Time to learn sign language?

A couple of days ago, I posted a piece by Jim Ridgeway on private soldiers killing U.S. citizens in New Orleans without consequence. Today, I'm offering the full text of a piece by Tom Burghardt that first appeared on Dissident Voice October 12th. Burghardt outlines a scenario that makes Freddy Kreuger look like Shirley Temple. It is yet another example of fascism afoot in the U.S., as electronic handheld devices can now put you in jail.

Battening Down the Hatches: Secret State Monitors Protest, Represses Dissent
by Tom Burghardt

As social networking becomes a dominant feature of daily life, the secret state is increasingly surveilling electronic media for what it euphemistically calls “actionable intelligence.”

Take the case of Elliot Madison. The 41-year-old anarchist was arrested in Pittsburgh September 24 at the height of G20 protests.

Madison, a social worker and volunteer with The People’s Law Collective in New York City, was busted by a combined task force led by the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) and Pittsburgh’s “finest.” The activist was charged with “hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime,” according to The New York Times.

Did the cops uncover a secret anarchist weapons’ cache? Were Madison and codefendant, Michael Wallschlaeger, a producer with the radio talk show “This Week in Radical History” for the A-Infos Radio Project, about to detonate a “weapon of mass destruction” during last month’s capitalist conclave that witnessed the obscene spectacle of our masters avidly conspiring to impoverish billions of the planet’s inhabitants?

Hardly! In fact, Madison and Wallschlaeger’s “crime” was to set up a communications center in a hotel room that alerted demonstrators to movements by the police, who after all, had viciously attacked protesters–and anyone else nearby–with heavy batons, tear gas and a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), a so-called “non-lethal” weapon.

Kitted-out with police scanners, computers and cell phones, the intrepid activists used a Twitter account to assist protesters eager to elude a thrashing by some 5,000 heavily armed camo-clad cops who had sealed-off downtown Pittsburgh to keep the area safe–from the First Amendment.

National Lawyers Guild on-scene legal observers reported an “unwarranted display and use of force by police in residential neighborhoods, often far from any protest activity.” According to the civil liberties’ watchdog group:

Police deployed chemical irritants, including CS gas, and long-range acoustic devices (LRAD) in residential neighborhoods on narrow streets where families and small children were exposed. Scores of riot police formed barricades at many intersections throughout neighborhoods miles away from the downtown area and the David Lawrence Convention Center. Outside the Courtyard Marriott in Shadyside, police deployed smoke bombs in the absence of protest activity, forcing bystanders and hotel residents to flee the area.

Later, while some protests were ending, riot-clad officers surrounded an area at the University of Pittsburgh, creating an ominous spectacle that some described as akin to Kent State. Guild legal observers witnessed police chasing and arresting many uninvolved students.

Among other questionable tactics, officers from dozens of law enforcement agencies lacked easily-identifiable badges, impeding citizens’ ability to register complaints. (National Lawyers Guild, “National Lawyers Guild Observes Improper Use of Force by Law Enforcement at the G-20,” Press Release, September 25, 2009)

The Times reported that after his arrest the FBI raided the home that Madison shared with his wife, Elena, and conducted an exhaustive 16-hour search of the premises seizing computers, books and a poster (horror of horrors!) of the old mole himself, Karl Marx.

Criminalizing the First Amendment

“Anyone can tweet, but the truth is, sometimes speech can be criminal,” John Burkoff, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

By that standard, anyone who has the temerity to question the legitimacy of a system that drives millions into poverty, wages preemptive war to secure (steal) other people’s resources, destroys the environment or uses “speech” to oppose said crimes against humanity–and cheekily urges others to do the same–is, by definition, guilty, in “new normal” America.

Witold Walczak however, the legal director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union told the Post-Gazette, “investigating the government and broadcasting information about it would seem to be a constitutionally protected communication.”

The ACLU director elaborated, “If the police want to communicate privately, there are certainly ways to do that, and police radios are not one of those. How can it be a crime? It’s not a secure communication.”

The good professor had another take on the matter and told the Post-Gazette, “Were they sending it to people simply to protest, or to commit further crimes?”

“Further crimes”? What crime? Oh yes, legally protesting the depredations of the capitalist system, that crime!

That such a statement can be uttered by a purported legal expert is rather rich with unintended irony. Burkhoff’s maneuver to cast the best possible light on repressive police operations is all the more absurd given the fact that none other than the Obama administration’s State Department had stepped-in and pressured Twitter to forego a service upgrade, and downtime, just scant months earlier.

But context as they say, is everything. Champions of other people’s freedom (particularly when they are geopolitical rivals), the State Department intervened and told the instant messaging service in no uncertain terms that Iranian protesters relied on Twitter to monitor police movements in Tehran and other cities as protests over disputed elections took center stage in the Islamic Republic.

The New York Times reported back in June that the U.S. State Department “e-mailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: delay scheduled maintenance of its global network, which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran.”

According to Reuters, “Confirmation that the U.S. government had contacted Twitter came as the Obama administration sought to avoid suggestions it was meddling in Iran’s internal affairs as the Islamic Republic battled to control deadly street protests over the election result.”

Twitter said in a blog post it had delayed the firm’s planned upgrade because of its role as an “important communication tool in Iran.”

A day earlier, President Obama had said he believed “people’s voices should be heard and not suppressed”–in Iran.

Message to the American people: Official enemy: Twitter good! Official friend (grifting multinational corporations and the criminals who do their bidding in Washington): Twitter bad! How’s that for an imaginative interpretation of the “new media paradigm”!

“Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Echoing the execrable logic of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, America’s premier political police force, the FBI, executed a search warrant on Madison that authorized agents to look “for violations of federal rioting laws,” according to the Times.

Madison’s attorney, Martin Stolar, told the Times that “he and a friend were part of a communications network among people protesting the G-20.” Denouncing the raid, Stolar averred that “there’s absolutely nothing that he’s done that should subject him to any criminal liability.”

On October 2, Stolar argued in Federal District Court in Brooklyn “that the warrant was vague and overly broad. Judge Dora L. Irizarry ordered the authorities to stop examining the seized materials until Oct. 16, pending further orders,” the Times reported.

This is not the first time however, that the secret state has sought to curtail text messaging by activists during large-scale demonstrations.

In 2008, as a result of the heavy repression of legal protests–and subsequent lawsuits by victims–during the far-right Republican National Convention in New York City in 2004, lawyers representing N.Y.’s “finest” demanded that M.I.T. graduate student Tad Hirsch and the Institute of Applied Autonomy, the inventors of TXTmob, turn over all “text messages sent via TXTmob during the convention, the date and time of the messages, information about people who sent and received messages, and lists of people who used the service,” The New York Times reported last year.

The FBI however, already possess the technological ability to hack into Wi-fi and computer networks as Wired revealed in April, citing internal Bureau documents released to the magazine under a Freedom of Information Act request.

According to a follow-up story by the publication, the Bureau’s Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit, CEAU, has deployed software called a computer and internet protocol address verifier, or CIPAV, that is “designed to infiltrate a target’s computer and gather a wide range of information, which it secretly sends to an FBI server in eastern Virginia.”

Antifascist Calling reported in 2008, that when a whistleblower, security consultant Babak Pasdar, stepped forward and blew the lid off the Bureau’s massive telecommunications’ surveillance network, the agency’s so-called “Quantico circuit” in Virginia, he revealed that major wireless providers, including AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, had handed the state “unfettered” access to the carrier’s wireless networks, including billing records and customer data “transmitted wirelessly.”

According to Pasdar’s sworn affidavit, Verizon provided the FBI with with real-time access to who is speaking to whom, the time and duration of each call as well as the locations of those so targeted.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the San Francisco-based civil liberties’ watchdog group, has posted Madison’s motion and his attorney’s supporting declaration on their web site. It makes for very interesting reading indeed! According to the search warrant obtained by FBI Special Agent Edward J. Heslin from the U.S. District Court, the FBI were allowed to seize:

Computers, hard-drives, floppy discs and other media used to store computer-accessible information, cellular phones, personal digital assistants, electronic storage devices and related peripherals, black masks and clothing, maps, correspondence and other documents, financial records, notes, ledgers, receipts, papers, photographs, telephone and address books, identification documents, indicia of residency and other documents and records that constitute evidence of the commission of rioting crimes or that are designed or intended as a means of violating the federal rioting laws, including any of the above items that are maintained within other closed or locked containers, including safes and other containers that may be further secured by key locks (or combination locks) of various kinds. (Honorable Viktor V. Pohorelsky, Magistrate Judge to FBI Special Agent Edward J. Heslin, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, Search Warrant, Case Number M-09-962, September 26, 2009)

Madison’s attorney, Martin Stolar averred that “a number of documents and other properties” seized by the FBI have “nothing to do with the governments investigation into what the search warrant characterizes as violations of ‘federal rioting laws’.”

According to Stolar “the seized items include political writings, notes, political associates and ideas, materials protected by the attorney-client and social work privileges, as well as property belonging to other persons residing in the premises which have no connection to any pending or contemplated criminal investigation.” Stolar declared that “the illegality of the search is in the overbreadth of the seizures and the vagueness of the term ‘federal rioting laws’.”

In other words, driftnet surveillance of American citizens is the norm for our secret state minders; an unambiguous sign of America’s slide into an extra-constitutional police state.

Fusion Centers: Leading the Charge

While Madison and Wallschlaeger’s arrest came as a result of actions undertaken by the Pennsylvania State Police, one cannot rule out that (a) informants had tipped off the cops to the pair’s activities, (b) CEAU had penetrated protest organizer’s computer net and therefore, were well aware of what the duo were up to, or (c) through some combination of the above, the FBI and presumably, their local fusion center allies, alerted PSP who then conducted the raid and shut the anarchist’s communications center down.

Federal Computer Week noted September 30, that the Department of Homeland Security “is establishing a new office to coordinate its intelligence-sharing efforts in state and local intelligence fusion centers,” and that the secret state’s new “Joint Fusion Center Program Management Office will be part of DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis.”

Among other things, the publication revealed that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said the new office will:

• Develop ways to assess threats and trends by gathering, analyzing and sharing local and national information and intelligence through fusion centers.

• Coordinate with state, local and tribal law enforcement leaders to ensure that DHS is providing the correct resources to fusion centers.

• Promote a sense of common mission and purpose at fusion centers through training and other support. (Ben Bain, “DHS established new office for intelligence-sharing centers,” Federal Computer Week, September 30, 2009)

Since Bushist–and now, Obama–securocrats designated fusion centers “a central node for the federal government’s efforts for sharing terrorism-related information with state and local officials,” the federal government has pumped some $327 million in taxpayer-funded largesse into these spooky “public-private partnerships.”

In Pennsylvania for example, the Criminal Intelligence Center (PaCIC), is described by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) as a “component of the Pennsylvania State Police.”

Washington Post investigative journalist Robert O’Harrow Jr., the author of No Place to Hide, revealed that “Pennsylvania buys credit reports and uses face-recognition software to examine driver’s license photos” and have “subscriptions to private information-broker services that keep records about Americans’ locations, financial holdings, associates, relatives, firearms licenses and the like.”

One can only wonder whether these or other intrusive surveillance tools, including the CEAU’s CIPAV software were deployed against Madison and Wallschlaeger prior to their Pittsburgh arrest.

But gathering information on fusion centers is often an exercise in Kafkaesque futility. Investigative journalist G.W. Schulz reported that when the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) attempted to obtain information from the Colorado Information Analysis Center on that state’s fusion center, they ran into a brick wall.

CIAC spokesperson Lance Clem refused to release what should be public documents to CIR claiming that releasing the records would be “contrary to the public interest” and “not only would compromise [the] security and investigative practices of numerous law enforcement agencies but would also violate confidentiality agreements that have been made with private partner organizations and federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.”

As of this writing, it cannot be determined with any certainty what role the Pennsylvania Criminal Intelligence Center played in repressing G20 protests. However, if past fusion center practices in Denver and St. Paul during last year’s Democratic and Republican National Conventions are any guide, their management of pre-G20 intelligence along with their federal partners, was in all probability considerable.

One lesson that can be gleaned however, from the federal witch hunt targeting activists Elliot Madison and Michael Wallschlaeger, is that dissent in post-9/11 America, as during the COINTELPRO-era of the 1960s and ’70s, has been criminalized.

___________________________________________________

To learn more about Tom Burghardt and read more of his work, visit his website at Antifascist Calling.

The Hidden History of Katrina

In the interest of priming the pump, as it were, after a few months of spending virtually all of my time elsewhere, I'm going to post some excellent and important things that other people have written. Hopefully, this will begin the process of getting me over whatever block I've been up against and bring my readers back so that I can re-establish that connection. I've missed you more than I can say.

The first piece I've chosen is by author and activist Jim Ridgeway, who is currently the Senior Washington Correspondent for Mother Jones magazine and has been around even longer than I have, which is saying something. I began communicating with Jim about a solitary confinement watch project and wound up reading the following on his blog, Unsilent Generation. He was kind enough to allow it's re-posting here. Prepare to be aghast. Once more.

The Hidden History of Katrina*
by James Ridgeway

Confronted with images of corpses floating in the blackened floodwaters or baking in the sun on abandoned highways, there aren’t too many people left who see what happened following Hurricane Katrina as a purely “natural” disaster. The dominant narratives that have emerged, in the four years since the storm, are of a gross human tragedy, compounded by social inequities and government ineptitude—a crisis subsequently exploited in every way possible for political and financial gain.

But there’s an even harsher truth, one some New Orleans residents learned in the very first days but which is only beginning to become clear to the rest of us: What took place in this devastated American city was no less than a war, in which victims whose only crimes were poverty and blackness were treated as enemies of the state.

It started immediately after the storm and flood hit, when civilian aid was scarce—but private security forces already had boots on the ground. Some, like Blackwater (which has since redubbed itself Xe), were under federal contract, while a host of others answered to wealthy residents and businessmen who had departed well before Katrina and needed help protecting their property from the suffering masses left behind. According Jeremy Scahill’s reporting in The Nation, Blackwater set up an HQ in downtown New Orleans. Armed as they would be in Iraq, with automatic rifles, guns strapped to legs, and pockets overflowing with ammo, Blackwater contractors drove around in SUVs and unmarked cars with no license plates.

“When asked what authority they were operating under,” Scahill reported, “one guy said, ‘We’re on contract with the Department of Homeland Security.’ Then, pointing to one of his comrades, he said, ‘He was even deputized by the governor of the state of Louisiana. We can make arrests and use lethal force if we deem it necessary.’ The man then held up the gold Louisiana law enforcement badge he wore around his neck.”

The Blackwater operators described their mission in New Orleans as “securing neighborhoods,” as if they were talking about Sadr City. When National Guard troops descended on the city, the Army Times described their role as fighting “the insurgency in the city.” Brigadier Gen. Gary Jones, who commanded the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force, told the paper, “This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”

Ten days after the storm, the New York Times reported that although the city was calm with no signs of looting (though it acknowledged this had taken place previously), “New Orleans has turned into an armed camp, patrolled by thousands of local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, as well as National Guard troops and active-duty soldiers.” The local police superintendent ordered all weapons, including legally registered firearms, confiscated from civilians. But as the Times noted, that order didn’t “apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property…[who] openly carry M-16’s and other assault rifles.” Scahill spoke to Michael Montgomery, the chief of security for one wealthy businessman who said his men came under fire from “black gangbangers” near the Ninth Ward. Armed with AR-15s and Glocks, Montgomery and his men “unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters on the overpass. ‘After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said.’”

Malik Rahim, a Vietnam veteran and longtime community activist, was one of the organizers of the Common Ground Collective, which quickly began dispensing basic aid and medical care in the first days after the hurricane. But far from aiding the relief workers, Rahim told me this week, the police and troops who began patrolling the streets treated them as criminals or “insurgents.” African American men caught outside also ran the risk of crossing paths with roving vigilante patrols who shot at will, he says. In this dangerous environment, Common Ground began to rely on white volunteers to move through a city that had simply become too perilous for blacks.

In July, the local television station WDSU released a home video, taken shortly after the storm hit, of a local man, Paul Gleason, who bragged to two police officers about shooting looters in the Algiers section of New Orleans.

“Did you have any problems with looters,” asked an officer.

“Not anymore,” said Gleason.

“Not anymore?”

“They’re all dead,” said Gleason.

The officer asked, “What happened?”

“We shot them,” said Gleason.

“How many did you shoot?

“Thirty-eight.”

“Thirty-eight people? What did you do with the bodies?”

“We gave them to the Coast Guard,” said Gleason.

Gleason told his story with a cup of red wine in one hand and riding a tractor from Blaine Kern’s Mardi Gras World.

Although the government’s aid efforts were in chaos, those involved in the self-generated community rescue and relief efforts were often seen as a threat. Even so, Common Ground, founded in the days after Katrina hit, eventually managed to serve more than half a million people, operating feeding stations, opening free health and legal clinics, and later rebuilding homes and planting trees. But they “never got a dime” from the federal government, says Rahim. The FBI did, however, recruit one of Common Ground’s founders, Brandon Darby, as an informant, later using him to infiltrate groups planning actions at the 2008 Republican National Convention.

And while the government couldn’t seem to keep people from dying on rooftops or abandoned highways, it wasted no time building a temporary jail in New Orleans.

Burl Cain, the warden of the notorious Angola Prison, a former slave plantation that’s now home to 5,000 inmates, was rushed down to the city to oversee “Camp Greyhound” in the city’s bus terminal. According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the jail “was constructed by inmates from Angola and Dixon state prisons and was outfitted with everything a stranded law enforcer could want, including top-of-the-line recreational vehicles to live in and electrical power, courtesy of a yellow Amtrak locomotive. There are computers to check suspects’ backgrounds and a mug shot station—complete with heights marked in black on the wall that serves as the backdrop.”

In the virtual martial law imposed in New Orleans after Katrina, the war on the poor sometimes even spilled over into the war on terror. In his latest book Zeitoun, published in July, Dave Eggers tells the story of a local Syrian immigrant who stayed in New Orleans to protect his properties and ended up organizing makeshift relief efforts and rescuing people in a canoe. He continued right up until he was arrested by a group of unidentified, heavily armed men in uniform, thrown into Camp Greyhound, and questioned as a suspected terrorist. In an interview with Salon, Eggers said:

Zeitoun was among thousands of people who were doing “Katrina time” after the storm. There was a complete suspension of all legal processes and there were no hearings, no courts for months and months and not enough folks in the judicial system really seemed all that concerned about it. Some human-rights activists and some attorneys, but otherwise it seemed to be the cost of doing business. It really could have only happened at that time; 2005 was just the exact meeting place of the Bush-era philosophy towards law enforcement and incarceration, their philosophy toward habeas corpus and their neglect and indifference to the plight of New Orleanians.

Through all the time that the federal and local governments, in concert with wealthy New Orleanians, were pitching their battle, there was virtually no one fighting on the other side. Reviewing the “available evidence” a month after Katrina, the New York Times concluded that “the most alarming stories that coursed through the city appear to be little more than figments of frightened imaginations.” The reports of residents firing at National Guard helicopters, of tourists being robbed and raped on Bourbon Street, and of murderous rampages in the Superdome—all turned out to be false.

But the truth of what happened in New Orleans—vigilantism and racially tinged violence, a military response that supplanted a humanitarian one—is equally sinister.
__________________________________________________
*For links, see the original posting at Unsilent Generation.

Ayieeee!

A close friend of mine is on her last day of a vision quest. I have not seen her in the flesh since Thursday, but my heart has followed her every breath. It has -- mercifully -- not rained since she began. At least not here. And the last two days have even been sunny, though colder than we've been having since last winter, which means that the nights are cold, indeed.

I worried at first.

"Is she warm enough?" I asked the sky.

The sky responded, "She never minds the cold." And I know this is true.

I have sung to the Universe for her and helped with all the other spirits who walk this with her to lift her up onto the altar of her resolve. I have sent her the strength I have to spare and trust her will to do the rest.

At one point, as I was walking outside, a stone that had been calling to me for weeks said, "Pick me up."

This happens to me sometimes. Not often. Even rarely. But from time to time over the years, what I've been told are Grandfather stones call out to me and I now have seventeen of them in a circle. They talk to each other about how I'm doing and what I should do and how to get me to do it.

The stone that called to me Friday morning is slightly larger than most of the others, smooth and flat and softly gray, like a cloud not full of water yet, but thinking about it. When I brought it in, I laid it in the middle of the circle of the other stones, something I'd never done before. A while later, it came to me that the stone represents my friend and placing it in the circle has surrounded her with my grandfathers while she dreams.

Last night, walking through the living room, I saw her lying on her side on my couch, warm and safe and oblivious to anything but her unfolding.

When she comes back to us, I will see her again with my eyes. I have thought much about what gift to give her on her return, what token to mark the journey she has walked this amazing weekend. And it turns out that it is this post (after so long not writing), this poem -- to her, to all women who walk the old ways, to friendship and sisterhood and love between all of us who long to be a part of the healing of our planet, our people, and ourselves.

May the vision you sought and found (I'm sure), my sister, continue to teach and guide you all the rest of your days on Mother Earth, feeding and sustaining your soul as you teach the rest of us what we come to you to learn.

The sun is rising now and your spirit rises with it, as I knew it would. God in me recognizes God in you. Thank you for being who you are.

Surviving Angola!

If I wasn't working impossibly hard most days of every week (even my students -- a third my age -- ask me incredulously how I do it), I'd feel guilty about not blogging for an entire month. It's not that I don't have stuff to blog about. That's endless. But I've been neck-deep in a project some students and I have been putting together and that's what this post is about.

As you know, if you're a regular reader (when I am posting more often), I have become increasingly committed to a campaign to free Albert "Shaka" Woodfox and Herman "Hooks" Wallace, the remaining two incarcerated members of the Angola 3, who have been in solitary confinement in Louisiana for more than 37 years (with a short break last year when Rep. John Conyers, Chair of the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, showed up at Angola). Not only do I blog about them, I talk about them. Daily. Multiple times. Many references. In class; out of class. In front of community groups. Casually to my friends, who have long since learned to accept it. So it was hardly shocking that the student club I advise became committed to the campaign, as well.

The result will be a huge campus event this coming Thursday, when Billy X Jennings and Malik Rahim (Panthers during the 1970's) will show the new VH1 documentary on the history of the Black Panther Party and then answer questions afterward; artist Jackie Sumell will show some documentary snips related to The House That Herman Built, a project she and Herman Wallace have kicked off; and author and activist Robert King, the Angola 3 member who won his release on bogus charges in 2001 after himself spending 29 years in solitary confinement, will speak. While all that is going on, a mock cell in the Student Union breezeway will invite students to experience the size of the space the Angola 3 call their universe, an Angola 3 and Black Panther Party historical exhibit will be presented, state-of-the-art homemade jambalaya will be served and a reggae/ska band out of New Orleans called Big, Fat and Delicious will play. The students wanted to call for justice, but they also wanted to celebrate the survival of these three remarkable men. So it's gonna be a par-tay!

Since I haven't met the national campaign team as yet, this is extremely exciting to me personally and I know how much it means to Shaka and Hooks. It's also wonderful to see students who are often drowning under school and work demands take off and run with an activist action like this. I already know what I'm going to blog about next (think next week-end...maybe, depending on whether or not visiting opens back up at Angola, where one of the prisoners decided to go on vacation the other day, shutting the place down).

And in the meantime, if you and yours would like to do something in solidarity with us on Thursday, September 17th, check out the newest Angola 3 website and go from there. See you in the street!

Black August and the Angola 3

Little did I know, back in 1970, when I entered the Black Panther Party headquarters in Oakland, California, with Eric, a red-headed Berkeley Barb reporter friend of mine (I was writing for the San Francisco Good Times myself), that when Eric went into the inner sanctum, leaving me to wait in the front office with three of the angriest looking and most silent Black men I've ever seen, he was going back there to talk with one of the most famous men in the world at that time. Huey P. Newton had just come out of prison to an organization that had waited for his release like a blushing bride. Jonathan Jackson -- only seventeen years old -- had just been shot down in an attempt to free his incarcerated older brother, George, whose book Soledad Brother had just hit the stands. And the place I stood was surely the center of the radical political world just then. It fairly boggles my mind to look back on it now and realize.

But I, being a middle-class White woman from the midwest who had just "dropped out" that spring and, at twenty-four, was somewhat older than many of those who were "on the road," was clueless. I had come to San Francisco like so many others, following I didn't know what. And because of my newspaper paste-up skills, I lucked into a prime spot in a long standing underground newspaper collective on Bush Street in the Fillmore. But while my intelligence and unapologetic nature (I hadn't dropped out to make nice) took me to some interesting places (like the Panther Party office), I was a blank slate when I got there and didn't even know it.

In fact, I'm only just now -- thirty-nine years later -- putting all the pieces together. And it's an impressive image, indeed.

It isn't that I hadn't already learned a few things about the BPP. I mean, I've been studying African-American/European-American relations -- formally or informally -- since I was in high school. I spent years in the prison abolition movement after I left San Francisco. I've been teaching racial and ethnic relations in universities for more than two decades, where I've been described by my students as "a flaming radical." I have a bi-racial daughter who's twenty-eight years old. I've been blogging on "the socially-constructed, political notion of 'race'" for nearly four years. And the more I learn, the more I get to learn (if this makes no sense to you, just keep learning till it does -- and it will).

I learned along the route, for example, that the Panthers started the breakfast program that virtually every public school in the U.S. now offers. I've shown "Passin' It On" in God knows how many classrooms by now, so I knew that the BPP had organized a lot of other social service programs, as well, all while being viciously attacked on every side by every imaginable law enforcement body in the country, including a couple that were developed just for them. And I didn't see anything in the Panther's Ten Point Plan that sounded insane to me, given the way African-Americans have continued to be brutalized and exploited for five hundred years by the establishment in this country.

I mean, once you understand that Black men are statistically FAR more likely to be stopped, to be rousted, to be charged with something, and to be arrested; to have the charges pressed by the local prosecutors and then to be convicted of those charges (appropriately or not) and to be sentenced to prison or jail for long periods for things White men wouldn't have been stopped for in the first place, then #9 doesn't seem unreasonable. After all, the criminal just-us sytem has always been one of the primary tools of exploitation used against Blacks, since under the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, anyone "duly convicted" of a crime (whether they did it or not) can be forced into virtual slavery.

And when you note that #7 calls for the stopping of all police brutality against any oppressed person, then you've come face to face with the reality that the Black Panthers never hated White people. They hated oppression. And unless you're prepared to argue that Black folks should accept oppression based on the color of their skin or you think police ought to have carte blanche to harass, torture, or even kill (accidentally or otherwise) poor and powerless people whenever they please without any responsibility whatsoever, then I'd assume you agree.

To what do I owe my new, improved awareness? As always, it seems the Universe packaged me up a very nearly overwhelming assortment of goodies to blow my mind (or what's left of it) one more time. For one thing, I've been talking with some VERY bright and VERY committed individuals connected to the campaign to free the last two members of the Angola 3, Albert "Shaka" "Cinque" Woodfox and Herman "Hooks" Wallace, who have now been held in solitary confinement here in Louisiana for more than 37 years -- for being Black Panthers. And I've begun to have phone conversations with Woodfox himself on a regular basis, as well.

So I just brushed off the demonization the Powers-That-Be have used in the media where the Panthers were concerned. And I painted a picture in my mind that was full of happy pancake-fed kiddies wearing cute little berets and little old ladies being accompanied to the store on check day and free clinics providing medical care for poor people regardless of their "race." As a sociologist, I know damned well that humans are just not that tidy. But J. Edgar Hoover wanted to see -- and portray -- the Black Panthers as a handful of rabidly violent Communists who were committed to overthrowing the government (something they never called for, though they felt pretty strongly about a badly needed overhaul). And I, on the other hand, wanted to see them as idealistic inner city superheroes with a spatula in one hand and a diaper in the other. While I knew Hoover was wrong-headed -- and for all the obvious reasons -- I have recently learned that there was MUCH I didn't understand before now about this highly complex and absolutely serious body of young Black warriors, a number of whom were prepared to die for the cause and some of whom did.

Then, I've read the award-winning new book, From the Bottom of the Heap, by Robert King, the third member of the Angola 3, who won his freedom from the Louisiana state prison system in 2001 after 27 years in solitary confinement for crimes he didn't commit. I also read the 90-page precurser to Orissa Arend's book -- just out -- entitled Showdown in Desire: the Black Panthers Take a Stand in New Orleans (which is on its way to me even as I write). I'm nearly done reading The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America by Hugh Pearson, who in the name of being "unbiased," sometimes appears to be somewhat anti-Newton'esque, but has unquestionably done all his homework. (If everything in that book is the truth, I can't imagine how he got all those details, though he offers more than fifty pages of notes at the book's end to tell me, I guess, if I was serious about wanting to know.)

I've watched a whole string of videos and movies, including, for example, "Black August," an excellent film that came out in 2007 about revolutionary writer George Jackson, who was shot to death inside San Quentin Penitentiary in an alleged escape attempt. And, of course, I've been all over the internet, including a mind-bending site called It's About Time. I can guarantee that if you follow in my footsteps, your mind will get boggled, too, one way or the other.

Regardless, what I slowly, but surely came to understand was that the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was conceived to be and called by such Party leaders as Fred Hampton, Sr., who was mercilessly murdered in his bed by "law enforcement officers" at the age of 21, "the revolutionary vanguard." A revolutionary vanguard sacrifices itself to organize and raise the consciousness of the mass population so that it will rise up to act in its own best interests against entrenched oppression. I had heard Hampton talk about "the vanguard" in his speeches. Hell, I had posted his words on this blog. But apparently, it didn't compute.

I was a child of the sixties, you must remember. We not only used the word "revolution" routinely, but in a whole gamut of different applications. People would come to blows over arguments about whether Trotsky or Lenin got it right theoretically, for goodness' sake. And in the end, what did it matter? Drugs were the new chocolate anyway. Rank strangers passing joints of marijuana with deadpan faces would have conversations about what things would be like "after the revolution." And women were being sucker-punched into casual sex to prove their commitment to some horny guy's version of touted revolutionary ideals. (Lest you see this as stupid, consider the fact that once, when I impulsively had sex with one of the men in our collective who had a steady girlfriend who was also a collective member, my report on his lack of prowess in bed became the topic of a discussion behind his back out of concern that her probable lack of sexual satisfaction might give an opportunistic government agent access to inside information about us through her...!)

I somehow understood that Newton, Hampton, Cleaver, Carmichael and others meant what they said, but by the time I heard them say it, it was so long after the fact that Hampton and Newton were dead and Cleaver had become a "born again" Christian and conservative Republican. So I spun their speeches as nostalgia, appropriate only to the context of a time when we were all a little "crazy," but not wrong.

What I forgot, though, was that I wasn't raised as an African-American in a country where the default position is White Supremacy. The Panthers were not being rhetorical. They were fighting for their lives and the lives of their people. Duh.

Further, the Panthers were prepared and committed not only to fight on the side of right and lead others to do so, but to lead by example. That's a helluva thing, if you think about it. If you're the only one who's keeping tabs on you, then you can let yourself off the hook from time to time, as the occasion calls for it. You can make up your own rules as you go along. But, if you say publically, "Follow me," then you have no wiggle room without failing to keep your stated commitment. Whew!

Some of the Panthers and some of their leadership will go down in history as doing some bad, bad things. Not just illegal things, you understand, but some uncool stuff. We know about it because, by and large, they did what they did right out there on front street. But they saw themselves as at war -- a war they could not win, but were committed to fight. In her book on the showdown in the Desire Project in New Orleans between the Panthers and the police, Orissa Arend talks about how some young soldiers wept as they went about the work of preparing for what they assumed was probably going to be the day of their death. Sad. Scared. And committed to demonstrate by example how to take a stand to defend yourself and your community -- no matter what the cost.

The Panther Party members were dead serious and they were not alone. There were rich, White, educated people totally in agreement with the idea that we need a whole new system based on justice and equal opportunity for all. But they could move through their lives unmolested by those who had the power to define. They could stand around chatting amicably with BPP leadership, maybe even hand them a gigantic check once a month, and then get in their cars and go home, knowing they would not be drugged and shot to death in their sleep.

Oh, there was the Weather Underground, all right (the Weathermen taking their name from the line in Bob Dylan's song, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"). And there are no-doubt-about-it revolutionaries that look like me all over the world, including in the U.S. even now, some of them doing time right along side their Black compatriots. But one of the reasons the Weathermen could remain underground for more than a decade was that White folks got it like that in this country. And Black folks don't.

As it finally dawned on me last week how serious the Black Panther Party had been about its agenda and I matched that with the balls-to-the-wall commitment of those with the power in this society to stop African-Americans from achieving full citizenship at all cost, it scared the socks off me. While I was putting out a newspaper in San Francisco or organizing prisoners to stop the violence against each other so they could be empowered toward self-determination, the Panthers were at war.

And so, apparently, was the government.

Even now, in 2009, counter-intelligence program-style tactics are used to maintain control over and within the Black community and to manipulate the media. When "Shaka" Woodfox's conviction was over-turned (for the second time) last year and the judge was about to set bail so that he would be released after four decades in solitary confinement, Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell released false information to the media that Woodfox is a convicted rapist. The community Shaka was headed for balked, of course, and the judge acted accordingly, leaving Shaka locked in a cell for 23 hours a day doing dead time indefinitely when he has the legal right to be free.

Shaka issued a statement immediately that rape charges were, in fact, added to his record in his youth, but that it was done at a time when this was the method of choice for clearing the books of unsolved crimes while creating increased leverage over young Black men in jail. The charges would be brought, but never pressed because there was literally no connection whatsoever between the crime and the person being charged. Not only was there no follow-up on these rape charges against Shaka back when they were originally filed, but once the judge had decided not to award bail last fall, nothing further was said about the charges then either. The point is that the Attorney General had no intention of pushing these bogus charges, but the damage done by them to Woodfox's reputation in the media and in the courts at such a pivotal moment was quintessentially effective. So Cointelpro is, for all practical purposes, still alive and well, though it has long since been dissolved for being illegal. Why am I not surprised?

In any case, for thirty-nine years, I've seen myself as down for life in my commitment to social change across the board and around the world, but to commit to being a member of a vanguard? Never did that. Not even close. Inched up on it a few times. Talked a good game. And jumped in -- every once in a while -- where not only angels, but damned fools would fear to tread. Nevertheless, though I'm confident we all have it in us to defend ourselves under just the right circumstances, members of a vanguard make the circumstances. And therein lies the difference.

So this post is dedicated to the revolutionary vanguard who, flawed as they were (and they were), will go down in history with the Gabriel Prossers, the Nat Turners, the John Browns, and the Harriet Tubmans. Some died and some didn't. Some distinguished themselves as heroes and some were, on some levels, at least, infamous. But they were willing and that willingness is what tells the tale in the end. That willingness is the sunrise of hope -- however desperate -- that we can somehow implement a new dawn of freedom and justice for the human race where life is more important than money and peace is ultimately attainable through mutual respect for all people.

1966: (in back, left to right) Elbert "Big Man" Howard, Huey Newton, Sherman Forte, Bobby Seale; (in front) Reggie Forte, Little Bobby Hutton

My last post was at least partly about a man who sits on a bridge every day, come hell or high water, and reminds passers-by that the Black man has survived. The Black man -- and woman -- have survived, I would suggest, because of the revolutionary vanguard that has existed since the first African was kidnapped and worked to death wherever he or she was taken. Yes, more than a few bodies, minds, and even spirits have been broken. But what sociologist Emile Durkheim called "the collective consciousness" -- that combined and amazing amalgamation of Truth and Identity that humans carry and share as humans and, in this case, as African people of this nation and the world -- wounded as it has been, survives yet in all its courageous richness.

Consequently, the prisoners in the belly of the beast created a living memorial to their collective consciousness, the revolutionary vanguard, some twenty plus years ago and they call it Black August. Because the first African slaves arrived in the Western Hemisphere in August of 1619; because the slaves in Haiti rose up against their oppressors in August of 1791; because Gabriel Prosser's slave revolt was discovered in August of 1800; because Nat Turner's slave revolt occurred in August of 1831; because the Underground Railroad was officially established in August of 1850; because Marcus Garvey was born in August of 1887; because Russell "Maroon" Shoatz was born in August of 1943; because Fred Hampton, Sr., was born in August of 1948; because Dr. Mutulu Shakur was born in August of 1949; because the March on Washington was in August of 1963; because the Watts Rebellion was in August of 1965; because the FBI circulated an internal order to "disrupt" Black Liberation groups in August of 1967; because the Courthouse Slave Rebellion (involving Jonathan Jackson, William Christmas, James McClain and Ruchell "Cinque" Magee) occurred in August of 1970; because the capital of New Afrika was attacked by the FBI and police in August of 1971; because George Jackson was assassinated in August of 1971; because Jalil Muntaqim and Nuh Washington were captured in August of 1971; because the police raided MOVE in August of 1978; and because Mumia Abu Jamal was scheduled for execution in August of 1995, though resistance stopped the execution. Some prisoners fast during daylight hours for the whole month of August to increase their level of discipline and re-commit themselves to the five hundred year struggle of African-Americans to be free.

Taken in the context of the Black Panther Party's spirit as the revolutionary vanguard to lead the rest of us, their brothers and sisters of all hues, into the promised land of self-determination and personal responsibility to the greater community that is the human race (past, present and future), it is no wonder that the Attorney General of the State of Louisiana called Albert Woodfox the most dangerous man in the world. It is not because "Shaka" Woodfox and "Hooks" Wallace are violent people. Quite to the contrary, they were actually originally targeted by the prison administration for stopping the prisoner-to-prisoner violence and rape that was making Angola a hell on earth for those incarcerated there. Rather than being violent, they put their lives on the line to prevent violence. What galled the administration about this so much was that, aside from the money they were losing through the cessation of vice and corruption on the prison yard (which was bad enough, in their eyes), they no longer felt that they were in control.

So they attacked and have continued to attack with all they have ever since. Rather than buckling under the pressure of four decades of vicious brutality, however, Woodfox, Wallace and King -- the Angola 3 -- have given not one inch. Even when told that they could be released, if they would only disavow their Black Panther principles and "take Jesus as their savior," they stood their ground, though it only measures 6 feet wide and 9 feet long. This continued resistance makes them frightening, indeed, to men who are so dead inside that they must inflict pain on others to feel anything at all themselves.

Black Panther Party members, as the revolutionary vanguard, sought to defend themselves in a nation committed to violently attacking people of color and, most particularly, African-Americans, wherever they raise their heads in the attempt to achieve full citizenship manifested as freedom, justice, and economic parity in the land of their birth. Frantz Fanon reminded us that the oppressed try everything else first, but that if the oppressor maintains its power through violence, then the oppressed may eventually choose similarly to defend themselves as a group or as individual representatives of that group also with violence.

These attempts of the oppressed to defend themselves are invariably and perhaps, necessarily seen by the oppressor as threats to the "social order" and the status quo wherein those with privilege through power continue to enjoy control over their own and others' destinies. Those who would suggest that the oppressed should simply suffer in peace either are not similarly suffering or, alternately, fear the oppressor. Either way, the revolutionary vanguard would remind them that no people will ever allow themselves to be oppressed forever and wherever we find oppression, we will find social conflict.

A Tale of Two Henrys

When the first news stories about the arrest of world renowned scholar, author and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates appeared, I shook my head and swore that it was just too obvious for me to "waste my time on." I refused to even imagine writing a post on the situation because, for real now, what kind of moron would arrest a 58-year-old Harvard professor (regardless of skin tone) wearing an upscale polo shirt, standing on his own porch with his photo identification in his hand? (And yes, Sgt. Crowley, I called you a moron -- no matter what a nice guy you are -- and I don't drink alcohol, so I guess we're not gonna be talkin' about it all over a beer, are we?)

Then, as the days passed and I watched the mainstream media grapple with the "issues" of the case, I became increasingly mesmerized by the attempts -- from the President on down -- to make this incredible display of institutionalized White supremacy wearing a gun Gates' problem. How dare he, the media et al seemed to be saying, come home from abroad and unjam his own front door in broad daylight? How dare he ask his driver for assistance in doing this to protect the hip he's already had to have replaced once? How dare he run the risk of confusing some woman watching him do all this so that she winds up embarrassed for being a "good citizen?" And above all, how dare he become frustrated with and worse yet, berate a uniformed law enforcement officer who had treated him with no more than the same dismissive disdain reserved for all Black men in the United States? Didn't he realize he could've been Tasered or even shot? The media and everybody they talked to seemed to be saluting the cop for not really letting loose on this uppity old man with a cane who obviously didn't re-ca-nize who he was talkin' to. In fact, other than the President (for a hot minute) and a handful of bloggers*, nobody seemed to be taking Gates' side.

"He oughta know better," said one article, speaking of Gates rather than the policeman who, we are told teaches other cops how to resist racial profiling -- which would certainly explain why some of them are so good at it. They're being trained by a guy who's surely gotta be one of the best since he can profile even a guy like Henry Louis Gates. I mean, if Crowley is the standard, it's a wonder there are any Black men at all still out of jail.

After hashing our blogospheric outrage to death, some of us even finally got around to asking the harder questions. Like why the President of the United States, himself a Black man, only stepped up to defend his "brother" when his brother was also rich and famous. Like why what happened to Gates was horrific, but when it happens to other, poorer, less privileged Black men every few minutes day and night in this country, it bearly gets a mention and a shrug. And like how this experience might affect Dr. Gates' work now that he's discovered what poor African-Americans have always known: that Blacks are virtually helpless in the face of institutionalized racism in this country and most particularly when it's wearing a badge and a gun. He never seemed to get that before. I suspect he'll have much less trouble believing it now. What more could we hope for, right?

Of course, eventually, the charges were dropped and everything went back to business as...well...usual. Which is where I come in, I guess, now that everybody's tired of reading and thinking and talking about what the Governor of Massachusetts called "every Black man's nightmare". What could I possibly have to add that hasn't already been written?

Just one small anecdote about another Henry, a man I watched for two years before I recently made it a point to meet him.

This Henry is also an older man -- maybe in the same age bracket as Gates -- but he isn't a Ph.D. He's a much more ordinary person, a working man, a Vietnam veteran who still looks into space and wanders a bit when he recalls what it meant to be Black and a soldier at war.

This Henry doesn't sit at a big, fine desk in an ivory tower at Harvard. He sits on a curb on a bridge across from my building. And he sits out there a lot.

Being a sociologist and all, I knew I had to approach him and even went so far once as to lean out my car window when the light was red and call out to him my name and a request to talk with him. He was agreeable, he said. But months more slipped by before I finally got there.

I crossed the busy street and stuck out my hand, introducing myself.

"Mind if I sit down?" I asked.

He was steady and welcoming, though not effusive. And we spent a half hour or so comparing notes on life.

Henry feeds the ants and the birds and he sits on his throne in the kingdom he has created, watching his subjects go about their daily lives while the trees behind him and across the street grow and move in the Louisiana breeze. He used to work in a restaurant, but it moved to another town. And now, Henry works here and there as he can: an afternoon's yard work or a handyman job for a day or so. At night, he goes home to his step-brother's house, where neither has steady employment. One wonders how they eat.

"The student's call you 'The Bridge Man.'" I told him. "How do you feel about that?"

"'S'all right," Henry answered.

"This is kind of like your front porch, huh?" I pushed a little further. "You sit out here and watch the cars go by...?"

Here Henry reached back into Vietnam and brought me up through the decades of his existence to the present. He's seen the world. He's lived up north. And he came back to Louisiana -- a Black man in A-merry-ca. Then, he reached back even further into history and touched the bases that the White establishment made such a crucial part of the game.

"They enslaved us and they worked us and they sent us off to war. They brutalized us and put us in schools without books and locked us in jail even when we didn't break any laws. But we're still here..."

At this point, Henry turned his head and, looking me straight in the eye, said, "I sit out here day after day -- in the rain, in the sun, in the cold, year after year -- and every person that goes by has to see me whether they want to or not. I am the Black man and in spite of all they've done to break us down and try to wipe us out, I'm still here. And I make them know that -- every day."

That, as Paul Harvey used to say, is the rest of the story. The Powers-That-Be can arrest Henry Louis Gates, proving once again that they are the Powers-That-Be and even the President better be careful what he says about it, no matter what. But there is no power that can best the spirit of Henry the Bridge Man. However quickly the cars speed by, the drivers who pointedly keep their eyes on the road have to work hard to ignore Henry the Bridge Man. He's the Truth sitting there on the curb. And the truth, Dr. Gates, will set you free.

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*See, for example, Nordette (who re-visited the highway trooper attack on the EMT in light of this newer situation), Carmen (who reminded us that the police -- ostensibly, at least --work for us), field (who shown a light on the way oppression uses language), and Macon D. (who wrote on how clueless White people are about what it's like to be Black in the USA).

Fight Human Rights Violations Today

Over the last year or so, I've nearly always posted something on human rights on the 27th of each month. Today, it's going to be short and to the point. We have two human rights related opportunities to act on today.




The first involves Leonard Peltier, the Native American who was sent to prison in 1977 for the killing of two FBI agents even the government now admits he didn't kill. He comes before the parole board tomorrow, so gear it up, readers! Watch this, if you have time. But regardless, visit this site, and then call, fax and email your congressional representatives, the warden, whatever today. Let's bring him out of there and return him to his family and friends that have sustained him during his ordeal.

The second action we're being called to take is in support of Francisco Torres, the remaining member of the San Francisco 8 who still has charges that have not been dropped. The case involves a group of former Black Panthers who were framed for the killing of a police officer back in the 1970's after several of them were tortured mercilessly by the police in New Orleans (why am I not surprised?). All of the accused have either had their charges dropped or pled no contest to greatly reduced charges, so for them, the nightmare is -- for the third and hopefully final time -- over. Torres, however, needs our help and the plan is to read up on the case and then call (916-322-3360, ext. 7) and fax (916-323-5341) California Attorney General Jerry Brown today.

School's Out (Of Whack)

I've mentioned from time to time the re-opened school de-segregation case in the parish where I've lived for the past two years. I'm still neck-deep in this effort and considering that the original court order in the case was issued in 1979, I'm not anticipating a major shift any time soon. Apparently, the gears of the Courts (even the Federal Courts) in Louisiana grind slooooowly indeed.

I certainly don't want to run the risk of putting my two cents so far out there as to compromise the best interests of the case, which is why I don't discuss it more often. And besides, there's a continually updated website that gets half a million hits a month, so it's not necessary for me to chime in. But there's an issue that's been unfolding of late that I think has more general applicability and that's what this post is about.

What you need to know about the case to understand what I'm going to write is that the defense (the parish school board and its appointed administrators) have drafted a plan that will supposedly de-segregate the schools enough to satisfy the Court's order. It should be obvious to even the unpracticed eye that anybody who unapologetically maintains a system demonstrated to damage the psyches of children (of whatever skin tone) for more than thirty years after they were ordered by a Court to change their ways is NOT going down without a fight. And fight they have.

First of all, they've drafted a plan so full of bells and whistles even an expert might miss the many ways the "new" is really old. For one thing, The Plan is heavily imbued with "magnet schools" that we are encouraged to believe will pull little White children from all over the parish to avail themselves of these special opportunities. Skip the fact that magnet schools have not been demonstrated to de-segregate schools successfully anywhere else. Skip the fact that they built into The Plan conditional acceptance criteria such as that those who qualify for free or reduced lunches (many, if not most, of the children of color) will be last on the list for inclusion in the magnet schools or precluded from entrance at all. And skip that, in any case, magnet schools still lock in a dual system that marks some children as worthy of "better" and some as worthy of "less," a designation that has always been made graphically clear to African-Americans of every age for five hundred years to the present in every area of our society.

And then, of course, my personal favorite aspect of this unmistakeable boondoggle is the simple fact that they have caaaarefully left "certain" schools either untouched or even Whiter than they were before (as if that would be explainable in any type of reasonable terms). One of these schools, already 94% White would actually become 97% White under The Plan...! And apparently, we're expected not to notice that this is the case when -- ostensibly -- the whole point of this debacle is to de-segregate. the. schools. Their excuse: that by law a "de-segregation plan" doesn't actually have to de-segregate ALL the schools or in this case, the schools where the little kiddies' Whiteness is already being most protected intact.

The Court, as might be expected, has asked both sides to consider what a "settlement" of the case would look like, which sounded to me like, "How little would you be willing to accept and still call it enough?" I, needless to say, wrote "Justice?" on my legal pad and the lawyer scribbled back, "That's why there are Appellate Courts." But why, after thirty years -- and fully fifty-five years after Brown v. the Board of Education -- should we be discussing "settlement" at all? In a just society, the men and women who've unapologetically maintained a racist system of relegating Black children to inferior schools to make sure they eventually "prove" their own inferiority belong in jail! I'm just saying is all.

Anyway, none of this, odious as it may be, is the real topic of this post. It is rather that the plaintiffs (who are lobbying to see implemented a fairer system of education) have somehow gotten off on a jag of pressing the Court to make comprehensive, state-of-the-art vocational schools part of The Plan. Now, on the surface, this would seem to be a no-brainer. Why not have vocational schools for all those students who, for whatever reason, "choose" not to go to college? (And the stats, of course, document that few of the youth in our parish opt to do the latter.) What bothers me about this, however, is that I see only too clearly how this can be used by the jerks who put this racist system in place back in the covered wagon days to keep Black youth (and even poor White youth) from taking the only track guaranteed to offer them a decent life in the future.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not invested in the idea that everybody wants to go to college. For example, I didn't. Or at least I didn't have a vision for myself that included college once it was made clear to me that I wouldn't get "one red cent" for college because "women are for sex and cooking." (I kid you not. In those words.) It took me twenty years to get over than one. And even then, I didn't enroll because I wanted to. I enrolled because it became apparent to me that I wouldn't be able to get a job good enough to support two children without a college degree of some kind. And that was in 1986.

The fact is that the United States has a number of values on which it operates as a society. One is White Supremacy, of course. And one, as I just explained, involves the Patriarchy. But another is a practice sociologists call "credentialism," which means requiring formal educational "credentials" for better jobs. And believe you me, they're not talking about high school diplomas or vocational school certificates any more.

When my father graduated with his Bachelor's Degree in the 1950's, it really meant something because people could still get a good job with a high school diploma. Hell, I myself filled great, highly responsible positions in my twenties and early thirties as only a high school grad. But during the 1980's, when we went from being a manufacturing economy to being a service-oriented economy, things changed. Not only did you need a college degree to get a "decent" job, but those jobs didn't pay enough to cover the bills even if you did have a degree. It didn't have anything to do with what you learned in school. It had to do with that little piece of paper. And today, the process is not moving toward vocational schools. It's moving toward Master's degrees.

I tell my students -- many of whom are struggling as the first college students ever in their families, many of whom are holding down full-time jobs while going to college, a ridiculous number of whom already got shellshocked in Iraq two or three times so they could go to college -- that they're not wrong. They don't have to want to do this. They need to do it. And when I tell my African-American students that Black men are four times more likely to be unemployed than White men at every educational level, I tell them that this just makes their college degree that much more crucial. In fact, in this parish, while European-American per capita income annually is over $20,000, African-American per capita income annually is under $10,000.

Not very pretty, is it?

And yes, it's possible for people to make a living wage with some trades. But that doesn't mean that a certificate from a vocational school is automatically going to put you in those jobs, assuming those jobs remain in place. At ten per cent unemployment -- and rising -- why do we think that there are any magic answers? The bulk of the tracks in vocational training do not provide a living wage in a country where a full-time, minimum wage job will bring in a whopping $237 a week after taxes. And that's assuming that the jobs don't fall to technological advancements or go to people with college degrees who are going to become "over-qualified," but increasingly desperate as the economy gets worse.

But if a well-organized and fully entrenched team of White racists recognize anything, it's how to play both ends against the middle and get what you wanted in the first place. So they're gonna jump on this vocational school bandwagon like, well, White on rice. And when the dust settles, thousands upon thousands of young people -- most particularly African-American -- will be "tracked" into vocational programs with promises that they'll be easier and faster and get them good money and that college probably isn't "for" them, anyway. (I wish I had a nickel for every time I've heard a young man or woman of color say this to me since I arrived in Louisiana. White kids don't say it. Now, why is that?)

Am I trying to push college on a bunch of underprepared children with no self-esteem and horrific work ethics and no vision for themselves or their futures? Well, what do you think? I have to teach these kids. I watch some of them crash and burn (educationally, psychologically, emotionally, and sometimes even physically). I watch some hanging by their fingertips somehow course after course. And I spend literally more time in my office trying to keep individual students from falling through the gates of hell than I do in the classroom. So what is my point?

That -- and I really want to break into capital letters here -- a LOT more children would opt for and be successful in college if they were prepared in schools that gave them a solid basic education. They don't need bells and whistles. They don't need gimmicks. They need teachers who give a shit about them, who believe in them, who are NOT themselves racist (especially without knowing it). They need admininstrators who are educators themselves, highly trained in the challenges that have developed because of their lack in the past and committed to spending money on quality education for all children rather than on inflated salaries for administrators, and who hold teachers responsible, not for front-loading to a standardized exam, but for turning children into learners. Believe me, this is NOT the stretch we're told it is by the racist Powers-That-Be.

Maybe we do need a community college level vocational school or two in this parish to pick up the slack for the thousands of Black and poor White young people who've already been hung out to dry by this school system. But the answer to our greater dilemma -- on-going institutionalized oppression in the name of racism -- will not be addressed and eradicated in this way. And giving the parish school board a get-out-of-jail-free card is NOT my idea of a law suit well won.

77% of the White people over 25 in this parish have a high school diploma (which is something like the national average), while only 55% of the Black residents over 25 are high school graduates. Poor White kids aside, because this is, after all, a racial de-segregation case, suggesting that Black kids "need" vocational schools because they don't "want" to go to college is just one more verse in the same old racist school song.

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NOTE: Last night, after writing this post, I was talking with Albert "Shaka" Woodfox (one of the Angola 3) on the telephone and before I even got into what my post was about, he volunteered: "The two primary tactics defendants use in trying to avoid school de-segregation are, first of all, vocational schools and then, magnet schools." Why am I not surprised?

The Mountain Comes to Muhammad

Yesterday, I spent the day with Albert "Shaka""Cinque" Woodfox, one of the Angola 3. It took me two hours for one reason or another to make the journey from my front door to the front reception desk at the Louisiana State Prison at Angola where he's been in solitary confinement for thirty-seven years. It wasn’t supposed to take that long, but half of the trip was on a country two-lane road and the construction and farming vehicles were out in force.

I was deep, deep in the prison abolition movement in this country in the early 1970's and I’ve been inside more than a few prisons during that time and since. But it never gets easy. I listened to an audio book -- a detective thriller -- while I drove because otherwise I would have made the entire trip with my stomach full of butterflies and my back teeth clenched and I didn’t want to throw away so frivolously the energy I would need to last the day. We’ve been writing and talking on the telephone for four months now, since I wrote to tell him that the student sociology club I advise threw him a birthday party when he turned 62 on February 19th.

It was a small gesture. We showed “The Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation” and ate a cake that read “Happy birthday, Cinque.” That’s the name he took for himself along the way after his comrades had already taken to calling him Shaka. I'd seen him called Cinque on the internet and that’s what his long-time supporters in New York City called him, too, when I met with them, but he signed his letters Shaka. So I wrote and asked him -- with some trepidation, I’ll admit now -- “Albert/Shaka/Cinque, just how many of you are there in that cell?” And he laughed and I was glad because I wanted him to be rational. I couldn’t believe that he would be, but I wanted it.

I became aware of the Angola 3 more than a year ago when Color of Change sent out a call for support because the Louisiana House Judiciary Committee was talking about reviewing the case. I jumped on the bandwagon: blogging, signing petitions, contacting the governor’s office -- the standard drill. Then, in July, Shaka's conviction was overturned. I posted a YouTube video of Richie Havens at Woodstock singing about Freedom. But he wasn’t released. And in October, another hearing didn’t release him either. And the state says it will appeal the Court’s decision anyway regardless. And Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell says he'll handle the case personally because Shaka's the most dangerous man in the world. And Amnesty International says that Shaka and Herman Wallace may have done more time in solitary confinement than anyone ever.

So we asked for a special visit and rather unexpectedly got permission. I hadn’t bothered to prepare myself emotionally for this possibility because I didn’t believe it would be allowed to happen. Even after it was approved, I didn’t believe it would happen. And all the way up there, I still did not believe I was actually going to see him. Back in the day, I sometimes drove four or five hundred miles only to have a visit be denied at the last minute, so I had no illusions. I wasn’t sure if it wouldn’t happen because he's him or because I’m me, but I wasn’t even excited because I didn’t want the crash at the gate when they gave me the word. I ate half of a muffin I had brought and drank most of a bottle of water on the last leg of the trip so my blood sugar wouldn’t dip and add to the likelihood of my losing my cool when they gave me the news.

They let me park without problem. Even that surprised me, I was so convinced that this was all a cruel joke. I went into the reception area, feeling new-girl-conspicuous, and after being instructed to stand in a booth that blew my hair around, I stumbled through the process at the counter. They asked for Shaka's prison number, which I guessed wrong and then right, receiving a broad grin from the woman behind the desk, as if I had just scored well on a pop quiz, the reward for which would be a visit with the matching prisoner. Then, without comment, she handed me a form reading “special visit -- non-contact,” and I was patted down, divested of my lip gloss, sent through a metal detector, and escorted across the street to the close custody building.

Waiting in the office to be further processed and taken upstairs, I watched an African-American woman officer eating watermelon while a boom box blared, “God’s got somebody for you!” The officer didn’t seem to be listening to the program, so I gathered it was like really loud background music, but I couldn’t help noticing that lying next to the boom box was a magazine wrapped in plastic, featuring a Black woman on the cover grinning back over her shoulder while her scantily clad derriere glistened with sweat. I tried not to look over-attentive, but honestly, it was a pretty surreal scene.

Guards came and went, bantering lightly with each other. And eventually I was taken upstairs and deposited in a cheerless room with seven cubicle spaces in front of seven thick screens and there was only one folding chair anywhere to be seen. I claimed it immediately, though ultimately I left at the end of the day, priding myself on having not sat in it for even one minute. Each cubicle had a stainless steel shelf on either side of the screen. I assume this was to rest your elbows or your food on while you were visiting, but it was obvious that sitting in the chair would put the shelf at approximately chin height, leaving the visit to be conducted between two talking heads. So Shaka and I either stood or perched on the steel shelves, barely inches apart despite the best efforts of the Powers-That-Be.

It was a good thirty to forty minutes between the time I pulled up in the parking lot and the moment Shaka entered the tiny room on the other side of the screen. He came through the door in hand cuffs and leg irons and after the cuffs (only) were removed and the door behind him closed soundly, he grinned and slapped his palms flat against the metal mesh and I responded by matching his palms with my own. And it was on.

Five hours and forty minutes later, the guard opened the door on my side of the room and said simply, “All right, ma’am. That’s it.” And after replacing our palms on the screen once more, we turned and walked away without looking back. And the visit was behind us. I had just met a bona fide hero, a man who shakes his head woefully over the responsibility that accompanies receiving twenty-five letters a day, a man who buys other prisoners underwear or shower shoes when they no longer have resources or connections to do so themselves, a man who teaches other men to read through the bars of his six by eight foot cell while rivulets of sweat run down his face onto the letter he’s trying to answer, the most dangerous man in the world.

I know that the “bona fide hero” line is going to make him wince. He's probably as humble as anyone I’ve ever met. “I don’t see myself as others see me,” he says. And I’m sure not. Nevertheless, the letters remind him daily how he appears to the rest of the world. They reach out to him in respect and love, feeding his spirit, holding up a mirror in front of a man who has done thirty-seven years in solitary confinement for being a Black Panther, populating the universe he has created in the iron house he calls home.

He works out six days a week, lives on French fries (not a great idea for a man on heavy-duty medications for hypertension), and prefers to wear sweatshirts when he's out of his cell. He speaks with the richest Black Louisiana accent I’ve heard yet in the two years since I moved here. And his conversations move easily from describing how the GOP should have handled Sarah Palin to advising on the best way to deal with being deposed by a lawyer to discussing a Sister Souljah book with the skill of a trained reviewer. He is equally adept at sharing deeply reflective personal insights or snapping unpredicted jokes. And his class analysis is absolutely elegant. He marveled at our spirited dialogue -- between a prisoner and a professor -- but I assured him that he was driving the conversation; I was hanging on for dear life just to keep up.

When I once asked him how he's maintained his sanity, he replied simply, "It is what it is." And that's what being rooted in stone cold reality looks like. That's what willingness to keep hoping looks like when there's been absolute proof that there is no reason to hope. That's why Albert "Shaka" "Cinque" Woodfox and Herman "Hooks" Wallace have visitors from all over the world and endless letters and telephone calls, why the world has beaten a path to their cells, why I spent the day at the Louisiana State Prison yesterday, and why Shaka and Hooks will come out of the hell holes in which they are presently trapped to walk as free men on the face of the Earth that has sustained them in their most desperate hours.

I wrote Shaka at one point that the reason the Attorney General called him the most dangerous man in the world is that if Shaka had adequately communicated at any point that he was ready to disavow Black self-determination and accept White Supremacy as appropriate and reasonable, he would have been released. But he did not. Consequently, he -- and Wallace -- have, for all practical purposes, made a daily decision to do thirty-seven years in solitary confinement voluntarily. That gives them the power and this frightens the be-jeezus out of White men like Attorney General Caldwell and Warden Cain, who still believe that there is only one kind of power -- brute force. Scared or not scared, however, Caldwell and Cain have already lost the battle because they are recognized far and wide as the misguided monsters they are and they will carry the knowledge and the repercussions of the evil they are perpetrating even as I write to their woebegotten, isolated graves.

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For more information on the case, you might want to check out National Public Radio's series, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

And The Students Become The Teacher

It's been a tough week or so. I didn't get nearly enough sleep for one thing. And there's been rather a lot of drama related to the re-opened school de-segregation case as folks on our side have been head-butting senselessly. I just love when that happens. Not.

At least I finally finished my statement for the court on the effects of internalized oppression on children of color "educated" in the segregated school system in this parish. Then, I spent all day Tuesday watching the melodrama that is the court itself. On Wednesday, I started teaching a new course. And after class, while discussing Robert King's book on his life as one of the Angola 3 with a young man I had loaned it to, another young Black man I've been working with over the past eighteen months dropped by to invite me to a spoken word event he was performing in that night.

Now, understand that this man was not doing spoken word when we met. And he has struggled with his unfolding. But two months ago, he found his voice and he wanted to show me. So I went. And not only did he bring the house down, but he did it reflecting my teaching back to me. He took our conversations and turned them into an war cry about what Black people in the United States are up against today. He covered poverty and education and parenting and prison. (My favorite line was "Prison is Fort Knox and Black men are the gold...")

By the time he was finished, I was undone. And then the M.C. took the mic and told the beautiful young African-American audience that he wanted them all to give me props for what I had done to develop my student's mind so he could bring his poetry to the world.

And there I sat -- old, White, exhausted and grinning -- grateful to have the opportunity to be of service, grateful to be changing the world by feeding its children, grateful to be embraced and understood and appreciated for what is utter joy to me.

When he came into my office Thursday to give me the back story -- he's known as Giraffe on the spoken word circuit and if you pay attention, I suspect you'll come across him at some point sooner than later -- he turned me onto Sunni Patterson, another fine young African-American spoken word poet from New Orleans. So even though I don't have time or energy right this minute to make up for my lack of blogging lately, I'm posting this video as an offer of apology.


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NOTE: The graphic featured at the top of this post was skanked from the blog of another former student of mine, Omar, who left to write for and be the lead singer for Molotov Compromise. Omar has a new solo cd out, too, which you can check out (and buy) on his blog and his MySpace site.