burst aflame
falling
like asteroids crashing to the earth
embers of amber crackling on the ground
branches laid bare
the phoenix consumes itself
in this perennial passion
smoldering into a compost crypt.
11/24/2011
the passion of the phoenix
a fury of leaves
burst aflame
falling
like asteroids crashing to the earth
embers of amber crackling on the ground
branches laid bare
the phoenix consumes itself
in this perennial passion
smoldering into a compost crypt.
burst aflame
falling
like asteroids crashing to the earth
embers of amber crackling on the ground
branches laid bare
the phoenix consumes itself
in this perennial passion
smoldering into a compost crypt.
9/21/2011
The Fierce Urgency of Now: The Struggle for Racial Justice Forty Years After King
(Keynote speech delivered at Lehigh University, January 23, 2008)
On April 4, 1967 The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave what was his most controversial speech, “A Time to Break Silence,” his denouncement of the US war against Vietnam. Exactly one year later he would be assassinated.
In that speech King spoke about three forces of oppression he identified as the “giant triplets of racism, militarism and materialism.” As we gather together to honor the man and the movement he gave his life for, let us not only reflect on the eloquence of his words, but let us reflect on the relevance of his words for our time and be moved to action. For today we can still see the giant triplets of racism, militarism and materialism. These three forces work together like some monstrous hydra wreaking havoc on the poor of this nation who are disproportionately people of color, particularly African American as well as people of color around the world.
Now there may be some who would rise up and resist such an assessment stating that racism is no longer an issue. These folk would point us to the progress that has been made in this country as it relates to the treatment of African Americans in our society. Most recently many have wondered aloud if racism is history given the willingness of many white people to consider voting for a Black man for president. A white person’s willingness to vote for a Black person may point to a stage in their own personal progress on racism, but racism is greater than an individual or a group of people’s beliefs about one Black person. To think that racism can be voted away belittles the role that racism plays in American life and also belittles those oppressed by it.
The fact is that despite all apparent progress, we are witnessing the erosion of civil rights for Black and Brown people in this nation. Everyone would readily acknowledge that education is the foundation for any people’s successful progress and development. Yet in this nation, the promise of education has been kept at arm’s length for many African American and Latino American children in this country, especially those living in the urban and rural regions of this country.
The discussion of public education is riddled through with rhetoric, much of it worth no more than the hot air its words ride on. The Supreme Court decision of 1954, that ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, failed to give adequate timelines on remedying the problem. They stated, “with all deliberate speed,” and some 54 years later, we continue to wait for the promise of integration to be realized.
America remains a nation divided. And the fault line remains the color line.
Our children are failing in public schools that look eerily similar to the segregated schools that were the subjects of the 1954 Supreme Court case. Dilapidated buildings, out-dated text-books, and we wonder why the drop-out rate is so high. Why, I am amazed that they come to school at all!
Our children fail to achieve not because of lack of parental involvement, but lack of books, computers and other adequate resources. It’s not because of disinterested or lazy students who fail to pass culturally biased exams, but disinterested and lazy legislators who fail to pass laws that would redistribute public school dollars; not because of poor teachers, but a poorly funded system in need of the money that is due us. We don’t need more finger-pointing. What we need is equal funding!
This refusal to ensure that poor African American children receive the same quality education that their predominantly white suburban peers receive speaks to the larger issue at hand. The specter of racism not only remains real, it is experiencing a resurgence. Just this past summer the Supreme Court ruled as unconstitutional the practice of bussing students of color to predominantly white schools for the purpose of insuring an integrated school system. This ruling is a reflection of the nation’s willingness to turn its back on the promise of integration that was mandated in 1954.
With this ruling, America is stating that it is more expedient to keep alive the vestiges of segregation than get to the business of doing the hard work of eradicating institutional racism. Everybody knows that public schools in predominantly white neighborhoods are better staffed, better funded and better resourced. Yet this country remains unwilling to either integrate the schools or provide equal funding for the schools. This unwillingness has set the course for another generation of African American and Latino youth stuck in the vice grip of history. The result is a nation as divided as ever. The haves and the have-nots, where the majority of the wealthy in this nation remain white and the majority of the poor remain disproportionately not white.
Again, rather than address the racism that is inherent in such a reality, the power-brokers have decided to blame those that have been victimized by their policies or lack thereof. Tell me, how is a child supposed to compete when they sit in a classroom where they are lucky if they have an up to date textbook against a child with a laptop computer that is able to get access to the latest information at the touch of a button? It is the stone-age against the information age. There is no way they can win, let alone compete.
It is this collective American unwillingness that is withering away all hope within the hearts of the children that roam the concrete streets of the inner-cities to the backwoods of America’s country-sides. Dr. King had this in mind when he wrote in 1968 that, “Justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Nor will a few token changes quell all the tempestuous yearnings of millions of disadvantaged black people. White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.”
This is the lesson that America still must learn. The power of that lesson is no greater seen than in the human tragedy turned political travesty that is Katrina. Even today, a full 2 years and 5 months since Hurricane Katrina ravished the Gulf Coast and left thousands of Americans dead and still tens of thousands more homeless and helpless.
The social chaos left in the wake of Katrina is the haunting omen of King’s Poor People’s Campaign. If only this nation would have considered King’s movement rather than have him removed, we would not have thousands upon thousands of poor displaced Americans roaming this country locked in multi-generational misery. King himself declared, “We must develop a program that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. … We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.”
King understood that this economic system is not set up to eliminate poverty. In fact, it functions to produce poverty. The waste produced by the gross pursuit for profit is the ever-perpetuating problem of poverty. And rather than eliminate or reduce that waste, America has decided to simply throw it away.
America is choosing to throw away the poor. We see it in New Orleans where Katrina survivors petitioned and then protested the city government for their right to return and were turned away, beaten and arrested. Just like their Civil Rights predecessors that were beaten at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in 1965. America’s response to those of us who are Black, Brown and poor has not fundamentally changed.
More and more this nation’s final solution for the poor is the prisons. Rather than guarantee them access to a quality education commensurate with that which their white suburban peers receive, rather than guarantee them the right to work for a liveable wage, the only guarantee this nation seems willing to give the poor is the guarantee of a life of misery, victimization and the promise of imprisonment or premature death.
Today there are upwards of three million people locked down in America’s prisons. They are, in effect, fodder for a new economy that is eerily reminiscent of an older economy. The legislative loophole left by the 13th Amendment enables the prison to serve as the new plantation wherein the prisoner like the slave has no rights that the system is bound to respect. Many of these prisons are private corporations that reap tremendous profits from the exploited labor of the poor who are paid wages less than the minimum allowed by law, i.e. “slave wages.”
This reality is the logical consequence of a society with an abhorrent history as this nation’s as it relates to the question of Black America and the exploitation of labor. We must have a new understanding of poverty, its origins, the reasons for its existence and preponderance within our society. We must move from the space of surface analysis to a deep-rooted resistance to the exploitation of the poor. This was the message of King’s final mission: The Poor People’s Campaign.
King stated, “A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”
King’s analysis did not stop there. He continued to extend his analysis to the relationship between racism and imperialism. He exposed and soundly criticized the hypocrisy of a nation that preaches peace and sells war, that counsels other nations on human rights even as it dismisses the rights of thousands and imprisons them at Guantanamo Bay, that proclaims democracy even as it denies rights to its own citizens, that calls itself a safe-haven for “the poor, huddled masses of the world, yearning to be free,” even as it criminalizes immigrants of color and sets up barriers of hostility to keep them out.
King responded to this hypocrisy by reminding us that, “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism … A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to [humanity] as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.”
This is the vision we all must embrace. Do we have the courage to view our world through the lens King provides? This is the challenge of our time. This is the choice we all must make. Social change does not require a particular gender identification, racial classification or sexual orientation. What it does require is an undying commitment to embody the revolutionary idea of justice for all. The Civil Rights Movement is the perfect example of this. We celebrate King, as we should. But King did not do it alone. He was a significant part of a significant whole. And if we fail to acknowledge these other activists, we run the risk of sending the wrong message as to who can best bring about the change we need in this world.
The fact is that the very man responsible for the movement’s embrace of non-violent direct action was not King, but a Black gay man by the name of Bayard Rustin, who at the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 had already given 15 years of service to the cause of Black freedom struggle.
A native of Pennsylvania, Rustin was principally responsible for the creation of SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Council that King would represent. He was also the architect and organizer of the March on Washington in August 1963. Were it not for him, America would have never been challenged by King’s brave, brilliant speech on that historic day.
Yet even Rustin was not alone in the creation and organization of the movement. He had a capable partner in the likes of Ella Baker. Baker too was a long-time activist in the field of Black freedom struggle. Not only did she aid in the establishment of SCLC, she would be the organization’s first director. A Black woman holding court in an organization composed of Black male clergy. This was unprecedented. This accomplishment alone would be enough to praise her. But it was only the beginning. She would go on to create the organization known as SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee that would be the bridge between the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements in the late Sixties. It was her strategic genius that would insure that the struggle would go on. James Forman, the executive secretary of SNCC, once observed that, “there were many people who knew the light that was SNCC without ever knowing the spark that was Ella Baker.”
And so as we conclude, let us know and remember Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin, and not just them but all of the activists who lived their lives in pursuit of a greater truth. A pursuit that has been bequeathed to us.
These persons’ lives and others like them best illustrate the fact that each of us has within us the spark of revolutionary change. That leadership is not the purview of any particular group, but each of us has the potential, no – the responsibility to act in the best interests of humanity and the world in which we live in our quest to make of this world a more just and humane place for all life within it. This is our task. This is our challenge.
So let us take it up and not worry over what tomorrow will bring. For as King reminds us: “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. … We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace … and justice throughout the … world. … Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter – but beautiful – struggle for a new world. … The choice is ours to make.”
We must push past the privilege of our own indecision to action. We must wake up from the slumber of our collective apathy and believe again that a new world is not only possible but a necessity, and if it is to come, it can only come through us.
And all the guidance we need has already been provided by a small group of Black folk huddled together in a small church basement united in their collective will to be free. They were sick and tired of being sick and tired and were ready to move. They braved the terrorism of burning crosses, nooses and four-legged dogs and two-legged rabid racists brandishing rifles. They feared no one save their God and with that conviction they marched out of that church and changed the course of history.
For more information on Osayande and his work, visit his website at Osayande.org and follow him on Facebook: Ewuare Xola Osayande.
On April 4, 1967 The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave what was his most controversial speech, “A Time to Break Silence,” his denouncement of the US war against Vietnam. Exactly one year later he would be assassinated.
In that speech King spoke about three forces of oppression he identified as the “giant triplets of racism, militarism and materialism.” As we gather together to honor the man and the movement he gave his life for, let us not only reflect on the eloquence of his words, but let us reflect on the relevance of his words for our time and be moved to action. For today we can still see the giant triplets of racism, militarism and materialism. These three forces work together like some monstrous hydra wreaking havoc on the poor of this nation who are disproportionately people of color, particularly African American as well as people of color around the world.
Now there may be some who would rise up and resist such an assessment stating that racism is no longer an issue. These folk would point us to the progress that has been made in this country as it relates to the treatment of African Americans in our society. Most recently many have wondered aloud if racism is history given the willingness of many white people to consider voting for a Black man for president. A white person’s willingness to vote for a Black person may point to a stage in their own personal progress on racism, but racism is greater than an individual or a group of people’s beliefs about one Black person. To think that racism can be voted away belittles the role that racism plays in American life and also belittles those oppressed by it.
The fact is that despite all apparent progress, we are witnessing the erosion of civil rights for Black and Brown people in this nation. Everyone would readily acknowledge that education is the foundation for any people’s successful progress and development. Yet in this nation, the promise of education has been kept at arm’s length for many African American and Latino American children in this country, especially those living in the urban and rural regions of this country.
The discussion of public education is riddled through with rhetoric, much of it worth no more than the hot air its words ride on. The Supreme Court decision of 1954, that ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, failed to give adequate timelines on remedying the problem. They stated, “with all deliberate speed,” and some 54 years later, we continue to wait for the promise of integration to be realized.
America remains a nation divided. And the fault line remains the color line.
Our children are failing in public schools that look eerily similar to the segregated schools that were the subjects of the 1954 Supreme Court case. Dilapidated buildings, out-dated text-books, and we wonder why the drop-out rate is so high. Why, I am amazed that they come to school at all!
Our children fail to achieve not because of lack of parental involvement, but lack of books, computers and other adequate resources. It’s not because of disinterested or lazy students who fail to pass culturally biased exams, but disinterested and lazy legislators who fail to pass laws that would redistribute public school dollars; not because of poor teachers, but a poorly funded system in need of the money that is due us. We don’t need more finger-pointing. What we need is equal funding!
This refusal to ensure that poor African American children receive the same quality education that their predominantly white suburban peers receive speaks to the larger issue at hand. The specter of racism not only remains real, it is experiencing a resurgence. Just this past summer the Supreme Court ruled as unconstitutional the practice of bussing students of color to predominantly white schools for the purpose of insuring an integrated school system. This ruling is a reflection of the nation’s willingness to turn its back on the promise of integration that was mandated in 1954.
With this ruling, America is stating that it is more expedient to keep alive the vestiges of segregation than get to the business of doing the hard work of eradicating institutional racism. Everybody knows that public schools in predominantly white neighborhoods are better staffed, better funded and better resourced. Yet this country remains unwilling to either integrate the schools or provide equal funding for the schools. This unwillingness has set the course for another generation of African American and Latino youth stuck in the vice grip of history. The result is a nation as divided as ever. The haves and the have-nots, where the majority of the wealthy in this nation remain white and the majority of the poor remain disproportionately not white.
Again, rather than address the racism that is inherent in such a reality, the power-brokers have decided to blame those that have been victimized by their policies or lack thereof. Tell me, how is a child supposed to compete when they sit in a classroom where they are lucky if they have an up to date textbook against a child with a laptop computer that is able to get access to the latest information at the touch of a button? It is the stone-age against the information age. There is no way they can win, let alone compete.
It is this collective American unwillingness that is withering away all hope within the hearts of the children that roam the concrete streets of the inner-cities to the backwoods of America’s country-sides. Dr. King had this in mind when he wrote in 1968 that, “Justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Nor will a few token changes quell all the tempestuous yearnings of millions of disadvantaged black people. White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.”
This is the lesson that America still must learn. The power of that lesson is no greater seen than in the human tragedy turned political travesty that is Katrina. Even today, a full 2 years and 5 months since Hurricane Katrina ravished the Gulf Coast and left thousands of Americans dead and still tens of thousands more homeless and helpless.
The social chaos left in the wake of Katrina is the haunting omen of King’s Poor People’s Campaign. If only this nation would have considered King’s movement rather than have him removed, we would not have thousands upon thousands of poor displaced Americans roaming this country locked in multi-generational misery. King himself declared, “We must develop a program that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. … We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.”
King understood that this economic system is not set up to eliminate poverty. In fact, it functions to produce poverty. The waste produced by the gross pursuit for profit is the ever-perpetuating problem of poverty. And rather than eliminate or reduce that waste, America has decided to simply throw it away.
America is choosing to throw away the poor. We see it in New Orleans where Katrina survivors petitioned and then protested the city government for their right to return and were turned away, beaten and arrested. Just like their Civil Rights predecessors that were beaten at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in 1965. America’s response to those of us who are Black, Brown and poor has not fundamentally changed.
More and more this nation’s final solution for the poor is the prisons. Rather than guarantee them access to a quality education commensurate with that which their white suburban peers receive, rather than guarantee them the right to work for a liveable wage, the only guarantee this nation seems willing to give the poor is the guarantee of a life of misery, victimization and the promise of imprisonment or premature death.
Today there are upwards of three million people locked down in America’s prisons. They are, in effect, fodder for a new economy that is eerily reminiscent of an older economy. The legislative loophole left by the 13th Amendment enables the prison to serve as the new plantation wherein the prisoner like the slave has no rights that the system is bound to respect. Many of these prisons are private corporations that reap tremendous profits from the exploited labor of the poor who are paid wages less than the minimum allowed by law, i.e. “slave wages.”
This reality is the logical consequence of a society with an abhorrent history as this nation’s as it relates to the question of Black America and the exploitation of labor. We must have a new understanding of poverty, its origins, the reasons for its existence and preponderance within our society. We must move from the space of surface analysis to a deep-rooted resistance to the exploitation of the poor. This was the message of King’s final mission: The Poor People’s Campaign.
King stated, “A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”
King’s analysis did not stop there. He continued to extend his analysis to the relationship between racism and imperialism. He exposed and soundly criticized the hypocrisy of a nation that preaches peace and sells war, that counsels other nations on human rights even as it dismisses the rights of thousands and imprisons them at Guantanamo Bay, that proclaims democracy even as it denies rights to its own citizens, that calls itself a safe-haven for “the poor, huddled masses of the world, yearning to be free,” even as it criminalizes immigrants of color and sets up barriers of hostility to keep them out.
King responded to this hypocrisy by reminding us that, “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism … A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to [humanity] as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.”
This is the vision we all must embrace. Do we have the courage to view our world through the lens King provides? This is the challenge of our time. This is the choice we all must make. Social change does not require a particular gender identification, racial classification or sexual orientation. What it does require is an undying commitment to embody the revolutionary idea of justice for all. The Civil Rights Movement is the perfect example of this. We celebrate King, as we should. But King did not do it alone. He was a significant part of a significant whole. And if we fail to acknowledge these other activists, we run the risk of sending the wrong message as to who can best bring about the change we need in this world.
The fact is that the very man responsible for the movement’s embrace of non-violent direct action was not King, but a Black gay man by the name of Bayard Rustin, who at the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 had already given 15 years of service to the cause of Black freedom struggle.
A native of Pennsylvania, Rustin was principally responsible for the creation of SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Council that King would represent. He was also the architect and organizer of the March on Washington in August 1963. Were it not for him, America would have never been challenged by King’s brave, brilliant speech on that historic day.
Yet even Rustin was not alone in the creation and organization of the movement. He had a capable partner in the likes of Ella Baker. Baker too was a long-time activist in the field of Black freedom struggle. Not only did she aid in the establishment of SCLC, she would be the organization’s first director. A Black woman holding court in an organization composed of Black male clergy. This was unprecedented. This accomplishment alone would be enough to praise her. But it was only the beginning. She would go on to create the organization known as SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee that would be the bridge between the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements in the late Sixties. It was her strategic genius that would insure that the struggle would go on. James Forman, the executive secretary of SNCC, once observed that, “there were many people who knew the light that was SNCC without ever knowing the spark that was Ella Baker.”
And so as we conclude, let us know and remember Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin, and not just them but all of the activists who lived their lives in pursuit of a greater truth. A pursuit that has been bequeathed to us.
These persons’ lives and others like them best illustrate the fact that each of us has within us the spark of revolutionary change. That leadership is not the purview of any particular group, but each of us has the potential, no – the responsibility to act in the best interests of humanity and the world in which we live in our quest to make of this world a more just and humane place for all life within it. This is our task. This is our challenge.
So let us take it up and not worry over what tomorrow will bring. For as King reminds us: “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. … We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace … and justice throughout the … world. … Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter – but beautiful – struggle for a new world. … The choice is ours to make.”
We must push past the privilege of our own indecision to action. We must wake up from the slumber of our collective apathy and believe again that a new world is not only possible but a necessity, and if it is to come, it can only come through us.
And all the guidance we need has already been provided by a small group of Black folk huddled together in a small church basement united in their collective will to be free. They were sick and tired of being sick and tired and were ready to move. They braved the terrorism of burning crosses, nooses and four-legged dogs and two-legged rabid racists brandishing rifles. They feared no one save their God and with that conviction they marched out of that church and changed the course of history.
For more information on Osayande and his work, visit his website at Osayande.org and follow him on Facebook: Ewuare Xola Osayande.
6/04/2011
Spirit Singed
(April 1, 1949 – May 27, 2011)
by Ewuare X. Osayande
why do we have to die
like this?
why?
do we have to live
like this?
when this ain’t living
the earth’s wretched
stuck in the muck and the mire
still the last hired and first fired
from “Washington DC” to “Johannesburg”
birthed into “Get Out The Ghetto Blues”
but even when we move
the oppression remains
cuz “Home is Where the Hatred Is”
we in pain
we in pain
like the pain we saw in his face
sucked dry
our pied piper hit the pipe
but he never lied
never tried to hide the hurt
never tried to glamorize our sorrow
no
this bluesologist
poured it into his song
and tapped the keys on the boards of our hearts
trying to resuscitate himself
trying to warn us
when he said “New York Is Killing Me”
but we was too busy surviving to see
that we too are dying
being stewed in the crack pot of America’s rot gut
cuz no matter how hot it gets
its always “Winter in America”
life here be cold as snow and hard as ice
cuz most of us still not willing to pay the price
to change the season
could this be the reason why
him wrote “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”
when we still mesmerized
by the lights and cameras of inaction
sit on our asses
waiting for the fire next time
to come in some phony nickel-and-dime rhyme
brought to you by Columbia Records, BMG or Sony
whose artists only bark when told to speak
who reek from the noxious fumes
from the butt-crack of the upper class
that gets passed off as the funk
and we can’t have any real talk
cuz when the truth hits too close to home
we been trained to
just change the channel
forgot that we supposed to be
channeling the “Spirits” of those that came before
who knew what we supposed to be fighting for
and this here be the reason why
some poets become prophets ready to die
cuz those with ears to hear
too hooked on chronic
to decipher the phonics that would set us free
so truth-tellers who were hip before hop
be left ass-out
moving targets for CIA-FBI operatives
COINTELPRO-type tactics
and this be as tragic as
those that now would turn his songs into music trivia
and play
“I can name that tune in five notes” type nonsense
while his words lie in state
on the corner of 125th and Malcolm X
where I stand and keep vigil
always on the ready
taking notes of the “Small Talk” that still is heard
as your truth still burns in the embers of my mind
I hear you Gil Scott-Heron
like the bird heron
ancient Egyptian phoenix
whose words are wings to raise our consciousness
spirit singed
black sage
born again in the fire of Malcolm’s everlasting rage
your spirit is our spirit is mine
a willing vessel to carry your “Message to the Messengers”
paying homage with each breath
cause I am always yearning
for something deeper than the ying yang
I keep hearing on the radio
so I study your verses like scripture
necessary meditation so my spirit stays vexed
and keep this candle-wick called my soul
lit
to spark the Molotov cocktail
in the mind of
whoever got next.
Ewuare X. Osayande is a political activist and author of several books including his forthcoming collection of poems entitled Whose America?. He lives in Philly, PA where he is director of POWER (People Organized Working to Eradicate Racism).
5/22/2011
When Consciousness Ain’t Common: Calling Out Karl Rove’s Contradiction and Ours Too
Copyright 2011 by Ewuare X. Osayande
After an appearance at a recent poetry event at the White House, the rap artist known as Common was called out by Republican strategist Karl Rove as a misogynist and thug. This was a broad and mean-spirited swipe against a Black president and the Black community in general. Republicans have been doing everything in their power to link Obama with the Black community to isolate him from “middle America.” This is but the latest attack.
A misogynist is someone who hates women. Common, a popular commercial rap artist, is considered one of rap music’s most conscious and gifted lyricists, which really isn’t saying much when you consider the current crop of so-called emcees repping the mic these days.
Most of the reactions I have heard and read on this have been an all-out defense of Common as rap music’s true conscious artist. He’s been honored by just about every respectable Negro in the country. Even Oprah (who on more than one occasion has spoken of her disdain for rap’s treatment of women) has even showered him with compliments when he appeared on her show in 2007. Now if that was the Common Rove had in mind when he criticized the White House for inviting him to perform, then maybe it would be an open and shut case of a white conservative seeking to unjustly malign or mischaracterize another brother holding it down. But if one were to be honest and look at Common’s more recent work, one would have to pause and reconsider their defense or we’ll have to come up with a new definition of conscious.
Not only has Common had many of his songs produced by fellow artists whose work is awash in misogyny, he, himself, has been known to take a swig or two of the pimp juice. Consider his appearance on Kid Cudi’s 2009 track “Make Her Say.” Cudi, Kanye West and Common toyingly appropriate Lady Gaga’s voice singing “Pokerface. In the track it comes off as though she is saying Poke Her Face. The song is a troubling phallic tribute that revels in the triumph of male domination. Common covers a lot of ideological ground in a few short lines when he says, “She blamed it on the al-a-a-al-a-alcohol/she had her hair did, it was bound to fall/ down down for the damn, Cudi already said it/her poker facebook, I’d already read it/but man her head was gooder than the music/electro body known to blow fuses/a stripper from the south/ looking for a payday/said bitch you should do it for the love like Ray J/but they say you be on the conscious tip/get your head right and get up on this conscious dick/I embody everything from the godly to the party/it’s the way I was raised on the Southside safari/so.” Common’s verse is particularly troubling in that he takes a verbal swing at those who have held him up as the bastion of conscious rap. His verse not only affirms the hatred of women that has come to be the mainstay of hip hop, he also disses those who claim him to be conscious. His posturing at the conclusion of his verse with “so” is a direct challenge to any who would take issue with him as if to say “I don’t give a f*ck what ya’ll say or think about me.” So much for conscious rap.
For those that would rise up and recite all the so-called conscious lyrics Common has ever wrote in his defense, I will reply with just one stanza from his song “I Used to Love H.E.R.” “I failed to mention that the chick was creative/But once the man got to her, he altered the native/Told her if she got an image and a gimmick/That she could make money/And she did it, like a dummy/Now I see her in commercials, she’s universal.” Forget that his personification of hip hop as “she” is problematic given that hip hop has always been a male dominant reality, who is the “she” he is referring to now but himself?
Those that would continue to try and claim Common as conscious even after he has distanced himself from the term and the accountability that comes with it are just as much a contradiction as he is. Rather than fight over whether this rapper or that rapper is more sexist than the next, we should be fighting to wrest control of our culture from the clutches of corporate America that truly dictates the levels of male domination these rap artists promote in their music. To do so would effectively liberate the Commons of the rap world to be able to offer up a true consciousness; one that is rooted in an acknowledgement of Black women’s equality in word and deed. To not do so continues to render us culturally vulnerable as a community. Our moral defenses have been compromised which has left us open wide to attack from those that have a vested interest in our people’s oppression.
The reality is that the whole of hip hop is controlled by a recording industry that manufactures misogyny as a means to profit. To attack the rap artist alone, then, is to strike out at what is the most visible party operating on the lowest stratum of a system that reaches the upper echelons of international media conglomerates and commercial syndicates. It is akin to when conservatives get tough on the dealers on the corner rather go after the drug kingpins.
In the rap world, the kingpins are not the new jack rappers calling themselves “King” or “Pin” but the CEOs who control what gets seen and heard, whose signatures set the tone and tenor for a culture that no longer belongs to the people who believe it is an authentic representation of who they are. For Karl Rove to call out these CEOs would mean he’d be calling out many of his homeboys. His failure to do so is a calculated power move. In one statement, he was able to attack the first Black president and Black people in general, reinforce the stereotype of the Black man as a violent sexual predator and, in the process, protect the most powerful perpetrators of misogyny in this country.
This year alone, we have witnessed and are witnessing an all-out right-wing assault on the rights of women by political thugs and senatorial sexists. These laws will have a devastating impact on the lived reality of women in this country, especially poor women of color. These laws are not made by miseducated young Black men from the inner city, but by multi-degreed wealthy white men whose deep pockets have been lined by corporate billionaires.
Karl Rove has the dubious distinction of being known as “Bush’s Brain,” a title that leaves much to the imagination given that some might argue that we are still without scientific evidence that the man actually has one. As “Bush’s Brain,” Rove was central in helping to plan and execute then President Bush’s unprecedented assault on the rights of women. It was during the Bush administration that the current fight over abortion began again in the country. Bush was responsible for stacking the Supreme Court deck with justices that would oppose women on every legislative front. In fact, Bush would replace the nation’s first female Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, with a man whose track record on women’s rights can only be described as misogynistic. Samuel Alito has been at the forefront of a concerted right-wing assault on the civil and human rights of women in the United States.
While still a judge on the Third Circuit, Alito, in the majority opinion, ruled that Congress did not have to require states to comply with the Family and Medical Leave Act. When this case reached a Supreme Court on which O’Connor still presided, the court overturned the Third Circuit. Imagine what might have happened had Alito been on the bench in O’Connor’s stead then. In 1991, while an attorney with the Justice Department, Alito scribed a memo that laid out his agenda for reversing Roe v. Wade. In the Civil Rights Act of 1991, Alito opposed a woman’s right to a jury trial in cases of discrimination and sexual harassment. In 1994, Alito defended an unwarranted police strip search of a 10-year old girl and her mother in Doe v. Groody. In 1992, Alito opined in his dissent that a woman should first gain the consent of her husband before obtaining a legal abortion. He dismissed evidence that such a requirement could lead to domestic abuse and violence. Such a position ran in the face of then Justice O’Connors’ leading Supreme Court opinion when she wrote that, “A State may not give to man the kind of dominion over his wife that parents exercise over their children.” In case after case, Alito has proven himself time and time again to be a woman-hater. Legislatively speaking, Alito can be best described a serial rapist given his unrelenting drive to violate the constitutional rights of women in our society. A misogynist rap artist would get all the material he’d ever need by just reading Alito’s opinions.
In comparison to the lyrics of Common or any rapper for that matter, Justice Alito’s words are certainly more thuggish to women. Yes, Common may wield some public influence as a pop star, but Alito actually dictates public policy and directly impacts what women can and cannot do in this country. For Rove to attack Common in light of his support of someone like an Alito is beyond contradictory, it is downright sexist itself.
If Common can’t enter the White House because he’s a “misogynist thug,” then every Republican in office since the Bush regime should be banned from the White House gates and that would include Karl Rove too.
Ewuare X. Osayande (www.osayande.org) is a political activist and author of several books including Misogyny & the Emcee: Sex, Race & Hip Hop. Follow his work at Facebook.
After an appearance at a recent poetry event at the White House, the rap artist known as Common was called out by Republican strategist Karl Rove as a misogynist and thug. This was a broad and mean-spirited swipe against a Black president and the Black community in general. Republicans have been doing everything in their power to link Obama with the Black community to isolate him from “middle America.” This is but the latest attack.
A misogynist is someone who hates women. Common, a popular commercial rap artist, is considered one of rap music’s most conscious and gifted lyricists, which really isn’t saying much when you consider the current crop of so-called emcees repping the mic these days.
Most of the reactions I have heard and read on this have been an all-out defense of Common as rap music’s true conscious artist. He’s been honored by just about every respectable Negro in the country. Even Oprah (who on more than one occasion has spoken of her disdain for rap’s treatment of women) has even showered him with compliments when he appeared on her show in 2007. Now if that was the Common Rove had in mind when he criticized the White House for inviting him to perform, then maybe it would be an open and shut case of a white conservative seeking to unjustly malign or mischaracterize another brother holding it down. But if one were to be honest and look at Common’s more recent work, one would have to pause and reconsider their defense or we’ll have to come up with a new definition of conscious.
Not only has Common had many of his songs produced by fellow artists whose work is awash in misogyny, he, himself, has been known to take a swig or two of the pimp juice. Consider his appearance on Kid Cudi’s 2009 track “Make Her Say.” Cudi, Kanye West and Common toyingly appropriate Lady Gaga’s voice singing “Pokerface. In the track it comes off as though she is saying Poke Her Face. The song is a troubling phallic tribute that revels in the triumph of male domination. Common covers a lot of ideological ground in a few short lines when he says, “She blamed it on the al-a-a-al-a-alcohol/she had her hair did, it was bound to fall/ down down for the damn, Cudi already said it/her poker facebook, I’d already read it/but man her head was gooder than the music/electro body known to blow fuses/a stripper from the south/ looking for a payday/said bitch you should do it for the love like Ray J/but they say you be on the conscious tip/get your head right and get up on this conscious dick/I embody everything from the godly to the party/it’s the way I was raised on the Southside safari/so.” Common’s verse is particularly troubling in that he takes a verbal swing at those who have held him up as the bastion of conscious rap. His verse not only affirms the hatred of women that has come to be the mainstay of hip hop, he also disses those who claim him to be conscious. His posturing at the conclusion of his verse with “so” is a direct challenge to any who would take issue with him as if to say “I don’t give a f*ck what ya’ll say or think about me.” So much for conscious rap.
For those that would rise up and recite all the so-called conscious lyrics Common has ever wrote in his defense, I will reply with just one stanza from his song “I Used to Love H.E.R.” “I failed to mention that the chick was creative/But once the man got to her, he altered the native/Told her if she got an image and a gimmick/That she could make money/And she did it, like a dummy/Now I see her in commercials, she’s universal.” Forget that his personification of hip hop as “she” is problematic given that hip hop has always been a male dominant reality, who is the “she” he is referring to now but himself?
Those that would continue to try and claim Common as conscious even after he has distanced himself from the term and the accountability that comes with it are just as much a contradiction as he is. Rather than fight over whether this rapper or that rapper is more sexist than the next, we should be fighting to wrest control of our culture from the clutches of corporate America that truly dictates the levels of male domination these rap artists promote in their music. To do so would effectively liberate the Commons of the rap world to be able to offer up a true consciousness; one that is rooted in an acknowledgement of Black women’s equality in word and deed. To not do so continues to render us culturally vulnerable as a community. Our moral defenses have been compromised which has left us open wide to attack from those that have a vested interest in our people’s oppression.
The reality is that the whole of hip hop is controlled by a recording industry that manufactures misogyny as a means to profit. To attack the rap artist alone, then, is to strike out at what is the most visible party operating on the lowest stratum of a system that reaches the upper echelons of international media conglomerates and commercial syndicates. It is akin to when conservatives get tough on the dealers on the corner rather go after the drug kingpins.
In the rap world, the kingpins are not the new jack rappers calling themselves “King” or “Pin” but the CEOs who control what gets seen and heard, whose signatures set the tone and tenor for a culture that no longer belongs to the people who believe it is an authentic representation of who they are. For Karl Rove to call out these CEOs would mean he’d be calling out many of his homeboys. His failure to do so is a calculated power move. In one statement, he was able to attack the first Black president and Black people in general, reinforce the stereotype of the Black man as a violent sexual predator and, in the process, protect the most powerful perpetrators of misogyny in this country.
This year alone, we have witnessed and are witnessing an all-out right-wing assault on the rights of women by political thugs and senatorial sexists. These laws will have a devastating impact on the lived reality of women in this country, especially poor women of color. These laws are not made by miseducated young Black men from the inner city, but by multi-degreed wealthy white men whose deep pockets have been lined by corporate billionaires.
Karl Rove has the dubious distinction of being known as “Bush’s Brain,” a title that leaves much to the imagination given that some might argue that we are still without scientific evidence that the man actually has one. As “Bush’s Brain,” Rove was central in helping to plan and execute then President Bush’s unprecedented assault on the rights of women. It was during the Bush administration that the current fight over abortion began again in the country. Bush was responsible for stacking the Supreme Court deck with justices that would oppose women on every legislative front. In fact, Bush would replace the nation’s first female Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, with a man whose track record on women’s rights can only be described as misogynistic. Samuel Alito has been at the forefront of a concerted right-wing assault on the civil and human rights of women in the United States.
While still a judge on the Third Circuit, Alito, in the majority opinion, ruled that Congress did not have to require states to comply with the Family and Medical Leave Act. When this case reached a Supreme Court on which O’Connor still presided, the court overturned the Third Circuit. Imagine what might have happened had Alito been on the bench in O’Connor’s stead then. In 1991, while an attorney with the Justice Department, Alito scribed a memo that laid out his agenda for reversing Roe v. Wade. In the Civil Rights Act of 1991, Alito opposed a woman’s right to a jury trial in cases of discrimination and sexual harassment. In 1994, Alito defended an unwarranted police strip search of a 10-year old girl and her mother in Doe v. Groody. In 1992, Alito opined in his dissent that a woman should first gain the consent of her husband before obtaining a legal abortion. He dismissed evidence that such a requirement could lead to domestic abuse and violence. Such a position ran in the face of then Justice O’Connors’ leading Supreme Court opinion when she wrote that, “A State may not give to man the kind of dominion over his wife that parents exercise over their children.” In case after case, Alito has proven himself time and time again to be a woman-hater. Legislatively speaking, Alito can be best described a serial rapist given his unrelenting drive to violate the constitutional rights of women in our society. A misogynist rap artist would get all the material he’d ever need by just reading Alito’s opinions.
In comparison to the lyrics of Common or any rapper for that matter, Justice Alito’s words are certainly more thuggish to women. Yes, Common may wield some public influence as a pop star, but Alito actually dictates public policy and directly impacts what women can and cannot do in this country. For Rove to attack Common in light of his support of someone like an Alito is beyond contradictory, it is downright sexist itself.
If Common can’t enter the White House because he’s a “misogynist thug,” then every Republican in office since the Bush regime should be banned from the White House gates and that would include Karl Rove too.
Ewuare X. Osayande (www.osayande.org) is a political activist and author of several books including Misogyny & the Emcee: Sex, Race & Hip Hop. Follow his work at Facebook.
12/19/2010
Word to the Wise: Unpacking the White Privilege of Tim Wise
by Ewuare X. Osayande
“My friends, I have come to tell you something about slavery – what I know of it, as I have felt it. When I came North, I was astonished to find that the abolitionists knew so much about it, that they were acquainted with its effects as well as if they had lived in its midst. But though they can give you its history – though they can depict its horrors, they cannot speak as I can from experience …”
Frederick Douglass, 1841
In the past decade or so, we have witnessed the rise of critical race studies, even something called Whiteness Studies. With the rise of Whiteness Studies on college campuses across the country has come the resurgence of whites as so-called experts on all matters pertaining to race. Among the most popular of them is the anti-racist speaker Tim Wise, who has become a regular presence on the college lecture circuit as well as in the media in the past few years. He has even been deemed the leader of the anti-racist movement by some of these very media outlets.
As Black liberationist, abolitionist, anti-racist and social justice activists, we would be wise to use this moment to ask some critical questions of ourselves and the state of the movement for racial justice in the U.S. We are thus compelled to critically engage Tim Wise and what his apparent popularity represents both in symbol and substance. In so doing, we confront the two fundamental issues in this work of eradicating racism: internalized oppression and white privilege.
Wise’s popularity among liberal whites is not that surprising to me. What is surprising is the level of popularity he’s gained within segments of the Black community. Some have even gone as far as to view him as some kind of Great White Hope. What is most curious about this apparent Black fascination with Wise is that when I hear certain Black people and other people of color refer to him, they talk about him in the same way they would talk about the first time they saw a white guy dance, rap or dunk a basketball. By internalizing the stereotypes of Blackness as defined by the white racist imagination, we have, in turn, embraced a codified image of Blackness. Thus, when we see white people cross the race-tracks and engage in behavior that has been deemed “Black,” we react with a kind of cultural “shock and awe.” In the case of Wise it is a little more complicated than that. Wise isn’t being acknowledged for his ability to sing or dance “like a Black person” but for his willingness to cross the tracks of race discourse and out whiteness – the ultimate racial taboo.
There is this sense among some of us that because he speaks against racism, he must be all right. And as such, he has garnered the coveted “ghetto pass,” a symbolic gesture given to those whites considered “down” with Black people. But we have seen what happens when whites feel they are “in like Flynn” with our people; they get right racist and condescending (remember Bill Clinton during the 2008 Presidential campaign?). In effect, they become even whiter. Therefore, let us insure that Wise’s “pass” doesn’t enable him to bypass critical inquiry that could benefit the movement and, maybe, even Wise himself.
What this fascination fails to take into consideration is the fact that white people have been speaking out against racial oppression since the first slave ships docked in the colony of Virginia. We should be past such elementary appreciation. When we fail to hold whites who proclaim an anti-racist stance to a higher standard, all we end up with are whites talking about how bad racism is. Mouthing off against racism is not going to end racism, no matter how loud and boisterous the bombast becomes. We have to get beyond this almost worship-like praise for what, in the end, are but baby steps in the long march against white supremacy.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not have a problem with white people speaking out against racism or Black people acknowledging white people working against racism. But when that acknowledgment precludes or is prioritized over and beyond our acknowledgment of ourselves, then we have a problem. That problem is called internalized oppression, a symptom of the very system we are working to defeat. Therefore, Black people giving uncritical praise or consideration to our white allies actually works toward our continued oppression. Remember how some of our people who were blinded by whiteness used to say: “The white man’s ice is colder”? Well, it seems these days that that same internalized oppression is at play in some who believe that the white man’s anti-racist analysis is more accurate than our own.
When I ask such persons what makes Wise’s commentaries so unique or revolutionary, they become quiet. For in truth, there is nothing new in Wise’s analysis. If anything, it is an analysis born of the blood struggle for Black liberation and racial justice throughout American history. Our ancestors may not have used terms like “white privilege.” Instead, they just called it what it was and is: white supremacy. (Imagine a white anti-racist saying, “I’m going to use my white supremacy to help people of color.”) Nonetheless, white privilege has become the watch-word of the movement. Yet, for the most part, it has been used as a means for white anti-racists to point the finger at “those” whites or navel gaze and wallow in a guilt that doesn’t produce results. Overall, it has the tendency to takes us away from addressing the real issue head on – whiteness itself and the ideology of white supremacy that gives whiteness whatever power and meaning it currently holds.
In the case of Tim Wise and other leading white anti-racists, we can accurately pin-point the state of the anti-racist movement by unpacking the white privileges they, themselves, hold and benefit from.
The first of these white privileges is one I have already addressed: The ability to paraphrase and/or otherwise exploit the analysis of Black liberation struggle and have it received by others as though it were their own. In the past decade or so, there has grown a cottage industry of books written by white people talking about their whiteness and their awareness of racism. When these white authors fail to acknowledge the debt they owe to the blood struggle of people of color in this country as they often do, they practice a form of racism that keeps that history erased from the consciousness of this country. This enables the white establishment to bypass Black people and hold up their own as authorities on the race question.
Another white privilege Tim Wise and other white anti-racists carry is the ability to emotionally express their views about racism without having that expression dismissed as “angry” or “too emotional”. When Wise speaks passionately and fervently about racism, his expression is understood as a sign of a person standing up for what he believes. As such, it is championed even when he is derisive or sardonic in his remarks. When we, people of color activists, speak passionately about racism, we are maligned and ridiculed as being angry, militant, even hateful and dangerous. If we wish to be heard (let alone understood), we are expected to speak calmly and politely about our experience and analysis regarding racism. Otherwise we are demonized. White moral indignation is justified. Black moral indignation is vilified. This has long been the case.
The third white privilege that Tim Wise and other so-called white anti-racists enjoy is the privilege of being honored for their anti-racist work as their Black activist counterparts and other activists of color are denounced and derided. Case in point: Several years back I spoke at a school in Massachusetts for their annual Dr. King Day commemoration. As I spoke about King’s legacy and the ongoing struggle for racial justice, I was met with outright hostility from the students gathered in the auditorium. The following year I would be contacted by an Arab faculty member at the school. She would inform me that for that year’s King Day event, the school decided to invite Tim Wise to address the student body. She went on to inform me that Wise was received with profound admiration by the very same students that heckled me the year before. Isolated incident? Chance circumstance? To my knowledge, similar events like this have at occurred on two more occasions since.
On one of the other occasions, I was contacted by a Black student organization that had to petition a reluctant administration to gain the necessary approval to invite me to speak. Just one semester following my presentation they would inform me that Tim Wise had just spoken at their school, where he received the red carpet of administrative respect and welcome. When this occurred at a third school, a Vietnamese student emailed me and rhetorically but sincerely asked, “Isn’t this what Tim Wise is supposed to be against?”. In all three cases, persons and groups that reached out to me expressed a level of frustration at witnessing the hypocrisy of the institutions they were working at or attending.
Let me make it clear here that I am not airing this to complain about my personal experiences. I do it because I know that I am not the only one who is experiencing this kind of racism. I am also addressing it here because in one of the cases I’ve mentioned, it actually worked to undermine the efforts of students who had organized to hold their university accountable. Over a four-year period, I worked diligently with these students and their allies. During this time of dedicated training, they all became adept anti-racist activists. They were a small but formidable band of students ready and prepared to take the university to task on its stated and unstated policies toward students, faculty and staff of color. The very year they planned to confront the university administration with their agenda, word got back to some key university officials. And in true duck and cover fashion, the administration brought in Wise with much publicity to avoid addressing the students and their demands. The entire campus turned out and the university was able to present itself as champions of diversity. Thus, when the students brought forward their demands, the university was able to side-step them by claiming that they were on top of it given their experience with Wise. Of course they were lying, but the students no longer had leverage as the campus community felt that they had done enough by bringing Tim Wise to speak.
This is just one example of the ways that white anti-racists who are not in accountable relationships with activists of color can be used to work against the best interests of people of color, whether knowingly or not.
One of the student leaders of this effort would later ask me if I’d be willing to debate Wise. I informed her that I would welcome the opportunity to engage in a constructive conversation with Wise on the state, purpose and direction of anti-racist struggle. The problem with that is that Wise only debates individuals with views more conservative than his own. This way he can continue to promote himself as the most radical anti-racist voice on the scene when he is not – not even among whites. [Noel Ignatiev has called for the outright abolition of whiteness in the face of other whites’ calls for what essentially amount to a kinder, gentler whiteness. By so doing, Ignatiev is taking up the challenge to expose whiteness as a form of status within the capitalist system rather than as a biological or cultural reality, which is how it continues to get passed off as – even within certain so-called anti-racist circles. Such an assertion takes it cue from an observation James Baldwin made many moons ago: “As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you.” If such an end were the aim of the movement, so-called white anti-racists could no longer go around claiming to want to use their white privilege for the good of the movement. Such a claim would be recognized as the nonsense it is.] Like Eminem in “8 Mile” taking on the Black rapper from the suburbs in his effort to establish his street cred and carry the “Blacker than thou” mantle, it seems that Wise takes on conservative intellectuals of color like Dinesh D’Sousa and Ward Connerly to prove he’s “Blacker” (more radical) than they are. That might impress some of Wise’s liberal Black bourgeois friends, but such side-show debates do nothing to bring us any closer to eradicating institutional racism.
It seems that Wise and other anti-racist whites have become higher education’s answer to people of color activists like me. As long as the dissidents are white, these schools are willing to practice the “tolerance” they claim to uphold as beacons of the liberal arts. It has even gotten to the point that nowadays it is not at all strange to see a white person giving the keynote speech for Black History Month. I honestly don’t think that is what Dr. Carter G. Woodson had in mind when he instituted the week-long celebration that would become Black History Month back in 1926. It is bad enough that February, the shortest calendar month of the year, is what Amiri Baraka calls “Black artist employment month.” Now we can’t even count on that. Like our people who are removed from the neighborhoods they grew up in as affluent whites gentrify urban communities, we find ourselves being removed from the one space our ancestors fought for on the calendar. And why is it so difficult for some of us to not see this racial switch as an attack on Black self-determination in much the same way as the current effort to dismiss Black History Month all together?
What can be deduced from these experiences is that there is clear benefit for those with white skin even in the context of anti-racist discourse. There is a distinct inequality in how we are perceived and treated by the white establishment. Despite Wise’s opposition to white supremacy and white privilege, he is a clear beneficiary of both. This is largely due to the fact that, evidently, he is not perceived as a threat to the establishment.
What does this say about Wise? What does this say about the state of the movement? What does this say about the state of racism in our society? White institutions can tolerate anti-racist discourse as long as it is spoken by somebody who looks like them. In fact, such staged discourse becomes a prime opportunity for such schools to present themselves as champions of multiculturalism and diversity even as they continue to enact policies and initiate professional and educational practices that discriminate against students, faculty and staff of color.
By definition, white privilege is not earned. Wise doesn’t have to do anything to gain access to the benefits assigned to the social construct of racialized whiteness. Even his apparent efforts to expose it have not caused the white establishment to banish him or treat him like a person of color. Given that Wise isn’t saying anything new or revolutionary in regards to how to eradicate racism, what accounts for his popularity and celebrity status and the fact that his calendar is filled with engagements for the next few years? His whiteness! The very thing he speaks against. Might this be the ultimate white privilege?
Now I am sure that there are some people reading this who might be saying, “Of course he can’t escape his privilege, we live in a racist society!” No argument here. All the more reason for him and those like him to be held accountable.
When grassroots Black activists speak honestly about racism at colleges across this country, we are not met with open arms by administrators and faculty. And most certainly our calendars are not full for the rest of the year let alone for the next three to five. When we speak, we are often met by the deaf ear of white denial. When Tim Wise speaks, he gets applause, standing ovations, awards and proclamations. The fact that schools can’t “hear” us when I and other people of color speak but will search out and roll out the red carpet for Wise is a statement to a kind of racism that doesn’t get discussed much – if at all – in our work. Despite all of the white anti-racist presentations given over the years at colleges and universities across the country, institutional racism at these schools remains intact. All the while, activists of color continue to be muffled and marginalized. Even in the ghetto of race discourse we remain tenants and never owners of an analysis that is ours to begin with.
One way that whites can be accountable is to stop being enablers to white supremacy by supplanting the voice of people of color with their own. We do not need white people speaking for people of color. Such talk is crass paternalism. My words do not need to be placed through a white filter in order for them to be understandable. Besides, there are some things that get lost in “translation.” If there is work for whites to do on this issue, then let it be work that addresses this deaf ear of white denial. This is a question of power. Whites that do not listen to people of color do not have a “hearing problem.” They fail to hear and to listen because they can. Those that promote the claim that white people speaking for people of color is a positive only coddle such whites in the comfort of their conformity to a way of life that denies, not just the voices of people of color, but our lives as well.
All of the aforementioned privileges taken together provide Wise a pretty formidable platform from which to attract the support of those of us who seek an end to racism. By supporting him, such persons are made to feel as if they are fighting racism. In this vein, he is able to make use of such support from those who will rally to his rescue when he calls on them to defend him with a bevy of “like” button clicks or a hail of 5-star reviews when he has occasioned a derisive remark made by the usual suspect – an avowed white supremacist. Really? Has this become the epitome of anti-racist activism? This would be laughable if we weren’t discussing something as deadly serious as racism. Such “cyber activism” is just another form of white diversion from engaging in actual activist work.
Must I remind us that people of color live our lives under daily assault? Clicking a “like” button is not going to stop the hail of gun-fire that snuffs out the lives of the Oscar Grants and Aiyana Joneses of our communities. Oscar Grant and Aiyana Jones were not militant activists. Jones was just seven years old for God’s sake! They were Black and, according to this system, that was sufficient. Until the movement confronts that reality head on rather than cry about some nasty review of their book, I have little regard for their “anti-racist” activism. Such attacks from white supremacists should be expected in this work. If I had a dollar for every piece of hate mail I’ve received …. My point is that it comes with the territory. To make noise about it is just self-serving. And that is putting it mildly.
This imbalanced relationship between people of color activists and white anti-racists reinforces the power dynamic of white supremacy even within the movement. White anti-racists have been able to evade accountability on this front due to the fact that they wield power and influence over and beyond people of color activists by virtue of their white-skinned privilege. This is a fact that has dogged our movement since the days of Abolition. And to those who question my right to question Tim Wise or suggest that Wise is beyond critique, I say as Henry Highland Garnet said to the white abolitionists of his day, “If it has come to this, that I must think and act as you do, because you are an abolitionist, or be exterminated by your thunder, then I do not hesitate to say that your abolitionism is abject slavery.”
The fact is that someone like a William Lloyd Garrison, who did far more than Wise with far less than Wise, was critiqued way more harshly than anything I have penned here by his Black contemporaries. Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass and others within the Black Abolitionist Movement always maintained an analysis that was independent of white abolitionists. Theirs was an analysis based on the life-and-death reality they faced on the daily. And they were quick to check the blurry vision of those who sat upon the lofty heights of their privileged status as whites no matter how well-meaning they may have been. To relinquish that right and responsibility now would be a disservice to my forebears and the example they have left for all of us.
This is a problem that our movement must address. This movement cannot challenge the institutional racism as it is currently positioned or personified. Our people’s movement for liberation and self-determination has resulted in the development of a community of whites who have amassed a working knowledge of the system of white supremacy. Many of them claim to possess a conscious commitment to eradicate racism. Yet there is a lack of critical direction or an expressed unwillingness on their part to take the direction from the lived reality of people of color movements for racial justice.
In order to resolve this, we must first question ourselves and address our failure to anticipate this trend and prepare ourselves for it. Instead of providing an agenda for white anti-racists to engage with us in authentic solidarity, many of us now just get giddy and tickled by the spectacle of whites talking about racism. Our lack of awareness of the lessons learned from past alliances with whites and our apparent unwillingness and/or inability to hold those whites who claim a commitment to anti-racist struggle accountable has resulted in a movement that is largely led by whites.
Black liberation theologian James Cone’s twenty-five year old observation remains true: “Wherever Black people have entered into a mutual relation with white people, with rare exceptions, the relationship has always worked to the detriment of our struggle. From the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century to the recent civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s, whites demonstrated that they cannot follow but must always lead.”
I do not expect or anticipate Wise of his own volition to critically assess himself in the context of Black self-determination and people of color solidarity. Further, I don’t expect Wise to move beyond his lucrative lecture tours to organize a movement of whites that actually confronts systemic racism. After all these years that he has been on the scene, if he were to start such an effort, he would have done so by now. Even so, the fact remains that in the realm of anti-racist struggle, thousands-of-dollars engagements do not constitute activism. They might be materially enriching for him on a personal level, but for the cause he claims to represent, such talk is cheap. And please, lest I find myself inundated with emails from those who idolize Wise, let me state for the record that nothing I have written herein will have any detrimental impact on his ability to make a living. His bank account will not take a dive on the account of my critique. One thing is for certain, he will never have to contend with the daily concerns of activists of color who are attacked and marginalized for speaking our truths and challenging convention in society and within our own ranks.
I’d say it is high time to up the anti-racist ante. In the end, what actually is a white anti-racist? Who defines such? And if that definition comes from a white person, how is that anti-racist? These questions may not be convenient, but us closing our eyes to them doesn’t make the issues they speak to go away. And I am clear that I am not the only one asking such questions. There is an ever-widening circle of committed people of color and white activists that see the hypocrisies and inconsistencies that exist within this work. They, too, are trying, in their own responsible way, to address them. It is time that we bring these questions to the surface, not to denigrate each other, but to strengthen our will and resolve in the spirit of fulfilling our purpose as a movement: the eradication of systemic racism.
Until the movement as a whole is able to adequately address these critical concerns, and people of color are no longer being dismissed and having our truths overlooked or otherwise dissed by those that claim to be our allies, here is a word to the wise: Rather than talk about the white privilege of others, Wise would be wise to simply discuss his own. Not in some general, “I’m a white guy” way either, but in a way that addresses his particular privileges as a white guy talking about racism such as the ones outlined in this essay. There would be no more compelling argument.
Ewuare Xola Osayande is a political activist, poet and author of several books including Misogyny and the Emcee: Sex, Race and Hip Hop. He is co-founder and director of POWER (People Organized Working to Eradicate Racism), a liberatory learning initiative that educates and empowers persons and organizations interested in and involved in anti-racist social justice movements. He is also host and producer of “The Resistance with Ewuare Osayande,” an online radio show that features news, music and commentary that champions the causes and concerns of people of color across the globe.
“My friends, I have come to tell you something about slavery – what I know of it, as I have felt it. When I came North, I was astonished to find that the abolitionists knew so much about it, that they were acquainted with its effects as well as if they had lived in its midst. But though they can give you its history – though they can depict its horrors, they cannot speak as I can from experience …”
Frederick Douglass, 1841
In the past decade or so, we have witnessed the rise of critical race studies, even something called Whiteness Studies. With the rise of Whiteness Studies on college campuses across the country has come the resurgence of whites as so-called experts on all matters pertaining to race. Among the most popular of them is the anti-racist speaker Tim Wise, who has become a regular presence on the college lecture circuit as well as in the media in the past few years. He has even been deemed the leader of the anti-racist movement by some of these very media outlets.
As Black liberationist, abolitionist, anti-racist and social justice activists, we would be wise to use this moment to ask some critical questions of ourselves and the state of the movement for racial justice in the U.S. We are thus compelled to critically engage Tim Wise and what his apparent popularity represents both in symbol and substance. In so doing, we confront the two fundamental issues in this work of eradicating racism: internalized oppression and white privilege.
Wise’s popularity among liberal whites is not that surprising to me. What is surprising is the level of popularity he’s gained within segments of the Black community. Some have even gone as far as to view him as some kind of Great White Hope. What is most curious about this apparent Black fascination with Wise is that when I hear certain Black people and other people of color refer to him, they talk about him in the same way they would talk about the first time they saw a white guy dance, rap or dunk a basketball. By internalizing the stereotypes of Blackness as defined by the white racist imagination, we have, in turn, embraced a codified image of Blackness. Thus, when we see white people cross the race-tracks and engage in behavior that has been deemed “Black,” we react with a kind of cultural “shock and awe.” In the case of Wise it is a little more complicated than that. Wise isn’t being acknowledged for his ability to sing or dance “like a Black person” but for his willingness to cross the tracks of race discourse and out whiteness – the ultimate racial taboo.
There is this sense among some of us that because he speaks against racism, he must be all right. And as such, he has garnered the coveted “ghetto pass,” a symbolic gesture given to those whites considered “down” with Black people. But we have seen what happens when whites feel they are “in like Flynn” with our people; they get right racist and condescending (remember Bill Clinton during the 2008 Presidential campaign?). In effect, they become even whiter. Therefore, let us insure that Wise’s “pass” doesn’t enable him to bypass critical inquiry that could benefit the movement and, maybe, even Wise himself.
What this fascination fails to take into consideration is the fact that white people have been speaking out against racial oppression since the first slave ships docked in the colony of Virginia. We should be past such elementary appreciation. When we fail to hold whites who proclaim an anti-racist stance to a higher standard, all we end up with are whites talking about how bad racism is. Mouthing off against racism is not going to end racism, no matter how loud and boisterous the bombast becomes. We have to get beyond this almost worship-like praise for what, in the end, are but baby steps in the long march against white supremacy.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not have a problem with white people speaking out against racism or Black people acknowledging white people working against racism. But when that acknowledgment precludes or is prioritized over and beyond our acknowledgment of ourselves, then we have a problem. That problem is called internalized oppression, a symptom of the very system we are working to defeat. Therefore, Black people giving uncritical praise or consideration to our white allies actually works toward our continued oppression. Remember how some of our people who were blinded by whiteness used to say: “The white man’s ice is colder”? Well, it seems these days that that same internalized oppression is at play in some who believe that the white man’s anti-racist analysis is more accurate than our own.
When I ask such persons what makes Wise’s commentaries so unique or revolutionary, they become quiet. For in truth, there is nothing new in Wise’s analysis. If anything, it is an analysis born of the blood struggle for Black liberation and racial justice throughout American history. Our ancestors may not have used terms like “white privilege.” Instead, they just called it what it was and is: white supremacy. (Imagine a white anti-racist saying, “I’m going to use my white supremacy to help people of color.”) Nonetheless, white privilege has become the watch-word of the movement. Yet, for the most part, it has been used as a means for white anti-racists to point the finger at “those” whites or navel gaze and wallow in a guilt that doesn’t produce results. Overall, it has the tendency to takes us away from addressing the real issue head on – whiteness itself and the ideology of white supremacy that gives whiteness whatever power and meaning it currently holds.
In the case of Tim Wise and other leading white anti-racists, we can accurately pin-point the state of the anti-racist movement by unpacking the white privileges they, themselves, hold and benefit from.
The first of these white privileges is one I have already addressed: The ability to paraphrase and/or otherwise exploit the analysis of Black liberation struggle and have it received by others as though it were their own. In the past decade or so, there has grown a cottage industry of books written by white people talking about their whiteness and their awareness of racism. When these white authors fail to acknowledge the debt they owe to the blood struggle of people of color in this country as they often do, they practice a form of racism that keeps that history erased from the consciousness of this country. This enables the white establishment to bypass Black people and hold up their own as authorities on the race question.
Another white privilege Tim Wise and other white anti-racists carry is the ability to emotionally express their views about racism without having that expression dismissed as “angry” or “too emotional”. When Wise speaks passionately and fervently about racism, his expression is understood as a sign of a person standing up for what he believes. As such, it is championed even when he is derisive or sardonic in his remarks. When we, people of color activists, speak passionately about racism, we are maligned and ridiculed as being angry, militant, even hateful and dangerous. If we wish to be heard (let alone understood), we are expected to speak calmly and politely about our experience and analysis regarding racism. Otherwise we are demonized. White moral indignation is justified. Black moral indignation is vilified. This has long been the case.
The third white privilege that Tim Wise and other so-called white anti-racists enjoy is the privilege of being honored for their anti-racist work as their Black activist counterparts and other activists of color are denounced and derided. Case in point: Several years back I spoke at a school in Massachusetts for their annual Dr. King Day commemoration. As I spoke about King’s legacy and the ongoing struggle for racial justice, I was met with outright hostility from the students gathered in the auditorium. The following year I would be contacted by an Arab faculty member at the school. She would inform me that for that year’s King Day event, the school decided to invite Tim Wise to address the student body. She went on to inform me that Wise was received with profound admiration by the very same students that heckled me the year before. Isolated incident? Chance circumstance? To my knowledge, similar events like this have at occurred on two more occasions since.
On one of the other occasions, I was contacted by a Black student organization that had to petition a reluctant administration to gain the necessary approval to invite me to speak. Just one semester following my presentation they would inform me that Tim Wise had just spoken at their school, where he received the red carpet of administrative respect and welcome. When this occurred at a third school, a Vietnamese student emailed me and rhetorically but sincerely asked, “Isn’t this what Tim Wise is supposed to be against?”. In all three cases, persons and groups that reached out to me expressed a level of frustration at witnessing the hypocrisy of the institutions they were working at or attending.
Let me make it clear here that I am not airing this to complain about my personal experiences. I do it because I know that I am not the only one who is experiencing this kind of racism. I am also addressing it here because in one of the cases I’ve mentioned, it actually worked to undermine the efforts of students who had organized to hold their university accountable. Over a four-year period, I worked diligently with these students and their allies. During this time of dedicated training, they all became adept anti-racist activists. They were a small but formidable band of students ready and prepared to take the university to task on its stated and unstated policies toward students, faculty and staff of color. The very year they planned to confront the university administration with their agenda, word got back to some key university officials. And in true duck and cover fashion, the administration brought in Wise with much publicity to avoid addressing the students and their demands. The entire campus turned out and the university was able to present itself as champions of diversity. Thus, when the students brought forward their demands, the university was able to side-step them by claiming that they were on top of it given their experience with Wise. Of course they were lying, but the students no longer had leverage as the campus community felt that they had done enough by bringing Tim Wise to speak.
This is just one example of the ways that white anti-racists who are not in accountable relationships with activists of color can be used to work against the best interests of people of color, whether knowingly or not.
One of the student leaders of this effort would later ask me if I’d be willing to debate Wise. I informed her that I would welcome the opportunity to engage in a constructive conversation with Wise on the state, purpose and direction of anti-racist struggle. The problem with that is that Wise only debates individuals with views more conservative than his own. This way he can continue to promote himself as the most radical anti-racist voice on the scene when he is not – not even among whites. [Noel Ignatiev has called for the outright abolition of whiteness in the face of other whites’ calls for what essentially amount to a kinder, gentler whiteness. By so doing, Ignatiev is taking up the challenge to expose whiteness as a form of status within the capitalist system rather than as a biological or cultural reality, which is how it continues to get passed off as – even within certain so-called anti-racist circles. Such an assertion takes it cue from an observation James Baldwin made many moons ago: “As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you.” If such an end were the aim of the movement, so-called white anti-racists could no longer go around claiming to want to use their white privilege for the good of the movement. Such a claim would be recognized as the nonsense it is.] Like Eminem in “8 Mile” taking on the Black rapper from the suburbs in his effort to establish his street cred and carry the “Blacker than thou” mantle, it seems that Wise takes on conservative intellectuals of color like Dinesh D’Sousa and Ward Connerly to prove he’s “Blacker” (more radical) than they are. That might impress some of Wise’s liberal Black bourgeois friends, but such side-show debates do nothing to bring us any closer to eradicating institutional racism.
It seems that Wise and other anti-racist whites have become higher education’s answer to people of color activists like me. As long as the dissidents are white, these schools are willing to practice the “tolerance” they claim to uphold as beacons of the liberal arts. It has even gotten to the point that nowadays it is not at all strange to see a white person giving the keynote speech for Black History Month. I honestly don’t think that is what Dr. Carter G. Woodson had in mind when he instituted the week-long celebration that would become Black History Month back in 1926. It is bad enough that February, the shortest calendar month of the year, is what Amiri Baraka calls “Black artist employment month.” Now we can’t even count on that. Like our people who are removed from the neighborhoods they grew up in as affluent whites gentrify urban communities, we find ourselves being removed from the one space our ancestors fought for on the calendar. And why is it so difficult for some of us to not see this racial switch as an attack on Black self-determination in much the same way as the current effort to dismiss Black History Month all together?
What can be deduced from these experiences is that there is clear benefit for those with white skin even in the context of anti-racist discourse. There is a distinct inequality in how we are perceived and treated by the white establishment. Despite Wise’s opposition to white supremacy and white privilege, he is a clear beneficiary of both. This is largely due to the fact that, evidently, he is not perceived as a threat to the establishment.
What does this say about Wise? What does this say about the state of the movement? What does this say about the state of racism in our society? White institutions can tolerate anti-racist discourse as long as it is spoken by somebody who looks like them. In fact, such staged discourse becomes a prime opportunity for such schools to present themselves as champions of multiculturalism and diversity even as they continue to enact policies and initiate professional and educational practices that discriminate against students, faculty and staff of color.
By definition, white privilege is not earned. Wise doesn’t have to do anything to gain access to the benefits assigned to the social construct of racialized whiteness. Even his apparent efforts to expose it have not caused the white establishment to banish him or treat him like a person of color. Given that Wise isn’t saying anything new or revolutionary in regards to how to eradicate racism, what accounts for his popularity and celebrity status and the fact that his calendar is filled with engagements for the next few years? His whiteness! The very thing he speaks against. Might this be the ultimate white privilege?
Now I am sure that there are some people reading this who might be saying, “Of course he can’t escape his privilege, we live in a racist society!” No argument here. All the more reason for him and those like him to be held accountable.
When grassroots Black activists speak honestly about racism at colleges across this country, we are not met with open arms by administrators and faculty. And most certainly our calendars are not full for the rest of the year let alone for the next three to five. When we speak, we are often met by the deaf ear of white denial. When Tim Wise speaks, he gets applause, standing ovations, awards and proclamations. The fact that schools can’t “hear” us when I and other people of color speak but will search out and roll out the red carpet for Wise is a statement to a kind of racism that doesn’t get discussed much – if at all – in our work. Despite all of the white anti-racist presentations given over the years at colleges and universities across the country, institutional racism at these schools remains intact. All the while, activists of color continue to be muffled and marginalized. Even in the ghetto of race discourse we remain tenants and never owners of an analysis that is ours to begin with.
One way that whites can be accountable is to stop being enablers to white supremacy by supplanting the voice of people of color with their own. We do not need white people speaking for people of color. Such talk is crass paternalism. My words do not need to be placed through a white filter in order for them to be understandable. Besides, there are some things that get lost in “translation.” If there is work for whites to do on this issue, then let it be work that addresses this deaf ear of white denial. This is a question of power. Whites that do not listen to people of color do not have a “hearing problem.” They fail to hear and to listen because they can. Those that promote the claim that white people speaking for people of color is a positive only coddle such whites in the comfort of their conformity to a way of life that denies, not just the voices of people of color, but our lives as well.
All of the aforementioned privileges taken together provide Wise a pretty formidable platform from which to attract the support of those of us who seek an end to racism. By supporting him, such persons are made to feel as if they are fighting racism. In this vein, he is able to make use of such support from those who will rally to his rescue when he calls on them to defend him with a bevy of “like” button clicks or a hail of 5-star reviews when he has occasioned a derisive remark made by the usual suspect – an avowed white supremacist. Really? Has this become the epitome of anti-racist activism? This would be laughable if we weren’t discussing something as deadly serious as racism. Such “cyber activism” is just another form of white diversion from engaging in actual activist work.
Must I remind us that people of color live our lives under daily assault? Clicking a “like” button is not going to stop the hail of gun-fire that snuffs out the lives of the Oscar Grants and Aiyana Joneses of our communities. Oscar Grant and Aiyana Jones were not militant activists. Jones was just seven years old for God’s sake! They were Black and, according to this system, that was sufficient. Until the movement confronts that reality head on rather than cry about some nasty review of their book, I have little regard for their “anti-racist” activism. Such attacks from white supremacists should be expected in this work. If I had a dollar for every piece of hate mail I’ve received …. My point is that it comes with the territory. To make noise about it is just self-serving. And that is putting it mildly.
This imbalanced relationship between people of color activists and white anti-racists reinforces the power dynamic of white supremacy even within the movement. White anti-racists have been able to evade accountability on this front due to the fact that they wield power and influence over and beyond people of color activists by virtue of their white-skinned privilege. This is a fact that has dogged our movement since the days of Abolition. And to those who question my right to question Tim Wise or suggest that Wise is beyond critique, I say as Henry Highland Garnet said to the white abolitionists of his day, “If it has come to this, that I must think and act as you do, because you are an abolitionist, or be exterminated by your thunder, then I do not hesitate to say that your abolitionism is abject slavery.”
The fact is that someone like a William Lloyd Garrison, who did far more than Wise with far less than Wise, was critiqued way more harshly than anything I have penned here by his Black contemporaries. Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass and others within the Black Abolitionist Movement always maintained an analysis that was independent of white abolitionists. Theirs was an analysis based on the life-and-death reality they faced on the daily. And they were quick to check the blurry vision of those who sat upon the lofty heights of their privileged status as whites no matter how well-meaning they may have been. To relinquish that right and responsibility now would be a disservice to my forebears and the example they have left for all of us.
This is a problem that our movement must address. This movement cannot challenge the institutional racism as it is currently positioned or personified. Our people’s movement for liberation and self-determination has resulted in the development of a community of whites who have amassed a working knowledge of the system of white supremacy. Many of them claim to possess a conscious commitment to eradicate racism. Yet there is a lack of critical direction or an expressed unwillingness on their part to take the direction from the lived reality of people of color movements for racial justice.
In order to resolve this, we must first question ourselves and address our failure to anticipate this trend and prepare ourselves for it. Instead of providing an agenda for white anti-racists to engage with us in authentic solidarity, many of us now just get giddy and tickled by the spectacle of whites talking about racism. Our lack of awareness of the lessons learned from past alliances with whites and our apparent unwillingness and/or inability to hold those whites who claim a commitment to anti-racist struggle accountable has resulted in a movement that is largely led by whites.
Black liberation theologian James Cone’s twenty-five year old observation remains true: “Wherever Black people have entered into a mutual relation with white people, with rare exceptions, the relationship has always worked to the detriment of our struggle. From the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century to the recent civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s, whites demonstrated that they cannot follow but must always lead.”
I do not expect or anticipate Wise of his own volition to critically assess himself in the context of Black self-determination and people of color solidarity. Further, I don’t expect Wise to move beyond his lucrative lecture tours to organize a movement of whites that actually confronts systemic racism. After all these years that he has been on the scene, if he were to start such an effort, he would have done so by now. Even so, the fact remains that in the realm of anti-racist struggle, thousands-of-dollars engagements do not constitute activism. They might be materially enriching for him on a personal level, but for the cause he claims to represent, such talk is cheap. And please, lest I find myself inundated with emails from those who idolize Wise, let me state for the record that nothing I have written herein will have any detrimental impact on his ability to make a living. His bank account will not take a dive on the account of my critique. One thing is for certain, he will never have to contend with the daily concerns of activists of color who are attacked and marginalized for speaking our truths and challenging convention in society and within our own ranks.
I’d say it is high time to up the anti-racist ante. In the end, what actually is a white anti-racist? Who defines such? And if that definition comes from a white person, how is that anti-racist? These questions may not be convenient, but us closing our eyes to them doesn’t make the issues they speak to go away. And I am clear that I am not the only one asking such questions. There is an ever-widening circle of committed people of color and white activists that see the hypocrisies and inconsistencies that exist within this work. They, too, are trying, in their own responsible way, to address them. It is time that we bring these questions to the surface, not to denigrate each other, but to strengthen our will and resolve in the spirit of fulfilling our purpose as a movement: the eradication of systemic racism.
Until the movement as a whole is able to adequately address these critical concerns, and people of color are no longer being dismissed and having our truths overlooked or otherwise dissed by those that claim to be our allies, here is a word to the wise: Rather than talk about the white privilege of others, Wise would be wise to simply discuss his own. Not in some general, “I’m a white guy” way either, but in a way that addresses his particular privileges as a white guy talking about racism such as the ones outlined in this essay. There would be no more compelling argument.
Ewuare Xola Osayande is a political activist, poet and author of several books including Misogyny and the Emcee: Sex, Race and Hip Hop. He is co-founder and director of POWER (People Organized Working to Eradicate Racism), a liberatory learning initiative that educates and empowers persons and organizations interested in and involved in anti-racist social justice movements. He is also host and producer of “The Resistance with Ewuare Osayande,” an online radio show that features news, music and commentary that champions the causes and concerns of people of color across the globe.
8/29/2010
Wife-Beater
by Ewuare X. Osayande
A wife-beater is not a tank top
is not made of cotton
is not manufactured by Hanes, Fruit-of-the-Loom or Perry Ellis
is not soft and comfy
does not come wrapped in plastic
cannot be bought at the local Walmart or Macy’s
is not sexy
cannot be taken to the Laundromat to be cleaned
a wife-beater is not a muscle shirt
an A-shirt
or a T-shirt without sleeves
a wife-beater is not a tank top
but does come in a variety of
sizes and colors.
3/01/2010
Aftershocks
Aftershocks
for those that perished in and survived the earthquake that hit
by Ewuare Osayande
here
there is no dignity in death
poverty is not natural
is not like sunshine or rain
this pain is manufactured
is the product of rationalized greed
as internationalized creed
a shower of screams
is all that can be heard
in this aftershock of horror
in this hell called
where blood runs like paint in a Basquiat portrait
chronicling the catastrophe
reporters rush to scene
to objectively watch the survivors die
while daydreaming of winning the Pulitzer Prize
relief workers expert in severing limbs
and severing families
set up blockades and ration aid
while supplies sit stockpiled at the airport
controlled by the americans
who’ve sent in their marines
landing on the presidential palace green
brandishing rifles rather than bread
on orders to kill the people’s will
and accurately count the dead
so vultures who’ve learned how to speak
with protective gear that hide their beaks
can harvest the organs
funded by corporations that dine on corpses
as a way of life
and sponsor telethons
so others can expunge their guilt of privilege
by texting ten dollars to their charity of choice
and get the chance to talk to Julia Roberts
about what a shame those poor people have to live in such squalor
yet refuse to cast blame
as Half-a-Buck the rapper recites
“holla if you hear me” from the teleprompter
sampling cries for help in Creole
in his yet-to-be-released remix
the proceeds to benefit those damned by Pat Robertson on CBN
under contract with the devil going by the guise of Rupert Murdoch
who owns the Bible he touts as God’s Holy Word
broadcasting to the suburban family
heads bowed at their dining room table
praying “there by the grace of God go I …” on vacation
on a Royal Caribbean cruise liner
docked just out of ear-shot
of the screams of those with legs being sawed off
while the descendants of
basking under the same sun
that burns the skin of those drowning in a sea of concrete
drinking margaritas of misery
mixed with their own urine just to survive
you wanna know where the fault lies?
just follow the 200 year-long fault line
that runs back from Port-a-Prince to DC
where Thomas Jefferson walks the halls
with his slave concubine in tow
conferring with Napoleon
on how to overthrow the first Black republic
in the Western hemisphere
for fear that word might stir
them nigras in the cotton fields down below
but back to the coverage on CNN
the announcement’s just been made
that the relief effort will officially end
as the sound of generators try to drown out
the cries for help
that would otherwise be heard
word has it
Toussaint’s spirit was seen
giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a million Haitians
conjuring the resurrection of his people
zombie Christs
rising from their concrete tombs
with the ash of their ancestors’ determination
pouring like blood from their faces
brandishing machetes in their cries
Copyright 2010 by Ewuare X. Osayande
7/24/2009
Michael Jackson: The Man, The Majesty, The Misery, The Mythology
by Ewuare X. Osayande
It has been an entire month since the passing of Michael Jackson and yet each night the mainstream media continues to raise his remains and set their character assassins loose on his legacy, riddling his image with all manner of prevarications and perversions. Mere gossip and rumor is presented as investigative reporting as speculation mounts over whether he abused prescription drugs, whether his mother should maintain custody of the children, who really fathered them and who will assume control of his estate. Most recently, Rolling Stone magazine featured an article discussing how his body looked in the morgue! Even in death the King of Pop has no rest as reporters and journalists scurry to and fro like rats nibbling away at his corpse. But their reaction to his death is no different in character than when he was alive. To them, Michael Jackson is nothing more than a jackpot. And they continue to milk his memory for every red cent they can squeeze out of it.
Thankfully, the Black community, from which he emerged, has not fallen for the mainstream media’s efforts at disparaging our beloved son. And whether the white world will ever understand is not necessary for us to mourn him the way we wish. In Black communities throughout this country, homemade CDs blare out car speakers a tribute to the man who gave so much love through his music. And why do we celebrate him as we do? For in celebrating him, we celebrate the best in ourselves: our very aspirations and hopes are actualized. In a world that despises Blackness and renders us a caricature for the world’s consumption, we relate to Michael Jackson in a way that is kin. We forever sing with him: “They Don’t Really Care About Us,” even as we try to create some semblance of happiness in our corners of the world. He reminds us that despite the chaos around us and within us, moments of joy and peace are never out of reach.
Yes, there is a lot we can learn from the life and legacy of Michael Jackson. He offers us a glimpse into those aspects of Black life that we still have difficulty facing, let alone, discussing. Further, there are aspects of his life that are not that well-known and need to be raised up as examples.
Although Michael Jackson may, at one time, been considered the wealthiest Black person on the planet, he was born, like most Black folks, in poverty. Gary, IN, a working-class outgrowth of Chicago, is where he called home as a child. His parents were part of the Black proletariat that emerged from the Great Depression embodying the strong work ethic they inherited from their sharecropping forebears. Striving to stake their claim of the American Dream.
Michael Jackson didn’t just pop up in American society an icon. His route to stardom was not unlike the route taken by many Black entertainers before him. He, along with his brothers, formed a singing group and appeared at the legendary Apollo Theater, which is a feat in itself. Long before the crass Simon Cowell brought American Idol to these shores, the Apollo was the site for grooming and crowning American’s next cultural idol. Members of Harlem’s Black underclass, the Apollo audience was well-versed in the aesthetics of Black culture holding up and taking to task those who would have the audacity to grace the stage of the legendary Apollo Theater. In 1967 The Jackson Five would win Apollo’s amateur night competition making them a recognized name in the Black music world. They would soon be signed to Berry Gordy’s Motown Records.
The Jackson 5: America’s first Black boy band. Forerunner and prototype to every boy band that would come after them: both Black and white. Groups like DeBarge, New Edition and Jodeci, all tailored their acts on aesthetics established by The Jackson 5. Coming forth out of the tumultuous and revolutionary era that was the Sixties, these five brown-skinned brothers came sporting their Afro crowns - a nod to the Black Arts and Black Power Movements of the late Sixties. With their well choreographed moves, melodic rhythms, eclectic style and small-town charm, they came to personify the aspiration for peace that was the “Age of Aquarius.”
But it would be as a solo artist that Michael Jackson would make his greatest impact on American culture. The release of Off the Wall in 1979 laid the musical blueprint for the record-breaking success that would become Thriller. (Isn’t “P.Y.T” just the funkiest love song ever recorded?) After establishing his sound, Michael returns to Quincy Jones with Thriller and in one album they put on display the entire spectrum of Black music – from gospel to blues to jazz to rock – and the whole world rejoiced to the tune of 25 million copies sold in two years time, making Thriller the best-selling album of all time. At its peak, the album was selling a million copies per week. To date, it is estimated that more than 120 million copies of Thriller have been sold. No other album in history comes close.
Jackson always remained conversant with the fullness of Black music tradition throughout his career. It could be said that he was the cultural love child of James Brown and Diana Ross, carrying on their craftsmanship, showmanship and their hard-working ethic.
Michael Jackson and Legacy of Racism in the Music Industry
Jackson was ever-cognizant of the reality of racism. In the early Eighties, MTV was just an upstart cable station that played mainly low-budget videos by obscure British punk rock acts. In 1983 Michael Jackson changed all that when his video for “Billie Jean” broke MTV’s whites-only color-barrier. He not only challenged the cultural apartheid that was American pop culture at the time with Black artists relegated to the Billboard ghetto of “Urban Contemporary Music” while white acts that tried to play “Black” music were considered “Pop,” he also opened the flood-gates for other Black artists, entertainers and athletes to garner mainstream attention and status. The Eighties, although a period dominated by Reaganomics and the contradictory conservative ideology of “Just Say No to Drugs” while we strip predominantly Black communities of any semblance of economic stability, was also a period that brought us the likes of The Cosby Show, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan. Michael Jackson’s musical activism had plenty to do with the socio-cultural progress made by a class of Black people during a time of severe political backlash against the Black poor.
Not only did he change the unwritten racial policy at MTV, he changed the cultural terrain of American society. In other words, he didn’t just change the game, he remade it his own. He remade MTV from a marginal TV channel to the cultural tour de force it would become. In the process, he took the burgeoning music video genre and gave it a new sense of purpose. He didn’t make music videos; he made musical motion pictures. With the success of “Thriller,” Jackson insured that all future music videos would be measured by the rule of his far-sighted cultural vision and conviction.
Michael Jackson was not the naïve Black artist he may have appeared to be. He crossed over with an agenda that he executed with the deftness and calculation of a shrewd businessman. In 1985 Jackson acquired the rights to the Beatles’ music catalogue when he purchased ATV Music for $45.5 million dollars. In addition to gaining the rights to more than 200 Beatles’ tunes, he also acquired the rights to Little Richard’s music catalogue, which he gave back to Richard without fee. In this one financial act Jackson gave Richard an artistic freedom he had not known for years. Before Jackson’s acquisition Little Richard had to pay the Beatles to play his own music, a kind of cultural slavery that many Black artists have experienced since the days of Bessie Smith. He, the King of Pop, retrieved cultural freedom for the true King of Rock. Like free Africans who purchased the freedom of their kin, Jackson’s purchase of the rights to Richard’s music in effect freed Richard from the bonds of cultural servitude to a white establishment that continually insults him anytime they proclaim Elvis the King.
He redeemed Black music and righted a legacy that was rife with corruption and exploitation. Black musicians and singers have had their work stolen from under them since the first Black artists set foot in white-owned recording studios. Jackson, surely cognizant of this history, took executive action, and with one stroke of his pen, sealed a business deal that turned the tables on a music industry that had done wrong to his folks. He recaptured the soul of Black music and retrieved the cultural dignity of Black artists before him - the Bessie Smiths, Robert Johnsons, Chuck Berrys and Little Richards of our history. He did what no other Black artist before him could have done.
Michael Jackson and Masculinity
Jackson in his person and in his music makes a conscious effort to challenge the fundamental tenets of masculinity in our society. In three videos specifically, “Beat It,” “Bad” and “The Way You Make Me Feel,” we witness Jackson confront the violence that underlies male domination.
In the video “Beat It” Michael Jackson intervenes and stops an ensuing gang fight. The lyrics are a challenge to the fundamental notion of manhood that says that a man never backs down from a fight. Jackson counsels the implied male listener that retreat from senseless violence is more valiant than risking one’s life.
“You better run, you better do what you can Don't wanna see no blood, don't be a macho man You wanna be tough, better do what you can So beat it, but you wanna be bad …
They're out to get you, better leave while you can Don't wanna be a boy, you wanna be a man You wanna stay alive, better do what you can So beat it, just beat it …You have to show them that you're really not scared You're playin' with your life, this ain't no truth or dare …”
“Beat It” seeks to redeem manhood from the death-wish of barbarism.
In the video “The Way You Make Me Feel” we see the barrio and the hood through the eyes of the men that line the streets. Young and old are jockeying for position amidst a montage of oppression and self-inflicted pain. Jackson plays a kid trying to gain the respect of the gangstas as he witnesses the young men harassing the women as they make their way down the street. Noticing Jackson’s conflicted state, an elder man sits Jackson down and counsels him. He says to Jackson: “I’ve been watching you. You been trying to act like those boys; they ain’t about nothing. Why don’t you just be yourself? You know, just reach down inside and pull the real you out. … You can’t be them. You don’t wanna be them.” Jackson encourages a thoughtful and introspective Black manhood that is rarely seen in music video.
The video “Bad” features Jackson breaking out in a free-style refrain not heard in the song itself. Charging the hustlers in a spontaneous chorus of “you’re doing wrong,” Jackson brings the issue home with the fervency of a Baptist preacher when he sings:
“That’s your mother/That’s your brother/ That’s your sister/That’s me.” Placing himself in the family of those most victimized by urban violence, Jackson’s sincerity comes off as authentic and compelling.
Jackson is seen in these videos donning the masquerade of machismo to expose its ultimate shallowness. The cool-posing, crotch-grabbing, muscle-flexing becomes parody on Jackson’s wiry frame. More than anything, Jackson seems to be mocking these aspects of manhood rather than celebrating them. The mission in this video trilogy is a call for a manhood imbued with a morality steeped in a commitment to non-violence. Jackson shows that behind the posturing and bravado of contemporary manhood is a generation of men seeking community and acceptance. Jackson challenges us to see ourselves without the mask of machismo and calls on us to embrace ourselves and each other in the spirit of peace.
Jackson was crying out. He was crying out for a new manhood even as he was struggling with his own. It has often been stated that Jackson sought to retrieve a childhood lost due to his early stardom. But maybe there is more to it than that. Maybe Jackson was resisting manhood altogether. Maybe Jackson was saying to the world that “if manhood means being cold, heartless and abusive, then I don’t want to grow up.” Clearly, Jackson’s Peter Pan complex was just that: complex. Our media and social institutions lack the motivation or conviction to address the complex nature of Jackson’s development as well as the development of those men that also struggle to live outside the confines of hegemonic masculinity. Rather than address his challenges both personal and those he expressed through his music, the media chose to make a spectacle of his struggle and mock the coming of age battle that raged within him.
The mainstream media took great pleasure in attacking Michael Jackson’s sexuality under the purview of investigative news journalism. This worked to create an extreme bias against Jackson which he would fight against for the rest of his life.
Sure Jackson had issues. But his issues are the kind of issues that aren’t addressed with the proper measure of dignity and respect in this nation. And as an African American, he was not about to receive the courtesy of respect. If Jackson were not Black or as famous as he was and the children involved were not white, then this would not have made the front page of the local paper let alone national and international headlines. America’s sordid fascination with Black popular figures and their biased concern for white children fueled this story into the media maelstrom it became and remains.
Jackson, a Black man, playing host to white children in his home is a white American nightmare realized! The white racist imagination was unleashed by the news of his interactions with white children, and there would be nothing Jackson could’ve said or done to quash the racial fears that have fomented in the collective mind of white America for generations. For Jackson, it was a public relations nightmare, no doubt. But that doesn’t imply guilt. In fact Jackson was never found guilty by a jury for any of the charges of child molestation brought against him. Yet, the American media was successful in portraying him as a bona fide pedophile. Keeping with America’s historic treatment of Black sexuality, Jackson, as a sexual being, would be rendered deviant and criminalized.
Michael Jackson and White Supremacy
Of all of Jackson’s idiosyncrasies, the one that was most perplexing to so many is his change in complexion and his many face-lifts. Take a look at him on the cover of Off the Wall and then look at him on the cover of Invincible; there is a clear distinction that cannot be covered by the claim that he had Vertigo. Anyone that would try to argue that Michael did not try to change his appearance so as to appear less-Black and more-white is in as much denial as he was. Yes, Michael made a conscious effort to pass as white. If Jackson suffered from anything, he suffered from an ailment that all Black people struggle with: internalized oppression. Internalized oppression in part is the social circumstance that occurs when an oppressed people take on the mores, values and ideas of their oppressors in their effort to be recognized by and identified with their oppressor. It is an inferiority complex that we as Black people are socialized to accept and embrace.
Most Black people have at one time or another wished they could change the complexion of their skin, the shape of their noses, eyes or lips. This kind of racial masochism just comes with the territory when you are born not-white in a world that praises, honors and adores whiteness. Michael would come to personify this psycho-social condition for the entire Black world. He manifested in his very person the effects of racism on the Black mind and body. Michael became a vaudeville freak show in the circus of white supremacy. “Step right up and see a Black man turn white before your very eyes!” In the deformed face of Jackson we witnessed the utter absurdity of white supremacy taken to its illogical ends. It is an absurdity that we as people of color live with and must endure on the daily. Such absurdities as a Latina candidate for the Supreme Court being charged with being a racist and interrogated by a white Southern politician who was once an acknowledged Klan sympathizer!
American pop culture has always reserved its highest praise for its white performers that have parodied Black music, style and movement. Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, Madonna, Eminem, Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears have all experienced the white privilege of being able to perform Black music without incurring the commercial slight and cultural contempt reserved for Black artists. Jackson sought to enter this exclusive, segregated cultural space by changing his visage so as to appear as a white artist performing Black music.
Jackson betrays the wide-eyed white liberal idealism of his song “Black or White.” It does matter as Jackson’s million dollar racial make-over clearly established. Yet despite his extraordinary efforts, the white world never accepted or embraced him. He would be banished to the Neverland of Anti-Blackness. The white world made it very clear when they began to deride him with names like “Wacko Jacko” that no matter how white you become in skin, you will never be accepted as our kin! Even his being a father to three white children didn’t help matters. Nothing he did was ever enough to win the welcome of the white world.
The legacy of slavery and the reality of racist oppression have warped the self-image of Black people. Each day we struggle to maintain a semblance of ourselves as we strive toward a more liberated and conscious awareness. Just five years before Michael Jackson was born, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted a “doll test” to study the psychological effects of segregation on Black children. An overwhelming majority of Black children tested preferred the white doll over the black doll. Further, they attributed positive characteristics to the white doll and negative characteristics to the black doll. This test helped make the argument for desegregation in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. . In 2004 the doll test was redone by 17 year old Kiri Davis. In this test 16 of 21 Black children chose the white doll over the black doll. Given these findings and the legacy they point to, there is still a lot of corrective cultural work that we need to do to redeem the image and vision of Blackness.
Michael Jackson and the Black Underclass
Michael Jackson’s deformed face stares back at us eternally beckoning us to rescue him and ourselves from this strife. Until we do, the souls of our children, deformed before the age of puberty, will continue to drown in the delirium of racism. Jackson went to extreme lengths to show us that “They Don’t Really Care About Us.” The question is: Do we? Sometimes it is hard to tell given the willingness of many of us to lambast and malign those of us who are Black and poor. It seems that such derision and uttered distortion of reality of Black poverty is a requirement for aspiring Black comedians, actors and entertainers. It is true that many Black entertainers have gained their fame and fortune by portraying Blacks in a negative and racist manner. The same is true for many Black comedians that mock and joke about the Black poor as though they never were poor once upon a time. Then there is this new generation of Black politicians who have risen to power on the vote of the Black community only to turn around and enact policies that deplete inner-city communities of the services they desperately need even as they blame the poor for the problems that result. Each Sunday Black ministers equate material success with religious piety, riches with righteousness. Their “prosperity gospel” condemns the poor for being poor. This pseudo-theology adds insult to the injury that is already felt by many of the Black underclass who are as committed to their faith as their middle class “brothers and sisters in Christ.” These uncaring and unjust criticisms amount to an all-out assault on the Black underclass by a Black petit bourgeoisie that continues to put their class interests above the best interests of Black people.
In Jackson’s music, condemnation of the poor is replaced with compassion, alienation is replaced with alliance. Michael Jackson never forgot his impoverished roots. And more than that, he remained ever vigilant in his efforts to alleviate the suffering of the world’s disadvantaged. Jackson’s most compelling video in this regard is for the song “They Don’t Really Care About Us.” It is not by chance that Jackson chose to shoot the video in Brazil, home to the largest population of Black people outside the continent of Africa. Here he is at his most militant and uncompromising in his critique of racism and class oppression.
Tell me what has become of my rightsAm I invisible because you ignore me?Your proclamation promised me free liberty, nowI'm tired of bein' the victim of shameThey're throwing me in a class with a bad nameI can't believe this is the land from which I cameYou know I do really hate to say it… Some things in life they just don't wanna seeBut if Martin Luther was livin'He wouldn't let this be …
Among Jackson’s rash of record-breaking accomplishments, his most meaningful will probably be the 2000 Guiness title of “Most Charities Supported by a Pop Star.” Yet despite the millions of dollars Jackson shared with the world, despite the billions of dollars that get poured into the fight to end hunger and disease, poverty persists. The philosophy of capitalism would have us believe that philanthropy can solve the problem of poverty or at least manage it effectively. Yet, the capitalists are having a hard enough time dealing with their own financial woes. The recurrent cry of the world’s hungry and malnourished beckons us to reconsider our commitments and revision a world that does not thrive on the production of private property, private markets, that is not based on the exploitation of labor and the reproduction of poverty as a means to profit. Jackson’s Guiness title achieved amidst a world awash in suffering shows us the failure of capitalist philanthropy as a means to solve the world’s problems. His call to “Heal the World,” is ultimately a call to rethink how we approach the world’s problems.
Michael Jackson is gone. And even now it is still hard to believe. The world that loved him is now left to ponder the meaning of his majesty and misery. Whether the issue is gender, race or class, Michael Jackson’s life leaves us much to consider and address. He lived a life that in many ways is mythical for most of us. Traditionally, societies have created myths to teach their people valuable lessons about life and the struggles they are sure to experience. Also, myth-making has been a means to store heritage and history for the benefit of successive generations.
The message of Michael’s cosmic life must ultimately be determined not by a mainstream media that rendered him a caricature and a commodity. But let us, the people that gave him life and loved him for who he was, make meaning of his mythical life in a way that honors him and offers us lessons to heed. He was a star. May he now exist as a constellation in the collective consciousness of Black America.
I choose to remember him as he was in the video for “Can You Feel It.” There he will forever stand alongside his brothers looking like Obatalah, the Yoruba deity, with his arms raised opening up the sky, sprinkling the gold goober dust of hope onto the faces of those that dwell in the inner-cities of the world with a wide smile on his still African face and sincerity beaming from his eyes. Michael Jackson, the myth, the anomaly, the man, who was, is and forever will be The King of Pop.
2/01/2009
An Open Letter to Will Smith
by Ewuare X. Osayande
Recently, in response to the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, you were quoted in London’s Daily Express as stating, "It was as if some part of me was validated. It was something that I've known for a long time that I couldn't really say: 'You know guys, I really don't think America is a racist nation.' I know that I feel like that sometimes but I just don't believe that. There are racist people who live there but I don't think America as a whole is a racist nation. Before Obama won the presidency I wasn't allowed to say that out loud because people would say: 'Oh yeah, of course for you, Mr Hollywood!'"
As someone who is often referred to as the most famous actor in the world, you must be aware of the power of your opinion and the influence it can wield on the world stage. We live in a time when facts hold less weight in the court of public opinion than unqualified, off-the-cuff remarks made by celebrities.
Yes, we were all overcome with joy and utter jubilation as we witnessed the election and inauguration of the first Black president of the United States of America. It was truly the most historic event in our generation. But for us to now profess that this one act was so compelling as to turn a country that owned and sold Africans as slaves for almost one hundred years since it declared itself a nation, that fought a Civil War to determine if it would keep them enslaved, that then rendered them second-class citizens and sanctioned segregation and the terrorism that came with it for another hundred years, and that spent the last forty years fighting against their advancement through every sphere of American life, into a nation that is not racist is a thing of fantasy – like your films. These historic and current events were not the actions of isolated white supremacists. They were the government-sanctioned policy of the United States of America. Why would you make such an irresponsible statement that only adds confusion to an already frustrating issue that most people of color must contend with on a daily basis?
The fact is that you could only make such remarks because you have removed yourself both physically and psychologically from the everyday reality faced by Black people and other people of color in this nation. World-famous Black actors before you, such as Paul Robeson, Sidney Poitier, and Harry Belafonte, couldn’t separate themselves as easily due to the legislative and social constraints of Jim Crow. But now, because of their struggle and the blood sacrifice of Black people, you can and have separated yourself from the very Black community that nurtured you and supported you, only to turn around and make a statement that only works to soothe the guilt-ridden conscience of a nation that continues to downplay its legacy of oppression and the toll that legacy has taken on those of us who are Black, Brown and poor. To use the platform bequeathed to you by the Civil Rights Movement to deny the legacy of racism and its continued persistence amounts to a slap in the face to each and every Black person that died and continues to die due to the reality of racism. Your comments add insult to the injury of racism that most of us experience each and every day.
When was the last time you visited your hometown of Philly? We have a Black mayor here, our third in fact. Yet, racism is no less real now than when white Gov. Rendell was sitting in city hall. Our cities are no less segregated today than when George Wallace declared “segregation forever” from the steps of the Alabama state house in 1963. The remedies for this social ill will take more than the single act of electing a Black man to the nation’s highest political office. It will take a generation of acts to repair the more than a century’s worth of social damage and degradation that the Black community has reaped in these United States.
What about the cop-killing of Oscar Grant in Oakland this past New Year’s Day? What about the kidnapping and torture of Megan Williams? What about the acquittal of the officers that shot and killed Sean Bell? Jena 6? Katrina? These are just some of the racist events that made national headlines. The list could easily go on. And while we’re at it, Will, last I checked, most Native Americans still reside on reservations. Mexican immigrants are still being targeted for deportation while the red carpet is laid out for European immigrants. Arabs and Muslims are still being profiled at airports and stereotyped in the media.
Do you not realize that there are those of us still fighting the racism of a country that continues to treat most of us as second-class citizens, and that discriminates against us on the job, in the neighborhood, at the banks, in the hospital, in the courts, in the schools? Do you not realize that this is a country that continues to deny so many of us equal protection under the law when we are lynched, terrorized, tortured, murdered and otherwise mistreated or misrepresented? The election of Barack Obama hasn’t fundamentally changed any of this. And as great a man as he now is, invested with the power of his office, he, alone, can’t change it either. In fact, he is no less threatened by that same reality himself! Why do you think he has the tightest security detail of any president in U.S. history?
Your comments make a mockery of the self-determination of our community against a nation that has throughout its history denied our very citizenship and humanity. By denying the reality of racism, you also deny the strength of character, the persistence of will, and the power of Black people who have fought against it. Coincidentally, your comments also deny the very audacity of hope that lit the match of Obama’s own determination to be the president in a United States that didn’t believe that a Black man could win.
Furthermore, your comments only work to falsely confirm the conservative attitude that continues to hold sway in this nation. Your denial of this country’s racism doesn’t challenge the status quo desires of certain whites and wealthy people of color who are quite comfortable with things as they are. Taken at face value, your remarks defend the racist proposition that any problem Black people experience in this nation must be of our own making and doing. America remains in denial as to the actual state of racial progress. Your comments only work to rock this nation into a deeper slumber. If America is to be freed from its racism, it must wake up to the work that is yet to be done. Otherwise, we all might be in for a rude awakening.
No, Will, unlike the characters you portray in your films, people of color in this country do not have the privilege or luxury to exist without a walking awareness of race and what that means in a country that at any given moment and without any warning can remind us of racism’s truth in all its cruelty and brutality. No, we cannot afford to pretend or play make-believe. In our world the bullets are real as is the racism.
Just as racism still existed after slavery ended, and racism still existed after Black people won the right to vote, so too racism still exists, even after the election of the first Black president. You don’t measure progress by the exceptions. Rather, progress is measured by the rule. And the rule for most Black people and other people of color in this nation and around the world is that racism is all too real. The sooner this nation breaks out of its denial and comes to terms with this truth, the sooner we will be able to address it and do what it takes to eradicate it for good.
Ewuare X. Osayande (http://www.osayande.org/) is a political activist and author of several books including Commemorating King: Speeches Honoring the Civil Rights Movement and Misogyny & the Emcee: Sex, Race & Hip Hop. He is co-founder and director of POWER (People Organized Working to Eradicate Racism). He can be reached at OsayandeSpeaks@hotmail.com.
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