Senator Larry Craig, anti-gay rights crusading, Republican pol. Toilet-tipping, gay-cruising, man-crush having hypocrite. These devils use their Christian verbiage to drug the populace into a God-fearing, religious stupor…while they get their ‘Merv’ on in the toilet.

Everything they said about Osama, about Hussein, is truer of them. Evil. Terrorists. Anti-freedom, anti-justice. Totalitarian, Orwellian, Hitlerian. They tuned up their violins and played a sad song for New Orleans, cooing how much rebuilding they were going to do.

WELL?!

What happened to NO was by design. Intentional. Just like what is happening in Iraq. They told you what they knew about Iraq and their WMD’s and their evil intentions. They use the “oops, we made a mistake/the intelligence wasn’t as good as we thought” excuse…when THOUSANDS of human beings were killed. How can a system be THAT incompetent?! In other times, people would hang for such errors. Or the perpetrators would have the common decency to commit hari kari.

And if they weren’t that incompetent, they were marvelously competent.

Don’t let them tell you that the disorder, the chaos in Iraq and New Orleans is unintended. The bodies dropping here and abroad are small potatoes for the jackpot that these hustlers provide to the men in the shadows. “If we don’t tear up shit, how do we get security, rebuilding and weapon system contracts for our pimps?!”

And the Democrats, rhetoric aside, are NO different.

No different.

Like the alcoholic who knows deep in their being that their -ism is the issue, we all, somewhere inside KNOW this to be true. But what do we do? What are our lived principles?

We need a new system, a new country. Check. This car is defective, a danger to all but a few. Time to take it to the junkyard. We need to vision something new, something smaller. Break this muthafucka up into fifty tiny pieces. Double check.
Who needs a country, a nation-state to identify with? Who needs a flag? I say, give the land back to the Native American. Triple check.

But what do we do? Where’s the plan? How many of us still have the illusion that this monstrosity can be tweaked? That the Democrats are an alternative? Or that they can be moved to really take on OUR concerns?!

We ain’t going anywhere until we put the baby bottle down. The baby bottle is our belief that ANYTHING presented to us as the proper channel for our activism is real or designed to give us what we want. The baby bottle is our naivete, our religious faith in the Constitution, the Supreme Court, Reverend Al, Al Gore, Amy Goodman, Jesse Jackson or Cindy Sheehan.

You don’t get free with, or by proxies. You only get free when you absolutely, positively must be free and then snatch it for yourself. You have to become an outlaw, a runaway slave. And no slave gets truly free if they believe the master has created “some good” on his plantation that can be taken advantage.

Its still a plantation, muthafucka!!!!!!

Dismantling the plantation is the task for any slave that truly wants to be free. Let’s get on with it.

Chess.

A game filled mainly with pawns (US), ruled by a King and Queen (the ruling class), with the able assistance of bishops, rooks and knights (the white collar buffer). The colors, black and white, generally, differentiate the opposing sides.

The pawns are far more numerous and thus more expendable. They take the hits; they are used against each other, to gain more ground (for ‘royalty’) and they are sacrificed for this purpose. Black and white pawns engage in conflict with each other while the King and Queen stay behind a protective phalanx of wealth and fodder, aka, your dumb ass. To rule another day.

The invisible hand of the Kings and Queens direct the bishops and rooks to move you scientifically, to get you to think and act in exactly the desired manner.

Your self-hate is programmed, synthesized and output as religious piety, political reverie or pseudo-nationalistic fanaticism. Your dividing yourselves into different classes and sub-classes as human beings is a classic symptom of ‘divide and conquer strategy’ and the ruling class’ wet dream: “dreaming negroes vs. real black folks,” “assimilationists versus the pro-black clergy,” “liberal stooges vs. conservative cadavers.”

This is a mind divided against itself. A mind that gives thinking a bad name. An educated fool. You will know them by the contradictory nature of everything they say; ultimately, they will siphon discourse into a well-meaning cesspool of negativity, a cesspool educated and trained into them. Scientifically.

Check.

But the game is deeper still. Some of you think that the white man is unified and that they have complete solidarity. Granted, superficially, they appear to. Look deeper, if you can. You will see a people who have embraced a deadening psycho-spiritual philosophy of total compartmentalization that has thoroughly dehumanized them. Wrapped in a massive inferiority complex, they are constantly triggered to demean the one they’ve been ‘taught’ to feel superior to - like Pavlov’s dog. And by whom? Manchurian candidates in white face, with just a little more pep in their step thanks to a placebo dosage of R/WS.

Believe it or not, they weren’t always this way. Have you ever studied the use of racism as a tool to divide po’ white from black, black from Indian, Indian tribe from Indian tribe - back in the day? Have you ever read how white indentured servants ran off to the same illegal communities that African slaves had, joining up with them and Indians to create free societies that had surprising harmony?  These communities were targeted by the ‘Man’ who feared the ‘threat of a bad example:’ people unified by class and condition working together and living in relative harmony and equality.

The white landowners worked overtime - using masterful doses of racism/white supremacy on these indentured white folks, teaching them that they had no common cause with those low-life black/Indian *%#@!! And they bought it hook, line and stinker. Now, you buy it on the other end.

Check mate.

Can the pawn learn to think like a Queen or King, not in a manipulative way, but in terms of seeing the big picture, seeing the entire board instead of the little square that they’ve been assigned, see beyond his or her petty hurts and injuries, see the connections between all of the pawns?

Game over.

We are slaves.

What is presented to us as freedom, what are represented to us as institutions of democracy or social change, of education or justice - are in fact chains, manufactured by an invisible government, expert at creating poison and calling it medicine that keeps us mentally ill and tethered to our own mental plantation. A plantation that they teach us to tend - and we do it.

I’m always amused by the Re-thuglicans who condemn the liberals, the progressives who condemn the moderates and conservatives, the racist rednecks who condemn the low-life porchmonkeys, the so-called black nationalists who condemn the so-called black assimilationists. Pure insanity. Petty people who fail miserably to see what is happening right before their eyes.

Divide and Conquer.

All of these labels and categories are prisons, built for your cranium only; building blocks of separation, the knives and forks for a buffet of sophisticated divide and oh-so-subtle conquering methodologies for the bred-ignorant and shortsighted populace.

Racism/white supremacy is a vicious, global system that has butchered too many human beings, physically, emotionally, spiritually. Yet, it too is a tool, a MAJOR tool and the means, the apparatus of control, rather than the end desired by the ruling class itself.

Most of us have mistaken the manipulative use of race for the goal itself. Yes, they talk bad about us, denigrate us. We think that because the media utilize racist depictions of us that that is the end itself. PERIOD. In fact, that contempt has a deeper, more utilitarian purpose: conditioning the brains of the white folks, black folks and every other kind of folks to impede the development of ANY class empathy or solidarity between the so-called white and the so-called black, latino/latina, etc, et-fucking-cetera.

And its working: white folks are so thoroughly racist and oblivious to it and we black folks are so packed into our mental matchbox trying to prove how racist this is and how racist that is, that we can’t see SHIT else. How convenient for the people with a hand in ALL of our pockets.

My Ism’s bigger than your isM!!!

The manipulators of the planet are few, yet their ability to make us think ourselves into pretzels is incomparable.

The film that I posted below, “Zeitgeist,” characterizes the way things actually are:

1) Christianity/Religion and its use as a tool of imperialism, indoctrination and social control.

2) The fact that the September 11th attacks were an inside job, carried out, not by Arabs with boxcutters, but elements of the United States government. I refer back to the time honored quote of a sista who made it plain: “To understand the intent, look at the affect.”

You can’t name one benefit that accrued to “Muslims” from the attack on the World Trade Center (and momentary glee that the “Great Satan” got hit doesn’t count)….but we know who profits in billions from the terror carried out on the people of this land mass called America. Corporations that bilk money from you…politicians elected by YOU who line their pockets with contractor money…offense, excuse me, defense contractors, construction companies, soldiers of fortune and a cast of thousands. Only a fool believes the story put out by the government, but that’s what this culture has turned most of us into - in advance of their most nefarious deeds.

3) The proof of the conspiracy to defraud EVERYONE of us is the so-called, “Federal Reserve Bank.” It is not federal and it is not a government bank, but a private bank that controls the debt of this nation and the destiny of the planet. These bankers are kind who fund both sides of a war because war is profitable. (Aside: if you think US policy in Iraq failing, think again. Winning is creating as much disorder, chaos and destruction as possible in order to profit for decades to come. And also, to allow the building of numerous military bases in the Middle East…somebody’s got to watch that oil!)

Watch the movie and check out the history of the passage of the Federal Reserve legislation, who was behind it and what they have succeeded in doing. Also, think about the federal taxes that you pay and the fact that there is no legal basis for taxation, in fact, the federal income tax is illegal according to the Constitution. Why are you paying ‘em then? Because they told you you had to and you unthinkingly do so, that’s why.

Don’t take me at my word; do your own investigation. Do a search for books on Jeckyll Island, the Federal Act, 911Blogger.Com, the Kennedy assassination and all of that other stuff that they told you only paranoid schizos drooled about. Try to wake up and see beyond the Afro-puff straightjacket clogging your domepiece or the beansprout cataracts clouding your vision. We’re more alike than different, in spite of everything I’ve said to the contrary.

When the sheet-wearing racist, the tie-dyed hippie, the beret sporting black militant, the latina domestic recognize their common interest, recognize that there are bigger fish to fry, fish who are frying US - one stereotype at a time - what a world THAT will be.

“There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are now in control of the transmission. We control the horizontal and the vertical. We can deluge you with a thousands channels, or expand one single image to crystal clarity and beyond. We can shape your vision to anything our imagination can conceive. For the next hour, we will control all that you see and hear.”

The Outer Limits

See Zeitgeist!!!!!!!!!

It will validate what you already know

Wake your ass up with this caffeinated intellectual cocktail.

“I have always been a martial artist by choice, an actor by profession, but above all, am actualising myself to be an artist of life”

“Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.”

“Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own”

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”

Are you a victim of racism/white supremacy?

In other words, are you a person classified as non-white who lives somewhere other than an uncharted island? Okay then.

Now, if you have or can be classified as non-white, you should know that you have been a victim of racism/white supremacy. ““Racism (White Supremacy) is the local and global power system and dynamic, structured and maintained by persons who classify themselves as white, whether consciously or subconsciously determined, which consists of patterns of perception, logic, symbol formation, thought, speech, action and emotional response, as conducted simultaneously in all areas of people activity (economics, education, entertainment, labor, law, politics, religion, sex and war), for the ultimate purpose of white genetic survival and to prevent white genetic annihilation on planet Earth - a planet upon which the vast majority of people are classified as nonwhite (black, brown, red and yellow) by white skinned people, and all of the nonwhite people are genetically dominant (in terms of skin coloration) compared to the genetic recessive white skin people”.” Dr. Francis Cress Welsing

R/WS is a comprehensive matrix that heinously impacts non-whites intellectually, emotionally, physically, spiritually. Racism/white supremacy is a disease that impacts both perpetrator, passive beneficiary and victim (whether they are engaged in struggle against the R/WS dynamic or not).

Kameelah raised a point recently which I have attempted to bring up: we need to begin a process of healing our wounds from racism/white supremacy. Every last one of us, but particularly those of us who like to hear ourselves speak - in cyberspace and elsewhere.

We NEED therapy!!!!!

I’ve observed in my travels how people, regardless of color, get involved in causes, become activists and leaders - and use their activism as a means to work out their inner pathology. Or better still: they use their work to escape having to deal with their pathology, their dis-ease. These unconscious people are oppressors of the very people they claim to love, because they refuse to look at the AFFECT of their blind assertions and activity. They wrap themselves in kente cloth and animal hides, while behaving like the Great White Hunter.

I observe people who use other black people as building blocks for their egos, as putty to fill the holes in their paper tissue psyches. I observe people who make sport of “exposing” fellow black people as “assimilationists” or “race traitors,” without offering solutions or assistance. They apparently get off on running down black people who are, in their opinions, confused, irredeemable. Who’s really confused and irredeemable?!

All of us can grow - if only we’d allow ourselves to. All of us can take in new info, adapt, let go of that which doesn’t serve us. But many of us settle into rigid, fixed, stereotyped personnas to shield us from the pain within. We attack, but never reflect, never look within our own meager souls because its too unbearable.

Many of us mistake ‘hardness’ for ’strength,’ mistake ‘callousness’ for ‘telling the truth.’ To be vulnerable is to be strong, elastically strong. To be rigidly strong means becoming a potted plant, stagnant, stuck, thinking in fuzzy cliches - and going nowhere fast. The person who crouches in the sniper tower picking off black people, all the while claiming their authentic, unique, Uber-BLACK love for us - needs help, probably more help than most. That’s okay, just as long as they get it.

I’ve been a part of a community that welcomes people who struggle with addiction, with disease and offers those people support. Love. We might offer tough love every now and then, but we don’t withdraw their membership if they can’t get sober immediately. We make sure our sobriety is intact so that we have something to offer the newcomer. Why can’t black people who claim to be righteously together and tru-black authenticated Negroes offer the same kind of love and hopes for redemption to our people?

We can; but we must place doing our inner work AHEAD of ‘liberating tha people.’ If you aren’t liberating yourself, you may contribute little more than a bad example… and intellectual insights bound up in great confusion.

Dr. Neely Fuller has stated that “if you don’t understand racism/white supremacy, everything else will only confuse you.” I would add that if you don’t really know yourself, know your vulnerablities, know your dependencies - you will misinterpret everything you see.

Find a good therapist. Meditate. REALLY listen to what your insides are trying to tell you. And try loving black people by loving black people. Holding people up to ridicule and simply pointing at them and saying how f*%#d they are is not love. Offering suggestions, insights from your own life and support IS.

Share the luv, baby!!

“After dark on June 18, the police say, as many as 10 armed assailants repeatedly raped a Haitian immigrant in her apartment at Dunbar Village and then went further, forcing her to perform oral sex on her 12-year-old son. They took cellphone pictures of their acts. They burned the woman’s skin and the boy’s eyes with cleaning fluid, forced them to lie naked together in the bathtub, hit them with a broom and a gun and threatened to set them on fire.”

Our tendency to ignore acts done “BUTU” (By Us To Us), seems about on the order of white folks forgetting that between the Emancipation Proclamation and right now, Jim Crow, lynching, firebombing and Co-Intel Pro, among other coercive tools, were and are used to impede and shackle our “American Dream.” Well, what does it mean when deafening silence greets a crime about as horrific as it gets?

What does it mean when it is a sign of public “intra-racial traitorousness” to note such a profoundly sick, spasm of violence…and asking, ‘where are the black leaders on this one?’ What’s happened to us, to our relationships, to our humanity, that our children, our youth could “allegedly” perpetrate this? And we ain’t got shit to say, including me, up to this point.

What can black men do to stem the violence in our communities? Certainly, violence in general is a male phenomenon. What can we do about this/how do we in the AfroSphere respond?

As some of my friends in the AfroSpear - Sokari and Aulelia - have pointed out, rape is a tool of coercive, demeaning, genderized power. As men, we have to let go of our patriarchal impulses, our ‘power over’ and raise up the WOMAN Power in our midst. We need to be silent, when its our tendency to dominate and speak when we feel like shrinking from our responsibility to face our own behavior. We aren’t expected to be patriarch’s by free women; but we aren’t supposed to be fencesitters when our women are being debased by other men either.

More later.

It may be that they died for what they dared to share!

on August 9, 2007
Category: South Africa, Busi, HIV/AIDS, LGBT, African Women, Gender Violence

Today women’s day in South Africa, we remember SIZAKELE SIGASA and SALOME MASOOA who were raped, tortured and murdered on the 7th July 2007 in Soweto. We rmember all our African lesbian sisters murdered, raped and living with HIV and AIDs.

The submission of women is an essential aspect of patriarchy. Sex is one of the tools used by men to subjugate women. Any signs of a woman becoming financially or sexually independent becomes a threat to male power. Whether this is an unmarried woman who is financially independent or a lesbian who is sexually independent.

Read the rest of the article here.

From Democracy NOW:

The Case of Kenneth Foster: Texas Prepares to Execute Man for Driving a Car Near Scene of Murder

Three weeks from today, a 30-year-old African American man on death row in Texas is scheduled to be executed. Kenneth Foster was sentenced to death ten years ago for the murder of Michael LaHood, a white man. The trial judge, the prosecutor, and the jury that sentenced him to die admit he never killed anyone. Foster is scheduled to be executed under a controversial Texan law known as the law of parties. The law imposes the death penalty on anybody involved in a crime where a murder occurred. In Foster’s case he was driving a car with three passengers, one of whom left the car, got into an altercation and shot LaHood dead.

 What we gon’ do, AfroSpear?!

Posted by Asabagna

In an effort to have more focused discussions over at Afrospear, we are starting a monthly carnival with rotating topics. As I understand it, the way a carnival works is that those who wish to participate, post an essay on the topic on your blog page and forward the link to us at Afrospear@hotmail.com. We will post all the links and then have a discussion on the essays which have been submitted.

I am re-reading “The Mis-Education of the Negro” by Carter Woodson. The first edition was printed in 1933. I am stunned by how many of the issues he discussed then, appear to be relevant today…. in 2007.

It has inspired me to submit for the first topic of our monthly carnival, the issue of education with the Black/African community. Some questions to consider: Are we currently suffering from mis-education? What is your opinion and/or perspective on how our young are being educated? Are they being mis-educated and if so, what are the dynamics and results of this process of mis-education that you see? Does education have the power to change our lives and if so, do we, as a people, truly value and take advantage of that opportunity? What solutions and/or strategies do you propose to the education dilemma which is facing our community(ies)? It would be beneficial and enlightening to hear from different regions of the Diaspora and from the Motherland itself.

Please have your link submitted by Friday 31 August and the carnival date will be Monday 03 September. We also welcome your suggestions on topics you would like to see discussed here in the future.

Sometimes, I just have to steal something from my comments section that strikes me as smart, smART, SMART.  Exhibit A: Kameelah

“Keep it moving! Nothing is perfect on the first run and the mere existence of Afrospear is powerful in and of itself. Yes, more thinking, planning, and getting a clear philosophical approach is necessary but none of these processes are ever complete–in fact, that is the nature of these processes–we are perpetual larvae–we are always in the process of becoming. So keep “becoming” Over the past couple of months I have been integrating more gerunds into my vocabulary when even identifying myself because I am not a “definite.” I am Muslim-ing, I am Black-ing, I am Woman-ing, etc. etc. because trying to force ourselves into inactive definition does a certain discursive as well as material violence. (THIS makes too much damn sense!!) We have to grow and we can’t grow in conceptual incarcerations and cages.  Keep it moving (Literally) Afrospear.

As Black bloggers we have a lot of responsibility, and I have been reevaluating my role in this community as well trying to balance being a full time grad student, a teacher and moonlighting as a writer and artist. I think that one thing that all black bloggers can work on (myself included) is building community, and linking our activism. I would love to see more of us connected to each others struggles, I would love to see more of us engaged in revolutionary acts of love–ie we all spend a lot of time talking about what’s wrong, let’s write more about what we want to see and how we are going to bridge that gap between urgent dreams and our everyday reality.” 

Preach, Sister, Preach!