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“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.”
Alice Miller, Author
The Drama of the Gifted Child
Look high into the sky: its not a bird, but a plane and behind it and others like it are huge plumes that don’t dissipate but remain, sometimes for hours. Often, dueling plumes crisscross the sky and as they hang in the air, they become broader and wider. I saw several yesterday.
Most planes have a “contrail” that dissipates very quickly; what’s the difference? Is there a sinister reason or motive? What is the composition of this atmospheric phenomenon? Is it a “Chemtrail?”
Watch this and see for yourself:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=chemtrails&emb=0#
My sister, Lisa of BlackWomenBlowTheTrumpet.blogspot.com left this query today:
“Hello there!
I don’t think that many “new” bloggers know that AfroSpear and AfroSphere are two separate entities.
I am confused now about them after reading your post.
Are there TWO e-groups now? Why are the names so similar?
Feel free to hop over to my blog and send me an email.
Lisa”
Lisa, you inspired me to try to make a beginning on answering those questions right here.
Having been one of the six members who put this AfroSpear idea into orbit - Sylvia, Asa, Field Negro, Aulelia and Kizzie - I must say that I’m as confused as the folks who email here regularly asking us “what’s the difference between the ‘Spear and ‘Sphere”…“what and why is there an ‘AfroSp(here)ear Bloggers Association’ and a ‘AfroSphere Google Group’?!” Etc, etc.
“And, why are these names so similar?!”
Why indeed. And a related question: Does it help or hurt the cause that these names are so similar?
The name “AfroSpear” was inspired by conversations that were going on at a number of blogs regarding segregation in the so-called “blogosphere.” We chose Afro- “Spear” over “Sphere” because a spear is a tool and we proposed to make the AfroSpear a tool that we could use for education, inspiration and creation.
Rather than complaining about how white bloggers didn’t understand us or our interests - something that sadly afflicts many of our web savvy folk - it seemed like a good idea to create an entity that represented and expressed the aspirations of blacks and other people of color. We believed that it could help us move from helpless and hapless victims to empowered actors on our own behalf.
That shift, we knew, begins in the mind and this site, necessarily, focuses on the domepiece, providing information that brings light to our community, through reports, screeds and provocations of all sorts that tell us what’s really going on and force us to confront illusions about ourselves and our condition. And no doubt, we wanted to get the word out about efforts by people of color to fight the power and who were developing a ‘lil bit of their own.
We created an ‘umbrella’ concept which welcomed black bloggers of all stripes to convene here to promote, plan and process. We encouraged the formation of cells/cadres (as opposed to cliques) of black interest groups that would take on community specific issues. We know that there are black anarchists, gay and lesbian rights activists, feminists/womanists/animal rightists or vegans; we wanted that light shown here, for those of us who possess hetero-privilege, male-privilege or class privilege. In effect, we want/ed some spiritual and intellectual gumbo going on here that could fill us up with more and more light. And I’ll be damned if we don’t have some of that goin’ on here.
We believed and understood from our experiences that it is in smaller configurations that work actually gets done. Most mass movements have and always will depend on the actions of a few dedicated, committed laborers and visionaries.
Clearly the ‘Spear and its offshoots are similar because there has been some cross pollination by folks who were involved here and began participating in other groups. Some became excited with the initial concept and demonstrated their zeal by using the same name with a slight twist. Flattering to be sure, but highly confusing. And frightening.
“Where were they taking this and why?” “Is it being borrowed or ‘jacked?” “Is it my ego or are these legitimate concerns?”
I know I looked on with some trepidation as I saw some folks borrow the name but forget the concepts at root of what we were trying to do: bringing us under one banner that acknowledges our differences, commonalities and tensions and seeks to resolve them through passionate, authentic engagement.
“AfroSpear, we have a problem!” Or do we?!
Is it a branding issue, or is it something more, deeper, darker? Those of us who are a part of the AfroSpear and all of its tributaries should think about this confusing state of affairs and how it should be resolved - if it needs resolving. Clarity and greater coalescing might prove fruitful.
I got a comment from my sister, Ingrid to my last “Animal” post:
There is a definitive line drawn between animal lovers (ie. pet owners who value their pets) and animal right activists who assume that animals carry the same set of emotions and feelings that people do and should therefore be treated equally.
I have two poodles. I love them to death, I feed them treats, and take excellent care of them, but they are not my child. They do not get deferential treatment when the choice is the child need new whatever or the dogs are low on dog food.
My biggest issue with animal rights organizations is that they feel animals deserve the same rights as humans. They do not. This is why they can so carelessly describe human rights issues and animal rights issues as being the same.
While I love my “butt butts” and treat them like members of the family they are not equal members. They are the expendable members. The first to go if money gets too tight for their care. That would break my heart, but it is true.
I agree with Byrdparker in that there is a hierarchy and there is nothing wrong with following the natural order of things, we should just do it naturally without artificial growth hormones and antibiotics.
Animals are not human. Dogs do have feelings and emotions, but they are not the same as our feelings and emotions. We should care about the earth’s lesser creatures, but not to the extent that we overshadow the natural order that makes humankind the top of the food chain. We have too many human atrocities that overshadow the ones inflicted on animals. Our time and effort are much better spent creating a better world for all humankind first then we can worry about the abuse of animals.
And my retort:
Ingrid, I hear what you’re saying but vehemently disagree with you.
Nobody that I know of says, nor do I say: “animals carry the same set of emotions and feelings that people do and should therefore be treated equally.” Animals may or may not have the same or they may have a completely different set of emotions/feelings than people. And I don’t know what treating animals “equally” would look like. But I do know that we treat animals abysmally, horribly, and the main reason that we do so is because we believe that we are so-called superior.
When the white man wanted to mistreat you, he first called you inferior, an animal, in order to justify not caring anything about you and what he did to you. When you say your animals are expendable, that is the same mentality of the captain on the slave ship, who knew, when things got rough, which piece of cargo was getting thrown overboard first.
I’m talking about the mentality, the brainwashing or conditioning that began long ago. Its been filtered, twisted, repackaged today, for ex-slave and ex-slave master alike. (One of the few things that the ex-slave and ex-slave master can agree on is their right to make animals their meal. And to blind themselves to the exact nature of how animals are treated in our gluttonous name)
Most human beings are accorded “human” status today, meaning they are not officially considered subhuman. But you and I both know that people of color, black people, still carry the taint of their being owned, being sold, being branded, being transported, being caged like “beasts.” That could not have happened if man had not first declared himself superior, greater, better than the animals. And given himself the right to abuse at will.
There is a hierarchy, by the way, because men decided that there would be hierarchy. And they placed themselves at the top…just like men decided that there would be a ‘human’ hierarchy and women would be positioned beneath them. Or when whites decided there would be a ‘colorized’ hierarchy and niggas would be beneath them. (I mean, “why should we be equal; whites are superior to us aren’t they?! I mean after all, they told us so!!!“) Straights over gays, religious over non-religious, its all a part of the same hypocrisy. And we have bought into the concept of hierarchy hook, line and stinker.
Animals are not exactly like humans, but humans are animals. We are more alike than different. And if you truly look at the nature of so-called human atrocities, their root is in the human atrocities we have visited on animals. And first, in our brains, the divisions we’ve created between ourselves and each other. And animals.
It would make sense to me to deal with the divisions, break down the false divisions between animal US and animal THEM, that, rather than reinforce and solidify them. Perhaps that could help us break down the divisions between human beings.
If you truly want to end human atrocities, perhaps destroying the concept of hierarchy in all of its forms would be a good starting point.
Whenever animal rights activists compared the treatment of blacks to the abuse suffered by animals, I balked.
I was not alone. Many black folks find the comparison an insult. How dare you mention black people in the same sentence with fur or a chicken or a cow being led to slaughter.
It feels reductive to compare people to animals because…we are more than that. We can think. We can speak. We have feelings.
Was the first dehumanizing act of “mankind” to reduce animals to “things”, to set them beneath us, to claim that they are soul-less, emotionless tools granted by God - here to provide us with their labor, their hides, their flesh?
Does that act run in a straight line to the domestication of women, to the enslavement of people of color, to the African and Jewish Holocausts (“Eternal Treblinka“), to all of the organized brutality man heaps upon man, woman, child and planet? Could it be that the seeds of global oppression, the idea of a hierarchical order that has the divine right to call the shots for the planet, sprouted once man claimed himself separate from and better than animals while claiming dominion over them?
This is not territory that I envisioned trodding. I’m the last nigga that believed in giving animals an even break if I gave any thought to animals at all. But today, at this moment, I see the unity of oppressions.
There is no question that the “spiritual vivisection” of humanity, begun by Plato and his cronies, their crazed belief in “rationality”, hierarchy, in the ‘philosopher king,” their cleaving of the brain from the body and spirit, their creation of a profane, analytic, abstractive monster (this according to Marimba Ani in her brilliant “Yurugu”)….this is why we are the way that we are.
We are the soul-less, conscienceless monster that we decry. Its not the shark that is vicious - it is you. It is not the black slave that is vicious - it is you. It is not the whore who deserves what’s coming to her - it is you. It is the culture and its people who make a folly of the Goddess’ handiwork, denigrating two and four legged creatures and the earth itself - before abusing and destroying it.
The prepubescent serial killer, the gangbanger, the Christian, genocidal President, the Marine rapist, the stockyards, the chicken plant, the Southern plantation are all part of the same continuum. Speciesm begat Sexism begat Racism begat begat begat.
Part of our challenge as people who classify themselves as human, is to see the connections between us and everything, particularly other living things. We are trained and we train ourselves to stay in our mental shoe boxes, support only those causes within the shoe box, leave our brains in a safety deposit box - in our shoe box. DO NOT THINK OUTSIDE OF THE SHOE BOX.
I don’t want to talk about sexism when we’re talking about racism…I don’t want (white) you changing the subject. But I need to be able to see the intersection of racism and sexism, need to see how women are played off against men, how “minorities” are set in competition with each other, unable to see who is manipulating them, see who is behind the curtain.
If one truly wants to be correct, the root of oppression, the first oppression that one can identify clearly is that of animals. The ability to separate ones’ feeling self from what’s between their fork and their knife, the ability to care about some life - but not all life, the ability to laugh at or laugh off the suffering of animals…It took a long time and a steady dose of serious indoctrination to make people dead to these connections.
That deadening and the “selective compassion’ that results, is why we sit on our hands as Iraqis are blown to pieces, or now blow themselves to pieces in rage, in despair at the barbaric treatment that they suffer. Its why Darfur is happening and nobody is doing anything about it. Its why Bush can steal two elections. We pretend we’re better than animals but we are not…We are simply the tamest, most domesticated, most brutally detached animals on the planet.
As long as we are that, heaven help this world.
Its amazing how quickly I can forget that I don’t engage ignoramuses. One or two have been swimming around the pond belching their Exxon Valdez into the Straits of Negritude and I started actually communicating with them.
Oh no I didn’t…Oh yes I did.
No matter. WordPress makes it very easy to delete gnats and other irritants.
So, in case you were wondering why our pseudo-conversation ceased and why your tepid handiwork disappeared???
Wonder no more. I’m not interested in what you don’t think and I’m definitely not interested in your regurgitations of someone else equally ignorant.
Take yo’ shit to yo’ friends, homie.
“How long? Too long!!”
Anonymous
My man Asa wrote a beautiful post just the other day entitled: “On Responsibility, Accountability and Values: The Process to Change.” And it was beautiful, not because he quoted me, but for his consciousness of where change must begin in our communities. That would be with US!
This message fell on and continually falls on deaf ears in my view. Even with something as egregious as the Jena 6 situation, the fact is we do that shit to each other ten times a day. Checking the Field Negro’s blog, how many homicides are we up to today? 176 DEAD in Philly, the overwhelming majority, our people. How many of us died in Jena? HELLO?!
How many of us died today in DC? Oakland? LA? NYC? Atlanta? Miami? Chicago? Detroit?
Where are our BIG leaders, our black organizations, black progressives, the Afrocentrists and militant nationalists, handkerchief head Republican-Shelby-Steele-Flava-Flav-type muthafuckas, when it comes to healing and dealing with this Black Holocaust we confront and have confronted since the slave ship?
Getting P-A-I-D that’s where, being turned out like the $3.00 crack ho’s that they are, pimped by foundations, corporations and pseudo-religious government entitlement programs. Selling their soul to the devil, that’s where. Jesse wasn’t so wrong with his little Fox aside; he’s still trying to be the Head Eunuch In Charge, the nutless chumpion. All of our so-called leaders with one or two exceptions has been neutered, made harmless before white capital. They don’t die, they multiply. And they lead us steadily to the showers of the concentration camp, serenaded by the sound of Reverend Michael Eric Dyson aka Nas-lite, rapping and hambone fiddling, the narcissistic academic, BEOTCH!!
What can we do, those of us who live in the real world? Brother Asa reminds us that it begins with us. We have to look at life in terms of spheres of influence. The closest spheres to us are us; our life, our habits, our failings, our strengths, our families, our communities. We can change ourselves. We may have some influence on others, perhaps not so much by what we say but by what we do. Ditto for our community.
The major problem we face is that too many of us carry around violins poised and prepped to strike up that same old ‘white folks done me wrong song.’ Its like some of us can’t wait until the next white outrage so that we can have an excuse to take the focus off of ourselves and place it back where it belongs: white folks.
Nothing motivates us or stirs us to phyrric action faster, nothing gets us out in the street, gets our hearts pumping quicker than a white racist incident.
Well, there are a whole lot of otha racist incidents, filtered through us, filtered through OUR behavior. They call it “internalized racism” and it is perpetrated by people with a darker hue, though it is rooted in our oppression by the white man. Today, white folks outsource much of their vicious racism/white supremacy through black subcontractors: think the US military and Halliburton. That’s what they call “renting a negro.” You think I’m wrong? Take a look around you…
“To understand the intent, look at the affect.”
If we don’t address the poison in us FIRST, we will NEVA address the R/WS “out there” properly, with clarity, or with wisdom. We’ll simply have another ineffectual march, call on some other political charlatan to ‘represent’ you, represent ‘us.’ And these fakers will continue to steal your precious marrow that you sell like the Bowery bum looking for enough coin to get a half pint. Your half pint is your self-delusion, your addiction to whiteness.
Yes, you are addicted to white people. Your addiction is the other side of the coin to assimilation. You hate white, track whites, see all the wrong that they do to our people. That’s where your energy goes, that’s what animates your political organizing, or lack thereof. Its the foam around your mouth when you launch another diatribe that puts the white folks in their place when they come to this blog, for being white and ignorant which is par for the fucking course.‘ (Right on, baby’)
And this kind of militance is perfect for the armchair quarterback that you are. It requires no organizing, it requires no work. Its fucking Afrocentric Muzak piped in on cue.
And we are addicted to someone else carrying our water. Obama?! Negro puhleaze?! That man ain’t for you. He love Israel more than you, he just said so at the AIPAC slave auction meeting. How many billions will he send to Israel when your broke ass is praying to an Obama altar for some heat next winter?! J. Edgar Hoover knew something about us when he said he wanted to prevent the rise of a “Black Messiah” who could unite the race.
Their savvy response: create a Negro Messiah themselves, give the niggas a Trojan Horse, black on the outside, making noises like he is one of us. Hell, he plays basketball for chrissakes, he’s got to be down! And when he gives you the Rev. Wright treatment you’ll blame white folks for that one too.
No, blame yourself; when you can begin to do that you’ll be ahead of the game. When you can take responsibility for your misplaced thinking, your delusions, your shirking of your role in changing you and becoming more and more awake - you’ll be on your way.
And don’t think that I’m not talking about me here; I’ve been as deluded, confused and irresponsible as anybody. I was blind; now I can see. Temporarily. That’s why I need my brothers and sisters with emerging sight, to give me a little bit of clarity regularly. None of us can see the whole picture, but together, if we’re rigorously honest, we can see much if not most of it.
Why don’t we talk to each other about our dreams, our vision, our plans? What are your dreams, visions and plans? Where do you see yourself, where do you see us, five years from now; on the local, state, national or international level?
Where do you see black youth? What legacy do you want to leave them - “I’m a habitual complainer about what white folks do?!” Or, “I’ve begun building institutions, smalls ones that have morphed into larger ones, that feed black people spiritually, emotionally and intellectually?!”
OR, much more importantly, “I’ve begun looking at myself and how family and societal bullshit has fucked me up and now I’m getting some serious therapy to address it so that the harm stops with me.”
We’re at one of those Booker T./W.E. B. moments. We’ve got some hard choices as a people - and they are about us and only us. We must ask ourselves some very hard questions and grow the fuck up. Then and only then can we be of use to others. Can we ‘pretty-please-with-a cherry-on-top’ have a moratorium on talkin’ bout white folks? Can we create a methodology that respects ourselves, our gifts, our power and cease this voodoo like attachment to ‘all things white folks.’ Fuck them and their missteps; we’ve got plenty of our own to own up to and deal with.
Before I got married, I told my wife that I didn’t want her to take my name, that I wanted us to maintain our individuality/identities. Yesterday, six years after our divorce, she told me that I needed to re-write my child support check and use her new, married name.
I’d known she’d taken dude’s name, but it caused me to meditate on the issue some more: Why would a woman want to take a man’s name…in 2008? Who wants to be property? Hell, who wants to be married?
Does anybody stand for anything anymore?
Call me naive but……. what sense does it make to protest or complain about our illegal, imperial, fascist government - if you’re gonna turn around and pay taxes to it so it can continue functioning?! Its a requirement that when the government is injurious of these ends, meaning “the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness,” that we are REQUIRED to dismantle this shit and start over. But who wants to start ovah?
People are jive, man. While my heart always holds out hope, part of me don’t give a fuck what happens to the collective. I’m taking care of tcb!!
I was evangelizing some brothers at work about veganism and it was so clear, there is a causal relationship between the casual callousness towards anything besides people and the casual callousness towards people that eventually rears its head. It is impossible to feel compassion for humans and actively or passively brutalize animals - and NOT have that brutality seat itself in your soul. Impossible. But try telling that to someone who has bought the buffalo wing blinders…Impossible.
The capacity to change is in short supply…and if you can’t change, how the hell do you expect other folks to change?!
I’ve been truly educated the last couple. People are people. They certainly have their differences born of where and with whom and under what conditions they were raised. But people are so very much people. I have a warmth in my heart for my own “kind” but we aren’t as special as I’d imagined. At least, not under current conditions. We have and are being spiritually, emotionally and intellectually savaged every moment of every day. This culture is rape culture; it rapes your mind. Only “real” human currency can batten down the hatches, a real you, not some hand me down, borrowed personna. I see, hear so few, sense so few who can keep it real, can be authentic AND vulnerable at the same time. All around me I see caricatures, cartoons: the strong, black woman, the down brother, the b-girl and boy, the militant, the sellout. Cutouts. Set pieces, costumes, masks, veils.
DEAD. I see dead people, half-people, sheeple, retards, cowards, slaves, compartments, con men and con women.
Where is my tribe? Where are my people?
If you’ve ever read this blog, you won’t be unfamiliar with the blog post themes herein.
Themes of the crime, crime being reality - how we can’t seem to see, feel or taste the shackles on our feet.
For all of our vaunted specialness as so-called “survivors” of the brunt of racism/white supremacy,
I submit that survival is not only not enough - it don’t mean shit, that surviving the slave ship, etc, confers no grand, noble right to perpetually evade responsibility for one’s own black self regardless of what the white man did, and is currently, doing to us.
No, transcending this swamp, this immoral OZ would seem RIF, far real-er than asking white folks to save us from the condition they put us in…AGAIN. We don’t need a white man in front of us to know that he injected his syphlitic, bone marrow into our African nature and begat a hybrid, a zebra, a new man, a lost sheep.
Alas, we keep it real in rhetoric only - but with a bangin’ flow - while men with tails and pitchforks plant bountiful crops full’o toxic weaponized waste, bionic green beans and radioactive hog maws.
The only conclusion is that we are addicted to complaining, addicted to outsourcing our liberation to some cigarette-lipped Pinochico, programmed to make the ultimate animal sacrifice to the Messiah - your own frontal lobe.
I don’t blame our three-piece suited exploiters for turning our pockets out; I blame us, not just black folks, but so-called progressives. Hell, I don’t even blame us anymore.
We need this, perhaps, in order to reclaim our humanity. Maybe hitting rock fucking bottom - a depression, nuclear fallout, a race war, concentration camps, chattel slavery - will wake us the fuck up. Meanwhile….this American Life and the beasts who run the show, are dedicated, through miseducation, through the media bread and circus, to the surgical removal of the soul of each citizen - and replacing it with a toaster. And we pick a number and stand in line.
There are no accidents.
The populace has been progressively deadened over the last twenty, thirty years. We used to have four television channels; today we have four hundred. Is that an accident? A sista said a looong time ago: “To understand the intent, look at the affect.” And the affect is our condition, our ignorance, our stupidity, our inertia.
Amen.
How many political parties can you choose from? And what is the qualitative difference between those two choices? The Beverly Hillbillies in Spanish and a Democrat or a Republican without a dimes bit between them. And lawdy, lawdy, you call that choice.
Obama is GHB, a date rape drug; he intoxicates you, makes you high on the political possibilities. You awaken with empty pockets, your anus and hope bloody and torn. Why did your invest once again, your holiest of holies in another savior?!
America is a drug dealer; as long as you keep buyin’ and identifyin’, you’ll stay heroin-hooked. You needs to go cold turkey, turkey. No wonder we don’t organize, make plans, have grand political gatherings like we did before. Our brains have been and are continuously being short-circuited by TV and corporate Hip Hop. They stole the music, they stole Obama. Anything they set out in front of you is tainted, toxic.
“When you absolutely, positively have to kill every nigga in the room: accept no substitutes”
Jesse wasn’t wrong (though he ain’t shit either); cut that niggas nuts off/what nuts?! and what do you have? No nuts at all. A black eunuch, a walking, talking, word-splitting pragmatist. Though he has not said anything truly progressive - if progressive means moving this country beyond state terrorism, globalization and Third World slavery - you’d be hard pressed to hear any critique of Obama’s policy statements from the zombies.
No, image is everything: a nice looking, articulate brother in a suit, who never demands anything of white folks but their vote, yet demands that the victim’s of his white sponsors shape up or ship out. The only reparations he demands are white votes for him and cornbread for the masses.
To what end?! The perpetuation of the status quo. There ain’t no secret plan that he’ll unfold after the inauguration for you, negro. This nigga is who he says he is. “Are you who they say you are?!
Be real, Negroes. Stand fast, black man. Look critically. Organize locally. Be modest in the change you seek. Take your money out of the system. Barter. Stop eating poison - remember the sicker you are, the fatter their pockets are. Drive less, or sell your damn car if public transpo is cheap. Hell, if we duplicated the Montgomery Bus Boycott - but nationwide - and carpooled for a year, we could take this country ovah!
But how many of you would do it? How many of you would sacrifice a little bit of time, independence and shoe leather - to change the world? We could bring the cabal that runs things to its freckled knees if we had a little ingenuity and a little chutzpah
Leave your car at home, bitches!
Come on ya’ll, let’s get committed!!!
From Pattrice Jone’s Bravebirds.Org:
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“As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.” In this passage, Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer gets right to the heart of the connection between violence against animals and violence among people: the principle that might makes right. Even people who are pacifist in every other aspect of life will condone violence against animals with no better justification than “because we want to and we can.” Killing in self-defense is one thing; killing for pleasure is another. As every happy vegan demonstrates, people do not need to eat meat to be healthy. As long as one has access to other sources of protein, then one cannot claim to be killing in self-defense when one eats meat. In the United States, families consume far more meat than could ever be considered necessary by any reasonable standard. Indeed, many meat items are snack foods rather than meals. In the United States, we also have an epidemic of violence among young people. When we encourage our children to eat the wings of dead birds as a snack, we are teaching them that that it is okay to kill for pleasure. Is it any wonder that some children put that lesson into action in the classroom? When we torture and kill animals so that we can have snack foods, we are doing something to the body of a non-consenting creature in order to obtain pleasure for ourselves. The same dynamic is involved in the sexual abuse of children. In both cases, the wishes of the victim are ignored while the desires of the perpetrator are paramount. In both cases, the only “justification” is that might makes right.
KFC’s killing your brain cells and you’re too dumb to see it. They feed you good tasting, bad food, filling your body with sugar-coated strychnine, a body led to the medical slaughterhouse, cared for by detached Mengele’s. The same man who owns Mickey D’s owns the pharmaceuticals, owns the surgical supplier, owns the politicians - like Obama - who won’t do anything to stop the “nutricide”/genocide/homicide that is being visited on our people. |
A different, more subtle, form of child abuse occurs every time a child’s natural empathy for animals is supressed by parents or care givers who demand that the child eat meat. When the crying child who does not want to eat a cow or a pig is forced to swallow those tears along with the dinner, real damage is done. Psychologist Alice Miller has shown that children who have been taught not to feel empathy grow up to be adults who can follow the orders of Nazis. Thus, in forcing children to participate in violence against animals, parents endanger not only their children but the world.”
When will we see the unity of oppression, see how the treatment of animals is mimicked by the inhuman treatment of so-called human beings. The brutality visited upon animals by kindergarten sadists always finds expression through domestic battery, child abuse, police brutality and war. And those kindergarten sadists aren’t born - they are made, produced, cultivated, nurtured and rolled off of the cultural assembly line. When will we see that when all life is respected, all life is respected and when some lives are not respected…Abu Ghraib’s happen, Holocausts happen, slavery happens, reservations happen, incarcerations, rapes and torture happens.
From Grace Lee Boggs’ “Living for Change”:
“The oppressed internalize the values of the oppressor. Therefore, any group that achieves power, no matter how oppressed, is not going to act diffferently from their oppressors as long as they have not confronted the values that they have internalized and consciously adopted different values…
…We cannot make a revolution without developing our human capacity to distinguish between needs and wants and to make responsible choices. Americans will not regain their membership in the human race until they recognize that their greatest need is no longer to make material goods but to make politics…
…Revolutionists have a responsibility to create strategies to transform ourselves as well as the victims of oppression into human beings who are more advanced in the qualities that distinguish human beings: creativity, consciousness, self-consciousness, and a sense of political and social responsibility…
…A rebellion disrupts the society but it does not provide what is necessary to make a revolution and establish a new social order. To make a revolution, people must not only struggle against existing institutions. They must make a philosophical/spiritual leap and become more human human beings. In order to change/transform the world, they must change/transform themselves.”
Many of us have been brainwashed to accept the application of political eye shadow as real change. We have become so intellectually and spiritually deadened that we can no longer distinguish between change and its facsimile, between a child and a cadaver.
We outsource our man and womanhood to an image on a screen, to a primal ghettobox beat, to external notions of who we should be. We ship our responsibility to change this miserable country overseas, to “representatives,” “proxies,” bought and sold by the highest bidding corporate bag men. We stare the truth of this trap in the face and have the nerve to talk about ‘the lesser of two evils.’ Evil is evil; if both candidates represent the perpetuation of an immoral, repugnant system, one, merely a kindler, gentler warden than the other, there is no difference. Denial is some cataracts for your ass!!
Have we “confronted the values” that we have internalized from this diseased society and “consciously adopted different values?”
Have we “transformed ourselves” into “human human beings?”
Do we even want a “new social order,” or do we want merely to get a better hand in the existing one?
The answers to the questions above are obviously NO. Where are my kind, my tribe, people who see what I think I can see? Or, am I crazy? Is the US really paradise and should I just get off of my delusional pot?
Where are the strategists for the New Social Order? Where are the people willing and mature enough to transform themselves, who desire to transform themselves as much as the society?
If you want to answer the questions above in the affirmative and are a recovering Democrat/Obama-holic/ideologue of any stripe…
Holla!!
…there’s at least one group that gets more attention than a missing blonde white girl…
Yes, watching and then desperately avoiding the media coverage of the death of NBC journalist Tim Russert, I had to wonder…
WHY?!
He wasn’t a head of state; he covered heads of state, politicians, entertainers. He wasn’t a reporter, he was an interviewer, a presenter. How could his death possibly require days-long coverage, emotional remembrances from tearful colleagues and acquaintances, as if he were the President, as if he were God. Well…
The Last Poets said that the “White Man Has a God-Complex.” I feel for the man’s family and yet, something doesn’t smell right. What is the motive for this kind of saturation coverage, the subtext, the conscious or unconscious intention of shining floodlights on Russert while the Global Nigga remains in the shadows, in the dark - misunderstood, misinterpreted, marginalized? What are they telling us that we haven’t yet understood?!
Moses, the great lion tamer, Indiana Jones, Neo - The One.
WELL…
There are a few blogs dedicated to tracking the missing and murdered among the black populace, black women stolen, beaten and abused. A few sistas have complained that “white blondes” are the only women CNN, Headline News or Fox deem worthy of covering.
So take heart, sistas, cuz I ain’t neva seen no white woman get the kind of coverage that Tim Russert got this weekend.
Black folks cover yo’ self!
From Grace Lee Boggs’ Biography:
“Reading and rereading Hegel’s Phenomenology, I began to understand why my philosophy professors at Barnard had been so unsatisfying. Because their concept of Truth was so static and sterile, they were in love with abstractions. Hegel, on the other hand, believed that the human spirit or “healthy human reason” is constantly evolving through a process of overcoming contradictions or inadequacies. Human beings are constantly struggling to make what they believe to be true, right, and just into a reality in their individual and social lives. Progress does not take place like a “shot out of a pistol.” It requires the “labor, patience and suffering of the negative.” In everything there is the duality of the positive and the negative.
What is important is not any particular idea but the process of continuing development as the contradictions or limitations inherent in any idea surface and require the leap to a new idea or a new stage of Spirit. For Hegel, therefore, the abstract truths cherished by traditional philosophy are actually untrue because they represent ideas from the past that is already behind us.”
ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
Washington, Jun 10 -
Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio
In the United States House of Representatives
Monday, June 9th, 2008
A Resolution
INDEX
Article I
Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq.
Article II
Falsely, Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a Security Threat as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of Aggression.
Article III
Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War.
Article IV
Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States.
Article V
Illegally Misspending Funds to Secretly Begin a War of Aggression.
Article VI
Invading Iraq in Violation of the Requirements of H. J. Res114.
Article VII
Invading Iraq Absent a Declaration of War.
Article VIII
Invading Iraq, A Sovereign Nation, in Violation of the UN Charter.
Article IX
Failing to Provide Troops With Body Armor and Vehicle Armor.
Article X
Falsifying Accounts of US Troop Deaths and Injuries for Political Purposes.
Article XI
Establishment of Permanent U.S. Military Bases in Iraq.
Article XII
Initiating a War Against Iraq for Control of That Nation’s Natural Resources.
Article XIIII
Creating a Secret Task Force to Develop Energy and Military Policies With Respect to Iraq and Other Countries.
Article XIV
Misprision of a Felony, Misuse and Exposure of Classified Information And Obstruction of Justice in the Matter of Valerie Plame Wilson, Clandestine Agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Article XV
Providing Immunity from Prosecution for Criminal Contractors in Iraq.
Article XVI
Reckless Misspending and Waste of U.S. Tax Dollars in Connection With Iraq and US Contractors.
Article XVII
Illegal Detention: Detaining Indefinitely And Without Charge Persons Both U.S. Citizens and Foreign Captives.
Article XVIII
Torture: Secretly Authorizing, and Encouraging the Use of Torture Against Captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Other Places, as a Matter of Official Policy.
Article XIX
Rendition: Kidnapping People and Taking Them Against Their Will to “Black Sites” Located in Other Nations, Including Nations Known to Practice Torture.
Article XX
Imprisoning Children.
Article XXI
Misleading Congress and the American People About Threats from Iran, and Supporting Terrorist Organizations Within Iran, With the Goal of Overthrowing the Iranian Government.
Article XXII
Creating Secret Laws.
Article XXIII
Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
Article XXIV
Spying on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment.
Article XXV
Directing Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens.
Article XXVI
Announcing the Intent to Violate Laws with Signing Statements.
Article XXVII
Failing to Comply with Congressional Subpoenas and Instructing Former Employees Not to Comply.
Article XXVIII
Tampering with Free and Fair Elections, Corruption of the Administration of Justice.
Article XXIX
Conspiracy to Violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Article XXX
Misleading Congress and the American People in an Attempt to Destroy Medicare.
Article XXXI
Katrina: Failure to Plan for the Predicted Disaster of Hurricane Katrina, Failure to Respond to a Civil Emergency.
Article XXXII
Misleading Congress and the American People, Systematically Undermining Efforts to Address Global Climate Change.
Article XXXIII
Repeatedly Ignored and Failed to Respond to High Level Intelligence Warnings of Planned Terrorist Attacks in the US, Prior to 911.
Article XXXIV
Obstruction of the Investigation into the Attacks of September 11, 2001.
Article XXXV
Endangering the Health of 911 First Responders.
____________
ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT FOR PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
Resolved, that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate:
Articles of impeachment exhibited by the House of Representatives of the United States of America in the name of itself and of the people of the United States of America, in maintenance and support of its impeachment against President George W. Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors.
In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has committed the following abuses of power.
If you can’t get behind this WTF are you talking about.
“…And when they come to march on ya
Tell 'em to make sure they got their James Brown pass And don't be surprised if Ali is in the White House Reverend Ike, Secretary of the Treasure Richard Pryor, Minister of Education Stevie Wonder, Secretary of FINE arts And Miss Aretha Franklin, the First Lady Are you out there, CC?..."
Never has a political candidate shed so much to receive so little from so few. He offers “CHANGE,” but he is the one who has become a veritable contortionist, wrenching and masticating his value system, his support system, his backers, HIMSELF, to gain the succor of the (white) world…The Last Poets warned of niggas incessant penchant for change -shape-shifting, flip-flopping and mind-melding to their white betters, staying just ahead of or barely behind the latest trends, curves, possibilities, fashion.
And for what exactly? What do you exactly gain when you can’t take YOU with YOU?
Meanwhile, the political battlefield is strewn with beige limbs and black bones, fingernails, red tissue and sinew, peeled from once proud, principled flesh. What does Obama believe in that he would NOT throw overboard - one by one - his pastor, his friends and now his church. And on what basis? The prying, king making eyes of the white media? Or his precious white voters?
Is this the prelude to his next Great Escape, from YOU, you who have voted for him, prayed for him, stalked precincts for him, received racist taunts for him, all in hopes of what you’ll get in return - symbolically.
Will you be the next one to feel the ’sting’ of him grasping for that higher wrung that requires him, of course, to release YOU with his off-hand? And what then? Will you claim that you didn’t see it coming, or, that its the nature of politics? Will you break down, disappointed, hopes dashed again? Or will you search for the next messiah?
Perhaps you will derive another lesson: the need to let go of all prophets, all authorities outside of yourself.
Children need leaders, parents. Adults need to learn how to lead themselves, band together with like minded folks, if they must, and create, like grown folks are supposed to do.
The political process, hell the American educational-indoctrination process is designed to infantilize you, make you look for aid from a glorified parent, a ‘representative,’ a pastor, a priest, a walking, talking contradiction, a phony panacea. ‘Leave the driving to us,’ so says the politrickster. ‘Sleep little baby, sleep.’ And you do. You say, ‘ we must be pragmatic, we must accept what’s reasonable, we must accept the one who can win…’ our wants and needs be damned. As well as those of the African Diaspora and Planet Earth. ‘He’s doing what he needs to do to win.” What does he win and what do you gain from your sacrificing your autonomy on his behalf?
Don’t get me wrong, I like Obama. I appreciate the tightrope that he’s walking and the manner in which he’s crossing it. He’s made it further than I imagined he would and with a grace and charisma that hasn’t been seen in years. And yet…
REAL CHANGE is what we need - but its not what we’re being offered. Lawd knows America needs to change from the root. But if our hero speaks change out of one side of his mouth, and status quo politics out of the side of his neck, what will we get? Embargo against Cuba? Troops stationed in 138 countries?! 158?! (Hell, how many countries are there?!)
Change would mean feeding the hungry, opening the prisons, calling off the attack dogs in blue, pumping money into a real educational system, allowing all lands their autonomy, their own system of governance or no governance at all; the complete withdrawal of all US troops from foreign soil, giving the Native American her due, her back rent, her land, her resources
And the destruction of nuclear weapons, as well as complete disarmament.
CHANGE. Is this the “new and improved” kind, the buzzword that we get on packaging for untested, genetically-modified poison? Do you hear the word “Change” and simply fall asleep, never minding what it actually means… is that what its designed to do - sound pleasing to the ear and provide a cold comfort and a nap?
We don’t need Billary, nor do we need McBush. And we don’t need Obama, though he’s welcome to help.
We need the change Sam Cooke was talking about, that Bob Dylan was talking about, that Ghandi and King and Malcolm and Bobby were talking about. We need the change that William Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn were talking about, what the Weathermen were all about in spite of their rockets red glare.
We need change. We need to change. We need to be the change. Uncompromisingly. Passionately. Truthfully.
Its hard to change, though, when we don’t first speak change into existence, when we don’t feel that we have permission to speak change into existence, when we put goals and objects and positions ahead of speaking change into existencee, real honest to Goddess change.
If you place anything ahead of change, ahead of freedom, you’ll never have either.
I have been grappling with - my entire life it seems - questions of identity. I have gone back to the beginning, to a man who enlightened me 30+ years ago with his ability to cut through the rhetoric, expose the blind corners and convenient, comfortable illusions of our species.
Krishnamurti, the anti-guru, the anti-teacher, the anti-philosopher says it too well:
“….That search for security again expresses itself through class divisions, which develop into the stupidity of nationalism and imperialism, breeding hatred, racial antagonism and the ultimate cruelty of war. So through our own egotistic desires we have created a world of nationalities and conflicting sovereign governments, whose function is to prepare for war and force man against man….”
What benefits do I derive from identifying with my “race,” “my religion,” “my nation?!” Are there any benefits?
Krishnamurti identifies fear as the root cause of our need for a jiveass psychic security blanket, a binky, an externalized label that makes us feel warm, fuzzy and o-fucking-kay. And yet, there is no protection and no security behind any label, marker or identifier. You are you and I am me, regardless of what the world calls us or what we pretend to call ourselves.
What slapped me in the face again is the way in which I’ve fallen into a pattern of identifying myself as a black man, a member of the black community, an advocate for black people, a freedom fighter, a freeslave. The prime motivator was and is fear nurtured with brainwashing and coercion.
I am only free when I see and refuse to play THE game. I’m only free (and me) when I confront my deepest fear - being alone in the water with no lifeboat, living life with no chaser or cut card. I know and wear the ‘Mask’ of patriotism expressed through race rhetoric, posing, narrow colored concerns. The fear of dismissal and rejection by my so-called tribe haunts me, the jealous, excommunicating, nitpicking kente set, a people who could never embrace me because they can’t embrace their real selves in the light of day.
They too wear the nationalist blindfolds, refuse to peek out of their colored foxholes, can’t see the stockyard fence that hems them in and leads them to physical, psychological and spiritual slaughter. We’ve learned to lobotomize ourselves with German efficiency.
I see the ignorance, the studied evasion, the terrified, sophisticated grasping for validation, the ravenous need for love…in myself!! I see it in my so-called people, in THEIR ignorance, in their impotent rebellion, wolf tickets sold by spiritual eunuchs. I see this madness in other people - people who are not supposed to be my people. And they are, though they don’t know it and I tend to forget it.
Its such a funny picture: racist termites infest the minds of whites who can’t see, feel or taste it and the black folks, who see too much, the real merged with the hallucinatory, ghosts and shadows frolicking with the child within who never had and chance and who we don’t give a chance. Far easier to wade in ‘post-traumatic-slave-disorder.’ We drink the stagnant water, the poison we intend for our enemy, who lives in a tra-la-la fantasy world of shallow, monstrous faux conceit and narcissism. Hemlock ain’t nuthin’ but a .40 and a resentment against the white man…and yet, WE die from it.
There are those who howl at any thought of seeing outside of the color-construct:
“COLORBLINDNESS!!!!!!!!!!!!”
FUCK YOU!
Your color-stuck malignancy is precisely why WE can’t shake our dehumanization, can’t see our common humanity and kinship with the white fool who is our ignorant-opposite, the tails’ side of the same coin. No, we’d rather walk with a pimp’s pride and a whore’s dignity. We recall the great civilizations and innovations of “our people,” before our capture and enslavement. 100 years from now, who will recommend us, our civilization, our great offerings? No one because we have none. They will say that our enslavement ended on paper - but not between the ears.
None of our movements have yet freed us from our desire to merge with something or someone else - bigger, stronger, wiser - someone who will solve all of our riddles, protect and save us. From ourselves. That boat will never arrive in time to save our drowning carcass. It will never arrive at all. My advice: Swim, muthafucka, swim!
What happened to the “divinity within?” You?!
I hate white people and black people and religious people and nationalists and patriots and communists and anarchists and all others who live, breathe and die by hand me down tags - cranial brands that they can’t see beyond. Their petty insanity and narrow soul-lessness makes it impossible for them to see the quilt, only the individual panels. And what results: Man in conflict with man, woman, child, animal and planet. We are in internalized, dysfunctional conflict with ourselves.
Will you be militantly yourself, or will you be what they tell you you should be, oughta be, what they teach and train you to be?! No one will liberate me and you from that prison, that woodchipper. I charge and convict myself first and foremost of these crimes. And then I charge you with the same.
I hate myself for conforming, for feeling guilt, feeling pressured to raise my right hand and be “BLACK, first, last and always,” to be manipulated by the drunken clergy that cries “SINNER” when black penis touches white pussy, or threatens to. “Black and white don’t go together,” two little black girls tipsily sang to me when I was hanging with a white girl one day long ago. This disease of compartmentalized races that must stick to their own kind or else be infected with mongrelized cooties….why this is our spiritual Alzheimers and Everest.
We have become like the pods in “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers,” numb replicas of ourselves that grow and flourish in the basement of our consciousness, our dim awareness and then - when we fall completely asleep - this dead thing replaces us, human no more. Just a vacant, vapid, windup doll, trolling the surface that shackles us in place.
So, while I can’t help but be spiritually and emotionally nekkid when it comes to racism/white supremacy and its discontents, to sexism, homophobia, speciesm, shadism, etc, I’m gonna be blind when it comes to not allowing shade or looks to keep my thinking, my heart, my spirit on the down-low, in a shoebox, programmed, fitting all that I see into a narrow paradigm. And I will remember that, as Krishnamurti puts it, “most people are second hand.” Derivative. Clones. Dead. What do I look like following them, following anybody?! If I meet some free people along the way, I meet some free people along the way. But I don’t need you to hold my hand and support me, nurse me, educate me, prop me up.
NOT seeing is not an option. I say, see ALL that you can see, all of this bullshit including yourself. Don’t just look at the surface sheen, look at the underneath, feel it, take it into your mouth and suck on that lozenge of self-hate and revulsion, the personal powerlessness animated through fake religion, fake militance, fake solidarity, fake, fake fake. Don’t take my world for it, see and feel it for yourself.
Look at how retarded, how limited we are, how underdeveloped, how incapable of seeing except through the borrowed prism through which you see everything, race, gender, etc. You picked it up, read it somewhere - in church, in school, in your political re-education class; dogma that explains your life neatly and folds it like a starched shirt at the Chinese laundry.
But don’t take my word for it; don’t even listen.
I want to know a new freedom whether it includes happiness or not; one that doesn’t require a bulletproof vest, or a moat, a Bible or a Big Book, a woman, a servant, a mob or a movement. I’m dropping all of my dogmatism and crutches - just for today, just this second. No Gods, No Masters and NO ANSWERS - NOTHING unless it comes out of my unique many layered, authentic experience.
Why aren’t we enough?!
In the wake of Brownfemipower shutting down her blog due to racism/racist appropriation, my question is: WHY?!
Why allow the very thing (RACISM) that all people of color should be united in fighting against, to drive us underground, drive us away from our task, to communicate our hard earned insights, fire and passion?
What does it say about our value system when white folks jes bein’ white folks - who we SHOULD know are the enemy - causes us to pack up our mic and pull the plug?
It sends a terrible signal, in my opinion. Perhaps it is simply the destruction of the illusion of the good, progressive white folk that caused BFP to make such a hasty, impolitic exit. What about all of the young, brown/black/red/yellow women who having viewed this spectacle, decide to go off into their corners, do their thing after years of reading about the power of WOC and seeing that power dissolve before an allegedly more powerful, admittedly more privileged, journalistic hack?!
There is NO excuse to not immediately decenter white women - and to rally round and CENTER, brown women, black women, red women, yellow women to this righteous cause…now that white feminists have shown what feminism really means to them:
“Kizzy, git in the kitchen and do them dishes…NOW!”
Aren’t we enough?!
What people of color need to do more and more is to turn to EACH OTHER. Regardless of language, national origin, religion, the white world rests on Plymouth Rock — which rests on all of us!
White folks stepping on our toes - which they so often do - causing such a pyrrhic reaction bespeaks an unhealthy relationship and perhaps, attachment to white folks. It validates their superiority, their power, it enacts/reenacts the silencing that is critical to their controlling us. Why volunteer?
Who benefits from BFP’s voluntarily servitude and acquiesence to the white feminist prerogative to take the brown fruit and not thank the one who slaved over the crop? White cannibals who’ve always feasted on dark meat. Methinks just the opposite tack is required.
I’ve read many of the posts regarding the Amanda Marcotte/Seal Press debacle…ain’t nuthin’ new under the sun, and yet…
Why don’t we have a press, or respect the press that we have? Why don’t we publish ourselves? Why do we concern ourselves with being “credited” for our spiritual property when they’ve been stealing both and more since the muthafucking Mayflower?! They won’t use it like we use it because we have or should have revolution on our mind, not a jive ass book deal.
No, as long as we center them, genuflect to them, beg and entreat them to, ‘pretty please understand our plight’…all of this prostration, without paying MORE attention to what we NEED to be building between brown you and black me…
Believe me, I don’t say this as someone whose never been where BFP is, but precisely because I have been there…and still, I have to keep watch and ferret out those ingratiating weeds that want to make white folks my superior, my God, my master.
To quote Nancy Wilson: “You can have him, I don’t want him, I don’t want him, you can have him, for he’s not, the man, for me!”
White feminists and white liberals/progressives are buttering their bread with white privilege in a cafe called Racism/White Supremacy. Most are completely clueless; a thimble full are in the process of getting it. Maybe. And a couple might even have it. We can’t afford any delusions, and certainly can’t expect square dealing from people who want us to validate their goodness and kindness, window-dress their image at the price of YOUR or MY sanity.
Somewhere an illusory bubble burst, full of white allies and cream pie that splattered in our faces. This was intolerable. Let’s grab a rag and clean each other up, keep each other honest and yell “DUCK” or “INCOMING” when the next bubble whizzes by.
We are enough.
Intelligence is often ephemeral, viral, acquired with little or no effort, surface; wisdom is hardboiled and hard-earned, rooted in lived truth and often, trauma. One example…
Words by Zuky:
It seems to me that one of the principal sources of confusion when it comes to racial disourse is the stunning lack of clarity and consensus regarding the exact meanings and definitions of the words “racism” and “racist”. Those of us who spend significant time doing anti-racist work end up developing a variety of nuanced concepts surrounding these words, but many people never explore those meanings and instinctively respond to talk of racism with strong emotions and weak understandings. Racism is a complex multi-dimensional interdisciplinary subject which cannot be reduced to an absurdly-shallow bifurcation of the populace into laudable “not racists” and condemned “racists”. Racism is an overarching, interlocking set of economic, political, social, and cultural structures, beliefs, and actions which systematically advantage one racial group at the expense of all others. A statement, thought, belief, assumption, or action can be described as racist when it plugs into the overarching grid of racism, like a node which lights up once it plugs into its compatible network, thus transcending an individual act of bigotry or prejudice and fusing into broader institutions and societal forces.
As for defining what makes an individual person “a racist”, I think it’s a pretty fuzzy area, and not a particularly fruitful intellectual direction. Most anti-racists are much more concerned with identifying, understanding, and dismantling racism, than in exposing any individual as “a racist”, whatever that means. Clearly, there are hate-crime types out there who organize their lives around advancing white supremacist violence and such; but most of the racism that people of color deal with in our day-to-day lives — especially those of us who interact with a lot of white liberals — is far more subtle and covert, more of a background buzz than an in-your-face threat. White liberal racism tends to manifest in unspoken assumptions, attitudes, and social dynamics which normalize and center white privilege, while deprioritizing, marginalizing, and dismissing the voices, perspectives, experiences, histories, cultures, agendas, and initiatives of people of color. White liberals who engage in these behaviors aren’t “racists” in the same sense as the hate-crime types, but they are nevertheless participating in the replication and perpetuation of racism. Pointing this out is not “playing the race card”; it is accurate socio-political observation. Pointing this out is not the same as running around indiscriminately shouting “racist!” at every white person within earshot in some kind of rageful frenzy; it is constructive anti-racist critique aimed at illuminating an important but dimly-lit pattern, for the purpose of healing wounds which continue to bleed our society and our own humanity.
From the “Anarchist People of Color, Race, Anarchy, Revolution” website:
“Anarchism calls for a fundamental transformation of society. No messianic leader guides the flock to the promised land, where the government tries to kill them all. With anarchism, no shadowy leadership clique calls the shots for our community. An anarchist solution means people are all taught the lessons and go forward to teach our own lessons so that everyone in the community can lead the struggle. It is a radical departure from the power politics that have been at play in many communities of color. Anarchist revolution is what is needed for people of color now.
People of color are in the crosshairs of this system every single day. Now is not the time to mourn, but to build with determination for anarchist revolution.”
Do you want a fundamental transformation?
I’ve been thinking about the meaning of Wesley Snipes’ pending incarceration. As one who has followed a similar path and refuses to pay for my oppression and that of other black people and people of color worldwide, what does a three-year term for tax evasion REALLY mean?!
It means that any action against the system will be met with maximum retaliatory force. Stealing the wealth of the people and using it to oppress the people is divine law, according to the maniacs who run this thing. And what if we were all Wesley’s, what if we all knew that the 16th Amendment was a fraud, that the Federal Reserve is a private bank, NOT a government concern. “We are not consumers; “WE are what’s being consumed!”
Do you want a fundamental transformation or to exchange seats on the Titanic, a ship headed for massive icebergs, a ship that mows down black and brown and red fish on its queasy path to oblivion?!
Reformism - voting in new masters, a female or black male overseer for the global plantation - is status quo, handkerchief head politics/existence par excellence. Revolution means that there are no more Gods, masters or slaves. YOU are your own overseer, YOU are the boss of YOU!!
Can you git wit that?!
White folks are lactose intolerant when it comes to the truth!!
Black folks: you can’t be accepted unless you tone it down, scale it back. Nigga, filet yo’ self!!
You can’t be the “First Black President” unless you chew your words like a cow turning cud.
Don’t improvise, don’t be Jeremiah-ically real, correct, oh, hell, no.
The audacity of a delusion preferred.
White folks don’t want to know the truth and niggas who believe that this Titanic can be righted, saved, steered away from the icebergs are just as delusional as the outraged tongue cluckers on Fox, CNN and the heart-less heartland.
All they can see, the only thing they can think about is their pain, their suffering: “how dare that nigga mock OUR suffering on 911!!” White folks don’t know shit about real suffering, they’re too busy trimming their hangnails. They don’t dare look out from under their intellectual blankets to see the global suffering that has been heaped on millions by their blue eyed government.
So, here comes Obama, the pretty, smiling black marionette, trying to appeal to an un-satisifiable beast, that will use tweezers and a fine toothed comb to ferret out any inconsistency, any faux paux, any racism (imagine that!) and magnify it, twist it into necro- or pedophilia.
And he plays the game, because the prize seems desirable. But what we could really use is some of that community organizing that he constantly brags about. He talks that WE talk, while he seeks an “I” prize. We may get him elected, but I’d be surprised if we - meaning black folks benefit.
If you have to de-bone words, deny reality - if you have to lose your black soul in order to gain the world - what’s it worth?! I’d rather be Obama’s “former” pastor and tell the unvarnished truth. I’d rather minister to the real soul’s of real black, white and green folks than engage in politically expedient, statesmen-like verbal masturbation.
How fulfilling it must be to cater to the white fantasies of a shining city on a hill, formed in a vacant land by courageous, persecuted men who only wanted to breath free. That they could strangle the life out of and make extinct tribe after tribe of Red people - one dare not mention.
For true: If these folks can’t step up at this late date and accept that Rev. Wright speaks nothing but the whole black truth - then we’re no different from those teachers who have low expectations of our students. Put these crackas in remedial Ed and leave ‘em the fuck alone.
When we talk down to the white man, we demean ourselves because all black folks know Obama’s lying, by omission. Distancing himself from his pastor - while ostensibly embracing him - makes Obama a political gumby: flexible, but without backbone. If we can’t bring the entirety of our black selves to the table, if our complaints are dismissed as the politics or rhetoric of the past, when the conditions those bitter words describe are happening in this day and time, why we have lost our good black minds.
I’d rather leave this country, secede from the Union, live off the grid than pretend that temporizing is a form of nobility.
” Yo, man… There’s a lot of brothers out there flakin’ and perpetratin but scared to kick reality…”
If you don’t like reality…continue to ignore it!
I hear a lot of complaints, but few solutions offered for the problems of black folks. We in the AfroSphere have perfected the stenographic act of documenting the atrocities and petty slights of white racist culture. But, as they say in recovery: “when you focus on the problem, the problem gets bigger, when you focus on the solution, the solution gets bigger.”
Why does it seem that some of us get off on constantly re-traumatizing ourselves? At some point, we have to make a stand. At some point, we - and we can be me, a circle of friends, a neighborhood, a city - have to make a decision.
One decision that has revolutionary implications for black folks is our diet, or as it should be named, “the poison that we stuff into ourselves that we erroneously call food.”
What is the difference between a cow being led to slaughter and us: they don’t have TV in the stockyards. They can see the bars, the barbed wire that fences them in. You can’t. You can’t because your prison bars are internal, bred into you by sophisticated means. Black folks commit Hari Kari every day with chicken wings.
The massive health problems that our community suffers can be massively reversed without a single march, protest or demonstration, simply by taking the pig, pork, swine, beef, fish, candy bar off of our fork or plate, take it out of our mouths. We all know the physical implications of the way that we eat, but there are also mental, emotional, spiritual implications.
What does it do to the spirit of a human being to eat the flesh of an animal? What does it mean that we don’t know what the system of production does to these animals - and what does it mean that we don’t care? How can the spiritual man or woman co-sign the brutality, the savagery inflicted on animals and then complain about the petty bullshit that they suffer? Can one exist without the other? I don’t think so.
Oh, I know, its easy to dismiss animals as things, we are “higher mammals,” etc. That might be true; the problem is, claiming to be higher while actually behaving worse than that which we classify as lower is an American tradition. The white man said he was superior while raping and ravaging whole populations of Native Americans and blacks, ravaging and raping the land for good measure. And the animals. So while I understand the temptation to assert my personhood at the expense of animals, how can I? And how do I know that God/Goddess/The Great Spirit don’t have plans for animals that I can’t understand, see or comprehend? By destroying animal life, how do I know that I’m not sinning my black ass off?
But the good news: The Revolution can begin this second for all of us black folks.
STOP EATING MEAT, FISH, FOWL, CANDY or any other synthetic foods.
EAT FRUITS, VEGETABLES, WHOLE GRAINS, LEGUMES. EAT ORGANIC. SETTLE FOR NOTHING LESS!
Live longer, think more clearly, weigh less, be happier. You can do more righteous harm to the concentration camp that is America by not participating in his slaughter of animals and his slaughter of YOU in the process. Niggas in Baghdad and Beantown get treated no different than Elsie the cow. We are nothing but product, profit, FEED for the machine.
If all the black folks in this country resolved to never touch another chicken wing again, by that simple act, the walls of this oppressive, imperialist country would come tumbling down. This country can’t survive without you swallowing lies and chicken thighs.
Once you get clean - and that’s what getting off of these food drugs means - once you have your brains back, you can begin proposing solutions that can solve, rather than documenting the latest predictable white outrage. The white man ain’t gonna change if you don’t change and the most fundamental, simplest change black folks can and need to make is what they put into their bodies.
From Lord Vegan:
Vernetta Cockerham-Ellerbee’s neck was sliced open by her estranged husband, Richard Ellerbee, In November 2002. She escaped with her life, but her 17-year-old daughter, Candice, was brutally killed despite several protective orders and warrants designed to keep Ellerbee away.
This is her story.
Scarred by abuse, she says police failed her
Those sworn to help didn’t, she says. Now, she’s taking them to court
, Staff WriterJONESVILLE - Vernetta Cockerham-Ellerbee peeled back the curtain of her bedroom window and saw the man she once loved enough to marry. Hunched over in a field across the street, Richard Ellerbee toiled, shoveling clumps of dirt over his shoulder. She glanced past him to the nearby police station in this rural Piedmont town of 2,000. She spotted one of the department’s nine officers just beyond the station’s front door.Cockerham-Ellerbee rang the station: He’s back, she whispered. He was once again violating the judge’s order to stay away. Police didn’t catch Ellerbee that day. Cockerham-Ellerbee repeatedly reported her husband’s threats during the summer and fall of 2002. He never spent a night in jail.
She didn’t know what he was up to with the shovel until he called days later to explain: He was digging graves to bury her and the children.
Ellerbee delivered on his threat in November 2002. He broke into their home and fatally stabbed his teenage stepdaughter, Candice Cockerham. He left Cockerham-Ellerbee for dead, too, slicing open her neck with a shard of glass.
Click the link above to read the entire blurb: Promise of Protection
This is her story.Hell, EVERYBODY needs to read this most powerful statement. It needs to be read - carefully.
The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties
We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974…involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while…doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements…. [W]e see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.
1. The Genesis of Contemporary Black Feminism
[W]e find our origins in the historical reality of Afro-American women’s continuous life-and-death struggle for survival and liberation…. As Angela Davis points out, Black women have always embodied an adversary stance to white male rule and have actively resisted its inroads upon them and their communities…. Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation…. Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for Black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and 1970s…. It was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men. There is also undeniably a personal genesis for Black feminism…. However, we had no way of conceptualizing what was so apparent to us, what we knew was really happening…. Our development must also be tied to the contemporary economic and political position of Black people…. [A] handful of us have been able to gain certain tools as a result of tokenism in education and employment which potentially enable us to more effectively fight our oppression…. [A]s we developed politically we addressed ourselves to heterosexism and economic oppression under capitalism.
2. What We Believe
Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics…. [T]he most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity…[t]o be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough…. Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand…. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism…. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses…. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons…for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives…. [O]ur Black women’s style of talking/testifying in Black language about what we have experienced has a resonance that is both cultural and political…. No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black women’s lives…. “Smart-ugly” crystallized the way in which most of us had been forced to develop our intellects at great cost to our “social” lives…. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society…[b]ut we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se–i.e., their biological maleness–that makes them what they are.
3. Problems in Organizing Black Feminists
The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we are…trying…to address a whole range of oppressions…. We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level, and yet we feel the necessity to struggle to change the condition of all Black women…. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression. Feminism is, nevertheless, very threatening to the majority of…people because it calls into question some of the most basic assumptions about our existence, i.e., that sex should be a determinant of power relationships…. We feel that it is absolutely essential to demonstrate the reality of our politics to other Black women and believe that we can do this through writing and distributing our work.
4. Black Feminist Issues and Projects
The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people. We are of course particularly committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex and class are simultaneous factors in oppression…. One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white women’s movement…. Eliminating racism in the white women’s movement is by definition work for white women to do, but we will continue to speak to and demand accountability on this issue…. As feminists we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics…. We are committed to a continual examination of our politics as they develop through criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice.
(Excerpts from: The Combahee River Collective Statement, 1986)
I’m a nonfiction person.
History. Politics.
I’ve struggled to embrace the novel. Baldwin, Ellison. Henry Miller reads like a novel, but is in fact a hybrid, as is Anais Nin. I read one Terry McMillan book and have some Octavia Butler, too. I decided to dive head first into some ‘classic’ fiction, particularly fiction by black women.
I bought several Toni Morrison books - Bluest Eye, Beloved, Jazz. And then I bought the Color Purple by Alice Walker.
I avoided this book and the movie of the same name like the plague. I heard, even in my drunken stupor, all of the charges and counter charges about Walker’s book being an attack on the black man, the questions asking: “of all the books about black folks, why the hell are they gonna use this manhating, blah, blah, blah…”
I bought that shit for many years and just never wanted to delve into it. But, I bought it a couple of weeks ago. I bought it in hopes of delving into myself, my fears around ‘what I heard,’ my fear of engaging with subject matter that might teach me about myself. A book that might teach me about black women and their grievances against us.
What a surprise, what a beautiful surprise. Once I traveled through the thicket of Mister’s abuse and that of his son Harpo, his daddy, what captured my attention was the relationships between the women. The love, the resistance, the range of behaviors that the sisters in the book used to deal with a system of oppression. An intersectional system of oppression.
The strength of Shug, of Sofia, of Nettie and of course, Celie was beautiful. What a surprise then that over the years, the men bent, became not more rigid but elastic. The men meaning Harpo and Mister. Did they become angels from heaven? Uh, no. Did they shift, open up, loosen, let go - of their overwhelming control and brutality and allow their black sisters space to be themselves? Yes they did.
Can black people of this day and age shift, open up, loosen, let go - of their overwhelming control and brutality towards one another? Can they, can we own our propensity for martyrdom? Our propensity for emotional and verbal “blackmail” and abusiveness, self righteous abusiveness? Can we make a commitment to get the psychological help that we need to heal before we attempt the impossible: trying to have a grounded grown folks conversation. A grown folks conversation that precludes us vomiting daggers into each other?
I don’t know. Many of us are so far gone, co-opted by this white culture of death, consumed with internalized hate. One of the things I learned once I got sober was how my disease manifested within me.
I believed when I was a drunk, that if I drank enough to cut off all emotional feeling - that I would eliminate the greatest impediment to my being able to think rationally. My emotions, in my view, were a major liability. If I could suppress them, I could win. Nothing could touch me, no feeling could intrude on my “super-rational project.”
What I discovered was that having a ‘Spockian-intellect’ was the liability, that emotion, rather than hindering was a massive aid to me being my truest black self. That having ‘healthy’ emotions, married to a functional intellect was the height of health. My ‘lone brain theory’ had been my disastrous guide and downfall.
Feeling, feeling my feelings, letting my feelings be my guide, getting assistance in dealing with the wreckage of my past and using my head as an able assistant instead of a tyrant - that was “how I got over.”
I ain’t done mind you, but I am like Mister. I am a work in progress. Like Shug, I am powerful and passionate. Like Celie, I was meek, mild, beaten down; now I’m rising up, filling out my body, my skin, rather than hiding in a corner. And like Sofia: under the right conditions, I’m the wrong nigga to fuck wit.
The Color Purple seems like a template, an emotional/psychological template for black community healing. One day, when we get beyond needing an oppressor, a violator, an enemy, when playing the victim no longer pays our spiritual bills and we move to a place of personal healing FIRST, perhaps we will be able to heal the race. If we could move from complete dysfunction as the group in this book does - and encourage and allow each other our process and time to heal our inner wounds without throwing salt in them - “oh happy days!”
Until then…I pray that we can get together, regardless of color(ation), gender or any other pseudo-impediment on the real, on a truthful, authentic basis and lay our shit on the table. Too many of us, in the words of Dunbar, wear the mask…
“WE wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!”
Stop hiding!
Follow the link….
Two men - me and Seminalson - have begun a conversation on patriarchy. It was inspired by my conversations with Dark Daughta. If you haven’t gone over to her place you should. NOT for the faint of heart and sometimes that includes me. Actually, mainly that includes me.
You are joining the middle of the conversation - but that’s how some of the best conversations are - and it is very looooooooooooong, but it may be useful to someone. Oh, and its a conversation that has no end until IT ends…
Here is the current blog post at Seminalson’s (S2’s) house…
Holding racism, patriarchy and our feelings TOGETHER…
Maxjulian said…:
I don’t know what I didn’t get to from your previous post. What is the question.
I feel like you’re telling me that I just need to accept in whole cloth what women, or you say no matter what. Is that correct? I don’t know. I’m confused. I feel like I should consider where and how I agree.
Having someone wag their finger in my face and holler: “YOU’RE AN ALCOHOLIC/YOU’RE A PATRIARCH” doesn’t seem a very effective strategy to promote self reflection, particularly when one is opening themselves up, trying to remove the shrapnel at the same time. Removing shrapnel from yourelf is hard enough without someone repeating, “you’ve got shrapnel in your leg, you’ve got shrapnel in your leg.” No, I need help ID’ing the shrapnel, specifically, not restating the obvious. And some awareness that I have removed some of it and am committed to removing all of it.
It probably feels good to the person doing that, but having been a part of a little personal transformation, it seems doomed to failure. But that’s just my opinion.
I also grew up in the United States, not Canada, so I didn’t experience it through books, or television or visits. I’ve been a black man all my life - who grew up in the good ole USA of lynching, castration - physical, emotional, spiritual.
So, I know that I have male privilege, male power. And it cuts both ways here in the larger culture. Nigga men are the greatest threat to the white man, thus they have received the full force of his oppressive machinery.
Certainly, I have power over women. I, as a male represent a group that poses the greatest threat to women. Its kind of like the concept of “all white people being racist suspects” from ‘TheCode.Net.’ I get that.
But after we’ve been beaten over the head with theory and studies and books and told we are patriarchs, we who need and must change have to be met on a heart level by somebody, don’t we? Otherwise, its going back to doing my work on my own which I ain’t got a problem with.
I’m looking at the opportunities that I have to exercise patriarchal power; I’m looking at how I’ve used it in the past; I’m disowning and backing away from it when I recognize it, when I see it in real time. Its not like I don’t know that I can be a patriarch - but I’m not married, I’m not in a committed or uncommitted relationship; I’m not a minister, pastor or officeholder. I work from home. I don’t know whether I agree that because I have a dick, that I am an unequivocal, practicing p