WHITE SUPREMACY-2 BY MARVIN X

The Pan African Mental Health Peer Group
to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy Type II
Meets tonight, Friday, July 29, 7pm,
at 1222 Dwight Way, Berkeley, off San Pablo. You are invited.

Fable of the Rooster and the Hen

Fable of the Rooster and the Hen


There was a farm that had many chickens and roosters. One rooster used to control his many hens with an iron fist and he made the sound of the rooster to let everyone know not to mess with his hens. He roared and cockadoodled early in the morning to signal dawn of the new day.

And he cockadoodled throughout the day, strutting around the yard with his hens well under control, standing guard when they were laying eggs, especially when he found the door of the big house open and one of his favorites would lay her eggs on the couch in the living room of the big house.


The rooster would not go inside but stand in the doorway so he could watch both ways, inside the house and outside. If the farm lady would not come into the house and chase the hen outside, the hen would stay until she laid her egg, then she and the rooster would go down the steps and back into the yard, joining the other roosters, hens and baby chicks.


There were other fowl on the farm too: turkeys, ducks, guineas, peacocks, doves, and pigeons.
One day, after the farm lady got some special feed from the store and tried a little out on the rooster, he no longer could make the sound of the rooster.

The other fowl were surprised when they heard rooster sounding like a hen and no longer making the sound of the mighty rooster. They all laughed at the rooster and thought he had gone crazy. What the hell is wrong with you, rooster, they asked. They figured maybe the farm lady had given him some special food to make him sound different.

They were happy she didn't give them the feed she gave the poor rooster, who looked so pitiful and sounded even worse.

They knew something had changed him and he started not only sounding like a hen but acting like one as well. He made every attempt to act like he was laying eggs, although he wasn't able to lay any, still he put on a show for everyone on the farm who gathered around to see him play the role of a hen.

Other rooster's would even stand guard while he pretended to lay eggs, though he couldn't, it was just an act and they went along with it just to please him.


He no longer strutted about like a rooster but like a hen. They called him a freak and made fun of him until he couldn't take it anymore and asked the farm lady to give him some better food so he could sound and act like a rooster again.

She honored his request, telling him she was trying out some new feed and didn't think it would completely alter his behavior, she told him she was sorry, and she would never give him that feed and special water again.

The feed store had told her to try it out, but she would not bring anymore to the farm. The rooster was happy to return to his true self and make the sound of a rooster. The hens gathered around him again and the other fowl danced they were so happy to see he was a rooster again and not a hen.

--Marvin X
3/5/10

How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy: Step One

Step 1


We admit we are not powerless over self hatred, racism and white supremacy thinking, but our lives have become unmanageable, partly because we live in denial and fear. Fear is the residue of slavery, the torture, rape, murder, the mores of submission and passivity whipped into our ancestors and elders and transmitted through DNA to the present generation who live in fear of white authority, especially the police who are the modern day slave catchers. But fear remains as the single most element that prolongs white supremacy. We fear each other, we fear success, we fear to do for self or to attempt self sufficiency on the economic level—for how shall we live without a paycheck from the white man, how shall we make it?

We fear associating with a black radical brother or sister, after all, the white man is watching us always, he has spies tracking our every move, we are certain of it, thus we cannot go to a black business, a conscious happening for fear of being reported. We fear the woman and man we love, for surely they will betray us, it is only a matter of time, they are going to cross us, so we cannot trust them ever, no matter how much they say they love us and no matter how much we love them. We cannot unite with the brotherhood because we fear something is surely to go wrong, money will be stolen, our wife or girlfriend will run off with another brother. Thus the drama of fear is constant. Each time we leave the house we fear not making it back home alive, for we live in a war zone and if the police don’t catch us riding dirty, another brother will try to take us out for some ignorant reason, something petty, maybe a twenty dollar dope or gambling debt. We must detox and recover from fear. The only thing to fear is fear itself. Release the fear because it has made our lives unmanageable.


If truth be told, we are not powerless over anything, but have the power within ourselves to overcome any force in the universe that is not in harmony with the Higher Power without and within ourselves. We are only powerless when we deny who we are and do not recognize we exist in harmony with the universal spirit of peace, justice and mercy. White supremacy is an illusion in the minds of those who believe it and those who accept the scam. Nothing has power over you except when you allow it to have such power. Thus, we should not blame the president, congress, corporations or any other institutions because it is we who allow them to carry on business, and if we did not give them the power they would disappear overnight like a bad dream, but we support white supremacy by supporting its institutions, working its jobs, buying its goods, attending its houses of worship, then get angry because we feel useless, helpless, depressed, confused, etc. Yet we have allowed ourselves to be deceived, used and abused, for we have given power to those who despitefully use and abuse us. What can the wicked husband do to the good wife that she doesn’t allow him to do? She has the power to separate and divorce him. She has the power to flee in the night. Should we then blame the wicked husband or blame her for allowing wickedness to consume her life? Thus, the problem with you is not white supremacy, the problem with you is you! You continue buying a bogus bag of goods and then when you get home you wonder why the food in the bag is no good, rotten fruit fit for the garbage can.

So yes, we need to admit our lives are unmanageable, but only because we refuse to exercise the God given power to manage ourselves, but allow other forces to take over our existence: we become slaves to racism because of our refusal to stand up and face it toe to toe. We have forgotten the faith of our ancestors who were determined to be free by any means necessary. We accept injustice on the job, at the church, in the home because we are cowardly beings not worthy of the name human and certainly not of the name divine, though that is our essence, divinity. After all the blood we shed in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas, why are we yet today victims of white supremacy exploitation, pimped downtown and uptown by blood sucking merchants who refuse to employ us, yet we are the reason for their existence. If we boycotted them one week they would be out of business, yet we want to blame them for exploiting us, no, blame ourselves, and thank them for teaching us a valuable lesson: don’t allow ourselves to be pimped, yes, refuse to be nappy headed hos. Refusing to be called a ho is one matter, but to act like a nappy headed ho is quite another. Don’t say you are against white supremacy when you buy the goods of white supremacy. No matter how high gas prices get, you have no intention to protest, but you will kill your brother if he jumps in front of you in the gas station line, yet you won’t protest or boycott Shell, Exxon, and Mobile when they report their multi billion dollar quarterly earnings. So you are either ignorant or simply in denial that you support white supremacy, just as you are constantly reacting to white supremacy police when they kill a brother in the hood, but while brothers are killing each other nightly in the hood with guns and bullets bought from white supremacy gun sellers, you don’t protest. You refuse to organize peace patrols in your community, but are satisfied to attend funeral after funeral of neighborhood children, even your own sons and daughters. Come out of your slumber, come out of your sloth, you can and must manage your existence, you can and must erase white supremacy thinking from your heart and mind. Go somewhere and sit down to think seriously how you can configure a beautiful life for yourself and your family. Think about resisting the devil so he will flee from you. Think about putting on the armor of God or your Higher Power under whatever name.

Fable of the Horse, Cow and Bull

Fable of the Horse, Bull and Cow


There was a man who lived in the city. He loved the city but he was born in the country, so his heart yearned for the country. He knew how to make his way in the city, but it became a place to be nobody, so he wanted to move back to the country. The city was full of murder, drugs, hate and other strife of urban life. He had lost friends to murder, drugs and other problems. He fell to drugs himself but was able to recover.

Thankful for his recovery, he wanted to escape back to the country. He loved the quiet and peacefulness of the country. The land, bees, lizards rushing about harming no, woody the peckerwood--pecking on trees as if he had a hammer, the squirrel with the long tail going up trees with nuts, wild turkeys feeding on leftover from the horse and cow feed.

Ye yearned for the country where he could write, think and praise his God. The angel came to provide him with space for his needs. The angel told him just feed the animals, don't worry about anything else. And so he did.

Each day he would get up and ready himself to feed the animals. Actually, the animals, the horses, cows and a bull could see him through his bedroom window. Around feeding time they would be on post watching him moving about.

The animals would have a sad look on their faces as if they were starving to death. They were running drag because they knew he could see them too. The bull would stand still at 12 o'clock, at attention to show his seriousness. "You see me, you see us, so you better bring yo ass out that house if you know what's good for you," the bull said. "I got two horns faya ass if you don't rush it!"

The horses would hang near the gate, knowing he must come there with the hay, but especially with the oats that they loved. "So why is he playing around?" they asked each other. "Don't he know we will kick his ass if he don't hurry up with our food? And he better come with some oats, to hell with that damn hay. He can give that hay to the cows and bull, we don't want hay, although we will eat it, but he knows we want the oats, so why is he stalling, playing power politics with us like he's God Almighty?"

The man observed the animals outside his window watching his every move, especially the sound of his voice as he talked on the phone. He talked so loudly, they could hear every word. They wished he would get his ass off the cell phone and bring their food.

The man dressed, putting on his straw Stetson that was torn from city life. He put a scarf across his nose because he was allergic to hay but enjoyed feeding the animals, so he suffered sneezing.
He walked down to the storage shed and filled two bags with hay and a small bag of oats.

As he walked toward the animals, they saw him coming and began to dance, prance and moved toward the gate, all of them, the bull, cows and horses. The horses were right at the gate, making sure they were first in line to be fed, next to them was the bull, then the cows since they were actually calves and had no seniority, although the bull wasn't much older, except he had two horns if there was a need to prove he was indeed the bull!

He opened the gate, barely able to get inside since the horses were hogging the entrance, but he pushed his way inside and began giving out the hay, holding back the oats because he knew the power of oaks, especially in the world of horses. They loved oats like a nigguh loves pork chops!

Since the horses knew he had oats, they played the waiting game, munching on the hay along with the cows and bull, but their eyes were on him, watching his every move, waiting until he brought forth the treasured oats, which he eventually did and the horses mobbed him at the gate, aggressively going for the bucket in his hand which he drew away least they snatch it from him and gobble the treasured oats.

He put a handful in one horse's mouth, then the other. He spread oats on the hay for the cows and bull, for the cows and bull loved oats too, but not like the horses--oats was dope to them, for the cows it was simply a pleasure, an extra at morning meal. But with the horses it was no joke, but a necessity since it was available.

They gobbled each handful he presented, following him as he moved in any direction, actually blocking him from getting to the cows and bull. When he would get to the cows and bull and pour the oats atop their hay, the horses would push the cows and bull aside and gobble the oats.

Looking pitiful, the cows and bull would submit, even though the bull had horns to demand respect from the horses. He did not challenge the horses, but instead sought out another pile of hay away from the greedy horses.

The man did not leave because he knew if he did, the horse would devour all the hay after they finished following him around with the oats. After giving out the oats, the man stood watching the animals, wondering if their behavior was any better or worse than that of the Negroes he'd left in the city. He thought maybe he should return to do battle with them for their upliftment, no matter the price.

But he decided to stay in the country for the moment, even though the city women were calling him and he was calling them.
--Marvin X

from the Wisdom of Plato Negro, Parables and Fables, by Marvin X.

Fable of the Horse, Cow and Bull

Fable of the Horse, Bull and Cow


There was a man who lived in the city. He loved the city but he was born in the country, so his heart yearned for the country. He knew how to make his way in the city, but it became a place to be nobody, so he wanted to move back to the country. The city was full of murder, drugs, hate and other strife of urban life. He had lost friends to murder, drugs and other problems. He fell to drugs himself but was able to recover.

Thankful for his recovery, he wanted to escape back to the country. He loved the quiet and peacefulness of the country. The land, bees, lizards rushing about harming no, woody the peckerwood--pecking on trees as if he had a hammer, the squirrel with the long tail going up trees with nuts, wild turkeys feeding on leftover from the horse and cow feed.

Ye yearned for the country where he could write, think and praise his God. The angel came to provide him with space for his needs. The angel told him just feed the animals, don't worry about anything else. And so he did.

Each day he would get up and ready himself to feed the animals. Actually, the animals, the horses, cows and a bull could see him through his bedroom window. Around feeding time they would be on post watching him moving about.

The animals would have a sad look on their faces as if they were starving to death. They were running drag because they knew he could see them too. The bull would stand still at 12 o'clock, at attention to show his seriousness. "You see me, you see us, so you better bring yo ass out that house if you know what's good for you," the bull said. "I got two horns faya ass if you don't rush it!"

The horses would hang near the gate, knowing he must come there with the hay, but especially with the oats that they loved. "So why is he playing around?" they asked each other. "Don't he know we will kick his ass if he don't hurry up with our food? And he better come with some oats, to hell with that damn hay. He can give that hay to the cows and bull, we don't want hay, although we will eat it, but he knows we want the oats, so why is he stalling, playing power politics with us like he's God Almighty?"

The man observed the animals outside his window watching his every move, especially the sound of his voice as he talked on the phone. He talked so loudly, they could hear every word. They wished he would get his ass off the cell phone and bring their food.

The man dressed, putting on his straw Stetson that was torn from city life. He put a scarf across his nose because he was allergic to hay but enjoyed feeding the animals, so he suffered sneezing.
He walked down to the storage shed and filled two bags with hay and a small bag of oats.

As he walked toward the animals, they saw him coming and began to dance, prance and moved toward the gate, all of them, the bull, cows and horses. The horses were right at the gate, making sure they were first in line to be fed, next to them was the bull, then the cows since they were actually calves and had no seniority, although the bull wasn't much older, except he had two horns if there was a need to prove he was indeed the bull!

He opened the gate, barely able to get inside since the horses were hogging the entrance, but he pushed his way inside and began giving out the hay, holding back the oats because he knew the power of oaks, especially in the world of horses. They loved oats like a nigguh loves pork chops!

Since the horses knew he had oats, they played the waiting game, munching on the hay along with the cows and bull, but their eyes were on him, watching his every move, waiting until he brought forth the treasured oats, which he eventually did and the horses mobbed him at the gate, aggressively going for the bucket in his hand which he drew away least they snatch it from him and gobble the treasured oats.

He put a handful in one horse's mouth, then the other. He spread oats on the hay for the cows and bull, for the cows and bull loved oats too, but not like the horses--oats was dope to them, for the cows it was simply a pleasure, an extra at morning meal. But with the horses it was no joke, but a necessity since it was available.

They gobbled each handful he presented, following him as he moved in any direction, actually blocking him from getting to the cows and bull. When he would get to the cows and bull and pour the oats atop their hay, the horses would push the cows and bull aside and gobble the oats.

Looking pitiful, the cows and bull would submit, even though the bull had horns to demand respect from the horses. He did not challenge the horses, but instead sought out another pile of hay away from the greedy horses.

The man did not leave because he knew if he did, the horse would devour all the hay after they finished following him around with the oats. After giving out the oats, the man stood watching the animals, wondering if their behavior was any better or worse than that of the Negroes he'd left in the city. He thought maybe he should return to do battle with them for their upliftment, no matter the price.

But he decided to stay in the country for the moment, even though the city women were calling him and he was calling them.
--Marvin X

from the Wisdom of Plato Negro, Parables and Fables, by Marvin X.

Parable of the No People

No, no, no! That is all you say. Everything about you is no. Your lips say no, your eyes, your heart, your mind, your arms, your legs, your feet. You are a no person. I run from you. You say no to God. I am afraid of your no touch. I cannot expand my mind around no people. You will kill my spiritual development. No no no no!
When you say yes to life you open the world of infinite possibilities. I understand no part of no, only infinite possibilities. No does not exist in my world, only yes. Yes to love. Yes to success, yes to hope, yes to truth, yes to prosperity, yet to divinity, yes to resurrection, yes to ascension, yes to eternity. I am the language of yes. If you cannot say yes, get away from me. I run from you, want nothing to do with you. There is no hope for you until you open your mouth to yes.

Cast away the yes fear. Let it go, let God. Yes. No matter what, yes. No matter how long, yes. No matter how hard, yes. Let there be peace in the house, yes. Let there be love between you and me, yes. Let there be revolution in the land, over the world, yes. We will try harder, yes, we won't give up, yes. We shall triumph, yes. Yes is the language of God. Yes is the language of Divinity, Spirituality.

All the prophets said yes. Adam said yes, Abraham said yes. Moses said yes. Solomon said yes.Job said yes. Jeremiah, Isaiah said yes. The lover in Song of Solomon said yes. David said yes. John and Jesus said yes. Muhammad said yes. Elijah and Malcolm, Martin and Garvey, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth said yes. Fannie Lou and Rosa Parks, Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott said yes. Mama and daddy said yes. Grandma and grandpa said yes. All the ancestors said yes. Forevermore, let go of no and say yes. Dance to yes. Shout to yes!


--Marvin X


from Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2007

Parable of the Gangsta

Parable of the Gangsta

He wanted to be a gangsta since childhood. He watched his big brothers gang banging, in and out of prison, the funerals, parties with more wine than they had at the Last Supper. Females were always on hand serving the brothers, raising their babies, visiting them in jail and prison. Big cars, flashy clothes, bling bling, the little brother watched and waited his turn.

When it was time for him to join, he got ready for the initiation. On that day he was required to kill and rape. He was ready. No matter his mother was a hard working house cleaner who took the bus to work. She wanted none of her children's ill gotten gain. She was a Christian woman who tried to get him into college, rather than go the path of her other sons.

But he had other plans. He didn't want to be a square. He hated squares. They were, in his mind, suckers for the white man. He saw them with their suits and ties and brief cases, thinking they were all that and a bag of chips. He saw them in the dope house coping, along with their square girls. When the girls got sprung, they would leave the square nigguhs for the dope man.

He watched the square brothers get broke and turn tricks with the dope man in front of their women. He vowed to his dead gangsta brothers he would not be a square, but would be like them, even though they didn't want him to end up like them, in prison or a coffin early in life. Thursdays was gang initiation night in the hood.

Most people stayed off the street on Thursdays, unless people got off work late and had to walk home. Anyone could be a victim if caught on the street. He drove around looking for a victim, not far from his house. It didn't matter who it was. On a dim lighted street he saw a woman and snatched her onto the ground, tearing off her clothes. She screamed and yelled but he didn't care, especially since he was loaded on dope and out of his mind.

He didn't bother to look at the woman's face as he raped her. When he finished he turned her around and got the shock of his life. She was his mother! He ran to his car in shame and horror.When he got home he took out his gun and shot himself in the head and fell to the floor dead. He was now a gangsta.

--Marvin X



3/11/10

Based on a true story.
from the Wisdom of Plato Negro, Parables/fables, Volumes I and II, Marvin X, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2010, $100.00.

Hustler's Guide to the Game Called Life

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 and watch Marvin X at work. He's Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland.--Ishmael Reed, poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, professor emeritus, UC Berkeley

Hustler’s Guide to the Game Called Life

The worse sucker in the world is a pitiful no-hustling, job-ass nigguh waiting for the white man to give him a paycheck or a woman to bring him money as in pimping. Let’s be clear on the last point—the pimp has no relation whatsoever to the hustler. The pimp is a bitch ass nigguh too trifling to do for self and make his own money. The true hustler will never wait on anybody to bring him shit—he gets his with his own wits and game. It is beneath his dignity as a man to wait around for somebody to help him when he can hustle with toilet paper and come up.

The square nigguh can’t figure out his ass from a hole in the ground, but sits around like a frog on a lily pad trying to figure out how to come up. He will pray to a mystery God to help him when the God within himself has already answered: Nigguh , get yo black ass up and do for self!

And you nigguhs with Supreme Wisdom are just as pitiful because you got it but didn’t get it—Supreme Wisdom. If you are God then wake up the town. Shake up the universe by letting your little light shine. Get yo ass out the mosque and do something for self. What does a hustler need to fellowship with some dead ass nigguhs sending all their money to Mississippi. Even the dead preacher don't send his money nowhere but his pocket.

I am a revolutionary hustler standing on the shoulders of my ancestors who made something out of nothing, who took animal food and cooked it into a gourmet meal, who were raped, lynched, tar and feathered, who couldn’t read or write but came through it all to see a better day.

You pitiful motherfuckers whining about the white man should be shot in the head as a disgrace to your ancestors, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, David Walker, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Ella Collins, Mae Mallory, Queen Mother Moore, Fannie Lou Hamer, Clara Muhammad, Betty Shabazz, Coretta Scott King, Booker T., DuBois, Garvey, Noble Drew Ali, Master Fard Muhammad, Elijah, Malcolm and Martin.


How can you get up each morning and go to your wage slave job with the white man and call yourself African, Black, Colored or Negro. You a bitch ass nigguh and should be pimped until your drawers fall off, then given a fake gold watch after thirty years loyal service. A one week general strike will cause the fall of America! Can you sacrifice one week for your freedom? No, you must collaborate with your woman and her addiction to white supremacy conspicuous consumption. You are a co-dependent that needs to detox with her and your children.

The Hustler is a rebel, outlaw, incorrigible and recalcitrant, the type the white man had no choice but to kill or allow to go free, yes, that crazy nigguh each town had that nobody fucked with, not even the white man.


The Hustler is fearless and don’t give a fuck—his life and death are all for Allah! He fears nothing and serves nobody but Allah! His objective is not to satisfy a woman, he is content to let her satisfy herself as long as she doesn’t interrupt his flow. Most importantly, the Hustler is independent, meaning he will never move in with a woman to be under her control, at her whim and emotional disposition, to be thrown out in the middle of the night when she calls her real boyfriend, 911, otherwise known as the peckerwood, pig, devil.

It is proper for a man and woman to move into a place together or she can move in with him. The hustler cannot put himself in a weak situation that will interrupt his flow. Either you are about business or romanticism, make up your mind. Now if his woman is a hustler too, there is no limit to what they can do together, and ideally, a hustler needs a hustling woman, not one of those job loving women who look down on the hustling life, otherwise known as a square, willing to get pimped for life by the white man and make her man a ho too.

In his independence, he usually, and most often, must hustle alone because all around him is a bunch of punk ass, jealous nigguhs who are out to down him or prevent him from coming up in a big way. There are those well heeled hustlers who will only help him a little, never in a big way so he can come up and possibly surpass them in the game.


Most people fear the hustler or won’t join with him because they fear the unknown—how can they start out with nothing each day but come up at the end of the day? It is the beginning that scares them. Therefore, the real hustler must leave his friends alone when he discovers they ain’t real hustlers but punks who got to go pray during prime time hustling hours. What the hell are you praying for when God has already answered? When God gives you a product to work, work it!


In the hustler’s mentality, business is war, something he learned from the Japanese who have executed this philosophy to the max, and now China is learning the game, with India following suit. Where is Africa in the game? Somewhere down the line trying to be the world’s greatest criminal that will get them nowhere except to drown in their greed and corruption.


The hustler will sell anything and everything to come up, for he knows he can get anything and everything again. He will sell the clothes off his back because he knows he can get a new pair of shoes, it is only a matter of time. There is no shortage in the universe. Everything Job gave up he got back double for keeping the faith.

The hustler is self confident because he knows the game and how to play it. He doesn’t burn bridges because he needs contacts, networks of fellow hustlers who are for real and not running scams. He has respect for the game and all true fellow hustlers, but he scorns fake hustlers who think they are getting over but will ultimately only go under and never be heard from again in the game.

These are the motherfuckers who fuck up the game for the real hustlers with their punk ass actions and insincerity. You can look at them and smell their phoniness. They are rats of the worse kind and are thus short-lived in the game—they only fool square ass nigguhs much like themselves who don’t know shit from Shinola.

From The Wisdom of Plato Negro, Parables/fables, Volume II, by Marvin X, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, CA, 2010, $100.00.

Beyond Black Rage/White Supremacy

Anger and rage are the dominant emotions expressed at the Pan African Mental Health Peer Group sessions to recover from the addiction to white supremacy. The initial emotion is joy due to the relief and excitement of persons finding themselves in a safe space to express themselves, finally and freely.
Dr. M, aka, Marvin X and Land of My Daughters (poets Aries and Toya Jordan)
photo Gene Hazzard

The consensus is such a space has been long overdue and why has it taken so long to figure out the solution to an unbearable situation of stultification. What a relief to be in a space where persons can speak and be heard, accepted and not rejected or told they are too angry or too emotional.

Poetically speaking, it is as though they have been standing in the rain but finally someone has arrived with an umbrella. As each addict to white supremacy does his/her check-in, anger is clearly the dominant emotion, with women expressing the most severe degree of outrage, the men maintain their well known cool pose until they go deeper into their testimony, then we see their rage equals if not surpasses that of the women.

There are those of both genders who want to do acts of violence to white society. They are pissed at the hostile environment on the job and want to attack their boss or co-workers. Again, they are overjoyed to be in a space where their anger can be expressed without recrimination.

There are those upset at the recent arrival of white people in the hood. They don’t understand why the white people are there, how they got there, and why nothing can be done to get them out, such as burning down their houses or even burning crosses on their lawns, such is the severity of the rage—totally irrational, making those addicted a danger to themselves and others.

Some of the blacks addicted to white supremacy are angry at other blacks. They cannot understand the negative behavior of blacks, why they are killing each other nightly, why youth are out of control, or why the police harass them for simply being black.

Of course violence is the ultimate result of anger and rage, and there are quite a few men and women forced into court mandated anger management classes. Homicide and suicide are clearly on the rise, especially as we slip into the worldwide recession/depression, for tension is heightened, frustration is deep because many persons cannot decipher a solution to their economic woes.

Misplaced aggression is the order of the day because the cause is never attacked such as blood sucking oil companies, scheming and scamming mortgage companies who graciously gave sub-prime loans only to foreclose, and the perennial wage slave bosses.

More often the object of rage is the wife, another brother or sister in the hood who is just as frustrated as the victimizer. Obama’s run for president has given hope to some in the hood, but many can see how racism is tearing him down at every turn, even his wife has been attacked for saying only of late is she proud being an American, as if we owe America the Nobel peace prize for oppressing us through the centuries down to the present moment.

Jesus Was A Revolutionary

JESUS


Jesus was against religion!
--Rev. J. Alfred Smith,
Allen Temple, Oakland CA


Jesus was a revolutionary, a radical, a mover and shaker. Did he not shake up the world with his divine powers? He was God in man and man in God. He was a magician who did magic things with his hands: healing the sick, lame, blind, even the dead he brought back to life. What manner of man is this?

He was a revolutionary. We cannot make him otherwise. He was no chump, no nerd, no frog sitting on a lily pad: he was an activist who chased the money changers out the temple with a whip. He told the whore to go and whore no more. He asked the woman at the well, “Woman, where is your husband?” She said master, I have none. Jesus could see things coming. He knew his friend would betray him. Some friends ain’t friends. Bob Marley sang, “With my friends, I don’t need enemies.”

Jesus knew Peter was a weak sucker who would say he never knew him--denial. Peter could have walked on water like Jesus, but he lacked faith. He didn’t have the self-confidence of Jesus. Jesus had to get him out the water and throw him into the boat.
But Jesus was a man of supreme confidence. He told Mary and Martha not to moan, don’t worry about a thing, everything going to be all right. “I got it covered--go on home, Martha and Mary, see you in a couple of days. Don’t worry about Lazarus.” And he did what he said he would. Jesus was a revolutionary. You want to make him a boy scout, a sissy, a girlie man. But he was a revolutionary. He shook up the world. Things ain’t been the same since.

He wasn’t a Christian. Where and when did he say he was a Christian? He didn’t have a church. He didn’t have a religion. But he had faith in his God. He said he and his God were one, indivisible.

He knew how to turn the other cheek in a situation with thugs and other evil ones. He had enough sense to give up his coat and his cloak. He knew how to survive to fight another day. He had more sense that a lot of Negroes who refused to give up their gear to the boys in the hood--they lost their lives because of too much pride. They didn’t have enough sense to know they could get another coat and tennis shoes, I-Pod and cell phone.
Jesus knew how to walk through the midst of his enemies--at least until that final moment of truth--when the bullfighter must kill the bull.


Until then he was a revolutionary. He had no fear of death. His life and death were for God. You want to make him a square, but he was hipped to everything. What did he tell the Jews who questioned his authority, “If God were your father you would love me, but you seek to kill me because I t ell you the truth. If you were Abraham’s children you would do the works of Abraham.”

He was a revolutionary. You say you believe in Jesus, but you ain’t no revolutionary. You ain’t trying to change nothing. You ain’t trying to get Jack out of the box, you trying to keep Jack in the box. You ain’t trying to wake up the dead, the deaf, dumb and blind. You say let the dead stay dead, especially if they ain’t in your brotherhood or sisterhood. Jesus wasn’t in a secret society, hiding truth while he knew. He said the truth will set you free. You want tell the truth, you playing silent night. You won’t say nothing, but you know everything. The Negro knows everything. You know every word Jesus said, but you ain’t saying nothing, selfish. Greedy. What party of Jesus was selfish, greedy? He took one fish and fed five thousand. You eat a whole fish and smack your lips, won’t share with nobody. You say you waiting for Jesus. You ain’t waiting for nobody. What you waiting for? You ain’t going to do nothing he says. You ain’t done nothing he said since he been gone. What makes you think you going to do something if and when he returns. If I was Jesus, I wouldn’t think about coming back here to deal with your silly ass.

All you want to do is sit around on Sunday and pray. Monday through Saturday you the devil. But you holy Joe and Josephine on Sunday. Get real. Get a healing. Jesus was a revolutionary. If you ain’t no revolutionary, you ain’t no part of Jesus. If you was with Jesus, you would be against war, killing, violence of any kind, hatred, materialism or things of this world, but you ready to kill at the drop of a hat. You so full of hatred, soon as you see a nigguh, your evil mind tells you to hate that nigguh--don’t even know the nigguh, but you hate him, want to kill him, yet you say you with Jesus. You with the devil. Leave Jesus alone. Close the Bible. Give it way until you ready to do what Jesus did, until you ready to get up and shake up the world. Jesus was a revolutionary. He didn’t look down on the homeless, drunks, dope fiends, prostitutes. You too holy to touch the homeless, unlike the good Samaritan, you walk on the other side of the street. You won’t dare walk through San Francisco’s Tenderloin. When you see the man robbed, half dead, you refuse to aid him. But you a Jesus lover. Get real, get a healing. Jesus was a revolutionary.


His essence was love. If you ain’t about love, you ain’t about Jesus. You don’t love yourself, how can you love Jesus or anybody else? The dope fiend goes to the dope dealer asking for love. He says, “Dope man, show me some love.” Sometimes the dope man might have a big bag of dope, but he won’t show love. He wouldn’t give up love to save his life--and sometimes he lost it because he was greedy, selfish, arrogant, proud, evil, when its all about love. God is love. Ain’t nothing else happening. I’m loving you for God. If God didn’t tell me to love you, I wouldn’t have nothing to do with you.
Yes, I confess, I wanted to kill a white man not long ago, a taxi driver who took me home but he charged me more than the usual fare, plus made me pay in advance. Yes, I though about killing him all the way home. But God told me don’t kill him. God said the next time you need a taxi, you won’t be able to get one, so don’t kill him. I fought the feeling. And I knew the big red neck, long hair, hippy looking peckerwood wanted to kill me. But when I got home, I got out and gave him a five dollar tip. God told me to do that. If it had been up to me, I would have chopped his head off. But it wasn’t ulp to me because I was flowing in the flow of the universe. I was on a mission from God to God. Jesus said love your enemies. Something told me I was bigger than the taxi driver. I just needed to think about it, get into my God consciousness. What would Jesus do, Muhammad, Moses, Buddha? Jesus was a revolutionary!

from Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality, essqys on consciousness, Marvin X, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2007.

What If

What If


What if
All is Allah
Allah is All
Allah is the people
Allah is the cow
Allah is the horse

Allah is the tree
Allah is the river
Allah is the fish
Allah is the child
Allah is the youth
Allah is the old people
Allah is the poor
Allah is the rich
Allah is the hungry
Allah is the sick
Allah is the dope fiend
Allah is the alcoholic
Allah is the sinner
No God but Allah
What if what if what if
There is no God but Allah
What if Allah is the captive you won’t liberate
The child you won’t love
The mama you hate
The daddy you hate
What if there is No God but Allah
What if Allah is the fear
You won’t release
Allah is the pain you won’t release
Allah is the love you won’t release
Allah is the tears you won’t cry
Allah is the lies you tell
Allah is the mountain you won’t climb
Allah is the success you won’t try
Allah is the beauty you don’t see
Allah is time
Running out the hourglass
Allah is the body you refuse to heal
Allah is the mind you refuse to feed
What if what if what if

What if Allah is ready when you ain’t ready
What if Allah is ready when you get ready
What if what if what if
What if there is no God but Allah
What if Allah is the forgiveness you won’t give
What if Allah is the denial you drown in like a hog in slop
What if what if what if
What if Allah is the peace in your house

The love in your life
The joy on your face
The happiness in your heart
The thankfulness of your smile
What if there is NO God but Allah
What if my life and my death are all for Allah
Not for woman, not for man
Not over a woman, not over a man
Life and death are all for Allah
What if what if what if
What if I grieve for nothing
Because Allah is everything
Whatever Allah wants I want
Whatever Allah don’t want I don’t want

Whatever Allah has I have
Whatever Allah don’t have I don’t want
What if what if what if
There is No God but Allah
La e la hah e la ilah.
--Marvin X (Maalik el Muhajir)

Marvin X is the USA’s Rumi!—Bob Holman
He’s the father of Muslim American literature.—Dr. Mohja Kahf

The Psycholinguistic Crisis of the North American African

The Psycho-linguistic Crisis of the North American African
4/16/98 (c) 1998
By Marvin X

I have long wanted to discuss language problems relating to the psychology of the oppressed. Let's begin with the notion that the oppressed is a disoriented person suffering symptoms of amnesia :he is not quite sure who he is, where he is, where he came from or where he is going.

We know to a great extent he was stripped of his cultural trappings and forced to don the apparel of the so-called negro, for American slavery would not allow him to retain knowledge of his African self--it was a danger to the slave master's plan of eternal servitude. So the proud African was beaten down from Kunta Kinte to Toby, perhaps the first level in his psycho-linguistic crisis: who am I, what is my name? Once in the Americas, he was no longer Yoruba, Hausa, Ibo, Congo, Ashante but Negro, and according to Grimm's law (the consonants C,K, and G being interchangeable) he was dead, from the Greek Necro, something dead, lifeless, without motion and spirit. Of course, he retained some of his African consciousness in the deep structure of his mind, in the bowels of his soul and he expressed it in his dance, his love life, his work habits, his songs and shouts, but basically he was a traumatized victim of kidnapping, rape and mass murder--genocide, for after all, when it was all said and done, between 50 and 100 million of his brothers and sisters were lost in the Middle Passage, the voyage between Africa and the Americas, thrown to the sharks that trailed slave ships, one of which was named Jesus, perhaps the same one whose captain had the miraculous conversion and wrote the song Amazing Grace!

But changing the African into Negro was a primary problem in terms of identity which persists until today, even as we speak a new generation is now in crisis trying to decide whether they shall be called by Christian, Muslim or traditional African names, trying to decide whether they are Americans, Afro-Americans, African-Americans, Bilalians, Khemites, Sudanese, or North American Africans.

With this term I've tried to emphasize our cultural roots by making Africa the noun rather than the adjective. Also, I wanted to identify us geo-politically: we are Africans on the continent of North America, as opposed to Africans in Central and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia or the Motherland. As such, we are unique and have created an original African Culture in North America, imitated throughout the world.

The whole world wants to talk like us, dance like us, sing like us, dress like us: we have the highest standard of living of any Africans in the world and are thus in the position of leadership even though we lack any degree of National sovereignty, are yet a defacto Nation, albeit captive and colonized, exploited 24/7 by any pimp fearless enough to enter the ghetto, and there are many from around the world, including Asians, Arabs, Jews, Africans, West Indians, and Latins. I refuse to be sympathetic to anyone exploiting North American Africans--call me anti Pan African, anti Third World, whatever, but don't pimp my people and expect me to accept it because you're from Africa or Jamaica. I wouldn't go to Jamaica and exploit Jamaicans, then have the nerve to refer to them as "you people." I would be nice and diplomatic on their turf--then talk about them when I got home.

We are often derided by our African and Caribbean brothers, sometimes called "black Americans" but often simply "Americans," said in the most derogatory manner, as if we're dirt or feces, meanwhile they are in America enjoying the benefits of our struggle with the white man. If everything is so cool in Jamaica, why did they leave their Island in the sun?

With the last statement, we enter the Pan African psycholinguistic crisis, transcending the borders of North America, and perhaps the crisis of the North American African cannot be understood except in terms of the international Pan African struggle for liberation from neo-colonialism, the last stage of imperialism. The colonized man--wherever he is, wherever he's from--is a sick man, mentally ill. And as Franz Fanon pointed out, the only way the colonized man can regain his mental health is through the act and process of revolution. Dr. Nathan Hare tells us in his introduction to my autobiography SOMETHIN' PROPER, that neither messianic religiosity nor chemical dependency will free us. We must grab the bull by the horns or slay the dragon.

I referred to an African as black brother recently. He responded, "Why do you call me that?" "What do you want me to call you," I asked. He said, "Call me gentleman." And the beat goes on. Here was a man blacker than night, ashamed of himself, preferring to be called a gentle man rather than Black man, once proud, but now whipped into gentleness, or servility, expressing clearly the mark of oppression, the mark of the beast.

The recent discussion of Ebonics was most certainly an example of the psycholinguistic crisis of North American Africans. Of course we are bilingual, with one pattern of speech used in the "slave huts" and one for the "big house." Technically, if we were able to deconstruct the language of the "slave huts" we would be in a position to deconstruct the "big house" language as well. And why shouldn't deconstruction of the Mother Tongue be the point of departure for acquiring language skills? Let's start with the child's primary language and build; teach the child that even his so-called slang, dialect or African speech patterns can be examined and explained according to the rules of grammar, the universal rules of grammar, i.e., the science of linguistics. Is there any sound, any speech pattern in any language that cannot be explained and thus respected on a scientific level?

We know that no matter what language Africans speak, whether English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, we speak it from an African speech pattern, from an African grammatical structure. Is there a genetic basis for this phenomenon, I'm not sure, but its existence appears universal throughout Pan Africa.

Nigger or Nigguh has caused the most severe psycholinguistic crisis among North American Africans. Earlier we traced its etymology to the Greek Necro, something dead, which is more befitting and functional than the Spanish Negro (black), or Niger, from the river. We became dead beings in the transformation from Africa to America, so quiet as its kept, Negro is very appropriate to call us. Of course the Honorable Elijah Muhammad said we were so-called Negroes and therefore not truly Negroes, but temporarily under the spell of white magic--white power--which caused us to be deaf, dumb and blind to the knowledge of self and others, therefore dead. We had become the living dead, despised and rejected around the world, even today, although the valiant struggle of the 60s put us in a more favorable light in the eyes of the world. The dead socalled Negro awakened and shook off the chains on his brain and let the world know he was no longer dead, no longer a tool and fool of the white man. He rejected being called Negro and Nigger and became Black man, the Aboriginal Asiatic Black man, ruler of the planet earth, god of the universe. For a moment, it appeared he truly believed this mythology, which was as valid as any other mythology, at least it was original and Afrocentric. But with the destruction of the black liberation movement, we can say the Negro returned, as per plan of the U.S.A.'s counter intelligence program, Cointelpro: kill the black man and bring back the Negro or shall we say the Nigger that the Master used to know, and to make sure he remains dead, introduce CRACK to make him a first class zombie, the corpse of a man.

Imagine, for the first time in history, the black woman lost her ass behind crack, meanwhile the white woman was at Gold's gym working on acquiring an ass, which I must admit, she has obtained. But this point takes us off course into psychosomatics. Let's stay with psycholinguistics.

In the 70s, 80s and 90s, the so-called Negro has been fighting to erase the N word from our vocabulary, particularly brothers in prison who have been the most negroid in their death dealing criminality. Perhaps in their guilt, they have been trying to purify their behavior and speech to gain self respect and dignity--if caught using the N word, they will require the user to do any number of pushups. This is very noble, but the reality is that the N word has now transcended the North American African community and is in wide use by Asian, Latin and white youth who call each other nigguh as a badge of honor. We no longer have a monopoly on our language, and this is another reason for the present crisis: our culture is forever eluding our control, consequently making us the most insecure people on earth. We have lost everything on the good ship America--for three centuries we lost complete and total control over the fruits of our labor, the primary source of security. How else does one secure the family, the women and children?

Not long ago, I heard rappers discussing their tour of Italy. Upon arriving at the airport, the first thing they heard Italian youth discussing was how many "Bitches" they had, obviously influenced by hip hop culture or shall we say specifically gansta rap--yeah, ganstas who when caught are ignorant of a preliminary hearing.

But let us deconstruct the controversial term BITCH. Besides Nigger or Nigguh, no other term has caused more controversy of late, no other term has created a crisis situation among North American Africa, prompting the Million Man Marchers to vow never to use the term again. They claimed it demeaned the black woman, the mother of civilization. My personal view is that crack culture demeaned the black man and women to the extent that the term "bitch" has taken on new meaning and now refers to both male and female, and a discussion of the term cannot be limited to the feminine gender.

Youth in the dope culture will quickly address a tweeking, fumbing OG as "punk bitch." For example, to a male they will say, "Punk-bitch, you better take this dope and get the fuck up outta here wit da quickness." This sentence is most indicative of the pyscholinguistic crisis because it reveals the utter destruction of filial piety (respect or duty of children to elders) in the North American African community. When adults began buying crack from children, children saw the utter weakness in the older generation and lost total respect which was expressed in verbal denunciations such as "punk bitch." In my recovery drama ONE DAY IN THE LIFE, a youth confronts the late Huey Newton and myself with the following words as we sat in a West Oakland crack house: "Yeah, you nigguhs is dope fiends, you ain't no revolutionaries, so don't say shit to me bout no program. How you gon buy dope from me and my podnas--I mean, I'm in recovery now but when I was a dealer, you couldn't come to me and tell me you some revolutionaries--you some punk-bitch nigguhs. When you get your shit together we'll have some respect fa ya, but until then, don't talk to us bout no revolution, O.G., cause if I saw ya comin on my turf, I'd make a movie out that ass, podna. Don't be no walkin contradiction ma nigguhs."

My associate, J.B. Saunders, asked me to include a word-picture of male "bitch behavior" as expressed in the crack ritual. An example of this comes from the observation of monkeys when the female is ready to present herself to the male. She will go to a corner of a cage or by a tree and expose her rear end to the male, letting him know he can come and get her or know her as the Bible says.

In the crack house, the male bitch will expose his posterior in his ritual of crawling on all fours around the room, supposedly looking for crack, but mainly picking up lint and other particles, even chips of dry wall. The ultimate expression of male bitch behavior is the so-called straight guy who under desperation, i,e. , when the tweeking ritual is exhausted, will present his posterior to the dope dealer--accompanied with the words "I'll do anything for another hit," and perform homosexual acts to obtain more crack, but in his psycho-linguistic crisis he adamantly denies he is gay, all the while swallowing the dope dealer's penis and cum.

The worse bitch in the world is the bitch in denial! And even that bitch will--in a moment of scandalous activity declare, "I know I'm a bitch." But why bitch? My views on the matter are prejudiced by the fact that I grew up in a house with six sisters who referred to themselves as bitches--and I must say, many times acted like bitches, if we mean behavior unbecoming a woman--such behavior being acceptable only during PMS or pregnancy!

But is it demeaning to say, "That's a fine bitch!" We know words only have the power we give them, i.e., we define words. Bourgeoisie culture cannot define mass culture or the culture of the grass roots. A rich man cannot tell a poor man what to say. If a rich man comes to the poor man's community, he better talk like a poor man or he may be a dead man! Those who want to criminalize black language are in many cases people who are in the business of criminalizing black people for the benefit of the real criminals, the Masters of the Realm. Not only do you not like the way I talk, but you don't like my dress, my eating habits, my choice of drugs, they way I pray and the loud manner of my worship, how I earn a living--my hair or non-hair--actually, you don't like anything about me, in fact, you wish I were dead, if fact, you do everything you can to kill me, in fact, you have now made a new industry of confining me for life without the possibility of parole.

From a writer's perspective, a poet, much of endgame in the psycholinguistic crisis is censorship, pure and simple, a violation of First Amendment rights and human rights. I have a right to say what I want to say the way I want to say it. This is an old tired discussion we encountered thirty years ago in the Black Arts/Black Culture revolution of the 60s: shall we define ourselves or the shall the masters and their pitiful bourgeoisie imps impose their definitions, their hypocritical, perverted moral standards. If a bitch is bitch call her a bitch. If yo mama is a bitch call her a bitch. If your wife is a bitch call it, your daughters call it. The worse bitch in the world is the bitch in denial. And as I've said, men are known to be bitches too!

There was a time when we were kings and queens, in Africa and during the 60s in America, but this was B.C., before crack. With the coming of crack, we reduced ourselves beyond slavery. We returned to the auction block of the crack house, and indeed, in fact, became bitches and hoes. With crack, the sexual etiquette of North American Africans has been forever altered and whether we will again reach the level of kings and queens depends more on the success of our total liberation than our correct grammatical structure, after all, we see Asians, Arabs, Latins, come to America and get rich while speaking no English, yet we are being deluded by our leaders into believing we must speak the Kings English in order to be successful. If nothing else, the rappers have shown us they can make millions for themselves and billions for the white man utilizing three words: bitch, hoe and motherfucker. The tragic reality is that the black bourgeoisie failed to teach inner city youth proper English or anything proper for that matter, so the upper class must reap with rewards of neglect, in the form of their children as well, enraptured by rap and thus incomprehensible to the middle-class parents--as my daughter has said, "You might not like rap, but if you want to understand me, you better try to understand rap." To paraphrase Eryka Badu, the psycholinguistic crisis goes on and on......on and on.....

1 - The Black Code System Concept - (Brother) Neely Fuller Jr.

A Dialogue on How to Recover from White Supremacy Type II

A Dialogue on How to Recover from White Supremacy Type II

Wed, July 6, 2011 11:24:10 PM


Cornel West with two daughters
of Marvin X, Nefertiti and Amira,
at the Kings and Queens of Black
Counsciousness Concert, San
Francisco State University,
April 1, 2001. A Marvin X production.






From Nefertiti

I missed this spirited conversation and dialogue, but nevertheless I will share it with you. I believe this conversation in and of itself shows the essential problem with black liberation. What is it, what does it look like and who gets to be the ones to determine what it is? We are certainly not a monolithic group and this is not news that should be praised or condemned, it just is. We are alive and all fighting for a different destiny. I used to think we were fighting for the same destiny with different routes to achieve that outcome, but we're not. Our visions for the future of black America are so vastly different.

Do we throw our hands up and throw the towel in, or do we keep pressing forward hoping that there will be a remnant of people whose own truths eventually sees the manifestation of blacks in America who reach self determination? Can you reach self determination and then stop? It seems that because of the disturbing course of history that brought us to this nation, we will forever have a people fighting for the right to be heard and the right to determine their own future, and to this it appears there will never be an end.

Nefertitti

From: Dr. Mustafa Ansari
To: Carl Dix
Cc: gloriadulanwilson@gmail.com; blacklist
Sent: Wed, June 8, 2011 11:12:19 AM
Subject: Re: [TheBlackList] From Carl Dix: "Cornel West Slammed by Obama Supporters For Telling the Truth About Obama"

Sister Gloria,

Africans in America cannot remain silent while we are being disregarded by President Obama, as we could not remain silent when Bush withdrew from the Elimination of Racism discussions in Durban 1 under Bush. This president does not deserve our respect, because he does not respect our rights. Who cares if the person who is disregarding our rights as a people are Black or White?? African Americans have a unique problems that emanate from the forced use of our labor, market exclusion and educational exclusions that could have been addressed in the UN Conference. What did your man Obama do? Just like George Bush, he withdraws from the conference because the Palestinians, Arabs, Africans, and most of Europe equate their conduct in Palestine with "Ethnic cleansing" and "racism".

Sister Gloria, and all those who support this president, have conveniently looked the other way when he withdraws from the Racism conference, and fails to support our righteous request for "Reparations", and programs to "reduce poverty", our unemployment disparity, and the failures of our schools. Obama, supporters, fail to act or say anything, when he withdraws from the 'slavery reparation talks', gives billions of dollars to Israel, and dictators around the world, [while we suffer astronomical rates of unemployment] bombs, assassinates, infringes on our civil liberties, or invades other countries on false pretexts. Give us a reason to support this president, rather than we are 'crabs in a barrel", because if we are 'crabs in a barrel', trying to be free it is because the chief Crab [The U.S government is holding us down']. This president instead of being a model of achievement for his race, is a disgrace, not only to us, but to the whole of humanity.

Support your arguments on 'why Cornel West, Dr. Dyson, and many of us intellectuals, are lining up against Obama. Sister Gloria, these are the men you should be supporting rather than this political pimp.


On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 10:56 PM, Carl Dix wrote:Sister Dulan-Wilson,

The crabs in a barrel analogy doesn't apply when one of the "crabs" is the commander in chief of the global US empire. This ain't about some Black people attacking other Black people. It's about some of us saying waging wars for empire and continued white supremacist suppression of Black people is intolerable even if the person presiding over all this is Black.

If this system can get a pass for all the hell it enforces here in this country and around the world merely by putting a Black face on top of it, then we've signalled to them that we'll accept anything they enforce on us. To his credit, Cornel West doesn't buy into that, and neither do I, which is why I have his back on this. This ain't about thinking Obama owes me anything--it's about being clear that drone attacks on villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and city blocks in Libya, is wrong whether it's Bush or Obama ordering them. It's about saying that warehousing Blacks and Latinos in prison across the US is wrong, whether it's Bush or Obama who's the head jailer. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point.

And if you want to say, he's only one man and can't do anything about all that, then what use is it to people catching hell every day to work to get him in office?

Carl Dix


From: gloriadulanwilson@gmail.com
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2011 11:13:57 -0400
To: TheBlacklist@lists.riseup.net
Subject: Re: [TheBlackList] From Carl Dix: "Cornel West Slammed by Obama Supporters For Telling the Truth About Obama"

Stephen: Cornel West is slammed for being a self-serving hypocrite. He is looking for someone to kiss his behind and it won't be the president. Kindly stop spewing out this hateration crap - Cornel is paid to do this - what's your excuse. You and the rest of the self-hating genre who think the brother ought to owe them a living should "GET REAL." I find it sad that smart Black men are jealous of other smart Black men - pluck the muck out of your own eye.

As I said before, whenever white folks want to defeat Black folks, they pit one against the other - we are definitely prone to crabs in a barrel, divide and conquer tactics. It's been proven time and again: Garvey & DuBois is one case that springs to mind; Malcolm X & Martin Luther King - while they never fought each other, they had camps who disparaged each other all the time - instead of taking all that brilliance and joining forces for empowerment; they use their grey matter to continuously harangue and whip less well educated folks into stupid conjectures that lead to our ultimate defeat.

This is the reason I won't give this kind of crap any space in my blog. We have much more important things to do. We have to be about finding ways of developing unity in the Black community, because if we don't we will be the catalysts who wipe ourselves out. We are already on automatic pilot for self destructive behaviors, beliefs and activities that resulted in the reduction of our population as a whole, world wide, as well as here in the US. We are on automatic pilot of self-destruction! Just look around you. More of my peers will survive this millennia than those of the so-called hip-hop generation. My generation is better educated than those of the upcoming generation.

We get a first Black president, and all you negroes can do is vetch. I didn't hear that much out your mouths - especially not Cornel's - when Bush was president. And goodness knows there were so many egregious acts against humanity, he could, and should have, written a book on it. But we now have Obama, and he is doing a fantastic job - so much so, whites are both jealous, wishing he would stumble and fall, or show some sort of weakness in any way - but instead of you wishing more power to him, and doing concomitant things in the community to mirror what he is trying to accomplish, all you do is flap your gums, and say that we are against Cornel. We are against anyone who would in any way, shape, form or fashion try to undermine Brother Barack Obama.

I've said this before, and it bears repeating - you people (YES I SAID YOU PEOPLE) are never satisfied. Just like white racists, you always have some issue going. If Barack Obama walked across the Potomac right now, you would look at him, point at his walking across the water, and say to the rest of your ilk, "Look I told you he was no good; he can't even swim!"

Negroes need to wake up and stop playing this stupid game!!!!

STAY BLESSED &
ECLECTICALLY BLACK
Gloria Dulan-Wilson

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 8:11 PM, Steven Yip wrote:
Revolution #235, June 12, 2011Cornel West Slammed by Obama Supporters For Telling the Truth About Obama

By Carl Dix

A shit storm has been raging around critical comments by Cornel West about Barack Obama’s presidency, in an interview done by Chris Hedges for the online magazine, Truthdig. West has been accused of launching personal attacks and hurling racial slurs at Obama. The attacks on West have had several striking features in common. One is how his accusers have had little or nothing to say about what he actually said about what Obama has, and hasn’t, done as president. The other is how those attacking West have either distorted his history and track record or gone after him like he has neither. (For the interview, go to www.truthdig.com.)

In his interview with Hedges, West bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”

Is this true? Obama is the commander in chief for the U.S. global empire. In that capacity, he has continued much of the thrust of the Bush regime, waging wars for empire, ordering drone attacks that destroy whole villages, carrying out government spying, torture and indefinite detention.

As it says in the 2010 statement issued by World Can’t Wait, “Crimes Are Crimes No Matter Who Does Them”: “In some respects, this is worse than Bush. First, because Obama has claimed the right to assassinate American citizens whom he suspects of ‘terrorism,’ merely on the grounds of his own suspicion or that of the CIA, something Bush never claimed publicly. Second, Obama says that the government can detain you indefinitely, even if you have been exonerated in a trial, and he has publicly floated the idea of ‘preventive detention.’ Third, the Obama administration, in expanding the use of unmanned drone attacks, argues that the U.S. has the authority under international law to use such lethal force and extrajudicial killing in sovereign countries with which it is not at war.

“Such measures by Bush were widely considered by liberals and progressives to be outrages and were roundly, and correctly, protested. But those acts which may have been construed (wishfully or not) as anomalies under the Bush regime, have now been consecrated into ‘standard operating procedure’ by Obama, who claims, as did Bush, executive privilege and state secrecy in defending the crime of aggressive war.” (To read the entire statement, go towww.worldcantwait.net.)

And on domestic policy, Obama has represented the interests of the capitalist class while their system is caught up in an intense financial crisis. This is the backdrop against which Obama has pushed legislation and policies that serve banking and other corporate interests and that has caused severe economic deprivation for the masses. This deprivation includes massive unemployment, a record number of foreclosures and evictions, and cutbacks in all kinds of social services, from education to health. And all this hits minority people disproportionately. While Obama has taken the spotlight off immigration, more deportations have been carried out on his watch than under Bush.

Right-wing forces have continued and escalated their attacks on abortion rights during his presidency. And before him, Bill Clinton did harm on this front, by implying that abortion was morally wrong a stand which Obama has not just echoed but taken further.

And Obama has been singing lead in the chorus that blames poor Black people for what the system does to them. How often has he blamed the poverty and miserable conditions faced by Black youth on absent Black fathers without mentioning how the criminal “injustice” system targets Black men disproportionately and warehouses hundreds of thousands of them in prison? Or blamed Black parents for the high drop-out rates of Black youth while giving a pass to the education system that is geared to fail those youth?

Those slamming West argue that Obama has done the best he can, and that, whatever his shortcomings, he represents the best Black people and progressive people are going to get. They also argue that any criticism of Obama by a prominent voice of conscience like West only aids his right-wing opponents. Instead, people should shut up, get behind Obama and, at most, try to nudge him into a better direction.
But what are people supposed to get behind? Obama’s wars for empire? His attacks on Black people and immigrants? If people fall for swallowing all that because something worse might be waiting in the wings, then the capitalist rulers of this country will ram even worse down their throats. As Bob Avakian, the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), puts it in his new book BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian : “If you try to make the Democrats be what they are not and never will be, you will end up being more like what the Democrats actually are.”
What West is really doing in the Truthdig interview is calling Obama out for what he has done, and hasn’t done, in heaping abuse on people in the U.S. and around the world. He has dared to say the emperor has no clothes.

This is consistent with who Cornel West is and what he’s done all his life. He has a history of speaking truth to power, of dramatically telling the truth about the way the powers that be have abused “the least among us.” He tours college campuses across the country to challenge the youth not to become “adapted to indifference” or “adjusted to injustice.” He goes into prisons to meet with, educate and learn from those locked down in this country’s dungeons. He tirelessly speaks out about how Black people and other oppressed nationalities, poor and working people, women, lesbians and gays are being mistreated by the wealthy and powerful. And he bends every effort to forge unity among oppressed groups and between people from different class backgrounds.

Again from West’s interview with Chris Hedges: “‘When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first, not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority,’ says West, the Class of 1943 University Professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton University. ‘And even at this moment, when the empire is in deep decline, the culture is in deep decay, the political system is broken, where nearly everyone is up for sale, you say all I have is the subversive memory of those who came before, personal integrity, trying to live a decent life, and a willingness to live and die for the love of folk who are catching hell. This means civil disobedience, going to jail, supporting progressive forums of social unrest if they in fact awaken the conscience, whatever conscience is left, of the nation. And that’s where I find myself now.’”

Cornel West, a widely respected public intellectual listened to by many, promotes critical thinking. He challenges the young generation to have the courage to speak the truth and to be committed to working to alleviate the suffering of those on the bottom of society. He displays a poetic spirit. In his own words, Cornel would describe himself as “engaging in Socratic questioning, being committed to the least of these and being a bluesman in the life of the mind.” All this is why I love this brother so much.

This is also why he has become the target of Obama’s defenders. The concerted chorus of condemnation of West has coincided with indications of widespread unease and dissatisfaction over the actions, and inactions, of the first Black president, among Black people and progressive people in general. Cornel West is giving voice to that spreading discontent in his critique of Obama, and to some that makes him a dangerous man. But those who are still catching hell every day under Obama, just as they have before, and those not willing to swallow their principles and go along with the continuing outrages, should cherish and defend Cornel West.

The attacks on West come down to a concerted attempt to tear down and discredit him among the Black masses and progressive people generally and to place criticisms of Obama’s presidency and exposure of whose interests it is serving outside the bounds of acceptable discourse. On one level, this shores up the prospects of a second term for Obama as president, but on another and deeper level it serves the global and strategic interests of the U.S. imperialist ruling class.

In 2008, Bob Avakian likened the U.S. ruling class allowing/having Obama win the presidency as their global empire faced heavy challenges around the world and domestically, to them playing a major trump in a bid whist card game to try to change the flow of the game. This was gotten into in an article in Revolution newspaper #148: “Tears & Pride, Reality & REAL Change.”

“Anyone on this planet with any sense of the real history and present-day reality of the U.S.A. and how deeply white supremacy is embedded into the operation of this exploitive system… Anyone who knows about the slave master’s whip…the lynch mobs…and present-day reality where any young Black man who steps out of his door faces a death sentence waiting to be executed by a policeman… Anyone who has any sense of this understands and feels the tears and celebrations that met the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States.”

The article goes on to lay out the global and domestic challenges facing the rulers of the U.S. Then it says:
“In the face of all this, put yourself in the shoes of those who run this system: They see storms on the horizon, and they have some idea of the pent up anger and outrage among Black people in particular. From that perspective, you can begin to get a sense of why they took what is for them, the major strategic step of turning now to a Black man to represent the interests of this system.
“Obama is not talking about any real or substantial positive changes in the conditions of Black people. The ‘first Black president’ is not a concession to struggles or potential struggles against the oppression of Black people. Study Obama’s actual proposals and speeches. Listen to the theme in Obama’s victory speech, calling for ‘a new spirit of sacrifice.’ Obama is a vehicle to rally America, including those who have been systematically cut out of the so-called American Dream, to identify with the system as it forces people to sacrifice.”
We in the Revolutionary Communist Party, along with a very few others, stood against the wave of Obama mania in 2008. We called out how progressive people who were backing Obama in order to end the horrors of the Bush regime were engaging in wishful thinking and self-deception in “On the Nation’s Open Letter to Obama.” (revcom.us/a/139/Nation-en.html) I exposed in “Don’t Be a Buffalo Soldier” how Obama’s call for a new spirit of service to America was aimed at pumping up Black youth and others to enlist in America’s wars for empire. (revcom.us/a/150/buffalo_soldiers-en.html) We also spoke to how even before his election, Obama was adding his voice to those blaming Black people for the things the system does to them.

We also said that we would stand together with people to oppose injustice, whatever their position on Obama. Cornel stands out as someone whose principles have moved him to re-evaluate his stance on Obama and to expose, rather than ignore or try to justify, actions which inflict abuse on people in the U.S. and around the world.
Again, from his interview with Chris Hedges: “‘I have to take some responsibility,’ he admits of his support for Obama as we sit in his book-lined office. ‘I could have been reading into it more than was there.’”

Cornel was among the many signatories to the “Crimes are Crimes, No Matter Who Does Them” statement I excerpted above. The attacks being aimed at Cornel are vicious, and people need to support him.

How Racism, Global Economics and the New Jim Crow Fuel Black America's Crippling Jobs Crisis

Published on Tuesday, July 5, 2011 by TomDispatch.com
How Racism, Global Economics, and the New Jim Crow Fuel Black America's Crippling Jobs Crisis
by Andy Kroll
Like the country it governs, Washington is a city of extremes. In a car, you can zip in bare moments from northwest District of Columbia, its streets lined with million-dollar homes and palatial embassies, its inhabitants sporting one of the nation's lowest jobless rates, to Anacostia, a mostly forgotten neighborhood in southeastern D.C. with one of the highest unemployment rates anywhere in America. Or, if you happen to be jobless, upset about it, and living in that neighborhood, on a crisp morning in March you could have joined an angry band of protesters marching on the nearby 11th Street Bridge.

They weren't looking for trouble. They were looking for work.

Those protesters, most of them black, chanted and hoisted signs that read "D.C. JOBS FOR D.C. RESIDENTS" and "JOBS OR ELSE." The target of their outrage: contractors hired to replace the very bridge under their feet, a $300 million project that will be one of the largest in District history. The problem: few D.C. citizens, which means few African Americans, had so far been hired. "It's deplorable," insisted civil rights attorney Donald Temple, "that... you can find men from West Virginia to work in D.C. You can find men from Maryland to work in D.C. And you can find men from Virginia to work in D.C. But you can't find men and women in D.C. to work in D.C."

The 11th Street Bridge arches over the slow-flowing Anacostia River, connecting the poverty-stricken, largely black Anacostia neighborhood with the rest of the District. By foot the distance is small; in opportunity and wealth, it couldn’t be larger. At one end of the bridge the economy is booming even amid a halting recovery and jobs crisis. At the other end, hard times, always present, are worse than ever.

Live in Washington long enough and you'll hear someone mention "east of the river." That's D.C.'s version of "the other side of the tracks," the place friends warn against visiting late at night or on your own. It's home to District Wards 7 and 8, neighborhoods with a long, rich history. Once known as Uniontown, Anacostia was one of the District's first suburbs; Frederick Douglass, nicknamed the "Sage of Anacostia," once lived there, as did the poet Ezra Pound and singer Marvin Gaye. Today the area's unemployment rate is officially nearly 20%. District-wide, it’s 9.8%, a figure that drops as low as 3.6% in the whiter, more affluent northwestern suburbs.

D.C.'s divide is America's writ large. Nationwide, the unemployment rate for black workers at 16.2% is almost double the 9.1% rate for the rest of the population. And it's twice the 8% white jobless rate.


The size of those numbers can, in part, be chalked up to the current jobs crisis in which black workers are being decimated. According to Duke University public policy expert William Darity, that means blacks are "the last to be hired in a good economy, and when there's a downturn, they're the first to be released."

That may account for the soaring numbers of unemployed African Americans, but not the yawning chasm between the black and white employment rates, which is no artifact of the present moment. It's a problem that spans generations, goes remarkably unnoticed, and condemns millions of black Americans to a life of scraping by. That unerring, unchanging gap between white and black employment figures goes back at least 60 years. It should be a scandal, but whether on Capitol Hill or in the media it gets remarkably little attention. Ever.

The 60-Year Scandal

The unemployment lines run through history like a pair of train tracks. Since the 1940s, the jobless rate for blacks in America has held remarkably, if grimly, steady at twice the rate for whites. The question of why has vexed and divided economists, historians, and sociologists for nearly as long.

For years the sharpest minds in academia pointed to upheaval in the American economy as the culprit. In his 1996 book When Work Disappears, the sociologist William Julius Wilson depicted the forces of globalization, a slumping manufacturing sector, and suburban flight at work in Chicago as the drivers of growing joblessness and poverty in America's inner cities and among its black residents.

He pictured the process this way: as corporations outsourced jobs to China and India, American manufacturing began its slow fade, shedding jobs often held by black workers. What jobs remained were moved to sprawling offices and factories in outlying suburbs reachable only by freeway. Those jobs proved inaccessible to the mass of black workers who remained in the inner cities and relied on public transportation to get to work.

Time and research have, however, eaten away at the significance of Wilson's work. The hollowing-out of America's cities and the decline of domestic manufacturing no doubt played a part in black unemployment, but then chronic black joblessness existed long before the upheaval Wilson described. Even when employment in the manufacturing sector was at its height, black workers were still twice as likely to be out of work as their white counterparts.

Another commonly cited culprit for the tenaciousness of African-American unemployment has been education. Whites, so the argument goes, are generally better educated than blacks, and so more likely to land a job at a time when a college degree is ever more significant when it comes to jobs and higher earnings. In 2009, President Obama told reporters that education was the key to narrowing racial gaps in the US. "If we close the achievement gap, then a big chunk of economic inequality in this society is diminished," he said.

Educational levels have, in fact, steadily climbed over the past 60 years for African Americans. In 1940, less than 1% of black men and less 2% of black women earned college degrees; jump to 2000, and the figures are 10% for black men and 15% for black women. Moreover, increased education has helped to narrow wage inequality between employed whites and blacks. What it hasn't done is close the unemployment gap.

Algernon Austin, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., crunched data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and found that blacks with the same level of education as whites have consistently lower employment levels. It doesn’t matter whether you compare high-school dropouts or workers with graduate degrees, whites are still more likely to have a job than blacks. Degrees be damned.

Academics have thrown plenty of other explanations at the problem: declining wages, the embrace of crime as a way of life, increased competition with immigrants. None of them have stuck. How could they? In recent decades, the wage gap has narrowed, crime rates have plummeted, and there's scant evidence to suggest immigrants are stealing jobs that would otherwise be filled by African Americans.

Indeed, many top researchers in this field, including several I interviewed, are left scratching their heads when trying to explain why that staggering jobless gap between blacks and white won't budge. "I don't know if there's anybody out there who can tell you why that ratio stays at two to one," Darity says. "It's a statistical regularity that we don't have an explanation for."

Behind Bars, the Invisible Unemployed

So what keeps blacks from cutting into those employment figures? Among the theories, one that deserves special attention points to the high incarceration rate among blacks -- and especially black men.

In 2009, 7.2 million Americans -- or 3.1% of all adults -- were under the jurisdiction of the U.S. corrections system, including 1.6 million Americans incarcerated in a state or federal prison. Of that population, nearly 40% percent were black, even though blacks make up only 13% percent of the American population. Blacks were six times as likely to be in prison as whites, and three times as likely as Hispanics. For some perspective, consider what author of The New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander wrote last year: "There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began."

Incarceration amounts to a double whammy when it comes to African-American unemployment. Rarely mentioned in the usual drumbeat of media reports on jobs is the fact that the Labor Department doesn't include prison populations in its official unemployment statistics. This automatically shrinks the pool of blacks capable of working and in the process lowers the black jobless rate.

In the mid-1990s, academics Bruce Western and Becky Pettit discovered that the American prison population lowered the jobless rate for black men by five percentage points, and for young black men by eight percentage points. (Of course, this applies to whites, Asians, and Hispanics as well, but the figures are particularly striking given the over-representation of blacks in the prison population.)

Even that vast incarcerated population pales, however, in comparison to the number of ex-cons who have rejoined the world beyond the prison walls. In 2008, there were 12 million to 14 million ex-offenders in the U.S. old enough to work, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). So many ex-cons represent a serious drag on our economy, according to CEPR, sucking from it $57 billion to $65 billion in output.

Of course, such research tells us how much, not why -- as in, why are ex-cons so much more likely to be out of work? For an answer, it’s necessary to turn to an eye-opening and, in some circles, controversial field of study that may offer the best explanation for the 60-year scandal of black unemployment.

Twice as Hard, Half as Far

In 2001, a pair of black men and a pair of white men went hunting for work in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Each was 23 years old, a local college student, bright and articulate. They looked alike and dressed alike, had identical educational backgrounds and remarkably similar past work experience. From June to December, they combed the Sunday classified pages in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and searched a state-run job site called "Jobnet," applying for the same entry-level jobs as waiters, delivery-truck drivers, cooks, and cashiers. There was one obvious difference in each pair: one man was a former criminal and the other was not.

If this sounds like an experiment, that's because it was. Watching the explosive growth of the criminal justice system, fueled largely by ill-conceived "tough on crime" policies, sociologist Devah Pager took a novel approach to how prison affected ever growing numbers of Americans after they'd done their time -- a process all but ignored by politicians and the judicial system.

So Pager sent those two young black men and two young white men out into the world to apply for perfectly real jobs. Then she recorded who got callbacks and who didn't. She soon discovered that a criminal history caused a massive drop-off in employer responses -- not entirely surprising. But when Pager started separating out black applicants from white ones, she stumbled across the real news in her study, a discovery that shook our understanding of racial inequality and jobs to the core.

Pager's white applicant without a criminal record had a 34% callback rate. That promptly sunk to 17% for her white applicant with a criminal record. The figures for black applicants were 14% and 5%. And yes, you read that right: in Pager's experiment, white job applicants with a criminal history got more callbacks than black applicants without one. "I expected to find an effect with a criminal record and some with race," Pager says. "I certainly was not expecting that result, and it was quite a surprise."

Pager ran a larger version of this experiment in New York City in 2004, sending teams of young, educated, and identically credentialed men out into the Big Apple's sprawling market for entry-level jobs -- once again, with one applicant posing as an ex-con, the other with a clean record. (As she did in Milwaukee, Pager had the teams alternate who posed as the ex-con.) The results? Again Pager's African-American applicants received fewer callbacks and job offers than the whites. The disparity was particularly striking for ex-criminals: a drop off of 9 percentage points for whites, but 15 percentage points for blacks. "Employers already reluctant to hire blacks,” Pager wrote, “appear particularly wary of blacks with known criminal histories."

Other research has supported her findings. A 2001-2002 field experiment by academics from the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, uncovered a sizable gap in employer callbacks for job applicants with white-sounding names (Emily and Greg) versus black-sounding names (Lakisha and Jamal). They also found that the benefits of a better resume were 30% greater for whites than blacks.

These findings proved a powerful antidote to the growing notion, mostly in conservative circles, that discrimination was an illusion and racism long eradicated. In The Content of Our Character (1991), Shelby Steele argued that racial discrimination no longer held black men or women back from the jobs they wanted; the problem was in their heads. Dinesh D'Souza, a first-generation immigrant of Indian descent, published The End of Racism in 1995, similarly claiming racial discrimination had little to do with the plight of black America.

Not so, insist Pager, Darity, Harvard's Bruce Western, and other academics using real data with an unavoidable message: racism is alive and well. It leads to endemic, deeply embedded patterns of discrimination whose harmful impact has barely changed in 60 years. And it cannot be ignored. As the old African-American adage puts it, "You've got to work twice as hard to get half as far as a black person in white America."

Is There a Solution for Black America?

Tracing black unemployment in America since World War II, there are two moments when, briefly, the gap between black and white joblessness narrowed ever so slightly -- in the 1940s and again in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For example in 1970, unemployment was at 5.8% for blacks and 3.3% for whites, a sizeable gap but significantly better than what followed in the Reagan era. Those are moments worth revisiting, if only to understand what began to go right.

According to University of Chicago professors William Sites and Virginia Parks, those periods were marked by a flurry of civil rights and anti-discrimination activity on the federal level. A series of actions ranging from the creation of the Fair Employment Practice Committee in 1941 to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which mandated the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, write Sites and Parks, had "dramatic impacts on employment discrimination."

But those gains of the 1970s were soon wiped out. The thinning of union membership and the dwindling power of organized labor didn't help either, after decades of pressure on employers to end discrimination against workers of color.

Today, in terrible times, with the possibility of social legislation off the table in Washington, the question remains: What, if anything, can be done to close the jobless gap between blacks and whites? When I asked Devah Pager, she called this the "million-dollar question." This form of discrimination, she pointed out, is especially difficult to deal with. As she noted in 2005, many employers who discriminate don't even realize they're doing so; they're just going with "gut feelings." "It's not that these employers have decided that they are not going to hire workers from a particular group," Pager told me.

What won't work is relying on discrimination watchdogs to crack down more often. The way federal anti-discrimination law works, it's up to the person who was discriminated against to raise an alarm. As Duke's William Darity points out, that’s a near impossibility for a job applicant who must convincingly read the mind of a person he or she doesn’t know. Worse than that, the applicant who wants to lodge charges of discrimination also has to prove that the discrimination was intentional, which, as Pager’s experiments make clear, is no small feat. Under the circumstances, as Darity told me, perhaps no one should be surprised to discover that blacks "grossly underreport their exposure to discrimination and whites grossly overreport it."

Of course, fixing a problem first requires acknowledging it -- something the nation has yet to do, says the Economic Policy Institute's Algernon Austin. To put blacks back to work, lawmakers should invest federal money directly in job creation, especially for black workers. Other avenues for putting people back to work, like a payroll tax credit won't do the trick. "We've spent billions in trying to build jobs overseas" in war zones, Austin told me. "But if we invested that money here in our cities, we wouldn't have this racial gap."

But how likely is that at a moment when, in a Washington gripped by paralysis, any discussion of spending in Washington begins and ends at how much to cut? The painful reality of permanent crisis for black workers is here to stay. That’s how it seems to blacks in D.C., especially those who live east of the river. In April, another group of protesters took to the 11th Street Bridge to demand more D.C. hires, and the following month, the group D.C. Jobs or Else took their complaints to City Hall. But progress is slow. "We're being pushed out economically," said William Alston El, a 63-year-old unemployed resident who grew up in D.C. "They say it’s not racism, but the name of the game is they have the money. You can’t live [in] a place if you can’t pay the rent.”

© 2011 Andy Kroll