Emma Dabiri Instagram – Jimi Hendrix passed away 54 years ago today on September 18th 1970. Repost: “There seems to be a lot of general misunderstanding about what racism actually is. Its not only interpersonal events, insults or slights but the position you are born into, what your family has access to, or doesnt, where they can go, what they can do, the level of trauma that has been meted out on previous generations , the ways this impacts countless outcomes. When we conflate all experiences of racism with the experiences of Black Americans, we do a disservice to what it means to be the descendants of slaves distinct differences in experiences of being black from a majority white country versus being black from a black country , but we also fail to pick up on the textures and nuances of black experiences of children of immigrants (rather than descendants of slaves) in places like the U.K. and Ireland…but I digress
#JimiHendrix a black American of African, Cherokee and Irish ancestry was born into an environment of poverty and dysfunction the result of the type of structural racism that cannot be understood on the level of microaggressions.That he even survived his childhood is remarkable, that he went on to distinguish himself as the greatest guitarist of all time beggars belief and yet he’s so much more then a guitarist. As a lyricist & storyteller he remains unmatched, but a form of pernicious racism that allows Bob Dylan (also one of my faves) to win the Nobel Prize for literature for his songwriting, fails to acknowledge the poetry of Hendrix…again I digress…Hendrix is in my opinion far more then a musician, as a child there are stories of him describing the music he could hear in his head and his grandmother washing his ears out with oil or taking apart a radio to “find the music” – then being brutally beaten for his efforts. When I listen to Hendrix I can feel time expanding out on itself and repeating in multiple directions, the essence of Afrofuturism. Hendrix feels like a conduit or a medium for things outside of our immediate realm, a person attuned to the infinite, with the ability to translate it back for the rest of us *cont in comments* | Posted on 18/Sep/2024 20:59:20
