Random Thoughts on a Random Evening
By W. F. Twyman, Jr.
[Introduction: Not that you should care but I have a friend who feeds me “woe is me” news stories and essays. At first, I dutifully welcomed these accounts from the dark side of life but I have now had my fill. I am positive and upbeat by and large. I don’t appreciate being pulled back into the pit of black consciousness. If I were being fed essays about, say, the famous writer Charles Chesnutt or Jack London or fast breaking developments in Quantum AI, I would feel enriched and elevated. But no, the friend sends me dispiriting essays about traffic stops and blackness is oppression.
I don’t like having my joy and peace at the center imposed upon with sad sack tales about living while Black. I am beginning to feel these accounts are lies. I never thought I would use those words, lies. I think less of people and writers who lie. A heavy dose of the missives I receive are lies, I have concluded. Are writers really Walking while Black, Driving while Black, Dreaming while Black? I will keep my distance from racial lies about Blackness. Even though I have retired from Blackness, it is strange that others have a cancerous consciousness of Blackness in the year 2025 in San Diego.
C’est la Vie!]
As I think about this thing called “Blackness,” I am drawn to the author Annaka Harris. I have suggested before that Consciousness begats Blackness. Consciousness comes before Blackness. Consciousness creates Blackness. The more I think about consciousness, the more this sequence of thought makes sense to me. And as I listened to Harris this afternoon on the Modern Wisdom podcast, I was drawn more and more into my nascent sense of consciousness as a precondition for Blackness. Here is the link to Harris on the Modern Wisdom podcast. The Most Unsolvable Question in Science
Did you know there is no color such as green out there? What we see as green is how our mind filters and perceives light coming into the brain. Think about that. I did. It is a brilliant observation made by Harris on the podcast. Let’s take the pattern one step further by analogy. If there is no such color as green, could it be that there is no such thing as oppression, Blackness, out there in San Diego in 2025? Maybe, just maybe, our minds observe reality and, like the color green, our mind creates the illusion, the perception of Blackness, of oppression. In other words, if the very color green, the color of my shirt right now, is an illusion created by my consciousness, might the same be true for Blackness as well?
Consciousness may go all the way down to the fundamental, according to Harris. If consciousness is fundamental for the color green, might it also be fundamental as the starting point for Blackness? Such a starting point might change our intuitions about Blackness. Suppose we lived our lives and lacked the consciousness of Blackness. Suppose every interaction one observed in reality was an interaction between two individuals. Suppose news stories reported interactions between individuals cleansed of references to Blackness or Whiteness? Are we losing the ability to perceive and observe reality through a consciousness free of color?
I know someone who is color-blind. He was born color-blind and has been that way since I first met him in the 2000s. I oftentimes suspects his consciousness does not observe reality as Blackness. Too much trouble to discern color differences. His consciousness is incapable of perceiving Blackness as a visual matter. If given a choice, I think the average Black American would prefer this guy’s company to a hyperconscious person stepped in Blackness is Oppression, Nothing else matters.
What do you think?
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That's just the way it goes
(That's life) Oh yeah
(C'est la vie, c'est la vie)
That's just the way it goes
(That's life) Mm
A higher order of consciousness recognizes that consciousness is a felt experience. If I do not feel oppressed, why send me driving while sad black traffic stories? Seems offensive to my human dignity. I believe Harris is on to something that will help us become more wise about consciousness as the fountainhead of Blackness. Consciousness is self-awareness, the perception of feeling about oneself, how one observes reality. This is a new frontier for understanding Blackness. Blackness is not the evil white policeman or the unseen micro aggression. Blackness becomes the intentional waste product of consciousness. In other words, everyone has an individual consciousness. One individual writer’s story of Blackness should not be taken as gospel truth. Who among 1.2 billion black souls speaks for all blacks?
There is no such creature. My friend presumes if a black writer writes a sad story about Blackness, it must be true. The story is probably false in a time of racial hoaxes. How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War The traffic stop story my friend sent me in a heated rush is (probably) a lie.
That’s just the way it goes.
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Now, I much prefer to write about Artificial intelligence (AI) these days. Here is a link to one of my favorite AI prophets, former Goggle X Business Director Mo Gawdat. The Ethics of AI — Who’s Really In Control? Guest Rumman Chowdhury offers that AI is a mirror of ourselves. I took that observation to heart. It means we who detest dogma and slogan words have a duty to write and create so that the large language models (LLMs) will have viewpoint diversity. Otherwise, the AIs will be California-based and we will all feel the distortion of reality going forward.
According to Chowdhury, AI flattens the nuance and complexity of humanity. The models generate narratives that offer no context. The hallucinations are there and the AI doesn’t apologize for mistakes. What AI needs to do is to see through your eyes and my eyes. This is important. AI speaks as if what they speak is the truth. Suppose the AI is trained on the essay that claims traffic stops target black drivers? That is not true in my experience and it makes me annoyed that lies in an essay are fed into large language models to create a distorted reality.
What gives AI the right to say what is true and what is not true? Just because a low-self esteem essay gets 200,000 views on X doesn’t mean it is more true than a lonely writer who declines to perform oppression art. Sadly, there is an appetite for stories of oppressed blacks. And AI is learning from these stories of woe and misery. People Love Oppressed Blacks
I do not love stories of oppressed blacks.
Conclusion: We can stay in the pit or come out of the pit of Blackness, dogma and slogan words. The emphasis should be on one’s individual culture, one’s unique consciousness. The emphasis should not be on color. When the emphasis is on color, one has created a consciousness primed to observe reality as Blackness morning, noon and night. Does that make sense? Do you see how it is the foundational consciousness that creates the pit of Blackness where all is oppression?
Well, I see it even if you don’t. And that is good enough for me this evening. Be in control of your own life. Protect your consciousness from dispiriting essays about Blackness. You decide what you believe.
That's just the way it goes
(That's life)
(C'est la vie, c'est la vie)