As noted a couple of months ago, The Girlfriend’s been working on a podcast project, connecting her #100HardTruths website, a digital media primer she created during Trump’s first 100 days, to a subsequent series of poetry workshops, where participants discussed ideas, then wrote poems, about fake news. CoronaWorld delayed publication of a book she authored, including a collection of 100 poems written by diverse workshop poets. So she’s turning the ideas and poems into a series of podcasts.
In response to the Black Lives Matter uprising, The Girlfriend is releasing on Thursday a podcast “emergency edition,” mainly an oration by an academic colleague and friend of The Girlfriend. In this moment of looming authoritarianism and collective action organized around African-American experience, I present here the episode’s transcript. You can listen to the episode here.
[Podcast transcript]
The Girlfriend: On the sixth day of protest here in Brooklyn, I sent a text to Dr. Gabrielle Foreman, the founding director of the Colored Conventions Project and co-director of the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State. Would she act quickly to contribute what she is so well equipped to offer: hard-earned wisdom about photography, poetry, and civil rights for Black Americans?
Later that day, Gabrielle spoke. In the eight-minute oration that follows, she connects two HardTruths written in 2017 for my online primer on fake news. Gabrielle penned HardTruth #77, where she concludes: “The free press is, indeed, crucial and critical for efforts to enliven democracy. But we might do well to grapple with the hard truth that its marriage to advertising—and to basest forms of U.S. racial injustice—exposes the costs and histories of freedom.”
I wrote HardTruth #44: “black lives matter.” I was reflecting on photographs unearthed to help identify the 272 slaves whose sale funded Georgetown University. I wrote: “The personal, political, and historical connections between reality and representation are riven with power, beauty, contradiction, and loss.”
[Recorded interview between The Girlfriend and Dr. Gabrielle Foreman]
The Girlfriend: We are recording. And thank you so much for participating in this podcast effort around the HardTruth “Black Lives Matter.”
Gabrielle Foreman: I was really taken, when you asked me to take a look at several of the HardTruths in this particular historical moment: where we are in the streets; where George Floyd’s death is resonating around the world, as a fissure, as a crack, in a system of greed and avarice and late capitalism that allows so much money to consolidate in the hands of so few; when the Corona virus is bankrupting and leaving impoverished in so many ways — not only the poorest of our country, but the principles that this country likes to claim for itself are also being laid bare as impoverished, as anemic, as hypocritical.
And so I took from one of the 100 HardTruths this statement: “The personal, political, and historical connections between reality and representation are riven with power, beauty, contradiction, and loss.” And I want to amend that to say: “The personal, political, and historical connections between reality and representation are riven with power, contradiction, and loss.” Because it’s hard to find “beauty” in this moment, unless the beauty is the hope of people in the streets all over the globe, inspiring us as they have to lose their lives or put the loss of life at the crosshairs of the Corona virus and the economic loss that it is laying bare. And the fact that we will not continue to watch videos of black death as if they are snuff films caught on phones across the country for us to consume over and over and over again.
So this question for me of the contradiction and connection between reality and representation centers on the question of looting. That’s the word which really resonated for me: the reality of looting versus the representations in print, in the newspapers, in the media around what looting means, what looting is, and the reality of looting in this economic moment.
At this moment where Big Pharma is more interested in creating a monetized cure than a democratic global cure that would literally go to the citizens of the world, I’m taken by the fact that representations of looting and violence began this tragedy: a $20 bill, they say, was being passed off by George Floyd. That label labeled him a “looter” who could then be pinned down under the knee of a police officer, with others watching and others in a larger orbit around them screaming at them to stop. The thousands who are in jail for petty crimes, when Wall Street bankers and Congresspeople and senators make millions of dollars in trades based on information they gleaned in Corona-virus briefings that then get dropped. That is not looting. Perhaps passing a $20 bill is looting; but the looting of all of that money based on trades, millions of dollars made by those in positions of power based on their inside knowledge — that gets dropped. When George Floyd instead gets dropped to the ground with a knee on his neck, like the looting of the enslaved people sold from Georgetown to keep that institution afloat, in one of the other hundred HardTruth entries you asked me to consider
Tamika Mallory’s speech during a rally in Minneapolis, protesting George Floyd’s death really came home for me. I was at a day of protest that she helped organize, as co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington to protest Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment, When Republicans looted a Supreme Court seat denied by Mitch McConnell, which should have been filled by Obama’s choice, Merrick Garland. This is a looting of democracy. This is a looting that really strikes home for me, for so many of us, between reality and representation around the word “looting.”
At the demonstration in Minneapolis, after the city went up after the murder of George Floyd, Tamika Mallory said Black America was in a state of emergency. She said, “Don’t talk to us about looting. Y’all are the looters. America has looted black people. America has looted the Native Americans when they first came here. Looting is what you do. We learned from you.”
Trump is looting the Constitution. He’s making the press the “enemy of the people,” making them the targets of the violence of the police. Now today that creates a loop, it seems to me, between the violence embedded in the press’s very conception, which I wrote about in another one of the 100 HardTruths: where they advertised the selling of black people in the state of Pennsylvania, in the City of Brotherly Love, in Benjamin Franklin’s newspapers, to raise the very money that allowed American newspapers to flourish through the sale, through the looting of black people.
I come from a family of poets. I learned about capitalism at the feet of my father and my mother, who was a protestor and an activist who walked me through neighborhoods telling me about red-lining and about why black poor neighborhoods couldn’t get the loans in order to make their property more valuable, which allowed the University of Chicago to scoop in and buy properties at the lowest values because people lost them because of banking policies.
And my father wrote three short haikus — well, I guess haikus are short by definition — called “Das Kapital.” And I’d like to read them now.
Das Kapital I
Wherever having
money matters more than how
you get it crime rules.
Looting: The differences between reality and representation are riven with power, contradiction, and loss.
Das Kapital II
Hustlin’ is the art
of practicing capitalism
with no capital.
“Looting” is what that hustling is called. It’s the personal, political, and historical connection between reality and representation, which is riven with power, contradiction, and loss.
Das Kapital III
Greed motivates more
Efficiently than hate and
For longer than love
We talk about “love wins” in the face of gun violence in the United States. And this poem makes me wonder if love wins when it is pitched in battle against greed. “Greed motivates more/ Efficiently than hate, and/ For longer than love.” I only hope my father’s words are not true, even when history teaches us that here historically, and here now, he resonates with a righteous truth that we’re living through, right now.
Did you get that? Were you there?
The Girlfriend: I did. I’m in awe, and I’m ending the recording now.
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