I posted my thoughts about her and this song, I'm a Rainbow, here on October 23, 2010.

Labels: African Americans, American Culture, Anarchism, Obituaries, YouTube

As you might have expected, BART overreacted to the protest called by Anonymous:

The busy evening commute out of downtown San Francisco gave way Monday to a chaotic cat-and-mouse game between police officers and roving protesters who lashed out at the transit agency for temporarily shutting down underground cellular phone service last week.

BART closed all four downtown San Francisco stations - Civic Center, Powell, Montgomery and Embarcadero - soon after the protest began at 5 p.m. Officers in riot gear blocked entrances as many train riders fumed on the sidewalks and tried to figure out how to get home. All stations were reopened by 7:30 p.m.

BART is playing a high stakes game, trying to inflame its commuter ridership against protesters angry at the agency's police violence and suppression of cell phone communication. According to Mission Local, the station closures had the absurd result of enabling about 150 protesters to strand hundreds of commuters. Politically, it has an obvious allure, but ignores the possibility that the protesters and their supporters can make the operation of the system extremely difficult.

It is possible that the BART response is indicative of a more serious governmental concern, the fear that thousands of people may attempt to shut down services essential to day to day economic activity within cities in response to policies of austerity and militarism. If one evaluates the pictures of threatening riot police at various downtown BART stations in this light, it makes more sense. Hence, the deployment, which creates a comical first impression, is designed to normalize such actions in the future as an appropriate response to any form of political protest or unrest.

Of course, the commuters find themselves in the middle. One woman complained that she couldn't get to her children's preschool on time to pick them up. As the parent of a four and a half year old, I empathize, but it is worth noting that Oscar Grant doesn't have to worry about this sort of thing anymore in regard to his young daughter. BART police officer Johannes Mehserle killed him. Sometimes, it is important to see beyond your immediate needs.

Labels: Activism, African Americans, BART Killing, Bay Area, California, Racism

Anonymous has announced a protest today in response BART 's decision to shut off cell phone service last week in response to a belief that there would be protests at stations in downtown San Francisco over the killings of Oscar Grant and Charles Blair Hill. Meanwhile, BART wants everyone to understand that protest is verboten at any of its transit stations.

Labels: Activism, African Americans, BART Killing, Bay Area, California, Racism

Just to show that I'm not entirely devoid of sentimentality:

And all the colors that you see, are all a part of me, in this crazy world of mine. Has anyone ever so concisely captured the personal alienation that so many of us feel from the world in which we live? Such a lightning flash of recognition can lead people to travel down many paths, including, but not necessarily, political activism. For my money, Donna Summer remains one of the most unappreciated pop musicians of my lifetime because of the racially tinged ridicule of disco. Another of my favorites, On the Radio, was a prominent feature on the soundtrack of an excellent, but now forgotten, Jodie Foster film, Foxes, where it was used to ironically comment upon the naive expectations of the teen protagonists in a jaded, late 1970s Los Angeles. Apparently, I'm a Rainbow was recorded in 1981, but not released until 1996. One of the impressive subtleties of this composition by her husband for her is the thread of self-doubt (or is it self-awareness?) that runs throughout: I'm a rainbow and sometimes I can shine.

Rarely have the personal and the political been as brilliantly fused as in this 1964 Holland-Dozier-Holland composition for Diana Ross and the Supremes. As accurately noted by wikipedia: The song seemed to strike a chord in the USA as, while on one level it can be seen as a simple tale of a failed relationship, it can also been as capturing the spirit of the time after the assassination of JFK, racial tension, deepening problems in Vietnam and foreseeing the end of the early optimism of the 1960s.

But, at the gut level, this reaction by someone over at YouTube has it exactly right:

When this song came out I was 13 yrs old and my best friend Denise and I were walking up the street listing to the radio and it just blew my mind. I started walking backwards and she and I walked up Clinton Ave and I said, "Denise, this song will last FOREVER!" And it has.

And, finally, along similar lines, there is Angie, the Rolling Stones' valedictory to the communal spirit of the late 1960s:

Angie, Angie, when will all those clouds all disappear, Angie, Angie, where will it lead us from here, with no lovin' in our soul and no money in our coat, you can say we're satisfied, Angie, Angie, you can't say we never tried . . .

Typically, the Stones gave expression to a stark pessimism, which suggested a socially Darwinian future. Being the good cultural capitalists that they are, though, they continued to flourish by highlighting the sybaritic aspect of their music to the detriment of its other, more ambivalent qualities, so as to be compatible with Reaganism. If there could be said to be a pop music representation of neoliberalism, the Rolling Stones would be a strong candidate for it.

Labels: African Americans, American Culture, Music, Neoliberalism, YouTube

On Saturday night, I had a rare opportunity to go to the theatre, and decided to see a production of August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean at The Next Stage. It was a small, intimate production in a theatre that does not hold more than 75 people. After seeing this play, as well as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, it is clear to me that very few American artists have ever examined the interwoven themes of race, class, identity, migration and capitalist exploitation with the insight of Wilson. His work has a significance beyond the admittedly important African American world in which they are situated. If you watch one of his plays, you are perpetually compelled to confront theory with the reality of lived experience.

In Gem, there is an especially important way in which this happens, through the profound question of forgiveness, and the extent to which it is an essential feature of any enduring community, and hence, any effective political movement. Set in 1904, the narrative in Gem is centered around the decision of a factory worker to jump into the river and drown himself instead facing punishment for something that he didn't do, stealing a bucket of nails. Afterwards, the man who did take the nails, Citizen Barlow, arrives at Aunt Ester's, the home of an elderly women known for her ability to clean souls.

Barlow admits that he took the nails, and plaintatively asks, why didn't he come out of the water? Ester has the answer: He'd rather die innocent than live guilty, suggesting that the man evaded the injustice of the world in which he lived through death, an extreme form of protest. And the other African American workers respond to it that way, thereafter refusing to work, despite a severe economic downturn. But the essential question is the fate of Barlow within the larger community.

Despite what some might expect, Ester and her circle of friends do not condemn Barlow to the life of an outcast. Instead, Ester washes his soul by compelling him to confront the traumatic experience of being transported from Africa to the United States as all of their ancestors were. Here, bound by imaginary chains, Barlow must seize the opportunity to confess his misdeed to all of the other captives, or be alone forever. Peter had three chances, you may not get another one, implores Ester. Wilson brings out the truth that people invariably do terrible things, but they are only lost when they are separated from their collective identity. In this, curiously enough, his perspective is reminiscent of the German anarchist Landauer, who emphasized that we embody all of those who came before us.

It is an important subject for the American left, and possibly even the global left, which has been notorious for sectarian condemnation and intrigue. Instead of extending a hand to those with whom we disagree, and even personally dislike, we have been all to willing to shove them through the door. For African Americans, as represented by Wilson, the price of such expulsions is too high, as they need all the help that they can get surviving in a country dominated by whites. More personally, there is a bond amongst all going back to slavery days that is emotionally hard to sever, even with someone who treats his own people as harshly as the black cop, Caesar. Thus, the emphasis is upon rehabilitation, with the characters in Gem celebrating Barlow's return from the metaphorical slave ship, ecstatic that he understands his familial bond with those who struggled against slavery and continue to do so against industrial exploitation. Similarly, we should also retain our association with those who share vision of the future, even if we have intense disagreements and conflicts.

Two examples may serve to illustrate the principle. In the last month or so, I have published two posts critical of Chomsky's perspective on Palestine, and, particularly, the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Several years ago, I disagreed with his statement that the US should bring back the draft. With a few exceptions, I have focused upon the substance of what Chomsky has said, not upon Chomsky personally. Without question, Chomsky is a titan of the global left and nothing will ever change that. But we can, and should think for ourselves and persist in our own views when we believe them to be correct. Most importantly, we should extend the same respect that we give Chomsky to all other leftists. In other words, we should not mitigate Chomsky's perceived errors, while mercilessly punishing others who lack his record of achievement and popular support. Instead, we should respectfully disagree when appropriate without seeking to ostracize anyone.

Here is another example. I frequently comment on blogs like Lenin's Tomb and The Unrepentant Marxist, even though I am not a Leninist like Richard Seymour and Louis Proyect, the people responsible for these blogs. I am open about being anarchist influenced, and Seymour seems fine with it, Proyect less so, probably because I was a little too strident in criticizing his overly broad characterizations of anarchists. I visit both blogs because I find them informative, and refuse to allow my access to information and my ability to communicate with others to be compromised by sectarianism. Someone I highly respect told me awhile ago that they refused to buy Seymour's book, The Liberal Defence of Murder, even though he believed that it was probably pretty good, because Seymour is affiliated with the British Socialist Workers Party. Despite the entryism and sectarianism that many associate with the SWP, you can still read Seymour's book without endorsing them.

Perhaps, there are some Leninists and anarchists out there who consider my perspective too infused by the residue of Christianity. But Wilson has an answer to this in Gem as well. Nearly all the characters justify their social attitudes by references to Christ or the Bible. However, in all instances, with the exception of Caesar, they are quite radical, prioritizing the needs of people over the profits of whites and the wealthy. Instead of seeing such people as impaired by their Christian faith, it may be more accurate to understand them as invoking Christian utopianism in the service of an egalitarian enterprise.

Labels: African Americans, American Culture, Anarchism, Marxism

Prometheus 6 said it best: I guess it's time to get over my childhood crush. From the Guardian:

A handful of decades ago the roles for black performers in Hollywood movies were deliberately kept peripheral to the plots, so that their appearances could easily be edited out for screenings in the American south. Black singers and musicians were barred from taking rooms in the same hotels in which they were performing. Partners in an interracial marriage might decide to leave the US and move to more hospitable locations, such as Paris, to avoid hate mail and threats. All this and more happened to the singer and actor Lena Horne, who has died aged 92.

Horne not only rose above it all, but also significantly contributed to changing the situation. The velvet-voiced, multi-talented Horne first negotiated, and then resisted, the worst that a racist entertainment industry could throw at her. She rose to its summit as an original creative artist and a free woman whose style, beauty, eloquence and independence made her a role model for millions.

Horne shared stages with Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Billy Eckstine, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and many other legends of American music during her long and varied career.

She became one of the first African Americans to cross the music-business colour divide and tour with an all-white band, singing for the successful Charlie Barnet swing orchestra in 1940 and sometimes sleeping in the band bus when hotels would not let her enter with her colleagues. She became a favourite pin-up among black servicemen, but would nonetheless refuse to perform on wartime tours in which black GIs were either excluded from the audience, or on occasion placed behind the German PoWs in the seating arrangements.

Indeed, it seemed that just about every aspect of her life was a provocation:

. . . She had been singing at the Manhattan nightclub Café Society when the impresario Felix Young chose her to star at the Trocadero, a nightclub he was planning to open in Hollywood in the fall of 1941. In 1990, Ms. Horne reminisced: My only friends were the group of New Yorkers who sort of stuck with their own group — like Vincente, Gene Kelly, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Richard Whorf — the sort of hip New Yorkers who allowed Paul Robeson and me in their houses.

Since blacks were not allowed to live in Hollywood, Felix Young, a white man, signed for the house as if he was going to rent it, Ms. Horne said. When the neighbors found out, Humphrey Bogart, who lived right across the street from me, raised hell with them for passing around a petition to get rid of me. Bogart, she said, sent word over to the house that if anybody bothered me, please let him know. . .

In 1945 the critic and screenwriter Frank Nugent wrote in Liberty magazine that Ms. Horne was “the nation’s top Negro entertainer.” In addition to her MGM salary of $1,000 a week, she was earning $1,500 for every radio appearance and $6,500 a week when she played nightclubs. She was also popular with servicemen, white and black, during World War II, appearing more than a dozen times on the Army radio program Command Performance.

The whole thing that made me a star was the war, Ms. Horne said in the 1990 interview. Of course the black guys couldn’t put Betty Grable’s picture in their footlockers. But they could put mine.

Touring Army camps for the U.S.O., Ms. Horne was outspoken in her criticism of the way black soldiers were treated. So the U.S.O. got mad, she recalled. And they said, ‘You’re not going to be allowed to go anyplace anymore under our auspices.’ So from then on I was labeled a bad little Red girl. . .

And in 1947, when Ms. Horne herself married a white man — the prominent arranger, conductor and pianist Lennie Hayton, who was for many years both her musical director and MGM’s — the marriage took place in France and was kept secret for three years.

And, there was this:

Horne's long-suppressed anger over the treatment of blacks in white society erupted in 1960 when she overheard a drunk white man at the Luau restaurant in Beverly Hills refer to her using a racial epithet.

Jumping up, she threw an ashtray, a table lamp and several glasses at him, cutting the man's forehead.

When reports of her outburst appeared in newspapers across the country, Horne was surprised at the positive response, mostly from African Americans.

Phone calls and telegrams came in from all over, she told the Christian Science Monitor in 1984. It was the first time it struck me that black people related to each other in bigger ways than I realized.

Not surprisingly, Horne was one of the strongest, most publicly visible voices for civil rights in the 1960s.

Labels: African Americans, American Culture, Music, Obituaries, Racism, YouTube

Being a high profile Obama supporter, as Melissa Harris-Lacewell is, creates some problems of cognitive dissonance, as well as an impairment of one's ability to interpret historical events:

I often begin my political science courses with a brief introduction to the idea of "the state." The state is the entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, force and coercion. If an individual travels to another country and kills its citizens, we call it terrorism. If the state does it, we call it war. If a man kills his neighbor it is murder; if the state does it is the death penalty. If an individual takes his neighbor's money, it is theft; if the state does it, it is taxation.

To the extent that a state is challenged as the sole, legitimate owner of the tools of violence, force, and coercion, it is challenged at its core. This is why "state's rights" led to secession and Civil War. The legitimacy of the central state was challenged, then reestablished. It is also why the Civil Rights Movement was so powerful. The overt abuse of state power evidenced by the violence of Southern police called into question their foundational legitimacy. The federal government had to act or risk losing its authority as a state altogether.

Which leads us to March 2010.

The Tea Party is a challenge to the legitimacy of the U.S. state. When Tea Party participants charge the current administration with various forms of totalitarianism, they are arguing that this government has no right to levy taxes or make policy. Many GOP elected officials offered nearly secessionist rhetoric from the floor of Congress this weekend. They joined as co-conspirators with the Tea Party protesters by arguing that this government has no monopoly on legitimacy.

I appreciate the parallels to the civil rights movement drawn by the MSNBC crowd, but they are inadequate. When protesters spit on and scream at duly elected representatives of the United States government it is more than act of racism. It is an act of sedition.

John Lewis is no longer just a brave American fighting for the soul of his country- he is an elected official. He is an embodiment of the state.

There is much to admire about Harris-Lacewell, and her approach to social life and politics. In the early stages of the 2008 presidential campaign, I appreciated the way that she conducted herself in her confrontation with Gloria Steinem. She has championed the plight of the people of New Orleans since Katrina, and certainly doesn't deserve being demeaned by being described as a whore, even if she was defending the refusal of the Obama administration to release torture photographs, and believes that reconciliation is a better approach for dealing with the perpetrators than prosecution. But her recent article in The Nation about the tea party movement is one of the oddest expressions of progressive thought that I have encountered in quite some time.

Where to begin? Well, first of all, there is the unquestioning acceptance that the state's monopoly on the use of violence as a modernizing force, one that results in greater security and prosperity for all. Is she not unaware that the slave trade was facilitated by the British state and its American colonies, and then accepted and institutionalized by the US one that followed? Slavery was not part of the underground economy, it was legally accepted by both the UK and the US, and regulated by both. People could invest in slave ships, and call upon the legal system to enforce their contract rights, obtain redress against fraud and, of course, recover their property or the monetary equivalent. Indeed, the US Supreme Court acknowledged it with the notorious Dred Scott decision in 1857.

Conversely, figures like Nat Turner and John Brown acted outside the state, and, necessarily, outside the law, when they sought to induce African Americans to liberate themselves. And this is not a question of historical antiquity. Today, it is the state that criminalizes drugs and controlled substances, it is the state that incarcerates poor people and people of color in large numbers as a result and it is the state has enforced neoliberal policies that have impoverished the lower middle class and lower class, policies that, coincidentally, continue to be mercilessly implemented by the man Harris-Lacewell supported for President, Barack Obama.

Her belief that the federal government finally enforced civil rights because it would have otherwise lost its authority strikes me as implausible. Even if it had not done so, the federal government possessed the military and police power to maintain order, with the covert suppression of the Black Panthers as an example of what it would have done more broadly had it been necessary to do so. Instead, there are more prosaic explanations for the end of segregation: the rejection of it by millions of Americans in their personal lives, and a recognition by capital that integration could serve as the foundation of a new American brand with trasnational appeal that would increase its economic and cultural power at home and abroad. Just Do It with Michael Jordan and the multicultural allure of the US in Europe and Asia are unimaginable if segregation had persisted. Of course, the US may have taken on more fascistic characteristics had it persisted in preserving segregation, but it, contrary to what she says, had the power to do so.

Internationally, the picture is equally bleak. Around the world, middle class people have been increasingly proletarianized, and lower middle class ones sub-proletarianized, that is, informalized, required to work without a guaranteed minimum wage, health care or pension, without any labor protections, because of the power of the state to enforce the demands of capital. Resistance is suppressed through economic coercion, and, if necessary, through military force, all carried out through state instrumentalities. Furthermore, it is the state that now asserts the authority to seize anyone anywhere in the world and subject them to indefinite detention and torture.

But, never mind, Harris-Lacewell is worried about the Tea Party. Admittedly, there is much to find contemptible about it, many of its participants espouse beliefs that are highly objectionable and often offensive. But the notion that the Tea Party constitutes a threat to the legitimacy of the U. S. state is absurd. The Tea Party participants are not anti-state, rather they want to take control of the government at all levels in order to impose their vision of society, as muddled as it is. They would not dissolve state structures, nor would they diminish the power of the police and the military, both of which rely upon the state for resources and legal authority.

No doubt, there would be more turmoil if the Tea Party attained any significant political power, but all states experience turmoil, and to analogize such turmoil with a crisis of legitimacy such as the USSR experienced in the 1970s and 1980s is not very credible. One need only look at the intensity of violent protest that has taken place in the People's Republic of China in recent years, protest that goes far beyond the Tea Party, to understand that states can weather quite a lot of turmoil. And, more importantly, the Tea Party, much like the most radical elements within 1960s protest movements, cannot generate support with most middle and lower middle class Americans. It will soon fade, but there is no sign that the economic distress that afflects most Americans will, and that is far more dangerous than Tea Party participants.

But that's the point, isn't it? Harris-Lacewell, as an Obama supporter, can't malign him, and baldly state, as Frank Rich often does, that Obama's policies present the peril of greater and greater social unrest, unless abandoned. As with health care, where the Tea Party served as Rahm Emanuel's New Model Army for the defeat of tepid progressive demands for a public option and an overall redistributive proposal for the benefit of middle and lower income Americans, it now serves the purpose of creating a binary opposition between Obama and the Tea Party that permits Obama to continue to govern in the interests of transnational capital. One or the other: choose now. You are either with us or against us. Sound familiar?

Finally, Harris-Lacewell's contention that yelling obscenities and spitting on John Lewis constitutes sedition is, there is no other way to politely say it, bizarre. Offensive, yes, a low level battery, possibly. But sedition? Old school politicians of the days when large cities were governed by machines would have found this assertion comical, and rightly so. And, what about her statement that John Lewis was more than just John Lewis, he was, in this instance, an embodiment of the state?

Was I the only person who read this and thought, wait a minute, how can Lewis be an embodiment of the state, when the state that he purportedly represents has rejected most of his recommended policies for decades? I guess she meant it symbolically, but, even then, what makes Lewis more of an embodiment of the state than you and me? It's hard to answer, isn't it, because there isn't one. And, what is the importance of him being an embodiment of the state, anyway? Does this mean that Harris-Lacewell now considers flag burning a seditious act, too? Apparently, there is an of elitism that runs through her political thought, an elitism that contains a thread of the royalism of past centuries.

Labels: African Americans, American Empire, Barack Obama, Neoliberalism, Political Violence, Sub-Proletarianization of America, The Nation

See you in 2010, originally posted on December 3, 2009

Yesterday, David Reynolds, a CUNY Graduate Center professor who wrote a courageous, groundbreaking biography of John Brown published in 2005, emphasized the necessity of rehabilitating him:

It's important for Americans to recognize our national heroes, even those who have been despised by history. Take John Brown.

Today is the 150th anniversary of Brown’s hanging — the grim punishment for his raid weeks earlier on Harpers Ferry, Va. With a small band of abolitionists, Brown had seized the federal arsenal there and freed slaves in the area. His plan was to flee with them to nearby mountains and provoke rebellions in the South. But he stalled too long in the arsenal and was captured. He was brought to trial in a Virginia court, convicted of treason, murder and inciting an insurrection, and hanged on Dec. 2, 1859.

It’s a date we should hold in reverence. Yes, I know the response: Why remember a misguided fanatic and his absurd plan for destroying slavery?

There are compelling reasons. First, the plan was not absurd. Brown reasonably saw the Appalachians, which stretch deep into the South, as an ideal base for a guerrilla war. He had studied the Maroon rebels of the West Indies, black fugitives who had used mountain camps to battle colonial powers on their islands. His plan was to create panic by arousing fears of a slave rebellion, leading Southerners to view slavery as dangerous and impractical.

Second, he was held in high esteem by many great men of his day. Ralph Waldo Emerson compared him to Jesus, declaring that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Henry David Thoreau placed Brown above the freedom fighters of the American Revolution. Frederick Douglass said that while he had lived for black people, John Brown had died for them. A later black reformer, W. E. B. Du Bois, called Brown the white American who had “come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.”

Du Bois was right. Unlike nearly all other Americans of his era, John Brown did not have a shred of racism. He had long lived among African-Americans, trying to help them make a living, and he wanted blacks to be quickly integrated into American society. When Brown was told he could have a clergyman to accompany him to the gallows, he refused, saying he would be more honored to go with a slave woman and her children.

Reynolds concludes with a request that Brown receive a posthumous presidential pardon, and you can go here to sign a petition encouraging Obama to issue it. Despite the passage of time, the life of John Brown still touches upon the rawest of nerves in the American experience.

While subsequent revisionist historians succeeded in stigmatizing him as part of a broader project to justify the emergence of the New South and the segregation that replaced slavery, many people, such as myself, have always known better, and held him in our hearts. Many of us preserved a different, almost folkloric, rememberance of Brown at odds with mainstream historical accounts. The intensity of the stigmatization merely reflected the desperation of those who recognized that they could never erase his shining example as a man who, despite his flaws, never shrank from confronting the most horrific injustice of his time.

Make no mistake. Brown retains enemies to this day, not because of his recourse to violence, after all, if there is one common thread that runs through much of American history, it is violence, violence to seize lands from Native Americans, violence to bring African Americans here as slaves and maintain control over them, violence to expand the frontier from the Appalachians to the Pacific Ocean and beyond, violence to impose a neoliberal economic order upon peoples and states who resist it.

Indeed, violence is, as H. Rap Brown once said, as American as cherry pie. If Barack Obama proved anything by his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, it is the continuing accuracy of this acid assessment. So, no, John Brown was not maligned because he was violent, because to do so would have required the condemnation of many of the most prominent American social and political figures of the last 233 years. Non violence is for the opponents of American imperial designs, not for those who facilitate them.

Instead, Brown is considered beyond the pale because he resorted to violence to try to free the slaves. It was the purpose, and not the method, that resulted in his condemnation. And, more than that, he did not insist upon a white monopoly upon the use of violence for this purpose, but sought to empower the slaves to free themselves by seizing the arsenal at Harper's Ferry in order to distribute weapons to them. Brown believed that enslaved African Americans had the ability to free themselves and should be assisted in the endeavor.

In this respect, as well as his reliance upon the past examples of black rebels like Toussaint L'ouverture in Haiti, Brown foreshadowed the national liberation movements of the 20th Century. Not surprisingly, Toussaint L'ouverture also finds himself exiled to the same circle of historical oblivion as Brown because his life runs counter to the modernization mythology that still infuses much of our perspective about US and European imperialism. Brown was no socialist, but, in a sense, he was actually more radical than many leftists of the time, because he embraced the notion of a multicultural society wherein capital did not exploit racial and class divisions to its advantage, similar to the sort of polyglot social formations described by historians like Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker.

Paradoxically, if one believes that Brown made the Civil War inevitable, he accelerated the transformation of the US from an agrarian economy to an industrial one, one in which his utopian vision of white, black, red, brown and yellow struggling together on the frontier as individualists bound together collectively was overwhelmed by the emergence of a working class in the mill and in the slaughterhouse. The steam engine, the railroad and the manufacturing processes that emerged during the war rendered his vision obsolete. As Brown stood on the scaffold, he was frozen in that moment when the workers of America were about to be proletarianized on a massive scale.

But Brown not only rejected the white monopoly on violence, he challenged the state monopoly on it as well. He did not, like the Project for a New American Century, petition the government to launch a war to achieve his end, the eradication of slavery. He trained and provisioned his own group for this purpose, a 19th Century example of an affinity group, as it were, with a well thought out plan for igniting a slave insurrection. In this, he prefigures propaganda by the deed, much as his earlier life, such as his homesteads, his attempt to break the wool monopoly, his farming in an integrated community in upstate New York and his participation in the underground railroad, prefigured the anarchist emphasis upon the creation of social institutions independent of the government, mutual aid and free agreement. No one had to explain the concept of direct action to John Brown, he was too busy living it.

Labels: Activism, African Americans, American Culture, Anarchism, From the Archives, Obituaries, Political Violence, Racism

Yesterday, David Reynolds, a CUNY Graduate Center professor who wrote a courageous, groundbreaking biography of John Brown published in 2005, emphasized the necessity of rehabilitating him:

It's important for Americans to recognize our national heroes, even those who have been despised by history. Take John Brown.

Today is the 150th anniversary of Brown’s hanging — the grim punishment for his raid weeks earlier on Harpers Ferry, Va. With a small band of abolitionists, Brown had seized the federal arsenal there and freed slaves in the area. His plan was to flee with them to nearby mountains and provoke rebellions in the South. But he stalled too long in the arsenal and was captured. He was brought to trial in a Virginia court, convicted of treason, murder and inciting an insurrection, and hanged on Dec. 2, 1859.

It’s a date we should hold in reverence. Yes, I know the response: Why remember a misguided fanatic and his absurd plan for destroying slavery?

There are compelling reasons. First, the plan was not absurd. Brown reasonably saw the Appalachians, which stretch deep into the South, as an ideal base for a guerrilla war. He had studied the Maroon rebels of the West Indies, black fugitives who had used mountain camps to battle colonial powers on their islands. His plan was to create panic by arousing fears of a slave rebellion, leading Southerners to view slavery as dangerous and impractical.

Second, he was held in high esteem by many great men of his day. Ralph Waldo Emerson compared him to Jesus, declaring that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Henry David Thoreau placed Brown above the freedom fighters of the American Revolution. Frederick Douglass said that while he had lived for black people, John Brown had died for them. A later black reformer, W. E. B. Du Bois, called Brown the white American who had “come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.”

Du Bois was right. Unlike nearly all other Americans of his era, John Brown did not have a shred of racism. He had long lived among African-Americans, trying to help them make a living, and he wanted blacks to be quickly integrated into American society. When Brown was told he could have a clergyman to accompany him to the gallows, he refused, saying he would be more honored to go with a slave woman and her children.

Reynolds concludes with a request that Brown receive a posthumous presidential pardon, and you can go here to sign a petition encouraging Obama to issue it. Despite the passage of time, the life of John Brown still touches upon the rawest of nerves in the American experience.

While subsequent revisionist historians succeeded in stigmatizing him as part of a broader project to justify the emergence of the New South and the segregation that replaced slavery, many people, such as myself, have always known better, and held him in our hearts. Many of us preserved a different, almost folkloric, rememberance of Brown at odds with mainstream historical accounts. The intensity of the stigmatization merely reflected the desperation of those who recognized that they could never erase his shining example as a man who, despite his flaws, never shrank from confronting the most horrific injustice of his time.

Make no mistake. Brown retains enemies to this day, not because of his recourse to violence, after all, if there is one common thread that runs through much of American history, it is violence, violence to seize lands from Native Americans, violence to bring African Americans here as slaves and maintain control over them, violence to expand the frontier from the Appalachians to the Pacific Ocean and beyond, violence to impose a neoliberal economic order upon peoples and states who resist it.

Indeed, violence is, as H. Rap Brown once said, as American as cherry pie. If Barack Obama proved anything by his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, it is the continuing accuracy of this acid assessment. So, no, John Brown was not maligned because he was violent, because to do so would have required the condemnation of many of the most prominent American social and political figures of the last 233 years. Non violence is for the opponents of American imperial designs, not for those who facilitate them.

Instead, Brown is considered beyond the pale because he resorted to violence to try to free the slaves. It was the purpose, and not the method, that resulted in his condemnation. And, more than that, he did not insist upon a white monopoly upon the use of violence for this purpose, but sought to empower the slaves to free themselves by seizing the arsenal at Harper's Ferry in order to distribute weapons to them. Brown believed that enslaved African Americans had the ability to free themselves and should be assisted in the endeavor.

In this respect, as well as his reliance upon the past examples of black rebels like Toussaint L'ouverture in Haiti, Brown foreshadowed the national liberation movements of the 20th Century. Not surprisingly, Toussaint L'ouverture also finds himself exiled to the same circle of historical oblivion as Brown because his life runs counter to the modernization mythology that still infuses much of our perspective about US and European imperialism. Brown was no socialist, but, in a sense, he was actually more radical than many leftists of the time, because he embraced the notion of a multicultural society wherein capital did not exploit racial and class divisions to its advantage, similar to the sort of polyglot social formations described by historians like Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker.

Paradoxically, if one believes that Brown made the Civil War inevitable, he accelerated the transformation of the US from an agrarian economy to an industrial one, one in which his utopian vision of white, black, red, brown and yellow struggling together on the frontier as individualists bound together collectively was overwhelmed by the emergence of a working class in the mill and in the slaughterhouse. The steam engine, the railroad and the manufacturing processes that emerged during the war rendered his vision obsolete. As Brown stood on the scaffold, he was frozen in that moment when the workers of America were about to be proletarianized on a massive scale.

But Brown not only rejected the white monopoly on violence, he challenged the state monopoly on it as well. He did not, like the Project for a New American Century, petition the government to launch a war to achieve his end, the eradication of slavery. He trained and provisioned his own group for this purpose, a 19th Century example of an affinity group, as it were, with a well thought out plan for igniting a slave insurrection. In this, he prefigures propaganda by the deed, much as his earlier life, such as his homesteads, his attempt to break the wool monopoly, his farming in an integrated community in upstate New York and his participation in the underground railroad, prefigured the anarchist emphasis upon the creation of social institutions independent of the government, mutual aid and free agreement. No one had to explain the concept of direct action to John Brown, he was too busy living it.

Labels: Activism, African Americans, American Culture, Anarchism, Obituaries, Political Violence, Racism

Former Atlanta Constitution and Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Nelson is dead. Very few journalists successfully challenged the official version of history as he did:

The next year Mr. Nelson went to Selma, Ala., when Sheriff Jim Clark’s deputies and state troopers arrested more than 3,000 demonstrators there, beating many of them, as they demanded that blacks be allowed to register to vote. Mr. Nelson covered the Selma-to-Montgomery freedom marches, including Bloody Sunday, on March 7, 1965, when 600 marchers were attacked with billy clubs and tear gas.

Then came a scoop. On March 25, Viola Liuzzo, a white housewife from Detroit, was killed by gunfire from a passing car as she and another civil rights worker were driving from Selma to Montgomery. The next day four Ku Klux Klan members were arrested.

“Nelson sensed immediately that there was an untold story in how the F.B.I. had cracked the case so speedily,” Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote in their book “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation” (Knopf, 2006).

“He began tapping the network of law enforcement sources he had started cultivating during his years as an investigative reporter,” the authors added. “Within days, he supplied readers of The Los Angeles Times with the answer: One of the four men in the Klan car when the shots were fired was an undercover F.B.I. informant. It was a remarkable exclusive.”

Another exclusive came in February 1968, when three black students were shot to death and 27 others were wounded by state troopers at South Carolina State College, a black college in Orangeburg. The troopers claimed that the students had charged them, hurling bottles and bricks.

Mr. Nelson went to the local hospital, introduced himself as “Nelson, with the Atlanta bureau” — he did not say “F.B.I.” — and asked to see the victims’ medical records. What he revealed became known as the Orangeburg massacre.

“It was eye-popping; they were shot in the soles of their feet, in the back of the head,” Mr. Nelson said in the interview. “Even today, if you ask somebody about the Orangeburg massacre, hardly anybody has a clue. But if you ask about Kent State, where it was white people, everybody knows about it.”

In 1970, Mr. Nelson learned that the F.B.I., in a sting operation, had given two Ku Klux Klansmen $36,500 to enroll Kathy Ainsworth, a sympathizer, pretending that it was for a plot to dynamite the home of a Jewish businessman in Meridian, Miss. When she and another Klansman arrived with the dynamite, a gun battle broke out and Ms. Ainsworth was killed.

“Nelson’s story of entrapment and the use of agents provocateurs raised more moral and legal questions than the F.B.I. was prepared to answer,” Time magazine wrote in October 1970. “Ever since, Nelson has been on the F.B.I.’s list of untouchable people.”

Most people under the age of 40 probably have trouble believing that journalists have been anything other than stenographers for the power elite. And, admittedly, a lot of them always have been. But not Jack Nelson.

Labels: African Americans, Civil Rights, Mainstream Media, Obituaries, Police, Racism

October 16, 1859
Harper's Ferry, Virginia

Labels: Activism, African Americans, American Empire, Political Violence, Racism

Hurricane Katrina made landfall four years ago, resulting in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in American history. Sadly, the horrific ripples seem to just spread wider and wider with the passage of time, as reported by Newsweek last fall:

Even before the storm, they were some of the country's neediest kids. Now, the children of Katrina who stayed longest in ramshackle government trailer parks in Baton Rouge are the sickest I have ever seen in the U.S., says Irwin Redlener, president of the Children's Health Fund and a professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. According to a new report by CHF and Mailman focusing on 261 displaced children, the well-being of the poorest Katrina kids has declined to an alarming level since the hurricane. Forty-one percent are anemic—twice the rate found in children in New York City homeless shelters, and more than twice the CDC's record rate for high-risk minorities. More than half the kids have mental-health problems. And 42 percent have respiratory infections and disorders that may be linked to formaldehyde and crowding in the trailers, the last of which FEMA finally closed in May. The unending bureaucratic haggling at federal and state levels over how to provide services and rebuild health centers for the Gulf's poor has made a bad situation much worse, says Redlener: As awful as the initial response to Katrina looked on television, it's been dwarfed by the ineptitude and disorganization of the recovery.

The low income victims of Katrina remain an internally displaced people, expelled, ostracized, abandoned.

Hat tips to Teddy Partridge and Peterr.

Labels: African Americans, Hurricane Katrina, Neoliberalism

Reverend Ike, dead at 74. I remember seeing his videotaped sermons on television in the 1970s.

UPDATE: Branded a Heretic: Reverend Ike reflects upon his popularization of the Prosperity Gospel in the African American community. He is, in my view, a figure who deserves greater attention for shaping the social values of the world in which we live today. He masterfully exploited radio, television, and even direct mail to reach a mass audience. His emphasis upon self-empowerment was praiseworthy, his unwillingness to place it within a collective context a grave defect. All in all, he will probably be remembered as someone who spiritually legitimized the aspirations of the African American middle class in the post-civil rights era. In this respect, he is probably equal to, and perhaps, even more significant than, the much more highly publicized Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. Without question, he was one of the most charismatic figures that I have ever encountered through the media.

Labels: African Americans, American Culture, Obituaries, Religion, YouTube

Labels: African Americans, American Culture, Police, Racism

And don't neglect to read the comments, and the articles linked there.

Labels: African Americans, American Culture, Police, Racism

During the course of my recent travel in Georgia and North Carolina, I introduced my young son to relatives there that had never seen him before. Naturally, they were delighted to see him. But I also learned more about the severity of the recession.

One of my aunts lives in Dalton, Georgia, a city in the Appalachian foothills that describes itself as the carpet capital of the world. Indeed, there are numerous plants sprinkled throughout the region that produce carpet. Unfortunately, with the collapse of new home construction, there isn't much demand for it anymore. Perhaps as many as half of the plants there have been shuttered. Unemployment in Whitfield County, the county where Dalton is located, is officially 12.5%, the highest in Georgia, comparable to the most devastated areas of the Rust Belt, like Detroit.

Last Saturday, we drove down the Old Dixie Highway into town to go to the grocery store. There were numerous empty store fronts along the way, and, at one point, I observed a Latino family in front of one of them, a family with a little girl, displaying some used children's toys in a row, including a tricycle. By the time that we passed them again on our return, about half an hour later, numerous other household items, including a microwave, had been added. Upon seeing the microwave, it dawned on me: the family is selling everything to return to Mexico.

An era of economic development in north Georgia was coming to a sad close, with the most bitter consequences for those who had arrived too late to permanently established themselves and their families. Back in the mid-1980s, the cities and counties of north Georgia discovered that they had one of the lowest percentages of high school graduates proceeding to college in the United States. Work in the carpet plants was sufficiently renumerative to enable these graduates to live quite comfortably, given the low cost of living there. Embarrassed local elites adopted a conscious policy of encouraging young people to go to college, while actively recruiting undocumented people from Mexico to serve as a workforce in the growing carpet industry.

By the mid-1990s, Dalton resembled a Southwestern city more than it did a Deep South one. Local political and business leaders mediated disputes between a growing, Spanish speaking immigrant population and resentful hill country whites, falling back upon a tried and true emphasis on economic pragmatism. Dalton was one of the epicenters of Latino migration into the South, one of the major demographic trends of the last 20 years, one that exploded onto the nation stage during the 2006 immigrants rights' protests, when people in small to medium sized towns throughout the Appalachians and the Piedmont were astounded to discover that there were not only Latinos in their town, documented and undocumented, but quite a lot of them. Latinos later played an important role in the success of the Obama campaign in states like North Carolina and Virginia, as well as his surprisingly strong performance in defeat in Georgia.

But that's ancient history now. Fleeing immigrants are a symptom of a much more serious disease, the loss of manufacturing jobs that aren't likely to return anytime soon. Furthermore, when manufacturing jobs finally do increase again, the recovery is going to be conditioned upon a restructuring of the economy to the detriment of the people who need them. My experience in Dalton was more generally confirmed when I talked to relatives in western North Carolina. My uncle-in-law ruefully told me that the region had lost a lot of manufacturing jobs, and doubted that they would ever return. His sadness was genuine. Well educated people like him live in communities with many high school graduates who have relied upon semi-skilled employment throughout their entire lives. A sense of community and extended family trump the class based elitism that one commonly experiences in most major American cities.

And, it is precisely that sense of community and family, both real and artificially constructed, that is being frayed by the severity of this recession. As I returned my rental car at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, accompanied by my son, safely secure in his car seat, the woman who about to give me my receipt asked me if I had a lot of luggage. I said yes, as I had to take the car seat and several other items of varying sizes home with us, and she immediately called for a valet. Within a couple of minutes, another women arrived, and got into the driver's seat to drive us to our terminal. Of course, as anyone who has traveled through Hartsfield-Jackson would know, both women were African American, as the airport and its myriad support services, such as rental car companies, have been a major source of employment for African Americans in the greater Atlanta metropolitan area.

Most people who work in these jobs are friendly and engaging, sometimes to a fault, it is one of those stereotypes about Atlanta that happens to be true. As I conversed with the woman during our quick trip to the terminal, she informed me that business at the rental car companies was down, that people had been laid off, and that her husband, who was a supervisor at an unspecified company of some kind, had been forced to lay off a lot of people as well. It had been painful for him, she said, as he was close to them after many softball games and barbeques. It hurt him to lay off the younger workers. Better them than us, she told him.

Labels: African Americans, American Empire, Global Recession, Immigration, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

Well, not quite. The story is a little more complicated than that. But, as this article indicates, the discovery that three African American brothers in Detroit performed and recorded music that anticipated the punk explosion of the late 1970s remains quite striking, given that punk was often described as the antithesis of disco, drawing a stark racial boundary. Of course, it wasn't true, as both punk and disco emphasized multiculturalism, but that was the perception manipulated by the mainstream.

Labels: African Americans, American Culture, Music, Racism

Remember this post from late December? Kevin Johnson, a young, black, Atlanta entrepreneur discovered that American Express had slashed his credit limit, despite a perfect payment history and high credit score. After quoting the Atlanta Constitution article, which didn't emphasize his race in the text, I observed:

Mr. Johnson, if you haven't already guessed is black, as you can clearly see from his photograph, which accompanies the story. He is also a successful executive, as explained in the article as well. One can only imagine how many African Americans less fortunate have already experienced reductions in credible regardless of their history of payment. Just as people of color were disproportionately victimized by the housing bubble, they are likewise going to be targeted to during the recession.

Well, now, it turns out the American Express is terminating this mysterious credit evaluation program:

In recent months, American Express has gone far beyond simply checking your credit score and making sure you pay on time. The company has been looking at home prices in your area, the type of mortgage lender you’re using and whether small-business card customers work in an industry under siege. It has also been looking at how you spend your money, searching for patterns or similarities to other customers who have trouble paying their bills.

In some instances, if it didn’t like what it was seeing, the company has cut customer credit lines. It laid out this logic in letters that infuriated many of the cardholders who received them. “Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped,” one of those letters said, “have a poor repayment history with American Express.”

It sure sounded as if American Express had developed a blacklist of merchants patronized by troubled cardholders. But late this week, American Express told me that wasn’t the case. The company said it had also decided to stop using what it has called “spending patterns” as a criteria in its credit line reductions.

“The letters were wrong to imply we were looking at specific merchants,” said Susan Korchak, a company spokeswoman. The company uses hundreds of data points in making its decisions, she said, adding that the main factor in determining credit lines “has always been and still is the overall level of debt, relative to the card member’s financial resources.”

OK, American Express still has a lot of ways to engage in mischief here. Interestingly, though, it also turns out that Johnson played a prominent role in publicizing the program and embarrassing American Express:

Kevin D. Johnson, a 29-year-old Atlanta resident who runs a marketing and communications firm, received a letter from American Express last October saying that his credit limit was being lowered. One reason was that other customers who had used their cards at places where he had shopped were late in paying their bills.

The company couldn’t — or wouldn’t — tell him which charges had met with its disapproval. Frustrated, he told his story to the local newspaper and on “Good Morning America.” He also began documenting his experience on newcreditrules.com, where he posted the names of all the merchants he patronized, in the hope that other American Express customers would cross-check his list with theirs and solve the mystery.

Good work, Kevin! But, as I said in my original post, I believe that there was more to it. I suspect that American Express performed an internal audit, and discovered that disproportionate numbers of people of color with good income and good credit histories were experiencing substantial reductions in their available credit. The public relations debacle regarding spending patterns, spending by card users at particular merchants, was just the tip of the iceberg, and potentially a red herring. It is very possible that American Express is still evaluating creditworthiness based upon spending patterns, but in a modified way, subjecting the outcomes to an analysis as to whether they are having a disproportionate racial impact. And, oh, did I forget to mention that Obama just got inaugurated?

Labels: African Americans, Credit Crunch, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Racism

For background on the killing of Oscar Grant at an Oakland BART station by BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle during the early morning hours of New Year's Day, go here and here and here. Here is a KTVU report about Grant's funeral earlier today.

Family members told KTVU reporter Claudine Wong that they are pleased that the public is coming foward with videos of the incident. A frame by frame analysis of the most recent one indicates that Grant was handcuffed before the shooting, as initially reported based upon the statements of several witnesses. Furthermore, indybay.org is reporting that a protest that began at the scene of the killing at Fruitvale station has been tranformed into a march through East Oakland involving betewen 500 and 1000 people.

Labels: African Americans, BART Killing, California, Racism

For background on the killing of Oscar Grant at an Oakland BART station by BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle during the early morning hours of New Year's Day, go here and here and here. Today, Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Tom Orloff made it crystal clear that the US will support the Palestinians before he decides to criminally prosecute Mehserle:

If Mehserle is charged with a crime in Grant's shooting, it will be a first.

No one we talked with - from the district attorney's office to lawyers who work either side of police shootings - could remember a case in the last 20 years in which an on-duty officer had been charged in a fatal shooting in Alameda County.

"By and large, police officers have been reacting to some type of situation before they shoot someone that usually provides a legal justification," said District Attorney Tom Orloff, who has seen dozens of police shooting cases during his nearly four-decade career as a prosecutor.

Orloff, whose office would ultimately decide whether Mehserle should be charged with anything, hastened to point out that many details about the Fruitvale Station shooting remain unknown and that it is far too early to know whether the case will enter the criminal arena.

The most recent controversial police shooting in Alameda County happened July 25, when Oakland police Officer Hector Jimenez shot a drunken-driving suspect in the back as the man ran from an early morning traffic stop in the Fruitvale District.

Police said Jimenez shot 27-year-old Mack "Jody" Woodfox III because he thought Woodfox was reaching into his waistband for a gun, although no gun was found. Jimenez gave the same reason for taking part in the fatal shooting New Year's Eve 2007 of another man, Andrew Moppin, who, like Woodfox, turned out to be unarmed.

Police and a deputy from the district attorney's office interviewed Jimenez after the Woodfox shooting, then went out to the scene at night and re-enacted the incident as the officer related it.

The result - although technically the case is still pending, no charges have been filed.

Orloff's assertion deserves more scrutiny than that provided by the San Francisco Chronicle columnists who wrote the story, Matier and Ross. To their credit, they implicitly acknowledge that there have been no judicial determinations that shooings perpetrated by local police officers are justified because the district attorney doesn't file cases against them. But they then rather oddly proceed to cite this fact as an indication that these shootings are invariably legal when it actually suggests that the District Attorney is allergic to prosecuting them under any circumstances.

Nothing like a cop friendly district attorney's office with cop friendly media allies to ensure that nothing ever happens to officers who kill people in the line of duty, regardless of the circumstances. If the family of Oscar Grant expect an honest investigation of his death, they should insist that the investigation be taken away from BART and the Alameda County District Attorney's Office as quickly as possible, because, as they used to say at race track, the fix is in.

Labels: African Americans, BART Killing, California, Racism