Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
3.04
Ethnic Politic
by Travis Hedge Coke
Three things about being a nonwhite academic:
1) I spend a lot of time structuring what I talk about to mixed audiences with what I might talk about to an Indigenous audience.
2) Much academic terminology does not apply fantastically to minority concerns and the terms that do (“survivance”), we often do not want to expand to embrace more.
3) If there were prizes for avoiding being the expert minority or the expert academic, I would try pretty earnestly for at least the Silver.
I may be too quick to accept I am wrong, but I would rather take that route – if no one else is being hurt – than get into a fight over something with someone who has no flexibility to their thought, anyway.
White America run the show. So you keep your mouth shut.
And, frequently, nonwhite people in white-colonized places, believe that their dynamic is unique to them. So, you keep your mouth shut.
“Scam” is a term which can describe merchants who make money from prepaid benefits which are never claimed. But, in colonial economics, it is called, “breakage.”
Colonization fucks us.
As an artist, as a writer, painter, musician, whatever, there are so many things I will not show. Things I will not show an opinion on.
I have siblings, cousins, family who are vastly more successful than me. Relatives who are doing relatively well for themselves. And, I have family who are losing eyes, who are suicidal, in debt, who have been assaulted, been murdered, had people murdered in the room next to them.
When I went to graduate school, at first, I lived with a white guy who came well recommended, a dealer and sex worker who made offers to pimp me out often enough. You don’t complain. White people can do whatever they want.
A year into school, walking through desert miles a day, disabled, broken, broke, eating the cheapest foods and pretending to browse chip aisles or drinks fridges to stay in air conditioning at the occasional corner store, I had to walk from a neighboring town to the city in which school was in, at an angle from the highway, through sands, to cut distance, when a sandstorm hit.
On campus, a wreck, I stepped into our building, hoping to find no one and running into our new Chair, Tod Goldberg, and a flock of suits he was escorting.
“And, this is the hardest motherfucker on campus,” he said.
I hit the restroom, stripped to the waist, brush and deodorant to the side of the sink, and lowered my face to the water to slough off the dirt and sweat. The basin ran pink with blood and gold with sand. I had to put my glasses back on to look in the mirror and the cuts lining my sand-caked head.
A few hours later, in the classroom active with a class, two students referred to how much Indians get, how easy it is for me and not for them. Students who would be vocally upset if I cut up meats or fruit from my bag or filled my bottle from the restroom sink instead of buying a water or trying to defeat my own body and balance a bottle and the drinking fountain flow and bar.
This is a thing for white academics, for white people, too. They too get fucked by JD Vance and Donald Trump and Christopher Columbus.
You may not feel as much need to make yourself an academic or a painter, a nurse, a dancer, a carpenter, a something, so you are not that marked for death. And, you make sure you never act or think you are too good of any of those things, so that you are not marked to be beat down. Or, maybe you do.
Grad school or die. Sing or be killed. It is always something or die. Presenting.
You get to live and JD Vance biopics can be made by guys who who turn Max Baer into a villain in David v Goliath movies designed, it seems, to heroically take 1930s Jews down a peg or two.
HILLBILLY ELEGY: (L to R) Glenn Close (“Mamaw”), Amy Adams (“Bev”). Photo Cr. Lacey Terrell/NETFLIX © 2020
Umberto Eco’s warnings against hermetic thinking, once more elaborate and rich, would spare us, universally heeded, from some bad historicism, from a lot of conspiracy theory bigotry, in which semblances are fused and exaggerated and fused again so that any and all tangent or tandem elements boil into a soup of similarity and a paste of sameness. Lizards have blood, and this ethnic minority has blood, ergo this ethnic minority is a lizard and trying to take our blood.
The hylic ideal that things have form and matter, shape and content, commercially appealing, is a colonial loss of the soul. The one soul, all soul, sole soul.
“”
– George Frederick Augustus Bridgetower, of whom we have no surviving quotes easily found.
Eco’s warnings also leave us open to the bigotries reinforced by rationalism, inductivism, empiricism, and much application of the scientific model by emotional, political, non-empirical and non-inductive human beings. A famous physicist argues in a half-explanatory journalism/half-memoir book that traditionally, the past couple hundred years of scientists are an apolitical tradition unified by their sharing of information and forward-thinking. This is all colonialist.
Colonialism can be well-meant, in microcosm or the cosmic scope of the non-cosmic. Declaring that a deity is only this, so that all deification or deity not-that can be ignored or erased is good enough for a Richard Dawkins book, but not for real life or smart people. That trancework or prayer work best universally at a particular room temperature or that this is a transubstantiation and this is a misapprehended literalism, are well-meant in micro-scale, and can help, even. Stepping in and stepping up. Applied as universal, they only function as conquest bids.
Whether or not a thousand or ten or one of the texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, for example, “the Egyptian,” are forgeries, or misattributed, if they present useful material, they present useful material. Identifying what that material is and how or why it is useful is a separate track from throwing out baby, bathwater, and decrying baths as “magic thinking” before we dig up Hermes and measure his skull.
Hermes, from which, “so above, so below,” and other magick and hermetic truisms are supposedly derived. Thrice great. In a trice great!
The real reason he is, “the Egyptian,” in Renaissance habit, is to distinguish Hermes as someone ancient. It is the ancientness from which power is deriving, in this strain, because that ancientness can override foreignness. If Hermes Trismegistus is the founder of the German peoples, if Hermes is an antecedent to Christianity or to Jesus, and Jesus represents a breaking from Jewishness to a rising white European cultural supremacy, then Hermes can have an ethnicity without losing validity.
You can start to wonder if Protocols-of-Zion-are-real gurus signal they communicate from the Isle of Wight to tip their hat to the code-lookers.
This, too, is magic thinking, and alchemical habit, but mine or theirs (or affected)?
Jesus Christ is not Black in Kevin Smith’s Dogma because Smith is speaking for God or God’s Truth, but because as a narrative and as a piece of art, it prods good results. It is good to consider how responses to Christian teaching or biblical quotations change if Jesus is Black, as they do when we remember Jesus as Jewish and not White Jesus. The mutability and awkwardness of ethnic and racial labels and qualifiers when we remove our contemporary biases or those of long, reinforced colonialist traditions.
“They don’t dig my jag.
And the missus is asleep.
So you gotta take it down man.”
– Ram John Holder, Pub Crawling Blues
Fear of a Black Hat (1993)
Directed by Rusty Cundieff
Shown from left: Mark Christopher Lawrence, Rusty Cundieff, Larry B. Scott
Is Jesus Black in Rusty Cundieff’s Fear of a Black Hat?
In the Invisibles, so many Black people we get to know, as audience, as police or musicians. Inasmuch as Jim Crow is a superhero, he is a pop musician, a hip hop bandleader in his public life, and in his secret Invisible life, an enforcer of justice who can be called on by those suffering in society. Jim is close to a cop and Boy, one of her brothers, Lt Peebles; all police. There are not more Black police in The Invisibles or in their world, but a greater proportion of Black people we see on-panel are police than is true of white people or other ethnicities.
Is ease with which we can decry stereotypes as too common the same ease we find in, “Stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason?” Do we choose to take that explanation to mean the stereotypes reflect a real circumstance, rather than the possibility that stereotypes are engineered or encouraged because they control how a thing or people are considered?
As we see with the titled Brits and teachers in formal British schooling, nostalgia and well-meaning are, themselves, orientalist and oriented to colonization. There is colonialism in King Mob’s head. There is colonialism in Dane McGowan’s classroom teachers. Colonialism in flags and street signs. In an old woman’s wistful sentimentality.
When The Invisibles introduces “Invisible movies,” the idea of Invisible arts speaking to Invisibles and illustrating or intimating principles separate or concurrent with their universal or espoused narratives and ideas, the result is not that we believe or need to confirm these intentional secondary readings. The Eastern Orthodox Easter-fresh Jack Traven and Annie Porter who gets him there. Perhaps Harry Temple is Jesus and Howard Payne, Satan, in Speed. We can make the cases. We can bolster it with the director’s childhood Catholicism, as a cinematographer for Paul Verhoeven, who directed the passion film, Robocop, and various uncarefully grabbed touchstones from the movie.
“[T]he Black Man was a constant, serving symbolically as a dark passage down into an imagined ‘underworld…’”
– Dick Hebdige, Subculture
Whether we see Dennis Hopper as ethnic, really always depends on how we see ethnic. Whether we see Keanu Reeves as ethnic, well, there is marketing involves, too. There always is. Whether Anne is the porter of Mary or the porter of Mary is favored.
Egyptian. Black Jesus. Howard Payne. Keanu Reeves. Ultimately, racialization is to ensure unfairness. It is the rhetorical tactics of debate clubs. The hermetic traditions developed around Hermes Trismegistus over the last several hundred years – not thousands – are colonial in heart. Conquest-narratives of how pilgrimage is is yours alone, how you walk alone, think alone, know alone. And – unspoken – know to follow “mighty and strong” patriarchal type who can think and walk alone, or at least, pretend they do. Who we can pretend they do.
I do not dislike shamanism. I hate the term. I despise the globalization, the commercialization, the colonization and universalization of the word, “shaman.”
Tribalism is something demeaning to people with no tribe. “Tribe” becomes a thing to call a coffee klatch, a group of friends, and no longer a nation, by people who perpetuate colonialism and dogmatic a priori ownership of lands and resources from tribal peoples. Colonialism fetched in condescension and fetishization.
Sham shamanism is sometimes well-meant something else. Well-entrenched practical appliance.
The cat above and the mouse below.
“Workers and bosses” is so often a scam to defraud those who are not solely disenfranchised by boss and worker roles. Both the methodology of weaponizing theory and terminology to cut out the disenfranchised and the techniques which rely on a rhetoric that for the disenfranchised, no theory, no specialized terminology should be used, are frequently aimed at keeping the disenfranchised permanently disenfranchised.
The Outer Church distinguishes itself, in The Invisibles, into bosses and workers, elites and servants, with the servants exchangeable and often faceless and the elite Sirs and Misses individuated who “walk alone, think alone, know alone,” and “know to follow.” The Invisibles cells are not tribal, but their group orientation de-centers even group leaders or elders. Both follow models of mystery religions and social clubs, but those models are agglomerated the same way as Joseph Campbell or Christian universalisms. They do not mean the same in practice for the Invisibles and the Outer Church, but are a catch-all for two the Church – and real life perspectives they represent – perceive the techniques of secrecy and leveled education.
“They restored ‘deported Africa’, that ‘drifting continent’ to a privileged place with the black mythology.”
– Dick Hebdige, Subculture
When you feel a deep breath coming on, a gasp, a yawn, a panicked yelp, shift your entire breathing technique. Rapid fire those breaths, shallow as you can. Inhale hard and need for a count of eight, hold for a count of ten, exhale harder for a count of six, inhale again as you count eight, do your ten, your six, your eight, you ten, your six, your eight.
Under white colonization, how much falls back to whiteness without active resisting? How much does active resistance refuel colony?
Piston-pull politics. Every move you feel, as a disenfranchised person, is to be treated as a minority, even when you are a majority or they can craft your image into the threat of a majority. Every movie you see and hear, as a disenfranchised person, portrays a permanence to your disenfranchisement. To be disenfranchised is to be mongrelized by caterwauling hounds. To be diffused and disturbed. To be a lament, and worse, someone else’s lament.
*******
NEXT: Mob’s Death
And previously…
- Prologue/Series Bible
- Chapter One: I Was a Librarian’s Assistant (Pt. 1)
- Chapter Two: I Was a Librarian’s Assistant (Pt. 2)
- Chapter Three: Robin Roundabout
- Chapter Four: How Did Helga Get in Here?
- Chapter Five: Boy Our Embarrassment
- Chapter Six: Once I Was a Little Light
- Chapter Seven: Sacrificial Greed
- Chapter Eight: Dreams Like This
- Chapter Nine: Whose to Tell
- Chapter Ten: The Dead Weight
- Chapter Eleven: Non-Causal Time
- Chapter Twelve: The Fanfic of the Book of the Movie
- INTERSTITIAL – 3.0: Back and Forth and Back Again
- Chapter Thirteen: Batman!
- Chapter Fourteen: Aged Out?
- Chapter Fifteen: Una is the Superior Jerry
Nothing in There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles) is guaranteed factually correct, in part or in toto, nor aroused or recommended as ethically or metaphysically sound, and the same is true of the following recommendations we hope will nonetheless be illuminating to you, our most discriminating audience.
Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story. Howe, LeAnne. 2007. Aunt Lute Books.
An Autumn’s Tale. Directed by Mabel Cheung. 1987. D&B Films.
Speed. Directed by Jan DeBont. 1994. 20th Century Fox.