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.