Over a Decade Later That Photo with the Babies Is Back

For those of you who are familiar with the Southern California history of Urb Magazine you might be aware of the “little” publications of that same era: No Sellout and FreeStyle. Now, cut to a scene in a small, backhouse apartment in Inglewood California in the early 1990s and you would find a 286 and a 386sx stacked up on a child’s desk. These were the two computers I used in my early twenties to run PageMaker 3.x to layout pages for FreeStyle. (I used two computers because one was just a giant external hard drive—before I knew these things existed).

This whole “urban” magazine venture was the inner-city brainchild of one R/Kain Blaze. He was the cat that motivated me to learn desktop publishing—which caused me to learn database-driven publishing—which eventually made me a formal computer programmer. However, we’ve had our disagreements. One major disagreement is our view of the Web. You will find no comments from R/Kain Blaze on this Blog (even though this cat knows me since we went to Audubon Junior High School) because of his view of the Web. Another more interesting disagreement we had was his remix of that famous picture of “black-white relations” with the babies. You can see it on Denmark Vesey and The Assualt on Black Folk’s Sanity.

What my homeboy did was use Photoshop (better than anyone does, seriously) to put a gun in the African baby’s hand pointed at the European baby’s face. R/Kain Blaze has released some FreeStyle magazine covers on the Internet—but not this one with the babies. I simply refused to layout this composition for the next issue of FreeStyle. To avoid turning this into a huge debate event, I’m almost certain that my homey would agree that these were our post-pubescent views at the time:

rasx(): African children should be nowhere near white children. The Black baby should not even be there!

R/Kain Blaze: Fuck that shit! Fuck you! Eat a dick.

So, now that I am a little older (and, to this day, my “dick” gets ‘eaten’ by lucky women—and never am I the eater of anything resembling dangling from any human body), I can refine my view: African children are naturally born into a context that predates the existence of war. To teach an African child about guns is what we have today in the form of child soldiers. And the unfunny reality about Black children with guns is that they shoot other Black people—very, very rarely do they shoot white people. So to promote a fantasy image of a “wise” child with cartoon, anti-white violence is a pretense that ignores the overwhelming reality of who suffers from the warlike “genius” of African-descended people.

Now my statement, ‘African children should be nowhere near white children,’ is racist on oh so many levels. But for the self-described white person who claims to take “offense” let them send their children to an all-Black “community” to be reared and educated and get back to me. There are white people who do this—so I’m saying it’s not impossible.

For the self-decribed American “of color” who I might call a “Negro” who takes offense and bursts out, “You see! That is exactly what our problem is: we deliberately isolate ourselves and limit ourselves.” Such a Negro outburst is framed within the assumption that the only place without limits is the so-called “white world” (which is an ironic declaration of a limitation). And of course I dare such a Negro to test my limits and see where I actually fall short. Usually these Pollyanna pretenders do better ostracizing me and pretending that there is something wrong instead of actually finding real, objective measures. And “weird” articles like, “Black Students Out Performed White Students On Standardized Tests Prior to ‘Desegregation.’ Garvey Was Right,” are willfully ignored.

So, of course my homeboy and I had one big difference: I was already the divorced father of my first son, Amon, so my thoughts about joking with babies were bound to be different. R/Kain Blaze was a bachelor brother getting down with some of the finest women I have ever seen (no kidding)…

You can study up on our FreeStyle salad days in “rasx() Screenshots: Freestyle—The Art of Rhyme” here in the kinté space.

rasx()