Behind Big O’s Eight Ball
Today is the start
of a new day a new way
a fresh start for America
The end of racism, so they say.
An African-American in the Whites
House painting it beige. And the sage
wisdom of pundits across the country
telling us we all have entered
a post-racialist stage in the
history of America, blowing their horns
tooting aloud to the crowd about
how “WE” have overcome
and they have given “US” our
first black president.
“We” just ain’t ready to by into it.
At least be skeptical despite all
the cans of paint it takes to
remove the taint of Jeffersonian
slavery and neocon knavery
still won’t dissolve the smell
built up to 2009 from 1776.
The racists declaring the end
of racism. Hysterical. A trick.
As in Ward Connerly on affirmative
action, as in Colin Powell plotting
Grenada’s invasion or the overthrow
of Aristide and democracy in Haiti.
Like Atlanta’s black middle class war
against Mukasa and Jamil.
Or the black shills employed to oust
Cynthia McKinney at any cost.
IN ATLANTA, NIGGERS, ATLANTA!!
Frontline of the neo-colonialist war.
The ATL, hell on earth, from street
corner ballers to international shot
callers, black mayors and wannabe
players hustling everything except
the right thing and Mukasa Ricks
fighting prostrate cancer up against
Morehouse, the college where MLK
got his knowledge. A world upside
down turned right-side wrong
to beat down a civil rights icon, the
father of Black Power, a tower
of principle and love while
Jamil Al Amin cools
his heels behind walls of
ice cold concrete and steel for
opposing the Counterinsurgency.
Tormenters worse than
the monkeys of Tarnation,
a capitalism that runs your
momma thru a gauntlet to cop,
makes her bob and weave night
long for a hit of crack, with you
slinging from some cut feeding her.
What’s crackin, niggaz? Yo momma.
Thinking it’s some other time, not wake
up time, you stacking cheddar ain’t enuf,
since the monkeys of Tarnation run this stuff.
They mock you, they knock you, and they
clock you until you think you kno they
rules and then it’s another game.
All the same, you doing time
with Jamil yet ain’t learnt, still.
Yes. Today is the start
of a new day a new way
a fresh start for America
The end of racism, so they say.
2009-01-27
2009-01-24
Black Power in Action and History
A Brief Response to A. Wilson's “Blueprint for Black Power”
Anyone who owns fewer degrees than a thermometer can see that capitalism is based upon the principle of concentrated economics. Wilson’s sociology essay does not speak about this. It approaches Black Power from outside the community in a language foreign to most people. It omits the question of capitalism, while comparing apples to oranges. For all of his educated logic, Wilson neglects to account for several simple factors.
First, the US is not at war with the Koreans it brings to this country; like Wilson, they kno no experience related to COINTELPRO, civil rights, SNCC and the Black Panthers. As a group they have no history in America which looks anything like our Black Power movement. Secondly, Black Power grows from the people and not from the pages of a book, nor the sleeve of a dashiki. It does not grow from the New Black Panther Party, either. Black Power cannot exist outside of a revolutionary context. Otherwise, it boils down to fighting capitalism with black capitalism.
So we have to combat the false consciousness which misled us to consider a capitalist model for change; which has proven to be a failure in our community yet led Wilson to pose the comparison in the first place. The mistaken belief that capitalism is a social system based upon the recognition of individual rights is like Mussolini innocuously asserting that ‘under fascism the State collaborates directly with business.’ Fascism inhumanly represses working people, which is why we define the US prisons system as neo-fascism. And fascism is a form of capitalism. In legitimizing capitalism thru the example of Korean success on the back of the ghetto, should the black middle class oppose foreign ownership of black slaves, but espouse slave ownership for themselves? Yet the enslaved worker opposes capitalism, slavery and fascism.
We have to deal with capitalism as the accumulation of wealth thru the process of concentration. Capital is wealth concentrated by converting real value into a paper product (money, stocks, bonds, etc.) with an abstract value attached to it. Sometimes that abstract value represents land or oil futures or anything that can be owned. Capital is wealth made liquid, compact, transferable and portable. But they don’t explain it to us like that.
Concentration, in a social context, can only occur if money gets drawn out of wide distribution and hoarded by a small class. For wealth to exist, it must be concentrated thru resources that have been taken out of distribution. By transforming wealth into abstract form, by making paper relate to real value, as if the picture and the image of the king were as real as the king himself, wealth becomes simple to accumulate by the minority ruling class. As long as people recognize the abstract value attached to worthless paper, they will continue playing by rules that benefit not them but their oppressors. Thus, power must logically flow out of this rigged system, because the people surrender power to it. The abstraction converted back into real value systemizes the basis for inequity and poverty in society today.
Thus, inequity and poverty continue only because of the implied consent of the masses thru a political tool known as democracy. The illusion of choosing our rulers imparts us with the idea that we want a dictatorship that works against our interests. Because Americans believe their standard of living derives from this political system, the delusion is compounded.
Since our modern world subsists as a vast interwoven social fabric, the gap between rich and poor has more to do with exploitation than with any other factor. The class divisions in society are due entirely to this gap. Class divides human beings between workers and bosses, masters and slaves, the colonizer and the colonized. Always remember, that in capitalism, the principle of concentration exists at all levels. Therefore, we have to look for concentration even in the class question. Whereas class divisions existed long before capitalism, today they have become agitated in a concentrated form, known as racism. Racism exists because of the colonial relationships which brought capitalism into existence and sustained it thru out history.
From the end of World War II to the present, the politics of class have become diluted. At the same time, concentration of wealth has accelerated. The dual character of this development is important to recognize. As the colonized world broke free from direct control, this caused a social revolution in the Imperialist world. Social revolution is not political revolution. The social revolution took place at a level where the masses of middle class and laboring peoples rejected the politics of nullification and interposition, to coin a famous phrase.
Plus, an added corollary to this is Bro Wilson offers us a blueprint for Black Power out of the history and context which shaped and defined the original concept. This is revisionist at the very least, and at worst it may fall into the category of reactionary opportunism. Because Black Power emerged as a concept at a very specific and well-documented point in time. To ignore the historical character of this theory is to deny the history of our struggle. That is tantamount to saying that black people have no history.
Subjectively speaking, the only people without history are those who have labored under racist oppression. And while they do, indeed, have a history, it is the denial of their history which operates hand-in-hand with the denial of their humanity to deepen their oppression. Racism, being concentrated class oppression, may convince Africans that we have no history and that we are African Americans whose fortunes and opportunities ascended only with our enslavement in America. Hence, the term “African American”. Yet our culture and identity and history began long prior to the US being founded as a republic, and to Europe existing as a place with cities and even settlements.
History is a developing process, and the struggle which birthed the movement known as Black Power does not begin with Amos Wilson offering blueprints for its emergence. It bears noting that I am not taking on this issue out of ego, but to set the record straight inasmuch as Wilson’s plan ignores the critical work which went into creating Black Power. Lives were lost, people were imprisoned. Hugo Pinell, for instance, was recently denied parole because he remains a staunch revolutionary who belonged to the Black Power trend. Where does he fit in Wilson’s Black Power paradigm?
On that note, we as organizers must take into account how SNCC field organizer Willie Mukasa Ricks’ Black Power slogan developed into a movement in 1966 with a working class thrust. Breaking with the petty bourgeois role that had it providing shock troops for the civil rights movement, SNCC disbanded two years later. Its leaders like Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and H Rap Brown (Jamil Al Amin) joined the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Panthers promoted a revolutionary class analysis and was founded by Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale. They became the embodiment of Black Power as they implemented free breakfast programs for children, and helped people kick drugs. The Panthers did other valuable work which created a significant distance between their base and the capitalist system which they opposed.
In opposing capitalism, they grew international links with Cuba, China, Vietnam, Algeria, Ghana and other revolutionary societies. They built solidarity with white sympathizers in the US, based on Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton’s axiom, “You don’t fight racism with racism, you fight it with Solidarity.” Which means cultivating the most principled forces from the non-black community to help our cause on a material (economic) basis. Fred Hampton was assassinated in his sleep by Chicago pigs and the FBI in a pre-dawn assault on December 4, 1969, which also took the life of Panther Mark Clark. Chairman Fred’s funeral was attended by 5,000 people, and he was eulogized by such black leaders as Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy. In his eulogy, Jesse noted that “when Fred was shot in Chicago, black people in particular, and decent people in general, bled everywhere.”
The Panthers grew Black Power from a slogan into a reality. They created dual and competing political power, that is, they did for our community all the things the US government had resources to do but refused to do. They did not criticize the masses, but helped them understand their conditions. For this, the FBI labeled them “the greatest internal threat to the national security of the United States.”
Concomitant with the nation-wide police State crackdown on the Panthers, this movement became watered down into black empowerment, with the slogan “Black Power” being contaminated first in 1968 by Floyd McKissick reinterpreting it to mean "green power, money." At this juncture the black middle class turned its back on democratic rights in our community in exchange for mobility within the white power structure. This was effected largely thru affirmative action and equal opportunity. This is the primary reason why our community has become bogged down in the politics of divisiveness, fragmentation and opportunism.
In summation, I don’t think Bro Amos Wilson offers a critique which articulates the genuine, revolutionary theory of Black Political Power. His view represents a continuation of middle class sociological and professional mores. No revolution has ever been waged thru sociology. None has ever been won except by those who have committed class suicide and joined their fate to that of the masses. We may never have a violent revolution in North America, however, to create qualitative change in the lives of the broad masses of black people we have to develop a clear class analysis and a scientific theory which will help them break the bonds of oppression. Peace.
“An articulated tribe may be best represented by one of a number of immigrant groups, e.g. the Korean Americans. In this instance, we have a group organized around cohesive families or kinship groups, land or communities, and confederations, with formal power organizations, extending beyond family ties. The articulate nature of these groups devolves from their high level of intergroup cooperativeness and self-sufficiency, economic assertiveness and monopolistic business practices, their concentrated populations with an informal leadership establishment generally composed of highly respected or regarded individuals whose authority rests on their power to persuade, influence, and organize their followers. Authority and leadership status is generally attained by personal achievements and abilities, and often as the result of leading important cultural institutions such as economic enterprises and/or religious establishments. The articulate tribal arrangement may yield relatively high levels of economic subsistence or surplus. In the United States, any group which achieves substantial economic surplus combined with cohesive economic-political organization and distinctive group consciousness and identity, can and does exert power and influence beyond their actual numbers in the general national population. An economically enriched, articulate tribe can use its leverage to significantly influence the actions and attitudes of the dominant White American nation and perhaps make deep inroads into its social, economic, and political infrastructure.”All due respect to Amos Wilson for his piece on Black Power, yet his synopsis lacks a critique of Imperialism. What is primary for African people in the US to improve our relationships to Africans everywhere, and in the Motherland in particular, so as to effect OBJECTIVE change in this country? Yet nobody can accurately and honestly discuss Black Power out of its contextual origins by comparing Korean middle class mobility to black economic stagnation in America. In no cogent way do the two groups compare, in our analysis of Black Power. Plus, Wilson’s point has nothing to do with Black Power and the class analysis which will help our people understand history and social relationships.
Amos Wilson, Blueprint for Black Power
Anyone who owns fewer degrees than a thermometer can see that capitalism is based upon the principle of concentrated economics. Wilson’s sociology essay does not speak about this. It approaches Black Power from outside the community in a language foreign to most people. It omits the question of capitalism, while comparing apples to oranges. For all of his educated logic, Wilson neglects to account for several simple factors.
First, the US is not at war with the Koreans it brings to this country; like Wilson, they kno no experience related to COINTELPRO, civil rights, SNCC and the Black Panthers. As a group they have no history in America which looks anything like our Black Power movement. Secondly, Black Power grows from the people and not from the pages of a book, nor the sleeve of a dashiki. It does not grow from the New Black Panther Party, either. Black Power cannot exist outside of a revolutionary context. Otherwise, it boils down to fighting capitalism with black capitalism.
So we have to combat the false consciousness which misled us to consider a capitalist model for change; which has proven to be a failure in our community yet led Wilson to pose the comparison in the first place. The mistaken belief that capitalism is a social system based upon the recognition of individual rights is like Mussolini innocuously asserting that ‘under fascism the State collaborates directly with business.’ Fascism inhumanly represses working people, which is why we define the US prisons system as neo-fascism. And fascism is a form of capitalism. In legitimizing capitalism thru the example of Korean success on the back of the ghetto, should the black middle class oppose foreign ownership of black slaves, but espouse slave ownership for themselves? Yet the enslaved worker opposes capitalism, slavery and fascism.
We have to deal with capitalism as the accumulation of wealth thru the process of concentration. Capital is wealth concentrated by converting real value into a paper product (money, stocks, bonds, etc.) with an abstract value attached to it. Sometimes that abstract value represents land or oil futures or anything that can be owned. Capital is wealth made liquid, compact, transferable and portable. But they don’t explain it to us like that.
Concentration, in a social context, can only occur if money gets drawn out of wide distribution and hoarded by a small class. For wealth to exist, it must be concentrated thru resources that have been taken out of distribution. By transforming wealth into abstract form, by making paper relate to real value, as if the picture and the image of the king were as real as the king himself, wealth becomes simple to accumulate by the minority ruling class. As long as people recognize the abstract value attached to worthless paper, they will continue playing by rules that benefit not them but their oppressors. Thus, power must logically flow out of this rigged system, because the people surrender power to it. The abstraction converted back into real value systemizes the basis for inequity and poverty in society today.
Thus, inequity and poverty continue only because of the implied consent of the masses thru a political tool known as democracy. The illusion of choosing our rulers imparts us with the idea that we want a dictatorship that works against our interests. Because Americans believe their standard of living derives from this political system, the delusion is compounded.
Since our modern world subsists as a vast interwoven social fabric, the gap between rich and poor has more to do with exploitation than with any other factor. The class divisions in society are due entirely to this gap. Class divides human beings between workers and bosses, masters and slaves, the colonizer and the colonized. Always remember, that in capitalism, the principle of concentration exists at all levels. Therefore, we have to look for concentration even in the class question. Whereas class divisions existed long before capitalism, today they have become agitated in a concentrated form, known as racism. Racism exists because of the colonial relationships which brought capitalism into existence and sustained it thru out history.
From the end of World War II to the present, the politics of class have become diluted. At the same time, concentration of wealth has accelerated. The dual character of this development is important to recognize. As the colonized world broke free from direct control, this caused a social revolution in the Imperialist world. Social revolution is not political revolution. The social revolution took place at a level where the masses of middle class and laboring peoples rejected the politics of nullification and interposition, to coin a famous phrase.
Plus, an added corollary to this is Bro Wilson offers us a blueprint for Black Power out of the history and context which shaped and defined the original concept. This is revisionist at the very least, and at worst it may fall into the category of reactionary opportunism. Because Black Power emerged as a concept at a very specific and well-documented point in time. To ignore the historical character of this theory is to deny the history of our struggle. That is tantamount to saying that black people have no history.
Subjectively speaking, the only people without history are those who have labored under racist oppression. And while they do, indeed, have a history, it is the denial of their history which operates hand-in-hand with the denial of their humanity to deepen their oppression. Racism, being concentrated class oppression, may convince Africans that we have no history and that we are African Americans whose fortunes and opportunities ascended only with our enslavement in America. Hence, the term “African American”. Yet our culture and identity and history began long prior to the US being founded as a republic, and to Europe existing as a place with cities and even settlements.
History is a developing process, and the struggle which birthed the movement known as Black Power does not begin with Amos Wilson offering blueprints for its emergence. It bears noting that I am not taking on this issue out of ego, but to set the record straight inasmuch as Wilson’s plan ignores the critical work which went into creating Black Power. Lives were lost, people were imprisoned. Hugo Pinell, for instance, was recently denied parole because he remains a staunch revolutionary who belonged to the Black Power trend. Where does he fit in Wilson’s Black Power paradigm?
On that note, we as organizers must take into account how SNCC field organizer Willie Mukasa Ricks’ Black Power slogan developed into a movement in 1966 with a working class thrust. Breaking with the petty bourgeois role that had it providing shock troops for the civil rights movement, SNCC disbanded two years later. Its leaders like Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and H Rap Brown (Jamil Al Amin) joined the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Panthers promoted a revolutionary class analysis and was founded by Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale. They became the embodiment of Black Power as they implemented free breakfast programs for children, and helped people kick drugs. The Panthers did other valuable work which created a significant distance between their base and the capitalist system which they opposed.
In opposing capitalism, they grew international links with Cuba, China, Vietnam, Algeria, Ghana and other revolutionary societies. They built solidarity with white sympathizers in the US, based on Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton’s axiom, “You don’t fight racism with racism, you fight it with Solidarity.” Which means cultivating the most principled forces from the non-black community to help our cause on a material (economic) basis. Fred Hampton was assassinated in his sleep by Chicago pigs and the FBI in a pre-dawn assault on December 4, 1969, which also took the life of Panther Mark Clark. Chairman Fred’s funeral was attended by 5,000 people, and he was eulogized by such black leaders as Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy. In his eulogy, Jesse noted that “when Fred was shot in Chicago, black people in particular, and decent people in general, bled everywhere.”
The Panthers grew Black Power from a slogan into a reality. They created dual and competing political power, that is, they did for our community all the things the US government had resources to do but refused to do. They did not criticize the masses, but helped them understand their conditions. For this, the FBI labeled them “the greatest internal threat to the national security of the United States.”
Concomitant with the nation-wide police State crackdown on the Panthers, this movement became watered down into black empowerment, with the slogan “Black Power” being contaminated first in 1968 by Floyd McKissick reinterpreting it to mean "green power, money." At this juncture the black middle class turned its back on democratic rights in our community in exchange for mobility within the white power structure. This was effected largely thru affirmative action and equal opportunity. This is the primary reason why our community has become bogged down in the politics of divisiveness, fragmentation and opportunism.
In summation, I don’t think Bro Amos Wilson offers a critique which articulates the genuine, revolutionary theory of Black Political Power. His view represents a continuation of middle class sociological and professional mores. No revolution has ever been waged thru sociology. None has ever been won except by those who have committed class suicide and joined their fate to that of the masses. We may never have a violent revolution in North America, however, to create qualitative change in the lives of the broad masses of black people we have to develop a clear class analysis and a scientific theory which will help them break the bonds of oppression. Peace.
2009-01-09
Interracial: Sara Seti off the Point
Irrational YouTube Rant on Interracial Relationships
For those who believe in the color theory of racial confrontation, that idea not only seems immature and inaccurate, it lacks any place in liberation politics. Take a moment to see what Brother Sara Seti is spitting on YouTube. By-passing the obvious problems with his presentation -- which I am sure many viewers have a good idea what I mean -- there are several inaccuracies concerning his perspective. Let me take them broadly without trying to address specific statements that he made because that can only require a more detailed breakdown which may be unnecessary.
Some folks believe our community suffers from an entrenched “Willie Lynch” mode and that represents the primary contradiction within black America. However, a definite distinction must be drawn between primary and secondary contradictions. The psychology of the black community is a secondary problem. And all of what Sara Seti has to say and the way he says it really derive from a low-rate view of our community. Perhaps the masses can see thru his open contempt for us by lecturing people in a way which propels them backwards to address less important and pressing issues than appear in our day-to-day living conditions.
So interracial relationships, for one, do not represent the primary problem within the black community. Our main problem remains based in the concentrated class question known as racism; interracial relationships of the sort he opposes actually dilute racism. Thus, it may be seen that Sara Seti prefers this demagogic approach rather attacking urgent problems facing our community, such as racism or its secondary effects like unemployment or health or housing. The genocidal, neo-fascist prison industry has been built on the back of African labor and is a major economic sector within US capitalism. Rather than focusing on the crises which deepen our oppression and misery, he places his energy into a demeaning attack on a fourth-rate issue. Actually interracial marriage looks like a last-rate issue, if it can be ranked as one at all.
In a community where people struggle to pay bills, anybody with time on their hands to spook up a campaign about who is married to whom wants too much control and threatens to be even more repressive than the present colonial apparatus. This is the problem in places like DR Congo, in the Motherland, where men with guns and armies invent pretexts for waging genocidal, subimperialist wars. These wars really turn out to be non-ethnic based conflicts, contrary to the Western media portrayal of what is going on. It turns out that Nkunda and Musaveni and Kagame and others are fighting each other over the extraction of columbite-tantalum (coltan) to supply SONY and other manufacturers. So Africans must remain extremely wary of all demagoguery and metaphysics.
Secondly, and this shows how low in rank this subject sits as a concrete, definable issue, if a negro man will only be happy with a white woman nobody can force him to be with a black one. In fact, had Clarence Thomas chosen instead a black woman to be his bride, how would that have stopped his role as a shill for Imperialism? Colin Powell is happily married to a black woman, and his whole career as a military man has involved massacreing poor populations in places such as Vietnam, Grenada, Haiti, Panama, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Mobutu Sese Seko had a black wife and was one of Africa’s worst bloodsuckers. Look again at Musaveni, Kagame and Nkunda, all parasitic excrescences on the body of African people. On the face of it, Sara Seti's argument so far proves not only fallacious but woefully inadequate in logic and reasoning.
The person with black parents and other family members, who must commit national suicide by waging a political struggle that takes place below the belt, will not be persuaded by the brother's argument. You may befriend any number of young people inclined to cross the tracks in search of their life mate. Talk to those who have filled themselves with African self-hate and loathing, who despise their nappy hair and dark skin and big lips. Poll them and see how many will heed his advice. You might also want to ask those white women and men who love African people to stay with their own, to leave us alone, we don't want their friendship and love. Let them kno we prefer hate and racism and Jim Crow and slavery to friendship and comradeship and solidarity. We are all okay. We don't need allies in our struggle. Tell them we need racial purity, racial cleansing, and then we will be perfect. I don't think that will fly, Hitler.
Finally, Sara Seti's line of reasoning peals faulty on the issue of who will carry out his campaign for cleansing bedroom politics. The whole idea just fills empty matter between peoples ears. 'Who will join the revolutionary crusade to patrol black America's bedrooms to end this filth! Who will bell the cat of interracial marriage, interracial sex, and interracial children!'
Sara Seti is not only demagogic, he has no idea of revolutionary thought. In fact, whatever literature he has read, if any, has led him in the wrong direction. It may not be his fault, as it may not have been the fault of Jonas Savimbi that he twisted against the Angolan Revolution and brought in the apartheid-era South African Defense Force to help him occupy Cuito Cuanavale. However, that was not the concern of the Angolan people, who had a duty to defend their country and their revolution against counterrevolutionaries. For that reason, they rose up as a nation, with allies from many revolutionary formations, to defeat the interlopers. I hope that Sara Seti does not permit his demagoguery to lead him one step further in dictating what African people must do, because he sets a trifling example.
Frantz Fanon, one of the greatest revolutionary thinkers of any period, married a French woman. Cheikh Anta Diop married a French woman. Amilcar Cabral had married a Portuguese woman, tho Cabral went on to become one of the revolutionary giants of the African liberation movement. So let us dispense with this notion that what goes on in the bedroom somehow has something to do with how a man or woman tends to look at the world and deal with it. Sara Seti and others involved in promoting the color theory of racist confrontation, instead of the scientific, class theory of racism, may hope to throw these brothers under the bus but in that case will find themselves in that unfortunate position instead. Seti's vid proves there is an ocean of difference between a rant and a theory.
Our efforts are better suited towards understanding the objective conditions which shape social trends, and then knowing and applying proven methods for changing society thru the historical process of revolutionary activity. We had best study the successful struggles against racist oppression made in Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. While we kno how these efforts were carried out on the battlefield, there were also necessary ideological and political components which shaped those revolutions along humanitarian lines. If American society someday begins to look like the populations of Puerto Rico and Brazil, where many people are blended with Caucasian, Indio and African peoples, that is not the contradiction. The class contradiction which gives expression to racism will continue to exist and racism will continue to be exported the way it is with Africans here being lulled into a type of comfort zone because of their personal relationships with the oppressor society. Peace and Revolution.
See Sara Seti's vid
For those who believe in the color theory of racial confrontation, that idea not only seems immature and inaccurate, it lacks any place in liberation politics. Take a moment to see what Brother Sara Seti is spitting on YouTube. By-passing the obvious problems with his presentation -- which I am sure many viewers have a good idea what I mean -- there are several inaccuracies concerning his perspective. Let me take them broadly without trying to address specific statements that he made because that can only require a more detailed breakdown which may be unnecessary.
Some folks believe our community suffers from an entrenched “Willie Lynch” mode and that represents the primary contradiction within black America. However, a definite distinction must be drawn between primary and secondary contradictions. The psychology of the black community is a secondary problem. And all of what Sara Seti has to say and the way he says it really derive from a low-rate view of our community. Perhaps the masses can see thru his open contempt for us by lecturing people in a way which propels them backwards to address less important and pressing issues than appear in our day-to-day living conditions.
So interracial relationships, for one, do not represent the primary problem within the black community. Our main problem remains based in the concentrated class question known as racism; interracial relationships of the sort he opposes actually dilute racism. Thus, it may be seen that Sara Seti prefers this demagogic approach rather attacking urgent problems facing our community, such as racism or its secondary effects like unemployment or health or housing. The genocidal, neo-fascist prison industry has been built on the back of African labor and is a major economic sector within US capitalism. Rather than focusing on the crises which deepen our oppression and misery, he places his energy into a demeaning attack on a fourth-rate issue. Actually interracial marriage looks like a last-rate issue, if it can be ranked as one at all.
In a community where people struggle to pay bills, anybody with time on their hands to spook up a campaign about who is married to whom wants too much control and threatens to be even more repressive than the present colonial apparatus. This is the problem in places like DR Congo, in the Motherland, where men with guns and armies invent pretexts for waging genocidal, subimperialist wars. These wars really turn out to be non-ethnic based conflicts, contrary to the Western media portrayal of what is going on. It turns out that Nkunda and Musaveni and Kagame and others are fighting each other over the extraction of columbite-tantalum (coltan) to supply SONY and other manufacturers. So Africans must remain extremely wary of all demagoguery and metaphysics.
Secondly, and this shows how low in rank this subject sits as a concrete, definable issue, if a negro man will only be happy with a white woman nobody can force him to be with a black one. In fact, had Clarence Thomas chosen instead a black woman to be his bride, how would that have stopped his role as a shill for Imperialism? Colin Powell is happily married to a black woman, and his whole career as a military man has involved massacreing poor populations in places such as Vietnam, Grenada, Haiti, Panama, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Mobutu Sese Seko had a black wife and was one of Africa’s worst bloodsuckers. Look again at Musaveni, Kagame and Nkunda, all parasitic excrescences on the body of African people. On the face of it, Sara Seti's argument so far proves not only fallacious but woefully inadequate in logic and reasoning.
The person with black parents and other family members, who must commit national suicide by waging a political struggle that takes place below the belt, will not be persuaded by the brother's argument. You may befriend any number of young people inclined to cross the tracks in search of their life mate. Talk to those who have filled themselves with African self-hate and loathing, who despise their nappy hair and dark skin and big lips. Poll them and see how many will heed his advice. You might also want to ask those white women and men who love African people to stay with their own, to leave us alone, we don't want their friendship and love. Let them kno we prefer hate and racism and Jim Crow and slavery to friendship and comradeship and solidarity. We are all okay. We don't need allies in our struggle. Tell them we need racial purity, racial cleansing, and then we will be perfect. I don't think that will fly, Hitler.
Finally, Sara Seti's line of reasoning peals faulty on the issue of who will carry out his campaign for cleansing bedroom politics. The whole idea just fills empty matter between peoples ears. 'Who will join the revolutionary crusade to patrol black America's bedrooms to end this filth! Who will bell the cat of interracial marriage, interracial sex, and interracial children!'
Sara Seti is not only demagogic, he has no idea of revolutionary thought. In fact, whatever literature he has read, if any, has led him in the wrong direction. It may not be his fault, as it may not have been the fault of Jonas Savimbi that he twisted against the Angolan Revolution and brought in the apartheid-era South African Defense Force to help him occupy Cuito Cuanavale. However, that was not the concern of the Angolan people, who had a duty to defend their country and their revolution against counterrevolutionaries. For that reason, they rose up as a nation, with allies from many revolutionary formations, to defeat the interlopers. I hope that Sara Seti does not permit his demagoguery to lead him one step further in dictating what African people must do, because he sets a trifling example.
Frantz Fanon, one of the greatest revolutionary thinkers of any period, married a French woman. Cheikh Anta Diop married a French woman. Amilcar Cabral had married a Portuguese woman, tho Cabral went on to become one of the revolutionary giants of the African liberation movement. So let us dispense with this notion that what goes on in the bedroom somehow has something to do with how a man or woman tends to look at the world and deal with it. Sara Seti and others involved in promoting the color theory of racist confrontation, instead of the scientific, class theory of racism, may hope to throw these brothers under the bus but in that case will find themselves in that unfortunate position instead. Seti's vid proves there is an ocean of difference between a rant and a theory.
Our efforts are better suited towards understanding the objective conditions which shape social trends, and then knowing and applying proven methods for changing society thru the historical process of revolutionary activity. We had best study the successful struggles against racist oppression made in Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. While we kno how these efforts were carried out on the battlefield, there were also necessary ideological and political components which shaped those revolutions along humanitarian lines. If American society someday begins to look like the populations of Puerto Rico and Brazil, where many people are blended with Caucasian, Indio and African peoples, that is not the contradiction. The class contradiction which gives expression to racism will continue to exist and racism will continue to be exported the way it is with Africans here being lulled into a type of comfort zone because of their personal relationships with the oppressor society. Peace and Revolution.
See Sara Seti's vid
2009-01-05
Ubuntu, and Clean Water in Africa
Ubuntu is a Zulu word meaning "humanness." In Pan Africanism we call this quality "humanism" but it is even more down-to-earth among sisters and brothers in the Motherland than it is among us Westernized Africans. For too many people, ubuntu only refers to a Linux developers program; Linux gave it that name because it is openface software, or something like that. It is free. Yet you can find examples of what is called ubuntu thru out African culture, not just among the Zulu. Almost all Africans have some version of it. Ubuntu is a quality which must be used to bring us together both as Africans and as human beings across this planet.So I have begun my own quest for spreading ubuntu globally. On FaceBook, I joined Sherekea Clean Water Project to recruit everyone of my friends to join. Having clean water in the Motherland is important. I think it is a key component to bringing peace there and slowing the depredations of capitalism.
A few words about the most important substance in creation. Water cannot be found just lying around unless it is trapped. Gravity alone is not enuf to keep water in one place; it will evaporate or precipitate out of the sky. Water erodes the hardest stone and bursts the strongest container. Water moves; water is the substance of life and that is why it moves and that's why it is the most precious substance on earth.
And movement is the inherent tendency of all living things. To defy the conditions of a life's existence, to spread life as far and wide as possible, we kno that life just isn`t possible without access to water. But aint enuf water on moon or Mars to sustain life as we kno it and love it. Whitey might be on the moon, but we can't get clean, accessible water in Africa, the place where humanity and civilization began.
So after joining FaceBook, I started blitzing for folks to join Sherekea. It's quite a crusade of mine, and my blog has suffered for it. I apologize to my readers, who expect original stuff. Well, this is part of it.
Indeed, Africa needs clean water. That racist ex-prez Jimmy Carter suggests people use a rag to filter water and prevent disease when the US has companies like Calgon, Coca Cola and Budweiser which filter enuf H2O to provide clean water for Africa. US beer companies purify six billion gallons of water per year. So yeah, I sed it. Jimmy Carter is a racist who calls for a reactionary stop-gap measure! Jimmy Carter should be calling for clean water so women and children don't have to walk miles. He should advocate clean water so that people no longer have to worry about river blindness, guinea worm, schistosomiasis, infantile diarrhea and countless other diseases!
Jimmy Carter is not that stupid. He knows Americans aren't that stupid. But he is that racist, and so is America to stand for such a suggestion. This is part of the unconscious racism of Imperialism. If guinea worm infected some part of the southern USA, Jimmy Carter would never settle for asking people to drape a rag over their water vessels to strain out some bug. I hate to call people names, no, that's a lie... But anyhoo, let me break it down for you.
Dracunculiasis or guinea worm is a disgusting parasite. It is a nematode which enters the human body thru microscopic crustaceans. There it usually matures and migrates to the foot, where it creates an ulcer from extending its head (scolex) whenever the foot enters water. However, the guinea worm can emerge from the eyes, lips, arms or any body part. It is extremely painful, potentially crippling. If it migrates to the brain, it remains dormant there in a cyst. This is the bug that the Carter Center claims to be eradicating. The former prez wants to deliver his rag to millions of people to strain out the microscopic water flea. There are so many flaws in this plan it is ridiculous.
Unlike Jimmy Carter and other capitalist apologists, natural parasites have no choice but to behave the way they do. For eradication of guinea worm, the Carter Center has received $40 million at one time from just Bill and Melinda Gates building a $55 million total, yet not one water purification plant has been built from that money. How much loot does it take to supply everybody in Africa with a cheap, dirty rag? It is such a lousy idea, it just might work. After all, the Carter Center claims that guinea worm has been eliminated in over 99% of previously reported cases.
(Pics of Dracunculiasis emerging from the body.)
Even if Jimmy Carter's cheap rag is 100% successful, a cholera epidemic is sweeping across Zimbabwe not because of Robert Mugabe but because racist US sanctions in the form of ZIDERA have done to African society what being tired and run down does to the individual's immune system. I and many others have written before that the US has as its goal to destabilize Zimbabwe so as to place their stooge in power. During the current phase of US sanctions, the goal of Imperialism is to turn the masses against the revolution so that they will become willing pawns of Imperialism. If there were at least water purification facilities in African cities, such epidemics would not be likely. However, the lack of infrastructure allows the Imperialists to impose any solutions they deem. That is why we have to understand the problem in Africa as a political one, a leftover from colonialism, and intensified under the final stage of Imperialism: NEO-COLONIALISM.
Schistosomiasis, also known as bilharzia or snail fever, comes from a nematode (actually a "trematode") that lives in fresh water and penetrates the skin. It is estimated to infect 200 million people worldwide. The worms grow inside the body and lay eggs. Schistosomiasis causes fever, chills, muscle aches, anemia, malnutrition, and can damage the liver, intestines, lungs and bladder.
River blindness is caused by another water-borne worm in Africa.
Infantile diarrhea is caused because of water which hasn't been distilled, boiled or otherwise purified. It is a leading cause of infant mortality in Africa, where women daily walk miles to fetch water for cooking and drinking. So not only are people dying because of poor water, they also suffer because of lack of access to water. It is estimated that 70% of all hospital visits in East Africa are because of water-related illness.
Stop military aid to reactionaries like Yoweri Musaveni and Paul Kagame, and help the people of Africa. Whenever you have a bottled drink, from a soda to a beer to any of America's countless water-based drinking products on the market, just think how the facilities which bottled your favorite drink could contribute towards building water purification facilities in Africa. So that people could be liberated from water-borne disease one village at a time, rather than at the pace of one drinking vessel at a time. So that people can enjoy sanitation. So that women do not have to walk miles away from home just to provide drinking and cooking water for
their families.
Think about that for a moment. Then do something about it.
Happy New Year.
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