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!

from vodpod.com posted with vodpod

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:

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)