africa the center, africa the margin

My social background of origin, the world of my family, friendships and education into early adulthood, is a form of religious culture cast as outsider, marked strongly by walking-corpse fringe thought in matters scientific and historical and by a generalized undercurrent of working-class-identified anti- or counter-intellectualism. It happens to be a form of marginal culture with one (at least) foot ever planted paradoxically at the center of U.S. political power, never to more dismaying effect than under today’s Republican-Party-led state and federal governments. This fact owes, of course, in great part to its predominate demographic whiteness, as also to ideological whiteness.

That this U.S.-rooted conservative Evangelicalism is however far from racially uniform is, in North America (as reflected, say, in student populations of institutions like Regent or Biola) and world-wide, without doubt one of its more important features. The phenomenon of its cultural marginal-ness or counter-ness, perceived from within but also from without, can’t be so neatly accounted for.

For me, it’s useful to have that in mind on coming to the very different, indeed opposite — if not in every way entirely separate — socially marginal, religion-inflected twentieth-century alternative-culture emergent that two political-left video essayists, F.D Signifier and Lil Bill, take up together in a joint commentary project published about a year ago on YouTube and Nebula. This development in American life, their subject, while comparatively very narrow in demographic-spectrum terms, is one likewise resistant to straightforward explanation. (It has had likewise, moreover, in arts and media especially, remarkable mainstream-culture impact — in some respects much larger than apparent wealth or institutional underpinnings associated with it might lead one to suppose it should have.)

To be clear here, what F.D Signifier and Lil Bill are about in their paired videos isn’t some sort of documentarian endeavor. It’s history-telling, yes, but to a complex political-education end. They’re offering an intro to Black radical thought in America and, to an extent, to America through Black-radical lens — a subject I continue in a lot of ways to experience as new but am here not for the first time taking occasion to attend to in posts on this site.

I catch F.D Signifier mainly on Nebula, and it’s his piece I encountered first, there, only in the last few weeks. You can view it via YouTube at bottom of this post (where I’ve set it to start mid-way through, at a key transition point). It’s long. But my recommendation is that you don’t stop with that one. Watch both. Link to Lil Bill’s video is also below.

Lil Bill goes hard at the close of his video; you really should listen to the whole. Here’s part of his wind-up toward the end:

There’s a not insignificant number of folk who have more faith in white allyship than Black solidarity. And y’all see where that got us, right? The thing is, hoteps aren’t stupid, it’s just a lot of them believe some really stupid stuff — and, again, whose fault is that? And — again — y’all made that excuse for white folks, and you see where that got us, right? Y’all might say it’s not your job to educate them on what’s a simple Google search away. But again, for how long have we wasted energy on supposedly well-meaning whites before finally throwing the towel in on them. And I still see some of y’all, even after what has transpired . . . , still wringing your hands over how to pull your suburban white male co-workers far enough left to cast a vote for anyone besides a white man with dementia for once. . . .

As Fanon argues, the Black bourgeoisie assimilated the culture of the colonizer, and as a result have learned disdain for schools of Black thought . . . but, more importantly, for people who adhere to those schools of thought, i.e. poor and working-class people. . . . The reality is, hoteptry, if anything, is an indictment against those who despise it most.