Field is celebrating his one year anniversary as a blogger. He mused how black conversatives have their own network thang together, but apparently, black progressives don’t. This is important.

We are the ones who will vision the future. Conservatives, by definition, are reformist, they want to preserve the system/status quo. They want their lil negro cut of the pie, even if it is arsenic for the rest of us and the Planet.

How can we use our brains and voices to create what is wholly absent: a black progressive movement?

I know I can complain and point out racism’s finer points fairly well; where is that getting us and me? Is our race in crisis or what? Has the prison-industrial complex collapsed and I missed it? The plantation in 2007 is in the prisonyard - ya’ll realize that prisons are doing more business on the inside than Eli Whitney!

Its like the prison guard in Slam: “They are wiping out our race…and you’re sitting around here playing these silly-ass games.”

The ‘AfroSphere’ (Asabagna’s invention) must become an Afro-Spear, carving a path for our people into this 21st Century

Black Progressive Blogger Organizing Conference anyone?

The ‘Magical Knee-grow’ Strikes Again

Rather than a shrunken head, he totes an acoustic guitar and a huge car chain. The plot is pure pimplicity:

Samuel L. finds a sleazy white fucktoid who craves the ‘black snake’ - black men, black dick - lying in a ditch near his property. We’re supposed to believe that this brotha would trifle with this ‘Backdoor Sal’, forgo the boots which she offers on a ritz cracker and all of a sudden gets enough religion to HEAL this evil wench.

I mean, white folks are insane. Every movie that Tinsel Town churns out is essentially one of the following formulas: White Man As God, White Man As God, White Man As Missionary, Lost White Man/Woman Who Needs a Kneegrow to Help Them Find Themselves & Their Long Lost Love

It reminds me of when Angela Bassett (Waiting To Exhale) uttered that fateful line ’bout her husband though she was really talking ’bout us: ‘you expected me to be background to your foreground.’

Lawn Jockey.

We are positioned by this white culture to either background invisibility or foreground monstrosity. White people have a desperate need to be served or frightened by us. We are healers or scapegoats, mammies or monsters, sex fiends or soul savers.

Films constantly reflect this. Last King of Scotland - the Gorilla helps the misguided white Scot earn his spurs. Reign Over Me a new film with Don Cheadle (sporting a title without irony), Black Snake. In Training Day, Denzel shepherds Ethan Hawke through the rites of passage into black manhood. Queen Latifah helps Steve Martin crank up a woodie and get the girl in ‘Burning Down The House.’

When are we going to make our own films? With all the juice that Denzel and Halle and Jamie have, how come we aren’t creating a real Black Cinema, where we control all the positions in front of and behind the camera, where we WRITE the scripts, tell OUR stories? With digital, films can be made incredible inexpensively and can be very profitable. Why don’t we get that?

Well, I want to make movies, I want to ‘change the game’ as my hero Goldie says - who’s with me?

Pattrice Jones is white, but I give her mad ’sistah props’ for her work.  She is the only person who’ve I’ve re-run a piece 4 times.  But, its just that good, that vital. What she is saying in “The Show” is so pertinent, but evidently so subtle that these mind colonized, signwaving muthafuckas just can’t read plain English.

Her point is that the marches that are going on today and tomorrow (this Saturday and Sunday) are scams and shams.  She breaks the shit down for all but the most delusional.  I would add racism/white supremacy is also integral to the march as white spectacle; as they march, they still lap up beaucoup privilege.

I go back to Mario Savio: if you ain’t throwing your body into the levers and gears of this monstrous system, you are simply talking out your booty slide.  Its a con game.  Read Pattrice and free yo’ muthafuckin’ mind.
Read THIS shit!!!!

Shock & Awe to the dome piece.

This is the catalyst of US foreign policy.  Hell, this IS US foreign policy.  They have no moral impetus; they use a contrived ‘national security interest’ as permission to rule the world.

Watch this.

This is YOUR government at work.

This ain’t no accident.

Check this out.

If they will do this, what else will they do?

Mental colonization continues. The terrorized brain is fertile ground for all manner of delusional activity.

Don’t co-sign this madness.

Take yo’ mind back!

From Wiki…

Mario Savio (December 8, 1942 – November 6, 1996) was an American political activist and a key member in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He is most famous for his passionate speeches, especially his “place your bodies upon the gears” address.

Life

The son of a Sicilian born factory worker, Savio grew up in New York City, went to a public high school (Martin Van Buren High) in Queens, and attended Manhattan College and Queens College before enrolling at the University of California, Berkeley as a philosophy major in 1963. In March of the following year, he was arrested for demonstrating against the San Francisco Hotel Association for excluding blacks from non-menial jobs; in the summer, he traveled to Mississippi as a civil rights worker, helping African Americans register to vote.

Savio rose to prominence as a leader of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, delivering a fiery speech in Sproul Plaza on December 3, 1964. But Savio was not a fame-seeker and took modest jobs for twenty years before returning to college in the 1980s, this time at San Francisco State University, where he received a summa cum laude bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in physics. Savio died at 53. He had a history of heart trouble, and while carrying his son’s small amplifier to the car, suffered ventricular fibrillation and lapsed into a coma; his family authorized doctors to disconnect his life support. At the time of his death, he was on the faculty of Sonoma State University teaching mathematics and philosophy.

Honorifics and controversies

In 1997, the steps of Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley, where he led the Free Speech movement, were officially re-named the “Mario Savio Steps” in his honor.

In 2004, it was revealed that Savio was the subject of a massive FBI surveillance program even after he left the Free Speech Movement. The FBI trailed Mario Savio for more than a decade after he left UC Berkeley, and bureau officials plotted to “neutralize” him politically, even though there was no evidence he broke any federal law. [1] According to hundreds of pages of FBI files, the bureau:

• Collected, without court order, personal information about Savio from schools, telephone companies, utility firms and banks and compiled information about his marriage and divorce.

• Monitored his day-to-day activities by using informants planted in political groups, covertly contacting his neighbors, landlords and employers, and having agents pose as professors, journalists and activists to interview him and his wife.

• Obtained his tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service in violation of federal rules, mischaracterized him as a threat to the president and arranged for the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies to investigate him when he and his family traveled in Europe.

• Put him on an unauthorized list of people to be detained without judicial warrant in event of a national emergency, and designated him as a “Key Activist” whose political activities should be “disrupted” and “neutralized” under the bureau’s extralegal counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Mario Savio

They weren’t perfect.

They made errors.

But their analysis of the United States is still accurate.

And many of their innovations could be very useful today.

This is an imperialist, racist, global, terrorist state.

Obama isn’t talking about it, nor is Hilary. They are defenders of the status quo. Defenders of ‘IT.’ They are slaves of capital, co-opted by the enemies of our people, the enemies of the planet.

Yet, we have people debating whether or not Barrack ‘is black enough?’ Well, obviously not, not if he is proposing the same old Democratic pabulum with a dash of progressive paprika. No, the election season is the season of the ‘Bread and Circus,’ the charade trotted out to make you think you have a vote - when you don’t.

No, we are afraid to notice the Big Lie, say the unmentionable that we ALL know in our bones to be true: this ain’t gon’ change at the ballot box. It ain’t gon’ change on BET, through the ‘Covenant’ or no other knee-shaking, half-stepping enterprise. It will take what Huey P. Newton described as ’stronger stuff.’ Take what the Panthers called ‘revolutionary intercommunalism.’

This nation and the actual nation-state are dead. PC - Pure Capital itself drives the institutions of the facade-state. How can 10 million people protesting globally against war be ignored? They’re ignored cuz they don’t understand that they are complaining to the wrong people, that THEY are the ONLY corrective power. Nobody else will save us but US! But these fake progressive, liberal Democrats aren’t willilng to pay the price that it takes to be free. They are afraid to use the God-given power that they have. They’d rather defer to the experts, to the authorities, to their damn slave masters.

The magician gives you a toy that has voting levers and a curtain on it and you think its the real thing, when its ‘Barbie and Ken,’ something that resembles what you claim you want - but isn’t.

Its ‘placebo-governance’ in miniature; you are the control group who DOESN’T get true democracy, who doesn’t get autonomy, who doesn’t get freedom. You get the dildo, but not the dick; you thought they gave you the carrot, but it was really the stick.

Revolution is necessary, of the communities that are in the crosshairs of the Beast. All across the globe. It is frightening to consider - what does it mean to revolt, how, how will we survive? The consideration of these questions must begin in order to answer them. I know I’m scared, but the alternative is worse. To be black, of color and to SUPPORT this madness is to support racism/white supremacy, imperialism, globalism. The status quo rapes women, rapes societies, rapes cultures, rapes communities. If you like Obama, you also like that, if you love Hilary, you love all of that.

Stop living in the delusion and see it for what it is.

Until communties become communities and then fight the REAL power arrayed against them, this OZ that looks democratic, that appears to have a legislative, judicial and executive branch of, by and for the people - then they will continue to get the best of us and the planet. We need to fight, but fight the real fight instead of the reformist, ‘lemme see what crumbs I can get for myself’ fight.
The Black Panthers are worthy of great study because they were on to something and this repressive governent knew. Why else would the US have tried to destroy these beautiful black women and men?

The Black Panther Lives!

All Power To ALL The People!!

Who are you?

What are you?

What is your primary identity?

What ethnic, racial, nation-state do you identify with?

Or do you identify with none at all?

How did you learn who you are/how to categorize yourself?

How does having/maintaining an identity detract/support one being their authentic self?

When we confront people as labels or categories, how does that affect our ability to see them for who they are?

Is having a simplistic, hand-me-down identity a form of ’security,’ and a strength or an ‘escape’ from the anxiety of growing into something beyond the flowerbox you were planted in? Or both?

Do you ever ask yourself who and what you are, who and what you are supposed to be and whether you are being your truest self?

Krishnamurti says that the drawing of lines, of distinctions in one’s mind has and does create all of the conflict, all of the war on the planet

What say you?

Speak now or forever hold your peace

• • From Sewere:

  March 6th, 2007 at 07:6 p 

  Peace FS,

  It’s been a while that I’ve been here but it was quite a surprise to see this conversation still going from last year. Not that a continuing conversation is a bad thing and I’m definitely happy to see Emerging Phoenix engaging you… But there’s still much missing in all of this that only looks at the white vs. black dimension of interracial relationships that does not speak to the experiences of many of us who are black non-African American.

  I do not want to trivialize the multitude of issues that black women face from not only the society at large but also from black men who are more than happy to denigrate them… But in order of magnitude, the number of black-white interracial marriages is by far less than black-black marriages. I think the current stats (I will try and find the link soon) is that of all marriages involving black folks, black-white marriages are less than 10% even when you climb up the socioeconomic ladder the proportion of black-white marriages is still less than 10% of all marriages involving black men or women. In terms of severity, I think attacking those negative images of black women while promoting the multi-faceted lives and experiences of black women is more important and more constructive than calling race-traitor on black men who date white women. With regards to the black men who denigrate black women to protect white women or other non-black women (e.g. Wesley Snipes) they should be condemned outrightly BUT the kind of prejudice they express is by far more complicated than just a black man thing… this segues to how the issue of denigrating black folk affects the diverse romantic interactions between the multiple ethnicities in the black community.

  If you were to ask Nigerian who he/she would marry, nine times out of ten they will pick a Nigerian, which on the face is a good thing because they’re with black people, but if you were to dig deeper this perspective also includes a racialized view of non-Nigerian black folk (especially African-Americans) as less than acceptable. This also brings in very sexist perspectives, where Nigerian women are beholden to Nigerian men in order to have legitimate identities as Nigerians within their families as well society at large, Nigerian men are all too happy to have their way with African-American women but after having their fun will settle down with a Nigerian woman (without loosing their identities in anyway). Even between and within African nationalities there are so many prejudiced views; where Ibos, Ibibios, Yorubas, Hausas, Nigerians, Ghanaians, Ethiopians and Egyptians employ nationalist, tribal prejudices against one another. If one were to extend RR’s theories of black on black love to Yoruba on Yoruba love or Nigerian on Nigerian love or Ethiopian and Ethiopian love only, then we would be left with more of a fragmented community.

  Flipping the coin, my experience has shown me that just as much anti-African racialized prejudice and discrimination from African-Americans who have internalized their racism. I’m talking about those who still use the “paper bag” test when it comes to dating other black folks, as well as African-Americans that look at us Africans as savages. This does not mean that the other extreme i.e. those who exoticize the sexuality and identity of Africans as the “real” Mandingos/Africans, is any less problematic and detrimental to building personal relationships. Additionally, having lived and worked in countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Central, I’ve seen too many African-Americans take full advantage of their American privilege (which is by extension a racialized privilege) at the expense of their African and Afro-Latino cousins. These same people were in relationships with other African-Americans enjoying their isolation or when they were in relationships with African or Afro-Latino were very happy to utilize their privilege to select partners from the “cream of the crop”. Tell me what difference does it make if the doctors, marine biologists and engineers who were trained (with heavy investment by the government of Nicaragua and Cuba) to serve their poor communities left with African-American sisters (which was the case) rather than white women (which was rarely so)? Because at the end of the day, the government and community (including the women from these men’s communities) will not be able to reap the dividends when the people they’ve invested in decide to take advantage of the opportunity to live in the U.S.

  Lastly, while I will never submit to the view that employs the epithet of race-traitor to EVERY black man who is in a relationship with a non-black woman (white women included) because I much prefer to leave that type of stubborn generalization to bigots… It has to be said that black women have suffered far too much and for far too long at the hands of our racist and sexist society, and they should be free from the poisonous racist and patriarchal views that act as gatekeepers in their selection of partners who are not black… I will say it again, Black women should NEVER be subjugated and obligated to be with Black men (who also benefit from a male-dominated society) solely because of racial solidarity because too often that involves disempowering Black women. Black women should be able to marry anyone they so choose because it is their right as human beings and anyone or any social system that actively or passively denies their agency or the legitimacy of their identity (as well as any offspring they have) as black folk is nothing but racist and sexist and it must be systematically dismantled. Period.

Lubangakene, one of the issues among “us” that I find most fascinating is how we struggle to define ourselves in an effort to recapture our humanity. I would argue that “we”, the Black/African people of the Diaspora, are in a continual struggle to create an identity we are comfortable with, so our definitions of who and what we are forever changing. This is of-course due to being taken from our natural homeland, stripped of our natural culture, history, familial relationships, name, religion(s), and had foreign cultures, names and religions imposed upon us. In this process not only was our identity thrown into question, but more importantly, OUR HUMANITY! To enslave “us”, the Europeans (and let’s not forget the Arabs) societies at the time had to “dehumanize” us and the easiest way to do that, to begin this process of dehumanization was to label us, define us and call us by derogatory names. The past, present and future white supremacy mechanisms of dehumanizing definitions/names for us never fail to amuse me. We’ve gone from the blatant: “Niggers” to the “oh so subtle”: Racialized People!

I went through a process of self-actualization which culminated in 1997, when I made a pilgrimage to West Africa. This journey was very significant for me and it led to a spiritual and cultural rebirth. I saw myself in a new light and made a conscious decision to define myself as being of “African heritage”. During this pilgrimage I visited a village in Ghana and was given the name “Asabagna”, which means “Hunter”. I also visited a Mandingo village in Senegal and a griot gave me the name “Alatentou” which means “God is gracious”. So to acknowledged this new consciousness that had awaken within me, this new way that I saw the world, particularly the eurocentric-western world and my place within it, I took the African/Spiritual name: Asabagna Alatentou.

Since then I, Asabagna Alatentou, have grown, changed, transformed and developed as a man of African heritage. I deliberately address you by your African name: Lubangakene, (as well as Bygbaby as “Tafari”). It builds up within us human/cultural capital, by acknowledging our heritage through our names, more so than by our eurocentric (slave) names or through monikers which identify and I would dare say, TRAP US, in a mentality of continual struggle.

Peace my brother!
Asabagna Alatentou

All white people are racist suspects - Wolves In Sheep’s Clothing -until proven otherwise.

I’m sorry….were you waiting for more…

That is all.

It occurred to me that I should briefly discuss the name of this blog.

There’s a 1960’s jazz album, “The Free Slave” by Roy Brooks. Its a rambling, soulful, freewheeling song, recorded live in Baltimore, MD. That name…

When considering what to call this thing, I felt into what was truest about myself and where I was when it began.

Freeslave recognizes my urge to be free in the context of a multi-tiered slave society. I’m still a slave in and to the culture - it still steals from my wallet as well as my soul; but I try on a daily basis to take back what this culture steals from us - 24/7. I resist in every way that I can, while by necessity living off of this carcass, living off of it until…

I want to free others while I free myself, want to be freed by those who are wiser and further along the path than me. I’ve been freed of certain thinking and certain behaviors that numbed me to this beastial way of life. But there is so much work to do, outside and in.

One of my favorite books is by Erich Fromm: Escape From Freedom. When I first saw it in the bookstore I was like, “Escape From Freedom?!” I was intrigued cuz I always thought people were trying to escape TO freedom.

Not so, according to Fromm. In fact, many if not most people don’t want to be free. They want to be slaves. They want to be shackled. They want to be bound, held down, oppressed.

Fromm examined Hitler’s Germany and discovered that, far from the people having the wool pulled over their eyes, Hitler appealed to the German people’s desperate need for security, safety - psychological security and safety. “Freedom creates anxiety” and that anxiety causes some people to choose authoritarian regimes/relationships in order to quell the anxiety, the uncertainty.

When I watch activists complain about Bush, yet hold the same ineffectual march over and over again, I suspect they are engaged in a coverup: surface resistance concealing their slavish obeidance to the system they cry about. They actually NEED the authoritarian regime to feel safe - after all, it is no threat to racism/white supremacy.

We all have the same dilemma: freedom with the giant void of external authority versus slavery and its concomitant security.

Even among the oppressed, it is easier to hold onto outdated, ill considered, wrongheaded views - easier to stay stuck on stupid - cuz the alternative is the discomfort of change.  I struggle with this shit, too.

So, thefreeslave is an intention, a mental, spiritual and emotional goal.  It’s what I am and can be.

I look forward to the day when I can drop the last part of the name.

5 facts about myself that are not known to the readership…

1. I’m not unfamiliar with the ‘happy ending.’

2. I’ve been a part of two menages a trois. (MANY years ago)

3. I’ve hit tennis balls with Arthur Ashe and Illie Nastase; met Bjorn Borg, Dizzie Gillespie, Diana Ross.

4. It took me 22 years (2000) to get my BA - Liberal Studies (major, Poli Sci/History), Antioch University-Seattle.

5. I have between 500 and one thousand CD’s, mostly jazz but tons of world, R&B and hip hop.

I shall now tag Thinking Girl, Aulelia, Bitch Who Blogs, Betmo and SuperBabyMama.

PS Sylvia, the Anti-Essentialist…I want to hear from YOU!!!