Race & Racism & Personal & Music Posted by Bill Benzon, 17 Aug 2007 07:00 am

A White Blackman

I published this a decade ago at a now-defunct website called Gravity, run by Cuda Brown (a pseudonym). I’ve been looking for a time and a place to republish it. This is the place and, in the words of Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, now’s the time.

The first time I heard the phrase — “white black man” — Zola Kobas was talking about me. He paid me that compliment after hearing me play the trumpet at a July 4th party hosted by a mutual friend, Ade Knowles. When, three-quarters of a life ago, I had originally become interested in jazz, I was simply pursuing music which moved me. That Zola, a political fugitive from South African apartheid, should see me as a white black man affirmed the African spirit I cultivated in the heart of jazz.

When I was a young boy learning to play the trumpet I looked for musical heroes. Rafael Mendez, a Mexican-American who made his living playing in Hollywood studios, was my first. I admired his virtuosity and expressiveness. I was particularly attracted by the Hispanic part of his repertoire, with its tone colors and rhythms which sounded so exotic, and sensual. Then I discovered jazz.

My first jazz record was A Rare Batch of Satch, which I had urged my parents to get through their record club. I had heard that this Louis Armstrong was an important trumpet player and thought I should check him out. At first I didn’t quite understand why this man was so important. But I listened and listened and, gradually, I began to understand his music. There was Armstrong’s tone — by turns jubilant, plaintive, tightly-coiled, tender — his ability to bend notes, to worry them. And his rhythm, his amazing ability to stretch or compress time, to float phrases over the beat. This rhythmic freedom was quite unlike anything I knew in the military band music which was the staple of my instructional and playing experience. It was exciting.

Above all, there was the blues. There was its emotional provenance, grief, resignation, longing. And there was the sound, the particular notes, those so-called “blue notes.” It wasn’t until much later that I learned enough about music theory to know which notes these were, to know that these notes didn’t exist in any European musical system. But I could hear these notes, I could grasp their expressive power. I wanted to make them mine.

Fortunately I had found a trumpet teacher who was a jazz musician. He was more than willing to teach me the ways of this strange idiom. He taught me jazz rhythm and phrasing — “It don’t mean a thing if it don’t got that swing”. He also told me that it was almost impossible for musicians with a “legitimate” (i.e. European) background to play with a jazz feel. The ways of swing had to be learned when you were young. That was when I first became consciously aware of the cultural distance between my background and the music I loved.

But it wasn’t until I went to college — to study philosophy — that I began seriously to think about these matters. That was in the late Sixties, with the civil rights and anti-war movements in high gear. I read about the African origins of jazz rhythm and tonality, about how the slaves were forbidden to play drums but that didn’t keep them from clapping their hands or from singing those “blue” notes, the tones they brought from Africa. Reading Amari Baraka (then Leroi Jones), among others, I became aware of how American music was tremendously indebted to African-American music and, by implication, African music. I began to understand that when I moved toward jazz, as many other European Americans have done, I was moving toward Africa and away from Europe. Whatever American culture is, in general, in the musical arena it is largely a hybrid of European and African elements.

Late in my college career I joined a local jazz-rock band called the St. Matthew Passion. One particular arrangement began with the horns playing in a free-style for a short time after which the rhythm section started the song proper, with a regular beat, and melody, etc. At our last gig the sax player and I were alone — the trombone player couldn’t make it. We began as usual, and then, something snapped. All of a sudden there was just the music, flowing through me. Through us. It was wonderful. And frightening. We pulled back. And the rest of the band came in on cue. The sax player and I never really talked about what had happened — what could we say? could talk bring it back? — but, with a significant nod, a mumbled “that was nice,” we managed to communicate to each other that something special had happened.

Perhaps a year or so later I went to hear Dizzy Gillespie play a concert at Morgan State. He played a long solo in “Olinga” and, as the solo began to end, I had a definite sense that, in some way, Dizzy was returning to himself, as though his soul had left his body during the solo and now was returning — from a spiritual Africa, everywhere present, and available, to those who listen but do not seek the present in the future/past. While it is almost impossible to describe this event — perhaps because I must do so in the language of a culture which tries very hard to deny that such things happen, and are important — my sense of it is quite definite. To this day I believe that, if I saw a film of Dizzy playing this solo, I could indicate the precise moment when his soul rejoined his body.

Strange, and moving, as these experiences were, they were yet not unexpected. A child of the Sixties, I had read about ecstasies, about mystical experience, about “altered states of consciousness,” as the psychologists called them. But even before that, when I was first studying the trumpet, I had read J . B. Arban’s assertion that “There are other things of so elevated and subtle a nature that neither speech nor writing can clearly explain them. They are felt, they are conceived, but they are not to be explained.” That statement is from Arban’s Complete Conservatory Method for Trumpet , a standard pedagogical text which has come down to us from Nineteenth Century France.

The Nineteenth Century in which Arban wrote the book on the trumpet was the same century which saw the United States of America fight its bloodiest war, a Civil War growing from the cruel injustice of slavery. Those slaves survived to become free men and women in part through the strength of their religion, a vigorous religion in which an African Spirit wore European Christian dress. When, back in college, I read that jazz — and Aretha, and Brother Ray, and the Beale Street Blues Boy hisownself — springs from the African-American church, I was astounded. This vibrant, expressive, funky music was unlike anything I had ever heard in church. In my church people gave me puzzled looks when I sang with too much enthusiasm and improvised variations on the hymns.

Yet it is only in the past few years that I have heard this church music, and it was not even in a church that I heard it. It was in a concert setting on a Sunday afternoon. First a local ensemble, the Wilborn Temple Ensemble. Then the Morgan State University Choir. Spirits were high. People in the audience shouted encouragement to the singers — “I hear you,” “Take it slow girl.” Many clapped rhythmically and many were unable to remain seated. The joy and the love were infectious. I clapped, and cried, and felt renewed. This was my home.

And then it was over. I returned to my apartment and reflected back on the afternoon. The music was what I had expected it to be. While it wasn’t a church service, the enthusiasm and passion of musicians and audience was what I had expected from all the descriptions I had read. I felt that, if I could have this experience every week, it might be worthwhile to attend a church where this music is sung. But I realized that, for me, it wouldn’t work. Most, probably all, of the musicians I had heard that afternoon, and most of the audience, believed the religious doctrine in that music. I do not.

For me, the spirit must live in the world I can see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and share, with others. And work with them to make the world a better one, for us, for our children, and the nieces and nephews of their great-grandchildren. The human spirit was born on the savannas of Africa. It survived slavery, triumphantly so. We must not allow it to die in the ghettos of the Twenty-First Century.

That Zola Kobas saw me as a white black man is a good thing; just as it was a good thing that Ade had a party where Zola and I could meet. But it is not a good thing that we live in a world where such good things seem remarkable. I would be happy to live in a world where racism is but a distant memory and so would Zola and Ade. That is not our world, not yet. And so we must acknowledge that I am white, they black, and work against the conditions which force that acknowledgment from us. To be a white black man is a good thing. It would be better to be just a man.

Trackbacks

Responses to “A White Blackman”

  1. on 17 Aug 2007 at 10:10 am 1. James Killus said …

    When I first moved to California, I went to a lot of concerts, and one of them was Gil Scott-Heron. That would have been at the Berkeley Greek Theater, an outdoor amphitheater. During one of the breaks I went over to the porta-potties for the usual reason, and there was a line, as is generally the case during the breaks. While waiting in line, I got to talking with a couple of young ladies from Oakland. The young ladies were black.

    It was a very pleasant conversation, and afterwards, I tried to analyze why I had felt so comfortable. Their young lady-hood obviously was part of it, but it occurred to me that part of it was their accents and manners.

    What has come to be called “Ebonics” is actually a large sub-variant of the southern accent and grammatical quirks. My relationship to the southern way of talking is complicated, of course, given that I grew up in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky, then left for what still seem to be very good reasons. Nevertheless, I have the same reflexive it’s-okay-for-me-to-criticize-but-not-for-you-to-do-so that everyone has about their family, town, state, and country. Added to that is something else: speaking with a southern accent means that people automatically make all sorts of assumptions about you, including that you are dumb and ignorant.

    The black conservative economist Thomas Sowell has written that Ebonics (as well as a number of other features of “Black Culture”) is actually derived from “Cracker Culture,” which in turn was a English/Scots transplant that was pushed on African slaves by their white overseers. One of the features of my mild prejudice in favor of blacks is that I tend to cut black conservatives a little more slack than I do white conservatives, so I lean toward the opinion that Sowell believes that American blacks are held back by their culture and would do better if they got rid of it—akin to my own ditching of my southern accent, for example. Nevertheless, Sowell tells only half the story.

    The reason why people in the south, both black and white, talk the way they do is partly informed by slaves learning English from Scots overseers, but once that happened, some of the slaves then became the house servants of the southern plantation owners. In particular, they assisted the plantation owners’ wives in household duties, including child care and child rearing. In many cases, they even served as wet nurses.

    Guess who the children learned to speak from? There have been cases recently of largely absent parents being shocked when their children began to speak Spanish, or Tagalog, or whatever the native language of the main care-giver. In the case of the old south, they learned to speak from the negro slaves, who spoke a creole compounded from Scots grammar and African intonation. In other words, the slave owners began to speak like African-Americans. And when the wealthiest and socially prominent members of a community talk in a certain way, the rest of the community tends to begin talking that way.

    From The Way I Talk:

    I will add that, every once in a while, because of the shared culture of southerners, both white and black, and the deep roots of American Culture in the Southern Experience, I get a brief glimpse of what it would be like to focus on the culture rather than the races that it comprises. Maybe those glimpses are just hallucinations, brought on by longing or the utopian impulse. But it does seem to be a better world I see, and I hope that someone eventually lives there.

  2. on 17 Aug 2007 at 10:33 am 2. Bill Benzon said …

    Gil Scott-Heron, eh?

    Ade Knowles went to Lincoln University with Gil and toured with him in the Magic Band for awhile before he decided that the life of a working musician was not compatible with family life. I don’t know when Ade left Gil, but he was an administrator at RPI by the time I got there (Fall of 1978) and had been in academic administration for a year or a few before that.

    So, do you think of sweet potatoe pie as a Southern delicacy or a black one?

  3. on 17 Aug 2007 at 11:30 am 3. Oaktown Girl said …

    Sweet potato pie is a staple in my (Black) family. But that’s part of traditional “soul” food, and you’ll find it being served in most Black families everywhere in the country.

    I’ve never set foot in the South, but my dad’s side is from Louisiana. (Mom’s side from Kansas).

  4. on 17 Aug 2007 at 11:39 am 4. Oaktown Girl said …

    To finish the thought up at #3 -
    I don’t divide soul food into one specific category or “Southern” or “Black”, because no one in my family did. (And frankly, I don’t know many if any Black folks who do). It was understood that White folks in the south ate much the same as Black people everywhere did, and that was just plain and simple history. There is no neat/clean division.

    [Boss #1 is away for the moment, but Boss #2 just dropped a monster clusterfuck assignment on me, so I’m probably gone for the rest of the day. Thanks for the post, Bill]

  5. on 17 Aug 2007 at 11:50 am 5. James Killus said …

    I’m not the guy to ask about sweet potato pie. Part of the standard school lunchroom fare in my day was the sweet-potato-covered-with-marshmallow attrocity. Later, there were the sweet potato “orange hockey pucks” that would bounce a fork dropped from five feet (and actual test run by one of my classmates). Between them, they put me off sweet potatoes, in any form, for life.

    In general, though, I doubt I make any division between black and white cuisine. My mother grew up in a sharecropper family in south Georgia, so “poor” pretty much covers what she passed on.

    It sounds like I just barely missed Knowles, as I left RPI in 1974 and knew a pretty large number of administrators while I was there.

  6. on 17 Aug 2007 at 9:52 pm 6. Zeus said …

    Great post Bill,

    I read the quotes below like a triptych.

    “There are other things of so elevated and subtle a nature that neither speech nor writing can clearly explain them. They are felt, they are conceived, but they are not to be explained.”

    “I felt that, if I could have this experience every week, it might be worthwhile to attend a church where this music is sung. But I realized that, for me, it wouldn’t work. Most, probably all, of the musicians I had heard that afternoon, and most of the audience, believed the religious doctrine in that music. I do not.”

    “For me, the spirit must live in the world I can see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and share, with others. And work with them to make the world a better one, for us, for our children, and the nieces and nephews of their great-grandchildren.”

    Those deeply felt and shared experiences, like the perfect jam, athletes in the “zone”, and rowers perfectly in synch (rare but heavenly in my time with the Ohio State team in the mid to late 80’s) are the proof, for me, of the shared spirit and its capability in the world. No, one cannot hold on to it or analyze it except if one wants to slay it. It is a gift and an invitation and a doorway into the collective spirit. You can never “do” these things purely of your own accord. You open up and connect with something larger than your own self-consciousness and then your self becomes co-extensive with that, its creative power flows through you, and then like an overamped wire you get awed and a little scared at this phenomenon. But that is the beauty of the music of life.

    To me you don’t have to believe the gospel words. If you “feel” and experience the gospel through music, the “sermon” has been received. I know some do not believe this, but I do. Beliefs are there to develop that core spiritual experience. So are sermons and Bible studies groups. If you think that these things do not reflect you or kill your connection than you are obligated not to participate, but if you follow the music it may take you into realms you do not “believe” but nonetheless learn mightily from.

    For humans the spirit can only live in the world, and if the world is seen as an expression of heaven rather than as exile, then we have much to rejoice within. In human life there is no spirit without sharing. Even the guru on the mountain must share him or herself. Growing up on a farm, I can tell you there is much you can share and share with that is not altogether purely from or about human existence. Immanence of spirit can be smelled in the dusty slake of rain on bone-dry dirt.

  7. on 17 Aug 2007 at 9:58 pm 7. JP Stormcrow said …

    Gil Scott-Heron, eh?

    I’ll curb my rampant embedding since I’ve done so twice before on this blog already, but here is a work-up of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised that is available on YouTube.

    Truth in commenting disclaimer. I am not someone who has ever penetrated the circle of appreciators of jazz. But I have read a book or two. Ken Kesey had a good “white guys dueling with jazz records” scene in Sometimes a Great Notion. In the end the younger one, Leland Stamper, brings out John Coltrane.

    “But forchrissakes listen to that manure. Eee-onk: onk-eeek. I mean maybe hes got balls but it sounds like someone is stompin’ up and down on ‘em.”
    “Exactly! Exactly! Hundreds of years of stomping; ever since the slave traders. That’s the story he tells! Not what would be nice … but the way it     IS!”

  8. on 17 Aug 2007 at 10:48 pm 8. JP Stormcrow said …

    Last comment of the night. I promise. (Especially now since Zeus snuck in and complicated my plan to take over the entire “Recent Comments” section.)

    Michael responded to a comment of mine on his steroids post (in case you missed his two comments which snuck in just before the MOJ closed comments click here) with:
    Harmon Killebrew and Boog Powell will always share Most Whitest Man Ever honors in my book.
    To which I immediately thought of replying:

    It is too bad that Barry Bonds is not nicknamed “Boog” Bonds (Boog Powell is actually John Wesley Powell), because then a generation of sports announcers could have said: They aren’t yelling his name, they’re actually booing him.

    (warning you may need to be older than you are to know what the hell I’m referring to in that “joke”.)

    But then it occurred to me that you can have a beloved Boog Powell, but you aren’t going to have a Boog Bonds, beloved or not. So the co-claimant of Whitest Man Evah can be “Boog”, but a black man probably can’t. Was Powell’s nickname racially insensitive? Or just close? Why can’t Bonds have that nickname? Would it matter who gave it him or how it was used? It just seems to me that it would not happen - not now anyway. And I have two alternate worlds in mind in which it could, and they are both towards opposite ends of the racial tolerance spectrum.

    And then to build off the “Jesus/Black Jesus” Earl Monroe** riff I referenced in that thread, I guess there could (/couldn’t?) be a “Black Boog Powell” (Cecil Fielder comes to mind.) Multi-colored Jesus on the Cross! It truly is a tangled web we have woven - and one that will be centuries in the unweaving, with many a tangle and knot along the way.

    **Earl Monroe was a significant contributor in yet another “good NE Ohio sports team almost, but not quite getting to the top” story: When he was at Winston-Salem he was the nemesis of a very good U of Akron team in the small college NCAAs in the 60s. .. and then there was the time the U of Akron football team went to its first bowl ever only to run up against Terry Bradshaw when he was at Louisiana Tech. (who was the White Doug Williams.)

  9. on 18 Aug 2007 at 8:06 am 9. Bill Benzon said …

    Back in the days of Gravity, there was a guy who signed in under the name of “runawayslave.” He was an art dealer and a doctrinaire cultural nationalist. He insisted that sweet potatos were not authentically Black, only yams would suffice. So I decided to quote him the following passage from Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe:

    The next night I baked three sweet-potato pies. . . . And while my pies are cooling and he’s in the bedroom reading his newspaper, I run me a warm bath and throw in a bottle of vanilla extract in the water. So I’m soading in the vanilla, the pies are cooling, and we’re all ready about the same time. I go into our bedroom, carrying one of my pies, dressed the same way I stepped out of that tub. I made sure it was sliced real nice – six even pieces. And he’s looking at me like I’ve gone out of my mind, but I take it all real slow. I laid back on the pillows. Took out a slice, without disturbing a crumb, mind you. And wedged it right between my legs. It was time for the first lesson. Husband, I said, pointing, this is sweet-potato pie. Didn’t have a bit of trouble after that.

    Not so with runawayslave. He did not appreciate that passage at all, not one bit. These authoritarian types are very fragile.

  10. on 18 Aug 2007 at 6:14 pm 10. Oaktown Girl said …

    Well said, Zeus. Indeed, music is one of those rare somethings that has the capacity to break through and eliminate (if even just for a little while) all barriers - not just between people, but between everything, both seen and unseen. For both the performers and the hearers, music can provide tangible experiences to that “better world” James mentioned way up at #1.

  11. on 19 Aug 2007 at 11:42 am 11. JP Stormcrow said …

    Was thinking more about the “nickname” theme, and wondered if the case of the great female athlete Babe Didrikson-Zaharias was instructive. Would any female athlete today allow herself to be nicknamed “Babe” (in Didrikson’s case, it supposedly came about after she hit 5 homeruns in a softball game and was subsequently compared to Babe Ruth - but of course the subtext clearly there as well). Gender issues are of course their own tangled mess, and often even more unvoiced/implicit than racial ones. Yet another asymmetry woven into the warp and woof of our lives.

  12. on 21 Aug 2007 at 9:38 am 12. Oaktown Girl said …

    Here’s a diary from My Left Wing calling attention to another diary. (I tried to track down the original diary, but was unable to locate it in my limited time available here at work).

    The story the diary tells is, sadly, all too common, but may be an eye-opener to many.

  13. on 21 Aug 2007 at 6:25 pm 13. christian h. said …

    Here is the original diary Oaktown Girl referred to.

  14. on 21 Aug 2007 at 11:23 pm 14. JP Stormcrow said …

    You may (or may not) want to take a gander at a thread over at Pandagon that has taken a somewhat unexpected turn into a discussion of racism (or not.) Amanda posted the cover of her new book - It’s a Jungle Out There: the feminist survival guide to politically inhospitable environments. In what looks to me to be a retro-King Kong takeoff it shows a scantily-clad female in the arms of a gorilla. Comments started out somewhat slowly last night with mostly supportive and appreciative comments. However, several alleged then racism on the cover and today there has been a full-fledged 180+ comment binge with various views on the matter. I have not had time to go through them all, but it may be an interesting read - MB has weighed in several times.

  15. on 23 Aug 2007 at 10:47 am 15. JP Stormcrow said …

    Just a quick update - Amanda has taken down the image of the cover from her site and apparently is going to try to get the publisher to use another one - though it is probably not entirely (or at all) her call.

    I really do ont know where I stand on it, but to me it seems mor evidence of what a tangled web we have enmeshed ourselves in with our behaviors and attitudes (past and present) on race and gender.

  16. on 23 Aug 2007 at 2:32 pm 16. Bill Benzon said …

    I read through part of that mess and gave up. I don’t think there’s any there there. It’s such a mess that you can impute whatever meaning you want to and whatever intentions make sense and you can argue your point in a convincing way. Once the issue is joined, there’s no way out.