Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)
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Social realism had depicted images of everyday people to urge a better future. It moved the unseen into the frame in order to mobilize disenchantment with inequality. Capitalist realism reappropriated this radical act of seeing in order to induce trust and satisfaction. The idea was that all our aspirations could be contained within the frame.
Where Social Realism conveyed heroic struggle, capitalist realism traded in sentimental acquiescence. Here was what the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo had called “imperialist nostalgia,” that condition “where the people mourn for the passing of what they themselves have destroyed.”28 Capitalist realism seemed to say, “Things have always been good. We have always been good.” In this sense the notion was not very realistic at all. But it would become the sunrise gleam of Reagan’s morning, the “living tapestry” of Thatcher’s No Alternative, the abundant eternal Now of the End of History.
In the closing voiceover of “Friendly Feelings,” a narrator declared, “A bottle of Coke has brought more people together than any other soft drink in the world.”29 Bill Backer and the young staff at McCann-Erickson finally were ready to meet BBDO’s challenge. But they also seemed to want to address something deeper: what it meant to be an innocent American bumbling through a suddenly very big and dangerous world.30
In the early 1600s, Puritan leader John Winthrop outlined an aspiration for the new colony at Massachusetts Bay. He called upon New England to become the “city on a hill” of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. As the 1960s dawned, John F. Kennedy revived the idea. Ronald Reagan later used it to exorcise the nation of the demons of that decade. American exceptionalism patinated into creation myth—baptismal, purifying, God had shed his grace on thee. “The eyes of all people are upon us,” Winthrop had written. Everyone in the world wanted our lifestyle economy. We simply wanted to share it.
Walt Disney introduced his last great amusement at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. With funding from Pepsi and using his latest “audio-animatronic” technology, he unveiled an exhibit featuring the children of the nations of the world. Early in its conception, Disney’s Imagineers wanted to have the kids singing their nation’s anthems. But Disney felt that the competing songs would turn the exhibit into a boat ride through Babel. Instead he insisted that each animatronic child be synched to a single jingle—born in America, sung first in English. So the songwriters came up with a melody and line that stood: “Though the mountains divide and the oceans are wide, it’s a small world after all.”
Now that the Real Thing spots had displaced crisis into opportunity, Coke might wed the genius of Winthrop and Disney. The next spot would be “Buy the World.”
YO, WHAT HAPPENED TO PEACE?
It was Backer who first saw the outlines of racial harmony and world peace in a green bottle of brown bubbly sugar water. His epiphany, like Martin Luther King’s insight into the evils of segregation, also came out of a disrupted airline flight.
Two weeks before the debut of “Friendly Feelings,” Backer was on his way to meet his songwriting collaborators in London. But he found himself grounded by Heathrow fog at the tiny Shannon Airport outside Limerick, Ireland. Passengers, mostly high-maintenance business travelers, were forced to double up overnight at an overcrowded motel, a situation accepted mostly with reluctance and not a little petulant acting out.
The next morning Backer took a seat in the airport restaurant and looked at the crowd. The night before they had been at each other’s throats. Now they were all conversing in English, laughing together. And they seemed to be drinking bottles of Coke. Backer was struck by the notion that Coke was “a tiny bit of commonality between all peoples, a universally liked formula that would help to keep them company for a few minutes.”31 He started scribbling ideas on a napkin.
When Backer finally met with his colleague Billy Davis—a songwriter from Motown who had been in the Four Tops—and the rest of his team, he said he wanted “a song that treated the whole world as if it were a person—a person the singer would like to help and get to know.” He read to them what he had written on the napkin: “I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.”32
Working quickly, they got British folksingers the New Seekers to record the song and brought it to radio. Coca-Cola’s bottlers hated it, company president Paul Austin thought it was too sentimental, and listeners were unmoved. But somehow the agency prevailed in getting more money to turn the jingle into a television commercial. A young McCann-Erickson employee named Harvey Gabor suggested an idea for the “First United World Chorus” singing the song. Medium Cool director Haskell Wexler signed on to direct. They returned to England to shoot, a globalized production assembling the diversity of the Old World to comfort the anxious masses of the New.
London brought bad weather so they moved to Rome. This first shoot was a disaster, a telling one.
An Italian production company brought in 1,200 young extras from local orphanages. As the sun grew hotter, the orphans were kept locked in steaming buses. By noon the bored, parched teens were rocking the buses off their axles and wolfishly eyeing the big truck full of Cokes parked at the bottom of the hill. At the top, Davis stood on a conductor’s ladder, struggling to teach the united world chorus how to mouth lyrics in a language many did not speak.
For the final scene—an aerial shot of the orphans cheering alongside the united world chorus—the teens were released from their buses. They raged loud and broad across the field. A beleaguered team of marshals finally corralled and herded them into place near the chorus. There the orphans took the glass bottles they had been handed and with an angry roar began flinging them at the director’s helicopter overhead. Then they stormed down the hill toward the Coke truck and tried to overturn it.
Where was the harmony? It had been interrupted by a teenage riot worthy of Black Friday. Perhaps this, too, was what American exceptionalism looked like.
The next day Wexler, still angry he had nearly been toppled from the sky to certain death over a stupid Coke commercial, fled the set, never to return. With a different crew and production company, a much smaller cast, and a different Italian location, the spot was finally completed. The “Buy the World” commercial was released in Europe, mostly to indifference.
But in the United States the TV spot found huge success. Coca-Cola was suddenly flooded with letters of gratitude and requests for lyrics and sheet music. As Tom Clay’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love” fell off the Billboard charts, two different versions of “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)” took its place. In the end both topped the charts not just in the United States but around the world, including Europe. America was still losing the war in Southeast Asia, but it was back to winning hearts and minds at home and abroad.
In 1939, near the end of the Great Depression, Coke had run print ads entitled “The drink everybody knows…” that collected illustrations of Americans at work and at play. There were airline pilots and stewardesses, young women shoppers, baseball-playing kids, courting teens, a homemaker, a snow-shoveler. Except for a smiling Pochontas-type Indian sharing a drink with a young little rosy-cheeked cowboy, all of the subjects were white. Each illustration represented a frontier closed and a market opened. Together they pointed forward toward the affluent society and Kennedy’s suburban New Frontier.
At the start of the 1970s, at the end of the long postwar boom, “Buy the World” pictured the last frontier. Each smiling young person on the Italian hill—marked by their race, nation, and culture—held a market in their hand. It was a primitive picture, to be sure, a couple hundred smiling stereotypes, a stock sheet of misrepresentations. But it was not dishonest. In the eyes of capital, nonwhites and non-Americans represented the last to be brought inside, organized, harmonized. What else did it care for representation?
Here was a plausible capitalist realist narrative of multiculturalism. As the American Century roared to a close, capitalism’s destiny would belong to identity. “Buy the World” had stumbled upon a key
to unlocking not just for Coca-Cola, but all of American business, the young world of the coming Global Century. From capital’s dream of one America, a New World Order might be born. But it would be decades before many realized that such a world was even possible.
From Right On!, 1971. Courtesy of Morrie Turner.
The cover of Yardbird’s 5th edition, 1976. Top row (L –R): Lawson Inada, Joe Bruchac, Victor Cruz, Alex Kuo, James Welch, Al Young, Neil Parsons, Mei Mei Berssenbrugge. Bottom row: Frank Chin, Phil George, Ishmael Reed. Cover image permission courtesy Ishmael Reed and Al Young.
CHAPTER 4
EVERY MAN AN ARTIST, EVERY ARTIST A PRIEST
THE INVENTION OF MULTICULTURALISM
I once leafed through a photo book about the West.
I was struck by how the Whites figured in the center of the photos and drawings while Blacks were centrifugally distant.
The center was usually violent: gunfighting lynching murdering torturing.
The Blacks were usually, if it were an interior, standing in the doorway.
Digging the center.
—Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
Multiculturalism—what a waste of syllables. The original idea had been: Third World thieves looting the Western art temples to repatriate their stolen legacies and making a party of it all, an ecstatic liberation dance heralding a prismatic future. At least that had been the way Ishmael Reed described it in his giddy novel-cum-manifesto, Mumbo Jumbo.
Neo-HooDoo—now there was a real fermented agave drink of a word. If U.S. history had been different, maybe the haters would have been talking about how Neo-HooDoo was assaulting the academic enterprise, insulting serious art practice, contaminating children’s minds, segregating lunchrooms, and turning America into a Negro-Chindian-Mexifornia slum-country. Instead they had multiculturalism to kick around.
Might have been a good joke on them, too. Except that even when multiculturalism was young, wild-eyed, and dangerous, it seemed destined for bland respectability, stiff-necked formality, and a particularly unforgiving senescence—set upon by goons, abandoned by its BFFs, its kin and offspring publicly protective but privately embarrassed about how it had let itself go.
We might have blamed the Canadians. In 1973, just about the time that Bruce Lee and Bob Marley were going global, Canada got official, establishing a Ministry of Multiculturalism. It was a national imposition—unappreciated by right-wingers who saw it as a safe harbor for barbarians and by Canadians of color who saw it as just another government window. Nonetheless this little innovation put the Canadians far ahead of us, their unenlightened neighbors south of the border.
So in the United States, where racial history sometimes still seemed to hang like a tire necklace and whose official policy after 1965 on all matters of cultural equity began with, “Well, we’d rather not but…,” it was up to the young, wild-eyed, and dangerous writer Ishmael Reed to be the first to suggest that this doomed-to-be-regrettable word maybe wasn’t such a bad idea.
GAINING MY RELIGION
Reed himself had grown into multiculturalism, out of other things. In 1962, at the age of twenty-four, the prodigy—he had started writing poetry and journalism at thirteen—moved from Buffalo to Manhattan. He quickly became the consummate hipster, back when “hipster” was still something good, a one-man transfer station between the Black Arts movement and the East Village counterculture.
Reed joined Umbra, a collective whose eponymous magazine captured the energy of a new Black literary renaissance. He roomed on East 5th with Charles Patterson, William Patterson, and Askia Muhammad Touré, who were developing what they would call the “Black Arts aesthetic” and codifying a philosophy of Black Power they would introduce in a famous SNCC position paper. Reed developed close friendships with Joe Overstreet, Amiri Baraka, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and Sun Ra. Langston Hughes published Reed’s poetry and introduced him to the big publishers.
Later he moved to a swank apartment at 79 St. Mark’s Place and hung out at Stanley’s Bar, where he and Walter Bowart founded one of the country’s first underground newspapers, The East Village Other. “I’d just read Carl Jung’s introduction to Milton’s Paradise Lost,” he would later recall, “where he referred to Milton’s Satan, the revolutionary Satan, as the ‘Other.’”1 Somehow it seemed perfect for one who would always find solace with cultural outsiders.
He hobnobbed with Norman Mailer, Brion Gysin, and W. H. Auden. He and his partner, Carla Blank, became fixtures of the counterculture. When Woodstock happened, he was one of a small number of Blacks name-checked in the festival program (the others included Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix). But in later accounts the East Village of the 1960s would become associated with Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, and the Yippies.
“We get left out of history,” Reed would note. “The whole impetus for the East Village renaissance in the 1960s was the whole cultural and political Black Power thing.”2
Reed’s notion of Neo-HooDoo began taking shape after he read a Robert Tallant book called Voodoo in New Orleans, pulp nonfiction issuing from the symbol-rich Tremé borderland that led him toward sustained study of Yoruba language and cosmology. Not long after he was dumbstruck by Joe Overstreet’s painting Hoo Doo Mandala. In these circles and stripes of bright oranges and blues and deep violets, forming a bull’s-eye canvas pulled taut with rope, was a whole worldview.
To the untrained eye, the painting might have seemed folkish, earthbound, Mondrian through a curved lens. But here was an entirely different art history. Overstreet described the color fields to Reed as “Ve Ve,” “landing strips for loas,” the saints of Haitian syncretism.3 Reed began to see the links between African religion—vodun, santéria, macumba, and candomblé, African American hoodoo—and the absorptive, protean creativity of Afrodiasporic music and art.
It suddenly seemed to him that all of American pop—its rhythms, its poetry, its swagger—descended from African and indigenous religion. If that were true, then perhaps the entire American tragedy of race had issued from the forcible suppression of such forms of knowledge and other more inclusive worldviews. Reed wrote a prose poem he titled “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto,” 1,794 words of rapturous provocation limning the coming culture wars: uptight Christians and hidebound ideologues bent on closing the American mind in one corner, free practitioners of a forgotten faith opening up myriad new ideas for modern living in the other.
“Neo-Hoodoo believes that every man is an artist and every artist a priest,” he wrote with not a little ambition, signifying on no less than Walt Whitman and his famous first-edition preface to Leaves of Grass. Reed concluded his “Black Power Poem” with the clang of the bell:
may the best church win. shake hands now and come out conjuring
Reed rendered the coming clash of civilizations not as a Samuel P. Huntington heaven-and-hell battle between the forces of light and dark, but as a sloppy cosmic tug-of-war between Funkentelechy and the Placebo Syndrome. His tour de force jazz-age renaissance noir Mumbo Jumbo and his early poetry collection Conjure—both published in 1972—were stuffed full of systems of thought, histories of knowledge, and aesthetic strategies that would not rigidly oppose European American norms as much as mock, humble, seduce, and jook them into awe, dialogue, or submission.
Mumbo Jumbo described the spread of a recurring epidemic known as Jes Grew, after James Weldon Johnson’s sublime encapsulation of ragtime, a plague that largely took the form of spontaneous urban outbreaks of jazz and blues parties and dancing, “a Church finding its lyrics.” This idea shared with the visual artists’ image of the spiral a sense of organicity and inevitability.
It also smuggled in Ralph Ellison’s idea about Black music’s relation to time and space—that invisibility allowed one to slip down inside the break to take a look around. In 1972, Jes Grew indeed was back—rumba, samba, salsa, nyabinghi, New Orleans R&B, and soul were together locking into a new hoodoo moment: funk. When the scholar Rickey Vincent asked George Clinton what had inspired his
P-Funk cosmology, Clinton turned the question back on him: “Have you ever read a book called Mumbo Jumbo?”4
Litany finding text—Neo-HooDoo was ancient but futuristic, African but expansive, connective and viral, spiritual, sexual, magical, and always unfinished. It was America.
ROOTING IN THE WEST
Reed would have to go west to have his own Neo-Hoodoo moment. By 1967, Reed had published his first novel, The Free-lance Pallbearers, to great acclaim, but feared the New York literary scene would kill him softly with an overdose of affection. Black Arts and Black Power made him cynical. “All art must be for the end of liberating the masses,” he had the “neo–social realist” villain in his new novel saying. “A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree.” He felt his former roommates had become separatists. Their writing merely served the new politics.
Reed thought to himself, “I want to go to the most primitive part of the country.” So he and Carla packed their bags for Los Angeles. There in the shadow of the dream machines he completed this second book, a countercultural hurly-burly/hoodoo western called Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. One day as he walked down from his apartment to the Echo Park library—who walked in LA?—he was surrounded by a small army of LAPD officers. They had taken the suspicious Black pedestrian’s writing notebooks for women’s purses.
In the wake of the Watts riots, Alonzo and Dale Davis had opened the influential Brockman Gallery in Leimert Park to show African American artists and other artists of color, and C. Bernard Jackson had established the nation’s first multicultural theater with his Inner City Cultural Center in central Los Angeles. The metropolis was a sprawling, combustible lab of political and aesthetic energy. But Reed was not yet ready for the emerging West Coast scene.