I’ve Been Refused New York
Years after Mayor David Dinkins’ single term, after the triumphant civil rights movement of the 60's, it is no government secret that I’ve been refused participation in much of the cultural life of New York City.
I am being pushed out.
NYC’s elite has a certain perception of itself. Very few people of my skin color have been able to participate in The City’s architecture, literature, language, despite having fed The City with music, work at all levels, and big and small ideas for years.
Despite the “New York City!” hip-hop slogans, the bebop that changed both it and me, the many movies like Brown Sugar and Spike Lee’s, living its many streets, alleys, rooms, halls, has led me to believe that the things that I brought with me from the deep South are being thrown out because they aren’t The City. The history of me is not exhibited, the fine art I’ve made and that I make is not as present, and many many other cultural things that manifest me are nowhere to be found.
It is a city that I know well, and I even forgive it for smoke seen rising on a work morning to, as the poet Lyonel Trouillot wrote about cigarette ashes, “Tell human pain to God.” It is a city that, because I am ambitious and because I am left out of much of its cultural life, in the end, I will not like.
Very little of the architecture and urbanism is of my doing. I can only name the Studio Museum that J. Max Bond designed and state that David Adjaye is a new architect here. David Adjaye is an African man who was raised in Europe. NYC was designed for Northeastern American Commerce and its modernist culture. As such, it is large, well-built, beautiful at its highest points and serious about its business.
Its high points are American staples and inventions: sky scrapers.
Its guardians are guardians of its majesty. The New New York Times building is an American staple designed by an Italian. It remains grand by conserving itself. This includes very little input from me.
New York City does not value soul culture, my great achievement.
Neither Jazz nor hip-hop are as comprehensive as my soul culture. My soul culture includes proverbs, dress, political theory, medicine. This, despite my moving up to The City during the great migration. It is certainly never soulful about doing business (there is such thing as American banking vs. French banking). Religion knows that it has a specific place in this city. There is money for beautiful choirs and for the preservation of cathedrals. The Holy Ghost is openly caught in some parts of the city and not in others. However, City Hall is secular and so are most rooms, floors, and buildings for doing business as it was first learned in Europe. The keywords are Global and Economy and The City looks to subject others. This has made it rich.
Historian Sven Beckert puts it well:
NYC is a Moneyed Metropolis.
Money pushes aside soul. Money finances beautiful, however repugnant the ideology that produces beautiful. It loves me when I am beautiful, whatever my ideology is. It walks past when I am not. When it does think that I am beautiful, for example, for Black refinement (Whitney Houston), it does nothing to make that refinement a dominant aesthetic.
You’d think that nothing is wrong. It is a genial city because its citizens forget that some pasts are not represented. It is a city with roads large enough for the motor — the car motor, but also the factory. It hosts large parks: its nature is to be intelligent at crafting possibilities and probabilities for human life. If not for film, its bleak yesterdays would be, for the most part, erased. It does not want to learn from me. Where are what remains of the Blacks who moved after the Great Migration? Was the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X got shot, not going to be demolished by Columbia University in 1989?
The City is full of universities that seem to do very little to create a new intellectual class.
These universities are full of books that do not make it down to P.S. X. Some are Black arts writers that are marginalized. Some are Humanists who criticized the Protestantism that is fundamental to American life at its very beginnings — like Erasmus of Rotterdam. Others are African writers, like Amos Tutuola, who tell our own tales that it took years of fighting to tell. Few like me will be able to be this city’s critics and to nobly hold a mirror up to it. Despite the many universities, the dominant pathos and ethos will not created by me, unless I scream.
I fill the nightclubs and outings with music.
However it ends there. My songs will never be legitimized into art as artistic as European art, nor will they ever be as well-regarded as that White-centric spin off of my own music: Indie Rock. I’ve sung songs of drunkenness, roustabout songs of sorrow, but also many songs of love, songs to raise children, for several centuries now, first as folk culture and then as a professional artist.
I’ve put this country on the cultural map. Baron Charles de Talleyrand-Perigrord, French political and social strong man if there ever was one, once said that going to America was like going back in civilization. By the 20th century, not only was Paris dancing to the American music that I created — Jazz — but also a spin off of the rock and roll that I created as Ye Ye music. Yea, Yea.
There is self-affirmation in my gestures and manners, despite New World baroque New Orleans society at the heart of my first jazz. Despite misery, I was and still am — constructively — bewitched by the world around me, to quote the poet Quevedo, and I have articulated it through rhythm, rap, blues and other music. It was when I composed and played bebop, music to match its architecture. I am also the gin and pig feet of the deep South that is that blue rhythmic funky sound that evolved from my rent parties. Where are the government financed orchestras and symphonies of my music? Or must I lobby for that alone?
There isn’t much memory of me in The City’s theater. The City only shows plays that I have recently written, like August Wilson’s sometimes. However, Langston Hughes is not shown, though Porgy and Bess hosts diversity.
New York City is the cultural center of both the oral and written epigram, that short and satirical amount of wording. Epigrams at the park, waiting on food, in the elevator, at work. The lesson and the proverb. Not so much. There is no ancestral wisdom in The City like there is at Home. I also write Epigrams but sometimes I’d like to be ancestral about things. When I want to, I walk alone.
Aside from the relatively few well-placed Black writers, The City has a dominant style of writing — heavy on the adjectives when comfortable, specific with the nouns, allowing one to be recklessly subjective all the while acknowledging the other names, nouns, well individuals of other ethnic backgrounds. It makes for less open racism.
The fundamental issue persists.
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