Comment on Marvin X's Letter to the Post Black Negro Editor of the Oakland Tribune


Marvin, Martin seems to be one of those Negroes who writes with a little white man on his shoulder. Martin is up to his eyeballs in sterile hypocrisy and sham sentiments.

Does he really believe that anyone reading his "people must become people" and "Death is death" that Americans are of that mind set when we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year seeking to murder people in the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, to kill those who killed Americans? These are sentiments uttered daily by American politicians and American whites: we want the death of those who killed on 9/11!

Just today in the NYTimes the US Special Forces were applauded in killing 5 Afghan "militants," and they didn't call it murder or thought it outrageous when they did not know for certain that these were civilians. Where was Martin and the Oakland paper when Israelis were killing Gazan civilians, more than 1300--men women, and children?

We all know everything is not everything. That kind of equality and equity has never existed for blacks, browns--the Other American. Some deaths are more heavy and valuable than others. The officials and the elite of Oakland will cry huge crocodile tears for the four cops murdered in Oakland streets, tears that did not come for Oscar Grant, outrage that did not occur in high places for the black and poor beaten, abused, and murdered, daily in American cities.

We know in our hearts people are not treated as people especially when their skins are black and brown. Black men are murdered with abandon in American and there is a great reluctance to do anything about it. We all know this on our pulse.

Martin knows as well as anyone that white cops are placed in communities to terrorize black men, women, and children and that white police unions and judges and attorney generals support this terrorism by hook or crook and that often black mayors are afraid of their own police departments. Martin is a phony and a phony with phony sentiments. To place the great Marvin X on the same level as murderous and terrorizing cops is utterly outrageous and the height of pandering to power. He feels free to do that because he thinks he will gain some points from that little white man sitting on his shoulder.

We all want peace and love in our communities. We all would like to respect the security forces in our communities. But it just ain't that way, however evolved Martin may be. But dear Martin, they will be coming after you one of these days and your kiss up words will not save you -- Rudy

Rudolph Lewis, Editor

ChickenBones: A Journal

www.nathanielturner.com