Why Am I Not Surprised?

On Justice

2012-01-25T05:00:00.008-06:00

"When justice is present, tranquility transcends a land much like the calm, flowing waters of the Niagara. When justice is absent, there is outright unrest; equilibrium in society is disturbed, and progress is paralyzed. Absent justice can be felt as impactfully as the waters gushing from the hoses of police spraying civil rights marchers. It stings. While these raging waters did not kill the civil rights workers, it forcefully halted their functions for the time. Absent justice has the same effect on society. Justice that is selectively present or disparately applied is no less deleterious. Disparate justice leaves a sect of society disconnected and breeds a spirit of divisiveness. Much like a person standing knee-deep in the murky, debris-filled swamp waters of Louisiana, those on the receiving end of disparate justice see what is across from them and know it is within close reach, but experience great frustration knowing they can only get to it if they fight great resistance."
~ Angela A. Allen-Bell, from 'Bridge Over Troubled Waters and Passageway on a Journey to Justice: National Lessons Learned About Justice From Louisiana's Response to Hurricane Katrina' in the California Western Law Review, Spring 2010

Etta James: At Last

2012-01-24T08:08:00.001-06:00

At 8:30 a.m. on New Year's Day, the Boxer and I went to a Waffle House on the beach in Biloxi, Mississippi, to have breakfast. We had danced the new year in the night before at our first new year's eve celebration together. And we were headed that morning to hear a message of hope and inspiration delivered by someone like us who has beaten all the odds and is still standing.

After we ordered our eggs, I went over to the jukebox, as I always do, to play a series of my Old School favorites. Putting in my dollar for six plays, I punched in the numbers and the first one I played -- of course -- was "At Last" by Etta James. As the first few notes rose and moved through the restaurant, I walked back over to the table where I looked down at the Boxer and said softly, "May I have this dance?"

Without a moment's hesitation, he rose, took me in his arms, and we danced in the Waffle House in the broad daylight of New Year's morning, ignoring the cloud of witnesses as if we were the world entire.

When the song ended and we sat down to eat, the restaurant roused itself as if it had been on pause for three minutes. And life went on. For everyone but Etta.

Thank you, my sister. Rest in peace.

OMG! Red Tails!!

2012-01-22T17:35:00.007-06:00

I've seen "Red Tails" now and the Boxer and I give it an enthusiastic four thumbs up. We all watched "Roots" in 1977 and were suitably impressed by the fact that someone would be allowed to portray the nightmare of Black oppression during slavery. Then, in 1985, we all watched "The Color Purple" and were suitably impressed that a movie about Black people surviving their pain could make it to the big time. Now, in "Red Tails," we finally have the opportunity to watch Black people outshine -- and even save -- White people just because they were better at flying and fighting than anybody else doing it at the time. It's a matter of public record, y'all, but who expected to see it done like this?

Laurence Fishburne starred in a previous film about the Tuskegee Airmen, but it was almost entirely about the struggle of the group to leave the states for Europe. And in fact, that might never have happened had Eleanor Roosevelt (who was the First Lady at the time) not created a huge photo op when she demanded to go for a plane ride with one of the Airmen.

Don't let the bi-racial relationship throw you either. From what I've heard, many American soldiers (let alone flyboys, the cream of the crop) fell for (and were welcomed in that) by beautiful young European women in World War II. And race, if you'll recall, was not the issue for the Europeans that it was in the U.S. at that time. Not to mention the fact that these young Black officers were liberating heroes to the families they came into contact with.

In any case, I loved the film. It was refreshing to watch history portrayed as it probably was, for a change, even if the writers of "Red Tails" made up some stuff for the sake of the story line. I mean, when was the last time you saw a high budget action thriller where the White faces went past so fast you hardly noticed 'em and twenty minutes at a whack would go by without any White faces at all? This is a well presented story of the commitment of a group of young warriors who could have been any extraordinary young men, but were, in fact, Black.

You'll want to see this on the big screen. So do it. Sooner than later. You'll be glad you did.

The Real Tuskegee Airmen, 1945

The Tuskegee Airmen in the movie

Come on. You KNOW you wanna see it. ;^)

"Red Tails"

2012-01-20T05:00:00.004-06:00

"Red Tails," the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, arguably one of the most heroic tales of all time and certainly one of the most inspiring chapters in the Black struggle for respect in the United States, opens today at theaters across the country. One would think that such a film would be a slam dunk for attention, recognition and support. After all, it was produced by George Lucas of Star Wars fame (and who better to offer us heart-stopping aerial dog fights?). It was directed by Anthony Hemingway who was part of the directorial team for the award-winning and highly touted television series, "The Wire." And it stars most of the finest young Black male actors in or even near Hollywood of late (including Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding, Jr.).

Cast & Director of Red Tails with former Tuskegee Airman Roscoe Brown

But it turns out that's a problem. It features so many fine Black actors, there just weren't any major roles left for White folks at all. Gracious. In fact, the lack of White actors meant that nobody would step up to help Lucas fund it (so it took him twenty years to get it done). Once produced, nobody wanted to distribute it, claiming they didn't know how to go about marketing a movie without appeal to White audiences (and why would White people want to watch a bunch of African-Americans saving White bomber pilots?).

So the deal is this: if "Red Tails" doesn't make a boatload of money, George Lucas takes a financial beating for risking his reputation to make such a film, Black directors like Hemingway will continue to be shut out of the making of high budget movies, and Black actors will remain, too often, tokens of color in stories that forever feature Whites. Lucas, the film, and the Tuskegee Airmen deserve better.

Frankly, I have my concerns about the presentation of this film at this time. I'm concerned that it glorifies war at a time when the American public should be gut sick of dying in and paying for wars, wars and more wars all over the world. I'm concerned that economically and emotionally discouraged young Black men will follow the dashing young heroes on the screen down the yellow brick road to fight today's battles for old White politicians. And I'm concerned that Black folks will turn out en mass, but mostly only Black folks, "proving" yet again that Whites won't pay to watch a movie that's not about Whites.

But all that notwithstanding, I know I'm gonna love "Red Tails." I might just see it twice. And I hope you'll go, as well. With all your friends and relatives. And "like" the Facebook site. And, when the time comes, buy the DVD. ;^)

Hear, Hear

2012-01-16T04:00:00.002-06:00

"The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, master and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.” ~ Dr. Martin L. King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence,” April 4, 1967

Self-Explanatory

2012-01-15T16:34:00.004-06:00

A couple of months ago, I received the following email. I don't think it needs comment from me to get the point across, do you?

"Hi. I'm in your Racial and Ethnic Relations class. I recently had an experience and I don't know what to make of it. I had to bring my son to turn in a paper and...as I was walking around campus with my son in his stroller, I started to notice the way people were looking at me. I knew the look because you get it from teachers and co-workers all the time. It's that look people give you when they are associating your race with some kind of negativity. I've been getting that look my whole life so I know it when I see it.

"I could tell that they figured me to be a single mother on welfare or something, that I might as well give up on school because I was going to drop out eventually anyway. It's weird because no one said that to me. I just felt it from the look people were giving me.

"To my amazement...I literally started to feel anxious to get back in the car because I knew what people were thinking. I started to feel like I was that person.

"There's nothing wrong with being single or on government assistance. That's not the part that made me feel like that. It was knowing that these people figured me to be nothing more than another Black statistic. How could the way people look at me make me feel that way? I know in my head what I am. I've been married for almost four years. My husband makes good money. I'm a good person. So, I thought I must be crazy.

"When I told my husband, he said, 'No, you're not crazy. I know exactly what you mean.' He told me that when he brought our son with him to talk to one of his former teachers, he felt the same way. He said he felt like a drop out, like another Black statistic, even though he graduated with an accounting degree two year ago and is CPA certified. I have a feeling it was because I'm Black and he's Black.

"When we see a young White woman with a child on campus, we assume that it's her brother or sister. Or if we do assume that it's her child, we don't assume the worst about her...There is so much power behind racism that it has the ability to make you believe that you are something you're not. Sometimes, the way people look at you can make you feel like a nothing. Sometimes, it makes you feel as if you can work hard all your life, but you will still be seen the same."
____________________________________________________
NOTE: The above photo is only for illustration purposes and is not a photo of the woman who wrote this email.

The MisAdventures of Awkward Black Girl

2012-01-13T06:00:00.008-06:00

This is not clever, ingenius, intelligent, funny and entertaining because it's about being Black. It's not. It's clever, ingenius, intelligent, funny, and entertaining, all right. But it's about being human and it just happens to be done by a Black woman. A very clever, ingenius, intelligent, funny and entertaining Black woman. For real. With more available at Awkward Black Woman. Enjoy. And remember you first saw it here. (You're gonna love me for this.)

"Is the American Dream Fading?"

2012-01-12T13:55:00.003-06:00

According to the latest census bureau data, nearly one in two people in the United States (that would be half of us) is now living either in or near poverty. Is this really because they're all just too lazy to do anything about it? Multi-millions of American jobs have vaporized over the past twenty years, now outsourced to other countries or turned into low-paid temporary positions without benefits. Yet the rich keep blaming the workers that made the rich rich in hopes that the workers will keep blaming themselves.

So American citizens -- no longer qualified for unemployment assistance (that's the real reason that the rate has gone down) -- are frantically looking for work or accepting work they know will not take care of themselves and their families. People of Color are more than twice as likely to be shut out of the job market. And many U.S. citizens were already strung out on credit because of trying to keep up the illusion that they weren't poor before the most recent economic setbacks. When are we going to stop kidding ourselves? More people are on foodstamps now because there are fewer and fewer jobs every day which means more and more poverty for more and more people. This is not rocket science requiring fancy economic analysis.

In the film clip above, Cornel West, Tavis Smiley and Barbara Ehrenreich address this situation without ever once sounding sensationalistic or raising even one puff of academic dust. Watch the clip. Show it to some friends. Start a conversation. Let's face reality together.

I recently came across a quote saying something like: "Facing something might not change it, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." My version: "Everything I ever refused to face eventually hit me in the back of the head." I'm just sayin'.

A. Phillip Randolph, Organizer Extraordinaire

2012-01-11T06:00:00.003-06:00

"Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous ~ for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship." ~ A. Phillip Randolph, who demonstrated how to make 'em listen

On This Day in History

2012-01-09T12:12:00.005-06:00

The perception that many people in the United States have is that Africans were helpless victims of their own inability to protect themselves from their "betters" (that would be the White Europeans, of course) and that, as a result, they sort of "deserved" whatever came after that. The 30 million or so who died crossing the Atlantic from abuse, disease, starvation, suicide, or just being thrown overboard so the White slavers (all God-fearing men, needless to say) could avoid prosecution for the crime of being slavers were just collateral damage, as it were. Mutinies on slave ships with the exception of The Amistad have been largely ignored. And the African-American uprisings that have occurred in the past one hundred years have invariably been called "riots" and used to suggest that Black folks are just...well...like that ...you know?

Though one of the best known volumes on American Negro Slave Revolts (by Herbert Aptheker) has had six editions released since it was first published in 1943, most of us would be hard put to name even one person we know who's read it. Few, if any, Blacks have revolted and lived to tell about it from their side of the story, leaving us with little to ponder outside of cases White history touts, such as Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner -- all of whom were rapidly identified and executed, of course.

I watched two documentaries on the Black Panther Party yesterday: Merritt College ~ Home of the Black Panthers and the third episode from the VH1 series entitled Lords of the Revolution. I had seen them before, but I am always struck afresh by the panic-stricken brutality the White power structure in the U.S. unleashes whenever Black Americans rise up. The Black Panther Party for Self Defense, as one example, was the last full-tilt boogie organized attack on White power in this country. And we know what happened to them.

So I paid particular attention when I was made aware that, beginning January 8,1811 -- for a period of four days -- a free mulatto driver from Santo Domingo named Charles Deslondes with two Asante warriors named Kook and Quamana led what has been called the largest slave revolt in American history. Hundreds of Black men and women armed themselves with hoes, axes and cane knives and set out to take over New Orleans. Starting at Woodland Plantation in LaPlace, Louisiana, about thirty miles west of their target, the revolutionaries (that's what people who revolt are called, y'all), burned plantations and crops, collected weapons and ammunition, killed two White plantation owners -- sparing their wives and children (unlike the White slaveholders) -- and proceeded to Jacques Fortier's planation in what is now Kenner, just thirteen miles from their goal.

In Rivertown, the insurrection was met by military fire power and beaten back to St Charles Parish where they were routed. Somewhere between 40 and 60 died in the fighting, while an additional 45 were tried at Destrahan Plantation and either sentenced to death or sent on to New Orleans for subsequent legal proceedings. Those executed were first shot to death and then beheaded, with their heads placed on pikes along the route from LaPlace to New Orleans as a warning to others who might share their passion for freedom. As for Deslondes, he didn't make it to trial, but was dealt with by the militia as soon as he was captured. First, his hands were cut off; then, he was shot in both thighs and the abdomen, and, while still alive, set on fire.

It should be remembered that Louisiana was not even a state until a year later and the Haitian revolution twenty years before had freed an entire nation from European control. So we could surmise that the brave men and weomn who took on the world on this day in 1811 probably had dreams of establishing a Black republic in New Orleans. Some might argue that the insurrection is still in process.

In any case, Harvard-trained historian Daniel Rasmussen has written a new book entitled American Uprising: the Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt. And in honor of the 200th anniversary of this page in U.S. history, events and exhibitions will be held all year at the Destrehen Plantation, the New Orleans African American Museum of Art, Culture and History, and other venues.

I've lived in Louisiana for nearly five years without visiting a single plantation. It ain't my thing. But I might just make it a point this year to do something to honor the memory of the valiant souls who reached so sacrificially for a dream still dreamed by so many.
_______________________________________________________
NOTE: The painting featured above is by renowned River Parishes artist Lorraine Gendron and depicts the revolt discussed in this post. It will hang among other pieces in the Destrehan Plantation exhibit for the duration of this year.

Les Twins!

2012-01-05T15:22:00.000-06:00

It occurs to me that this is just one example of why White Supremacy is a joke. It also occurs to me that any group that can produce things of this caliber in absolutely every category of human endeavor (especially under the literal lash of unrelenting oppression) will never be utterly bested. Maybe this is why White folks stress so much. Ya think?

Body and Soul

2012-01-02T21:30:00.005-06:00

On January 14th, 2006, I published the first post on this blog site. It read:

When I wrote the end of last September that I was going to start blogging only on the topic of what I call the "socially-constructed, political notion of 'race'," I really thought I meant a few days later. Apparently, I meant three months later. Regardless, I hope to have a book on race (the story of my life, actually) published this year. Then, I'd like to travel around and tell people what I've got on my mind. But in the meantime, while I work on a couple more books and teach and live my life and all, I'll do this, too.

I did my first piece of research on race in 1963 (I was sixteen) on racial discrimination in the area in which I lived with my college-educated, white-bred (pun intended) parents and four younger brothers and sisters. Years in the prison abolition movement, years on welfare, and years in college and grad school later, I am still learning about "race." And talking about it. Loudly. And writing about it. Passionately.

I hope you're not horrified. I'm pretty straight-forward, in general, and absolutely shocking to some folks when I'm communicating about institutionalized oppression against people of color and, most particularly, African-Americans. Most bloggers write: if you don't like what I write, don't read it. But you're not gonna read that here. I hope you're not horrified because I hope you have a clue and you'll be willing to admit it and maybe we can finally make some progress before it's too late. (Yeah. I think there's every possibility that we're already on the downhill slope with our brakes locked as a society and that race is the oil on the pavement.)

But, if you are horrified, don't freak out. Just read it. Then ask yourself, "What if she's right?" Because, dear reader, I am. I'm not here to bury you with statistics. I could, but I won't because people that do that much better than me are already doing it and too many people that need to aren't listening anyway.

No, I'm here to just point out the sights as we careen through our national evolution. I know you can't wake up somebody who's pretending to be asleep. So those of you who choose to snore may continue to do so. But I'm not alone in what I know. So don't think my perspectives are a "personal problem." If you're scared, holler "red rock." And if you believe that there's still hope for us as a nation, then clap your hands. But if you still want to ignore reality, just remember that the ball's still the ball, no matter what kind of spin somebody tries to put on it. And that'll be me you hear in the background, mumbling to myself, "Why am I not surprised?"

Six years later, I read this, amazed that it's six years later and disheartened that, six years later, I could have written the post yesterday. Nothing so far as I can tell has even moved an inch in a positive direction. In fact, some stuff has actually gotten worse where the "socially-constructed, political notion of 'race'," is concerned. For one thing, White people have become so frustrated by the tanking economy, some of them have no problem whatsoever throwing Blacks overboard, just as they did when things got tricky on the Middle Passage. "F' 'em!" they seem to say, sounding like the quixotic Capt. John Yossarian in Catch 22: "I know they're shooting at everybody, but they're shooting at me!" So White people are crying bloody murder over a 9% unemployment rate, while Blacks are staggering under more than double that burden.

It would be an indicator of great naivete to imagine that anything is going to magically improve in the few decades I've been an anti-racist ally. I mean, what kind of social change agent expects visible shift in so short a period when so many have spent the past four centuries in the ninth ring of hell? I know that I can't stop pushing the envelope regardless. It's just not in me. So I'm not whining. But things are complicated. I don't know what to do.

On one hand, I just finished teaching a very effective course on Racial and Ethnic Relations last semester (to students at least half of whom were White criminal justice majors in rural Louisiana, for God's sake) and got to see real consciousness raising occur for a number of the students -- both Black and White (more about that in another post). But on the other hand, walking around New York City with Boxer for a week over Christmas, I was made incredibly aware that a Black man and a White woman holding hands in public in the United States is still an anomaly even in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. I actually felt uncomfortable when I paid attention to it (especially in Harlem, needless to say). And it all gets a little wearing eventually. I expect to feel like an odd ball in Louisiana, but in The Big Apple, filled with every different type of culture and face?

Things are complicated.

I remember some years ago, when I was still living in south Florida, I was contacted one day by a young White male former student of mine who had taken my Race course at a university down there. He was student-teaching in a middle school and was horrified to discover that the Social Science teacher under which he was interning had chosen a text book presenting seventy pages of information about Ancient Greece and only seven pages total about the entire continent of Africa for all time. He asked if I would come "do what I do" for a class of pre-teens. Somewhat surprised by the request and not at all convinced that I knew how to approach "children" about the topic of "race," I ultimately agreed and put together a pair of presentations that attempted to explain very simply how the idea of race had evolved and how it works, ending on a positive note about what we can do to make things better.

Afterwards, he seemed truly pleased and appreciative, but I left without being sure what, if anything, the students actually got out of what I had said.

Two weeks later, the local newspaper reported that an African-American boy had shot and killed a White girl at the school. A tragedy of this caliber is always stunning, of course. But for me, it was downright garish. I never had the nerve to ask whether or not the boy with the gun had been in the class I addressed. I didn't recall his name as being listed, so I told myself the timing of the occurance was a coincidence. Racial tensions at the school were one of the reasons my former student had contacted me in the first place. But I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that, if I discovered that something I taught those children had resulted in the death of one of them at the hands of another, I would never be able to deal with it emotionally.

Like I said, things are complicated.

In Harlem, on Christmas Eve morning, Boxer and I came across a sidewalk display of crimes perpetrated against African-American victims by White oppressors. It was a graphic display, indeed, with dozens of photos attached to draped cloth being viewed by passers-by. Black men stood wounded and naked before cameras capturing their dignity in the face of what was intended to be humiliation. Black bodies hung limp as rags from tree branches in picture after picture. Photos of instruments of torture were presented without comment. And White men and women wearing White hoods stared wordlessly and permanently at all who cared to consider them.

I had been using my daughter's camera all over Manhattan for days and started snapping the shutter instantly before I began hearing the voice of a Black man behind me.

"Do you know what the holocaust is?" he asked, sounding agitated. "This is the Black holocaust!"

When I realized he was speaking directly to me, I stopped taking pictures, turned to him and replied in a tiny voice, "Yes, I know what the holocaust is and I know what this is."

"This is sacred to us," he went on, his face constricted with the pain I had caused him by entering his space, his sidewalk cathedral. "This is sacred to us. It's not just here for White tourists to take pictures of..."

Even in the sweep of the cold winter wind, I could feel my cheeks flush red. I was sorry. And I was ashamed of being insensitive. And I was heartbroken for all those who have to deal with White insensitivity all day every day. My always-ready voice stalled in my throat and I slunk away like a dog caught digging up a garden.

Like I said, things are complicated.

So here I am, six years after I began. With no sense that what I'm doing is necessarily of any real and particular assistance in the process of working for racial justice. I know that I started this blog to provide input for students, to write because I must write or die, to provide myself with a platform from which to cry "Wolf!" when there most definitely is one. Yet, things are complicated.

After six years, I'm wondering if those reasons are still enough. It takes great discipline to keep slogging along through the swamp water month after month if you're not sure where you're headed or whether you're going in circles or whether there is, in the end, any point to it, after all.

I started a new blog yesterday on In Your Face Women. The intention is for it to present daily postings for one year. I already have four months of it written, but it's still going to be yet another commitment. I'm also on the verge of kicking off a blog talk radio show about spiritual (not religious) growth. And if I want to continue to pay my rent, I must keep my day job, too, which seems to demand ever so much more of me than it does of those who make easier peace with not being as available to students as I am. In addition, I'm thinking about self-publishing Reduced to Equality. And I'm starting to speak at conventions for an organization to which I belong.

Am I kidding myself? Have I lost my mind? Am I like a comet that has entered the atmosphere and become an incendiary spectacle as I approach the later years of my life? I used to say years ago that my fourth twenty years would be my most productive. At nearly six years in, that would certainly appear to be true. But it has turned out to be complicated. I'm not satisfied any more with just producing. I want to be effective. I want to be careful to do what is really helpful and not just satisfying to my ego. And frankly, in a world full of anguish, I have finally reached a point where I want to be happy, as well.

The old song goes, "John Brown's body lies a moulderin' in the grave, but his soul goes marching on." The things I care about are complicated and I don't have all the answers by a long shot. I'm beginning to tire and I'm adding pieces to my life that get in the way of my posting here, but I can't imagine quitting. So I guess my soul as expressed through this blog, for the predicable future at least, will go marching on into another year. Thanks for marching with me.

Reduced to Equality - Conclusion

2011-12-30T18:23:00.004-06:00

This concludes the posting of my book-length manuscript, Reduced to Equality: My Odyssey to Renounce Racial Privilege ~ and Find Myself. You may read the previously posted segments here.

2004 (cont'd)

After months of chasing the story, I learned little more than I had known at the beginning. And John Ed’s bi-racial child was born only one month before he eloped with Elizabeth. I don’t know why John Ed married Elizabeth so quickly after Dillon’s birth, if as Pearce suggests, he was in love with Dillon’s mother, so we just have to surmise things. Like, well, maybe he was so hurt by not being able to be with Dillon’s mother and his son that he went sideways into another relationship. But why a Garrard? Maybe Elizabeth, who was, after all, a real looker, was his second choice. Or maybe he wasn’t really in love with Dillon’s mother. Or maybe, since they had talked him out of doing what he really wanted to do -- based, I’m sure, on family “honor” -- he just wanted to piss everybody off and make years more trouble in the family by snatching the granddaughter of a former Governor of the state.

Regardless, he got Elizabeth pregnant almost immediately, and had a son with her the following year. But the boy, named Benjamin Franklin White after his grandfather, died only a few years old, and though John Ed and Elizabeth stayed married for more than fifty years, they only had two more children -- in 1862 and 1865 -- in spite of the local and family practice of having many.

The family tells the story that Lizzie raised Dillon like he was her own, but the census in 1870 does not list the boy -- who would have been ten or eleven-years-old at the time -- in John Ed’s house. John Ed did send Dillon to the University of Kentucky eventually, as he probably promised Dillon’s mother he would, though Dillon only attended for a year until the feuds intensified and he came home to stand beside his father, along with his younger half-brother, my great-grandfather, Daugherty White, named for his slave-holding uncle.

Dillon never owned any land, but he is shown in the 1880 census, at the age of twenty-one, living with a housekeeper right next door to John Ed and Elizabeth. Four years later, he married Sallie Allen, the daughter of a Baptist minister, and before it was over, they had had eight children in a span of fifteen years.

As I thought it over more and more, and put together different pieces of research, I realized that, since Kentucky had slaves until 1865 and had ordered free Blacks out of the state in 1851, then a mulatto woman in Clay County, Kentucky, in 1859, when Dillon was born, was either a slave or in the state illegally. There appears to be no birth certificate for Dillon. And no one in the family seems to know his mother’s name. Even Dillon’s granddaughter assured me that her mother did not know her own grandmother’s name, which is highly unusual in Clay County. It is as if Dillon's mother did not exist, except that she left a son, my Great-Great-Uncle Dillon, who was shot to death on Christmas eve in 1900 at the age of forty-one while trying to force his daughter to leave a dance.

Dillon’s murderers, who were drunk and supposedly feuders from the Garrard side of the conflict, apparently didn’t believe that his status as a member of the White family would mean anything because he was born out of wedlock. Nevertheless, Dillon’s wife Sallie, knowing that everyone would expect her sons to retaliate according to feud law and tradition, was scared that someone would try to kill them before they could act, so John Ed helped her to move the whole household to a different county. Then, for whatever reason, the White family chose not to seek revenge, not to report the crime to the authorities (although everyone knew the four men who had committed the murder), and not to file probate on Dillon’s estate until several years later.

Some think it’s because, by 1900, the White family dynasty was on the down-hill slide. The freeing of their slaves had cost them dearly, with no way of recouping their losses, since the federal government refused to pay the injury allotments the family felt they deserved because they had backed the Union. And then huge salt domes were discovered farther west and on the Kanawha River, forcing the Whites completely out of the salt business by 1885.

One of the ways White people, such as my family, have avoided feeling responsible for their transgressions against their fellow human beings is simply not to “know” what happened, not to talk about the truth, to “go to the grave,” as they say, with secret after secret.

“They held slaves?” they might ask.

“I don’t know…” they might add.

“You know, everybody back then…” they try to argue.

“Not everybody…” you remind.

“Yeah, well…I don’t know…” and they trail off. “That was a long time ago.”

And it was. But long time ago or not, it happened and it had an effect -- on the individuals involved, either master or slave; on the families involved, either master or slave; on the mountain community and the state and the nation in which it stood, to the present.

Zen Buddhists believe that our ancestors are not just vaporous memories wafting through time and space in some vacuous manner irrelevant to us, but rather reside yet in the very cells of our bodies, come down through us genetically, for good or ill. As I did my research, reading and poring and thinking and considering, talking to strangers, and reading and poring some more, I began to feel as if they were all around me: old Hugh Lowry and all his sons and grandsons, Col. Daniel and his kith and kin, those who murdered and were murdered, and always and ever, the slaves, listed nameless on slave schedules census after census, distinguished only by their gender, their age, and the name of the one who held them in bondage that year. And, as the days and weeks turned into months, increasingly I saw her there, as well: Dillon White Hollin’s mother, off to one side, waiting now for one hundred forty-six years to be granted the right to her name.

After meditating one day, assuring my ancestors that I knew they did the best they could with whatever their consciousness was at the time, that I was forgiving them their drunkenness, their meanness and their cruel self-centeredness, that I was not angry at them for doing awful things and leaving the legacy in my physical, psychological, and spiritual being, it hit me. They had kept coming to life, generation after generation, until I could be born and write this book. They wanted the record told. They knew now that their actions had not served them well, but rather had put a blot on themselves and their progeny that they could not do anything about because they had lived and died without ever acknowledging that all humans are just doing the best they can and that no humans deserve to suffer at the hands of any others.

“Well, that’s a bit lofty, isn’t it?” my rational mind asserted. “Not to mention convenient, at this late date.”

But a few days later, following a thread to something else entirely, I saw it: a little remembrance at the tail-end of a slave narrative I shouldn’t even have come across, offered by a woman who had not even been held by the White family:

“My master wuzn’t as mean as most masters,” reported Sophia Word in 1936 at the age of ninety-nine. “Hugh White was so mean to his slaves that I know of two gals that killt themselfs. One nigger gal, Sudie, wuz found across the bed with a pen knife in her hand. He whipped another nigger gal ‘most to death fer fergitting to put onions in the stew. The next day, she went down to the river, and fer nine days they searched fer her. And her body finally washed up on the shore. The master could never live in that house again as, when he would go to sleep, he would see the nigger standing over his bed. Then he moved to Richmond and there he stayed until a little later, when he hung himself.”

Appealing to various sources, I tried to find out whether there was a corroborating family tale among the Whites, but it was not uncommon for a given nuclear family in Clay County to have many children, naming them every one for one or more relatives. My great-great-great-great-grandfather Hugh, for example, had thirteen children, eight of them sons. And, as lately as my mother’s generation, there were among she and her seven siblings no less than ten names still carrying on the tradition, including Daugherty, Lowry, and Hugh.

With multiple Hugh Whites holding slaves, then, I wasn’t able to identify the particular ancestor or “prove” the account, though I did learn that there was a family home in Richmond, Kentucky. Still, there’s no doubt in my mind that the story is true. I can feel it my bones. I can hear it in the whispering wind rustling the leaves on the tree outside my window. But rather than feeling ugly or sad, the feeling is one of resignation and release. A sigh, if you will, that the truth will be told, with or without the details, that the pain he caused others and then his family can be laid to rest in the pages of this book, that the pain that drove him to give up his life will be washed in the light of an old woman’s words come to us through history like a song of freedom for us all. We cannot and do not avoid the repercussions of our actions, however ill-guided, socially-accepted, or unintentional.

When I asked my mother about what it was like for her growing up in Clay County as a child, related to the matters at hand, her memories were few. She remembers growing up with African-American “squatters” on her father’s land, sharing holidays with them, having them help to get her family through the Great Depression, and not much else.

But one of her memories that I found particularly interesting was that my grandfather, Rob Roy White, her father, would not allow his children to use the “n-word,” even in their home, though it was common custom in Clay County to do so. I couldn’t help but wonder if his stance had anything to do with the fact that his father was raised with a Black half-brother. I know my grandfather was trained as a lawyer, although he never took the bar exam. I know he was an engineer and newspaper editor and sheriff and historian and that he preached the Sunday sermon when there wasn’t a preacher in town and that he told Uncle Remus stories using his deep, deep voice in what I recall as perfect Black dialect. But I wish I had known to ask him what he knew about his Uncle Dillon, who died when Pa, as we called him, was already twelve-years-old. Did he know that Dillon was, by every interpretation of the “one-drop” rule, himself one of those people that other White people called by that pejorative term? Did he ever hear him called that? Is that why he grew up, the grandson of a slaveholder’s son, with such strong principles against it?

When I first told Morgan that I wanted this book to make a statement about the socially-constructed, political notion of “race” and relate it to my family’s history as slaveholders, she was her usual blunt self in her unhesitating response.

“What do you mean, a statement?” she asked flatly.

“I’m not sure,” I waffled. “I just want to go on record, as a representative of the White family, accepting responsibility for our past history as…I don’t know…some kind of apology, I guess.”

“Well, I can tell you one thing,” she finished with a flip of her head. “No amount of bullshit liberal White guilt trying to make apologies will ever be enough!”

Needless to say, in spite of the fact that I’m pretty used to her nonchalant dismissals when she feels strongly about something, I was a bit taken aback. Not because I didn’t agree with her, but because I did. It’s not like I was voted the Chairperson of the Whites of Clay County or something. Who did I think I was anyway? And after the Civil War, with slavery no longer legal and salt production moved to more centrally located and even more plentiful sources, my ancestors began to live a lot more like ordinary folks.

Besides, despite the fact that Great-Great-Great Uncle James left millions of dollars when he died, his granddaughter Bessie bequeathed it all to her White maid’s illegitimate daughter, who was in and out of mental hospitals most of her life and finally died, leaving the money to -- of all people -- her lawyer. It seemed somehow poetic in the face of the White family’s use and abuse of that occupation themselves over the years, especially since the base of much of that wealth was ill-gotten through the suffering of others. I had never heard anything about that branch of the family before, so hearing the story now seemed anti-climactic.

Still, money or no, if Morgan was right and I believed that she was, then it wouldn’t be enough to just make a polite apology and go on with my life, or even to imagine the book as an effort to make a difference in a racist society in a new millennium, which it is. I had to do something. But what?

It didn’t take long for the idea to come. I would set up a scholarship fund, using half of my book royalties, for anyone who could document, using any mechanism whatsoever, that they are descended from a slave who was held by my ancestors. It wouldn’t be much, necessarily. It wouldn’t be enough, in any case. But it would be something. It would model for other White people that, because we have benefited personally -- psychologically, emotionally, and financially -- from the exploitation and suffering of people of color, we have no choice but to make personal attempts to, at least figuratively, even the playing field ourselves.

I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, God knows. I remember well using outdoor toilets, taking baths in a sink, and only eating meat for Sunday dinner. But my life and my opportunities from Day One were prescribed by not only my skin tone, as a White woman, but by the on-going legacy of my position as a member of a family that chose to benefit in a thousand ways by holding other human beings in bondage. Even the way I carry myself these long, long distant days after my family was rich has served me well whenever I wanted it to. I cannot go back and undo even one sad fact of that sad, sad history. But, having looked into my soul and found my ancestors there, I must now let them tell me what they would have me do to stop the on-going saga of our participation in the racism that belongs to all White Americans, no matter what their names.

We are often given to saying in one context or another that two hundred fifty years of slavery has had an on-going effect on the African-American community in the United States. What we don’t say, largely because no one has forced us to, is that two hundred fifty years of being slaveholders has had an on-going effect on us -- the European-American community, even for those individuals and families that never held a slave themselves.

Very few White people ever made -- before or after the Civil War -- the kind of sacrifices necessary to hold themselves outside the racist construct that our social institutions were established to be from the outset. The rest of us -- all the rest of us -- have been complicit by our lack of protest, complicit by our participation in the institutional oppression that has always given us the most of the best and the least of the worst, complicit by our ready acceptance of the economic prosperity that was produced for us as a nation by millions of Black laborers working twelve to fifteen-hour days for free year after year after year for two and one-half centuries.

My ancestors were "Christian" people, if you examine the records or even ask the family today. And it’s hard for White people to understand, admit, or deal with the reality that being “Christian” by category (rather than “Christ-like” by principle and practice) has never precluded individuals and groups from being less than moral or even committing atrocities. The Crusades and the Inquisition stand as ready proof of that.

Montesquieu’s assertion in The Spirit of the Laws that Blacks had no souls laid the groundwork for a raft of “Christian” nations to unleash fleet after fleet of slave ships, killing millions of Africans horrifically to fill endless coffers with gold. Even once that perspective was discarded, many European-Americans agreed that it was better to enslave and convert Africans to Christianity, however brutally it was accomplished, than to leave them to die as free people in “heathen” lifestyles of their choice.

All of our nation’s “founding fathers” were slaveholders, even as they invoked the name of God at every turn and claimed that God had created all men equal. Further, the Baptist church itself in the southern states held no less than 25,000 slaves before the Civil War for the purpose of renting them out. And slaveholders, including my ancestors, I’m sure, appear to have thought nothing of going to church on Sunday, having beaten a slave half to death and rubbed salt in his or her wounds the day before for not having worked fast enough or some other offense deemed punishable without conscience.

Even a century and a half later, "Christian" believers often seem able to skirt issues that would seem on the surface to call into question the morality of their faith when it intersects with “race.” Where were the Christian ministers after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his letter from the Birmingham jail challenging them to support people of color as they suffered for daring to suggest that they, too, were children of God and equal to White folks? Where is the protest in the Christian community when the Ku Klux Klan burns crosses as the symbol of their belief-system or wears crosses on their robes while espousing their poisonous doctrines today? Where is the organized response from Christians when the Christian Identity movement and other so-called religious entities tout beliefs that pair rabid racism with fundamentalist Christian dogma? The routine practice of overt, covert, and subtle racism by well-meaning White people who profess Christianity would make the Jesus who threw the money-changers’ tables out of the temple go ballistic all over again. “We have met the enemy,” said Charlie Brown once years ago in the popular cartoon, Peanuts, “and it is us.” Indeed. And we don’t want to hear it.

We ignore the jokes, minimize what African-Americans tell us about their experience of life, always think we got the job because we deserved it, always suspect that Blacks got hired because somebody had to hire them, walk on eggshells around racist family members so as not to “offend” them, date and marry racists (considering it not to be a fatal flaw), and don’t reach out to make a real difference because we’re too busy, too uncomfortable, too unclear about what exactly to do, too few, and too…racist?

We are so conflicted on the socially-constructed, political notion of “race,” we have convinced ourselves that the more than 700 hate sites on the internet viciously hyping the murder and degradation of Blacks, Latinos, Asians and Jews are really just exercising their first amendment rights. So there are laws against speeding and under-age drinking, but hate-mongering against people of color is “constitutional” in the United States. “Inciting to riot” is illegal; inciting to murder is not. Paying someone to kill is illegal, but psyching people up to kill people of color for free is purported to be protected by U.S. law.

No wonder African-Americans -- our fellow citizens, our brothers and sisters before God -- are ill, stressed, and angry. Now, what are we going to do about it?

EPILOGUE

Four days after I finished my book, after celebrating my fifty-ninth birthday with crab-stuffed shrimp and tira misu, I came home to find an e-mail waiting for me from someone I didn’t know. I had sent out a blanket request a couple of weeks before on several genealogy list-servs seeking information related to Dillon White Hollin’s mother. I was almost done with the book at the time, but had not tried this, as yet, and hoped for a last minute miracle. None came and I had closed out the book, assuming that none would.

“I doubt if you will get very many responses to your questions,” the unexpected e-mail began. “Dillon is listed in the White family bible. I would be curious to know what information you have to share…” And it was signed “Regards.”

I immediately decided that this was my birthday present from the Universe. I figured that I had nothing to lose anyway, so without even waiting until morning, I gratefully and graciously outlined everything I knew, genuflecting appropriately to demonstrate my good faith and respect. Within thirty-six hours, I had it, at least what there was to have.

My informant, as we call them in sociology, who chose to remain anonymous, had his own reasons for searching out the name of Dillon’s mother and, consistent with my earlier struggles, had not found in a decade of rigorous research “absolute proof” available. Nevertheless, he had done much work and had a theory that made sense to me.

It centers around a tiny family listed in the Clay County census in 1860, a little more than a year after Dillon’s birth. A Jeff Allen, age 22, and his wife, Mary, age 17, whose marriage was recorded on January 25th of that year, appear in the census with a 2-year-old son listed as “Dilliard Hollandsworth.”

It’s important to understand that names were apparently changed more or less at will in Clay County in those days and not necessarily in court. A given member of the Hollingsworth family, for example, might also appear variously over time as a Hollinsworth, Hollandsworth, Holland, Hollan, Hollen, or Hollin. Census takers, for one thing, didn’t seem concerned with consistency, spelling, or for that matter, any form of documentation on either race or name. Needless to say, this plays havoc with the ability to follow a genealogical thread. But once you accept it as more or less inevitable, any irritation is minimal, though it cannot help but leave one somewhat perplexed. Is it him? Is it not? Who would know? Did they mean to do this and, if so, why? Questions reign supreme and often without any clear answers.

Still, the date and ages seemed plausible. And, though the original Hollingsworth family came into Clay County in the very early 1800’s listed as “free whites,” whatever that is, most of those with the various versions of their name were subsequently listed as Black or mulatto at one point or another. This is a major issue, since central to the story about Dillon and his mother is always the fact of her race being the reason John Ed was talked out of marrying her. And while the story has been orally transmitted from generation to generation and household to household for nearly a century and a half, that one detail has always remained intact against great resistance from all branches of the White family.

By 1870, when a ten-year-old named “Dillian” appears as a farm worker in the household of James C. White (both of them listed as Black) and another ten-year-old named “Dilliard” appears in the household of an Elizabeth Parker (both of them listed as mulatto), Jeff and Mary had seemingly vaporized, at least out of Clay County. It would appear likely, at least on the surface, that, if Mary was Dillon’s mother, then she left him to John Ed’s protection, with John Ed’s agreement, but not in John Ed’s house.

Ten years later, in 1880, a 21-year-old “Dillian Holland” is found in the census immediately next door to John Ed and Lizzie and their two children, Ella and Daugherty. That John Ed wanted Dillon close to him, however this practice grieved his wife, as it must have or Dillon would have been in the White family home, suggests that John Ed did more than likely feel very strongly about Dillon’s mother, Mary.

There is no way to know at this point, given what little we have as information, whether or not Dillon knew his mother. It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that he did not, since the Whites made an art form out of secrecy, backed up with legal expertise. Still, he may have been told. If John Ed had once loved her as much as it seems that he might have, given his commitment to their son, it’s not beyond imagination.

A number of the White family males had many children out of wedlock -- slave and free -- that they did not claim or acknowledge. There is even some indication that John Ed had at least one other child out of wedlock himself some years after Dillon was born. But only Dillon, to the best of my knowledge, of all the White family members born out of wedlock, was held close and claimed and supported in the way that he was.

So, I was a bit startled, actually, when I received a copy of a letter from one elderly Clay Countian to another, describing the murder of Dillon Hollin and making his racial heritage finally, utterly clear. The men who shot my grandfather’s uncle that dark night were drunk and dancing until he arrived. Dillon, married to a Baptist minister’s daughter, was loathe to have his only girl, Ada, out dancing at local affairs, especially in the face of his having spent his life having to listen to his mother being maligned for having had him outside of marriage.

Apparently, Ada didn’t want to leave the party and her dancing partner, John Lucas, being drunk and a Garrard supporter, decided to use the opportunity to get in a lick against the White family. With the help of several other men, he shot Dillon White Hollin point blank without even going outside to do it, calling Dillon, as he did so, “White’s nigger bastard.” I wonder if those were the last words my Great-Great-Uncle Dillon ever heard. I wonder if he thought about his mother as they were spat out at him, meant to kill his soul even as the bullets killed his body. And I wonder if Mary Hollinsworth was alive or dead at that moment in time. But regardless, as a mother myself, I’ll bet she was there, somehow, arms around her son, in spite of them all.

How different it would all have turned out if Dillon had just let Ada go to the party that night. How different it would all have turned out if Clay County, Kentucky, had not been so violent in those earlier times. How different it would all have turned out if John Ed had married Mary regardless of what the rest of the family said. And how different it would all, all, all have turned out if the socially-constructed political notion of race did not prescribe the lives of all Americans, including my ancestors, my children, and myself.

The End
____________________________________________________
NOTE: The photo at the end of this post -- dated 1895 -- is of Dillon White Hollin and was shared with me by my anonymous informant. I am grateful for it.

NOTE #2: The graphic at the top of this post is a stencil offered here.

Nina Simone: Revolution

2011-12-12T09:11:00.000-06:00

It's been a minute since I posted. Had to close out the semester. Whew! Glad that's over. Anyway, here's Nina Simone to prime the pump, let you know I'll be around, clear out my head and lay the groundwork for whatever comes next.

Yeah...

"American Grace" by Rick Nagin

2011-11-24T07:55:00.007-06:00

Remember those who grew this food
Who picked and packed
Who shipped and sold.
Bronze rainbow arms
Have set this food upon our table.

Remember those who built this house
Assembled, weaved, created
Light and warmth and health.

Remember those who fought and died
To break the king’s command, the slaver’s yoke
And slay the Nazi beast.

Remember those who walked in darkness
Eyes on the gourd and the Trail of Tears,
Marching in Selma, martyred in Memphis

They can’t kill the dream, Jesús y Maria,
Che on his cross in the Andean highlands
Shot in the stadium, pushed from the airplane
Martyrs for freedom
And America.

Never forget
Our ancient foe
His craft and power,
His cruel hate
His endless thirst
Through blood and oil
For profit, profit
Uber alles.

Remember those whose songs of love
Restore us still
Pablo, Diego, Woody and Giant Paul
Mus’ keep on fightin’, Comrades all

Remember those who grew this food
Who mined and forged
Who sang and loved
Who fought and died
Who made all wealth

All honor and glory,
All power and peace
Be unto you
Be unto you.
_________________________________________________

NOTE: This poem/prayer was originally published in People's Weekly World in March 2006. Updated Nov. 23, 2010 and Nov. 23, 2011. Learn more about Rick Nagin here

Reduced to Equality - Part 18

2011-11-23T11:39:00.001-06:00

This continues the posting of my book-length manuscript, Reduced to Equality: My Odyssey to Renounce Racial Privilege ~ and Find Myself. You may read the previously posted segments here.

2004 (cont'd)

Hugh Lowry White’s father moved his household from Pennsylvania to Virginia in 1790 because Pennsylvania had decided to emancipate its slaves that year and, apparently, old William White had no intention of letting that happen to his household. It’s quite possible, interestingly enough, although there are conflicting stories about this, that old William himself came to the colonies as an indentured servant chased out of Ireland by the British, when the Scotch-Irish lost their take-over attempt. So it would seem on the surface odd that he had become so heartless so rapidly after arriving, but that he had slaves, we know, and that he moved to Virginia, we know, and unfortunately, that’s the kind of information I was often stuck with -- bare-bones facts with no explanation for any of them.

William’s son, James, was a master businessman who quickly distinguished himself as a representative for somebody else’s entrepreneurial endeavor, and then struck out on his own to seek his fortune, which he fairly quickly began to find. Hearing about the salt wells in the region that eventually became Clay County, Kentucky, James convinced his brother, Hugh Lowry White, who had not amassed his own fortune as yet, to move there in 1803 and oversee a salt manufacturing business for the two of them. They began buying up land in the mountains at a price intended to encourage the development of the area, and by 1840, Hugh was the richest individual in the county, owning $88,000 worth of land and holding $105,400 in personal property -- including 38 slaves.

By 1850, the White family interests were producing 250,000 bushels of salt annually and selling them for anywhere from $1 to $5 each. To do this required a great deal of highly dangerous, back-breaking labor and this labor was done by slaves -- 162 of them in 1850, mostly men, who were held in bondage by eight households and represented approximately one-third of the total slave population in Clay County. In addition to the slaves they held personally, the Whites hired other slave-holders’ slaves, as well, some from as far away as Tennessee, for a yearly amount of $50 to $150 (paid to the slave-holder), but some slave-holders, in the interest of not losing their “property” inadvertently, would contract that their particular slaves could not be used to do the most dangerous types of work.

Slaves drilled salt wells, dug coal, cut timber for fuel, tended furnaces and boiling salt kettles, constructed barrels; built, loaded, and piloted boats; grew crops, and raised and slaughtered animals for use and for sale. As many as one hundred wagons of salt in a train could be seen rolling out of Clay County on a routine basis in 1835, each one pulled by six horses or three yoke of oxen. Even as the Civil War was beginning in 1861, and the death knell for slavery had been sounded, the Whites still held 110 slaves worth $129,935.

As industrial slaves rather than domestic slaves, the African-Americans held by the White family in Clay County lived in what amounted to slave communities, typically crowded into a row of small shacks behind their “master’s” house. The seventy-one slaves held by Hugh’s sons James and Daugherty White, for example, lived nine to a shanty. And they were much more likely to have their lives disrupted by being sold or having their loved ones sold than those living in other types of settings.

According to Billings and Blee,

“…Clay County’s county seat, Manchester, was a bustling slave marketing center. Here, slave traders, salt manufacturers, and farmers crowded around an auction block from which slave men, women, and children were bought, sold, and leased. One former slave remembered seeing lines of slaves standing on an outdoor elevated wooden platform erected in the city center while an auctioneer gave ‘a general description of [their] ability and physical standing’ and traders beat them with long whips ‘to see if they could jump around and wuz strong.’” (p.211)

Henry Lucas, who served the Whites as an overseer, reported that the slaves liked James, but did not like Daugh, who used to get on a stump when he whipped them. Nevertheless, in 1937, Mrs. Amelia Jones, a former slave living at the time in London, Kentucky, just a few miles west of Manchester, was quoted as saying:

“…I was born eighty-eight years ago in Manchester, Kentucky, under a master by the name of Daugh White. He was a southern Republican and was elected as congressman by that party…He was the son of Hugh White, the original founder of Whitesburg…

“Master White was good to the slaves. He fed us well and had good places for us to sleep, and didn’t whip us only when it was necessary, but didn’t hesitate to sell any of his slaves. He said, ‘You all belong to me and if you don’t like it, I’ll put you in my pocket,’ meaning, of course, that he would sell that slave and put the money in his pocket.

“The day he was to sell the children from their mother, he would tell the mother to go to some other place to do some work and, in her absence, he would sell the children. It was the same when he would sell a man’s wife. He also sent him to another job and when he returned, his wife would be gone. The master would only say, ‘Don’t worry. You can get another one.’”

According to Mrs. Jones, in separate incidences, she lost both her father and her twelve-year-old sister to the auction block, after which they were handcuffed and marched away to southern plantations. Though she had enough to eat, Mrs. Jones reported that she had no privileges, and that most masters in Clay County treated their slaves cruelly, underfeeding them and beating them often. The fact that she didn’t call separating families from each other without warning a cruel act, even seventy-two years after her ordeal was over, is a testimony to the internalized socialization of oppression, embedded so deeply in the consciousness of the oppressed that it’s often there forever. One can only imagine what Mrs. Jones would have described as a cause that would make a whipping “necessary.” And, of course, she failed to mention -- or was not quoted as mentioning -- the other common practice among slaveholders of raping their “property” to produce more of it.

Records indicate that Hugh’s son, James, named for his illustrious uncle, not only had a total of twelve children by two successive wives, but routinely had children by his slaves, as well. In 1858, for example, two of James’ slaves presented him with babies on the same day, while James was in his fifties and his wife was also pregnant! One of his brother Daugh’s sons was so dark, it’s said that his nickname was “Nig.” Even among the broader population of European-American, free Black and mulatto families, the White family was often implicated in complicated genetic patterns, which are now almost impossible to trace, other than by what is left of oral histories, because they often gave the children last names other than their own. In one case, a mulatto woman was forced to sign a legal paper promising that she would make no legal claim to a child she had birthed to one of the White family members, but the child was not even named in the document, leaving no future record of its identity, its existence, or its whereabouts.

In fact, when the Civil War was over and slaves throughout the south were mandated to appear at courthouses to report their birth years and parents’ names in the attempt to create records of them as citizens, no such records were ever collected in Clay County. One cannot assume why this was so, but since members of the White family were often in positions of decision-making authority related to matters of the court, it would not be hard to imagine that they simply did not feel that making official records of paternity among the former slaves would serve their best interests -- or their reputations. A great deal of money, a great deal of power, and a fixation on honor can typically produce such scenarios as appear to have been common in Clay County among the White family for the better part of a century in the 1800’s.

African-Americans who were emancipated in Kentucky during the years before the War were not in much better shape than those who were still in bondage. They could be snatched by bounty-hunters, taken south, and enslaved or re-enslaved, regardless of their being free when taken. Their children -- as young as two-years-old -- could be arbitrarily seized by the courts and forced into “apprenticeships” in service to European-American families, just because their own families were poor. And they had to carry papers attesting to their status, observe curfews, be gainfully employed or go to jail, and, in general, be very, very careful all of the time not to upset anyone who looked White.

Thinking back to my own experiences in the town of Manchester, a town where I could and did, as a three-year-old, walk anywhere alone and without fear, I realize now that the safety I enjoyed was completely attributable to my heritage and my name, though I would have had no way of understanding that at the time. I remember one incident when an African-American man had reached out to me in what was unquestionably, I think now, with all I know, a friendly greeting. I panicked, being very young, and ran from the stranger, who must, then, have panicked himself. I still recall us racing down the street full-tilt, me bellowing at the top of my lungs and him trying frantically to allay my fears by reaching out his arms and calling out to me over and over, “I wouldn’t hurt you! I wouldn’t hurt you!” I was terrified, but under the circumstances, in 1950 in Clay County, Kentucky, he must have been twice as afraid as I was. I wonder if he was subsequently accosted in some way for that unfortunate situation over which he had absolutely no control.

When the Civil War came, my ancestors heard the call and, as they had in the Revolutionary War and against the Native Americans who were, after all, only trying to protect themselves from intruders, the Whites and the Garrards donned uniforms and joined the fight. As individual family members made their choices, each family found itself with members on the side of the Union and the Confederacy both, creating yet again controversy and drama within and among the relatives.

Col. Daniel Garrard’s house was said to be the regular information depot for the rebel army in Clay County, but his son, Theophilis Toulmin Garrard (better known as T.T.) fought for the North. Nevertheless, demonstrating the conflicted loyalties of the time and place, T.T. was quoted as saying at one point after the Emancipation Proclamation, “If I’d known Lincoln was going to free the slaves, I’d have fought for the Confederacy instead of the Union.”

As if there wasn’t already enough animosity between the two branches of the family, the federal government decided that, since it couldn’t seem to keep the Confederate forces from accessing the salt wells, it would simply destroy them. So, according to a sign that stands 2-1/2 miles south of Manchester today,

“On Oct. 23, 1862, 22nd U.S.A. Brig. including 1st, 2nd, and 20th Ky. Infantry moved here in wake of retreating C.S.A. forces. 500 men worked 36 hours to destroy salt works mainly owned by unionists, but used by Confederates. Loyal U.S.A. citizens were allowed to remove salt enough for their own needs on taking oath none of it would be used to benefit the Confederacy.”

James White wept, saying, “I am ruined for the Union.”

But, while cannon balls were driven into the ground to staunch the flow of salt water at the White’s Goose Creek Salt Furnace and other White family wells, these locations could eventually be re-opened. The Garrards, on the other hand, with their overall leaning toward the Confederacy, had their well-heads blown up, rendering them permanently useless. Needless to say, this increased and broadened the enmity between the two families.

But there was always something creating havoc between them anyway. For example, in 1859, when my great-great-grandfather John E. White went up to Owsley County and eloped at the age of twenty-one with Elizabeth Garrard Brawner, Col. Daniel Garrard’s seventeen-year-old granddaughter, all hell broke loose. The couple had to ride hard by horseback one hundred twenty-five miles, it’s said, stopping only for meals and a change of horses. Then they were married in Tazwell, Tennessee, before they could be stopped.

As dramatic as all of this sounds, however, and Grandpa John Ed, as he was called, was a pretty dramatic guy, already known for his hot temper and his love of whiskey, not to mention his reputed murder two years earlier of a Garrard-supported jailor, none of these stories held a candle to the one I came across and then couldn’t follow up on. According to John Ed Pearce in Days of Darkness: the Feuds of Eastern Kentucky:

“…On March 1, 1859, Dillon (or Dillion) Hollin was born to a mulatto woman of that name. Everyone knew, and the principals did not deny, that John Ed [White] was the father. Their back-door romance had been going on for some time, and John Ed wanted to marry her, but the Whites begged, threatened, and raised so much trouble that John Ed gave up the idea, though he admitted paternity and supported Dillion.”

I had originally heard about Dillon Taylor White Hollin from a distant cousin, who had done a great deal of tracking of the White and Garrard genealogical information. When I responded with some excitement, he was quick to suggest that the term “mulatto” could mean any mixture of blood lines.

“Oh, no,” I corrected him. “According to the dictionary, mulatto only means half Black, half White.”

“But Dillon’s granddaughter has blond hair and blue eyes,” he countered.

“Well, she may have blond hair and blue eyes,” I wrote back, “but her Granddad was part Black, just the same.”

To be continued...

Why I Blog

2011-11-17T07:00:00.002-06:00

"The people must know before they can act, and there's no educator to compare with the press."

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist and anti-lynching activist (1862-1931)

Terrorism Is As Terrorism Does

2011-11-15T07:00:00.032-06:00

The following article on the "nativist movement" that originally appeared, as far as I know, at Reader Supported News, was written by James Ridgeway, one of the writers I respect most in the world today. The more I think about it, the more important I think it is. Especially as the Occupy movement has developed in recent months, which must, I would assume, make nativists and others who are already agitated, more nervous (and thus more dangerous) than ever.

It is quite interesting, I think, to scan the comments after Ridgeway's piece and notice the range of commentators outside (and sometimes far outside) the box. Which is one of the reasons I'm re-posting it.

Sometimes, I get tired of scaring myself and others. I don't think it's always effective in moving people in the direction we need to be going. Nevertheless, it often seems to me that not to be scared at this juncture is to risk putting oneself in mortal danger. So what are we supposed to do?

Read on, that's what.

"The Threat of America's Nativist Far Right"
by James Ridgeway

As emerging reports would have it, Kevin William Harpham, 36, who is accused of setting a bomb to go off at the Martin Luther King Jr Day parade in Spokane, Washington, was yet another "lone wolf" terrorist, acting at his own behest and on his own behalf. Even groups on the racist, radical far right that so clearly inspired him are rushing to disown and denounce the indicted man. Regardless of whether he was a "member" of an organised group, there can yet be no doubt that Harpham saw himself as part of a movement – one that has an especially broad reach in the age of Obama, and roots as deep as American culture itself.

The vision of a black president has given the racist far right one of its biggest boosts since the civil rights era of the 1960s. Figures toted up by the Southern Poverty Law Center suggest a dramatic rise in the numbers of organized groups: their numbers grew by 40% from 2008 to 2009, and an additional 22% from 2009 to 2010, bringing the total to 2,145 groups. It's difficult to know precisely what these numbers mean, since these groups are constantly changing names, dissolving, reforming or springing up, and few of them maintain public membership rolls. What is nonetheless clear is that a strong far right movement has re-emerged, and what unites it is the age-old American doctrine of nativism, born out of fear of some dark outsider sneaking in to steal the white man's homeland and his hegemony.

Nativist thinkers are spread all over the map, but the strongest current comes in the form of the Sovereign Citizen movement, or what used to be called the Posse Comitatus and before the posse, the Silver Shirts. For the old Posse adherents and their contemporary progeny, the white Aryan man is the only true "sovereign" over his land and his life. White women serve beneath him; black and brown "mud people" are menials worthy only of disdain; and Jews (who do not qualify as white) are usually behind it all, running the economic and financial systems through a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. They do not admit to being subject to the laws and dicates of the US government; they eschew social security, cars and drivers' licences, and won't pay taxes.

For the true sovereign, the sheriff is the highest legitimate law enforcement official in the land, and a jury of his (white male) peers the only legitimate government body. These beliefs are underpinned by the religion of Christian Identity, which claim white sovereigns are the direct descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, who on their long trek out of the Middle East made their way up through Scotland and Ireland over to the United States.

Different facets of the nativist movement have enjoyed periodic heydeys in 20th-century America – first in the 1910s and 20s, when anti-immigrant sentiments were rife and membership in the Ku Klux Klan reached more than 2m. In the 1930s and 1940s, they penetrated the edges of the political mainstream through figures like Father Charles Coughlin, who was the Glenn Beck of his day. A Catholic priest and radio personality, Coughlin was at once enormously popular and virulently antisemitic and anti-New Deal. His ally Gerald LK Smith, leader of the Share Our Wealth campaign, was evocative of some of today's more extreme Tea Party candidates.

The Klans and related groups had another resurgence in response to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In the 1980s, groups like the Posse, which drew together white supremacy and Christian Identity with anti-government "patriot" sentiments, found particularly fertile ground for recruitment among dispossessed Midwestern farmers. While figures like David Duke ran for political office, others, like the violent group The Order, carried out bombings, bank robberies and murders, and engaged in blazing shootouts with federal agents, all in service of their plan to build a white homeland.

After the Oklahoma City bombing, with its perpetrators' ties to the militia movement (and, most likely, to other far right groups as well), the movement tended to dig in further underground. Just as Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were deemed to be acting alone, the periodic bursts of far right violence – whether they be an attempted bombing, the murder of an abortion doctor, attacks on undocumented immigrants or on Muslims, or the shooting of a congresswoman – are attributed to "lone wolves" rather than to organised plots by any particular group. Yet the distinction belies the reality of a movement that has long encouraged its adherents to act in "leaderless resistance" cells or carry out one-man guerrilla attacks (and become celebrated as "Phineas Priests", named for the Bible story of a man who executed an interracial couple).

The alleged MLK Day parade bomber, Kevin William Harpham, may or may not have consider himself a lone wolf if, as he is accused, he put together a backpack bomb laden with shrapnel dipped in rat poison to induce bleeding and placed it on the route of the parade. But there can be little doubt as to where his inspiration came from. Bill Morlin, formerly a reporter for the Spokane Spokesman-Review and now an independent investigator, traced Harpham's background in a comprehensive report for the publication Hatewatch. In the military, Harpham was stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington, home base for 320 far right wingers. He was once a member of the racist far right National Alliance, and had left various postings on extremist websites suggesting he had had enough of the "international Jewish conspiracy", which, among other things, he held responsible for 9/11.

Leonard Zeskind, a leading expert on the radical far right and author, says that today, "the main tendency of organisations is mainstreaming … The movement imperative is towards the Tea Parties, running for office, anti-immigrant mongering – not roadside bombs." None of this, of course, prevents people from being "recruited" to their ideas and choosing to act on them. One far right leader said much the same in an interview following the attempted bombing in Spokane. "There are many aspects to the white supremacist movement," Shaun Winkler, Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the KKK in Idaho, told a local television station. "There are those of us that are on the political side, and there are those of us that are revolutionary. It sounds as if this individual was on the revolutionary end rather than the political. And there are a lot of lone wolves out there. People that are sympathetic to us, but people that we don't know."

Historically, federal law enforcement has given little credence to the power of the nativist current in American society, and has paid relatively little attention to the activities of nativist groups. That has perhaps changed since the election of Barack Obama, whose presidency has so focused and emboldened the racist far right. Yet, despite their obvious threat, there are no competitors to Peter King, holding congressional hearings on the recruitment of homegrown jihadist terrorists.
___________________________________________________
NOTE: Ridgeway has excellent links in his article, but I couldn't for the life of me seem to transfer them into this re-post, so I strongly recommend, if you're interested, that you visit the original on Reader Supported News and check out his corroborating material.

Lucky Peterson: "Is It Because I'm Black?"

2011-11-13T07:00:00.001-06:00

The Fatal Invention of "Race"

2011-11-11T08:24:00.010-06:00

Northwestern Law School professor and author Dorothy Roberts was recently interviewed by Tavis Smiley about her new book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Recreate Race in the Twenty-First Century. I haven't read it as yet, but it sounds interesting, indeed, while certainly controversial.

Francis L. Holland, Esq. suggests in his review of the book on Amazon.com:

There's a new book out in which author Dorothy Roberts explains that what we have called "race" for hundreds of years is, in actuality, not a biological reality. "Race" is also a name that has been used to refer to social, political and cultural realities.

The Root says:

"According to Dorothy Roberts, author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century, it's because, despite centuries of efforts to treat race as if it's a biological category, it is no more than social construction -- created to oppress people -- that changes with place, time and perspective."

Here's the disappointing part of Ms. Roberts' perspective, as displayed in The Root's interview with Dorothy Roberts: She says that although "race" doesn't exist as a biological reality, we can continue to use the word "race" to refer to political, social, economic and cultural realities, and all without confusing anyone about the difference between "race" and "race."

Can we also continue to use the word "bi*ch" without confusing people between the biological meaning (female dog) and the social construction (woman who is detestable)? Should we even try to continue to use one word to mean two different but inherently intertwined things? Where is the value of maintaining the confusion?

Here is an excerpt from The Root's discussion with Dorothy Roberts:

The Root: How do we talk about the very real issues surrounding race today without perpetuating harmful misunderstandings about what race is?

Dorothy Roberts: "I don't think it's that confusing. Some people think there's a contradiction in saying that race is not a biological category but we have to pay attention to race. But race as a political system. We can make a clear distinction between accepting a false view of race as an inherent biological category written in our genes and race as a political system of governance that was invented to perpetuate racism."

The Root: So the fact that race was invented and has been perpetuated for reasons that we don't like doesn't mean we want to get rid of it or not talk about it anymore?

Dorothy Roberts: "Yes, not talking about it doesn't do anything to eradicate it. We know now that intending to be color-blind only leaves in place and allows to expand the institutional inequities that are based on race and continue to affect every aspect of people's lives in this country. Yes, even their health -- but it's affected by race because the political division of race affects institutions that treat people unequally, not because there is some natural genetic division among us."

In my view, to the contrary, using the word "race" in any context and for any purpose perpetuates the salience (prominence) of the biological concept, just like saying McDonald's in any context makes people want a McDonald's hamburger.

The trademark last name "McDonald," in the possessive sense of "McDonald's [hamburgers]" has come to be so connected with a particular restaurant chain that it has become impossible for people to think of "McDonald's" without thinking about a hamburger, fries and Coke.

Likewise, the word "race" has been used so often to refer to baseless biological nonsense, meant to isolate and marginalize Black people, that it has become impossible to use the word "race" in any context without people thinking of, for example, alleged genetic differences in IQ that are purportedly caused by or reflected in skin color. The word "race" is toxic, no matter WHAT you mean when you use it.

Author Dorothy Roberts' conclusion is disappointing, because she refuses to offer a new vocabulary that refers to the political system now called "race." In fact she asserts that no new vocabulary is needed. She says,

"We can make a clear distinction between accepting a false view of race as an inherent biological category written in our genes and race as a political system of governance that was invented to perpetuate racism."

What, I ask, is "clear" about using one word to mean two totally different but inherently interrelated things? This insistence that the word "race' is different from the word "race" reflects an unwillingness of Blacks and whites to linguistically be "out with the old and in with the new."

If "we can make a clear difference" between "race" and "race," then why do we need a book by Dorothy Roberts or anyone else to teach us what the "clear" difference is?

For example, there is a clear phonetic and written difference between the words "dog" and "cow," and everyone knows what the difference is. However, the difference between "dog" and "dog" depends upon the context in which the word is used. It can be a noun with several different possible meanings, and it can also be a verb, and so you have to rely on the context in which the word is used.

Whenever you have to rely on the context in which the word is used, and also consider who is using the word, in order to distinguish between one word with two meanings that are written the same way, then you have gone beyond the average American's ability to interpret the difference between two or more things that are inherently intertwined and spelled identically.

You might as well tell white people that they can use the "N" word, as long as they use it in the right way and not in the wrong way. Is there also a "clear" difference between what is "the right way" and what is the "wrong way" in this context?

The reality is that the "N" word is so burdened by its history and the present that it will NEVER, EVER be possible to use the "N" word without evoking all that is historically toxic in inter-color-group interactions. I think we've learned that there is no legitimate way to use the "N" word and the same is true of the word "race."

Let me offer some alternative ways of discussing political "race" that help to clear and clarify the air instead of perpetuating the mist and misunderstanding.

* "Race, as used by whites and Blacks, when referring to persons, is almost always used to mean "skin-color group." In virtually every conversation about "race", the alternative phrase "skin-color group" successfully says what is meant, without conjuring up centuries of stereotypes, biological, political and cultural offense and nonsense.

* Instead of calling someone a "racist", call them a "color-aroused antagonist." As soon as you begin to use this phrase, you will realize how much more useful it is. Everything that is said about skin color is color-aroused. Anyone who mentions skin color in an antagonistic way with respect to a skin color group is a "color-aroused antagonist" relative to that group.

* Consider this: In a legal context, a man who has been convicted of one rape is a "rapist." For some reason, we feel the need to plumb the depths of a human's mind to determine whether he is a "racist" or not. How many times does a person have to refer to skin color in an antagonistic way, with respect to a particular skin color group, before they can be called a "racist"? Were Geraldine Ferraro's comments in the 2008 election "racist." That could be endlessly debated.

But, did Geraldine Ferraro act as a color-aroused antagonist vis a vis Black people? If that seems like a hard question to answer, then ask yourself how many times a man needs to be convicted of "rape" before he can be called a "rapist"? He need be convicted of rape only one time to be a "rapist" and that is the answer to both questions.

Personally, I am not going to engage in any discussion about whether someone "is" a "racist." But if I hear them saying things that only a color-aroused antagonist would say, then we'll write about that at our blogs and get a discussion and political action in motion.

When anyone brings up matters of "race," we know there will be fight. The fight starts even between well-meaning people because those involved don't even know whether the others are referring to "race" or to "race," or to both "race" and "race" simultaneously.

A new vocabulary is needed but Dorothy Roberts told The Root that she will not be the author who offers the new vocabulary. She thinks that "race" and "race" are easily distinguished. I believe that "skin-color group" and the phrase "political, social, cultural and economic isolation and disenfranchisement based on color" teach people what "race" is by spelling it out, rather than hoping that they will someday figure it out.

After more than half a century in which people have not learned to distinguish between "race" and "race," I think we're better off just using different words and phrases that, without further explanation, nonetheless communicate precisely what we mean to say in a way that is easily understood by others.

This is precisely why I typically use the term "socially-constructed, political notion of 'race'" so much that you may often identify my repeat students by their tendency to use the same terminology. I don't agree hook, line and sinker with every point in Holland's analysis, but our points of departure are pretty miniscule compared to the greater issue of "race" versus "race." In fact, I like Holland's development of the term "color-aroused antagonist" so much that I'm going to start using it in lectures and watch what happens. I agree with him that this shines a fresh light on the topic which could help to force people who are comfortably numb to the real implications of racism in our -- or any -- society to take notice of what they are doing and thinking and how destructive their acts and thoughts truly are.

To the Prisoners, With Love

2011-11-05T22:09:00.006-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, Boxer and I went up to the Art and Craft Fair at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Boxer was incarcerated for twenty-eight and a half years in all, the first twenty at Angola, so we spent much of the day just hanging out with guys he's known for decades, guys we carry in our hearts, guys that can't leave when we do.

We didn't go to the last Fair, so it had been a year since we saw them. They wondered if we had moved on with our lives and left them behind, as so many others have.

"We went through some changes," I explained. "We split up for a minute, had some things we needed to work through on our own. But now we're back together and ready to reach out from the center again."

They were glad to see us. But some of them had gone through changes, too.

One, we were told, had died of cancer in a matter of months. One would get out in January and was counting the days like a walking calendar. One got out and had already returned.

"Whataya gonna do?" he shrugged with a grin. "It was a bitter pill, but ya gotta just keep goin', right?"

What he wasn't saying, but I heard loud and clear in the tone of his words was that the rapid return was actually a relief. It was complicated, being on the street. The economy sucks. There's no place for him in his family, if they're still around at all. He's not prepared to get or hold a job. He's not used to making even the smallest decisions. And nobody understood him in the world outside of prison except the guys who'd already been there or were on their way back. He got tired of trying to figure it all out. As bad as prison is, it's now the only place he can really exhale. That's the dirty little secret of nearly all recidivists. And nobody knows it better than the guards and the administrators who pay their rent making sure things stay just the way they are.

One guy looked, if possible, even better and stronger and "happier" than he did a year ago. He's doing natural life and trying to get released on a technicality. I talked with his mother for a while and she told me she's doing the time with him. For more than thirty years -- and he's not an old man -- she's been visiting and speaking with him on the phone, encouraging and loving him with the singular focus only a mother can muster. But it takes its toll on her physically, psychologically and emotionally. And she worries about who's gonna be there for him, if something should happen to her.

Her husband (his father) died last winter and the prison administrators not only let him visit his father on his hospital deathbed, but turned around two weeks later and let him leave again for the funeral. He went from the church to the cemetary and on to the house for lunch with all the other mourners, only returning to the prison that evening. Yet he remains a "danger to society."

Another guy we stopped to talk with -- who's also doing natural life -- seemed distracted. He might be slipping away to that place in his head where one goes to give up hoping. But we were moving so fast, I barely caught it until later.

Another lifer, though, -- I'll call him "Danny" -- got my attention big time and follows me around like a phantom. I met him in the spring of 2010 when Boxer first introduced us. We bought a powerful painting from him at the time, which we subsequently hung in our bedroom. And he later gave us a painting which I allowed my sociology club at school to auction off to raise funds for their radical activities. He liked that.

But from what I could gather two weeks ago, he doesn't like much else. He's been down more than thirty years, too, with the rest of his life stretching out in front of him like a long dark tunnel. He appeared before the Board of Pardons and Paroles three years ago and was told to wait seven years before asking again for his freedom. I cannot begin to imagine what possible use seven more years of incarceration could be after already doing thirty. It is obviously an arbitrary and subjective number. It's not based on odds after all this time. What good does it do society to continue to keep him imprisoned? Yet the Board could and did -- quite casually, I'm sure -- relegate him to seven more years as if this was a largely meaningless decision. ("Do you want fries with that?")

His eyes are dull. His facial expression flat. His voice is a monotone. And despite the presence of his grandchildren and his son's mother, the fatigue in his body language related to more than just the fact that he had gotten little sleep the night before in order to prepare for the Fair.

When all the others left, we talked like old friends.

"Don't give up," I said helplessly. "If Boxer and I could survive where we've been and find each other, anything can happen."

"I know," he responded. "You do believe in God, right? I didn't used to pray, but I do now..."

His voice trailed off.

"I do believe in a Force bigger than me," I agreed. "But we have to do the footwork..."

The words came out of my mouth, even while I was kicking myself in the ass in my mind for saying them. What "footwork" could I be referring to when the Board gave him "more time" for no reason, when the plan doesn't include any other instructions or any other benchmarks to strive for? Just do the time and maybe -- maybe -- then we'll let you out. Or not. And you won't know which till the time comes.

Not much to cling to.

On the way home, it poured. Boxer and I don't like to be on the road in the rain and it was not only rainy, but dark. Then I took a wrong turn in Baton Rouge and spent part of the trip afraid we were going to wind up driving around the city endlessly. By the time we arrived at our place, I felt inside like Danny's face had looked. Played out. Frustrated. A little disgusted by life. And fresh out of any ideas about what to do about anything.

As the days slipped by since then, I've had to teach and grade papers, fulfill obligations and meet responsibilities, do what I can to keep the students I mentor focused on social change in meaningful ways, and somehow avoid catching the varied collection of sicknesses that run rampant through the campus during and after midterm exams. Still, I've been thinking about the prisoners, as I so often do. Especially Danny.

I know I haven't been to prison. I only spent one night in jail ever. It was over so fast, I hesitate even to mention it. But I've been talking with and listening to and writing and visiting and reading about and watching movies about and thinking about prison and prisoners for forty years and if it's possible to "get it" without being there, I'm pretty sure I do. I have met some men and women (and heard about others) that spent lots of years behind bars and yet not only survived the process, but did so with dignity and grace. And there are some commonalities. Those are the ideas I'm going to write about in this post.

If you know someone in prison you think would want to read this, please send it inside. I used to write for a newspaper that went from hand to hand inside the walls. We were unfailingly mesmerized at how a piece of news could fly from one prison to another coast to coast with the efficiency of radar, smoke signals, and the telegraph combined. The prisoners often knew things before the mainstream press. So please pass this on.

I'm not suggesting I have some magic answer. I own no pixie dust. Nor do I purport to. But I love prisoners with an inexplicable constancy. And I long to make their time easier, to the extent that it is possible.

There are circumstances inside (just as there are circumstances outside the walls) that are so painful and so debilitating, they make life almost impossible to bear. As much as I would like to mitigate those circumstances, I know the limitations of any set of ideas. Even so, I have watched human beings survive circumstances beyond their own capacity for doing so. And as a person who has been beaten and beaten up, molested and tortured as a child, raped on multiple occasions as an adult, who has survived the suicide of my father and a husband and the murder of my son, all while trapped in the prison of my own madness because of what I had experienced, I know there is life after weird.

As a Haitian street kid said to me over the phone one day, "Where there is life, there is hope." And anyone who can read these words is alive.

I can't whisk you out of prison over the wall, out of the cell, away from the troubles of your life, but I can tell you what I've learned. If it sounds crazy, remember how I learned it. And keep in mind that others have independently arrived at some of the same conclusions.

Albert Woodfox, for example -- one of the Angola 3 -- tells me every time we visit that if he could go back, knowing what he knows now, after spending forty years in solitary confinement because he wouldn't disavow his Black Panther principles, he wouldn't change a thing because he likes the man he's become through his experiences.

In Killing Time (the story of John Thompson, who did eighteen years on death row for a crime he did not commit), the authors recount the statement of Thomas Lee Ward, a man who was executed shortly after Thompson arrived at Angola:

"In the end, you know, it don't make no difference. Death is comin' and none of us is gonna run fast enough. It's not this cell that keeps me from runnin' either. None of them guards is gonna escape it. Hell, lookin' at some of those fat crackers, I might live longer than they do. It's somethin' else. And the question you gotta ask yourself is: if it's somethin' outside of this cell that controls life or death, then how are you gonna act inside this cell? Death row is a beautiful thing. We got no distractions. We got our lives and our deaths and that's all. And in between, we gotta figure it all out."

In his book, From the Bottom of the Heap, Robert King, also one of the Angola 3, wrote:

"During my twenty-nine years of solitary...I lived out the conclusion that the Black Panther Party's assessment of America...[that power actually does belong to the people and we are empowered en masse to direct or redirect our own course], was correct. Without the Party's appraisal and my own total acceptance of this appraisal, I could not have survived intact those twenty-nine years. I had been given a truth to live by, a truth to cling to...[T]his truth has sustained me. I made a vow to myself that no matter what, I would do my best to live out this truth, even in solitary confinement. I told myself that no matter where one resided in America -- whether in minimum custody (society) or maximum security custody (prison) -- the struggle must continue."

And the struggle is not just the struggle to be free or to free others. The struggle is to become, as Woodfox reminds us, the person we really want to be in a world full of people who are only being what they are told they must or should be.

e.e. cummings wrote: "To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting." He didn't mention prison, but whether we are in a physical prison or "just" a social prison or even a prison inside ourselves (as I was for the first six decades of my life), while that makes it harder to know who we are so we can try to be our true Selves, it does not let us off the hook. And the fight goes on, cummings says, until the day we die.

So how do we fight this fight? How do we face the obstacles before us? How do we stand at the walls that block our progress and not despair?

What Robert King clung to for twenty-nine years in the hole was a perspective that still informs his choices to this moment, a decade after his release. The perspective had to do with the "bigger picture." We can choose to remember that, no matter where we are, we are, in fact, members of the human race and, as such, are playing our parts to make the world a better -- or worse -- place because of our presence in it. We decide.

Albert Woodfox will go without to help other prisoners in need. He teaches men in other cells on his tier to read. He shares books and leads revolutionary discussions. And he is not a saint. He is a person who chooses to live the Black Panther Party principle that our communities (wherever they are) are our responsibility; that each and all of us can use our time and our lives to leave a legacy of love.

Che Guevara wrote: "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality... We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force." That this can be done anywhere and in myriad ways is common knowledge. We have all felt it in our lives, sometimes at most unexpected moments. And it is precisely that knowledge that makes it possible for us to access this truth and this reality and put it into action in our own lives. The result can not only keep one alive, but actually keep one shining.

When my son (himself the leader of a Black street gang) was murdered just short of his 23rd birthday for trying to stop other gangbangers from selling drugs to kids, I could have self-destructed. He was my boy, my revolutionary clone. And the photo of his dead face (since they would not let me see his body) was an agonizing reality I still cannot always get my brain around. Yet I stared down my rage and my anguish with the statement: "This is not the worst thing that ever happened to a human being on the face of the Earth."

I have, as I outlined above, been through a number of things. Yet, I can at any given moment tick off rapidly a long list of situations happening even as I write that I would rate as much, much worse than anything I have ever had to face. Knowing that others have faced and survived so much themselves gives me hope that I will continue to find within me all the resources I need to keep my sense of perspective so I do not lose my way.

Last night, I had the joy of sharing an evening with friends who are committed to work for social change. One of them told a story about poverty-stricken people in the mountains of Nepal who, though they have no access to electricity or any of the other things we think we cannot live without, though they live out their lives in isolation from even the middle class urban citizens of their own country, nevertheless they say of the revolution they wage, "Even if we do not succeed, we must do this for the world."

These ideas remind us that we -- like the Nepalese revolutionaries -- are inescapably connected to all life and all other humans (even the ones we don't like very much) and cannot be disconnected by anyone or anything regardless of indications to the contrary. Further, they also remind us that we are in control of our perspective. It was prisoners in a maximum security women's penitentiary in South Florida that taught me that how I think about things creates my belief system; that I then act in given ways because of what I believe to be true; and that I become the person who develops as a direct result of those actions. When the members of the Angola 3 focus their thoughts on the ongoing struggle against injustice and for unity, their belief in those principles manifests itself as actions which have then turned them into role models for all the rest of us.

Martial arts practicianers tell their acolytes, "Don't seek to break the brick. Look beyond the brick. Then put your hand where you are looking. When your hand reaches the spot you are looking at, the brick will have been broken."

One of the reasons this is true is that what we plant grows. If we plant beans, beans grow. If we plant corn, corn grows. I'm not suggesting that nothing bad ever happens to good people. Nor am I suggesting that once we plant mayhem, we can never plant anything else. But I am working on a daily basis these days not to plant anything I don't want to have growing in my life.

In the past, I made some less than stellar decisions, but today, I know better. So I get no excuses. Fire will cook my dinner or my gizzard and it has no feelings one way or the other about either. Consequently, it's on me to sow what I want to reap.

I used to point at all the miseries of my life and tell myself that I couldn't do any better than I was doing because of them. I have changed my perspective and, while it's not foolproof, I am more free of craziness in my life than I've ever been. As a matter of fact, I'm positively dazzled on occasion at how things unfold in ways I could not possibly have engineered and I have become convinced that everything -- small and large -- in my life is somehow connected to everything else. I now believe that the smallest seed I plant can pop up as the most unexpectedly lovely flower. And conversely, I believe that if I do something that my gut told me not to do, it may not only produce something I don't want, but it may further stop something good from coming to me and I will never even know what I missed. Does all this sound like mumbo-jumbo? Maybe. Does it seem to be working anyway? Yeah.

I realize that prisoners can and do argue that prison guards, admininistrators, judges, prosecuting attorneys, other prisoners, and so on have tremendous power over their lives, leaving them helpless and hopeless. If you read the litany of my life events again, you know I'm familiar with what helpless and hopeless feels like. Even as an adult, when the internal revenue service demanded $7500 they swore I owed them and didn't have, when a very fancy house I co-owned was destroyed and abandoned (unbeknownst to me) and I was left holding the bag a week before foreclosure, when my husband du jour had his hands around my neck in a motel room in a city where I knew no one, or when I was writhing in agony on the floor of a hospital emergency room with a shot-out gall bladder and no health insurance, I felt helpless and hopeless, but I am still here and if you're reading this, you are, somehow, still here, as well.

So what are you going to do with the rest of your life? What if you have to live it where you are?

I have diabetes. It doesn't run in my family. I wasn't overweight when I crossed the line. I was eating pretty well and was active in my life style. Yet, I came down with a progressive and terminal illness that constrains my life, restricts my choices in the most basic ways, requires constant consideration, and will eventually kill me (if something else doesn't get me first). Am I going quietly into that good night (as Dylan Thomas wrote)? Not by a long shot. I'm gonna go down swinging.

When the illusion that I am lost and alone wells up around me, one of the techniques I use is acknowledging what I'm grateful for. On a good day, I'm grateful for lots of stuff. On a more problematic day (like the day a few months ago when I was informed on a Thursday that I would be having half my thyroid removed surgically the following Tuesday), I had to get a bit more creative with it. One of the things I came up with that day to be grateful for was that if I died on the operating table or learned I had cancer (which they told me was a possibility), I felt as if all the inner turmoil I needed to resolve from my screwed up childhood had been resolved. See what I mean?

Some days, the best I can do is to be grateful that I didn't walk into a post office and start shooting people. Some days, I'm incredibly grateful that the rain has finally stopped. Or that I got a decent night's sleep the night before. Or that I woke up at all, considering my past. But the more I focus on what is good in my world, the more I see to focus on and the more unfolds -- again quite magically in some cases -- that I'm pleased with and sometimes even amazed by.

Another technique some (and I) have used, is writing and repeating affirmations. For a period of five years earlier in my life, I wrote an affirmation every morning in response to whatever was going on or what I was dealing with at that moment. Unfortunately, a lot of folks seem to think affirmations are sort of a grandiose form of ignoring reality. For example, they might go around repeating over and over: "I'm incredibly, wonderfully healthy" when they're obviously on their last legs. That's not an affirmation. That's denial. An affirmation in the case just mentioned might be (and there could be thousands of them): "Everything I need to be healthy is on its way to me right now." In other words, an affirmation is a statement that does not ignore reality, but instead places that reality in the context of a greater reality. So, when my son died, I wrote as my affirmation for that day, "Every ending is a beautiful new beginning."

Last spring, when I was exhausted pretty much twenty-four/seven because I was way, way overbooked and couldn't cut back for the moment, my diabetes started acting up and the news about the thyroid surgery hit me harder than it might otherwise have done. I reminded myself about all the stuff I've just written in this blog post, hoping to get some peace. But I didn't. I tried telling myself to "trust the process", but I didn't. So I finally said to the Universe/Creative Life Force/Yahweh/God/Goddess/Higher Self/Higher Power or whatever I was calling it that day, "Please. Give me the grace to trust the process." And I got it. Did it make my diabetes stop what it was doing or grade my papers or make the surgery unnecessary? Nope. But I got a certain calm that let me walk through it all to the other side.

While I was writing this, Albert Woodfox called and I told him what I was writing about. I hope he isn't put off by the "New Age" quality some might see in it. But I'm, if anything, a pragmatic soul. I believe that whatever it is that has made it possible for him to survive forty years in the hole is a force worth believing in. We compare notes -- Albert and Boxer and I and whoever else we come across in our process of evolution -- and holding hearts, if not always hands, we reach into the future of the human race together, confident in the belief that change (personal or social), however slow, is constant. Look for it. Work for it. Celebrate it. And know when you do that you are at that moment One with every other person on the planet who looks for and works for and celebrates it, too.
________________________________________________________
NOTE: The graphic above is a lithograph by Julius T. Bloch entitled Prisoner, 1930's.

Lil' Bobby Hutton

2011-10-25T08:38:00.001-05:00

This semester, I'm teaching a Racial and Ethnic Relations class, which I present more or less as a course in White Supremacy 101. Last week, I showed "Passin' It On," the story of Dhoruba bin Wahad, a Black Panther Party member who was targeted by the criminal justice system and spent nineteen years in a cell until he was finally acquitted and released. Reading the startled reactions written by my students after watching the film, I was caused to think about another Black Panther: Lil' Bobby Hutton.

Bobby was the first recruited member of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, joining in December of 1966 at the age of sixteen. Sixteen months later, two days after Martin Luther King, Jr., was gunned down by a police officer in Memphis, Tennessee, the Oakland, California, police department attacked the BPP office and shot Lil' Bobby more than twelve times when he walked out into the street in his underwear so they would know he was unarmed. Long live Lil' Bobby Hutton and all people who unite to fight those who carry on the traditions and practices of White Supremacy.

"We called ourselves the children of Malcolm"

2011-10-18T08:32:00.004-05:00

In honor of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which celebrates its 45th year this month; in remembrance of all the brothers and sisters (Black and White) who struggled, suffered and died to advance the goals and aspirations of the Party; and in solidarity with those brothers and sisters (Black and White) who remain in the belly of the beast in prisons and jails throughout the not-just, not-legal system in the United States because of their political beliefs and most particularly Albert "Shaka" "Cinque" Woodfox and Herman "Hooks" Wallace who have spent their last forty years in solitary confinement, I am posting this recent interview with Billy X, one of the earliest organizers for the Black Panther Party. Learn more here or here.

White Is Right...?

2011-10-11T18:46:00.003-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I saw an article about another White Southerner with a really bad case of "Let-Me-Show-My-Ass-In-Public-Over-My-So-Called-White-Heritage." Apparently, Annie Chambers Caddell feels so strongly about her "White heritage" she has to hang a big Confederate flag in front of her house in a -- get this -- Black neighborhood in Summerville, South Carolina.

Yeah.

And it gets weirder than that.

She has a bunch of drawings on her wall of famous Black men, including among others, Tupac Shakur and Barack Obama (one can only wonder how she made her list of who to...er...hang). And she told a British journalist that she sees no contradiction in the fact that she hung both the pictures and the flag.

I can't imagine why she moved into a Black neighborhood last year with her White-is-right perspective. Maybe somebody left her the house in a will. Maybe she just couldn't wait any longer for her fifteen minutes of fame so she hung the flag a month after she got there. Maybe she's crazy as a bedbug.

But one thing I know for sure: she uses the words "White heritage" without the foggiest clue what they mean. Because if she thought about it, she'd think again.

In his essay entitled "Failing to See", Harlon Dalton tells us that "ethnicity is the bearer of culture," but that Whiteness isn't an ethnicity. It's just a "race" -- what I call "the socially-constructed, political notion of race." Unlike an ethnicity, it's not linked to location or language or tradition. But it's damned sure historical and that's what I want to focus on in this post.

Annie Caddell says with a wistful note in her voice that she wishes she could go back and see what it was really like back in the day when her Southern heritage was functioning the way it was described to her as a child. Now, I don't know exactly what she means by that, of course, but I know the history of "White" people.

Let's start with old Chris Columbus, shall we? I mean, since yesterday was "Columbus Day" and all, shouldn't we talk about who he was, even though, of course, he never really touched the soil of what is now "America" and died convinced he'd landed in India rather than the Caribbean Islands?

According to his ship's log (as copied by Bartholomew Las Casas, one of his companions), on his first voyage, Chris kidnapped a dozen or so natives to take back to Spain as proof that he needed to return -- with 1,200 to 1,500 soldiers, cannons, crossbows, guns, cavalry and attack dogs. Obviously, a diplomatic mission.

In 1493, they arrived in what is today Haiti, demanding food, gold, cotton and anything else the natives had. To make sure the natives cooperated, Chris and his buddies -- all stand-up examples of White heritage -- would cut off the ears or noses of those who resisted, sending them back to their people as a warning. But it doesn't stop there.

Chris liked to reward his merry band with native women to rape. Nine and ten-year-olds were particularly popular (and this is according to the ship's log, remember). Overall and over time, he was personally responsible for sending about five thousand indigenous Caribbeans back to Europe as slaves. Wotta guy. Certainly the kind of man we'd want to celebrate every year with a federal holiday and teach our children commemorative poems about.

And lest we think that the natives were just "primitives" who don't warrant our sympathy (after all, if Christopher Columbus hadn't done it, somebody White would have, right?), consider that Tiwanaku, Bolivia, had 115,000 residents in 1000 A.D., a population Paris wouldn't reach for another five hundred years. In fact, when Columbus landed in the "New World," there were 25 million people living in Mexico and only 10 million in Spain and Portugal combined, but within a few years of the arrival of the White man, 95% of the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere was dead. Beginning to get my drift?

By the mid-1700's, when Montesquieu wrote The Spirit of the Laws (the book that laid the groundwork for our august -- and White Supremacist -- legal system), he said of the Africans that Europe so wanted to exploit to accumulate capital: "It is hardly to be believed that God, who is a wise being, should place a soul...in such a black, ugly body...It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men."

It was this mindset, in fact, that caused Thomas Jefferson to write a few decades later, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever...the Almighty has no attributes which can take sides with us [slaveholders] in such a contest." Yet those who tout their "White heritage" invariably wrap their racist ideology in an American (or Confederate) flag while singing songs about having God on their side. And in truth, they may not be wrong. Their God may be on their side. After all, the Baptist church in the U.S. South held more than 125,000 slaves which they rented out to make money and the Catholic church held in bondage far more than that.

It was "Christian" nations, remember, that established empires on the back of the slave trade -- an enterprise responsible for the deaths of an estimated thirty million Africans (more than twice the number of deaths attributed to Adolph Hitler who causes shudders at every mention of his name, except among those most committed to White Supremacy). In all fairness to the principles and practices of Christianity, however, I would agree with Frederick Douglass when he wrote: "[B]etween the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference -- so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt and wicked...I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity."

"I am filled with unutterable loathing," he continues, "when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies which everywhere surround me...The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings...meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning to show me the way of life and the path of salvation."

And it is not vastly different today. Church-goers listen to sermons about loving their fellow humans as if people of color are not human, yet continue to let the criminal not-just, not-legal system brutalize men and women of color who, it is reasoned, must have done something wrong or they wouldn't be arrested/arraigned/imprisoned/beaten/or shot forty times by cops. The fact that 500 Black men -- and only 8 White men -- were arrested in New Orleans in 2009 doesn't even raise most White folks' eyebrows. They're busy pretending to be asleep and have drunk the kool-aid of their own "superiority" so long ago now that they honestly claim to be "beyond racism."

Despite the fact that the Ku Klux Klan has used the Christian symbol of the cross to terrify Black citizens of this country for more than one hundred years, I've never heard of a single incident where a Christian has protested this use. When Martin Luther King, Jr., went to jail in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, White Christian ministers castigated him for bringing unrest and being a bad example until King asked them why they weren't there with him fighting injustice against their fellow Christians. Subsequently, King referred to Sunday mornings as the most segregated hour in America.

Well-meaning White people who profess Chrisitianity claim not to be racist, but Jane Elliott reminds us that "it's not the intent; it's the impact." And I would suggest, with the late Eldridge Cleaver, that "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

Far too many White people in the United States in 2011 ignore or even laugh at racist jokes, minimize what Blacks tell us about their experience of life, always think we got the job because we deserved it, always suspect Blacks got hired because somebody had to hire them, walk on eggshells around racist family members so as not to "offend" them, date and marry racists as if such an attitude is not really that big a problem, and don't reach out to make a real difference because we're too busy, too uncomfortable, too unclear about what to do, too few, and too...racist?

The fact is that White people in America still have the power, as well as the power to hold onto it. And typical of the violence they used to take over the world, they're quick to use it still not only to maim or kill, but to intimidate and terrify. And the Confederate flag stands for the addle-pated idea that White is right and should be supreme; that holding people of color in bondage is something to be remembered fondly; that an attempt was once made to shatter this nation; and that those who made the attempt were whipped on the field of battle by the Black men they had brutalized. Is that something to be proud of or celebrate, Annie? I wouldn't think so.

Rest in Peace, Troy Anthony Davis

2011-09-22T07:14:00.001-05:00

The United States has shamed itself once again. I am sad beyond words. My heart goes out to his family and to all who suffer in the belly of the beast -- guilty or innocent. We will never stop fighting for you.

This is how we do it in New Orleans.

Will Georgia Lynch Another Innocent Black Man Today?

2011-09-21T08:09:00.003-05:00

The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles has ruled that Troy Davis will die at 7:00 p.m. tonight. Davis was convicted of the shooting death of a police officer twenty-two years ago. I blogged about the case yesterday and the media is blazing with discussion on the issues involved. As I go through my day today, I will be mulling over some questions:

1. How many innocent Black men do you suppose have been gunned down in cold blood by the police in this country over the past twenty-two years without it even being considered a crime?

2. The family says they need closure in the death of their loved one. Wouldn't "closure" include knowing that the actual murderer was held accountable, rather than that he walks around free -- bragging about getting away with killing a police officer -- while an innocent man is sacrified?

3. Doesn't Chatham County District Attorney Larry Chisolm (phone number: 912-652-7308) realize that, since he can personally intervene to save Troy Davis' life -- or not -- public attention to this case and how it's handled will make it political suicide for him to let Davis die?

4. How long are we going to continue begging for relief from a rampant White Supremacist criminal not-just system before it dawns on us that it isn't going to change until we make it change?

5. What would it take to make it change?

Same Song, 4th Verse: Don't Kill Troy Davis

2011-09-18T16:22:00.005-05:00

Three years ago -- almost to the day -- I first heard and blogged about Troy Davis. And here he is, having been on death row for nineteen years, facing execution once more (for the fourth time) on Wednesday, while a horrified world watches. The Atlanta Journal Constitution says the case has been "perhaps the most extraordinary and controversial legal odyssey in the state’s history."

Despite the fact that most of the family of the police officer Davis was convicted of shooting to death twenty-two years ago still hold fast to the idea that he is, in fact, guilty, seven of the nine "witnesses" recanted their original testimony in 2003. One of the remaining "witnesses" is, unsurprisingly, a guy who is said to have confessed to his family and friends that he was the one who actually committed the murder. These folks have come forward and signed sworn statements, which would seem to make a difference in the state's commitment to kill Troy Davis, but such is not the case.
On Thursday, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles received a petition signed by more than 600,000 people pleading for Davis' life while protests and demonstrations of all kinds are occurring all over the world. Besides Amnesty International and the usual batch of death penalty detractors like Color of Change, a wide-ranging host of other important Davis supporters include former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict XVI, former Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Norman Fletcher, former FBI Director William Sessions, the Dalai Lama, and sixties radical Angela Davis.

The Pardon and Parole Board, which has the ability to commute Troy Davis' sentence to life in prison, has agreed to hold a hearing Monday to consider whether or not to stop the execution based on the new information. Even three of the jurors who originally voted to sentence Davis to death want to testify at the hearing that they now think Davis should be spared, saying that if they had known what is now known about the case, they never would have felt able to convict Davis "beyond a shadow of doubt," and would most certainly not have recommended the death penalty.

One can only imagine what must be going through Troy Davis' mind tonight as he prepares himself emotionally and psychologically for what may -- or may not -- happen at tomorrow's hearing. Wednesday is right around the corner. If an innocent person can be executed by the authorities in this country, then none of us is safe.

____________________________________________________________
NOTE: For more insights into the Troy Davis case and the White Supremacist system of "justice" in America, read what Brotha Wolf has to say on the matter.

UPDATE: According to the New York Times this morning, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles has ruled that Troy Anthony Davis should die tomorrow. So there we have it. I'm speechless.

Toshi Reagon: The Battle of the Broken Word

2011-09-11T13:27:00.000-05:00

When are we going to stop buying what we're told as the truth?

I'm just sayin'.

Brotha Wolf: The Deepest Pain

2011-09-10T18:30:00.009-05:00

Sometimes, when a Person of Color says or writes something I could never have adequately expressed because it is communicating something extraordinary from their perspective, I try to serve as a bridge between them and others. It's part of the responsibility I feel as a person who looks like me to work toward change in a White Supremacist world. Yesterday, I read a blog post by Brotha Wolf I felt that way about. He had been inspired to write it by another blogger's post and that is how the blogosphere works. Here's to modern technology. And here's to Big Man and Brotha Wolf.

Big Man, the brotha behind the popular blog Raving Black Lunatic, wrote an excellent piece about the thoughts and feelings about today’s world relating to how some people have been on top for so long mostly due to the destruction of other people without any large-scale repercussions while those who still benefit from it avoid any responsibility to try and do the right thing. It also describes the need for vengeance as a way to ease the pain and sadness, and questions why such destruction happened or was allowed to happen in the first place.

I think I know what he was getting at. For me, personally, they were thoughts that I constantly have every day and night, thoughts about the history and reality of white supremacy. Despite the fact there are some whites who do accept responsibility and are working hard to change things, most whites are still so blinded by a world they’ve created they see nothing wrong with it. It is a reality that keeps me either angry or depressed.

All People of Color, and some religious groups, have deep wounds within their hearts and souls, but I don’t think anyone has deeper wounds than people of African descent. The reason is that parts of their homelands were colonized for a long time by European powers. Their people were snatched away from the continent for the purpose of serving Europeans at the cost of their basic human rights, their cultures, their names, and even their souls. Eventually, slavery ended only to be replaced with more sophisticated systems of discrimination and oppression. Any form of change was suppressed by the powers-that-be while the power structures of European descendants grew larger and more profitable here in the West and abroad creating a world where only whiteness is important.

Even though we overcame perhaps the most powerful forms of oppression ever known to man thus far, we are still suffering inside. Sure, we joke around, party around, and smile every now and then, but it’s a mask to hide our true pain. It is buried deep within our souls until it somehow manages to surface in emotions so extreme it will scare anyone who witnesses them. It's the kind of pain that stems from ancient trauma beaten into our ancestors mixed with the pain of living in a world where you are not considered “normal” because of your skin and the denial and avoidance of society’s concerns for such matters.

Instead of being understood, blacks are more feared than ever. Society’s members, particularly those of the white persuasion, fear blacks. They are indifferent when we try to explain why we are hurting and are terrified when it explodes in full force. When it explodes, that is proof enough to sneer at the whole black race collectively. It is the perfect incentive to oppress in more creative ways. In a way, it’s a form of psychological torture to keep blacks perpetually angry and(or) depressed. It is a form of control to keep as many blacks as possible subservient and subordinate to whites while presenting a facade of a post-racial society. Whites can argue against any and all accusations of racism, making those who made those accusations look insane. Thus, blacks who were offended are told in one way or another that their hurt feelings don’t matter, and so, their pain continues unchecked.

Meanwhile, the world around you will try to make you feel ashamed of yourself even when you are innocent of any crime. It will tell you that you are less-than-human. It will lie to make you feel ashamed of being black. It will make you think there’s something wrong with being black. It will try – without remorse – to make you hate blackness and love whiteness.

Perhaps what brings on the most misery (in my opinion) is the fact that those of European descent have yet to experience any major or powerful form of punishment for their sins against humanity. For centuries, they’ve gained power, wealth, and privileges, and it’s hard to see any signs of the collapse of the white power and privilege structure. Even though nothing lasts forever, you see no end to white supremacy. You become frustrated, miserable, and you lose hope for any kind of change.

You may ask yourself why this happened. You may ask what the ultimate purpose was to allow a race of people to commit so many atrocities against another race based on skin color. You may even ask, “Why was I born with the most hated skin color in the white man’s world?”

Some who are more religious will question God: “Why didn’t you do anything when this began centuries ago? Why aren’t you making them (white people) pay? Why did you allow this world to be created where we are valued less? What is the meaning behind this? When will things change? God, are you a white supremacist too?”

The pain buried deep within black people around the world will never be fully understood. We – along with our fellow People of Color and non-Christians – are hurting. It is a pain we endure in our daily lives living in a world where whites “rule.” Most of us learn how to handle it in stride, but beneath our game faces we are secretly crying endless tears.

Reduced To Equality - Part 17

2011-09-07T22:00:00.004-05:00

This continues the posting of my book-length manuscript, Reduced to Equality: My Odyssey to Renounce Racial Privilege ~ and Find Myself. You may read the previously posted segments here.

2004 (cont'd)

Over the next year, I followed my intellectual curiosity from point to point as if I was rigorously and dispassionately researching some topic for a scholarly paper. But in truth, my burning desire to look at the reality of it all held me in its thrall, rather like being unable not to gawk at the scene of a bloody accident as you pass it on a highway. I started by learning about Kentucky.

I had known for decades that Kentucky was a slave state; that, in fact, it had expressly bred slaves like a product, but now I took a closer look at the mindset that would be required to do such a thing. The historical record was graphic and predictable. Even before Kentucky became a state in 1792, declaring that slavery would be legal there, more than sixteen percent of its population was already made up of enslaved Africans and their descendents. By 1800, the Kentucky General Assembly had codified the institutionalized oppression by passing a whole string of laws calculated to make sure that even free Blacks would know that in Kentucky they were considered “inferior” and would not, for example, be allowed to vote. To underscore the generalized concern about free Blacks, then, in 1818, they were barred from moving into the state at all, and in 1851, those who had been born free in the state or freed while living there were politely instructed to leave.

By 1850, Georgia, Virginia, and Kentucky shared the dubious distinction of having the most slaveholders in the nation, with twenty-five percent of Kentucky’s population being slaves, and with 2500 to 4000 slaves being exported south every year as a three million dollar boost to the state’s annual economy. Moreover, when the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the states that had seceded from the Union, it didn’t affect Kentucky because she hadn’t joined the Confederacy, so Kentucky’s slaves remained in bondage until the end of the War more than two years later. Consistent with this unwillingness to follow others’ leads, Kentucky’s General Assembly maintained an unblemished record of rejecting the earliest attempts to recognize the rights of people of color, even after the War was over and even though Kentucky had not seceded.

In the five years immediately following the end of the Civil War, for instance, while most of the rest of the nation ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, freeing African-Americans from slavery and giving them full rights as citizens, including the right to vote, Kentucky successively rejected ratification of all three until March 18, 1976. And as if to emphasize her intentions during those earliest days after the War, Kentucky had lynchings occurring on the average of one per month between 1865 and 1875. It’s no wonder that, by 1920, African-Americans made up less than 10% of Kentucky’s overall population. Freed, they had moved out in droves, sometimes selling what little they had, including hard-bought family plots of land, to do so.

Interestingly enough, on the other hand, Kentucky somehow produced a few remarkable individuals who did not demonstrate the same ways of thinking. One of these was the Rev. John Fee, who founded the now-famous Berea College in 1855 in the mountains near where I was born. A well-known abolitionist, Fee established the institution on the premise that, despite the policies and practices of Kentucky and the rest of the nation, “God has made of one blood all the peoples of the earth.” Local racists literally ran Fee out of the mountains, but after the War, he returned, recalcitrant, and soon, students such as Carter G. Woodson (the scholar who eventually gave us Black History Month) were attending and graduating from the college. Needless to say, the Kentucky General Assembly was greatly unnerved by Berea’s practice of accepting both Black and White students, who were known to take classes together, study together, and even, God help us, date each other. By 1904, the legislative body was desperate enough to pass a law just for Berea, forcing the college to stop taking students of color until the law was amended in 1950.

Another departure from the stereotype was found in Justice John Marshall Harlan, a tobacco-chewing, bourbon-drinking Kentuckian, who wrote the single dissenting opinion when the rest of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 to accept a standard of “separate, but equal” accommodations that really forced African-Americans to wait another sixty years for simple decency. Harlan was well-known for socializing with Latinos, African-Americans, and Asians, and distinguished himself yet again a decade later, when he rallied the Court in a private session to save the life of a Black man in Chattanooga who had been unfairly convicted of rape and sentenced to die.

In point of fact, Kentucky drafted and passed the first Civil Rights Act in the south in 1966, prohibiting discrimination in employment, public accommodations, and housing. And the state passed one of the very earliest Anti-Lynching Laws in 1913, too, only four years after a newly-formed NAACP started demanding them, but my mother remembers lynchings in Clay County up until we moved in 1950, and, it must be remembered that the mountain people were often known to make their own rules about such things.

Clay County, Kentucky, where I was born and bred, was carved out of the Appalachian Mountains in 1806, and stands perched at 890 feet above sea-level, in an ancient range rubbed soft and green by the sands of time and characterized by roads impassable and “hollers” up which one might not want to go. To this day, it has less than 25,000 inhabitants in the whole county and most of them are the descendents of people that moved there when the county was new. Only half of them have graduated from high school, forty percent live below the poverty line, and only about one in twenty is Black. It wasn’t always so. In 1840, with slavery in its heyday, 15% of Clay Countians were African-American. And even in 1850, with a total overall population of less than 5500, Clay County still sported approximately 550 Black inhabitants, though, of course, 515 were not free to leave.

Named for General Green Clay, a legislator and cousin of Henry Clay, an even more prominent politician of the day, Clay County rapidly took position under the direction of my great-great-great-great-grandfather Hugh White and his brother, James, as one of the leading salt-producing areas in the country at a time when lack of refrigeration meant a desperate need of salt to preserve enough meat to feed a nation bursting at the seams. Daniel Boone even offered to re-route the Wilderness Road to pass right by Grandpa’s salt works on Goose Creek, but he did not get legislative approval. So, for many years, Uncle James lived, they say, on horseback, conducting his business, back and forth, between Clay County and his plantation in Abingdon, Virginia, and using waterways to branch down to Huntsville, Alabama, where he established such a name for himself that Huntsville’s ritzy-est neighborhood is still filled with things labeled “Whitesburg” in honor of “The Salt King.”

I got lost for a couple of months examining books and articles written on what the rest of the world calls “feuds,” but what mountain people call “wars.” Apparently, my ancestors, the Whites, were deeply implicated in these actions, bullying their way around like the tribal Scotch-Irish highland warriors from which they were descended. It was impossible not to be fascinated by the way they took care of what they simply perceived as their “duty,” making sure that people from other families “showed respect” and routinely resorting to the use of guns -- and even ambush -- to do it. I was reminded of movies like “Menace 2 Society,” that portray young Black men being deftly introduced to the same way of life and for many of the same reasons.

I thought back to the episode in my own life, when one of my mother’s brothers showed up drunk before dawn at our apartment over the newspaper office in Manchester, the county seat, with the intention of killing his wife, who was hiding from him there. He had, the story goes, told her to meet him at the railway station and she, inappropriately by mountain standards for women, had disrespected him by ignoring his directive. Children under five scattered like cockroaches as multiple bullets, shot in rapid succession, careened around the room, and my five-foot, two-inch mother, in cotton pajamas, fought with him over the gun mano a mano as if she were a warrior herself, blood running down her arm from where the hammer kept coming down on the flesh between the thumb and forefinger on her right hand. I always saw my Uncle J.D., who was a lawyer and eventually became a judge, as a hero after that because he came running to take control of his brother. But, in retrospect, it was my mother who was the hero. Without her valiant and selfless act of bravery, my aunt -- and who knows how many of the rest of us -- might have died that morning in a bloody massacre, as a result of rage or accident.

Actually, I recall quite well that my uncles often wore guns in holsters on both hips like cowboys and, being so used to it, I don’t remember thinking it at all odd, though my mother worked hard to keep the kids protected from guns lying around the house and it was, in fact, her concern with how “everybody was their own law” that made her decide to urge my father to take our small family out of the mountains permanently when I was only five-years-old or so. A card game, a car accident killing a pig, or a dispute over a dollar speeding ticket could -- and often did -- turn into shoot-outs at a moment’s notice, with no seeming recourse or negotiation available. It’s no wonder I begged for a cowboy suit for Christmas the year I was four and then insisted on wearing it to Sunday School. It gave me the first and only set of guns I ever owned!

Reading about how members of our family would get themselves elected to one office or another as a way of ensuring that they could not be prosecuted for forcing their will or exacting their revenge left me breathless. Referred to as the “Corsica of America,” Clay County’s reputation was known far and wide. “More money [is] invested in shooting irons than in agricultural instruments,” one article proclaimed. “The Whites have control of the courts and run things as they wish.” As lately as 1986, a story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal described practices of jury-tampering (called “knowing the jury” in Clay County) that resulted in locals not being brought to justice for bombings, sniper attacks, and even unsolved murders.

Story after story, I read about instances between 1840 and 1932 when the ground ran red with blood; when small armies of feuders would entrench themselves with Winchesters on either side of the courthouse where I eventually played on the grass as a child; when a hundred troops with full support and a Gatling gun would be sent by the Governor, only to have most of them desert in terror before reaching their destination. It was no wonder that the state decision-makers kept calling for the county to be divided up once and for all among the counties surrounding it. The weirdest part for me was reading how the whole thing, decade after decade, was a stand-off between the two sides of my mother’s family, the Whites and the Garrards. It seemed to me that these two families, that inter-married almost as if there were no other choices available, should have been able to work it all out over punch at a wedding reception. But that’s not how clans work.

The media took the easy way out and blamed it all on ignorance and isolation. The way the “feuders” were painted in print, you would think they were barely literate and had never been out of the mountains. But in reality, not to say that this was true of all Clay Countians, virtually all of the men in both of my mother’s ancestral families were not only college-educated, but lawyers. There were among them judges, county clerks, sheriffs, tax assessors, magistrates, school board commissioners, legislators (both state and federal), a Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and, even a Governor. Yet a number of them picked up a gun—and used it, from all accounts—or saw to it that somebody else did.

Still, as relentlessly ferocious as they were with each other, they never shot women or children, though both were expected to be involved in many ways to assist their “men-folk,” even under fire. It seemed to me that it was overly romantic to think that such viciousness could be based on some 18th century Saxon and Celtic conception of “honor,” but the ignorance-and-isolation hypothesis obviously didn’t hold either, so I was left shaking my head in confusion and I hadn’t even begun to consider the question of slave-holding as yet.

My great-great-grandfather, John E. White, for one, had a notch in his gun by the time he was nineteen-years-old and, over the years, had at least two and maybe three other murders attributed to him directly, though he was never convicted of anything. He was, nevertheless, eventually outdrawn and shot in a bar arguing over a difference of political opinion, which was, after all, the kind of resolution he apparently understood. It is said that this particular incident, however, convinced him to subsequently leave the liquor alone, which would have been difficult for a man in the White family, since the Whites made their own and many of them shared a penchant for rampant drunkenness. With all the blood, guts, and bravado, Clay County history -- and my family history with it -- read like a Hollywood script for a Grade B western, but with everybody changing hats so fast, you couldn’t tell who to root for.

I ultimately had to pull myself away from the topic, though, as it became apparent that those who fought in the Clay County wars were not the only ones in which I was interested. I had to go back farther and deeper to get at the slavery issue. If Great-Great-Great-Great-Uncle James was on horseback all the time, and Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandpa Hugh lived on a creek, what did the slaves do, I wondered. Images of plantation life as I had always imagined it were preventing me from getting the picture.

Then, contacting Dwight Billings to see if he had more specific information, I was informed that he and Kathleen Blee had published a book in 2000 entitled The Road to Poverty: the Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia, and that they had included an entire chapter on the dynamics of race in Clay County. I harangued local librarians until I could locate a copy that very day. And there it was in all its shining glory: a detailed account of precisely how my ancestors -- the slaveholders -- had lived. Using this book as a springboard, then, over the several months following, I managed to slowly piece together the best version of the truth I could.

To be continued...
______________________________________________________
NOTE: The vintage photo above is of the south fork of the Kentucky River near where I was born in Clay County, Kentucky.

How "The Help" Can Help

2011-09-05T22:54:00.001-05:00

In the past few weeks, I had read a number of reviews of "The Help" (one of the hot movies of the summer), but nearly all of the ones I saw began with the words, "I haven't actually seen this movie, but..." followed by a castigation of every possible aspect of the film. Reviews without the benefit of reading the book, seeing the film, or hearing the music send up a sociological flag on my analytical playing field. So despite the fact that I thought I'd probably agree with the reviews even after watching the movie and very concerned that I was about to waste time and money on one more flick about how only White people can save Blacks, I decided I needed to see it. Then one of my Black students who is very forthright about pretty much everything -- and especially race -- told me that she had gone to see it twice and loved it. So today, I gathered up my trepidations and went to the theater.

In brief, I give it an eleven on a scale of one to ten with one being "made a White person look like a Savior-figure while making darkies look like sheep" and ten being "made White people in general look like icy-faced monsters who probably deserve to drown in shallow water while being stung by killer bees and eaten alive by starving red ants simultaneously." I have absolutely never seen a better, more nuanced, more ghastly depiction of what real ordinary White people in the U.S. acted like in the 1960s. The fact that many White people still act the same way today is another point and I'll come back to that momentarily. But I kid you not, White folks walked out of the theater after watching "The Help" today veeeery quietly, while Black folks were talking to no one but each other. It's that kind of flick. I give it a "must see" with a warning: if you have any consciousness at all, this one will piss you slap off and if you haven't gotten ahold of your rage yet, you should probably just go ahead and skip seeing it for now.

The Boxer -- who admitted that, for the first time in the two years we've been seeing each other, the film made him ask the question why he's with a White woman anyway -- and I talked about the film for the rest of the day. And although I'm supposed to be grading papers right now, that obviously ain't happening. Worse than that, I don't even know where to start to do the whole thing any real justice. So I'll focus on one realization I had that I'll be thinking about for a while.

I often hear African-Americans talk about how much White people "hate" them. Sometimes they'll write in a reaction paper or on the back of their contact card on the first day of class when invited to ask anything they want, "Why do White people hate us so much?" And whenever I hear a series of people use the same word over and over, I pay sociological attention. "It isn't 'hate,'" I try to explain. "It's fear...or it's a need to feel superior so as not to feel the inadequacy they really feel..." or whatever. But today, after watching "The Help," when The Boxer said something about White "hate," it finally dawned on me. It's not "hate" most White people feel toward Blacks. It's disdain.

KKKlan members hate people of color (and maybe themselves), but hate is easy to counter. You can hate right back. Besides, people that openly hate others clearly have a screw loose somewhere. And it's reeeeeal easy for ordinary White people to point at a Skinhead and say, "Now that's a racist. I'm not like that at all." And they're not, so they give themselves a get-out-of-jail-free card. And that's that. Then they can go right on being how they are -- so graphically presented in "The Help" that I'm considering giving double extra credit points to any student who'll check it out and write about specific ways it's the same in 2011.

Oh, it's not entirely the same on the surface, though it's sure as heck not buried more than an inch or two deep. Given, nobody's trying to pass legislation that White people must provide separate (but equal, of course) bathrooms if they employ "help" (to protect sweet, innocent little White children from the awful diseases carried by "the coloreds" -- who hug and kiss those White children in front of their parents all day long throughout the movie). But the other stuff "The Help" demonstrates so well, the bold-faced contempt virtually all the Whites in the film exhibit toward people of color routinely and without apology -- that's as public and in-your-face as ever. And interestingly enough, this is at least partially why Black potential viewers may not go to see "The Help," because this aspect of the film is not really being advertised. Everybody knows what Jackson, Mississippi, was like in 1962 and all. But "knowing" this and "seeing" it so well presented by a group of White actors The Boxer was ready to kill by the end of the film (hair-spray, high heels and all) is two different things.

In looking for a photo to illustrate this post, for example, I realized that only one available picture (the one above obviously) held even the tiniest shred of the blatent vitriol that oozes out of the White faces in the actual movie. If most White movie-goers knew how perfectly "The Help" characterizes White people in general (both in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s and right this minute pretty much everywhere in America), they not only wouldn't pay to see it, they'd be bouncing up and down like Daffy Duck all over the internet screaming their outrage.

Mark my words, this movie has the capacity to start some shit, if the word gets out that it lays bare the real ugliness of White disdain. Whites don't wish Blacks ill, by and large. They don't think they're worthy of consideration at all. They don't see Blacks as even a blip on the radar of importance in their lives other than in abject service of one kind or another to Whites (as "help," entertainment, sports, or distraction from the boredom of their whitebread lives). It isn't only that Whites see color, it's that they don't see anything else. So the average White person in America could care less if Blacks live or die. They don't even see Blacks as human. This is why police brutality brings no outcry from the White community. The brutality for the most part only occurs against Blacks -- and Whites don't consider it worth noticing. This isn't hate; it's disdain, which is far more destructive to Blacks than hatred could ever be. It attacks their sense of self, their personhood, and their connection to both their history and their future. It sucks the life out of them and then laughs as they struggle to rise above the circumstances created by the contempt of Whites, not just those in power but those with which they come into contact on a daily basis -- their bosses, their teachers, their co-workers, their fellow students, the cashier at the grocery store, the anchorman on television, the woman accepting marriage license applications at the courthouse, wherever they go. And it's why U.S. society still looks so similar in so many ways to this movie.

Now don't get me wrong. There is much complexity in the film. There are White people in "The Help" who demonstrate relationships with people of color that are complicated in various ways. And this mirrors reality, as well. One of them is the protagonist who is a young journalist wanting to make it as a writer. Does she use the opportunity to write about "The Help" to put herself on the New York publishing map? Yes. Does she know she's jeopardizing the Black women's jobs, safety, freedom and lives? Yes. Does she know she's breaking the law by doing her research and writing her book? Yes. Does she do it anyway? Yes.

But we are offered more than is typical of an evolution of shared experiences with and about women of color who "serve" Whites as "help" that raise the journalist's consciousness. And this can and does sometimes happen in the real world, too. She doesn't "save" anyone, nor seek to. She writes what she's been told by women who honor her with their willingness to tell her. They're not looking for or needing "salvation." They want their story told and the incarceration of one of them gives them the courage to participate in the process. Could they tell it themselves? They do tell it themselves. She just writes it down and then gives them money when she gets it. Do they benefit from the telling? Yes. Does that make her a "savior"? Hardly. Doe she benefit from the telling? Yes. Does that make her a villain? Not in my book. I do the same thing.

I have been and continue to be honored by those people of color who have chosen for more than forty years to teach me what's really going on in this country. I honor them back by giving them my best effort to listen, tell the truth, and to the extent possible, bridge the gap between them and anyone else who will listen. Do I benefit? Sometimes. Is there a cost? Always. Will I stop? Never.

You might want to see "The Help."

The Not-Just Not-Legal System

2011-09-03T20:31:00.001-05:00

I just finished watching "The Trials of Darryl Hunt" and I'm ready to stick my head out the window and scream. Darryl Hunt, for those of you who may not know, is a a 46-year-old man who did twenty years in prison for a crime of which he was "wrongfully convicted" in 1984. The crime was the brutal rape and stabbing murder of a young White newspaper woman. The location was Winston-Salem, North Carolina. And Darryl Hunt, of course, is Black.

What makes the story so gut-wrenching, is that Darryl Hunt was originally offered $12,000 to say somebody else (who was also innocent) did the crime. When he said he wouldn't, he was charged with the crime himself, convicted by an all-White jury, and sentenced to natural life in prison -- at nineteen. When an appeal resulted in a second trial, he was offered a second degree murder plea bargain by the prosecution in exchange for the five years he had already served, but he said he wouldn't say he committed the crime any quicker than he would "lie on" somebody else, so another all-White jury (why am I not surprised?) convicted and sent him to prison a second time.

In 1994, DNA testing (which could have been done at any time, but wasn't) proved he could not have committed the rape, but one judge after another in subsequent appeals -- all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court found no reason to release him. Until, of course, the real killer was identified and arrested after Hunt's lawyers finally managed to get a judge to order a DNA manhunt.

The guilty man confessed as soon as the handcuffs hit his wrists. And Hunt was subsequently exonerated and paid $1.6 million by the city of Winston-Salem for multiple miscarriages of justice in the usual parade of illegalities it's so easy for law enforcement and ~~persecutors~~ prosecutors to perpetrate against people of color and Black males, in particular. So that means everything's okay in the end, right? I mean, that represents a big fat 226 dollars for every day Hunt spent dodging the White Supremacist skinheads the guards were paying to threaten his life on a daily basis while he wondered if he'd ever be free again before they carried out their stated intentions. That's more than he would have been making as a Black man on the street.

It's important to understand about this case, by the way, that during the entire process, Darryl Hunt had a truly remarkable support network first in the Black community and eventually, in the whole community. Yet, the police and District Attorney were fighting to keep this not-dangerous not-criminal locked behind bars in a private hell. That is to say, he wasn't just one more unfortunate Black man somehow free-falling through a bureaucratic maze because nobody realized he was there. There were Black and White people doing everything in their power to get him free and the police and District Attorney were committed to preventing it, even when they knew they couldn't prove he did it, even while they were fabricating evidence or hiding what didn't fit their purposes.

At some point, these stories would become ridiculous, if they weren't so horrific. Read The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther" by Jeffrey Haas or watch "The Murder of Fred Hampton" on YouTube. Read Killing Time: An 18 Year Odyssey From Death Row to Freedom by John Hollway and Robert Gauthier. Read From the Bottom of the Heap: the Autobiography of Black Panther Robert Hillary King or watch "Passin' It On". Read Slavery By Another Name: the Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon or The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander (see below). Watch "USA vs Al-Arian". Then visit The Innocence Project, Resurrection After Exoneration, Angola 3 News, and Solitary Watch. And that will barely get you started.

Then, after you've digested a bellyful of roiling worms of truth, ask yourself how many men and women you figure are buried under the collective jails of this not-just not-legal system. I'm through calling it the criminal "just-us" system because if it's not based on justice for all, then it's not just at all.

Here's a YouTube video of Michelle Alexander talking for an hour about the ideas in her book, The New Jim Crow. It's well worth the time.

That Mean Old Yesterday

2011-09-02T11:50:00.005-05:00

Last year, I read a book by Stacey Patton entitled That Mean Old Yesterday. It affected me greatly. As a person who studies race relations in the United States. As a person born with a vagina instead of a penis in a country -- and a world -- where that fact matters greatly. And as a person who later reconnected with memories of childhood torture by my own mother, a memory quite frankly that I might not have found the strength to face had I not read Patton's book.

It's well, well written. In fact, it's so well written, it'll make you crazy. Like a horror movie where you wind up peaking through your fingers, but unable to look away or run from the darkened theater. I often wanted to put it down and sometimes did -- mid-paragraph. I had to stop reading it at bedtime entirely because it gave me creepy dreams. But, at least partly for this reason, I had to finish it. I mean, if you can open a non-fiction book that begins with the narrator lurking in sockfeet outside her adopted parents' house in the rain in November with a 9mm automatic, working up the courage to blow their brains out -- and then not have to follow it to its end, you're way less curious than I am.

Patton lived in hell as a child. Born to a mother who gave her up to the foster care system and eventually agreed to her adoption by a couple who appeared on the surface to be good parental candidates, she was "punished" virtually from day one verbally and physically as a general exercise in preparing her for "life." Her adoptive "mother" demonstrated huge psychological and emotional problems and her adoptive "father" was apparently incapable of protecting her. I know I'm glossing over things, but really, you must simply read the book. Any descriptive details I just threw in here would disrespect the quality of Patton's writing and the horrific nature of her experience.

In any case, her book is far, far from just a memoir, though I assure you, it could stand on its merits as that alone. But Patton has developed her skills and passion not only as a truly fine journalistic writer, but as a thoroughly rigorous historian and what she has created in That Mean Old Yesterday should be required reading for every parent, most particularly in the Black community.

I have long pondered the tendency of many Black parents to be so quick to "train" their children using what is often quite brutal force. But as a person who looks like me, I never felt able to respond when African-Americans would say things like, "The White authorities will arrest you these days for disciplining your own kids! They want Black children running wild in the street, so they can put 'em in jail."

Don't get me wrong. My parents (who were brutalized as children themselves) were very violent people. They did great damage to their children as a result of it. And they were resoundingly White. So it's hardly just Black folks perpetrating these practices. But I have noticed through the years a seeming embrace of those practices with rather more vigor in the Black community in general than elsewhere and, as I already stated, I'm a curious person with a lot of training now in sociological analysis.

So I let Patton take me to school.

In a stroke of absolute genius and powerful reporting technique, she presents each chapter of her life story followed by a usually brief but invariably stunning account of how what was happening to her fits into the greater context of U.S. historic brutality against African-Americans by their White tormentors. This juxtapositioning shocks, grieves, teaches, and ultimately demands both attention, realization and resolution.

"America," writes Patton in the introduction to this book, "has never been held accountable for its crimes against black people. The white masters of American slavery left their psychic imprints on the flesh and minds of my ancestors. They were loud, intense, and unforgiving scars."

Later, she adds:

"The real truth is that after slavery, white society had a vested interest in keeping black families dependent, subordinate, and dysfunctional...The family, in essence, plays a vital role in the maintenance of certain cultural norms and social hierarchies. It is also a crucial aspect of democracy. But white society never intended for blacks to equally participate in the adult business of democracy. So the goal was to infantilize the race by trapping it in a continuous limbo of childhood, attacking the physical, intellectual, and moral development of black children and keeping the black family dysfunctional out of fear of the potential and possibilities of what the African American race could become -- healthy, functional, competitive, independent, and equal...In truth, whiteness, white supremacy, and gradation of white identity have always been defined by what it is not rather than what it is. And what white is not is everything that it deems to be black. " [p. 163]

"...In slavery, all black children had prenatal and economic value. In freedom, black children became expendable nuisances whose futurity was always problematic for white society. In return for their lost economic value, black children were further devalued in many ways. They became subjects in racist cartoons, postcards, games, household goods, and visual pornography. Black children were also demonized in black baby tales, nursery rhymes, songs like 'Ten Little Niggers,' books such as 'Little Black Sambo,' and films like 'The Little Rascals.' In freedom, black children represented a new kind of African American citizenry that was never going to be disciplined by slavery. Their potential was unhinged from the peculiar institution, and their potential was unknown and feared by whites. For white racists, the goal in the aftermath of slavery was to undermine the future prospects of the African American race by attacking the physical, moral, and intellectual development of its children by denying them the privileges and protections reserved for innocent white middle-class children." [p. 188]

The unknowing participation of some Black parents in this process is outlined in the book when a Black woman says to some other Black women in a beauty shop:

"Don't you see that when you beat your children down that you are doing just what the white man wants you to do to them? They want you to break them. They want you to make them passive, submissive, deferential, and never question or challenge anything. You are breaking their self-esteem. Killing their spirits. Murdering their souls. This is what the white man wants you to do. You are doing his work for him. Don't you see that this behavior stems directly from the plantation? From slavery? Slave mothers beat their children so the master wouldn't do it. And look at you all standing here today saying you beat your children so the white man won't do it. This is so plantation...This is why black people are dysfunctional. Their minds are still shackled to a slave mentality. And you are passing it on to your children. What they need is love and assurance, not violence and more degradation. We need to teach black boys and girls how to cope and compete in this racist society. Not break them and twist them to fit into some limited place in it." [p. 128]

I can imagine these ideas resonating powerfully, and possibly negatively or at least defensively, among my Black readers. I don't offer Patton's work as a point of contention, but as a point to consider. Her story is beyond painful and masterfully told. Her redemption and restoration is monumental and inspiring. But she never suggests that her evolution made her pain "worth it all." And I, for one, appreciate this greatly.

I tell my students on a regular basis that I'm living proof there is life after weird. But that doesn't make me glad I suffered. Still, I celebrate what I have learned through my suffering, as does Patton, if I don't miss my guess by much. The book she has birthed is important. It needs to be read and discussed, especially in this time of such unmitigated attacks on the Black community (in the form of increased poverty and joblessness) and against Black youth, in particular (in the form of disproportionate and ever rising targeting by law enforcement and criminal "justice" personnel).

When you make the connection she draws between Black family violence and the history of White Supremacist violence against Black people for the past four hundred years, and then drop that connection into the context of the burgeoning violence perpetrated against Black people in the present by White people and by each other, you have a Molotov cocktail that must not be ignored.

There's no quick fix to the dilemma of the "color line" in the United States. And White people must step up, learn from, and take responsibility for initiating radical, wide-ranging, and to the extent possible, instantaneous change in the "racial" arena. But I think Patton's work and her voice provides fertile ground to nurture and nourish a Black empowerment movement at a crucial time in history. It's not the whole answer by a long shot, but I think it's an important, pragmatic, and therefore hopeful note.

Here's Patton reading from the introduction to That Mean Old Yesterday:

__________________________________________________________
Note: Stacey Patton has a new website dedicated to providing Black parents, families and communities with a full range of alternatives to corporal punishment. You may visit it at Spare the Kids.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

2011-08-30T06:02:00.001-05:00

A couple of things that are becoming clear among the students in the course I'm teaching on Racial and Ethnic Relations right now are that (1) some White folks still don't get why Black folks are angry and (2) that pisses Black folks off.

Duh.

Here's a clip showing Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase demonstrating the types of skits they were putting on Saturday Night Live in 1970. In 2011, of course, we've "come so far," we could never broadcast something like this on network television today. I mean, nobody thinks like this anymore.

Do they?

Think White folks don't realize this?

Check this one out:

Locked Into The Locked Up

2011-08-29T07:29:00.005-05:00

I remember the first time the subject of prisons and prisoners was presented to me. It was 1971. I was in San Francisco, working on an underground newspaper, the San Francisco Good Times. Black Panther Huey P. Newton had been released from prison the year before. George Jackson had just been gunned down in cold blood by guards in California’s San Quentin Penitentiary during an alleged “escape attempt” that nobody believed. And former prisoner “Popeye” Jackson of the United Prisoners Union dropped by our collective to engage our interest. I spent that afternoon listening to his tales of what was really going on behind the prison walls. But it would be another few months before I locked into what I call “the prison abolition movement.”

I was living now in Iowa City, Iowa, recuperating from a broken jaw I received while riding in a BMW that managed to wind up under a snow truck during a blizzard. Thanks to what I had learned in San Francisco, I was quick to pick up on a conversation in a bar that soon led me to the Prisoners Digest International. When I arrived, the collective was busy fighting efforts of the administration at Attica Prison to keep a special 90-page Attica uprising edition complete with photographs out of the hands of the prisoners inside; the courts eventually said otherwise and we shipped hundreds of copies into the institution.

Initially I helped to paste up the paper, but it became rapidly apparent that the collective had a much more dire need. There was no organization to the daily process, whose degree of complexity had reached crisis level. As many as seventy letters per day were arriving from prisons and jails across the United States representing a gamut of concerns. Prisoners would be looking for penpals, free subscriptions, legal guidance, and jobs. They’d report in detail on conditions that were invariably unconstitutional and sometimes horrifying. They’d send transcripts of their cases, articles or poems for the newspaper, and occasionally even money –- which we needed desperately. They’d report that they were about to be or had just been moved from one prison to another and that no one knew where they were, so they were terrified, and begged us not to let them disappear in a system where that was not only possible, but typical.

Such correspondence, stuffed into envelopes of all sizes, filled two huge cardboard boxes; and overflowed onto two large office desks. We were drowning in paperwork with no one “assigned” to the task of making sense of it all. So I picked a desk and waded in. It took months and God knows how much postage to catch up, and only then because I relegated the legal questions to their own cardboard box to wait for the coming of an ex-prisoner legal whiz who’d gotten 100 men released from prison in Connecticut over a 25-year period of incarceration. He was released on parole to work with us under our umbrella organization, the National Prison Center. And he was crazy as a bedbug, but he knew his law.

By the time I finished the task, I had written a song out of the many zip codes of prisons I had accidentally memorized. Prison abolition (not reform) and the prisoners who made this movement necessary were now officially a part of my psychological and emotional DNA.

Over time, I started writing a column I called “At Large” (as in “You’re doing time for me –- I’m at large for you”). The logo was an icon showing a star-filled night sky since the point had been made to me a number of times that many prisoners never get to see the stars. When I wrote my first attempt, fellow collective member Richard Tanner (a brilliant writer himself and my lover by this time) told me it wasn’t good enough to publish and didn’t say what I really had in my heart to say. A second attempt got the same treatment and now I was livid. The emotion his rejections generated in me propelled me to write as I had never written before and the style that was birthed in me that day is the style I have been using ever since.

Referring to Richard Nixon’s line, “Let me make one thing perfectly clear...,” I wrote in part:

Let’s take all the walls, real and illusionary, and make them clear as glass so the people can take a look around and see the truth of what has been happening. What is happening in this country behind the locked doors of bureaucratic convenience and individual lack of responsibility? We have been looking through a glass darkly, beloveds, and it is time to draw aside the veils. We have nothing to hide but our own sense of humanity, nothing to fear but our own slowness in seeing and speaking the truth…

And the prisons, ah, the prisons, my friends -- pitched for two hundred years in the deepest darkness of our perverted conditionings. What will they yield up to the unsuspecting viewer through those fine clear walls? Go to Springfield, Terre Haute or Butner. Or look through the walls at Marion. See the life. See the humanity caged against itself. See the bleeding faces with no more tears left to shed. See the broken bodies and struggling spirits. See the desperation, the loneliness, the fear, the courage and the faith. See the people staring back at you through that clear glass wall.”

The column was a hit and, at least partly as a result of it, I became something of a hero to some prisoners (a “madonna,” one said, though I was never that) because, while others were giving them the knowledge they needed to survive, I was feeding their souls.

When the Church of the New Song was ruled in federal court to be as official a religious body as any other, most members of the PDI collective decided to join. Soon after, we agreed to be the outside headquarters for the Church, which otherwise was completely made up of “purlieus” (branches) inside prisons and jails, where it had been established and burst into flower. There is little question that this decision, though absolutely necessary, spread us much too thin. In addition to bringing out the newspaper and trying to support the collective financially, we now had to appear at court hearings, take actions to make legal suits possible all over the country, and provide chaplaincy services to our members of record inside.

In the maximum security men’s penitentiary at Fort Madison, for example, on a given Sunday when the Catholic and Protestant services would have seventeen and twenty-three in attendance respectively, more than four hundred prisoners (out of a population of seven hundred or so) would fill the auditorium for the Church of the New Song service. By court order, we had an office and prisoner clerk in the education building, access to all of our members (even in solitary confinement), and were (despite administrative denial) important to the peaceful running of the institution.

One night, while allowing Bob and Melissa Copeland, Church of the New Song chaplains at Ft. Madison, a break from a year of seven-day-per-week duties, I was called on the phone at home by the officer on duty that night. He said the prisoners were threatening mayhem because one of them was not getting medical attention and they were afraid he was going to die.

I told him to take the sick prisoner on a stretcher to the downtown hospital without delay. I instructed him to make sure the prisoners saw this happening and to tell the inside leader of the Church that I had been called and was asking the Church members to maintain their “cool” in the face of the officer’s humanitarian actions. The next morning, I was thanked by the officer and told that everything went off without a hitch.

Like many other activists from the period, I finally burnt to a crisp after three years. One afternoon, I said to a National Lawyers Guild lawyer that I just sometimes felt like going to Marion Federal Penitentiary and setting myself on fire. “You need a break,” he laughed. I didn’t listen, but in time, I did walk away from the PDI and the Church of the New Song –- though not far.

I wrote letters to Jerry Mack Dorrough, one of the Church founders, while he spent five years in solitary confinement to win the legal right for all prisoners to grow their hair, if it represented a religious or cultural commitment. I wrote letters to the editor, newspaper columns, and articles, and spoke at every opportunity on what prisons are and what they represent in a country that uses them to rationalize White racism while making money by disproportionately locking up Black men and women. I created a workshop for ex-prisoners called “How to Stay on the Street –- Without Going Back Up the Wall.” I consulted, conducted trainings, and did research on ex-prisoner employability. I worked with adjudicated teenaged boys in a facility in Miami. I designed programs for poverty-stricken African-American kids, many of whom were already involved in the system on the fast track for prison. I counseled women in a maximum security penitentiary in south Florida (eventually earning myself a never-gets-to-come-back-in-here stamp of disapproval when I purchased $300 worth of new books for the prison library). Eventually, I taught college courses in juvenile delinquency and the sociology of the correctional system.

Today, in addition to everything else, I blog regularly on criminal justice issues. And I am deeply committed to the campaign to release the remaining two members of the Angola 3, Black Panther Party members who have been in solitary confinement since 1972 because of their politics. Both of my children were fathered by men I met while they were in prison. And my fiance served twenty-seven years for a robbery that netted $70 and involved no physical injuries.

When I first found this road I’ve been on these past four decades, people -– especially prisoners –- would ask me why I cared enough to do what I was doing. I care because, as I read somewhere, the criminal code is the line of demarcation between the individual and the state. A society that can remove all the rights from any group in that society can remove all the rights from any group in that society. This society has made an art form out of assaulting the rights of people of color, especially African-American men. I am only too clear that anyone can go to jail in the United States if the authorities want them there –- for whatever reason. So when I question my longstanding commitment, I always think to myself, “If I was locked in a cell, what would I hope someone would do for me?”

Choices

2011-08-16T11:27:00.006-05:00

Yesterday, I got my student evaluations from my spring courses. I was glad to know I'm "cooler than John Travolta" (whatever that means), that most students gave me high marks and that a healthy handful wrote that I changed their lives. One student even said I should get a raise (a sentiment with which I heartily agree).

But, needless to say, a few students were made uncomfortable enough by my admittedly somewhat ruthless examination of racial issues that they felt the need to mention it. A few always do. Sometimes graphically. This time, for example, one evaluator suggested in three different boxes under "Improvements Needed" that I hate White people, suggesting that the improvement would be to put more Black people in my classes "to make [her] happy."

These are, of course, my favorite evaluations. In fact, if my boss doesn't see enough such potshots, he thinks maybe I'm losing my edge. Nevertheless, I know they don't mean it to be funny. They're trying to communicate something. Some more than others. My first academically-related death threat, after all, was over the phone in the middle of the night while I was in the process of teaching my very first course ever.

Still, as I prepare the syllabus today for the course on Racial and Ethnic Relations I'll start teaching tomorrow morning, I'm remembering a reaction paper I got several years ago from a student in an earlier Race class. Though it was apparent she had the academic skills she needed to do very well in the course, she was often absent and rarely turned in her assignments. Finally, she showed up at my office.

"I grew up living on my family's plantation," she began. "We've been living there for generations and we're very well off. I never thought anything about it. Until now."

I nodded.

"I'm trying to just approach your class like any other class," she went on. "But it's all I can do to sit there and listen. I can barely get myself to show up."

I nodded again.

"Still, I know you're telling the truth. I just don't know what to do with the information. I mean, I'm still living there. And now, when the guy that supervises the workers tells my father he'll get the fruit picked before the rain hits, I wonder who's doing the picking and how much they get to do it and where they live at night..and how long their families have been connected to mine."

She asked if it would be all right for her to hand in her work late and, intrigued at what it might look like, I assured her that it would. Among her submissions was an emailed essay in reaction to a film the class had watched. I think she got it and this is why I teach.

I'm dedicating this post to AngieNoRemorse89, whose comment I deleted this morning after it appeared on one of my earlier posts. She was addressing Black commentators to the same post, who hadn't themselves written anything incendiary, but for some reason Angie was outraged. She started out by writing that ignorance holds Blacks down and they should "focus on their own wrongdoings," that a lot of Blacks have a "state of psychosis going on" and that "in order to see the light, you have to be open to all races" (especially, I take it, the White one). Angie wrote that she hears "lots of reports of flash mobs of Blacks beating up Whites," called Black people who would do such a thing "ignorant apes," and closed with a direct threat: "If you come to my house and threaten my family because you hate Whites, I will blow your worthless brains out."

Consider this alternative perspective from a young White woman who forced herself to take, show up for and participate in a course on race I taught in 2008:

“We, the children of a ‘politically corrected’ society, seem to pride ourselves on the idea that progress has been made; that we have risen above the crude bluntness exhibited by previous generations into a stratum permeated by ‘tolerance,’ ‘equality,’ ‘fairness,’ and ‘justice.’ As [students in] this class, we seem incredulous at the idea that caricatures like the ones seen in [the media] were not only allowed, but were celebrated icons from which much of ‘White America’ formulated its opinion of who the ‘Negro’ is. I wonder how many people were amazed that American’s cultural standards were at one time so debased that the word ‘nigger’ was commonly seen in advertisements and cartoons directed toward and intended for children. I know that I was. But it is this very incredulity at past offenses that helps blind us to the inequities within the society by which we ourselves have been socialized. Even as we acknowledge our current shortcomings, we’re giving ourselves the proverbial ‘pat on the back’ – rejoicing in our own sensitivity and awareness when compared to previous generations. We like to think ‘we’ve come so far’ because people of color are no longer openly depicted as alligator bait.

"But in truth, have we?

"However blatant or subtle the delivery, to the conscientious observer the message is clear. Inequities in how the different races are portrayed abound – and the channels through which these racially charged messages flow are wider open and more numerous than in any generation that’s come before. So, should we honestly believe ourselves immune to the constant technological bombardment our senses endure every day? Of course, we shouldn’t. We navigate a veritable minefield of racially loaded biases every day; we just don’t want to see it. We remain cloistered by our misplaced sense of progress and pride.

"Yet we know racism is real. We know inequality exists. We’d just rather not admit to the possibility that our lives are affected by it. As a result, we have become, not less prone to an ignorance of our own ignorance, but more so. And what we’re truly failing to see about racism in America is that the denial of its existence equates to a justification of its practice.

"We are blinded…and our sight will only be restored when, on some deeply honest and undeniable level, we realize that we cannot claim both ignorance and innocence – that we must choose. We must either acknowledge that our society is wrought with the perpetuation of oppressive perceptions and humbly share in the responsibility of eliciting change or we must admit to having assimilated racism into our belief system, to having accepted its fallacy as truth, and to simply not caring.”

Maybe the Angie's of the world can hear it better from one of their own.

Um...hello?

2011-08-11T15:54:00.004-05:00

I had to go through four passwords to figure out how to break into my own Blogger account. I guess that says it all, huh? I've been scared to death for the last couple of weeks that I was never going to blog again. After more than five years, that was a disturbing thought to me. I hate being the last one to know something -- especially about myself. Which happens more often than I like, as it is.

But here I am. After all. And maybe there's a few more words in the old girl yet.

It's been a hairy summer.

I thought it was going to be a down time when I could consider my overdriven life and make sense of what to prune and what to keep or even -- Goddess help me -- what to add.

Then, as I mentioned in passing in June, I was blindsided by needing exploratory thyroid surgery with only five days' notice. Everything turned out fine, though I now have a faint but permanent three-inch smile in my neck and the jury's still out on whether or not I'll need replacement hormones to take up the slack for the half of my thyroid that got left where it was.

Exciting? Yes. But, though still in a serious state of recuperation, the initial physical, psychological and emotional trauma of the operation was pretty well over by the time I started teaching full-time again for the month of July.

Two days into the month, though, The Boxer and I had started talking about moving back in together after an eight-month hiatus. We knew I wouldn't have the time or the physical stamina to take on the necessary move to a larger place until December when I get a month off. But we were talking. And a casual question to my landlord produced a startling response.

Yes, he had a bigger place. Three times bigger, in fact. For only 250 more dollars per month. But it had just come open and, in order to snatch this too-great-to-pass-up opportunity, we would have to pack up and move my entire household in fourteen days -- the last three of which I had already booked a flight to spend in Wisconsin with my birth family (including my 85-year-old mother), who I hadn't seen in more than five years. The thought was mind-boggling to say the least. I wasn't even sure it could be physically accomplished. I was fairly sure it would kill me regardless. And it meant that The Boxer and I would be making a MAJOR transition in our lives with roughly NO time to think about it whatsoever.

Gulp.

But 1800 square feet at less than the going rate locally with the same landlord (meaning no ante-up of additional security deposits or anything) turned out to be an offer I couldn't refuse.

So, by putting in twelve-hour days seven days per week without a break until now and focusing absolutely on the tasks at hand (working full-time, packing, moving, cleaning two places, UNpacking everything and organizing a new household, which turned out to mean, among other things, buying sofas and a 40" television set), we pulled it off. And while we're still reeling somewhat under the craziness of it all, we have not regretted taking on the project as yet. In fact, the hummingbirds and baby fox that welcomed us in our new digs -- along with the fact that we did it all without coming to blows -- have convinced us we did the right thing.

But blogging, as you will no doubt have noticed (since my visit numbers have gone down from 150 to 60 per day...sigh) fell off the bottom of the list until this moment. And to be honest, I'm really supposed to be working on my course syllabi since I'm due to begin teaching my usual five classes next Wednesday. AND I'm going to be out of town for the next three days for a conference for which I promised to be a featured speaker.

So there you have it. I am alive. The summer is over. I still have a job (not a minor issue in the current state of academe). And life with The Boxer in our new digs is good, if you don't look too hard at how little time we actually have to spend together (almost none). And what it might be like if and when that changes.

What will be the future of Why Am I Not Surprised?

Well, I'm here, ain't I?

I mean, the single best scientific indicator of what a person is going to do is usually what they did in the past. Since the day I introduced this blog, even after pauses, I have always returned to you, my Faithful Readers, a decent group of which appear to have hung in there this time in the belief that I can't keep my commentary to myself indefinitely and a college classroom just is NOT big enough.

Turns out, you were right. ;^)

The Tedeschi Trucks Band: Revelator

2011-06-24T15:18:00.007-05:00

As most of you are aware, I've been recuperating from surgery the past ten days or so and my body is confused. Sometimes, I can't keep my eyes open and sometimes, I'm all the way awake at midnight. Even my emotions are all over the place. You can imagine the havoc this plays with the likelihood of my blogging.

But right in the middle of it all, last night, I decided to watch the film made at Eric Clapton's 2010 Crossroads Guitar Festival in Chicago. This kind of show is a perfect example of why I support Public Television. A kick-ass concert and no commercials. Yes, indeed.
Anyway, I'm piled up in bed watching fine musicians enjoying themselves and each other when the Tedeschi Trucks Band took the stage and blew what was left of my mind.

I remember getting turned onto Susan Tedeschi in Ft. Lauderdale when she was a rising blues star in the nineties. But as I said in my post on Clarence Clemons, I was never much of a rocker, so I didn't know her grammy-winning guitarist husband Derek Trucks (of Allman Brothers fame) from Adam.

Apparently, they each had a band and mostly worked separately until last year when they announced hiateses across the board, holed up at their home recording studio in Jacksonville, Florida, and produced "Revelator", an album that's now ranked on Amazon.com at #1 for blues, #2 for rock and #3 for all music. Yeah.

This is one you don't want to miss. I got up this morning, bought the album, and am already eyeing the mailbox with anxious anticipation while I listen to the them on YouTube over and over and over.

I was only going to post "Midnight in Harlem" here, but I just couldn't bear to leave out "Coming Home" (featuring Warren Haynes), especially since Oteil Burbridge's bassline on that one wound me up so tight, I burst into tears.

One more time, shall we...? I may be walking wounded at this point, but with music like this to keep me company, life is good!

The Angola 3 Struggle Builds

2011-06-20T21:56:00.003-05:00

Eight days ago, facing surgery, I decided to spend the weekend visiting Albert "Shaka Cinque" Woodfox, one of the Angola 3. Of all the places I might have gone and all the ways I might have spent that time forty-eight hours before going under the knife, I never really considered anywhere else.

I'm not alone in this. Another A3 supporter who had to drive even farther than the five hours I spent on the road (each way), came tearing into the visiting room at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, announcing, "I know I won't get to stay long, but it's my birthday and I just had to see Woodfox on my birthday!"

The guard at the gate, knowing I was already inside, had asked her coming in, "Why do so many people want to come visit this man?"

"That's just who he is," Jackie replied.
I've been in the A3 fold now for three years. One letter to Shaka and he reeled me in like a bigmouth bass. It took us two years to get me on his visiting list, but if he's taught me anything so far, it's how to keep doing the next right thing until you prevail or die. This time, we prevailed.

The visit was particularly celebratory because that Saturday morning, I learned that Amnesty International has finally pulled out the stops on a full tilt campaign demanding the release of the two remaining Angola 3 members, Woodfox and Herman "Hooks" Wallace. AI has even formulated a 12-page report on the case.

And, of course, Shaka has been granted an evidentiary hearing in September, as well, which may, in fact, move his release radically nearer. In the meantime, a quick poll taken over at the Huffington Post found that three-fourths of those taking the poll consider forty years in solitary confinement to be torture.

In his statement read at the showing of "In the Land of the Free" at the New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival in April, Shaka Woodfox wrote: "Justice is a child without parents, without moral fiber, without meaning or purpose. Justice has no life until you, The People, pick it up, love it, guide it, give it meaning, purpose and a moral set of legs to stand on...[To] give justice life, [to] move it from the abstract world of one's mind to the world of reality...is a daunting task. I wish you strength, wisdom and determination."

For that same event, "Hooks" Wallace wrote: "Your letters to Albert and I have been a great help; [they] let our keepers know that they are being watched...There are thousands of political prisoners here in America, and if you wish to help, seek them out. They're calling for you; we're all calling for you...Join with the Angola 3 in our fight against injustice...and you will realize just how much of a difference you can make."

In 2001, geronimo ji jaga issued this statement about his Angola 3 brothers:

"Robert King, Albert Woodfox, and Herman 'Hooks' Wallace are very dear to me because they come from my home state of Louisiana. The Louisiana chapter of the Black Panther Party was one of the best chapters we organized and they were some of our best, most disciplined soldiers. They were the kind of soldiers who never cried out to anyone for help, even though they were facing life imprisonment.

"Understand that after being in that kinda situation for so long, I can personally attest to the highly disciplined and dedicated nature of these askaris [Swahili for 'soldier']. They endured, and they survived, over all the years, with very little help from the outside world. They are the kind of unsung heroes who we must come forward to help, because they never asked for anything from us in exchange for suffering what they have suffered.

"To struggle for The People and not expect anything selfish in return is a rare thing and this is what King, Wallace, and Woodfox have personified throughout all those hard years. They most certainly deserve our strongest salute."

Please consider supporting the Amnesty International campaign for the release of Shaka and Hooks, who have served nearly forty years in solitary confinement for a crime they didn't commit.

And I, for one, will keep on driving up Highway 520, into the Kisatchie National Forest, past the "Prison Area -- Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers" sign and the unnamed cemetary across the road from the prison itself, to visit Shaka Cinque Woodfox until he walks out the doors and goes home with the rest of us.

Albert Woodfox
#72148 N1 - A3
David Wade Correctional Center
670 Bell Hill Rd.
Homer, LA 71040

Herman Wallace
#76759 CCR - D6
Elayne Hunt Correctional Center
PO Box 174
St Gabriel, LA 70776

Another Big Man Dies

2011-06-19T11:08:00.005-05:00

Clarence Clemons, 69, who played saxophone with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band for nearly forty years, died last night after having a stroke last weekend at his home in Singer Island, Florida, (a community I regularly haunted -- drunk -- back in the late sixties).

I won't lie. I was never a rocker. And for whatever reason, I thought Bruce was way too White for me. But you couldn't be in my generation and not know Clarence Clemons played sax.

And now, the Big Man (as he was often called because of his 6'5", 270 pound frame), has played his last solo.
He felt so strongly about his relationship to Bruce and the Band that he went so far as to try to explain how it felt to be so bonded to a group of men in a patriarchal society, where it's not socially acceptable to talk about loving men or feeling one with them so the words don't come easily and the fear of being misunderstood almost makes the speech sad. But Big Man tried and out of respect for his attempt, rather than just featuring his famous solo in the song "Jungleland," I've chosen to include the whole song (filmed during a performace in Great Britain just two years ago), so we can watch him doing what he loved to do with those he loved to do it with.

Springsteen said this morning: "Clarence lived a wonderful life. He carried within him a love of people that made them love him. He created a wondrous and extended family. He loved the saxophone, loved our fans and gave everything he had every night he stepped on stage. His loss is immeasurable and we are honored and thankful to have known him and had the opportunity to stand beside him for nearly forty years. He was my great friend, my partner and with Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music. His life, his memory, and his love will live on in that story and in our band."

Rest in peace, Big Man.

geronimo ji jaga returns to the source

2011-06-13T18:44:00.004-05:00

I'm sure you've heard by now that geronimo ji jaga has transitioned. He died of an apparent heart attack in his sleep at his home in Tanzania on Thursday, June 2nd. Some people still call him some combination of the name I'm using with "Pratt," which geronimo called a "slave name."

geronimo (who humbly chose to write his name with no capital letters) fought in Vietnam, bringing home with him two bronze stars, a silver star and two purple hearts, along with a case of malaria he struggled with for the rest of his life. Joining the Black Panther Party, he quickly rose to the position of Minister of Defense in the Los Angeles area, where he was attending UCLA to study political science.

Recognized almost immediately both inside and outside the BPP as a strong leader, geronimo was targeted by COINTELPRO in the 1960's and ultimately framed for the murder of an elementary school teacher in 1970. The result was, as it has been for many Black leaders in the United States, that geronimo spent the next twenty-seven years of his life in prison for a crime he didn't commit.
The conviction was vacated in 1997 when it was shown that the key witness against him was on the payroll of both the FBI and the LAPD when he testified. Additionally, though the husband of the murder victim identified geronimo as the killer, the man had previously identified a different individual entirely as the killer and this information was withheld from the jury. So, geronimo ji jaga eventually won a settlement of $4.5 million for being wrongfully imprisoned. The story is told in a book entitled, Last Man Standing: the Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt by Jack Olsen.

I could and would wax more poetic, but I'm facing surgery tomorrow afternoon to remove most or all of my thyroid and I'm feeling distracted and somewhat mortal myself just now. Still, I wanted to get this up first in memory of a revolutionary who lived the principles he was willing to die for to the day he left us here to carry on in his stead. We will.

I'm presenting here -- in four segments -- an interview Tavis Smiley did with geronimo ji jaga when he was released from his long, grueling prison ordeal. Enjoy. And remember: be grateful for his life. And his example to us all.

Part 1
[Unfortunately, there seems to be a glitch that won't allow me to embed this segment in the post, so you'll have to follow the link. You may watch the remaining three segments here or on YouTube.]

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Reduced to Equality - Part 16

2011-06-09T07:00:00.005-05:00

This continues the posting of my book Reduced to Equality: My Odyssey to Renounce Racial Privilege ~ and Find Myself. You may read the previously posted segments here.

2004

After several semesters teaching the course, challenging my students to declare the racial category into which they would place me, I began to consider the possibility that I might, in fact, have African-American roots somewhere back in my family. When my daughter was young, she had once assured me that I wasn’t “White,” anyway—I was “peach-colored.” It was some years later before I realized that referring to skin-tone in various food-related colors is common in the African-American community. Cinnamon, chocolate, lemon-colored, brown sugar, honey pecan—the list is as long as the imagination. I had been introduced more than once by a Black acquaintance to another African-American person as “not really White.” And had been taunted by some for my full lower lip, my prominent backside, and a dark spot on my leg that was about the size of a dime.

But none of that indicated any real likelihood as to what my racial background might actually be. I was intrigued by the idea. I thought it would make a powerful moment in my course, if I could announce to my students’ consternation that their European-American-looking professor, was “Black.” I became almost fixated, poring over the internet genealogy websites for hours on end. Besides, I had been thinking about writing a book on race ever since working for Friends of Children. What a great addition to the book it would be to describe how I had discovered the one drop of Black blood that would make me Black!
I had never been able to intellectually understand my fascination with race. It made no sense, really. My parents were neither dyed-in-the-wool liberals nor openly rabid racists. My experiences as a child were relatively middle of the road for a young girl raised in northern Illinois. I hadn’t gone out of my way to avoid being a part of the European-American community. And I hadn’t immersed myself utterly in Black America. “Why do I hope I’m Black?” I asked myself.

I tried putting intellectual parameters on the feeling. Maybe I was so aggressively anti-racist, I reasoned, that I wanted to shed my “Whiteness,” and identify myself physically with the oppressed group, once and for all. Maybe I was being driven by some undeniable spiritual compunction to uncover a deep-seated truth about my Self or my family. Or maybe I was just a drama-queen, I thought, never satisfied until I can trump my last “act.” But it hardly mattered, I ultimately admitted to myself. I couldn’t stop the process. I lived on the internet week-end after week-end, chasing the one Black droplet.

My daughter was less than supportive.

“Mom,” she would declare with more than a hint of disdain in her voice, “finding an African-American ancestor in your family won’t make you Black! If you’ve never been followed around in a store while you’re trying to shop, you’re not Black, no matter what your bloodline says!”

I knew from listening to my students and other African-American people over the years that this would be an attitude held by many people of color. Nevertheless, I had seen enough very, very light-skinned “Blacks” to know that, if I declared myself “Black” and stuck by it and could document that I was directly descended from a person of color, I could create one hell of a discussion on “race.” And it was a discussion I wanted to create. I wanted other “White” people to look at me and have to imagine that they, too, might have a “drop” of African blood. I knew that such a demonstration would work to undermine the European-American rationale for mandated privilege. How could we rightly claim the benefits of our “superiority” if we didn’t even know which of us “deserve” it and which do not?

I searched and I searched. I followed endless threads of historical accounts, started haunting genealogical message boards, and pored over the U.S. census records till my eyes blurred, burned, and watered. And still no direct connection. I did find a number of “Black,” “colored,” and “mulatto” people named “White” (my mother’s maiden name) listed in the 1870 and 1880 censuses for Clay County, Kentucky, where I was born, but there appeared to be no way for me to ascertain whether or not I was related to any of them.

Then, chasing down yet another historical lead on the internet, I found a 1995 article by Dwight Billings and Kathleen Blee (sociologists themselves), entitled “Agriculture and Poverty in the Kentucky Mountains: Beech Creek and Clay County, 1850-1910.” On page six, I found the following:

“James White, a Virginian whose estate was valued at $2 million when he died in 1838, began to purchase land and manufacture salt in Clay County in cooperation with his brother Hugh White (and Hugh’s sons), who moved to Clay County during the first decade of the nineteenth century. By 1860, the White family controlled approximately 20,000 acres of land in Clay and other mountain counties. James Garrard, the second governor of Kentucky, patented more than 45,000 acres of land in Kentucky before and after Kentucky became a state. Although most of his lands were in the Blue Grass region, Garrard also bought thousands of acres in southeastern Kentucky and sent his son Daniel to Clay County to establish salt wells and furnaces there early in the century. The Whites and the Garrards, along with a few other families, thus established economic and political dynasties in Clay County based on slave labor, salt manufacturing, commerce, and large-scale farming that persisted throughout the antebellum and early postbellum periods…The county’s fifty-eight slaveowners, representing only 7 percent of household heads, owned 10 percent of the population (515 slaves) …The ten wealthiest individuals in Clay County in 1860—all of them slaveowners—averaged personal estates worth $45,890 in a county where the mean estate was worth only $859, or fifty-three times less.”

Later in the article, it got even more specific, describing how “salt manufacturers Daugherty White, Alexander White, and James White, Sr….[held a] combined 80 slaves and Daniel and Theophilis Garrard [held]…21 slaves.” The words felt like a flat wooden board smashing into my astonished face. I reeled under the weight of the knowledge. It took little exploration to verify that I was indeed related to all of the men the sociologists named, that Hugh Lowry White and Daniel Garrard were my great-great-great-great-grandfathers on my mother’s side, and that I was descended from slaveholders.

It was unimaginable to me. I retreated into a shell of disbelief. My ears rang with silence like the horrible hush after a big handgun is shot. My body rejected food. I was incredulous.

“Well, what did you expect?” asserted Morgan ruthlessly. “You were born in Kentucky, for God’s sake.”

“I’m from the mountains,” I countered dejectedly. “I vaguely knew there was money back there somewhere, but slaveholding…I mean, it’s not like they had plantations in Clay County…”

“Whatever!” she tossed back at me, leaving me to my misery.

And I was miserable. For several weeks, I continued my searches for more information, now horrified in advance at what I might find, but incapable of stopping my forages for the truth. I could hardly face my African-American friends, students, and clients at work. I was convinced that they would retreat from me if they knew, backing silently away as one might from someone with a debilitating and contagious disease. I wasn’t sure they wouldn’t rail at me with angry words. I feared they might even punch me in the face, a reaction I would almost have welcomed under the circumstances of my own inability to come to grips with my new knowledge. Whenever I wasn’t consciously caught up in the needs of the moment at work or at home, I mulled over the facts of my heritage. When I would least expect it, the refrain would waft into my head like an old spiritual song gone awry, “Slaves aaa-nd slaveholders…comin’ for to carry me home….”

I finally took the plunge one afternoon with one of my clients—an elderly African-American woman. I started by telling her about the book I wanted to write and then described what I had discovered. I think, in retrospect, I was asking her for absolution. And I feel quite sure that she knew it. She was old and she was Black and Black people have been saving White people from their nightmares since the earliest days of slavery. My anguish notwithstanding, I had no right to present the matter to her and make her responsible for accepting it with grace. African-Americans have been forced for the past four hundred years to take up Whitey’s slack, to respond with dignity however painful it is, to “understand” the unacceptable, to forgive the unforgivable, in the interest of being free from their own dark past. Still, I was helpless in the face of my dilemma. I could not easily go forward with my life, continuing to do my work, dragging this secret along behind me like so many bodies wrapped in chains and attached – now – permanently to my psyche.
She received my confession with the countenance of the priest I was begging her to be, nodding gently as the words proceeded with great hesitation from my quivering lips.

“You write your book,” she finally pronounced by way of benediction. “You write your book and you tell your story and you do whatever it is God has for you to do.”

And then she hugged me before she left, but not without a certain holding back. Or maybe that was just me, still feeling that no one from my family would ever deserve a hug from anyone again.

To be continued...

Deborah Luster - One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana

2011-06-07T16:06:00.004-05:00

I'm a photo freak. A black and white enthusiast. I have stacks and shelves of books that feature photos.

The topics vary. The first one I remember "collecting" -- The Family of Man compiled by Edward Steichen -- is legendary, though I didn't realize it at the time. Decades later, the photo of an indigenous South American flute player that appears on the cover of that book is the wallpaper on my computer at work.

Since that first one, I've added enough such books to my collection as to cause myself to wonder on occasion what I'm thinking. I rarely look at them after the first long, slow time through. Yet I'm a veritable sucker when I see one that reaches out and grabs me. In fact, I've begun to wonder what my poor daughter is going to do with them all when I move on. Some old ladies collect cats or balls of rubber bands. I'm apparently accumulating art works and photo books.

Anyway, yesterday, I came across my next acquisition, I'm sure. It's pricy, but I really must have it and in a minute, you'll understand why.

The photographer is Deborah Luster and the book is entitled One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. Poet C.D. Wright adds a running commentary throughout and the book is available for $150 from Twin Palms Publishers. Or if you're a glutton for punishment, Amazon.com offers it for nearly three times that.

When her mother was murdered 25 years ago, Luster turned to photography -- a passion her mother enjoyed -- in an effort to deal with her shock and pain. As her hobby became her profession and she was hired to take photos highlighting the life and culture of northern Louisiana, where she still lives, she noticed the mini-prisons that formulate the base for the economy in many of those communities. One thing led to another and One Big Self was the result.

Luster shoots with a dark eye. Her latest project, for example, is constituted of photos of places in New Orleans where people have been murdered or bodies found. But One Big Self, while deeply disturbing on multiple levels, pierces the viewer's soul and deposits therein a conscious awareness of the life staring out of each image, radiating humanity. Luster's photos drag the weight of her mother's murder like Jacob Marley's chains scraping across the floor in Scrooge's bedroom. Yet she finds and presents in the faces of her prisoner subjects the anguish she herself struggled with as a youth coming to grips with her own private nightmare. And it is that connection -- so inexplicable, so undeniable -- that makes the book worth whatever they want to charge for it.

Luster's work appears all over the internet in blog posts and on various gallery sites. She's been covered by National Public Radio and The New York Times. Yet I somehow hadn't run across her until yesterday and, as sobering as a contact with her work is, I am beyond glad I did.

Trying to be artful in presenting a few of her prisoner photos and a YouTube video by way of introduction is like trying to frame a sledgehammer. I'll just go ahead and post them. Then, looking toward Monroe, I'll send a small Namaste to one who has turned her suffering into a lens through which the rest of us can not only better see her and her beautiful, beautiful subjects, but better see ourselves, as well.

Angola (the Prison, not the Country)

2011-06-02T12:23:00.011-05:00

It appears that I'm gearing up to do some more posts on the criminal justice system here in Louisiana and some of the cases that highlight it's...shall we say...peculiarity? I realize that it's not just Louisiana. I recently watched "Conviction", for example, the movie released just last fall about Kenny Waters, who did eighteen years on a life sentence for a robbery/murder he didn't commit. The payoff of $3.4 million came, of course, but eight years after Waters died of head injuries sustained in a 15-foot fall that occurred when he was taking a short cut on the way to his brother's house for dinner six months after his release. He had earlier said he was suffering from anxiety attacks, but the fall was considered an accident. Still, we'll never know.

This weekend, I'll be viewing "American Violet", the fictionalized account of the real life case of Regina Kelly, a single mother who took on and beat the District Attorneys in Hearne, Texas, after 28 innocent African-Americans were arrested for dealing drugs there. This was only a year after the infamous Tulia, Texas, case, by the way, wherein 15% of the local Black population was arrested for drug dealing, subsequently sharing a six million dollar settlement because, yet again, it was all a big, orchestrated lie.
Still, my focus currently, aside from the on-going saga of the Angola 3, is on a couple of cases about which I've become more recently aware. The first I can't write about until I have a conversation with the man's family, which I'm trying to do. The second is described in a book I'm almost finished reading, after which I intend to make a trip to New Orleans to sit down with the exonerated man himself. All this, and I'm planning another trip up to visit Albert Woodfox (one of the Angola 3) this month, as well.

If you've been a Faithful Reader for a while, you already know I've been neck-deep in one aspect of the prison abolition movement or another since 1971. Sometimes I marvel at how our lives unfold. We don't realize what's happening at the time and then decades later, we can't imagine doing anything else.

While I'm finishing the book and waiting for my calls to be returned, I thought I'd better signal you what I'm up to and maybe give you a little backstory about the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for future reference.

Angola (named for the African country where so many slaves apparently came from) was first established as a plantation with a woodyard and a sawmill by Isaac Franklin, a slave trader and planter in 1840. Three additional plantations located immediately adjacent to Angola were added to it when the whole package was sold to Confederate Major Samuel James in 1880, ten years after James first leased the land from Franklin's widow and moved convicts there by steamboat up the Mississippi.

"Leased" convicts, of course, were the first "temp" workers. The one leasing them didn't have to pay them or give them any benefits beyond the barest subsistence, if that, and they could be required to do the most egregious, back-breaking, mind-numbing and even dangerous labor imaginable from dark to dark in any kind of weather for a flat fee payment to whomever was leasing them out (in this case, the state of Louisiana).

Ordinary slaves might cost something at the outset, but prisoners did not. So for no capital investment at all (past fatback and grits), the lessor would be clearing major money from day one and for every subsequent day thereafter. And since, in this case, the lessor was the same entity that was "bringing criminals to justice," there was a veritable pipeline of free labor guaranteed because more men convicted of a crime (whether innocent or guilty) meant more money to be made. And the lessee, needless to say, was paying far less than the going rate for labor. So it was a win-win situation for those White folks with the land and the power, while vast pools of predominantly Black men -- often given long sentences for petty crimes or no crime at all -- endlessly processed into the system. What a deal.

This convict leasing system, by the way, was first implemented in Louisiana in 1844, twenty years before the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery, became law. It was, it would seem, the Plan B put in place in case the Civil War was lost by the South. Black men would go from being slaves to being "criminals" (Jim Crow made sure of that) and could just stay right on the plantation without a hitch.

In his book, Politics and Punishment: The History of the Lousiana State Penal System, Mark Carleton calls the convict leasing system in the period from 1880 to 1901 "the most cynical, profit-oriented and brutal prison regime in Louisiana history." While prisoners and share-croppers worked side by side at Angola raising and processing cotton and other produce, cutting timber, and working in homes or on the levees, Samuel James became arguably the richest man in Louisiana. He spent much time in Europe and was the President of the Pickwick Club, New Orleans' leading men's club, for years until his death in 1894.

Conditions only became worse after James' death, with more than one hundred convicts a year dying at Angola until the State stepped in and took over officially in 1901. We can only assume that it was the loss of revenue from the deaths of those 732 prisoners during that time that caused the State to decide they'd better run things themselves.

Eventually, the State of Louisiana purchased the property from the James family, removed the remaining free Blacks and sharecroppers, and expanded the prison to its present area of 18,000 acres, trading out sugar cane for cotton as the primary crop. Today, more than three-fourths of the prison population at Angola is still Black and that same proportion is serving life sentences without parole. And there you have it. Slavery By Another Name.

Let Freedom Ring!

2011-05-01T14:29:00.011-05:00

The main problem with waiting so long between what I call "real" blog posts is that they don't stop writing themselves in my head. Consequently, while I don't publish them so that you, my Faithful Readers, can actually faithfully read them, the process keeps rolling. And when I finally do have time to sit down and write, I'm so backed up, the idea set has gone from being a forty-minute "lecture" to being a three-day "workshop."

It never occurred to me before, but this might be why some of my posts run WAY longer than you have time to read. None the less, it is what it is and here I am, keyboard (rather than hat) in hand, hopeful there's somebody still out there who will wade through what I'm about to sketch out.

The train of thought began back in February, when I was invited to take a look at this post about a situation on a "Christian" college campus in Kentucky. The blogger was basically asking the Black students on the campus (who had apparently had enough of what I imagine was an on-going racist context) to continue sucking it up until White folks have time and the motivation to change. In other words, business as usual.
This business as usual expectation, of course, is not peculiar to Kentucky (where I was born) or to the deep south (where I live now), but is easily identified from coast to coast in this country even as I'm writing. In fact, even a few White folks (dare we begin to hope?) are increasingly likely to notice and admit it and try to do something about it themselves (what a concept: White Americans taking responsibility for rampant institutionalized racism in their country!)

Now, the reality is that African-Americans have been incredibly patient in their chains. They have, yes, resisted valiantly and sometimes successfully from the beginning of their ordeal, though this resistance hasn't made the history books by and large and since curricula are typically drafted by Those-Who-Have-The-Power-To-Define (White and male) and presented by teachers who, however well meaning, are painfully, painfully clueless, then our tendency is to blame Black Americans for their own victimization or to claim they'll be fine once they face the fact that they'll never be White and just accept their reduced position in the land of their birth.

The problem with this for Black people, though, is that White Supremacy as a system isn't satisfied with just threatening, beating, brutalizing, arresting, incarcerating (and using solitary confinement against), lynching, or executing a few Black folks in certain parts of the country. Most White people want African-Americans in general to be quiet while the nightmare for the Black community goes on. And the effects of this, like chickens, are coming home to roost.

I've written on this blog before about what Black sociologist Calvin Hernton called "the psychology of the damned" back in the 1960's. And Franz Fanon wrote that torture rearranges the mind of the tortured. Duh. But White folks, like the blogger writing to the Black students on the campus in Kentucky in February, either think Fanon was overstating the situation (in which case, I would suggest they go get tortured and see what they think after that) or they just don't see what is happening to Black Americans as "torture" (in which case, I would suggest that they traipse through the links in the paragraph above one more time). And I hasten to add that none of those links are about slavery in the 19th Century. They are all about the current reality in this country related to the socially-constructed, political notion of "race." Further, what happened on the campus in Kentucky can happen only because all the far worse manifestations of racial oppression such as I mention above exist.

The torture White Americans are so good at misidentifying is not something Black folks are confused about. Many believe it's "always been this way and it's always going to be this way," which is, of course, erroneous, since nothing has ever always been any way and everything changes continually, whether we recognize the change or not. However, things can get worse -- one way or the other -- and just now, it appears to me that they're doing so.

The result? More and more Black Americans (and most particularly, the young men) are, just as Calvin Hernton predicted, losing their minds. They are enraged and disheartened. They are just as desirous as anybody else of having a decent life, a decent job, a decent education, and a safe place to be and raise their children for the future. But the way it's been presented to them in substandard schools and poverty-stricken neighborhoods where cops are not their friends and 500 people apply for every job opening doesn't exactly make them believe the American dream is intended to include them and their offspring.

What makes Black rage -- and it's quieter but just as deadly cousin, frustration -- so remarkable is that White Supremacy as a system has had a really good run using brainwashing to convince Black people to ignore White Supremacy as a system and see themselves as the cause of their own problems, to see themselves through the White man's eyes: inferior, incapable, violent, and ugly. It was no mistake when Souljah Boy gave a shout out to the slave masters for rescuing Black folks from Africa. And Tom Burrell, among others, are trying to introduce an antidote. Still, the "double-consciousness" W.E.B. DuBois discussed a hundred years ago, wherein African-Americans are never allowed to be fully (and proudly) Black and fully American at the same time, continues to live on.

White Americans who protest indignantly that they never owned any slaves and they don't owe anybody anything need to recognize that they have benefitted since the day their lilly White rumps hit the doctors' hands. They were born into a society with a culture that privileges White people by seeing to it that they are more likely to get enough nutrition, go to the better schools and get the better jobs, not to mention being raised in families where, more often than not, their grandparents' grandparents were probably benefitted in the same ways. Even when European immigrants were put through changes on their arrival, they were, nevertheless, eventually allowed to become full citizens, something Black people are still waiting for.

White folks horrified by the fact that a Black man could become President of the United States have tried everything from the sublime to the ridiculous in an effort to get rid of him (none of it based on his race, of course) because Black people just can't be equal to White people in this country without the White people being reduced from their position of "superiority." Just as importantly, White Americans are not arrested, brutalized, and discriminated against in the same ways as people of color and that alone would make it easier and better to be White.

In short, as Dr. William R. Jones (my principal intellectual mentor) used to say: White people in America get the "most of the best and the least of the worst." Right now. Today. Are all White people high-rollin'? No. (But even a rich Black American is still "Black" in America, something few Whites would want to be -- not because it's not a good thing to be, but because of the way Black people are treated in this country.) Do lots of White people work hard to claim their benefits? Yes. (But nobody in history has worked harder for less pay back than Black Americans.) The fact is it's better to be White than Black in this country and the reason is because White people have the power.

So, if you're a "White" person in the United States, unless you're working daily to get rid of White Supremacy as a system, you are, in fact, personally responsible for the anguish Black Americans suffer at the hands of that system. We love to hear America called the "land of the free," but I don't see how we can say the entire country is "free" when people of color born in it aren't treated as full citizens. As long as only White folks can enjoy their "rights" and "privileges" as "free" Americans, then America isn't free. Just the White folks are.

In the meantime, Black people who are overcoming the effects of their "Whitewashing" are creating a list of demands. I, for one, suggest listening.

Toshi Reagon: I Will Stand Next To You

2011-04-14T12:10:00.003-05:00

It's my birthday. I am now officially really old. My birthday message to each and all of you: I love you and I will stand next to you.

If Information is the Engine, Unity is the Fuel

2011-04-10T11:08:00.007-05:00

Activists protest in Atlanta after police killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston, November 2006.
(W.A. Bridges Jr./Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

I often receive tips from students, fellow bloggers, fellow activists and friends that I should take note of one thing or another related to the topic of "race." Actually, I get so much and have so little time these days that I'm often helpless to do more than barely take note. But there are those particularly insidious, flying-under-the-radar type stories that will stop my train and force me to re-post them. This story by Hira Mahmood and Wafa Azari, appearing a few days ago at Occupied Palestine, is one of those. I offer it here in it's entirety:

The racism of the American “war on drugs,” especially in the south, is notorious. So is the racism faced daily by Palestinians. In Atlanta, a university program allows these two manifestations of racism to feed off each other and community activists are organizing to shut the program down.

On the evening of 21 November 2006, the Atlanta Police Department’s recently disbanded Red Dog Unit killed Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old Black resident of the northwest Atlanta neighborhood of English Avenue. As she sat in her home watching television, several Atlanta policemen bashed in her front door to execute their fraudulently obtained “no-knock” search warrant. After firing 39 shots, the police officers handcuffed Johnston, placed a dime bag of marijuana on her corpse and vacated her home, leaving her to bleed to death there (Ernie Suggs, “City to Pay Slain Woman’s Family $4.9 million”, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 16 August 2010).

Organizers with the Movement to End Israeli Apartheid-Georgia (MEIA-G) read a newspaper article about the court proceedings following Johnston’s brutal murder, stumbled upon a brief note about the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) and wondered what it was and how was it connected to Johnston’s death.

MEIA-G was established in February 2009 after an unprecedented mobilization in response to the 23-day-long Israeli assault on Gaza. Hundreds rallied in the streets of Atlanta in solidarity with the Palestinian people, vowing to organize to support them in their struggle for liberation. After launching MEIA-G, we endorsed the 2005 Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions and identified GILEE as our primary campaign target.

Housed in Georgia State University’s (GSU) Criminal Justice Department, GILEE is a police exchange program whereby high-ranking Georgia police officers travel to Israel to learn counter-terrorism tactics from the Israel national police. Conversely, Israeli police officials travel to Atlanta every two years to learn Georgia’s drug enforcement tactics such as those employed against Johnston, Tremaine Miller, Pierre George and countless other African-American victims of police abuse and aggression. Through GILEE, the Israeli police adopt these tactics and employ them on Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians residing in the occupied West Bank.

While GILEE has relationships with several international police agencies, its relationship with the Israeli police is the most intimate and most troubling. Israel is one of the most brazen violators of human rights and international law in the world. Israeli police, in their execution of the racist and discriminatory policies of the Zionist government, have been and are a major source of these violations. MEIA-G hopes to keep the brutal police methods and tactics employed by the Israeli police from being adopted and implemented in Atlanta. To do this, MEIA-G seeks to expose and shift the practices of both the Atlanta and Israeli police by eliminating this exchange program, the aim of which is to proliferate repressive police tactics internationally.

Alongside 18 campaign endorsers and more than 1,200 individual supporters, the MEIA-G and GSU’s Progressive Student Alliance have built, cultivated and sustained a growing coalition organizing to eliminate GILEE from GSU and ultimately from Atlanta.

While the collaboration between the US military and the Israeli military is well-documented, social justice activists in the US are just now beginning to uncover the depth of collaboration between US and Israeli police forces. These collaborations further underscore the extent of the “special relationship” between the US and Israel, and their similar needs, as European settler-colonial projects, for elaborate systems of social control to manage the troublesome “undesirables” in their midst.

The US south has a particularly troublesome history of managing “undesirables.” With the formal abolition of slavery after the Civil War, a critical social question arose: how would the Georgia elite maintain its wealth and power in a society dependent on cash crops like “King Cotton” that relied upon a cheap, controllable and stable labor force? Policing provided the answer: newly established law targeting such activities as vagrancy and loitering were used to arrest and incarcerate southern Blacks. In short, prisons replaced plantations and police officers replaced plantation overseers (see Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture", pp. 7-18).

Both the US and Israel are rooted in outside colonial forces invading a territory with the goal of possessing the maximum amount of natural resources — namely land — while erasing its indigenous population. In both cases, the US and Israeli militaries were created to engage the “external” threats of the unconquered indigenous populations, while their police forces were created to maintain control over the conquered indigenous populations (and other subjugated peoples like enslaved Africans) absorbed and “internalized” within these nation-state projects.

The US boasts the highest incarcerated population in the world — more than two million persons, including more than 800,000 Blacks. This does not include those on parole, on probation or unable to be employed because of a criminal record. Policing plays an integral role in not only surveiling, controlling and intimidating communities of color but also in funneling people into prisons. With such an exorbitant national incarceration rate, what do Georgia police officials like current Atlanta Police Department Chief of Police George Turner, former Chief of Police Richard Pennington and current Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director — all of whom have sojourned in Israel for the GILEE training — have left to learn about terrorizing and controlling these communities?

The Zionist project of confiscating the most amount of Palestinian land with the least amount of indigenous Palestinians remaining has one vital flaw. Evidenced in more than 60 years of resistance and resiliency to occupation, apartheid and genocide, Palestinians continue to resist the Zionist program of ethnic cleansing. Following the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians in 1948, the Israeli state was tasked with controlling that pesky, residual population throughout historic Palestine. Under the guise of counter-terrorism, it is the Israelis’ sophisticated social control mechanisms that Georgia police officials learn to inflict upon Georgia residents.

The Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange operates within a public university but is largely funded by private donations, including donations from corporations and former graduates of the program. The extent of private support for this program is symptomatic of neoliberalism transforming public institutions in a way that compromises their integrity. GILEE does not reflect the desires of the Georgia State University community as evidenced by the opposition to the program voiced by numerous students, faculty and community members.

The director of the GILEE program is Dr. Robert Friedman, Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice at GSU. Dr. Friedman serves on the advisory board of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT), an Israeli organization that has actively opposed human rights groups and acted as an apologist for the Israeli security apparatus. Boaz Ganor, founder and executive director of the ICT, serves as a board member for the GILEE program.

Another highly influential, and controversial, Israeli politician — Avi Dichter — has visited Atlanta to meet with Georgia law enforcement officials as part of GILEE. Dichter has been charged with extrajudicial killings, war crimes and other human rights violations by the Center for Constitutional Rights for the 2002 air strikes on Gaza. The meetings between Israeli and Georgia officials, the unknown specificities of the training program, and the large infiltration of money into the GILEE program from unknown sources are all being done under the auspices of Georgia State University, a public institution.

Activists throughout the US are beginning to uncover more and more police exchange programs in which US law enforcement officials travel to Israel to learn “counter-terrorism” tactics. Campaigns organizing to shut them down continue to take root. We have a political obligation to expose these programs, highlight how they impact oppressed communities in the US and close them as we build a more just world free of racist violence in both the United States and Palestine.
______________________________________________________
Hira Mahmood is a student activist and BDS organizer studying English literature at Georgia State University. Wafa Azari organizes with the Movement to End Israeli Apartheid-Georgia. Currently residing in Atlanta, she was born and raised in Oujda, Morocco.

When Old School Becomes Old Hat

2011-04-08T11:27:00.007-05:00

I'm old school. In fact, I'm darn near old as the hills. Next Thursday, I'm going to hit one of those landmark birthdays that is assumed to put a human over the hill and out of commission (and I wish I could say it's only the big 5-0, but that ain't even close).

So I'm thinking about things. Taking a look around. Flexing the old muscles, physically and mentally, and pleased to discover that, thus far, at least, I appear to be largely functional. For the most part.

I get a lot of positive reinforcement for living my belief system. I still have hotties coming after me. (Hey, you get here and tell me that's not important any more!) And I can still put in a week of twelve-hour days and not wind up in a hospital.

But one of the things I value most as I age emotionally, psychologically and even physically -- if I'm going to do any of those gracefully -- is input from younger people who care enough about me to urge me in new directions when it's appropriate to move along.

I'm one of those folks that will spend great energy carefully placing my furniture, art, and so forth, and then leave it just like that until I move to a different location entirely. I am a creature of habit. I am given to ordering the same stuff from a menu. I don't keep clothes I don't love to wear and I'm subject to wear a lot the things I love best.

But I pay Napster every month to keep me apprised of who I need to be aware of. This month's new additions to my personal playlists? Ledisi and Robbie Robertson. Last month, it was Rage Against.

My wardrobe ran to jean-tights and oversize sweaters this winter. And I buy a couple of new attention getting hats every year because I'm a hat-wearing fool.

The only reason I don't tweet (aside from the fact that I'm not a bird) is that I'm not that fond of texting and haven't yet become convinced that tweeting is going to do anything for me I want done at this time.

Still, I was made aware last night that I've been blogging for more than five years now using the same old pre-packaged blogger template I started with. I never got tired of it. I was (dare I admit it?) proud of that little sucker. It was simple but strongly colored. Over time, it built its little following of Faithful Readers (for which I am beyond grateful). And if it had its glitches (like not being wide enough for YouTube music videos of late), I forgave it like I forgive my knees for aching when I jog too far.

But it's time for a shift, I'm told. And of course, once I started to check out my options, I learned how easily that could be done, including the part about changing the width of the blog page to accomodate the videos. Who knew? Not me, obviously, or I'd have done it a year ago.

I've never rushed to embrace change much. Partly because I used to be one of those folks that ran from fire to fire, spending a lot of time nursing burns, and I didn't know how to tell the difference between "change" and "fire."

Increasingly, as my life unfolds, though, I am learning when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em without a lot of angst. So out with the old and in with the new. Blog format, that is. With a tip of the attention-getting hat to my daughter, who I trust will keep me as ever young as she has since she first came into my life to help me stay honest, informed and fresh.

Siji: Yearning for Home

2011-03-25T11:07:00.009-05:00

I haven't blogged for a minute and my plate, as usual, is busy dropping figurative food all over the floor of my agenda. I'm preparing for a presentation for the art department on "Creating Resonance at Will" (the sociology of art) for which I will be flying almost entirely by the seat of my pants. I'm working to set up a presentation on dance as social commentary (working topic: death and dying as a manifestation of oppression). I'm making notes to produce a booklet on how Black students can make it successfully through the first two semesters on a majority White campus without sacrificing what's left of their souls. I'm still teaching 350 students per week. And I have yet another, a superbly talented and highly educated Nigerian raised in Britain and set of midterms to grade (besides all the rest of the "less important" papers).

I have a small stack of topics I'm itching to get on here about. But it won't be today, unless I forego clearning the bathroom, in which case, I'll have to start using the ditch out back since it's becoming a bummer to have to face what a slovenly housekeeper I am.

While you're waiting, though, I have a treat. Someone kindly sent an email tipping me to an artist about which I was unaware: Siji immersed in Brooklyn. I couldn't bring myself to choose between the two videos I'm posting here. What a wonderful dilemma. Enjoy!

SIJI - "Yearning For Home" Music Video from SIJI on Vimeo.

SIJI - 'Ijo'(Official Video) from SIJI on Vimeo.

Justice Roars!

2011-03-18T08:42:00.008-05:00

Every now and again, I blog about a blog. And that's what I'm doing today. I had been vaguely aware of The Louisiana Justice Institute for some months, having run across some of its activists here and there in the course of doing the work I do. It's not like they're low profile folks. In fact, Institute Co-Director Tracie Washington was named this month by The Root, the daily online magazine published by the Washington Post, as one of its twenty Leading Black Women Advocating Change. And somewhere along the line, I started noticing links on my Facebook site to posts on Justice Roars, the blog of the Institute. But you know how it is, you're moving at the speed of light through your own life, trying to stay on top of the 419 plates you have spinning, and who has time to really pay attention, right?

Then, one day (this morning, obviously), you wake up knowing you don't have to leave the house before you have your coffee (for a change) and you somewhat arbitrarily read a post from one of those links and get blown the eff away. Now, I'm asking myself, how did I avoid realizing the nature of these folks' work all this time? (*shakes head ruefully*)

The post I read is on Louisiana's 200-year-old "crimes against nature" law (this in a country where corporations have the governmental green light to rape the land we live on and the water we drink but disproportionately Black and poor teenagers are put into prison for offering oral sex to keep themselves from becoming homeless). This antiquated excuse to harass and brutalize should have been deep-sixed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against sodomy laws in 2003. But Louisiana always resists the opportunity to treat ordinary poor people and people of color with the same casual acceptance as, say, rich White politicians like David Vitter (who was re-elected Senator on a family values platform even after it was divulged that he's been known to engage in "diaper play" with prostitutes).

Thankfully, what sounds like a crack legal team has formed and brought suit on behalf of those who continue to suffer at the hands of a criminal justice system that has recently been outed yet again as unconscionable. And Jordan Flaherty's discussion of the situation and the case kept me glued to every word and has me now committed to seeing what I can do to help (make that 420 plates).

So, I've added Justice Roars to my blog roll, joined the blog followers on that site, and decided to contact someone I know from Women With A Vision to see if they have time to come up and talk about the case on my campus. Whether you're in or outside of Louisiana, I highly recommend that you take a look at what The Louisiana Justice Institute is up to and what's shakin' at Justice Roars.

Reduced to Equality - Part 15

2011-03-09T07:00:00.005-06:00

This continues the posting of my book Reduced to Equality: My Odyssey to Renounce Racial Privilege ~ and Find Myself. You may read the previously posted segments here.

2001

I left Friends of Children the summer following my son, Eli’s, death from a hot shot of heroin a rival gangbanger had slipped him in February of 2000. His long-term addiction had finally succeeded in killing him early one Friday morning while his friends tried desperately and unsuccessfully to save his life until the ambulance could arrive. The telephone call from the police had sent me to the floor like a falling tree, only faster. I spent most of the call lying on my side, lifting my head off the floor, berating the officer indignantly.

“Is this the only way you could think of to tell me that my son is dead —- over the telephone?!” I squawked.

The officer apologized, but told me that they hadn’t been sure that I was the one they should notify. Because Eli had already been identified by his friends, the morgue wouldn’t even allow me to see his body, though they did show me a photograph. And so my precious first-born child left the earth unexpectedly one day two weeks before his twenty-third birthday, leaving Morgan and me behind. It was the beginning of a year of losses for me.

In July, I left Friends of Children to strike out on my own. I had a couple of contracts to start out with and was newly married, so I figured that it would be okay if things got off to a slow start. Then my husband and I bought a house in Sunrise, so I left the home that Morgan and I had shared for five years, a home where I had been, by and large, fairly happy most of the time. In August, while I was taking our furniture from one house to the other, Morgan moved to Tampa to work on a Bachelor’s Degree at the University of South Florida. Even my car died that year and had to be replaced by one I liked infinitely less, though it was a better car.

By New Year’s Day, 2001, I was in a different house, a different car, a different job, and without either my son or my daughter. When my husband admitted to me that he had not only been unfaithful, but had been intentionally cruel to me ever since in hopes that I would leave him, I gave up and walked away. As soon as the summer semester closed and the courses I was teaching ended, I gathered up what little I had accumulated over the years and followed Morgan to Tampa by default.

I had just used a credit card to pay her August rent. So, I reasoned that I had a right to live with her for the remainder of that month in any case. Besides, rent was cheaper in Tampa, and though Morgan had been talking about moving into student housing, I knew that, on my own, I would not be able to assist her financially other than to offer her a specialized living arrangement with me. She agreed and we took a two-bedroom apartment, which tossed us back into each other’s lives in a way neither of us had bargained for and neither of us welcomed.

Nevertheless, I was almost immediately hired for a position as a social service administrator and began teaching at USF, as well. By down-sizing my life and my car and carefully budgeting my money over the next couple of years, I was able to make a dent in the financial disaster that leaving my marriage had produced for me. And, as it turned out, Morgan and I —- stuck with each other and with only each other for much of the time -— managed to work through much of our mother/daughter angst by the time she graduated and moved away from me once more.

When the Sociology Department chair at USF asked me if I would be willing to teach “Racial and Ethnic Relations” in the spring of 2003, I was excited at the prospect. I had taught the course once before at Florida Atlantic University, but it had been at least several years earlier and I wondered what my years of experience at Friends of Children would have added to my presentation of the subject. Part of the process of working for Willie Myles had involved participating in an on-going series of rigorous trainings on Africentricity, being exposed to a continual focus on Afri-centric rather than Euro-centric perspectives, and, for that matter, being inundated by Blackness itself on a daily basis, none of which were targeted particularly at me, but all of which took me on pretty much the ride of a middle class White woman’s life. I had relished it all -— every moment, every conversation, every recommended book, every correction of a misunderstood idea. If they were willing to teach me, I was willing to learn.

So, I knew that the course was very likely to be electric. I had plenty to say and knew I was willing to say it, even if it made students crazy. I might not get the opportunity again and I was going to do my teachers proud.

When another professor suggested that I could use Joe R. Feagin’s Racist America as my principle text book for the course, I looked it over and chose it immediately. I had met Joe a decade before when I invited him to come to Florida State to talk about the book he had most recently published at that time. I found him to be erudite and certainly anti-racist, but very down-to-earth, as well, and I was glad to be able to support his newest book. Then I added two other books and a whole series of intensely provocative videos to the line-up. I wanted my students to view carefully selected presentations that would get them all worked up right before each class ended so that they could go home to write a paper in reaction to it. Each week, I would read some of the most challenging and thought-provoking reactions to the class without identifying the student writers. This made it possible to give them a voice without watching our very limited class hours be eaten up with argumentative protests based primarily on racist perceptions. It also allowed them to say what was really on their minds without having to worry about how other students might receive their thoughts.

I like interspersing dramatic works and poems here and there during my lectures and unabashedly tweak my students’ feelings in a variety of ways calculated to help them break through to a deeper understanding of social realities they may not otherwise be able to imagine.

“Whenever I see a fifty-year-old Black man on a bicycle ridin’ down the edge of the street on a hot day goin’ in the opposite direction while I’m in my car with the A/C pumpin’ and the DVD player rockin’ out,” I might say forcefully and with emotion, “when his eyes meet mine, I can’t help but think that he didn’t pick up that bike to get a little exercise. He’d like to have a car, too, but African-American men are four times more likely to be unemployed than European-American men at every educational level. And even the ones who are allowed to get a job, make roughly three-fourths of what a White man would get to do the same job. How do you suppose he feels about having to ride a bicycle at the age of fifty while I’m in my little red car? And how do you suppose he feels about me?”

Even the students of color get in touch with things they might otherwise have long since started trying to avoid thinking about.

“In all oppressive situations,” wrote Calvin Hernton in The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers, “it is deemed a virtue for the oppressed to identify with the world-view of the oppressors. The oppressed are ‘praised’ and ‘rewarded’ for loathing themselves and for admiring their oppressors; they are derided, made to feel ashamed, and are punished for embracing any ways they themselves might develop, and are instructed and forced to manifest allegiance to the ways of those who oppress them.” But not in my class. I look to set people free...even myself.

As a matter of fact, I agree with Paulo Friere in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

I believe that education is an inter-relational experience during which the conscious presence of both the teacher and the student is required. Even when I’m standing in front of the class talking, the students in front of me determine the course of my delivery process. A question, a questioning eye, a sorrowful gaze, a skeptical frown, a quixotic smile, an angry demeanor, can all change my direction at a moment’s notice without the student even knowing it. I want my practice of education to be a practice of freedom. I want my students to discover how to participate in the transformation of our world. Because otherwise, as the late Jamaican reggae artist, Bob Marley, sang, “Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war...Until there no longer are first class and second class citizens of any nation, until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes, there is war.”

Hernton, Friere, and Marley all sound so in agreement because there was slavery in the so-called “New World” for far longer than we have been without it (slavery was made illegal less than 150 years ago, while the former period lasted for over 250 years). But it is also true that the on-going impact of institutionalized oppression in the form of racism has continued through the handing down of cultural norms and perceptions throughout U.S. society to the present. When I ask my students to write down what they learned -— one way or the other -— about other ethnic and racial groups when they were growing up (in the 1980’s), they invariably list the same kinds of stereotypes, semester after semester, that would have appeared on a similarly requested list in the 1950’s or before.

One class’s compiled list had them admitting that, when they were children, they learned that African-Americans are “poor, lazy, loud, stupid, irresponsible and violent, weed-smoking liars, thieves and gang-members, who are more likely to be on welfare, love to eat fried chicken, and are troublemakers from the ghetto who are always late, beg for stuff, have no sense of self, and are drug-addicted criminal trash who live a hard life because they choose to...!” Even if someone wanted to argue that these students all learned that these stereotypes were not true once they grew up, we would still have to remember that those who taught them all this were themselves taught the same things and then grew up, many of them, to see, work with, know, and even love people of color who are nothing at all like any of those stereotypes. So if growing up and learning differently makes the stereotypes go away, then why were they still around for these kids to learn?

When I further encourage my students to carry an index card around for a week, making a slash mark every time they hear, see, or think a reference to race or ethnicity, they are flabbergasted to find that we think about racial and ethnic issues all day long—a conservative estimated average of at least 45,000 times in their first twenty years! Considering the pejorative nature of the above list and imagining those kinds of stereotypes lathered that many times over one person’s brain, it’s no wonder we’re all so hyper-racialized. And as Jane Elliott, whose consciousness-raising experiments using eye color to demonstrate the effects of racial discrimination, often says, “It’s not the intent; it’s the impact.” The fact that we are basically good people who mean well means diddley-squat (as my mother used to say), if the damage done is brutal, insistent, and on-going.

As I prepared for the first day of class that semester, though, I wanted to do something really special in the classroom, something that would immediately excite the students to the level of what they might learn in the course, if they liked it, and make them want to drop the course, if they were not ready for it. I didn’t see much point in watching some European-American youth slouched in the back of the classroom for the duration, giving me the evil eye while grinding his or her teeth week after week to the point of ulcers. And I wanted very badly to start out with a strong statement, to communicate that we were going to boldly examine racial and ethnic relations; White privilege, in general; and African-American/European-American relations, in particular, as if our lives and futures depended on it.

Then it occurred to me. I would have the class put themselves into a giant circle in skin-tone order. I told Morgan what I was going to do and she immediately committed herself to be there, which was very uncharacteristic of her. She had seen me “perform” in the classroom for years and she had her own busy schedule, as well, but this, she said, was something she wanted to see, as long as the others would not be told that she was my daughter.

When I walked into the room for the class, I was somewhat unsettled because there were about sixty students and the room looked to be disproportionately filled with people of color. I didn't know how this was going to affect the exercise and I was more concerned that a person of color might be offended by the exercise than a European-American, who would probably be too embarrassed to admit their discomfort, in any case. I was keenly aware that the perception of an offense of that nature could cost me the opportunity to teach. Consequently, I was seriously nervous. In fact, Morgan told me later that, at first, I was so nervous that I was talking with some kind of an accent!

Anyway, I was committed. We had gotten through the first half of the class, took a break, and, for good or ill, I was ready to proceed. From the moment I began the exercise, I kept up a constant banter. I believed -— rightly or wrongly -— that this first time through, at least, if I didn't maintain control of the group, things might quickly degenerate in ways I could not repair.

First, I talked about how the socially-constructed political notion of race is not biological. In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, UNESCO brought together eminent scientific minds from all over the world to study the concept of race. After several years of rigorous analysis, they determined that “‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon, as a social myth,” and that, if there had ever been separate and distinct races before, they certainly had not persisted into the mid-1900’s. Apparently, I went on, there is no way to identify a drop of blood as being from a “Black” person or a “White” person under normal circumstances.

Then I pointed out that we have no idea, when looking at a person, whether or not they have African-American ancestry. White people want to think we can tell, but we can't, especially not after a couple of generations and particularly not if the blood-line has been crossed with that of one or more alternative ethnicities. “Tiger” Woods, for example, is only one-quarter African-American and Colin Powell’s background through his Jamaican immigrant parents has strong European, Jewish, and Indian strains. Their descendents may sooner than later look very little different from typical “White” people, regardless of their heritage as people of color, but our current social norms would still categorize them as “Black,” even if that occurred.

An additional and even more dramatic example is Gregory Howard Williams, whose book Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black, describes how he suddenly lost all the privileges of his Whiteness at ten-years-old even though he looks as White as any White man I’ve ever seen.

“Who wants to guess what my racial category is?” I asked the group boldly, looking from face to face, challenging them to take a risk.

“No one?” I pushed. “Why not? I have very light skin and straight hair...but you’re not absolutely sure I’m ‘White,’ are you? As a matter of fact, how can I be sure beyond a shadow of a doubt what I am?”

And turning to the European-American students, I added, “Or you, for that matter?”

Nevertheless, I continued, the socially-constructed political notion of race is the principle social identifier in the United States and we make our judgments based on a perception that we can always biologically ascertain racial identity. I reminded them that, in spite of the conclusions of the UNESCO scientists to the contrary more than fifty years ago, we have well-established scholars who still maintain that race is biological, and that even some sociology texts define race as a category indicated by skin tone and hair texture, in spite of the fact that Gregory Williams’ experience would prove otherwise. Periodically, I went on, we even have some so-called “scientist” pop up and declare that their “research” proves that people of color are biologically inferior in one way or another to European-Americans. Then I told them that I wanted them to put themselves in skin tone order.

The eyebrows went up and the students started milling around, making soft noises and appearing visibly uncomfortable. I used myself as an example, comparing arms with some of the students to find my "position." I told them to form a large circle and find their place in it. I enlisted the other students' aid in assisting a blind student (a light-skinned Black man) to find where he "belonged" and insisted that the African-American students (who were clumped up at the "dark end" of the circle, uncomfortable with declaring specific position) thin their line to one-person deep.

I encouraged the group by telling them that there were going to be dollars handed out shortly and that they must be one-person deep in order to determine who would get the cash. That seemed to help. We even had to deal with the presence of a European-American student in a wheel chair who could not get easily through the maze of desks. We estimated where he would fit and then had students go over to him and compare arms until we found his "slot." By now, they had made peace with the process and exhaled somewhat, though European-Americans looked a little flat-faced (with small, pasty-looking smiles and nervous eyes) and African-Americans were clearly reserving judgment and maybe waiting for the other shoe to fall, presented with what they might have seen at that point as one crazy White woman who was obviously liable to do anything.

Moving around the inside of the circle to a European-American woman who was about three people up from where "color" started to appear, I asked her, "When you have to check a box on a form, what do you check to indicate which group you identify yourself with?"

"White," she replied matter-of-factly.

"And you?" I asked the woman next to her.

"White," she also replied.

"And how about you?" I asked the next woman, who didn’t look radically different from the other two, but looked as if she might be from another country.

"Where I come from," she fired back strongly, "we don't think that's anybody else's business! I don't check a box at all!"

The African-American students looked startled and somewhat pleased, like they were impressed with her answer and liked such a thought. I jumped on it quickly.

"You see?" I queried. "Some cultures don't force individuals to constantly racialize themselves. Why does ours?"

I proceeded on around the circle, pointing out that we were listing in order: White, White, no answer, Black, White, Latino, Latino, Black, Latino, Asian...

"How can race be biological," I asked the group, "if we can't draw clear lines of demarcation? Shouldn't all the Blacks be in one section of the circle and all the Whites in another? Shouldn’t everybody in a category look alike?"

Then I took a deep breath, looked around the room, and said, "Okay...now we're going to add 'hair texture' as a secondary identifier."

You could see the African-American students' eyes go to half mast.

"Just bear with me," I said seriously, looking straight at them. "We're learning something here..."

The European-American students remained pleasant, if somewhat numb-looking. Nobody moved. I never hesitated, walking over to a Latino man with wavy hair who looked at me as if he wished he could disappear.

"Now," I continued, indicating various students as I went along, "how can we clearly define ourselves or each other when we've got this man who calls himself a 'Latino' standing next to a woman that identifies herself as 'Asian?’ His hair is wavy and hers is straight, but her skin is darker than his. Which one should come first: lighter skin with wavy hair or darker skin with smoother hair? And what are we going to do with a woman who comes before him in the skin tone continuum, but identifies herself as 'Black' and has some curl in her hair, but who comes after a Latino woman whose skin is even lighter, but whose hair is very curly?"

By this time, they were right with me and I was moving at a good speed. Whipping six one-dollar bills out of my brief case, I handed one bill to each of the six darkest students and then looked around the circle without comment. The other students looked crest-fallen.

"Oh," I said. "You're disappointed you didn't get dollars, too? How does that feel -— not getting a dollar, when they got a dollar?"

"I feel like I'm in the wrong place," responded one light-skinned Latino woman immediately. I repeated her words back to the group and added, "So, we don't like it when other people get rewarded for being in a quasi-biological category that we're not a part of, huh?"

I repeated my original question again, slowly and clearly: "How do we feel when someone else gets a dollar and we don't when the decision made is based on something neither they nor we have any control over?"

The man who had wound up in the slot as the person with the darkest skin in the room chortled, "I don't know!" and everybody laughed. But I was able to add just before releasing them from the class, “In our society, European-Americans have come to expect and do not even know that they are getting special privileges and rewards all their lives just because they are categorized and identified as ‘White.’ People of color know it and are hurt by it, but do not have the power to change it. This semester, should you decide to return, we will consider what this does to us, to our society, and to our futures. See you next week!”

And I did – almost every one of them.

To be continued...

Dr. James Cone on Christianity and White Supremacy

2011-03-09T07:00:00.000-06:00

Please allow me to introduce to any of you who are unaware of this brilliant man Dr. James Hal Cone, the Charles Augustus Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Whether or not you identify yourself as a Christian, whether or not you believe in a Supreme Being, and whether or not you would normally even care about or listen to a presentation on this topic, I strongly urge you to spend the twenty minutes necessary to hear what this man has to say. I guarantee he will expose you to some ideas you will not hear anywhere else, ideas which I for one think are important to any dialogue on power and justice related to the socially-constructed, political notion of "race" in America.

On This Day in History

2011-03-07T09:56:00.015-06:00

On March 7, 1932, according to This Week in History, a publication of PeaceButtons.info, a Ford [Motor Company] Hunger March began on Detroit’s east side and proceeded ten miles, seeking relief during the Great Depression. Facing hunger and evictions, workers had formed neighborhood Unemployed Councils. Along the route, the marchers were given good wishes from Detroit Mayor Frank Murphy as well as two motorcycle escorts, and thousands joined the marchers along the route.

At the Detroit city limit, however, the marchers were met by Dearborn police and doused by fire hoses. Despite the cold weather, they continued to the Employment Office at the Ford River Rouge plant, from which there had been massive layoffs. Five workers were killed and nineteen wounded by police and company “security” personnel armed with pistols, rifles and a machine gun.

Dave Moore, one of the marchers that day (photo above), said, “That blood was Black blood and White blood. One of the photos that was published in the Detroit Times, but never seen since, shows a Black woman, Mattie Woodson, wiping the blood off the head of Joe DiBlasio, a White man who lay there dying...It’s been 75 years, but when you drive down Miller Road today, your car tires will be moistened with the blood that those five shed.”

70,000 people showed up for the funeral of the five who were killed that day and grave markers with the words “His Life for the Union” pay tribute to the fallen marchers in Woodmere Cemetery on Detroit’s west side.

We imagine that Black and White people have always fought their battles separately, but Bacon's Rebellion proves otherwise. The death of Crispus Attucks proves otherwise. John Brown's raid proves otherwise. The Detroit Hunger March proves otherwise. And the civil rights struggles of the 1960's prove otherwise.

There's a reason the Powers-That-Be make such an effort to keep Black and White workers segregated and separated. It's called "divide and conquer." Edna Bonacich developed her Split Labor Market Theory out of that idea, suggesting that if the Fat Cats convince one group of workers that they're "special," giving them a little more money, a few extra benefits, an illusion of respect, they'll help to hold another group down to maintain their position and both groups will keep each other too busy to notice who's really making out like a bandit. White unions bought this shell game for a long time, but one day they realized that in addition to getting worked (as in producing all the profit for their bosses to get rich while they couldn't make ends meet), they were getting worked (as in being manipulated out of their common sense).

It's solidarity that gave workers in this country the weekend, eight-hour work days, lunch hours, sick leave, vacation time, health insurance, work place safety guarantees and every other benefit they now enjoy. Even so, workers in the U.S. work more hours and get less goodies (including raises) than workers do in other industrialized nations. The "owners of the means of production" know this. So they're attacking any ability workers might have to hold onto those rights.

I call them rights rather than "special privileges" because the U.S. Constitution guarantees the citizens of this nation -- Black, White, Latino, Asian, Native, men, women, and children -- "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." I'd like to see Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin pursuing his happiness with no job, no income, no health care, and no prospects of any showing up. Hell, I'd like to see him pursuing happiness with the kind of wages and health care many people who are working struggle to meet their families' basic needs with. One thing's for sure: Walker won't be having to "tighten" his belt, will he? So why should those whose labor bankrolls this country's corporations and government have to tighten ours?

I grew up being told I'd better "know which side my bread's buttered on." And I know. Whoever writes my paycheck in the lowest possible amount I will accept only does so in order to keep me hanging in the vampire closet (for ready feeding). I feel no particular loyalty to whomever buys my labor on a given day because they obviously demonstrate no such loyalty to me. I give them without fail more than they ask for. But I stand beside my brothers and sisters in the human race -- in and outside of this country -- who are committed to fighting for justice for everyone come hell or high water. Even -- and maybe especially -- if they're police officers like this one at the Capitol Building in Wisconsin on February 24th:

Those who have the power may be able to brutalize us in senseless, cruel and unusual ways. They may be able to operate as if they they do not have to answer to anyone. And they may be able to launch unjust and insanely expensive wars for us to fight in, die in and pay for. But the real power in this country is supposed to be "of the people, by the people and for the people." They seem to have forgotten this. Let us not forget it, too.

Funeral of those killed at the Detroit Hunger March, 1932

Mardi Gras!

2011-03-06T10:12:00.003-06:00

It's Mardi Gras in Louisiana, folks, and this makes my fourth year here without going to New Orleans, only 45 miles away. It's been raining cats and dogs for two days. I have hundreds of papers to grade by Thursday, thanks to falling behind (again) when my community activities claimed too much of my time. And I threw my back out carrying great big potted plants back outside only to have to haul them in again last night in anticipation of the temperature going back down to 30 degrees after we were all in sandals a week ago.

So...unless someone kidnaps me (and I'm secretly hoping they will), I'll put my eggs in next year's Mardi Gras basket for now, but I absolutely must post this YouTube video of the Rebirth Brass Band (oh, yeah!) playing while the Treme' Sidewalk Steppers second line. 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky...

Happy birthday, Albert Woodfox!

2011-03-05T13:46:00.017-06:00

I had heard of the Angola 3 before moving to Louisiana more than three years ago. Even so, I didn't immediately think to plug into the campaign to release Albert "Shaka" Woodfox and Herman "Hooks" Wallace, who were both still in solitary confinement in Angola when I got here. But when Albert's birthday rolled around the next February, I got it in my head to throw him a little party -- complete with cake -- and tell him so. And we've been communicating ever since.

The following fall, the sociology student club I advise decided to plan and execute a big two-day Angola 3 awareness event. They worked their butts off, plastering the campus with announcements for weeks in advance and even inviting Robert King (the third member of the Angola 3, who was released in 1991) to speak, as well as supporters and former Black Panther Party members from as far away as California. It put the club on the campus map for certain, but the turn out was disappointing, at best. Still, hundreds of postcards with information about the Angola 3 were distributed by sociology club members wearing handcuffs in the student union breezeway. And you can still see the Angola 3 t-shirts we had made at that time bobbing around the campus occasionally.

At the time (Fall of 2009), Albert Woodfox had been to court (again) and was waiting for the judge's decision, which would normally have come down by that time, nearly six months after the hearing. We all had high hopes that he would be released, since the lower court had said he should be, a decision the persecuters (er...Prosecuters) had appealed. Time dragged on for more than a year before the Court decreed that Shaka should continue to spend twenty-three hours per day in a nine by six foot cell alone after having already done so since 1972 for a crime not even the victim's widow thinks he and Herman Wallace committed.

We were crestfallen. Shaka and Hooks were devastated. The Powers-That-Be were jubilant and celebrated by shipping Hooks to Elayne Hunt Correctional Center near Baton Rouge so the men would no longer see each other occasionally in the visiting yard and lawyer's visits would be more inconvenient since they couldn't see both men on the same day.

Subsequently, Shaka himself was moved out of Angola to David Wade Correctional Center near Shreveport (in the far northern section of the state), making visits by folks from New Orleans a real ordeal in terms of distance. But a bit of good news developed recently when Judge Brady ruled in Shaka's favor, granting him an evidentiary hearing in the matter of discrimination in the selection of a Grand Jury foreperson who was clearly known to be biased against Woodfox. The ruling came so quickly after the judge was asked for it that we're rather expecting to be in court in Baton Rouge (with Shaka and as many of us as possible present) as soon as May or June.

In any case, Albert "Shaka" Woodfox turned sixty-four on February 19th, so the sociology club took another shot at a birthday party for him. We got special permission to show the new Angola 3 documentary, "In the Land of the Free", directed by Roger Vadim and narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. And, quite by accident, we laid in enough birthday cake to feed a small army (which turned out to be a good thing.)

We set the party for 5:00 p.m. on the Tuesday after his birthday and, unlike previous events, somewhere in the vicinity of seventy people showed up -- Black, White, old, young, men, women, student and city-folk, some coming all the way from New Orleans. In a festive mood, they went through two large decorated cakes like marauding ants at a picnic, scooping up hundreds of items of informational material on their way back to their seats where they settled in to watch the film.

As they watched, they laughed at Robert King's story about being arrested as a kid, raged audibly at obvious travesties of justice, and wiped their eyes as the lights came back up. Their comments were declarations of love and support:

“Watching this film really changed my outlook on America.”

“When I actually heard the voices of these innocent men, voices that sounded tired, but not without hope, it dawned on me that this movie is more than just another documentary...It introduced me to reality.”

“Evidence is everything these days; how can it be irrelevant in this case?”

“I pay my taxes to keep jails going and they use my money to keep innocent men in prison for something [they] did not do?!?”

“[This film] made me feel...proud as a Black person. I would give my heart to the Angola 3 for what they have been dealing with for 40 years...This movie really inspired me to be more open about what I believe in.”

“If you think that one person can’t make a difference, these three men will tell you different.”

“Whether or not Wallace and Woodfox gain their freedom, they are fighting for a just cause. The time they’ve lost and the pain they continue to suffer will not go unnoticed and this will greatly affect societies all over the world for decades to come.”

“I never read or heard about the Angola 3 before, but now that I have, I feel as if it is my civic duty to help these men acquire justice, restore their lives, and get out of jail as soon as humanly possible.”

Which are my sentiments precisely. Happy birthday, Shaka. You're far from forgotten. In fact, you're in there for us and we're out here for you. Hang on, my brother. We're comin'.

ALBERT "SHAKA" "CINQUE" WOODFOX
#72148
CCR - NIA#3
David Wade Correctional Center
670 Bell Hill Road
Homer, LA 71040HERMAN "HOOKS" WALLACE
#76759
CCR - D #11
Elayne Hunt Correctional Center
P.O. Box 174
St. Gabriel, LA 70776

Lenore J. Daniels: To Fellow Travelers Who Have Considered Suicide When Resistance Is Enough

2011-02-20T10:22:00.016-06:00

As circumstances personal and political, on my job and in the world arena increasingly unfold in ways that threaten the stability of my own and others' lives, I go from hoping for the best to arming myself for whatever comes next. I am not alone. As a regular reader of The Black Commentator, I have come to greatly appreciate the perspective of Dr. Lenore Jean Daniels, who's on the Editorial Board there. Here is her essay for this week. I couldn't agree with it more.

...[T]hey certainly want that freedom which they thought was mine -- that frightening limousine, for example, or the power to give away a suit or my increasingly terrifying trans-Atlantic journeys. How can one say that freedom is taken, not given, and that no one is free until all are free? And that the price is high. -- James Baldwin, "Take Me to the Water"

The conceited villager believes the entire world to be his village. Provided that he can be mayor or humiliate the rival who stole his sweetheart or add to the savings in his strongbox, he considers the universal order good, unaware of those giants with seven-league boots who can crush him underfoot or of the strife in the heavens between comets that go through the air asleep, gulping down worlds. What remains the village in America must rouse itself. These are not times for sleeping in a nightcap, but with weapons for a pillow, like the warriors of Juan de Castellanos: weapons of the mind, which conquer all others. Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stones. -- Jose Marti, Our America

At some point, you have to say "Enough is enough. You will not bury me in it so that I become a zombie among the walking dead."

Your spirit of resistance is in danger! Hollowness becomes fashionable. The dead seek to infect or drain you of that spirit.

Misery loves company.

But it is futile to seek freedom in battle with the dead. Strategies to gain freedom must have as a central goal the removal of human-made systems of oppression -- no matter how many corpses surrounding you say otherwise in an attempt to distract you.

Death don’t ring no doorbells.
Death don’t knock.
Death don’t bother to open no doors,
Just comes on through the walls like TV,
Like King Cole on the radio, cool…
Next thing you know, Death’s there.
You don’t know where Death came from:
Death just comes in
And don’t ring no bell.
--Langston Hughes, "Casual"
It is in this knowledge of resistance that we join others anywhere on Earth in the pursuit of freedom. It is in this spirit of resistance that we maintain our humanity; we may be victimized but never surrender to victimhood. It is in this spirit of resistance that we can say to the clever aid-ers and abetters alike, "we know you, too, and we see in your appeasement glorified road blocks with labels: Democratic Party, Tea Party, the American Way." In Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics, Joy James writes that the system, as well as Black aid-ers and abetters, contributed to the "closure of Black rebellion" [because] "once a person disembarks at the Promised Land, the final destination of the 'North' as geopolitical terrain or chair of the Democratic National Committee as prime political landscape, insurrection becomes 'folly.'"

Ours is the road less taken and increasingly so in these times when government capitulation to corporate pressure signals the capitalists’ fear of losing control. Austerity measures, privatization, de-regulation and police states shift fear to the people who, in turn, are urged to recognize in our voices and see in us the "folly" of insurrection.

It has increasingly become a chaotic and cruel world. We are urged to die -- and quickly! It is no wonder the corporate media, while mocking our anger and passion, misinforms our youth with slick advertisement proclaiming racism, sexism, imperialism dead, and uses a man as dead as a doorknob and as Black as snow to lie to a nation, to the world (change is here; freedom is now!) and who, in the course of his ascendance, has lured the masses of youth and Black Americans to Zombieland, where they roam to this day, wandering and foundering in a state of confusion.

The corporate world did what was best to sustain the system of capitalism and to enrich and further empower its class. It concocted its best trick ever when it selected the best representative from among the dead to represent its interests and goals.

It is a matter of survival!

The true meaning of freedom must survive, too, if the Earth and its people have a future as inhabiters of this planet. By its own definition, capitalism cannot sustain life on this planet. "Freedom, to be viable, has to be sincere and complete. If a republic refuses to open its arms to all, and move ahead with all, it dies." (Jose Marti, "Our America").

Any of us committed, however, to serious and fundamental change (radical disruption of systems of race, gender and economic divisions); any of us activists, writers, journalists, educators, thinkers -- intellectuals because we refuse to live as dead and reject shallow offerings from the road blocks -- need to remember, as Edward Said urged us to remember, that "an intellectual does not represent a statue-like icon, but an individual vocation, an energy, a stubborn force engaging as a committed and recognizable voice in language and in society with a whole slew of issues, all of them having to do in the end with a combination of enlightenment and emancipation or freedom." (Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures).

We are armed for battle; we have knowledge of the spirit of resistance. In this spirit, we are strong. When we meet, we will recognize one another by the work we do, that is, by the "barricades of ideas" we help form in the battle to preserve life on this planet._______________________________________________________
Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer for over thirty years, of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. You may read more of her work at The Black Commentator where she serves on the Editorial Board.

Gonna Have A Good Day!

2011-02-14T12:50:00.004-06:00

One of my faithful readers turned me onto Nappy Roots last night and I've been humming this song ever since. So, because it's Valentine's Day and everybody reading this is my valentine, I'm sharing it with you. Enough with the bummers for a minute. Just for this one day, I'm gonna have a good day. Wanna join me?

Black History Month in America

2011-02-11T14:37:00.016-06:00

It's "Black History Month" in the United States again. So we'll be inundated with various performances and presentations of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream Speech." We'll be reminded that African-Americans used to be slaves and that now (praise God!) they're not. Not only are they not slaves any more (we'll be reminded), but they can vote, use any bathroom they want to, ride in the front of the bus, and walk right up to any water fountain and drink if they please. They can go to private schools right along side the White kids who live in other neighborhoods. They can try on clothes at "better" stores. And they can sue for damages, if they're locked up for thirty years when they were, in fact, innocent. Why, they can even be President of the United States.

What we won't be encouraged to think about is that the life of the average ordinary Black person in this country is still routinely structured and strictured by White Supremacy. I've written about it so often on this blog, I feel as if I repeat myself endlessly. Yet White people often don't get it. And even many African-Americans I meet have been socialized to be in denial about it, as well.

We're all taught that in the United States anybody can accomplish anything. Which automatically means, of course, that if you don't have a job, you must not want one, right? And if you don't make enough money to survive, you must just not be trying hard enough. So there's no point in noticing that Black men (who make up about 14% of the men in the U.S.) make up more than half of the men in prison. And guilty or not, a felony conviction fixes the felon permanently outside the job market. That alone should tell us something about how inequality can be locked into the daily lives of millions using what amount to social sleight of hand maneuvers, allowing those who have the Power-To-Define (and lots of other folks) to blame the victim.

In any case, I don't have the time or the inclination right this minute to hash over the economics again. But I do want to highlight another aspect of "Black History Month" that bothers me immensely and that's the tendency to present "Black History" (which actually dates to the beginning of the human race) as if it started with the European-driven slave trade of Africans (which dates back about five hundred years). Africa is a huge continent, fabulously varied and marvelously culturally complex. It holds the cradle of civilization and, despite centuries of rampant, unapologetic economic rape and pillage by White-led corporations and interests, remains even now rich beyond measure.

My thesis for my Masters degree was on "Social Distance Between Africans and Black Americans and the Attitudes of White Americans Toward Both Groups." What I discovered was that many Black Americans tend to want to divorce themselves from any connection to Africa or Africans because of the lop-sided perceptions we're taught by the Euro-centric agenda.

Malcolm X understood very clearly how this affects people of color. Listening to him speaking while viewing the accompanying photos reminds me yet again why we hear so much more about Martin Luther King, Jr., this time of year than we do about Malcolm X who is typically presented as a violent, White-hating religious bigot. He wasn't.