Summer Reading

Good morning.

I guess I'm back. I'm starting to blog in my head now while I'm driving. Seeing things through not just my eyes, but through my readers' eyes. Wanting to tell you things, to share my thoughts. And that's how it started two and a half years ago.

Let's pretend we're sitting down to coffee. I don't drink a lot of it these days, being focused on my body 24-7 and all. But this morning I had to go to have blood tests before I even woke up good, so I stopped at the local Waffle House for scrambled eggs with cheese, grits, and toast with apple butter (though, apparently, they didn't know I was coming because they had somehow inexplicably allowed themselves to run out of raisin bread). And of course, I had coffee. A cup and a half. With cream and the tiniest bit of sugar. Thinking to myself, "I'll take this nice high and go home to Blog Central."

So here I am, imagining myself at my little glass-topped table (which I rarely use except to hold red flowers) sitting across from you, rambling from topic to topic in my head, with no particular order to it all.

Did I mention I've been doing a lot of reading?

Reading is the cave into which I descend when I'm depressed or trying to muddle something through. I devour books when I'm going through a crisis and escape into them when I'm trying to re-group. And not just books, but magazines. Jet and The Sun are staples -- always. And I "have to" read the occasional "scientific" piece in this or that publication (usually as a result of assigning it to students to read, really more like assigning it to myself, since most of them won't read it and I must anyway.)

But today, I'm feeling intimate, wanting to "share." So here's a few things I read recently that you might want to check out (in no particular order):

1) The Beautiful Struggle: a father, two sons, and an unlikely road to manhood by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Initially, this book hit my radar when M.Dot. wrote about it back in March. So when my daughter gave me a nice phat gift certificate to Amazon.com for Mother's Day (wotta girl!), tucked into the box with the dvd's and cd's and hummingbird feeder was this book. I scarfed it down too fast. And read almost the whole thing aloud (the sign that I'm entranced, that the words are crafted so beautifully that their sound becomes part of the experience for me). Coates is the son of the former Black Panther who founded Black Classics Press and raised his children in a sort of boot camp to implement Consciousness (a word Coates, the younger, has now taught me to capitalize). This remarkable piece of writing (M.Dot. said it was and she was MORE than right) is not just a "coming of age" story. It's a Coming of An Age story, a description of growing up poor, Black, and male in Baltimore that will (write this down now) eventually be called the sequel to Black Boy by Richard (the original man) Wright, who landed so hard on Western literature in the 20th Century, he came with a name warning us first what he was here to do.

"The words were all braggadocios, but when done with the recital, even though I was alone, I felt bigger. I'd walk outside, and my head was just a little higher, because if you do this right, if you claim to be that nigger enough, though you battle only your bedroom mirror, there is a part of you that believes. That was how I came to understand, how I came to know why all these brothers wrote and talked so big. Even the Knowledged feared the streets. But the rhyme pad was a spell book -- it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back. That summer, I knew...that when under the aegis of hip-hop, you never lived alone, you never walked alone."

2) The Tin Roof Blowdown and/or Jesus Out to Sea by James Lee Burke. Even if you don't like detective thrillers, if you read fiction, you may find, as I have that Burke is a state of the art master of description. And his topic in The Tin Roof Blowdown and in the title story of his collection Jesus Out to Sea is New Orleans during and just after Katrina hit. Burke has the credentials to do this justice since his folks have lived in New Iberia (maybe 90-minutes from The Big Easy) since 1830-something and he has the horrifying clarity of vision and cajones to write it the way it really happened. If you've got the willingness to read on after he has systematically gutted all your gentle sensibilities, then take one of these to the beach. It'll give you something to think about the next time somebody mentions Mardi Gras or beignets or jazz or the night the levees broke.

"A hurricane is supposed to have a beginning and an end. It tears the earth up, fills the air with flying trees and bricks and animals and sometimes even people, makes you roll up into a ball under a table and pray till drops of blood pop on your brow, then it goes away and lets you clean up after it, like somebody pulled a big prank on the whole town. But this one didn't work that way. It's killing in stages.

I see a diapered black baby in a atree that's only a green smudge under the water's surface. I can smell my neighbors in their attic. The odor is like a rat that has drowned in a bucket of water inside a superheated garage. A white guy floating by on an inner tube has a battery-powered radio propped on his stomach and tells us snipers have shot a policeman in the head and killed two Fish and Wildlife officers...

'You guys got anything to eat up there?' the guy in the inner tube asks.

'Yeah, a whole fucking buffet. I had it catered from Galatoire's right before the storm,' Miles says to him."

3) The Angels of Morgan Hill by Donna VanLiere. I bought this book for $3 at a Books-a-Million and it kept me up all night. Admittedly, I thought it was a memoir and it turned out to be a novel, but the fact that I didn't realize it was a novel until AFTER I read it shows you how meticulous the detail is and how real the characters seem to be in this story about the coming of integration to a small town in eastern Tennessee in the late 1940's. The drama is gut-wrenching and the tension of almost ever-present violence forms a skeleton on which the poverty of the entire town hangs like tatters of clothing left over from a former life. If this is just supposed to be an inspiring read, I'm okay with it. Sometimes, I need to be inspired.

"'That little nigger boy livin' with you now?'

The words rang out in the stillness and a shiver ran down my spine. We all looked up the embankment and saw Beef and Clyde smiling at us from Beef's porch. Mama took hold of Milo's hand and threw up her other hand in a wave. 'Mornin'.' She appeared to hope that if she left Beef and Clyde alone they'd leave us alone.

'I don't think Lonnie'd be too happy knowing what's going on at his house,' Clyde said. Mama held tighter to Milo's hand and I grabbed John's, pulling him along. 'He wouldn't like that nigger smelling up the place.'

I felt my heart in my throat and ran to keep up with Mama.

'He's a pretty little nigger,' Beef yelled after us."

4) Respect in a World of Inequality by Richard Sennett. I have to begin by admitting that I've only read the first fifty pages of this one. And it's a totally different kind of read, being rather unapologetically sociological, but at least early on, Sennett manages to weave his early years in Cabrini Green in Chicago into a more over-arching consideration of the difficulties with trying to get past the cultural perspective of individualism that often leads us to determine that only certain people in the U.S. are worthy of respect. I don't know exactly whereall Sennett intends to take his readers yet, but I already want to know and think it will be worth the trip.

"Lack of respect, though less aggressive than an outright insult, can take an equally wounding form. No insult is offered another person, but neither is recognition extended; he or she is not seen -- as a full human being whose presence matters. When a society treats the mass of people in this way, singling out only a few for recognition, it creates a scarcity of respect, as though there were not enough of this precious substance to go around. Like many famines, this scarcity is man-made; unlike food, respect costs nothing. Why, then, should it be in short supply?"

5) Finally, I want to recommend a magazine, The Crisis, published by the N.A.A.C.P. The tricky part (or great part, depending on how you look at it) is that when you join the organization, you automatically get a subscription to the magazine for free (how cool is that?) At the risk of sounding as if I'm hawking memberships (not that I'd be ashamed to do that, you understand), I am SO impressed with the Spring 2008 issue of this 64-page magazine that I have to suggest that the magazine alone is worth the price of membership ($30 a year). It's super glossy, slickly produced with LOTS of strong photographs, well-crafted, intriguing articles, and the printed equivalent of dozens of sound bytes of interesting worthwhile information. So far, I've read a piece about a female jockey who went from being homeless to winning races, a fine interview with Tom Joyner (accompanied by a photo that is probably the best I've ever seen at expressing the soul of this man), an insightful consideration of Richard Wright's work, a grading of the members of the U.S. Congress based on their voting records on race-related issues, and an article on a new publishing house established by a former New York Times senior editor to bring out works by prisoners and ex-prisoners (see Think Outside the Cell). If you've never looked at The Crisis before or not recently, you might want to. I've been taking mine on the road around town, to read when I'm stuck in a waiting room or grabbing a bite of lunch.

"...[T]hough the elites of academia have claimed [Richard Wright] and indeed deconstructed and post-deconstructed him, he belongs in the end to the community. Bigger was electrocuted by the state, x-rayed by academia, given care and attention where academics can be most generous -- and yet, elusive still, he is alive and kicking out there, seeking answers to questions that are being asked manifold." (Julia Wright on her father's legacy; in "Native Son" by Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, The Crisis, Spring 2008).

Now don't say I didn't tell you. ;^)

Remember Me?

Well, this has turned out to be harder than I thought. Apparently my new condition, discussed here, is more demanding physically and emotionally than I had expected. Some days I feel just like I always have. Some days -- for weeks at a time -- I feel like I'm car sick. Some days I feel vaguely depressed for no reason. Though of course, when you feel vaguely depressed, everything is a reason. Some days I get through the day, but by the time I do my now necessary work out at the gym, I'm just too played out to do anything but play a few games of Solitaire and collapse.

To make things worse, if that's not enough already, I often feel as if I'm drowning in a sea of "race" here. I mean, I'm always hyper-sensitive to "race" everywhere I go and always find plenty to be hyper-sensitve about. But here, aside from stuff I'm just not prepared to go into today, de facto segregation alone means that I can be with Black folks or White folks, but rarely with them both and frankly, I hate that. At work, I have to leave my building to have a real conversation with a person of color who's not a student. And, since not everybody knows me personally, I never know when a White person will haul out the n-word (behind African-Americans' backs, of course), leaving me with the hot potato and no idea whether or not it's even worth saying something to rank strangers who might, in fact, be dangerous to me or someone else, if they get their panties in a bunch.

I can go to a family gathering with an African-American friend, but after a few times of this, I'm almost ready to give it up. She can introduce me as her "sister" all she wants, but they're not buying it. And I don't blame them. Why should they trust some trouble-making White woman? And what is she up in here for anyway?

I do have several African-Americans I consider close friends now, but our relationships are conspiratorial in nature. We compare notes, shore each other up, and plan insurrections, laughing in that dark way that soldiers laugh in the trenches.

And as I'm now in the process of being moved into a permanent position, after all, it finally occurs to me what the implications of all this are for someone like me. Good golly, Miss Molly! I'm a highly Conscious White woman living in what might as well be rural Louisiana. I'm not complaining. I'm ready to do my part. But some days, I really don't want to leave my apartment. And it's lonely there.

So I feel sad. And weak. And heartsick (about all the oh-so-obvious effects of the on-going nature of racial oppression all around me -- everywhere, yes, but amped up some here, in spite of my quick disavowals of that in earlier months). And tired (all of this plus 300 students will do that to a person). And daunted by the idea of these circumstances and feelings lasting for the rest of my life.

Then, since I'm not blogging, I don't read blogs either. I mean, I can't bare to lurk when I don't feel up to playing, and apparently, on some level, I don't think I deserve to be part of it all because I'm not holding up my end (whatever I perceive that to be). And since blogging and bloggers are the joy of my life, I ain't having a lot of joy these last few months.

May I please come home?

Is there anybody there?

I got a shit-load of stuff to write about.
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The image above is from Kaotic Enzymes, which is a tattoo blog(!)

One World! One Dream!

"The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?" -- Dorothy Day

Quote of the Week

"What after all has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of [hu]mankind, if not faith in new possibilities and courage to advocate them?" -- Jane Addams (1860-1935)

Wright is Right!

I know this is probably a day late and a dollar short, as they say, but I just gotta throw in my two cents on Dr. Jeremiah Wright's sermon or anyway several other people's two cents's with me shouting "Amen!" every third word. If you want to know what I thought about what the good Reverend said and how Obama distanced himself from it, just read this and this and this. And that oughta do it. Thank you, Tim Wise, Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III, and The Free Slave for takin' care of business. I thought maybe I was the only one until I found what you guys wrote.

By Way Of Apology...and Renewed Commitment

Dear Faithful Readers,

I know some of you have been sniffing around in spite of the fact that I took a little unannounced break after discovering that I have diabetes. That news alone would have been enough to give me pause, but it came on the heels of another set of procedures called for by the possibility that I had another even more dire condition, which turned out not to be so. Regardless, the last two months have been difficult at best and frankly, scary, as I got used to a whole set of new ideas and practices that will be with me now for the rest of my life.

I've gone through a lot of feelings. Shock. Dismay. Crushing disappointment. Panic. Fear. Depression. Determination. Overwhelmedness. Despair. And finally, acceptance. And even gratitude. That I can do this. That it is manageable (with rigorous attention and commitment). That in a world where people are starving to death and watching their children starve, in a world where people are being bombed in their own homes even as I write, in a world where human beings are languishing heartsick in cells and cages year after year like animals, some of them for no reason except that they are used to rationalize a government gone mad without restriction, a diagnosis such as mine is really not enough to be an excuse for the end of all joy.

Perspective is the name of the game now. And renewed commitment to the work I have been given to do. Enough with feeling freaked out and all that being freaked out brings with it.

I had the pleasure of having an unexpected lunch with a young woman of whom I am very fond on Monday. She was passing through town on her way across the country with her young cousin who admitted in embarrassment that she voted for George Bush because she believed he would "allow himself to be lead by God to do the right thing as a Christian leader." Needless to say, she's become somewhat disillusioned.

First of all, I assured her that she didn't vote the man in because he wasn't elected. He just stole two terms and the U.S. public let him do it.

"Well, why?" she asked petulantly. "When the French don't like something, they bring that country to a halt until they get what they want. The people in Spain go to the streets. What's wrong in the U.S. that everybody just watches what's happening and does nothing?"

I explained that we've been socialized to believe that money is more important than life, that wage labor is the only viable system, that the U.S. is the greatest nation on Earth and therefore deserves whatever it wants, that violence is the result of the victim's poor choices, that having stuff is the litmus test of personal worth, and that alienation is natural so escape (of all types) as a way of life is reasonable. I told her that this nation is careening in the direction of facism at a speed light would envy and that I'm not the only one who's noticed (see The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot by Naomi Klein or the video above as two of many examples available by now if you really can't see it staring you in the face on the nightly news).

In any case, I guess what has occured to me of late is that we act like we have forever. But my recent experiences have reminded me that we don't. Enough with the whining and complaining. We get serious or we die. Know what I mean?

The Statement of the Problem

The first thing you write on a grant proposal is what they call "The Statement of the Problem." It's a description of why you think something needs to be done. I was working on a proposal for a program at my school last week-end and after I read it over a few times, I decided that "The Statement of the Problem" deserved a little more attention than it may ever get in its current application. So here it is. Keep in mind as you read that it is not referring to every single male of color on every U.S. college campus, but I see far too many on mine that fit the description.

A strong desire to imagine and purport that racism no longer exists in the lives of most African-Americans masks its presence and effects in the United States today. Despite the disappearance of immediately visible and enforced racial segregation, what some sociologists now call “neo-racism” results in such broad manifestations that statistics in every area of daily life document the up-hill climb success remains for many African-Americans even after decades of supposed progress.

Not only are African-American males four times more likely to be unemployed than European-American males at every educational level, but young Black males are infinitely more likely to be arrested, convicted, and incarcerated than their European-American counterparts. This is, unfortunately, all too common knowledge. Further, White family’s average net worth is still 11 times that of Black families, even when we control for income, education, and family size. And largely African-American urban centers are disproportionately likely to be poverty-stricken and crime-filled without the presence of adequate compensating opportunities for any kind of personal development. In such an egregiously difficult social context, many African-American males arrive at young adulthood filled with grave self-doubt and little sense that they can, in fact, (and deserve to) access a successful future for themselves.

These particular young men often struggle with poor educational backgrounds, traceable to poor schools, poor nutrition during formative years (because of chronic poverty), and the lowered expectations of those authority figures and even teachers with whom these young men have been forced by circumstances to interact over their entire lives. But, as if this is not enough, these same young men have a far greater struggle inside themselves, as they deal with the pain of believing that they are incapable – of learning, of performing, and of achieving beyond the lowest possible goals. Those that are fortunate manage to get into college, but often with just enough of an edge to get in, and no idea whatsoever what to expect or how to negotiate the shoals of college life, still in many ways presented at the average university as a middle class White experience accessible only to specific students of color.

Nowhere in the United States are racial inequalities more apparent than they are on the public university campus, where many young men and women of color are allowed to enter, but expected to fail, where they can watch others successfully acquire the knowledge and skill sets necessary to seamlessly move into the job market as fully prepared workers, but where they nevertheless all too often carry the constant frustration and pain of not being able to find enough belief in themselves to complete that same journey.

A study by Claude Steele at Stanford University in 1999 and since replicated many times, for example, showed that when college students about to take standardized tests were told that the exams were simply for practice, Black students tended to score roughly as well as White students. When, on the other hand, the students were instructed that the tests would be used to rank them for placement purposes, the Black students scored lower. Worse, the best Black students showed the greatest effect in a demonstration of what was apparently their even more heightened fear of not measuring up to White students.

Universities are using such research now to justify creating programs for the purpose of reaching out to and retaining students of color. How successful can these programs really be, however, if they do not take into consideration the fact that the overall society in the United States still relegates these young people to the back of the social bus? Even as they study, even as some become computer-literate and learn how to pass classes, many of them suffer with broken hearts and a sense of their own unworthiness, a condition supported by the default position of White Supremacy in a nation where this reality is not only ignored, but denied. How can they come to believe in themselves when the society in which they live their daily lives continually communicates to them their reduced status?

As long as this situation exists, no amount of superficial programming will do much more than teach students of color and most particularly Black males how to “act White” better. No matter how committed they are or how hard they work, if they do not, as Bob Marley sang, “emancipate their minds from mental slavery,” in the end, the best they may be able to hope for is to someday find themselves able to afford a flashy car, while never actually reaching their full potential or being comfortable in their own skins – assuming they graduate at all. The entire African-American community struggles under the hardship of this truth.

Why We Have "Black History Month"

The other day, I received an email from a student who was questioning why we have Black History Month every February. Somewhat modified, this was my response:

The reason we have Black History Month is because we don't typically have history taught as it actually occurred. In essence, we have White History Month all year round. What we should be doing is having True History taught all the time, but we're nowhere near this happening at this point since White Supremacy is still the default position in this country. So-called Black History Month is a knee-jerk concession to the fact that we don't intend to change the way we teach history in general because it makes White people look as if they're the only ones important enough to study seriously--when they're not.

Race, as I so often say and write, was socially-constructed about five hundred years ago and there are those who call for brushing it aside as a concept now. Unfortunately, however, despite the category of "race" being a fabrication, rampant racism and, in fact, institutionalized oppression against all people of color and women are still fully functional throughout the society we live in. Because of this, we have no choice but to continue the practice of trying to give Truth a word in edgewise.

Some folks suggest that observing Black History Month keeps us stuck in the past. They apparently imagine that two hundred fifty years of slavery was the only oppression ever perpetrated against African-Americans when that's far from the case. Historical oppression is still taking a toll because it made White society rich at the expense of people of color and that huge foundation creating and bank-rolling the White power structure has yet to be addressed. But even so, statistical data clearly documents that full-tilt discrimination against people of color and most particularly African-Americans is as United Statian as apple pie right now.

Another argument I sometimes hear for doing away with the practice of honoring our African-American heritage as a crucial part of our national history and focusing appropriately on White participation in the oppression of people of color is that Black History Month somehow keeps the problem of race relations in this country all "stirred up" instead of "letting" us all learn to "love" each other (as Christian doctrine teaches).

In reality, Christianity as an organized religion has participated in the process of oppression against people of color since it helped to invent the concept of "race." There are and have always been some Christians who are committed to fighting injustice and oppression, but most church-goers who look like me just talk about love and being "one in Christ." While the family in the pew next to them might be African-Americans, they're basically being given positions as honorary White people for church-going purposes only. Let them wake up on Monday morning with a taste for parity in the job market and watch what happens--and who doesn't want to get involved with "that sort of thing."

White people who only "love" Black people in church need to remember Jesus' admonition that inasmuch as we have done it (or not done it) to the least of these His brothers (and sisters), we have done it to Him. In my opinion, not attacking oppression against the powerless is just exactly the kind of thing Jesus was probably talking about.

Whether White people like it or lump it, get it or don't, people of color are owed a whole lot more by this society than one month of reflection a year. The hard work and creativity of people of color are evidenced everywhere you look in this country and they have at no point been invited to fully participate in the benefits they made possible for White citizens who have, in fact, paid far less dearly for what they have always expected to receive, accumulate, and enjoy. African-Americans are not even allowed full citizenship in their own country. That's apartheid, just like South Africa had.

I'm always fascinated by the way some folks say this nation demonstrates its godlessness by not having prayer in school. I think it demonstrates its godlessness by brutalizing people of color (all over the world) for money right up to the present and pretending it's not happening. Until that's understood, we better keep right on having Black History Month. If knowledge is power, then there's a whole lot of White folks in this country in dire straits because they don't know their asses from a hole in the ground.
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The graphic above is the work of Syracuse Cultural Workers.

Quote of the Week

"It is good to know that there still remains a creative minority who would rather lose in a cause that will ultimately win than to win in a cause that will ultimately lose."
~written by Martin Luther King, Jr., to Charles Sherrod, Diane Nash and the others who went to jail on this day in 1961 for requesting service at a lunch counter in Rock Hill, South Carolina. The ten college students refused to post bail and demanded jail time rather than paying fines, refusing to acknowledge any legitimacy of the laws under which they were arrested.
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Thanks to This Week in Peace History for this information.

Two Thumbs Up!

Last year, while I was still in Tampa, I had lunch with a former student of mine and some of her friends. One of them was an African-American woman in her twenties who had gone to school for fashion design, worked hard, and then won an internship to travel with the Ebony Fashion Fair for a while. She was excited (needless to say) that EFF had decided to purchase a couple of her dresses (talk about starting at the top!)

While reading one of my latest Jet Magazines last night, I scanned the names of the designers mentioned in the current show and there it was, among the greats -- Balmain, Biagiotti, Montezin, Missoni, and Elizabeth Carson of Tampa. Two thumbs up for designer Elizabeth Carson, a young woman of color who knew she could. And two thumbs up, as well, for an organization that'll give a young woman of color a shot when she's got it coming.

Tote That Barge, Lift That Bale

It was this week in 1865 that the U.S. legislature passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. Three-quarters of the states ratified it before the end of the year, making the Amendment official, though, just for the record, Kentucky didn't ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1976 and Mississippi never has.

If you notice the Amendment's wording, however, you realize that the way to get around it was written right into the Amendment itself:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly
convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place
subject to their jurisdiction.

Any state that wanted to take advantage of this codicil, as it were -- whether Northern or Southern -- could by simply arresting and incarcerating African-American males who were now, of course, "free" men. This was hardly difficult to do if you just shut them out of the job market and then implement Jim Crow laws that could lock them up for such infractions as not stepping off the sidewalk when a White person walks by.

Now that corporations have stepped into the picture, it's not likely that this game plan is going to be abandoned anytime soon. CorpWatch paints a graphic picture of how insidious and well developed the prison industrial complex is today.

And lest we imagine that African-Americans are the only people of color to suffer under the lash (literally and currently), despite the Thirteenth Amendment, check out this story from Nezua Limon Xolagrafik-jonez, The Unapologetic Mexican.

Or how about this story concerning the Louisiana sheriff who forced prisoners to work in a
stolen vehicle "chop shop" and serve as a pit crew for his hot rod?

What to do about all this? You can look into Free the Slaves or Not For Sale or Ten Students or Critical Resistance -- all of which are organizations working in one way or another to eliminate what the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution supposedly addressed more than 140 years ago.

Quote of the Week

"Only people with hope will struggle. The people who are hopeless are grist for the fascist mill. Because they have no hope, they have nothing to build on. If people are in trouble, if people are suffering and exploited and want to get out from under the heel of oppression, if they have hope that it can be done, if they can see a path that leads to a solution, a path that makes sense to them and is consistent with their beliefs and their experience, then they'll move. But it must be a path that they've started clearing. They've got to know the direction in which they are going and have a general idea of the kind of society they'd like to have. If they don't have hope, they don't even look for a path. They look for somebody else to do it for them." ~~Myles Horton in The Long Haul (1990)

Fire in the Delta

Fire in the Delta
Uploaded by Ndelta

Sokari at Black Looks tells us:

"In 2005, the High Court declared gas flaring illegal yet both the Nigerian government and oil multinationals have ignored the court ruling. Last year the Nigerian government once again promised to stop all gas flaring on the 1st January this year - a promise that goes back nearly 40 years. Companies defying the order were to be shut down. Once again the government has shown complete disregard and insensitivity to the communities in the Niger Delta and given into pressure from Shell, Chevron, Elf etc. The date has now been set for the end of the year but no one really believes that the government will once again bow to the oil multinationals.

"Inemo [Ndelta] has put together this short video [see above] which shows the environmental damage (gas flares both on the ground and those that burn up in the sky; old leaking pipes across farmlands and homes; oil filled creeks and ponds; oil fires which burn the land and people; across the region)."

So, in solidarity with the people of the Niger Delta, I just cut my Chevron gas card in half (even though that's the only local station I have a card for) and I'm mailing it back to the company with my explanation as to why. Our brothers and sisters are specifically asking us -- the heaviest users of gasoline in the world -- to bring pressure on the companies that are causing them to suffer: Shell, Exxon, Mobil and Chevron. Are you in?

A Drum Major For Justice

Some things to think about today.

Passin' It On

I'm tired from reading for the new semester and for the paper on bloggers I'm working on. I'm crabby because I'm back in the office tomorrow morning and, despite the fact that I love what I do as a teacher, it eats me alive. I mean, how am I going to accomplish all the things I want to be doing, if I'm spending fifty hours a week on the campus (the way I usually do)?

Anyway, I made my blog rounds today as I always try to do on Sundays and came across more than a few things I really should pass on. Here are the ones at the top of the list:

For starters, Sokari over at Black Looks turned me onto a film that's in the making. It's called "The Naked Option" and tells the story of a small group of African women who brought Chevron to its knees. I can hardly wait to see it in its entirety, but in the meantime, the trailer alone is electrifying.

Secondly, both Sylvia at Problem Chylde and Kai at Zuky tipped us to to the fact that former Black Panther Party leader Elaine Brown, another extraordinarily strong woman of color, has announced that she is not going to run for President on the Green Party ticket after all and for reasons of which we need to be aware.

Maxjulian, The Free Slave, is giving us yet another election issue to re-consider, since it seems we've put it on the back burner now that campaigns are heating up on the front of the stove.

And Professor Zero has issued a Chiapas Alert related to apparent governmental threats to the people of that region in Mexico. I understand that duties on U.S. agri-products were dropped as of January 1st, so I was expecting some backlash from indigenous people with their already poverty-stricken backs pushed even harder to the wall. It seems the government has similar expectations and is preparing to respond to them as they usually do.

Finally, Theriomorph at Creek Running North initiated a truly excellent thread on being an ally to people of color, especially to women of color. It will likely inspire me to write another in my series on How To Be An Ally (see the top of the link list to the right), but until that happens, you'll have plenty to read. Because even when I'm tired and crabby, when it comes to my faithful readers, love is spoken here.

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The poster above is a product of the highly respected Syracuse Cultural Workers.

And The Beat Goes On

I was going to post this later this evening, just before I go out to dance the new year in around a bonfire, but I made the mistake of playing it again and got so worked up, I can't wait. So if you're already in the mood for a jam featuring B.B., Bo, Ray, James, Fats, Jerry Lee, and a host of others, here it is. It's even better the second time. And if you can stay in your seat through this one, you need new speakers!

Sunset

Year's end. How can that be? I read a poem this morning that used the image of the hourglass to talk about how we watch the moments of our lives slip through the tiny hole that is time, into "the past," leaving an ever smaller supply of moments to expend.

As I get older, that decreasing supply becomes mesmorizing. It moves whether I move or not. It threatens to leave me staring fixated as I lose all opportunity to finish what I imagine is "my work." I only see the back of the tapestry and it is not a pretty sight, albeit colorful.

The end of a year always makes me melacholy now. Time speeds so ridiculously past me that I've long since stopped trying to grab it as it shoots by. There is so much to do, so much that's wrong. And I am so helplessly befuddled (yet) by those elements of existence that could have but didn't ultimately shatter my ability to function at all. I work so hard at trying to keep the edges from unraveling, too often taking myself FAR too seriously. But maybe this mark of the tormented soul is what opens a window on a deeper consciousness. Yes?

Am I tormented? I certainly used to be and sometimes still find myself in that space. But now, increasingly, my torment is for others rather than mySelf. It hurts me deeply how little I have been able to do to make a difference in the world, no matter how diligent I have tried to be, no matter what I do accomplish. I spend so much of the little time I have doing what amounts to pleasuring myself. Yet is not the joyous exhale, too, part of healing a world gone wrong?

You, dear members of the Blogosphere, whether you are readers or writers or both, have held me to the earth another year. And for that I am most positively grateful. Let us shake off the past and celebrate the breath that we are given. Let us trust the process to end up where it will. Let our voices rise like the scent of many flowers in the darkness that seems so deep, but can only be followed by the coming of the light. Come, Light. I pray you find us still prepared and ready to do our part.

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The photo above was taken by my good friend Ed, a fellow struggler on this path we call life.

Please Help Save New Orleans

Tomorrow, the City Council of New Orleans will vote on whether or not to allow HUD to begin demolishing 4500 units of affordable public housing. I moved to Louisiana to be a part of the re-building of New Orleans back into the beautiful, historical, multi-cultural and heavily diverse city that it is famous all over the world for being. We have enough White-bread gentrified playgrounds in the U.S. In the end, they are boring, at best. If the City Council backs the forces of corporate development and allows New Orleans to turn into just another same old thing, everybody will lose in the end. Many of the residents who want to return to these housing units--and have not been allowed to do so--were the low income workers on which New Orleans culture and tourist trade have been based. Shutting them out will change not only the face of New Orleans, but eventually, its finances, as well.

If you've ever been to New Orleans, then you know what I mean and you will want to act immediately to stop this process by signing the petition at Color of Change. If you've never been to New Orleans, but someday hope to see for yourself the magic that you've heard so much about, then you must act, as well, or lose your opportunity forever. The damage of Katrina and the collapsed levy didn't end two years ago. It is still occurring, one day at a time. Are your fingers in the dike?

A Word To The Wise

In line with my recent theme of connecting the past to the present and, if we're not careful, to an foreboding and unavoidable future, I really must link to The Unapologetic Mexican's post on how we are haunted by the spectre of slavery in the United States. He features, besides his extraordinary and poetic description of our haunted land, a piece by Cynthia Boaz that appeared recently on Truthout.org. Boaz writes:

"[T]he institutionalized ownership of one human being by another - is arguably the most disempowering system ever created by humans. It is intended to degrade and humiliate to the point that a person no longer feels agency over his own life. Like other systems of injustice, its effects can run so deep that when the institution is removed, the sense of indignity continues for members of the formerly repressed group until there is an open and comprehensive addressing of past injustices and the pain caused by the systematic abuse. In the last 25 years, in countries recovering from severe oppression, "Truth and Reconciliation Commissions" have been set up to accomplish these tasks. Peru, South Africa, Morocco and East Timor are just a few of the places where TRCs have helped their societies heal and have facilitated reform by acknowledging past wrongs and ensuring that the horrors of history will not be repeated.

"Because there has been no significant attempt to deal with the history of slavery in this country, it is as though our collective mind has been asked to exist in a state of cognitive dissonance. There are no national monuments in the US to former slaves, although they exist for almost every other group who has sacrificed for the "vital interests" of the nation. As a country, we prefer to pretend that slavery never happened, or that it existed too long ago to be relevant to our lives today. This historical amnesia comes easier to some than to others, and it may be that those who have the hardest time reconciling some sense of injustice with the legal rights afforded to every American are young black men. They know that they should feel powerful - after all, they are young and living in the "world's greatest democracy." But for many there must also be (what I imagine as) a constant, gnawing sense of indignity whose source may be vague, and which is easily manifested in rage, aggression, and other substitutes for true empowerment. To a young, misguided and righteously indignant person, a gun equals power."

Ignore this truth, if you want to, but over at The Free Slave earlier today, I ran across a quote by Lao-Tzu: “To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.” And to pretend you're asleep when you're not asleep is not only stupid, but can be very, very dangerous.

Jena One Plus Five -- And So It Goes

I heard it from another blogger on the telephone a couple of nights ago. Word is that Mychal Bell beat up his girlfriend, resulting in the prior charges he had on his record. Even if this is true, I commented that it's typical of the racist criminal "justice" system in this country that a Black man beating up a Black woman wouldn't be treated as strongly as it probably should be. For the longest time, a European-American woman who crossed the color line and was beaten up by her boyfriend was as good as told that that's what she got. And in his best-selling memoir, Makes Me Wanna Holler, Nathan McCall points out the graphic sentencing differences between how Black-on-Black crime (even murder) was dealt with as compared to, say, Black-on-White crimes.

But for those who've been around the just-us system for a while, one of the slickest tricks commonly used (besides the plea bargain, which has turned into an art form) is the practice -- particularly against juveniles -- of "saving" charges for later. In other words, it's as if the prosecutors say, "We don't really care about this situation right now because, you know, this is just the way they are, so we'll just put this one up here on the shelf in case we need it for leverage later." Leverage. Such as in the case of the Jena Six, which may after all have really only been the Jena Five in the first place since there's reason to believe that one of the young men charged didn't even arrive on the scene until the deed was already done.

So the prosecution:

• slam dunks Mychal Bell,


• turns him from a victim into a weapon against not only himself, but against his team mates,


• destroys six young lives while protecting the White racist instigator who most certainly was supportive of the noose-hangers, if not a noose-hanger himself,


• circumvents and then neutralizes community support for the Jena Six,


• and teaches those who don't know better that The Man always has the power, just as he threatened the Jena Six from the beginning.

Carmen D. at All About Race tipped me to all of this. Check it out. And tuck this away for future reference: Carmen's right. We dropped the ball, high-fivin' each other for the march when we needed to be vigilent. This bob-and-weave strategy has been around longer than Br'er Rabbit. Better recognize. And don't be too quick to villainize Bell. If what he did wasn't worth locking him up over when it first came up, why is it worth locking him up over now? Given just the right circumstances, it could be any of us. Even the ones that look like me. If you don't think so, hide and watch what happens now that the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 has passed. The key word in that title is "Prevention" and just how do you suppose the Powers-That-Be intend to accomplish that...hmmm?

A Song For Humans And Their Rights

When I get tired, my head works differently. More negative. Depressed. Sinking into some dark torpor. Swirling into a space I normally try to avoid.

Most of the time, however, when someone asks me how I am, I reply "Peachy!" And they laugh.

On Sunday, a cashier asked me how I was, and I quietly replied, out of nowhere, distracted and not even looking up, "Happy." We were both suprised.

"Happy?!" she exclaimed, startled. "As long as I've worked here, I don't believe I've ever heard a customer answer that way. Happy...humph."

But honestly, that's where I try to live. I mean, with people all over the world starving and being bombed by weapons of mass destruction and eating coca leaves to stave off the pangs of an empty stomach and snorting glue to kill the hopelessness; with people all over the world dying of infected mosquito bites and the result of drinking water that should not -- but must -- be drunk; with people all over the world being forced to make their bodies a sexual receptacle either because they do not have the power to resist or will not eat otherwise; with people -- even children -- all over the world fighting wars they never started and cannot win, despairing of ever again being free of the nightmares that have been deposited in their minds; how could I dare whine about my condition?

I eat, have health insurance, know my job (paying a living wage) will last at least until May. No one is subject to bomb my town tonight. I talked to my mother today on my daytime minutes and wasn't even worried about it. I have -- thanks to a lot of work and a lot of help -- bested most of the demons that were visited on me as a child. I do work I love. I no longer resent being born a woman. And overall, I do expect that, for the time being at least, my human rights are more or less protected. Looking like I look, living in the nation in which I live, having enough money to live on and having the support of others who care about me and know I dance well over the line sometimes, having been taught the skills of articulation and argumentation, having been granted the grace to finally stop apologizing for my existence, I am -- most of the time -- when I'm not tired, peachy.

But I am incredibly conscious of those who are not being allowed to exercise their basic human rights. The right to dignity, safety, privacy, and health, for example; the right to a decent education and meaningful work for a living wage; the right to express their views without being threatened, to worship the way they choose without harassment, and to participate in governing themselves without intervention; the right not to be locked up unjustly or tortured under any circumstances; and possibly above all, the right to equal treatment no matter what.

Last Friday, while starting my day in prayer and meditation, I suddenly began to cry. I couldn't stop the tears. I beseeched the Higher Power I call God to please save us from ourselves, to protect those who are powerless, to comfort those who are suffering for any reason, and to move on those who think they are the only ones who matter. I was a bit unnerved. The episode (as it were) came unexpectedly. And while it wasn't by a long shot the first time I've despaired of our human condition, its effect -- or the effect of what caused it -- has lingered.

And now here it is Human Rights Day. And I've been thinking about the death of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, who was killed by the police on December 4th, 1969, for such heinous crimes as coming up with the first school breakfast program.

And I've been thinking about Joseph Conrad, whose book, Heart of Darkness, recounted the story of what Belgian King Leopold II did in the Congo between 1880 and 1920, killing, it is said, as much as half the population of the country in what Conrad called "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of the human conscience." Conrad spent four months piloting a steamboat up the Congo River until he couldn't stand it any more, but it was ten years later before he could finally write down what he had seen, including the stuffed heads of Africans jammed onto stakes around a Belgian trading post. "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary;" wrote Conrad, "men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."

And I've been thinking about how what Conrad saw and what Hampton experienced laid the ground work for the dual consciousness of my current students of color, who have been socialized to carry the belief in their hearts that they are inferior to people who look like me and that it is hopeless to imagine that they will ever be allowed to assume that their human rights -- the rights they OWN as citizens of the world -- will be respected.

My White students will write in a heartbeat how happy they are to live in a country where everybody's human rights are protected and how terrible it would be to live in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan where people are denied those rights. And my stomach turns. And my heart breaks a little more. And I become a little sadder.

Then I remember what Martin Luther King, Jr., once said: "I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality."

And I become a lot more resolute.

The Connections Between Then and Now

Much more often than I can bear sometimes, a White person will kick off one of the standard scripts on race with the line, "I'm really tired of hearing all about the history of slavery. I never owned any slaves. My father never owned any slaves. Why do Black people keep using history as an excuse not to go on with their lives?" Or some other similar more or less developed rendition of this thought. It's so common that I feel my brain immediately shift over, lock onto the file of standard addressals, and put my mouth in gear to respond. It's not history that's making African-Americans crazy, I say, it's the present (duh!) By the time we finish, they seem to have gotten it without a meltdown, but I have learned that sometimes they have and sometimes, by twenty minutes later, White Supremacy being what it is, they've lost it again. Frustrating.

Anyway, this is crunch time in an already overwhelming semester, but I've been walking around with a headful of thoughts lately on how neatly history connects to the present. Here are a few of those:

1) Eric Stoller hosted the newest Erase Racism Blog Carnival here. It's all about White Supremacy and much of it focuses on Thanksgiving, which was a wonderful idea considering the fact that most folks in the U.S. still "celebrate" that holiday without a backward glance at what it ultimately meant to the indigenous people who made the first feast possible. Eric's choice of topic inspired me to write my own post about Thanksgiving by the day itself.

2) Yesterday marked the anniversary of two important historical events: Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat on the bus in 1955 and Abraham Lincoln's State of the Union address in 1862. I see them connected, of course. Lincoln's address is what took the Civil War from being about State's Rights to being about slavery, though the only reason Lincoln took it in this direction was because he was trying to win the war and preserve the nation as one cohesive whole. He had emancipated the slaves in the seceeded states just 10 weeks before so that African-Americans could legally join the Union forces and take up arms against their former "masters." And he only did this because northern White men were becoming seriously disinterested in fighting the war themselves, at least partly because most of them didn't mind slavery all that much, if at all. Lincoln was smelling defeat, so he clutched at a straw, saying: "In giving freedom to the slave, we ensure freedom to the free... We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth." Thus, he enlisted (literally) the aid of nearly two hundred thousand former slaves to put a finish to the war -- and they did. But, while this released them from the bonds of legal slavery, it did not institute either justice or parity for U.S. citizens of color. So Rosa Parks, nearly one hundred years later, still had to plan and implement a personal self-destruction of her individual right to privacy, employment, or peace by challenging the practice of keeping African-Americans "in their place." The final irony: both events, while defining moments in their respective ages and successful in their immediate results, have only changed the surface of our social milieu, leaving it to us to dig up the roots of racial oppression in the United States and free ourselves -- finally -- from the toxic poison that still and maybe even more effectively threatens our nation's survival yet.

3) For those who need more "proof" that Lincoln did not lay slavery to rest in all its manifestations, Kirshan Murphy over at Nubian Waves relates a story that will leave you staring at the floor.

4) Last, but far from least, a few days ago, I was reminded that forty years ago this week, Martin Luther King, Jr., called for a Poor People's Campaign against those whose interests require the continued oppression of all who work to make this country rich without being allowed to share fully in that abundance. An example of what he was saying: "...There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life..." It's most interesting to note that King was a major power player in the civil rights movement for more than four years prior to this new evolution, but the minute he started talking about poor Whites and poor Blacks organizing themselves as one unit in their collective interests, it took only four months for some individual (acting entirely alone, of course) to kill him. Catch just a whiff of the power that was on the move in this video clip. Can't help but wonder if that kind of power could be lurking just under the surface if poor people today would pick up the thread of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last thought...

The Massacre at Thibodaux

I've been writing about African-American resistance of late and always like to remind my readers that African-Americans and European-Americans have throughout U.S. history joined together to fight injustice. One such story unfolded in 1887 when sugar cane cutters tried to organize a union in St. Mary, Terrebonne, and Lafourche Parishes in Louisiana, better known to some as "the sugar bowl."

At the time, most cane cutters were being paid $13 per month in script which could only be spent at the company store. Goods at the company store, of course, were marked up on average as much as 100% or more over retail value which typically meant that most of the workers wound up and often stayed in the red. And local lawmakers did their part by making it illegal for workers to leave the sugar plantation owners' land until their debt was paid. Uh-huh.

On the first day of the crucial harvest period in November of 1887, ten thousand workers--one thousand of them White--let it be known that they were NOT going to harvest the crop and they were NOT going to vacate their plantation-owned cabins. In fear that their valuable crop was going to get caught by a freeze, plantation owners turned to Governor McEnery (a plantation owner himself), who quickly sent in troops to "resolve" the issue.

Over the next couple of weeks, tension continued to build until on this day in 1887, somewhere between thirty and three hundred workers were rounded up and shot to death after being told to run for their lives. To read the whole story, go here.

Thinking About "Thanksgiving"...

I've been trying to figure out what it is we celebrate on Thanksgiving. "A bountiful harvest," we're told. A bountiful harvest the Europeans would not have had, had the indigenous "savages" of the Western Hemisphere not taught them how to produce it before the Europeans decided the continent wasn't big enough for all of us.

This has, unfortunately for millions in the world over the past four centuries, become the pattern of the United States as a culture and as a nation. We come smiling (most of the time) and then strike mercilessly and without, it would seem, conscience of any kind. What kind of people, one wonders, has NO conscience? And what might be the eventual destiny of such a people?

European capitalists snatched North America from the native civilizations that had lived here for thousands of years and, in a matter of only two centuries, have all but destroyed it, building cities that even many of us now seek to abandon. The process of laying waste to all of the beauty and abundance that had sustained itself for millions of years has now unapologetically poisoned the soil, polluted the air and waters, and exterminated the wildlife to the point of extinction. But first had to come the genocide of the indigenous human protectors of all the natural magnificence the Europeans so coveted and then so destroyed.

So we will belly up to the table today -- those of us who can afford to do so (and the statistics tell us that we are fewer than ever this year, with one out of ten in the U.S. not having enough to eat, many of these being children) -- and we will eat our way into a stupor. This "celebration" is to thank whoever we thank that we have much at the expense of others, that we are "safe" in a world where we support making others unsafe, that we have a "right" to do whatever we must to maintain our strangle-hold on the resources of every other people in the world, even our "allies," and to maintain that strangle-hold by any means necessary, knowing full well the ultimate result of such a plan for mass collective suicide.

What we need to be grateful for is that we have not, as yet, met our demise as a nation and as a people, that we can yet set a different course. There are repeated examples throughout history of populations who lived long in bondage and then struck out on their own for a promised land with no idea of where that was or what it would look like. Perhaps we, too, need to set our hearts toward the highway, as it were, to opt to survive and flourish rather than struggle and waste away, in bondage to a way of life that increasingly bewilders and reduces us. As more and more of us are touched by the cancer of our addiction to fear and materialism, more and more of us will come to imagine (as John Lennon once suggested) a different, better world, where we can be proud of something besides our credit limit and our military might.

In the meantime, we might want to be grateful, as well, that there are still remnants of the indigenous peoples we so summarily decimated. Their history is long. Their wisdom is deep. And if we learn to honor what is true over what is illusion, if we look inside our hearts instead spending all our resources decorating our social and physical outsides, if we ask for the guidance we so desperately need from those who have lasted so very long even in the face of ruthless attack on every level, perhaps there is hope for us yet.

Remember To Buy Nothing On Friday

Supporting the consumer culture that encourages spending money we often do not have to buy things we typically do not need to buy supports globalization, White supremacy, sexism, addiction, and low self esteem. In fact, nobody wins but the rich guy. Is that the world you want to support? Buy nothing on Friday.

Chiquita Banana Update

Thanks to SeeingBlack.com, I learned the following:

The American fruit giant Chiquita has been hit with a new lawsuit on behalf of victims of Colombian paramilitaries. Earlier this year Chiquita admitted to paying one point seven million dollars to a right-wing Colombian paramilitary group on the U.S. terrorist watch list. On Wednesday, nearly four hundred Colombian plaintiffs filed a civil suit seeking almost eight billion dollars in damages. Plaintiff attorney Jonathan Reiter said Chiquita should be held accountable for the killings it helped fund: "The principle on which this lawsuit has been brought is that when you put money into the hands of terrorists, when you put guns into the hands of terrorists, then you are legally responsible for the atrocities, the murders and the tortures which those terrorists commit."

Chiquita says it fell victim to an extortion attempt and made the payments only to protect its employees. But a private investigator hired by the plaintiffs disputed Chiquita’s denials. The investigator, William Acosta, says his findings leave no doubt over Chiquita’s complicity: "Most of the victims during our interviews in Colombia always mention Chiquita as being the party which sends people to threaten them."

Chiquita is already facing another lawsuit from relatives of one-hundred forty-four people killed by Colombian paramilities. The company has paid a twenty-five million dollar fine to the U.S. government, but none of the money has gone to the victims’ families.

Why am I not surprised?

The Looooooong Road Home To New Orleans

I got a notice today from Color of Change asking me to support a bill intended to help poor people return to their homes in New Orleans. Many of them are African-American. Besides signing the petition in favor of the bill, I decided to post their email and its accompanying video from Brave New Films (above):

New Orleans public housing residents have been fighting for over two years to return to their homes. Many of their units were minimally damaged by the storm, but the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has shut them out. HUD plans to demolish most available public housing units and replace them with mixed-income housing. While there are good arguments for mixed-income housing, HUD's plan calls for far fewer total units of affordable public housing, and it completely ignores short-term housing needs. The inevitable result will be thousands of low-income residents--most of whom are Black--pushed out of the city.

S.1668 honors the right to return of all New Orleans public housing residents and takes steps to preserve affordable housing in New Orleans. It requires the re-opening of at least 3,000 public housing units and ensures that there is no net loss of units available and affordable to public housing residents. The bill quickly passed in the House earlier this year, and after thousands of ColorOfChange.org members pushed for the Senate to take action, the bill was introduced to the Senate by Senators Landrieu and Dodd. Now the bill is in danger of dying.

Last month, the Bush administration came out against the idea of reopening public housing units in New Orleans, with a HUD representative making the dubious claim that HUD "can't get people into" existing housing units because "they won't come home." Louisiana Senator David Vitter opposed the plan on the grounds that it would "re-create the New Orleans housing projects exactly as they were," which is simply not true. What no one can dispute is that the failure to provide affordable housing for low-income residents has contributed to the huge drop in the Black population in the city. Whether they'll admit it or not, opponents of S.1668 are working to reinforce this trend.

The Gulf Coast needs a housing policy that welcomes all citizens home, not just those who are wealthy, privileged, or White. The Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act is the last great hope for New Orleans public housing residents who want to come home. But it won't pass if we don't fight for it. Please join Color of Change in demanding that your senators support S.1668.

Little? White Lies

This has been a hectic and somewhat disconcerting week, during which I have received some information with which I have not been able to come to grips as yet. There are many whisperings, some quite frightening, frankly. But there are many people--both African-American and European-American--who stand strong in their commitment to make this a better world. I simply don't trust myself to write about this stuff yet. So, rather than leave you hanging, I post this Barry Deutsch cartoon* about the stuff White people tell themselves to rationalize and justify their clinging to the sickness of racism. Joe Feagin calls these "sincere fictions." I would argue that they're FAR from sincere.

James Baldwin once said, "You can find out everything you need to know about race in the United States by asking a White person would they like to be Black." And that's what I'm talkin' about.

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*Click on the cartoon to make it large enough to see clearly or print out.

A Short Reading List On Black Resistance

After I wrote a recent post on Black resistance to White oppression, a commentator mentioned a couple of books worth reading and inspired me to create the following list of a few books I commonly recommend on the topic. The list is in no particular order and is in NO way comprehensive. In fact, I'm hoping that readers will add to the list in the comments section. But this will give those who are interested some options with which to begin.

American Negro Slave Revolts by Herbert Aptheker

Black Consciousness in South Africa by Steve Biko
Garvey and Garveyism by Amy Jacques Garvey
The Negro Revolution by Robert Goldston

Runaway Slaves by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger

Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody

Black Students by Harry Edwards

We Want Freedom by Mumia Abu-Jamal

Antislavery by Dwight Lowell Dumond

Detroit: I Do Mind Dying by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin

The Making of Black Revolutionaries by James Forman

Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas by Richard Price

Here I Stand by Paul Robeson

A Taste of Power by Elaine Brown

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Hailey

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs

Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton

As I have already stated, there are many, many more such books. And I have only listed books, though there are some essays (such as "Dynamite Growing Out of Their Skulls" by Calvin C. Hernton, ") and even some letters (such as "The Letter from the Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King, "Letter to a Farm Boy" by Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin's "if they take you in the morning" letter to Angela Davis in the 1970's) that are so classic on the topic that they stand alone on their own merit. And it could be argued that many of the poems, fictional stories and plays written by African-Americans since the 1700's have been couched in either recounting, defending, explaining, or inciting Black resistance in one way or the other. You will have to find out that on your own (and I hope you will, no matter what your skin tone).

In any case, I just listed here the first few that came to mind. What books on African and African-American resistance would you add?

Don't Be Confused -- Hate Spills Over

There has been much in the media of late reporting the hanging of nooses and other reactions in apparent response to a September 20th march of more than 50,000 people against institutionalized racism in the United States as manifested in Jena, Louisiana, over the past year. Some want to claim that the nooses hung in a tree in Jena a year ago were a "prank," even though I would argue that White people in general do not for one moment perceive the hanging of nooses as a prank. They know very well what nooses mean not only to African-Americans, but to White people in the U.S., as well.

There's nothing "prankish" about the torturous murders of innocent people of color over a period of five hundred years. According to the statistics, 3811 incidents were officially labeled lynchings between 1889 and 1942 alone. That averages out to one every five days for fifty-three years. They occurred all over the country. That figure doesn't even count the incidents involving a body that never surfaced or a "suicide" such as Malcolm X's father's wherein he hit himself in the head and put himself on a railroad track to die. And, needless to say, lynchings didn't stop in 1942. In fact, anyone that doesn't recognize what happened to Megan Williams this summer in West Virginia as a slow-motion lynching is just quibbling over details.

But I would like to remind my readers that the mindset that hangs nooses is a dangerous one to many European-Americans in this country, as well. On this date in 1979, a group made up of both African-Americans and European-Americans gathered in Greensboro, North Carolina, to protest against the Ku Klux Klan. Before they could even get started, however, forty KKK members and American Nazis drove into the crowd, got out of their vehicles, pulled out their automatic weapons and opened fire, killing five and wounding ten others. The massacre was filmed by four television stations. Nevertheless, after two trials, two all-White juries acquitted all defendents and no one has ever served a day in jail for these cold-blooded killings in broad daylight while law enforcement officers looked on. The five who died were a nurse and two doctors, a graduate of the Harvard divinity school, and a Cuban immigrant who graduated magna cum laude from Duke University. None were African-American, though all were active in union organizing, poverty programs, and the push for racial parity.

True, in 1985, a civil jury found the city, the Nazi Party, and the Klan guilty of violating the civil rights of the demonstrators, resulting in a payment of $350,000 total to include all parties. This is one of the only times a police department has been held accountable for cooperating with a hate group in the matter of a wrongful death. Still, when a grassroots movement demanded the seating of a 2-day Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2005 to investigate the matter, White Mayor Keith Holliday and some of the city council voted along racial lines NOT to support the Commission's work.

My point? If you look like me and have ever had a date or even dinner with an African-American; if anyone in your extended family is married to, living with, or has had a child with an African-American; if you hire an African-American to work for you; if you invite an African-American to visit you in your home or visit one in theirs; if African-Americans go to your church; or even if you think in the most vague and generalistic terms that African-Americans are citizens of the United States and therefore have the absolute right to every privilege and protection under the U.S. Constitution, then YOU could be accused of being the enemy of those who see you as a threat to the future of "White" America and will tell you so in no uncertain terms. There is no gray area with these folks. Just thought you would want to think about that the next time you hear somebody say hanging a noose is "just" a "prank." And just in case you're wondering, the photo above was taken in 2003.

Quote of the Week

This Ricardo Levins Morales poster is available from Northland Poster Collective, a wonderful source of posters, buttons, bumper stickers, calendars, gifts for the holidays, and so forth, ad infinitum.