Race

aw shit, time to flip the record…

QUITE CHILLY aka YELLOW UNCLE SNAKES is co-host of podcast WAKE N HATE alongside BABY FACE CHEM

MAX MCMAHON is creator of THAT VOODOO

SIDE B tracklist:
1. Suffering Olympics
2. What if/What’s next
3. Black Israelite

track 1: Suffering Olympics

Quite Chilly: People always say it’s like survivor’s guilt and shit like that, but I don’t like to be that dramatic with it, but there’s a sense of indebtedness that you have as a more affluent African-American, as somebody who comes from better circumstances than other black people – you always have a certain awareness that your status can be removed that I think white people in the same socio-economic position don’t have, and you always feel a certain responsibility and indebtedness to the people who are in a worse situation to you that I feel like white people in the same socio-economic circumstance don’t [feel]. Now I’ve never been an upper-class black, but I’ve associated with them, but I’ve never been dirt poor neither, ya know what I’m sayin’? Thank God I’ve lived a nice middle-of-the-road life, so I’ve seen kinda both sides of where – and I’ve felt this way myself to where there’s a guilt associated with enjoying your privilege that is not seen in other places…It’s a sense of knowing that your family – for whatever reason – had a rare opportunity that allowed you to be where you are, you feel more of a – this is a part of white privilege that white people don’t know that they enjoy is that you don’t feel responsible for white people in poverty. They’ve made mistakes and we know this because they didn’t have the same weights attached to them that we know that black people had, right? And white people make that same argument that “black people have had long enough to catch up,” or whatever.

Max M.: And it’s the same argument they use for other white people, it’s the fact that they don’t “work hard enough,” or something like that, “they’re there because they didn’t work hard enough, they’re lazy or on drugs.”

QC: Right, but no level of education is going to lead you to the conclusion that that white person has been and continues to be systemically disadvantaged, so your judgment of that white person as a white person feels more valid because it kinda is more valid, right? If we’re still sticking with this idea that America is a meritocracy, and there’s never been any codified laws that prevented this person from achievement then their lack of achievement must somehow be their responsibility.

MM: Well, this goes to the argument, what is black and white? I’ve heard black and white being socio-economic statuses more so than your skin color, you know what I mean? Like, where you live…

QC: Well, people say that, but when your disadvantages were codified into law, it was skin color, so that is always the origin of those disadvantages, you know what I mean?

MM: Yeah. It’s now a matter of where you live, I feel like more than anything. I guess you could be a white person and get out of a lower economic status because, I guess, you’re white, but if you’re living in an environment where you’re not given the resources, the accessibility, than you’re no better off than the person living next to you – could be black, could be Asian, know what I mean?

QC: Nah, see, but the problem is the assumption that you might belong is going to always be easier for you to arrive at with a white person. In other words, when you go to try to better yourself, and you arrive at whatever institution you’re going to try and use to do that; do you look like you’re ‘sposed to be here? Because your neighbor, who might be from the same socio-economic circumstances, is going to look like he doesn’t belong there. So, that’s another way in which your privilege is manifesting, ya know what I’m sayin’? And, again, that’s white and black, that’s not socio-economic.

MM: That’s like skin color, that’s superficial.

QC: Right, I mean, famously Henry Louis Gates was stopped by a police officer ‘cause he was on the porch of his crib – I think he locked his self out his house – and he was sitting on the porch, waiting for a locksmith, or something like that – you can google this ‘cause I’m sure I’m wrong on mad details. But, um, police roll by and ask Henry Louis Gates questions about whether or not he lives there. And he’s like a famous intellectual negro if, I guess, you’re into intellectual negroes, ya know what I’m sayin’? But not a threatening person. I’ve never seen him not wearing a suit and tie. But that presumption that you may not belong is never something that has to do with how much money you actually have. By the time you know how much money somebody has, and you’re judging them based off that, you’ve moved a little bit past the roots of discrimination in this country. You’ve moved to second-level discrimination in this country, which is class – eh, it might be gender, but that’s not my thing, not saying that I don’t care about it, but I can’t speak to it.

MM: I don’t think it would be good to rate things on a level, like “This is number one: racism; number two is classism, number three is sexism,” you know what I mean? [Laughs]

QC: No, no, absolutely. Suffering Olympics: black people, gold, every time. I don’t know, I’m going toe-to-toe. I’ll step in the ring with anybody. And this is one of the reasons why black people are so fussy about the transgender shit is the rate at which these – and I don’t mean ‘these people’ in an offensive manner – but the rate at which these people have acquired rights has out-passed every other minority group. It’s just…I get that transgendered people have existed since human beings have existed, there’s evidence of that in history books – that’s a fact, you know what I’m sayin’? Just like that gays are not new – transgenders are not new.

MM: I grew up with RuPaul. [Laughs]

QC: Right. None of this shit is brand-e-new but the fight for equality is pretty new from transgendered people. And the rate at which they’ve gotten acceptance and publicity for that struggle for equality in a time when we are still having conversations like “Well, do black people really commit more crimes than white people,” it’s insulting to us. Now, I do regret that some people misplace that sense of righteous indignation onto the shoulders of transgendered people and not the power structure that has refused to acknowledge our struggle, but that’s where some of that comes from. For anybody that was curious.

MM: People have this argument between the Civil Rights Movement and the LGBTQ Movement.

QC: I discard all comparisons.

MM: I’ve talked to legitimate gay people, like they weren’t playing a part, you know what I mean? And some don’t understand the transgender part of it. They actually think it’s hindering the progress.

QC: I don’t want to put out my homosexual friends who have expressed that to me, I wouldn’t say who has told me that, but yeah, I’ve heard some ill transgender slurs from gay people that I would never ever repeat as a straight man. I just value my privacy too much to ever say that shit ‘cause they’ll plaster you on the internet saying some of the shit these people say.

MM: I don’t know. I do believe in the freedom of choice, I do think that if you decided you wanted to become a woman because you felt that strongly about it, and there’s a doctor willing to do [the operation], than so be it. You’re goin’ for it.

QC: This is not my space. I can’t make any case for or against it, all I know when it comes to Suffering Olympics is I can make the case for the blacks, and I think it’s overwhelming. That’s all. I just care about Suffering Olympics, that’s all.

MM: [Laughs]

QC: I’m not here to enunciate anybody else’s struggle. I’m not here to give voice to anybody else. I’m just here to let you know that: first place [points to self, inferring black people].

MM: Would you say we should take it a step at a time as a nation?

QC: No, I don’t believe that in any way we need to retard the rate at which we’re accepting other people. I just think we need to absurdly accelerate the rate at which we’re accepting black people.

MM: [Laughs]

QC: You see what I’m saying? For us to be stuck on the same time right now, and the issue being in the mainstream to be hundreds of year apart, ya know what I mean? We have hundreds of years of head-start of trying to start a dialogue about equal rights for black Americans in this country. For us to be like neck-and-neck is insulting. Not because they shouldn’t have rights but where the fuck is our progress at?

MM: I think it’s politically exploitable. I think there’s something political behind all of it, you know what I mean? Is it politically viable to get behind black people when all these people have perceptions of black people? I don’t know. But is it politically viable to get behind the LGBTQ movement because it encompasses a larger group of people? When you say L-G-B-T-Q, that’s like mad people. Anybody could identify as queer. Then you’re appealing to different types of sexualities – it is just a wider group and it’s politically viable to exploit that because you can just get a bigger voting base.

QC: Victimhood is politically popular right now and what I will say that might sound discriminatory to some people, but what I will say is that the LGBTQA+ umbrella has provided a path to victimhood for a lot of people who otherwise can’t find reasons to be victims to satisfy their almost pathological need to be apart of some victimized group. And I don’t know why that’s become so in vogue, but the don’t-you-fuckin-feel-bad-for-me shit is over and the feel-bad-for-me-and-understand-my-feelings shit has hit us like a fucking wave and I can’t understand why.

MM: I think we’re coming a little bit out of it though, especially since the Jussie Smollett thing. I think that’s one of the things that kind of caused a divide.

QC: But this is not the way to come out of it though because this is going to lead to a return to not having victims, and that’s not true – there are victims. But they’re not everybody. And I don’t know why everybody is racing to get into ‘victim.’ I do kind of agree with you – we’re going to see people be like “nah, we’re fed up, we’re tired.” Once you have a couple of people cry wolf, it’s gonna spoil it for actual victims.

track 2: What if/What’s next

MM: You know what’s crazy about the 50’s? I feel like there was opportunities for black people – they were building and moving up. Of course, there was discrimination, redlining, there will always be discrimination in those times. If discrimination didn’t exist back then – which is impossible because it’s coming out of such a mentality –

QC: If black people were entitled to reap the benefits of the GI Bill the way that white people were entitled to reap the benefits of the GI Bill, then, yes, I shudder to think how much better things would be in this country. It makes you want to shed the single G tear to really think about how deeply integrated our communities might be at this point.

MM: For real, though, for real.

QC: But that wasn’t the case.

MM: Yeah, no, that’s the history of it. You know, I hear things about Tulsa, Oklahoma and we were talking about how we don’t learn about these things until, like, after we’re twenty. Tulsa, Oklahoma – I didn’t know about a carpet bombing of the Black Wall Street in the 20’s.

QC: There’s a regressive element, always, right? The same thing happens in Reconstruction where, immediately following the Civil War, you have the first black mayors in a ton of cities throughout the South. And there’s a backlash that wipes out all these gains that are made during Reconstruction that comes a short time after, like a really short time after. You could compare it to the election of Trump right after the election of Obama in the sense that we go through these cycles of fast progression and fast regression. You look at New Deal politics versus the social conservativism of the 60’s. We remember the 60’s now for the counterculture, but it was the counterculture for a reason.

MM: Yeah, growing out your hair. You know, it was coming out of the Golden Era of the 50’s when America was “great,” or something like that. But the thing was, it was very socially conservative and religious. It was not like you had the freedom to think how you wanted, that’s the reason why counterculture grew. They didn’t see it as a great time because they saw it as something cold and [society was] not thinking enough about things.

QC: It was quote-unquote great for everybody because, in the sense of economic growth, it was one of the best economic periods in the history of this country.

MM: Which is sad because what if it was great socially and economically. What if – I can say what ifs all day, but for real though –

QC: I’ve never heard anyone use that hypothetical before, I’ve never imagined it until you just said it. But that’s why it’s the shame of this country, always, that these advancements are not uniform, right, like what if the benefits of the post-war economy were equally available to all Americans. Not just in terms of black people, but Mexicans, Asians – what if there was a truly uniform distribution of the resources we had at our disposable after the second World War, how incredible that could have been –that’s not something that I’ve ever even heard posed as a hypothetical because it’s so contrary to what we know about this country.

MM: Yeah, that’s real. I do think, though, as a country we have made great advancements, there’s still room for improvement. I think that coming into 2020, we gotta think – we’re going into another decade. The 2000’s are blowing by as an adult. 2010 is already almost 10 years ago. In 2010, I was just turning 20, I was just getting out of High School. Now, we’re going into the 2020’s. What does that mean for us and all these arguments?

QC: Well, to give you my typically bleak perspective, it depends on who you mean when you say “us.” For homosexuals and transgenders, I think you have nothing but good things to look forward to by-and-large. I think that acceptance is going to continue to spread. For the Black American, expect to continue traffic, you know what I’m sayin’? Continue to fuckin’ advance in bullshit-ass starts and stops and continue to encounter obstacles that we can’t seem to see the origin of.

track 3: Black Israelite

MM: …I started thinking: what if black people are the Jews, the Israelites, the Hebrews? There were Ethiopians. They talk about Ethiopians as great –

QC: Ah, in a metaphorical sense I can entertain that conversation, but I hate when people do the – don’t-don’t do the Black Israelite thing with me right now.

MM: What?! Aw man.

QC: [Disappointed] Aw, aww. No, nooo. The Jews are not Rastafarians, I’ve heard that one, I don’t wanna hear it. The biblical Jews did not wind up in Jamaica.

MM: It’s not far-fetched.

QC: It is far-fetched.

MM: It’s not far-fetched, though.

QC: It’s far-fetched as a motherfucker that the biblical Jews wind up in Jamaica!

MM: Ugh.

QC: [Laughs]

MM: [Laughs]

QC: Tell me how it’s not far-fetched that the biblical Jews wound up in Jamaica? That’s Mormon level shit! [Laughs]

MM: I’m not saying that the Rastafarians are the lost tribe of Israel, there’s no evidence of anything, but I do think that it’s more likely that Africa is more connected to Judaism than anything else. I don’t think people should write-off the Black Israelite theory – I don’t think you should go out dressed up like a wrestler on the streets either, you know what I mean?

QC: Were there Jews in North Africa? Most definitely.

MM: There’s a biblical quote, an end times type quote: [Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God]. And Ethiopia apparently wasn’t just Ethiopia, it was all of Africa. They used to call Africa “Ethiopia.”

QC: They were referring to a large part of Africa as Ethiopia, yeah. Now, what I will say is that we teach history wrong in this country – I say that all the time – but one way in which we do it is that as territorial organization and nations have supplanted city-states, and as overland travel and air travel have supplanted maritime travel as the number one way that humans move goods and people quickly, we’ve organized the way that we view world history in an inaccurate way. So, we talk about the development of Europe, and the development of Asia, and the development of Africa when really it’s the development of the Mediterranean, it’s the development of the Southeast Asian Archipelago. The trade routes are really how human culture and human civilizations advanced. There has always been more of a connection between what they used to call Anatolia and the Middle East – all of those places that border the Mediterranean from the Iberian Peninsula, all the way around the Mediterranean, and back to Morocco have always been more culturally connected than places that were miles away from them on land because you don’t move goods and people as easily across land than [sea]. So, yes, there’s something to be said for the history of the Abrahamic religions in North Africa being downplayed, but I stop short of Black Israelite.

MM: The thing about Judaism, the Torah, and the modern day bible is that that was the last incarnation of the African spirituality and African stories, that was kind of the appropriation of it on a state level – it became Israel and this idea of Zion – but the stories are still connected to old African stories – these stories are older than we think.

QC: The willingness to accept monotheistic faith, people say, in the Mediterranean has its roots in Sun worship in Egypt, where like the Egyptian pantheon that we’re all familiar with was replaced in the later dynasties by worship of the Sun disk – which was either represented only as a sun disk or the god Ra – that being the only God. There’s not a pantheon, there was one God, and its representative is the Sun.

MM: And Judaism is about coming out of Egyptian culture, out of Egyptian thought, out of slavery – whether it’s if slavery as we know it, like bondage-type slavery – I mean they were in bondage –

QC: Not chattel slavery. What we call chattel slavery is what they refer to American slavery as now, because there is still an acknowledgement that the Jews are human beings, that the Hebrews are human beings, but they are enslaved humans. Chattel slavery is different in that there’s the intended perception of African slaves as animals.

MM: So, yeah, damn. That’s crazy. It is true, there is a difference, and it should definitely be noted because United States slavery is definitely way different than what Jewish slavery was –

QC: It’s thee most vile institution.

MM: We have this image of Jews carrying rocks on their backs to build the pyramids – on the record, I’m Jewish, I know the stories – but if you actually read it, Jacob was accepted [in Egypt] – the Hebrews had their own culture, they spoke a different language, they were different than the Egyptians. If you compare it to the United States dialogue, the Hebrews had their own culture and the Egyptians had their own culture, they all had different languages, they probably had a different word for God, and that made [the Hebrews] a marginalized people within a country, so they had to escape it and that’s the story, they became their own country.

QC: Hence the attachment of modern day Jews to Israel. This idea of the repeated victimization of the Jewish people has happened as a result of their lack of estate, their lack of home turf – so to speak. So, this stereotype that Jews are good with money, that Jews work at banks, that Jews are lapidaries, that Jews are jewelers, these stereotypes come from the real circumstances imposed on Jews in Europe where, once again, they’re viewed as a separate population living inside of the country, rather than, at that time, citizens – they’re not fully the same. So, in a lot of European countries, what professions Jews were allowed to hold were limited and that actually did force Jews into banking and jewelry because they were prevented from entering other occupations. So, I understand where you see that attachment to the state of Israel as a result of that continued – the same reason why Pan-Africanism exists in the United States is this idea that our dispossession of a government and an army, and all of these things, is what is responsible for our repeated victimization in this country. And that’s hard to argue against that.

MM: Yeah, I was about to say, the thing about the Hebrew slavery in Egypt and the African slavery in America is that literally the Africans were forced into the United States. Don’t interpret this the wrong way, but this is not their country. This is not where that people was born and raised and they wanted to come here. It’s obvious why they’re angry. It’s a spiritual thing.

QC: African slaves, no, but at the risk of upsetting people, Black Americans, yes. This is absolutely more my country than any other ethnic group in this nation for that same reason you listed. The perception among Egyptians about their Hebrew slaves were that these were Hebrew people who they had enslaved who were different to them. They may have hated those differences and not allowed them to practice their religion in public, but removing someone’s personhood and literally removing where they came from in relation to their captors, to their enslavers, is not a level that they describe in the bible. The foundational stories, the things that kept the Hebrew people an ethnic group distinct from their oppressors is that shared history that they maintained. That shared history was taken, and often not shared, because actually it may come from very distant locations in Africa – it may not actually be significant shared history. Again, if you come from North Africa, you are much more related to Mediterranean culture than you are to Central African culture.

MM: Exactly, I don’t want to say all Africans are Jews, it’s obviously a very specific thing.

QC: When you rob people of their shared history or their awareness of their history – we’ve only seen it once happen in history – but what you do create is a dispossessed group of people who now do belong to where they are from because they can not belong to anywhere else. The reason why I’m not down with Pan-Africanism like that is why the fuck should I go back to Africa? I don’t know where in Africa to go back to, they don’t want me back there. This is the only place that my people have ever known because we were robbed of our history of the things before which makes it more mine than your’s. White people in this country know exactly where the fuck in Europe they should go back to. If it was time to go “I am such and such percent Dutch, I am such and such percent German,” I’ve heard ‘em do it, ya know what I’m sayin’? Send 60% of ya ass back to Holland and send 40% of you back to Berlin and get the fuck up out of my face.

That Voodoo

creation and knowledge

Drum Major

A Discussion with Quite Chilly AKA Yellow Uncle Snakes: Side B

track 1: Suffering Olympics

track 2: What if/What’s next

track 3: Black Israelite

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track 1: Suffering Olympics

track 2: What if/What’s next

track 3: Black Israelite

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