Book Signing and Conversation with Author Marvin X
On Saturday, August 1, the Post Newspaper Group will host a conversation and book signing with author/poet/playwright/activist Marvin X. The event will be in memory of journalist Chauncey Bailey who was assassinated August 2, 2007. Marvin X will celebrate the release of his memoir Eldridge Cleaver: My Friend the Devil. Marvin wrote his memoir while on a national book tour in March. In less than three weeks he finished the first draft, inspired by a conversation with his daughter, Nefertiti, in Houston, Texas. Amiri Baraka, godfather of the Black Arts Movement (Marvin X is a co-founder), provided the introduction.
The event will at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th Street, Oakland. James W. Sweeney will converse with Marvin on a variety of topics, local, national and international. Sweeney has said, "Marvin walked through the muck and mire of hell and came out clean as white fish and black as coal." Sweeney, a collector of black art, allowed Marvin to use a painting of Eldridge Cleaver for the book cover. He says My Friend the Devil is a metaphor for everyone to examine the demons in their lives. "Don't think Marvin is talking about Eldridge's demons, or even Marvin's because we all have demons in our midst, even Jesus had demons."
On the subject of his friend Chauncey Bailey, Marvin has this to say: It has been revealed that the brothers at Your Black Muslim Bakery were only patsies for the OPD, local politicians and Mexican drug dealers. The OPD was shaking down black drug dealers so the Mexicans could take over the black tar heroin trade. The OPD black shake down squad (similar to the Riders) then used the Muslims to fence the dope and jewelry taken from the blacks.
This case reveals the din of iniquity Oakland has become. It is almost impossible to separate the good guys from the bad. It is clear to me Chauncey was not killed because he was planning to write something negative about the Muslims. The Muslim Bakery problems were public information, including their bankruptcy proceedings. Bailey was thus not killed for investigating the Muslims but because the OPD, politicians and the Mexican drug gangs feared he knew about their scurvy activities, including the behavior of former mayor Jerry Brown, now attorney general, who is quoted as saying when Chauncey worked for the Oakland Tribune, "I'm going to stop that Nigger (Chauncey) from snooping around City Hall and the police department." Brown orchestrated Bailey's firing from the Tribune. The above information has been known by the OPD and the Chauncey Bailey Project but they have failed to disclose the Mexican drug connection. The former Chief of Police warned Post publisher Paul Cobb if he filed a complaint based on this information he should get a bulletproof vest.
Marvin X says it is time to tell the truth, so help me Allah (God). A community living on lies and denial can only go down as Murphy’s law tells us. Lies become an addiction until we are consumed by them. We cannot even face our children and family because they know we are cowards whose manhood and dignity is crushed under foot by fear. Our ancestors paid the price in full for us to stand tall and tell the truth, not scurry around like rats.
Invited guests include Angela Davis and Bobby Seale. Call 510-355-6339 for more information. Wine and light refreshments will be served. Admission with book purchase, $19.95.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Ishmael Reed on Skip Gates, Harvard Negro
How Henry Louis Gates Got Ordained as the Nation's "Leading Black Intellectual"
Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism
By ISHMAEL REED http://counterpunch .com/reed0727200 9.html
Now that Henry Louis Gates’ Jr. has gotten a tiny taste of what “the underclass” undergo each day, do you think that he will go easier on them? Lighten up on the tough love lectures? Even during his encounter with the police, he was given some slack. If a black man in an inner city neighborhood had hesitated to identify himself, or given the police some lip, the police would have called SWAT. When Oscar Grant, an apprentice butcher, talked back to a BART policeman in Oakland, he was shot!
Given the position that Gates has pronounced since the late eighties, if I had been the arresting officer and post-race spokesperson Gates accused me of racism, I would have given him a sample of his own medicine. I would have replied that “race is a social construct”--the line that he and his friends have been pushing over the last couple of decades.
After this experience, will Gates stop attributing the problems of those inner city dwellers to the behavior of “thirty five-year-old grandmothers living in the projects?” (Gates says that when he became a tough lover he was following the example of his mentor Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka as though his and Soyinka’s situations were the same. As a result of Soyinka’s criticisms of a Nigerian dictator, he was jailed and his life constantly threatened.)
Prior to the late eighties, Gates’ tough love exhortations were aimed at racism in the halls of academe, but then he signed on to downtown feminist reasoning that racism was a black male problem. Karen Durbin, who hired him to write for The Village Voice, takes credit for inventing him as a “public intellectual.” He was then assigned by Rebecca Penny Sinkler, former editor of The New York Times Book Review, to do a snuff job on black male writers. In an extraordinary review, he seemed to conclude that black women writers were good, not because of their merit, but because black male writers were bad. This was a response to an article by Mel Watkins, a former book review editor, who on his way out warned of a growing trend that was exciting the publisher’s cash registers. Books that I would describe as high Harlequin romances, melodramas in which saintly women were besieged by cruel black male oppressors, the kind of image of the brothers promoted by confederate novelists Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon.
Gates dismissed a number of black writers as misogynists, including me, whom he smeared throughout the United States and Europe, but when Bill Clinton was caught exploiting a young woman, sexually, he told the Times that he would “go to the wall for this president.” Feminists like Gloria Steinem defended the president as well, even though for years they’d been writing about women as victims of male chauvinists with power, the kind of guys who used to bankroll Ms. magazine.
Not to say that portraits of black men should be uniformly positive--I’ve certainly introduced some creeps in my own work--but most of the white screenwriters, directors and producers who film this material--and the professors and critics who promote it-- are silent about the abuses against women belonging to their own ethnic groups. Moreover, Alice Walker, Tina Turner and bell hooks have complained that in the hands of white script writers, directors and producers, the black males become more sinister straw men than they appear in the original texts.
There are big bucks to be made in promoting this culture. Two studios are currently fighting over the rights to a movie called “Push” about a black father who impregnates his illiterate Harlem daughter. A representative of one, according to the Times, said that the movie would provide both with “a gold mine of opportunity.”
As an example of the double standard by which blacks and whites are treated in American society, at about the same time that the Gate’s article on black misogyny was printed, there appeared a piece about Jewish American writers. Very few women were mentioned.
Gates was also under pressure for making himself the head black feminist in the words of feminist Michele Wallace as a result of his profiting from black feminist studies sales because, as she put it in the Voice, he had unresolved issues with his late mother, who was, according to Gates, a black nationalist. The black feminists wanted in. As a result, Gates invited them to join his Norton anthology project. The result was the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. One of the editors was the late feminist scholar Dr. Barbara Christian. She complained to me almost to the day that she died that she and the late Nellie Y. McKay, another editor, did all of the work while Gates took the credit. This seems to be Gates’ pattern. Getting others to do his work. Mother Jones magazine accused him of exploiting those writers who helped to assemble his Encarta Africana, of running an academic sweat shop and even avoiding affirmative action goals by not hiring blacks. Julian Brookes of Mother Jones wrote:
“Henry Louis Gates Jr. has never been shy about speaking up for affirmative action. Indeed, the prominent Harvard professor insists that he wouldn't be where he is today without it. Odd, then, that when it came to assembling a staff to compile an encyclopedia of black history, Gates hired a group that was almost exclusively white. Of the up to 40 full-time writers and editors who worked to produce Encarta Africana only three were black. What's more, Gates and co-editor K. Anthony Appiah rejected several requests from white staffers to hire more black writers. Mother Jones turned to Gates for an explanation of this apparent inconsistency.
“Did the staff members who expressed concern that the Africana team was too white have a point?”
Gates responded:
“It's a disgusting notion that white people can't write on black history--some of the best scholars of Africa are white. People should feel free to criticize the quality of the encyclopedia, but I will not yield one millimeter[to people who criticize the makeup of the staff]. It's wrongheaded. Would I have liked there to be more African Americans in the pool? Sure. But we did the best we could given the time limits and budget.”
While his alliance with feminists gave Gates’ career a powerful boost, it was his Op ed for the Times blaming continued anti-Semitism on African Americans that brought the public intellectual uptown. It was then that Gates was ordained as the pre-eminent African American scholar when, if one polled African-American scholars throughout the nation, Gates would not have ranked among the top twenty five. It would have to be done by secret ballot given the power that Gates’ sponsors have given him to make or break academic careers. As Quincy Troupe, editor of Black Renaissance Noire would say, Gates is among those leaders who were “given to us,” not only by the white mainstream but also by white progressives. Amy Goodman carries on about Gates and Cornel West like the old Bobby Soxers used to swoon over Sinatra. Last week Rachel Maddow called Gates “the nation’s leading black intellectual.” Who pray tell is the nation’s leading white intellectual, Rachel? How come we can only have one? Some would argue that Gates hasn’t written a first rate scholarly work since 1989.
CNN gave Gates’ accusation against blacks as anti-Semites a worldwide audience and so when I traveled to Israel for the first time in the year, 2000, Israeli intellectuals asked me why American blacks hated Jews so. In print, I challenged Gate’s libeling of blacks as a group in my book, Another Day at the Front, because at the time of his Op-ed, the Anti-Defamation League issued a report that showed the decline of anti-Semitism among black Americans. I cited this report to Gates. He said that the Times promised that there would be a follow up Op-ed about racism among American Jews. It never appeared. Barry Glassner was correct when he wrote in his “The Culture of Fear” that the whole Gates-generated black Jewish feud was hyped.
Under Tina Brown’s editorship at The New Yorker, Gates was hired to do hatchet jobs on Minister Louis Farrakhan and the late playwright August Wilson.
The piece on Wilson appeared after a debate between Robert Brustein and Wilson about Wilson’s proposal for a black nationalist theater. Gates took Brustein’s side of the argument. Shortly afterward, Brustein and Gates were awarded a million dollar grant from the Ford Foundation for the purpose of holding theatrical Talented Tenth dinner parties at Harvard at a time when regional black theater was heading toward extinction. Tina Brown, a one-time Gates sponsor, is a post-racer like Gates. Like Andrew Sullivan, a Charles Murray supporter, she gets away with the most fatuous comments as a result of Americans being enthralled by a London accent. On the Bill Maher show, she said that issues of race were passé because the country has elected a black president. This woman lives in a city from which blacks and Latinos have been ethnically cleansed as a result the policies of Mayor Giuliani, a man who gets his talking points from The Manhattan Institute. Thousands of black and Hispanic New Yorkers have been stopped and frisked without a peep from Gates and his Harvard circle of post-racers such as Orlando Patterson.
Even the Bush administration admitted to the existence of racial profiling, yet Gates says that only after his arrest did he understand the extent of racial profiling, a problem for over two hundred years. Why wasn’t “the nation’s leading black intellectual” aware of the problem? His exact words following his arrest were “What it made me realize was how vulnerable all black men are, how vulnerable are all poor people to capricious forces like a rogue policemen.” Amazing! Shouldn’t “the nation’s leading black intellectual” be aware of writer Charles Chesnutt who wrote about racial profiling in 1905!
The Village Voice recently exposed the brutality meted out to black and Hispanic prisoners at New York’s Riker’s Island and medical experiments that have damaged black children living in the city. Yet Maureen Dowd agrees with Tina Brown, her fellow New Yorker, that because the president and his attorney general are black--in terms of racism--it’s mission accomplished. Makes you understand how the German citizens of Munich could go about their business while people were being gassed a few miles away. You can almost forgive Marie Antoinette. She was a young woman in her thirties with not a single face lift operation.
What is it with this post-race Harvard elite? I got to see Dick Gregory and Mort Sahl perform in San Francisco the other night, the last of the great sixties comedians. During his routine, Gregory said that he’s sending his grand kids to black historical colleges because even though he lives near Harvard and can afford to send them there, he wouldn’t “send his dog to Harvard.” Maybe he is on to something.
When Queer Power became the vogue, Gates latched on to that movement, too. In an introduction to an anthology of Gay writings, Gates argued that Gays face more discrimination than blacks, which is disputed even by Charles Blow, Times statistician, who like Harvard’s Patterson and Gates, makes tough love to blacks exclusively. Recently, he reported that the typical target of a hate crime is black, but failed to identify the typical perpetrator of a hate crime as a young white male.
Moreover, what’s the percentage of Gays on death row? The percentage of blacks? Which group is more likely to be redlined by banks, a practice that has cost blacks billions of dollars in equity? Would Cambridge police have given two white Gays the problems that they gave Gates? Why no discussion of charges of Gay racism made by Marlon Riggs, Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde? How many unarmed white Gays have been murdered by the police? How many blacks? Undoubtedly, there are pockets of homophobia among blacks but not as much as that among other ethnic communities that I could cite. The best thing for blacks would be for Gays to get married and blacks should help in this effort, otherwise all of the oxygen on the left will continue to be soaked up by this issue.
For white Gays and Lesbians to compare their struggle to that of the Civil Rights movement is like Gates comparing his situation with that of Wole Soyinka’s. Moreover, Barbara Smith says that when she tried to join the Gay Millennial March on Washington, the leaders told her to get lost. They said they were intent upon convincing white Heterosexual America that “We’re just like you.”
Will the pre-late-80s Gates be resurrected as a result of what MSNBC and CNN commentator Touré calls Gates’ wake up call? (This is the same Toure, a brilliant fiction writer, who just about wrote a post-race manifesto for The New York Times Book Review, during which he dismissed an older generation of black activists as a bunch of “Jesses”.)
Will Gates let up on what Kofi Natambu the young editor of the Panopticon Review calls his “opportunism.” Will he re-think remarks like the one he made after the election of his friend, the tough love president Barack Obama? Gates said that he doubted that the election would end black substance abuse and unmarried motherhood?
Is it possible that things are more complicated than tough love sound bites which are designed to solicit more patronage? Will he reconsider the post-race neocon line of his blog, TheRoot.com, bankrolled by The Washington Post? Will he invite writers Carl Dix and Askia Toure, who represent other African American constituencies, as much as he prints the views of far right Manhattan Institute spokesperson and racial profiling denier, John McWhorter.
Will he continue to advertise shoddy blame-the-victim and black pathology sideshows like CNN’s “Black In America,” and “The Wire?” (Predictably CNN’s Anderson Cooper turned Gates’ controversy into a carnival act. The story was followed by one about Michael Jackson’s doctors. CNN is making so much money and raising its ratings so rapidly from black pathology stories that it’s beginning to give Black Entertainment Network a run for its money, so to speak.)
Predictably, the segregated media--the spare all white jury dominating the conversation about race as usual--gave the Cambridge cop the benefit of the doubt and the police unions backed him up. The police unions always back up their fellow officers even when they shoot unarmed black suspects in the back or, in the case of Papa Charlie James, an elderly San Francisco black man, while he was laying in bed. They back each other up and “testilie” all of the time.
Will Gates listen to his critics from whom he has been protected by powerful moneyed forces, which have given him the ability to make or break academic careers, preside over the decision-making of patronage and grant-awarding institutions. Houston A. Baker Jr.’s Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned The Ideals Of The Civil Rights Era offers mild criticisms of Gates, West and other black public intellectuals, who, according to him, are “embraced by virtue of their race transcendent ideology.” His book went from the warehouse to the remainder shelves. The Village Voice promised two installments of courageous muckraking pieces about Gates written by novelist, playwright and poet Thulani Davis; part two never appeared. Letters challenging Gates by one of Gates’ main critics at Harvard, Dr. Martin Kilson, have been censored. Kilson refers to Gates as “the master of the intellectual dodge.” And even when Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell at The Nation’s blog defied the 24-hour news cycle that has depicted Gates, a black nationalist critic, as an overnight black nationalist- - she calls him “apolitical”-- she had to pull her punches. As an intellectual, she has more depth than all of the white mainstream and white progressive media’s selected “leaders of black intellection,” among whom are post-modernist preachers who can spew rhetoric faster than the speed of light.
It remains to be seen whether Gates, who calls himself an intellectual entrepreneur, will now use his “wake up call” to lead a movement that will challenge racial disparities in the criminal justice system. A system that is rotten to the core, where whites commit the overwhelming majority of the crimes, while blacks and Hispanics do the time. A prison system where torture and rape are regular occurrences and where in some states the conditions are worse than at Gitmo. California prisons hospitals are so bad that they have been declared unconstitutional and a form of torture, over the objections of Attorney General Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who leased his face to the rich and was on television the other day talking about how rough they have it. A man who is channeling his hero the late Kurt Waldheim’s attitudes toward the poor and disabled.
Gates can help lead the fight so that there will be mutual respect between law enforcement and minorities instead of their calling us niggers all the time and being Marvin Gaye’s “trigger happy” policemen. Not all of them but quite a few. Or Gates can coast along. Continue to maintain that black personal behavior, like not turning off the TV at night, is at the root of the barriers facing millions of black Americans. Will return to the intellectual rigor espoused by his hero W.E.B Dubois or will he continue to act as a sort of black intellectual Charles Van Doren? An entertainer. (An insider at PBS told me that the network is demanding that Gates back up his claims about the ancestry of celebrities with more solid proofs.)
Gates has discussed doing a documentary about racial profiling. I invite him to cover a meeting residents of my Oakland ghetto neighborhood have with the police each month. (Most of our problems incidentally are caused by the off-springs of two family households. Suburban gun dealers who arm gang leaders. The gang leader on our block isn’t black! An absentee landlord who owns a house where crack operations take place.) He can bring Bill Cosby with him. He’ll find that the problems of inner citizens are more complex than “thirty five year-old grandmothers living in the projects” and rappers not pulling up their pants and that racism remains in the words of the great novelist John A. Williams, “an inexorable force.”
Finally, in his 2002 Jefferson lecture, delivered at the Library of Congress, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during remarks about the 18th-Century poet Phillis Wheatley in which he excoriated the attitudes of her critics in the Black Arts movement, one more time, ended his lecture with: “We can finally say: Welcome home, Phillis; welcome home.”
If Gate’s ceases his role as just another tough lover and an “intellectual entrepreneur,” and takes a role in ending racial traffic and retail profiling, and police home invasions, issues that have lingered since even more Chesnutt’s time, we can say, “Welcome home, Skip; welcome home.”
Ishmael Reed is the publisher of Konch. His new book, "Mixing It Up, Taking On The Media Bullies" was published by De Capo.
Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism
By ISHMAEL REED http://counterpunch .com/reed0727200 9.html
Now that Henry Louis Gates’ Jr. has gotten a tiny taste of what “the underclass” undergo each day, do you think that he will go easier on them? Lighten up on the tough love lectures? Even during his encounter with the police, he was given some slack. If a black man in an inner city neighborhood had hesitated to identify himself, or given the police some lip, the police would have called SWAT. When Oscar Grant, an apprentice butcher, talked back to a BART policeman in Oakland, he was shot!
Given the position that Gates has pronounced since the late eighties, if I had been the arresting officer and post-race spokesperson Gates accused me of racism, I would have given him a sample of his own medicine. I would have replied that “race is a social construct”--the line that he and his friends have been pushing over the last couple of decades.
After this experience, will Gates stop attributing the problems of those inner city dwellers to the behavior of “thirty five-year-old grandmothers living in the projects?” (Gates says that when he became a tough lover he was following the example of his mentor Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka as though his and Soyinka’s situations were the same. As a result of Soyinka’s criticisms of a Nigerian dictator, he was jailed and his life constantly threatened.)
Prior to the late eighties, Gates’ tough love exhortations were aimed at racism in the halls of academe, but then he signed on to downtown feminist reasoning that racism was a black male problem. Karen Durbin, who hired him to write for The Village Voice, takes credit for inventing him as a “public intellectual.” He was then assigned by Rebecca Penny Sinkler, former editor of The New York Times Book Review, to do a snuff job on black male writers. In an extraordinary review, he seemed to conclude that black women writers were good, not because of their merit, but because black male writers were bad. This was a response to an article by Mel Watkins, a former book review editor, who on his way out warned of a growing trend that was exciting the publisher’s cash registers. Books that I would describe as high Harlequin romances, melodramas in which saintly women were besieged by cruel black male oppressors, the kind of image of the brothers promoted by confederate novelists Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon.
Gates dismissed a number of black writers as misogynists, including me, whom he smeared throughout the United States and Europe, but when Bill Clinton was caught exploiting a young woman, sexually, he told the Times that he would “go to the wall for this president.” Feminists like Gloria Steinem defended the president as well, even though for years they’d been writing about women as victims of male chauvinists with power, the kind of guys who used to bankroll Ms. magazine.
Not to say that portraits of black men should be uniformly positive--I’ve certainly introduced some creeps in my own work--but most of the white screenwriters, directors and producers who film this material--and the professors and critics who promote it-- are silent about the abuses against women belonging to their own ethnic groups. Moreover, Alice Walker, Tina Turner and bell hooks have complained that in the hands of white script writers, directors and producers, the black males become more sinister straw men than they appear in the original texts.
There are big bucks to be made in promoting this culture. Two studios are currently fighting over the rights to a movie called “Push” about a black father who impregnates his illiterate Harlem daughter. A representative of one, according to the Times, said that the movie would provide both with “a gold mine of opportunity.”
As an example of the double standard by which blacks and whites are treated in American society, at about the same time that the Gate’s article on black misogyny was printed, there appeared a piece about Jewish American writers. Very few women were mentioned.
Gates was also under pressure for making himself the head black feminist in the words of feminist Michele Wallace as a result of his profiting from black feminist studies sales because, as she put it in the Voice, he had unresolved issues with his late mother, who was, according to Gates, a black nationalist. The black feminists wanted in. As a result, Gates invited them to join his Norton anthology project. The result was the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. One of the editors was the late feminist scholar Dr. Barbara Christian. She complained to me almost to the day that she died that she and the late Nellie Y. McKay, another editor, did all of the work while Gates took the credit. This seems to be Gates’ pattern. Getting others to do his work. Mother Jones magazine accused him of exploiting those writers who helped to assemble his Encarta Africana, of running an academic sweat shop and even avoiding affirmative action goals by not hiring blacks. Julian Brookes of Mother Jones wrote:
“Henry Louis Gates Jr. has never been shy about speaking up for affirmative action. Indeed, the prominent Harvard professor insists that he wouldn't be where he is today without it. Odd, then, that when it came to assembling a staff to compile an encyclopedia of black history, Gates hired a group that was almost exclusively white. Of the up to 40 full-time writers and editors who worked to produce Encarta Africana only three were black. What's more, Gates and co-editor K. Anthony Appiah rejected several requests from white staffers to hire more black writers. Mother Jones turned to Gates for an explanation of this apparent inconsistency.
“Did the staff members who expressed concern that the Africana team was too white have a point?”
Gates responded:
“It's a disgusting notion that white people can't write on black history--some of the best scholars of Africa are white. People should feel free to criticize the quality of the encyclopedia, but I will not yield one millimeter[to people who criticize the makeup of the staff]. It's wrongheaded. Would I have liked there to be more African Americans in the pool? Sure. But we did the best we could given the time limits and budget.”
While his alliance with feminists gave Gates’ career a powerful boost, it was his Op ed for the Times blaming continued anti-Semitism on African Americans that brought the public intellectual uptown. It was then that Gates was ordained as the pre-eminent African American scholar when, if one polled African-American scholars throughout the nation, Gates would not have ranked among the top twenty five. It would have to be done by secret ballot given the power that Gates’ sponsors have given him to make or break academic careers. As Quincy Troupe, editor of Black Renaissance Noire would say, Gates is among those leaders who were “given to us,” not only by the white mainstream but also by white progressives. Amy Goodman carries on about Gates and Cornel West like the old Bobby Soxers used to swoon over Sinatra. Last week Rachel Maddow called Gates “the nation’s leading black intellectual.” Who pray tell is the nation’s leading white intellectual, Rachel? How come we can only have one? Some would argue that Gates hasn’t written a first rate scholarly work since 1989.
CNN gave Gates’ accusation against blacks as anti-Semites a worldwide audience and so when I traveled to Israel for the first time in the year, 2000, Israeli intellectuals asked me why American blacks hated Jews so. In print, I challenged Gate’s libeling of blacks as a group in my book, Another Day at the Front, because at the time of his Op-ed, the Anti-Defamation League issued a report that showed the decline of anti-Semitism among black Americans. I cited this report to Gates. He said that the Times promised that there would be a follow up Op-ed about racism among American Jews. It never appeared. Barry Glassner was correct when he wrote in his “The Culture of Fear” that the whole Gates-generated black Jewish feud was hyped.
Under Tina Brown’s editorship at The New Yorker, Gates was hired to do hatchet jobs on Minister Louis Farrakhan and the late playwright August Wilson.
The piece on Wilson appeared after a debate between Robert Brustein and Wilson about Wilson’s proposal for a black nationalist theater. Gates took Brustein’s side of the argument. Shortly afterward, Brustein and Gates were awarded a million dollar grant from the Ford Foundation for the purpose of holding theatrical Talented Tenth dinner parties at Harvard at a time when regional black theater was heading toward extinction. Tina Brown, a one-time Gates sponsor, is a post-racer like Gates. Like Andrew Sullivan, a Charles Murray supporter, she gets away with the most fatuous comments as a result of Americans being enthralled by a London accent. On the Bill Maher show, she said that issues of race were passé because the country has elected a black president. This woman lives in a city from which blacks and Latinos have been ethnically cleansed as a result the policies of Mayor Giuliani, a man who gets his talking points from The Manhattan Institute. Thousands of black and Hispanic New Yorkers have been stopped and frisked without a peep from Gates and his Harvard circle of post-racers such as Orlando Patterson.
Even the Bush administration admitted to the existence of racial profiling, yet Gates says that only after his arrest did he understand the extent of racial profiling, a problem for over two hundred years. Why wasn’t “the nation’s leading black intellectual” aware of the problem? His exact words following his arrest were “What it made me realize was how vulnerable all black men are, how vulnerable are all poor people to capricious forces like a rogue policemen.” Amazing! Shouldn’t “the nation’s leading black intellectual” be aware of writer Charles Chesnutt who wrote about racial profiling in 1905!
The Village Voice recently exposed the brutality meted out to black and Hispanic prisoners at New York’s Riker’s Island and medical experiments that have damaged black children living in the city. Yet Maureen Dowd agrees with Tina Brown, her fellow New Yorker, that because the president and his attorney general are black--in terms of racism--it’s mission accomplished. Makes you understand how the German citizens of Munich could go about their business while people were being gassed a few miles away. You can almost forgive Marie Antoinette. She was a young woman in her thirties with not a single face lift operation.
What is it with this post-race Harvard elite? I got to see Dick Gregory and Mort Sahl perform in San Francisco the other night, the last of the great sixties comedians. During his routine, Gregory said that he’s sending his grand kids to black historical colleges because even though he lives near Harvard and can afford to send them there, he wouldn’t “send his dog to Harvard.” Maybe he is on to something.
When Queer Power became the vogue, Gates latched on to that movement, too. In an introduction to an anthology of Gay writings, Gates argued that Gays face more discrimination than blacks, which is disputed even by Charles Blow, Times statistician, who like Harvard’s Patterson and Gates, makes tough love to blacks exclusively. Recently, he reported that the typical target of a hate crime is black, but failed to identify the typical perpetrator of a hate crime as a young white male.
Moreover, what’s the percentage of Gays on death row? The percentage of blacks? Which group is more likely to be redlined by banks, a practice that has cost blacks billions of dollars in equity? Would Cambridge police have given two white Gays the problems that they gave Gates? Why no discussion of charges of Gay racism made by Marlon Riggs, Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde? How many unarmed white Gays have been murdered by the police? How many blacks? Undoubtedly, there are pockets of homophobia among blacks but not as much as that among other ethnic communities that I could cite. The best thing for blacks would be for Gays to get married and blacks should help in this effort, otherwise all of the oxygen on the left will continue to be soaked up by this issue.
For white Gays and Lesbians to compare their struggle to that of the Civil Rights movement is like Gates comparing his situation with that of Wole Soyinka’s. Moreover, Barbara Smith says that when she tried to join the Gay Millennial March on Washington, the leaders told her to get lost. They said they were intent upon convincing white Heterosexual America that “We’re just like you.”
Will the pre-late-80s Gates be resurrected as a result of what MSNBC and CNN commentator Touré calls Gates’ wake up call? (This is the same Toure, a brilliant fiction writer, who just about wrote a post-race manifesto for The New York Times Book Review, during which he dismissed an older generation of black activists as a bunch of “Jesses”.)
Will Gates let up on what Kofi Natambu the young editor of the Panopticon Review calls his “opportunism.” Will he re-think remarks like the one he made after the election of his friend, the tough love president Barack Obama? Gates said that he doubted that the election would end black substance abuse and unmarried motherhood?
Is it possible that things are more complicated than tough love sound bites which are designed to solicit more patronage? Will he reconsider the post-race neocon line of his blog, TheRoot.com, bankrolled by The Washington Post? Will he invite writers Carl Dix and Askia Toure, who represent other African American constituencies, as much as he prints the views of far right Manhattan Institute spokesperson and racial profiling denier, John McWhorter.
Will he continue to advertise shoddy blame-the-victim and black pathology sideshows like CNN’s “Black In America,” and “The Wire?” (Predictably CNN’s Anderson Cooper turned Gates’ controversy into a carnival act. The story was followed by one about Michael Jackson’s doctors. CNN is making so much money and raising its ratings so rapidly from black pathology stories that it’s beginning to give Black Entertainment Network a run for its money, so to speak.)
Predictably, the segregated media--the spare all white jury dominating the conversation about race as usual--gave the Cambridge cop the benefit of the doubt and the police unions backed him up. The police unions always back up their fellow officers even when they shoot unarmed black suspects in the back or, in the case of Papa Charlie James, an elderly San Francisco black man, while he was laying in bed. They back each other up and “testilie” all of the time.
Will Gates listen to his critics from whom he has been protected by powerful moneyed forces, which have given him the ability to make or break academic careers, preside over the decision-making of patronage and grant-awarding institutions. Houston A. Baker Jr.’s Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned The Ideals Of The Civil Rights Era offers mild criticisms of Gates, West and other black public intellectuals, who, according to him, are “embraced by virtue of their race transcendent ideology.” His book went from the warehouse to the remainder shelves. The Village Voice promised two installments of courageous muckraking pieces about Gates written by novelist, playwright and poet Thulani Davis; part two never appeared. Letters challenging Gates by one of Gates’ main critics at Harvard, Dr. Martin Kilson, have been censored. Kilson refers to Gates as “the master of the intellectual dodge.” And even when Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell at The Nation’s blog defied the 24-hour news cycle that has depicted Gates, a black nationalist critic, as an overnight black nationalist- - she calls him “apolitical”-- she had to pull her punches. As an intellectual, she has more depth than all of the white mainstream and white progressive media’s selected “leaders of black intellection,” among whom are post-modernist preachers who can spew rhetoric faster than the speed of light.
It remains to be seen whether Gates, who calls himself an intellectual entrepreneur, will now use his “wake up call” to lead a movement that will challenge racial disparities in the criminal justice system. A system that is rotten to the core, where whites commit the overwhelming majority of the crimes, while blacks and Hispanics do the time. A prison system where torture and rape are regular occurrences and where in some states the conditions are worse than at Gitmo. California prisons hospitals are so bad that they have been declared unconstitutional and a form of torture, over the objections of Attorney General Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who leased his face to the rich and was on television the other day talking about how rough they have it. A man who is channeling his hero the late Kurt Waldheim’s attitudes toward the poor and disabled.
Gates can help lead the fight so that there will be mutual respect between law enforcement and minorities instead of their calling us niggers all the time and being Marvin Gaye’s “trigger happy” policemen. Not all of them but quite a few. Or Gates can coast along. Continue to maintain that black personal behavior, like not turning off the TV at night, is at the root of the barriers facing millions of black Americans. Will return to the intellectual rigor espoused by his hero W.E.B Dubois or will he continue to act as a sort of black intellectual Charles Van Doren? An entertainer. (An insider at PBS told me that the network is demanding that Gates back up his claims about the ancestry of celebrities with more solid proofs.)
Gates has discussed doing a documentary about racial profiling. I invite him to cover a meeting residents of my Oakland ghetto neighborhood have with the police each month. (Most of our problems incidentally are caused by the off-springs of two family households. Suburban gun dealers who arm gang leaders. The gang leader on our block isn’t black! An absentee landlord who owns a house where crack operations take place.) He can bring Bill Cosby with him. He’ll find that the problems of inner citizens are more complex than “thirty five year-old grandmothers living in the projects” and rappers not pulling up their pants and that racism remains in the words of the great novelist John A. Williams, “an inexorable force.”
Finally, in his 2002 Jefferson lecture, delivered at the Library of Congress, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during remarks about the 18th-Century poet Phillis Wheatley in which he excoriated the attitudes of her critics in the Black Arts movement, one more time, ended his lecture with: “We can finally say: Welcome home, Phillis; welcome home.”
If Gate’s ceases his role as just another tough lover and an “intellectual entrepreneur,” and takes a role in ending racial traffic and retail profiling, and police home invasions, issues that have lingered since even more Chesnutt’s time, we can say, “Welcome home, Skip; welcome home.”
Ishmael Reed is the publisher of Konch. His new book, "Mixing It Up, Taking On The Media Bullies" was published by De Capo.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Comments on Mythology of Pussy
I admit the title turned me off-no man would ever lay his hands on me with that kind of language,but you have plenty to say and you say it like it is even if it makes you feel uncomfortable.
--C. Mixon
--Don't send me anything vulgar like this. My mother didn't talk like this.
--D. Jackmon
--My pussy ain't no myth!
--Anon
--Take me off your mailing list.
--Dr. E. Allen, Umass
I want my son to read this with a man, not with me.
-Rashida M
I wish I'd read this when I was 18. It would have saved me a lot of trouble with women. I would have recognized who they are and who I am as a spiritual being.
--Reginald J.
--Marvin, you and I should have read this when we were 17. Would have saved women a lot of hell.
--Lumukanda
Do you have a brown bag? I can't take this back to work, might get fired.
--Anon
I put it in the trunk of my car--can't take it in the house, my wife will kill me.
--Conway J
--C. Mixon
--Don't send me anything vulgar like this. My mother didn't talk like this.
--D. Jackmon
--My pussy ain't no myth!
--Anon
--Take me off your mailing list.
--Dr. E. Allen, Umass
I want my son to read this with a man, not with me.
-Rashida M
I wish I'd read this when I was 18. It would have saved me a lot of trouble with women. I would have recognized who they are and who I am as a spiritual being.
--Reginald J.
--Marvin, you and I should have read this when we were 17. Would have saved women a lot of hell.
--Lumukanda
Do you have a brown bag? I can't take this back to work, might get fired.
--Anon
I put it in the trunk of my car--can't take it in the house, my wife will kill me.
--Conway J
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Chauncey Bailey's Last Story
Chauncey Bailey's Last Story
Chauncey Bailey's last story did not have his byline as he was known to do with many stories. The story was more important than his name, after all, he said to me, "Do you know how many stories I write in a week?" But his last story was a review of my book How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy. It was a good review, not detailed as the Reginald James review that appeared in the Post, but the short story Chauncey was known for when he came into the editorship of the Oakland Post.
When it did not appear in the Post the week scheduled, I did not call to ask why. But a few days later Chauncey came down to my outdoor classroom at !4th and Broadway to show me a copy of his story and informed me it would be in the current week's paper. He wanted to let me know he wasn't "jiving." I said OK, but could I have a copy of it? He said no, then in what seemed like a flash, he was gone around the corner, like Clark Kent. He disappeared into eternity because I never saw him alive again. He fell victim to an assassin's bullet early the next morning, a few blocks down 14th at Alice.
I appreciated Chauncey because he was the "writer's writer," who wrote daily as I do--dedicated to his craft. When he interviewed me for the story, he had no tape recorder, nor did he take extensive notes. After all, he knew his subject, having written about me several times throughout his career while at the Oakland Tribune and the California Voice.
As news director at Soulbeat television, he appointed me as commentator, although it was short-lived because Chuck Johnson removed me for giving a radical opinion of the first Gulf war. The real reason was because Chauncey did not tell Chuck of his appointment. Chauncey would do silly things like that. There was a writer's conference at the African American Library/Museum in which I participated, but I left the conference when only a few people showed up. I went to the Black Cowboy event at Defermery Park. When Chauncey saw me there, he asked why wasn't I at the writer's conference. Off the record, I told him because all the nigguhs are at Defermery--look around. I thought my remarks were off the record, but Chauncey reported them on the Soulbeat evening news, totally upsetting the conference planners, who demanded I explain my remarks. I couldn't get mad at Chauncey as I am known for doing similar things when people tell me information that
should be kept off the record.
But again, Chauncey was the writer's writer, often without tape recorder or even without taking notes. His brain was his tape recorder and note book. Yes, he was that good.
Marvin X
25 July 2009
On Saturday, August 1, 3-5pm, Marvin X will pay tribute to his friend, Chauncey Bailey, at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th Street at Franklin. The even is a book signing for Marvin's latest book Eldridge Cleaver, My friend the devil, a memoir. He will also have a conversation with former Berkeley city councilman, James W. Sweeney. Marvin X will read from his works, accompanied by percussionist Tacuma King, singer Augusta Collings and choreographer/dancer Raynetta Rayzetta. Light refreshments. The event is sponsored by the Oakland Post and the Black Dialogue Brothers. Call 510-355-6339 for more information.
Black Arts West/Black Liberation Writers Photo Shoot
In tribute to slain journalist Chauncey Bailey and in celebration of Marvin X's latest book Eldridge Cleaver, My friend the devil, a memoir, Bay Area writers will have a photo shoot at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th Street @ Franklin, Tuesday, July 28, 11am. Invited writers include: Dr. Julia Hare, Dr. Nathan Hare, Ishmael Reed, Cecil Brown, Peter Labrie, Alice Walker, Jerri Lange, Ruth Beckford, Barbara Lee, Ron V. Dellums, Opal Palmer Adisa, Ayodele Nzingha, Ptah Allah El, Mickey Moore, Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Emory Douglas,
Oba T'Shaka, Dr. Wade Nobles, Rev. J. Alfred Smith, David Hilliard and Fredrika Newton, Fritz Pointer, Charlie Walker, Adam David Miller, Avotcja, Wanda Sabir, Fahizah Alim, Dorothy Tsuruta, Margaret Wilkerson, Ula Taylor, Lige Dailey,
Chauncey Bailey: The Cross and the Lynching Tree
From the 12th floor office of the Oakland Post newspaper at 14th and Franklin, one can look down the block to a tree at 14th and Alice. Chauncey Bailey was lynched near that tree, although it was not in the tradition of a white lynching, but in the neo-America, his lynchers were black. And although the suspect is a young black man, there are witnesses who say the killer was an older person. Does it really matter, except for the fact that we are now doing the work of the KKK. We wear the hoods these days, and the fad is to wear gear with “stupid” designs, including skull and bones, thus signaling to the world our deathly intentions. We have become death angels, as sinister as the suicide bombers in the Middle East, although we have no purpose, no mission, except to kill another black, for of the nearly 130 killed in Oakland last year, not one white man was killed by a black. And for the most part, this is true throughout America. Our youth exhibit an
animal consciousness as opposed to their spiritual consciousness. No, they do not use the mind God gave them, as my mother told me to do, but they seem motivated by a demonic spirit of hatred of self and kind, causing them to perpetuate the internal violence Dr. Franz Fanon wrote about in Wretched of the Earth.
Mao Zedong told us some deaths are higher than Mount Tai, some deaths lighter than a feather. At least Chauncey gave his life for the cause of truth, no matter that we did not always agree with his abrasive attitude, who can deny the man was dedicated to seeking the truth? We all have defects of character, but are we fulfilling our life’s mission as Chauncey was doing? Are we trying to inform the blind, deaf and dumb, to educate the ignorant? Many of us say let the blind stay blind, and that the youth are a lost cause, yet we saw in the film the Great Debaters, youth will do the right things when guided right by sincere and dedicated adults. The only excuse for youth behavior is adult behavior!
The tree at 14th and Alice stands still, a monument to a fallen soldier. From the window, our eyes zoom down to the tree, eyes full of tears and heart full of sorrow. Bill Moyers asked Rev. James Cone the meaning of the cross and the lynching tree. He said they are one and the same, for on the cross Jesus was crucified and on the tree the black man was done the same. And just as Jesus transcended the cross, the black man must rise above his self crucifixion and ascend to spiritual consciousness. The crucifixion ends when the resurrection and ascension begins. We must rise up from the grave of ignorance, from the lynching tree of hatred, jealousy and envy. We must heal from the wretchedness that allows us to kill another brother at the drop of a hat, yet never approach the real enemy. And perhaps the real enemy doesn’t exist except inside of our selves. White supremacy/lunacy has no power over us except when we allow it. As Rev. Cone explained, the
lynching tree has no power over us because in our crucifixion comes resurrection and ascension.
Paul Cobb observed how white women can jog past West Oakland’s Campbell Village housing projects at night without fear. No one dare harm them because they are white and thus sacred. To speak harshly to them is a terrorist threat, to harm them is a hate crime that qualifies for the death penalty. But there is no crime for speaking harshly to another black, and killing another black does not qualify as a hate crime, although most surely it is the absolute essence of hate, self hate.
And so we dig our own grave these days. We put the noose around our necks, as some rappers have demonstrated. We killed our brother Chauncey because he was just another nigguh, therefore worthless, in the imagination of the killers, whoever they are. And then perhaps they recognized his importance and were instructed to eliminate him, for writers and journalists are killed around the world, simply for their dedication to telling the truth.
But we see after the thousands and thousands of words written about him, we see death has no sting, it has no victory.
On a horrible day last August, the tree at 14th and Alice gave forth a strange fruit that shall rise from the earth and give blessings from high heaven. Because Chauncey lived, we shall be a better people, a people who shall one day fulfill our radical tradition and destiny to free ourselves and the world. The attempt was made with the Oakland branch of the Pullman Porters, and it was made with the Black Panthers. Chauncey extended that tradition into the present era, for he gave his life in the cause of truth, freedom, justice and equality. Yes, he transcended the lynching tree. His death was not lighter than a feather but higher than Mount Tai.
--Dr. M
1/16/08
Chauncey Bailey's last story did not have his byline as he was known to do with many stories. The story was more important than his name, after all, he said to me, "Do you know how many stories I write in a week?" But his last story was a review of my book How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy. It was a good review, not detailed as the Reginald James review that appeared in the Post, but the short story Chauncey was known for when he came into the editorship of the Oakland Post.
When it did not appear in the Post the week scheduled, I did not call to ask why. But a few days later Chauncey came down to my outdoor classroom at !4th and Broadway to show me a copy of his story and informed me it would be in the current week's paper. He wanted to let me know he wasn't "jiving." I said OK, but could I have a copy of it? He said no, then in what seemed like a flash, he was gone around the corner, like Clark Kent. He disappeared into eternity because I never saw him alive again. He fell victim to an assassin's bullet early the next morning, a few blocks down 14th at Alice.
I appreciated Chauncey because he was the "writer's writer," who wrote daily as I do--dedicated to his craft. When he interviewed me for the story, he had no tape recorder, nor did he take extensive notes. After all, he knew his subject, having written about me several times throughout his career while at the Oakland Tribune and the California Voice.
As news director at Soulbeat television, he appointed me as commentator, although it was short-lived because Chuck Johnson removed me for giving a radical opinion of the first Gulf war. The real reason was because Chauncey did not tell Chuck of his appointment. Chauncey would do silly things like that. There was a writer's conference at the African American Library/Museum in which I participated, but I left the conference when only a few people showed up. I went to the Black Cowboy event at Defermery Park. When Chauncey saw me there, he asked why wasn't I at the writer's conference. Off the record, I told him because all the nigguhs are at Defermery--look around. I thought my remarks were off the record, but Chauncey reported them on the Soulbeat evening news, totally upsetting the conference planners, who demanded I explain my remarks. I couldn't get mad at Chauncey as I am known for doing similar things when people tell me information that
should be kept off the record.
But again, Chauncey was the writer's writer, often without tape recorder or even without taking notes. His brain was his tape recorder and note book. Yes, he was that good.
Marvin X
25 July 2009
On Saturday, August 1, 3-5pm, Marvin X will pay tribute to his friend, Chauncey Bailey, at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th Street at Franklin. The even is a book signing for Marvin's latest book Eldridge Cleaver, My friend the devil, a memoir. He will also have a conversation with former Berkeley city councilman, James W. Sweeney. Marvin X will read from his works, accompanied by percussionist Tacuma King, singer Augusta Collings and choreographer/dancer Raynetta Rayzetta. Light refreshments. The event is sponsored by the Oakland Post and the Black Dialogue Brothers. Call 510-355-6339 for more information.
Black Arts West/Black Liberation Writers Photo Shoot
In tribute to slain journalist Chauncey Bailey and in celebration of Marvin X's latest book Eldridge Cleaver, My friend the devil, a memoir, Bay Area writers will have a photo shoot at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th Street @ Franklin, Tuesday, July 28, 11am. Invited writers include: Dr. Julia Hare, Dr. Nathan Hare, Ishmael Reed, Cecil Brown, Peter Labrie, Alice Walker, Jerri Lange, Ruth Beckford, Barbara Lee, Ron V. Dellums, Opal Palmer Adisa, Ayodele Nzingha, Ptah Allah El, Mickey Moore, Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Emory Douglas,
Oba T'Shaka, Dr. Wade Nobles, Rev. J. Alfred Smith, David Hilliard and Fredrika Newton, Fritz Pointer, Charlie Walker, Adam David Miller, Avotcja, Wanda Sabir, Fahizah Alim, Dorothy Tsuruta, Margaret Wilkerson, Ula Taylor, Lige Dailey,
Chauncey Bailey: The Cross and the Lynching Tree
From the 12th floor office of the Oakland Post newspaper at 14th and Franklin, one can look down the block to a tree at 14th and Alice. Chauncey Bailey was lynched near that tree, although it was not in the tradition of a white lynching, but in the neo-America, his lynchers were black. And although the suspect is a young black man, there are witnesses who say the killer was an older person. Does it really matter, except for the fact that we are now doing the work of the KKK. We wear the hoods these days, and the fad is to wear gear with “stupid” designs, including skull and bones, thus signaling to the world our deathly intentions. We have become death angels, as sinister as the suicide bombers in the Middle East, although we have no purpose, no mission, except to kill another black, for of the nearly 130 killed in Oakland last year, not one white man was killed by a black. And for the most part, this is true throughout America. Our youth exhibit an
animal consciousness as opposed to their spiritual consciousness. No, they do not use the mind God gave them, as my mother told me to do, but they seem motivated by a demonic spirit of hatred of self and kind, causing them to perpetuate the internal violence Dr. Franz Fanon wrote about in Wretched of the Earth.
Mao Zedong told us some deaths are higher than Mount Tai, some deaths lighter than a feather. At least Chauncey gave his life for the cause of truth, no matter that we did not always agree with his abrasive attitude, who can deny the man was dedicated to seeking the truth? We all have defects of character, but are we fulfilling our life’s mission as Chauncey was doing? Are we trying to inform the blind, deaf and dumb, to educate the ignorant? Many of us say let the blind stay blind, and that the youth are a lost cause, yet we saw in the film the Great Debaters, youth will do the right things when guided right by sincere and dedicated adults. The only excuse for youth behavior is adult behavior!
The tree at 14th and Alice stands still, a monument to a fallen soldier. From the window, our eyes zoom down to the tree, eyes full of tears and heart full of sorrow. Bill Moyers asked Rev. James Cone the meaning of the cross and the lynching tree. He said they are one and the same, for on the cross Jesus was crucified and on the tree the black man was done the same. And just as Jesus transcended the cross, the black man must rise above his self crucifixion and ascend to spiritual consciousness. The crucifixion ends when the resurrection and ascension begins. We must rise up from the grave of ignorance, from the lynching tree of hatred, jealousy and envy. We must heal from the wretchedness that allows us to kill another brother at the drop of a hat, yet never approach the real enemy. And perhaps the real enemy doesn’t exist except inside of our selves. White supremacy/lunacy has no power over us except when we allow it. As Rev. Cone explained, the
lynching tree has no power over us because in our crucifixion comes resurrection and ascension.
Paul Cobb observed how white women can jog past West Oakland’s Campbell Village housing projects at night without fear. No one dare harm them because they are white and thus sacred. To speak harshly to them is a terrorist threat, to harm them is a hate crime that qualifies for the death penalty. But there is no crime for speaking harshly to another black, and killing another black does not qualify as a hate crime, although most surely it is the absolute essence of hate, self hate.
And so we dig our own grave these days. We put the noose around our necks, as some rappers have demonstrated. We killed our brother Chauncey because he was just another nigguh, therefore worthless, in the imagination of the killers, whoever they are. And then perhaps they recognized his importance and were instructed to eliminate him, for writers and journalists are killed around the world, simply for their dedication to telling the truth.
But we see after the thousands and thousands of words written about him, we see death has no sting, it has no victory.
On a horrible day last August, the tree at 14th and Alice gave forth a strange fruit that shall rise from the earth and give blessings from high heaven. Because Chauncey lived, we shall be a better people, a people who shall one day fulfill our radical tradition and destiny to free ourselves and the world. The attempt was made with the Oakland branch of the Pullman Porters, and it was made with the Black Panthers. Chauncey extended that tradition into the present era, for he gave his life in the cause of truth, freedom, justice and equality. Yes, he transcended the lynching tree. His death was not lighter than a feather but higher than Mount Tai.
--Dr. M
1/16/08
Monday, July 20, 2009
Mythology of Pussy Dance
Choreographer Raynetta Rayzetta
Marvin X's favorite choreographer, Raynetta Rayzetta, has agreed to create a dance to accompany the reading of Mythology of Pussy.
She was ecstatic to learn Marvin X has written a work on manhood and womanhood training. But without her having read the book, Marvin is confident she can come up with a creative dance. She has been the best interpreter of his poetry in recent times, along with dancer Suzzette Celeste. Over the years, Marvin X has worked with many outstanding choreographers and dancers, including Raymond Sawyer, Nantizi Cayou, Ellendar Barnes, Jamilah Hunter, Nisa Ra and others.
Raynetta will perform with Marvin at the Joyce Gordon Gallery on Saturday, August 1, technically a book signing and conversation, but is shaping up to be an extravaganza in the X-man tradition. Percussionist Tacuma King and drummer Kokoman Clottey will perform, along with Augusta Collins, singer/guitarist.
Marvin loves the creativity of Raynetta because she can translate every word of his poetry into dance. She performed with him at his In the Crazy House in America concert at the Buriel Clay theatre, San Francisco, and at his concert with Amiri Baraka at the Berkeley Black Repertory Group Theatre.
Saturday, August 1, 3-5 pm, Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th Street @ Franklin, downtown Oakland. Call 510-355-6339 for more information. It is a benefit for Black Bird Press and sponsored by Oakland Post Newspaper Group and Black Dialogue Brothers. Sisters supporting this event include Joyce Gordon, Sister Shukuru, Rashida Wongozi, Alona Clifton, Lanice Jones.
To read the online version of Mythology, go to www.marvinxwrites.blogspot.com
Marvin X's favorite choreographer, Raynetta Rayzetta, has agreed to create a dance to accompany the reading of Mythology of Pussy.
She was ecstatic to learn Marvin X has written a work on manhood and womanhood training. But without her having read the book, Marvin is confident she can come up with a creative dance. She has been the best interpreter of his poetry in recent times, along with dancer Suzzette Celeste. Over the years, Marvin X has worked with many outstanding choreographers and dancers, including Raymond Sawyer, Nantizi Cayou, Ellendar Barnes, Jamilah Hunter, Nisa Ra and others.
Raynetta will perform with Marvin at the Joyce Gordon Gallery on Saturday, August 1, technically a book signing and conversation, but is shaping up to be an extravaganza in the X-man tradition. Percussionist Tacuma King and drummer Kokoman Clottey will perform, along with Augusta Collins, singer/guitarist.
Marvin loves the creativity of Raynetta because she can translate every word of his poetry into dance. She performed with him at his In the Crazy House in America concert at the Buriel Clay theatre, San Francisco, and at his concert with Amiri Baraka at the Berkeley Black Repertory Group Theatre.
Saturday, August 1, 3-5 pm, Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th Street @ Franklin, downtown Oakland. Call 510-355-6339 for more information. It is a benefit for Black Bird Press and sponsored by Oakland Post Newspaper Group and Black Dialogue Brothers. Sisters supporting this event include Joyce Gordon, Sister Shukuru, Rashida Wongozi, Alona Clifton, Lanice Jones.
To read the online version of Mythology, go to www.marvinxwrites.blogspot.com
Marvin X Literary Revolution
The real mission of the Marvin X Literary Revolution is to spread literacy. After all, with half high school students dropping out of school in the urban cities, how many of them can read his or any books? Educators must first get Johnny's attention somehow, then take Johnny up the road to literacy by holding his attention with relevant information in a language he can at least partly identify with. For sure, once Johnny gets into Mythology of Pussy, he will quickly discover my language is beyond the vernacular and reflects my education, even though I flunked English grammar, but I know enough to teach it on the university level. So the reader will find himself/herself with the need to grab the dictionary because I do know more words than motherfucker and bitch.
But let's be real, how many men in the hood have asked a woman for some vagina? White people or white black people may say, "Give me some vagina," but where I come from it's, "Baby, give me some pussy, please," although I advocate not asking for the pussy. Let the woman give it to you, since it's hers to give. Furthermore, I advocate silence and ESP in black communication since "the devil" is in the language. Look how stupid and silly some of us are reacting to the term pussy.
So the objective is literacy and I found out long ago when I taught English in secondary schools that the first order of business is to get the student's attention. Once you have their attention, learning can begin. In my case, students got so inspired they asked me to read my poetry during lunch and after school. Yes, students surrounded me during lunch and demanded I read my poetry because it was in a language they could understand and identify with. They came into my class after school and demanded I again read to them.
When I told them to read my poetry, they said, "No, Teach, you read it. We like the way you read."
When this happened to me, it made we reflect on post-slavery education when it is said they had to beat the students out of the classroom because they didn't want to go home, the thirst for learning was so great, in contrast to today when we must beat them into the classroom, unless we can get their attention and inspire them to learn with the thirst of their ancestors.
My colleague (Brother Ptah) and I have been working on the Hug A Thug Book Club to inspire literacy. "Hug A Thug Before the Thug Hugs You!" Paul Cobb added, "Crack a book before you're booked for crack!" Brothers write me from prison and jail to send them my books, but I am honored when these so-called thugs buy my books before they go to jail as Paul Cobb suggests. Although I understand jail and prison is the first time some black men get "time" to read, so I don't mind sending them books.
In these tight economic times, many brothers and sisters don't have money for books. When a young father told me the other day he didn't have money for Mythology of Pussy because he had to get his two sons haircuts, I started to give him the pamphlet. But I did not, instead I reflected to myself that the father better get them information to save their lives rather than a haircut. And when a mother said she was going to read the pamphlet herself rather than give it to her 15 year old son, I told her, "OK, but when Dante goes to juvenile hall for assaulting his girlfriend, don't call me." Another mother was simply embarrassed to have her son read it, especially in her presence. She said, "I don't want him to read this with me. He can read this by himself." Many parents have so much sex guilt and shame they cannot discuss sex with their children. This is why I call for manhood and womanhood training rites.
At the Berkeley Flea Market, an African man came by with a group of young African American males I suspected were in a group home or foster home. The African let me know he had received his manhood training in Africa, so I told him to give it to the boys with him. He said, "Yes, yes, yes."
As Brother Lumukanda, noted, if he and I had received Mythology of Pussy when we were 17, it would have guided us on the right path regarding gender roles or sexual identity confirmation. We would have had better manners and morals. So many of our youth are suffering a sexual identity crisis, they can't decide whether they are straight or gay. But this was/is the purpose of manhood and womanhood training, to help them decide. See Jomo Kenyatta's classic Facing Mount Kenya, his ethnography of the Kikuyu tribe in Kenya--their life and death, work and play, sex and family. President Obama, himself a product of Kenya, said notable things in his speech to the NAACP but perhaps because he lacked manhood training did not suggest it as a solution to African American youth. He said they must stop trying to get into the NBA and instead get MBAs and science degrees, and aspire to be scientists rather than rappers. I agree totally, unless they are going to rap freedom songs/poems.
Sonia Sanchez asks, "Will your book free us?"
I was so happy shortly after Obama was elected when I heard a young man on the bus in Oakland say, "Man, I'm so happy he is president. Now I got somebody else to look up to beside rappers." Yes, I was proud to hear this young man say this, even with a grill in his mouth--the grill made his remarks more profound!
The real mission of the Marvin X Literary Revolution is to spread literacy. After all, with half high school students dropping out of school in the urban cities, how many of them can read his or any books? Educators must first get Johnny's attention somehow, then take Johnny up the road to literacy by holding his attention with relevant information in a language he can at least partly identify with. For sure, once Johnny gets into Mythology of Pussy, he will quickly discover my language is beyond the vernacular and reflects my education, even though I flunked English grammar, but I know enough to teach it on the university level. So the reader will find himself/herself with the need to grab the dictionary because I do know more words than motherfucker and bitch.
But let's be real, how many men in the hood have asked a woman for some vagina? White people or white black people may say, "Give me some vagina," but where I come from it's, "Baby, give me some pussy, please," although I advocate not asking for the pussy. Let the woman give it to you, since it's hers to give. Furthermore, I advocate silence and ESP in black communication since "the devil" is in the language. Look how stupid and silly some of us are reacting to the term pussy.
So the objective is literacy and I found out long ago when I taught English in secondary schools that the first order of business is to get the student's attention. Once you have their attention, learning can begin. In my case, students got so inspired they asked me to read my poetry during lunch and after school. Yes, students surrounded me during lunch and demanded I read my poetry because it was in a language they could understand and identify with. They came into my class after school and demanded I again read to them.
When I told them to read my poetry, they said, "No, Teach, you read it. We like the way you read."
When this happened to me, it made we reflect on post-slavery education when it is said they had to beat the students out of the classroom because they didn't want to go home, the thirst for learning was so great, in contrast to today when we must beat them into the classroom, unless we can get their attention and inspire them to learn with the thirst of their ancestors.
My colleague (Brother Ptah) and I have been working on the Hug A Thug Book Club to inspire literacy. "Hug A Thug Before the Thug Hugs You!" Paul Cobb added, "Crack a book before you're booked for crack!" Brothers write me from prison and jail to send them my books, but I am honored when these so-called thugs buy my books before they go to jail as Paul Cobb suggests. Although I understand jail and prison is the first time some black men get "time" to read, so I don't mind sending them books.
In these tight economic times, many brothers and sisters don't have money for books. When a young father told me the other day he didn't have money for Mythology of Pussy because he had to get his two sons haircuts, I started to give him the pamphlet. But I did not, instead I reflected to myself that the father better get them information to save their lives rather than a haircut. And when a mother said she was going to read the pamphlet herself rather than give it to her 15 year old son, I told her, "OK, but when Dante goes to juvenile hall for assaulting his girlfriend, don't call me." Another mother was simply embarrassed to have her son read it, especially in her presence. She said, "I don't want him to read this with me. He can read this by himself." Many parents have so much sex guilt and shame they cannot discuss sex with their children. This is why I call for manhood and womanhood training rites.
At the Berkeley Flea Market, an African man came by with a group of young African American males I suspected were in a group home or foster home. The African let me know he had received his manhood training in Africa, so I told him to give it to the boys with him. He said, "Yes, yes, yes."
As Brother Lumukanda, noted, if he and I had received Mythology of Pussy when we were 17, it would have guided us on the right path regarding gender roles or sexual identity confirmation. We would have had better manners and morals. So many of our youth are suffering a sexual identity crisis, they can't decide whether they are straight or gay. But this was/is the purpose of manhood and womanhood training, to help them decide. See Jomo Kenyatta's classic Facing Mount Kenya, his ethnography of the Kikuyu tribe in Kenya--their life and death, work and play, sex and family. President Obama, himself a product of Kenya, said notable things in his speech to the NAACP but perhaps because he lacked manhood training did not suggest it as a solution to African American youth. He said they must stop trying to get into the NBA and instead get MBAs and science degrees, and aspire to be scientists rather than rappers. I agree totally, unless they are going to rap freedom songs/poems.
Sonia Sanchez asks, "Will your book free us?"
I was so happy shortly after Obama was elected when I heard a young man on the bus in Oakland say, "Man, I'm so happy he is president. Now I got somebody else to look up to beside rappers." Yes, I was proud to hear this young man say this, even with a grill in his mouth--the grill made his remarks more profound!
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Marvin X Literary Revolution
Marvin X Literary Revolution
According to Brother Lumakanda, Marvin X should receive the Pulitzer prize for his recent memoir on Eldridge Cleaver and his pamphlet Mythology of Pussy. Lumakanda says if he and Marvin had read something similar to Mythology of Pussy when they were 17 years old, it might have saved some sisters from partner abuse--it might have saved Marvin's marriages. It would have given them progressive consciousness at an early age. They would have avoided the patriarchal notions of women as chattel property. They would have received manhood training, especially on the nature of the female and male as spiritual beings.
Dr. Jimmy Garrett says Eldridge Cleaver, my friend the devil, is the funniest book of the year. And the more you know about black liberation movement history, the funnier it is.
Jerry Vernardo, one of the BSU strike leaders at San Francisco State University, says Marvin's Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality and How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy are both prophetic works.
At the Berkeley Flea Market, the largest African market in the Bay, women and men hugged Marvin for writing Mythology of Pussy, although the politically correct pseudo conscious Negroes avoided him. Not so with the masses, they grabbed nearly every copy of his latest writings.
In a phone conversation last night with Amiri Baraka, he asked Marvin, "What are you going to come out with next?" Marvin replied, "I don't know. I'm like Coltrane, I just let it happen. I try to take my mind as far out as I can--trying to figure out this conundrum of life in America."
Marvin X is a one man army on the streets of the Bay Area, selling and giving away his writings on the streets of Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco. In the last few months, his plays have been produced from New York to the Bay, so is there a Marvin X literary revolution in progress? His first play will be performed at the upcoming San Francisco Theatre Festival later this month at Yerba Buena Center. On Saturday, August 1, he will have a book signing and conversation with James W. Sweeney, former Berkeley City Councilman. The event will take place at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th Street @ Franklin, downtown Oakland, 3-5 pm, sponsored by the Oakland Post Newspaper Group. It is a tribute to slain Oakland Post editor, Chauncey Bailey. Co-sponsor is the Black Dialogue Brothers. Call 510-355-6339 for more information. Space is limited, come early. Refreshments served.
According to Brother Lumakanda, Marvin X should receive the Pulitzer prize for his recent memoir on Eldridge Cleaver and his pamphlet Mythology of Pussy. Lumakanda says if he and Marvin had read something similar to Mythology of Pussy when they were 17 years old, it might have saved some sisters from partner abuse--it might have saved Marvin's marriages. It would have given them progressive consciousness at an early age. They would have avoided the patriarchal notions of women as chattel property. They would have received manhood training, especially on the nature of the female and male as spiritual beings.
Dr. Jimmy Garrett says Eldridge Cleaver, my friend the devil, is the funniest book of the year. And the more you know about black liberation movement history, the funnier it is.
Jerry Vernardo, one of the BSU strike leaders at San Francisco State University, says Marvin's Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality and How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy are both prophetic works.
At the Berkeley Flea Market, the largest African market in the Bay, women and men hugged Marvin for writing Mythology of Pussy, although the politically correct pseudo conscious Negroes avoided him. Not so with the masses, they grabbed nearly every copy of his latest writings.
In a phone conversation last night with Amiri Baraka, he asked Marvin, "What are you going to come out with next?" Marvin replied, "I don't know. I'm like Coltrane, I just let it happen. I try to take my mind as far out as I can--trying to figure out this conundrum of life in America."
Marvin X is a one man army on the streets of the Bay Area, selling and giving away his writings on the streets of Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco. In the last few months, his plays have been produced from New York to the Bay, so is there a Marvin X literary revolution in progress? His first play will be performed at the upcoming San Francisco Theatre Festival later this month at Yerba Buena Center. On Saturday, August 1, he will have a book signing and conversation with James W. Sweeney, former Berkeley City Councilman. The event will take place at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th Street @ Franklin, downtown Oakland, 3-5 pm, sponsored by the Oakland Post Newspaper Group. It is a tribute to slain Oakland Post editor, Chauncey Bailey. Co-sponsor is the Black Dialogue Brothers. Call 510-355-6339 for more information. Space is limited, come early. Refreshments served.
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