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By Corey Gilkes
August 06, 2014 - trinicenter.com
Years ago, the late economist and social thinker Lloyd Best pondered over the question of how does one save a culture from itself. This is a question we have not collectively dealt with as we continue to entangle ourselves more and more in the destructive aspects of this culture that we’re partly responsible for creating. Somewhere along the line, Emancipation, understood as “freedom” – and I’ll come back to that later – was hijacked to become something that was tolerant of mediocrity, the spurning of ambition, industriousness and intellectual pursuits. Small wonder some people say “dey should bring back de white man” because we’ve made a mess of our Independence (and our Emancipation). I don’t necessarily subscribe to such a self-loathing sentiment but much of what we’re doing to ourselves and our space certainly gives credence to it.
I had another piece written for Emancipation Day. But after listening to the talk shows on i95.5 and Power 102 the morning before and the comments made by some callers and the hosts – all of whom admittedly, fall well within the age group I’ve always said need to be politely eased out of any serious discourse on social transformation – I felt it necessary to write this setta ramblings instead. Besides, I always like to comment on things like Emancipation Day out of the “season.”
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By Margaret Kimberley
March 22, 2012 - blackagendareport.com
"Al Sharpton and Michael Baisden have announced that they will attend a rally in support of the Martin family."
The shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida has thankfully become a national news story. Martin was killed as he went about his daily business, under circumstances which usually don't result in death for anyone but black people. While Martin was returning to the home of a family friend in a gated community, a "neighborhood watchman," a trigger happy rent-a-cop, shot and killed the seventeen year old. The killer's assertion of "suspicious behavior" boils down to just one thing. Martin had a black face, and that has always served as reason enough to be deemed suspicious.
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U.S.A.: Black America Still Paralyzed, Powerless, Irrelevant
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Black America Still Paralyzed, Powerless, Irrelevant: Year 4 of the Obama Era
By Bruce A. Dixon
January 20, 2012 - blackagendareport.com
Three years ago this week, more than 2 million souls, at least half of them African American, converged upon the nation's capital. They came, in what my colleague Glen Ford called the Great Black Hajj of 2009, to witness and celebrate the swearing in of the nation's first African American president. They wept and danced and sang and prophesied. They marveled at how far they had come. It was, their leaders assured them, the beginning of a new day.
Three years later, it's clear that this is indeed a new day, a new era. But for most of black America, it's not the one they hoped for. Nobody expected urban poverty would begin to vanish overnight, or that millions of acres of lost black farmland would be restored. But promises were made, and expectations were justifiably high, not because Barack Obama had promised to investigate Wall Street, prosecute banksters, or stop the imperial wars and illegal foreclosures, but because humans do have the right to expect justice at home and peace abroad, whether their leaders deliver these things or not.
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Black Liberation in an Occupied Land
By Ron Jacobs
December 05, 2010 - counterpunch.org
When I was a high school student in Frankfurt am Main, Germany during the early 1970s the student movement was at one of its peaks. Part of the reason for this was the Solidarity German students felt with African-Americans. At the same time, black GIs were expressing their revolutionary and racial consciousness, much to the dismay of military officials in Germany and the Pentagon. One of the major issues for the more radical of the GIs and students (along with a few of us so-called military dependents) was the case of Angela Davis and the Ramstein Two. The latter were two African-American Army vets who were organizing support for Angela Davis, who had been charged with murder in the case of Jonathan Jackson, the younger brother of Black Panther revolutionary George Jackson. According to the prosecutor, Davis's gun had been used in the failed courtroom takeover implemented by the younger Jackson and was therefore an accomplice to the murders that ensued. The Ramstein Two were accosted by German police guarding a gate at Ramstein AFB and responded with force. They were arrested and charged with attempted murder. Their case was taken up by leftist German students, workers, radical American GIs and dependents and elements of the Black Panther Party. The episode was emblematic of both the treatment of African-Americans in Germany and the solidarity among elements of German society and the US civil rights movement.
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African Diaspora: African History Month: More Than a Celebration of Struggle, Arts & Culture
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By Michael De Gale
January 23, 2007
If I didn’t know better, during the month of February I will be left with the distinct impression that the Civil Rights struggle, crafts and music mixed with a dazzling display of dance and a variety of cultural activities represents the sum of Africa’s contribution to civilization. In spite of the overwhelming scientific evidence and the existence of numerous artifacts, little is ever mentioned in the mainstream about Africa’s contributions to civilization in the fields of science and technology. With the exception of inquiring minds, the proliferation of numerous books and scholarly articles on the subject has done little to dispel the truncated view of Africa as simply a land of exoticism in the consciousness of the greater public.
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by Eja
"Have you remembered
yet
or are you still
in forgetfulness
Like when you
misrecognised
your sister
your African sister
When you called her
trade-goods
When you sold her
because you did not
remember
you did not recognise
your sister.
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A Step Towards the African Revolution
By Leslie
October 05, 2006
The session at the last Moonlight Gathering in September was highly profound and without a doubt, edifying and interesting. Usually, after a period of song, poetry, drumming and other chosen activities, the group at the Moonlight Gathering would engage an issue; any issue that we feel worth discussing and for whatever reasons. However, the last gathering was the first time that the discussion was so heated; so much so, that some chose to 'stay out of the kitchen'.
The issue discussed was the controversial topic, colourism. This subject had never been talked about so openly at the gathering before and some were stunned that it would have ever been brought up. Members of the gathering were knocked out of their positions of comfort and were forced to come to terms with this issue; at least those who were courageous enough to stay within the circle to discuss it. Seeing that many were largely unfamiliar with the term and issues surrounding colourism, I attempted to briefly explain it as I would do now. The word colourism is a recent term that has entered into our vocabulary which has arisen in an attempt to address the deeper complex of race discrimination which is a critical and largely unaddressed aspect of racism.
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By Akilah Riley
Truth be told
Many of us sellin our soul
In moments
Dressed up in condiments
To savour the flavour of the disguise
So we could swallow the lies
That we feed ourselves
About ourselves
And so we present ourselves
Wearin masks of themselves
Yeah u heard me "themselves"
Themselves are the selves that u tryin to be
Everytime u say that u find that u too heavy
Is dem self tell yuh that yuh need to be a size three
Or four
Either or
You still a liar
Cus u know that u would prefer to eat that slice of pizza
Or that las piece of macaroni pie
But is dem self have u wrapped up in their lie
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By Nate Mezmer, counterpunch.org
Last night at the Academy Awards "Crash" took home the Oscar for best picture. The film starring Matt Dillon and Terrence Howard (Hustle and Flow) has been acredited with deconstructing the race issue in America by exposing the human frailties of its multi-racial cast of characters.
Indeed at first glance this collision course of incredible coincidence seems to push the limits by painting a provocative and ground breaking picture of race relations in the city of Los Angeles. However when everything is said and done, "Crash" is nearly as safe a flick as "Gone With The Wind."
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U.S.A.: Seeing Ourselves Through Our Own Black Eyes
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by Darice Jones
Africans have been held underwater again by the big hand of US hypocrisy that has no love in reserve for us and never has - but that has love unlimited for those considered family.
But we Africans do not drown under water, we transform into sea creatures - we breathe anyway - and we swim into the arms of our common bond. In the aftermath of the storm and the government/media crimes committed against black people in and around New Orleans, the necessary next step is to transform our excruciating sadness and our fierce rage into collective action. In addition to the common color hatred we face, we descendants of Africans enslaved in the Americas share a common history of very real power. This power is manifest through our ability to step over, to dig under, to somehow make our way around the physical obstacles of oppression placed in our path every day since the Maafa. We are more than survivors of these institutionalized forms of racism, we have managed to thrive in the face of them.
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