FYI-- The Model Minority award category that D/DC was in ultimately went to Eminem...sorry guys...


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striped
thug
Posts: 7
(7/9/03 6:41 pm)
Reply thanx
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thanks for this thread guys. it really great that it is here, and that fucked-up awards or politics are called out.


Ralowe and Reginald
thug
Posts: 1
(7/13/03 12:35 pm)
Reply > attn: sf people. regarding gay shame.
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Testing this shit. Hold up.

Ralowe and Reginald
thug
Posts: 2
(7/13/03 1:43 pm)
Reply > > attn: sf people. regarding gay shame.
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From the two gay shame token negroes:

As Juba so eloquently described us, the reason for D/DC's nomination was to draw attention the fact that they play into the most white liberal guilt aspects of identity politics as opposed to actually dealing with any sincere emotions or inspiration in the perpetration of their music. I, Reginald have never seen them perform outside of an all-white context and I felt, as a negro that their work was only for the white people in the audience and not for me. Since what so much of what they seem to be about seems to be politics I wondered about the politics of exclusion. It re-centers whiteness and white supremacy to only focus on the white liberal response in your performance to your performance and not consider the black people in the audience. We as black artists do not only make work to be seen and consumed by white people. If any of you have seen a D/DC show, you can attest to this. See, it's complicated. At the bottom of this posting there will be a verbatim re-cap of the original exchange when I left D/DC and why, which wasn't simply because they refused to show up for a show that was...

Posted all over SAN FRANCISCO ON FLIERS WITH D/DC'S NAME ON IT...

The most insidious position that people of color can ever be put in is the position of only being able to speak about race. That was the reason I left the group and the reason why they got nominated for a Gay Shame award. Don't you understand that? Or are all of you too caught up in white guilt to be "Oh My God, these invioable sad black artists...they can't possibly be doing anything wrong...?" Is anyone on this board capable of any real critique of white supremacy and how identity politics plays into it or are all of you just reactionary dickwads? Juba and Tim'm are very very very smart and went to a lot of school and have done a lot of reading about race. I (Ralowe speaking) have not. Tim'm went to France and read the writings of Foucault on race. He knows what the fuck is going on, and all of you are falling for this huge guilt ruse, that as Juba explained, he's trying to exploit and get money out of. That disgusts me deeply. I guess I don't have any moral agendas to put on other folks (people can sell drugs, be contract killers, work for a bank) but I decided not to be part of it. I cannot make art in a world where I have to trade on people's perceptions of me to be accepted .....WHICH IS A BIG ISSUE, don't you think?, and is why I left the group, BECAUSE THAT WAS ALL THAT IT WAS ABOUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think it's cute how Juba feels the need to very carefully tally the number of people of color involved in Gay Shame as if that made a difference.

I, Ralowe, not Reginald, (we need to make clear) created the Model Minority Award. I felt that there needed to be a critique of the fascinating white liberal phenomenon that is Deep Dickollective, and I'm very pleased with the response. It makes me feel wonderful that all of you are pissed off, because even though we are, as you presume, such disempowered and helpless black gay commodities, as your identity politics choose to relegate us to, we are in fact not above critique and need to be made accountable for our cultural productions and the political implications that they have, you know, like conforming, complicity etc... it's not enough to dismiss the award as an art school arty punk rock faux-radical posturing because focussing on that misses the point of the critique. It should be stated that this critique is not coming from the arty white folks in the group... it's coming from the arty black folks, meaning me and Ralowe, but putting it out there, as it was, it's for everybody, clearly. I have issues with Gay Shame.

We, Reginald and Ralowe, were not part of the planning, and I, Ralowe was not there when the award was handed out because I was working on music and I didn't think that it was really necessary to go to the Casto again with this little thing we do. It should be said that we both ambivalently participate in Gay Shame out of a need to exist in a space outside of the mainstream gay community and not to be totally isolated. Ralowe leaving D/DC clearly meant that his voice in that context could not be heard. Remember the Guardian article? In the Gay Shame context it can despite its shortcomings. I felt that my voice was less likely to be censored at Gay Shame than as it was in the D/DC context, as will be illustrated later in this writing. I came up with the name for the award "model minority" from a usage that Juba would throw around and call other people of color as he saw fit. They always say that when you criticize someone else that you're really projecting how you feel about yourself. Hence. Thus. Also is any person of color who doesn't fall into Juba's limited idea of what is possible culturally, politically, socially, automatically a house nigger? It is reductive for him to say that my critique of D/DC is only about the perputation of a black masculinist paradigm; it also skirts the bigger issue of representations of black masculinity in hip hop...(duh!)...and how they're often complicit with white supremacist representations of black masculinity. This particular point clearly doesn't interest D/DC. At all. That's why I took off. It really bothers me that people can be so completely jaded and/or stupid.

When I was in the group I felt that my general voice (I am a black person raised in a white suburb) was censored (of course a black person in hip hop can't be talking about being from anyplace but an all-black ghetto): to draw an example, we were doing a show at the Good Vibes anniversary and noticed gay supervisor Tom Ammiano...which caused me to suspect other local political figures had been invited...so I asked up front and found out that Gavin Newsom had also been invited...Gavin Newsom was a supervisor from the upscale Marina district and entrepeneur who was running for mayor by...well refer to this link for details:

http://www.indybay.org/archives...16&id=1020

...anyway I was like I wanna say something about Gavin Newsom if it turns out he shows up here to Juba and Juba told me to stop acting white. Juba has a white girlfriend. Does he talk to her like that?

I, Ralowe, have no problem with the way I exist in white supremacy. Other people do. I exist as a being filled with a lot of self-hate, desire to be loved by white people and an intense feeling of alienation from black people. Everybody knows this about and I think I make it pretty clear if you ever hang out with me. I don't think that history nor the social machines that inflict this upon me will change in my lifetime. I make music that deals with this complicated plateau of recognition and resistance in my art. I don't think that things can be easily summarized as being one or the other. My relationship with the world is way more complicated than can be represented at D/DC.

I, Reginald, am trying to construct a complicated subjectivity where notions of a fixed identity are constantly disrupted. I feel as if most the people who know me know this, and Juba's simplistic categorization of me seeks to erase my years of work as an artist, activist, and living performance piece. I was really hurt by his evaluation and insulted since he knows nothing of my politics which have been consistently over the years anti-white supremacy, anti-capitalist, and anti-patriarchal and much to the chagrin of many of you here

ANTI-THE-GAY-MAINSTREAM.

Check out my lyrical content and my music at http://www.mutilatedmannequins.com/

Also, http://www.ralowescrappymusic.com/... why not

We refer you to our music only to suggest that there are negroes out there not making work directed toward narrow liberal expectations.

Smooches
Ralowe and Reginald