May was a month of death and dying for me and frankly — my head is just fucked up right now…

First, I watched as my beautiful, sister-in-law lost her battle with metastatic kidney cancer in Upstate New York after she left the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota where her older sister lived and she'd been being treated for almost a year. She was 70, and died on Mother's Day, a day after her baby brother's (my husband's) 68th birthday.

From April 28, when we arrived at her Upstate, NY home from Texas (the family’d decided we’d all take turns being there cuz she couldn’t really do anything for herself and her husband was undone), we were relieving her twin brother who’d been there for a week.

I've never been in the house with someone dying.  That shit f*ked me the hell up, Fam.  But something I think we Black folk are conditioned to do -- is love folk up as they "go through it."  I massaged her legs and when her older sister, Joyce, asked her if she wanted us to say the rosary with her -- she said, "Yes, please."

And damned if that Jesuit-indoctrinated, Oblate Sisters of Providence shit didn't come right back to me!  I said the rosary with Joy & Caroline (her daughter), despite what I think about Catholic indoctrination -- cuz that's what I'm sure Jan would've wanted..

When I realized that on May 21 — a white, 18 year-old , killed 10 Black folk buyin’ damned groceries and injured three in the May 14 Buffalo mass shootingjust four hours away from where we’d been, I lost my f*ckin’ mind.

Then, on May 24, by the time we got home, 19 Latino children and two teachers were massacred at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde by another white, 18 year-old for a total of 30 people dead in nearly as many days as had the month of May!  Fam, I'm really undone.

I’m always there it seems, or in close proximity to this sh*t. I was living in Charleston when Michael Slager killed Walter Scott and when the Emanuel 9 were murdered by Dylan Roof; I was in Minnesota after George Floyd was murdered, not far away from Kenosha, WI when Jacob Blake was murdered. I was living in South Texas when the El Paso massacre happened. It’s startin’ to creep me the hell out, Fam!

Either that, or I need to get busy…

ABC never-aired this 1979 Baldwin profile. Producer was told -- No one would be interested in a “queer, Black has-been”

Never Aired: Profile on James Baldwin ABC’s 20/20, 1979 from A Closer Look on Vimeo:

"Baldwin speaks frankly about outing himself to the general public with his 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room and about what it means to live as a Black man in a nation that has always favored its white citizens:

"The American sense of reality is dictated by what Americans are trying to avoid. And if you’re trying to avoid reality, how can you face it?" 

Nearly 35 years before Black Lives Matter’s formation, he tackles the issue of white fragility by telling Chase, “Look, I don’t mean it to you personally. I don’t even know you. I have nothing against you. I don’t know you personally, but I know you historically. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t swear to the freedom of all mankind and put me in chains.” 

The finished piece is a superb, 60 Minutes-style profile that covers a lot of ground, and yet, 20/20 chose not to air it. 

After the show ran Chase’s interview with Michael Jackson, producer Lovett inquired as to the delay and was told that no one would be interested in a “queer, Black has-been”:

I was stunned, I was absolutely stunned, because in my mind James Baldwin was no has-been. He was a classic American writer, translated into every language in the world, and would live on forever, and indeed he has. His courage and his eloquence continue to inspire us today."  (All emphasis mine)

The White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy showed their ass -- and got it handed to them tonight...

Not only did Trump supporters continue their fear-based, asinine behavior tonight -- the media (Yeah, John King, I'm talking to you!), blamed the protestors for what happened -- like Trump's ongoing rhetoric didn't have a damned thing to do with fanning the flames!

Lawd ha' mercy! This shit is gettin' thicker and thicker ain't it? Where, or how will it end? Is there a REAL revolution going on? Or does "Feelin' the Bern" only offer up more of the same shit, different day (Hillary's an equal opportunity shyster, so I didn't include her in my question)?? You decide.


Related:
- Donald Trump, Chicago, and the Lessons of 1968
- The Fearful and the Frustrated
- Reality TV

Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe, 1930 - 2013

“I think it’s changed a bit. But not very much in its essentials. When I think of the standing, the importance and the erudition of all these people who see nothing about racism in Heart of Darkness, I’m convinced that we must really be living in different worlds. Anyway, if you don’t like someone’s story, you write your own. If you don’t like what somebody says, you say what it is you don’t like. Some people imagine that what I mean is, Don’t read Conrad. Good heavens, no! I teach Conrad. I teach Heart of Darkness. I have a course on Heart of Darkness in which what I’m saying is, Look at the way this man handles Africans. Do you recognize humanity there? People will tell you he was opposed to imperialism. But it’s not enough to say, I’m opposed to imperialism. Or, I’m opposed to these people—these poor people—being treated like this. Especially since he goes on straight away to call them “dogs standing on their hind legs.” That kind of thing. Animal imagery throughout. He didn’t see anything wrong with it. So we must live in different worlds. Until these two worlds come together we will have a lot of trouble.”

Chinua Achebe

Which is why we must continue to work, exceedingly hard at telling our own stories -- all of them.

The prolific, Nigerian novelist and educator, Chinua Achebe is now with the ancestors and I think it only fitting, to have the remarkable, young, Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie eulogize him. Read and enjoy her 2010 piece in Salon entitled, "Chinua Achebe: The man who rediscovered Africa":

When, in 1958, the London publishers William Heinemann received a manuscript of Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart,” they were unsure whether to publish it. The central question, according to editor Alan Hill, was this: “Would anyone possibly buy a novel by an African?” Not only were there a mere handful of examples of African writing in English at the time – such as Amos Tutuola’s surreal “The Palm-Wine Drinkard” and Cyprian Ekwensi’s novel of contemporary Lagos, “People of the City” – but none of them had the ambition, the subtlety, or the confidence of “Things Fall Apart.”

Chinua Achebe had initially conceived it as a story of three generations: a man in pre-colonial Igboland who struggles against the changes brought by the first European missionaries and administrators; his son who converts to Christianity and receives some Western education; and his grandson who is educated in England and is living the life of the new elite on the cusp of independence. Achebe later scaled down the novel, focusing only on the first generation, to produce a carefully observed story of the African-European colonial encounter set among the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria in the 1890s, with the tragic hero Okonkwo at its center. Achebe’s second novel, “No Longer At Ease,” would skip a generation and tell the story of Okonkwo’s grandson, Obi, a civil servant in 1950s Lagos. His third novel, “Arrow of God,” about an Igbo priest and a British district officer in 1920s Igboland, can be read as representative of the times of Okonkwo’s son. All three novels, taken together as Achebe’s “African Trilogy,” create a full and beautifully nuanced arc, a human chronicle of the cultural and political changes that brought about what is now seen as the modern African state.

After William Heinemann overcame their reservations and published “Things Fall Apart” in June 1958, it became a critical success. Achebe, the Times Literary Supplement wrote, had “genuinely succeeded in presenting tribal life from the inside.” A novelty indeed. “Things Fall Apart” was pioneering not in its subject but in its African point of view, as there were already many well-regarded books about Africans written by non-Africans; tribal life had already been endlessly portrayed from the outside. Achebe himself first read some of the better-known examples of these “colonialism classics” as a secondary school student in the 1940s. “I did not see myself as an African to begin with,” he has written about his response to the African characters. “I took sides with the white men against the savages. The white man was good and reasonable and intelligent and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid or, at the most, cunning. I hated their guts.” As Achebe matured and became more critical in his reading, he began to understand the enormous power that stories had, and how much this power was shaped by who told the stories and by how they were told. As a university student in the 1950s, in addition to reading Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Coleridge, Achebe also read Joyce Carey’s “Mister Johnson,” a novel set in Nigeria, which Time magazine had named the “best book ever written about Africa.” Achebe disagreed. Not only was the Nigerian character in the novel unrecognizable to him and his classmates but he also detected, in the description of Nigerians, “an undertow of uncharitableness … a contagion of distaste, hatred, and mockery.”

There has been much written about Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” as a response to Mister Johnson, and one likes to think that Achebe would have written his novel even if he had not read Cary’s. Still, the prejudiced representation of African characters in literature could not but have had an influence on Achebe’s development as a writer. He would, years later, write a famous essay about the portrayal of Africans in Joseph Conrad’s classic novel “Heart of Darkness,” arguing not that Conrad should not have written honestly about the racism of the time, but that Conrad failed to hold an authorial rejection of that worldview.

The strangeness of seeing oneself distorted in literature – and indeed of not seeing oneself at all – was part of my own childhood. I grew up in the Nigerian university town of Nsukka in the 1980s, reading a lot of British children’s books. My early writing mimicked the books I was reading: all my characters were white and all my stories were set in England. Then I read “Things Fall Apart.” It was a glorious shock of discovery, as was “Arrow of God,” which I read shortly afterwards; I did not know in a concrete way until then that people like me could exist in literature. Here was a book that was unapologetically African, that was achingly familiar, but that was, also, exotic because it detailed the life of my people a hundred years before. Because I was educated in a Nigerian system that taught me little of my pre-colonial past, because I could not, for example, imagine with any accuracy how life had been organized in my part of the world in 1890, Achebe’s novels became strangely personal. “Things Fall Apart” was no longer a novel about a man whose exaggerated masculinity and encompassing fear of weakness make it impossible for him to adapt to the changes in his society, it became the life my great-grandfather might have lived. “Arrow of God” was no longer just about the British administration’s creation of warrant chiefs, and the linked destinies of two men – one an Igbo priest the other a British administrator – it became the story of my ancestral hometown during my grandfather’s time. “And No Longer at Ease” transcended the story of an educated young Nigerian struggling with the pressure of new urban expectations in Lagos, and became the story of my father’s generation.

Later, as an adult confronting the portrayals of Africa in non-African literature – Africa as a place without history, without humanity, without hope – and filled with that peculiar sense of defensiveness and vulnerability that comes with knowing that your humanity is seen as negotiable, I would turn again to Achebe’s novels. In the stark, sheer poetry of “Things Fall Apart,” in the humor and complexity of “Arrow of God,” I found a gentle reprimand: Don’t you dare believe other people’s stories of you.

Considering the time and circumstances under which he wrote, perhaps Chinua Achebe sensed that his work would become, for a generation of Africans, both literature and history. He has written that he would be satisfied if his novels did no more than teach his readers that their past “was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.” He has, on occasion, adopted a somewhat anthropological voice in his fiction: “Fortunately among these people,” we are told in “Things Fall Apart,” “a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father.” But what is remarkable is that Achebe’s art never sinks under this burden of responsibility. A reader expecting to find simple answers in Chinua Achebe’s work will be disappointed, because he is a writer who embraces honesty and ambiguity and who complicates every situation. His criticism of the effects of colonialism on the Igbo is implicit, but so is his interrogation of the internal structure of Igbo society. When Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son in “Things Fall Apart,” breaks away from his family and community to join the Christians, it is a victory for the Europeans but also a victory for Nwoye, who finds peace and an outlet for deep disillusions he had long been nursing about his people’s traditions. When a character says, “The White man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers and our clan can no longer act as one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart,” the reader is aware that Achebe’s narrative is as much about the knife as it is about the vulnerabilities, the internal complexities, the cracks that already existed.

Achebe writes spare, elegant sentences in English but it is a Nigerian English and often, more specifically, an Igbo English. All three novels are filled with direct translations from the Igbo, resulting in expressions like “still carrying breakfast” and “what is called ‘the box is moving?’” as well as in laugh-out-loud lines, especially for an Igbo-speaking reader, like “the white man whose father or mother nobody knows.” It is, however, the rendition of proverbs, of speech, of manners of speaking, that elevate Achebe’s novels into a celebration of language. In “Arrow of God,” for example, Ezeulu eloquently captures his own cautious progressiveness when he tells his son whom he has decided to send to the missionary school: “I am like the bird eneke-nti-oba. When his friends asked him why he was always on the wing he replied: men of today have learnt to shoot without missing and so I have learnt to fly without perching…the world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place.”

Achebe takes his characters seriously but not too seriously; he finds subtly subversive ways to question them and even laugh at them, and he refuses to rescue them from their foibles. Okonkwo, perhaps the best-known character in modern African writing in English, is the quintessential Strong Man, and is ruled by a profound fear that blinds him. His insecurities result in a relentless harshness and an extremist view of masculinity – he is so terrified of being thought weak that he destroys a person he loves and yet the reader empathizes with his remorse, repressed as it is.

It is impossible, especially for the contemporary reader, not to be struck by the portrayal of gender in “Things Fall Apart,” and the equating of weakness and inability with femaleness. More interesting, however, and perhaps more revealing, are the subtle ways in which Achebe interrogates this patriarchy: Okonkwo denigrates women and yet the child he most respects is his daughter Ezinma, the only character who dares to answer back to him and who happens to be confident and forthright in a way that his male children are not. My favorite part of the novel, and a small part indeed, is the love story of the old couple Ozoemena and Ndulue. When Ndulue dies, his wife Ozoemena goes to his hut to see his body and then goes into her own hut and is later found dead there. Okonkwo’s friend Obierika recalls, “It was always said that Ndulue and Ozoemena had one mind. I remember when I was a young boy and there was a song about them. He could not do anything without telling her.” This recollection troubles Okonkwo because, in his eyes, it casts doubts on Ndulue’s authentic masculinity. He says, “I thought he was a strong man in his youth.” The others agree that Ndulue was a strong man and had led the clan to war in those days. They do not see, as Okonkwo obviously does, a contradiction between the old man’s greatness in the realm of masculinity and his mutually dependent relationship with his wife.

It is this rigidity of Okonkwo’s, in addition to his uncompromising nature, his rashness, his excesses, for which the reader feels impatience. Yet, when placed in the context of the many small humiliations of the colonial encounter, his actions become worthy of empathy. The power structures of his society have been so easily overturned. Okonkwo is left struggling to understand a world in which the dignity he had always taken for granted has disappeared, in which elders are treated with scorn and he, proud warrior that he is, is flogged by agents of the District commissioner. The reader is moved to understand the helpless rage, and final violent actions, that are Okonkwo’s response to the enormous, and perhaps baffling, political and economic power that came with Christianity and Colonialism. We are left, in the end, with an unforgettable tragic character: a man who is gravely flawed but who has also been gravely wronged.

Ezeulu, the character at the center of “Arrow of God,” which remains my favorite novel, is both flawed and wronged like Okonkwo, and is also held captive by what he imagines his society expects of him. Unlike Okonkwo, a character who was clearly in Achebe’s control, Ezeulu is wondrously unwieldy and his deep complexity lends “Arrow of God” much of its enduring power. I suspect that, as happens in the best fiction, Chinua Achebe did not have complete control over this character; ultimately the spirit of Ezeulu dictated how his story would be told. “Arrow of God” is told from the points of view of both Ezeulu and the British district commissioner Winterbottom; when the novel begins, the central event has already occurred, much like a Greek drama, and what Achebe explores is the aftermath. Ezeulu has testified against his own people in a land case with the neighboring town, because he is determined to speak the truth, and this action has earned him the respect of the district officer the as well as the ire of his local opponents. It will also act as a catalyst that – added to Ezeulu’s stubborness, his idealism, his pride – will contribute to his tragic end.

Like “Things Fall Apart,” “Arrow of God” shows the angry helplessness of people in the face of formalized European power: powerful men are treated with scorn by government agents, great men are flogged, the justice system is replaced by one the people do not understand and do not have a say in, and the internal dynamics of the society is turned around.

In “No Longer at Ease,” however, this helplessness is replaced by something inchoate but less suffocating, because the terms have changed during the short-lived optimism of independence. Obi, struggling with the pressures of the new Nigerian society, captures this change when he thinks of his boss the Englishman Mr. Green, who he is sure “loved Africa but only Africa of a certain kind: the Africa of Charles the messenger, the Africa of his gardenboy and stewardboy. In 1900 Mr Green might have ranked among the greatest missionaries, in 1935 he would have made do with slapping headmasters in the presence of their pupils, but in 1957 he could only curse and swear.”

Achebe writes in the realist tradition and there are often traces of the autobiographical in his work. He was born in 1930 in the Igbo town of Ogidi, southeastern Nigeria. His parents were firm Christians but many of his relatives had retained the Igbo religion and so he grew up a witness to both sides of his heritage and, more importantly, a recipient of stories from both. Influences of his great-uncle, a wealthy and important man who had allowed the first missionaries to stay in his compound but later asked them to leave because he found their music too sad, are obvious in “Things Fall Apart.” He worked as a radio producer in Lagos in the 1950s and the details of this life – film shows and clubs and bars, observing formerly expatriate clubs that were now admitting a few Nigerians – give “No Longer at Ease” its verisimilitude. It was through a radio program that Achebe heard the story of an Igbo priest in a nearby town who, as a result of a number of events with the British administration, had postponed the sacred New Yam festival, which had never been done before. He decided to go and visit this town and the story inspired “Arrow of God.”

All of Achebe’s work is, in some way, about strong communitarian values, the use of language as collective art, the central place of storytelling and the importance of symbolic acts and objects in keeping a community together. The American writer John Updike, after reading “Arrow of God,” wrote to Achebe to say that a western writer would not have allowed the destruction of a character as rich as Ezeulu. This is debatable, but perhaps what Updike had understood was that Achebe was as much concerned with a person as he was with a people, an idea well captured in the proverb that a character in Arrow of God recites: “An animal rubs its itching flank against a tree, but a man asks his kinsman to scratch him.” (all emphasis mine)

I've only read "Things Fall Apart" but, I'll certainly read the rest of the trilogy.  Because,  just as I felt when my high school English teacher, Mrs. Alfreda Jenkins, fed our young, Black minds (thirsting for voices and experiences that sounded like our own) with all those wonderful voices of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond, my old-assed mind, right now, today -- still thirsts for those ancestral voices about whom Achebe wrote, voices which a lot of us would rather deny, or worse yet, hope would disappear.

Related:
- Author Chinua Achebe dies at 82
- Nigerian Writer Chinua Achebe, Author of ‘Things Fall Apart’, Dead at 82
- Chinua Achebe at 82: “We Remember Differently,” By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Chinua Achebe Biography

"The Façade of the American Dream" (for those who've no idea -- or do, but think they're "special")

H/T to Brother Sukant over at Sons of Malcolm for this...

The timeless and prescient -- Mr. James Baldwin

White in America

After reading several posts from Black bloggers (Abagond, Chauncey DeVega at W.A.R.N  and Sharon Toomer over at BlackAndBrownNews) opining why CNN never did a "White in America" series -- here we have it:  "White in America" on HuffPost Live.

I swear -- the day I posted this, the video was embeddable!  As I scrolled down the blog this morning, I noticed there was this big. blank.white.space where the video used to be (hmmm...maybe that's all that needed saying)! You can click on the link and still watch it though. {smdh} (comments still forthcoming)

I have so many comments on this one, but I'll have to come back to it because I'm finishing another post, so go ahead and watch it and stay tuned.

Related:
- Time to profile white men?

The "Transcendent" Mrs. O

“For Barack,” said Michelle Obama in her wildly acclaimed speech tonight, “these issues aren’t political – they’re personal.”

That reprise of the shopworn feminist slogan — “the personal is political” — was the essential premise of her entire speech. In a cloyingly theatrical modern tradition, first ladies attend the national conventions to testify about biography, not policy; they talk about the man as only they know him. But Michelle Obama managed to effortlessly marshal both to tell a story about change in America — with the promise of more to come — and to deliver her speech transcendantly. (emphasis mine)

I watched Michelle Obama's speech last Tuesday and my take-away was nowhere near Salon's take on said speech, Michelle Obama: Beyond mom-in-chief.  My first thought was, "There goes that word again!   Why are Black "achievements" always described as transcendent by our alabaster brethren (they certainly used it enough in the run-up to, and selection of, the Changeling)?"  Answering my own question I said, "Because they only consider one of Webster's definitions of the word when it comes to some, former 'savages' -- exceeding usual limits : surpassing.

Discarding the white racial frame, Webster's second definition seemed a more apt description of the Mom-in-Chief's speech to me as I talked back to the TV like one of my great aunts used to do -- beyond comprehension.  This wonderful piece by Saswat Pattanayak, posted over at voxunion last weekend, captured most of my reasons why most eloquently in, Michelle Obama and American Status Quo Action Plan:

Michelle Obama’s convention speech has been both applauded and criticized for being too emotional. Those amazed at her love towards her husband have shed a tear or two, while the detractors are disappointed at her personal narrative lacking statistical substance.

A critical inquiry would reveal that her speech was anything but emotive. It was a carefully orchestrated rehash of an old American fixation with individual merits, family values and competitive prosperity. Her speech was a blueprint for humanizing capitalism. It was a justification for the status quo politics that has uniformly strengthened a populist cry for American hegemony; decade after decade, regime after regime. Michelle Obama’s speech has merely colored the template acceptable.

Then this week, Black Agenda Report Editor and senior columnist, Margaret Kimberley succinctly and skillfully laid waste to the white-framed idea of "transcendent" in her, Black America Stands Down for the Obamas:

The best example of foolishness masquerading as substance was the overwrought reaction to first lady Michelle Obama’s speech. She gave what has become a traditional address asking voters to support the candidate because his wife tells funny stories about him which will make voters determined to vote for the good husband/dad/one time poor student who loves his country. The only difference between Michelle Obama and Ann Romney’s speeches was in the quality of delivery and fashion sense. Apparently there is still nothing like a beautiful woman in the right dress to make otherwise intelligent people lose their common sense.

I, for one, certainly appreciate these "canaries in the coal mines," who (with facts), exposed the white-framed description of Mrs. O's "transcendent" speech for what it was, politricks as usual -- "with the promise of more to come."

That in mind, Ms. Hill's searing, "When the, Son of Perdition is Commander-in-Chief..." shouldn't be ignored:



Yet the beat goes on...

"Mighty Jerome"

Because we need to know...




If you get a chance to see this documentary -- DO!

Lincoln, the resolute white supremacist -- the Changeling's "homeboy"?

Back, when I was younger, "homeboy" didn't only refer to someone who came from the same place as you.  It was someone of that place, someone with whom you shared a collection of innate life experiences, or, as Baldwin put it below -- a "system of reality":



Whether one wants to own the "system" Baldwin described, or not (and there are many who do not), most of us cannot disown the skin color by which white supremacy judges, attacks and devalues our worth.

During the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas Debates on slavery, The Changeling's "homeboy" made quite clear there was a different "system of reality" at play between Blacks and himself.  In an excerpt from the first debate held in Ottowa, IL (interesting name, given so many slaves escaped American terrorism via the Underground Railroad to Canada, only to "meet the enemy" there as well), he said:

"Now, gentlemen...This is the whole of it, and anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro, is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse. [Laughter.] I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.  I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. [Loud cheers.] I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. [Great applause.] (emphasis mine)

I guess if you consider him your "homeboy" -- you just ignore the lasting, soul-murdering effects of Lincoln's positioning us as socially, politically, morally, intellectually and physically unequal to white men,in favor of praising his pragmatic arguments against "the institution" (which itself, was fully formed as a result of all those things you ignore).

Was he clear in his white supremacist beliefs?  I sure think so. Was he consistent in those beliefs?  Here's an excerpt from the fourth debate held in Charleston, IL -- you be the judge:

While I was at the hotel to-day, an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people. [Great Laughter.] While I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject, yet as the question was asked me I thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in regard to it. I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]-that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied every thing. (emphasis mine)

Seems pretty consistent and mighty white of him to me.  I might've even said, "At least he was honest!" -- except for the level of manipulation, guilt-tripping and dishonesty described in Rick Beard's recent New York Times piece, Lincoln's Panama Plan; a plan devised to get as many of our Black asses out of their, United States as he could (as if Sierra Leone and Liberia weren't enough).

I went back and forth on whether to link to, or post in its entirety, Lincoln's address, whose arguments were, according to Beard -- "...so audacious that they,retain the ability to shock a reader 150 years later."  After reading it, I thought its "homeboy" impact would be much better felt if readers saw it all at once, in his own words (with my own commentary interspersed, of course). So, here it is:

"Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Negroes"
Abraham Lincoln
August 14, 1862

This afternoon the President of the United States gave audience to a Committee of colored men at the White House. They were introduced by the Rev. J. Mitchell, Commissioner of Emigration. E. M. Thomas, the Chairman, remarked that they were there by invitation to hear what the Executive had to say to them. Having all been seated, the President, after a few preliminary observations, informed them that a sum of money had been appropriated by Congress, and placed at his disposition for the purpose of aiding the colonization in some country of the people, or a portion of them, of African descent, thereby making it his duty, as it had for a long time been his inclination, to favor that cause; and why, he asked, should the people of your race be colonized, and where? Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration. You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated. You here are freemen I suppose.

A VOICE: Yes, sir. (emphasis mine)

Per Beard's piece, "It was the first time African Americans had been invited to the White House on a policy matter." That in itself, in 1862 was enough to impress them I'm sure (all we need do is consider the behavior of some Black folk who today, were first-time invitees to the Big House after the Changeling was selected).  And Lincoln wasted no time in flashing some cash in return for their complicity in his colonization "scheme" (hm-m-m-m, sounds like reparations if we'd just get the hell out of Dodge, right?  See footnote 1 of the address for how much they were willing to pay in 1862 dollars; She-e-e-t, back then, I might've been inclined to take that damned cash!).

But in his never-wavering white supremacy, he made sure to keep them "in their place" by reminding them of our "physical difference" (which I think disguises their mortal fear of us) and the fact that our mere presence caused suffering among the white race (like we asked to come here via the Black Holocaust of slavery). Hell, how much could they have been "suffering" or "disadvantaged, given they'd worked us like the animals they felt we were, to -- clear land; farm, in order to feed them and make profits; build roads, homes and striking edifices in which they still "govern" (and I use that word loosely); be wet nurses to their damned children; clean their houses; wash and iron their clothes; cook their meals; milk their cows; raise their chickens and gather their eggs, etc., etc.?  Suffering?  Please!

The President---Perhaps you have long been free, or all your lives. Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. You are cut off from many of the advantages which the other race enjoy. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you. (emphasis mine)

So-o-o, he sees "the greatest wrong inflicted," but still can't see Blacks as equal to whites.  Then, he uses his faux, give-a-shit to try to convince them that it was best for us to get the hell out. Clearly our existence among "those particular angels, angels who, nevertheless, are always willing to give you a helping hand" -- had to come second. The Doctrine of "Divine Right" said so. {smdh}

I do not propose to discuss this, but to present it as a fact with which we have to deal. I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact, about which we all think and feel alike, I and you. We look to our condition, owing to the existence of the two races on this continent. I need not recount to you the effects upon white men, growing out of the institution of Slavery. I believe in its general evil effects on the white race. See our present condition---the country engaged in war!---our white men cutting one another's throats, none knowing how far it will extend; and then consider what we know to be the truth. But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other. Nevertheless, I repeat, without the institution of Slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence. (emphasis mine)

The Changeling's "homeboy" is pretty patriarchal with his "I'm not discussing this" attitude.  Doesn't  seem to matter much to him what they might be thinking.  And, "I cannot alter it if I would" sounds like pretty resolute, white supremacy to me.  And then, the guilt-tripping begins in earnest, blaming slavery (the capitalist enterprise into which white men willfully and gleefully plunged for profit) -- not only for "white men cutting one another's throats," but for the war as well (for all you deniers out there).  Way to take NO agency at all in white folks's absolute barbarity against us, AND one another there Abe.  Yeah, this institution y'all needed so badly caused white folk to act like, horror of horrors -- savages!

It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated. I know that there are free men among you, who even if they could better their condition are not as much inclined to go out of the country as those, who being slaves could obtain their freedom on this condition. I suppose one of the principal difficulties in the way of colonization is that the free colored man cannot see that his comfort would be advanced by it. You may believe you can live in Washington or elsewhere in the United States the remainder of your life [as easily], perhaps more so than you can in any foreign country, and hence you may come to the conclusion that you have nothing to do with the idea of going to a foreign country. This is (I speak in no unkind sense) an extremely selfish view of the case.

But you ought to do something to help those who are not so fortunate as yourselves. There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us. Now, if you could give a start to white people, you would open a wide door for many to be made free. If we deal with those who are not free at the beginning, and whose intellects are clouded by Slavery, we have very poor materials to start with. If intelligent colored men, such as are before me, would move in this matter, much might be accomplished. It is exceedingly important that we have men at the beginning capable of thinking as white men, and not those who have been systematically oppressed. (emphasis mine)

His "...we should be separated" grand solution is funny.  What would America have looked like had we all left back then?  Accusing them (in no unkind sense, mind you) of being extremely selfish is guilting.  And so is his paternalistically telling these men what they ought to do (all the while keeping at the forefront, how much white folk don't want to deal with Black folk).

Among the many egregious statements made by the "Great Emancipator" in this address, I find these to be among the rankest:  1) Black men, "should give a start" to these barbarians in order for the rest of us to be free?  What kind of shit is that?  The onus should be put on US, to make them act like human beings??  2) Those minds, "clouded by Slavery," are "poor materials to start with?"  Pitting the House Negro's alleged superior thinking against the Field Negro's alleged inferior thinking is so par for white supremacy's course.  3) And this, especially, is the pinnacle of that course, which is still working like a champ to this day -- "It is exceedingly important that we have men at the beginning capable of thinking as white men, and not those who have been systematically oppressed."

O-h-h-h, given the Changeling's craven idolatry of the guy, were he around today, he would certainly give his little, brown-faced "homeboy" a hearty pat on the head for his performance to date!  I have no particular love for Rev. Jesse Jackson but, the predominantly white, MSM's heyday notwithstanding, he certainly should have stood by his open-mike comment about the Changeling back in 2008 (Okay, maybe not the "nuts" part) -- because he was right about him "talking down to Black folk," mirroring Lincoln's encouragement to these Black men.

There is much to encourage you. For the sake of your race you should sacrifice something of your present comfort for the purpose of being as grand in that respect as the white people. It is a cheering thought throughout life that something can be done to ameliorate the condition of those who have been subject to the hard usage of the world. It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels he is worthy of himself, and claims kindred to the great God who made him. In the American Revolutionary war sacrifices were made by men engaged in it; but they were cheered by the future. Gen. Washington himself endured greater physical hardships than if he had remained a British subject. Yet he was a happy man, because he was engaged in benefiting his race---something for the children of his neighbors, having none of his own. (emphasis mine)

"For the sake of your race..."  Okay,  I'm getting plenty weary of the guilt-tripping, aren't you?  And even more, I'm sick of him telling Black folk to be, "as grand in that respect as the white people."  And what exactly does Washington's "commitment" have to do with anything?  He was considered white, just like them.

The colony of Liberia has been in existence a long time.  In a certain sense it is a success. The old President of Liberia, Roberts, has just been with me---the first time I ever saw him. He says they have within the bounds of that colony between 300,000 and 400,000 people, or more than in some of our old States, such as Rhode Island or Delaware, or in some of our newer States, and less than in some of our larger ones. They are not all American colonists, or their descendants. Something less than 12,000 have been sent thither from this country. Many of the original settlers have died, yet, like people elsewhere, their offspring outnumber those deceased.

The question is if the colored people are persuaded to go anywhere, why not there? One reason for an unwillingness to do so is that some of you would rather remain within reach of the country of your nativity. I do not know how much attachment you may have toward our race. It does not strike me that you have the greatest reason to love them. But still you are attached to them at all events. (emphasis mine)

First, he tells these men, "in a certain sense," that Liberia is a success.  Yet, he talks about meeting the "old president of Liberia" for the first time.  In a certain sense,  I don't think he knew a damned thing about the successfulness of Liberia (or didn't want to admit how much success had been made as relayed during that first-time visit).

The place I am thinking about having for a colony is in Central America. It is nearer to us than Liberia---not much more than one-fourth as far as Liberia, and within seven days' run by steamers. Unlike Liberia it is on a great line of travel---it is a highway. The country is a very excellent one for any people, and with great natural resources and advantages, and especially because of the similarity of climate with your native land---thus being suited to your physical condition.

The particular place I have in view is to be a great highway from the Atlantic or Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean, and this particular place has all the advantages for a colony. On both sides there are harbors among the finest in the world. Again, there is evidence of very rich coal mines. A certain amount of coal is valuable in any country, and there may be more than enough for the wants of the country. Why I attach so much importance to coal is, it will afford an opportunity to the inhabitants for immediate employment till they get ready to settle permanently in their homes.

If you take colonists where there is no good landing, there is a bad show; and so where there is nothing to cultivate, and of which to make a farm. But if something is started so that you can get your daily bread as soon as you reach there, it is a great advantage. Coal land is the best thing I know of with which to commence an enterprise.

To return, you have been talked to upon this subject, and told that a speculation is intended by gentlemen, who have an interest in the country, including the coal mines. We have been mistaken all our lives if we do not know whites as well as blacks look to their self-interest. Unless among those deficient of intellect everybody you trade with makes something. You meet with these things here as elsewhere.

If such persons have what will be an advantage to them, the question is whether it cannot be made of advantage to you. You are intelligent, and know that success does not as much depend on external help as on self-reliance. Much, therefore, depends upon yourselves. As to the coal mines, I think I see the means available for your self-reliance.

I shall, if I get a sufficient number of you engaged, have provisions made that you shall not be wronged. If you will engage in the enterprise I will spend some of the money intrusted to me. I am not sure you will succeed. The Government may lose the money, but we cannot succeed unless we try; but we think, with care, we can succeed. (emphasis mine)

Now did he think the "similarity of climate" to our "native land" thing was a deal-maker?  Hell, all of the Deep South has that kind of climate (one of the main reasons they brought us here to clear land, prepare fields and grow cotton and rice, among other cash crops)!  And ole Abe was just being totally dishonest about the whole, "rich coal mines" nonsense.  As it turns out, it was merely another, flashing-of-cash-to-come, setting-folk-up-to-fail exercise.  According to Beard's piece, "The Chiriquí venture was, in retrospect, doomed from the start. Ambrose Thompson’s title to the coal lands proved questionable, and a report by the Smithsonian Institution’s Joseph Henry found that the Chiriquí coal was almost worthless as fuel."

The political affairs in Central America are not in quite as satisfactory condition as I wish. There are contending factions in that quarter; but it is true all the factions are agreed alike on the subject of colonization, and want it, and are more generous than we are here. To your colored race they have no objection. Besides, I would endeavor to have you made equals, and have the best assurance that you should be the equals of the best. (emphasis mine)

Another outright lie, as indicated in the last paragraph of footnote 1:  "A letter of authority from Lincoln to Pomeroy was prepared for Lincoln's signature, probably by the State Department, under date of September 10, 1862, but remains unsigned in duplicate copies in the Lincoln Papers. The project was abandoned when first Honduras and later Nicaragua and Costa Rica protested the scheme and hinted that force might be used to prevent the settlement."

Besides lying on Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, can somebody please tell me how he could have us made equals -- in Central America?  By throwing some money around to foment rebellion between the "contending factions "like his "homeboy" does today?  And even if that would have worked, it wouldn't have made us "equal" -- just gone (which is all he wanted anyway).

The practical thing I want to ascertain is whether I can get a number of able-bodied men, with their wives and children, who are willing to go, when I present evidence of encouragement and protection. Could I get a hundred tolerably intelligent men, with their wives and children, to ``cut their own fodder,'' so to speak? Can I have fifty? If I could find twenty-five able-bodied men, with a mixture of women and children, good things in the family relation, I think I could make a successful commencement. (emphasis mine)

Sounds like an auctioneer doesn't he?

I want you to let me know whether this can be done or not. This is the practical part of my wish to see you. These are subjects of very great importance, worthy of a month's study, [instead] of a speech delivered in an hour. I ask you then to consider seriously not pertaining to yourselves merely, nor for your race, and ours, for the present time, but as one of the things, if successfully managed, for the good of mankind---not confined to the present generation, but as

"From age to age descends the lay,

To millions yet to be,

Till far its echoes roll away,

Into eternity."

The above is merely given as the substance of the President's remarks.

The Chairman of the delegation briefly replied that "they would hold a consultation and in a short time give an answer." The President said: "Take your full time---no hurry at all."

The delegation then withdrew. (emphasis mine)

"For the good of mankind." Now that just warrants nothin' but this:

 

And, going back to Beard's piece, there were better men than Lincoln who agree:

Nevertheless, the publication of Lincoln’s remarks at the meeting generated a furious response from all corners of the anti-slavery world. To Senator John P. Hale, a Radical Republican from New Hampshire, “The idea of removing the whole colored population from this country is one of the most absurd ideas that ever entered into the head of man or woman.” Lincoln’s treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase, wrote in his diary, “How much better would be a manly protest against prejudice against color! — and a wise effort to give freemen homes in America!” On Aug. 22 William Lloyd Garrison editorialized that “the nation’s four million slaves are as much the natives of this country as any of their oppressors,” and two weeks later The Pacific Appeal noted that Lincoln’s words “made it evident that he, his cabinet, and most of the people, care but little for justice to the negro.” And Frederick Douglass said that “the President of the United States seems to possess an ever increasing passion for making himself appear silly and ridiculous, if nothing worse.” (emphasis mine)

Unlike Mr. Beard, I experienced no "shock" at all in reading Lincoln's machinations toward these free Black men.  Maybe because, I long ago abandoned the whole "Lincoln-freed-the-slaves" meme as some humanitarian gesture on his part (h-m-m-m-m, his "homeboy," uses that word, "humanitarian" a lot too -- right before he joins the "usual suspects" in some land-grabbing, imperialist, regime changing inhumanity) -- because it was not.  It was merely a focused military strategy to "save the Union," which didn't even apply to those slaves in border states or those in southern states already under Union control.

So let's just be clear -- Lincoln's concern was neither for us, nor our well-being.  His aim was to keep this country as white as he possibly could, which is why he's no "homeboy" of mine.  And while I agree with William Lloyd Garrison above, there are days when this comment I read and saved long ago, makes more and more sense to me:

"Stay where you are celebrated, reconsider where you are tolerated, and flee where you are persecuted."

-- commenter Alex Raventhorne on "....and yet they wonder why POC emigrate"

Related:
-"Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream"/ Lerone Bennett, Jr. (video)
- A Separate Peace
- Emancipation’s Price
- Thomas concedes that ‘we the people’ didn’t include blacks
-Was the Civil War actually about Slavery?
- I'm Black Really. Just Read My Book
- The incredible nothingness of "whiteness"... (you can listen to the entire October 26, 1965, Baldwin v Buckley debate at Cambridge from which the first video was taken here)
- Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land (Randall Robinson interview begins at the 28:27 click)

From "Oh say can you see," to 'decolonial love'--a long, but necessary walk to freedom

Amid all the "Independence Day" talk and Star-Spangled-Banner singing this week, three eerily interrelated offerings on Salon in the past four days got me thinking about how taken together, they give the absolute lie to the reason for celebrating this so recently passed holiday.   To clearly explain the usual jumble of thoughts racing around in this head of mine--"The last shall be first, and the first, last."

-Article #3-

Though I disagree with some of his conclusions, Jefferson Morley's, July 4, "Francis Scott Key on trial," sets the stage for the widely ignored fact (by whites and Blacks alike), that the majority of whites in this"land of the free, home of the brave" never, ever, had the equal inclusion of Blacks as their intention.  We were here as property, merely tools to be used to achieve imperialist ends -- much like today:

The crowds had come to see Key’s case against the abolitionist movement. Just as the slaveholders’ representatives on Capitol Hill were noisily seeking a “gag rule” to prevent debate over slavery on the floor of Congress, so did Key, the famous author of “The Star Spangled Banner,” seek to silence those who would agitate for freedom on the streets of Washington City. In the trial of New York doctor Reuben Crandall, he hoped to defeat the antislavery men in the court of public opinion. The abolitionist, in turn, hoped to discredit Key, sneering about his hometown, “Land of the Free …. Home of the Oppressed.”

The debate between Key and Coxe crystallized how radical new ideas of rights introduced by the free people of color and their white allies in the early 1830s had galvanized popular thinking in America.  These ideas divided Americans into two broad political tendencies that would endure into the 21st century. Key and Coxe were exemplars of what we now know as red and blue politics.  (emphasis mine)

But rather than seeing Key's authoring of "The Star Spangled Banner" as a contradiction, I see it (along with the Declaration of Independence) as confirmation of the total invisibilising of the "Other" in their midst.  As I read the above, I thought about Dr. Clarke's counsel on forming "alliances" from the 1:05 - 5:38 click  here.  Yes, abolitionists were "partners" in ending the slave trade, but we cannot forget about how both  Freetown and Liberia (an idea endorsed by the "Great Emancipator," Abe Lincoln) figured into their equation.  And I have to ask myself, if popular thinking in America had been so galvanized--what the hell happened?  I don't know about you, but for me, more than any other abolitionist, John Brown was one of the very few white men on whose alliance we could always count back then--and to the very end no less.  But that's just me.

"Radical new ideas of rights introduced,"already speaks to the existing and continuing inhumanity of those, with whom we have always been dealing.  That there was a need to "introduce" in the first place, confirms the "white is right" mentality in which most of the populace was engaged, which renders the idea that there was ever a division quite moot. While Key and Coxe may have been "exemplars of what we now know as red and blue politics," ALL white folk then (as they do now), enjoyed the "privilege" of being "white" in these alleged, United States of America (I can't even count the number of times that white kids, similarly situated spewed, "At least I'm not a nigger!).

 So, along with the authors of the "Declaration of Independence," penning this "historic" document in 1776 (one of whom I'm almost certain, but am still trying to nail down, owned my father's side of the family), Francis Scott Key and his 1814, "Star Spangled Banner," along with the much-admired-in-journalism-schools in America, John Stuart Mill, with his 1859, "On Liberty,"  we find the nexus of the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy (WSCP)--writ large.  None of those so-called "leaders," up to which most Americans look, nor any of their "contributions" to American society, gave two shits about Blacks, either here or abroad -- yet we continually sing, "Oh say can you see..."

The blues of the 1830s were the liberals of the day, the opponents of slavery, concentrated in the Midwest and Northeast.  They were so-called abolitionists and they brought three radical ideas into the realm of American politics:

1) Property rights are not unlimited;

2) American citizenship is open to people of any race;

3) The freedom to advocate both is essential

These strong ideals still animate the American liberal tradition nearly two centuries later. Like the anti-slavery men and women of yore, 21st century liberals believe that property rights can be limited for the common good; that American citizenship should be as inclusive as possible; and that freedom of expression is a prerequisite of a free society. Reuben Crandall’s defense attorney Richard Coxe was no abolitionist and he did not argue in court for Negro equality in U.S. v Crandall. But he did lay out a “true blue” case for freedom of expression to protect those who wanted to advance such ideas.

Key’s response was a classic conservative rebuttal. From the start Key denounced Coxe for even defending the advocates of Negro citizenship and those who questioned the slave owners’ expansive definition of property rights. Compared to Coxe, Key had a much narrower conception of freedom of speech. He argued that the antislavery publications could be suppressed in the name of public safety since they might incite violent rebellion. He defended a narrower conception of American citizenship — that it was reserved for the native-born and whites only. And he had a much more expansive understanding of property rights. White men did have a constitutional right to own property in people, Key insisted. (emphasis mine)

{Baldwin whispers at the end of Pg. 64 of  Every Good-bye Ain't Gone:  "...in many ways, from the language of the lawgiver to the language of the liberal -- is that "your people" deserve, in effect, their fate.  Your fate--"your" people's fate--involves being, forever, a little lower than these particular angels, angels who, nevertheless, are always ready to give you a helping hand" (like Coxe}.  It's no wonder Morely tagged them "so-called abolitionists!"  Forget looking at all this through Morely's conservative vs. liberal, red vs. blue lens.  Let's just be clear here:

1. None of this--was about any of us "Others," particularly Blacks (unless of course, there's a get-me-over-the-hump election in the offing). We're all still seen as property, unlimited or no.  We were and remain, mere tools to manipulate to further imperialist ends (many decisions citing Crandall today rarely, if ever, contain a human element);
2. Native Americans in particular, still do not enjoy true "openness" of American citizenship though they were here, long before the neocolonialists came with their fancy court cases (Dartmouth anyone?  A peanut butter and jelly sandwich to the first person who can show me that today its enrollment -- for whom they said it was being built -- is predominantly Native American).  And despite the Changeling's, election year about-face (after deporting more of you than any administration--ever), brown folk just might want to keep Keys's argument about the whole idea of "scorning the idea of multiracial citizenship" in mind.  After all, it's been the WSCP's MO since they claimed this land for all of those Western monarchs).
3. Let's face it Jefferson, while the freedom for advocating for both remains essential, it will still result in proverbial "asses warming the Prison Industrial Complex bench"in red and blue states alike.

As we all put our right hands over our hearts and sing Key's "Star Spangled Banner," thoughts of its author, his beliefs, and the beliefs upon which his country was founded, never really even cross our minds (present company used-to-be included) -- but it should.  Mr. Frederick Douglass explains this way better than I, here.

The rest of Morely's piece documents what happened during the case, historically.  But pardon me if I give no cookies to the jury that rendered the "Not guilty" verdict (just as hindsight is 20-20, so is foresight--nobody wanted their "property rights" infringed upon down the road!).  Besides, they were defending a white man's rights to freedom of speech -- not ours.

As Mr. Baldwin points out in his, "Notes on the House of Bondage":

The situation of the black American is a direct (and deliberate) result of the collusion between the North and South and the Federal Government. A black man in this country does not live under a two-party system but a four-party system. There is the Republican Party in the South, and there is the Republican Party in the North; there is the Democratic Party in the North and the Democratic Party in the South. These entities are Tweedledum and Tweedledee as concerns the ways they have been able, historically, to manipulate the black presence, the black need. At the same time, both parties were (are) protected from the deepest urgencies of black need by the stance of the Federal Government, which could (can) always justify both parties, and itself, by use of the doctrine of "States' rights."

I've absolutely no quarrel with his estimation.

-Article #2-

I include this Jul 4, Glenn Greenwald clip not only because I enjoy his constitutional conversations as he "rails against the machine," but because the title of the segment, "Without rule of law, are all men created equal,"along with Spitzer's intro, provide yet another example of our total invisibility.  Glenn's thesis aside (and yes, I know his being there was to talk about the so-called "elites" employing their infamous foot-on-neck brand of behavior on white folk now, but anyway),  America has always been two populations, one oblivious to the law (of humanity as it relates to us) and the other subject to it (that'd be us).



But as much as I enjoy Glenn (appreciate his nod to the Prison Industrial complex which houses more people who look like me than him), and because he's a member of a decidedly new, "protected class" of so-called allies, I found his response to Spitzer's, "I don't want to spend too much time on history but, has it always been thus?" -- very telling (particularly since I could hear Dr. Clarke's voice, over and over in my head saying, "But watch the alliance!").

Glenn recited a litany of advantages/privileges white folk had back in the 1820s (lest we forget, Key penned his little ditty in 1814), which are the same ones they enjoy today.  And even though Glenn felt the difference then, was "we always affirmed the principle that the rule of law required that everybody played by the same set of rules," his need to add the, "even though we violated it and breached it in all sorts of ways" basically said to me, "Yes, Black folk, it has always been thus for you but no need to talk about that historical fact -- cuz us white folk catchin' hell right now!"  Just sayin'...

-Article #1-

Paula M.L. Moya's, incredible, "The search for decolonial love" interview with Junot Díaz was the best of the three pieces by far (took my old head some time to get through it, having to look some shit up and all).  But I gotta tell ya, I just love it when the interviewer, is as emotionally connected and invested as the interviewee!  Makes for some riveting commentary.

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist notwithstanding, I'd never heard of, nor read, any of his work. That will change.  One of the things I appreciated most was the honoring of the women whose literary works in their heyday, mightily informed the woman I have become.  Listening to each of them share their understandings, I realized I'd walked a very similar walk, every day, to be free -- even as I struggled against my colonized mind (and what a long and necessary walk it has, and continues to be!)

"I was so pleased when, during your lecture yesterday, you stated — clearly and unapologetically — that you write about race. I have always been struck by the fact that, in all the interviews you have given that I have read, no one ever asks you about race. If it does come up, it is because you bring it up. Yet it has long been apparent to me that race is one of your central concerns."

I was pleased to hear that statement too.  Instead of running away from race, here's a brother running toward it.  And like a runner in a 4-man relay race, he's reaching confidently back for the baton he needs and knows is there -- to keep him going forward toward victory.  That just makes so much more sense to me than the Changeling's "Look forward, not back" nonsense.  As I considered this young brother's recollections which mirrored my own slow, but sure, "coming of age" in many ways, I could certainly feel his "metanoia":

Junot: "Well, first of all, these sisters were pretty clear that redemption was not going to be found in the typical masculine nostrums of nationalism or armed revolution or even that great favorite of a certain class of writerly brother: transracial intimacy. Por favor!  If transracial intimacy was all we needed to be free, then a joint like the Dominican Republic would be the great cradle of freedom — which, I assure you, it is not. Why these sisters struck me as the most dangerous of artists was because in the work of, say, Morrison, or Octavia Butler, we are shown the awful radiant truth of how profoundly constituted we are of our oppressions.  Or, said differently: how indissolubly our identities are bound to the regimes that imprison us. These sisters not only describe the grim labyrinth of power that we are in as neocolonial subjects, but they also point out that we play both Theseus and the Minotaur in this nightmare drama. Most importantly these sisters offered strategies of hope, spinning the threads that will make escape from this labyrinth possible. It wasn’t an easy thread to seize — this movement towards liberation required the kind of internal bearing witness of our own role in the social hell of our world that most people would rather not engage in. It was a tough praxis but a potentially earthshaking one, too. Because rather than strike at this issue or that issue, this internal bearing of witness raised the possibility of denying our oppressive regimes the true source of their powers — which is, of course, our consent, our participation. This kind of praxis doesn’t attack the head of the beast, which will only grow back; it strikes directly at the beast’s heart, which we nurture and keep safe in our own. (Come on now, tell me I'm the only one who didn't know who Theseus and the Minotaur were? -- emphasis mine)

Akin to Baldwin's directive to continually "do your first works over," this internal bearing of witness to which Díaz refers, also requires us to reexamine -- everything.

Paula: This reminds me of a point you made in the question-and-answer session following your lecture yesterday. You said that people of color fuel white supremacy as much as white people do; that it is something we are all implicated in. You went on to suggest that only by first recognizing the social and material realities we live in — by naming and examining the effects of white supremacy — can we hope to transform our practices.

Junot: How can you change something if you won’t even acknowledge its existence, or if you downplay its significance? White supremacy is the great silence of our world, and in it is embedded much of what ails us as a planet...And yet here’s the rub: If a critique of white supremacy doesn’t first flow through you, doesn’t first implicate you, then you have missed the mark; you have, in fact, almost guaranteed its survival and reproduction. There’s that old saying: The devil’s greatest trick is that he convinced people that he doesn’t exist. Well, white supremacy’s greatest trick is that it has convinced people that, if it exists at all, it exists always in other people, never in us.

Now if there was any damned truth at all to D'Souza's nonsense here,  I'd say THAT was the greatest trick--EVAH!  But since the Changeling is constantly complicit in some of the most colonial shit -- EVAH (Libya/Uganda/AFRICOM anyone?), no need to get my hopes up.   Rereading Badwin's, Every Good-Bye Ain't Gone, I found many of the same threads running through both his and Junot's observations (which somehow consoles me greatly).

Junot:  The kind of love that I was interested in, that my characters long for intuitively, is the only kind of love that could liberate them from that horrible legacy of colonial violence.  I am speaking about decolonial love....Is it possible to love one’s broken-by-the-coloniality-of-power self in another broken-by-the-coloniality-of-power person? (emphasis mine)

I wonder how many of us can honestly answer that question?   How many of us are willing to shed our, "Oh say can you see," colonized minds, for the "decolonial love" about which  Díaz speaks?  As I read around the internet, it seems not very many of us.

The interview goes so much deeper than I have room to do here.  Try to get through the entire thing and then -- think.  I'm certain you'll come to some critical conclusions of your own.

Related:
-Decolonizing Black Power Studies w Dr. Quito Swan

KKK in South Carolina feeling a little neglected?

My cousin just forwarded this to me - and I just have to think that the pointy-hatted, sheet-wearers are feeling just a little put-off by all the publicity this young Black man's death is garnering.

Do pause at the 1:25 click to read the flier. {SMDH}

"La Baker" continues to live - as do we!

Just back from an extended, "Homegoing" (MUCH more on that later), and I thank all of you for allowing me the time and space to piece it together.  In the meantime - a beautifully, wonderful, Black History Month "building upon"...



My, my, my - isn't this just what we've wanted??  For the songs, the stories, the truths - the Culture - to continue, and be built upon?  I can't lie, this just gives me shivers when I think about how we continue despite - AND - because of!!  Bravo, my young, beat-boxing to a damned CELLO, young brother - BRAVO!!

Could just be me, but really - isn't young brother, Olusola's offering of "The Times They Are a-Changin'" (to which my youngest just hipped me in the last 15 minutes or so) just the most perfect homage to the Walter Winchell-pegged, Josephine "La Baker" and her belief in our right to order our own steps in these alleged "united states?"

Every "inconvenient truth" she faced along her journey, she faced them - in all our names.  Listen to her version of  Olusola's rendering, watch the appended videos about her life, or read about her this Black History Month - and decide for yourself.

American terrorism - "you can dress it up" tomorrow, "but you can't take it out" - of reality

"In the church I come from - which is not at all the same church to which white Americans belong - we were counselled, from time to time, to do our first works over. Though the church I come from and the church to which most white Americans belong are both Christian churches, their relationship - due to those pragmatic decisions concerning Property made by a Christian State sometime ago - cannot be said to involve, or suggest, the fellowship of Christians. We do not, therefore, share the same hope or speak the same language. (emphasis mine)

To do your first works over means to reexamine everything. Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road and tell the truth about it. Shout or testify or keep it to yourself but know whence you came." (emphasis his)

James Baldwin

"The Price of the Ticket"

First of all, I apologize to those of you who've been periodically returning for the end of the "Homegoing" series.  I so appreciate your patience and I assure you, Part 5 is forthcoming.  But since Part 4 - as is its wont - life just kept happening, mightily challenging many of my remaining realities and making "All My Bones Shake."

In the interim, I sporadically posted and/or commented elsewhere, as I watched the HN(Over-seer)IC  - partner with the usual imperialist suspects in raining down all manner of death-delivering armaments on a sovereign, African country with the intent of assassinating its leader; authorize and actually oversee the orchestrated murder (true or not - that visual was disturbing) of another, non-alabaster-skinned brother; play a shell game with brown brothers and sisters at the border, even as he and Brother-Ass-Coverer played a botched game of Fast and Furious - all, while totally ignoring what his privileged, string-pullers are doing to Blacks - here and in Haiti.

(An interesting, electioneering aside - my friend, Eric Sheptock left a message on my phone this morning (What?  It's Saturday!  And - I'm an hour behind him!  Let me tell you, voicemail is all anyone will get from me before noon, especially on a Saturday!), advising that the Changeling, himself, will be visiting the CCNV Homeless Shelter this morning.  Since our meeting during my first - and last - year of grad school in DC, he keeps me up on all things activism.  Now, you mean to tell me, that in two-and-a-half years, he couldn't make it the 1.5 miles to 2nd St., NW (I know that's the distance, because I lived off of 3rd St, NE while in school)  - to see about the homeless living in the shadow of the Big House??  Puh-leeze!  I returned his call once I got up and movin' - and got his voicemail.  I left him a message saying, "I know you're in the throes of Obama-love right now, but call me when you're done.")

Yes, all my bones have surely been shaking, signalling that it was way past time to do some of "my first works over."  And that's pretty much where my mind's been (and often still is).  And alas, I've been side-tracked yet again, with the convergence of these recent events, which prompted forced me to write this post on American terrorism before publishing Part 5:

• the planned, then postponed, MLK memorial dedication (about which I've written, here and here);
• the electioneering, "Zing, went the (AIPAC) strings of (the Changeling's) heart" on Palestine (which I'll address, yet again in an upcoming post);
• my blog-sister, Kitty, giving me the, available-this-month, heads-up on "The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975" (and the various and sundry, needin'-happy-darkies reviews of same, which also requires a separate post);
• the upcoming 10th anniversary of 9/11;
• and finally, this jolting piece of "do-our-first-works-over" proportions by HamdenRice entitled:  "Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did"

With the continued twisting of Dr. King's legacy, reducing him to a, "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" kinda brother, HamdenRice rightfully puts American terrorism on blast.  Having been born in the Jim Crow South two years after Brown v. Board, raised there until 1974 and subsequently getting my "higher learning" at an HBCU there until 1978 - this piece really hit home:

The reason I'm posting this is because there were dueling diaries over the weekend about Dr. King's legacy, and there is a diary up now (not on the rec list but on the recent list) entitled, "Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Dream Not Yet Realized." I'm sure the diarist means well as did the others. But what most people who reference Dr. King seem not to know is how Dr. King actually changed the subjective experience of life in the United States for African Americans. And yeah, I said for African Americans, not for Americans, because his main impact was his effect on the lives of African Americans, not on Americans in general. His main impact was not to make white people nicer or fairer. That's why some of us who are African Americans get a bit possessive about his legacy. Dr. Martin Luther King's legacy, despite what our civil religion tells us, is not color blind. (emphasis mine)

Thank you HamdenRice!  Dr. King's legacy was never - EVER - color blind.  And the continued co-option of it as such - is merely, more white folk, trying to make white folk, feel comfortable with, and unnaccountable for, their seemingly irrevocable,  often-depraved and most assuredly fearful and insecure, "Divine Right"-thinking,  power-mongering, imperialist - terrorism.

From the "no running water" to the "much more under slavery than under freedom, and all of it under some form of racial terrorism, which had inculcated many humiliating behavior patterns" - the writer's background in Virginia sounds very similar to my own South Carolina upbringing.  But I was never sarcastic about what Dr. King had accomplished, because like his father, I personally understood Dr. King's herculean, and ultimately fatal-for-him efforts to try and end (at least as we knew it) "...the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south."  And while he wasn't 100% successful in that regard (as the terror continues, even today) - what he accomplished was, in fact, a far cry from giving "this great speech" and marching.

It wasn't that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn't sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus...It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.

Though I get his meaning in the first sentence, I do have a small quibble with it - having lived it.  While the "main suffering in the south" indeed, "did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain or ride in the front of the bus" - I think he misses the soul-murdering effects (especially on children) of those, absolutely intended and daily attacks on our dignity; of always seeing one's parents or one's self, being considered some unclean, inhuman animal after which no "civilized" person, in their right mind, would drink.  It does something to your psyche, believe me.

And that back-of-the-bus thing?  Ditto.  I remember riding home from my Black, Catholic school in the 60s, minding my own damned business in the back of the bus (despite the Supreme Court-ordered mandate to desegregate, many southern states ignored it until the Freedom Rides - and they started getting fined), when an older white boy from the white Catholic high school, running up and down the aisle with his friends - stopped, looked at them laughing and then - hawked up a big, green glob of snot, and spat on me.  I froze, first in roiling anger and disgust, but within seconds, as I watched it run down the right strap of my green, plaid jumper uniform - embarrassment and yes, fear, quickly took hold.  Even though we were s'posed to be free, I knew I couldn't retaliate because:  1) all eyes from the "white section" were on me, 2) he was white and way, bigger than me, and 3) I was afraid of what the repercussions would be at home, or at school if I hit his ass.  So I stayed put, fighting back the tears until my stop.
 
I needn't have worried about the home front though.  My, by-then-divorced Mama, struggling to ensure we got the "best education" possible - wasn't havin' it.  When I came in the door crying, she called me in the kitchen to ask what was wrong.  And between those choking sobs (during which you can barely catch your breath), I pointed to the glob, now crusty from being exposed to the air, and said, through a fresh flod of tears, "One of those white boys from Bishop England (he was wearing their uniform) spat on me!"   She asked me, her voice rising, "Then what did you do?!"   Hoping to, at least, keep my ass out of the sling, I responded, "Nothin' - cuz I know I'm not s'posed to be fightin'."  She got mad as hell, saying, "I'm gonna call that damned school, cuz nobody's spittin' on my child and gettin' away with it!"  She did - they did nothing.  I was in the 6th grade!  And while I felt so loved and protected by her efforts, I not only got, how little the emotional well-being of a little Black girl mattered to white folk - I saw, how my Mama's standing up for me meant even less to them.

So while the writer is dead-on with the second sentence about lynching, I think it extremely important we not forget how effective, long-standing, emotional terrorism is as well (Baldwin also wrote about that!).

So please don't tell me that Martin Luther King's dream has not been achieved, unless you knew what racial terrorism was like back then and can make a convincing case you still feel it today. If you did not go through that transition, you're not qualified to say that the dream was not accomplished.

Seeing as I "knew what racial terrorism was like back then" (to include the KKK purportedly meeting upstairs over the Edward's 5-and-dime around the corner from our rented house downtown; my Grandmama's house being mysteriously burned to the ground out on the Island; my Daddy having to engage in many of those "humiliating practices in order to prevent the random, terroristic, berserk behavior of white people" - at times, in the presence of his children and particularly his son), and - because I "can make a convincing case" that I definitely "still feel it today" here, in "the belly of the beast" - I think I'm qualified to say, unequivocally, that the dream was not accomplished.

And while the knowledge of racial terrorism remains a reality for plenty of us, these days it seems, making a "convincing case you still feel it today" is purely relative and matters not in the big picture (unless of course, you unwaveringly know, like the Freedom Riders of old, what you're "willing to ride (and die) for").

Once the beating was over, we were free.

A hundred times - Yes!   In our hearts, souls and minds, we were freer than we'd ever been before, from American terrorism, which propelled us even further toward our rightful place as citizens in this country we built, by the sweat of our brow.  But, if one takes the statement literally - Fannie Lou Hamer might have been the last Black woman, sterilized without her knowledge and consent (she was not), nor would she have had to deliver this speech (video) to the DNC in 1964; the descendants of Henrietta Lacks (video), some medically uninsured, wouldn't STILL be waiting for some kind of recompense for the universal use, and profitting from, of her HeLa Cells which have saved countless lives; Medgar, Malcolm, Martin, along with a host of others, would have lived well into their old age; there'd have been no need to fight for Affirmative Action; we would not currently have, the highest unemployment and imprisonment rates that we do; we would not today, have a toothless Congressional Black Caucus (some of whom are ex-Freedom Riders!), getting rich like the white fat cats (both legally and illegally), while their constituents still live in poverty and poor housing; etc., etc, etc.

It wasn't the Civil Rights Act, or the Voting Rights Act or the Fair Housing Act that freed us. It was taking the beating and thereafter not being afraid. So, sorry Mrs. Clinton, as much as I admire you, you were wrong on this one. Our people freed ourselves and those Acts, as important as they were, were only white people officially recognizing what we had done.

No, it wasn't any of those acts that freed our hearts, souls and minds, but we'll just have to agree to disagree with what Hillary Clinton (whom I used to admire) said.  As Joseph A. Califano Jr., Lyndon Johnson's special assistant for domestic affairs from 1965 to 1969, said in 2008 - "It Took a Partnership."

All that being said however (I know, I was kinda full) - I salute HamdenRice, for not allowing the white-wash to continue by putting his finger smack-dab on the pulse of Dr. King's achievements.

Look, I know this piece is link-heavy, but I thought it was necessary to illustrate how Black folk have endured a shit-load of American terrorism - and continue to.  Read them at your leisure but please - do, at least, watch the videos.

But, we are certainly not alone.  Even those immigrants who came here on the ship, instead of in the belly of it (and who insist, now, "On Being White and Other Lies,") - have also suffered at the hands of that pesky, American exceptionalism with which, I suspect, we will be inundated tomorrow on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

I stumbled upon a six-part series on You Tube awhile ago entitled, "Violence:  An American Tradition."  I'm posting Part 1 - but as the disclaimer says on each part, "Caution:  Contains scenes that may be disturbing to young or sensitive viewers" - because it, and the other five parts - are not for the faint of heart!:



I've been trying not to watch much TV at all these days, and I'll certainly not be watching any between now and tomorrow.  Because, I know I won't be able to stomach all the government/Hollywood hypocrisy, mourning the almost 3,000 killed, while literally and figuratively laying waste - to many, many millions more, both here and abroad.