What Do We Want? A Five Part Series

Cross-posted from Double Consciousness.

I got this e-mail from the blogger Brown Man, check it out:

I’ve heard a constant refrain lately – at work, on TV, on the internet – from some of my black brethren about Barack Obama.

He doesn’t need to “lecture black people” about personal responsibility.

He should be mindful of the tone he uses when he speaks to us.

He’s just saying what racist white people want to hear.

He sacrifices black people to score points with whites and other non-blacks.

I was offended by his criticism of black people.

What gives him the right to call anybody out about anything?

Since he doesn’t have anything good to say about black people he shouldn’t say anything at all.

What do we want from this man?

Over the next five days, the blog Brown Man Thinking Hard presents “What Do We Want?” which will explore some of the issues that underlie this intraracial discord within black America.

Poor White Folk and Poor Black Folk

Malik blogs:

I think the analogy of the house negro and the field negro is better applied to the relationship between poor Black folks and poor white folks than to the relationship between poor Black folks and “Black conservatives”. Poor white folks are the ultimate house negros. They are only marginally better off than poor Black folks (the “overwhelming advantage” is a well-maintained illusion), but because they inhabit the same psychological house as their rich white masters, and get a few extra favors, they wholly identify with their masters. Think about it.

Happy Birthday to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

In honor of this blogs namesake.

Sylvia blogs:

In honor of what would have been Malcolm X’s 83rd birthday, Villager has compiled a phenomenal list of links to some of his famous speeches and interviews, including “Ballot or the Bullet,” “Who Taught You to Hate Yourself?” and “House Negroes vs. Field Negroes.” He’s also leading a discussion about how this man has touched the lives of so many people through his voice, his fire, and his life.

…

Happy birthday, Brother; your spirit lives on.

Latoya blogs:

The Autobiography of Malcolm X is one of the defining books in my life. The first time I read it, I was nine. Even now, though I haven’t picked it up in about five years, I can still remember whole passages by heart, and the basic wording of much more. What I find interesting is that as I grew older, my interpretation and understanding of the book changed. When I was younger, I was enthralled by ex-criminal, black nationalist Malcolm X; as I got older I began to wonder more about his transformation to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, his journey to Mecca, and his change in mindset and focus. It is his journey that inspires my own.

Melissa blogs:

Many of our modern leaders live by cynical double standards. They practice slippery personal ethics, while lecturing the masses about morality. They consume conspicuously, while telling ordinary folks to save their pennies. They father children outside of marriage, then blame single mothers for the violence in black communities. They blame individuals for their circumstances, rather than help them deconstruct, understand and overcome the historical, structural, political, reasons for their plight.

Malcolm taught us better. He criticized the powerful rather than the powerless. He pointed to the pathologies of the privileged instead of the failings of the oppressed. His own story of redemption was emblematic of the possibilities available to even the most disempowered, but when he pointed to solutions, they were consistently collective.

Miss Jones blogs:

…very few people, even those who claim to love him, have taken the time to learn more about what he believed and what he did over his lifetime. There was more to Malcolm X than his views on race; his leadership style is something to admire. Too often, as I have written about here, older leaders are inaccessible because they are spoken about as though they are angels who neither grow nor change over their lifetime. However, Malcolm X never hid the fact that he made mistakes and that he was constantly learning and growing nor that he expected people to take ownership of their lives.

Mr. Shadow blogs:

Above all we must understand what Malcolm stood for: justice, freedom and equality for Africans in America and abroad. It is for this he fought and it is for this that he died.

I think it is appropriate to end this post with the spiritually moving eulogy at Malcolm’s funeral given by our late elder, actor and activist Ossie Davis.

Image From:
Eminem Italia 5.0

No Justice for Sean Bell

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Brotherpaecemaker blogs about the acquittal of the homicidal cops from New York:

People in the black community need to rethink our relationship with the dominant community. The disparity between the two communities is getting wider and wider. Police murder us in the streets and suffer no repercussions while black pastors are demonized for preaching about racial disparity in our communities. Even when the most extreme forms of this discrimination is caught on tape it is dismissed as our fault because we didn’t prostrate ourselves in front of the cop fast enough or the police officer was having a bad day and had to release his frustrations on the black citizen or whatever. We are in danger every time we come out in public from the very people sworn to protect the public. The police and the courts are doing their best to protect the public from black people.

TOXIC SLUDGE IS GOOD (enough for black folk)…

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Francis L. Holland blogs about a recent article he read from the Associated Press:

Although whites would have us believe that AIDS could NOT have been started by whites and that the Tuskegee Experiment could never happen again,

BALTIMORE - Scientists using federal grants spread fertilizer made from human and industrial wastes on yards in poor, black neighborhoods to test whether it might protect children from lead poisoning in the soil. Families were assured the sludge was safe and were never told about any harmful ingredients.

…

It galls me. It galls me that the major news institutions can make federal cases out of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s prophetic indignation at a nation whose policies undervalue and marginalize whole populaces, and reduce it to the rantings of a mad man, when in our own backyard our own government is conducting more experimentation on its citizens!

[Hat Tip: the field negro]

Hunters View Residents Losing Their Homes

Cross-posted from Double Consciousness.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Every week in her notorious public housing development, Darlene Fleming watches another neighbor move out and construction crews come in to nail plywood over the vacant apartment’s doors and windows. And every week, she says, more residents get eviction notices, possibly signaling that they could be the next ones forced out.Of the 267 units at Hunters View, 110 are boarded up. Just 157 families remain at the violent and dilapidated development in San Francisco’s Hunters Point neighborhood and 116 of them are in danger of eviction because they’re behind on their rent or for other reasons.

It’s just what many residents feared when city officials said their development would be the first in line for a complete rebuild that would include hundreds of new, market-rate homes built among the subsidized units.

Hunters View is a housing project in Bayview Hunters-Point and is considered one of the worst housing projects in the nation, edging out the Sunnydale housing project in Visitaction Valley, also in San Francisco.

For those of you who don’t know this is what institutionalized racism and gentrification looks like. Obviously, for events outside of their control relating to the history of white supremacy in this country (see “Sundown Towns,” “The Heart of Whiteness,” “No Thanks to Thanksgiving,” “The Construction of Whiteness“), many of the San Franciscans who call Hunters View home are Black and other people of color. And its no mistake that in order to “clean up” the housing project they need to demolish it and basically displace an entire group of Black people.

A Hunters View resident puts it best:

“They’re finding all kinds of reasons to put us out of here,” said Fleming, a 60-year-old great-grandmother who has lived in Hunters View since she was 9 and whose eviction case is winding its way through Superior Court. “The less of us they have here, the less they have to deal with.”

Also, it should be noted that during the 1950s and 1960s it was white folks who were getting lones from the Federal Housing Authority, which was able to get many working class white folk homes and a place in the surburbs, but for Black folk (who are bared from getting loans from the FHA) they got federal housing (or “high-rise ghettos”); and because they got federal housing there were never able to own their own home and accrue wealth that could be passed on through the generations.
I’ve only passed by the housing complex by foot while heading to a few friends’ houses in the area but from those short experiences I can tell you that Hutners View is in need of some repair, and many do recognize this:

Sara Shortt, director of the Housing Rights Committee, a tenant advocacy group, praised the city’s plan to get Hunters View residents up-to-date on their rent, but also questioned the mayor’s motive.

“The city is stepping in and cleaning up the mess the Housing Authority has created, and that’s a really positive thing,” she said. “But at the same time, I think the mayor’s working to prevent the political backlash that would occur if a flood of residents were evicted at the very first Hope SF project.”

The problem is we’ve seen this before. A neighborhood that is economically deprived and is populated by mainly people of color is declared dirty because of its rundown conditions (which the government is supposed to upkeep by the way). With this the government says they need to clean it up for the good of the people. They come in, bulldoze homes, kick people out, hire contractors to build new homes, whites move in, businesses follow, and now the neighborhood is to expensive for the previous folks to live there. Thus forcing people of color out of the city. It happened in the Filmore and it might happen again.

In a previous post I posted an article written in the San Francisco Bay View, a Black owned and operated newspaper, in where the author, talking about the Marcus Garvey complex in the Filmore, wrote about how whenever a reformist minded group of people would run for the complex board the government would say that an inspection was coming, they complex might fail, and therefore might shutdown, then once the reform folks were defeated and the old guard reinstated the inspection would come and the complex would pass. So inspections and the shutting down of housing complexes are also political tools to get rid of “unsavory people,” such as reformists and people of color.

Not only that, but even if the complex is “cleaned up” and ends up looking nicer it does not fix the actual socio-economic situation that the residents are in. It just alleviates the minds of whites by having them say, “See, look, we fixed it. It’s nice and pretty. Work done.”

The Chronicle ends with:

Public housing residents in San Francisco who are in jeopardy of being evicted can call Bay Area Legal Aid, working in conjunction with the Housing Rights Committee, at (415) 354-6353.

Image From:
[X]Press Magazine

Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes: Part I

Cross-posted from Double Consciousness.

I just finished watching a great documentary by Byron Hurt called Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes on the PBS show [I]ndependent Lens. I just want the film to speak for itself and quote a few people interviewed in it.

One thing the film makes clear is that it just doesn’t blame hip-hop for being misogynistic or sexist and it just doesn’t blame Black men but instead points out the great prevailing misogyny in American culture. Dr. Michael Eric Dyson states:

When you think about American society, the notion of violent masculinity is at the heart of American identity. The preoccupation with Jesse James and the outlaw, the rebel, much of that is associated in the American mindset, the collective imagination of the nation, with the expansion of the frontier. In the history of American social imagination, the violent man using the gun to defend his family, his kip and kin, becomes a suitable metaphor for the notion of manhood.

Rapper Chuck D puts it best during the movie when he speaks on white supremacy and confronting it:

The dominant image of black masculinity in hip-hop is the fact that somebody can be confrontational but confrontational with the wrong cat. It’s like they’re not ever confrontational with the cats that will claim I’ll wipe your whole neighborhood out, because it’s almost like they’re trained not to even see them. It’s like, my beef is with this cat right here that looks just like me. The rise of the culture of black animosity is something that adds to the street credibility factor. It’s like almost to the point where 2Pac and Biggie were used as martyrs for this new endorsement of black animosity.

And more from Chuck D:

Black death has been pimped by corporations. Young people think that the street credibility is the gig that will ride them to some profitability in life.

…

Black manhood, by the structures and powers that be, the corporations, they’ve found a way that they think they can put soul in a bottle. If they can put soul in a bottle, then they could put manhood in a bottle. And then show the bottle in advertising. And we’ll follow the crumbs to the big bad wolf.

Latter on in the documentary Hurt focuses on how corporations, owned by white males, exploit the Black community through their selling of hip-hop. Talib Kwelli reacts to some comments some up and coming rappers who say they need to act thug to become real big time rappers
Those are the same cats who are just listening to the radio and just watching TV.

They’re confused. They don’t know. We have trusted the media and the corporations to define what hip-hop is. Back in the days when it first came out, and ABC did a story on rap, you’d be like, I know that’s bullshit. I know it’s not true. But now you see it on the news. You see it on BET. Because they call themselves hip-hop now. Now Hot 97 is the station where hip-hop lives, so we hear that, but we don’t understand that it’s some corporation owned by people who have nothing to do with hip-hop. They’re just trying to cash in. It’s like, hip-hop lives there. So they must know. That must be what rap is. No, we had never let the media define us, so why are we doing that now?

Hurt then interviews former Def Jam president Carmen Ashurs-Watson who had this to say:

The time when we switched to gangster music was the same time that majors bought up all the labels. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. At the time that we were able to get a bigger place in the record stores and a bigger presence because of this major marketing capacity, the music became less and less conscience. We went to Columbia, and then the next thing I know, our producers of Public Enemy were over producing an Ice Cube album, and then the next thing I know we’re pushing a group called Bitches With Problems…

Followed by Chuck D:

Once that perpetuated into one thing and corporations get involved,
yes you’ll sell two million NWA’s as opposed to one million [Public Enemy]. You’re gonna go from “Fight the Power” to “Gin and Juice.”

…

BET is the cancer of black manhood in the world. They have one-dinemsionalized us and commodified us into being a one-trick image. We’re throwing money at the camera. We’re flashing jewelry that can actually give a town in Africa water. We got 160 million dollar contracts because we got happy niggas.

When asked about what happens when he confronts mainstream rappers about the misogyny and falling into the racist corporate trap Chuck D answers:

They couldn’t even look you in the eye. Fuck that. We can really get to the nuts and nails of this. They couldn’t even look you in the eye. Number one, cats can’t even look a man in the eye. If they look a man in the eye, they think it’s confrontation. Why? Because they can’t answer. They can’t answer to it. And it’s almost like now, and it ain’t their fault. This is all systematic. It’s all part of genocidally breaking things down to the point where people are gonna follow a program that gets played out for them. This is the play. This is the playbook. Y’all gonna follow through. Crank robots up, they gonna do what robots do, what you told them to do.

I’ll blog more about white consumption of hip-hop and white supremacy in marketing hip-hop in part II.

Transcript obtained from Media Education Foundation.

Image From:
Rappers Den

Identity Politics: “Selling Out” and “Being Black”

Cross-posted from Double Consciousness.

Jill Nelson in the New York Times Book Review reviews two books, one by Randall Kennedy, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal, and another one by his conservative counterpart Shelby Steele, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win. Nelson opens up the review:

For Americans of African descent, one of the difficulties in writing about identity is that the discussion, intentionally or not, is simultaneously intensely personal and profoundly public. Our unique experience and the racial identification manifested in melanin binds us inextricably to both our individual, subjective, personal experiences and to the collective experience of the group. Efforts to be seen as “an individual” necessitate that we differentiate ourselves from some supposedly monolithic black identity and authenticity. Like it or not, our individuality is dependent on first identifying and, depending on where we are coming from and where we are going, either embracing or distancing ourselves from the group.

Nelson has many critiques for both authors, especially when it comes to Kennedy dangerously asserting that possibly snitching on the Black Panthers and other “sellout” examples are not really examples of “selling” out but either certain Black folks being misguided or doing so simply because they saw it as helping out the Black community as a whole. Another one of her critiques is that of Steele’s when he tries to draw to many connections between him and Obama (both had white mothers) and his sense of playing the victim to Blacks by being called a “race traitor” and yet not acknowledging that he made a huge profit out of being called a sellout.

One quote that stuck out to me in this pretty well balanced review was this:

Perhaps most troubling about both Steele and Kennedy is the virtual absence of any acknowledgment of the ways in which white racism, and the more subtle and prevalent white privilege, influence black identity and necessitate, for some, a strong collective identity as a defense against white power. “Obviously, black responsibility is the greatest — if not the only — transformative power available to blacks,” Steele says. But this is simply not true. Ditto for Kennedy’s assertion that “open expression of racial prejudice is politically and socially suicidal.” Tell that to Trent Lott, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and Don Imus, to name but a few. Lott and Imus were finally taken to task for their racist comments, but after what has become an American ritual of denial, apology and a brief stay in the woodshed, they were back.

In studying racism we always tend to ignore the power of white privilege in shaping American society and indeed in shaping the “macro-identity” of American populations of Blacks, Chicanos, Pilipinos, etc. We must always have a critical eye on white privilege when studying racism, not by just studying the effects of racism on people of color but also studying white privilege itself and the creation of white privilege and how it benefits whites.

Black History Box

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

The newest blogger, Sara Rosell, of Double Consciousness blogs about Black History Month:

We definitely need to teach what contributions blacks have made, but before we teach about that we need to first talk about what it means for those contributions to be absent when it comes to the teachings of History itself. The problem is that our Anglo-centric educational system boxes “Black History” into a month, separating it from “U.S. History.”

Race and Law

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet

The Field Negro blogs about a recent murder case in Northern California involving a white home owner shooting and killing two (of three) robbers who broke into his house and were Black:

OK I must admit that this case has me torn. On one hand I am thinking that it was racism why this Northern California prosecutor chose to charge this young man with first degree murder under the rarely used “Provocative Acts Doctrine.” On the other hand I am thinking; Renato, just what the fuck were you thinking when you broke into that man’s home with your friends?

Your ignorant ass actions set into motion an act that cost two of your friends their lives, and now you are on the verge of losing your freedom; and if the good folks of California have their way, maybe your life as well.
But please don’t think I am letting Mister homeowner off the hook either. Yes, he has a right to defend his home, but he doesn’t have a right to shoot two fleeing individuals in the back. Had I been the DA I would have charged his ass with at the very least, voluntary manslaughter. But we know how that works; small county, every one knows each other, no one wants to upset the order of things. Heck I am sure the DA was a friend of Mr. Homeowner, or maybe even a family member.

Race and the Vote

JanInSanFran writes:

When you can’t win an election on your own merits, wouldn’t it be great to pick own your electorate who you can trust will vote for you? That’s why politicians like to draw district boundaries to ensure one-party dominance. A new study [pdf] from the University of Washington’s Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Sexuality shows pretty conclusively that by demanding voters show photo IDs, Republicans ensure that more voters are white, older, and affluent. Others, likely Democrats, get pushed off the rolls.

Indiana’s photo ID law is being challenged as discriminatory in court. Researchers set out to find what it really would do voter eligibility. They polled carefully randomized samples of voters and non-voters about their IDs. The results show clearly that the ID requirement is designed to build a Republican bias into the universe of voters and potential voters.

Republicans and the Race Card

Lambert, on Corrente, blogs about a recent article by Paul Krugman on how the Republicans used race to gain the upper hand over Democrats in the South and have been playing that card ever since:

Today, Krugman—Yay! No pay wall!—gives the Conservative apologists for the Republican’s racist Southern Strategy a good old-fashioned beating, and would leave them whimpering if they weren’t all the idelogical equivalent of The Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The Beautiful Struggle

Ethnic Cleansing, San Francisco, and White Supremacy

Last week I read a very good and interesting article (originally published at BlackAgendaReport.com) in the The Bay View a Black owned and operated newspaper based out of Bay View Hunters Point (the most predominate Black neighborhood in the city) which tackles issues effecting the Black community in San Francisco, the Bay Area, and the nation. As the author was writing about gang injunctions imposed on the Latino and Black communities in the Filmore and the Mission district he stated:

Not surprisingly, the City Attorney’s injunction list did not include the Downtown Gang, also known as the AWDG (All White Downtown Gang). These gang members virtually control all public policy in San Francisco, including who will live in the City and who will not.

How does one identify members of the Downtown Gang? Well, for starters, like members of all gangs, the AWDG hang out together: at museum galas, society do’s, first nighters at the opera and the symphony, parties in Pacific Heights, winter in Tahoe and so forth. But the best way to ID them is to use the old-fashioned follow-the-money method. Pick a politician, check out the big buck contributors and then see whether the politician’s policies benefit private sector profit or the public good. It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to find a political spear carrier for the AWDG and then the AWDG member who owns and supplies the spears.

This is a very good explanation of describing white privilege and white supremacy in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as in the nation, all one really has to do is follow the money.

The author wrote how when mayor Gavin Newsom was in trouble with his Green Party opponent during his run for mayor, the AWDGs closed ranks:

Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi hit the phones. Republican businessmen rushed to the fore. George Shultz, a Republican flush with new found Bechtel riches from Iraq, opened his wallet, as did the heirs to the Getty oil fortune, who were Newsom’s original sponsors. Republicans Charles Schwab and Donald Fisher wrote checks. The Swig and Shorenstein families, real estate developers who had underwritten the activities of local Democrats for years, dialed in their dollars.

And, of course, Newsom won and policies favored by the AWDG continue to flourish during his regime - like the onslaught to quickly privatize the shipyard property, regardless of the health of the residents during construction on this toxic site or the fact that no one in the neighborhood will ever be able to live in the new housing units. In 2006, Lennar Corp. was cited multiple times for failing to monitor and control asbestos dust during the grading phase on Parcel A. Oddly enough, the project was never shut down to correct any non-compliant operations.

Finally, several local African American neighborhood organizations went to City Hall this year to protest this continuing contamination and request that the City red tag the site until safety measures could be enforced. Their request fell upon deaf ears.

Meanwhile, the AWDG, not content with securing a financial stranglehold on future development of public lands, continues to target existing public housing for privatization.

One reason why white people are so blind to their privilege is obviously because one can’t really see what one already has. So in order to show someone their privilege you have to break it down in terms they can understand. In this article we can see how white privilege and white supremacy effects whites and people of color in this city. The real movers and shakers in politics are those who (obviously) have money. These people can pump in money to start up “grass-roots” organizations, fund lobbyist groups, wine and dine city officials and supervisors, fund TV, newspaper, radio, and internet ads, as well as gain important spots on the local and national news because of this so called “buzz” their money has generated around a certain issue.

Historically in this country money has flowed from and through the hands of white people with very little trickling down to people of color and those of the underclass. While wage gaps have decreased for some ethnic groups compared to whites, the reality is is that wealth is still in the hands of whites through property, the stock market, trade, etc. Carlo made a good point by using Monopoly as a metaphor. Everyone in the game who passes go collects $200, therefore equal pay, yet those who make the real money and wield the real power are those who own most of the property on the board, collecting the big bucks on every turn as other players land on their property.

Those who effect and shape policy in San Francisco are those who wield the money. Those who wield the money (because of past and present day injustices) are white people. As whites in this city systematically try to gain more capital and create more benefits for themselves people of color get effected by these policies. A capitalist wants to make a profit in land redevelopment. Well than redevelop the cheapest and least cared about part of the city, the Filmore, a Black neighborhood. When the Filmore was bulldozed down hundreds of Black businesses, businesses which generated income for the Black community, were destroyed. In their place came high end apartments and expensive cafes. What happened to the Black community was of little interest to the white politicians at City Hall, the white media, and the white population in the Bay Area. The only way it was looked at by whites was a “redevelopment” and a “rejuvenation.”

This of course continues to this day. But before I ramble on any more I recommend you all read the article.

Image From:
Public Broadcasting System (PBS)

Public Statements and Private Thoughts

Asabanga comments on the latest controversy caused by geneticist Dr. James Watson on his comments that Blacks are “naturally” inferior to whites:

He simply stated what is the widely held belief among those in the dominant “white” society. It is not the first time (nor the last) that science has been utilized to assert the inferiority of the so-called “Black Race”. Scientists are forever coming up with hypotheses and theories either contending that “whites” and/or “Europeans” and their culture is superior to everyone elses, or that “Blacks” and/or “Africans” and their culture are inferior to all others. However, because it is no longer “socially acceptable” nor “politically correct” to make such assertions publicly, “the rule” now is to do it within private (i.e. where Black people aren’t allowed) confines of the backrooms, the social clubs, the boardrooms, the executive offices… hell even in the bathroom…. but never, never out in the open and certainly not to the media! If you break this rule…. you are on your own!