22 December 2014

Ismaaiyl Brinsley




The Right wing has predictably blamed Ismaaiyl Brinsley's assassination of those two New York City police officers on the mayor and the protesters. The Left - and by Left I now mean the white left that pretends to guide us - has quickly distanced themselves from Brinsley's political act, striving to characterize this man's mental faculties: so, he tried to commit suicide. So what?

Bringing this fact up again and again shows they on that remedial Left have no knowledge, no respect, no empathy for the condition of Black people, particularly Black men, in this white-settler country. They know nothing and don't care to know the suicide rates among Black and First Nations peoples. Nor do they have these characteristics when it comes to our First Nations, whose stolen lands they do not want to talk about.

The bottom line, Left or Right, is that any African or First Nations person who shoots back, literally or rhetorically, must be insane.

The bottom line is the left and the right as they are presently constituted of white people, clowns, minstrels, and their ass-kissers does not want a revolution.

This should tell us why they would parade the families of Eric Gardner and Michael Brown in front of the media to express compassion for these police and ask for peace, when no police officer stood up for us.

This should explain why the mayor of New York has shown how he's been tamed by saying how the police assassinations was an "attack on every single New Yorker," not the murder of Black and Brown people mind you: the assassination of the police.

A white friend writes to warn me about making Brinsley a hero, points to his assault on his girlfriend. White people, allies or not, are quick to misconstrue these words and this post, and that is their problem - among many problems; and I hope we give them many, many more.

First, I will choose my own heroes. Second, when they start making an issue of the racists, sexists, and white nationalists who make up the lexicon of radical history - from whom we have all learned - they might be able to come to me about the deeper meanings of Brinsley shooting his girlfriend as somehow making his overtly political act questionable. I am not confused; white people may be.

If you fear revolution then you are content with the predicament of Africans and First Nations peoples and think another dissertation will solve this wretched problem of this wretched civilization. Again, white people will even misconstrue that elocution, and it is not for me to guide them. If their eyes stay closed, I hope we can drag them into the light.

20 December 2014

When I think of Home I think of a Place




Imagine for a moment that you were adopted by a decent, loving family who had their hearts in the right place, who fed and clothed you, sent you off to school, and did their best to encourage your development in every way. You know they had heart for you, but as you get older you are also always aware that they are not your kin, that their family name does not give you a history. Family dinners and family reunions impress upon you your actual role as an orphan.

Still, you grow up. Then one day you decide to do some arduous, painful research and find your birth mother, maybe meet her or confront her if she's still alive. Mother, why did you give me up? You just want to know your place in the universe, and that you have a place other than as someone who was abandoned and picked up by kind, loving strangers.

After years of research, you find your birth mother, and you locate the state and town where she lives; you see she has brothers and sisters and cousins. You get an address. You buy a plane ticket. and you fly there to connect with your own roots.

When you arrive you find the address is that of a maximum-security, open-air prison of a feudal epoch, and most of your surviving kin, these brothers and sisters, are housed in it with life sentences. You pick up a local newspaper that details some sketchy but horrifying facts about life in the prison, the conditions, the bad food, the lack of plumbing, the rampant diseases, and maybe some slow-moving lawsuits to get things improved.

You read praises lavished on the local police forces  for their sternness and refusal to coddle "these people."

 ... I have written lately about the DNA results I've gotten over the last few years, first from my father, which was restricted to just Africa, and my own DNA tests, which covered anything there was to uncover.

I have noted that more than 70% of my DNA comes from Africa, specifically West Africa, and specifically the area that comprises modern-day Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon, the Bubi, Tikar, Hausa, Fulani, and Tsogo Peoples. But more specific to that, the results tell me about my strong ties to Bioko Island, the homeland of the Bubi Peoples, off the coast of Cameroon but part of the nation of Equatorial Guinea.

As my awakening to what the United States really is as an adoptive parent has grown, this has steadily lead me away from the delusions and mirages that white-settler culture offers in abundance and toward finding my birth mother. And in doing that, I find this birth mother, Africa, in a dungeon of horrors worse than Guantanano or Abu Graib.

I find myself between a rock and a harder place, between a white-settler nation-state in my adoptive home and the land of my birth weaponized by the same white settlers.

The police in this narrative - the African governments which can very loosely be called governments, because they do no governing at all - all carry arms manufactured by Western nation-states, Western nation-states who are essentially the social workers who facilitated my adoption in the first place. These African police states have, at best, a cynical view of their captives, whom they allow to exist somewhere between abject misery and starvation.

The reality of this more than washes over me but is like a deluge through which at first I cannot see a direction.

I wonder: what is my purpose here all along? Because as I have pretended to grow in this adopted home - by which I clearly mean the Western hemisphere, my birth mother has faced a worse brutalization that was kept from my knowledge. My adoptive parents did not tell me. My schools did not inform me.

The Western flag I was to pledge allegiance and was alleged to symbolize all that was modern and good and civilized was in fact making vast swathes of humanity untried prisoners of torture in chambers of horrors and concentration camps.

When I get beyond looking at Africa as a spiritual home, the Mother Continent, or whatever religious relic many trifling Negroes try to make of it, a stand-in for the Garden of Eden and Heaven - the actual, daily terrors in our homes cannot be hidden.

It cannot be hidden in a place like Equatorial Guinea and Bioko Island, the land of my ancestors. It is no home to go and be nurtured or to reconnect with long, lost family. It is not a place to have a family reunion. It is not even good enough to be a place for privileged, white Europeans to go and have a ClubMed vacation and be waited on by poor natives. It is a place in dire, dire need to be liberated, as any political prisoner would be, and by any means on the table. These are places that need revolutions.

Having this knowledge I know it must have been in the strategy of the white settlers as they broke their African captives to totally disassociate their knowledge from their homes and their families. Hell has been let loose in steady infernos on that continent, and its children in the diaspora are, on the whole denied the outrage due them, and therefore the inkling to do something about it, as the Irish were in regards to British occupation of Ireland; or the Jews still are in defending the nation-state of Israel. The little-discussed Vietnamese community in Southern California is a Republican constituency just as anti-communist as their Miami counterparts. But, by design, as the late John Hendrik Clark said repeatedly, "Blackness" only describes what you look like; it does not tell you where you're from.

In "The Whiz," Dorothy sings "When I think of home I think of a place where there's love overflowing ..." before she clicks her magic shoes and returns to New York City. The joke is on us. My ending would have had her wake up with a gun in her hand, a copy of Che's manual, "Guerrilla Warfare" at her side, and in the land of her ancestors ready to organize the people and drive out the client class and Euro-kiss-assers.

Now, imagine you were kidnapped by a family who did not have your best interest at heart and essentially did the same things to you ...

09 December 2014

The Global Race War and Revolution


James Baldwin was correct when he said to be a Black man in the US is to be in a constant state of rage.
But this anger intensifies into something worse when Africa, a spiritual symbol for not enough Blacks in the US, becomes a tangible homeland of countries and peoples. Because as soon as you consider Mali or Angola or Nigeria the home of your kin as the German-American considers Germany his, you are confronted with facts:

On the one hand, you are confronted with the reality that your so-called "family" name, Jones, Howard, Denny, Williams, is not the end of the story, which was more of a cruel lie because to trace, say, Denny, back to Ireland in search of a family reunion would meet with a mystified, chilly reception.

You realize the meaning of a comment made by a Black Mexican friend of mine, who had just been cruelly harassed by the police in his own country, just outside Mexico City, where my passport got me a pass. But his own Mexican ID was not believed, and when it was he was instructed to open his mouth and show his palms like he was a farm animal being inspected. When we got back into his car to continue our drive he said "We are only known in our own homeland."

We are only known in our own homeland.

On the other hand, when your connection to that immense continent becomes personal, you realize how the US and the Western imperialist powers have declared open season on African peoples and an open market for US corporations. You encounter countries that are in realty open-air concentration camps, where people are moved or murdered by Western-made weapons, so as to gain access to gas or minerals or petroleum. You find, as I am with that tiny country of my African ancestry, Equatorial Guinea and Bioko Island, in particular that thugs are installed in power by Western might to subdue the people and give cheap access to natural wealth for Western capital. What had become a tangible home to leave behind the white-settler nation-state of the US becomes a prison's death row, where African men's life expectancy is a mere 50 years! So you are faced with the choice of the cornered animal.

Incidentally, it says something to me that too many Christian Black preachers in the US, the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, and Urban League do not make the case of Africa an issue, a central issue. They are clearly bankrupt of meaningful ideas and unworthy of our attention. I think about the Irish community of Boston which helped fund the cause of the IRA and Ireland's long overdue independence from the United Kingdom. Of course, I think of many Jews in the US who hold and financially support the cause of Israel, whether they have been there or not.

But the so-called Black leadership in the US is, on the whole, with few exceptions, is a house of tap-dancing, master-pleasing, thesis-writing, Negroes.

In contrast, Cuba, a poor country assaulted by the US, has made African liberation a central cause and has been instrumental in upending apartheid in South Africa, helping to defend colonial attacks from such European countries as Portugal, and of course, famously, exporting teachers and doctors to African countries. Cuba also accepts African students into its medical school to return to their home countries to practice.

That even this is being overwhelmed by Western powers does not diminish the efforts of this tiny, Caribbean island, but it should cast a scrutinizing eye on so-called Black organizations and who pays them and whose ideologies they propagandize.

So the corner the animal finds himself drives home two realities, one that the revolution must happen and it is the central happening; and, two, it must be a revolution that intersects all our communities around the world, of all colors and races, regardless of so-called nationality, which we know brings marginal and diminishing benefits depending on the desires of capitalism. It cannot be a US revolution, nor can it be a Cameroonian revolution. It is a revolution that must begin to deal rhetorical and literal blows against the structure of the mechanisms that oppress us: we must dismantle the beliefs in white racism, its rewards, and the myths of the successes of capitalism.

Capitalism spawned the phenomenon of the industry of slave trading, unheard of in history, even the Roman Empire, and it still seeks to maintain this caste system of racism on the globe. It is the father and spiritual source of Naziism and Jim Crow, not to forget the genocide of the First Nations of the American continent. It cannot be tamed or reformed. It must be abolished.

Black men are not only hunted and shot on the streets of the US but also all over the world, even the homelands of their ancestors.

05 December 2014

An Open Letter to a Young Black Man who could have been Me


An Open Letter to my younger self, my, older self, and my other selves.

Dear, brother,
It says a tremendous lot about the decimation of our culture as Africans in the diaspora that our young have to re-learn what our elders went through, and they often learn it stubbornly, unwillingly. I speak from experience, but I am not speaking of the data on the timeline. I think we all pretend to know that; I am speaking of the implications.

Let's put aside for this letter that most of the fault lies with white civilization, which took you from your home, made you and that home into something neither would recognize.

But part of this is the fault of our own elders who - unlike ANY oppressed people I know of - hand their own children over to the white racist society to grow into complete men and women, even though these elders know better. They know no other option than to hand over their treasures because they are so removed and disconnected from their source, so it follows that we would be just as hopeless.

And so we go about trying to blend in and do our best for these elders, who are no better than the African and Arab dictators installed by European powers: their values are one and the same; they answer to their bell ringing. It is not in their plan that we grow into men and women.

And Hawaii will not give that to us, though it HAS removed me from the mainland, and this is a good thing, because - maybe like you - it has allowed me to breathe.

Part of the fault in our being so lost lies with us, as adults. We keep seeing manifestations of what this white-settler state thinks of us, plans for us, but we simply refuse to believe it. We feel we cannot believe it because we "know" there is nothing else. And we "know" there is nothing else because we do not know we came from somewhere. It is this "knowing" that is the cornerstone of the government schools in which we were all sent to learn. Nothing.

I have to say: it must begin with us knowing we came from somewhere. This doesn't mean dressing it up in the archetypes of patriarchy [viz. "Great Kings and Queens of Africa"], which is bullshit to keep you tethered to a warped ideology. You cannot Africanize European Christianity and make things right.

Hawaii sovereignty will not replace our origins anymore than dabbling in Buddhism or getting an MBA from Harvard will, which are just some of the things we do to distract ourselves, but the sovereignty cause does shed light on how white capitalism works [for them], and why MY homeland of Bioko Island and Cameroon are further along down the same toilet that occupied Hawaii will go. Hawaii is just South Central LA and Ferguson, MO. in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Hawaii is the Pine Ridge Reservation with a beach.

I say this in this particular way because these manifestations of white supremacy and imperialism are to be studied, to illuminate who you are and where you came from and how you got here, but they are not diversions.

When I got back from my first trip to Cuba, several small magazines and newspapers asked me to write about it. I could not. For the life of me and the need of money I could not. Then it dawned on me that I could not because it wasn't Cuba I learned about; it was the United States of America.

[I had to go back then and re-read James Baldwin's "The Discovery of What it Means to be an American"]

Brother, if you have friends taunting you and calling you names for speaking about the racial issues of the day; if you have boyfriends calling you "nigger", I say it's way passed time to stop and look around because it's going to get worse.

When Polonius tells his son Laertes in "Hamlet": "TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE ..." he's not telling him to be whoever he wants to be. He's telling him to know where he came from, and remember his ancestors.

22 November 2014

Cosby, Witch Hunts, and Hollywood


The line-up of women accusing Bill Cosby of rape and their testimony has me puzzled
, which is not the response I am supposed to have when a woman says she's been raped. So I'm uneasy with myself  for being puzzled at all.

But Hollywood is an interesting place with some interesting people. All that glistens is not gold, as Shakespeare wrote. And for some reason this series of allegations reminds me of the impetus and fallout of passed Hollywood witch hunts.

Most of us know about the ones conducted in the 50's by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, but these were actually begun in the late 40's in the House of Representatives under Rep. J. Parnell Thomas and "evolved" into grander show trials in the Senate.

But there was an even earlier witch hunt, by a decade, rarely discussed, which had a congruent purpose to weed out a subversive element from the film industry. The witch hunt of the 30's came as a result of the Christian Church threatening a mass boycott of films in the vulnerable economic times of the Depression. The Church leadership did not like certain themes discussed in film, and said so; they did not like how certain plots were developed and resolved, and said so; they loathed certain actors who exemplified these themes, and they blacklisted them in billboards nationwide as "Box-Office Poison".

The film studios, run by right wingers, like LB Mayer at MGM and Ray Cohn at RKO, fearful of the affect of the promised boycott and the visible affect the cultural blacklist was already having, set up in conjunction with the Christians the Hayes Office. This was a censorship tool to ensure the Church got what it wanted.

The Hayes Office ended in the late 60's when the motion picture rating system replaced it.

In the meantime, film scripts had to follow a certain formula. Topics were made off limits. More over, the film colony that developed since the Talkies was decimated. With the Talkies, producers looked to the New York stage community for actors, and what they got were beautiful speaking voices but basically the sort of people the Church despised: freethinkers, communists, homosexuals. I don't think I'm overstating this.

But with the new climate, the studio moguls not only demanded scripts be cleaned up but also the actors' public lives. Where possible, heterosexual marriages were quickly arranged, and gossip magazines feminized women and masculinized the men into red-blooded heteros.

The models and role models, the Golden Age, the Tinsel Town that we are told ever after to revere is really a horrible confection of lies and charades, hiding truths about the lives many of these actors lived. Of course, some careers could not be rehabilitated, and they either returned to Broadway or disappeared altogether.

That in the 30's was the first purge. The second came with Rep. J. Parnell Thomas in the House of Representatives a decade later. You have to know about the first purge to appreciate the second, more infamous one.

The threat of subpoena and blacklist got a lot of people who should have known better to come out and Name Names - and they should have known better because maybe at one point in their development they had been freethinkers or communists or affiliated with either. They certainly lived and worked alongside them daily.

But with the threat of a lost career they had to maneuver themselves away from the scrutiny of this witch hunt and offer a sacrificial lamb. Many to their shame did, and we really should memorialize their names in a Wall of Shame at an Academy Awards ceremony.

But what does this have to do with Bill Cosby? Maybe nothing. But knowing that behind the public relations departments of the studios and talent agencies press releases is a reality we are rarely treated to, Cosby among them. We believe the Make Believe. We believe in Dr. Huxtable or even the creator of Fat Albert. We do not believe in depression, sexaholics, group sex games, partner swapping, recreational drug use, serial abortionists.

I know if that same Christian mafia that started the original purge in the 30's was able to look today under some sheets and behind some closet doors they'd have epileptic fits, speak in tongue, and see their Jewish messiah.

When one of Cosby's accusers speaks about being in a hotel room with him in his bathrobe, accepting a pill from him, taking the pill, then drinking wine BEFORE SHE BLACKED OUT and woke having had sex, I am not directed immediately to call the Special Victims Unit. Did Cosby take a pill too? She doesn't say. Were these sexual games he played with others in the film industry? He's alleged [by her] to have been in a robe.

The scenarios only tell me that Cosby possibly had the sexual appetite of, say, John F Kennedy, whose rape victims have never come forward; or many of the film producers [and many more pretenders!] who coerced young male and female actors in auditions into having sex [rape], but rarely do the famous come out and Name Those Names.

That what some hyper-moralists would call sordid while they became wet between the legs is is all I am willing to accept as occurring ... so far. My jury is out.

But now, as with the Hollywood witch hunts before, a peculiar set of testimonies come one after the other, and another moral crusade seems to be afoot, and I just can't help seeing the ghosts of Louis B Mayer and Nazi Christians ready to set some new standards.

If the name Scotty Bowers means nothing to you, it shouldn't. It may mean nothing to Bill Cosby. But it apparently meant a lot to much of Hollywood for many, many years. Bowers was a former sex worker who turned his talents to procuring young men and women for Hollywood stars. He performed this pimp service for some time and with countless clients, some of whom he names in his memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of Stars.
Bowers isn't writing about one star with one secret.

20 November 2014

Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire the Real Dilemma of the Undocumented Immigrant


While I'd never consider the closed, militarized borders and xenophobia of the right-wing,
the US left has its glaring problems when it comes to immigration. I'd imagine as with most official narratives there exists an establishment of mostly white business interests that massage a pro-capitalist angle that the left repeats without much self-reflection.

But before anyone gets too alarmed let me be clear that I not only believe the borders should be as open to people as they clearly are to corrosive finance and deadly military weapons, but I also think the border themselves and the nation-state that spawned them are a cancerous lesion upon humanity.

My issue is not with so-called immigrants, who in modern conversation are always Brown or Black. Interesting that we do not speak of Canadians or Europeans coming here as immigrants. Europeans coming to the Americas seems to be accepted as a naturally occurring phenomenon.

Immigration is a white problem of Black and Brown people. And this issue has been carefully managed to hide certain truths.

Post-slavery slavery. Last week, for example, I heard comedian-turned-activist, Russell Brand, defend the US allowing immigrants thus: we would no longer have access to cheap food. Brand is not the first leftist to utter such disturbing words - indeed, it has been uttered so much and for my entire adult life that this argument is taken as acceptable.

But why on the face of it is our needing cheap food a justification for a virtual slave system? Why is this an acceptable leftist or radical position? When did it become acceptable to doom castes of people to labor for a more privileged caste?

If the only way we can have access to cheap food is underpaid labor, then, like all of our minimum-wage jobs, this agricultural food system should be abolished.

Then what, you ask? Of course human beings lived for aeons growing their own food, and if returning to this system compromises other cherished phenomena, like the City, then so be it.

Our Son of a Bitch in Central America. Another lost point for the left is a critique of the countries these immigrants flee, and the social, political, and economic dynamics that create these countries of misery in the first place.

The Immigration Issue is really a refugee problem, only we call it immigration at home and label refugees people from the global South who cannot get out of the global South: when they dare to cross the Rubicon into the land of milk and honey it's an immigration issue.

Refugees are a political thing: they come from wars, natural disasters, failed states, military regimes - all of which, except maybe the nature - can usually be traced right to the capitols of the global North. A military regime is installed and armed to terrorize civil society to ensure compliance with Western demands. Disastrous terms of trade agreements demand the global South extract its wealth to enrich foreign elites while a basic domestic health system cannot be built. Et cetera.

Even natural and health disasters can often be laid at the feet of the global North because without the ability to build durable infrastructure, train technicians, poor countries are left that much more vulnerable to a tornado or a pandemic which might have less impact in the global North, except of course in poor communities.

Twenty-first Century Feudalism. And finally, the pro-immigration debate overlooks an analysis of the global Northern countries being fled to, which must include the nature of Western "democracies" as increasingly bastions of industrial feudalism and not democracies at all.

James Baldwin lamented being integrated into the burning house that is Western civilization. I am more than circumspect about the selling points of the United States of America as far as anyone goes, but especially my Black and Brown brothers and sisters in the global South. I know what really awaits them

By carefully framing immigration in these ways and relentlessly repeating its diversionary talking points, radicals avoid the key point that we not only need a revolution in the United States and abroad but also more over that these nation-states as we know them - the US, UK, France, Spain, etc, Western-designed African countries, Latin American states - as they are constituted by an elite who fundamentally worships at the altar of Wall Street, profit over people, and using various tech booms to make larger swathes of people superfluous, must die. They must be dismantled in that artful way anything obsolete or harmful to children is recalled and incinerated never to be considered again. They must perish in the spirit that the late Lakota Russell Means, co-founder of the American Indian Movement, said: for America to live Europe must die.

18 October 2014

Study Finds More than a Third of Oakland's Fast Food Workers Cannot Afford Food and I Wonder Why do we Care At All


I'm a bit confused about something from my friends on the left. Yes, once again I am having to take stock of the nature of this so-called friendship for what me and mine are getting out of it. It's not just my anarchism but also just plain, good sense that any relationship be constantly assessed and re-assessed for its ... qualities. Yes, I almost wrote "utility" instead of qualities, but this might have been misconstrued ideologically by these same friends I'm questioning.

A study by the Restaurant Opportunites Center United reveals that more than one-third of the fast-food workers in the city of Oakland, CA, cannot afford food because of the poverty wages they must subsist on. Food insecurity is the polite way of saying that people are going hungry, they may be starving, they are certainly snowballing a host of health issues for which the state will simply let them die.

So the results of this study, though not surprising, should be an urgent concern. I just don't understand why the left is concerned.

Just the other day, I heard Russell Brand, whom I have more in common with ideologically and would never kick out of my bed, utter the line that many use as a justification for immigration [read: immigration from Latin America]. Brand noted without any irony that without allowing these men and women to cross the border, our food costs would escalate.

Brand is not the only person making this argument. I think the argument is at least as old as I am because I have heard it all my life

And it is a sorry argument that says something to me about those on the left willing to use it.

Because if you look at the argument that without immigration [from Latin America! They do not expect Germans to come here and do agricultural work] our food costs will go up, what it is saying is we need these immigrants [from Latin America] to work at below-subsistence wages and without any labor or health protections. This is what the argument is saying.

So it should strike us radicals a bit odd that fast-food workers wages are a concern because they cannot live on them, but the wages of immigrant labor is not a concern because we need cheap food..

It should also strike us that when we speak about immigration from Latin America we are talking about indigenous people who were already at the economic bottoms of these Euro finance-centered economies, like the Mexican economy, which is run and headed by wealthy white Mexicans, while thankfully many of the indigenous are not trying to assimilate into this culture but have rebelled in Chiapas as an example to us all.

I'll say the same thing about agriculture that I've already said about the fast-food or any industry: if a business cannot exist without giving a living wage to its workers that business has no right to exist, period. To say otherwise is to accept the argument of the antebellum slave owner, who was probably correct that he could not be competitive in the marketplace - particularly selling textiles to Great Britain at low cost - if he had to pay wages to his plantation workers [another immigrated workforce].

Granted, private ownership of businesses is antithetical to community interests. Read that again. The labor fight of our times should be no different than the labor fight of a hundred years ago: that workers collectively own and self-manage the factories they work in. This should be the standard.

But the system we have is the system we have for today. So the bar should be reasonably placed that if you must pay your workers wages on which they cannot live and must beg, plea, borrow, or steal to make ends meet your business license should be nullified and you, the business owner, sentenced to long hours of community service.

So already, with the plantation example in mind it's clear I am calling less these friendships but more an entire economic system into question. It is fundamentally no different than the antebellum South in its labor relations.  And it is indistinguishable from a system that seems on the one hand to create vast wealth [for the plantation owners] and fathomless poverty. This system cannot be improved with a few reforms or some regulations, any more than forcing farm owners to provide bathrooms and water to poorly paid farm workers is an improvement. It is not. Just so, if poorly paid, hungry fast-food workers is intolerable then so too is our reliance on cheap food from cheap farm workers [from Latin America]. This should spark a revolution in how we feed ourselves, how we organize our lives, our towns, our cities, our strip malls: if we are to have any of these things at all.

17 October 2014

On Negro Maid Servants and the White Settlers They Serve


In James Baldwin's brilliant book-length film study, Devil Finds Work [1976], he uses the tool of his prose as always to dismantle our most cherished mechanical sins. In one startling part, he discusses the role of a maid servant in DW Griffith's classically racist "The Birth of a Nation" [1915] from the early, early days of the movie industry, and he observes how this same character emerges unchanged 50 years or so later in a "liberal" movie, Stanley Kramer's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" [1967]

Baldwin's problem - and ours, to be clear - with this character is that she is nothing but an appendage of the white family she toils for, and that generations of struggle have not improved this. She is a matronly House Slave, who only seems to feel and see what the whites who hold her leash feel and see. She is without familial concerns, only the concerns of the white settlers who command her; she seems to come to us with no connections of her own. Baldwin seems to cringe when the manifestation of this strange character in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" is the one who takes Sydney Pointer's character to task for stepping outside of his place for his intentions with the white daughter and coming in disrupting the white family.

I think about this phenomenon when I think about Africans rushing to join every cause, immerse themselves into any religion, and of course take on any political issue that white-settler culture dishes to them, as long as they do not speak of Africa.

With Africa, there is a tacit understanding among too many of us New Negroes, post-racialists, African-Americans [sic] that anything associated with Africa - and our ignorance already prepares us that nothing exists in Africa before European slavers and colonization arrived - is sullied and as embarrassing as ebonics.

This is not only why we run from Africana but also run into the arms of anything emanating out of Europe, ground zero for some monstrous crimes. This is also why we as a people wholeheartedly turn our treasures, our children, over to the monsters who started this, in order for those children to be be civilized and made whole.

I'm recalling the Black male character in "Follow Me Home," [1996] a beautiful independent movie produced by the Bratt Brothers of San Francisco. The Black male character is immersed in Buddhism. Or, the Black female character in "La Mission," [2009] another brilliant independent movie, also by the Bratt Brothers, who seems to be practicing another South Asian faith rather than an African one, even a New World African one.

I cite these two movies because they are created, like Kramer's 1967 classic, by liberals - our so-called "friends"! In truth, they are reinforcing that same tacit understanding that Africa is backward, primitive, and only brought into the light of civilization by white slave traders and venture capitalists.

These characters seek awakening anywhere and everywhere but where they came from: the Christian church is, of course, a given among North American Africans. According to a Pew study, over 40% of Africans in North America identify with some form of Baptist church. Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism are in the single digits or much less. What is fascinating about this Pew study is nowhere is the acknowledgement that Africans had their own indigenous religions, which were denied New World chattel slaves; the study finds no irony that these people had been forced to adopt Christianity, and does not note why most North American Africans gravitated to the Baptist denomination over others [no white hierarchy to exclude Black membership and the Baptists took on the abolition cause early].

If Baldwin were alive, he might continue the non-evolution of the maid servant with this Pew study of a people from nowhere with no history heading into whiteness on the same leash.

But this phenomenon boils over into other areas, like activism. Like the maid servant characters discussed by Baldwin, we Africans in North America are guilty of joining anyone else's campaign but our own. Let me be clearer about this: because, our oppressions are connected, and we should be working as co-conspirators with each other to understand the complex affects of capitalism on all our communities and wage revolution to upturn it, but except when a Ferguson or BART shooting occurs and makes the headlines, the issue of the condition of Africans in North America is not an issue at all for whites.

The left - I'd argue as witnessed by its movies - does not really know and lacks a comfort in tackling the social and economic contexts of Africans in North America.

We rush to their causes even though often within these other critical movements, we as Africans in the diaspora face the same marginalization that we do in employment, housing, wages. Leftist activists treat us like their pets, like we are an appendage, and when we step out of their roles for us, they pull back on the yoke.

This isn't a pleasant thing to say. I'm supposed to only attack FOX News and the rightwing, not my "friends." But with precious few exceptions, precious few radical whites who "get it" and have marched right out of these organizations, this must be stated as the nature of our so-called friends.

If you do not believe me, look at any of the cottage industry organizations on the left and identify where their mission statement acknowledges the crimes done historically to Africans in North America and how these crimes are still in full effect.

They would respond that this is not part of their mission, and I would say "Exactly." Because just as fundamental as the human rights violations against indigenous nations of this hemisphere is the state of the Africans. Both, not surprisingly, are almost totally ignored. The reset switch for these friends do not correct the crimes of white-settler institutions on these populations, the assumption being that this really is a white country, and we others are merely making guest appearances.

Baldwin's point was pretty clear in drawing that link between an old film and a new one. The only advancement is technicolor. So many of us still in vain situate ourselves as having come from nowhere running to a white settler population which doesn't want to deal with us except as the farm animals working on their narrow agenda. Their lip service and false concern will not win us progress; only a revolution will do that. Their program will bring us 60 more years of maid servants cooing for their masters.

06 October 2014

All Equality is not Equal


This is not my last or first word on the topic of gay marriage. Many years ago when this was just becoming THE issue in the LGBT community, AIDS activism was splintering, and marriage seemed to be THE stage-managed solution, I penned an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle expressing my non-support of gay marriage. I said it demanded conformity that queers were not about; and that it was predictably spearheaded by privileged white gay men and lesbians, who had a real stake in this fight that fast-food or domestic workers, mostly of color, did not. What did marriage between two poor Black fast-food workers without health care mean? What cache did it offer them towards a better life? Nothing!

The morning the editorial appeared, many of my teacher colleagues would not speak to me until one approached me and challenged: "what did you mean by this?"

What I mean is that I do not confuse at all economic and social equality, nor do I think they can be separate things. You cannot have one without the other, and I am just old enough to throw back in your face anyone that says one can be a "step" to the other. You might as well tell me to wait my turn and know my place.

Gay marriage is social development without economic development: it is like building schools for communities whose parents have no jobs It is like donating a library for a community whose children have no shoes.

It is, in short, a very typical Western tactic. The West's empires will assuage restless colonials with garbage but never, never economic development because this risks making the colonial a competitor.

What is social development for people who have little and lessening economic viability in a white supremacist capitalist system but an empty promise?

The opposite is just as true but more revealing: what is having economic wealth and yet be marginalized socially?

This is the dilemma the white lesbians and gays found themselves in as they continued to reach the pinnacles of their professions but forced by laws to be in the closet.

Meanwhile, racial minorities continued to menace this wretched Western Experiment founded by hate groups, like the Pilgrims, on the corpses of Native Americans. Racial minorities continue on the trajectory being a refuse population. And yet, THE program offered by the LGBT hierarchy - Lambda Legal, Human Rights Campaign, the ACLU - is solely and uniquely marriage.

These whites are like the 17th century bourgeoisie who grew wealthy as Commoners (from the trade in Africans!) but as Commoners had zero standing in the Royal Courts of France and Great Britain, which held on to feudal ritual. These bourgeoisie only gained social status to match their economic status by waging revolution; they did to some kings and courtiers what we find so abhorrent in the Middle East: heads had to be dismembered from some bodies. Then with Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity in their mouths, they expanded the trade in human cargo, depopulated generations of brain trust from the African continent, enriched themselves, and told us it was the Age of Enlightenment.

Their progeny today don't give a goddamn in hell for the social and economic condition of Black and Brown peoples: they do care to what extent we support their agenda. We are still their human cargo, so they keep assuaging us with broken lies and broken treaties that tomorrow will be as bright for us as today must be made for them.

What do I mean by this? I mean that the only equality that has any meaning  is jointly economic and social as one. The only way to attain this FOR EVERYBODY is a Revolution. Didn't our European counterparts already prove that time and time again? Appealing to the moral conscience of a people who have no conscience is a waste of time. So while I'm indifferent to anyone's marriage, I am not fooled that this move by the US Supreme Court today is a step for progress while me and mine keep getting dragged back into another century.

13 September 2014

To be an African in North America

To be a Black man in a white country is to be presumed not a member of that country.

A former Del Taco supervisor during a job I had in high school liked to speak of "all-American types" being at the front counter. I had no consciousness then except the consciousness that passes through us psychically, so the phrase always rubbed me the wrong way, made me uncomfortable, even though I could not put my finger on it. And I did not notice until much, much later that while I occupied that front counter, I was alone as a POC. My unconsciousness, in part, made me safe. The grill and cook areas were mostly Latinos. The phrase was to come up again later when I heard about certain temp agencies using that code to indicate white people.

To be Black in a white country meant when the restaurant chain, Houlihan's, had NO Black waiters, this included me, even though my white college peers were readily hired as such, and I allowed to be a busboy and clean up after them, and after the patrons, for whatever spare change they delighted to give me. After many attempts to move up in spite of this, that Okie cracker manager woman, Kris Tinger, said to me "Lowell, if you insist on being a waiter I can make you a waiter, but I can't guarantee you any hours."

To be African in the United States is still to be defined by that US Supreme Court which said we were not now nor ever meant to be Americans, citizens, of this infamous country.

To be of African descent in this white-settler country is to be a tool for exploiters, even so-called liberal ones: so those gay bars, like the Midnight Sun in San Francisco's Castro District, were found by a District Attorney sting to in fact be routinely denying Blacks employment, charging cover charges where there was none, and selling cocktails at a higher price. When I went as a freelance reporter for the local gay newspaper, The Sentinel, to cover the story, the white patrons greeted me as if I had walked into a Klan gathering, heckling me and throwing ancient racist epithets my way.

To be descended from that stock of stolen African labor made surplus, therefore dangerous, after the United States Experiment utterly blew up in 1865 means you cannot be rented an apartment by many a large property owners in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Orange County, California, because you are still surplus labor; nor given an office temp assignment because - again - you are not "front-office type," except to go assemble tents for a Beverly Hills Arts Expo, then finally get a job at barely minimum wage while your white "friends", bless their clueless puzzled hearts, ask you "why are you working there?"

To be Black in a a lily-white land is to be a vagrant, and you belong nowhere, so every police and justice institution in this country is intent on prodding you, questioning your presence, frisking you, moving you along, until you're dead, in jail, or you go mad so they can put you in jail.

In fact, to be Black in this racist country is to be one false accusation or corrupt district attorney away from incarceration.

To be Black in this white supremacist patriarchy means, then, your gay, meth-addicted, weed-smoking compatriot, tweaking throughout the whole night without sleep, barely passed his adolescence, is presumed fit for an executive manager position at a five-star hotel, while your Black ass cannot get a minor promotion.

Where is this white fool who says he lost a job to a minority?!

To be African in a land founded by hate groups and Nazis, who've bred more hate groups and more Nazis, is to be a walking provocation, always presumed to be shouting and threatening. But don't be angry. We are not allowed anger.

This all means we may be troubled Black people, but we are troublesome Africans.

To be an African in North America for more than one, or many, generations, is to be at your core a revolutionary, a table-turner, one who upends the smallest to the grandest symbol of oppression, to constantly but at varying pace pull the thread with the intent on destroying the fabric. Whether we deconstruct, destruct, burn down, blow up, blow out, we do it dangerously: this much the white institutions of this ass-backward country know and fear. And I want them to shit their pants.

05 September 2014

Why the Campaign to Raise the Minimum Wage is an Awful Idea


Let me be clear. I'm opposed to the raising of the minimum wage to $15. I'm opposed to a campaign to raise it at all. I am opposed to making it a point of discussion.

Yes, not only will raising the minimum wage hurt local business owners by imposing greater overhead costs on them, possibly incur layoffs, which means a heavier workload for remaining employees, but raising the minimum wage will increase prices of goods and services.

But that is not why I am opposed to raising the minimum wage or the campaigns to do so. I couldn't care less about local business owners or larger corporations' bottom line and their overhead costs. I couldn't care less about their profit motive.

It shows the bankruptcy of our discussion about labor and wages that a so-called civilized country could tolerate a business that can only exist on laborers who cannot feed and house themselves. Why is it important we preserve a business that can only exist on virtual slavery?

It's important because the US has never been a civilized country.

The United States started unapologetically as a slave state, where vast fortunes were built literally on the backs of African free labor and the extermination of existing indigenous nations whose land was stolen. If my radical activist friends cannot begin there, they cannot go anywhere.

In other words, for the West to win, human rights crimes have to be committed and enshrined in the laws of this settler nation-state.

So using those not-so-long-ago times as an example - and I say this because my grandparents grew up in this so-called civilized country knowing people who had been born into slavery, so that is not that long ago - let's pretend a movement arose in the 1800's to give African free labor an allowance. Call it a wage, if you like. Now, I can see some slave owners rising up on their hind legs opposing this, how it will raise their costs, etc., etc., but given enough public pressure, such an allowance might be instituted as a compromise to preserving the country's "peculiar institution."

Mind you, the slave system would otherwise endure, the African laborer still the property of the white master.

Similarly, my first of two reasons for opposing making higher wages an issue is that it preserves a wage-slavery system fully in place. The capitalist superstructure is unaffected. Wall Street continues as it began, darkly, as a site of slave auctions.

At a time after the abolition of chattel slavery in the US, as industry was on the rise, it was widely campaigned among trades-union activists that factory laborers not only set a maximum work day and abolish child labor but also abolish capitalism and private ownership. The people who run the factories, it was assumed, should own the factories. This democratic idea implies that work rules would be implemented fairly and that wages would be distributed equitably if not equally.

These trades-union campaigns weren't about becoming rich as laborers but rather empowering workplace and community democratic control. Industrial feudalism was incompatible with democracy.

These campaigns, their rhetoric, its activism was pretty well erased by the end of the 1930's after a combination of US government retaliation against trades-unionists - assassinations and deportations - and finally an entente cordiale between certain elements of the labor movement, Wall Street, and the US government, whereby unions would be recognized, afforded some collective bargaining rights, limited or restricted in other bargaining rights, prohibited from internationalizing their movement - that is, taking it abroad to combat capitalism at all fronts - and, most damaging of all, the purge of all communists and anarchists from the trades-unions, which had formed the backbone of what the trades-union movement meant.

The result became instant. For, while union labor won lucrative contracts and high salaries, the militants were gone. The critique that capitalism was the problem was gone. The collaboration with our brother and sister laborers abroad was gone. So when Wall Street predictably found even unions undesirable, they had only to move to right-to-work, anti-union states or to Mexico or anywhere they pleased. As union power began to decline, along with membership, precipitously, there was no one within the union to militantly oppose and give voice to this massive assault on laboring people.

I want the conversation returned to capitalism being the problem, Wall Street being the problem, and if the solution cannot come legislatively - and I doubt it ever can or will - then a revolution must happen. By hook or crook, by any means on the table, the so-called means of production must be taken. I am not holding my breath for Progressive Caucuses or Congressional Black Caucuses or one political party over another to make a radical move: they are all slaves themselves to a Wall Street, capitalist system.

My second reason for opposing this campaign to raise the minimum wage involves a bit of conjecture.

When I moved to San Francisco in the late 80's, Chevron and Bank of America were headquartered in that city. Because of rising taxes, they left. Bank of America moved to a Southern state. Chevron simply went across the San Francisco bay into the suburbs.

Recently, a fast-food corporation has made headlines by effectively transferring its headquarters to Canada where business taxes are less.

This is what capitalists do because they are driven to show productivity every quarter whether they are producing anything or not - and I would argue that few are really producing anything at all but showing some margin of profit by fraud and by starving their labor force with poverty wages.

At any rate, I foresee the result of this Campaign for $15 resulting in some urban areas being emptied of much of its low-wage work into the suburbs where wages will be kept low. For a city like San Francisco or Seattle, a $15 minimum means nothing in a high-technology boom economy. These high-tech workers are not making $15/hour, but many times that.

I envision these oases of high pay being populated with a largely highly skilled, white, male workforce, and the surrounding suburbs and unincorporated areas, where there will be no high wage by design populated with the warehouses, fast-food, and bargain businesses employing largely women and people of color.

So let's not delude ourselves further with this silly campaign. It will succeed. We see signs of it already, where big cities - who happen to be eager to gentrify, which already presupposes their hatred of poor people and nonwhite people - are giving a nod to raising wages. The end result will be worse for labor, but more important, it will not advance the democratic movement that had always been the labor movement.

Capitalism, whether peacefully or militantly, must be ended. That is the campaign. Capitalism is incompatible with democracy, because democracy means democratic control of your community, which includes yours schools and your workplaces and how the productivity is shared among the people; and capitalism means the antithesis of this. Human beings cannot become honest partners with Wall Street, because Wall Street - as has been shown and is being shown - will kill you to turn a profit.

23 August 2014

How the Public Funds its Own Extermination


The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) news site ran a lead story headlined "Ebola-Infected Americans Released from Hospital, Thanks to Experimental Drug U.S. Government Helps Develop".

The story reads "The National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Defense's Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), have provided support for the development of ZMapp, the experimental drug used to treat the two Americans who had contracted Ebola while helping patients infected with the disease in Liberia."

The story highlights a particular contradiction in the US capitalist system, whose proponents like to speak about ingenuity and independence while they bash the function of government: that nothing was built by these tycoons alone. In fact, they could not have built anything alone.

Most of our major corporations have benefited from essentially a government handover of patents and technologies.

From pharmaceuticals to the high-tech industry, private corporations have been the recipients of highly subsidized ventures paid for by tax dollars. Any losses are borne by the consumer, by empty city coffers, schools and public universities with less funding, public transportation subsidies decreased so bus and transit fares continue to increase.

The gains are passed on to for-profit corporations to maximize on our backs.

Microsoft, Hewlitt-Packard, Dell, Apple, and all of the expanding Silicon Valley could not have happened without the huge transfers of government [including military] research from the public to the private sector.

The worst of the victims must lately include 1400 African deaths from the Ebola virus who were denied access to a treatment publicly paid for.

But Africa and the global South have long been denied access to the treatments of curable diseases because for-profit corporations do not find it profitable to produce the treatments, the recipient country will not pay the demanded price of the treatment, or, in the case of Cuba and other US "enemies," it is simply barred from purchasing the life-saving treatment or technology.

The victims don't stop there: the people of the US who witness the transfer of billions of dollars from their pockets for the enrichment of a few. The beneficiaries grow richer; their incomes continue to inflate out of proportion to the common workers, if the common workers can find work at all.

The technology drive seeks to maximize profit and minimize costs, and this includes labor costs. This is why the maqueoladoras on the US-Mexican border, the move to South Asia, the coups in Haiti and Honduras against leftist, pro-public, democratically elected presidents.

The technology drive means fewer jobs, and what jobs there are will be lower-waged ones.

Publicly funding our own extermination is not only class warfare but it is also a microcosm of how the West has Won for the last few centuries. The real wealth is not in London, Paris, or New York, it is in the lands of the global South - first made colonies or private fiefdoms, later guarded by Western-installed military juntas and eternal presidents - who secure the transfer of the foreign wealth to the global North in order to benefit the empire.

Once in the empire, we have seen it will always benefit a select few.

There is no reform under the sun that will right this crime, no picket line, no tweeting campaign. As things have gotten only worse they will continue to do so.

The unique path to right this crime is a revolution. If we cannot begin there, we will not begin anywhere.

The whole system must be dismantled by any and all available means.

26 July 2014

What the Left won't tell you about Africans in North America and why they are not our friends


Will the Left ever redeem itself and truly become conspirators with the African diaspora and the holocausts against indigenous nations all over the global South? I have my doubts. Be it in the anti-war organizing, LGBTQ rights, and even the current focus on Gaza and the Israeli slaughter of over 1,000 souls, the European Left has framed the dialogue in the narrowest fashion and always to its advantage and to the exclusion of Africans, Natives, and occupied peoples it pretends to befriend.

White settlers and the regimes they live under must come to an different end-game if they are going to be worth hearing and allying with. So far, they get to pull the strings, design the blueprints, and set strategy for the darkies to follow, to do the heavy lifting. and of course to give the movements that faux democratic, multicultural feel-goodedness.

The result of this unbalanced alliance can be seen everywhere, not only in the persistent racism and cultural genocide in our respective countries' institutions but specifically in things like the mass incarceration of men of African descent - widely disproportionate to our numbers; to persistent spread of HIV/AIDS among young men of African descent and higher mortality rates generally - also, disproportionate to our numbers; our greater vulnerability as wage slaves - lower wages and higher unemployment - again, also disproportionate to our numbers.

Within the context of the US settler nation-state, dated from 1776, the central defining document of the role of Africans in the United States is not the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution. It is still the US Supreme Court Dred Scott vs Sanford decision, written by the Chief Justice Roger Taney - a racist and a slave owner - which decided that Africans in North America were not then and had never been considered part of this country, were not citizens, and therefore had no rights, that their only purpose was as livestock.

The indigenous nations on North America have it much, much worse. Their indices show this, are actually worse than people of African descent, but are never discussed. We are at best allowed exoticizing American Indians because to do otherwise challenges the very existence of the white settler plantation formed when those lowly Pilgrims came over from Europe to do what the European Jews did in Palestine: land theft, concentration camps, genocide.

The real foundation of this settler nation-state continues to make our role precarious at best. When the farmer has too many rabbits, he culls them - meaning he slaughters them for their meat and pelts lest they overtake the farm and become nuisance pests. The white settler regime when faced with a surplus population of people of African descent - that is, numbers the capitalist system has no use for - it similarly culls us by shooting us in the streets and locking us up in prisons.

The capitalist system's current phase as a post-industrial, technological one will prove to have less use for us, as it strives to grow richer and is proportionately more threatened by our presence.

Since our importation from Africa, people of African descent have been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we forcibly provided free labor to literally build the empire on the land stolen from indigenous nations; but on the other, our numbers have represented a constant threat.

The second amendment to the US Constitution was put there to ensure that a time when standing armies of any kind were a provocation against [white] liberty, the individual states - particularly in the South - could maintain standing armies to keep the Africans in check. There is no other reason why that amendment is in the Bill of Rights; owning a gun - even a cache of guns was not controversial in 1776 or 1876.

The white settler state knows the threat the Africans and indigenous nations pose to it, so it has strategized to keep us in our places. We may not know it today, may not be intimately conscious of it, but we are a revolutionary cadre always on the verge of waking up and striking back.

What does this have to do with the Left, our supposed friends, and their Programs we are supposed to sign up for?

The Left has never really acknowledged our beginnings. It will rhetorically support us, but invariably direct us to the very institutions which are both racist and illegitimate - as illegitimate as an Israeli settler institution on Palestinian land. In other words, the Left wants us to work within a framework - the system. The Left implicitly believes in the "Promise of the Founding Fathers." This Left lacks revolutionary zeal to overturn the system altogether because it benefits from this system.

And I do not mean to suggest the so-called Right is any better. It is just another wing of the same bird.

People of African descent are disproportionately filling US jails and prisons for the same reason the Second Amendment was embedded into the US Constitution. The white Left is not. Our numbers represent a provocation to the white settler when the white settler has no use for us in his fields. Not to lock us up would threaten rebellion and revolution. The white Left does not menace the settler state because it always acts within in.

People of African descent indoctrinated in government [public] schools may not know this. The settler does.

I've had enough of this dog-and-pony fiasco. With the current slaughter in Gaza, the Left will refer to a few months back, or maybe a few years; they may allow that Israel has a right to defend itself; they invariably return to the magical year 1967; or even 1948.

But implicit in everything they say is Israel's legitimacy as a settler state and theft of land. The Establishment of these countries are settlers, the Left being no better and not of the caliber to end one epoch for a better one.

When Guyanese Marxist Walter Rodney [author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa] had a dream fulfilled to go to London to continue his education as young student, he was looking forward to meeting this European Left, the Labour Party, and other radicals he had read so much about. He talks about what he found is more comparable to Dorothy arriving at OZ and finding a little weasel behind a curtain.

White people - especially white settlers - love to talk. Admittedly, so do many of their indoctrinated pupils of color. But we don't have the luxury to sit behind a curtain pulling strings. The gun is at our head, knives at our throats, and we must act. If you're not down with our revolution, you're just in the way.

28 June 2014

Eleven unknown facts about Katharine Hepburn and what they say about us



Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born May 12, 1907, and died June 29, 2003, eleven years ago. Up until shortly before her death. she acknowledged that she had been using her late brother's birthdate - November 8 - as her own for all of her career (see #3).

So, for the 11 years Hepburn has been asleep - as she deliciously described death: "No more leaves to rake," she once relished to a reporter - I have listed eleven not-widely-known factoids about the famous actress.

Basically, en total, the reason these are not talked about is that we live in a fantasy world constructed by Hollywood and a PR machine under the watchful eye of the Christian church. Hepburn herself took part in this charade and, like many celebrities, is guilty of sometimes confusing fact with fiction. Our heroes cannot have be villains, so anything that is in the record is simply ignored - viz., Churchill using chemical warfare against Arab tribes in the early 1900's, a rather Hitlerian response before Hitler was even thought of.

For example, number 11 I read myself from a New York Times news story on microfiche - who remembers microfiche and the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature!? - of Kit Hepburn's testimony to Congress in the 1930's. It has changed forever my view of Planned Parenthood but not about women's rights.

So here's my eleven facts you may not have known:

11. Hepburn's mother, Kit*, cofounded Planned Parenthood with Margaret Sanger. She testified in a congressional hearing that [poor] Blacks and Asians needed to be sterilized as a remedy to poverty.

10. Hepburn's younger sister, Marion**, was a cofounder of the URBAN LEAGUE in Hartford, CT, and earlier a labor organizer for the radical union federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations [CIO].

9. Hepburn's mother, Kit, was a Marxist and when she predeceased her husband in 1951, he burned all of her papers and letters and remarried a few months later while Hepburn was in Africa filming "The African Queen". When she began as a suffragette, she abandoned one women's party for a Marxist, radical one.

8. Hepburn wrote an article for the Univ of Virginia law review journal on the Right of Privacy in 1965 on the occasion of the US Supreme Court's Griswold decision.

7. The first political candidate Hepburn openly supported was author Upton Sinclair, a socialist, who ran for governor of California with an EPIC [End Poverty in California] Program. The last presidential candidate Hepburn openly supported and campaigned for was Henry Wallace, who was also backed by the Communist Party USA. Wallace ran against Truman.

6. Hepburn's secret spot to go read scripts, books, and take naps was a gay cruising area of Central Park in NYC [see photo]. She once took a film writer friend for a picnic there, and he says she seemed either oblivious or indifferent to these gay men coming out and going in bushes around her.

5. One author writes that Hepburn not only liked Nixon but defended him saying he was "misunderstood." No context if this was said before or after Watergate, but no matter since Nixon had to have been known to her as a Red baiter since the 1950's.

4. During the "communist" witch hunts, Hepburn was subpoenaed to testify by the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused. Attempts to hold her in contempt were stopped by someone yet to be named.

3. When she was 14, Hepburn's oldest brother, Tom, 16, committed suicide by hanging himself, and Kate found the body and held it aloft until help arrived. In later years she speculated that he might have been gay. Until the 1980's, she used Tom's birthdate as her own.

2. Hepburn put herself in self-imposed exile from the US in the 1950's and lived mainly in the UK and Australia. The man reported to be her "lover" Spencer Tracy was not there. The woman reported to be her lover, Laura Harding, was. Harding came to Hollywood with Hepburn in 1932, where press rumors swelled in print; and when the morality police started tightening down on the whole film colony, Harding was sent back to the East Coast, and Hepburn started to be "paired" in the press with different men.***

1. In today's parlance, Hepburn would be considered a lesbian, though in her day this was not only unacceptable but considered a slur even to upper class same-gender loving women. Hepburn's godparents, Bryn Mawr friends of her mother's, were lesbians. Biographer Anne Edwards wanted to document this in her book, but the publishers nixed it. Not until Michael Mann and Scott Bowers (who procured women for her) was the extent of her relationships with women revealed.


__________________________________________________________________

* Kit was Katharine Martha Houghton-Hepburn. I only use Kit here as it was what she went by and to distinguish her from her actress daughter.

** Marion Houghton Hepburn-Grant was also the mother of Katharine Houghton, the actress who played Joey in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"

*** Anyone who hasn't read a history of the Hay's Office, predecessor to the movie rating system, ought to. The Hay's Office asserted itself in the 1930's guided by the Christian Church and dictated what could and could not be in movies, even how they had to end. This spilled over into the film colony itself where actors, like Hepburn, were made to seem to lead exemplary STRAIGHT Christian lives.

13 June 2014

Brief Obit on Ruby Dee and a Lot about our Real Missing Militants



Ruby Dee (October 27, 1922 – June 11, 2014) was an actress. She was a GREAT actress, stage and screen. That she was a supporter of various civil rights activities of her time and has had her name associated with some of the icons we have come now to revere - but we did not always, mind you[!] - should not revise her biography. To now mourn her as if she had been some kind of Black Panther or Communist Party activist is false. Worse, to inflate her role also underplays Dee's peers, African, Indigenous, and European, who committed their lives to radical, revolutionary work. Women we do not talk much about: instead we talk about actors who say interesting things ... when sometimes saying interesting things is quite powerful.

If after Katharine Hepburn's death, someone like me - who adores her and has read every biography - had cast her as a civil rights activist I'd be looked at with a lot of justified skepticism: and yet, one can glean from the Hepburn biography a continuum of far leftist politics, causes she herself supported, and her name was associated with a few militants. But Hepburn was an actress. Like Dee, she was a GREAT actress of stage and screen. Like Dee, Hepburn paid a price sometimes for her politics.

But to call Hepburn an activist because she supported and campaigned for a Communist Party-backed presidential candidate does not, in the totality, make her a political activist. This grade inflation revisionism of calling either Dee or Hepburn "activists" really undercuts the people who do put their necks out for radical change. They rarely come from Hollywood, though you wouldn't know this if the center of your universe is in Hollywood. The political associations of each woman say a lot about who they were but that they chose the road they'd hoe - film, theater - says a lot about them too.

Recently a low-income elder home for the veterans of the Stonewall riots was opened in Philadelphia. We don't think about these fighters, but they paid a great deal as out lesbians and gays and drag queens in their employment. Now that they enter the senior years they lack hefty 401K's to sustain them. They chose a path, often a militant path, and we must honor their path as we queers stand on their shoulders. Because they aren't fixtures of Hollywood, they and their plight is ignored.

I honor Ruby Dee as a great actress, and that much greater that she succeeded in a racist, post-Dred Scott United States She was a working and prolific actress, performing Shakespeare and O'Neill, Hansberry and Tennessee Williams. I would love to have seen her perform Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession."

But she's not Assata or Angela or Winnie Mandela. Let's not get it twisted. If we are hungry for militants - and we should be if we had any sense - they're here, and they were here.

03 June 2014

The Abdication of another Spanish King


The First and Second Spanish Republics were born out of insurgent radicals who forced the king to either abdicate or flee for his life and limb. In the view we are not supposed to take, Spain has been trying since the 1870's to build a vibrant civil society, democratically run, and imbued with egalitarian principles. This, thanks to those radicals, anarchists, and republican anti-monarchists who've never gone away in more than 100 years and are reappearing and reimposing themselves in the streets of Madrid and Barcelona right now demanding a Third Republic.

On the other hand, the view of history we are supposed to digest is a fluke of history forced one 19th century king to abdicate only to have the military install "order and stability" a short time after. Then, in April 1931, another fluke caused the Bourbon king to flee until Franco emerged to set things right by 1939.

There is fact, and there is fiction.

The fluke, if you will, is the radicals; and here they come again stubbornly sprouting through the concrete.

We are supposed to believe - because we are told as much - that Juan Carlos is abdicating because of ill health. Granted, like the end of the First Republic, this king was carried back in not on the shoulders of revolutionaries but rather the French- and UK-backed military of Franco. Just like, not far from Spain, we are told to believe Egyptians want the "order and stability" of a new dictatorship over democratic free elections.

But there is fact, and there is fiction.

If four out of five dentists surveyed recommend saccarine-laced, cancer-causing chewing gum for their patients who chew gum, what are we to make of those dentists?!

Tyrants and constitutional monarchs have always suffered ill health, and we are never told much about it, and they go on and on useless in their own faculties but not useless to the state which needs them. Mental illness and inbreeding plagued many a European monarch but interestingly as long as the elites got their wealth, "order and stability" was declared. No one cared much about these genetic defects that were constantly replenished with marriages to first and second cousins.

And this is the point. As the late Tony Benn observed about the abdication of Edward VIII in the UK, 1936, it was less about a marriage to a divorced woman and more about the possible erosion of the office of the monarch and, therefore, the powers exercised by a handful of bureaucrats. Especially a prime minister. Without the king and the powers invested in that office, the raison d'etre of a prime minister "exercising" these powers disappears.

Benn noted that any president with the powers of the prime minister under a "constitutional" monarch - such a president would be considered a dictator.

This is probably why not 24 hours after the Spanish abdication the UK Buckingham Palace Press Office released a photo of their 88-year old queen carefully astride a pony on what we are told is among her daily rides. Vigor? "Continuity," is the word barked at us over and over again by the royalists. "The 'A-word' is not in her vocabulary."

Juan Carlos's health is as relevant to this story as his estranged wife Sofia's avowed homo-hatred, her espousal against gays and gay rights, or the state of their marriage.

What is relevant?

Spain is in a toilet, like many other Mediterranean nations. The banks tell us the European economies are turning around, but this is belied by the truth of widespread unemployment and misery, especially among young Spaniards. European workers are becoming refugees. Austerity continues to slash at the gains of the last 50 years. "Turn around" must be understood here to indicate that the financial world has found new ways to make profits, and nothing more.

So, thankfully, the insurgents of the 1870's have never died. They were brilliant in 1931, and they are ever-present today. In the recent European Union elections, more green sprouts emerged. Not believing the hype that things have turned around, pro-Republic, anti-monarchy parties, like PODEMOS, gained seats in Brussels.

Now, PODEMOS, United Left, Equo, and Republican Catalan Left Parties are all demanding a referendum on what Spain is to become, a republic or a monarchy. Elites are worried, and they seemed to ask Juan Carlos "Por que no te callas?".

Nixon advises the old Bourbon from his grave. Let the Republic inspire the masses.

No pasaran. Pasaremos! Campesinos, la tierra es vuestra.


16 May 2014

Calling Things By Their Right Names: A brief word on the retirement of Barbara Walters


This media icon came into my life just after my parents' divorce in the early 70's.
In the mornings I would go into my father's room, where he was sleeping on a bean bag, turn on the TV and watch Barbara Walters on the NBC Today Show. Something about her captivated me. Then one morning, she was gone. I remember the anxiety I felt as I went back every morning, and Walters was never there again. I scrolled through the TV channels looking for her, and she was no where to be found. I was baffled and bewildered. I must have been three or four years old.

While Freud and the psychoanalysts may have some field research to do on me, what's more interesting is how Walters got in front of the camera in the first place. In earlier interviews long ago, she noted the beginnings, but I notice in the last month as she has announced her impending retirement, leaving her TV show, and a building named in her honor at ABC-TV, she is silent about the history of how she came to be a respected TV journalist.

More than a generation ago, women in the news business was an oxymoron. Walters, like a lot of women of her generation, was kept behind the scenes in the research departments writing copy for the male reporters. In high schools and colleges, they had no chance of perfecting themselves as athletes.

Then class-action lawsuits, feminist activism, Title IX, and affirmative action programs changed all that and forced the athletic departments, news rooms, newspapers, and TV stations to bring [white] women into the forefront.

It was force. It was pressure. It was organized chutzpah. It was a form of class war. It was not some Darwinian evolution to naturally occurring higher state of being that enlightened men and patriarchy to eek out a sliver of its privilege to women anymore than our slave owners or factory owners were naturally enlightened to see the error of their ways: they did not, they will not, and they have not, to this hour.

There would be no Barbara Walters [or Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung, or the late Jessica Savitch] were it not for feminist activists being "pushy". Granted, these white feminists come with problems. As the major beneficiaries of 1970's affirmative action, they have not shown much solidarity with the Black or Brown recipients, brothers or sisters, who faired far worse under affirmative action programs.

This white feminism is a lot like that of the elites in the LGBT community of the last generation in that the demand to sit at the controls of white supremacist capitalism, be "married," or fight its imperialist wars is ultimately not a very radical demand. These victories cost the system nothing, just widen the cage of rats competing for the spoils. Liberation and revolution with real demands cost a lot but come with greater benefits, like ending patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.

Still, even with that sordid history, those white feminists of the 60's and 70's offer a valuable lesson about activism and organizing worth repeating. The working class and poor have always been in the cross-hairs of the slave state, but we are losing precipitously more ground now.

If Walters wants a building named in her honor, it should be one that honors this militant history and its class warriors, not her. I'm sorry she is not repeating the real story now while she is being given so much attention but has allowed the Creation Myth to take over. The Creation Myth says that she worked hard and kept her head up, and this is all it takes to succeed in a white settler state, like the the United States of America.

This Creation Myth has no truth to it, and Walters knows this unless she's become senile and brittle-minded. Listening to her over the last few days, she seems perfectly lucid. And this risks leaving generations of men and women waiting for the sun to rise into the dark hearts of the empire and jubilee to come.

02 May 2014

Extremism in Africa


More than 200 Nigerian girls kidnapped by "extremists" has the world's attention, and it should. But the tens of thousands of African children who die of curable diseases is of interest to no one in the West. No Western media reports the tears and anguish of these mothers. No one in the global North - the so-called "developed" world - calls this extremism.

For the last 10 years or so, another Scramble for Africa has occurred by the global North - US, France, China and its militaries, its economic policies, its Christians[!] - for land and resources of the continent. Note that this is not extremism but framed in the language of business interests, defense, or "humanitarian intervention."

AFRICOM, for example, is the US Defense Department's solidification of military and business power on the African continent. It was founded around 2006 probably because China was already making advances into the continent for treasures.

Like the Berlin Conference of the late 1800's, which solidified Western Europe's interests in the continent, AFRICOM is not called colonialism or extremism either. It claims it is providing protection and "defending our interests." White civilization has always framed these interventions in terms of defense or protection.

Britain, for example, wanted us to believe its 19th century intervention into Africa was about defending one ethnic group from another. And interestingly - please note this - it used this supposed conflict to justify its imperial ambitions.

The latest scramble for Africa is exactly related to the extremists we are warned about in the Western press. Make no doubt about it: kidnapping anyone - especially children - is criminal, and an extreme tactic. Interesting you never, ever hear the European-driven slave trade, which kidnapped millions of Africans and set its development back several generations - indicted as extremism. It is not discussed how the West went to extreme measures to steal free labor on which to build its civilization, etc. But criminals usually find justification for their crimes; all the better if intellectuals and the media support this delusion in dissertations, journal articles, and above the fold of newspapers.

What should interest the West if it had any collective conscience is where these so-called extremists of today - kidnappers, pirates, and jihadists - come from.

By Western standards, it is a near moral travesty to ponder the reasons these kidnappers might actually go to extreme measures. I think this is a tactic to keep us from looking behind curtains and asking intelligent questions.

But I make it my business to ask questions and connect dots.

For example, the group alleged to have kidnapped these 200 school girls in Nigeria is reportedly against Western education. To the indoctrinated classes, it is mystical that anyone would resort to a crime because of what is supposedly the best education in the world.

If I were living on the continent at this moment, and I saw Western militaries and Western business interests coming in with cheap talk of humanitarianism and bold action of theft, taking the land beneath my feet, making my already vulnerable position from centuries of colonialism, that much worse: I might think a Western school would save my children ... and I might not.

If I saw whole populations made into refugees in the name of Western intervention and foreign corporations who wanted to mine what is under the ground and displace me to do it, I might want a piece of the pie ... Or I might want to kill the people making the pie and destroy its institutions.

If I listened to sermons from Christian missionaries, NGO's, and foreign government bureaucrats about how much they cared while simple development solutions and cheap medical treatments remained elusive to my people, I might just as easily hold out hope for these carpetbaggers as I might want to see them removed forcibly and permanently from my lands.

But I could not hold out hope or believe in their sermons or feed my people on US arms for long before I got very distressed. And from this distress, I could imagine doing all sorts of creative and terrible things.

And this, the West must wake up to realize.

Every day in the West, human rights crimes against it own populations - denying a living wage, access to social services, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and health care - are committed because Wall Street and the financial centers want to maximize their profit margins. The indoctrinated classes tolerate - even if they do not support by poll numbers - our social, political, and economic policies being dictated by pirates.

Just as movements large and small have organized in the West against capitalism and employed all kinds of tactics - pickets, petitions, kidnapping, assassination, sabotage - to combat this home-grown extremism, they will organize anywhere.

Just because our intellectuals and the media are never far labeling these activists as "extremists" while they have forgiven Wall Street its excesses doesn't mean the activists are extremists and Wall Street deserves forgiveness.

Our own distress and complacency have a breaking point, and I'm afraid we see it in this recent mass kidnapping.

The solution is simple but elusive. If we don't want extremism in the world, simply stop participating in it. Unfortunately, white civilization is extremism, its foundation and infrastructure is extremism; theft and slavery is its life's blood. White civilization will always find short-term ways to nuance Naziism, and the most gullible will be the first to be exterminated. The least will have to get creative: so more distress and breaking points are to come. Gird your loins.