Sorry that's a bad subject line. (edit: definitely a bad one and I keep making it worse every time i try to change it so you get what you get) Not sure how to phrase it properly.

I was thinking about 'getting the black vote' and what works. Thinking how instrumental the church was in organizing back in the day. Then thinking about the oral tradition of preaching and how that relates to addressing the black community. There's probably correlation with all religious leaders but I want to pretend like we're special.

Preachers from the pulpit have always held a position of authority. They don't talk to you. They don't really explain things to you either. They tell you what is fact. Where they are effective is the way they carry their authority, to make you beieve their facts without question.

One of the key ways of doing that is creatively preaching to the choir. In this regard I mean saying the things that folk want to hear and say amen to. Its twisting words around into a digestable form that sounds like what people want to believe either about themselves or others around them. They can hear it, interpreted as fact, and make it their own.

Now I'm not saying there aren't subtlties, because there definitely are, but it goes back to the point that it's not about matters of discussion. The preacher is telling it like it is. Sister Mary in the bible study can discuss it with you further if you need, but that discussion is gonna be the facts which the preacher has presented.

******* coming back around.

Politicians talk to the black community like preachers. There's no discussion, no nuance. It's tell them what they want to hear so they can won it too. But our situation, our issues are so full of nuance that it's the discussion that's needed most. We don't need you to tell us that black lives matter, don't need you to tell us that predatory lending is decimating our communities like a contract crack epidimic.What we need is for you to ask questions and engage the conversation. Even more we need you to come to the table with the stuff we don't know. We don't need promises of what you'll do because we know they are bullshit once you get elected and something else takes priority. Come to the table and say, you know what, these are the banks that actually fucked yall over, and they were able to do it becasue of law x,y and z. We need the insight s we may not have access to, but you do. Tell us which which legislators are bonafide racists. Who's planning what to draw lines that diminish our vote.

Tell us some shit we don't know, we don't need halleluja talking points. BUT those halleluja's work because the feel good in the moment even if they don't address the breadth of the issue. Put it all in a politicians hands even though they've done nothing to show that they will follow through, and if they do that will be enough.

Sorry rambling...

Convo can go any way you want from here .

Like what came first the preacher or the pimp.

I imagine the preacher because I think of Swing Lo Sweet Chariot on the plantation. But then again you gotta know massa wasn't the only pimp on the plantation, and the pimp who was a slave, how much game did that nigga have.

OK now I've ruined a perfectly good thread.


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Big PEMFin H & z's
"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am 1 thing, a musician." � Miles

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

Read some Adolph Reed he explains it well, much better than I can

"It would look a lot like, mutatis mutandis, the moment at the beginning of the 20th century when Booker T. Washington and others, both his antagonists as well as his pals, were vying to establish what Kenneth Warren describes as “managerial authority” over the Negro Question. That’s where we are now. Another way to look at the arc of this politics, of black politics, is on the analogy of the arc from Emancipation to the defeat of populism and the imposition of the Jim Crow order. There you had a fairly open politics, class-asymmetrical with respect to race in particular, but with black free people improvising and sometimes aligning with whites to engage in politics as a mechanism for making their lives better and for defining what making their lives better might actually mean. That got squashed, so that the activities of the likes of Washington were what was understood to be black politics until the mid-1920s through the 30s. As Judith Stein points out, there certainly were black people forming trade unions and fighting their employers and all that sort of thing before the mid-20s, but what was understood as “black politics” in this period was this elite enterprise, the professed aim of which was to articulate the interests of the popular black population—though it did this, of course, in ways consistent with what the dominant elites were prepared to hear. These race managers presented themselves as an organic leadership of that black population, and it’s an under-appreciated fact that in large measure these claims to organic race leadership themselves hinged on the premises of Victorian race theory.

By the mid-1930s the Popular Front and mass direct-action politics had emerged. This was the active, dynamic, and partly constitutive strain of black political activity until the victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the emergence of black political regimes in big cities between the late 1960s and the late 1970s. What we’ve seen increasingly since then, at least since Reagan if not earlier, is a reassertion of a black Professional Managerial Class (PMC) as a tutorial leadership class. This hinges on “underclass” ideology, which disqualifies a significant section of the black population from having the authority to articulate its own concerns. What disappears from contemporary black politics is a working class. There’s no space for an autonomous working class capable of articulating itself politically. This goes back to the 1990s and all that crap that comes out of the universities: the emergence of Cultural Studies discourse and people like Robin D. G. Kelly (alongside the vast majority of English professors) claiming that the black experience is opaque and unknowable to those outside and that it’s only possible to gain access to it through skilled racial interpreters."


http://platypus1917.org/2015/04/04/unite-many-interview-adolph-l-reed-jr/

There's also Lester Spence who just came out with a book detailing how neo - liberalism infected black politics after the civil rights, I made a post and tried to discuss it but it flopped.

Gotta go but I'll be back to discuss in full

swipe:

On the “new Jim Crow” front, have you seen the recent news about the mental health problems suffered by the protesters in Ferguson?1 That’s indicative of where this sort of nonpolitics as politics is overwhelmingly likely to go. When all is said and done, its only political standpoint is self-referential. I have been at meetings on campus recently where earnest activist-ist kids full of the Holy Ghost of political righteousness rise to declaim on what the “Young Activists in Ferguson” want the rest of us to do, the rules of racial and gender etiquette they want us to follow, and to demand that we all declare our willingness to follow those rules, as well as meetings where faculty babble on about the lessons of “intersectionality” we should take from this nonexistent movement, e.g., how meaningful it is that the actual authors of #blacklivesmatter are black lesbians or whatever. Of course, none of this has anything at all to do with political goals, strategies, or vision. And, as Kenneth Warren has pointed out, defenses of all this sort of purely expressive stuff as a politics invariably depend on claims about what it supposedly will enable in some future beyond the scope of strategic projection—that is, on ********calls for faith in things as yet unseen or unseeable*******. I think anti-racism is beyond useless as a politics. It is now an artifact of neoliberalism and has been for quite some time. Its inadequacies even for making sense of the carceral state are made clear by contrast with Marie Gottschalk’s new book, Caught, some of the key themes of which she articulates in a recent interview.2 As Gottschalk notes, even if all the racial disparities in criminal justice were eliminated, for example, the United States probably would still lead the world in carceralization. Anti-racism—along with anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, etc., as well as diversity as the affirmative statement of them all—is a species of a genus of social and economic justice that is utterly compatible with neoliberalism: parity in the distribution of costs and benefits among groups defined by essentialized ascriptive identities. That is what is commonly referred to as identity politics. Despite the chatter among its proponents about group celebration and recognition, the substantive ideal of identity politics is a condition in which costs and benefits and potential individual winners and losers are sorted in rough proportion to their representation in the society. A “Left” committed to this metric, in addition to identifying outrages, focuses on cleansing opportunity structures of invidious and unjust discrimination along identitarian lines within what remains a regime of increasingly ruthless upward redistribution. That is a vision that marks the ultimate triumph of Gary Becker’s utopia.


Yeah that line i starred. That's what I think I was getting to. It's easy to intellectualize it though and break it down step by step but disseminating the understanding of these dynamics is nowhere near as effective as halleluja politics. Hence your neo-liberal thread.

I'm running too but I'll be back. You always come with the quotes that hit the nail so hard on the head goes over on most :)

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Big PEMFin H & z's
"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am 1 thing, a musician." � Miles

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

No humble brag





















But humble brag tho

from Black preachers. I don't take voting advice from any Black preacher. I don't care who they endorse. It feels like the politicians are stuck in the past - like preachers have the same influence they had in the past. I no like.

that strategy was employed.

Honestly I don't like politicians being too good orators. Decent public speaking is required of the job, but Hitler should have taught us what good orators are capable of with political power. And if he didn't teach us that then, Trump show is letting us know now.

█▆▇▅▇█▇▆▄▁▃
Big PEMFin H & z's
"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am 1 thing, a musician." � Miles

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

in an effort to improve conditions in the black community

of the black church as an institution. the black church's history is uniquely different from any other because our situation in america is unique.

discrimination and the after effects of slavery (<-- colorblind niggas is eyerolling right now but you can never get away from that as prologue to discussions of black american issues) created a situation in which there were very few avenues for black people to be in positions of leadership, or where education was valued.

in segregated economies, the educated black class ended up as, largely, teachers or preachers (in addition to the other professions which were located in the communities). i'd assume, due to segregation, that there wasn't too much white folks up in black churches seeing what was going on and what was being said. so this was a safe space where people could have dignity and community and heal as well as air grievance.

folks who may have been suited to be politicians or business leaders, in a world where those options were largely closed to them, became vocational preachers. i don't know the percentages, but in addition to folks who were 'called' to ministry, preaching was also a significant outlet for folks with a certain set of talents that they could not necessarily exercise on the daily as janitors and porters in the white man's world.

all of the above created a self-reinforcing environment which concentrated black leadership, politics, oration, economics, etc., in the black church. which, in turn, shaped the way that leadership, politics and economics was (and is, but to a lesser degree) done in the black community.

so black people didn't necessary choose this form of organization and leadership. partially we did, because spirituality and community are a big part of our shared culture. but it was also largely due to container theory -- this was the shape of the society in which we were confined so we grew and evolved to take this shape.

contrast this with, say, jews. THEY faced discrimination and barriers -- nowhere near the same level of dehumanization and cultural abnegation as black people in *this* country. but assimilation after a generation or two was still on the table for them, as it was with other white ethnic groups. they could get cultural and communal support and encouragement through their faith community prior to eventual economic advancement in ways that we could not. our best and brightest were steered toward being teachers and preachers. and we know what desegregation did to the black teacher class.

for a good 40 years, at least, i've seen critiques of the black church, etc, which don't take these things into account. but this is where the 'top down', authoritative, patriarchal structural relationship of the preacher class to the parishioners comes from.

so when someone runs for office, they get the local preacher(s) to put 'em on for a sunday and address the congregation from the pulpit. i don't think they understand why, but they are doing this because this is how it has historically been done.






peace & blessings,

x.

www.twitter.com/poetx

=========================================
I'm an advocate for working smarter, not harder. If you just
focus on working hard you end up making someone else rich and
not having much to show for it. (c) mad

In my original post I through the disclaimer in to cover my ass and keep from tangenting. But I do think the historical place for church and preachers is an important one.

That said I think is a historical one, and the inability of us an others to shake it in dealing with the topic at hand is indicative of our larger race problem

America can only deal with the black community in monolithic terms, and then only hierarchical where there power is disseminates to us through accepted leaders. People like to complain about the lack of leadership in the black community but that falls into the monolithic thought.

Going back to the top we dont need leaders to represent our interests, we need our interests to be a part of the broader conversation, not just ancillary.

█▆▇▅▇█▇▆▄▁▃
Big PEMFin H & z's
"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am 1 thing, a musician." � Miles

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

***
I'm tryna be better off, not better than...

care for each other, and Love God. Do all of these in spirit and in truth. That loving God bit isn't too popular these days, but the previous ones are good too.

█▆▇▅▇█▇▆▄▁▃
Big PEMFin H & z's
"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am 1 thing, a musician." � Miles

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

which would explain a lot about the nature of a lot of churches-- be they white, black, korean, etc