“I read the Cornel West article.” (West’s commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Attica Prison rebellion, Democracy Now! transcript, September 12, 2011). “We’ve got to do something.”

“We are.”

“Wait! Let me talk!”

“You always do.”

“The way I figure it, we’ve got to change the mindset of white people.”

In this “we” is a bowed, if not dead, Black America. In this “we,” the continuation of the Struggle is invisible. In this “we,” he is Quaker, one-time wheeler and dealer in real estate; one-time owner of multiple rental housing properties. White man. I, merely the owner, he knows, of books he once suggested I could do without. Black woman.

“How many books,” he asked once. “A library!” A personal library is no less dangerous, if not more so, than a public library - particularly a personal library owned by a Black woman.

“How many?”

Where do you start? Why bother?

“White people understand that Blacks are incarcerated for minor offenses. But they are silent about releasing these Blacks from prison,” he says.

Where are you, my liberal brother? Why have you gone back to your home when the battle has just begun? Why are you silent, my liberal friend?

King. But he does not have a memory of this Martin Luther King, of the Struggle, of how it is ongoing. How it never ended. How we remember the killing fields that littered the urban landscape when he believed the dream.

“What speech is that from? Where does that come from?” Black woman!

“Make a copy and give it to me.” Provide me with proof, Black woman - because this is the moment he can no longer see what he imagined - shelves of romance novels, or college textbooks, or Huck Finn, Moby Dick, and Catcher in the Rye, fit for elementary and high school students, decorating bookcases.

“When did King say this?”

In his world, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, W.E.B. DuBois. Ella Baker, Diane Nash, John H. Clarke do not exist.

Che Guevara, Huey P. Newton, Crazy Horse, Assata Shakur, Malcolm X are forever criminals.

Henry L. Gates is the academic luminary on all things Black people, the expert that permits the marginalization and dismissal of Marimba Ani and bell hooks.

Prison diaries of Thiong’o Ngugi, Antonio Gramasci, Nawal al-Saadawi, Bessie Head, Leonard Peltier are inconceivable.

In his world, there never was a Black world before or after the Trans-Atlantic Trade in human cargo. And “a little bit of capitalism” (regulated, huh?) to spread wealth to the middle class would usher in a second American Revolution.

Orwellian revolutions, he knows. Co-opted revolutions, staged and broadcast, as in 1984 when Big Brother announced Oceania’s victories over Euroasia (or was it Eastasia?). The U.S. Empire’s State media proclaims victory over the Taliban, over Al Qaeda, over terrorism, while families bury victims of air raids and drone attacks. Broken, bloody bits of lives invisible to the suited-negotiators and the military might of the international brigade led by NATO, the U.S. and other Western nations. Bin Laden the ally becomes Bin Laden the enemy. Qaddafi the man becomes Qaddafi, subhuman.

But the struggle for justice and freedom is still alive.

        We learned how to read and write

                war

                        and school

                                and co-operative

                                        and culture

and our machine guns

                spelled Freedom… (Sergio Vieira, “Four Parts for a Poem on Education”)

“We have to think of a way to change this thing!”

We have to think…

Yes, Toni Morison, you are right. The white face is impenetrable. I hear you Fanon: “By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.”

“The way I see it, call them the ‘underclass,’ if you will…”

No, I will not, but you have the right to be because you can and do call them the “underclass.” You whose skin, social, political and cultural privilege allows you to adopt the clothing of the economically poor and homeless, to shave and comb your hair infrequently, to wear worn sneakers, yet be addressed with respect from your Black working class and economically poor “underclass” neighbors

There are five thousand of us here

in this small part of the city.

We are five thousand

I wonder how many we are in all

in the cities and in the whole country?

Here alone

are ten thousand hands which plant seeds

and make factories run.

How much humanity

exposed to hunger, cold, panic, pain,

moral pressure, terror and insanity?

Six of us were lost

as if into starry space.

On dead, another beaten as I could never have

believed

a human being could be beaten.

The other four wanted to end their terror -

one jumping into nothingness,

another beating his head against a wall,

but all with the fixed stare of death.

What horror the face of fascism creates!

(Victor Jara, “Chile Stadium”)

We have been revolutionaries fighting from LA to NYC, from Latin America to Africa, from Palestine to Egypt - while He has been afforded the right to eat well, sleep well, consciously indifferent to the “fixed stare of death.”

The urban battleground of the 1970s, the stadium in Chile, the car bomb that eliminated the warrior Ghassan Kanafani, and the gunshot that riddled Cabral is connected to the increase of Black incarceration rates in Philadelphia in 2011.

        I have no other way of

        saying this gently - your husband

killed in battle - your brother lost.

Freedom’s hunger claimed them

end their love for this soil, these rocks. (Balach Khan, “Sister”)

“The young Blacks who get themselves caught up in the prison system are full of rage, self-destructive behavior.”

…Because as we all know, Blacks suffer from this disposition. This “rage” is innate with Blacks. This “rage” is responsible for their self-destructive behavior!

The U.S. and European nations spend “hundreds of millions of dollars on arms, training and equipment for the Ugandan and Burundian militaries.” (Jeremy Scahill, “Blowback in Somalia,” The Nation, September 2011). And the “rage” of the U.S. armed Ugandan and Burundian militaries leveled at other Africans - is what?

Follow the thread back to the U.S., the seat of the corporate Empire where the level of unemployment and poverty among Blacks continues to rise. Of the 46.2 million living in poverty in the U.S., 27 percent are Black and Latino/a. Crime? The “rage” inflicted on the suffering from the familiar and the State is welcomed by the U.S. manufactures and traders in weapons and drugs.

Take any thread and notice that at one end, a white hand yanks back and, at the other end, a darker hand pulls for more rope. One end pulls up and the other pulls down and the people barely holding on, go tumbling down.

But some do not want their governments to play any more.

A report from Ampedstatus.org cited an interesting passage from an article by veteran journalist Paul B. Farrell of the conservative Wall Street Journal, a government “friendly press,” in which Farrell writes,

‘What a year. Rage in London, Egypt, Athens, Damascus…

‘Warning: More rage is dead ahead. Across our planet a new generation is filled with rage. High unemployment. Raging inflation. Dreams lost. Hope gone. While the super-rich get richer and richer.

‘Listen to that hissing: The fuse is rapidly burning, warning us. Wake up before the rage explodes in your face. This firestorm is endangering America’s future…

‘Super-rich addicts are destroying the American Dream for everyone. They’re destroying the American economy. They don’t care about you. Yes, they hear the ticking time bomb. They’re stockpiling cash. Don’t say you weren’t warned. The IMF sees a new collapse sweeping across the planet. Open your eyes. You’re not watching a film. This is not a metaphor. Plan now for the revolution, class warfare, market crash, economic collapse, plan for another depression.’

Rage? Black rage? Psycho-babble creating a prism through which spectators view Black Americans, contained subsequently by their own despair and the silence of the liberal class…

“Forget it,” he shouts

Forget it! And the circle closes and that we (his we) is where it started again before the attempt to teach that we (still resisting) are without history!

Let him go on thinking about his “underclass.”

Let us remember where “justice” has led Troy Davis and all the Troy Davis’ and political prisoners in the Empire’s dungeons.

Let’s have poems

blood-red in colour

ringing like damn bells…

…             

Talk of freedom

and let the plutocrat

decorate his parlour walls

with the performed scrawl of dilettantes.

                        …

        Talk of freedom

and touch people’s eyes

with the knowledge of the power

of multitudes

that twists prison bars like grass

and flattens granite walls like putty.

Poet

find the people

help forge the key

before the decade

                        eats the decade

                                        eats the decade.

(A.N.C. Kumalo, “Red Our Colour”)

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.