Emmanuel Jal: Cush

A couple of years ago, I learned of a man named Emmanuel Jal. He had just published a bestselling book about his experiences as a Sudanese child soldier who had wound up going to school and, ultimately, became an ambassador for peace through his rap music. I mentioned him in a post at the time because I had read his book (which I highly recommend), Sudan was in the news at the time, and I have a long-standing attachment to that country.

A few days ago, I received an email tipping me to Jal's newest album, entitled See Me Mama. One of the cuts from the album is featured above, reminding us that the human race in general and, most particularly, our darker brothers and sisters, share a rich history dating back to the kingdom of Cush.

Louis CK On The Historical Context Of White Supremacy

A couple of days ago, I re-posted Brotha Wolf's discussion of Whiteness in the U.S. I'm certain some White folks would be more than a little defensive about the essays he chose to present. So I'm posting a short YouTube video today to let Louis CK add his two cents. Humor about White Supremacy is the equivalent, I guess, to making children's medicine bubblegum-flavored so it's easier to swallow. Come on, kiddies, open wide.

Brotha Wolf: About the White Male Problem

I am hosting another of Brotha Wolf's blog posts today. In it, he features and discusses three recent essays examining White male pathology, a topic I think is not only crucial, but long, long overdue for consideration. Thanks to Brotha Wolf for this piece and for his permission to re-post it.

What Would Martin Be Like Today?

The minute Martin Luther King, Jr., went from talking about equal rights for Black people to calling for the end of war and a shift from giving the military a blank check to a fair and equitable distribution of wealth in the U.S. and around the globe, he was a dead man walking. Those with the Power-To-Define in the White Supremacist system didn't feel threatened by King talking about Black folks suffering or White folks having privilege. That was just considered "whining." White Supremacy says Black peoples' suffering is acceptable, if it's noticed at all, and White folks have earned their privilege.

But when he started pointing at the basic foundation of White Supremacy, the mother lode of capitalist profit that gushes from the wounds of millions of exploited workers -- Black and White -- into the hands and bank accounts of the few at the very top, it was time for a lynching. And lynching it was.

Here's To Making The World A Better Place

Just got back from spending three days visiting Albert Woodfox, one of the Angola 3, who's been in solitary confinement for forty years. Ordered a fancy ham to share with my daughter who'll visit me from New York City for the holiday. And heard from a young relative who has four months sober after years of sneaking up on the decision to try it.

Maybe next year, Albert will be eating Christmas dinner out here, money from In-Your-Face Women will be rolling in to bankroll projects I dream about funding, and the Occupy movement will have occupied Wall Street for real. The world can be a better place, you know. But we gotta include everybody.

Getting Down To Business

I originally intended to embed a video produced by a group in Boston on how to beat back the bank attacks. Unfortunately (and I can't imagine why), they chose to disable embedding for some reason. Normally, I don't post music videos I can't embed, but I was so impressed with the production -- and the message -- of this one, I'm doing it anyway. So, much less dramatically (and I'm sorry about that), I give you  Twice Thou with "The Bank Attack".

After you watch it, visit The Billfold to learn about how to do something about our student loan debts. And after that, jump over to The Rolling Jubiliee to learn about how some folks are working to wipe out other folks' debts. (Apparently, that can be done.)

The election is over. Problems abound. Let's get down to business, shall we?

A Little Happy-Happy/Joy-Joy Dance

Malcolm X: The Ballot or the Bullet

I've been thinking about whether or not I'd like to post something just before the election, but for weeks now, I've known what I was going to do. And this is it. I'm not going to campaign. I'm not going to tell you what I think about who. I'm not going to outline anybody's shortcomings or castigate anyone for not being the person I think we need or deserve. I'm just going to post part of Malcolm X's famous speech on the ballot or the bullet.

I'm not going to post the whole thing because, while I am in agreement with the whole thing, I don't want people to get distracted from his major point. And I have updated his statistics because I think that what he says is as pertinent today as it was in 1964.

What you do on Tuesday is up to you. But remember: it's the ballot or the bullet.

Same Love

As some of my Faithful Readers may have noticed, I also teach courses in gender and sexuality. So I now paint oppression with a broader brush than I used to. Considering how the Christian church was used during slavery as a lethal mechanism to quiet Black frustration and bribe slaves to obey, I have often been fascinated by how African-Americans in the U.S. have become the most church-focused group in the nation.

Unfortunately, many of those church-goers are now being as brutal against people who are gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgendered or queer as slave-holders used to be when they came home from church and whipped their darkies bloody, claiming it was necessary and even Godly to do so. Frederick Douglass had some pretty strong things to say about that back when he wrote his autobiography.

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, who created the video above, have some things for us to think about today. They aren't alone. Prominent Black clergy have begun to take a stand in support of gay rights and gay marriage. And some have become quite publicly vocal without having their congregations bolt and run. As I recall, Jesus was quoted as saying, "Judge not, lest you be judged." One can only wonder  what some folks think that means.

Brotha Wolf Is Tired

As my regular readers know, I sometimes get down off my soapbox just long enough to make room for another blogger to have his or her say. One blogger I've presented more than once is a young man of color, Brotha Wolf, a good writer with something to say, but when I step aside, it's not just because I'm feeling lazy. It's because he has opened his soul and I cannot but love him for that.

This opening of the soul is not an accident or the egoistic machinations of a would-be intellectual. Opening the soul relieves pressure sometimes, but always at a cost. Opening the soul occurs only after its very fabric has ripped. Then, for a few hours or days, a certain clarity of vision and expression makes possible a breakthrough of understanding and statement that can, if heeded, benefit us all. Today, with gratitude and his kind permission, I'm presenting this recent post by Brotha Wolf.

The Tired Rant

by Brotha Wolf

Kamau Bell for President...?

What with all the intensity of the debates and such, I thought it might be a good time to lighten things up a tad in the political arena. So here is a YouTube video of a comedian I got turned onto recently. This is political commentary Kamau Bell style. And after watching this a couple of times, I'm thinking I hope he runs for election some day. Options are good. ;^)

On This Day in History

On October 9, 1990, the United States government began making $20,000 payments to Japanese-Americans who had suffered internment in concentration camps during World War II. Despite the fact that no Japanese or Japanese-American person was ever convicted of spying for Japan during the war and despite the fact that the most decorated unit of the war (the 442nd Infantry Regiment) was made up almost entirely of troops of Japanese heritage, more than 110,000 (62% of which were U.S. citizens) were forced to move into "War Relocation Camps" that even President Franklin Roosevelt referred to in speeches as concentration camps. Old army bases and even former horse stables served as locations and as some of the horrified prisoners -- who had been stripped of their homes and businesses without opportunity to secure them for the future -- lost their minds and ran for the fences, they were shot without remorse.

The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which was signed by President Ronald Reagan, called the government's actions "a grave injustice" based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." Eventually, $1.6 billion was dispersed to those who were interned and their heirs.

My question: if four years of internment is "a grave injustice" worthy of redress, then what is four hundred years of slavery followed by another one hundred fifty years of Black Codes, Jim Crow laws and policies, segregation, public lynchings, police brutality, minority over-representation in the nation's prisons and full scale unapologetic educational, economic and social discrimination as recently as five seconds ago? I'm just sayin'.

White History Month...?

"One of the things that most afflicts this country is that White people don’t know who they are or where they come from. That’s why you think I’m a problem. I am not the problem; your history is. And as long as you pretend you don’t know your history, you’re gonna be the prisoner of it. And there’s no question of your liberating me, ‘cause you can’t liberate yourselves. We are in this together. And finally, when White people talk about progress in relation to Black people, all they are saying, and all they can possibly mean by the word ‘progress’, is how quickly and how thoroughly I become White. I don’t want to become White; I want to grow up! And so should you." ~ James Baldwin

"Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal"

I am re-posting here an interview Angola 3 News did with filmmakers Noelle Hanrahan and Steve Vittorio about their new documentary on Mumia Abu-Jamal. It stands on its own, I think, so plunge right in:

On October 6, the new documentary film entitled Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal, will be making its world premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival, just north of San Francisco.

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a veteran journalist, author of seven books, and a former Black Panther who was convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting death of white Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner in a 1982 trial deemed unfair by Amnesty International and many others. Abu-Jamal, who has always maintained his innocence, spent almost 30 years in solitary confinement on death row in Pennsylvania. The death sentence has now been officially overturned and since early in 2012, Abu-Jamal is out of solitary and in general population at SCI-Mahony, with such new ‘privileges’ as contact visits with family and friends (view photos).

Conference: "The Business of Incarceration in Louisiana: Do Prisoners Have Human Rights?"

With one out of every 86 adults behind bars, the State of Louisiana has more people incarcerated per capita than any other societal group in the history of the human race. Additionally, the practice of incarcerating individuals for natural life without the expectation of parole – for a wide range of offenses – has been elevated to an unprecedented level here, with Louisiana currently utilizing the option at nearly 4 times the national average. In real numbers, this means that more than half of the 5,100 prisoners at Angola State Prison will die in that institution, despite the fact that an ailing elderly prisoner costs the state $80,000 per year.

With cost-cutting issues frequently touted as of crucial importance in every area of our government, financial considerations alone, then, would seem to call for a more rigorous examination of prisoners’ rights in the interest of lowering the sheer numbers of those warehoused by the state. Nevertheless, Louisiana doubled its prison population in the past 20 years. And it is meaningful that 70% of the state’s prisoners are African-American. According to a New Orleans Times-Picayune expose’ published in May, 2012, more than half of the inmates in the state are housed in local prisons run by local law enforcement agencies that sorely need the funds generated in this way. So, arrest and incarceration are now very much driven by financial incentives.

On Friday, September 14, 2012, from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., the Southeastern Sociological Association at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond (halfway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans) will host a conference for academics, lawyers, students, advocates, activists and former prisoners to examine prisoners’ rights in Louisiana today. The intent is that those who attend will be able to share information and create a plan for networking in the future to maximize their effectiveness in the work that they do.

Topics will include, but not be restricted to: schools as a pipeline to prison, prison conditions, community re-entry issues, minority over-representation, women in prison, long-term solitary confinement, natural life sentencing, capital punishment, and the burdens of prisoners’ families. Speakers, breakout sessions, planning workgroups, and time to network will be provided, and the keynote address will be delivered by activist/lawyer Bill Quigley, professor and Director of the Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University in New Orleans and Associate Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City.

The conference is open to the public and the registration fee (which includes breakfast and lunch) is only $25 for professionals, $12 for students and low income individuals, and free for ex-prisoners. For more information, call 985-549-5731.

Skin Deep

A Letter to White Southern Women from Anne Braden

As I mention from time to time, I've been studying the socially-constructed, political notion of "race" for fifty years now. That's a while. But I just keep learning. Which amazes me.

A year or so ago, one of my students mentioned Anne Braden because the Flobots had sampled one of her speeches to include in a spoken word/rap cut on one of their albums. The student thought she sounded like me -- and she did. But she sounded like me now back in the 1960's, so I was impressed.

Then, last month, Appalshop (an arts and social justice collective in the mountains of Kentucky in a little tiny town named for one of my notorious and very likely super racist ancestors) came out with a documentary entitled "Anne Braden ~ Southern Patriot." And now we can see her in action for ourselves.

Braden was the genuine article, the no-holds-barred, go-for-broke, take-no-prisoners real deal. And the film is beyond inspiring and all the way into challenging. At the risk of sounding like all the other commercial hawkers out there, I'm going to say this film is a must-see if you're a regular reader of this blog. You can buy the film directly from Appalshop or from California Newsreel. Or you can ask your local public or school library to buy it (they have money for this sort of thing and are just waiting for people to make good suggestions).

To whet your appetite, there's a letter floating around from Anne Braden to White Southern women. I've edited it slightly to leave out a few lines that are now untimely. But this will give you a sense of who she was and how far short many of the rest of us fall when it comes to the fight for social justice.

A Letter to White Southern Women from Anne Braden

White Denial (cont'd)

White Denial and a Culture of Stereotypes

One topic I have to keep coming back to over and over, it seems, is the topic of White denial. What I mean by this is that many White people instantly deny that the experience of people of color in the United States is different from the experience of White people. The particular White people in question (like some of those in my course on race that just started a couple of weeks ago) will suggest that anyone can be racist (most especially Black people who are still angry at White people for holding them in slavery); that White Supremacy is only evident in folks that wear hoods made of sheets; and that oppression is something that happens only to people who live under extremist Islamic regimes.

The fact is that White denial is the Number One form of "playing the Race Card." In fact, White denial is probably the hands-down biggest Race Card of all time. And it's been discussed ad nauseum to no avail. White people ain't listening. But maybe (I keep thinking), if we try it one more time, somebody will say it differently and somebody new will catch the drift.

In hopes of this, I'm re-posting an excellent piece by Dr. David J. Leonard. It's somewhat more scholarly than the language usually is on this blog, but it appeared last week on the Huffington Post (not exactly the Journal of the American Sociological Association), so I'm going to give you an opportunity to check it out and see if it helps make sense of a few things better than I already have. If the post by Lesley didn't do it for you last week, maybe Dr. Leonard can bring it home today.

White Denial and a Culture of Stereotypes
by Dr. David J. Leonard

Power to the Online People

As many of you know, I live 45 miles north of New Orleans, so this has been a tough week. No lights. No air-conditioning. No internet. So having the folks at OpenSite send me this graphic really struck home. The only reason I'm able to blog right now is that I've crawled out to an empty office building that has power. Mother Nature is nothing to fool with. But our Auntie Internet's pretty damn powerful herself.

Thank Goddess.