Me and Ebrahim Hussein  In the spring of 1994, I published a commentary in Research in African Literatures , "the premiere journal of African studies worldwide," in which I recounted my conscientious preparation, and ultimate checkmate, in my quest to secure an academic position teaching Black and African literature.  This may seem like a Quixotic choice in the angry fragmentation of knowledge stemming from our post Black-Lives-Matter upheavals, but w-a-a-y back in the 1970s, when I made my selection of academic studies, most professors of African studies in America were white, and there was still a kum-ba-ya quality to the whole enterprise.  I ticked off the stages of my preparatory journey, and -- I have to admit -- I was impressed by my own achievements. First there was three years of Peace Corps Service in the "Heart of Darkness" (aka The Central African Republic). That provided the experiential foundation of my studies to follow. The Central African Republic had been a former colony of French Equatorial Africa, and since literature was my foreordained area of specialty, it only followed that my time in Africa segued into a year of study at the University of Paris, where I perfected my French and took courses in francophone literature taught by well-meaning Frenchmen and -women who had spent time in the former colonies and had turned their service there into literary specialties by reading works written by the intellectuals of their particular fiefdom.  Returning to the States, I enrolled at Indiana University which boasted an excellent African Studies program and employed in its Department of Comparative Literature one of America's leading francophone experts, a charming, convivial Frenchman of slender academic achievement and no knowledge of an African language. "Screw that!" I thought to myself. "I'm going to be a different kind of Africanist," and I set about learning Swahili. Ten years later, I joined the Department of Kiswahili at the University of Dar es Salaam as a Research Associate as I prepared and wrote my dissertation on East Africa's leading literary light, an untranslated Swahili playwright by the name of Ebrahim Hussein. I befriended the great man himself, and when he began voluntarily conversing with me in Swahili rather than English (which, of course, he knew as well as a native speaker), I felt I had broken through to a rarefied level of linguistic intimacy.  I put myself on the job market the following year and was confident of the aces in my hand. The University of Wisconsin was certainly a reputable institution (I had changed schools during my graduate studies), and I had demonstrated fluency in not only French but in an African language. I had just had an article accepted in a major peer-reviewed journal; three of the papers I had delivered at conferences of the African Literature Association had been selected for inclusion in their subsequent anthologies -- an unheard-of achievement for a graduate student. Surely with my newly-minted Ph.D. I was a hot prospect!  Then I hit The Wall. OMG! I was a white! Worse, I was a white man! Actually, I was a gay Jewish man, but having my own experience of minority status and what is now called intersectionality mattered as little to the college hiring committees as my laborious acquisition of Swahili. They needed candidates of color or, failing that, at least a woman. I was screwed -- but I had done it to myself. And there was a philosophical side to all of this. I found out that not only was I politically unsuited to teaching Black literature (even though I was doing so at such institutions as New York University and several campuses of the University of California), I was ontologically incapable as well. While researching a graduate course in African poetry, I came across the following sentiment by a Nigerian critic. "By what feat of imagination, or metaphorical slip of the tongue, can one assert that a white person can understand what it is to be a black man? All dictates of common sense and reason suggest the contrary to be the case: that only a black man -- whether in America, Africa, Europe or elsewhere--can understand what it is to be black."  When I read those lines, my blood ran cold. All of the books, all of the years of learning Swahili and East African culture, all of the hours of conversation and exchange with Black colleagues, teachers, students, friends, lovers -- none of it meant anything. I was white and therefore could not "understand."  Is it true? Am I trapped inside my class/racial/gendered box? Is my emotional attraction to a culture and experience outside my "birthright" a pathology? A conscious or unconscious power play for dominance? An aggression, no matter how well-informed or well-meaning? Does that inviolable kernel of experience -- "it's a Black thing; you wouldn't understand" -- incapacitate all effort at friendship, allyship, or even love?  What does it mean if I write that same line -- "It's a Black thing; you wouldn't understand" -- in a script that a Black lesbian delivers to a white man coming from an interracial relationship? Wait! That just happened in Shoga's latest narrative short, "The Knowing." It's like three-dimensional identity politics checkers! Who's really speaking here, and what does that do to the reality of the No Trespassing sign? If somebody figures it out, please leave a note at the front desk of whatever mental institution accepts me because this kind of s**t just blows out my circuits!  -Robert Philipson  Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, What Do We Do About Carlo? SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In 1931, James P. Johnson wrote and recorded a song, "Go Harlem," extolling the extraordinary life of New York's Black Mecca. Among the lyrics: "Like Van Vechten/Start inspection'./Go Harlem!/Go Harlem!/Go Harlem/ Startin' right now." Carl Van Vechten, a white writer, music critic, journalist, photographer, and tastemaker, was such an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance that within the artistic and intellectual circles of the movement he needed no introduction. Hence, the lyric penned by the incomparable Andy Razaf. Born and raised in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one would not have pegged Van Vechten as the most consequential booster of the Harlem Renaissance, but in 1924 when he discovered that there were Negroes who possessed and created products of High Culture, he became, in his words, "violently attracted to Negroes,” a predilection that was to last the rest of his life. The list of Van Vechten's achievements as a promoter of the Renaissance is long and seminal. He arranged for the publication of Langston Hughes' first book of poetry, The Weary Blues . He got Paul Robeson singing on concert stages. He introduced white America to the blues through influential articles published in Vanity Fair . He encouraged Nella Larson to write, then arranged for the publication of the two best novels to come out of the Renaissance. Turning to photography in the 1930s, he captured the portraits, many of them iconic, of every African American celebrity, achiever, and person of interest during the next three decades. He arranged for important archives and collections of African American materials to be housed and cataloged at Yale, Fisk, and other institutions. His Manhattan apartment on West 55th Street where he threw interracial parties -- a groundbreaking contravention of social norms -- was referred to by Walter White, its President, as "the midtown headquarters of the NAACP." Yet there were deeply problematic aspects to Van Vechten's patronage. DuBois felt that the bisexual dandified writer introduced a note of European-style decadence that ruined the productions of the younger Black artists. When Van Vechten brought downtown whites to Harlem as a tour guide, there were Harlemites who were offended by his proprietary air, that this was a culture that he had discovered and cultivated. In 1926 he published the first novel describing (not unsympathetically) Harlem's social scene but gave it the title Nigger Heaven , which set off a bomb that tarnishes his reputation to this day. Many were suspicious of Van Vechten's motives, but some, most notably Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, defended Van Vechten's novel and evinced a genuine, lifelong affection for the man. Others who were won over to "Carlo," as he encouraged his friends to call him, were Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Zora Neale Hurston. Rudolph Fisher, a Black physician and minor novelist, called Van Vechten "the only pro-Negro Nordic on earth with whom I am constantly comfortable." For the final fourteen years of his life before his tragic death in a 1938 automobile accident, the polymath J. W. Johnson celebrated his birthday together with Carlo and publisher Alfred A. Knopf — all of whom shared the June 17 date. To honor his friend after his death, Van Vechten made sure that the greatest archive of African American literature, after the Schomberg, was called The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection . Like it or not, Carlo played an outsized role in the development of Negro music and literature, partly a comment on how beholden Black artists were to the white power structure. One well-connected white man could influence the course of a movement by writing some articles and making some introductions. So, when celebrating the Harlem Renaissance as an early pinnacle of Black achievement, what do we do about Carlo? -- and Julius Rosenwald (arts and education)? the Spingarn brothers (civil rights)? William E. Hurston (the visual arts)? Shall we leave them out of the account for the month of February? How do we keep Black history Black? Carlo screws everything up. To quote one of his most perceptive critics, Dr. Emily Bernard, "He walked the messy, murky line between appropriation and appreciation boldly and unapologetically." Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in The Making and Unmaking of A "White" Africanist SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Doris and Alice enjoy a Footsie Wootsie at the San Joanquin County Fair  In 1954, at seventeen, Doris Hale started living with my family two days a week, which rapidly turned into five days a week. My mother hired her to help clean the house, do the laundry, and look after the kids. "Looking after the kids" became the dominant component of her job. There were four of us, ranging in 1954 from my youngest sister, two years old, to my older brother, turning ten and already suffering under the behavioral disorders that would plague his life and ours as a family.   Doris had come from a large Black family in Blythe, California, but had been the twelfth of fourteen children, so they hadn't had much experience in child care. Neither had she spent much time around white folks (let alone Jews) nor in middle-class environments. She was understandably nervous when my parents left Doris in charge of the household after just four weeks for a week of travel. But nobody died, as they say today, and Doris became our de facto mother during my parents' frequent travels, as well as being around quite a bit otherwise. She shared my bedroom with me. The house was not designed with a "servant's quarter," and we never thought of her that way. In fact, we never thought of her as any way. She was a person in our family life. She came to love us, and the feeling was mutual. Though she married twice, she couldn't have children of her own. We were as close as she got to motherhood.  One cringe-inducing comment that we avoided was the decorous lie that white families often apply to their longtime Black workers/servants/menials. "She's just like one of the family." This is patently untrue. Does she inherit like other members of the family? Does she sit at the dinner table during the holidays? Does she go on family vacations? Probably not and certainly Doris didn't during the years she was most involved with our family.  What role did Doris play in our family's life? "Mammy" springs immediately to mind, but I recoil at the term. It's so freighted with racism and yet the realities of racial and class inequities were the same that structured our relationship with Doris. Ours was much more than a commercial relationship – the exchange of services for money – but what was it? We never asked the question and in the relative innocence of the latter half of the 20th century, we never gave it any thought. The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 had nothing to do with us. Except for its relative geographical proximity (we lived in Pasadena), the Watts Riots of 1965 had nothing to do with us. All we knew was that we loved Doris and that she was always there for us, even after we no longer needed a babysitter after she married her second husband and moved to Richmond, California. She would take care of the house when my parents traveled on some of their more extended vacations. She organized the wedding banquet in our backyard when my older sister was married. She spent weeks nursing my mother during the final four months of her life in 1985 when she died of a brain tumor.  The gifts of relationship didn't only flow in one direction. When my older sister and I lived in the East Bay, we visited Doris every few months. She and her husband had moved to Stockton to be closer to her sister. Doris had severe diabetes and couldn't drive by then. We had to come to her, but we did so gladly. When her husband died (heart failure), we felt it was more important than ever to keep up the connection. Her lack of mobility kept her housebound, but we found ways of taking her out – to a meal downtown or to a park. The San Joaquin County Fair takes place in Stockton. We knew she wanted to go but wouldn't consider it because she couldn't walk anymore. My sister and I took her out for a "surprise destination" – the county fair, which we toured in a wheelchair, much to our great delight. It is one of my cherished memories, and I've been to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. If I had to select only one of those experiences, the county fair with Doris and my sister would win hands down.   When Doris died, we contributed to the expenses of her final illness and burial arrangements to take some of the burden off her sister. And that was the end of it, right? Not quite …   In the early 90s, I had the idea that I wanted to write a family memoir. I taped an interview with Doris and eventually turned it into a chapter called "Skinny." A voiceover artist has recorded the chapter itself and it will drop as a Shoga Speaks podcast. There you can hear Doris describe her life in her own words as a not-quite-member-of-the-family. It is also the way I'd like to end this essay–in her voice. But be forewarned: Doris expressed herself in her own Black English. If encountering that within a white context will offend you, then don't listen to the podcast and stop reading here. Otherwise …   "I know people have a hard time seein one another. Some people look at you and all they see is the outside. And they see you different from what you really are cause they don't get to know you. Miz Philipson to me was my friend. She was my employer but she was my friend. I never did understand it. I was just glad. When I came to work for her I didn't have no references. Later on I asked her why she took me in when she didn't know anything about me. She says, "Oh Doris, you was so skinny. I knew you was all right."                        -Robert Philipson  Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Two Maids of Ethel Waters SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In 1950, the superstar singer and actor Ethel Waters checked off another box in her list of African American firsts when she starred in a weekly television series, Beulah. As the name indicates, Beulah was a maid whose raison d'être was to serve her white employers, "Mr. and Mrs. Henderson," and act as a nanny to their son, "Donnie." Although Waters brought as much warmth and humor as she could to the stereotype, the other Black characters portrayed were even flatter and more offensive: "Bill," the unemployed beau who is a braggart and a screw-up; and "Oriole," a ditzy maid (played by Butterfly McQueen, no less!) who works for the family next door. Despite its landmark status, African American critics hated the show. "Beulah defiles and desecrates colored people," wrote a critic for The Pittsburgh Courier. "The dread and despised stereotype--that of colored people presenting themselves as buffoons, slavish menials and ne'er-do-wells." Of course, white America had no problem with the familiar minstrelsy and Beulah ran for three seasons, although Waters left after the first. The same year that Beulah went into production Ethel Waters was enjoying a triumphant comeback on the Broadway stage playing -- an earth-mother mammy, wouldn't you know! Adapted from her successful 1946 novel, Carson McCullers co-wrote The Member of the Wedding into an unlikely Broadway hit. The story focuses on the quirky dialogue and braided interplay between three outsiders in a small Southern town: Frankie, an overly emotional tomboy on the cusp of adolescence; her six-year-old cousin John Henry; and Berenice, the fount of maternal warmth and stability. Berenice is probably the greatest mammy role in American letters. She has a family (a doomed brother destined for jail like many Black men in the South), an interior life glimpsed through the occasional monologue, deep folk wisdom and emotional intelligence, and she keeps up with Frankie's overwrought longings and verbal ping-ponging. When she embraces both her outsider "children" in a rendition of "His Eye is on the Sparrow," only the most jaded viewer is supposed to remain unmoved. (Waters used the same title for her 1951 autobiography.) To the greatest mammy role came one of the greatest Black talents of the twentieth century. Ethel Waters had been scoring "firsts" and successes since she began her career recording blues sides for Black Swan Records in 1921. Thirty years and 300 pounds later, she had lived through, suffered, and triumphed enough to bring true gravitas to McCullers' menial. When the play was turned into a major Hollywood movie, it was her name that went above the title – another first. (Ironically, because of that, Waters couldn't be nominated for an Oscar for what would be her best on-screen performance. No African American could be considered for a best leading role, although she had been nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 1949 for her portrayal of yet another mammy in Pinky.) There were other stereotypes upon which Hollywood continued to draw: the Black Siren (Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones) and the Tragic Mulatto (always played by white actresses). But until the spirit of the Sixties broke open these shopworn shells, Waters' maids represented the limits of Black female representation in popular culture. Still, even within those constraints, an authentic chord could be struck. Check out the final 60 seconds of The Member of the Wedding . Berenice has lost her family – to prison, to a fatal illness, and, in the case of Frankie, to the heedless abandonment of a mother the adolescent no longer needs. The pain on Mammy's face in that final close-up is far more affecting than the set piece of "His Eye is on the Sparrow." Berenice's sorrow is for herself; Waters' talent forces us to recognize the humanity of the women who work in our kitchens. Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in "She's Just Like One of the Family" SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

I'm a poet And my feet know it. They’re longfellas. This sophomoric ditty illustrates the dilemma of a poetic practice which cuts itself off from rhyme and meter – two qualities of the English language for which I have some facility. Anybody who writes in rhyme either condemns him- or herself to Hallmark card banality or does so with an ironic wink. Let me present, as exhibit A, a bagatelle I tossed off for a friend who aspired to monogamy. I can’t always say yes, but I never say no I can’t always go fast, but I never go slow My relationships last, and they’re always true love I’m not always on top, but I’m always above You say that you only want love for the night You say that you’re into just keeping it light Well for me, babe, Lite’s beer, not a human response But I think that you’re hot, so I’ll do it – just once See what I mean? Low risk, low reward. Poetry – serious poetry – is considered to be the highest form of literary art. Although it continues to be produced and published, it is sustained (like opera) by a small coterie of enthusiasts, usually academics and other poets. I never considered myself a Poet, but there were swells of emotion that occasionally extruded themselves as attempts at serious poetry. The best I can say of the results is that they missed being embarrassing – but not by much. When I was an English major in college and (like all English majors) an aspiring writer, my premature encounter with modernist poetry (what 19-year-old can understand Eliot’s “Wasteland”?) conditioned me to accept that I was not going to enjoy or understand the vast majority of contemporary poetry that came my way. If I couldn’t read it, I certainly couldn’t write it. I kicked against this unjust state of literary affairs with the following masterpiece. This is a poem because I say it is Look at the typography Does it not scream ART? I need no rhyme or scansion I need only me to transform urinals to fountains Benefit from my exquisite corps sensibility Hear through me the Mallarmean music of the spheres Marvel at how lightly I wear my erudition (Critics may give me my due, champion my subtle puns, my modernist armor, my post-m irreverence, and dada field of dreams . . .) No audience need validate my pose But you may read and thus enlarge your soul (Bonus points: What is the name of the famous artist hidden in the text?) Thus I condemned modernist poetry and its arrogant progeny as elitist irrelevance. Ah, but Erato, the muse of erotic and lyric poetry, would not leave me in peace! During the aughts, when online dating took off, I read hundreds of profiles that gay men put online. Many of them were funny, sad, cynical, deluded, or revealing in ways their authors didn’t intend. How easy it would be, I thought, to turn these self-portraits into poems! And so my one book of (self-published) poems was born, “Very Good-Looking Seeks Same.” Damn it! I was writing poetry–and enjoying it! But it was another version of Poetry Lite, so I could take pleasure in it. Low risk, low reward. Since I was writing free verse, I had to seriously confront issues of spacing, what to place within a stanza, where to break the line. But I now understood the freedom of free verse. Also, none of these poems were confessional. They were persona poems, and I enjoyed putting on the various masks. One example: Water Baby I like snowboarding Jet skiing, paintball, motocross Ricky Carmichael! My build is athletic I’m definitely a partier As a paramedic I get off on the adrenaline rush You must be possessed of the following three nonnegotiable items a job a car a place to stay besides your parents’ house Do not talk to me if you are a shallow judgmental person who evaluates people based on color race drug usage or anything else People do things for reasons I may or may not agree with I do not judge them My dad, who introduced me to water and bikes, judged me so I had to get a job a car a place to stay at 17 Conforming to the endless self-promotion encouraged – no, demanded! – by our capitalist society, I must inform you that you can purchase your very own copy of “Very Good-Looking Seeks Same” on your favorite discounted book website. You can also hear a dramatic reading of selected poems slyly inserted into the myth of Narcissus as the Shoga Treat, “The Modern Narcissists.” – Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Tortured Antisemitism of Amiri Baraka SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

We want poems like fists beating niggers out of Jocks or dagger poems in the slimy bellies of the owner-jews. These lines, published in a much-anthologized poem written in 1966, spurted from the pen of the most influential and widely known Black writer/poet in America, Amiri Baraka. The poem, “Black Art,” advocated a poetry of violence and revenge: “ Poems that wrestle cops into alleys/and take their weapons/ leaving them dead/with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland .” Other enemies of Black liberation get their meed of bile, but Jews are called out three times, including the invocation of “ Another bad poem cracking/steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth .” This last image is particularly shocking as it can’t be justified as retribution against Jewish slumlords (“owner-Jews”) or hypocritical liberals. Baraka’s rage taps into an antisemitism that tarred the whole Black Arts Movement of the 1960s (along with sexism and homophobia). Would it surprise you to learn that his first wife, Hettie Jones (née Cohen), was Jewish, as were the two daughters he had by her? What makes Baraka’s Jew hate particularly poisonous is that it is an infected form of Jew love. And what makes Baraka’s antisemitism so culturally percussive is that he’s a really powerful poet. His one poem exclusively devoted to pillorying the Jews, “The Black Man Is Making New Gods,” published in a 1967 issue of “The Evergreen Review,” an avant-garde literary journal, makes the point for better and for worse. I reproduce it elsewhere in the newsletter for those who can stomach its full force. However, the opening lines are pungently representative. Atheist jews double crossers stole our secrets crossed The white desert to spill them and turn into wops and bulgarians The great sin of the Jews, according to Baraka, was that in crossing the white desert, they had repeated the role they had played earlier in history. Once, the Jews had been part of a slave culture. When they gained their freedom, left Africa, they crossed the desert and eventually spawned Christianity, the slave religion par excellence. “The Fag’s Death/they gave us on a cross.” The Diaspora sent the Jews into Europe where, “their escape/with our power/with our secrets and knowledge, they turned into “wops and bulgarians.” Likewise in America Jews had come as a persecuted band. Here too they crossed the white desert and assimilated into Amerika – the oppressor. Literally as well as figuratively “Atheist jews” (modern Jews having long stopped believing in Jehova) were “double crossers.” But Baraka’s antisemitism is fueled by self-hatred as well. The culture that birthed him as a poet had many Jewish midwives. Allen Ginsberg, Jules Feiffer, and Norman Mailer were among “the little arty bastards” who helped create the Beat movement of the fifties. When he was married to the enemy, the couple’s Greenwich Village apartment served as a salon and nexus where America’s most revolutionary poetry was conceived. But as Baraka became increasingly radicalized by the rise of Black Power in the civil rights struggle, the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 pushed him over the edge. Leroi Jones left his Jewish wife and their Village scene, moved to Harlem, and founded the Black Arts Movement. “For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet,” published in the same collection as “Black Art,” reveals how much Black intellectuals were influenced by the Jews. (Brace yourselves!) You screamed and slobbered on me, to hear you. And I didn’t. Shacked up with a fat jew girl. Talking about Shakespeare, I didn’t hear you, brother. But Tom Postell’s final words are, “The jews are talking through my mouth.” The insoluble contradiction for the modernist poet is that his culture, his literary culture, is Western. As long as the Black writer communicates in this mode, the Jews are talking through his mouth. “ I got the Hitler syndrome figured ,” Baraka writes later, “ What that simpleton meant. He can’t/stand their desert smell, their closeness to the truth .” And what makes it even more galling is that even though the Jews are historical sellouts, they still get the twentieth-century prize for suffering: “ cinemascope the jews do it/big .” The strength of the Jews derives from the fact that they were originally in the non-Western camp; all their power comes from the people they ripped off. They suffered; now they oppress. As oppressors, they mock the wisdom they once possessed. Their success is no model for the Blacks but weaves itself into the texture of American exploitation. So, rejecting that legacy – as he must – “The Black Man Is Making New Gods.” And out of this antisemitic logic comes a poem – a poem not devoid of literary merit. Shocking as they are, some of the lines are brilliant in their compression. hanging stupidly from a cross, in an oven, the pantomime of our torture There are others (“ Suck you pricks .”) that seem less inspired. This is a bridge much farther than the genteel antisemitism of such other modernist gods as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The blast furnace of Baraka’s hate, no matter how understandable its origins, no matter how “artistically” expressed, incinerates all possible dialogue between Black nationalists and Jews of any stripe. (But perhaps not his daughters? It’s all very confusing!) Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in Poetry Lite SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In 1954, Jean Guyard, a Frenchman working as a civil servant in the tax department of the French Republic, married my cousin Marion Michelle, who had settled permanently in Paris after the dissolution of her five-year affair with the famous left-wing documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens. Jean had grown up in the Morvan, one of the poorer regions of France, and had not been blessed with a bourgeois family or upbringing. However, he gravitated to Paris after World War Two, where he acquired an urban sheen and enjoyed the occasional stint as a radio actor. He’d had little exposure to the visual arts and had shown no indication that he would go down that road. Marion, however, had always been with men who were artists (her first husband, Joseph Vogel, studied at the National Academy of Design in New York and launched a modestly successful career through the auspices of the Federal Arts Project, a New Deal program). Under Marion’s influence, Jean discovered his vocation as a painter and pursued it with passion for the rest of his life. He was 37 when he picked up his palette. “Well Gauguin was 35 when he quit his job as a stockbroker to devote himself full time to his art (with a wife and five children),” you might reply. Yes, but even though painting entered Gauguin’s life as a hobby, he rubbed shoulders with the Impressionists and studied under Camille Pissaro. Jean Guyard, though personable, remained a loner in the art world and never took a lesson in his life. Everything came from within. What emerged on canvas were colorful shapes transmogrifying, some vaguely anthropomorphic, meltingly contiguous – all resolutely non-representational. Since Jean had emerged with no knowledge of or interest in art history nor any style that was immediately recognizable, I could not see any movement or development in the hundreds of paintings he produced in a span of almost six decades. I met Jean in 1961 when I was eleven years old, and my family relocated to Paris for two years. Marion had apprehensively invited the Philipson brood to her apartment in the 7th arrondissement, where my mother had to stanch the flow of childish derision triggered by the stacks of (to us) incomprehensible paintings that took up half the living room. Thereafter I was a frequent visitor (and sometimes sojourner) to Paris and knew Jean until his death. I can’t say we were close. Jean was as uninterested in our family as we were in his art. He adored Marion, however, and Marion adored her cousin, my mother. I benefited from that and felt that Jean and Marion were family in the fullest sense. Once I had grown up and had mastered French sufficiently enough to listen to his rants about the craven machinations of the French left, a grudging tendril of acceptance entered his heart. But we never talked about art. He painted alone and mostly on the weekends. Occasionally he would retail his near-misses with the art world. Apparently, a potentially major one-man show was planned for a gallery in Beirut when Lebanon was called “the Switzerland of the Middle East” (gone are the days!), but political unrest disrupted those plans. And I remember another exhibition in a left-bank gallery that produced a nice poster, a small catalog, and no sales. To my knowledge, Jean never sold a painting in his life. He wasn’t interested in marketing or working in the art scene; he just wanted to paint. As Jean entered the precincts of what the French call “le troisième age,” he came to terms with the probability that he would not become famous in his lifetime. Then, his hopes rested on posthumous discovery. In one sad exchange during the early aughts when Marion was dying and my visits to Paris were frequent, he asked me if I would be his artistic executor. He had a painting gifted to him by Édouard Pignon that he was sure would cover whatever costs were involved. I was able to refuse without hurting his feelings by explaining that it was not a practical undertaking, given that I was an American citizen living almost halfway around the world. Jean Guyard died in 2010. His one living relative, a schoolteacher niece, inherited the trove; God knows how she faired with that! Jean’s passion of 58 years disappeared without a trace. Non-commercial art has been defined as unmotivated or disinterested activity. We don’t do it for practical reasons. We do it because we want to “express ourselves.” Most of us, like Jean, are Sunday painters. Like Jean, our ambition and desire for recognition outrun our talent. (I include myself here.) Jean would have been happier had he not felt the need for outside validation. Producing art is not enough. It rarely is. To riff on Pascal’s famous quote, all of your problems stem from your inability to create quietly in your room alone. Expect no recognition and you will not be disappointed. But undermining the bitter wisdom of the artiste manqué, we believe in our inmost hearts that our genius must eventually announce itself to the world. Look at Vincent Van Gogh! He sold only one painting while he was alive! Better not to look at Vincent, I say. His genius far exceeds yours. Paint your cats and take your pleasure there. – Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Queer Harlem Renaissance and the Visual Arts: Richmond Barthé SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Of the many visual artists born at the turn of the last century who came of age during the Harlem Renaissance, only one has been pegged (no pun intended!) as unambiguously gay -- Richmond Barthé. Perhaps because of this odd underrepresentation (I mean, isn't any boy who dabbles in the arts under suspicion?), the visual arts haven't figured much, or at all, in any inventory of the Queer Harlem Renaissance. (Not that there's been such an inventory, but rest assured, it's coming!) Two things to note about the visual art of the Harlem Renaissance. 1) It was a late-comer to the party, gathering momentum in the late 20s and continuing into the 30s. By contrast, the Great Depression had almost snuffed out the literary efflorescence of the Renaissance. 2) Because a Parisian apprenticeship was practically de rigueur for these artists, there was much less cohesiveness among them -- different artists got to Paris at different times for different lengths of stay. There was no "movement," no unity of style, no anointed leader. It wasn't even that New York-based. The one organization, the Harmon Foundation, that almost accidentally ended up nurturing and promoting the artists of the Harlem Renaissance was founded by a white real-estate developer with no interest in art and ran under the iron guidance of a white lesbian, Mary B. Brady. As Barthé's name indicates, he was descended from Louisiana gens de couleur, even though he was born (1901) and spent his childhood in nearby Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. New Orleans was the Big City in that part of the world and there he went in his later adolescence, where he entered the toxic embrace of the Catholic church, which encouraged his artistic development (Friar Harry Kane raised money for him to undertake studies in fine art) and infected him with a lifelong crippling guilt about his sexual orientation. Barthé's drive and talent eventually brought him to the heart of the Harlem Renaissance via a four-year curriculum at the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago was where he gained recognition as a sculptor, but in 1930, he established his first studio in Harlem and went on to become one of the most successful African American artists of the next two decades. Like any good artist, Barthé was a mass of contradictions. His art was clearly Afrocentric yet he was impatient with critics who pointed this out. Even though he enjoyed access to and friendship with the leading lights of the Renaissance, he moved to Greenwich Village after his first year. Success followed success but several demons drove him from the site of his greatest acclaim to live as an expatriate in Jamaica from 1950 to 1970. Firstly, although he was a superb sculptor, the winds of artistic fashion (realism -- so passé!) turned against the human bodily representation that inspired his art. He couldn't or wouldn't shift from the early style that had brought him such success. His queer sensibility also wedded him to the human form. The homoeroticism of his male nudes is so blatant that most commentators won't even talk about it. (The statue in the photo above was the final model of a James Weldon Johnson Memorial that Carl Van Vechten tried to get the City of New York to erect. In this one instance, the queer eye, trying to leverage the classical tradition of the male nude, couldn't overcome the shocked objections of the Black bourgeoisie and the city's civic leaders.) Also, his homosexuality brought him little joy. Handsome, talented, ensconced within the largest, most active gay population of the time, he had only fleeting affairs of which we know little. He and Richard Bruce Nugent were an item for a hot minute, but Nugent wasn't cut out for monogamy. Barthé fell in love with one of his African American students, but the guy was straight and couldn't reciprocate. Alain Locke undoubtedly came onto him and, generous of spirit in the rejection he so frequently encountered from the objects of his desire, Locke became Barthé’s friend and confidant. It was in a letter to Locke that Barthé confessed his desire for a long-term relationship with a "Negro friend and a lover." Barthé’s preference for Black men made the small pool even smaller. Nor did an ingrained internalized homophobia, courtesy of the Catholic church to which he was devoted all of his life, move him towards a more liberated stance. We can only speculate about what kinds of erotic adventures Barthé may have experienced once he became an expatriate. Jamaica was -- and is -- a deeply homophobic society. As the years passed, Barthe's reputation and financial resources diminished. However, his undiagnosed and untreated mental condition grew to the point where, after twenty years in Jamaica, he abandoned his home and undertook a peripatetic life in Europe for the next seven years. In 1967, he washed up on the shores of my hometown, Pasadena, California, where he lived until his death in 1989. The decades of his greatest fame were long past, and there was no miraculous revival of his artistic reputation. Sick, elderly, and impoverished -- and incapable, apparently, of soliciting African American support (Pasadena was not the place to find a vibrant Black community) -- Barthé would have suffered a far worse and shorter final act had it not been for the unlikely friendship of actor James Garner (not gay) who became his benefactor and advocate. (Barthé's last sculpture was a bust of Garner as Maverick.) Richmond Barthé was the first African American artist, along with Jacob Lawrence, to have his work acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1942). He was important then, and he is important now, not least to the queer community that can celebrate dozens of white artists of the mid-twentieth century but few Black ones. His art is profoundly moving and beautiful -- and sometimes sexy AF! C'mon, boys! Swap out your tired statues of Michaelangelo's David for Barthé's Stevadore . I might have seen Barthé somewhere in downtown Pasadena, although, in my salad days when my years were young and green, I would have taken no cognizance of an elderly Black man. Somehow Pasadena recognized the artist who had chosen the city as his final residence and renamed the street where he lived Barthé Drive. New Orleans, Atlanta -- take the hint! Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's person experience with this foray in A Sunday Painter SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Folsom Street Fair 2019 --- not bad for 69  Way back in 1981, I was living in Washington, DC, with my first lover. I was only three years into my new gay identity, had only begun sleeping with men at the age of twenty-seven and was still battling my way through internalized homophobia. Falling in love with Michael helped, but he was not out to his Black family in rural Maryland, although he certainly enjoyed dancing at the numerous gay bars near Dupont Circle.   Coming out was, for me, a jagged and stuttering process. Some people I told fairly quickly; with others, I stayed closeted way longer than was necessary. I had not learned to introduce the subject casually, so the "revelation" took on the shameful coloration of confession. Also, being out at work was not advisable. AIDS was just spreading into the gay male community, and that certainly complicated the possibilities for acceptance. However, it was from a colleague at work that I learned about the three stages of gay acceptance.    Roger was an attractive young man who projected an ambiguous sexuality and didn't seem concerned about what others might think. In our enclave of the federal bureaucracy, all the gays knew one another, and I was the beneficiary of some valuable professional mentoring. Roger was not a mentor, but he wore his homosexuality in a free and easy manner. I asked him about it one day. How had he come to this enviable equilibrium?    "I went through three stages," he explained. "O God, is it me?" I nodded in recognition. My denial had been so pervasive that I didn't even recognize that I was attracted to men until I was nineteen. "The second stage was, 'O God, it is me!'"  I knew that one too. I had spent years in that stage. From the age of nineteen to twenty-seven, I continued to sleep with women or remained simply celibate, all the while burning with lust for the attractive young men my expatriate years (Africa, then Paris) threw my way. Then Roger divulged his third stage, "Thank God, it's me!"    That flummoxed me. I was gay, but I didn't want to be gay. When some unenlightened acquaintance opined that being gay was a choice, I said, "Why would anybody choose a sexual orientation that was viewed with such disdain, that alienated one from friends and family, that so drastically reduced the pool of sexual partners?" Gay pride? Thank God, it's me? It took me years to get there.     Am I proud to be gay? No. Why should I be proud of a sexual orientation or identity which I didn't choose, which forced itself upon me? I'm not proud of being Jewish, of being male, of being American. I didn't choose any of it, so why should I be proud to be gay? However, I am grateful to be gay, and that's where I concur with my friend Roger. Thank God it's me!    Why? I never had to hew to the heterosexist nonsense about the value of masculinity, monogamy, or how men can't truly be friends with women. As shallow as I might find the imperative to cultivate and maintain physical beauty, it kept me physically active, attentive to dress and grooming, and led to many hot encounters. I've had far more sex and at a much later age than had I been straight. And the fun I've had at gay events, at the clubs! Call me superficial, tax me with a lack of gravitas, but I'll be seventy-five next year, and for most of those years, I've had a great time!    And finally, I doubt I would have stumbled into my career as a filmmaker, public intellectual, or snarky contrarian (after all, you're still reading this, aren't you?) had I not benefitted from the launchpad of queer identity and culture.     It is ironic that the identity I struggled so hard to understand and accept is so boring these days! A gay cis male whose pronouns are he/him? Is there anything to talk about here? However, you'd be surprised at the number of unnecessarily closeted men I meet even here in the Bay Area, so I guess it can still pack a punch for the fearful, the bearers of bad faith, and those in denial.    "O God, is it me?" If you're even asking the question, you're already at stage 2. It is you! Let's hope you can make it to stage 3 so you can live with some kind of authenticity.      – Robert Philipson  Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Queer Eye for the Renaissance Guy: The Impact of Alain Locke SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Alain Locke’s claim to immortality rightly rests on his epochal 1925 anthology, “The New Negro” and midwifing the first generation of Harlem Renaissance writers. But Locke was a polymath, and his thumbprint was all over African American cultural productions of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Locke was also gay, short, effeminate and politically astute enough to avoid getting blown up by a sexual orientation he couldn’t change and refused to bury. Besides literature, Locke’s contribution to the theorization of a Black visual aesthetic was seminal. He wrested an early interpretation of African art from the crazy and controlling Albert Barnes; he was an avid advocate for the visual arts, championing the work of Aaron Douglas, Richmond Barthé, and Jacob Lawrence. He frequently contributed essays to exhibition catalogs and, in 1927, he organized a landmark exhibition of African art from the Blondiau-Theatre Arts collection.  When the Harmon Foundation stumbled into its role as the principal early promoter of African American art, its white lesbian director, Mary Beattie Brady, turned to Locke to organize its two important shows of 1931 and 1933. No one in the Harmon Foundation had any formal art or art history background. The criterion of evaluation was based on race, not aesthetic excellence. (In a 1934 essay, a young Romare Bearden excoriated the Foundation on this point.) Nonetheless, Locke made sure that every important African American artist of the period was represented in the shows. In his contribution to the catalogs, Locke argued for the development of an art that consciously connected to African art and that focused on Black representation. (Miss Brady didn’t like that idea at all.) What was revolutionary about Locke’s position was that he championed the beauty of the Black body against the grain of an American tradition which either rated the Black body as beneath the consideration of Fine Art or as suitable only for caricature. (There were exceptions, such as Henry O. Tanner’s “The Banjo Lesson,” but they were rare.)  Hard to believe that the Black face and body were considered “ugly” by mainstream America, but such was the case. And, of course, at that time, what white America believed was largely adopted by the aspiring African American “Talented Tenth” elites. But because Locke was gay and a race man, he loved the Black body, especially the male Black body. Fortunately, he had a Western art historical tradition through which he could “redeem” that Black body – the male nude. Enter Richmond Barthé, also gay, also enamored of the Black body. Prior to Barhé’s work in the 30s and 40s, depictions of African American nudes were considered beyond the Pale. Barthé broke that taboo again and again, and the results were so striking and self-evidently “artistic” that a space was made for the representation of the Black as a figure of beauty and dignity (and also of homoerotic desire, but we don’t talk about that). If Richmond Barthé hadn’t appeared on the Harlem Renaissance scene in 1929, Alain Locke would have had to invent him.  All well and good. The Queer Harlem Renaissance in the visual arts gets its due – or does it? None of this condensed history is hard to uncover. Jeffrey C. Stewart lays it all out in his magisterial biography of Locke, “The New Negro” (2018). Isaac Julien created a five-screen installation for the Barnes Foundation, “Once Again …. (Statues Never Die” (2022), that really rams the point home. That same year, Kobena Mercer published a whole book, “Alain Locke and the Visual Arts.”  Part of Shoga Films’ mission is to educate and spread awareness about the Queer Harlem Renaissance. As far as the literature of the movement is concerned, that battle has been won. (Look for a “Langston Countee Wallace Richard Bruce” shirt near you!) That’s not so much the case with the queer contributions of Alain Locke, Richmond Barthé, and Richard Bruce Nugent to the African American visual arts. I’ll look for a mention of it when I visit the New York Met’s exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” later this month, but I’m not optimistic. Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in The Three Stages of Gay Acceptance SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Garvey handcuffed to U.S. Marshal on his way to prison.  Marcus Garvey was, without question, one of the most consequential and infuriating Black thinkers and activists of the twentieth century. Born and raised in Jamaica, Garvey had his world rocked reading Booker T. Washington's autobiography Up From Slavery. "Where is the black man's government?" Garvey asked himself. "Where is his King and his kingdom? Where is his President, his ambassador, his country, his men of big affairs? I could not find them," he said, "and then declared, 'I will help to make them. In 1914, Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Kingston, Jamaica. By May of 1917, Garvey relocated the UNIA in Harlem and began to use speeches and his newspaper, The Negro World, to spread his message across the United States to an increasingly receptive African American community.  Garvyism resonated with the rapidly urbanizing black community and spread beyond the United States to the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. Regardless of the locale, Garvey's UNIA promised black economic uplift via self-reliance, political equality via self-determination, and the "liberation of Africa from European colonialism via a Black army marching under the Red, Black, and Green flag of Black manhood." Garvey's most ambitious effort was the establishment of the Black Star Steamship Line. Garvey hoped that this joint stock corporation would develop lucrative commercial networks between the United States, the Caribbean, and the continent of Africa.  He also hoped that his three ships would help in the return of millions of Blacks in the diaspora to Mother Africa. However, because of heavy debt and mismanagement, the steamship line went bankrupt, and Garvey, in January 1922, was arrested and charged with using the US Mail to defraud stock investors. The long-delayed trial finally took place in the spring of 1923, and Garvey, in accordance with the hubris that had both made and destroyed him, once again proved the maxim that "the man who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client."He blew his defense in court, and the jury found him guilty. Upon this pronouncement, Garvey burst into a storm of rage, denouncing both the judge and district attorney as "damned dirty Jews."  Fuming at the perceived injustice of the verdict, he wrote that night, "The peculiar and outstanding feature of the whole case is that I am being punished for the crime of the Jew, Silverstone … who has caused the ruin of the company … I was prosecuted by Maxwell Mattuck, another Jew, and I am to be sentenced by Judge Julian Mack, the erminent Jewish Jurist." This is factually correct. All of these men were Jews, but were they acting in concert as part of a Jewish conspiracy? Prior to the trial, Garvey had never displayed antisemitic tendencies. Rather, he had celebrated Jewish thrift and group solidarity and voiced common cause with the concept of Zionism – applied to Africa rather than to Israel. I believe that in his anger, Garvey reached for the antisemitic trope of Jewish conspiracies that was always in the air and ready to hand. Antisemitism was never a sustained theme of Garveyism, and Garvey himself only spoke of a Jewish cabal in connection with his trial. His remarks, though not widely disseminated, may have influenced Judge Mack (a prominent Zionist and president of the first American Jewish Congress) to impose the maximum penalty: five years in jail and a fine of $1000. Based on this one incident, calling Garvey an antisemite could be overstating the case. But he never repudiated his statements, and there was nothing to stop antisemitism from encrusting itself into the ideological children of Garvey's movement, most notably the Black nationalism of the 1960s.  Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's person experience with this foray in I Translate Black Nationalism For the State Department SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

The closest equivalent we have to the N-word as an ethnic slur is “kike,” which, while certainly meant to be wounding and offensive, isn’t very much used and contains nowhere near the dynamite of the former. Simply saying “Jew” with the right tone of contempt or hatred conveys the poison without recourse to a special word. Nonetheless, “kike” is what we’ve got, and where does it come from? There are several theories that we needn’t go into here, but there’s agreement that the term originally surfaced in the wake of the millions of Eastern European immigrants who flooded the United States at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. In fact, some of the richer and more established Western European immigrants, somewhat appalled by this massive influx of benighted raggedy-ass Ostjuden, used the slur themselves as a marker of their difference and superiority. In the American context, the major interethnic division was between (broadly speaking) “German” Jews (my father’s side of the family) and Eastern European Jews (my mother’s). Sephardic Jews? Never heard of them. Did I possess even a theoretical knowledge that there were Jews who didn’t look white? I don’t believe so. Like the proverbial fish who isn’t aware of the existence of water because that is his world and all he knows, I uncritically equated Jew with Ashkenazi. This unconscious bias was so strong that I filtered out any evidence to the contrary. When I spent five months on a kinnutz in 1969 and toured Israel, I must have seen many non-Ashkenazi Jews, but I have no memory of them. Everybody on the kibbutz, the major players in the history of Zionism and of the kibbutz movement, were Ashenazi Jews. The Jews uprooted and incinerated during the Holocaust were Ashkenzi Jews. Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax were Ashkenazi Jews. My literary studies didn’t help. All of the Jewish writers who were then in vogue and widely read were Ashkenazi Jews: Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Grace Paley. Bernard Malamud wrote many of his acclaimed short stories in a Yiddishsized English that glorified and memorialized that dying language. But only Ashkenazi Jews spoke Yiddish. I’d never heard of Ladino. Finally, my historical research brought other kinds of Jews into my ken. While writing about the “embrace” of Blacks and Jews occasioned by of Enlightenment thinking, I learned that the French 1790 decree granting civic emancipation applied only to the well-to-do more acculturated Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux, not to the poorer Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews of Alsace and Lorraine (although as the French Revolution progressed, these, too, were emancipated in 1791). Because of my specialization in African studies, I knew of the existence of Ethiopian Jews, but they were never more than a demographic oddity to me, even after that community had been so dramatically airlifted into Israel in 1991 and became a (discriminated and disadvantaged) part of Israeli society thenceforth. They didn’t come to the United States in significant numbers, and I referred to them as “falashas” (Amharic for “stranger” or “outsider”) without knowing that the term was pejorative. Yet still, I was unaware of my Ashkenazi blinders. The two sons of my romantic partner during the '90s were the issue of their Black father and their Jewish mother. I never thought of them as Jewish, and the topic of our shared Jewishness never came up. Since they look Black by the peculiar racial codes of American society, that is how the world perceives them and mostly how they move through that world. In fact, because their mother made sure they received a Jewish education, they have a greater Jewish literacy than I do! The older son has become quite famous as an actor and rapper, but he is never perceived as Jewish. Drake doesn’t acknowledge him as a colleague or co-religionist. But like Drake, Daveed rarely plays his Jewish card … with one major exception. At the behest of the Disney studios, he wrote and recorded a song destined to enter the slim musical offerings of this minor Jewish holiday, “Puppies for Hannukah” (His autotuned but perfect delivery of the brucha draws from his mastery of both rap and Jewish literacy). So the blinders are off. I watched the amazing documentary Little White Lie, learned about the Lemba of Southern Africa, have been harangued on social media by Raven Schwam-Curtis, and shared a stage at the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival with the founder of Jews in ALL Hues. I’ve been schooled. However, I will not watch the YouTube video of Sammy Davis, Jr., in full shtetl drag singing “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof. There are depths in my quest for multiculti authenticity to which I will not descend. --Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Marcus Garvey's Antisemitic Flare-Up SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts