SEE BELOW to read a critical review of "Body of a Neo-Nazi" by Dustin Craun, scholar of Ethnic Studies, author of the forthcoming book Decolonizing Whiteness and writer for Adbusters, among other publications.
The Lighter Shade of Resistance: On Whiteness, Hip Hop, and the Revolutionary Spirit By Dustin Craun
From poems of ecstatic spiritual experience in the form of the classical Sufi canon to Hip Hop battle Raps, to say that Oakland based emcee/poet Baraka Blue has range would be an understatement. While his first full solo album Sound Heart and his first book of poetry Disembodied Kneeling's, put out simultaneously by Remarkable Current in 2010, beautifully represented these two sides of his lyrical musings, it is with great anticipation that we await his forthcoming album Majnun’s LostMemoirs, which he describes as “the diary of a madman torn from his beloved homeland and forced into exile in an industrialized, mechanical, dystopian, Babylon concrete profantuary.”
Cover Art by Paul Bellas
It is in this place of a profane existence filled with the stench of death and decay that we are immersed in the newest track released from Majnun’s Lost Memoirs, “Body of a Neo-Nazi.” While most White rappers take from the privileges of their skin tone Elvis Presley style, there have recently been a few exceptions to this rule that have dared to confront America’s deepest form of racial agnosia as they take anti-racist/ new abolitionist stances in songs explicitly about Whiteness and White racial rule. This short
list includes Brother Ali’s songs “Daylight,” “The Travelers,” and “Mourning in
America and Dreaming in Colour,” the Flobots track “Anne Braden” about the White
anti-racist civil rights activist Anne Braden, Macklemore’s song “White'Privilege,” the
Poet/Anti-racist educator Ariel Luckey’s poem “ID Check,” and Adam Mansbach’s
novel Angry Black White Boy.
Baraka Blue like Brother Ali, is a White, convert to Islam who places himself squarely in
this debate as he takes a radical anti-racist stance in his track “Body of a Neo-Nazi,” that
will surely upset the White people who refuse to talk about race and prefer to imagine
themselves in a post-racial America. This, while also raising the ire of the vile racists
David Horowitz, Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and their like, who are more
infamously known as the leaders of the Islamophobia network in the United States.
While making important anti-racist critiques each of these tracks could also be said to
be making important poetic contributions to the nascent field of Critical Whiteness
Studies. Founded by one of the United States most important intellectuals, W.E.B.
DuBois with his essay written in 1910, “The Soul of White Folks,” DuBois was
attempting to theorize in his work the global, systemic, and psychological nature of
White supremacy. At the time of DuBois writing, the state of Whiteness was such that
he called it “the new religion of Whiteness,” which White people followed as they
looked past their own ethnic roots and any form of class solidarity. Somewhere
between our European ancestors migration to these lands and our present moment,
most White people paid what James Baldwin called “the price of the ticket” to fit within
the normative idea of what Whiteness was and is today. A category always related to
the tropes of benevolence, innocence, and racial purity. As Baldwin wrote of what was
created in this space of cultural nothingness and lack of true community created by the
idea of Whiteness, “It bears terrifying witness to what happened to everyone who got
here, and paid the price of the ticket. The price was to become “white.” No one was
white before he/ she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of
coercion, before this became a white country.”
So while Whiteness was once not a uniform identity as people were Italian-Americans,
Irish-Americans, Jewish Americans, etc., today this amalgamation of whiteness into one
racial category has created an identity, which is as complex as any other racial identity.
However, because the reality of living in the skin of the dominant racial group goes
unrecognized by the majority of White people, its complexities are most often ignored
and not discussed publically. In my research, which I explore in depth in my
forthcoming book Decolonizing Whiteness: Race, and the Genocidal Mentality of Colonial
Modernity I have found there to be at least eight sub categories which form White racial
consciousness and identity today: White benevolent innocence, the White supremacist
consciousness, poor Whites/ White victim mentality, the ethnic White consciousness, White liberal color blind consciousness, White melancholia, culturally specific White people, and finally Anti-racist White double consciousness.
Over a hundred years after DuBois’ writing, plenty of people still bow down to this
false god of Whiteness, as the Southern Poverty Law Center recently reported there
were 1018 hate groups operating in the United States in 2011, many of whom have
explicitly White supremacist agendas. While this is representative of a distinct group of
White people, the majority of White folk today would rather not talk of race, and when
race is discussed it is talked about as an abstract issue only pertaining to People of
Color. This stance of White racelessness or White racial denial has created its own form
of twenty-first century racism, what the Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls, “Colorblind
Racism,” a concept with central importance in the so called ‘color-blind’ era of
Obama.
Then there is a growing population of White people who are working to confront
Whiteness head on, who have done in-depth studies of race and who work to build
anti-racist alliances with the hope of creating a new world free from White racial rule,
White racial/ historical amnesia and a world which begins to heal from racial hatred
and division. After 500 years of Western modernity’s unending colonization, war,
genocide, rape and continuous exploitation of the world’s people and resources, we
know that we must turn inward to make these critiques, we must critique Whiteness
and its reign of death ourselves as White people for it truly is our ‘burden.’ It is our
burden because, regardless of our personal stance on race, we reap the benefits of the
legacy of White Supremacy by virtue of the fact of our belonging to the category of
Whiteness and its societal implications domestically, internationally and
psychologically.
Bearing this “White Mans burden of liquor, lust and lies,” as DuBois called it, instead of
looking at the world through the eyes of the pale skinned world conquerors, we look at
the world from below and centered in our hearts. Our heroes are not the great
colonizers of Western civilization, instead we see them as merchants of death and at the
same time we realize that this burden is bred into our skin and is always with us. We
do not follow the attempts of others to ‘abolish the White race,’ for we know its false
signification has become too deep of a global reality and Whiteness is an inescapable
fact of life that is central to any White persons social identity whether they want to
recognize this or not.
To develop a critical anti-racist consciousness amongst White people today it is
necessary to constantly deploy what the Latina Feminist philosopher Linda Martin
Alcoff terms, White double consciousness. She states of this idea that, “for whites,
double consciousness requires an ever-present acknowledgment of the historical legacy
of white identity constructions in the persistent structures of inequality and
exploitation, as well as a newly awakened memory of many white traitors to white
privilege who have struggled to contribute to the building of an inclusive human
community.”
This is precisely why this track “Body of a Neo-Nazi,” is so important, because it
artistically employees this idea as a constant back and forth throughout the song of a
revolutionary consciousness versus the reality of living in a White body. For the ever
presence and possibility of White supremacy, indeed the historical trauma of its endless
facts are always with a community if it is unwilling to confront this legacy. While we
ourselves are not guilty of the sins of American Indian Genocide, of the enslavement of
Africans brought to the Americas or the endless genocidal wars fought by the United
States all over the world. The reality is its legacy lives on for as long as the lie of White
supremacy has currency in the world. For as long as its myths stand and as long as we
are given false privileges for simply having light skin. Much of this song then is about
orientation, and how we orient ourselves, who we align ourselves with and ultimately
who we look up to for our examples of moral character and great examples of living
lives of truth. As Baraka Blue raps throughout the course of the song weaving different
revolutionary figures into the chorus,
“I’m a problem pappi, nobody could stop me,
I’m the Black Panther Party in the body of a neo-Nazi.
I’m a problem pappi, nobody could stop me,
I’m Mahatma Ghandi in the body of a neo-Nazi
I’m a problem pappi, nobody could stop me,
Harriet Tubman in the body of a neo-Nazi
I’m a problem pappi, nobody could stop me,
I’m Crazy Horse in the body of a neo-Nazi.”
As the song continues he also mentions Bob Marley, the Dalai Lama, Marcus Garvey,
Oskar Schindler, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, Che Guevara, Rumi, the Libyan anticolonial scholar and revolutionary Omar Mukhtar, the twelfth century liberator of
Jerusalem Saladin Ayyubi, and the Senegalese anti-colonial Sufi saint Amadu Bamba.
And perhaps most surprisingly for the uninitiated he raps, “I’m on my Mahatma
Mohandas Gandhi like Ahmad taught me,” referring to the teachings of mercy and
justice of the Prophet Muhammad (referred to here as Ahmad). Finally as the song
draws to a close Baraka Blue raps, “I’m a problem pappi, nobody could stop me, I’m
John Brown in the body of a neo nazi.” The abolitionist John Brown of course being one
of the first great traitors against White supremacy who helped organize a slave rebellion
in Virginia in 1859 and who was ultimately hung for his efforts.
For Uncle Sam (pappi), that great symbol of American Whiteness and imperialism
surely has a problem if White folk start to develop revolutionary consciousness like
Baraka Blue describes here. Rather than looking at the slave masters George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson as our heroes, we’ll take as inspiration the great
representatives of truth, and righteousness throughout history. We’ll take those like
John Brown who fought against slavery. And rather then aligning ourselves to Western
modernity’s age of death, we will instead align ourselves with the age of life that we
hope to bring into the world as we work in alliance with people of color to help create
critical interventions in confronting White supremacy and continuing the anti-racist
legacy that many have set for us. It was our great exemplar and teacher of anti-racism,
moral character, and political consciousness, Malcolm X, who said it most plainly, “In
my opinion it’s with this young generation of Whites, Blacks, Browns, whatever else
there is. Your living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there has
got to be a change. People in power have misused it and now there has to be a change,
and a better world has to be built… and I for one would join in with anyone, don’t care
what color you are. As long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists
on this earth.” Without confronting the legacy of White supremacy, White racial rule
and the false privileges that come from its legacy, this world will always be divided and
we will never move towards the type of holistic and global transformation that is
necessary today.
Dustin Craun is a writer, educator, community organizer, and strategic
communications consultant who lives in Berkeley, California.
Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/dustincraun
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