Black Bird Press News & Review

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Revised Be Careful Black People

Be careful black people

White folks crazy

Been crazy long time

Longer than they been white

People told me don't call it

white supremacy

It's white lunacy

They looney tunes Right Left Center Communist Capitalist Christian Gender Fluid Multi-mixed race crazy

but I love Naomi Osaka

she dat child my son aborted with Japanese girl said couldn't take home black baby

Naomi dat black baby son's girl couldn't take home from UC Santa Cruz

Naomi ain't scared of her blackness and she only half black

some negropeons full black scared to death of black

don't mention white kiss whitey boots for mess of pottage

kibble n bits

30 pieces of silver for Jesus

$3,000 for Malcolm and killer didn't collect

black looney too, Type II Loonism

back to looney tuners Type I (Dr. Nathan Hare)

Dance to different drummer

beyond reality not of this world some airless room Baldwin said

"rationalizations so fantastic it approaches pathological"

they world ain't our world

ain't nobody's world but

man alone exceptional

supreme ideological mythology

deaf dumb blind cannot see yet cheer

blink cheer but cannot hear see smell

Ovid 19 killed smell of death in the land

no hiding place

inside house husband wife alone

strangers in the night

children discover father is fool

Jesus said children will lead you if you follow

will you follow children out of darkness your mythical dreams created

fantasy world of make believe

Lone Ranger don't trust Tonto

Tonto walk with African swag

Southern Baptists

don't sing like COGIC

Mississippi Mass Choir

James Cleveland

Oh Happy Day Tramaine Hawkins (Oakland in da house)

COGIC choir give'm heart attack (ten people choir singing

I don't know what you came to do

but I came to praise His name!

I wish somebody hep me

better ax somebody

Storefront church foundation shakes

ten people choir

Preacher jump on top of piano praising His name!

Rev. Cone told you 'bout the Cross and Lynching tree

You saw George Floyd lynched before your eyes

pig so evil kill man wit hand in pocket

and you say we in post racial world

why bleaching cream everywhere

India, Nigeria, Congo, South Africa, Jamaica

America

post black blonds flood Pan Africa

no black african queen rap videos

mulattoes half breeds asian european women love rap

be rap 'hoes for billion dollar jew rap producers agenda

ain't our agenda

Sonia say, "Will your rap free us, will your poem free us,

will your book free us" Then shut the fk up! Silencio por favor silencio

tu dice nada nada nada esclavo negro esclavo negro

Who killed dreams of Lumumba Mandela Toure'

Qaddafi Nkrumah Elijah Garvey Malcolm Martin

Betty Shabazz Correta Scott Fannie Lou Hamer

Clara Muhammad Angela Dessie X Asata

Be careful black people

They still on slave patrol

Miss Ann Mr Ann same

Looney luney luni

Can't hep it crazy

Lie lie lie

No lie like white lie

Don't Trump lie

He smarter'n scientists

he smarter'n a negro

(see my poem The Negro Knows Everything,

and my other poem The Smart People)

He lies for nothin' just to lie

pathological

for the joy of lying

bombastic lies

hyperbolic to the max

Straight face

No smile lies like he serious

the low information vibration people think he serious

Is Trump from Emerson club

Transcendentalist

So what if I contradict myself

Said Covid19 over by April lie

Easter lie like rabbit laying chicken eggs lie

Drink bleach lie

guard against being deceived

Elijah said we must trick the trick out of the trick

Tricknology Supreme Wisdom master trick for the trick

He ain't go leave white house lie

He say slavery didn't make America great lie

Baldwin told me nothing else happened here but us

nothing else 1619 to 2020

1619 black lives mattered as chattel

black lives matter 13th Amendment 2020

involuntary servitude slavery

2.4 million

makes America great again

wage slave jobs for negroes

makes America great again

Negroes in dirty south work three minimum wage jobs to survive

don't want Cali negroes comin' down talkin shit

upsetting Lunatic

retaliate on Cali negro host family

now dirty south negro got two minimum wage jobs to survive

Go home Cali Negro Negro from North

Old people say leave dem white folks 'lone

Day crazy chile'

Be careful when you see'm comin'

Keep yo' social distance

Wear your mask!

--Marvin X

9/27/20 revised 9/29/20

Monday, September 28, 2020

Marvin X speaks at African Health Fair and Free the Rap in Honor of Imam Jamil Alamin

Marvin X at Laney College, Oakland CA

photo Alicia Mayo

Marvin X at Third Baptist Church, San Francisco CA

photo Adam Turner

Saturday, September 26, 2020

Isabel Wilkerson’s Book "Caste" and the Discontent of a Ruling Class in Crisis

Anthony Monteiro

23 Sep 2020

Isabel Wilkerson’s Book "Caste" and the Discontent of a Ruling Class in Crisis

Oprah gushes that this book by the latest darling of the ruling classes might “save us,” but all it’s really trying to save is capitalism.

“Wilkerson’s understanding of caste is not as a scholar, but as a dilletante and amateur.”

A New York Times reviewer called Isabel Wilkerson’s new book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent “an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.” It is neither. Oprah says it "might well save us." It won’t. It is a book in this Time, it is not for this Time; by which I mean it neither understands the magnitude of the crisis of our Time, nor the way out of it. Designed to erase race as the central category explaining the American crisis, it also dismisses class, the Black proletariat and the larger working class. In the face of 60 million working people unemployed, underemployed or completely removed from the labor force in this COVID 19 driven depression, Wilkerson’s arguments turn attention away from actual racial and class conditions, to a non-material and made-up reality she calls caste. Moreover, she misguidedly substitutes an ill-conceived caste analysis for class analysis; the extreme of petit bourgeois obscurantism. Rather than the real and actual material conditions of the life worlds of the people, Wilkerson makes beliefs, values and ideas her central focus. In the name of caste, she flips reality on its head, from working people to their alleged deeply held beliefs; beliefs so deep in their consciousness that they seldom recognize them. Such analysis works in polite parlor discussion, or in university faculty lounges, but is completely meaningless to the lived experiences of Black folk and workers.

The book says nothing particularly new; it is intellectually lazy and social scientifically superficial. Because the theory doesn’t work and explains very little if anything in the current crisis, she uses anecdotes, ad nauseum, as evidence of an identity between the Indian caste system and the US race/class system. These stories tell us very little we don’t already know but demonstrate the horrors of the modern capitalist race/class system.

“In the name of caste, she flips reality on its head.”

Admittedly, all systems of oppression and exploitation have common characteristics, but comparisons between the 7000-year-old Indian caste system does little to explain in depth modern US racial capitalism. The race/class system in the US arises with capitalism and in important ways makes its rise possible. The Indian caste system arose from completely different modes of production and different social class conditions and at a different epoch of human Time. If she wished to comparatively study caste and its origins, she might have been better served studying the caste systems in Ancient Egypt, and other parts of Africa; or maybe the systems in Ancient Persia or Abyssinia. But she superficially ties the modern capitalist system to an ancient precursor and the US and Nazi Germany to India.

Wilkerson says the US “caste system” has three castes, the upper, the lower and the middle. In some ways this sounds like the superficiality of liberal US class analysis during the Cold War, the three-class division. The upper caste is the white majority, the lower caste is the Black minority and the middle caste are “Hispanics” and Asians, striving to make it into the upper caste. The white majority are the equivalent of the Indian Brahmin upper caste and Black Americans are the equivalent of Indian Dalits (Untouchables).

Insult is added to injury when Wilkerson includes in the American upper caste the entirety of the white working class and poor. If at no other moment in her work, it is here that its absurdity is revealed; and the ludicrous essence of her caste analysis, void of any even minimal effort to include something of class analysis stands out.

“She superficially ties the modern capitalist system to an ancient precursor and the US and Nazi Germany to India.”

The book’s arguments go back to the middle 1940’s and the white establishments’ efforts to whitewash race from social discourse. The reason was to prevent the idea being used for proposes akin to the ways Nazism did. Gunnar Myrdal and Ashley Montague, well-meaning liberals, led the charge. Myrdal’s massive study of race An American Dilemma wrestled unsuccessfully with the crises of racial oppression and how to save liberal democracy. Du Bois, Oliver Cromwell Cox and a cadre of Black social scientist had concluded the race problem remained the problem of the 20th century and could not be disguised by using other language. Furthermore, they concluded that racism and capitalism were so intimately connected that racial oppression could not be resolved without eliminating capitalism; socialism as a system, they reasoned, was necessary to resolve the crisis of what had crystalized into a white supremacist social system. Myrdal and other establishment white liberals could not go that far and hold on to support from ruling class foundations and politicians; the paradox was they could not have it both ways, racism and imperialism, on the one side and democracy on the other. In the end, the liberal model collapsed, as Wilkerson’s does. The search for a new vocabulary about race and racial inequality is no substitute for a new economic and political order; neither is Wilkerson’s call for “radical empathy.”

Wilkerson writes “The issue of caste was, to my mind, the basis of every other ism.” She, and what she calls her tribe, wish to “see past the hierarchies and false divisions that undermine the species”, and thus, get to the heart of matters. What she calls “false divisions” are actual and historically constituted ones rooted in the capitalist mode of production. The divisions between slaves, slave traders and slave owners are not false, that between workers and capitalist is real, as are the divisions between the billionaire class and rest of us. Yet, Wilkerson insists, our lived experiences with race, class and gender are but manifestations of deeper mechanisms of oppression that we don’t directly experience. These unseen mechanisms are what produce false divisions and specifically race and racial hierarchies. Wilkerson argues that race discourse and research must move from race to caste, from material relations of race and class oppression and exploitation to beliefs, values and ideas. Caste, she argues, was implanted in the US with its founding and has endured all the changes in the racial order from slavery through Jim Crow and to the present.

“What she calls ‘false divisions’ are actual and historically constituted ones rooted in the capitalist mode of production.”

Wilkerson connects Nazi Germany and the US as examples of caste systems. It is correct to connect them, but not for the reasons she gives. Germany, the US, Britain, France, Belgium and other Western capitalist nations have much in common as imperialists and racist societies, which colonized most of the world and carried out multiple genocides and wars. They all participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery. To explore this linkage might start an investigation of the current crisis, the lived experiences of this crisis by billions of people worldwide and the possibility of fundamental and liberatory change. Such an investigation would bring into question capitalism itself and the necessity of a systemic alternative to it. To go there would deprive Wilkerson and this book of the gushing support both receive from the ruling elite.

Sight should not be lost of the consequences of this theory on peoples’ struggle. By claiming that deep and unrecognized (and perhaps unknowable) beliefs and mechanisms control us, Wilkerson is arguing that struggles in the past and today against “false divisions” ultimately will not lead to freedom. Even the end of capitalism, imperialism and racism, will not end caste oppression.

Wilkerson’s understanding of caste is not as a scholar, but as a dilletante and amateur; looking at the

book’s bibliography she hardly knows where to start. In terms of India her ideological predisposition mirrors the British colonialists, who argued that India had little real history, that for thousands of years it was static, and India needed British rule to reenter history. Wilkerson, however, writes as though history is not relevant. Time as a central category for understanding human institutions, civilizations and humanity itself is absent. For instance, when talking of India or America she ignores the struggles against oppression. The long history and the dynamics of resistance to all forms of oppression in India include the Buddhist rebellion (5th century BCE), the anti-colonial struggle, the struggles against poverty, the Dalit resistance and those of workers and farmers currently are not mentioned. If Wilkerson addressed actual history, it would shift her narrative from talking about the constancy of victimhood to the dialectics of resistance and freedom. The other absence is no discussion or even recognition of political economy, that is, the modes of production, the ways people make livings and the contradictions therein. Just taking Wilkerson’s argument about caste at face value, the economic foundations of the Indian system and that of the US are completely different and occur in vastly different historical conditions. In these respects, Wilkerson’s project ends up as a parody and a caricature of scholarship.

The book’s subtitle references “our discontent”, however, it is ultimately about the discontent of a ruling elite trapped in the throes of ideological malaise and scrambling for a way to hold on to power. The crisis is systemic and existential. In the face of this, the ruling class turns to fake answers and delusional ideas, ideas that obscure reality. It can abide a change in the language of oppression, like those found in books by Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi, but not a change of the system of race/class oppression. Unable to fully process the crisis of its rule and its memento mori (reminder of death) moment, it turns to self-help anti-racism cures and denial of the race/class foundations of the crisis. This zeitgeist gives birth to Wilkerson’s unsuccessful theory, but not to a way out of the crisis. But why now?

“When talking of India or America she ignores the struggles against oppression.”

A new technological revolution is underway, what is called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Black labor, and most labor, is becoming increasingly unnecessary. As such, a new and more sophisticated attack upon working people is underway. They are not just unnecessary and superfluous, but they are being attacked as degenerate beings, as less than human. White workers are being defined as congenitally racist, whose very beings degrade society. These attacks are financed and promoted by the tech giants like Google, FB, Twitter and Microsoft, capitalists who stand to make hundreds of trillions in profit from the new technology, that will make tens of millions of working people unnecessary, unemployed and impoverished. Moreover, any resistance by especially white workers will ahead of time be defined as racist. The working class will in this scheme be reduced to slave-like conditions and imaged as backward and dregs upon society. Hence, it is quite understandable that the cofounder of Twitter donated $10 million to Ibram Kendi’s alleged anti-racist institute, where it’s argued that Black people and Black workers are racist; or that Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility is favored in corporate board rooms and business schools, due to its attacks upon the very being of white workers. Add Wilkerson’s book to the list of books that prepare the way for an all-out assault upon the working class in the interest of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and a profit bonanza of hundreds of trillions of dollars.

Oprah insists this book “might save us all”, the “all” she’s referencing is the ruling elite. Oprah is not interested in saving working people from the ravages of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Nor do I think that capitalists of Silicon Valley, transnational banks and financial institutions and the political order that fronts them can be saved from the fire this time, fueled by the anger and resistance of working people of all colors. 2020 is a moment of truth for all sides; in this moment of struggle, political and ideological clarity must be uppermost as we the people fight for our common future.

Anthony Monteiro is an organizer with Philadelphia’s Saturday Free School, a Du Bois scholar, a community educator, a radical and activist.

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Racial Capitalism

Saturday, September 19, 2020

SUN RA SPEAKS - BERKELEY LECTURE PT 1

Friday, September 18, 2020

Donald Trump: The White Man's Last Hurrah!

"Donald Trump is Marvin X rich and white!"--Elliott Bey, Philadelphia PA

Donald Trump in Univision's black list - Abasto

Marvin X and daughter Nefertiti at the Black Arts Movement 50th Anniversary, Oakland's Laney College, 2015. On an intergenerational panel of activists and their children, she called for her father to pass the baton to her generation, "We're qualified and ready, so pass the baton. Don't say it, pass it!" Her remarks went viral. When Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf arrived for the reception, she mentioned his daughter's remarks.photo Ken Johnson

Marvin X's smart mouth oldest daughter, Nefertiti, told her father, after meeting his agent for the sale of his archives, Peter Howard (RIP), a rich white man,"Dad, Peter is just like you, an intelligent, arrogant bastard!" Enter Donald Trump, another intelligent, arrogant bastard, and rich, unlike Marvin who was described by one of his students as the poorest famous person she'd ever met. A white patron from Canada who assisted Marvin X's Recovery Theatre in San Francisco said, "I might be poor, Marvin X, but I ain't as poor as you." Alas, some people describe him as the poorest but richest man in the world. In 2001, he produced the Kings and Queens of Black Consciousness at San Francisco State University, participants included Dr. Cornel West, Amiri and Amina Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Rev. Cecil Williams, Rev. Andriette Earl, Phavia Kujichagulia, Tarika Lewis, Dr. Julia Hare, Dr. Theophile Obenga, Rudi Mwongozi, Elliott Bey, et al. In the Q and A, someone asked Marvin X how he brought all these people together, especially with no money? He replied, "I used a device called the telephone." Have you not heard a good name is better than gold?” In her remarks, ancestor Dr. Julia Hare said, "When Marvin X calls, it's like the Lord calling. If he says jump, you say how high!"

Back to the Devil!

For star worshippers, Donald and Marvin are both Gemini, known for intelligence and duplicity, multiple personalities, and throw in an overwhelming degree of narcissism. As per truth, Marvin X may be ahead of Donald because Marvin's mother was a disciple of Mary Baker Eddy and her Christian Science, so Marvin is deeply imbued with truth, although he is known for hyperbole in league with the right wing white nationalist, Prez Trump. If Trump plays with truth at his whim, when Marvin X taught English at the University of Nevada, Reno, his mostly white students informed him they had no knowledge of truth. They asked what did he mean by truth? FYI, they knew one "truth" their parents had taught them, "Niggers are bad news!" Meanwhile they were discovering "Niggers" were very good news as they sucked and fucked the black athletes!

While a teacher at the University of Nevada, Reno, Marvin discovered Nevada was the most conservative state in the union. He taught at UNR in 1979, during the regime of President Ronald Reagan, whose base of operation was Nevada, Reno specifically. His best friend was Senator Paul Laxalt of Reno. Chair of the RNC was Attorney Frank Fahrenkopf of Reno. One of Marvin's "teacher's pets'' was "Coco" who became an intern for Senator Laxalt. The Nevada people, conservatives and liberals, treated Marvin X royally: he was awarded two planning grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities via the Nevada Humanities Committee and was employed as a planner/data analyst for a Community Service Agency, writing multi-million dollar grants proposals for Head Start and other projects. He also taught at Upward Bound and courses in Technical Writing and Creative Writing at Nevada Community College.

Back to Donald Trump and Marvin X as Black and White Nationalists

Marvin X was born a Black nationalist, i.e., his parents were known as Race people, Blacks who were for their people. If Donald Trump is not a white nationalist, none exists anywhere in the world. Marvin X says, "I'm not mad at Donald Trump for being a white nationalist. Every person should stand and defend their own kind, otherwise they're a sellout. Donald is fighting to preserve the last vestige of white supremacy in America, but the world is already majority non-white and America is on the precipice of becoming the same." So Donald is like a child in Toys R US, fighting for the last toy before a new shipment arrives from, yes, China. He is a dramatic persona with that tragic flaw of hubris or overwhelming pride in himself and his people. No other people matter, for his vision is warped in dreams of a white Christmas that shall be no more. As many of his brothers are doing, he should consider suicide since, as Baldwin said, "White supremacy has led white people to rationalizations so fantastic it approaches the pathological." (FYI, Marvin X interviewed James Baldwin, December, 1968, NYC) Donald is a mad warrior who must represent all those white men who cannot understand or articulate why their world is coming to an end. So he is in battle with Plato's shadow on the wall that is not of himself but the breathing world in which he shall exist in name only, diminished, for sure, not in any dominant position, no matter his military budget, no matter the building of a Chinese style or Israeli wall to keep out the barbarians. Alas, the barbarians are Donald and his brothers, Vandals who are their own worst enemies and who shall ultimately destroy themselves because they are constitutionally unable to change. Have you heard of the mental virus, unlike Covid19, the mental virus is similar to the virus that infects your computer when the keys and mouse at stuck on stupid and ultimately you must buy a new one or a new hard drive. You can go nowhere until you do so. Yes, you are stuck on stupid as we see America. How stupid is stupid? Example, Trump has been blaming the Western states, i.e., California, Oregon, Washington, for the recent fires but in truth 88% of the land on fire is owned by the Federal Government, not the states.

A primary and fundamental difference between Marvin and Donald is that those who know Marvin know he is a personality in constant transformation, although basically a Black nationalist. Have you seen him embrace the white woman, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf? She supported the creation of Oakland's Black Arts Movement Business District along the 14th Street corridor, downtown. The legislation was pushed through by Lynette McElhaney, President of the City Council. Google Marvin's essay In Search of My Soul Sister, in which he delineates the difference between Black Secretary of State Condi Rice and Senator Barbara Boxer.

Marvin X and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf at Laney College,

2015 BAM 50th Anniversary Celebration photo Jahahara

Marvin X and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf at opening of Marshawn Lynch's Beast Mode outlet, 2016 photo Troy Williams

But Marvin realized long ago when he taught in universities and colleges, especially when he had classrooms of mostly white students, a teacher who hates his students is a very sick puppy and he had no intention to be that puppy. He embraced his white students and they embraced him. He could see they needed knowledge and truth to dispel the world of make believe they inherited from their racist parents. It would be good if Donald Trump, in these Last Days of Whitey, could really become the man he claims to be. For sure, he is trying his best to be brutally honest, a phenomena most of his brothers and sisters cannot phantom. But in his honesty is a plethora of lies and half truths that cannot and will not stand no matter how adamantly he proclaims such antiquated notions of his world

of make believe. He will not be able to exterminate those he feels are roaches, simply because there are too many of them and the blow black will be horrific for Donald and his brothers. They may be forced to undergo long term recovery in some facility like Gitmo.

Gitmo: 10 years of injustice and disgrace - CNN.com

Take a good look at wars America is engaged in at this hour: Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. She is losing everywhere, in fact, hasn't won a war since World War II. Alas, she didn’t win WWII, hell, the Russians sacrificed millions to defeat Hitler. And America is still fighting North Korea, she lost in Vietnam. War! What is good for? For the military industrial complex, the global bloodsuckers of the poor? Imagine, she's been bombing Iraq twenty-five years, Afghanistan nineteen. How long can this go on? And he wants to bomb the hell out of ISIS and take their oil? How can America bomb the hell out of ISIS when she is supplying ISIS? Donald knows the truth so why all the drama to deceive the 99%, the deaf, dumb and blind of America, White, Black, Latino/Latina, Asians and Aboriginal? He may be bluntly honest but at his core he is delusional, his soul atrophied, as ancestor poet Amiri Baraka wrote in A Black Mass, "Where the soul's print should be there is only a cellulose pouch of disgusting habits."

I may be an intelligent, arrogant bastard, but someone said, "At his best, Marvin X is clarity of perception." I can see clearly the world of Donald Trump is ephemeral. It is good to see he is trying to stand tall and represent the last hope of White American manhood, but it is too late. The condition of the patient is terminal, he cannot be rusticated. So have a good laugh, Donald, just know he who laughs last, laughs the longest! We are convinced, the suffering masses shall have the last laugh! We must applaud Donald Trump for calling upon China to release the Muslim millions in socalled Education Centers that are concentration camps. We’ve heard little from the Muslim world on their incarcerated brothers and sisters.

Perhaps the Muslim regimes see the Chinese Muslims as they see the Palestinians in the Gaza concentration camps and West Bank hovels under Zionist occuption. These reactionary Muslim regimes will join the Axis of Evil (Sunni Arabs, USA and Israel) in a futile attempt to counter the rise of Iran that seeks to revive the Persion Empire from the Tigris and Euphrates to the Mediterranean, along with Turkey seeking a resurrection of the Ottoman Empire. What a wonderful world!We wish you well, Donald Trump. Your people need your tragic flaws at this hour. Perhaps you can help them realize their flaws as they rejoice in yours.--Marvin X 9/19/20

Marvin X at his Academy of da Corner, in the Black Arts Movement District, 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland. photo Adam Turner

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Revised Be Careful Black People

Monday, September 28, 2020

Marvin X speaks at African Health Fair and Free the Rap in Honor of Imam Jamil Alamin

Saturday, September 26, 2020

MORE STORIES

Ya'um El Hajr (Day of Migration)

Saturday, September 19, 2020

SUN RA SPEAKS - BERKELEY LECTURE PT 1

Friday, September 18, 2020

Donald Trump: The White Man's Last Hurrah!

Gravitas: Could Michelle Obama be America's next President? | WION

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Revised Be Careful Black People

Monday, September 28, 2020

Marvin X speaks at African Health Fair and Free the Rap in Honor of Imam Jamil Alamin

Saturday, September 26, 2020

RELATED STORIES

MORE STORIES

Ya'um El Hajr (Day of Migration)

Saturday, September 19, 2020

SUN RA SPEAKS - BERKELEY LECTURE PT 1

Friday, September 18, 2020

Donald Trump: The White Man's Last Hurrah!

Gravitas: Could Michelle Obama be America's next President? | WION