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by Zaire Saunders
“We built a movement without those major backers … without the usual institutions.”
“Paperboy Love Prince runs for mayor” screens on Friday June 16th in the block of films from 1-6pm at the African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton St, in San Francisco. You can purchase tickets online at www.sfbff.org.
We all know how the year 2020 in American politics was a major breaking point in the lives of millions of people. From the numerous victims of lynching that sent people all over the world protesting and yelling, to the Covid-19 pandemic that swept through, decimating communities throughout the country, many were affected by the swift mobility of the people and the virus.
But, what many here in the West might’ve missed during all the chaos was the bid for mayor of New York City. Post George Floyd’s lynching, it seems like most Democrats needed to shoe-horn in their Black candidates to appease the very obviously upset constituents of the U.S. All under the guise of anti-racism. These candidates, while owning a Black consciousness, failed to live up to the transformative power of a Black consciousness.
Philosopher Lewis R. Gordon explains in his book, “Fear of Black Consciousness,” the difference between Black consciousness and black consciousness as this: “There is the consciousness of being a ‘race,’ which the white world produced, and which many people across all racial and ethnic groups have come to believe in, over the past few hundred years.
“There is the set of black perspectives, often called ‘black experience’ and understanding, of that consciousness. That is what black people produced. There is the everyday life of black people when white people are not around or at least not on black people’s minds. That is also what black people produced – and continue to produce. And there is the active political transformation of the first, second and third perspectives into a movement from ‘black’ to ‘Black’ consciousness. Think about the world that produced the first kind of black consciousness.”
That’s where Paperboy Love Prince comes in. For those unaware, Love Prince is an American artist, community activist and, as recently as 2020, a New York City mayoral candidate, all while repping Brooklyn as their original stomping grounds. I had the chance to get a bit more familiar with Paperboy’s bid for mayor through his film “Paperboy Love Prince Runs for Mayor.”
Paperboy Love Prince took the off-beaten path campaigning by working a grassroots campaign. Driving a van around New York, Paperboy, decked out in a variety of colors like a bouquet of flowers, spoke hope into the community. Their campaign spoke to the everyday struggles of working class folks, poorer folks, Trans folks and Black folks.
Seeing Paperboy take the issues the people face, as well as something as pretentious as a mayoral bid, become a Black and queer mediator meant to heal and help those very same communities left behind.
The movement from black consciousness to a Black consciousness is even more apparent once you reach the part of the film when Paperboy Love Prince is excluded from even partaking in the mayoral debate. Proponents of democracy – the high million dollar net worth candidates – feared having to share a debate stage with a grassroots campaigner beloved by and a part of the very same community they seek to speak for.
All the parading of Black faces in high, often out of reach, spaces is meant to be a veil of hypocrisy to have their peers be solely their lookalikes – Mirror images of the same politician to be reheard and reused.
Paperboy doesn’t fold that way. At the end of the day, we know paperboy does not win. Fast forward and it is in fact former policeman Eric Adams who won the race. Our society is only prepared to nudge forward with a Black face so long as they’ve operated under the state as armed forces. What that tells me is that we aren’t yet able to see past the thin veil of American white-supremacist thinking. We only accept people of a certain type on the stage. Never the actual people on the stage.
It tells me that the only good nigger the American people can respect and get behind is one who has worn a badge and bends over backwards to appeal to non-black faces. We aren’t yet ready to see a bad nigger who happens to be poorer, Blacker, Queerer or otherwise unorthodox, lead us. Or even speak to us.
The recent ousting of two Black Democratic lawmakers in early April over a gun control demonstration on the chamber floor is recent proof of the worries our “democracy” has around Black governance, or to speak more specifically in the case of Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, Black movement. The demonstration was following the Nashville school shooting. They were forced out of the legislature, and Rep. Gloria Johnson, a White woman who joined them, was not.
Paperboy Love Prince, though in New York, speaks to the possibility of us all. They speak to an active consciousness that wants to feed the people – not hide behind respectability, a consciousness that wants to connect the people – not confuse and use them.
We should ask ourselves what our democracy means in this current decade. If you chose to argue that until the Civil Rights Movement, our “democracy” didn’t fully materialize until voting rights were protected under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – when it finally became illegal to use the outdated anti-democratic ways of the South – you would be correct. Our democracy has never wanted the people to decide for themselves and we know with the 13th Amendment slavery never went away. We never were emancipated into a democratic government, only a half freedom.
We all can’t even participate in a half-free democracy.
Zaire Saunders is the copy editor and reporter for the SF Bay View Community Journalism Program, which is funded by the California State Library.
