the role of a man who, having fatalistically resigned from their post of a prominent activist, waning in their permeating despair, offers nothing but a paralyzing pessimism in the linear path of material progress. This scene of pessimism feels even more familiar when considering the recent refusal of the Black left to vote, similarly rejecting the ‘lesser of two evils’ argument. 

This scene of paralyzing pessimism is undoubtedly what is conjured in one’s mind when one hears a pessimistic style of politics, with its merit invariably stamped out and run into the ground. This style of pessimism has no seat in the political theater for the hopeful optimist who demands a definitive course of action. However, is this unquestioned conception of pessimism warranted? 

Towards the end of the article, Du Bois reaffirms that:

“Stop yelling about a democracy we do not have. Democracy is dead in the United States.”

Without endorsing some of Du Bois’s remarks–to speak of democracy disappearing without it existing in the first place is comical–the role Du Bois plays under a different gaze in the political theater seems promising. No longer does the audience boo at the perceived despair, or walk out on his fatalistic resignation. The audience, as the set designers, have substituted a paralyzing pessimism for a critical pessimism, one that, driven by an intense dissatisfaction, retains a critical outlook necessary to challenge the prevailing structures of power. 

But promising for what? A new consciousness necessary for Afrikan progress. While the hopeful optimist remains fastened to their faith in the existing order of things, convinced that all that is needed is a mere change of moral scenery for political leaders, this critical pessimism, underpinned by a wave of intense dissatisfaction, gives rise to a new subjectivity, a new consciousness necessary for Afrikan liberation. Rejecting the hopeful optimist’s faith, the critical pessimist comes to recognize the power dynamics that drive history, priming one to fundamentally challenge the existing order and the primary channel for political change. 

Source:

Du Bois, W.E.B. “I Won’t Vote.” The Nation, 1956. 

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Arts & EntertainmentBlack HistoryCultureOpinionPolitical Education

Uprooting Language

by Xavier Adams
written by Xavier Adams

*This article provides a detailed guideline in deconstructing language; this is to be used both as an offering to ongoing discussions and as an interpretive tool to reshape how we interact with language*

I.

What is language? As the facilitator at the “social center of gravity,” language functions as an intersubjective process of articulating one’s relationship to the world, thereby producing a unique, autonomous identity–a requisite for resistance. 

II.

One remarkable aspect of algorithmic technology is its aptitude to shatter tradition: the amazing pace at which images are uprooted from its soil and spread to a global audience creates a haze of multiplicities that drown out the origin. The doors to the past are closed; shut out, one must start anew. 

III.

A walk through modern history illustrates the continuous commodification of afrikan bodies. From the enslavement of afrikan bodies through sharecropping and up to mass incarceration, the physical commodification of the afrikan body is a tale inseparable from the modern era. What about the often overlooked image: commodification facilitated not through physical bodies, but through representations?

IV.

As far as the jurisdiction of digital spaces stretches, the image reigns supreme as the chief manifestation of commodification, whether it be through fashion, music, or, most importantly, language. It is the image of afrikan language, that articulation of a unique existential experience, that becomes commodified in digital spaces. Here, one enters a practice of fetishization–a process of obsessive consumption of images that, while exploiting the represented bodies, simultaneously frames the viewer’s experiences–a natural consequence of commodifying images. The simple act of consuming such images situates the viewer–who may be Afrikan as well as non-Afrikan–as an agent of fetishization.

V.

One does not need to spend much time on social media to get acquainted with the “ironization” of AAVE: between phrases such as “type shit” and “woke,” it is not uncommon to find another deploying such phrases for a purely humorous effect. This “ironization” is effectively an alien encounter: with the pace of algorithmic technologies bent on uprooting, to encounter AAVE in digital spaces is to “translate” it to one’s own language, to attribute it a fresh meaning, divorcing race from language, shattering the tradition of language–that unique articulation of one’s relationship with the world, that autonomous identity melts away (generalized as “Gen-Z slang”), along with the potential of resistance.

VI.

With the doors to the past now sealed, without that autonomous identity offered by language, and without appealing to an origin, how are we to start anew? What new language can be articulated to regain an autonomous identity necessary for resistance? These are the discussions we must enter in our struggle toward reimagining a liberated world.

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Black HistoryCultureLifestyleOpinion

“Onwards and Upwards”

by Xavier Adams
written by Xavier Adams

It is no secret that peering into the past affords us a more illustrative picture of the present and allows us to grapple with pressing issues of change, liberation, and one that I find particularly interesting, progress. 

My enthusiasm may then come as no surprise once I was granted access to NOMMO’s historical archives which date back to half a century ago. The burning question in the foreground of my mind was: How does the past compare to the future? 

As I dug through the archives, the headlines read: “The Perpetual Rape of Africa: The Scramble Continues” “Gates Wants it All: Battering Ram Not Enough” “The Coming Racial Struggle and the Crisis of Capitalism” “Radio Stations Refuse Airplay of Anti-Apartheid Single” “African Self-Determinism Through the Arts” 

Not to mention a flier that read, “We are Promoting the Complete Unification of All Africans. We Understand this to be the Prerequisite to Liberation.” 

Although these articles were published decades ago they are, in a sense, uncanny – all too familiar despite the celebrated notion of progress. 

Here we witness calls to end colonial rule throughout Africa, South America, Asia, and the Middle East; editorials concerned with the increasingly repressive police apparatus; unrelenting social and economic racial disparities under capitalist regimes; popular media, grounded in a white standpoint, refusing to shed any spotlight on the subjugation of the subaltern; the need for independent Pan-Afrikan voices to reveal the gravity of their own oppression; and calls for nation-building through the unification of the Afrikan diaspora. 

Decades have passed and yet these issues reverberate perfectly in today’s world. Neo-colonialism is well alive (a struggle that especially resonates in Palestine, the Congo, and Sudan, whose people routinely suffer from atrocious acts of injustice). Mass incarceration and police violence as instruments of oppression are well alive. The social and economic inequalities wrought by capitalism are well alive. The widespread neglect of the marginalized experience is well alive. The need for independent Pan 

Afrikan voices is well alive. The fragmentation of the Afrikan diaspora is well alive. 

The notion of progress within the Pan-Afrikan community is a slippery one: it is widely assumed that we have significantly – though gradually – progressed toward freedom, effectively severing ourselves from 20th-century ills. Yet, it must be asked: how much progress have we enjoyed? 

To my disappointment, this all too attractive idea of significant progress is, for the most part, a 

mistake. The present is marked not by linear and gradual progress but by its absence. 

The ills of the 20th century are the ills of today. 

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Arts & EntertainmentBlack HistoryCultureLifestyleOpinion

The Negro Is Still in Vogue

by Xavier Adams
written by Xavier Adams

“The 1920s were the years of Manhatten’s black Renaissance,” writes Langston Hughes in his memoir The Big Sea, recalling the time “when the Negro was in vogue:” A time of “Countee Cullen, Ethel Water, Claude McKay, Duke Ellington, Bojangles, and Alain Locke,” of those “New Negros,” and of great strides for the Afrikan body: “They thought that the race problem had been solved through Art.”

Of course, the period of great progress was permeated with irony: consuming the performance and entertainment from Afrikan bodies while simultaneously degrading said bodies through strict segregation policies. As Hughes recalls, “Some of the owners of Harlem clubs, delighted at the flood of white patronage, made the grievous error of barring their own race, after the manner of the famous Cotton Club.” The Afrikan body undoubtedly occupies a zone of commodification.

But, what is equally concerning is the fascination with the Afrikan body, a provocation to speak about it: the increasing amount of Afrikan plays performed, books published by Afrikan authors, and, importantly, “the white writers [who] wrote about Negros more successfully (commercially speaking) than Negros did about themselves”.

Here, one is drawn back to Hughes’s remark about the great progress of the black Renaissance: “I don’t know what made any Negros think that–except that they were mostly intellectuals doing the thinker. The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance.” This knowledge of the Afrikan body, and its prominence in media, far from reflecting the experience of the ordinary Afrikan body, was created by the white imagination.

It would be a mistake to place degradation in contrast to fascination: they stem from the same history casting the Afrikan body into a commodity. In the latter case, the Afrikan body as an object of fascination functions not merely to perform and entertain, but more so as a blank canvas whose history becomes implanted according to the white imagination: the great “Negro Renaissance” which cements itself a rendezvous of cultural identification and pride.

A fundamental link therefore emerges between the Afrikan body, media presence, and the white imagination, a link that functions to further regard the Afrikan body as a commodity.

Upon reflection, Hughes implies that that time has passed, peaking “…just before the crash of 1929, the crash that sent Negros, white folks, and all rolling down the hill toward the Work Progress Administration.” Whether Hughes was mistaken in suggesting the end of the vogue or not is irrelevant, for today, the Afrikan body in popular media continues to function as a commodity of fascination placed within the white imagination in the guise of progress. Today, fascination with the Afrikan body often manifests as an uncritical narrative of equality that equates representation to progress: great strides in movies, shows, and advertisements as if “…the race problem had been solved through Art.” In the final analysis, the negro is still in vogue.

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