Leonard Peltier Beaten In Prison

I just received the following email. If you don't know Leonard Peltier's story, now's the time to learn about this Native American man who has been imprisoned for decades for a crime even the FBI admits he did not commit. They claim they don't have to release him because he was originally convicted. Now they are apparently trying to kill him before he can be released on parole. Please pass the word and do what you can.

Dear Leonard Peltier Supporters,

I am so OUTRAGED! My brother Leonard was severely beaten upon his arrival at the Canaan Federal Penitentiary. When he went into population after his transfer, some inmates assaulted him. The severity of his injuries is that he suffered numerous blows to his head and body, receiving a large bump on his head, possibly a concussion, and numerous bruises. Also, one of his fingers is swollen and discolored and he has pain in his chest and ribcage. There was blood everywhere from his injuries.

We feel that prison authorities at the prompting of the FBI orchestrated this attack and thus, we are greatly concerned about his safety. It may be that the attackers, whom Leonard did not even know,were offered reduced sentences for carrying out this heinous assault. Since Leonard is up for parole soon, this could be a conspiracy to discredit a model prisoner. He was placed in solitary confinement and only given one meal, this is generally done when you won't name your attackers; incidentally being only given one meal seriously jeopardizes his health because of his diabetes.

Prison officials refuse to release any info to the family, but they need to hear from his supporters to protect his safety, as does President Obama. His attorneys are trying to get calls into him now. This attack on LP comes on the heels of the FBI's recent letter, prompting this attack by FBI supporters as an attempt to discredit LPas a model prisoner. Anyone who has been in the prison system knows well that if you refuse to name your attackers or file charges against them, then you lose your status as a victim and/or are given points against your possible parole and labeled as a perpetrator.

It is not uncommon, in fact is quite common, for the government to use Indian against Indian and they still operate under the old adage "it takes an Indian to catch an Indian." In 1978, they made an attempt to assassinate him through another Indian man who was also at Marion prison with LP. But Standing Deer chose to reveal the plot to him instead of taking his life in exchange FOR A CHANCE AT FREEDOM. When Standing Deer was released in 2001, he joined the former Leonard Peltier Defense Committee as a board member. He also began to speak on Leonard's behalf until his murder six years ago today. Prior to his murder, Standing Deer confided with close friends and associates that the same man who visited him in Marion to assassinate Peltier, had came to Houston, TX and told him that he had better stay away from Peltier and anything to do with him.

We are aware that currently, the FBI is actively seeking support for his continued imprisonment and also seeking support from Native People. So please be aware, and keep Leonard in your prayers.

The FBI is apparently afraid of the impact we are having. If they will set him up to blemish his record just before a parole hearing, what will they do when it looks like his freedom will become a reality? We need to make sure that nothing happens to him again!

Please write, call, or email President Obama, urging him to grant clemency to Leonard before it is too late. Call or write your congressional representatives. Do what you can to get the word out to insure that LP is receiving adequate medical attention for his injuries. Also call Canaan Federal Prison at 570-488-8000 and request that Leonard be treated with dignity and respect. I am asking you, supporters of Leonard and advocates of justice, to help. I don't know what else to do. Please Help! Thank you.

Betty Peltier

Solano Executive Coordinator

Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee

CONTACT:

Warden Ronnie R. Holt, Warden

USP-Canaan

U.S. Penitentiary

3057 Easton Turnpike

Waymart, PA 18472

Phone: 570-488-8000 Fax: 570-488-8130

E-mail address: caa/execassistant(at)bop.gov

D. Scott Dodrill, Director

Northeast Regional Office

Federal Bureau of Prisons

2nd & Chesnut Streets., 7th Floor

Philadelphia, PA 19106

Phone: 215-521-7301

E-mail: nero/execassistant(at)bop.gov

Harley G. Lappin, Director

Bureau of Prisons

U.S. Department of Justice

320 First Street, NW, Room 654

Washington, DC 20534

Phone: 202-307-3250 Fax: 202-514-6878

President Barack Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20500

Comments: 202-456-1111 Switchboard: 202-456-1414 FAX: 202-456-2461

E-mail: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact

Is Open Season Ever Going To Close?

I've been busy of late. Brought several major projects to fruition -- finally. Have done rather more socializing than is typical for me. Have a fifty-pound dog now named VooDoo who absolutely DEMANDS to be cuddled and played with (he's not a baby, he just acts like one). And, of course, I'm hard on the process of preparing for the new semester's classes. But all this isn't why I've been silent on the killings in New Orleans and Oakland this past two weeks. I just don't know what to say.

I'm horrified. I'm anguished. And I'm disgusted. I've seen these kind of incidents over and over all my life and increasing, it seems to me, as times goes on and I'm just out of angles to discuss them.

I mean, WTF?!!

Two more young African-American men lie in their graves. Families huddle together, heartbroken. But no one has been arrested. And authorities are talking about making a "complete" investigation. Not really investigating yet, you understand, from what I can tell. Just talking about investigating.

What's to investigate?

In New Orleans, 22-year-old Adolph Grimes III, having just arrived from Houston to celebrate New Year's Eve with his family, a man with no record, with a good job, and with a fiancee and 17-month-old son, was shot a total of fourteen times -- twelve in the back -- by nine (count 'em, nine!) "plain clothes" police officers at 3:00 a.m. that morning after discovering Grimes commiting the heinous crime of waiting in his car for his cousin. The police say Grimes shot first. Unfortunately, Grimes can't say. My question is, for starters, did they shoot Grimes in the back FIRST and then roll him over and shoot into his dead body two more times just on general principle or did they shoot him twice from in front and then gun him down in cold blood as a group while he was running for his life?

In Oakland, California, only a few hours later, another 22-year-old man, Oscar Grant, was detained and forced onto his face on the floor (for whatever reason) in a Bay Area Rapid Transit station, and then, while one BART cop held him down with his knee, Grant was summarily -- almost casually -- shot in the back at close range by another BART cop in full view of multiple witnesses, a number of which filmed the incident. Almost instantly, the media started positing excuses for the killer ("maybe he thought he grabbed his taser") and indictments of the victim ("Grant appears to have had a record"). What either of those two ideas has to do with the fact that one man has killed and another is dead is entirely unclear to me, but such excuses and indictments ALWAYS form the litany of responses to situations like this one. ALWAYS.

What bothers me most, though, is that when protesters in Oakland aggressively went to the streets eight days later, primarily because of the usual under-the-rug-sweeping process, all I heard on the news was how awful and inexcusable and wrong that was. "It's NEVER right to use violence!" declared one radio announcer on PBS before I hit a different button not to hear any more. While the man who killed Oscar Grant has been charged with nothing to date, dozens of the protesters were arrested and at least three charged for crimes against property. Does there seem to be a disconnect here somewhere?

Where is the media outrage at the senseless deaths of two young men, only the last two in a long, long line of such deaths of similar men? In fact, why aren't we ALL in the streets over this? If a young White man was shot to death by the police under specious circumstances every few weeks somewhere in this country, there would be noise (although, obviously, this is a meaningless analogy since this would never happen in the first place in a nation operating under the paradigm of White Supremacy).

When Ida B. Wells, forced this nation to face its culpability in the use of lynching as a means to oppress African-Americans, the Ku Klux Klan, apparently, just joined the police force, where it would be legal to do the same thing. Admittedly, a more or less clean kill doesn't have the extra drama (and satisfaction?) of a full-tilt boogie lynching, but it's just as effective as a means of social control and intimidation. And you don't have to hide your uniform in a closet or wear a hood either.

George Ciccariello Maher's Znet piece on the uprising in Oakland is the best thing I've read yet on this on-going outrage. But just writing about it isn't enough for me any more. And I don't know what to do. Jonathan Adams suggests calling the Bay Area Transit Authority and I do believe in speaking truth to power, but it just doesn't feel like enough for me any more.

The first open forum the student organization I advise is co-sponsoring this semester is on police brutality. I'm almost afraid to go for fear I'll wind up saying something that could cost me my job. And that's what I like least about institutionalized oppression. It doesn't just work on the targets. It works on us all. When will we finally get that and respond accordingly?

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UPDATE: Even though Johananes Mehserle has now been charged with murder for the killing of Oscar Grant, Color of Change is reminding us not to ease up on the pressure. The usual game plan is for the authorities to do only what they feel they absolutely have to do and only for as long as they have to do it. If they can string it out long enough, we get distracted, quiet down, and the matter "goes away." Color of Change writes:

"In 14 years as Alameda County District Attorney, Tom Orloff had never before charged a police officer for an on-duty shooting. And when asked, several legal experts were unable to come up with any examples of officer-involved shootings becoming murder cases in California...He said that 'because of the intense public interest I think more resources were put into wrapping this up than would be put in in other situations.' Orloff...poured investigative resources into this case that his record tells us he never would have otherwise. We need to keep the pressure on Tom Orloff to make sure he keeps devoting time and energy to Mehserle's prosecution."

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The poster featured above is available from the Northland Poster Collective.

DREAM Act Action Now

More than a year ago now, some of us were talking about the DREAM Act and its ultimate dismissal by the Bush administration et al. But the DREAM Act is not dead, nor are its proponents. I received the following communication yesterday and have decided that it's too well done to pretend that I could do it any better. So, with minor modifications, let me introduce Maria M.:

"Hi,

"My name is Maria and I am a DREAM Act beneficiary. I arrived in this country at the young age of 12, with my parents, from Peru. I am now 21 years old and undocumented. I have grown up in the United States and consider this country my only home. If sent back to Peru, I would be banned from the U.S. for 10 years and the chances of coming back are slim to none. I graduated from high school in 2004 and since then, it has been difficult for me to continue my education as a result of my status. The DREAM Act would help me, and students in my situation, realize our dreams of becoming active members of society by allowing us to attend school or join the military.

"Currently, there is an active project on Change.org, a website that will present the top 10 ideas it generates to the Obama administration upon its inauguration. DreamACTivist.org has presented the idea "Pass the DREAM Act Now" and it has gathered enough support to make it to the second round.

"Starting January 5th, the voting polls will re-open for the second round. We will have only 10 days to gather as many votes and as much support as possible in order to become one of the top 10 ideas that will be presented to the Obama administration. Please help us achieve our goal and consider voting for the other immigration ideas that made it to the second round, as well, since they also need your support. This project is of extreme importance and your prompt participation is greatly appreciated.

"In addition, DreamACTivist and the United We DREAM Coalition will be launching a website on January 21 that will become a 65,000-name petition drive for the DREAM Act, signifying the 65,000 undocumented students that would benefit from this act each year. Please visit this site for more information and consider joining our efforts to make the DREAM Act a reality in 2009.

"In solidarity,

Maria M.

Co-Founder of DreamACTivist.org"

A Bright New Year

So here we are, alone once more and at last. I am returned from New York City, where I heard Handel's Messiah at Carnegie Hall, visited the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side, and discovered that my daughter's new Significant Other has this blog bookmarked on whatever it is he carries around with him (clever man!). I've traded the emergency furniture I lived with for so long for a lovely assortment of newer old furniture at a Furniture Exchange. I returned to find the latest edition of a rather fine African-American topics magazine in which I have not one, but TWO articles published. And I have somehow (I swear this is unclear to me) wound up the new best friend of a rather large brindle mutt I rescued yesterday afternoon from the local shelter only a few days short of a day he was not looking forward to and who will, I'm sure, answer to his name as soon as he has one. ("Anonymous" has been suggested. "Charlie" suits, but I date a man named Charles off and on. And "Buddy" came to mind, but that's SO plebian.) So, I'm feeling rooted and solid and happy and strong and ready, I guess, for what comes next (I write "I guess" because how does one ever know?).

Anyway, it is a new year. A year a new beginnings, we hope. A year of challenges, we suspect. What will I remember -- looking back -- about last year? That I was diagnosed diabetic (sigh) and threw myself into such a rigorous regimen, I lost nearly a third of my body weight, becoming a slender shadow of my former self, so close to the designation of "underweight" on the BMI scale, I've been ordered to stop losing (?!). That I was offered and accepted a permanent full-time Instructor position at a public university in a part of the country that originally scared the be-jezzus out of me. That I watched a cadre of younger folks catch my fire on that campus and organize themselves to implement social change in every imaginable direction and with great heart. That I was elected Third Vice President of a branch of the NAACP that is hunkered down against the forces of evil in that same location, having reawakened the dogs of war on segregation after fifty years of waiting for change. That Barack Obama, a dazzlingly bright and doggedly determined man of color was somehow inexplicably elected President of the United States, a nation increasingly recognized around the world for it's unapologetic commitment to the paradigm of White Supremacy. A busy year, indeed, laying much groundwork for an interesting one to come.

I've ordered my Amnesty International wall calendar for my office and my Women Artists datebook from the Syracuse Cultural Workers Collective. I've committed to make a presentation next week to a group of nearly one hundred mostly Black high school football players about how to prepare for and make it in college. I've committed to meet with the new Gay-Straight Alliance group on campus before classes begin. And I am ready for the games to begin.

So, as we say good morning to a New Era of commitment to change, I salute you, my Faithful Readers. I trust you, too, are shaking off the disappointments of the past, facing your personal realities with unabashed courage, looking squarely in the face of whatever you see that needs changing in this world and "jumping at the sun," as Zora Neale Hurston once said. Let's boogie on out and do it!
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The poster featured above is by Ricardo Levins Morales and is available from Northland Poster Collective.

Am I Not Human?

I can't believe it's already the 27th again. I'm committed to posting about human rights violations on the 27th of each month. Sadly, it's never difficult to find an appropriate topic. In fact, there's usually a whole bunch of possible issues from which to choose. This month, since I'm in New York City visiting my daughter, I don't have time to write much, but these stories seem to me to be the most immediately crucial:

1) The Nation has reported that White vigilantes murdered African-Americans in the Algiers Point neighborhood after Katrina hit New Orleans two years ago. And Color of Change is trying to make sure the matter isn't just swept under the rug.

2) Top high school football recruit Billey Joe Johnson wound up shot in the head by a shotgun at a traffic stop in Lucedale, Mississippi, on December 8th. An independent investigation by the NAACP found that the incident was not a suicide, as had been originally suggested, but while it MAY have been an tragic accident, the family has hired the nationally-recognized Cochran legal firm to represent them.

Please forgive me for being so silent and so short this week.  I'll return after Monday and then I'mahna tear it up.

Where I've Been This Week

In case you wonder where I've been since last Tuesday, I've been (ready?) snowed under. That's right. My small town in southern Louisiana picked up eight (count 'em, eight) inches of the fluffiest white snow you can imagine. My twenty-something neighbors made snow angels, threw snow balls, and built a snowman, complete with jaunty Louisiana bluesman hat. A small herd of children marauded excitedly from yard to yard. And the power, needless to say, went out for multiple days for the second time in three months. Thanks to an under-sized emergency transformer thrown up and never replaced after Hurricane Gustav, I went 72 hours before I got my power back, even though everybody else on my road got theirs back in 48. Sigh.

Just imagine trying to sleep under three cotton blankets and a comforter while wearing jeans, a turtleneck sweater, a Brooklyn Industries hooded sweatshirt (zipped up), two pairs of socks, wooly slippers, and gloves. In pitch darkness. Only crawling out of said cave to sit on a toilet seat made of ice.

To make matters worse, the roads for that first day were so icy (and Louisiana drivers so inexperienced) that trucks were in ditches all over the place and cars were bouncing off the highway abutments like popping corn.

And it was finals week going into Commencement on Saturday, so on top of everything else, students were panicking and teachers were walking the halls in the clothes they slept in, looking seriously rough and having trouble maintaining focus.

I ultimately wound up spending two nights at a friend's place, did almost NO work, and lost yet another freezerful of food, bringing my total loss to about $150 worth of food in three months. The up-side was that it was so cold in my house that the soy milk, yogurt, meat and cheese in the fridge didn't spoil. Yeah.

This morning I came across the following YouTube video, so now I know who to blame for this um...interesting evolution. (I originally attributed it to the way we've screwed up the ecological balance, but who knew?)

To the little girl in Baton Rouge who wrote Santa asking for snow, I'd like to say, "Okay, now. That's enough." But just in case she really does have some kind of special line to the old guy in the red suit, I'd like to suggest that she ask for world peace next. Snow is pretty, but peace would be glorious. Wouldn't it?

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The photo above was captured by Vonna Varnado, one of my students and a multi-talented artist to watch.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

In recognition of the fact that it was sixty years ago today that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted at the U.N., I'm posting this beautiful YouTube video produced by Amnesty International. It's crucial that we consider on this (and every) day that millions of people's human rights are violated routinely, causing horrendous and unnecessary suffering around the world. I would also suggest, however, that we should also be considering the following:

1. Is it not a human rights violation that African-Americans in the United States still cannot expect to exercise the rights they are guaranteed as U.S. citizens by the U.S. Constitution?

2. Is it not a human rights violation that women and women's work is devalued in every nation of the world despite the invaluable -- and widely recognized -- social, cultural, and economic contributions we make to those nations daily?

3. Is it not a human rights violation whenever an individual consumer -- anywhere in the world -- purchases a product made under conditions that violated the human rights of the worker who produced it?

4. Is it not a human rights violation that the public education system in the U.S. is two-tiered, ensuring that the children of middle and upper class families will have an entirely different experience of education than poor children?

5. Is it not a human rights violation that some people in the world have food while others do not, some people in the world have drinkable water while others do not, and some people in the world have access to medical care while others do not...even in the U.S.?

6. Is it not a human rights violation of all U.S. citizens that George Bush (the second) took office as President twice without ever being elected as such?

Fats, Ray and Jerry Lee to the Rescue

It's been a hard semester and as I head for the finish line on Friday, I'm feeling like a marathon runner at the end of a race. It ain't easy.

And already, looking beyond, I'm thinking about how to cut the paper I wrote on bloggers and get it submitted for possible publication, preparing to do some research on how Africans and African-Americans feel about each other, fittin' to (as we say) do some work on my "In-Your-Face Women" manuscript, projecting all the way to next summer when I may work with a Latino advocacy agency in Texas, and knowing that I still have to find time to set up the course on sexuality I'll be teaching next semester...all while preparing to spend a few days in New York City with my daughter.

Gracious. Where am I gonna get the energy? Music helps...

The Revolutionary Love of Fred Hampton, Sr.

In the wee hours of the morning on this day in 1969, Fred Hampton, Sr., was assassinated by a coalition of law enforcement officers representing city, county and federal agencies in Chicago, Illinois. These lines, taken from some of his speeches, as presented in the movie, "The Murder of Fred Hampton," are why:

"I was born in a bourgeois community and had some of the better things in life, but I found that there were more people starving than there were people eating, more people that didn’t have clothes than did have clothes, and I just happened to be one of the few. So I decided that I wouldn’t stop doing what I’m doing until all those people are free.

"We’re gonna have to do more than talk. We're gonna have to do more than listen. We're gonna have to do more than learn. We’re gonna have to start practicing and that’s very hard. We’re gonna have to start getting out there with the people and that’s difficult. Sometimes we think we’re better than the people so it’s gonna take a lot of hard work.

"You don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We're not gonna fight capitalism with Black capitalism. We’re gonna fight capitalism with socialism. Socialism is the people. If you’re afraid of socialism, you’re afraid of yourself.

"Without education, people will accept anything. Without education, what you’ll have is neo-colonialism instead of the colonialism like you have now. Without education, people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, you know what I mean? You might get people caught up in an emotionalist movement, might get them because they’re poor and they want something and then if they’re not educated, they’ll want more and before you know it, we’ll have Negro imperialism.

"You have to understand that people have to pay the price for peace. If you dare to struggle, you dare to win. If you dare not struggle, then you don’t deserve to win. Let me say ‘Peace’ to you, if you’re willing to fight for it.

"Nothing is more important than stopping fascism because fascism will stop us all. We don’t hate White people. We hate the oppressor, whether they be White, Black, Brown or Yellow. We will work with anybody, coalesce with anybody that has revolution on their mind. But anybody that comes into our community and sets up anything that does not meet the needs of the masses, I will grab him by the neck and beat that man to death with a Black Panther paper.

"I’m going to do my job and I believe that I was born not to die in a car wreck. I don’t believe I’m going to die slipping on a piece of ice. I don’t believe I was born to die because of a bad heart. I don’t believe I was born to die of lung cancer. I believe I’m going to be able to do what I came to do. I believe that I’m going to be able to die high off the people. I believe that I will be able to die as a revolutionary in the international revolutionary proletariat struggle. And I hope that each one of you will be able to live in it. I think that struggles are going to come. Why don’t you live for the people? Why don’t you live for the struggle? Why don’t you die for the struggle?

"If you ain’t gonna do no revolutionary act, forget about me. I don’t want myself on your mind if you’re not gonna work for the people.

"I might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But you can believe that the last words on my lips were ‘I am a revolutionary.’

"You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution."

Passin' It On

Thanks to being off work for several days in a row (what a luvlee thing!), I managed to get around to a few of blogs I love to visit when I can. The result, of course, is that I simply MUST steer you in the direction of a few posts.

First, being that most of us are still eating leftovers from Thursday, duck on over to Stuff White People Do and read the Robert Jensen take on Thanksgiving Day.

Then, check out the post Carmen put up at All About Race on Bob Jones' University "apologizing" for racist practices (NO!! Who would have imagined that?!).

Next, thanks to Kevin at Slant Truth, we got tipped to the new Jay Smooth production on YouTube, wherein Jay talks about what we need to do now that the Presidential election is over.

What Would Malcolm Say?

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” -- Antonio Gramschi

Back in the early 1960’s, when nobody was doubting whether or not the socially-constructed, political notion of “race” “mattered,” a young African-American sociologist named Calvin Hernton, who had not yet written Sex and Racism in America, the landmark polemic that put him on the international map, took a job as a social worker in New York City to pay his rent. Entering the apartment of a woman whose 12-year-old son had been arrested, he found on the wall a painting by the boy. Using heavy oils – bright reds, greens, and blues, with large splotches of black – the youth had obviously been communicating his frustration and his rage in no uncertain terms.

The painting depicted fat grinning White men with money sticking out of their pockets, and even White police officers in blue uniforms with huge distorted silver badges, beating African-American men who lay on the ground, bleeding, with what looked like blood on the tips of stick-like plaited hair.

Circles with arrows pointed at the White men’s mouths read, “You niggers love us, don’ you?”

Turning to the boy’s mother, Hernton asked about the blood on the tips of the Black men’s plaits.

“That’s not hair with blood on it,” the woman replied without emotion. “That’s dynamite growing out of their skulls.”

Hernton went home, gave this some thought, and cranked out an essay about how, if we did not change the way things were being done in this country, we were ultimately going to produce an entire generation of young African-Americans suffering from a condition he called “the psychology of the damned”:

“As the collective mind, supraorganic, pitting itself against the mythologized odds of an unsurmountable monster, this demon will rise, for only demons can destroy demons and thereby become human again. The sense of fear will be wiped from their consciousness, reason will disappear, emotions will evaporate, fear of death will be meaningless, for they have been dead all their lives. Nor will they care about winning, not in any understandable sense of the word, for in and through the act of destroying and killing and dying, they shall be winning, a sense of life will be born anew within them…Their madness will no longer be attached to any identifiable norm, value or nonvalue – neither money, hate, freedom, or revenge. For, having been purged of faith in all human values, in all normal behavior, their madness will be the only god in whom they can put their fidelity without being deceived and betrayed. No doubt, according to the way America will look at them, they will appear as raving Blacks on a rampage of ruin and riot – nothing new, for America has always looked at them this way…[E]verything you might offer them will be irrelevent, for how do you give a people back their manhood, their souls?”*

Forty years after Hernton issued his warning, we stand uncorrected, having done as a society almost nothing to address the real issues at hand for people of color in the United States, let alone take responsibility for the damage done every U.S. citizen as a result of having our culture formed by, under, and within a 400-year system of unapologetic White supremacy. African-American men are nearly four times more likely to be unemployed than European-American men – at every educational level – with unemployment for young Black males pushing 50%. One out of every two African-American children is still growing up in abject poverty (while the Federal Poverty Guideline is considerably lower than what it really costs to live in this country). And at current rates, one of every three Black boys born in 2001 is headed for prison (thanks to a criminal “justice” system that marks them early and slams them ever so much more quickly and for substantially lesser “crimes” than their White counterparts).

In the meantime, the European-American middle class is disappearing more rapidly by the month as workers struggle to hold onto jobs that don’t pay enough any more to support even an individual, let alone a family. And with inflation going straight through the dwindling ozone layer, average White folks aren’t likely to be in the mood to share with or even be empathetic toward their Black fellow citizens – at least any time soon.

Highly respected European-Americans belly up to the psycho-social bar in the attempt to describe in painful detail the fixated brutality of their own and others’ infection with the virus of White supremacy, not to be confused with White superiority, which doesn’t exist. Yet even as Joe Feagin releases Racist America, Tim Wise pens White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, and Paula Rothenberg authors Invisible Privilege: A Memoir About Race, Class, and Gender, we still manage to find scholarly people of color such as Orlando Patterson appearing in The New York Times, holding forth that Black people’s problems are ultimately just caused by themselves. And, according to Columbia University professor Ronald Mincey’s “Black Males Left Behind” study that came out last year, even young Black men “admit” that they simply don’t “try hard enough,” ignoring (thanks to the Pattersons and the Minceys of this world) how they have been systematically turned into people who won't try hard enough. And indeed, even when they do try hard enough, damn few are allowed to succeed or to succeed at the level they would were “race” not in the equation.

What is to be made of this schizoid U.S. culture? Is Feagin just selling books? Is Patterson’s perspective just a function of going straight from the Caribbean to Harvard? They can’t both be right. Can they? People with lesser credentials decide routinely to hold the perspective with which they have been socialized and to embrace whichever “expert” espouses their particular and sometimes peculiar belief. So a White youth sitting in a university classroom next to a Black youth wearing the same type of clothing, getting the same grades, even participating in class projects together, will nevertheless describe Black people in general as "lazy, violent, welfare frauds who want something for nothing," in spite of all the immediately visible evidence to the contrary.

This mindset has been demonstrated most recently and in a most graphic manner both before and even after the latest Presidential election. There’s no confusion among those who bother to review such matters at all that, despite a new President-elect of color, the political system in this country is still made up almost entirely of European-American men and that those women and people of color who finesse their way into legislative halls seldom get anywhere near the inner circle without selling their souls, at the very least. There is most assuredly a racial “party line” dictated by those who have always had the power to define in this nation. And even the most perfunctory review of the political arena demonstrates who those folks are.

Further, if one listens to politicians who are either women or people of color (or both), one will have no problem identifying which ones have any real power at all (the ones pushing the “party line” even against people who look like themselves) and those who are hard put to accomplish much when the rubber meets the road (those who truly attempt to represent or at least include the ranks of the politically powerless – of any skin tone). The political career of Cynthia McKinney serves as a classic example.

Even Barack Obama’s campaign was marked, many have noted, by almost no addressal of the blatant fact of racial privilege in the U.S. And with a national commitment to denial about the reality of what the Kerner Commission called “two Americas – one Black and one White” forty years ago, Obama’s choice to backburner such a crucial reality was seen as expedient rather than short-sighted or odd. The public kept waiting - and even expecting - to hear Obama declare how he was going to even the racial playing field because he is Black, yet considered it "smart politics" when he did not. The fact that it seemingly doesn't occur to us that the well-documented racial divide in this country belongs on any politician's list of issues to address is further proof of White Supremacy's insidious hold on our culture.

In this political context, unequal access to the market place is a no-brainer. Even college-educated African-American men who are allowed to be employed full-time still make only about 76% of a White man’s income, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In fact, a full-time Black male worker in 2003 made less in real dollar terms than a similar White man earned in 1967. And Black homebuyers with incomes above $100,000 per year are charged high interest rates on their mortgage loans more often than Whites with incomes below $40,000, regardless of credit history. The result? White families’ average net worth stands currently at eleven times that of Black families, with the gap remaining substantial even when comparing families of like size, composition, education, and income status. No wonder African-Americans can so often be heard to intone, “It’s always been this way and it’s always gonna be this way,” even though we didn't construct racial categories until a few hundred years ago.

Another masterminded aspect of the system of racial disparity in this country has been the development of an almost direct connection between one’s economic well-being and one’s level of academic achievement. Because of this, Jonathan Kozol has made a life's work out of producing book after book examining how the educational system in this country has utterly failed children of color to the point that while 80% of African-Americans over fourteen could read in 1930, one study estimated that this figure was reduced to 56% by 1990. Another source suggested that the latter figure was closer to 63%, but even that would substantially lower the much earlier figure. Are we to assume then, that African-Americans became less intelligent, less capable, and less motivated all by themselves over that sixty year period? Or would we want to consider the possibility that once Brown vs the Board of Education demanded that all children in the U.S. be equally prepared in this country to fulfill their potential as economically and socially successful citizens, a new sidestep was put in place?

Could it be that African-American teachers in front of their charges during segregation were actually teaching their students to value and respect themselves in ways that later lighter teachers might not always attempt or be able to do in the face of generalized anti-Black socialization? And reading levels aside, this might also help to explain the disparity between White high school graduation rates (at 78%) and Black high school graduation rates (at 56%), as reported by Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute. Further, this same dynamic would also ensure the lack of resources committed to reduce the level of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome and depression that has been identified as rife among poverty-stricken inner city youth, as demonstrated by the fact that suicide is now the number three cause of death among young Black American men.

As if all this wasn't enough, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that nearly 900 organized hate groups, most of them anti-Black, are currently operating in the United States, representing a substantial and continual rise over the past five years. Nevertheless, federal prosecutors declined to pursue federal civil rights charges in 98.7% of race-related matters referred to them from 1986 to 2003, while pursuing charges in about 40% of tax evasion cases and 51% of those related to sexual exploitation of minors. So it would appear that the government, charged with the responsibility to protect U.S. citizens from each other is simply abdicating that responsibility when it comes to people of color, even though a study in 2002 found that 75% of U.S. citizens polled did not believe everyone in the U.S. is treated equally.

James Baldwin once said, “You can learn everything you need to know about race in this country by asking a White person would they like to be Black.” This was true in 1960 and it’s true now. The question is: will it still be true in 2060? We seem to be counting on Calvin Hernton’s prediction to be wrong. But what if it isn’t? Would it matter? We act as if locking up vast numbers of young - and not so young - Black males for ridiculous periods of time is going to save this society from itself. But no people ever allowed themselves to be oppressed forever. And wherever you find oppression in history, you will find social conflict.

African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans want nothing more than what European-Americans want: safety, opportunity, respect. Acting as if they don’t understand this makes White people look stupid, mean-spirited, and even, perhaps, dangerous to an ever increasing percentage of the U.S. population. Some White people – whether they’re willing to admit it or not – fear that “sharing” the basic rights of full citizenship with people of color will result in Whites losing privilege and economic benefits. I would argue that not doing so will ultimately cost us both and maybe much, much more.

Though a cadre of disgruntled racists have reared their ugly heads in response to the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, many in this country – Black and White – have touted the election as a symbol of change, as proof positive that, at least in very important ways, race no longer matters here. I would argue, however, that this perspective is not only badly mistaken, but will be used to further entrench and intensify institutionalized oppression against ordinary people of color in the U.S., and most particularly African-Americans. Wholesale denial of the real problems I have discussed in this post will now be masked by a ready appropriation of this one man’s remarkable achievement to mean that, if a Black man can be elected President, then there are no differences between us. Thus racism will morph into yet another incarnation of neo-racism so that, even with a Black President in the White House, we can continue to face the world as a nation marked by its refusal to honor the Constitutionally-guaranteed rights of millions of its citizens.

Can the European-American power structure maintain its strangle-hold over the entire population of the United States, many of whom it has never appropriately served or even considered? Can we continue to pretend that all is well because those with the power to define keep saying it is? Do we really believe that a nation divided against itself can long endure just because we have somehow survived thus far? And if not, what practical and comprehensive social changes are we prepared to implement immediately in the best interests of our nation, our children, and ourselves? Until we sit down together and draft that list, the socially-constructed, political notion of “race” will continue to matter to all of us in further reaching ways than we can possibly know or dare to risk.

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*Quote from "Dynamite Growing Out of Their Skulls," pp. 78-104, Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro American Writing, Leroi Jones and Larry Neal, eds.,1968, NY: William Morrow.

Imagining

This afternoon, out of nowhere, I experienced an extraordinary moment in time. One of those everybody's-here-who's-s'posed-to-be-here moments; one of those this-is-what-it-feels-like-to-be-safe moments; one of those wow-what-if-life-could-just-be-like-this moments. Students and teachers; activists and revolutionaries; young and old; men and women; all talking straight out without holding anything back, in agreement, in peace.

Imagine.

Am I Not Human?

Last month, I agreed to be a part of a movement to focus on human rights violations on the 27th of each month. Since today is the 27th and also, as it happens, the day most people in the United States call "Thanksgiving Day," I have decided to feature a listing from the Peace Buttons "This Week in Peace and Social Justice" newsletter. On November 29th, 1864:

"A U.S. Army cavalry regiment under Col. J. M. Chivington (a Methodist missionary and candidate for Congress), acting on orders from Colorado's Governor, John Evans, and ignoring a white surrender flag flying just below a U.S. flag, attacked sleeping Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, killing nearly 500, in what became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. Captain Silas Soule, however, not only refused to follow Chivington's lead at Sand Creek, but ordered his troops not to participate in the attack.

"The Indians, led by Black Kettle, had been ordered away from Fort Lyon four days before, with the promise that they would be safe. Virtually all of the victims, mostly women and children, were tortured and scalped; many women, including the pregnant, were mutilated. Nine of 900 cavalrymen were killed. A local newspaper called this 'a brilliant feat of arms,' and stated the soldiers had 'covered themselves with glory.'

"At first, Chivington was widely praised for his 'victory' at the 'Battle' of Sand Creek, and he and his troops were honored with a parade in Denver. However, rumors of drunken soldiers butchering unarmed women and children began to circulate and Congress ordered a formal investigation of the massacre. Chivington was eventually threatened with court martial by the U.S. Army, but as he had already left his military post, no criminal charges were ever filed against him."

You can read the Congressional testimony of an eye-witness here.

This should give us all something to think about and talk about as we pass the stuffing...

Happy birthday, Arundhati Roy!

Arundhati Roy is forty-seven years old today. An author who won the prestigious Booker Prize in English literature, Roy is also an activist extraordinaire whose acumen as a speaker and writer feeds the soul like manna from Heaven.

Celebrate Roy's birthday by first reading this classic article she wrote in 2004 about turkeys and Thanksgiving, New Racism and the World Social Forum. Then think up something you can do right this minute to make the world a better place.

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The poster featured above is available from Northland Poster Collective.

I Don't Know How African-Americans Do It

I’m exhausted. Really. I am what my mother used to call “sick unto death” of White folks’ thinly veiled commitment to their position of racial privilege and their smarmy, sniveling need to feel put upon by all those Black folks wanting “something for nothing.”

“I never got anything I didn’t work my butt off for,” White people declare defensively, causing me to have to try to remind them for the umpteenth time that people of color work their butts off, too, but all too often without the pay-off Whitey expects and can usually count on.

“I never owned any slaves and besides, that was a hundred years ago.” Whitey continues, “Why can’t Black people just move on and get over it?”

“Well, let’s see…” I counter, “Could it possibly be that they’re not thinking about what happened a hundred years ago, but rather about the way African-American men are still four times more likely to be unemployed than European-American men at every educational level? Could it be that they’re thinking about how law enforcement and the criminal justice system is continually demonstrated to function in a deliberately discriminatory manner toward people of color – and doesn’t change those practices despite being nailed for them repeatedly? Could it be that they’re checking out how even the President of the United States cannot expect to be shown common respect by many White people if the tone of his skin is such that he would be labeled ‘Black’? Ya think?”

“All I know,” Whitey huffs, “is that my grandfather came to this country with nothing but the clothes on his back and he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps…”

“Uh-huh,” I agree. “But he came with boots on. Most African-Americans came shoeless and naked and were stripped even of their names. They worked not only brutally hard, but for no pay at all for hundreds of years. It’s real hard to put together a nest egg when you get no pay at all; when your wife can be raped in front of you and you can be killed for even thinking about trying to protect her; when you, as an African-American, have (as the courts said decades after slavery ended) NO rights any White person has to honor."

"Then, like that wasn’t enough," I rant on, "African-Americans went from not being allowed to go to school at all to being relegated to schools so much worse in every way that even today, White people break their personal banks sending their kids any place else than public school, if they can pull it off at all. And all along, right up to the present, every kind of socialization process in this nation not only tells White people (no matter how stupid, how poorly educated, how mean-spirited, and/or how clueless in every way they may be) that they’re ‘better than’ people of color, but tells people of color (no matter how intelligent, how well educated, how gracious, and how reasonable they may be) that they’re ‘inferior to’ White people.” Good. grief.

And my favorite line of all is, “Okay...but everybody gets oppressed in one way or the other…”

I try to imagine what that oppression against White people looks like – really I do. But I can’t. And that’s when I get tired. Tired of listening. Tired of explaining it. Tired of thinking about it. Tired of watching the parade of broken-hearted children of color who've learned not to think it will ever change. Tired of watching White folks preen and priss their hour upon the stage of life as if they earned their moment in the sun.

Sometimes, I think they deserve what they’re gonna get. But the trouble is I’m White, too. Or at least I look White. And that’s good enough. Good enough to get me the privileges and benefits I don’t ask for. Good enough to keep me out of the line of fire directed at people of color for no other reason than the fact that it’s a norm in this society. And good enough to require me to do something about the situation. I can't help being part of the problem, but I can be part of the solution, if I so choose.

I didn’t ask to be me. But on my darkest day, at least I'm White-looking. So I can be tired, if I want to be. But since I can’t abdicate the goodies, I can’t skate on the responsibility of at least attempting to address the situation either. I wrote something similar a week or so ago. And just before the election, Abby Ferber did a good job of describing the mindset of Whiteness -- and what to do about it.

And in the meantime, this poem by Pat Parker reminds us that White folks can't begin to know what "tired" feels like.

For the White Person Who

Wants to Know How to Be My Friend

The first thing you do is to forget that i'm Black.

Second, you must never forget that i'm Black.

You should be able to dig Aretha,

but don't play her every time i come over.

And if you decide to play Beethoven--don't tell

me his life story. They made us take music

appreciation too.

Eat soul food if you like it, but don't expect me

to locate your restaurants

or cook it for you.

And if some Black person insults you,

mugs you, rapes your sister, rapes you,

rips your house, or is just being an ass--

please, do not apologize to me

for wanting to do them bodily harm.

It makes me wonder if you're foolish.

And even if you really believe Blacks are better

lovers than whites--don't tell me. I start thinking

of charging stud fees.

In other words, if you really want to be my

friend--don't make a labor of it. I'm lazy.

Remember.

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Thanks to Macon D. for tipping me to this poem and to the Angry Black-White Girl's blog.

The Big 5-0 (thousand, that is)

Some time early this morning, my little blog crossed the line marked "50,000 views." Now, I realize this doesn't mean 50,000 different viewers. And I'm sure there have been those who dropped by once and never returned, not to mention those who dropped by, expressed their disgust in no uncertain terms and then never returned. Nevertheless, it's 50,000 views. I came, I saw, and I conquered, as it were. I wheeled my funny-looking little intellectual junker onto the freeway of the blogosphere and managed through it all to keep up with the traffic most of the time at an age I suspect is significantly older than most who blog.

I've been watching this moment coming for a few weeks and it feels to me like some kind of rite of passage. And now that it's here, it's causing me to think back on what has happened in the world and in my personal life during the process.

There was actually a false start in the fall of 2005, when I was just writing about whatever was going on for me personally, but when I actually posted about my battle to keep a squirrel from eating all the bird seed I had put out on my window sill, I quit. Nobody, I decided, would go out of their way to read that stuff. It even bored me. But it was an appetizer. My little effort had a name, I had an online identity and the blogosphere was calling.

As the season passed, some of the students in my Race and Ethnicity course started pressing me to meet with them outside of class so they could learn more about that thorny topic. We made time somehow, but the meetings had to be at night to accomodate schedules and often went late as I hung out in the parking lot with one or another of them wrestling with racial issues. Plus it was only reaching a handful considering the effort expended. So it was maybe a no-brainer that, as the new year approached, it should suddenly occur to me that the answer was to blog about race.

I approached the task with trepidation. My opening post had me stepping out onto a stage (exactly how I felt) and bowing expectantly before my unseen audience. But soon I was hastening home from campus to blog or driving across town thinking about a post or stopping in the middle of a sentence to jot down something someone had just said that would spur me to respond but to an international audience of imaginary readers as soon as I could get to a keyboard.

And here I am just short of three years later, watching the figures move into the second 50,000. I know that others get 10,000 hits per day and pay their rent by writing posts. I know they get to go on television and get invited to hold forth at blogger conferences I can’t even afford to attend. Nevertheless, I am most assuredly a part of the blogosphere and play my little role with great seriousness and great pride.

Since I started, I have watched and been a part of a number of blogging efforts that increased the credibility of new media in general and blogging in particular as an important addition to the on-going evolution of communication among humans on this planet. I played some small part in the development of a huge blogospheric response to the backlash against Latino immigration, more specific campaigns having to do with such situations as the boycott against Chiquita bananas because of United Fruit’s admission that they paid millions over time to kill union organizers in Latin American countries, and – oh, my, yes! – the gearing up for the mind-blowing march on Jena.

I was featured in an American Sociological Association publication article on sociologists as bloggers (the writer of which found me on the internet). I had a blog post published in a social problems reader on welfare (after the editor found the post by surfing the web). If you google my online identity, I come up for days. And I even did a piece of research on bloggers as social change agents, an effort that is just now having its finishing touches applied before submission to a scientific journal.

But while all that was going on, I also left my day job to write a book on race (which I’m finally considering publishing myself); had my gall bladder removed in a veeeeery dramatic moment without health insurance; managed to sell a house after it was trashed by a former husband; somehow skirted paying the IRS $7000 I didn’t owe them, but which they were committed to collecting; discovered I could move full time into the academic arena and did so; moved from one Southern state to another even deeper one; and was diagnosed with diabetes, a permanent life-change of the first order. Yet I always ultimately found time to post, returned to posting after brief hiatuses and posted more in the past year than in either of the first two. Apparently, I’m a blogger. And linked to others like myself around the world, some of whom have become dear friends, though few I have gotten to see face to face.

On other fronts, as I think back over the past three years, I'm reminded that Sami Al-Arian is now finally out of prison (at least for the present and I pray God daily that he stays that way); Aafia Siddiqui has been removed from her hell-hole in Afghanistan, Genarlow Wilson is free and the Georgia law that he “broke” has been struck down; the Angola Three are no longer in solitary confinement; word has it that Guantanamo Bay is on its way to being dismantled; and the President-elect is a hyper-intelligent African-American who ran on the platform that we can change our country and our world.

Have there been less triumphant outcomes to other stories? Yes. But my question just for this one day is not whether anything bad has happened, but rather whether anything good has. And it has. We – you and I – helped to make good things happen. By reading and writing and clicking on and linking to, by thinking about and passing along and meeting up and working to change -- ourselves and our respective societies, we have demonstrated our commitment to life as it can be, even in the face of what has sometimes seemed to be insurmountable odds.

It’s been a good three years. Thanks for dropping by. I’m looking forward to what comes next.
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The graphic featured above is a Ricardo Levins Morales poster available from Northland Poster Collective.

Homecoming

Life is an endless evolution of developments. Mine. Yours. Jeff Rivera’s. And Dio Rodriguez’. Who are these last two? I’m glad you asked. I’m getting ready to tell you.

Jeff Rivera is an author. Young. African-American. Model-gorgeous. Driven. And talented. I learned about him because he sent me an email introducing himself and introducing me to his concept of “guerilla marketing” (more about that later). He told me that Warner Books/Grand Central Publishing’s Hachette imprint was bringing out a new edition of his book Forever My Lady and that he was available for interviews. I, of course, wrote him back and asked if the email was really from him or from some PR person at Grand Central. He laughed. And it was on.

Rivera’s story is almost a novel in itself. He spent most of his childhood dirt poor and asthmatic in a predominantly White neighborhood outside of Portland, Oregon, before moving with his mother to Las Vegas. The marriage between his mother and his step-father was turbulent, at best, and Rivera felt the pangs of watching the people he loved in long-standing and debilitating anguish. Those pangs of pain and abuse burrowed deep in his soul where they became the words that even as a child poured onto paper.

At six, Rivera was already known for his “stories.”

“Watch out!” his schoolmates would warn each other, “He’s gonna write a story about you!”

But the budding writer was helpless to resist his urge to capture life and turn it into pages. “Even early on,” Rivera remembers, “I knew I wanted to write stories that would make people feel.”

Asked why that was – and remains – so important to him, Rivera is quick to answer. “If people read my words and feel something, then maybe they’ll get me and I won’t feel so different.”

The feeling of difference, needless to say, manifested itself in the longing he had for peace in his life and in the embarrassment and fatigue Rivera felt as a youth from having to get up in the middle of the night to clean offices with his mother to help the struggling family survive.

By the time he was a sophomore in high school, he was journaling about the things that were going on in his world, often in French for privacy, and his reputation as a nerd made him an easy target among his classmates. Then the die was really cast when a kid he knew taunted him with the statement, “Go ahead and write a book! I’ll walk the street naked when you make your first million!” The challenge haunts him still and he fully expects to collect on that debt one day.

But it has been far from an easy process. For starters, after his mother's marriage finally fell apart, Rivera and she wound up at one point living out of their car for a while and if he felt “different” before, his humiliation was now truly complete. While his younger brother stayed with a friend and his older sister was successfully established in a marriage of her own, Rivera and his mother were so reduced in spirit, they couldn’t bring themselves to tell anyone about their plight – not even family. And he spent his days escaping to the library when he wasn’t working at the skating rink within view of the car that had become the symbol of his family’s financial failure.

It was only after his mother reached her emotional and psychological breaking point that social services stepped in to provide a roof over the two brother’s heads. Then, while working in one of the many jobs he has had to take to meet his basic needs, Rivera met a young Latino former gang member who told him – in broken English – stories about his life. Rivera was captivated and ultimately used the stories as the basis for a screenplay, which eventually morphed into the novel Forever My Lady, an “urban romance” in the “street lit” genre.

Hollywood didn’t see the possibilities in the original screenplay at the time Rivera first submitted it, though they are sniffing around the project now. And a decade went by before the novel about a young man named Dio Rodriguez was a fait accompli. Lacking confidence that a mainstream publisher would opt to put the book into print, Rivera decided in 2005 while working a day job at a fancy hotel in Miami to publish the first 25 copies himself.

Every penny he earned from the sale of the books went back into more copies and this was when “guerrilla marketing” was born. He shamelessly peddled the book, joining message boards, linking to websites, allowing it to be downloaded for free online, and emailing thousands of publishers and agents, until about 8000 people had read it.

In the following year, Forever My Lady was voted Best Urban Fiction by the Mahogany Book Club Media Review, who also named Rivera Best New Author of 2006. Mi Gente Magazine made Rivera their Author of the Year that year, as well, and made Forever their Book of the Year. Why? Because Forever My Lady is a story of first love and obstacles, of hopes and dreams, of abandonment and letting go in the classic tradition of all such tales of heartbreak. In other words, it’s a coming of age story and even the preface is so tense in its immediacy that the reader is sucked into it at once.

Needless to say, once the awards joined the voices of thousands of readers, it didn’t take long for folks in important places to smell the money. And when Rivera finally connected with an agent, the sale of Forever My Lady to Warner Books took only seven days. Does this make Rivera’s life a rags-to-riches story? Absolutely. Is he an example of one man’s triumph over adversity to fulfill his own potential? No question. But it took a lifetime of honing his craft, more than a decade of unflagging commitment, and a LOT of work (while working his day jobs) to find the pot at the end of the rainbow. Still, find it he has.

Jeff Rivera, at 32, is now awash in speaking opportunities and consultancy gigs with a passel of literary projects in process. He is being pressed for a sequel, which will be forthcoming, though Rivera is in no rush any more. He can exhale now. No more living in cars with a goldfish in a cup for him. No more crappy day jobs or taunting schoolmates or self-doubt for him. The publishing world and his fans have embraced the wanderer. Jeff Rivera is home.

Serve Yourself

"Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time." ~ Shirley Chisholm

Shirley Chisholm, earned a degree in elementary education and ran a day care for some years before becoming the first African-American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1972, she ran for the Presidency "in spite of hopeless odds," as she put it, "to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo." In other words, she didn't just talk about service, she put her money and her energy and her reputation and her commitment where her mouth was. There is much we could learn from her example.

As you know from my frequent whining, I spend a lot of my time overburdened and overwhelmed. I keep it like that. And while there have been times in my life when I was dodging reality by doing this, and while there have been other times in my life when I think I was just doing this from sheer habit, it's different now. I'm serving. And aware of it. But, of course, I still whine. Or brag. What's the difference?

Anyway, the point is, I've been thinking of late about the benefits I enjoy by the accident of nature or design that put me in the U.S. born to my college-educated parents in this skin with this brain at this point in history. I'm not high-rolling by a long shot, but I eat pretty much what I want or at least I don't go without food. I have four rooms all my own plus a bathroom with a flush toilet that works all the time. I have drinkable water coming out of three different faucets and take a hot shower whenever I like. I can flick a switch and get adequate light or heat or air conditioning at will.

I have a job paying a living wage. I have a car that runs pretty well almost all the time (even if it looks a little funky). I can buy clothes when I need them and boots just because I want to. I can get what I need to manage my diabetes without worrying about it. I belong to a gym and I already have my plane ticket to go see my daughter in New York City for Christmas where I will spend fifty dollars just getting from the airport to her apartment in Manhattan. I buy books -- albeit used -- on a regular basis. I can occasionally spend forty bucks on dinner without more than a pause (and have been known to spend more on very special days). I bought new flannel pajamas when the old ones got too big. I have a few pieces of art just because. I can afford to send money to feed street kids in Haiti or regularly help sustain the work of my local NAACP chapter or pick up the tab for a student's dinner. And I have ready access to two computers (just for me), the internet, services beyond any rational limit, and a ridiculous variety of almost any product you can imagine.

In addition, I can expect that, under most circumstances, I will not be stopped or arrested by the police for no reason, I will get a more or less fair shake in court, and I will not be followed around a store to make sure I don't shoplift. I don't have to be concerned that I might be snatched up by mistake and deported. My skin tone won't keep me out of a job, should I need one. And most of the time, I will be treated with respect I may, quite frankly, not have earned.

I mean, life is good. For those like me.

But I am incredibly aware that it's not like this for everybody. Increasingly, it's not like this for many, many people. Even right around the corner from me.

My point? Well, according to Shirley Chisholm, I owe for this. There's a bill. Just as surely as the one I pay with my debit card -- and without thinking -- at the restaurant table or the cash register or the toll booth or on the internet. Only you can't pay it with a debit card (though money, too, can be useful in a wide range of positive ways).

But when push comes to shove, I owe with my body. With my brain. And with my time.

This whining I do, this feeling overburdened and overwhelmed, needs to go. I am rolling in wealth, comparatively speaking. I am surrounded by beauty and joy. I am awash in the best of so much of what life offers that I really must just say thank you and ante up in every way I can and look for more opportunities. THIS is what is meant by you reap what you sow. THIS is what is meant by the more you give, the more you receive. THIS is what is meant by whatever measure you use to give will be used in measuring what you get back. It's NOT cash money the way the evangelists (hungry for their cut) suggest. It's our lives we owe. And absolutely worth it.

It's a great thing, in my opinion, that Barack Obama was elected to the U.S. Presidency, but that doesn't get anybody off the hook. If we expect one human being to fix this mess (which every one of us has helped to create either by what we do or what we haven't done), if we imagine that one human being can somehow magically turn this ship around, we are still living in la-la land. Let's make it happen. Let's change the world. Yes, we can. Yes, I can. Yes, I will.

Hail to the Chief!

I hate to have to write this post, but there isn’t any choice, I guess. Apparently, there are some people in this country who are so sick, so racist, so anti-American and so stupid they think it’s okay to threaten people of color because the President of the United States is African-American.

I was veeeeery busy this week, so I tried my damnedest not to pay attention to the stories. But when one of your closest friends is the President of the local chapter of the NAACP and she insists on sending you blow-by-blow emails about whatever insanity is currently being perpetrated, it’s hard to stay out of the loop.

This week, since the election, some local teachers have been saying things to Black students like, “Nobody that looks like you could be a real President because you’re all too stupid.” Then, there was the case of a White child who was walking around his school the day after the election so upset by it that he was saying, “I’m gonna kill the first nigger I see.” (We don't have to wonder what HE hears at home, do we?)

Then children started being suspended from school for mentioning the name of President-elect Barack Obama at all. Needless to say, we’re talking African-American children here, which would seem to presume that no self-respecting White child would mention our new President.

The excuse for sending these “bad” children home is that there are rules intended to keep “politics” out of public classrooms, but the principals who are participating in this madness are pretending they don’t realize this means “political campaigning.” By the standard these sicko’s are using, the children will ostensibly not be allowed to talk about George Washington either or Abraham Lincoln or any government (U.S. or otherwise) or any legal system or any branch thereof or…whatEVER!

And to make the whole thing worse, it’s not just happening in Louisiana. I got an email from another blogger informing me that it's happening in Mississippi, too, though at least there's been some discipline meted out by administrators over there. And in Texas, the election of the President was greeted by epithets, but not by newspaper articles. Good grief! What are these people thinking?

The landslide election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States is being celebrated all over the world. The United States has never elected a man with more capability and intelligence and we need his kind of leadership right now worse than we ever have. That a**holes are intimidating and punishing children for being excited about that is exactly the type of thing that makes people in other cultures think we as a nation deserve to go to our knees in front of God and everybody.

On Tuesday, I was prouder of my fellow United Statians than I have been in many a moon. Since I heard all this, I'm wondering if maybe some of us would rather go somewhere else. It would be okay with me if they did.

The Struggle Is Not New News

On this day in 1837, a drunken mob attacked a warehouse where a printing press sat waiting to produce the Alton (Illinois) Observor, an unapologetically anti-slavery newspaper published by Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist minister. He had already been run out of St Louis, just across the river in Missouri. And similar mobs had already destroyed two printing presses and threatened Lovejoy's life. But his response was simple and straightforward:

"You may hang me...you may burn me at the stake, tar and feather me, or throw me into the Mississippi, but you cannot disgrace me. I and I alone can disgrace myself; and the deepest of all disgrace would be, at a time like this to deny my Master by forsaking his cause."

When the mob charged, Lovejoy tried using a torch to hold it back, but two doctors, hiding behind a woodpile shot him a total of five times and he died, two days before his thirty-fifth birthday. One of the doctors was seen to dance a jig as Lovejoy's bloody body was carried home to his pregnant wife.

Until this occurance, many "White" northerners labored under the delusion that the controversy around the abolition of slavery was just a clash of opposing ideas, but this event demonstrated otherwise as an early predictor of the Civil War which came twenty-five years later. Read the whole story here.