Barbara Boxer and/or Condi Rice—In
Search of My Soul Sister
By
Marvin X
I urge readers to use my essay to stimulate a dialogue between black men and women. Most often we engage in monologues that end in despair by both genders, in fact, it is often a shouting match with the woman pleading just to be heard, listened to as a human being with a mind that God gave both genders equally. But macho men, like myself, steeped in the patriarchal mythology, even though socialized in a matrifocal household, are so addicted to our patriarchal domination that we are deaf to the woman's repeated plea just to be heard. And more often than not, we are saying the same things, are in total agreement but deaf to each other's words and point of view. As per male/female relations, this is a psycho-linguistic crisis of the highest and most severe degree, alas, it often leads to partner violence. Alas, France passed a law against verbal violence that we know leads most often to physical violence. Didn't the brother tell us who are victims of the English language to practice silence to preserve our love that so often masquerades as hate?
--Marvin X
Black August, 2017
After a lifetime of
fears, doubts, ambivalence and general paranoia (my
essential mental state) about the feminine gender, I
recently concluded, based on six decades of interaction,
that the black woman was, after all is said and done, my
friend, and that she has never wanted to be anything
other than my friend, helper, lover and mate, really,
for eternity, if I could have ever been shackled to her
that long. Yes, after thinking about my most wonderful
Mother, an even more gracious and loving Grandmother
(Oh, Grandma’s hands!), and after reflecting on my six
sisters who probably more than anyone else helped form
my ambivalence and maybe paranoia too, since I was so
traumatized by their constant chatter and feminine
intrigues that I would find it a simple matter upon
adolescence and adulthood to ignore any words from the
feminine gender, especially simple advice or wisdom,
which cost me greatly on the road to success, including
several failed marriages and a kind of psychic distance
from my three lovable and most wonderful daughters.
If truth be told
and certainly it is time to tell the truth at this stage
in my life, I must admit that all the women in my life
have been absolutely wonderful, not one ever treated me
wrongly or without tenderness and unconditional love,
yet my response was to dog them to no end, or rather
until the end when they departed broken hearted and
disgusted.
This new
recognition on my part was made even plainer when my
actor/singer J.B. Saunders presented me with a wonderful
song “Don’t Bite The Hands That Feed You.”
J.B., also a dogger
of women, perhaps even worse than myself since he had a
career of pimping, had also had a revelation that it was
time to reconcile with the feminine gender, or least
stop the abuse, whether physical, mental or emotional.
Perhaps old dogs actually do learn new tricks! J.B.’s
lyrics said that our woman was indeed our friend and
supporter, not someone to be dogged at every turn, for
in the end we become the victim, or as another song told
us “the hunter gets captured by the game.”
Of course, one
truth about love is that love is a game of victims, for
by its nature, love makes the beloved victim of the
lover, for love is that state wherein we willingly
accept to be victimized for we submit and declare to all
who need to know and to some who don’t need to know that
we are helplessly under the power of the beloved.
Moving from the
personal to the political, we now clearly recognize that
love for the Black woman had to move from the romantic
to the critical in deciding who or what she represented
on this stage of life. How is she connected to us and we
to her—a question we had to answer about men as well,
with the same if not more degree of political acumen
because few men allow another man to do to us what we
allow women to do, after all, women have the unique
skill to get anything from us with a smile, a glance of
the eye, a stride. During my brief academic career, my
female students knew they could get almost any grade
from me, especially if they came at me right, or simply
talked right, it wasn’t always about sexual favors. And
two of my students convinced me to marry them, so much
for the wisdom of the professor.
But in the politics
of love, we matured to the point of understanding a
black face, even of the feminine gender, was not
sufficient to gain our allegiance and respect. We came
to recognize that politics was not about color, contrary
to what we “believed” during the 60s, especially with
the call for black power. Forty years later, however
belatedly and detrimentally, we came to see blackness
was about consciousness not color and had much to do
about class as well, since class very often determines
consciousness, although not always, after all, we know
of several instances in our history when “house Negroes”
plotted slave revolts, but generally speaking, the house
Negro is not to be trusted, since he/she is more
determined to preserve the house than the master.
We are reminded of
that scene in the film Amistad where the Africans are
being marched into town for mutiny. One African sees a
Negro carriage driver and remarks, “He is our brother.”
An African replies, “No, he is a white man.”
And so it is the
class nature of things that must be examined with
respect to loving or not loving Dr. Condi Rice—to be or
not to be our sister—that is the question! Having
transcended our gender fears, having made every
determination to reach out in sincerity to embrace our
sister in struggle, who endured with us all the horror
and terror of the centuries, we must sadly reject her
and everything for which she stands, for we find her
political consciousness an abomination, a betrayal of
our racial heritage of resistance in the face of
suffering, in short genocide. Clearly, she came from us,
but is no longer us, she has graduated from victim to
victimizer—while some, perhaps her “classmates” on the
right will call this progress and a point of pride for
the “race.” Well, I remember Elijah Muhammad describing
UN Undersecretary Ralph Bunche as “A Negro we don’t
need,” and this most surely applies to Condi, who
graduated from oppressed to oppressor. She stands at the
pinnacle of imperialism, the most powerful woman in the
world, yes, even more powerful than the Queen of
England, for Condi literally has the world in her hands.
In assuming to Secretary of State, we are humbled at her
meteoric rise from the slave pit of Alabama to steering
the ship of state.
Her brother Colin
Powell whom she replaces for the simple reason that he
was found disagreeable to the imperial throne, perhaps
even in his conservatism too uppity with thoughts
slightly to the left of Pharaoh, had to be replaced by
Condi who shares a more amicable relationship with boss
man sah, to the tragic extent that Senator Barbara Boxer
voted against confirmation, saying “…Your loyalty to the
mission you were given…overwhelmed your respect for the
truth.”
In the darkest days
of my gender fears, I never forgot the teachings of my
mother’s Christian Science religion with it’s emphasis
on the centrality of truth in all matters.Indeed what
has gotten me in trouble with women even more than
physical and mental abuse is being truthful, especially
in regard to my sexual improprieties.
Condi Rice stands
condemned before the world for being a liar and
murderer, a person completely and utterly devoid of
truth, thus her elevation to Secretary of State must be
a great embarrassment to our ancestors, and her reply to
Senator Boxer that her credibility and integrity was
being impugned is without merit. Boxer pointed out how
she contradicted the president and herself with respect
to weapons of mass destruction as the cause for war
against Iraq. Contrary to Dr. Rice, Saddam was not a
threat to his neighbors in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey,
Iran, Jordan and Syria. He was contained and therefore
not a threat to the “American people,” who, as Nelson
Mandela pointed out, are the greatest threat to world
peace. There was nothing to fear from Saddam but fear
itself, quite similar to my gender fears I harbored for
decades when I imagined female friends, mates, lovers
were somehow my enemies, and were, in my tortured mind,
out to get me, when in reality, I was out to get them.
Condi’s advice to
President Bush has, at this point, caused the death of
1,366 Americans,10,372 wounded, also over 100,000 Iraqi
dead. As Boxer noted, this is no light matter but a
deception of the most despicable kind that has brought
America’s credibility in the world to a new low, yet,
like the President, Dr. Rice is totally unapologetic and
stoic in maintaining her stance that contravenes
reality.
I cannot in the
name of our shared Africanity go there with her, for she
long ago crossed the line of propriety. She cannot have
my respect and sympathy in her dutiful defense of
Pharaoh and his meanderings throughout the world in the
name of global capitalism. Imagine, in the midst of the
Iraqi quagmire, they are now contemplating an invasion
of Iran. This American arrogance has no end except The
End.
As between Senator
Barbara Boxer and Condi Rice, if I had to choose my soul
sister, I would rise above color in favor of
consciousness, thus claim Senator Boxer as my sister.
This is no time in
history to be starry-eyed idealists and continue with
romantic notions about blackness. Sadly, we live in a
world where what appears to be black is white and what
appears white is black. Get over it and march forward
into the new millennium. I shall never forget how we
banned interracial couples from attending our black
nationalist parties in the 60s. Amina Baraka loves to
tell the story of when she and her husband were at the
Black House cultural/political center in San Francisco
in 1967. Amina observed my lady friend Ethna Wyatt
(Hurriyah Asar) tell a white woman she couldn’t come in.
The lady replied she was part Indian. Hurriyah replied,
“Well, the Indian can come in but the white got to go.”
At another party
with revolutionary black nationalists, a brother tried
repeatedly to convince us his white woman was in fact
black in consciousness, therefore should be admitted. We
rejected his pronouncement, but in consciousness his
woman was black and should have been admitted,
especially since there were sisters at the party who
harbored thoughts, if only subconsciously, similar to
Condi Rice’s. As a matter of fact, I was recently told
of one sister who was at this particular party who is
now such a right wing fanatic that her in-laws banned
her from their house, even changed their telephone
number to avoid her right wing ranting.
I am not promoting
interracial relationships, rather, in the tradition of
my Mother, I am promoting truth and honesty which is the
least we should expect from human beings with
consciousness, no matter their color. But we understand
that class has a way of stretching truth beyond reality,
where it becomes an exercise in arrogance and sick
pride, the stuff of classic tragedy. I am not into
hating human beings, especially my distant sister Condi
Rice, whom we must allow history and God to judge—may
they have mercy on her soul.
At least Colin
Powell was man enough to apologize to the world for his
United Nations pseudo lecture justifying the war. Shall
we await the day when Condi will admit her sins? Let us
hope she is not made to do so before the World Court for
crimes against humanity.
black ain't black
white ain't white
beware the day
beware the night!
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