Touré: Spiritual Liberation Comes Through Worshiping Skin Color
Introduction: Post-Modern Blackness in Theory and Practice.
Part 1: Why Black Jesus Wears a Hoodie Today
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The song running over the credits of 1999′s sci-fi epic The Matrix from Rage Against the Machine, “Wake Up.”
I love the Matrix for giving us Black people being brilliant & in leadership positions. The Oracle, Morpheus…
— Touré (@Toure) May 17, 2011
In Afrolantica Legacies Derrick Bell utilized many occult themes — from racializing the legend of Atlantis, to extraterrestrial encounters with the sexy alien goddess Chiara, to a continued reliance on conspiracy theories, the man who blurbed books by both Louis Farrakhan and Barack Obama knew his esoterica.
And in Bell’s follow-up we understand why. After a small radical publisher released Afrolantica Legacies in 1998 a more mainstream, respectable house — Bloomsbury — blessed the world with his next book in 2002, Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth. The chapter on spirituality includes the passage in the above illustration.
Bell rejected the principles of ethical monotheism that make up the foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition and its political expression in classical liberalism. Instead of understanding human nature as flawed and man as separated from God he embraced the Gnostic conception: “To know self at the deepest level, they believed, is to know God.”
The practical result of this is self-worship, a form of idolatry and the practice the second of the 10 Commandments confronted.
This focus on the self manifests in both Bell’s arguments and his rhetorical style. Count the number of times the word “I” appears on any random page in one of Bell’s books. Note his frequent references to himself. Then do the same exercise with Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness. Here’s the top paragraph from page 168, where Touré drops 12 I’s:
Touré opens his second chapter by claiming that his vision of “Post-Blackness” will bring “spiritual liberation.”
What are his primary liberation concerns in the chapter he titles “Keep It Real is a Prison”? Liberating the black children trapped in inner city schools mismanaged by Democrats and teacher union bureaucrats? Liberating the law-abiding, black families struggling to keep out of the crossfire amidst the the astronomical rate of black-on-black violence? What about liberating the untold numbers of African blacks oppressed by dictators and Islamists? How about all the black women around the world today living as victims of female genital mutilation? What about the black women victimized by gang rape in the Congo?
No, with his focus on the self Touré wants black people to know they have permission to skydive, eat sushi, marry non-blacks, and engage in any other act that might generate the “acting white” or “oreo” slurs. Apparently in Touré’s view American blacks feeling good about themselves takes priority over non-American blacks living.
Is this what happens to someone who’s swallowed the red pill in real life? Is this what happens to those who think spiritual liberation comes through intense focus on the self?
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P.S. Some of the lyrics from “Wake Up” attempt to deflect the role of the Nation of Islam in the assassination of Malcolm X and assert a conspiracy:
Ya better beware
Of retribution with mind war
20/20 visions and murals with metaphors
Networks at work, keepin’ people calm
Ya know they murdered X
And tried to blame it on Islam
He turned the power to the have-nots
And then came the shot
Was Malcolm your traitor or ours? And if we dealt with [Malcolm] like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours?-A nation has to be able to deal with traitors and cutthroats and turncoats.
Update: See the third Commandment of Post-Modern Blackness here.
Is the narcissism rampant in society the result of all the esteem building done in schools over the last forty years? If it is, can we stop doing that, now?
All you Libbies out there who voted for Obama because he was black, raise your hands! Congratulations, you too are a racist.
When it comes to the endemic racism of the black celebrity community, you don’t have to do much to assemble a team of bigots – mostly just dip the net.
Rage Against the Machine to me is a perfect analogue of a white-supremacist band, except they hate themselves and me. Arguably they are the most politically correct band in America. Faux-rage would be a much more applicable term.
Forward by one of America’s premiere racists, Michael Eric Dyson – check.
I love Toure’s comment about black folks “being brilliant and in leadership positions” without a hint of self-awareness or irony that it takes a crazy science-fiction movie to depict that in those kinds of numbers – unless you feel affirmative action will inhabit even giant caverns in the future and blacks will be elected mostly because they’re black as Obama almost undeniably was.
As someone who’s read massive amounts of SF, I can tell you The Matrix stretches even SF when it comes to overreaching in that regard. Without any kind of actual reality that suggests such a thing or which one can extrapolate from, it amounts, artistically, to lying, and financially, to simply casting to make more money off black folks, knowing white folks won’t really care one way or the other, despite what Toure’ and his sad minions say.
If 80% of the NBA is black and you extrapolate that out plus the sudden disinterest in “diversity” there and add that fewer than 2% of fighter pilots are black, you can extrapolate that out into the future rather than making leaps of logic supported by wishful thinking that can’t even be considered speculative otherwise.
I find this observation deeply racist. I would have never thought anything like that in a million years. Silly me, I just saw the Oracle and Morpheus as two characters played by two actors who were doing their job pretty well. Silly me.
This is beyond childish.
And I observe that these “intellectuals” never teach to “their people” to overcome social difficulties by becoming, I don’t know, world class mathematicians, nuclear physicists, whatever…
Or experts in Coptic language, able to translate in an original way the Nag Hammadi Manuscripts. (For the “Gnostic” thing, you know…)
I’ve been saying for years that we need more black MDs, engineers, accountants, and business owners. A degree in Black Studies does nothing to prepare one to be a productive member of society, except perpetuate the racial grievance industry.
Basically, Booker T. Washington was right, and NAACP founder/Communist sympathizer/lover of post-colonial African dictators W.E.B. DuBois was wrong.
The black racists are immersed in fantasyland; a childish conjuring where they are smart and wear stylish clothes and live atop complex civilizations and make thoughtful poses. But back in mundane terra firma, they attain little, contribute next to nothing in all of the hard sciences, mathematics, and engineering, and mostly go in for sports and entertainment–and conspiracy theory. There is a huge portion of black Americans living in a world of magical thinking about themselves, their position, and their realistic opportunities going forward; why do the grueling heavy lifting of applied mathematics when we can just imagine that we did the heavy lifting of applied mathematics? Why get a useful and honorable degree in engineering when a phony one in Black Studies will do just fine?
The problem going forward is not whitey, the problem going forward, my sleepers, is that no one in the rest of the world, a world of tough, resourceful people who have clawed and scraped and sacrificed to get up the ladder are buying your bullshit for one second. That white guilt trip you’ve overplayed is going to fall on deaf ears to the illegal who sold oranges at the overpass as his third job; his achievement is the kind acted out in real time in real currency, not the miasma of lies that black racists peddle from academe.
You said it all. Google “The Empty Black Suit” for more on this racial fantasy land. http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/011380.html
Toure is an intellectual bantamweight, but one has to admire the mileage he’s gotten out of his online degree in hip hop.
Toure and Bell seem less interested in people “worshiping themselves” than they are in convincing their readers that on the grounds of brilliance alone, they should be worshiping… Toure and Bell.
I consider this proof that The One does not a have a monopoly of narcissism on the left.
BTW, if you liked the Matrix movies, fine. (I didn’t.) But calling them SF is a bit of a stretch, in the same sense of calling most of Philip K. Dick’s work SF. “Dystopian fantasy” would be nearer the mark. (And no, I didn’t think much of “Minority Report”, either.)
cheers
eon