Kind of Blue

Kind of Blue's Journal

July 28, 2018

Who knew? The Very Black History Of Punk Music

"Stories about punk music tend to picture thin-framed white guys and girls with shaved heads, part of an angry, energetic scene born out of the working class angst of young white England in the 1970s. But the actual history of punk – as a type of music and movement – is more complicated than that.

Black punks have been an integral and pioneering part of punk history – and they're keeping the movement alive and growing today. Host Sana Saeed explores that history and talks to proto-punk band Death, musician and journalist Greg Tate, the band The 1865 and festival organizer Shawna Shawnté."

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Learn more here:
New York Times. “This Band Was Punk Before Punk Was Punk. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/arts/music/15rubi.html

Vice. “The Bands Taking British Punk Back to Its Multicultural Roots.” https://noisey.vice.com/en_uk/article/padjev/decolonise-fest-uk-punk-nekra-sacred-paws-fight-rosa
GQ. “Nazi Punks F**k Off: How Black Flag, Bad Brains and More Took Back Their Scene from White Supremacists.” https://www.gq.com/story/punks-and-nazis-oral-history
Relevant links:
A Band Called Death: https://drafthousefilms.com/collections/a-band-called-death
The Universe Is Lit: http://www.theuniverseislit.com
Bay Area Girls Rock Camp: https://www.bayareagirlsrockcamp.org/
The 1865: https://www.instagram.com/the1865band/

July 25, 2018

"To the degree that white progressives think we have arrived...

we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived.”

Excerpt from Robin DiAngelo's new book "White Fragility."

"The book is more diagnostic than solutions-oriented, and the guidelines it offers toward the end—listen, don’t center yourself, get educated, think about your responses and what role they play—won’t shock any nervous systems. The value in White Fragility lies in its methodical, irrefutable exposure of racism in thought and action, and its call for humility and vigilance. Combating one’s inner voices of racial prejudice, sneaky and, at times, irresistibly persuasive, is a life’s work. For all the paranoid American theories of being red-pilled, of awakening into a many-tentacled liberal/feminist/Jewish conspiracy, the most corrosive force, the ectoplasm infusing itself invisibly through media and culture and politics, is white supremacy.

That’s from a white progressive perspective, of course. The conspiracy of racism is hardly invisible to people of color, many of whom, I suspect, could have written this book in their sleep." https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-sociologist-examines-the-white-fragility-that-prevents-white-americans-from-confronting-racism

June 22, 2018

Oh, my God! Kindred was the first Butler book I read

and I had no idea the author was a black woman. I can't even start to tell you of the effect of being a sci-fi/fantasy nerd Butler had on me as a young black woman. Now, as I'm approaching crone-dom, I jump out of my skin to see many sites, such as black girl nerds, and I can rest, happy and hopefully way before I die, that Butler has inspired African and African-American writers to explore and write ourselves into the future and that Ms. Butler did this. I need a tissue of joy right now

Thanks so much, Polack MSgt, and Google, for this remembrance. I fucking love it!

And Thank You for the link, too!

June 19, 2018

AMERICA'S LEGACY OF SLAVERY SEEN IN TRUMP POLICY SEPARATING CHILDREN AND FAMILIES

"This is nothing new for America. The only difference is who the victims are.

For those not well versed in American history, the current actions are somewhat surprising and abhorrent. How could a nation founded on principles, which seem to be the polar opposite of these policies, be so callously taking children away from their parents?

The explanation is simple. We have done it before as a nation.

The famous orator and anti-slavery advocate Frederick Douglass used the forced separation from his mother as a tool to drive his desire and eventual escape from enslavement. With the official ending of slavery at the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in December 1865, the march was on to find lost family members. Children would look far and wide for missing parents and other relatives. Mothers and fathers would desperately try to reconnect with the children who had been stolen from them."

http://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/featured/americas-legacy-slavery-seen-trump-policy-separating-children-families/

June 7, 2018

Battalora and DiAngelo: How #Antimiscegenation Created #WhiteFragility

ABOUT DR. JACQUELINE BATTALORA

Dr. Jacqueline Battalora is an attorney and professor of sociology and criminal justice at Saint Xavier University in Chicago. She is the author of “Birth of A White Nation: The Invention of White People and it's Relevance Today.”

ABOUT DR. ROBIN DIANGELO

Dr. Robin DiAngelo is the author of two books, “What Does It Mean To Be White: Developing Racial Literacy” and “Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education.”

Her area of research is in Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, explicating how Whiteness is reproduced in everyday narratives.

[link:http://
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March 13, 2018

Rumble The Indians Who Rocked The World

There's a lot of excellent history in this documentary's study of the birth of the blues, jazz and rock. I was hard pressed to find a promotional video that did not skim over or outright remove the importance of African-ness in the creation of American music that the movie reveals. Yet still, I couldn't understand my small dissatisfaction with the film but Jack Hamilton, Slate’s pop critic and assistant professor of American studies and media studies at the University of Virginia, nailed it for me.

Patton discussed below is "Delta blues pioneer Charley Patton, whose grandmother was thought to be Cherokee, is quite simply one of the most important musicians of the 20th century and probably worthy of at least a hundred such films."

"The film doesn't mention the prominence of such musical characteristics in West African traditions, nor does it mention Patton’s well-established influences and mentors such as Henry Sloan and Willie Brown, both of whom were black. Neglecting this context runs the risk of suggesting that Patton’s musical style was acquired through something like biological transmission—an old-fashioned notion, indeed—as well as potentially muddying the still-charged question of whom the black American blues tradition rightly 'belongs' to.

Patton’s segment also illustrates some of the film’s shortcomings, particularly its quixotic and quasi-musicological quest to uncover the Native American 'roots' of modern popular music. This type of sleuthing is always tricky and rarely all that satisfying, and the film’s lengthy theorization that the melismatic style of Patton’s singing and the intricate rhythms of his guitar playing are direct retentions of his Cherokee ancestry feels flimsy at best. Melisma and polyrhythms are common to many musical traditions, including those of the black American South, where Patton spent his life as an itinerant musician under the constant threat of Jim Crow–era racial violence."

The documentary connected a lot of dots for me and I loved it. You can view it on Amazon Prime.

https://slate.com/arts/2017/08/rumble-the-doc-about-indians-and-rock-reviewed.html

November 13, 2017

Roy Moore: Acceptance of pedophilia in the South is a legacy of slavery

"While some people were surprised by the allegation that Alabama Republican Senatorial candidate Judge Roy Moore attempted to date a 14 year old girl in 1979 when he was 32, many more were shocked by how many of his Alabama supporters seemed to be willing to defend, or even accept, what is essentially a charge of pedophilia, or child sexual assault, in the candidate they hope will represent them in the Senate. To understand why many Southern whites find acceptable, behaviour which would be considered deviant and criminal in most parts of the United States, one must understand the role that Antebellum slavery played in cultivating a culture of sexual abuse and pedophilia in the South.

Before the Civil War, forcing frequent and casual sex on young girl slaves was a prized white privilege of the Southern culture they built on the backs of their slaves. It's no accident that the age of consent is only 16 in all the former Confederate states but Louisiana, Florida, Virginia and Tennessee. Before the women's movement forced a change around 1920, it had been 12 or even 10 in the former Confederate states.

Slavery made sex with children easy for the masters of the old Dominion. There were no rules. A UK national archives report on the childhood of slaves states:
The trauma of sexual abuse is also a difficult subject to quantify. Sensibilities of the time and the fact that abolition was often associated with religious organisations means that sexual abuse of girls was often only alluded to in veiled terms and sexual abuse of boys was almost never mentioned. The dangers of sexual exploitation are only too obvious with slave children being seen as chattels with no legal protection. The fact that sexuality appears to have rarely discussed also left slave children ignorant and vulnerable to abuse. If the issue of forced marriage of slaves is included in this category along with coercion into sexual activity for preferential treatment, it is easy to see how sexual abuse could be seen as endemic in slave children’s lives.

When the struggle to raise the age of consent finally erupted in the 1920's, some whites argued that it should be lower for the South, saying African American women 'matured earlier.' This was a common myth about non-white people. Some even had the audacity to stretch the bunk science to the point where they claimed that white girls living in sub-tropical climates 'ripened' into women earlier."

http://claysbeach.blogspot.com/2017/11/acceptance-of-pedophilla-in-south-is.html

September 29, 2016

"I'm finally speaking out: My White Feelings are Hurt-PLEASE watch the whole thing before commenting

I'm tired of being labeled the villain because I'm white... I'm the o p p r e s s o r.
Because I'm straight, I'm h o m o p h o b i c.
Because I'm cisgender, I'm t r a n s p h o b i c.
Because I'm a millennial, I'm lazy and entitled."

PLEASE watch the whole thing before commenting" ~ Palmer Davidson - at least past the three minute mark

September 23, 2016

WATCH: Inside the Night President Obama Took On Donald Trump

“It was April of 2011. For weeks, Donald Trump had been fanning the flames of the 'birther' movement and attacking President Barack Obama on television — demanding that Obama produce his birth certificate, implying that he was not born in the United States, and questioning both his religious identity and the legality of his presidency.

But on April 30, the tables were turned. Trump was the recipient of President Obama’s jokes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — and Trump political adviser Roger Stone tells FRONTLINE in The Choice 2016 that the dinner was a turning point for Trump.

'Donald dreads humiliation and he dreads shame, and this is why he often attempts to humiliate and shame other people,' author Michael D’Antonio tells FRONTLINE. 'This is a burning, personal need that he has to redeem himself from being humiliated by the first black president,' D’Antonio adds in the final moment of the film’s opening sequence.

Premieres Sept. 27 at 9 p.m. EST/8 p.m. CST on PBS stations nationwide."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/watch-inside-the-night-president-obama-took-on-donald-trump/

June 20, 2016

Song for My Father.

It's not too late from where I am to wish Happy Father's Day to all the dad's here and our dads still with us and those who've passed on.

Recorded live in Copenhagen, Denmark, April 1968. Song for My Father was recorded in October 1964 and released on the Blue Note label. The album was inspired by a trip that Silver had made to Brazil. The cover artwork features a photograph of Silver's father, John Tavares Silva, to whom the title song was dedicated. "My mother was of Irish and Negro descent, my father of Portuguese origin", Silver recalls in the liner notes, "He was born on the island of Maio, one of the Cape Verde Islands." The album line-up differs from the Copenhagen musicians here.

One of the most indelible tunes in the jazz canon, Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father,” recorded 50 years ago on October 26, 1964 for the album that bears the same name, could have become an AM Top 40 radio hit had the powers to be back then bothered to delve deeper beyond the Beatles, the Beach Boys and Motown to find rich sources of beguiling song. In fact, a decade later, the pop group Steely Dan lifted the catchy bass lines from “Song for My Father” for its own song “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” (from its 1974 album Pretzel Logic), which reached the upper echelon of the pop singles chart—testament to Silver’s brilliance as a songwriter whose appealing tunes over the course of his career have been fully recognized as lyrical, whimsical gems.

While Song for My Father as a whole perfectly captured the Silver aura of his Blue Note days, the title melody made jazz history. With Silver’s bluesy, swinging piano flavored both by the Cape Verdean folk music of his father and Brazilian bossa nova, “Song for My Father” proved to be both an enthralling dance for the day and a timeless piece of music. http://www.bluenote.com/spotlight/horace-silver-song-for-my-father-turns-50-yea

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Hometown: California
Member since: Fri Aug 29, 2008, 10:47 AM
Number of posts: 8,709

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