Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

by Chang, Jeff; Herc, D. j. Kool

  Instead he was soon lured north to Berkeley with the promise of a teaching job. The place was a perfect fit. The Bay Area was the last frontier of the visionary, the bold, and the weird. Here was where students had launched the Free Speech movement, where the Black Panther Party bought guns with money from the sales of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung to college students, where Chinatown leftists battled the slumlords by organizing gangsters and artists, where Raza artists had repainted the Mission in the bright colors of la huelga y la lucha—the UFW grape boycott and the struggle, where the American Indian Movement had taken over Alcatraz Island, where students of color had launched their own cultural revolution.

  Grassroots arts movements led by people of color were blooming across the United States, but nowhere were there the kind of proliferating, overlapping circles of artistic, political, and intellectual intensity that there were in the San Francisco Bay Area. These students, activists, and artists began with the act of naming themselves. They called themselves “Third World.”

  THE NEW COUNTERCULTURE

  In 1967, the future novelist, poet, and playwright Jessica Hagedorn was a precocious teen rushing into the future, only three years removed from the mestizo suburbs of Manila but now deep in the Bay Area counterculture, hanging at the Grateful Dead house in the Haight-Ashbury or pretending to be a college coed at San Francisco State, smoking cigarettes on the quad and sitting in on the San Francisco Renaissance lion Kenneth Rexroth’s poetry workshops.

  After her father’s extramarital affair was discovered, her mother had uprooted her and her two brothers from the Philippines and taken them to San Diego, then to San Francisco. She bought Jessica a typewriter, and allowed her to hang out with Rexroth and his daughter at their Haight district home, with its Cubist paintings, endless bookshelves, and its nonstop parade of visitors like James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka. Her brothers felt stranded in America. But Jessica fully embraced the new city—its buses, its bookstores, its bloom of freaks. “It was an adventure to me,” she said.

  She graduated from Lowell High School into the Summer of Love and moved across town to a cheap apartment on the Lower Haight because she hadn’t been able to find anything in the white part of the Haight. While the national media hyped the appearance of gentle flower children, the counterculture was hurtling into darkness. A new guru named Charles Manson, just out of jail, had arrived on Haight Street with his retinue of female converts. “It got ugly fast,” she recalled. “It wasn’t about anything anymore but just good times and a kind of opportunism.”

  At the historically white institutions San Francisco State College and the University of California at Berkeley, young radicals of color energized by the Black Panthers’ call to “serve the people” had formed a new kind of vanguard. They staked solidarity with the anti- and postcolonial leaders of the underdeveloped African, Asian, Pacific, Latin American, and Caribbean nations. They were colonial subjects within America forming their own movements for self-determination. Fanon, Guevara, Mandela, Neruda, Ho Chi Minh, and Malcolm X were their heroes.

  They believed, as the American Indian scholar Vine Deloria Jr. wrote at the time, “The white man must no longer project his fears and securities onto other groups, races, and countries. Before the white man can relate to others he must forego the pleasure of defining them.”5 They were no longer Negro, Mexican, Oriental. They were Black, Chicano, Asian American. They would be the agents of their own freedom.

  By the spring of 1968, the student of color organizations at San Francisco State formed the Third World Liberation Front. When the campus president suspended a popular Black lecturer in the fall, the Front began the longest campus strike in U.S. history, demanding the creation of a Third World College. By the end of the year, students at UC Berkeley and the College of San Mateo launched their own strikes.

  The new Ethnic Studies programs at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley ushered in a kind of an intellectual renaissance. Afro-American Studies programs soon opened at Harvard, Stanford, Syracuse, Cornell, the University of Michigan, and other campuses in the wake of similar student protests. In segregated ghettos, barrios, and Chinatowns, young people of color set up storefronts for community organizing and arts projects. As the hippie counterculture entered its decadence, the new Third World counterculture was emerging.

  By 1972, Hagedorn was all in, hanging out at the City Lights bookstore in North Beach, reading at the Blue Unicorn near the Haight-Ashbury, listening to Brazilian pop and free jazz at the Keystone Korner around the corner, catching film and theater at Project Artaud in Potrero Hill, digging the muralistas at the Galeria de La Raza in the Mission, sharing rough drafts and salsa dance lessons at the Kearny Street Workshop in the I-Hotel at the border of Chinatown, North Beach, and Financial District. Tiny publishers sprouted like poppies.

  One night Hagedorn found herself at Glide Memorial Church, a progressive outpost in the Tenderloin, reading at a benefit for Chilean leftists. As she began, small on the wide stage under soaring rafters, before a standing-room audience filled with poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Serafin Syquia, Janice Mirikitani, and Thulani Davis, she was nervous. By the end she had been inducted into the new scene. “Come to a meeting, sister!” a young writer told her. She wondered whether to call him brother.

  From Yardbird Reader, Volume 5: “The Yardbird Krewe” making the scene in 1975.

  The meetings were convened at Mirikitani’s home and they produced Third World Communications, a collective of the daughters and sons of migrant workers and train porters and family farmers and shopkeepers and intellectuals, a group of artists determined to advance a revolution of culture. In 1972, the collective produced an anthology, Third World Women, helping outline a new feminism that centered women of color. Time to Greez! Incantations from the Third World, an expansive anthology that marked the vitality of a movement of U.S. writers of color, followed in 1975.

  It seemed the perfect moment for a cultural turn. With rising inflation and declining standards of living, the affluent society seemed a distant memory. Watergate and the backlash from San Francisco to Boston against busing fueled distrust in the state’s ability to advance the fortunes of minorities. Rising unemployment and crime rates seemed to have become indexes of the failure of the political revolution.

  So the artists turned inward. They rejected realism and dogma. They embraced the abstract, the disjunctional, the conceptual, the magical. They focused their rage on the structures of invisibility. They preached and practiced self-determination. The world revolution began with the personal revolution. Identity was their critical work. Their self-questioning turned rigorous, relentless.

  Hagedorn asked herself: Didn’t “Third World” signify something inferior? Why were her light-skinned Spanish relatives considered higher-class than her dark-skinned village-born grandmother? She had long discussions with Rexroth about race and American history. Was it true that Filipinos in the United States picked asparagus? That they had organized with Cesar Chavez? She wondered, how did people really see her?

  It helped to try to figure this out together with others. Soon Hagedorn and Davis were helping their friend Ntozake Shange develop an experimental “choreopoem” play Shange was calling for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuff. At Black Expo ’72, they met Ishmael Reed and the poet Al Young.

  MISSION IRRESISTIBLE

  In the same year folklorist Alan Lomax, who had spent four decades recording the music of the African American South and the African diaspora, published a manifesto through UNESCO that he called an “Appeal for Cultural Equity.” The problem of the era, he declared, was that cultural diversity had been put at global risk. “A grey-out is in progress,” he wrote. “A mismanaged, over-centralized electronic communication system is imposing a few standardized, mass-produced, and cheapened cultures everywhere.”

  He called for “the principle of cultural equity,” the protection, expression, and propagation of local, marginalized cultures. All
culture was local, he argued, “Nations do not generate music.” And local musics had deep importance to all of humanity:

  1. They serve as the human baseline for receiving and reshaping new ideas and new technologies to the varied lifestyles and environmental adaptations of world culture;

  2. They perpetuate values in human systems which are only indirectly connected with level of productivity, and they give women and men—old and young—a sense of worth;

  3. They form a reservoir of well-tested lifestyles out of which species can construct the varied and flexible multicultural civilizations of the future; since they are living symbol systems, they have growth potential of their own. As such they are the testing grounds for the social and expressive outcomes of human progress.

  Lomax argued that the best way to foster the preservation and growth of local musics would be to provide these cultural producers with resources and “an equitable share of media time.”

  “Practical men often regard these expressive systems as doomed and valueless,” he wrote. “Yet, wherever the principle of cultural equity comes into play, these creative wellsprings begin to flow again.”6

  Cultural diversity, Lomax was arguing to global leaders and thinkers, was every bit as important as biodiversity. Although he was not at all involved with the young counter-culturalists in the Bay Area, he had perfectly described the founding notions on which they had built one of the most fertile cultural ecosystems anywhere.

  Ishmael Reed and Al Young had founded a journal called the Yardbird Reader to “publish the finest work by Afro-American artists without regard to ideological or aesthetic affiliation.” But by the second issue, they were championing the new multiracial counterculture. Yardbird featured Hagedorn, Shange, and Davis, as well as writers like Victor Hernández Cruz, Leslie Marmon Silko, June Jordan, Terri McMillan, and Frank Chin. With Reed’s help, Chin, Shawn Wong, Jeffery Paul Chan, and Lawson Inada published Aiiieeeee!, the first anthology of Asian American writers.

  Reed was captivated by the ardor in these bars, cafés, nightclubs, galleries, and black-box theaters, all these young voices eager to explode form, passionate to reveal the unseen and tell the untold. He knew what a movement felt like, and this felt like a movement. Why couldn’t this movement transform the entire country? Just as ragtime and jazz had sprung forth from New Orleans, this latest outbreak of Jes Grew might spread across the country from the Bay Area.

  Reed’s friend, the writer Toni Cade Bambara, was telling her growing audiences in this nascent movement—becoming aware of themselves as they gathered in cafés and bookstores and lecture halls—that the work of the artist was to make revolution irresistible.7 It had not yet been named a multicultural revolution—but there the word was, flickering like a grand yearning, a mass becoming, an end to the monoculture, the true arrival of a post-segregated nation.

  And so Reed, an adept of the neological arts, plucked it down and put it into circulation. In a December 12, 1975 cover story interview of the Berkeley Barb, Reed announced the movement:

  The multi-cultural movement is the movement of the Seventies. In the Sixties you had the Black Arts group, which was very narrow and Black; and the counterculture movement, which was very narrow and white. Now you have the multi-cultural movement, which is mixed up. This is the wave of the future for the whole country.8

  An editor had inserted a hyphen into the word, as if to highlight how paradoxical it seemed then to think of culture as multi. How could a culture—one that, by definition, sought to melt, absorb, unify—be multi?

  Reed was describing multiculturalism as the next step in the great American march to freedom. The civil rights movement had been concerned with bringing down legal barriers to integration. The multiculturalism movement would concern itself with bringing down cultural barriers. The turn from politics to culture would pivot around the concept of difference.

  Civil rights activists had attacked differential treatment under the law, the engine of racial segregation and inequity. But multiculturalists believed that the play of cultural difference might undo those same conditions. The law could set only the basic terms on how we were to interact. The multi-culture was the place where we might actually create a new nation.

  In this context, the very notion of integration became something of a loaded word for the multiculturalists. The central question in Brown v. Board had been, “[D]oes segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?” In arguing that it did, the Warren Court argued that segregation always implied “the inferiority of the negro group.” Formal integration had been delivered under the shadow of the white man’s burden.

  Integration meant one thing in education, public accommodations, and housing. In culture, it meant another. It implied cultural inferiority as much as structural inequality, unequal distribution of ability as much as unequal access to opportunity. From the majority’s point of view, the new freedom afforded by Brown v. Board left a person of color with a single option: assimilation.

  But after the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., after the cities burned, after the white backlash and as benign neglect set in, many had come to agree with Malcolm X’s critique of the March on Washington from over a decade before. In his November 1963 speech, “A Message to the Grassroots,” he had said:

  It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What d’you do? You integrate it with cream. You make it weak. If you pour too much cream in, you won’t even know you ever had coffee …9

  These artists would never go back to that. In a brief, funny, but pointed retort to “‘qualified’ racial missionaries unmindful of booby traps in racist language” who had “begun to describe Yardbird’s projects as ‘integrationist,’” Reed wrote, “[T]he super-race phase of American art, whether advocated by yellows, blacks, browns, or whites, men or women is through!”10

  Instead, they would begin at the point where the law had ended and the multi-culture began. They would refuse the kind of integration that changed just the minority for the actual cultural exchange—“a fact of everyday ordinary existence in the complex civilization in which we live,” Reed wrote—that transformed everyone.

  The future of desegregation was not just about reaching mere numerical diversity. It was about fostering radical diversity, the wild protean sort. It was about what might flower when people could really meet across the lines. The cover of the fifth volume of the Yardbird Reader, rendered in day-bright Oakland A’s yellow and green, featured the collective caught as they laughed at someone’s wisecrack. They looked simultaneously hip and welcoming. In this colorized vision of American renewal, everyone could share in the joy.

  At the end of Invisible Man, Ellison’s nameless narrator had concluded, “Our fate is to become one, yet remain many—This is not prophecy, but description.” Now Reed told his interviewer, “This country has a historical destiny to change the world. It started off as an experiment, and there have been a lot of setbacks, but I think it can work.”

  He said, “I think we can start a new culture.…”11

  In the coming decade this little avant-garde from the far Left Coast would no longer be invisible, would find its ideas taken up by intellectuals and a new generation of students, would be described as a new threat to the Union, a force that might bring down American civilization. In their name opponents would assemble to declare the opening of the culture wars.

  But when Reed had wanted to announce the arrival of the American multiculturalism movement outside of the West Coast underground press, he had to do it in the Paris newspaper Le Monde for the utter disinterest at home. Word of the big ambitions of this small group of dreamers had not even reached the other coast. Over a decade after the formal legal breakthroughs of the civil rights movement, there was still no national language throu
gh which to describe a post-segregated American future. Words still failed.

  Autobiography: Water / Ancestors / Middle Passage / Family Ghosts by Howardena Pindell, 1988. Acrylic, tempera, cattle markers, oil stick, and polymer on paper. 118 × 71 in. Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum. Gift of The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund.

  CHAPTER 5

  COLOR THEORY

  RACE TROUBLE IN THE AVANT-GARDE

  What I’m getting at is that we’re all more or less niggers and slaves, teachers and students alike.

  —Jerry Farber, The Student as Nigger

  In February 1979, the downtown New York gallery Artists Space opened an exhibition featuring a group of young white postmodern artists that included a twenty-three-year-old who chose to use only his first name, Donald—as if, like generations of self-mythologizing young urban newcomers before him and since, he might rush into his American future by casting away his past.

  His surname was Newman and he had come to the sooty punk streets of lower Manhattan from the crisply sodded suburban tracts of Southern California. He had been studying at the California Institute of the Arts, a short freeway ride from his family home, where the eucalyptus trees were still taking root in the Valencia soil and teachers like John Baldessari were still overturning received wisdoms. It was the tail end of the era that had produced the “CalArts Mafia,” a clique of precocious alumni headed for super-stardom. Very quickly, Newman was accepted into the prestigious independent study program at the Whitney Museum in New York.

  Donald was like a rocket launched at two. He arrived at Penn Station and headed straight to the front desk at Artists Space, where he name-dropped Baldessari and CalArts and asked, “Do you have any place for me? I was told you would take care of me.” That first night, he slept on the floor of the gallery.