……is here.
Category Archives: world history
My Root Article On Grace Lee Boggs……
…….is here.
Something About October Magazines
Because the ones I’m reading right now are “off the chain,” as the post-modern expression goes.
This must be the month magazine’s submit for the National Magazine Award, because the Sunday going-to-meeting clothes have appeared on the last Rolling Stone (excellent articles on the Pope and cover-boy Trump), and October’s Smithsonian (the Egyptian pyramids, Einstein, the Brazilian Gordon Parks, and Hemingway)! I’ve viewed Smithsonian as a wannabe National Geographic, but it does more than that. I especially like its articles on technological and popular culture history.
The October National Geographic promised and delivered on a lost city in Honduras, the Congo River, Sweden wilderness, sea wolves and, on the cover, a new link in the human evolutionary chain! WOW!
OCTOBER 15th UPDATE: Was happy to read this.
Book Review: Neo-Colonialism By PowerPoint: The Fight For, And Against, The Newark, N.J. Schools
The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?
By Dale Russakoff.
New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
240 pp. $27.
The word “conspiracy” gets thrown around a lot in African communities, ever since the middle of the last century. And it’s understandable: the assassinations of King and X, the discovery of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s COINTEL-PRO files, and the disposal in one way or another of any leader of African descent who doesn’t toe the blood-dotted line of the West. But how much of a conspiracy is it when the victim doesn’t have the required amount of power for self-determination in the first place? This book, released today, is about how relatively powerless people fought back against their status when, insult to injury added, even their relatively little power was taken from them.
It starts with Cory Booker, the neo-liberal mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and Chris Christie, the conservative governor of the state, secretly deciding all by themselves in the backseat of a Chevy Tahoe in 2009 that they will transform American education by turning Newark into a laboratory for the New York-based, greatly monied education reform movement. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, develops a political man-crush on Booker and signs on by 2011, pledging $100 million (to be matched by other donors) to make New Jersey’s largest city into a charter-school haven in five years, staffed by six-figure, non-unionized teachers. Like the benevolent colonizers of old, all believe they go in with good intentions: self-government by the dark, poor people has not worked in the internal colony, the reasoning goes, or the state would not have taken over the school district back in 1995. The teacher’s unions are stopping progress, the reformers argued to themselves, by making sure they tie the hand of local politicos and school board members. So, they privately reasoned, the only way to change the system is to overthrow it—to go past all the community obstacles. So they hire $1,000-a-day consultants and get to work.
After absorbing the opening shot heard-round-the-world of the revolution it now understood it was a pawn in, the Newark grassroots is then introduced to Cami Anderson, a white woman of hippie background who has been named the school’s superintendent by Christie and Booker. Like education reformer Michelle Rhee did in Washington, D.C., she then sets out, from the community perspectives, to close as many schools and alienate every teacher and parent she can. Meanwhile and not coincidentally, charter schools, some rising out of the closed public ones, begin flourishing in the the old, struggling-against-decay, never-recovered-from-the-1967-rebellion ghetto, providing resources and specialized attention to small, selected groups of poor Black and Brown children the always-struggling public schools can’t match.
Everyone flexes what muscle they have. The teacher’s unions demand their back pay as a condition to their negotiations with Booker and Anderson over being able to fire bad teachers and financially reward good ones, and get it. The money people get their calls answered from the celebrity mayor, who eventually uses his Captain America persona to get elected to the U.S. Senate in 2013. Newark students organize and protest Anderson, with more than a little help from a well-known local name: Ras Baraka, a high-school principal and city councilman (and one of the sons of poet-activists Amiri and Amina Baraka). He seizes the issue that will get him elected mayor in 2014, defeating a Theo Huxtable-type candidate propped up by the same education reform movement. “The festering resistance to Anderson, the backlash against [the top-down reforms], and the first mayoral campaign of the post-Booker era became one and the same.” The street protests grow so large and consistent in Newark that Christie—days away from announcing his Republican presidential nomination run this past summer—makes a deal with newly-elected Mayor Baraka that, at this September 2015 writing, may transfer city education power back to the people a year from now. A bewildered Anderson is sent packing, replaced, amazingly, by a former state education commissioner—one of the chief architects of the neo-colonial plan! Whether the new school district superintendent cleans up his own mess is this story’s next chapter, to be written by today’s journalists and tomorrow’s historians.
Dale Russakoff, a longtime Washington Post journalist and resident of Montclair, a middle class suburb of Newark, embeds herself with Christie, Booker and Anderson while, simultaneously, sits in on more than 100 school-related community meetings (“There it was again: disrespect. The word rose from conversations all over the auditorium”), and the reporting not only shows, but shines. Her spectacular juggling act blames everybody but those whose demonstrated first commitment is to the students. In her telling, nearly everyone involved received something and/or learned something but the city’s least-of-these. She makes a clear observation that needs to be on T-shirts in the city: “For four years, the reformers never really tried to have a conversation with the people of Newark. Their target audience was always somewhere else, beyond the people whose children and grandchildren desperately needed to learn and compete for a future.”
The book’s author might not agree with the following assessment: that her carefully crafted work clearly documents that white supremacy’s psychotic historical urge to covertly or overtly experiment with the lives of poor Black people—whether medically, socially, economically or, in the case, educationally—is not some obscure 19th or 20th century Africana Studies classroom topic, but as current as the next awarded education grant. African-Americans used to be classified as sub-human, because of their three-fifth status under the U.S. Constitution. Then, after the Civil War, they became second-class citizens, because they didn’t have the right to vote or use public accommodations. In this updated 21st century form of pseudo-democracy, poor Black and Brown communities like Newark are filled with sub-citizens: those who have no input on their future, no matter how much taxes they pay and how often they vote. Christie and (especially) Booker should be ashamed of their public actions here, but who could, or would, succeed in shaming them that they would actually respect?
Thank You, Dr. Wayne Dyer
I learned a lot of basic spiritual lessons from this man, who dominated PBS fundraising for at least a decade!
I’ll miss those long Sunday morning sessions! In my time in Maryland, it was the closest I ever got to going to church!
See you on YouTube, Dr. Dyer!
My Root Article On Jimmy Carter and Guinea Worm…..
…….is here.
Book Review: Mumia–Still, Not Stilled
Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Edited by Johanna Fernandez. Foreword by Cornel West.
San Francisco: City Lights.
370 pp., $17.95 (paperback).
If the fight earlier this year for the right of imprisoned writer Mumia Abu-Jamal to get correct care for his diabetes had failed, this book, his eighth, would have been possibly the last he would get to approve under his name. The diabetes complication was not just a shock to his system. There is an insane sense of normality that has now developed around the idea of Abu-Jamal’s work—the assumptions that he is writing, and will be writing frequently, that his commentaries will get emailed around the world, that his recorded voice will be on YouTube. Frankly, Abu-Jamal’s rat-a-tat journalistic contribution would be almost taken for granted if he hadn’t almost died. The ubiquitousness of the author and product shows how much he has succeeded in creating a foothold in Black radical thought in the last 20 years.
And that Panther-inspired bootprint continues here. Following in the steps of Noelle Hanrahan’s 2000 Abu-Jamal column collection “All Things Censored,” Fernandez, an assistant professor of history and Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Baruch College/City University of New York, creates a second unofficial “Mumia Reader” of 107 columns and speeches that span from the former Black Panther Party member’s 1981 arrest for the killing of a white Philadelphia police officer to 2014. The editor takes significant time to explain the how, when, what and why of Abu-Jamal’s essays. She shows that the intellectual scope and depth of Abu-Jamal’s writings precede Hanrahan’s mid-1990s recordings—the ones that, along with a 1995 death warrant and a ready-to-go international anti-death penalty movement, jump-started the “Free Mumia” movement and pushed it straight to the international Leftist stage.
The “new” gems discovered here are, ironically, among his oldest. “Christmas In a Cage,” his rarely read 1981 account of his own arrest and treatment by the police (“Where are the witnesses to the [police] beating that left me with a four-inch scar on my forehead? A swollen jaw? Chipped teeth?”) is worth the price of the book alone.
The editor situates the first few columns in a way that explains him, not just his opinions. Upfront, his love for the MOVE Organization and its founder, John Africa, is clearly articulated, using the 1982 trial and conviction statements he made as an understandably angry young man. (“John Africa is not a slave to this foul, messed up system—he is not bought and sold.”) An example of what he told the court after it decided it wanted his death: “On December 9, 1981, the police attempted to execute me in the street; this trial is just a result of their failure to do so.”
And as the wall writing progresses with a combination of memories, obits and news riffs that, policy-wise, string Reagan to Obama, the reader feels the air from the older Abu-Jamal’s steady, intellectual darts thrown at, for example, the post-911 legalization of COINTEL-PRO under George W. Bush, the devastation that followed Katrina, et. al. Abu-Jamal’s commentaries, taken together, target the contradictions of the established order, pointing to its corrupt nature versus the natural power of people-fueled resistance. (“The objective of all politics is power,” he writes in a 2000 column about the police killing of Amadou Diallo, a Black man shot in his building’s vestibule in New York City. “No major political party in America can even begin to promise Black folks in America the power to stand on their own doorstep[s], or ride their own car[s], or walk the streets of the urban center, without the very real threat of being ‘accidently’ blasted into eternity.”) The book, therefore, is a half-lifetime of well-researched, historically radical Black print rage, from waxing nostalgia about his brief political brush with Huey Newton in and the Black Panther Party circa 1970 to predicting in advance the acquittal of George Zimmerman of the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin.
It is now assured that, whatever his future health in prison, Abu-Jamal’s body of work will outlast his actual one. The writer, as Cornel West discusses in the preface, belongs in “that cultural continuum of struggle that shaped urban Black people between 1950 and 1980.” It remains to be seen in a 2015 world of social media if the masses of “Black Lives Matter” Tweeters will develop the skill, discipline and commitment of their now- elder statesman Abu-Jamal, who wrote in the margins of the society decades before it became cool.
MOVE-ing Tribute (May 13, 2015)
(Photos by Dr. Mark Bolden)
MOVE is not just some memory, but an existing–and perhaps even mainstream!–organization, I learned yesterday.
Thanks to Jared Ball for the trip and Mark Bolden for the photos.
Book Review: Within The Cage
Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga.
Pamela Newkirk.
New York: Amistad/HarperCollins.
304 pp.; $25.99 (hardcover).
It’s the ingredients for a powerful devil’s brew: take white supremacy, slavery and colonialism and mix thoroughly with late 19th and early 20th century zoology, ethnology, wildlife conservation and taxidermy. Sprinkle with Darwin’s theory of evolution and simmer in Greater New York, the precursor to New York City. Simmer. Then pull back the curtain and pour, showing the African—the so-called “pygmy”—on public display in the monkey cage at the Bronx Zoo, all for the sake of greed disgustingly disguised as science.
Written by New York University journalism professor Pamela Newkirk in as dispassionate a tone as can be attempted, “Spectacle” shakes all the way to the reader’s core. The tale of Ota Benga, the Congolese forest dweller—exhibited with other captured people in the 1904 World’s Fair, the symbol of white world progress, and then, two years later, solo at the zoo—crackles with 21st century disbelief, even after taking into account an elementary historical understanding that many Europeans and white Americans for centuries publicly declared Blacks sub-human.
“For the general public [of the World’s Fair], the sight of barely clad, presumably primitive people assembled across the fairgrounds was evidence enough of Caucasian superiority,” writes Newkirk. “The beings whom scientists had described as semi-human, cannibalistic dwarfs were no longer regulated to mythology or to anthropological field notes. The reality—that the delegation comprised captured African children—if considered at all, was understood as merely a means to a scientific end.”
The painful, and painstakingly researched, work of social history goes beyond the surface level of “Whites Only” signs into the bleached hearts of an insecure, psychologically disturbed people who, in the early part of the 20th century, argued over the level of humanity of an African they had caged, failing to see the obvious irony. The efforts of a group of Black preachers to free Benga from his Bronx Zoo cage is prominently noted (as is the intellectual combativeness of the voice of true scientific reason, the anthropologist Franz Boas), but their limited, and relative, access to their own freedom and power dangles in the background.
Because Newkirk had no historical access to Benga, the public sensation via personal violation, she had the challenging task of writing around the man at the center of the monkey cage—the “prey for a merciless hunter.” That hunter’s name is Samuel Phillips Verner, and he is the central subject of this merciless defilement. He proves the old adage that some people in life pose as a friend in order to get into position as a more effective enemy.
Verner is, in many ways, the quintessential unapologetic white man for this type of unapologetically harsh story, fitting the perfect casting call for the benevolent white American liberal who interrupts African life for gold, status and power. He is a liar and thief who camouflages his character through the chronological guises of missionary, then adventurer, and finally an amateur “scientist” and “African expert” in this white world of European and American pseudo-science. In the histories and academic studies written and embedded by white men, he is the man who did well by doing good. Newkirk exposes his decades of shameless, opportunistic motives and behavior in what should be called visionist history.
Belgian King Leopold II’s shadow, and especially the mass graveyards of his uncounted African victims, loom over this work. Benga’s “rescue” by Verner, while the “hero” cuts business deals almost every waking hour, is symbolic of the American complicity in the raping of the continent by Europe. (As Newkirk shows, Belgium’s public relations campaign to get greedy American imperialists on its side—with Verner as one of many leaders—was quite successful, while it lasted.) The public shaming of white supremacy in the Congo by true heroes Mark Twain, George Washington Williams and Booker T. Washington are mentioned, but it is Verner’s ruthless ambitions that solidify the book’s central vortex.
Meanwhile, Benga—who a New York Times editorial charitably described as “a human being, of a sort”—resisted his captors as best he could, being a stranger in an absurd land surrounded by paternalistic friends. One day, he defies the zookeepers by physically fighting them. When he was physically prodded by the rowdy throngs that crowded the park to see him, he struck back. When he was allowed to roam the park, and another horde decided to track him, he fired an arrow at one of the rabble. He pulled a knife against a handler. Later, when he was moved to a museum, he attempted to escape. And finally, now years separated from his village, refusing to ask his former captors for help getting back to the Congo, he does what he must to ease his deepening depression. The author allows Benga’s actions to speak above the crushing waves of this psychologically tortuous history.
The Bronx Zoo, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Natural History, the National Geographic Society and their institutional fellow travelers in quantitative academia—all historic bastions of elite, white male privilege—will have a lot of questions asked by Newkirk’s readers to answer. Complicity in the crimes against African humanity connects like amber waves of grain. “Me no like America,” Benga said from his cage.
Frederick Douglass said in a famous 1852 speech that the United States of America was guilty of “crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages.” This superb book proves that postulate again, right in time for recent, post-modern generations of Americans who seriously need to come to terms with that consistent, historical truth.
re: Stokely And Peniel Joseph: Well Said, Jared A. Ball!
Jared A. Ball is harsh but correct here in this very strong, well-written, well-thought out article. He has said out loud what many in Africana Studies have only said privately. And I think all of us have to be more careful in the future about providing uncritical support, and public platforms, to people who just say some of the right things about our history while omitting things whites don’t like, or just do some of the things we want while ignoring other things. I know many people feel that the larger direction of providing operational unity is more important, but I think we all have to individually decide what the cost of that would be. We can’t teach just half our history. As I said in my critique of Manning Marable: We don’t owe him anything; instead, we owe Africana Studies.
