This raises a long simmering issue which has plagued many aspects of our community from scholars & artists to musicians and *leaders* — how do we, in a positive/noncontentious way, critique & engage one another around our work, our collective responsibilities, the maintenance/upliftment of our culture, and nurture, in the process, as Dr. West suggests?…and we should be keenly mindful of the distinction he asserts between “succe$$” and “greatness.” This is crucially important in the discernment of value(s), and endurance of one’s work over time.

We live in a highly competitive society, which places contention above cooperation.  Those who were around remember when there was only one flavor, one *representative* allowed overall, or in a given niche.  As our presence multiplied, there was room for Flip Wilson(Geraldine) AND Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Moms Mabley AND Redd Foxx.  But, when Sidney Poitier was the ONLY, a different level of care & responsibility applied. Does that mean we should allow members of our community to run us down, to belittle or brutalize segments of our community — as rappers have done to our women?  No.  Is Dr. West’s proscription for sensitive dialogue called for in all cases?  Perhaps not, but it should at least be the FIRST choice, the first effort, before we step to other more serious means.

There may be a few — a very few AA’s who use computers — who do not know the name of Octavia Butler, an award-winning speculative fiction author. In case there are some of you who are unfamiliar with this extraordinary AA woman/author, follow the link.

Octavia Butler @ book signing

I was fortunate to meet Octavia a few times in the 80’s, at a conference of the IBWA Los Angeles, where she spoke, and at some meetings of LASFS, where she held court in a rather odd social dynamic…which would require a separate post.  She was a gloriously tall and dark sister, proud and articulate, though a bit shy.  Of her works, Mind of My Mind was my favorite. I can only say, if you have not read Octavia Butler, you are in for one good surprise…

The Huntington Library announcement is available in PDF.

A big FYI to folks connected to the SF Bay area, doing NGO and community services. A potentially useful resource… Follow links to complete online resources.

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Rebuilding Together San Francisco Offers Free Repair and Renovation Work for Nonprofit Organizations

Rebuilding Together San Francisco provides free repairs and renovations for San Francisco-based nonprofit organizations and community service facilities as part of its annual Rebuilding Weekend program on the last weekend of April.

Rebuilding Together organizes volunteer teams to provide repair and renovation work for low-income homeowners, nonprofits, and community centers. The type of work completed includes (but is not limited to) interior painting, minor plumbing, electrical, landscaping, carpentry, safety modifications, flooring, appliance upgrade, general beautification, etc.

The deadline for facility applications is November 30, 2009.

Visit the Rebuilding Together Web site for further information and the facility application.

More & more of the same…..folks need to PAY ATTENTION!!! Try reading some international news instead of the oatmeal hype we get here…

One of the rampant atrocities scathing the globe is the abuse of poor countries by wealthy corporations, by offering BIG $$$ in exchange for the dumping &/or abandoning of toxic waste in the national waters of these nations. While this is not news, it is no less heinous. The most recent example is Trafigura, a British oil trading giant which has agreed to a multimillion-pound payout to settle a huge damages claim from thousands of Africans who fell ill from tonnes of toxic waste dumped illegally in one of the worst pollution incidents in decades.

There are several aspects of interest to this story, including the initial denial of injury by Trafigura, to the paying of a multi-million pound bounty to the government of Ivory Coast — without any admission of liability, which got their president, Claude Dauphin, out of a Cote d’Ivoire jail, and resulted in pending criminal prosecution against Trafigura being dropped(article).

Also of interest are the efforts of Trafigura to squelch news reportage of the incident, and its unfolding debacle, by ‘leveraging’ Britain’s libel laws(article).

It is specifically worthwhile to take the time to read the full series of articles, to apprise oneself of the sequence of events, the steps/actions taken by Trafigura, and the final unraveling of the story in the British press.  Now, ask yourself two questions:

• Do you remember reading or hearing about this in the domestic USA press at any time going back to the event of the dumping in 2006?  If not, what does that tell you?
• Secondly, like many crimes, specifically rape, most such events go unreported, even by the victim, as a result of the government being bought off(which occurred in this case), or the victim nation and its people are considered so inconsequential that their plight doesn’t even show up on UN radar.

If  we consider these aspects with any degree of critical thinking, then immediately it becomes clear that this ‘rape of the earth’ is not an isolated incident.  Accountability seem to be the clarion call of this age…and it needs to be shouted MUCH MORE LOUDLY!!!

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How UK oil company Trafigura tried to cover up African pollution disaster

by David Leigh
16 September 2009

The Guardian can reveal evidence today of a massive cover-up by the British oil trader Trafigura, in one of the worst pollution disasters in recent history.

Internal emails show that Trafigura, which yesterday suddenly announced an offer to pay compensation to 31,000 west African victims, was fully aware that its waste dumped in Ivory Coast was so toxic that it was banned in Europe.

Thousands of west Africans besieged local hospitals in 2006, and a number died, after the dumping of hundreds of tonnes of highly toxic oil waste around the country’s capital, Abidjan. Official local autopsy reports on 12 alleged victims appeared to show fatal levels of the poisonous gas hydrogen sulphide, one of the waste’s lethal byproducts.

Trafigura has been publicly insisting for three years that its waste was routine and harmless. It claims it was “absolutely not dangerous”.

It has until now denied compensation claims, and its lawyers repeatedly threatened anyone worldwide who sought to contradict its version. It launched a libel case against BBC Newsnight, forced an alleged correction from the Times, demanded the Guardian delete articles, and yesterday tried to gag journalists in the Netherlands and Norway with legal threats.

But the dozens of damning internal Trafigura emails which have now come to light reveal how traders were told in advance that their planned chemical operation, a cheap and dirty process called “caustic washing”, generated such dangerous wastes that it was widely outlawed in the west.

The documents reveal that the London-based traders hoped to make profits of $7m a time by buying up what they called “bloody cheap” cargoes of sulphur-contaminated Mexican gasoline. They decided to try to process the fuel on board a tanker anchored offshore, creating toxic waste they called “slops”.

For the rest of the article, including audio report

Folks, if you’re not hip to this, ya gotta check this out. There are a great many *scandals* being continually revealed within our society. I dare say that this is in the top 2 or 3. As a good friend of mine, Laurence Rozier notes often on his Meshverse blog, the mechanism for conducting business, ‘protecting’ intellectual property — even how it is defined — is in the process of irrevocable change.

Part of this question involves a redefinition of “theft/stealing”, as well as “property” itself. This is an ongoing discussion, so feel free to leap in…..

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The Hidden Truth Behind Drug Company Profits
by Johann Hari

This is the story of one of the great unspoken scandals of our times. Today, the people across the world who most need life-saving medicine are being prevented from producing it. Here’s the latest example: factories across the poor world are desperate to start producing their own cheaper Tamiflu to protect their populations – but they are being sternly told not to. Why? So rich drug companies can protect their patents – and profits. There is an alternative to this sick system, but we are choosing to ignore it.

To understand this tale, we have to start with an apparent mystery. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has been correctly warning for months that if swine flu spreads to the poorest parts of the world, it could cull hundreds of thousands of people – or more. Yet they have also been telling the governments of the poor world not to go ahead and produce as much Tamiflu – the only drug we have to reduce the symptoms, and potentially save lives – as they possibly can.

In the answer to this whodunit, there lies a much bigger story about how our world works today.

Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist – and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels – is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes.

Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive, but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.

Although it’s not the goal of the individuals working within the system, the outcome is often deadly. The drug companies who owned the patent for Aids drugs went to court to stop the post-Apartheid government of South Africa producing generic copies of it – which are just as effective – for $100 a year to save their dying citizens. They wanted them to pay the full $10,000 a year to buy the branded version – or nothing. In the poor world, the patenting system every day puts medicines beyond the reach of sick people.

For the rest of the article…

Chicken a la Carte is one of those films which will rearrange your vision, your values, what you thought was *real.*  Winner of the 56th Berlin International Film Festival, and judged the most popular short film, these awards may surprise you as you watch it…but won’t when you get to the end.  It pretty much speaks for itself.  I will simply say, if we can each remember the images of this film the next time we get ready to complain about something….

A colleague sent this video to me on Facebook, and I marveled, even before I watched it, at the very idea of what they were attempting, which is included below. Like so much in our world these days, genius is too often misidentified, misunderstood, exploited, even denied.  We are clear now that genius includes more than intellectual and artistic/creative endeavors, but encompasses a much broader context of human experience.  Some will argue that we all possess some element of genius.  Perhaps, but let us not dilute its meaning in an effort to be inclusive and *even-handed.* Nature is not even-handed, to this extent.  At one level, all aspects of existence are Divine.  Yet, it is safe to say that some aspects of existence, expression and behavior may not seem so.  Part of this exercise, in shifting the context/parameters of our perception is the challenge of stepping outside the enculturated memes and ‘normative standards’, which we digest — and then become — just like the food we eat.

So, then what is genius?  How do we define it, recognize it, engage it, respect it? Is there a difference between mastery and genius, or the latter require the fermentation of the former to reach full bloom?  Clearly, genius is one of those rare things in existence which cannot be faked or pretended, nor is it generally reasonable for one to claim this for themselves.  It is often considered to be, most appropriately, an appellation given or bestowed, one clearly earned by the evidence of one’s ability and works.

Well, I had said I wasn’t gonna post anything else about Gates….then Prof. Ishmael Reed comes along & drops a series of photon torpedoes so incisive, I had not choice….. As a sister friend put it “full metal jacket”…  It’s worth noting the recounting of facts/patterns Prof. Reed unfurls, and, as his writing tends to do, you may find yourself marveling “..the meaning, the connections — it jus’ grew…”

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Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism

By Ishmael Reed

Now that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has gotten a tiny taste of what “the underclass” undergo each day, do you think that he will go easier on them? Lighten up on the tough love lectures? Even during his encounter with the police, he was given some slack. If a black man in an inner city neighborhood had hesitated to identify himself, or given the police some lip, the police would have called SWAT. When Oscar Grant, an apprentice butcher, talked back to a BART policeman in Oakland, he was shot!

Given the position that Gates has pronounced since the late eighties, if I had been the arresting officer and post-race spokesperson Gates accused me of racism, I would have given him a sample of his own medicine. I would have replied that “race is a social construct”–the line that he and his friends have been pushing over the last couple of decades.

After this experience, will Gates stop attributing the problems of those inner city dwellers to the behavior of “thirty-five year-old grandmothers living in the projects?” (Gates says that when he became a tough lover he was following the example of his mentor Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka as though his and Soyinka’s situations were the same. As a result of Soyinka’s criticisms of a Nigerian dictator, he was jailed and his life constantly threatened.)

Prior to the late eighties, Gates’ tough love exhortations were aimed at racism in the halls of academe, but then he signed on to downtown feminist reasoning that racism was a black male problem. Karen Durbin, who hired him to write for The Village Voice, takes credit for inventing him as a “public intellectual.” He was then assigned by Rebecca Penny Sinkler, former editor of The New York Times Book Review, to do a snuff job on black male writers. In an extraordinary review, he seemed to conclude that black women writers were good, not because of their merit, but because black male writers were bad. This was a response to an article by Mel Watkins, a former book review editor, who on his way out warned of a growing trend that was exciting the publisher’s cash registers. Books that I would describe as high Harlequin romances, melodramas in which saintly women were besieged by cruel black male oppressors, the kind of image of the brothers promoted by confederate novelists Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon.

Gates dismissed a number of black writers as misogynists, including me, whom he smeared throughout the United States and Europe, but when Bill Clinton was caught exploiting a young woman, sexually, he told the Times that he would “go to the wall for this president.” Feminists like Gloria Steinem defended the president as well, even though for years they’d been writing about women as victims of male chauvinists with power, the kind of guys who used to bankroll Ms. magazine.

Not to say that portraits of black men should be uniformly positive–I’ve certainly introduced some creeps in my own work–but most of the white screenwriters, directors and producers who film this material–and the professors and critics who promote it– are silent about the abuses against women belonging to their own ethnic groups. Moreover, Alice Walker, Tina Turner and bell hooks have complained that in the hands of white script writers, directors and producers, the black males become more sinister straw men than they appear in the original texts.

For the complete text, go to Counterpunch.org

Ishmael Reed

It has been a long while since I encountered anything as intriguing — and simultaneously disturbing — as what I am about to share with you.  This documentary raises such fundamental questions & issues that simply coming up with a title for this post was a challenge.  I must give props to my friend Greg Bridges, from the Bay Area for cluing me into this.

This documentary, by Adam Curtis, of Britain, and initially broadcast on BBC, entitled The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom.  While the link goes into some depth describing some of what the film deals with, there are a few areas which I found uniquely troubling:

• First and foremost was the underlying and ongoing reference to the definition of the human behavioral paradigm, as something wherein the overriding drive is individual self-interest & gain, most often at the expense of those around you.  This ‘paradigm of paranoia’ as the human norm — which he often references as being a source of the unfurling problem — is something which immediately registered for me as traceable to what I have found to be some quite reliable research, initially captured(to my knowledge) in the book Iceman’s Inheritance, by Michael Bradley. [NOTE:  The new edition includes an introduction by Prof. John Henrik Clarke] As others far more knowledgeable than I have asserted, the crucible of an ice age environment, and its inherent context of lack, scarce resources, and the attendant hoarding response(s) have significantly ingrained the subsequent social development of western culture in clearly identifiable ways.  As Cheikh Anta Diop, in The Cultural Unity of Black Africa, and in his final work, Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology, introduced his premise of the Two Cradle Theory, he engaged the aforementioned differential in cultural development between those of the tropics, and those outside the tropics. This disparity — and, in the case of the premises and discussion of this film — lies at the RNA/DNA basis(pardon the pun) of the socio-psychological discussion, which Curtis continues to elaborate on, to his credit.
• The second factor which struck me, given my own interests, research & profession, was the role of mathematics — particularly game theory, and the ascribing of numerical values as a means of winnowing out the *emotional/subjective component*. Curtis’ examination of the evolution of game theory, within the pressurized social crucible of Cold War dynamics, and, later, its expansionist blooming within the financial and government sectors is highly illuminating.  His exposition on John Forbes Nash(including film clips with Nash), the centerpiece of successful bio-pic A Beautiful Mind, puts Nash, and his developments in a context sorely lacking in the film. The ongoing and underlying role of applied mathematics, including the genesis of the field of systems analysis, and its parallel in technological development is one of the major threads of the series.
• The third factor I found intriguing/disturbing, was his examination of changes/revolutions in the field of psychiatry and psychology, in particular the work of R. D. Laing(especially regarding the *normal modern family* dynamic), and the work of David Rosenhan.  Laing’s revelations about the family dynamic, the oppression/control/power games he found to be endemic to the *normal modern family* is enough to make you want to sit down with parents, spouses and loved ones to watch this together…with a deep heart-to-heart afterwards.  Some of it many of us always felt we *knew*, in the back of our minds, but never had enough info to back up our intuitive graspings.  Well, this film certainly points the way. The well known Rosenhan Experiment is also significant, in what it did to expose flaws in psychiatric hospital diagnoses and evaluations. The changes Curtis chronicles in this field of science were mind-boggling by themselves.  I do feel compelled to comment here that Curtis’ characterization of Frantz Fanon, his writings & principles is troubling in its linearity, its single-mindedness, in an effort to link Fanon with Satre, and the resulting revolutionary ideologies applied on many fronts across the non-western world. Fanon is also well known for writings on the challenge of being of African descent in the western world, as in The Wretched of the Earth, and Black Skin, White Masks.
  

Once the influences of the above factors began to be interwoven, and their developmental interdependencies  were revealed, the entire sordid morass became increasingly clear.  Now, in the last few years, many have trumpeted the films Zeitgeist[& here](including me), and The Secret, among others. I must say, imho, this documentary series was far more chilling — and enlightening — than both of those put together.  Some may claim thisis because I was already aware of much of the info in the other two films.  Perhaps.  But I encourage you to check this film series out.  I have inserted a window below for each part — 1-3.  It’s available on Google video: The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, and is apparently also available on DVD.  This is definitely one of those “What do you think you REALLY know” films, prodding us to re-examine our perceptions, and the entire matrix around us, for glitches in our understanding, which we may find have been prodding us to actions we long thought were our own.

Lastly, how he links this all to the contamination & undermining of our concept of freedom, as well as the global social dynamic around “freedom”, are cognitive munitions of the highest order.  I feel compelled to add that there are some incidents of — though apparently unintentional — outright hilarity, albeit on a sort of Monty Python kind of riff.  The end of Part II – The Lonely Robot is a great example of this.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

First of all, this is not about Prof. Gates, though I don’t want anyone to think I’m just skipping over him. The salient political dynamics of this situation are part of the RNA/DNA of this nation — they are inherited, renewed/renewable, and only appear to diminish or slip beneath the surface when those tattooed with targets become complacent, and drop their guard.

IMHO, a few things set this particular scenario apart:

• Prof. Gates is the internationally known Harvard professor who has appeared on television many times, so for locals to be unfamiliar with him is tough to explain away;

• Prof. Gates happens to be a personal friend of the President of the United States;

• In the heat of the moment, and subsequently, Gates has erred(imho) by his eruption of personal outrage, as though he, due to privilege, should be *above* such treatment. The more expansive & inclusive his comments had been, referencing how this can happen to anyone, regardless of station/insulation, the more widely embraced his situation would have been…without the necessary *translation*;

• This event occurs in the midst of an extended & widely reported series of police/legal system abuses and murders across the country, from the release of two white men in Paris Texas, accused of dragging Brandon McClelland to death to the pattern of arrests of activists/hip hop artists Paradise Gray of X-Clan and Wise Intelligent of Poor Righteous Teachers. (FWIW, I was living in Houston, in the mid-90’s, when James Byrd was dragged to death in Jasper, Texas. That state is no joke, and the Bushes are no exceptions the knuckle-dragging mindset common in Texas.)

That said, I was pleasantly surprised when Pres. Obama stepped up to speak directly — in response to a question — on at least the Gates situation, while addressing some of the broader issues.  Let me be clear:  Like many people of color in this country, I feel Pres. Obama is being WAAAAAY too soft on crackers.  [Before some of you take offense at that term, at no point have I suggested all white people are crackers.  However, if the glove fits....] It’s worth mentioning that the white woman(?) who placed the call has not been discussed much.  How long had she lived there to not know/recognize Dr. Gates.  It’s not like Cambridge is a standoffish community, which I can say having been there.  Yet, no matter the trigger, nothing absolves the cops’ behavior.

In many areas, I have said for months now that the single strongest move Pres. Obama could make in terms of national morale/support would be to step out of the way and allow the investigations & prosecutions of those perpetrating wrong — at ALL levels — to run their course, then apply the full weight of specified punishment, no free rides.  My sense is that if this were to occur — and we can throw in investigations/prosecutions of these police abuses — even the red state conservatives would applaud the fact that the playing field was levelled(however briefly), and no favorites were played.  This approach, instead of the disparity say, between how the banks/investment firms and the auto companies were handled in this economy by the White House.

In any case, if you’re interested, there’s a YouTube video of Pres. Obama’s full comments, so you can avoid the sliced versions circulating.

For me, the bottom line is that no person of color, no matter their demographics or notoriety/celebrity, can afford to step too freely anywhere in this country, if they plan to navigate the social minefield effectively. We exist within a social framework stoked & stygmatized by corporate media, augmented and reinforced by film, music & art, not to mention the role parents, family & religion play in the promotion and sustenance of this insidious virus. White supremacy/racism is not an accident;  it is not anecdotal, or by any stretch a casual or infrequent participant in our social exchanges — within our cultural communities as well as between them.  See also Dr. Francis Cress Welsing and her Cress Theory of Color Confrontation .

There are apologists, who would have us believe all sorts of dismissal perspectives about white supremacy, from “young men sowing wild oats” to ‘nonspecific social entrainment’.  I suggest a very simple test.  The next time someone (or you) try to explain away a racist act, expression or hate crime, simply shift the context — make it about domestic violence, or make the victim & perpetrator the same race(& class), and see if then, it is so easy to dismiss their behavior.  We remain on the culturopolitical wilderness of a young nation, barely a century away from the closing of the *frontier,* run by an adolescent culture(within the ages of civilizations), and these convulsions of hate & resentment are only going to get worse as the economy gets tougher.  You’ve been warned.