"Blues People" excerpts.../*Fri 6/12/09- Twitter

These next tweets I’ll be tweetin are excerpts (dumbed down a lil) from the book “Blues People” by LeRoi Jones. It came out in 1963. I suggest you guys (those who are interested) go find a copy. Buy it, borrow it, read it at your local book store a few days out of the week. It’s turning out to be my favorite book of all time. Here we go:

When black people got to this country, they were Africans, a foreign people. Their customs, attitudes, desires, were shaped to a different place, a radically different life. What a weird and unbelievably cruel destiny for those people who were first brought here. Not just the mere fact of being sold into slavery, no that in itself was common practice among the tribes of West Africa. But to be brought to a country, a culture, a society, that was (and is), in terms of purely philosophical capacity, the complete antithesis of one’s own version of man’s life on earth---that was the cruelest aspect of this particular enslavement.

An African who was enslaved by Africans (or for that matter, a Western white man who was, or is, enslaved by another Western white man) can still function as a kind of human being. There remains some condition of communication on strictly human terms. However, the African who was unfortunate to find themselves on some fast clipper ship to the New World was not even accorded membership in the human race.

There was no communication between master and slave on any strictly human level, but only the relation one might have to a piece of property---if you twist the knob on your radio, you expect it to play.

One of the most persistent traits of the Western white man has always been his fanatical and almost instinctive assumption that his systems and ideas about the world are the most desirable, and further, that people who don’t aspire to them, or at least think them admirable, are savages or enemies. The idea that Western thought might be exotic if viewed from another landscape never presents itself to most Westerners. As owners of these black people, they, Americans, were certainly in a position to declare that all thought outside their known systems was at least “backward”. What made the American most certain that he was “superior” to the African (aside from the fact that the African was his slave) was the foreignness of African culture.

It’s absurd to assume that all traces of Africa were erased from the black peoples minds because they learned English. The very nature of the English that black people spoke (and still speaks) drops the lie on that idea. The Africans belief in the supernatural was carried over into the life of the American slave. The reason for the Westerners ridicule of the Africans “fear” of the supernatural is simply that the white man conducts his life without thought to the gods.