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.