Saturday, June 13, 2020

Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters



Now who would not be for abolishing the slave catchers? All those in favor of and benefiting from slavery! As per the neo slave catchers known as police, those people who object to the abolishment of a gang of abusers and murderers under the color of law, are undoubtedly descendents of slave masters and their collaborators, yes, uncle toms, who benefit from the oppression of their people. They are mostly of the reactionary black bourgeoisie class of boot lickers, i.e., sycophants, who enjoy crumbs from the master's table. Of course the master has no desire to abolish his slave catchers, brute beasts dressed in blue uniforms who vow to protect and serve but most often abuse and murder under the color of law. These brute beasts in blue are trained to inspire fear in the oppressed, thus whenever the beasts appear the blood pressure rises in the oppressed. The oppressed are often ignorant of the Tone Test: based on your tone of voice when stopped by the beast, one can be arrested, released or killed. When is protect and serve in this paradigm? The white population feels protected and served, thus have no desire to abolish the slave catchers. The very idea is anathema and sounds totally insane. We must have our white beasts to protect us from the black beasts. Wasn't this the attitude expressed by the white woman in New York's Central Park when the brother asked her to chain her dog?
In the name of God, why would slaves not want to abolish the slave catchers? The police are of no benefit to those who live under their occupation, who suffer their wrath for the slightest infraction, selling single cigarettes, cashing a counterfeit twenty dollar bill, broken taillight, Sandra Bland. 

Surely we can configure a more humane security force for our community besides one that brutalizes us at every turn? We can train our young men for community security as Mayor Ras Baraka has done in Newark NJ. Alas, the Newark NJ Model has stopped the police murder of Newark's citizens.
Since the lynching of George Floyd, have you heard of any anti police rioting in Newark NJ? Now it is clear under proper supervision, the brute beasts can be trained to act civilized. On a recent visit to Newark NJ, the people told me they feel relieved of police pressure on their bodies and minds for the first time in their lives.

So implement the Newark NJ Model or abolish the police, this is the choice for America. 
--MARVIN X
6/10/20

Friday, June 12, 2020

Notes on Abolish Police and Prisons by Marvin X

Notes on Abolish Police and Prisons by Marvin X

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"Marvin X is Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland."
--Ishmael Reed, Lecturer Emeritus, UC Berkeley

"Marvin X is the African Socrates teaching in the hood."
--Dr. Cornel West, Harvard University

"Marvin X has always been in the forefront of Pan African writing. Indeed, he is one of the founders and innovators of the revolutionary school of African writing."
--Ancestor Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Black Arts Movement Co-founder


Abolish police, well, ok, abolish prisons too. Ancestor Dr. Walter Rodney in his monograph West Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade on the Upper Guinea Coast, told us how an almost utopian society was eventually corrupted, yes, all the institutions, religious, political, judicial, marital, military, et al., by the slave trade. Prior to this horror we learn there were no police and no jails, that a white man, i.e., Arab, could drop his wallet and come back years later to reclaim it. Of course an alternative to jail and prison was banishment, exile from the tribe and/or community, and how could one live without community, but such was the punishment, perhaps the worse punishment for a communally socialized human being. So yes, abolish the police if they cannot be civilized, and there are those who say a security force rooted in the slave catchers (catch a nigger) cannot be reformed since we can see clearly the catch a nigger paradigm is alive and well in 2020. Can a leopard change its spots? 

Left to right: Chief of Staff, Amiri Middy Baraka, Jr., Marvin X, Mayor Ras Baraka, Newark NJ



Mayor Ras Baraka during interview with Marvin X



The Honorable Mayor Ras Baraka, Newark NJ and Marvin X who enjoyed
a 47 year friendship with the Mayor's father, poet Amiri Baraka (RIP)



Left to right: Mrs. Amina Baraka, Poet Sonia Sanchez, Marvin X and Amiri Baraka at memorial for Dr. Betty Shabazz, Riverside Church, NYC.
photo Risasi

We have submitted the Newark NJ Police Model under Mayor Ras Baraka. His mother informed me today (and she's tired of me revealing our private conversations, as is the world!) but she said not one black person has been killed by the police since her son became Mayor of Newark. Indeed, we know the world is full of infinite possibilities, unless one subscribes to the dictum of BAM Master Teacher and father of Afro-futurism, Sun Ra, "You so evil the devil don't want you in hell! (from Sun Ra lectures at UC Berkeley, 1972, YouTube). 



Marvin X and Sun Ra, outside Marvin's Black Educational Theatre San Francisco, 1972. Both were teaching in the Black Studies Department, UC Berkeley. Sun Ra arranged the musical Take Care of Business by Marvin X. Sun Ra is the Father of Afro-futurism.



We have put a tremendous burden on the criminal justice system as the panacea for our social ills: to be mental health workers, yes, police and correctional officers as domestic violence counselors, interpersonal relations mediators, etc. Meanwhile the police are rooted in the slave catcher tradition and the correctional officers main job is containment not correction of psychopathic personalities suffering drug abuse as well, the dual diagnosed. 




Founders of Black August, the American Prison Movement 
Left to right: Mama Efia Nwangaza, Human Rights Advocate, Greensville, SC, 
Shaka Al Thinin. Back left: Kumasi, Griot of Black August and Marvin X  


photo Wanda Sabir, SF Bayview Newspaper


 Soledad Brothers: Ruchell McGee, John Clutchette, George Jackson


 John Clutchette, George Jackson, Ruchell McGee



George Jackson and Angela Davis


Soledad Brother John Clutchette upon release from prison and Marvin X at 
his Academy of Da Corner, 14th and Broadway, Oakland, the most dangerous
classroom in the world!


Ironically, the police and so-called correctional officers often exhibit the same psychopathic maladies as those they must arrest and contain. And we know in the slave catcher roots of American society, after a certain indoctrination, whites, blacks, brown and yellow ethnic personalities can exhibit equal abuse and inhumane treatment. Often the non-white police and correctional officers must prove themselves by transcending the brutality of their white colleagues. We have witnessed their behavior on the street and in jail and prison. Thus we know color is not the answer. One need only consider the brutality of African police and correctional officers in the Motherland, or Caribbean for that matter. How many Africans have died for violating the Covid19 man-made pandemic social distance orders?

Sadly, we have doubts that so-called human beings will ever be able to rise above the animal plane, above tribal and ethnic conflict, although the concept of Pan Africanism is utopian due to centuries of colonial and neo-colonialism.  As we write, the European colonial powers have imposed themselves into the African Union, yes, while the European Union disintegrates with Brexit as the canary in the coal mine. 

And we have not mentioned issues rooted in the patriarchy, but it is there in the deep structure of problems that often lead to criminality, including rape, partner violence, homicide and suicide, alas, let us not mention infanticide, especially of female babies, Africa, Arabia and China are guilty in this regard. 

And let us not neglect to mention so-called family honor killings and female mutilation, steeped in national, tribal and religious mythology. With such a multiplicity of issues, one will indeed need to be a superman and superwoman of consciousness to unravel such conundrums that are so pervasive in the global drama that the endgame calling for police and officers from the department of correction most often doesn't correct because it is itself a victim in the matrix of dysfunctional psycho/social behavior by so-called human beings who often degenerate to the degree Sun Ra said, "....so evil the Devil don't want you in hell!"

As a grandfather, I pray for my grandchildren who must come into such a wretched world. I was so relieved when my grandson told me at three years old, "Grandfather, you can't save the world but I can!" I wish I knew the source of his wisdom but I suspect it came from God Almighty!

 
Grandson Jahmeel at the Rap Exhibit,
Oakland Museum of California

I know I can't save this shit. It was here when I came from my Mother's womb in 1944 as they dropped the Atomic bomb on Japan. It was here when my parents attended the 1945 Peace Conference in San Francisco that established the United Nations. 



Parents of Marvin X, Marian M. Jackmon and Owendell Jackmon I, 1945 Peace Conference,
San Francisco.


This shit was here in 1948 when the Europeans and a Negro (Dr. Ralph Bunch, UN Secretary) established the apartheid state of Israel. How can Jews out Nazi Nazis? Is this not beyond human comprehension? Again, Sun Ra, "These people so evil the devil don't want them in hell!"

No matter, there is hope with the multi-ethnic protesters of the public lynching of martyr George Floyd. 

Yes, we see a single spark can start a prairie fire. We see some deaths are lighter than a feather and some deaths are higher than Mt. Tai! George is the supreme example of the Cross and Lynching Tree Rev. James Cone tried to explain to Bill Moyers. "You cannot understand Christianity until you understand the meaning of the cross and lynching tree, which are the same." Jesus was on the cross in the same manner as George Floyd, except Jesus cried out for his Father but George cried out for his Mother!" Oh, Mary, Mother of God! 
--Marvin X
6/12/20
























Angela Davis, Marvin X and Sonia Sanchez


Cover art by Emory Douglas, Black Panther Party Minister of Culture





Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, Co-founders of the Black Panther Party, Oakland CA 1966




Eldridge Cleaver and Marvin X outside the house where Lil' Bobby Hutton was murdered by the Oakland Police and Cleaver wounded.
photo Muhammad Kareem




Marvin X with the Berkeley Chief of Police. "I ain't skeered of pigs, my friends used to shoot police and they admitted they were murdering us and still shootin' us, 2020. The brother write, "We Will Shoot Back!"







Notes on Lil' Bobby

I remember Lil' Bobby like I remember yesterday. He loved Huey Newton and Huey sent him to give me a message at the Black House, San Francisco, that was rapidly becoming the San Francisco headquarters of the Black Panther Party of Self Defense, especially after I took Black House co-founder Eldridge Cleaver to meet BPP Co-founder Bobby Seale and Cleaver became the BPP Minister of Information. Lil' Bobby came to inform me that we had to close down the youth cub house in the basement because the young men were taking advantage of the young women and playing hooky from school with them and a possible police raid was likely. I was in charge of the youth because Eldridge Cleaver and playwright Ed Bullins had no time for them. Lil' Bobby said, "The Supreme Commander said you must close down the youth club house." I looked at Lil' Bobby and said, "Fuck the Supreme Commander!" I looked in his eyes and saw he had death for me but I'm a crazy nigga too so I didn't give a fuck. Lil' Bobby said, "We gonna deal with you, dude!" That night the Panthers were clicking automatic weapons outside my room door which was across from Cleaver's. I didn't give a fuck, nor did my partner Ethna/Hurriyah. But our days in the Black House were coming to a close and soon we departed. I joined the Nation of Islam and after refusing to fight in Vietnam, fled to exile in Toronto, Canada, 1967. But I love and honor Lil' Bobby Hutton for being a young warrior who died for our people. As Mao said, "Some deaths are lighter than a feather, some higher than Mt. Tai." Lil' Bobby's death was higher than Mt. Tai! His life and death is the example for youth of today in this Black Lives Matter era. In the spirit of Lil' Bobby, I command you to pull up your pants and join the revolution! Stop dying like flies killing each other, such deaths are indeed lighter than a feather! My patron, now ancestor, Abdul Leroy James, said, "When you kill your brother you kill yourself. Why kill a dead fly that's already dead!" Yes, your brother and you are both mentally dead, so why kill a dead fly, and then for all practical purposes you are dead too, now we have two dead flies!






Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Now who would not be for abolishing the slave catchers? All those in favor of and benefiting from slavery! As per the neo slave catchers known as police, those people who object to the abolishment of a gang of abusers and murderers under the color of law, are undoubtedly descendents of slave masters and their collaborators, yes, uncle toms, who benefit from the oppression of their people. They are mostly of the reactionary black bourgeoisie class of boot lickers, i.e., sycophants, who enjoy crumbs from the master's table. Of course the master has no desire to abolish his slave catchers, brute beasts dressed in blue uniforms who vow to protect and serve but most often abuse and murder under the color of law. These brute beasts in blue are trained to inspire fear in the oppressed, thus whenever the beasts appear the blood pressure rises in the oppressed. The oppressed are often ignorant of the Tone Test: based on your tone of voice when stopped by the beast, one can be arrested, released or killed. When is protect and serve in this paradigm? The white population feels protected and served, thus have no desire to abolish the slave catchers. The very idea is anathema and sounds totally insane. We must have our white beasts to protect us from the black beasts. Wasn't this the attitude expressed by the white woman in New York's Central Park when the brother asked her to chain her dog?
In the name of God, why would slaves not want to abolish the slave catchers? The police are of no benefit to those who live under their occupation, who suffer their wrath for the slightest infraction, selling single cigarettes, cashing a counterfeit twenty dollar bill, broken taillight, Sandra Bland. 

Surely we can configure a more humane security force for our community besides one that brutalizes us at every turn? We can train our young men for community security as Mayor Ras Baraka has done in Newark NJ. Alas, the Newark NJ Model has stopped the police murder of Newark's citizens.
Since the lynching of George Floyd, have you heard of any anti police rioting in Newark NJ? Now it is clear under proper supervision, the brute beasts can be trained to act civilized. On a recent visit to Newark NJ, the people told me they feel relieved of police pressure on their bodies and minds for the first time in their lives.

So implement the Newark NJ Model or abolish the police, this is the choice for America. 
--MARVIN X
6/10/20


UC Merced lecturer Dr Kim McMillan on Marvin X


Marvin X after a lecture/discussion with Radical Theatre students at UC Merced


Unidentified student, MX and Dr. Kim McMillan


Dr. Kim McMillan's Radical Theatre students perform Marvin X's BAM classic Flowers for the Trashman


Dear Marvin,

I so appreciate you.  I appreciate the manner in which you speak to my students about your writings.  I appreciate your honesty.  I love the way you open their minds into delving deeper into important issues of race and culture. The work you are doing is changing how so many deal with racism and examine the truth about white privilege in our society. 

Thank you.

Peace,
Dr Kim McMillan
UC Merced

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Book release August 1, 2020: Mythology of Pussy and Dick by Marvin X, M.A.


“This book will be a great source by which young people can come to grips with their troubling sexuality. It will help move the internal conflicts from below the solar plexus to above the neck. For many young people, especially black men in their 20s and 30s, there is little more than hot amorphous vapor in that region. So-called urban lit is their bible in coming to grips with the violent urgings of their penis. I used to conceal my own risings with a jock strap. It took me some time to train myself to sit still: running after a woman, any attractive woman, was an addictive impact on the soul. Your teachings in this matter is a kind of how-to book, much needed within our oppressed communities where inordinate violence is turned within, on our women, on our children, and our reckless unfulfilled manhood.”
--Rudolph Lewis, Editor, Chickenbones.com

“Marvin X has always been in the forefront of Pan African writing. Indeed, he is one of the founders and innovators of the revolutionary school of African writing.” --Amiri Baraka, Co-founder of the Black Arts Movement

“Marvin X is the African Socrates in the hood! He is a towering figure in the Black freedom struggle and the Black Arts Movement. His plays, poetry and prose alongside his courageous activism have made him a living legend! In these catastrophic times, we need his great example! He’s a combination of Theolonius Monk and Marianne Williamison!”
--Dr. Cornel West, Harvard University School of Divinity and Black Studies

“If you want to learn about motivation and inspiration, don’t spend all that money going to workshops and seminars, just go stand at 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland, and watch Marvin X at work. He’s Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland!”
--Ishmael Reed, Lecturer Emeritus, UC Berkeley

“He’s the USA’s Rumi, Saadi, Hafiz!”--Bob Holman, Bowery Poetry Club, NYC

“He’s the father of Muslim American literature!”--Dr. Mohja Kahf, Professor of Middle Eastern Literature, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

“He is a Master Teacher in many fields of thought—religion and psychology, sociology and anthropology, history and politics, literature and the humanities. He is a needed Counselor, for he knows himself on the deepest of personal levels and he reveals that self to us, that we might be his beneficiaries.--Rudolph Lewis, Chickenbones.com

“Courageous and outrageous! He walked through the muck and mire of hell and came out clean as white fish and black as coal!”--James W. Sweeney (RIP), Berkeley CA

“The Main, the Ho’, the Cook was one of the most beautiful pieces about real love I’ve ever read. The image of the ‘crackhead’ as scandalous and without human dignity is destroyed by Marvin’s recollection of the sister with whom he fell in love.”--Lil’ Joe, Radical Activist, Los Angeles CA

“When you listen to Tupac Shakur, E-40, Too Short, Master P or any other rappers out of the Bay Area of Cali, think of Marvin X. He laid the foundation and gave us the language to express black male urban experiences in a lyrical way.”--James G. Spady (RIP), Philadelphia New Observer

“His writing is orgasmic!”--Fahizah Alim, Editor Emeritus, Sacramento Bee Newspaper

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Thursday, August 1dr. nathan hare's foreword to marvin x's how to recover from the addiction to white supremacy


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”).

dr. nathan hare and marvin x

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 and fillmore slim will perform together at the black repertory theatre, berkeley, september 30, 8pm. 

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