Last Week In Alabama

If you haven't been hiding in a cave somewhere, you know that two middle-aged White male politicians had a scuffle last Tuesday in Alabama and, inexplicably, the one who isn't a known pedophile won. Not by much, I must hasten to add, but won, nonetheless.

Interestingly enough, the winner also distinguished himself once by successfully prosecuting two KKK members for the bombing deaths of four little girls in the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham back in the day. While his opponent shot himself in all his feet making remarks about slavery that he would have done better to keep to himself.

Anyway, Lesle' Honore' (see photo above) wrote this poem the day after the election, giving props to the voters in Alabama who carried the day. Lest you have any doubt, I'm providing the statistics at the bottom of this post. Hopefully, they will give us all pause. What this exercise in political will demonstrates rather clearly is that whenever solidarity hooks up with action, anything can happen.

Sorry To Keep You Waiting. I Hope You Are Still Here.

Twelve years ago, I introduced this blog early in January with the idea in mind that I could write about race relations so my students wouldn't keep me standing in the parking lot at the university until midnight. I didn't realize at the time that I would shortly be moving from a major city in Florida to a small rural town in Louisiana. I took my photo off the blog and the "Eracism" bumper sticker off my car because I thought they were going to take me out in the woods in Louisiana and nail me to a tree. As it turned out, they didn't. In fact, I found a real niche for myself where I still reside and do my work and socially reproduce myself and even find time to write when I get the chance.

If We've Fallen Down A Rabbit Hole, Does It Have A Bottom?

Maybe I'm just getting old. I mean I am 71. And it happens to everybody -- until they die. And I'm still producing more than the average person I know. After all, I taught six courses to three hundred students this spring, including one that turned ten students into social change agents and ended with a performance titled "Truth Be Told" -- on speaking truth to power (with no holds barred).

The end of May, I went to Havana, Cuba, for nine days to work on organizing a conference there for sociologist/activists from all over the world to meet, learn from, and network with each other for five days in November. I've taught two more rapid-fire Intro courses online this summer already while healing a broken foot, getting over a hellified parasitic invasion I dragged back from Cuba, and recording my book on race relations so people can buy an audio edition (it's been out as paperback and Kindle editions for two years). I'm still sending money to a family I know in Haiti, to Black Lives Matter, and to build an underground hospital where women can more safely birth their babies in Syria while U.S.-provided bombs fall often and without warning from the sky.

But it's never enough when reading your Facebook feed becomes an exercise in shock-and-awe, dead bodies all over the place with no repercussions, things just getting weirder and weirder in Washington, and the police reaching new heights in horror and new lows in morals daily. The prisons have become physical and emotional pressure cookers, where men, women, and even children are being par-boiled in their own juices in a summer determined to prove that climate change is real, with or without scientists to tell us so.

So everybody I know is either stumbling through their lives in a state of numb acceptance, doing what has to be done to pay the rent, but little else. Or they're careening through a tsunami of one kind or another trying not to wind up unemployed, incarcerated, or dead. I'm trying to soldier on, but what the fuck? I mean, really, what the fuck?

A Communique From A New Afrikan

On occasion, I like to post or re-post things written by others, particularly People of Color who have something I think my readers would want to read or benefit from reading. The following communique was developed out of a conversation I had with a brother inside the walls.
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Greetings, New Afrikan womyn, men, and all people’s POWER!!!!

 

~~ from Mujahid Kambon ~~

Last week, a brutha and elder gave me a copy of Negroes with Guns by Robert F Williams to read. It's a short book without complicated words or obtuse ideas, yet it affected me deeply. I had never heard of Bro. Williams before nor his struggle in Monroe, NC, in the 1950s and early 1960s. But after leaving the Marines in 1945, he felt compelled to serve his people in their struggle for justice and human rights.

Let Me Make One Thing Perfectly Clear

When I first dropped out in 1970, hit San Francisco for a hot minute, and then proceeded on to join a collective in Iowa City, Iowa, committed to the prison abolition movement, I could not possibly have imagined that 45 years later, I would want to re-publish something I wrote in 1972. Yet here I am, more than a little disappointed that the call for unity, solidarity, and action I issued in the Prisoners' Digest International four and a half decades ago would still be pertinent -- and even sorely needed.

This is why I am still doing what I am doing, teaching what I am teaching, and writing what I am writing. Still trying to make our situation perfectly clear.

Bloody, But Unbowed

Emory Douglas/2016 (by permission)

It's taken me a while to catch my breath. That one-two punch last November was a doozy and though I've been meeting my responsibilities (which are many), my psyche went down for the count and has been lying on the canvas in the ring ever since, trying to figure out if I can make it to the locker room on these jelly legs or do I need to jump in a cab and head straight for the border. There's something to be said for living to fight another day.

I've been lying still with my eyes closed, as it were, reminding myself that this is not new news. White Supremacy. the patriarchy, capitalism, and a cold-blooded commitment to power held by a handful of old White men combined with an almost stunning lack of consciousness in the mass public over the past 250 years has delivered us to the present like an express train to hell. And for the last fifty years of that period, I've been watching it all unfold like a Grade B movie. Yet -- no matter how you've trained -- a well-placed upper cut that catches you off-guard can rock your world, even if you're the better fighter.

Still, as I often tell my students, it's not what happens. It's what happens after that. Watcha gonna do?