Sleep and you awake something else - something without the ability to feel anger or pain or even happiness or express compassion. Numbness is the One World Order. Your humanity has been sucked out of you in the night when your eyes are closed. In the daylight, you speak politely and above all calmly with others - unless you haven’t submitted to the “transformation,” the “change.” Then those around you, family, neighbors, and friends, point and hiss at you because they have detected something human in your gesture, speech, or movement. In collaboration with the government officials, these others seize you and force you to sleep. Sleep.

It’s not a 1956 movie (Invasion of the Body Snatchers). It’s reality. Just keep watching!

Gas prices are rising. Food prices are high and rising. Wages are low and stagnant. Foreclosures are sending people out in search of affordable housing in a housing market that caters to those who can afford luxury lifestyles in gated communities. This is not news for Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow people. The struggle to purchase food, fill the car with gas, and afford decent housing has always been of primary concern for the masses of people of color in the U.S.

But keep watching!

Look at how people absorbed in their long night of sleep, awake to work and at the end of the week, purchase “Oprah” hair (super straight hair that swings) and colored contact lenses to emulate the Takers, the white Masters in their lives (see K. Danielle Edwards, “Biracial is the New Black,” The Black Commentator, June 19, 2008). They work with Master to kill Blackness. They work to be as white as they can afford to be under this One World Order of Numbness. Purchasing whiteness is the highest realm of “success” in Amerikkka for Black Americans bowing before the absurdity of American consumerism with a gleeful numbness. The frantic rush to purchase corporate goods marks the level of “success” Empire is achieving in the process to re-colonize Black Americans who, in turn, without thought, count their “blessings” and thank their god, creator of greed and violence. But those who sleep with fake eyes can’t see!

Keep watching and look at how corporate media spends hours discussing Tiger Woods’ pending knee surgery. Tiger, Mr. Cablinasian with a Black (oh, erase that) father, has publicly denounced identification with Blackness. For many whites, he represents the future where even the trace of Blackness will be surrounded and snubbed out. There’ll be no elimination of whiteness. Indeed, there will be an expansion of whiteness everywhere on the global!

Tiger is among the forerunners of a grand vision of colorblindness (or color erasure). He’s acceptable and therefore has the corporate media’s attention because he needs surgery for his knees. (Don’t send Tiger money). He is sure to have the best insurance and will receive treatment at the best hospital because that’s how it works! Tiger is rewarded. The public too, rewarded for sleeping, is guiding to turn attention and concern on Tiger’s knee when they are not working hard to purchase whiteness for themselves and their families.

While Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow people who are absorbed by whiteness wallow in the absurdity of the Empire’s One World Order of Numbness, most of the leadership, particularly the Black leadership has long undergone domestic “regime change” that substituted look-alike coloreds for the authentic leaders. Limiting the collective horizon of their people to the space in the narrative of white supremacy designated for the Other, these leaders steer their followers away from the narrative of liberation and, as a result, collectively this mass of people and their leaders are tongue-less. The hypnotic dribbling from the mouths of people who’ve never considered a political strategy for resisting the Empire is incapable of warning the people; they are incapable of serving the betrayed as betrayed member of the community. When it comes to Black people in the U.S., white leadership seeks the aid of Black leaders to maintain law and order and, in return, these leaders are given prominent positions within the system.

Everything can be bought and sold, including the collective soul of a people!

The great savior, the shining knight, the man of change, the man who uses his gifts (unlike Malcolm and King) in the service of the Takers, epitomizes the numbness of the One World Order. He asks politely and above all, calmly, that the people of color, the Black, Red, Brown, and Yellow, just sleep - forever!

And most have gone to sleep and there’s no waking them up. The process is irreversible!

So the tragedy continues.

As the world watches the tragedy of sadistic and brutal abuse at Bagram and Abu Graibe, Black American leaders, in particular, are speechless! For a people kidnapped, tortured and brutalized, Black Americans can no longer speak of a nation’s moral consciousness. Is this not by design? The moral consciousness of Black Americans is in the process of being fully consumed by the Empire. They won’t hear the prison gates closing or see the mushroom cloud in the distance.

Continue to watch the tragedy unfold at your risk! Leave these people to their passivity before the flickering screens with images of white glamour and glitter.

There’s a voice in a territory otherwise occupied by the dead.

There’s a sister alive with rage! Karen Salazar was fired. The LA School District ended her contract at Jordan High School. Why? Well, she’s “too Afro-centric.”

Salazar, a second-year English teacher, dared to teach the Autobiography of Malcolm X! She dared to teach the poetry of Langston Hughes and the lyrics of Tupac Shakur!

Chapter One: Nightmare

When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our house in Omaha, Nebraska one night. Surrounding the house, brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out.

And

We will take you and kill you,

Expendable.

We will fill you full of lead,

Expendable.

And when you are dead

In the nice cold ground,

We’ll put your name

above your head -

If your head

Can be found.

And

As real as it seems the American Dream

Ain’t nothing but another calculated schemes

To get us locked up shot up back in chains

To deny us the future role our names

Kept my history mystery but now I see

The American Dream wasn’t meant for me

Salazar must be fired! Right?

The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Langston Hughes poetry have been “approved” by the L.A. School District. But it is Salazar’s perspective as a leader that is perceived as a threat to the goals of a One World Order of Numbness. Salazar has employed the words of these authors to inspire and empower young minds into becoming critical thinkers and leaders in their own right - not passive recipients of law and order - of numbness.

Salazar, her students, and colleagues, awake and fired up, took to the streets!

“This school system for too long has been not only denying them human rights, basic human rights, but doing it on purpose in order to keep them subservient, to subjugate them in society,” she told reporters.

A bullhorn in her hand, Salazar told the students at her side: “You embody what it means to be a warrior-scholar, a freedom-fighting intellectual…you are part of the long legacy, the strong history, of fighting back.”

Sixty students rallied on Wednesday, June 11, 2008, at the Watts campus. Some 15 colleagues of the teacher have announced that they might resign or transfer to protest the firing of Karen Salazar. The community of “warriors” surrounding this brave sister has pasted videos on the website You Tube that is attracting thousands of hits.

Salazar graduated from UCLA with a degree in Political Science and a minor in African American and Chicano Studies, according to the LA Times, June 12, 2008 report. She also completed a Master’s degree in education from UCLA. Salazar didn’t obtain her “qualifying papers” to “sell out” the interests of the struggle. She didn’t hustle for a position in academia that would be safe or politic or popular, to paraphrase Martin Luther King. Her conscience asked the question: Is it right? Salazar did the right thing in those classrooms. Salazar is doing the right thing in the streets! Her campus profile speaks of a woman “definitely a teacher who wants kids to wake up and look around them and ask questions and be motivated and be engaged.”

But what was she told by the L.A. School District?

Connecting students to their past struggles for liberation in order to fight present struggles against the Empire - waking them up - is just too dangerous!

According to Salazar in a Democracy Now! interview, the administrator who came and observed her class later wrote in an evaluation (that enters her file) that she was “brainwashing students and imposing extremist views on them.”

“I guess that I am being accused of indoctrinating students with Afrocentrism.”

To remind Black, Red, Brown and Yellow students of the legacy of “fighting back” is to shoot blood through the veins of these young students in danger of being among the walking dead. Salazar’s leadership in the classroom and in protest is a matter of life or death! One World Order of Numbness is not an option!

Salazar is a revolutionary leader. Leadership, Paulo Freire writes, either “identifies itself with the oppressed state of the people, or it is not revolutionary. To simply think about the people, as the dominators do, without any self-giving in that thought, to fail to think with the people, is a sure way to cease being [a] revolutionary leader.” Here’s a leader who understands that Empire has long recognized the legacy of resistance as a threat to their ability to form their vision of a One World Order of Numbness for the benefit of transnational corporations.

While Salazar fights to maintain what will keep the Left alive - a strong legacy of resistance and struggle - others, particularly the Black leadership chosen by corporate media and neo-liberal academic corporate gatekeepers, have bowed before the imperialists who never stopped building their movement of corporate power.

Self-giving rather than taking engenders real leadership. Self-giving empowers a movement of the people to banish the One World Order of Numbness - by any means necessary!

Will more Karen Salazars stand up and truly be revolutionary leaders!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.