Live From Planet Earth

2017-05-01T07:58:00.001-04:00

Live From Planet Earth features stories and products of self-sustaining tropical organic beings as meditation and inspiration, both for others returning to the lifestyle (livity) of the land and also for the merely curious. Please link us with any such Afro/Indigenous that you know or meet whom we may visit. Give thanks, bless up.

Brian Hughes Kasoro // Director
//scripts at liberatormagazine.com
//youtube.com/livefromplanetearth

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

2017-05-01T07:55:00.001-04:00

2017-04-27T00:13:00.000-04:00

2017-04-27T00:01:00.000-04:00

2017-04-25T16:37:00.001-04:00

2017-04-25T14:06:00.000-04:00

2017-04-23T15:45:00.000-04:00

2017-04-20T00:28:00.000-04:00

The Last Generation of Black People

2016-12-20T03:42:00.000-05:00

2012, New York: The Liberator Magazine.
ISBN 9780991108404
» Artbook @ Museum of Modern Art PS1
» McNally Jackson
» The Strand
» Quimby's
» Ancestry Books
» PanAfrican Connection

Table Of Contents:
» Editor's Note
(by Brian Hughes Kasoro / Minneapolis, MN:USA)

» For the Sake of Sanity
(by Stephanie Joy Tisdale / Philadelphia, PA:USA)

» Realities We Otherwise Would Never Know
(by Brian Hughes Kasoro / Brooklyn, NY:USA)

» On Aesthetic Reasoning In Africana Studies
(by Josh Myers / Philadelphia, PA:USA)

» The Case of Hip-Hop
(by Michael J. Wilson / Brooklyn, NY:USA)

» Outsider Music: Willis Earl Beal and the Real Blues
(by Brian Kupillas / Fayatteville, AR:USA)

» I'm in the Band
(by Nira Minniefield / Houston, TX:USA)

» Nat Turner: God's Instrument of Vengeance
(by Vagabond Beaumont / New Rochelle, NY:USA)

» Reflections on African (American) Adulthood in an Object Permanence Culture
(by Adisa Ajamu / Long Beach, CA:USA)

» The Children of Injustice (book excerpt)
(by Ruth Auguste / Vancouver: Canada)

» (art) Rap Music and Gold Teeth
(by Fletcher Williams / New York, NY:USA)

» The Percussive Approach
(by Sherese Francis / Hollis, NY:USA)

» The Last Mask: An Ekphrasis of Papua's Masquerade Kamoro
(by Mia R. Keeys / Jakarta: Indonesia)

» "Dude, you're the Whitest Black man I've ever met."
(by Khaya Maseko / Johannesburg: South Africa)

» The Rise and Inevitable Liberation of the Black Creative Class
(by Robert Bland / Hyattsville, MD:USA)

» Beautyful Radiant Things
(by Taryn Jeanie Mackay / Johannesburg: South Africa)

» Notes from the Nobodies
(by Jessica Porter and Jeanette E. Toomer / Brooklyn, NY:USA)

» A Prince Remembers A King Named Oliver In Exile
(by Shawn Chandler Bingham / Tampa, FL:USA)

» Speaking Truth to Perceived Power
(by Vanessa May / Los Angeles, CA:USA)

» I Bet You Thought Her Life Was About You (Ms. Lauryn Hill)
(by Krystal Nylle Roberts / Atlanta, GA:USA)

» Heathen Songs of the Natives
(by Charles Nhamo Rupare / Johannesburg, South Africa)

» Afro-America at the Crossroads: Ritual Ethnogenesis
(by Shayla Monroe / Memphis, TN:USA)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: scripts@liberatormagazine.com

The Last Generation of Black People

The opening words of The Liberator Magazine’s first book release fittingly belong to historian Dr. John Henrik Clarke: “A people’s name should link them to land, history, and culture. ‘Black’ tells you how you look, but not who you are.”

So begins The Last Generation of Black People (The Liberator Magazine LLC, 2012) — a biographic, ethnographic compilation of critical research in consciousness and culture that marks more than a decade of independent print journal publishing. The theme and namesake were born out of a recognition that a mutation had occurred; from the multi-generational experiences bracketed by post-slavery reconstruction and the crack epidemic of the 80s, into fully-commercialized notions of “Blackness.” At this pivotal juncture, the generation of the post-crack era could either go the way of an historically-amnesic Blackness or embrace the potential for a generational rebirth and time-signature realignment with African land, history, and culture.

“In order to proceed confidently with the work of remaking lost connections in our collective consciousness there ought to be sober acceptance, as a whole, however long it takes, of both what we are and what we are not,” said publisher Brian Kasoro. “It follows that it may be a good thing to cap an era of rhetorical confusion.”

The Last Generation of Black People is 138 compact and perfect-bound pages with a matte full-color finish, adorned with commissioned double-cover artwork, reprinted on limited edition t-shirts.

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

Africana Study Abroad Alliance (ASAA)

2016-12-20T03:41:00.000-05:00

Read the report at AfricanaStudyAbroad.org

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

Realities We Otherwise Would Never Know / Beyond Ideology

2016-12-20T03:40:00.000-05:00

lib.mg exclusive feature
Brian Hughes Kasoro {Brooklyn, New York}

"You know what I wanted to be? I wanted to be Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. That was my dream. I blue sky'ed it like crazy. I dreamed and dreamed. And while I was dreaming, I was living in my sister's basement. Dreamers often end up living in the basements of relatives, FYI. ... And I thought, I could dream about being Toni Morrison, or I could do."
- Shonda Rhimes

"The old models either are outmoded or didn't work in the first place. While I give all praises due to the spirits of Coretta and Sister Betty, I can't create my activist-self in their image 'cause it ain't me. Furthermore, I am representative of the new Black feminism, and we reject the notion that women can only be defined in two ways: saint or whore. My crew can't go for that, un-unh, no can do. Real feminism is not negated by a passion for high heels, lip gloss and lace, nor is is it rendered void because a woman may chief, swear, drink or fuck. And yes, you can be vigilant against misogyny and still recognize that all your sisters ain't worthy of the title. So here's to the RBG's: the Real Black and Brown girls who are mighty and motherly, sexy and sisterly, vigilant and but not necessarily virginal. We party, and we have the right to fight. And most importantly, we are HUMAN: no longer 'impervious to pain'-Superwomen, prone to mistakes, and always growing and learning. The little boys will cry and clutch at their flaccid manhood, trying to exert some sort of non-existent patriarchal power. The little girls will hate and continue to be the sort of woman that only a little boy could 'love.'"
- SisterToldja / Jamilah Lemieux

"There is a general consensus in the Africana community that the feminist movement, by and large, is the White woman's movement for two reason. First, the Africana woman does not see the man as her primary enemy as does the White feminist, who is carrying out an age-old battle with her White male counterpart for subjugating her as his property. Africana men have never had the same institutionalized power to oppress Africana women as White men have had to oppress White women."
- Clenora F. Hudson-Weems {a prominent Africana Womanism intellectual relegated to the 'ideology' section in the 'Womanism' Wikipedia entry, where it is listed as a subsection of Feminism}

"Let's do things the way they used to do them so that things may turn out the way they used to turn out."
- Obafemi Origunwa

...
Printed article begins here:

"We cannot see the wind, but we can both hear and see what it does. What some call intuition, others would call the eyes and ears of the heart. In real ways, only when we experience the Universe with our hearts as well as with our minds will our ears hear, our eyes see, realities we otherwise would never know."*

My dear love,

I do not support Feminism. Yet, I have noticed enough to call it a trend that many intellectual-types have pledged ideological allegiance today. I do not consider myself enlightened. I am not a romantic. At every turn ideology seems to me a reactionary solution. Imbalance--the absence of peaceful understanding--between man and woman, however, is one of the most important issues of our time.

In thinking about this imbalance, I think about struggle, war, and justice, as these remain major considerations. Forced to take war for granted today, I wonder about how people judge whether or not the winner of war deserves the result. How do people determine the winner's victory to be just? Outside of ideology, the best rational argument is simply "survival of the fittest," that cliche bromide used to describe Charles Darwin's biological theory of natural selection. If, by and large, men are physically stronger than women and have assumed this power over their counterparts in the physical world, then I suppose one could question whether the "fittest" are not simply surviving according to their natural abilities in this moment--those forms that are capable of outdoing others deserve to outdo others. Are we required to take war for granted for all time though? I'm aware that many Western philosophers shun what they call essentialist thought, or the imagining of a Utopian world where the problems of today do not affect our essential knowledge. Yet, for the oppressed--victims of the empirical knowledge that constructed scientific racism--discernment regarding what affects and transforms knowledge will always be an essential mechanism of existence. In this light, I conclude that justice cannot exist in war.

I'm not really tryna make an argument of it here, my dear.

I want for you to know of balance, first and foremost; as my father and my mother taught me. We come to know righteousness and unrighteousness in compliment, as with light and darkness, and love and hate. One cannot even take love for granted in the natural world, so it should be cherished. Indeed, one can always take balance as granted, even when delayed, because it is absolutely necessary for life at its most basic, technical level. The "change" that Octavia Butler wrote about "shaping" is the continuous process of balancing--finding peaceful understanding.

"All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change..."

The epic story of our nature begins with the ingenuity that is original creation--as our original nurturer, nature is also our original teacher. It continues with the brilliance of re/connecting to original creation through successive original creations.

...
We see dominance in nature. So, are we surprised when we see it in human social structures? Certainly, we are not the only sociable beings on Earth. Yet, dominance in nature is a balancing act alongside subordinate instances. Hegemony--imperial dominance--seeks permanent justification in the face of balance and change. I ask, not how you justify becoming or being the fittest but rather, what do you wish to be fit to do, and why?; is it the right thing for the right reason?; can you do it and be doing to others as you would have them do to you? And is ideology necessary then, which causes some to believe that it is just and right to dogmatically reject dominance?

My dear, do you find an ongoing, interchangeable symbiosis between dominance and subordination in your life? If so, are they dynamic concepts that dance their way around questions of static victory in your mind, to lay your focus on the oneness in mechanisms of change and balance?

...
In a 2011 lecture titled "Reconceptualizing the Gender of Africana Women," Dr. Valethia Watkins-Beatty defined Feminism as "the study of gender as pathology, the study of pathological models of gender."

"... if the only thing that exists is pathology, then your interpretive framework does not allow you to account for, nor to see, positive health constructions of gender... it is a conception of gender that infuses permanent pathology in the study of gender, so there is no room for the construction of healthy gender relationships.

Can you analyze male-domination sexism without feminism? ... Those who cannot make that separation, then that tells you something about that analytical framework ... Our gender stories are not interchangeable.

Deborah Gray White in the film "Slavery and the Making of America" ... says that slavery demanded a different kind of womanhood from black women. It demanded that black women be self-reliant, that they have strength, that they show intelligence, that they be resourceful, that they be spiritually powerful, that they become warriors in order to survive, that black women would not have survived with the cultural norm of being weak, of being submissive, of being passive, of being less capable, or seeing themselves in that way. But that norm that we think is a norm is not a universal norm, it is a very specific norm.

My point would be that, although slavery demanded a different kind of womanhood, slavery did not create or produce that different kind of womanhood, that womanhood preceded slavery. So we have a different project. What Feminism is trying to do is bring into existence something they said never existed before, and that is the notion of powerful women, strong women, women in leadership, et cetera and so on. That is not our project. Our project is not bringing something new into existence, it is reestablishing, reconnecting, and returning to.

... When we have powerful women doing powerful things they are not defying gender norms, they are not transcending gender norms, they are living up to the gender expectations that African people have nurtured and groomed."

God bless his soul, when African American "anti-sexist activist" and filmmaker Byron Hurt (Beyond Beats and Rhymes, 2006) declares, "I am a male feminist," I instantly have a sense of his familiar. It literally comes to me in a flash. I sense it, he's about to share the pain and imbalance he witnessed in adult relationships as a child. He explains his ideological allegiance with testimony of his father's aggressive behavior toward his mother. He says he bears witness to "feminism giving women a voice" and "clearing the way for men to free themselves from the stranglehold of traditional masculinity."

"By the time my father died from cancer in 2007, he was proudly sporting the baseball cap around town that I had given him that read, 'End Violence Against Women'. Who says men can't be feminists?'"

Hurt never actually demonstrates that his father adopted ideological Feminism. He simply says that his father, "aged ... mellowed, and stopped being so argumentative and verbally abusive" toward his mother, and that his mother, "grew to assert herself more whenever they disagreed." Nevertheless, he co-opts his father's personal narrative of intimate maturation into the umbrella of ideological Feminism. It is tempting for children to idolize, idealize, and compact testimony--especially that of our parents--into ideology. It can often lead to disappointment and disillusionment, though, for those other than the most committed ideologues. Keep in mind that ideological Feminism and feminists are two terms with some distinctions between them. As Dr. Oyeronke Oyewumi notes, "the adjective feminist has a broader reach in that it need not be confined by history; in fact it describes a range of behaviour indicating female agency and self-determination." The problem here is that Hurt conflates the two in an attempt to recruit African Americans to Feminism, which "usually refers to a historically recent European and American social movement founded to struggle for female equality" (Oyewumi). In fact, according to Hurt, his father never claimed to be anything other than a man who changed through a transformational process and "grew" toward balance, publicly supporting ending violence against women.

...
As a child, my black African mother was honest with me in explaining that my parents were together because everyday, on balance, they wanted to be. They reunited when I was about 9 years old after spending almost a decade apart becoming more in tune with their essential selves. Their understanding relating to agency and intention doesn't guarantee permanent harmony but by maintaining a functional, ongoing conversation around the processes of change and balancing, they actively cultivate honest peace. They have demonstrated for me that "love" is malleable. Although it maintains a general form, it is defined uniquely across specific relationships. I've learned that what is most important to a relationship is to define and agree on a love, and definition cannot be a one-sided affair. This is why simply "loving God" just won't do in many spiritual practices; one must know God to love God, one must know self to love anyone, one must love someone to develop personal relationships, and one must develop a personal relationship with God to know God. In other words, the art of relating is a non-ideological human function.

Of the myriad factors that prevent men and women from achieving balance, our social structure--hegemonic; white supremacist; American; European--is a dominant one that we are forced to cope with incessantly. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno said in 1944 that "culture today is infecting everything with sameness." Looney Tunes has long been fully integrated into what Horkheimer and Adorno named the "culture industry." Drama is the order of our day in ways more intimate and massive than ever. We experience a desperate need to survive; indifference, disregard and negligence toward each other; as well as ignorance and fear of each other, while the dominant cultural discourse suffers amnesia regarding us, virtually unable to offer any honest constructive instruction. We're given a weak choice between the typical preserved and the newly manufactured symbols of reactionary hope. In the 21st century, our contradictory twoness, which has resulted as a consequence of the social construction of race, remains in the minds of many. Yet, from within this mess, balance between men and women must come to be known or re-known.

Today the question of freedom from this order is primarily a psychological one and for us the normalization of resistance to psychological imbalance is most vital. The act of balancing begins first and foremost in minds and attitudes. While it ought not end there, it is under no uncertain terms the very first step. From within an amnesic social order the question becomes how have we--thus, how do we--escape the hypnagogic constructions of the administered society?

...
Ideology has often been used as a supplemental catalyst toward correcting imbalance--as Dr. Cedric Robinson has shown us with his study of the ideological communist experiments of W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, and C.L.R. James in his book Black Marxism (University of North Carolina Press, 2000)--but it often falls short. We now know that adopting alien, dogmatic ways of knowing--and the oft-hidden historical legacies that accompany them--for the sake of empowerment can confuse and damage our own sociocultural relations. As Dr. Oyewumi illustrates:

"Feminism is primarily concerned with the liberation of women. Given the aforementioned historical occurrences and the fact that in many African societies the category 'woman' cannot be isolated raises the question of the relevance and value of Western feminism.... In its various guises and disguises, feminism continues to be the most avid manufacturer of gender consciousness and gender categories, inevitably at the expense of local categories such as ethnicity, seniority, race, and generation that may be more locally salient

... sisterhood makes sense ... within the social organization of the white American nuclear family and the ideologies that flowed from it. Gender distinctions are fundamental to the institutions of Western culture on which the white American family is based, and the family as an institution is at the cutting edge of gender attribution and manufacture...

The gender-based division of power in the nuclear family permanently cast the mother in the powerless role of a victim...

... In the black community, 'sister' does not imply a desire for a female exclusive community (of interests), which is precisely what is at its base in white feminism.

... it is significant that for many of the enslaved Africans, gender was not coded linguistically in their original languages. Indeed the kinship categories 'brother' and 'sister' do not exist in Yoruba, Igbo, Efik, Wolof, Songhoi, Benin, Manding and Fulani to name some of the West African languages and nationalities from which many black Americans originated.

... The comparable category in sentiment in many West African cultures to the concept of 'sister' in Western culture--that is, sister as sibling who has a common interest because of shared experience and social location and whose love and loyalty are supposed to be unconditional--is a category that literally translates as 'my mother's child/ren.' In Yoruba it is 'omoya.' The following is a sample of the term in some West African languages: 'Nwanne' (Igbo), 'Omwiyemwen' (Benin), 'Doo mi ndey' (Wolof), 'N ba den' (Bamana, 'Gna'izo' (Songhoi-Hombori), 'Eyen-eka' (Efik), 'Badenya' (Manding), 'Biddo yaya'm' (Fulani).

... To put it crudely, in the traditional Yoruba household, the first thing you need to know is not whether you are a boy or a girl but who are your 'omoya'-siblings with whom you share the same mother.

... The experience of the mother's womb is not gendered--it carries both male and female babies; therefore the social grouping of 'omoya' does not anticipate any gender commonality amongst its members, and the elaboration of their emotional closeness does not rest on it. Sisterhood, in contrast, is defined solely by gender commonality and the anticipated similarity in social experience as a result of having what Western culture designates as the inferior body-type--the female one.

What emerges from such African household and family organization is the importance of motherhood, the fact that mother-derived ties are the most culturally significant, and that mothers have agency and power. Fundamentally, motherhood is not usually constructed in relation to or in opposition to fatherhood; it is conceived in its own right. Mothers are perceived as especially powerful--literally and mystically, in regard to the well being of the child. They are therefore the pivot around which family life is structured and the child's life rotates.

... In African societies, the question of organizing to attain a political goal speaks to the issue of forming political alliances, and not sisterhood, since group identity is constituted socially and is not based on any qualities of shared anatomy popularly called gender. Consequently, it would be impractical and counterproductive to approach community building and the struggle for a just society as projects constituted on the bases of an exclusive sisterhood of the body. Coalition politics seems to be the practical, age-old system of furthering group interest only, of course, if a group has identified a common interest. Women do not constitute such a group unambiguously or continuously. In the oft-repeated, eloquent words of Bernice Reagon, a 'coalition is not a home.' So if a coalition is not home, why are we looking for sisters within it." (Oyewumi).

To these ways of knowing from African societies, mothers and children unambiguously or continuously constitute groups with common interests, but women alone do not. Here, what need is there for an alternative empire of balance to be created from a blank slate in order to save us from an empire of imbalance? Here, it is not about there being a fundamental problem with male or female dominance. Ideology falls short because although the status quo is a site of mutual resistance, the actual process of balancing our relations is largely circumstantial and intimate to those experiencing a given reality and informed by a given cultural genealogy. Here, a study of just one African widely shared language concept orients our values and aesthetics. Balance is cultivated from the bottom up like this; from the inside out. It requires honesty and openness with self and any counterpart. While it may be unfortunate that today it's exceptional to have the type of sustained, brave honesty and openness required for good speech, it is nevertheless still true that honesty with ourselves enables our capacities for love. I can see no sustainable ideological shortcuts or cohorts.

The impetus for an African future has historically been the vision of the reawakening of the African mind and the re/birth of African civilization. It is by force and the will to survive that African-descended people came to react to white privilege at all. Liberal Studies could not contain an African future and only the focus on remembering is ultimately a true coming forth of a new dawn. For many of us, honesty and openness means reconciling the reality that we feel as if we don't know who we are. Yet, straightforward insights into the African past, like those of Drs. Watkins-Beatty and Oyewumi, orient us and link us to an intergenerational conversation, which speaks back to us through our hearts and minds.

...
Many of black Feminism's critiques of patriarchy contain at least some modicum of diatribe against emotionally imbalanced "hypermasculinity," rightfully so. But today, the Liberal view essentially seeks a blank slate from which to create a new man. Instead, given a amnesic circumstance and cultural genealogy, the focus should be placed on recovering memory, lost both violently and through distraction, and the healing of the dark and empty spaces. Otherwise, we may enter a war that may never be won, finding ourselves stuck in a never-ending quagmire. African-descended/black women pledging allegiance to a Feminism that shares the genealogy of the status quo only serves most immediately to divide them from many of their men who see no need for ideology in order to honestly seek peaceful understanding in comradeship. Suffering and hate distract and consume us precisely with the symptoms of imbalance. And while perpetrated imbalances shouldn't be ignored, they should rarely dominate the journey to creating and recreating health and balance. The "hater" period is valuable but only insomuch as it informs our subsequent creative action.

As we resist having conversations in our heads and insist on engaging each other in faith, discarding ideology becomes increasingly practical; it can be an instigator that encourages counterparts to interpret critique as judgement. Our society of spectacle maintains a blurred fine line between the two, sensationally equating one with the other. But, as in therapeutic spaces where speech is constructed sensitively and open-ended, we ought to work on constructing our conversations in frames that are conducive to reaching each other. Both giver and receiver should be mindful of giving and receiving criticism in the spirit of peaceful understanding. Our options for relating are education and war. Even if at times we must war for a more just, more balanced survival, should we not generally prioritize? Even the pursuit of justice requires a future and if the war around this persistent imbalance destroys the fabric of our relations in the name of justice, for us justice itself will have nowhere to exist.

My dear, I only see true hope in education.

The recovery of memory is escape from an amnesic social order. The self who engages in the cultivation of balance becomes a site of balancing regardless of where or when she begins. From sites of intimate balancing, through authentic exchange, men, women, and families can share similarities, differences, and synergies. Authentic exchange involves the free sharing of strategy, ideas, tactics, and critique--not with the competitive goal of establishing or imposing a universal, rather for the purpose of constantly growing and improving our own intimate concepts of balance. Our senses develop and sharpen. Imbalance lurking, we consistently pursue and practice balance through action and speech rooted in intimate present demands. Despite the loud cries of our modern liberalisms, our instinctual, intuitive goal seems most correct: know ourselves, find ourselves around others who are also in the act, communicate honestly about our passionate imperfect pursuits of balance**, and either do or do not*** find the comforts, compassions, and passions in companionship that allow us to learn and journey with our counterparts. No matter how hard you try, you can only know when you know. Mom always said, "there will be incompatibilities that are worth your energy and ones that aren't." This too is a part of peaceful understanding and authentic exchange. Our most formidable creative challenge is in practicing the art of relating in order to maintain a real, constant conversation with each other. Some seek ebb and flow through fairness in the representation of competing ideologies, but this is a different project. Wherever and whenever our hearts and minds remember that which is hidden we are where we ought to be. Imagine the rise of generations armed with peaceful understanding of themselves across the three dimensions of time and of the social order that made them two--decidedly operating not from a twoness, neither confused nor amnesic, but from a oneness aware that it was made two. These generations know that ours is the perpetual movement, always in relation to each other and seeking solvency; that each act of relation is an original creation.

Footnotes
*From a note my father sent to me.

**In a friendly, laid back survey of five men on this topic of relating, I learned that their most common worry was the ability of their counterparts to balance confident self-improvement with honest and considerate communication. They took it for granted that they deserve nothing that they do not work toward themselves; "If I want the Jedi I need to get busy in the dojo." These young men--from major cities in the east, midwest, and west--worried: about the lack of cultural forums for self-improvement; about women's "Chi flow;" about how women reconcile "emotional trauma related to physical attraction;" about women who "worry" often; about women who are "controlling;" about women who "would rather have collective misery than individual happiness;" about "emotional manipulation" and being "tricked" or "forced;" about women who do not acknowledge emotional shifts and lack consistency in communicating thoughts and feelings. They joked with a serious air: about "voluptuousness," "oral sex," "physical fitness," "foreplay," "cockblocking," "breakfast with no strings attached," and their discourses of desire. They wished: for mutual consideration and skill, but also for intellectual exchange; for a partner with the ability to enjoy the present moment, and for family; for negotiation over manipulation, and the mutual freedom to dissolve unfollowed contracts; to not be viewed as saviors. And, they imagined: the advice they'd give their daughters one day about accepting and acknowledging weaknesses and ineffectiveness alongside agency and power.

***Even in putting ourselves in the open--naturally, non-ideologically, with faith--we may still find our connections strained or severed. Such organic, non-ideological disconnects are dynamic though, and it is at least clearly possible to regrow them in new context at any point.

Notes
Hilliard, Asa G. "The State of African Education" (Plenary Presentation). American Education Research Association Commission on Research in Black Education, New Orleans, LA. 2000.

Horkheimer, Max & Adorno, Theodor W. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." 1944.

Hurt, Byron. "Why I Am a Male Feminist." TheRoot.com, Mar. 2011.

Oyewumi, Oyeronke. "Ties that (Un)Bind: Feminism, Sisterhood and Other Foreign Relations." JENDA: Journal of Culture and African Women Studies, Vol. 1 No. 1, 2001.

Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Univ of North Carolina Press, 1983.

Slaughter, Anne-Marie. "Why Women Still Can’t Have It All." The Atlantic, Jul./Aug. 2012.

Watkins-Beatty, Valethia. "Reconceptualizing the Gender of Africana Women" (Lecture). Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization, Washington, D.C. 2011. (link)

Related
"Africans Only People In Antiquity Who Shared Male & Female Leadership" / Askia Toure (Part 1) exclusive interview with The Liberator Magazine

"The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings" / Masanobu Fukuoka on Do Nothing Farming

Kasoro, B. H. (2012). Realities We Otherwise Would Never Know. The Last Generation Of Black People. New York: The Liberator Magazine.

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

Malidoma Patrice Somé / Messenger to a Lost Generation

2016-12-18T08:50:00.000-05:00

No lengthy introduction is necessary here. Author of 3 books: Of Water and the Spirit; Healing Wisdom of Africa; Ritual: Power, Healing and Community, as well as several audiobooks, Malidoma is the truth, simple and plain.

Liberator: In "Of Water and the Spirit" you say, "It seems obvious to me that as soon as one culture begins to talk about 'preservation' it means that it has already turned the other culture into an endangered species"... How do you feel about the current trend of American celebrities gaining an "interest" in Africa's development like Madonna adopting a child from Malawi; Jay-Z building a well, Oprah's school and the Live-8 campaign.?

Malidoma Patrice Some: Too little too late. Still this is a commendable preservationist initiative. The sadness comes from knowing that the continent has been going down for centuries with little or no intervention of this nature even conceivable. I am left wondering how much of such initiative is self gratifying and how much reflects a deep calling to restore dignity to the continent. If, in "gifting" Africa, something is not accepted from Africa, in return, then on some level, it is a more gentle visit from colonialism; that is, if Africa is seen only as needy, without something to offer in return, then the benefactors are coming with the mindset of needing to "rescue" the continent from itself. I would feel excitement if I knew that the westerners, so generous with financial support, had also sought out an appointment with a diviner, to seek the support of the ancestors in their endeavors.

Liberator: You set out to study and fulfill your elder's wishes at a young age. Now an elder, what do you suggest should be the biggest responsibility of today's younger generation? What are ways that a culture can perhaps restore relationships between the young and old, so that more may be shared across generations?

Malidoma: Today's younger generation should be aware that their predecessors did very little to prepare the way for them to live a life that is purposeful and gift oriented. It is the daunting task of the youth to not only find their way through a maze of cultural confusion, but to also live in such a manner that they will be the first true generation of elders-in-training to mentor those who follow them. This will begin to happen as they have the courage to listen and to trust the voice within that says that there is better than what is shown. The young people will need to protect their spirits from being misdirected by the culture of consumption and to understand their frustration and anger as not theirs, but that of a culture that has already succumbed to the seduction of consumerism; this initiative will preserve their integrity and provide fertile ground in which true wisdom can have a chance of surviving and growing into maturity. To restore relationship between young and old, the old must stop behaving toward the young as if they have it all under control. The old must know that the young are not dumb and can see right through most masquerades. For the young and the old to relate to each other, hierarchy must be removed.

Liberator: What are the benefits of a male initiation process into manhood and do you think it is a necessary aspect of human societies?

Malidoma: To the extent that initiation merges the self with gift and purpose, one of the greatest benefits is a life that is aware and committed to delivering the gift it came to give, that was the binding element in agreeing to come into this world. Society will greatly benefit if its people understand that they are a part of it because they have a gift to give to each other, a purpose to fulfill. Initiation, therefore, allows society to by filled by men (and women), not by large children. Initiation also allows the individuals, as well as the community, to tap into the spiritual and energetic resources which are readily available, though not so easily accessed by the uninitiated person.

Liberator: You talk about homosexuality in "Of Water and the Spirit" when you were at the boys school and the priest were abusing children and children abusing each other, what are your feelings today on that?

Malidoma: It is sad to use the umbrella of an institution to legitimize abuse, yet abuse cloaks itself in a large garment of secrecy and legitimacy in order to survive and proliferate. But the healing which came later from knowing that I have never been alone, and that almighty Catholicism is not as powerful as it insists on convincing society that it is, has gone a long way to salve the wounds. That, plus the restorative power given to me by initiation and the healing power of gift and purpose contributed to calming my feelings. There is no resentment in my heart, though I have no tolerance for anyone who directly or indirectly condones or practices abuse. It is subhuman to harvest reward from the pain of another human, and it is no more human to remain silent in the awareness of this widespread cultural disease.

Liberator: How do you feel we, in the West, can most effectively assist the widows and children of AIDS/diamond mine victims?

Malidoma: First, follow what spirit tells you in your heart. Listen to the voice of wisdom telling you that these widows and children are you and your children, also. You are looking at yourself. So the first thing is to learn how to pray for them and for the world. In this ritual prayer, it is good to inquire with spirit for guidance in doing what is right. Spirit will, in turn, inspire what needs be done with integrity. It may also be helpful to view these people as messengers about the dark side of living in ignorance and rejection of the reality that each of our actions, our thoughts, has an effect on the entire world. What is happening in Africa, and on the rest of the planet, is the tragic side of the "butterfly effect" that says the gentle flapping of the wings of a butterfly, in one place in the world, has a subtle effect on the weather in another place in the world. The examples of the victims and survivors of AIDS and the diamond "industry" are very powerful signposts on the road we are traveling; they are inviting us to consider how we live and what our priorities are.

Liberator: What do you feel is the significance of African culture today (politics and all) on the future of the world? How do you feel about African-Americans receiving west African VISAs and the possibility of dual citizenship?

Malidoma: There is some sense in which one can see the world as African and Africa as the world. There is no geographical place in this planet that has not been touched by the energy of the Continent. It might not be clear yet to everyone, but the time is coming when the wisdom of the continent will exercise an undeniable appeal in the face of an all out failure of modern wisdom. So those VISAs are an initial sign of something much bigger in the making. Besides, African American need to know that they have a major role in the future of the continent of their ancestors. It's time for a conscious return to root.

Liberator: What is your perspective on the western reaction to the supernatural and in your travels how do western people receive it?

Malidoma: The average westerner is fascinated by the supernatural. Yet, at the same time, he is afraid of it. My stories are captivating to most westerners as long as they remain fictitious. To most people, the thought of this being possible is too much to bear. At the same time, there are a few who relate deeply to the reality behind the supernatural and long to merge with it. It is the supernatural which resides in us that resonates with the stories that people find so attractive; it is the supernatural longing to be in conscious partnership with our "natural" selves. Our fear and separation from our true natures has created this imaginary divide between us and the supernatural; the indigenous person does not see a benefit in the separation, since we are all in training to join the supernatural at the end of this planetary lifetime.

Liberator: What is your spiritual perspective now, and has it changed any since you've traveled to America? Have you incorporated any other spiritual aspects since traveling the world?

Malidoma: My spiritual perspective at this time is sustained by a deep hope for the awakening of human consciousness. There are evidences of a growing sense of the spirit in the modern world. In the face of the failure of organized religions to feed the hungry souls, spirituality has become more and more attractive to people in search of a holistic way of being. This is not the way it was twenty years ago. Back then I had to prove everything I was saying. Today, people are more accepting. Everywhere I go to share rituals with people, I am aware of the existing tradition of the area. To the best of my ability I welcome these traditions since they all belong to the ancient wisdom.

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}
by Gayle Smaller, Opiyo Okeyo, Brian Hughes Kasoro
{The Liberator Magazine 6.3 #19, 2007}

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

Ayi Kwei Armah Speaks / Our Awakening {lecture/video}

2016-12-17T02:30:00.000-05:00

Ayi Kwei Armah has been featured here previously. If you cannot tell from the bubbling enthusiasm that attend each of these posts, we here at libmag are very impressed with his work. To date, Armah is the only African writer I have encountered who has not only addressed the need of African writers to control their own artistic production, but has also shown contemporaries and future generations that it can be done through his example. You can access the full account of his successful efforts in wrestling distributive control of his work away from Heinemann publishers in his memoirs, Eloquence of the Scribes.

Thanks to Youtube I stumbled upon this gem of a lecture he delivered during one of his visits to the States. I am unable to discern the date (or the location where) the lecture was given but the content is certainly timeless...

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

Thoughts on constantly achieving this mind-body practice / "More than being proud to be seen in novelty"

2016-12-15T16:00:00.000-05:00

In "Literacy: Reading the Word & the World", Paulo Freire recalls an adult literacy workbook in Sao Tome with pictures in it. Next to a picture of a group of young people swimming it is written, "It is by swimming that one learns to swim." Next to a picture of youths working it is written, "It is by working that one learns to work." And at the bottom of the page it is written, "By practicing we learn to practice better." A profound truth on the importance of mind-body practice for the simple sake of practicing living better.

But there's just something about the way Bird put it -- this fusion of jazz and mdw ntr -- that is so sweet:

“Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”
-Charlie Parker

And perhaps this is what we feel when we get tired of taking pictures of moments. If, however, we choose for our processes of literacy to never end, to always tell our stories humbly, then all of our texts and works (written words, spoken words, photos, videos, songs, performances) aren't just pictures of individual moments, but also snapshots of a collective eternity full of texts and works (stories) that guide us. We sort of learn that our stories are something valuable when we learn that others have preserved their stories, but we only know why stories are preserved when we come to know why our stories are worth preserving. Connection is necessary to that process. And faith is the result of such connection. Likewise, we know good listening because we've witnessed it and can testify to its power. The more we practice good listening, in faith, the more we find ourselves guided by the bodies of stories out there, the less we find ourselves guided by just our individual moments. More than being proud to be seen in novelty, we're honored -- at peace -- when we practice better, with the possibility of being a literal part of the classic; a shining measure of time in a timeless eternity.

Originally Posted 8/4/2011

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

To be an African Teacher

2016-12-14T10:01:00.000-05:00

To Be an African Teacher
by Asa G. Hilliard III in KMT, 1998

Ptahhotep instructs the ignorant in the knowledge and in the standards of good speech.

"A man teaches as he acts ... The wise person feeds the soul with what endures, so that it is happy with that person on earth. The wise is known by his good actions. The heart of the wise matches his or her tongue and his or her lips are straight when he or she speaks. The wise have eyes that are made to see and ears that are made to hear what will profit the offspring. The wise is a person who acts with MAAT [truth, justice, order, balance, harmony, righteousness and reciprocity] and is free of falsehood and disorder."
-Ptahotep, 2350 BCE / from, The Teachings of Ptahhotep (An African book and the oldest complete book in the world, written sometime between 3800 and 2350 BCE, 4750 years ago in KMT [pre-Islamic Black Egypt]).

Many of us do not know it, but African people have thousands of years of well-recorded deep thought and educational excellence. Teaching and the shaping of character is one of our great strengths.

In our world-view, our children are seen as divine gifts of our creator. Our children, their families, and the social and physical environment must be nurtured together. They must be nurtured in a way that is appropriate for a spiritual people, whose aim is to “build for eternity.”

What a pity that our communities have forgotten our “Jeles” and our “Jegnas,” our great master teachers. What a pity that we cannot readily recall the names of our greatest wise men and women. What a pity that we have come to be dependent on the conceptions and the leadership of others, some of whom not only do not have our interests at heart, they may even be our enemies. Some actually seek to control us for their own benefit through the process of mis-education.

Henry Berry of the Virginia House of Congress (during the antebellum period) said this about African people:

We have closed every avenue through which light may enter their minds. If we could only extinguish the capacity to see the light, our work would be complete.

So we have two primary reasons for knowing our heritage in education and child raising, or socialization.

» We have the best teaching and socialization practices ever developed anywhere in the world. These practices are still good for others and for us now.

» The primary tool of our oppression is mis-education by our oppressors. We must regain control over the primary education and socialization of our children.

Everywhere on the African continent, from the time of the Pharoahs in Ancient KMT (Egypt) to the modern era, great African civilizations in many river valleys, from the Nile to the Niger and to the Cape, were the center of the most sophisticated education and socialization systems ever developed on the Earth. Some of these civilizations developed in Africa long before other civilizations developed anywhere else in the world. The vestiges of these brilliant African creations can still be found in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora (see Finch, 1998).

We must consider our ancient traditions; traditions that made us respected teachers all over the globe. Our people must hold their heads high in all matters that pertain to teaching and learning.

African traditional teachers were and are people of high character, who have deep respect for ancestors and for community tradition. African teachers accept the calling and the obligation to facilitate inter-generational cultural transmission. African teachers also strive for the highest standards of achievement in emerging science and technology, areas that have always owed much to African scholarship.

Our genius is a part of the foundation of the revolution in knowledge in physics, mathematics, engineering and cyber-technology. Our genius is present at the deepest levels of the arts and humanities. All of this is in spite of overwhelming resistance to our learning by determined oppressors.

Therefore, for many African Teachers, tapping the genius and touching the spirit of African children is not a mystery. Not only can our children learn, they bring awesome intellects to the task. It is a routine manifestation of the African teacher’s excellence to nurture this genius. Along with teaching content, teaching good character and social bonds are our historical and contemporary strengths.

African teachers, worldwide, share in a cultural deep structure, based upon an African “world-view,” a shared way of looking at the world and the human experience. This world-view channels the focus of African teachers, providing them with appropriate patterns for thought and practice.

While it certainly is a practical necessity to get academic degrees and certification from non-African institutions, such teacher training and legitimation is really minimal preparation for African teachers. We go far beyond these things to reach our traditional higher standards, whether we work in public or in independent settings, whether we teach our own children or also teach the children of others.

For the African teacher, teaching is far more than a job or simply a way to make a living. Students are not “clients” or “customers.” Our students and parents are our family. No sacrifice is too great for that family, for its growth and enhancement.

What is special about an African teacher? It is the world-view and the practice that comes from our world-view, even when it is a dim memory.

A teacher of African ancestry who does not go beyond certification and degrees to know or to embrace an African world-view is not an African! Cultural excellence is the essence of an African teacher. In all of our learning, we must acquire an understanding of ourselves and our heritage. This does not mean that we cannot learn from others. However, we must be critical learners, rejecting anything that is anti-African.

African teaching functions must be embedded in and must serve an African community. Traditionally, African communities have been identified by a shared belief in several key elements. It is these elements that are the foundation for African teachers.

» The belief that the cosmos is alive.

» The belief that spirituality is at the center of our being.

» The belief that human society is a living spiritual part of the cosmos, not alien to it.

» The belief that our people have a divine purpose and destiny.

» The belief that each child is a “Living Sun,” a Divine gift of the Creator.

» The belief that, properly socialized, our children will experience stages of transformation, moving toward perfection, that is to be more like the creator (“mi Re” or like Ra, in the KMT language, meaning to try to live like God).

» Since the deep guiding principle of “living like God” is to follow MAAT (Truth, Justice, Righteousness, Order, Reciprocity, Harmony, Balance), then African teachers focus the curriculum on the real and the true, on what was, what is, and on what can be, in keeping with divine principles.

» African teachers place a premium on bringing their students into a knowledge of themselves and a knowledge of their communities. African people place great value on WHO each person is, on WHO the community is and the honored place that each member of the family occupies within the community.

» African teachers respect mastery, and seek through apprenticeship to learn from true masters, masters who are valued agents of the African community, who are steeped in the deep thought and behavior of the community, who exhibit an abiding unshakable primary loyalty to the community and who are in constant communication with the wise elders of the community.

» African teachers recognize the genius and the divinity of each of our children, speaking to and teaching to each child’s intellect, humanity, and spirit. We do not question a child’s possession of these things. In touching the intellect, humanity and spirit within children, African teachers recognize the centrality of relationships between teachers and students, among students, and within the African community as a whole.

» For the African teacher, teaching is a calling, a constant journey towards mastery, a scientific activity, a matter of community membership, an aspect of a learning community, a process of “becoming a library,” a matter of care and custody for our culture and traditions, a matter of a critical viewing of the wider world, and a response to the imperative of MAAT.

» The African teacher is a parent, friend, guide, coach, healer, counselor, model, storyteller, entertainer, artist, architect, builder, minister, and advocate to and for students.

A brief sample of African socialization can be found in the work of K. Kia Kimbwandende Bunseki Fu-Kiau and A. M. Lukondo-Wamba, master teachers and authors of Kindezi: The Congo Art of Babysitting (1988):

The Kindezi can only be perceived and understood through the social context of the community it serves as an art and a big social responsibility. It is through the role that Kindizi plays in the community that one can appreciate its importance in the dingo-dingo (process) of shaping African social patterns. The quality and personality of the ndezi/babysitter, make by influence the quality and personality of the child in the sadulu (school place) and the community as well. Since it is the ndezi with whom the child stays all day long, the future of the child will greatly reflect the impact of Kindezi, the art of babysitting, not only upon the child but upon the society itself.

The contribution of Kindezi in Bantu societies in general, and the Kongo in particular, cannot be under-estimated or denied. The role it plays in all aspects of community life is so great that it merits erection of a monument. (p. 20)

Though things are rapidly changing today in Africa, the Kindezi, in its substructure, still remains as a skill and are to be learned by all young community members, girls as well as boys, through an initiatic and practical process for, as a Kongo proverb would say, Kindezi M’fuma mu kanda (The art of babysitting is a baobab to the community), i.e., a string supporter of community economic activities . . . Babysitting, sala sindezi, is not instinctively acquired as some would assume or pretend. Dingo-dingo diena it is a process by which one discovers the mystery of human growth and reaches the total understanding of the psychology of the child.

By babysitting, one learns the wonderful skill of being responsible for another life and how to become a new “living pattern.” A “living pattern” is a model through which cultural values are transmitted from generation to generation. Through Kindezi, Africans acquire this skill, a skill that has made the African not only one of the most religious human beings on earth but, also, one of the most humanistic.

African parents, mothers in particular, have a great concern about their children’s childhood because they are aware that Kimbuta kia muntu, bonso kimuntu, ga mataba–“One’s leadership, like one’s personality, finds its roots in the child-hood.” Earlier events in the childhood life play an important role in adulthood. As such, great attention is paid to whoever has a role to play in the life of a child—the human being with the quickest copying mind. This basic understanding that childhood is the foundation that determines the quality of a society is the main reason that prompted African communities to make Kindezi and art, or kinkete, to be learned by all their members. Thus Kindezi is required in societies that want to prepare their members to become not only good fathers and mothers, but above all, people who care about life and who understand, both humanely and spiritually, the highly unshakable value of the human being that we all are. (4–5)

Typically the African teacher leads a social collective process, one where social bonds are reinforced or created. In this social process, the destinies of the students are connected to each other, to their families, to their communities, to their ancestors, to those who are yet to be born, to their environment, to their traditions, to MAAT as a way of life, and to their creator.

From these few thoughts, one can see that the popular use of the African proverb, “It takes a whole village to raise a child,” is interpreted in a very trivial way, and is taken out of context. Africans who use the proverb understand it. It is a part of their world-view, their value system, a world-view and value system that may not be shared by those who quote Africans out of context. As Fu-Kiau and Lukondo-Wamba show above, the proverb is really about raising a village, not merely raising a child. It is not a matter of welfare as it is understood in the West. It really takes a whole village to raise itself, a village that values every member as a “living sun,” a village to which the child belongs, a village where every child is shown that he or she “will never be given away.” Clearly, this is a different order of “child care.” This is African teaching/socialization, and the incorporation of the child into the community.

Africans never take teaching lightly. It is a sacred calling. The long night of slavery, colonization, apartheid, and White supremacy ideology ruptured the traditional bond between African teachers and their nurture, and even their memories of that nurture. We have been reduced in our expertise, lowered in our expectations, and limited in our goals. We have even been dehumanized and de-spiritualized. We must return to the upward ways of our ancestors. We have forgotten our aims, methods and content.

We must not bring shame on ourselves and upon our descendants. We must bring light to the world again.

Selected References and Bibliography

Ainsworth, Mary (1967). Infancy in Uganda Infant Care and the Growth of Love. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Anderson, J. D. (1988). The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Callaway, H. (1975). “Indigenous Education in Yoruba Society” in Conflict and Harmony in Education in Tropical Africa (Studies on Modern Asia and Africa: No. 10), G. N. Brown and M. Hiskett (Eds.). Rutherford, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Carruthers, J. (1995). MDW NTR Divine Speech: A Historiographical Reflection of African Deep Thought from the time of the Pharaohs to the Present. London: Karnak House.

Erny, Pierre. (1973). Childhood and Cosmos: the Social Psychology of the Black African Child. New York: New Perspectives.

Erny, Pierre (1981). The Child and His Environment in Black Africa: An Essay on Traditional Education. New York: Oxford University Press.

Finch, Charles. (1998). Star of Deep Beginnings: The Genesis of African Science and Technology. Decatur, Ga.: Khenti Inc.

Fu-Kiau, K. Kia Bunseki and Lukondo-Wamba. (1988). Kindezi: The Congo Art of Babysitting. New York: Vantage Press.

Geber, M. (1958). “The Psychomotor Development of African Children in the First Year And The Influence Of Maternal Behavior.” Journal of Social Psychology, 47, 185-195.

Hilliard, Asa G. III. (1998). SBA: The Reawakening of The African Mind. Gainesville, Florida: Makare Publishers.

---. (1995). The Teachings of Ptahhotep. Atlanta, Ga.: Blackwood Press.

Pearce, Joseph Chilton. (1977). Magical Child: Rediscovering Nature’s Plan. New York: E. P. Dutton.

Webber, T. L. (1978). Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831-1865. New York: W. W. Norton.

Wilson, Amos (1991). Awakening the Natural Genius of Black Children. New York:Afrikan World Infosystems.

Woodson, C. G. (1968). Miseducation of the Negro. Washington, D. C.: Associated Publishers (first published in 1933).

(source one | two)

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

DuBois: The African Roots of the War

2016-12-12T19:27:00.000-05:00

This connects with:

"Consumerism culture = Starvation" (post)
"Capitalism = Marxism. European culture's the issue" (post)
"Sheehan explains leaving the anti-war movement" (post)

(The Atlantic, May 1915) "The African Roots of the War" by W.E.B. Du Bois:

"Semper novi quid ex Africa," cried the Roman proconsul, and he voiced the verdict of forty centuries. Yet there are those who would write world history and leave out this most marvelous of continents. Particularly to-day most men assume that Africa lies far afield from the center of our burning social problems, and especially from our present problem of world war.

Yet in a very real sense Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization which we have lived to see; and these words seek to show how in the Dark Continent are hidden the roots, not simply of war to-day but of the menace of wars tomorrow.

Always Africa is giving us something new or some metempsychosis of a world-old thing. On its black bosom arose one of the earliest, if not the earliest, of self-protecting civilizations, and grew so mightily that it still furnishes superlatives to thinking and speaking men. Out of its darker and more remote forest fastnesses, came, if we may credit many recent scientists, the first welding of iron, and we know that agriculture and trade flourished there when Europe was a wilderness.

Nearly every human empire that has arisen in the world, material and spiritual, has found some of its greatest crises on this continent of Africa, from Greece to Great Britain. As Mommsen says, "It was through Africa that Christianity became the religion of the world." In Africa the last flood of Germanic invasions spent itself within hearing of the last gasp of Byzantium, and it was again through Africa that Islam canoe to play its great role of conqueror and civilizer.

With the Renaissance and the widened world of modern thought, Africa came no less suddenly with her new-old gift. Shakespeare's Ancient Pistol cries: --
A foutre for the world, and worldlings base!
I speak of Africa, and golden joys.
He echoes a legend of gold from the days of Punt and Ophir to those of Ghana, the Gold Coast, and the Rand. This thought had sent the world's greed scurrying down the hot, mysterious coast of Africa to the Good Hope of gain, until for the first time a real world-commerce was born, albeit it started as a commerce mainly in the bodies and souls of men.

So much for the past; and now, to-day: The Berlin Conference to apportion the rising riches of Africa among the white peoples met on the fifteenth day of November, 1884. Eleven days earlier, three Germans left Zanzibar (whither they had gone secretly disguised as mechanics), and before the Berlin Conference had finished its deliberations they had annexed to Germany an area over half as large again as the whole German Empire in Europe. Only in its dramatic suddenness was this undisguised robbery of the land of 7,000,000 natives different from the methods by which Great Britain and France got 4,000,000 square miles each, Portugal 750,000, and Italy and Spain smaller but substantial areas.

The methods by which this continent has been stolen have been contemptible and dishonest beyond expression. Lying treaties, rivers of rum, murder, assassination, mutilation, rape, and torture have marked the progress of Englishman, German, Frenchman, and Belgian on the Dark Continent. The only way in which the world has been able to endure the horrible tale is by deliberately stopping its ears and changing the subject of conversation while the deviltry went on.

It all began, singularly enough, like the present war, with Belgium. Many of us remember Stanley's great solution of the puzzle of Central Africa, when he traced the mighty Congo 1,600 miles from Nyangwe to the sea. Suddenly the world knew that here lay the key to the riches of Central Africa. It stirred uneasily, but Leopold of Belgium was first on his feet, and the result was the Congo Free State -- God save the mark! But the Congo Free State, with all its magniloquent heralding of Peace, Christianity, and Commerce, degenerating into murder, mutilation, and downright robbery, differed only in degree and concentration from the tale of all Africa in this rape of the continent already furiously mangled by the slave trade. That sinister traffic, on which the British Empire and the American Republic were largely built, cost black Africa no less than 100,000,000 souls, the wreckage of its political and social life, and left the continent in precisely that state of helplessness which invites aggression and exploitation. "Color" became in the world's thought synonymous with inferiority, "Negro" lost its capitalization, and Africa was another name for bestiality and barbarism.

Thus, the world began to invest in color prejudice. The "color line" began to pay dividends. For, indeed, while the exploration of the valley of the Congo was the occasion of the scramble for Africa, the cause lay deeper. The Franco-Prussian War turned the eyes of those who sought power and dominion away from Europe. Already England was in Africa, cleaning away the debris of the slave trade and half consciously groping toward the new Imperialism. France, humiliated and impoverished, looked toward a new northern African empire, sweeping from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. More slowly, Germany began to see the dawning of a new day, and, shut out from America by the Monroe Doctrine, looked to Asia and Africa for colonies. Portugal sought anew to make good her claim to her ancient African realm; and thus a continent where Europe claimed but a tenth of the land in 1875, was in twenty-five more years practically absorbed.

Why was this? What was the new call for dominion? It must have been strong, for consider a moment the desperate flames of war that have shot up in Africa in the last quarter of a century: France and England at Fashoda, Italy at Aduwa, Italy and Turkey in Tripoli, England and Portugal at Delagoa Bay, England, Germany, and the Dutch in South Africa, France and Spain in Morocco, Germany and France in Agadir, and the world at Algeciras.

The answer to this riddle we shall find in the economic changes in Europe. Remember what the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have meant to organized industry in European civilization. Slowly the divine right of the few to determine economic income and distribute the goods and services of the world has been questioned and curtailed. We called the process Revolution in the eighteenth century, advancing Democracy in the nineteenth, and Socialization of Wealth in the twentieth. But whatever we call it, the movement is the same: the dipping of more and grimier hands into the wealth-bag of the nation, until to-day only the ultra stubborn fail to see that democracy, in determining income, is the next inevitable step to Democracy in political power.

With the waning of the possibility of the Big Fortune, gathered by starvation wages and boundless exploitation of one's weaker and poorer fellows at home, arise more magnificently the dreams of exploitation abroad. Always, of course, the individual merchant had at his own risk and in his own way tapped the riches of foreign lands. Later, special trading monopolies had entered the field and founded empires overseas. Soon, however, the mass of merchants at home demanded a share in this golden stream; and finally, in the twentieth century, the laborer at home is demanding and beginning to receive a part of his share.

The theory of this new democratic despotism has not been clearly formulated. Most philosophers see the ship of state launched on the broad, irresistible tide of democracy, with only delaying eddies here and there; others, looking closer, are more disturbed. Are we, they ask, reverting to aristocracy and despotism -- the rule of might? They cry out and then rub their eyes, for surely they cannot fail to see strengthening democracy all about them?

It is this paradox which has confounded philanthropists, curiously betrayed the socialists, and reconciled the Imperialists and captains of industry to any amount of "Democracy." It is this paradox which allows in America the most rapid advance of democracy to go hand-in-hand in its very centers with increased aristocracy and hatred toward darker races, and which excuses and defends an inhumanity that does not shrink from the public burning of human beings.

Yet the paradox is easily explained: The white workingman has been asked to share the spoils of exploiting "chinks and niggers." It is no longer simply the merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, or even the employing class, that is exploiting the world: It is the nation; a new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor. The laborers are not yet getting, to be sure, as large a share as they want or will get, and there are still at the bottom large and restless excluded classes. But the laborer's equity is recognized, and his just share is a matter of time, intelligence, and skillful negotiation.

Such nations it is that rule the modern world. Their national bond is no mere sentimental patriotism, loyalty, or ancestor worship. It is increased wealth, power, and luxury for all classes on a scale the world never saw before. Never before was the average citizen of England, France, and Germany so rich, with such splendid prospects of greater riches.

Whence comes this new wealth and on what does its accumulation depend? It comes primarily from the darker nations of the world -- Asia and Africa, South and Central America, the West Indies and the islands of the South Seas. There are still, we may well believe, many parts of white countries like Russia and North America, not to mention Europe itself, where the older exploitation still holds. But the knell has sounded faint and far, even there. In the lands of darker folk, however, no knell has sounded. Chinese, East Indians, Negroes, and South American Indians are by common consent for governance by white folk and economic subjection to them. To the furtherance of this highly profitable economic dictum has been brought every available resource of science and religion. Thus arises the astonishing doctrine of the natural inferiority of most men to the few, and the interpretation of "Christian brotherhood" as meaning anything that one of the "brothers" may at any time want it to mean.

Like all world schemes, however, this one is not quite complete. First of all, yellow Japan has apparently escaped the cordon of this color bar. This is disconcerting and dangerous to white hegemony. If, of course, Japan would join heart and soul with the whites against the rest of the yellows, browns, and blacks, well and good. There are even good-natured attempts to prove the Japanese "Aryan," provided they act "white." But blood is thick, and there are signs that Japan does not dream of a world governed mainly by white men. This is the "Yellow Peril," and it may be necessary, as the German Emperor and many white Americans think, to start a world crusade against this presumptuous nation which demands "white" treatment.

Then, too, the Chinese have recently shown unexpected signs of independence and autonomy, which may possibly make it necessary to take them into account a few decades hence. As a result, the problem in Asia has resolved itself into a race for "spheres" of economic "influence," each provided with a more or less "open door" for business opportunity. This reduces the danger of open clash between European nations, and gives the yellow folk such chance for desperate unarmed resistance as was shown by China's repulse of the Six Nations of Bankers. There is still hope among some whites that conservative North China and the radical South may in time come to blows and allow actual white dominion.

One thing, however, is certain: Africa is prostrate. There, at least, are few signs of self-consciousness that need at present be heeded. To be sure, Abyssinia must be wheedled, and in America and the West Indies Negroes have attempted futile steps toward freedom; but such steps have been pretty effectually stopped (save through the breech of "miscegenation"), although the 10,000,000 Negroes in the United States need, to many men's minds, careful watching and ruthless repression.

Thus the white European mind has worked, and worked the more feverishly because Africa is the Land of the Twentieth Century. The world knows something of the gold and diamonds of South Africa, the cocoa of Angola and Nigeria, the rubber and ivory of the Congo, and the palm oil of the West Coast. But does the ordinary citizen realize the extraordinary economic advances of Africa and, too, of black Africa, in recent years? E. T. Morel, who knows his Africa better than most white men, has shown us how the export of palm oil from West Africa has grown from 283 tons in 1800, to 80,000 tons in 1913 which, together with by-products, is worth to-day $60,000,000 annually. He shows how native Gold Coast labor, unsupervised, has come to head the cocoa-producing countries of the world with an export of 89,000,000 pounds (weight, riot money) annually. He shows how the cotton crop of Uganda has risen from 3,000 bales in 1909 to 50,000 bales in 1914; and he says that France and Belgium are no more remarkable in the cultivation of their land than the Negro province of Kano. The trade of Abyssinia amounts to only $10,000,000 a year, but it is its infinite possibility of growth that is making the nations crowd to Addis Ababa. All these things are but beginnings, "but tropical Africa and its peoples are being brought more irrevocably each year into the vortex of the economic influences that sway the Western world." There can be no doubt of the economic possibilities of Africa in the near future. There are not only the well-known and traditional products, but boundless chances in a hundred different directions, and above all, there is a throne of human beings who, could they once be reduced to the docility and steadiness of Chinese coolies or of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European laborers, would furnish to their masters a spoil exceeding the gold-haunted dreams of the most modern of Imperialists.

This, then, is the real secret of that desperate struggle for Africa which began in 1877 and is now culminating. Economic dominion outside Africa has, of course, played its part, and we were on the verge of the partition of Asia when Asiatic Shrewdness warded it off. America was saved from direct political dominion by the Monroe Doctrine. Thus, more and more, the Imperialists have concentrated on Africa.

The greater the concentration the more deadly the rivalry. From Fashoda to Agadir, repeatedly the spark has been applied to the European magazine and a general conflagration narrowly averted. We speak of the Balkans as the storm center of Europe and the cause of war, but this is mere habit. The Balkans are convenient for occasions, but the ownership of materials and men in the darker world is the real prize that is setting the nations of Europe at each other's throats to-day.

The present world war is. then, the result of jealousies engendered by the recent rise of armed national associations of labor and capital, whose aim is the exploitation of the wealth of the world mainly outside the European circle of nations. These associations, grown jealous and suspicious at the division of the spoils of trade-empire, are fighting to enlarge their respective shares; they look for expansion, not in Europe but in Asia, and particularly in Africa. "We want no inch of French territory," said Germany to England, but Germany was "unable to give" similar assurances as to France in Africa.

The difficulties of this imperial movement are internal as well as external. Successful aggression in economic expansion calls for a close union between capital and labor at home. Now the rising demands of the white laborer, not simply for wages but for conditions of work and a voice in the conduct of industry make industrial peace difficult. The workingmen have been appeased by all sorts of essays in state socialism, on the one hand, and on the other hand by public threats of competition by colored labor. By threatening to send English capital to China and Mexico, by threatening to hire Negro laborers in America, as well as by old-age pensions and accident insurance, we gain industrial peace at home at the mightier cost of war abroad.

In addition to these national war-engendering jealousies there is a more subtle movement arising from the attempt to unite labor and capital in world-wide freebooting. Democracy in economic organization, while an acknowledged ideal, is to-day working itself out by admitting to a share in the spoils of capital only the aristocracy of labor -- the more intelligent and shrewder and cannier workingmen. The ignorant, unskilled, and restless still form a large, threatening, and, to a growing extent, revolutionary group in advanced countries.

The resultant jealousies and bitter hatreds tend continually to fester along the color line. We must fight the Chinese, the laborer argues, or the Chinese will take our bread and butter. We must keep Negroes in their places, or Negroes will take our jobs. All over the world there leaps to articulate speech and ready action that singular assumption that if white men do not throttle colored men, then China, India, and Africa will do to Europe what Europe has done and seeks to do to them.

On the other hand, in the minds of yellow, brown, and black men the brutal truth is clearing: A white man is privileged to go to any land where advantage beckons and behave as he pleases; the black or colored man is being more and more confined to those parts of the world where life for climatic, historical, economic, and political reasons is most difficult to live and most easily dominated by Europe for Europe's gain.

What, then, are we to do, who desire peace and the civilization of all men? Hitherto the peace movement has confined itself chiefly to figures about the cost of war and platitudes on humanity. What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa? How can love of humanity appeal as a motive to nations whose love of luxury is built on the inhuman exploitation of human beings, and who, especially in recent years, have been taught to regard these human beings as inhuman? I appealed to the last meeting of peace societies in St. Louis, saying, "Should you not discuss racial prejudice as a prime cause of war?" The secretary was sorry but was unwilling to introduce controversial matters!

We, then, who want peace, must remove the real causes of war. We have extended gradually our conception of democracy beyond our social class to all social classes in our nation; we have gone further and extended our democratic ideals not simply to all classes of our own nation, but to those of other nations of our blood and lineage -- to what we call "European" civilization. If we want real peace and lasting culture, however, we must go further. We must extend the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples.

To say this is to evoke on the faces of modern men a look of blank hopelessness. Impossible! we are told, and for so many reasons -- scientific, social, and what not -- that argument is useless. But let us not conclude too quickly. Suppose we have to choose between this unspeakably inhuman outrage on decency and intelligence and religion which we call the World War and the attempt to treat black men as human, sentient, responsible beings? We have sold them as cattle. We are working them as beasts of burden. We shall not drive war from this world until we treat them as free and equal citizens in a world democracy of all races and nations. Impossible? Democracy is a method of doing the impossible. It is the only method yet discovered of making the education and development of all men a matter of all men's desperate desire. It is putting firearms in the hands of a child with the object of compelling the child's neighbors to teach him not only the real and legitimate uses of a dangerous tool but the uses of himself in all things. Are there other and less costly ways of accomplishing this? There may be in some better world. But for a world just emerging from the rough chains of an almost universal poverty, and faced by the temptation of luxury and indulgence through the enslaving of defenseless men, there is but one adequate method of salvation -- the giving of democratic weapons of self-defense to the defenseless.

Nor need we quibble over those ideas -- wealth, education, and political power -- soil, which we have so forested with claim and counterclaim that we see nothing for the woods.

What the primitive peoples of Africa and the world need and must have if war is to be abolished is perfectly clear:

First: land. To-day Africa is being enslaved by the theft of her land and natural resources. A century ago black men owned all but a morsel of South Africa. The Dutch and English came, and to-day 1,250,000 whites own 264,000,000 acres, leaving only 21,000,000 acres for 4,500,000 natives. Finally, to make assurance doubly sure, the Union of South Africa has refused natives even the right to buy land. This is a deliberate attempt to force the Negroes to work on farms and in mines and kitchens for low wages. All over Africa has gone this shameless monopolizing of land and natural resources to force poverty on the masses and reduce them to the "dumb-driven-cattle" stage of labor activity.

Secondly, we must train native races in modern civilization. This can be done. Modern methods of educating children, honestly and effectively applied, would make modern, civilized nations out of the vast majority of human beings on earth to-day. This we have seldom tried. For the most part Europe is straining every nerve to make over yellow, brown, and black men into docile beasts of burden, and only an irrepressible few are allowed to escape and seek (usually abroad) the education of modern men.

Lastly, the principle of home rule must extend to groups, nations, and races. The ruling of one people for another people's whim or gain must stop. This kind of despotism has been in later days more and more skillfully disguised. But the brute fact remains: the white man is ruling black Africa for the white man's gain, and just as far as possible he is doing the same to colored races elsewhere. Can such a situation bring peace? Will any amount of European concord or disarmament settle this injustice?

Political power to-day is but the weapon to force economic power. Tomorrow, it may give us spiritual vision and artistic sensibility. To-day, it gives us or tries to give us bread and butter, and those classes or nations or races who are without it starve, and starvation is the weapon of the white world to reduce them to slavery.

We are calling for European concord to-day; but at the utmost European concord will mean satisfaction with, or acquiescence in, a given division of the spoils of world dominion. After all, European disarmament cannot go below the necessity of defending the aggressions of the whites against the blacks and browns and yellows. From this will arise three perpetual dangers of war. First, renewed jealousy at any division of colonies or spheres of influence agreed upon, if at any future time the present division comes to seem unfair. Who cared for Africa in the early nineteenth century? Let England have the scraps left from the golden feast of the slave trade. But in the twentieth century? The end was war. These scraps looked too tempting to Germany. Secondly, war will come from the revolutionary revolt of the lowest workers. The greater the international jealousies, the greater the corresponding costs of armament and the more difficult to fulfill the promises of industrial democracy in advanced countries. Finally, the colored peoples will not always submit passively to foreign domination. To some this is a lightly tossed truism. When a people deserve liberty they fight for it and get it, say such philosophers; thus making war a regular, necessary step to liberty. Colored people are familiar with this complacent judgment. They endure the contemptuous treatment meted out by whites to those not "strong" enough to be free. These nations and races, composing as they do a vast majority of humanity, are going to endure this treatment just as long as they must and not a moment longer. Then they are going to fight and the War of the Color Line will outdo in savage inhumanity any war this world has yet seen. For colored folk have much to remember and they will not forget.

But is this inevitable? Must we sit helpless before this awful prospect? While we are planning, as a result of the present holocaust, the disarmament of Europe and a European international world police, must the rest of the world be left naked to the inevitable horror of war, especially when we know that it is directly in this outer circle or races, and not ire the inner European household, that the real causes of present European fighting are to be found?

Our duty is clear. Racial slander must go. Racial prejudice will follow. Steadfast faith in humanity must come. The domination of one people by another without the other's consent, be the subject people black or white, must stop. The doctrine of forcible economic expansion over subject people must go. Religious hypocrisy must stop. "Bloodthirsty" Mwanga of Uganda killed an English bishop because he feared that his coming meant English domination. It did mean English domination' and the world and the bishop knew it, and yet. the world was "horrified"! Such missionary hypocrisy must go. With clean hands and honest hearts we must front high Heaven and beg peace in our time.

In this great work who can help us? In the Orient, the awakened Japanese and the awakening leaders of New China; in India and Egypt, the young men trained in Europe and European ideals, who now form the stuff that Revolution is born of. But in Africa? Who better than the 25,000,000 grandchildren of the European slave trade, spread through the Americas and now writhing desperately for freedom and a place in the world? And of these millions, first of all the 10,000,000 black folk of the United States, now a problem, then a world salvation.

Twenty centuries before the Christ a great cloud swept over sea and settled on Africa, darkening and well-nigh blotting out the culture of the land of Egypt. For half a thousand years it rested there until a black woman, Queen Nefertari, "the most venerated figure in Egyptian history," rose to the throne of the pharaohs and redeemed the world and her people. Twenty centuries after Christ, black Africa, prostrated, raped, and shamed, lies at the feet of the conquering Philistines of Europe. Beyond the awful sea a black woman is weeping and waiting, with her sons on her breast. What shall the end be? The world-old and fearful things, War and Wealth, Murder and Luxury? Or shall it be a new thing -- a new peace and new democracy of all races: a great humanity of equal men? "Semper novi quid ex Africa!"

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

Kwame Ture on Black Power [Berkeley, CA 1966]

2016-12-11T10:47:00.000-05:00

On Black Power:

Transcript:
Thank you very much. It’s a privilege and an honor to be in the white intellectual ghetto of the West. We wanted to do a couple of things before we started. The first is that, based on the fact that SNCC, through the articulation of its program by its chairman, has been able to win elections in Georgia, Alabama, Maryland, and by our appearance here will win an election in California, in 1968 I'm going to run for President of the United States. I just can't make it, 'cause I wasn't born in the United States. That's the only thing holding me back.

We wanted to say that this is a student conference, as it should be, held on a campus, and that we're not ever to be caught up in the intellectual masturbation of the question of Black Power. That’s a function of people who are advertisers that call themselves reporters. Oh, for my members and friends of the press, my self-appointed white critics, I was reading Mr. Bernard Shaw two days ago, and I came across a very important quote which I think is most apropos for you. He says, "All criticism is a[n] autobiography." Dig yourself. Okay.

The philosophers Camus and Sartre raise the question whether or not a man can condemn himself. The black existentialist philosopher who is pragmatic, Frantz Fanon, answered the question. He said that man could not. Camus and Sartre was not. We in SNCC tend to agree with Camus and Sartre, that a man cannot condemn himself.¹ Were he to condemn himself, he would then have to inflict punishment upon himself. An example would be the Nazis. Any prisoner who -- any of the Nazi prisoners who admitted, after he was caught and incarcerated, that he committed crimes, that he killed all the many people that he killed, he committed suicide. The only ones who were able to stay alive were the ones who never admitted that they committed a crimes [sic] against people -- that is, the ones who rationalized that Jews were not human beings and deserved to be killed, or that they were only following orders.

On a more immediate scene, the officials and the population -- the white population -- in Neshoba County, Mississippi -- that’s where Philadelphia is -- could not -- could not condemn [Sheriff] Rainey, his deputies, and the other fourteen men that killed three human beings. They could not because they elected Mr. Rainey to do precisely what he did; and that for them to condemn him will be for them to condemn themselves.

In a much larger view, SNCC says that white America cannot condemn herself. And since we are liberal, we have done it: You stand condemned. Now, a number of things that arises from that answer of how do you condemn yourselves. Seems to me that the institutions that function in this country are clearly racist, and that they're built upon racism. And the question, then, is how can black people inside of this country move? And then how can white people who say they’re not a part of those institutions begin to move? And how then do we begin to clear away the obstacles that we have in this society, that make us live like human beings? How can we begin to build institutions that will allow people to relate with each other as human beings? This country has never done that, especially around the country of white or black.

Now, several people have been upset because we’ve said that integration was irrelevant when initiated by blacks, and that in fact it was a subterfuge, an insidious subterfuge, for the maintenance of white supremacy. Now we maintain that in the past six years or so, this country has been feeding us a "thalidomide drug of integration," and that some negroes have been walking down a dream street talking about sitting next to white people; and that that does not begin to solve the problem; that when we went to Mississippi we did not go to sit next to Ross Barnett²; we did not go to sit next to Jim Clark³; we went to get them out of our way; and that people ought to understand that; that we were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy.

Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom. No man can give anybody his freedom. A man is born free. You may enslave a man after he is born free, and that is in fact what this country does. It enslaves black people after they’re born, so that the only acts that white people can do is to stop denying black people their freedom; that is, they must stop denying freedom. They never give it to anyone.

Now we want to take that to its logical extension, so that we could understand, then, what its relevancy would be in terms of new civil rights bills. I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people. For example, I am black. I know that. I also know that while I am black I am a human being, and therefore I have the right to go into any public place. White people didn't know that. Every time I tried to go into a place they stopped me. So some boys had to write a bill to tell that white man, "He’s a human being; don’t stop him." That bill was for that white man, not for me. I knew it all the time. I knew it all the time.

I knew that I could vote and that that wasn’t a privilege; it was my right. Every time I tried I was shot, killed or jailed, beaten or economically deprived. So somebody had to write a bill for white people to tell them, "When a black man comes to vote, don’t bother him." That bill, again, was for white people, not for black people; so that when you talk about open occupancy, I know I can live anyplace I want to live. It is white people across this country who are incapable of allowing me to live where I want to live. You need a civil rights bill, not me. I know I can live where I want to live.

So that the failures to pass a civil rights bill isn’t because of Black Power, isn't because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; it's not because of the rebellions that are occurring in the major cities. It is incapability of whites to deal with their own problems inside their own communities. That is the problem of the failure of the civil rights bill.

And so in a larger sense we must then ask, How is it that black people move? And what do we do? But the question in a greater sense is, How can white people who are the majority -- and who are responsible for making democracy work -- make it work? They have miserably failed to this point. They have never made democracy work, be it inside the United States, Vietnam, South Africa, Philippines, South America, Puerto Rico. Wherever American has been, she has not been able to make democracy work; so that in a larger sense, we not only condemn the country for what it's done internally, but we must condemn it for what it does externally. We see this country trying to rule the world, and someone must stand up and start articulating that this country is not God, and cannot rule the world.

Now, then, before we move on we ought to develop the white supremacy attitudes that were either conscious or subconscious thought and how they run rampant through the society today. For example, the missionaries were sent to Africa. They went with the attitude that blacks were automatically inferior. As a matter of fact, the first act the missionaries did, you know, when they got to Africa was to make us cover up our bodies, because they said it got them excited. We couldn’t go bare-breasted any more because they got excited.

Now when the missionaries came to civilize us because we were uncivilized, educate us because we were uneducated, and give us some -- some literate studies because we were illiterate, they charged a price. The missionaries came with the Bible, and we had the land. When they left, they had the land, and we still have the Bible. And that has been the rationalization for Western civilization as it moves across the world and stealing and plundering and raping everybody in its path. Their one rationalization is that the rest of the world is uncivilized and they are in fact civilized. And they are un-civil-ized.

And that runs on today, you see, because what we have today is we have what we call "modern-day Peace Corps missionaries," and they come into our ghettos and they Head Start, Upward Lift, Bootstrap, and Upward Bound us into white society, 'cause they don’t want to face the real problem which is a man is poor for one reason and one reason only: 'cause he does not have money -- period. If you want to get rid of poverty, you give people money -- period.

And you ought not to tell me about people who don’t work, and you can’t give people money without working, 'cause if that were true, you’d have to start stopping Rockefeller, Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, the whole of Standard Oil, the Gulf Corp, all of them, including probably a large number of the Board of Trustees of this university. So the question, then, clearly, is not whether or not one can work; it’s Who has power? Who has power to make his or her acts legitimate? That is all. And that this country, that power is invested in the hands of white people, and they make their acts legitimate. It is now, therefore, for black people to make our acts legitimate.

Now we are now engaged in a psychological struggle in this country, and that is whether or not black people will have the right to use the words they want to use without white people giving their sanction to it; and that we maintain, whether they like it or not, we gonna use the word "Black Power" -- and let them address themselves to that; but that we are not going to wait for white people to sanction Black Power. We’re tired waiting; every time black people move in this country, they’re forced to defend their position before they move. It’s time that the people who are supposed to be defending their position do that. That's white people. They ought to start defending themselves as to why they have oppressed and exploited us.

Now it is clear that when this country started to move in terms of slavery, the reason for a man being picked as a slave was one reason -- because of the color of his skin. If one was black one was automatically inferior, inhuman, and therefore fit for slavery; so that the question of whether or not we are individually suppressed is nonsensical, and it’s a downright lie. We are oppressed as a group because we are black, not because we are lazy, not because we're apathetic, not because we’re stupid, not because we smell, not because we eat watermelon and have good rhythm. We are oppressed because we are black.

And in order to get out of that oppression one must wield the group power that one has, not the individual power which this country then sets the criteria under which a man may come into it. That is what is called in this country as integration: "You do what I tell you to do and then we’ll let you sit at the table with us." And that we are saying that we have to be opposed to that. We must now set up criteria and that if there's going to be any integration, it's going to be a two-way thing. If you believe in integration, you can come live in Watts. You can send your children to the ghetto schools. Let’s talk about that. If you believe in integration, then we’re going to start adopting us some white people to live in our neighborhood.

So it is clear that the question is not one of integration or segregation.

Integration is a man's ability to want to move in there by himself. If someone wants to live in a white neighborhood and he is black, that is his choice. It should be his rights. It is not because white people will not allow him. So vice versa: If a black man wants to live in the slums, that should be his right. Black people will let him. That is the difference. And it's a difference on which this country makes a number of logical mistakes when they begin to try to criticize the program articulated by SNCC.

Now we maintain that we cannot be afford to be concerned about 6 percent of the children in this country, black children, who you allow to come into white schools. We have 94 percent who still live in shacks. We are going to be concerned about those 94 percent. You ought to be concerned about them too. The question is, Are we willing to be concerned about those 94 percent? Are we willing to be concerned about the black people who will never get to Berkeley, who will never get to Harvard, and cannot get an education, so you’ll never get a chance to rub shoulders with them and say, "Well, he’s almost as good as we are; he’s not like the others"? The question is, How can white society begin to move to see black people as human beings? I am black, therefore I am; not that I am black and I must go to college to prove myself.

I am black, therefore I am. And don’t deprive me of anything and say to me that you must go to college before you gain access to X, Y, and Z. It is only a rationalization for one's oppression.

The -- The political parties in this country do not meet the needs of people on a day-to-day basis. The question is, How can we build new political institutions that will become the political expressions of people on a day-to-day basis? The question is, How can you build political institutions that will begin to meet the needs of Oakland, California? And the needs of Oakland, California, is not 1,000 policemen with submachine guns. They don't need that. They need that least of all. The question is, How can we build institutions where those people can begin to function on a day-to-day basis, where they can get decent jobs, where they can get decent houses, and where they can begin to participate in the policy and major decisions that affect their lives? That’s what they need, not Gestapo troops, because this is not 1942, and if you play like Nazis, we playing back with you this time around. Get hip to that.

The question then is, How can white people move to start making the major institutions that they have in this country function the way it is supposed to function? That is the real question. And can white people move inside their own community and start tearing down racism where in fact it does exist? Where it exists. It is you who live in Cicero and stop us from living there. It is white people who stop us from moving into Grenada. It is white people who make sure that we live in the ghettos of this country. it is white institutions that do that. They must change. In order -- In order for America to really live on a basic principle of human relationships, a new society must be born. Racism must die, and the economic exploitation of this country of non-white peoples around the world must also die -- must also die.

Now there are several programs that we have in the South, most in poor white communities. We're trying to organize poor whites on a base where they can begin to move around the question of economic exploitation and political disfranchisement. We know -- we've heard the theory several times -- but few people are willing to go into there. The question is, Can the white activist not try to be a Pepsi generation who comes alive in the black community, but can he be a man who’s willing to move into the white community and start organizing where the organization is needed? Can he do that? The question is, Can the white society or the white activist disassociate himself with two clowns who waste time parrying with each other rather than talking about the problems that are facing people in this state? Can you dissociate yourself with those clowns and start to build new institutions that will eliminate all idiots like them.

And the question is, If we are going to do that when and where do we start, and how do we start? We maintain that we must start doing that inside the white community. Our own personal position politically is that we don't think the Democratic Party represents the needs of black people. We know it don't. And that if, in fact, white people really believe that, the question is, if they’re going to move inside that structure, how are they going to organize around a concept of whiteness based on true brotherhood and based on stopping exploitation, economic exploitation, so that there will be a coalition base for black people to hook up with? You cannot form a coalition based on national sentiment. That is not a coalition. If you need a coalition to redress itself to real changes in this country, white people must start building those institutions inside the white community. And that is the real question, I think, facing the white activists today. Can they, in fact, begin to move into and tear down the institutions which have put us all in a trick bag that we’ve been into for the last hundred years?

I don't think that we should follow what many people say that we should fight to be leaders of tomorrow. Frederick Douglass said that the youth should fight to be leaders today. And God knows we need to be leaders today, 'cause the men who run this country are sick, are sick. So that can we on a larger sense begin now, today, to start building those institutions and to fight to articulate our position, to fight to be able to control our universities -- We need to be able to do that -- and to fight to control the basic institutions which perpetuate racism by destroying them and building new ones? That’s the real question that face us today, and it is a dilemma because most of us do not know how to work, and that the excuse that most white activists find is to run into the black community.

Now we maintain that we cannot have white people working in the black community, and we mean it on a psychological ground. The fact is that all black people often question whether or not they are equal to whites, because every time they start to do something, white people are around showing them how to do it. If we are going to eliminate that for the generation that comes after us, then black people must be seen in positions of power, doing and articulating for themselves, for themselves.

That is not to say that one is a reverse racist; it is to say that one is moving in a healthy ground; it is to say what the philosopher Sartre says: One is becoming an "antiracist racist." And this country can’t understand that. Maybe it's because it's all caught up in racism. But I think what you have in SNCC is an anti-racist racism. We are against racists. Now if everybody who is white see themself [sic] as a racist and then see us against him, they're speaking from their own guilt position, not ours, not ours.

Now then, the question is, How can we move to begin to change what's going on in this country. I maintain, as we have in SNCC, that the war in Vietnam is an illegal and immoral war. And the question is, What can we do to stop that war? What can we do to stop the people who, in the name of our country, are killing babies, women, and children? What can we do to stop that? And I maintain that we do not have the power in our hands to change that institution, to begin to recreate it, so that they learn to leave the Vietnamese people alone, and that the only power we have is the power to say, "Hell no!" to the draft.

We have to say -- We have to say to ourselves that there is a higher law than the law of a racist named McNamara. There is a higher law than the law of a fool named Rusk. And there's a higher law than the law of a buffoon named Johnson. It’s the law of each of us. It's the law of each of us. It is the law of each of us saying that we will not allow them to make us hired killers. We will stand pat. We will not kill anybody that they say kill. And if we decide to kill, we're going to decide who we going to kill. And this country will only be able to stop the war in Vietnam when the young men who are made to fight it begin to say, "Hell, no, we ain’t going."
Now then, there's a failure because the Peace Movement has been unable to get off the college campuses where everybody has a 2S and not going to get drafted anyway.

And the question is, How can you move out of that into the white ghettos of this country and begin to articulate a position for those white students who do not want to go. We cannot do that. It is something -- sometimes ironic that many of the peace groups have beginning to call us violent and say they can no longer support us, and we are in fact the most militant organization [for] peace or civil rights or human rights against the war in Vietnam in this country today. There isn’t one organization that has begun to meet our stance on the war in Vietnam, 'cause we not only say we are against the war in Vietnam; we are against the draft. We are against the draft. No man has the right to take a man for two years and train him to be a killer. A man should decide what he wants to do with his life.

So the question then is it becomes crystal clear for black people because we can easily say that anyone fighting in the war in Vietnam is nothing but a black mercenary, and that's all he is. Any time a black man leaves the country where he can’t vote to supposedly deliver the vote for somebody else, he’s a black mercenary. Any time a -- Any time a black man leaves this country, gets shot in Vietnam on foreign ground, and returns home and you won’t give him a burial in his own homeland, he’s a black mercenary, a black mercenary.

And that even if I were to believe the lies of Johnson, if I were to believe his lies that we're fighting to give democracy to the people in Vietnam, as a black man living in this country I wouldn’t fight to give this to anybody. I wouldn't give it to anybody. So that we have to use our bodies and our minds in the only way that we see fit. We must begin like the philosopher Camus to come alive by saying "No!" That is the only act in which we begin to come alive, and we have to say "No!" to many, many things in this country.

This country is a nation of thieves. It has stole everything it has, beginning with black people, beginning with black people. And that the question is, How can we move to start changing this country from what it is -- a nation of thieves. This country cannot justify any longer its existence. We have become the policeman of the world. The marines are at our disposal to always bring democracy, and if the Vietnamese don’t want democracy, well dammit, "We’ll just wipe them the hell out, 'cause they don’t deserve to live if they won’t have our way of life."

There is then in a larger sense, What do you do on your university campus? Do you raise questions about the hundred black students who were kicked off campus a couple of weeks ago? Eight hundred? Eight hundred? And how does that question begin to move? Do you begin to relate to people outside of the ivory tower and university wall? Do you think you’re capable of building those human relationships, as the country now stands? You're fooling yourself. It is impossible for white and black people to talk about building a relationship based on humanity when the country is the way it is, when the institutions are clearly against us.

We have taken all the myths of this country and we've found them to be nothing but downright lies. This country told us that if we worked hard we would succeed, and if that were true we would own this country lock, stock, and barrel -- lock, stock, and barrel -- lock, stock, and barrel. It is we who have picked the cotton for nothing. It is we who are the maids in the kitchens of liberal white people. It is we who are the janitors, the porters, the elevator men; we who sweep up your college floors. Yes, it is we who are the hardest workers and the lowest paid, and the lowest paid.

And that it is nonsensical for people to start talking about human relationships until they're willing to build new institutions. Black people are economically insecure. White liberals are economically secure. Can you begin to build an economic coalition? Are the liberals willing to share their salaries with the economically insecure black people they so much love? Then if you’re not, are you willing to start building new institutions that will provide economic security for black people? That’s the question we want to deal with. That's the question we want to deal with.

We have to seriously examine the histories that we have been told. But we have something more to do than that. American students are perhaps the most politically unsophisticated students in the world, in the world, in the world. Across every country in this world, while we were growing up, students were leading the major revolutions of their countries. We have not been able to do that. They have been politically aware of their existence. In South America our neighbors down below the border have one every 24 hours just to remind us that they're politically aware.
And we have been unable to grasp it because we’ve always moved in the field of morality and love while people have been politically jiving with our lives. And the question is, How do we now move politically and stop trying to move morally? You can't move morally against a man like Brown and Reagan. You've got to move politically to put them out of business. You've got to move politically.

You can’t move morally against Lyndon Baines Johnson because he is an immoral man. He doesn’t know what it’s all about. So you’ve got to move politically. You've got to move politically. And that we have to begin to develop a political sophistication -- which is not to be a parrot: "The two-party system is the best party in the world." There is a difference between being a parrot and being politically sophisticated.

We have to raise questions about whether or not we do need new types of political institutions in this country, and we in SNCC maintain that we need them now. We need new political institutions in this country. Any time -- Any time Lyndon Baines Johnson can head a Party which has in it Bobby Kennedy, Wayne Morse, Eastland, Wallace, and all those other supposed-to-be-liberal cats, there’s something wrong with that Party. They’re moving politically, not morally. And that if that party refuses to seat black people from Mississippi and goes ahead and seats racists like Eastland and his clique, it is clear to me that they’re moving politically, and that one cannot begin to talk morality to people like that.

We must begin to think politically and see if we can have the power to impose and keep the moral values that we hold high. We must question the values of this society, and I maintain that black people are the best people to do that because we have been excluded from that society. And the question is, we ought to think whether or not we want to become a part of that society. That's what we want to do.

And that that is precisely what it seems to me that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is doing. We are raising questions about this country. I do not want to be a part of the American pie. The American pie means raping South Africa, beating Vietnam, beating South America, raping the Philippines, raping every country you’ve been in. I don’t want any of your blood money. I don’t want it -- don't want to be part of that system. And the question is, How do we raise those questions? How do we ....How do we begin to raise them?

We have grown up and we are the generation that has found this country to be a world power, that has found this country to be the wealthiest country in the world. We must question how she got her wealth? That's what we're questioning, and whether or not we want this country to continue being the wealthiest country in the world at the price of raping every -- everybody else across the world. That's what we must begin to question. And that because black people are saying we do not now want to become a part of you, we are called reverse racists. Ain’t that a gas?

Now, then, we want to touch on nonviolence because we see that again as the failure of white society to make nonviolence work. I was always surprised at Quakers who came to Alabama and counseled me to be nonviolent, but didn’t have the guts to start talking to James Clark to be nonviolent. That is where nonviolence needs to be preached -- to Jim Clark, not to black people. They have already been nonviolent too many years. The question is, Can white people conduct their nonviolent schools in Cicero where they belong to be conducted, not among black people in Mississippi. Can they conduct it among the white people in Grenada?

Six-foot-two men who kick little black children -- can you conduct nonviolent schools there? That is the question that we must raise, not that you conduct nonviolence among black people. Can you name me one black man today who's killed anybody white and is still alive? Even after rebellion, when some black brothers throw some bricks and bottles, ten thousand of them has to pay the crime, 'cause when the white policeman comes in, anybody who’s black is arrested, "'cause we all look alike."

So that we have to raise those questions. We, the youth of this country, must begin to raise those questions. And we must begin to move to build new institutions that's going to speak to the needs of people who need it. We are going to have to speak to change the foreign policy of this country. One of the problems with the peace movement is that it's just too caught up in Vietnam, and that if we pulled out the troops from Vietnam this week, next week you’d have to get another peace movement for Santo Domingo. And the question is, How do you begin to articulate the need to change the foreign policy of this country -- a policy that is decided upon race, a policy on which decisions are made upon getting economic wealth at any price, at any price.

Now we articulate that we therefore have to hook up with black people around the world; and that that hookup is not only psychological, but becomes very real. If South America today were to rebel, and black people were to shoot the hell out of all the white people there -- as they should, as they should -- then Standard Oil would crumble tomorrow. If South Africa were to go today, Chase Manhattan Bank would crumble tomorrow. If Zimbabwe, which is called Rhodesia by white people, were to go tomorrow, General Electric would cave in on the East Coast. The question is, How do we stop those institutions that are so willing to fight against "Communist aggression" but closes their eyes to racist oppression? That is the question that you raise. Can this country do that?

Now, many people talk about pulling out of Vietnam. What will happen? If we pull out of Vietnam, there will be one less aggressor in there -- we won't be there, we won't be there. And so the question is, How do we articulate those positions? And we cannot begin to articulate them from the same assumptions that the people in the country speak, 'cause they speak from different assumptions than I assume what the youth in this country are talking about.

That we're not talking about a policy or aid or sending Peace Corps people in to teach people how to read and write and build houses while we steal their raw materials from them. Is that what we're talking about? 'Cause that’s all we do. What underdeveloped countries needs -- information on how to become industrialized, so they can keep their raw materials where they have it, produce them and sell it to this country for the price it’s supposed to pay; not that we produce it and sell it back to them for a profit and keep sending our modern day missionaries in, calling them the sons of Kennedy. And that if the youth are going to participate in that program, how do you raise those questions where you begin to control that Peace Corps program? How do you begin to raise them?

How do we raise the questions of poverty? The assumptions of this country is that if someone is poor, they are poor because of their own individual blight, or they weren’t born on the right side of town; they had too many children; they went in the army too early; or their father was a drunk, or they didn’t care about school, or they made a mistake. That’s a lot of nonsense. Poverty is well calculated in this country. It is well calculated, and the reason why the poverty program won’t work is because the calculators of poverty are administering it. That's why it won't work.

So how can we, as the youth in the country, move to start tearing those things down?

We must move into the white community. We are in the black community. We have developed a movement in the black community. The challenge is that the white activist has failed miserably to develop the movement inside of his community. And the question is, Can we find white people who are going to have the courage to go into white communities and start organizing them? Can we find them? Are they here and are they willing to do that? Those are the questions that we must raise for the white activist.

And we're never going to get caught up in questions about power. This country knows what power is. It knows it very well. And it knows what Black Power is 'cause it deprived black people of it for 400 years. So it knows what Black Power is. That the question of, Why do black people -- Why do white people in this country associate Black Power with violence? And the question is because of their own inability to deal with "blackness." If we had said "Negro power" nobody would get scared.

Everybody would support it. Or if we said power for colored people, everybody’d be for that, but it is the word "black" -- it is the word "black" that bothers people in this country, and that’s their problem, not mine -- they're problem, they're problem.

Now there's one modern day lie that we want to attack and then move on very quickly and that is the lie that says anything all black is bad. Now, you’re all a college university crowd. You’ve taken your basic logic course. You know about a major premise and minor premise. So people have been telling me anything all black is bad. Let’s make that our major premise.

Major premise: Anything all black is bad.

Minor premise or particular premise: I am all black.

Therefore...

I’m never going to be put in that trick bag; I am all black and I’m all good, dig it. Anything all black is not necessarily bad. Anything all black is only bad when you use force to keep whites out. Now that’s what white people have done in this country, and they’re projecting their same fears and guilt on us, and we won’t have it, we won't have it. Let them handle their own fears and their own guilt. Let them find their own psychologists. We refuse to be the therapy for white society any longer. We have gone mad trying to do it. We have gone stark raving mad trying to do it.

I look at Dr. King on television every single day, and I say to myself: "Now there is a man who’s desperately needed in this country. There is a man full of love. There is a man full of mercy. There is a man full of compassion." But every time I see Lyndon on television, I said, "Martin, baby, you got a long way to go."
So that the question stands as to what we are willing to do, how we are willing to say "No" to withdraw from that system and begin within our community to start to function and to build new institutions that will speak to our needs. In Lowndes County, we developed something called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. It is a political party. The Alabama law says that if you have a Party you must have an emblem. We chose for the emblem a black panther, a beautiful black animal which symbolizes the strength and dignity of black people, an animal that never strikes back until he's back so far into the wall, he's got nothing to do but spring out. Yeah. And when he springs he does not stop.

Now there is a Party in Alabama called the Alabama Democratic Party. It is all white. It has as its emblem a white rooster and the words "white supremacy" for the write. Now the gentlemen of the Press, because they're advertisers, and because most of them are white, and because they're produced by that white institution, never called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization by its name, but rather they call it the Black Panther Party. Our question is, Why don't they call the Alabama Democratic Party the "White Cock Party"? (It's fair to us.....) It is clear to me that that just points out America's problem with sex and color, not our problem, not our problem. And it is now white America that is going to deal with those problems of sex and color.

If we were to be real and to be honest, we would have to admit -- we would have to admit that most people in this country see things black and white. We have to do that. All of us do. We live in a country that’s geared that way. White people would have to admit that they are afraid to go into a black ghetto at night. They are afraid. That's a fact. They're afraid because they’d be "beat up," "lynched," "looted," "cut up," etcetera, etcetera. It happens to black people inside the ghetto every day, incidentally, and white people are afraid of that. So you get a man to do it for you -- a policeman. And now you figure his mentality, when he's afraid of black people. The first time a black man jumps, that white man going to shoot him. He's going to shoot him. So police brutality is going to exist on that level because of the incapability of that white man to see black people come together and to live in the conditions. This country is too hypocritical and that we cannot adjust ourselves to its hypocrisy.

The only time I hear people talk about nonviolence is when black people move to defend themselves against white people. Black people cut themselves every night in the ghetto -- Don't anybody talk about nonviolence. Lyndon Baines Johnson is busy bombing the hell of out Vietnam -- Don't nobody talk about nonviolence. White people beat up black people every day -- Don't nobody talk about nonviolence. But as soon as black people start to move, the double standard comes into being.

You can’t defend yourself. That's what you're saying, 'cause you show me a man who -- who would advocate aggressive violence that would be able to live in this country. Show him to me. The double standards again come into itself. Isn’t it ludicrous and hypocritical for the political chameleon who calls himself a Vice President in this country to -- to stand up before this country and say, "Looting never got anybody anywhere"? Isn't it hypocritical for Lyndon to talk about looting, that you can’t accomplish anything by looting and you must accomplish it by the legal ways? What does he know about legality? Ask Ho Chi Minh, he'll tell you.
So that in conclusion we want to say that number one, it is clear to me that we have to wage a psychological battle on the right for black people to define their own terms, define themselves as they see fit, and organize themselves as they see it.

Now the question is, How is the white community going to begin to allow for that organizing, because once they start to do that, they will also allow for the organizing that they want to do inside their community. It doesn’t make a difference, 'cause we’re going to organize our way anyway. We're going to do it. The question is, How are we going to facilitate those matters, whether it’s going to be done with a thousand policemen with submachine guns, or whether or not it’s going to be done in a context where it is allowed to be done by white people warding off those policemen. That is the question.

And the question is, How are white people who call themselves activists ready to start move into the white communities on two counts: on building new political institutions to destroy the old ones that we have? And to move around the concept of white youth refusing to go into the army? So that we can start, then, to build a new world. It is ironic to talk about civilization in this country. This country is uncivilized. It needs to be civilized. It needs to be civilized.

And that we must begin to raise those questions of civilization: What it is? And who do it? And so we must urge you to fight now to be the leaders of today, not tomorrow. We've got to be the leaders of today. This country -- This country is a nation of thieves. It stands on the brink of becoming a nation of murderers. We must stop it. We must stop it. We must stop it. We must stop it.

And then, therefore, in a larger sense there's the question of black people. We are on the move for our liberation. We have been tired of trying to prove things to white people. We are tired of trying to explain to white people that we’re not going to hurt them. We are concerned with getting the things we want, the things that we have to have to be able to function. The question is, Can white people allow for that in this country? The question is, Will white people overcome their racism and allow for that to happen in this country? If that does not happen, brothers and sisters, we have no choice but to say very clearly, "Move over, or we’re going to move on over you."

Thank you.

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

Cuba, 2015

2016-12-09T14:50:00.000-05:00

lib.mg exclusive feature
Clyde Taylor {New York, New York}

Editorial Note: Fidel Castro invoked a seductive binary as an aesthetic approach to reading the world when speaking about the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987 and 1988 during the Angolan liberation movement; the world would know itself in terms of before and after it. Toussaint L’Overture says “Let them tremble when they reach our coast ...” Fidel says “You will never have Cuba”. The nuances of concession, negotiation, and intermingling often get lost in headstrong revolutionary-period narratives. The before-befores and after-afters are important. Sex, Lies, and Tourism, for instance. In Cairo, on behalf of Namibia, Cuba just wanted to be at the table, after all.

●●●
As Gertrude Stein is famously reported to have said on her death bed, “Alice, what is the answer?” No response: “Alice, what is the question?” Stein observed a sound path: in order to find the best answer, you need to find, or choose, the right question. Here I track maybe six answers searching for the right question to be put to new relations between the United States and Cuba.

Historian Gerald Horne offers an answer to a question few have bothered to ask. He argues that economic and political pressures from the African presence was a major reason why the colonial elite decided to wage a war for independence. (“Negro Insurrection and Foreign Invasion: Slavery, 1776 and the Founding of the United States”)

The political outlook in the early (U.S.) American colonies was fraught with chaos and insecurity, much of it gathered around the presence of the African. The slave trade, one of the most stupendous profit-making operations in history, was under attack from abolitionists in London. As commodities, humans are more complicated than rice, sugar or tobacco. The Crown deployed Africans as sailors and soldiers keeping the peace. The numbers of Africans grew to an alarming ratio. Real and rumored insurgencies had to be factored into every calculation, even more when African rebels combined with Spanish or French enemies to attack settlements. To deal with these and other pressures, the colonists went to war.

I once wrote that war has been good for black Americans. No matter which side Africans supported in the Revolutionary War, for instance, some were sure to benefit. That was a miscalculation. What I saw as the potential for African Americans to capitalize on the discombobulation of wartime, the American “fathers” saw as signs of an unreliable alien in the Blacks. Horne quotes Benjamin Franklin: “Every slave might be reckoned a domestic enemy,” and finds John Adams and James Madison in agreement. These founders of the republic sniffed the disagreeable prospect of Pan-Africanism and Du Bois’ ideal of a world-wide coalition of people of color, what he called “the darker races,” before the age of imperialism made such links clear.

The gains U.S. Blacks have salvaged from U.S. wars have to be measured among mixed considerations. How do such gains related to gains made from resistance to injustices? And are these gains only relative to the wider framework of the global struggle against racial colonialism? Most U.S. war-like actions have been aggressions designed to suppress people of color, as Du Bois and others knew. American imperialists in Du Bois’ time saw an affinity between “the little brown brothers” abroad and their counterparts at home. The minor benefits that fell to African Americans were side effects that never threatened the status or privileges of white freedom. The perception of U.S. Blacks as semi-aliens and potential threats lies sleeping in the White American imaginary, raising its unhinged head to expose President Barack Obama as a Mau Mau from Kenya.

What has this to do with Cuba?

The wart on the face that America shows the world was rapped by Samuel Johnson well before the 1776 revolt. “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” The Confederacy followed the example of the original founders by going to war for their independent, God-given right to decimate another people. To paraphrase the definition of Freedom in Ambrose Bierce’s satirical Devil’s Dictionary, “A political condition that some nations seek to enjoy in virtual monopoly.”

Frederick Douglass hammered still-ringing questions in his 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” It is one of the great American documents, an unarguable delegitimization of the intent behind the Declaration of Independence. “[Y]our shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock ... a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” Here he upends the face-off between civilization and savagery, a chosen trope of the racial colonizer. The bite of Douglass’ words is the fiercest anti-racist language we hear until Malcolm X speaks a century later; the cover up has had a lot of success. Douglass knew what few see clearly today. Some independence declarations are made to end oppression. Others are made to extend it. The search for freedom in the birth of the nation was at its core a search for the freedom to oppress.

How long. How long after New world nations got their independence did it take them to end slavery? Mark that time and you find a trail to conquest-driven freedom. Haiti holds one end of the spectrum, ending slavery in 1804 in synch with its victory over the French colonizers. It went on to promote emancipation at large. “In 1816,” writes Eduardo Galeano, “it was Haiti that furnished Bolivar with boats, arms, and soldiers when he showed up on the island defeated and asking for shelter and help.” In exchange for military troops and aid, Bolivar promised President Alexandre Petion that if he was successful in his mission to decolonize Latin America, he would free the slaves. That promise was largely kept. Venezuela, Colombia (including Panama), Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia all began ending slavery around 1815, soon after winning independence from Spain, though the process wasn’t completed in some of these countries until 1854. At the other end of the spectrum, as Horne notes, slavery in (U.S.) America escalated after the Revolutionary War and became more brutal. The American democracy continued to produce “the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes” for eighty-nine years, the crowning record, and racial segregation for another century.

What has this to do with Cuba?

Remember the Alamo? Honestly, no. The Euro-Americans who died at the Alamo were martyrs to the right to bring slavery into Mexico which had abolished it in 1829, as well as to grab land from the Comanche in Mexican territory that extended as far north as Colorado. To bring success to their mission the settlers played the Independence card, declaring themselves the Republic of Texas. Once the dust settled, the new nation seceded from Mexico, gained huge land spaces, and then got itself annexed to the United States with the right to slave labor guaranteed. When Rick Perry and other Texans bluster about seceding from the U.S., they are not channeling the Confederacy as much as waxing nostalgic for the time when Texans used the independence gambit and got away like bandits.

(A few die-hards pretend that the Republic of Texas was never fully annexed, and today run a kind of Mom and Pop shadow government. A candidate for governor recently ran as a secessionist and got 19,000 votes.)

Declaring independence has been a key maneuver among the “Little Europes”-- overseas colonies whose European settlers came in numbers and settled to stay, like Canada, Australia, Kenya, Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa. Some of these immigrants adopted strategies from the Yankee playbook, going to war if necessary. The freedom they sought, the freedom to oppress, has been described by George M. Fredrickson as “white freedom” in his book "White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African history." “Sometimes…the cause of white freedom and independence was directly linked with a desire to maintain flagrant forms of racial hegemony.” Gerald Horne notes that when Ian Smith declared the independence of Rhodesia from Great Britain in order to block decolonization of what is now Zimbabwe, he “argued that his unilateral Declaration of Independence was a replay of 1776.”

Ancient history. What about Cuba today?

Cuba shares a painful historical experience with the Philippines. Sectors of the Filipino population fought a war of liberation from Spanish colonialism that was gaining momentum until the United States came in and car-jacked their insurrection, defeated Spain and battled the Filipino revolutionaries in a very bloody war (during which Americans refined water-boarding). The Philippines were shifted from one Euro-American colonizer to another. To save face, the Spanish colluded with the Americans to stage a phony naval battle before surrendering. This is a meme of Western colonialism, passing dominions around like call girls at a Dominique Strauss Khan party instead of letting them fall into the hands of the locals. Some say this Philippine intervention is ancient history; but it is easy to match similar tactics in the U.S. attack on Vietnam’s revolution for self-determination.

The staged event, the manufactured threat, the call to an endangered honor, the seething media blitz are all part of the tool kit of U.S. expansionist geopolitics. “You couldn’t make this stuff up,” says the CIA chief in a Jason Bourne movie. But the real CIA and the Pentagon with their media hacks have no writer’s block when it comes to fabricating a pro war scenario. Richard Sanders has framed a compilation: “How to Start a War: The American Use of War Pretext Incidents.” Pretexts for military offensives are no more occult than espionage, black ops, war game and white-washing historical narratives. Much of the discourse of U.S. state-craft is in fact pretexts. The Declaration of Independence for example works also as a Declaration of Innocence pre-texting present cut outs and future double-dealing.

How does this relate to Cuba?

Remember the Maine? I was taught to remember it as an atrocity to be avenged by Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill. The Maine was a battleship that in fact blew itself up in Havana harbor by letting fire get into its weapons storage. The domestic war party cranked up its mob patriotism and stole another revolution in Cuba at the same time as in the Philippines.

We mis-remember the accidental tragedy of the Maine. What we don’t remember is the Cuban revolution for independence from 1868 to 1898, because, as Ada Ferrer points out, (U.S.) Americans have a way of ignoring the realities of the people they engage with. Ferrer reminds us of this key struggle in the island’s history in her book, "Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898". And what a revolution it was! It was a striking stand-alone insurgency beside the raids for white freedom launched from 1776 on. The planters bent to necessity and joined with slaves, who consequently became ex-slaves in an army that was deeply integrated, with troops of all races commanded by officers that included Black and Mulatto generals. The most illustrious of them was Antonio Maceo. Maceo and his successes against the Spanish colonizers were victories fought for the ideal of making Cuba a multiracial, antiracist society. There were, he declared, “no whites nor blacks, but only Cubans.”

As in the Philippines, the U.S. snatched the prize. “United States intervention,” Ferrer writes, “at its most basic level, blocked an independence sought by violent and peaceful means for three decades.

The multiracial and antiracist principles of the Cuban revolutionaries were running against the tide of supremacist ideology of social Darwinism and the pseudo-scientific racism of Arthur de Gobineau. “[I]t is clearly significant,” writes Ferrer, “that in an age of ascendant racism, the United States opted to temper the victory of a multiracial movement explicitly antiracist.”

Once the U.S. took over the administration of Cuba from the Spanish, they disarmed the nationalist revolutionaries and gave favorable positions to Spanish bureaucrats. They engineered a reversal of the revolutionary ethos, demanding that Cubans prove their readiness for independence by miming “civilization and modernity” as defined by the occupiers. General William Shafter: “Self-government! Why these people are no more fit for self-government than gunpowder is for hell.” One test of civilized behavior set up by this occupying army, which included many Texan troops, was to re-subjugate Blacks. The Cuban elites gave in with only a little resistance.

At some points questions become answers and vice versa.

Where has the U.S. intervened in support of a movement for freedom, independence or self-determination of people of color? Instead its habit has been to watch for the rise of liberation movements among first world peoples and like a shark smelling blood move in for the kill. Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano analyses this aspect of white freedom as “the coloniality of power.” He writes: “One of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism.”

When the Fidelistas rolled into Havana victorious over the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, they carried memories of the earlier Cuban revolution that the U.S. had tried to erase. The 1959 revolution “embraced the independence movement as its spiritual and ideological predecessor,” writes Ada Ferrer. “It extolled the anti-imperial and antiracist nationalism of nineteenth century figures, and it excoriated the intervention of the United States. By its own account the revolution of 1959 represented the fulfillment and embodiment of nineteenth century patriotic ideals, thwarted by the intervention of the United States in 1898 and by the decades of direct and indirect American rule that followed.”

If J.F. Kennedy had understood more of this history, he might not have greenlighted the Bay of Pigs invasion. The Castro revolutionaries predicted a U.S. counter-revolutionary assault, and counted on it. The CIA planning for this counter-revolutionary coup began on schedule under Eisenhower a few months after the Cuban liberation. The pretext this time was that the invasion was supposed to look like it was executed by Cuban exiles in the United States. In the mix was the fantasy of the Cuban people rising up to greet the invaders as liberators, throwing roses in their path and joining the counter-revolution. The threat of communism was also part of the ticket, even though as we have seen, the pattern was set long before communism became a global factor. Not long after the “perfect” military fiasco at the Bay of Pigs (which included plans to simultaneously assassinate the Castro brothers and Che Guevara), the revolution declared itself Marxist-Leninist. The Bay of Pigs was an attempt to baby-snatch the new Cuban revolution like the one in 1898.

The rationale that a communist Cuba must be eliminated is only the latest iteration of the (U.S.) American fear of and hostility toward alternative political possibilities. Long before Marx, the Haitian Revolution was opposed by the United States out of fear that it would spread a contagion (a “domino effect”) for liberation from slavery and White colonialism. Fearing a liberated Haiti, Thomas Jefferson “warned that Haiti had created a bad example and argued it was necessary to ‘confine the plague to the island.’" The U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba has tried to revive the “White Curse,” as Eduardo Galeano calls it, placed on a free Haiti. From some angles, Cuba looks like the twentieth and twenty-first century version of Haiti -- a thorn in the side of American dominance. The dissonance between the American and Cuban way of addressing freedom springs from roots in the colonial past, a struggle for or against the persistent coloniality of power. Apartheid in South Africa offered a challenge to the two ways of making free. The U.S. supported the Apartheid government until forced to change its policy by international and national pressure through divestment and economic sanctions, including African American protests led by Randal Robinson and TransAfrica.

That’s the American side of the story; a credible run against type; one more time when unloved protesters saved the country from its worst impulses -- for a minute. But the remarkable Cuban contribution to the overthrow of Apartheid pales in the U.S. memory like the revolution of 1868. Cuba supported liberation movements in Africa from 1960, in the Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, and most importantly in Angola, where it sent over 55,000 troops to confront and defeat the South African Defense Forces. It was this exceptional act of popular liberation that drew the Apartheid regime to the negotiations that ended its White supremacist order. It was the flip side of the Bay of Pigs invasion, a brilliant military campaign to liberate instead of a pitiful flop of an invasion to repress. Nelson Mandela saluted this act: “What other country has such a history of selfless behavior as Cuba has shown for the people of Africa? ... In Africa we are used to being victims of countries that want to take from us our territory or overthrow our sovereignty. In African history there is not another instance where another people has stood up for one of ours ... The decisive defeat of the aggressive apartheid forces destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor.” This story is told in Cuba, An African Odyssey, a masterful documentary made by Egyptian filmmaker Jihan El Tahri, available on YouTube.

Two societies in the Western hemisphere, wide apart in their ideas and practice of freedom and humanistic values. The gulf gapes when Little Havana propagandists denounce Cuba on human rights while ignoring the innocent and tortured political prisoners on Guantanamo, Cuban land that the U.S. seized after the 1898 invasion.

So, we come to the question we’ve been searching for.

Will the opening of new contacts between the U.S. and Cuba produce benefits for Cuban people not only in material health, but spiritually and culturally as well, since the concept of how to be human splinters, with one society modeling itself as universal and transcendental norm? Can U.S. foreign policy, unfolding in screeds of freedom and free trade, put aside its appetite for vulnerable anticolonial movements? (Do we remember Grenada?) Will that policy try to make of the Castro revolution a forgotten history the way it did the rebel republic of 1868?

The right wing castigates Obama for this deal of opening to Cuba because “we haven’t gotten anything” for it. This sounds like a design to update the terms for ending the U.S. occupation after 1898 “civilization and modernity.” What will the price be to earn membership in “the international community?” Laid out in Americanist rhetoric, it will necessarily be a demand for Cuba to make itself a place more to the liking of U.S. interests -- a nation closer to the Batista Cuba that the Fidelistas overthrew -- that’s what counter-revolutions do.

Or, will the Cuban people hold onto their well-graced identity, with its rhythms, flavors and colors, its soulful humanism, confident in the joy of their freedom to grow, free from any freedom other than their own? -END-

Dr. Clyde Taylor is author of The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract Film and Literature)

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

On Afrocentricity, Diop, Egypt, & Scholarship

2016-10-08T12:00:00.012-04:00

A close friend of mine shared with me some of his thoughts on the recent post "The Fallacies Of Afrocentrism" and the response post from Kintespace, "Flippant Remarks about 'The fallacies of Afrocentrism'". His insight is both profound and invaluable. Hopefully we can encourage him to expand these thoughts into an article for the magazine. For me this conversation is important because identity is vital. I know and love too many folks who struggle with finding theirs and often get muddled in pseudo-science in trying to find themselves. We have a responsibility to make things clear. His thoughts gave me a greater understanding of my own identity in the context of ancient African civilization and reminded me that scholarship is a process to be engaged and built upon, not a dogma:

On Diop, his imperfections and continuing his work:
My opinion (w/ some disclaimers) is this:
1) I've not honestly read Asante or Karenga yet and,
2) Diop was Diop. He did his own research and worked and challenged scholars in the field during that day. Fact of the matter is though is that M. Diop made his transition in 1986. His students are Theophile Obenga (Congo), Aboubacry Moussa Lam and Babacar Sall (both Senegal). Obenga was with him in Cairo in 1974 (UNESCO "Peopling..."), and Lam wrote his dissertation on the migrations of the Peul from Kmt [Kemet/Egypt]. Also, Cameroon has an Egyptology program at the University out there at Yaoude.

His work was profound, largely true (though he made some mistakes) and seminal; but not expert. Diop had the equivalent of 2 PhD's (one in physics and one is history). He was an eclectic scholar. But, to my knowledge, he didn't start learning glyphs until the 1970s and there is never one instance in which he cites a text which he himself translated.

Diop's work (and he hinted at this by telling Obenga that he'd never write again the topic of Egypt as an African civilization if he felt he'd "won" in Cairo) was meant as a springboard. That's exactly what folk on the continent are starting to do now. It's exactly what we need. It's easy to take shots at Diop's work 50/60 years later when 1) That's not even the whole of his first work folk are reading in English and 2) It's his first work.

On Afrocentricity as "fallacy", ancient Egypt, humanity + scholarship:
Molefi Asante and others are irrelevant. If you're not doing research with primary sources, no right to speak. Of course, Africa is characterized by much, much more than Kmt, but Kmt was a part of it: and whether black folk came from there or not -- and there's not reason why African's on the continent would, as Ann Macy Roth states look to Kmt, because it's respected by the West, when they have little to no contact with the West (i.e. It shouldn't be in their oral histories, see Peul, Songhay, Baasaa, Wolof) -- we're still who we are (that is, human).

The point of reclaiming history is to know who we are and frame our existence (Furr's point about not taking pride in our ancestors was obviously asinine). If we don't expand the discourse about African history in a meaningful way; that is learning Arabic, saving those documents and researching Kmt, oral histories, meanings behind symbols, anthropological work on pre-colonial religious practices, etc, then we've missed the boat. The truth is always better than any fantasy we could ever kick up: we owe it to our children, ourselves and our ancestors to get it right.

Romanticizing about anything is backwards. Too many of us get caught up in focusing on white folk to the point that we lose ourselves and feel that we have to evoke civilization in order to feel human. White folk ain't that important; our children are. Asante needs to feel himself relevant, so he writes his own holiday into the historical narrative. Where's the scholarship in that?

Fact is though, if we don't do the work, then cats like him get to speak 1) because he is speaking, 2) because white folk like seeing it and, 3) because it's easy for white folk to beat down. Hence we get the short end of the stick by not hittin' these cats up -- intellectually. Just prove his points wrong and move on. Or don't bother and move on anyway. Asante will always find an audience though, even among black folks because there are people who need to feel -- there's a void there. Our responsibility is to take care of that -- it's what we've been trained to do.

We have to move beyond the discourse on Afrocentrism in our work. We can point it out as fallacious, but the work has to be geared to another frontier. Otherwise folks are speaking for "us" who are really in the end only speaking for themselves. It also gives white folk the tools to beat down our self concept in front of those among us who don't have the acumen to know better, which is the true shame in all of this.

On rural living and the need for direct identity:
As Diop continually reiterates, the point of historical research is the reconstruction of historical consciousness. Example: my most profound experiences in Senegal were in the village. If anyone wants to know how African we are, just talk so someone rural. It's seriously eery to hear something and literally feel like you're amongst family members. I can't explain it. My friend just got back from Guinea and was mentioning to me how folks there did the same song and dance (i.e. catch the spirit, fall out and be covered with cloths) rituals there as black folks here do in church. I think the ultimate point of understanding where you come from is to be, historically, but really through that, spiritually grounded. Not knowing where we're from creates a serious void. Folk can chose their own paths as they please, but it's the feeling connected to something that's key. Right now we're connected to a thing we don't want to be associated with, and that's a dangerous/suicidal combination.

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

Dr. Asa G. Hilliard: The State of African Education / "We have acute amnesia, with no valid memories or awareness of ourselves as a historical people evolving through time and spreading throughout the world. We are episodic in our experience of ourselves."

2016-10-08T12:00:00.009-04:00

Info: Asa G. Hilliard, "The State of African Education", Plenary Presentation, American Education Research Association Commission on Research in Black Education, New Orleans, LA, 2000) (PDF download)

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

Exploration of new materials & Great Barrington, Egremont Plain, W.E.B. DuBois' boyhood home

2016-10-08T12:00:00.005-04:00

We Don't Die, We Multiply, Artist Statement: "In my new work created in the past several months at Darrow, I was concerned with responding to my new environs here in the Northeast. The works are grounded in an exploration of new materials and also in my learning of Great Barrington, or more accurately, Egremont Plain, as the boyhood home of Dr. W.E.B. DuBois. Many of the works are inspired by the ideas of multiplicity and iteration between concept and form, a result of pondering the passage of time, in regard to the modest land inhabited by this great thinker juxtaposed with his enormous body of work.

My interests in these new works are manifold; on one hand concerned with the actual site itself—and the power potentially held by the remnants of its ruins—and an exploration of materials that engage concepts of time, repetition and transcendence."

— Nikki Pressley
(Art Director, The Last Generation of Black People)

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

Consciousness Beyond Feminisms, Marxisms, Gender, and Genre: An interview with Sylvia Wynter

2016-10-08T12:00:00.003-04:00

A selection from our New York City study group (liberatormagazine.com/study).

Consciousness: An interview w/ Sylvia Wynter (PDF)

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

The Healers / "The newness of life's journey continues to find reflections outside of itself, for nothing is new. What comes to our mind as revelation at first, usually reveals itself to be our moment of connection with what is already"

2016-10-08T11:47:00.000-04:00

"After his training the healer walks through the same world every person walks through. But he sees signs others don't see. He hears sounds others don't hear. The same tree that just stands there dumbly to everyone, to the healer its leaves have things to say. The healer learns the meaning of the river's sound, of the sounds of the forest animals ... He who would be a healer must set great value on seeing truly, hearing truly, understanding truly and acting truly ... You see why healing can't be a popular vocation? The healer would rather see and hear and understand than have power over men. Most people would rather have power over men than see and hear ... the healer devotes himself to inspiration ... He also lives against manipulation ... It's a disease, a popular one. If I'm not spiritually blind, I see your spirit. I speak to it if I want to invite you to do something with me. If your spirit agrees it moves your body and your body acts. That's inspiration. But if I'm blind to your spirit I see only your body. Then if I want you to do something for me I force or trick your body into doing it even against your spirit's direction. That's manipulation. Manipulation steals a person's body from his spirit, cuts the body off from its own spirit's direction. The healer is a life-long enemy of all manipulation. The healer's method is inspiration."
-Excerpted from "Part Three: The Inspirers" of The Healers by Ayi Kwei Armah

I cannot find the words to fully capture what the above passage means to me. I do know that, once again, something I know in my soul has revealed itself as already being. It has already been and so I know that it makes sense.

It seems that the newness of life's journey continues to find reflections outside of itself, for nothing is new. What comes to our mind as revelation at first, usually reveals itself to be our moment of connection with what is already. And so, the above passage from The Healers revealed itself to me only recently and yet, it multiplies in significance and speaks to the following:

1. A Healer is someone who trains himself or herself to see. The world around a Healer begins to illuminate itself and the things around him or her become much more clearer.

2. There is a truth involved in the seeing and hearing of things around us. Understanding becomes more important than simply knowing about a thing.

3. A Healer must inspire. The goal of the Healer is to speak to the spirit and inspire the spirit to make changes for the better.

I am still unable to explain where this fits in my world. Not what it means or how it comes to be but how I ended up reaching the road where I would tap into the tradition. I didn't know it until it was over, I didn't realize that so much of what Armah describes above has been a part of my experience and inadvertently, I, too, have experienced some of what it means to be a healer. So much so that I even said it aloud, before I even read this book. So, I was awestruck when I began to read the book and realize that my seemingly random musings weren't so random at all. There is a science to it and I was just beginning to familiarize myself with the surface without even realizing it.

In hindsight, I was never the nature type. Actually, that isn't all the way true. As a child, I really wanted to become a farmer, among other things. Even still, the inclination to examine and experience the natural world wasn't as deliberate. However, a few years ago, something in the woods interrupted the immediacy of my incessantly busy life and all of a sudden The Creator (and the Creations) were alive, in the present, and available to me. No matter what I had (or didn't have enough money to do), I could go sit by a tree or a river and "beam-up" i.e. tune into the earth and the heavens on a deeply spiritual level. One of the Holiest experiences: to sit by something created by the Creator that has its very own way of being and that I can experience just by being within its proximity. A very powerful thing.

Another example: around this same time last year I was running late and missed my bus. I had to wait outside for the next one and happened to be across the street from a park full of trees. I was annoyed at first and then something came to me: I needed to be out to see the trees but they needed to see me too. It was the most random thought in the world. But I knew it was true. From then on my awareness was heightened. The trees were alive.

More recently, I've been interested in the Sequoias and Redwoods. I remember a book I read as a small child which showed how massive these trees are and recently, I rediscovered them. After watching a few documentaries on these special, old, giant trees, I found a new sense of hope. If they can last that long, then we also can last. Even if we are not physically here, we can build things that are lasting enough to mirror the tenacity of these giant forest-dwellers.

What am I saying? A few things, but mainly, that so much of what we do already has a defined and deliberate purpose. Although we know this in theory, it is a whole other thing to connect the dots and really recognize the factors that move us through this world. Very few things are random or by chance. So much of it is ordered and some things are just mere reflections of nature's laws. They are much more calculated than not.

I'm beginning to see the direction in which my life is moving more clearly, even though it has been moving this way for some time. More than this though, by allowing myself to experience higher levels of earthly existence, so much continues to be revealed that, at times, I am in complete awe. And so, an experience here or there begins to manifest as a pattern and the pattern reveals itself to be truth.

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

After maroonage... On that process of disengaging

2016-10-08T10:50:00.000-04:00

As an unexpected treat, Nikki just so happened to have posted an article from ProudFlesh Journal in which the author speaks of disengagement and how so called "lower income" and "less educated" black folks ("disconnected" black people, as the New York Times calls it) are more and more realizing that we cannot live out our proper way of life -- not even in the shadows of maroonage -- in this modern "slave society" that I call euro-judeo-Christian capitalist civilization, which I say knowing that there is an african judeo-Christian tradition (not saying you need to call it that though, just helps me be clear).

[2-day liberatormagazine.com featured story]

Here's an excellent excerpt from the piece Nikki posted that reminds those of us striving to be "in tune" that we're heading in the right direction. According to a New York Times article cited in the essay below, so called "lower income" or so called "less educated" black people, who I consider some of the strongest in the tradition of urban African resistance in America, are beginning to "disengage" from this modern slave society. Or, as the article says specifically, they are "leaving New York City, the epicenter of global capital exploitation, for more space and family roots," citing the recent historic decline of New York City's black population growth as evidence.

That sentence hit me like a rainbow, especially since I've been feeling this intense itch -- starting with this post (link) -- to discuss how family and community is built in the intentional experience, as oppose to the reactionary (but necessary) maroon experience.

Now, the way I see it, if my knowledge of history and our people's struggles shows us that the strategy of trying to transform these epicenters of global capital exploitation through engagement has pretty much failed, in 2009, I'm going to take my ancestors' experiences and learn a lesson from them. I think I'm increasingly see that the lesson to be learned here is that true freedom cannot be found here in these epicenters of global capital exploitation.

That my inclination is in sync with black migration trends makes me extremely happy and gives me an enormous amount of hope that we as a people are moving in the right direction, despite our losing many over to the pitfalls of modern slave society and its "global capital exploitation" way of life. Those of us in tune with this trend should be happy because this reminds us that we haven't lost what it means to be in that proud African/indigenous tradition in our American existence and separation from home. Ultimately, that's where I want to be -- in tune with THAT spirit of resistance. I think there will always be those of us who choose to salvage a maroon existence whose time has come. But the nature of maroonage is also that it is always changing. Like the nomad, unlike the agriculturist, the maroon does not build stable, sustainable community.

I don't care to knock the nomadic maroon existence. I'm just realizing it's not for me. I'm increasingly seeing the urban capitalist existence for our people as an idea whose time has passed.

What I love about the piece Nikki shared is that it articulates that the transition from maroon back to the indigenous must be a process rather than an instantaneous phenomenon. That is important to understand. That articulation also leaves room for us to be at different points in our transition, or for us to remain at different points, and form different identities, as well. Some may choose to follow the path of return to the indigenous fully. Some of us may choose to follow it half way. Some of us may choose to not follow it at all and to continue on the path of trying to transform and salvage a society of "global capital exploitation".

The most important thing, I think, is that we all make a conscious choice for ourselves and live, unregretful, with our choice:

"[...] The phenomenon that is incorrectly called “disconnectedness” is, upon closer analysis, in fact disengagement, the active self-removal from a society as a means of self-defense and collective survival. Understanding that the dominant power structure is antithetical to collective Black community, Black people in the United States are disengaging. This Black disengagement, motivated by a desire for a more complete and collective existence, is rooted in a radical legacy that dates back to, and even pre-dates, New World chattel slavery. Cedric Robinson, in Black Marxism: the Making of the Black Radical Tradition, writes:

"[...] the more fundamental impulse of Black resistance was the preservation of a particular social and historical consciousness rather than the revolutionary transformation of feudal or merchant capitalist Europe . . . This perhaps is part of the explanation of why, so often, black slave resistance naturally evolved to marronage as the manifestation of the African’s determination to disengage, to retreat from contact. To reconstitute the community, Black radicals took to the bush, to the mountains, to the interior. Where we cannot retreat to such far off locations, we find means of disengagement."

But disengagement is not a clear and definitive break. It is a process by which one first recognizes the contradictions of the system under which s/he finds her or himself, and then proceeds to transform her or his reality to one more in accordance with her or his moral standards. It includes the self-distancing from said society in the quest for an alternate one. It must be underscored, once again, that disengagement is a process.

When the teenagers with whom I work at Rikers Island, New York City’s largest penal colony, expound upon the inadequacies of this power structure, cite countless injustices found in the criminal justice system, demonstrate a deep awareness and understanding of the racist underpinnings of their detainment, and then proceed to glorify the merciless attainment of material goods by any means, thereby validating the system they just rebuked, it should come as no surprise. The current racial capitalist/imperialist power structure is one that imposes limits upon the imagination as a means of preserving hegemony. In many instances, we cannot imagine ourselves outside of the current system, for we have not yet gained the vocabulary to articulate nor the tools to construct that which we seek. As the process of disengagement matures, however, the vocabulary to purport a vision is developed, which the collective then becomes ready to enact.

[...] Unfortunately, what we do not always see in Black youth culture are articulated and productive alternatives.

Further evidence of this disengagement can be found in another recent New York Times article reporting a significant shift in the Black population of New York City. The article states that “an accelerating exodus of American-born blacks, coupled with slight declines in birthrates and a slowing influx of Caribbean and African immigrants, have produced a decline in New York City's black population for the first time since the draft riots during the Civil War...”9 In search of more space, lower cost of living, and family roots, a large share of migrants leaving not only the city, but the region, and heading for the South are ‘lower income’ and ‘less educated,’ the same population cited in the earlier article as being “disconnected.” Black people are leaving New York City, the epicenter of global capital exploitation, for more space and family roots. We are disengaging from urban centers and then moving to environments that facilitate an improved quality of life and connect us to our family traditions. What plight are these studies referring to?

Above all else, disengagement is a source of hope, as it demonstrates that, even in the height of State repression, Black people are still resisting white hegemony, that we have still not yet been conquered by a society that has nothing more to offer us than urban death chambers, rural peonage, imprisonment, and enslavement. It is not hopelessness. It is intelligence, the comprehension that this society has nothing for us. Of course the New York Times, as a tool of white supremacy, would publish these academic findings. Who knows? Perhaps it will generate funds for NGO’s who will implement programs which only serve to disillusion, deceive, and misguide Black people by teaching them the errors of their ways and upholding mainstream (read: white supremacist) cultural values. Disengagement is one means through which the space is created to enable us to discuss the terms of our realities, plot and plan. It is a collective understanding that the current order is not working. We are slowly coming to realize that what we need can only be found in our own traditions and experiences.

With this, we disengage.

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).

Dr. K. Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau / "The Ancestors and Our Connection to Them: The Real Power of Being"

2016-10-08T04:00:00.000-04:00

Info: "Dr. Fu-Kiau Bunseki was Born in Minianga, Democratic Republic of Congo, and is one of the most distinguished scholars of African culture. He was educated in both Western and African systems of thought. His degrees are in the areas of Cultural Anthropology (B.A.), School Administration (M.Ed.), Library Science (M.S.), and in Education & Community Development (Ph.D.). He has been initiated into three major African education systems (Lemba, Kimkimba and Kimpasi) and founded one of the first indigenous research centers in Africa, Luyalungunu Lwa Kumba-Nsi Institute, which was dedicated to exploring and documenting traditionally accumulated Kongo teachings for the post-independent society and its institutions. Dr. Bunseki is considered the Father of Bantu-Kongo modern school of thought. He has published numerous books and articles on African culture. A leading lecturer at universities and cultural institutions in the United States of America where he travels extensively sharing his knowledge and wisdom, Dr. Fu-Kiau lives in Boston. His work has taken him to many parts of the world, to Brazil (Brasilian Federal University of Bahia), Germany (Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf) and Israel (Hafia University). He has more recently and in different locations, run a wonderful full four day empowering program An Unusual Deep Insight Retreat for Self & Community Healing Power based on Bantu-Kongo Cosmology."

We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).