#51

HUMANITY vs. CIVILIZATION by Diva JC

The reality is that Europe and the United States created terrible poverty and instability around the world. So much so, that the people they oppress yearn to live in the oppressor nations in hopes of improving their lives.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

What I do not understand is, if Africans built great civilizations and Mayans built great civilizations why is this generation out of ideas?

Are white men the only ones who know how to build roads?

It seems to me that too many people of color look to white "civilization" for what they need. Wells were drilled 10s of thousands of years ago.

Why can't they drill them in Africa, today?

Yes, yes, I know all the strength and brainpower and resources are drained out of Africa, but come on, when are African men going to wake up.

My client, Nate Perkins, says that black people have a "hate" gene. I may be inclined to agree, considering the fact that Africans are said to be "jealous of their American cousins". I know when I was in Gambia and Ghana, I found the people to be very very needy. No self-reliance, but just a "begging" nature.

I'm sorry to say but I was actually wounded in Gambia by children grabbing for the pens and pencils I was handing out.

We can continue to blame slavery for all the downfalls of black people but, one day, we must wake up and realize we are co-creators with the universe and that we have the power to change our minds - not blaming anyone, anymore.

In the Times article Gates gives us this nugget of wisdom. "The myth was our African ancestors were out on a walk one day and some bad white dude threw a net over them. But that wasn't the way it happened. It wouldn't have been possible without the help of Africans." A real historian might have added that there would have been no slave trade without a demand from Europe and America.

I think this applies to Nike, Tommy Hilfigger, Sean John, FUBU, etc. Supply and demand. Hey, black women made Donna Karen and other designers and black men demand Armani and other designers. Supply and demand is the marketplace. I know, I know, it's not fair how Africans were "used" by Europeans. But there's always time to reverse the playing field.

When will we be doing that?

Diva JC

Above is my response to the article sent to me in email re Henry Louis Gates

Freedom Rider
Henry Louis Gates and the Times: Unfit to Print
by Margaret Kimberley
Printer Friendly Plain Text Format

On December 27, 2005 the New York Times printed an article entitled "Ghanaians' Uneasy Embrace of Slavery's Diaspora." The New York Times rarely delivers on its claim to give its readers "all the news that is fit to print." Even white politicians like John Kerry get biased coverage when they dare to challenge the established order. If a white presidential nominee can't catch a fair break from the Times, then black people are definitely out of luck.

According to the Times, black Americans should just forget about visiting Africa or forging any links with Africans. Like people in poor nations all over the world, many Ghanaians seek to emigrate to the United States. The Times tells us that Ghanaians envy their American cousins for being taken into slavery.

Suppose, for arguments sake, that the statement is an accurate assessment of some Ghanaian opinion. A real newspaper would then ask how much Ghanaians know about the United States, and what if anything they have been taught about African American history or their own history for that matter.

Ghanaians aren't alone in seeking refuge in nations that exploited them. Most of the southwest United States was stolen from Mexico. Mexicans know this but still cross the border in hopes of improving their lives. The United States military killed hundreds of thousands in the Philippines at the turn of the last century. That unforgotten history doesn't prevent Filipinos from waiting years to get green cards that ensure their passage to the country that caused their people so much anguish.

The reality is that Europe and the United States created terrible poverty and instability around the world. So much so, that the people they oppress yearn to live in the oppressor nations in hopes of improving their lives.

The real point of the New York Times article is to tell black Americans that they should just get over the past, realize they are in the best nation on earth, and stop trying to learn anything about their ancestral home. After all, Africa is poor and its people envy three hundred years of slavery, lynching and Jim Crow.

No other group is dissuaded from learning about its ancestry as much as black people are dissuaded. Even groups whose ancestors immigrated voluntarily came from poor countries. Their homelands weren't just poor, they were often oppressive. There would have been no immigration if that were not the case. Yet the New York Times doesn't tell anyone else to forget about identifying with their place of origin. Only black Americans are told to wise up and be grateful for what the system has meted out to them.

Not content to make light of African Americans attempts to connect to Africa, the times had to add the piece de resistance. They had to call Henry Louis Gates.

Gates' area of expertise is African American literature. He is not a historian. He is not a mental health professional. He is not an expert on public affairs. He is not an economist. He knows literature and that is all. Despite his limited base of knowledge, he is continually called upon to opine on subjects he knows little if anything about.

Gates is definitely shrewd. He has gamed a system that confers top dog status on only a few black faces. Journalism schools teach courses like Gates 101 and grade students on their ability to get in touch with Gates when in need of a handy quote about black people.

Several years ago Gates proudly showed the world how little he knew in the PBS documentary series "Wonders of the African World." In the slave trade segment, Gates'only moment of anger was directed at an Ashanti prince. If Gates wants to wax righteously indignant, he should interrogate a member of the Brown family of Brown University. The Brown fortune was made through slavery, as were many others. Gates ought to give a Brown descendant the third degree on camera.

In the Times article Gates gives us this nugget of wisdom. "The myth was our African ancestors were out on a walk one day and some bad white dude threw a net over them. But that wasn't the way it happened. It wouldn't have been possible without the help of Africans." A real historian might have added that there would have been no slave trade without a demand from Europe and America.

From Canada, where slavery was once legal, to the Caribbean, and all the way to the tip of South America, white Americans developed and sustained a voracious need for African free labor. Maybe the Times will tackle that subject some day.

If the Times and their journalistic brethren stopped thinking of the head Negro in charge of all things involving colored people, they might find a useful perspective and write better articles. The New York Times can make local phone calls and find experts on any subject known to humankind. New York City is home to Columbia University, New York University and a 19 campus City University of New York, to name just a few.

Is it possible that some of these institutions have experts on African history? Of course they do, but they will never be heard from as long as a publicity savvy English professor is the only acceptable source of information.

So, if, on your next visit to Ghana, you are referred to as "obruni," a word usually reserved for white people, don't worry about it. Take it as an opportunity to learn from another culture and to teach people who may need to learn from you. In any case, obruni has probably come to mean "foreigner who has more cash than I do."

DZT wrote:

You are, of course, right on point yourself, Joan, with these observations.

If there is an "answer," I offer this, at least as a starting place to figure out why things are the way they are. I too have wondered and been frustrated by some of those same scenes you describe. One that comes to mind was in the days approaching Xmas back in the '80s as I was driving down Dr. MLK Blvd. here in Miami, near the Tacolcy Center. Someone yelled, from the vicinity of the Center across the street to some of his friends, "Hey, they givin' away toys over here." A mad dash ensued, with several children being very nearly hit by cars, and then fighting and yanking at each other's clothes to get through the gate first. The Christmas spirit! The state of our people!

What has happened to us?

You may have heard me expound before on my cherished notion that "history and land are one and the same: there is no history without land and no land without history." Building on that notion, I dare to say that "all political, social, economic, ethnic and cultural questions and issues in the 21st century will be reduced to one matter only: land use."

When we think about it, when we envisage the possibilities and horizons open to us, when we look to our past for guidance, when we look around at our peers, our elders and our heroes and sheroes, all of the data we gather is based on our relationship to the land, or, more precisely, to the underlying political question of who controls the use of the land. Ain't nobody ever built no pyramid on no land that they did not control the use of.

The world we live in today would probably look like alien science fiction to the very vast majority of our Ancestors. Electric lighting is barely 150 years old, not to mention all else that has come with it, right down to computers and our ability to communicate through this medium right now. Some of us think nothing of jumping into a car to go three blocks to buy a newspaper. Even the notion of "newspaper" or of abundant paper at all (meaning some serious deforestation) has come a long way from the invention of papyrus. We assume much about the world, with our expectation of warm water out of faucets, flush toilets and conversations by telephone (fast evolving into digital wonderland, combining image, e-mail, music, etc). Among these unquestioned assumptions that are part of our reality is the notion that land can be owned by individuals, and we usually are not those individuals. (Lest anyone doubt, just let a question of "eminent domain" arise, or the discovery of mineral wealth beneath our homes to clarify the difference between "deed" and "title" and who really "owns" what, or a "military emergency").

I believe that the late Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist as well as a revolutionary thinker, was among those brilliant observers who took time to evaluate the psychological impact of this notion, and how thoroughly alien it is to the great majority of the human race. The notion of land ownership by individuals -- enforced at gunpoint, of course, just as all other unnatural social orders must be enforced by violence; whips, shackles, prison bars, nooses, etc. -- is totally dislocating and disorienting to the [natural] human spirit. Everyone agrees that we definitely own the land that is beneath our two feet; anyone who tries to take that away will justifiably be fought. There is even an accepted sense of family and clan compounds, as with designated farming plots, in those settled communities that were created by the agricultural revolution of 11,000 years ago. But all of these have a sense of stewardship of and responsibility for the land under one's control, which is completely different from something like, say, absentee ownership of a territory. I am nowhere around, you may not even know who I am or if I really exist, but I can fence off a piece of property and you dare not enter it, not even if you are starving and I have fruit falling from trees and rotting on the ground.

With our own versions of the "American Dream of home ownership" that is supposed to be the very icon of "middle class" status, most of us are not much inclined to question the values and assumptions inherent in the notion of home ownership. (Not so, of course, in the rest of the hemisphere, where the question of "land reform" is a perpetual threat to the wealthy, even though it is hardly talked about except when it explodes anew, as in Chiapas, Mexico a few years back; it is the same kind of permanent threat that slave uprisings were, and each time they were quelled there was this notion that God wanted it that way and therefore supplied the violent means by which to prevail). Here in this country, whereas the plight of sharecroppers (our own "peons") and migrant workers might go unnoticed and unchallenged, the Supreme Court's most recent decision on eminent domain but the whole nation, even the so-called "conservatives" on notice that the "middle class" is not really much more, in the eyes of the really wealthy and powerful, than the "house niggers" on their great plantation, living a little more comfortably than the masses in the global sweatshops, prisons, "ghettoes," and reservations.

In urban environments we have little control of the environment (the land) right around us. (This makes for endless possibilities for horror writers like Stephen King; literally anything around us can become a threat). People can appear in front of our homes digging up the street with no explanation or accountability to us. They can appear on the light poles, and sometimes even in our very yards (As with the citrus canker inspectors who marked trees for destruction, much to the delight of the commercial citrus industry). No matter how big or bad we think we are, no matter what we spent on that luxury waterfront home (how high up in the house nigger hierarchy we are, in other words), our sense of control of the land is tenuous at best. Those who come closest to feeling in control of it are those who are well enough armed to pose the threat or the actuality of violently inflicted pain, loss of loved ones, and even death.

"If for me to maintain my lifestyle and my country-club membership, a person has to die, or two people, or three, or three hundred or three hundred thousand, so be it. We do what we have to do". That is the mentality of those who rule by violence. In this, they are no different from what I call (pardon my French) "the asshole in the alley." You know, you've worked hard all week, you're walking home with the meager rewards of your efforts to take care of your family's needs, when an asshole appears out of an alley with a gun. The gun is his only qualification for being able to stop you from what you are doing, to take time out of your life, consume your energy, and interfere with your and your family's livelihood. Because of his possession of the gun -- and NO other mental, spiritual or otherwise redeeming qualifications -- he can take for himself what you have worked so hard for, whether you object or not, since he can also take your life. This is what colonialism was all about. This is what the global social order that has ben put in place over the past 500 years is all about.

It starts with a segment of the human population that is disposed to violent control of others. (We might theorize that in every generation there will be that percentage that decides to beat up other kids and take their lunch money. Among them, the only respect is gained by how many more one can beat up than another and how much wealth they can gain. They will form gangs that might end up in wars with each other, but they fundamentally agree, and it will always be the other kids who pay the highest price. Among them, there is no "crime" against their victims that is recognized or punished, the other kids are just "collateral damage"). This segment of the population will deploy their ill-gotten wealth to build up immense arsenals of weapons, prisons, and of course, "security" measures, with no limits on what degree of torture or intimidation might be resorted to. That's the harsh, hard reality, but this is often hidden away in remote locations, behind barricades and so forth. The "soft" reality is the unrelenting psychological warfare that is carried on, yes, with propaganda and "popular culture" and miseducation, but no less so with tangible realities like money and the enforced concept of land ownership.

Why are we African men and women worldwide seemingly so much less competent than our Ancestors in managing our reality, in fostering great civilizations, in accomplishing dazzling feats of engineering and the like? Nothing great that our Ancestors achieved along those lines was achieved without their control of their habitat, of the land of which they were a part. We, of course, as you suggested, can fall back on the excuse of the consequences of slavery, but, even then, how do we excuse our avid participation in our own economic destruction, with our great outpouring of support for Mercedes Benz (or, more to the point, of Exxon-Mobil, Texaco-Chevron, BP, Shell, and all the rest), Donna Karan, Armani, etc.? This is precisely the behavior that got us put onto the ships in the first place.

So, we end up with three things, starting with this matter of land use, even though they may seem to be a stretch. First, there is the inexcusable and the unexcused: the aforementioned exploiters of their fellows, the beaters-up of other children now grown up into corrupt self-serving assholes, the ones who, for some cheap liquor, red cloth, mirrors and -- not to be forgotten -- guns, would sell human beings to slave ship captains with no regard whatsoever for the social, economic, environmental, spiritual or any other consequences. They are still with us. Today's boys-wanting-toys (and their whorish mates) are always in a position to sell out our community resources, especially what little control we may have over land use, and thereby contribute to our slow demise while they stupidly think they profit. They don't believe -- they are assholes, after all -- that "if they come for us in the morning, they'll come for them that night." How many a "slave" seller, when he could no longer deliver a supply, found himself shackled and chained in the bottom of a ship.

Secondly, there is the excuse and the excusable. Slavery is not just an excuse, it was -- and is -- a reality whose consequences cannot be ignored. I have often thought that "we have been through one hell of a shipwreck, and those of us who survived bear all the scars, physical and mental." We survive in an environment that is not only unsympathetic but downright hostile, hateful and destructive. A good friend once asked, hypothetically, why we have such drug problems. His answer is, the reason that there is such a market for drugs, the reason people take drugs is that they are in PAIN. If we want to end drug abuse, we have to end the pain that leads to it. Good logic, to my mind. I am using drugs metaphorically here to also include all of our irrational consumerist addictions and behaviors. The reason I say this is excusable is not because it is acceptable, but it is understandable. Everybody got hit a different way by this shipwreck. Some are physically handicapped, others mentally so, none of us unaffected. No healers or counselors are around to welcome us. We have to rely on each other for this. (I remember a powerful story of those orphaned child-assassins that mercenary rebel armies in Africa routinely create actually being recaptured by government troops and being left in the care of villagers that they don't know. There are no professional healers there, all the people can do, as limited as their own time and resources are, is "surround these children with love," and let them know that their nightmare is over. A lot easier said than done, but it is done. But, here too, as we can clearly see, it is about being in a place where the villagers control the land). We need to "light a lamp rather than curse the darkness" and let some truth shine in the life of our community. I personally believe that art & culture is the most inspiring way to do that, and, in this context, that the music called "Jazz" is a very powerful weapon indeed (which makes me commend you even more).

Thirdly, it may seem strange to call music a "weapon" rather than, say, a tool, but this has to do with a whole paradigm shift in our thinking that redefines the universe according to the rules of our own experience and aspirations, rather than those of others. The heroic Guinean revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral made a famous statement that "Our People Are Our Mountains." The context was this: a Portuguese massacre of dockworkers in "Portuguese Guinea" (Guinea-Bissau) ended any and all hope of achieving independence through peaceful protest, and only armed struggle could be the next phase. Cabral and others had studied the revolutions in China and Cuba, as well as Maroon rebellions in slavery time, when resistors took to the mountains as a very successful military strategy. But Guinea-Bissau is a country that does not have mountains, so how could this be done? "Our people are our mountains," Cabral replied, and his revolution was very successful. We have so little to show, in comparison to either our glorious Ancestors or to other civilizations, that can prove that we are of equal greatness to them. European nations can point to their centuries-long successions of monarchs; Italy, Greece, Iraq, India and China can point to ancient wonders that are part of who they are. Even when we look back to Africa at the great structures of Kemet or Zimbabwe, we must ask, honestly, who among us is capable of constructing those things now (and if we don't know how, we should drop all silly boasts and claims that "we" built them in the first place).

I say, in response to this apparent dearth and deficit of landmarks that "our people are our landmarks." This is not just convenient, feelgood rhetoric, but, as in Cabral's situation, a very real and vital understanding to the success of our struggle. Every great achievement of every Ancestral generation that ever lived is embodied in us today (just as we are also the embodiment of all of our future generations). In the scale of great human achievements -- the Colosseum, the Great Wall, the Pyramids, the Cathedrals -- show me one that compares to the ability to survive the Middle Passage and slavery, with strength, knowledge, and spirit to live and love and give life to new generations. No one in the recorded history of earth, as David Walker pointed out eloquently, has ever been so tested. Survival alone, even in this extreme circumstance, might be called a "negative achievement," only a return to zero from the minus column, so to speak, but here again, we are well served to be reminded that the African survivors of the Middle Passage brought much more with them than their physical bodies.

Africa's traditional knowledge systems have never been accorded, in this racist, ignorant and fearful environment, anything like the respect that has been given to such others as Greek humanism, Yoga, or various Asian martial arts systems. But the ignorance of racists is not the measure of our worth. The drum, divination systems, martial arts like Capoeira, technology like tabby building construction, and a host of other manifestations of the African genius have been indispensable to both the building of the Americas and African survival in these lands (out of our control). Jazz (African American Classical Music) originated here, a completely new cultural invention that is not so much a remake of past musical forms as a rebirth of musical genius that will make of its environment what it needs. My contention is that the whole African presence here is "jazz": This has been identified and given a name and a category, but how many other aspects of African life in America have been "invented" in the same way but have never been subjected to the analysis that would make these jump out as discrete phenomena.

African traditional science is, in fact, not so much analytical as it is synthetical. That is, it is more concerned with the human individual's ability to harmonize, or seek synthesis, with the universe than with the western proclivity to stand apart from the universe as something outside of ourselves, to be analyzed, broken down into its component parts, in order to see what makes it tick. The appreciation of our scientific greatness, then, is not attained by seeking its outward manifestations as objects to be pointed out in comparison to those of other cultures; rather it is in the act of living the knowledge, right here, right now, at all places at all times. This is why I say that "our people are our greatness." The ability to produce (and even be) greatness today, in the African traditional paradigm, is of far greater value than the products of past generations. This is the paradigm shift in our thinking that I believe is needed for us to understand and manage our current situation.

Intelligence is awareness. Everything going on in the universe is going on anyway, whether we know it or not. The more we are aware of it, the closer we come to harmony and synthesis with the rest of the universe, or, to put it another way, with Creation, and therefore with the Creator. A paradigm shift to the "African" way of thinking greatly increases our awareness of who we are, what we are, and where we come from, not to mention "why" we are here. This paradigm shift is also essential to our understanding of the basic point that I started with: land use.

In this understanding, we know that we are of the land, not just "on" the land. We know that "ownership" of the land is not the most relevant issue to our life and survival, even though it is, as we have already seen, a legal reality, which means one that is enforced by the armed military might of the state. (We can be shot and removed from the planet for "trespassing"). It is true that we need to seek to use the land and any control of it that we do have wisely. This is why I am so involved in historic preservation efforts; the landmarks of our Ancestral past do have importance and meaning, and many of these are on sacred sites -- places on planet earth that our traditional knowledge systems can identify as having special powers to help us synthesize. Even beyond this need to save sacred places, we, like all human beings, need land to live on and maintain ourselves and families. These are physical realities that sometimes require physical struggles over land. Even so, we are best served by keeping our whole understanding in the game. We, unlike those who might be less knowledgeable, must be very astute in managing our access to resources so that the land over which we gain stewardship is neither a wasteful appropriation to satisfy the ego of assholes, nor a consumerist drug to dull our individual sensibilities to our collective pain, but rather special places, each with a special meaning, where we are fulfilled by our connection to the rest of life, sometimes in the most mundane and inglorious ways.

I hardly expected this to turn into such a lengthy tirade when I started, but, as with so many things in real life, once it started I had to go with it.

All the best,

G

ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE

Of National Lies and Racial America
By TIM WISE

For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having
brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever
anyone, least of all an "angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.

Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America"
because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?

Well actually, no he didn't. Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more
than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.

He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst
sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe
those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save American lives."

But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also
ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we're the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush
the First, who once said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."

And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully
in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on
America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.

Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks--and I do, for instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright isn't the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and racial minorities.

So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America's favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and
stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination,
and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers" who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had
he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.

What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock-- though make no mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this
nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who
died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the
time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that "everything changed." To some, everything
changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.

But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently,
that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.

This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:

"White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac."

And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.

We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we're shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation--we're literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.

Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.

Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country--when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.

Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for
over seventy years.

Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion
of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that "Leave it Beaver" and "Father Knows Best," portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.

These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were--and to the extent we still love them and view them as representations of the "good old days" to which we wish we could return, still are--from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.

No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager's textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon "this great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one's nation into an idol to be worshipped, it not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.

It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals
prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.

So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter- narrative "earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we can say is that such a place is missing the
only and last opportunity it may ever have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals. What we can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have yet to fully address
and come to terms with that which lay behind.

What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone--which needless to say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and worship resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely calling bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?

And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness as to who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for
concern.

Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those who don't believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as to defy belief--after all, they imply that God is so
fundamentally evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking,
responding to a question about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one accepted Jesus as one's personal savior, the Bible made it pretty clear that indeed, hell was where
you'd be heading.

So, you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God's part is surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren't Christians, and no one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted. That isn't considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because they go to a church that says that shit every single week, or because they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it,
and see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the right to be offended.

Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.

Tim Wise is the author of: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005). He can be reached at:
timjwise@msn.com

Source: Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/wise03182008.html

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