“Uncle Flatboot” Reviews the kinté space (back in 2004)
I kid you not. My first test of the new Bing search engine brought back a review of kintespace.com written back in 2004 by someone named “Uncle Flatboot.” Based on the criteria for inclusion in this review, just including kintespace.com in this context is an honor. One criterion jumps out at me:
No Hidden Agendas: The site should exist primarily to serve as a writer’s resource or a publishing venue. Sites that cleverly masquerade as literary journals but that are really just trying to sell proofreading services or the like will be aggressively ignored.
Since kintespace.com endured the Bush years here in the U.S., having “no hidden agendas” has been a liability (unless your hidden agenda is to edify in one entertaining way or another empire—labeled as “conservative values” or being “realistic”). So I should make every effort to preserve anyone out there on the Web with the writing skills to articulate in detail their appreciation for this little thang here. I’m going to make a little commentary track here for this elderly review. Let me start with the opening paragraph:
I’m probably going to hear something like this: “You’re not qualified to review the kinté space,” or, “you’ve got no right talking about the kinté space.” I expect I’ll get this in email in the next few weeks, unless I receive nothing in my inbox at all. And perhaps my interlocutors will have a strong point, assuming my race is inherently incompatible with the dialog the kinté space is shaping. In any case, I can’t avoid touching on this site because it has the strongest and deepest soul of any site I’ve visited in a good while.
Anyone who is willing to answer to the name “Uncle Flatboot” comes from a particular aesthetic—an aesthetic that is deliberately ‘foreign’ to me but with which I am very fluent. But before I go off on “the deep end” let me say immediately that I would not be eager to disqualify or ignore anyone willing to write as many paragraphs as written by “Uncle Flatboot” about my work. To impose such draconian limits on people within the context of the Internet betrays a gross misunderstanding of the Internet—as visualized by Tim Berners-Lee.
However, there are many, many “black oriented” or “afrocentric” web sites that do (wish) exactly this. Simultaneously, there are plenty of old-media moguls in the lily-white upper classes who are systematically planning to do this…
What Uncle Flatboot is touching upon is a problem that few self-described “black tech entrepreneurs” talk about openly: how do you express your African heritage in the context of a perceived “white high technology” world? The elephant in the room is that self-described “white” people—especially “white Americans”—are extremely sensitive to what is different. This myopia is by design when you hear what it said in “Noam Chomsky: Propaganda and Control of the Public Mind” here in the kinté space.
Just take a statistical sample of acts of what I call ‘cross-cultural aggression’ from popular tech podcasts like TWiT or Java Posse. All you have to do is count how many times Leo Laporte has to perform his mostly-eastern-European foreign accent routine—or how many times Tor Nobye and the Englishman, Dick Wall, are identified as “different”—which is essentially not a North American white kid with a Valley-Girl accent that was raised in the suburbs after the 1980s. I take special care to identify what a brother from the ’hood would easily regard as white-on-white cultural interactions. I take special care to identify issues to which so called “white” people would “naturally” be more sensitive. I take this special care now to assert my understanding of the “traditional” strategy that self-described “successful” Black entrepreneurs would eventually support: show continually your “reasonableness” and “business sense” by suppressing African understandings in the “wrong” context—and the “wrong” context these days is any situation that is not comedic or pathetic.
So let’s suppose that Leo Laporte reads my “complaint” here. Will he make me “happy” by hosting his next podcast with some kind of heavy-handed tiptoeing, taking the time out to give some wack-ass speech about his cultural sensitivity topped with an apology? No, that would not make me happy—the very concept of “making” someone else happy is stupid to me. I think insult comic Don Rickles says some funny-ass shit. This is because Don Rickles is a talented comedian. So let’s not even talk about “cultural sensitivity”—because any Pollyanna solutions to “cultural sensitivity” sponsored by the NAACP are wellsprings of mediocrity. It is more effective for me to talk about talent and aesthetics. Leo Laporte is not a comedian—he never makes me laugh (except that one time). This is why I would not be attracted to society surrounding Leo Laporte—even though he might make the mistake that I do not “like” him because of my “over concern” with issues of “race”—and it is this ‘mistake’ that pisses me off. This ‘mistake’ is an act of self-consolation. When one has the choice to consider the self untalented, unimaginative and undereducated or consider another self-centered with their egotistical preoccupations, most “normal” people will not “attack” themselves. This is just instinctive self preservation.
So what is important for Uncle Flatboot to understand is that I have the capacity to download gigabytes of shows produced by Leo Laporte and will continue to download more. What is stereotypical of people with Leo’s background (and I do not claim to know every detail of his white liberal life) is that he would likely not be able to return the favor—to me or my near equivalent. Here’s a white stereotype for you: in my experience, too many white people of all skin colors violently mistake what is very “ethnic” for what is “normal”; too many white people of all skin colors violently mistake what is “absolute” for that which is quite relative. It follows that there is a tendency to portray true diversity as not normal or absolutely crazy. This is why issues of ethnicity are often mixed with comedy—this mixing is an aesthetic choice that is often force-fed as absolutely universal. And now for something completely different…
Next paragraph:
The entry page for the kinté space immediately announces that something is going on here that’s different from the typical online poetry journal. Simple, bold graphics and colors predominate, with three enigmatically titled links (space people, space time, space visitors) pointing to the three main sections of the site. Selecting one of three—space people gets you poetry and art, space time gets you essays and other prose pieces, while space visitors gets you general information about the site—will direct you to a subsection in which links to poetry, prose, visual and “streaming” art pieces are arranged in separate text boxes by type or format. An interesting aspect of the kinté space is that it includes poetry in both HTML and PDF formats. The PDF pieces are worth a look even though they can really tax a download connection, as they’re really more mixed media presentations than purely textual poetry and so blur the distinction between poetry and visual art. There are also music streams, reviews, etc., in broad variety. Navigation is straightforward, but moving between sections requires a trip back to home, linked from a large, prominent graphic on the bottom of each page. This home link may elude the new or casual reader, which encourages the use of the browser back button. Otherwise the site is easy to navigate.
Yes, my navigation is antiquated and dates back to when a site like Yahoo.com was edited entirely by hand. In my “2000: Design Diary,” I wrote that “I still hang on to the hub-and-spokes design (although I am seriously considering adding a Macromedia Flash-based navigation bar at the top of selected pages).” When Uncle Flatboot says that, “moving between sections requires a trip back to home,” this refers to the Web 1.0 hub-and-spokes design. I have modified this a bit by adding a top menu bar (done with CSS and JavaScript—not Flash).
What makes the kinté space interesting is that it represents a growing and dynamic collection of works intended to develop an expressive space established by another work, in this case, the 1977 ABC television adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots. The site’s editor and chief contributor, Bryan Wilhite, asserts that the appearance of the miniseries, Roots, marked the first time the work of a black author transcended media and made a formative impact on pop culture consciousness independent of race and corporate commercialism. In short, it punched a persistent hole in the fabric of pop culture, and it’s that hole the kinté space seeks to maintain and develop on the Web.
True. In “about the kinté space” I wrote: “Any educated person (especially educated peoples of African descent) would be quick to conclude that a lot was lost in the translation of Alex Haley’s literature to Tee Vee. What is more, Alex Haley was only one exemplary writer with one voice who was ‘allowed’ to go public on the corporate airwaves. Now, I am not going to insult your intelligence by reminding you of the virtues and ideals of the Internet and its World Wide Web. Let me just say that, that this is yet another time in our history to support a medium that can be as far reaching as television but personal enough for genuine voices not underwritten by large corporations. It is all up to you, a mass audience willing to read the words in this sentence deep down in this paragraph, to want this to happen.” Let’s not mistake accuracy for “negativity”—the “mass audience” is not wanting for this to happen in the manner expected here in the kinté space… but (for now) the project is still here…
The collection is pretty uncompromising in its rejection of mainstream thought and form. You’re not likely to find the likes of Holly Day’s “Handyman” in a typical mainstream literary journal, for example. But* the kinté space* is not [an] enshrinement of anger and bitterness or a celebration of anti-establishment revolutionary fervor, although it certainly has aspects of all that. Rather it represents a focus on that which is genuine and strong, or that which is beautiful because it is unique. It tells us there are shades of freedom, and that the right to be free includes the risk of being disaffected and lost. It encourages us to oppose the war in Iraq, not just because the war benefits the rich at the expense of the poor, but because violence is stupid and wasteful.
I appreciate the observation here because Uncle Flatboot is the only personality that I am aware of on the entire English-language World Wide Web who has written about this matter so explicitly. ‘This matter’ is the awareness that kintesace.com is not “a typical mainstream literary journal”—most people (especially the Black people) of the literary establishment would not even consider kintespace.com a literary journal. One of the leading observations about projecting an online version of my personality on the Internet is that it is not welcome in an unspoken very weird way—especially by too many of the qualified Black people encountering the Web site.
Here is one cinematic analogy: in a few seconds, you can stage a corporate lunchtime scene with me walking in a full three-piece suit past groups of other on their way to lunch as well. When this scene is composed to my liking you will see three distinct features: that lone other Black male in the group of white-collar diners is sheepishly reluctant to acknowledge me “in front of” his “white friends”; the blue collar Black people preemptively scoff at me based on the misplaced assumption that I think I am “better than” them for no other reason than I am “the only” Black person on my floor (for ‘some’ reason they would never assume that I am lonely); and the white-collar Black women are aggressively over prepared to ignore me with more American preemption. Now, when one needs to ask foundational questions like, “Why would he even bring this up?,” this is the same one that would regard kintespace.com as “uncompromising.”
For the writer, submission is as broad as it gets; as Wilhite states in the FAQ, “if you can digitize it then send it.” What makes the cut and what doesn’t is presumably a result of editorial taste and caprice, so if ever there were an example of the need to read before you submit, this is it. For the reader, the kinté space is a challenging, rough-edged delight that will make habitués of shallow, commercial thinking uncomfortable. So to the extent at which Wilhite’s project strives to develop and maintain a space where solid personal expression is welcome,* the kinté space* succeeds brilliantly.