During the first week of this month, I was blessed, once again, to lead the study tour to Kemet. Do you know where Kemet is? Do you know what Kemet is?

I ask because I found out when my fifth book was published that most people did not know the Akan word “Sankofa.” I was blown away!

Not only did people not know what the word “Sankofa” meant or how to pronounce it (and I mean all kinds of people – from school teachers to people like my esteemed church history mentor from The University of Chicago). I was blown away because I soon discovered that most African Americans who were buying the book did not know what the word meant and were constantly questioning me at book signings as to where I got the word from, how to pronounce it and what it meant!

I was blown away because I thought most African Americans had seen or heard about Haile Gerima’s movie, “Sankofa.” I was wrong.

I knew most people did not know the Adinkra symbols used by the Akan people in Ghana. I have seen hundreds of African Americans wearing the Adinkra symbol, gye nyame. I have seen that symbol on earrings, necklaces, rings, bracelets and clothing worn by African Americans.

As I have talked with persons wearing that Adinkra symbol, however, I found out that they did not know many other – or sometimes any other – of the Adinkra symbols.

I did think, however, that African Americans had at least seen the movie, “Sankofa,” and knew what the Adinkra symbol of the Sankofa bird stood for and stands for. I was terribly wrong.

Having just experienced that “wake-up call,” therefore, I am not going to take it for granted that all of our readers know what Kemet is or where Kemet is! Kemet is the name that the Africans living in the country called Egypt today called their own land before the Greeks renamed their land “Egypt.”

Just as Blacks in Nubia and Kush had their names changed by the Greeks to “Ethiopian,” the Blacks who lived in the land of Kemet had the name of the place in which they called home changed to “Egypt.”

I started my trips to the Continent this summer on July the 3rd in Kemet and the first two weeks of the month here in Kemet have been both powerful and painful.

They have been powerful in that we were in Kemet from July 3rd through July the 14th. Those two weeks exposed twenty-seven African Americans to ancient, classical, African civilizations and the classes that I taught each day opened up for them many of the “mysteries” that the educational system in the United States of America omits in its various curricula!

Experiencing the historic sites and covering the theology and the religious beliefs of those who shaped Moses and Jesus’ understanding of the world has been a powerful experience. It always is!

The “painful” part of this month-long sojourn, however, has been the daily reminders (the constant reminders!) of my last trip to Kemet. I have not been back here in this country since Baba Asa Hilliard died here!

For the last ten years of my pastorate at Trinity United Church of Christ, Baba Asa (Dr. Asa Hilliard) would come to our congregation every February. He would lecture. He would teach. He would autograph books.
He would answer questions about the African experience, the African American experience and the world of classical African societies like Kemet, Nubia, Cush and Sumer. Most enjoyably, Asa would also worship with us! He and his wife, Patsy, became “regulars” at Trinity United Church of Christ.

For at least eight of those ten years that Dr. Hilliard came to our congregation, both the members of our congregation and the visitors who would come to hear his lectures kept asking him (and me) when we were going to lead a study tour to Kemet together!

In February of 2008, we settled on a date and we announced it before he began his lecture on the second Sunday of Black History Month. The day that we announced our jointly-led study tour, eighty persons signed up for the trip!

Dr. Hilliard and I divided up the workload in terms of lectures. He was to do half of the lectures and I was to do the other half. He finished his half before he fell sick! I was in the midst of doing my lectures when we had to rush him from the J. W. Marriott Hotel in Cairo to the hospital. The night he went to the hospital is the night (or the day) that he died!

Each day during this month as I have returned to Kemet, I see a sight, I visit sites and I am reminded of our trip together to this historic place. It hurts! This is my first time to return to Kemet since losing such an invaluable friend.

The trip to Kemet back in 2008 was also another one of my mentor’s last trips. Judge R. Eugene Pincham was with us as we visited all of the sites that we are visiting this month. Every time Judge Pincham got on the tour bus, he was singing, “The Lord God Has Brought Me From a Mighty Long Way!”
Judge Pincham’s son, Robert, is with us on this trip.

Seeing Robert wearing his straw hat reminds me of his father’s straw hat and his father’s gait, as he treads each day where his father walked two years ago. Now you can begin to understand why this trip to Kemet has been both powerful and painful.

I give thanks to God for the lives of Dr. Asa Hilliard and Judge R. Eugene Pincham. They have enriched my life beyond description and their lives (and deaths) make this trip a trip that I will never forget.

I leave here on the 14th of July to lead another study tour in Ghana, Togo and Benin. In many ways, that trip will also be a reminder of what happened here on the Continent two years ago!

When Baba Asa died in Kemet, Dr. Iva Carruthers accompanied Asa’s wife, Dr. Patsy Hilliard back to the States with Asa’s remains. My wife, daughter, Jeri, and I went on to Ghana where we met members of Trinity Church who were waiting there for us to lead a study tour in that country.

While we were in Ghana, Jeri pointed out to us that Patsy Hilliard was waiting for me to get back from Ghana in order to hold Asa Hilliard’s funeral services! She wanted me to preach Asa’s funeral.

The entire time we toured Ghana and while I was teaching in Ghana, my thoughts were on what final words of tribute I could possibly say to honor such a great man as Dr. Asa Hilliard. Returning to Ghana and going there from Kemet will open up that floodgate of memories also.

As I try my best to expose African Americans to the rich, cultural legacy that is theirs, I ask for your prayers. Putting a “hedge” around the pain in order to share the power of our story is “more than a notion” (to use the words of the old folks)!

Trying to “teach through the pain” has given me another glimpse of God’s grace and I thank God for that grace, as I remain,

Respectfully yours,

Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.
Pastor Emeritus, Trinity United Church of Christ

© 2010 Copyrighted by Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., All Rights Reserved.

Our annual study tours are offered to expose African Americans to the cultures, the histories and the stories of African people on the Continent of Africa and African people who live in Diaspora. During this year’s first two study tours, the Annual Revival at Trinity Church is taking place.

As I sat in my room looking at the Pyramids in Giza I thought about the revivals in the past when I was serving as pastor of Trinity UCC in Chicago. One particular Revival (2006) and our contact with people from “another country” during that revival came to my mind; and I want to share a reflection that I wrote back then as a result of that exposure.

It was published in our TRUMPET magazine and some of you have read it. For those who have not seen it before, please read it carefully; and as you read it, enjoy!

I am asking you to do more than enjoy, however. I also ask you to think! Reflect and see “When and Where [You] Enter” in this story of different people, different cultures, different stories, different perceptions, different perspectives, different stereotypes and different ways of building bridges of understanding in the family of God
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“Sharing Truth and Shattering Myths”

On Father’s Day 2006, I had two incredible assignments to fulfill – - both on the same day. On the morning of Sunday, June 18th, we had seventeen German visitors who came to worship with us.

These were not your typical “tourists” from another country. These were students and leaders from the German community who had never been to an African-American worship service. I had to meet with them for an hour before service to try to explain to them what it was they would experience as they entered our Sanctuary for worship in a context completely alien to anything with which they were familiar.

I had the assignment of sharing the truth of the African-American experience with persons who were clueless as to the African perspective on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Middle Passage, assimilation and mis-education. I had to share the truth of our experience with them and shatter myths that they had in their heads about us. I had to do it, moreover, in less than an hour.

At four o’clock in the afternoon on that same Sunday, I had to meet with twenty Korean pastors and perform the same tasks. This time, however, I had the daunting obstacle of a “language barrier.” Most of the pastors present did not speak English and I had to talk with them through two different translators.

As I wrestled with how best to accomplish that second task, I remembered the history of the Korean people being abused by the Japanese. I remembered the stories I had read of Korean women being raped by the Japanese. I remembered the horrible recounting of the stories of the lives of Koreans who were abused by the Japanese and how the Japanese looked down on them as inferior.

Jesus told Peter that “flesh and blood had not revealed” those truths unto Him. I am convinced that flesh and blood did not reveal those insights unto me. It was the Holy Spirit who guided me into an hour and forty minute lesson wherein I tried to get Korean pastors to understand the similarities between their experience as persons who were oppressed by the Japanese and our experience as persons who were oppressed by the Europeans.

I shared with them some truths that none of them had ever heard or read before. Koreans are not taught about the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Koreans are not taught about how we were brought into the “New World” in bondage.

Koreans are not taught about how we had our culture taken from us, our languages take from us, our religions taken from us and our identity taken from us. Koreans are not taught about the Middle Passage.

Koreans are not even taught about the slave ships and the experience of being brought here as cargo on a slave ship. I had to share those truths with them and shatter the myths they had of what it was to be an African American.

Their myths are based on media images of Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson. The pastors who were with us thought (prior to our time together) that African Americans were simply white folks in a darker hue.

They knew the stereotypical, smart-aleck opinions many of us have about them. For instance, when I told one member I had to meet with some Koreans they said to me, “Can I get my nails done while they are here?”

Just as we are seen as being big, black bucks with a special dose of “athleticism,” red-hot mamas who have an insatiable desire for sex, and a bunch of entertainers and singers, gang bangers and dope dealers we have the same stereotypes of Koreans as “those people” who do nails and who take over parts of our town selling their foods and taking all of the money out of our community. Those are dangerous myths on both sides of the ethnic fence.

Some of us have been to Korea, so we do not have as negative a stereotype in our minds when it comes to Korean people and Korean culture. We have “soft stereotypes.”

We see Koreans as the people who make those fantastic suits for such low prices. We see Koreans as followers of Reverend Sun Yung Moon or Reverend Cho – - a deeply religious people who either have fantastic mega-churches or some sort of strange theology that is going to unify not only North and South Korea, but the entire world!

Those unfortunate misperceptions and stereotypes do nothing toward building community. They only perpetuate the wide chasms across which we try to communicate in an impossible no-win situation. We stereotype them. They stereotype us and we all live unhappily ever after in our own little mythical worlds.

I had one hour and forty minutes to shatter those myths while sharing with them the truth of the Middle Passage, the nineteen countries out of which Africans were brought into America as slaves, the triangular trade system which carried us through the Caribbean, the facts of the 30 million Africans who live in the U.S.A., the additional 30 million who live in Central America and the 80 million Africans who live in South America.

I had to share the truths of our experience and shatter the myths that they held concerning our experience (in an hour and forty minutes).

I talked to them about the similarities and the dissimilarities between our two stories (the Korean story and the Africa story, the Korean-Japanese story and the African-European story) and then I painted a picture for them of an analogy. I asked them to imagine a group of Korean men, women and children captured by the Japanese and taken away to Japan.

I asked them to imagine what those descendents of stolen Koreans would be like two-hundred and forty-seven years after having been contraband in the country of Japan.

After two-hundred and forty-seven years of living in Japan, the Korean natives would no longer be able to speak the Korean language. They would speak the Japanese language. If there had been a law passed by the Japanese making it a crime to teach any Korean how to read Japanese, they would have been illiterate Koreans.

That law was passed for Africans who lived in America and that is the problem we faced immediately following the Civil War. I also asked our visitors to imagine those Koreans no longer being called Koreans, but being called “Kopanese.” I asked them to imagine how conflicted those “Kopanese” would be mentally as some of them identified with their Japanese oppressors and some of them identified with their Korean origins.

I then went on to talk with them about how those “Kopanese” would have been assimilated and acculturated into Japanese culture, given a mis-education just like Carter G. Woodson described the process that confused millions of African Americans; and I then told them to imagine what the Japanese missionaries would have taught the Korean ex-patriots in terms of how they as Koreans should worship as the Japanese worshipped!

Slowly but surely I could see the light bulbs coming on in the eyes of our Korean visitors. They understood the parallel I was making and they then understood our story in a different light. One of the pastors said that he had no idea our two histories were so similar.

Another one of the pastors said I was hitting closer to home than I realized. There are 300,000 Koreans still living in Japan as a result of their oppression, the wars, the rapes, the kidnappings and the internment.

The most defining moment of my time with the Korean pastors, however, was when the Korean professor of Church History, Dr. Jae Won Lee, said to me, “You made up the name “Kopanese.” But, there really is a group of Koreans who are fighting the fight that you described fictitiously.

They are the cho chong nyon and they are trapped between the oppression of the Japanese and the “distancing” they experience at the hands of their own people who want to assimilate and acculturate into Japanese culture! The gyo-ru-min-dan are comparable to the Negroes who don’t understand why the cho chong nyon (those folk who consider themselves Africans) want to identify with Korea.

They say things like you have heard coming from the lips of miseducated African Americans, “I ain’t got nothing to do with no ‘Afack-a.’ I ain’t left nothing over there. My peoples is from ‘Miss’sippi!’” Just as the gyo-ru-min-dan want nothing to do with Korea, the Negroes want nothing to do with Africa!

As a result of their history of oppression and colonization, the Korean people living in Japan (and some in South Korea) are now divided into two camps. There are some Koreans living in Japan who want to forget all about their Korean heritage. (These are the gyo-ru-min-dan.)

There are other Koreans living in Japan (the cho chong nyon) who want to embrace their Korean heritage and who are looked down upon by the Koreans who have assimilated into the Japanese culture! Does any of this sound familiar?

Once we shatter the myths that keep us separated from others who are oppressed, one of the most powerful things that happens to us is our ability to share truths that we normally would never have thought of sharing becomes greater. We see parallels that we did not know existed.

We begin to learn stories of other people that are parallel to our own stories and we begin to share truth that helps us to build bridges across which we can walk in order to meet, embrace and understand other people in other cultures who are all a part of this tremendously diverse human family that God has created.

Sharing the truth of our story with people from another culture who speak another language enabled me to shatter some of the myths that separate us. It also opened my eyes to the bond of humanity that binds us in spite of our differing oppressions.

During this month of Revival at our church it is my prayer that the readers of this month’s Trumpet will begin to share the truth of their own story with other members of God’s family, shattering myths and seeing others at a deeper level for the first time in their lives!

I found him to be a man you can trust and I find all of his writings to be works that challenge you, make you think and cause you to “hear the voice of God” in a new and exciting way.

This piece below by Chris just came to me today.
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Subject: Re: Obama’s Health Care Bill Is Enough to Make You Sick by Chris Hedges

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/obamas_health_care_bill_is_enough_to_make_you_sick_20100712/
Obama’s Health Care Bill Is Enough to Make You Sick
Posted on Jul 12, 2010
By Chris Hedges
A close reading of the new health care legislation, which will conveniently take effect in 2014 after the next presidential election, is deeply depressing. The legislation not only mocks the lofty promises made by President Barack Obama, exposing most as lies, but sadly reconfirms that our nation is hostage to unchecked corporate greed and abuse. The simple truth, that single-payer nonprofit health care for all Americans would dramatically reduce costs and save lives, that the for-profit health care system is the problem and must be destroyed, is censored out of the public debate by a media that relies on these corporations as major advertisers and sponsors, as well as a morally bankrupt Democratic Party that is as bought off by corporations as the Republicans.
The 2,000-page piece of legislation, according to figures compiled by Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP), will leave at least 23 million people without insurance, a figure that translates into an estimated 23,000 unnecessary deaths a year among people who cannot afford care. It will permit prices to climb so that many of us will soon be paying close to 10 percent of our annual income to buy commercial health insurance, although this coverage will only pay for about 70 percent of our medical expenses. Those who become seriously ill, lose their incomes and cannot pay skyrocketing premiums will be denied coverage. And at least $447 billion in taxpayer subsidies will now be handed to insurance firms. We will be forced by law to buy their defective products. There is no check in the new legislation to halt rising health care costs. The elderly can be charged three times the rates provided to the young. Companies with predominantly female work forces can be charged higher gender-based rates. The dizzying array of technical loopholes in the bill—written in by armies of insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists—means that these companies, which profit off human sickness, suffering and death, can continue their grim game of trading away human life for money.
“They named this legislation the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and as the tradition of this nation goes, any words they put into the name of a piece of legislation means the opposite,” said single-payer activist Dr. Margaret Flowers when I heard her and Helen Redmond dissect the legislation in Chicago at the Socialism 2010 Conference last month. “It neither protects patients nor leads to affordable care.”
“This legislation moves us further in the direction of the commodification of health care,” Flowers went on. “It requires people to purchase health insurance. It takes public dollars to subsidize the purchase of that private insurance. It not only forces people to purchase this private product, but uses public dollars and gives them directly to these corporations. In return, there are no caps on premiums. Insurance companies can continue to raise premiums. We estimate that because they are required to cover people with pre-existing conditions, although we will see if this happens, they will argue that they will have to raise premiums.”
The legislation included a few tiny improvements that have been used as bait to sell it to the public. The bill promises, for example, to expand community health centers and increase access to primary-care doctors. It allows children to stay on their parent’s plan until they turn 26. It will include those with pre-existing conditions in insurance plans, although Flowers warns that many technicalities and loopholes make it easy for insurance companies to drop patients. Most of the more than 30 million people currently without insurance, and the 45,000 who die each year because they lack medical care, essentially remain left out in the cold, and things will not get better for the rest of us.
“We are still a nation full of health care hostages,” Redmond said. “We live in fear of losing our health care. Millions of people have lost their health care. We fear bankruptcy. The inability to pay medical bills is the No. 1 cause of bankruptcy. We fear not being able to afford medications. Millions of people skip medications. They skip these medications to the detriment of their health. We are not free. And we won’t be free until health care is a human right, until health care is not tied to a job, because we still have an employment-based system, and until health care has nothing to do with immigration status. We don’t care if you are documented or undocumented. It should not matter what your health care status is, if you have a disease or you don’t. It should not matter how much money you have or don’t, because many of our programs are based on income eligibility rules. Until we abolish the private, for-profit health insurance industry in this county we are not free. Until we take the profit motive out of health care we cannot live in the way we want to live. This legislation doesn’t do any of that. It doesn’t change those basic facts of our health care system.”
Redmond held up a syringe.
“I take a medication that costs $1,700 every single month,” she said. “I inject this medication. It costs $425 a week for 50 milligrams of medication. I would do almost anything to get this medication because without it I don’t have much of a life. The pharmaceutical industry knows this. They price these drugs accordingly to the level of desperation that people feel. Billy Tauzin, the former CEO of [the trade organization of] Big Pharma, negotiated a secret deal with President Obama to extend the patents of biologics, this new revolutionary class of drugs, for 12 years. And Obama also promised in this deal that he would not negotiate drug prices for Medicare.”
Obama’s numerous betrayals—from his failure to implement serious environmental reform at Copenhagen, to his expansion of the current wars, to his refusal to create jobs for our desperate class of unemployed and underemployed, to his gutting of public education, to his callous disregard for the rights of workers and funneling of trillions in taxpayer money to banks—is a shameful list. Passing universal, single-payer nonprofit health care for all Americans might have delivered to Obama, who may well be a one-term president, at least one worthwhile achievement. Single-payer nonprofit health care has widespread popular support, with nearly two-thirds of the public behind it. It is backed by 59 percent of doctors. And it would have helped roll back, at least a bit, the corporate assault on the citizenry.
Medical bills lead to 62 percent of personal bankruptcies, and nearly 80 percent of these people had insurance. The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, $8,160 per capita. Private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume 31 percent of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year—enough, PNHP estimates, to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.
Candidate Obama promised to protect women’s rights under Roe. v. Wade, something this legislation does not do. He told voters he would create a public option and then refused to consider it. The health care reform bill, to quote a statement released by PNHP, has instead “saddled Americans with an expensive package of onerous individual mandates, new taxes on workers’ health plans, countless sweetheart deals with the insurers and Big Pharma, and a perpetuation of the fragmented, dysfunctional, and unsustainable system that is taking such a heavy toll on our health and economy today.”
“Obama said he was going to have everybody at the table,” Redmond said, “but that was a lie. Our voice was not allowed to be there. There was a blackout on our movement. We did not get media attention. We did actions all over the country but we could not get coverage. We had the ‘Mad as Hell Doctors’ go across the country in a caravan, and they had rallies and meetings. If that had been a bunch of AMA Republican doctors, Cooper Anderson would have been on the caravan reporting live. NPR would have done a series. Instead, they did not get much coverage. And neither did the sit-ins and arrests at insurance companies, although we have never seen that level of activity. They turned us into a fringe movement, although poll after poll shows that the majority of people want some kind of single-payer system.”
Our for-profit health system is driven by insurance companies whose goal is to avoid covering the elderly and the sick. These groups, most in need of medical care, diminish profits. Medicare, paid for by the government, removes responsibility for many of the old. Medicaid, also paid for by the government, removes the poor people, who have a greater tendency to have chronic health problems. Hefty premiums, which those who are seriously ill and lose their jobs often cannot pay, remove the very sick. If you are healthy and employed, which means you are less likely to need expensive or complex treatment, the insurance companies swoop down like birds of prey. These corporations need to control our perceptions of health care. Patients must be viewed as consumers. Doctors, identified as “health care providers,” must be seen as salespeople.
Insurance companies, which will soon be able to use billions in taxpayer dollars to bolster their lobbying efforts and campaign contributions, know that single-payer nonprofit insurance means their extinction. And they will employ considerable resources to make sure single-payer nonprofit coverage is denied to the public. They correctly see this as a battle for their lives. And if human beings have to die so they can survive, they are willing to make us pay this price.
The for-profit health care industry, along with the Democratic Party, consciously set out to confuse the public debate. It created Health Care for America NOW! in 2008 and provided it with tens of millions of dollars to supposedly build a public campaign for a public option. But the organization had no intention of permitting a public option. The organization was, as Dr. Flowers said, “a very clever way to distract members of the single-payer movement and co-op some of them. They told them that the public option would become single payer, that it was a back door to single payer, although there was no evidence that was true.”
Physicians for a National Health Plan attempted to fight back. It worked with a number of organizations under a coalition called the Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care. The group, which included the National Nurse’s Union and Health Care Now, sought meetings with members of Congress. Flowers and other advocates asked Congress members to include them in committee debates about the health care bill. But when the first debate on the health care reform took place in the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Sen. Max Baucus, a politician who gets over 80 percent of his campaign contributions from outside his home state of Montana, they were locked out. Baucus invited 41 people to testify. None backed single payer.
The Leadership Conference, which represents more than 20 million people, again requested that one of their members testify. Baucus again refused. When the second committee meeting took place, Flowers and seven other activists stood one by one in the room and asked why the voices of the patients and the health care providers were not being heard. The eight were arrested and removed from the committee hearing.
Single-payer advocates were eventually heard on a few of the House and Senate committees. But the hearings were a charade, part of Washington’s cynical political theater. It was the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists who were in charge. They dominated the public debate. They wrote the legislation. They determined who received lavish campaign contributions and who did not. And they won.
“We are talking about life and death, about the difference between living your life and dying,” Redmond said. “And once again it came down to the Democratic Party trumping the needs of the people.”

Oh, by the way, for my “haters,”…Tim is one of my Jewish friends and supporters.
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By Tim Wise
July 10, 2010

Prominent white conservatives are angry about racism.

Forget all that talk about a post-racial society. They know better than to believe in such a thing, and they’re hopping mad.

What is it that woke them up finally, after all these years of denial, during which they insisted that racism was a thing of the past?

Was it the research indicating that job applicants with white sounding names have a 50 percent better chance of being called back for an interview than their counterparts with black-sounding names, even when all qualifications are the same?

No.

Was it the study that found white job applicants with criminal records have a better chance of being called back for an interview than black applicants without one, even when all the qualifications are the same?

No.

Was it the massive nationwide study that estimated at least 1 million cases of blatant job discrimination against blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans each year, affecting roughly one-in-three job seekers of color?

No.

Is it the fact that black males with college degrees are almost twice as likely as their white male counterparts to be out of work?

No.

Is it the data indicating that Chinese-American professionals earn less than 60 percent as much as their white counterparts, even though the Chinese Americans, on average, have more education?

No.

Was it the study that found the lightest-skinned immigrants to the United States make as much as 15 percent more than the darkest, even when the immigrants in question have the same level of education, experience and measured productivity?

No.

Perhaps they finally stumbled upon the evidence suggesting millions of cases of race-based housing discrimination against people of color each year, and this is what has them so incensed?

No.

Or maybe their anger is due to the reports of blatant racism practiced by Wells Fargo, which was deliberately roping black borrowers (to whom they referred as “mud people”) into high-cost loans, targeting them for these instruments, and even falsifying credit histories to make black applicants look like greater risks than they were, so as to justify the scam?

No.

Was it the study demonstrating that e-mail inquiries about rental property submitted by people with white sounding names were 60 percent more likely than those with black sounding names to get a positive response from a landlord (meaning an indication that a unit was available for rent), even when the housing had been previously advertised as available?

No.

Maybe they’re furious because of the way whites in the New Orleans area conspired after the flooding of the city to keep blacks from returning and being able to find housing on equitable terms, if at all?

No.

Or maybe it’s because of the data from the Justice Department, to the effect that blacks are far more likely than whites to have their cars and persons searched after a traffic stop, even though whites, when searched, are more than four times as likely to have drugs or other illegal contraband on us?

No.

Well then, perhaps it’s the recent revelations that police in New York City are blatantly profiling blacks and Latinos, stopping and frisking them in massive numbers, even though in 90 percent of all cases, the people they stop are released without any charge because they are found to have done nothing illegal?

No.

Is the source of their anger the data showing that although whites and blacks use and sell drugs at roughly the same rates, African Americans are anywhere from 2.8 to 5.5 times more likely than whites to be arrested for a drug offense, depending on the year? Or perhaps the state level data indicating that in nine states, blacks are arrested at more than seven times the rate of whites, and in Minnesota and Iowa at rates that are more than eleven times greater than white arrest rates for drugs? Or perhaps the additional data that blacks are more than 10 times as likely as whites to be sent to prison for drug offenses, despite relatively equivalent rates of drug crimes? Or the fact that a majority of persons admitted to prison for drug offenses are black, even though there are about six times more white users nationwide?

No.

Maybe they’re beside themselves over the fact that millions of black men who are ex-felons and have paid their debt to society are permanently blocked from voting thanks to disenfranchisement laws that were devised for blatantly racist reasons? Surely they are upset that these laws have led to blacks being denied the right to vote after serving their time at a rate that is 7 times the national average?

No.

Perhaps they’re enraged by the way white police officers conspired to murder a black man in New Orleans after Katrina, and then cover up the crime, or the way other whites formed a vigilante terror squad and went hunting for black people in the aftermath of the flooding?

No.

Maybe it was that racist e-mail sent by the white Boston police officer to the reporter at the Boston Globe, in which he called Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates a “banana eatin’ jungle monkey?”

No.

Then maybe it was the story about that high ranking racist in the Chicago police force who OK’d the torture of black men to extract confessions for years?

No.

Then I bet they must have finally seen that story about the Philadelphia cop who refers to black folks as animals and niggers. That’s it, right?

No.

Could it be that they’ve read and been moved by the dozens of studies that show the cumulative health effects of racism and discrimination on people of color, and which indicate that doctors do indeed treat patients of color differently, and worse, than their white counterparts? Or perhaps the research that finds how even black women with college degrees, decent jobs and good incomes have infant mortality rates for their children that are higher than the rates for white women who dropped out before high school? And the way that researchers believe stresses associated with racial discrimination are implicated in the worse fetal and neo-natal health of these mother’s children?

No.

Perhaps it’s the research that shows black students being suspended and expelled from school at far higher rates than white students, even though there are no significant differences in the rates at which students of different races violate serious school rules?

No.

Maybe it’s the research indicating that teachers set lowered expectations for children with black-sounding names, independent of observed ability, and even when compared to the child’s own siblings who have less identifiably black names. These lowered expectations, based on presumptions of lowered competence and ability then result in lower performance by the stigmatized students.

No.

Or maybe it was that troubling story on CNN about how white children and even many children of color seem to prefer white skin, and think that children with black skin are bad, dirty, mean and ugly?

No.

Well then it must be the blatant stuff. Maybe they finally got around to looking at those images of Tea Party protesters and other assorted conservatives coming to rallies with signs advocating the lynching of Democratic party leaders, or portraying the President as an African witch doctor? Or maybe somebody informed them of all the times that conservative and Republican Party activists have sent around blatantly racist e-mails lately, like those portraying the white house lawn covered in watermelons, or once again with the witch doctor imagery, or likening Michelle Obama to an ape, or picturing the President as a pair of “spook eyes” against a black background?

No.

Maybe they’re angry at Tea Party leader Mark Williams for calling the President an “Indonesian Muslim” and a “welfare thug?” I mean, that’s pretty racialized rhetoric, right?

No.

Or maybe it was the Tea Party leader in Ohio who tweeted about how he wants to shoot Hispanic immigrants, to whom he refers as “spicks?” (sic)

No.

Well then surely it must have been the story about Tea Party candidate for Governor in New York who sent e-mails picturing the President dressed as a pimp and featuring a group of African tribesman performing a traditional dance, which he referred to as the “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal?”

No.

Perhaps what has them angry is the statement by that Arizona Congressman, to the effect that black folks were better off under slavery than they are today?

No.

Maybe it was because of those guys over at the popular right-wing website, FreeRepublic.com who called the President’s daughter, Malia, “typical ghetto trash,” and a “whore” whose mother likes to entertain her by “making monkey sounds?”

No.

Or perhaps they finally had enough when they heard about how Rep. Ciro Rodriguez was called a “wetback” by one of his constituents and told to go back to Mexico?

No.

Or maybe it was that lawmaker in South Carolina who called both President Obama and Republican Gubernatorial candidate (and Indian American) Nikki Haley, “ragheads?”

No.

Or perhaps they’re upset about how the guy who sponsored the law in Arizona, ostensibly to catch “illegal immigrants” (a law they support), turns out to be pals with neo-Nazis? Or the fact that the organization that takes credit for writing the bill has longstanding ties to blatant racists and hate groups?

No.

Or maybe it was the story about how National Review columnist John Derbyshire told Harvard law students that black achievement lags behind white achievement because blacks are biologically inferior to whites?

No.

Well perhaps it was that story about the motorists in Prescott, Arizona who continually shouted racial slurs at artists who were painting a mural on the walls of a school, which featured children of color who go there? And certainly they must have been upset about the fact that initially the school was actually planning to lighten the subjects’ skin color so as to appease locals and a right wing talk show host?

No.

Or maybe they’re irate because of the report that employees of the Department of Homeland Security have posted blatantly racist comments about Latino immigrants on web boards?

No.

Surely it must be because of the evidence that uniformed American soldiers are joining up with neo-Nazi organizations and even flaunting their membership in such groups?

No.

It is none of this. Neither the evidence of systemic discrimination against people of color in every walk of American life, nor the repeated examples of blatant racism directed towards people of color individually moves them.

But they’re angry nonetheless about racism in America.

They’re especially angry about the tax being placed on those who use tanning salons. Because this is racist. Against white people. No, seriously.

Oh, and the President criticized a white police officer for arresting a black man for a crime that, turns out, the black man didn’t actually commit, according to state law. That Obama would do such a thing–namely, criticize an officer for making an unjustified arrest–means that white police officers are “under assault” from Obama, and that the President is trying to “destroy” the white officer, no doubt because he’s white.

Oh, and since people of color disproportionately lack health care coverage, the President’s plan for expanding coverage is obviously a racist scheme to get reparations for slavery.

Oh, and the President is deliberately trying to destroy the economy so as to pay back white people for slavery and hundreds of years of oppression.

Oh, and two black kids beat up a white kid on a bus in Belleville, Illinois–something that is obviously due to Obama being President.

Oh, and the President picked Eric Holder as Attorney General. Since Holder has said Americans have often been “cowards” when it comes to discussing race, this proves that Holder is racist against white people, even though he didn’t mention white people. He said Americans, and Americans means white people. So he’s a bigot. And so is Obama for picking him.

Oh, and the President nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. And she’s a Latina, who notes that she sees the world through the lens of her experience, and that she hopes that experience would positively inform her decision-making. And that means she’s a bigot. And the fact that Obama nominated her, as well as Eric Holder, proves that he “views white men as the problem” in America, and that the only way you can get promoted by Obama is “by hating white people.” Like Tim Geithner, who most definitely hates your honky ass.

Oh, and the President also nominated Elena Kagan, and Kagan once worked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, and Marshall once said the Constitution as originally conceived–which, ya know, excluded blacks from citizenship–was flawed. Imagine. And this means that Marshall was anti-white, and anyone who worked for him must be too.

Oh, and the Obama Justice Department dropped criminal voter intimidation charges against three members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia (while obtaining an injunction against a fourth member). So this proves the Administration is allied with the Panthers, whose Philly leader proclaims that he “hates all white people,” and Obama probably agrees with him, and is refusing to prosecute because he doesn’t care about white folks’ voting rights. In fact, the New Black Panthers are part of Obama’s “army of thugs.” Even though the same Philly leader of the group didn’t support Obama for President, and has called Obama a “puppet” and “slavemaster.” And of course, as a point of fact, the criminal charges against the other three Panthers were dropped by the Bush Department of Justice. And there have been no voters who actually claim to have been intimidated by the Panthers. And even a leading conservative Republican on the Civil Rights Commission ote_redirect.php?note_id=10150203063700459&h=10316515925c54d357d9e353e0e7d5c0&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmediamatters.org%2Fblog%2F201007060019″says the incident is much ado about nothing.

Oh, and since the Justice Department is considering bringing federal charges against the white officer who killed Oscar Grant–a black man–in cold blood in Oakland last year, this proves that we’ve returned to the 1950s, only this time it’s whites who are the victims of racist oppression. Because it’s oppression to bring charges against a white cop who kills someone. Naturally.

Yes indeed, they all agree, Obama is a “reverse racist” who has a deep-seated hatred of white people, and who is like Hitler, and we know this because he’s proposing a national service corps to help work on various community problems, and this is just like the Nazi SS, well, except for the murdering part. Or if not Hitler, then at the very least he’s just like an “African colonial despot”.

And for sure, Obama is the reason race relations are so strained: not because of the ongoing discrimination against people of color, which the data indicates is commonplace, or because of the incendiary rhetoric coming from conservative commentators. But because of Barack Obama.

Race relations could never be strained by say, for instance, having a white talk show host fantasize about murdering a black congressman with a shovel.

Or by another host calling undocumented migrants from Mexico “invasive species”.

Or by spreading lies about how 5 million so-called “illegal aliens” were given subprime mortgages, as a way to blame the undocumented for the housing meltdown, even though there is no evidence whatsoever to support the fabricated claim.

Or by alleging that ACORN (a community-based organization comprised mostly of people of color) committed massive voter fraud so as to help elect Obama, even though there is no evidence that a single illegitimate vote was cast due to ACORN’s voter registration efforts, and despite the fact that when a few ACORN operatives filed phony voter registration cards, it was ACORN itself that alerted election officials to the problem

Or by a prominent conservative commentator insisting that white men are experiencing the same kind of oppression that blacks faced for years, even as that commentator has previously reminisced fondly about the days of segregation.

Or by another radio host and prominent conservative author blaming “multicultural” people for “destroying” the country, or calling Arab Muslims “non-humans,” or fantasizing about killing people in the “civil rights business.”

Or by another radio host and prominent conservative author referring to the mostly black residents of New Orleans, in the wake of Katrina as “worthless parasites” and “human parasitic garbage” because of their high rates of welfare receipt. Even though, according to Census data, there were only 4600 households in all of the city receiving cash welfare at the time of the flooding, which was less than 4 percent of all black households in the city, and whose annual benefits came to only around $2800 per year.

Or by walking around with a sign suggesting that President Obama intends to put white people into slavery.

Or by saying that President Obama only won the election because he’s black, and if he weren’t black, he’d be a tour guide in Honolulu.

Or by saying that the only reason Colin Powell endorsed Obama was as an act of racial bonding.

Or by saying that Oprah Winfrey is also successful only because she’s black.

Or by blaming the economic collapse on fair lending laws and lending to minorities, even though all the evidence suggests such laws and such loans had nothing to do with the housing or larger economic crises.

Or perhaps by having a right-wing talk show host announce a plan for conservatives to “take back the civil rights movement,” and compare himself to Martin Luther King Jr. This, even though conservatives were almost uniformly opposed to the movement and King, and even though the talk show host’s favorite authors, whose work he promotes regularly, viewed the movement as a communist conspiracy and referred to civil rights activists as animals.

Or by another conservative comparing himself to Dr. King, and speaking of how much he respects King’s legacy, even as he–the conservative–has said he believes private businesses should have the right to discriminate on the basis of race.

No, none of those things could strain race relations, or further racism.

And certainly not when compared to a tanning booth tax.

While on the face of it, these kinds of right-wing inanities may seem so absurd as to hardly merit being taken seriously, it’s important to step back and think about the internal logic of even the most outlandish claims. I mean, no one can honestly believe that health care reform is reparations. After all, what the hell kind of reparations is it where you have to get sick first in order to get paid? That’s not a good hustle. And no one can really believe that some white kid got beat up on a bus because it’s “Obama’s America,” as if the President had sent a text message to those black guys saying: HEY, YNOT BEAT SUM CRAKA ASS 4 ME, U DIG?

But the intellectual strength of the claims is not the issue. It doesn’t matter. From a political perspective, even the most insane-sounding claim about Obama’s supposed hatred for white people makes sense. It’s a perfect way to prime white racial fears and anxieties, to say, in effect, they’re coming for your money white folks, and then your children. In a nation where the population will be half people of color within 25-30 years, and where the popular culture is now thoroughly multicultural (and thus many of the icons don’t look the way they used to), and where the President doesn’t fit a lot of people’s conception of what such a person is supposed to look like, and where the economy is in the toilet for millions, playing upon white anxiety is the perfect recipe for political mobilization.

They’ve said very clearly that they want their country back. And if we who oppose the right don’t challenge these folks for the racists they are, or continue to shy away from making race an issue (as if it weren’t already), they just might get it.

Tim Wise is the author of five books and over 250 essays on race. His latest is Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010).

Thank you so much and thanks to your daughter, Jeri, who served as the midwife to this profound delivery by “tricking you” into bringing this forth.  It’s obvious that you are no more retired than I am and I look forward to our paths to continue to run parallel in our continued growth. God (ain’t but One and He is Mighty) bless you my brother!!

By the way, I got another copy of the book to pass along to my pastor here in Tallahassee, Rev. R.B. Holmes, Jr., the closest that I can find to a local visionary ministry here in the boon docks of North Florida.

Peace to you,
Na’im

Na’im Akbar, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Na’im Akbar Consultants
324 N. Copeland Street
Tallahassee, FL 32304

Setting the Record Straight
A Response to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

We, the undersigned, take strong exception to the Op-Ed, “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game,” published in the New York Times, April 23, 2010 by Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. There are gross errors, inaccuracies and misrepresentations in Gates’ presentation of the transatlantic European enslavement system. Moreover, we are duly concerned about his political motivations and find offensive his use of the term “blame game.” It trivializes one of the most heinous crimes against humanity—the European enslavement of African people. Gates contradicts his stated purpose of “ending” what he refers to as a “blame-game,” by erroneously making African rulers and elites equally responsible with European and American enslavers. He shifts the “blame” in a clear attempt to undermine the demand for reparations.

The African Holocaust or Maafa, as it is referred to by many, is a crime against humanity and is recognized as such by the United Nations, scholars, and historians who have documented the primary and overwhelming culpability of European nations for enslavement in Europe, in the Americas and elsewhere. In spite of this overwhelming documentation, Gates inexplicably shifts the burden of culpability to Africans who were and are its victims. The abundance of scholarly work also affirms that Europeans initiated the process, established the global infrastructure for enslavement, and imposed, financed and defended it, and were the primary beneficiaries of it in various ways through human trafficking itself, banking, insurance, manufacturing, farming, shipping and allied enterprises.

No serious scholar of African history or reparations activist denies the collaboration of some African rulers, elites, merchants and middlemen. Indeed, collaboration accompanies oppression as a continuing fact of history. Historians have described collaborators in two other major Holocausts: the Jewish Holocaust and the Native American Holocaust. Yet Gates, ignoring the historical record, makes the morally unacceptable error of conflating three distinct groups involved in the Holocaust of enslavement: perpetrators, collaborators and victims. The Jewish Holocaust had its Judenräte, Jewish councils which chose Jews for enslaved labor and for the death camps and facilitated their transport to them, as well as its kapos, Jewish camp overseers, who brutalized their fellow prisoners along with the SS guards. In the Native American Holocaust, there were also Native American collaborators who fought with the Whites to defeat, dispossess and dominate other Native Americans. Thus, such collaboration in oppression is not unique to Africa and Africans.

Gates makes it clear that the article is written in the context of “post-racial posturing,” eagerly set forth by a nation citing its first Black president as false evidence of the declining significance of race and racism. Indeed, this is a period of resurgent racism reflected in the rise of the Tea Party movement, increasing hostility toward immigrants, open public recommitments to embracing and celebrating the history of racial oppression, joined with the fostering of fear to facilitate the continued denial of civil and human rights.

The purpose for Gates’ misrepresentation of the historical record is to undermine the African and African descendant reparations movement, and to make it appear to be based on unfounded demands. An accurate reporting of the history of the Holocaust of enslavement and the period of segregation and other forms of oppression which followed it, attests to the importance, in fact, the essentiality of reparations. The widespread opposing responses to Gates and the anti-reparations interests and sentiments he represents in his article, provides us with an excellent opportunity to renew the just demand for reparations for centuries of enslavement and continued economic disadvantage and exploitation Black people endured in the Jim Crow era and subsequent years of wage slavery.

Gates’ flawed and misconstrued presentation of the global reparations movement to redress the injuries of the Holocaust of enslavement and subsequent labor exploitation attempts to leave the reader with the impression that the movement is only a product of misguided African Americans. However, legal battles regarding reparations for the European enslavement of Africans are being waged throughout the United States, Jamaica, Brazil, South Africa, The Virgin Islands, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Martinique, Canada, Namibia and Barbados. The United Nations declaration that 2011 is the International Year of People of African Descent will afford yet another opportunity to expand the reparations movement for the longest unpunished crime against humanity — the European enslavment of African people. In this country, reparations scholars, activists and others will continue their efforts in support of the House Judiciary Committee, HR-40, which calls for a study of the economic, cultural and psychological impact of enslavement on United States citizens.

The record of the United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), held in South Africa in 2001, offers additional evidence of the global reach and relevance of the reparations movement and the work of Africans and African descendants in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora. Gates’ omission of these efforts and WCAR seems to suggest either a deliberate misrepresentation or a reflection of his distance from contemporary political movements in the international African community.

We, the undersigned, intellectuals, activists, artists, professionals, men and women from various fields of focus, assemble here from a call by the Institute of the Black World 21st Century united in our profound commitment to African people and with a long history of involvement in national and international issues involving Africa and people of African descent. Signing this letter is not simply to respond to Gates’ clear inaccuracies, misrepresentations and questionable timing, but rather to honor and defend the memory and interests of the victims of the Holocaust of enslavement. We have come together at this historical moment to bear continuing witness to this gross human injury and the continuing consequences of this catastrophic and horrific event and process, and reaffirm our renewed commitment to continue and intensify the struggle for reparative and social justice in this society and the world.

Committee to Advance the Movement for Reparations

Rick Adams Dr. Leonard Jeffries
Atty. Adjoa Aiyetoro Sister Viola Plummer
Dr. Molefi Kete Asante Brother James Rodgers
Herb Boyd Atty. Nkechi Taifa
Dr. Iva Carruthers Dr. James Turner
Dr. Ron Daniels Dr. Ife Williams
Dr. Jeanette Davidson Dr. Ray Winbush
Dr. Maulana Karenga Dr. Conrad Worrill

Signatories

Adisa Alkebulan, San Diego State, President, Diopian Institute
Dr. Mario Beatty, Chair, African American Studies, Chicago State University
Keith Beauchamp, filmmaker
Dr. Melanie Bratcher, University of Oklahoma
Dr. Sundiata Keita, Cha-Jua, President of National Council for Black Studies
Dr. Lupe Davidson, University of Oklahoma
Dr. Joy DeGruy, author of “The Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome”
Dr. Daryl Harris, Howard University
Eddie Harris, filmmaker
Juliette Hubbard, Australian Aboriginal Activist
Rev. Dr. Bernice Powell Jackson, North American President World Council of Churches
Iya Marilyn Kai Jewett, Progressive Images Marketing Communications
Darryl Jordan, American Friends Service Center-Third World Coalition
Prof. Chad Dion Lassiter President, Black Men at Univ. of Penn School of Social Work, Inc
Haki Madhubuti, President/CEO, Third World Press
Dr. Emeka Nwadiora, Temple University
Dr. Patricia Reid Merritt, Stockton State University
Dr. Segun Shabaka, National Association of Kawaida Organizations–New York
Dr. Michael Simanga, Fulton County Arts Council, Atlanta
James Lance Taylor, President of National Conference of Black Political Scientists
Dr. Christel Temple, University of Maryland
Dr. Ronald Walters, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland
Dr. Valethia Watkins, Chair, African American Studies, Olive Harvey College
Dr. Komozi Woodard, Sarah Lawrence College
Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Pastor Emeritus, Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago
Atty. Faya Rose Sanders, President, National Voting Rights Museum, Selma, AL
Leonard Dunston, President Emeritus, National Association of Black Social Workers
Betty Dopson, Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People
Bob Law, National Radio Personality

Contact Information

Press Inquiries and Interviews via Herb Boyd: 917.291.1825 – Email: herbboyd47@gmail.com
General Information and/or Responses: 888.774.2921 – Email. info@ibw21.org

He also writes as a person who has resisted racism and still fights it every chance he gets. What follows is an artice Professor Dews wrote in “Aspenia.” (The Italian Journal published by the Aspen Foundation in Italy)

‘The nigger show.”

I first heard this expression used to describe the Obama administration
during a visit to my hometown in East Texas during the early summer of 2009.
I understood what the epithet meant: Our minds are made up, the president
lacks legitimacy, and there is nothing he can do that we will support. I was
not surprised to hear such a phrase.

I grew up in the 1960’s during the ragged end of the Jim Crow era, where
many of the books in my school library were stamped Colored School, meaning
they had been brought to the white school when the town was forced to
integrate the public school system. I recall my parents had instructed me,
before my first day of elementary school, not to sit in a chair where a
black child had sat. And I remember my sister joked that her yearbook, when
it appeared at the end of her first year of integrated high school, was in
“black and white.”

The outward signs of racism of my home state have now disappeared, but
racial hatred remains. My father and his friends still use the word nigger
to refer to all black people, and the people of my hometown don’t hesitate
to spout their racist rhetoric to my face, assuming I agree with them. I
hold my tongue for the sake of having continued access to this kind of
truth. I learned long ago how not to accept the hatred I was being taught
and how to survive not having done so. More recently, I realized that I also
learned another lesson: how to recognize racism when it masquerades as
something else.

More than 40 years after my first experiences with racism, I am thousands of
miles away in Rome, but surrounded by ghosts. Last year, I received a grant
from the National Endowment for the Arts for a community program called the
Big Read, which sponsors activities to encourage communities to come
together to read and discuss a single book. I chose Harper Lee’s To Kill a
Mockingbird, in part because I thought that some of the most salient issues
in the novel – racism, classism, xenophobia, the Jim Crow era – were perhaps
relevant to an increasingly diverse, contemporary Italy.

That there is racism in Italy is obvious to anyone who pays attention to
current affairs. In fact, during the first week of the Big Read Rome, a
story in one of Italy’s national newspapers detailed the experience of a
Nigerian woman being called sporca nera (essentially, dirty nigger) by two
women she asked to stop smoking on a Roman bus.

But I never imagined that consideration of the novel would prove so relevant
to a country that had just elected its first black president.

Ironically, until the election of Barack Obama, my discussions of racism in
the United States seemed historical. I felt that with the passage of the
civil rights legislation of the mid-1960’s, the country had turned a corner,
that the slow evaporation of overt racism was perhaps inevitable. Now, my
personal experience of Southern racism feels current and all too familiar. A
news story about the Big Read that appeared in La Repubblica on Sept. 20
(unaware that my grant was awarded during the Bush administration),
presciently brought Rome, Obama, To Kill a Mockingbird, and racism together
in its headline: “Obama brings antiracist book to Rome.”

Jimmy Carter was lambasted for having recently explained that the vehemence
with which many Americans resist Obama’s presidency is an expression of
racism. Carter was accused of fanning the flames of racial misunderstanding
by labeling as “racist” what on the surface could be perceived as legitimate
policy differences. Like Carter, as a white Southern man, I can see beyond
the seemingly legitimate rhetoric to discern what is festering behind much
of the opposition to Obama and to his administration’s policy initiatives. I
also have access, via the racist world from which I came, direct
confirmation of the racial hatred toward Obama.

The veiled racism I sense in the United States today is couched, in public
discourse at least, in terms that allow for plausible deniability of racist
intent. And those who resist any policy initiative from the Obama
administration engage in a scorched-earth policy that reminds me of the
self-centered white flight, the abandonment of public schools, and the
proliferation of private schools, that followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of
Education decision to desegregate public schools. The very people, like my
own rural, working-class family back in East Texas, who stand to gain from
the efforts of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are,
because of their racism, willing to oppose policies that would benefit them
the most. Their racism outweighs their own self-interest.

Unfortunately, racists in the United States have learned one valuable lesson
since the 1960s: They cannot express their racism directly. In public, they
must veil their racial hatred behind policy differences. This obfuscation
makes direct confrontation difficult. Anyone pointing out their racist
motivations runs the risk of unfairly playing “the race card.” But I know
what members of my family mean when they say – as so many said during the
town hall meetings in August – that they “want their country back.” They
want it back, safely, in the hands of someone like them, a white person.
They feel that a black man has no right to be the president of their
country.

During a phone conversation a few weeks after Obama’s election, my father
lamented that he and my mother might have to stop visiting the casinos in
Shreveport, La.: Given Obama’s election, “the niggers are already walking
around like they own the place. They won’t even give up their seats for
white women anymore. I don’t know what we’re going to do with ‘em.”

My students often ask me how I managed to avoid accepting the lesson in
racism offered by my family. From the time I was 4 or 5 years old – roughly
the same age as Scout Finch, the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird – I
recall knowing that I didn’t agree with racism. More important, my paternal
grandmother provided me with the encouragement that I could ignore what I
was being taught. She provided me with the courage to resist.

My grandmother hoped that my father and his father represented the last
generations of the type of Southern man that had shaped her life -
virulently racist, prone to violence, proud of their ignorance, and
self-defeatingly stubborn. It was a type of Southern man that she hoped and
prayed I could avoid becoming.

However, my father and his father were not the last of their kind; their
racial hatred has been passed on. My grandmother, if she were alive, would
recognize the same tendencies among many of the people who shout down
politicians and bring guns to public rallies. She would also see how the
only change they have made is to replace overt racist epithets with more
euphemistic language.

Rather than seeing my home state and its racist attitudes, slowly, over
time, pulled in the direction of more acceptance, the country as a whole has
become more like the South, the racial or cultural equivalent of what is
called the Walmartization of American retail.

It might be easy to see literature as impotent in the face of the
persistence and adaptability of racism. But I continue to believe in the
transformative potential of literature and its ability to provide an
alternative view of the world. And for children who are not lucky enough to
have grandmothers like mine, I believe that books like To Kill a Mockingbird
can provide inoculation against the virus that is racism.

—————————————————————————-
—-

This article originally appeared in the December 2009 issue of Aspenia, the
Italian journal published by the Aspen Foundation Italy.

Enjoy!

TRIBUTE TO REVEREND DR. JEREMIAH A. WRIGHT
FROM
DR. WILLIAM A. JACKSON

RESPECT and LOVE

Dr. Wright, you are Loved and Respected not because you are good-looking, but because you make people of all positions and persuasions, and even your enemies, take a good, long hard look in the mirror of their lives, their interactions, their service and their duties, and see ourselves as we and the world system(s) really are.

You are Respected and Loved not because you are light-skinned, but because you shine the light of truth on our thinking and our actions to show our waywardness and our self-deception, in addition to the deception and perfidy of those in positions of power and authority.

You gain the Respect and Love of all who hear you not because you have wavy hair, but because you help us to straighten out the kinky and convoluted thinking, myths and misperceptions going on beneath our weaves, wigs, waves and dreadlocks sitting atop our weary and worried heads!

I believe that even your Right-Wing brothers and sisters are listening to your analyses of the failure of politicians, officials, business leaders and government to truly serve and benefit the people, and without admitting it, they are responding to your truths in their own specific ways.

You are Respected and Loved not because you are haughty, high-minded, arrogant and unpatriotic, as some would contend, but because you go directly to the heart of both important spiritual and carnal matters and, unpretentiously and uncompromisingly, tell the Truth and the Whole Truth as God and the Holy Spirit lead you to see it.

This is why the masses of the people the world over Love and Respect you. And, this is why the devil, his demons, his denizens and his cowardly cohorts hate and attack you!

So keep the Faith. Continue to fight the good fight, stay in The Race and Finish the Course, and keep striving for the Prize and the Crown that Awaits at the End of Your Days.

In the meantime, “Keep So Busy” that “You Ain’t Got Time To Die!!!”
———————————–
What a way to end the week!

Attached please find an essay I have written in response to the very disturbing NYT op ed by Skip Gates on Friday, April 23. Thank you to those of you who read the piece in draft form and offered feedback. I offer it for wide circulation and discussion because I think the public mis-representation of slavery has deep and serious implications for racial justice work and the public understanding of it. Sadly, I think Gates’ op ed deals a blow to progressive efforts to move forward on issues of race and racism. Feel free to circulate or post this where you deem appropriate.

Barbara

A Response to Skip Gates’ Call for Slavery Absolution

By Barbara Ransby

In a recent New York Times editorial, entitled, “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game,” (April 23) Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates calls on the United States’ first Black president to end the nation’s sense of responsibility for the legacy of slavery. It is a pernicious argument, well suited to the so-called “postracial” moment we are in. Like the erroneous claims of “post-racialism,” in general, Gates’ editorial compromises rather than advances the prospects for racial justice; and clouds rather than clarifies the history, and persistent realities, of racism in America.

Gates essentially absolves Americans of the guilt, shame and most importantly, financial responsibility for the horrific legacy of slavery in the Americas. How does he do this? — Through a contrived narrative that indicts African elites. And they did collaborate in the trade. But this is no news flash. Every history graduate student covering the Atlantic World knows that people of African descent (like the elites from every other corner of the globe) waged war against one another, captured enemies in battle, and enslaved their weaker and more vulnerable neighbors. This is nothing unique to Africa. What is problematic about Gates’ essay is how he frames and skews this fact.

The frame is this. Black and White people in the United States should now “get over” slavery because as we all know, this was not a racial thing but an economic thing. Since both Blacks and Whites were culpable, the call for reparations is indeed meaningless and bereft of any moral weight. If we take Gates’ argument to its full conclusion, we might claim that it is not America or Europe, but the long suffering, impoverished, and debt-ridden nations of Africa, that should really pay reparations to Black Americans. “The problem with reparations,” Gates proclaims, is “from whom they would be extracted.” This is a dilemma since Africans were neither “ignorant or innocent,” when it came to the slave trade.

At its worse, Gates’ argument resembles that of some Holocaust deniers who don’t deny that “bad things” happened to the Jews, but add that maybe the Nazi’s weren’t the only ones to blame. Maybe the Jews, in part, did it to themselves. Stories that over-emphasize the role of the Judenrats (Jewish Councils), for example, who were coerced into providing slave labor to the Nazis and organized Jews to be sent to the concentration camps, distorts the real culprits and criminals of the Holocaust, and in the final analysis, serves to blame the victims.

Even though African monarchs did collaborate in the selling of blacks bodies into slavery, what happened after that was the establishment of a heinous and brutal system that rested squarely on the dual pillars of White supremacy and ruthless capitalist greed. There was nothing African-inspired about it.

It is with the construction of a racialized slave regime in the Americas that a new form of the ancient institution of slavery was honed and refashioned. African slaves in the Americas, unlike most other places, were deemed slaves for life, and their offspring were enslaved. Moreover, Black servants were distinguished from white servants (who were also badly treated) and stripped of all rights and recourse. As slavery evolved even “free” Blacks were denied basic rights by virtue of sharing ancestry and phenotype with the enslaved population.

Racism, as so many scholars have documented was the critical and ideological justification for the exploitation, or more accurately, theft, of black labor for some 300 years. Blacks were deemed inferior, childlike, savage, and better suited to toiling in the hot sun than Whites, and innately incapable of governing themselves. These are the racist myths and narratives that justified slavery in the Americas. It was indeed different in this way from other slave systems where the fabricated mythologies of race did not rule the day.

Another problem with Gates narrative about slavery is that he neglects to examine the plantation experience itself as the main ground on which African and African-American labor was exploited. As distinguished historian, Eric Foner, points out in his letter to the Times on April 26, in critical response to Gates, the internal U.S. slave trade, which had nothing to do with Africa or African elites, involved the buying and selling of over two million Black men, women and children between 1820 and 1860. Slavery existed for over a half century after the abolition of the trans-Atlantic trade in 1807. Even if African monarchs were complicit in and benefited individually from the trade, none of them received dividends from the profits generated by the production of millions of tons of tobacco, sugar and cotton by the stolen labor of imprisoned African and African-American plantation workers (i.e. slaves). It is this appropriation of millions of hours of uncompensated labor that is the core of the reparations demand.

Professor Gates’ selective storytelling and slanted use of history paints a very different picture than does the collective scholarship of hundreds of historians over the last fifty years or so. A learned man who commands enormous resources and unparalleled media attention, why would Gates put this argument forward so vehemently now? It is untimely at best. At a time when ill-informed and self-congratulatory commentaries about how far America has come on the race question, abound, Gates weighs in to say, we can also stop “blaming” ourselves (‘ourselves’ meaning white Americas or their surrogates) for slavery. The burden of race is made a little bit lighter by Gates’ revisionist history. It is curious that the essay appears at the same time that we not only see efforts to minimize the importance of race or racism, but at a moment when there is a rather sinister attempt to rewrite the antebellum era as the good old days of southern history. Virginia Governor Bob McConnell went so far as to designate a month in honor of the pro-slavery Confederacy.

Gates’ essay fits conveniently into the new discourse on post-racialism. Slavery was long ago, the story goes, and Black Americans have come such a long way. So, we need to stop embracing ‘victimhood,’ get over it and move on. We need to stop complaining and ‘end the blame game,’ with regards to racism. After all, doesn’t the election of Barack Obama relegate racism to the dustbins of history? Gates goes even further to suggest that even the worst marker of American racism, slavery, wasn’t so exclusively racial after all.

Clearly, there has been racial progress in the United States since the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. That progress was born of decades of struggle and protest. But we have not come as far as some would have us believe. And we don’t escape history by either tracing common ancestry or blaming others for comparable crimes. Reconciliation with the past is a long, arduous and complex process and there are no shortcuts. Moreover, ‘the past’ is not so long ago. In other words, chattel slavery ended in the United States in the 1860s but, as Herb Boyd, in yet another letter to the New York Times in response to Gates, rightly points out, “the economic disadvantage of Black workers extended beyond the long night of slavery into the iniquitous era of Jim Crow” (marked by segregation, legal disenfranchisement, and rampant violence). Moreover, we don’t have to go back to Jim Crow to see the ravages of American racism, a racism that took hold under slavery. Today, millions of young Black men and women are caged, shackled and dehumanized by a prison system that is growing rapidly, privatizing and increasingly exploiting the labor of its inmates. That scenario is far from Harvard Square, where police harassment lands you in the White House and on television. But the reality of the 21st century carceral state suggests that various forms of coercion and containment are palpably present today. It is not slavery but a powerful reminder of it. And once again people of color are disproportionately impacted.

Finally, despite its flawed and reckless uses of history, and powerfully disturbing political messages, there are some useful lessons embedded in Professor Gates’ essay. The lessons are about the self-serving role of certain Black elites, who in slavery times and now, will sell (or sell out) other Black bodies for their own gain and advancement. African royalty did it in the 1600s and 1700s. Comprador elites did it in colonial and postcolonial settings through the Global South. And certain public figures, in political, cultural and academic circles, do so today, with a kind of moral blindness and impunity that rivals the slave sellers of old. As we know, ideas have consequences. And misleading narratives that fuel and validate new forms of denial and give cover to resurgent forms of racism should not be taken lightly.

Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010

Dear Marcus

Where was this article published?? The journalist’s whole bias is reflected in her introduction “Guess we have Reverend Wright to thank for Obama.” That is the game right there.

White people should understand that if they come to Black churches to worship and fellowship, they are welcomed. However, if they come to form an analysis and be judgmental about our theology and worship models-they have no standing to do so and should stay in their own sanctuaries and not use our churches to insult Black people and Black worship.

White America should remember that it was their worship model that purported to have Black people accommodate ourselves to a segregationist social value system. That effort failed, our faith compelled them to expand their faith and it shall continue to do so.

Black churches are not laboratories conducted to secure the approval of racists ,bigots or other small minded judgmental /self righteous individuals. What church extends an invitation to the press to run around in the worship service taking pictures? Go to the Mormon Church and see if they will even let you in if you are not a Mormon. Go to a Mosque and see if you set the rules. Go down to the local synagogue with your camera blazing during worship and see how quickly you are ejected. Go to some white churches and see if they will even let you in.

The arrogance of white privilege leads its adherents to see something wrong with Black control- even in the Black church. The fact of the matter is that this poor soul did not have to come,neither did she have to stay. Like wise if her interest was genuine, she did not have to publish her experience. The reasons why she did both are self evident in her bigoted and ignorant account which patently reveals her selfish motivation. What a poor effort to camouflage racism as journalism. The larger insult is to the congregation who presumably, according to her description, is simply to slow to know the difference between fact and fiction. But observe that she herself does not have the intellectual foundation or the political courage to assail a single point recited as fact by Dr Wright. That is the strategy of the small minded and the cowardly ” do not join the debate, just redefine the question and draw your own unsubstantiated conclusion. She, as a journalist, perhaps is small enough to ignore????? New Cavalry however needs to be clear about defining this weeks Installation activities for the larger community. The agenda of this “journalist” is to “scare ” the community away because of Rev Wright and to put Pastor Small in a Box because of their association. Define the Box. Let us talk if you all wish.