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Achievement Gap Too Tine  (a tine accessible only from here)

As powerful as these images were, and as they still are/can be (depending on the framing system[s] activated) in part for having imprinted (marked) that with which they've interacted directly and indirectly; having marked what they've come in contact with in some way, on some scale, in some location, for some duration of time; marking easily configured as evidence (some as just ever-diminishing echoes of interaction taking many forms: weak, forceful, profound, ridiculous, inconsequential, insurmountable, etc.) of marking, evidence of encounter; as powerful as these were, and as they still are/can be, the images and their configurable meanings are social and cultural configurations as opposed to fundamental or foundational units of existence on which configurations are formed.  Real social and cultural perceptions  whose realities may be limited to those social and cultural systems, those human perceptual systems.  

Reasons for emergence of such racial configurations are complex systems of thought and practice.  Whether or not these objects have in their interaction sets the degrading and dehumanizing of perception of a population in order to frame social value to advantage some members and disadvantage others, these objects have become collectible objects with value as memorabilia.  Authentic objects are seldom cheap unless found in circumstances outside insiders.  Please go to the University of Minnesota's Visualizing Otherness sets for more images and other configurations of context.  As degrading as such images can be, when configured so as to emphasize that perception, complex systems of affection and dependence are also associated with such figures that inspire a range of interactions such as in Ralph Ellison's

What happens in psychological framing systems on some scales can be similar to (an kaleidoscopic extension of) a configuration of a relationship system between a strangler fig tree and the tree being strangled.  Without information beyond a visual assessment, the strangler could be configured as scaffolding supporting a tree or a fortification for the tree surrounded by strangler roots and branches.  The strangler is holding the strangled tree in place; looks to be in service to the strangled.  Indeed, the strangler roots embellishing the temple system of Angkor Wat, damage to the temple aside, can be configured as a form extension of the sacred; the temple itself growing by proxy roots, spirituality becomes rooted in the ecosystem; to climb the tree becomes a means to climb or enter the temple. The roots participate in worship and devotion, have linked themselves to the spiritual notoriety of the history of the temple system, a history itself already rooted in the people.  For Christians, the tree being strangled in this photo could be configured as sacrifice within a form of encompassing cross (or form of fork). 

In the complex system of strangler and strangled interaction, there is also a configuration of analysis in which the strangled tree adopts conditions and terms of the strangler, becomes a subject of the strangler, becomes defined as strangled; the broad-leaved lilly pilly's identity is reconfigured to include its accommodation of the strangler fig. Once strangled, the strangled may be (perhaps also must be [on some scale in some location for some duration of time) considered in the context of the strangler that becomes the point of contact with the strangled, a controlling tine of the interaction.  We know the strangler and the strangled better (have access to other configurations of information) through studying their interaction, their relationship, their intimacy. 

It is interesting that in the tine system in which denigrating configurations of Black people become necessary, for a variety of configurable reasons, including (on some scale in some location for some duration of time) an attempt to visually mark and increase multiple forms of distance between races; in this tine system, the tine splits and twists  in and out of itself, and back on itself (perhaps suggestive of twists of DNA or the aggressiveness of strangler fig trees) —it is interesting that contact and intimacy between despiser and despised increases though working at, though maintaining the despising.  The strangler fig and the strangled tree are locked in an intimate relationship; they sleep together night and day.  To produce such pieces as the Sambo bank, especially in circumstances of hand-crafting, is to be intimately involved with the other, is to forge a relationship with a fantasized version of the other, a desired exaggerated iteration of the other (possibly to desire for a purpose of despising the object of an emotional disgust that requires some attention on the object of disgust to maintain a disgust that might please the person experiencing the configuration of disgust; such emotions perhaps can be experienced in a more intense way than an individual might experience more conventional configurations of love).  When such objects are mass produced (such as Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, Cream of Wheat's Rastus, and Sambo bank facsimiles), there is (an underlying configuration of a system of) assumption that these objects can help configure desirable profits, business success helping to endow (reconfigure) the objects with value and desirability; there remains a market for Sambo who is still being sold.  (Ficus watkinsiana, strangler fig, image from wikipedia commons; Cream of Wheat ad featuring Rastus from Ferris State University's Jim Crow Museum )

While moral and ethical objections against owning human beings might prove difficult to defy, less ethical objection is placed on owning such representations of humans, some of which become endearing and enduring associations (interactions) with pleasant systems of memory and childhood, the reading of Bannerman's books to children associated with adult/child bonding in which case the images bring people together instead of distancing them.  There is a scene in A Night to Remember, a 1958 film about the Titanic, in which though the ship is sinking, a small child of the aristocracy clings tightly to his Golliwog as he is about to be placed into his mother's arms in a lifeboat; this doll to which the boy has a strong attachment is too precious to leave behind, and is a source of comfort: the boy's father will be lost in the sinking, but not the Golliwog.  Of note: his two sisters get into the lifeboat without any obvious personal keepsakes in hand; only the boy, who, though at times he falls asleep during the scene, does not let go of his doll.  Because no other children on ship as first class, second class,or steerage passengers are shown with toys on which the camera lingers, it becomes easy to associate the Golliwog in this tine of interaction with a system of privilege.  Indeed, this memento becomes part of the boy's last memory of being with his father and with his family in an intimate moment.  The Golliwog is one of Titanic's survivors, and was placed in a lifeboat ahead of second and third class passengers.

Of course, this configuration as a system of privilege perhaps also is an extension (tine) entangled with a larger system of human subjugation and inhumanity, which is tethered to a system of humanity which has not been escaped: the privilege of being able to designate hierarchies of human status based on a number of interacting factors, including race, class, culture, gender, level of academic achievement, religion.  Reduction (also a perceptual configuration) of the other to a rag doll, beloved or not, can be considered dehumanizing, but no races are exempt from configurations as dolls intended for role-playing as care-givers and intended for reliable companionship and attachment. Products marketed to demarcate affluence and marketed to those interested in upward social mobility as articles of convenience that save time and enhance quality of living, indicating progress, include many products for the kitchen, including lines of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben food products where these icons still assure users of the product that the rice or pancakes would/will taste good, and be of a quality associated with southern tradition. The strong agricultural configuration is part of a long association of Blacks with agriculture, toiling in fields, sharecropping, slave labor, planting, harvesting, cooking, serving good-tasting food.   Those faces on the box still indicate a trustworthy product whatever else those faces said and did not say directly     —the system is  complex and entangled; echoes and resonances of these interacting systems still occur in various intensities on various scales in various locations for various durations of time.  

[Throw Betty Crocker, Mrs. Joy Butterworth's, the Gorton's Fisherman (Gorton's Gloucester MA now owned by a Japanese Company), and the Quaker Oats Quaker into the consideration, and it necessarily reconfigures to accommodate them, but since the achievement gap functions better without them, they will be disregarded; they will be pushed slip through the gap and land in another neighborhood.]

Aunt Jemima (although the White Lily product has the label benefit of being self-rising, self-elevating, not self-deprecating).  Then again, it's just corn meal, just grain, useful in making corn bread, in breading fish for frying, for tasting good (barring allergies, and other variables that can interact with and configure/reconfigure taste), for linking the cook, the diner with any associations held (or that form in an introduction) with any of the components of a system of corn meal, Aunt, Jemima, lily, white, scarecrows, buttermilk, and whatever misunderstandings or misreadings lead to still more possibilities for configuring realities within realities (which do not need to be shared to function as realities, though shared components may strengthen [or perhaps weaken by exposing locations to disturb them]  those [aspects] of reality systems.  Both are also linked to manufacturing processes cleaned up for the shelves, packaged for success.  Transposing white and lily can be irresistible; and seeing the scarecrow makes me hear the Wizard of Oz scarecrow singing If I Only Had a Brain, and then I think, configuring these thoughts together, the song strangling the lily; then I think that if I do indeed have a brain and am in my right mind, I won't buy the lily white.  

In some configurations of human racial and ethnic interactions, iconic poams (products of acts of making) such as Sambo, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, Rastus, and Uncle Tom have emerged and function(ed) as parts of barrier systems to emergence of systems of Black Pride and bulwark systems in support of black inferiority although even within systems of slavery within the United States, the experience of individuals interacting with US slavery systems covers a range of possibilities; indeed all possibilities —some configuration of all that was possible happened (and happens as slavery systems continue to be investigated) on some scale in some location (including imagination, including erroneous fact as well as fiction) for some duration of time.  

In configurations in which such icons have successfully functioned as collaborating barrier and bulwark systems, response systems emerge, some configured in rejection and rebellion, whose tines go on and bifurcate into a range of systems including militant movements and Afrocentric movements part of whose function is to be a parallel system that refutes claims of inferiority (that are collaborated with in tines or systems of refutation: a form of acknowledgment). Entangled response systems emerge in which configurations of apparent acceptance of inferiority also emerge.  Some of these configurations of apparent inferiority can be framed so as to include dream and hope configurations, equality as a goal rather than an active present state, and such configurations can accommodate much poetry of Langston Hughes, especially A Dream Deferred.  

Configurations of the postponed dream frequently imply interaction with variables, often in the form of vectors, or other viral, destructive forms that can strip dreams that are not quite realized of their ability to become realized.  These destructive variables have more mass and more energy associated with that mass to push the dream further away; negative space between dreamer and dream widens (a gap between tines), and with that negative widening, the impact range of efforts to align dream and dreamer diminishes, so that what reaches dream from dreamer, and dreamer from dream is too weak to  overcome, neutralize, reverse, or halt damaged reconfigurations of possibility that frame circumstances well.

 A Dream Deferred

Overcoming obstacles is a configuration of the human condition set that seems to do a good job holding most configurations of humanity on some aspect of some of its tines.  At times, having to overcome obstacles is inspiring, at times discouraging especially when suffering is involved.  But so long as mortality is part of the configuration, so long as there are interactions that interfere with ideal configurations of lives, it seems likely that accounts of confronting obstacles can and will inspire.  Some inspiring (calls to action) configurations of the complex inspiration of A Dream Deferred (ascent mitigated by descent, descent mitigated by ascent) follow.  These are video variations, kaleidoscopic extensions (that as they keep extending, can connect with anything/everything connectable, eventually forming an allness, that, of course, still has gaps, space between tines, space within tines, perhaps becoming infinitely smaller, but perhaps without disappearing altogether, depending on the increments of measure that try to keep pace with a system that is dynamic, and not the same system being measured moment to moment [and not the same instruments of measure moment to moment, being also part of the dynamic and complex system being assessed).

Langston Hughes — A Dream Deferred

by Harlem Chancemill and Marc Cary

(also features kaleidoscopic visual extension and idea unfolding; connected to the idea system of this tine (page) of an official Limited Fork Theory website and to other idea systems, each one forming a multidimensional form of rose attached to a range of configurations of realities and universes simultaneously).

 And with this is a return to what, via interaction sets, was never left: 

SAMBO TO OBAMA: from one icon to another:

a fusion of hope and dream into the palpable, the graspable; a reality with mass; the energy of dreaming become mass.  As the video says, in one assessment (configuration) of it, it is not (necessarily or only) the abandonment of Sambo out of guilt, shame, anger, remorse, regret, indifference, or any other configuration; it is (also) a reconfiguration of Sambo, an evolution of Sambo, Sambo with time of generations to forge a complex, dynamic identity, one that changes, perhaps improved (variable perceptual configuration system), perhaps not (variable perceptual configuration system), but identity, like most things (according to [some of] what seems reasonable based on [some of] what is observable, [some of] what has not slipped through tines) is not fixed, is not permanent, is subject to reconfiguration, influence, collaboration (to fall as well as to rise).  

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