That was Carter G. Woodson, our founder, writing in 1947. He was a straight up square with integrity. Oh, but now the mis-educated Negroes who have sway over the ASALH board have lost their way. They have become savvy, able to run game. Here’s the latest case for selling out:
Two people on ASALH’s board supporting the sellout to the University of Chicago have made the case that it is temporary. You got it, temporary. They know, I’m told, the Journal of African American History would come home. It is a short-term move. This is the recast argument in the wake of the pounding they have taken about thinking they were going to get rich selling journals to libraries who are not try to buy any journals. So now they are wise, hip to what is going on in the publishing world, and want to take promises made by Chicago while the getting is good. There is a five-year get over with $15K to $20K in positive revenue it per year, greater than what we make now. A $75,000 to a $100,000 take.
This is where you start playing the old School Curtis Mayfield or, if it’s your pleasure, Pimp-C. ASALH is about to get over.
Well this is not an easy hustle tho’. The trick comes with strings, some complicated paper that you must sign. The mark requires that you have to put your annual stipend from JSTOR in his control. Roughly $22k. That is the money you make from your intellectual property that your Daddy, Woodson, left you. Your trust fund so to speak. That trick you playing with will be holding that. He did not earn any of it, but you are letting him have half, thinking you will come out ahead–for five years.
Now the cost of production is not fixed so if there are cost overruns–too many pages, too many changes, etc–then you are eating into that $15K. You see that trick you hustling has ways of getting that $15K you are dreaming about–chump change–down to $5K. So let’s say you make $5K a year hustler boy. That is a chump’s hustle any way. You would pimp out the oldest black scholarly journal in the world for chicken feed? Shame on you.
Oh, but it is worse. In the five years that you are working the trick, you not only made–at best–chump change you have gotten hooked on it. You have lost the knowledge of how to publish yourself. The business you were in for a century, you would effectively be out of it and would later have to figure out, if you can, how to re-enter it. You have not done what it takes to reduce the cost of your production and take up a new business model. Instead of going to school on how to survive without subsidy, you have learned nothing but how to hustle for chump change.
But you see, I am an old ghetto boy, and I learned that tricks never lost money they did not have to lose. On the other hand, hustlers tended to stay broke and could never make a honest living doing anything else.
Yet this is worse that the “hard out here for a pimp” story we hear about nowadays. Let us complicate this narrative in the way that life on the hustle often is. What if the trick is another pimp trying to take over the thing you’re pimping. You see the master pimp is actually a con man and a gangster all rolled-up together. They don’t dress funny, talk crazy, shoot up things, and brag about their accomplishments. They appear harmless and in fact they often pose as tricks. Well, let me just say, the “trick” in question is the University of Chicago. You are trying to hustle an institution that plays the long game. And they have been playing Negroes for generations. They cut deals with the Black Stone Rangers, Southside politicians, and now they are buying up black neighborhoods and institutions. The traditional Southside black community has become their Roman lake, which they are acquiring through reverse mortgages to the black elderly. If you sign the trick’s contract you may not ever get the legacy you were pimping back. The judge might eventually tell you that you’ve played yourself. You see squares rule the world.
So these sellouts are now posing as savvy hustlers, temporary ones in their minds, pimping out Woodson’s legacy, the oldest independent black scholarly journal in the world. And this my friends is the kind of argument that education was supposed to cure–short-term, penny ante thinking with no respect for the integrity of our heritage.
When we get to Richmond for #asalh2016, we will have to teach them that money talks…and God bless the child that got its own.
