In Memory of Martina Correia

Here is Michael Parenti commenting on the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement, November 9, 2011, in “Occupy America,” published at CommonDreams.org:

I recall learning about the Palestinians and their struggle because young Black Americans, Black Panthers to be exact, traveled to Palestine in the early 70s to share their experiences in the struggle against injustice. I recall also how we learned the meaning of the word “apartheid” and acknowledged an affinity with the struggle in Black South Africa. I recall the message of Caribbean Blacks and all of us young Blacks in the U.S. reading Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and feeling as if we were born again.

But okay! Scores of other nations are specifically pronouncing the words “Wall Street” as they gather in parks and in city squares. Never mind that many in the Arab world are saying “it’s about time, Americans!”

But okay! Predominately young white North Americans are standing up and they have come onto the streets and parks in protest, spreading across the United States. I can understand how liberals, “radicals” of the 60s protest era, want to project an image of protest that is marketable, free of historical contamination, free of the blackness of the 60s era.

Black Americans organized and lined the streets to protest against police brutality when white America believed Black violence and Black non-violence justified police violence. Blacks organized and served hungry children when white America said Blacks were asking for too much and moving too fast. They organized to fight the U.S. Empire when frightened parents and grandparents of the new OWS activists stood by and did little while the Black activists were shot down and imprisoned, marginalized.

Young white America has awakened to just catch the “echoes” of those gunshots that rang out then and even now on el platforms and in the streets, but they are without memory of Malcolm X, of Huey Newton, of Shirley Chisholm. They are not harmonizing along with a fellow Black activist Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues” nor or they riding a bus from some northern college campus town, sitting alongside a Black, arriving to face a crazy sheriff and angry mobs of whites shouting “go home, Nigger…and Nigger Lover, too.”

These young white activists of the OWS Movement have not been tortured, mutilated and then killed alongside a Black southern activist in a car on a dark road.

There are beatings and arrests as there has been since the end of enslavement and the beginning of Jim Crow and again during the Civil Rights era. But no police force would think of killing OWS leaders, if they had leaders, while they slept after being drugged by a police informant nor would even a Bloomberg give the thumbs up to an all-to-willing police force to drop a C-4 bomb over the home where 8 children died and where the adults were unarmed.

The young protesters today have been saturated with the image of a gentle Dr. Martin L. King and the Dream (colorblindness) and have been captivated by the American Dream (class blindness).

So here is Parenti again and what is so troubling to me:

We need to invite them, explicitly invite them - to the fight as he reminds the “we,” the “everyone” that is not really everyone that “the Great Recession,” the economic crisis of the 2008 (which struck white America and everyone who advanced economically above the fray) “victimized everyone” but especially hit hard “the ethnic poor.”

This latest crime of capitalism “victimized everyone” and everyone who consciously or unconsciously advanced as a result of capitalism’s victimization of the “ethnic poor” should be mindful of those invisible ones in the nooks and crannies, mindful of those useful step ladders and necessary scapegoats. The Ethnic poor!

These are who the liberals such as Lyndon Johnson ultimately dismissed in order to escalate the killing in Vietnam, and the Lover Boy Clinton disenfranchised through major eliminations of public assistance to children, while the corporate world is still thankful for the advancement of prison construction throughout the U.S. to house the parents of these children. Affirmative Action for Black Americans, a blemish on the American landscape, morally outraged white men.

I can’t imagine why or how things have turned around, but “explicitly invite” them, calls out to those who once lead the movement for civil and human rights to join the “fight.”

Bring them reluctant and screaming from what remains of public housing and their grassroots campaigns, from the unemployment lines, from the rank and file of McDonald’s workers, from the kitchens and nurseries of your parent’s homes, and from the tomato fields in Florida. Please drag them kicking and screaming from those inadequate public schools where despite the protest of parents and communities, their children slowly become damaged goods, left behind to be transported to prison as discarded waste. Over 2 million targeted by law, charged and incarcerated as criminals, segregated for non-violent crimes while Hollywood producers, celebrities, fellow college classmates, friends, neighbors, someone you know, enjoys a “hit” or a “line” or even a meth or ecstasy trip regularly.

And racial profiling does not help!

Tell them the fight is on! The Movement is here! Tell them to come away from their homes occupied by Fox News blasting lies and depictions of criminals that look like them. Tell them to delete the corporate subsidized rappers from their iPods and respectfully bring their mothers, sisters, and daughters to the fight. Tell them the time is now! Join the fight! But warn them: don’t come angry like their parents and grandparents before them!

“As is the case with so many of the tropes that are repeatedly deployed in our media environment, the practice of disparagingly labeling select people as ‘angry’ has a documentable history,” writes Thomas S. Harrington, in “Anger and Angry People,” (CommonDreams, November 2011). This we know.

Return to your ‘ghettoes’ and turn the anger inward and self-destruct!

Are the angry invited to the fight? Are the ethnic poor really being invited, explicitly or otherwise “into the fight”? As Harrington rightly notes, “the further down the social totem pole you are, the more angry you are likely to be.”

But I disagree with Harrington’s depiction of King. So many of the tropes on the Left forget the King who said “there comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair” (“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” August 1963). And they did, but America rejected the racial make-up of the protest and the anger of a King, first and foremost, turned Americans off to any genuine movement to end political and economic injustice.

It is not an accident that, as Harrington argues, the OWS Movement is obsessed with “appearing good-humored and positive,” following the “noble examples of Gandhi and King,” but also attempting to “avoid being tarred as ‘angry’ by the country’s right wing media machine.”

But it is not as simple as that, is it? Some right wing media machine is the sole culprit of 45 years of repression? The safe and squeaky clean “Black” emerges from so-called liberal institutions, too.

The young white American, for the most part, has not experienced life in the U.S. in the same way the Red, Black, Brown, and Yellow has experienced this government’s rage. College tuition is high in the U.S. A college loan means debt for years to come. But for many Red, Black, Brown and Yellow citizens, however curious, intelligent or talented, a college education is out of reach.

The emergency room is the health care plan and diabetes and high blood pressure is on the rise along with the profits of the pharmaceutical industry.

Good humored and positive - they are not, but then neither was Dr. King; the angry Dr. King who condemned the violence and the use of taxpayer’s money to conduct the Vietnam war, and to hell with the religious clergy and civil rights careerists; the angry Dr. King who said he was standing with the Memphis garbage workers and preparing for a poor peoples’ march in Washington D.C., and to hell with President Johnson and the liberal class determined by then to protect their families from the angry Blacks! But few are courageous enough to refer to this angry Dr. Martin Luther King!

I remember reading about Blacks who were not so angry and who tried to be “good humored and positive,” as the young protesters are urged to be today, and masses of people in celebration of their freedom, lynched these good humored and positive people by the hundreds, for years.

The full history of the 99% is forgotten these days. “Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten” (King, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? 1967).

The “we” representing the long-standing protected privilege of many Americans cannot “invite” representatives of the long-standing struggle without implying that the continuation of the same hierarchical structure will remain in place. The later are already present and have been present but “underprivileged” or “lower economic class” has made them and their continuing fight for human rights invisible. They are still in the back of the bus, still at the segregated lunch counter, still partitioned in non-gated communities serving the privileged as janitors, security guards, garbage workers, housekeepers, and nannies. Before September 2011, before the OWS Movement, they tried to steady the boat. And to what end - their bosses sunk it!

But now there is an open invitation! Join this fight against the U.S. Empire’s manipulation of “allies” and “enemies,” against capitalism’s production of poverty, against white supremacy.

Because you are Black, we are inviting you, “explicitly inviting” you, to experience with us the brutality of the militarized police’s uses of tear gas, pepper spray, and horses (no dogs yet!). We invite you to spend a night or two in jail.

We are inviting you to the Struggle, to the repressive tactics used against protesters, dissenters, those seeking justice and human rights, earth rights.

Join us - who are so new to the fight - and maybe, together, again, we can forge a revolution! Stamp out the blackness of injustice and brutality against humanity, against Mother Earth! And work toward a future of democratic socialism!

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Long live the fighting spirit of Martina Correia, 1967-2011, who fought the good fight on behalf of her brother Troy Davis and all those sentenced to the death by the Just-Us system of injustice.

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