Live From Planet Earth

On Afrocentricity, Diop, Egypt, & Scholarship

2016-10-08T12:00:00.012-04:00

A close friend of mine shared with me some of his thoughts on the recent post "The Fallacies Of Afrocentrism" and the response post from Kintespace, "Flippant Remarks about 'The fallacies of Afrocentrism'". His insight is both profound and invaluable. Hopefully we can encourage him to expand these thoughts into an article for the magazine. For me this conversation is important because identity is vital. I know and love too many folks who struggle with finding theirs and often get muddled in pseudo-science in trying to find themselves. We have a responsibility to make things clear. His thoughts gave me a greater understanding of my own identity in the context of ancient African civilization and reminded me that scholarship is a process to be engaged and built upon, not a dogma:

On Diop, his imperfections and continuing his work:
My opinion (w/ some disclaimers) is this:
1) I've not honestly read Asante or Karenga yet and,
2) Diop was Diop. He did his own research and worked and challenged scholars in the field during that day. Fact of the matter is though is that M. Diop made his transition in 1986. His students are Theophile Obenga (Congo), Aboubacry Moussa Lam and Babacar Sall (both Senegal). Obenga was with him in Cairo in 1974 (UNESCO "Peopling..."), and Lam wrote his dissertation on the migrations of the Peul from Kmt [Kemet/Egypt]. Also, Cameroon has an Egyptology program at the University out there at Yaoude.

His work was profound, largely true (though he made some mistakes) and seminal; but not expert. Diop had the equivalent of 2 PhD's (one in physics and one is history). He was an eclectic scholar. But, to my knowledge, he didn't start learning glyphs until the 1970s and there is never one instance in which he cites a text which he himself translated.

Diop's work (and he hinted at this by telling Obenga that he'd never write again the topic of Egypt as an African civilization if he felt he'd "won" in Cairo) was meant as a springboard. That's exactly what folk on the continent are starting to do now. It's exactly what we need. It's easy to take shots at Diop's work 50/60 years later when 1) That's not even the whole of his first work folk are reading in English and 2) It's his first work.

On Afrocentricity as "fallacy", ancient Egypt, humanity + scholarship:
Molefi Asante and others are irrelevant. If you're not doing research with primary sources, no right to speak. Of course, Africa is characterized by much, much more than Kmt, but Kmt was a part of it: and whether black folk came from there or not -- and there's not reason why African's on the continent would, as Ann Macy Roth states look to Kmt, because it's respected by the West, when they have little to no contact with the West (i.e. It shouldn't be in their oral histories, see Peul, Songhay, Baasaa, Wolof) -- we're still who we are (that is, human).

The point of reclaiming history is to know who we are and frame our existence (Furr's point about not taking pride in our ancestors was obviously asinine). If we don't expand the discourse about African history in a meaningful way; that is learning Arabic, saving those documents and researching Kmt, oral histories, meanings behind symbols, anthropological work on pre-colonial religious practices, etc, then we've missed the boat. The truth is always better than any fantasy we could ever kick up: we owe it to our children, ourselves and our ancestors to get it right.

Romanticizing about anything is backwards. Too many of us get caught up in focusing on white folk to the point that we lose ourselves and feel that we have to evoke civilization in order to feel human. White folk ain't that important; our children are. Asante needs to feel himself relevant, so he writes his own holiday into the historical narrative. Where's the scholarship in that?

Fact is though, if we don't do the work, then cats like him get to speak 1) because he is speaking, 2) because white folk like seeing it and, 3) because it's easy for white folk to beat down. Hence we get the short end of the stick by not hittin' these cats up -- intellectually. Just prove his points wrong and move on. Or don't bother and move on anyway. Asante will always find an audience though, even among black folks because there are people who need to feel -- there's a void there. Our responsibility is to take care of that -- it's what we've been trained to do.

We have to move beyond the discourse on Afrocentrism in our work. We can point it out as fallacious, but the work has to be geared to another frontier. Otherwise folks are speaking for "us" who are really in the end only speaking for themselves. It also gives white folk the tools to beat down our self concept in front of those among us who don't have the acumen to know better, which is the true shame in all of this.

On rural living and the need for direct identity:
As Diop continually reiterates, the point of historical research is the reconstruction of historical consciousness. Example: my most profound experiences in Senegal were in the village. If anyone wants to know how African we are, just talk so someone rural. It's seriously eery to hear something and literally feel like you're amongst family members. I can't explain it. My friend just got back from Guinea and was mentioning to me how folks there did the same song and dance (i.e. catch the spirit, fall out and be covered with cloths) rituals there as black folks here do in church. I think the ultimate point of understanding where you come from is to be, historically, but really through that, spiritually grounded. Not knowing where we're from creates a serious void. Folk can chose their own paths as they please, but it's the feeling connected to something that's key. Right now we're connected to a thing we don't want to be associated with, and that's a dangerous/suicidal combination.

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Huey Newton's Doctoral Dissertation

2016-10-08T12:00:00.002-04:00

Info: "[Huey] Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) earned a bachelor's degree from UC Santa Cruz in 1974. He was enrolled as a graduate student in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz in 1978, when he arranged to take a reading course from famed evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, while in prison. He and Trivers became close friends. [...] Newton earned a Ph.D. in history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980. His doctoral dissertation was entitled 'War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America.' Later, Newton's widow, Frederika Newton, would discuss her husband's often-ignored academic leanings on C-SPAN's "American Perspectives" program on February 18, 2006."

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On Tim Dog, gangs, community and organization.

2016-10-08T11:19:00.000-04:00

This video came up in a recent discussion about Crips and Bloods in 2008 New York as we were reminiscing about the days when they didn't belong here. I'm originally from the Midwest so Tim Dog was not on my radar really. I was too busy getting jumped for claiming that I was a GD when I really wasn't, and pedaling my bike 10 times faster than normal because I was in the 40s blocks with red on instead of green, or in the 30s blocks with blue on instead of red.

Also of interest is something that relates to another recent discussion I had with friends -- the mention of "kings" in the entry below on the Folk Nation. We talked the other day about how black men are like little "kings" with no confederacy, often incapable of working together due to ego, and, because of this, a resorting to a tendency to utilize the services of women more often than not, in forming, growing and maintaining organizations and/or ideas. Not because black men manipulate women all the time, but because women tend to be less egotistical and thus more willing to contribute to another's vision. Look at the organization "US", look at the "Black Panther Party".

I guess street gangs appear to be operated by men but I assume they are held together by women in vital economic roles such as drug running and prostitution, and of course drug customers. Going to have to think on that one some more. Our conclusion the other night though was that it's going to take some creative ways to harness the power of the black male ego -- to tone it down while preserving the positive aspects of it -- to really get us working together and organizing without being threatened by each other or feeling like working with each other waters down our personal "kingdom"/destiny -- you know brothers, the one your mama always told you was yours if you worked hard enough for it.

In some ways I think we have to forsake the pride of our mothers who blow up our heads larger than they should ever be blown, in order to work together. Are we willing to practice diplomacy among each other and make compromises in order to build community? Or will we continue to pursue our personal kingdoms because we see anyone outside of our friendship circles as threats?

Folk Nation (wiki)
"After the split each leader was considered a king in his own right. Each having loyalty to the national rules, but following only their set king."

People Nation (wiki)
"Many of the African American gangs adopted an Islamic religious doctrine, while many Latin gangs in the People alliance adopted a Catholic one."

Latin Kings (wiki)
"Latin King documents reveal a man by the name "Gino Gustavo Colon" (a.k.a. Lord Gino) is considered the "SUN" of the Almighty Latin King Nation in Chicago and has been for a long time. Latin King headquarters is located on Beach and Spaulding in Northwest Chicago. Luis Felipe created his version of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation "manifesto" based on teachings he had picked up from his time in Chicago, the "motherland." Felipe designated himself as Inca and Supreme Crown. In 1995 Antonio Fernandez was designated Inca and Supreme Crown of New York State and New Jersey, and the ALKQN once again began a transformation."

Gangster Disciples (wiki)
"The Gangster Disciples began with Larry Hoover who entered and rose through the ranks of the Chicago gang circuit in the 1960s and took control of the gang in 1974 by leading a series of increasingly powerful alliances.[1] He ran the gang from prison until he was transferred to a higher security wing in the 1990s. Hoover was born in Jackson, Mississippi on November 30, 1950. He moved to Chicago with his family in 1955. At the age of 16, Hoover joined a gang of 50 older youths called the Supreme Gangsters. Hoover and his Supreme Gangsters hung around their neighborhood at the corner of 68th and Green Street in impoverished Englewood on the South Side of Chicago. Hoover was kicked out of high school on the first day of his sophomore year in 1965, after being shot in the thigh by a rival gang member."

Bloods (wiki)
"While being great rivals to the blue-color Crips, the Bloods goes all the way back to the 1970s, where the Pirus street gang, originally a set or faction of the Crips[6][7], broke off during the 1970s internal gang war and founded the gang that would eventually become known as the Bloods. Therefore, the Pirus are considered to be the original founders of the Bloods."

Crips (wiki)
"The Crips are a primarily, but not exclusively, African American gang founded in Los Angeles, California in 1969 mainly by 16-year-old Raymond Washington and Stanley "Tookie" Williams. Stanley "Tookie" Williams, generally acknowledged as co-founder of the Crips,[9] started his own gang called the Westside Crips. The Crips became popular throughout southern Los Angeles as more youth gangs joined; at one point they outnumbered non-Crip gangs by 3 to 1, sparking disputes with non-Crip gangs, including the L.A. Brims, Athens Park Boys, the Bishops, and the Denver Lanes. Along with friends, Stanley Williams and Raymond Washington created the initial intent of continuing the revolutionary ideology of the 1960s. These aspirations were unattainable because of a general lack of political leadership and guidance. Washington and Williams were never able to develop an agenda for social change within the community and instead became obsessed with protecting themselves from other gangs in the community. By 1971 the gang's notoriety had spread across Los Angeles. The gang became increasingly violent as they attempted to expand their turf. By the early 1980s the gang was heavily involved with drug trade."

Black P. Stones (wiki)
Black P. Stones, originally Black Stone Rangers, are a gang that formed in the area of Blackstone Avenue and Sixty-sixth Place in the Woodlawn area of the South Side of Chicago.[1] In later years, a quasi-Islamic faction of the gang emerged, naming themselves the El Rukn tribe of the Moorish Science Temple in America (or simply El Rukns), under their 'religious leader' and Blackstone Rangers founder Abdullah-Malik (born Jeff Fort)[2]. The BPSN has managed to finance itself through a wide array of criminal activities and are also part of the large Chicago-based gang alliance known as the People Nation.[3] The Black P. Stones' main rivals are the Gangster Disciples, and to a lesser degree, the Black Disciples. They are rivals to all Folk Nation gangs, white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Brotherhood, and white power skinheads. Their allies are the Vice Lords, Latin Kings and other People Nation Gangs, Black Separatist Groups, Zulu Nation, Five Percenters, the Bloods, the Chicago Outfit. There are 9 BPS branches in Chicago: Gangster Stones, King Stones, Jet Black Stones, Rubinite Stones, Familia Stones, Puerto Rican Stones, Corner Stones, and Black P. Stones.

Vice Lords (wiki)
The Almighty Vice Lord Nation (abbreviated AVLN, VLN or CVLN) is the second largest and one of the oldest street gangs in Chicago.[1] Their total membership is estimated to be more than 120,000. They are also one of the founding members of the People Nation multi-gang alliance. In 1958, the Vice Lords "club" was founded by several African American youths originally from the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago. These youths met while incarcerated in the Illinois State Training School for Boys in St. Charles (also known as the St. Charles Juvenile Correctional Facility). At the time, they were led by founding member Edward "Pepalo" Perry.[1] The name is taken from the dictionary definition of "vice", meaning "to have a tight hold".[1]
As the original Vice Lords group were released from incarceration, they quickly began to recruit other African American youths from their neighborhood and began engaging in conflicts with other "clubs" from various Chicago neighborhoods.[1] By 1964, they had grown significantly and law enforcement named them as a primary target for their various illegal activities, including robbery, theft, assaults, battery, intimidation, and extortion.[1] They were noted for their violent behavior and were feared throughout the Lawndale neighborhood.

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After maroonage... On that process of disengaging

2016-10-08T10:50:00.000-04:00

As an unexpected treat, Nikki just so happened to have posted an article from ProudFlesh Journal in which the author speaks of disengagement and how so called "lower income" and "less educated" black folks ("disconnected" black people, as the New York Times calls it) are more and more realizing that we cannot live out our proper way of life -- not even in the shadows of maroonage -- in this modern "slave society" that I call euro-judeo-Christian capitalist civilization, which I say knowing that there is an african judeo-Christian tradition (not saying you need to call it that though, just helps me be clear).

[2-day liberatormagazine.com featured story]

Here's an excellent excerpt from the piece Nikki posted that reminds those of us striving to be "in tune" that we're heading in the right direction. According to a New York Times article cited in the essay below, so called "lower income" or so called "less educated" black people, who I consider some of the strongest in the tradition of urban African resistance in America, are beginning to "disengage" from this modern slave society. Or, as the article says specifically, they are "leaving New York City, the epicenter of global capital exploitation, for more space and family roots," citing the recent historic decline of New York City's black population growth as evidence.

That sentence hit me like a rainbow, especially since I've been feeling this intense itch -- starting with this post (link) -- to discuss how family and community is built in the intentional experience, as oppose to the reactionary (but necessary) maroon experience.

Now, the way I see it, if my knowledge of history and our people's struggles shows us that the strategy of trying to transform these epicenters of global capital exploitation through engagement has pretty much failed, in 2009, I'm going to take my ancestors' experiences and learn a lesson from them. I think I'm increasingly see that the lesson to be learned here is that true freedom cannot be found here in these epicenters of global capital exploitation.

That my inclination is in sync with black migration trends makes me extremely happy and gives me an enormous amount of hope that we as a people are moving in the right direction, despite our losing many over to the pitfalls of modern slave society and its "global capital exploitation" way of life. Those of us in tune with this trend should be happy because this reminds us that we haven't lost what it means to be in that proud African/indigenous tradition in our American existence and separation from home. Ultimately, that's where I want to be -- in tune with THAT spirit of resistance. I think there will always be those of us who choose to salvage a maroon existence whose time has come. But the nature of maroonage is also that it is always changing. Like the nomad, unlike the agriculturist, the maroon does not build stable, sustainable community.

I don't care to knock the nomadic maroon existence. I'm just realizing it's not for me. I'm increasingly seeing the urban capitalist existence for our people as an idea whose time has passed.

What I love about the piece Nikki shared is that it articulates that the transition from maroon back to the indigenous must be a process rather than an instantaneous phenomenon. That is important to understand. That articulation also leaves room for us to be at different points in our transition, or for us to remain at different points, and form different identities, as well. Some may choose to follow the path of return to the indigenous fully. Some of us may choose to follow it half way. Some of us may choose to not follow it at all and to continue on the path of trying to transform and salvage a society of "global capital exploitation".

The most important thing, I think, is that we all make a conscious choice for ourselves and live, unregretful, with our choice:

"[...] The phenomenon that is incorrectly called “disconnectedness” is, upon closer analysis, in fact disengagement, the active self-removal from a society as a means of self-defense and collective survival. Understanding that the dominant power structure is antithetical to collective Black community, Black people in the United States are disengaging. This Black disengagement, motivated by a desire for a more complete and collective existence, is rooted in a radical legacy that dates back to, and even pre-dates, New World chattel slavery. Cedric Robinson, in Black Marxism: the Making of the Black Radical Tradition, writes:

"[...] the more fundamental impulse of Black resistance was the preservation of a particular social and historical consciousness rather than the revolutionary transformation of feudal or merchant capitalist Europe . . . This perhaps is part of the explanation of why, so often, black slave resistance naturally evolved to marronage as the manifestation of the African’s determination to disengage, to retreat from contact. To reconstitute the community, Black radicals took to the bush, to the mountains, to the interior. Where we cannot retreat to such far off locations, we find means of disengagement."

But disengagement is not a clear and definitive break. It is a process by which one first recognizes the contradictions of the system under which s/he finds her or himself, and then proceeds to transform her or his reality to one more in accordance with her or his moral standards. It includes the self-distancing from said society in the quest for an alternate one. It must be underscored, once again, that disengagement is a process.

When the teenagers with whom I work at Rikers Island, New York City’s largest penal colony, expound upon the inadequacies of this power structure, cite countless injustices found in the criminal justice system, demonstrate a deep awareness and understanding of the racist underpinnings of their detainment, and then proceed to glorify the merciless attainment of material goods by any means, thereby validating the system they just rebuked, it should come as no surprise. The current racial capitalist/imperialist power structure is one that imposes limits upon the imagination as a means of preserving hegemony. In many instances, we cannot imagine ourselves outside of the current system, for we have not yet gained the vocabulary to articulate nor the tools to construct that which we seek. As the process of disengagement matures, however, the vocabulary to purport a vision is developed, which the collective then becomes ready to enact.

[...] Unfortunately, what we do not always see in Black youth culture are articulated and productive alternatives.

Further evidence of this disengagement can be found in another recent New York Times article reporting a significant shift in the Black population of New York City. The article states that “an accelerating exodus of American-born blacks, coupled with slight declines in birthrates and a slowing influx of Caribbean and African immigrants, have produced a decline in New York City's black population for the first time since the draft riots during the Civil War...”9 In search of more space, lower cost of living, and family roots, a large share of migrants leaving not only the city, but the region, and heading for the South are ‘lower income’ and ‘less educated,’ the same population cited in the earlier article as being “disconnected.” Black people are leaving New York City, the epicenter of global capital exploitation, for more space and family roots. We are disengaging from urban centers and then moving to environments that facilitate an improved quality of life and connect us to our family traditions. What plight are these studies referring to?

Above all else, disengagement is a source of hope, as it demonstrates that, even in the height of State repression, Black people are still resisting white hegemony, that we have still not yet been conquered by a society that has nothing more to offer us than urban death chambers, rural peonage, imprisonment, and enslavement. It is not hopelessness. It is intelligence, the comprehension that this society has nothing for us. Of course the New York Times, as a tool of white supremacy, would publish these academic findings. Who knows? Perhaps it will generate funds for NGO’s who will implement programs which only serve to disillusion, deceive, and misguide Black people by teaching them the errors of their ways and upholding mainstream (read: white supremacist) cultural values. Disengagement is one means through which the space is created to enable us to discuss the terms of our realities, plot and plan. It is a collective understanding that the current order is not working. We are slowly coming to realize that what we need can only be found in our own traditions and experiences.

With this, we disengage.

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Polygamy. A realistic solution?

2016-10-08T00:46:00.000-04:00

Got an email about Polygamy today from a reader sharing her thoughts on the subject. After reading up on it, she wondered if a modified version of the practice might be an immediate solution to some of the broken homes our communities have.

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

She specifically mentioned an example where perhaps a father has children by different women yet those women choose to get along and foster and cultivate their relationships with each other for the purpose of making sure the children feel at home even when they are with their "step" mothers. In fact, I'm sure this type of thing happens pretty regularly already.

I would assume the reverse of this would also be something to consider, although the majority of these type of multi-parent situations that I know of involve woman sharing a common link to one man. But given the incarceration rates (or should I say the unjust incarceration laws) affecting black men, this is no surprise to me.

Like she suggests, I don't think that actually sharing a husband sexually and financially would work in this society unless the practice was shielded by a sub-culture/cult bubble from the mainstream norms. But I can definitely see the fundamental concept -- multi-parents who share a common father or mother making those ties of accountability stronger to each other.

So maybe the women wouldn't all want to get married to a brother, but perhaps they might define for themselves a higher definition or title for the relationship than "baby mama" as to hold each other accountable for each person's and the collective responsibility in raising ALL of the children in the circle, even if they don't belong to a certain individual in the group, they might belong to the group collectively.

Here's what she had to say [I edited out names, etc]:

B, I stumbled upon a blog last week about Polygamy, it's African and biblical origins and as a possible alternative for single parent homes so prevalent today and breakdown of the black family in western culture.

Reading what everyone had to say was really interesting and got me thinking a lot deeper on the subject.

Perhaps a modified version... could be the cure for the destruction of the black family unit in today's society.

At first when I read it, I was like... hell nah, that's some crazy waco cult mess. Then I thought about my current situation...

Neither of us are "married" to him but the three of us are bonded as a parental unit and have the common goal of love, nurturing and growin him into a man... Which in theory loosely resembles a polygamist union. Food for thought...

Some of the stuff... is way out, but the basic idea of it (minus the sharing of a "husband" by more than one woman) can't be ignored as we all strive to regain and redefine the "village" culture in the western society.

I think it would spark an interesting debate for the Liberator blog.

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Tupac = Bob Marley?

2016-10-04T22:42:00.000-04:00

This interview definitely resonates when you retrospectively think of the "icons" in today's music. I'm not confident that anyone in popular music right now is as in-tune with themselves, their actions, the times, and their surroundings as much as Tupac Shakur was. Does that deem today's artists cowardice? Is it because they're Pop? Tupac's music matriculated in and out of pop culture. Is fear a safe argument? Or that today's artists are simply uninformed?

Music has always been known as an ancient medium used to support, strengthen, and transform peoples energies, especially in times of despair, such as during a recession, depression, wave of unemployment, endless war, and of course all of the other things that a sociologist can assure will manifest as a result of a society being struck by the aforementioned conditions.

In high school I read about scientists being able to test the effects on plant growth in an environment where music is played and an environment where there is no music. After numerous tests, it was concluded that the plants exposed to music grew quicker, or proved to carry stronger growth patterns than the plants unexposed to music... of course I'm sure the plants were watered at the same rate, shared an equivalent light intensity.

Applying this to human beings, classical music is said to enhance mathematical apprehension, but there is an increased complexity when considering what's actually being verbalized, because we're then dealing with more than just sound. The sound is more organized and language creates a reality where two sounds can sound the same but mean two entirely different things. Songs are mantras. Some may prove uplifting, others destructive. It's all perception. It all can be dependent on who's listening, or what type of plant is growing. That's the benefit of being a superior species, I guess. Not tryin' to drop science here, I'm just saying. What are we listening too?

As critical as American media and the black bourgeoisie can be about Tupac, it's no question that the guy was not only incredibly intelligent but threateningly prophetic. I was 12 when he died and swore his death was a result of "gangster rap violence"... it rattled my thinking when an elder head whispered to me, "They killed him because he was the next Bob Marley... he was going to be the next Malcolm." Almost 10 years later and in college, I began to see what that really meant.

You know, I got a firm belief in the power of questioning. I think man's ability to question separates her/him from any other known life source, NOT because s/he is upright... someone can still play the upright to decide what sound its going to make and when. So if I do get inked up, it'll probably look something like this:

"How long will they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?"

It's just a question, but we all know some of the most critical lives in the history of civilization were taken simply due to exercising their innate, God-given, human-survival impulse to question.

Originally Posted 4/28/2009

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The Greatest Love Song Ever / Stevie Wonder’s Key of Life

2015-10-08T12:00:00.000-04:00

Let me summarize in 1960s sci-fi terms: Stevie Wonder (Steveland Morris) set out on a “mission” like a “mad scientist” to “invent” the “greatest love song” ever. After the rise of the gangsta rap aesthetic, it should sound strange to a twenty-something in the year 2007 to imagine a time in pop music when self-described Black recording artists (with a capital B) would compete against each other with love songs. Just imagine gangs of Black dudes trying to out love one another! What is sad is that today’s youth would more accept the possibility of a singer or a rapper competing with knowledge of ballistics, vehicles, jewelry or food rather than this thing called “love.”

So, back in the day, Stevie Wonder lived and thrived in what is now the ‘alien’ world of the “love” song. And when Songs in the Key of Life was released September 1976, the opinion here is that our “mad scientist” achieved his goal in the form of a song called “As” (on CD disk 2, track 6). You see, one too many self-described Black pop artists in the 1970s put on African costumes and inconvenient disco boots—but few barely could see the nature of African consciousness. The poetic irony is that a blind man in America could catch a glimpse of the ancient African Old Kingdom. When you need the white executive summary of what ancient Africa was all about, the short answer is this: Africa was about the complex, technical challenge of populating the Earth in a responsible manner. So ‘we’ properly-trained Americans know about the “great” Space Race—‘we’ even accept the slang “rocket scientist” without a thought. Well, the great-society mission of our Africans of the Old Kingdom was being fruitful and multiplying.

You have to read his lyrics to understand that Stevie Wonder is not singing about sexual intercourse. His powerful ancient message is that “loving” you is correct—quintessentially righteous.

Since it seems so easy for say, roaches or other vermin to breed and multiply ‘we’ as imperial minions may erroneously assume that developing humans from scratch is easy, simple—something “dumb” animals do. This is an imperial assumption because it is relatively easy to invade a preexisting “enemy” territory with indigenous, developed civilization, murder all the guys and steal all the girls. But what happens when there is no one ‘else’ to steal from? What do you do when you come from a cultural memory that is so ancient that there was no revolutionary concept of the ‘other’? What happens is sort of like the “love” that Stevie Wonder sang about in his song “As.” You have to read his lyrics to understand that Stevie Wonder is not singing about sexual intercourse. His powerful ancient message is that “loving” you is correct—quintessentially righteous. To not “love” you means nature, itself, is no longer existing as that which was previously set in place. No so-called “love” means the universe no longer ‘knows’ itself. Stevie Wonder begins:

As around the sun the earth knows she’s revolving.
And the rosebuds know to bloom in early May.
Just as hate knows love’s the cure,
you can rest your mind assured
that I’ll be loving you always.

As now can’t reveal the mystery of tomorrow.
But in passing will grow older every day.
Just as all is born is new.
Do know what I say is true,
that I’ll be loving you always.

Until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky—always
until the ocean covers every mountain high—always
until the dolphin flies and parrots live at sea—always
until we dream of life and life becomes a dream.

Since the language you are reading now intends to inherit from Greek “genius,” we should remember that the Greek language has about five words for different kinds of “love.” Your local, Baptist pastor might have let you know about agape “love.” Certainly, Stevie Wonder knew he had to clarify himself on this “love” thing. So he goes on to say:

Did you know that true love asks for nothing?
Her acceptance is the way we pay.
Did you know that life has given love a guarantee
to last through forever and another day?

When my eye sees “life has given love a guarantee,” a reference to Biological Altruism pops out. This casual intersection between so-called “art” and science makes this “art” work more powerful to me—and more educational for young people. This is a far cry from hollow-point/mercury-tipped bullets and Cristal!

Now, Stevie Wonder, in the tradition of the Blues goes on to repeat himself as his song continues. But, as in the wise tradition of the Blues, each successive repetition is different (this is the unity of changing changelessness—the Unmoved Mover). No digital sampling loops here! So, in addition to expressing the correctness of his “love,” in his next succession he reveals his awareness of himself and his mortality:

Just as time knew to move on
since the beginning
and the seasons know exactly
when to change.

Just as kindness knows no shame,
know through all your joy and pain
that I’ll be loving you always.

As today I know I’m living
but tomorrow
could make me the past
—but that I mustn’t fear.
For I’ll know deep in my mind,
the love of me I’ve left behind,
’cause I’ll be loving you always…

It would not surprise me to find that Stevie Wonder was directly inspired by Martin Luther King, his speech, when he says at the Mason Temple in Memphis, “I might not get there with you, but I want you to know, tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land!” Remember that Stevie Wonder lived in a time when a man like Martin Luther King was a part of pop culture. In this time of Rupert Murdoch, this historical fact must be seen as impossibility. So it’s only natural that Wonder would ‘answer’ this King impossibility by saying, “I mustn’t fear… The love of me I’ve left behind…” Once Stevie Wonder begins to ‘speak beyond the grave’—that is, have an open, honest (and relatively courageous) relationship with his mortality, a traditional African conversation begins.

But Stevie Wonder knows that he is talking to a traditionally oppressed people with these lyrics. Yes, his music is meant for “everyone”—but when he poly-rhythmically interjects, “Did you know that you’re loved by somebody?” in the middle of talk about the gravitational pull on “trees and seas” and elementary mathematical expressions, he is addressing the suffering of an oppressed people using Baptist-church-style choir leading (ministering) that is very Black and very much from the African experience in America:

Until the day is night and night becomes the day—always
until the trees and seas just up and fly away—always
until the day that 8×8×8 is 4—always
until the day that is the day that are no more—

Did you know that you’re loved by somebody?

Until the day the earth starts turning right to left—always
until the earth just for the sun denies itself—

I’ll be loving you forever.

Until dear Mother Nature says her work is through—always
Until the day that you are me and I am you—always

Eventually, the repetition of the word “always” inspires Stevie Wonder to make the sound of the word take on the meaning of the word. This, again, is very African (and may sound weird to a modern European ear trained in the “classical” sense of the ordered, sedate music commissioned by the imperial elites without Mozart, Beethoven or Mahler). The strong opinion here is that it does not respect Stevie Wonder, his work, enough to simply try to write out how he sings the word “always”—it is best for you to be there in the song to listen to what he means. Stevie Wonder is singing for an organized purpose beyond demonstrating that he is capable of singing. The previous sentence may seem obvious but too many pop singers forget this option.

And when we listen we notice that the chorus ‘behind’ Stevie Wonder is dominated by Black female voices. My ignorant guess is that Stevie Wonder used this design because of “dear Mother Nature” mentioned earlier. When we discover that my ignorance is actually accurate then we have yet another example of a Black man ‘accidentally’ drawing from his ancient African roots. Because the wisdom of the Old Kingdom tells us that all matter is of female. And, when we dig for a deep and profound effect, we may uncover that the form sitting next to the throne is female—and this throne represents phenomenal consciousness itself. Now dig this: the symbol of the woman next to the throne is an Old Kingdom word with a sound that almost sounds like “As,” the title of Stevie Wonder’s song! But let me stop my indulgent digression as Stevie Wonder’s “As” lyrics continues. He gets very low down to urban earth, addressing my traditionally oppressed people directly:

We all know
sometimes life’s hates and troubles
can make you wish you were born
in another time and space.

But you can bet your life
times that and twice its double
that God knew exactly where
he wanted you to be placed.

So make sure when you say
you’re in it but not of it
you’re not helping to make this Earth
a place sometimes called “Hell.”

It’s seems to be a fad over the last few post-modern years to find prototypical examples of hip hop and rapping. Many credit James Brown, Teena Marie and many others from before the 1990s. And here comes Stevie Wonder in 1976 with his unique outburst of rapping that is punctuated with the incredible rapid-fire staccato in, “You’re not helping to make this Earth a place sometimes called Hell.” Again, of course, you have to hear it to respect it justly.

And because Stevie Wonder is so, well, wonderful, we may forget that there can be a great deal of psychological trauma associated with being blind. This should put more weight upon the words, “God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed.” Would not many a blind man question his God for “making” him blind? So there has to be more going on here. And what follows next is definitely, profoundly more:

Change your words into truths
and then change that truth into love.
And maybe our children’s grandchildren
and their great-great grandchildren will tell.

These words represent the heart of the message in “As.” The hard work of the song ends here. The rest of the music is a celebration of itself. The exquisite orderly arrangement simply functions according to the established rules from here. This is the divine by-product of what ‘we’ call creativity. Why should the hard work end here? What just happened? For me, what just happened is with the question, ‘How can our distant descendants (our great-great grandchildren) tell that we “love” them?’ Another, similar question would be, ‘How can our distant descendants tell that we understood and incarnated universal/natural law?’

In a Western imperial context, this question is a mere rhetorical luxury item to throw away at the end of some eulogy, novel or play. It is a quaint candy of fleeting nobility. But when you are faced with the real problem of developing humans from scratch this question needs a real answer. In the Old Kingdom of Africa, the answer is literally on a monumental scale—and this is all I’m going to write about this right now so that we don’t get too far away from Stevie Wonder’s reality. His song is a modern monument to his sincere concern for our descendants of the human family general—and definitely the African family in particular (which sounds redundant from a particular musical point of view). Would you dare to answer the question that Stevie Wonder implicitly proposed over 20 years ago: ‘How can our distant descendants tell that we “love” them?’

I daresay that most of ‘us’ are more likely to ask a relatively selfish question no healthy child should ever ask, “Do you love me?” But within Stevie Wonder’s weird, alien, “love” song, such a question means about two things: the person asking the question is disconnected from nature (the universe) and in this naked insecurity must ask such a question—or the person is asking the question of a person who is similarly naked. Such a situation of nakedness leads me to Genesis 3:11 with a Divine Voice asking, “Who told thee that thou wast naked?” Most of ‘us’ cannot answer that divine question because what we listen to is not always noticed or remembered—for the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field (the Africans of the Old Kingdom established a symbolic relationship between a kind of serpent and the act of listening—weird eh? And another kind of serpent is associated with what ‘we’ now know as a manifestation of “evil.” Nature teaches us that there is more than one kind of serpent…).

Definitely, being “in it but not of it” does not help as this achieves disconnected individualism that blocks out any authentic concern for any distant descendants (or any ancient ancestors for that matter). Clearly, ‘us’ having no concern at all for even the basic laws of the natural world makes Stevie Wonder’s song ineffective and useless—and when I try to count the number of “nature lovers of color,” I keep coming up short. Right about now, most Black folks are caught up in an urban game in a jungle of concrete that is often confused with ancient stone. And what Black people in particular do, most people in general will do. This is why there are rock-n-roll bands in China, Jazz clubs in Amsterdam and hip-hop concerts in Istanbul.

Now imagine someone in an intimate moment around 1976 compelled to ask Stevie Wonder, “Do you love me?” What? Didn’t this person get a little from his message distributed by a record company all over the U.S.? Either, this famous musician is a terrible hypocrite or the person that got close enough to ask Stevie the question is a complete idiot! In such an imagined situation, we may begin to understand why Stevie Wonder might say to you that being world famous and called a “musical genius” gets tiring and sometimes quite lonely and painful when few or no one will engage you on the level of your creative expression. Surely, for a Black man like Stevie Wonder, artistic expression is meant to be communication—a conversation—not an ivory-tower lecture. (However, I reserve the right to be wrong about this…)

Would you dare to answer the question that Stevie Wonder implicitly proposed over 20 years ago: ‘How can our distant descendants tell that we “love” them?’

This incredible distance from Stevie Wonder’s highest esoteric achievements breeds a lack of serious, intimate study of Stevie Wonder the artist. As of this writing, the only contemporary book that looks remotely promising is Stevie Wonder: Rhythm of Wonder by Sharon Davis. Surely there must have been more than a few archived magazine articles from back in the days when Stevie Wonder was a “new sensation” saved somewhere… I refuse to believe that there are not more serious studies out there…

By the way, our study of the African Old Kingdom informs us that there was no word for what ‘we’ now call “love.” Sounds harsh, cold, inscrutable—non-Shakespearean? Certainly you may somehow read something translated from the Old Kingdom that uses the word “love” but transliteration is different from translation. Stevie Wonder can explain so directly with his song “As” why there would be no need to have a word, “love.” In “As,” Stevie Wonder tells us that to not “love” means the universe is no longer functioning correctly. So what’s the point of having a word for it? Are we planning for a day that is the day of no more? Don’t we have better things to do than to get ready for the end of doing? What can you do when all existence ends?

To see the use of “love” as a rhetorical loophole for justifying and indoctrinating “hate” definitely should seem very strange to a native English speaker. It also makes no sense to a “normal” person (who assumes the dialectical is natural) to imagine that a world without the word “love” might possibly be all “love” (this gives new meaning to the hip-hop-era quip, “It’s all good.”). And a world of all “love” is kind of like an Eden… What! Just imagine gangs of Black dudes trying to out love one another… So it’s best to stop these words now before it gets so “weird” that even Stevie Wonder won’t want to follow me…

But it must be said that “As” is truly the “greatest love song” I have ever claimed to understand. It transcends the boundaries of romantic, traditional “love,” making a “love” beyond “love.” I would dare to call this work authentic Christian music, a family stone without the ligaments for concrete religion.

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by Bryan Wilhite (The Liberator Magazine #21)

Originally Posted 9/25/2007

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"The nauseating stench that oozes from the wound" / In Defense of Chris Brown

2015-10-04T23:50:00.001-04:00

“Let’s pray for him.” These words tumbled sarcastically out of my BFF’s mouth a couple of weeks ago during a routinely short phone conversation. The subject of our conversation—the ‘him’ in question—was Chris Brown, who just hours earlier, had concluded the public relations disaster that was his appearance on “Good Morning America” with Robin Roberts. Yes, let’s bow our heads.

As a preemptive strike against the barrage of rage-filled responses likely to follow this post, let me clarify my stance: this is not an essay condoning Brown’s arguably immature angst-filled outburst, or those of similarly volatile men who, like Brown, have committed vile acts of aggression towards women. By all accounts, the data that details the myriad of ways in which violence towards us, as women, is perpetuated by male figures in our lives is grim. In her essay, “Feminist Focus on Men: A Comment,” bell hooks reports that “half of all married women are victims of male violence, one girl in four is a victim of male incest, one woman in three is raped.” Those of us who have nursed a sistah, a sister, a mother, a daughter, an aunt—or ourselves—back to health following a physical and/or emotional assault recognize that behind each sobering statistic is a bruised face, a broken bone, a ravaged body, a splintered self, or a shattered soul.

But if we, as black people, choose not to look carefully at the type of monster that Brown represents, the trope that he embodies—if we fail to ask ourselves about his origins and motivations, if we refuse to question why and how he has survived in our midst—then we’re likely to continue to generate, in our private and public interactions, the very fodder that allows him to survive and appear masked and disguised as our brothers, boyfriends, husbands, fathers, and sons.

At 21, Brown has just grazed the precipice of black manhood within the confines of a society where black men and black women occupy two different social planets, each spinning on its own axis, traveling on its own orbit. Is it any wonder that from him emanates a childish aura that betrays his confusion? Hair salons and nail shops are filled with pervasive chit-chatter about the shortage of black men, period; ‘good ones,’ it seems, are a relic. In those spaces, there are abundant testimonies offered as indisputable evidence that ‘niggas ain’t shit.’

Somewhere along this lonely road to Damascus, public discourse on black male-female relationships has stalled. It’s stuck between DC socialite turned—dear God, help us all—self-declared relationship guru Helena Andrews’ Bitch is the New Black, and thrice married comedian turned self-appointed relationship-guru Steve Harvey’s Think Like a Lady and Act Like a Man. A perfunctory glance at excerpts from these texts will reveal this to even the casual reader: both authors offer instructions on whom, when, and how to date (or not), and yet neither explicitly tells us how to love. The difference between the two worlds is substantial.

Chris Brown personifies the nauseating stench that oozes from the wound housed in our individual and shared experiences as black men and women. Yes, he is not entirely of our making—the wound that he represents has been exacerbated by centuries of emasculation, and prolonged physical and mental enslavement, the reasons for and consequences of which are better elaborated on by historians and sociologists. But he is ours.

I’m applying war paint on my face, planting my feet firmly on the ground, and standing staunchly by Chris Brown. After all, he is my brother, boyfriend, husband, father, and son—he is my other; therefore, his wounds are my wounds, and vice versa. If I—as his sister, girlfriend, wife, mother, and daughter—don’t love him back from the brink of implosion, then who will? If I, as a black woman, can’t will him back to life, then who can? Yes, let’s pray to Nyasaye, Mungu, Ngai, Yesu Christo, and all others we call God for him—let’s pray that he retreats into solitude and finds healing for and respite from the pain that is searing through his soul. And let’s pray the same for ourselves.

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by Nyaugenya

(Originally Posted 4/7/2011)

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Speak, So You Can Speak Again

2015-10-04T23:49:00.000-04:00

Pull up Michael Jackson's first Moonwalk. Incredible concert, huh? I mean this is MJ’s coming out party, the day he dazzled the world. His performance was so arresting comedian Richard Pryor is alleged to have declared it “the great performance [he’d] ever seen.”

And what did the man of the hour think of his act...

/////“I remember doing the performance so clearly, and I remember that I was so upset with myself, cause it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted it to be more.”/////

It appears MJ was disappointed because he intended to hold the crouching position he assumed at the 3:43 mark for a teeny bit longer but was unable to maintain his balance. In criticizing his inability to execute this well-practiced move, MJ failed to appreciate how he effortlessly turned that “mistake” into a perfect 360’ turn that added another layer to an already rich assembly of dance moves.

Was the audience aware of this “costly” mistake? Judging from the feedback, it is safe to assume not. The entire conversation was taking place in Mike’s head. As humorous as Mike’s self-criticisms sounds in light of the performance, think about how many of us freeze up after sharing our creative work in a public setting over similar trivialities. I am not talking about building up the courage to do it initially. According to a [NY times article], starting is a relatively simple act for writers. I am referring to the moments after. The third article you submit to a magazine or the fourth blog posting you set out to write after receiving major accolades for the “brilliance” of the first three. Those days when your words appear jilted, flat, rhythm-less, unreflecting of the genius we imagine ourselves to posses. I think MJ’s self-criticisms are a fitting space to convene a discussion around writer’s block, but even more crucial, self-confidence. The following is a set of examples culled from the biography of MJ that has helped me manage those moments when self-doubt creeps in and interrupts the creative process.

1. Be in Conversation
Mike constantly shot his ideas past Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross. At 17, he asked and received permission from Stevie Wonder to observe him while Songs in the Key of Life was made. Being in conversation requires opening yourself to wisdom from elders by listening and sharing. As the great jazz musicians remind us, you can only improvise once you’ve mastered a subject. MJ was constantly in conversation, not only with his musical superiors but also his peers. "Billie Jean" and "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" were playful collaborations between him, his brother Randy and his sister Janet.

Sharing our work with others strips the ego of its power, particularly its selfish desire to keep thoughts contained within the mind. Artists will tell you that the recording process is usually a collective effort, with folk offering lines that support the artists’ lyrical intent. The same applies to book authors where a perusal of the acknowledgments section invariably features the author giving props to several colleagues and mentors for specific ideas or general theoretical directions. Being in conversation relieves you of trying to construct a masterpiece without a blueprint. No man lives on an island.

There is another crucial aspect of being in conversation illustrated in MJ’s life. As John Jeremiah Sullivan, the author of the insightful GQ article, “Back in the Day,” tells us, “Michael yearn[ed] for... competition.” While, “fading child stars can easily insulate themselves from further motivation, if they wish, and most do... Michael seeks pressure instead... He recruits people who can drive him to... higher effort.” In seeking this demanding mentorship, Michael placed himself in a position to continuously expand. I used to believe that the ultimate aim was to reach an adequate level of consistency and articulation that would then flat-line and require nothing more than simple maintenance. This belief contradicted the laws of nature. Either something is expanding or it is contracting. By committing oneself to growth, I am allowing myself to discover something new daily, from project to project, moment to moment. Now, there is no such pressure to reach a particular goal, a linear based model that discourages risking. The journey itself is the goal, and as such, precludes the need for judgment from the craft. Whether a particular writing is considered good or bad, the fundamental goal is to write, and that goal should operate as the exclusive measure of one’s ability. For Mike, staying in touch with his “childlike inner instrument” was essential. Children are always seeking a new adventure, even in seemingly old rituals. Identifying a level, or what he termed “big” music, always resulted in Mike’s worst production. Interestingly, Sullivan informs us he associated “big” music with military imagery.

2. Operating from a Perspective of Abundance.
I grew discouraged my senior year of college, actually really depressed by the biographies I was reading because it seemed the only success I could have was through “killing the father.” The scholars I admired all seemed to achieve their success by aggressively attacking those that preceded them. It was not until I read Jacob Carruthers Intellectual Warfare that I understood this intellectual patricide was a product of the Western tradition.

Through his work, I realized the source of my anxieties stemmed from the belief that my “shine” crowded out the possibility of another person's “shine.” It sprang from notions of scarcity, the idea that there was simply not enough light for everyone to bask in. Like the proverbial gunner on the basketball team, my forty points meant most of the other cats on my team would barely touch the rock.

Shifting the conversation however, I am discovering that there is more than enough light to go around—as long as I am in conversation. Unlike the ball hog example, an alternative representation is the drum line. The drummers keep the beat for the dancers as a unit. Still, there is a moment for each drummer to step up and showcase his/her individual talent before rejoining the drum line. In so doing, the drummer contributes to the overall music being played rather than takes away. This perspective is also more in tune with nature. To think that expressing yourself is taking away from someone else is an indication of alienation, the stubborn belief that there is a “you” disconnected from your surroundings that can actually take away. If all of the elements in the universe are present in you however, then your personal expression is a gift back to the universe. Mike, once again, instructs us:

/////“Deep inside I feel that this world we live in is really a big, huge, monumental symphonic orchestra. I believe that in its primordial form, all of creation is sound and that it’s not just random sound, that it’s music.”/////

This Is It
So, the short of this blog posting is to encourage writers and artists in general to keep at their craft, despite whatever misgivings we may encounter along the way. Mike’s self-criticisms did not deter him from continuing; it emboldened him to keep striving for excellence. The trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie put it this way: “the only wrong note is when you stop playing.” Anyone who had a chance to see the recent documentary on MJ, This Is It, will support Gillespie’s statement. This Is It was marketed as his final performance but what came across instead was the opportunity to observe someone who had mastered his craft to the point he embodied it. The “It” for Mike was his transcendence over his material self, to the point we witness his plucking notes out of the air. His physical self may have ceased but we get to see him depart his physical form before he physically departed the earth. We can all arrive at that point. The trick is to keep writing. Keep performing. Keep dancing. In the words of Zora Neale Hurston, "speak, so you can speak again."

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(Originally posted 11/18/2009)

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Paul Mooney: "If you had a revolution in California you'd have to kill half the black people there"

2015-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00

Mooney gives it honest and raw on Hollywood's brainwashing machine, the Elvis-Eminem-Al Jolson-Asher Roth phenomenon, black consciousness, intergenerational misunderstanding in our community, sell-outs, the allure of fame, definitions of success, how he fulfilled his life purpose, health versus wealth, "black Anglo-Saxons", and more.

Keep It On The (Download)

It's The End Of The World:

Analyzing White America:

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United African Alliance Community Center: An African Renaissance

2015-10-04T00:40:00.000-04:00

The Black Panther Party is said to have deteriorated nearly three decades ago however some of its original members continue to operate thousands of miles across the Atlantic. This summer a handful of Howard students had the opportunity to travel to Arusha, Tanzania for a three-week intensive Kiswahili language course. Between the 8-hour lectures and weekend Safaris the students managed to set aside time to pay homage to political activists and former members of the Black Panther Party, Mzee Pete O’Neal and Mama Charlotte O’Neal. Their compelling story serves as a testimony of the continued international legacy of the Black Panther Party.

In the fall of 1969 Pete O’Neal, the chairman and a founding member of the Kansas City chapter of the Black Panther Party, was arrested and charged with transporting a shotgun across state lines without a license. After repeated verbal threats from local police it became clear that a prison sentence would result in certain death.

O’Neal was tried and sentenced to four years in prison. While out on bail, armed with little more than the ideology of the Black Panther Party, Mzee O’Neal and his wife, Mama Charlotte O’Neal, fled to Algeria with their two children where they remained for two years before relocating to Tanzania in 1972, once a hotbed for Pan-African activity. During their time in Tanzania, they became actively involved in community development and in 1991 officially transformed their home into the United African Alliance Community Center.

Today the organization serves a community of more than 200 people. The single room dwelling that once served as their home has since been turned into a recording studio for local artists. In addition, the UAACC houses a dining hall, dormitory, classrooms, art studio, and computer lab where various English, art, and computer classes are taught all free of charge.

Aside from its various cultural and community events, the Center completed a major community water project, providing a continuous supply of fresh water to the surrounding community. The Center also facilitates student exchanges between Tanzanian and American university and high school students.

When asked about his and Mama Charlotte’s work in Tanzania Mzee O’Neal stated, "It's 100% a continuation of the work we were doing as members of the Black Panther Party without the politics - I never hesitate to tell people that. I am very proud of that history . . . We have taken it to another level by providing opportunities for education and enlightenment here in this setting. But it's the same spirit."

For the Howard University students, witnessing the impact of the O’Neal’s work in Arusha demonstrated the continued relevance of the Black Panther Party. One student noted, “It showed me you don’t need to be a high ranking USAID official or UN aid worker to make a difference. All you need is a solid ideological foundation rooted in the development of the community."

Almost 31 years later, Mzee O’Neal, still considered a U.S. fugitive, is unable to travel back to the United States. He continues to maintain his innocence and work with lawyers in hopes of being granted a repeal.

For more information on the United African Alliance Community Center and ways you can make a contribution visit the website at www.uaacc.habari.co.tz

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by Justin Dunnavant

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David Foster Wallace: on Reading

2015-10-04T00:38:00.000-04:00

"Reading requires sitting alone by yourself in a quiet room... I have friends -- intelligent friends -- who don't like to read because they get, it's not just bored, there's an almost dread that comes up I think, here, about having to be alone and in having to be quiet and you see that when you walk into most public spaces in America it isn't quiet anymore, they pipe music through... it seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet --ever -- any more..."

I came across this interesting bit from famed author David Foster Wallace after reading one of his (long) essays entitled E Unibus Pluram: Television and American Fiction wherein he meditates on the difficulty (if not the impossibility) that fiction writers have when it comes to competing with television in the attempt to entertain/stimulate/etc. American audiences.

In the video, he discusses the distaste many Americans have for reading "serious" works of literature as opposed to more "commercial" books.

DFW wrote two novels, The Broom and the System (1987) which was was a mild success and Infinite Jest (1996) which has pretty much been elevated to "Great American Novel" status. The second book is a 1,079 page (including footnotes) giant of what can briefly be described as meticulous and grandiose writing.

Sadly, DFW committed suicide in 2008, but a posthumous novel entitled The Pale King is due out some time soon.

Originally Posted 09/12/2010

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James Baldwin speaks / Black english

2015-10-04T00:32:00.000-04:00

Baldwin breaking it down! Yo, funny how this essay from 1979 says more about "stop snitchin", Imus, Cam'ron and Russell Simmons than ALL of the articles I've read PUT TOGETHER. Point blank period. This is what clear sight will do to ya. I think in some ways we are the generation that Baldwin speaks of when he says "a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white." And that August Wilson seems to be discussing in his new play "Radio Golf". We have an unpublished article by a contributing writer on Ebonics. The argument is sort of that if Black folks can establish that English is a second language, our kids might be more clear as to its usefulness--similar to a Spanish speaking kid who is encouraged to learn English as a survival tactic rather than a cultural socialization. Baldwin seems to suggest something similar in this essay--teaching us that Black language is a unique creation. And those who fight its recognition seek to take a profound power and recognition of history and struggle away from our people.

July 29, 1979
If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?
By James Baldwin

St. Paul de Vence, France--The argument concerning the use, or the status, or the reality, of black English is rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument supposes itself to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other--and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him.

People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. (And, if they cannot articulate it, they are submerged.) A Frenchman living in Paris speaks a subtly and crucially different language from that of the man living in Marseilles; neither sounds very much like a man living in Quebec; and they would all have great difficulty in apprehending what the man from Guadeloupe, or Martinique, is saying, to say nothing of the man from Senegal--although the "common" language of all these areas is French. But each has paid, and is paying, a different price for this "common" language, in which, as it turns out, they are not saying, and cannot be saying, the same things: They each have very different realities to articulate, or control.

What joins all languages, and all men, is the necessity to confront life, in order, not inconceivably, to outwit death: The price for this is the acceptance, and achievement, of one's temporal identity. So that, for example, thought it is not taught in the schools (and this has the potential of becoming a political issue) the south of France still clings to its ancient and musical Provencal, which resists being described as a "dialect." And much of the tension in the Basque countries, and in Wales, is due to the Basque and Welsh determination not to allow their languages to be destroyed. This determination also feeds the flames in Ireland for many indignities the Irish have been forced to undergo at English hands is the English contempt for their language.

It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identify: It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity. There have been, and are, times, and places, when to speak a certain language could be dangerous, even fatal. Or, one may speak the same language, but in such a way that one's antecedents are revealed, or (one hopes) hidden. This is true in France, and is absolutely true in England: The range (and reign) of accents on that damp little island make England coherent for the English and totally incomprehensible for everyone else. To open your mouth in England is (if I may use black English) to "put your business in the street": You have confessed your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future.

Now, I do not know what white Americans would sound like if there had never been any black people in the United States, but they would not sound the way they sound. Jazz, for example, is a very specific sexual term, as in jazz me, baby, but white people purified it into the Jazz Age. Sock it to me, which means, roughly, the same thing, has been adopted by Nathaniel Hawthorne's descendants with no qualms or hesitations at all, along with let it all hang out and right on! Beat to his socks which was once the black's most total and despairing image of poverty, was transformed into a thing called the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely, composed of uptight, middle- class white people, imitating poverty, trying to get down, to get with it, doing their thing, doing their despairing best to be funky, which we, the blacks, never dreamed of doing--we were funky, baby, like funk was going out of style.

Now, no one can eat his cake, and have it, too, and it is late in the day to attempt to penalize black people for having created a language that permits the nation its only glimpse of reality, a language without which the nation would be even more whipped than it is.

I say that the present skirmish is rooted in American history, and it is. Black English is the creation of the black diaspora. Blacks came to the United States chained to each other, but from different tribes: Neither could speak the other's language. If two black people, at that bitter hour of the world's history, had been able to speak to each other, the institution of chattel slavery could never have lasted as long as it did. Subsequently, the slave was given, under the eye, and the gun, of his master, Congo Square, and the Bible--or in other words, and under these conditions, the slave began the formation of the black church, and it is within this unprecedented tabernacle that black English began to be formed. This was not, merely, as in the European example, the adoption of a foreign tongue, but an alchemy that transformed ancient elements into a new language: A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey.

There was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today. He cannot afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long.

Now, if this passion, this skill, this (to quote Toni Morrison) "sheer intelligence," this incredible music, the mighty achievement of having brought a people utterly unknown to, or despised by "history"--to have brought this people to their present, troubled, troubling, and unassailable and unanswerable place--if this absolutely unprecedented journey does not indicate that black English is a language, I am curious to know what definition of language is to be trusted.

A people at the center of the Western world, and in the midst of so hostile a population, has not endured and transcended by means of what is patronizingly called a "dialect." We, the blacks, are in trouble, certainly, but we are not doomed, and we are not inarticulate because we are not compelled to defend a morality that we know to be a lie.

The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.

And, after all, finally, in a country with standards so untrustworthy, a country that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a country unable to face why so many of the nonwhite are in prison, or on the needle, or standing, futureless, in the streets--it may very well be that both the child, and his elder, have concluded that they have nothing whatever to learn from the people of a country that has managed to learn so little. (article)

Originally Posted 5/10/2007

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"Deeper connections with everything we engage with" / A conversation with jazz prodigy Esperanza Spalding

2015-10-04T00:27:00.000-04:00

Some excerpts from a great interview from The Revivalist. I'm reminded of how our Chris Brown conversation is centered around an appreciation of nuances and b-sides. But, more importantly, if you look close enough, you'll see this is testimony -- a look into the spiritual and philosophical journey of a present, disciplined practicer of life.

A Conversation with Esperanza Spalding
(SOURCE: The Revivalist)

Talk a little bit about your relationship to the bass. Is there a particular way you feel when playing versus practicing? How has your relationship or connection changed over the years?

When I’m practicing, or when anyone’s practicing, we’re honing the details. We’re studying physically how to become agile. We’re working out, in sort of frozen time, meaning we can take a long time with a concept or an idea or a pattern or sound if we need to, until we have access to it physically, and intellectually. We can sort of stop the clock, so to speak, and we can go in and hone in the details. Refine, polish. All these things that have to do with our physical and intellectual understanding, and ability to do something. So when you’re performing, ideally, you don’t have to worry, or think about those things. When I get on the stage and I’m performing, what I’m trying to do is to play from a place of transmission. I want to intuitively have access to these intellectual concepts—either it’s a sound combination, or a physical pattern. I’m passively trying to convey a feeling, or a story, or a thought through the notes, through my instrument. So I’m not worried about technique; I’m not worried about playing a certain shape or phrase. I’m assuming and I’m trusting that these things I’ve practiced will come out when they need to come out to contribute to the music in that moment. So, in a way, it’s like the clock is moving now. So once everything just happens spontaneously, in real time, you’re not really in control of it. The music that we’re playing is based so heavily in improvisation. So when I get on the stage, I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. I know something’s going to happen, but I have to be free enough to listen and react to what’s happening around me. So I kind of let go of all that intellectual control and physical planning, and just try to let the music come out of my well-refined machine, being my body, that is handling the instrument. I think most instrumentalists would say that’s the main difference between performing and practicing.

And as we all get older, we start having deeper connections with everything we engage with. You have a broader understanding of the way that you’re interacting with your work. So when I was much younger, the bass was just fun, and it was intuitive. And improvised music was just a fun, intuitive thing. And now it’s really starting to become a language that I’m studying as a language, and studying different ways of articulating, and vocabulary, and grammar, and different ways of putting together these fine words with their fine meanings, to say finer and finer, and more refined things, that are more meaningful to me. And I assume that as I grow older, and I mature as a human being, my relationship with the instrument itself, and with the music itself will become more ingrained in my being. Just like language—I’m not really thinking about my word choices right now. I’m trusting that what I want to say will come out, and that I have enough vocabulary that the idea I want to convey to you will come out clearly. And as an instrumentalist, that’s sort of what I’m striving for. And I assume that as I get older and have better words and a bigger vocabulary, I’ll just be clearer and clearer. And, of course, for me, the instrument is bass, composition, and singing, and lyric writing, so all of those things I consider my instruments, or perhaps, it’s just music as a whole that’s my instrument, and I intend to just continue to refine and distill my use of the language.

In what ways is the bass limiting (versus the other instruments you tried before it)? In what ways does it allow you more freedom?

I don’t really remember what it was like to play violin. I don’t know why. I don’t remember what it felt like to practice. And I don’t really remember what I physically thought about, what it was like to be a violinist. That was the instrument I played the longest, so I don’t think I really thought about it in that way. But compared to voice, I guess, or compared to writing, for example—again, writing can happen in stop-time, and you can take as much time as you need to work out everything and then you present it when it’s done. Which is very liberating, because you are in control, ultimately, of what gets put out. You can work on it until it’s like, “Okay. This is perfect. This is exactly what I want to say, and I know it, because I’ve edited out everything I don’t want to say.” So with the bass, at least with the way that I’m usually playing it, it’s much more spontaneous, so that is liberating, in and of itself, because you’re so in the moment, and you’re not responsible for everything in the music, so you can sort of relax and lay back, and just become a part of this musical entity. And the drawback to that, of course, is that in real-time, you could play something that you don’t really mean, or you might play something that’s frivolous, or out of tune, or placed in the wrong spot, or not be able to physically achieve what your ears want to hear, which can be a drawback. So the comparison between bass and voice I think would be that the melodies that I’m playing on bass, for most listeners, are much more abstract than what I’m singing. We have such an ingrained connection with the human voice, that however I open my mouth and sing, it’s going to have some symbolism or meaning for the listener—because it’s a voice. The way I breathe, the way I enunciate, even if I’m not singing lyrics, and then when you add lyrics—okay, so then it’s not abstract at all. I’m actually telling you what I’m talking about, what I’m emoting about. So with the bass, there’s a certain freedom in the abstraction. And then of course, again, it’s limiting. If I want to specifically convey an idea, I’m not exactly sure if the listener got what I meant. Whereas with words, I can say, “I am sad because my cat is sick.” So you can say, I understand exactly what you’re singing about. Those are just some comparisons. I don’t find any of them limiting. And they’re not inherently freeing either. With discipline and time, you become freer on all the instruments. And if you don’t practice, and you don’t work hard at them, you feel limited because you can’t physically achieve what you can intuitively conceptualize. So the instruments in themselves are neither, but our relationships with them dictate the relationship that we’ll have whether we feel like a free musician, so we can play and say anything that we feel, or we can never really quite achieve it. (source / full interview)

Originally Posted 4/12/2011

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Ishmael Reed Speaks On Henry Louis Gates' Black Pathology & Career Boosts From Token Alliances With Feminism & Queer Power

2015-10-04T00:09:00.000-04:00

WHY?: This incident is being run into the ground on CNN, but I thought this essay by Oakland writer Ishmael Reed was worth sharing. He asks some good questions about the role the media plays in annointing "black leaders", the gaps that exists between classes in the black community and relationships between black male leaders and feminism.

{image via Flickr}

(SOURCE: Counterpunch) Now that Henry Louis Gates’ Jr. has gotten a tiny taste of what “the underclass” undergo each day, do you think that he will go easier on them? Lighten up on the tough love lectures? Even during his encounter with the police, he was given some slack. If a black man in an inner city neighborhood had hesitated to identify himself, or given the police some lip, the police would have called SWAT. When Oscar Grant, an apprentice butcher, talked back to a BART policeman in Oakland, he was shot!

Given the position that Gates has pronounced since the late eighties, if I had been the arresting officer and post-race spokesperson Gates accused me of racism, I would have given him a sample of his own medicine. I would have replied that “race is a social construct”--the line that he and his friends have been pushing over the last couple of decades.

After this experience, will Gates stop attributing the problems of those inner city dwellers to the behavior of “thirty five-year-old grandmothers living in the projects?” (Gates says that when he became a tough lover he was following the example of his mentor Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka as though his and Soyinka’s situations were the same. As a result of Soyinka’s criticisms of a Nigerian dictator, he was jailed and his life constantly threatened.)

Prior to the late eighties, Gates’ tough love exhortations were aimed at racism in the halls of academe, but then he signed on to downtown feminist reasoning that racism was a black male problem. Karen Durbin, who hired him to write for The Village Voice, takes credit for inventing him as a “public intellectual.” He was then assigned by Rebecca Penny Sinkler, former editor of The New York Times Book Review, to do a snuff job on black male writers. In an extraordinary review, he seemed to conclude that black women writers were good, not because of their merit, but because black male writers were bad. This was a response to an article by Mel Watkins, a former book review editor, who on his way out warned of a growing trend that was exciting the publisher’s cash registers. Books that I would describe as high Harlequin romances, melodramas in which saintly women were besieged by cruel black male oppressors, the kind of image of the brothers promoted by confederate novelists Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon.

Gates dismissed a number of black writers as misogynists, including me, whom he smeared throughout the United States and Europe, but when Bill Clinton was caught exploiting a young woman, sexually, he told the Times that he would “go to the wall for this president.” Feminists like Gloria Steinem defended the president as well, even though for years they’d been writing about women as victims of male chauvinists with power, the kind of guys who used to bankroll Ms. magazine.

Not to say that portraits of black men should be uniformly positive--I’ve certainly introduced some creeps in my own work--but most of the white screenwriters, directors and producers who film this material--and the professors and critics who promote it-- are silent about the abuses against women belonging to their own ethnic groups. Moreover, Alice Walker, Tina Turner and bell hooks have complained that in the hands of white script writers, directors and producers, the black males become more sinister straw men than they appear in the original texts.

There are big bucks to be made in promoting this culture. Two studios are currently fighting over the rights to a movie called “Push” about a black father who impregnates his illiterate Harlem daughter. A representative of one, according to the Times, said that the movie would provide both with “a gold mine of opportunity.”

As an example of the double standard by which blacks and whites are treated in American society, at about the same time that the Gate’s article on black misogyny was printed, there appeared a piece about Jewish American writers. Very few women were mentioned.

Gates was also under pressure for making himself the head black feminist in the words of feminist Michele Wallace as a result of his profiting from black feminist studies sales because, as she put it in the Voice, he had unresolved issues with his late mother, who was, according to Gates, a black nationalist. The black feminists wanted in. As a result, Gates invited them to join his Norton anthology project. The result was the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. One of the editors was the late feminist scholar Dr. Barbara Christian. She complained to me almost to the day that she died that she and the late Nellie Y. McKay, another editor, did all of the work while Gates took the credit. This seems to be Gates’ pattern. Getting others to do his work. Mother Jones magazine accused him of exploiting those writers who helped to assemble his Encarta Africana, of running an academic sweat shop and even avoiding affirmative action goals by not hiring blacks. Julian Brookes of Mother Jones wrote:

“Henry Louis Gates Jr. has never been shy about speaking up for affirmative action. Indeed, the prominent Harvard professor insists that he wouldn't be where he is today without it. Odd, then, that when it came to assembling a staff to compile an encyclopedia of black history, Gates hired a group that was almost exclusively white. Of the up to 40 full-time writers and editors who worked to produce Encarta Africana only three were black. What's more, Gates and co-editor K. Anthony Appiah rejected several requests from white staffers to hire more black writers. Mother Jones turned to Gates for an explanation of this apparent inconsistency.

“Did the staff members who expressed concern that the Africana team was too white have a point?”

Gates responded:

“It's a disgusting notion that white people can't write on black history--some of the best scholars of Africa are white. People should feel free to criticize the quality of the encyclopedia, but I will not yield one millimeter[to people who criticize the makeup of the staff]. It's wrongheaded. Would I have liked there to be more African Americans in the pool? Sure. But we did the best we could given the time limits and budget.”

While his alliance with feminists gave Gates’ career a powerful boost, it was his Op ed for the Times blaming continued anti-Semitism on African Americans that brought the public intellectual uptown. It was then that Gates was ordained as the pre-eminent African American scholar when, if one polled African-American scholars throughout the nation, Gates would not have ranked among the top twenty five. It would have to be done by secret ballot given the power that Gates’ sponsors have given him to make or break academic careers. As Quincy Troupe, editor of Black Renaissance Noire would say, Gates is among those leaders who were “given to us,” not only by the white mainstream but also by white progressives. Amy Goodman carries on about Gates and Cornel West like the old Bobby Soxers used to swoon over Sinatra. Last week Rachel Maddow called Gates “the nation’s leading black intellectual.” Who pray tell is the nation’s leading white intellectual, Rachel? How come we can only have one? Some would argue that Gates hasn’t written a first rate scholarly work since 1989.

CNN gave Gates’ accusation against blacks as anti-Semites a worldwide audience and so when I traveled to Israel for the first time in the year, 2000, Israeli intellectuals asked me why American blacks hated Jews so. In print, I challenged Gate’s libeling of blacks as a group in my book, Another Day at the Front, because at the time of his Op-ed, the Anti-Defamation League issued a report that showed the decline of anti-Semitism among black Americans. I cited this report to Gates. He said that the Times promised that there would be a follow up Op-ed about racism among American Jews. It never appeared. Barry Glassner was correct when he wrote in his “The Culture of Fear” that the whole Gates-generated black Jewish feud was hyped.

Under Tina Brown’s editorship at The New Yorker, Gates was hired to do hatchet jobs on Minister Louis Farrakhan and the late playwright August Wilson.

The piece on Wilson appeared after a debate between Robert Brustein and Wilson about Wilson’s proposal for a black nationalist theater. Gates took Brustein’s side of the argument. Shortly afterward, Brustein and Gates were awarded a million dollar grant from the Ford Foundation for the purpose of holding theatrical Talented Tenth dinner parties at Harvard at a time when regional black theater was heading toward extinction. Tina Brown, a one-time Gates sponsor, is a post-racer like Gates. Like Andrew Sullivan, a Charles Murray supporter, she gets away with the most fatuous comments as a result of Americans being enthralled by a London accent. On the Bill Maher show, she said that issues of race were passé because the country has elected a black president. This woman lives in a city from which blacks and Latinos have been ethnically cleansed as a result the policies of Mayor Giuliani, a man who gets his talking points from The Manhattan Institute. Thousands of black and Hispanic New Yorkers have been stopped and frisked without a peep from Gates and his Harvard circle of post-racers such as Orlando Patterson.

Even the Bush administration admitted to the existence of racial profiling, yet Gates says that only after his arrest did he understand the extent of racial profiling, a problem for over two hundred years. Why wasn’t “the nation’s leading black intellectual” aware of the problem? His exact words following his arrest were “What it made me realize was how vulnerable all black men are, how vulnerable are all poor people to capricious forces like a rogue policemen.” Amazing! Shouldn’t “the nation’s leading black intellectual” be aware of writer Charles Chesnutt who wrote about racial profiling in 1905!

The Village Voice recently exposed the brutality meted out to black and Hispanic prisoners at New York’s Riker’s Island and medical experiments that have damaged black children living in the city. Yet Maureen Dowd agrees with Tina Brown, her fellow New Yorker, that because the president and his attorney general are black--in terms of racism--it’s mission accomplished. Makes you understand how the German citizens of Munich could go about their business while people were being gassed a few miles away. You can almost forgive Marie Antoinette. She was a young woman in her thirties with not a single face lift operation.

What is it with this post-race Harvard elite? I got to see Dick Gregory and Mort Sahl perform in San Francisco the other night, the last of the great sixties comedians. During his routine, Gregory said that he’s sending his grand kids to black historical colleges because even though he lives near Harvard and can afford to send them there, he wouldn’t “send his dog to Harvard.” Maybe he is on to something.

When Queer Power became the vogue, Gates latched on to that movement, too. In an introduction to an anthology of Gay writings, Gates argued that Gays face more discrimination than blacks, which is disputed even by Charles Blow, Times statistician, who like Harvard’s Patterson and Gates, makes tough love to blacks exclusively. Recently, he reported that the typical target of a hate crime is black, but failed to identify the typical perpetrator of a hate crime as a young white male.

Moreover, what’s the percentage of Gays on death row? The percentage of blacks? Which group is more likely to be redlined by banks, a practice that has cost blacks billions of dollars in equity? Would Cambridge police have given two white Gays the problems that they gave Gates? Why no discussion of charges of Gay racism made by Marlon Riggs, Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde? How many unarmed white Gays have been murdered by the police? How many blacks? Undoubtedly, there are pockets of homophobia among blacks but not as much as that among other ethnic communities that I could cite. The best thing for blacks would be for Gays to get married and blacks should help in this effort, otherwise all of the oxygen on the left will continue to be soaked up by this issue.

For white Gays and Lesbians to compare their struggle to that of the Civil Rights movement is like Gates comparing his situation with that of Wole Soyinka’s. Moreover, Barbara Smith says that when she tried to join the Gay Millennial March on Washington, the leaders told her to get lost. They said they were intent upon convincing white Heterosexual America that “We’re just like you.”

Will the pre-late-80s Gates be resurrected as a result of what MSNBC and CNN commentator Touré calls Gates’ wake up call? (This is the same Toure, a brilliant fiction writer, who just about wrote a post-race manifesto for The New York Times Book Review, during which he dismissed an older generation of black activists as a bunch of “Jesses”.)

Will Gates let up on what Kofi Natambu the young editor of the Panopticon Review calls his “opportunism.” Will he re-think remarks like the one he made after the election of his friend, the tough love president Barack Obama? Gates said that he doubted that the election would end black substance abuse and unmarried motherhood?

Is it possible that things are more complicated than tough love sound bites which are designed to solicit more patronage? Will he reconsider the post-race neocon line of his blog, TheRoot.com, bankrolled by The Washington Post? Will he invite writers Carl Dix and Askia Toure, who represent other African American constituencies, as much as he prints the views of far right Manhattan Institute spokesperson and racial profiling denier, John McWhorter.

Will he continue to advertise shoddy blame-the-victim and black pathology sideshows like CNN’s “Black In America,” and “The Wire?” (Predictably CNN’s Anderson Cooper turned Gates’ controversy into a carnival act. The story was followed by one about Michael Jackson’s doctors. CNN is making so much money and raising its ratings so rapidly from black pathology stories that it’s beginning to give Black Entertainment Network a run for its money, so to speak.)

Predictably, the segregated media--the spare all white jury dominating the conversation about race as usual--gave the Cambridge cop the benefit of the doubt and the police unions backed him up. The police unions always back up their fellow officers even when they shoot unarmed black suspects in the back or, in the case of Papa Charlie James, an elderly San Francisco black man, while he was laying in bed. They back each other up and “testilie” all of the time.

Will Gates listen to his critics from whom he has been protected by powerful moneyed forces, which have given him the ability to make or break academic careers, preside over the decision-making of patronage and grant-awarding institutions. Houston A. Baker Jr.’s Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned The Ideals Of The Civil Rights Era offers mild criticisms of Gates, West and other black public intellectuals, who, according to him, are “embraced by virtue of their race transcendent ideology.” His book went from the warehouse to the remainder shelves. The Village Voice promised two installments of courageous muckraking pieces about Gates written by novelist, playwright and poet Thulani Davis; part two never appeared. Letters challenging Gates by one of Gates’ main critics at Harvard, Dr. Martin Kilson, have been censored. Kilson refers to Gates as “the master of the intellectual dodge.” And even when Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell at The Nation’s blog defied the 24-hour news cycle that has depicted Gates, a black nationalist critic, as an overnight black nationalist-- she calls him “apolitical”--she had to pull her punches. As an intellectual, she has more depth than all of the white mainstream and white progressive media’s selected “leaders of black intellection,” among whom are post-modernist preachers who can spew rhetoric faster than the speed of light.

It remains to be seen whether Gates, who calls himself an intellectual entrepreneur, will now use his “wake up call” to lead a movement that will challenge racial disparities in the criminal justice system. A system that is rotten to the core, where whites commit the overwhelming majority of the crimes, while blacks and Hispanics do the time. A prison system where torture and rape are regular occurrences and where in some states the conditions are worse than at Gitmo. California prisons hospitals are so bad that they have been declared unconstitutional and a form of torture, over the objections of Attorney General Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who leased his face to the rich and was on television the other day talking about how rough they have it. A man who is channeling his hero the late Kurt Waldheim’s attitudes toward the poor and disabled.

Gates can help lead the fight so that there will be mutual respect between law enforcement and minorities instead of their calling us niggers all the time and being Marvin Gaye’s “trigger happy” policemen. Not all of them but quite a few. Or Gates can coast along. Continue to maintain that black personal behavior, like not turning off the TV at night, is at the root of the barriers facing millions of black Americans. Will return to the intellectual rigor espoused by his hero W.E.B Dubois or will he continue to act as a sort of black intellectual Charles Van Doren? An entertainer. (An insider at PBS told me that the network is demanding that Gates back up his claims about the ancestry of celebrities with more solid proofs.)

Gates has discussed doing a documentary about racial profiling. I invite him to cover a meeting residents of my Oakland ghetto neighborhood have with the police each month. (Most of our problems incidentally are caused by the off-springs of two family households. Suburban gun dealers who arm gang leaders. The gang leader on our block isn’t black! An absentee landlord who owns a house where crack operations take place.) He can bring Bill Cosby with him. He’ll find that the problems of inner citizens are more complex than “thirty five year-old grandmothers living in the projects” and rappers not pulling up their pants and that racism remains in the words of the great novelist John A. Williams, “an inexorable force.”

Finally, in his 2002 Jefferson lecture, delivered at the Library of Congress, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during remarks about the 18th-Century poet Phillis Wheatley in which he excoriated the attitudes of her critics in the Black Arts movement, one more time, ended his lecture with: “We can finally say: Welcome home, Phillis; welcome home.”

If Gate’s ceases his role as just another tough lover and an “intellectual entrepreneur,” and takes a role in ending racial traffic and retail profiling, and police home invasions, issues that have lingered since even more Chesnutt’s time, we can say, “Welcome home, Skip; welcome home.” (source)

Originally Posted 7/28/2009

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Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: On race, black power, black studies and affirmative action / "It really meant that blacks would be recognizably second-class citizens"

2015-10-04T00:07:00.000-04:00

The following is an essay taken from Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, subtitled "How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students". Published in 1987, the book was a clarion call to university administrators and concerned citizens alike, warning them that American university students were in the midst of an intellectual and moral crisis as a result of -- among many other things -- "cultural relativism" (i.e., "No one can say which culture is better because all cultures are equal").

Along with essays plotting the cultural deterioration among students in such areas as sex, divorce, self-centeredness, books, and music, Bloom charts his thoughts on affirmative action, black studies programs and race relations on elite university campuses in general.

On race and affirmative action
(from Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind)

The one eccentric element in this portrait, the one failure -- a particularly grave one inasmuch as it was the part most fraught with hope -- is the relation between blacks and whites. White and black students do not in general become real friends with one another. Here the gulf of difference has proved unbridgeable. The forgetting of race in the university which was predicted and confidently expected when the barriers were let down, has not occurred. There is now a large black presence in major universities, frequently equivalent to their proportion in the general population. But they have, by and large, proved indigestible. Most keep to themselves. White students act as though their relations with black students were just as immediate and unself-conscious as with other (including Orientals). But although the words are right, the music is off-key. Here there is an atmosphere of right-thinking, principal and project -- of effort rather than instinct. The automatic character of current student camaraderie is absent; and the really intimate attachment that knows no barriers stops here. The programmatic brotherhood of the sixties did not culminate in integration but veered off toward black separation. White students feel uncomfortable about this and do not like to talk about it. This is not the way things are supposed to be. It does not fit their prevailing view that human beings are all pretty much alike, and that friendship is another aspect of equality. They pretend not to notice the segregated tables in the dining halls where no white student would comfortably sit down. This is only one of the more visible aspects of the prevailing segregation in the real life of universities -- which includes separation in housing and in areas of study, particularly noticeable in the paucity of blacks in the theoretical sciences and humanities. The universities are formally integrated, and black and white students are used to seeing each other. But the substantial human contact, indifferent to race, soul to soul, that prevails in all other aspects of student life simply does not usually exist between the two races. There are exceptions, perfectly integrated black students, but they are rare and in a difficult position.

I do not believe this somber situation is the fault of white students, who are rather straightforward in such matters and frequently embarrassingly eager to prove their liberal credentials in the one area where Americans are especially sensitive to a history of past injustice. These students have made the adjustment, without missing a beat, to a variety of religions and nationalities, the integration of Orientals and the change in women's aspirations and roles. It would require a great deal of proof to persuade me that they remain subtly racist. Although preferential treatment of blacks goes against a deep-seated conviction that equal rights belong to individuals and are color-blind, white students have been willing by and large to talk themselves into accepting affirmative action as a temporary measure on the way to equality. Still this makes them uncomfortable because, although they are very used to propaganda and to the imposition of new moralities on them, in daily life they like to act as they think and feel. And they do not think that black is beautiful any more than they think that white is beautiful, and they do not think that a student who is not qualified is qualified. So the tendency among white students is to suppress the whole question, act as though it were not there, and associate with the minority of blacks who want to be associated with and forget the rest. They cannot befriend blacks as blacks, and the heady days of a common purpose are gone. The discriminatory laws are ancient history and there are a large number of blacks in the universities. There is nothing more that white students can do to make great changes in their relations to black students.

Thus, just at the moment when everyone else has become a "person," blacks have become blacks. I am not speaking about doctrine although there was much doctrine at the beginning, but about feeling. "They stick together" was a phrase often used in the past by the prejudiced about this or that distinctive group, but it has become true, by and large , of the black students. In general, the expectation of anything other than routine contact in classes or campus jobs -- usually quite polite -- has vanished. This is peculiar inasmuch as race is less spiritually substantial than religion, and also inasmuch as integration was both the goal and the practice of blacks in universities prior to the late sixties, when numbers were smaller and human difficulties greater. Further, it is peculiar in that blacks seem to be the only group that has picked up "ethnicity" -- the discovery or the creation of the sixties -- in an instinctive way. At the same time, there has been a progressive abandonment on their part of belief or interest in a distinctive black "culture". Blacks are not sharing a special positive intellectual or moral experience, they partake fully in the common culture, with the same goals and tastes as everyone else, but they are doing it by themselves. They continue to have the inward sentiments of separateness caused by exclusion when it no longer effectively exists. The heat is under the pot, but they do not melt as have all other groups.

There are obviously some good reasons for this, and it is the right of any part of the large community in a pluralistic society to separate itself. But the movement of the blacks goes counter not only to that of the rest of society, and tends to put them at odds with it,but also to their own noblest claims and traditions in this country. And it is connected wit a dangerous severing of the races in the intellectual world, where there can be no justification for separatism and where the ideal of common humanity must prevail. The confrontations and indignations of the political realm have become firmly fixed in the university. For this the university's loss of conviction in its universalizing mission must bear a part of the blame. Since the end of World War II there was in most major universities an effort -- ever increasing in intensity -- to educate more blacks, in the sincere American belief that education is good and the inclusion of blacks at the highest levels of intellectual achievement would be decisive in the resolving of [the] American dilemma. Practically nobody hesitated, and there were private discussions about whether, at least in the beginning, standards should not be informally lowered for talented but deprived blacks in order to help them catch up. Decent men took different sides on this question, some believing that blacks, for the sake of the example they were to set for their own self-respect, should be held to the highest standards of achievement, others believing that gains would be incremental over generations. No person of goodwill doubted that one way or another it would work out, that what had happened with respect to religion and nationality would also happen with race. At the peak of the civil rights movement there was a sense of urgency about enrolling greater numbers of blacks in order to prove the absence of discrimination. A sign of the times was the reappearance of pictures on applications so that blacks could be identified, whereas pictures had been banished a decade previously so that blacks could not be identified. High school records and standardized tests began to be criticized as insufficient guides to real talent. But the goal was unchanged -- to educate black students as any student is educated and to evaluate them according to the same standards. Everyone was still integrationist. The belief was that insufficient energy had been devoted to the recruitment of black students. Cornell, where I taught for several years, was one of many institutions that announced great increases in goals for enrollment of blacks. The president, adding a characteristic twist, also announced that not only would it seek blacks, but that it would find them not among the privileged blacks but in the inner cities. At the beginning of the 1967 academic year there were many more blacks on campus and, of course, in order to get so many, particularly poor blacks, standards of admission had silently and drastically been altered. Nothing had been done to prepare these students for the great intellectual and social challenges awaiting them in the university. Cornell now had a large number of students who were manifestly unqualified and unprepared, and therefore it faced an inevitable choice: fail most of them or pass them without their having learned. Moralism and press relations made the former intolerable; the latter was only partially possible (it required consenting faculty and employers after college who expected and would accept incompetence) and was unbearably shameful to black students and university alike. It really meant that blacks would be recognizably second-class citizens.

Black power, which hit the universities like a tidal wave at just that moment, provided a third way. Integrationism was just an ideology for whites and Uncle Toms. Who says that what universities teach is the truth rather than just myths necessary to support the system of domination? Black students are second-class not because they are academically poor but because they are being forced to imitate white culture. Relativism and Marxism made some of this claim believable. And the discomfort of the timesmade it more so. Blacks were to be proud, and from them the university could learn its failings. Such a perspective was decidedly attractive to the kids who were the victims of the university's manipulations. Courses in black studies and black English, and many other such concessions became the way out. It was hopefully assumed that these would not fundamentally transform the university or the educational goals of black students. They were merely supposed to be an enrichment. But this was really a cop-out, and the license for a new segregationism that would allow white impresarios to escape from the corner they had painted themselves into. The way opened for black students to live and study the black experience, to be comfortable, rather than be constrained by the learning accessible to man as man.

When the black students at Cornell became aware that they could intimidate the university and that they were not just students but negotiating partners in the process of determining what an education is, they demanded the dismissal of the tough-minded, old-style integrationist black woman who was assistant dean of students. In short order the administration complied with this demand. From that moment on, the various conciliatory arrangements with which we are now so familiar came into being.

The black studies programs largely failed because what was serious in them did not interest the students, and the rest was unprofitable hokum. So the university curriculum returned to debilitated normalcy. But a kind of black domain, not quite institutional, but accepted, a shadow of the university life, was created: permanent quotas in admission, preference in financial assistance, racially motivated hiring of faculty, difficulty in giving blacks failing marks, and an organized system of grievance and feeling aggrieved. And everywhere hypocrisy, contempt-producing lies about what was going on and how the while scheme is working. This little black empire has gained its legitimacy from the alleged racism surrounding it and from which it defends its subjects. Its visible manifestations are to be found in those separate tables in the dining halls, which reproduce the separate facilities of the Jim Crow South. At Cornell and elsewhere, the black militants had to threaten -- and to do -- bodily harm to black students with independent inclinations in order to found this system, Now the system is routine. For the majority of black students, going to the university is therefore a different experience from that of the other students, and the product of the education is also different. The black student who wishes to be just a student and to avoid allegiance to the black group has to pay a terrific price, because he is judged negatively by his black peers and because his behavior is atypical in the eyes of whites. White students have silently and unconsciously adjusted to a group presence of blacks, and they must readjust for a black who does not define himself by the group. he is painfully conscious that many whites, well-meaning ones, judge him by special standards. All this is daunting. The university's acquiescence in the interference with its primary responsibility of providing educational opportunity to those capable of education should be a heavy burden on its collective conscience.

Affirmative action now institutionalizes the worst aspects of separatism. The fact is that the average black student's achievements do not equal those of the average white student in the good universities, and everybody knows it. It is also a fact that the university degree of a black student is also tainted, and employers look on it with suspicion, or become guilty accomplices in the toleration of incompetence. The worst part of all this is that the black students, most of whom avidly support this system, hate its consequences. A disposition composed of equal parts of shame and resentment has settled on may black students who are beneficiaries of preferential treatment. They do not like the notion that whites are in a position to do them favors. They believe that everyone doubts their merit, their capacity for equal achievement. Their successes become questionable in their own eyes. Those who are good students fear that they are equated with those who are not, that their hard-won credentials are not credible. They are the victims of a stereotype, but one that has been chosen by black leadership. Those who are not good students, but have the same advantages as those who are, want to protect their position but are haunted by the sense of not deserving it. This gives them a powerful incentive to avoid close associations with whites, who might be better qualified than they are and who might be looking down on them. Better to stick together so these subtle but painful difficulties will not arise. It is no surprise that extremist black politics now get a kind of support among the middle and upper-class blacks unheard of in the past. The common source that united the races ate the peaks in the past has been polluted. Reason cannot accommodate the claims of any kind of power whatever, and democratic society cannot accept any principle of achievement other than merit. White students, as I have said, do not really believe in the justice of affirmative action, do not wish to deal with the facts, and turn without mentioning it to their all-white -- or rather, because there are now so many Orientals, non-black -- society. Affirmative action (quotas), at least in universities, is the source of what I fear is a long-term deterioration of the relations between the races in America.

Originally posted: 5/11/2011

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The dilemma of the metaphorical mulatto

2015-10-04T00:05:00.000-04:00

Updated:
I'm not sure how I missed this comment a loooong while back. But that Michael Fisher post had me searching for this post:

Electricladylike said: I don't know how I missed this one...but I feel that there are some inherent differences between individuals who maintain a Eurocentric point of view and human beings who are developed within the African World View. Scholars like Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop and Dr. Charles Finch have written extensively on the subject. so has Dr. Jacob Carruthers in Essays in Ancient Egyptian Studies as well as Intellectual Warfare. My point: there are profound distinctions. There are differences that make a world of philosophical difference. I'm sure Caucasians read the Liberator; I know that thats a part of the European identity crisis ANYWAY. (Attaching to the rebellious other!). As mentioned, New Orleans was an eye-opener (that same white lady pushed my buttons too!).

And also: I don't really care to have hope for white individuals. I don't have the energy to hate or love them; I don't feel that we share the same world view at all. I believe that their may be another John Brown, but there have been so MANY more Africans who have bled and died. I mean, its so uncanny. As James Baldwin so eloquently says: if we ever calculated the damage that has been done to African people it would really be deep. Sitting in a classroom with students,trying to teach them, trying to love them, I realize the depth of our wounds. I just don't have the energy to fight with white folks about their origin or their future. I am only concerned with bulding for us and ours (so to speak). I honestly don't respect their collective humanity (or the lack their of) enough. I can concede that there are exceptions. However, I don't have time to worry about them. If they are bright, they will find their way. But the damage has been done. There is no way to undo it...but we can work towards healing the wounds. Identifying the areas that have been damaged. Unless a European is willing to give, put in the WORK, give their heart, mind, and soul to our agenda...I refuse to even SEE them.
It is not my intention to offend any indivudal (be that white or otherwise) wh connects to the concept of humanity that originates in Africa. However, those who connect themselves to the deviance of modern Europe will have to grin and bear it.

--
The infamous convo is back. Is this the most popular topic ever on the site? In case you missed it. Here are the pieces:

1) It started off with this: Do White People Read The Liberator?
2) Then got into this: The Dilemma of the Metaphorical Mulatto.
3) And the latest incarnation was this: White Privilege.
4) And this: Paleness as Pathology: The Future of Racism + AntiRacism
5) The latest: Bono's Bullshit

The "Dilemma" post has been seeing some activity in the past few days with the conversation heating up again. Here are some of the questions being dealt with throughout all of these conversations:

Is "whiteness" inherently destructive?
Is "whiteness" really about simply having white skin?
Is race reality or construct?
Or both?
Is there a such thing as being neutral?
Is the personal ALWAYS political?
Or is the personal sometimes apolitical?

It's a whole lotta reading but very, very interesting discussion. Well worth it. Check it out. There's also a good article in the latest issue of The Liberator entitled, "In Search of a Positive White Identity". Make sure you cop that and read it as well.

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On the Allure of the Light-Skinned Woman

2015-10-03T23:54:00.000-04:00

Regardless of all the talk surrounding the post-racial America, the nigga still drools at the sight of the the light-skinned form. Green or light brown eyes, long hair, voluptuousness only add to the enigmatic seduction of yellowness. After trudging through the hot chocolate desert of darker women we arrive exhausted at the Yellow Oasis, anxious to drink the bath water of the yellowbone.

How does the yellow form arrest us even into the 21st century? It must finally be acknowledged here that most light-skinned women possess defects that would automatically disqualify their darker skinned sisters. Short hair, hairy arms, crooked teeth, bad proportions are all more likely to be forgiven when the skin tone is bright. Even the cardinal sin of 'no backshot' is forgiven when we come to bow at the foot of the yellowbone.

The post-racial project is not a matter for white people to consider until niggas can forfeit the notion that all light-skinned women are inherently gorgeous.

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Mos Def: The Ecstatic [review/mp3]

2015-10-03T23:53:00.000-04:00

Mos Def's most recent album The Ecstatic is a classic album. Meaning: it will be just as good, and probably better, with more and more time sprinkled on it, and long after Mos is gone. It was released on June 9, 2009. I was moved to write this review in February 2010, to share. Therefore this review is more than mere marketing and promotion. Call it outreach if you must.

The Ecstatic is what you call a born again experience. Mos is older than he was on his first classic album, Black On Both Sides. More importantly though, he's wiser. It shows. In-between this classic and his first one, Mos played around in more experimental Hip-Hop (The New Danger and True Magic albums), acting, and messing around with sexy Brooklyn women. Here he's returned to focus, with countless insights regarding being in tune with one's purpose and one's peace in life -- everlasting inner peace, independent of worldly definitions of success. Mos is heard in vulnerable but powerful form, testifying on the ever important how and why in conversations about finding and manifesting love in a chaotic modernity, and on the infinite beauty of the simple.

Between beautifully crafted pieces like: the wailing, "Life In Marvelous Times"; the minimalistic retro-jazzy, "Priority"; the haunting, "No Hay Nada Mas" versed entirely en espanol; the warm foreign-film nostalgic fuzziness of "The Tournament"; and the joyful pure innocence of "Roses"; there are three songs that summarize the primary trajectory of the album for this listener -- "Auditorium", "History" and Casa Bey. Respectively, they illuminate three of the greatest human acts in my opinion; bearing witness, declaration and testimony -- all of which Mos has done an excellent job manifesting with this project.

On "Auditorium", featuring Slick Rick, Mos bears witness on the current shared somber reality of globalized life for so many of us in these times, demonstrating that he continues to recognize the importance of being in harmony with the instinct and the emotion of the communities he is rooted in. He raps: "The way I feel sometimes it's too hard to sit still/ Things are so passionate, times are so real/ Sometimes I try an chill mellow down blowin' smoke/ Smile on my face but it's really no joke/ You feel it in the streets, the people breathe without hope/ They goin' through the motion, they dimmin' down, they focus/ The focus gettin' clear and the light turn sharp/ And the eyes go teary, the mind grow weary". He continues: "I speak it so clearly, sometimes ya don't hear me/ I push it past the bass, no nations gotta feel me/ I feel it in my bones, black, I'm so wide awake/ That I hardly ever sleep, my flows forever deep/ And it's volumes of scriptures when I breath on a beat."

On "History", featuring Talib Kweli, Mos declares the comeback, and the futility of trying to defeat a feisty radical young man turned clearer seeing man, born again and ready to live faithfully as an "ecstatic". He raps: "And don't call it a come back in particular/ Even if it blend into ephemera or/ Fade into peripheral transition of the minister's original/ We're broadcast clear without diminishing/ Black Star stove top burning soul/ temperatures, administers: Alkalines, aminos and minerals; its sensuous/ Served over Dilla time signatures/ it's miracle material, remember it's right now foreverness."

On "Casa Bey" Mos testifies to ultimate truths and his humble encounters with them. Here Mos has found deep purpose, and understanding, and peace. In that lies a tremendous power; fear (of failure, of lack of recognition) is overcome by a testimony on the knowing of his self. No question, Mos know the blues of Babylon rat race. But here he testifies that he knows what his ultimate purpose is and has accepted it (thus, peace) -- anything more in life is simply God's grace (thus, beauty). He has tapped into a harmony with time and space and found joy in the vastness of it all by choosing to be an ecstatic about the gifts around and inside of him. The cipher has come full circle. He raps: "Magnetic, the flows are athletic/ Dimensions are perfected but the static and kinetic is power/ Past pressure and mass beyond measure/ You can place son where ever he Bed-Stuy forever"... "Stanzas and anthems based on expansion/ A vantage point of the past, present and after/ Rapture, master of ceremony, a master craft/ Of the masterminds who craft masters"... "And it's constant, my mother an artwork/ And God is the author, from Flaco to Archer/ We right on target, a ready steady responsive/ A black light white in the darkness, y'all just/ Are fantastic rawness, good morning, yes"... He continues: "Don't stop the rock/ You don't, don't stop the rock/ You hear the people say, Don't stop"... "You can't stop my go/ I've been born to be where I am/ A bright light from a distant star/ Miracles and answered prayers".

Casa Bey

(rightclick+download)

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"Space is the Place": Val Wilmer photographs Sun Ra

2015-05-17T18:50:00.000-04:00

"In tomorrow's world, men will not need artificial instruments such as jets and space ships. In the world of tomorrow, the new man will 'think' the place he wants to go, then his mind will take him there."
-Sun Ra (1956)

I have always been seduced by the obscure—cryptic writings, abstruse music, and the like. As such, my awkward love affair with Sun Ra and his various iterations across time and space comes as no surprise. I cannot remember when I first came to know him, but there is something eerily intimate and bewitching about his music. I can listen to his album Lanquidity (1978) on repeat for hours and become entirely consumed by "That's How I Feel." Despite the peculiar intimacy his music conjures up, there is a competing remoteness. As the audience seeks to get closer to Sun Ra, he eludes detection, leaving the audience yearning for some semblance of familiarity.

The mystifying jazz musician, philosopher, and intergalactic highness remains elusive in many regards. However, as a photographer, I look to photographs to give insight into enigmatic characters. Valerie Sybil Wilmer (1941), a British photographer and writer specializing in jazz and British African-Caribbean culture photographed Sun Ra for over a decade from 1966-79. Her 1973 exhibit "Jazz Seen: The Face of Black Music," held at the Victoria and Albert Museum featured jazz musicians on and off the stage--a natural choice considering her autobiographic writing where she writes, "It just seemed normal to shoot pictures that showed who the people were rather than merely what they did."

Not only did Wilmer photograph Sun Ra and his Arkestra, she also wrote a corrective obituary on July 1, 1993 in for the British The Independent. She notes,

/////
Long stays in New York in the 1970s enabled me to witness his influence. Dozens of young men passed through his Arkestra, few failing to acknowledge his inspiration. His pioneering electronic keyboard work inspired a generation of jazz and rock artists, notably Miles Davis.

The Arkestra's African drums and non-Western instruments prefigured the universality of percussion-packed ensembles. His flamboyant dress, echoing the 'Moorish' style of Shriners, came from traditions of personal adornment retained by African peoples in the New World. His recurrent Egyptian motif was copied by the leading 1970s Soul band, Earth, Wind and Fire.

[...]

Combining social endeavour with studying the occult was not unusual among black thinkers of Ra's generation. If people are told they 'have no history', the search for an origin becomes paramount. When he began a perusal of antiquarian literature in the 1940s, the belief in North Africa as the source of certain intellectual traditions was already a century old.
/////

Take a look a Valerie Wilmer's photos below.

As a teacher, I cannot possibly leave you without a syllabus of sorts. For those yearning to engage in an archeology on Sun Ra, the sources below may lead you to some fruitful spaces.

General
+ Sun Ra Bibliography

Film
+ Ephraim Asili's experimental film, Points On A Space Age (2009)
+ Robert Mugge's, A Joyful Noise (1980)
+ Sun Ra's film, Space is the Place (1974)
+ Phil Niblock's experimental short, A Magic Sun (1966)

Audio
+ Pacifica Radio Archive | Sun Ra interview with Dennis Irving (1968) and interview with KPFK producer Jay Green titled, “Getting Better than Good, Notes from the Omniverse” (1991)
+ Sun Ra Speaking at 1971 Rehearsal (1971)
+ The Berkeley Lectures (1971)

Books
+ Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn and Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68, ed. Anthony Elms (2007)
+ Blutopia: visions of the future and revisions of the past in the work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton, by Graham Lock (1999)
+ Space Is The Place: The Lives And Times Of Sun Ra, by John F. Szwed (1998)

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by Kameelah Rasheed (Intern, The Liberator Magazine)

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The Disadvantages of an Elite Education / "Peers too busy for intimacy"

2015-05-17T12:55:00.000-04:00

This is a great companion piece to the conversation we had here a while back on David Foster Wallace's comments on reading, television, intimacy and creativity in America. Here, William Deresiewicz reflects with an honest voice on his elite education and his experience providing one to his students. But more than just a conversation on educational systems and curriculum, it ends up being a reflection on the very health of our society's cultural ideals, values, character and spirit. These are fundamental insights for students, teachers, parents and aspiring parents who want to see their loved ones attain that ethereal concept of success, or the American dream. This piece explores what the concept of "success" actually means for those who have the opportunity to grasp it, and it illustrates the trajectory of the entire nation as evidenced by the aspirations of both its richest and poorest citizens. The picture painted here by an educational insider is somewhat shocking and it might make you reconsider the value of certain goals you've always taken for granted. Following W.E.B. Du Bois' eloquent 1930s critique of The University itself, especially historically black ones, the author below questions the worth of a system of elitist-aspiring modes of study. Here are a few key excerpts.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education
(SOURCE: The American Scholar)

[...]

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.

[...]

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others. (Let’s not even talk about the possibility of kids from privileged backgrounds not going to college at all, or delaying matriculation for several years, because however appropriate such choices might sometimes be, our rigid educational mentality places them outside the universe of possibility—the reason so many kids go sleepwalking off to college with no idea what they’re doing there.) This doesn’t seem to make sense, especially since students from elite schools tend to graduate with less debt and are more likely to be able to float by on family money for a while. I wasn’t aware of the phenomenon myself until I heard about it from a couple of graduate students in my department, one from Yale, one from Harvard. They were talking about trying to write poetry, how friends of theirs from college called it quits within a year or two while people they know from less prestigious schools are still at it. Why should this be? Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure. The first time I blew a test, I walked out of the room feeling like I no longer knew who I was. The second time, it was easier; I had started to learn that failure isn’t the end of the world.

[...]

Indeed, that seems to be exactly what those schools want. There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty. As another friend, a third-generation Yalie, says, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference. The college career office has little to say to students not interested in law, medicine, or business, and elite universities are not going to do anything to discourage the large percentage of their graduates who take their degrees to Wall Street. In fact, they’re showing them the way. The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.

It’s no wonder that the few students who are passionate about ideas find themselves feeling isolated and confused. I was talking with one of them last year about his interest in the German Romantic idea of bildung, the upbuilding of the soul. But, he said—he was a senior at the time—it’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.

Yet there is a dimension of the intellectual life that lies above the passion for ideas, though so thoroughly has our culture been sanitized of it that it is hardly surprising if it was beyond the reach of even my most alert students. Since the idea of the intellectual emerged in the 18th century, it has had, at its core, a commitment to social transformation. Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power. It means going into spiritual exile. It means foreswearing your allegiance, in lonely freedom, to God, to country, and to Yale. It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage. “I am not afraid to make a mistake,” Stephen Dedalus says, “even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity, too.”

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time. Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and, in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school or even with looking good on a college application. Maybe they just sat in their room, reading a lot and writing in their journal. These are the kinds of kids who are likely, once they get to college, to be more interested in the human spirit than in school spirit, and to think about leaving college bearing questions, not resumés.

I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone looks. You hardly see any hippies or punks or art-school types, and at a college that was known in the ’80s as the Gay Ivy, few out lesbians and no gender queers. The geeks don’t look all that geeky; the fashionable kids go in for understated elegance. Thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla. The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy. Everyone feels pressure to maintain the kind of appearance—and affect—that go with achievement. (Dress for success, medicate for success.) I know from long experience as an adviser that not every Yale student is appropriate and well-adjusted, which is exactly why it worries me that so many of them act that way. The tyranny of the normal must be very heavy in their lives. One consequence is that those who can’t get with the program (and they tend to be students from poorer backgrounds) often polarize in the opposite direction, flying off into extremes of disaffection and self-destruction. But another consequence has to do with the large majority who can get with the program.

I taught a class several years ago on the literature of friendship. One day we were discussing Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, which follows a group of friends from childhood to middle age. In high school, one of them falls in love with another boy. He thinks, “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.” A pretty good description of an elite college campus, including the part about never being allowed to feel alone. What did my students think of this, I wanted to know? What does it mean to go to school at a place where you’re never alone? Well, one of them said, I do feel uncomfortable sitting in my room by myself. Even when I have to write a paper, I do it at a friend’s. That same day, as it happened, another student gave a presentation on Emerson’s essay on friendship. Emerson says, he reported, that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip you for solitude. As I was asking my students what they thought that meant, one of them interrupted to say, wait a second, why do you need solitude in the first place? What can you do by yourself that you can’t do with a friend?

So there they were: one young person who had lost the capacity for solitude and another who couldn’t see the point of it. There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude. It used to be that you couldn’t always get together with your friends even when you wanted to. Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships. “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?”: my student was in her friend’s room writing a paper, not having a heart-to-heart. She probably didn’t have the time; indeed, other students told me they found their peers too busy for intimacy.

What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude. They took this in for a second, and then one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” Well, I don’t know. But I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system. (full text)

Originally Posted 6/24/2011

Agriculture's necessity in liberation / "I thought of land people live on, develop and make profitable but do not own ... contemporary serfs, forced off when beneficial for proverbial landlords"

2015-05-17T12:41:00.001-04:00

While picking shell peas and green beans one steaming day, I got to thinking again about why I'm doing this. I was tired, lost the connection to my task, and missed my family. I am currently interning on a farm in southwest Michigan, owned by liberal, “social justice” young whites, with all white interns, who more times than not still (for all their information on oppression) do not comprehend the extreme disparities between Africans around the world and whites of the most important and basic of necessities. Amidst the irritants (the stifling heat, persistent mosquitoes and gnats, and never-ending reminders that I am the “other”), I have to remember why I came here in the first place.

I looked for an internship that catered to a student with no extensive knowledge in planting, harvesting, and caring for an organic farm. I needed people who were passionate about feeding people food of the highest nutritional value, in ways least damaging to the product and the environment. A group who knows how to manage a farm business, worked with local farmers, and was honest to their consumers about the food they were buying. After a long, unfruitful search for African farmers in Michigan who share my vision of an organic African food network and (re)connecting Black folk with their ability to positively manipulate the Earth, I settled on the farm I currently reside.

During my moment of frustration, I reminisced on the land being seized by corporations & governments from small farmers in many countries in Africa (New York Times: "African Farmers Displaced as Investors Move In") namely Mali, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Mozambique, etc. I thought of the land that so many Black people live on, develop, and make profitable for the insatiable capitalist system that rules the global economic order but do not own and are therefore contemporary serfs, forced off when beneficial for the proverbial landlords. And I thought of my family in the U.S., many who grew up working with older family members sharecropping but had the benefit of fresh food, as it came from the Earth, sans the harmful preservatives and insecticides such as (formaldehyde and carboxymethylcellulose).

{related: Battle For Brooklyn trailer}

Many of my family members can't understand why I'd do seemingly backward movement farm work, during the summer, on a white farm no less. I was then taken to George Washington Carver. This genius, who was enslaved during his childhood and treated no better upon physical emancipation, continued to labour in the field of agriculture in hopes of providing sustainability for his people and farmers abroad. His research in transforming crops like sweet potatoes and peanuts into reusable necessities such as gasoline, a variety of other palatable foods, and cosmetics helped replenish much of the soil that had been exhausted from cotton and was ahead of its time in environmental safety by excluding the use of precious fossil fuels for his creations.

Foreigners throughout the centuries have plundered Africa’s vital resources, resulting in the vast empires that exist today. Just as a global network of imports and exports has been created between developed nations and exploitation of developing nations, African people can and should create a food network of small-scale farmers across these arbitrary nation-state lines. While "you can’t get back what you never owned"* we should be the stewards of the land granted to us from Nature and use it responsibly to produce food fit for human consumption (*as Nana Peazant from the film ‘Daughters of the Dust’ noted). Land “ownership” in the African worldview, taking back control of our familial lands, is integral to reclaiming our selves, maintaining our families, and nation-building. Self-sustenance saves money by not relying on grocery stores (whose prices will inevitably rise with the decrease of arable land and water fit for consumption), conserves the Earth’s swiftly decreasing materials by not relying on fuel and packaging to transport food over long distances, and re-builds and maintains the innate spiritual connection we share with the Earth. Growing your own food will require one to be politically responsible, as it is tied to land rights (whether it be the regulations of a suburban/urban complex or acres in a state); as an African person anywhere in the world you will have to defend your right to grow natural produce to heal your Self and contribute to the restoration of the Earth.

It dawned on me during my junior year of university that if we don’t learn how to heal our Earth and respect our bodies by providing it with the authentic food it needs (to replenish itself and ourselves), we’ll perish. We can and will remain slaves to a system that creates and manufactures products that break down brain cells and keep oppressed peoples mindless to the fact that they are in fact oppressed if we do not re-member how to grow our own foods. Small-scale farming, wherever you are, is the key to a healthier life as it is not as exhaustive to the soil as commercial farming and uses less of the already dwindling water supply. The flavor of food grown nearby is also more delicious because it does not require preservatives (which will alter a fresher, sweeter, or more savory [depending on the crop] flavor) to maintain natural flavors. Children grown up on food as it comes from the Earth will be less enticed to eat or purchase food that has been waxed or dyed to appeal to the popular look of fruits and vegetables today. Liberation is in the ground we’re at.

I don't have any amazing ideas for inventions (yet) but I’m striving to learn all that I can about permaculture. This would give one the skills to design a farm in any type of environment and train/work with people unfamiliar to the field in using where they reside for self-sustenance. If We (African people) can plant/harvest (in a manner that sustains the Earth we use), sell, and trade subsistence/cash crops with each other, around the world, I think we'd have an amazing liberation scheme on our hands. Agriculture, done sustainably, can not only heal the Earth but also our communities and our spirits. Black people are master preservationists. We can be just as proficient at agriculture (again).

These connections are why I sought out an agricultural internship. I’m learning the different ways of planting, the seasons, weeding, and the basics of sustainable agriculture, organic farming, and agri-business. I have the time and resources here to research more on how to till the land in the few seasons that we have left (four definitive seasons appear to be diminishing).

I thought being here, in a small white town in West Michigan, would bury my soul but in all moments, especially when I'm alone, my Ori is ever present. Moferefun to my Egun and all the Orisa for always being with me and whispering to me of the necessity of these skills. It may not be my "dream job (or internship)," but I'm definitely getting what I need. I came to learn how to find/develop a cooperation of people dedicated to providing wholesome food to consumers, growing the food and the labyrinth of considerations that must be reviewed, and how to ultimately use what you grow as energy that won’t disintegrate this planet or our bodies. As my sister reminded me, “I’m doing what I have to do, to do what I want to do.”

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}
by Sawdayah Brownlee (Intern, The Liberator Magazine)

Investigating "Teach for America"

2015-01-13T15:37:00.000-05:00

Public education, once viewed as the great equalizer of "our union", now faces unprecedented scrutiny and ever-increasing competition from private and semiprivate entities. Teach For America (TFA), a national teacher recruitment and placement non-profit organization is a major player in current education reform efforts in the United States. In 2009 alone, TFA placed some 4,000 teachers nationwide. This fact in combination with TFA’s growing influence in schools, communities, and school districts across the country, has brought Teach For America and its corps members under the proverbial microscope of America’s politicos, educators, teacher training institutions, and teacher unions.

The following article entitled "Looking Past the Spin: Teach for America" by Barbara Miner provides readers an in-depth examination of the role TFA plays in shaping educational policies at every level, whether it be at the classroom, school, community or city level.

Miner’s investigative reporting and the insightful and probing questions offers a rare analysis of Teach For America, which makes a clear distinction between the work being carried out by the foot soldiers of the TFA organization -- the local teachers and staff -- and the work being carried out by staff at the national level. Interestingly, Miner points out that throughout her discussions with TFA staff and teachers at both the local and national level, children were absent from their conversation.

Looking Past the Spin: Teach for America
by Barbara Miner

(SOURCE: Rethinking Schools)

Most Teach for America recruits are idealistic and dedicated. But who is behind the organization, and does its approach bolster or hinder urban education reform?

It is late at night, foggy and misty, and road construction has forced me off the interstate into downtown St. Louis. My Google directions are useless and I follow my nose, heading west on city streets to my hotel. I go past abandoned buildings, lonely gas stations, dimly lit rescue missions. I think of stopping to ask directions, but the neighborhood’s desolation gives me pause; it’s hard to find an open business, let alone any people walking about.

I am driving from Milwaukee to St. Louis for an article on Teach for America, to get a first-hand take on what is a media star in urban education reform. As I drive past yet another building with flaking paint and boarded-up windows, my cynicism grows. Do people honestly think that sending Ivy League graduates into the St. Louis schools for two years will somehow unlock the academic achievement that is seen as a cornerstone of rebuilding our cities? Can the antidote to educational inequity, urban disinvestment, and neighborhood decay really be so simple?

As my thoughts wander, I try to regain focus: I am writing a story about Teach for America and education reform, not the abandonment of low-income communities of color. They are two separate issues. Or so I keep reminding myself.

Two weeks later, back in Milwaukee after scores of interviews with TFA teachers and staff and with non-TFA educators and policy makers, I am still groping towards an understanding of the organization. I have come to distinguish between the generally hard-working, smart, and idealistic TFA classroom teachers, and a nation al organization that is as sophisticated, slippery, and media savvy as any group I have ever written about. TFA is perceived as a major player in the education wars over the future of public schools, and a key ally of those who disparage teacher unions and schools of education, and who are enamored of entrepreneurial reforms that bolster the privatization of a once-sacred public responsibility.

But what exactly is TFA’s role in these education wars? Who is directing the organization and to what ends? More importantly, what is TFA’s role in improving urban education?

Twenty years ago, Princeton University senior Wendy Kopp came up with her solution to low achievement: a Peace-Corps-type initiative called Teach for America. As she writes in her memoir, One Day, All Children..., this idea “exploded into a movement.” In two decades, the organization’s approach to eliminating educational inequality has not changed: Recruit smart, hard-working graduates from Ivy League and other highly competitive universities, and ask them to take a hiatus from their future careers to commit two years to teaching in a low-income urban or rural school.

But leaving aside issues such as poverty and inadequate school funding, it is universally acknowledged that one of the biggest problems in low-performing schools is the revolving door of inadequately prepared teachers. Does TFA’s two-years-and-out commitment feed into this problem and thus exacerbate educational inequity?

On the Ground in St. Louis
TFA accounts for a small percentage of the roughly one-quarter of a million public school teachers hired every year but receives significant media coverage. Over the years, it has grown in size and influence, and has developed a market niche with districts that, for a variety of reasons, have significant teacher turnover and hire large numbers of uncertified teachers.

In recession-plagued 2009, when teaching became a safe harbor for graduates unsure about the best career path, more than 35,000 people applied to TFA, including 11 percent of Ivy League graduates. TFA placed about 4,000 new members in 2009, bringing its corps to 7,300 teachers in 35 regions.

Some critics have dubbed TFA “Teach for Awhile” and “Teach for a Résumé.” At the same time, there’s no doubt that TFA has proved inspirational to many recent graduates and has helped make teaching a noble and respectable undertaking. Over the years, thousands of young people have answered the TFA call. People such as Chanel Harris.
Harris, 22, grew up in a small city 30 miles from Ann Arbor, Mich. Until she was in the 11th grade, she and her brother were the only self-identified African American students in the city. “On a daily basis, it was not unusual for me to be denied opportunities, and several teachers made it clear that this was due to my ethnicity, not my academic performance,” she recounts.

Since she was 7 years old, Harris has dreamed of being a civil rights attorney. For now, she is pursuing that goal by way of Teach for America.

Harris is one of three corps members that TFA arranged for me to interview in St. Louis, where there are 167 TFA teachers in public schools and 17 in charter schools. I can see why TFA wanted me to interview Harris. She is impressive in many ways: her background, her personality, her work ethic, and her appreciation of being in a good school with a supportive administration.

Harris, who, like the others interviewed, is in the second year of her TFA commitment, teaches English and social studies at Compton-Drew Investigative Learning Center, a St. Louis Public Schools magnet middle school partnering with a variety of universities, corporations, and foundations.

While a senior at the University of Michigan, Harris was drawn to TFA by what she calls the organization’s passion to improve urban education. She also liked that it was a prominent organization and that “they are very on top of things,” whether it be the latest in technology or strategies to foster leadership skills. On the down side, she wishes that TFA had a more diverse corps. In 2008 about 10 percent of corps members nationwide were African American, and about 7.5 percent were Latino; overall, almost 29 percent are people of color. Figures for the TFA staff are similar. TFA classrooms, meanwhile, are about 90 percent African American and Latino.

Asked to describe some of TFA’s strengths, Harris emphasizes the organization’s high expectations and the tools it provides to reach those expectations: “I can honestly say, what I have learned I could use in another profession: the networking, the time management and organizational skills.”

It’s the type of comment I hear repeatedly from TFA members and alumni. But such comments cut two ways. After visiting the TFA teachers in St. Louis, I wondered why I heard more about what TFA-ers learned about data and time management than I did about the children and their dreams and accomplishments. It bolstered another of the complaints about TFA: that the organization’s value accrues mostly to corps members—what they gain from the experience—and not to urban students, who once again see a teacher come and go.

Harris believes it is important to commit to the classroom beyond two years, and hopes to stay at least five. Her five-year plan also includes a master’s degree in education, a master’s in education administration, and then law school. And TFA will help make Harris’ career dreams become reality.

In its early years, TFA recruits often taught without training beyond their summer boot camp. That has changed, largely because states have tightened requirements for provisional licensing. In St. Louis, as in many districts, TFA has a relationship with area universities so that corps members can get an education master’s during their TFA stint. The tuition is paid in part by the $4,725 annual educational award that members get through TFA’s affiliation with AmeriCorps, the federally funded national community service program. (TFA members are paid a regular teacher’s salary by the district or charter school where they work.) TFA also spends significant money on supporting its corps members. In St. Louis, for instance, TFA had six staff members providing support and training for its TFA teachers.

TFA’s partnerships with schools of education have received little publicity, perhaps because they run counter to TFA’s much-heralded view that recruiting good people without certification is more important than promoting high quality teacher education programs. As TFA founder Kopp writes in her memoir, from the very beginning she was “baffled” at the idea that “teachers, just like doctors and lawyers, needed to be trained in campus-based graduate programs before entering the classroom. . . . How could Teach for America do anything but raise teaching standards? We were talking about recruiting the most talented graduates in the country to teach. Where was the conflict?”

Harris was, hands down, the most impressive TFA teacher I met in St. Louis. The second seemed smart and hardworking but naive; she wasn’t sure of her future plans and was leaning towards grad school in the emerging field of performance studies. The third, who had a quick answer to any question and was supremely confident in his abilities, would ultimately like to run for office, “maybe school board, or start off as a mayor of a small town.”

I returned to my hotel that evening, trying to absorb all that I had seen and heard. And knowing I had seen merely a slice, one coordinated and arranged by TFA’s well-oiled media operation.

All media inquiries are managed by TFA staff at the national level. After requesting copies of articles I had written for Rethinking Schools, the media staffer at TFA initially said she would be unable to help me set up interviews in St. Louis. Flabbergasted, I called her up, and complained vociferously. A request went out that night to the Rethinking Schools listserv asking for help getting in touch with TFA members or alumni and noting that “the national TFA media office has been uncooperative in helping set up any interviews.”

The next morning, I got a call from Kerci Marcello Stroud, TFA’s national communications director. She said there had been a misunderstanding and TFA would be happy to help. Before long, I was receiving almost thrice-daily calls from Marcello Stroud, along with a stream of emails, as part of what I imagine was a strategy of media overkill.

While in St. Louis I interviewed people with a range of perspectives on TFA. Helen Sherman, associate dean of teacher preparation at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, has a number of professional concerns about TFA’s model: “It’s a pretend band-aid, a quick fix to make it look like they are doing something. But, honest to God, these kids aren’t prepared.” Sherman adds that she has mixed feelings overall; her own daughter joined TFA after graduating with an English degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Byron Clemens, vice president of the teachers’ union, said the union has good working relations with TFA local staff and has been asked to present at local training sessions. At the same time, some union members worry that administrators are using TFA to hand-pick staff and get rid of teachers they may not like, especially higher paid teachers with seniority.

Peter Downs, president of the elected school board, summarizes TFA’s role in one word: “privatization.” He says that the mayor, not the district, first invited TFA to St. Louis, in line with reforms such as for-profit charters and the privatization of services in curriculum development, teacher recruitment, maintenance, and food service. As part of its contract with TFA, the district pays $2,000 a year to TFA for each of its recruits. (The elected board has no power because the state took over the St. Louis schools; the mayoral appointee to the new three-person board is a former regional staff person for Teach for America.)

St. Louis provided a window on many of the complexities of Teach for America at the local level, but didn’t answer the question of TFA’s national role. So I interviewed others across the country, and also Googled, phoned, and emailed, acquiring reams of studies, reports, and articles on TFA. Which is how I came to find out about two of TFA’s newest initiatives: Teach for All and Leadership for Education Equity.

Teach for All is a global network of like-minded organizations, launched in 2007 to replicate TFA in countries ranging from Argentina to Estonia, from Australia to Germany. Leadership for Education Equity (LEE) was founded in 2008 to provide a vehicle for political work and campaigning.

LEE appears to be crucial to another aspect of Teach for America’s strategy: TFA’s ambitions in shaping the country’s education policy agenda and encouraging alumni to run for office. My surprise at the media silence around LEE was outdone only by my amazement at LEE’s lack of public transparency.

Spin and Numbers

Barnett Berry, head of the Center for Teaching Quality, based in North Carolina, knows that too many urban kids are taught by ill-prepared substitutes. And it is a problem that TFA, in a finger-in-the-dyke approach, can help solve: “They can provide a teacher that the kids might not have otherwise, because the alternative could be a substitute with barely a college education. It’s not a question of whether we shouldn’t draw upon a bright, young, energetic group of people. Of course we should.”

“But,” Berry continues, “to suggest that TFA is the solution to the nation’s teaching quality gap is misguided at best.”

Berry likens the TFA recruits to sprinters—talented athletes, but insufficient if one wants to build a well-rounded track team. “TFA gets its recruits ready for a sprint, not a 10K or a marathon,” Berry notes. “They look like they are working harder than the veteran teachers. But the veteran teacher has experience and knows that if you want to make a career of teaching, a sprinting pace will burn you out.”

Because TFA recruits aren’t expected to stay, they have two other advantages: they cost less and they tend to do what they are told. “By and large, they don’t raise questions,” Berry notes.

TFA is sensitive to the complaint that its recruits aren’t committed to teaching as a career, and tries to counter the critique. On its website, its “Alumni Social Impact Report” states that “more than two-thirds of Teach for America alumni are working or studying full-time in the field of education.” The report goes on to note that one-half of those are teachers, with a prominent graph linking a 50 percent bar to K-12 teachers.

A closer look reveals a more complicated story. To start, small print notes that the report’s information is based on self-reported data in 2007 from 57 percent of the alumni network. Off the top, therefore, 43 percent of the alumni are unaccounted for, which distorts the report’s findings.

There are other problems. For instance, TFA alumni are defined as those who have finished the two-year commitment. But only 87.1 percent of members completed their commitment in 2007, and dropout numbers were higher in earlier years. Yet that 13 percent or higher drop-off is not factored in. What’s more, the field of education is loosely defined to include everything from working with a nonprofit advocacy group to getting a graduate education degree. Finally, there is no sense of whether those who responded to the survey tended to be recent alumni, perhaps only a year past their initial commitments and more likely to be in graduate school or teaching for a third year, or older alumni who have moved on to other careers.

Take away the fine-print percentages—the roughly 13 percent who didn’t finish their commitment and aren’t alumni, the 43 percent who didn’t respond to the survey, the fact that the 50 percent who are K-12 teachers are a subset of the 67 percent of alumni working in the loosely defined field of education—and the numbers become a lot less impressive.

A math teacher ran some numbers for me. His conclusion? The only thing one can say with certainty is that in 2007, at least 16.6 percent of those recruited by Teach for America were teaching in a K-12 setting beyond their two-year commitment. —B.J.M.

The Mysterious LEE
Twenty years ago, before TFA had placed a single teacher in a single school, there were glowing articles in the New York Times, Newsweek, and Time, and a segment on Good Morning America. The media love-fest with TFA has never stopped, extending to soft publications always eager for a feel-good story, such as Reader’s Digest and Good Housekeeping. When TFA founder Kopp calls Thomas Friedman at the New York Times, he not only answers her call, but also quotes her extensively (see Friedman’s April 22, 2009, column).

At the same time, Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University, a vocal critic of TFA, has been tarnished as a pro-union anti-reformer in influential media outlets such as Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the New Republic. Darling-Hammond’s 2005 study found “no instance where uncertified Teach for America teachers performed as well as standard certified teachers of comparable experience levels teaching in similar settings.” (see sidebar, p. 31.) Following Obama’s election, when Darling-Hammond was head of the education sector of Obama’s transition team and mentioned as a possible secretary of education, media attacks increased, with her critique of TFA one of the concerns cited. The attacks became so relentless that the late Gerald Bracey wrote an article for the Huffington Post titled “The Hatchet Job on Linda Darling-Hammond.”

TFA spends significant organizational time, energy, and money on its alumni, who are arguably the source of the organization’s true political power. (The most famous alumni are Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools, and Mike Feinberg and David Levin, founders of the KIPP Schools.) LEE is an outgrowth of TFA’s Political Leadership Initiative, which the TFA website says is designed to provide “tools, resources, and opportunities to help alumni influence the policies and priorities of local, state, and national government. It also helps prepare them to pursue elected positions.”

Some 27 TFA alumni are currently in office, nine more are running for office, and more than 700 are interested in “pursuing political leadership.” TFA has a goal of 100 elected officials in 2010.

The elected officials, however, present a potential quandary, which is where LEE comes in. As a 501(c)4 nonprofit, LEE can engage in lobbying and political campaigning that is either off-limits or strictly curtailed for a 501(c)3 such as Teach for America.

Jen Bluestein Lamb, vice president of TFA’s Political Leadership Initiative, who spends part of her time overseeing LEE, agreed to talk about the new organization. At the same time, Bluestein Lamb refused to give me even temporary access to the members-only website that is at the heart of the organization’s work.

I was hoping that LEE might unlock the door to TFA’s political agenda, so imagine my surprise when Bluestein Lamb said in no uncertain terms, “We have absolutely no agenda for LEE. We don’t have an agenda, we don’t have political goals, we don’t have an ideology.” In fact, she added, “Our [501](c)4 does not lobby.”

I found it hard to believe, but Bluestein Lamb patiently said the same thing in several ways. So then I asked whether there might be any positions deemed out of bounds—say a TFA alumnus wanted to run for office on a platform ending taxpayer support of public education or a total conversion to vouchers. Would LEE have any problem with that?

“No,” Bluestein Lam responded, although she hoped such a platform would spark “a pretty brisk dialogue” among other alumni.

Hoping there might be other information to help me understand LEE, I asked if there had been any media articles about the organization. “No, not to my knowledge,” she responded.

LEE was far out of the realm of any 501(c)4 that I knew, especially one that says its mission involves ending the achievement gap and educational inequity. LEE may not lobby or advocate a political agenda but, I asked, has it ever taken a policy position of any sort?
“No, and we never would,” she responded.

“But even the Boy Scouts take policy positions,” I countered.

Bluestein Lamb laughed and then repeated, “We have never, and never will, take a policy position ourselves.”

We were at a standstill. I felt I had entered an alternate reality. All this passion, all this talk of social justice and ending educational inequity—but without any political content or ideology or platform of any sort? It didn’t make sense.

If LEE and TFA are as apolitical as they claim, why does the media constantly link Teach for America with “reformers” who attack the unions and schools of education, and reforms such as entrepreneurially motivated charter schools, even for-profit charters, as necessary alternatives to traditional public schools? And if the media is falsely linking TFA to such pro-marketplace reforms, why doesn’t TFA set the record straight?

TFA and Teacher Layoffs

Many local teachers and unions, while irked by the halo that the media has placed around the heads of TFA teachers, haven’t spent much time worrying about TFA one way or another. But that may be changing. As the economy slows, districts are laying off veteran teachers—and yet still hiring TFA recruits.

Last summer, Boston Teachers Union President Richard Stutman met with 18 local union presidents, “all of whom said they’d seen teachers laid off to make room for TFA members,” according to an article in USA Today. “I don’t think you’ll find a city that isn’t laying off people to accommodate Teach for America,” Stutman said.

In the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, for instance, the superintendent laid off hundreds of veteran teachers but spared 100 TFA-ers. TFA, meanwhile, expanded into Dallas this fall, bringing in nearly 100 new teachers, even though the district had laid off 350 teachers in the 2008-09 school year.
In Boston, where the district planned to lay off 20 veteran teachers and replace them with TFA corps members, the union filed a complaint. The state’s Division of Labor Relations determined in early October that “the likelihood existed that the Boston School Committee violated the union contract when signing an agreement” with TFA, according to the Boston Globe.

More recently, in Washington, D.C., former TFA corps member and current Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee laid off 229 teachers in October, but only six of the 170 TFA teachers in the system, according to the Washington Post.

There is also growing tension between schools of education and TFA over jobs for new teachers. The College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, for example, graduates about 300 certified teachers a year. The graduates, especially elementary teachers, are increasingly having difficulty finding jobs in the Chicago schools. “One reason is the number of jobs committed to Teach for America and similar programs, which have arrangements with the Chicago public schools,” notes Victoria Chou, dean of the College of Education. —B.J.M

TFA’s “Theory of Change”
My interview with Kevin Huffman, TFA’s vice-president in charge of public affairs, was equally frustrating. I asked where TFA saw itself and its priorities in five years. Huffman explained how TFA has consistently improved over the years, from training and support to growing in scale and diversity. “Every year we learn new things that we should be doing better, and I think this is going to continue,” he said.

The same could be applied to classroom teaching, I noted. Might TFA consider changing its mission, and ask teachers to commit to, say, five years in the classroom?

No, Huffman made clear. Sticking to the two-year commitment “is critical to our theory of change.”

I struggled to remember media references to this “theory of change.” What was this theory? “That we will bring in great people who will have a tremendous impact on the kids they are teaching and who will go on for the rest of their careers to have an impact on root causes that cause the gap in educational outcomes in this country,” Huffman explained.

I noted that TFA’s theory of change sounded top-down and that it left out the voices and perspectives of the communities who were supposed to benefit. I could sense Huffman’s frustration. “I think that misapprehends our theory of change,” he said. This wasn’t just an educational policy initiative, he noted, because TFA hoped that alumni would enter other fields such as medicine and law and make equally important contributions. “We are decidedly nonpartisan and apolitical about what our alumni are pursuing or pushing,” he said. “We have a belief that our alumni have had an experience that will help them make better decisions.”

The explanations were vague and ephemeral, making it seem that TFA has as much political heft as a Kiwanis Club selling corn on the cob at county fairs to raise money for needy kids around the world.

A few days later, I was talking to Mike Rose, best known as the author of education books that raise big-picture questions about the intellectual, social, civic, ethical, and aesthetic purposes of public education. Rose was also perplexed by Huffman’s perspective.

“Everybody who has anything to do with education in any way, from the most conservative to the most radical, is going to say they want to make a change. But the kind of change is what matters,” he said. “They’re making a big claim about Teach for America and social change, so it’s fair to ask for an independent empirical study that demonstrates the validity of that claim. Otherwise there’s no way of knowing if and how their theory of change works in the real world.”

I also talked to someone who, as much as anyone in this country, understands social movements for change. Shortly before his death, I emailed Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, and relayed my experience with Teach for America and Huffman’s explanation of its “theory of change.” In response, Zinn emailed that he found the theory “remarkably orthodox.”

“The idea of bringing in ‘great’ people, ‘important’ people, is counter to the idea of a democratic education,” he wrote. “And all the insistence on not taking policy stands, not having an ‘ideology,’ is simply naïve. Not taking policy stands is itself an ideology, and an ideology which reinforces the status quo in education and in society.”

In early 2010, meanwhile, a study out of Stanford University found that TFA alumni actually had lower rates of civic involvement than those who were accepted by TFA but declined, and also had lower rates than those who dropped out before their two years were completed, according to a summary in the New York Times. Although Kopp herself had recommended the study, she disagreed with its findings; her comments in the Times suggested that the study did not adequately understand TFA’s “theory of change.”

Journalism 101: Follow the Money
To further investigate TFA, I decided to go back to Journalism 101: Follow the money. Which leads, among other places, to the story of Barbara Torre Veltri’s mother.

Torre Veltri is an assistant professor at Northern Arizona University. Last summer, her mother received a letter from Wachovia Securities/Wells Fargo Advisors, dated June 12, 2009, requesting input on a customer service questionnaire. In exchange for her time, the letter promised, “We will make a donation to your choice of one of the following charities: American Red Cross, Teach for America, or the National Council on Aging.”
Torre Veltri’s mother was puzzled. “Why would donations be solicited by [Wachovia Securities/]Wells Fargo for Teach for America?” she asked her daughter. “Since when is teaching some kind of charity?”(1)

Good questions without easy answers. Wachovia Securities/Wells Fargo was undoubtedly in need of an image makeover in early June. A few days before the letter to Torre Veltri’s mother, affidavits in a federal lawsuit recounted how Wells Fargo deliberately steered working-class African Americans into high-interest subprime mortgages, with the lending referred to as “ghetto loans.”

TFA’s 2008 annual report lists Wachovia as one of five corporations donating more than $1 million at the national level. The others are Goldman Sachs, Visa, the biotechnology firm Amgen, and the golfing tournament Quail Hollow Championship.

The organization is, without a doubt, a fundraising mega-star. In one day in June 2008, for instance, TFA raised $5.5 million. The event, TFA’s annual dinner, “brought so many corporate executives to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York that stretch limousines jammed Park Avenue for blocks,” the New York Times reported.

To my knowledge, there has been no in-depth analysis of who funds TFA and why. Clearly, one of the unanswered questions is how TFA has been able to garner such amazing corporate support—especially since some of these same companies, in their business practices, have preyed on low-income people or have exacerbated this country’s growing inequality of wealth.

Are the donations to TFA “guilt money”? Is TFA just smarter than other education groups in wooing corporate support? Is it that corporations believe it is no more politically risky to support TFA than to support the American Red Cross or the Council on Aging?

Or is there a confluence of views between TFA and its leading corporate and foundation funders? TFA has no public criticism of pro-market reforms such as privatization and for-profit charters. Nor does it ask hard questions about the relationship between the achievement gap and problems of segregation, poverty, and an unemployment rate among African American men that hovers around 50 percent in some urban communities.

Wendy Puriefoy is president of the Public Education Network, a national association focused on public school reform in low-income communities, and was on the board of Teach for America in the early 1990s. She believes the organization has expanded its agenda in recent years and chooses her words carefully in analyzing its current role because, she says, “it is going to sound harsh.”

Likening market-oriented reforms in public education to the deregulation of the financial industry that culminated in a recession, she says that the very same people who promoted economic deregulation are influential supporters of organizations such as Teach for America. They want to sidestep professional teachers, unions, and schools of education “and let loose the forces of the market,” Puriefoy says. “The marketplace of education is a big market. There is a lot of money to be made.”

Are TFA Recruits Better Teachers?

The Mathematica Study
One of the controversies swirling around TFA is the teaching quality of its recruits. To answer this question, Kerci Marcello Stroud, TFA’s communications director, pointed me to a 2004 Mathematica study on Teach for America. She specifically noted that the conservative education policy journal Education Next gave the report an “A” for methodology and that three other studies, including a 2005 study by Linda Darling Hammond and others from Stanford University, received a “C” or lower.

I went to the Mathematica study and, quite frankly, wondered why TFA was promoting it. I imagined how the Onion might summarize the study: “Teach for America goes up against the worst teachers in the country—they’re both awful!”

The Mathematica study involved 17 schools across the country, 100 classrooms, and nearly 2,000 students, and thus could be considered a representative, one-year snapshot. The study’s executive summary notes that the control group for the TFA teachers consisted of other teachers in the same schools and at the same grades—teachers with “substantially lower rates of certification and formal education training” than a nationally representative sample of teachers. In addition, the study said that many of the control group teachers had no student teaching experience at all and were less prepared than the TFA recruits.

The Mathematica study, using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, found that there were statistically insignificant differences in reading achievement for students in the TFA and control classrooms. In math, students in the TFA classrooms faired slightly better—equal to one month’s extra teaching.
The Mathematica study also found, however, that TFA teachers “had no substantial impact on the probability that students were retained in grade or assigned to summer school.”

A closer look at the math and reading results shows that neither the TFA group nor the control group was even beginning to close the achievement gap. In math, the TFA teachers bumped their student math scores from the 14th to the 17th percentile. The control group stayed flat at the 15th percentile. In reading, both the TFA and control group teachers marginally raised reading scores, from the 13th to the 14th percentile for the control group, and from the 14th to the 15th percentile for the TFA recruits. This, as Center for Teaching Quality head Barnett Berry notes, “is essentially virtually no gain at all. These [TFA] students were still reading more poorly than 85 percent of their peers nationwide, and well below grade level.” Teach for America boasts about its impact, noting on its webpage: “[O]ur corps members and alumni work relentlessly to increase academic achievement.” Yet in a study touted by TFA, the students of corps teachers remained far below their national peers and made only marginal gains.

Darling-Hammond’s Houston Study
"Does Teacher Preparation Matter?” is a peer-reviewed, scholarly evaluation of the effectiveness of the TFA approach, published by Linda Darling-Hammond and three other Stanford University colleagues in 2005. Reading through the study, one can see why TFA doesn’t like the results.

The study is a longitudinal, six-year look at data from Houston representing more than 132,000 students and 4,400 teachers, on six different math and reading achievement tests. (TFA has sent recruits to Houston since 1991, and this year has more than 450 corps members teaching there.)

“Although some have suggested that perhaps bright college graduates like those who join TFA may not require professional preparation for teaching, we found no instance where uncertified Teach for America teachers performed as well as standard certified teachers of comparable experience levels teaching in similar settings,” the study states.

The study also found, however, that teachers who gained certification, including TFA teachers who became certified by their second or third year of teaching, increased in effectiveness.

At the same time, few of the TFA teachers stayed in the Houston schools for long. Based on district data, the study notes that “generally, rates of attrition for TFA teachers were about twice as high as for non-TFA teachers.” For instance, of those who entered in the 1998 school year, 85 percent had left the Houston public schools after three years, compared to about 55 percent of non-TFA teachers. —B.J.M.

Doing Good and Doing Well
In a cover story last fall, Business Week put TFA at the number seven spot in its top 10 listing of “The Best Places to Launch a Career,” just after Goldman Sachs and just before Target.

TFA, meanwhile, actively promotes the value of joining its teaching corps, especially for those thinking of graduate school or immediately transitioning to a corporate job. Its website boasts of TFA’s partnership with over 150 graduate schools offering TFA alumni benefits such as two-year deferrals, fellowships, course credits, and waived application fees. The most popular schools for TFA alumni are Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Northwestern, and the University of California-Berkeley—with Harvard the overall top choice.

Its employer partners, which actively recruit TFA alumni, are equally prestigious and include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, KPMG, Credit Suisse, McKinsey and Company, and Google. TFA partners in its School Leadership Initiative for alumni, meanwhile, include the for-profit Edison Schools. (TFA founder Kopp has nothing but praise for Edison in her memoir. She is also open to the idea of vouchers.)

Anecdotally, and from conversations with various TFA staffers, it’s clear that the pay for TFA staffers is significantly higher than for similarly qualified classroom teachers. But it is not something the organization likes to talk about. Marcello Stroud, for her part, wrote in response to an email request about TFA salaries, “We consider compensation information to be confidential.” I knew there was no point pressing the matter but muttered to myself, “Thank God for the 990.”

The term “990” refers to the IRS forms that tax-exempt organizations must file and that by law are available to the public. Included on a 990 is not just essential information on total revenue and total expenses, but a breakdown that includes the compensation of the highest paid employees.

Marcello Stroud sent me TFA’s 990 for fiscal 2008. It shows that TFA had revenues of $159 million in fiscal year 2008 and expenses of $124.5 million. CEO and founder Wendy Kopp made $265,585, with an additional $17,027 in benefits and deferred compensation. She also made an additional $71,021 in compensation and benefits through the TFA-related organization Teach for All. Seven other TFA staffers are listed as making more than $200,000 in pay and benefits, with another four approaching that amount.

It’s also interesting to look at the 990 for the KIPP Foundation, the charter school chain led by Richard Barth, a former Edison vice president and TFA staffer who also happens to be Kopp’s husband. Barth made more than $300,000 in pay and benefits, bringing the Kopp/Barth household income to almost $600,000 for their work with TFA and KIPP. (In a 2008 article, the New York Times dubbed Kopp and Barth as “a power couple in the world of education, emblematic of a new class of young social entrepreneurs seeking to reshape the United States’ educational landscape.”)

TFA’s 990 lists its major contributors—some of the biggest names and players in the privatization of public education.

Take, for example, the Walton Family Foundation, based on the philanthropic beliefs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton. Its $9 million in contributions made it the single largest contributor to Teach for America. Within the world of education foundations, Walton is synonymous with privatization and the promotion of vouchers for private schools.

The Doris and Donald Fisher Fund is listed as contributing $2.5 million to TFA. The late Donald Fisher founded the Gap clothing store chain and made headlines in the San Francisco Bay area for decades for his conservative Republican politics and his various deregulation and privatization plans—including a pledge of $25 million in the late 1990s to expand the for-profit Edison Schools into California.

Teach for America also relies on local and regional funders. In St. Louis, for instance, contributions included a $1 million four-year grant from the Monsanto Fund, the philanthropic arm of the agribusiness giant Monsanto.

The 990 also broke down the $523,475 that TFA spent on political lobbying in 2008, within the allowable limit for a 501(c)3. On a state level, TFA worked to pass alternative certification requirements. On a federal level, its lobbying included support for appropriations for Teach for America and for unspecified education programs in the stimulus package.

Leadership for Educational Equity, meanwhile, has been less than cooperative in providing IRS documents that, by law, are to be made publicly available within 30 days of a request. In mid-January, after more than two months of LEE’s refusal to provide these documents, Rethinking Schools filed a formal complaint against LEE with the IRS; as of press-time in mid-March, LEE had still not responded.

Is This MLK’s Legacy?
One constant in TFA’s 20-year history has been founder Wendy Kopp, whose vision remains at the core of TFA.

It’s useful to read Kopp’s book One Day, All Children . . . The Unlikely Triumph of Teach for America and What I Learned Along the Way. Many of TFA’s hallmarks—the language of educational equity, the emphasis on social entrepreneurship, the reliance on corporate funding, Kopp’s messianic aura, and the missionary approach to closing the achievement gap—have been there from the beginning.

Equally interesting, however, is what is missing from Kopp’s memoir. For example, children.

The first and only time a child is mentioned by name is 20 pages from the book’s end, when Kopp talks briefly about visiting the home of a 4th grader named Zakia. Most of the section is actually about KIPP, because Zakia is thinking of attending a KIPP school. We don’t hear anything from Zakia herself or her mother. We do hear KIPP described as “a program designed to prepare students for success in high school and success in college.” But we don’t know if Zakia ever attends KIPP, or what happens to her in subsequent years. This is in keeping with the rest of the book, however. Purportedly about education, the book is essentially an impressive fundraising and media relations manual.

As I assess the book, I return to a single word: hubris. And that hubris has existed ever since Kopp started TFA as the answer to urban education reform, apparently without visiting a single urban classroom.

Kopp crystallized her plan while a senior at Princeton, when she needed to write a thesis on mandatory national service. She focused on a teacher corps for low-income areas, wrote her thesis, and applied for jobs. If she hadn’t been turned down by her final prospect, Morgan Stanley, TFA might not exist. Unemployed after graduation, she decided to found TFA. She focused on corporate funding—IBM, Xerox, AT&T, and Mobil. One of her overtures worked out and Union Carbide donated office space in mid-town Manhattan. TFA moved from idea to reality.

In the book, Kopp claims that she is carrying on the struggle for civil rights, asserting that “through Teach for America, my generation is insisting upon educational opportunity for all Americans. To us, this is a civil rights issue.” The title of Kopp’s memoir, One Day, All Children . . ., is a not-so-subtle reference to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and rests on the assumption that Kopp has taken up King’s mantle and is carrying on his legacy.

Much of the rhetoric takes the high road, especially in the beginning chapters when Kopp is wooing the reader. Later in the book, Darling-Hammond comes in for almost four pages of criticism, and her peer-reviewed studies of TFA are called “diatribes.” Nor did Kopp’s attacks on Darling-Hammond end with the memoir. In March 2006, for instance, Kopp wrote a strongly worded personal letter to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger opposing Darling-Hammond’s potential appointment to the state’s Teacher Credentialing Commission. (Darling-Hammond was not appointed.) Kopp’s letter not only portrays Kopp’s ongoing enmity toward Darling-Hammond, but also calls into question the organization’s alleged uninvolvement in political and policy controversies.

As for broader reform efforts, Kopp’s memoir dismisses initiatives such as smaller class sizes in favor of “clear outcome goals.” Similarly, she belittles efforts to improve schools of education, saying that she would instead “do what every successful organization does” and focus on recruiting talented people. (Kopp practices what she preaches when it comes to recruitment; she interviewed 30 people before choosing the nanny for her children.)

Kopp’s Parting Words
There are any number of concerns that swirl around Teach for America: that the organization is part of a global network promoting ideologies of privatization, individualism, and elitism; that TFA rests on the dubious supposition that elite graduates of elite colleges are inherently better teachers than people from local or regional schools who come from the communities where they teach; that the media and foundation attention lavished on TFA sucks away energy and money from other important reforms.

But what if one accepts TFA’s assumptions—that its purpose is purely to address educational inequity by recruiting the best and the brightest, training them briefly, and having them teach for two years in a low-income school? And that its model trumps the value of recruiting accredited teachers who view teaching as a career?

Given that the revolving door of unqualified teachers is a key factor in the poor performance of many low-income schools, what are the repercussions of those assumptions? Is TFA aggravating a problem that it claims to be solving?

It is Kopp herself who perhaps best answers that question. Speaking in a 2007 commencement speech at Mt. Holyoke College, Kopp said:

What I have come to appreciate is that things that matter take time. We live in an era when it is rare to meet people in their 20s and 30s who have stayed with something for more than a few years. And certainly, in some cases the right thing is to experiment and move on. But in many cases, the right thing is to stay with something, internalize tough lessons, and push yourself to new levels of knowledge and responsibility. Deep and widespread change comes from sticking with things.

Endnote:
1 This vignette is adapted from the forthcoming book: Torre Veltri, Barbara. Learning on Other People’s Kids: Becoming a Teach For America Teacher. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing.

Barbara Miner is a journalist based in Milwaukee, Wis.

(source)

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The Problem With Outkast

2015-01-13T13:09:00.000-05:00

While Andre Benjamin and Antwon Patton have not released a cohesive LP since the fall of 2000, the specter of Outkast continues to loom over our cultural moment. From their seminal, but slept on, 1994 album Southernplayalisticadillacmusic to the chart-topping SpeakerBoxxx/LoveBelow, we see the group gain millions of fans and gather almost universal critical acclaim. And, while we take for granted the flood of lil’s, young’s, man’s (and mane’s) who dominate the airwaves of our favorite hip-hop and R&B stations, and yes, even occasionally roll our eyes at the hijinx of Nene, Sheree, Tiny and Toya, it goes without saying that in the last 15 years, black popular culture looks and sounds a lot like Atlanta. A closer look at the various forces inextricably connected to the group’s rise presents a picture of not only a pop culture sensation but also a group sitting uncomfortably at the nexus of our nation’s political, social and cultural crossroads. In this way, the group’s real and imagined tensions help make sense of the profound shifts that were occurring both in the South and America as a whole during the last quarter of the twentieth century.

It should be no mystery that the most prominent rap group of the last 20 years emerged from a southern state. Cultural shifts depend on socioeconomic shifts and no socioeconomic shift was greater in the last quarter of the twentieth century than the rise of the Sunbelt South. As jobs and factories shifted away from the Midwest and a rising anti-liberal mood turned against municipal taxes, unions and the urban poor, the once maligned American South was now the model for how the sluggish postindustrial United States economy could be revitalized. Advertising low taxes, affordable suburbs, non-unionized labor, and black leaders that partnered with big business, the South was now at the forefront of national progress. The crown jewel in this “sunbelt strategy” was Atlanta. “The city too busy to hate” had a reputation of placing the interests of big business over the demands of segregationists, which allowed the city to attract multinational corporations and retain a “creative-class” of labor to fuel the city’s booming high-tech sectors. While the capital produced by these corporations and high-tech workers was divested away from the central city and into suburbs and exurbs in Atlanta’s surrounding counties, the partnership between big business presence and the growing black middle class softened criticism that not enough was being done for the city’s black poor.

Enter Outkast. Revisiting and revising the space in the black musical tradition where one balances the tightrope between 11:00 pm Saturday night and 11:00 am Sunday morning, Outkast presented a radically different — albeit still fraught — vision of a postindustrial city. Through the hazy funk-sampled production of Organized Noize, Andre and Big Boi rapped against hip-hop’s traditional narrative of the city as carceral space that could only be addressed with nihilistic rage. For Outkast, a player’s ball could be a “black man’s heaven”; from behind the windshield of a 1975 Cadillac El Dorado, one could see the Promised Land just off in the horizon. More than any group of their era, Outkast could romanticize the gendered and commercialized spaces in black southern life while still remaining firmly rooted in the rawest, funkiest, most beautifully human aspects of day-to-day life.

No wonder the group was booed at the 1995 Source Awards. At the moment when tales of authenticity and urban realism subsumed rap culture, Outkast asked for listeners to follow them into an Inception-like dream world without a totem. The South, as Outkast had imagined it, was still illegible to most hip-hop listeners.

In many ways, this new sound was as indecipherable as the group’s changing image. The tension between Cadillacs and the cosmos on their second album Atliens became even more pronounced on their third LP Aquemeni. Now officially being marketed as “The Poet and the Pimp,” Andre 3000 was given the character of the politically-conscious idealist in contrast to Big Boi’s street smart hustler. While it appears that this divide was largely a marketing ploy, it accurately captured the imagined binaries that were integral for late nineties hip-hop. The gravitational pull between hip-hop’s more hedonistic mainstream and the supposedly more progressive underground became an inescapable fact of life and Outkast played right into it. Big Boi’s narrative remained in the southernplayalistic world of strip clubs and trap houses, while Andre was now being billed as the evolved, politically conscious rapper, giving some consumers the opportunity to disassociate with the commercialism and misogyny of mainstream hip-hop by saying they “listen to Outkast.”

While we should be critical of the way Outkast is presented to listeners, we should also be aware of how the post-Aquemeni division is representative of the way hybrid spaces and radical alternatives often get re-inscribed into the traditional boxes that order our society. If we read Atlanta as the model late 20th century city, then we must understand Outkast as the model music group of this same moment. In our post-civil rights moment America’s historically rooted inequities are still present but are becoming increasingly unnameable in our public discourse. More specifically, we should be guarding against any efforts to sanitize the South’s history. In the same way that a re-branded “New South” is meant to cover the stench of slavery and segregation, Outkast, when presented as a neatly bifurcated binary, allows the listeners to avoid entering Outkast’s world on the group’s terms.

Rather than rinse our history clean of displeasing elements, it may be more useful to leave it drenched in funk. Just as various black American musical traditions blur the line between the sacred and profane; Outkast, and by extension, Atlanta, embody the enumerable tensions in our society that cannot be separated from one another. The flight into the suburbs is always haunted by the unseen poverty of the central city. The long-standing tradition of black middle-class respectability and community uplift symbolized by the Atlanta University Center must be coupled with the Bacchanalian excess that comes with having the luxury of leisure time in a consumer society.

While it is easy to imagine oneself as wholly in one world or another — and indeed there are specific cultural and institutional mechanisms designed to reinforce these divides — the most precarious problems of the twenty-first century will require us to build on the past, even if it is rooted in trauma we would rather forget. The raw, funky, contradictory elements of life are signs of history; and, more importantly, signs of struggle.

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}
by Robert Bland {Hyattsville, MD: USA}

Originally Posted 1/12/2011

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"Organized Labor & The State Fistfight in Heaven" / Context for the Wisconsin Protests

2015-01-13T12:01:00.005-05:00

Be weary of any charlatans, snake oil salesmen or general prevaricators who would have you believe that the zeitgeist of the “American Dream” is located in the nineteenth century. Let me be clear: This is not to say that the expansion on the antebellum slave trade, extermination of native peoples, incorporation of land and labor, and, most importantly, the disassembling and reconstruction of the country were not foundational moments for our modern state. The type of historical sleight of hand that I want to caution against will have you believe that the American ethos was forged away from the meddling paws of the state. In a frontier space somewhere between Samuel Clemens’ Mississippi River and Davey Crockett’s last stand at Alamo, the rugged individualist weathers the hardships of the elements, and the hostile brown people and ultimately produces to a particularly American brand of free market capitalism.

In reality, rugged individuals perish with the quickness. In an imagined world, the virtuous yeoman farmer can enter the market and be competitive. In reality, the frontier had been almost entirely incorporated by the turn of the twentieth century as railroads and bonanza farms colluded to keep the small guys out of the marketplace. As far as an “American Dream” with positive material consequences for the greater good exists, it is the vision that speaks to the necessity of collective action.

The Labor movement has historically been the vanguard for this type of struggle. When the Wagner Act of 1935 finally enshrined the right to collectively bargain with management into federal law, workers in the industries that drove the American economy could finally require management to negotiate with labor on working conditions. The 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” reached by United Auto Workers in some ways is seen as the high water mark of the era of collective bargaining. By giving up the right to strike, The Big Three automakers promised UAW workers pensions, healthcare and unemployment benefits, expanded vacation time and annual cost-of-living increases. This package of benefits seems standard fare for most middle-class jobs, but is only a relatively recent byproduct of collective action.

It is also the result of a road not taken. A more radical route -— and a route that certainly was on the table during the 1950s -— would have moved this package of benefits to the state, essentially giving all Americans universal healthcare and unemployment benefits through the state. The state, in collusion with big business, killed this “public option.” Labor did not escape the fifties with its hands clean either. By severing all ties with unions affiliated with the Communist Party (CPUSA) during the Red Scare, black workers in the South who had been organized throughout the thirties by the CPUSA were suddenly cut out of the organized labor movement.

When mass collective action would emerge again, this time in the form of the black freedom struggle of the sixties, labor rights were subordinated in order to gain more pressing goals in racial equality. These two goals were never mutually exclusive and we can see very clearly that certain leaders in the black freedom struggle of the sixties move towards the questions of economic justice.

How far is the distance from Memphis in 1968 and Madison in 2011? Where union membership has dropped precipitously in the skilled trades and industrial sectors since the seventies, Public sector employees remain the most highly unionized portion of our economy. They also present the rugged individualist charlatans with a preferred target to direct faux populist rage. Where “real” labor is masculine, white, and “productive”, public sector workers are more likely to be women, black or brown, and have their work portrayed as a socialist misallocation of your tax dollars. In the same way that the bogeywoman of the “welfare queen” did not have to be true to create seismic shifts in state policy towards poor women of color, the demonization of public sector workers —- especially teachers -— in our national discourse over the last couple years seems to have us hurtling towards another major setback.

Watch for the long con.

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}
by Robert Bland

(Originally posted 2/21/11)

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Einstein On Being Human {sayings}

2015-01-12T12:01:00.004-05:00

{image via onBeing}

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is in the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.”

Though it was new to me, this is a fairly well-known quote by Albert Einstein. He wrote this to Robert S. Marcus on the occasion of his son passing away due to polio. Like many other famous quotations, this text is often taken out of the original context and reproduced for a type of autonomous meaning that it invokes for the reader. And often the excerpts still resonate regardless of context or not.

I thought it was worth including this breakdown I read on another blog about this particular quote. Basically the quote has been altered from the original version which is shown on these documents. When I read the breakdown, it loosely made me think of a thread on the forums and the idea of how we receive information and how that reception may or may not affect meaning or resonance.

As it appears in most reproductions:
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Actual version from handwritten note:
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is in the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.”

(source)

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"White girls dipped in chocolate" / The Colour of Beauty [short film]

2015-01-12T12:01:00.001-05:00

Synopsis: "Renee Thompson is trying to make it as a top fashion model in New York. She's got the looks, the walk and the drive. But she’s a black model in a world where white women represent the standard of beauty. Agencies rarely hire black models. And when they do, they want them to look “like white girls dipped in chocolate.”

{Director Elizabeth St. Philip}

"The Colour of Beauty is a shocking short documentary that examines racism in the fashion industry. Is a black model less attractive to designers, casting directors and consumers? What is the colour of beauty?"

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The Rise and Inevitable Liberation of the Black Creative Class

2015-01-12T10:01:00.000-05:00

Urban Studies theorist Richard Florida makes a living writing about a group of individuals called the “creative class.” While some of our great American cities have seen precipitous declines in this postindustrial, Florida argues that our country’s still relevant cities have one thing in common—hipsters. If only Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland could have sold hipsters on the luxury of being in the rustbelt, they too could be like Seattle. Or, even better—Brooklyn.

Ok, Maybe not. But it appears that in our intensely hipster-aware popular culture, the idea of a creative class does have some resonance. Despite most of the creative class focus being centered around a white upper-middle class experience, I think there is sufficient evidence to say that over the last ten years we have witnessed over the rise of a sort a “black creative class.”

While not quite a fully cohesive group, the black creative class does share some similar traits. Because most of the group has been to college, and a considerable amount grew up in the suburbs, the black creative class fits somewhat neatly into the American definition of middle-class. After school, they generally migrate to a large city where a critical mass of other black creatives can be found. They are weary of essentializing conceptions of race but also discount the idea that we are living in a “post-racial” America. While most do not enter the arts or the entertainment industry directly, popular culture is the lingua franca of the black creative class. If you post an article that is critical of Tyler Perry on your Facebook wall, one of your black creative class friends will probably “like” it (if they did not already post it themselves). If you are not sure if you are talking to a black creative see if they respond positively to any of the following: Stringer Bell, Erykah Badu’s “Evolving” tattoo, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Hillman College, She’s Gotta Have It, early nineties black fashion, J*Davey, or Jean-Michel Basquiat (patron saint of black creatives).

After spending tens of minutes doing copious field research, here are some of my initial findings on what makes the black creative class tic:

1) Our revolution was televised

I am hesitant to give undue influence to television changes in our culture but for the black creative class, you cannot get around the fact that we grew up in the golden age of black television. In our childhood years, there was always a wholesome representation of the black middle class on TV. From The Cosby Show and A Different World to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Living Single, we consistently saw black families, black education, and black working professionals in prime time. Of course, these shows were being aired at a moment when the black middle class was increasing but, as a cultural backdrop, I think having these trends reinforced on a weekly basis has been critical for how the black creative class sees the world.

Conversely, our adolescence and young adult years have been spent watching, debating (or avoiding) another televised force: Black Entertainment Television. As the golden age of black television waned in the late nineties, BET became a larger figure in our cultural imagination and served as the primary provider of images for black folks in our popular culture. Subsequently, 200 years of African-American progress was lost and Frederick Douglass wept with the ancestors in heaven.

2) Kanye West is our spirit animal

While the black creative class has some overlap with hip-hop, we were not actively consuming the culture’s musical productions during its golden era (1986-1994). It was not until the shiny suit era that the burgeoning black creative class engaged in the culture at a critical level; even here, we are walking into a preexisting culture war, with listeners being forced to align with either the substance-free mainstream or the self-seriously grim underground. That is until Kanye showed up.

While the underground vs. mainstream divide was always a bit contrived, Kanye was the first individual from the black creative class to really suggest that there was another way to frame hip-hop music. With his debut album The College Dropout, Kanye eschewed dense slang and ornate wordplay for a rap style that was stripped down, if not conversational. Against the backdrop of looped soul samples that would please the fiercest golden-era acolytes, Kanye waxed eloquently on themes that black creative class’ own struggles: college, relationships, family, religion, and balancing materialism with peace of mind.

Many in the black creative class encountered his music at some point in college and the meteoric rise of Kanye is in some ways a reflection of their own transition into adulthood. His catalogue mirrors their own desire to enjoy the good life of the American dream while still being keenly aware of how limiting the more material sides of the dream can be.

3) We are painfully middle class but struggle with elitism

A lot has been written about class in America in the aftermath of the 2008 market crash. While millions of Americans have lost equity in the recent financial collapse, the effects of recession have been especially pronounced on the gains black Americans have made in the post-civil rights era. Looking at just wealth, the national average in the black community has dropped from $5,000 in 2007 to $2100 in 2010. In comparison, the amount of wealth in the average white household in 2007 was $100,000.

I point to this data to show the tension between being culturally middle-class and economically middle-class. As a group, the black creative class is more college educated and more cosmopolitan than any group of black folks in our country’s history. In this very unique historical moment, the black creative class seems more ready to push forward on the civil rights dream that our parents and grandparents fought so valiantly to make a reality. But, as a group, we are also painfully unsure about where to go next.

This tension can be most readily seen in the ambivalence the black creative class has towards figures like Tyler Perry. Where there will always be space in our culture for folks to produce art that is accessible, if not downright reductive, the black creative class defines itself in opposition to these movements. We want to be in alliance with, if not a part of, a cultural elite that imagines a world that could be. In some ways, this is a vital gesture. The most powerful social movements have always been accompanied by rich turns in our cultural conversations. Great art makes radical statements about society and makes space for new types of productive labor.

At the same time, these efforts cannot be in the form of reactive criticism. Simply looking down on portions of the black community by using culture to create social distance will only reify the class distinctions that imprison us all. As the black creative class reaches its maturity, it will have to use its cultural capital to again stretch our larger cultural imagination. In writing about the often unseen struggles that occur in black history, Bernice Johnson Reagon stated, “Waves go out. When they come in there is always a rock-back. It is not the same wave in the same place and the sands have shifted to never again be the same.” We are all part of larger, longer series of interconnected struggles. And, while the fruits of creative labor do not always correlate to immediate change, the sands are slowly shifting.

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}
Bland, Robert (2012). Realities We Otherwise Would Never Know. In B. H. Kasoro & K. D. Whittaker (Eds.), The Last Generation Of Black People. New York: The Liberator Magazine.

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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

2015-01-12T00:30:00.000-05:00

An excellent screen adaption of Dee Brown's book of the same title.

It was really interesting to watch the dichotomy of Charles Eastman portrayed on screen. The Sioux Indian who was forced to assimilate into white civilization only to be used to exploit himself and his people in the end. Watching him struggle with his 'Twoness', something I don't think I have really explored historically within other cultures.

As a child it always seemed that out of all the peoples of color that dwell here in this country, African Americans were the most lost and culturally desecrated of them all. A lot of the Mexican, Native Americans, and Asian families I was exposed to at least had some inkling to their culture's original traditions and values.

Whereas mine was really bits and pieces that we have meshed together to form this blurred identity of African American. So watching this man struggle gave me some feelings of angst because I felt this weird solidarity within our struggles. Not that I have ever really separated them in the grand scheme of things, but I think in the search of individual identity, inside the search of an identity for the collective it can overshadow our ability to deal with things on a basic human level. For whatever it's worth, this film gave me a kind of a (visual) clarity. And I think HBO did a good job with it.

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Justice? Or Revenge?

2015-01-02T13:22:00.000-05:00

There is no justice unless the judged agree. Without understanding and repentance there can only be revenge. There's a belief that any society that is forced to punish its citizens is, to one degree or another, an unhealthy state... A man who recognizes his crime and accepts his punishment is a member of good standing in his country. But the criminal who runs and hides, who is unrepentant even though he knows what he's done, is a symptom of a much greater disease.
~Walter Mosley

This is one of the many reasons why our criminal and juvenile justice systems don't work. No matter how much we try to deny it, societal laws are just a combination of moral and behavioral code. If people don't agree with, and understand the moral code, they won't follow the behavioral codes that go along with them. For example, these are a few moral code that we have put into law:

Marry only one person. Adults can only marry other adults. You can't cut off the hand of a person who steals from you. You can't sell your daughter. You can't take someone else's car on the street just because you like it.

We put moral codes into law, thereby making them codes of behavior we must live by. Yet if we refuse to admit that we desire a moral code as a society, and continue to pretend that each family can create their own moral code, then we must expect each family to create an individual behavior code. And so therefore, we are hypocritical for imprisoning people for acting outside of a prescribed behavioral code. Do you follow, Internet People?

People who break the behavioral code of the country must also believe they have broken a moral code, or else they do not see why they should change their behavior. For example, many poor people with few options wonder why they are so persecuted for small time drug selling. The moral code of 'taking care of the family' or 'doing for one's self 'is for many stronger than 'do not sell drugs no matter what'. And so when they are punished for selling drugs, they continue to feel justified in their actions, because their moral code fit their own behavior code.

What do you all think?

* FYI: Walter Mosley is a freakin' genius. One of the best fable-ists of our time, if you branch out from the Easy Rawlins series.

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Our father, which art in

2015-01-01T21:58:00.000-05:00

Our father which art in St. Frances hospital
...for hypertension.

Our father which art in jumpsuits and prisons,
...federal detention.

Our father which art in dark bars and alleys,
...lethal injection.

Our father which art in denial and delusion.

This cannot happen again.
(saul williams)

I'm not big on "days" for much of anything. But I enjoy talking with my dad and so I just wanted to share some of that positivity with the world. I think we need it. My dad ain't a big shot. Just a regular man who has aquired an extraordinary amount of wisdom in his [young] (ahem!) age. As a young man, I can only imagine how much more difficult life would be without a dad.

He hasn't laid the path out for me, but he's definitely set some ground rules that I am thankful to have. Humility, balance, humanity, consideration... if you find any evidence of these qualities in me, that's one of the main sources of them.

It may sound very cliche... but for all the things that my mother has been to me and done for me (and no question, I'd say that she's done more for me than my father and I think my father would agree) however, being a man and thus giving me a reference point for how to be a man, she could not do.

I recall talking with my dad and him telling me stories about his childhood friends being decimated by crack cocaine. This one's in prision. This one just got out. This one is dealing. This one is strung out. This one beats his wife. This one just died... He would tell me (with my 4 or 5 friends), "wow it's good to see so many of you..."

I think of my own friends growing up and at this moment it really escapes me to think of ONE who had a dad. How lucky am I? Then I think of my graduating class and I can recall less than 5 of us black boys who went on to graduate from college. My friend whose grandma's house I used to go to in the morning before the bus came and watch cartoons sits in prison for the rest of his life to this day.

I have a lot to be thankful for. We need our fathers.

"This cannot happen again."

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Imani

2014-04-02T23:07:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been on a real mission.

I'm cutting down my hours at the 9-5, trying to follow dreams, my heart; basically, trying to spend more time doing what I feel is right.

I have this deep desire to help people. Like everyone. So I always go to the root of a problem. I'm a virgo, so I realize that sometimes I do this with a percieved coolness, or coldness, but it's never in that spirit. I'm just always about the goal, the mission. I'm the friend that bugs you and asks, what's the point? Or, why are you doing that? Or, what's your 50 year vision for that? Sh*&, I'm interested in your 50,000 year vision!

I'm reading about HIV/AIDS in Africa and it almost brings me to tears in public. Some governments are still refusing to commit to The African Common Position On AIDS!

I believe in the potential of humans to do what is right. I think, however, that many of us are shackled by short term vision. We don't do what's right in the big picture sense because we can only see short term gain at times. I believe that we all want to work doing something we love, contributing to a community that we love. Hell, we all want to be loved in general. When I look around at my friends NOT doing what they love or at least NOT working towards doing what they love I usually find evidence of fear. I'd argue that most people don't run to money because of greed. Rather they run to greed because of fear. Damn, we scared of not being successful, or perhaps of just not being percieved as successful. (sometimes it's the ones who have been "successful" all their lives for whom it's hardest to free themselves from the outside pressure to please others. you get used to people praising you and if they aren't you think you're on the wrong path. it's a natural tendency.) That fear leads to jobs we don't like, let alone love, and that initial compromise often leads to greed. Afterall, once you've compromised yourself and your heart what is left to achieve? Except mo' money, more stuff. More "success."

I almost found myself on that road. But I can't continue on it. So I'm not. I'm getting off now, while it's still early. But I guess early's all in perception also. But they say God takes care of the birds so not to worry if he'll take care of you or not. I'll be talkin' to the birds for some advice on how this thing works :) And maybe my mama. lol! But then again, in many ways my mama is God. Right? Yes, I know, in many ways she is not too. (for those of you too scared of that statement) But in many ways she is. (so there!)

I am a communal being. I believe we're at our best when we are of community. (in communion? perhaps? interesting.)

I'm determined to do work that allows me to love and feel loved. Moreso, I'm determined to help as many people do the same as possible. And I'm not talkin about getting rich so I can employ a few people. Like I said, I look to the root. It's my nature. So I understand that in order for everyone to have what I want for myself, and not just my friends of my family or my country, somethings are going to have to change on a very fundamental level. I'm down to help make that happen in the best ways I know how.

So today I'm starting on a journey of faith. I'm not sure about how I'm going to do a lot of things that I see myself doing when I close my eyes. But I know that even if I die trying, at least I'll get to dream peacefully about finishing them when I'm sleeping eternally, knowing that I was headed in the right direction.

Originally Posted 6/9/2006
(So please excuse the dead links to our old forum, we were just starting out the gate! Also, it's crystal clear when I close my eyes now.)

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Huey Percy Newton / Revolutionary Suicide: "does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite"

2013-12-30T12:45:00.000-05:00

Here's an online copy, Huey P. Newton "Revolutionary Suicide" (download)

Originally Posted 8/19/07: Anyone know: is this joint out of print? Cause I don't have $100 to spend on a book right about now... [amazon]

Second Posting 7/13/2009

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Zakes Mda on Biko, Theatre of Resistance, and Protest

2013-07-28T16:14:00.000-04:00

WHY?: This is a 2001 lecture titled "Biko's Children" given by Zakes Mda at the 2nd annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture.

Excerpt: [...] "I have written elsewhere that protest theatre made a statement of disapproval, but did not go beyond that. It addressed itself to the oppressor, with the view of appealing to his conscience. It was therefore a theatre of complaint, of weeping and of self-pity...Black Consciousness was a philosophy of resistance rather than of protest. With it came a new generation of theatre practitioners, the Matsemela Manakas and the Maishe Maponyas, who created work that went beyond protest. This new theatre of resistance no longer placed the onus on the oppressed to prove their humanity. It no longer attempted to appeal to the conscience of the oppressor. It addressed itself directly to the oppressed, with the view of mobilising the oppressed to fight against oppression." [...]

(SOURCE: Steve Biko Foundation) In Sesotho there is a saying that motjheka sediba ha a se nwe - he who digs a well does not drink from it. Only those who come after him will quench their thirst from its cool water. When the forebears formulated this adage they had Steve Bantu Biko in mind, even as he sat in the world of pre-creation waiting to be created. When he finally came he became a digger of wells from which he never drank since his life was cut short. As a drinker from the wells that he dug, I am honoured and humbled by the Steve Biko Foundation's invitation to deliver the Second Steve Biko Memorial Lecture.

Recently I was invited to an inspiring event that left me proud to be a South African in the heart of Soweto - the Youth Empowerment and Networking Imbizo. The young woman who organised the event, a powerful performance poet called Lebo Mashile, told me that the objective of the imbizo was to inspire young people through art, and to motivate them to greater heights of creativity through the successes of peer role models, with the view of creating a positive and productive youth community.

I had been for some time on the trail of dub poets who were signalling a new age of activism in their performances. The invitation was promising me performances by Tumi, Zee, Sammy, Lebo, Kano, Palesa, Makgabe, Miriam, Siphiwe, Mpho, Masello, Roots 200 and Delia - young men and women without surnames, who have been plying their consciousness-raising poetry in the various underground venues of Gauteng.

What was remarkable about this gathering was that it had not been decreed from above, perhaps by some youth commission, some government agency or even some non-governmental organisation that needed to justify its existence to some donor. At their own volition and expense young people came together to create community dialogue on issues that concerned them most. And this, I was told, happened quite often. The whole movement is not institutional. It is a cultural and political re-awakening of those who had been consigned to the ditches of a lost generation, who are now pulling themselves out, quite mercilessly, with the scruff of their necks.

The performances of the poets were interspersed with presentations from Black Rage, Loxion Kultcha and Blk Sonshine, initiatives by young people who had taken a creative concept and managed to implement it and make it financially viable in such fields as internet publishing, fashion range designing and production, and music.

The presentations were followed by a workshop that explored what the participants referred to as Universal Oppression. In the words of Lebo Mashile: "Most black people have the perception that oppression is something that is imposed from 'top' down. Oppression begins with the self-perception that one is unworthy, unlovable, stupid, ignorant, good for nothing. One cannot impose on another that which they know to be untrue about themselves. Once a false self-image is ingrained in the individual psyche, oppression works more like a ripple in a pool. It is the feeling of powerlessness that inspires us to oppress others. When I feel as though I have been robbed of power society has conditioned me to react by robbing others of their power, usually those that I deem less powerful than me. Thus the victim and oppressor are usually one and the same, but play different roles in different contexts."

This process of self-examination and self-criticism is achieved through drama because, according to the facilitator, drama and creativity are effective outlets for the exploration of issues in a space where people feel safe enough to expose their vulnerability. Lebo Mashile says the use of drama and the creative arts has been essential to all struggles all over the planet, including our own struggle here in South Africa. It will continue to be essential in the new struggle against the enemy of self.

At this youth imbizo I could hear echoes of the voices of the youth of the early 1970s, when Steve Biko and other leaders of the time espoused the philosophy of political and economic liberation that would emanate from the psychological liberation of the oppressed black masses. Indeed I could see the young Matsemela Manaka of the 1970s in a poet from a Diepkloof based outfit called C4 Tupperware from Mars (Don't be put off by these names, they belie profound content). The movement may be reminiscent of the activism of the 1970s, but the poetry is fresh and new. Its form and content are of this age. It is mostly rhyming dub-influenced poetry that addresses the youths' disillusionment with post liberation politics and politicians who, they feel, have betrayed them. But most importantly, the resounding message is that of self-assertion, self-development and psychological liberation through positive cultural action.

We remember that one of the greatest contributions of Steve Biko's Black Consciousness movement was that of positioning culture at the centre of the liberation struggle, more than any other political movement had done before.

An early attempt to harness cultural action to the liberation struggle began and ended in the 1940s when prominent members of the ANC Youth League mooted plans for the establishment of an African Academy. Through the African Academy African artists in all spheres of the arts would unite and interpret the spirit of Africa. The Academy would also help African scholars break the dominance of white academics in African studies. The Programme of Action, a statement of policy authored by AP Mda, the president of the ANC Youth League, and adopted at the ANC annual conference on the 17th December 1949, stated that the theatre of struggle against white domination and for the attainment of political independence would not be confined to the political arena. The revolution would also be staged in the arenas of economics, education and culture. The document stressed the necessity of uniting the cultural with the educational and national struggle. And, of course, the establishment of a national academy of arts and sciences stood out as one of the key objectives.

With the advent of Black Consciousness a protest culture that pervaded black South African life was converted into a resistance culture. This was reflected clearly in the practice of theatre - in its production and enjoyment. Whereas the predominant mode of political theatre before this era was a theatre of protest, the Black Consciousness movement gave birth to a theatre of resistance. I have written elsewhere that protest theatre made a statement of disapproval, but did not go beyond that. It addressed itself to the oppressor, with the view of appealing to his conscience. It was therefore a theatre of complaint, of weeping and of self-pity. It did not offer any solution beyond the depiction of the inhumanity of the system on passive victims. Its most famous practitioner was Athol Fugard with his plays that depicted various aspects of segregation and racial discrimination in South Africa. When Gibson Kente finally turned his hand to a theatre that had some political content, his work was also of the protest theatre mode.

Black Consciousness was a philosophy of resistance rather than of protest. With it came a new generation of theatre practitioners, the Matsemela Manakas and the Maishe Maponyas, who created work that went beyond protest. This new theatre of resistance no longer placed the onus on the oppressed to prove their humanity. It no longer attempted to appeal to the conscience of the oppressor. It addressed itself directly to the oppressed, with the view of mobilising the oppressed to fight against oppression. Not only did this new militant theatre propagate messages of liberation; it agitated for action on the part of the oppressed to change their own situation. It was the theatre that was seen on professional stages. But it was also the theatre of street corners, of funerals, of weddings and of political rallies. Depending on the proficiency of its creators, it was a theatre of an artistry that lived beyond the occasion, but also it was a theatre of litanies and slogans.

We also remember that Steve Biko and his colleagues did not only take our culture from a protest mode to that of challenge and resistance, they were hands-on activists who established practical community development projects. These men and women went beyond moaning and whinging about the plight of the black people; they made their hands dirty with the soil of the land, building health delivery centres and running them, and facilitating the establishment of communal gardens in marginalized communities. In this way they aimed to inculcate values of self-reliance and self-development in addition to self-esteem, self-respect and self-confidence.

In my view the young men and women without surnames are the true heirs of Biko even more than factious political formations that profess to be the guardians of his legacy. Not only have these young people taken practical steps to inject consciousness into their lives through their art, to use culture to create a critical awareness of their situation and to mobilise themselves to action; questions of self-esteem, self-reliance and self-development form the foundation of their philosophy. They have come to a conclusion that culture is the central tool for domination and must therefore be resisted by an alternative culture. Using the arts as a tool of analysing their society, they are re-writing the script of their lives in a manner that defies their imposed identity of a lost generation.

The various excluded South African groups can re-write the script of their communities too if they embrace the ethos of self-development and self-reliance. Self-development is the kind of development that has not been imposed from above by so-called experts. It emanates from the community itself after the community has been equipped with the tools of critically analysing their society, engaging in a dialogue about their needs, and then adopting resolutions on what route to take to solve their problems. Only after this process is technical expertise from outside necessary. The reliance on the community's own mental and material resources - self-reliance, that is - engenders a sense of ownership of the development in question. This does not in any way imply the rejection of external resources, but these generally are used to supplement, enhance and enrich local resources. It does mean, however, the rejection of those external resources that are offered at the cost of the community's loss of self-respect and that impinge on the community's autonomy of choice of action. Self-reliance, of course, can only be achieved if the community has a critical awareness of its own creative assets. In many instances cultural action has been effective in realising this awareness.

It is clear, therefore, that self-development and self-reliance are products of popular participation. South Africa is yet to learn that there can be no transformation without popular participation. Hence we do not see any organised efforts to increase the people's control over their own institutions and resources. Popular participation in the transformation of South Africa has been rendered irrelevant by a government bent on centralising power at all levels. Even at the very village level people are represented in local government structures by officials who have been deployed from outside those communities, in many instances as a reward for services rendered the party. Local communities are regarded as spoils that must be shared at the table of expediency. I have visited many rural communities in the Free State and the Eastern Cape, and I have seen party officials at some district headquarters making decisions on behalf of villages they know nothing about. From a position of ignorance apparatchiks are supposed to drive community development.

No wonder many of our developmental efforts have failed. We operate under the false notion that the meaning of development is confined to economic growth and technological advancement. We forget that the quality of life of the people will only improve when individual members of the community have achieved greater control of their institutions, and therefore of their social, economic and political destiny.

There is no doubt that our government has made great strides in the war against poverty in this country, especially in the areas of housing and provision of clean water, electricity and phones. Even in the much-maligned education arena the South African child is much better off than he or she was ever before. And there has been a great improvement in the delivery of primary health care, while tertiary health services are floundering. Another great stride that I see is in the development of human resources. We are enjoying an unprecedented period of freedom, and a human rights culture is beginning to crystallize - even though ugly intolerance does occasionally rear its head. Amazing things have happened in this country in a very short space of time.

Yet still, children are dying of malnutrition in the Eastern Cape, a region with the highest mortality rate for women and children in the whole of South Africa. Dire poverty covers the beautiful landscape that is inhabited by walking ghosts with sunken eyes. These are the excluded people of South Africa, and they are a clear indication that the government's strategy for rural development, if ever there is one, has failed. And its failure lies at the door of the politics of deployment and redeployment, where government officials and elected representatives are not accountable to the people but to party bosses.

One senses strong disillusionment with politicians among young South Africans, only seven years after the euphoria of 1994. And here I am not talking of the white youth who believe affirmative action has rendered their future meaningless in this country. I am talking of young black South Africans in the rural areas and marginalized urban ghettoes, who see, rightly or wrongly, only bleakness in their future and blame politicians for betraying them. You hear it in their songs and in their poetry - works of art that are irreverent and have the potency of crushing political egos.

This is a good sign. It augers well for the future of South Africa because post-colonial Africa (or neo-colonial Africa, if you like) has not been known for its vigilance against the excesses of its political leaders. Soon after independence the youth were incorporated into the organs of a monolith whose function was to advance the cult of the personality of the political leader. He became the Chosen One, the Anointed One, and even the Saviour. Megalomania began to gel, and political leaders became infallible. This was accompanied by the complicity of African intellectuals in the deification of these nationalist leaders. The fate of the African peoples was sealed in the hands of corrupt buffoons who wreaked no opposition. Even trade unions became mere labour desks of the ruling parties.

Thus Africa was burdened with the Mobutu Sese Sekos and the Kamuzu Bandas, who ganged into an old boys' club that used the Organisation of African Unity to safeguard their position through its non-interference clause. Today we see the results of that cult of the personality and the deification of political leaders in the person of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. We also see the old boys club mentality in the manner his brother-leaders from the SADC countries have grouped around him and played down his excesses, not only against white farmers, but against black Zimbabweans, for it is black Zimbabweans who have been the greatest casualties of his insanities.

Perhaps I should hang my colours to the mast in as far as Zimbabwe is concerned, especially because there is a tendency in this country for black people to be reluctant to criticise Mugabe because that would place them on the same side as Tony Leon.

As a writer I have a close affinity to Zimbabwean writers, the Chenjerai Hoves and Yvonne Veras, whose work has greatly influenced mine. I have seen writers and other artists contributing in the liberation struggle by rallying people around the cause. I have seen their work celebrating a new Zimbabwe and a great future that everyone thought awaited Zimbabweans. I have seen the cult of the personality emerging around Mugabe, and I myself contributed in its creation, for, as a staunch pan-Africanist, Mugabe was my hero. I have seen the complicity of the trade union movement in that country. It was only much later that the Zimbabwean trade union movement woke up to the excesses of the ruling alite and assumed an independent voice. I have seen the usual complicity of the intellectuals. I remember Eddison Zvogbo, a senior cabinet minister in the Mugabe government and a poet of sorts, becoming a doyen of the denizens of the university staff club in Harare where intellectuals would ply him with whisky while he plied them with socialist rhetoric. At the same time he was accumulating hotels and farms for himself.

A culture of unbridled accumulation established itself in that country soon after independence in 1980. It spread and seeped deep into the walls of the halls of power in proportion to the increasing volume of socialist rhetoric emanating from every aperture of the ruling elite. It is only partly true that Mugabe was unable to address the land question because he was hamstrung by "sunset clauses" in the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement that set the stage for Zimbabwean independence. During the twenty years of the "sunset clauses" Mugabe was able to dish out farms to his cronies and colleagues in an elaborate patronage system.

It is a fact that the white farmers in Zimbabwe have always obstructed land reform. But Mugabe's government had the option to exercise its power to introduce and enforce reforms through legal and constitutional means. If his had been a government worth its salt at all, it would have effectively dealt with that little problem. Mugabe failed his people. He failed to redress the inequities of colonialism in the twenty-one years he has been in power. Then he decides to render his country ungovernable to save his skin, sacrificing his country and its economy for short-term gains. A self-destructive ruse for the retention of power! In the meantime the people of Soweto have their electrical power cut off when they default on payment while Eskom continues to feed endless supplies of current to a defaulting Zimbabwean government. The poor people of South Africa find themselves subsiding the excesses of a dictator.

The very intellectuals who helped create Mugabe's cult of the personality are at the receiving end of those excesses. Writers who used to sing the songs of that revolution are now under constant surveillance from the Central Intelligence Organisation. Those who speak out are given a thorough hiding by the members of the youth organisation of the ruling party and by the so-called war veterans. No one is ever charged for such gross violations of human rights.

In South Africa we are beginning to see the emergence of a similar culture of unbridled accumulation. Unlike the ruling elites of Zimbabwe who garnished their accumulation with socialist rhetoric, our ruling elites have discarded any pretensions to socialism. Instead they have adopted a new slogan: "Accumulation cannot be democratised." We hear this repeated at their cocktail parties and at every self-congratulatory gathering. We see a culture of conspicuous consumption and instant gratification giving birth to wholesale corruption. We also see the arrogance of power gradually turning into racial arrogance: black people are not supposed to criticise black people, otherwise they are playing into the hands of racist whites who do no think blacks can run this country without taking it down the sewers.

This antipathy to public debate about our strengths and weaknesses is a symptom of our lack of self-confidence and self-esteem. We seem to forget that we are in power now. We should get on with running the country unapologetically instead of whining and whinging about how much of an unfair deal we are getting from our racist compatriots, from foreign investors and from the media. Yes, most of our media have replaced scepticism with cynicism when it comes to the government. But from where I am standing this is a lesser evil than the media that I saw eulogising the nationalist leaders in newly independent Africa, glossing over their weaknesses, and reflecting on their looting of the coffers of the state as due rewards for sacrifices made in the fight for liberation. This continued unabated until we reached a stage where news became news only if it had something to do with the president's speech or with a cabinet minister opening a new conference centre.

The constant looking over our collective shoulder in fear of racist judgment of our conduct and performance has stifled the self-examination and self-criticism that is essential for community development. Bur fortunately, as I have indicated, the young people of South Africa do not subscribe to this antipathy. A young playwright, Xoli Norman, has written a powerful play titled Hallelujah! It has been enjoying a season of full houses at the Market Theatre. The play addresses, among other issues, black people's self-hatred, which manifests itself in their interactions among themselves and with black people from other parts of the continent. After one performance a black journalist commented, "This playwright is exposing us to the whites. What he is saying in his play is true, but must not be said in a public forum because it reinforces racist notions about blacks." It was therefore gratifying to hear a young member of the audience respond, "But Steve Biko said we need self-criticism in order to liberate ourselves. Black Consciousness was conceived with the view of getting rid of the very self-hatred that Norman writes about."

The strength of our political development in South Africa lies in the fact that we did not develop a cult of the personality. As much as some of our honoured freedom fighters would have liked to be reincarnated into parliamentary political life as demigods, we refused to let that happen - although we almost canonised a living Nelson Mandela into sainthood. It is to his credit that he publicly revolted against deification. It is also to the credit of his generation of freedom fighters who continue to lead humble lives devoid of the vulgarities demonstrated by our new national elites. But the age of humility is passing. We have seen Govan Mbeki depart. Walter and Albertina Sisulu and a very few others remain the bearers of this humility. In no time we shall be confronted head-on by the age of arrogance. The signs are there already.

Some of the signs lie in the politics of deployment and redeployment that I mentioned earlier. My concern is in its effect at the very grassroots level in the rural areas of South Africa. Its effect at national level has been discussed extensively. I myself have written on a number of highly qualified black South Africans who have opted to leave the country because the jobs for which they were qualified were given to political cronies and family members of the ruling elites who had zero qualifications in those fields, but who received huge salaries while their jobs were done by highly paid consultants. That trend continues today. Recently a young highly talented black woman went back to exile in Canada after discovering that affirmative action in practice does not really affirm black South Africans but black ruling party faithfuls. Another talented young black South African, Majakathata Mokoena, wrote that the economy of South Africa had the potential to be the strongest in the southern hemisphere, and could support jobs for many people is southern Africa. But it is lagging behind because of what he calls crony capitalism. He writes that

Crony capitalism is based on who one knows in the political body rather than on those who are well disposed to entrepreneurship and new business formation. That includes people who have gone to school to study business and other technocratic qualifications so that they can contribute positively to the growth of the country's economy. Now all these people's efforts are wasted while economically inept people are put in positions they barely understand. That is why there are so many failures in the new SA, despite the country's potential.

With weak opposition parties that are only able to proffer right-wing and reactionary solutions to the problems of this country, and that are unable to deal with the government's arrogance of power, the trade union movement is a source of hope for many South Africans. The feeling is that even though it is part of the ruling alliance it has not lost its independent voice. But in my book the trade union leaders in this country have not acquitted themselves with any measure of brilliance or even integrity. They have used the workers as stepping-stones for the accumulation of untold personal wealth. They have ridden on the backs of the workers to the corridors of political power. After they had attained it they soon forgot about their constituents. It was therefore difficult to take Zwelinzima Vavi seriously when he declared on SABC television on 30th August 2001, "We have no ambition of becoming fulltime politicians. We have no wish of going to parliament."

But facts speak a different language. The government has been able to silence trade union opposition by offering union leaders fat posts in the national and provincial governments, and by deploying them to the corporate world, where they implement the very policies they had been screaming against. Of course, one day the posts will get exhausted, and we shall see a trade union movement leadership that genuinely looks after the interests of the workers without using them for a cheap ride to self-aggrandisement. Perhaps Vavi's declaration is a signal that that is beginning to happen.

The effects of the politics of deployment and redeployment on rural development have not been discussed. I have indicated that the failure of the government's rural development strategies lie in the lack of participation of the communities concerned in mapping out their own development. Plans are conceived by experts from outside the community, without the community's involvement in identifying their problems and in working out solutions from their own perspective. The rural poor are never involved in the design, implementation and evaluation of the projects. The notion of development is this country is that the centre must "deliver" development to the periphery, which must remain a passive beneficiary of whatever services and materials delivered. The people's role as makers of history is negated. This concept of "delivery" has created and reinforced a dependency mentality on the people. Hence people now expect their lot to improve without any agency on their part. They have been socialised into that kind of thinking.

Empirical studies have shown that participation of local communities and their organisations has improved performance in many urban and rural poverty alleviation projects. But South Africa cannot achieve any level of participation with its penchant for the centralisation of power, where everyone is subject to what the centre decrees.

In my experience in the rural areas local government representatives who have been imposed on the villages, and therefore are not accountable to the villagers but to party bosses, have stifled those development initiatives by members of the community in which the local government representatives did not have a stake. In some villages a project must first be approved by party structures before it can be put before government and non-governmental structures. There is no longer a distinction in the village between a party and a government structure.

Our movement away from a people-centred government to a government by deployment breeds the arrogance of power. The arrogance of power goes hand-in-glove with corruption. But rural development is not only thwarted by corruption at the local level. The biggest constraint to development is corruption at the centre where funding from our taxes and from the donor community is controlled. Ineptitude and inefficiency also play their part. We have heard of the six executive directors of the National Development Agency who pay themselves R450 000 each while the agency fails to disburse funds to struggling poverty alleviation projects.

An example of a community development project that has suffered because of the unsavoury practices of the national elites the Lower Telle Beekeepers Collective. This was established two years ago by members of a village community in the Herschel district of the Eastern Cape after going through a process of critically examining their situation. Village men used to work in the mines, and women used to trek to the Free State farms for seasonal employment at harvest time. But retrenchments, both in the mines and at the farms, have taken their toll. The vast majority of the people of Lower Telle are unemployed. The village is located on a rocky mountain and only small strips at the banks of the river are suitable for agriculture. But the mountains are rich in aloes whose flowers produce nectar and pollen that is natural food for bees. The people then decided to form a beekeeping collective - a development project that would rely on their own mental and material resources, using raw material that exists in abundance in their community. But to achieve this they needed technical expertise and financial resources from outside the community. Their application for assistance, which included training in beekeeping and initial stock, was approved by a development foundation of a big parastatal. But before any assistance could be disbursed the ugly head of corruption reared its head. All funding was suspended by the foundation while it undertook a forensic audit because the foundation's chief executive had either mismanaged or embezzled some funds. Once again the rural poor had to swim in the quagmire of their poverty while the national elites stuffed themselves like pigs from their ill-gotten spoils. It took almost two years for the problem to be resolved, and for forty families in some remote mountain village to realise their dream of establishing their own business from which they could feed their families and send their children to school.

Because I want to make certain proposal to the audience that is gathered here tonight I must add that I have been intimately involved with the Lower Telle Beekeepers Collective from its inception. I was a catalyst or a facilitator in the community's process of critically analysing their problems and in working out solutions from their perspective. I even took a beekeeping course in order to participate meaningfully in their activities.

I began this talk with Biko's children - the young men and women from marginalized communities who are using the arts to understand the nature of oppression (which includes the sources of poverty) and to liberate themselves from it. These youths are striving to put content back into their art and their lives. It is the duty of our society to support them in the generation of alternative values. It was therefore wonderful to learn that in June the Steve Biko Foundation launched the Expression of Identity Programme, a youth arts programme that encourages the adoption and reinforcement of the values I am discussing here. The Foundation has worked with some of the poets I have mentioned, and a group of them is taking a pilgrimage to King Williams Town for a youth heritage festival from September 22 to 24.

I end this lecture by throwing a challenge to our black professionals in the public and private sectors in all the cities of South Africa to continue the legacy of Steve Biko. We have seen how Steve Biko and his colleagues did not dwell on high-flown philosophies that had no practical relevance to the lives of the people. They took practical steps to transform society at the very grassroots level. They conceived and established community development projects. We can continue the Biko legacy by doing the same. Black professionals can adopt a village and act as catalysts or facilitators for its development, in the same manner that I did with my ancestral village of Lower Telle.

Black people in South Africa have a link with some village. Even those who are fourth generation city dwellers, as you will find in townships like Soweto, have a village where their great-grandfather's umbilical chord was buried. Go back to that village and facilitate community dialogue on the issues that concern the villagers. Help the villagers to establish collectives and co-operative societies that use appropriate technology to exploit the raw materials that are found in any community. And this, of course, includes the raw talent of the youth in the arts and other facets of life. Be a catalyst for a people-centred development. This has no financial implications on you, except perhaps the cost of going there. And it will only take one weekend a month to achieve something that will save thousands of babies from dying of malnutrition. After a few months, when the project can stand on its own, you won't be needed anymore, except perhaps as an honorary adviser. After training in basic business methods the villagers can run their projects themselves. There are many non-governmental organisations that specialise in this kind of training.

Rural development is the key to many of our problems, including that of the children who die of malnutrition in the Eastern Cape. But this would also contribute in the reduction of crime and grime in the cities.

My challenge is further directed to black empowerment companies to establish foundations of the ilk of Eskom Development Foundation to fund the individual projects of this Adopt-a-Village Campaign. It is very unfortunate that black empowerment companies are perceived to be reluctant to plough back into the community. The young people of the imbizo expressed the same sentiments. Lebo Mashile said about their attempts to fight poverty, "There is nothing noble about poverty. But young people with ideas do not get any assistance from black empowerment corporations. The people in these corporations have climbed up and reached the top. Now they kick the ladder."

We know that the main reason black empowerment corporations have fallen short of their responsibility to the black community is that in many of these corporations the leadership is that of a new South Africa while the content remains that of old South Africa. This is clearly illustrated by a big corporation with a strong black empowerment component that refused to sponsor a television programme meant to cultivate a culture of reading particularly in black communities in support of Kader Asmal's Masifunde Sonke Campaign, but which is now sponsoring an idiotic programme called Big Brother on M-Net. Today there is no book review programme on South African television and Big Brother thrives, thanks partly to black empowerment.

Of course the corporation will say it is in business and is more interested in the mileage that it will get from Big Brother. But there is such a thing as social responsibility.

My emphasis is on black empowerment companies to fund the Adopt-a-Village Campaign because they have a special duty to do so, but in reality it is the task of the South African corporate world as a whole to fund such endeavours and to make Biko's children realise their potential.

An investment in Biko's children is an investment in the future of South Africa, for they will not desert this country. It is their heritage. The Biko Foundation has launched development programmes in Ginsberg Township, much along the lines of the Adopt-a-Village Campaign that I am proposing here. The question I want to ask the foundation: would they willing to spearhead the Adopt-a-Village Campaign nationwide?(source)

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Sexual Surrogates

2013-07-09T17:26:00.000-04:00

After that interesting discussion on masturbation, I'm curious what folks think about the idea of "Sexual Surrogates". Some might view them as prostitutes by a better name but this article might change your mind (might not).

(New Times) Sexual Healing; Sad stories and otherwise freaky tales from Florida's last sexual surrogate:

Part of him wanted to lay her down on the bed and hold her and make passionate love to her the way they do in romantic movies. Part of him wanted to get his clothes on and get out of there as fast as possible. And never look back. And never discuss this moment. Ever.

They were covered in soapy bubbles, standing close to each other in the shower of her Fort Lauderdale townhouse. Steam crept down the bathroom mirror.

"Does that feel OK?" she asked, running her fingertips through the lather on his shoulder. He was a burly man, a merchant marine in his 40s who'd spent most of his life at sea. The only woman with whom he'd had any relationship was his mother, who was both religious and abusive. She'd often reminded him that sex was a dirty, sinful, unspeakable act.

Catherine, the woman touching him in the shower, was the first woman who'd ever caressed him.

"That feels good," he said in a shaky voice.

"Now I'm going to rub the other shoulder," Catherine said. A slim, modest-looking woman with straight, soft hair and a smooth, warm face, she was calm and reassuring. "That isn't too bad, is it?"

Before they got in the shower, they'd talked a bit, getting to know each other. They started with soft touching on the hands and arms. Eventually, they were standing naked next to each other.

All the while, Catherine encouraged him to talk about how he was feeling.

He said he was frightened, tense. He couldn't stop thinking about what his mother had told him so many times. He couldn't help but feel that what he was doing was wrong. But it also felt good to be touched. It felt good to connect with someone, even if it was just temporary.

Catherine continued rubbing him and speaking in a soothing, caring tone.

He extended his hands to her body. First to her hands and arms, then her shoulders and stomach, and soon her breasts. As his hands moved over Catherine's soapy body, he gulped. His eyes turned glassy. His hands shook. He felt a twisting deep in his chest.

Soon it was too much for him. The merchant marine was overwhelmed by the experience. He began sobbing.

"That's all right," she said, still covered in bubbles. Catherine's voice was like warm syrup on a cold morning. "Stay with your feelings. Talk to me. It's OK."

Catherine isn't his wife or girlfriend. Nor is she some trollop off the street. And while technically she is getting paid $185 an hour to play with him in the shower, she is not a prostitute.

She's a sexual surrogate — a partner supplied by the man's therapist so he can work through his sexual dysfunction. The concept of sexual surrogates first came about in the late 1950s, when sexology researchers William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson were working with couples dealing with sexual problems ranging from physical handicaps to serious emotional issues caused by childhood trauma. Many of the most severe cases were men and women who struggled with these issues but understandably didn't have a partner to work with. So Masters and Johnson found open-minded, compassionate young women to fill the role of sexual partner for therapy purposes. Since then, men have also become sexual surrogates.

Partner surrogates can work with patients for as long as several years or for only a few weekends. Over an extended treatment period, a surrogate might dispense anything from verbal encouragement and soft touching to intercourse.

Though most psychologists no longer view surrogate therapy as radical, the practice is rare these days. Dozens of surrogates were spread across the country in the '70s and '80s, but today, in a Viagra-infused society, there are fewer than 30 licensed practitioners. And there is just one certified surrogate working in Florida — Catherine. She works with men traumatized by childhood abuse or who have physical or emotional handicaps that make sex difficult.

The merchant marine, for example, felt that his mother's sentiments about sex had a hold on him that prevented him from connecting with anyone. "It wasn't until his mother died that he would even think about these things," says Dr. Marilyn Volker, the Miami sexologist who brought in Catherine to be the sailor's surrogate. "He had never really been around women, and these thoughts paralyzed him."

Because he was so accustomed to living at sea, where he showered in saltwater once every few days, Volker and Catherine started by coaching him on simple things like dress and meal etiquette and showering and brushing his teeth daily. They were nonjudgmental and reassuring, explaining how a mature relationship should work.

"It's not about sex," Volker says. "It's about being able to connect with another human being."

The sailor's breakdown in the shower was actually a breakthrough, Volker says. As he felt the sensuous touch of a woman for the first time, he discovered that he was capable of opening up and sharing with another person and, in turn, being loved himself.

Later that afternoon, he told Volker, "If I never have sex with a woman, it won't matter, because today I feel free of whatever my mother did to me."

Before that moment in the shower, Volker says, "all of his emotional connections to other humans had been tapered down or shut off. You wouldn't be able to tell it by looking at this big, smelly kind of guy, but he was closed down. Now he feels like he can at least search for someone. Like life isn't hopeless."

The first time Volker told her about surrogate therapy, Catherine felt as though her entire life had been leading up to this. "I felt immediately like this is what I was meant to do," she says.

Now in her early 60s, she sat down recently to talk about her life as Florida's only sexual surrogate.

Catherine is not her real name. She asked that her name not be published because of the nature of her work. Catherine, ironically, is her confirmation name.

She grew up in a Catholic family in southeast New Jersey. Her father was a factory worker and an alcoholic. Though her Ukrainian mother was devoutly Catholic, she divorced while Catherine was in elementary school and waited tables at a diner to pay the bills. She worked the graveyard shift while Catherine looked after her three younger sisters.

Her mother never taught her about the birds and the bees. "All my mother ever told me about boys was that I should stay away from them no matter what," Catherine says. "She never even said anything about protection or how anything worked or anything. 'Just stay away.' So, of course, naturally, I couldn't resist."

In high school, she'd sneak out of the house to meet her older, football-star boyfriend. At 15, she got pregnant. It was 1960. Her mother was devastated. "A priest came to my house," she says. "They said I had two options: Get married or move to a convent. Luckily, [the father of the baby] was OK with getting married, and as much as you can be at 15, we really were in love."

A week before her 16th birthday, she married and moved to Key West, where her new husband's father was a wealthy businessman. She says her father-in-law had a string of girlfriends he regularly mistreated. She worried that her husband might one day take after Dad.

Seven months after the move, she gave birth to a boy. Over the next five years, they had two more sons. She says that by then, her husband had cultivated a stable of paramours just like his father. When they divorced, she was 22. She says her father-in-law pushed hard to keep the kids in Key West.

Relinquishing custody of her sons, Catherine worked one odd job after another, bouncing up and down the East Coast. She tended bar, waitressed, and sang in clubs in Key West. Her longest stint was as a receptionist for Xerox in Miami.

The same year her oldest son went off to college on an ROTC scholarship, her ex-husband died at 37. The two youngest sons decided not to move in with their mother. Their grandfather gave the boys a mobile home to live in by themselves in Key West. "As you can imagine, two teenage boys living on their own, the place was a constant party."

Catherine took a job as a flight attendant. Two of her sisters were flight attendants, and it sounded appealing — crisscrossing the world, meeting interesting travelers, learning about other cultures. And taking care of people, which is what Catherine did best.

She had a run of short relationships with men, including a brief marriage to an alcoholic who reminded her of her father.

After several airlines she worked for went out of business, she started looking for a new line of work. She took acting classes and got work as an extra in movies and a few speaking roles in commercials. She saw an ad in New Times calling for actresses who would be comfortable showing their genitals to Nova University med students needing to learn how to examine live patients. She got $30 per student, with about eight per class. She found that she was completely relaxed with her clothes off. And she liked it. She found satisfaction in helping nervous future physicians navigate what could have been an awkward experience.

Catherine told a chiropractor friend how much she liked working with the young students. One day, as he worked on her back and she talked about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life, he touched a sore spot below her shoulder blade, the area behind her lungs. The sensation immediately brought tears to her eyes. Not from physical pain, though; the touch seemed to trigger something else inside of her.

Her friend asked her to talk about what she was thinking. She explained that the touch reminded her of something from her childhood. Something horrible. Something someone had done to her.

He told her about the concept of "muscle memory." As humans, one of our brain's coping mechanisms for dealing with trauma, particularly sexual trauma, is to repress the memory of the traumatic event. Certain kinds of touch can stimulate those memories, even if they've been dormant for decades. "The body is a funny thing," Catherine says. The chiropractor's touch brought back memories of a time as a child when she was molested.

Through the years, Catherine pieced together her college degree, taking night classes at community colleges, majoring in psychology. She told her chiropractor she wanted to work in therapy. Maybe even sex therapy. "The problem was, I didn't want to go through getting a Ph.D., and in psychology, you basically can't work unless you have a doctorate." He put her in touch with his friend Volker in Coral Gables. Volker, a slim, urbane woman, told Catherine there was something in the field of sex therapy that didn't require a post-grad degree.

Catherine had never heard of surrogate therapy, but as Volker explained the process, it made sense. Surrogates help patients connect on an intimate level. "I'd been doing that all my life. In my personal life, I had been coaching boyfriends for years. I'd get calls from exes telling me how much I helped them become comfortable with themselves," she says. "I've never felt better-suited for anything."

When the International Professional Surrogate Association training program accepted Catherine, she was told to bring plenty of comfort foods and her favorite blankets — this was going to be an emotional process.

To get into the IPSA program, the only surrogate partner certification course in the country, Catherine needed three letters of recommendation from health professionals attesting to her earnest desire to help people. She had to write an essay detailing her sexual history and another one explaining why she wanted to be a surrogate. After her application was approved by the IPSA board, Catherine paid the $1,500 tuition and went to California for three weeks.

Her class consisted of four students: herself, a young man, and a married couple. There were two instructors: Vena Blanchard, president of IPSA, and a male surrogate trainer. Classes took place at Blanchard's home in Los Angeles. The first day, the students were told they would work as partners for the duration of training. "Obviously, I thought they'd put the couple together and pair me with the young man," she says. "But no, I was told to work with the man, even though his wife was right there watching us and talking to us."

On the second day, the class was instructed to disrobe. The exercise for that day was a full-body, head-to-toe, up-close inspection of each student. Throughout the training, the partners played the roles of both patient and surrogate. Students kept journals of their most intimate feelings and shared them with Blanchard every day. They heard lectures on topics ranging from basic human biology to dealing with the natural human attachments that arise in this line of work.

Toward the end of training, Catherine wrote in her journal that she was having conflicting feelings. She believed 100 percent in the concept of surrogate therapy, but she suspected that her training partner — the husband — was "just there to get a cheap thrill." She felt guilty for feeling that way. Blanchard approached her after the last class. She told Catherine that her instincts were right on. "You've got exactly what it takes," Blanchard told her. "You're going to be a great surrogate."

Her training was put to the test with her first client: the malodorous merchant marine who'd never been around women. "It was a really tough case," she says now, smiling as she thinks of the patient. "I had to call Vena [Blanchard] and ask what to do. He just had all sorts of social problems."

The solution? "She suggested I take him out on a date. The rules were, he picks the place, he pays, we walk through what women like and don't like. Then have the session afterward." So the sailor cleaned himself up and took Catherine to a nice steak house in Fort Lauderdale. "It was rough," she says. "He was eating with two hands, burping, getting up for smoke breaks throughout the meal. I told him, 'Look, if you want to connect with someone, you can't do this. You can't just get up and go outside in the middle of dinner.' "

After dinner, he said he was too full of steak to have a regular surrogate session. "You see, food was one of the ways he dealt with his anxious feelings, along with alcohol and cigarettes," she says. "So when he was nervous about the date, he ate more than he should have and smoked more. Those were his crutches."

As therapy progressed — long before the breakthrough in the shower — he began to open up more. He talked about his overbearing, controlling mother, but he also talked about the time an uncle took him to a prostitute as a teenager. He had showered and put on cologne ahead of time. But when the time for sex came, the prostitute told him he needed to shower again. He couldn't go through with it.

It's no coincidence that his big breakthrough with Catherine occurred in the shower, she says. Human psychology is a powerful force. Behind man's sexual desires are millions of years of evolution urging him to spread his seed, she says. But the emotional responses such as fear and shame are so strong that they override biology and physiology.

"He was already self-conscious and scared being in that situation," Catherine says, "and now you have a hooker telling you that you smell bad. The poor thing. He went 20 years before he could even talk to a woman."

Picket-fence America wasn't ready for the concept of sexual surrogates when the therapy was developed in 1959 at the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation in St. Louis, later renamed the Masters and Johnson Institute. Respectable folks didn't discuss such matters. Masters and his research assistant turned wife, Johnson, were the first American academics to examine human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey's groundbreaking work at the University of Indiana. They created a broad program that involved everything from interviewing volunteers about their sexual histories to observing couples having sex in the laboratory. Their findings are still the basis for most research in the field of sexology, according to Dr. James Walker, president of the American Board of Sexology, a national quality assurance and certification organization that oversees sex therapists. "There have been new models for study and treatment and obviously with pharmaceuticals," he says, "but everything people are doing really comes from adaptations of this original way of looking at sex."

Masters and Johnson developed new methods to treat married couples with sexual dysfunctions, conditions they described with terms such as "ejaculatory incompetence" and "orgasmic dysfunction in women." The solution, as they saw it, combined psychological approaches with practice at home. The exercises were based on trust and acceptance, with couples and therapists working as a team.

But this posed a problem for unmarried men and women, who were often the most severe cases. Their sexual problems, in fact, were precisely the reason they didn't have a partner. It was a twisted social paradox: can't work on the problem without a partner; can't get a partner before working on the problem.

So Masters and Johnson trained the first surrogates. For the study, 13 women were selected as surrogates from 31 volunteers. They worked with 41 single men. After 11 years, in 1970, Masters and Johnson published Human Sexual Inadequacy, a book about their research. It became a bestseller and has since been translated into 30 languages. The book, written in intentionally dry, clinical language, has a chapter dedicated to the work of the original group of women, whom they called partner surrogates.

An optimal partner surrogate, they explained, was, for the patient, "someone to hold on to, talk to, work with, learn from, be a part of, and above all else, give to and get from."

Masters and Johnson believed that without two people present to explore the nature of the dysfunction, there was no chance of recovery. With an emotional connection, they said, the treatment can bring healing, in some cases overriding the original trauma and replacing it with a positive association.

The original surrogates came into the program with some traumatic stories of their own. Three of the 13 women had been married to men with sexual dysfunctions. One man killed himself. Another husband, unable to deal with his dysfunction, became an alcoholic and eventually divorced. But the women all had their own reasons for wanting to participate in the program.

If someone wants to conquer a fear of flying, at some point, he must ride in a plane. If someone wants to conquer a fear of intimacy, he also has to board the plane at some point. The way Volker looks at it, to be a surrogate, you have to like being the plane in the equation — the one who eases the pain, no matter how physically or emotionally handicapped the patient may be.

Volker is sometimes called the Dr. Ruth of South Florida. She used to host a call-in radio show called Sex With Marilyn. She also teaches graduate classes at Florida International University, Barry University, and St. Thomas University. She's the type of grandmother who gives her grandkids books about sex every year.

Volker does at least four or five "talk therapy" sessions before she introduces a patient to the surrogate. If the patient is struggling with problems like addiction or anger management or depression, or even if there's a medical issue such as high blood pressure, these must be addressed before starting therapy with a surrogate. "We can't have anything else getting in the way of those true, intense emotional feelings," she says.

The first sessions are a screening process. Because patients often work with surrogates in the surrogates' home or alone in hotel rooms, she has to make sure she isn't putting the surrogate in danger. They use protection if there is intercourse.

If the patient seems like an appropriate candidate, the three parties — Volker, Catherine, and the patient — meet in the Hollywood office. "The first step is everyone getting to feel comfortable with one another," Volker says. "Surrogates aren't prostitutes, not that there is anything wrong with prostitution. It isn't, 'Here's 50 bucks — give me a blowjob.' A lot of times, there isn't even intercourse. It's mostly talking."

She says if a patient asks about what the surrogate looks like, "that's an immediate red flag. I know right there that's not the type of person who would benefit from working with a surrogate."

If the meet-and-greet goes well, the therapy begins with what Volker calls body mapping — the surrogate and patient going over the patient's body together, determining what's comfortable (or functional) and what's not.

Then comes an exchange of touches: first observational, then playful, then nurturing, and, finally, sexual touching, which may or may not lead to intercourse.

The process is often done slowly, with weekly meetings over a number of years. "For people who have done surrogate work," Volker says, "their rituals of moving with regard to closeness will be very different from what's on adult films. Their ritual of what we call foreplay — I call it 'outercourse.' They get to genitals in very different ways. Because for many people, if it were done like on adult films, it could be triggering, and the body could shut down. Because it is like reenacting the traumatic experience."

Volker recalls the case of a man who'd been injured in a car accident at 18. Before the accident, the man was sexually active; he was engaged, in fact. But the crash left him a quadriplegic, unable to speak. After ten years of rehab, he was living in a nursing home. His psychologist asked Volker to see the patient. "This man was very angry, hostile," she explains. "He was making — I suppose clinically it'd be called 'lascivious tongue movements' at women."

He also managed to swing his arm, hitting people near him.

Volker established a communication system so the patient could answer yes or no questions. "I wanted to see what was important to this young man. He was very interested in the sexuality part. He was very angry that there was no way to express this. Here he was in a Catholic nursing home, which was great for helping him in all the rest of his life, but the sexuality was very overlooked."

When she brought in pictures, she learned he liked blonds — blonds with large breasts. As it turns out, his fiancée who left him after the accident ("and one could hardly blame her," Volker adds) fit that picture.

Volker said she'd bring in a surrogate to work with him but only if he agreed to stop the tongue movements and hitting.

Catherine quickly figured out what he could feel and what he couldn't, what worked and what didn't. As it turned out, the patient could get erections and ejaculate (the limbic system, which controls sexual impulses, had not been affected by the accident), but he couldn't reach himself to masturbate. He had gone ten years unable to tell anyone.

The climax of the treatment came when they arranged for Catherine to come to the nursing home one night. It was Volker's idea. "We set up a step-by-step 'date' of watching a movie together, eating some food or drinking something together, then a massage with what we might call a happy ending."

There's no way of knowing exactly what percentage of the populace might be candidates for surrogate therapy. Volker suspects that the percentage of "sexual anorexics and phobics" who actually come in for therapy is small. There are many others out there who would be right for the treatment but can't afford it or are too embarrassed.

David Yoblick is no longer embarrassed about the time he spent with a sexual surrogate. It was 30 years ago. Yoblick, then 37, had just divorced his second wife, and he wanted help with delayed ejaculation. "This was before we had Viagra," he says. "There wasn't much a man could do, but I tried it all: eating certain things, not eating certain things, vitamins, minerals, exercises, whatever I thought might work."

Yoblick says the problem began with his first sexual experience, when he was 12. "It was in a public park in Philadelphia, and, well, I ejaculated very rapidly." He had sex in high school, but it was always brief, and there were long stretches when he couldn't perform. It was the same when he got married. He was always tired from working two full-time jobs, causing a strain on the marriage. In his second marriage, sex wasn't as big an issue, but it still didn't work out.

Yoblick's lack of sexual confidence was a huge issue, he says. "The first thing I thought about whenever I shook a woman's hand and introduced myself was, 'Will I be able to get an erection?' Men think if they don't get erections, they are in some way less of a person."

In the late '70s, Volker was finishing her graduate work in sexual behavior at the University of Miami. She was at a party with one of her mentors when a psychologist was talking about a patient who needed someone with knowledge of sexology to work as a surrogate with him. Inspired by the moment — and a recent divorce — she volunteered her services.

She worked with the therapist and the patient, following the traditional Masters and Johnson steps, making emotional connections, then physical. "There's nothing like seeing a person discover their own sexuality — seeing the moment they feel free from some trauma or the moment they learn they are just as capable of having sex as anyone else." She gets a knot in her throat as she talks. "It's just overwhelming. What people are capable of is amazing."

After she had assisted several other patients, the therapist she worked with at the time introduced her to a man who'd been having problems getting and keeping an erection. They got to know each other. His name was David, and he needed an understanding partner who wouldn't rush him and wouldn't scold him if he couldn't perform. She liked him.

She really liked him. Something was wrong, actually. She told the therapist that it would be psychologically damaging to everyone involved if she continued seeing someone for whom she had such strong feelings. Patient and surrogate had a sitdown in the therapist's office. When David was told Marilyn would no longer be his surrogate, he asked her out on a date.

"I can't date one of my patients," she said.

"Why not?" he asked, pointing out that she already knew his darkest secret and didn't seem to mind. "And you just said I'm not your patient anymore."

Soon, David Yoblick didn't need a surrogate. Marilyn, his new girlfriend, knew just how to handle his little dilemma.

Volker's voice gets softer and quieter when she talks about the successes she's seen through surrogate partner therapy, like the resolution of the quadriplegic accident victim's problem.

"This young man still gets help eating and dressing and speech therapy," she says. "He gets taken to church and to the beach and different activities. And once a week, an escort comes who sits and watches a movie with him and they have something to eat, and she gives a massage with the manual sex. And he's able to ejaculate."

As for the merchant marine, he's doing OK too, she says. He's still looking for the right woman. And he's ready to connect with someone. "And who knows?" Volker says. "There are people into all sorts of what I call skanky smells."

Almost every day, as she's leaving her office, she gets a call from her favorite surrogate patient. After 30 years, she and David are still married. They see their children and grandchildren regularly.

David knows he's lucky to have found the perfect partner for him. When he tells people how they met, he says, "Thank God for my limp-dick problem."

Technically, since she is getting paid and occasionally has sex with her patients, Catherine could be charged with prostitution. The only state with explicit laws protecting therapists and surrogates is California. A police officer would have to be having a really bad day, though, to ignore the fact that this is clearly therapeutic, Volker says, and it's never happened in any of her cases.

But Dr. Walker of the American Board of Sexology says legal ambiguity is precisely the reason surrogate therapy might be in its last throes. "The controversy comes from the fact that prosecutors have decided that if you are hiring someone to have sex with someone, you are a panderer," he says. "Many clinicians, not wanting to put themselves at risk, have stopped using surrogates."

The decline has more do with technology and pharmaceutical advancements, says Volker, citing what she calls the "Viagrazation of America."

Catherine thinks it also has something to do with the emotionally draining nature of the work. Recently, she took a year off from being a surrogate. "It's rewarding, but it's also exhausting," she says. She calls the work "a roller coaster of feelings you have for and about these desperate people who need your help so badly." She knows how much of a man's identity is entwined with his sexuality, sometimes becoming an all-consuming plague on an otherwise tolerable life.

More than any other dysfunction, her patients are rapid ejaculators with anxiety issues. "I'm here to tell you, the Jewish mother is alive and well," Catherine says. "That overmothering, the control, the 'He's my son, and nobody's gonna take him away,' that has an effect on men. I see it."

One patient needed overstimulation to get aroused. He was a doctor who was able to have sex, but he needed to watch an adult movie to maintain an erection. "He needed women with unnaturally large, superenhanced breasts," Catherine says. "He couldn't get enough of anything. But he was also in his 40s, and he had never been in love. He wanted to know why he couldn't get into a serious relationship."

During an early session, Catherine was giving him a full-body, fully clothed massage. Going over his back, she pushed down below his shoulder blade, behind his lung — the same place her chiropractor had pressed on years earlier. The doctor began sobbing.

She spoke to him in a calm voice. "Stay with your feelings," she said. "Talk to me. Talk to me about what you're feeling."

He was inconsolable, she says, holding his arms over his ears as he cried. It turned out that, when he was 7, his family lived in an apartment building in New York. The building's janitor lived in the basement, where the boy would sometimes visit him. That spot on his back that Catherine touched during the massage was the same place where the janitor had put his hand when he raped him and ejaculated on his back.

Not long after the massage, the physician started seeing someone. For the first time in his life, he had what was at least the beginning of a serious relationship. He had his final session with Catherine and switched to exercises with his girlfriend. As the final session with Catherine ended, he leaned over to her and whispered, "Still, she's not you."

Many of Catherine's patients fall in love with her, just like Volker's surrogate patients fell in love with her at the time. It's only natural when you have an emotionally wounded individual and someone who's always ready to listen.

"I tell them, 'You don't see me first thing in the morning. You don't have to deal with me when I'm cranky or tired.' "

Catherine always holds a closing session in which she explains that she was there just to model a relationship and that they will do just fine without her. In 12 years, she has had about 30 patients. She's had intercourse with only three of them: two 40-plus virgins and one rapid ejaculator who couldn't last more than a few seconds during intercourse.

After a year off and a move from Fort Lauderdale to Boynton Beach, she's ready to start seeing clients again. She feels like her life is coming together for the first time in years.

She has a good relationship with her sons, the oldest of whom is a captain in the Navy. And yes, they do know what she does. She sat them all down in a room a few years ago and told them she had a great opportunity to help people as a surrogate.

"It's not about the sex. It's about the intimacy," she told them. If they had any questions, she added, all they had to do was ask. The topic has not been discussed since.

She's in a serious relationship now. Relationships are tricky for a surrogate. Before the current boyfriend, she'd had two serious boyfriends. When it came time to talk about her work, she gave them both the same careful, practiced talk about helping people with serious sexual dysfunction and feeling like she had a purpose in life. One ended the relationship immediately. "The other one said he was OK with it, but he basically didn't understand it and wasn't OK with it." They split up a month later.

After that, she didn't date for a while. "It was just easier," she says. "I fell into the same routine I'd always had in life: give and give and give and not get anything back." That's what she did when she was taking care of her younger sisters as a child.

But self-neglect has consequences. "If you don't date outside with this job, it will kill you," she says. So she set up an online dating account. On Yahoo! Personals, she met a man 15 years younger than she who hadn't been in a relationship for ten years. He told her he'd never been in love. On their first date, they ended up kissing in a booth at Bennigan's. This time, she had told him ahead of time in an email that she was a surrogate.

"He really is OK with it," she says. "He isn't jealous at all. He's more curious about it than anything else. He likes to hear stories about different patients I've had."

They just celebrated their one-year anniversary. When she works as a flight attendant now, Catherine has someone to pick her up and drop her off at the airport.

One night, she got to thinking about their age difference. "I know one of these days, you'll leave me for someone younger," she told him, a slight hint of bitterness in her otherwise sugary voice. Her eyes tear up and her voice flickers as she talks about the moment. She thinks about her life spent taking care of others.

"He held me by the hand," she says, "and looked me in the eye. He said, 'You're the first woman I've ever loved. I'll always take care of you.' " (source)

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"When my father was a young idealist, he let me know that it is not my place to try to "fix" whatever problems the elders, the parents, were having..."

2013-07-02T12:01:00.000-04:00

The enmity between male and female laid out in the book of Genesis is real and almost daily between me and ‘my woman’ my inherited concept of collective womanhood. I have whined and complained about this in the past, culminating with “My Three Sexist Assumptions of the Apocalypse” and my poem “void this misogyny.” This is a huge subject that is guaranteed not to get you into favor with the intellectual/political fashion trends of the last few decades—even in so-called “afro-centric” circles. Standing on the foundation of this writing, I’ve experienced what must be “closure” on this ‘area’ and have really moved on… but then my young cousin, my paternal uncle’s youngest son comes out with this:

/////"It’s sad: [there’s] no need for the thirsty crap she does and has done my whole life… that’s prolly y I’m with a white woman now… my moms drove me away from my own woman…"/////

First of all I’m a poet so I’m going to have a poetic view of every-mufukkin-thang. So, from jump, let’s look at the word mufukka—the word motherfucker. I’ve been a motherfucker for almost two decades. I am not a husband. Let those last two sentences stand out:

/////"I’ve been a motherfucker for almost two decades. I am not a husband."/////

Do you have a renewed understanding of what the word “motherfucker” means? It means that I am “good” enough to impregnate a woman but I’m not “good” enough to be her husband. Why is that? Now we need a lot of discipline and a little street education—first of all: in the segment of society where we Wilhites come from, a man has to gain access to women almost completely under his own power.

It sounds like every young man in America has to do this in one way or another but this is an illusion. Many males of all skin colors gain access to females though third-party influences. For example, when I was a kid, I could see that one sociable family in my neighborhood that had a lot of functional connections—gave a lot of parties, cookouts—brought in a lot of little girls for the boys of the house to play with… (Another often forgotten third-party influence is the college campus; my first and only wife [who was quickly my ex-wife] came from this place…)

When your society is not working correctly you don’t have such vibrancy and diversity. When your family dysfunctions, there are other priorities—many of them warlike, isolating, mentally ill. So, whatever and blah, blah, blah: the bottom line is you got this young brother, my cousin, from a working-class family (just like me) who has to go out on his own and make a life for himself without proper introductions. Without even asking my cousin, I will “arrogantly” make the following assumptions about what happened to him when he set out on this task:

>> He was mistaken for a thug and profoundly underestimated. Many would never have guessed that he went fishing in his father’s boat. He learned how to take cars completely apart and put them back together again under the direct tutelage of his father. His father was there.

>> When his father divorced, he effectively gave his mother a house—and not some rinky-dink house either…

>> When too many people find out more about my cousin they were jealous and mysteriously competitive—almost like a sibling possessed with self-centered, warlike rivalry. Instead of being a “peaceful” educated observer truly relieved and even pleased that not all is born into abject poverty—especially us Black men.

Now more of my “arrogance”—this is why you will never see me “blogging while brown” even though this is clearly the case—as assumptions: too many of the people that reacted so strangely to my cousin as he tried to set out in the world were Black women—let’s be fair: Black women born and raised in Los Angeles under the deadly radiation of the Hollywood sign. First of all, the Black middle class as an enclave in California is almost completely gone. Most of us migrated back to the Southern United States (like my father). What this means is that a brother can:

>> Do something passionate and creative with the last of his childhood innocence in the cocoon of college with the white-washed remnants of Native America. This is how my eldest child, my son, nature boy #1, was born.

>> Find a Black woman from the upper classes, fail to respect her at face value and tolerate her condescension and fears with white-liberal guilt. This is how my youngest son, the nature boy, was born.

>> Find the best home-/school-educated Black woman from the lower classes and wrap her up in what remains of your idealism. This is how my youngest child, my dear daughter was born.

>> Let the non-Black woman find you: forget the political rhetoric, the social theory and let the system take its course.

I fought the system and succeeded as a 21^st-century, post-modern father—and failed as a husband in a new-age-African communal adult partnership. (The ‘system,’ by the way, is the one in which Blacks were systematically disenfranchised, our social institutions corrupted/eroded/destroyed. This is the same system, by the way (again), that leaves constructive youth no other choice but to join the armed forces for lack of other opportunities.)

I am not ashamed of this outcome at all because I when I write the words “Black women” or speak of women as a collective, I do this knowing that I inherited my view and magnetism for women from my family tree. The women that my father chose, leading toward my mother,—and the complex psychological reasons why he chose these women—has a direct and indirect impact on my choices. I’m not passing the “blame.” I’m just recognizing that ideas come from somewhere. I am free to distort or modify the root—but there is a root.

I would feel like there was something way, way wrong with me when it’s clear that my mother and father are happily married and somehow I’m still just some motherfucker. But this is not the case. There is something else going on…

When my father was a young idealist, he let me know that it is not my place to try to “fix” whatever problems the elders, the parents, were having. He was very clear about me establishing my young family first and not to worry about the happening with the old folks… The establishment of this new family unit was the top priority and my father expressed no real concerns about its “racial composition.” Once you got Wilhite blood or once you bear Wilhite children you are one of us. Period.

Now, what I notice from my mother has been something very different. But I do this not to turn my mother into some kind of villain. My eyes see that my mother in particular and the Black women of my little squalid world in general are not encouraged to leave their mothers and be a sovereign person with “permission” to be. This is not really a Black thang—this is an American slavery thing. My mother is the daughter of one of the most ruthless, cunning force of classical evil ever to drive a bright yellow Cadillac. It is only “natural” that my mother would expose her children to some of this white exploitation—to carry on the tradition of oppression injected in the missionary position. It looks like my young cousin has a similar landscape to get through. It may not be exactly the same but the regional theme is similar.

Now that I feel like I’m about to go “off topic” in this “rant,” here’s a few points that are “appropriate” to me right now:

>> What I was told frequently by my sisters from elementary to middle school was, “I’m not thinkin’ ’bout you!” Now that I’m older, I understand the import of this direct, accurate, objective message: I am not thinking about you. This is less an expression of hate that requires vengeance than of simple fact that requires respect and avoidance.

>> Prejudice is powerful and often rooted well beyond conscious control. When I was younger, I tried to enter some kind of political campaign that compelled me to make speech after speech to defend myself against the suspicions of others. Eventually I realized I was trying to move too many persons from a deeply rooted position in which they did not even know they were sunk. What made it worse is that I assumed, because these people “know” me, this matter could be resolved with actual investigation. These people don’t know me and have little time for investigation. Remember: “I’m not thinkin’ ’bout you!”

>> Be suspicious of adults trying to correct the behavior of other adults. Have no respect for an ultimatum wrapped in a complaint for a single event. When a person truly “loves” you, they will complain and share with you several “chances” (opportunities) to improve yourself—because they are actually thinking about you—instead of thinking about some experience they had (or inherited) in the past that they are afraid of reliving.

>> I have never been in a situation where I had to choose a woman of one “race” over another—like I’m a judge for two ladies, waiting on me to make some beauty contest decision. This statement is meant to fly in the face of what is quickly becoming the out-of-date story of how some Negro dude explicitly rejects some sister for some swirl.

>> People will do what they are willing to do. It took me a long time to discover the difference between will and want. People might do what they want. But they will do what they will.

>> All of the women that gave birth to my children I have felt were mavericks or stragglers from the main “herd”—I felt I had to scrape and scavenge together these relationships. I associate these relationships with a kind of desperation in poverty under significant pressure of economic threats. This is just another way of saying what my father used to say to me: “I did the best I could under the circumstances.” As I observe from a distance, as these women “move on” I’m beginning to realize that there is more scavenging going on than ever…

>> Another major oversight of my many oversights about some women (which I feel is more North American than “universal”) is not recognizing the high-energy, often dramatic transformation some women have to go through once they “decide” they are going to be in a committed relationship. I am saying that I recognize this. I am not saying that I respect this. The yoke should be easy. The burden should be light. (I am not saying that marrying me is like marrying Jesus—but it appears it can be just as boring…)

>> The media in the United States has been repeatedly accused of nurturing a sick culture of fear. My assertion is that with this sickness comes too many women who are preoccupied with their personal safety (real and imagined) rather than feeling the healthy aggression that fuels creative acts of “love” and outreach. I do not mistake “healthy aggression” for being a bitch. But I must remember: “I’m not thinkin’ ’bout you!”

>> My desire has been to be in partnership with a woman such that this bond of friendship represents the progressive heights of my personal internal development. This is very much in conflict with how many women will their relationships to be. Many women are willing to have their intimate partnership(s) represent the heights of their social external development. There are many dandy guys out there who are no different than these women—they will make very happy political power couples (the political arena, by the way, can be just the local night club or church down the street). My interpretation of my father’s idealism left me with the root demanding that my intimate relationship with my woman belongs to me first—not to some third, social party. So listen and watch carefully when a dandy guy with a metal ring on his finger says the words “my wife.” I have yet to meet any husband from my generation who can say “my wife” and really be talking about the “better half” of his inner being. Remember: “I’m not thinkin’ ’bout you!” (Too many times she’s right: there’s not much to think about…)

>> Here in the rasx() context, Blacks are largely distinguished from whites by being of a more intense, concentrated, percussive form of whiteness—not from any full/partial incarnation of African high culture whatsoever.

That last “divisive” statement is just another way of saying, “we are all the same under our skin.” To be of anything functionally African implies a profound transformation of consciousness that is just not there because some lady from an American city learned how to use Shea butter and pay someone to braid her hair.

So, yes: when my father was a young idealist, he let me know that it is not my place to try to “fix” whatever problems the elders, the parents, were having. I now see that I ‘disobeyed’ my father’s indirect instructions. I actively engaged in relationships with women that were echoes, metaphors, symbols—whatever you want to call it—of the problems of my elders (especially my mother’s internal struggle to free herself from her mother). So when my cousin says, “my moms drove me away from my own woman”—his “own woman” may be beyond simple “race” matters. He might have simply avoided trying to find a woman with a similar archetypical design as his mother—and then interpreted his flight to freedom in racial terms like what so many American “interracial” couples have done. What can be very tragic—especially in Black- and-white terms—is when you realize that you did not escape the perils of mother no matter what “race” your “own woman” may be. Now you face the horror of “we are all the same under our skin.” (source)

{liberatormagazine.com feature}
by Bryan Wilhite (Guest Contributor, The Liberator Magazine)

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A Good Day to be Black and Sexy

2013-05-17T16:20:00.000-04:00

“And I hate to tell you too much, cuz I stay with too much pride
And we way too young to know love; maybe not, but we don’t need no rush
Don't believe in love at first sight, but I believe in love at first ... huh”
-Wale, “Lotus Flower Bomb”

Well, kids, there’s a whole lot of huh-ing happening in this movie. That fact, however, should not be the sole reason for your attraction to or rejection of this film, which is crafted around six vignettes of mostly black folks navigating a variety of sexual predicaments. (I’m choosing to forgive the story featuring the interracial couple as a poorly executed attempt to appeal to a larger audience.) Virgins, adulterers, freaks -- errrrbody gets air time in director Dennis Dortch’s dramedy. In an odd way, the scintillating title and sometimes gratuitous lust-fueled scenes actually mask the hidden truth that the sexual escapades highlighted are meant to function as an entry point into a much needed conversation about black love and relationships.

What the movie loses in depth of storylines -- and it is quite lacking in that regard -- it recovers in breadth of characters. I appreciate what feels like an intentional effort to move beyond a rap-video clichéd projection of black men as hypermasculine, over-sexed sperm-spewing machines and black women as preternaturally eager fetish-worthy receptacles. Given that, my favorite narrative is “Reprise,” which centers on a couple negotiating a particular sexual encounter. The crux of this specific tale is that she wants something he doesn’t. The thing itself isn’t important; in roughly four minutes, and about as many sentences -- not including grunts -- what emerges is an example of how symbiosis in a relationship, when added to an acute attunement to your own and your partner’s needs, can enrich the various levels on which the relationship is experienced. It’s a portrayal that goes beyond him as pussy-slaying African warrior, à la Shaka Zulu and Luanda Magere, and her as docile, passive, “Daddy, you the boss” cooing harajuku Barbie, offering a touchingly rich, honest and surprisingly tender image of black male and female sexuality. The moral of this story is that the only thing sexier than a confident black man is one confident enough to be vulnerable. Yes, Lawdy.

The theme that unifies Dortch’s distinct vignettes is that there’s never a bad day to be black and sexy. And really, who could disagree with that? This is a worthy addition to your Netflix queue.

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

Malcolm's grandson speaks

2013-05-09T23:00:00.000-04:00

Worth every second of your time. Young Malcolm (25 years old) talks about Nas, the release of his grandfather's confessed killer, government involved in Malcolm X's death, his responsibility for the death of Betty Shabazz, and more. JR Valrey from Block Report Radio did a great job with this interview.

Interview w/ Malcolm Shabazz

(rightclick+download)

Originally Posted 8/4/2010

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Three Sexist Assumptions of the Apocalypse That Had a Devastating Impact On My Life

2013-03-18T19:06:00.000-04:00

Definitely one of the best essays on the limits feminism, et al. Moreover, it's one of the best essays on the wholeness and near infallibility of "sankofa-ing" the African indigenous way that I’ve encountered. It absolutely destroys the idea that there is some sort of grand feminist or womanist living tradition that has existed independently of the African indigenous living tradition that ought to be "sankofa-ed", that women don't need instruction on how to be women because womanhood is innate, that somehow the African indigenous tradition doesn't include instructions for women.

There was a time (even though I didn't realize it) when my disgust with the Eurocentrism that had seeped into institutions such as marriage, religious worship, fraternities (I still don't get how the Alphas can claim to be so well-versed and oriented in the Ancient Egyptian tradition yet symbolize their collective with Greek letters), sororities, secret societies (Prince Hall Masons, etc) and rights of passage ceremonies caused me to dismiss the very idea of institutions as being able to contribute anything to the creation and/or maintenance of family, community and hence, humanity. And damn right, I rebelled.

This essay resonates with me mainly because it's a kindred-like articulation of the direction I've been heading in as I've realized more and more that it's a mistake to view the idea of systematic organization as oppressive simply because so many of the organized institutions I've been (and am) exposed to are often corrupted manifestations of healthy and necessary counterparts that are informed by the African indigenous tradition. And so my goal ought to be to ensure my institutions are informed, just as this essay suggests that women cannot be whole (thus, relationships, families, communities, etc cannot be whole) until they too are informed by the African indigenous tradition.

My Three Sexist Assumptions of the Apocalypse
by Bryan Whilhite {Los Angeles, CA: USA}
Guest Contributor, The Liberator Magazine

My Three Sexist Assumptions of the Apocalypse: The previous post in this journal about being ostracized leads me to list, in public, the three sexist assumptions that had a devastating impact on my life. Women consciously suffering under the yoke of oppression often assume that sexism only benefits males. The purpose of me writing this Blog post is to disagree with this assumption. Because any disagreement is unpleasant to “sweet” people, be warned about the “bitterness” in this Blog post. And now, for something completely different, my three sexist assumptions of the apocalypse:

The assumption that “all women” are in touch with their feelings and are articulate about them…

This stupid assumption was inherited from my father’s generation. My sex life really got going well after the sexual revolution. This fact alone should make my father’s information in this area useless. One of the runner-up prizes women get from the sexual revolution is the right to be “equal” with a beer-belly, overweight, slovenly, inarticulate, chauvinist pig. This supposed “bitter” insult leads to the more tactful question: When a women says she wants to be equal to “a man” then what “man” are they trying to be equal to? Is a sister that looks like The Queen of Sheba trying to be equal to Gomer Pyle—right down to the sports-bar baseball cap?

My innocent guess was that women would seek parity with great men who fight for justice. I am fucking, dead serious about this. What is actually happening is that some women resemble small, inarticulate, materialistic (white) men who live in fear. When my hormones were running wild and the mastery of “dick control” was the least of my lofty tantric concerns, the optical illusion of a person that looks like a woman actually being one of these small men escaped me. It is now clear to me why some men can cultivate such a deep relationship with misogyny—these dudes are jealous of how these small women-men can switch back and forth between these two artificial, patriarchal roles. It’s just like how George Bush can one minute claim to be a democratically elected president—and the next cotton-picking minute, act like a whimsical bitch emperor.

Ed Dunn touches upon one aspect of this duplicity in “Yeah, Brothas are Real Intimidated by Fine, Black Women… Whatever…”—to me, here in the rasx() context, what Ed is getting at is that one minute some small woman with a big ass (clearly on display) can passively expect to be dominated by the greeting of a “real man” but then the next moment feel that she is being assaulted by another greeting of another “real man”—and then the next minute accuse yet another man of cowardice for not assaulting her. It is the “challenge” of a “real man” to guess or sniff when the time is right to pounce. Not a week goes by when I am certain that a woman is deliberately placing herself in my line sight so that I can take the risk and pounce on a total stranger. Based on the pre-Columbian, pre-Imperial reports I have read, this female expectation is simply not African in particular or indigenous in general. In fact, the whole concept of “cold calling” strange-but-good-looking women on the street, in first-class airline seats or in corporate elevators is a foreign, urban, modern, angst-ridden concept. What this means to me is that the woman is participating (mostly non-consciously) in a system of patriarchal dominance (in a fit of confused love-hate with patriarchy)—and this is why so many sexual rumors fly about Condi Rice sleeping in the pool house at the Bush estate.

An indignant woman determined to represent the “real world” will jump raw and say some shit like, “Well if you can’t hang little man then you can’t hang!” My mature reaction to this “attack” on my masculinity is to respectfully measure who actually can “hang” with this fine woman. The results of my measurements produce few dudes that I can sincerely respect—or, simply, no dudes at all. To me, most of the ‘lucky’ women in this “mindset” end up sounding like Alexyss K. Tylor.

The assumption that women are born with a social organizing principle…

To assume that women are innately able to organize and participate in social groups is one of the most profound insults I have ever perpetrated against my ancestors. I am dead serious about this. Here in the rasx() context, this assumption of mine is patently racist because in order for me to hold this assumption I have to ignore the learned social-scientific achievements of thousands of African societies for thousands of years. Only a racist can be so willingly ignorant. Africans of the Old Kingdom, succeeded monumentally to carefully and consciously design and refine what we would call—trapped in English—“matriarchal” societies, with layers upon layers of social-bonding redundancy. In fact, the success was so great that ignorant asses like me can just assume that women—even women born in the worst of American slavery—were just insect-like in their ability to organize socially.

For you other Negro asses out there who just happen to be reading this, you should have no motherfucking problem recognizing that the Civil Right Movement is founded upon the social organizing principles of women of African descent. Yes, you want to credit some Negro preacher man in a suit and you want to credit some Quakerly Jewish lawyer but nothing would have happened without organized Black women.

Wangari Maathai is the New Millennium, Nobel-Prize-Winning shining example of this ability for Black women to make it happen. My clearly evident “angry tone” here is not contrived out of white-liberal-style, Pollyanna condescension. The oppression of Black women makes my life a living hell because I am convinced that no organized, wisdom-based group of African women would treat a brother like me like shit—and until Black women get their collective heads on straight, shit it will be for me!

You can be “sweet,” but over here in my “bitter,” little “fantasy world” of Black power, my 20-to-30-something younger self should have been getting slick, direct-marketing postcards in my mailbox from various Black women groups petitioning to interview me for the sake of their daughters. I’m dead fucking serious about this—just inquire about how a young W.E.B. Dubois’ dating life was like and this Black history lesson won’t sound like science fiction to you! This is beyond that Jack and Jill, tea-dance, Liberian-missionary bullshit! I should have been contacted in an organized manner by groups of Black women representing other (younger) Black women since I graduated college. All it would have taken was just a little bit of Black-owned data mining to understand just how many obstacles my person had to overcome and any wise elder sister would know and immediately respect the family line that produced me. Note that it is not about me: it’s about the family that produced me—and there are at least hundreds of other Black families here in North America that deserve such basic African respect.

But there is just one little problem: too many women don’t give a fuck about other women—even the women in their own family—even their own daughters! Beginning with my mother and her mother, this was a most startling, heart-wrenching revelation to me so please excuse the profane English language… (assuming you can actually make English profane)…

The assumption that women are born with an internal organizing principle…

The African primacy sees that the human body is made out of organized systems. Any Bantu (man) with down-home sense can see how the bones of the skeleton are organized—and the priests would see the circulatory system, the respiratory system—maybe even the lymphatic system. It follows that there ‘should’ be a system of the unseen part of man (because all major African societies agree that there is an unseen part of man)—man, made male and female. The unseen system of anthropomorphic abstractions that make up what, say, white Egyptologists call “gods” work together in a family governed by an organizing principle. Since this abstract family of the unseen is designed to be instantiated and incarnated in actual people, it follows that actual people should be governed by a conscious organizing principle. Trapped in English, one might call this a “moral” code.

Remember when your mother got indignant at the department store and demanded to speak to the manager? Well, my person makes this same request of adult people I am trying to care about—can I speak to your manager? Usually my answer has been something ranging from, “The manager is not available right now but if you’d like to make an appointment…” to, “You don’t have the right to speak to my manager.” Often these obscuration tactics reveal a ruse because the person fronting does not really have access to their management—which is a very “convoluted” (but articulate) way of saying too many people have no self control—deeper still: they have no model of self control. An African of the Old Kingdom School can literally draw you a picture of self control and let you see his understanding—from the root to the fruit, baby… And, of course, a smart-ass response would be, “A’ight then: take your ass back to this ‘Old Kingdom’ and go live there with them dead mufukkas…” It’s very hard to rebut such a smart-ass (but self-destructive) remark when the woman telling me this looks like a taller, thicker version of N’Bushe Wright… It’s the Queen of Sheba eating a toxic pastrami sandwich in a baseball cap, keeping it “real” again…

In the post-modern empire we “live” in today, a too-popular organizing principle is called “whatever”—whatever the fuck ‘they’ tell you tamed shrews is what’s “real” at the moment. You can hear this “whatever” principle invoked in the casual conversation of self-assumed “normal” people. For too many years I thought a smart woman was just hiding behind this “whatever” shit. I just could not agree that the option to be a slob just like any “regular” guy was available to an adult Black woman. I assumed that my role was to ‘break through’ this thin veneer and get to the “real woman” hiding behind this dorm-room mess. I thought she was just trying to “fit in” to survive the throes of patriarchy and, with me, she could ‘drop her guard’ and begin to instinctively make a home for her with my “protection.” Hah!

Number one: women don’t “instinctively” make a home for themselves. Home making takes formal training—home training. The esoteric meaning of “home training” really did not get across to me until it was too late for my children. Ask any woman, wearing the all-American baseball cap, what “home making” means and you are likely to get something related to slavishly serving others—instead of serving themselves. Never respect an adult person more than they respect themselves. This is why some bitches, male and female, actively prefer to be treated like bitches—because they know they ain’t shit. And they can easily spot a white-liberal Pollyanna fool (like I have been) when they decide you are treating them “too well” (treating a person “too well” is not always acting like someone’s slave—it is also assuming that you are relating to an equal that deserves to be just as responsible accountable as you are). And because I refuse to systematically and deliberately disrespect people—especially Black women—being ostracized and quintessentially alone represents healthy respect for my humanity. Anyway, this home-making-instinct shit goes back to the same profoundly racist insult I made earlier about the African social science of group dynamics.

Number two: most modern women—especially Black women—even Black women in the Black Panthers—rarely even fantasize that a Black man could protect them. In fact, they would rather use imperial purchasing power to buy a sense of protection and do “it” for themselves (—“whatever” it is)—and this is why so many sexual rumors fly about Condi Rice sleeping in the pool house at the Bush estate. (source)

Originally Posted 10/19/2007

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The Best Reaction to the Black Male Privilege List

2013-02-15T16:00:00.000-05:00

Here's the best response I've seen to Jewel Wood's "Black Male Priviledges Checklist". While most of the forwards I received evidenced the fact that few had actually read through the entire thing (myself included), let alone approached it outside of the American paradigm, as usual, Bryan Wilhite [Contributing Writer, Liberator 7.1] came through with a thorough, and specific response, in a way no one else has -- exceeding the challenge. Although we won't, I'd probably be justified in deleting the original post and keeping just this.

(Kintespace) The Jewel Woods “Black Male Privilege” Checklist: Jewel Woods is male. Let’s get that straight. And, without him, I would not have been able to write “Flippant Remarks about the ‘mass exodus of African American male tourists to Brazil’.” So I think it is my Blog-civic duty to respond to (almost) all 94 of the items on “The Black Male Privileges Checklist” (hat-tip to Liberator Magazine for letting me know about this). I do this heavily under the influence that my opinion does not truly matter to the people who should care the most: that would be Black women in particular and contemporary, urban women in general. Too many women are too busy being oppressed (and I just wrote those words in this sentence without any sarcasm) and making conscious/subconscious plans of revenge against male monsters to care about what this “monster” has to say.

The eye of my imagination sees so clearly a woman 100 years from now reading my poem, “void this misogyny,” being driven to tears with the desire to meet me and talk to me because suddenly I am so interesting. Well, guess what lady: 100 years from now I’ll be dead! And I have been using the most advanced communication technology in the history of the white world for over a decade and I have yet to discover any example of this tool being used to its fullest—especially in the world of literary arts. So in an effort to contribute to the future—because the future is always better (as it selects for African genes)—here are my responsible responses:

Leadership & Politics
1. I don’t have to choose my race over my sex in political matters.

“Political matters” is in the marketing department of the business. I’m in the technical department. The very concept of politics and the polloi are foreign to the real me. “Race” is not a real concept for me. Next.

2. When I read African American History textbooks, I will learn mainly about black men.

African American History textbooks are secondary to me. African History has always been my primary concern—even before Michael Jordan (and his dark complexion) became popular with ‘my’ women. African history is about African women. You can spot a pseudo-African snake-oil dealer real quick when he starts talking about Black power without a concern for the English language and no serious prioritization of the regeneration of wisdom-communities of women of color. There is no frickin’ way in the world a group of wise, strong African women would treat me like the shit that supposedly I am according to properly-assimilated “real world” women. So clearly I am biased toward all of us studying the world of wise women. For an example, see “Vandana Shiva: Planting Seeds for Change.”

3. When I learn about the Civil Rights Movement & the Black Power Movements, most of the leaders that I will learn about will be black men.

This item is just like item #2 only framed differently. In addition, here is an excerpt from “My Three Sexist Assumptions of the Apocalypse”:

For you other Negro asses out there who just happen to be reading this, you should have no motherfucking problem recognizing that the Civil Rights Movement is founded upon the social organizing principles of women of African descent. Yes, you want to credit some Negro preacher man in a suit and you want to credit some Quakerly Jewish lawyer but nothing would have happened without organized Black women.

4. I can rely on the fact that in the near 100-year history of national civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League, virtually all of the executive directors have been male.

Read these words carefully, written by an award-winning ACT-SO finalist (in poetry of course): f’ the NAACP! The Garveyite bottom line is this: the NAACP was not allowed to own land. It was in the original charter. So, from the beginning, the organization was not designed to grow any real influence or real power. So whatever manhood is in the organization it is no greater than my manhood because at this time I hold no real estate investments outside of a squalid REIT.

5. I will be taken more seriously as a political leader than black women.

I immediately assume that this is reference to mainstream (“white”) authority figures taking seriously. Secondarily, I assume this refers to Black church leaders’ realm of influence. These two populations are temporal to me—these are not of the everlasting so not a concern for me. Get Cynthia McKinney on the phone for this one. I’ll respect her need to talk about this issue.

6. Despite the substantial role that black women played in the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement, currently there is no black female that is considered a “race leader”.

Oprah Winfrey turned that one down in exchange for a larger viewing audience.

7. I can live my life without ever having read black feminist authors, or knowing about black women’s history, or black women’s issues.

This is more toward “American privilege” than Black male privilege. For more details, see “Photograph of Gayl Jones.”

8. I can be a part of a black liberation organization like the Black Panther Party where an “out” rapist Eldridge Cleaver can assume leadership position.

No I—even I—cannot do that.

9. I will make more money than black women at equal levels of education and occupation.

My personal experience does not agree with this observation. Get Microsoft’s Tammara Combs Turner on the phone for this one. The women who choose my career and have my qualifications make more money than I do—sometimes dramatically more. I heard about one sister (through my Black female head hunter) who bought a house built by one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s assistants. I blame no one but myself for this—when one has to place blame. My number one problem is that I am Black man—many Black women (and more than one wily brother) know how to take a lot of Eurocentric workplace punishment (because, likely, they took a lot of Afro-centric childhood punishment)—and for those women with the technical chops—they will go far, very far. I have trouble fooling meat-and-potatoes guys that I can stomach their corn-beef-hash aesthetic. I explored this back in 2000 in “Bryan Wilhite: An IT Fundamentalist Speaks.”

Now there are Black women who think (through an ironic mixture of self-limiting egocentrism, racism and sexism) they are just as educated as I am and there are Black women who know that I am more educated and trained than they are—and not one of these Black women have ever expressed any serious lasting praise for my accomplishments. When I achieved I assumed I was achieving for my people and my family—and then myself. I found out the hard, hard way that my achievements are largely seen as self-centered, isolated and individualistic. I have heard similar stories of ambivalence from Black women who return home from college only to be dismissed and avoided.

10. Most of the national “opinion framers” in Black America including talk show hosts and politicians are men.

One Oprah Winfrey is worth 10,000 Tavis Smileys.

Beauty
11. I have the ability to define black women’s beauty by European standards in terms of skin tone, hair, and body size. In comparison, black women rarely define me by European standards of beauty in terms of skin tone, hair, or body size.

This is simply a lie. I have a childhood filled with Black girls identifying my dark skin color as “wrong” in various capacities. Since I actually grew up in a Black working class neighborhood in Los Angeles, my earliest, direct experiences with racism was through these Black girls. And these Black girls are still here to this day. Just because some male-dominated rap videos came out in the last 15 years suddenly it us Black men doing all the hating. Hah!

When we just have to get Freudian than know that my mother was flawlessly chocolate—and this is why my light-skinned father was attracted to her. I have my Dad’s taste in women but I also inherited my mother’s view of her dark self through the kind of women I easily attract in my life.

12. I do not have to worry about the daily hassles of having my hair conforming to any standard image of beauty the way black women do.

This is absolutely true. Do read “The Black Hair Thing.”

13. I do not have to worry about the daily hassles of being terrorized by the fear of gaining weight. In fact, in many instances bigger is better for my sex.

I am the child of a mother who was terrorized by her mother about her appearance—including her weight. So even though “I do not have to worry”—my mother was not my servant, she was my mother. And to this day, I can feel her pain. And I largely destroyed much of what “normal” people would call a “normal family life” because of my desire to “save” my mother through relationships with women who were almost supernaturally like my mother. This savior complex of mine was a necessary horror.

14. My looks will not be the central standard by which my worth is valued by members of the opposite sex.

I’m suspicious of this one. As women seek equality with male patriarchal stereotypes, I’m seeing more than a few selecting males for youth and beauty—just like a male would. It is an error that most women—especially properly-assimilated American women—are looking for a companion for some kind of sophisticated psychological experience.

Sex & Sexuality
15. I can purchase pornography that typically shows men defile women by the common practice of the “money shot.”

It is an error to assume that all “healthy” males consume pornography. Serious studies of African history before Islam shows that “healthy” males were indoctrinated into what I call ‘fertility conspiracies’—males were exposed to real, live girls in ritualized, regulated sex games. I understand how totally alien this can be to so-called Afrocentric people—but just perhaps you might understand how this assumption that I consume pornography with “money shots” is insulting to me. I prefer Japanese gravure videos! No nudity and more sexy!

16. I can believe that causing pain during sex is connected with a woman’s pleasure without ever asking her.

I hate this “belief” because it is actually true for women in a love/hate relationship with patriarchy and gluttony. Women have asked me to smack that ass—hard. Now I did not hate to smack that ass but I hate the larger system of lowered sensitivity and confusion. Women are very tough. They largely have higher thresholds of pain than males do—especially me. More than a few women will look down on me for preferring to go slow and gentle with them because they prefer to ride hard most of the time. I’m just keeping it real and letting you know, homes.

17. I have the privilege of not wanting to be a virgin, but preferring that my wife or significant other be a virgin.

I prefer that my wife not have herpes. It is for purely strategic reasons: I do not want to risk an outbreak during pregnancy that might harm our children—and her. I leave all that virginity stuff to wealthy Catholics.

18. When it comes to sex if I say “No”, chances are that it will not be mistaken for “Yes”.

My personality is designed (often against my lustful will) to repulse women who actually do say no and they mean yes. There is no woman sexier than a woman who means yes and can look you straight in the eyes and say, “Yes.” The ideal behind this is that I desire a woman in my life that deliberately chooses to be with me—not one I caught like some soldier riding on horseback in an Indo-European battle field. There are army men and there are family men.

19. If I am raped, no one will assume that “I should have known better” or suggest that my being raped had something to do with how I was dressed.

See “How a Terrifying Moment in Toni Morrison’s Beloved Relates to 1990s Thug Music” and get back to me.

20. I can use sexist language like bonin’, laying the pipe, hittin-it, and banging that convey images of sexual acts based on dominance and performance.

There are army men and there are family men.

21. I can live in a world where polygamy is still an option for men in the United States as well as around the world.

Ousmane Sembène on polygamy:

You have to understand how these women are raised. There’s a real hierarchy—the senior wife, the second wife, and the junior wife. Then the man is the supreme master, so to speak. But, when I say that the man is the supreme master, it is because he believes this. In actuality, the first wife, not the husband, wields the power. People don’t say this, but it’s something that’s unspoken.

That’s why in the context of polygamy in my society, I just see the man as a progenitor—the only role he has is to make babies [laughs]. He has to satisfy his own sexual appetites, but he also has to satisfy the three women’s sexual needs. He’s just a sex machine, so to speak [laughs]. Of course, in this situation there’s inevitably some sort of rivalry between the three wives because they’re often denied sexual satisfaction. And when the man is around, no matter what he’s done during the previous night, he has to perform sexually. To help him perform, the woman feeds him food that functions as an aphrodisiac. Since women know more about these aphrodisiacs than men do, they share their secrets.

22. In general, I prefer being involved with younger women socially and sexually.

I prefer to be with holistically healthy, mature women who can hold a conversation with me. Just read what I have written here and guess what kind of woman you know that would be very eager to talk to me because this woman moves thoughts like gold diggers move mountains. Tell that woman to look me up on Facebook. I won’t hold my breath.

23. In general, the more sexual partners that I have the more stature I receive among my peers.

I do not socialize my sexuality among other males. One might call this behavior of mine “homophobic.” My priority is to get down with one woman several thousand times instead of trying to process several thousand women. It’s a form of yoga—a weird fantasy of co-ed monasticism.

24. I have easy access to pornography that involves virtually any category of sex where men degrade women, often young women.

This is like saying to me that I have “easy access” to bags of refined white sugar to pour directly into my mouth.

25. I have the privilege of being a part of a sex where “purity balls” apply to girls but not to boys.

What the f’ is a “purity ball”? This sounds like teenaged, unregulated American Imperial sex games. There is something known as Imperial Sexuality…

26. When I consume pornography, I can gain pleasure from images and sounds of men causing women pain.

Umm… no.

Popular Culture
27. I come from a tradition of humor that is based largely on insulting and disrespecting women; especially mothers.

The whole point of Black “yo’ momma” jokes is that it actually pisses a real Black man off to have someone talk about his mother. Just because Richard Pryor started a popular movement away from this Black fact has nothing to with me.

28. I have the privilege of not having black women, dress up and play funny characters—often overweight—that are supposed to look like me for the entire nation to laugh.

Tyler Perry had two choices: continue to sleep in his car—because his father would not pay for his education (like mine did)—or dress up like a woman to make white men and Black women laugh. Tyler Perry chose not to sleep in his car. I’m sure Flip Wilson and many others had similar choices. I choose to not call that shit a “privilege.”

29. When I go to the movies, I know that most of the leads in black films are men. I also know that all of the action heroes in black film are men.

Halle Berry will never be another Cleopatra Jones.

30. I can easily imagine that most of the artists in Hip Hop are members of my sex.

I try not to imagine what has become of Hip Hop. Remember that sister in Digable Planets? I wanted LadyBug so bad…

31. I can easily imagine that most of the women that appear in Hip Hop videos are there solely to please men.

I’m still imagining me with LadyBug… hol’ up…

32. Most of lyrics I listen to in hip-hop perpetuate the ideas of males dominating women, sexually and socially.

So what. It sucks. White kids buy it. Next!

33. I have the privilege of consuming and popularizing the word pimp, which is based on the exploitation of women with virtually no opposition from other men.

So what. It sucks. White kids buy it. Next!

34. I can hear and use language bitches and hoes that demean women, with virtually no opposition from men.

So what. It sucks. White kids buy it. Next!

35. I can wear a shirt that others and I commonly refer to as a “wife beater” and never have the language challenged.

So what. It sucks. White kids buy it. Next!

36. Many of my favorite movies include images of strength that do not include members of the opposite sex and often are based on violence.

One of my favorite movies is in “Flippant Remarks about the Double Life of Véronique.”

37. Many of my favorite genres of films, such as martial arts, are based on violence.

There are army men and there are family men.

38. I have the privilege of popularizing or consuming the idea of a thug, which is based on the violence and victimization of others with virtually no opposition from other men.

There are army men and there are family men.

Attitudes/Ideology
39. I have the privilege to define black women as having “an attitude” without referencing the range of attitudes that black women have.

I think I wade into this deep water very well in “My Three Sexist Assumptions of the Apocalypse.”

40. I have the privilege of defining black women’s attitudes without defining my attitudes as a black man.

This is not so much a Black male privilege as the blindness of egocentrism. Also, I can assure you that I have been expressing my imperfections quite well on this Blog for years and I can only remember one Black woman on this entire planet that responded to me with any form of comprehensive support. She writes “Beautiful, Also, are the Souls of My Black Sisters”—I also recognize attention from The Black Snob. Other than that most of my people are too busy being oppressed or too young to know to care—to care not just for me but for others online (and in the bricks and mortar) as well…

41. I can believe that the success of the black family is dependent on returning men to their historical place within the family, rather than in promoting policies that strengthen black women’s independence, or that provide social benefits to black children.

This item is too deeply invested in European death models to address effectively in the space that I provide myself here.

42. I have the privilege of believing that a woman cannot raise a son to be a man.

This is not a “privilege”—this is a tragedy. No child should spend their formative years influenced by the eyes of one person—especially when the child is male and the parent is a female that deeply “knows” that males are foundationally animalistic and inferior. I’m not here to “debate” this shit with you. It takes a village to raise a child. This shit we are living now is not civilization so it should be talked about too much…

43. I have the privilege of believing that a woman must submit to her man.

Shut the f’ up. My experience is of the deeper confusion where the woman—especially the Black woman—wants to submit to her man in bizarre, slavish ways that reminds me of my very unpopular opinion of Kara Walker.

There is no greater privilege in my life than to be chosen again and again as a companion by a free, powerful, healthy, wise woman of color. The reason why I distinguish women of color is because of the monumental physical and metaphysical obstacles they have to overcome to be truly free in thought. In the same manner that the male penis goes deep into the physical body, yes, we can go deep into the non-physical body of the woman. Too many women are too, too quick to deny what I am implying here—because what I have seen in the souls of ‘my’ women are imbroglios that truly baffle.

44. I have the privilege of believing that before slavery gender relationships between black men and women were perfect.

Really. Shut the f’ up. The end of the world started when Upper and Lower Egypt was unified. Anything after, is all that indigenous woman-centric cultures built being unraveled and degraded. Yes, it took thousands of years—and here we are…

45. I have the privilege of believing that feminism is anti-black.

Get bell hooks on the phone and get back to me.

46. I have the privilege of believing that the failure of the black family is due to the black matriarchy.

This is literally perverse. This item is of a trend that implies that Black male “privilege” identifies with white male privilege. This is just wrong.

47. I have the privilege of believing that household responsibilities are women’s roles.

First of all, few people that I know actually have a household. Secondly, too many women I know can barely keep a structured domicile for themselves let alone for another person (including children).

Homemaking is a technical skill. Think of how much money fake-ass Martha Stewart has made and perhaps we can have a materialistic idea of how much homemaking is worth in both males and females. Find me an African male—from Africa—that cannot cook and you are probably showing me the son of a cleptocratic, Eurocentric family.

48. I have the privilege of believing that black women are different sexually than other women and judging them negatively based on this belief.

My guess is that this item mixes two debilitating influences on the sexuality of Black women: the traditional need to suppress open, honest sexuality to prevent rape and murder during the era of legal American slavery and the white missionary tradition of suppressing female sexuality that still runs the Black church to this day.

My other guess is that this item suggests that we Black males have the “privilege” to “escape” these debilitating influences on Black women by having more ‘open,’ ‘honest’ sex with women from different so-called “races.”

Many Black men who have spoken to me about this do not consider this a “privilege” but, at best, an “alternative” and at worst the last resort. Do remember that the Black men that speak to me (about these personal issues) are not famous Hollywood actors, investment bankers, sports stars or any celebrity of any kind.

What about me? I have yet to have a serious, adult, long-lasting relationship with a non-Black woman. That does not mean I have not tried! Hey! Look me up on Facebook, G!

Sports
I am just going to avoid covering the sports section point by point. I just have two comments: one is that women have the right to be dumb jocks too. And, two, I do remember playing soccer (football) in the park on a hot summer day with a beautiful Haitian-American woman named Fay Jasmine Walker. She became seriously angry when I took my shirt off because she knew she could not take hers off. She also knew that she was physically fit and very comfortable with her chocolate-body self-image. I felt so strongly for her that I put my shirt back on… I have told this story to many other women—many of whom not as physically fit as Jasmine—and these ladies aggressively don’t care to know just what the big deal was…

Diaspora/Global
61. I have the privilege of being a part of a sex where the mutilation and disfigurement of a girl’s genitalia is used to deny her sexual sensations or to protect her virginity for males.

Again this is not a “privilege”—this is just ostentatious sarcasm.

62. I have the privilege of not having rape be used as a primary tactic or tool to terrorize my sex during war and times of conflict.

More ostentatious sarcasm.

63. I have the privilege of not being able to name one female leader in Africa or Asia, past or present, that I pay homage to the way I do male leaders in Africa and/or Asia.

Ancient Japan was ruled by women. I tend to remember this quite frequently. In Africa, in the Old Kingdom, the women chose the male king. Sounds complicated but the bottom line is that women ruled in composition with men.

64. I have the ability to travel around the world and have access to women in developing countries both sexually and socially.

I mentioned “Flippant Remarks about the ‘mass exodus of African American male tourists to Brazil’” earlier.

65. I have the privilege of being a part of the sex that starts wars and that wields control of almost all the existing weapons of war and mass destruction.

Again, the author too easily confuses white patriarchy with traditional African manhood. I understand how easy it is to do this, but he should stop. Stopping this will make him a better person but he will get fewer dates with the population of properly-assimilated women and their confused, malformed love/hate of patriarchy.

66. In college, I will have the opportunity to date outside of the race at a much higher rate than black women will.

Black women actually shunned me at UCSB. There were so few of them there. Remember those girls with the skin color issues? They did not disappear—as much as they would like to deny it. At 21, I married a Latina. She was brown like my mother… but still, to this day, very white (self-alienated) on the inside…

67. I have the privilege of having the phrase “sewing my wild oats” apply to my sex as if it were natural.

Please. Go make me some ho’ cakes.

68. I know that the further I go in education the more success I will have with women.

Wrong! Very wrong. It’s the money that you get from an education that attracts many women—not the education itself. Only one Black woman talked to me at length about how aroused she got when she began to feel my thoughts. Those were the good ol’ days…

69. In college, black male professors will be involved in interracial marriages at much higher rates than members of the opposite sex will.

Okay… you are losing your liberal, Negro audience with this one…

70. By the time I enter college, and even through college, I have the privilege of not having to worry whether I will be able to marry a black woman.

This is just a fucking joke. I’m living proof. Check this: “Flippant Remarks about ‘Getting the Love You Want’.”

71. In college, I will experience a level of status and prestige that is not offered to black women even though black women may outnumber me and out perform me academically.

Yes, I wish I went to Howard instead of UCSB.

72. If I go to an HBCU, I will have incredible opportunities to exploit black women.

Yes, I wish I went to Howard instead of UCSB. I would have had my savior complex turned up to 11. Supposedly, to this day, I would have a fiercely devoted young, educated, healthy Black woman at my side because she would have known that I was actually serious about the power of woman—instead of the old, bitter, cynical bats flying around me today thinking they are “smart” for not taking me seriously. Instead, I went to school in Ronald Reagan’s backyard.

Communication/Language
73. What is defined as “News” in Black America is defined by men.

This item is of a trend that implies that Black male “privilege” identifies with white male privilege.

74. I can choose to be emotionally withdrawn and not communicate in a relationships and it be considered unfortunate but normal.

My experience is that “normal” women prefer this. I have memories of women wanting to talk—but it’s actually them doing most of the talking. I am very serious about being a poet so what I say makes too many women want to make me shut f’ up. When I speak, I speak to penetrate. I know that sounds like more male violence but it depends on how the penetration is done and the quality of the surface being breached.

75. I can dismissively refer to another persons grievances as ^*ing.

This is more white shit in Negro form. Very annoying and not me… When you find me dismissing you, this is after I tried to talk to you—several times. Remember those women who literally asked to have their asses slapped I mentioned earlier? These tough ladies can’t feel it when someone is actually trying to speak with them. Often, through past sexist experiences, that don’t have damn thang to do with me, these ladies are over-prepared not to be heard and are underprepared and ill-equipped to actually have the conversation. Again, I refer you to “My Three Sexist Assumptions of the Apocalypse.”

76. I have the privilege of not knowing what words and concepts like patriarchy, phallocentric, complicity, colluding, and obfuscation mean.

Yeah, that’s me—or you can’t read. In the past, too many women would rather think of themselves as literate and educated, while I permanently remain, to this day, a complete idiot. Do I sound bitter, sweetie? This honestly does not anger me because I have seen what kind intimate relationships some of these “smart” women have (or never have) and then I learn something new about poverty in the world.

Relationships
77. I have the privilege of marrying outside of the race at a much higher rate than black women marry.

To be blunt, many Black women (especially the younger ones) are not truly, deeply upset about Black men marrying women of European origin. What pisses some sisters off is Black men with Asian women—one bad theory for this is that many Asian women do not meet the European beauty standard that rules so many of our lives—so why would a Black man be attracted?

78. My “strength” as a man is never connected with the failure of the black family, whereas the strength of black women is routinely associated with the failure of the black family.

This statement of “privilege” is just gay.

79. If I am considering a divorce, I know that I have substantially more marriage, and cohabitation options than my spouse.

Yes, but by the way she act—she does not know this… that’s just the horror that this patriarchy—and it is too easy to find women that will consciously and non-consciously defend it.

80. Chances are I will be defined as a “good man” by things I do not do as much as what I do. If I don’t beat, cheat, or lie, then I am a considered a “good man”. In comparison, women are rarely defined as “good women” based on what they do not do.

In my experience, these are “privileges” women (who will consciously and non-consciously defend patriarchy) impose upon males.

81. I have the privilege of not having to assume most of the household or child-care responsibilities.

Again, in my experience, these are “privileges” women (who will consciously and non-consciously defend patriarchy) impose upon males. My mother was not playing that shit. I can run a house better than most sets of three women combined. Women, largely, do not praise me for this. They got too many f’ up problems to go around praising people all the time.

82. I have the privilege of having not been raised with domestic responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, and washing that takes up disproportionately more time as adults.

Wrong. It is because of these domestic skills that makes me proud even arrogant. This power is part of an aesthetic that I value—like ancient priests cleaning the temple.

Church & Religious Traditions
83. In the Black Church, the majority of the pastoral leadership is male.

Check.

84. In the Black Church Tradition, most of the theology has a male point of view. For example, most will assume that the man is the head of household.

Check.

Physical Safety
85. I do not have to worry about being considered a traitor to my race if I call the police on a member of the opposite sex.

The framing of this item is just flawed. Most Black men don’t even want to see the police—on a television.

86. I have the privilege of knowing men who are physically or sexually abusive to women and yet I still call them friends.

Naw… not really… you can have a friend from childhood that you are real close to but as this child grows older into a male adult they sometimes admit things in passing that weakens the bond… as time passes the bond gets weaker…

87. I can video tape women in public—often without their consent—with male complicity.

Again, I do not share my sexuality with males as some kind ritual of “bonding”—I was not into team sports that much while growing up.

88. I can be courteous to a person of the opposite sex that I do not know and say “Hello” or “Hi” and not fear that it will be taken as a come-on or fear being stalked because of it.

I actually hate—deeply hate—the fact that a lone woman cannot stop me on the street and introduce herself to me because most are afraid of being physically violated. When we simply must be racist about this matter, I notice that “white” women are the most comfortable with this rare behavior—and this also makes me angry (because this is one way some Black men think life is better apart from Black women—and “white” women often do this in ‘exclusive situations’ where the socioeconomics often bar Black women from the scene).

89. I can use physical violence or the threat of physical violence to get what I want when other tactics fail in a relationship.

I have never done this—but I know that (especially in my younger days) some women actually wanted me to be like this. This is because some women under patriarchy only have materialistic/physical concepts of strength and dominance. And they want to have the wartime experience of being with a “real” man.

90. If I get into a physical altercation with a person of the opposite sex, I will most likely be able to impose my will physically on that person.

In my little world of unpopularity, the greatest “punishment” I have for a woman is to “banish” her. I’m one of those strange people that actually thinks a woman is pleased simply by being in my presence—and to take that away from her is violence enough… This punishment is not very effective but, by habit, it’s all I have… maybe I should teach myself to body slam people…

91. I can go to parades or other public events and not worry about being physically and sexually molested by persons of the opposite sex.

Have you been to West Hollywood on the wrong day?

92. I can touch and physically grope women’s bodies in public—often without their consent—with male complicity.

There are army men and there are family men.

93. In general, I have the freedom to travel in the night without fear.

Yes. And I cannot stand people who live in fear. But many men who travel the streets of Iraq at night are very afraid.

94. I am able to be out in public without fear of being sexually harassed by individuals or groups of the opposite sex.

Have you been to West Hollywood on the wrong day? I may be forty but I’m still pretty, baby! Snap! Snap! Snap! (source)

Originally Posted 9/26/2008

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"My theory of girl chasing" & remarks on "Sorry successful black women, but most of ya’ll ain’t as cute as you think"

2013-01-07T03:00:00.000-05:00

I would only have something substantial to contribute in response to just a few points made in the concise pieces below that we're sharing here today:

In the so-called millennial generation, we all seem to be able to use a bit of help with making any choices, precisely because there are so many (the Great Recession will surely temper some of this haughtiness). Given that, "showing off" does have it's place, if tempered in a disciplined manner. In my multi-regional experience, working with a very artificially limited amount of time is only a limitation because we have extremely limited access to natural things in our immediate environment (or, say, less than 30 minutes away) -- such as sacred land (where one might be able to build a fire to share stories, take a swim, catch some fish, go on a hike, or stare at the stars, with one's ancestors "watching" over the courting process from the trees) -- that speak volumes quickly. Sure we have sacred maroon spaces in Babylon, but they are not the same {see: "Why maroon community is not enough"}. Without such framework for our modern lives, I don't blame anyone harshly, or with too much disappointment, for their lack of instinctual sight; being disconnected from natural Earth simply diminishes our natural instincts. We must all be patient with one another, albeit to a degree lest we become, as the writer suggests below, "missionaries" or simply pulled from our foundation. Mos Def's ex-wife might have valuable insight into mate assessment, but certainly it's limited to a few specific types of query.

In fact, in another text of his, the writer hints at the type of "simultaneous consciousness" (that I think of as a diplomacy between dimensions of the past, present and future) involved with "showing off" in a disciplined, efficient manner:

/////"Dr. Hendrix writes about his daughter having the characteristics of what he calls 'original wholeness': "When all her physical needs were taken care of, she would nestle into our arms and look around her with the contentment of Buddha. Like all babies she had no awareness of herself as a separate being and no internal divisions between thoughts, feelings, and actions. To my eyes, she was experiencing a primitive spirituality, a universe without boundaries."

"Before this wonderful description, he introduces the technical term “autistic period” when “the baby makes no distinction between itself and the rest of the world.” Now, with these two items laid down into the rasx() context, let’s add that the great “arms race” in the Old Kingdom of Africa was to never abandon this “primitive spirituality” yet simultaneously develop a distinction between the self and 'the rest of the world' governed by eternal, divine laws of natural science. These two “contradictions” sound just like the polyrhythmic music that is Old Africa [editor's emphasis]. It is bizarre, beyond the imagination of most New-World, science-fiction writers to imagine an entire nation sincerely devoted to raising healthy, whole children such that even the 'adult words' in the language are easy for a child to say and carry for the rest of her life.

"It is utterly ridiculous to try to 'convince' a kid from a broken, Western home that there existed a people who built gigantic monuments for the education of future children of their family. Surely the pyramids were built by slave-driving egomaniacs because 'our Greek heritage' sees utopia as unachievable (since it is clearly unachievable by Greeks). You can stop a conversation and quickly run to the edges of the flat-earth map for the self-described-but-European-trained “African feminist” who is simply unable to imagine matriarchy on this scale. A nation where all the male leaders are chosen by women—not depressed, insecure, bitter women but wise, powerful, whole women—a Queen mother not from England? You probably can’t do it. 'Primitive spirituality' is for babies. So let’s crack a few jokes and forget about it."/////

Put simply, rather than not play "the game" because we don't see any worthy partners, we might play speed "chess" (in order to "hurry up" and locate a worthy partner) that allows us more time for other things alongside our "chess habit", ever mindful that the increased rate results in not only decreased time, but thus also requires increased focus with the time allotted.

We "millennials" are perhaps playing double consciousness with the wrong dimensions -- and algebraic values with different base variables do not go together -- trying to balance romanticism with general architecture, instead of balancing personal architecture with familial architecture. Once I began to witness God, romance became just a cheap, wasteful, and egotistical substitute.

The reader may also benefit from an introduction to the style of this text. A recent observation of a previously invisible-to-me comment at Kintespace.com revealed this about the style and process of the writer:

/////"The long ass sentences will most likely be from English writers like Dickens. But I am no expert on this—but writers in his day were paid by the word. I write in this English style mostly because of Monty Python. I think it is funny but readers that assume I take myself seriously often fail to assume that I am being funny. Chris Rock had the same problem: his early work was too subtle for the stereotypes of the time (like right now)—eventually he bypassed the Franklin Ajaye style and came up with a field holler the people can understand."/////

So, despite the sensationalist, satirical title of this post, you won't find much hollering here. But I trust the serious reader will find this text literally full of relevant ideas. Happy reading.

Flippant Remarks about “Sorry Successful Black Women, but Most of Ya’ll Ain’t as Cute as You Think”

(SOURCE: Kintespace.com)

My imaginary ex-girlfriend, Brown Sugar, wrote “Sorry Successful Black Women, but Most of Ya’ll Ain’t as Cute as You Think”:

A simple fact that too many black women over look is that powerful, successful men like beautiful women. Having a beautiful woman on his arm connotes power. It signals to the world that he is the man and the woman on his arm is the living breathing beautiful proof of his man-ness. Now this gets a little tricky if the man in question is in politics or some other very public high powered position. That man needs a woman who is going to play the role of high powered wife well and that may trump looks…for his wife. You best [believe] his mistress will be a stunner.

And he will have a mistress.

... Dating at the top of the food chain is cutthroat, dog eat dog, and if you’re not coming with the right weaponry, and for women that means stunning looks, it’s going to be a tough row to hoe. There’s no getting around that, no matter how much we may want it not to be true.

My girl wrote this article about the self-described “mean” woman, Helena Andrews. Her memoir with the word “bitch” in the title is on sale near you. So now that I’ve laid out the context of today’s rasx() context, here’s the jumble for your neuro-melanized right-brain to sort out:

*Here is more harsh truth that Brown Sugar will agree with: too many “successful” women are not physically attractive—and this is often the reason why they are “successful.” Often the rule is this: “successful” women retreated from their bodies and thrive in a world of ideas while attractive women “genetic celebrities” are forced to live in their bodies. No Christian nation in the world forces women more than the United States of America.

*One common trait of retreating from the physical body (for both men and women) is to overeat and take no exercise. Often, too, too often this is the only reason why “successful” women are not attractive (to me).

*The “top of the dating food chain” is relative—not absolute. To imply that there is one “chain” means mental bondage leading into a velvet-covered slave pen—or we are talking about a high school lunch room or the only night club in town.

*When a woman (like Helena Andrews) is being “mean” during an encounter, this is often an impatient, pre-emptive strike against the possibility of rejection.

*The fear of rejection is often seen by me as a lack of courage—and my lack of sexism here often, ironically unwelcome: I fully expect women to be brave.

*Trying to navigate around the insecurities of women can cost a do-right man hundreds of thousands of dollars—and maybe even his life. I am gravely serious about this as I have the cherished relatives in my family to prove it.

*“Successful” women are often competitive—even when it is unnecessary, like in a relationship with a do-right man.

*I cannot afford to f’ around with a woman that is just attractive. I have three children to consider—and movie tickets are off the chain!

*Read “My Theory of Girl Chasing”…

My Theory of Girl Chasing

(SOURCE: Kintespace.com)

As the fine woman behind Brown Sugar embarks on a new enterprise, T-Time, my eye cannot help but capture this one:

The reason why so many men today think that they have to do so little to attract quality chicks, is because they don’t. Too many women out here will do whatever it takes to find, get and keep a man, turning the whole natural order of the dating world on its head. Women are doing the chasing and men are doing the choosing. And apparently I’m the only one who seems to think something is wrong with that.

This reminds me of the Garret Morris skit on the old SNL in response to a Rolling Stones lyric about Black women wanting to have “sex all night long”—just where are these women? Actually, coming from my west-coast North American perspective, I know where they are and I am not willing to go into debt (just from the acting lessons alone) to go there...

Firstly, for my Brown Sugar babe, my wild guess is that she has been biased by the college scene. You see, I ended up at UCSB in my twenties back in the late 1980s—the population of Black women was very small there. We did not dominate enough to have a “dating world.” On the east coast, a collegiate setting, packed full of educated sisters, would have placed me in that “wrong” place Brown Sugar is talking about. But, on the mean streets far from the campus, the only time I have seen (adult) Black women openly chasing Black men is when the possibility (real or imagined) of being near one million or more dollars is involved. Now... for non-Black women the story is a little different—and this can make me quite angry—which can be quite surprising to far too many Black women—because they are even angrier and filled with incorrect assumptions and frustrating inaction (but this topic is beyond the scope of this rant).

Now I have also seen what appears to be adult Black women chasing Black men—but it really wasn’t... What really happens (most of the time) is that Black women (all women) are competing against each other in a social setting (what Jimi Hendrix called “the scene” in that oldie but goodie “Foxy Lady”). The males (of any skin color) taken seriously for consideration in this social setting (is it the “club scene” these days? —or is it the college scene? —or is it the church scene?) are merely prized, token targets for the women. Often this activity is not completely conscious—it just happens. It is similar to the classic story of two blood sisters competing for the attention of one, designated guy. Oftentimes this stuff gets down to the level of natural survival instinct in artificial scarcity.

A woman can feel domination over other women by capturing a male prized by all within the scene. Because of this woman-to-woman competition, they are willing to do that “wrong” thing and chase. In my experience, young women with some kind of ‘childhood issue’ (usually related to her father) will chase a guy in private and in secret. Women—especially women of color with a strong missionary education—know how to deny themselves, very, very well. Bulimia is just one way a woman knows how to starve herself—don’t think my big, thick sisters are not doing the same thang—but in a different way. In my idealism, no one—male or female—should chase or starve at all. But who cares about my non-Olympian ideals when a girl is training for the Olympics! From anon to agon!

For many, competition is everything. Recognition of supremacy is the American way. There is no point for many socially “well”-adjusted females to have a great guy by her side when “nobody” knows about it and “nobody” cares about it. To me, this is another way of saying that people—especially people “of color” who are proud to call themselves “normal”—do not value having a deep, rich, inner life. This is why the television is always playing in the background, keeping “us” company.

What can be extremely uncomfortable to more than a few of my insecure, socially-overactive sisters is their discovery that their “friends” are not happy for them when they show up at the house party with one of the few, undeniably handsome, do-right males on the premises (possibly the entire city). The always-deniable jealousy can get thick at times—to that level of savage, subsistence-level sibling rivalry. Certain sensitive guys may notice this when suddenly they are getting more female attention because the females saw you with one of the girl-“friends.” Stupid guys assume that this attention is for them—but it is really a woman-to-woman thing. I find this behavior demeaning and insulting (now).

What is important to understand here is that I am saying that most women are connected to a social scene. Most functional women are connected to some social structure. (But the terrible irony for me is that this social structure is often dysfunctional.) When you are walking down the street and you see the billionth “cute” girl still on the phone then you are literally seeing her connecting to a piece of that social scene. Here are the stereotypical social scenes women (and men) are connected to:

*The friends from school. This is my bias but most modern North Americans in the W2 world get their real friends from K through 12—this is because most, pre-pubescent children are not cowards and liars. Sadly, in the underclass world in general and the Black world in particular, many of these genuine friends are killed off in large numbers in various physical and meta-physical ways before we can be effective in adult life. This is why most adults reading this have no accurate, non-cynical idea why I am writing this.

*The “friends” from work. Increasingly, North American workers get almost all of their friends from working in a corporation.

*The “friends” from the religion. To me, since the rise of the mega-church this is just like the friends at work—except more open weeping is involved.

*The “friends” from the corporate-sponsored “community.” This is just another, smart-ass way of saying the club scene—even a DJ house party can have corporate, energy-drink, clothing-line overtones.

The reason why I put the “friends” in quotes is because as soon as my lady’s “friend” is laid off, excommunicated or can no longer afford that new silk number for the club that night, the “friend” vanishes from her so-called life. So, to me, chasing a woman means following her through all of these social scenes—often very dysfunctional social scenes that I despise—and (sometimes literally) standing around waiting for her to see that her superficial social life is totally bullshit. But after all of these years I am still not gentle with my words: calling part of my woman’s foundational identity ‘total bullshit’ gives her an excuse to hate me instead of the artificial social systems that continually fail her. Again, I have violated the sacred trust. A “smarter man” knows to just shut the f’ up and get that ass while he can. An even smarter man would live alone in the mountains with rent raiment eating locusts.

But I am not so smart and it is far easier for her to hate me and start a new life with a new “man” putting the ridiculousness of her youthful (and sometimes not-so-youthful) social experiments behind her. My ‘reward’ for chasing this girl is that she grows for the better as a person—but she takes her newly grown self into a new “pure” relationship where she can do no wrong (she hopes). She’ll have a better (false) sense of control there (she hopes). I have learned that an American sense of control is related to American slavery—the archetypal slave master’s sense of “liberty and freedom.” It, of course, is ridiculous and insanely ironic to associate a Black person’s sense of domination with the stereotypical slave master’s—so you, reader, have a choice: you can call me ridiculous and insane or you can call an entire social structure with millions of eagerly-participating, properly-assimilated people ridiculous and insane. Hmm... which one of the choices is easier? You know, fried locust might taste like shrimp...

Do I sound bitter? Let’s get some American perspective. Note how I excluded the “friends from family” in my list above. The high divorce rates and employment-related migrations make family friends a rare, precious possession. I can’t go around feeling like a victim when so much poverty is obviously all around me. I don’t care how much fiat money you have: I know what poor people look like. The teachings of my African ancestors show me how to see. Precious few people transcend poverty with active imagination. This situation is by design. This is not some “curse” put on lonely me. It is the manifestation of oppression.

So, anyway, since sweet Brown Sugar covers the female perspective on chasing boys, I’m free here to flip off a few toward chasing girls:

*I’m sure there are all kinds of boy-girl chasing but where I come from much of the male ‘dedication’ to this activity is based on the sexist principle that women need “help” making a choice. And there is nothing like a little aggression and persistence to lubricate the decision-making process. Sure, I agree you can find women who get “turned on” by this form of aggression and high-energy dominance. Some Black women when pushed by my “rhetoric” often move to get “above” me to take this to a level of solemn, sacred seriousness—because this sexy violent place is surely where the “real” Black man resides. Why am I remembering Alexyss K. Tylor right now? This implies that all of what you may be reading here right now is total bullshit because a “real” Black man would not even waste his ass-smacking time to write shit like this—or even write at all... I look forward to seeing the 10-year wedding anniversary photos based on this theory of Black masculinity.

*In the same vein where flows “the love for the chase” are the same intoxicants that drive soldiers back into the action and hunters back for another chance to kill. To me, the purpose for chasing girls was to get the right one very quickly and settle down. It was through great disappointment to find out how many women “love” the chase itself. Why give up something when you do it so well? Aren’t we going to be young and bling forever? For Black people to deliberately ‘settle down’ in a strategic manner means to accept the real situation of being Black in the white world. For many of my brothers and sisters, this is just too much to bear—party on!

*The desire to show off in front a Black woman means you have already lost. You are already putting yourself in the place where you actually think you can explain yourself to her (likely in a very artificially limited amount of time). She should already have an accurate, basic conceptual model of you by the time you say, “Hello.” When you find that she does not, do not consider yourself her missionary teacher. Accept being a total stranger and respect her ability to see (and not see).

*The woman you want should already have a pretty powerful idea of who you are before you even try to introduce yourself. You think this is bullshit? Just ask some experienced female strippers (who have made a lot of money) to profile men they have never met and see how accurate they are. The ex-wife of Mos Def is coming out with a tell-all book. This might save us some footwork.

*Most women would consider themselves “professional” in the white, corporate sense of the word. This means that I can present myself in serious sincerity as a business contact to a “professional” woman and then move on… Instead of chasing, all we guys need to know is where we can leave our curriculum vitae with contact information. To think that “real” Black women are not this professional means you are hoofing it in poverty. You want to be with someone who knows how to take care of business. What is quite bizarre is that some Black women will treat everyone in this professional manner except for Black males. I have learned the hard way that it is not my place to attempt to correct for or protest against this situation (real or “imagined”).

*Chasing another person usually takes you away from the place where your identity flourishes. It is usually an act of passionate, low self-esteem. There are exceptions. But it is best to cultivate the courage to stand in your place—even when this means your ass will stand alone for many, many years. It is best to think of this situation as wilderness survival in solitary confinement—even when it appears that “civilized” people are all around you in some bustling, fictional 21st century metropolis with shiny iPhones and shit.

That last bullet was easy for me to write now that my hormones are trimmed out... When my sex-drive was pubescent through the roof I was more than willing to humiliate myself for some woman body... (source1 | source2)

Originally Posted 11/19/2010

Finger on the Page: Frantz Fanon's "Black Skin White Masks" (Chapter 1)

2013-01-03T05:40:00.000-05:00

lib.mg exclusive feature
Michael J. Wilson {Brooklyn, New York}

The goal of these posts will be to conduct a chapter-a-week close reading of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, while analyzing, summarizing, and dialoguing with the text to provide readers with a better understanding of this crucial contribution to thinking about race. For those curious, I will be using the 1991 paperback reissue with [cover design by Liadain Warwick Smith]. Given the current debates raging about a post-racial America, the election of the nation's first black president, and continued disagreements over what really constitutes "blackness," we may find that Fanon provided some very intriguing answers -- over 50 years ago -- to our most pressing questions about black people.

Chapter One: The Negro & Language
(Last week: Introduction)

/////What I want to do is help the black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the colonial environment./////

In this chapter, Fanon shares his thoughts on how langauge choice reveals some of the effects oppression has had on the black psyche. He points out that, for black people, "to speak is to exist absolutely for the other" meaning that the language one chooses to communicate with requires that he or she "assume a culture, support the weight of a civilization" (17). Key to this theory is the notion that, in the oppressed black mind, there is the tendency to equate European culture and whiteness with humanity. Thus, "the Negro will become whiter--become more human--as he masters the white man's language" (18).

Next, we are presented with a few examples of how and why this process takes place. Fanon uses the instance of the native Caribbean's first encounter with the "mother country" (in this case, a Martinican visiting France for the first time) to illustrate the nature of a black inferiority complex. He states that,

/////Every colonized people--in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural orginality--finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle. (18)/////

The author goes on to point out that schoolchildren in Martinique were taught to look down on their native creole and that the middle class only used the dialect when speaking to their servants. Some families did away with creole all together and ridiculed their children for using it, all in the name of perfecting their French. Fanon reminds us that, "for the Negro knows that over there in France there is a stereotype of him that will fasten on to him at the pier in Le Havre or Marseille" (20).

The logic of equating French culture with progress or cultivation is peculiar. Fanon describes it as "a psychological phenomenon that consists in the belief that the world will open to the extent to which frontiers are broken down" (21). Colonialism and oppression have a way of distorting one's notions of success and achievement to the degree that the person will forget about his or her own self completely and attempt to become another (in this case, white) person.

Briefly and vaguely, Fanon delves into a larger philosophical problem at the end of page 22, that of man's narcissism. Because of man's extreme infatuation with himself "in order to imagine that he is different from the other 'animals'". This narcissism is a mirage, but it is also at the root of black people's pursuit to "change who they are" in order to impress or prove themselves to whites. The solution to this problem, according to Fanon, is "man's surrender", that is, his doing away with his narcissism. Again, this section of the chapter is not explained in detail and the reader may have the feeling it feels out of place or serves as a distraction to the rest of the text.

Moving on, we are provided with yet another example of the language problem manifesting itself, this time in a Martinican who has just returned home from France. We see that he has seemingly forgotten creole, developed an intimate association with French culture, and become "critical of his compatriots" back home. He envisions himself as having oracle-like knowledge and comes to view life in his hometown as "deplorably played out" (24). This "brand-newness" is understood to be "evidence of a dislocation, a separation" (25).

Next is Fanon's take on the white perspective of this dilemma. For Fanon, the relationship between the two is analogous to that of the relationship between an adult and a child. In his observations, he recalls seeing many whites speak condescendingly to blacks (in dialect).

/////A white man addressing a Negro behaves exactly like an adult with a child and starts smirking, whispering, patronizing, cozening. It is not one white man I have a watched, but hundreds; and I have not limited my investigation to any one class... (31)/////

Naturally, these actions make blacks angry because they are a part of the process of "classifying, imprisoning, primitivizing, and decivilizing" black people. Fanon believed that the "European has a fixed concept of the Negro" (35).

Near the end of the chapter, Fanon provides us with one more example of language pathology when he states that "there is no reason why Andre Breton should say of [Aime] Cesaire, 'Here is a black man who handles the French language as no white man today can" (39). For Fanon, this is the height of insult. He closes the chapter by saying, "we should be honored, the blacks will reproach me, that a white man like Breton writes such things" (40). -END-

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Finger On The Page: Frantz Fanon's "Black Skin, White Masks"

2013-01-02T16:54:00.000-05:00

The first serious encounter I had with Frantz Fanon's work came during a college course surveying post-colonial literature. A hefty part of the class was dedicated to understanding the conversation between members of the Negritude movement (particularly Aime Cesaire) and Fanon's writing in Black Skin, White Masks. At first approach, the book seemed to be an oddly written (i.e., translated--from the French) and dense combination of anti-colonial rants and black philosophical esoterica. My colleagues and I were excited to finally get the chance to delve into Fanon, a writer we had heard referenced in other classes and so many of those bull session conversations about "blackness" one has into the wee hours of the morning. We came away from our initial reading confused and unsatisfied; the professor spent two weeks bouncing around the book, the wording seemed all over the place at times, and the parts we did comprehend appeared to color Fanon as stereotypically angry.

While the book does call for an end to oppression along with attempting to identify the nature of the "black self," it is also a direct assault on what many considered (and still consider) to be the essence of the black identity. As such, the book becomes a sort of internal conversation among black people calling for a reassessment of who we consider ourselves to be.

The goal of these posts will be to conduct a chapter-a-week close reading of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, while analyzing, summarizing, and dialoguing with the text to provide readers with a better understanding of this crucial contribution to thinking about race. For those curious, I will be using the 1991 paperback reissue with [cover design by Liadain Warwick Smith].

Given the current debates raging about a post-racial America, the election of the nation's first black president, and continued disagreements over what really constitutes "blackness," we may find that Fanon provided some very intriguing answers--over 50 years ago--to our most pressing questions about black people.

At any rate, let's get right to it...

INTRODUCTION

"At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man."
~Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

One of the first mistakes my class made in tackling BSWM was skipping over the introduction. I can't stress how important it is to ALWAYS read the introduction to any piece of literature you come across as it prepares you for what you are about to read!!!

In Fanon's case, the introduction immediately tells us a number of things. The author assures us, with characteristic irony and sarcasm, that he has not come with "timeless truths" and that he "is not illuminated with ultimate radiances" (7). He also informs us that he ultimately believes in mankind's ability "to understand and to love" (7). With those disclaimers out of the way, Fanon goes on to state that he "propose[s] nothing short of the liberation of the man of color from himself." (8). For Fanon, this type of liberation is necessary because it is the "black" psyche which motives black people to "want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the value of their intellect" meaning, "For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white" (10). While Fanon acknowledges that some black (and white) people "will not find themselves in what follows" it does not mean that the problem he is outlining is nonexistent.

The author then goes on to give us brief descriptions on what each of the chapters will cover. The first three will deal with the modern black man's thoughts and feelings once he finds himself in the "white world". The fourth chapter is a critique of a book (Prospero and Caliban: Pyschology and Colonization) by M. Mannoni. The fifth chapter--a very important chapter!!-- is an examination of black people's understanding of blackness. This chapter reveals the heart of Fanon's writing in the book as he seeks to explain the inherent desperation and existential angst found in black people "driven to discover the meaning of black identity" (14). The last two chapters seek to explain the philosophical underpinnings of being black.

Now that we've covered the Introduction, next week we can begin with chapter one which covers some of the issues surrounding black people and the adoption of the colonizer's language. While this chapter will deal mainly with speech politics concerning continental Africans and Caribbeans, African American readers may find that some of the ideas expressed will ring relevant to our own issues with "talkin' white"!!!

See you next week...

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Forgiveness

2013-01-02T13:13:00.000-05:00

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

Mac Walton, you probably remember the name from the What Will It Take For Black Men To Heal? piece he penned a while back, just sent me this piece on Forgiveness this morning and suggested it may be a good topic for everyone to meditate on and discuss:

Forgiveness: Woman enough? Man enough?
In German, it’s called Vergebung, in Italian Perdono, in Latin Venia, and in Ebonics, it’s “Come to Jesus”. But are we, as Black men and Black women, ready to take that long, silent walk to the altar, kneel down and, in a praying position, ask Jesus or The Creator lying some place deep within our soul to help us to forgive?

We’re talking about pardoning folks for the pain, injury, sin and wrongdoing that’s been done to us in the guise of taming the savages, manifest destiny, expanding the West, defending “the southern way of life,” upholding “the purity of white womanhood,” otherwise known as increasing the power and profits of white folk.

And we’re talking about pardoning not just white folks but black folks as well. And this kind of pardoning can get real ghett-o.

“So you want me to forgive the man I loaned my last $200 bucks to keep his apartment only to find out he spent it all on crack-- and didn’t give me any? You crazy!”

"So let me get this straight. You want me to forgive the man who left me for his secretary {That ho!} and who hasn't paid child support in three years. Did he send you here to talk to me?"

“Wait a minute: are you telling me I should forgive this woman who left me to shack up with my only friend and the best man at my wedding? I’ll forgive her--after I kick her black ***!”

Ultimately, we’re asking ourselves, “Should I forgive this white man for capturing and herding us into ships like cattle, selling us on the auction block like pack animals, lynching our men, raping our women and still holding his foot on my neck to this day?”

We know that, ideally, forgiving is the right thing to do. But ideals are one thing and reality is another. Some of us see forgiving as “giving up” or “letting the white man off the hook” and not releasing ourselves emotionally from the effect of someone’s behavior. And some of us feel that we shouldn’t forgive anyone unless they apologize first, not recognizing that this stance is just another excuse to remain tied up in emotional knots of anger, depression, hatred and revenge.

Forgiving is difficult
Author Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People and Stop Worrying And Start Living) understood the difficulty of forgiving. “Any man can criticize, condemn and complain," he wrote, "But it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.” But it was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?) who seemed to understand just how much character it will take for African Americans to take even a single step on this journey, not to mention see it through.

“Change” he preached, “does not roll on the wheels of inevitability but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man cannot ride you unless your back is bent.” King understood that, while liberty is a condition of the environment, freedom is the domain of the mind, and that, to be truly free, we must free our minds and hearts from the heavy burdens of anger, guilt, hatred and revenge.

What is the hour of the night?
To transcend such feelings, we must ask, to paraphrase poet Queen Mother Audley Moore “What is the hour of the night?” and recognize that the Watchman’s midnight lantern lights brightly through the darkness. We must revisit our African history, studying not only great African empires but not-so-great, smaller yet important events marked by great moments of resilience, moments which included not only revolts but every-day acts of resistance.

This new reading will allow us to see not only painful events of the past but remarkable, heroic acts of both the past and the present, indeed, see how the present and past combine to define us a a people of courage, heroism and dignity. It will help us to understand why even the great abolitionist Frederick Douglas, a former slave himself, would marvel at our ability to persevere and declare “This struggle will be fought with words or blows or both, because the limit to tyranny is prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” In other words, the harder you hit us, the harder we keep coming back; and you just can’t keep a brotha and Sistah down for long.

These lessons from history will help us to see that, despite the hardships and brutality, we have traveled a long road to liberation with many rewarding mileposts along the way, becoming a stronger and more resilient people in the process. And, hey, if we can do it collectively, we can do it personally as well.

What it is
When we gain a greater appreciation of our struggle for liberation and begin to practice the art of forgiveness, a key will unlock the door to both our collective and personal salvation, all the emotional baggage of anger, depression and revenge will fall, like lint from our minds and hearts.

Dr. King may have said it best: “He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.”

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Theorizing African Motherhood

2013-01-01T20:06:00.000-05:00

What a brilliant article! Update: JENDA complained to our hosting company about our sharing of this article, so we've taken it down. Because the complaint caused our hosting company to take our entire website offline yesterday, we are extremely disappointed that they chose to avoid contacting us directly per our disclaimer notice. In maintaining the original spirit of this post, we share key points from the article below.

Highlights of this piece are the author's critique of Nancy Chodorow ("The Reproduction of Mothering") and other feminists who define the verb "mother" as "things that mothers do in regard to children, which they see as primarily nurturing." The author points out that Chodorow's perspective sought to expand the role of men in terms of motherhood because they too can nurture, so they can also mother. The author goes on to suggest though that such a conceptualization of motherhood discounts other aspects "that only females experience such as gestation, parturition and childbirth." Finally, the author settled on agreeing to disagree, noting that Chodorow can keep her definition but must admit that rather than being universal, the type of "secular motherhood advanced in feminist theories is best described as nuclear motherhood -- a very specific cultural construction."

Theorizing African Motherhood
by Oyeronke Oyewumi

(SOURCE: JENDA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies, Vol. 4)

[...] In earlier writings (Oyewumi 1993a, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2003), I have made a case that dominant Western feminist accounts of motherhood reduce it to a gender category. As such, mother is represented as a woman first and foremost, a category that is perceived to be subordinated, disadvantaged, and oppressed because women are subordinate to males who are the privileged group. The gendering of the institution of motherhood leads to its patriarchalization. In turn, because of the privileging of males, reproductive processes like parturition, gestation, and childbirth, which have no male equivalents, are erased from many feminist accounts of motherhood.

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Live From Planet Earth, Dakar (PanAfrican Summit)

2013-01-01T13:02:00.000-05:00

{liberator event}

2nd Pan African Youth Summit: Dakar, Senegal
+Live From Planet Earth: Dakar ("Style de Dakar")
+May 28-29, 2010: University Cheikh Anta Diop

If you've been with us for more than a year you'll remember the first annual Pan African Youth Summit held at Howard University in February 2009.

Held in Senegal this year at University Cheikh Anta Diop, The Liberator Magazine will be more closely connected to the 2nd annual Pan African Youth Summit, specifically through a co-produced "Live From Planet Earth: Dakar" which will take place during the weekend of the summit. More info below.

Student organizers in Dakar are asking for donations to help cover some of the operational costs of the summit. In the name of transparency, a full budget is outlined here.

We are putting out a call to our online community asking for help with covering the $172.63 that organizers will spend on a venue for the Live From Planet Earth party and DJ for the night.

Donations can be made at the Pan African Youth Summit website. If you prefer to donate through The Liberator Magazine please contact us.

Africa Unite: 2nd Pan African Youth Summit 2010: Dakar, Senegal.

The Pan African Youth Summit 2010 will be held in Dakar, Senegal on May 28th, and May 29th. The theme for this year is "Africa Unite: Toward a Second Wave of Liberation Struggle". The aim of the summit is to lay the groundwork for a West African collective of music artists, youth activists, farm workers, students, soldiers, and journalists united in opposition to both domestic crony capitalism and externally imposed neo-colonial control. In order to make this gathering a success we are asking for small donations from members of the African diaspora and other concerned members of the international community who share the values of our gathering.

The location of the event will be at University Cheikh Anta Diop, Restaurant des Sciences et des Facultes Techniques. We are asking for small donations from supporters in the United States and international community to help cover some of the costs for our gathering.

Live From Planet Earth: Dakar (sponsored by The Liberator Magazine)
On Friday, May 28th there will be a party featuring soulful music from around the African diaspora and continent hosted by the U.S.-based Liberator Magazine. The party will be a chance for fellowship and consciousness raising through spoken-word performance, art work, and soulful music.

Conference
On Saturday, May 29th there will be a day long conference including panel discussions, guest speakers and a concluding plenary session to form a new West African collective to coordinate the urgently needed consciousness-raising work throughout the region. A description of the panel discussions can be found near the end of this brochure.

Fundraising
To make this summit a success we are asking for support from conscious members of the African diaspora and others who share the progressive and transformative aims of the event this year. Because we are organizing this event in Africa, the costs are fairly minimal. However, at the same time many members of our collective can not afford to completely subsidize this event. Your financial support will go a long way to helping us prepare for the work ahead. Any bit will help. In the interests of transparency, a detailed budget of the costs is public on our website. Please, donate if you can. A little support will go a long way.

Donations can be made at the Pan African Youth Summit website. If you prefer to donate through The Liberator Magazine please contact us.

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

Capitalism = Marxism / European Culture's the Issue

2013-01-01T12:52:00.000-05:00

(Russell Means *edited for length*) Hegel and Marx were heirs to the thinking of Newton, Descartes, Locke and Smith. Hegel finished the process of secularizing theology- and that is put in his own terms- he secularized the religious thinking through which Europe understood the universe. Then Marx put Hegel's philosophy in terms of "materialism," which is to say that Marx despiritualized Hegel's work altogether. Again, this is in Marx' own terms. And this is now seen as the future revolutionary potential of Europe. Europeans may see this as revolutionary, but American Indians see it simply as still more of that same old European conflict between being and gaining. The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of European imperialism lie in Marx'- and his followers'- links to the tradition of Newton, Hegel and the others.

Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is "proof that the system works" to Europeans. Clearly, there are two completely opposing views at issue here, and Marxism is very far over to the other side from the American Indian view. But let's look at a major implication of this; it is not merely an intellectual debate.

...After all, their philosophers have despiritualized reality, so there is no satisfaction (for them) to be gained in simply observing the wonder of a mountain or a lake or a people in being. No, satisfaction is measured in terms of gaining material. So the mountain becomes gravel, and the lake becomes coolant for a factory, and the people are rounded up for processing through the indoctrination mills Europeans like to call schools.

But each new piece of that "progress" ups the ante out in the real world. Take fuel for the industrial machine as an example. Little more than two centuries ago, nearly everyone used wood- a replenishable, natural item- as fuel for the very human needs of cooking and staying warm. Along came the Industrial Revolution and coal became the dominant fuel, as production became the social imperative for Europe. Pollution began to become a problem in the cities, and the earth was ripped open to provide coal whereas wood had always simply been gathered or harvested at no great expense to the environment. Later, oil became the major fuel, as the technology of production was perfected through a series of scientific "revolutions." Pollution increased dramatically, and nobody yet knows what the environmental costs of pumping all that oil out of the ground will really be in the long run. Now there's an "energy crisis," and uranium is becoming the dominant fuel.

Capitalists, at least, can be relied upon to develop uranium as fuel only at the rate which they can show a good profit. That's there ethic, and maybe they will buy some time. Marxists, on the other hand, can be relied upon to develop uranium fuel as rapidly as possible simply because it's the most "efficient" production fuel available. That's their ethic, and I fail to see where it's preferable. Like I said, Marxism is right smack in the middle of European tradition. It's the same old song.

There's a rule of thumb which can be applied here. You cannot judge the real nature of a European revolutionary doctrine on the basis of the changes it proposes to make within the European power structure and society. You can only judge it by the effects it will have on non-European peoples. This is because every revolution in European history has served to reinforce Europe's tendencies and abilities to export destruction to other peoples, other cultures and the environment itself. I defy anyone to point out an example where this is not true.

So now we, as American Indian people, are asked to believe that a "new" European revolutionary doctrine such as Marxism will reverse the negative effects of European history on us. European power relations are to be adjusted once again, and that's supposed to make things better for all of us. But what does this really mean?

...Revolutionary Marxism is committed to even further perpetuation and perfection of the very industrial process which is destroying us all. It offers only to " redistribute" the results- the money, maybe- of this industrialization to a wider section of the population. It offers to take wealth from the capitalists and pass it around; but in order to do so, Marxism must maintain the industrial system. Once again, the power relations within European society will have to be altered, but once again the effects upon American Indian peoples here and non-Europeans elsewhere will remain the same. This is much the same as when power was redistributed from the church to private business during the so-called bourgeois revolution. European society changed a bit, at least superficially, but its conduct toward non-Europeans continued as before. You can see what the American Revolution of 1776 did for American Indians. It's the same old song.

Revolutionary Marxism, like industrial society in other forms, seeks to "rationalize" all people in relation to industry- maximum industry, maximum production. It is a doctrine that despises the American Indian spiritual tradition, our cultures, our lifeways. Marx himself called us "precapitalists" and "primitive." Precapitalist simply means that, in his view, we would eventually discover capitalism and become capitalists; we have always been economically retarded in Marxist term. The only manner in which American Indian people could participate in a Marxist revolution would be to join the industrial system, to become factory workers, or "proletarians," as Marx called them. The man was very clear about the fact that his revolution could only occur through the struggle of the proletariat, that the existence of a massive industrial system is a precondition of a successful Marxist society.

I think there's a problem with language here. Christians, capitalists, Marxists. All of them have been revolutionary in their own minds, but none of them really means revolution. What they really mean is continuation. They do what they do in order that European culture can continue to exist and develop according to its needs.

So, in order for us to really join forces with Marxism, we American Indians would have to accept the national sacrifice of our homeland; we would have to commit cultural suicide and become industrialized and Europeanized.

At this point, I've got to stop and ask myself whether I'm being too harsh. Marxism has something of a history. Does this history bear out my observations? I look to the process of industrialization in the Soviet Union since 1920 and I see that these Marxists have done what it took the English Industrial Revolution 300 years to do; and the Marxists did it in 60 years. I see that the territory of the USSR used to contain a number of tribal peoples and that they have been crushed to make way for the factories. The Soviets refer to this as " the National Question." The question of whether the tribal peoples had the right to exist as peoples; and they decided the tribal peoples were an acceptable sacrifice to the industrial needs. I look to China and I see the same thing. I look to Vietnam and I see Marxists imposing an industrial order and rooting out the indigenous tribal mountain people.

I hear the leading Soviet scientist saying that when uranium is exhausted, then alternatives will be found. I see the Vietnamese taking over a nuclear power plant abandoned by the U.S. military. Have they dismantled and destroyed it? No, they are using it. I see China exploding nuclear bombs, developing uranium reactors, and preparing a space program in order to colonize and exploit the planets the same as the Europeans colonized and exploited this hemisphere. It's the same old song, but maybe with a faster tempo this time.

The statement of the Soviet scientist is very interesting. Does he know what this alternative energy source will be? No, he simply has faith. Science will find a way. I hear revolutionary Marxists saying that the destruction of the environment, pollution, and radiation will all be controlled. And I see them act upon their words. Do they know how these things will be controlled? No, they simply have faith. Science will find a way. Industrialization is fine and necessary. How do they know this? Faith. Science will find a way. Faith of this sort has always been known in Europe as religion. Science has become the new European religion for both capitalists and Marxists; they are truly inseparable; they are part and parcel of the same culture. So, in both theory and practice, Marxism demands that non-European peoples give up their values, their traditions, their cultural existence altogether. We will all be industrialized science addicts in a Marxist society.

I do not believe that capitalism itself is really responsible for the situation in which American Indians have been declared a national sacrifice. No, it is the European tradition ; European culture itself is responsible. Marxism is just the latest continuation of this tradition, not a solution to it. To ally with Marxism is to ally with the very same forces that declare us an acceptable cost.

...Distilled to its basic terms, European faith-including the new faith in science-equals a belief that man is God. Europe has always sought a Messiah, whether that be the man Jesus Christ or the man Karl Marx or the man Albert Einstein. American Indians know this to be totally absurd. Humans are the weakest of all creatures, so weak that other creatures are willing to give up their flesh that we may live. Humans are able to survive only through the exercise of rationality since they lack the abilities of other creatures to gain food through the use of fang and claw.

But rationality is a curse since it can cause humans to forget the natural order of things in ways other creatures do not. A wolf never forgets his or her place in the natural order. American Indians can. Europeans almost always do. We pray our thanks to the deer, our relations, for allowing us their flesh to eat; Europeans simply take the flesh for granted and consider the deer inferior. After all, Europeans consider themselves godlike in their rationalism and science. God is the Supreme Being; all else must be inferior.

All European tradition, Marxism included, has conspired to defy the natural order of all things. Mother Earth has been abused, the powers have been abused, and this cannot go on forever. No theory can alter that simple fact. Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated. Things come full circle, back to where they started. That's revolution. And that's a prophecy of my people, of the Hopi people and of other correct peoples.

American Indians have been trying to explain this to Europeans for centuries. But, as I said earlier, Europeans have proven themselves unable to hear. The natural order will win out, and the offenders will die out, the way deer die when they offend the harmony by over-populating a given region. It's only a matter of time until what Europeans call "a major catastrophe of global proportions" will occur. It is the role of American Indian peoples, the role of all natural beings, to survive. A part of our survival is to resist. We resist not to overthrow a government or to take political power, but because it is natural to resist extermination, to survive. We don't want power over white institutions; we want white institutions to disappear. That's revolution.

American Indians are still in touch with these realities-the prophecies, the traditions of our ancestors. We learn from the elders, from nature, from the powers. And when the catastrophe is over, we American Indian peoples will still be here to inhabit the hemisphere. I don't care if it's only a handful living high in the Andes. American Indian people will survive; harmony will be reestablished. That's revolution.

At this point, perhaps I should be very clear about another matter, one which should already be clear as a result of what I've said. But confusion breeds easily these days, so I want to hammer home this point. When I use the term European, I'm not referring to a skin color or a particular genetic structure. What I'm referring to is a mind-set, a worldview that is a product of the development of European culture. People are not genetically encoded to hold this outlook; they are acculturated to hold it. The same is true for American Indians or for the members of any culture.

It is possible for an American Indian to share European values, a European worldview. We have a term for these people; we call them "apples"-red on the outside (genetics) and white on the inside (their values). Other groups have similar terms: Blacks have their "oreos"; Hispanos have "Coconuts" and so on. And, as I said before, there are exceptions to the white norm: people who are white on the outside, but not white inside. I'm not sure what term should be applied to them other than "human beings."

What I'm putting out here is not a racial proposition but a cultural proposition. Those who ultimately advocate and defend the realities of European culture and its industrialism are my enemies. Those who resist it, who struggle against it, are my allies, the allies of American Indian people. And I don't give a damn what their skin color happens to be. Caucasian is the white term for the white race: European is an outlook I oppose.

The Vietnamese Communists are not exactly what you might consider genetic Caucasians, but they are now functioning as mental Europeans. The same holds true for Chinese Communists, for Japanese capitalists or Bantu Catholics or Peter "MacDollar" down at the Navajo Reservation or Dickie Wilson up here at Pine Ridge. There is no racism involved in this, just an acknowledgment of the mind and spirit that make up culture.

In Marxist terms I suppose I'm a "cultural nationalist." I work first with my people, the traditional Lakota people, because we hold a common worldview and share an immediate struggle. Beyond this, I work with other traditional American Indian peoples, again because of a certain commonality in worldview and form of struggle. Beyond that, I work with anyone who has experienced the colonial oppression of Europe and who resists its cultural and industrial totality. Obviously, this includes genetic Caucasians who struggle to resist the dominant norms of European culture. The Irish and the Basques come immediately to mind, but there are many others.

...But there is a peculiar behavior among most Caucasians. As soon as I become critical of Europe and its impact on other cultures, they become defensive. They begin to defend themselves. But I'm not attacking them personally; I'm attacking Europe. In personalizing my observations on Europe they are personalizing European culture, identifying themselves with it. By defending themselves in this context, they are ultimately defending the death culture. This is a confusion which must be overcome, and it must be overcome in a hurry. None of us has energy to waste in such false struggles.

Caucasians have a more positive vision to offer humanity than European culture. I believe this. But in order to attain this vision it is necessary for Caucasians to step outside European culture-alongside the rest of humanity-to see Europe for what it is and what it does.

To cling to capitalism and Marxism and all other "isms" is simply to remain within European culture. There is no avoiding this basic fact. As a fact, this constitutes a choice. Understand that the choice is based on culture, not race. Understand that to choose European culture and industrialism is to choose to be my enemy. And understand that the choice is yours, not mine.

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Past Afrocentricity {footnotes}

2013-01-01T12:24:00.000-05:00

In Liberator 8.1, we published an article titled "Past Afrocentricity" by Lafayette Gaston. Regrettably, we did not have the space to publish the footnotes alongside the article in the magazine. Therefore, the footnotes to that article follow below.

[1] The 'dē•ŏp' or 'jē•ŏp' pronounciations are incorrect. Diop is the Francophone representation of a Wolof name, which in Wolof is spelled Jóob (Diouf & Yagello, 2004: 18), with 'b' being the proper ending (Diop, 2003: 249), as the Francophone spelling "Diop" is erroneously transcribed with a 'p' at the end.

Diop, Cheikh M’Backé. Cheikh Anta Diop: L’Homme et l’Oeuvre. Paris: Présence Africaine, 2003: 249.

Diouf, Jean Léopold & Marina Yaguello. J’Apprends le Wolof: Damay Jàng Wolof. Paris: Karthala, 2004: 18.

[2] Spady, James G. "The Changing Perception of C.A. Diop and His Work: The Preeminence of a Scientific Spirit." In I. Van Sertima (ed.), Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1992: 89-101.

Note: The interview in question was conducted by Harun Kofi Wangara (Harold G. Lawrence) and published as follows: "Interview with Cheikh Anta Diop." Black World, XXIII, no. 4 (February 1974): 53-61.

[3] Ehret, Christopher. "The African Sources of Egyptian Culture and Language." In Josep Cervelló (ed.), África Antigua: El Antiguo Egipto, una Civilizatión Africana. Actas de la IXme Semana de Estudios Africanos del Centre D’estudis Africans de Barcelona. Barcelona: Aula Aegyptiaca Fundación, 2001: 121-128.

Diop, 2003: 160-163.

[4] McCall, Daniel F. "Anteriorité des Civilisations Nègres: Mythe ou Realité Historique? by Cheikh Anta Diop." African Historical Studies, 1, No. 1(1968): 134-135.

Walker, J.D. "The Misrepresentation of Diop’s Views." Journal of Black Studies, 26, No. 1(September 1995): 77-85.

[5] Diop, Cheikh Anta. “Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop speaks at the Morehouse School of Medicine.” Atlanta, GA: Larry Williams, April 1985.

South Carolina Educational Television Network. "For the people presents an interview with Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop. Parts 1 and 2." Columbia, SC: South Carolina Educational Television, May 16, 1985.

[6] Diop, Cheikh Anta. "Vers Une Idéologie Politique Africaine." In Cheikh Anta Diop, Alterte sous les Tropiques. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1990: 45-65.

Diop, Cheikh Anta. Nations Nègres et Culture: De l’Antiquité Nègre Égyptienne aux Problèmes Cultures de l’Afrique Noire d’Aujourd’hui. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1954, 1967 & 1979: 401.

[7] Finch, Dr. Charles S. Personal Communication: August 7, 2008.

*Note: Diop’s numerous scientific achievements and political endeavors are not the subject of the present work. James G. Spady’s article (Van Sertima, 1992: 89-101) touches on his exploits. Also, in addition to the cited works below Cheikh M’Backé Diop’s work details both (2003: 31-34, 49-63, 74-83 and 110-124). For a very sound, though early, perspective on Diop’s ideological objectives, read Spady’s 1973 article.

Diop, Cheikh Anta. Le Laboratoire de Radiocarbone de l’IFAN. Catalogues et Documents, no. XXI. Dakar: Université de Dakar and L’Institut Fondamental de l’Afrique Noire, 1968.

Spady, James G. "The Cultural Unity of Cheikh Anta Diop." Black Images, I, Nos. 3-4 (1973): 14-22.

Diop, Cheikh Anta. Physique Nucléaire et Chronologie Absolute. Initiations et Études Africaines, XXXI. Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1974.

Rassemblement National Démocratique. Le Combat Politique de Cheikh Anta Diop: Du B.M.S. au R.N.D. Dakar: Imprimerie du Midi, 1999.

[8] It is often noted (Van Sertima, 1992: 7; in John Henrik Clark’s forward to the translation of Civilization or Barbarism, 1991: xiii) that Diop comes from a village called Diourbel; this is incorrect. Sénégal has 10 regions: Dakar, Thies, Louga, Saint Louis, Matam, Fatick, Koalack, Tambacounda, Ziguinchor and Kolda—the latter three make up what is known as the Casamance, the former Portuguese possession, for which a border as established between Guinea-Bissau and Sénégal in 1888. To be sure, Asante’s (2007: 1) remark that Catyu was “near Diorbel,” while correct, is somewhat misleading. Each region shares the name with its capital city. Hence, Caytu is both close to the city of Diourbel, and located in the region of Diourbel. Baol is the indigenous name for the region taken from the kingdom that existed there at the time for the first Portuguese and later French/English contacts with the area.

Clark, John Henrik. "Forward." In C.A. Diop, Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology. Translated from the French by Yaa-Lengi Meema Ngemi. Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991: xiii.

Van Sertima, 1992: 7.

Cheikh M’Backé Diop, 2003: 23.

Asante, Molefi Kete. Cheikh Anta Diop: An Intellectual Portrait. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 2007a: 1.

[9] The two best sources of information on Diop's early life are Mama Yatassaye Ndiade’s 2003 work entitled Cheikh Anta Diop: Le Dernier des Pharaons and Cheikh Anta Diop et l'Afrique dans l'Historie du Monde (1997) by Pathe Diagne.

Cheikh M’Backé Diop does not delve much into his father’s early years.

Diop, 2003: 27, 31.

Ndiade, Mama Yatassaye. Cheikh Anta Diop: Le Dernier des Pharaons. Dakar: Éditions Tokossel, 2003.

[10] Finch, Dr. Charles S. "Meeting with the Pharaoh: Conversations with Cheikh Anta Diop." In I. Van Sertima (ed.). Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1992: 28-34.

Diop, 2003: 28.

[11] Diop published two major works (1977 & 1988) on the relationship between Ancient Egyptian and his native language Wolof. He also devoted a significant portion (pgs. 287-335 of the 1979 edition of Nations Nègres et Culture) of his first major work (Nations Nègres et Culture was first published in 1954) to the subject and would go on to publish a Wolof dictionary of scientific terms and translate Einstein’s relativity theory into Wolof (first done in part in Nations Nègres et Culture, and then subsequently in 1975). In fact, Diop’s interest in language was apparent from an early age, voluntarily staying back in Quranic school an additional year at a long age. He later took up what was then craze in Baol known as Walafal, the writing of Wolof using Arabic script. This was a widespread practice throughout West Africa, and was done for other African languages in the region. (To be sure, Wolof is the word used for the language, while its speakers are referred to as Walaf). Also, during Diop’s teenage years he prepared a Wolof alphabet in addition to writing a history of Sénégal. Thus, the roots for his later intellectual achievements were clear at an early age (Ndiade, 2003: 37-54).
Diop, 1954, 1967 & 1979.

Diop, Cheikh Anta. "Comment Enraciner la Science en Afrique: Exemples Walaf (Sénégal)." Bulletin de l'Institut Fondamental de l’Afrique Noire, série B, XXXVII, n° 1(1975): 154-233

Diop, Cheikh Anta. Parenté Génétique de l’Égyptien Pharaonique et des Langues Négro-Africaines. Dakar: L’Institut Fondamental de l’Afrique Noire and Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1977.

Diop, Cheikh Anta. Nouvelles Recherches sur l’Égyptian et les Langues Négro-Africaines Modernes. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1988.

[12] Obenga, Théophile. Personal Communication. September 16/17, 2008.

[13] Spady, 1992: 89-101.

Diop, 2003: 31-38.

[14] The rest of the work is chapters XI-XIII of Diop’s 1967 work, Anteriorité.
Diop, Cheikh Anta. The African Origins of Civilization: Myth or Reality? New York: Hill, 1974: ix.

[15] Obenga, Théophile. Personal Communication. September 16/17, 2008.

[16] Asante, 2007: 89.

[17] Diop, 2003: 31-69.

[18] Diop, 2003: 90-91.

[19] Diop, Cheikh Anta. Apports de l’Afrique Noire à la Civilisation Universelle. Conference held in Niamey, Niger (1984).

Obenga, Dr. Théophile. Personal Communication. September 16/17, 2008.

[20] The Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script: Proceedings of the Symposium held in Cairo from 28 January to 3 February 1974. Paris: UNESCO, 1978.

Obenga, Théophile. Cheikh Anta Diop, Volney et Le Sphinx: Contributions de Cheikh Anta Diop à l’Histiographie Mondiale. Paris: Presénce Africaine, 1996: 225-233.

[21] Obenga’s paper was published in the proceedings (1978: 65-71), while Diop’s appeared in Volume II of the General History of Africa (1981).

Obenga, Théophile. “The Genetic Linguistic Relationship Between Egyptian (Ancient Egyptian and Coptic) and Modern Negro-African Languages.” In The Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script: Proceedings of the Symposium held in Cairo from 28 January to 3 February 1974. Paris: UNESCO, 1978: 65-71.

Mokhtar, G. (ed.). General History of Africa. Volume II (unabridged). Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1981: 27-82.

[22] Much of the methodology in question is laid in the African Origin of Civilization (1974).
Diop, Cheikh Anta. "Introduction à l'Étude des Migrations en Afrique Centrale et Occidentale. Identification du Berceau Nilotique du Peuple Sénégalais." Bulletin de l'Institut Fondamental de l’Afrique Noire, série B, XXXV, n° 4 (1973): 769-792.

"Symposium on the Peopling of Ancient Egypt: A Report on the Discussions." The Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script: Proceedings of the Symposium held in Cairo from 28 January to 3 February 1974. Paris: UNESCO, 1978: 73-103.

[23] Obenga, 1996: 226.

Obenga, Dr. Théophile. Personal Communication. September 16/17, 2008.

[24] See any comprehensive bibliography on Diop. The best two are by Cheikh M’Backé Diop (2003) and Théophile Obenga (1996).

[25] Diop was not able to see Nouvelles Recherches (1988) through to completion. He passed in 1986 and his eldest son, Cheikh M’Backé, made the book, the nearly finished manuscript of which Diop had been working on prior to making his transition, a reality. The work, however, is missing significant sections (1988: 9-13). It is thus with his caveat that we call Civilization or Barbarism Diop’s "final" work.

Finch, 1992: 28-34.

Diop, 1988: 9-13.

25a Note: Van Sertima’s Great African Thinkers (1992) is the best source of information about Diop’s visit.

[26] Spady, 1992: 89-101.

[27] Finch first left to Dakar in 1982, but did not meet Diop on this first visit. Finch was also a founding member of the Bennu Study Group, which was, along with Van Sertima, responsible for the push to get Diop to the states.

[28] According to those involved in getting Diop to the states (Finch, 1992 & 2008 and Van Sertima, 1992), Diop’s plane made it out 1,500 miles over the ocean before developing engine trouble, causing it to turn around. The plane caught fire in mid-air, which created such heat that it jammed the plane’s doors shut for 30 minutes, and came down with such force that the tires exploded. Upon landing the passengers were then rushed off the plane. This at around 4 in the morning. After the ordeal Diop, who had been involved in numerous parties that had previously placed him in opposition to Senghor and whose political activities landed him in jail on four separate occasions, was instructed by his party members not to get back on the plane until they knew for sure what had happened. Diop had wanted his ticket endorsed to board after retiring to a hotel for the evening waiting for word about repairs to the plane and it was only when this request was denied and Diop returned again to his hotel that is comrades were able to persuade him to stay home (Van Sertima, 1992). As a result, the second planning for Diop’s arrival was done in "semi" secrecy (Finch, 2008). Corresponding took place between Diop, Van Sertima and Finch, while Dr. Lawrence Edward Carter coordinated Diop’s Atlanta activities. Then Mayor Atlanta Andrew Young gave Diop 24-hour police escort and Diop was arranged to fly Delta directly from Paris to Atlanta (Finch 2008). This since flying to Paris was nothing unusual at that time for intellectuals in Francophone countries (Van Sertima, 198-). Again, Great African Thinkers (1992) provides the best available summary of Diop’s Atlanta trip.

Van Sertima, Ivan. Great African Thinkers. Cassette Tape. Highland Park, NJ: Audio Division, Journal of African Civilizations, 198-.

Van Sertima, 1992: 301-302.

Finch, Dr. Charles S. Personal Communication: August 7, 2008.

[29] Great African Thinkers, 1992: 309-320.

Finch, Dr. Charles S. Personal Communication: August 7, 2008.

[30] Special thanks here to Dean/Dr. Lawrence Edward Carter of Morehouse College, who, despite his busy schedule, took time to furnish me with a copy of Diop’s Atlanta itinerary.
Middleton’s interview with Diop, which aired in May, was conducted April 5.

Arranged by Morehouse College. Official Schedule for Professor Cheikh Anta Diop. University of Dakar. Dakar, Senegal. SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS. 1985.

South Carolina Educational Television Network. “For the people presents an interview with Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop. Parts 1 and 2.” Columbia, SC: South Carolina Educational Television, May 16, 1985.

Great African Thinkers, 1992: 284-288.

[31] Finch, Dr. Charles S. Personal Communication: August 7, 2008.

[32] Diop, 2003: 118-120.

[33] This is Dr. Cervello Autuori’s appellation of African scholars who advocate Diop’s approach.
de Brito, Mark. "Egyptology between Africa and Europe." Cahiers Caribéens d’Égyptologie, Nos. 3-4 (Février/Mars 2002): 263-271.

[34] Diop, 2003: 89.

[35] Gray, Christopher. Conceptions of History in the Works of Cheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga. London: Karnak House, 1989: 12-14.

Obenga, Théophile. Personal Communication. September 16/17, 2008.

[36] Obenga, Théophile. Origine Commune de l’Égyptien Ancien, du Copte et des Langues Negro-Africaines Modernes: Introduction à la Linguistic Histoirique Africaine. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993.

[37] Lam, Aboubacry Mousa. De l'Origine Égyptienne des Peuls. Paris: Présence Africaine/Khepera, 1993.

[38] For example: Sall, Babacar. "Egypte et Koush (aux Origines de l’Hostilité)." Revue Senegalaise d’Histoire, No. 4-5(1999-2000): 27-39.

Sall, Babacar. "L’Apport de l’Éthiopie a l’Égypte et a la Libye." Annales de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Dakar, No. 24(1994): 1-16.

Sall, Babacar. "Herkouf et les Pays de Yam." Ankh, No. 4/5(`995-1996): 57-71.

[39] For example: Sall, Babacar. "Les Grecs et l’Égypte (Géographie et Idéologie)." Annales de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Dakar, No. 14(1984): 261-273.

Sall, Babacar. "Des Influences Éthiopiennes sur l’Europe Méridionale." Ankh, No. 1(1992): 41-49.

[40] Sall, Babacar. Racines Éthiopiennes de l'Égypte Ancienne. Khepera/L’Harmattan, 1999.

[41] See various articles published in Ankh.

[42] Lam, Aboubacry Moussa. Personal Communication. May 25, 2007.

Obenga, Théophile. Personal Communication. September 16/17, 2008

[43] Coovi-Gomez, Jean Charles. "Étude Comparée de l’Écriture Sacrée du Danxomé et des Hiéroglyphes de l’Ancienne Égypte." Ankh, No. 1(1992): 59-78.

[44] Note: There are likely other schools around the continent. Those listed are the ones the author is familiar with.

Lam, Aboubacary Moussa. Personal Communication. 2007.

[45] Lam, Aboubacry Moussa. Personal Communicaiton. May 25, 2007.

[46] Sy, Souleymane Diam. "Université Cheikh Anta Diop: Bientôt un Institut d’Égyptologie." Le Soleil, May 13, 2008. Retrieved June 27, 2008 from http://fr.allafrica.com.stories/200805130918.html.

[47] At present UCAD offers a PhD. in Egyptology through the History Department, but all essential research is done abroad due to resource issues.

Sall, Babacar. Personal Communication (via email). July 18, 2008.

[48] Moore, Shawna. "Interview with Cheikh Anta Diop." In Van Sertima, 1992: 238-248.

[49] Diop, 2003: 69-70 & 155-164.

[50] Finch "Further Conversations with the Pharaoh." In Van Sertima, 1992: 225-237.

[51] Diop, 1990: 141.

We must correct our characterization of Diagne as Diop’s “political opponent.” Dr. Diagne was formally as member of the Parti Africain pour l’Indépendance (PAI) during the 1960s until undertaking independent political activity while Diop was in the Bloc des Masses Sénégalaises (BMS). However, in 1976, with the founding of the RND, Diagne joined along with Diop when Babacar Niang, Amadou Tidiane Baidy Ly, Moustapha Diallo and Seyni Niang asked Diop to be the head of the party. Diagne also stayed with Diop when the RND split after the 1983 elections. Diagne has said “I have not opposition to Cheikh Anta, neither intellectually, nor in the domain of politics” (ni sur la plaine intelletuelle, ni sur la plaine politique). In fact, Diop and Diagne had known each other since 1959/1960 and Diagne had supported Diop in articles written in Présence Africaine prior to that time, going on to pursue questions inspired in part by Diop’s work in his own research.

(Rene Lake, Dame Babou and Pathé Diagne, personal communication, 2009)

[52] No author. "Les 50 Ans de Nations Nègres et Culture de Cheikh Anta Diop, les 30 Ans du Colloque d’Égyptologie du Caire." Ankh, No. 12/13(2003-2004): 10-11.

Finch, Charles S. Personal Communication. August 20, 2008.

[53] Diop, 2003: 155-164.

Finch, Dr. Charles S. Personal Communication. August 7, 2008.

[54] Obenga, 1973.

Dieng, Aly Amady. "Hommage à Cheikh Anta Diop, 1923-1986: Un Bilan Critique de l'Oeuvre de Cheikh Anta Diop." Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, 23, No. 1(1989): 151-157.

Lam, 1993.

Obenga, 1996: 88.

[55] Van Sertima, 1992.

[56] Obenga, Théophile. Personal Communication. September 16/17, 2008.

[57] Diop, 1984: 42nd minute.

[58] Asante, Molefi Kete. Afrocentricity. Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 1988: 6.

[59] Asante, 1987: 4.

[60] Note Appiah’s demonstration in the irony of Kiswahili as a choice. Appiah, 1997: 728-731.

[61] Asante, 1988: 21-22.

[62] Asante, 1988: 109-120.

[63] Asante, 1988: 49-58.

[64] Asante, Molefi Kete. The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987: vii.

[65] Asante, 1988: ix-x.

[66] Asante, 2007: 81-114.

[67] Jewsiewicki, Bogumil. "Conceptions of History in the Works of Cheikh Anta Diop and Théophile Obenga." The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 28, No. 1(1995): 214-215.

Obenga, Théophile. La Sens de la Lutte contre l’Africanisme Eurocentriste. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001: 46.

[68] Lefkowitz, Mary. "Not Out of Africa: The Origins of Greece and the Illusions of Afrocentrists." New Republic(Febrary 1992): 29-36.

[69] Lefkowitz, Mary. Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History. New York: BasicBooks, 1996.

[70] Asante, Molefi Kete. "On the Wings of Nonsense: The Attack on Afrocentricity." Black Books Bulletin, 16, nos. 1-2(1993-1994): 37-40.

[71] Asante, Molefi Kete. "The Many Fallacies of Mary Lefkowitz: Attacks on Afrocentrism are as Weak as They are False." Emerge(July 1996): 66-70.

[72] Asante, Molefi Kete. The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism: An Afrocentric Response to Critics. Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 1999.

[73] Asante, 1996: 66-70.

Asante, 1999.

[74] Asante, 1993-1994: 37-40.

[75] Asante, 1993-1994: 37-40.

[76] According to Lefkowitz, she had read Asante’s 1990 work Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge prior to writing the New Republic article.

Lefkowitz, Mary. Personal Communication. August 21, 2008.

[77] See the paragraph on the top-right in Asante (1993-1994): 38.

[78] Asante, 1999.

[79] Asante, 1993-1994: 37-40.

[80] Asante, Molefi Kete. Personal Communication. August 10, 2008.

[81] Asante, 1996: 66-70.

[82] King, Leophus S. Philomythy: Afrocentric Analysis of the Plausible Kemetic Influences on and Resonated Kemetic Retentions in Greek Creation Stories. Doctoral Dissertation. Temple University (2003).

[83] For another illustration of this, see the following, which can be found on the internet and contains only lay references to hieroglyphic writings of the words Kmt and Dšrt, along with few other substantive arguments: Asante, Molefi Kete. "Contesting African History: Assumptions and Claims of Eurocentric Historians,"available online at http://www.asante.net/articles/contesting-Kemet.html.

[84] Wangara, 1973: 53-61.

[85] Arranged by Morehouse College. Official Schedule for Professor Cheikh Anta Diop. University of Dakar. Dakar, Senegal. SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS. 1985.

Van Sertima, 1992: 238-248.

[86] Asante, 1987: 4.

Asante, Molefi Kete. "The Afrocentric Idea in Education." Journal of Negro Education, 60, no. 2 (1991): 170-180.

Asante, 1993-1994: 37-40.

Asante, 1996: 66-70.

Asante, Molefi Kete. "Analytic Afrocentricity. Afrocentricity and the Eurocentric Hegemony of Knowledge: Contradictions of Place." Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 22(2003): 61-70.

[87] Asante, 1996: 66-70.

[88] It is also interesting to note this in the face of numerous African oral traditions linking themselves to the homeland of Islam. As an example, take the Songhai legend about Zuwā Yāsiboy (Hunwick, 2003: 5-8). Compare this to Asante’s assertion that Afrocentrists see through attempts to rewrite Greek history rather than taking as truth what the Greeks wrote themselves (1996: 66-70), particularly in light of Lam’s (1997: 156-159) hypothesis with regards to Songhai origins.

Asante, Karimu & Molefi Asante. "Great Zimbabwe: An Ancient African City." Journal of African Civilizations. Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern, 5, Nos. 1-2(April & November 1983): 84-91.

Asante, 1996: 66-70.

Obenga, 1996: 17-44.

Lam, Aboubacry Moussa. Les Chemins du Nil: Les Relations entre l’Égypte Ancienne et l’Afrique Noire. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1997: 156-159.

Hunwick, John. Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Sa’Di’s Ta’Rikh Al-Sudan Down to 1613 and Other Contemporary Documents. Boston: Brill, 2003: 5-8.

[89] Asante, 1996: 66-70.

[90] Hunwick, 2003: 5-8.

[91] Obenga, 1996: 17-44.

[92] Lam, 1993.

Lam, 1997: 156-159.

[93] Asante, Molefi Kete. The History of Africa: The Quest for Eternal Harmony. New York: Routledge, 2007b.

[94] Currey, James. General History of Africa, Volume IV. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1997: 60

[95] Obenga, Théophile. "Les Derniers Remparts de l’Africanisme." Présence Africaine, 157(1988): 47-65.

[96] Diop, 1954: 198-203, 356-357

[97] Diop, Cheikh Anta. "Histoire Primitive de l’Humanité: Évolution du Monde Noir." Bulletin de l’Institut Fondamental de l’Afrique Noire, XXIV, séries B, Nos. 3-4(1962): 449-574.

[98] Diop, 1991.

[99] Obenga, 2001: 46-48 & 74.

[100] Asante, 1996: 66-70.

[101] Asante. 2007a: xi-xii, 34-36 & 90-114.

[102] McCall, 1968: 134-135.

[103] Spady, 1992: 89-101.

[104] Asante, 1993-1994: 37-40.

[105] Compare, for example, the admission Lefkowitz makes on page 30 (columns 2 and 3) of the (1992) New Republic article to Asante’s assertions made on page 38 (1993-1994; 2nd column), in addition to his page 40 remark that “Whites do not have the monopoly on intelligence.”

[106] Obenga, 2001: 23-41.

[107] Asante, 1987.

[108] Asante, 1988: 70.

[109] To be clear, Carr’s use of the term “orientation” seems to expand on ya Azibo’s (1992) definition, which is constricted to group identification.

Carr, Greg Kimathi. African Philosophy of History in the Contemporary Era: Its Antecedents and Methodological Implications for the African Contribution to World History. Doctoral Dissertation. Temple University (April 10, 1998): 125-127.

[110] Asante, 1988: 70.

[111] Asante, 1988: 21.

[112] Asante, 1987: 71.

[113] Carr, 1998: 118.

[114] Carr, 1998: 114.

[115] Williams, Chancellor. The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. Chicago: Third World Press, 1979.

[116] Rodney, Walter. A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970: vii-ix.

[117] Mazama, Ama. "The Afrocentric Paradigm." In Ama Mazama (ed.) The Afrocentric Paradigm. Trenton : Africa World Press, 2002: 3-34.

[118] Not all of Stewart’s critiques of Asante stick though. For instance, Asante has specifically stated that he does not subscribe to the theory about the particularity of melanin (Asante, 2007: 101-102).

Stewart, James B. "Reaching for Higher Ground: Toward an Understanding of Black/Africana Studies." In John Conyers (ed.), Africana Studies: A Disciplinary Quest for both Method and Theory. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1997: 108-129.

Asante, 2007a: 101-102.

[119] ya Azibo, Daudi Ajani. "Articulating the Distinction Between Black Studies and the Study of Blacks: The Fundamental Role of Culture and African-Centered Worldview." The Afrocentric Scholar, 1, No. 1 (May 1992): 64-97.

[120] Asante, 1999: 3.

[121] Carr, 1998: 112-149.

Beatty, Mario. Personal Communication. August 15, 2008.

[122] Obenga, 2001: 75.

[123] Diop, Cheikh Anta. Black Africa: The Cultural and Economic Basis for a Federated State. Trenton, NJ: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987: 117-124.

[124] Asante, Molefi Kete. "Afrocentricity and Negritude: Two African Perspectives." The Palestine Review (Summer 1980): 5-6.

Asante, 1988: 70.

[125] Carr, 1998: 118.

[126] Asante, Molefi Kete. Kemet, Afrocentrcity and Knowledge. Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 1990: 12.

[127] Diop, 2003: 31-39.

[128] Carr, 1998: 120.

[129] Obenga, 2001: 16 & 42-43.

Obenga, Théophile. Personal Communication. September 16/17, 2008.

[130] Diop, "Vers une Idéologie." In Diop, 1990: 45-65.

[131] Carr, 1998: 131-132.

[132] Diop, 1984.

[133] Asante, Molefi Kete and Abu S. Barry. African Intellectual Heritage: A Book of Sources. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.

[134] Asante, Molefi Kete. The Egyptian Philosophers: Ancient African Voices from Imhotep to Akhenaten. Chicago: Afircan American Images, 2000.

[135] Williams, Bruce Beyers. "A Prospectus for Exploring the Historical Essence of Ancient Nubia," in W. V. Davies (ed.), Egypt and Africa. London: British Museum Publications in association with the Egypt Exploration Society, 1991: 74-91. Also published in Ankh, No. 6/7(1997-1998): 91-120.

Garcea, E.E.A. Cultural Dynamics in the Saharo-Sudanese Prehistory. Rome: Gruppo Editoriale Internazionale, 1993: 148-150.

Williams, Bruce B. “New Light on Relations Between Early Egypt and Sudan.” Cahiers Caribéens d’Egyptologie, No. 1(February/March 2000): 5-19.

Gatto, Maria Carmela. "The Early A-Group in Lower Nubia, Upper Egypt and the Surrounding Deserts." in Lech Krzyżaniak (ed.), Archaeology of Early Northeastern Africa. Poznań: Poznań Archaeological Museum, 2006: 223-234.

[136] Hendrickx, Stan. "La Chronologie de la Préhistoire Tardive et des Débuts de l’Histoire de l’Egypte." Archéo-Nil, No. 9(1999): 13-81.

[137] Also, black-topped red ware is not unique to the Naqada phases, and shows up, though in small quantities during the preceding Badarian (Brunton & Caton-Thompson, 1928: 20-23).

Brunton, G. and G. Caton-Thompson. The Badarian Civilisation. London: British School of Archaeology in Egypt, 1928: 20-23.

Midant-Reynes, Beatrix. The Prehistory of Egypt: From the First Egyptians to the First Pharaohs. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001: 69-99.

Kuper, Rudolph, et al. "Climate-Controlled Holocene Occupation the Sahara: Mother of African’s Evolution." Science, 313(August 11, 2006): 803-807.

[138] Asante, 2007b: 21-23.

[139] Edwards, David N. The Nubian Past: An Archaeology of the Sudan. New York: Routledge, 2004: 75-111.

[140] Asante, 2007b: 48-59.

[141] Asante, 2007b: 63-65.

[142] The Index, known as KRI, is a complete compilation of all hieroglyphic inscriptions recorded during the Ramesside Period and contains a annotated translations in a separate volume.

[143] Asante, 2007b: 118-124.

[144] Asante, 2007b: 137-142.

[145] Es-Sadi, Abderrahman. Tarikh es-Soudan. Traduit de l’Arabe par O. Houdas. Paris: Librairie d’Amerique et d’Orient, 1964.

[146] Hunwick, 2003.

[147] Diop, 1987: 48-158.

[148] Asante, 2007a: 81-114.

[149] Smith, Arthur Lee, Jr. Samuel Adams’ Agitational Rhetoric of Revolution. Doctoral Dissertation. University of California (1968).

[150] Asante, 1987: 11-16.

[151] Asante, Molefi Kete. African and African American Communication Continuities. Buffalo: Council of International Studies, 1975.

Also see www.asante.net for a bibliography.

King, 2003.

[152] Asante, 1987: 4.

Asante, 1988: 38-43.

Asante, 1990: 12-14.

[153] Trigger, Bruce. "Meroitic and Eastern Sudan: A Linguistic Relationship?" Kush, XII(1964): 188-194.

Leclant, Jean. "The Present Position in the Deciphering of Meroitic Script." In The Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script: Proceedings of the Symposium held in Cairo from 28 January to 3 February 1974. Paris: UNESCO, 1978.

[154] Asante, 1987: 4.

Asante, 1988: 38-43.

Asante, 1990: 12-14.

[155] Gomez, 1996: 114-134 & 150.

[156] Diop, "Vers une Idéologie." In Diop, 1990: 45-65.

[157] Obenga, 1988: 47-65.

Obenga. Personal Communication. September 16/17, 2008.

[158] Diop, 2003: 31-38.

[159] Diop, 1984.

[160] Diop, Cheikh Anta. "Une Continent à la Recherche de son Histoire." In Diop, Alerte sous les Tropiques. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1990: 115-122.

[161] Obenga, 1996: 71-93 & 107-122

[162] Obenga, 2001: 46.

Beatty, Mario. Personal Communication. October 19, 2008.

[163] Diop, 1974: ix.

[164] Diop, 2003: 31-33.

[165] Diop, 1973: 769-792.

[166] Lam, Aboubacry Moussa. "Au-dèla de l’Incertitude: Les Armes pour des Conclusions Scientifquement Établies dans le Domaine des Rapprochements entre l’Egypte Ancienne et l’Afrique Noire." In Lam, Le Sahara ou La Vallée du Nil? Aperçu sur la Problématique bu Berceau de l’Unité Culturelle de l’Afrique Noire. Dakar: IFAN, 1994:1-16.

Lam. "L’Égyptien et la Clarification de l’Origine des Populations Sénégambiennes." In Lam, 1994: 17-32.

Lam, 1997.

Lam, "Les Relations entre l’Égypte Ancienne et le Reste de l’Afrique ala Lumière des Données de la Civilisation Matérielle et des Traditions Orales." In Lam, La Vallée du Nil Berceau de l’Unité Culturelle de l’Afrique Noire. Dakar: Presses Universitaires de Dakar, 2006: 41-66.
Lam. "Sources Iconographiques en Égyptologie: Importances et Usages." In Lam, 2006: 89-102.

[167] Obenga, 1993 & 2001.

[168] Diop, 1984.

[169] Diop, 2003: 175-225.

[170] Obenga, 1996: 235-304.

[171] See various of Diop’s lecture/sit-ins at Morehouse, particularly those given at Morehouse School of Medicine (4/8/1985) and in MLK, Jr. International Chapel (4/9?/1985).

Diop, 1991: 61-65.

[172] Hommage du Cameroun au Professeur Cheikh Anta Diop. Dakar: Éditions Panafrika, 2006.

[173] Garcea, 1993: 148-150.

Garcea, E.A.A. "From Khartoum to the Saharan Neolithic: Ceramics in Comparison." in Actes de la VIIIe Conférence Internationale d’Études Nubiennes. Lille, 11-17 Septembre 1994. Villeneuve-d'Ascq: Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille III, 1997: 91-104.

Kuper, 2006: 803-807.

[174] Gambier, Dominique. "Le Peuplement de la Vallée du Nil au Paleolithique Supérieur." Archéo-Nil, No.2(October 1992): 71-78.

Midant-Reynes, 2001.

[175] Brunton & Caton-Thompson, 1928: 20 & fig.8.

Arkell, A.J. Shaheinab: An Account of the Excavation of a Neolithic Occupation Site Carried out for the Sudan Antiquities Service in 1949-50. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953: __.

Nordström, Hans-Åke. Neolithic and A-Group Sites, Volume 3. Stockholm: Scandinavian University Books, 1972: 14-15 & 28-30

Williams, Bruce B. The University of Chicago Oriental Institute Nubia Expedition, Part 1. Chicago: Oriental Institute of Chicago, 1986: 13, 30 & 106.

Gatto, Maria Carmela. "Ceramic Traditions and Cultural Territories: The Nubian A-Group in Prehistory." Sudan & Nubia, 6(2002): 8-19.

[176] Petrie, W.M.F. Diospolis Parva. London: Special Extra Publication of the Egypt Exploration Fund, 1901.

Reisner, George A. Archaeological Survey of Nubia. Report for 1907-8, Volumes I & II. Cairo: Government Press, 1910.

Firth, C.M. Archaeological Survey of Nubia. Report for 1908-1909, Volumes I & II. Cairo: Government Press, 1912: 9-11.

Junker, Hermann. Bericht über die Grabungen auf def Friedhofen von El-Kubanieh Süd, Winter 1910-11. Vienna: Alfred Holder, 1919: 53-43.

Brunton & Caton-Thompson, 1928: 20-25.

Arkell, A.J. Early Khartoum: an Account of the Excavation of an Early Occupations Site Carried out by the Sudan Government Antiquities Service in 1944-5. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949: 85.

Arkell, 1953: 75, 84-84 & pl. 34.

Chilodnick, M. "Ceramics from the Neolithic Cemetery at Kadero." Archéologie du Nil Moyen, 2(1987): 141-148.

Wendorf, Fred. "Nabta Playa and Its Role in Northeastern African Prehistory." Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 17 (1998): 97-123.

Fattovich, Rodolfo. "The Gash Group of the Eastern Sudan: An Outline." Krzyżaniak, L., et al. (eds.). in Environmental Change and Human culture in the Nile Basin and Northern African until the Second Millennium B.C. Poznán: Poznán Archaeological Museum, 1993: 439-448.

Reinold, Jacques. "Kadruka and the Neolithic in the Northern Dongola Reach." Arkamani: Sudan Electronic Journal of Archaeology and Anthropology(August 2002). Retrieved March 15, 2008 from: http://www.arkamani.org/arkamani-library/neolithic/jak1.htm.

Gatto, Maria Carmela. "Prehistoric Nubian Ceramic Tradition: Origin, Developments and Spreading Trajectories." Caneva, Isbella & Alassandro Roccati (eds.). in Acta Nubica. Proceedings of the X International Conference of Nubian Studies. Rome 9-14, September 2002. Rome: Institutu Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 2006: 103-106.

[177] Williams, Bruce B. "New Light on Relations Between Early Egypt and Sudan." Cahiers Caribéens d’Egyptologie, no. 1, Février/Mars 2000: 5-19.

Gatto, 2002: 8-19.

[178] Reisner, 1910.

Firth, 1912.

Junker, 1919.

Arkell, 1953: 49-50.

Geus, Francis. "El-Kadada, un civilisation du 4eme millénaire sur les rives du Nil soudanais." Archéologia, 170 (1982): 24-33.

Reinold, Jacques. "Les Fouilles Pre- et Proto-Historiques de la Section Française de la Direction des Antiquités du Soudan: Les Campagnes 1984-85 et 1985-86." Archéologie du Nil Moyen, 2 (1987): 17-60.

Krzyżaniak, Lech. "Kadero: Preliminary Report, 1993." Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean, V (1994): 111-114.

[179] For a summary see Williams, 1991: 74-91.
Wengrow, David. The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East Africa, 10,000 to 2650 B.C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006: 41-62.

[180] Sanders, Edith. "The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origin and Functions in Timer Perspective." Journal of African History, 10, No. 4(1969): 521-532.

[181] Trigger, Bruce. "Nubian, Negro, Black or Nilotic?" in S. Hochfield & E. Riefstahl (eds.), Africa in Antiquity, Volume I: The Arts of Ancient Nubia and the Sudan. Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Museum, 1978: 27-35.

[182] Obenga, 1993.

[183] Asante, 1988: 70.

[184] Gomez, 1996.

[185] Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom. Third Edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.

[186] Asante, 1988: 79 & 82-84.

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On the misrealization of the black presidency / "After a black president proves to be just as ordinary ..."

2013-01-01T12:01:00.018-05:00

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

The election of the first black president can really only be truly appreciated by those over 40. It marks a kind of conclusion to the Baby Boomer narrative: begin with Jim Crow, fight against it, conclude with a rearranged political understanding and crown the achievement with a black president. A black president seemed impossible to their generation; it seemed to be an inevitability to our own. Having missed the release of the hounds and the blasting of fire hoses, having witnessed police brutality and rioting as anomalies rather than everyday occurrences, our generation is far removed from the true impact of the last election. We merely aped the elders' enthusiasm because our own generation has yet to bring about its own truly definitive and unifying cultural event(s).

Because today's nigga has yet to articulate any real qualms with the political order he cannot see the election of Obama as anything other than run of the mill. If the elder generation of niggas seek larger concessions from the President on behalf of the nigga community it is only a result of their "conclusion" not tying all of their loose ends. We see a similar behavior when a puppy, having eaten its large heaping of food, still continues to lick the empty bowl in hopes that some small morsel will be found. He would do better to hunt for another meal than go on scraping his bowl.

The current nigga generation has not yet defined their "loose ends" or even their salient issues in the way previous niggas advocated for desegregation and equal opportunity. Those policies now paint the reality of young niggas.

What is of supreme interest for our generation is the fact that the seemingly revolutionary election of a black president, after all the dust has settled, has proven to illicit more of the same disparaging yawns and anxieties that niggas once reserved for ambivalent or hostile white presidents. Compounding that realization is another ominous question: After a black president proves to be just as ordinary as all the others what sort of president can we ever place our "hope" in again?

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Mumia on Kanye: "Most brilliant"

2013-01-01T12:01:00.010-05:00

Mumia Abu-Jamal addresses the past "year of Kanye" in context {see: Kanye: "One w/ energy of my dreams"}. The concept of Mumia and Kanye in conversation is itself fascinating. Imagine a live exchange (if Jay-Z and Cornel West can sit down, why not?).

Here, Mumia comes to the defense of West from behind enemy lines, almost saying for him now what Kanye might say one day for himself when he's older and wiser -- Mumia has nothing to lose. For now, Mumia says Kanye speaks directly through his art as one of the "most brilliant musical artists of his generation." As a black son, I love when our fathers speak to us directly. This affirmation across such a perceived large internal cultural divide is the village in the space of action, the work of unity. Someone make sure Kanye hears this -- and the Mumia lovers and Kanye lovers alike. We'll meet you at that intersection.

{*}

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