Lurkers with Strong African Features

Many of us here in California—so close to Hollywood—have heard the old story about how the old lady sends her letter to the producers of a TV show and how much of an impact this has. A show that has millions of viewers only receives a handful of these old-lady letters.

Back in 1998 when a younger, more innocent Bryan Wilhite started kintespace.com, my assumption was that the reign of the old lady and her letter is over… Wrong. More people—by orders of magnitude—are passively viewing the content they actively discovered. Even in the mainstream Internet sites like YouTube.com, or even a tech site like Channel9.msdn.com, you will see an item that gets 30,578 views but only 15 responses. So when my eye reads the kintespace.com numbers and these numbers are measured against the direct responses from the kintespace.com audience, my conclusion is not that kintespace.com sucks. My eye sees lurkers with strong African features—and a whole rainbow of people from all over the world who really dig human voices.

But this Blog post is about the lurkers with strong African features. My shabby, sloppy survey of this demographic dates back to my years in elementary school. Just for those of you who are familiar with “inner city” Los Angeles, my most dear elementary school was Raymond Avenue School. Back then, little Bryan was a star science student. They called me a “gifted student.” Since you have never seen this in a Hollywood movie, you really, really have to work hard imagine a little Black boy stepping into a classroom full of little Black children lecturing them about some subject of science I can’t remember now. Sadly, even young self-described “black” children of 2007 may have trouble imagining this… Anyway, when I finished my little lecture, I would ask about any questions. And not one person said a thing.

Eventually, one teacher pulled me aside and told me that I was “intimidating” the students—that’s why they are not asking anything. The students were “too scared” to ask questions about the subject matter. Years later, my guess is that the teacher used words like “too scared” to replace a more subtle, complex phenomenon related to captivity in a “free” society. Many of the children, my fellow students, came to school from a home far away from whatever I was talking about—me standing there talking about a subject that has nothing to do with making money, playing or eating was—and still is—simply not worth the expected level of participation.

So, for most us who are driven to present content to the public on the Internet, ‘the expected level of participation’ did not include 30,578 views but only 15 responses. Most of us who have been doing this for years, way before the Blog and outside of “mainstream trends,” have had to get used to the indirect responses we get from our audience. But every now and then the lurkers mentioned earlier surface. Catching a lurker with strong African features is like catching one of those rare deep-sea creatures living under extreme pressure—when they come out to the surface they often explode. Since clearly Bryan Wilhite here in the rasx() context is too far gone and is clearly beyond help, I don’t experience these explosions like I used to…

However, AG of bkaeg.org caught one on February 22 in “Sun-City—Renaissance of South Africa.” This one is Paul Hue of reformedleftist.blogspot.com. Here are my reckless assumptions:

His Blog marks his first appearance on the Internet as a content producer. He’s coming from the year 2005.
The implied phrase “reformed leftist” means he was a degenerate, colored leftist hippie but now he’s all better and “balanced” (and African-American) now.
He uses the word “honkie” with a level of affection and tough-love admiration that may surprise those not looking carefully. Accusing him of Stockholm syndrome would be wrong especially since Stockholm is the only place to find decent housing these days. Many African orphans are adopted and raised in Stockholm. We are talking about the foundational components of human being born in captivity here…Reading his comment for AG’s article, I can see his new-found “balance” in these two passages:

AG’s professor who claimed that the Egyptians weren’t Africans is nuts.

And:

My daughter attends a cracker-majority jr high. It appears that any “hiding” of black history has disappeared from the official education curricula; AG, you might be fighting now an already won war. She is learning about all sorts of astonishingly horrible things that honkies have done over the years to non-honkies. One thing she is not learning in her history classes is that honkies have also committed these horrible acts to other honkies (exception: WWII); and non-honkey civilizations have committed these acts as well, both to other non-honkies and even to honkies.

So it seems that Mr. Hue is “tough on white folks” like everybody running for office these days needs to be “tough on crime.” He’s using words like “cracker” and “honkey” but he also insinuates statements like “that cultural imperialist, enslaver, and genocidal maniac Shaka Zulu” or “AG, you might be fighting now an already won war.” This is a classic way of showing “balance” to the “silent majority”—those peculiar “average” Americans.

These are the reasons why Mr. Hue should not discover me by accident and then, perhaps, try to open a dialogue:

He is demonstrating by his own words that racism is a solved problem. This is like saying that European hygiene was a solved problem before Marco Polo went to China—of course it was a stanky-ass solved problem until the scope of the European imagination was enlarged by world travel! Just wait until the concept of hygiene becomes holistic again—beyond the body and into keeping the air, rivers and soil clean. Who among us will suddenly be filthy again?
His syntax is demonstrating that warlike behavior is matter of universal law—it is “human nature” instead of an imperial innovation sparked by the influential administration skills of ancient Egyptian empire. He would never imagine that rasx() would ever accuse the ancient Egyptians of anything “bad” because he fails to distinguish the Old Kingdom from the New World Order. These dialectic assertions prove to me that artificial intelligence begins with the knowledge of good and evil. Binary simplifications are for machines and not whole people.
His report about his daughter’s school life shows that he fuses together white liberalism with African deep thought. There can never be more confusion than this. Eliminating this confusion is the struggle of Black liberation. White liberalism is behind the Alice-Walker-style Pollyanna “political correctness”—and for him to associate this shit with me would be a distracting, energy-draining, time-wasting misunderstanding.
Black history taught by competent Black people, like Professor Gerald Horne, does not feature learning about how horrible “honkies” are. Hue’s words are saturated with this gross assumption. He might as well be shooting a machine gun from a helicopter over a rice paddy in 1972. This is an egocentric reaction formation helped in no small part by Alice-Walker-style Pollyanna “political correctness.” What else could we talk about in Black history but white people? What is most interesting to me going forward is to spend my time writing and talking about subjects that have nothing to do with horrible whiteness—while simultaneously not avoiding the subject of oppression and dominator culture.
Mr. Hue appears to be the type of “regular guy” that uses the word “philosophy” to describe anything not drop forged out of steel. Listen carefully how self-described “normal” people use the words “philosophy” and “philosophical.” Actually, don’t do that. You might depress yourself… Quite often, the same person who has no time to discuss “philosophical bullshit” has plenty of time to watch anything on broadcast or cable television. To mistake African deep thought with “philosophy” is to mistake the Africans of The Old Kingdom with the handful of Greek philosophers that were often killed in Greek-on-Greek violence because of their literally foreign thinking. O.J. may have killed on television but he had no hemlock on his person.There is a distinction between being a man of peace and a man without the concept of war. Excuse me for my exposition: a Pollyanna man of peace needs the concept of war in order to exist. A man without the concept of war is super bad—he is above war and peace. There is a whole heaven of grey matter above the reptilian brain just waiting for us all… And, yes, our super-bad man is above “cracker” and “black.” Great. This is not meeting your immediate needs. So let’s get back to the “real world”:

As of this week, Mr. Hue has a high level of comments per post on his Blog, reformedleftist.blogspot.com. It seems that he breaking my 30,578-to-15 rule. I guess I must be dumb… I’m definitely not that popular guy from 37signals.com—but these tech people (and their tech audience) are a special lot. But most of Mr. Hue’s “real world” Blog posts are inflammatory, political button-pushers designed for affluent colored people with new computers and chatty white liberals of all dupable colors—it’s John-C.-Dvorak-style social engineering that attracts road-rage-esque anger (and more eyeballs). It reeks of the very thing that Anil Dash says is “Threatening to Kill Blogs.” There’s good money in savages.

rasx()