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i'll come back to this tomorrow, but for the moment what i'll say is that among the consequences of this history and the ways it continues to constrain or condition the present is that it warps people. it warps *everyone* --everyone performs it's effects directly, in mirroring them, indirectly in trying to move out from all that.
personally, i think the most difficult area that this history is tangled up with is the way socio-economic class works in the states, and i think there are ways in which we won't be rid of it until we're rid of the class order as it currently exists. sometimes i think the only way to get rid of this history is revolution. other times, i think it's possible to move in that direction otherwise, but to do it, we'd have to think as revolutionaries and act in a different fashion tactically. this because the class order is self-evidently tied up with the rest of the capitalist order that produces it, that relies on it, that reproduces it, in the context of which it is functional, to the extent that it is. the underlying problems are that fundamental. not everyone sees the linkages between racism and class and the capitalist mode of production as being as tight as i do--but that is my basic position.
for what it's worth, it's one of the many reasons i am as distant as i am from conventional politics in the states, and one of the reasons i often find conversations about this to the acting as though playing with plush toys addresses real problems.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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