❝ It features a peculiarly African-American twist on Marx’s and Engels’s observations about capitalism’s commodity-fetish effect—the transformation of a marketable object into a magical thing of desire. It is my belief that capitalism’s original commodity fetish was the Africans auctioned here as slaves, whose reduction from subjects to abstracted objects has made them seem larger than life and less than human at the same time.

It is for this reason that the Black body, and subsequently Black culture, has become a hungered-after taboo item and a nightmarish bugbear in the badlands of the American racial imagination. Something to be possessed and something to be erased—an operation that explains not only the ceaseless parade of troublesome Black stereotypes still proferred and preferred by Hollywood (toms, coons, mammies, mulattoes, and bucks, in Donald Bogle’s coinage), but the American music industry’s never-ending quest for a white artist who can competently perform a Black musical impersonation: Paul Whiteman, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, Sting, Britney Spears, ’N Sync, Pink, Eminem—all of those contrived and promoted to do away with bodily reminders of the Black origins of American pop pleasure.

It is with this history in mind that African-American performance artist Roger Guenveur Smith once posed the question: Why does everyone love Black music but nobody loves Black people?

❝ Questioning why a rich black man has a right to express anger at the plight of less rich black people is essentially asking, “Well, you’re gonna be okay, so what’s the problem?” … Kanye has transcended the class that is bearing the brunt of the issues at hand in “New Slaves”, and thus is expected to gratefully shut the fuck up and let it slide (“throw him some Maybach keys/ Fuck it, c’est la vie”). He now belongs to the same social class that has essentially trapped his people, via the “DEA teamed up with the CCA” compounded with “broke nigga racism vs rich nigga racism.” Kanye is not a “new slave” in the same sense as the victims of the prison industrial complex, but he is still trapped in a world that expects him to not only be complicit with the struggle of his people, but to be appreciative that he is not one of them.

❝ I hate being the race card guy, but I’m not scared to be, either. As “New Slaves” makes the rounds, I just want the general population to exhibit the awareness of the song’s objective that comes to me and other blacks so naturally. I know about “broke nigga racism” because I’ve been in the Louis Vuitton store in Monaco where motherfuckers told me not to touch anything if I wasn’t going to buy it. I know that they’re “trying to lock niggas up” because when I got my driver’s license in high school, my mother was just as concerned about my ability to not get my ass beat should I get pulled over by cops as she was about me putting on my seatbelt.

❝ I inquired about the Glyph Awards this year. Unfortunately I missed the deadline by one day, and was quickly told there were no exceptions. Fair enough; that’s what deadlines are for… but as Johanna mentions, there’s always a flurry of publicity right at the deadline. Info on the awards was forwarded to me by a friend who saw a last-minute notice. By the time I saw his email, however, it was 9am the next morning.