Culturing Words

The inequalities of shared culture are discussed in this chapter. Issues include the question of what “Negro” is; race, nation, culture—the sequence of failures; racism, citizenship, and pig deconstruction; hunger in the United States; the problem of “we”; sharecropping and race; and impunity.

This chapter covers suburbs and stables, the GI Bill of Rights and race, Ford and Fordism, yammering, getting high, Max Weber and Michel Foucault and their fantasies of control, and “floating” states and democracies. It invokes Prometheus and the rock chained to each other, and how that matters to the fire in our bellies.

The interweaving of intimacy, domination, distance, and anger in the production of race, racism, gender, and sexism are at issue in this chapter. The author looks at the complexities of the N-word, as well as the necessary fluidity of struggle to match and engage the intimate and distancing fluidity of domination.