If you want to learn about inspiration and motivation, don't spend all that money going to workshops and seminars, just go stand at 14th and Broadway and watch Marvin X at work. He's Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland.--Ishmael Reed, author, poet, educator
Marvin X with grandson Jah Amiel. At two years old, he told his grandfather, "You can't save the world, Grandpa, but I can."
Academy top student Jermaine, Civil Rights attorney Walter Riley, Blues living legend Sugar Pie de Santo, Chancellor Marvin X, aka Plato Negro, at Academy of da Corner, 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland. Jermaine's interest is radical spirituality.
Black History
at Academy of da Corner:
Five Black Men Reading!
Academy of da Corner Staff
L to R, Professor of Art, Jackson; Professor of Math,
Ramal Lamar, Chancellor Marvin X, aka Plato Negro;Gregory Fields, Professor of Legal Affairs
photo by Ted Pontiflet
“A Talk to Teachers”
By James Baldwin
(Delivered October 16, 1963, as “The Negro Child – His Self-Image”; originally published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.)
Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible – and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people – must be prepared to “go for broke.” Or to put it another way, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen.
Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I’m the child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.
Now, if what I have tried to sketch has any validity, it becomes thoroughly clear, at least to me, that any Negro who is born in this country and undergoes the American educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the stars and stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war. He pledges allegiance to that flag which guarantees “liberty and justice for all.” He is part of a country in which anyone can become president, and so forth. But on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization – that his past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured. He is assumed by the republic that he, his father, his mother, and his ancestors were happy, shiftless, watermelon-eating darkies who loved Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, that the value he has as a black man is proven by one thing only – his devotion to white people. If you think I am exaggerating, examine the myths which proliferate in this country about Negroes.
All this enters the child’s consciousness much sooner than we as adults would like to think it does. As adults, we are easily fooled because we are so anxious to be fooled. But children are very different. Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions. They don’t have the vocabulary to express what they see, and we, their elders, know how to intimidate them very easily and very soon. But a black child, looking at the world around him, though he cannot know quite what to make of it, is aware that there is a reason why his mother works so hard, why his father is always on edge. He is aware that there is some reason why, if he sits down in the front of the bus, his father or mother slaps him and drags him to the back of the bus. He is aware that there is some terrible weight on his parents’ shoulders which menaces him. And it isn’t long – in fact it begins when he is in school – before he discovers the shape of his oppression.
Let us say that the child is seven years old and I am his father, and I decide to take him to the zoo, or to Madison Square Garden, or to the U.N. Building, or to any of the tremendous monuments we find all over New York. We get into a bus and we go from where I live on 131st Street and Seventh Avenue downtown through the park and we get in New York City, which is not Harlem. Now, where the boy lives – even if it is a housing project – is in an undesirable neighborhood. If he lives in one of those housing projects of which everyone in New York is so proud, he has at the front door, if not closer, the pimps, the whores, the junkies – in a word, the danger of life in the ghetto. And the child knows this, though he doesn’t know why.
I still remember my first sight of New York. It was really another city when I was born – where I was born. We looked down over the Park Avenue streetcar tracks. It was Park Avenue, but I didn’t know what Park Avenue meant downtown. The Park Avenue I grew up on, which is still standing, is dark and dirty. No one would dream of opening a Tiffany’s on that Park Avenue, and when you go downtown you discover that you are literally in the white world. It is rich – or at least it looks rich. It is clean – because they collect garbage downtown. There are doormen. People walk about as though they owned where they are – and indeed they do. And it’s a great shock. It’s very hard to relate yourself to this. You don’t know what it means. You know – you know instinctively – that none of this is for you. You know this before you are told. And who is it for and who is paying for it? And why isn’t it for you?
Later on when you become a grocery boy or messenger and you try to enter one of those buildings a man says, “Go to the back door.” Still later, if you happen by some odd chance to have a friend in one of those buildings, the man says, “Where’s your package?” Now this by no means is the core of the matter. What I’m trying to get at is that by the time the Negro child has had, effectively, almost all the doors of opportunity slammed in his face, and there are very few things he can do about it. He can more or less accept it with an absolutely inarticulate and dangerous rage inside – all the more dangerous because it is never expressed. It is precisely those silent people whom white people see every day of their lives – I mean your porter and your maid, who never say anything more than “Yes Sir” and “No, Ma’am.” They will tell you it’s raining if that is what you want to hear, and they will tell you the sun is shining if that is what you want to hear. They really hate you – really hate you because in their eyes (and they’re right) you stand between them and life. I want to come back to that in a moment. It is the most sinister of the facts, I think, which we now face.
There is something else the Negro child can do, to. Every street boy – and I was a street boy, so I know – looking at the society which has produced him, looking at the standards of that society which are not honored by anybody, looking at your churches and the government and the politicians, understand that this structure is operated for someone else’s benefit – not for his. And there’s no reason in it for him. If he is really cunning, really ruthless, really strong – and many of us are – he becomes a kind of criminal. He becomes a kind of criminal because that’s the only way he can live. Harlem and every ghetto in this city – every ghetto in this country – is full of people who live outside the law. They wouldn’t dream of calling a policeman. They wouldn’t, for a moment, listen to any of those professions of which we are so proud on the Fourth of July. They have turned away from this country forever and totally. They live by their wits and really long to see the day when the entire structure comes down.
The point of all this is that black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor. They were indispensable to the economy. In order to justify the fact that men were treated as though they were animals, the white republic had to brainwash itself into believing that they were, indeed, animals and deserved to be treated like animals. Therefor it is almost impossible for any Negro child to discover anything about his actual history. The reason is that this “animal,” once he suspects his own worth, once he starts believing that he is a man, has begun to attack the entire power structure. This is why America has spent such a long time keeping the Negro in his place. What I am trying to suggest to you is that it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn’t understand. It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in or4der to make money from black flesh. And now, in 1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble.
The Reconstruction, as I read the evidence, was a bargain between the North and South to this effect: “We’ve liberated them from the land – and delivered them to the bosses.” When we left Mississippi to come North we did not come to freedom. We came to the bottom of the labor market, and we are still there. Even the Depression of the 1930’s failed to make a dent in Negroes’ relationship to white workers in the labor unions. Even today, so brainwashed is this republic that people seriously ask in what they suppose to be good faith, “What does the Negro want?” I’ve heard a great many asinine questions in my life, but that is perhaps the most asinine and perhaps the most insulting. But the point here is that people who ask that question, thinking that they ask it in good faith, are really the victims of this conspiracy to make Negroes believe they are less than human.
In order for me to live, I decided very early that some mistake had been made somewhere. I was not a “nigger” even though you called me one. But if I was a “nigger” in your eyes, there was something about you – there was something you needed. I had to realize when I was very young that I was none of those things I was told I was. I was not, for example, happy. I never touched a watermelon for all kinds of reasons that had been invented by white people, and I knew enough about life by this time to understand that whatever you invent, whatever you project, is you! So where we are no is that a whole country of people believe I’m a “nigger,” and I don’t , and the battle’s on! Because if I am not what I’ve been told I am, then it means that you’re not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis.
It is not really a “Negro revolution” that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of anybody’s history, you must lie about it all. If you have to lie about my real role here, if you have to pretend that I hoed all that cotton just because I loved you, then you have done something to yourself. You are mad.
Now let’s go back a minute. I talked earlier about those silent people - the porter and the maid – who, as I said, don’t look up at the sky if you ask them if it is raining, but look into your face. My ancestors and I were very well trained. We understood very early that this was not a Christian nation. It didn’t matter what you said or how often you went to church. My father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother knew that Christians didn’t act this way. It was a simple as that. And if that was so there was no point in dealing with white people in terms of their own moral professions, for they were not going to honor them. What one did was to turn away, smiling all the time, and tell white people what they wanted to hear. But people always accuse you of reckless talk when you say this.
All this means that there are in this country tremendous reservoirs of bitterness which have never been able to find an outlet, but may find an outlet soon. It means that well-meaning white liberals place themselves in great danger when they try to deal with Negroes as though they were missionaries. It means, in brief, that a great price is demanded to liberate all those silent people so that they can breathe for the first time and tell you what they think of you. And a price is demanded to liberate all those white children – some of them near forty - who have never grown up, and who never will grow up, because they have no sense of their identity.
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That’s how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life. When I was living in Europe, for example, one of the worst revelations to me was the way Americans walked around Europe buying this and buying that and insulting everybody – not even out of malice, just because they didn’t know any better. Well, that is the way they have always treated me. They weren’t cruel; they just didn’t know you were alive. They didn’t know you had any feelings.
What I am trying to suggest here is that in the doing of all this for 100 years or more, it is the American white man who has long since lost his grip on reality. In some peculiar way, having created this myth about Negroes, and the myth about his own history, he created myths about the world so that, for example, he was astounded that some people could prefer Castro, astounded that there are people in the world who don’t go into hiding when they hear the word “Communism,” astounded that Communism is one of the realities of the twentieth century which we will not overcome by pretending that it does not exist. The political level in this country now, on the part of people who should know better, is abysmal.
The Bible says somewhere that where there is no vision the people perish. I don’t think anyone can doubt that in this country today we are menaced – intolerably menaced – by a lack of vision.
It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should continue, as we do so abjectly, to say, “I can’t do anything about it. It’s the government.” The government is the creation of the people. It is responsible to the people. And the people are responsible for it. No American has the right to allow the present government to say, when Negro children are being bombed and hosed and shot and beaten all over the Deep South, that there is nothing we can do about it. There must have been a day in this country’s life when the bombing of the children in Sunday School would have created a public uproar and endangered the life of a Governor Wallace. It happened here and there was no public uproar.
I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the evidence – the moral and political evidence – one is compelled to say that this is a backward society. Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them - I would try to make them know – that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once decide that his is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never make his peace with it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth. I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a man’s respect. That it is up to him to change these standards for the sake of the life and the health of the country. I would suggest to him that the popular culture – as represented, for example, on television and in comic books and in movies – is based on fantasies created by very ill people, and he must be aware that these are fantasies that have nothing to do with reality. I would teach him that the press he reads is not as free as it says it is – and that he can do something about that, too. I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger – and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn’t have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything. I would try to show him that one has not learned anything about Castro when one says, “He is a Communist.” This is a way of his learning something about Castro, something about Cuba, something, in time, about the world. I would suggest to him that his is living, at the moment, in an enormous province. America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way – and this child must help her to find a way to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy.
Renaissance of Imagination by Dr. Marvin X
Chancellor, Academy of da Corner
It is perhaps in the field of education where the murder of imagination is most blatant and criminal, for the creative child is often the genius who is of a contrary spirit and mind, who desires to do things differently but is often opposed and may be relegated to special education and thus defined as incorrigible and out of control. Yet, this child is often the leader by the power of his imagination, thus able to usurp the authority of the teacher, therefore he must be banned from the classroom. As a result his creative energy is unused and the educational process suffers. If only he had been given the chance to exercise his creative authority, even allowing him to dialogue with his peers on the lesson at hand. He may have the answer to the conundrum that the majority of his peers find most difficult, yet he is the criminal, the mentally retarded who supposedly suffers from attention deficient disorder. But what is killing him is the suppression of his imagination. We dare say the 50% of students who drop out of schools in America share his problem, and often if they do not drop out they are pushed out because their attendance and test scores are an embarrassment to school ranking and thus funding.
So we end up blaming the creative child for using his imagination while it is the teachers, administrators and parents who are brain dead and stuck on failed educational policies and programs. As far as we are concerned, every child is a genius until made stupid and ignorant by a deranged educational system that primarily has the mission to prepare cogs for the wheel of capitalism, not to inspire children to use their imagination for the advancement of society.
The classics of literature are totally irrelevant to a child when they are not in his language, even those that may be on the eternal themes of humanity. And today far too many children come to school traumatized by life thus they are totally bored by the fictional world presented to them by school. More than likely, the teacher would do well to learn from them. Imagine, the Washington DC children said the only thing they could imagine for their future was what kind of funeral they wanted. How can one teach students in such a state of mind, and of what value is traditional curriculum until the students have processed such damaging mental health issues. And are teachers prepared to be grief counselors? But do they have a choice when students come to school from a war zone, when the school itself is a war zone?
We applaud the sincere suffering teachers who believe in the students but are often blocked by reactionary, conservative administrations and parents from instituting radical approaches that will unlock the imagination of students and ignite that innate passion to learn.
The result of killing the imagination is obvious in the 50% drop out/push out rate of public education. It is seen further in the high incarceration rate of youth for sometimes horrendous crimes often motivated by gang initiation or the desire to belong to a group that tolerates their creative imagination and leadership, while simultaneously offering them a sense of belonging, of brotherhood and sisterhood, for in this regard the family, schools, church and traditional social groups have failed.
One solution is peer education, yes, let the students teach themselves, even if and when it involves removing the teacher from the classroom when he is often of minor importance anyway. So let the teachers stand in the hallways outside the class, reversing the situation so common. Let the class clown (usually the bright, imaginative students) instruct the lesson once they have conferred with the teacher, let the student translate the message into the language of his peers. We have tried this method, so we know it works if you work it. But more than likely, this approach is too radical for the conservative public schools, thus they will likely continue to drift toward disintegration and the continued death of imagination.
The renaissance of imagination can only be achieved by brave and bold leadership that itself has undergone a revolution in consciousness and is duty bound to resurrect brain dead students who deserve a chance to make use of the minds God gave them.
There is such a dearth of sincere political leaders that there is no need to address them with respect to youth matters, for the primary goal of politicians is to get reelected by any means necessary, thus they are prepared to do little more than talk when it comes to the crisis in imagination. The political minds are prone to give only lip service to the people until after election when they suddenly develop an acute case of amnesia, unable to recall the people‘s agenda but only the names of lobbyists to whom they owe a higher degree of loyalty.
The talk of a new black church sounds inspiring but it is doubtful it will engender a renaissance in the imagination of youth or adults, for by its nature the church is conservative, it must remain true to tradition, to the myth and rituals it is duty bound to serve, no matter that these myths and rituals have morphed into something that would seem very foreign and strange to Mary’s baby. For sure, Mary’s baby embodied and exemplified the renaissance of imagination by transcending many of the ancient traditions, and the world is better for his spiritual imagination, yet like the Amon priests who reacted to the monotheism of Akhenaton in Egypt, the priests and preachers of today have revised the words of Jesus to fit their agenda of worshipping Pharaoh or being his magicians who do damage control for him rather than carry out the mission of Jesus to liberate the poor, the oppressed, the imprisoned, the sick and broken hearted.
The renaissance of imagination will thus necessitate transcending religiosity into the realm of radical spirituality that consists of inculcating a new consciousness that develops out of freeing the mind of reactionary mythology that inhibits free thinking; the new consciousness allows radical thinking similar to the prophetic tradition which found itself in confrontation with those in authority, sometimes even at war with them. But new ideas come with a price that involves moving beyond thought into action to realize the renaissance of imagination.
It is in the field of the arts that we expect to observe the imagination forever soaring and searching for new heights, new means of expression, for artists by nature give us visions and prophecy, since their work is to search the consciousness for new ways of representing what lies in the depth of the soul and give creative expression to their findings. They require freedom with discipline in order to do their work. Freedom by itself is chaos but with discipline the artist is able to give birth to a cosmological order which is the mythology of his work, for upon examination by the critic, it is clear the artist has a certain consistency, a repetition of form, shape, colors, style, space and place. There are themes that seem to hold his interest, a vocabulary that is unremarkably his and his alone that marks his style, his originality. We expect the artist to help us understand the chaos of life, its vicissitudes and to make plain the endgame; where are we headed and how shall we get there. We are in the dark, so give us a little light that we may find our way out of this morass, this ever encroaching darkness. Help us imagine life in the sun for that is our home and our pressing wish is to return, for it is there that we experienced love, joy, happiness and peace. There we found justice, righteousness and mercy.
The work of the artist is sacred for his tools are the signs, symbols, words, sounds of the universe, thus he cannot take these tools lightly, for they contain powers beyond himself, powers that include the ancestors, the living and the yet unborn, powers that can shatter lies and falsehoods to usher in a new day, a new birth of imagination for humanity.
The cultural revolution will take a great leap forward when the keepers can organize African centered experiences on a daily basis, including conferences, festivals, bazaars,
and other educational, economic and artistic events that keep the culture alive 24/7, thus not allowing the people time for relapse, but instead there is only time for cultural expression which promotes economic progress and political unity for a radical agenda.
Only in this manner can a renaissance come about that is lasting unto the next generation.
Be careful of contradictions for they are the stuff that breed counter-revolution, so resolve them immediately with unity, criticism, unity and keep on pushing. The tide is turning because you are turning the tide! The new birth will come about when the mind is pregnant with new ideas that must be delivered and cannot be restrained. As they say, there is nothing like an idea whose time has come. We had the renaissance of the 20s and 60s, now it is time for the permanent revolution that will not allow itself to be aborted, diverted or defeated. But it requires eternal vigilance, yes, we must all stay on our posts until properly relieved.
Listen to the women because they are natural bearers of good news, new ideas that may be concealed only because men don’t listen. Then the women will say, “I told you that but you didn’t hear me.” Solomon told us two are better than one because if we stumble by ourselves there is no one to pick us up. So listen to the women, they may be able to keep us from falling when we are on the precipice. They have ideas that are sound but never been used, they have creative minds that have been repressed because men think they know it all, when sometimes they know very little but presume. Let the men not be prone to those classic tragic flaws of pride, arrogance and self importance, flaws that will surely prevent any renaissance except a new birth of old ideas.
Critical thinking is the primary tool in this era. Reacting emotionally will avail us nothing but more reaction from the opposition. Critical thinking precedes detailed planning for the future, then we stay the course, and shall not be moved by the moment but we are steadfast on our agenda, no matter what the opposition does, we do not waver, for it does not matter what someone else thinks, says or does, but only what we think, plan and carry out. We are soldiers up in here, and shall not be moved. Yes, a change is gonna come because we have come to make a change. Develop a five year plan, fifty year plan and hundred year plan. You can do it, simply do as Mama said, “Use the mind God gave you.”
We discussed earlier the retarded thinking of politicians whose mantra is, “Vote
for me, I’ll set you free.” It is very rare when political leaders have freed a people, but more often it is when the people decide to free themselves that they achieve such freedom, and perhaps then the leaders can offer assistance. If it were up to the people, there would be no US troops in Iraq, but the leaders, even after hearing the voice of the people, persist in their own agenda which is the agenda not of the people but of the military-corporate complex. The leaders are thus sycophants of the most servile kind. But if the people use their imagination, they might consider the general strike to stop the war and bring their sons and daughters home and out of harm’s way.
We must engage our minds in the critical thinking that produces solutions instead of allowing the show to go on ad infinitum. There are so many social problems that persist because we refuse to subject them to critical analysis, searching out the connection between events. How can we stop the war in Iraq when we can’t stop the war in the hood? There are just as many if not more sons and daughters being slaughtered in the streets of America as are being killed in the streets of Iraq and Afghanistan. If we pondered for a moment on the devastation in our streets we could easily solve the conundrum in the streets of Baghdad.
Perhaps we should turn to that most astute genre of individuals who are trained to use their esteemed imaginations on the difficult questions of humankind, those who deem themselves philosophers, who have been blessed above all others to have the time to dwell on issues those less suited never bother to consider. In truth, we are not qualified to delineate the meanderings of this elite group, but we know that there is no consensus on a critical issue such as freedom, its meaning and parameters. We know there are those who have thought deeply on this matter ever since our unholy sojourn in the wilderness of North America. The thinking has been divided into camps, often spit between those who say we should pack up and depart and those who say we should plant our feet on solid ground. Usually the path that comes into prominence depends on the circumstances of the moment, for it is usually when times are most difficult that the idea to depart comes into play, and then when things get better, when we achieve a momentary reprieve, we are willing to give ole Massa another chance, to declare our belief in the American dream, or nightmare as the segment who see no hope will maintain.
And what might be possible in the space between the two extremes, between separation and integration, just to clarify terminology. Shall we not take a lesson from the Jews who are eternally pessimistic and always prepared to go. For sure, we know our historical record is one of migrations and immigrations, voluntary or forced, by nature or man as a result of war, struggles over succession, ethnic strife and other matters in the human drama.
Perhaps we need a philosophic position that will keep our feet on solid ground yet prepared for the worse (keep your passport renewed), or shall we take the position of Claude McKay’s poem If We Must Die, “…Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back.” Essentially liberty or death, at least in this position we can remain on solid ground and fight to the bitter end for that which is ours.
But if we say stay, don’t go, what is the nature of our staying and not going--is it to suffer all that might be coming to the oppressor or to declare a space independent of him that is due us for injuries suffered throughout the centuries down to the present moment. Yes, reparations are due from Massa, and reparations are due from Africa, and reparations are due from ourselves, most importantly, for we have the wherewithal to achieve even the most seemingly impossible political configuration that will make national independence a reality.
There is no way we should suffer what America has coming for its iniquities--there is no way the robbed shall suffer the penalty of the robbers, oh, no, the universe is not like this, no matter how much we want to love Massa and save Massa, we shall not go down with Massa, unless we are determined to worship the beast, then of course we shall go down with the beast. Otherwise, as they say in prison, “Ride yo own beef.” No matter what the philosophers and intellectuals conclude and pontificate before crowded audiences for mega honorariums, our destiny is not the destiny of Americans since we have never enjoyed the American dream to any meaningful degree. For sure, we now enjoy a few crumbs from Massa’s table, a few trinkets that pacify the bourgeoisie until they are reminded they too are Africans, especially when their so-called first class status is called into question when driving while black or eating out while black. Even Oprah found she could not shop where she wanted and Condi was told she could not enter Lebanon during the American supported war between Israel and Hezbollah.
But men and women have arisen to great power in America though they must often be seen as belonging to the class of oppressors as opposed to the oppressed class from which they came, thus they are part of a select group that have roots in the African ruling classes who conspired to put us aboard ships for that westward journey into oblivion, from which we are presently attempting to regain our mental equilibrium and spiritual sensibility, which is why we are calling for a renaissance of imagination. For sure, we have made great strides since the revolution of the 60s. Today our children have acquired the necessary qualifications to advance educationally and thus economically; our women have acquired all the trapping of this materialistic culture save a husband, especially from their ethnic group, yet there is a void, a chasm so deep that we must again quote Dr. Nathan Hare who tells us no amount of sex, drugs, money, power or position will satisfy our social angst and shattered cultural strivings. For we have yet to solve the conundrum of the box, how to escape or even find that middle ground wherein we can maintain a level of sanity that is functional.
Perhaps our philosophers can look upon the still waters or even consider the raging ocean tide and come to us with answers that will guide us through this millennium that began with such turbulence and portends to be a rocky road until we reach that final destination called freedom.
And finally, we must applaud the imagination of the hip hop generation that has created a world youth culture, that has made more millionaires than ever before in our history, and made billions for the record, film and fashion industry. Hip hop has its detractors but the glass is clearly half full rather than half empty. Hip hop need only let its voice of consciousness rise again to the top, and this generation will astound the world, for in consciousness it is in synch with the ancestors and the radical tradition of defiance and resistance until victory. When hip hop consciously reconnects with its elders, the circle will be complete, for the family shall be able to reason together again
with respect, no matter the contradictions of the elders or the youth. Issues can be resolved at the table while sharing a holistic version of soul food.
Dr. Marvin
5/29/07
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