hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

What I do not understand is, if Africans built great civilizations and Mayans built great civilizations why is this generation out of ideas?

Are white men the only ones who know how to build roads?

It seems to me that too many people of color look to white "civilization" for what they need. Wells were drilled 10s of thousands of years ago.

Why can't they drill them in Africa, today?

Yes, yes, I know all the strength and brainpower and resources are drained out of Africa, but come on, when are African men going to wake up.

My client, Nate Perkins, says that black people have a "hate" gene. I may be inclined to agree, considering the fact that Africans are said to be "jealous of their American cousins". I know when I was in Gambia and Ghana, I found the people to be very very needy. No self-reliance, but just a "begging" nature.

I'm sorry to say but I was actually wounded in Gambia by children grabbing for the pens and pencils I was handing out.

We can continue to blame slavery for all the downfalls of black people but, one day, we must wake up and realize we are co-creators with the universe and that we have the power to change our minds - not blaming anyone, anymore.

In the Times article Gates gives us this nugget of wisdom. "The myth was our African ancestors were out on a walk one day and some bad white dude threw a net over them. But that wasn't the way it happened. It wouldn't have been possible without the help of Africans." A real historian might have added that there would have been no slave trade without a demand from Europe and America.

I think this applies to Nike, Tommy Hilfigger, Sean John, FUBU, etc. Supply and demand. Hey, black women made Donna Karen and other designers and black men demand Armani and other designers. Supply and demand is the marketplace. I know, I know, it's not fair how Africans were "used" by Europeans. But there's always time to reverse the playing field.

When will we be doing that?

Diva JC

Above is my response to the article sent to me in email re Henry Louis Gates

Freedom Rider
Henry Louis Gates and the Times: Unfit to Print
by Margaret Kimberley
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On December 27, 2005 the New York Times printed an article entitled "Ghanaians' Uneasy Embrace of Slavery's Diaspora." The New York Times rarely delivers on its claim to give its readers "all the news that is fit to print." Even white politicians like John Kerry get biased coverage when they dare to challenge the established order. If a white presidential nominee can't catch a fair break from the Times, then black people are definitely out of luck.

According to the Times, black Americans should just forget about visiting Africa or forging any links with Africans. Like people in poor nations all over the world, many Ghanaians seek to emigrate to the United States. The Times tells us that Ghanaians envy their American cousins for being taken into slavery.

Suppose, for arguments sake, that the statement is an accurate assessment of some Ghanaian opinion. A real newspaper would then ask how much Ghanaians know about the United States, and what if anything they have been taught about African American history or their own history for that matter.

Ghanaians aren't alone in seeking refuge in nations that exploited them. Most of the southwest United States was stolen from Mexico. Mexicans know this but still cross the border in hopes of improving their lives. The United States military killed hundreds of thousands in the Philippines at the turn of the last century. That unforgotten history doesn't prevent Filipinos from waiting years to get green cards that ensure their passage to the country that caused their people so much anguish.

The reality is that Europe and the United States created terrible poverty and instability around the world. So much so, that the people they oppress yearn to live in the oppressor nations in hopes of improving their lives.

The real point of the New York Times article is to tell black Americans that they should just get over the past, realize they are in the best nation on earth, and stop trying to learn anything about their ancestral home. After all, Africa is poor and its people envy three hundred years of slavery, lynching and Jim Crow.

No other group is dissuaded from learning about its ancestry as much as black people are dissuaded. Even groups whose ancestors immigrated voluntarily came from poor countries. Their homelands weren't just poor, they were often oppressive. There would have been no immigration if that were not the case. Yet the New York Times doesn't tell anyone else to forget about identifying with their place of origin. Only black Americans are told to wise up and be grateful for what the system has meted out to them.

Not content to make light of African Americans attempts to connect to Africa, the times had to add the piece de resistance. They had to call Henry Louis Gates.

Gates' area of expertise is African American literature. He is not a historian. He is not a mental health professional. He is not an expert on public affairs. He is not an economist. He knows literature and that is all. Despite his limited base of knowledge, he is continually called upon to opine on subjects he knows little if anything about.

Gates is definitely shrewd. He has gamed a system that confers top dog status on only a few black faces. Journalism schools teach courses like Gates 101 and grade students on their ability to get in touch with Gates when in need of a handy quote about black people.

Several years ago Gates proudly showed the world how little he knew in the PBS documentary series "Wonders of the African World." In the slave trade segment, Gates'only moment of anger was directed at an Ashanti prince. If Gates wants to wax righteously indignant, he should interrogate a member of the Brown family of Brown University. The Brown fortune was made through slavery, as were many others. Gates ought to give a Brown descendant the third degree on camera.

In the Times article Gates gives us this nugget of wisdom. "The myth was our African ancestors were out on a walk one day and some bad white dude threw a net over them. But that wasn't the way it happened. It wouldn't have been possible without the help of Africans." A real historian might have added that there would have been no slave trade without a demand from Europe and America.

From Canada, where slavery was once legal, to the Caribbean, and all the way to the tip of South America, white Americans developed and sustained a voracious need for African free labor. Maybe the Times will tackle that subject some day.

If the Times and their journalistic brethren stopped thinking of the head Negro in charge of all things involving colored people, they might find a useful perspective and write better articles. The New York Times can make local phone calls and find experts on any subject known to humankind. New York City is home to Columbia University, New York University and a 19 campus City University of New York, to name just a few.

Is it possible that some of these institutions have experts on African history? Of course they do, but they will never be heard from as long as a publicity savvy English professor is the only acceptable source of information.

So, if, on your next visit to Ghana, you are referred to as "obruni," a word usually reserved for white people, don't worry about it. Take it as an opportunity to learn from another culture and to teach people who may need to learn from you. In any case, obruni has probably come to mean "foreigner who has more cash than I do."

If there is an "answer," I offer this, at least as a starting place to figure out why things are the way they are. I too have wondered and been frustrated by some of those same scenes you describe. One that comes to mind was in the days approaching Xmas back in the '80s as I was driving down Dr. MLK Blvd. here in Miami, near the Tacolcy Center. Someone yelled, from the vicinity of the Center across the street to some of his friends, "Hey, they givin' away toys over here." A mad dash ensued, with several children being very nearly hit by cars, and then fighting and yanking at each other's clothes to get through the gate first. The Christmas spirit! The state of our people!

What has happened to us?

You may have heard me expound before on my cherished notion that "history and land are one and the same: there is no history without land and no land without history." Building on that notion, I dare to say that "all political, social, economic, ethnic and cultural questions and issues in the 21st century will be reduced to one matter only: land use."

When we think about it, when we envisage the possibilities and horizons open to us, when we look to our past for guidance, when we look around at our peers, our elders and our heroes and sheroes, all of the data we gather is based on our relationship to the land, or, more precisely, to the underlying political question of who controls the use of the land. Ain't nobody ever built no pyramid on no land that they did not control the use of.

The world we live in today would probably look like alien science fiction to the very vast majority of our Ancestors. Electric lighting is barely 150 years old, not to mention all else that has come with it, right down to computers and our ability to communicate through this medium right now. Some of us think nothing of jumping into a car to go three blocks to buy a newspaper. Even the notion of "newspaper" or of abundant paper at all (meaning some serious deforestation) has come a long way from the invention of papyrus. We assume much about the world, with our expectation of warm water out of faucets, flush toilets and conversations by telephone (fast evolving into digital wonderland, combining image, e-mail, music, etc). Among these unquestioned assumptions that are part of our reality is the notion that land can be owned by individuals, and we usually are not those individuals. (Lest anyone doubt, just let a question of "eminent domain" arise, or the discovery of mineral wealth beneath our homes to clarify the difference between "deed" and "title" and who really "owns" what, or a "military emergency").

I believe that the late Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist as well as a revolutionary thinker, was among those brilliant observers who took time to evaluate the psychological impact of this notion, and how thoroughly alien it is to the great majority of the human race. The notion of land ownership by individuals -- enforced at gunpoint, of course, just as all other unnatural social orders must be enforced by violence; whips, shackles, prison bars, nooses, etc. -- is totally dislocating and disorienting to the [natural] human spirit. Everyone agrees that we definitely own the land that is beneath our two feet; anyone who tries to take that away will justifiably be fought. There is even an accepted sense of family and clan compounds, as with designated farming plots, in those settled communities that were created by the agricultural revolution of 11,000 years ago. But all of these have a sense of stewardship of and responsibility for the land under one's control, which is completely different from something like, say, absentee ownership of a territory. I am nowhere around, you may not even know who I am or if I really exist, but I can fence off a piece of property and you dare not enter it, not even if you are starving and I have fruit falling from trees and rotting on the ground.

With our own versions of the "American Dream of home ownership" that is supposed to be the very icon of "middle class" status, most of us are not much inclined to question the values and assumptions inherent in the notion of home ownership. (Not so, of course, in the rest of the hemisphere, where the question of "land reform" is a perpetual threat to the wealthy, even though it is hardly talked about except when it explodes anew, as in Chiapas, Mexico a few years back; it is the same kind of permanent threat that slave uprisings were, and each time they were quelled there was this notion that God wanted it that way and therefore supplied the violent means by which to prevail). Here in this country, whereas the plight of sharecroppers (our own "peons") and migrant workers might go unnoticed and unchallenged, the Supreme Court's most recent decision on eminent domain but the whole nation, even the so-called "conservatives" on notice that the "middle class" is not really much more, in the eyes of the really wealthy and powerful, than the "house niggers" on their great plantation, living a little more comfortably than the masses in the global sweatshops, prisons, "ghettoes," and reservations.

In urban environments we have little control of the environment (the land) right around us. (This makes for endless possibilities for horror writers like Stephen King; literally anything around us can become a threat). People can appear in front of our homes digging up the street with no explanation or accountability to us. They can appear on the light poles, and sometimes even in our very yards (As with the citrus canker inspectors who marked trees for destruction, much to the delight of the commercial citrus industry). No matter how big or bad we think we are, no matter what we spent on that luxury waterfront home (how high up in the house nigger hierarchy we are, in other words), our sense of control of the land is tenuous at best. Those who come closest to feeling in control of it are those who are well enough armed to pose the threat or the actuality of violently inflicted pain, loss of loved ones, and even death.

"If for me to maintain my lifestyle and my country-club membership, a person has to die, or two people, or three, or three hundred or three hundred thousand, so be it. We do what we have to do". That is the mentality of those who rule by violence. In this, they are no different from what I call (pardon my French) "the asshole in the alley." You know, you've worked hard all week, you're walking home with the meager rewards of your efforts to take care of your family's needs, when an asshole appears out of an alley with a gun. The gun is his only qualification for being able to stop you from what you are doing, to take time out of your life, consume your energy, and interfere with your and your family's livelihood. Because of his possession of the gun -- and NO other mental, spiritual or otherwise redeeming qualifications -- he can take for himself what you have worked so hard for, whether you object or not, since he can also take your life. This is what colonialism was all about. This is what the global social order that has ben put in place over the past 500 years is all about.

It starts with a segment of the human population that is disposed to violent control of others. (We might theorize that in every generation there will be that percentage that decides to beat up other kids and take their lunch money. Among them, the only respect is gained by how many more one can beat up than another and how much wealth they can gain. They will form gangs that might end up in wars with each other, but they fundamentally agree, and it will always be the other kids who pay the highest price. Among them, there is no "crime" against their victims that is recognized or punished, the other kids are just "collateral damage"). This segment of the population will deploy their ill-gotten wealth to build up immense arsenals of weapons, prisons, and of course, "security" measures, with no limits on what degree of torture or intimidation might be resorted to. That's the harsh, hard reality, but this is often hidden away in remote locations, behind barricades and so forth. The "soft" reality is the unrelenting psychological warfare that is carried on, yes, with propaganda and "popular culture" and miseducation, but no less so with tangible realities like money and the enforced concept of land ownership.

Why are we African men and women worldwide seemingly so much less competent than our Ancestors in managing our reality, in fostering great civilizations, in accomplishing dazzling feats of engineering and the like? Nothing great that our Ancestors achieved along those lines was achieved without their control of their habitat, of the land of which they were a part. We, of course, as you suggested, can fall back on the excuse of the consequences of slavery, but, even then, how do we excuse our avid participation in our own economic destruction, with our great outpouring of support for Mercedes Benz (or, more to the point, of Exxon-Mobil, Texaco-Chevron, BP, Shell, and all the rest), Donna Karan, Armani, etc.? This is precisely the behavior that got us put onto the ships in the first place.

So, we end up with three things, starting with this matter of land use, even though they may seem to be a stretch. First, there is the inexcusable and the unexcused: the aforementioned exploiters of their fellows, the beaters-up of other children now grown up into corrupt self-serving assholes, the ones who, for some cheap liquor, red cloth, mirrors and -- not to be forgotten -- guns, would sell human beings to slave ship captains with no regard whatsoever for the social, economic, environmental, spiritual or any other consequences. They are still with us. Today's boys-wanting-toys (and their whorish mates) are always in a position to sell out our community resources, especially what little control we may have over land use, and thereby contribute to our slow demise while they stupidly think they profit. They don't believe -- they are assholes, after all -- that "if they come for us in the morning, they'll come for them that night." How many a "slave" seller, when he could no longer deliver a supply, found himself shackled and chained in the bottom of a ship.

Secondly, there is the excuse and the excusable. Slavery is not just an excuse, it was -- and is -- a reality whose consequences cannot be ignored. I have often thought that "we have been through one hell of a shipwreck, and those of us who survived bear all the scars, physical and mental." We survive in an environment that is not only unsympathetic but downright hostile, hateful and destructive. A good friend once asked, hypothetically, why we have such drug problems. His answer is, the reason that there is such a market for drugs, the reason people take drugs is that they are in PAIN. If we want to end drug abuse, we have to end the pain that leads to it. Good logic, to my mind. I am using drugs metaphorically here to also include all of our irrational consumerist addictions and behaviors. The reason I say this is excusable is not because it is acceptable, but it is understandable. Everybody got hit a different way by this shipwreck. Some are physically handicapped, others mentally so, none of us unaffected. No healers or counselors are around to welcome us. We have to rely on each other for this. (I remember a powerful story of those orphaned child-assassins that mercenary rebel armies in Africa routinely create actually being recaptured by government troops and being left in the care of villagers that they don't know. There are no professional healers there, all the people can do, as limited as their own time and resources are, is "surround these children with love," and let them know that their nightmare is over. A lot easier said than done, but it is done. But, here too, as we can clearly see, it is about being in a place where the villagers control the land). We need to "light a lamp rather than curse the darkness" and let some truth shine in the life of our community. I personally believe that art & culture is the most inspiring way to do that, and, in this context, that the music called "Jazz" is a very powerful weapon indeed (which makes me commend you even more).

Thirdly, it may seem strange to call music a "weapon" rather than, say, a tool, but this has to do with a whole paradigm shift in our thinking that redefines the universe according to the rules of our own experience and aspirations, rather than those of others. The heroic Guinean revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral made a famous statement that "Our People Are Our Mountains." The context was this: a Portuguese massacre of dockworkers in "Portuguese Guinea" (Guinea-Bissau) ended any and all hope of achieving independence through peaceful protest, and only armed struggle could be the next phase. Cabral and others had studied the revolutions in China and Cuba, as well as Maroon rebellions in slavery time, when resistors took to the mountains as a very successful military strategy. But Guinea-Bissau is a country that does not have mountains, so how could this be done? "Our people are our mountains," Cabral replied, and his revolution was very successful. We have so little to show, in comparison to either our glorious Ancestors or to other civilizations, that can prove that we are of equal greatness to them. European nations can point to their centuries-long successions of monarchs; Italy, Greece, Iraq, India and China can point to ancient wonders that are part of who they are. Even when we look back to Africa at the great structures of Kemet or Zimbabwe, we must ask, honestly, who among us is capable of constructing those things now (and if we don't know how, we should drop all silly boasts and claims that "we" built them in the first place).

I say, in response to this apparent dearth and deficit of landmarks that "our people are our landmarks." This is not just convenient, feelgood rhetoric, but, as in Cabral's situation, a very real and vital understanding to the success of our struggle. Every great achievement of every Ancestral generation that ever lived is embodied in us today (just as we are also the embodiment of all of our future generations). In the scale of great human achievements -- the Colosseum, the Great Wall, the Pyramids, the Cathedrals -- show me one that compares to the ability to survive the Middle Passage and slavery, with strength, knowledge, and spirit to live and love and give life to new generations. No one in the recorded history of earth, as David Walker pointed out eloquently, has ever been so tested. Survival alone, even in this extreme circumstance, might be called a "negative achievement," only a return to zero from the minus column, so to speak, but here again, we are well served to be reminded that the African survivors of the Middle Passage brought much more with them than their physical bodies.

Africa's traditional knowledge systems have never been accorded, in this racist, ignorant and fearful environment, anything like the respect that has been given to such others as Greek humanism, Yoga, or various Asian martial arts systems. But the ignorance of racists is not the measure of our worth. The drum, divination systems, martial arts like Capoeira, technology like tabby building construction, and a host of other manifestations of the African genius have been indispensable to both the building of the Americas and African survival in these lands (out of our control). Jazz (African American Classical Music) originated here, a completely new cultural invention that is not so much a remake of past musical forms as a rebirth of musical genius that will make of its environment what it needs. My contention is that the whole African presence here is "jazz": This has been identified and given a name and a category, but how many other aspects of African life in America have been "invented" in the same way but have never been subjected to the analysis that would make these jump out as discrete phenomena.

African traditional science is, in fact, not so much analytical as it is synthetical. That is, it is more concerned with the human individual's ability to harmonize, or seek synthesis, with the universe than with the western proclivity to stand apart from the universe as something outside of ourselves, to be analyzed, broken down into its component parts, in order to see what makes it tick. The appreciation of our scientific greatness, then, is not attained by seeking its outward manifestations as objects to be pointed out in comparison to those of other cultures; rather it is in the act of living the knowledge, right here, right now, at all places at all times. This is why I say that "our people are our greatness." The ability to produce (and even be) greatness today, in the African traditional paradigm, is of far greater value than the products of past generations. This is the paradigm shift in our thinking that I believe is needed for us to understand and manage our current situation.

Intelligence is awareness. Everything going on in the universe is going on anyway, whether we know it or not. The more we are aware of it, the closer we come to harmony and synthesis with the rest of the universe, or, to put it another way, with Creation, and therefore with the Creator. A paradigm shift to the "African" way of thinking greatly increases our awareness of who we are, what we are, and where we come from, not to mention "why" we are here. This paradigm shift is also essential to our understanding of the basic point that I started with: land use.

In this understanding, we know that we are of the land, not just "on" the land. We know that "ownership" of the land is not the most relevant issue to our life and survival, even though it is, as we have already seen, a legal reality, which means one that is enforced by the armed military might of the state. (We can be shot and removed from the planet for "trespassing"). It is true that we need to seek to use the land and any control of it that we do have wisely. This is why I am so involved in historic preservation efforts; the landmarks of our Ancestral past do have importance and meaning, and many of these are on sacred sites -- places on planet earth that our traditional knowledge systems can identify as having special powers to help us synthesize. Even beyond this need to save sacred places, we, like all human beings, need land to live on and maintain ourselves and families. These are physical realities that sometimes require physical struggles over land. Even so, we are best served by keeping our whole understanding in the game. We, unlike those who might be less knowledgeable, must be very astute in managing our access to resources so that the land over which we gain stewardship is neither a wasteful appropriation to satisfy the ego of assholes, nor a consumerist drug to dull our individual sensibilities to our collective pain, but rather special places, each with a special meaning, where we are fulfilled by our connection to the rest of life, sometimes in the most mundane and inglorious ways.

I hardly expected this to turn into such a lengthy tirade when I started, but, as with so many things in real life, once it started I had to go with it.

All the best,

G

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