→ March 2, 2021
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Judas and the Black Messiah.

Daniel Kaluuya’s Golden Globes win might bring some more attention to the superb Judas and the Black Messiah, available now on HBO Max, a biopic that focuses on the final months of Fred Hampton’s life by focusing equally on the man who betrayed him. It’s a different angle than a more typical biography, and I can see an argument that it gives Hampton short shrift, but the two lead performances absolutely drive this movie.

Fred Hampton (Kaluuya) was the head of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party when Edgar Hoover’s FBI decided he was a threat to the nation and, with the help of the members of the Chicago Police Department who weren’t busy assaulting protesters, executed him in his bed while his pregnant girlfriend listened from the next room. The FBI was able to do this because one of Hampton’s lieutenants, William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), was an FBI informant who ratted out Hampton to avoid a felony charge of car theft. O’Neal not only provided information to his FBI handler, Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), but slipped a sedative into Hampton’s drink the night of the execution so he’d be unable to flee or fight back.

Judas and the Black Messiah follows O’Neal’s story from his arrest to Hampton’s murder, bookending the film with footage from Eyes on the Prize II, in which O’Neal gave his only public comment on his involvement in Hampton’s assassination. The narrative focus shifts away from O’Neal to Hampton as needed, giving more time for Hampton’s character to develop, and more time for Kaluuya to show how a magnetic speaker like Hampton could develop such a strong following in such a short period of time – he first became active in social justice movements at 18, and the FBI had him executed when he was 21. (Kaluuya and Stanfield are both much older than the men they portray.)

Stanfield is the lead actor here, at least by how the film’s producers have submitted the pair’s names for awards, but most of the film’s strongest moments belong to Kaluuya. It’s unsurprising, given his superb performances in Get Out and Widows, but he is an unbelievably compelling Hampton whenever he’s speaking to any sort of crowd, friendly or hostile. Kaluuya was positively creepy in Widows as a remorseless, vindictive killer, and here he channels that same implacable calm in any situation, such as when Hampton speaks to a group of Appalachian whites, transplants in Chicago, who rallied under the Confederate flag but also shared some progressive views with the Panthers (a meeting, and subsequent alliance, that occurred in real life).

Meanwhile, despite a strong performance by Stanfield, the script doesn’t give us enough insight into why O’Neal was willing to betray Hampton, to work with the FBI and against his own community, even when he gets clear evidence that the Panthers were creating positive change. His initial willingness to sign up as an informant, avoiding what the film says would have been six years in prison, is easy to grasp, but as the demands on him grow, and he’s more entrenched within the Panther organization, why wouldn’t he balk? Where’s the hesitation beyond what the script gives us in a phone call or two where he threatens to walk away and then changes his mind when reminded of the charges hanging over his head. Stanfield is very good at portraying anguish, speaking through clenched jaws with his head slightly bowed, but there’s something lacking in the character’s portrayal here – although even the actual interview O’Neal gave shortly before his death (the same day that Eyes on the Prize II aired) fails to provide a satisfactory explanation, as he seems unwilling to confront the consequences of his own actions. It’s at least plausible that director Shaka King and writers Keith and Kenneth Lucas made an active choice to leave O’Neal’s character vague because of the paucity of information on his motivations and feelings after the fact.

Between this film and the contemporaneous The Trial of the Chicago 7, it’s a strong year for ACAB in movies (or perhaps ACCAB, since both films involve gross misconduct by Chicago police), which speaks to much of the present mood in large portions of the country even though both events took place over 50 years ago. The idea of our own government executing a 21-year-old citizen in his sleep, where the police fired 90 shots and the Panthers in the apartment fired just one, should still shock and horrify us, and Judas and the Black Messiah doesn’t shy away from the corruption and police-state authoritarianism that allowed these events to take place – and the men behind them to walk away unscathed. It’s infuriating without feeling manipulative, unlike Sorkin’s film, because Judas’ script hews far more closely to the true story. It’s a film-world crime that The Trial of the Chicago 7 got a Best Picture – Drama nomination at the Globes, and a screenplay win, when Judas received neither, something I hope is remedied when the Oscars come out with their own slate of nominees in two weeks, with Kaluuya also deserving of a nod. Judas is an imperfect film in a few ways – I could have done without some of the inside-the-FBI stuff too – but between Kaluuya’s performance and the sheer power of the story behind it, it’s one of the year’s best.

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→ October 24, 2018
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The Cooking Gene.

Michael W. Twitty’s memoir The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South won the James Beard Foundation’s Book of the Year Award this spring, as well as a separate award for Writing. Combining Twitty’s own search for his genealogical and culinary roots with a long exploration of how the enslavement and forced migration of millions of Africans defined what we now think of as the cuisines of the United States, the Caribbean, and much of South America, The Cooking Gene wanders around the globe in prose and subject in a quest for meaning and identity through food.

Twitty is a fascinating character in his own book: born in Washington D.C. in 1977, Twitty is African-American, gay, and a convert to Judaism, and thanks to DNA testing and genealogical research, he can trace his ancestry back to white ancestors in the 1800s. He’s an advocate for black culinary history in this country, leading the “Southern Discomfort Tour” and giving a TED talk on the extent to which African foodways informed and defined American cooking, notably southern cuisine, but have been ignored or underrepresented in discussions of our culinary history. He has spoken, cooked, and served at plantations in the South that formerly housed slaves, and his knowledge of culinary history is largely the result of his own autodidactic nature. He began the project that eventually became The Cooking Gene in 2011, publishing the book in 2017 (via an imprint of HarperCollins, the same publishing house that produced Smart Baseball) to great acclaim.

The narrative in The Cooking Gene is nonlinear of necessity, something Twitty acknowledges in the closing section, which meant that for me it took a while to get wrapped up in any aspect of the story, but once he gets rolling on his own ancestry the book starts to resemble a more cohesive work – even though his heritage is anything but cohesive. Twitty traces his roots back to many places, including presumed white ancestor named Bellamy whose plantation he visits, to various tribes of west Africa including the Akan people of Ghana and Mende people of Sierra Leone, and to … Ireland, of all places, which apparently got him some amusing reactions when he visited and told locals why he was there.

Every trip branches out into multiple anecdotes, just as every new DNA test he takes – there’s one, AfricanAncestry.com, that provides more specific information on African DNA lineages – also leads to new digressions and stories. There’s a lot of slave history in The Cooking Gene, much of it physically brutal, but also much of it putting the lie to the myths of the benevolent slaveholders who sent their cooks to learn French cooking in Paris, but treated them just as badly when they returned, often using the education merely as a way to increase the resale value of their ‘property.’

The broader point of this book, however, is that all cuisines we think of as distinctly American or Caribbean derive heavily from west African cooking traditions, to the point where Twitty flatly accuses many white chefs, writers, and culinary historians of a form of appropriation. Even our words for many ingredients, like okra (from ??k??r??, an Igbo word, spoken in southeastern Nigeria), trace their etymologies back along the slave trade routes from the American South and Caribbean to western Africa, where such foods and the antecedents of dishes like gumbo go back for centuries. Beans and rice, whether the Creole red beans version or the Brazilian feijão or the hoppin’ john of the Carolinas, originate in west Africa. Fried chicken, considered a staple Southern food with Scottish origins, also has roots in west Africa, where the meat was heavily seasoned and fried in palm oil. Yams, peanuts (groundnuts), and watermelon all originated in different parts of Africa, and are also now considered part of the traditional cuisine of the American South. Twitty also offers the rare example of a culinary tradition traveling the other way, from the Americans to Africa, as nixtamalization, the process of treating corn (maize) with a strong alkaline solution to remove fungal toxins while increasing the nutritional value of the product.

Twitty connects his search for his genealogical roots with his exploration of his culinary roots by combining them into a single if meandering narrative around identity – that both types of roots were, in effect, stolen from black Americans when they were captured in Africa and brought against their will to the Americas. Thus, by reclaiming the culinary and gustatory heritage of black Americans, Twitty believes he and others can continue to rebuild their cultural and ethnic identities in a country that still attempts to marginalize and disenfranchise people of color.

I listened to the audiobook version of The Cooking Gene, read by Twitty himself, which was probably not the best decision. Twitty has an endearing, folksy delivery, but pauses constantly at strange points in sentences, even breaking up phrases where no breaks belong, which I found endlessly distracting. It’s not an occasional thing – he regularly does this, as if he’s turning to the next page – and I think I’d recommend the physical or ebook formats instead.

Next up: Ben Rhodes’ memoir of his years in the Obama White House, The World As It Is.

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→ August 9, 2018
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So You Want to Talk About Race.

When a TV channel decided to put together a panel on the Atlanta Braves’ 1990 teams on Hall of Fame weekend last month, they chose a set of criteria – members of the organization from that time period who were also inducted or selected for the Baseball Hall of Fame by the writers or one of the Hall’s committees – that produced a panel of six men, all of whom are white. The 1990s Braves were a typically diverse MLB team for the era; about 20-24% of their roster in any given year comprised players of color, some of whom were crucial to the team’s success. Fred McGriff’s arrival in a mid-1993 trade spurred one of the most furious second half runs we’ve ever seen, where Atlanta overtook San Francisco to win the division after falling nine games back in mid-July. David Justice’s home run accounted for the only run in Game 6 of the 1995 World Series, the only championship won by Atlanta in the 1990s. Andruw Jones became the youngest player ever to homer in a World Series game in 1996, then became the second player ever to homer in his first two World Series at bats, and his defense was a big part of Atlanta’s run of division titles for the rest of that decade. Given that those Atlanta teams depended on the contributions of players of color, and that diversity improves outcomes in education, workplace productivity, and decision-making, the choice of criteria that excluded all persons of color harmed the end product.

This panel took place right after I had finished listening to the audio version of Ijeoma Oluo’s book So You Want to Talk About Race, which is part polemic, part plea, and part guide for people of all political and philosophical beliefs who want to talk or even think about issues of race and diversity. She’s talking about racism, yes, but more broadly, she’s talking about race and how we can have better, more productive conversations about race, and racial bias, and similar types of bias like those around gender, place of origin, or sexual orientation. Ojuo is a queer black woman whose father is Nigerian, so she is able to fill the book with personal anecdotes, but she also draws substantially on others’ stories and on scholarship in the areas of racism and diversity.

The book’s chapters are provocative, by design, even though the subject matter within each often veers significantly from the initial questions. Chapters include “Why can’t I say the N-word?,” “Is police brutality really about race?,” and “Why can’t I touch your hair?,” all of which contain stories that range from appalling to horrifying, and grab the reader’s attention from the outset by the shocking nature of the titles. (The hair thing really flabbergasted me, but I asked two African-American women I know well enough to ask about the subject, and both said yes, they are frequently asked by strangers if someone can touch their hair – or have strangers touch their hair without asking.) I’m sure most people inclined to pick this book up would have the same reaction to such chapter titles as I did – because you’re not black, yes it is, and because it’s not your body – but Oluo uses those as departure points for broader questions of how society others people of color and ignores systemic or structural forces that continue to hold back nonwhite members of society on both social and economic fronts.

Other chapters get right to the meat of the subject, such as those on intersectionality and the school-to-prison pipeline, as well as the one titled “Why am I always being told to ‘check my privilege?'” Oluo is comfortable making the reader uncomfortable; she even acknowledges this by telling how often she’s been criticized for talking too much or too vocally about race and racial bias. Some people want to believe we live in a post-racial society or that we are raising our children to be “blind to color.” The systemic issues behind police brutality against citizens of color or the high discipline and incarceration rates of young black men are not gone, or going away any time soon, and Oluo explains just how pervasive they are (that black students are far more likely to be suspended than white students, three times as likely for boys and six times as likely for girls).

As for privilege, Oluo doesn’t hold back. You can see some of the same ideas that appear in her book in this long essay she wrote in March of 2017, in which she points out that people who ‘woke up’ to the existence of systemic and structural racism after the election of Donald Trump were, in fact, experiencing the result of privilege, because Americans of color deal with it and its residues every day. (Resumes with white-sounding names get more callbacks for interviews than those with nonwhite-sound names. Scare quotes may apply.) But Oluo’s message to white readers is clear: We are late, and we have contributed to the backsliding in the rights of minorities, but we can still help if we are willing to accept our own failings and those of society. She wrote in that essay to white readers, “you can help in ways that I cannot,” and the exhortation appears again and again in the book, with countless suggestions and calls to action, questions you can ask at work, at your children’s schools, of your elected representatives, in formal and informal social groups.

There is much work to be done, and it will require the cooperation and effort of populations who are not adversely affected by such biases, conscious or structural. If you have privilege and a platform, which I do, you can use it to speak out when you see active or passive bias – lack of representation, dog-whistling, micro-aggressions, stereotype threat. You can go to school board or PTA meetings and ask about the percentage of faculty members who are persons of color, or whether the curriculum accurately reflects nonwhite cultural experiences, or how students of color are disciplined – and whether that’s different from how white students are. You can push for laws that might reduce incidents of police violence against citizens of color, like requiring body cameras, or to change or repeal laws that do not mention race but have had a disparate impact on black communities, like fighting to decriminalize drug possession and to expunge records of those non-violent crimes. You can push for greater diversity at work, not for ‘tokenism,’ but because it will make you and your company more productive. Most of all, Oluo urges readers, you can’t just pretend this stuff isn’t real. It’s everywhere because it is writ into the fabric of our society, a society that is a mere six generations away from enslaving black people, two generations away from denying them basic civil rights, one generation away from open discrimination in the workplace, and still today in a world where Americans of color, especially those who are black, face insidious, subtle discrimination at the workplace, in church, on the streets, in schools, and anywhere else they might dare to be black.

So yes, I do want to talk about race. I want to try to do something to make the world better when it comes to race, bias, and diversity. I believe that world will make us all better off – we’ll be happier and more productive people. I also believe that I am privileged, and that I’ve benefited from the same kind of structures that Oluo points out have held back people of color, because most of these arenas are a zero-sum game – college admissions, employment, etc. If a black candidate is rejected for his/her race, or is seen as less qualified because s/he grew up in disadvantaged conditions and lacked access to better education or learning resources, the beneficiary will more than likely be a white person. Oluo’s book encouraged me to say something when I saw tweets about that panel – not that it was “racist” per se, but that it excluded persons of color, and thus was not representative – and to think more about how I can make some small difference when it comes to race and bias in my work and in my life.

One aside: There was one section of one chapter in So You Want to Talk About Race that rang false for me – the portion of the chapter on cultural appropriation (an uncomfortable read for me, as someone who consumes a lot of culture without thinking about this question) where Oluo discusses rap music. Rap originated as a black genre of music, just as jazz and the blues did, and was later co-opted by the musical mainstream, which has meant white artists also use the form, and white record executives and promoters and agents all profit from it. Whether a musical form, essentially rhythmic poetry, can truly be appropriated is a worthwhile question to debate; is it comparable to a structure like a fugue or an aria, a template to which the artist must then apply his or her own creative energies? Oluo lost me, however, with claims that this assimilation has led to white rappers finding easy success in the field despite showing less talent than black rappers who struggle to find an audience. The claim itself is entirely subjective; judging what rappers have more talent would probably bog down in an argument over what exactly defines talent in rap, whether it is technical skill or lyrical ingenuity or musical innovation or something else, but even more troubling to me is that the claim appears not to be true. A few white rappers have found enormous commercial and critical success. Eminem is the best example, but he was the protégé of Dr. Dre (who is African-American), and Dre produced Eminem’s biggest albums and released them through his Aftermath imprint. (For example, The Marshall Mathers LP was produced by Dre, The 45 King, Mel-Man, and the Bass Brothers; three of those five men are African-American.) You could count the number of white rappers to have significant commercial success on two hands – the Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice, Macklemore – while African-American rappers, many of whom seem (to my subjective ears) to have had success because of who produced them rather than their own talents, continue to dominate the singles and album charts. I understand what Oluo was trying to say here, but I don’t think the reality of the marketplace bears out her specific criticisms.

Next up: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport.

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→ May 19, 2018
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Locking Up Our Own.

James Forman, Jr., was a public defender in DC for six years, right after he clerked for Sandra Day O’Connor, and encountered the results of two decades of disastrous policies in the criminal justice system of the nation’s capital, many of which led to differential policing and mass incarceration of the city’s black residents. He discussed the history and causes of this system in his 2017 book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which lays much of the blame for the high incarceration rates on policies embraced and advocated by black community leaders themselves. The book won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction this past April.

Forman’s parents met while working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (known colloquially as “snick”) during the civil rights movement, which he says spurred his decision to move off the career track into the public defender’s office, eventually moving from there into teaching at Georgetown’s and now Yale’s law schools. Where the 2016 documentary The 13th laid all of the blame for the high rates of black incarceration in the United States on two-plus centuries of racism and white domination – a view that is largely justified – Forman’s book lays bare the role that leaders in black communities played in supporting those policies. Foremost among them: Fighting early progressive efforts to decriminalize possession and personal use of small amounts of marijuana.

Washington DC didn’t achieve some semblance of home rule until 1973, and Congress still holds the power to overturn some laws passed by the DC council and could even, in theory, dismiss the city’s council at will. This gives the city’s residents a status not too much greater than those of territories like Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands, although I suppose if two hurricanes knocked out power to DC for several months the federal government would be a little quicker to address the problem. DC’s population is nearly half African-American, and the high rates of incarceration and different policing strategies in its neighborhoods with higher black populations have had a severe effect on the city’s economy, including continuing high crime rates. Forman explains how DC got into this mess, going back to the end of the civil rights movement and explaining how it was actually a white progressive council member who tried to decriminalize marijuana possession, but found himself opposed by black church leaders, Nation of Islam leaders, and even some black city council members, all of whom ended up working together to scotch the proposal (which may not have passed muster with Congress anyway). When a similar proposal arose a few years later to create mandatory minimum sentencing to fight rising crime rates in DC – themselves at least in part the result of the crack cocaine epidemic – black community leaders were all for the new law, responding to residents’ concerns about violent street crime and home invasions, but also enforcing a longstanding moral viewpoint that African-Americans could defeat stereotypes about them by, in essence, behaving better. If DC cracked down on even trivial crimes, even misdemeanors, the theory went, it would improve the quality of life for all DC residents while also working against white politicians and community leaders who worked to disenfranchise and/or limit the economic mobility of people of color.

None of this worked, as Forman writes, and instead helped fuel a new DC underclass – as it did in other cities, including Detroit, the US city with the highest proportion of residents who are African-American – of blacks, mostly men, who were now de facto unemployable because they had criminal records. Such ex-convicts also could find themselves ineligible for certain government assistance programs, turned down for housing, and even unable to vote. Forman, as a public defender, worked with many such clients, but, in his own telling, he was struggling upstream against a system that simultaneously limited the advancement of African-Americans in its police force and judiciary and also aggressively pursued policies that further hindered the black community. He touches on greater arrest rates in black wards of DC versus white, the long-term harm of “stop and frisk” policies (formally known as a Terry stop, and of dubious constitutionality, especially when opponents can show disparate impact by race of police targets), and the formal and informal obstacles that efforts at community improvement can face from municipal police forces – even when officers and administrators are themselves African-American.

Locking Up Our Own is a sobering look at how we got here, but perhaps short on prescriptions for undoing forty years of damage. Marijuana decriminalization is finally happening, although it’s driven by white stoners and libertarians rather than black citizens and provides no procedure for vacating past convictions for trivial possession cases. Stop and frisk was ruled unconstitutional in NYC in 2013, but our current President and Attorney General have both explicitly endorsed the practice. Mandatory minimums remain popular, in large part because they serve “tough on crime” candidates well – and who would dare to stand up and say that criminals deserve shorter sentences? A path to greater African-American enfranchisement and sovereignty in majority black neighborhoods would likely be impossible in any system where higher level, white-dominated government bodies can invalidate city or state policies. Any change that starts at the bottom will fail without a change at the top.

Next up: Claude M. Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do.

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