The Beyoncé Effect and the Re-Negrofication of Black America

Recently I have been thinking, that I am glad South African apartheid was gone before Alicia Keyes, Rihanna & Beyoncé were born because I really believe that they would have performed there just to get a check.  Now I am not holding the aforementioned to the platitudes of others like Stevie Wonder or an AliceWalker or MayaAngelou, who in their youth and currently were more conscious and global than the three cited previously, but I am questioning how lost one has to be to take a stance against nations and regimes that treat people like cattle?

 

Recently I just learned that Beyoncé has just informed the world that she will be performing in Israel in this year on June 15. Now I am certain that many who have been hammered and for lack of a better word Beyonceified, do not see this as a big deal.  But I would also speculate that the same folk were not even around let alone born when Apartheid was alive and well in South Africa.

We should all be aware of the issues that presently and historically confront Palestinians, in particular children whom are frequently used as targets while walking to school by West Bank settlers and the Israeli military.  This I hope is a given, but what I am more concerned with, which is rarely addressed, is the manner in which Blacks and Africans are treated in Israel.

Over the past few years, the Israel government, under the panoply of Zionism and the desire for a pure Jewish state, have been rounding up Africans and placing them in detention camps they way Hitler rounded up Jews and placed them in concentration camps. The only reason why, is because they are black and Africa and politicians openly state this to the public. The official policy is to treat them as animals in the exact same fashion South African Whites treated blacks during apartheid and this is not an over statement. This short film can show you in images what my words will never be able to convey.

Africans in Israel are frequently attacked violently in the streets of Israel and there homes, apartments and businesses are often the targets of arson and fire bombings, just like blacks were targeted in the South in the United States during the 1960s. But the Israel government even takes it back to the way in which the United States treated many black women and force sterilize African women in Israel today without their knowledge or permission. Just a few weeks ago, CCTV recorded an Assailant caught beating an African refugee at Tel Aviv port for no apparent reason.

I would go on, but my goal is not to belabor but rather question how could a person not realize that playing in Israel is giving tacit support and approval to an apartheid regime, the same way such was during Apartheid in South Africa?  I really do wonder what many of the entertainers of this generation think (if they think at all) about what they do and what their actions represent. Whether it is Nicki Minaj defacing Malcom X or Lil Wayne denigrating Emmett Till, or Yo Gotti taking the classic ‘I AM A MAN” sign used in the Memphis garbage strikes in which Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and changing it to “I AM A GANGSTER.”

Albeit consequential, I have decided to call this the Beyoncé effect. She is no different than any of the other examples have mentioned, it just so happen she is the latest to show her ignorance regarding how blacks outside of New York and Houston are being treated today. It is this Beyoncé effect, in my opinion that is causing the re-Negrofication of Black America. And by re-Negrofication I mean the dumbing down of a community to the extent where being informed, well read and supportive of proactive self-determination is a worthless morality when compared to the dollar bill. Re-negrofication takes effort because as Benjamin Franklin said, "We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid."  

Federal Government Forgets I am a man

This week reminds me of why Martin Luther King, Jr. was in my home town when he met his untimely murder. It was because of the garbage strike, I suspect many folk don’t know about it to even care, or even understand its corollary with today’s US economic crisis.

Ask any Black person, and they will say the economy is growing. They will also say that it is all because of the policies of President Barack Obama. Ask the same folk how the dollar is doing in the world and the present US economic picture for employment prospects, and they will say he is doing his best and that it will take time, or that he is not just the President for Black Americans. But you never hear such pronouncements with respect to Jewish people, Gay or Lesbians or even Hollywood. They get mentioned and African Americans are conveniently left out of the conversation.

Now I am writing about the economic situation America finds itself in but I want to make this lucidly terse - I was objectively as critical about former commanders in chief starting with Regan and I will continue to be until my dying years as long as I can both read and write. But never have I been attacked prior (and I expected to be attacked) by my own folks for pointing out mathematical facts. For I know some uppity progressive, quasi-liberal, libertarian hating black political pundit will take aim and me and ridicule my suppositions, even if they don’t have facts on their side, all to protect the current Teflon President.

Again, proponents blinded by party affiliation will say the economy is growing and will give the President Props and if it is doing bad will blame it on the GOP. I think both are equally responsible but if it is so good, then tell that to the average African American or college student who is under employed or unemployed.

Fact is many recent college graduates are working at coffee shops and tend to be very skilled workers with higher degrees. In addition, each day they are increasingly ending up in lower-skilled jobs that don't really require a degree. This means they are making it even harder for unskilled workers who usually get such jobs out of the work force and yet, the present administration has offered no policy response to deal with this phenomenon. And by the way, the unskilled can be a synonym for the African American worker.

The US Labor Department reports that approximately 280,000 Americans with bachelor’s degrees and 37,000 with advanced degrees were working minimum-wage jobs in 2012 and that the number of college-educated Americans working such jobs has risen 70 percent in the past 10 years ( a figure double the number who worked minimum-wage jobs before the Great Recession).

The reality is that the high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the past no longer exist. Although the mantra of the economy is getting better is batted around like a whiffle ball, the math shows us that the U.S. economy is in a bubble inflated by money created out of thin air by the federal reserve, and all of this money, instead of creating jobs, is going into the stock market by already well-off and wealthy folks. And this cannot and will not last. Obama’s approach is just as Regan’s economic approach - “trickle down.” When the Federal Reserve prints new money, it is basically reducing or stealing the value of the dollar (all the money you have in your bank accounts and wallet).

The math shows us that the Federal Reserve Bank is buying approximately $85 billion in assets every month, while at the same time keeping its key interest rate near zero. This does nothing to reduce unemployment or create jobs but rather only serves investors and big wig traders in the various stock and bond markets. This is why corporate profits and Stock prices are up. The question remains, why isn’t anyone hiring?

Fifteen percent of Americans are on food stamps according to the latest USDA report for November 2012. To put it plainly, in America, there are two economies - one for the rich, and the other for everyone else. The number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of "Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming." If one is lucky to have a job, it goes on deaf ears that the average worker’s hourly wages, after accounting for inflation, were nearly 2 percent lower this year than last year, and in total is taking home less than $800 a week.

As it stands one in four of every US citizens that is employed has a job that pays $10 an hour or less and for the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. To top it all off, the U.S Dollar is losing its status as the world reserve currency. Just last week, five of the top ten economies in the world, decided to no longer use the dollar as an intermediary currency for trade. Last week the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) agreed to set up a development bank to compete with the IMF, indicating it's gearing up to compete in a post-dollar world. In addition, Australia (the world's 12th-ranked economy), China (2nd behind the U.S.), Japan (3rd), Brazil (6th), India (9th), and Russia (10th), have agreed to bypass the dollar in bilateral trade with China.

President Obama and Geithner’s toxic asset plan has enabled one of the biggest transfer of wealth in history allowing for big banks to transfer their toxic debts from fraudulent activities to the American People. All the banks are doing is redistributing the nation’s wealth to shareholders and their top executives. This what President Obama has done, even with all his flossy rhetoric is assist the wealthy in get richer at everyone else’s expense. All of the monetary and economic policy of the last 3 years has helped the wealthiest and penalized everyone else. Wall Street is good but Main Street isn’t. How can it be when the richest 10% own 98.5% of all financial securities like stocks and bonds?

But for some reason or another, our economic prowess is always, or in most cases obviated by the inability to be critical of the current administration. For it seems as for most black folk, politics involved talking about President Obama and even his policies in the affirmative only, Trayvon Martin or the GOP. I don’t hear any of the TV propagandists of the African American community dare mention the president’s name in the same sentence with growing equity disparities, employment and poverty as a function of race. And you shole wont here nothing asserting that under the Obama administration, crony capitalism has gotten worse. As President, Obama is prosecuting fewer financial crimes than Bush, or his father, Clinton or even Ronald Reagan.

I recall of this as I said, on the week in which one of the greatest men to ever live was killed. King was in Memphis, marching with sanitation workers on strike for a living wage when he was killed. No one remembers the words he stated while delivering a speech a Stanford University a year before his death: “In this America people are poor by the millions. They find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” And no one remembers how he frequently spoke about poverty and how that during his time, America had about 40 million people living in poverty. Obama seems to ignore that in America, the richest nation in the world today, there are almost 100 million people who are in poverty.

The sanitation strike in Memphis started because two sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker died when they were crushed to death with the garbage and nobody noticed – crushed in the back of a garbage truck because during a sever rain storm, they were not allowed by the city to seek shelter from storms. Why because white folks in Memphis at the time didn’t like or want any of the all black sanitation workers to stop in their neighborhoods. Cole and Walker couldn’t fit inside of the truck, so they crawled in the back where the garbage was placed and a broom fell on the lever which resulted in them being crushed to death with the garbage.

I would wish that folks knew this and would never forget this, for this is where the slogan “I am a man. I am a man, not a piece of garbage" originated. It seems that the Federal Government in all of its aspects seems to forget that African Americans are people and that we are men, not the refuse and waste or cheap labor for the rich.

One TV – one bullet

point of order: listening to the foolish makes the fool an idiot....torrance stephens

You know, before I actually had the chance to visit and live in South Africa for 4 summers in a row, I recant when Nelson Mandela was granted his freedom. As such I also recall when the first DEMOCRATIC elections were too be held. It was a major point of consternation for me because I knew just as the US; South Africa was a republic and not a democracy. As such, my folk was hating on Jones because he was down with the PAC as opposed to the ANC. I used to love their slogan – one settler, one bullet. But that is just the live free or die, don’t tread on me, and Patrick Henry in Jones.

When I found out that TV-One was going to air the Democratic National Convention and Not the Republican National convention, I decided to modify the slogan proffered by the PAC to one TV, one bullet. Now don’t get me wrong I aint hating on TV-one, but rather I am hating on their lack of acceptance that black folk in America only watch TV, are poorly informed and basically no where close to being well read. It made me mad. I mean we get mad at a satrical cartoon on the cover of the New Yorker but aint got the gumption to say shit bout stuff that keeps us stupid.

I mean, we need to see these mutha fucas and what they actually propose so we can have a better understanding of the issues that we HOPE Barack Obama can handle if Jones wins the general election in November. I mean we already poorly informed and if we don’t know the issues, or have tenable suggestions about how to solve the problem, then we cant or wont be able to tell if the answers we get from Obama or McCain are satisfactory or pragmatic. As a result, we will accept anything a mother fucker will tell us without objective and valid query. For me, that’s foul. I already see problems equally in how both the front runners of both parties want to deal with the Economy and Health care. Not to mention they connections to K Street.

TV One should be ashamed to keep information from the community they say they care about. It is no different than saying since you black, you can’t learn to read (you a slave). But then again what do folk here know, I’m just an Idiot Savant who is trying to become well read.

Much Ado about Reparations-circa 2002

Reparations: The act or process of repairing or the condition of being repaired. the act or process of making amends; and/or something done or paid to compensate or make amends. All of the aforementioned definitions are nouns that refer to something given in compensation for loss, suffering, or damage suffered at the hands of another.

This is the new calling card of descendants of slaves in America and it is not difficult to see why a big push is being made for such in light of the fact that the United States will never proffer such restitution -- reparations for slavery. The way I see it, there is no way possible for millions of white folk to pay let alone admit that slavery was so damaging to our kind. One problem is the observation that most whites did now own slaves. Complicating this is the current administration position on the issue of race. Both President Bush and the Attorney General have blocked any discussions on the issue of race and white privilege in America as well as issues related to compensations for African Americans. They even refused to send representatives to a conference in Durban, South Africa where racial issues were being discussed. Only an simpleton would think that those same forces would ask their corporate sponsors to tax themselves as a punishment for becoming rich off free labor in the form of slavery? Another concerns are that the vast majority of people who have spoken publicly on the issue have been less than articulate on the main points.

The Entire United States of America benefited from the institution of slavery. This includes individuals able to afford slaves, insurance companies that insured ships and human cargo, builders making slave ships, loggers who cut down trees to the smallest businessman? All of these people profited and benefited from the institution of slavery both financially and socially. In the final word, the truth is we will be lucky if we get an apology for slavery. This however, is very unlikely given the current locution and attitudes of the political public in this age of growing polarization in America. Is it possible to provide reparations to 36,000,000 or more African Americans for the enslavement of some Africans in the United States between the 16th and 19th centuries? I say yes. Establishing regional banking institutions that assist in developing and providing no interest loans to individuals for education and business development purposes can do it. This type of an approach would be apt given how racism as a consequence of slavery resulted in reduced access and opportunity for African Americans.

Whatever the solution for empowerment, we must do something. Something other than try convince some white folks about the morality of reparations and the obvious disinfanchisment of descendants of slaves complicated by not being able to participate and have a history of wealth and its intergenerational transfer, in a manner similar to people of european descent in America.