19 June 2020> A jubilant Juneteenth y'all... 155 years later + still the same story, slavery just replaced by prisons + police. In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois talks about emancipation + how it wasn't as e-z as "whopee! we free!" but was a long burrocratic process w/ lots of heal-dragging.... took over 2 years before news of emancipation reached Texas. Pretty dry + textbooky reading (written over a century ago, so give the dude sum slack), but intresting, specially where he talks about the idea of double-consciousness.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two reconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength along keeps it from being asunder.

To sum extent we all experience dubble-conchusness—sum of us go out of our way to attract attention to our outer selves (as reflections of inner selves)—but most white folk can choose to blend in if need bee. We ain't sure how self-conchusness weed be if it weren't for growing up partly in Mexico, where suddenly we was the minority. We could work on our accent to sound Mexican, but nothing we could do about the way we looked, tho on occassion we was mistaken for mestizo o chilango. Sin embago, this is all nada compared to the baggage black skin carries in America. As a hippie/punk child from liberal west coast we could fit in in backwordass interior places with a simple snip of scissors or change of clothes (+ lots of tongue biting) + believe me, weave lived + worked in sum fucked-up places we wouldn't want to be cot dead if we was black.

The last chapter on music was also intresting.

And so by fateful chance the Negro folk music—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.

True dat + earlier in the book Du Bois says:

There is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.

.... ditto true dat, but as a white Amerikin (7^th generation at minimum, w/ no intention of passing on our genes) where does that leave us if we can't appropriate yet want to particpate in Amerikin art? Speaking of which, we finished our 10th song (for our 3rd album) today called Totem #9, where we even worked in a Du Bois line, tho the song sounds more like sumping Tom Petty would do (we actually mustered to write sumping sounding like R.E.M., in Aeolian mode), either way, rock'n'roll wouldn't exist were in not for blues + black music. None of the songs have vocals yet, so we can't share even a teaser, but maybe soon, once we can get our bedder-½ to sing. Speaking of black music, here's our playlist + here's a few more books destined for our liebury boox in the spirit of black books matter:

• We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—we haven't read this yet, but our bedder-½ got 2 copies so we'll add the extra to our massive pile of to-reads
• Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett—we read this in Northern Kenya in 2016
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (also an extra copy)

We shd also mention that in this effort to keep our free little liebury well-stocked with black books that matter to us weave bin trying to get them from black-owned bookstores, tho honestly it ain't e-z or as cheap as Amazon. In any event we no longer link to Amazon (the kickback we got was hardly worth the effort anyway) + encourage anyone reading this to source your books from local black-owned shops.