Table of Contents

There are 15 chapters in this issue

About BlackCommentator.com

Cover Story: Lincoln’s White Blind Spot - The Slaves Were the Leading Actors in Their Own Emancipation By Eric Mann, BC Guest Commentator

Quote to Ponder: "We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history…” - Carter Woodson, 1926, historian

And the Oscar goes to… War on Iran! - Political Cartoon By Carlos Latuff, Rio de Janeiro Brazil

Another Tragedy in the Rainforest - Solidarity America - By John Funiciello - BC Columnist

Book Review - Out of Control: A Fifteen Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons - Represent Our Resistance - By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD - BC Editorial Board

CSI New York: Hill Harper Should be Ashamed! - Nafsi ya Jamii - By Wilson Riles - BC Columnist

Hedonistic ‘Americans’ and the Role of the Media: Will It Ever Change? - Keeping it Real - By Larry Pinkney - BC Editorial Board

Pick-A-Pope - Political Cartoon By Mark Fiore, San Francisco CA

Chris Brown and Rihanna... Their Ultra-Dysfunctional “Relationship” is Precisely What’s Wrong with Black America - Sharp n’ Blunt - By Desi Cortez - BC Columnist

Sequester Me, Please - The Other Side of the Tracks - By Perry Redd - BC Columnist

Ode to Jerry Buss: NBA (and Los Angeles) Gamechanger - Between The Lines - By Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, PhD - BC Columnist

Self-Determination is the Key - Worrill’s World - By Dr. Conrad W. Worrill, PhD - BC Columnist

South Africa Oscar Stories - Political Cartoon By Zapiro, South Africa

Coextensive Love - Art By Larry Richardson, Valencia CA

This is an eBook version of BlackCommentator.com - An independent weekly internet magazine dedicated to the movement for economic justice, social justice and peace.

BC Provides commentary, analysis and investigations on issues affecting African Americans and the African world.

BC was established April 5, 2002 and is published weekly on Thursday.

Executive Editor: David A. Love, JD - Managing Editor: Nancy Littlefield, MBA - Publisher: Peter Gamble

Feb 28, 2013 - Issue 506

As the Oscars are just passed, I’d like to contribute to the discussion of Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln that is still in theaters, will be moving to Netflix, HBO, and pay per view, and as celebrated by the liberal media, will be an influential cultural and political force for a long time. As a civil rights organizer and coalition builder since my work with the Congress of Racial Equality 1964, I well understand that liberal projects can sometimes help the movement even if they do not go as far as we would like them to. But in this case, screenwriter Tony Kushner and producer Steven Spielberg made an aggressive, conscious, and harmful intervention to re-write Black history through a white lens and write Black people out of their own emancipation. In this case, I think it should be re-submitted for a new category that Hollywood perfects but does not yet publicly recognize: “Well-meaning pictures that do more harm than good.”

Lincoln is a film about white people debating, maneuvering, and fighting over whether or not to pass the 13th Amendment which stated—“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” But where were the Black historical and dramatic actors who were the real leads of the story—the 400,000 runaway slaves who forced the Union armies to accept them, and who put the heat on Lincoln to support their emancipation or lose the war? They were whited out of the film. Lincoln is not just historically inaccurate but tragically so—doing its greatest disservice to a new generation of Black youth whose people’s remarkable history in fighting slavery, leading the Reconstruction, fighting Jim Crow, leading the anti-Vietnam war movement, and creating the conditions for the election of the first Black president in the history of the United States has been stolen from them in a wave of mass imprisonment and aggressive revisionist history.

When I first saw the film, I suspended disbelief and enjoyed it a lot. But minutes after leaving the theater I realized that once again Hollywood had deceived me and the person I was most angry at was myself

So, as soon as I got home I re-viewed the film through the lens of my greatest teacher, W.E.B. DuBois, and his master-work Black Reconstruction in America. Clearly, Lincoln’s support for the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment was situated in the great slave rebellion that DuBois calls “the general strike.” As DuBois argues, “it was the fugitive slaves who forced the slaveholders to face the alternative of surrendering to the North or surrendering to the Negro.” DuBois explains that it was the Black slave proletariat who fled the plantations threatening the white folks with starvation. It was the Black runaway slaves who put boots on the ground and made the Union army accept them despite the opposition of many white northern soldiers. They were eventually accepted by Lincoln, his generals, and most of the white soldiers, because they were brilliant and ferocious fighters against the Confederacy, many white Union soldiers were deserting, and Lincoln feared they would lose the war without them. Two hundred thousand Blacks served in the army and another 200,000 Blacks served in food, construction, and support services. Without them the North would have lost the war, or conceded to “reconciliation” with the white South with slavery intact.

So how was it possible that Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg, good people who have written an anti-slavery script, could interpret history in ways that I believe have very destructive consequences? Surely they had read DuBois, E. Franklin Frasier, Lerone Bennett, Frederick Douglass and scores of other Black scholars who put Black people at the center of the Civil War narrative. And when I read Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodman, on which the film-makers say the screenplay was based, I was happily surprised that she has an entire chapter about the critical role that Frederick Douglass and the runaway slaves played in this story - none of which was reflected in Lincoln. Douglass, as Kearns explains, recruited Black soldiers, including two of his sons, for the Union Army and had a contentious, complex, and influential relationship with Lincoln. Imagine a scene in which a towering Douglass demands of a vacillating Lincoln that unless he retaliates against the Confederacy ideologically and militarily for their murdering of captured Black Union soldiers, Douglass would stop all recruiting and distance himself from the Union cause. Douglass thunders, in terms few would have dared, “What has Mr. Lincoln to say about this slavery and murder? What has he said? Not one word…” Until he shall “interpose his power to prevent these atrocious assassinations of Negro soldiers, the civilized world will hold him equally with Jefferson Davis responsible for them.” Lincoln apologizes and re-assures Douglass that his caution is not vacillation and does act. But that film, which has not yet been made, would show that it was the pressure of Douglass and the Black soldiers who were leading Lincoln—Blacks providing moral, political, and military leadership for whites—challenging the myth of white supremacy that even many liberals internalize and perpetuate. A tentative title: The Douglass-Lincoln Debates.

And where is the scene of Harriet Tubman, who led raids on Southern plantations with Black troops that freed 750 slaves at a time? Imagine multiracial audiences cheering as a Black woman led Black soldiers burning down plantations as the fugitive slaves joined the Union army.

And what of the painful impact of films like Lincoln on progressive Black actors who observe that, with a few exceptions, the roles they are offered in Hollywood are caricatured, degrading, or none at all? If Black actors can’t get leading roles in a film about the civil war, can’t get roles playing Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman because they are not even in the picture, then the civil rights movement must confront, expose, and change Hollywood’s treatment of Black actors as invisible men and women.

Today, the challenge of the civil rights movement is again to free the slaves—the 1 million Black and 500,000 Latino prisoners in bondage “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” and the millions more on probation and parole under constant police control. I work with so many brave Black youth facing privatization of their schools, constant police harassment, brutality, and arrest for just living their lives—and forming organizations to fight the school-to-prison pipeline. At a time when the system is denying these young, gifted, and Black women and men their own revolutionary history, a new generation of civil rights organizers must set the record straight.

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator Eric Mann, a veteran of the Congress of Racial Equality, Students for a Democratic Society, and the United Auto Workers is the author of Katrina’s Legacy: White Racism and Black Reconstruction in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast and Playbook for Progressives: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer (Beacon Press). He the host of Pacifica Radio KPFK’s Voices from the Frontlines and director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles. Click here to contact Mr. Mann.

Feb 28, 2013 - Issue 506

Quote to Ponder

Click here for moreabout Carter Woodson

Feb 28, 2013 -Issue 506

And the Oscar goes to…War on Iran!

Political Cartoon

By Carlos Latuff, Rio de Janeiro Brazil

Carlos Latuff, a cartoonist, artist and activist based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Latuff has spent the last 15 plus years crafting a style that can best be described as “populist cartooning.” He has touched on issues like Apartheid in South Africa, the plight of Native Americans in the US and the oppression of Tibetans in China.

But perhaps his most controversial series to date is “We are all Palestinians,” in which he compares the actions taken by the Israeli government towards Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip directly to the Nazi’s treatment of Jews.

Click here to contact brother Carlos

Feb 28, 2013 - Issue 506

Another Tragedy in the Rainforest

In ancient Greece, Euripides, the playwright, told the story around 416 B.C. about a man who returned home after a long absence expecting to be reunited with his wife and children, only to be driven mad resulting in their deaths at his hand.

The man was Hercules and the play was a tragedy, as was Hercules.

In 2013, another tragedy is forming, only this time it does not take a playwright to create the script. This tragedy is being planned by a New York-based corporation, Herakles Farms (Hercules) and it plans to clear-cut a rainforest 10 times the size of Manhattan in the West African country of Cameroon. The forest destruction will be for a palm oil plantation that will provide profits for the “farm” corporation.

According to the environmental organization, Greenpeace, the area to be destroyed is “home to some amazing wildlife, like African elephants and endangered chimpanzees. And, it is also home to more than 14,000 Cameroonians who rely on the forest for subsistence farming.”

The group said this month that clearing of the rainforest from the area already has begun. Although Herakles has insisted that it is engaging in this enterprise in a “sustainable” way and that it is being done in a place where minimal forest clearing is required, they do not provide any proof that this is the case.

Their palm oil plantation is enormous and whatever rainforest area they clear-cut, it will be further destruction of wildlife habitat and, literally, the homes and forest farms of the people who occupy the land now, including the forests themselves, which are vital to the subsistence living of the people.

The subsistence living of the people does not seem to be a hindrance to Herakles’ development of its plantation. After all, they say they offer a new way of sustainable farming and the people will be able to work on the plantation and be introduced to the modern methods of agriculture, such as that seen in the U.S. It’s doubtful that the Cameroonians are told of the difficulties of farm life in the U.S., that small farm agriculture is on the way out, and small farmers are forced to sell out and work for industrial agriculture giants or move to the city for low-wage jobs, if they can find any.

A similar fate awaits the Cameroonians who live in the area destined to become a palm oil plantation. Some will likely find employment on the Herakles holdings. The others? Who knows? One thing is for certain, and that is that once a forest is clear-cut, it will take several long lifetimes for another forest to grow to similar size and function in the ecosystem. So, humans should be extremely careful about disrupting something that seems to be working well.

Herakles would like the world to believe that it only wants to help the Cameroonians and that its operations in Africa and elsewhere are simply to provide that help, ignoring the issue about who benefits from the rainforest destruction and the “unsustainability” of a monoculture like a palm oil plantation. Innumerable U.S. corporations have traveled the world, telling the people that their methods and operations will be good for the people of the country, again, ignoring the disastrous results of monoculture industrial farming in the U.S.

To help the general public understand the benign nature of the company’s efforts in the country, Herakles has even put a Cameroonian native in charge, Dr. Blessed Okole, senior vice president of strategic planning and field operations. Also at the top of the staff in Cameroon is Sarjit Singh, senior vice president, agriculture. Okole holds a Ph.D. in agriculture technology, while Singh holds a B.S. in agronomy science from Punjab University, India.

Environmental organizations are generally very critical of displacing human cultures and wildlife populations for the kinds of development Herakles is embarking upon and it is mostly because they see such an operation as unsustainable, in that clear-cutting rainforests is virtually always so, no matter how the issue is dressed up. Herakles has promised to show the people who are displaced modern methods of agriculture and to provide some 10,000 jobs. Usually, these promised jobs are low-wage, which do not compensate for the loss of traditional ways, cultural and social.

It’s unlikely that the people had anything to say about their removal from the lands. It is very likely that the deal was cut between Herakles negotiators, on behalf of CEO Bruce Wrobel, directly with the government of Cameroon. According to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, French Cameroon became independent in 1960 as the Republic of Cameroon and, in 1972, a new constitution replaced the federation with the United Republic of Cameroon.

Since 1982, however, the country has been ruled by President Paul Biya, who appoints the prime minister, the Supreme Court judges, and he has the power to lengthen or shorten the five-year term of the legislature. According to the CIA, “The country has generally enjoyed stability, which has permitted the development of agriculture, roads, and railways, as well as a petroleum industry. Despite slow movement toward democratic reform, political power remains firmly in the hands of President Paul Biya.” It does not take a great leap of understanding to see the ease with which Herakles and Biya, alone, could come to an agreement on the clear-cut in the south of the country.

Despite Herakles’ contention that the area already had been logged and degraded (and, therefore, it wouldn’t make much difference if it were clear-cut), Greenpeace stated that “ground, aerial and satellite surveys have shown this to be untrue. Rather, areas that have been logged have been done so selectively and the forest remains largely intact. Thus, Herakles Farms will be cutting down dense, high canopy tropical rainforest.”

That means that Herakles will be clear-cutting sustainable rainforests, to make way for the growing of a product that will make them much profit, but leave the people who live there with little to show for the destruction. For them, there is little expectation that their government would be responsive to their wants and needs. Since they cannot use all of the palm oil that would be produced, obviously the product is for export, sold on the world market. Palm oil, which is native to West Africa, is used for cooking, cosmetics, lubricating oil, and diesel and other fuels, among many other uses. In such an arrangement, the only one that would profit from the plantation would be Herakles. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Far away, in another part of the world, there is a very different approach to saving the rainforest while, at the same time, enriching the lives of the people who depend on the forest. Willie Smits, for 30 years, has labored in the rainforests of Indonesia and he has found a way to grow cash crops, keep the rainforests as they are, and teach local people how to benefit from the research that he and they have accomplished during their long collaboration. The 56-year-old Smits is a conservationist, a trained forester, animal rights activist, and a microbiologist. He is now a citizen of Borneo and has been recognized by the Indonesian government for his work and dedication.

The difference between Smits’ vision for economic development of “developing” countries and that of companies like Herakles is stark. The sugar palm trees that Smits has planted on thousands of acres of rainforest (as a demonstration of what can be done on a massive scale) do not require cutting of forest for them to thrive. They grow well under the canopy of the forest, can be dispersed throughout the forest, and can be tended by individual farmers, who benefit directly from their sugar palm trees. There are many of the same uses for the sap from the sugar palm, including biofuels.

He has come up with a plan for processing of sugar palm sap by people who live in the deepest rainforest, where there are no roads. Called “village hubs,” the little factories can be lowered anywhere, even into the roadless forest by helicopter, so the people can process (add value) to their sugar palm production, which can then be taken out to be sold at a higher price than the raw sap would bring. Such an enterprise allows the people to maintain their independence and way of life, send their children to school, and solve some of their social problems. Smits’ group, Masarang Foundation says of the people and their hubs, “They can make a better living and preserve the forest at the same time. Not only do the Hubs process sugar sap, they are also equipped to immediately deliver clean bio-ethanol (healthier to cook on than wood), electricity, drinking water and even have tools for medical care.”

Smits’ vision is one that is needed in our dealing with all of the rest of the world, since he believes that sustainability will only be achieved when the majority of the people in the developing countries are the beneficiaries of any programs, especially those that are promulgated by the technologically advanced nations. It’s too easy for any program that is offered by a transnational corporation to become a program that only makes money for that corporations…same with governments.

There are entire bureaucracies of developed nations that are devoted to “helping” or “aiding” or “assisting” the developing countries, but the end result is nearly always the same: There is a great flurry of activity, such as the clear-cutting in Cameroon, when jobs are available, for some, and there is some benefit, for some, but in the end, the money goes to the corporation, to foreign banks, and out of the country. The people who have been displaced are then left with the destroyed residue of the natural resources, which brings them nothing but disruption of their societies, and the loss of the necessities of life. What is happening in Cameroon is happening in virtually every part of the world and the exploitation of people in need is becoming commonplace.

Americans are suffering the same fate, in some ways. The nation’s heartland is full of communities that are just vestiges of their former selves, with their empty storefronts, theaters, schools, and churches. The connection to the outside world is a big box discount store at one of the exchanges of the nearest Interstate highway. The bustle of a hundred farm families in the community has been replaced by the relative silence of a computerized “farming” operation, likely owned by investors in New York City or Chicago. They are the ones who have decided which towns, villages, and small cities will live and which will die. The people have no say in any of it, except after the fact. And then, they say, if they say anything, what they have heard from the boardrooms and the schoolrooms, on television, and in their local newspapers is: “You can’t stop progress.”

So it is in the U.S., with the issues of hydrofracking for oil and natural gas and the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline that will bring toxic tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to Houston, Texas. Both are set to do irreparable harm to vast regions across the country, if we are to judge by the history of corporate activity over the past century. This time, however, the people are organizing and rising up over environmental and social issues, but it remains to be seen whether it will make a difference. The people, in so many ways, have little control over their own lives, compared with the power that Corporate America wields over people.

It’s hard to decide which came first, the disempowerment and displacement of American farmers and workers, or the displacement of peasant and indigenous peoples around the world to make way for the corporate kind of “progress.” Did the transnational corporations use the American technique to exploit the developing world or vice versa? It doesn’t really matter which came first. In both places where they have held sway, the results have been the same. Since the peoples of developing nations have little power, it is up to volunteer organizations in the rich nations to try to bring corporations to heel.

These are tragedies ofHerculean proportions in the making and it will take the same kind of effortsof sheer numbers of citizens to thwart the destruction that is coming. Theplanet needs friends and there are very few to befound in the government-corporate coalitions that are striding across theworld, ever in search of more and more profit.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello,is a long-time former newspaper reporter and labor organizer, who livesin the Mohawk Valleyof New YorkState. Inaddition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as theystruggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory foodproducers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.

Feb 28, 2013 - Issue 506

Out of Control:
A Fifteen Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons

One of the chief symptoms of every revolution is the sharp and sudden increase in the number of ordinary people who take an active, independent and forceful interest in politics.

-Nikolai Lenin

You can never have a revolution in order to establish democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

-G.K. Chesterton

Attend a Forum to discuss our assertion that Prisons are about RACISM

What are you doing about it?

What could you do about it?

-The Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, Out of Control: A Fifteen-Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons

In the years between 1965 and 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began “challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities,” writes Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon in “The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV” (FAIR: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, January 4, 1995). He became “the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic.”

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for ‘radical changes in the structure of our society’ to redistribute wealth and power. ‘True compassion,’ Dr. King declared, ‘is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.’

Dr. King’s economic critique complained about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.” Here, at home, Dr. King took up a “militant project” - the Poor People’s Campaign.

This is the Dr. King we do not see or hear, write Cohen and Solomon. This is the Dr. King the Washington Post declared had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.” The Reader’s Digest “warned of an ‘insurrection’” while Life Magazine called his “Beyond Vietnam Speech” “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.”

Martin Luther King’s commitment went beyond voting rights.

***

For correctly linking the U.S.’s militaristic (imperialist) ambitions with the economic edifice of capitalism, King was targeted for elimination and his legacy of radical thought and militancy omitted, replaced by the mythical: equality for all - at last!

White liberals went home to establish careers and families. Black liberals took up the flag of the donkey and urged Blacks to join the Democratic Party. The Left, along with the poor, King and Malcolm X, radical thought and militancy were vilified, and crime became associated with Black Americans and the desire for equality and democracy. It is not an accident, writes Michelle Alexander that the civil rights movement is identified as “a threat to law and order” at the same time the FBI is reporting “fairly dramatic increases in the national crime rate” (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness).

The liberal bourgeoisie, white and Black, awakening now from the Dream, appear to be recognizing a narrative to which they have contributed to sustain the omissions and gaps thereby forestalling the movement of the poor and working class. Now, more than 2 million, mostly Black, Brown and Red people, are behind bars, more, according to Michelle Alexander, than were enslaved. Prisons are everywhere and the pipeline from school to prison is very real for poor and working class children left behind in the testing-til-you-drop-out-and-drop-into-a-prison Public School System. Homeland Security and the CIA have their eyes on everyone, as everyone, including American citizens, could become a potential enemy of the State, a State that has declared itself at war with everyone!

The fundamental restructuring of domestic and foreign policy, the kind of fundamental change Dr. King advocated and pursued demands a commitment to eradicating the omission of truth and the vilification of the poor and working class, a commitment that does not contribute to sustaining any facet of the violence that is the capitalist system. For it is capitalism that is the ultimate enemy of humanity and of this Earth. Our war is to bring about a just civilization for sustaining life not proliferating suffering, destruction, and death.

I know a few long-time, committed activists who have worked for years with and on behalf of poor, working class and political prisoners and who have for years struggled to educate the public with the truth about the link between incarceration and the Empire’s wars against humanity. These individuals still sacrifice their time, indeed, their lives to the vision of democracy and freedom they share with King and Malcolm X. In that sense, the “omitted” legacy of Dr. King and of Malcolm X and others still lives on.

Wherever there is power, there is resistance.

-Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, Vol. 1, Introduction

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness forced many Americans to understand (and for some to admit) that the criminalization of populations was part of a systematic program to neutralize resistance to a capitalist/imperialist coup that ultimately succeeded in drawing executive, judicial, and legislative resources to the promotion of a capitalist state of “law and order.” On the other hand, Out of Control: A Fifteen Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons, with a forward by Sundiata Acoli, is a well-written, historical, first person account of ordinary people, activists and prisoners, in the struggle to effect fundamental change in which Dr. King would advocate and participate were he alive today.

Out of Control, is one story of feet on the ground and the efforts of prisoners themselves resisting their dehumanization. The story that Out of Control tells of one organization’s (the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, CEML) efforts to resist, centers on the prisoners first and foremost and their activist activities. It does not offer the liberalization of struggle: no activist in or out of prison expects to be honored at the next annual civil rights conference or invited to the White House for beer and a chat with the president. Lockdown is permanent and control unit prisons are nearly in every state. Although CEML “ceased to exist” in 2000, together, these prison activists were, in fact, so effective that they forced capitalist institutions, particularly the Bureau of Prisons, to reveal themselves as the true monsters of nightmares - not activists who remember the legacy of Dr. King’s activism.

Out of Control is a documentation of the struggle, in other words, a narrative of resistance against the institutionalization of capitalist/corporate power that in itself challenges the irrational State documentations justifying the necessity for methods of controlling human beings as if repressive uses of technology and brute force are symbols of progress. Out of Control attests to the contrary! It could be read as an invaluable lesson to generations taught to believe that ever since the day a bullet landed Martin Luther King on the floor of the balcony at the Lorraine Hotel we all have been freed from deception and corruption. Skip along with the narrative of the Dream - we have a Black president! Proof of freedom and democracy for all!

We are not free and our work is not yet done.

I can think of a few former students who could have greatly benefited from a thorough discussion of prison activism that links the repressive apparatus of incarceration and torture to the pursuit of capitalist goals. But we have the young, committed activists, including those participating directly and indirectly with the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Nothing ever happens once, Faulkner once wrote...

***

King, on that Easter Sunday, defied his father and fellow pastors. He had to step up. More sacrifice. More protest. He canceled his appearance at Ebeneezer, put the robe away and donned a shirt and jeans to join the people in protest.

I cannot end this review of Out of Control without mentioning again that we are talking about ordinary people. Not people with, as they say, plenty of “time on their hands.” Both Nancy Kurshan and her life-long partner, Steve Whitman, held “professional” jobs. Kurshan recalls the challenges the couple faced doing “political work” and supporting it financially while raising two children - “oh yes - go to work each day.”

“It pissed me off when people would yell ‘get a job’ as we demonstrated, since we voluntarily took up this second job without financial recompense.”

In 1983, when the government established the first control unit prison in the U.S. at Marion in Illinois, Kurshan remembers that a few friends in Chicago “realized that this was a disaster that could thwart efforts to pursue justice and freedom.” These control units, as Kurshan explains, are 8×10 foot cells in which a human being is contained for 23 hours a day, “seven days a week.” They are not permitted contact with other humans - (except, the guards). “There was no way to know when it would end. Days, months, years would go by. There was total idleness, no work, no education.”

“Intense sensory deprivation and indefinite confinement was a way of life.”

Sometimes, Kurshan continues, prisoners “pondered if they would go crazy. Some did.”

The incident that brought these outside activists and the prison activists together in 1985 was not so extraordinary either. After “two guards were killed by two prisoners,” the prison at Marion was placed under lockdown. An isolated incident left 350 prisoners vulnerable to the brutality of institutionalized capitalist power.

From 1983 to 1985, according to Kurshan, all work and educational programs, and religious services (Out of Control) were shut down - replaced by violence:

During the initial stage of this lockdown, 60 guards equipped with riot gear, much of it shipped in from other prisons, systematically beat approximately 100 handcuffed and defenseless prisoners. Guards also subjected some prisoners to forced finger probes of the rectum. Random beatings and rectal probes continued through the two-year lockdown. Despite clear evidence of physical and psychological brutality at the hands of the guards, Congress and the courts refused to intervene to stop the lockdown.

Today, the world has a picture of this image of violence: the pictures of U.S. soldiers proudly posing as the powerful beside the humiliated and tortured prisoners from Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. Today, as Kurshan writes, we can see “a direct line” extending from the U.S. control units to “these so-called ‘enhanced interrogation’ centers throughout the world.” As Kurshan points out,

[s]o-called ‘brainwashing’ strategies that involved physical as well as psychological abuse were being adopted from international arenas and applied inside U.S. prisons. Now, in 2011, similar strategies, honed in Marion and its progeny, are being employed around the world in the ‘war against terrorism.’

But then, some of us have images of “Indian” hunters, slaveholder and whips, infamous sheriffs and their dogs, the bullet in Crazy Horse’s back and the bullets that riddled through the home where Fred Hampton slept. How did the U.S. take control of the Philippines and Cuba?

In 1985, a C-4 bomb landed on the Philadelphia the home of MOVE activists, killing 11 unarmed people - and five of these threatening people were children.

Today, the U.S. is a notoriously cruel nation: it holds “more prisoners in solitary confinement than any other democratic (sic) country in the world.”

Kurshan quotes activist, Fay Dowker, who was a citizen of the United Kingdom: “on the British news when there is a story about U.S. Politics, they always show the White House as a symbol of U.S. power. Fay suggested it would be more appropriate to show a picture of Marion because it is the ‘real dark heart of the U.S. Where the government incarcerates those it feels most threatened by.’”

Was it easy for Kurshan and Whitman to envision a situation in which the lockdown at Marion becomes the normal state of business for the operation of prisons throughout the U.S. “It seemed imperative to do something before the lockdown became set in stone. We were terrified that if Marion became an accepted model that proliferation would inevitably follow.” Kurshan, Whitman, and those enlightened to see “saw” the “first-time-ever repressive apparatus” for what it would produce: an “incipient evil.”

Kurshan and others began their work by contacting existing organizations, including Freedom Now! and Jericho, grassroots presses - anyone working on behalf of prisoners, and by organizing conferences, a handful of people ultimately formed a coalition of prisoners, former prisoners and activists. This was no small feat then or now! “Prisoner” Bill Dunne, for example, had been editing a newsletter called The Marionnette, “despite the repression and the efforts of the authorities to destroy it.”

The Bureau of Prisons’ response to prisoners who had had enough and to the activists who joined them in protest is to step up its use of violence. Recalling a conference in which the head of the BOP, Michael Quinn, appeared in Chicago, in 1988, Kurshan writes that “Quinn and his colleagues slunk out the door, and the workshop was terminated” when she and other activists tried to confront the BOP’s one-sided description of the criminal.

It was apparent to most of us present that the response of the BOP was characteristic of that institution and the people who run it. In the face of the mildest opposition, they responded immediately with no allowance of dissent, no pretense of dialogue. To them, we were the enemy.

Out of Control recalls the conferences and demonstrations, including the valuable historical and educational documentations arguing that “prisons are a tool of social control and that the problems are societal, not individual.”

In 1986, “in a continuing effort to connect the issue of racism to our work at Marion, Kurshan and fellow activist presented a film on the life of Malcolm X. It was May19th, Malcolm’s birthday.

By now we were no longer fooling ourselves into believing we were a temporary, ad hoc group. In fact, we made a conscious decision to continue and were developing a rhythm to our work, alternating between educational events and demonstrations and actions. We called ourselves The Committee to End the Marion Lockdown (CEML).

Out of Control clearly describes and illustrates that following in the footsteps of Dr. King and Malcolm requires a stead-fast commitment to fundamental change. “I believe it’s important,” Kurshan writes, “to explain the labor-intensive nature of serious political work.” And Out of Control does just that!

CEML lasted fifteen years, and its core members, some 8-12 activists, organized educational workshops and presentations, (often featuring former prisoners such as “Jaime Delgado, a Puerto Rican independentista,” Safiya Bukhari-Alston, the late former Black Panther activist, Akil Al-Jundi, of the Attica Brothers). Members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), and others, worked to distribute the “Dear Friends” newsletter and press releases, and yes, organize and engage in demonstrations and protest. Out of Control includes pictures, posters, pamphlets, including “Resistance Won’t Stop,” press releases, samples of handouts, poetry, and newsletters.

As Kurshan recalls, she, Sundiata Acoli, Steve Whitman and others worked on “a piece about the Black struggle behind prison walls.” Kurshan wrote a chapter on “women and imprisonment” for the project they called Out of Control. Kurshan and Acoli sent a proposal to South End Press and the editors “agreed to publish it and assigned” the project to an editor. Everything was fine until the editor left South End. A “new editor wanted more control over the content of our book. Her political views differed significantly from ours, and so the project never came to fruition.”

This version of Out of Control, including the documentations of CEML’s struggle, is available online as an e-version. Kurshan: “[w]e realized that we should produce a hard copy version of the main narrative (a book, if you will) that could be distributed to people without web access, notably prisoners, but others as well. The e-version can be accessed through the Freedom Archives website.”

There is so much history in Out of Control. There are people and events some of us remember. There are activists who sacrificed everything to remain on the right side of history. Some are still with us and others have passed on. Nonetheless, here in Out of Control is their story - and for this - the narrative and supplemental documentation cannot and does not record a failure!

We are appreciative to Kurshan and former members of CEML for making this narrative and a history of resistance available to new generation of activists. Out of Control proclaims that human beings are not expendable and the prisoners’ narratives are not subversive, but represent a crucial reminder of the potential for peoples’ power to effect fundamental change. We thank those friends who said - write a book!

Yes,Dr. King would be proud!

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

Feb 28, 2013 - Issue 506

CSI New York:

Hill Harper Should be Ashamed!

The Crime Scene Investigator (CSI) television series is one of the most popular series on television today. CSI New York with the President’s college buddy, Hill Harper, playing one of the characters is one of the spinoffs that have helped greatly to garner this popularity. Audiences’ sense of justice achieved in the criminal justice world is greatly stroked by the plots which use heavy doses of scientific laboratory work to identify the perpetrators of crimes. There are absolutely NO police departments in the nation that have the depth of lab resources that are evident in these shows so they are definitely just fiction. They are science fiction! The science is real but the criminal justice communities’ real investment in it is fictitious.

Too many white people and others who are ignorant of the lives of poor people who are touched by the real criminal justice system come away from these shows believing that these are reasonable facsimiles of how the criminal justice system works in their own communities. I, and others dedicated to the abolition of our current criminal justice industrial complex, frequently must confront this illusion in the minds of too many television watchers. The last episode of this season’s CSI New York series, which aired on Friday February 22, does huge damage to our efforts. Hill Harper should be ashamed!

This ninth season episode (17th) was titled, “Today is Life.” Amazon summarizes the plot as follows: “Community unrest over the police shooting of an unarmed man forces Mac and the team to move quickly to solve the case.” The plot entailed a jewelry store robbery where the perpetrators escaped on foot running through a maze of alleys. Hot in pursuit, a New York police officer stops to peer around a corner and is shot at. He pulls back, looks again, and sees a similarly dressed young man who raises his arm. The officer shoots the young man dead but they do not find a gun on him or near him. The black community surrounds the police station demanding prosecution of the officer. Those who know and love the deceased young man are absolutely sure that he did not rob any store. But he has jewelry falling out of his pocket. The officer who took the shot is barricaded by a surrounding crowd in the police station with the head of the crime lab, Mac Taylor, played by Gary Sinise.

Mac Taylor, Sinese’s character, is portrayed as an “American” hero. His character is supposed to make us like all cops. “He got his police job as the result of his bravery under fire as a U.S. Marine; and like most of major CSI characters, he harbored quite a few personal demons, most of them stemming from the death of his wife in the Twin Towers on 9/11.” Hill Harper plays “the Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Sheldon Hawkes, a Harlem native who’d graduated from college at 18 and became a licensed surgeon at 24, but who felt out of place in the rarefied world of commercial medicine and opted for police work instead.”

A cop shooting the wrong person while in hot pursuit is more than believable because it happens too frequently in real life. Some departments have wised up enough that they prohibit officers from shooting fleeing felons except when those felons obviously intend to harm others. Some departments enforce those regulations. “Capital punishment” for robbery makes no sense anywhere, neither in the courts nor on the streets. Helicopters were sold to cities as a means to eliminate these dangerous chases.

Half way through the episode, an utterly unbelievable scene is shown. This scene entails an attempt to move the police shooter from the surrounded station to a “safer” locale while the investigation is going on. This officer is pulled out of an ambulance escape-vehicle by the crowd and is dragged a short distance before a phalanx of shield carrying cops is able to reach him and rescue him. Wow! What balderdash! We know that nowhere in the U.S. would a crowd be allowed to barricade all entrances and exits to a police station without drastic action being taken. In real life, no matter how much sympathy those in authority might have to a loud crowd calling for justice, this would not be allowed without folks in the crowd getting hurt or dying. This totally unbelievable dramatic element was dropped in to assuage the real anger that many of us feel about cops killing innocent young men. But it leaves the taste in the mouths of the general public that angry black crowds calling for justice are out of control vigilantes. That is racist projection of the worse kind; historically it is whites that are more prone to be vigilantes.

Eventually in this CSI New York episode, the lab science comes to the conclusion that the young black man was not one of the jewelry store robbers. The jewelry in his pocket was costume jewelry that he was hocking to buy a ring for his girlfriend and there was no gunshot residue found on his corpse’s hand or on his clothing. But the officer had been shot at because Dr. Hawkes (Hill Harper) found a mark of the bullet on a pipe nearby the corner the officer peered around. When the young black man’s girlfriend is told that he is the innocent person she thought he was, an even more unbelievable scene results. First, she refuses the ring he got her because she “wants to move forward rather than hold on to the past.” Then she goes out into the crowd and asks them not to condemn the murdering officer “because he was doing his job.” She blames the death of her boy friend on the robbers that were running away. Holy Mother of God! How much is a young black man’s life worth if it can be dismissed so easily! The episode ends with Mac Taylor down on his knees asking a new character to be his new wife.

The moral logic exhibited in this drama is beyond unacceptable; it is obscene. The devil made me do it. Taking any life, regardless of innocence, ought to prompt bone and soul deep considerations of how this can be prevented and avoided in the future. Hill Harper ought to be ashamed at allowing his talents to be used in a drama that so lightly values the life of a young black man! Hill Harper, whose real name is Frank Harper, tries in real life to be a mentor for young black men. He wrote the book Letters to a Young Brother: Manifest Your Destiny. He was a member of Boston’s Black Folks Theater Company. He is smart having graduated magnum cum laude from Brown University, cum laude from Harvard Law School where he was a friend of President Obama and with a Masters of Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Harper knows better.

This level of callousness was jarring to me. We do have better alternatives to catching law breakers than playing-out “the shoot out at the OK Corral” on our streets. The human carnage that we wade through in urban communities has got to stop. That will require fundamental change on the part of all of us and a total revolution in our criminal justice system so that there really is some justice to be found there and some equitable valuing of all human life. Please, please, please do not be lulled to sleep or let others be lulled to sleep by these obscene “morality plays” that so popularly justify the present day injustice.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Wilson Riles, is a former Oakland, CA City CouncilMember. Click here to contact Mr.Riles.

Feb 28, 2013 - Issue 506

Hedonistic ‘Americans’
And the Role of the Media
Will It Ever Change?

“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”

-Malcolm X [el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz]

“If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.”

-Howard Zinn

Hedonism is defined, in relevant part, as the ‘pursuit of or devotion to pleasure.’

The U.S. corporate-stream media plays an integral and insidious role, not only in misinforming everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people - but also in distracting and diverting - the attention of the masses of people from having the much needed crucial information pertaining to the reality of corporate hegemony and perpetual wars, to the pursuit of superficial hedonistic pleasures. This is being perpetrated at a time when the economic and political well-being and very existence of everyday people (in this nation and globally) is increasingly at stake. It’s all about keeping the people ignorant, distracted, divided, uninformed and/or misinformed. Indeed, it’s all about controlling and dominating the “ideas” and thought processes of everyday people.

The role of the corporate-stream media is to ensure that everyday people do not become critical thinkers. Simply tell the people, for example, that Barack Obama’s murderous drone missiles and his draconian ‘kill list’ (at home and abroad) are, after all, for their own good. Simply tell the people that war is actually peace, and is also for their own good. Simply tell the people that they must sacrifice human rights and civil liberties in the name of a ‘freedom’ (which so-called freedom is of course itself made null and void by the sacrificing of human rights and civil liberties). Simply tell the people anything and keep repeating it - in order to keep them from thinking for themselves as critical thinkers!

Even as joblessness, home foreclosures, homelessness, political corruption, systemic police brutality, judicial injustice, economic austerity (for the masses), the privatization of education, corporate greed and hegemony, and the population of poor and everyday people inside U.S. prison gulags steadily rise at home - bloody U.S. corporate-driven wars abroad continue unabated. Yet, the masses of people are, in essence, told by the corporate-owned U.S. government and corporate-stream media, ‘don’t worry, be happy.’ In other words, shut up, go away, and be content in your misery by watching the mindlessness of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, American Idol, or Dancing With the Stars, etc.! Do what you are told to do! Believe what you are told to believe! And most of all: be obedient, mindless clones and slaves to corporate/government propaganda and domination! Of course, none of this would be accepted or tolerated by critically thinking persons. Thus, the need to keep people as uncritical thinkers and mental slaves.

By keeping the majority of people in a perpetual state of economic insecurity while programming them to pursue hedonism at the expense of their collective needs and humanity, the corporate-owned Democrats and Republicans seek to keep everyday people manipulated and controlled. It is not so much that most of the people in the United States are hedonistic as it is that they are unceasingly distracted and programmed by the propaganda machine of the U.S. corporate/political elite to act against their own collective needs and best political, economic, and social interests.

This deplorable and untenable state of affairs does not have to be allowed to continue. These horrible chains can be broken by:

1) recognizing, first and foremost, that the Democratic and Republican parties are simply superficial variations of precisely the same rotten corporate-owned coin

2) recognizing that the undemocratic de facto merger between corporations and the U.S. body politic is today, all but complete - which means that the United States is a people’s democracy in name and illusion only

3) identifying that the root of perpetual U.S. wars abroad, and economic austerity and social injustices at home, is an irretrievably corrupt and undemocratic political system that is owned by an avaricious corporate elite

Once these three factors are recognized and understood, it becomes much easier to determine who are the enemies and bloodsuckers of everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people, and with this knowledge, to collectively act accordingly.

The real hedonists are the relatively tiny and insatiably greedy U.S. and global corporate elite (and their minions) who attempt to economically and socially suck the life-blood and humanity from the vast majority of people in this nation and throughout Mother Earth. They must be recognized and dealt with as the bloodsuckers they are.

It is time for genuine and serious systemic change brought about collectively by we, the everyday people! This begins with each and every one of us, and it will be a tough, challenging, long and protracted struggle - but it can and must succeed!

Remember:Each one, reach one. Each one, teach one. Onward then, mysisters and brothers. Onward!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Larry Pinkney, is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil / political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities in opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil / Lehrer News Hour. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.) Click here to view Larry’s interview of October 26, 2012. Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.

Feb 28, 2013 -Issue 506

Pick-A-Pope

Animated Political Cartoon

By Mark Fiore, San Francisco CA

Click here to view the animation

PulitzerPrize-winner, Mark Fiore, who the Wall Street Journal has called “theundisputed guru of the form,” creates animated political cartoons inSan Francisco, where his work has been featured on the San FranciscoChronicle’s web site, SFGate.com, for over ten years. His work alsoappears on Newsweek.com, Slate.com, CBSNews.com, MotherJones.com andNPR’s web site. Fiore’s political animation has appeared on CNN,Frontline, Bill Moyers Journal, Salon.com and cable and broadcastoutlets across the globe.

Click here to contact Mark

Feb 28, 2013 - Issue 506

Chris Brown and Rihanna...
Their Ultra-Dysfunctional “Relationship”
Is Precisely What’s Wrong
With Black America

Yes, I know there’s dysfunctionalism across White America, however that’s irrelevant and meaningless to the plight of Black folks; if White folks, collectively, have got a cold or some perhaps even the flu, we Black folks must have Cancer, Tuberculosis, Polio, Leprosy.

I know, I know, I know, the poster boy n’ girl are “Black Royalty” in the sometimes trifling’ world of Black popular culture. Think James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor, circa 1955, dipped in chocolate. Billy Dee n’ Diana Ross - updated. And to an even greater extent, Brown and Rihanna are “crossover” stars who “represent” and are symbolic of “Black love” and adored by kids all over the planet, but their tale is littered with acts of immaturity, violence and stupidity.

Ken n’ Barbie bronzed, and as hollow inside as the Mattel dolls.

Nonetheless, I’m sorry I’ve got to be a cloud on a sunny day mon, but these two full-grown teenagers, their adult-child melodrama is sad to say a tragic example of the ills n’ woes which plague my people - we’re so ignorant and uninformed that we can’t decipher folks are laughing at us, not with us.

Did you dig that... laughing at us, not with us.

This pair’s affair, and pop-culture’s elevation of them, the widespread acceptance and adulation of these two Buffoons... their notoriety and popularity, it not only reflects upon our “Black world” - but all the loooooove they receive condones the upside-down/inside-out ass-backward world they, you, we dwell in.

Yes, the whole soap opera glorifies our contemporary Back culture’s dysfunctionalism. Their affair embodies the thuggarazation, the ghettoization and ultimately the tragic “niggerrazation” of our once proud Afro-American culture.

Can I get the Last Poets to help me...

Niggers come in from work and change into pimping clothes

And hit the streets to make some quick change

Niggers change their hair from black to red to blond

And hope like hell their looks will change

Nigger kill other niggers

Just because one didn’t receive the correct change

Hey-sit back , wee-lax before you start demanding they pull my Black man card, demand back my secret “Black man” decoder ring and my White Canvas Chuck Taylors and my sacred “Cake cutter” afro- comb...

Of course I’m not saying they’re the only representatives of Black love; we’ve got The First Family - the Obamas. Or even Tinsel Town’s everything-they-touch-turns-to-titanium love bunnies Beyonce and Jay-Z as examples of “wholesomeness” - an essential, it seems, “fast-laning-it” Black folks have a disdain for.

But you know, like I know... the “Black family” seldom, 1 in 4, 1 in 5 “families” looks like the Obamas.

And our intellectual base defends and rationalizes that horrific fact, while we all know it’s a pre-determining indicator of impending hard-times/the chaos we see around us - broken, busted, maleless families. And it’s so pervasive that we, yes we, act like it’s the way it ought be. Women don’t yearn for a good man, a husband, a father for their children... Black men don’t desire families, they just want stables of whores... yeah, “trifling” is the word I’m looking for.

I wouldn’t want my son to grow up to be like young lost Mr Brown, an abuser of women. This is a crime which ought to be, in a more-perfect world, about as low as a coward-with-testicles can go. And I sure-as-hell wouldn’t want my daughter bringing this mancub home. And sad to say, the last porcelain princess I’d want my little girl to emulate and imitate is a “lady” like Rihanna.

Sorry.

“Bimboism” is Rihanna, she personifies the term “object.” coupled with her back-alley low standards, this insane ability of her’s to “stand by” her punk. Please! To accept the abuse of a popular pretty-boy weasel as she does - is a disservice to young black ladies who horrifically take their clueless-cue from her, and only encourages the Black neanderthals.

Forgive me, my old man didn’t say a damn thing about sparing the feelings of so-called grown folks. And if you think I owe these two clowns an apology - you’re crazy. It’s sad we Black folks can’t stand the “Bill Cosby” truth. We got to have “Big Momma” sit us down n’ rub our tummies... blame and attribute all our individual ills and woes to the White devil.

The White man didn’t backhand Rihanna - that piss-poor example of a man Chris Brown did, and his boys laughed along with him afterward.

Boys is the key word there.

Look, I spend my day working in a inner city/urban/Black, right off MLK Blvd, public middle school, been there for almost a decade, and I can say to you with all certainty that both these cartoon characters are admired and praised by the rank n’ file student body... his abuse of her is rationalized, minimized and justified... by girls even - “you know how girls can be talkin’ Mr Cortez, you know she said some stuff to make him hit her... ”

Let’s not treat this in some superficial manner, “our” as in Black folks, our institutions and organizations which still shine a spotlight on them. The acceptance, embracement, anointment and immolation of this couple... are a large significant slice of what’s wrong with us. A people already running far behind in the race... and we lower our standards.

“Women are born, ladies are made... Men are born, gentlemen are made.” Hand-crafted by the absolute love of parents, that’s two people – who have as a top-priority preparing their children to live a better life than they did. Horrifically, our Black American culture has been stripped down to what we see today, babies, mommas and my Niggah.

This is our own branding of ourselves, not White society’s.

Honestly, I seldom if ever inquire of a Black child, and for that matter Latino... “where’s your dad…?” The answer tends to be sad, predictable and half of the time, tragic.

We have three or four lost generations of babies having babies, then raising babies who’re having babies... without a good man in sight. No?

While let’s admit we’ve redefined what a “man” is, what a “lady” is, what a “husband” is. Predictably we’ve redefined the “value” of a formal education, of “mastering” a vocational craft…

This is what “my” generation did. Yes we helped get a Black man in the prestigious Oval Office, but we can’t get our own kids out of the dean’s office, the detective’s office, the undertaker’s office… When I start lying, sit me down.

I’m telling you, history will depict the ultra-materialistic Black me/my/X n’ Y generations as weak, soft, gold diggers who turned our focus on the mundane - on furs, Platinum and Porches, and walked around with weak, lame-ass excuses to justify our simplistic pawn-like behavior, a behavior of which our great grand parents would be ashamed.

Niggers act so coooool and slick

Causing white people to say:

What makes you niggers act like that?

Niggers act like you ain’t never seen nobody act before

But when it comes to acting out revolution

Niggers say: ‘I can’t dig them actions!’

Niggers are scared of revolution

Chris is so-cool, and Rihanna’s so-very hot - exactly, precisely what Black American culture desperately needs, another playboy and his bunnie. Not a fireman and nurse, not housewife and dentist, but two airheads who have the ability to sing n’ dance and the people throw them money, so they’re “rich.”

What more can one ask for, right?

Now, granted, I clearly understand there need to be examples of Black beauty and success, but good god, are you serious, this is what passes as an ebony fairy tale, for our youngsters to aspire to?

This is tabloid sheet Jet Magazine Buffoonery.

I ask this question with all sincerity... is there any behavior that shames us?

If not the mass-production of daddyless babies, then what about the shooting gallery Chi-Town has regressed to? Or for that matter, any town or city we predominant? Is there no shameful behavior that we, as the Black court of public opinion, are willing to cop to?

Let me go back to the Last poets:

Niggers do a lot of shootin’

Niggers do a lot of shootin’

Niggers shoot off at the mouth

Niggers shoot pool, niggers shoot craps

Niggers cut around the corner and shoot down the street

Niggers shoot sharp glances at white women

Niggers shoot dope into their arm

Niggers shoot guns and rifles on New Year’s Eve

A new year that is coming in

The white police will do more shooting at them

I bet anyone within eyeshot of this that Black girls under the age of 14 watch more NBA/Atlanta Housewives type TV then they do “Disney”. They don’t want to be Tiana, or China or any of the more wholesome Mayberry RFD/Cosby Show type Black girls - they want to be Tamar Braxton or one of the Atlanta Housewives role models.

They want to be 21st century renditions of the 20th century stereotypical “Sapphire,” but now, the last few generations don’t read, and have no clue “who n’ what” that derogatory image is. Just as they’ve no clue who was Amos n’ Andy nor Stepin’ Fetchit - which in itself explains why they put on minstrel shows in NFL endzones every week during the Fall.

That’s right my friend, this is another episode of “Negroes Lost in Space!” Non-thinking Negroes who call not only each other “Niggahs” endlessly and relentlessly, but then call Asians and Jews Niggers, too.

Niggers are players, niggers are players, are players

Niggers play football, baseball and basketball

While the white man cuttin’ off their balls

I can’t count the times I’ve witnessed our Black kids calling White teachers and administrators “niggers.” Latino Kids go around calling each other Niggers and calling Black kids Niggers, and Black kids defend it. Please note, most are reading, writing and doing arithmetic 3, maybe 4 grade levels behind... go figure.

And they mirror, as in act like and talk like the adults in their households, on the block, in church. Not the White folks across town.

Is it really a Gumby-like stretch if I say our children have been betrayed by their recent lackadaisical ancestors, for without question, we’ve not prepared our offspring to compete within Mainstream US society. It seems we’re more suited for and deliberately prepared for life on the Black reservation.

Rihanna and Brown reflect and embody alot of what’s wrong with us; it’s too bad we can’t see it.

BlackCommentator.comColumnist, Desi Cortez, washatched in the heart of Dixie, circa 1961, at the dawning of the age ofAquarius, the by-product of four dynamic individuals, Raised inSouth-Central LA,the 213, at age 14 transplanted to the base of the Rockies, Denver. Still a Mile-Hi. Sat at the feet of scholars formany, manymoons, emerging with a desire and direction… if not a sheep-skin."Meanderedthru life; gone a-lot places, done a-lot of things, raised a man-cubinto agood, strong man, produced a beautiful baby-girl with mylover/woman/soul-mate…aired my mind on the airwaves and wrote some stuff along the way." Click here to contact Mr. Cortez.

Feb 28, 2013 - Issue 506

Sequester Me, Please

Okay, the sky is about to fall, and now, people are concerned. When the Republicans were playing hardball and the Democrats were talking about raising taxes - on the rich - you were silent…my working-class brothers and sisters. You were watching Scandal and going out to Chuck E. Cheese in your shiny, new BMW. Federal budget cuts totaling $85 billion could result in nearly 800,000 people losing their jobs and a reduction in economic growth of about half a point…and now, you’re worried.

When left-wing crazies like me were out fighting off the assault of corporate take-overs and monopolies, you sat on the sidelines and flipped your cable remote to catch the latest sports highlights. Now, you’re the highlight. Your job is at stake. You are a government worker - a government contractor. You could care less about a “living wage” or Obamacare. Your BlueCross/BlueShield was better than any of that. Now, you’re in jeopardy.

Do you think I care? You see, I’ve been among the ranks of the underrepresented, muted and unemployed who were put out of the game years ago. Even unemployed or fighting within a recessed economy - that we didn’t cause - we were told to go out and spend, as the rich enjoyed Bush-era tax cut after tax cut. Remember the “economic recovery?” The 1.2 million households whose incomes put them in the top 1 percent of the U.S. saw their earnings increase 5.5 percent in 2011, according to estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Earnings fell 1.7 percent for the 96 million households in the bottom 80 percent - those that made less than $101,583. That’s a lot of people I know. And now, “the sequester” has got you anxious. When you should’ve been voting and taking a stand on “voter suppression” laws, you sat in your easy chair and said, “That’s not my problem.” In the meantime, people who are now playing chicken with your means of earning a living are dangling your life - and your family’s existence - in the wind. But you were smart not to get involved, huh?

The recovery that officially began in mid-2009 hasn’t arrived in most Americans’ paychecks. In 2010, the top 1 percent of U.S. families captured as much as 93 percent of the nation’s income growth, according to a paper by Emmanuel Saez, a University of California, Berkeley economist who studied Internal Revenue Service data. So if the top 1% gained that much in wealth, how much do you think you gained?

While corporate CEOs’ salaries tower above yours - by over 400 times - we let the media lead us into believing that there’s a recession. There’s no recession; it’s the CEOs. They’re stealing the wealth…and we let ‘em! According to Census data, in 2011, the earnings gap between rich and poor Americans was the widest in more than four decades, surpassing income inequality previously reported in Uganda and Kazakhstan. The notion that each generation does better than the last - one aspect of the American Dream -- has been challenged by evidence that average family incomes fell in the last decade for the first time since World War II.

Just know that you’ve been partially responsible for voting for (or not voting for) the very people who are causing this anxiety. I’m not anxious though. You see, I’ve been broke - before, during and after the sequester. There’s no 401(k) for me to have get ripped off. Each time ExxonMobil, Shell and BP raise gas prices, we know not whether they pay more or less per barrel…and no one’s going to check.

We’re getting ripped off each year: Gas prices, rents and municipal costs rise by 3%, while paychecks rise only a tenth. That’s not a fair trade-off, but who’s keeping track? I bet you that the Republicans are…they say they want “smaller government” don’t they? Well, the job losses would result from declines in government spending in a wide range of government programs. Does that sound like “pain all around” to you? Are the rich going to suffer any in that scenario? The across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester are slated to take effect Friday.

Getin the game, will you? Every dance in political brinksmanship affects us all. Evenyou! In the meantime, I’m not concerned…sequester me, please.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Perry Redd, is the former ExecutiveDirector ofthe workers rights advocacy, Sincere Seven, and author of the on-linecommentary, “The Other Side of the Tracks.” He is the host of theinternet-basedtalk radio show, Socially Speaking in Washington, DC. Click here to contact Mr. Redd.

Feb 28, 2013 - Issue 506

Ode to Jerry Buss:
NBA (and Los Angeles) Gamechanger

We take a break from the serious stuff to give propers to a man who changed our lives and changed our culture in the city of Los Angeles. The passing of Los Angeles Lakers owner, Dr. Jerry Buss, requires that we take pause and reflect on a man whose charisma changed the face of a city and its cultural reality. Not just any city. The most laid back, nonchalant, indifferent city in the nation. What city do many “East Coasters” call the most “fake” and “disingenuous”? You got it, Los Angeles. The land of illusion. Or is it, “delusion?”

As a firsthand observer of this nonchalant-ness for nearly fifty years and encountering my fair share of delusional people, I can tell you nothing fazes the people of L.A. Not poverty. Not racism. Not anti-intellectualism - in fact, the stupider, the better. Not violence. We, the land of “gangsta rap.” Not homelessness. We’re the nation’s homeless capital. Not failing schools. We protect failing teachers and promote failing students. Not police abuse…well, maybe police abuse…a little bit. We kinda’ act up on that one every 27 years or so. They’re trying to keep it from coming five years early after the Dorner incident - yet I digress - Los Angeles doesn’t get excited about very much, very often. Los Angeles is so surreal, it earned its own nickname.

“La-La Land.”

Nothing excites L.A. Everybody’s “Hollywood” and thus, are so “unimpressed.”

Los Angeles is as close as you can get to John Lennon’s Strawberry Fields (where nothing is real). People forget Los Angeles (the Valley) invented, “What-ever!!!”

We dismiss everything…even when it’s important.

Remember, we dismissed professional football over 25 years ago and still don’t know when we’ll get it back. But we’re building a stadium in hopes that the NFL will come back. There is one exception to this cultural passivity, and that’s when it comes to the Los Angeles Lakers. Particularly, the post-1979 Lakers and it’s all because of one man, Jerry Buss.

Why did Los Angeles get excited about the Lakers, and not the Dodgers, the Rams, the Raiders or the Clippers? It’s not like we didn’t have professional sports teams before. We did, for nearly a half century. They just didn’t win very often. The Dodgers won every ten years or so after the Drysdale/Koufax years. The Rams hadn’t won a championship since the 1950s. The Raiders created some fever during their short stay in town in the mid-1980s, and the Clippers? Well, let’s just say the Clippers are acting a little out of character right now. They do look good, but talk to me after the playoffs. After Jerry Buss bought the Lakers, Los Angeles became perennial winners.

Jerry Buss brought a swagger to the Lakers, and a Lakers game became more than a basketball game. It was an event. Every game. Every season.

Winning only made the game more exuberant and the fans more fanatical. Laid back was gone forever (though they still leave the games early). There has never been a fever in Los Angeles like Laker fever since Jerry Buss bought the team. He introduced the Laker girls, the NBA’s version of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. People thought it was corny when he first did it. Now you can’t imagine a Lakers game without the Laker girls, or the exaggerated “lights out” introductions, or the live music from USC band, or the hip hop samples during parts of the game. Showtime wasn’t only on the court, Jerry Buss made sure there was always a show off the court while the game was on pause. There was “Dancing Barry.” There was “Dog Man” that barked at opposing team’s freethrow shooters. There is the ever popular “Kiss Me” fancam, all activities that held (holds) your attention as much (or more) than the game.

Randy Newman’s song, “I Love L.A.” is a piece of cultural curiosity that came out of Showtime when the Lakers pulled out a close game in the Showtime era. Showtime is associated with the Magic Johnson era when the Lakers won five championships in eight seasons. They went to the finals eight times in eleven seasons. The Lakers won so often, the city forgot what it was like not to be in the finals. We got spoiled winning and being entertained.

After Magic retired (the second time), the Lakers went into a five season lull. Then Jerry Buss did what he had to do. He hired the winningest coach in basketball, Phil Jackson, whose previous employer didn’t think he was worth $10 million dollars a season, even after winning six championships in seven seasons with the Chicago Bulls. They would’ve won seven out of seven had Michael Jordan not retired for a year to play baseball. The point is that Phil knew how to win, and so did Jerry Buss. Money was no object.

Phil bought us five more championships in seven seasons. People hated the Lakers so much, other stadiums chanted, “Beat L.A., Beat L.A.,” to whatever team from the eastern conference that would be playing L.A. in the finals. That was how it was. People are going crazy, including Kobe, because it doesn’t appear the Lakers are playoff bound. It’s not because the Busses didn’t open up their checkbooks. They have the best talent. Now they have to learn how to win again because Lakerland now expects nothing less, as Kurt Rambis and Mike Brown found out.

They do need a coach…but the point is, the Lakers will win again because it is now part of their culture. They expect it. The city expects it. And it’s all because of the winningest NBA owner of all-time brought us ten championships over the last 24 years, and that changed the way the city saw the Lakers. Now every team in the NBA has cheerleaders, light flashs, music, halftime shows to create an enriched “fan experience.” That’s a fancy name for showtime off the court.

JerryBuss, you will be missed. Thank you for the ride.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist,Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad,is a national columnist, managing director of the UrbanIssues Forumand authorof SavingThe Race: Empowerment Through Wisdom. His Website is AnthonySamad.com. Twitter @dranthonysamad. Click here to contact Dr. Samad.

Feb 28, 2013 - Issue 506

Self-Determination is the Key

In order for the African Community in America to continue our fight for self-determination and dignity, it is important that we remind ourselves of the nature of the American dynamic. Essentially, and at the foundation of the American-European dynamic, is the fact that it is made up of many nations who migrated to this country and continued to fight for and develop their national interests, inside this country. At the same time they maintained their economic, political, cultural, linguistic, and social relationships with their country of origin.

We can witness this phenomenon on a daily basis by just taking a quick glance at the national/ethnic group practices and beliefs of the Jews, Poles, Irish, Italians, Germans, Swedes, Greeks, French, Slovakians, Czechs, etc., and how they have consolidated their political and economic power in America. They have all done this through their nationalistic unity on the fundamental life-giving and life-sustaining issues that affect their interests.

In other words, they have maintained a strong sense of where they came from, who they are, and where they are going. This formula has been at the heart of their historical efforts to acquire power in America. We can observe this same trend among the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Jordanians, and Palestinians who are the new national/ethnic groups of America. In fact, the Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and other Spanish-speaking national/ethnic groups are following this same pattern. They are fighting for nationalism in America, without calling it that.

When African people in America talk about nationalism, we are often charged with being racists or anti-white. However, the historical record demonstrates clearly that nationalism has been the primary method by which every national/ethnic group has achieved and maintains power.

Harold Cruse describes this dilemma of the African Community in America, in his most profound analysis of our movement, in his book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership. Cruse framed the American dynamic in this manner when he said, “On the face of it, this dilemma rests on the fact that America, which idealizes the rights of the individual above everything else, in reality, a nation dominated by the social powers of groups, classes, in-groups and cliques - both ethnic and religious.”

He goes further to explain, “The individual in America has few rights that are not backed up by the political, economic and social power of one group or another.” Therefore, Cruse states, “…the individual [Black person] has, proportionately, very few rights indeed because his ethnic group (whether or not he actually identifies with it) has very little political, economic or social power (beyond moral grounds) to wield.”

In our efforts to acquire Black Power, we should remind ourselves that the Black Nationalist Tradition has always been opposed to integration, assimilation, and accommodation as a solution to the problems of people of African ancestry in America. In this regard, the Black Nationalist Tradition has rejected the strategies and tactics of appealing to the morality of white people and their white supremacy system.

Black Nationalists have been historically clear that people in power do not teach powerless people how to get power. And they certainly do not give power away, even though, when challenged, they may make some concessions.

It is so clear that every national/ethnic group understands their political, economic, and cultural interest. It is so natural for them to function in a nationalistic manner in their struggle to acquire and maintain power. The African Community in America has not fully conceptualized and reached a consensus on our nationalistic agenda. Many of us function as if we are scared of really acting out what we really know, for fear of being called racist. We need to stop denying our own reality.

Being called racist because we believe in, and will fight for, the interests of our race with undying loyalty should become the most honorable badge of courage in our community. We should get off of this defensive “trip” when we fight for the interests of our race and some other national/ethnic group calls us racist. We should know by now, this is a tactic to sway us away from the path of acquiring power.

Let’s continue our movement “to assert our own identity, define our own purpose, to make and enforce decisions and to move into our own national interest.” It is called nationalism!

[Please support the upcoming CCICS Open House Wednesday, April 10th 4:00 p.m. – 7:00p.m. and Thursday, April 11th 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.]

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Conrad W. Worrill, PhD, is theNational Chairman Emeritus of the National Black United Front (NBUF). Click here to contact Dr. Worrill.

Feb 28, 2013 - Issue 506

Political Cartoon

South Africa Oscar Stories

By Zapiro, South Africa

Jonathan Shapiro is a South African cartoonist, famous as Zapiro, whose work appears in numerous South African publications and has been exhibited internationally on many occasions.

Licensing & Syndication Rights

Zapiro is always keen that his cartoons are published as widely as possible. There are many circumstances where the use of Zapiro cartoons can help you get your message across or increase the sales of your publication. For example:

- syndication for regular use in a newspaper or magazine

- on websites and other promotional materials

- in fan websites dedicated to Zapiro or cartooning in general

- in reports and books to emphasise or illustrate issues

- in printed and online collections of cartoons either by Zapiro or by cartoonists in general.

Whatever your use please only use Zapiro's cartoons for your own website, publication or presentation once you've got his prior consent — they are both his livelihood and his copyright.

Normally permission will be granted quite readily provided that your use doesn't conflict with or misrepresent the message in the cartoon. Sometimes there will be a fee for using the cartoon(s) — particularly for commercial or quasi-commercial purposes.

For further information about licensing Zapiro's cartoons please click here to make a Licensing Enquiry.

Feb 28, 2013 - Issue 506

Coextensive Love

Art

By Larry Richardson, Valencia CA

Larry Richardson ~ Artist
www.aminaarts.com

Click here to contact Larry Richardson to comment or arrange a purchase

Coextensive Love

$2,500 USD

24" x 36" Mixed media with gold leaf on linen

Represented by BlackCommentator.com

Artist Statement

Since I returned to painting in 1995 I have wanted to express the beauty in our African heritage. To show the diversity that the Diaspora gave us in various other cultures in the world. I have tried to present our culture as seen not only in the context of the pain and suffering inflicted on us in the days of slavery but to bring forward those cultural contributions, and legacies we left in Spain, France, Italy and other places of the world. Truly, that is what the Diaspora was about... the dispersion of culture.

When looking at the many histories on art and researching many of the famous old masters, our image is present even in medieval times. Anti-Black racism in the modern sense was unknown in the Middle Ages; Blacks were simply part of the human race.

In the latter Middle Ages there were even black saints and one of the Magi was accurately shown as black. Most literature on Black American artists is approached as though it was a form of expression separate from the so-called majority culture. This critical isolation in terms of art comes from the tradition of classifying people and their culture by race. I feel the crucial issue is the quality of work and it’s relevance to the society in which it was created.

As an artist it is not my color that gives me the inspiration or the capacity to produce a desired result, but the ability to be sensitive to the various conditions of life that face all mankind.

My first showing of some of these paintings was called “Lost Images Found Paintings from the Soul” reinforcing the importance of our culture in various parts of the world.

Three shows followed after that. One expanded on cultural isolation and the other specifically was to present a new approach to Afro-American figurative art merging the contemporary and the classical forms.

The objective of my vision is to heighten the awareness of those who view figurative images in my art and to stimulate one’s thought and imagination. The end result is a series of paintings and drawings that form cultural links between our past and our future.