Glen Ford and Mumia Abu Jamal (on phone)

Sorry for the poor sound and video quality (filmed with my phone) but Black Agenda Report's Glen Ford and Mumia Abu Jamal were on the point at yesterday's The World Stands with Palestine event. Glen was on point as always when Mumia was able to call in. I can't think of a better way to spend 32 minutes.

The Spread of Ebola

There I am on Iranian Press tv discussing the spread of the Ebola virus. The interview was prompted by my latest Black Agenda Report column, The Real Ebola Conspiracy.

Al Sharpton, King Rat

Yesterday a black man named Eric Garner was murdered via choke hold and suffocation in broad day light on a Staten Island, NY street by the NYPD. His killing is on video for the world to see.

Al Sharpton, King Rat, has taken over the faux protesting duties, comforting the family, etc. Just remember who he is. This photo was taken in December 2013. The newly appointed NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton, Sharpton and mayor de Blasio all at the house of hoodwinkosity, I mean house of justice.

Sharpton's job is to make it look like black people are protesting. His real job, for which he is well compensated, is working with the powerful to make sure that black people don't do anything of substance.

During Bloomberg's time in office Sharpton said nothing about stop and frisk. He wasn't going to bite the hand that fed him. Now Bloomberg is gone, Obama is a lame duck (his other hustle since 2009) so he slithered back to NYC and pretended to be an activist.

If you want to protest Garner's death, bypass Sharpton. He can't be trusted.

Black America and the Empire in Criisis

Black Agenda Report panel at the recent Left Forum. Myself, Nellie Bailey, Glen Ford, Bruce Dixon, Anthony Monteiro, Marsha Coleman-Adebayo on Black America and the Empire in Crisis.

Enjoy.

The Problem with Bring Back our Girls

You can listen to my interview here on KPFA. Thanks to Ann Garrison.

Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report at Left Forum 2014

Imperialism: Facts, Perspectives & Solutions - Your World News

What is imperialism? How is it manifested in 2014? Thanks to Solomon Comissiong from Your World News, I was able to discuss this topic along with Abayomi Azikiwe, Ajamu Baraka, Dahlia Wasfi, Eric Draitser, Stephen Lendman and Michael Parenti.

Well worth your time.

Modern Day Lynching

“Lynch law was never repealed.” Glen Ford

Black people are still being lynched at a rate of one every day. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement documented in a 2013 report, “Operation Ghetto Storm”, that a black person is the victim of an extra-judicial killing every 28 hours. We may hear the name of some of those individuals as in the case of Trayvon Martin, but he was joined by 300 other black people in 2012 whose names we didn’t know.

The killings are becoming more numerous and more brazen. Why else would Stand Your Ground laws exist, if not to give white racists permission to kill without fear of prosecution. Modern Day Lynching is the title of my most recent Black Agenda Report column. I wrote about the killings of brothers Carl and Garrick Hopkins in West Virginia and Mckenzie Cochran in Michigan and the brutal assaults on Darrin Manning in Pennsylvania and Charda Gregory in Michigan.

On the same day that my column appeared I learned of another horrific case. Alfred Wright was found dead in Sabine County, Texas. His throat was cut and his ear was cut off. If that is not a lynching I don’t know what is.

These murders are being committed in part because black people have stood down from their legacy of agitation and demands for justice. The crowning of a black prince/president just put the icing on the cake and silenced people who were always at the forefront of fighting for justice.

Where are the black elected officials? Where were they when Kwadir Felton was shot in the head and blinded by a cop in Jersey City, New Jersey and then convicted of assault?

To put it bluntly, they don’t give a damn. Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee made this mealy mouthed statement about Alfred Wright’s murder.

“the Department of Justice will investigate and take appropriate action and will conduct a thorough and independent investigation into all the circumstances surrounding this tragedy and to take appropriate action necessary to vindicate the federal interest, protect the civil rights of all Americans, ensure that all persons receive equal justice under law.

We are all better off when the facts are discovered, the truth is discerned and the family and the community are at peace.”

If Jackson Lee cared at all she would have personally led a protest and an investigation in Sabine. Instead she speaks jibberish about federal civil rights prosecutions which never take place.

Black people are in very grave danger and in part because we won’t even say so. The predators are winning.

Faithful Negros and Old Time Darkies

In the late 90s and early 00s I was an avid amateur genealogist. I discovered quite a lot of my family history and enjoyed it all very much.

Black people do face the 1865 brick wall but there is still a lot of information to be had. I have shared my discoveries and in turn been assisted by other family members with their information. I think of genealogy as a way of remembering and honoring my forebears.

Now thanks to digitization, searching is easier and more fun. I’m also planning to attend a family reunion in my grandfather’s hometown this summer and I’ve decided to resume my research and present it there. 

As a friend told me years ago, it is important not just to research one’s own family tree, but to learn from the history gathered along the way. In that spirit, I share with you an obituary that I discovered from 1895.

Death of Adam Prater

Adam Prater, colored, died at his home in this city on the evening of the 5th instant after a lingering sickness. Adam was a good citizen and belonged to the old time class of darkies whose number is gradually but surely diminishing. He was a hard working, honest negro, and attended strictly to his own affairs.

One by one this class of negroes is passing away. Between them and the white people there exists a peculiar bond which death alone can sever. We will never see any more like them for they belong to a different era. The affinity between those faithful old negroes and their former masters and mistresses is peculiar, for it is born of a different period and is the result of a mutual affection that can never be effaced.

Peace to his remains. Piedmont Inquirer, Saturday Morning, 7 Sep 1895, p. 1, c. 5.

I wish that we knew what Mr. Prater’s family had to say about him. I also wish we knew what he thought of his former masters.

If he was among the “old time class of darkies” he had good reason to be. Alabama in 1895 was no place to be a proud black person.  After all, being outspoken in 2014 can still be problematic. In 1895 it was just plain dangerous. Whatever else can be said of him, Adam Prater was probably a very smart man.

A Shout Out from Glenn Greenwald

2 good year-end essays on Snowden: (1) from BAR's @freedomrideblog (http://t.co/d9rrpVoLnS) & (2) from @nsheizaf http://t.co/QbmmvkUHw1
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 28, 2013

I measure success and prosperity in some very basic ways. I'm alive, in good health, and supporting myself. I have dear family and friends. By all those measures 2013 was a good year for me.

Sometimes though you get some icing on the cake, like when Glenn Greenwald retweets your work.

That is all.

Lynne Stewart, Laguardia airport, January 1, 2014

Sorry about the bad sound quality, but you can feel the vibe of the moment. Powerful.

Global Research Interview

 

The week before Christmas I was interviewed by Michael Welch on Global Research to talk about Nelson Mandela. Listen up here. Interview begins at about 7:50.

Lynne Stewart is Free. Happy New Year!

“We learned this morning that the US Attorney’s office has made the motion for my compassionate release and that the Order was on Judge Koeltl’s desk.  Since on the last go-round he stated in Court that he would treat it “favorably”, we are now just waiting expectantly.” Lynne Stewart

Lynne Stewart, the people’s lawyer, shared those words with us yesterday. Today I was honored to be with some 50 other people to greet Lynne and her husband Ralph Poynter at Laguardia airport.

I did not know of this momentous change in Lynne’s status until last night. I received an email that she had been granted compassionate release and I was invited to be among those who welcomed her home.

Apparently Lynne and Ralph missed their flight, so I and others had to wait another 90 minutes or so. I came close to coming back home but when I saw friends I decided to stay. I’m glad I did. We all need reminders that we are not alone and that millions of people work for a better and more just world.

In October 2013 Black Agenda Report wished Lynne, the people’s first responder, a happy birthday. Read it here or listen here. If you need more background on Stewart’s case, Chris Hedges explains here.

Happy new year to Lynne and Ralph and to all of us.

Miss Ani

“The second mention of slaves came when the guide spoke of the ingenuity that Mr. Randolph displayed when he developed an intricate bell system which rang in different tones so that the slaves would know exactly which room they were needed in. The last mention of slaves on the one-hour tour came when the guide described the “whistling way.” This was the path that led from the outside kitchen to the dining room. As the guide noted, Mr. Randolph ordered his slaves to whistle while they walked along the path in order to ensure that they were not eating or spitting on any [sic] the family’s food.”

About 24 hours ago I was sitting at home thinking about the new year and minding my own business. Well, truthfully I was bored and that leads to indulging in my social media addiction. Social media can lead to further boredom, new and valuable information, or foolish drama. I ended up learning about a drama which actually did turn out to be illuminating. Read on.

While on facebook I saw that my friend Marc Polite posted something intriguing.  Two weeks ago Ani DiFranco, a feminist, bi-sexual, anti-racist, left wing, singer/songwriter, had announced that she was hosting an event called Righteous Retreat which would be held at the Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana.

Louisiana plantation? Uh oh. Black feminists and many others were quite rightly angry and as happens nowadays a facebook kerfuffle ensued. One white DiFranco fan decided to defend her idol under the disguise of  black womanhood. Yes, a white woman pretended to be black so that she might make a more pervasive case. She even called herself LaQueeta. Oh yeah, it has been a hot mess.

The story certainly piqued my curiosity. While doing my investigatory due diligence on facebook and twitter I discovered many things. Nottoway Plantation is not just a resort. Its antebellum owners held 155 people in chattel slavery as they harvested sugar cane. It is now a slavery theme park, complete with books extolling the virtues of the confederacy, the peculiar institution, and white supremacy.

“The gift shop cashier kept eyeing us suspiciously. Then we noticed the books for sale. The collection included books such as When the South was Southern by Michael Grissom, The South was Right by James and Walter Kennedy, Myths of Slavery by Walter Kennedy and Bob Harrison, and Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters by Grace King.”

Episodes such as this tell us a lot about who people really are.  The Righteous Retreat was also to have featured Toshi Reagon. Ms. Reagon is also an accomplished musician and as a black woman found herself in a difficult position. She attempted to explain herself via a facebook post called Plantations and frankly she should not have bothered.

“We know we are connected to a world economy that is based on the exploitation of workers many of whom are children, but a lot of us still have smart phones, computers, clothes on our backs, new sneakers, etc...”

It is true that we cannot live without some connection to exploitation on this earth, but that doesn’t excuse blithely supporting an institution which was the location of endless atrocities and which celebrates those atrocities to this day.  Nottoway is a no go and there is no getting around it.

“All told, I wish I had been more aware of this gig.  I would have spoken about it right away and there would be no way to go that place without being in dialogue with where I was.  We all need to be in dialogue with where we are actually standing.” 

Aside from wishing she had done her homework, it isn’t clear what Ms. Reagon is saying. I don’t know what it means to be in dialogue with where she is but I definitely know where Louisiana is. Nottoway was in the belly of the beast. New Orleans had the largest slave market in the country and as such was the epicenter of evil. That can’t be wished away with meditation and verses of kumbaya.

Today Ani DiFranco announced that she was cancelling the retreat and in so doing should have ended her misery and the controversy. But Ms. DiFranco obviously succumbed to pressure and not to conscience. She didn’t really understand why she shouldn’t have chosen Nottoway in the first place or why so many people were so angry for the past two weeks. She was also angry because complaining colored people foiled her plans.

Like Ms. Reagon she claimed ignorance about Nottoway.

“when i agreed to do a retreat (with a promoter who has organized such things before with other artists and who approached me about being the next curator/host/teacher), i did not know the exact location it was to be held.”

And also like Ms. Reagon, she didn’t ask enough questions. (Apparently getting information about the venue was not a big issue for anybody.) DiFranco went on to say that she didn’t see what the big deal was and she didn’t understand why colored people were so upset.

“i did not imagine or understand that the setting of a plantation would trigger such collective outrage or result in so much high velocity bitterness. i imagined instead that the setting would become a participant in the event. this was doubtless to be a gathering of progressive and engaged people, so i imagined a dialogue would emerge organically over the four days about the issue of where we were.”

Pity the poor do-gooder white person. Bitter black people just won’t let them get their groove on and dialogue about the distant mists of time.

“i believe that people must go to those places with awareness and with compassionate energy and meditate on what has happened and absorb some of the reverberating pain with their attention and their awareness. i believe that compassionate energy is transformative and necessary for healing the wounds of history. i believe that even though i am white, i can and must do this work too.”

So just say “Om,” as you strum your guitar and the bad ancestral memories will disappear. Voila! How very white of you.

“i know that the pain of slavery is real and runs very deep and wide. however, in this incident i think is very unfortunate what many have chosen to do with that pain.”

My response is simple. It is none of her business how anyone chooses to express their pain. If black people are mad get over it Miss Anne, I mean Ani. 

“i also planned to take the whole group on a field trip to Roots of Music, a free music school for underprivileged kids in New Orleans. Roots of Music is located at the Cabildo, a building in the French Quarter which was the seat of the former slaveholder government where all the laws of the slave state were first written and enacted. i believe that the existence of Roots of Music in this building is transcendent and it would have been a very inspiring place to visit.”

Black people really need to shut up. She was going to do a poor ghetto child tour and get all transcendent.
I know so many conscious white people but this incident proves there are precious few of them. When push came to shove, Ani DiFranco was self centered and petulant, whining because black people questioned her intentions.  Whatever else can be said of her, Ani DiFranco chose sides and she chose to be a white person before she was a feminist or non-racist or whatever else. She should have done a quick mea culpa and called it a day but she didn’t do that because she wanted to hang on to what she considered the rightness of her decision and her whiteness too.

“maybe we should indeed have drawn a line in this case and said nottoway plantation is not a good place to go; maybe we should have vetted the place more thoroughly. but should hatred be spit at me over that mistake?”

Well, Miss Ani, the answer to that question is yes. The fact that you even asked means that the answer is yes.

Trinity College Under Pressure

“We suspect it says a great deal about the state of US academia and its democratic traditions that presidents can speak for a college or university without the minimal courtesy of consultation of the faculty, staff, students and
alumni.”

The National Council of the American Studies Association (ASA) voted to endorse an academic boycott of Israel. They did the right thing but of course but the pressure placed on the ASA was immediate and intense.

Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut was among the institutions who bowed to the pressure. The president and dean issued a statement in opposition to the ASA vote without notifying Trinity faculty they were doing so. Some of those faculty are ASA members and are supportive of the call for a boycott.  They wrote this letter in response.

January 2014.

Dear President Jones and Dean Mitzel,

We received your letter by accident. It was sent to one of us after it was sent off to the American Studies Association (ASA). No announcement was made to the faculty prior to the letter going out, and so no discussion was permitted. The letter – which is below – condemns the ASA for its resolution on Israel. It is also found on the website of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, as part of a campaign by that body to undermine the ASA.

Many of us who are signing this letter are members of the ASA, proudly so, and several of us voted on behalf of that resolution that you chose to condemn in your letter. We believe that your letter is wrong-headed for several reasons. Some of these are detailed below:

(1) Your letter is singularly uninformed.
One of the tired mantras of the Anti-Defamation League is to say that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East.” This is a factually challenged statement. You seem to neglect at least two countries – Lebanon and Turkey – that are formal democracies. In the region, as well, there are monarchical democracies such as Kuwait and Morocco, with Jordan not far behind. Surely these are not so different from the monarchical democracies of Europe that would not earn a similar sneer (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom for example). We do not hold any water for monarchical democracies, but the double standards is remarkable.

The use of this statement reveals how little effort was used to write this important position taken by the President and Dean of Trinity College. Or else you are of the view taken by Princeton’s doyen of Orientalism Bernard Lewis, that Arabs are somehow not capable of democracy – and that even where there is electoral democracy, this is simply a mirage. As an antidote to this view, we recommend Larbi Sadiki’s The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counter-Discourses, 2004 and the volume Democracy in the Arab World edited by Ibrahim Elbadawi and Samir Makdisi, 2011.

Democracy should not be reduced entirely to elections. It has to be seen in a wider context. For instance, the Israeli system has disenfranchised the totality of occupied Palestinians and has reduced the democratic rights of Palestinian Arabs who live in Israel (in other words, Palestinians who live in Israel and hold its passport have lesser rights in practice). We recommend for your reading the reports from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and from B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. If you are interested in these issues, we strongly recommend you read the new UN report, Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories (November 13, 2013). This has to be part of any discussion of “democracy in the Middle East.” At the same time, in the context of the Arab Spring, as vibrant attempts to create political democracy continue across the Middle East, your comment sounds tone deaf.

(2) Your letter is intellectually lazy.
The debate over the ASA’s resolution began in 2007, and was heightened over the past six months. The discussion about boycotts and academic freedom took center stage in the debate. The level of intellectual conversation on these themes was sophisticated and of great interest. Your letter avoids the fine-grained conversation and returns to clichéd denunciations. We would encourage you to read at least a few of the essays that offer the case for the ASA position and show that academic freedom is not violated. The best debate was held in the American Association of University Professor’s journal, Journal of Academic Freedom, vol. 4 (2013), edited by Ashley Dawson (http://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/journal-academic-freedom/volume-4); to us Princeton historian Joan Scott’s essay, “Changing My Mind About the Boycott” is a good place to begin. But the debate is an old one. The philosopher Judith Butler offered a scrupulous analysis of the idea of academic freedom and the boycott strategy in 2006 (“Israel-Palestine and the Paradoxes of Academic Freedom” Radical Philosophy, vol. 135, January-February 2006; available ~ http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/articles/israel-palestine-paradoxes-of-academic-freedom/). It would have been a useful gesture to have read up on the debate and engaged it with some authority. As it is, your letter returns to the first utterance when the campaign for an academic boycott was proposed by Palestinian and Israeli scholars in 2005 – there is no engagement with the long debate as it has unfolded over the past decade.

What is doubly disappointing is that you had a front-row seat a few years ago when Vijay Prashad’s appointment to lead an institution at the college was attacked by the ADL and faculty on campus – at that time Vijay had engaged President Jones in a discussion about academic boycotts in his role as member of the advisory board for the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. On your faculty you have several people – Raymond Baker, a former Dean, and Johnny Williams, for instance – who have worked concertedly on issues of justice for Palestinians. None of this seems to have in any way troubled the tired language of your letter. At the very least, there might have been recognition that this is a long-standing discussion and not an impetuous decision by the ASA as you suggest. It behooves intellectual leaders who speak for academic freedom to at the very least take the ideas seriously. That is what the ASA did, which is why it hosted a long period of debate and discussion.

(3) Your letter ignores the denial of academic freedom to Palestinians.

In her essay mentioned above, Judith Butler lays out a broad understanding of academic freedom:
“a. The new formulation of an academic-freedom argument that insists that academic freedom requires and consists in the workable material infrastructure of educational institutions and the ability to travel without impediment and without harassment to educational sites; by linking academic freedom to the right to be free from violent threats and arbitrary detentions and delays, one would effectively be saying that the very idea of academic freedom makes no sense and its exercise is foreclosed by the conditions of Occupation. This would be a way of affirming that academic freedom is essentially linked with other kinds of protections and rights and cannot be separated out from them.
b. When academic freedom becomes a question of abstract right alone, we miss the opportunity to consider how academic freedom debates more generally – and here I would include both pro- and anti-boycott debates – deflect from the broader political problem of how to address the destruction of infrastructure, civil society, cultural and intellectual life under the conditions of the Occupation. As much as rights, considered as universal, have to be imagined transculturally and transpolitically, they also bring with their assertion certain geopolitical presuppositions, if not geopolitical imaginaries, that may not be at all appropriate for the situation at hand.”

Your letter notes that Trinity participates in the very important Rescue Scholar program – the program that funds scholars from parts of the world who feel threatened in their workplaces or whose political views deny them academic work. This is a laudable effort, and as you know many of us have been major supporters of it.

A study of the academic situation in Occupied Palestinian lands might have you reconsider your smug statement that “it is inconceivable to us that we would ever be welcoming a Rescue Scholar fleeing Israel for political reasons.” As a warm up to understand the situation of academic freedom in Israel, we recommend you read Ilan Pappé’s Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (2010). Ilan used to teach at the University of Haifa, in the city of his birth in 1954, but was hounded out in 2007 when the President of his college called for his removal based on his support of the academic boycott campaign – a campaign that is illegal according to Israeli law (so much for academic freedom, by the way). Ilan now teaches, virtually as a Rescue Scholar, at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

If matters are hard for Israeli academics who wish to put their views against the Occupation on record, matters are worse for Palestinians and those who teach in Palestinian universities. Once more we recommend that you read a few of the publically available reports:

a) Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, “Obstacle Course: Students Denied Exit from Gaza,” July 2009.
b) Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, “Students from Gaza: Disregarded Victims of Israel’s Siege of the Gaza Strip. A Report on Israel’s Prevention of Gazan Students from Studying at the West Bank Universities,” July 2010.
c) The materials amassed by the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University, a college that has been under siege for the past decade (http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/).
d) Ruhan Nagra, Academia Undermined: Israeli Restrictions on Foreign National Academics in Palestinian Higher Education Institutions, May 2013.

Your silence on this deep attack on the rights of Palestinians to an education indicates that the principle that motivates your letter is not academic freedom. If it were, you would certainly have expressed your concern about the violation of the academic freedom of an entire population since at least 1967. What principle you are upholding is up to you to establish. An indication might come from your failed attempt to suborn the American Studies faculty at Trinity to break their institutional linkage to the ASA; having failed with the faculty, you ignored them and claimed to speak as if there is not a rich seam of disagreement on our campus on this issue.

Your letter does not surprise us. In 2007, without a discussion in the faculty, President Jones signed on to an American Jewish Committee advertisement in the New York Times with the inflammatory tag line, “Boycott Israeli Universities? Boycott Ours, Too!” We suspect it says a great deal about the state of US academia and its democratic traditions that presidents can speak for a college or university without the minimal courtesy of consultation of the faculty, staff, students and
alumni. The signing of the 2007 letter to the Times, this letter – these are political acts by a college administration that are disguised as acts of high principle.

That you have written this letter shows that the resolution of the ASA has had some effect – it has forced a conversation about the denial of the rights to full education of our Palestinian colleagues, about the impunity granted to Israeli institutions by the complicity in the US as well as the active financial, military and diplomatic support by the US government for the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians. That your letter does not seriously engage any of the issues – even academic freedom still less the actual occupation – is a sign of the lack of seriousness on your part. We look forward to a more robust discussion. As it is, you did not speak in our name – also members of the Trinity College community – when you wrote this ill-advised letter to the ASA President.

Sincerely,
1. Anne Lambright, Associate Professor of Language and Culture Studies.
2. Davarian L. Baldwin, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies.
3. Drew Hyland, Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy.
4. Garth A. Myers, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Urban International Studies.
5. Gary Reger, Hobart Professor of Classical Languages.
6. Janet Bauer, Associate Professor of International Studies.
7. Jeffrey Bayliss, Charles A. Dana Research Associate Professor of History.
8. Johnny E. Williams, Associate Professor of Sociology.
9. Maurice Wade, Professor of Philosophy.
10. Paul Lauter, Allan K. & Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of Literature and past president of the American Studies Association (1998).
11. Raymond William Baker, College Professor of International Politics and Chair, Middle East Studies Program.
12. Robert J. Corber, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in American Institutions and Values.
13. Seth Sanders, Associate Professor of Religious Studies.
14. Thomas Harrington, Associate Professor of Language and Culture Studies.
15. Vijay Prashad, George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian Studies and Professor of International Studies.
16. Zayde Antrim, Charles A. Dana Research Professor of History and International Studies and Director, International Studies Program.
<<>>

THE MESSAGE SHOULD READ RENOUNCING, NOT ANNOUNCING.

James F. Jones, Jr.
President and Trinity College Professor in the Humanities
Office of the President
Trinity College
300 Summit Street
Hartford, Connecticut 06106
(telephone) 860-297-2086, 2087
(fax) 860-297-5359

From: Jones Jr., James F.
Sent: Tuesday, December 24, 2013 9:49 AM
To: 'asastaff@theasa.net'
Cc: Mitzel, Thomas M; Keating, Mary Jo M.; Holland, Jenny N.; Jacklin, Michele J.
Subject: ASA boycott of Israel
Importance: High

To The Immediate Attention of the President of the American Studies Association:

Our Dean of the Faculty, Thomas Mitzel, and I wish to go on record announcing the boycott of Israel on the part of the ASA. Trinity once years back was an institutional member (we were then advertizing for an open position), and apparently some members of our faculty are individual members. Were we still an institutional member, we would not be any longer after the misguided and unprincipled announcement of the boycott of the only democracy in the Middle East. The Dean and I oppose academic boycotts in general because they can so easily encroach upon academic freedom. In this strange case, why the ASA would propose an academic boycott of Israel and
not, for example, of Syria, the Sudan, North Korea, China, Iran, Iraq, or Russia escapes rational thought. Trinity has participated in the Rescue Scholar program since its inception; we have welcomed scholars from some of the most repressive countries on the planet, and it is inconceivable to us that we would ever be welcoming a Rescue Scholar fleeing Israel for political reasons.
As President of the ASA, you have tarnished a once distinguished association.

James F. Jones, Jr.
President and Trinity College Professor in the Humanities
Office of the President
Trinity College
300 Summit Street
Hartford, Connecticut 06106
(telephone) 860-297-2086, 2087
(fax) 860-297-5359

"Talking About Mandela" with Netfa Freeman

Today I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Netfa Freeman of the Institute for Policy Studies. We talked about my recent Black Agenda Report column, Talking About Mandela. The interview will be aired on Tuesday, December 23rd on the Voices with Vision program on WPFW radio.

I would like to add that Netfa had a great interview with Rene Gonzalez, one of the Cuban Five. We linked to the interview in Black Agenda Report. Read it here.

Obama’s Phony Commutations

My Black Agenda Report colleague Glen Ford pointed out that Barack Obama is not the lesser of two evils. He is the more effective evil and all of his nefarious skills were seen clearly today with an important announcement. The president made a decision which is right and proper and that will be applauded by anyone who believes in justice. Unfortunately a grave injustice was recently done with Obama’s help and hardly anyone knows about that.

There is good news for eight fortunate people. The president will commute their drug conviction sentences which were determined by terribly draconian crack cocaine laws. Thanks to presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton, 5,000 people languish in prisons across the country because the mass incarceration, prison industrial complex was brought to its fullest fruition on their collective watch.

The crack cocaine “epidemic” was a trope used to whip the public into a frenzy of fear. The media and politicians used justifiable concerns about drug trafficking to turn the United States into a gulag for black people.

Judges were stripped of discretionary authority and mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine were meted out at a ratio of 100:1. Possession of 5 grams of crack was treated like 500 grams of powdered cocaine.

We were told that only “kingpins” would do serious time but every black person was turned into a kingpin and all did serious time. After years of protest and lawsuits Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010 which lessened the ratio to 18:1. 

But an important question remained about those sentenced under the older guidelines. Would they be able to request resentencing based on the new rules? On December 3, 2013 the Sixth Court of Appeals answered in the negative.

Organizations like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund immediately protested but didn’t bother to point out that president Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder also opposed making the new guidelines retroactive.  Another BAR colleague, Bruce Dixon, asks an important question. “Are establishment black  ‘civil rights’ organizations like the NAACP, the National Action Network and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund really opposed to mass incarceration and the prison state?”

“They claim to oppose mass incarceration and the prison state, although they've only just learned the phrase ‘mass incarceration’ and cannot fix their lips to say ‘prison state.’

But since their first priority is boosting the political fortunes and careers of their peers in the black political elite, who we affectionately call our black misleadership class, they are unable to call the devil in charge of mass incarceration by his name, if that devil has a black face.”

I have not read about Obama and Holder’s duplicity outside of the pages of the Black Agenda Report. The New York Times article I linked to doesn’t mention it, and neither do the rest of the corporate media. Obamabots are dancing for joy but most probably have no idea that Barack Obama could have begun the process of releasing 5,000 people unjustly incarcerated. Sadly, even if they did know they would still be in love with their idol.

Obama had an opportunity to fight for the rights of 5,000 people, but instead fought against them, and then makes a big splash about doing the right thing for just eight individuals. Well played.

I am happy for these few people who will soon be going home but I haven’t forgotten about the rest. I also haven’t forgotten that the first black president and first black attorney general chose to keep them behind bars.

Telling the Truth About Nelson Mandela

“Mandela, too, fostered crony relationships with wealthy whites from the corporate world, including those who had profited from apartheid. He saw this as part of ‘reconciliation’.” John Pilger
I am feeling very sad right now. I don’t feel sad because Nelson Mandela died today. After all he was 95 and had been ill for some time. Of course if he were my father or grand father I would not be so sanguine, but ultimately we all have to die and preferably in peace without physical suffering.
I feel sad because the hideous hagiography has already begun. The sickening mantra that he forgave white people. As I pointed out in a recent Black Agenda Report column, Black people are always lauded if they forgive white people. If Mandela didn’t forgive white people for what they did to South Africa, well, who could blame him? White people of course but I digress.
Mandela fought the good fight against oppression for many years. That is why he was imprisoned in the first place. But his release from prison and the direction the ANC took after he became president were intertwined with deals he made to keep white people on top economically and the country firmly in the grip of avaricious capitalism.
We at Black Agenda Report have reported numerous times on the betrayal of black South Africans by their own misleadership class. We were fortunate to meet with Ronnie Kasrils, a long time ANC member and Mandela comrade who has told uncomfortable truths about the end of apartheid.
“What I call our Faustian moment came when we took an IMF loan on the eve of our first democratic election. That loan, with strings attached that precluded a radical economic agenda, was considered a necessary evil, as were concessions to keep negotiations on track and take delivery of the promised land for our people. Doubt had come to reign supreme: we believed, wrongly, there was no other option; that we had to be cautious, since by 1991 our once powerful ally, the Soviet union, bankrupted by the arms race, had collapsed. Inexcusably, we had lost faith in the ability of our own revolutionary masses to overcome all obstacles. Whatever the threats to isolate a radicalizing South Africa, the world could not have done without our vast reserves of minerals. To lose our nerve was not necessary or inevitable. The ANC leadership needed to remain determined, united and free of corruption – and, above all, to hold on to its revolutionary will. Instead, we chickened out.”
Mandela need not be vilified completely, but he doesn’t need to be canonized either. While the Cubans must be given credit for bringing about South Africa’s military defeat, it is also necessary to talk about the deals that Mandela made to get out of prison.
Black South Africans are free to travel where they want but that freedom means little if going on strike means being killed by the police. It doesn’t mean anything if the country still supplies the world with  wealth which the workers will never enjoy.
I am feeling sad because the lies and dumbing down will be thick until his funeral takes place. I’m hoping that event will take place as quickly as possible. I don’t look forward to Obama claiming that he loved Mandela and he was inspired by him and blah, blah, and blah. I don’t want to see British royals looking solemn or celebrities who don’t much of anything suddenly claiming to know South African history.
I wonder how Fidel Castro is feeling now. He fought for decades to aid African liberation movements. How does he feel after seeing his South African comrades succumb so badly and so blatantly? Does he regret his decision to defeat apartheid? I wonder.
Let’s tell the truth, the whole truth about Nelson Mandela.

NFL is “Jail with money”

“The NFL is like jail with money. It really is. There is a culture of intimidation, humiliation and violence.  That makes you… You know they try to keep you in control.” – Terry Crews

“Hey, wassup, you half-nigger piece of shit. I saw you on Twitter, you been training 10 weeks. [I want to] shit in your fucking mouth. [I'm going to] slap your fucking mouth. [I'm going to] slap your real mother across the face [laughter]. Fuck you, you're still a rookie. I'll kill you.” – Richie Incognito

I happen to be a fan of professional football. I come from a family of sport fans. In the days when we only had channels 2 through 13, it was a big deal when Ohio State games were televised and my dad made a very big deal out of watching his favorite team. I knew way more than I needed to about Woody Hayes (google if you must) and how brilliant he was. It was all a lot of fun and I have great memories about it.

My level of interest has waxed and waned over time but I’ve been a consistent football fan for the past couple of years and I’m a big fan of the New York Giants. It is a great sport and I admire the skill of the players. I enjoy having a kind of camaraderie with other fans who understand why I’m happy or sad or why I like or dislike a person or a team. It has been fun, but all that started to change for me recently.

Last week, Jonathan Martin, a black player for the Miami Dolphins, left the team after enduring insults, humiliations and threats to his family from team mate Richie Incognito. (Yes, that is his real name.) The story itself was pretty shocking, but the real shock came when black players defended Incognito and berated Martin. To a person they said the same things. Martin should just “man up” and ought to have “handled it in house.” He was called “weak” and “a coward.”

I assumed that football players were not the most enlightened people, but I’m shocked that they do in fact live up to the worst stereotypes about dumb jocks. It is heart breaking to see these black men sound like old segregationists whining about their “way of life.” Football has its own culture we are told. That’s just the way it is. Everyone is first bullied and then bullies others.

In other words, they are a bunch of highly paid gangsters with the NFL locker room being like a prison yard. If that is the case they can play without getting more of my time, energy or attention.

In case you didn’t google Woody Hayes, you should know that he was fired after he punched an opposing player. Yup. I have been in denial for years.

It is hard to stop doing things we find enjoyable, which is we have rehab and weight watchers. Tomorrow is Sunday and will be the first day of my football reduced diet. Time for a different hobby.

Very Small of You, Jay Z

How lame was Jay Z’s statement about his collaboration with Barneys New York? It was so lame, that even the conservative New York Daily News took him to task. I did that when I posted yesterday. Today I’ll let the Daily News speak for itself.

“When he joined a partnership with upscale retailer Barneys, Shawn “Jay Z” Carter applied his celebrity, fashion sense and marketing savvy to raising large sums of money for his charitable foundation. All hail.

Certainly, Carter was shocked to read, via the Daily News front page, about mounting evidence of racial profiling by his chic collaborators.

First, he learned that store security had triggered the groundless arrest of a young African-American man who purchased a $350 belt with a debit card wrongly assumed to be fraudulent. Then, he learned that a similar false presumption brought detectives down on a young African-American woman.

Were he reading closely — and Carter and public relations aides surely were — he also saw that in 2013, Barneys had logged more than 50 calls to the NYPD alleging credit card fraud against specific individuals.

The store’s allegations produced a total of only 11 arrests, according to the police department, strongly suggesting that Barneys has overwhelmingly been siccing cops on consumers baselessly judged to have been criminals. How many were white, black or other? Neither the police nor Barneys will say.

None of this was Carter’s fault.

But it became his responsibility, because with power and the wealth that begets power come social obligations. These can be heavy for notables who become role models and even more onerous for those, like Carter, who rise to iconic stature. In this cultural stratosphere, he carries the dreams, allegiance and commercial support of the public, and the public, perhaps especially the black public, expects his allegiance in return.

Carter had long put forth the face of just that kind of generous, socially conscious figure. Now, in the aftermath of the racial profiling revelations, the public looks into the soul of a peevishly egotistical man who appears to have erased from memory his long-ago address in Brooklyn’s Marcy Houses.

After three days of why-are-you-bothering-me evasions, Carter on Saturday issued a statement that portrayed him — and not Barneys arrestees Trayon Christian and Kayla Phillips — as the mightily wronged party.

Twice his name appeared in the statement; never once theirs.

He complained of being “demonized and denounced”; they were swarmed by cops and held in custody.

He imagined “negligent, erroneous reports and attacks on my character.” There were none, but Christian and Phillips suffered the very real fear and humiliation of being held and interrogated by police, wondering whether their only offense was skin color.

Finally, in the eighth paragraph of 10 paragraphs of bitterness, Carter said that he had been working “to get to the bottom of these incidents,” wanted a “solution that doesn’t harm all those that stand to benefit from this collaboration,” and empathized with anyone who had been profiled.

Carter’s cry of victimization must be taken as the measure of the man, for he issued it not in the heat of the moment but after three days of consideration and consultation. The tone deafness of a man so musically talented is all the more glaring in comparison with the words and actions of the NYPD and Barneys.

While neither has been remotely forthcoming with facts, both have recognized the gravity of the Christian and Phillips cases. The cops who arrested Christian apologized, and the department has launched an Internal Affairs investigation. Barneys quickly brought in a civil rights lawyer to review its actions and policies.

And Carter felt aggrieved that anyone might hope to hear his voice reverberate for justice. The smallness of a big man is most shocking.”