Stuck between a Rock and a Bantustan

Aloha from the US-occupied nation of Hawaii. I think language is important, not only as a writer but also as a person who strives to have a grip on reality. So, like I think it's important to call Africans on the continent or in the diaspora Africans, and First Nations peoples First Nations peoples, it is important to tell you where I actually live, so as to give you some notion what we are dealing with - well, what Hawaiians are dealing with in their own occupied land, and what I deal with as someone who witnesses this atrocity.

Hawaii is beautiful. I see the stars every night outside the window of my cabin. This beauty, however, since this is an occupied colony, is marketed to tourists and to mainlanders with access to capital. Tourists dollars and mainland capital is used to build and run resorts and buy cheap land on which housing is constructed. Fuck the Hawaiians, who have no access to capital and are losing access to their land.

Unlike Africans in the diaspora, Hawaiians are newly colonized and newly polluted with Anglo-Saxon obsessions and their gutter monotheistic religion. This means two things: to the careful eye, the spirit of Margaret Mead can still see the beauty of the Hawaiian body and its connection to the earth and its energies. Though still barely visible, this beauty has been whipped out of Africans for a good 500 years, then reinforced by bad Negro parents emulating white plantation politics.

But this also means the Anglo-Saxon obsession with shame culture is rotting the spirit of that connection Hawaiians had with the earth. So of course their incidence of illness should increase. Of course their social connections should be undermined.

It sucks the spirit to try to thrive in such a place, which is like a person, who is unable to embrace you because it is losing the capacity to embrace itself.

My limited experience with travel and life have already taught me those places with the least and newest "contact" with Europe, its Anglo-Saxon peasant trash, and its maniacal ways are actually populated with the most beautiful and well-developed people.

So as Hawaii corrodes under US occupation, like the little bird I am I look for a new perch to land on. A few well-meaning, clueless people have suggested going back to California, or Missouri, even Florida. This only depressed me. For one, I feel no desire to go anywhere on the mainland.

But also, the only places afforded me on that almost thoroughly corrupted landscape are bantustans where I am really meant to struggle and die.

According to Wikipedia, a bantustan is "a territory set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia), as part of the policy of apartheid." In a broader sense, the term has come to refer to any such enclave set aside by the state for its least desired populations.

So, for example, the term bantustan was used in reference to the ridiculous partition of Palestinians during the Clinton "peace" negotiations between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israeli white-settler government. The Palestinian territory, according to the maps which were scarcely printed in the US press, showed the ethnic Palestine as several non-contiguous spaces spread across Israel.

Bantustans are not intended to be self-sufficient entities but what we in North America might refer to an "Indian Reservations."

Japanese POW's might reference internment camps.

Black ghettos are bantustans. The fact they are Black African and poor ghettos is by design. Most Africans understand this; but not enough since we are still handing our children over to the plantation and wondering why we too are getting sicker. Almost no white person will accept the fact of the bantustan, since this white settlement is the greatest thing to befall the planet since Jesus personified himself in a Roman cleric.

But like Ted Kaczinski I no longer care about the views of white people and the world ... until it impedes upon mine: that is when the reclusive Unibomber emerged as superhero.

I have my eye on Africa, but I also know that if I want my spirit to breathe it will only do so in a place least touched by the hand of Jesus and the progeny of his disciples. Life will not come from acquiring more skills or pursuing more degrees: that is a fool's game and enough fools are playing it.

Elections for the Europeans and Terror for the Colonials

The histories of the Greek rebellion lead by SYRIZA and the upcoming one in Spain led by PODEMOS are still being written, the ink is still wet. And European media is recording the events with awe, romanticism for these brash radicals; or dumbfoundedness that the European Union - Hitler's dream after all - could be so threatened.

The narrative continues to run that while the banks along with the EU finance ministers who serve them, stand firm in their austere principles, the bourgeois left, the radicals, the people cheer on this electoral victory against hegemonic Germany imposing loan-shark policy on broken economies. It is an insurgent democracy, and banks do not like this.

If only other brash insurgencies in other countries played out so cleanly!

The other countries I am thinking of are in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. And in their narratives they were not permitted to even get so far as hold an election of  bourgeois leftists before disappearances and assassinations became the norm ended their dreams of better societies.

Roughly two paths towards colonial independence after World War II emerged:

One, was through peaceful negotiation where the imperial power granted the colony nominal independence. A handover was staged, where usually a royal personage was dispatched to had over the keys and watch the imperial flag lowered and a new one hoisted.

The second path was militant, armed revolution.

Behind the peaceful path lay a lot of machinations. The colony was essentially indebted to pay reparations to the imperial power. Since this obligation flew in the face of  internal development, the newly independent colony had to have the worst kind of government - the client class, corrupt presidents and kleptocratic cabinets that looked like the locals but served the white empire.

Elections were essentially nullified, and no meaningful talk of democracy and free elections ever again came out of London, Paris, or Washington. The times where it happened, such as in Haiti with Jean-Bertrand Aristide's LAVALAS victory, the US immediately undermined and overturned the people's will for that of international capital.

For obvious reasons, the path of armed revolution, has been given a warped treatment by the West and its doyenne intellectuals. Part of this distortion of the facts is recreating the leaders of these armed resistance movements larger than life - that is, exaggerating their role vis-a-vis the mass struggles of the people - and then making these leaders into the worst kinds of human beings that ever walked the face of the earth.

Ho Chi Minh, before he founded the Vietnamese Communist Party, was a young ideologue in Paris who wanted a liberal democracy in Indochina in place of the brutal, occupying French.

The French refused to leave Indochina, and when their economy could no longer sustain a long, guerrilla war against the Viet Cong, the US as the rising imperial power stepped in.

He was rejected by the Americans and Europeans at the Versailles Peace Talks after World War I.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in the early 1920's as an intellectual movement against the borders imposed and fake kings installed after the demise of the Ottoman Empire.

They were immediately marginalized by the fake sheiks.The Brotherhood is still marginalized by the fake sheiks, potentates, and false presidents propped up by the US, the French, and the British.

Fidel Castro was a young, crusading lawyer, married to the Bacardi Rum heiress, living hand to mouth and running for a seat in the Cuban senate with a nationalist political party.

On the eve of the 1952 election what looked like a landslide election for Fidel and the Orthodoxo Party was  cancelled by a US-backed military junta. The US sent weapons to that same army to crush resistance to this coups.

The common denominator of these incidents was a Western imperial power backed, financed, armed, and demanded a particular course that was diametrically opposed to the one set out by the mass movements and revolutionaries.

Remember this when you think of the Greece narrative today.Greece gets elections. Greece gets a seat at the table to go head to head with the other European powers

Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong resistance, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Fidel and the Cuban revolution are just three examples of how the West treats its inferiors; and you might like to put these cases in "history." But they are not only the history of all of the former colonies, they are also the present of these falsely free nations, run by client classes, armed by French, British, and US weapons manufactures to suppress insurgencies of any kind - be they trades-unions, legalizing political parties, access to voting, land reforms, preserving sacred, indigenous spaces.

The imperial logic vis-a-vis the colonies is that nothing must be done in any area to spark a democratic blaze.

Except, it seems, Greece today; Spain tomorrow. Ireland soon after. They are allowed elections.

Greece is allowed an election of bourgeois leftists, some of whom were formerly hardcore Marxists, we are told; but in a Europe built literally on the backs of the colonies I cannot imagine what being a Marxist in Europe means.

The colonial world is not allowed to take a breath, let alone hold an election! Fidel once admonished the US for "hanging us by our necks" then "criticizing us for not breathing."

I know that the late, assassinated Guyanese Marxist scholar-activist, Walter Rodney, found the British Marxists he revered from afar, as simpletons, lacking inertia, and verbose. I do not know if he found them as dashing as they media today like to portray the new Greek government.

The contrast is stark.

During the 80's much of the former colonies were plunged further into chaos and misery by Western powers with the same austerity measures and structural adjustment programs being unleashed on Greece. The colonies were never given the opportunity to hold an election. No PODEMOS or SYRIZA were allowed by the Europeans in the former colonies, now "free". Their suffering colonial economies were squeezed even harder, people died, medical and social infrastructure could not be built, and these European Marxists wrote dissertations.

So my joy at SYRIZA's victory is short-lived and tempered with the reality that Equatorial Guinea, Afghanistan, The Congo, Egypt, and US states, such as Texas, Florida, and Georgia, among many others[!] do not have free elections, and there is hardly democracy in the Dakotas, where some of the poorest First Nations live among white-settler millionaires.

What are we to do? It is clear that we must be equally militant, equally armed, and equally revolutionary as Ho Chi Minh, the Brotherhood, and Fidel, among many others. The West will not let its colonials break free without a fight, or, as the FBI most feared day and night, a militant messiah cannot be allowed to emerge: this remains canon law to the Western empires.

Greece can have its election of young, male upstart radicals; African cannot. Georgia, whose gerrymandered congressional districts dilute African and First Nation power, cannot. Greece, I propose, can because like the rest of Europe it is a junior co-conspirator, but a co-conspirator nonetheless. The finance ministers of the EU know where the chips fall and how the bread is really collected. Greece would no more exist than its more dominant partner in crime, Germany, without the rape and pillage of the colonial world. That is the nature of their union; that was the impetus to Hitler bringing Europe together, by any means necessary.

Whatever these people agree to, Africa will be screwed.

On the Role of our International Institutions

In light of Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe's recent election to the African Union presidency and his call for Africa to withdraw from the International Court, it's important to reflect soberly on the function of the ICC and other international bodies as to their role and worthiness.

The ICC, like the UN and the World Bank were founded to bring unity on the planet, end wars between nations, bring justice where it is due, and alleviate poverty.

Digest this.

Then remember that the ICC has been used as a tool to indict leaders of the former colonies [good or bad ones, and even some of the ones the West installed but got out of line].

The UN has been used to destabilize former colonial governments, to investigate former colonial governments, to sanction former colonial governments, to sanction wars against former colonial governments. I cannot think of ONE government of the former empires that has suffered sanction or investigation or UN troops occupying it, not even the UK when the World Bank had to bail it out [I'll get to that next].

Neither the UN nor its predecessor, the League of Nations, did nothing to stop the extraction of reparations put upon Haiti for France, nor for any other subsequent reparations put upon African countries when they became liberated.

The World Bank has been used to impose SAP [structural adjustment programs], which is bank's way of saying "give me your shit for nothing, and feed and house your African, First Nation*, and Brown children with hopes." When the UK economy went under in the 70's [google: winter of discontent], no such terms were put on it by the World Bank or IMF when money was lent. The UK wasn't made to end its free health care or unemployment benefits. But Africans were made to do so. In fact, African countries were forbidden from implementing many social programs and to use that money to pay back "debts" to the empires. This was done without irony: these poor, underdeveloped countries were forced to pay money to enrich the Western, developed countries, and the very agency set up to prevent poverty orchestrated it.

So the judgment is clear. Crystal, crystal clear, and we must be just as clear. It is not digestible.

These are Nazis in our homes, these are terrorist forces intent on extracting what they want and making fertilizer into any man, woman, or child who gets in their way. Let me throw Ebola in for a minute, because it is related: Ebola and HIV emerged at around the same time with obviously different consequences, but we know Ebola comes from bat feces; bats who had been living for millennia in some jungle where Africans must have known to leave them alone. Whatever the empires found in that ground became more important, because as the jungle has been decimated to get to the ground, those bats fled like refugees into populated areas, spreading that deadly virus. So once again, Western greed is in fact behind Ebola, and I cannot prove it but I think behind HIV as well. I think there are probably many unknown microbes in the jungles and rainforests of this planet, and when industrial capitalism destroys those jungles, those microbes will be released unto all of us.




* First Nations, not Indians or American Indians or Native Americans, nor Latino or Hispanic. First Nations covers the whole gamut of the Americas.

Africans, not Afro-American, African-American, Afro-Mexican, Afro-Peruvian, nor Afro-Caribbean. AFRICAN. We all come from the same place and suffer the same indices and social exclusions, don't get LOST in your passport.

Skip Gates runs from Africa

Just finished watching the slimy Skip Gates (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) and his venture, "Black in Latin America." I suppose some information is better than none - like why he limited his production to some countries, not others, or not all, where Africans were stolen to build, literally, the wealth of the so-called New World - but as George Bernard Shaw is not famously fully quoted "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing BUT SOME MINDS CAN ONLY HANDLE A LITTLE."

Skip gives us a little because, unlike the Boston Police Dept, I know who he is.

Like any servant of the corporate class, this Harvard endowed professor has a very light touch when it comes to crimes committed by former imperial masters in the creation and maintenance and endurance of the African underclass. He romanticizes Spain's and France's relation to their Africans versus the English white settlers supposedly more brutal, and I recollect no mention of the still-cited Monroe Doctrine justifying USA interests and interventions (and murder) in the Western hemisphere.

Gates leans heavily towards speaking mostly with academics and only depicting images of Black poverty (social exclusion). Academics are good squirrels at amassing nuts and dusting off relics; they rarely indict their masters for current crimes, barely ancient ones. And the persistent of an African or First Nation underclass should be a prima facie indictment of any political system, never to be romanced.

African peoples exemplify in their shared low-caste status that the West is devoid of a religious morality, only a Wall Street one, which is full of brazen lies about how things trickle down to the "least of us": having been to Mexico and seen the racism against African-Mexicans there I wondered if Gates connected the dots between, say, South-Central and Yanga.

I was eager to see his treatment of Cuba, but girded my loins when he set his gauge outright on this alone: whether the Revolution had ended racism. I found this high minded and hypocritical because he sets no such gauge for the Dominican Republic, Mexico, or Peru, whose African populations might fare as worse. As a professional endowed by corporate foundations, he must discredit Cuba's revolution as a renegade from the Wall Street sphere of influence.

Until a National Geographic explorer funded by the Ford Foundation ventures into the marshes of 21st century Great Britain to see if sexism has been eliminated I cry foul.   

Those of us robbed of the knowledge of the African diaspora will come away from this series a bit more knowledgeable: but Gates is no Ali Mazrui. Mazrui was the Kenyan-born historian who gave us the 1980's series, "The Africans: a Triple Heritage," which was aired once, stirred controversy for his criticism of the West, and never, ever seen again. PBS doesn't even sell the DVD.

We are left to feed off the trash of Skip Gates.

Gates is not one to show the West as a macro institution united in subverting Africa and its children. Being Brazilian or Peruvian, Mexican, Dominican, or even Cuban nationality is an irrelevance. In the final analysis, if these nation-states keep you, your kin, and your African homelands in constitutional misery it is hardly worthwhile to compare which refugee camp suffers hunger less, does it?

Gates fails to show any of this. A "Top Chef" judge would lament that missing "sauce" that would give the dish an "elevation" and "tie it all together."

PBS's Dark Compromise with Osun Osogbo

I just watched the PBS Sacred Journey's "Osun-Osogbo" episode and need to carefully gather my thoughts before I attempt to decimate the production.

Careful examination of African and diaspora culture is a hard thing for the West. Since the global North is dependent almost entirely on the global South, is sustained by it, and continues to this hour to be fueled by it, old habits are not only hard to break for white-supremacist culture but also discouraged. The niggers must always be kept in their place in order for the master to keep his.

This makes empathy challenging. It has produced a hundred years of mostly bad cinema where the global South in general and Africa in particular are demeaned in Technicolor. And this institutionalized chasm will confound even the most well-meaning documentary film maker, who cannot let too much daylight in on the scam.

If I am ever dissected by biographers, they would not start my African recovery with reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X or a special friendship with a certain Moroccan, as they should, but perhaps being initiated an oloricha to Ochun, the supposed subject of this PBS feature.

I say supposed, because almost immediately "Osun-Osogbo" inadvertently brings up critical topics that Malcolm X critiqued and planted in my head, and which multiply like rabbits throughout the production of this documentary until, towards the end, I have other things on my mind than the oricha herself. And I began to wonder if by some conspiracy of silence Bruce Feiler cut things out or was it the sheer, willful ignorance one finds in so many liberal whites, ass-kissers, and Negro house pets that he just didn't see what was in front of him.

And so, the best part of "Osun-Osogbo" was what was left in the periphery, like how Feiler treats of the state of oricha worship. He glosses over the invasion of missionaries and what this is doing to African culture all over the sub-Saharan part of the continent.

Islam pre-dates the early Christian invasions of Africa we know because the Christian Portuguese slavers kidnapped Muslim Africans. Christianity came later with the Europeans, for the most part, along with and a part of the 19th century "scramble" for Africa.

Yet both these monotheist religions have become Frankenstein monsters of their former monstrous selves since the end of the Cold War; they have become more venomous and radicalized among global South peoples and I daresay unrecognizable to their 19th century counterparts.

The documentary barely shows how monotheism and indigenous culture are not only competing for office space but the monotheists, armed and funded by Western sanctimony, are also forcing through political policies which are anti-women, anti-gay, and, most importantly, anti-indigenous. In short, the West and monotheism are waging a culture war of extermination, which the indigenous cultures are losing.

I recognized this tension in the documentary and found the attempts to "save" the sacred shrine and the indigenous ways problematic and unchallenged. Does Feiler? Bringing in Western artists to do make-overs and making the shrine into a global theme park signal an impossible battle.

If the UN ever makes the Vatican a "World Heritage Site" we will know that Roman Catholicism has ended and a museum opened in its place.

Speaking of museums, enter the anthropologists. The worst parts of the documentary are how Feiler relies much on academics, and academics of a certain Western caliber, for testimony and experience.

Academics are an incestuous lot. They write for the foundations and for each other, not their subjects. To imply as the documentary does the preservation of this culture in the diaspora via PhD candidates is utterly false. Their arrival signals the spiritual transference of the culture from Ile-Ife to Harvard Square, where the Ford Foundation will decide the future of the religion.

The late Cuban journalist and writer, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, mused a lot about the survival of African culture in the diaspora. He observed the Jazz genre and African religions were preserved and nurtured not by the whites, the nobles, and the social climbers but rather by the lowest and most marginalized in colonial society. The curators and generators of the old ways were the enslaved Africans and their oppressed progeny, prostitutes, and social rejects. Those are the experts that official narratives ignore because their status cannot be discussed let alone displayed as evidence of Western crimes against humanity.

Cabrera Infante mocked the recent phenomenon of academics and New Class aspirants appropriating these forms and making them acceptable and then electing themselves as the "experts" to mainstream audiences. So do I.

Then, writer Richard Rodriguez has similarly mused on the uniquely US phenomenon of this same cultural appropriation by high-class wanna-be's to think they can go on a week-long "pilgrimage" and experiential vacations to, say, Ireland, Mexico, or Nigeria, buy a shamrock, pancho, or kinte cloth, and somehow transform into Irish, Mexican, or African, and implicitly less American, and come back to the global North laboring for research grants and defending their dissertations, with a new identity.

One of the gaggle of academics "Osun-Osogbo" says that wearing the cloths she buys in the African marketplace will identify her in the US as having a connection with her roots! This is pure Disney. Brace yourself, Pocohontas!

Since oricha worship has barely thrived in the US, even among the Black community, I would have liked Feiler to accompany some Cuban or Brazilian elder olorichas to the Osun Festival, those who live in Matanzas or the Diez de Octubre barrio of Havana, Port-au-Prince, or the favelas of Bahia, those who have been inter-generationally nurtured by this religion. But this would have robbed the US market of its white hero, who in this instance are these light-skinned, Ivy League doctoral students who are padding their CV's to gain one of the dwindling tenure-tracked endowed professorships. And the Black American audience -to the extent there would be one - would be so mis-educated as not see their cousins in the Afro-Cubans, Haitians, and Afro-Brazilian worshipers.

The poorer counterparts of these scholars - as has been seen when Cuban olorichas have gone to Nigeria to find similarities, or Nigerians have gone to Brazil to find the same - will not have books printed by university presses that no one will read.

In a diaspora starved of the images contained in this one-hour production, showing the constant devotion and work of the adherents, albeit in the background, to honor this magnificent oricha, it's easy to find my words harsh and hyper-critical. The documentary producers might argue they didn't set out to study history and they could not find anyone but academics to interview. But this is always the defense mechanism of the global North, that what purports to be a dialogue comes out to be a one-sided lecture. The global North, I argue, cannot have a dialogue with the global South, ever.

I welcomed the images contained in "Osun-Osogbo," since the West has been very reticent to give them to us. But hunger does not make me stupid. Having been to Havana, I know the difference between Diez de Octubre and Cambridge, MA.

The global North must be expelled from its occupation of our African Meccas. The pilgrimage of the diaspora is more of a jihad where, as the late Lakota activist said, "Europe must die," not thrive in the perspectives of Ivy League Negro academics. This is what is wrong with the United States, where everything is for sale, and if it is not for sale it is for the stealing. If you do not believe me, just ask Mobil Oil or British Petroleum, who with the force of the Western governments are continuing to suck the life out of Africa and making sure the peoples are powerless to object. This leaves a less than honey-sweetened taste in my mouth.

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.