To My Grandmother E. M. H. (1938-2020)

 Moist with one drop of Thy blood, my dry soul

Shall—though she now be in extreme degree
Too stony hard, and yet too fleshly—be
Freed by that drop, from being starved, hard or foul,
And life by this death abled shall control
Death, whom Thy death slew ; nor shall to me
Fear of first or last death bring misery,
If in thy life-book my name thou enroll.
Flesh in that long sleep is not putrified,
But made that there, of which, and for which it was ;
Nor can by other means be glorified.
May then sin's sleep and death soon from me pass,
That waked from both, I again risen may
Salute the last and everlasting day.

--Resurrection by John Donne

Black Reconstruction on YouTube, Episode 2

Still experimenting with how I plan to post about this series, so I'll try this out for this post.

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@thereadinseries posted chapters 3 & 4 of Black Reconstruction by W. E. B. Du Bois on YouTube being read by @thereal_shafiq , @michaelmichaeltheartist , and @marquisevilson respectively. Chapter 3 dealt with the Planter oligarchy as it looked before the Civil War, while chapter 4 dealt with the American Civil War itself as it relates to Reconstruction since much of the foundations of Reconstruction were created during the war. What I liked about chapter 4 is how Du Bois really demonstrates that black people—even as they were enslaved—had to make their moves pragmatically. Because of the initial Northern policy of not ending slavery, black workers had to wait and persist until a small Northern faction (which Du Bois calls Abolition-Democracy) was able to lobby the United States towards emancipation and the use and arming of black workers against the Confederates. A very good read here. #bookstagram #book #blackreconstruction #webdubois #thereadinseries #shafiqhicks #michaelmcelroy #marquisevilson #blackwriters #blackhistory #americancivilwar #reconstruction #history #americanhistory #diverseclassics #classicliterature #nonfiction #bookcollection #blackmenread #bibliophile #wellreadblackguy

A post shared by Ken's Bookshelf & Movieshelf (@rinehartstation) on Sep 7, 2020 at 6:33am PDT

My Goodreads Review of The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois

This may be my most popular or second most popular review on Goodreads which is astonishing to me since I personally think I have written much better. But given the wide-lack of knowledge people have of Du Bois and the way that popularity does not always equal quality when it comes to popular opinions, I 'm not totally shocked. I am happy I helped interest more folks on this scholar and his work.

The Souls of Black Folk (Everyman's Library by W.E.B. Du Bois
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
As the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
Look not upon me, because I am black,
Because the sun hath looked upon me:
My mother's children were angry with me;
They made me the keeper of the vineyards;
But mine own vineyard have I not kept." - Song of Solomon 1:5-6 KJV

Bright Sparkles in the Churchyard

These are the lyrical and musical epigraphs preceding chapter seven.


"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." This is going to be a hard book to review well. That is because of how well rounded and layered this book is at examining African-American life. There is much in this book that has made it so special. This book is to modern sociology what The Interpretation of Dreams was for psychology. In this book W.E.B. Du Bois offered one of the most complete studies of African-American life, history, politics, and culture. No book has really been able to over-shadow its relevance and its timelessness. It was written by the first Black man to earn a Harvard University doctorate degree. The book was published in 1903, a generation removed from slavery in the United States, yet it is still relevant to my life (four generations removed from slavery) and the present day. 112 years has not seen a lot of time pass!

This book has been the foundation text that civil rights and Black advancement in America was built on. This book influenced so many people whose careers come out of it. From the Harlem Renaissance to the thesis of my favorite novel (Invisible Man) to The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness all find roots in this book. Du Bois would, in the long years after 1903, change is stance on certain ideas presented in this book, most famously concerning his theory on The Talented Tenth, but he never had anything beyond spelling or proofreading corrections done in subsequent editions of this book since he wanted it to stand as a snapshot of how he saw the world in 1903.

Trying to list the ideas and multiple purposes this book is putting forward is maddening. It puts forward in idea that a special 10% of African-Americans would become this alpha-class that would lead the rest of the race (he abandoned that as his interest in socialism grew). The book also list the theory of Black people having "double-consciousness" which he defines as the "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." He goes onto say that the history of Black Folks is the tension between this duality of identity and I do not see any good counter-argument to this from my personal experience.

"Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half- hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience, -- peculiar even for one who has never been anything else..."

The above quote is from the first two paragraphs of the book. This excerpt is something that Black Americans consciously or unconsciously have to always confront. Of course this book, being part self-study, uses Du Bois own life in order to examine the Black experience.

This book is also a very thorough polemic against Booker T. Washington. Du Bois sees Washington and his influence as one of the worst calamities to hit the African-American nation. Booker T. Washington believed that Black people should not seek social equality or political independence, but should strive for economic equality only and be guided on political matters under strict, White supervision; Black education should not include the liberal arts, but be limited to vocational trades. All of this infuriated Du Bois and led to an intense rivalry between the two that only ended with Washington's death in 1915. A whole chapter of this book is devoted solely to refuting Washington and his accommodationist beliefs.

The sad state of political status and employment of Black Folk are also covered in this book and it is depressing to see how much things have not changed. Given the recent spat of police shootings it makes reading the following quote even more painful:

"...the police system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves...For such dealing with criminals, white or black, the South had no machinery, no adequate jails or reformatories; its police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police. Thus grew up a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination. For, as I have said, the police system of the South was originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and the whole South was convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of re-enslaving the blacks. It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color, that settled a man's conviction on almost any charge. Thus Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of injustice and oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims. - from chapter 9.

This has been confirmed, by now, as not just a Southern problem, but as a nation-wide issue now. Another issue is the lack of balanced employment. Du Bois was convinced that if greedy land-owners did not perpetually swindle Black people out of ownership, there would not be such a large movement of people from rural areas to the urban areas. He was, in-fact, witnessing the origins of The Great Migration.

One of the more interesting things covered in this book are Negro Spirituals. Each chapter of this book contains two epigraphs (as demonstrated at the beginning of this review). One is a random quote vaguely related to the chapter, but the second quote is a musical notation of a passage from a spiritual. The last chapter of this book is dedicated to talking about the deep cultural and artistic importance of the spirituals (called Sorrow Songs by Du Bois) and he talks about their origins and of the musical group most noted for interpreting them: The Fisk Jubilee Singers. Each chapter quotation is also listed in this part of the book, but if you can read music you will guess the universally recognized ones like Swing Low or Steal Away.

While I would like to keep thoroughly dissecting this book, I will probably just keep shaping the review as I think of new things to examine in it, in the future I may keep adding on, but I find that it is especially difficult for me to analyze this book that is so old, but so relevant and personal. I will give Dr. Du Bois the last word then:


"Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed

THE END"

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Black Reconstruction on YouTube, Episode 1

This channel called The Read-In Series has decided to do a read-along of W. E. B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America on YouTube. To call such a project ambitious is an understatement, but since it is happening I have decided to follow it along with them and re-visit this massive work (I rarely reread any books these day--certainly not books of this length). I am a big fan of this book. The first episode was read by Phylicia Rashad for chapter 1 & Yvette Nicole Brown for chapter 2. Rashad did a masterful job as expected, but poor Ms. Brown was so nervous and rushing through the chapter that I had to put the playback speed on 0.75x to follow along with her. In any case, I like being able to revisit the work and I will give some thoughts on chapters here as I am able to follow-along.

Chapters 1 & 2 serve to set the scene of what is to come and what this book is partially about. That Du Bois begins this book before Reconstruction is a formality, but serves as his way to offer the fullest rebuking of the Dunning School that he was able to do. These two chapters--The Black Worker & The White Worker, respectively--also introduces us to the framework that Du Bois is analyzing this history. He is not using any sort of mythological sentimentality here, but he is relying on straight historical materialism to analyze this. I call this book Marxist-adjacent rather than simply Marxist, because as Du Bois shows in the chapter on white workers, the white labor movement in the USA never seriously contemplated working with black workers or fighting for the abolition of slavery--even when such abolition would be favorable to conditions of the white laborers themselves. White workers, regardless of class or geographic location, felt that they could either own slaves themselves or go west and keep black labor out of that territory. As we'll find out, even attempts by Karl Marx and the First International to get white workers to unionize with black workers after the Civil War fail and lead to whites-only anti-socialist groups like the AFL coming to power. Chapter 2 pretty-much tells you why Bernie Sanders can't win the Black Belt today: black people know that white Socialists have never truly had their backs when all was said and done.  Black labor was trying at all manner to resist there fate, but it was hopeless in the South. Only as emigration of black people to the North started to stir the conscience of a small group of white people called Abolitionist, than some started to really consider the impossible idea of the ending of Slavery. I think the recasting this as a labor struggle that has race as the fundamental agent (i.e. the hardened belief by a majority of whites of an inherent inhumanity of black people) really expands the scope of this period and enables a vaster and much more profound story to be told. It restores the agency of black people in this story about black people and makes the actions taken by the different actors in this book more honest to the truth. Anyone who reads this will discover quite soon why W. E. B. Du Bois is America's greatest scholar: his merging of scholarship and poetics into prefect harmony is something to behold. Returning to this book after the 2020 American Athletic Strikes and their aftermath, the lessons of this book are critically present.

Thoughts On Last Week (August 23-29, 2020)

 Last week on August 23rd, a man was shot 7 times in the back by police officers in front of his kids. Thus begun a most interesting week. It was one that saw the largest strike by black (and somewhat more un-willingly their white "allies") in American history and it lead to actual policy concessions by their pay-masters. The collective rolling-strike action by the NBA/WNBA, USTA, MLB, and eventually the NHL. Though this was a mostly symbolic gesture, it did have the very real consequence of forcing the concession of NBA owners opening their sports arenas to polling on Election Day, partially-thwarting the voter suppression of the reactionaries. Nothing of like this has ever been achieved. That a group of black millionaires could make their mostly-Republican bosses go against their interest in the name of labor-peace and the maintaining of the still relatively-recently agreed CBA is astonishing. The idea that a black Japanese female tennis player could bring one of the larger-level tennis tournaments to a complete halt is astonishing. We've reached a new phase in this civil rights struggle.

And yet we end this week with the death of the Black Panther/Jackie Robinson himself Chadwick Boseman. That he had spent the last 4 years dying of colon cancer before our eyes is shocking--another incalculable loss.

Chadwick Boseman (1977-2020) Memorial Reading Recommendations

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Here's a proper book recommendation post to honor Chadwick Boseman. These are books I have based off of characters he played. From left to right, top to bottom: Black Panther Epic Collection: Panther's Rage (the @blackpanther movie was based off this story); I Never Had It Made: The Autobiography of Jackie Robinson; The James Brown Reader: 50 Years of Writing about the Godfather of Soul; Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (The first chapter of this book is about the fight to racially desegregate American schools and Thurgood Marshall's key-role in it). #bookstagram #books #bookworm #bookish #blackpanther #panthersrage #jackierobinson #42 #jamesbrown #getonup #eyesontheprize #thurgoodmarshall #readsoullit #diverseclassics #librosgram #librosrecomendados #libros #literaturanegra #bookcollection #blackmenread #blerd #bibliophile #chadwickboseman #wellreadblackguy #wakandaforever

A post shared by Ken's Bookshelf & Movieshelf (@rinehartstation) on Aug 29, 2020 at 9:54am PDT

My Goodreads Review of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

I read this book back at the tail-end of BLM I and it was the beginning of a deep examination of history for me which is still ongoing. I don't think this review does justice to how good this book actually is, but I hope folks don't mind that. This was me before I had perfected my reviewing skills to their current state.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"It has been said that the Civil War was 'unnecessary' because slavery was already destined to end, probably within a few decades after the 1860 election. Yet this is mere dogma. The evidence points in the opposite directions. Slavery yielded ever more efficient production, in contrast to the free labor that tried (and failed) to compete with it, and the free labor that succeeded it. If slave labor in cotton had ever hit a wall of ultimate possibility, enslavers could have found new commodities. Southern enslavers had adapted slavery before, with incredibly profitable results. Forced labor that is slavery in everything but name remained tremendously important to the world economy well into the twenty-first century. And the lessons that enslavers learned about turning the left hand to the service of the right, forcing ordinary people to reveal their secrets so that those secrets could be commodified, played out in unsteady echoes that we have called by many names (scientific management, the stretch-out, management studies) and heard in many places. Though these were not slavery, they are one more way in which the human world still suffers without knowing it from the crimes done to Rachel and William and Charles Ball and Lucy Thurston; mourns for them unknowing, even as we live on the gains that were stolen from them."

This is the United Nations International Decade of People of African Descent . Here is a preface document that is relevant to this review: http://ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/...

Starting from the heart and ending with a full corpse, this book is a revolutionary, but very familiar (depending on what you already knew) look at how the United States went from laughably broke at the end of the American Revolution to being the 19th century version of Saudi Arabia in terms of world-supplying resource. Ed Baptist quotes from Ralph Ellison's Shadow and Act that American history was a drama played on the body of a "Negro giant." He takes this as the theme of the book and looks at how the discovery of how easily cotton could be grown provided the key jewel in the crown of the Industrial Revolution. Baptist looks at enslavers ever growing quest for both making the enslaved pick more cotton and obtaining more land for them to be transported to. He also looks at attempts by the enslaved to resist (until that fails) and simply survive, by any small measure, the process.

Baptist's labor in this book is stunning. He lays any type of pleasantry or "respectability" language aside and gives you the very cold, harsh, brutal truth of what happened between the 1780s and 1860. This book gives an amazing amount of respect and dignity to the people who were, in their words, always being "stolen" and destroyed by enslavers. This book's authenticity moved me in a profound way and really made me feel what people like Lorenzo Ivy, Charles Ball (who is a key character in this book), Rachel, Ben, Amar and other enslaved people whose stories are examined in this book. The examination of the impact that forced migration south and west had on Africans turning into African-Americans in the process (as well as their culture and religion that survives to this day in modern African-American, and really Western, culture). The use of both the primary sources of the oppressed and oppressors was very powerful.

The economics thread of this book (this is an "economic history") really enlightened me. Though I think most African-Americans would have guessed that American slavery built American capitalism, I was surprised at how much it also contributed to Europe's Industrial Revolution, in particular Great Britain. Essentially, blood-soaked cotton was turning Great Britain into the world power that would never see nighttime. As much as the UK loves to mouth-off about banning the slave trade and slavery itself before the rest of the Western world, it was British entrepreneurs, stock brokers, and government officials invested in cotton before the Panic of 1837 and enslaved people directly afterwards, so much for that. The fact that Monaco was still trying to get the state of Mississippi to pay its debts in the 1930s was amazing.

I hope this book gets taught not just as a history book, but as an economics book. This book lays bare the fact that slavery's economic mission...was a rousing success. The numbers do not lie: setting a minimum number that a person had to meet and beating them severely when they did not reach that number while raising that number every time it was met-for 80 years-can turn you from a third world country to a first world country in under a century if you do it on a industrial scale (and never pay the people you beat and also raping them, lots of rape). This is one of those sad, cynical facts about the nature of the world (just look at any 20th century genocide, it usually does what it sets out to do). The after-effects of 250 years of degradation and depravity go un-punished and in-fact, as recent years have shown, can be used to effectively disposes the decedents of enslaved people in the United States (I remind you that Mike Brown of Ferguson is buried just across town from Dred Scott). Please read this book! It is one of the best history/economic texts I have read in some time.

"The militia stood Amar up in the yard at the Widow Charbonnet's place. Herded into an audience, the men, women, and children who knew him had to watch. The white men took aim and made Amar's body dance with a volley of lead. In his head, as he slumped and fell, were 50 billion neurons. They held the secrets of turning sugarcane sap into white crystals, they held the memories that made him smile at just such a joke, they held the cunning with which he sought out his lover's desires, they held the names of all the people who stood circled in silence. His cheek pressed on earth that his own feet had helped to pack, his mouth slackly coursing out blood, as gunpowder smoke gathered in a cloud and blew east. A white officer's sideways boots strode toward him. The dancing electrons in Amar's brain caressed forty-five years of words, pictures, feelings, the village imam with his old book, his mother calling him from the door of a mud-brick house. The memory of a slave ship or maybe more than one, the rumor of Saint-Domingue -- all this was there, was him -- but his cells were cascading into sudden death. One last involuntary wheeze as a soldier raised an axe sharpened by recent practice and severed Amar's head from his body"

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