Jim Crow is back y'all and he's going in for the kill. What i mean by he's back is that he never left, he got a makeover. Now he's going in for the kill, the consolidation of our subjugation wholesale plantation style. Austerity. Austerity was named the word of the year in 2010 by Merriam-Webster. i've always hated this word even upon first hearing it. For a long time i heard comrades using this word and intentionally tuned it out because it simply had no ring to it. A word i would not likely use. I would simply find another word. Austerity. i would somewhat avoid these conversations because i hated this word. i never knew exactly why i hated Austerity so much. i got curious once or twice as to my aversion. The thought of the word repulsed me. It wasn't until i began writing this that i actually looked up the word on wikipedia: In economics, austerity is a policy of deficit-cutting, lower spending, and a reduction in the amount of benefits and public services provided. Development projects, welfare, and other social spending are common programs that are targeted for cuts. Taxes, port and airport fees, and train and bus fares are common sources of increased user fees. As a response to this so-called economic crash. Prison construction is booming in rural white communities across the nation and especially here in the promised land of the great migration, California. While black folks make up maybe 12% of the population we make up nearly 50% of the prison population. Prisons and their populations grow exponentially everyday. Public education in general is really a joke in this country but the schools in black and brown communities are shameful, and what i mean by shameful is shameless, sick. Young black boys are routinely tracked into "special ed" and remedial classes. Schools are now a referral site for the juvenile prisons and courts, and by courts i mean auction blocks. Chain gangs. In these schools behavioral issues are criminalized making it once again legal to take black children from their parents and ship them off to another plantation too far to have a relationship with their families. Does this sound familiar? We're talking about reconstruction, You know Jim-fucking-Crow. We are familiar with lynchings by now. The klan. The sheriff. The public killing of black men. The spectacle of violence that Foucault describes as being confined to the prisons and dungeons. How many have we had here in the bay area alone in just the past couple years? And i'm supposed to believe what? That i'm free? i'm supposed to believe that we have money to just give to banks who've already proven they can't handle it properly but we still don't have no damn jobs and now we have to pay more on the bus and the train and cut money from schools? Wow. We are in a State of perpetual war. anyway it's late and i'm ranting. You should know that every shut eye ain't asleep and we are still slaves some of us are being tossed overboard because this slave ship is getting to heavy. The sharks are circling.
Going In For The Kill
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
Violence Is An Everyday Thang For Me
Violence is an everyday thang for me
An unnerving feeling I've never been able to shake since the first time I witnessed a pistol take aim at my own body and discharge. At the age of 14 when the flash opened up squarely in front of me it wasn't my life that flashed before my eyes but rather the life i would never see if I allowed this bullet to touch me. Dreams of happiness and family, children and grandchildren simultaneously screaming for their very existence sounding off in unison within my head and my body "run nigga run". And I ran. In the midst of running from bullets your leggs feel like led and you feel so slow. I felt slower than i had ever felt. Terrified I run. I run for my life. I run from my own death which is never far behind. This will forever be my understanding of gunshots on the streets. When its over I want to cry but it never quite feels over. No time to process the threat returns spontaneously. Standing in front of Joe's on first street Deep C Richmond, holding my swisher waiting for my big cousin to get the tree from her patna in the st johns projects.... enjoying the warm summer night i see a figure emerge from the darkness and just as he does a flash opens in front of him. My thoughts are "this nigga's tryna kill me". I run into the store to the back of the store lay down on the floor and prey for my grandchildren to be allowed life. After it's over I frantically search for my cousin screaming her name "may......may.....may" I find her around the corner looking almost dazed... lost in her own neighborhood but not lost she says come on little cuz we runnin home hurry up before these niggas come back.
last night seven shots sound off. I am instantly 14 again running for my life in richmond. But at the same time i'm not. I'm 25 in west Oakland... I look out the window to see if one of my neighbors just got killed (I like my neighbors).... no bodies in the street everything seems ok...... I watch a little further as three women emerge from a house across the street.... they're hysterical(not because they're women but because they just got shot at) they are trying to tell my other neighbor what happened he is walking towards them. They tell him not to come because a man was just shooting at them and could return. He does return he jumps out of a car with a shiny pistol in hand waiving it in the direction of where the three women were. They've scrambled into the house he's walking up their stairs "bitch I'll kill yo mothafuckin ass" he gets back in the car and drives off. I feel implicated. i watched this man assault the women of my community with no immediate consequences. I want to knock his ass down. But if I knock him down I do life in prison probably in solitary for my political beliefs. I'm up against a wall between a rock and a hard place. My soul remembers a time we would have ripped him to pieces. Now we watch from our windows hoping no one we love gets hit.
Violence Is An Everyday Thang For me
An unnerving feeling I've never been able to shake since the first time I witnessed a pistol take aim at my own body and discharge. At the age of 14 when the flash opened up squarely in front of me it wasn't my life that flashed before my eyes but rather the life i would never see if I allowed this bullet to touch me. Dreams of happiness and family, children and grandchildren simultaneously screaming for their very existence sounding off in unison within my head and my body "run nigga run". And I ran. In the midst of running from bullets your leggs feel like led and you feel so slow. I felt slower than i had ever felt. Terrified I run. I run for my life. I run from my own death which is never far behind. This will forever be my understanding of gunshots on the streets. When its over I want to cry but it never quite feels over. No time to process the threat returns spontaneously. Standing in front of Joe's on first street Deep C Richmond, holding my swisher waiting for my big cousin to get the tree from her patna in the st johns projects.... enjoying the warm summer night i see a figure emerge from the darkness and just as he does a flash opens in front of him. My thoughts are "this nigga's tryna kill me". I run into the store to the back of the store lay down on the floor and prey for my grandchildren to be allowed life. After it's over I frantically search for my cousin screaming her name "may......may.....may" I find her around the corner looking almost dazed... lost in her own neighborhood but not lost she says come on little cuz we runnin home hurry up before these niggas come back.
last night seven shots sound off. I am instantly 14 again running for my life in richmond. But at the same time i'm not. I'm 25 in west Oakland... I look out the window to see if one of my neighbors just got killed (I like my neighbors).... no bodies in the street everything seems ok...... I watch a little further as three women emerge from a house across the street.... they're hysterical(not because they're women but because they just got shot at) they are trying to tell my other neighbor what happened he is walking towards them. They tell him not to come because a man was just shooting at them and could return. He does return he jumps out of a car with a shiny pistol in hand waiving it in the direction of where the three women were. They've scrambled into the house he's walking up their stairs "bitch I'll kill yo mothafuckin ass" he gets back in the car and drives off. I feel implicated. i watched this man assault the women of my community with no immediate consequences. I want to knock his ass down. But if I knock him down I do life in prison probably in solitary for my political beliefs. I'm up against a wall between a rock and a hard place. My soul remembers a time we would have ripped him to pieces. Now we watch from our windows hoping no one we love gets hit.
Violence Is An Everyday Thang For me
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
The Post Modern Kitchenette
The Post Modern Kitchenette
Well we have officially entered the age of the Post Modern Kitchenette. For Black people migrating to the North from the South during the Great Black Migration the kitchenette came to symbolize the transition from living under the threat of lynching by peckerwoods with guns to living under the threat of murder by the police in the confinement of a single room apartment. While those poor Black folks from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Arkansas, in fact all of the Deep South, took the risk to strike out for the “Promised Land” for a chance at freedom, what the vast majority of them found was the cramped space of the kitchenette.
The kitchenette was most often a single room apartment, similar to what we might call a studio apartment today, however the kitchenette usually only had a hot plate and maybe a food cooler, thus the kitchenette and not kitchen. For the courageous Black folks that had the skill to escape to the North (I say escape because whites would arrest and lynch Blacks attempting to leave the sharecropping plantations) found themselves living sometimes 9 or 10 people to a kitchenette. The kitchenette was little more than a prison cell that people were overcharged for. Black folks in the North didn’t have white people lynching them in the public square, instead they faced a racist apparatus of Civil Society in everything from the hiring boss on the loading dock or business agent at the local union hall to the policeman on his beat. The current economic crisis is making the return to life in the kitchenette inevitable for Black folks.
We may have thought those days had passed, or at least some of us may have, but the economic downturn will do what the White Supremacist of the World have been longing for. And that is to put Niggers in their place. The poverty and oppression associated with kitchenette made it possible to contain Black folks without having to put them all behind prison wall, not that they wouldn’t, but the kitchenette made containment more cost effective.
Some of us have never believed we had made it to anything like freedom. Those of us who worked on construction sites, loading docks, or anywhere that is not part of the official state, knew that in the mind of working class peckerwoods little had changed since the sharecropping era. No matter how much skill and no matter what the law says the rules of the American game are set by the peckerwood. Now once again the peckerwood is on the rise through what Obama is calling a compromise deal on the Debt Ceiling. With this deal we will see not only the continued closing of economic opportunity for Black working class, which is the vast majority of Black folks, but a coming crisis that we never thought possible after the election of a Black President.
The kitchenette is coming for those it hasn’t captured yet. The new economic reality has made it possible to see that type of confinement reemerge. The economy that leaves at least 20% of Black folks unemployed will have most of us living in what can only be called kitchenette conditions. If we are not behind the prison wall then we are captured or waiting to be captured and brought back to a Nigger’s place in the Obama era of US politics. Hard times have been with Black folks ever since we got here, but, in an era when we have lost the collective sense of our struggle we are about to descend to a whole new level of hell.
Let’s remember that we do not have any sort of coherent radical Black movement. We may be working to get one, we may be getting the word out about our oppression and the ways this has come about, but we do not have a movement and we Black folks are not on the move. What we have is East v West funk, North v South funk, and Black people prepared to murder another Black person for the pettiest reason, so some of us, perhaps most of us, have no sense of the hell that is coming when these Tea Party peckerwoods get done beating the anemic white Left and Obama down. It’s time to plan; it’s time to understand that what is at stake is more than has ever been before. The policy that Obama signed into law will leave us in a condition akin to what France did in the Congo or South Africa after Apartheid, we will be blamed for our on destruction and there will be no civilians.
Well we have officially entered the age of the Post Modern Kitchenette. For Black people migrating to the North from the South during the Great Black Migration the kitchenette came to symbolize the transition from living under the threat of lynching by peckerwoods with guns to living under the threat of murder by the police in the confinement of a single room apartment. While those poor Black folks from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Arkansas, in fact all of the Deep South, took the risk to strike out for the “Promised Land” for a chance at freedom, what the vast majority of them found was the cramped space of the kitchenette.
The kitchenette was most often a single room apartment, similar to what we might call a studio apartment today, however the kitchenette usually only had a hot plate and maybe a food cooler, thus the kitchenette and not kitchen. For the courageous Black folks that had the skill to escape to the North (I say escape because whites would arrest and lynch Blacks attempting to leave the sharecropping plantations) found themselves living sometimes 9 or 10 people to a kitchenette. The kitchenette was little more than a prison cell that people were overcharged for. Black folks in the North didn’t have white people lynching them in the public square, instead they faced a racist apparatus of Civil Society in everything from the hiring boss on the loading dock or business agent at the local union hall to the policeman on his beat. The current economic crisis is making the return to life in the kitchenette inevitable for Black folks.
We may have thought those days had passed, or at least some of us may have, but the economic downturn will do what the White Supremacist of the World have been longing for. And that is to put Niggers in their place. The poverty and oppression associated with kitchenette made it possible to contain Black folks without having to put them all behind prison wall, not that they wouldn’t, but the kitchenette made containment more cost effective.
Some of us have never believed we had made it to anything like freedom. Those of us who worked on construction sites, loading docks, or anywhere that is not part of the official state, knew that in the mind of working class peckerwoods little had changed since the sharecropping era. No matter how much skill and no matter what the law says the rules of the American game are set by the peckerwood. Now once again the peckerwood is on the rise through what Obama is calling a compromise deal on the Debt Ceiling. With this deal we will see not only the continued closing of economic opportunity for Black working class, which is the vast majority of Black folks, but a coming crisis that we never thought possible after the election of a Black President.
The kitchenette is coming for those it hasn’t captured yet. The new economic reality has made it possible to see that type of confinement reemerge. The economy that leaves at least 20% of Black folks unemployed will have most of us living in what can only be called kitchenette conditions. If we are not behind the prison wall then we are captured or waiting to be captured and brought back to a Nigger’s place in the Obama era of US politics. Hard times have been with Black folks ever since we got here, but, in an era when we have lost the collective sense of our struggle we are about to descend to a whole new level of hell.
Let’s remember that we do not have any sort of coherent radical Black movement. We may be working to get one, we may be getting the word out about our oppression and the ways this has come about, but we do not have a movement and we Black folks are not on the move. What we have is East v West funk, North v South funk, and Black people prepared to murder another Black person for the pettiest reason, so some of us, perhaps most of us, have no sense of the hell that is coming when these Tea Party peckerwoods get done beating the anemic white Left and Obama down. It’s time to plan; it’s time to understand that what is at stake is more than has ever been before. The policy that Obama signed into law will leave us in a condition akin to what France did in the Congo or South Africa after Apartheid, we will be blamed for our on destruction and there will be no civilians.
Monday, August 1, 2011
POCC statement
ATTENTION...
Free 'em All! Call...POCC/BPPC on membership,
non-membership, defections, etc.
It has been brought to the attention of the POCC/BPPC (Prisoners Of Conscience Committee/Black Panther Party Cubs) that there are a number of unofficial statements being disseminated via video, written correspondence, and internet in regards to the status of POCC/BPPC membership, non-membership, defections, etc. At the present time, we request that all parties involved refrain from further issuance of statements regarding the matter. Furthermore, we request that individuals, organizations, and the masses in general, be ever mindful of the delicate nature of the situation(s) at hand. For embellishments and sensationalism may prove to be a plus in arenas such as hip hop, journalism,etc.. In the battlefield of struggle, however, strategy and structure must be respected in the spirit of combating liberalism, yet adhering to rules of Party Discipline. The POCC/BPPC shall be providing an official position paper within the near future concerning these matters. We have called upon the Cubs, comrades ,supporters, and the community at large to respect rules of engagement with all relevant and respective forces. Prematurely or incorrectly assessed and/or addressed positions provide fodder for fallout directly, indirectly, covertly and overtly that does not work in the people’s interest. We ask that this statement be forwarded, cc'd, and disseminated throughout all pertinent venues. We thank you in advance for your consideration and cooperation.
Free 'em All!
POCC/BPPC
Free 'em All! Call...POCC/BPPC on membership,
non-membership, defections, etc.
It has been brought to the attention of the POCC/BPPC (Prisoners Of Conscience Committee/Black Panther Party Cubs) that there are a number of unofficial statements being disseminated via video, written correspondence, and internet in regards to the status of POCC/BPPC membership, non-membership, defections, etc. At the present time, we request that all parties involved refrain from further issuance of statements regarding the matter. Furthermore, we request that individuals, organizations, and the masses in general, be ever mindful of the delicate nature of the situation(s) at hand. For embellishments and sensationalism may prove to be a plus in arenas such as hip hop, journalism,etc.. In the battlefield of struggle, however, strategy and structure must be respected in the spirit of combating liberalism, yet adhering to rules of Party Discipline. The POCC/BPPC shall be providing an official position paper within the near future concerning these matters. We have called upon the Cubs, comrades ,supporters, and the community at large to respect rules of engagement with all relevant and respective forces. Prematurely or incorrectly assessed and/or addressed positions provide fodder for fallout directly, indirectly, covertly and overtly that does not work in the people’s interest. We ask that this statement be forwarded, cc'd, and disseminated throughout all pertinent venues. We thank you in advance for your consideration and cooperation.
Free 'em All!
POCC/BPPC
on fielding a revolutionary offensive
The primary goal is to assemble a power base void of centralized leadership. This is not to say that there won't be leadership roles and leaders who push the agenda forward. The fundamental nature and structure of such community bodies should always reflect the basic mantra "one person can't stop the flow". This is for several reason only two of which i will explore in this communique. First and foremost recent activities within the so-called "movement", on the part of repressive agencies such as FBI and local law enforcement, have illustrated to us the danger of having identifiable leadership. We've seen fist fights lives threatened and guns drawn. All of these dysfunctional a-political acts have contributed to creating an environment in which we are all vulnerable to COINTELPRO neutralization. The confusion is what agents of repression thrive on. If we continue at this rate true revolutionary spirits will find themselves in cages or coffins. This is not only a serious threat to our success as a class engaged in class struggle but a threat to the very lives of those who engage in this struggle. The second phenomena I want to address is this celebrity-ism. There are elements within our struggle who seek to create and manipulate political celebrities. Family members who've lost lives to police violence are routinely targeted by organizations and individuals with opportunistic agendas seeking to feed their egos with fame and underhanded hate speak. Family members of historical political leaders and revolutionaries are targeted as well albeit to a lesser degree. Through theses individuals war is waged on our efforts. The puppet master is often underestimated or down right invisible to the naked eye. Confronting these forces has proved disastrous as well. This fire that's burning in our house must be suffocated. We must not fan the flames or allow it the air it needs to continue. There is a lot of personal beef and hearsay going on in the bay area concerning those involved in this struggle it must end in the most expedient fashion. The legitimacy of an organization should be based on the work they do in a specific place rather than being based one what "celebrity" is in a particular organization. Malcolm X as well as the Republic of New Afrika have outlined for us that any revolution that takes place must be based on and grounded in first and foremost the land which a particular people occupy. We most form collectives and community bodies based on the neighborhoods that we occupy rather than being based on a city or territory defined by the colonial regime. One of my teachers once taught me that to prevail in the game of chess i had to shift my focus from moving and taking the pieces to a broader perspective of controlling the squares on the board. If every piece holds down their square or their field of squares than victory becomes that much more attainable. It's time for us to hold down our squares and stop focusing so much on high profile pieces.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)