[Mb-hair] F--k What You Heard About Black Males from the NYTimes

[Michael Butler]

Mike,
Good posting
Thanks
M

> Found this in my Inbox...wanted to share
> PEACE
> -m
> 
> F--k What You Heard About Black Males from the
> NYTimes          
> By Omowale Adewale (formerly L. James)
> 
> 
> I heard yall bombarding my email with the New
> York Times's article on the plight of
> the black male and your own analysis and your
> friend's analysis, and frankly, it
> bothered me. I'm good though. I'm straight. I
> just wanted to enter into the
> discussion. 
> 
> They said "he was a case history, as well as an
> extraordinary and twisted man,
> turning many true gifts to evil purpose
his
> ruthless and fanatical belief in
> violence
marked him for fame, and for a violent
> end
he did not seek to fit into
> society or into the life of his own people
The
> world he saw through those
> horn-rimmed glasses of his was distorted and
> dark. But he made it darker still with
> his exaltation of fanaticism. Yesterday someone
> came out of that darkness that he
> spawned and killed him."
> 
> The New York Times, "the best daily paper in the
> country, in the world
urbane,
> sophisticated, liberal on certain civil liberties
> and civil rights questions," their
> mask slipped on February 22, 1964. This is how
> they described our Honorable Brother
> Malcolm X, our beloved Black Prince on day after
> he was shot. The leader of black
> males, the very working class and poor black
> males described by the Times on March
> 20, 2006. The leader in which SNCC (Student
> Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and
> the Black Panther Party both revere for providing
> them with their initial political
> science and courage to organize black people to
> defend against white American
> lynchings, fire hoses, dogs, discrimination, and
> America's systemic attacks. The
> Times pumped more lead in El Hajj Malik El
> Shabazz through each line they wrote the
> very next day after his first assassination. And,
> I am supposed to take their
> information packaged and sold to us under the
> guise of scholarly studies from
> Columbia,!
> Princeton and Harvard for gold?
> 
> Already, some black intellectual is doing white
> power's work and dissecting my words
> and concluding, "Their information is still
> true." Nah, homey. It's not. Statistics
> might be, though. Author of "the Debt" Randall
> Robsinson explained so eloquently
> that "a little learning is, as they say, a
> dangerous thing, and particularly when it
> is presented, like a severely cropped photograph,
> as an independent truth. And I do
> not believe as a general matter, such truncated
> analyses are innocently delivered by
> white establishment academics." Interestingly
> enough, but hardly coincidental he his
> commenting on another New York Times article
> about blacks falling behind in 1998. I
> believe we see a pattern here, John!
> 
> The best tactic the government and media ever
> used (and I mean they did spend
> billions of dollars on hundreds of agencies and
> organizations to complete its
> strategy) is the strategy of making young
> brothers feel like they are responsible
> for their current conditions. 50CENT hasn't been
> out more than five years in the
> media and we think he created the black villain
> in New York. We fault 50CENT more
> than we turn our waving fingers at the music
> groups that own the labels that own
> him. Meanwhile, folks are convinced that a
> nation, which stole land and murdered
> millions and enslaved millions for 300 years
> can't possibly be this diabolical.
> 
> Yes, black males are heading to prisons at
> astronomical rates and unemployment among
> black men is above the roof. However, I don't buy
> the ivy-league's solutions or
> conclusions or the New York Times story because
> they inexplicably and cautiously
> relate the reason for black male's crisis to the
> fault of black men themselves. "In
> response to the worsening situation for young
> black men, a growing number of
> programs are placing as much importance on
> teaching life skills — like parenting,
> conflict resolution and character building — as
> they are on teaching job skills."
> This quote in the Times article clearly suggests
> Blacks are messed up because we are
> bad parents, are irrational people, can't get
> jobs because we don't know anything,
> and we are just plainly bad people.
> 
> The poor statistics of black men in the US has
> always been a picture worth strong
> solutions. The difference was that Malcolm X,
> Martin Luther King, Jr., and even Huey
> P. Newton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. never summed
> up black male oppression as
> something that we spawned. Not even remotely!
> Whether they preached non-violence or
> the right to defend yourself they always gave you
> clarity on the black current
> situation in America. They never blamed us for
> being apart of the poorest and most
> discombobulated communities. Harriet Tubman saw
> probably the most backwards of black
> men in their desire to stay enslaved instead of
> risking being free. She understood
> that that backwardness was always connected to
> white power's attempt to justify
> black slave's position in society and if it
> failed, white power frightened you
> beyond belief. The problem was always summed up
> as white power is the enemy and that
> it maintains power at the expense of the African.
> Whether it's wrestling Hip-Hop
> away a!
> nd using it's human and financial resources
> against us and for themselves, taking
> advantage of slavery and prison labor, or
> crushing the urge and the ability for
> uprising, black people have been the pedestal.
> 
> Am I supposed to believe after 300 years of
> slavery and 46 years of Jim Crow that
> now I am responsible for black males being 1
> million locked up? Am I supposed to
> think that the reason young black males are mad
> ass hell and selling drugs because
> we don't mentor enough black children? Am I
> supposed to believe that the CRIPS
> (Community Revolutionary Interdisciplinary
> Program Service) and the Bloods created
> the conditions that force me to live from check
> to check? The fact is that black
> people were awarded Civil Rights 42 years ago by
> the same government that launched a
> war on us. 
> 
> In the 1920's, remnants of COINTELPRO began
> forming from the young J. Edgar Hoover.
> His first task was to crush the Black Star Line
> and send one of the most powerful
> black men in America and his African
> internationalist ideas back to which they came.
> Marcus Mosiah Garvey, leader of millions in the
> UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement
> Association) was deported to Jamaica under a form
> of counterinsurgency used by the
> United States government. The UNIA had 700
> branches in 38 branches.
> 
> That same counterinsurgency finally took on the
> name called COINTELPRO in 1956 and
> was responsible for the deaths of 27 known Black
> Panther Party members and several
> others are still locked up as political
> prisoners, which are mostly men. The Black
> Panther Party had taken self-determination into
> their own hands and into black
> communities. Lead by mostly black males, but
> transcribed to me by my mother Cleo
> Shivers a teenage Black Panther organizer from
> 1969-1971. She explained to me the
> daily food being given out to the black community
> at the Sutter office in Brooklyn
> and the free clinic that treated the black
> community. The songs and poems she
> recited and the rallies described so detailed and
> vividly made me imagine the
> greatest zeal and love black people ever had for
> us in this nation. We were proud,
> although we were going to jail for our
> rebelliousness. The difference is we were
> politically clear on why and how we got there!
> 
> The conditions are still the same but black
> people's political clarity changed with
> COINTELPRO's successful execution, a US
> counterinsurgency program that murdered,
> imprisoned, misdirected, discredited, and
> disrupted the revolutionary, its spirit
> and potential revolutionaries to come. In 1969
> the FBI special agent in San
> Francisco wrote Hoover that his investigation of
> the Black Panther Party revealed
> that in his city, at least, the Black
> nationalists were primarily feeding breakfast
> to children. Hoover fired back a memo implying
> the career ambitions of the agent
> were directly related to his supplying evidence
> to support Hoover's view that the
> BPP was "a violence prone organization seeking to
> overthrow the Government by
> revolutionary means". J. Edgar Hoover said if you
> are going to be a revolutionary,
> you are going to be a dead revolutionary. The
> very people who admitted to killing
> our leaders and brandishing them as violent and
> hateful in our mourn for them now
> find themsel!
> ves articulating the depths of our despondency.
> Find their half attest to these
> claims in the Freedom of Information Act.
> 
> Black men are not in the poor conditions in
> America because of natural conditions,
> bad habits, because of fatherlessness, because
> some are stuck on a sixth grade
> reading level, or because they are helpless
> recidivists or even because the US
> government doesn't intervene effectively. We are
> facing these very issues because
> America's imperialism requires young black male's
> incarceration; it requires the
> petty bourgeoisie black males to offer up
> solutions that point to the government as
> the problem-solvers and the black working class
> and poor peasantry as the
> problem-makers. There is a very real and material
> obstacle preventing black men from
> becoming Marcus Garvey's, Malcolm's, and Huey's.
> The reason why black men suffer is
> because the US government DOES intervene in our
> community. Everyday, the police
> squad car patrols the black community waiting for
> the slightest reason to throw us
> in jail and extract labor and inject despair.
> Elected officials in our community get
> their posi!
> tions at our expense because they are complicit.
> 
> At the juncture in which the black working class
> and poor begin to show insurgency
> due to their conditions such as the 1992
> rebellion in Los Angeles, CA after the
> LAPD's beating of Rodney King, the 1996 rebellion
> in St. Petersburg, FL after the
> police shooting death of Tyrone Lewis, the 2003
> rebellion in Cincinnati, OH for the
> deaths of five unarmed black men by police in a
> five month period, and the Benton
> Harbor, MI rebellion in 2003 after a black
> motorist was killed when a police car
> pursued him the government increases
> counterinsurgency methods. Although, these are
> sporadic uprisings, it is a strong cause for
> concern for the government. It is also
> an explanation for counterinsurgency's
> maintenance. Yet, they flood our neighborhood
> because of possible rebellions, they say it's
> because they're fighting gangs, drugs,
> or poverty for our own good or for our quality of
> life. Counterinsurgency carries
> out in the form of eliminating black youth from
> the streets at disastrous lev!
> els. Right now in the South Bronx you have the
> poorest congressional district in the
> nation, in addition to it being one of the
> neighborhoods in the country with the
> highest levels of youth incarceration. There is
> no coincidence between incarcerated
> youth and its connection to poverty no more than
> there is a coincidence for
> rebelliousness found in black youth that live
> under the harshest conditions in the
> US. In reality, we've been living under the same
> climate for 400 years, non-stop.
> 
> The New York Times article was an attack. It was
> a rap sheet on the black male in
> America executed in public cold-blooded fashion.
> It spoke nothing of the
> arrest-quota-driven police targeting black
> neighborhoods, which has been
> corroborated by PBA President Pat Lynch. The
> article spoke nothing of Bill Clinton's
> dismantling of welfare (less than 2% of the
> government budget), which systematically
> separates the black male their families. Not to
> mention Clinton's heinous
> sponsorship of the most punitive crime bill in
> history, support for more
> paramilitary police, and his administration's
> investment in prisons that reported an
> economic boom for whites and a decline for blacks
> in 2001. Countless black and
> Latino women have visited my office confiding
> that their social worker suggested
> they'd get public assistance if they managed to
> divorce their husband.
> 
> Last year, I went to the Old Navy in Harlem to
> handle an issue and witnessed almost
> 20 young black men within an hour, most likely
> unfamiliar to each other's pursuit,
> walk in and out looking for employment positions.
> What they didn't know that some
> employees are clear on is that you better act
> white and change your tone when you
> speak. Have you ever observed black men in Old
> Navy or other big department stores?
> It's like seeing the results of American black
> male emasculation. Either that or
> find yourself being discriminated against, but
> given some bulls_it reason on why
> you're not qualified to sell clothing. Those with
> criminal records rarely bother in
> that sector. 
> 
> As a person who has been to family court
> countless times for my daughter I witnessed
> what many will never believe because they
> continue to retrieve all their information
> from a racist media. I personally had to fight
> three years for the system to
> recognize a costly glitch in the system while
> hearing other men suffer worse
> accounts. There are honest brothers overpaying
> child support by the thousands, as
> there are definitely some brothers under paying
> by gross amounts. I was shocked and
> embarrassed by my own shock that several black
> men were OVER paying child support
> that sometimes never reached the mother. In most
> cases like mine, the Child Support
> Enforcement agency are never on the same page as
> Family Court so you are regarded as
> a deadbeat and end up further in arrears. Luckily
> for me I had the flexibility and
> the resources of a government entity to go to
> court three years to put them on the
> same page. One non-custodial brother was fired
> because of this mishap, threatened !
> with jail time with only weeks away from
> homelessness and forced to pay a
> five-figure amount to Child Support Enforcement.
> I can't tell you how many times I
> was hung up on seconds into discussion because I
> was labeled as a deadbeat. I am
> reminded of a lawyer that explained that the
> reason courts started using metal
> detectors wasn't because of serial killers,
> gangsters, rapists, but because some
> fathers who had no visitation rights had a
> earnest and most brazen-red desire to see
> their children. 
> 
> Luckily, for me there is no problem in seeing my
> child. But, I'll make sure to
> inform her that you cannot leave it to this
> current media to explain your husband,
> father, uncles or brothers. Otherwise, you'll get
> the most diabolically concocted
> analysis and racist psychological babble that
> leaves the black petty bourgeoisie
> stuck vilifying themselves and other Africans.
> The problem is not black youth's
> rebelliousness; the problem I see is that
> Africans own less than 1% of the entire
> media and no percentage in the US government,
> only the appearance. We must learn
> even as we are under attack daily to stop
> continuing to sum up our conditions, as
> not only our own fault but also something new and
> fresh. Everything, black people
> and all others peoples are tied to a dialectical
> and historical process in which
> eras and events are interconnected even as things
> die and come anew. Hopefully. A
> revolution. 
> 
> 
> Omowale Adewale (27) is the co-founder and
> executive director of G.A.ME. He is a
> senior staff member for an elected official in
> the Bronx, member of the Uhuru
> Movement and FAR Fund Fellow. He drew national
> acclaim in his first visit to Nigeria
> in 2005 speaking on issues ranging from Hip-Hop
> to healthcare to self-determination
> for all Africans.