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The Current Global Food Crisis

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The World Food Crisis: Sources and Solutions
by Fred Magdoff

Fred Magdoff is professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont in Burlington and a director of the Monthly Review Foundation.



An acute food crisis has struck the world in 2008. This is on top of a longer-term crisis of agriculture and food that has already left billions hungry and malnourished. In order to understand the full, dire implications of what is happening today it is necessary to look at the interaction between these short-term and long-term crises. Both crises arise primarily from the for-profit production of food, fiber, and now biofuels, and the rift between food and people that this inevitably generates.

‘Routine’ Hunger before the Current Crisis

Of the more than 6 billion people living in the world today, the United Nations estimates that close to 1 billion suffer from chronic hunger. But this number, which is only a crude estimate, leaves out those suffering from vitamin and nutrient deficiencies and other forms of malnutrition. The total number of food insecure people who are malnourished or lacking critical nutrients is probably closer to 3 billion—about half of humanity. The severity of this situation is made clear by the United Nations estimate of over a year ago that approximately 18,000 children die daily as a direct or indirect consequence of malnutrition (Associated Press, February 18, 2007).

Lack of production is rarely the reason that people are hungry. This can be seen most clearly in the United States, where despite the production of more food than the population needs, hunger remains a significant problem. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2006 over 35 million people lived in food-insecure households, including 13 million children. Due to a lack of food adults living in over 12 million households could not eat balanced meals and in over 7 million families someone had smaller portions or skipped meals. In close to 5 million families, children did not get enough to eat at some point during the year.

In poor countries too, it is not unusual for large supplies of wasted and misallocated food to exist in the midst of widespread and persistent hunger. A few years ago a New York Times article had a story with the following headline “Poor in India Starve as Surplus Wheat Rots” (December 2, 2002). As a Wall Street Journal headline put it in 2004 “Want Amid Plenty, An Indian Paradox: Bumper Harvests and Rising Hunger” (June 25, 2004).

No ‘Right to Food’


Hunger and malnutrition generally are symptoms of a larger underlying problem—poverty in an economic system that recognizes, as Rachel Carson put it, no other gods but those of profit and production. Food is treated in almost all of the world’s countries as just another commodity, like clothes, automobiles, pencils, books, diamond jewelry, and so on. People are not considered to have a right to purchase any particular commodity, and no distinction is made in this respect between necessities and luxuries. Those who are rich can afford to purchase anything they want while the poor are often not able to procure even their basic needs. Under capitalist relations people have no right to an adequate diet, shelter, and medical attention. As with other commodities, people without what economists call “effective demand” cannot buy sufficient nutritious food. Of course, lack of “effective demand” in this case means that the poor don’t have enough money to buy the food they need.

Humans have a “biological demand” for food—we all need food, just as we need water and air, to continue to live. It is a systematic fact of capitalist society that many are excluded from fully meeting this biological need. It’s true that some wealthy countries, especially those in Europe, do help feed the poor, but the very way capitalism functions inherently creates a lower strata of society that frequently lacks the basics for human existence. In the United States there are a variety of government initiatives—such as food stamps and school lunch programs—aimed at feeding the poor. Yet, the funding for these programs does not come close to meeting the needs of the poor, and various charities fight an uphill battle trying to make up the difference.
In this era relatively few people actually die from starvation, aside from the severe hunger induced by wars and dislocations. Most instead become chronically malnourished and then are plagued by a variety of diseases that shorten their lives or make them more miserable. The scourge of malnutrition impedes children’s mental and physical development, harming them for the rest of their lives.

The Acute and Growing Crisis: The Great Hunger of 2008

At this moment in history there are, in addition to the “routine” hunger discussed above, two separate global food crises occurring simultaneously. The severe and acute crisis, about two years old, is becoming worse day by day and it is this one that we’ll discuss first. The severity of the current crisis cannot be overstated. It has rapidly increased the number of people around the globe that are malnourished. Although statistics of increased hunger during the past year are not yet available, it is clear that many will die prematurely or be harmed in other ways. As usual, it will be the young, the old, and the infirm that will suffer the worst effects of the Great Hunger of 2008. The rapid and simultaneous rise in the world prices for all the basic food crops—corn (maize), wheat, soybeans, rice, and cooking oils—along with many other crops is having a devastating effect on an increasing portion of humanity.

The increases in the world market prices over the past few years have been nothing short of astounding. The prices of the sixty agricultural commodities traded on the world market increased 37 percent last year and 14 percent in 2006 (New York Times, January 19, 2008). Corn prices began their rise in the early fall of 2006 and within months had soared by some 70 percent. Wheat and soybean prices also skyrocketed during this time and are now at record levels. The prices for cooking oils (mainly made from soybeans and oil palm)—an essential foodstuff in many poor countries—have rocketed up as well. Rice prices have also risen over 100 percent in the last year (“High Rice Cost Creating Fears of Asia Unrest,” New York Times, March 29, 2008).

The reasons for these soaring food prices are fairly clear. First, there are a number of issues related directly or indirectly to the increase in petroleum prices. In the United States, Europe, and many other countries this has brought a new emphasis on growing crops that can be used for fuel—called biofuels (or agrofuels). Thus, producing corn to make ethanol or soybean and palm oil to make diesel fuel is in direct competition with the use of these crops for food. Last year over 20 percent of the entire corn crop in the United States was used to produce ethanol—a process that does not yield much additional energy over that which goes into producing it. (It is estimated that over the next decade about one-third of the U.S. corn crop will be devoted to ethanol production [Bloomberg, February 21, 2008].) Additionally, many of the inputs for large-scale commercial agricultural production are based on petroleum and natural gas—from building and running tractors and harvesting equipment to producing fertilizers and pesticides and drying crops for storage. The price of nitrogen fertilizer, the most commonly used fertilizer worldwide, is directly tied to the price of energy because it takes so much energy to produce.

A second cause of the increase in prices of corn and soybeans and soy cooking oil is that the increasing demand for meat among the middle class in Latin America and Asia, especially China. The use of maize and soy to feed cattle, pigs, and poultry has risen sharply to satisfy this demand. The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last twenty years alone. (New York Times, January 27, 2008.) Feeding grain to more and more animals is putting growing pressure on grain stores. Feeding grain to produce meat is a very inefficient way of providing people with either calories or protein. It is especially wasteful for animals such as cows—with digestive systems that can derive energy from cellulose—because they can obtain all of their nutrition from pastures and will grow well without grain, although more slowly. Cows are not efficient converters of corn or soy to meat—to yield a pound of meat, cows require eight pounds of corn; pigs, five; and chickens, three (Baron’s, March 4, 2008).

A third reason for the big jump in world food prices is that a few key countries that were self-sufficient—that is, did not import foods, although plenty of people suffered from hunger—are now importing large quantities of food. As a farm analyst in New Delhi says “When countries like India start importing food, then the world prices zoom....If India and China are both turning into bigger importers, shifting from food self-sufficiency as recently we have seen in India, then the global prices are definitely going to rise still further, which will mean the era of cheaper food has now definitely gone away” (VOA News, February 21, 2008). Part of the reason for the pressure on rice prices is the loss of farmland to other uses such as various development projects—some 7 million acres in China and 700,000 acres in Vietnam. In addition, rice yields per acre in Asia have reached a plateau. There has been no per acre increase for ten years and yield increases are not expected in the near future (Rice Today, January–March 2008).

Some of the reasons for the recent price increases for wheat and rice are related to weather. The drought in Australia, a major wheat exporting country, and low yields in a few other exporters has greatly affected wheat prices. A 2007 cyclone in Bangladesh destroyed approximately 600 million dollars worth of its rice crop, leading to rice price increases of about 70 percent (The Daily Star [Bangladesh], February 11, 2008). The drought last year in northcentral China combined with the unusual cold and snow during the winter will probably lead the government to greater food purchases on the international markets, keeping the pressure on prices.

Speculation in the futures market and hoarding at the local level are certainly playing a part in this crisis situation to make food more expensive. As the U.S. financial crisis deepened and spread in the winter of 2008, speculators started putting more money into food and metals to take advantage of what is being called the “commodities super cycle.” (The dollar’s decline relative to other currencies stimulates “investment” in tangible commodities.) While it would be a mistake to see these aspects, however despicable and inhumane, as the cause of the crisis, they certainly add to the misery by taking advantage of tight markets. It is certainly possible that the commodity bubble will burst, bringing down food prices a bit. However, speculation and local hoarding will continue to put an upward pressure on food prices. Transnational corporations that process agricultural products, manufacture various foods, and sell food to the public are, of course, all doing exceptionally well. Corporate profits usually do well in a time of shortages and price increases.

Although not a cause for the increase in prices of other foods, the higher prices for ocean fish have created an added burden for the poor and near poor. Overfishing of many ocean species is removing this important protein source from the diet of a large percentage of the world’s population.

The response to the crisis has come in the form of demonstrations and riots as well as changes in government policies. Over the past few months there have been protests and riots over the increasing cost of food in many countries, including Pakistan, Guinea, Mauritania, Morocco, Mexico, Senegal, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. China has instituted price controls for basic foods and Russia has frozen the price of milk, bread, eggs, and cooking oil for six months. Egypt, India, and Vietnam have banned or placed strict control on the export of rice so that their own people will have sufficient food. Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, has expanded the number of people eligible to receive food aid by over 10 million. Many countries have lowered protectionist tariffs to try to lessen the blow of dramatically higher prices of imported foods. Countries heavily dependent on food imports such as the Philippines, the world’s largest importer of rice, are scrambling to make deals to obtain the needed imports. But these various stop-gap efforts have mainly marginal effects on the problem. Almost all people are forced into a lower standard of living as those in the middle class become increasingly careful about the foods they purchase, the near poor drop into poverty, and the formerly poor become truly destitute and suffer greatly. The effects have been felt around the world in all classes of society except the truly wealthy. As Josette Sheeran, the head of the UN’s World Food Program, said in February, “This is the new face of hunger....There is food on shelves but people are priced out of the market. There is vulnerability in urban areas we have not seen before. There are food riots in countries where we have not seen them before” (The Guardian, Feb. 26, 2008).

Although Haiti has been a very poor country for years—80 percent of the people try to subsist on less than what two dollars a day can purchase in the United States—the recent situation has brought it to new depths of desperation. Two cups of rice, which cost thirty cents a year ago, now cost sixty cents. The description of an Associated Press article from earlier this year (January 29, 2008) is most poignant in its details:

It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau.

The “cookies” also contain some vegetable shortening and salt. Toward the end of the article is the following:

Marie Noel, 40, sells the cookies in a market to provide for her seven children. Her family also eats them.

“I’m hoping one day I’ll have enough food to eat, so I can stop eating these,” she said. “I know it’s not good for me.”

Many countries in Africa and Asia have been severely impacted by the crisis with hunger spreading widely—but all nations are affected to one extent or another. In the United States—where over the past year the price of eggs increased 38 percent, milk by 30 percent, lettuce by 16 percent, and whole wheat bread by 12 percent—many people are starting to purchase less costly products. “Higher Food Prices Start to Pinch Consumers” is the way the Wall Street Journal put it in a headline (January 3, 2008).

It should be noted here that while wheat prices are at record levels and prices of wheat products in the United States will certainly go higher, the cost of the wheat in a loaf of bread is only small part of the retail price. When wheat prices double, as they have, the price of a loaf of bread may increase by 10 percent, perhaps from $3 to $3.30. However, the effect of a doubling of prices for corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice is devastating for poor people in the third world who primarily purchase raw commodities.

With food pantries and soup kitchens stretched to the breaking point, the U.S. poor are experiencing deepening suffering. In general, the poor in the United States tend to first pay their rent, heat, gas (for a car to get to work), and electricity bills. That leaves food as one of the few “flexible” items in their budgets. In the central part of my home state of Vermont, over the last year the use of food shelves (i.e., aid from local, charitable food assistance programs that give groceries directly to the needy) has increased 133 percent among all users and 180 percent among the working poor! (Hal Cohen, with the Central Vermont Community Action Council, personal communication February 20, 2008.)

The economic recession is beginning to be felt in many parts of the United States, adding to the rise in requests for help from the various government food assistance programs (“As Jobs Vanish and Prices Rise, Food Stamp Use Nears Record,” New York Times, March 31, 2008). But, frequently people using the inadequately funded government programs tend to run out of food toward the end of the month, resulting in a huge increase in demand at food shelves and soup kitchens at that time. And as the need for food has increased, food donations have actually declined—with a large drop in federal donations (with high prices there are fewer “surplus” commodities from farm programs, so $58 million in food was given to food shelves last year versus $242 million five years before).

Supermarkets have found ways to make money from damaged or dated goods they previously donated to charities. In Connecticut, there has been a surge in demand for food while supply is not keeping up. A food pantry in Stamford is supplying food to four hundred families, double the number of a year ago. According to the food pantry’s director, “I have had to turn people away....There were times I went home and wanted to cry” (New York Times, December 23, 2007). A professor at Cornell University who studies food-assistance programs in the United States has summarized the situation: “There is a nascent crisis building....Demand for food-bank assistance is climbing rapidly when the resources are falling in dramatic terms because the dollars just don’t go as far” (Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2008).

The Long-Term Food Crisis

As critical as the short-term food crisis is—demanding immediate world notice as well as attention within every country—the long-term, structural crisis is even more important. The latter has existed for decades and contributes to, and is reinforced by, today’s acute food crisis. Indeed, it is this underlying structural crisis of agriculture and food in third world societies which constitutes the real reason that the immediate food crisis is so severe and so difficult to surmount within the system.

There has been a huge migration of people out of the countryside to the cities of the third world. They leave the countryside because they lack access to land. Often their land has been stolen as a result of the inroads of agribusiness, while they are also forced from the land by low prices they have historically received for their products and threats against campesino lives. They move to cities seeking a better life but what they find is a very hard existence—life in slums with extremely high unemployment and underemployment. Most will try to scrape by in the “informal” economy by buying things and then selling them in small quantities. Of the half of humanity that lives in cities (3 billion), some 1 billion, or one-third of city dwellers, live in slums. The chairman of a district in Lagos, Nigeria described it as follows: “We have a massive growth in population with a stagnant or shrinking economy. Picture this city ten, twenty years from now. This is not the urban poor—this is the new urban destitute.” A long New Yorker article on Lagos ended on a note of extreme pessimism: “The really disturbing thing about Lagos’ pickers and vendors is that their lives have essentially nothing to do with ours. They scavenge an existence beyond the margins of macroeconomics. They are, in the harsh terms of globalization, superfluous” (November 13, 2006).

One of the major factors pushing this mass and continuing migration to the cities—in addition to being landless or forced off land—is the difficulty to make a living as a small farmer. This has been made especially difficult, as countries have implemented the “neoliberal” policies recommended or mandated by the IMF, the World Bank, and even some of the western NGOs working in the poor countries of the third world. The neoliberal ideology holds that the so-called free market should be allowed to work its magic. Through the benign sanctions of the “invisible hand,” it is said, the economy will function most efficiently and will be highly productive. But in order for the market to be “free” governments must stop interfering.

With regard to agriculture, governments should stop subsidizing farmers to purchase
fertilizers, stop being involved in the storage and transportation of food, and just let farmers and food alone. This approach also holds that governments should stop subsidizing food for poor people and then the newly unbridled market will take care of it all. This mentality was evident as the Haitian food crisis started to develop late in 2007. According to the Haitian Minister of Commerce and Industry, “We cannot intervene and fix prices because we have to comply with free market regulations” (Reuters, December 9, 2007). This was the same response that colonial Britain adopted in response to the Irish potato famine as well as to the famines in India in the late 1800s. But to a certain extent this way of thinking is now internalized in the thinking of many leaders in the “independent” countries of the periphery.

This ideology, of course, has no basis in reality—the so-called free market is not necessarily efficient at all. It is also absolutely unable to act as a mechanism to end poverty and hunger. We should always keep in mind that this ideology represents the exact opposite of what the core capitalist countries have historically done and what they are actually doing today. For example, the U.S. national government has supported farmers in many ways for over a century. This has occurred through government programs for research and extension, taking land from Indians and giving it to farmers of European origin, subsidizing farmers directly through a variety of programs including low-cost loans, and stimulating the export of crops. It should also be noted that the United States, Europe, and Japan all developed their industrial economies under protectionist policies plus a variety of programs of direct assistance to industry.

The effects of the governments of the third world stopping their support of small farmers and consumers has meant that the life for the poor in those countries has become more difficult. As an independent report commissioned by World Bank put it: “In most reforming countries, the private sector did not step in to fill the vacuum when the public sector withdrew” (New York Times, October 15, 2007). For example, many African governments under pressure from the neoliberal economic policies promoted by the World Bank, the IMF, and the rich countries of the center of the system stopped subsidizing the use of fertilizers on crops. Although it is true that imported fertilizers are very expensive, African soils are generally of very low fertility and crop yields are low when you use neither synthetic nor organic fertilizers. As yields fell after governments were no longer assisting the purchase of fertilizers and helping in other ways, more farmers found that they could not survive and migrated to the city slums. Jeffrey Sachs—a partially recovered free-trade shock doctor—has had some second thoughts. According to Sachs, “The whole thing was based on the idea that if you take away the government for the poorest of the poor that somehow these markets will solve the problems....But markets can’t step in and won’t step in when people have nothing. And if you take away help, you leave them to die” (New York Times, October 15, 2007).

Last year one country in Africa, Malawi, decided to reverse course and go against all the recommendations they had received. The government reintroduced subsidies for fertilizers and seeds. Farmers used more fertilizers, the yields increased, and the country’s food situation improved greatly (New York Times, December 2, 2007). In fact, they were able to export some food to Zimbabwe—although there are those in Malawi, who consider that to have lowered their own supplies too far.

Another problem occurs as capitalist farmers in some of the poor countries of the periphery enter into world markets. While subsistence farmers usually sell only a small portion of their crops, using most for family consumption, capitalist farmers are those that market all or a large portion of what they produce. They frequently expand production and take over the land of small farmers, with or without compensation, and use fewer people than previously to work a given piece of land because of mechanized production techniques. In Brazil, the “Soybean King” controls well over a quarter of a million acres (100,000 hectares) and uses huge tractors and harvesting equipment for working the land. In China corrupt village and city officials frequently sell “common land” to developers without adequate compensation to the farmers—sometimes there is no compensation at all.

Thus, the harsh conditions for farmers caused by a number of factors, made worse by the implementing of free-market ideology, have created a continuing stream of people leaving the countryside and going to live in cities that do not have jobs for them. And those now living in slums and without access to land to grow their own food are at the mercy of the world price for food.

One of the reasons for the growing consolidation of land holdings and forcing out of subsistence farmers is the penetration of multinational agricultural corporations into the countries of the periphery. From selling seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides to processing raw agricultural products to exporting or selling them through new, large supermarkets, agribusiness multinationals are having a devastating effect on small farmers. With the collapse of extension systems for helping farmers save seeds and with the disbanding of government seed companies the way was paved for multinational seed companies to make major inroads.

The giant transnational corporations such as Cargill and Monsanto now reach into most of the third world—selling seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and feeds while buying and processing raw agricultural products. In the process they assist larger farms to become “more efficient” —to grow over larger land areas. The main advantage of genetically modified organism (GMO) seeds is that they help to simplify the process of farming and allow large acreages to be under the management of a single entity—a large farmer or corporation—squeezing out small farmers.

The negative effects of the penetration of large supermarket chains are being felt as well. As a 2004 headline in the New York Times put it “Supermarket Giants Crush Central American Farmers” (December 28, 2004). Large supermarkets would rather deal with a few farmers growing on a large scale than with many small farmers. And the opening of large supermarkets does away with the traditional markets used by small farmers.

The Prolonged Crisis Is Intensifying


It seems logical that with higher food prices, farmers should be better off and produce more to satisfy the “demand” indicated by the market. To a certain extent that is true—especially for farmers that can take advantage of all the physical and monetary advantages of large-scale production. Yet, the input costs for just about everything used in agricultural production have also increased, thus profit gains for farmers are not as large as might be expected. This is a particularly difficult problem for farmers raising animals fed on increasingly expensive grains.

In addition, things are not necessarily going well for small and subsistence farmers. Many are stuck in debt so deep that it’s hard for them to get back on their feet. An estimated 25,000 Indian farmers committed suicide last year because they could see no other way out of their predicament. (The Indian government has proposed a budget that includes loan wavers for small farmers that have borrowed through banks. However, if it actually goes into effect, the millions that have borrowed from local usurers will not benefit.) The consolidation of land holdings and the removal of small farmers and landless workers from the land has been exacerbated by the exceptional crop price increases over the last few years.

Rising crop prices cause the price of farmland to increase—especially of large fields that can be worked by large-scale machinery. This is happening in the United States and in certain countries of the periphery. For example, Global Ag Investments, a company based in Texas, owns and operates 34,000 acres of Brazilian farmland. At one of its farms, a single field of soybeans covers 1,600 acres—that’s two and a half square miles! A New Zealand company has purchased approximately 100,000 acres in Uruguay and has hired managers to operate dairy farms established on their land.

Private equity firms are purchasing farmland in the United States (Associated Press, May 7, 2007) as well as abroad. A U.S. company is cooperating with Brazilian and Japanese partners to purchase 385 square miles in Brazil, approximately a quarter of a million acres! This is also happening with South American capital taking the lead—a Brazilian investment fund, Investimento em Participacoe, is buying a minority stake in a an Argentine soybean producer that owns close to 400,000 acres in Uruguay and Argentina.

Rising crop prices have also led to an acceleration of deforestation in the Amazon basin—1,250 square miles (about the size of Rhode Island) in the last five months of 2007—as capitalist farmers hunger for more land (BBC, January 24, 2008). In addition, huge areas of farmland have been taken for development—some of dubious use, such as building suburban style housing and golf courses for the wealthy.

In China during 2000 to 2005, there was an average annual loss of 2.6 million acres as farmland is used for development. The country is fast approaching the self-defined minimum amount of arable farmland that it should have—approximately 290 million acres (120 million hectares)—and the amount of farmland will most likely continue to fall. As part of an effort to gain access to foreign agricultural production, a Chinese company has made an agreement to lease close to 2.5 million acres of land in the Philippines to grow rice, corn, and sugar—setting off a huge protest in the Philippines that has temporarily stalled the project (Bloomberg, February 21, 2008). As one farmer put it: “The [Philippine] government and the Chinese call it a partnership, but it only means the Chinese will be our landlords and we will be the slaves.’’

Ending World Hunger

Ending world hunger is conceptually quite simple. However, actually putting it into practice is far from simple. First, the access to a healthy and varied diet needs to be recognized for the basic human right that it clearly is. Governments must commit to ending hunger among their people and they must take forceful action to carry out this commitment. In many countries, even at this time, there is sufficient food produced to feed the entire population at a high level of nutrition. This is, of course, most evident in the United States, where so much food is produced. It is nothing less than a crime that so many of the poor in the United States are hungry, malnourished, or don’t know where their next meal will come from (which itself takes a psychological toll) when there is actually plenty of food.

In the short run, the emergency situation of increasingly severe hunger and malnutrition needs be addressed with all resources at a country’s disposal. Although mass bulk distribution of grains or powdered milk can play a role, countries might consider the Venezuelan innovation of setting up feeding houses in all poor neighborhoods. When the people believe that the government is really trying to help them, and they are empowered to find or assist in a solution to their own problems, a burst of enthusiasm and volunteerism results. For example, although the food in Venezuela’s feeding program is supplied by the government, the meals for poor children, the elderly, and the infirm are prepared in, and distributed from, peoples’ homes using considerable amounts of volunteer labor. In addition, Venezuela has developed a network of stores that sell basic foodstuffs at significant discounts over prices charged in private markets.

Brazil started a program in 2003 that is aimed at alleviating the conditions of the poorest people. Approximately one-quarter of Brazil’s population receive direct payments from the national government under the Bolsa Família (Family Fund) antipoverty program. Under this program a family with a per capita daily income below approximately $2 per person per day receives a benefit of up to $53 per month per person (The Economist, February 7, 2008). This infusion of cash is dependent on the family’s children attending school and participating in the national vaccination program. This program is certainly having a positive effect on peoples’ lives and nutrition. It is, however, a system that does not have the same effect as Venezuela’s programs, which mobilize people to work together for their own and their community’s benefit.

Urban gardens have been used successfully in Cuba as well as other countries to supply city dwellers with food as well as sources of income. These should be strongly promoted—with creative use of available space in urban settings.

Agriculture must become one of the top priorities for the third world. Even the World Bank is beginning to stress the importance of governments assisting agriculture in their countries. As Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director of the World Bank, has stated,

Today the attention of the world’s policy makers is focused on the sub-prime woes, and the financial crises. But the real crisis is that of hunger and malnutrition...this is the real problem that should grab the world’s attention. We know that 75 percent of the world’s poor people are rural and most of them depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Agriculture is today, more than ever, a fundamental instrument for fighting hunger, malnutrition, and for supporting sustainable development and poverty reduction. (All-Africa Global Media, February 19, 2008)

Almost every country in the world has the soil, water, and climate resources to grow enough food so that all their people can eat a healthy diet. In addition, the knowledge and crop varieties already exist in most countries so that if farmers are given adequate assistance they will be able to grow reasonably high yields of crops.

Although enhanced agricultural production is essential, much of the emphasis in the past has been on production of export crops. While this may help a country’s balance of payments, export oriented agriculture does not ensure sufficient food for everyone nor does it promote a healthy rural environment. In addition to basic commodities such as soybeans, export-oriented agriculture also leads naturally to the production of high-value luxury crops demanded by export markets (luxuries from the standpoint of the basic food needs of a poor third world country), rather than the low-value subsistence crops needed to meet the needs of the domestic population. Production of sufficient amounts of the right kinds of food within each country’s borders—by small farmers working in cooperatives or on their own and using sustainable techniques—is the best way to achieve the goal of “food security.” In this way the population may be insulated, at least partially, from the price fluctuations on the world market. This, of course, also means not taking land out of food production to produce crops for the biofuel markets.

One of the ways to do this and at the same time help with the problem of so many people crowded into urban slums—the people most susceptible to food price increases—is to provide land through meaningful agrarian reforms. But land itself is not enough. Beginning or returning farmers need technical and financial support in order to produce food. Additionally, social support systems, such as cooperatives and community councils, need to be developed to help promote camaraderie and to solidify the new communities that are developed. Perhaps each community needs to be “seeded” with a sprinkling of devoted activists. Also, housing, electricity, water, and wastewater need to be available to make it attractive for people living in the cities to move to the countryside. Another way to encourage people to move to the country to become farmers is to appeal to patriotism and instill the idea that they are real pioneers, establishing a new food system to help their countries gain food self-sufficiency, i.e., independence from transnational agribusiness corporations and provision of healthy food for all the nation’s people. These pioneering farmers need to be viewed by themselves, the rest of the society, and their government as critical to the future of their countries and the well-being of the population. They must be treated with the great respect that they deserve.

Conclusion

Food is a human right and governments have a responsibility to see that their people are well fed. In addition, there are known ways to end hunger—including emergency measures to combat the current critical situation, urban gardens, agrarian reforms that include a whole support system for farmers, and sustainable agriculture techniques that enhance the environment. The present availability of food to people reflects very unequal economic and political power relationships within and between countries. A sustainable and secure food system requires a different and much more equitable relationship among people. The more the poor and farmers themselves are included in all aspects of the effort to gain food security, and the more they are energized in the process, the greater will be the chance of attaining lasting food security. As President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, a country that has done so much to deal with poverty and hunger, has put it,

Yes, it is important to end poverty, to end misery, but the most important thing is to offer power to the poor so that they can fight for themselves.

The Late Great Sekou Sundiata Droppin a Reparations Rap


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National Reparations Education & Mobilization Campaign
Launched By The Reparations Mobilization Coalition

The Reparations Mobilization Coalition is Working Hard to Build a Massive Black Reparations Campaign. We are working to help build a National Reparations Campaign with other pro-reparations organizations and individuals which will culminate in a mobilization of several million Black people not only demanding reparations but actively engaged in the various efforts for its realization. We understand that a comprehensive Reparations campaign embraces ALL of our sites of struggle and areas of concern.

There are many reasons why we have a campaign for Reparations, not the least of which is the UN World Conference Against Racism's announcement to the US, Europe, and the rest of the world, that people of African descent are determined not to begin a new millennium with this UNRESOLVED issue of compensation for past and present crimes against African Humanity.

The following are some of the reasons for a National Campaign and Congress for Reparations for people of African descent.

• A Reparations Campaign enjoys major support within our communities. It has the capacity to revitalize the Black Liberation Movement and reassert the leading role of the Black progressive forces.

• A Reparations Campaign is primarily directed at the U.S. (Federal and State governments) but is also directed at other Western Imperialist Capitalist powers, corporations and individual families that have benefited from slavery as well. Foreign states who participated in the slave trade and slavery including the structures of the United Nations can still be used as part of an international Reparations strategy.

• A Reparations Campaign is fundamentally anti racist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. It attacks the very heart of these oppressive systems. We have never been compensated for the millions and millions of hours of unpaid labor conservatively estimated to be $97 trillion for enslaved African labor in the US alone. Our ancestors were the backbone to the development of capitalism here in the US and throughout the rest of the world!

• A Reparations Campaign will include the demand for compensation of the tens of thousands of Black men and women who were used as prison labor to work without pay on farms, factories and mines throughout the South from the time of Reconstruction to the present.

• A Reparations Campaign will include the demand to cancel the usury rates imposed upon us through killer mortgages and loan shark credit card interest rates.

• A Reparations Campaign will demand that African Americans pay no federal, state or municipal taxes until there is economic parity between white America and Black America.

• A Reparations Campaign will demand that African Americans have access to free education up to an including graduate work wherever one is accepted to study until there is education parity between white America and Black America.


• A Reparations Campaign will demand that African Americans have access to free healthcare for one entire life. This would include our choice of Western or nonWestern medical care as well as free medicine and homecare.

• A Reparations Campaign will demand the creation of a Reparations Cooperative Development Bank to help develop, employ and advance the Black communities of the US. It will operate independent of the federal government and the monopolistic banking system. It will operate under the auspices of the UN's international development banking system... monitored by an international team of peoples development specialists (such as from the Indian state of Kerala, Cuba and Vietnam).

• A Reparations Campaign will include a debt cancellation demand resonating throughout Africa and the Diaspora. It will also support the demand for reparations presently unfolding for African nations and the Diaspora for the crimes of genocide, colonialism and present-day neocolonialism.

• A Reparations Campaign is a powerful tool to educate the people of the U.S. and world societies about a brutal and savage system that is the basis for institutional racism and white supremacist oppression today. A system which inflicted on African people the most horrific form of cultural genocide (virtually complete destruction of historical memory, religion, language, traditions, ancestry) which continues to be the basis for the racist dehumanization and demonization of African peoples and other oppressed peoples of color.

• A Reparations Campaign will demand the return of all stolen African/African Descendent art to their respectful homeland. The Reparations Campaign will seek out stolen African art in museums, corporations and private hands. It will leave no stone unturned in the search for the thousands of sacred items of our African cultural and spiritual heritage.

• A Reparations Campaign will educate our people to the fact that our ancestral mothers have never been compensated for the reproduction of Human Capital (giving birth to an African child during slavery which meant that this child automatically had a "price value") through rape and/or forced breeding. The Black Woman has not only never been compensated for her brutal field work (and the tortuous work in the Master's house), but also her domestic chores within the slave quarters. This most beastly form of slavery tried to humiliate and strip our ancestral mothers and fathers of their womanhood and manhood.

• A Reparations Campaign will educate our people to the fact that our ancestral fathers had to face systemic humiliating attempts to strip them of their manhood and dignity of which its horrific legacy resonates throughout US cultural, governmental, and corporate institutions today.

• A Reparations Campaign will demand just compensation for the millions of Black children forced into horrific death inducing child labor from as early 3 years old.

• A Reparations Campaign will expose the additional injuries inflicted during slavery: the never ending war against free Blacks. This war was in an anticipation of what would become of us during the post-slavery oppression period: rapes, lynchings, pogroms (state sanctioned and initiated murder) and anti-migration laws. For instance, this included 19th century anti-migration laws- often written into state constitutions- that were passed to stop African Americans from settling in Illinois, Indiana, and Oregon. This pattern of conscious legal exclusion denied our ancestors the possibility of benefiting from land grants made available for old and new members of these states. These are legal injuries that must be calculated into the reparations demands. We cannot look at the oppression and repression of our enslaved and "free" ancestors as two distinct realities. They were just two sides of the same racist and capitalist coins that fed the banks and wallets of the ruling classes of Europe and the Americas.

• A Reparations Campaign is a self-reliant movement; it is a nation building campaign that allows Black people to address some of the fundamental issues confronting our survival today. It gives us the ability to create our very own self-determining institutions in developing jobs with a living wage, quality affordable housing, healthcare and anti- racist education.

• A Reparations Campaign will include the fight to free all US political prisoners and prisoners of war as well as the battle to dismantle the racist prison industrial complex. They are the direct political descendants of our warrior-ancestors who gave their lives organizing for and fighting for our liberation and dignity from the 15th Century onwards. Today's US political prisoners and prisoners of war are also the direct victims of US capitalism's systematic anti-freedom and unprincipled campaign called the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO).

• A Reparations Campaign is the most powerful weapon that can be used against racism and the right-wing onslaught on affirmative action and political disenfranchisement (voting-while-Black).

• A Reparations Campaign will create a strategic bridge between Africa and the Diaspora. Blacks from Brazil, Costa Rica, Columbia, Honduras, and throughout the Caribbean are currently joining the International Reparations Campaign by the thousands.

• A Reparations Campaign is ultimately a political offensive. Issues such as homelessness, struggles for jobs, universal health care, decent affordable housing organizing against attacks on welfare, cutbacks on education, attacks on affirmative action, anti-gay violence, discrimination based on sexual orientation, sexual harassment in the workplace, domestic violence, police brutality, racist and fascist attacks on the Black community, amnesty for political prisoners, the genocidal incarceration of Black youth, and the prison industrial complex, etc. all can be connected to and enhanced by a United Campaign for Reparations.

Contact:

The Reparations Mobilization Coalition
451 West St
NYC 10013

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Principal Baruti Kafele Droppin' Mad Education Science
Speaking at a 2008 Los Angeles conference entitled: Motivating African and Latino Boys to Excel in the Classroom and Beyond



Baruti Kafele is principal of Newark Tech Hi School in Newark, NJ. He has turned this school-as-preprison into a center of Black & Latino educational excellence. His website is: <http://www.principalkafele.com> where you can get more info and purchase his very useful books.
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NYPD Go To Hell! We Are ALL Sean Bell!

Tim Wise on the Creation & Impact of Whiteness

This is a clip from The Pathology of Privilege: Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality, the newly released video from the Media Education Foundation. The video is of a speech given by Tim Wise at Mt. Holyoke College, October 1, 2007

=====================

(Proto)Typical White Denial:
Reflections on Racism and Uncomfortable Realities

By Tim Wise

April 2, 2008

Not long ago, after I had written an article in which I discussed white denial--the tendency for most white folks to reject the notion that racism is still a significant obstacle for people of color in the U.S.--I received an e-mail from a white man who insisted that my argument was itself racist. His reason? According to his message, simply by stating that most white folks remain in denial about the extent of racism and discrimination against people of color, I had engaged in anti-white bigotry, since I had made a generalization about a racial group: in this case, the one that both he and I share.

He went on to offer an analogy that he felt proved my argument to be racist. "What if I were to write an article where I said 'most black people are criminals'?" he asked. "Wouldn't that be racist against blacks?" In other words, he argued, to make any comments about racial groups is inherently racist, and so my saying that most whites were in denial was every bit as bad as saying that most blacks are criminals.

Of course, and as I explained to him at the time, such an argument makes no sense at all. The reason it is racist to say that "most blacks are criminals," is because such a position is based on racial stereotypes rather than factual information: it casts aspersions upon an entire group of people, based not on truth, but on the basis of ignorant prejudice. Most blacks are not criminals; indeed, the vast majority are not. There are about 28 million African Americans over the age of 12 in the U.S. (and thus eligible for inclusion in crime data), and only a small number of these (fewer than five percent) will commit a crime in a given year. So while it would not be racist to note that black folks have a higher official crime rate than whites--this is a fact borne out by evidence, and which doesn't necessarily cast a characterological judgment upon those it mentions--saying that most blacks are criminals is simply a lie, and to the extent it casts aspersions upon a racial group that can lead to their continued stereotyping, a racist lie at that.

To say that "most white folks are in denial" is not racist, because such a belief is not based on stereotypes about whites; rather, the claim is supported by what white folks actually say when asked if we believe racism to be a significant problem: the vast majority, in poll after poll answer that it is not, irrespective of the evidence to the contrary. And we have long believed that, so even in the early 1960s, at a time when in retrospect all would agree the nation was profoundly unequal in its treatment of people of color, whites told pollsters in overwhelming numbers (anywhere from sixty-five to nearly ninety percent) that blacks had equal opportunities in employment and education. White denial has been a hallmark of the nation's racial history. Saying that is not racist, it is an incontrovertible fact.

Apparently, and if recent events are any indication, the difference between mentioning a group tendency, on the one hand, and casting aspersions upon the group in question, on the other, is something lots of folks can't quite grasp. So, consider the uproar among many white Americans when presidential candidate, Barack Obama stated recently that his grandmother had been a "typical white person," in that she would often have a negative reaction when encountering someone of a different race. The comment, made during a radio program the day after Obama's now-famous speech on race from Philadelphia, was taken by an awful lot of whites as a racist assault, a blatantly prejudicial example of anti-white bigotry on the part of the U.S. Senator. To many whites, still in a lather over the comments made by Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, the "typical white person" remark was only further confirmation that Obama is racist against white people. The story dominated talk radio for days, as well as letters to the editor of local and national papers, and I received hundreds of e-mails from folks demanding to know when I was going to speak out against Obama's "defamation" of white people.

Interestingly, outrage over Obama's remarks has manifested, despite how easy it is to confirm the utter accuracy of his comment--accuracy which itself disproves the notion that the statement about "typical" white people was racist. The fact is, if by "typical" one means the norm, the average (and what else, after all, could be meant by it?), then whites indeed, by our own admission, hold any number of negative, prejudiced, and ultimately racist beliefs about black people. Evidence of this basic truth can be gleaned from any number of sources: opinion surveys, psychological tests like the Implicit Association Test, and several experiments that one can do (and I have done) time and again with white audiences, all with the same result: namely, confirmation that the "typical" white person (and I include myself in that by the way) does harbor internalized notions of white racial superiority or "betterness," vis-a-vis African Americans.

Looking first at public opinion surveys just over the past fifteen years or so, roughly six in ten whites, by our own admission, adhere to at least one negative racial stereotype about blacks. According to a National Opinion Research Center survey in the early '90s, over sixty percent of whites believe that blacks are generally lazier than other groups, fifty-six percent say that blacks are generally more prone to violence, and over half say that blacks are generally less intelligent than other groups (1). What makes these beliefs racist is that by assuming that blacks are more "prone" to violence and "less intelligent," respondents are not merely signaling that blacks have higher crime rates, or score lower on various indicia of academic achievement--both of which are true, for reasons owing to the opportunity structure and the location of black communities relative to that structure--but instead are making assumptions about the inherent abilities and characters of black people.

A similar survey from 1993, conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, found that three in four whites accept as true at least one racist stereotype about African Americans, regarding such items as general laziness, propensity to criminality and violence, intelligence, or work ethic. And according to a 2001 survey, sixty percent of whites, approximately, admit that they believe at least one negative and racist stereotype of blacks: for example, that they are generally lazy, generally aggressive or violent, or prefer to live on welfare rather than work for a living (2). In fact, the belief in black preference for welfare over work is typically the most commonly believed of the stereotypes; this, despite the fact that only a very small percentage of African Americans--and for that matter, a minority of even poor African Americans--receive benefits from programs typically considered "welfare."

Interestingly, whites often deny the importance of racism in determining the life chances of blacks, even as they give voice to beliefs that are themselves evidence of the very racial prejudice they deny. So, for instance, in one of the more respected opinion surveys from the 1990s, six in ten whites said that discrimination was less important in determining the position of blacks in society, than the "fact" that blacks "just don't have the motivation or will power to pull themselves up out of poverty." But if most whites believe that blacks as a group are unmotivated or lazy, that is itself a racial generalization amounting to racism: ascribing a negative characterological trait to blacks as a group. Of course the irony should be apparent to all: on the one hand, whites are saying that blacks are lazy, but on the other they insist that racism--including the kind that holds African Americans in this low regard--would be of very little consequence to their ability to succeed; as if people imbued with that kind of bias would be able to fairly evaluate job applicants or students who were members of the presumed defective group!

Other studies stretching back nearly forty years have indicated a significant degree of white racial bias towards blacks, which we are almost always loath to acknowledge. But in one set of studies, when whites were told (falsely as it turns out) that they were hooked up to functioning lie detectors that would be able to ascertain if they were being dishonest when they claimed not to have any racist beliefs about blacks, they were far more likely to indicate biases up front. In other words, whites often deny our racial biases, even when those remain deeply ingrained. Research has suggested, for example, that many persons will feign a more liberal and non-prejudicial attitude than that to which they actually adhere, when asked questions about racial "others" on opinion surveys. Meaning that if roughly six in ten whites are willing to admit to serious anti-black prejudices of one form or another, the real percentages holding those beliefs are likely quite a bit larger.

Implicit Association Tests are even more decisive as to the extent of internalized and often subconscious, but nonetheless real, white racism. These tests, which measure response time to visual stimuli--specifically testing how quickly respondents associate briefly shown images of blacks or whites with either positive or negative words that are also briefly flashed on a screen--suggest that the typical white person does indeed harbor racial biases against African Americans. According to the research:

"...when given a test of unconscious stereotyping, nearly ninety percent of whites who have taken the test implicitly associate the faces of black Americans with negative words and traits such as evil character or failure. That is, they have more trouble linking black faces to pleasant words and positive features than they do for white faces. Most whites show an antiblack, pro-white bias on psychological tests. In addition, when whites are shown photos of black faces, even for only thirty milliseconds, key areas of their brains that are designed to respond to perceived threats light up automatically." (3)

In my own work I have often conducted word association exercises, in which I ask participants to honestly tell me the first thing that pops in their heads when they hear certain words. Although there is no way to verify their answers, since I am relying on them to be honest, even in this non-controlled environment, in which participants could easily lie in order to seem less racist than they are in practice, the answers are quite revealing. When asked to envision a criminal, a person buying groceries with food stamps (or an electronic benefits card), a drug dealer or user, or a pregnant teenager, almost all white participants (and even large numbers of participants of color) respond that their first image was that of someone who was black or Latino/a. This, despite the fact that over half of all crime is committed by non-Hispanic whites, most people using food stamps are white, more than seven in ten drug users are white (as are most dealers), and most pregnant teens are white as well. Although people of color have higher rates of crime, or welfare receipt, or teen pregnancies, it is simply false that the typical representative of any of these groups is black or brown. Thus, for people to think of a person of color when those words are mentioned is to acknowledge implicit biases, rooted in the conditioning that comes from numerous sources, media first and foremost among them.

On the other hand, if I ask people to envision an "all-American boy or girl," or even worse, God, they invariably admit to envisioning white images (in the latter case, even those who admit to being atheists, because of the symbolic conditioning to which they have been subjected). Confirming my own experiments, researchers who have asked white focus group members to envision a "typical drug user," report that upwards of 95 percent of whites report envisioning a black person, despite the fact that blacks only represent thirteen percent of all drug users, according to the Centers for Disease Control and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, while whites comprise approximately 70 percent of all drug users (4).

Of course, none of this should be interpreted to imply that whites are inherently racist, as if because of something intrinsic to our culture or biology. White bias against black folks is the direct result of environmental conditioning: media images that over-represent blacks as criminals relative to the share of crime that they commit, and images that, at least since the early '70s, have overrepresented blacks as members of the welfare-dependent "underclass," relative to the percentages of the long-term poor who are actually black. If one is subjected repeatedly to images of God, or all-American kids that are white, it ought not surprise anyone that such images would become ingrained in the minds of white folks, and many folks of color as well. Likewise, if one is repeatedly subjected to negative imagery of blacks--imagery that represents them as pathological and culturally defective--how shocking should it be that such images would influence the way in which whites come to view African Americans and their communities?

This is why it was ultimately so easy for whites to believe the stories coming out of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which suggested that black folks were raping and killing people en masse in the Superdome and Convention Center. These reports, all of which turned out to be false, and which were exposed as false by the media about a month after the city flooded (retractions that many Americans never heard, it should be noted), were never questioned at the time they were being reported by any mainstream media outlet. Looking at the comment boards on Nola.com during the tragedy--the main website for the city's newspaper and media outlets--one could find hundreds of racist comments from whites who had bought the claims of black depravity, and were advocating machine-gunning those responsible, and letting the masses who were stuck downtown starve to death, because they were "animals" who didn't "deserve to be saved."

Needless to say, were a hurricane to take out Nantucket, or destroy the summer homes of the white and wealthy who vacation on Cape Cod, and were the media to broadcast rumors to the effect that rich white folks were raping and killing people in the local Episcopal church, no one would believe the reports without evidence, without bodies, without proof. But because of racism, you can say anything you like about black people, especially when they're poor, and others will believe it, every word of it, without question.

So until white folks can demonstrate that we have transcended our racist conditioning, and until we no longer confirm our anti-black biases in test after test, and survey after survey, our defensiveness (indeed, outright anger) at the comments of Barack Obama, makes me wonder if we may be protesting just a bit too much, and giving away our hand in the process. To the extent there are some white folks who don't envision a black person when they hear the term "drug user," or who don't see a white man when they hear the term "God," or who don't automatically think of an Arab Muslim when the term terrorist gets thrown around (because after all, there have been hundreds of terrorist bombings and arsons at abortion clinics by white Christians in the U.S. in the last two decades, not to mention the Unabomber, the Olympic Park Bomber, or Tim McVeigh), then so be it. But such persons shouldn't get defensive on behalf of the majority of our white brothers and sisters who still think exactly those things: rather, they should be challenging them, and encouraging them to break out of the racist box into which years of conditioning have placed us--all of us, to at least some extent.

Our anger should be aimed at those who, by virtue of their racism, implicate us all in the sickness, rather than at those who merely point out that we indeed, are still carrying the virus.

NOTES:

(1) Tom W. Smith, "Ethnic Images," GSS Technical Report No. 19, Chicago: NORC, January 1991

(2) Lawrence Bobo, "Inequalities That Endure? Racial Ideology, American Politics, and the Peculiar Role of the Social Sciences," in Maria Krysan and Amanda Lewis, eds. The Changing Terrain of Race and Ethnicity. Russell Sage Foundation: 2004: 19-20

(3) Joe Feagin, Systemic Racism. NY: Routledge, 2006: 26

(4) B.W. Burston, D. Jones, and P. Robertson-Saunders, "Drug use and African-Americans: Myth versus reality." Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education. 40(2), 1995:19-39.

A Videobite from the Math & Social Justice Conference April 4-6, 2008:

www.brightcove.tv title="1498586954"

(for more info: www.radicalmath.org)

About the "Creating Balance" Conference

From April 4 - 6, over 400 educators, parents, students, activists, and community members from around the country participated in the second Creating Balance in an Unjust World conference on math education and social justice. Held at Long Island University's Downtown Brooklyn campus, participants from 26 states and 3 countries attended:

• 36 different workshops, 13 of which were facilitated by young people
• a panel discussion on community organizing and math education
• Keynote speeches from Joan Countryman and Monty Neill
• a lunchtime networking session
• Action Groups on topics including fighting high-stakes testing, organizing social-justice-themed schools, and working with pre-service teachers
• school visits at 9 NYC public schools

vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

The Topic Is Race; the Art Is Fearless

(see article below)

...A good article, a kind of primer of the "racial" (not to say Black) art scene. There is a very interesting point that continues to surface in the article -- and in the real world.

The more we talk about erasing, or ignoring "race' as a relevant category, the more it becomes a factor in our lives. On the other hand, the more of a big deal we make of it, the more it becomes clear that it doesn't deserve all that importance. Even the art that sets out to explore/exploit this contradiction gets caught up in it.

This has been with us for a long time, even when it was not being intended or consciously thought about. I have often thought about how Duke Ellington, whose highest compliment for anything was that it was "beyond category" and who saw himself as a producer of a kind of universal world music (which he was) actually became one of the most eloquent spokespersons (musically) for African American culture specifically. (His very artful piece on "Madame Zajj" even goes so far as to suggest that the Black music of North America stands in a special place, compared to that from other parts of the African World.)

Paul Robeson (whose birthday is tomorrow, 4/9), on the other hand, often portrayed himself as a voice of African America, being the son of a man who escaped from slavery and all, but turned out in reality to be the voice of the global working class, singing traditional songs from many cultures, ad singing in multiple languages. Ultimately, I guess it all comes down to what people in the Far East call yin and yang; everything exists because of its opposite. The only reason that there is a word for cold is that hot exists.

If there were no "evil," there would not even be a concept of "good." The more we tell someone close, "I love you," the more we raise the specter that the opposite also exists, the possibility of not loving. The things that have no opposites have no words, and therefore do not even exist in conscious thought. That is what meditation is all about (and why it figures so prominently in the far East): being aware of what REALLY exists beyond the limiting tyranny of words, by silencing the internal dialogue. This is also, by my calculation, what art is also all about (not only visual artifacts, but music -- notably "jazz," dance, etc.), reaching that inner and deeper truth that is universal to all humans, transcending cultural and language differences.

This is why African American Classical Music is so welcomed and understood in so many other places. Visual art has that capability also. (The influence of African art redefined European art, for example, which, in turn, under the influence of colonialism, reshaped the whole sense of art making globally: art as object/commodity for sale, for example, which, in ying-yang fashion, gave rise to the art-as-anti-commodity: conceptual and performance pieces that strive to break free of limitation but in so doing reinforce it by reminding us that it is there and it is powerful enough to spawn reactions and responses.)

Given this paradigm, it is easy to see how "race," a myth so powerful that it could turn an entire countr y into a cult around it, can be trap from which the artist makes stronger by striving to be free from it. (Remember those woven straw "Chinese handcuffs" from novelty shops and Cracker Jack boxes? The harder you tried to pull your fingers free, the tighter they got.) This is the stuff that has fueled the unspoken-yet-loud debate between "Black artists" and "Artists who happen to be Black," which was all about something called Consciousness (at least depending on who is speaking and from which side), and now this latest iteration called "Post-Black" which -- Life imitates Art -- has come to fruition in the Obama presidential candidacy, raising that eternal question of the next generation to be traveling down this long, long road: "Are we there yet?" Obviously not.

Tyne Daly, the white actress who is married to Georg Stanford Brown and played in the "Cagney & Lacey" TV series was asked in a radio interview if she thought the country had progressed to the point where her "interracial" marriage did not really matter any more. Her answer was as classic as it was swift: "If we had, you wouldn't be asking me that question! Obama's vision and message has a resonance in the nation that hasn't been heard since Dr. King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech, but Dr. King's speech contained a metaphor which has yet to be addressed, when he said that America had written a check with its promise to be a land where "all men are created equal" but that check has been returned for "insufficient funds."

Yes, there is that thorny matter of Reparations for wrongs that have been done. I, for one, am among the first to say that we would be making a grave error (for which neither Ancestors nor future generations would forgive us) if we equated Reparations with "funds," i.e. money, or even more precisely debt, a "substance" controlled by Central Banks and used very effectively as a means of global population control, as everyone dealing with the World Bank and IMF can attest. But the inappropriateness of currency and finance, over whose value we, the offended party, have no control and by which we can actually be controlled, does not negate the validity of our claim. (In any case, there is not enough money on the planet anyway.) Something more like Restorative Justice needs to come into play. That is all another story (but not a separate story). It is a part of what needs to be done to get us back to the REAL story.

The real story, the true story, the deep story, the one that gets all hearts to beat in unison, the truth that is reached by "jazz" (AACM) and other real art forms, is the one that, by definition, recognizes all life as important, all babies as equally significant, all people as righteous heirs to the bounty of the earth, who are equally responsible not to be wasteful or disrespectful. Either we glorify that or we glorify disparity, and celebrate the "lifestyles of the rich and famous" watching multiple boob tubes in projects, prison cells, trailer parks and rural cabins without plumbing, gleefully showing off what bit of silly bling or overpriced sneakers we have been able to garner from the same sweat shop economy that will "come for us tomorrow."

The "Bankers' Manifesto" of 1898, for all we know, could be a contrived hoax, but even if it were, it is a dead-on accurate description of the way this country is being run, and by whom. The strategy of keeping the "common people" distracted with political issues that are of no consequence whatsoever, such as "race," has proven itself to be most effective. The fact that artists have bought into it adds to that effectiveness, but it is also a tribute to those artists that out of such madness they have been able to create, produce and perform real art, that succeeds in speaking to higher and deeper aspects of human existence as well. It does make one wonder, however, what greater things these artists might accomplish if they were actually, really "free within ourselves" (to use Langston Hughes' famous phrase in his own very insightful 1929 manifesto on this very question). So many of the artists of that Harlem Renaissance era had it so right. They so well understood that the essence and the beauty of being Black was being in possession of the wisdom that freed them (and us) from being essentialized as only Black in a world where the categories of "White" and "Black" existed for no other reason than to enforce, reinforce and perpetuate systematic disparity and inequality. (There was no reason to be "Separate" other than to be "UNequal.")


"Race," in the tradition of African (Black) wisdom could only mean the whole human race. Paul Robeson, in his own most famous quote (his epitaph, in fact, at Fernwood Cemetery), said it all: "The artist must elect to fight for slavery or for freedom. I have made my decision. I had no choice." I strive to live by that.

A luta continua,

Dinizulu

==================================

March 30, 2008

nytimes.com--

The Topic Is Race; the Art Is Fearless

By HOLLAND COTTER

IN the 1970s the African-American artist Adrian Piper donned an Afro wig and a fake mustache and prowled the streets of various cities in the scowling, muttering guise of the Mythic Being, a performance-art version of a prevailing stereotype, the black male as a mugger, hustler, gangsta.

In the photographs that resulted you can see what she was up to. In an era when some politicians and much of the popular press seemed to be stoking racial fear, she was turning fear into farce � but serious, and disturbing, farce, intended to punch a hole in pervasive fictions while acknowledging their power.

Recently a new kind of Mythic Being arrived on the scene, the very opposite of the one Ms. Piper introduced some 30 years ago. He doesn�t mutter; he wears business suits; he smiles. He is by descent half black African, half white American. His name is Barack Obama.

On the rancorous subject of the country�s racial history he isn�t antagonistic; he speaks of reconciliation, of laying down arms, of moving on, of closure. He is presenting himself as a 21st-century postracial leader, with a vision of a color-blind, or color-embracing, world to come.

Campaigning politicians talk solutions; artists talk problems. Politics deals in goals and initiatives; art, or at least interesting art, in a language of doubt and nuance. This has always been true when the subject is race. And when it is, art is often ahead of the political news curve, and heading in a contrary direction.

In a recent solo debut at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in Chelsea a young artist named Rashid Johnson created a fictional secret society of African-American intellectuals, a cross between Mensa and the Masons. At first uplift seemed to be the theme. The installation was framed by a sculpture resembling giant cross hairs. Or was it a microscope lens, or a telescope�s? The interpretive choice was yours. So was the decision to stay or run. Here was art beyond old hot-button statements, steering clear of easy condemnations and endorsements. But are artists like Mr. Johnson making �black� art? Political art? Identity art? There are no answers, or at least no unambiguous ones.

Since Ms. Piper�s Mythical Being went stalking in the 1970s � a time when black militants and blaxploitation movies reveled in racial difference � artists have steadily challenged prevailing constructs about race.

As multiculturalism entered mainstream institutions in the 1980s, the black conceptualist David Hammons stayed outdoors, selling snowballs on a downtown Manhattan sidewalk. And when, in the 1990s, Robert Colescott was selected as the first African-American to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, he brought paintings of figures with mismatched racial features and skin tones, political parables hard to parse.

At the turn of the present millennium, with the art market bubbling up and the vogue for identity politics on the wane, William Pope.L � the self-described �friendliest black artist in America� � belly-crawled his way up Broadway, the Great White Way, in a Superman outfit, and ate copies of The Wall Street Journal.

Today, as Mr. Obama pitches the hugely attractive prospect of a postracial society, artists have, as usual, already been there, surveyed the terrain and sent back skeptical, though hope-tinged, reports. And you can read those reports in art all around New York this spring, in retrospective surveys like �Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution� currently at the P.S 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, in the up-to-the-minute sampler that is the 2008 Whitney Biennial, in gallery shows in Chelsea and beyond, and in the plethora of art fairs clinging like barnacles to the Armory Show on Pier 94 this weekend.

�Wack!� is a good place to trace a postracial impulse in art going back decades. Ms. Piper is one of the few African-American artists in the show, along with Howardena Pindell and Lorraine O�Grady. All three began their careers with abstract work, at one time the form of black art most acceptable to white institutions, but went on to address race aggressively.

In a 1980 performance video, �Free, White and 21,� Ms. Pindell wore whiteface to deliver a scathing rebuke of art-world racism. In the same year Ms. O�Grady introduced an alter ego named �Mlle Bourgeoise Noire� who, dressed in a beauty-queen gown sewn from white formal gloves, crashed museum openings to protest all-white shows. A few years later Ms. Piper, who is light skinned, began to selectively distribute a printed calling card at similar social events. It read:

Dear Friend,

I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past I have attempted to alert white people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative or socially inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe there are not black people present, and to distribute this card when they do.

I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.

Sincerely yours,

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper

Although these artists� careers took dissimilar directions, in at least some of their work from the �70s and �80s they all approached race, whiteness as well as blackness, as a creative medium. Race is treated as a form of performance; an identity that could, within limits, be worn or put aside; and as a diagnostic tool to investigate social values and pathologies.

Ms. Piper�s take on race as a form of creative nonfiction has had a powerful influence on two generations of African-Americans who, like Mr. Obama, didn�t experience the civil rights movement firsthand, and who share a cosmopolitan attitude toward race. In 2001 that attitude found corner-turning expression in �Freestyle,� an exhibition organized at the Studio Museum in Harlem by its director, Thelma Golden.

When Ms. Golden and her friend the artist Glenn Ligon called the 28 young American artists �postblack,� it made news. It was a big moment. If she wasn�t the first to use the term, she was the first to apply it to a group of artists who, she wrote, were �adamant about not being labeled �black� artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.�

The work ranged from mural-size images of police helicopters painted with hair pomade by Kori Newkirk, who lives in Los Angeles, to computer-assisted geometric abstract painting by the New York artist Louis Cameron. Mr, Newkirk�s work came with specific if indirect ethnic references; Mr. Cameron�s did not. Although �black� in the Studio Museum context, they would lose their racial associations in an ethnically neutral institution like the Museum of Modern Art.

Ethnically neutral? That�s just a code-term for white, the no-color, the everything-color. For whiteness is as much � or as little � a racial category as blackness, though it is rarely acknowledged as such wherever it is the dominant, default ethnicity. Whiteness is yet another part of the postracial story. Like blackness, it has become a complicated subject for art. And few have explored it more forcefully and intimately than Nayland Blake.

Mr. Blake, 48, is the child of a black father and a white mother. In various performance pieces since the 1990s he has dressed up as a giant rabbit, partly as a reference to Br�er Rabbit of Joel Chandler Harris�s Uncle Remus stories, a wily animal who speaks in Southern black dialect and who survives capture by moving fast and against expectations.

In 2001 Mr. Blake appeared in a video with another artist, AA Bronson. Each had his face slathered with cake frosting, chocolate in Mr. Blake�s case, vanilla in Mr. Bronson�s. When then two men exchanged a long kiss, the colors, and presumably the flavors, began to blend. Shared love, the implication was, dissolves distinctions between �black� and �white,� which, as racial categories, are cosmetic, superficial.

As categories they are also explosive. In 1984, when Mr. Hammons painted a poster of the Rev. Jesse Jackson as a blond, blue-eyed Caucasian and exhibited it outdoors in Washington, the piece was trashed by a group of African-American men. Mr, Hammons intended the portrait, �How Ya Like Me Now,� as a comment on the paltry white support for Mr. Jackson�s presidential bid that year. Those who attacked it assumed the image was intended as an insult to Mr. Jackson.

More recently, when Kara Walker cut out paper silhouettes of fantasy slave narratives, with characters � black and white alike � inflicting mutual violence, she attracted censure from some black artists. At least some of those objecting had personal roots in the civil rights years and an investment in art as a vehicle for racial pride, social protest and spiritual solace.

Ms. Walker, whose work skirts any such overt commitments, was accused of pandering to a white art market with an appetite for images of black abjection. She was called, in effect, a sellout to her race.

In a television interview a few weeks ago, before he formed plans to deliver his speech on race, Mr. Obama defended his practice of backing off from discussion of race in his campaign. He said it was no longer a useful subject in the national dialogue; we�re over it, or should be.

But in fact it can be extremely useful. There is no question that his public profile has been enhanced by his Philadelphia address, even if the political fallout in terms of votes has yet to be gauged.

Race can certainly be used to sell art too, and the results can be also be unpredictable. As with politics, timing is crucial.

In 1992 the white artist team Pruitt-Early (Rob Pruitt and Walter Early) presented a gallery exhibition called �The Red Black Green Red White and Blue Project.� Its theme was the marketing of African-American pop culture, with an installation of black-power posters, dashiki cloth and tapes of soul music bought in Harlem.

What might, at a later time or with different content, have been seen as a somewhat dated consumerist critique proved to be a public relations disaster. The artists were widely condemned as racist and all but disappeared from the art world.

Eight years later, with the cooling of identity politics, a show called �Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage� arrived, with no apparent critical component, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. An array of fashion images, videos and artifacts associated with stars like the Notorious B.I.G., Missy Elliott and Tupac Shakur, it was assumed to be a welcoming (if patronizing) gesture to the museum�s local African-American audience. Yet its appearance coincided with the general massive marketing of hip-hop culture to middle-class whites, a phenomenon that Mr. Pruitt and Mr. Early had been pointing to.

Were Pruitt-Early postblack artists ahead of their time, offering a new take on race, as a movable feast that collided with older, essentialist attitudes? If so, they would probably find plenty of company now in artists who stake out terrain both black and postblack, white and postwhite.

Mr. Pope.L (he who crawled up Broadway) does so with a posture of radical outsiderness that cancels bogus notions of racial or cultural essence. Basically he short-circuits the very concept of what an artist, black or white, �should� be. He smiles as he inches up the street on all fours; he uncomplainingly devours news of money he�ll never have. He paints murals with peanut butter and makes sculpture from Pop-Tarts, the stuff of welfare meals. In many ways his main subject would seem to be class, not race. Yet race is everywhere in his art.

He works with mostly white materials � mayonnaise, milk, flour � but he also runs the Black Factory, a mobile workshop-van equipped to transform any object, no matter what color, into a �black� object. How? By covering it with cheap black paint.

For a retrospective at the Maine College of Art in Portland in 2003, Mr. Pope.L presented a performance piece with the optimistic title �eRacism,� but that was entirely about race-based conflict. In a photograph in the show�s catalog, he has the word written in white on his bare black chest. Were he pale-skinned, it might have been all but invisible.

Whereas Mr. Pope.L has shaped himself into a distinctive racial presence, certain other artists of color are literally built from scratch. A Miami artists collective called BLCK, in the current Whitney Biennial, doesn�t really exist. The archival materials attributed to it documenting African American life in the 1960s is actually the creation of single artist: Adler Guerrier, who was born in Haiti in 1975.

Projects by Edgar Arceneaux, who is also in the biennial, have included imaginary visual jam sessions with the jazz visionary Sun Ra and the late Conceptual artist Sol Lewitt. Earlier in this art season, a white artist, Joe Scanlan, had a solo gallery show using the fictional persona of a black artist, Donelle Woolford. Ms. Woolford was awarded at least one appreciative review, suggesting that, in art at least, race can be independent of DNA.

The topic of race and blood has always been an inflammatory one in this country. Ms. Piper broached it in a 1988 video installation and delivered some bad news. Facing us through the camera, speaking with the soothing composure of a social worker or grief counselor, she said that, according to statistics, if we were white Americans, chances were very high that we carried at least some black blood. That was the legacy of slavery. She knew we would be upset. She was sorry. But was the truth. The piece was titled �Cornered.�

And are we upset? I�ll speak for myself; it�s not a question. Of course not. Which is a good thing, because the concept of race in America � the fraught fictions of whiteness and blackness� is not going away soon. It is still deep in our system. Whether it is or isn�t in our blood, it�s in our laws, our behavior, our institutions, our sensibilities, our dreams.

It�s also in our art, which, at its contrarian and ambiguous best, is always on the job, probing, resisting, questioning and traveling miles ahead down the road.

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