Bein' Bold, Bein' Red

This is a few of the nearly fifty students that wore red today on our campus in solidarity with women of color in their fight against violence. Good bunch, huh?

Be Bold! Be Red! This and Every Day!

Be Bold! Be Red! is one year old today. Let us dance in our red dresses. Let us dip and sway to our own internal music. For every woman of color who was ever raped or spit upon or struck or taught not to believe in herself or told she was ugly. For every girl child or woman of color who was disregarded as worthless. For every girl child or woman of color anywhere in the world today who is suffering for no other reason than that she was born female, let us rise and rise and shout.

My students get extra credit today for wearing red. The sociology club I advise will wear red. And the grad student I mentor (a male) intends to wear a t-shirt with a big red circle and the words "this is what a feminist looks like" inside it. Me? I'm wearing a long red coat and a red striped sweater and red underwear (just in case I decide to throw down for real).

Come join us, Universe. And may the many of us who have been wounded stand together with women and girls of color this day in great joy because our blood will NEVER signify defeat and our hearts will EVER sing our solidarity.

Out of the Silence, We Come: A Litany

Out of the silence, we come

In the name of nuestras abuelas,

In honor of our mamas

In the spirit of our petit fils,

In tribute to ourselves

We come crying out

Documenting the torture

We come wailing

Reporting the rape

We come singing

Testifying to the abuse

We come knowing

Knowing that the silence has not protected us from

the racism

the sexism

the homophobia

the physical pain

the emotional shame

the auction block

Once immobilized by silence

We come now, mobilized by collective voice

Dancing in harmonious move-ment to the thick drumbeat of la lucha, the struggle

We come indicting those who claim to love us, but violate us

We come prosecuting those who are paid to protect us, but harass us

We come sentencing those who say they represent us, but render

us invisible

Out of the Silence, we come

Naming ourselves

Telling our stories

Fighting for our lives

Refusing to accept that we were never meant to survive

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NOTE: The women in the photo above are Nepalese women Maoists, the vanguard of change in that violence beleaguered country.

Don't Forget: Wear Red Tomorrow

I gave you a heads-up last week about the Be Bold! Be Red! campaign that kicked off a year ago and will be observed again tomorrow. Its point: to stop violence against women of color and to support women of color as they stand up for their basic human rights.

So read up on the campaign and tomorrow, please wear red.

And as a way to get us geared up for tomorrow's activities, I'm posting a video in two parts about the Gulabi Gang, a group of women in India who have donned bright pink saris (since pink is the color that celebrates life in India). The members of this ferocious group of women move among their fellow citizens like real live super-heroes, addressing wrongs and defending the rights of themselves and their sisters in a nation where women have been traditionally seen and treated as second-class citizens. The sociology club I advise have gotten all excited of late about these women and what they do as an example of what it looks like and what happens when people organize in their own best interests.

It works for me.

"The Gulabi Gang" (Part 1)

"The Gulabi Gang (Part 2)

Am I Not Human?

Thanks to Electronic Village and Roots of Humanity, there is a new movement on the internet. It's a campaign inviting bloggers to hold forth on the 27th of every month on the theme of human rights violations. It's called "Am I Not Human?" and from now on till I hear otherwise, I'll be doing this. Unfortunately, it won't be hard to find material.

The human rights violation I'm featuring today is the case of Brandon McClelland, which has been all over the news the last few weeks. Brother Jesse of The Final Call has weighed in. Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune has thrown in his two cents. Even the Associated Press is on the story by now. And I first read about it thanks to Sokari over at Black Looks emanating all the way from South Africa.

The story unfolded in Paris, Texas, (why am I not surprised?) and is a LOT messier than some, but still clearly marked by indicators that the crime in question was committed the way it was committed because of the skin tone of the victim. Further, the way it's being persued by law enforcement officials has all the overtones at this point of a racist cover-up.

The backstory (where most of the messiness occurs) is that long-time criminal Shannon Finley, who is a European-American (that's "White" for those of you new to my blog), killed one of his "friends" five years ago, getting off with a manslaughter conviction because he shot the guy three times in the head by accident...? Uh-huh! (Oh, those Texans!) The conviction resulted in a four-year bit in prison.

During the trial, Brandon McClelland, an African-American who was just a teenager at the time and another "friend" of Finley's, originally testified under oath that Finley was with him when the killing occurred, but since that turned out to be a lie, he wound up doing two years in prison for perjury. Sound funny? It does to me. I mean, I'm wondering why this kid would be willing to lie on the stand for a guy with a long record who just shot somebody in the head three times. You wonder, too? I would guess so.

Anyway, time passed, the two men were released and life went on. Then, in the wee hours of September 16th, after Finley, McClelland, and another man named Charles Ryan Crostley made a late night beer run to Oklahoma, McClelland somehow wound up on foot on the road in front of the truck Finley was driving. The short form is that (again) somehow, McClelland ended up under the truck and dragged as much as 70 feet, a process that dismembered and mutilated his body. Finley and Crostley then left the body parts in the road and proceeded to a carwash where they attempted to clean McClelland's blood and brains from the truck before they went home to sleep it off.

When the crime was reported, law enforcement officers called it a "hit and run by an unknown driver," but since the three had been seen together and since the underbelly of the truck still bore the evidence of McClelland's dna, Finley and Crostley were eventually arrested. It is still unclear what the actual charge will be. Family members, the New Black Panther Party, and the Nation of Islam are calling for the incident's designation as a hate crime. But thanks to the history of the men and the history of the area, this may or may not occur.

You see, Paris, Texas, was the location of last year's hot story about Shaquanda Cotton, the 14-year-old African-American girl who was sentenced to seven years in a juvenile prison for pushing a hall monitor at her school while a 14-year-old European-American girl was given probation for purposely setting the fire that burned down her parents' house. And here we are, back in Paris again just a year later, so despite their assurances that this is NOT a cover-up, one would be, I assume, forgiven for wondering.

Supposedly, investigators are looking for any sign on what's left of Brandon McClelland's body that he was tied to the truck, the way James Byrd, Jr., was ten years ago in Jasper, Texas, just two hundred miles south of Paris. But, as one community activist put it, "What's the difference between dragging behind a truck or dragging under it?" Besides, though Finley admits that McClelland was "walking" in front of the truck and told someone else he "bumped" McClelland a few times before the man went down, I can't believe a Black man, however drunk, would "walk" casually down a road in front of two White guys in a truck -- especially in Texas.

Additionally, there is considerable discussion related to Finley's palling around with White Supremacists while he was in prison. And rumor has it, as well, that Finley took a dim view of McClelland's recent interest in a European-American woman.

There will unquestionably be much more to read about this story in coming weeks and months. Because Brandon McClelland is asking, "Am I not human?"

Quote of the Week

"People say, 'What is the sense of our small effort?' They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time." ~ Dorothy Day

An Appeal to the World

On this day in 1947, W.E.B. DuBois stood before the United Nations General Assembly and presented his now famous address, "An Appeal to the World: a Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress." He had been dedicating both his personal and professional life for over fifty years at that point to the struggle of his people to be treated as full citizens in their own country. He obviously felt that he had exhausted all avenues without success and that it was, therefore, necessary to ask the United Nations to bring to bear whatever influence it had to pressure the U.S. to fulfill its democratic principles and its moral responsibilities.

The Appeal was a factual study of the denial of the right to vote, and also outlined grievances related to educational and other types of discrimination, as well as the withholding of other basic human rights. As a result, President Harry Truman subsequently created the first civil rights commission.

One can only imagine what Du Bois would think today of seeing Barack Obama, his fellow Harvard graduate, hung in effigy even while being the frontrunner in the race for the U.S. Presidency. One thing's for sure, Du Bois never stopped -- no matter what. And we ain't stoppin' either.

Be Bold! Be Red! on October 30th

Thanks to The Unapologetic Mexican, I was reminded this week that a year ago (and it hardly seems possible that it could have been that long already), the Be Bold! Be Red! campaign called on men and women from coast to coast to organize to fight violence against women of color. Since that time, we have seen publicized multiple cases of such violence, a ridiculous number of them involving women in Iraq, such as Pvt. LaVena Johnson, brutally beaten before being murdered and disfigured in an attempt to hide the identity of the perpetrator(s). The official ruling on the case from the Army? Suicide.

And so it goes.

So we will return. We will blog, we will gather, we will sing, we will wear red, and we will talk about why. Last year, one of my Latino students who had spoken with me about her own difficulties only a couple of days before, came walking into my classroom on Be Bold! Be Red! Day wearing red and I almost wept right there in front of God and everybody.

Last week, when the sociology club I advise chose to co-sponsor a Discussion Forum on violence against women (in one of the busiest locations on campus), a beautiful young African-American woman who had admitted to me only days before that she has been beaten by her husband for years, chose to step up and tell her story to the group. With tears running down her face, she talked of how the fear of leaving involved not just fear for her safety, but fear of what her friends and family would think of her for allowing this abuse to go on for so long. She told of how talking to me had given her the courage to tell her family and how, in spite of the fact that she still bears the marks of her latest attack, she is now -- finally -- living alone and going to therapy and doing so with the support of those who love her. I'll wear red for and with her on October 30th. And in memory of LaVena Johnson who did not commit suicide, no matter what the records say. And for the victims who will be suffering even as we wear red and gather and blog.

Please go to Document the Silence and then consider what you might do to commemorate the struggle of women of color to be free of the idea that they don't matter, the idea that they should remain silent, and the idea that we won't stand with them.

It's the Little Things

Yesterday, I attended one of those institutional "affairs" that you're not required to go to unless you want to be seen as a "team player" who "goes the extra mile" (a perception that has a way of winding up on departmental evaluations that help you keep your job or get a raise or whatever). I don't really mind that much. They don't come along all that often. And our department was celebrating the establishment of a scholarship in the name of one of our own who just retired, so we proceeded to a little soiree afterward where the food was excellent and it was just "us" in rather high spirits.

The ceremony, of course, had been boring, with a whole list of names being called and individuals -- most of them little old people -- receiving plaques they then placed in their respective spots on the display board. It was homecoming, you know, and these were the folks that had distinguished themselves with their giving, a veeeeery important role at universities who count on this money in many ways. The amounts were impressive. The bottom rung was ten thousand dollars and the ladder kept rising until two gentleman representing their deceased sister's estate were recognized for a "gift" of three and a half million. I don't mean to be flip. And once when I was in my twenties and received an insurance settlement after being in a horrified car wreck, I gave the bulk of the settlement of seven thousand dollars to an organization I was attached to at the time. Money is, after all, only money. But three and a half million? How much would you have to have to let go of THAT much and nobody freak out?

Anyway, it reminded me of a comment left on my last post by Sorrow the other day, tipping me to a post at Soaring Impulse. The post, beautifully written by Maithri Goonetilleke and featuring a YouTube video showing Patti LaBelle singing to the woman herself, is about Osceola McCarty, the African-American washer woman who dropped out of the sixth grade in Wayne County, Mississippi, in the early 1900's and spent a long, long life scrubbing other people's laundry for $1.50 a bundle. Then, in 1995, at the age of 87, Osceola McCarty walked into the University of Southern Mississippi with a check for $150,000 and told them she wanted to endow scholarships for needy students. This selfless act was so inspiring that others jumped on the bandwagon, as well, bringing the Osceola McCarty Scholarship Fund to over half a million dollars!

Sometimes, when I'm tired, I don't know if I can keep on keepin' on. I do SO much I don't have to do and don't "have time" to do. I choose to spend frankly interminable hours encouraging, counseling and comforting students one on one and in small cadres. I'm only paid to provide intellectual stimulus and I love to do that, too, but a person can't wrestle ideas when they're wrestling drug addiction or emotional traumas or psychological sorrows or unresolved pain or confusion. And while there are therapists and counselors and ministers and relatives, sometimes they come to me instead and I just don't have what it takes to say, the way many of my colleagues do, "I'm not trained to deal with your problem. You failed the exam and if you don't buckle down, you're going to flunk the course. Now, what's it gonna be?"

I read a story years ago about a man who told exhausted, unlovely women they were beautiful in such a convincing way that, he said, sometimes they transformed right before his very eyes. Osceola McCarty scrubbed clothes with her bare hands and lived as a pauper to be able to change the lives of others who would follow behind her. I am much less sacrificial, but I do drive a funky car and buy my clothes at thrift stores so I can help to feed street kids in Haiti and support local legal battles against organized racist institutions. And I do often forego time to "relax" to give a struggling student a safe place to reconnect with their own sense of hope. I'm not trying to suggest that I'm in her category because that would be far from true, I'm sure.

But I get a lot of satisfaction knowing that I make the world a better place for somebody every single day. Osceola did her part. I'm doing mine. And there are millions around the globe who also work for change, which entails not only huge considerations, but individual ones, as well. Sometimes, I forget how many there are. Sometimes when I think about the men in the gulag at Guantanamo Bay or the families trying to run the gauntlet at the Mexican-American border or children huffing glue or people being bombed or women being raped for profit, I think we might be helplessly careening toward ultimate extinction. Then, I watch a little band of budding sociologists sprouting their wings and singing of social change. Or somebody drops by my blog and reminds me of a woman who quietly modeled love. And I know that love conquers all; that even as I warn of how crucial it is for us to face reality and quit causing pain; that even as I threaten us all with the possibility of our social demise; that I believe in the power of love. And I love being loved and loving. The rest is just bugs on a windshield, a momentary inconvenience, a challenge to address, making it hard to see where we're going, but never, never stopping us from getting there.

Black and Green

Van Jones has started a revolution and it WILL be televised. In fact, it already has been and it's all over YouTube. Jones, a Yale-graduated lawyer, developed the Green For All movement as the founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights out of Oakland, California, and if you don't know about him and his work already, you've been hiding at the back of the cave, my friend. His new book, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, suggests that we need to train low income and disenfranchised youth in the United States how to carry us into a more sustainable future as a nation and as a race (as in, the human). This would keep us from destroying ourselves using the non-green practices of the past and keep us from destroying a whole generation (or more) of U.S. citizens who are presently languishing in frustration at the bottom of a barrel that is getting deeper all the time.

Like dust, wrote Maya Angelou, African-Americans rise and rise and rise. And ain't that the truth?

I can't help but think about the misguided young man who was captured by the media this week saying that his wife is pregnant and the thought of Barack Obama being the President of the United States scares him. He would, we must assume, feel "safe" with a White guy who is widely known in Washington for flying off the handle at a moment's notice when he doesn't get his way. He would, I suppose, be comfortable with a back-up plan in the person of a woman who has been officially found to abuse her power even as Governor of a state having fewer residents than the city of New Orleans. But he's AFRAID of Obama. And Jones? And Martin Luther King, Jr.? And Angelou? And...?

What Kind Of Amazing Grace?

This is the new one by Ian Rhett, the guy who wrote and performed "(Didn't Know I Was) UnAmerican" a few years ago. Great talent. Pass it on.

Where are the children, Denver?

Looking for films to show during the Childrens' Rights Film Festival the Amnesty International chapter at our university intends to host next month, I came across a video produced by a group of young people in a Denver, Colorado program called Arts Street. The video, entitled "Where are the children, Denver?", is about the struggle of many young people to make it through their day, let alone to stay in school. It's about the hard core realities of family poverty and addiction. It's about going without food and being locked in closets and despairing of life. And it's about the pain of walking alone with no one to tell.

Some years ago, I had the opportunity to get very involved with a Truancy Task Force in Broward County/Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where at that time, on any given day, 10,000 children would not be where they belonged -- in school. Multiple professionals, offices and agencies spent months compiling information and arm-wrestling issues only to find that many of those children were dealing with heart-breaking levels of abuse and neglect. We learned that racism (especially by teachers and administrators), fear of bullies, and plain old hard core depression haunted the schoolday experiences of hundreds of youth. And we learned that the attitudes of too many over-loaded, ill-prepared teachers and overworked, overwhelmed social workers was to try to hold the children responsible (somehow) for problems that were far to heavy for their young shoulders.

One California study found that every dollar spent on keeping kids in school reduces crime by FIVE TIMES the amount of every dollar spent to lock them up. But where do we put the bulk of our funding? Into locking them up, of course. I've said for years that, as far as I'm concerned, if you know how to change something and you choose not to do it, then you don't really want change.

A mentor, an adult who cares, who lights up when they see the young person, can literally make the difference between that youth staying alive and dying a little every day until they are, for all practical purposes, beyond the vale. I have seen a student come back from the brink of disaster on the basis of a sixty-minute encounter. And yet many adults, though busy they may be, are bored out of their minds for want of doing anything that brings real satisfaction.

Is that television program, that football game, that shopping trip, that hour with the newspaper so valuable to you that you can't EVER change it out for a few minutes with a kid who has no one? Are you sure? Why not try watching "Where are the children, Denver?" and asking yourself again?

Two White Men Hugging

Some folks think I never have anything good to say about White people (despite the way I look and the fact that I like myself and others like me just fine, thank you). So here's a photo of two White men hugging. Now, that's positive, right?

Right?

Just Keepin' It Real

Yesterday, I spent some time in a room full of African-American folks who live in this parish. In the matter of an hour, I heard three stories that made me sad.

The first one was about a young man who was arrested for some trumped up charge that wound up not even being pressed. Nearly a week went by before "the authorities" called his grandmother and told her she needed to pick him up because "something" had happened to him. She went down to the jail and found him bloody and disoriented. The officers in charge informed her that he beat his own head against the wall until he had a skull fracture and that they didn't know how he had gotten the wounds on his forearm (consistent with those of a person who held up his arms to protect his head). The young man, who had suffered for days with what appears to be a billy club gash on the back of his head before finally being given medical attention, is still displaying the symptoms of his ordeal. The grandmother, aside from being furious about what was done to the youth, is worried that he's now going to be dealing with the physical and mental repercussions of his wound for the rest of his life.

The second story had to do with an African-American man who was hired as head coach by one of the parish high schools only after a federal court forced the School Board to hire the most qualified applicant (over a White man who had virtually no athletic coaching experience whatsoever). When they buckled to the court, the School Board first tried to hire the aforementioned White man at a $100,000 salary to make him the African-American coach's boss. When they weren't allowed to do that, they simply removed all the furniture from the coaching office, including the computers, the photocopier, the television monitor and equipment (used to watch game tapes), even the chairs. So now the coach's staff has to do their work sitting around ONE desk on whatever they can find. Needless to say, the court is already involved in this, but still...

The third story was told by a woman in her fifties who was roughed up, handcuffed, and dragged to jail for standing in front of her son when an officer entered their yard and pulled a gun on the boy. The officer behaved in this way because he saw the teenager teaching his brother how to defend himself and the policeman thought they were fighting. Marching into the yard with gun drawn, the officer quickly frightened the whole family into defense mode. And the aggression built from there -- on both sides. By the time it was over, the family had been arrested, with the officer assuring them all that, even if they bring a complaint against him, it won't be the first time he's been written up. (Gee, why am I not surprised?)

When the storyteller got to that part, another Black woman turned and shot me a hateful look, which was difficult for me because most of these folks know me (though she doesn't) and I was horrified by these stories, just as everyone else was. Afterward, as things moved on, I picked up some vague hostility toward me from at least one of the people that knows me and that was even harder to take. But that's the way it is. It's not my fault I'm "White." And they know which side I'm on. But White people have been spreading so much pain around here for for such a very long time now that one European-American committed to change isn't going to fix anything, especially not feelings.

I normally hang around afterward, but this time, I didn't. I had some place else to go, but that isn't why I left before usual. I left because of my skin tone and because of the truth that had been shared. White people want (they claim) to have this patch behind us.

"Can't we just be friends?" they intone.

"Can't we stop dwelling on the past and just move on?" they query.

And the answers to these questions are yes and no, respectively. In fact, without saying no to the second one, we can't say yes to the first. We must be crystal clear that the past laid the groundwork for the present and the nightmares continue -- not just occasionally or on a bad day or as a result of a "misunderstanding" or "when somebody asks for it" -- but routinely and without apology and often, without recourse. One saying in the Black community is: "No need to explain what's already understood." Quit pretending, if you are. You're making it difficult on those of us who want to make a difference.

Essayist Rebecca Solnit wrote: "These are the essential steps toward being an activist: to see injustice; to do something about it; to be willing to risk; to be unpopular or out of step; to change your life." And that's what I'm doing. Not "trying to do," because there's a difference between "trying" and "doing it." I'm doing it. And what about you?

Dee Dee Bridgewater knows:

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NOTE: The poster featured above is an example of the posters at the Syracuse Cultural Workers Collective. While this particular poster doesn't appear to be available any longer, other great ones are.

To Register and Vote or Not -- THAT is the Question

Speaking of the election (and is there any way NOT to?), the opportunity to register to vote will be coming to an end shortly. If you're not registered, you can jump over to Rock the Vote and do so in less time than it takes to read most blog posts. And if you need more information than you have right now, Vote Smart may well have all the answers.

We are in a grave situation in this country -- much graver, I fear, than most of us know. Do our votes mean anything? I'm not convinced they do. But I'm not going to lay down and participate in the dismantling of my world using the excuse of blaming the bad guys. What I do and don't do is still a matter of my choice. Regardless of the outcome.

I'm registered. I'm active. I'll vote. As long as that's an option.

And the Oscar for Documentary Goes to...

Once in a while in life, for whatever reason, you get to be at "the spot." You know what I mean: "the place to be," where something so extraordinary occurs that you walk away knowing you've been touched by The Force. Last night, the spot was in a Canal Place theater auditorium in New Orleans and I was there, along with Danny Glover (one of the executive producers of the film being shown), Carl Deal (the director of said film), and two bonafide heroes and stars, Kimberly Rivers and Scott Roberts (seen above with Rivers holding up the photo of her deceased mother, a photo miraculously spared by the floods after Katrina). The film? Trouble the Water. It already won the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at Sundance, among other awards. And if it's not about to open in your city in the next month or so, you might want to make it a point to approach your local theater post haste with enough information to change that. This is the real deal.

The story opens with Kimberly trying out her brand new Sony movie cam in the hours before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. She and Scott were living in the lower 9th Ward at that time and as she talks to the neighborhood children about who's going and who has to stay for lack of money, the audience, of course, already knows what's about to happen and views the bright young faces through the window of that knowledge.

Through the next few weeks, Kim Rivers continued to film the incredible story of survival from inside the skin of the survivors. You're with them up very close and personal when the water begins to rise, forcing them into the attic ("I can't reach it...Gimme your foot..."). You hear the stark reports of dwindling supplies. And in seamless continuity, Deal and his technical crew intersperse other film and audio clips. You see the devastation from the air. You hear the voice of a woman telling a 911 operator she isn't strong enough to break through the ceiling in her attic and she's going to drown. She isn't screaming. She's just telling someone. You hear a young Black man's voice talking to another operator, dropping into sadness with lost hope as she tells him with unemotional finality that no one -- no one -- is coming.

I've seen some hellified thrillers in my day, but it would be very difficult for a fictional presentation to reach the level of tension Rivers, Deal and the film editors produced with Trouble the Water. You watch a Black man named Larry in water almost to his shoulders making trip after trip to move others to higher ground ("I'll take two at a time," he shouts up at the folks in the window. "Bring me two at a time.") and you have no way of knowing whether he's going to go under in the next frame. You see Scott somehow -- incredibly -- maintaining his patience and his dignity while trying to negotiate a space to spend even one night out of the ruins in an abandoned naval station the military was ordered to keep the weary citizens from entering.

"How about just the women and children?" Scott says without a shred of the rage in his voice that anyone in the audience would surely have understood.

"Get off this property or we'll shoot," the soldier barks at gunpoint. You could almost feel the theater audience recoil.

A fading clip shows a weakened survivor scooting across a bridge on an office chair with wheels, pushing along with one foot as if this is the most natural thing in the world to be doing. The unfolding weeks of struggle, of relocation, of returning give not the least relief of tension to either the viewer or those being viewed. The dance with FEMA is punctuated by an understated, but stunning series of silent faces looking dead into the camera without blinking, waiting for anything to happen.

Then, completely unexpectedly, in Memphis, where the couple had escaped for a time, Kim hears her cousin thumping a CD she had made in New Orleans and thought she'd never see again. Without introduction, she jumps off into a rap that produced a spontaneous burst of applause in the theater. Not only is she really, really good, I mean seriously talented, but the story of her life as she tells it in the rap she titled "Amazing" is...well...amazing.* And the viewer is forced to realize, gasping, that these people have been surviving one Katrina or another all their lives. With all that talent. With all that strength of personhood and determination and the solidarity and kindness and respect they had evidenced before the cameras for weeks under the most mind-numbing duress -- they've been hanging by their thumbs year after year after year while the rest of the population sails blithely by, acting as if they don't exist.

Later, on the way home, the woman I was with said she was disappointed that BlackKoldMadina (the name Kim uses as a rapper) isn't a star now. Apparently, my friend wanted to see Kim and Scott living large with the rich and famous by the end of the movie, above the pain of their former lives and the terrible ordeal they somehow survived.

"But she is a star," I countered.

I mean, sometimes, being a star is having the courage to lift a camera at a time when most people would be too panic-stricken to move. Sometimes, being a star is walking through hell and still finding the strength to call yourself "Amazing." Sometimes, being a star is having a husband whose face absolutely radiates his pride when he looks in your direction. Sometimes, being a star is pushing your baby down the aisle in a theater while your hometown stands to its feet. We should all be so lucky.


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*If you doubt my judgment on the matter of BlackKoldMadina's talent, I invite you to visit Born Hustler Records to find out for yourself. "Amazing" doesn't come across quite as strongly on that site, in my opinion, as it does in the film and on the cd. Still, there's no doubt about her talent and I'm very glad I bought the cd last night, unashamedly asking for an autograph while Sky, Scott and Kim's new baby girl, sitting in her stroller at my feet, played with the cuff of my brightly colored sleeve.

Aren't Presidents SUPPOSED To Be White?

Last week, I posted a doctored photo of Sarah Palin in a bikini with a gun. Some people took one kind of offense or another and I ultimately removed it because it didn't really fit the topic arena of my blog anyway and, while I do that occasionally, I don't want to make that particular move lightly. However, as I made the rounds last weekend of my usual "race" blogs, almost everybody had several posts on this woman.

I don't have the time, energy or inclination to get neck-deep in this electoral process when I don't believe we've actually elected a President since Bill Clinton (and he was no prize, what with NAFTA and "welfare reform" and all). But Tim Wise (bless his heart -- I'm sorry, but ya gotta love this guy) wrote a piece on Palin I can 100% co-sign from Why Am I Not Surprised?. It's about what a poster child for White privilege Palin is. I'd post the whole thing right here except I think we all need to go on over to RedRoom and leave some decent comments on the piece. Now, go on. Do it.

Don't Kill Troy Davis

Please read Macon D.'s thoughtful and thought-provoking post on Troy Davis, the man the Governor of Georgia intends to have executed on September 23rd, even though nobody believes any more that he actually did the crime. I'm in a dark space today and don't feel much like writing, but Macon said it all anyway. One question does occur to me, though. If a governor executes an innocent man, doesn't that make the governor a murderer? I'm just sayin' is all.

Lock 'Em Up and Throw Away the Key

I'm never far removed from thinking about prisons, prisoners and those who so relish incarcerating their fellow citizens in tiny cavities of darkness and pain. Those of you who've read this blog fairly regularly know by now that I was highly involved in the national prison abolition movement in the 1970's. I've counseled prisoners and their families. I've trained people to work with those re-entering society. I've worked with teenaged boys already locked into the system and trained others to do so. I designed programs for adjudicated and "at-risk" kids for an Africentric agency for two years. And I taught a wildly popular and very reality-based course on adolescence and delinquency at a university for more than five.

I met both of my children's fathers while they were still incarcerated. I have friends who did as much as twenty-five years straight. I have friends today who are still caught up in the system in one way or another. I went up to the craft fair in Angola last October and very much want to return, if possible, next month. And I'm incredibly clear about the fact that the criminal code is the line between personal freedom and the power structure, which is made up of those, we should remember, who get to decide what constitutes a crime and how it should be punished.

There are few of us by now, I expect, who don't know that the United States has more people behind bars than any other nation in the world. Far more. Roughly two and one-half million of us are "doing time" these days. And the majority of us must surely know that men of color and most particularly, African-American men, are far and away the most disproportionately likely to be those individuals.

No wonder so many "decent, God-fearing" White folks have the impression Black men are dangerous. Why else would so MANY of them be locked up? We sure are lucky, one can almost hear average White folks say, that we have plenty of prisons to put all these bad Black guys in so we can all be "safe." Besides, prisons and jails and law enforcement bodies of all kinds provide millions of jobs for the rest of us, right? And jobs are something we're getting pretty desperate about of late.

If you find yourself agreeing with this sentiment (or even leaning in that direction), I strongly suggest that you read "Slavery Haunts America's Plantation Prisons" by Maya Schemwar. And if that article leaves you wanting more, you might read God of the Rodeo: the Quest for Redemption in Louisiana's Angola Prison by David Bergner. And then, if you really want to get a good grasp on the bottom line (literally), you can pick up Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon.

I've been talking and writing about prison so long, I'm running out of words.

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The photo above appears in Douglas A. Blackmon's book, Slavery by Another Name. The poster is an example of Ricardo Levins Morales' work and is available from Northland Poster Collective. It reads "More than ninety thousand inmates in US prisons labor in a booming "prison industrial complex" for a growing list of major corporations. As unprecedented numbers of Americans are swept into the penal system by crime, drug, and welfare policies, their labor is being sold at bargain rates. Laws prohibiting prison labor have fallen as prison sales have swelled to nearly a billion dollars per year. At the close of the century, the prison workforce is an increasingly important arena for organizing."

Long Live Steve Biko's Words!

On this day in 1977, Stephen Biko, a thirty-year-old student activist leader against the apartheid system in South Africa was beaten to death by the police who were holding him in custody for his commitment to justice for all. 15,000 people attended his funeral and thousands more were turned away, but we remember him today particularly for his ideas related to the ways oppressed people internalize their oppression. His founding of the Black Consciousness movement, calling for the psychological and cultural liberation of his people so that they could then set themselves free politically, may, in fact, be the touchstone all revolutions must visit in order to be effective.

It's no wonder the Afrikaner power structure put a ban on his public speaking. Nevertheless, we can still read his last public statement, made very publicly in spite of the ban and then subsequently captured in the book Black Consciousness in South Africa, edited by Millard Arnold.

It is telling -- and chilling -- that Biko was arrested under the Terrorism Act in his nation, which gave rather broad scoped powers to those that feared him so. It is equally telling -- and chilling -- that the officers who brutally beat and starved Biko for the last twenty-four days of his life were absolved of any wrong-doing in the matter of his death, despite the medical report that he died due to a brain lesion caused by the “application of force to the head”. Increasingly, under current policy and practice, we see routine news reports of people being brutalized and even murdered by law enforcement officers in full view of witnesses without their being held legally responsible.

Time has moved on. There is a different government in South Africa, although it sometimes seems that not much has changed after all. I can't help but think that Biko would not be surprised. Worse, though, is the fact that run-amuck Terrorism Acts have now popped up as de rigeur in most nations and most certainly in ours.

I would suggest that we all need to consider what Biko was trying to tell us about internalized oppression. Before more of us have been caused to join him as heroes. Dead heroes.

More About Haiti

As my Faithful Readers know, I maintain an interest in and even connection to Haiti. It all began a little over twenty years ago, when I wound up with a student who had just shortly before quite literally escaped her homeland with her family after an aggressive attempt on their lives as a result of her father's commitment to social change.

When I asked her to tell me about what was really going on in Haiti (as opposed to what the governments and the media wanted us to "know"), she was reticent to engage in a conversation.

"Are you sure you really want to know?" she asked in warning. "Most people here in the U.S. say they want to know, but when I start telling them, they argue with me about it."

I assured her that I wanted to hear whatever it was she had to say. And she had plenty to say, believe me. Soon, I was reading about Haiti and writing about Haiti and planning an Amnesty International banquet about Haiti (with her father as the speaker) and, generally speaking, crafting a relationship with the culture, apparently for life.

Then, three years ago, I came across a website of photos of Haiti and its people and it was really on. Slowly, but surely, I tried with limited, but on-going, success to raise interest, consciousness, and funds for various causes related to Haitian children.

In July, right after I downloaded Skype, an on-line phone service that's free to use, even internationally, I discovered that I could talk with some of the kids I had been helping and, up until the last couple of weeks, we were talking as regularly as Haitian electricity availability and my difficult schedule allow. In fact, they have begun teaching me Creole against the day I come to visit them, which will be, it's beginning to appear, MUCH sooner than later. In fact, I'm nosing around for possible research funds so I can spend a month or two next summer in Port-au-Prince, looking at the effects of globalization on this tiny, poverty-stricken nation.

Haiti and Globalization, Part 1

Haiti and Globalization, Part 2

It's difficult to be in such close contact, distant as it is. The voices make the names and photos real to me, so that when Peter (who has had the most schooling and dreams of college) tells me that school for this fall is currently on hold because his sponsor has not sent the expected assistance as yet, I hear -- and feel the pain of -- his disappointment.

Still, he reminds me that "Depi nou gen la vi gen lespwa" ("When there is life, there is hope"), even though "lavi-a di depi le-m" ("life has been hard"). And I try to just keep forging ahead, living and hoping with him. A movie entitled "Strange Things" is currently under production. Maybe that will help. But when will the help arrive?

An unexpected pleasure in this process was reconnecting with my former student and friend who originally taught me about Haiti in the first place years ago. She's living in Port-au-Prince (of course) and sent me a truly beautiful photo book one of her companies published on the people, culture, and nation she loves so much. Needless to say, I'm trying to connect her to some of the kids I've been helping. And I feel the tendrils of this island country further planting themselves in my heart.

When I watched the YouTube videos above, I was reminded of a poem I wrote twenty years ago, a poem that could have been written yesterday and is still true. Between the economic devastation, the political corruption (still driven by U.S. interests), and the current horrified weather conditions, one wonders how Haiti and her people can survive. Yet, Peter tells me, when there is life, there is hope. And I cling, with him, to that thought.

~~For Haiti~~

Fire comes and fire goes

and we don't ever really know

what comes to take us by the hand

to lead us to the promise land.

We reach for stars and grasp the air.

We search for answers everywhere.

The echoes of our voices cry

through mountain passes to the sky.

We take our stand against the flood,

collect our tears and bathe in blood;

we will not stop till daylight comes

and we return to peaceful homes.

Ah, freedom.

Ah, freedom.

Time goes on while time stands still.

The scribes record a people's will.

We hold our ballots, hold our breath;

we stand in lines to meet our deaths.

With guns behind us, guns before,

we stand, steel-eyed, upon a shore.

We taste the salt, the coming tide,

and cling to hope that stirs inside --

believing that our cause is just,

agreed to suffer if we must,

committed now to fight as one

till flowers dance beneath the sun.

Ah, freedom.

Ah, freedom.