Flippant remarks about my birthday and Kwame Turé…
So it’s my birthday here on Earth as it is in the kinté space. The kinté space? Yes. This website is the very, very likely oldest, continually-running, Black/African cultural force on the Internet. I think there are about two ways to look into this: my kinté hits page and the Internet archive, its Wayback Machine.
The Blog in which these words appear, the rasx() context, dates back to 2005—so, again, one of the oldest Black/African voices on the Internet. —Why all of this “bragging” when my attendance at the last Blogging While Brown conference in Los Angeles went completely unnoticed?
When I turned 21 (in the 1990s), I was “bragging” about how the LAPD—or some other gang—had not murdered me. I knew the stats—the leading cause of death for Black men—and I was openly proud that all the wise ancestors that produced me survived all of the obstacles deliberately put in place.
My people perish for lack of knowledge. We all need to know the stats and we need to “brag” more and more about how we survive and sometimes thrive in what Chuck D called the “anti-nigger machine” or deeper still “intellectual Vietnam.”
The reason why a project like the kinté space would go unnoticed (especially here in the Americas) is because it is not a business. In Black Enterprise terms, the kinté space is like a very, very badly run 1980s bookstore with a dusty display in the shop window that looks abandoned but every now and then the neighborhood kids noticed a few display items moved around on the slatwall as they skateboard to the bus stop (okay, to be fair: lately, it’s been about 50,000 “neighborhood kids” a month).
Another way to look at the kinté space is like a really, really obscure house of couture. The house is run by seamstress that does work-for-hire sewing for other people—other more famous, financially wealthy people. Yes, I am that couture seamstress. I even have my own website with notes about threads. But I don’t own an overpriced fragrance that can make up for the money spent on runway shows.
“Huh?”
“What is he talking about?”
Here’s my point: yes, it’s my birthday and I am older than most Black people who care to use the Internet properly. I understand that sometimes I am treated like “the old man at the club” in that Chris Rock joke. Instead of staying in my little world I research what is going on in other worlds. My research encourages me to continue badly-running kintespace.com until I am unable to do so. I have a few new ideas on the way and would like to try them out in near future.
When the kintespace.com is as popular as netnoir.com was or bossip.com has recently been then you know there has been foundational shift in Black world culture. The balance of power between the political/aesthetical poles of Haiti and the Dominican Republic has shifted back to Haiti, you dig?
“Huh?”
Next stop: Kwame Turé. He died when he was 57. I look forward to my 57th year, “bragging” about not being murdered by kale stalks in a kinté space future…