Is Black Art a Force for Black Liberation with Jemma DeCristo

Speaker 1: Welcome, everybody, to Millennials Are Killing Capitalism Live. It is good to be with you today on this Tuesday. Um, at this time, I'm looking forward to this discussion. I really enjoyed reading this book. So a couple things up front, of course, like, share, subscribe, make sure more people saw this, see this. We are streaming on the Millennials platform. We're also streaming on Everything Else with Jay because this conversation kind of spans both. Like, it could go to Everything Else with Jay, but also Gemma is multi-time guest and a good friend. And also, as we'll talk about, she doesn't use counterinsurgency frameworks within her book, but there's ways that this conversation, I think, dovetails with some of the stuff that we've done in terms of those conversations as well. And so, yeah, so looking forward to this. For folks who don't know, Gemma is, of course, the author of The Aesthetic Character of Blackness, which is now out in the world. We don't have to say that as a soon-to-come book anymore. It's on Duke University Press. You can also download it for free. It's open access. Some people had some issues downloading it. It seems like it works on some browsers and not on others, so try them. But the link is in the show description for that. She is also a frequent contributor to the podcast Sad Francisco, which she will be repping heavily today, and an organizer in San Francisco. So, Gemma, it's good to be with you again. Looking forward to this conversation.

Jemma DeCristo: Hey, I am repping.

Speaker 1: You are. You got the hat and the shirt.

Jemma DeCristo: And the shirt. I know I'm very, very branded up.

Speaker 1: Yeah, we need to— it— all I know is, um, that we need to at some point finally get Millennials merch, uh, because we just— we've been doing this for 8 years and we still don't have anything.

Jemma DeCristo: So, um, I'm surprised it doesn't exist.

Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just too intimidating. Every time I think about it, I'm like, I don't— I don't know where to even start with this. Um, all right. So before we get going though, you wanted to plug a mutual aid effort today, which you've done, I think, every time that you've been on, which is wonderful. So do you want to say a little bit about this group and I can share their Chefs page, which the link for this is in the show description as well?

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, this is Dahoon Mutual Aid Collective. Dahoon, you can see it, Mutual Aid Collective. It's Run by, uh, Gazawis, and, uh, both in occupied Gaza, and then it's also run by folks outside, of course, you know, because it's hard to get money inside. And they have been doing really incredible work since the beginning of the genocide. And, you know, it goes right to people. It's, you know, I don't— I'm not someone who thinks like, oh, we have to be so worried about getting scammed or these kinds of things. But, you know, for people that do have that— Yeah. Skepticism, whatever. This is all their work. It's really incredible, important, immediate mutual aid work that sustains folks in Gaza. And it's you know something we can do, especially this for those that celebrate holiday season, where you know it feels increasingly empty to buy things, which maybe it always did. And it's it's a really great way to support folks in Gaza and organizers elsewhere that are involved in it, that are doing some incredible work and. Yeah, that's— please donate and share. You can always repost or retweet or re-up on your social media. We appreciate it.

Speaker 1: Awesome. Yeah, no, thank you for doing that. So I really like the way that you start this book out, and I think it's a good place for us to start this conversation. So you start with Oakland post-George Floyd, right? So summer of 2020. And like you lay this out in the preface, which is called Black Art Against Black People, and this section actually reminded me quite a bit of some of Too Black's reflections. I think he writes some of it in the book Laundering Black Rage along with Rasool Moat. They co-authored that. But Too Black specifically was, you know, he's a poet, right? And so he's been in the art scene in Indianapolis.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: And he just— I remember him noticing and talking about how much, you know, there were kind of like these city gigs that were coming up.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: And a lot of money, not a lot of money like, but money being channeled to Black artists, right, around him. And seeing the way that even sometimes producing like artwork that You know, has a revolutionary aesthetic to it and all of this, which that's maybe a contradiction in terms, but we'll talk about that. But basically, you know, this is one of the things that drove him to want to write Laundering Black Rage, right? It's like, what are the mechanisms that are going on here? And so you writing about the same kind of thing, you know, thinking about it in also really related to real estate, which I thought was really interesting. And that's a big piece of your book is kind of the role of speculation and all of this and land and buildings and all of this. But I remember Too Black kind of reflecting upon it as both confusing and diffusing in certain ways.

Jemma DeCristo: Right.

Speaker 1: politically confusing for folks, but also diffusing people, like people who might be involved in resistance or protests or organizing, like now are doing these art gigs and stuff like that. So say a little bit about what you saw in Oakland in that moment that relates to the theme of this book.

Jemma DeCristo: Sure. That's a great place to start. It's kind of where, to me, the book starts, even though it's not where my research started. I mean, My research, you know, it goes back to grad school, and it is more of the historical parts you see in the book. But the contemporary was very much part of being an artist, or, you know, reluctantly, increasingly reluctantly being an artist. And we can— I'll show a picture of the physical book, which you said is available. I don't want my background to blur it out on— yeah, there's multiple austerity. You have to cross-brand. So, There, there was actually— I don't know if we can— I think you're— I mean, you're probably allowed to put the pictures if you're able to. Sorry, we didn't talk about this, um, because I took them. Um, they're not—

Speaker 1: Yeah, I can, I can pull those up. Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, that might, that might help folks just because this is the most visual part of the book, I think, for the most part. And what I noticed is immediately following— so Oakland in particular, very similar to a lot of other cities across the United States, was subject to these really, frankly, like, kind of autonomous moments of revolt on, I wanna say, like, maybe it was May 28th. I forget what I say in the book, 29th. And this was obviously following the state murder of George Floyd. And it, not long after, you see this, some of these photos are taken in, I wanna say, September, but I noticed it actually in June. So probably a few days after, maybe a week.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: After this night where, you know, very famous, there's a lot of probably footage online, I've never really checked, but like people broke into car dealerships and took cars and, you know, it was very much a big, you know, depending, moment of revolt. And I think, you know, obviously a lot of these got mischaracterized or not mischaracterized but characterized as riots, whatever we want to think about the utility. You know, we want to have like riot respectability politics, I guess. But I think there was an obvious political exhaustion that I also talk about and the product of kind of what was specifically happening in downtown Oakland, which we can go into. But in June, after this night, which I think, you know, if you're in a city, I'm sure this was true of Philly, that had kind of one of these nights of revolt or perhaps extended periods of revolt, as is the case with Oakland, it lasted more than a few days, you started to see a lot of banks and businesses downtown, what would normally have been, for example, like I think of during Occupy, I lived here this long and longer, you know, they would put plywood over their windows so that it was like, you know, we expect people to smash our windows, we're Citibank, or we're, you know, in the case you showed the picture, a yoga studio in downtown, right, or we're Starbucks or some major corporate chain, you know, kind of going back to the WTO maybe as a sort of immediate, relatively immediate moment being, you know, in the last Yeah. 30 years. And so they would cover them with plywood. But what I noticed this time, and it's the first time I've noticed it, I'm not— it's possible it happened during Occupy, but I don't remember that being the case, is that a lot of these businesses, from multinational banks to presumably local, smaller gentrification businesses like a yoga studio, to what I was particularly focused on, the empty, voluminous empty real estate that occupies downtown Oakland, They were putting plywood, but it was covered with art. I mean, for lack of a better word. And we could call it Black art, and we can talk about what, you know, maybe we'll talk about this too. I know you all did like Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, and like Cedric Robinson's like kind of like talking about what constitutes Black film or what constitutes Black art. And I could also talk about it in the context of the way the book is defining Black art to an extent that it gives it a positive definition. But you saw all these kinds of images, some of which A lot of which adopted the sort of radical, or at least, you know, fairly radical in the case of this defunct one, and aesthetics of like graffiti, of Black cultural imagery, particularly local stuff. There is a very— we could talk exhaustively about the— I would actually call it kind of artification, but we could also say representation of the Black Panthers in the Bay and how that's kind of used too, right? So you see like a Black Panther Holding a BLM flag as if to be like, this connects the history of the Black Panthers in, you know, '60s, '70s to this moment right now, right? That's kind of— I mean, someone got into an argument with me about, one of the editors, if that was a jaguar. And I was like, well, actually, panthers can have spots. Anyway, I mean, it would seem kind of random. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 1: No, that's true. I remember that, that, you know, panthers have spots. They're just You know, hard to see.

Jemma DeCristo: Yes, exactly. You didn't— that was like one of those pointing your head memes, like, wake, you know. Uh, so there, you know, that felt like a very— it— in what I think you used the word you're talking about, Too Black, talking about it being confusing or diffusing. It's like you saw this if you were just a passerby, and that's how I kind of tried to approach it, because when I first saw it, I was like, oh, this is weird. And then, you know, I was like Okay, so is what's happening an attempt at kind of— and you saw people try this in 2020, I mean, maybe kind of famously in Portland, for example, of all places. I unfortunately grew up in Portland. We share the Pacific Northwest heritage. And, you know, kind of occupying, like, is this going to be people occupying? And we could problematize that word, but occupying an area, is it people trying to come up with a kind of protest zone or, you know, Yeah. Leaving aside the merits of that or not, that's what I kind of thought was happening, but there were no people. It was just the murals, you know, it was like there— after a while, there were projects that began, and usually, you know, they were in different parts of the Bay. I don't want to say these things weren't happening, as I referred to in the beginning of the first page of the book, but there was essentially this depopulated part of downtown that had all these murals, kind of, I would say, like an excessive amount relative to the people you saw, you know, it was like there were more murals and images of Black people than there were of actual Black people. And that struck me as a very immediate way to understand this kind of moment and a react— both a reaction to this moment, but also kind of what had always been happening and what provoked this, you know, to also kind of think of it in those complex terms, perhaps dialectical or negatively dialectical, depending on how we want to look at it. Like, is it—

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: In a way, the, the plywood was obviously meant to block people from breaking the glass, but then the question was kind of like, why do they need the images? And the images were kind of, you know, these are not targeting people's, for lack of a better word, kind of material capacities, you know, like whether that be a kind of project of folks going out at night and smashing the glass of banks or whatever, which a lot of, you know, the anarchist folks do. And others, autonomous folks. But it was like, this is obviously meant to target your, you know, for lack of a better word, kind of imaginative space, right? Like, this is meant to be like, oh, this space has been— it was an acknowledgement that the space has been transformed, but it was acknowledgement that space has been transformed only to reimpose the reason it needed to be transformed in the first place. And it did so through the kind of I wouldn't even just call it— and this is something the book also pushes against a lot— just the appearance or simulacrum of Black art. It was doing it in a very targeted, I think, kind of deeper way that is— and I talk about this a little bit, and I think it sounds like in the other book, Too Black gets at this— of like materially funded way of getting at Black art. So to the extent that, like a lot of the US, but particularly let's say the Bay Area, has an extensive investment in funding Black art, not to suggest that this is— that's any kind of radical gesture, is debatable, right? There's not a lot of money made available for Black artists. So the fact that a great amount of city money and, you know, also through corporations, and it's something I talk a little bit about but don't exclusively want to talk about, is like institutional funding, which I think could also go to the counterinsurgents angle of it, right? And we'll probably talk about that, maybe we'll talk about that again when we talk about the last chapter, But I thought ultimately there were Black artists and artists who make Black art, you know, and again, how can one distinguish, especially with this representative kind of project, who decided this was a good idea? And whether that means it was a good idea like, I'm getting money, I'm, you know, getting a little bit of money, kind of like you just referred to, or they thought, hell yeah, this is in the spirit of this moment of 2020. Yeah. And it says a lot that there is both this kind of structural problem of— I don't quite frame it this way, but I'll speak in this way just for a moment— using Black art, because I don't think this opposes the essence of what Black art is, but using Black art in a way to neutralize, and you could use the words confuse, dilute, water down, The kind of projects, and I would say ultimately life of Black people, right? So it is a very overt moment of where Black art is being used to quite literally hold Black people back. Like, before you throw that whatever chair— no, it's not a chair, but, you know, like, if you throw that rock or that brick, to use the kind of Stonewall chronotrope, think of— wait, you can't throw a brick through a Black Panther. That's— Right. Our history, that's our lineage. And you can't throw— I think the interesting one is you also saw the Defund Police, which is like very much in a size— a style of graffiti. Down the street, I didn't— I don't think this ended up in the book, there was also this luxury condo that had very bespoke graffiti. I don't know if we'll get more of it. Yeah, like, I mean, the We Can't Breathe, that might have been done by a person that night, it's hard to tell, or someone who came by And it's also— that also kind of creates— adds to that confusion argument that I think I'm— I kind of embrace in the book, and that I'm like, well, we don't actually need to tease out the entirety of the confusion because this could have been done that— after that night, because obviously the plywood wasn't up the night it happened. I don't remember, I don't think so. But the effect is very similar, that it can be turned into this kind of depopulating project. And that's a good example of graffiti. Yeah. So it was like— What does it mean? And even if that's someone who's a local graffiti artist, it's kind of like, what does it mean that they're like, oh, and there's an acknowledgement in that gesture that this is as far as we can go. We can have a surface to make our representations on. In other words, if we were to go back to the 19th century, and we'll probably talk about this, right, we can see ourselves reflected in the world that is annihilating us. And I think that's what I would define as something like Black art, right? Like, as we can see ourselves reflected. And that goes back a long time to the, you know, I think someone like Adorno would say the the reflective conception of an artwork that goes back to the 19th century in Europe. I don't think it's— it's not something Black people don't have because we have a kind of different, for lack of a better word, sort of cultural origin than non-Black people in the West, you know. It's like we very much see this right there in the kind of material project of luxury real estate development, which preceded the George Floyd night and unquestionably led up to it.

Speaker 1: Right.

Jemma DeCristo: You have a city that— Oakland and San Francisco and the Bay in general— that is, like, antagonizing and attacking Black folks and displacing them, which we should call a form of attack and violence, for the expense of vacant real estate property, which is for the production of real estate values, right? Like, to speculate the land. I don't know if we want to— we could talk more about speculation, but maybe kind of briefly before I go on and on and on, is I think we can see the kind of joining point of 2 forms of speculation, which is the speculation of capital that is in— and I'm sure other people live in other cities, especially like Philly, you see this, I'm sure, tons of luxury condos. You can see the speculative value or the speculative production of vacant real estate and the speculative imagination of so-called Black art right against that surface, right? One is about Protecting that space of value that loses the value to a great extent, especially if it happens more often, people break all the glass. And then you see something that attains its value from producing, for lack of a better word, Black people's reflection in the glass, right? So that was to me like a really overt, one could even say material point of—

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: overlap or kind of like a joining point for these two, what people might think of superficially as— or not even superficially, you might just think of even historically as opposed projects, right? And that they might go, oh well, Black art has never been about or centered or caused the extermination of Black life. But I think that is something that made me realize, oh no, that's not actually true. And it's not just this moment, this has happened before. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll get into some of the historical background because I think it's really interesting. I mean, this is one of the things I really enjoy about the book is that I think there was something about that 2020 moment that felt quite new in some ways in terms of the ways that representations were being I think maybe it was just the capacity that they had to have Amazon Prime send out solidarity to Black people and these kinds of things.

Jemma DeCristo: The videos.

Speaker 1: Yeah. But so I think there can be a way, like, we want to go back, and that is something that You know, Too Black and Rasool Muwat do in their book as well, is to like kind of like, okay, like let's, let's go back and think about this. But they're not doing it so much from art and aesthetic, right, in the same way that you are. And I will go there in a second because I do want to go to kind of Frederick Douglass next. But one of the things that I really appreciated, you kind of, you know, laid it all out there. But in the—

Jemma DeCristo: In the—

Speaker 1: In that preface, you're really talking about how Like, one of the things you write is, quite deceptively, these murals were not for us. They were against us. They were for the protection of empty buildings that we could never live in. They were banks that flourished from making our communities' homes and lives unlivable, stores that we, like Benko Brown, could never shop in without being followed, harassed, arrested, murdered. These Black representations expressed an affliction that cohabitated with Oakland's arting, our resounding and our imaging increasingly liberate the aesthetic. They do not liberate us. And there's other points where you talk about this, of just this notion of that, yeah, it defends the value of the space, and it's a space that Black people can't populate.

Jemma DeCristo: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1: And interestingly too, I think at some point in the book too, you kind of talk about the figure of the Black artist, right, as also someone who maybe could populate that space as an individual, right? Like, you know, if we're talking about somebody who's super successful, right? But that's not something that's going to, you know, allow the masses of Black people to—

Jemma DeCristo: Right.

Speaker 1: benefit from in any kind of way. Well, let's talk about— let's go back because I really do want to talk about the Frederick Douglass thing. Well, Sure. before we get that, I do have one other question. So I'm interested in when this project started for you. Was it inspired— I know you wrote that preface, but was it inspired by that moment, or was it something you were already working on and it just kind of took another level of analysis as you kind of experienced that moment in Oakland. And, you know, I know you also write in the book about being a musician and your experiences with that over time. So I'm just curious, like, how much— like, when it started, kind of, and, you know, and like how it refined over time.

Jemma DeCristo: That's a great question. Yeah, I mean, this was— it was definitely closer to the latter, you know. It was I had some of the research done about some of this, like the chapter on George W. Johnson, I had some analysis of, which we could also talk about how that relates to Frederick Douglass maybe too. I had, I think, yeah, I definitely had written a version of the Ma Rainey chapter, which I think you have some questions about later too. And there are probably some version of these Before 2020, but the sort of framing— and they all got completely rewritten, I'll say that— but some of the framing, the framing really comes from the contemporary, or at the time contemporary moment of 2020 and kind of after. I mean, in some ways we're still in that moment. Maybe that's also something to discuss is like, are we still in that moment or how are we still in that moment? So it came from that, and then it also came from a long time before any of that stuff was written.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: In— gosh, I mean, or before grad school, but also especially in grad school, living in San Francisco and trying to be an artist, and specifically a Black artist, specifically really being like, you know, claiming that mantle and being like, you know, can we develop spaces, collectives of Black artists that make Black art? Which, you know, was never interested in— this is why I also kind of don't do that in the book— a positive definition of the content of the art.

Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.

Jemma DeCristo: But was about Black art as a project on some level that was for Black people. And that for is, of course, in some ways also the— as you read in that line a bit ago, the complexity and contest— point of contestation for the book now. But what I found as a— you know, I'm not gonna say successful, but as a Black artist in the Bay, although to the extent that you could be a successful artist in the Bay, I suppose. It's not New York. It's not LA.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: Usually people who are successful move to those cities, or, you know, maybe Europe, although I don't think that'll happen anymore, uh, for a lot of reasons. Uh, so I found that, you know, it's also helpful to contextualize. This is not in the book, I don't think, in terms of in a broad way, but I'm sure you've had people talk about it. It was kind of the— this is over 10 years ago, over 10 years ago. There's also kind of the Obama moment. It's the Beyoncé moment, I would say, was a big part of it, right? So it really is this moment where Black people broadly, maybe in response to the 2008 financial crisis slash Obama, are like brought to be or made to be reinvested in capitalism in a way that perhaps they would less have been, you know, had the kind of lessons of 2008 been sat with or something like that in a broader way. So you see, I felt, or I saw a lot of people who, you know, I'd approach other Black artists, people I worked with in some cases, or took kind of classes with. I took a lot of classes in different mediums and a lot of music. I did a lot of experimental music and like computer music. Yeah, there's a long history of experimental music in the Bay. And I kind of always wanted to form something like that, like a collective of Black experimental musicians. But— Yeah. What I found is that there was kind of this very ever-present austerity logic that was kind of framing the opposite, right? Like, so people had this very like, fuck you, pay me, your best revenge is your paper, all these kinds of like sort of sloganized things that people maybe now think of that moment. I think people are, especially younger people, are probably more critical of those, but that was very much the milieu in which I came up as a Black artist and It was very frustrating to talk to other Black artists who were also Black people and be like, hey, you know, we should do something for this, you know, community that's being displaced. And it was like, well, that's not really— you're not getting paid to do that, and no one is going to see it who's in the art world. You know, you're not going to get any career progress from it. That's okay. You know, if that's the only way you even need to make a check, da da da. You know, there's some— I can on some level be like, that's fine. You make art for money. The thing I found frustrating, even more frustrating than that, was people taking— Black artists taking gigs for massive corporations, particularly tech corporations, because this is also the, you know, 2010s, 2011, 2012, 2015, etc., the tech— second tech boom, which has been, I think, probably more devastating to the Bay Area than the first tech boom. And a lot of Black artists, a lot of whom were transplants but some of whom grew up here, you know, it— there's different kinds of I would say like kind of ignorance around tech amongst Black art. I kind of found that to be the case. Some would be people here that had weirdly grown up here and never sort of understood or been exposed to tech. It was kind of just like operated in a different part of the city than them, maybe the same way like Wall Street would for people in New York. Like it just didn't— they didn't really understand what it was. And then I think there were also a lot of transplants who more insidiously probably were like, oh, I don't care. I'm not gonna live here forever. I'm trying to make it. I'm, you know, I'm gonna move to New York or LA to have an art career. And so They would take any gig any corporation, any tech company threw at them, and like, you know, to make murals in the lobby of like Twitter or Instagram or one of these corporations, like massive surveillance corporations that are so— you know, now I think again people are more aware of this— that were the reasons we had, you know, more and more Black people being displaced from the Bay Area, not just San Francisco, but, you know, Particularly San Francisco, but also Oakland. I mean, Oakland experienced, I think, way more than the first dot-com boom, a really dramatic force of displacement and gentrification and financialization, all these things that really destroyed a lot more Black life. And I kind of allude to that in the beginning of the book. And so it was also funny, I've always lived in San Francisco, I've never lived in Oakland, but I would have to come at other Black artists who lived in Oakland for doing this. And I was like, you know, you can hate— because a lot of their complaints would be like, there's no Black people in San Francisco. And I was like, wait, what do you think that is? You know, I mean, not that there are none, I mean, I would push against that, but I get it. There's a lot less. And that happened in the '90s under Willie Brown and under the first dot-com boom. So, like, I would say that to them, like, you can't— you doing a mural for Uber or whatever, one of those companies, you're helping turn Oakland, which you view as this kind of Black cultural mecca that made you move here, and gentrify it from whatever, you know, college, Wesleyan or— I don't know where, you know, whatever.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: You're taking part in the very kind of thing you're criticizing. But I think because there was this kind of— to pick on the murals earlier— this kind of memorialized version of Blackness in Oakland, particularly in the Black Panthers, but also that kind of— and maybe we'll talk about it in the end when we talk about the last chapter— kind of the Afrocentric moment, which I think of as totally counterinsurgent, if you want to use the word counterinsurgency, and cultural nationalist moment, which I think is also A big point of criticism. We could talk about that when we talk about Baraka. Because there was that kind of long enduring history, people didn't really think— other Black people didn't— it was almost like they didn't think there were still Black people. It kind of felt like there is Black art, there are not Black people. In other words, I'm accountable to a kind of Black art, perpetuating it as a Black artist, but I'm not really accountable to the Black people who live here. And I was like, no, this is what's happening to the Black people. They're, you know, They're getting priced out of apartments so landlords can put people from Twitter in there who pay 3 times the rent or whatever. And no one, you know, and so that created a lot of the context that we started this with, with 2020. It was like, of course, a lot of people were fucking pissed that this, you know, all these mega corporations, including, of course, banks and all the usual suspects, were used to turn Oakland into a real estate project, a get-rich-quick scheme, a—

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: a place totally depopulated, significantly more depopulated of Black folks. And I think Black artists played a role in that in at least those 2 ways. One, that they didn't really want to do anything to fight gentrification directly. And I have a friend who lives here, lived here in the '90s and got into fights with people around that with San Francisco. And they also, they didn't want to do anything to stop it, but the fact that they also wanted to do stuff to aid it is where I really was like, this is where it's, you know. So I was very disillusioned with that and I got It was very— it eventually, it just was not possible to form a Black arts collective. I realized that kind of had those politics that were a little, actually a little more in line with a lot of the more radical arts organization, Black arts organizations in the '60s. So that's how it kind of came out of that. And yeah, a lot of— I could talk about, there's a lot of citation or paraphrasing of the kinds of excuses and this idea, which I think is maybe still exists, of being paid in exposure. And a lot of Black artists were like, oh, you know, Twitter's not gonna pay me much, or this company.

Speaker 1: Right.

Jemma DeCristo: The startup, you know, for example, which is also part of gentrification, is not going to pay me much, but they're paying me in exposure. They're going to, you know, put me on their website, or I'll be able to perform in front of these people, or networking. It's a good networking opportunity. And it's like, fuck your networking. It's not more important than your money. But it says a lot that that was more important to them than a kind of mythic Black people that I guess don't exist in them, ironically, in their very espousal of a kind of populated Black art.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: You know, sometimes visually, sometimes representationally, art that, you know, represented Black people. So that's kind of where it came from in a very basic way. And the more esoteric ideas around Blackness and things started to cohere around that very real experience, if you like, for that kind of regardless of the content of a lot of this art, this was happening across that, the form. Yeah.

Speaker 1: That's really interesting. So let's see. So yeah, so let's go back. Let's talk about Frederick Douglass, who's interesting, like, because I, you know, I had never thought of Frederick Douglass as an artist, right, for one thing, or musician, right? Because you're talking in specific to him related to music too.

Jemma DeCristo: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1: There's a lot of reasons it's interesting. I mean, for one reason, yeah, obviously you're going way back, so it's not like a kind of, okay, let's trace the lineage of this from, you know, through the 20th century or through the— you know, you do get to the Black— you do look at, in particular, the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, which we'll get to later on, as well as some other, you know, kind of in-between moments. But You know, here you're really grappling with, you know, we have to deal with slavery, we have to deal with, you know, manumission, which I like that you use that term as opposed to, you know, abolition, right? And the development of early commercial spaces for Black artists and musicians, right? And this coming, of course, on the heels of white minstrelsy to a degree as well, or actually going on in the same eras in certain ways. And it takes us out of the question of, which I've asked this question before of folks, and it's not a very good question, of why don't we have good protest songs anymore? Or what happened to us?

Jemma DeCristo: Right.

Speaker 1: Why can't we produce Curtis Mayfields today? These sort of questions. And I think when I've asked those questions, people often give me the kind of like, well, the movements and the politics and the organizations that exist in an era, they produce the Curtis Mayfields. So it's the struggles and it's the material conditions and it's the discussions that are going on at the time that produce something like that. Right. And I think that is interesting, and I think there's something to that as well. But you're kind of looking at the beginning of— you're also grappling with new forms of even, again, the speculation of like, okay, if slavery, if chattel slavery is no longer going to be the economic way that we extract from Black folks, what are some of the new ways that that's going to work? So yeah, let's start with Douglass. And I'm just interested in you talking about what you— first, what you're talking about with Douglass so people know the context of what among Douglass's work you're referencing, but some of those dynamics that you're looking at in that very early period. Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, so it's also helpful too in light of your earlier question is like how the book started. And so I actually in grad school was looking at a lot of the origins of the beginning of the recording of Black music and Black people. And, you know, again, there can be argued to be a kind of split between those, but also lots of— a lot of points of overlap. And so Frederick Douglass, as I kind of became more invested in, like, okay, looking purely at, in simple terms, kind of like the first records, if you will, you know, the wax cylinders, which is what I talk about in the next chapter, of Black musicians or singers or different kinds of performers. I was like, well, what about before that? You know, like, what occasions recording? And of course, I had kind of the historical genealogy of, like, the phonograph, you know, and you can look at similar technologies and I talk about that a little bit. But then I also thought kind of like, well, what about Black music then? Is it just the case that Black music incidentally gets caught up in the phonograph? And it's, you know, that would be one argument that people kind of make when they're like, oh, technology is neutral, it's just what people do with it or what people, let's say, capture in the case of that. But the more I looked into the early writings on Black music, which I think there is a book, I'm forgetting the name of it, by John Cruz that I cite a couple times that talks about it as beginning in Frederick Douglass's writing. And that really, for the most part in the US, but this kind of branches out to the broader, you know, slave owning and to some manumitted world, 'cause we could say like Britain, you know, and countries that manumitted their slaves a bit earlier. But, you know, you have a question later about Brazil too, which obviously—

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: You know, in many myths. And I don't want to say— I'm not a scholar of Brazilian slavery, so I don't— I can talk about it a little bit, but it, you know, many myths much later than the US, or somewhat later. So Frederick Douglass was, for me, interesting because he's such a seminal figure in how Black music becomes a cultural object, how it becomes Black music, honestly.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: Because, you know, before that, to a greater degree, particularly from the perspective of white people, and you could even in a lot of cases say the Black bourgeoisie, which did exist, right? You know, even go back to the 18th century, Black— the primary musical representation of Black folks you saw, or the kind of 2 predominant ones, one was the, you know, broadly dehumanizing structure of the minstrel stage, right? Which again was white artists in blackface, which was something people knew, you know, a lot of the posters, and I think I put one in here, there's a bunch in books like Eric Lott's Love and Theft has this poster, there's a bunch of other where it shows the white artists and then it shows their Black personas, right? So you get this as a person in the, you know, in the 19th century going to one of these shows, let's say the early 19th century, you get this depiction that it's not necessarily— for some it may be, but it's not necessarily that These are real Black people. Quite to the opposite, it's kind of like, this is what we can do to Black people, you know. It's kind of an extension of the logic of mastery, to use that, I suppose, like the term from Saidiya Hartman, that it's a way— it's a way of liberating mastery. I talk about it, right? Like, so the minstrel stage is a way— again, we often, I think, as you highlighted why I use the word manumission, we mischaracterize this moment leading up to the 1860s. Yeah. As emancipation or abolition. And I think what actually happens is the forms of domination that are sealed inside the, you know, theoretically unique property form of the enslaved are actually liberated, right? Now, for example, you know, you've had a lot about prisons on the show, so that's an obvious example, right, where more and more people are subject to these forced labor regimes. That were to a degree unique. I mean, they exist in other places, but unique to this chattel slavery institution. And so that, you know, I think that the, the kind of liberation of mastery, again, imaginatively so, of the minstrel stage, where white people who are, you know, more closely you could kind of say like sort of middle class, there are some poor working— there are a lot of working-class white people for sure, especially as it goes on. who can attend the minstrel stage but who could themselves never own slaves, right, never afford to own slaves, can partake in this kind of— and someone like Saidiya Hartman talks about this in Scenes of Subjection, I think— can take part in this kind of not just effective but kind of, as I talk about it aesthetically, imaginative reproduction of mastery. And so the question from the minstrel stage is kind of also like, well, if there is this imaginative reproduction going on, What is it producing? What is it, you know, what is mastery if it's just in your head, you know, or something like that? Not that to speak— complicate the imagination as just in our heads, but— and so that is what is a very predominant form of music. And, you know, is it Black music? Technically, no. A lot of the, you know, instrumentation and things are taken from, you know, Irish folk musics and other sort of European folk musics. It does, you know, it does use things like the banjo and instruments that have their origins in Africa and with African, you know, enslaved African folks in the New World. But it's very clearly a— the other side of it you have is the burgeoning abolitionist perspective, which is, to the extent that it's looking at sound, is looking at the sounds of the enslaved, right? And it's mostly looking at them as Right. So the minstrel stage was— the argument was, oh, Black people are happy being under our governance. And I mean, the word governance is very important there, which again goes to the, you know, already kind of flagging the question, what does it— what does this imaginative product produce? It produces a form of governance, whether that's the self, the governance of the self, which I think someone like Saidiya Hartman talks about it. So, you know, this was the kind of argument, if you will, of the minstrel stage, that, oh, Black people are actually happy if not happy, kind of like a horse pulling a cart, they're better off, you know, or a dog with a master, they're better off under this kind of governance and labor regime that is plantation slavery. A lot of the abolitionists, of course, which is, you know, an increasingly bigger group but starts as a smaller group, are hearing the sounds of the enslaved, you know, similar— it's a similar reservoir to what minstrelsy claims to be. emerging from, right? It's, you know, it's white people being like, I heard them do this, I heard Black people did this, I saw a Black person perform and this is what they performed like, you know, this is what they looked like or sounded like to me. Abolitionists countered that. It was a direct response. A lot of abolitionism at a sonic level, if you will, was a direct response to minstrelsy, right? So it was like, No, what you're hearing as happy, fanciful dancing Mm-hmm. Is actually the groans of suffering and the, you know, the plight of Black people. And, you know, you'll have people like Douglass say this, but before him, there are some white abolitionists who will say things like this, like, you know, in the sorrows of the enslaved, we hear a nascent humanity, you know, bubbling that is yearning to get free, which, you know, right there, again, this is probably more what I talk about in the book, but I do talk a lot about the menstrual sage, too. Because it's impossible not to talk about them as co-constitutive, is also part of my point. You have this kind of framing of a, you know, a teleology, a goal, a trajectory for the enslaved that almost, you know, in a kind of— this is where the kinds of political projects— there is a lot of fear on certainly the anti-abolitionist side, but also on the abolitionist side, that if we do let these people go, They're going to kill us. You know, it's very similar arguments people make now with like land back and, you know, prison abolition. They're like, oh, you know, which is obviously a confession of the colonizer being like, well, I did this to you, so of course you would do it to me. Regardless of what, you know, what has— yeah, there's a lot of— Cedric Robinson writes about that kind of in Black Marxism, right, a lot in that one chapter, a couple chapters. So there is this profound anxiety even amongst the kind of good white people That if we do liberate these people in a very 18th century way, I— who's going to refine them into humanity so that they don't kill us, you know, commit crimes? I mean, sexually assault, you know, there's a lot of the same kind of paranoias that you see 100 years later in like Birth of a Nation. I mean, it's like a lot of abolitionist people, even if they could see that slavery was wrong, didn't necessarily—

Speaker 1: Right.

Jemma DeCristo: think, oh, these people wouldn't do that, you know, like these, these kinds of, you know, fantastic racial fantasies of violence that are more accurate, of course, to what white people were doing to Black— to the enslaved Black people than what Black people did when they did get free, or even, you know. So there— that— a lot of that context is where I situate Frederick Douglass. And Frederick Douglass was an immediate kind of Translator of that so-called slave humanity through music, you know. And he was like, these are the kinds of— very in line with the abolitionist movement, right? These are the kinds of sounds I hear in these. These are what I remember from the slave community. And the power he has, of course, you know, or perhaps people— it is obvious to people that say white abolitionists don't, who are writing around the same time, Is that he was a slave, right? He comes from this context where he's like, I was in those— the slave community, to use Angela Davis's term. I was in the circle. I was in the— I was around the ring shout. I was, you know, all these kinds of things. And I'm the kind of unique translator, and I would even say, like, representer, to use that, you know, kind of like, of these sounds that are here to, you know, like before this point looked at as, you know, to use like aesthetic language, looked at as ugly, right? These are only sounds that signify abject pain and torture and hatred. So there is no— the question for like something like the abolitionist movement becomes eventually, and of course, you know, at the point of manumission is like, well, okay, we understand the negative capacity of slavery, negative speaking You know, um, yeah, like in terms of how it negates humanity, we understand the groans. What's the positive that's going to be extracted from that? Like, are we just letting people out, so to speak, that have been totally non— unrefined, to use again an aesthetic term, by this brutal system? Which— and we could also talk about that too, maybe, I think, because you have the question later about Brazil. These are people that, as far as we understand it, have not produced culture. We don't understand it at the time that slaves have produced culture. So they don't have— again, to speak in kind of an 18th century conception of it, but I don't think this ever changes, to be honest— they have not produced the kinds of refining, self-regulating practices that culture serves as. And the reason I would say that is because this is the way Europeans look at music for themselves. You know, and looking at the Enlightenment, it's like art, art does this. It involves this sort of self-regulation as well as this sort of prowess for the production of a self that can govern themselves. So there's an immediate aspect to the abolitionist movement where at the very least it has a productive capacity that it instills in the enslaved for when they get free. Don't worry, they will produce this kind of sound, for lack of it— and it's not just sound, but they will produce this kind of sound, whether we're calling it music or not is, is contested— but they will produce this kind of sound that suggests a humanity in a very kind of developmental ethos to us, meaning they are the child race, as Du Bois, you know, kind of uses that, that framework, as a lot of people did in the 19th century. They will eventually get to where we are, But this is what they're producing, right? So to the question about speculation, this is a kind of speculative power that white folks— and, you know, again, you can look at Douglass as a Black person who eventually becomes part of the bourgeoisie or the, you know, owning class. I mean, he owns quite a bit of property, especially his family, which we could even do. Who— one of his sons was the first Black violinist to be recorded. And kind of, you know, very seminal in starting music— or grandson, excuse me— in starting sort of Black musical institutions in the late 19th, early 20th century. But he's sort of the first bearer of these sounds as a site of the production of something like Black humanity after slavery, right? And I'm putting that— sorry, I realize not everyone's watching this. I'm putting air quotes around that. So it's a way to find— and what kind of aesthetics in particular And what they give this moment, right, is that they suggest a form of self-regulation. And not just self-regulation— so self-regulation will be produced, these people will produce a kind of self-regulation that we'll eventually see in forms of music, but they'll also produce something for us, right? There's also something, which is the obvious thing that's going on the whole time with any of these people listening to music, whether they're abolitionists or anti-abolitionists, right, is this, this kind of need for a cultural product, which I think this is the era, especially by the time we get to the late 19th century, the era of cultural products that will have a kind of, again, sort of speculative value that we don't have in this moment of uncertainty. Like, you know, and again, as you think of the way that Capitalism's power, prowess exists in the ability to produce a speculative future, right? Like, it's all about the future. So that's very much like what you see going on with the mid-19th century. And Frederick Douglass is like, no, don't worry, these people will, you know, again, they will be up from slavery, they will be. And so I mostly look at like the narratives in the life of Frederick Douglass, which were, of course, big textual points for people like Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten's In the Brick was a big influencing in graduate school and beyond. And so kind of looking at the way that it's sort of about almost sort of the culturification of Black people, if you like. I don't use that word in it, but it is like, how does this become a site to regulate the imagine— the unknowable, the opaque imagination of Black people? Because we don't know what— we never imagined these people as sentient beings on some level, on some level, ambivalently so. Right. So how do we ensure a kind of arresting of that imagination, you know, self-arresting, that they won't kill us, etc., all these other things, they won't form alternatives to this system we've invented for them, etc.? And then how do we engender some, if not industry, I don't think Black music is not quite looked at as an industry yet, and much more have to go into the late 19th, early 20th century for that, which I talk about. But how do we develop some kind of regime of— with a cultural— with a product that these people can produce? And, you know, I don't want to discount, like, the obvious examples of prisons and other things, and that a lot of people did the same material labor, you know, sharecropping, things like that. But one that's less talked about in that trajectory is this kind of imaginative product that is Black music and Black art, which is where Black art comes from, I think, in my— Um, treatment of it. So I don't know if that necessarily answered you about Douglass, but we could talk more about it.

Speaker 1: No, it's great. I mean, I think one of the things that it makes me think about too is, like, you know, if you study, like, you know, Stuckey and, like, you know, work around, like, the ring shouts and, like, all of the— you know, there was a lot of fear among Europeans about all the things that, especially after Nat Turner, after Denmark Vesey, about what was being planned and what was being communicated and discussed in these spaces that Europeans didn't understand at all. They didn't understand the language often or what was being communicated, that to then channel all of that, which, to use one of your terms, inscrutable, is that what the—

Jemma DeCristo: Right.

Speaker 1: Where they really don't know what's going on, what it means, but it concerns them. And I think Du Bois also talks in Philly about All of the work that was done too to police just Black people being together in spaces, like in public, right?

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: And it's interesting to think about this going on simultaneously with that, of like, okay, well, we have all these concerns about what we're doing in all of these spaces that we don't actually understand. I mean, as you said, there was all this work among even the abolitionists, but also funded by big capitalists in terms of creating these early social work and manuals and stuff of how to be this self-regulating, teaching self-regulating individual crap so that people could do labor in a setting where there wasn't somebody with a whip and a gun. Yeah. And simultaneously to all of that, you have musical forms being put forward by the abolitionists, people like Douglass participating in it. And let's work these songs into English. Let's give them certain message. Again, this demonstration, I mean, this is one of the things that stuck out to me in those early chapters is like, You know, the music sort of demonstrating the humanity, right? Or that, you know, and meaning that in a very, like, European humanistic, you know, kind of frame, you know, of what we would mean by that. Go ahead.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, no, I was gonna say, there's this very interesting moment, if you look in across, kind of pulling musical figures out of Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass, where he talks about, right, the sound of the whip. And he talks about, for example, the scream famously, and Moonan and Hartman talk about this a lot, right, the screams of Aunt Hester. And he talks about that. And he'll also talk about kind of what he perceives as Black musical— he also talks about Black moment, and this is actually, I think, in another writing, talks about the moments of more officialized Black music. He mostly feels like they're kind of a— he doesn't use this word, but like a kind of false consciousness that slaves are given leisure time exclusively That the leisure time of slaves is exclusively controlled by the master. And, you know, there's an argument around that, of course, that broadly connects it to capitalism because, you know, it's like when Adorno talks about this with labor time, is that you have leisure time because you have labor time, and to the extent that one occasions the other is the only reason it exists. But he has this sort of idea that more or less all Black sound under slavery is just a product of the whip, to put it simply. And he kind of talks about that as the sound of the whip and Yeah. Later, when he— well, not later, but narratively later, when he lands on— when he's, you know, enters— he crosses the Mason-Dixon, whatever, and he's in, I think, Maryland, he talks about dock workers. And he talks about, like, there was such a quiet efficiency to their labor. I heard none of the groans of, you know, this pained humanity. And I think it's very fascinating because really what that depicts is that, well, to be an official regulated worker, it means you have the sound of the whip inside your head. I mean, there is the boss, you know. I mean, in a lot of cases, bosses did use physical violence. I mean, of course, especially during this time. But it's funny that he doesn't see that. Like, you know, there's unionization. There's all these things going on that maybe we don't literally see a whip, but there is, you know, weapons being used against workers. But in that moment he describes, just in— which I think, yeah, is in the Narrative of the Life, he talks about how there's like a quiet sound of their humming and there's like music going on in their head that keeps them working. And it's funny that he doesn't assume that's a kind of whip, right? He's— so it is very much to your point about the self-regulation. He's like, they're— the goal of his kind of Black historical laboring subject, right, is someone who, you know, choose— they got the cop in their head, choose the whole Black anarchism, you know? So it is like someone who's like, they have internalized the whip. You know, you don't need— there's something, again, very 19th— 18th, 19th century aesthetic There's something very ungainly— they'll use the word when they describe melodies— who gets ungainly about the whip. We don't want to see the violence that makes labor productive during slavery. And almost that's the most upsetting part, which again, you could think of the trajectory of capitalism, right, where people— and I talk about this in the trajectory of the book, right— that the whip is beautified. That's what gets liberated from slavery. And not just against Black people, but against everyone, right, is that we have these regimes of labor That are meant to look nicer, if even by virtue of them being disguised totally from us, you know, like in factories and places we don't see, that essentially make the sound of the whip less unpleasant, you know, like, or inaudible to us, we could say, especially when we talk about the traversal of distance, which is very central to his own journey. But it's so fascinating because he doesn't see, like, dock workers as being dehumanized, you know, and you're kind of like, well, why wouldn't you think—

Speaker 1: Right.

Jemma DeCristo: You know, anyway, so, so, so there is, to your point, there is very much an ethos in him of a kind of self-regulation. And the reason I— to your earlier question, why I talk about him as the first Black artist is because he is about beautifying the world after slavery. I mean, that's my sense, you know, it's like, I think that is one of those moments where you see that, as opposed to being like, well, Black slavery is brutal, but when Black people get free, like, this shit's terrible too, you know, like wage labor is terrible, it's impressive too, right? There's not really that kind of at least at this moment, critique of racial capitalism, right? It's very much just like, this is a— this is a barbaric— we could use the word, right, in the terms of the West is always against barbarism to the extent that barbarism is always a thing of the past, right? Or always trajectory, uh, in terms of geographical trajectory, something down south, right? Like, it's not— there is no northern barbarism for the most part to him because There's that quiet self-regulatory whip inside the head of these workers, you know. So, yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So I found this section on A. Simpson. I don't know what his actual first name is, but he's an ethnographer or—

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Ish, right? And, you know, as you mentioned, he goes to Brazil. This is the Brazil section. And he's documenting the African capacity for music. And I found it really interesting, I guess, in part because there's always this kind of saying or this feeling that Black people have an innate capacity for music. You hear this all the time, right? Black babies are born with rhythm, this kind of thing.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: What his, his thing is like, sort of like, you know, well, I'll let you say it, but like, just talk about this, like what he does, what he goes, why he's doing it, and, you know, kind of what meaning you draw from this, you know, story.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, I could totally. I think that's a good thing to talk about. It also repeats as a figure, which I'm glad you brought in the contemporary example, because it, you know, there is— so the minstrel sage, the argument of minstrelsy, but also it wasn't that different from, in a certain kind of way, the argument of abolitionists was there is this kind of innate capacity in Black folks to produce music, you know, which has a part to do with this sort of like intentionally produced inscrutability that you're referring to, right? Which is— some of which is, you know, kind of a simple way, like a refusal, an invested refusal in not seeing them like us. Certainly that's in there, but it also is— I try to kind of look at it more like what you're saying is an invested authority about what kind, among them, not the only kind of course, but what kind of labor these people can do, particularly in a kind of public setting. Like, again, because that being, as you alluded to, a kind of, to this day, fear of Black people being in public. Um, and so in that, one of the proclamations, or one of the claims, sorry, of the minstrel stage was that like, well, Black people are inherently more musical. And, you know, I kind of talk a little bit about the 18th, 19th century conception of like these kinds of hierarchies of being where music was looked at as a much more— a lower form of development as far as people's capacities for sentience and reason, you know. And I mean, this is really very Platonic, if anything, too. You go back to the Greeks on some level for like people like Hegel and—

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: That are talking about this. And so to challenge that, because there is, especially as the menstrual stage kind of winds down as being as influential, I guess, in the 19th, you know, by the time you get to the 19th century, late 19th century, there is this, um, there is this, this, this quest by some, you know, to To contest the idea that are Black people inherently musical, right? Which is what this Simpson person studies. And part of that is also as— because he's going to Brazil in— I'm forgetting the year off the top of my head, but I think it's after the manumission of slavery in the US, but before it in Brazil. And— or close to the manumission of slavery in the US, but before it in Brazil. And the other reason—

Speaker 1: It's an 1868 article. Right.

Jemma DeCristo: Okay. So just after, you know, manumission, right after the end of the Civil War. And stuff. So the other part of that is too, is we're starting to see in Europe and amongst Europeans by the middle late 19th century that music—and I mean, I talk about someone like Nietzsche—is a great example, probably the peak of this example. Right? Music is becoming actually a the most human thing. Right? Like it's the most human site. It's the most central site for the reproduction of of of. of humanity. And there's a couple of Nietzsche quotes I use that reflect that, right? So it's also this moment where, in a certain way, as culture becomes broader and is something that's both contained and both possessed by the aristocracy and the kind of maybe burgeoning nouveau riche— it's a little bit early for that— but there also becomes this kind of guard against like, well, actually, can Black people make music? Because to say that, to admit that, means they can make culture.

Speaker 1: Right.

Jemma DeCristo: And to your point, I think it's such a funny moment because— and this is why the book is, to your earlier question, like, what made me write it, is that I kind of view it as very much a history of the present in this way, because that is still an argument, you know. I mean, you can look about like there— it goes both ways. There is still an argument about like whether Black musics are serious forms of music or whether Black art is a serious form of art. You guys do the film one a lot, like whether Black film is a serious— wait, it's a little different with film, I think. For a lot of reasons, but— and so there is on the one side this path towards humanization and a so-called serious art, which has a lot to do with sentience and structure and musical structure. Can Black people— are they actually applying musical structure to the sounds they made? Especially because not long ago, at the same time, abolitionists are saying these sounds are emanating from them spontaneously, almost like, you know, people talked about jazz like this, like Ben Sidran's jazz talk, where it was like, oh—

Speaker 1: Right.

Jemma DeCristo: Black people just talk like jazz, you know, or when we were growing up, I feel like it was like, oh, Black people just rap naturally. They don't, you know, as if they weren't practicing. It's like, I was like, well, I don't rhyme when I talk normally, but it's very much like an '80s, '90s kind of discourse, maybe into the 2000s, where it was like, oh, you know, they just— that slang just flows right into rap. Um, so yeah.

Speaker 1: And just the point quickly that you make too about Like, whether it's music, I mean, that was heavy with rap for people who weren't there in the '80s and the '90s. It was very— there was a long time where people would just refuse to accept that it was a legitimate form of music. So yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah. And right, that's exactly. And I mean, that was a big— Hot 97 wouldn't play it until the early '80s. You know, they said, for people in New York, we have to have a New York reference. We have hip-hop. A friend of mine would hate that. But yeah, that— and, you know, so the other reason I bring that up in the context of the book is I'm also like, to put it simply, I'm like, well, of course this is a kind of trap because it also is to the earlier— the way this conversation started and the way book starts is like, well, what's the point of it? What is the goal of an art? I don't think, you know, but this would be maybe a way to talk up— we could talk about this again when we talk about the Harlem Renaissance because this is absolutely the project of the Harlem Renaissance is to refine an art or arts. Yeah. But so that's one argument. The other argument, of course, back to the— what you alluded to is the kind of anti-abolitionist, but I think that, you know, it's a cross perspective of like, oh, Black people are naturally musical. You know, it's very similar to the way we see this repeated as a figure of their kind of almost like this is the, you know, you have to— this is also the era, not that it's ever ended, but the era of kind of eugenics and other things and this idea that people naturally produce Right. Things that kind of reify their station in life, right? Like, naturally producing criminality, naturally producing— so this is also what these kind of debates hinge around is like, can these people actually produce music? And it goes right back to Frederick Douglass where it is also, can these people attain a kind of humanity if they can produce music? Is that what it means to acknowledge that? And there's this person, A. Simpson, who goes to Brazil and is— I mean, I could read the little section because I have it pulled up, but he says, it has been a common idea for many years, accepted without examination or proof— this is very rational language of application— that the Negro was essentially musical in nature. So again, that kind of terminology. We now venture boldly to assert that the claim is unfounded in fact, and that while the Negro possesses capacity for acquiring certain degrees of musical knowledge, which he gets from his organ of imitativeness, which is— there could be a whole thing written about. I do write about that in the Joseph Johnson chapter. He has in his native state, to which only we must look in examining the question, no idea whatever of music, so far as melody or harmony is essential— is an essential ingredient of such a quality. So there is— this is, you know, the other reason I put it is that this is an early form of ethnomusicology. Right, like depending on what people characterize as the origins of ethnomusicology, a lot of particularly American ethnomusicology is built up through the study of Black people and Indigenous people, very similar to American anthropology, right? So there is these— I kind of think of this as there are sort of recurrent moments, you know, if one wanted to think of it dialectically, but I think it's part of a long process.

Speaker 1: Right.

Jemma DeCristo: Because what I was going to say earlier is that, like, you think of us Black people, and I think people think of us as extremely culture-full, right? But that was not a— like, we exude culture at all times. I mean, I think that is entirely the way this sort of spectacularized contemporary notion of Black people that probably doesn't start to exist until the '50s or so, maybe the '40s and '50s, academically with, you know, Herskovits's work where he, you know, There's, of course, that also that argument, which I actually should mention this too, whether Black people retained any culture, right, from the slave trade, from the Middle Passage, from the plantation, right? Because it was like, this was such a violent endeavor. They may have human— again, it's this very developmental ethos developed in terms of development, and it's, and it's all, it's kind of common Enlightenment and economistic thinking, right? Like, oh, well, they might have humanity. We're acknowledging that in 1860. Or starting to, but do they have the highest forms of humanity, which are increasingly these notions in a 19th century conception set? But again, I think people still think this way of culture, right? To be able to produce culture is this kind of pinnacle of human being, you know, to use it in framing it that way as a practice. And so you start to see these kinds of debates now that we've, you know, to think of it linearly to the extent that it is, that like, okay, they have humanity, but do they have the ability to produce culture. And again, I think it's an interesting one because that is always written in these kinds of intra-institutional complaints by Black artists, which are like about, they don't see my art as real art. It's very much, you know, like, for lack of— to put it super simply, it's like a white validation thing. It's like, then don't make art there. I don't like what— It's always a very easy answer. I know you have Ntoomay on a lot too, so Yeah. Talk about that kind of thing where you're like, how much of your life is oriented and like energies and imaginative space is oriented towards proving this kind of, you know, rationalized capacity to make this thing for these people who are destroying people like you, but maybe they're like not destroying— you know, you're the one that made it out, again, Frederick Douglass, so you're, you're not quite being destroyed in the same way the rest of us. You're kind of, you know, or Fanon, we can think of in a certain way talking about this kind of predicament. So That that is one of the reasons I kind of talk about that, and then I also kind of talk about the you know how if we look at this moment, like he records a lot of the sounds of these music these rituals in Brazil, and he's like you know he records the sounds as like uh uh uh uh ee ee ee you know these sort of pre linguistic sounds we might call them, and then he's like well these aren't music, which you know of course to our 21st century understanding of music we could be like well why not? You know, but it has to do with the fact that, again, to kind of look at that trajectory of the aesthetic, right, and this deeply informs something like the Harlem Renaissance that is much later, comes much later, there always has to be this kind of project of regulation and refinement within the musical, right? So like there actually is something very terrifying about kind of unregulated public sound, right, in a way that you go back to the beginning of the book, right, and And so it also is one of these moments in— it's when you start to see a thing that I think goes on even to when we were growing up, but also exists, you know, throughout the 20th century of this kind of— again, and it's also found in Douglass, is this kind of— Daphne Brooks, I think, uses the term looking glass, right, where it's like about putting Black— it's like about kind of turning Black people into or Or finding a version of a kind of looking glass for them. Like, how do we actively construct a kind of interiority of Black people? Because there's a kind of interiority that needs to be, you know, seized upon by the, you know, kind of like a certain form of racial capitalist production in order to do a kind of work to turn that interiority into a productive space, right? Which is, you know, down— not rioting among us, not coming and killing us. And so that's very much where this debate around music becomes.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: Um, staked out in this. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah, which I think is such a— I mean, I don't know, I hope people are very conscious of all the ways, especially if you watch our channel, and, you know, of all the effort that goes into trying to shape our interiorities, right? Um, but you can, you can understand that, I think, thinking about, you know, slave society, right, who— that has just, you know, manumitted. And somebody asked the question of like, why use that term and not abolition? I mean, it's not something that I'm super invested in actually that deeply one way or another. I mean, manumission is actually the process for an individual person basically to move from slavery to Emancipated, you know, you know, you know, an abolition would be like the bigger, you know, process. Partly why I like manumission is I think it's more— maybe it's actually not a fair thing, but I think nowadays, and probably even in that moment too, for a lot of people, Abolition can call to mind a huge transition. And I mean, sure, it was a big transition, but I think that there's all the ways that your work, Saidiya Hartman's work, et cetera, show that actually what happened was not— it was on a big scale, but the outcome of it is rather underwhelming if you're thinking about freedom or liberation. I guess that's what I would say.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: And so to some extent, manumission sounds like more of the bureaucratic, you know, kind of reconfiguring of things to me than something like abolition does. But yeah, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, for sure. And I think that was very well said. I agree with all that. And I think also, like, and the term I use a lot in the book is the term slave society, which is from, I don't know if I'm pronouncing the name right, but György Binder, I think, is the legal scholar from the essay written some time ago. It's, um, and they talk about this, uh, this idea that, you know, they talk— they also use the framework of manumission and, and, and are kind of like, well, you know, an obvious point that I think anyone listening to this is going to agree with is like, well, they didn't abolish the racist society that made slavery, that enslaved people. You know, all the same families were wealthy, all the same— you know, you could try— you can draw back— you could draw a line back to those Families owning, you know, whether moving to the colonies or moving back to Africa, so to speak. I mean, if anyone went back to Africa, it was during the 1880s, and particularly the breaking up of Africa by the European powers. And so, you know, there, there is that immediate point. And the other, the other way I talk about it a lot too, to that effect, is that in a lot of ways the slave society was not abolished, it was liberated. It was liberated through that moment of emancipation. That's all that was liberated.

Speaker 1: Right.

Jemma DeCristo: Mm-hmm. You know, people may have been manumitted and that your legal status changed individually on certain levels. Of course, there's also the, you know, very vital history to get into that I allude to, especially when we talk about the blues a little bit, of, like, convict leasing and prisons. And, you know, Du Bois talks about this in Black Reconstruction, like, of things that, you know, were slavery by another name or worse, you know? Like, I mean, in some cases, you could argue worse, especially because they didn't have the kinds of— they were invisibilized in a way to a lot greater extent, and they kind of involved I mean, I would say also worsen that they also had a broader surveillance net around them, things like the Black Codes that were instituted in the US during Reconstruction and after that, you know, are basically our policing today. So like the manumission is a way to talk about the— which of course, the— to you that you alluded to, the sort of reformative gesture or the reform gesture that was that moment, which was not a gesture. It was not, you know, it's Mm-hmm. The Fanon, like, decolonization cannot be decided over the negotiating table or whatever the kind of— and that's like, you know, it feels sort of obvious when you think about the US that way, as opposed to thinking about it as exceptional from colonial context. But like, you know, yeah, what was— you know, Lincoln signed something and everything was better, you know? Not that I know that's not in the question, but I think it's really important we press against that because there's still a lot of people that have either a common or even very deep understanding that that might be what happened. And so in the book, I talk a lot about structures of oppression during slavery as being liberated and not the men, not the enslaved, right? And that what is liberated, again, in the tradition of liberalism, which, you know, we live in a liberal, liberal fascist society, to the extent there's a difference between those two things, is the liberation of these kinds of mechanisms of regulation and governance. And so that's also to our earlier conversations, that's something I look a lot at.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: Rather than being like, you know, and again, you could look at the way people like Sylvia Wynter or a lot of the sort of critiques of humanism through Blackness have gone, is also pointing to the way that human— humanity and humanism in a way were like another kind of capture that was awaiting, if not kind of working through Black folks when they got manumitted. And again, I think if you think of— One of the reasons I talk about Douglass, but also one of the reasons I talk about this first Black recording artist George W. Johnson is that there's a lot of that that kind of gets heaped onto him around criminalization, self-regulation. And so that kind of becomes— obviously, someone like Saidiya Hartman's written about this a lot— that becomes kind of the new mode of management of Black life, you know, that's not limited to the— relatively limited to the exclusive governance of the plantation. But in a way, it's actually—

Speaker 1: Right.

Jemma DeCristo: A bigger responsibility of the world to police Black people than— because they don't got a master. Like, it's not like a dog running away where it's like, whose dog is it? You know, it's not that kind of society as much anymore. It's much more like, again, the liberation of mastery that goes back to the minstrel stage. It's like, oh, we all get to take part in some version of this. You know, the same way personal property is invented during this time. I talk a lot about property, which I— there was a lot more in it, but they made me take it out because it was very— it went a lot different. I teach classes on property and things like that too. So there's a lot about the relationship to property that again gets reformed, it doesn't get abolished. You know, we don't experience after slavery the collectivization of the means of production, anything like that, you know. And to the extent that Black people try to make those kinds of things, they're usually destroyed. But yeah, yeah. So—

Speaker 1: No, I appreciate that. Yeah, somebody in the chat, a couple people in the chat were talking about Haiti or, you know, Haiti as A counterexample, right, of, you know, it's not a manumission, right, because it's actually won, right? And I think that's—

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Although, I mean, certainly Black folks' role in the Civil War, right, is definitely decisive in that regard too. So let's talk about the Harlem Renaissance. And I know I'm skipping over— I have to pick my spots because there's like a lot in this book that we could go into. But you write, I theorize what many Black music scholars are uneasy about considering: how Black music has justified us from without and from within to the imagination of the slave society and to our imaginative practices with each other, end quote. And so, yeah, I mean, this whole section on the Harlem Renaissance is really interesting. I loved that. quote, obviously it's something you've already talked about to some degree already, but maybe you could talk a little bit about that and some of the, you know, the work going on in the Harlem Renaissance. I know we're going to talk about Ma Rainey as a counterexample later, but, you know, folks like Alain Locke and others that you're looking at there.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, no, that's a great question. I mean, I think that that is something that still exists. Like, it— so there is this— I use this very famous quote from Nietzsche that is, you know, he says, quote, this is from The Birth of Tragedy, I think. He says, we have our highest dignity and our significance as works of art, for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence in the world are eternally justified. And I kind of wanted, you know, I thought that, like, To him, that's a provocation. Make art, make the kind of— to the extent that people would, Dionysian, kind of like the Bacchanalic, sort of like make art. People reclaim that kind of energy in maybe the '60s too. But I kind of look at it as a doomed sentence, that it's a problem, right? This is a kind of a different form of bondage, right? That I kind of, like I alluded to earlier with Frederick Douglass, that like you people must continually justify yourselves through your rep— you're, you know, as to use another term from Nietzsche, representing beings. Like you have the capacity to represent, you know. I mean, I, I, I, and I think that's unmistakably, if we were to jump now, but we'll go to the Harlem Renaissance because I think it's also kind of where it comes from in a way that's more codified. You, uh, this is unmistakably the way we look at so-called conversations about representation. Yeah. Right, and I'm using scare quotes around representation. I guess I don't need to use quotes. It is what we talk about representation. So, you know, these lines beneath each other written like I think it was the 1870s, 18 yes, 1870s, 1880s. You know, before the Harlem Renaissance, but I think it's very much that period, and you see this in someone like Du Bois's early writings. I think they become more complex, and I again I can talk about that too, like in the 1920s. But in something like *The Souls of Black Folks*. There very much is this grammar of, like, you know, civilizational language that you see in also someone like Locke, you know, really anyone in the 19th century who's writing, I think, you know, like, including Marx. Like, I mean, you know, there's these kinds of developmental logics of people that, of course, get applied negatively, meaning in terms of negation, to, like, Indigenous and Black people. But you see someone like Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folks talking about, like, this child race, You know, right, which was a common phrasing at the time. And how are we going to kind of prove ourselves to a broader society? But also, you know, there is a sense of proving ourselves to ourselves, but I don't think that's, you know, I mean, I sort of, as you alluded to in that quote, we don't ever get— there is no, you know, it's much more murky. You know, we can go back to the way we started this conversation around the murals. And so, you know, you also have to think about this time. This is— Yeah. So you see kind of this breaking down of the aristocracy. You see this liberation of the idea of culture in the 19th century and certainly in the 20th century, where you also start to see the invention of something we would maybe kind of call the middle class, being, you know, like in the U.S. at least. And, and so you see the capacity to produce culture being liberated, right? Which is also a way to talk about Maybe we could call it liberalism, or, you know, we could even allude to neoliberalism. Japan, I think, is like kind of neoliberalism from above, right? It trickles down, so to speak. The ability, the capacity to produce culture trickles down in this case to the extent that it benefits the reproduction of the society, the ruling classes, the racial, you know, racial capitalist regime of the ruling classes. So. Yeah. You start to see this is part of this moment as well. The other big thing, right, which maybe people would kind of just casually know, of course, right, in— we see the invention of the phonograph, I mean, really technically like the 1870s, but, you know, it becomes sort of a popular object in like the 1890s, 1900s, 1910s. By the time we get to like the mid-1910s, people know what a phonograph is. 1920s, people certainly know. We tried to get the Harlem Renaissance, people certainly know what reproduced music is. Which is a better way to talk about it. We also get, of course, film, right? And you could look back to, like, Birth of a Nation and things like that, which was, like, 1914, I want to say, or 1914, 1915. So the way that— what kind of art or the aesthetic becomes is this capacity to eternally justify oneself. And it becomes that way partially because of this sort of, like, I don't want to call it panopticon, but like sort of this sort of surveillance architecture, if you will, of culture, of cultural representing machines. You know, I talk a lot about this when I talk about the phonograph, and that there is always this sense in the writings of people like Alain Locke that like we are being produced from without, right? And we will see, going back to the minstrel stage, which, you know, doesn't really exist then in a— it's traditional thing, but there's still, you know, blackface. Lots of blackface representations in movies, everything. We just mentioned Birth of a Nation. The audio I look at, there are audio representations of blackface minstrelsy. These are the kinds of things that Alain Locke will, of course, point out as like, well, this is the problem, is that we are being justified from without, you know, meaning from outside our community, not by— I mean, there are Black people doing blackface, but, you know, people who are not part of this kind of project, you know, that's not just the Harlem Renaissance but this kind of project of representation. That the Harlem Renaissance I look at in a lot of ways, it's— I think it's more complicated by its artists, some of its artists, than it is by its sort of pontiffs like Alain Locke or even to some degree Du Bois, although he has some interesting ideas too that I talk about. But the project of the Harlem Renaissance I look at a lot is this way of internalized justification, right, like a little like we saw in Douglass, right, like How do we produce a positive engine of imagination that proves, you know, if we go back to that writing The Simpsons example, there's a lot of this like proof, evidence, facticity. How do we create things that prove and kind of eternally justify us, which is like a very, you know, artistic term in a romantic sense of eternal, eternal art. How do we create things that prove us to the society from without. And then a lot of something that Alain Locke's going to talk about is also, again, you know, kind of riffing off of Douglass, what can kind of prove our— justify ourselves within our community. Like, not so much accountable, being accountable to our community, but what can be produced aesthetically to refine the unrefined among us, right? So like the Black people, you know, to use That kind of— that term from Saidiya Hartman, who's talking about the Philadelphia Negro, which you also referenced earlier, these kind of unruly Black folks, you know, who are in a number of ways have a kind of public ungainliness to them that, again, we could look back in the way Black people were talked about during slavery, you know, that must be refined, you know, with this kind of aesthetic education which will serve, you know, again, we could also call it policing, right? I mean, there's ways in which I make that obvious connection, which If people go back and look at something like, you know, someone I think quoted at the beginning of the book is Michel de Certeau, the French author. And he talks in, I think, one of his books about history about, like, the term policé being connected to ecclesiastical culture. So the people who had culture were the people in the church who could police other people. Like, you're not wearing your robes properly. You're not, you know, these sort of sumptuary things. You're not, you know, playing the right music publicly. You're not— so It's not far to say, and I, you know, that, that's sort of one of the paradigms I look at the Harlem Renaissance from, is that the sort of spokesmen of the Harlem Renaissance become these kind of people like, how can we use culture to police our activities into a way that, you know, it justifies us from— and I use the word justification to also complicate this idea of justice too as a goal, but how can it justify us to other people. In other words, the big fear even in the Harlem Renaissance, and certainly you see this in Du Bois, is like, yeah, there's a— I can't pull the quote up right now. Zaire Bell is like, always like, you know, if we don't do this, lest we be, uh, consigned to slavery, is a frequent expression. I think he even says that in Black Reconstruction, which is written a bit later. And so, or yeah, so like there is a constant sense that That if— which I think is a very— it should say a lot, but I think this actually does still very much determine Black folks' ways of being in the world in a way that, like, the idea that being subject to a wide-scale structural oppression— this goes back to the manumission question— is something that can be obviated or confronted with our sort of internal policing. And that, you know, if we didn't do that, we might be justified in the kinds of things we would of course, just understandably view as a punishment, which is, you know, enslavement or other sort of similar forms of subjugation. So that becomes very big for someone like Locke. And the interesting thing I talk about with him is that he talks a lot about that justification as having a value, because he's very much like a value thinker. He's kind of influenced by like not so much what we maybe would— folks would read on the channel, like, you know, continental sort of thinking, but also by like a lot of the British Philosophers and people like that that he reads, and like William James and people like that, uh, who was really big in the US at that point, or around that point. And so there's very much this, this notion that, that it— that, that internalized capacity to justify ourselves is itself a value. And I think that this is where, if I were to speak— and this is not super radical because I think most people in the— that study Black art in the US would kind of locate the Harlem Renaissance as the first big moment of Black art, even if it's not literally the first Black artists. They would kind of traditionally study that moment, and then they would probably go to the Black Arts Movement. Maybe they would talk about the '30s, which is interesting too. But, um, yeah, so that's kind of the way I frame the Harlem Renaissance, is like thinking about, again, in terms of its sort of bourgeois discourse, but also the— I mean, you know, this gets built into a lot of institutions That some of which still exist in places like New York, of, like, refinement, education. And I think even when they allow a kind of symbolically unruly form of Black being in them, which is maybe something we talk about more when we talk about the '60s or post-'60s even, they're still doing that kind of activity of showing us back to the earlier way we started this conversation, like, these are the safe ones. Who are safe? Who are, you know, these don't worry, they're not gonna break the glass outside your condo. These are the ones that kind of, you can actually put this in your condo, you know, you can actually hang this painting, which is probably, you know, this will be the period where it'll be the earliest sort of period people buy Black American art. I mean, I know this differs for like African art or someone mentioned AD, like, you know, Caribbean art and things like that, but that, you know, that's very much a, An essential value of, or an essential project of someone like Alain Locke is kind of this, he has this very value-laden conception of justification, you know, and he uses the word comportment and other sorts of words that, again, people might look at that period and be like, oh, that's too stodgy. We live, we're making art in the post-'60s, you know, happening, Schechner, whatever kind of exact, you know, Black Power, all the things that happened in the '60s. Which is too much to go into all of it, but, you know, these are things that are— these destroyed these notions of comportment and self-justification. But I actually don't think so. I think they intensified them. And I think they, again, to use that framework, I think they actually liberated them into more of the engines of, you know, things like, yeah, we could call them surveillance, like online and, you know, or social media or whatever and things. So that's kind of the way I look at that class, racial class project that is the Harlem Renaissance, which we've Yeah, it's really interesting.

Speaker 1: I mean, we're not going to go there today because you don't get to this period in the book, but it makes me— we definitely have to do an episode of Rap Album Dialectics together where we talk about an album and a period, because I also do think that what you're talking about becomes really interesting when you get to hip-hop, right? And like, what is that?

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: What does that mean and how does that work in that period? So yeah, anyway, so let's talk about Ma Rainey, right? As the kind of— she's the counterexample really that you use in this section. Yeah, talk about why you chose her and how you think she relates or opposes this project.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, I mean, I think this is a great question too. So the other thing that A lot of— and, you know, won't get into super the details of, like, Elaine Locke's project, right, is about this kind of reap— it also goes to that sort of futurity that I alluded to that's very endemic or essential to racial capitalism, is like about producing a futurity. So it's also kind of about Black art that produces Black art, you know. And I mean, this is also a way to think of, like, canonization and institutionalization of Black art, which has to be talked about at this time, which, you know, again, the Harlem Renaissance is very influential in, if not in just founding organizations, but kind of putting together the ethos by which organizations are founded. You know, if even in places that have been founded after the Harlem Renaissance, there is that kind of veneer of justification. And so Ma Rainey is really interesting to me. I mean, you know, she is a Black queer, maybe we say gender non-conforming, you know, kind of artist. I look at a lot of this period that people like Angela Davis have talked about, and the scholar K. Hammer talks a lot about, and people like Clyde Woods have talked about, like, you know, like the blues period. And I think there is something quite interesting in this period in the sense that there does not— particularly contrary to that, and I actually think this is why you get some of Alain Locke— there is Not this, this fixation with how white people see us, or how, you know, we could say the Black bourgeoisie see us, if we see that as any different. There's much more kind of an internal form, almost kind of a material relationality going on in a lot of these performances, which, you know, you can look back at this period, and it's not like this never exists after it, but it's one of these moments which I think we can also understand Some, if not a lot, of the Harlem Renaissance is a response to, too, which is another way to think of the policing aspect of the law needing to be laid down against the transgression, is you see a lot of, you know, like queer trans performance that is kind of, you know, very much not respectable, not like— I mean, a lot of it is— I don't know how much you've listened to, like, you know, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, but even people like Lucille Bogan and those kind of people, and you're like I'll play that for students and they're like, how was this made in the 1920s or 1930s? It's like very profane, very, you know, all these kinds of things. And I think there was a lot of that that was much more of sort of an internal conversation, if you will, to use that common metaphor of a conversation that wasn't necessarily about a product that would justify the internal worlds of Black folks to other people. You know, I don't know that there's a lot of playful sort of masquerade and avoidance and kind of intentional opacity in these repertoires that I think— not I think, you know, because there were a lot of people who did not like the blues, like Du Bois and like, you know, Alain Locke hated that. Like, they really hated the blues. And they were like— and that's the other way to look at the Harlem Renaissance is like, well, this was a direct response response to like the way these people were carrying on, you know, which was much closer, which I think is also interesting too because it's not like there wasn't a lot of complex musical craft or like great voices or whatever. But I think what also made it dangerous is that there wasn't the conventional bourgeois distinction between the kind of social world of the art and the social world of being Black in a way that I think Again, looking at the Harlem Renaissance, there is much— it's more vanguardist, you know, it's much more vanguardist. Like, these are the artists, these are the people who understand the project that, say, someone like Alain Locke is, is, you know, where you go back again to Frederick Douglass, who's part of this, you know, totally could be considered in kinds of vanguardist terms in a certain way. Um, it— there's a little bit less of that. It's a lot messier. And then the other thing that I think is really interesting about it, and one could study— it would be interesting to talk about Black music in a long— I've always been interested in a conversation about this at some point, but to think about the way a lot of Black music in the 20th century is this long sort of straightening project, you know, and you get that even with the most beloved music, especially something like— I think of the '60s a lot. I grew up listening to a lot of like Sam Cooke and those kind of people, but it's under, you know, you look at like the period of Sam Cooke to like Whitney Houston is a great example, right? A queer artist that was forced to present as straight and be straight, you know, whatever, how you want to look at that, even though she was queer, you know, lesbian or queer, I don't know what she identified, would have identified as. But there's this long kind of trajectory by the institutionalizations, and someone like Manning Marable will talk about how the church seized on the civil rights movement to reassert its relevance at a period when it was waning. And you can look at a period like the Harlem Renaissance, particularly in the South or the, you know, the first Great Migration is also being deeply contested because you see these other kinds of, um, you see these other sort of practices of Black people seizing on their sort of like autonomy, their sexual autonomy. You know, someone like Angela Davis will talk about how this is a period where people, especially Black women or, you know, gender minorities, realize like, oh, we do not have to Our procre— our sex is not for, like, the procreation of Black property. It is not for, you know, this is kind of a long— and especially in cities, less so, because of course in a lot of rural areas people are still being pushed into a kind of sharecropping, you know, sort of we need to maintain the sort of structure of the heteronormative family, or whatever you want to call it, kind of normative family, to the extent that we can by virtue of reproducing, you know, um, our productive capacity. Whereas people in cities where you start to see or even, I mean, really, it actually does happen a lot of real places with the blues. You start to see this turn away from that and a kind of, you know, bodily autonomy and a kind of, you know, I mean, to the extent that we want to look at it in terms of labor, a kind of movement away from the romance of artistic labor too, which is already something that the Harlem Renaissance is kind of afraid of. It has to have, and it says a lot again in a very European way, that you have to have the romance of artistic labor in order to have this kind of civilizational project take hold. And I think someone like Ma Rainey and a lot of other Black— it's, you know, it's not just her, but like, I think she's like very emblematic of that period. I think she kind of challenges that in a way that's very interesting. And yeah, and breaks up these sort of productive engines and imagine— and part of that is around this sort of regulation of this imagination. that is so central to, you know, increasingly official notions of Black art.

Speaker 1: So— Thank you. So we're going to move into the Black Arts Movement, which I just, you know, I enjoyed the whole book, but this was— I don't mind saying it was my favorite chapter. There's just a lot in it that I really enjoyed. And so start with Larry Neal, who's a really important figure to the Black Arts Movement, and the notion of Black beauty that he put forward. What's important to you about this?

Jemma DeCristo: So I think this is the most interesting time to me too. And it was kind of like when earlier when I alluded to being a Black artist, it was very much like the period that I was referring to where I was like, oh, You know, I mean, the, the Bay Area is very much like a, uh, a reservoir of nostalgia for the '60s. Not exclusively, but that definitely is something. It feels very intense in a way, at least when I moved here. And so, you know, while Larry Neal was not living here and writing this, but I, I was like, oh, you know, this is a place where the Black Power movement is so revered. And there are Black— like, there are Black repertory theaters that are still around. I don't Entirely, I wouldn't necessarily know to say like who, whether they're, how active they are, but there's like one in, I think, in Oakland, kind of close to Berkeley. And so there are, there is this history of these products of the '60s and the Black Arts Movement. So I mean, what's interesting about Larry Neal, and I actually say this is still something that informs me to the extent that I make art, I am making a film, so I do, you know, people often, people read this and they'll be like, oh, you just don't want us to have make anything and did it, you know, and it's like, well, if that's what that feels like for you, then I get, you know, I don't know, it said a lot what she was doing it for, I don't know, but, you know, so I think that, which also could be something to talk about, like, what's the, you know, what am I expecting with the book? But, um, so for me, you know, what was really radical about Larry Neal and the Black Arts Movement is this idea that we don't need these institutions that are art institutions and that A Black aesthetic must be one, something that exists without these institutions, you know, without them, against them even. And, you know, this is helpful because it does happen at a time in the '40s, '50s, a lot of Black art that's in, just to pick museums, is not done by a Black artist. But when you see, you start to go into the '60s, '50s, '60s, a lot what they're realizing in there is— I'm not going to remember the name of this, Yeah. But maybe I can find it. But there is a book, maybe it's called Mounting Frustration, I want to say that sounds right, that actually talks about how museums in the '60s— and there's, you know, like, people like Darby English has that book, 1971. So it's kind of like the mid-late '60s, early '70s, museums among other institutions, right? I mean, in kind of lockstep with this ethos of integration, realized that the best way to sort of like fight the demands of, you know, Black Power, even a kind of vague racial justice, is actually not to exclude Black people but to let them in, right? And I mean, you talk about a lot— you all talk about this a lot broadly when you do talk about things like counterinsurgency and things. Um, and so someone like Larry Neal writing in the mid-'60s is like, no, we don't need these institutions. These are not the things. And, and I think more radically than that is It almost seems the first time anyone's ever done it, but this is like, it's not just about where we show art. It's not just about the content of the art. It's about how the art— it's about how what we make, maybe a better way to put it, ethically relates to other Black people. You know, and that is, I think, a very profound move on his part where There is this conception that I think is largely gone from us, I would almost say like especially Black art, where what you do ought to be accountable to other people, you know, especially other Black people. And that's kind of what I began this conversation with. And so there's a much more, you know, obviously I think this is in his lineage more informed by kinds of, you know, Marxist thinking and left— and there was a really big period of 1930s Black Marxism.

Speaker 1: Right.

Jemma DeCristo: This art and people like, you know, to a degree Richard, uh, for sure Richard Wright, and to a degree, you know, like Ralph Ellison, other literary, particularly literary figures, but other painters came out of this. Um, but I think that it's undeniably this kind of like, you know, we ought to have a relationship to the people kind of thing. And more than that, I think it's even just this idea that there ought to be a constant, or the way I take it and what I had hoped to kind of bring into my life when I was You know, or when I first moved here and was making art, it was like there ought to be a constantly revised ethical import to what we're doing that takes precedence, and that we're not just, you know, as the book frequently talks about, kind of putting pictures of Black people on the walls of, you know, condos, whatever, to use that pair. So that's one really big, I think, challenge laid down by Larry Neal's writing. But I also think what is— this chapter kind of deals with is the complexity of that, because I think it's actually— it's worth bringing up. I don't think we talked about this necessarily. One of the other things that's really important in the book is that while I talk a lot about these kind of structures of oppression, there's always— there always has to be some kind of agential aspect to them, even if the person is not Frederick Douglass, like this is why the book couldn't be all Frederick Douglass or Alain Locke, right? Is because then we get we get into this this sense by which like which is not very relevant for I think you know the current kind of neoliberal order is like oh well people who have privilege or power or whatever you know I mean to the extent that Douglass had these things they are the ones who are these agentful people who can make kind of conscientious choices that internalize ethics or political decision-making, whereas something I heard a lot making art in the Bay was like, oh, I— you don't understand, you know, I don't got the privilege to turn down that gig. And again, sometimes people were not being paid for these, you know, gigs for Twitter or whatever, some corporation. So, um, but there's, there's kind of this, for one of the, one of the first times under the mantle of a kind of self-conscious Black art, but again, I think you can go back to We go back to Frederick Douglass and say, well, on some level, this is what is happening in the so-called slave community. This is what— you know, there is this— is that Fred Moten quote that I really like, that being Black is being Black in groups or being Black with other people or something, you know? And it is like, well, yeah, you couldn't just act out and do whatever you wanted without there being consequences or accountability to the people you care about or, like, are in community with or are neighbors with and cohabitate with. to think of a very classical sense of the political. And so I think that's a really immediate and still less under-interrogated part of Larry Neal's aesthetic as far as it relates to, I mean, our contemporary reality. And, but I also talk about like the complexity of the ways people try to thread that through our— the aesthetic. And particularly, I think something you asked a question about when you sent it to me was like this idea of Black And I think for me, that is a really great problem space of like, can the beautiful hold these kind of ethical relations? Can it be a vehicle or a conduit for the kinds of ethical relations? To go back to what I was talking about earlier with like the condos, how we started this conversation. And, you know, ultimately, I look at a lot of, including this local—

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: Black Arts Movement poet who passed away not too long ago, Dinganagón Calves, who I think lived in San Francisco and Oakland, and he has this really interesting hard-to-find book about Black beauty or has an essay about Black beauty. And I was kind of interested because the way he talked about beauty, you know, sort of contrary related to Larry Neal's like emphasis on a kind of collectivity, but I think ultimately there's this Irreconcilability of the beautiful with a kind of collective project of even sort of ethical being in relation, let alone liberation, I think. And I— that's sort of, you know, the, the conclusion I, I reach in this chapter is that, like, the beautiful is not, um, it's not for that, like, in a way. And that ends up being a really difficult, I think, kind of point of navigation for the Black Arts Movement, as well as probably, for example, why we still have the Black Beautiful. but we don't have the artistic collectives in the '60s that I write about, you know. So yeah, we can—

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we probably want to come back to that point to some degree, because I think it's an important one for sure. So there's this quote, I'm going to read it out actually, this passage. This is some of your writing. A danger grew in the power In the saving power of Baraka's synthesis— this is Amiri Baraka— for what was necessarily antagonistic about the Black queer blues to the enduring and predominating drives of secular and religious Black aesthetic comportment, the policing, not just from without but also from within, was subsumed under a collective whole, sublated, beautified, For this word, the herbarium, herbarium of Black beauty.

Jemma DeCristo: That's how you pronounce herb.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: British people.

Speaker 1: Right, right, right, right, of Black beauty. Um, paradoxically, this resolution by Baraka was nothing less than a capitulation to the quietude of the beautiful, quote, Black people. So this is from Baraka, I think. Black people in the unified portrait of strength Beauty and contemplation, end quote. The sublimation of Black living under beauty's ground facilitated a kind of collection and curation of Black people as Black art. Black beauty put a kind of frame around Black unity, a new structure of capture that facilitated a new site of value. The long history of the curation of Black art as the curation of Black people To the extent that it relies on the aesthetic character of Blackness, complicated the ethical projects of the Black Arts Movement. It was almost Warholian in its total artification of Black life. We might ask what outside of the arting of Black life remains for the living. And so actually, this is perfect because this is kind of what you were just talking about to some degree. So yeah, to help people understand more, like, uh, more context of what you're talking about there.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, I mean, that's a great— I think that's like a really interesting— so like, first of all, you know, full acknowledgement that a danger grew, that's Hölderlin. And if you've read— I know that there's— Fred says something about not saying Heidegger's first name, if you call him Marty, or so. It's also— I'm covering them. So there's, you know, Heidegger quotes it a lot too. Not advocating for Heideggerism, but, you know, um, I forgot I forgot the last sentence, first of all.

Speaker 1: So the last sentence of the thing is, is there any future outside of us all being made Black art? That's important. I didn't mean to leave that off.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no, no. It's— and yeah. And I think that's kind of where it— the argument of it begins, because it is this argument, you know, the— I think if one were to look at it as I kind of do in the book, I think dialectically, right, you would look at this moment where there is A, say, in response to the Harlem Renaissance as being a bit too vanguardist, you know, and that's a common critique of it, but especially by a lot of Black Arts Movement scholars when they talk about that period. And sometimes they'll talk about how people like Langston Hughes already said that, like he said that during— and he was like, well, how's our art changed? I think it's like paying the rent of the regular Black people, or so he has some line like that, Langston Hughes, and I think in the '20s. And so there's a lot of Black artists at that time, including Baraka and Larry Neal, and, you know, numerous others, and I talk about collectives who are weary of the vanguardism of Black art and that it kind of is just sort of the settlement of this, uh, small Black bourgeoisie who kind of manage the cultural affairs of Black people but are, you know, again, very— and then someone like Alain Locke too, to, you know, I don't think I mentioned this, he often would use the word class division and talk about it as We have to have that in order to have like a Black civilization. We have to have class division. You can't be civilized and not have class division. So you see that in, you know, see that in The Harlem Renaissance, a lot of Black Arts Movement writers are responding to that. And a lot of the, you know, and I think this relates to other artistic movements, and that's also where there's the kind of Warhol reference, Warholian. I'm sure other people have used it, but I, you know, like kind of use it there as like Um, is that what it kind of, I think, has the effect of doing is there ends up being this, uh, for lack of a better word, kind of, uh, reaching across the aisle to, like, you know, the masses of Black people, whatever, which is not— we could get into the problems of that conception. But, you know, and it's— it does so for the purpose of kind of liberating the means to produce, to produce the products of art. Like, and I think what you end up with, and why I kind of allude to in that paragraph, is that what you actually get is that, you know, because you have a lot of the institutions of Black life increasingly destroyed post-'60s, you know, for a lot of reasons, and including some of the machinations, intentional otherwise, of Black artists, is that you end up with the kind of, you know, again, I think the critique that a lot of Black radicals like Black Liberation Army have of this kind of period of the kind of nascent but emerging cultural nationalism that kind of comes out of it. So you have, you know, that term from Baraka, in a unified portrait of strength, beauty, and contemplation, feels very like a culturally nationalist idea. But I also think it It's interesting that he uses the word portrait, right, and that he kind of— it very much goes back to where what I also talk about in the coda of the book too, where there's condos now which still exist if you go to downtown Oakland that have a bunch of pictures of Black people on them in a neighborhood where it would be, you know, impossibly expensive for most Black people to live, where Black people are not, you know, encouraged to linger in public. And so you kind of have this effect Which you get with the sort of, you know, neoliberal— I guess it's also a way to kind of criticize some of the nascent, intentional or otherwise, in the Black Arts Movement kind of— whether people want to call it an ideological weakness, and that would be more like sort of the conventional, maybe leftist sort of political framing of it, but like to sort of participate in a kind of neoliberalism from below type of structure where it's like we now have the capacity To make more of Black life into Black art. And this is the way we avoid the kind of exclusionary logics of a sort of Harlem Renaissance, right, is that— and I mean, a phrase, a framing like Black is Beautiful is a really good example out of that, where it can— it comes with this kind of capacity and set of more acceptable projects to inaugurate people into the producers and certainly consumers of a kind of widely available Black beauty, but it doesn't, you know, undo the means by which one feels a need to wield that beauty as some kind of defense, or as a friend would call it, armor against this world. And I think we— it's also a way to kind of look at, like, okay, the Black Arts Movement was opposed to, you know, some of the sort of neoliberal, uh, Black artistic institutional forms of art that I would talk about, allude to, you know, if someone were to talk about, for example, Black art in the museum. I think it's unavoidable and kind of totally a product of that sort of neoliberal diversity logic, things like that that we think of that we, you know, don't necessarily do anything for Black people outside the museum, which is most Black. I didn't go to a museum until I was in college, so I didn't really— art museum. So there's that part of it, and then there is— so it's kind of a way to think about, like, well, it's not like this is just— but then you look at that period, and again, kind of thinking of it dialectically, it's like that period includes some of the logics and the thinkings and even the grievances of the Black Arts Movement. Mm-hmm. Which are kind of also about this sort of idea that the ethical relationship to Black life is about this kind of, uh, capacity and, um, almost like, um, willingness to reproduce Black people as this representation. And it is this complex way of putting a very simple thing, right, that like we, we care about Black people Because we have their pictures on our wall type of thing. And that there is a certain form of— this kind of becomes— and actually, we didn't talk about this earlier when you asked about, like, the places where people aren't. There's also a lot in this book about this kind of artificial personhood logic that is very essential to the state and capital, right? Where that is absolutely part of what this is taking part in, that it's like, well, you can have this kind of unified portrait of—

Speaker 1: Right.

Jemma DeCristo: Black people, and you can have it in a place where there are no Black people. And there is, you know, an undercurrent of, of course, what was not the goal, I don't think, of the Black Arts Movement, and quite the opposite. That kind of gets pulled out from under its sort of more dominant or radical tendencies and becomes the one of, if not the dominant ethos of Black art. But it also becomes in some ways the way people remember it. Like, I think it's kind of similar to the sort of Black Panthers point that I was making, that people kind of— or maybe people do this with MLK a lot too, where they like remember the thing that is like, oh no, we have the— you know, it's Voltaire— we have the world, we actually have the best of all worlds, and that's why, because it did work out. And it's like, it's like, no, actually they had a critique of this kind of— but the way it's sort of framed around these notions of beauty and almost like a kind of personal property. Mm-hmm. Construction is susceptible to these dominant, you know, orders of racial capitalism that can take that part of it and not have, of course, the larger ethical projects that are connected to it, or can take— like I talk about in the book too, how a lot of Black artistic collectives in the '60s are a site for, um, you just— I mean, you talk about a fair amount on the podcast, like Ford Foundation funding. And so they're like, oh, if we can get a Collective of Black artists to go into a Black neighborhood and help us gentrify it, which can be suppressing political organizing. It can be beautifying the neighborhood, making murals, going back to how we started this. And this was going on in the '60s, even if not earlier, right? Like, so we can have— we can kind of use that unified portrait of collective Black being, you know, like, oh, we see—

Speaker 1: Blackness.

Jemma DeCristo: A bunch of Black artists come into our neighborhood, I guess that's a good thing. They must be making our lives better. And it's like, no, actually they're trying to make them worse, but they're trying to make the making worse of your life more beautiful, right? Which is different than, you know, I don't know, free housing, other things people would want. So.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great. I'd want to say to the chat, there's a few questions I've flagged, and I will try to get those to Gemma in a bit too. We're Kind of winding down. We got a few more questions here, but yeah, I do want to—

Jemma DeCristo: Oh, I see comments. I didn't even know there was a tab.

Speaker 1: It's all good. But let's talk— this kind of relates to what you were just talking about, the Freddy Fixer sort of phenomenon. And so I just wrote a note of, I want you to talk about the Freddy Fixer to YIMBY pipeline. I don't know that that means anything to you, but that's—

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, I mean, so Freddie Fixer, it's in the book. Freddie Fixer was this thing that started in New Haven, I want to say, yeah. And, you know, New Haven has a significant Black population. It's also where Yale is, you know, those two things. Anyone— I've never gone to Yale. I mean, I've visited New Haven, but I didn't go to Yale, so don't put that on me.

Speaker 1: Shout out to Shout out to Hiram and Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, both from New Haven.

Jemma DeCristo: So, oh, I didn't know that. Okay, well, there you go. Okay, they gotta check it out then. Okay, yeah, um, I've been interested to know what they think then. Um, but yeah, it's, it's this kind of, you know, it's early— basically Freddie Fixer is these early— one of the, one of these early, more formally— I mean, I think the book is arguing like this exists before this in a way, or the sort of tentacles are Sort of ur stuff, or as you know, essential aspects sort of exist before this. But as a sort of more conventional form, Freddy Fixer is this. I don't know if we have. We don't have the picture. There's a really great picture that I could not get from another book. But um, it's uh, it's this anti littering campaign, kind of a cleaning up the neighborhood campaign that conscripted. And I did a lot of these as a kid. I think you've talked. You've had people on the show that talk a lot about the Boys and Girls Club and things like that. YMCA, all those kinds of things. It's very much one of those kind of things like Pal, you know, if you did that basketball. Unfortunately did as a kid. So Freddy Fixer is one of those things that this is a parade and this is kind of a later version of it, but there was these young kids. Actually kind of like the history of the Boy Scouts. If you know the colonial history of the Boy Scouts, it's sort of similar too, but it's like It was a project that started in the '50s, I want to say, that used model cities funding, which is part of, you know, urban renewal, part of these things that were about blighting Black neighborhoods in order to turn them into sites of speculation and real estate development, which is what we're now living in, right? And Freddie Fix-It was one of these things that was about deputizing young Black kids to be Freddy Fixers in their neighborhood. I think, yeah, maybe like the Boy Scouts is a good comparison. And so they would go around picking up litter, you know, maybe they might yell at like someone as a litterbug and like, basically, we want— if we don't want, you know, and the kind of ethos of it was attributed to this very wealthy doctor, but it actually turned out that a lot of the program funding came from the Model Cities Foundation and similar kind of, you know, sort of like the Ford Foundation kind of things.

Speaker 1: Right.

Jemma DeCristo: For policing communities. The inventor of it, Rich, was kind of describing it as like, well, if we don't clean up our communities, what right have we to complain when we're policed? Or, you know, very conventional, sure, the respectability politics. But I think particularly what I was interested with Freddie Fixer was this idea that the beautification come— and is also kind of going to the Black Arts Movement question— if the beautification comes from within, community or within the community, you could put in scare quotes, does— how does it— does it absolve us of those kinds of problems that we might encounter from the beautification from without? And, you know, my answer is no, in that actually in the '50s and '60s, particularly in response to all the racial, uh, riots and, you know, movements and things like that that are happening at the time, the Black, you know, Black Power movement and other things, these beautification efforts are a way to Mm-hmm. Inaugurate and indoctrinate, you know, especially Black youth into cleaning up their neighborhood. And so, it also is one of these things where it's kind of a way— it goes back to the Amiri Baraka quote of a unified portrait, you know, and things like that, is that— and I didn't— I couldn't get the picture from another book, but there's a book called Model Cities that has this photo in it, which I could run and get. And it has, like, young Black kids, like, you know, proudly walking down the street and, you know, like, shout, you know, with sashes that say Freddie Fixer. And then, by the time, I think, in the Yeah, the one you—

Speaker 1: I showed is from '77.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, and this is a parade that starts in the '50s and then it goes to actually very recently to win the— I don't know if it— I don't know if it happened this year, and there's a funny story that I cite in that why it didn't happen. And, you know, it was— it was one of these ways to kind of almost seed within Black communities a sense of pride in the Black community. culture of— it looked— it was one of these ways to kind of naturalize policing. And so, in particular with Freddie Fixer, it became kind of a community tradition such that if you were, like, in the '70s and you were like, what is this? You know, whether you're from the neighborhood— let's say you're from the neighborhood, or let's say you're from outside the neighborhood, they'd be like, oh, this is an old tradition. This is our tradition of cleaning up our communities and making them clean for ourselves, not for white people. You know, right? But it actually— the history of it is that it came from these sort of you know, quite more directly counterinsurgent, if you want to use that term, institutions that were like, how can we get Black people to police themselves and police and beautify their neighborhoods? Not because we care about how they live, but so that it can prime them for real estate speculation, right? So, and also another way, it's another way to think about neoliberalism and getting voluntarist labor from poor Black people that would have previously been, you know, by paid state employees. There's There's lots of that in it, but I think it's one of those interesting examples because a lot of times the question I'll get with the book is like, well, can we have beautiful things, you know, or something like that? That's a kind of conclusion people, you know, and I'm like, well, I don't know, I don't have a, you know, you might imagine them and I can't, I haven't, you know, I mean, this is a challenge, but which gets to why, you know, some of the conclusions of the book. But it absolutely kind of confronts this idea that You know, very common now that like, oh, you'll see this in the Bay Area, and I'm sure you see in Philly too, where you see a lot of Black folks, sometimes rich, sometimes not, who are like, oh, you know, fuck gentrification or the police, but they do need to sweep those unhoused people. We do need to be— we do need our neighborhood to be beautiful. We do need— oh, this person was pissing on the street, this person was shooting up on the street. Well, you know, I don't want gentrification, but you can't have that kind of thing.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: And the point that this kind of brings up in the book, to also to the, the YIMBY aspect, which we can talk about, I can define for people that if you're, you know, longtime listeners, you've encountered the term, but is that beautification of our neighborhoods, you know, or this kind of project of beautification is this kind of policing and this regulation turned in. And it's a way of— it has to be questioned about, and I, I would often say it's never anything but this, whether it's priming the neighborhood for someone else, you know, a kind of future person that doesn't— it's not you. They don't want you to live there anymore. So I think that the YIMBY pipeline thing is also a reference to the fact that that's a lot of the ways YIMBY movements, after a— I think actually from the jump, ingratiated themselves to poor communities of color was by saying, well, okay, you might not want luxury condos in your neighborhood, But don't you want clean sidewalks? Don't you want litter patrol? Don't you want a garden that, you know, a community garden, which is usually— I mean, there are real community gardens to an extent, but like, you know, well, or maybe, I don't know. I mean, maybe I don't— I don't want to say I'm not an expert on community gardens, but because this also is like who doesn't belong in the community type of thing. But, you know, they're always about presenting the positive fruits of a kind of beautification As if they're not the Trojan horse of more violent forms of displacement and speculation, and they just always are. Like, you know, and it's like, there might— again, someone in the chat might be like, well, actually this, but someone put junior spies or something. But yeah, it very much was like a snitch patrol. It very much was. And, you know, you can look at kind of things like the history of liter— you know, the idea behind Freddie Fixer that, like, oh, Black neighborhoods are blighted, or— I'm putting in quotes— or dirty, in quotes, I'm putting—

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: As if that's because, oh, just Black people aren't— again, we go back to the civilization logic— are uncivilized and they're not clean. It's like, first of all, have you ever been to a white person's house? You know they're not more clean than us. But of all, you know, it's like, no, this is structural abandonment. These are all these, you know, all these kind of terms we would understand neoliberalism as. And that part of this also gets to the period in the book that I talk about a little bit but don't talk about a lot, like in the '70s. It was like, this is part of this kind of hustle mentality that becomes just inextricable from Black art. I don't know that there— it could exist without the internalization of this logic that, you know, we— you, you make beautiful things out— you, you gotta, you know, you gotta marketize yourself. You have to turn yourself into a regulated and regulatable project before you can make any real complaints. I mean, why are you making— why are you, you know, And not to mention that, we don't even need to get into the so-called real political work, because what we can do is hustle our way out of this. You know, we can— we can have voluntarist free Black police. It's just there's a lot of things into it, because of course you don't want to pay Black— you don't want to pay— I mean, neither of us is arguing for paying Black people to police Black neighborhoods. Actually, just don't do that. But it's a very fascinating thing. And if you look at, like, Lester K. Spence's Knockin' the Hustle that came out some years ago, I remember meeting him as a very nice and talked about this with me, where it's like, yeah, you know, the response to that with things like YIMBYism, and it goes back earlier, is like voluntary trash patrols, voluntary neighborhood watch, you know, all these kind of things that basically carry a more insidious version and logic of the policing. And I think one of the reasons they're more insidious is because, to go back to Baraka, they kind of are able to seed it in the cultural in a way where people growing up, you could be young enough or just, you know, whatever, and think, oh, this is natural. Like, it is actually part of our culture to police this, to not have unhoused people, not have drugs, not have what, da da da da da. And, you know, you go back to the blues, for example, that's why I think that period is interesting. It's like, that's not really the ethos of that period, you know, whereas this becomes to this day a still very dominant way of looking at this. So that's what— I don't know if I explained Freddie Fixer well, but yeah. And it's a parade that celebrates that, basically. But it also is a person, a kid usually could win Freddie Fixer things. And the picture's not in the book, but a lot of times these parades, like most parades, they would have the kids marching with police too. So they would like show them like, see, you're like a little— someone said junior spies in the comments. Like, yeah, it would be literally like kids like, see, you're almost like a policeman. Good work. Good. You know, you're making the neighborhood beautiful. Which I think is also not just a thing we should use to think about what the kids are doing, but a way to think about what cops are doing, right, as also part of a beautification project, which also complicates the celebration of beauty as something more important than us.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I forget the— I can't remember the name of the person who comes up with the phrase, but like that The dirt is matter out of place, right? And so, you know, there's this whole connection with, you know, like beautification or removing dirt is actually about taking things out that don't belong, right? And so then the question, you know, becomes like, well, what do you do with people who don't belong, right? And, you know, and—

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I know when it came up, it came up in the 2-part conversation with Tara Khan around settler colonialism. But yeah, anyway, go ahead.

Jemma DeCristo: The last thing I'll say is I think that's what I think about beauty is that it's actually about, it's its own construction of belonging. And I think that's what's dangerous about it. And to speak a little more concretely, and I talk about Goncalves as someone who writes about this and is like, well, what is Black beauty? And he has this interesting theorization of it, but it is ultimately Ultimately, to your point, it's like, well, who belongs? You know, it's— I talk a lot about it, which feels like a very, like, Kant or Kantian sentence. He talks about the rose being plucked as beautiful. And I think that's— it's about that plucking. It's about that power gesture. You go back to the menstrual stage and, you know, blacking up is like— it's about the power of that gesture, which is anti-relational in this kind of way, you know, in a more complicated way. And that's the difficulty of beauty and—

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: But yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 1: No, I appreciate that. Thank you. So I do want to talk about— because there are some collectives and organizations that you look at within the Black Arts Movement that you think of as— and maybe this can connect also to a conversation around kind of what— because I think— I hope people have gotten through this conversation And it'd be interesting to hear your kind of thoughts on it. But you're not saying, like, you know, Black people shouldn't make things, right? Or that there shouldn't be, like—

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Right, like, it's not an anti-creativity, you know, kind of discussion, right?

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Like, it's really about, you know, what is meant by the aesthetic and what is the role of the Black artist and Black art within this society? And what does it justify, and what kind of comportment does it require, and all of these kind of things. And so there are groups that you look at too within the book that you draw inspiration from or think, you know, are short-lived but, you know, cool projects in terms of trying to do something different. And so I wondered if you wanted to talk a little bit about AfriCOBRA.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: And is it Obasi? Is that how it's pronounced? Or Obasi? I'm not sure.

Jemma DeCristo: I thought it was pronounced Obasha. It might not be. I think it's pronounced like a sha. Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah. So, or any other groups that, you know, and examples from the Black Arts Movement that you kind of, you know, found really interesting this way in terms of trying partly the question that you brought up earlier of like some frame of accountability and some frame of like, you know, not just, okay, we're just going to do this for ourselves and, you know, who cares what anybody thinks about it kind of thing?

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, no, I think that's a great question. The— in the last chapter, I think the groups that I primarily talk about, or I talk about the Black Artists Group of St. Louis, which is really interesting because they have a much more embattled relationship. Like, they do take some of the funding from, like, the model cities, um, and they're very quickly— they're, like, given a space by We'll just say like the government, you know, government-private foundation funding, we'll just say that, to create an artist space for themselves. So they get to, you know, kind of every artist's dream, I think, who's not a millionaire, right? Having our own space to make stuff. And they get the space after a lot of argumentation because they're actually pretty aware of what these funds are supposed to do. And so at the same time they're being offered these funds, the Pruitt-Igoe strike is going on. And people are probably fairly familiar with it, right? It's this huge— the biggest rent strike, I think, still in the history of the US for better conditions and, you know, like, better living conditions in Pruitt-Igoe, which was a housing project in St. Louis, like, around— in and around St. Louis. And they're very hesitant to take the money to have— do any sort of artistic work because they realize that— Right. It's, I think, in Amelia Cruz or one of them says something like, oh, this is like they wanted us to civilize people, you know, because these people who were striking and, you know, pissed off about their poor living conditions are actually in need of— again, going back to the slavery— in need of civilizing because they're not acting right, you know, whatever. And so they, you know, they met about it, they debated, and then eventually they, you know, agreed to take some of the money or take the money and created a space. And then they created the space and were like, oh, we can perform. A lot of them were kind of experimental musicians, maybe we would call them, in the line of like the AACM, which is also a group I talk about, which the AACM, the advancement— the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, people probably know about from Chicago. They actually— the AACM actually met about getting these kinds of funds and refused to take them, at least at this point in the '60s, which is interesting. I think that One short answer to the concerns is like, you can just not do something. You cannot get something, you know. There's that quote from James Baldwin. I don't think I ended up getting to put it in the book, but he's like, you know, you have to lose something. This is going to cost you everything. That house, that child of yours, they're not yours. You have to give up something. I'm paraphrasing. Sorry, I can't— it's a really good quote. But yeah, so it's also like about giving stuff up, which I think is often a difficult argument to get into with Black people, even though ironically a lot of them Black people who are artists are from more affluent backgrounds, especially fine artists. But you know, maybe with music it's a little more complicated. So they create a they create a space outside St. or in St. Louis, or maybe slightly outside, and they invite the Prudigo strikers like, "Hey, why don't you? You know, I mean they're passing out flyers or something. I forget. Like, wouldn't you come see art in our space?" And they're like the people who are striking are like, "No, we don't really care for that. But can we use your space to meet?" our political meetings. And I thought that was actually really, like, a really good, like, way to respond. And they're like, oh, sure, yeah, you can use our space for, you know, having meetings. Like, I think this is, like— it's also kind of— it's a small thing, but it's like even just giving up that much was a good thing. It was like, oh, this is not a space for us to reproduce ourselves as Black artists. It's actually a moment where we could—

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: You know, give something away to, like, Black people who we are theoretically, again, in the spirit of the Black Arts Movement, interested in, you know, supporting, or I don't want to use the word serve the people, but I know that that is a, you know, that's a common term then that a lot of them use. So I think that's like, you know, that's kind of the— that's one example I think is sort of interesting. And then there is— AfriCOBRA is interesting also. I think that's— a— starts out as Obasha, which is a much bigger group, which contains more sort of like, I guess you could say, sort of multidisciplinary artists. And it's— Obasha is actually, if I remember correctly, much more driven by theater a little bit more than it is driven by— eventually, like, AfriCOBRA becomes probably more associated with painting and things like that. But there are a lot of painters in the group. I think there's musicians too, but I'm not off the top of my head remembering. And so, you know, obasha, we can call them, go in, you know, are like, many of them are local, they're from Chicago. A lot of these people, you can, I think some are, quite a few are still around. I don't know if they're still, still around, but they would've been till very recently. And there's also, there's a lot of debates in their sort of artistic production.

Speaker 1: Wasn't Abdul Akalima part of it?

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yes, he's been on the show.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, he's been on the show. Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. I didn't know that. Oh, cool. Okay. Yeah. And he was part— yeah. And I believe he's part of AfriCOBRA as well. So, because it— sorry, I didn't clarify that. Obasha starts as a maybe, I think, a bigger group. AfriCOBRA might become bigger later, but it starts and then kind of becomes AfriCOBRA by, I think I want to say the early '70s or late '60s. And, you know, I mean, it's interesting because a lot of people credit— what people might know this, especially if you live in Chicago, Chicago, they're credited with kind of starting the '60s mural movement. I mean, there's, you know, this happens in the '30s too, but with sort of socialist murals. But in the '60s, they're sort of credited with starting the sort of modern mural movement that we have in San Francisco in big, big numbers, right? Like a lot of targeted communities, particularly Black folks, but also a lot of other, you know, Latine folks. But, you know, that also comes from a tradition too in lots of parts of Latin America. But Comes from a, you know, this sort of tradition of creating public murals. And they're very, you know, like they taught— the interesting thing I found sort of in answer to your question too is also just the most interesting part to me of any of these collectives was the meetings and the like actual discussion about like what are the ethics of these things? Like what are we actually doing? And so they made this thing called the Wall of Respect, which was, you know, made with the input of people in the community, which on the one hand, Yeah. You listen to that and you're like, oh, that's a common— it's a common developer phrase, you know, phrasing like, oh, we took the concerns of the people in the community into account, da-da-da. But I think what's interesting is that from the perspective of like kind of art or Black art, right, is that like these are people who made something that it was much— it was more about trying to prevent them from demolishing buildings or, you know, from valuing the— which at that point, I think the valuing of the neighborhood was in the sort of demolition of huge things. Like, you see this— Chicago is a great example of that, like, you know, whole freeways, other things like that, that they demolish in order to— roadways and things like that, whole buildings, whole complexes. LA too, sure, would be great. In Oakland actually too. Like, so I think that it was interesting to think about their— the Wall of Respect, which, you know, is not still around to my knowledge, but there are lots of photos of over the years, as a project that they sort of self-consciously took up to defend the neighborhood from being, you know, treated to urban renewal and, you know, I could say gentrified or speculated upon. And so I thought that was an interesting approach to art as to the extent that art can be a defense of Black people. I thought it was interesting. That's not often the way. And I think, again, we enter in this paradigm with Alain Locke where most of the time it's about the imaginary project of a defense of a Black people that are not the Black people right here, by the way, for some reason. But that was kind of interesting because it had this material component to it where it was like literally this wall is on a building they're trying to develop. How can we kind of use art to prevent them from demolishing things? Which I don't think works now, but yeah. So those are 2 examples. And I talked about the ACM a lot too, but yeah.

Speaker 1: Sorry, I had to— I was trying to pull up the Wall of Respect. And then I had a— I couldn't get to the unmute button. All right, let me pull it up actually though so people can see it. And yeah, we have a huge— I mean, I'm in the Philly area and there's the Philly Arts Mural Project. Philly— but anyways, there's huge— there's murals all over the place in Philly. Yeah, here too. Yeah, this is the Wall of Respect.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah. And I think what's interesting is that it was called Respect, but it also— I mean, there are interesting things too, like organizing groups held meetings in front of it or like outside, which is also interesting to think of a group that, you know, I don't know, like people that— political groups that meet outside. I think that's kind of cool, you know, like, so there is an— I could go into it more, but I don't want to prolong on time. But there's some interesting— if people check in the book and, you know, there's a lot of books written by Obasha, AfriCOBRA artists. So I encourage you to read those as well. And they talk about, like, all the things that happened around the Wall of Respect. And, like, I think someone— I want to say someone got killed. I don't know if it was by the police in front of it. And then that became kind of a conversation. Like, so, you know, there's some interesting things in there that are a little more interesting than I, you know, which I guess is just a little opening. I'm not like, do this and it will change, you know, create a revolution or whatever. But I think they're interesting moments to think about.

Speaker 1: Right on. So I'm gonna pull up a couple different things people asked about along the way. If you have— do you have time? I don't wanna presume, of course.

Jemma DeCristo: Sure, I'm just hanging around. We got the— people listen to this while they're on the job. Is that how it works?

Speaker 1: They do, yes. We help them get through their shifts. That's the way it goes. All right, where was the question? Oh yeah, so Justin had a couple of good questions. So curious about the relationship between limits of Black art in its It's being used to sell, to validate Black people in a white imaginary, and symphonies, museums being used to civilize Euro immigrants in the late 20th and early 20— late 19th and early 20th century. And then, is it partly in arts history? I'm not sure if that's it.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: connected to that question or not, but do you have any thoughts on that?

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, I think that's a great question. Someone said I'm for the people in the chat, that's so sweet. Yeah, I think, I mean, I would answer yes. I think that's also something the book is trying to— to both those questions is that, so if you look, it's kind of interesting at the history. This is— there's a lot written about this, I'll try to answer succinctly. There's a very— the phonograph is interesting, Because in the US in the late 19th, early 20th century, one of the selling points of the phonograph and why they want to use it for music, contrary to like Edison wanted it to be like a stenographer, which is its own fascinating thing, he wanted it to like be the secretary, right, and stuff, because he was— we could go into that, the sort of invisibilized feminized labor. But they wanted it to kind of to use that term or sort of what the was referencing the question, like, sort of like edifying youth. Very simple. It's really an 18th century idea. I mean, I talk a lot about Friedrich Schiller in this, if people have ever read Schiller's writings. I mean, he's a very famous playwright, German playwright. But, you know, the aesthetic refinement that goes back to, let's at least say, the 18th century is very much present in the late 19th and early 20th century in a broad kind of way too. And so the phonograph, they think, in the U.S., one of the marketing points One of, not the only one, but one of the marketing ploys becomes, well, this is how we will mass, you know, refine our population, civilize, mass civilize our, you know, to address what I think is alluded to in the question. And I think there's definitely a relationship to that. And one could, there are other versions of the work where I looked at where I was like, you know, talk a little bit about the relationship between that and the fact that You have blackface recordings going on at the same time as it, so that even though the minstrel stage, which is the obvious reference for those recordings, is looked at not as a form of, like, higher refined art, but being, you know, having that kind of racialized power over Black people is absolutely part of having a kind of refined relationship to art. So, you know, as was the case with the minstrel stage in the 19th century, you could be a rich white person going to the minstrel stage, and then later that evening, You hit up a symphony, you know, like, it's not— or the next day, whatever, you know, those are not— they're opposed forms and they're opposed, um, or they are symbolically opposed forms, but they don't— they cohabitate in the same, you know, people kind of, uh, project of subject production or whatever we want to kind of call it, self-making, which is that term from Saidiya Hartman. So I think it's absolutely related. And then I think there is something about Art and y'all talked about, I think the beginning of film also answers this question very concretely too. Like, is you there is this sense that in the early late 19th early 20th century America to compete with Europe in a kind of imperial as an emerging imperial power has to have its own music American music and you know people who have studied the history of so-called of jazz or so-called jazz you know a lot of Musicians rejected the term jazz, can think about the way, for example, that jazz becomes, you know, as well as the sort of popular front things in the '30s— I talk a little bit about this too— becomes a way to create this kind of coherent American culture, American music. That is very much also part of what was, um, part of what was asked in the question. And then, and yeah, and also I don't talk about film a lot in the book. I do watch a lot of film. We don't have a film, but, um, I think, you know, interestingly with film and like, when was that? I want to say it's the 19— maybe it's the '20s when you see, you start to see all these actual regulatory bodies get invented, right? Which is very much the term alone, like, I forget the name, but there are, they're called like regulatory bodies. So you kind of get these, this, you know, idea that these are, these, you know, sort of modes of artistic production need to be entrained to Teach people to regulate or they will be regulated or both. I mean, really both happening at the same time. So I think there's actually a lot of relationship. And I do think that's part of the book. I kind of push against some of the romance of Black music in it that like, you know, people have. I talk about the sort of expressionist or expressivist tendency, right? Like that you see in the 19th century that Black music is always an expression of our suffering or always an expression of our joy.

Speaker 1: Right.

Jemma DeCristo: expression of sort of more immediate emotions. And that's not to say that doesn't happen or that's not in there, but it's difficult once you look at actually making music, you know, because it's not how people make music. I mean, generally. And then it also, it does allow for this sort of civilizational differentiation between how Black subjects are formed and everybody else. And I'm less interested— I don't know if this answers the question, but it's worth talking about too. I'm less interested in of the inheritance of slavery just as our inheritance rather than it being like, this is the world's inheritance, like the world did this to us. I mean, I wasn't personally enslaved, but, you know, the Black folks, and that it's— that is kind of the way it ought to be taken up with respect to art rather than it being the private possession of— yeah. So I don't know if that really answered the question, but that's also where that kind of comes from. So there definitely is a kind of connection to other groups in a way. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Appreciated. Yeah. And Justin's still in the chat. So Justin, if you have a follow-up or if there was a piece of that that we didn't get, then feel free to let us know. There is an interesting question. So Marwa, we did not talk about Emory Douglas, but this is an interesting thing that came up as I was listening to you today, really. I didn't think to ask you about this question beforehand, but it is Somewhat of a choice to talk about the Black Arts Movement. And then another choice would be to talk about someone like Douglas or how the Panthers used art. And I think it's interesting because obviously, for one, there's specific context for Douglas in that he's a member of an organization that has a political program.

Jemma DeCristo: Right.

Speaker 1: And his art is specifically, and I don't mean this in a negative term, it's for propaganda purposes.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: But it's to promote the ideas and the analysis and images that will draw people into the party, that will help communicate the politics of the party, et cetera. And I'm interested in your thoughts on that. And then I guess, Part of the question related to what you talk about in the book is how maybe we still have in certain ways the artistic portion of Emory Douglas, you know, in terms of represent— you know, this— like, what—

Jemma DeCristo: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1: It's sort of the question of, like, what lives on from the '60s and the '70s in terms of the art and what is lost, right? And, like, I would say, That if you're an Emory Douglas and you're not in some sort of political movement, organization, collective, etc., then, you know, I think there are real limits to what you can do as an artist to some extent. So yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, that— I think that answers it. That's a great question. I thought I would get that more often because I think some people could move from this. Well, I think it's a little— I hope I Kind of, you know, headed it off. And it's like, then am I— is my argument a kind of utilitarian art that purely— I don't believe in this kind of stuff. I mean, if you've ever done political organizing, how to get people to do things, I have no idea. You try a podcast, you know, like people are trying to say, if we knew, you know, if even just the basic level of like class, not to say that class is not, you know, woven in through all these other things, how to get people to, you know, Just basically recognize that I don't, you know, I, we try, we try different things. But, um, so I'm, you know, I wouldn't say I have that view of subjectivity. But I was thinking based on this, would people think, oh, I'm, you know, sort of secretly saying there should be a kind of utilitarian function of the art that like it's party delegated or something? You know, I'm not, I mean, I'm an anarchist. I've said on the show before, so no, in a way. But I'm a Black anarchist, so. But I do think what you said is exactly true, Emory Douglas. And I think the other thing, you know, living in the Bay long enough, The Tremendous 20 Years, like, there isn't a shortage of the slogans of the Black Panthers or the imagery or any of these things. It kind of goes back to that Baraka quote. We have a plentitude of those, I think. And I actually think this goes to the core argument of the book, is that there's actually a way in which— and I think we've talked about this on the show before in some way, and you've definitely had other people— that that actually holds back our political imaginations in a certain way, because people are thinking like, oh, well, I have the slogans, I have— we could go back to Kant— I have the understanding, I have the kind of faculties, I have this rationalized understanding of all this kind of project. But as you alluded to, I think the thing that's gone is the collectives, you know, is the people. And I'm not saying every— you know, there probably are some, you know— well, there are some collectives, but I'm sure some, you know, people will be like, oh, there's this. But we don't have those kind of, you know, you could call them parties, you can go whatever. I mean, I mean, I don't, you know, I believe in a many approaches thing. I'm sure different parties that I wouldn't perfectly agree with would've done some amazing stuff, but, or artists for that matter. So it is to your point that what my experience was that I kind of alluded to earlier is that even just telling people not to do art for a condo or a tech company was unthinkable. Like, so— I think what made someone like an Amiri Douglas strong Is a strong or interesting example was the collectivity that's happening behind the scenes. And I think that's where a lot of things are interesting. I mean, you know, we could even look at things— again, I don't super go into the '70s, but there are some interesting things about, like, the LA Rebellion in terms of filmmakers, which is very influential for me. And I'm sure— I know you've been to me on the show a lot, probably, I'm gonna guess, is a big fan of, like— so there are lots of examples. Yeah. Of, you know, that are more interesting. And also why I kind of do point to forms of collectivity, you know, in a different way, the blues. But it's not the same kind of, you know, self-conscious political project. But I think that is a start, a more powerful place to start for me, which I just see as totally absent in, not exclusively, but I do think, you know, an increasingly individuated conception of an artist, which I do think we live in that world now. So, so yeah, it is, it is exactly what you alluded to in the question, that, you know, he had these parties, these groups he's— that he's belonging to, you know. Like, if you looked up ACT UP, there's lots of things that have interesting artistic examples. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's really, you know, I've talked to Too Black about this stuff a little bit too, and him within poetry and stuff like that. And like, the— I think at one point he talked about the myth that like You know, people would have a line in their poetry of like, I'm gonna write the poem that's gonna start the revolution, right? Or this kind of— right? And so like the idea that people have, right, that it's like if they just write or paint or make the kind of like that the— The right thing. Yeah, that like somehow what's missing is just the quality and the craftsmanship around revolutionary messaging, I guess you could say, of a certain kind, without people accountability, all of these pieces. I know it's a tricky question to ask you to talk about the Panthers as an anarchist, but— Oh, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, I think that that's That's important, right? Is this sort of like some sort of political home, political accountability, right, for what you are doing as an artist? And then not to just be— I mean, we could talk about it within podcasting or anything else. A lot of what we have these days are not accountable to some sort of base or group of people that And maybe if it is, it's people you don't even know, right? So then it's like, what does that mean?

Jemma DeCristo: What does accountability mean?

Speaker 1: Yeah. All right, let's see. Everything in San Francisco concerning the Black community is counterinsurgent. Small, isolated community ripe for experimentation on many levels by empire. Working with students and families, you can really see it. Let's see. I loved this comment, Shitty Matcha. It is, unfortunately, we don't have written records of the first impressions of the colonized upon encountering and observing Europeans. It would probably blow their settler minds. Yeah, I like this comment, too. When white people sound extra sciency analytical with a lot of big words. To express the most odious racism is sometimes weirdly funny. I agree. That was in relation to the Brazil segment.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: This question, if revolutionary art is linked with a conscious movement and organization that has an ideological base, program demands, and political education, it can be powerful. I didn't know if you knew this reference, um, what Du Bois says about— yeah, do you want to say something about this?

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, I talk about that essay in the beginning of it. And, um, yeah, he talks about— and he uses that also why I don't criticize the word. He, uh, in that essay he says something— I'm not gonna, you know, paraphrase— is very pretty. 1926, I think the essay is from, Language, where he's like, you know, I have everything I have created for— has been for propaganda. He says something to that effect, and so his I mean the there's there's someone who I think reviewed the book. I think it was offered extremely helpful comments. I think it was Nahumi Chandler, who was very sweet. Thank you if that was you. And he was like, you know, big Du Bois expert, and he was like, he pointed out this essay, and he was like, "I don't know if anything you're saying, and this is beyond that essay," which was funny because it was written exactly 100 years ago now. I think it was 1929. And that essay is really— I talk a lot about that, of it being like, you know, his argument is like, you know, the Negro artist is doing these things for a kind of white outsider, that it is, you know, there is not a core to what— there is no sort of positive definition of the Black artist that is not about creating these kinds of cultural ambassadorial sort of projects towards an outside other. Right. And so, I, you know, I mean, I kind of agree with that. Like, I think, and maybe I would push even further in to say, like, even, you know, there's that line in the book too where I'm like, you know, even without ourselves or even amongst ourselves kind of thing, where I think that that is such a deeply ingrained notion now 100 years later in the conception of the Black artist that there is always this kind of, uh, there is always this tendency towards that kind of justification. And it goes back to that The other question too that you said about like if you have a revolutionary program and then you make art, I mean, maybe, I mean, I don't, you know, like it also gets to that question of like are people these, you know, kind of vessels that you can communicate, you know, language doesn't work that way, so I don't know why art would, whatever we're calling art. But I think it is the question of like almost something that goes beyond the justificatory, and I do think that that collectivity is something like that. It's somewhere like that, you know, to the demand that we always organize ourselves, get organized, whatever type of way one wants to frame it, that I think there's a lot of arguments to be made that, you know, in a kind of relationality, something like the Black artist doesn't exist. And that that's the way you move beyond this perpetually— that Du Bois talks a lot about this perpetually kind of justificatory, or that the way that, the denigration of something like propaganda or the opposition of propaganda to real art, that kind of thing doesn't— that opposition doesn't emerge or doesn't cohere entirely because there are not these sort of counter-institutions that I, you know, I've almost always, at least in the 20th century, mostly almost always existed, or all of our lives, I'm going to say, unless anyone's over 120 years old, um, that, that I think that is something like a way to push that conversation. But yeah, that Du Bois essay is really good. People should read it. It's free online. It's 100 years old, so it should be free. And it's pretty short. And that was a big turning point in the book because I think it was Naomi Chandler recommended it and was like, you know, you need to read this. And yeah, I think it is— it's a challenge. And it is like, in a way, also inspiring to be like, oh, they were still dealing with this 100 years ago. I mean, it could go the opposite You could be like, Jesus, why is it so? But, but yeah, so that's— yeah, it is, it is, you know. And so there is, there is like in him a little like Larry Neal, more of an attention to a kind of accountability. Like, you have— hey, you— it's not just about this, not only individual pursuit, but also to that earlier point, like a kind of eternal objective project of art, you know, that exists beyond us conveniently.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: Even though it often is used against us or exists against us, because what do we do with that?

Speaker 1: Yeah, no, thank you. Somebody brought up there's also an element of voyeurism when playing for primarily white audiences, whether it's expressing a radical view or not. I've had to come to terms with that. Claps feel consuming. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things you don't— I mean, you do deal with it in terms of The justificatory, like, that justifying to without as well as to within. But I think one of the things that I really found— and I mean, they're related actually, right? Because like this— so I really liked the fact that one of the places that you focus around is imaginations, right? And around like how it kind of causes its own— there's these own processes of self-regulation.

Jemma DeCristo: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1: Of, okay, like, if I'm going to any, you know, thinking about this and going all the way back to like Douglass, right? And saying like, okay, in this era, if I'm going to be a Black artist, like, these are, you know, these are the kind of justificatory pieces I need to take on, or like whatever. Like, this is, this is what this looks like. This is how it needs to look in a certain way, right?

Jemma DeCristo: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1: And then, of course, with the Harlem Renaissance, just the interesting of like kind of in like, well, if we don't want white people to tell us how it has to look, then we need to, as our own community, decide how it needs to look, which is interesting, right? Like, it is very interesting. And you can see value to that to a certain degree.

Jemma DeCristo: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1: But I think this is always a problem. Like, this is something that Dr. Jared Ball talks about quite a bit, right, of like anyone who is in the United States that is looking to become like a mainstream artist, right, or a very— or just to play in different parts of the country or whatever, right? Like, you have to come to terms with the fact that you're creating something largely for white folks, right? And so then, like, how do you navigate that? And I think that's a really— it's a complicated and difficult question. He recently had a good discussion about Chappelle's recent Netflix thing.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: And it was a good commentary on it. He uses this discussion of the Cosby effect with relation to Chappelle. But yeah, I mean, that question of audience, I guess, is one you don't spend a whole lot of time, I didn't feel like, in the piece discussing that question or thinking about that question deeply.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah, no, I think so, because I think there's a lot of theories like audience reception theories and things, but I think it's also one of the things the book also tries to complicate too, right? And I mean, you can look at the history of Black art, and that's also why The Harlem Renaissance is really important, but also the Black Arts Movement too is also like, you know, even in periods where the art was aimed at a Black artist, I mean, the Harlem Renaissance is the most obvious example, but people know the history of things like Slumming It and the Cotton Club, all these places, right? Like, it's like even when, or perhaps especially when it's Black ruling class people or the Black elite, to use that, you know, that phrasing, that are kind of You know, either the dominant audience or the dominant producer or the, you know, like that. There's really just a step away from white people being in the picture, even if we're to think of it that way. And it's an interesting, it's an interesting thing too. I mean, it would— I would have a more— I would have a lot more to say for something like film. And I think it's really interesting because it's also one of these things where, like, I think why a lot of Black movies are bad, including a lot of African films too, is because there's like this festival audience. There's like this outside audience. But I also think it's one of those things that's interesting is that, again, I, you know, I'll try not to go into film too much because I don't write about it in the book, but it is one of those things to me I think about a lot when I think about contemporary Black film where I'm like, people might think that their audience is not Black, but I'm like, what about the form— or their audience is Black, sorry. But like, what about the forms? Where do we get these forms of kind of, you know, like—

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: And what do we— when— what do we get the why behind these forms, which gets into the justification aspect, you know? So, like, is, you know, one thing a lot of artists during the Harlem Renaissance and also the— although this is more of a point of contention, but I think especially in the '60s, and I mean, I very much grew up with this, you know, much later, was like taking African elements from music, you know, from, let's say, you're descended— you know, I'm not— neither my parents or grandparents were born in Africa. You know, let's say using African helm, is that a— is the content of the art a way to produce the form and a way to produce the audience? But then that enters into this whole complex matrix, whereas like if you're talking to African, you know, an African audience or diaspora— I don't really like the word diaspora. You know, an audience that's that audience that's Black people in the US, Caribbean, New World, and, you know, African folks on the continent, whatever people want to characterize it. I think there's also the question of what sorts of demands, what sorts of critiques, what sorts of worlds you're negating and bringing to the fore that is, you know, endlessly kind of a question. And that was a, you know, that was a big issue in the Harlem Renaissance too, especially for, you know, like Francophone Caribbean, Francophone African artists and reggae. So I think for me it was more a way to talk about— and I say this in the intro, I think— like the imagination of the slave society, and to talk about like, well, this is the audience. And I think a tendency a lot of Black folks can do, you know, maybe including myself, um, and I think very commonly the Black bourgeoisie do, which I think kind of is this, is like, well, that's not me. I'm not, you know, it's not, it's not appropriation if I take it. And of course, we have a lot of Black cultural forms that, again, you go back to Frederick Douglass, that are appropriated by white people because a Black person did it first, who was, you know, in most cases of the ruling class that had the means to do it. And so I think talking about the imagination of the slave society, which is a term I use, I say like the imagination of the slave society is a material site from which Black aesthetic justification is forged and reified. So it's also a way to— it's a challenge. It's like we can't just opt out by saying like, well, I'm Black, I don't do that, you know, or I'm like— because I just think that is too easy. And it's just not true, you know, like, it's like, and I think that's where it kind of, it also enters a kind of ethical political question about like, you can't make this art outside the world, which I think also starts to get into those sort of arguments around audience. And probably everyone has an audience in their head when they make some kind of art, but then how you engage that. And also, it's, you know, there's a lot of Worth, again, going back to the '60s too, the Black Arts Movement really influenced the text. I went as one of the other starting points since that's what I learned about when I was a teenager and in college, I think influenced me in making art is like, you know, there is this conversant with people like Brecht and other people about breaking down the audience and not having audience and having, you know, expansive participation. And that's the thing I get into where I'm like, I think that was A good move, to put it simply, and interesting and really powerful. And then I also think about the idea that, look at, like, you know, if people have ever read, like, Richard Iton's Search of the Black Fantastic, like, it's also fascinating to think that part one response to that is inaugurating every Black person into being this sort of spectacular aesthetic subject that's always producing, you know, now we have the term viral content, you know, or content, like, on— so.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: It's a challenge. I think it's not so much an issue of a white audience, although obviously in ways I think people have criticized and are even just casually aware of it's that, but also of a kind of relationship, a relationality to being in the world that would need an audience as a way to resolve the complicated questions around this kind of thing or something like that, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1: Yeah, it does. I mean, I think the last question I'll bring up, because it might enable us to talk about this and some related things, right? Somebody said, what is so— what is also tricky now as a liberation artist wanting to do exclusively community funding arts is there's a great deal of private and public partnership funding. And I think, you know, this is sort of like kind of in a certain way where you kind of start and end the book to some To some degree, is thinking about this problem of where we are now, where if you're going to be funded as an artist— I mean, a great example of this— well, maybe it's not. It's an example that I think is good. When Chuck D did the ambassador thing for the State Department in the middle of the Gaza genocide, Was like you know out there with Anthony Blinken and you know all of this. The Gaza genocide, of course, is still ongoing. I'm not saying it's in the past, but you know this was under the Biden administration, and it it it was Chuck D, of course. But there was also a whole like it was a program. These were like music ambassadors for the State Department, right? So it's government money enough to. Pay. So, you know, and I think in many cases it was like, you know, whatever, $60,000 a year plus travel. Like, so it's like something that for artists is not, you know, life-changing money necessarily, right? But it's, it's like, oh, I know how I'm gonna get paid for the year and I can tour and do this and da da da. It's like, yeah, and you're doing this on behalf of the State Department, right? Um, and I mean, maybe that's— there's always been stuff like that, by the way.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Of course, there's been all of these programs funded by the Congress of Cultural Freedom and the State Department and the CIA and all of this kind of stuff. But that's kind of the spectacular example. There's a lot more of within cities, mayoral budgets, nonprofit money. If you're in a place like you are in the Bay Area, then there's tech money and all of this stuff. And it is, I acknowledge, it's a very difficult landscape, I think, for artists of any kind to navigate nowadays if you are trying to make a livelihood off of doing art.

Jemma DeCristo: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1: And so, yeah, I don't know if there's any closing kind of things that you would want to say about All of that. But, you know, I think the book, particularly for folks, you know, since you can download it and look at it, like the preface and the conclusion, like you're really kind of looking at some of these questions too. So, yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. So very quickly, the Chuck D thing, that actually goes back— people probably know this. I don't know if it entered the chat, but there was a thing called The Real Ambassadors of Jazz, which is this— I don't know if you've talked about it on the show. I wouldn't be surprised if not. That I want to say it was made as a record. I actually have the record, like, and it's, I want to say, like, Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong. So it was this period, and it was like a Cold War project by the US, very similar to what you're describing. I want to say when I was in college in like the 2000-somethings, there was also, they tried to do this with hip-hop. I don't remember. I want to say like it didn't have super famous artists. I don't remember who was in it, but this was like maybe 15, more than 15 years ago. Um, so that does happen. Yeah, it is, you know, there is much more overt State Department-funded projects like that. And, you know, I mean, less so— I'm not even just with Black folks, but a lot of, I mean, films, film festivals. I mean, you know, the Berlin Film Festival, there's all this, you know, that are like, you know, we're anti-communist. All these kinds of things are very overt. Um, But yeah, so your question was about funding and other— you know, I mean, I really think we're— and if you make— I mean, it would be interesting to see what, you know, like someone like— because I think film is a great example where it's, you know, it— I don't want to say it is expensive because people always say that it can be expensive. I think it can just be time-consuming, which I think is the other leaning towards the answer is like how we choose to spend our time is something in some cases we have control over, even if it takes longer to do it. And versus, like, say, what we make money from, which we have far less control over. Um, so, you know, it's true, something like— I think of, like, a lot of film, it's, like, very impossible for them to get funded by things that aren't one of these sources that you brought up. And— but I also think, you know, one way to do these kinds of things is also not to make money. I mean, it sort of sounds like—

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: Obvious answer, you know, it's like, I think it's kind of where you start to go into the collectivity and it's like, okay, how can we sustain ourselves and make these things? Which is a very political question. I think that's like what political, you know, we, I think we did an episode with you, I want to say, or maybe it was, it might have been on San Francisco where we talked about like this argument that I think people my generation had probably because of how naturalized nonprofits were that you should get paid for doing organizing. And it was like, well, okay, you do that, you're not going to be able to unorganize the structures of power that are paying you. It's very simple. You can look at even labor organizing like that. Even though you're organizing your job, they're not paying you to organize against the job to the extent that— so I think that's where we enter into the kinds of questions around the political process. The other thing I kind of did in the book was also try to think about, or kind of leave open, the spaces for art that are not as valued, and that I tend to kind of attack the sites that are more the sites of value production, you know. So like now, a lot of people probably deal with this if you live in a city, is like contrary to the '60s, I think to a degree, is like a lot of murals are used to gentrify places. So it's like, what do we make of the kind of the way public art, the public of public art, is now constituted by a new kind of theft, you know, or a double theft, or however we want to look at it, that's like very much wielded against— which I guess we must consider Black folks outside the public then, if these public art is being used against Black, particularly poor working-class people, sex workers, unhoused folks. Um, I think not taking those kind of things, and I think it's also a way to look at How we give up and find each other. You know, it is very rela— I just, you know, like how we give up those resources that you highlighted and kind of find each other in other things. And I, you know, a lot of things are like this, but I think a lot about film and how people need a film to look a certain way, you know, or like have a certain quality to be, or, you know, they need art to be polished. This is actually, I think, a really big problem in Black art where—

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: People can't make, like, you know, you look at, like, if you go to film, you think of, like, Haile Gerima, all these, you know, all these kind of filmmakers who are making films that looked rough, but they're still better than anything that's made now by Black filmmakers in the US at least, and Africa, honestly. Like, you know, but films look better now. Like, they look, you know, this goes to the beauty thing. Like, I mean, it's easier to make a— so I think it's a, it's like, okay, well, looking doesn't have to be just looking backwards, but I think that is the way.

Speaker 1: Right.

Jemma DeCristo: They frequently looked as a negative, right? It was always like, oh, if we don't do this, lest we return to slavery type of thing. I think looking back at like— and I'm just picking film because I think it's the one where an aesthetic maybe is the most— always is conflated with getting these kinds of resources. And I'm like, well, yeah, but Bush Mama or, you know, Ashes and Embers is better than any Black American film, big, you know, whatever, the kind of those kind of the famous That very polished, unfortunately, clearly very Tree of Life Terrence Malick-influenced looking Black film that produces everywhere. There's a lot of queer films like that too, Black queer films. So I think there's something to be said when people say they need resources too. It's like a question of like, what are you doing and what are you building and what are you, you know, and how can, how can we get there together type of thing versus which people are more inclined to do with maybe sort of a so-called political thing but less inclined to do with art. Because it's supposed to be this private possession of us, you know, which is weird if you make music, because musicians aren't necessarily that way. And it's impossible if you make film, in my opinion, or do theater. I think it's harder to do that kind of thing and be like, this is my private possession. It must be this, and it can't. Anyway, so I don't know. That's one sort of answer.

Speaker 1: No, that's good. I think that's, you know, these are really difficult You know, questions. I think the thing that you talked about in terms of even the will that people have, right, to actually want to do something different, right? Like, that's a big part of it too. Like, what you talked about, like, trying to form artist collectives and stuff like that. Like, and it's not just artists, like, but it is an example, you know, of the way that—

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: I think just our— I don't want to give it just to our generation and the generations that follow, but there is something to just how hyper-individuated we've become. And obviously, that's something that has been really violently imposed through all kinds of media and other things, right? To sort of—

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Put us in this place of like, I mean, you know, it goes back to the, as you said, this is, this is where the neoliberal logics that you talked about, like, you can see when you go back to something like, you know, Douglass or, you know, these early, like these kind of 19th, you know, late 19th century, early 20th century, you know, logics of like, Mm-hmm. When you start talking about self-regulating individuals and stuff like that, right? This is— yeah.

Jemma DeCristo: And last thing I'll say is I think that's where art is really important because I think if we look at art as just expressive and expression and all these kinds of those sort of paradigms, it becomes unthinkable that art is this point of self-regulation. And so for example, let's say I'm A filmmaker, and I'm like, I want to make a film, and it has to be made this way. I'm an absolute auteurist, and I think I'm like, I don't know, Kubrick or Preminger, or one of those filmmakers who really was like, I mean, put the authoritarian in author. I think it says a lot about why one thinks that that's express— You know, like, that if that can be carried in expression, then what is expression doing there? And it goes to your thing, like, How is what I need to be the product of the film, even itself, regulatory in this sense? And, like, how do you give up? You know, again, I'm using theater because I'm making a film with someone from Hutoshio who's on here sometimes. And I think a lot of it— and there are filmmakers who would, you know, like, yeah, like who— Sembene was— who's one of my favorite filmmakers. You know, he had— he worked with regular people and he had to just be like, they're doing this, you know? And I— so I think there is some models and things like theater is like— I mean, a lot of theater And it's also because we don't have that, you know, those are things that people I think maybe are a little less hip to, like the records of those things. But a lot— and they go to the blues. I mean, a lot of it is like there's a lot of this being collective production that— I'm not saying it's a solution to all this, but it gets you into these places where it's a little more complicated to reassert what are some of the problems, I think. You know, it's not saying we're not gonna find new problems. You know, there is no— again, if you think of it kind of dialectically, we have to come at Or among other analytically other kinds of ways to think about it, you have to kind of confront these things. But I think there are lots of, you know, it's kind of that giving up that we associate with other political choices, but we don't think about with art because for some reason that's supposed— and that's very 19th century, that's Nietzsche. I don't think that's radical. Like, I think that's very much like that art is the one last protected thing, whereas giving up where you get your coffee from or whatever isn't. You know, I would be confused As to why I would— that's romantic thinking. I would have to— we'd have to, like, think about that with ourselves. Like, why is that the one thing that is off limits in that way? And I don't think that's where we came from, so to speak, with Black music. So, yeah. Oh, yes.

Speaker 1: No, awesome. Yeah, I just wanted to remind people, especially if folks missed early on, you know, that Gemma is— you know, wanted to have us plug and support this mutual aid project.

Jemma DeCristo: Please do.

Speaker 1: So, you know, folks, this is a program in Gaza, right, that is run by Palestinians in Gaza, and as well as folks, you know, in the US and other places, right?

Jemma DeCristo: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And so, you know, yeah, the link to this is in the show description, as is the link to download this book, which, you know, and I encourage people to buy it. I did, I think I put the Massive Bookshop link, and if folks aren't familiar with Massive, they do use their— they call it anti-profit model. And so they use the money that they make from sales, whatever proceeds they use to bail people out of jail. So— That's cool. I like that. Yeah. So anyways, if you're looking for a place to buy it, that's a good one. So anyways, Gemma, thank you. This is great as always. Look forward to having you on again. Uh, we have to do another movie, we have to do an album. So, you know, um, we do. Yeah, yeah. So, all right, so everybody have, have, you know, if you celebrate the holidays, have a happy holidays. And, um, I probably have one or two things that I'll put out before the end of the year, but this might actually— I don't know, might be the last live of the year. It might— there might be one more, but We'll see. So anyway, thank you, and much appreciation to you, Gemma, for this conversation.

Jemma DeCristo: Thank you for having me, and thank you, audience.

Speaker 1: Absolutely. Well, we'd be nothing without the audience, right? We'd just be 2 people talking to each other.

Jemma DeCristo: Well, you know, that's good too.

Speaker 1: Right on.