“Mcs get a little bit of love and think they hot
Talkin bout how much money they got, all yall records sound the same
I sick of that fake thug, r & b, rap scenario all day on the radio
Same scenes in the video, monotonous material, yall dont here me though
These record labels slang our tapes like dope
You can be next in line, and signed, and still be writing rhymes and broke
You would rather have a lexus, some justice, a dream or some substance?
A beamer, a necklace or freedom?
Still a nigga like me dont playa hate, I just stay awake
This real hip hop, and it dont stop until we get the po-po off the block”Dead Prez

Not that I’m an expert but…

This isn’t an art issue; its a commerce issue. It is commerce that drives this dubious “art”, not vice versa.

If one of these guys took their ‘lyrical doushes’ into Joe Blow’s poetry reading, they’d be laughed off the stage.

Ironically, it is the rappers who are the ho’s, the prostitutes. They are the product being pimped - inspite of their “I’m the Pimp-posture.”

What needs to be understood is that the media is in the firm grasp of the ruling class/aka/rich ass white folks. Their interest is tw0-fold: one, make mad money; two, keep the majority of people on brainlock, , manipulable, triggered, like Pavlov’s dog, by suggestion not so subtley hidden in print, film, television and music.

Goldie in “The Mack” reflected exactly the attitude of the people who pull the strings: “I’ve got these bitches minds controlled!”

Yeah, rappers are responsible for what they say - but someone conditioned them from birth to respond and react like marionettes. We need to bear this in mind ANYTIME we begin to create solutions to our problems. The ability of racism/white supremacy (like capitalism) to morph into different, benign-looking forms is not well understood - AT ALL. And this is its greatest feature.

If you don’t understand a bodily affliction entirely, its probably a mistake to start removing organs. No, we have to open the body cavity and peer in courageously and see what the disease is, how it truly manifests and then prescribe the right treatment.

Most of these dudes give poetry a bad name and that’s again, because, it is money and not art, that drives the majority of these brothers. Remove the beat and what do you have?!

“Black men may be hated, feared, admired, or made the object of sexual fantasy, but they are rarely loved - either by others or by themselves…Sadly, the real truth, which is a taboo to speak, is that this is a culture that does not love black males, that they are not loved by white men, white women, black women, or girls and boys. And that especially most black men do not love themselves. How could they, how could they be expected to love surrounded by so much envy, desire, hate? Black males in the culture of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist partriarchy are feared but not loved.”

bell hooks

I’ve been reading hooks’ “We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity.” It is eye opening and it rings true. We have bought our objectification as men and so has everyone else. Nobody loves us AND we don’t love ourselves.

People want our bodies or style, want us to be the groom on the cake, but they don’t want the REAL us, don’t want a REAL relationship which requires openness/listening/hearing/sensitivity/feeling/seeing/being heard, being experienced, being butterball nekkid before your beloved. Who’s willing to commit to that? None of us, it seems. Most of us want an ideal, an illusion, want to be captivated, carried away, catered to, babied, blindfolded. Marriage becomes the end of the journey, the casket with a bow, not the beginning of an incredibly complex, one-day-at-time journey into the heart of the self and your partner.

This behaviour, of course, is programmed. But when it comes down to it, we all have to feel the feelings to escape the digital chip implanted in our backsides, sidle up to the taboo emotions that we suppress as a matter of course. If we don’t, we will continue to confront people with our facades rather than our ‘face of vulnerability.’ Few today keep it real, least of all us. We can be mean, tart, hard - but can we be vulnerable, sensitive, open?

We want, desire, crave desperately a relationship - but is the partner simply a silhouette, a black stick figure that we project our hopes, fears and dreams on?

Black people must be willing to heal in order to survive. Healing is dealing, dealing with the shadow, the racist toe-jam that must be plucked one lint piece at at time. We cannot continue to wear our daishiki-tudes and cover up the fetal-posed child within us - it’s destroying us individually and collectively. We have to go towards the inner pain, reach it, grasp it, hold it, love it. If we ain’t lovin’ that, we ain’t lovin’ anything else. Or getting loved, you can believe that.

It takes an honest soul to allow themselves to go there. Are you now or have you ever gone THERE?

As I’ve read this book, I’ve paid attention to how I approach other men.  I harden myself, ‘mean mug,’ give a look of toughess, invulnerability.  I present another face to women - is it real?

AfroSpear

Welcome to AfroSpear! We are one galaxy in an interplanetary solar system of BLACKNESS…Blackness that is inclusive as well as incisive. We are united by our African-ness and our love for our people and the planet. Conversations here may become heated, but though this “Black Fire” may singe, it will never burn.

Let the Conversation Begin!!!

So, I hate violence.

This horrific tragedy in Virginia is America. They were innocent people. Completely innocent. As they flash the faces of the victims, pay attention to your thoughts and feelings.

“Wow, this shit was completely random…These people didn’t have a chance…There lives are over in split second…God, their families have to wait to be notified…This is horrible…What would I do if I were confronted with a shooter?”

So many thoughts flashed through my head.

Do you remember Iraq? Those people are equally innocent. They have done nothing to the people who beat them, shoot them, bomb them, poison them with Depleted Uranium. Does your mind flash on them, do you identify them as “innocents,” as innocent as the engineering or German students at Virginia Tech?

As a black person, the question of identity is always turbulent. Who we are is contested, questioned. We live on a fault line and depending on current events, we are either monsters or marginalized/invisible. Many of us fear the identication of criminals responsible for high profile crimes - fear one of us will be fingered. Why? Because we KNOW that all of us receive an adverse sentence behind the actions of one of us.

I woke up this morning and saw the picture of a Korean man, the alleged shooter. Conflicted. “I thought it’d be a white student…but thank God it wasn’t a black man.”

But this man’s violence (if he indeed committed it) took place within the American pressure cooker, within a context of illegal, indiscriminate violence, organized violence. The media focuses on random violence, so-called “street crime” but ignores the far more prevalent legal violence of our government. How does state-sanctioned “invisible-subliminal” violence impact the mind, body and spirit of people, particularly young people?

State violence is global. State violence is not simply the use of arms, it is the maintenance of conditions of social and economic injustice that are violence incarnate. It is the proponderance of rape imagery, assault imagery, murder imagery that is violence.

The United States produces and manufactures violence. Globally. And that violence is visited upon - 99% of the time - INNOCENTS.

In Iraq and in this country.

…So said George Jackson. In 1971.

Who is George Jackson you say? He was a black revolutionary, a political prisoner and a martyr of this fascist state.

As Jackson puts it, white intellectuals’ mistress is racism, thus they aren’t prepared to see things as they are. Neither are many people of color who fall for the same patriotic chin music and fail to understand the perniciousness of racism/white supremacy. AND, capitalism.

READ ‘Soledad Brother’ and ‘Blood in My Eye’ if you want to experience unvarnished truths that are even truer today than they were the week in 1971 when Jackson finished his final book. He was then assassinated by prison guards at San Quentin Prison, the same prison where Stanley “Tookie” Williams was executed.

Jackson, in the Malcolm X mold, spent years in prison studying philosophy, economics, history. His clarity of vision, his ability to see through the bread and circus/the okeydoke laid before us to confuse and bamboozle, is an utter inspiration. Lord, do we need more George Jacksons in this day and age.

Many of us are talking about reform when we speak of candidates and voting in this corrupt, slave system. Jackson asserts that “reform” is integral to the maintenance of the fascist system. Fascism must conceal itself in reformist, democratic-appearing levers. Reform is like the foreplay of a lover who has no intention of satisfying his partner. He’s going to tell you how much he can do for you/will do for you, while only concerning himself with getting his. And you keep falling for it.

Its like when I took my daughter to the playground the other day. There is a wheel fashioned to the jungle gym that the little kids delight in spinning. They imagine that they are steering a large ship or a fire engine. The fact is that it is merely a wheel that spins - a wheel attached to nothing. And this wheel does not lead them/you anywhere. What is voting but an empty symbolic exercise that only changes faces, but not fundamentals, not structures. Voting as the symbol of democracy is THE illusion required to further the facist/corporatist state.

Many refuse to see this, white people far, far more than people of color, but many of us too refuse to believe what our eyes should see as well. The massive prison system, the perpetual (race) wars, the destruction of the planet for profit among many other structural states should be convincing evidence that this nation means no one any good but the 1% of the 1% who control everything. For some reason, though, these dupes believe that they can wrest democracy out of institutions founded on repression, racist hierarchy and genocidal violence.

Reform is the anesthesia, the tether, the noose that white liberals and their cohorts drape around their necks, the device that allows the legitimate aspirations of the people to be channeled into activities that serve the ruling class and maintain the status quo.

“Everybody wants to get to heaven but nobody wants to die.”

In Portland, there is a “progressive” white radio station called KBOO, that promotes itself as an alternative to the establishment media outlets. Clearly, it is different, but only in degree and not kind; its freakish, ultra decadent coterie of bearded ladies, blue haired strumpets and their colored sycophants shit turds just left of the DNC out of their yawning assholes. But they ain’t sayin’ NUTHIN’!! The intellectual pauperism and the moral cowardice of these leftwing transvestites who are nothing but closet capitalists & white supremacists, is breathtaking. Jackson rips the veil from the waif and she’s ain’t wearin’ shit but a lie.

White liberals and progressives, in the main, are reformists stooges; they are incapable of seeing the fascism right in front of their pancake mask. Why? Because it holds the current property relations/racial hierarchy utterly harmless. Why else do they repeatedly sponsor effete marches, rather than direct action that shuts down the institutions that they claim to oppose? Because they don’t oppose the institutions, they oppose Bush, they oppose the particular personality. Within them at their core is the belief that one day they can hold the reins of the state. They’ll add a dash of hemp or tie dye or a sitar to the mix, but the evidence is clear: the average white person is legally blind and 100% self-deluded when it comes to keepin’ it really real and seeing what’s there.

Those of us who are black and have a belief in ANY of the institutions, that freedom or justice can be wrung from them if we work hard enough or do it “correctly” - are equally insane. But don’t take my word for it: read “Blood In My Eye.” Read the words of a brother who is in the pantheon of black leadership globally, a man who spoke incredible truths but who spent his formative years - from 18 - to his death in his early 30’s - transcending himself. Transcending the prison of blackness, of intellectual and spiritual backwardness that is foist upon our people.

We must free our minds completely and a part of that process is George Jackson. This society canNOT be reformed; he says it and I believe it. Our energy must be brought to bear on uniting our people, separating ourselves as much as we can from this vicious system and helping move the revolution forward.

What we call the United States is a living hell for black people, for Native Americans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Africans, South Americans. Getting a mortgage is not freedom; its placing larger shackles on our own wrists, squeezing ourselves deeper into the hull of the slave ship.

Freedom will come when property is abolished, when land belongs to all people, when all of us can have an equal share in the fruits of this planet, when there are no masters nor Gods. America is still a plantation. Choosing to live in better housing on the plantation, or gaining greater privileges, becoming a house negro in a suit when the masses around the globe are field negroes, is being a traitor to your race, to humanity.

When you allow yourelf to see what THIS is really all about - that it IT is madness - nothing short of revolution will do.

Black Power.

All Power To All Of the People!

Pardon my free association:

I was just reading a little teeny bit about the Francis Holland/Daily Kos tete a tete; the brother was banished from a white liberal/progressive website for ‘blogging while black.’

Lani Guinier called us “The Miner’s Canary.” We are the ones who continually notify this culture of its poisonous, hypocritical atmosphere. But, most white folks don’t want to hear about that, thus they tend to ban brothas and sistas for bringing too much heat, aka, Tha Truth!

Marimba Ani’s classic treatment (”Yurugu”) of the root of this problem is in her chapter called “Hypocrisy As A Way of Life.” Part of our job as black people is to decode the rampant hypocrisy endemic to this culture. Our task is to decode the Big Lie. The BL is the culture itself, how it functions/operates, the principles THEY claim it was founded on/versus the cannibalistic relations between black people and Native people and Mexican and Puerto Rican, between non-whites and whites.

We are the ones who SEE clearly what is before us; the only time our vision becomes cloudy is when we defer to them, entreat them, get caught up in making them open their hearts/heads to us, when it is their souls that have been poisoned by the DU of racism/white supremacy. They are, according to my dear friend, LA, so often CHILDREN. We are perpetually there spiritual nannies and mammies - if we choose to be.

Dr. Francis Cress Welsing says very simply that people who by, word and mainly by deed, say to us “I’m superior, I’m superior, I’m superior” like a mantra, are in fact letting the world know that they feel inferior. Terribly inferior.

This inferiority complex is projected onto the “Other” who they are jealous of, yet who they constantly imitate, steal and appropriate from. Asa recently pointed out how whites make writing and/or speaking careers out of documenting the pathology they inflicted us; they become the darlings of other liberal whites for taking on US.

In a million and one ways, they try to out-dick the black man - white folks’ mortal enemy - by building phallic weapons systems and ejaculating them onto red, brown and black cultures worldwide.

To seek privileges from white bloggers, to seek their acceptance is counter productive and counter-revolutionary. I’ve done this repeatedly myself.

Let them come to us. They already do anyway, as they study us like caged rats. As we build our power, our networks, our analysis of what ails us, as we use the “AfroSpear” to cure our affliction, those whites who are not completely ruined by R/WS and who can be of some aid will come running. For the truth.

Whites know how hypocritical their culture is and there are a precious few who know who is talking “truth” talk. We need to make sure we are constantly immersed in OUR truth as black, brown, red and yellow people.

We must constantly purge this need to be white folks’ sidekick, butler or tutor. Fuck DAT!! We, by necessity, will always need to educate whites about our struggle and about the world as we see it - let it be from a ‘take it or leave it stance.’ If they don’t want the castor oil, that’s more time for us to build OUR thing.

We ARE the vanguard. Let’s walk it!

Not a got damn thing.

White folks ride into the ghetto in their covered Subarus and pretend nobody is there. The attitude is “this land is vacant, this land is “OURS.” If there are murmurs of discontent from the hills and bushes of the ‘jungle,’ the white man presents his mortgage and pockets full of money as all the validation he needs.

Sorry, Charlie, that shit ain’t gon’ fly no’ mo’!!!

Racists at “The Florida Room” bar on Killingsworth in north Portland crossed a line that we find it necessary to redraw. First, they placed a sign up for the youth of our community, students at Jefferson High, students who deal with gangs and teen violence: “SIN ALL THE TIME, GO TEAM EVIL!” 

When righteous complaints from longtime aka, BLACK, neighbors poured in, the bar owners refused to change the sign and accused the neighborhood that they know shit about, of being “too sensitive.”

How the fuck do white folks get to decide the terms under which neighborhoods will operate?   Guess what, they don’t. WE decide.  We organize and we set the agenda, not some un-hip jiveass suckas.

Alas, the Florida Room did capitulate and change the sign to:

Nancy is the sister who heads the Humboldt Neighborhood Association that had fielded complaints from residents in the first place. She let it be known that she didn’t go for the boozy logic of the FRoom

You CANNOT move into OUR neighborhoods and insult black women.  How can any woman NOT be outraged by this flagrant crap?

Thankfully, that sign too has changed - but we know that the Florida Room has not - therefore a course in Slaptology is in order.

Rupert Kinnard, the founder of Slaptology, offers a course in this religion of face-stinging, re-educational retributive payback. This is just the medicine needed to cure the afflicted of all that ails them.

Let it be heard round the hipster havens in Portland, among all the blonde dread-appropriating, fedora-abusing, not-even-close-to-hip chumps, that this is a NEW day.  You aren’t coming into our neighborhoods, neighborhoods laden with dysfunction created by racism, to heap more racist abuse on us.
You  ARE ON NOTICE!

Slaptologists of the World have United and we are coming for YOU!!

We have been happily overwhelmed with the interest in the idea for a so-called Blackosphere/Afrosphere/AfroSpear!

Putting together a large grouping of bloggers seems extremely daunting and difficult. P6, Francis Holland and others have hit us up with some excellent ideas about what this AfroSpear can look like.

To the excellent point someone made that decentralization is critical to this endeavor, how about THIS: Let’s create an AfroSpear-ic Solar System, under which smaller planetary systems/black affinity blogs are created and then, united, under the larger AfroSpear Movement.

“One Nation Under An AfroSpear”

For example, there has been a very natural relationship developed between myself, Asabagna, Field Negro, Aulelia, Sylvia; we’ve invited a couple of other folks we hella respect and feel connected to, to join in . We’ve been considering the idea of a 6 person/’3 sista-3 brotha’ setup where we can use our natural affinity to hone in on the issues we seem to share and work towards solutions for our people in the Diaspora. As we haven’t gotten this group together, we don’t know how it will pan out. But it seems folks are hyped to get this going.

It may be that it is easier to manage smaller conglomerations of us, bearing in mind that we WANT to connect with ALL of our people - regardless of political affiliation - who feel the same way. Breaking this movement down into smaller elements that can fit under “The AfroSpearic Nation” banner should help us stay fluid and flexible and not get to bogged down in web structural/architectural issues.

Someone else used the term “cells” to describe how we should conceive of our collaboration and I think that is highly appropriate as we seek to move quickly - intellectually and firmly into actions that liberate us.

That we need honest discourse about the nature of what we face is a no-brainer. Here’s a chance to organize our way “out of our constrictions.” Let’s keep the conversation going as none of us have all the answers.

Let’s do this.