Fraternity, Frames, and Freedom Salad
Welcome to Black to The Bone. It’s been a long time coming, but I’m glad to be here. If you are new here, please check out the about section to see a lay of the land.
This week, I wrote about the greatest fraternity in the world, Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc., and the impact it has made on me since crossing into the noble bond. Then, I reflect on a photograph made by Eli Reed and why I think Black documentary photographers are some of the most important storytellers we have in the here and now. Finally, in the spirit of Ntozake Shange’s “If I Can Cook/ You Know God Can,” I gift one of my favorite recipes—Cucumber-Tomato-Avocado Salad.
“He quietly told me of his thoughts that led to the founding at [Indiana University], of the need for better housing, of the opportunity for social contact, of the need to help each other, and the great need for survival.”
Dr. G James Fleming [Xi 1935] recalling Elder Watson Diggs
On the fifth night of January 1911, in the middle of Klan Country, Indiana, ten brave men met and formed a noble bond. They named it Kappa Alpha Nu. It was the vision of these men to promote achievement, scholarship, and kinship that bound them together on a campus hellbent on breaking them. It amazes me to think of the lives these men lived. Elder Watson Diggs took classes in the hallways because the politics of white supremacy barred a brilliant Negro from a lecture hall. Paul Waymond Caine cooked for and waited on white fraternity houses.
In my dreams, I see Marcus Peter Blakemore and Henry Tourner Asher walking the quad, dapper and carrying duffle bags showing the wear and tear of books. I see Bryon Kenneth Armstrong and George Wesley Edmonds on a porch filled with laughter and joy. I hear John Milton Lee singing a song or Ezra D. Alexander preparing a table for spades (did they even play spades back then?). I see Guy Levis Grant and Edward Giles Irvin in the corner debating philosophy and history. But I must admit, sometimes it’s easier to envision ancestors as inanimate objects rather than living entities. Kappa Alpha Nu was later changed to Kappa Alpha Psi.
Fast forward 113 years, and I would have the honor of joining the noble bond that these men stewarded. I crossed with five other young men, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve made for myself thus far. I think about the duty one has to ancestors like my founders. I believe that Black Greek Letter Organizations are merely a reincarnation of African Rites of Passage. They are places in which Africans experiencing “natal alienation” find ways to mend their hearts back home.
As any Black Greek will tell you, we have our drama and pettiness. We talk shit and fight with each other more than those who have actual institutional power, but we all agree that our organizations are important.
The truth is, I fear for Black Organizations in this time. I fear for our momentum of memory. I fear that we have more interest in competition and material advantages rather than collaboration and service. We want to “run a yard” that doesn’t belong to us. Our rites and rituals have become a fad for social media. I fear the sacredness and founding objectives of our organizations are under attack. In less than two weeks, Donald Trump will return to the White House. He has already promised to implement policies that will further harm communities that look like ours. My question is—what will we do?
I’ve been talking to my prophytes and members of other Divine Nine organizations about the role our organizations have in movement building, and a few things have fascinated me. First, most, if not all, of our organizations were founded in support of progressive movements toward civil rights and equality, yet it seems that many have abandoned those causes. Yes, our founders were men and women who obviously wanted to see Black folk free and able to thrive in their lives. However, one cannot negate the undertones of Black Bourgeoisie politics that have come to be synonymous with Black Greek Letter Organizations.
The politics of non-partisanship, capitalism, militarism, and policing only serve to aid the state and its quasi-forces to continue the plundering of communities of color and the Global South. Secondly, the notion of Divine Nine members as the talented tenth and/or Black excellence doesn’t do the work we think it does. A member of D9 running a country built on genocide does not make them excellent—or maybe it does. It makes us excellent in repurposing white supremacy. [Read Black Skin, White Mask by Fanon and Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò]
These two annotations come to mind when I think about D9.
“I am annoyed by the phrase Black excellence. It doesn’t do the affirming work that many people who deploy it imagine that it does. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson gets it precisely right when she tells me that “Black excellence” is the answer to a racist question.”
Christina Sharpe
“Our college man today is, on the average, a man untouched by real culture. He deliberately surrenders to selfish and even silly ideals, swarming into semiprofessional athletics and Greek letter societies, and affecting to despise scholarship and the hard grind of study and research. The greatest meetings of the Negro college year, like those of the white college year, have become vulgar exhibitions of liquor, extravagance, and fur coats. We have in our colleges a growing mass of stupidity and indifference.”
W.E.B. Dubois
Evidently, this is something that I will be thinking and writing about for a long time. Last month, I got a chance to speak to a mentor and respectable man of Alpha Phi Alpha, Greg Carr. I told him that “I ran to my fraternity looking for maroonage.” He chuckled and assured me that if there is no refuge here, we must create it. Since then, I’ve been thinking about how I can continue to challenge my fraternity, chapter, and BrOthers to be bold in our vision and brave in our praxis of a radical progressive politics alongside our community.
Can Black Greek Letter Organizations be sites of refuge? Can they be incubators of radical politics? Can they be spaces in which we can fail and sharpen our politics against our praxis? I don’t know—that’s up to us to decide.
Recommendations: Gregory S. Parks and Wendy Marie Laybourn have written one of the most brilliant pieces about Kappa Alpha Psi’s commitment to Civil Rights while factoring in the collaboration between other BGLOs in that process. I’ve also been wrestling with Ali D. Chambers’ “The Failure of the Black Greek Letter Organization.” I don’t totally agree with everything that was written, but I do find the argument compelling and reasonable.
Eli Reed and the praxis of Black Documentary Photographers
Eli Reed’s work deeply inspires me. I remember the first time that I was able to talk to him. We spent hours on the phone as he talked through the importance of being a Black documentarian and why he chose to cover conflict in Beirut or how he fell in love with a daughter of royalty whilst on assignment. He is a soulful man. His laughs are bothersome. They carry with them a light and a reality that this man has seen some shit. If you don’t know Eli Reed, where have you been? Eli is a documentary photographer and professor at the University of Texas - Austin. He has covered wars and elections, done editorial and commercial work for clients, but his work documenting Black Life around the world is bar none. He is also the first Black member of the prestigious Magnum Photo Agency [think of the Rolls Royce of Photo Agencies].
The image above haunts me. It was taken in 1995 in Tanzania after the fallout of the Rwandan Civil War. The composition barks back to the works of Eugene Richards, Gordon Parks, Roy Decarava, and Henri Cartier Bresson. These days I think a lot about war and more specifically its aftermath. What does a genocide leave in a people? How does it mark the land? What is the role of a documentarian in the wake of a catastrophe? The two young people seem as if they are asking the world, what are you going to do? After you’ve seen the death, what future will you grant me?
In writing this newsletter, I tried to revisit my notes from talking to Eli and of course they were a mess. But I do remember us talking about the importance of Black Photojournalists and Documentary Photographers. I don’t consider myself a journalist. I’m not interested in objectivity or neutrality, I believe they can be tools to aid the powerful and oppress the many. However, I’m a documentary photographer, focused on preserving, archiving, and interrogating the historic record. A few months ago, I had a peer accuse my documentation of the sitting Vice President of the United States as advocacy for genocide, war, and the settler state. The thought is laughable, because the claim would never be lauded at non-Black photographers and I didn’t know my images held that much weight. But furthermore, what is shocking is that people really don’t believe that Black people should document history. We shouldn’t tune our heads and hearts towards the moments that contour our collective memory.
I think it’s a grave mistake not to have Black photographers on every corner of this earth. Our photographic tradition is one that takes us to the margins. We are the ones who tell the story of movements and people that mainstream publications refuse. We are the ones who literally break our sensors to render Blackness in its nuance. The photographic giant Gordon Parks wrote the forward to Reed’s “Black in America”, he said “With camera in hand and saturated with enthusiasm he moves unobtrusively into their lives, melts gently into their presence, then begins shooting.” This is the work that we, Black Documentarians, do. We, in the words of the old Negro spiritual, will go.. we shall go…we’re going to see what the end’s going to be.
If I could only bring one thing to the revolution, it would be this salad.
The recipe is simple and best eaten in the summer. But summer has long gone and I still hold on to this salad as a testimony that the sun is still out there somewhere. Take a few fresh cucumbers, slice them on an angle, or cube them if you want them to resemble the tomatoes and avocados. Salt and set to the side. Half a handful of cherry tomatoes. Cube a whole avocado. For the dressing, chop the head of a green onion. Mince a third of a shallot and a small garlic clove. Add half of the green onions and all of the garlic and shallot to a bowl, stir in a few tablespoons of rice vinegar [or red wine vinegar] and olive oil. Add in a touch of chili flake or crisp. Salt the dressing and the vegetables. Toss the chopped cucumbers in the dressing and let marinate for at least 10 mins [Note the water in the cucumbers will loosen up the dressing and you may need to stir to keep the dressing emulsified]. Then do the same with the tomatoes. Add Avocado and salt and pepper to taste. Be gentle at this point, one does not want to bruise the avocado. Plate the salad and garnish with the other half of the green onions and fried garlic/shallots on top [a swirl of olive oil also works good here]. Enjoy!
I eat this salad almost every day and it serves well as an appetizer for fish dishes. I’m pretty sure that I first had this salad in Panama and since then it has become my go-to salad. It’s great in the morning with a scrambled egg and toast. Add fennel and other fruits and vegetables to achieve a good balance of salt, fat, acid, and heat. [I recommend you read Samin Nosrat’s book on the subject - probably the best cookbook I’ve read so far].
See yall next week
Kaleb Autman