Joshua Rashaad McFadden: How Will I Be Judged Years From Now?

All pictures from Joshua Rashaad McFadden/Ceiba except one

I still remember the days when it was ok to boo the national anthem at British football matches. In many quarters, that kind of God Save The Queen nationalism was seen as questionable, as alien, as reactionary, as a little bit fascist (not everywhere of course, because a lot of football supporters were and are a little bit fascist as well).

That suspicion of knee-jerk nationalism would extend to its other manifestations, such as the presence of the army at football games. Sometimes you'd get military bands performing before games and they would be laughed at. They were not people who everybody would stand up and applaud for being at the sharp end of somebody's corrupt, brain-shrivelled decision to destroy a county because they imagined it would make them look tough.

Not any more. British sport as a whole is part of the militarisation of the UK, something has crept into schools, sport and popular culture. There are even recruitment advertisements that question the right of others to question the military.

No, the US is ahead of the UK in terms of questioning national values, as the actions of Colin Kaepernick show. He's the American football player who kneels during the Star Spangled Banner to protest police murders of black men on the streets of America.

I read this article on the Colin Kaepernick protest and found it really interesting that the protest was linked by some to the death of Muhammad Ali, and an awareness of the protests that he undertook against the US, the military, the war in Vietnam, and the hypocrisy of the language of nationalism.

'But he ( Denver Broncos linebacker Brandon Marshall ) also thinks Muhammad Ali’s death this summer awakened an awareness in many athletes. Until he died a lot of them did not know he refused to fight in the Vietnam War and was squeezed out of boxing for more than three years in the prime of his career because of it. Hearing of how he stood up to racial oppression opened their eyes. “Many of them have started to ask, how will I be judged years from now?” Neal said.

Things were different in the years after Ali first spoke about race. Black athletes were emboldened to protest in those days and often did. The former NBA star Marques Johnson, who now Milwaukee Bucks games on television, remembers that his college coach at UCLA, John Wooden, had the team stay in the locker room for the national anthem because he knew most of the players would not stand for the song.'

It revealed how quickly genuine protesters like Ali can be sanitised for general consumption. It's easy to forget that Ali was absolutely hated both for his political protests, but also for his embracing of Islam, and for being a Grade A asshole on many occasions. Not everyone loved him in other words.

Ali's legacy looms large in other words, especially if you are a black American male and you suddenly become aware of the incredibly brave personal and professional sacrifices Ali made for his beliefs. And the fact that they are beliefs that turn how to be 'right' makes that legacy even larger.

A couple of days before reading this piece on Kaepernick, I went to Gazebook Sicily where I was given  Ceiba's latest book Come to Selfhood by Joshua Rashaad McFadden. This is a book which looks at black masculinity, at fatherhood, at how you can be a black male in America.

The idea for the work began with the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012, and gathered pace with the slew of police murders of black Americans. The question then is what does it mean to be black in a country where people are allowed to kill you. If you can't look to the law, or the nation, or abstract ideas of justice to create a grounding for you, where do you look?



The parents of Trayvon Martin: Picture by Evan Vucci

And the answer in this book, is to your father (or your mother, or your family, or yourself). So the book consists of a series of portraits of young black men on the left, with family album/snapshot pictures of their fathers on the right. The contemporary portraits are studio shot, nicely lit and feature a very direct gaze to the camera.

They fill the whole page so your eyes go to them first and they are nice enough. But then you look to the right hand page and see the pictures of the father. These pictures are of a time. There are fathers in uniforms, in suits, at the disco, on the sea. There are pictures of grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

The pictures are dated (in a good way). They reach back to the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, and with that reaching a small history of America springs up, from Vietnam, to the rise of disco and the white suit, to the Reaganomics of the 1980s.

But where the book really kicks in is with the little pieces of text that are inserted between the pages (this, in true Ceiba tradition, is a handmade book). Here, the subjects of the pictures talk about what it is to be black, what is to have a father, about what kind of life a man should lead.

Read these and the pictures start coming to life. Jeremiah Thompson talks about the difficulties of being a gay black man and needing to '...be fearless and fight for true unity amongst the black community. Not talking about something doesn't erase its existence.'

Kamal Browne talks about the assumptions people make of black people and the beauty of his father:

• 'only speak ebonics (slang)
• all grew up in poverty
• all have baby mothers
• all have violent backgrounds

I watch people's first assuption of me disappear the second I speak. Perceptions make people look at me like I'm dumb or illiterate...

My father is the ideal figure for black male masculitinity. He works his ass off just to provide for his family. He's been married for almost 25 years and never cheated on my mother. He's the most passionate person I know.'

Not that all fathers are great. One man has a '6-7' father with a weakness for women. Other men skip over their fathers completely. One man was adopted into a Christian family and was almost killed by his biological mother. 

Many struggle with the being black in America and feeling the weight of historical and contemporary injustice on their shoulders. Others are more equanaminous and look to lead as good a life as possible. There are superhero-loving nerds, men who look to their mother as a source of strength and masculinity, and men who place the flaws and imperfections of being human at the heart of their male identity. There's peace and quiet and tenderness in there, there's flamboyance, there's machismo, there's struggle, there's dignity, there's sorrow, there's poverty, there's everything.

The beauty of the text (which is handwritten on tracing paper, the name of the writer printed on the back) is that it invites you into the pictures. These are short, engaging pieces that link to both the pictures of the writers and the fathers who are pictured beside them. So you read and you start looking into their eyes, and into those of their fathers and you wonder who they are, what struggles they have been through, what lives they have led and what lives they will lead. 

The messages aren't all the same. There is that Family of Man sentiment; what is it like to be a black man? Well, what is it like to be anybody? Everybody's different but we're all the same. That's what it's like (except that you're more likely shot by the police among other things, and that does make a difference). 

Maybe  that sentiment is the message of hope of the book. These are people who feel, who love, who have passion and desire and belief and who want to do good. I don't know why that should be a surprise to anybody, but it is the kind of truism that it seems increasingly necessary to say and to show. And McFadden and Ceiba have done a beautiful job saying it.

Buy Come to Selfhood here. 

Picture of Last Week: Trayvon Martin's Team

Picture by Evan Vucci

This picture by Evan Vucci jumped off the page when I saw it in The Guardian last week. It shows Tracy Martin, centre, and Sybrina Fulton, the parents of Trayvon Martin, as they talk to family lawyer Benjamin Crump, left, and Al Sharpton, centre. They are watching a news conference in which charges are announced against George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon and had never been arrested.

It looks like a team of operators circling the parents, the sharp-dressed man in the top left, the reverend and the lawyer; the sharp-dressed man seems a bit too sharply dressed for the occasion and doesn't seem to serve any picture, Sharpton seems to be visibly moved and expressing condolences and sympathy, and the lawyer is saying whatever it is lawyers say on occasions such as these.

Then in the middle there are the parents. From the picture, the father is just devastated, a broken and haunted man, wondering at what kind of a world he lives in where his son can be shot and the perpetrator go unpunished. It is quite different to his disposition in video clips, where he seems to be functioning well, where it seems almost as though his son's death hasn't hit him. In this photograph, he is shattered, there is both despair and disappointment on his face, but also a touch of fatalism, the sense that this happens all the time, somewhere to somebody; that it's a kind of reverse lottery and the chances of winning are just multiplied a hundred times if you are black. Perhaps he is also thinking of the legal system and the media circus surrounding it - he just wants everything to be over, to go back in time, to retrace his son's steps and keep him away from Florida's gated communities. Sharpton is talking to him and perhaps that's why the words are those of some form of condolence or consolation.

The mother, in contrast, is mad. She is filled with contempt and anger. Video clips show she is a religious and forgiving woman and you know she wants to be good, to do the right thing, to tread in the footsteps of Jesus and use Trayvon's death to make the world a better, more understanding place. But here she is a mother first.  She knows exactly what is happening and that is why the lawyer is talking to. She's the business end of things, a woman who wants justice but who knows, that whatever happens, it will not come. Her son is dead and there is no justice that can recompense her that loss. But still, she is ready to fight.

 and I must confess I am painfully ignorant of the lives of the people featured in the photograph but that's what the picture says to me. There's a short clip of  video from which this came, which says something different, as do clips of Trayvon's parents speaking at rallies like the Million Hoodie March but still, it's the picture that will stick with me; a picture of a broken father and an angry mother. And perhaps that is still the power of photography, that it can isolate a moment among the chaotic flow of everyday life and create a narrative that, while it might not always be real or true, is still the right message for the right time.

"I wouldn't walk around the goddamn corner for the American flag."

I am enjoying Homeland, the US TV series that is currently showing on Channel 4 in the UK (it's only halfway through so I don't know the ending). There are great performances, a dynamic narrative drive and compelling relationships between the main characters; Brody, the ginger Steve McQueen lookalike, his milf wife Jessica and Claire Danes' psychotic CIA agent Carrie.

The series tells the story of Sergeant Nicholas Brody, a US marine who has just been freed  after 8 years being held hostage (without trial) in Iraq. He was tortured, beaten and urinated upon by his sadistic and fanatical captors and manipulated into all kinds of abuses and treachery.

Great stuff but it is hugely fanciful stuff. Fancy dressed as realism and intended to be consumed as such. But excuse me, it seems to me that Homeland is kind of upside down, that what happened to the American marine Brody by Islamic fanatics is more of a reflection of US foreign policy in the region. Imprisonment without trial, torture, urination, humiliation of prisoners, it all sounds so familiar. But in Homeland things are twisted round. Everything is twisted  round. In Homeland the Arab royalty that features (and we're only halfway through in the UK so things might change) isn't culpable, rather it's their lackeys who are the evil-doers. The royal family escapes unblemished. Propaganda points are even scored on the names of the fictional Jihadist organisations; The Islamic People's Liberation Front. Really? What group in recent years has used "People's" in such a suggestive (and socialist ) manner? Who could they be alluding to? And the suggestion that G8 protesting leads to Jihadi activism. Mmm, I would say that being in the US military (or any military) is more likely to lead to violent protest and murder on a grand scale. There's certainly a lot more direct evidence for that.

I suppose Homeland is a product of its culture, a culture that at certain levels is based on an irrational, wish-fulfilling upside-down way of thinking that is based on limited perspectives and paranoia - a western version of the tunnel vision of those who categorise life and the unfamiliar through the narrow divisions of halal/haram oppositions. Both ways of thinking have the same result - the age of madness mentality where right is wrong and wrong is right and you blame the victim and bless the villain.

Other nations have their equivalents. Upside-down thinking is essential to preserving inequality, justifying murder, torture and theft and making greed and corruption desirable ends in themselves. I especially enjoy the way India squares the circle, how it can reconcile two opposing views within a particular framework. Hindi cinema is especially good at this , with the film Chak De! India being one of the finest examples.

Chak De!India was made in 2007 and stars Shah Rukh Khan as Kabir Khan, a disgraced hockey player seeking redemption through coaching the failing women's hockey team. So it's all about how they overcome prejudice, bigotry and small-mindedness to become champions of the world. It is a formula film with absolutely no surprises, where obstacles are overcome, barriers swept aside, ambitions realised and redemption is found.

The film is tremendous, the hockey team outstanding. They look great and have a raw and random edge. But this is Bollywood so every achievement they make is channeled through a man - their coach. It's the coach whose tactical nous conquers the tight-marking South Koreans, the coach who tells the goalkeeper which way to dive to save a crucial penalty. The coach even controls their sexuality and their aggression, channeling it to fight back against the dirty shin-whacking Argentinian women.

So the women overcome patronising boyfriends, controlling fathers, dismissive government officials and most of all themselves. But let's not get carried away here. It's always a man who makes this happen. The film ticks the women's box, but also the traditional, patriarchal man's box. Leading to box office delight all round!

So two different ways of on-screen seeing; the Anglo-American  twists things round, the Indian has it both ways. But then you get the occasional oddball who throws things right into the mix to see what will happen.

This is what Peter Watkins did with his Punishment Park.  Made in 1971, it's shot in shakey documentary style (using a handheld 16mm camera in desert heat) with a mix of actors and real people. The film is set in a dystopian US future where governments opponents are sentenced at hastily convened tribunals in the desert. Lengthy prison sentences are the norm and the only way to escape them are to go to Punishment Park and undergo a 3 day chase (with police and National Guard on your tail) across the desert.

The main action takes place in the tribunal tent where improvised speeches by both the radical defendants and the conservative tribunal members make the polarised nature of US politics to the fore. There is no bringing together of views, no upside-downess in the straightforward sledgehammer sentiments that Watkins sympathises with.

The film got killed by the critics (and an industry who didn't really like such anti-American/pro-justice sentiments being aired in their cinemas). So I watched it and wondered if the film isn't a bit too much, a bit too over the top, and if Watkins doesn't protest too much in the 25-minute speech he gives defending his film in the DVD extras.

And then I thought about the last 10 years and the rhetoric of right and wrong that have been so twisted in the US and the UK too. And I decided that no the film isn't too much, that Watkins doesn't protest too much.

And then I read about Trayvon Martin and I wondered what could you possibly show that would match that, that could capture the cruelty and venality of a place that justifies the murder of a 17-year-old skittle-eating boy and does not even bother to arrest the murderer. In exactly what way is that killing any different than a lynching? I know the police and the judiciary and legislature and electorate that voted for these dumbass laws aren't all crowded round a tree and it was a bullet that killed him and not a rope. But apart from that?


Some quotes from Punishment Park.



Jay Kaufman, Tribunal Defendant: You want me to tell you what's immoral? War is immoral! Poverty is immoral! Racism is immoral! Police brutality is immoral! Opression is immoral! Genocide is immoral! Imperialism is immoral! This country represents all those things!

Defendant Lee Robert Brown: You don't wanna hear my message. You spent fifty years evolving a propaganda system that'll take the truth and change it into what you wanna hear. You don't wanna hear shit that's gonna mean you might have to give up something. You don't want it. All you wanna do is sit on your fat, dividend-drawing ass and draw dividends.

  

Charles Robbins: Would you like for me to define what a politician is? A politician is nothing but a debater. All that you do is debate issues, you fat pig, you meathead. That's all that you are, because you are lying, sucker, you're lying to the camera, you're lying to your mama, you're lying to everybody, but every time I hear you open up your mouth, all I hear is oink, you pig. That's all I hear, oink. 'Cause you ain't got no humanity in you, 'cause you're a pig, you lying punk.

Defendant Lee Robert Brown: America is as psycotic as it is powerful and violence is the only goddamn thing that will command your attention.

James Daly, Defense Attorney: Ladies and Gentlemen of the tribunal, I would like to read you something: "The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might and the republic is in danger. Yes, danger from within and without. We need law and order or our nation cannot survive". We might all be forgiven for supposing those to be the words of our President. But they are not. Those words were uttered in 1932 by Adolf Hitler.