To begin at the beginning, for me, when I finally became conscious of the plight of black people and delved into the annals of history of Africans and Afro-descendants, from those that went with the Trans-Atlantic slave-trade to the Americas, to those that went with the Trans-Saharan slave trade to the Arab world, to those that even went using the least talked about Indian Ocean route from the East African coast, to those of us who are descendants of those that remained and every one in between. To read of the brutality, the exactitude of vileness, torture and all manner of isms that have been levied on my kind, for millennia, to say I was angry would be an understatement.
In fact, at that point I could not even think. I saw red and wanted blood. With every lash of historical injustice that I consumed, exacted by majority white people, felt unbearable. Even then, I consumed greedily, because I felt it was my duty, in order to remember the fallen, honour them and forever stay on guard. In a twisted way I thought it was salutary to see the damage with my own eyes for at least I was in a better position, as I did not necessarily go through it myself.
And even on that, I was wrong, because I do live through it, we all do. The legacy of all the oppression is born every day it seems, like a snake shedding its old skin for a new one the second we recognize it for what it is.
In this state, this state of charged rage and possible violence is when I stumbled upon the great Malcolm X. Him and his transformational parrhesia, and his separatism ideals were a worthwhile respite.
To this day I still love Malcom X, a man who died before my mother was even conceived. What can I say, real recognize real. I literally wept when I got to the bit in Alex Haley’s biography of him that narrated his death, his assassination, anyway that is a story for another day.
Nonetheless, this was my introduction to separatism as an actionable solution. Basically, to the best of my understanding, having white people and black people separate, build their own communities away from each other because having them together is just a fatal combination.
And I will say this, I was seduced by it. I even wondered aloud, if black people didn’t rely on white people economically as most of us do today, is it really the worst idea? Is there any love lost there? Will we even miss each other, at least for the black people in question?
First thing’s first, blackness is not a monolith and I am sure black people from different places, be it the US, the continent, Latin America or even the Caribbean and many other places where Africans and Afro-descendants are found, have varied answers to this. For me though, I was okay with it, let’s go, it’s about time. Time to all go our own way if for nothing else, to avoid killing each other.
The most compelling argument for this was again from Malcolm X. An argument that I still resonate with, that there is no justice for a black person in a white world. For no matter how much you destroy oppression and all his sons, as long as the whiteness is still the bedrock, politically, psychologically and economically, in a way it’s all always in vain.
Unfortunately, the tradition and proliferation of racism has perverted the world so much so, that even in a non-white world, say Asia, anti-blackness is now a core tenet.
Why it does not work?
So why wouldn’t such a delicious plan work. That is the question.
Well, for one, it will not work for the same reason that having interracial relationships and by extension, mixed-race children does not cure racism and anti-blackness. Not that there is anything wrong with interracial people, in fact I personally always hate how mixed-race people have historically and even now been used as political symbols to divide, unite and fetishize black people.
The issue with the solution is that it is hideously inept.
The truth is, the damage is already done. The loc has been loced and no amount of quick cutting and unwinding can undo it, at least not at this point.
I always say, what racism did, is what happens when a house filled with maximalist décor, very unique and beautiful décor to be exact, is robbed. Even if the police managed to get the robber, you could not possibly remember everything that was stolen in one go, and even if you could, tracing the items to their new landing spots, transfigured as they may be now, would be such a challenge. And I am talking about durable items what about the ephemeral things that were stolen, say your ice-cream for instance, even if you found it, would it be the same?
All that you are left to do is mourn over your possessions slowly over time, lick your wounds as slowly as you discover them. This is precisely where Africans and Afro-descendants are. Slowly trying to rebuild that which was lost in a hostile environment, so much so that the project of recovery takes many a hiatus even now. And if you are one of these, honestly, your very existence is a treasure to be celebrated.
As far as separatism goes, even to indulge myself with a thought experiment of a world where separatism has been achieved? Is that world, the black part anyway, free from internalized racism, colorism, texturism or featurism?
Do the Africans and afro-descendants pursue justice and liberation for all, especially the marginalized communities within the black world, be it certain tribes in certain African countries, boys, girls, men, women, children, LGBTQIA, the disabled and the mentally ill?
Are the Africans and Afro-descendants now firmly in possession of all their stolen artifacts, histories, traditions, institutions, consciousness, systems and ideas?
Are the Africans and Afro descendants ready to build anew without defaulting to capitulate to the immoral tactics and corrupt value systems that enslaved them in the first place?
Have the Africans and Afro descendants been purged of the generational pain and trauma that resides in the fiber of their very being?
And I could ask many more questions for that matter.
So you see, the problem is a complex one, therefore the solution cannot be simple, in fact the solution is not even one, and as such cannot be restricted to any amount of time, because remember, the evil you fight has had quite a head-start.
What then?
So then with all the devastation behind us, are we resigned to our demise? The current status-quo that works against us on every turn.
Well, no African or Afro descendant need me to explain to them that black people are just something else. Because even squeezed from all sides with all forms of oppression still we have overcome.
We love, we live, we excel, we enjoy in the face of all our detractors, every day of our lives and this is something I can say is true for each and every one of us, wherever we may be.
The Black Base
However, sometimes I think we do what we can in isolation, which in many ways is a choice and not a choice at all. Though separatism is not the answer, I do believe we need a black base.
Do not get me wrong, by a black base I do not mean let us all go back to Africa and force ourselves and our differences on one another. No. I reiterate, blackness is not a monolith, and we have all been on our respective journeys, similar but not the same, and that must be respected. But we are in this together, we are not the same but we are one.
What we need is to rebuild the black base, from institutions, both physical and psychological, to physical places that are just for us, to the black family and rebuilding that, to black feminism including both men and all women, to the protection of black children everywhere. To rekindling all black mythology, languages, literature, spirituality and traditions. To reigniting black propaganda, technology, science and invention.
We need our own thing, our own homeland, in the broadest of terms, where we can just be without fear of prejudice or discrimination. A black base to call home, where we can always return to and one that will always summon the collective when any one of us is in danger, anywhere.
And I must add, the building of the black base must be done only by black people. All this business of white philanthropy, poorism in Africa and white guilt should be despised by black people. The only people who should be allowed to build and indulge in the black base are the people it is for. This is something even Malcolm X understood intuitively, black people must not be seduced into becoming coons or house N-words or even the absurd post-racial utopia, that always ends up the same way, tokenism.
Black people are capable, all this time we have built everything for everyone else but ourselves and it’s a high time this changes. Black people must rise up for black people because that’s really the only way it can get done. Black people and Africa specifically does not need a big brother whether that be former colonial powers or the Chinese, we need to rebuild the motherland and be strong internally and then we can move as one bloc when we need to.
Still on that point, the infighting in the Black world has got to stop, whether it be based on class, geography, ethnicity, gender or whatever. Like I said, we are all so different, and that is a good thing, let us use it to bond. Some of us are Africans, others are from the Carribean, others are gay, others trans, others Americans, others Latin Americans and the list goes on and on. No one of us is more authentically black than the other.
Our differences have been used to separate us before and we cannot in good conscience let it happen to us again. We must embrace the wholeness of blackness, because we all belong and where injustice between ourselves occurs we must be honest and tackle it justly and courageously. However, I do admit that at times it is a delicate situation but most especially when dealing with each other, we must be even more empathetic, more gentle, more keen because we know how bad it can get out there, exposed and without each other.
The black base was robbed and we cannot remember everything that was stolen, when and why, but painstakingly and meticulously we can rebuild, God knows if anyone can do it, it is us. A black future glints in the horizon for all of us to share in, and all we need to do now, is reclaim it.
As I say this I suppose I won’t be alive to see it myself, but the seed has been planted and the tree prophesied. In many ways that is all we need to get started.
To begin with as usual, for all those who feel they might at one point or another like to watch the show this is absolutely your cue to leave, as this review will be chock-full of spoilers. However you can read the final thoughts if you need a push to start watching, no spoilers there
I have also inserted the bit about my identity a ‘Non-Diaspora African’, just to mean that I am an African who has not lived abroad and is not part of peoples or descendants of people who now live in the diaspora, either by choice or not, resulting from a number of reasons ranging from immigration, to slavery, to personal exploration and adventure. That being said, I am not the thoughts ambassador from those of a similar identity to mine, as we all know, blackness is not a monolith but perhaps the disclaimer will somewhat lend itself more to some of the opinions in this review so that if anything I say sounds odd perhaps it is just that my sensibilities differ from yours.
Well then, let’s begin.
The characters
I will begin with the male characters. I mean. I am not from America and could be wrong but I did think the writing to do with the male characters, especially Reggie, Troy, Moses and Lionel was a thing of beauty. I loved how each of them interacted with race but is such different and nuanced ways.
For Reggie, the boxed in hulk of a black man to the world, always being mistaken for a thoughtless jock who is just really a super conscientious Computer Scientist, also happening to come from a family of famed Black Panthers whose ideals he constantly seems to want to live up to. Oh, and the bit about the cop pulling the gun on him was priceless even though I did watch all this past George Floyd, I can imagine that at the time the show aired it was quite something. I also love the juxtaposition between people like him and the white player that died after jumping from a building while high or something of the sort. It was interesting to see that, because the other guy’s end was what people would expect from one such as Reggie, directionless masculinity that just ends fatal and yet that couldn’t be farther from the reality.
Reggie and Moses was also such a powerful dynamic to watch. How the idol became the mentor and finally the disgraced foe. The moral calculations Reggie had to wrangle in order for him to view his champion, one who had also stared down the barrel of a gun on the very same campus, could be a rapist, and with a name like Moses. Absolutely delicious.
His relationship with Joelle and fascination with the very light-skinned and vocal Sam was also done right. His vacillation between activism and colorism and his own blind spots when it comes to black women and their struggles. They did Joelle wrong though, but I will come back to that later.
Moses too, if I might add, added much needed spice especially with his perfidious ‘It wasn’t me’ initial response to Muffy’s allegations. That, together with the earlier portrayal of Muffy throwing sexual innuendos at him that he pretended not to want, kisebusebu na kijoyo ki papo, please, I saw right though that. However the trap laid to evoke slut-shaming later on was laid well, like a good wig.
Next up, Troy. Another one of my favourites. The hollowness of his being in order for him to be the golden boy, a.k.a the good harmless black boy who even though is built dangerously is softened by his accomplishments, mannerisms and dare I say, privilege, to only serve as a trophy. First for his father then briefly for Coco. All the while, underneath lies a misunderstood comic, full of silliness and insight, longing for his mother but having to contend with an unrelenting father and his drug of choice, sex. Again, expertly written and the delivery on another level.
Lionel, on the other hand was just a guilty pleasure. First things first, his relationship with Troy and the voluble absence of homophobia despite him having a major crush on, if nothing else Troy’s body was a cold glass of water on a sweltering day, refreshing times one million. I mean, homophobia among black men is one of the bigger diseases and if you don’t believe me, google two words, Da Baby.
The relationship with his first boyfriend though not heavily expounded on was a good start but I do wish we got to see more of that. He really blossoms when we are introduced to the gay scene in the school, where I also got to learn about ‘girl dick’, very educational indeed. When he goes to the sex club, his tryst with the pos guy which I honestly think counts a bit more like a missed opportunity. We definitely needed to see more of that and his various interactions with his loquacious friend cum doctor cum rival, D’Unte, an amazing side-character who I also wanted to see more of. I loved it all but it definitely counts as a missed opportunity because I just think what the show needed was more from that whole plotline.
As for the black women on the show, Joelle, Sam, Brooke, Kelsey and Coco. It was half and half.
First of all, I felt the women unlike the men, were boxed into stereotypes,from the light-skinned one riddled with white guilt, overly vocal to overcompensate for being half white and truly loving 2 white men dearly and I will get to Gabe, just you wait. The groovy, cool, non-angry, braid wearing dark skin Nubian queen, the aimless workaholic journalist one, and of course the precocious dark skinned girl from the most dangerous part of Chicago who is set to be the next thing bigger and even more marvelous than Michelle Obama with a hint of sinister born from her unbecoming background.
I mean it sounds nice but damn, can’t these women just be women and not standpoints. First of all it felt like everyone was assigned a hair mantra, I mean. Everybody knows black women, especially, like to experiment and while I suppose it might be a little harder to experiment in the States for a whole host of reasons, surely, one hair-style for 3 seasons. I call bull shit, but I could be wrong, I am a non-Diasporan African after all ,and here hair is only a charged subject if you want it to be, the options are immense and for the most part affordable so…yeah….we move on.
Sam, I think was written well but I honestly don’t really understand why we had to indulge her white guilt so much. So you love Gabe, so what, who cares. Don’t get me wrong she was sharp as a tack, girl been reading them books for sure, but should she really be the mouthpiece of Dear White People. She wasn’t even a journalist, she was like a documentarian/film maker, why do I feel that adding radio to that was just such a stretch. I loved the bit about her film making and how she almost flunked and Justin Simien himself coming through, very nice insertion. I also enjoyed seeing Laverne Cox as a villain, she needs more roles like that, just because she is inspiring in real life doesn’t mean she can’t get bitch roles, she killed.
Joelle. This was just, I think, done all the way wrong. They wasted that story and the actress. First of all why can’t she find a man? Her only choice are Sam’s sloppy seconds and a full-blown hotep. Even Rashid and her, I don’t mean that she should have chosen him but why didn’t we see more of that interaction, why not even a FWB situation, God knows she was lonely. She honestly felt like a prop being moved around between Sam and Reggie, and even in Season 1 when we finally had her episode, which basically just informed us that she has always been a golden girl, so what! What does she feel? What does she want? How is she evolving? And for God’s sake when will she change her hair style? I mean, all that deep melanin poured down the drain like that was painful to watch. And let me clarify this is not an indictment on the actress, that woman did all she could to save a pointless script.
Brooke, let me save her for later.
Coco was certainly the best work from all the women. Only her insistence on the same hair-style made sense, and can I just say, the few times she didn’t have the sow-in weave, not that she looked bad in the weave, like with the cornrows while it (the wig) was being installed and the short wig that was to mimic her natural hair, unless that was her hair, she looked absolutely adorable.
Anyway, between her naked ambition, her failed romance with the then aimless Troy then onto the very white and very rich Kurt, who I will also get to. She did feel a bit trite. Her best scenes, according to me, had to do with her abortion which although being sorely unoriginal were actually very well executed. The idea that the even the well-put together, control-freak Coco could fall into that pregnancy trap, and not for accidental failure of her contraception but because she got caught up and didn’t use contraception at all, which makes a lot of sense if you’ve seen Troy , was a very good choice.
I wish we got to see how juggling all those things, be it the obliviously passive-aggressive Muffy, to the obnoxious Kurt, to her friend turn foe Sam as well as her academics, a social life, being on the comeup, a sex life, CORE and her secret life of Colandrea back in Chicago, plus the abortion can wreck you mentally. I mean, I guess we sort of did see that especially with her seeing the ghost of her fully grown aborted daughter jeering at her, at every turn.
Her dilemma between rising in a terrible system using terrible tools, or sinking further to be the anchor for everyone else because she certainly was one of the most capable students and all round people in the whole campus to do just about anything , was very well articulated. Actually, come to think of it I quite liked Coco’s portrayal and I look forward to seeing more from her.
Some really good moments were her steadiness when it came to the sexual assault of Muffy and her sinisterhood when it came to some of her schadenfreude a.ka. powergasms especially with the girls who kicked her out of the sorority. I think her character was given room to splay on the screen quite beautifully.
Representation of ‘other’ blacks
Hmm, and here comes the tragedy. I will of course start with Rashid Bakr. I am definitely laughing just now as we speak, or is it as I write. As a Kenyan myself, let me just say I am well aware that people like me are not the target audience for such shows but surely, what was that. I will be the first to admit I do not even know all the accents in a country as rich as mine and by the way for those who do not know, it is pretty much the same in most other African countries. Richness is what I always feel is apropos when discussing Africa, no two anything are alike. All the more reason why it seems so absurd that they had to make up his accent when they could so easily just choose from the variety we have.
It was so bad that Rashid sounded like something I would expect from Lion King. I mean. Come on. I hate to bash Black-American creators but sometimes I feel like they do unto us what was done unto them by white people with this pathetic representation thing, because this isn’t the first time and I am sure won’t be the last.
Why the ridiculous accent when you could have easily gotten the right person on the team to do the research and get it right the first time. Black American creators should be the last people who need a lecture on why correct representation matters. I am sure there are African actors in the U.S who have a more believable accent and since Black Panther, if Prince T’Challa could do it, we know it can be done by Jeremy Tardy by just learning how to. Now I am just left to imagine the culprits are either laziness or an interesting version of racism or a combination of both and this does not please me not one bit.
The good thing about it is that it made me laugh like crazy. Thanks for that at least. Ha ha! It would have been really offensive if it wasn’t so damn funny.
As for Kelsey who I believe has a parent from Trinidad and Tobago, I am not really in a position to judge the portrayal but I did like that she was a lesbian but not like Lena Waithe, which is a common-place portrayal of black lesbians, not that there is something wrong with Lena or being more butch, it was just good to have such a confusing unpredictable black character. Half the time I didn’t even know she was Trinidadian or gay, it didn’t matter. Her opening, that kind of casts her as a spoilt idiot is a wonderful red herring, her relationship with Brooke, the friendship she offers Coco and even her unusual membership in the Black Caucus under CORE was spectacularly unexpected I still can’t even decide if she is rich or not. And not to forget Sorbet, side note I really love dogs, but I will get to Sorbet a little later.
The White Characters
Unfortunately, these to me were the most well written characters which was a sort of disappointment since I hoped there would be more effort dedicated to the black stars but I guess the title of the show gave it away.
Muffy’s embodiment of the oblivious rich white girl, trying to do her best for white feminism complete with the whole ‘Lean In’ mentality was spot on, I always really appreciate white actors or actresses who take on roles that they are sure reveals the worst of their kind, like the white girlfriend from Get out. Electric stuff.
The tension and plot progression her sexual assault brought forth was just perfect and how various people reacted to it. Loved it. How she herself reacted was a very bold choice because I think it was not to exonerate her from all her previous micro-aggressions especially towards Coco, but it was a delightful switch.
Where we are all so inured to white women shamelessly lying when abuse by a black man is non-existent, when it is in fact real they act very similar to typical rape survivors, hiding and trivializing their ordeal and in an unusual twist of events, somewhat discarding their privilege. Not to say that this is always the case, I just thought the story went to a very interesting place on how Muffy herself responded to her assault.
Gabe. You know at first I struggled with why we gave this guy so much screen-time, screen-time that could have otherwise been used on Joelle. Damn it, I literally came to see the black people, sorry for being frank.
Nevertheless, though I still feel he got too much time I get why he was so important in Sam’s story arc. He was her dad incarnate, and her dad was the best. Am not mad at it, every woman deserves the best deal, and for Sam, the best deal was Gabe. Especially the mature way he handled the cheating despite Sam’s incapacity to be to one to offer an apology first, I salute that guy.
Not to compare, but he did in 2 seasons what it took Lawrence to do in 4. That should tell you something about his suitability.
Besides that, his own struggles with money and Sam throwing the age thing at him since I presume he is bit older and might have seemed predator-like or like one who does not want to date an equal was interesting. His inclusion in the T.A’s Labor group, as an ex-T.A (Teacher’s Assistant or Graduate Assistant) myself remembering the abuse and low pay that came with the gig, I really appreciated that whole portrayal.
Last but not least, him taking the grant and noting himself as a Person Of Color, haha! It was very funny and very symbolic, reminded me of the scandal I heard from Brazil a while back that white students were the ones taking posts reserved for black students and it took a while for them to be discovered. It just goes to show even after a white ally has done so much work and seems alright, racism is still one of the bigger beasts to kill. Oh well. I do hope we see some consequences for that later on in the final 4th season.
Onto Kurt. El president of Pastiche himself. Hands down the fairest of them all.
I mean, a white man so blatant in his contempt, his privilege and yet in more ways than one, the most self-aware of them all, and by them I include all the characters. In fact intelligence-wise if I was to compare him to anyone I would pair him up there with Coco. He is a master of the system as it is and he even knows how to pervert it further for his own ends, for example the black lawn jockey debacle, he educated some people on that little bit of history, myself included, but was it really his place to do so? I will let you decide for yourself. Technically marvelous, morally reprehensible. Love it.
His relationship with Troy is interesting because I think it is one of the most authentic male to male frenemies dynamic, blackmailing him with a sex-tape one minute, only to give him a spot at Pastiche and then quickly over-editing his piece to make it both cartoonish and coonish. They are not close friends but are also never too far from each other.
And with Coco, a major shift. In many ways the relationship is undeniably honest and when it comes to the casualness of it all, even though he has nothing to lose by its revelation, he is surprisingly not uncouth about the whole arrangement. Even offering some wisdom about how the world though moulded for him whether he deserves it or not, it is people like Coco who should have the reins. I don’t know, though I still don’t trust him, that was some goodwill right there.
I also found it odd and kind of pleasant that the reason why he is good for Coco is one I hadn’t anticipated. He is good for her because he relaxes her, he is a good partner. Despite the fact that they are both vile and constantly conniving, that is somehow not the crux of their relationship. They never once get together to scheme, its’ all very, healthy, which is unusually pleasant.
And then, in the next scene there he is in all his tyrannical glory blackmailing everyone from Pastiche. Even just the meaning of Pastiche itself, an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period, from Dictionary boxes on Google which basically means a rented definition from a third-party source. Don’t ask. In the bid to come correct with sources, it led me to a whole new rabbit hole.
Anyway, Pastiche seems to me, just a fancy way of appropriating black racialised humor best explored by those who experience it but instead we get the whitest of men running the show, very much on brand if you ask me. This is the genius of Kurt Fletcher. And of course the juxtaposition with Troy who is an actual black comic willing to discuss race is very well done.
In fact the best juxtaposition is between how he interacts with Coco as a for real gentleman, even having her orgasms at the top of his priority list while he loathes but must tolerate Troy. I can’t decide if he is jealous or just angry at Troy which is a good thing, I like it when shows put me on a tight-rope forcing me to run because, such is life.
Wasted Opportunities
I know I have already mentioned a number but sadly there are more to come.
Beginning with the psychology of Silvio, I feel he was cast aside too fast. I wished we explored more of his story and exactly why he did what he did, he was basically Coco on steroids sans the black girl magic with the AltIvyW stupidity, I wanted to see more from him and I thought Lionel would be the guy for us to do that through.
Furthermore, I wanted to see what he lost by siding with the oppressor like that and though I loved Lionel uncovering him, I hated that it all had to end there for their storyline. I did see him sneaking back in with Al, who lo and behold is I guess part Hispanic.
I don’t want to say Al is a missed opportunity as well, because they may yet explore it as they have just only introduced it, very nice and subtle too if I might add.
I will say it again because it pains me so, Joelle! Joelle! Joelle! That was some missing black girl magic, her side characters kept overstepping her and pushing her to the side whether it was Sam, Reggie, Gabe, even the damn hotep. Goodness! For the record I think we could have done without the hotep to be honest. I am still seething from this Joelle business.
The Labor Movement though not too badly done, but it still felt a bit lackluster, I wish we saw more organizing, demonstrating and all. I however did like the Massa diatribe from D’Unte, but I would love to have seen even more. Additionally, though I have said it before, I liked Gabe’s story arc, I wish he did not take lead on this movement. I feel we missed out on some possible intersectionality if the lead was given to a person from yet another marginalized identity ,someone like D’Unte, so that we can see how discrimination and economics can collapse into one amazing thud. Oh well, like I said before, the name of the show, to my chagrin, was not a misnomer.
Also light-skin privilege especially between Joelle and Sam as well as between Sam and Coco was just nibbled at. Why, I ask, why? I so waited for that to be explored and then nothing. Unusually I think Gabe during her ‘Why did we break up’ spiel, her being Sam, before they found out her dad died and got back together was as much exploration as we got from light-skin privilege and from the lens of a white man. The shame.
Even the relationship between Coco and Sam was a bit underplayed, it too quickly soured into a frenemy situation where it lasted for the rest of the show, I wish we squeezed more from that.
But if I am being really honest, the female relationship I much more wanted to explore was Joelle and Coco. Two dark skinned women, two different schools of thought, equally beautiful, equally talented and in a weird twist, gunning for the same goal. Not that I want to see them fight, I just wanted to see that dynamic. I loved when they bonded during Sam’s dad’s funeral. I swear they wasted that Joelle.
When it came to Sam, I would have wanted to see more of her father, contrary to everything I’ve said before. I just did feel like, he was the key to understanding her and her motives. Plus, judging from the eulogy, he wrote for her to read, nice one by the way, sounded like a pretty good guy. But, if I can be frank ,looking at the way major white male characters have been written on this show from Gabe, to Sam’s dad, to Kurt, I didn’t like it one bit, the inner messaging.
This portrayal of white men being the saviors of black women if only black women would try them, rubs me the wrong way. While I understand that the issue has never been individual white men per se, you can’t give me three examples and all are angels. I call bullshit again. Some of that repugnance from Silvio should be equally shared.
Lastly, there was an episode that was an alternate universe where the show was, Dear Black People and it was the white people with black mannerisms that were discriminated against still with Sam being the mouthpiece.
Though I understood it I still wonder why Sam had to be the mouthpiece and why the white people when they are the ones being discriminated, exude black mannerisms, why not white mannerisms. As in, in an alternate universe where white people are discriminated, it is still their ‘black mannerisms’ that precipitate the hate, I found that a rather weird choice. I can still remember Muffy’s black and red braids and thinking to myself, WTF, why this route?
While it was a bit jarring and if I can think of a word to describe it, fully I would say, consternation. I still think they were headed in the right direction with that one.
This is the kind of surrealism that drew me into Justin Simien’s work in the first place, fresh from watching Bad Hair. I just wish they elaborated more on that. You know.
Racial Tension
This was by far one of my favorite devices used on the shows if you can even call it that. I always hate it when black and white people in shows share a space and everyone is good and happy, jolly as can be, no racism, tokenism or white supremacy here. Please!
I get that its’ not always all about racism but to ignore it totally is not a good look. I am not naming names but….2nd season of Why Women Kill, she says amid coughs.
In DWP, the tension is there, all day, ery day. The racial tension is a character of its own. Even just from the environment, everyone is aware of what’s up.
My personal faves were when Armstrong-Parker was integrated, the white guy who said the N-word to Reggie setting off an unfortunate series of events, Coco and Muffy’s interactions even down to the interaction between Troy’s dad and the cop who pulled a gun on Reggie, and especially the farce that is Dear Right People. That was some good s$%#.
I loved it.
Unusual Signage
This section is all about the stuff I am still on like ‘ok but huh, come again…’ feeling.
For one, Sorbet. Obviously the lovely actor playing Sorbet did a wonderful job but, Sorbet an all-white dainty poodle, brought in initially as Kelsey’s support animal. Stolen, only to be discovered in Al’s custody having been kidnapped by, I think, Rashid.
After which, he leaps onto the campus grounds only to re-appear in Dr. Ruskin’s lair for his Secret Society. I mean. Am I the only one who sees too much here? I think not. I do have some hypotheses since learning the difference between hypotheses and theory but I do not know why I still feel like Sorbet was a powerful signal that I didn’t quite get.
Of course I have to speak of the Secret Black Society, Dr Ruskin as well as Sam and Lionel. The weaving was not bad especially when we see the Secret Society in other instances with regards to Troy and Moses.
The history cum folklore behind secret societies in the school in general too is fascinating. Or maybe one of the many black student organization is the façade for its operation. And what does Dr.Ruskin want them to understand? Why is he the narrator of the show? Why does he not teach anymore and how does he know when to appear? How does he know Moses or even Troy’s dad? What the hell is going on there? Who are the other ominous silhouetted figures of the Secret Society that we see from time to time? Seriously though, what the hell is going on there?
I will not write it off but I am both confused and intrigued.
Brooke is yet another unusual symbol. Workaholic to no end, lesbian-experimenter, lover of white men and sometimes gay men on the down low and, pursuer of justice for the sexually assaulted because of some unconfirmed personal history. Not to forget, in-house natural hair goddess.
I know life and characters do not have to have neat, well-tied up definitions and motives but I will ask this, of all the things I have listed above, why exactly?
Brooke was just confounding to me, not in a good way but also not in a bad way. I felt we didn’t need her but I could never be sure.
And finally, Chester, chronicling loosely the sexual and romantic escapades of Lionel. I mean I did say Lionel felt a bit wasted and we did need to explore more of him and while I too found Chester riveting, it was unusual that we should explore him like that, hidden and closeted. Maybe, he just wanted to prove his salt as a writer, I am just not quite sure why it was so necessary especially after it basically became an open secret that he writes it. I still wonder what purpose it served, that style of delving into Lionel.
Final thoughts
I have surprised myself with my own feelings. Turns out it was a pretty good show, just not in the way I expected. I would definitely advise you to watch. Hopefully it’ll do for you what it did for me.
Why its pro-life vs pro-choice and not pro-life vs pro-abortion?
When it comes to the debate on abortion especially among feminists its’ clear that the binary is between those who support the choice of women to have an abortion or not and those who do not support the choice being a choice at all.
Notice that neither of the sides actually support abortion itself per se. In fact many women will tell you, abortion is plan Z. It is the plan after all plans have failed, because as many of us know there really is nothing pleasant about it. Even in the many wonderful on-screen depictions of abortion that do not chastise women at all, at least those I have seen such as those found in ‘Please Like Me’ , ‘For colored girls’ and ‘Never Rarely Sometimes Always’ , abortion is a necessary evil.
Pro-choice is the movement you get in an already unjust world. It’s the best decision out of the worst options.
As a long-term pro-choice feminist myself I am actually more vocal on all the ways we can prevent unwanted pregnancy before we ever need to terminate it unless of course it’s a case of abortion that does not result from an unwanted pregnancy.
Personally, I have always been more inclined to dealing with all the other injustices that lead to unwanted pregnancies in the first place, whether it’s the very deliberate obfuscation of sexual education, neglect of female science to further improve treatments such as birth control, society’s subtle excommunication of teen/unwed mothers as well as the economic maligning of mothers especially those with lower incomes in the family, in public institutions and at work.
All the while, I have always been aware that pro-choice is not the destination rather just a stop on the way. Things can be better, even with the help of reasoning from an unlikely source.
Where Pro-Life comes in
The pro-life stance in many ways I find quite abhorrent, because more often than not its proponents are not willing to deal with some of the glaring systemic issues underlying the choice to abort. Ignorantly choosing instead to perceive abortion as the disease and not the symptom of a much larger problem. Then continuing on to cite hilarious solutions such as ‘forceful purity culture’, ’rape culture’ and religious abstinence.
However, where I do resonate with pro-lifers is when they rally for the right of life for the unborn. Stating very clearly that they consider conception to be the genesis of life and from there on according the zygote, embryo or foetus with full dignity and humanity just like the rest of us.
On this, and probably this alone do I disagree with certain pro-choice arguments that go so far as to crudely dehumanize the foetus as just a ‘pair of cells’ in order to justify their termination.
And this right here is the problem with this debate. It forces you to pick one life over another. A decision which I believe has no moral value once made because each and every life has value, none more valuable than the other, and whatever choice is made, it is inevitably always, the wrong choice.
It seems to me like one of those trick questions where the right answer is always no answer at all.
Unfortunately for us, and many women of child-bearing age existing in an already patriarchal capitalist system, that chooses to weaponize motherhood only to leave both mothers and children in the cold when it really matters, a decision must be made. Enter pro-choice.
But does it always have to be like this? Will it always have to be like this?
What if indeed, we fix the underlying issues, and I hate the idea of utopia but still, I wonder, what if.
What if young men and women are given sex education adequately and in a timely manner? What if rape ceases to exist? What if we master birth-control such that it is both convenient, accessible and lacks side-effects for all women? What if having a child early or with low-income does not automatically mean living below the poverty line? What if there are no social ramifications for single-mothers and their children? What then?
Will we still need pro-choice in its current configuration or not?
This may seem like a little bit of jumping the gun and skipping certain steps but now more than ever I do believe that our radical imagination especially of the future is just as important as our logic in churning out possible solutions for some of our most pernicious problems.
Furthermore, I also firmly believe that we all have a right to our bodies, no matter our age or circumstance. And this is precisely the problem with maternity. One finds themself in the biological custody of another with possible devastating consequences on the body and life of the custodian just by existing.
So what then, what next in this impossibly uneven and unfair circumstance.
The Separation proposal
Well, what if there could be a separation early on so that each can own themselves if need be. For pregnant women who do not wish to be mothers especially, the choices need not be to kill or be killed rather to have a third more humane alternative that emancipates both woman and baby.
To some and largely even myself this does sound like a bit of science-fiction gibberish but I want to invite you to imagine such a world. Where abortion need not exist.
Not so long ago I feel that many felt the very same way about IVF and honestly I don’t think the science is that far ahead or the thinking so far-fetched. We have already found a way to conceive babies outside a womb ironically I feel the next natural step is to devise a way to grow babies outside the womb.
Right?
Unintended consequences
Well Yes and No. It would be remiss for me not to mention the ‘other’ possibilities that will come with the introduction of such a kind of technology. Not to mention the very real inhumanity of experimentation in order to get to it.
After all, there is a reason for the indivisibility of mother and baby in those first months of life and changing that natural order can very well usher in a different version of hell. But humans have been designing new ways to live out of old ones for a very long time and I suppose in a sense this is just part of the process.
Like fire, the wheel even language the sword that can be introduced will most certainly cut both ways.
I will start with a disclaimer that no. I do not revel or make it a habit to disagree with Lewis, who I truly think is the greatest Christian apologist that ever lived and I am not even a Christian. That should tell you something.
Just for today though, I will disagree with him.
The first phrase on this post is from his book where he discusses how we should be prepared for sex to be odd, repulsive and sometimes downright degenerate. How much of it we want, how we want to it. All of that. He advises us to welcome the oddity because rationale may be truly inadequate to explain the ins and out of the whole thing.
He says God did not consult us when he invented it so we should come prepared to deal with that.
I mean it’s true that God, the Higher Power or whatever you choose to believe didn’t consult us. I mean. he didn’t consult us about anything, but I think in that phrase Lewis was using the phrase more to mean ‘consider’ or maybe I’m just imposing my Freudian slip to his work because I really can’t stop interchanging ‘consider’ with ‘consult’ whenever I say it.
If that was the case though. I disagree.
I think God considered us particularly. So much so that he created a pocket called sexuality for us and us alone. Where our choice interacts with sex and sex interacts with our unconscious needs. Animals can’t have sexuality, in fact I think sex is the wrong word for what animals do. What they do is more or less just reproduction and what does reproduction tell us about them? That they live to die another day and further that cause.
So what does sex tell us about us? About our lives, how much we want it and why we want it at all, especially when it has nothing to do with reproduction. I mean to live to die another day is the obvious reason but that’s only part of it. What about the craving we have for it, the insatiability we have even after years of copulation. What does that tell us about our lives?
I think it tells us there is a great amount of loneliness in the world and it is as if this strange phenomenon of ‘horniness’ is the alert that we have more of it than we can handle at any one moment. By it, I mean loneliness.
In fact for me the physical desire for the act of sex is such a huge metaphor for the loneliness we feel and the true magnitude of it. The need to literally have someone hurtle into your body or you to theirs and I’m not talking about just the physical act even just kissing, it’s quite literal there too. I think in many ways sex is a comfort for the intense loneliness life has to offer us.
And I should say ‘correct sex’ that is just to mean, the kind of sex that fills the void, if only for a time. Any other kind of sex is incomplete in its goal thus more or less null and void, with the side effect of only increasing the hankering for ‘correct sex.’ The insatiability I was talking about earlier
Although, this void filling isn’t just about sex. I think sex is just a complex form of communication and more on the extreme side when you have had as much loneliness as you can take. ‘Horniness’ is not the alarm when the fire breaks out, it is the literal phone call to the firefighters when the heat is unbearable. There are plenty of remedies before we get to that level, not to say that those who do not want sex are not lonely because we all are and the physical desire has its roots in our biology too. But the desire coupled with the heightened intent to act on it usually points to the apex of loneliness.
As such this is why I think children have less inclination to want sex, usually. There is a kind of loneliness reserved only for the matured, when you no longer have your parents within that close reach.
In fact I think sex is the adult equivalent of bonding between babies and their mothers. When we are born we are truly vulnerable and saddled with our new individuality, I think we experience a profuse amount of loneliness. Enter mom. She provides the solace we need to encounter this new world we are now in away from uterine comfort.
When we want sex, we really just need to bond, badly, as the loneliness bites and thanks to our heightened awareness being adults the loneliness can be torturous. Unfortunately at that point bonding with our mothers like we used to, chest to chest, nipple to mouth is much less of an option.
I think this is why a mother dying in childbirth or a closed adoption is usually such a traumatic event. When the one person who could ease your new found loneliness is the one person you will never meet.
Educate comes from the latin word educare or educe. It means to bring out. As if we ourselves are the libraries and the dictionaries but before education, our wonders and knowledge are sealed off. So this seems education unleashes the sleeping beast within all of us, whoever the beast may be. Which comes as such a surprise to me. This is why.
All my life I have idolized knowledge and education. When I hear the aphorism, knowledge is power, I truly do believe it. But in my head it registers as knowledge is the power to do good. A thought I have only come to criticize recently after combating the paradox of ‘evil education’ what always seemed to be quite antithetical. How can education birth evil or worse yet be the child of evil?
When I heard of the stories of the founding of Uganda and Congo. Stories encased in the Machiavellian princely mentality of how their respective erudite leaders, which counted for a lot in the days of post -independent Africa led their countries to the slaughter. I am indeed, extremely dazed. Not to say that my own Kenya and other African countries are better, in fact this is the tale of many a African nations. Putting hope and the future in the arms of the educated who in turn stab us with their corruption and malevolence. All wrapped up in glossy academic qualification and impeccable experience in leadership. But how can this be? How can education be the root of this evil because place an illiterate ignorant individual in the same position and they would not do half as much damage as that of the educated fellow.
It makes me wonder if education in its essence is rather ambivalent or possibly wholly evil in some instances?
Or worse yet is its power akin to the power of money, dragging the beast from within regardless of whether the beast is evil or beautiful.
I presumed like many others that the process of education is a self-checking mechanism. Enabling only the good to go out. Right?
I mean there must be a reason why we all believe in educating our children and why it’s a millennium development goal. If Education had the same power as money we would feed our children as much money as we do education. It would be in legislature all over that children have a right money the same way they have a right to education. But this is not the case, and I know that isn’t coincidental.
Education is a kind of cure. Education has the power akin to free will. A sword immeasurably potent but also rather dependent on the swordsman. It is the power of choice. Because education can be used to build bombs to kill innocents or to build some beneficial structure to house the very same innocents from danger.
So it seems education isn’t at all what I thought. Education isn’t the one who breaks out the good inside. It just allows you access to the world inside and hand you the requisite tools to build its entry into the world outside. So I guess education is the cure of whatever we decide we are ailing from and the irony is we can decide that we are ailing from ‘goodness’ and use education to build ourselves bad medicine.
Jealousy is what you get when respect malfunctions.
For a long time I have wondered what the hype is about respect, these famous term that inspires every generation. What is this internal hype that everyone recognizes because it is marked with excellence.
Everyone that ever lived wanted respect and not necessarily from others but even from themselves. Disrespect had initiated divorce and even started wars, so what is this nagging emotion?
And I want to point out respect is not reverence. Reverence which is also associated with excellence. We regard God, geniuses and saints with reverence. Reverence is for the unattainable excellence, it is for those we a priori regard to be above us.
You will never match the goodness of a saint, the IQ of a genius or the potency of God so we revere them but respect is different. Respect is for our equals, we even respect people we otherwise dislike. Many at times we say, “I don’t even like so and so but I respect what they did.”
Respect is primal and automatic to another person’s good and it’s streamline even with other species. I thought of this in terms of dogs. Dogs respect us, they don’t revere us. They don’t pounce on us and kill us even though they can because they have seen something admirable in us, they’ve seen our loyalty to them, something they can aspire to themselves.
As the meaning of respect unfurled in front of me it struck just how similar it is to its malevolent counterpart, jealousy. Jealousy too is a response to another’s good a good which is perceived to be attainable by us but it goes a step further. It seeks to destroy the excellence.
Jealousy is not passive like respect. Jealousy is the woman who tries to seduce a man just to ruin his marriage. Jealousy is the rapist who recognizes purity and innocence and decides to twist it. Jealousy is the madness that can come from respect because we are only ever jealous of the things we respect.
So what contorts so that respect can morph into jealousy? Is it internal disequilibrium? Is it trauma associated with the excellence that now glides before you?
What are the ingredients that need to mix with respect to turn into virulent jealousy?
Laughably, it is also interesting to point out that dogs’ respect hardly ever shrivels into jealousy. It never succumbs to the turmoil and instead aspires to it. A rather odd outcome because the dog’s instinct like most other animals is to survive which usually means to kill. In this case however they seem to transcend their instinct something that hardly ever happens in the alpha ‘dog eat dog’ world of animals.
You would think it would be easier for humans but it is in fact humans whose respect occasionally deforms into jealousy. Even though humans don’t have to deal with the persistence of natural instincts to propel it. How is that?
Every revolution aspires to the institution it fights and the vice versa is true.
From the outset institutions and revolutions seem at odds. Enemies, set against each other to forever do battle. And yet amidst their enmity I have always found a distinct entanglement. Almost a reverence for the other, not just a simple hero/villain dichotomy but an outstanding connection such that even though one could exist without the other, they probably wouldn’t want to.
This I find very disturbing but in the ever evolving world of individualism, this conundrum is becoming more crucial.
Nowadays, life is centered on the individual as opposed to the past life that was centered on the communal. As a result, in the old world, culture and institutions were the bulwark of life, they were the templates with which life was organized. And now the opposite is true.
Now culture is a decoration, a figurehead to the real master. Me. Marriage used to be entirely about the process, how it was arranged, the role in the community taken after and the minute details of the ceremony were crucial for they were physical containers of the meanings behind it all. Now if you pay dowry it is less symbolic and more of a courtesy, a relic, in fact most do without it.
We are now living in revolutionary times where everything rests on the unique individual experience and thus everything is unique. Institutions have been thrown under the bus and all we pay credence to now is the revolution inside. The needs of the personal person within.
And many including myself have praised this shift. The age of institutions has come and gone. No more external definitions of how we must live, what we must do, who we must love even how we must love. No we are sober to our own lives. We want to write the vows to our lives not just replay those written for us by some obscure authority. It is the annihilation of institutions. The question is, is this good or even true?
Can we really ever do away with institutions? What was the problem with them to begin with and will they make a comeback?
And from that alone I understood the allure of revolutions especially in the context of the current world’s enlightenment. Revolutions are the best choice there is that is a no-brainer, because they are so simple. They are singular focused dealing with one issue at a time, generously while institutions deals with heaps of issues in a constrained manner. They are overworked but it wasn’t always like this. Institutions are revolutions, just grown up .
Think of a recent institution say, feminism that is now properly muddled with numerous opinions and yet in the beginning when it it was so focused and single-minded. It was either about women getting property rights or about the ability to vote or about legislation punishing violence against them. But the inevitable happens, the revolution caught fire and was embraced by many, many of whom saturated it with their individual selves and instead of it expanding in order to maintain its hold. It became obstinate to revision and extension in the face of new realities in an attempt to hold on to its uniqueness, viewing vagueness to accommodate everyone and changing needs a sell-out. Thus its members leave and go set up, revolutions. So now we have a bunch of duplicated institutions doing the same thing but for different persons.
It is this unwavering quality of institutions that make them obsolete and discarded, yet everlasting, in a constant labour because for every one of their disenfranchised member lies a revolution.
They live on but in dismay. As a retrogressive ideal with which to compare progress and lo and behold those revolutions that succeed in usurping it in a cruel twist of fate end up becoming it because like mother, like daugher. The kiswahili proverb sums this up perfectly, “mwana hutazama kichogo cha ninaye.”
So no, institutions are not going anywhere because revolutions need something to pull against. The romance between revolutions and institutions is an eternal one but not necessarily.
So the question is now that we are in a revolutionary space how do we guard against the faults of the institutions before?
Because it is clear that, the greatest dream of a revolution which is to spread and infect all, is in an ironic twist of fate infact its downfall. How do we sieve the obsolescence from the success?
I think the answer lies in realizing that institutions and revolutions are the same thing at different times. They are not at all interdependent or independent. They are the same. This alone removes the difficulty of having to found new institutions when all we need do is reform the old one.
It is an ideal known as generous orthodoxy i recently learnt from the brilliant Malcolm Gladwell . It is learning how to manage the paradox of a wide open sieve. Letting in some new ideas contradictory to the old ones in order to perfect the old ones. It is just as difficult a paradox to live out as it sounds.
Using our earlier example the truth is, we never needed to found feminism all we needed was to reform patriarchy because as we’ve seen in certain instances feminism can be quite patriarchal. The greatest irony of them all.
The next step is the preservation of the old institutions that have very much good in them still.
And for this the structure of institutions needs to change. Elasticity must be included so that it can at once be institutional and revolutionary because we need institutions and culture. Let no one lie to you that we have evolved beyond them.
Many have reported anxiety and even depression in the worst cases at the loss of institutions, every decision becoming one we have to agonize over and research interminably sometimes at the cost of enjoying life itself. Terms such as the ‘paradox of choice’ never even existed before this shift. Sometimes we don’t need new institutions only to find our place in them. It is much more pragmatic to fix a crack that rebuild a house.
In fact I think this is a huge reason why cults, polyamory, groups and all sorts of makeshift communities are on the rise despite the individualistic milieu we find ourselves against. We still need direction and guidelines even if only to go against them. The child within never truly grows up, neither should they. This inherent inadequacy and aspiration is I think the true anchor of the concept of God. And the main reason why we must re-integrate institutions and revolutions for our own good. We are just like ships who need to remain suspended in our own revolutionary ideals but moored nonetheless to institutional anchors.
The first time I heard of the word agnosticism I was mostly confused and took no note, I was still on the fence as to whether I was an atheist or a selective catholic. The only two options that had framed most of my religious life until then since Catholicism was my root and atheism the only other alternative I knew at the time with a certain shock value I enjoyed.
I hopped from one to the other occasionally which seemed rather obnoxious to everyone who met me. My parents thinking I was just too curious for my own good and my peers wondering why I bothered to be so critical of such a boring, adult topic. It didn’t occur to me to ever stop in any case, the curiosity like a black hole I had to be sucked into, choiceless in the matter.
I was a catholic when I saw the good deeds done by the church, watched nuns and sisters offer themselves to their admirable life of poverty, enjoyed a perfectly toned, and logical sermon or when I realized the uncertainty of life and my precarious position in all of it, needing that extra blanket of divine providence. I was an atheist when I discovered the underlying hypocrisy of the church that itself had committed atrocities in droves, when unassailable reasoning from atheist advocates shattered the bible’s own, when I saw the myriads of injustices inherent within the Christian structure, discriminations against women and non-Christians. For me religion was a revolving door and it was exhausting. All prior to the idea that has somewhat calmed me, agnosticism.
I doubt that I have the perfect definition of it even now that I am a kind of staunch agnostic. All I can say is that the neutrality of it all is what got me. The use of the term ‘ a higher order of being’ instead of a definitive God or Noo God is what I was attracted to, the humility in that statement.
A humility that I had not encountered in my previous posts. In Catholicism in the murmur of goodness, love and humanity there is always an underlying echo of righteousness, being better than others in the only way that matters, morally. I have never been fond of that and it was a relief to finally escape. A different kind of pomposity exists in atheism, directed mostly at religions. The atheist will think himself of superior reasoning since they have arduously combed through religious logic and decided that it is all worthless and not worth following. A subtractive, tasteless kind of pride.
For one, this is not at all true since there are is as much good as there is bad in religion and the monolith principle of atheism, that there is no God. I have always found rather ignorant, only because I was exposed to the argument of order early on as a proof of the existence of God, and though I refuse to declare and describe ‘God’ with such detail as a theist would, I undoubtedly see the truth of it evident in my life every single day.
It is just inconceivable to me that you will see all the intricate landscapes of reality, hidden within them equations of nature whose surface we have only began to scratch at with our ever changing sciences and explanations and not think that there is a superior being at work there, much like ourselves in some ways that left it there for us, precisely so that we can find it and ask these kinds of questions. There is no God almost sounds like a hoax, I prefer the attenuated ‘we cannot truly know that there is a God and vice versa.’
And yet with the submissive view of pride from agnosticism, I have still felt it quite incomplete. I find it one of the more lazy religions if I may say. The agnostic seems to halt the conversation of God in an instant with their indifference and thus be freed from the conundrum only endeavoring now to be ‘good.’ This is the part of the 2.0 which I am talking about.
Agnosticism should not just sit and wait. It should now construct its own religion but not necessarily from scratch, ploughing back to the notable beliefs of theists and atheists, all with a lot of good to add and build a scripture free from the need to describe a God that we cannot but nevertheless not renouncing him just because we cannot. A labour that each one must undertake for themselves with regard to their own context because I do believe though the principles of an agnostic religion for many may converge in similitude, the rituals, the history, the context which are all key pillars to any religion will differ significantly for each and every agnostic. With agnosticism, the size never fits all even though the designs resemble each other.
Many at times I have referred to this as ‘polytheistic agnosticism’ which I now amend to simply mean agnosticism 2.0. An idea I got from a modern day philosopher Alain De Botton who founded Atheism 2.0 whereby the belief that there is no God is not the end of discussion, but the beginning, and instead of in true atheist fashion studying religion with the sole purpose to disprove it. He suggested atheists should study religion to salvage the good reasoning and effective rituals within it they can use in their own atheism. Religion for atheists, he called it, a real paradox some may say and yet it fits perfectly to me because in truth we are solving the same problems theism tried to solve with religion. Therefore it is not enough as an atheist to just disprove the dubitable parts of theism and leave the problems it wanted to solve in the first place unsolved. You might as well gather from it what you feel was not erroneous and use it as a scaffold for your new system.
Agnosticism 2.0 I feel, has the same purpose in a different direction, reconciling the goodness in theism and atheism with the neutrality of agnosticism. Or maybe I am simply just tired of new categories of religion springing up whenever someone disagrees with another. I believe already have all we need to solve the part of this problem of religion that is solvable, through a unique kind of collaboration and reorganization.
The first time I ever encountered the term, assimilation I think was somewhere in a Social Studies textbook when I was in Standard 5 or so. It was something the French colonialists practiced in their African colonies. In fact at the time I thought, huh, what a wonderful opportunity. It made me even regard the French as the more sympathetic of all the Europeans who colonized African nations right?
At least they gave us a chance to be ‘better’ than our primitive barbarian selves right?
The next time I heard of this strange term, assimilation, it was with regards to immigrants in The States wherever they are from be it The Middle East, South America or African and you will notice Africa will be a very recurrent feature in this article. Notice I didn’t say Europe.
This is when I got a taste of just how insidious, this ‘assimilation’ is. Because it requires you to learn a different language under the guise that you’ll be more of an ‘international citizen’ or whatever, adopt another culture’s mannerisms, sometimes even warm you up to another culture’s predominant religion or face one of the worst things a human being can encounter, disrespect.
And for sure there is no real problem in embracing another culture, even I speak really good English and I don’t necessarily hate that. The issue arises only when the embrace of the other culture comes at the expense of your own culture.
And this is the really insidious part of this ‘assimilation’ business. It just follows the theory of ‘the failure of success’ which is that if you spend all your time mastering another’s language, culture, mannerisms and modes of worship what about your own? Assimilating is always in direct competition with embracing your own culture, so who wins? Since we are in fact bound by time and space.
And with the dawn of the global community, it seems sometimes that you don’t even need to immigrate to have to assimilate. From here in Kenya I have assimilated much more than was ever necessary. And for what? Because surely I can appreciate another’s culture without having to completely embrace it in my entire being. Right?
And what assimilation really does is just to emphasize and reinforce imaginary social status quo, things like blacks are less than whites, women are less able than men, stupid social stratification that doesn’t even make any sense because you will notice the indigenous peoples of nations that tend to be richer or more powerful never need to assimilate only the minorities need to. And I’ll ask again, for what?
The really interesting thing about assimilation is that it can happen entirely without your knowledge because the world is rigged for and against some and for us who walk into it blindly after these structures were already in place it can be hard to know when it is actually happening. Things like black women constantly straightening their hair despite the fact that it is by far the farthest thing from their natural kinky locks and that the practice damages their hair too, women battling with men in the work place to do the same kind of jobs in the exact same way as if the two were competitors while in reality the two are more compliments.
Assimilation forces us to chug down the corrupt social structure embedded into the world with a smile on our faces. I mean, does it really get any crueler than that? And alas the plot thickens.
The worst effect by far that I have seen of assimilation has got to be the number of cultures that have fallen prey to it. How many things have we forgotten from our own unique cultures while busily trying to embrace these other dominant cuture? How much diversity of culture has the world been robbed of? And this seems an issue for the descendants of these so called ‘forgotten’ cultures but you would be wrong, this is an attack on everyone because culture is for everyone. This is akin to say if all of Michelangelo Carravagio’s paintings were lost all of a sudden. That is of concern to me too even though I am not the least bit Italian or even European because culture is for everyone.
The good news is though that culture doesn’t make people, people make culture and we can make more culture to replace even that which was lost.
For a long time I was utterly wrong for why I hated porn, why I was so opposed to it. I thought in my prudish innocence I hated it because of course how could anyone in their right sane humane mind be enticed by such vile perpetrations. I was wrong.
I hated it because of precisely the opposite. In fact it is only a considerable few who do not in fact enjoy pornography. By pornography here, I don’t mean all of it but alas there is a part of the poison for everyone, some parts of pornography’s body of work are truly repulsive but some are completely orgasmic depending on who you are and that is where the problem starts. Sometimes you don’t want to be associated with say child pornography and yet you prefer amateur pornography so what does that make you?
Back to the title, what I have learnt from pornography. I have learnt that if you watch it, you will respond and you will hate it but at that point it may very well be beyond you. So the next question is what to do? There are really, I think only three responses but I could be wrong.
One, accept that it is somewhat normal for a human to need to sate their libido every once in a while through this particular mechanism and accept it into your life on a somewhat regular nut not obsessive basis. Two, realize the gross poison that it is but in the same breath realize your incapacity to stop thus begrudgingly proceed onto addiction. Lastly, which is the popular choice amongst the strong-willed and religious, decide that you hate it and try very hard not to ever expose yourself to it again, which can be troublesome given you’re a libidinous human being.
All of these reactions seem incomplete in some ways either there is too much desertion of morality, submission to biology or annoying self-righteousness. This is actually very similar in form to conundrum of cheating/infidelity/adultery but I will get to that later.
The problem with pornography is the sweetness of its despicable state. I mean of course sex and sexuality in any shape or form is of interest to human beings. And yet with pornography there is such a departure from our moral selves, as Alain De Botton aptly says with pornography our sexual and moral selves are in an eternal tug of war. On this he even goes about trying to invent a new kind of pornography, one where we can be moral and wonderful and sexual all at once. It may sound a foreign even ridiculous ideal but it is worth a thought and he delineates quite perfectly in his book, How to think more about sex.
For me rather I tend to disagree and agree with this utopic pornography since for me the issue in pornography is in the very definition of it.
Pornography is such a betrayal of sex, true sex. Not that the positions aren’t wonderful or the actors are exploited liars but because by definition, sex is private and pornography is sex made public. Sex is a secret or at least it should be, not the conversation at large but the actual act with the various humans in question. I realize that the conversation has taken a turn for the doctrinal even though I am a self-confessed agnostic, but do hear me out.
The sweetness of sex is in the secrecy of it, that is why affairs are so thrilling, and in that very secrecy is the act of love or more practically, the act of respect to safeguard that which ‘the other’ has at their own risk shared with you. In fact this view is held steadfastly in some of the colloquialisms like, a gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell… And this is the case in true sex where the participants are actually participating, not regurgitating positions, mannerisms and reactions from sources I’d rather not mention. The vulnerability of sex is what makes it a secret for how can someone let you inside of their most unedited, worrisome and at times unclean (not literally, although that could also be the case) area and that not be a secret?
That is why pornography is such a violation. And the violated is not just the actors, everyone engaged in the process of pornography is violated whatever they may say. From the actors, the production team to you who ogles at it in the wee morning hours when everyone is asleep. Everyone else is violated because in the act which is the case for all evil acts, you recognize yourself in the victims and the perpetrators sometimes you don’t even need to recognize yourself because you are literally a victim or a perpetrator and this is compounded by your reaction because you probably will react. And at that point the betrayal sears.
The worst part of this I found, is that no one is to blame and everyone is to blame. The blame is on the person who invented the first camera and all the others who continued the craft, the first person who decided to film sex, all the authorities so off-puted by anything sexual that in their quest to drive libido underground they drive us straight into the arms of porn, the sexual revolution that unknowingly paved the way for the acceptance of porn, the capitalism that drives people to develop skills to join said industry, those of us who are human enough to click on the sites. I’m sure you get the drift.
It is one of those universal problems, in fact that utopian pornography of the future is starting to sound very plausible a solution now. Anyway as usual I will leave a question. The only question I could think of after the conversation of pornography. The famous, what then must we do?
ofsenseandsensibility 