Once again, we see that issues surrounding Black-Jewish relationships get filtered thru Zionist eyes and minds. UCLA English prof, ERIC J. SUNDQUIST, writes an ahistorical hodgepodge of an essay (excerpted below from his new Harvard University Press book: "Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America"). There are many things that are fundamentally wrong or deliberately distorted within this essay that I would like to address in full. But that's for another time and place rooted in the physical world of struggle and debate, rather than this cyberworld of virtual struggle and debate "Matrixlike." I look forward to those others who will join in on this discussion to hammer home points that I have missed or glossed over in this brief note.
But let me just say that (not necessary in order of importance):
(1) SUNDQUIST is ahistorical when it comes to Black-Jewish relations.
First and foremost, the first Jews were Africans of Khemit (Eygyptian/Sudanese/Ethipoian/Somalian descent in today's modern Northwest African people-sense). Judaism was embraced by Europeans, Asians and Africans since its creation as an organized religion. It has been nurtured over 2 thousand years NOT just in Europe, but in Northwest Africa, Asia, the Middle East and within the Western Hemisphere. Hence, at its roots, Judaism is a multicultural/multinational form of organized religion. However, its European variation became dominant BECAUSE Europe on a whole become dominant as capitalism evolved there as the most powerful military, economic and social force in the world post 1492.
Secondly, Eurpoean Jewry had a significant role to play within the very foundations of capitalist development: slavery and the slave trade. Hence, the root of the tension between Blacks and Jews. I refer SUNDQUIST and others to four books that will help shed lite on this indisputable reality:
(a) Lopez of Newport- Stanley F. Chyet, Wayne State University Press. 1970 (b) Jews, Slaves and the Slave Trade- Eli Faber, NYU Press. 1998 (c) Jews and the American Slave Trade- Saul S. Friedman, Transaction Publishers. 1998 (d) Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World- Jonathan Schorsch. 2005
Of course, there are many other books that one can refer to. And, of course, there are Black writers on this subject that have spanned the centuries. But to minimize the attempt to dismiss out of hand the harsh realities of European Judaism's white supremacist and capitalist notions and policies, I suggest we look at what these four white scholars of Jewish descent have to say about the history of Black-Jewish relationships and Jewish involvement in the enslavement of African peoples. The last book, "Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World" is-to date- the most definitive work in English of Jews views and behavior towards African people thruout the history of modern Slavery and the Slave Trade that gave rise to Capitalism. It is a must-read for those of us who seek the evidence that European Jewry -for the most part- assimilated into the evolution of "white supremacy" even tho they were being persecuted as a group by these very same European nations. The African for the Jew -as with all others in Europe regardless of class- became that lowly negative nonhuman base you could never become because of your "whiteness." Because of your "whiteness" (implicity before the 20th Century and explicitly during the 20th Century to the present) you were -at least better off than any Black person on the planet... even if they were wealthier and more educated than you were!)
(2) SUNDQUIST has this tendency, like so many of his liberal colleagues, to equate the plight, oppression and superexploitation of African peoples with that of the plight and persecution of European Jews. That somehow our oppressions are both interchangable and equal in time spent "on the cross." One thing- among many -that distinguishes us Blackfolk from European Jews is the fact that our mothers' wombs -by law- automatically produced capital (even if the child was the master's, it was first and foremost capital destined to appreciate in value and destined to produce capital). That alone distinguishes our horrendous exploitation and oppression from any other people on Earth. But, laws upon laws were heaped upon us to try to reinforce the myth of our subhumanness... and we could not hide from these realities by changing our name or practicing our religion on the down low.
(3) SUNDQUIST talks about "...the decay of bipartisan liberalism into black radicalism...." Black Radicalism is not a degenrate form of struggle! It is the highest moral and political form that our struggle for freedom can take. We know that from the Stono Rebellion, Gabriel Prosser, Dessalines & Toussaint L'Ouveture, Denmark Vesey, David Walker, Mariah Stewart, Harriet Tubman, Henry Highland Garnet, Antonio Maceo, Martin Delany, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Edward Wilmot Blyden and thousands of other Africans of the 15th to 19th centuries who were proud of their radicalism... their relentless fight for freedom and power thruout the Americas. Because I am a 21st Century Black Radical, I am not a "decayed" being. I am a continuator of a powerful nation-changing tradition of high moral and political certainty.
There was always this tension between Jewish liberalism and Black radicalism or Black self-determinationism... especially in the US beginning in the 20th Century when Jewish petty-borugeois intellectuals began to try to influence and direct Blacks' struggle for justice and democracy in the US. In other words, the Jewish liberal joined a multigenerational Black Freedom Movement that had defined its Black leadership in battle. But there was little respect for this leadership... or for the multicentury history of mass actions by ordinary Blackfolk. No. the 20th century Jewish liberal came to these Black struggles as LEADERS and bearers of the KNOWLEDGE with how to becaome part of the American dream (that wasn't the nightmare).
(4) SUNDQUIST uses our great elder novelist John A. Williams ("Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light") as sort of a counterpoint to the amorphous antisemitic/antizionist Black Radical Ranter (a mixed bag of mixed eras, mixed ideologies and out-of-context quotes whose veracity rely on our historical ignorance).
Let me tell you a little thing about what happened to John A. Williams when he tried to get his last novel- "Clifford Blues"(Coffee House Press) published. His own contracted publisher refused to publish it along with some 50 other publishers. Why? Becuase he dared to write a novel about the plight of a Black man caught in the Nazi web of concentration camps during WWII. He dared to write about the thousands of Black people who were also caught up in this web of horror, degradation, humiliation and mass murder. He dared to write about what happens to peoples' morals and humanity when they are pushed into this cauldron of degradation. Not just the degraded, but also the degrader. He dared to write about homosexuality and its twisted fate within the Nazi Concentration Camp Experience. He dared to expose the myth that just Jews suffered in those Nazi Camps of Death and Humiliation.
Brother John A. Williams finally got his novel publish by a small midWedstern "arthouse" called Coffee Table Press. And because of the strife he experienced and the blocking and denial by the major publishers he added a bibliography that backs up his basic premise: Nazi concentration camps also interred people of African descent.
(5) SUNDQUIST does not and will not acknowledge the fact that Israel is a surragate cop for US/western Imperialism. He does not and will not talk about the development of Israeli apartheid that has led to Nazi-like systematic killings of Palestinian leaders and anyone else around them; the bulldozing of homes and neighborhoods; the walling in of Palestinians; the labelling of every resisting Palestinian as terrorist and ally of Bin Laden; the conscious economic destabilization of the Palestinian economy; the deliberate creation of a myriad of ecological disasters thruout Palestinian communities and cities. SUNDQUIST does not and will not talk about the overt military and economic collaboration between apartheid South Africa and Israel. A collaboration that not only helped sustain a faltering Apartheid regime, but also aided -via its intelligence network and technology- in Apartheid's attempt to kill the South African Liberation Movement. These are some of the things that have directly factored into more and more Blackfolk in the US becoming strongly antiZionist.
But SUNDQUIST tries to cover all this up by equating some antijewish statements made here and there by a few pseudo Black militants with genuine Black radical anti-Zionist assertions. And in this country of lite thought, he is relying on the fact that many "intellectuals" even cannot distinguish between an antiZionist statement and an anti-Jewish one. In addition, SUNDQUIST is also relying on the myth that Black Radicals are mere ranters and ravers and have not one analytical bone in their body.
(6) American Liberalism died with the election of Bill Clinton and was buried with the election of Bush. Blackfolk are far from being necrophiliacs. We seek the rejuvenation of Progressivism and Radicalism as two parts of a multipart Battle against this new Fascism on the rise. "Liberal" Zionism is still racism even tho it may be sugar coated with "good intentions," and a selfcentered mythological view of Black-Jewish relations in the US.
Our "common ground" is the revolutionary ground.
S. E. Anderson
--------------------
Here's the essay...
============================
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i09/09b00601.htm
From the issue dated October 21, 2005 Blacks and Jews: From Afro-Zionism to Anti-Zionism
By ERIC J. SUNDQUIST
In a culture steeped in ethnic friction and contested identities, the idea that the relationship between African-Americans and Jews was once thought special — indeed, critical to the cause of civil rights — seems strange. By the 1990s the belief of earlier Jewish and black leaders that they were each other's strongest allies had long since bred charges of exploitation and betrayal. Animosity between the two groups had become so normal that it was hardly a surprise when the Nation of Islam charged that Jews bore special responsibility for slavery.
Yet the importance of black people for Jews and Jews for black people when both were "strangers" in the Promised Land of America is a matter of voluminous, if perplexing, record. Occupying the shifting margins of national life, Jews and black people shared perspectives on the rewards and dangers of assimilation, the vicissitudes of intermarriage and "passing," and the meaning of citizenship in the face of discrimination and racist violence. Immigrant and native Jews alike found in black people a reminder of their centuries-long persecution, while Africans in America, beginning with their immersion in the Christianity of slaveholders and continuing through the modern civil-rights movement, were shaped by a profound identification with the Jews' biblical narrative. As Ralph Ellison once remarked, "All of us old-fashioned Negroes are Jews."
The alliance between the two groups reached its peak in the aftermath of World War II, but almost immediately began to dissolve, as Jews, with the downfall of educational quotas and other anti-Semitic restrictions, embarked on a rapid ascent of the social and economic ladder, while African-Americans, however much their lives were improved by the end of segregation, began an ascent destined to be far slower and more erratic.
When demoralizing setbacks made African-Americans skeptical of integrationist strategies and aroused them to the color consciousness championed by black power, many moved toward a greater sense of identity, as well as legal entitlement, predicated on race. When Jews moved in the opposite direction, black people perceived them to be abandoning historic commitments to social justice while reaping the rewards of their assimilation to "whiteness." Black people wondered how Jews could feel insecure in America, while Jews wondered how black people could be oblivious to anti-Semitism, let alone indulge in it themselves. In the eyes of black people, the Jewish columnist Nat Hentoff remarked in 1969, Jews were included among the goyim in America; the only question was who "among us are the Germans."
This relatively familiar story of the decay of bipartisan liberalism into black radicalism, on the one hand, and Jewish conservatism, on the other, is not incorrect. But it tells just part of the story. A critical, but less well-understood, cause of the breakup may be found in conjoined events — the Holocaust and the creation of Israel — that might have been expected to strengthen the alliance. Ultimately, they did just the reverse.
Hentoff's alarming formulation — that black Americans might perceive American Jews as Nazis — recognized that the calamity of the Holocaust contained the seeds of resentment: African-Americans feared that their suffering would be diminished by comparison to that of the Jews. Yet it also provided a new way for African-Americans to understand their own history. With the invention of the term "genocide," and its inscription into the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, the depredations of slavery and lynching, as well as America's own Nuremberg Laws of segregation, began to be seen in a different light, so that Holocaust eventually displaced Exodus as a principal organizing metaphor of black thought.
But 1948 also witnessed the founding of Israel. Just as the new Jewish state altered the identity of American Jews, so it changed black-Jewish relations — providing a concrete referent for the many strands of Afro-Zionism that saw Africa as the homeland of all black peoples, whether the Ethiopianism of Edward W. Blyden, the black Zionism of Marcus Garvey, or claims by the Rastafarians and others to be true descendants of the ancient Israelites. Upon visiting Israel in the early 1950s, the renowned singer Marian Anderson found herself witness to "an act of liberation" that she said also illuminated the "deepest necessities" of black freedom, while the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People proclaimed in 1948 that Israeli independence "serves as an inspiration to all persecuted people throughout the world."
In an opinion no doubt shocking to later anti-Zionists, that same year W.E.B. Du Bois embraced Israel as an example of progressivist liberation from colonial rule, pointing to what Jewish immigrants to Palestine had already accomplished in "bringing a new civilization into an old land" and raising it out of the "ignorance, disease, and poverty into which it had fallen." As late as 1969, the black writer and actor Ossie Davis, speaking in tribute to the prominent Zionist Avraham Schenker, asked his audience to remember that "we, too, seek our Jerusalem."
Yet even if black Americans had the same intensity of identification with a lost homeland as did Jews with Israel, their isolation from Africa, let alone from a single nation brought into existence by United Nations mandate, left them in a far more nebulous position than Jews either before or after 1948. By the end of the 1960s, moreover, Davis's voice was drowned out by those expressing a far more antagonistic view of Israel — and of Jews — as the long tradition of black support for Zionism gave way to expressions of anti-Zionism, presaging more vocal and widespread responses today.
Following the Six-Day War in 1967, and the onset of what proved to be Israel's protracted occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, its example as a national homeland and its role as a model of anticolonial liberation, which had made it a prominent partner to black African nations throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, were turned upside down. For many African-Americans, galvanized by anticolonial struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, the image of the Jewish state underwent a transformation: As Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the French historian who has eloquently responded to Holocaust deniers, would observe in 1987, the "victims" became the "executioners."
"We have got to be for the Arabs," exclaimed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Stokely Carmichael in 1968, for "we are Africans wherever we are." Israel, he said, "is moving to take over Egypt. Egypt is our motherland — it's in Africa. ... Egypt belongs to us since 4,000 years ago."
The Israelis, by that line of argument, were enemies of the third world, puppets of American power; the Arabs, as the black writer Richard Gibson claimed in 1967, were among the standard-bearers for "a world of color that fights for its liberation from Mozambique to Mississippi." Brotherhood with the Palestinians and identification with Egypt — in a political variation on the Afrocentric metonymy wherein the land of the pharaohs is taken for the whole of Africa — provided a psychological bridge to African wars of liberation and a symbolic recovery of a homeland otherwise unachievable.
Although evidence of black rejection of Israel dated to creation of the state — for example, in the journalist George Schuyler's scalding opinion that the Israeli War of Independence proved that the Bible is the "Jewish Mein Kampf" — the disintegration of black support for Zionism in the wake of the Six-Day War led, in extremity, not just to identification with the jihad of Arab nations but to an exterminationist mentality. The writer Amiri Baraka thus gave Malcolm X's vision of sovereignty for black urban enclaves a grotesque twist: "In order for the Black Man to survive," said Baraka in 1965, he must take steps to ensure that he has "what the Germans call Lebensraum."
A politically effective coalition between African-Americans and Jews might have continued so long as Jews believed that such rancorous views were part of the rhetorical war for third-world liberation. As Baraka's calculated figure of speech suggests, however, the rise of black anti-Zionism grew from black power's allegiance both to anti-Western revolutionary movements and to a domestic agenda in which the "black" homelands of Egypt and Palestine were deemed to be one with the "occupied" ghettos of the United States. Enemies abroad thus merged with enemies at home.
Jews, said Malcolm X in an interview, updating the anti-Semitic stereotype of the gouging Jewish merchant, "sap the very lifeblood of the so-called Negroes to maintain the state of Israel." Despite suffering genocide in Europe, contended the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, standing alongside Yasir Arafat at a 1968 Al Fatah rally in Algeria, the Israelis are "trying to solve their problems at the expense of another people. The same thing happened ... to the Black people in America."
Along with conflict over racial preferences and black appropriations of the Holocaust, such a blurring of the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism estranged not just Jewish conservatives and moderates but also those among the Jewish New Left who otherwise welcomed the radicalism and ethnocentrism of Black Power. The call for an end to the Jewish state, reasoned the young activist M.J. Rosenberg, admitted of no negotiation: "There is no such thing as 'progressive' anti-Semitism," he said.
At the same time, many of those African-Americans who now read the modern Exodus of Jews as a story of colonial conquest continued to find in Zionism a compelling example of national liberation. As a "nation within a nation," whose integrity is guaranteed by the survival of Israel, American Jews know that "they have to fight 365 days a year wherever they are in the world, to remain Jews and to keep Israel as a Jewish homeland," the poet Haki R. Madhubuti argued in 1973. Seeking a model for the Black Panthers' combination of armed struggle and community service, Cleaver himself cast back to the time of Theodor Herzl and the beginnings of modern Zionism, when Jews "had no homeland and were dispersed around the world." The Panthers, he argued, could likewise foment a revolution that will "sweep the people forward into nationhood."
Such paradoxical entanglements of black Zionism with black anti-Zionism are nowhere more vivid than in John A. Williams's 1969 novel, Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light, which hypothesizes a coming race war in the United States. Williams was dismissive of his novel, and not entirely without reason. The plot is contrived and the action sensational, but his anatomy of pro- and anti-Zionist ideologies is nuanced, astute, and more than a little prophetic.
The book's subtitle is A Novel of Some Probability, and the story is set prospectively in 1973. The action revolves around two characters: Eugene Browning, a middle-class black intellectual radicalized by the failure of the civil-rights mainstream, and Itzhak Hod, an Israeli who had served with the paramilitary Irgun during the War of Independence, before becoming a Nazi hunter and mercenary. Driven to despair following the killing of a black youth by a white policeman, Browning hires the Mafia to kill the policeman. The Mafia in turn contracts with Hod, who carries out the assassination, setting in motion a race war between the black community and the police.
Taking up the cause of black rights at just the moment the novel's American Jews appear to be retreating from it, Hod then sets out on his own to kill Herman Mahler, a celebrated Southern white supremacist responsible for the murder of three black college students. Hod's action proves pivotal in the novel's exposition of contending views of Zionism.
Williams took his title from a Dead Sea apocalyptic text known as The Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, which depicts a war waged by the tribes of Israel against their enemies. In quoting from the War Scroll in an epigraph to his novel, Williams ignores its prediction that God will intervene on the side of the Sons of Light. He thus secularizes his first frame of reference, the 1948 War of Independence, as though to confirm that the Jews' restoration to their lost homeland was a political, not a messianic, event.
Given the novel's publication in 1969, and its action set in 1973, however, its second frame of reference is the Six-Day War, one of whose official names proposed by the Israelis was the "War of the Sons of Light." In writing about a black nationalist uprising in such a context, Williams might well have been expected to adopt an anti-Zionist perspective. But his treatment proves to be far from predictable.
In Hod's career with the Irgun, our attention is directed first to the analogy between black power and the Zionists' anticolonial war of liberation against British rule in pre-1948 Palestine. It is not the Arab Palestinians, but the Jewish Palestinians, who are equivalent to African-Americans, each oppressed by a colonizer.
At the same time, Williams introduces a contrary analogy. Lying in wait to assassinate Mahler, Hod is surprised by the brother of one of the murdered black students, who is bent on a mission of vengeance. Recognizing the black man's prior right, Hod allows him to kill Mahler. But he also sees something in himself that complicates the equivalence of black nationalism and Zionism: "Hod looked at the Negro's eyes and understood. Once he himself had stood like the Negro — at Deir Yassin, it was — so intent on slaughtering that nothing else mattered." As a veteran of the April 1948 battle of Deir Yassin, Hod stands for a legendary moment of reckoning in the Israeli national conscience and in the creation of revolutionary consciousness among Palestinian Arabs.
During the civil war preceding independence, Jewish forces had to open a corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, which would otherwise have become isolated within territory allotted to Arab Palestinians in the United Nations' partition of Palestine. Creating that corridor was deemed indispensable in defining the state and protecting the Jews of Jerusalem from Arab armies once independence was declared. Among the villages along the corridor, lying near the northwest entrance to the city, was Deir Yassin.
There were varying views of the degree of force needed to accomplish the mission, just as there are now varying accounts of the tactics that were used and why they went awry. What ensued, in any event, was a difficult house-to-house battle that evolved into what most analyses speak of as a massacre of civilians, though how many, under what conditions, with what justification, and with what, if any, ulterior aim remain matters of intense dispute. Whether or not the action was part of a strategy to bring about the "transfer" of Palestinian Arabs, the battle at Deir Yassin came to be seen by many Arabs, as well as some Israelis, as a principal cause of the momentous outflow of Palestinian Arabs that followed, most of them expecting to return after Arab nations had driven out the Jews or, in later years, once their right to return had been negotiated.
The approximately 700,000 refugees became, as Cairo Radio put it in 1957, "the cornerstone in the Arab struggle against Israel." They also became the Palestinian people, whose ultimate fate would plague the region and the world on into the next century and whose rallying cry would forever be "Deir Yassin." At the height of the post-1967 campaign of terror carried out by the Palestine Liberation Organization, for example, an assault on Ben Gurion Airport took the code name "Operation Deir Yassin." In the words of the Birzeit University scholar Sharif Kanaana, Deir Yassin became "a symbol of everything that happened to Palestinians."
Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light evokes that history in complicated and sometimes paradoxical ways. As Hod's role makes clear, American black nationalists who resort to guerrilla warfare are comparable to the Irgun. But in post-1967 terms, they are also comparable to the Palestinians, despite the fact that the isolation of African-Americans from potential allies in Africa and from the people of the black diaspora puts them at a greater disadvantage in undertaking an armed uprising. In reversing the names of the combatants in his title, and thus foregrounding the tactics of the PLO, Williams also illuminates his epigraph drawn from the War Scroll, part of which reads: "They shall all together sing the hymn of return."
Well before the Six-Day War, a mystique of "the Return" had permeated Palestinian culture, especially in refugee camps. A lost sovereign state of Palestine was pictured as a bride awaiting her betrothed or a mother waiting for her sons to return — but in a violent vanquishing. Calling upon Palestinians to avenge Deir Yassin, Al Fatah's monthly publication, Our Palestine, addressed its readers beginning in the early 1960s as "Children of the Catastrophe," and, more specifically, as "Sons of the Catastrophe," the true sons of light who would liberate the homeland of Palestine from the Zionist infidel and occupier. As Egypt's foreign minister, Muhammad Salah al-Din, put it in 1949: "It is well known and understood that the Arabs, in demanding the return of the refugees to Palestine, mean their return as masters of the Homeland, and not as slaves. With greater clarity, they mean the liquidation of Israel."
Having emerged from the second catastrophe of the Six-Day War as not just the Palestinians' only hope but also, for the moment, the Arab nations' only weapon of war, Al Fatah and the PLO, which had effectively become one by 1969 — the year Arafat was elected chairman of the PLO and the year Williams's novel appeared — became the embodiment of nascent Palestinian nationalism and, with it, the radical anti-Zionism that persists today.
As Williams sees it, the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, the Israelis and the Arabs — or is it the other way around? — stood in a potentially irresolvable mirroring relationship from the moment of partition, if not from time immemorial. Is the "hymn of return" meant to allude to the return of victorious Jews to Eretz Yisrael after 2,000 years of exile? Or is it the triumphant return of displaced Palestinians in some history still to be written?
In Deir Yassin lay the paradox of statehood, as well as the paradox of the anti-Zionism espoused by black power — approbation of the Jews' right to a homeland, their right to exist, alongside disapprobation of the Jews' right to defend their homeland against enemies who refuse to recognize their right to exist.
In returning to Israel at the end of the novel, Hod seeks a way out of that quandary. "To consider Israel fairly," he ruminates, "you had to consider the Arabs and if you considered them fairly, would you then have an Israel? They stood in such great, great numbers, overwhelming numbers, at the gates of the nation." Hod is referring not just to the military threat posed by hostile Arab nations, but also to the demographic threat embodied in the Palestinian argument for the right of return, inscribed in the PLO's Covenant as a way to eliminate Israel by rolling back its borders and absorbing it in a Greater Palestine.
The War Scroll prophesies the victory of the Sons of Light, but victory in the Six-Day War, however much it strengthened Israel, not only failed to eliminate external threats but, in some respects, created a more dangerous one. In Hod's valor and clarity of purpose in 1948, upon which rested nothing less than the security and survival of Israel, Williams appears to say, one finds also the beginnings of a dilemma not solved in 1967 — indeed, made all the more intractable.
In leaving the outcome of his novel's race war inconclusive, Williams also leaves an ideological and epistemological puzzle. American black nationalists are neither the Irgun nor the PLO; they are not about to achieve their own state, let alone drive white America into the sea. Likewise the assertion that the Palestinians are victims of colonial rule, nearly a truism on the left today, was far more ambiguous in Williams's time. If the reading of history that found in Zionism a model for anticolonial liberation proved to be simplistic, it was no less so than Black Power's counterreading of Zionism as colonialism.
Pinpointing events that would define the tragic course of Israeli-Palestinian relations for decades to come, Williams also crystalized a key factor in the collapse of the once vital, if always precarious, coalition of African-Americans and American Jews. That the recovered homeland of Jews was and remains a strong ally of the United States, while African-Americans can point to no such "black Zion" of their own, has only made the collapse more poignant.
By the late 20th century, amid acrimonious charges and countercharges about black anti-Semitism and Jewish racism, a few Jewish and African-American compatriots still maintained strong convictions of brotherhood, but the time seemed to have come and gone when the two groups had obvious reasons to join hands. Mindful of "our respective exiles," said the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel in a 1987 birthday tribute to the black civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin, African-Americans and Jews must each cultivate their own traditions and "create their own community, their own fraternity."
Whatever its future, the black-Jewish question is no less central today than it was throughout the 20th century. At times a true alliance, at times a marriage of convenience, and more recently a bitter quarrel, the relationship between the two groups reset the course of American liberalism — its promise of belonging to the nation, as well as the seeming demise of the idea of one nation to which all could belong. The history of their association still holds important lessons for Americans ever in search of common ground. --------------------
Eric J. Sundquist is a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles. This essay is adapted from Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America, to be published next month by Harvard University Press. Copyright © by the president and fellows of Harvard College. ------------------
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 9, Page B6
Copyright © 2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
New Orleans Levee: A 40-Yr Explosion
Sista Gwen,
Whether or not the levee was blown up during the hurricane by the US government, it was actually blown up from 1965 to 2005.
By this I mean that after the big flood of '65, the local, state and national governments knew that the levees had to have a major overhaul/reconstruction given the constant shifting of the Mississippi and the fact that humans were eroding the surounding bayous for the sake of "development." The government officials did nothing in the past 40 years to upgrade the levees.
Engineers in and out of the government and military stated the urgency of creating Category 4 sustainable walls. Journalists (see Times-Picayune) and Scientists (see Scientific American Dec2004) wrote about the possibilities of great flooding with tremendous loss of lives.... Billions of dollars were squandered elsewhere and the few millions that did come to Louisiana got lost in the normalcy of corruption.
Hence, it was 90-95% certain that even a hurricane hitting New Orleans with 90-100mph winds would burst a levee or two.
You can rest assure that if the area was mainly made up white petty bourgeois residents and businesses, the levees would have been reinforced some time ago. All we have to do is look at the flood deterrant & draining system already in place in New Orleans: the richer whitefolk got a better support infrastructure.
...Yes, the levee was blown up! Blown up thru conscience racist/classist unprincipled corruption. This levee explosion was in deliberate slo mo: 40 years in the making... to make way for a Disneyfication of New Orleans filled with fake hypercommericialized Black Culture: Nigstalgia thru white eyes... to make way for gated communities well guarded from the floods of the Mississippi, the Poncetrain, the Black & Brown hordes that will soon be America's Majority....
In Struggle,
Sam Anderson
Whether or not the levee was blown up during the hurricane by the US government, it was actually blown up from 1965 to 2005.
By this I mean that after the big flood of '65, the local, state and national governments knew that the levees had to have a major overhaul/reconstruction given the constant shifting of the Mississippi and the fact that humans were eroding the surounding bayous for the sake of "development." The government officials did nothing in the past 40 years to upgrade the levees.
Engineers in and out of the government and military stated the urgency of creating Category 4 sustainable walls. Journalists (see Times-Picayune) and Scientists (see Scientific American Dec2004) wrote about the possibilities of great flooding with tremendous loss of lives.... Billions of dollars were squandered elsewhere and the few millions that did come to Louisiana got lost in the normalcy of corruption.
Hence, it was 90-95% certain that even a hurricane hitting New Orleans with 90-100mph winds would burst a levee or two.
You can rest assure that if the area was mainly made up white petty bourgeois residents and businesses, the levees would have been reinforced some time ago. All we have to do is look at the flood deterrant & draining system already in place in New Orleans: the richer whitefolk got a better support infrastructure.
...Yes, the levee was blown up! Blown up thru conscience racist/classist unprincipled corruption. This levee explosion was in deliberate slo mo: 40 years in the making... to make way for a Disneyfication of New Orleans filled with fake hypercommericialized Black Culture: Nigstalgia thru white eyes... to make way for gated communities well guarded from the floods of the Mississippi, the Poncetrain, the Black & Brown hordes that will soon be America's Majority....
In Struggle,
Sam Anderson
Monday, January 17, 2005
Sam Anderson’s Presentation before the NY City Council Commission on the Implementation of CFE
Sam Anderson’s Presentation before the NY City Council Commission on the Implementation of CFE-
January 13, 2005
Distinguished members of the NY City Council Commission on the Implementation of CFE, City Councilpeople, and citizens of New York City, I simply want to address the overwhelming scientific findings supporting the concept that class size does help create a more academically developed young person- particularly young African American and Latino persons. I also want to stress that smaller class size is a necessary but not sufficient condition for true educational excellence to flourish in New York City public education. Our system needs fundamental changes from top to bottom that establishes “Education as a Human Right” as its raison d’etre… not just more money and smaller classes.
It is documented that in the primary grades, when students are in classes of around 15 students per teacher, they are going to gain two to three months in academic achievement over their peers in larger classes.
The Tennessee STAR (Tennessee's Student Teacher Achievement Ratio) study -concluded back in 2000- was one of the largest educational experiments in the United States. "Experiment" in a scientific sense, in that the STAR study featured random assignment of students and teachers and carefully controlled experimental conditions.
The study began in 1985 with a group of kindergarten students who were in small classes through third grade. Between 8,000 and 10,000 students participated in STAR.
Those students have now graduated from college or are on the verge of graduating. Researchers have followed the students through the grades and have been able to document that their achievement gains in the primary grades continued throughout high school. Furthermore, they took the SAT and ACT tests at significantly higher rates than students who were in the larger classes.
One of the most encouraging results of the Wisconsin 1995 to 2000 study called: SAGE (Student Achievement Guarantee in Education) is the positive effect on the achievement gap between Black & white students. In the SAGE evaluation, evidence revealed that African-American students narrowed the gap in terms of their achievement with whites.
African-American students in both the SAGE schools and the comparison schools started off with their achievement at a significantly lower rate than white students. In the SAGE schools, Black students tended to narrow the academic achievement gap with white students. In the comparison schools, the African-American students fell further behind.
This corresponds to the Tennessee findings and the results of follow-up studies of students who attended small classes in the STAR experiment. Consider, for example, the ACT and SAT test-taking statistics on these students. Both Black and white students who took part in the smaller classes in the primary grades had significantly higher rates of taking the SAT and ACT. But the rate of increase for African Americans was substantially higher than that for whites. There was, in fact, a closing of the test-taking gap in that respect.
Today in the US, schools are perceived as cultural communities where the complex interplay of race, class, nationality, gender, and spiritual beliefs affect the lives of all who learn and teach in those institutions. The class size research agenda has been transformed to include such variables as instructional method, teacher morale and stress, teacher work load, student behavior and attitudes, content areas, student characteristics, and grade level.
In contemporary times, progressive education researchers have come to a broad agreement on the following general conclusions:
• Smaller classes result in increased student-teacher contact.
• Reductions in class size to less than 20 students without changes in instructional methods cannot guarantee improved academic achievement.
• No single class size is optimal for all grade levels and subjects.
• Smaller classes appear to result in greater achievement gains for students with lower academic ability and for those who are economically or socially oppressed.
• Classroom management improves in smaller classes (fewer discipline problems).
• Smaller classes result in higher teacher morale and reduced stress.
• Individualization is more likely to occur in smaller classes.
• Class size reductions alone do not necessarily lead to adoption of dramatically different instructional methods.
• Class size appears to have more influence on student attitudes, attention, interest, and motivation than on academic achievement.
• Smaller classes are beneficial for children at the primary level, particularly in math and reading.
• Very small classes of five or fewer students produce considerably higher achievement (Bennett, p. 3).
Major findings presented in the research on class size include:
• There is probably no optimum class size for all types of students, in all subject areas, and at all grade levels. • Smaller classes produce the necessary, though not sufficient, conditions for successful teaching and learning.
• Reduced class sizes in grades K-3, in the range of 13-17 students per class, significantly enhance student achievement.
• Reductions in class sizes to less than 20 students without changes in instructional methods cannot guarantee enhanced student achievement.
• Small class size, in the range of 13-17 students, benefits all students in all contexts at the K-3 level.
• Regular-size classes with a teacher aide are less effective than small classes in enhancing student achievement at the K-3 level.
• There are identifiable teaching behaviors which will enhance the benefits of a small class design; these include individual instruction, coaching, mentoring, and tutoring.
• The evidence favoring small class size at the upper grade levels is weak because teaching behaviors appear to be more rigid and research methodologies have been inadequate.
• Teacher inservice opportunities must accompany reduced class sizes so that appropriate teaching can be developed and reinforced.
• Class size definitions vary, depending on whether mean or median numbers are used.
• Class size averages may obscure the fact that some students require extra attention and care.
• Both class size and teacher workload (the number of students evaluated during the year) are important indicators of school quality.
This review of existing research, with all of its built-in limitations, suggests that increasing student learning by reducing class size is a positive but complex matter. It also suggests that class size reductions should be targeted to specific student groups for specific purposes which teachers must receive the training needed to make the most of the new learning opportunities available in smaller classes, and that race, class and gender must play an upfront role in determining the quality and quantity of classes.
A Human Rights-centered education mandates/demands not only smaller class size and an antiracist curriculum for educational excellence to flourish but also fundamental system-change to include students, parents and teachers in the daily local and citywide decision-making processes within all aspects of public education. Short of this, all we will be doing is continuing the present tracking system for poor children of color straight into prisons, poverty or graves.
--------------------
Sam Anderson < sama@mec.cuny.edu>- Education Director, Center for Law & Social Justice at Medgar Evers College, The City University of New York -- Member of Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence and the Independent Commission On Public Education (ICOPE)
January 13, 2005
Distinguished members of the NY City Council Commission on the Implementation of CFE, City Councilpeople, and citizens of New York City, I simply want to address the overwhelming scientific findings supporting the concept that class size does help create a more academically developed young person- particularly young African American and Latino persons. I also want to stress that smaller class size is a necessary but not sufficient condition for true educational excellence to flourish in New York City public education. Our system needs fundamental changes from top to bottom that establishes “Education as a Human Right” as its raison d’etre… not just more money and smaller classes.
It is documented that in the primary grades, when students are in classes of around 15 students per teacher, they are going to gain two to three months in academic achievement over their peers in larger classes.
The Tennessee STAR (Tennessee's Student Teacher Achievement Ratio) study -concluded back in 2000- was one of the largest educational experiments in the United States. "Experiment" in a scientific sense, in that the STAR study featured random assignment of students and teachers and carefully controlled experimental conditions.
The study began in 1985 with a group of kindergarten students who were in small classes through third grade. Between 8,000 and 10,000 students participated in STAR.
Those students have now graduated from college or are on the verge of graduating. Researchers have followed the students through the grades and have been able to document that their achievement gains in the primary grades continued throughout high school. Furthermore, they took the SAT and ACT tests at significantly higher rates than students who were in the larger classes.
One of the most encouraging results of the Wisconsin 1995 to 2000 study called: SAGE (Student Achievement Guarantee in Education) is the positive effect on the achievement gap between Black & white students. In the SAGE evaluation, evidence revealed that African-American students narrowed the gap in terms of their achievement with whites.
African-American students in both the SAGE schools and the comparison schools started off with their achievement at a significantly lower rate than white students. In the SAGE schools, Black students tended to narrow the academic achievement gap with white students. In the comparison schools, the African-American students fell further behind.
This corresponds to the Tennessee findings and the results of follow-up studies of students who attended small classes in the STAR experiment. Consider, for example, the ACT and SAT test-taking statistics on these students. Both Black and white students who took part in the smaller classes in the primary grades had significantly higher rates of taking the SAT and ACT. But the rate of increase for African Americans was substantially higher than that for whites. There was, in fact, a closing of the test-taking gap in that respect.
Today in the US, schools are perceived as cultural communities where the complex interplay of race, class, nationality, gender, and spiritual beliefs affect the lives of all who learn and teach in those institutions. The class size research agenda has been transformed to include such variables as instructional method, teacher morale and stress, teacher work load, student behavior and attitudes, content areas, student characteristics, and grade level.
In contemporary times, progressive education researchers have come to a broad agreement on the following general conclusions:
• Smaller classes result in increased student-teacher contact.
• Reductions in class size to less than 20 students without changes in instructional methods cannot guarantee improved academic achievement.
• No single class size is optimal for all grade levels and subjects.
• Smaller classes appear to result in greater achievement gains for students with lower academic ability and for those who are economically or socially oppressed.
• Classroom management improves in smaller classes (fewer discipline problems).
• Smaller classes result in higher teacher morale and reduced stress.
• Individualization is more likely to occur in smaller classes.
• Class size reductions alone do not necessarily lead to adoption of dramatically different instructional methods.
• Class size appears to have more influence on student attitudes, attention, interest, and motivation than on academic achievement.
• Smaller classes are beneficial for children at the primary level, particularly in math and reading.
• Very small classes of five or fewer students produce considerably higher achievement (Bennett, p. 3).
Major findings presented in the research on class size include:
• There is probably no optimum class size for all types of students, in all subject areas, and at all grade levels. • Smaller classes produce the necessary, though not sufficient, conditions for successful teaching and learning.
• Reduced class sizes in grades K-3, in the range of 13-17 students per class, significantly enhance student achievement.
• Reductions in class sizes to less than 20 students without changes in instructional methods cannot guarantee enhanced student achievement.
• Small class size, in the range of 13-17 students, benefits all students in all contexts at the K-3 level.
• Regular-size classes with a teacher aide are less effective than small classes in enhancing student achievement at the K-3 level.
• There are identifiable teaching behaviors which will enhance the benefits of a small class design; these include individual instruction, coaching, mentoring, and tutoring.
• The evidence favoring small class size at the upper grade levels is weak because teaching behaviors appear to be more rigid and research methodologies have been inadequate.
• Teacher inservice opportunities must accompany reduced class sizes so that appropriate teaching can be developed and reinforced.
• Class size definitions vary, depending on whether mean or median numbers are used.
• Class size averages may obscure the fact that some students require extra attention and care.
• Both class size and teacher workload (the number of students evaluated during the year) are important indicators of school quality.
This review of existing research, with all of its built-in limitations, suggests that increasing student learning by reducing class size is a positive but complex matter. It also suggests that class size reductions should be targeted to specific student groups for specific purposes which teachers must receive the training needed to make the most of the new learning opportunities available in smaller classes, and that race, class and gender must play an upfront role in determining the quality and quantity of classes.
A Human Rights-centered education mandates/demands not only smaller class size and an antiracist curriculum for educational excellence to flourish but also fundamental system-change to include students, parents and teachers in the daily local and citywide decision-making processes within all aspects of public education. Short of this, all we will be doing is continuing the present tracking system for poor children of color straight into prisons, poverty or graves.
--------------------
Sam Anderson < sama@mec.cuny.edu>- Education Director, Center for Law & Social Justice at Medgar Evers College, The City University of New York -- Member of Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence and the Independent Commission On Public Education (ICOPE)
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
My Brief Comments on the New Film: "Quiet Storm"
NOTE: My Brief Comments on the New Film: "Quiet Storm"
"Quiet Storm" is one of the few recent Black feature films that is explicitly political. How far will a small group of seriously determined Brothas from Africa and the Diaspora go to help jumpstart real PanAfrican economic and social development? Is protracted mass organizing in this era of US global rule an obsolete concept and "guerrilla surgical military and economic strikes" at the Empire's key institutions and its families the new "revolutionary answer?" Is the late Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton's concept of "Revolutionary Suicide" finally an acceptable and necessary part of our struggle for PanAfrican Liberation?
Many will not agree with some of the strategies and tactics worked out in this film. But, we will definately be discussing this film like Sistas & Brothas discussed "The Battle for Algiers" and "The Spook Who Sat By The Door" some 30+ years ago. It will be a positive politicizing experience BECAUSE it will provoke discussions and reveal to the less politically aware viewer some serious lessons in imperialism's plunder of Africa and the Diaspora.
"Quiet Storm" is a must-see flick... but be prepared to sit thru a long but worthwhile movie for the discussion.
We also need to help get the film shown thruout the nation and help raise the $3million it cost Brotha Shango (and others) to make "Quiet Storm."
"Quiet Storm"
Many will not agree with some of the strategies and tactics worked out in this film. But, we will definately be discussing this film like Sistas & Brothas discussed "The Battle for Algiers" and "The Spook Who Sat By The Door" some 30+ years ago. It will be a positive politicizing experience BECAUSE it will provoke discussions and reveal to the less politically aware viewer some serious lessons in imperialism's plunder of Africa and the Diaspora.
"Quiet Storm" is a must-see flick... but be prepared to sit thru a long but worthwhile movie for the discussion.
We also need to help get the film shown thruout the nation and help raise the $3million it cost Brotha Shango (and others) to make "Quiet Storm."
Sunday, October 10, 2004
My Comments On NY Times Mag Essay: "The Genome in Black and White (and Gray)"
My Comments on an Oct 10, 2004 NY Times Magazine article: "The Genome in Black and White (and Gray)" By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG---
Because science is a human endeavor situated within a society, it is impacted -directly and indirectly- by that society's cultural, social and religious norms. Hence, in the US -where racism/white supremacy is the norm- science is being impacted by this powerful but false belief-system. The scientific breakthrus in the study and applications of genomics mentioned in this important article below are rapidly being defined by both capitalist and racist paradigms and will bring forth a new and even more powerful form of "White Superiority-thru-Science" than the Nazis could ever dream of. And as long as US society is being deskilled and dumbed-down, the bearers of this genomic knowledge will be looked upon as 21st Century wizards to not only be in awe of, but to TRUST as advancers of society thru science.
One of the immediate challenges is for progressives to publically critique every corporate/adacemic aspect of the known research (there's lots of covert neo-eugenics research going on within US government's labs and other Western nations' labs). Another immediate challenge is to struggle to get more Blackfolk and Latinos involved in this new and rapidly expanding research area of genomics. This means we have about a 10 to 15 year window of opportunity to launch a campaign within US urban elementary schools to make science study not only achievable but about the hippest thing a young African-descendent or Latino person could aspire to do.
If we don't have a significant number of Black and Brown scientist in this mix as early as possible to keep eugenics policies at bay, then a truly brave new white world will prevail... relegating peoples of African descent to the periphery of the periphery: truly superfluous and expendable....
We have reached that critical moment where genetic science and technological "advancement" is evolving exponetially in hands and minds of scientist embedded within a white supremacist Euro-American civilization. Our challenge-- humanity's challenge is to find ways to not only stop their advancements, but to also reverse them and transform them into a gentetic science from and for the People of Earth.
Because science is a human endeavor situated within a society, it is impacted -directly and indirectly- by that society's cultural, social and religious norms. Hence, in the US -where racism/white supremacy is the norm- science is being impacted by this powerful but false belief-system. The scientific breakthrus in the study and applications of genomics mentioned in this important article below are rapidly being defined by both capitalist and racist paradigms and will bring forth a new and even more powerful form of "White Superiority-thru-Science" than the Nazis could ever dream of. And as long as US society is being deskilled and dumbed-down, the bearers of this genomic knowledge will be looked upon as 21st Century wizards to not only be in awe of, but to TRUST as advancers of society thru science.
One of the immediate challenges is for progressives to publically critique every corporate/adacemic aspect of the known research (there's lots of covert neo-eugenics research going on within US government's labs and other Western nations' labs). Another immediate challenge is to struggle to get more Blackfolk and Latinos involved in this new and rapidly expanding research area of genomics. This means we have about a 10 to 15 year window of opportunity to launch a campaign within US urban elementary schools to make science study not only achievable but about the hippest thing a young African-descendent or Latino person could aspire to do.
If we don't have a significant number of Black and Brown scientist in this mix as early as possible to keep eugenics policies at bay, then a truly brave new white world will prevail... relegating peoples of African descent to the periphery of the periphery: truly superfluous and expendable....
We have reached that critical moment where genetic science and technological "advancement" is evolving exponetially in hands and minds of scientist embedded within a white supremacist Euro-American civilization. Our challenge-- humanity's challenge is to find ways to not only stop their advancements, but to also reverse them and transform them into a gentetic science from and for the People of Earth.
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
The High Tide of Black Resistance- Interview With S E Anderson
The High Tide of Black Resistance, With SE Anderson
05/25/04
Larvester Gaither: How and at what age did you personally become politicized around the issue of the death penalty?
S.E. Anderson It goes back a ways. I think it goes back to the late 1960s. I was politically involved in student activism and stuff like that during the mid sixties. Specifically, however, it was in 1968 when my old comrade and good friend from the Harlem Black Panthers—Eddie Ellis—was arrested and sent to prison in New York for “killing somebody.” It was a COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) set-up. Eddie served twenty-five years and if the death penalty was active then, we knew that he would have been burnt. That was when I became very, very aware of the harsh reality of the death penalty.
Gaither: The reason that I asked you this question is that it isn’t an issue that’s really talked about in our nationalist community and very little is written on the subject.
Anderson: In the movement there is a real shortage of this material. I think it may have stemmed from the history of Black folk vis-Ã -vis the law in general. We understood that we would get the harsher deal from the times of slavery to the times of Reconstruction to the times of lynching. We understood that we wouldn’t get true justice and that often times many of us would be tried and sentenced before the “Bourgeois Law” could be enacted and, in effect, be lynched, or burnt.
It seems to me that the specific concern around the death penalty up until the 80’s really had no impact both in terms of the African American population in general and activist in particular because of this overarching assumption and understanding of the racist nature and class inequality of the law. And as we became more entwined within the US system at various levels and also more sophisticated towards it, the question began to be raised both in terms of the political reality of the death penalty as well as the moral aspect.
The other part is that the state through J. Edgar Hoover’s counterintelligence program operations—and even before from the days of the African [Blood] Brotherhood in the 1900s—would execute us before there was even a trial in many cases. So, for the vast majority of our activist brothers who may have been in a position of being accused of murder, they would usually be dead before they went to trial. In many cases, if there was murder involved, they would get extraordinarily long terms.
Gaither: From your experience as an active participant in SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and a founding member of the Black Panthers in Harlem, what differences do you see in the response of Black youth today to state repression versus the responses from your generation? And if there are any differences, why do you feel they exist?
Anderson: Yes. For me as a young person in the sixties, for tens of thousands of us, there was a mass social context in which we were operating. That social context was something we called The Movement. There was something happening both in the North and the South; and primarily in the South, with the Civil Rights issues, it spurred a number of us to get involved. So there was a context that shaped our developing consciousness towards militancy and struggle; whereas, with today’s young people—those who are trying to be militant and are trying to do something—there is no social context. There may be for many of them the glorification of the Lumpen or as they say, the “gangster” reality, and they get their cues from that element. They also get their cues through a filtered, distorted view of what happened thirty some odd years ago. It’s filtered and distorted through Hollywood eye lenses. So the militancy now for young people is all turned around and grounded in superficiality and anti-intellectualism.
One of the things that's fundamentally missing with the young folk involved in the struggle is the need to study and to be organized in their efforts. I think over the past generation, the normalcy of anti-intellectualism in this country has really taken a stronghold in our young Black activist forces. So it is rare to come across young sistas & brothas who are both looking at the classical works and who are studying and struggling, trying to figure out how to organize and mobilize beyond the spontaneous.
Gaither: It seems that the academization of black intellectualism parallels the deradicalization of it in a sense? The whole notion of the “public intellectual” who engages in commodified discourse centered on every issue except “What is to be done?” and we, of course, consume it.
Anderson: Yes. You talked about it, you listened; therefore you are involved. You’re engaged in struggle because you’re listening. That’s today’s perception of struggling. You don’t have to be active in the community or work place…just attend the latest meetings or cultural events.
Gaither: And the whole commoditization of it. That’s something we must figure out a way to move beyond.
Anderson: The commoditization is a very big stumbling block. In that process when things are commoditized here, everything is reduced to sound-bites and imagery. There is no substance or foundation.
Gaither: Is that a sign then that “Capitalism has usurped the Black Liberation movement?”
Anderson: It’s a sign that an aspect of the Black Liberation movement has been sucked up into it. Those of us who are aware of it and are revolutionary in consciousness have a lot more work to do now. The capitalist system is very sophisticated. It learns from the past and knows how to absorb and put a spin on or redirect a lot of the reformists’ efforts that are so essential to building a movement. So we have to constantly be on the move for counter-action. I mean, crudely back in the late sixties and early seventies, what the system crudely did was to take the slogans and depoliticize and de-Black them: Revolutionary New Tide. Tide Power. The concept of power, for example, is absorbed into tings that you have to buy. It trivializes them. The same thing with individuals or the imagery of individuals. They were trivialized.
The powerful political and cultural statements made on T-shirts were just absorbed into the dominant fashions. You had the Hi Bourgeois Fashion people such as Calvin Klein and Pierre Cardin running everything on T-shirts. So the depoliticization which is so important happens also. You had that kind of absorption happening in the 70’s.
Gaither: I would like to talk more about the literary S. E. Anderson. What influenced your decision to write Black Holocaust for Beginners? How did you arrive at producing it the way you did; the illustrations and all? There’s never a dull moment and, perhaps this is the type of creative approach we will have to take towards politicizing young audiences.
Anderson: The book evolved out of a discussion with Writers & Reader’s publisher Brother Glen Thompson. He already had the title as part of his series. He told me that there was a person who was doing it but couldn’t meet the deadlines because of other obligations. He asked me if I’d be able to do it. “I’ll need it in four months,” he said (laughter).
Fortunately, over the years I had begun to look at the Middle Passage and the slavery experience. And I have tried to look at it from the perspective of the captured African and the transformation of the captured African into what one can refer to as the first modern person: The African-American. That’s in the broad sense: North America, the Caribbean and the Americas. I realized that there was really nothing out there that focuses on the Middle Passage as such or that focuses from the perspective of the captured African.
I saw this as a kind of challenge to put together something that was in everyday language, accessible to people and to use the imagery that docu-comic series developed. But this book had to be a serious one because it was a serious subject. I wanted to formulate the material in such a way where the reader is drawn from the objective to the subjective while never losing the documentation aspect of it. That’s why it goes from the broad historical overview of African civilization to the individual experience of the young Seke sister who is captured. It ends at the beginning of the enslavement of Africans in the Americas. This leads us to the next book that is entitled Slavery for Beginners. In this book I will be talking about the enslavement process itself.
Gaither: In Defense of Mumia? What led you to this interesting anthology?
Anderson: Being involved in the Black cultural movement I realize that the power of culture is formidable. There are a number of people in the world who are supportive of Mumia and we needed to show this. There was a broad spectrum of support for Mumia in the cultural field. It was also another way of chronicling the whole struggle and documenting the artistic component to it.
So, Tony Medina and I approached Glen Thompson with the idea of bringing these voices together and he said, “Yes, we’ve got to do something for the brother and as a publisher, this is my contribution to it.” So this was in the summer of 1995 and in August of 95 Tony and I had organized a very successful poetry jam at the Schomburg. The original intent of the book was to just have poetry—a poetry contribution to Mumia. But when the word got out hat we were putting his book out on Mumia, it just spread like wildfire. People started sending in material. No one looked for money. Like John Edgar Wideman, we talked to him directly and he said, “We’ve got to support this brother. I’ve got two pieces that I want you to look at.” And it was fine.
Interestingly, we sent the book to about one hundred and seventy-five reviewers and got nothing. Literally. Race & Class eventually did something. That, of course, is in England and it has a very small readership in the United States. If this was an anthology put together for Mumia by Skip Gates, it would’ve—
Gaither: --received an award, high reviews, best seller status, critically acclaimed, seminal work, et al.
Anderson: (laughter) well we did get an award. We received the Fire Cracker Award from the American Booksellers Association for best alternative non-fiction work. Also, I believe that if it was not a black publisher, it would’ve been picked up. He’s been around for over twenty years, he’s established, has all of the connections with Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, etc.
Gaither: You mentioned the issue of definition: their pillow is softer than mine, et al. Why else do you think this was the case? Because with Live From Death Row, your sentiments are vividly confirmed. There was enormous pressure to silence Mumia Abu Jamal through censoring the book—and this censorship continues in myriad ways as we speak.
Anderson: In this country, two things converge with Mumia: the racist hypocrisy of the death penalty and the reality of political prisoners. The powers that be don’t want anybody to know about either. And the “mainstream media” in the United States follows that line because of their class interest. In Defense of Mumia received more publicity and recognition in Europe because Mumia is very well known in Europe. It’s being circulated there and people are talking about doing translations in German and French in particular. So that’s a strong possibility.
Gaither: For people that listen and look to the “mainstream media” to inform them, talk to us about the status of the Movement in support of Mumia and where we are legally with the case.
Anderson The Mumia case is now scheduled for January 27, 1997. At this time, there is supposed to be a decision from the Supreme Court in Pennsylvania. It doesn’t have to happen on that date but that’s one of the dates that have been confirmed. The sense is that they will reject the request for a retrial. But his lawyers are prepared to go immediately to the federal level at that point. He’s still on death row. His condition is that he can only call out. People can’t call in. The press contact, which was already extremely limited, is no longer there.
We had a successful December 1996 rally on Wall Street with Mumia as the focal point, but it was also about the realty of the growing poverty in this country and the prison-industrial-complex, the opposition to the death penalty in general and exposing the reality of political imprisonment in the US. However, none of the major “Bourgeois” press was there—on any level—even though they were notified and we had, I would estimate 1,200 or 1,500 demonstrators and the thousands of people who work on Wall Street checking it out.
So his case is one in which we feel in order to get any kind of justice moving on this, the Black community must be mobilized and informed. There are various ways to do that and it varies from community to community throughout the world. Earlier this year on King’s birthday in New York City, we had a successful fundraiser with Max Roach, Cassandra Wilson, Greg Osby, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez and others. Numerous celebrities—Spike Lee, Johnnie Cochran, Susan Taylor—were there to lend their support.
Gaither: The media, in their effort to trivialize movements, ran the line that the case of Mumia Abu Jamal was a “cause célébre.” Is there any truth to that?
Anderson: Yes, there are celebrities who see him as a cause. (Laughter) But it’s much bigger than that. Look at the worldwide effort of his support: tens of thousands of people in Europe, different countries in Europe amounting to half a million. He’s honorary Mayor of Venice! You know what I mean? That’s a slap in the face to the US because that’s an official status that is usually reserved for dignitaries and such.
So it’s a movement that is growing internationally but because of our Black Liberation movement being weak, he is not a known entity among the grassroots folks here in the United States. That’s what we’re trying to work on. The video that HBO put out is important. We have to promote that video and they’re going to do a ninety minute version in the summer again. The first one was a sixty minute version.
Gaither: All of the hoopla over the issue of crime in this country has really had a negative impact on Black and Latino youth. We are certainly faced with a challenge as we march toward the twenty-first century.
Anderson: That’s the essence of the late capitalist system. When a significant chunk of the labor force is no longer necessary, with a combination of “their” laws and racism, we are criminalized. Our potential labor force (i.e., Black and Latino youth), who are now superfluous, becomes criminalized. All of these efforts at pushing a harder and harder crime bill are the central focus of it. In addition, money can be made from it by certain people because the prison industrial complex is one of the most profitable businesses outside of the drug business in this country.
We have to in every way, shape, and form lay out to our young people the social, political, and racial reality of this country. And if we can capture an element of the hip hop community (referring to rappers) to get them to incorporate this reality into their lyrics, that will be helpful. I think that this is happening. There is a loose cadre of young activists who are really concerned about developing instead of just being spontaneous and opposed to study. There is a loose group throughout the country—in many cases they may not even be aware of each other—who are attempting to do the necessary work of pointing out that the highest form of organized crime is capitalism. And all things flow from there. It’s up to the young people to be in motion to not reform something that’s not reformable but to create revolution.
05/25/04
Larvester Gaither: How and at what age did you personally become politicized around the issue of the death penalty?
S.E. Anderson It goes back a ways. I think it goes back to the late 1960s. I was politically involved in student activism and stuff like that during the mid sixties. Specifically, however, it was in 1968 when my old comrade and good friend from the Harlem Black Panthers—Eddie Ellis—was arrested and sent to prison in New York for “killing somebody.” It was a COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) set-up. Eddie served twenty-five years and if the death penalty was active then, we knew that he would have been burnt. That was when I became very, very aware of the harsh reality of the death penalty.
Gaither: The reason that I asked you this question is that it isn’t an issue that’s really talked about in our nationalist community and very little is written on the subject.
Anderson: In the movement there is a real shortage of this material. I think it may have stemmed from the history of Black folk vis-Ã -vis the law in general. We understood that we would get the harsher deal from the times of slavery to the times of Reconstruction to the times of lynching. We understood that we wouldn’t get true justice and that often times many of us would be tried and sentenced before the “Bourgeois Law” could be enacted and, in effect, be lynched, or burnt.
It seems to me that the specific concern around the death penalty up until the 80’s really had no impact both in terms of the African American population in general and activist in particular because of this overarching assumption and understanding of the racist nature and class inequality of the law. And as we became more entwined within the US system at various levels and also more sophisticated towards it, the question began to be raised both in terms of the political reality of the death penalty as well as the moral aspect.
The other part is that the state through J. Edgar Hoover’s counterintelligence program operations—and even before from the days of the African [Blood] Brotherhood in the 1900s—would execute us before there was even a trial in many cases. So, for the vast majority of our activist brothers who may have been in a position of being accused of murder, they would usually be dead before they went to trial. In many cases, if there was murder involved, they would get extraordinarily long terms.
Gaither: From your experience as an active participant in SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and a founding member of the Black Panthers in Harlem, what differences do you see in the response of Black youth today to state repression versus the responses from your generation? And if there are any differences, why do you feel they exist?
Anderson: Yes. For me as a young person in the sixties, for tens of thousands of us, there was a mass social context in which we were operating. That social context was something we called The Movement. There was something happening both in the North and the South; and primarily in the South, with the Civil Rights issues, it spurred a number of us to get involved. So there was a context that shaped our developing consciousness towards militancy and struggle; whereas, with today’s young people—those who are trying to be militant and are trying to do something—there is no social context. There may be for many of them the glorification of the Lumpen or as they say, the “gangster” reality, and they get their cues from that element. They also get their cues through a filtered, distorted view of what happened thirty some odd years ago. It’s filtered and distorted through Hollywood eye lenses. So the militancy now for young people is all turned around and grounded in superficiality and anti-intellectualism.
One of the things that's fundamentally missing with the young folk involved in the struggle is the need to study and to be organized in their efforts. I think over the past generation, the normalcy of anti-intellectualism in this country has really taken a stronghold in our young Black activist forces. So it is rare to come across young sistas & brothas who are both looking at the classical works and who are studying and struggling, trying to figure out how to organize and mobilize beyond the spontaneous.
Gaither: It seems that the academization of black intellectualism parallels the deradicalization of it in a sense? The whole notion of the “public intellectual” who engages in commodified discourse centered on every issue except “What is to be done?” and we, of course, consume it.
Anderson: Yes. You talked about it, you listened; therefore you are involved. You’re engaged in struggle because you’re listening. That’s today’s perception of struggling. You don’t have to be active in the community or work place…just attend the latest meetings or cultural events.
Gaither: And the whole commoditization of it. That’s something we must figure out a way to move beyond.
Anderson: The commoditization is a very big stumbling block. In that process when things are commoditized here, everything is reduced to sound-bites and imagery. There is no substance or foundation.
Gaither: Is that a sign then that “Capitalism has usurped the Black Liberation movement?”
Anderson: It’s a sign that an aspect of the Black Liberation movement has been sucked up into it. Those of us who are aware of it and are revolutionary in consciousness have a lot more work to do now. The capitalist system is very sophisticated. It learns from the past and knows how to absorb and put a spin on or redirect a lot of the reformists’ efforts that are so essential to building a movement. So we have to constantly be on the move for counter-action. I mean, crudely back in the late sixties and early seventies, what the system crudely did was to take the slogans and depoliticize and de-Black them: Revolutionary New Tide. Tide Power. The concept of power, for example, is absorbed into tings that you have to buy. It trivializes them. The same thing with individuals or the imagery of individuals. They were trivialized.
The powerful political and cultural statements made on T-shirts were just absorbed into the dominant fashions. You had the Hi Bourgeois Fashion people such as Calvin Klein and Pierre Cardin running everything on T-shirts. So the depoliticization which is so important happens also. You had that kind of absorption happening in the 70’s.
Gaither: I would like to talk more about the literary S. E. Anderson. What influenced your decision to write Black Holocaust for Beginners? How did you arrive at producing it the way you did; the illustrations and all? There’s never a dull moment and, perhaps this is the type of creative approach we will have to take towards politicizing young audiences.
Anderson: The book evolved out of a discussion with Writers & Reader’s publisher Brother Glen Thompson. He already had the title as part of his series. He told me that there was a person who was doing it but couldn’t meet the deadlines because of other obligations. He asked me if I’d be able to do it. “I’ll need it in four months,” he said (laughter).
Fortunately, over the years I had begun to look at the Middle Passage and the slavery experience. And I have tried to look at it from the perspective of the captured African and the transformation of the captured African into what one can refer to as the first modern person: The African-American. That’s in the broad sense: North America, the Caribbean and the Americas. I realized that there was really nothing out there that focuses on the Middle Passage as such or that focuses from the perspective of the captured African.
I saw this as a kind of challenge to put together something that was in everyday language, accessible to people and to use the imagery that docu-comic series developed. But this book had to be a serious one because it was a serious subject. I wanted to formulate the material in such a way where the reader is drawn from the objective to the subjective while never losing the documentation aspect of it. That’s why it goes from the broad historical overview of African civilization to the individual experience of the young Seke sister who is captured. It ends at the beginning of the enslavement of Africans in the Americas. This leads us to the next book that is entitled Slavery for Beginners. In this book I will be talking about the enslavement process itself.
Gaither: In Defense of Mumia? What led you to this interesting anthology?
Anderson: Being involved in the Black cultural movement I realize that the power of culture is formidable. There are a number of people in the world who are supportive of Mumia and we needed to show this. There was a broad spectrum of support for Mumia in the cultural field. It was also another way of chronicling the whole struggle and documenting the artistic component to it.
So, Tony Medina and I approached Glen Thompson with the idea of bringing these voices together and he said, “Yes, we’ve got to do something for the brother and as a publisher, this is my contribution to it.” So this was in the summer of 1995 and in August of 95 Tony and I had organized a very successful poetry jam at the Schomburg. The original intent of the book was to just have poetry—a poetry contribution to Mumia. But when the word got out hat we were putting his book out on Mumia, it just spread like wildfire. People started sending in material. No one looked for money. Like John Edgar Wideman, we talked to him directly and he said, “We’ve got to support this brother. I’ve got two pieces that I want you to look at.” And it was fine.
Interestingly, we sent the book to about one hundred and seventy-five reviewers and got nothing. Literally. Race & Class eventually did something. That, of course, is in England and it has a very small readership in the United States. If this was an anthology put together for Mumia by Skip Gates, it would’ve—
Gaither: --received an award, high reviews, best seller status, critically acclaimed, seminal work, et al.
Anderson: (laughter) well we did get an award. We received the Fire Cracker Award from the American Booksellers Association for best alternative non-fiction work. Also, I believe that if it was not a black publisher, it would’ve been picked up. He’s been around for over twenty years, he’s established, has all of the connections with Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, etc.
Gaither: You mentioned the issue of definition: their pillow is softer than mine, et al. Why else do you think this was the case? Because with Live From Death Row, your sentiments are vividly confirmed. There was enormous pressure to silence Mumia Abu Jamal through censoring the book—and this censorship continues in myriad ways as we speak.
Anderson: In this country, two things converge with Mumia: the racist hypocrisy of the death penalty and the reality of political prisoners. The powers that be don’t want anybody to know about either. And the “mainstream media” in the United States follows that line because of their class interest. In Defense of Mumia received more publicity and recognition in Europe because Mumia is very well known in Europe. It’s being circulated there and people are talking about doing translations in German and French in particular. So that’s a strong possibility.
Gaither: For people that listen and look to the “mainstream media” to inform them, talk to us about the status of the Movement in support of Mumia and where we are legally with the case.
Anderson The Mumia case is now scheduled for January 27, 1997. At this time, there is supposed to be a decision from the Supreme Court in Pennsylvania. It doesn’t have to happen on that date but that’s one of the dates that have been confirmed. The sense is that they will reject the request for a retrial. But his lawyers are prepared to go immediately to the federal level at that point. He’s still on death row. His condition is that he can only call out. People can’t call in. The press contact, which was already extremely limited, is no longer there.
We had a successful December 1996 rally on Wall Street with Mumia as the focal point, but it was also about the realty of the growing poverty in this country and the prison-industrial-complex, the opposition to the death penalty in general and exposing the reality of political imprisonment in the US. However, none of the major “Bourgeois” press was there—on any level—even though they were notified and we had, I would estimate 1,200 or 1,500 demonstrators and the thousands of people who work on Wall Street checking it out.
So his case is one in which we feel in order to get any kind of justice moving on this, the Black community must be mobilized and informed. There are various ways to do that and it varies from community to community throughout the world. Earlier this year on King’s birthday in New York City, we had a successful fundraiser with Max Roach, Cassandra Wilson, Greg Osby, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez and others. Numerous celebrities—Spike Lee, Johnnie Cochran, Susan Taylor—were there to lend their support.
Gaither: The media, in their effort to trivialize movements, ran the line that the case of Mumia Abu Jamal was a “cause célébre.” Is there any truth to that?
Anderson: Yes, there are celebrities who see him as a cause. (Laughter) But it’s much bigger than that. Look at the worldwide effort of his support: tens of thousands of people in Europe, different countries in Europe amounting to half a million. He’s honorary Mayor of Venice! You know what I mean? That’s a slap in the face to the US because that’s an official status that is usually reserved for dignitaries and such.
So it’s a movement that is growing internationally but because of our Black Liberation movement being weak, he is not a known entity among the grassroots folks here in the United States. That’s what we’re trying to work on. The video that HBO put out is important. We have to promote that video and they’re going to do a ninety minute version in the summer again. The first one was a sixty minute version.
Gaither: All of the hoopla over the issue of crime in this country has really had a negative impact on Black and Latino youth. We are certainly faced with a challenge as we march toward the twenty-first century.
Anderson: That’s the essence of the late capitalist system. When a significant chunk of the labor force is no longer necessary, with a combination of “their” laws and racism, we are criminalized. Our potential labor force (i.e., Black and Latino youth), who are now superfluous, becomes criminalized. All of these efforts at pushing a harder and harder crime bill are the central focus of it. In addition, money can be made from it by certain people because the prison industrial complex is one of the most profitable businesses outside of the drug business in this country.
We have to in every way, shape, and form lay out to our young people the social, political, and racial reality of this country. And if we can capture an element of the hip hop community (referring to rappers) to get them to incorporate this reality into their lyrics, that will be helpful. I think that this is happening. There is a loose cadre of young activists who are really concerned about developing instead of just being spontaneous and opposed to study. There is a loose group throughout the country—in many cases they may not even be aware of each other—who are attempting to do the necessary work of pointing out that the highest form of organized crime is capitalism. And all things flow from there. It’s up to the young people to be in motion to not reform something that’s not reformable but to create revolution.
Friday, September 17, 2004
Out of Barbados: The birth of the Global Afrikan Congress
|
| N° 20 Novembre 2002 |
| Out of Barbados: The birth of the Global Afrikan Congress | |
| par S.E. Anderson |
|
| Over the past few weeks much has been discussed and debated about the African/African Descendents Caucus post-Durban gathering in Barbados from Oct. 1 to 6. This is, in part, an indication of the historic importance of the gathering. | |
| Let’s be clear from the outset: despite a frustratingly negative start and a blow to PanAfrican-Cuban solidarity that needs to be immediately rectified, the African/African Descendents Caucus-sponsored conference achieved one of its primary goals. | |
| We – more than 600 Sistas and Brothas from all regions of the Black World – established the Global Afrikan Congress (GAC). It is a necessary work-in-progress of a developing united front of African/African descendent organizations. About two years from now, GAC will hold another international conference to democratically ratify its constitution, sum up its work and plan for future struggles towards the liberation of African peoples everywhere. By the end of the conference, the vast majority of us recognized that this is a monumental task that requires us to be principled, open, united and in it for the long haul. | |
| Now, about that frustratingly negative start | |
| As many people have written and spoken of recently, there were mixed messages sent out by the key conference organizers about whether or not non-Africans should attend. To a veteran radical activist white American documentarian and his Asian activist wife - who have been, with their own monies, documenting the global rise of the Reparations Movement - were told by the conference organizers up to the Sunday before the conference that it was OK to attend. These two documentarians were only interested in filming the open plenaries and doing individual interviews of Sistas and Brothas active in Reparations struggles outside of the U.S. They were not interested in filming any of the 15 working groups because they understood the sensitive nature of the content of these sessions. | |
| When the need for interpreters was raised during the planning months, the organizers opted for a Barbados-based professional translation service that had the technical apparatus - wireless headphones - and personnel to do simultaneous translation in at least four languages. Their staff included three or four white Barbadians. | |
| In addition, there was a young Asian male student within the Canadian delegation and a young Lebanese activist woman who had planned to deliver a solidarity message from forces within the Palestinian Intifada. There might have been about four to six other whites and other non-Africans present during the hours of debates about whether or not non-Africans should attend. | |
| These were the non-Africans that the British delegation initially objected to. After heated debates - unfortunately, I was still en route to Barbados - and a vote carrying 70 percent in favor of expulsion, subjectivity took over. This meant that you had “security” checking you out to see if you were “African” enough to enter the plenary meetings. If Bob Marley had showed with his pops along with Adam Clayton Powell during these moments, they would have been kicked out! | |
| Fortunately, the working group leaders encouraged the delegates to stay the course and make real the reason they came to Barbados. | |
| Political and economic fallout for Barbados | |
| Another aspect one needs to take into consideration: the use of the conference center was underwritten by the Barbados government, which had openly invited the African/African Descendents caucus to hold its founding meeting in Barbados. The government has a nondiscriminatory policy that we as guests of the government should have respected. In addition, because the major corporate media focused only on this issue of expelling non-Africans, it can have a direct impact upon Barbados’ tourist-dependent economy as well as its relationship with a U.S. government hell bent on smashing all support for Reparations. | |
| Anticipating some of this wrath, the delegates passed a unanimous resolution stating that there should be no reprimands placed upon Brotha David Commissiong and the semi-governmental Pan African Commission he heads up because of the terrible mis- and dis-information being spewed out by the international corporate press. | |
| CIA presence | |
| Speaking of the U.S. government’s rabid anti-Reparations policy, you can rest assured that they want to kill this growing movement before it matures into a powerful global force challenging white supremacy and imperialism’s crushing globalization. Of course, there were at least three CIA agents present in Blackface. | |
| The Cuban delegation | |
| The Cuban delegation – and, therefore, government – was not and is not in opposition to the formation of a global PanAfrican organization or of Reparations. They were and are opposed to the expelling of non-Africans when there was publicity saying this was an open meeting for those interested in being in solidarity with and helping to form the united front of Africans and African descendents. | |
| We need not go into Cuba’s solid credentials of supporting with their own lives and medical and technical expertise African Liberation causes on the Continent and throughout the Diaspora. We don’t need to point out that Cuba has stood behind our Sistas Assata Shakur, Nihanda and other Black U.S. Freedomfighters for over 20 years - providing political asylum for them in spite of U.S. economic and military threats and bribes. We also need not point out that it was Fidel at the Durban UN World Conference Against Racism last year who laid out to the UN delegates the logic and moral necessity of Reparations. No other head of state took such a bold and clear positive stance for Reparations. | |
| It is absurd for some of us to think 1) that Fidel and the Cuban government have been opportunistic in their steadfast support of African Liberation as it struggles to endure a 42-year U.S. induced economic blockade and psychological, chemical and germ warfare. Remember, tens of thousands of Cubans volunteered to go and Fight and Die alongside Angolan, Namibian and South African Freedomfighters during the 1970s because they understood their African roots and the evils of imperialism grinding Africa and Africans into horrendous poverty and illness. | |
| 2) that Cuba is a “white” or “Latino” nation like Argentina or Paraguay. Cuba’s 11 million people are overwhelmingly of African descent and a very mixed group of folk. The majority of the “white” Cubans now reside in Miami and northern New Jersey. The spiritual base of the Cuban people is Santeria, a Yoruba-based religion. Cuba’s overall culture has an explicit African base that they no longer deny, but openly embrace. | |
| Brothas and Sistas, we, as the Global Afrikan Congress, will get absolutely no respect from many of those African/African Descendents we are going to try to join us in the monumental task of building the Congress if we do not immediately rectify our mishandlings with Cuba. It will haunt the Global Afrikan Congress and render us globally isolated as a bunch of narrow-minded super-Black nationalists seeking to unite only with the mythical “pure” African. | |
| The birth of the Global Afrikan Congress | |
| Through the various working groups deliberating over three days, the Global Afrikan Congress began to take shape. Keep in mind, the work was being done by hundreds of African people coming out of a very wide range of ideological and levels of activist experiences. The working groups were very open, lively and democratic in their deliberations, which rolled over to the final hours of plenary debates and discussions on structure and name. | |
| Reparations for the crimes of slavery, slave trade, colonialism and the lingering vestiges of these through white supremacy has become our centerpiece, which all our work informs and is informed by. There was no debate on this. | |
| The task now is to 1) immediately plan out the regional meetings so that they all occur within the next three to six months working towards a Global Afrikan Congress constitutional convention sometime in 2004 or 2005. | |
| 2) find ways to heal the wound between those Sistas and Brothas who chose to leave the conference after the vote supported the exclusion of non-Africans and bring them into the work ahead. | |
| 3) disseminate the working groups’ tasks and all the plenary resolutions to as many African/African Descent organizations as possible. | |
| You and I, Sistas and Brothas, along with countless millions of our brethren and sistren imbued with a lot of hard work and principledness are the only ones who can make the Global Afrikan Congress the real thing: powerfully Black and victorious for us, our ancestors and our future. | |
Mumia Abu Jamal reviews "The Black Holocaust For Beginners"
Mumia Abu Jamal is a Black Political Prisoner on Pennsylvania's DeathRow since 1982. Inspite of being under the harsh deathrow conditions, Brotha Mumia is able to get out four books and weekly commentaries both in writing and audio for radio (go to: for info on when his commentaries get aired).
The Black Holocaust for Beginners , by Sam E. Anderson: Unlike Addicted to War, Anderson's The Black Holocaust is not a comic book. It is heavily, and expertly illustrated, yet what drives the book is the text, as raw as new wounds on the skin of the psyche. It is a brilliant telling of, not just the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but the equally monstrous Arab slave trade along the eastern shores of Africa, which lasted some 600 years longer, and lasts up until our age. It is written in matter-of-fact style, straight forward; a chilling portrayal of foreign rapes and exploitation of Africa. It shows that the trade in human bondage was a global process, which involved and impacted millions of people. It uses both classical texts (like Cheikh Anta Diop's Civilization or Barbarism ) and numerous records from the period to give the speech, and flavor of the times to illustrate how economic, political, and social forces converged to justify slavery, and exploit the labor of millions. It's not 'fun' (it's not supposed to be), but it is informative. It really is the roots of America and much of the West.
The Black Holocaust for Beginners , by Sam E. Anderson: Unlike Addicted to War, Anderson's The Black Holocaust is not a comic book. It is heavily, and expertly illustrated, yet what drives the book is the text, as raw as new wounds on the skin of the psyche. It is a brilliant telling of, not just the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but the equally monstrous Arab slave trade along the eastern shores of Africa, which lasted some 600 years longer, and lasts up until our age. It is written in matter-of-fact style, straight forward; a chilling portrayal of foreign rapes and exploitation of Africa. It shows that the trade in human bondage was a global process, which involved and impacted millions of people. It uses both classical texts (like Cheikh Anta Diop's Civilization or Barbarism ) and numerous records from the period to give the speech, and flavor of the times to illustrate how economic, political, and social forces converged to justify slavery, and exploit the labor of millions. It's not 'fun' (it's not supposed to be), but it is informative. It really is the roots of America and much of the West.
The Fight Against Black Educational Genocide Grows In NYC
ARE BLACK NEW YORKERS LOSING THE WAR AGAINST 50-YEAR TIDE
OF EDUCATIONAL GENOCIDE?
By S. E. Anderson
OF EDUCATIONAL GENOCIDE?
Fifty years after the powerful impact of a combined legal strategy and activism across Black America that brought forth the Brown victory, we are worse off. The US political and economic system found ways to absorb our militancy and reformist demands because we– for the most part –wanted in to this rotten–by–nature system.
In the South, our Black- run schools were allowed to be dismantled… and most of our wonderful Black teachers wound up not teaching our children. In the North, white flight from the cities were the order of the day and we– for the most part– were uncritical of what and how our children were being taught by racist white teachers until… the rise of the Civil Rights/Black Power era of the 1960’s. It is in this era of the 60’s and 70’s that we dreamed of and struggled for POWER. Today, we need to rekindle that righteous fire to dream of and struggle for POWER. Especially the POWER to develop our children’s minds to be proudfully Black; to be inquisitive and critical thinkers; to embrace science and math….
…But today, if we randomly chose 100 eager wide-eyed Black kindergarten children from throughout the five boroughs entering Mayor Bloomberg’s “public” educational system, they have less of a chance of graduating from high school and going to college and graduating than their grand parents and great–grands did back in 1954 when the US Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional.
In fact, given the present quality of education provided for our children, this is what is happening and will most likely happen to them:
• Out of the 100 kindergarteners, only 40 will make it through to the 9th grade to high school––
• Out of the 40 who made it to high school only about 15 or 16 will graduate from high school––
• Out of the 15 or 16 who will be high school graduates, at most 6 will go on to college––-
• Out of the 6 who will go on to college at best 3 will graduate from a four–year college… and only 1 of them will be a Black man–– What happens to the 97 young Black men and women who never graduate from college?
We know only too well. Just walk down our neighborhood streets any workday afternoon and look at who’s hanging out. Just visit Riker’s Island… or any of NY’s prisons anytime. Just look at who’s behind the Burger King, KFC and McDonald’s counters for slave wages. Just look at who is getting killed in Iraq and other US imperial war zones of the world. It would be a horrendous criminal situation if we are only talking about 100 young Black men and women. But we are talking about witnessing tens of thousands of kindergarten-aged beautiful, inquisitive Black children being sent into these anti–education centers to be transformed into intellectual zombies destined to be bling–bling consumers, prisoners and warriors protecting white supremacists’ wealth in the name of “Democracy.
"We are also talking about us Black adults complying with these terrible institutional acts to render our children 21st century slaves. At the start of the 2004–05 school year we, African-American adult citizens of New York City, are allowing nearly 36,000 5 to 7–year-old Black children to enter the first stages of educational genocide, the systematic institutional miseducation of African- American, Latino and Asian youth based on the racist assumptions and policies of white supremacy that are embedded within the very structures of the US educational system. Let’s never forget that some 520,000 elementary and secondary Black children are also being subjected to this educational genocide policy.
This institutional mis–education process renders our children and our future “superfluous” (useless) to the needs of capitalism and white supremacy. At the start of the school year, we eagerly look forward to seeing our children go into these buildings of Education Hell. Sometimes we smile. Sometimes they smile or cry. We cry with pride & joy and with an undying assumption that our sons and daughters will learn and grow into prosperous men and women. We hope beyond hope that their experiences will be better than what happened to us.
Many of us either deny the horrors we see right in front of us or have fallen under the white supremacist spell that this is the best we can do because of our limited intellectual capacities. But since 1954, the reality is monstrously opposite of our dreams. For out of the 36,000 beautiful, bright Black tots happily skipping or tearfully being torn from moms or pops on that first day of school, 31,000 will end up with miserable lives of dropouts: jail, death, drug addiction, hustling, prostitution, teenage moms with no support, AIDS, dead–end jobs…. If we allow school year 2004–05 to go on as business as usual.
Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence (BNYEE) is here to say that we don’t have to have “business as usual” with Bloomberg and Klein cranking up their educational genocide machine preparing to transform our children’s brilliance into madness and criminal self–centeredness. BNYEE – Black men and women who are educators, parents and students – is here to take a stand and organize to regain community control of public schools so as to implement a curriculum that stimulates intellectual growth, critical thinking, scientific & technological knowledge, Black pride and respect for community.
BNYEE is prepared to go into every corner of the Black community to help build a mass movement to not only combat educational genocide currently operating within the public school systems, but we are also prepared to implement a totally different, more egalitarian, educational system where parents and students have a direct and equal say (as do the teachers and administrators) in the day–to–day operations of schools and the entire system.
BNYEE is a fighting organization. We know that this $12–14 billion/year educational system is run by ruthless men and women primarily concerned with making a profit and maintaining the criminalization and dumbing–down process of Black and Latino children. They are not going to give up their control through moral suasion and nice negotiations.
They have a “white supremacist” mandate to carry out… and have the backing from the governor, the US president and Congress through all kinds of racist and criminal policies including the No Child Left Behind Act that’s leaving our children behind at faster and faster rates than back in 1954.
A half–century after Brown v. Board’s promise of Black freedom and equality, we now have the possibility to unite and confront the educational genocide currently ravaging Black America in general and New York City in particular. BNYEE is just a local representation that is growing across Black America: organized resistance and struggle for education and liberation. It is ONLY You and I reading this that can fight to make this Black Freedom Promise a Reality.
BNYEE invites you to join us in this righteous work to bring educational excellence to our children. For information about our next meeting and actions please call: 718–270–6287.
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(S. E. Anderson is Education Director, Medgar Ecers College Center for Law and Social Justice, and author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners)
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