black, white, and trash on both sides. I remember poverty, so I write about it. Read in NYT, The Atlantic, Current Affairs, or3P Email: BertrandCooper
@gmail
.com
@curaffairs
gave me the opportunity to write about class disparity within black popular culture; rarely does a black person from poverty get to write about it (I pitched everyone). Thank you
@lyta_gold
for helping a 3 year grind finally bear some fruit.
I'm not dying to hear James Franco do a cuban accent, but the line Leguizamo draws is interesting. If you're calling for accuracy, why call for a latin actor when you could call for a cuban one specifically? Unless you're of the opinion that latin cultures are interchangeable.
If all the white poor formed a state, it would be the 3rd most populous in the U.S. White poverty persists despite white prominence in popular culture, which is why I don't get excited to see black faces on Hulu.๐คท๐พโโ๏ธ Pop cultural dominance taken to its limit doesn't end poverty.
"non-white ways of knowing" often seems to carry the implication that non-whiteness is intrinsically progressive, as if modeled off of 21st century values. It reminds me of when white family members of mine found yoga and then fetishized India/Hinduism into a personal fairytale.
I have serious criticisms of Coates' work, but he shouldn't be lumped in with the great not debaters (Kendi, NHJ, etc). When he was active, he met with John McWhorter, he did panels with contrary thinkers, and engaged in written responses with critics.
Are there any good essays on black men and their historical relationship with east Asian culture? Just to give the vibe: my first Kung Fu teacher was a black war vet, all my uncles loved kung Fu movies, several loved anime, and hip-hop is rife with examples like WuTang.
"Ways of knowing" is an obscuring phrase. For one, the "ways" have actual names: trial & error, induction, deduction, abduction, intuiton, divine inspiration (if you're spiritual), etc. "Ways of knowing" circulates primarily because it allows ahistorical racial claims.
@RealDianeYap
Do you hold as a principle that access to education supercedes the maintenance of any aspect of cultural heritage?
For example, if the school requires a Sikh to remove a turban or a Rastafarian to cut their dreads, is that not to be resisted?
Or are there caveats?
๐งตHaving been raised among the poor and the lower working classes, one of the things that will never make intuitive sense to me in the knowledge work professions is the assertion that work should be "inspiring and motivational."
It was dumb of the white poor to accept "representation"-- physical resemblance to white elites--as a consolation prize for poverty. And it would be similarly dumb for the black poor to get giddy just because they are increasingly offered the same kind of deal.
One moral of 140 hours of
@hubermanlab
: entirely avoiding low level stress (exercise, cold, heat, etc) progressively narrows the range in which you can experience positive feelings and makes your ability to stay in that range more and more susceptible to external disruption.
"Writers from poverty" is not currently a category in bookstores or even on Wikipedia. Regardless of political affiliation, it was the class awareness of writers raised in poverty or just outside of it that made me feel like the critique I was developing had some merit.
It feels like every time a Progressive podcast invites a guest with a defensible but heterodox opinion, I hear some version of "I agree with a lot of this, but isn't there a danger or a risk that people will misconstrue your words in a way that actually hurts the cause?"
@DrIbram
Kendi's point rests, implicitly, on the assertion that if you say poor black culture does not prepare children for school, it is equivalent to saying black people are inferior and morally wrong for not preparing their children. Why these are equivalent, he doesn't say...๐คท๐พโโ๏ธ
75% of poor black children never make it to the solidly middle class: households earning $53K - $86k.
91% never get over $87k.
Google salaries at big publications or showrunner pay at HBO. Most people who talk about the black poor are doing anthropology, not memoir.
๐งตSeeing white zoom is like watching a whole gaggle of people ask out loud "can race essentialism be used for good?"
I hoped people could understand that minorities are permitted to dabble in the opiate of racial pride as a kind of shitty consolation for their marginalization.
They didn't have Indian friends or visit India or read Indian newspapers. They didn't know how Indians translated Hinduism into policy (nor do I). But they carried this uncomplicated fantasy around as comforting proof that there were a billion people who agreed with them.
There is no poor people's wing of identity politics, not at the scale that other identies posess. A day of reading mainstream journalism will alert you to a wing for race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, middle and working class, but there's no contingent of the poor.
"despite repeated assertions that the 'racial' wealth gap is the most pressing concern for the race, nearly eighty percent of that wealth gap is concentrated among the richest ten percent of blacks and whites... half of blacks and whites have no wealth." - Adolph Reed Jr. (2022)
The "even 30 year olds don't have their shit together" genre would hit harder if they didn't always focus on writers, artists, journalists, entrepraneurs or other famously unstable professions. Do the show with two actuaries, a science teacher, and a dental hygienist.
๐งตI'm in The Atlantic today dissecting Affirmative action at Harvard, who it benefitted, and who it didn't.
"No policy that hesitates to say class prioritizes the impoverished, and the people we do nothing for should at least enjoy public acknowledgment of their abandonment."
"If we want to erect something that benefits all Black Americans, we cannot expect that to happen without policies that treat class as meaningful,"
@_BlackTrash
writes:
๐งตMy most read work deals with how lower income folks have been left out of pop culture jobs.
But, as a rule of thumb, in any job pool where a college degree is thought of as normal and pay is low, precarious, or short lived, the pattern repeats.
The Carmichael show averaged 3-4+ million viewers. Despite having an audience 5-10x larger than Insecure or Atlanta, it was cancelled. Unlike Glover or Rae, Carmichael grew up poor and never went to college. Being named pop culture's black genius means nothing and everything.
๐งตReading the articles on Trump's comments about Kamala, it's clear that a lot of writers (for better, or worse) are not online enough to notice that many of the political class of black Gen Z have transitioned from a one drop rule concept of black, to a colorism informed by--
If you said "deduction is white" or "intuition is black" or "divine inspiration is indian" that would be more obviously stupid. Every mode of inquiry has a history on every continent. But if you say "black ways of knowing," you can get a way with a silly assertion.
1.2% can be described as "20 percent more" than 1%.
2% can be written as double, two times, 2x, and 100% more than 1%.
The difference betwen 1% and 2% isn't compelling to most people, so writers use technically accurate synonyms instead to inflate your response.
I wish folks would accuse me of policing/gatekeeping poverty rather than policing/gatekeeping blackness. I'm 100% doing the former. The latter applies only if you think experiences statistically concentrated on the poor are the definition of black identity.
Not saying he took every fight. Given how reserved he is, I'm surprised he took on the amount of confrontation he did. Credit where it's due. It was a better time for debate.
Anyone interested in discussing/expanding/challenging the ideas in the
@curaffairs
piece, I'm about it.โ Writing is a solitary activity; I'm ready to experience some live dialogue with folks. So if you have a podcast or any similar platform, send that DM--they open๐ค
๐งตbut the work is not inspiring. It's also not expected to be. It's simply necessary. People need car maintenance, and you like it "enough."
A considerable amount of your lunch break is spent joking about how once you retire or win the lottery, you'll never do this shit again.
๐งตWhen I was a kid, biracial folks were cautioned and cajoled at every turn to align with blackness. Today, a fair number of online commentators would say that lighter skinned folks are not really black.
Usually, we don't tightly police identities unless they become a resource.
This isn't meant as ridicule.
It is seriously worth contemplating a state of affairs that allows a scholar to win a MacArthur fellowship and gain an entire center on the basis of a theory that openly carries a logical error taught to (and understood by) freshmen.
@SwipeWright
Kendi updated his Kindle edition to "explain" the error of his circular definition. But then he talks in more circles about the difference between "racism" vs "racist" in an utterly incoherent word salad depending on the difference between "and ideas" vs "or ideas." It's utterly
๐งต"The idea that youth culture is culture created by youth is a myth. Youth culture is manufactured by people who are no longer young. When you are actually a young person, you can only consume whatโs out there. It often becomes 'your culture,' but not because you made it."
๐งตIt's not easy to encapsulate, but if you were in a breakroom at the autoshop, and you talked about how inspiring it is to change tires or oil, that would be bizarre.
Motivation there is typically dependent on pay, working conditions, and whether you like your coworkers.
๐งตif you've done both kinds of work--knowledge work and blue/pink collar or trades--the assertion that you should find the work "inspirational" feels like an imposition on the mind, like youre being pressed into a kind of cult.
Seemingly, folks are eliding nuance out of fear that if people are given any avenue to be anti-progressive, they'll take it. Since there is no way to allow nuance without opening the possibility that folks will come to different conclusions, gamesmanship says prune the discourse.
Everyone born to a woman in poverty has heard someone say "you shouldn't have had them, if you can't afford them." It's how they say that she (and you) deserve to be poor. It's said to your mom and your friends' moms. People read me now and say it. I hear it when I read the news.
Imma keep saying this shit until the reaction to wealthy black folks speaking for all black people is met with the same skepticism as when a wealthy white woman speaks on behalf of all women, white or otherwise (e.g. the response to Lena Dunham from mid 2010's on).
people are intrigued by Megan thee Stallion's love of anime. Or all the DBZ love among black folks. I think that's part of a trend of black folks identifying with aspects of east Asian culture.
I would argue that white Americans assume that antiracism means anti-white because:
a. Antiracists do not mention races besides whites as impediments to progress.
b. The word "white" is literally conjoined with negatively connotated words in that literature(fragility,supremacy)
"Americans are familiar with white-supremacist movements like the Klan, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and the Proud Boys. But they donโt seem to recognize white-supremacist ideologyโthe most venomous form of racist ideology,"
@DrIbram
writes:
It is normal for liberal book stores to tie demographics to bookcases (e.g. LGBT/POC authors), yet a space reserved for authors from poverty remains elusive IRL.
@nytopinion
Fortunes has felt like the poor folks' shelf, and I'm glad to be on it.
When I point out that the black academics themselves do not come from the trap, I get either pearl clutching or some version of "yeah but their cousin's cousin was from the hood, and they visited on weekends in the summer." Lived experience either matters or it doesn't.
โBad and Boujee: Toward a Trap Feminist Theologyโ will be pulled from circulation, its publisher said, in response to criticism that the book, which centers on Black womenโs experience and was written by a white professor, was flawed in its execution.
๐งตYou're inspired/motivated to not break your word or be deadweight. But that's an extension of your social identity, and not a byproduct of the work.
That is, whether you're changing tires, shingles, windows, or helping a friend move--you don't want to be deadweight.
In 2019, I emailed
@TheAtlantic
to correct a statistic they had published. At the time, the little asterisk they added to the bottom of the article seemed as close to publication as I was going to get. Four years later, seeing my new piece on the sidebar feels pretty cool.
๐งตI saw discussion of couples/families sharing locations. As a nonjudgmental aside:
If you are someone concerned about anxiety, any habit that allows you to repeatedly check a device to soothe an emotional impulse (e.g. "is everything okay") fits a pattern that increases anxiety
๐งตThese two pieces by Nikole Hannah-Jones, one from Sunday, are only two years apart. They convey similar information about her identity, but give sharply contrasting emphasis that might even seem oppositional.
This is what it looks like to, subtly, curate history for politics.
๐งตIt's the sort of shit given to poor white trash. They get to look like leadership, even though they'll never be leadership. Psychological wages. Similarly, you get to have pride parades and awareness months because you're too marginalized for your ancestral pride to be a threat
Hatred and indifference can have identical social outcomes, but it's more alluring to believe one is suffering from societal hatred. At least then you're central to the social story; your suffering is someone else's purpose; you occupy space in your enemy's mind.
If you're anti-suffering, a white child in poverty is as troubling as a black child; race doesn't alter starvation or when hypothermia will set upon a body left to the cold. But, if you say that, all the white people might prioritize their own suffering. At least, that's the fear
@KirkWrites79
"Code switching" is also tied with privilege. You need to be exposed to standard english early to switch well. Black children in concentrated poverty rarely learn to switch and experience school/job prejudice for using AAVE. But Awkwafina lands jobs for her version of it.
Northern State Penitentiary, Newark. Visiting dad with some of his other kids in 2002. The bummy donation ensemble was almost all the clothes I owned--I definitely wore those jeans every day for a straight year. Getting published in
@curaffairs
makes it feel very long ago.
Being black and Jewish, I was always aware of the antisemitic streak that had merged with some (not all) lay interpretations of afrocentrism, black power, and islam. Ye, I think, shows some of that. But I don't think you can interpret him without some reference to mental health.
Nothing says, "I'm American" like saying that worship of the written word is white supremacy.
The degree of ignorance you'd have to have about, say, north africa, ME, East and South Asia--only true American patriots are that unaware of what cultures around the world have done.
Historically, drugs, gambling, and prostitution find markets without marketing, without propaganda, or culture. They maintain a market even when culture aligns its forces against them. I take that into account whenever I hear a broad media/culture -centric explanation of behavior
@Tyler_A_Harper
Feels like the beginning of an 80s action movie. Just need an old warden to give a tour to a young reporter and then say "Don't worry. Everything is controlled by an impenetrable, AI system. This is the safest place in New York City."
โYou got 1 percent of the population in America who owns 41 percent of the wealthโฆwithin the black community, the top 1 percent of black folk have over 70 percent of the wealth." Cornel West (2019)
๐งตAside: a lot of poor and LWC folks only ever experience this way of looking at things when working at corporate restaurants or stores (like Target). You assume those companies can try to impress that mindset on you because you're broke--not realizing they do it to everyone.
๐งตafropessism. What that looks like is the idea that the world's cutures are inherently antiblack, and how much antiblack prejudice you receive is primarily dependent on how black you appear to non-black people. This leads to many mixed & lighter skinned black folks being named
๐งตIn commentary on black/white biracial folks, explanations of social advance tend to focus on physical appearance.
What is less commented on and hard to disaggregate & quantify is cultural knowledge. White folks have social norms and biracials gain early knowledge of them.
Writing about "black consciousness" or "black experience" without acknowledging the role and the variety of black American cultures and the piecemeal fashion in which culture is practiced by individuals makes for some insipid commentary on biracial life and interracial dating.
From Jordan Peele to Donald Glover to Kendi to black suburbanites, every black American spared the experience of hood poverty must decide how to safeguard their authenticity against the gaze of those "whiter" and those "blacker." Popular culture cannot be understood without this.
"It is here that we come to the substance of whiteness, to reckon with it as both reality and illusion."
This seems to be one of my most misunderstood pieces, but folks who read it through seem to take something from it. I did put my heart into it.
๐งต
@Tyler_A_Harper
has been my portal into the discourse on "White Rural Rage"; it has indeed been heartening,
The conversation made me revisit
@DissentMag
(Fall 2019).
@onesarahjones
piece reminds just how badly scapegoated rural America was after Trump.
Iโm enjoying watching this book get torched but the brutal reception is also heartening: Iโve hardly seen anyone on the leftโfrom moderates to progressives to Marxistsโpraise this vile BS. Most normal liberals and lefties donโt seem to like it when you dunk on the poor so openly.
@curaffairs
@lyta_gold
Anyone interested in discussing/expanding/challenging the ideas in the
@curaffairs
piece, I'm about it.โ Writing is a solitary activity; I'm ready to experience some live dialogue with folks. So if you have a podcast or any similar platform, send that DM--they open๐ค
๐งตas "white adjacent" or having "proximity to whiteness."
I bring this up because many of the writers are addressing an audience that they presume do not split hairs in this way--that an inclusive, pan africanist, thought is still the norm. It was, but it is very much in flux.
I would have been at odds with the status quo in any country. None that I'm aware of have eliminated the things that trouble me. Criticisms of my own country come with that awareness. Nothing here is good enough to stop striving, but I wouldn't be happier elsewhere.
Like Harvard, networks can achieve 13% black without providing inroads to Americans who grew up poor. As I said in
@curaffairs
, though such initiatives are positioned as "recompense" for all the George Floyds, the latter still have no means of entering a classist popular culture
@OlufemiOTaiwo
If literal slavery and then jim crow didn't foment sufficient racial hatred to launch a black led genocide, I'm doubtful of MSNBC's odds.๐คท๐ฝโโ๏ธ
It's interesting to me that we've evolved for a life of mild to moderate inconvenience, but our adaptations whither without use, and we lose the ability to feel happy or motivated in the midst of mild stress.
๐งตThough not the main focus of the piece, I'm very happy that I was able to acknolwedge class among Asian Americans and also apprecaite the speed at which representation of class disparities between Asian Americans has permeated popular culture with shows like Beef.
"If we want to erect something that benefits all Black Americans, we cannot expect that to happen without policies that treat class as meaningful,"
@_BlackTrash
writes:
@timeforjaya
@curaffairs
@lyta_gold
It made the path longer for sure! But it allowed me to "live the thesis" of this piece (i.e. barriers to popular culture if you're black, poor, and not an ivy grad) and it led me to CA and the fantastic editor that is
@lyta_gold
! I'm grateful for all of it!
An important
@nytimes
piece that reaffirms the field's growing understanding of the ways in which poverty, food insecurity, mental health, & eating behaviors intersect, featuring work published in
#IJED
by
@DNeumark
& colleagues. Thank you to
@_BlackTrash
for sharing your story.
๐งตMany of us like to live "as if" a combination of imagination and empathy will allow us to recognize the issues of other people.
For sure, those characteristics allow us to take in information with compassion, but they do not create knowledge of experiences you've never had.
Pointing out that something was designed by racists or designed to produce/maintain/justify racist outcomes is--to me--not sufficient evidence that "something" remains racist. The historical note should be, at most, an intro to an argument built on current observations.
Given the recorded history of skepticism, empiricism, scholasticism, and mathematics in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, I don't know why its permissable to treat reverence for "intellectual debate and rigor" as uniquely white.