Blacks doubt the USA will ever achieve racial equality

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If Blacks don't believe racial equality will ever be achieved any time soon, what is Plan B? Or should we just stand around with our penis and/or pussy in hand and hearts racing, waitin' fa Jesus to step off the mothership bearing the gift of racial equality? What about getting off our black behinds to do something for self since it is clear we are in the house of a liar and murderer and what wife would continue to live with a husband she has discovered is a liar and murderer. If she remained, would she not be considered an accomplish to said liar and murderer? 

Do for self means self-determination and sovereignty, independence, nationhood, land, somewhere on this earth where we can live in freedom, justice and equality as Marcus Garvey and Elijah Muhammad taught us. 

Since Black America is among the richest nations in the world, we can buy several states and establish the Republic of New Africa. Or we can separate from these liars and murderers as Pakistan did from India. How many more generations of our children do we want to raise in this land of devils who are heartless, greedy, jealous, envious bastards of the worse kind, even to their own kind. While visiting the South, people repeatedly told me they treat dirty white trash worse than they treat nigguhs! And the dirty white trash are so ignut they would die before they became a nigguh. What did Chris Rock say, "I'm a rich nigguh but don't no white man want to be Chris Rock!" 

So forget white supremacy America, just like you would divorce yourself from an abusive partner. Grab your children and run for your life! Allah said, "If you flee in My name you will find many places of escape and abundant resources." The reason you won't consider my words (I'm only repeating what our ancestors and elders taught us) is because you are addicted to white supremacy Type II (Dr. Nathan Hare, foreword, How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, Marvin X, Black Bird Press, Berkeley). If you are ever able to detox and enjoy long term recovery, you will regain your mental equilibrium and see clearly what I'm trying to get into your thick skull. Elijah asked, "Why do we love the devil?" Answer: because he gives us nothing! You voted for Obama but got nothing. You will vote for Hillary and get nothing, and you will love nothing like a hog loves slop! You kill each other daily over nothing. He kills you daily over nothing. You live a nothing life and love it because you are addicted to the world of make believe. And you wonder why your children are wild and crazy. You send them to the enemy schools to become savages, wild and crazy, then you wonder why they come home from schools, colleges and universities hating you and everything you're about, even though they don't really know what you're about (Amiri Baraka) because they have been taught to hate you no matter what you have done for them, no matter all your sacrifices to keep them alive in this hostile environment with these devils wearing suits and ties and smiling faces.
--Marvin X
6/29/16

Marvin X, aka Dr. M

Black America and White America: Worlds Apart On Race/Racism

June 27, 2016- pewsocialtrends.org

On Views of Race and Inequality, Blacks and Whites Are Worlds Apart

About four-in-ten blacks are doubtful that the U.S. will ever achieve racial equality

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Almost eight years after Barack Obama’s election as the nation’s first black president –an event that engendered a sense of optimism among many Americans about the future of race relations¹ – a series of flashpoints around the U.S. has exposed deep racial divides and reignited a national conversation about race. A new Pew Research Center survey finds profound differences between black and white adults in their views on racial discrimination, barriers to black progress and the prospects for change. Blacks, far more than whites, say black people are treated unfairly across different realms of life, from dealing with the police to applying for a loan or mortgage. And, for many blacks, racial equality remains an elusive goal.

An overwhelming majority of blacks (88%) say the country needs to continue making changes for blacks to have equal rights with whites, but 43% are skeptical that such changes will ever occur. An additional 42% of blacks believe that the country will eventually make the changes needed for blacks to have equal rights with whites, and just 8% say the country has already made the necessary changes.

A much lower share of whites (53%) say the country still has work to do for blacks to achieve equal rights with whites, and only 11% express doubt that these changes will come. Four-in-ten whites believe the country will eventually make the changes needed for blacks to have equal rights, and about the same share (38%) say enough changes have already been made.

These findings are based on a national survey by Pew Research Center conducted Feb. 29-May 8, 2016, among 3,769 adults (including 1,799 whites, 1,004 blacks and 654 Hispanics).² The survey – and the analysis of the survey findings – is centered primarily around the divide between blacks and whites and on the treatment of black people in the U.S. today. In recent years, this centuries-old divide has garnered renewed attention following the deaths of unarmed black Americans during encounters with the police, as well as a racially motivated shooting that killed nine black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

The survey finds that black and white adults have widely different perceptions about what life is like for blacks in the U.S. For example, by large margins, blacks are more likely than whites to say black people are treated less fairly in the workplace (a difference of 42 percentage points), when applying for a loan or mortgage (41 points), in dealing with the police (34 points), in the courts (32 points), in stores or restaurants (28 points), and when voting in elections (23 points). By a margin of at least 20 percentage points, blacks are also more likely than whites to say racial discrimination (70% vs. 36%), lower quality schools (75% vs. 53%) and lack of jobs (66% vs. 45%) are major reasons that blacks may have a harder time getting ahead than whites.

More broadly, blacks and whites offer different perspectives of the current state of race relations in the U.S. White Americans are evenly divided, with 46% saying race relations are generally good and 45% saying they are generally bad. In contrast, by a nearly two-to-one margin, blacks are more likely to say race relations are bad (61%) rather than good (34%). Blacks are also about twice as likely as whites to say too little attention is paid to race and racial issues in the U.S. these days (58% vs. 27%). About four-in-ten whites (41%) – compared with 22% of blacks – say there is too much focus on race and racial issues.

Blacks and whites also differ in their opinions about the best approach for improving race relations: Among whites, more than twice as many say that in order to improve race relations, it’s more important to focus on what different racial and ethnic groups have in common (57%) as say the focus should be on what makes each group unique (26%). Among blacks, similar shares say the focus should be on commonalities (45%) as say it should be on differences (44%).

When asked specifically about the impact President Barack Obama has had on race relations in the U.S., a majority of Americans give the president credit for at least trying to make things better, but a quarter say he has made race relations worse. Blacks and whites differ significantly in their assessments. Some 51% of blacks say Obama has made progress toward improving race relations, and an additional 34% say he has tried but failed to make progress. Relatively few blacks (5%) say Obama has made race relations worse, while 9% say he hasn’t addressed the issue at all.

Among whites, 28% say Obama has made progress toward improving race relations and 24% say he has tried but failed to make progress. But a substantial share of whites (32%) say Obama has made race relations worse. This is driven largely by the views of white Republicans, 63% of whom say Obama has made race relations worse (compared with just 5% of white Democrats).

When asked about their views of Black Lives Matter, the activist movement that first came to national prominence following the 2014 shooting death of an unarmed black 18-year-old by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, roughly two-thirds (65%) of blacks express support, including 41% who strongly support it. Among whites, four-in-ten say they support the Black Lives Movement at least somewhat, and this is particularly the case among white Democrats and those younger than 30.

Across the survey’s findings, there are significant fault lines within the white population – perhaps none more consistent than the partisan divide. For example, among whites, Democrats and Republicans differ dramatically on the very salience of race issues in this country. About six-in-ten (59%) white Republicans say too much attention is paid to race and racial issues these days, while only 21% of Democrats agree. For their part, a 49% plurality of white Democrats say too little attention is paid to race these days, compared with only 11% of Republicans.

And while about eight-in-ten (78%) white Democrats say the country needs to continue making changes to achieve racial equality between whites and blacks, just 36% of white Republicans agree; 54% of white Republicans believe the country has already made the changes necessary for blacks to have equal rights with whites.

How blacks and whites view the state of race in America

There are large gaps between blacks and whites in their views of race relations and racial inequality in the United States. Explore how the opinions of blacks and whites vary by age, education, gender and party identification in key questions from our report.

The economic realities of black and white households

Trends in key economic and demographic indicators provide some context for the experiences and outlook of blacks today. While there has been clear progress in closing the white-black gap in some areas – particularly when it comes to high school completion rates – decades-old black-white gaps in economic well-being persist and have even widened in some cases.

According to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2014 the median adjusted income for households headed by blacks was $43,300, and for whites it was $71,300. 3 Blacks also lag behind whites in college completion, but even among adults with a bachelor’s degree, blacks earned significantly less in 2014 than whites ($82,300 for households headed by a college-educated black compared with $106,600 for comparable white households).

The racial gap extends to household wealth – a measure where the gap has widened since the Great Recession. In 2013, the most recent year available, the median net worth of households headed by whites was roughly 13 times that of black households ($144,200 for whites compared with $11,200 for blacks).

For most Americans, household wealth is closely tied to home equity, and there are sharp and persistent gaps in homeownership between blacks and whites. In 2015, 72% of white household heads owned a home, compared with 43% of black household heads.

And on the flipside of wealth – poverty – racial gaps persist, even though the poverty rate for blacks has come down significantly since the mid-1980s. Blacks are still more than twice as likely as whites to be living in poverty (26% compared with 10% in 2014).

Blacks and whites are divided on reasons that blacks may be struggling to get ahead

Despite these economic realities, when asked about the financial situation of blacks compared with whites today, about four-in-ten blacks either say that both groups are about equally well off (30%) or that blacks are better off than whites financially (8%). Still, about six-in-ten (58%) blacks say that, as a group, they are worse off than whites.

Among whites, a plurality (47%) say blacks are worse off financially, while 37% say blacks are about as well off as whites and 5% say blacks are doing better than whites.

Blacks and whites with a bachelor’s degree are more likely than those with less education to say blacks are worse off financially than whites these days. Roughly eight-in-ten (81%) blacks with a four-year college degree say this, compared with 61% of blacks with only some college education and 46% of blacks with a high school diploma or less. In a similar pattern, about two-thirds (66%) of white college graduates say blacks are worse off financially than whites, while fewer among those who attended college but did not receive a degree (47%) and those who did not attend college (29%) say the same.

When asked about the underlying reasons that blacks may be having a harder time getting ahead than whites, large majorities of black adults point to societal factors. Two-thirds or more blacks say failing schools (75%), racial discrimination (70%) and a lack of jobs (66%) are major reasons that black people may have a harder time getting ahead these days.

On each of these items, the views of blacks differ significantly from those of whites. But, by far, the biggest gap comes on racial discrimination, where only 36% of whites say this is a major reason that blacks may be struggling to get ahead, 34 percentage points lower than the share of blacks who say the same.

The views of blacks and whites are more closely aligned when it comes to the impact that family instability (57% and 55%, respectively) and a lack of good role models (51% and 52%) has on black progress. However, the relative ranking of these items varies among blacks and whites. While whites rank family instability and a lack of good role models above or on a par with societal factors as major reasons that blacks may have a harder time getting ahead than whites, fewer blacks say these items are major reasons than say the same about lower quality schools, discrimination, and lack of jobs.

Blacks are more likely than whites to say a lack of motivation to work hard may be holding blacks back: 43% of black adults and 30% of whites say this is a major reason blacks are having a harder time getting ahead than whites. ⁴

More whites and blacks say individual discrimination is a bigger problem than institutional racism

On balance, the public thinks that when it comes to discrimination against black people in the U.S. today, discrimination that is based on the prejudice of individual people is a bigger problem than discrimination that is built into the nation’s laws and institutions. This is the case among both blacks and whites, but while whites offer this opinion by a large margin (70% to 19%), blacks are more evenly divided (48% to 40%).

Still, large majorities of black adults say that blacks in this country are treated unfairly in a range of institutional settings – from the criminal justice system, to the workplace to banks and financial institutions.

Fully 84% of blacks say that black people in this country are treated less fairly than whites in dealing with the police, and three-quarters say blacks are treated less fairly in the courts.

Roughly two-thirds of black adults say that blacks are treated less fairly than whites when applying for a loan or mortgage (66%) and in the workplace (64%). Somewhat smaller shares – though still upwards of four-in-ten – see unfair treatment for blacks in stores and restaurants (49%) and when voting in elections (43%).

Across all of these realms, whites are much less likely than blacks to perceive unequal treatment – with differences ranging from 23 to 42 percentage points.

Personal experiences with discrimination

A majority of blacks (71%) say that they have experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity. Roughly one-in-ten (11%) say this happens to them on a regular basis, while 60% say they have experienced this rarely or from time to time.

Among blacks, men and women are equally likely to report having personally experienced racial discrimination, and there are no large gaps by age. There is an educational divide, however: Blacks with at least some college experience (81%) are much more likely than blacks who never attended college (59%) to say they have been discriminated against because of their race.

Experiences with racial discrimination are far less common among whites, but a sizable minority (30%) of white adults report that they have been discriminated against or treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity. Only 2% say this happens to them regularly and 28% say it occurs less frequently. Whites who say they have a lot of contact with blacks are more likely to say they’ve been discriminated against because of their race than are whites who have less contact with blacks.

While some whites report being treated unfairly at times because of their race, the overall impact is relatively minor. Only 5% of whites say their race or ethnicity has made it harder for them to succeed in life. A majority of whites (62%) say their race hasn’t made much of difference in their ability to succeed, and 31% say their race has made things easier for them.

College-educated whites are especially likely to see their race as an advantage: 47% say being white has made it easier for them to succeed. By comparison, 31% of whites with some college education and 17% of those with a high school diploma or less say their race has made things easier for them. White Democrats (49%) are also among the most likely to say that their race or ethnicity has made it easier for them to get ahead in life.

For many blacks, the cumulative impact of discrimination has had a markedly negative impact on their lives. Four-in-ten blacks say their race has made it harder for them to succeed in life. Roughly half (51%) say their race hasn’t made a difference in their overall success, and just 8% say being black has made things easier.

There is a sharp educational divide among blacks on the overall impact their race has had on their ability to succeed. Fully 55% of blacks with a four-year college degree say their race has made it harder for them to succeed in life. Some 45% of blacks who attended college but did not receive a bachelor’s degree say the same. Among blacks with a high school education or less, a far lower share (29%) say their race has made it harder for them to succeed. A majority of this group (60%) say their race hasn’t made a difference.

About half of blacks say people have acted like they were suspicious of them

Unfair treatment can come in different forms. Roughly half of blacks (47%) say that in the past 12 months someone has acted as if they were suspicious of them because of their race or ethnicity. Many blacks also report feeling like others have questioned their intelligence. Some 45% say that in the past 12 months people have treated them as if they were not smart because of their race or ethnicity.

Roughly one-in-five blacks (21%) say they have been treated unfairly by an employer in the past year because of their race or ethnicity, and a similar share (18%) report having been unfairly stopped by the police during this period.

Black men are more likely than black women to say that people have treated them with suspicion (52% vs. 44%). And they are more likely to say they have been unfairly stopped by the police (22% vs. 15%).

Being treated with suspicion and being treated as if they are not intelligent are more common experiences for black adults who attended college than for those who did not. For example, 52% of those with at least some college education say that, in the past 12 months, someone has treated them as if they thought they weren’t smart because of their race or ethnicity, compared with 37% of those with a high school diploma or less.

Among blacks, widespread support for the Black Lives Matter movement

Most blacks (65%) express support for the Black Lives Matter movement: 41% strongly support it, and 24% say they support it somewhat. Some 12% of blacks say they oppose Black Lives Matter (including 4% who strongly oppose it). Even so, blacks have somewhat mixed views about the extent to which the Black Lives Matter movement will be effective, in the long run, in helping blacks achieve equality. Most (59%) think it will be effective, but only 20% think it will be very effective. About one-in-five (21%) say it won’t be too effective or won’t be effective at all in the long run.

Blacks with a bachelor’s degree or more are among the most skeptical that the Black Lives Matter movement will ultimately help bring about racial equality. About three-in-ten (31%) of those with a bachelor’s degree or more education say that, in the long run, the movement won’t be too effective or won’t be effective at all, compared with about two-in-ten adults with less education.

Granted, many blacks are skeptical overall that the country will eventually make the changes needed to bring about racial equality. But even among those who think change will eventually come, only 23% say Black Lives Matter will be very effective in helping bring about equality.

For their part, whites have mixed views of the Black Lives Matter movement. Four-in-ten whites say they support the movement (14% strongly support and 26% somewhat support). And about a third (34%) of whites say, in the long run, the Black Lives Matter movement will be at least somewhat effective in helping blacks achieve equality.

Young white adults are more enthusiastic about Black Lives Matter than middle-aged and older whites. Six-in-ten of those ages 18 to 29 say they support it, compared with 46% of whites ages 30 to 49, 37% of whites ages 50 to 64, and 26% of whites 65 and older. Young whites are also somewhat more likely than their older counterparts to say that the Black Lives Matter movement will be at least somewhat effective in the long run (47% vs. 37%, 32% and 26%, respectively).

Whites’ views on Black Lives Matter also differ significantly by party identification. Some 64% of white Democrats support the movement, including 29% who do so strongly. One-in-five white Republicans and 42% of white independents say they support the Black Lives Matter movement (4% of Republicans and 11% of independents strongly support it). White Democrats are also much more likely than Republicans and independents to say that the movement will ultimately be at least somewhat effective in bringing about racial equality (53% vs. 20% and 34%, respectively).

When asked how well they feel they understand the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement, blacks are much more likely than whites to say they understand it very or fairly well. Even so, about one-in-five blacks (19%) say they don’t have a good understanding of its goals, compared with 29% of whites. But general awareness of Black Lives Matter is widespread among whites and blacks: Overall, 81% of blacks and 76% of whites have heard at least a little about the movement, including about half or more of each group (56% and 48%, respectively), who say they have heard a lot.

Many blacks and whites say community engagement is key to bringing about racial equality

More than four-in-ten blacks (48%) and whites (46%) say that working with community members to solve problems in their community would be a very effective tactic for groups striving to help blacks achieve equality. But the two groups disagree about the effectiveness of some other tactics.

In particular, while nearly four-in-ten (38%) black adults say working to get more black people elected to office would be very effective, just 24% of whites say the same. Blacks are also more likely than whites to say it would be very effective for groups working to help blacks achieve equality to bring people of different racial backgrounds together to talk about race (41% vs. 34%). Similarly, blacks see more value than whites in organizing protests and rallies, although relatively few blacks view this as a very effective way to bring about change (19% vs. 7% of whites).

The remainder of this report examines in greater detail the public’s views of the state of race relations and racial inequality in the U.S. Chapter 1 looks at some key demographic and economic indicators where blacks have made progress or lag behind other racial and ethnic groups. Chapter 2 focuses on views about the current state of race relations and its trajectory, as well as the job Obama has done on this issue. Chapter 3 examines the extent to which Americans think the country has made – or will eventually make – the changes necessary for blacks to achieve equal rights with whites. It also looks at perceptions about the way blacks and whites are treated across many realms of American life. Chapter 4 focuses on what the public sees as effective strategies for groups and organizations working to promote racial equality and explores attitudes toward the Black Lives Matter movement and other organizations that strive to bring about equality for black Americans. Chapter 5 looks at personal experiences with discrimination as well as perceptions about the impact race and gender have had in one’s life. Chapter 6 describes the outlook and experiences of blacks, whites and Hispanics, particularly as they relate to personal finances.

Other key findings

• About half (48%) of whites say they are very satisfied with the quality of life in their community, compared with about a third (34%) of blacks. This gap persists after controlling for income. For example, 57% of whites with an annual family income of $75,000 or more report that they are very satisfied with the quality of life in their community; just 38% of blacks in the same income group say the same.
• Blacks are far more likely than whites to say they have experienced financial hardship in the past 12 months. About four-in-ten (41%) blacks say they have had trouble paying their bills, and about a quarter (23%) say they have gotten food from a food bank or food pantry during this period. Among whites, 25% say they have struggled to pay their bills, and 8% report having sought out food from a food bank in the past 12 months.
• Black men are far more likely than white men to say their gender has made it harder for them to get ahead in life (20% vs. 5%, respectively). Among women, similar shares of blacks (28%) and whites (27%) say their gender has set them back.
• About eight-in-ten (81%) blacks say they feel at least somewhat connected to a broader black community in the U.S., including 36% who feel very connected. Blacks who feel a strong sense of connection to a broader black community are more likely than those who don’t to say that in the past 12 months they have made a financial contribution to, attended an event sponsored by, or volunteered their time to a group or organization working specifically to improve the lives of black Americans.
• Majorities of blacks say the NAACP (77%), the National Urban League (66%) and the Congressional Black Caucus (63%) have been at least somewhat effective in helping blacks achieve equality in this country. Only about three-in-ten or fewer say each of these groups has been very effective, likely reflecting, at least in part, the widespread view among blacks that the country has work to do for blacks to achieve equal rights with whites.

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Terminology

1. A Pew Research Center survey conducted shortly after the November 2008 presidential election among 1,500 voters found that 52% of all voters said Barack Obama’s election would lead to better race relations (including 49% of white voters and 75% of black voters). ↩
2. The survey includes an oversample of black and Hispanic adults. For more details about how the survey was conducted, see the Methodology section of the report. While the overview of the report focuses on the differences of opinion between black and white Americans, the views of Hispanics are presented throughout the remainder of the report. Due to small sample sizes, the views of Asians and other racial groups that make up a relatively small share of the U.S. population are not shown separately, but they are included in the overall numbers for all adults. Demographic data on Asians is analyzed separately in Chapter 1, which relies on data from the U.S. Census Bureau. ↩
3. Median household income figures have been adjusted to 2014 dollars and are scaled to a three-person household. ↩
4. White responses to this item may have been affected, at least in part, by social desirability bias, or the tendency of people to give what they believe is the socially acceptable answer. In this case, 35% of whites who believed they were speaking with a white interviewer said lack of motivation is a major reason blacks may have a harder time getting ahead; about one-in-five (21%) whites who believed their interviewer was black gave this answer. ↩

Posted 12 hours ago by black left unity network

Black Bird Press News & Review: Marvin X thinking out loud on the OPD, Slavery, Global wars and the beauty of life in spite of ugliness

Black Bird Press News & Review: Marvin X thinking out loud on the OPD, Slavery, Global wars and the beauty of life in spite of ugliness

Book: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbiuktu by Joshua Hammer

The Great Rescue in Timbuktu

Abdel Kader Haidara in Timbuktu with ancient manuscripts from Mali, Niger, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Nigeria, September 2009. Haider was instrumental in saving the manuscripts during the militant Islamist takeover of Timbuktu in 2012.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts

by Joshua Hammer

Simon and Schuster, 278 pp., $26.00

 

1.

On March 1, the International Criminal Court at The Hague formally charged Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, one of the leaders of the 2012 Islamist takeover of the Malian city of Timbuktu, with destroying the city’s cultural heritage—the first such international indictment. During June and July of that year, al-Mahdi took part in attacks on the mausoleums of Timbuktu’s Muslim saints, shrines that were deemed heretical under the strict Salafist religious code the occupiers tried to impose on the city. Using pickaxes, al-Mahdi and his group demolished the mud-brick buildings that had stood for five or six centuries and were central to Timbuktu’s rich cultural history. 

Among the targets of al-Mahdi and his fellow jihadists was the fifteenth-century Sidi Yahya Mosque; the jihadists smashed a sacred door that, according to long-held beliefs, would remain closed until the world’s last day.

The court’s decision to prosecute an act that victimized buildings, not people, says much about the West’s evolving response to radical Islamic jihad, and about the special significance of Timbuktu for the preservation of Islamic architecture and writings. In places like Afghanistan’s Bamiyan cliffs and the Syrian city of Palmyra, jihadists have tried to purge the historical record of what they regard as idolatrous or impure; both sites were mentioned by prosecutors at al-Mahdi’s hearing. Not mentioned there was another vicious act of destruction, aimed at the core of Timbuktu’s unique identity.

As jihadis retreated from the city, fleeing a French intervention that began in the first weeks of 2013, they set fire to thousands of centuries-old books in the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research. It was not the contents of the books the jihadis resented—many were in fact Korans, or Koranic exegeses—but apparently, as Joshua Hammer writes in his new book The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, the historical tradition from which they sprang: a golden age of literacy, learning, and intellectual debate at the heart of Islamic West Africa.

Timbuktu was founded in the twelfth century by traders traveling along trans-Saharan routes and the great Niger River; its population was a blend of Arabs, Foulani, Songhay, and Tuaregs, and the city soon became a remarkably cosmopolitan and tolerant place. Income from tariffs, and from nearby salt and gold deposits, made it rich as well. Just as in Florence at the same time, merchants in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Timbuktu began spending their wealth on manuscripts—not the bound codices of Europe and Byzantium, but loosely gathered folios, their initial letters often beautifully illuminated, held together in leather folders or tied with string. Handwritten texts on both sacred and secular topics, mostly in Arabic but a few in Greek or Hebrew, flowed into Timbuktu from Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, soon followed by blank Italian paper for the use of native writers and copyists. 

Learned debates on astronomy, law, and theology, and precious chronicles of otherwise unrecorded local history, were among the important texts. Private libraries flourished. In the late sixteenth century the great scholar and writer Ahmed Baba claimed that his collection of 1,600 volumes was small for its time.

In Timbuktu as in Florence, large collections of written texts attracted scholars and men of letters to the city. At some 150 schools, there were debates on science, philosophy, and jurisprudence. Most of the schools were small affairs in which a few dozen students gathered at the home of an elder sage, but several, like that centered at the Sankoré Mosque, grew large enough to be called “universities.” The city’s most revered teachers, who were often also its most prolific writers, became figures of mystical power; many were credited with miracles. Their life stories were retold in hagiographic collections, and after death their tombs, following the Sufist practices that have long prevailed in the region, became sites of prayer and worship. As such sites multiplied, Timbuktu became, as one of its honorific titles still proclaims today, “the city of 333 saints.”

This efflorescence of study and the written word lasted for over two centuries, as two successive West African states, the Mali and Songhay empires—both of which granted to Timbuktu a remarkable degree of autonomy—were able to maintain stability in the region. But internal divisions weakened the Songhay dynasty, and in 1591 a mercenary army sent from Morocco crossed the desert and conquered the city. Timbuktu came under harsh rule and the age of book production came to an end.
Ahmed Baba, in the middle of his long career as a writer, was imprisoned for suspected disloyalty by the Moroccan rulers of West Africa; his library was plundered and dispersed. 

But other manuscripts remained, preserved from decay by the dry Saharan climate and stashed away by families who, in many cases, no longer read or understood them. They remained in tin trunks and camel-skin satchels as Timbuktu declined into a place whose name came to stand for distance and inaccessibility. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries French colonial authorities took over local property. This made manuscript owners more wary and drove the texts deeper underground—in some cases quite literally, since burying them beneath the desert sand proved an effective way to protect them from termites.

Few outsiders knew about the Timbuktu manuscripts when Mali became independent in 1960. But after a UNESCO delegation visited Timbuktu in 1964, the organization took steps to gather and preserve the scattered volumes. A manuscript library was established, named for the great bibliophile Ahmed Baba. It was this institution, along with many of the saints’ shrines in the city, that the jihadists who took over northern Mali tried to destroy in 2012 and early 2013 under the leadership of Salafist zealots, among them Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi.

2.

By then Joshua Hammer, a Berlin-based journalist who has written about Mali in these pages as well as for Smithsonian and National Geographic, had become intensely interested in the manuscripts. On an initial visit to Timbuktu in 2006, Hammer reported on efforts to collect and preserve them and met Abdel Kader Haidara, a leading staff member of the Ahmed Baba library. Six years later, the unassuming Haidara, responding to the pressures of the jihadist takeover of northern Mali, would turn out to be one of the heroic “bad-ass” librarians of Hammer’s title.

Haidara’s father, master of one of Timbuktu’s many small, in-home schools, had collected manuscripts since well before the Ahmed Baba Institute was founded. He was continuing a family tradition that went back many generations. After the elder Haidara’s death in 1981, the executor of his will told a surprised seventeen-year-old Abdel Kader that he had inherited his father’s library, at that time stored in a set of footlockers inside a closet. Abdel Kader had intended to become a livestock trader, not a preserver of books, but he slowly accepted a responsibility for which he had felt no special calling.

The director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, sensing that bibliophilia ran in the Haidara line, persuaded Abdel Kader to join his staff as a manuscript hunter. The institute’s collection began to swell, as did its reputation abroad. New funding, mostly from Middle Eastern governments hoping to preserve Islamic history, allowed Abdel Kader to be generous when buying books from the wary villagers. In one transaction with a Tuareg nomad, Haidara bought a trunkful of volumes for twenty times what the man had first asked for. By the next morning, Tuaregs from all over the region had dug manuscripts out of their hiding places and brought them, stuffed into skin sacks, to Haidara’s door.

A chance visit by a television crew filming Wonders of the African World, a PBS -sponsored travelogue, brought Henry Louis Gates Jr. to the Ahmed Baba Institute, and suddenly new doors began opening for Haidara in America and Europe. Grants from the Ford and Andrew Mellon foundations funded new buildings where the manuscripts could be studied and preserved. Visitors began arriving, often having learned that a highly literate, scholarly culture had flourished for centuries in sub-Saharan Africa; many had assumed that writing had only arrived with European colonization. “These are books written by black people?” Gates had asked Haidara during his visit. He was assured that some indeed were. The exchange was later broadcast in the first episode of Wonders of the African World, and as the camera panned over shelf upon shelf of dusty folios, Gates commented: “The mind of the black world, locked into the pages of these priceless books…. Evidence of a great civilization, untranslated and unknown.”

The very effort to gather and preserve the manuscripts only made them a more visible target when, early in 2012, a military force led by radical Islamists arrived in Timbuktu. Hammer traces the origins of that uprising and describes three of its leaders: Mokhtar Belmokhtar and Abdel-hamid Abou Zeid, both Arabs, veterans of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb ( AQIM ); and a Malian Tuareg named Iyad Ag Ghali, formerly the leader of a Tuareg separatist movement. An alliance between the Tuaregs and AQIM had created a powerful rebel army dominated by the three leaders. Rich with funds paid by European governments as ransom for victims of kidnapping, and having obtained weapons from Libyan arsenals after the fall of Muammar Qaddafi, they were emboldened to launch a jihad against Mali’s democratically elected government. They hoped to found an ISIS -like state and attract militants from West and North Africa.

This was not the first time that Timbuktu had faced a jihad. In the first decade of the nineteenth century in what is now Nigeria, the jihadist Usman dan Fodio established the Sokoto Caliphate, a powerful empire connecting thirty different emirates across much of West Africa. Timbuktu was not part of this empire; but inspired by the success and growth of the caliphate, the preacher Seku Amadu tried to establish his own jihadist empire and in 1825 conquered Timbuktu. During his reign European explorers were banned from the city. But the city’s milder, more tolerant strain of Islam, with its reverence for shrines and its love of annual festivals, prevailed. According to Hammer, when invading jihadis proclaimed their campaign of religious reformation in 2012, the imam of the Sidi Yahya Mosque said, “How dare you say you’re going to ‘teach us Islam’? We were born with Islam. We have had Islam in this city for one thousand years.” The jihad leader Iyad Ag Ghali responded by saying, “We’re going to have to replace the imams in this town.”

Community leaders leaving a ceremony honoring Timbuktu’s Crisis Committee, formed the year before to mediate between the civilian population and the jihadists during the Islamist takeover, October 2013.

Ghali interests Hammer as a case study in the often mysterious origins, both personal and global, of jihadism. His Sufi background, his fondness for music and Western-style dance clubs, and his purely secular devotion to the cause of Tuareg rights seemed to make him an unlikely convert to the Islamist cause. But missionaries from Pakistan convinced him to join Tablighi Ja’amat, a fundamentalist movement advocating strict adherence to their interpretation of the Prophet Muhammad’s tenets. Ghali abandoned music and began practicing a harsh asceticism. In late 2007 he took a post at the Malian consul in Saudi Arabia in order to be near the Great Mosque. There, he adopted the views of al-Qaeda. Both Manny Ansar, a close friend in Mali with whom Ghali had once shared a passion for music, and the American ambassador Vicki Huddleston futilely tried to persuade Ghali not to become an ascetic radical jihadist. Hammer, for his part, feels unable to explain Ghali’s decision.

Before his transformation into a holy warrior, Ghali had helped organize a concert series in the Malian desert, and that event led to the yearly musical festival outside Timbuktu at a village called Essakane. Hammer devotes one of his best chapters to the events of 2012, when that year’s festival closely coincided with the launching of the rebel campaign that would, within a few months, threaten Malian territory as far south as the capital, Bamako. During the preceding decade Essakane, where artists like Robert Plant and Jimmy Buffett jammed with native Tuareg bands, had inspired talk of a Woodstock in the desert. “Swords turn to guitars,” wrote the MTV founder Tom Freston in Vanity Fair after attending the 2007 festival. But radicalized Tuaregs and many Islamists had come to regard Essakane as a “Sodom and Gomorrah” of alcohol, drugs, and illicit sex. By 2012, when Bono performed there—arriving, as Hammer writes, in a well-appointed private jet, “a cocoon of privilege, wealth, and celebrity”—the perimeter of the festival had to be protected by armored vehicles and elite troops.

Was the Malian government’s support of this and other music festivals, and of Western tourism, a cause of the attempted Islamist takeover? Hammer stops short of saying so, but his juxtaposition of Essakane’s success with the launch of the rebellion suggests that it may have had a part. After a joint performance with the Tuareg band Tinariwen, Bono climbed back into his luxury jet, proclaiming that “music is stronger than war.” But Iyad Ag Ghali and his new Arab allies were at that moment preparing an assault on a remote army camp to the north. Ghali’s forces captured and executed ninety government soldiers and started an aggressive advance toward Bamako. Mali’s president, Amadou Touré, was ousted in a military coup in March and the country descended into chaos. Unwilling to undermine Timbuktu’s relatively new status, he had insisted that the show go on at Essakane, even assigning to it the presidential guard troops that later turned against him.

When the militants arrive in Timbuktu, proclaiming it the capital of Azawad—an independent Tuareg state—the story of Abdel Kader Haidara and his manuscripts merges with that of the jihadist triumvirate. Haidara and his fellow librarians witnessed the imposition of harsh versions of sharia law, including stonings, amputations of hands, and a ban on broadcasting music. A large collection of cassette tapes of traditional songs recorded in neighboring villages was destroyed. Haidara worried that his books would suffer a similar fate, yet the jihadists seemed strangely indifferent to them. Even though some of the jihadists were assigned quarters in the Ahmed Baba Institute itself, they seem not to have recognized the special meaning the books held, both for Timbuktu and for the Western nations that had pledged funds to preserve them.

Though no immediate threat was apparent, the Timbuktu librarians decided, presciently as things turned out, that the entire collection must be moved. Hammer describes how almost all of the books were carefully packed into specially made tin storage lockers, then brought south by truck and canoe, past brigades, bandits, and the military checkpoints of both jihadist and Malian government forces. Thanks to Haidara’s orchestration by cell phone of the complex operation, and the funds that allowed him to buy off those who stood in their way, not a single manuscript was lost en route to Bamako, a city then thought to be safe from the jihadist threat.

As this rescue effort was taking place, the French began the military attack known as Operation Serval, sweeping up from the south in an effort to drive the militants away from Bamako and, ultimately, into the desert north of Timbuktu. Hammer’s account of this operation is tense and urgent. He convincingly shows what was at stake in Operation Serval, and how great a risk was taken by France, both militarily and politically, to support the elected government of its former African colony. The lessons of that intervention have not been lost on policymakers now struggling with the rise of ISIS in Libya, not far from Mali’s northern borders, and with its power over parts of Iraq and Syria.

Hammer’s tale ends on a note of very qualified triumph. Timbuktu freed itself from Islamist domination in January 2013 and music was again heard on local radio stations, but life did not return to normal. Northern Mali had been freed from a brutal, punishing regime, but kidnappings and suicide bombings continue there today. 

The Essakane festival has been canceled for the year. Iyad Ag Ghali and a group of his fighters have retreated to a desert oasis on Mali’s northern frontier. And Abdel Kader Haidara remains in Bamako, where he holds a great many manuscripts, uncertain when he can return them to the Timbuktu libraries built to preserve them. The books may have been saved from fire, but they are now threatened by mildew and rot from Bamako’s humid air.

Though liberated, Timbuktu has become yet one more front, another red zone cut off from the outside world. Its mausoleums have been rebuilt with the help of foreign aid, but no visitors from abroad now risk kidnapping in order to see them. The sources of Timbuktu’s vitality—the connections to travel and trade that once made it a meeting place for West Africans and a haven for writing and learning—have been destroyed, and Hammer’s book, to its great credit, makes us see what a loss that is.

----------------------------------
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
www.blackeducator.blogspot.com
If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor. (Haiti)
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Kujichagulia on Gentrification

Gentrification and “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”

by Kujichagulia

 Kujichagulia

In 1963, former governor of Alabama, George Wallace, delivered his infamous inauguration speech declaring, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Fast forward more than half a century later. America boasts of being a post-racial society, yet segregation remains an American epidemic. From colonization to plantations, reservations, ghettos, border patrols, and gated communities of insecurity forever whistling Dixie and protecting the Confederacy, America is determined to go down singing, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”

Although the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 prohibited segregation, mere legislation cannot regulate bigotry, ignorance, hatred, fear, or inhumanity. Instead of achieving desegregation, thus began half a century of “White flight” from major cities across the country to newly established suburbs where housing, education, liberty and justice were denied to all Melanites (non-Whites). The Kerner Commission Report of 1968 addressed the practice and politics of White flight stating “America’s social norm of segregation and exclusion leads to one obvious conclusion – “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal.”

In spite of an exodus from the cities in search of nuevo-segregation elsewhere, myopic dreams of perpetual privilege gave way to the stark realization that white-flight did not improve the quality of white life. Although white-flighters were able to avoid being neighbors to any Melanites, they couldn’t avoid the two- to five-hour segregated commutes that dominated their morning and evening routines from white-washed suburbia to the chocolate/brown cities they abandoned in favor of sustaining segregation and tolerating racism from the sidelines. Once antebellum dreams of racially-sanitized suburbs morphed into daily nightmares of refilling gas tanks for bumper-to-bumper commutes with intoxicating vehicle exhaust, crowded carpools, expensive toll booths, and random acts of road rage, white-flight shifted into reverse.

     The solution – gentrification! Based on the rules of segregation, gentrification displaces Melanite (non-White) families from their homes, communities, and cities so that the gentry (wealthy White class) can relocate back into the cities. As a result, foreclosures, redlining, escalating prices, and exorbitant rents force many Black and Hispanic people/families out of Oakland, as well as many metropolitan cities nationally. Rising property taxes are pricing long-established families out of their homes. Caucasians are consistently awarded with homes and home loans, while Blacks and Hispanics are routinely denied homes and home loans. Likewise, Blacks and Hispanics are generally denied home improvement loans. Moreover, Blacks and Hispanics are often charged exorbitant interest rates on the home loans eventually attained. The result … more segregation.

In February of 2016, the document, ECONOMIC EQUITY: LOCKED OUT OF THE MARKET / POOR ACCESS TO HOME LOANS FOR CALIFORNIANS OF COLOR, revealed an unwavering commitment to segregation and racism in the 21st century. According to journalist, Rob Wile, “The study, co-produced by the Greenlining Institute and Urban Strategies Council, found that in 2013, the top-twelve lenders helped African American borrowers purchase a mere four homes in Oakland, while Hispanic borrowers received just seven  home purchase loans.” The Rob Wile article, Another mortgage lender just settled charges that it discriminated against blacks and Hispanics for years (http://fusion.net/story/141197/another-mortgage-lender-just-settled-charges-that-it-discriminated-against-blacks-and-hispanics-for-years/), documented, “San Bruno, Calif.-based Provident Funding Associates is accused of charging 14,000 minority borrowers interest rates and broker fees that were on average hundreds of dollars, and at times thousands, higher than what white borrowers paid. The practice started as early as 2006 and lasted through at least 2011, according to the Justice Department’s complaint.” Yet it is what it is; it's business as usual; life goes on, et cetera. While gentrification guarantees increased segregation under the guise of urban improvement; it's merely business as usual. It's the same ole progressive racism that patriotically fulfills America's prophecy of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”

(Reprinted from the SF Examiner Online  http://www.examiner.com/ethnic-community-in-oakland/kujichaguliaphavia-kujichagulia)

Black Bird Press News & Review: Marvin X at the San Francisco's Juneteeth 2016 in Fillmore

Black Bird Press News & Review: Marvin X at the San Francisco's Juneteeth 2016 in Fillmore



See Herb Boyd's article on the G word in Harlem. Marvin X's brief remarks at SF Juneteenth give a sense of gentrification out West. The West Oakland cultural district on 7th Street is no more. The Fillmore is no more and Harlem is fading rapidly as the Cultural Capital of Black America. Brother Muhammad at the Schomburg Library feels the essential monuments in Harlem will remain. Nothing of West Oakland remains nor does anything in the Fillmore.

Herb Boyd on the G word in Harlem

How 'the G Word' is Translated in Harlem

[Opinion] Speaking to people who live in the storied New York community, gentrification means good things to some and bad things to others. It just depends on who you ask and how long they've been there

by Herb Boyd, June 22, 2016

St. Nicholas Ave at 116th Street, Harlem, New York. Photo: Jim Henderson via Wikimedia Commons

Once upon a time in the nation's socioeconomic matrix, Black activists once took to the ramparts challenging the advance of urban renewal, or as they called it “Negro removal.” Nowadays the issue is gentrification and with summer officially here we can expect a series of rallies in Harlem from groups hotly contesting the changes occurring in the residential and commercial sectors.

Say gentrification, or the “G word,” to some Harlem residents and they are ready to march with a sign saying that “Harlem is not for sale.” Ask others, as I have done for years in the community, and the responses are mixed. So much depends on who you ask, how old they are, and how long they have lived in Harlem.

On the block where I live in Sugar Hill there used to be nine eyesores or dilapidated brownstones when we moved in the early 1990s. Today, only two remain. Most of the homeowners on the block welcomed the arrival of new people who could fix up the buildings, paying little regard to race. The only thing that mattered for them was that the decaying buildings would be occupied and renovated.
To speak to them of displacement, a word often associated with gentrification, had no meaning whatsoever to my neighbors. The buildings had been vacant and abandoned for years. For the most part, the renewal had very little to do with the displacement of a family.

Many of our new neighbors are disproportionately White, which has not alarmed most of the residents. In fact, they appreciate the role the newcomers have played in commanding attention from downtown. While there is no scientific proof that complaints from White residents mean more, it seems that they do. While many longtime residents have complained about the potholed streets, a need for speed bumps, stop signs, garbage pickup, efficient mail delivery, and faster service in the post office, apparently the cry from White Harlemites, particularly those on the community boards, is being heard by the city’s leaders.

This is not to negate the influx and influence of new young Black residents, and certainly their concerns paired with their White counterparts bring additional clout.  

More good news comes from elders who are pleased to have the major retail giants move into the vicinity. Whole Foods, Fairway, Duane Reade, Rite Aid and other chain stores make it easier for senior citizens to get quality food and prescriptions without having to venture to midtown. The elders often mourn the disappearance of the Black-owned mom and pop stores, but many of those spots were replaced by bodegas owned by people in various other ethnic groups and not by the giant retail stores.

So, is gentrification a myth?
 
No way, says Nellie Bailey, who, as the leader of the Harlem Tenants Council, has been tireless in her fight against the invasion of gentrification. “Across the country, you can see U.S. capitalists’ aim with gentrification is to follow the European model. The inner cities were once for the poor and working class, for communities of color. But now they will be only for the wealthy.”

Her views were echoed recently in a New York Times op-ed piece by Michael Henry Adams, another devout advocate for saving Harlem from the menace of gentrification. He disparages people who “treat the neighborhood like a blank slate,” proclaiming they “don’t see color” as an important vector in the shifting demographics of Harlem. “They have no idea how insulting they are being, denying us our heritage and our stake in Harlem’s future,” Adams asserted.

Beyond the passionate rhetoric about preserving Harlem’s heritage and legacy are actual projects to this end, such as While We Are Still Here, led by Karen Taylor. “Our purpose in preserving Harlem’s history begins with exploring the history of two landmark buildings—555 and 409 Edgecombe Avenue,” she said. “A veritable who’s who in Black America lived in these two locations, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul and Eslanda Robeson, Elizabeth Catlett, to mention but a few. After we document their stays and others in the buildings we will extend our research into the larger tableau of the community’s history.”

In several respects Harlem is beginning to resemble its past when the majority of the population was White.  Not until the Black real estate speculators such as Philip Payton and "Pig Foot Mary" (Lillian Harris Dean) began to slice and dice the community was there rental space available for African Americans, albeit at an exorbitant price.

That exorbitant price is becoming more and more a reality in the housing industry with only a dollop of affordable housing. And, we ask, affordable for whom?

Mr. Adams raises another point about the erasure of Harlem’s heritage. If Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the soon-to-be-former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is right, we have nothing to fear about that possibility. In a recent interview he said that as long as politically and socially conscious Black Americans control the essential institutions in Harlem—the Schomburg, the Studio Museum, the National Black Theater, the Apollo Theater, the Dance Theater of Harlem, the Amsterdam News, and the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce--“our heritage and culture is secure and in good hands.”

Whither goes Harlem, the poet Langston Hughes observed many years ago, so goes Black America. Well, like the verdict on charter schools across the country, the jury is still out on the G word.

---

Herb Boyd is an author, journalist, and activist who teaches at the City College of New York.  His forthcoming book is Black Detroit--A People's Struggle for Self-Determination (Amistad, 2017). Follow him on Twitter @Simbabinski1.

An Evening with Poets Honoring the Lives of Poets Jayne Cortez & Amiri B...

An Evening with Poets Honoring the Lives of Poets Jayne Cortez & Amiri B...

An Evening with Poets Honoring the Lives of Poets Jayne Cortez & Amiri B...

An Evening with Poets Honoring the Lives of Poets Jayne Cortez & Amiri B...

An Evening with Poets Honoring the Lives of Poets Jayne Cortez & Amiri B...

An Evening with Poets Honoring the Lives of Poets Jayne Cortez & Amiri B...

An Evening with Poets Honoring the Lives of Poets Jayne Cortez & Amiri B...

Marvin X thinking out loud on the OPD, Slavery, Global wars and the beauty of life in spite of ugliness

Marvin X and Nuyorican poet Nancy Mercado at the reception for him in Harlem, NY at the home of author Rashidah Ismaili. 

Brothers ask Marvin X, "Marvin, how come every time I see you, you with a fine lady? How you do dat?" Answer: You have to be nice, just be nice. You have to be a friend to have a friend, I heard. My three daughters have humbled me to the extreme as per my need to recover from the addiction to the patriarchal mythology and its Macho culture that treats women as things. People have noticed how my aura changes when talking with my daughters. In my patriarchal mentality, I thought my sons would fulfill my dreams but alas, my daughters have taken the baton and continue every aspect of our family tradition as conscious people.  

In my healing pamphlet Mythology of Pussy and Dick, the leit motif is a quote from poet Kujichagulia, "If you think I'm just a physical thing, wait til you see the spiritual power I bring." 

It has taken me a lifetime to learn how to be nice, especially to the women who love me and I claim to love.  You know my favorite song is Nature Boy, i.e., "The greatest thing you will ever learn is to love and be loved in return...."

As per the Oakland Police Department, sad truth is that their sexual improprieties and those of other law enforcement agencies in the Bay Area and coast to coast cannot be separated from the addiction to patriarchal mythology in the general society. The police only commit such violations under the color of law, which is a crime. Yes, it is necessary to hold them to a higher standard even though they suffer the muck and mire of the general society. We therefore cannot clean up the police department's sexual improprieties until we are willing to clean up the mess in the general society but said society is unwilling to give up male privilege and when it does so, it then becomes victim of the next gender group, shall we call it the matriarchal mythology group? Or the gay/lesbian/trans mythology group. My young brother was fired from his HR job because he refused to hire a gay/lesbian person at the request of the gay/lesbians in charge of a certain city where they rule.

So what is the endgame? The more things change, the more they stay the same! Alas, we thought slavery ended but there is more slavery now than in 1863. There are 3 million slaves in America under the US constitution or the New Jim Crow. 

We thought the holocaust ended with Sir John Hawkins, King James,  Hitler or was it Stalin, King Leopold or Pol Pot or Rwanda or Syria or America! How many did the US kill in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan in its permanent wars?

Will our children ever know peace? I was born into war, 1944, and have known nothing but war ever since, atomic bomb on Japan, Palestine, Korea, Vietnam and now Africa and the Middle East. Who benefits from these wars, who suffers? And will it end with a bang or whimper as the poet asked?
--Marvin X
6/28/16

Catch Marvin X Sunday, July 3, 1:30PM at the San Francisco Main Library, Civic Center. He will be part of the discussion on Black Hollywood unChained, edited by Ishmael Reed, Third World Press, Chicago. 

Don't miss the discussion by Black Hollywood unChained contributors at the SF Main Library, July3, 1:30PM

Some of you know that last year, Third World Press published Black Hollywood Unchained. Edited by Ishmael Reed, the book contains a collection of critical essays by various authors around the country in reaction to Quentin Tarentino’s movie Django Unchained.

On Sunday, July 3, 1:30-3:30 pm, several of the authors will participate in a panel discussion at the San Francisco Public Library Main Branch to discuss the impact of Django Unchained as well as other Hollywood movie depictions of African-American life. Included with author presentations will be a time for questions and answers.

Along with Ishmael Reed, other participants include Halifu Osumare, Cecil Brown, Marvin X, Justin Desmangles, and myself.

If you’re in the Bay Area that weekend, hope you can make it.

Jesse Allen-Taylor

Toronto Star: Acclaimed Toronto author Austin Clarke dead at 81

In a 1967 interview with poet Marvin X who was exiled in Canada as a resister to the war in Vietnam, Austin said of his native Barbados, "The Bajans see the world with British eyes.... True, Canada did not have slaves nor colonies but racism is as Canadian as hockey!" FYI, when I arrived in Canada as a draft resister and connected with a cousin who was a professional football player, Ted Watkins, who lived in Hamilton, a suburb of Toronto, his children could not play outside because the white children would beat them up on sight! And when Ted founded a Black publishing company, the media labeled him a racist because he was doing something for self. The sensational media claimed that 20,000 Black Muslims had invaded Canada when in truth there were only two of us, myself and my fellow student from San Francisco State University, Abdul Rahim, aka Oswald Jones, who was also a draft resister.  

 

Austin Clarke embraced us exiled North American Africans and did all he could to assist us. Through Austin I was able to find housing with Salome Bey and her husband, Howard.  Salome Bey was a vocalist and sister of Andy Bey, renowned vocalist from Newark, New Jersey. The Beys were longtime members of Noble Drew Ali's Moorish Science Temple, one of the earliest Islamic movements that inspired North American Africans. 

 

Ancestor Austin Clarke, we love you and honor you for all the good you did for our people and humanity in general! What is tragic is that most North American Africans never heard of Austin Clarke until today. Don't you feel culturally deprived not knowing the gods and goddesses in your midst?

--Marvin X 

Acclaimed Toronto author Austin Clarke dead at 81

Winner of the Giller Prize for The Polished Hoe, the Barbados-born writer became a member of the Order of Canada in 1998.

Austin Clarke in 2012.  (STEVE RUSSELL / TORONTO STAR) | 

By Murray WhyteVisual arts

Sun., June 26, 2016

Austin Clarke, the acclaimed Toronto-based novelist of books such as the 2002 Giller Prize-winning The Polished Hoe, died early Sunday morning after a long illness. He was 81. 

Clarke’s passing was confirmed by Patrick Crean, his long-time friend and former publisher. He is survived by four daughters, a son and his former wife, Betty.

Clarke, who was born in Barbados, moved to Toronto in 1955 to study at the University of Toronto. A handful of brief digressions aside, he never left, evolving here into a frank and forthright literary voice and a champion of black rights. 

But he was leery of taking Canadian citizenship, acquiring it only in 1981, explaining later that “I was not keen on becoming a citizen of a society that regarded me as less than a human being.”

Indeed, Clarke’s observations of the splintering of Canadian society in the ’50s and ’60s gave voice to a new version of a country in its earliest stages of becoming.

“Austin wrote our multicultural moment before we even had a language to describe it,” said Rinaldo Walcott, a professor at the University of Toronto and a longtime friend. “He was an astute observer of those social dynamics, and he was a critic of it as well.” 

Clarke was bluntly critical of the endemic racism he encountered both here and at home, in Barbados, a colonial British outpost where he attended Anglican schools before coming to Canada. ‘Membering, his lyrical memoir published last year, recalls with vivid detail his daily struggles with discrimination in an uptight city of not-so-long ago. 

In it, he writes of living “in the atmosphere of great physical fear, of the expectation that a policeman might shoot me — bang-bang, you’re dead, dead — of being refused the renting of a basement room, or an apartment in a public building, that I would find myself standing noticeably longer than other customers at a counter in Eaton’s store, at the corner of Yonge and College Sts., that I might be thrown out, sometimes physically, from a restaurant, or a nightclub, as Oscar Peterson was, and face the embarrassment of being told by a barber that he does not cut niggers’ hair. This is my Toronto.”

Yet in private, friends speak of a generous, passionate spirit filled with an affection for simple pleasures in life: A love of cooking, of conversation, and of music. But he was also a complicated man, whose fiery passions around issues of inequity seemed at times to chafe with his conservative Anglican beliefs. 

“If you were going to have a real relationship with Austin, you had to be prepared to move nimbly,” said the author Barry Callaghan, a decades-long friend and literary colleague who in 1996 published The Austin Clarke Reader through his imprint, Exile Editions. “He was a worldly fellow, a man of elegance, a man of conservative principles, but at the same time, he could be engaged with people that most conservatives wouldn’t let into their house.” 

Clarke, famously, made a failed run as a Progressive Conservative candidate for the Ontario legislature in 1977, though his literary and intellectual fascinations seemed a clear ideological contradiction. He had built his reputation as a novelist as a keen observer of the nuanced plight of immigrants in Toronto, and specifically women. Meanwhile, his advocacy for a racially tolerant society had led him to places far outside standard conservative boundaries. 

In 1963, while working as a journalist at the CBC, Clarke found himself in Harlem, N.Y., seeking an interview with the great African American writer James Baldwin, but instead came back with an hour of tape from a chance encounter with Malcolm X. Quickly building a reputation as a voice of black empowerment in Canada, Clarke wrote at a furious pace, though his passion would drive him away, at least for a time. 

In 1968, Maclean’s magazine published a piece Clarke had written about his encounters with racism here under the headline “Canada’s Angriest Black Man.” Disillusioned at the simplification of what he had written as a complex issue, Clarke moved on to Yale University, where he became one of a group of professors to establish the school’s Black Studies program, one of the first in the United States. 

Clarke’s enthusiasms were diffuse, straddling culture and politics. From Yale, they would lead him to Washington, D.C., where he served as a cultural attaché for the Barbadian embassy in 1973, and back home to Barbados, where from 1975 to 1977, he ran the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation.

He eventually circled back home to Toronto, and Walcott believes his return helped seed the rich literary fabric that the city, and the country, enjoys today. “His great passions were for food, for drink, but much more than that, for young writers across race and class and gender, whom he would have to his home and mentor selflessly, reading manuscripts and offering his feedback,” Walcott said.

Though his passion for social justice never wavered — he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada from 1988 to 1993 — his commitment to his writing could be a powerful, monastic counterbalance. 

In the late ’90s, Walcott lived downstairs from Clarke while he wrote The Polished Hoe, in a central Toronto duplex. “I wouldn’t hear a sound for three days,” Walcott recalls, “so I’d call and see if he was all right. He would tell me he was writing — he hadn’t eaten, or slept. It would possess him like a spirit.” 

Clarke’s literary accomplishments, coupled with his strong social conscience, won him the Order of Canada in 1998, a poignant honour given the critical voice he had so often taken regarding his adopted homeland.

All the accolades aside, what Callaghan recalls most is a complicated friend who changed all around him for the better. 

“When I think of special dinners here, it was also Austin that said grace,” he said. “There was no one like him, because there could be no one like him. There were just too many cross-references in his personality. He was singular.” 

A funeral will be held at St. James Cathedral on July 9.