“Not Really Speaking to Us or About Us”

Posted by Melvin Bray on April 10th, 2012 filed in Useful Perhaps
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Oklahoma is an intensely conservative state. “Conservative” means “resistant to change,” which is all well and good when ‘what is’ works for all persons of noble intent. The problem is that so much in society only truly works for a select few, even with our best intentions.

When we encounter this, the just and noble response is to adapt how we function in order to enfranchise more and more people. However we don’t. And what has annoyed me most of late is that our faith doesn’t demand better of us. We have constructed theologies to justify social systems that repeatedly, incessantly produce results we openly label tragic–”but not really speaking to us or about us.”

Again, this is the world I fear for my children.

Where There Is Race There Is Always Privilege

Posted by Melvin Bray on April 5th, 2012 filed in Useful Perhaps
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As much as I talk about race and privilege, I had never thought of the two as being inextricably bound. Now that Jean Halley has pointed out that the only purpose for the sociological designation of race is to privilege one over another, I am confounded by the thought. Now that the fiction and fact of race exists in our consciousness, is there no way to extricate ourselves from them?

Halley’s observation would help to explain why the attempt to disqualify race (to be “color blind,” let’s say) is yet another act of privilege (power) exercised by some over others. Like a bell, now that color has been struck you can’t un-ring it. I guess we just have to learn to appreciate the various tones of all the various rings.

Forceful Non-Violence

Posted by Melvin Bray on April 3rd, 2012 filed in Useful Perhaps
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Martin Luther King, Jr, was a mid-20th centrury embodiment of a colonial project started in the Americas as far back as the mid-1700s. The project was an attempt to equate acts of force in the mind of the oppressed with acts of violence. Thus, when he spoke of non-violence, the subtext was, at least initially, “non-force”.

This call for the use of non-force in public protest was originally championed by colonial aristocrats prior to the American Revolution when dealing with the disgruntled masses who despised the economic disparities that kept them poor while making others rich. It was only when the propensity for the forceful redistribution of wealth and privilege could be channeled violently toward the British–to oust the British for the benefit of colonial aristocrats–that the use of force was considered to be moral. It has since been the case that every American act of war which has enriched a few while impoverishing many has been judged by those who have profitted as being moral, while every forcible attempt to bring about increased economic equity has been judged immoral.

Being the brilliant mind that he was, MLK eventually subverts this moral inequality by then turning his arder toward those who do violence without force, which is when he got himself killed. What he began to equate in 1968 was that poverty (violence minus force), the militarism of the Vietnam War (violence through force) and racism (violence with or without force) were all violence, one and the same. One has to respect this commitment to moral consistency.

However, it leaves the question of the appropriate use of force unanswered. Is there a use of force that is not inherently violent?

Greatest Fear as a Black Father

Posted by Melvin Bray on March 27th, 2012 filed in Useful Perhaps
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I was asked last week what my greatest fear as a father of a black boy is in light of the Trayvon Martin murder.  My greatest fear for my children is the cautious regret I see on the many faces that can’t help but leave open the possibility there may be some justification for this tragedy.  Rest assured George Zimmerman and his supporters will exploit this immutable suspicion.

Now that they are beginning to, even knowing the uncontested facts of the incident, some of the most compassionate people I know will find it disqualifying that a black young man being stalked by a belligerent stranger, would turn to defend himself when accosted.  For them, the only conceivable defense Trayvon can have is to have taken his bullet as a lamb to the slaughter.  How is this possible?

TRAYVON: may your death not be in vain

Posted by Melvin Bray on March 26th, 2012 filed in Useful Perhaps
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______________________________

White People, You Will Never Look Suspicious Like Trayvon Martin!
by Michael Skolnik (interviewed about this post)

I will never look suspicious to you. Even if I have a black hoodie, a pair of jeans and white sneakers on…in fact, that is what I wore yesterday…I still will never look suspicious. No matter how much the hoodie covers my face or how baggie my jeans are, I will never look out of place to you. I will never watch a taxi cab pass me by to pick someone else up. I will never witness someone clutch their purse tightly against their body as they walk by me. I won’t have to worry about a police car following me for two miles, so they can “run my plates.” I will never have to pay before I eat. And I certainly will never get “stopped and frisked.” I will never look suspicious to you, because of one thing and one thing only. The color of my skin. I am white.

I was born white. It was the card I was dealt. No choice in the matter. Just the card handed out by the dealer. I have lived my whole life privileged. Privileged to be born without a glass ceiling. Privileged to grow up in the richest country in the world. Privileged to never look suspicious. I have no guilt for the color of my skin or the privilege that I have. Remember, it was just the next card that came out of the deck. But, I have choices. I got choices on how I play the hand I was dealt. I got a lot of options. The ball is in my court.

So, today I decided to hit the ball. Making a choice. A choice to stand up for Trayvon Martin. 17 years old. black. innocent. murdered with a bag of skittles and a bottle of ice tea in his hands. “Suspicious.” that is what the guy who killed him said he looked like cause he had on a black hoodie, a pair of jeans and white sneakers. But, remember I had on that same outfit yesterday. And yes my Air Force Ones were “brand-new” clean. After all, I was raised in hip-hop…part of our dress code. I digress. Back to Trayvon and the gated community in Sanford, Florida, where he was visiting his father.

I got a lot of emails about Trayvon. I have read a lot of articles. I have seen a lot of television segments. The message is consistent. Most of the commentators, writers, op-ed pages agree. Something went wrong. Trayvon was murdered. Racially profiled. Race. America’s elephant that never seems to leave the room. But, the part that doesn’t sit well with me is that all of the messengers of this message are all black too. I mean, it was only two weeks ago when almost every white person I knew was tweeting about stopping a brutal African warlord from killing more innocent children. And they even took thirty minutes out of their busy schedules to watch a movie about dude. They bought t-shirts. Some bracelets. Even tweeted at Rihanna to take a stance. But, a 17 year old American kid is followed and then ultimately killed by a neighborhood vigilante who happens to be carrying a semi-automatic weapon and my white friends are quiet. Eerily quiet. Not even a trending topic for the young man.

We’ve heard the 911 calls. We’ve seen the 13 year old witness. We’ve read the letter from the alleged killer’s father. We listened to the anger of the family’s attorney. We’ve felt the pain of Trayvon’s mother. For heaven’s sake, for 24 hours he was a deceased John Doe at the hospital because even the police couldn’t believe that maybe he LIVES in the community. There are still some facts to figure out. There are still some questions to be answered. But, let’s be clear. Let’s be very, very clear. Before the neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, started following him against the better judgement of the 911 dispatcher. Before any altercation. Before any self-defense claim. Before Travyon’s cries for help were heard on the 911 tapes. Before the bullet hit him dead in the chest. Before all of this. He was suspicious. He was suspicious. suspicious. And you know, like I know, it wasn’t because of the hoodie or the jeans or the sneakers. Cause I had on that same outfit yesterday and no one called 911 saying I was just wandering around their neighborhood. It was because of one thing and one thing only. Trayvon is black.

So I’ve made the choice today to tell my white friends that the rights I take for granted are only valid if I fight to give those same rights to others. The taxi cab. The purse. The meal. The police car. The police. These are all things I’ve taken for granted.

So, I fight for Trayvon Martin. I fight for Amadou Diallo. I fight for Rodney King. I fight for every young black man who looks “suspicious” to someone who thinks they have the right to take away their freedom to walk through their own neighborhood. I fight against my own stereotypes and my own suspicions. I fight for people whose ancestors built this country, literally, and who are still treated like second class citizens. Being quiet is not an option, for we have been too quiet for too long.

______________________________

No Apologies: On The Killing of Trayvon Martin And Being “Good”
by Danielle Belton

In the tragic murder of Trayvon Martin, there’s no safe place. There’s no real excuse to cling to. None of the usual dismissals work or fit. It’s just bad. Real bad. And sits there and stares at you with it’s cruelty and unfairness and ugliness and says, “Take this.”

Take this load. And pick it up.

Just take it. And accept it. And choke back the lumps in your throat. As it has happened before. And it will happen again. And again you will be told to “take this.”

Take this burden and just accept it as your burden. It’s just “how it is.” You’re all statistics. Take these statistics. And black people get shot everywhere everyday by everyone. Police. Non-police. Crazy people. Bigots. Their parents. Other kids. Just take it. It’s part of your Life In America, Black People. Accept this tragedy and go through the motions of appealing to people’s decency and demanding justice and having protests and press conferences and crying and asking why and demanding answers and then eventually getting that bad dead cold thing that just sits there and says, “Take this.”

Here’s your load. Pick it up.

Pass it along to the children, so they can carry a bit of it too. Let it weigh down on their worlds. Let it rob them of their childhood and innocence. Tell them to take it, so they grow up faster and accept the unfairness in life and just give up. Be cynical and fatalistic. Be cold when it happens to the next person. Or be cold themselves when they do it to another person. And as they rob that person of what was once robbed of themselves and that person asks them why or looks for recourse or retribution or answers, they can stare back unblinking in the shadow of our common oppressors and say, “Take this load and pick it up.”

But I’m sorry. I’m not going to pick up this shit anymore. It’s not mine.

A long, long time ago when I was young my parents told me I had to be the best to make it in this world. Averageness was something only the white and the male could afford and as a black woman, I was neither. You had to take pride in how you dress and how you spoke and how you behaved. You had to be “good,” because good things happen to those who are good and bad things happen to those who are bad. And that’s the lie your parents tell you because no one should tell the truth to you when you’re that young. You really don’t need to know. Otherwise you’d never bother.

Who wants to deal with someone already jaded at age six?

And so I was good. I was so very good. I didn’t curse. I got good grades. I’ve never been in a fight in my life. The one time I got Saturday detention was because I was chronically late for a third period class in an over-crowded school where the only time you could go to your locker was during lunch to switch out books for the second half of the day and my locker was on one end of the crowded school, far from the other.

My teacher didn’t believe me when I told her I couldn’t leave lunch, go to my locker, then wade through the hallway crammed with kids to make it on my class on time.

She told me I was lying. She said she walked it once just to see what I was talking about and timed herself. But since she had to be in class waiting for me and other students, I highly doubted she did that at the height of the lunch rush.

It didn’t matter that I loved my Spanish class and was an A student and never caused trouble and had no reputation for someone who would ever be tardy for anything as I was obsessed with being “good.” She just didn’t believe me. My mother had to get involved and my locker was eventually moved to a place easier for me to navigate to.

I was never late for third period Spanish again. No one apologized.

That same year, the eighth grade, my history teacher moved my seat in the front of the class to the back with a pair of boys who harassed me, teased me and made trouble with me every day. Then, because I’m near-sighted, my vision worsened and I needed new glasses. I couldn’t read the blackboard. I told my teacher of both, the harassment and the inability to see.

He, oddly, agreed I was being harassed, but thought I was “weak” to complain. As for my inability to see, he told me I was lying.

Even though I wore glasses. We got a doctor’s note from my optometrist that I needed new glasses and should sit up front until they were ready.

The teacher suddenly decided everyone in the class could sit where ever they wanted.

He never apologized.

My mother, far more blunt than I, called it what it was. I was black. My teachers were white. The school was mostly white. It was racism. Even though all my teachers, even the jerk ones, thought I was a bright and talented student who was polite and respectful. They would lose my extra credit homework on purpose rather than add it towards my grade, lest I test higher than whoever they would always hope would beat me when the boys would play the girls in History Bingo.

But as annoying as all this was for me. For other kids in my public school experience it was far worse. Boys who defended themselves when picked on by bullying the school ignored until it got to a breaking point? Suspended. Kids who fought back or spoke up when they were being picked on, abused, harassed or marginalized? Sent to the “alternative school.”

But see? In my child mind, I tried to rationalize this. They were “bad” because the talked back or actually hit their tormentors. I was “good” because I took the abuse. And my “goodness” was rewarded in that I graduated in the top 25 percent of my class, but was still judged with the same suspicion all black kids were judged by at my school.

What difference really was there between I and my peers who had dropped out or wound up in halfway houses or jail other than I picked up the load and just thought about Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King, Jr. the whole time? I picked up the load and they wouldn’t. But who could ever want that load of shit? The only difference was I still believed goodness would be rewarded. If we all, as a people, were just “good” they’d have to stop accusing us of lying, assuming we were “bad” or criminals or ignorant. W.E.B. DuBois and the Talented Tenth and lead by example and all that rose colored lens malarky.

That if we’re just “good” we’ll be safe. If your son doesn’t listen to hip hop, goes to the church camp, gets A’s and B’s in school, is polite, says “sir” and “ma’am,” if he’s a good kid, he’ll be safe. That’s the bargain black parents make with their children.

If you are “good” the gangs and the violence and the racism won’t get you. You will be safe. You will live to see 25. You will have a great life. Opportunity will abound for you. We will be proud of you. The community will be proud of you. You will be Barack Obama and Michelle Obama and life will be beautiful if you just want it enough.

Just be “good.” Be good, Trayvon Martin. Stay in school. Listen to your parents. And you’ll be safe.

But that’s a lie. No one can make you safe. No one can save you for that day some sick person just decides you’re the bad guy because you’re black and carrying a bottle of ice tea and some Skittles and he self-appointed himself neighborhood watch and some black teenage boys aren’t good, therefore ALL BLACK PEOPLE ARE NOT GOOD. And you are a black person. And you’re a boy. And you had on a “hooded sweatshirt.” So, you’re dead now.

You lose.

Sorry. You didn’t follow the rules. It wasn’t good enough to be “good.” Why didn’t you just apologize to that man for existing as he had you on the ground, gun pointed at you? Say you were sorry for being born black and apologize for all the black people in the past who may have ever thought of robbing that neighborhood or doing whatever things George Zimmerman, 28, thought black people in Sanford, Fla. were doing in his neighborhood.

Maybe if you’d just taken it and accepted that it’s Zimmerman’s world and only his comfort matters and not yours, you would have got it. Maybe your parents could have been more paranoid. Kept you locked up in the house until you turned 25 (gotta keep you from being a statistic). And then …

And then … What? Then what?

If you have a child, what do you tell them? Especially him. What do you tell him? How do you tell him as his mother or his father or his grandmother or grandfather that you, the person he loves and trusts and believes in more than anyone in the world, that you can keep him safe? How does he believe you now? He knows you’re full of shit now. He’s on Facebook. He’s heard and read about Trayvon. Someone who looked like him. Someone who was “good.” How do you tell him that if he just stays in school and is “good” it will be OK? How do you tell him to handle something like this? Not a cop, just some guy. Some crazy self-appointed neighborhood watch guy with a gun who thought he was Batman that night? If you’re a good parent you tell your kid that if some guy, some scary guy is following them, you tell him to run and if he can’t run, to defend himself. Bad men in cars do terrible things to children and teens. You tell your son, if you can’t run, if you can’t get help, do whatever you have to do to stay alive. Fight, run, call out for help, make yourself trouble. Go down fighting, if you’re going down. Don’t do the thing the stranger in the car with the gun wants you to do.

But that doesn’t keep you safe.

And the cops are so worried about how Zimmerman feels and thinks — and their precious “Kill Your Neighbors” laws, but not how a 17-year-old would react to a stranger following him in his car at night. Not how anyone in Trayvon’s situation would react.

I know how I, as a 5-foot-3-inch woman, would react to some strange man following me in a car.

The cops say maybe Trayvon would have done something “differently” if he could do it over again.

Do what? Not be born black in America where black men are viewed with suspicion no matter their age?

People, and by people I mostly mean our society as a whole, tells us that if we just do the right things and follow the rules we will be safe and our kids will be safe. But these things are lies. The onus is not on the victim to wear a longer skirt when she goes out at night. It’s on the guy who thinks it’s OK to rape her.

The impetus is not on the kid walking home from the 7-11. But on the self-proclaimed, gun-wielding, one-man-neighborhood watch, calling the Sanford Police more than 40 times in the last year. It is not Trayvon’s job, or your job or my job to make bigots feel more comfortable with us because there is no way to get their comfort. It is a lie.

No amount of goodness will fix it.

You could get rid of every thing that has ever made you feel embarrassed, every black person you ever felt fulfilled a stereotype. It doesn’t matter. Because racism is illogical. Bigotry does not need a reason to fear and act on that fear with violence. There is no different clothing you could wear. There is no different accent you could take on. There are no grades you could get that could change them. Because it doesn’t matter.

We can’t Jackie Robinson our way out of this. Some people just want to hate you. And they don’t want to change. But they really enjoy you going through the gymnastics trying — because it takes the weight off them.

Don’t apologize — Because it doesn’t matter.

In St. Louis, my hometown, folks in the county would say, it wasn’t that they didn’t like black people it was the “quality” of the black people. Why? If it were Cosby-esque doctors and lawyers moving in next door in the suburbs they’d feel just fine.

Then, when my family and tons of other black professional families moved to the ‘burbs, they fled to O’Fallon and St. Charles anyway.

But you said doctors and lawyers were “OK?” I guess bigots lie. It wasn’t really about the “right” kind of black people. Ha ha. You were “good” too, weren’t you? Cute. Didn’t mean anything. Didn’t mean a damn thing.

My favorite book, Invisible Man, tells of Anonymous and there is a letter in that story that haunts me as it haunted the unnamed narrator that says “keep this nigger boy running.”

And that’s what they do to us. They keep us running. They keep telling us it is us. That if we just made ourselves a little different, it would all go away. If we’re just good.

And then, in our goodly and true lives, they give back to us the corpse of a 17-year-old boy and say –

Take this.

Pick it up.

Before Trayvon’s murder. Before now. Before I was even 25. I realized it didn’t matter what I did. It didn’t matter what any of us did. And so I decided, I was just going to live my life, however I saw fit. And that was my protest to an unfair world. That I didn’t care about their “rules” anymore, whomever “they” may be, because their rules were lies. I would be good to those who were good to me. I’d do what was right for myself and those I loved. I wasn’t going to be ashamed of who I am because it might check a stereotypical box.

Still, though. I wondered.

A woman, much older than I, who I’ve known most of my life, used to say “I feel like my purpose in life is to make white people mad.” I used to think that what she said sounded really silly. She was born under Jim Crow (hence her tendency to talk of white people as if they’re monolithic) and was a long-time housewife. All she’d ever done was marry a nice guy and have lovely children. She’d lived a quiet, sweet sort of life, isolated from most of the drama anyone — white or black — ever has to deal with. I thought the statement was awkward and short-sighted and weird. I would smirk and brush it off. What the hell was that supposed to mean? You’re not Angela Davis, I’d think. No one is shaking in their boots at night, worried about the fur coat wearing black housewives of Florissant, MO.

Then, in a conversation with a friend of mine, Dr. Jason Johnson, I told him of what she said and he actually argued my pampered housewife had a point.

To paraphrase: “When you really think about it,” he said. “What she did … falling in love, getting married, staying at home and raising her children … that’s not what she and her ancestors were brought to this country to do. We weren’t brought here to go to college, fall in love, get married and live our lives. We were brought here to work and live the lives others wanted us to have.”

Jason said our lives as free people is a protest to this society that criminalizes a boy just for being black.

Our love for each other. Our community. Our friendships. Our bonds are a form of protest.

Because we aren’t doing what we were brought here to do.

To this end, I say, if you ever thought about not doing, loving, saying, being something that you wanted to be because you were worried about what “society” would think, stop thinking that way. There is nothing you can actually do. All you can do is live your life in the most honest way possible. Be good to those who are good to you. Love whole-heartedly. Care for your friends and family. Follow your dreams. You can’t waste any bit of your short, precious time on this Earth worrying about what some unknown bigot thinks.

Or what anyone thinks.

Because it is beyond your control.

And there is no path that promises your child will be safe. And this is the world that we live in. But you don’t have to accept anything.

Not. One. Damn. Thing.

And you don’t have to take that load and just accept the racism and injustice and crime and rape and murder in our world. Nobody owns you. They can’t make you accept that tragedy as just “part of your life.”

When the murderer pulls out the gun and takes a life and puts it back on you. You say no, you murderer. That’s your load. Pick it up.

You did it. Deal with the consequences. Whatever those may be.

Us and our children are not picking it up anymore.

No apologies.

Turnabout is Fair Play

Posted by Melvin Bray on March 6th, 2012 filed in Useful Perhaps
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A Georgia lawmaker has introduced a bill to outlaw vasectomies since they preempt procreation, functioning as a sort of pre-conception abortion.

Good for her! I think more effort needs to be put into putting privileged groups on equal footing with the legislatively objectified.

In fact, as a colleague of mine pointed out, if some religious institutions want a legislative waiver from funding women’s contraception, then they should also be legislatively prohibited from paying for erectile dysfunction treatments

“Go F@#k Yourself.”

Posted by Melvin Bray on February 9th, 2012 filed in Useful Perhaps
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I’m Proud to be Your Black Friend

Posted by Melvin Bray on February 6th, 2012 filed in Useful Perhaps
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And for all my black friends, I’m taking pre-orders for the new Negroetta Stone app Baratunde mentioned to help us translate more effectively between our divergent urban, suburban and rural experiences.

Abolition and the Wild Goose Festival

Posted by Melvin Bray on November 13th, 2011 filed in Useful Perhaps
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Howard Zinn’s analysis of the abolition of slavery quoted in the previous post knocked me on my ass. I’ve heard several analyses of what brought slavery to an end and why, but I wasn’t prepared for this one. Thus, my one word commentary–DAMN!

Zinn’s A People’s History is the first history text I’ve ever undertaken of my own volition to read from cover to cover. It is an emotionally difficult book to read by myself. It’s actually depressing at times to see how much we think of as new or breakthrough that just isn’t. As a nation, we’ve been on the same treadmill for a while in regards to many things. Every once and a while we’ll jump off, pick the treadmill up and relocate it, but I’ve had to accept that much of that movement is lateral. For instance, the run up to the 2001 US War in Iraq was in broad strokes identical to the run-up to the US Mexican War of 1845.  In similitude, post-Revolution American cities saw their own Occupy movements silenced with the same authoritarian prerogative being exercised now.

So too we see in the instigation of the US Civil War a pattern and purpose that has since repeated itself time and time again. Zinn continues his insight, “With slavery abolished by order of the government–true, a government pushed hard to do so, by blacks, free and slave, and by white abolitionists–its end could be orchestrated so as to set limits to emancipation. Liberation from the top would go only so far as the interests of the dominant groups permitted. If carried further by the momentum of war, the rhetoric of a crusade, it could be pulled back to a safer position. Thus, while the ending of slavery led to a reconstruction of national politics and economics, it was not a radical reconstruction, but a safe one–in fact, a profitable one.”

In light of Zinn’s incisive analysis, the failures of American societal integration and other attempts of sub-set diversification since all make sense. Diversification fails when it is managed so as to be “orderly” or “non-offensive” or “fair” to the already privileged because these purposes smack of the very fear and prejudice and preservation of power that diversification is meant to overcome. To abolish the tyranny of inequity, one must also abolish the purposes for which that tyranny was established: one must die to them… daily.

This brings me to the Wild Goose Festival. Ours is not the first attempt to make room for everyone to celebrate a common hope in faith, music, art and social justice. What may be distinctive, however, is that we have caught in the wind two course correctives from our lead goose, the one we’re chasing. One is that the festival is not ours alone. The other, that at its best the festival will privilege those routinely (historically) underprivileged at other such gatherings.

The implication seems pretty straight forward enough: extend ownership of the festival to those routinely underprivileged who are most committed to making room for everyone else. But once articulated, it dawns on me how seldom this is done. Most often those privileged within a particular construct try to accommodate others without abdicating power (power is privilege; privilege is power), which creates a tokenistic dynamic that inevitably breeds resentment, alienation and contention.

Now, I am not naive. Un-privileging the previously privileged will almost inevitably lead through resentment and contention as well, even for those of limited privilege in the old construct, because at least initially there is a lot of uncertainty about one's place in anything new--no one wants to risk and end up losing ground. The traditionally privileged within any construct have historically used this angst among those of limited privilege to sew seeds of doubt about the wholesale dismantling of an established order. Ask Gabriel (Prosser), Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and John Brown how effective it is. Ask Gandhi and King. It works like a charm. And because there are so few examples of social orders or organizational dynamics not built upon oppressive inequities--because there are so few who have risked such a radical (to use Zinn's term) restructuring of thinking and practice as that advocated by Jesus (what would he know?)--those of us who have reason to believe something better is possible postpone it until some distant point in an idyllic future, when happiness and peace will subdue us against our wills and not be dependent upon our good-faith energies toward maintaining it.

At the chance that my sardonic commentary in the last sentence has missed its mark, let me be clear: I don't buy it. The beauty of an earth made new costs more than some flimsy wish for a picturesque future bought and paid for by someone else's heroism. For all those mindful of such things, yes, I'm making a very theological statement (everything we do or say makes a theological statement). "Jesus paid it all" to create the possibility of "a new heaven and a new earth," but we too must give back all we accumulated under the old order to live into the new. That starts now with abolishing the structures of inequity we've tried to preserve for fear of how vulnerable a new order might leave us. So don't be surprised when you see increasing numbers of women, people of color, queer, interfaith and differently-abled participants in the crowds and on stage at WGF next year and for years to come. And get this, although they will likely be open to all respectful inquiry, their invitations in large part will be to speak about something other than being women, people of color, queer, interfaith and differently-abled.

I know! That may sound all wild-and-crazy, even unsafe, but then again, it is no tame goose that we're chasing.

DAMN!

Posted by Melvin Bray on November 8th, 2011 filed in Useful Perhaps
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“The United States government’s support of slavery was based on an overpowering practicality. In 1790, a thousand tons of cotton were being produced every year in the South. By 1860, it was a million tons. In the same period, 500,000 slaves grew to 4 million. [How's that for workforce efficiency: 1000 times the output for only 8 times the investment!] A system harried by slave rebellions and conspiracies (Gabriel Prosser, 1800; Denmark Vesey, 1822; Nat Turner, 1831) developed a network of controls in the southern states, backed by the laws, courts, armed forces, and [the unabashedly articulated] race prejudice of the nations’s political leaders.

“It would take either a full-scale slave rebellion or a full-scale war to end such a deeply entrenched system. If a rebellion, it might get out of hand, and turn its ferocity beyond slavery to the most successful system of capitalist enrichment in the world. If a war, those who made the war would organized its consequences. Hence, it was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves, not John Brown. In 1859, John Brown was hanged, with federal complicity, for attempting to do by small-scale violence what Lincoln would do by large-scale violence [just a few] years later–end slavery.”

-Howard Zinn, “Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom,” A People’s History of the United States