kagablog

Race and Class: Some Connections

In a racist world, it’s nice when people who benefit from racism, such as Samantha Vice, not only recognise it, but also, going beyond the undeniable statistical facts on racial inequality, show insight into the subtle ways in which racial privilege is reinforced; and, even better, stick their necks out in the public domain despite the scorn and ridicule that, inevitably, will be hurled at them.

However, I don’t think it’s wise to recommend, as Vice does, that whites should humbly stay in South Africa’s political background and refrain from criticising “those now in power.” This advice, I would venture, would not bother South Africa’s white monopoly capitalists – still the richest people in the country – who seem to have few complaints about “those now in power.” As for less well-off whites who are anti-racist, I can’t see how this advice could legitimately be addressed to them. Here I side with Vice’s left-wing critics.

It would be better (and more consistent) if white South Africans opposed to the continuing racial injustice in their country used their privilege precisely to challenge, in a non-racist way, the economic and social policies of “those now in power” – not just their corruption, but their actual policies – and to join blacks and others engaging in collective struggle against this unjust regime. They should use their privilege to aid these struggles. On this point, Vice would agree, but she says whites should stay in the “background” of these struggles. I’m not sure what that means. If you’re going to aid these struggles, you should make your voice heard without preventing other voices from being heard.

Since 1994, despite the creation of a black middle class and a black elite, the poverty and misery of the black majority has deepened, and whites remain by far the most privileged group. The ANC, with its Western-inspired neoliberal turn (privatisations, cutbacks, a freer hand for both foreign and South African corporations, and so on) which has made life increasingly hellish for the majority, has actually done very little to diminish white privilege. Those white South Africans who are concerned about this should not merely criticise other whites who fail to see the injustice; they should, if they are serious about it, openly challenge the government. Refraining from doing so won’t help; we can be sure of that.

Moreover, they should do this because they oppose both racism and class oppression, just as progressive anti-apartheid whites (such as the assassinated political philosopher, Rick Turner) did, when it was more dangerous to do so. Those post-apartheid black elites who seem to want nothing more than to join the rich white men’s club that continues to be the most privileged ‘racial’ group in the world will, of course, cry ‘racism’ when they are criticised for their ongoing betrayals of the people. That should come as no surprise: what else are they going to say? Ideologically, that’s their only option.

They can’t say: ‘Yes, we are betraying the majority of our population by doing what the rich Western countries and white capitalists want us to do with our economy, and enriching ourselves in the process, but we think that’s okay.’ What they have to do, instead, is to use leftist rhetoric (like Robert Mugabe) to make it look like they are actually working for the people, while using repressive measures against angry and frustrated shack-dwellers and working class people when they rise up, as they have (and increasingly will).

Also, the government has not been averse to using racism and xenophobia as a kind of divide-and-conquer strategy. In this respect, they are no different from any other ruling elite in any other capitalist society with racial and ethnic divisions. Writing in 2009, in an article titled “ANC Sows the Seeds of Racial Discord”, Trevor Ngwane remarks: “It was naive for any of us to imagine that decades of racism would simply disappear because our country has adopted a democratic constitution that outlaws racial discrimination.” He describes an incident in Durban where ANC officials stirred up anti-Indian racism to deflect attention from the fact that both working class Indians and blacks were being mistreated by multi-national corporations – whose interests the ANC officials were primarily serving. Ngwane also stresses that the ANC would prefer the masses blaming their problems on non-South African blacks than on the ruling class in South Africa.

If this is indeed the case, as I think it is, Vice’s prescription of political quietism for whites, though it is based on a thoughtful kind of self-scrutiny, seems to me mistaken. The thought seems to be: ‘We whites have, historically and even to the present day, done terrible things to put the country in the mess it’s in now, a mess from which we disproportionately benefit, so it’s hypocritical for us to criticise black politicians and elites until we clean up our own act.’

Again, I think the self-critical nature of Vice’s reasoning is admirable. But I also think her argument depends on two false assumptions (unwitting assumptions which, I’m sure, Vice would disavow): i) that the black elite and the poor black majority are equally victimised by racism, and ii) that all whites (including poor and working class whites) equally benefit from racism. Vice would not accept these statements, but my sense is that she misleadingly downplays the class divisions within both the black and white populations; and because she treats race as being somehow more fundamental than class, she does not see how racism functions to serve a system of class domination. And because she does not see that (or focus on it), her battle against white race-blindness is marred by a kind of class blindness.

In general, if we are worried about racism, we should understand that racism does serve certain functions in class-divided, capitalist societies, in South Africa and many other countries. This is not the whole story that needs to be told about racism – I’m not ‘reducing’ race to class or capitalism – but I think it does help us to explain racism’s persistence despite the existence of anti-racist laws and constitutions: i) it helps to keep wages down, and thus profits up, if some racial and ethnic groups can systematically be paid less than others for their labour; ii) racist attitudes and double-standards, sometimes crude, sometimes nuanced and dressed up as ‘free market’ doctrine, serve to rationalise the continuing economic imperialism of the rich capitalist countries of the the global North (mostly white-majority countries); and most importantly, iii) racism effectively keeps the general population divided (as does sexism) and prevents the kind of class solidarity necessary to make this world a decent place for all.

We need to keep building, not only in South Africa but everywhere, an inter-racial, inter-ethnic, even international class solidarity; and Mvuselele Ngcoya is right to stress, against the temptation of political quietism, that what we don’t need is a kind of “politics of withdrawal that white people are accustomed to the world over.” Whether Ngcoya and I have interpreted Vice correctly is beside the point; what matters is that there is such a temptation among whites, and that it should be resisted.

first published here: http://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/80075-iol-hit-by-dos-attack.html

The Afrocentric paradigm is a revolutionary shift in thinking proposed as a constructural adjustment to black disorientation, decenteredness, and lack of agency. The Afrocentrist asks the question, “What would African people do if there were no white people?” In other words, what natural responses would occur in the relationships, attitudes toward the environment, kinship patterns, preferences for colors, type of religion, and historical referent points for African people if there had not been any intervention of colonialism or enslavement? Afrocentricity answers this question by asserting the central role of the African subject within the context of African history, thereby removing Europe from the center of the African reality. In this way, Afrocentricity becomes a revolutionary idea because it studies ideas, concepts, events, personalities, and political and economic processes from a standpoint of black people as subjects and not as objects, basing all knowledge on the authentic interrogation of location. Dr. Molefe Kete

In the aftermath of Guptagate there is a rising anti-Indian sentiment that brings into sharp focus what has been called “the national question”. All the components of the liberation movement, from the small but intellectually influential New Unity Movement to the fracturing but militant Pan Africanist Congress; from the oldest-of-the pack ANC to the vibrant black consciousness of Steve Biko, were all faced with how to deal with “the national question”.

This was the fundamental issue in understanding the nature of the settler-colonial reality that mutated into apartheid from the middle of the last century, but goes back to 1652 with the arrival of the first European settlers.

Essentially, “the national question” tells us how white supremacy was formed and how it reproduced itself. It suggested strategies to bring about a new nation free of racism. The late Neville Alexander was one of the foremost scholars and participants in the struggle for the resolution of “the national question”. His book, One Azania One Nation, remains a classic contribution to this debate.

Alexander showed that the problem with the ANC was that it accepted the four-nation thesis ­created and manipulated by the apartheid regime to divide and conquer. Indeed, the Freedom Charter accepts the apartheid racial hierarchy that posits, in descending order, whites, Indians, coloureds and Africans. Alexander warned about the dangers of how this hierarchy was likely to reproduce settler-colonialism instead of resolving “the national question” (though in his last years he seems to have abandoned his own thesis for a vulgar class analysis of the matter of identity). Twenty years of ANC rule have nevertheless settled the question in favour of those who criticised the ANC’s grasp of “the national question” as essentially colonial and ­sustaining of white supremacy.

This ANC project that has unfolded since 1994 is incapable of addressing the material dispossession (land and labour) of black people, but also can’t heal the subjectiveness of oppression and the damaged psychological complexes black people have suffered over generations. What we have is obfuscation and the reproduction of dangerous anti-black constructs.

Whereas black consciousness went against the apartheid categories and collapsed all the oppressed (Africans, Indians and coloureds) into one category of blacks as a group opposed to white racism, the ANC has sustained these divisions and now we are likely to reap the whirlwind.

Self-hatred
The Guptas, ironically, display in the most vulgar way the damage and the complexes we are talking about – those that essentially manifest as black self-hatred. The vulgarity of the showmanship at the Gupta wedding shows a desperate attempt to flee from blackness. The same madness is seen throughout post-colonial Africa, in the form of conspicuous consumption, and we would do well to remember that this is true for South Africa as well. The ministerial handbook is a bible for entering the white world. Why do we think Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma want houses with bunkers? Why would Juju so prize his R250 000 watch? These are all comical schemes to run away from blackness.

This self-hatred plays itself out tragically in the everyday interaction between the African and the Indian in Durban, seen in the vile and at times violent denigration of the African. Indians, because of where the white system has put them in the racial hierarchy, generally do strange and hurtful things to sustain their distance from “the kaffir”; we know that even the great Mahatma Gandhi was afflicted by similar problems, to the extent of siding with the whites against Africans.

On the other hand, the African is hurt by what he sees as Indian racism, because the Indian is black. It’s as we say: “I can tolerate white racism, but Indian … ?” Right now, emanating from marginal voices (thank God!), there are shrill calls for the “liberation” of KwaZulu-Natal from Indians. We also see anti-Indian sentiment on social media, showing an exaggerated sense of injury against alleged Indian racism.

But this rage is blind to the real beneficiaries and creators of the divisions between black people. Every time I have raised the issue of white land ownership and economic domination, I’m met with indifference: this is so because of the same damaged psychology, in which black ­people are quick to harm each other and avoid the real problem.

The response from Indian opinion-makers has not helped matters. They have tried to distance themselves from the Guptas and claim the Gutpas are bad Indians from India, while, on the other hand, denying that apartheid gave Indians slightly better privileges – and that these privileges explain why Indians are “overrepresented” in managerial positions. The worst is the talk of “Indian excellence and hard work”, half-truths and bad faith that serve only to annoy the African more, because we all know it’s not the Indian’s hard work but apartheid that apportioned privileges and thus enables these “achievements”. And, to the extent that we didn’t address “the national question” in 1994, the hierarchy will remain what it is, with white people on top.

The ANC’s four-nation thesis has proven that its critics were right to say it was about bringing black managers to the apartheid state and economy (with some perks, of course). What is now needed is a new search for the resolution of “the national question”. Black consciousness is the most advanced and comprehensive response to this challenge. First, it would rebuild damaged senses of black self; second it would show why Africans, coloureds and Indians belong to the same black identity.

The power of black consciousness is the power of self-identification and the refusal to be a slave to a reality created by the oppressor. The racial hierarchies and privileges were not a creation of any of the oppressed groups. They were determined by whites for their own evil agendas. The genius of black consciousness is precisely the refusal to allow white-created history to dictate how we respond to our oppression.

Only black consciousness can help us resolve “the national question” and avoid the impending mutual devouring of each other as we strive for affirmative-action promotions, vegetable markets and other marginal economic gains while leaving intact the apartheid, racist anti-black socioeconomic and political reality. Black consciousness shows beyond doubt that the problem is not the Indian: they are merely running away from blackness and mimicking whites, like all blacks do. The problem is the ANC’s project, which is about elite benefit and which sustains colonial and racist realities for the majority.

first published here: http://mg.co.za/article/2013-05-24-00-the-roots-of-anti-indian-racism

One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, “I want to be a poet–not a Negro poet,” meaning, I believe, “I want to write like a white poet”; meaning subconsciously, “I would like to be a white poet”; meaning behind that, “I would like to be white.” And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America–this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.

But let us look at the immediate background of this young poet. His family is of what I suppose one would call the Negro middle class: people who are by no means rich yet never uncomfortable nor hungry–smug, contented, respectable folk, members of the Baptist church. The father goes to work every morning. He is a chief steward at a large white club. The mother sometimes does fancy sewing or supervises parties for the rich families of the town. The children go to a mixed school. In the home they read white papers and magazines. And the mother often says “Don’t be like niggers” when the children are bad. A frequent phrase from the father is, “Look how well a white man does things.” And so the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all virtues. It holds for the children beauty, morality, and money. The whisper of “I want to be white” runs silently through their minds. This young poet’s home is, I believe, a fairly typical home of the colored middle class. One sees immediately how difficult it would be for an artist born in such a home to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people. He is never taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not according to Caucasian patterns.

For racial culture the home of a self-styled “high-class” Negro has nothing better to offer. Instead there will perhaps be more aping of things white than in a less cultured or less wealthy home. The father is perhaps a doctor, lawyer, landowner, or politician. The mother may be a social worker, or a teacher, or she may do nothing and have a maid. Father is often dark but he has usually married the lightest woman he could find. The family attend a fashionable church where few really colored faces are to be found. And they themselves draw a color line. In the North they go to white theaters and white movies. And in the South they have at least two cars and house “like white folks.” Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and an Episcopal heaven. A very high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist to climb in order to discover himself and his people.

But then there are the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority—may the Lord be praised! The people who have their hip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round. They live on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. 0, let’s dance! These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations. And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself. Whereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear. And they are not ashamed of him–if they know he exists at all. And they accept what beauty is their own without question.

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art. Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their “white” culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work. And when he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in this country, with their innumerable overtones and undertones surely, and especially for literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes at hand. To these the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears. But let us look again at the mountain.

A prominent Negro clubwoman in Philadelphia paid eleven dollars to hear Raquel Meller sing Andalusian popular songs. But she told me a few weeks before she would not think of going to hear “that woman,” Clara Smith, a great black artist, sing Negro folksongs. And many an upper -class Negro church, even now, would not dream of employing a spiritual in its services. The drab melodies in white folks’ hymnbooks are much to be preferred. “We want to worship the Lord correctly and quietly. We don’t believe in ‘shouting.’ Let’s be dull like the Nordics,” they say, in effect.

The road for the serious black artist, then, who would produce a racial art is most certainly rocky and the mountain is high. Until recently he received almost no encouragement for his work from either white or colored people. The fine novels of Chesnutt’ go out of print with neither race noticing their passing. The quaint charm and humor of Dunbar’s’ dialect verse brought to him, in his day, largely the same kind of encouragement one would give a sideshow freak (A colored man writing poetry! How odd!) or a clown (How amusing!).

The present vogue in things Negro, although it may do as much harm as good for the budding artist, has at least done this: it has brought him forcibly to the attention of his own people among whom for so long, unless the other race had noticed him beforehand, he was a prophet with little honor.

The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites. “Oh, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,” say the Negroes. “Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,” say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane. The colored people did not praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most of the colored people who did read Cane hate it. They are afraid of it. Although the critics gave it good reviews the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the work of Du Bois) Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson, it is truly racial.

But in spite of the Nordicized Negro intelligentsia and the desires of some white editors we have an honest American Negro literature already with us. Now I await the rise of the Negro theater. Our folk music, having achieved world-wide fame, offers itself to the genius of the great individual American composer who is to come. And within the next decade I expect to see the work of a growing school of colored artists who paint and model the beauty of dark faces and create with new technique the expressions of their own soul-world. And the Negro dancers who will dance like flame and the singers who will continue to carry our songs to all who listen-they will be with us in even greater numbers tomorrow.

Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz. I am as sincere as I know how to be in these poems and yet after every reading I answer questions like these from my own people: Do you think Negroes should always write about Negroes? I wish you wouldn’t read some of your poems to white folks. How do you find anything interesting in a place like a cabaret? Why do you write about black people? You aren’t black. What makes you do so many jazz poems?

But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul–the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile. Yet the Philadelphia clubwoman is ashamed to say that her race created it and she does not like me to write about it, The old subconscious “white is best” runs through her mind. Years of study under white teachers, a lifetime of white books, pictures, and papers, and white manners, morals, and Puritan standards made her dislike the spirituals. And now she turns up her nose at jazz and all its manifestations–likewise almost everything else distinctly racial. She doesn’t care for the Winold Reiss’ portraits of Negroes because they are “too Negro.” She does not want a true picture of herself from anybody. She wants the artist to flatter her, to make the white world believe that all negroes are as smug and as near white in soul as she wants to be. But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering “I want to be white,” hidden in the aspirations of his people, to “Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro–and beautiful”?

So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, “I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet,” as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world. I am ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after the manner of the academicians because he fears the strange unwhiteness of his own features. An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose.

Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand. Let Paul Robeson singing “Water Boy,” and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas’s drawing strange black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

THE NATION, 1926

published on the web here: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hughes/mountain.htm

The FBI added Assata Shakur to its Most Wanted Terrorist List today. In addition, the state of New Jersey announced it was adding $1 million to the FBI’s $1 million reward for her capture. Shakur becomes the first woman ever to make the list and only the second domestic terrorist to be added to the list.

Assata Shakur, who was born Joanne Chesimard, was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. She was convicted in the May 2, 1973 killing of a New Jersey police officer during a shoot-out that left one of her fellow activists dead. She was shot twice by police during the incident. In 1979, she managed to escape from jail. Shakur fled to Cuba where she received political asylum. She once wrote, “I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the U.S. government’s policy towards people of color.”

Tune in Friday when we will cover these latest developments.

In 1998, Democracy Now! aired Shakur reading an open letter to Pope John Paul II during his trip to Cuba. She wrote the message after New Jersey state troopers sent the Pope a letter asking him to call for her extradition.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Your Holiness,

I hope this letter finds you in good health, in good disposition, and enveloped in the spirit of goodness. I must confess that it had never occurred to me before to write to you, and I find myself overwhelmed and moved to have this opportunity.

Although circumstances have compelled me to reach out to you, I am glad to have this occasion to try and cross the boundaries that would otherwise tend to separate us.

I understand that the New Jersey State Police have written to you and asked you to intervene and to help facilitate my extradition back to the United States. I believe that their request is unprecedented in history. Since they have refused to make their letter to you public, although they have not hesitated to publicize their request, I am completely uninformed as to the accusations they are making against me. Why, I wonder, do I warrant such attention? What do I represent that is such a threat?

Please let me take a moment to tell you about myself. My name is Assata Shakur and I was born and raised in the United States. I am a descendant of Africans who were kidnapped and brought to the Americas as slaves. I spent my early childhood in the racist segregated South. I later moved to the northern part of the country, where I realized that Black people were equally victimized by racism and oppression.

I grew up and became a political activist, participating in student struggles, the anti-war movement, and, most of all, in the movement for the liberation of African Americans in the United States. I later joined the Black Panther Party, an organization that was targeted by COINTELPRO, a program that was set up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to eliminate all political opposition to the U.S. government’s policies, to destroy the Black Liberation Movement in the U.S., and to discredit activists and to eliminate potential leaders.

As a result of being targeted by COINTELPRO, I, like many other young people, was faced with the threat of prison, underground, exile or death.

At this point, I think that it is important to make one thing very clear. I have advocated and still advocate revolutionary changes in the structure and in the principles that govern the U.S. I advocate an end to capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policies, the eradication of sexism, and the elimination of political repression. If that is a crime, then I am totally guilty.

To make a long story short, …let me emphasize that justice for me is not the issue, it is justice for my people that is at stake. When my people receive justice, I am sure that I will receive it, too. I know that Your Holiness will reach your own conclusions, but I feel compelled to present the circumstances surrounding the applicatlon of “justice” in New Jersey. I am not the first nor the last person to be victimized by the New Jersey system of “justice.” The New Jersey State Police are infamous for their racism and brutallty. Many legal actions have been filed against them and just recently, in a class action legal proceeding, the New Jersey State Police were found guilty of having an “officially sanctioned, de facto policy of targeting minorities for investigation and arrest.”

Although New Jersey’s population is more than 78 percent white, more than 75 percentof the prison population is made up of Blacks and Latinos. Eighty percent of women in New Jersey prisons are women of color. There are 15 people on death row in the state and seven of them are Black. A 1987 study found that New Jersey prosecutors sought the death penalty in 50 percent of cases involving a Black defendant and a white victim, but in only 28 percent of cases involving a Black defendant and a Black victim.

Unfortunately, the situation in New Jersey is not unique, but reflects the racism that permeates the entire country. The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. There are more than 1.7 million people in U.S. prisons. This number does not include the more than 500,000 people in city and county jails, nor does it include the alarming number of children in juvenile institutions.

The vast majority of those behind bars are people of color and virtually all of those behind bars are poor.

The result of this reality is devastating. One third of Black men between the ages of 20 and 29 are either in prison or under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system.

Prisons are big business in the United States, and the building, running, and supplying of prisons has become the fastest growing industry in the country. Factories are being moved into the prisons and prisoners are being forced to work for slave wages. This super-exploitation of human beings has meant the institutionalization of a new form of slavery. Those who cannot find work are forced to work in prison.

Not only are prisons being used as instruments of economic exploitation, they also serve as lnstruments of political repression. There are more than 100 political prisoners in the U.S. They are African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Natlve Americans, Asians, and progressive white people who oppose the policies of the United States government. Many of those targeted by the COINTELPRO program have been in prison since the early 1970s.

Although the situation in the prisons is an lndication of human rights violations inside the United States, there are other, more deadly indicators.

There are currently 3,365 people now on death row, and more than 50 percent of those awaiting death are people of color. Black people make up only 13 percent of the population, but we make up 41 percent of persons who have received the death penalty.

The number of state assassinations has increased drastically. In 1997 alone, 71 people were executed.

A special reporter assigned by the United Nations organization found serious human rights violations in the U.S., especially those related to the death penalty. According to these findings, people who were mentally ill were sentenced to death, and people with severe mental and learning disabilities, as well as minors under age 18. Serious racial bias was found on the part of judges and prosecutors.

Specifically mentioned in the report was the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the only political prisoner on death row, who was sentenced to death because of his political beliefs and because of his work as a journalist, exposing police brutality in the city of Philadelphia.

Police brutality is a daily occurrence in our communities. The police have a virtual license to kill and they do kill: children, grandmothers, anyone they perceive to be the enemy. They shoot first and ask questions later. Inside the jails and prisons there is at least as much brutality as there was on slave plantations. An ever increasing number of prisoners are found hanging in their cells.

The United States is becoming a land more hostile to Black people and other people of Color. Racism is running rampant and xenophobia is on the rise. This has been especially true in the sphere of domestic policy.

Politicians are attempting to blame social problems on Black people and other people of color. There have been attacks on essentially all affirmative action programs designed to help correct the accumulated results of hundreds of years of slavery and discrimination. In addition, the government seems determined to eliminate all social programs that provide assistance to the poor, resulting in a situation where millions of people do not have access to basic health care, decent housing or quality education.

It was with great happiness that I read the Christmas message that Your Holiness delivered. I applaud you for taking up the cause of the poor, the homeless, the unemployed. The fact that you are addressing the issues of today, unemployment, hopelessness, child abuse, and the drug problem, is important to people all over the world.

One third of Black people in the United States live in poverty, and our communities are inundated with drugs. We have every reason to believe that the CIA and other government agencies are involved in drug trafficking.

Although we live in one of the richest, most techically advanced countries in the world, our reality is similar to an undeveloped, Third World country. We are a people who are truly seeking freedom and harmony.

All my life I have been a spiritual person. I first learned of the struggle and the sacrifice of Jesus in the segregated churches of the South. I converted to Catholicism as a young girl. In my adult life I have become a student of religion and have studied Christianity, Islam, Asian religions and the African religions of my ancestors. I have come to believe that God is universal in nature although called different names and with different faces. I believe that some people spell God with one “O” while others spell it with two.

What we call God is unimportant, as long as we do God’s work. There are those who want to see God’s wrath fall on the oppressed and not on the oppressors.I believe that the time has ended when slavery, colonialism, and oppression can be carried out in the name of religion. It was in the dungeons of prison that I felt the presence of God up close, and it has been my belief in God,and in the goodness of human beings that has helped me to survive. I am not ashamed of having been in prison, and I am certainly not ashamed of having been a political prisoner. I believe that Jesus was a political prisoner who was executed because he fought against the evils of the Roman Empire, because he fought the greed of the money changers in the temple, because he fought against the sins and injustices of his time. As a true child of God, Jesus spoke up for the poor, the meek, the sick, and the oppressed. The early Christians were thrown into lion dens. I will try and follow the example of so many who have stood up in the face of overwhelming oppression.

I am not writing to ask you to intercede on my behalf. I ask nothing for myself. I only ask you to examine the social reality of the United States and to speak out against the human rights violations that are taking place.

On this day, the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., I am reminded of all those who gave their lives for freedom. Most of the people who live on this planet are still not free. I ask only that you continue to work and pray to end Oppression and political repression. It is my heartfelt belief that all the people on this earth deserve justice: social justice, political justice, and economic justice. I believe it is the only way that we will ever achieve peace and prosperity on earth. I hope that you enjoy your visit to Cuba. This is not a country that is rich in material wealth, but it is a country that is rich in human wealth, spiritual wealth and moral wealth.

Respectfully yours,

Assata Shakur
Havana, Cuba

first published here: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/5/2/ex_black_panther_assata_shakur_added_to_fbis_most_wanted_terrorist_list#.UYN1HZaG_8A.facebook

(For the trajectory of the Palestinian struggle, Abulhawa searches for lessons from the past, neo-liberal thought, and Black Consciousness)

By Susan Abulhawa

It’s safe to say that a book you can’t put down is a good one. But I’ve come across a novel I can’t recommend enough, even though it took me months to finish. TIME OF WHITE HORSES, by my friend, Ibrahim Nasrallah, was a fabulous read that I had to put down, repeatedly.

I read the first 300 pages of this translated work from the original Arabic in just a few days. Then the world changed and I moved through the next 300 pages slowly, tiptoeing through lives I recognised and characters I came to love. I turned these pages with trepidation for nearly a month, sometimes holding my breath and swallowing hard. I was reading the unfolding of my own life, and the lives of all Palestinians. I knew what was going to happen and in the strange ways of a heart touched by literature, I wanted to warn the characters. I needed them to make different decisions to save us all from our fate; until, I finally came upon the last chapter and stopped. I put the book down and left it there for another 2 weeks. Along with other reading material, I carried this thick hardback with me on a flight to South Africa. The final chapter was only 5 pages long, but I didn’t read them on the flight. In my hotel room in Johannesburg, I put the book on the table by my bed, looked at its it’s beautiful cover, an image painted by Nasrallah himself, and I read other books instead. I did the same thing a week later when I flew to Durban to take part in Time of the Writer literature festival.

Evenings at the festival started with panel discussions among invited writers. A group of us would then continue on at a local bar or restaurant. These were nights with new friends and meaningful discussions around the Black Consciousness movement, pan-Africanism, labor struggles, personal relationships, and anything in between. After one evening of particularly intense discussions that were born from a single figure at the event – a Black Consciousness thinker named Andile Mngxitama – I decided to take the plunge for those final 5 pages. I had been awake for 21 hours and exhaustion was conquering me.

My Land, “even if I just want to look at it”

Andile’s panel discussion had been an expose of his uncompromising position that has no interest in settlement or pragmatism toward black liberation from white oppression, which clearly remains the social and economic order in a post-Apartheid South Africa. In a statement that some would examine the next day in conversation, he said that his position on land was that it belonged to blacks. Period. And should be reclaimed from white ownership regardless of economic, agricultural, or social repercussions. He said, “..even if I just wake up and look at it [the land]. Because it’s mine!”

Although I was aware of the discomfort of some in the audience around me, Andile grew larger in my eyes. His words touched a rage and an outrage that lives at my core. A wound that does not heal. I thought of that book on my hotel bedside table, 620 pages of Palestinian life spanning the Ottoman Empire’s occupation to the British, then Zionists. A story of four generations of Hadiya, a Palestinian village, its leaders and traitors, weddings and traditions, songs and seasons, loves and scandals, and deep kinship with horses and the land – their land, even if they should choose to just wake up and look at it.

Andile Mngxitama spoke his truth eloquently without equivocation, without tempering his own outrage in order to be heard by those in the audience who were not already supporters. Indeed, most only heard a lack of pragmatism in his message. And they heard a threatening strength in his resolve, which was later trivialised as irrational and unrealistic. He spoke of armed struggle if necessary and some in the audience heard only violence, misogyny and chauvinism. I heard what his supporters in the audience must have: a liberated black man in full possession of his humanity, unwilling to concede an inch to those who have shackled, oppressed, raped, exploited and committed unspeakable and still untold crimes against one black generation after another.

I admired and loved Andile after that session, but others did not feel the same. Not surprisingly, his message and demeanor provoked visceral reactions from some personalities and a sort of drama ensued in the aftermath that left me torn between new friends for whom I felt sincere affection, and a desire to talk further with Andile. I chose the former, but as it was my last night at the festival, I remained awake long after the others and found myself wandering in my own thoughts. I called my daughter in the US. I missed her and wanted to hear her voice. I spent some time speaking with Aman Sethi, a brilliant and witty reporter and author to whom I had taken an immediate liking and who was feeling the same ambivalence about sleep. Eventually, I had a conversation with Andile, however brief it was, and when I got back to my room, it was nearly 3am.
We died all over again, in the last five pages

Despite the assaults of fatigue, I picked up TIME OF WHITE HORSES and opened it to my bookmark. A few agonising minutes later, I had finished the final chapter. I closed the cover, put the book back on the bedside table, and wept. I had walked around carrying that final chapter for over 3 weeks, wanting but unable to look at it. I knew what was going to happen. I knew zionist thieves and thugs were going to take everything and rip all our hearts out one generation after another for the next six decades after the last chapter. I knew my grandmother and thousands of grandmothers were going to rot away as refugees in shacks until they died while European Jews occupied their homes. I knew our lives were going to fall and crumble and we would be blamed for our own miserable fate while a Zionist boot pressed on our necks. But I had hoped, for all those weeks, that the villagers of Hadiya would miraculously turn things around and stay and defeat those Zionist gangs and change the world.

Alas, Palestine was stolen and we all died all over again in the last 5 pages. I fell asleep with the remains of that long day in Durban, the wreckage of that final chapter, and the lullaby of the Indian Ocean coming through my open waterfront hotel window. A few hours later, my body’s annoying habit of rising with the sun had me dragging my mind to the breakfast room in the lobby at 6am. I walked holding hands with the newly dispossessed villagers of Hadiya in TIME OF WHITE HORSES. The ineffable sorrow and humiliation of being carted away, as if cattle, from everything they knew and everything they were so that new Jewish arrivals could take their place, was part of that morning in a Durban hotel restaurant.
Polite ironic violence

Aman Sethi had been my faithful breakfast companion for most of the week, because I would wake him (another habit that annoys my friends), but I didn’t have the heart to do so that morning. Instead, 4 cups of coffee later, I was joined by a prominent white South African writer who was held in high esteem by other writers at the festival. He was the only one of the writers at the festival with whom I had not really spoken at any length and I finally had a chance to do so, more or less privately, that morning over breakfast. Reflecting on the previous evening panels was the usual breakfast conversation and this was no exception. I was interested in hearing his thoughts on Andile Mngxitama’s panel. Quite simply, he completely dismissed Andile and Andile’s thesis, smiling as he said “No one here really listens to him [Andile]. He’s quite a fringe character. If he shows up for a revolution, it would just be him and a handful of followers.” From what I had seen and read, I didn’t think that was true.

In that same breakfast discussion, my colleague said I was intellectually lazy to use the label “colonised mentality”. The accusation, of course, was said in a polite way, but he certainly used the word “lazy”. It brought to mind what Andile called “polite white violence” and “ironic white violence”. My comment about a colonised mentality was in the context of the recent Marikana massacre in which 34 striking mine workers were shot dead by post-Apartheid police. My white colleague at breakfast remarked that many people in the black townships expressed solidarity with the police, invoking colonial stereotypes of primitive blacks who needed to be put in their place. That, to me, is the essence of a colonised mentality – the way oppressed people will often channel their own thoughts through the labyrinth of racist structures of their colonial past. My colleague was quick to chastise me for slapping such a label because, he said, it ignores the complexity of human beings. He said it was a lazy way to think because it disregards the nuances of what might be happening in the townships – although he couldn’t give an example of such a nuance which would provoke anything but outrage against the wanton murder of striking mine workers, much less satisfaction for it. Instead, he said that by using the term “colonised mentality,” I presumed to be in their heads, as if looking down on black people them from above, labeling and moving on.

Who is “Intellectually Lazy”?

On the surface (and ignoring my white colleague’s broad brush stroking, non-nuanced wholesale dismissal of Andile Mngxitama) his argument sounds enlightened. After all, as some intellectuals will happily (and quickly) tell you, using labels to explain human complexities is ignorant and unworthy of an intelligent discourse. It is a discourse that does not point fingers or make judgments, but one that looks for clues to discuss and probe endlessly. In this conversation project, people like me who pass judgment on human behaviour are unsophisticated (unless, of course, the judgment is made about individuals, like me, who make such judgments). In this discourse, usually “white” in nature, it is not correct to explain societal (especially black or brown society) behaviour with terms that refer to described phenomena. My colleague told me it was offensive. He didn’t say to whom it is offensive, but I think it at least offends the neo-liberal sensibilities, replete with white guilt and a desire to separate from the epic historic crimes that lie just beneath the skin that burned under Africa’s sun. It is understandable to want to detach from the label mentality that birthed centuries of perpetual misery on entire black and brown societies. But what, then, should one do with the enormous body of evidence, spanning all of recorded human history, that human behaviour is actually quite predictable? What should one do, then, with decades of social science data that demonstrate, both through controlled social experiments and real-world cross sectional studies, that given X, a certain proportion of people will do Y?

It is well-known that very frequently, victims become victimisers, both on individual and societal levels. Who would have thought that Jews, fresh from concentration camps, would come to Palestine and preside over new forced labor camps for Palestinians, just 4 years after the last forced labor camps closed in Germany? Who would have thought that these Jews who were dispossessed of everything and marched off into camps would turn around and dispossess Palestinians of everything and march them off into camps of a different kind? And who would have thought that Palestinians, who were tortured in Israeli dungeons, would turn around and torture other Palestinians once they got a taste of some power, however illusory, following the ill-fated Oslo Accords? It is a bitter truth that this is what human beings do. While we are capable of self-reflection, change, and evolution, we remain subject to unconscious programs.

To ignore established patterns of human behaviour is intellectually dishonest. This! is the lazy intellectual put-on that looks down from high above, insisting on nuance in order to avoid indicting victimisers who may have once been victims.
Neo-liberal “nuance”

I remember a talk I gave once at Smith College on the role of women in the Palestinian struggle. During the question and answer session, a member of the audience, a professor at the university, remarked that my thesis lacked nuance. She used phrases like “showing the other side”, “Ismalic terror”, and descriptors (like the ones politely leveled at me during breakfast) that stopped short of calling me an anti-Semite. She was a brown woman with a classic “colonised mentality”.

There you go my white friend at the breakfast table! There is no nuance, nor am I interested in finding nuance, in the fact that foreigners from Eastern Europe are living in the ancestral homes of Palestinians who languish in refugee camps that aren’t fit for rats! There is no nuance in the daily savage violence that is inflicted by a Zionist regime armed with the most advanced technological death machines against a principally unarmed indigenous civilian population. There is no nuance in five soldiers tying up a 13 year old girl and posing for pictures with their guns pointed at her, or nuance in the fact that over 500 children fester in Israeli jails without charge or trial, without access to their parents, imprisoned in solitary confinement or with adult criminal populations. And there is no nuance in the indiscriminate shooting of mine workers engaged in a labor struggle. There is only a vulgarity that must be confronted. The project of “finding nuance” in criminal behaviour then becomes a profound endeavor of obfuscation in the place where indictment should be. Sadly, this is the essence of western neo-liberal discourse on the Zionist project that is wiping Palestine off the map.

My colleague finished his breakfast and left. I stayed, nursing another cup of coffee (I had lost count at this point).

Black Consciousness versus a Colonized Mind

Other writers came down, looking fresh and energised. I became more aware of my uncombed, un-showered, flip-flop wearing, caffeine junkie self. I wished Aman would come down already. He’d be the only other person in that room who would look like he just rolled out of bed as I had. The conversation now was with two South African writers, one white, one Indian, and two writers from other African nations. Andile’s words were still the topic of discussion. Everyone more or less agreed that they disagreed with Andile and each gave different reasons. The white South African was offended by a perceived reduction of the issues to a black versus white matter. She said whites too had suffered and fought against Apartheid. She didn’t say, but I saw in her a fear of being alienated or outcast in the only country she had ever known, for no fault of her own. Others thought Andile was too rigid in his beliefs. The comment about taking back the land even if “just to look at it” was foolish as far as they were concerned and examples were cited of economic collapse in other places where nationalisation or redistribution of natural resources had been implemented. Some were offended by his insistence that armed struggle should not be removed from the equation. These were writers who had witnessed the human cost of armed struggle.

I listened, the villagers of Hadiya still with me.

During the British Mandate rule, Jewish immigration was encouraged and the British, seeing Zionists Europeans as more civilised than the indigenous Palestinians, were happy to arm the newcomers. Palestinian farmers in Hadiya were aware of the primitive tools they still used compared with new Jewish arrivals who employed heavy farm machinery on Palestinian land that the British government had designated for them. And I thought of the Jewish settlers now, who live in fortified Jewish-only colonies in the heart of Palestinian towns, with their Israeli-only roads and Uzi-totting arrogance that rampages through our lives, painting racist graffiti on our homes, beating our mothers and sisters, and fathers, and grandfathers. Shitting in our mosques and wiping themselves with pages from the Quran.

I picked up all these things, held them in my grip, and joined the conversation. I thought the claim of white suffering in resistance to Apartheid was absurd and said as much. That alienated me somewhat in the conversation. I said Andile was right to leave no room for pragmatism or concession with racists. There should be only liberation first and foremost. I said I wanted my land back, even if just to look at it. Because it is mine. Because they are thieves and opportunists and racists who have destroyed our society. Because they are terrorists with whom there should be no negotiation and no settlement. Because justice must also be restorative.

“Writing a New World”

Aman finally awoke long after I left breakfast and separately we managed to clean ourselves up before heading off together to Andile’s book launch and subsequent panel with Ashwin Desai on a Black Consciousness article that got pulled from the Harvard Review at the first complaint from a prominent white South African. That’s another story and Ashwin Desai is yet another agitating academic personality. But I digress.

The theme of Time of the Writer literature festival was “writing a new world” and it turned out to be fitting that I carried a hardback of the past with me, even with only 5 pages to go. TIME OF WHITE HORSES is made of short chapters, each a sort of self-contained story of different characters in the village of Hadiya. The chapters are akin to individual pieces of a larger whole and as the reader moves from one to another, the pieces begin to fit together as if a puzzle, until a beautiful tortured nation emerges from the pages. What emerges, too, are patterns of human behaviour, including the “colonised mentality”. Given X, some people will do Y. Given imperial power, some subjects will collaborate. Given occupation and colonialism, most will resist. Some will want to negotiate and others will insist on a fight. Heroes emerged from the story of Hadiya and the downfall of the village, indeed of the country, could not have been accomplished without the cooperation of collaborators. The appeasers wanted to negotiate with the Ottomans or the British, and now zionists.

In hindsight, the ones who clearly had it right were those who stood defiant, in full possession of themselves as an indigenous people, heirs to their own lands and their own heritage. They were the Andile Mngxitamas and Steve Bikos of their time and country. Had we but listened to them and followed their lead! Instead, we trudge in the molasses of a neo-liberal discourse of “nuance” trying to find our way through a maze of racist negotiations ands accords and settlements that are clearly wiping Palestine off the map. If I could write a new world, I would start it with the closing line in my friend Ibrahim Nasrallah’s novel TIME OF WHITE HORSES. It is a quote we all know well, by David Ben Gurion, who was born a Polish man named David Grunn. He said:

“If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country…They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

Why, indeed?

- Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian thinker, essayist, and the author of the international bestselling novel, Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury 2010). She is also the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, an NGO for children. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

first published on the web here: http://ramyabdeljabbar.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/reading-time-of-white-horses-at-time-of-the-writer-in-durban-palestine-chronicle/

gillian’s articles always make me think of a reading that lesego rampolokeng gave at the national arts festival in grahamstown in 2000.

it was the usual lesego thing, hard to follow, lots of urine, faeces, ugliness. the audience was all white; middle-aged ladies from the book club.

most of them sat there appalled of course, wondering who had made the mistake of selecting this guy for their book club, but at the end of it one of them put up her hand bravely and said to lesego (in a very upper class madam voice) “as a woman i too have been oppressed and i therefore understand you and your pain.”

and lesego spat his reply out at her like a snake, venomously – “i don’t want to be understood by you, don’t oppress me with your understanding.”

watching this i saw her recoil with pain, she genuinely did not understand where he was coming from and it made no sense to her that he had to hurt her. she could not imagine that she was hurting him. it was inconceivable to her that her comment was like a slap in his face.

actually the nice whites are the worst because they are so insensitive. gillian schutte in speaking on behalf of black men does more damage than good. unfortunately she has not learned the one thing that the black world requires of her. to shut up.

aryan kaganof

in response to this article: http://mg.co.za/article/2013-04-01-off-with-his-head-the-case-against-andile-mngxitama

Nice People’s Pogrom.

Who the hell is Andile Mngxitama, anyway? He’s a self-serving, self-satisfied proponent of black consciousness whose career largely depends on white people in the media and the publishing world paying him some attention. Not being a man very experienced in the arts of irony or self-examination, he fails to identify the obvious contradictions in this embedded lifestyle.

Recently he has become famous for attacking Jared Sacks. But who the hell is Jared Sacks, anyway? He’s a self-serving, self-satisfied proponent of Trotskyism based in Cape Town whose career largely depends on capitalists in the media and the publishing world paying him some attention. If he identifies the obvious contradictions in this embedded lifestyle, he doesn’t seem troubled by it. In sum, the similarities between Andile Mngxitama and Jared Sacks appear to outsiders to be greater than the differences. Perhaps the smallness of the differences drive the desire to make distinctions and thus promotes conflict.

But perhaps there is something else there which is more important, and therefore it might be worth asking what the fuss was all about, anyway.

Jared Sacks wrote an article in the Mail and Guardian about Mamphela Ramphele’s non-party party, “Agang”. Hurray! And in his article he said some stuff, most of which was too boring to mention. One little teeny-weeny bit indicated, however, that Steve Biko would not have voted for Mamphy Ramphy. And this caused poor Andile to go completely off his chump and start charging around declaring (tweeting, truthily) that he himself would give Jared Sacks a thick ear if he ever met him, and indeed that all blacks in South Africa should queue up (with organisational participation, presumably, from taxi-rank organisers) and punch, kick or otherwise structurally inconvenience Jared Sacks until he stopped being that way, whichever way it was.

Yes, it was extremely silly. Why, however, did Andile get so het up? Is it just that he’s blown all his income from posturing as the PC of BC on coke, and can’t handle the stuff? Perhaps not, for there does seem to be some method in this madness.

What does it mean to say that Steve Biko wouldn’t have voted for Agang? On the face of it, simply that anyone who has read I Write What I Like will have noted Biko’s distrust for black people who are working as political facades for white people. All the evidence suggests that Agang fulfils this criterion. Hence, Biko would have distrusted Agang, and therefore probably Ramphele as well, and would very possibly have disowned his “son”. (That is if he had any biological connection with the child Ramphele had after Biko’s death whom she named for Biko.) Said son recently wrote a crock of nonsense on behalf of white big business which he calls “The Great South Africa” (copying President Lyndon B Johnson, the notorious genocidaire). Enough said about such people.

The problem is, however, that Biko is not only a third-rate knock-off Frantz Fanon. As such he is worthy of respect simply because next to Biko’s rather ordinary writing, most current “political commentators” appear fit only for the sewer. But Biko is also an icon of black independence and resistance to white authority. As such, when a white person says “Biko would not have liked that”, even if it is obvious that the point is true, the white person is implicitly saying “I have the right to say what Biko would, and would not, have liked”. In other words, the white person is effectively colonizing Biko for the white community, and in a strange way, is posthumously turning him into the same kind of front-person for white interests that Ramphele is – except that Ramphele consciously chose to be such, whereas Biko is dead and cannot resist his appropriation.

That is, of course, very bad. It is perfectly possible that Jared Sacks didn’t really mean to do this. However, it is also perfectly likely that Jared Sacks would have no problem with doing this. After all, one of the main characteristics of white culture is that it denigrates all other cultures and tolerates their manifestations only insofar as they can be accommodated and repositioned within the frameworks laid out by white culture. Ouch!

Can one be certain of this? Unfortunately, there is a lot of evidence substantiating it. Why, after all, did Sacks mention Biko at all? It is true that Ramphele has moved a long way from Biko’s politics since the days when she used to sleep with him, but we actually do not know how far she encapsulated his politics along with his penis. Certainly, most of her activities since her liberation from her banning order have been devoted to serving the white ruling class, and even before then her concern was much more with local self-help programmes than with the revolutionary struggle which concerned almost everybody else in the mid-1980s. So a criticism of Agang could have, and should have, focused quite exclusively on Ramphele.

Bringing in the Biko seems to suggest that Biko was indeed presented as a talisman (exactly as he is used by black consciousness intellectuals like Mngxitama) and that the message was “If you are black and like Biko, then you ought not to like Ramphele”. In other words, “We, the white people, are entitled to tell you, the black people, how to make use of your own iconography”. One begins to see that Mngxitama might have a point in wanting to give Sacks a clip over the earhole.

Sacks is also part of the Western Cape Trotskyite movement. He has, for instance, written exuberantly inaccurate articles for the Daily Maverick, a Web publication controlled by white people and heavily influential over white conservative journalists who like to use left-wing jargon through which they can pretend to be actual leftists. One recent article was about how the Democratic Alliance in the Western Cape is allowing black people’s shacks to burn down without providing fire protection – a claim earlier made by the local ANC leader Marius Fransman, though Sacks doesn’t mention this. It might very well be true. However, it seems obvious that while Fransman’s party has a slim chance of gaining power in the Western Cape, Sacks has no such chance, so his writing has no political significance even though it purports to have political significance. And, of course, Sacks, in writing the work, is crowding out the people who actually experience the fires – the black people who actually live in the shacks.

Sacks, like other South African Trotskyites, does not acknowledge this distinction. His line is that he is representing the People in his writing. But where are the People? They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented (as Marx wrote in “The Eighteenth Brumaire” about the conservative appropriation of the electoral power of the French peasantry in 1848). This, again, is a sign of Sacks and his friends taking the suffering or the conundrums of black people in a white-dominated society and appropriating this in order to make political capital and private gain out of it. This is remarkably like the activities of white liberalism in the days before it became dominant in the white community – when it appropriated black voices in order to empower itself – and it is also characteristic of Trotskyism, which appropriates the voices of shackdwellers such as Abahlali baseMjondolo or those with genuine grievances like the South Durban environmental campaigners, and in doing so erodes the authority and organizational capacity of the grassroots while only temporarily providing legitimacy for itself.

In other words, politically speaking, Mngxitama may be a fool but he is at least authentic in his objectives, whereas Sacks is both a fool and a pseudo-radical.

This is particularly evident in the responses to Mngxitama. One would think, would one not, that a battle between two undistinguished journalists is not worthy of much commentary. However, and instead, this whole affair has flooded across the white-dominated fake alternative media spectrum, where websites and e-journals controlled by white people present messages of radical action to other white people with no intention of implementing them but who feel that transmitting such messages is a convenient substitute for actual radicalism which might deprive them of their swimming-pools.

As one might expect, there has been no support, nor even any understanding, for Mngxitama’s position. Whites do not like blacks – this is the secret which the fake alternative media exists to conceal, but it comes out when the whites have to defend themselves against a recalcitrant black. How dare someone become indignant when one of Our Side does the job which we have allocated to him! So the call has gone out to denounce Mngxitama, coming from the Western Cape Trotskyites – virtually all of them the whites and coloureds of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency rebranded as the Democratic Left Front, together with the spurious nominally black but actually organizationally nonexistent names of Abahlali and the “Unemployed Workers’ Movement”. In other words, the white middle-class appropriators of the image of black working-class activism are leaping to the defense of one of their own.

All this should not surprise Mngxitama, although it probably does – since he has long depended on white endorsements to sustain his own little disempowered political niche. It is perhaps a little more surprising that two Young Democrats have issued a call for Mngxitama to be denied all access to the media and thus silenced forever. (Like, before him, Malema and Ronald Suresh Roberts.) One might think it odd that Young Democrats, the pom-pom girls of the white supremacist free-market, should be marching shoulder to shoulder with Trotskyists who purport to speak for black people in order to crush someone else who also purports to speak for black people.

However, this is altogether comprehensible in terms of the notion that Mngxitama is suspected of actually believing in what he writes. All frauds, fakes and pseuds naturally unite against an honest person, especially a passionate honest person. This is surely the principal lesson we must learn from this episode – that, and the fact that since the frauds, fakes and pseuds are in charge, a passionate person cannot afford to be too honest.

first published here: http://hismastersvoice.wordpress.com/2013/03/31/nice-peoples-pogrom/

first published here: http://pretoriapen.co.za/?p=746