Thursday, July 31, 2014

Order Now: Marvin X's classic manual to recover from the addiction to white supremacy, reprinted


I welcome reading the work of a "grassroots guerrilla publicist" who is concerned with the psychological/intellectual freedom of his people. 
I think of Walter Rodney as the “guerilla intellectual” who was organically connected to the grassroots. Key book here would be The Groundings With My Brothers [and sisters]. Or Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like. I think though that Dr. M. is closely affiliated with Frances Cress Welsing’s Isis Papers: Keys to the Colors (along with Bobby Wright’s thesis….) Of course we need to also consult Dr. Nathan Hare’s The Black Anglo Saxons, and Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie. What I am most impressed with is Dr. M’s Pan-Africanist perspective.
--Dr. Mark Christian
Professor of Sociology and Black World Studies, University of Miami (Ohio)

Black Bird Press has reprinted by popular demand, Marvin X's manual (13 steps, based on the AA model) to recover from the addiction to white supremacy. Order directly from the publisher: Black Bird Press, 339 Lester Ave., Suite #10, Oakland CA 94606, $19.95 (free shipping)










Foreword 
How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy

By Dr. M

Foreword 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.    


















Meeting format 
for a Pan African mental health peer group to recover from the addiction to white supremacy type II 
(Dr. Nathan Hare)

Based on the book by Dr. M (Marvin X) How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, foreword by Dr. Nathan Hare, afterword by Ptah Allah El (Tracy Mitchell),
Black Bird Press, Oakland CA.

The facilitator should use this format to stay focused in a timely manner, to maintain order and yet allow for the free expression on the people. This meeting is thus a sacred space and time for people to vent and begin the long process of recovery from addiction to white supremacy/lunacy. Anyone can, should and must become a meeting facilitator. 



1. Welcome. Welcome to the Pan African Mental Health Peer Group to recover from the addiction to white supremacy/lunacy. My name is ___________________. I am recovering from the adduction to white supremacy. 

2. Group response: Hotep, Salaam_________________. 

3. I am your facilitator for this meeting. Please join me in prayer and medication, especially for all those persons suffering from the addiction to white supremacy around the world. . I will read the poem What If on page 97 of our text.

4. Definition of White Supremacy: a form of domination and exploitation. White supremacy can be in white face, black face, or any other color, male or female. White supremacy is a drug so pervasive that even when we think we are cured, the ravages and residue appear, affecting our thinking and behavior, social relations and interaction in the home, on the job, at religious worship, social and cultural events. In short, this drug is sometimes tasteless, colorless, yet cunning and vile. We think we are cured, yet a slip of the tongue proves the illness has reappeared, often suddenly without the slightest indication.

5. Will a volunteer please read the Thirteen Steps taken from our text. See table of contents. 

6. A telephone list is being circulated; please add your name, address, phone and email. Indicate if you are available to mentor another brother or sister in recovery from white supremacy. Please take numbers if you wish. The telephone is a means of gaining the needed support from each other between meetings. Email also. 

7. Donations. It is now time for donations since we cannot support our recovery without the proper finances to sustain the meeting such as rent, printing of literature, refreshments and the like. However, just give what you can.

8. Check-in. The meeting is open for check-in. Please limit your talk to five minutes so everyone gets a chance to share. In this meeting we discourage cross talk. Cross talk is defined as commenting, interrupting, criticizing or giving advice on another person’s share. We need a safe and supportive place to discuss our feelings and cross talk can be very hurtful and humiliating. Thank you. Who would like to begin the check-in?

9. Someone volunteer to read the Step of the present meeting.

10. Speaker. At this time I would like to introduce the speaker who will talk for twenty minutes on the present Step.

11. Discussion. The session is now open for discussion and comments.

12. Closing prayer. Read Step 7, page 78 or any prayer you desire.

13. Next meeting date and any reading assignments.

For more information or to invite Marvin X to establish a Pan African mental health peer group in your community, please call 510-200-4164, email jmarvinx@yahoo.com.




Black Bird Press News & Review: Saudi Wahhabism and Zionism

Black Bird Press News & Review: Saudi Wahhabism and Zionism



Arab nations back Israel in mass murder of GAZA resistance population: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, some Gulf States, et al. Did not the African ruling class support and benefit from the European slave trade?

Line from a Baraka poem, "The king sold the farmer to the ghost...." Likewise, the reactionary Arab governments don't want to see an independent Palestine, it may signal the coming end of their Uncle Abdullah regimes. Liberty or death is the cry in GAZA as we write! Long live Hamas!


Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Beyonce, Jay-Z and the Mythology of Pussy and Dick



Jay-Z and Beyonce are reportedly on their way to divorce court

The Daily News is reporting that a big part of the problem is that Jay-Z is not satisfied with being with just one woman.  He’s accused of sleeping around a bit, as many rich celebrities tend to do.

Comment

Whether a nigguh has two dollars or two billion, you can't tell him nothing. Don't even try. Sometimes a nigguh with two billion will rather be with a two dollar ho than his billion dollar woman. We all guilty, when it ain't the men, it's the women, no holy saints in this matter, hence the urgent need for a pussy and dick dialogue--for us, Vagina monologue will not suffice.--Marvin X

jayz
There’s the old saying that “All good things must come to an end.”  But the saying probably wasn’t supposed to apply to marriage.  The New York Daily News is reporting that the crown royale couple of America, Jay-Z and Beyonce, is going to be no more.  The two are allegedly putting together plans for an amicable split and now engaged in the process of figuring out the business and financial implications of a pending divorce.
According to an inside source, the two are being told to pretend to be a big happy family for the public, so as not to cause a media frenzy.   But they say that the two plan on releasing a joint statement in Septembr, telling the world that their marriage is no more.  Of course, this is all set to occur after their $100 million dollar “On the Run” tour has been run to its entirety.
“Let’s leave it at it’s only a matter of time (until they split.) It’s so obvious now it’s embarrassing,” a source tells Confidenti@l.
“Around the time the tour ends, they’ll make a choice on whether they want to separate or admit trouble.”
Another source says that Jay-Z is all but done with the marriage.
“He wants this tour to end and he wants the rumors to stop,” the second source said.
One of the insiders says that the marriage has been a farce all along, and that the couple has kept it up for image purposes.  This union has been profitable for both, with them raking in a collective net worth in the neighborhood of a billion dollars.
Sources tell the New York Daily News that Beyonce is even searching for her own place.
“This (trouble) has been brewing longer than anyone knows,”  one of the sources said.  “They’re performers. And they’re good performers. It’s a business now, and they are business partners. And they don’t even fight. They know what it is.”
The Daily News is reporting that a big part of the problem is that Jay-Z is not satisfied with being with just one woman.  He’s accused of sleeping around a bit, as many rich celebrities tend to do.   There are also reports that the two are tired of keeping up the charade for the public.  It’s just hard work.
“They are both being advised on how to look like they’re together. A negative report comes out, or a breakup report comes out, and they are advised to post a picture with Blue Ivy,” the source said.

You Don't Know Me


    You don't know me
    you had a chance to know me
    before we made love
    you had a chance to know my mind
    understand my fears
    learn about issues
    help me heal some things
    but you wanted to make love
    so you don't know me
    we made love
    but you don't know me
    don't have a clue
    think I'm a good dick
    or you some good tight pussy
    but you don't know me
    and never will now
    because you wanted to make love
    you wanted to get a nut
    we didn't even talk much
    a little bit leading up to sex
    I went along
    I was horny too
    but you don't know me
    and I don't know you
    now we never will
    we blew it forever
    because we made love
    too fast too quick too soon
    now you think you own me
    I can't breathe
    can't talk on the phone to friends
    because we made love
    because I gave you some dick
    you gave me some pussy
    now I'm no longer human
    I'm your love slave
    you my slave
    we're in love but you don't know me
    we gonna get married
    but you don't know me
    we're gonna have children
    but you don't know me
    you're gonna beat my ass
    but you don't know me
    you're going to jail
    but you don't know me
    we're getting a divorce
    but you don't know me
    now we're friends "Just Friends" Charlie Parker tune
    But you don't know me and never will.
    --Marvin X

    from the Mythology of Pussy and Dick ( A male/female dialogue) by Marvin X, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2014, approx. 400 pages, $25.00. Pre-order  $19.95, includes shipping.  Black Bird Press, 339 Lester Ave., Suite 10, Oakland CA 94606.


    The Los Angeles Black Book Expo nominates Marvin X to receive the LABBX Spoken Worlds Pavilion Humanitarian Achievement Award of the Year, for unlimited service to the community of Poetry and Spoken Word, educating and enlightening seekers of Truth. For your poignant and insightful works benefiting humanity and for your tireless search for Truth, Justice and Clarity of Thought.
    --Denise Lyles-Cook, Director, LABBX Spoken Worlds Pavilion, Hollywood CA


    The Human Earthquake hit radio station KPOO last night, major damage reported


    Marvin X on KPOO Radio, 89.5FM, interviewed by Terry Collins. Terry questioned him about the situation in GAZA or Occupied Palestine. During this two hour interview, Marvin talked about the liberation of Palestine and the liberation of North American Africans, whose situation is similar since we suffer colonialism as well.

    Our situation is known as Domestic Colonialism  since we suffer oppression in the belly of the beast. If we cut off the head of the beast, the whole world would be free. But unlike the people of GAZA who are conscious of their condition as the Zionists rain bombs, rockets and tank shells upon them, killing these mostly defenseless men, women and children, North American Africans are under attack but don't realize it; it is a low intensity war that is cunning and vile because the Monkey Mind Media has lulled them to sleep with fairy tales and nursery rhymes that perpetuate the world of make believe, so well described in the book Black Bourgeoisie by E. Franklin Frazier.

    "At four years old, I became aware of the Palestinians. I used to see the news reel at the drive-in theatre with my parents and I vividly remember seeing the Palestinians fleeing across a bridge into Jordan. It was 1948. Since then the people of Palestine have struggled to liberate themselves from Zionist occupation. I am amazed to see the people who suffered the Nazi concentration camps, put the Arabs in  similar camps. They may not put them in the gas chamber, but the Zionist weapons (Made in USA) are just as deadly. Baldwin told us, the murder of my child will not make your child safe."

    Terry asked Marvin to read Claude McKay's classic poem If We Must Die:



    If we can't live as men, at least we can die as men!--Brothers at Attica Prison, USA

    They died as Men!
    If We Must Die, Gaza style
    The murder of my child will not make your child safe!--James Baldwin


    If We Must Die

    If we must die, let it not be like hogs
    Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
    While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
    Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
    If we must die, O let us nobly die,
    So that our precious blood may not be shed
    In vain; then even the monsters we defy
    Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
    O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
    Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
    And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
    What though before us lies the open grave?
    Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
    Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!


    Poem: Gaza Concentration CAMP by Marvin X









    GAZA Concentration CAMP

    There are those who say we must restore peace to GAZA
    Peace in the concentration camp
    Peace of genocide
    Peace no protest allowed
    Submit to starvation
    humiliation
    stunted life hell on earth
    No protest
    peace before anything
    Before justice
    Before life even
    peace

    Let the people of GAZA sing silent night
    Holy night
    All is peaceful
    All is right
    Under the shadow of death
    Let there be peace
    No justice
    Peace
    With boots on necks
    Mass murder but peace
    At all costs
    Hamas Rockets to no avail
    Iron Dome is our gift from USA
    Iron Dome is saving our asses
    From land, air, sea you attack
    Mighty Mouse you are
    Iron Dome Mouse
    Look at you
    Wild wild West beast
    No thought of justice
    Just peace
    Peace be still.
    --Marvin X
    7/17/14