Scholars and spies: A disastrous combination
It's now time for all professional scholarly associations who might possibly be impacted by the renewed drive to recruit academics or use academic cover for spying to take a firm public stand against such practices.
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The academic community needs to create a clear firewall between itself and the military and intelligence communities.
Last Modified: 05 Dec 2012 13:27
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The CIA's relationship with academia has gone much deeper than merely sponsoring research [Reuters]
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Buried in a just published Washington Post exposé on the expansion of spying operations by the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) is a sentence that should send shivers down the spine of any researcher, journalist, student or scholar working in the Muslim world, regardless of whether she or he is an American citizen:"Having DIA operatives pose as academics or business executives requires painstaking work to create those false identities, and it means they won't be protected by diplomatic immunity if caught."I'm glad to know it takes "painstaking work" to create the "false" identity of a scholar (it's most likely not as hard to fake being a businessman, given the CIA's long history of using front companies for its espionage activities). But I have little doubt that the US intelligence and defence communities would do so if they believed such a cover could help better collect and/or produce actionable intelligence. Indeed, it's quite likely they wouldn't need to fake it, as there are likely many "scholars" who would willingly sign up for the job. Long and sordid history There is a long history of co-operation and collaboration between American intelligence agencies and academics. Almost a century ago, the seminal anthropologist Franz Boas was ostracised for revealing that academics were serving as spies in Latin America, a practice that apparently started in Mexico and was strengthened in World War II. As Boas argued, any scholar "who uses science as a cover for political spying, who demeans himself to pose before a foreign government as an investigator and asks for assistance in his alleged researches in order to carry on, under this cloak, his political machinations, prostitutes science in an unpardonable way and forfeits the right to be classed as a scientist". Scholars were also part and parcel of the allied effort in World War II in various capacities, including with the CIA's precursor, the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services). Since its creation in 1947, the Agency has routinely enlisted academics to engage in research and analysis, and recruited new generations of agents from the "best and brightest" students at elite colleges and universities. While the relationship waned somewhat in the 1970s and 1980s, it had already started to rebound before the September 11, 2001 attacks and grew substantially in their wake.
But the CIA's relationship with academia has gone much deeper in the last sixty years than merely sponsoring research that can help it analyse intelligence data. The Agency has not merely relied on the expertise of scholars on countries and cultures it engages. It has sponsored research and journals without publicly declaring its funding, and used academics to help produce disinformation and engage directly in activities related to spying. Moreover, in Southeast Asia (particularly in Vietnam during the war years), Latin America and Africa, research on "third world" development studies and techniques in counter-insurgency became staples of CIA-academic collaborations. A January 2001 Los Angeles Times article by political scientist David Gibbs explained that "the 'cloak and gown' connection has flourished in the aftermath of the Cold War... Since 1996, the CIA has made public outreach a 'top priority and targets academia in particular. According to experts on US intelligence, the strategy has worked'." Gibbs was building on a longer 2000 article in the magazine Lingua Franca by Chris Mooney, which went into even greater detail about the renewed scholar-spy relationship. Discussing the issue with Gibbs after we'd both read the Washington Post article, he explained in dismay, "Such situations present classic conflicts of interest. The problem is compounded by the fact that academic consulting agreements with intelligence agencies are highly secretive - thus undermining yet another basic tenet of academic research, which is the need for openness and full disclosure." It's worth recalling here the response of the 1976 Church Committee Report, which investigated the abuses of the intelligence community, to the situation Gibbs discusses. The report declared: "The Committee is disturbed both by the present practices of operationally using American academics and by the awareness that the restraints on expanding this practice are primarily those of sensitivity to the risks of disclosure and not an appreciation of dangers to the integrity of individuals and institutions."Scholar-spies? Despite the ethical problems associated with such collaborations, over the years prominent scholars such as Columbia University's Robert Jervis, Harvard's Joseph Nye and Texas A&M's Robert Gates have not only supported the CIA-academia relationship, but have served at the highest positions of the CIA. Most recently, Gates, the former CIA Director and Defence Secretary, has spearheaded the Minerva Research Initiative, which attempts to achieve a "deeper understanding of global populations and their variance [to] yield more effective strategic and operational policy decisions". Even the leadership of UC Berkeley, home of the 60s' academic counter-culture, was directly involved in promoting research done under academic cover but in fact being produced by and for the CIA. In the context of the Cold War, even supposedly "liberal" public figures broadly supported the strategic - political, economic, scientific and cultural - competition with the Soviet Union.
However powerful and prescient Franz Boas' sentiment recalled above, it's not farfetched to imagine that in the present economic and political climate, finding people with a claim to legitimate status as academics to work as spies will not be that difficult, and that doing so will seriously damage the integrity of academia, diminish an already shrinking funding stream for non-military research as money is allocated to fund scholars who spy (the oldest carrot in the academic world), and most important, put the research and even lives of non-spying scholars in danger. One might ask, given the far greater levels of violence in which the intelligence community and military are involved, is the (re)joining of scholars and spies really worth getting up in arms about? Yes, it is. It's hard enough to go to a region of the world where one's government is engaged either in violent activities through war, occupation or drone activities (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen), supports the oppressive policies of the local government (Morocco, Bahrain, Israel, Egypt, etc) or as bad, is actively engaged in espionage against it (Iran, Sudan), and try to win the trust of social, religious and/or political activists who would naturally be on the radar of their own and foreign intelligence services. Such relationships will be even harder, if not nearly impossible, to develop if it becomes known that the US government is actively using scholars (and, we can presume, journalists) as covers for intelligence operatives. Equally bad would be the agreement by universities, without the consent or even knowledge of their faculty and students, to provide covers for clandestine intelligence operatives, thereby putting legitimate scholars at risk without them having any idea of their so being. Such a situation would permanently taint every scholar engaged in research in the field in the Muslim majority world, or with diaspora Muslim communities in Europe or North America. However it is done, such practices would undoubtedly make it well-nigh impossible either to produce the kind of well-researched and objective knowledge that is crucial for accurate policy-making by governments, or to know when the research being produced is done explicitly to promote clandestine strategic ends, or is in fact deliberate disinformation or is otherwise tainted as the product of espionage or otherwise clandestine activities. Scholars in the field In recent years, not just the Minerva Program, but also the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) programmes have attempted to place scholars in the field of "kinetic operations" in order to help advance military and strategic objectives in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are numerous ethical problems with such programmes, as well as intellectual problems associated with the production of end-user determined knowledge. But at least such scholars, directly embedded with the military in the field, do not - as far as I have heard - pretend to be independent and outside military control. But to have scholars literally spying on the people they're studying, and in a way that puts their findings directly into the "kill chain" and thus can lead to the deaths of these subjects without any internationally accepted legal standard or judicial review, is in fact deplorable. Lest readers think that I'm being alarmist, in a follow-up article to the Washington Post piece, the Guardian reported that officials are having trouble filling the hundreds of spots that will be created by this programme, which means they'll be even more hard-pressed not to recruit members of academia. It further reported that the spying could be used to increase the efficacy of the US drone programme, which has been heavily criticised for the use of "signature strikes" that target and kill people merely for looking or behaving in a way those behind the trigger button declare is suspicious. We might imagine that most scholars, students or journalists would not risk their reputations, never mind their freedom and even lives, to spy on people while doing field work. But the success of the HTS and Minerva programmes show that in an era of deep budget cuts for research funding for students and professors, and a similar crisis facing journalism, there is likely no shortage of people who would feel compelled (or be willing) to engage in such work if enough compensation were offered to induce their participation.
There may not be much interaction between scholars in these parallel universes, but the differences between them will be largely lost to anyone on the ground who could now reasonably suspect that the academic interviewing them could be an intelligence operative. Protecting academics and the broader public globally It's perhaps not surprising given its past association with military and intelligence activities that the American Anthropology Association has taken the lead in prohibiting members from engaging in spying or other clandestine activities in the guise of research. Its current Code of Ethics declares that: "Researchers who mislead participants about the nature of the research and/or its sponsors; who omit significant information that might bear on a participant's decision to engage in the research; or who otherwise engage in clandestine or secretive research that manipulates or deceives research participants about the sponsorship, purpose, goals or implications of the research, do not satisfy ethical requirements for openness, honesty, transparency and fully informed consent."In 1982 and 1985, the Middle East Studies Association passed two resolutions that precluded scholars accepting covert funding or doing covert work while working as university-based academics. Other professional associations, such as the American Sociological Association and the American Academy of Religion, might have strong codes of ethics, but they don't explicitly address the issue of clandestine kill chain co-operation or collaboration between scholars and military and intelligence agencies.It's now time for all professional scholarly associations who might possibly be impacted by the renewed drive to recruit academics or use academic cover for spying to take a firm public stand against such practices. What is clear is that the academic community needs to create a clear firewall between itself and the military and intelligence communities now, before any programme is put into place to use academia as a cover for spying and other clandestine activities. If this does not happen soon, the inevitable disasters that result, including the arrests, imprisonment or even deaths of actual academics and/or the people with whom they work or study, will be on all our hands. Mark LeVine is professor of Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine and distinguished visiting professor at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden and the author of the forthcoming book about the revolutions in the Arab world, The Five Year Old Who Toppled a Pharaoh. His book, Heavy Metal Islam, which focused on 'rock and resistance and the struggle for soul' in the evolving music scene of the Middle East and North Africa, was published in 2008.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
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Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Do Black Academics Spy for US Intelligence Agencies?
National Writers Union Joins Day of Action in NYC
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Marvin X Classic--How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy
Foreword
How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy
By Dr. Nathan Hare
Call him Dr. M, as I do, though I’ve known him by other names in other places and, like Diogenes, who went around holding up a lantern to the faces of the people he would meet in the streets of ancient Athens looking for an honest man, I have come to the realization that we as a people have been waiting and looking for somebody like Dr. M to come along for more than half a century, ever since America was stunned by The Mark of Oppression (the Jim Crow era book by two white liberal psychiatrists whose findings had brought them to the heartfelt conclusion that the race of people called “Negroes” was “crushed.”
In only four years after their epitaph was written, Negroes (now called “blacks,” “Blacks,” “Afro-Americans,” “African-Americans,” or as Dr. M sometimes calls them “American Africans”) had exploded in Montgomery with passive resistance. In four more years the “sit-in movement” broke out among the youth, followed like a one-two punch by the so-called “freedom riders” (roving bands of individuals who boarded and defied the segregation of interstate vehicles and included a future student of mine on spring break from Howard University by the name of Stokely Carmichael). Then came “Black Power,” in the context of which I first heard of a man who had metamorphosed from the slave-name Marvin Jackmon into a prominent “North American African poet” who went by the name of Marvin X (the X connoting “the unknown”).
While, despite the fact that I have known him through the intervening years, I cannot unravel every single quality of the brother, I can testify that Dr. M is a brand new Marvin, a Dr. Marvin, a social doctor, if you will, with a gift and a mission for a new black movement. I know this to be true because, aside from my Ph.D. and years of experience in the practice of clinical psychology, I specialized in the study of social movements for a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago. But more than that, I have watched a dedicated Dr. M, up close and clinically, going about his fearless work in the mean streets of San Francisco.
Over a period of many months, on many a dark and dreary sometimes rainy Wednesday night, I served as a consultant in clinical psychology to Dr. M’s “Black Reconstruction Group” (the pilot to his twelve-step model now unveiled in this important book on “How to Recover from Addiction to White Supremacy.” In the Recovery Theatre’s pilot groups, I sat with diverse and ad hoc coteries of men and women gathered impromptu in the austere basement of a Catholic church, St. Boniface, located in the heart of The Tenderloin, the highest crime district in San Francisco, just down a few blocks from the famous Glide Memorial Methodist Church. Many a night I marveled at the ease with which Dr. M and his talented co-facilitator, Suzette Celeste brought out trickles of lost and unleashed hope and inspiration in the minds of destitute and degraded street people as well as in the confused and empty psyches of invited members of the black bourgeoisie who, still trying to be unbroken, had come where not many “bourgies” would dare to tread.
On many an appointed night I stood by silently looking on while Dr. M and his collaborators sauntered out into the shadowy mysteries of dilapidated streets to solicit and harness hapless homeless men and a woman or two and bring them in to meet as equals with the anxious representatives of the black bourgeoisie who had dared to cross momentarily back over their tentative territorial and social boundaries. This of course is not recommended for the feeble or the fainthearted; because, until the revolution comes, or the proletariat triumphs, there will be difficulties and perils in chance encounters of the social classes. So I must hasten to explain that a security conscious Dr. M was operating within a safety net of collaborators competent in the martial arts; like Geoffrey Grier, who has been an international martial arts competitor and is a son of a black psychiatrist, Dr. William Grier, coauthor with Dr. Price Cobb of the late 1960s blockbuster, Black Rage.
At the moment when the oppressed have had enough, their rage will explode -- Fanon had warned us in The Wretched of the Earth -- and it is at that moment, at the very point of mental and spiritual coagulation and defeat, when they will come together and rise. Frantz Fanon went on to tell of a category of reconstruction groups called “’djemaas’ (village assemblies) of northern Africa or in the meetings of western Africa, tradition demands that the quarrels which occur in a village should be settled in public. It is communal self-criticism, of course, and with a note of humor, because everybody is relaxed, and because in the last resort we all want the same things. But the more the intellectual imbibes the atmosphere of the people, the more completely he abandons the habits of calculation, of unwonted silence, of mental reservations, and shakes the spirit of concealment. And it is true that already at that level we can say that it spreads its own light and its own reason.”
However, psychiatric authority for a self-help peer group focus on individual feelings (or addiction) in relation to white supremacy became available anew in the late 1960s, when Jeffrey Grier’s father, Dr. William H. Grier, and his collaborator, Dr. Price M. Cobbs, published Black Rage. Dr. Grier has also consulted with Dr. M and his Recovery Theatre around the time of the pilot trial run of the first “Black Reconstruction Groups.” According to Grier and Cobbs, in the “Introduction to the Paperback Edition” of Black Rage, “The most important aspect of therapy with blacks, we are convinced, is that racist mistreatment must be echoed and underlined as a fact, an unfortunate fact, but a most important fact – a part of reality. Dissatisfaction with such mistreatment is to be expected, and one’s resentment should be of appropriate dimensions” among black warriors who would exact retribution. “Psychiatry for such warriors,” Grier and Cobbs went on to explain, should aim to “keep them fit for the duty at hand and healthy enough to enjoy the victories” that are likely to emerge.
Fitness for duty is a pleasant but likely side effect of Dr. M’s “Black Reconstruction Groups” working to free the minds of persons addicted to white supremacy. This no doubt is no doubt why they do not limit themselves in their group sessions to expressions of resentment of racist mistreatment and dissatisfaction but also calmly allow its hidden effects, which often remain unconscious in the way in which the relentless karate chops of white supremacy have killed our dreams on a daily basis and shattered our ability to love, to feel loved, to love ourselves and therefore one another. I listened with much satisfaction as Dr. M and his assemblies delved into the depths of fractured feelings and emotions of the brokenhearted in order to help them come to terms with betrayal, jealousy and rage, in their moving endeavors to learn to love again.
And so it is that you will find many a reference to love in How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy. This includes, for instance, “Women Who Love” and the motivations of the men who love them.
Dr. M’s own fitness for duty is complex, unique and variegated. According to James W. Sweeney, "Marvin walked through the muck and mire of hell and came out clean as white fish and black as coal." Marvin can boast of “a Ph.D. in Negrology,” as he puts it,” the study of nigguhs” issued by the University of Hardknocks’s College of Hell), based on twelve years of research , independent study , and practicum in San Francisco's Tenderloin and other unlettered social laboratories throughout the United States.
There may still be hope, if it pleases you, for Dr. M to join the white man’s system of miseducation and mental health care, when we consider that psychologists, including one of my mentors, the late Dr. Carlton Goodlett, at first were “grandfathered” in when the licensure of psychologists was started in the state of California. Later came the oral exam (conversational, not dental), followed in time by an essay exam, before the boom in “standardized “ multiple choice tests for which workshops were offered to prepare you for a fee, causing excellent practitioners, especially black ones, to be blocked from licensure until they found out and forked over whopping workshop fees .
There is also a burgeoning market opening up in “clinical sociology” and “sociological practice” still cutting out its slice of the marketplace and finding its way in matters of licensure and credentialing in the field of sociology. But here it may be important to say that the self-help peer group does not require a sociological or a mental health professional, any more than the primordial AA groups from which the mental health profession has profited and learned. Dr. M is a social “doctor” (which etymologically means “teacher”) grappling with a social problem, white supremacy and its punishing residue in the minds of oppressed black individuals and white oppressors who have chosen to reject and come to places where their fathers lied. Oppressors pure and simple, who accept white supremacy, must be dealt with in a later context, as you will not very well be able to keep them in a Black Reconstruction or White Supremacy Destruction Group (or White Supremacy Deconstruction, if you will).
Much in the manner of Hegel in his essay on “Master and Slave,” Marvin senses that the oppressor distorts his own mind as well as the mind of the oppressed. Hence Type I and Type II White Supremacy Addiction. White sociologists and the late black psychologist, Bobby Wright, converged in their findings of pathological personality traits (“the authoritarian personality” and “the racial psychopathic personality,” as Bobby put it).
But if Hegel was correct in his notion that the oppressor cannot free the slave, that the slave must force the oppressor’s hand, then it is Type II White Supremacy Addiction which if not more resistant to cure, must occupy our primary focus. Type II White Supremacy may be seen as a kind of “niggeritis” or “Negrofication” growing out of an over-identification with the master, who is white. As in any disorder severity of symptoms may vary from mild to moderate or severe.
As Frantz Fanon put it when he spoke for the brother with jungle fever in Black Skin, White Mask: “I wish to be regarded as white. If I can be loved by the white woman who is loved by the white man, then I am white like the white man; I am a full human being.” In the twisted mental convolution of a brother in black skin behind a white mask, Fanon observed a “Negro dependency complex” independently chronicled in my own Black Anglo Saxons (black individuals with white minds in black bodies). They struggle to look, think, talk and walk white by day, then go to sleep at night and dream that they will wake up white. They refuse to realize that no matter what they may ever do they will never get out of the black race alive.
On the other hand, you are going to be seeing “nouveau blacks” and lesser Afrocentrics -- who faithfully and unquestionably follow twelve-month years and endeavor even to blackenize the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ -- jumping up to question Dr. M’s re-africanization of the “Twelve Steps” model for “using the Eurocentric twelve steps,” but they forget that the very effort to be practical and collective is the original African way. In any event, we must build on whites as whites have built on us, taking the best of the West and leaving the rest alone. But Dr. M has expressly and creatively added a thirteenth step; for his goal is not just recovery but discovery, his goal is not just to change the individual but to change the individual to get ready to change the world.
Meanwhile there is one thing on which we can all agree: in any serious attempt to solve the bitter mental ravages of white supremacy, we must face the unadulterated fact that we are limited when we look to the institutionalized “profession” and their professional “providers.” This of course is not to say that the institutionalized professionals cannot be helpful. Dr. M is quick to point out that a self-help peer group cannot cure all the diverse neuroses and psychoses that afflict us. Indeed he goes so far as to suggest that some of us “may need to be committed.”
The late Queen Mother Moore (who loved to boast that she had “gone as far as the fourth grade, and stayed in school too long to learn anything”) delighted in going around deconstructing our “slave mentalities” and saying somebody needs to “do some surgery on these Negro minds” – in which Queen Mother had diagnosed a chronic condition she called “oppression psychoneurosis.” Queen Mother Moore was basically joking, that is, laughing to keep from crying, but it is no joke that mental health professionals, operating under the medical model, think nothing of seeing a person suffering from a psychosocial problem and not only treating the victim instead of the problem but – much in the manner of any addict or drug pusher– use or apply chemicals and sometimes chemical abuse to deal with the inability of the “patient” to feel good in a bad place and thrive, to try to “have heart” in a heartless world. Many people are unaware to this very day that the practice once was rampant for psychiatrists to treat a person with chronic mental maladies by subjecting them to lobotomies cutting off a portion of their brains. Shock treatment was another method – you’re shocked by life, let’s shock your brain, Senator Eagleton (who later ran for the vice-presidency in the 1970s on the ticket with George McGovern).
It should never have been any surprise that the mental health profession would be of only partial help in reconstructing the psychic consequences of centuries of prolonged brainwashing and subjugation (this is not to mention “Sicko” and what we know of the crippling new effects of “managed care” on the medical profession). Many mental health experts, the overwhelming majority of them white, have long suggested that the “medical model” may be inappropriate in the treatment of the psychological, not to mention, sociological components of mental illness.
But you don’t have to be a mental health professional or a sociologist to know that we can no longer restrict our search for healing to professional shrinks, raring back in executive chairs and carpeted suites stocked with “psychometric instruments” standardized on the white middle class, far removed from the realities of the concrete social milieu of afflicted and homeless black “subjects” living lives of hardship and subjugation, with no assurance of available treatment.
Even when they are “insured they are limited to the care and treatment some insurance clerk is willing to “authorize.” In matters of mental health, this typically will include a few sessions of “fifty minute hours” of “talk therapy” before leaving with a prescription or chemical palliative to dull agony and the pain but not the punishment of life on the skids in a sick society.
The hour is up and time is running out, black people, but white supremacy is not. We are living now in the final and highest stage of racism and white supremacy. We’ve let our struggle slip back while sitting in classrooms and conferences crooning about “afrocentricity” and ancient African glories that have gone forever.
We have come now to a crossroads. We have lost control of our children’s minds, our future. We have lost their respect, and appear to be on a collision course to a war of words between the black generations, in which hip-hop youth disparage and mock our language, our music and our humanity with a creativity and a rime and a rhythm we can’t fathom, let alone equal in our pitifully fruitless endeavors to eliminate the “n-word” and box with the black-on-black random violence of dissocialized youth who have concluded that adults and their leaders cannot or will not fight the power. Who knows but it may be that Dr. M’s movement of recovery from addiction to and from white supremacy is offering us a final and effective chance to begin to “sit down together,” to get together and get our heads together.
THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 2011
Review of How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy
How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy
Peer mental health group cures 'addiction'
by Reginald James
Laney Tower
Laney College Newspaper,
Oakland CA
May 22, 2008
Author, playwright, and poet Dr. Marvin X is a modern theologian and philosopher sent to earth to help others find themselves. He's not a prophet, but is certainly beyond worthy of his Oakland bestowed title of "Plato" (Ishmael Reed).
His most recent book is, "How to recover from the addiction to white supremacy: A Pan African 12-Step Model for a mental health peer group."
Using a poetic and personal prose, Dr. M, as he is known, leads readers of all ethnicities and national origins on a journey to recover from what he terms the earth's most deadly disease: white supremacy.
"White supremacy can be any form of domination, whether stemming from religious mythology and ritual, or cultural mythology and ritual, such as tribal and caste relations," writes Dr. M. "White supremacy is finally a class phenomena, the rich against the poor,thus the process of recovery must include a redistribution of global wealth, for there is no doubt that the rich became rich by exploiting the poor, not by any natural inheritance or superior intelligence."
Dr. M, a founder of the Black Arts movement, uses his life experience with drug addiction to create a recovery model for others. Similar to the "12-step model" used by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the book reads like a personal narrative of not just one man's struggle to overcome a grafted sense of self-inferiority and a disillusioned projection of superiority in others, but a prayer of confidence that when others connect with their spirits, they will be able to overcome "stinking thinking," negative attitudes and self-destructive behavior.
After defining white supremacy in the introduction, the next chapter details how to detox and "rid the body and mind of the toxicity of decades under the influence of racist ideology of institutions that have rendered us into a state of drunkenness and denial."
After detoxification, patients are now ready to step into a new era. The first step to recovery is to "admit we are not powerless over self-hatred, racism and white supremacy thinking."
Dr. M's message of mental purification comes through strong in his accounts, and his vast historical knowledge of the experience of North American Africans" (so-called African Americans) encourages students to study. His vast literary references do not discriminate as he makes reference to Shakespeare and "classic" Greek tragedies as well.
"The Other White People," as he refers to them, "are an enigma to themselves, a conundrum of major proportions, transcending Shakespeare's Othello in tragic dimension, for their tragic flaw is lack of self knowledge."
"Such is the gracious gift of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism. It has produced a Pan African people in love with all things European: women, clothing, religion, education (what people in their right minds would send their children to the enemy to become educated, especially without a revolutionary agenda), political philosophy, social habits, dietary preferences, sexual mores, etc" writes Dr. M.
While he seeks to create a dialogue with all, the sexism ingrained in this society leaps out at you. He attempts to make amends by apologizing for his past instances of sexism and emotional, verbal, and physical abuse of women.
The most powerful aspect of the book is the encouragement to the reader to gain a working knowledge of self. When speaking to the need for patients to take a "moral inventory," Dr. M puts a mirror up to all people.
Breaking down dynamics of interracial relationships with the analytical perception of a sociologist or psychologist, including historical context of relationships between black women and white men and the taboo of white woman with a black man, Dr. M simplifies the frustration faced by women who date outside of their "race" and the reaction of those who feel their "natural partners" have been stolen.
"In this war with the white woman over the black man's sperm, the black woman, in desperation and denial, tries to mimic the white woman as much as possible, donning blond hair and continuing the tradition of bleaching cream throughout Pan Africa."
Equally healing is the emphasis on seeking forgiveness. When under the influence of substances or mind altering racist ideology, people often hurt people that are closest to them. Dr. M apologizes for his own shortcomings while under the influence of not just white supremacy, but while using crack cocaine. The prolific writer fell victim to the "ghost" for 12 years, and apologizes to his family and especially his daughters.
He also apologizes on behalf of the "Black Bourgeoisie," "Pan African Professors" he attacked because they were "not as radical and revolutionary as I believed they should, after all, white supremacy institutions are not about to allow a radical Pan African ideology and philosophy to flourish within its institutional framework," writes Dr. M.
Dr. M is able to weave not only events in his life which were symptomatic of white supremacy, but the thought process and actions of others.
While some may be quick to write Dr. M off as a Pan-African revolutionary (which he is), or a "reverse racist" (which he is not), his book benefits people of all ethnicities to come to grips with their preconceived notions about one another.
He successfully differentiates between white supremacy and "white people" for only a few handsomely reap the benefits of white supremacy, while others simply enjoy white privilege. He also emphasizes that white supremacy has not, and will not, flourish without disciples and co-conspirators.
"The white supremacy rulers have used poor whites and working class whites to delude whites into thinking the blacks are the cause of their misery and economic exploitation, just as capitalism is presently using immigrant labor to suggest they are the cause of middle and lower class white economic woes, while in fact it is the white supremacy global bandits who are outsourcing for cheap labor." Dr. M equates the assertion with the current immigration debate.
Ultimately, after completing the 12-step model, patients are encouraged to join the "cultural revolution." Harkening to the era of he 1960s, Dr. M suggests "linguistic transcendence" in which North American Africans reclaim a regal self-concept.
In the great tradition of indigenous healers, Dr. M pours love into patients inspiring hope for a cure for what others have deemed the only reality.
Like all scientists, Dr. M is experimenting, hoping that patients will actively involve themselves in their recovery. The "peer group mental health model" accompanies the book and allows the reader to form their own circle to undergo transformation with friends, family, or those people you haven't met yet. Starting a much needed dialogue, Dr. M brings forward "5000 watts" of shock therapy to awake people to their senses.
Dr. M obtained his PhD in Negrology from the University of Hell, USA. Formerly known as Marvin Jackmon, he was born in Fowler, CA and grew up in Fresno and Oakland. He attended Merritt College and San Francisco State University where he received a BA and MA in English. He has taught English, African American Literature, Drama, journalism, and more at Fresno State, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, San Francisco State University, University of Nevada, Reno, Mills, and Laney College. He was an professor at Fresno State University when then Governor Ronald Reagan found out Dr. M refused to serve in Vietnam--he was barred from teaching.
His other books include Love and War, poems, 1995, In the Crazy House Called America, essays, 2002, and his most recent Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality, 2007His books are available from Black Bird Press, 1222 Dwight Way, Berkeley, CA, 94702. $19.95 each. His Academy of da Corner is at 14th and Broadway, Northeast corner. He is presently organizing the Blackwell Institute of Art, Math and Science. How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy was used as a textbook at Berkeley City College and Oakland's Merritt College.
Marvin X is now available for speaking and reading at colleges and universities. He does require a freedom of speech clause in his contract. Fee: $5,000-$10.000. Contact his agent: Sun in Leo PR: 718-496-2305; prgirl@suninleo.com
Laney Tower
Laney College Newspaper,
Oakland CA
May 22, 2008
Author, playwright, and poet Dr. Marvin X is a modern theologian and philosopher sent to earth to help others find themselves. He's not a prophet, but is certainly beyond worthy of his Oakland bestowed title of "Plato" (Ishmael Reed).
His most recent book is, "How to recover from the addiction to white supremacy: A Pan African 12-Step Model for a mental health peer group."
Using a poetic and personal prose, Dr. M, as he is known, leads readers of all ethnicities and national origins on a journey to recover from what he terms the earth's most deadly disease: white supremacy.
"White supremacy can be any form of domination, whether stemming from religious mythology and ritual, or cultural mythology and ritual, such as tribal and caste relations," writes Dr. M. "White supremacy is finally a class phenomena, the rich against the poor,thus the process of recovery must include a redistribution of global wealth, for there is no doubt that the rich became rich by exploiting the poor, not by any natural inheritance or superior intelligence."
Dr. M, a founder of the Black Arts movement, uses his life experience with drug addiction to create a recovery model for others. Similar to the "12-step model" used by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the book reads like a personal narrative of not just one man's struggle to overcome a grafted sense of self-inferiority and a disillusioned projection of superiority in others, but a prayer of confidence that when others connect with their spirits, they will be able to overcome "stinking thinking," negative attitudes and self-destructive behavior.
After defining white supremacy in the introduction, the next chapter details how to detox and "rid the body and mind of the toxicity of decades under the influence of racist ideology of institutions that have rendered us into a state of drunkenness and denial."
After detoxification, patients are now ready to step into a new era. The first step to recovery is to "admit we are not powerless over self-hatred, racism and white supremacy thinking."
Dr. M's message of mental purification comes through strong in his accounts, and his vast historical knowledge of the experience of North American Africans" (so-called African Americans) encourages students to study. His vast literary references do not discriminate as he makes reference to Shakespeare and "classic" Greek tragedies as well.
"The Other White People," as he refers to them, "are an enigma to themselves, a conundrum of major proportions, transcending Shakespeare's Othello in tragic dimension, for their tragic flaw is lack of self knowledge."
"Such is the gracious gift of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism. It has produced a Pan African people in love with all things European: women, clothing, religion, education (what people in their right minds would send their children to the enemy to become educated, especially without a revolutionary agenda), political philosophy, social habits, dietary preferences, sexual mores, etc" writes Dr. M.
While he seeks to create a dialogue with all, the sexism ingrained in this society leaps out at you. He attempts to make amends by apologizing for his past instances of sexism and emotional, verbal, and physical abuse of women.
The most powerful aspect of the book is the encouragement to the reader to gain a working knowledge of self. When speaking to the need for patients to take a "moral inventory," Dr. M puts a mirror up to all people.
Breaking down dynamics of interracial relationships with the analytical perception of a sociologist or psychologist, including historical context of relationships between black women and white men and the taboo of white woman with a black man, Dr. M simplifies the frustration faced by women who date outside of their "race" and the reaction of those who feel their "natural partners" have been stolen.
"In this war with the white woman over the black man's sperm, the black woman, in desperation and denial, tries to mimic the white woman as much as possible, donning blond hair and continuing the tradition of bleaching cream throughout Pan Africa."
Equally healing is the emphasis on seeking forgiveness. When under the influence of substances or mind altering racist ideology, people often hurt people that are closest to them. Dr. M apologizes for his own shortcomings while under the influence of not just white supremacy, but while using crack cocaine. The prolific writer fell victim to the "ghost" for 12 years, and apologizes to his family and especially his daughters.
He also apologizes on behalf of the "Black Bourgeoisie," "Pan African Professors" he attacked because they were "not as radical and revolutionary as I believed they should, after all, white supremacy institutions are not about to allow a radical Pan African ideology and philosophy to flourish within its institutional framework," writes Dr. M.
Dr. M is able to weave not only events in his life which were symptomatic of white supremacy, but the thought process and actions of others.
While some may be quick to write Dr. M off as a Pan-African revolutionary (which he is), or a "reverse racist" (which he is not), his book benefits people of all ethnicities to come to grips with their preconceived notions about one another.
He successfully differentiates between white supremacy and "white people" for only a few handsomely reap the benefits of white supremacy, while others simply enjoy white privilege. He also emphasizes that white supremacy has not, and will not, flourish without disciples and co-conspirators.
"The white supremacy rulers have used poor whites and working class whites to delude whites into thinking the blacks are the cause of their misery and economic exploitation, just as capitalism is presently using immigrant labor to suggest they are the cause of middle and lower class white economic woes, while in fact it is the white supremacy global bandits who are outsourcing for cheap labor." Dr. M equates the assertion with the current immigration debate.
Ultimately, after completing the 12-step model, patients are encouraged to join the "cultural revolution." Harkening to the era of he 1960s, Dr. M suggests "linguistic transcendence" in which North American Africans reclaim a regal self-concept.
In the great tradition of indigenous healers, Dr. M pours love into patients inspiring hope for a cure for what others have deemed the only reality.
Like all scientists, Dr. M is experimenting, hoping that patients will actively involve themselves in their recovery. The "peer group mental health model" accompanies the book and allows the reader to form their own circle to undergo transformation with friends, family, or those people you haven't met yet. Starting a much needed dialogue, Dr. M brings forward "5000 watts" of shock therapy to awake people to their senses.
Dr. M obtained his PhD in Negrology from the University of Hell, USA. Formerly known as Marvin Jackmon, he was born in Fowler, CA and grew up in Fresno and Oakland. He attended Merritt College and San Francisco State University where he received a BA and MA in English. He has taught English, African American Literature, Drama, journalism, and more at Fresno State, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, San Francisco State University, University of Nevada, Reno, Mills, and Laney College. He was an professor at Fresno State University when then Governor Ronald Reagan found out Dr. M refused to serve in Vietnam--he was barred from teaching.
His other books include Love and War, poems, 1995, In the Crazy House Called America, essays, 2002, and his most recent Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality, 2007His books are available from Black Bird Press, 1222 Dwight Way, Berkeley, CA, 94702. $19.95 each. His Academy of da Corner is at 14th and Broadway, Northeast corner. He is presently organizing the Blackwell Institute of Art, Math and Science. How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy was used as a textbook at Berkeley City College and Oakland's Merritt College.
Marvin X is now available for speaking and reading at colleges and universities. He does require a freedom of speech clause in his contract. Fee: $5,000-$10.000. Contact his agent: Sun in Leo PR: 718-496-2305; prgirl@suninleo.com
Dr. Walter A. Rodney--A Promise of Revolution
Walter A. Rodney-- A Promise of Revolution
155 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-58367-328-7
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-58367-329-4
Monthly Review Press-- November 2012
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-58367-328-7
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-58367-329-4
Monthly Review Press-- November 2012
The life of the great Guyanese scholar and revolutionary Walter Rodney burned with a rare intensity. The son of working class parents, Rodney showed great academic promise and was awarded scholarships to the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and the School of African and Oriental Studies in London. He received his PhD from the latter at the age of twenty-four, and his thesis was published as A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, now a classic of African history. His most famous work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, is a mainstay of radical literature and anticipated the influential world systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein.
Not content merely to study the world, Rodney turned to revolutionary politics in Jamaica, Tanzania, and in Guyana. In his homeland, he helped form the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) and was a consistent voice for the oppressed and exploited. As Rodney became more popular , the threat of his revolutionary message stirred fears among the powerful in Guyana and throughout the Caribbean, and he was assassinated in 1980.
This book presents a moving and insightful portrait of Rodney through the words of academics, writers, artists, and political activists who knew him intimately or felt his influence. These informal recollections and reflections demonstrate why Rodney is such a widely admired figure throughout the world, especially in poor countries and among oppressed peoples everywhere.
Contributors include Robert “Bobby” Moore, Abyssinian Carto, Brenda Do Harris, Robert Hill, Amiri Baraka, Leith Mullings, Issa G. Shivji, Clive Y. Thomas, and Rupert Roopnaraine.
The personal recollections in this book leave no doubt as to the impact that Walter Rodney had on each individual, while they also reveal much of interest about each writer. Taken together they remind us of what a seminal historical figure Rodney was, and how his reading of history and his practice as an activist still resonate today.
The interviews of these men and women who knew, studied with, and worked with Rodney provide a richly layered picture of the man, the scholar, the leader, and time in which he lived. Their recollections allow us to feel the energy and excitement as they collectively brought Caribbean history out from the shadows of British imperial history. You also feel the tension, anxiety and fear as the PNC government turned on its citizens. They help us appreciate that 1968 was as critical a time in Jamaica and the Caribbean as it was in Paris and Mexico City. Equally important, their stories convey the tremendous loss to them individually and to the peoples of Guyana, the Caribbean, and Africa when Rodney was so brutally killed. Chung has made Rodney accessible to a new generation of students. I hope they will be inspired to follow in Rodney’s intellectual and activist footsteps.
Walter A. Rodney: A Promise of Revolution is a compelling and intimate portrait of the life and legacy of Dr. Walter Rodney. Through the medium of oral history, Chung’s book provides insightful recollections on his experiences in England, Jamaica, Tanzania, the USA and Guyana from a diverse set of voices. The stories found here are honest, vivid and detailed—a wonderful example of the power of memory and the scale and scope of Rodney’s intellectual and political impact, past and present.
------------------BAM Actress Doris Knight Samuels Joins Ancestors
Doris Knight Samuels was recruited into the Black Arts Movement circa 1975 while we were teaching at San Francisco State University. When we taught drama at Oakland's Laney College, 1981, Doris performed the role of Eternal Woman in my play In the Name of Love. We last saw Doris at the 2012 San Francisco Juneteenth Festival. "I knew I would run into you," were her last words to me. Doris, we love you and miss, but know we will see you one day soon.
--Marvin X
Right to left, Doris Knight as Eternal Woman, Ayodele Nzinga, the Other Woman,
Zahieb Mwongozi as Eternal Man, a scene from In the Name of Love by Marvin X, Laney College Theatre, 1981. Doris and Ayo later performed in Marvin X's One Day in the Life, a docudrama
of his addiction and recovery, 1996-2000, the longest running Black drama in Northern California.
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