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On Rumors
against Black Life & History
Responsibility
of Blacks in Cyberspace
An
Open Letter to E. Ethelbert Miller
By
Rudolph Lewis
The Great New Orleans Land Grab: The
17th Street Canal levy was breeched on purpose?
Rumors, Dogs,
and Govt. Responsibility -- E-Notes
from Ethelbert
I've
been critical the last few days about what our public
intellectuals and writers are doing. Check my E-Notes. http://www.eethelbertmiller1.blogspot.com/
If
I read a poem about how Katrina was started by Israel I'll lose my mind.
Silly stuff- but some of us were born funny.
Rumors
really run around the black communities like dogs looking for fresh
meat. Because of the power of the internet we need to really be
careful. Katrina
is another example of why Black people should pay more attention to the environment,
etc. I would hope that we are a chapter beyond the storm pages in Their
Eyes Were Watching God . . . but maybe we just can't move beyond
it. I'm Teacake and folks can't get my medicine on time. Please don't
shoot me (again).
Stay
well - help others - build the Beloved Community.
If
things get really bad I suggest we organize "poor people" to
march on DC (again) and build Resurrection City. Jesse Jackson can be
mayor (again). This is what King would do - so if you hear about folks
wondering - why do we go from here? - just return to the unfinished
business and agenda. What
NO really shows is the failure of the Civil Rights Movement to address the
economical issues affecting black people. Now we have a new diaspora
and we still haven't helped Haitians. Go figure . . . there is so much to do.
Love
ya.
Ethelbert
www.eethelbertmiller.com
Read Newsweek's The
Other America (9/28)
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Try and
obtain a copy of David Carr's essay in the New York
Times today (9/19/05). It's in the Business Day
section of the newspaper. "More Horrible Than
Truth: News Reports" This article confirms what I
was talking about. One will notice Fox News being
at the center of things. Hmmmm.
—Ethelbert,
www.eethelbertmiller.com
"things
that sound too horrible to be true did
happen."
—David
Carr, "More
Horrible Than Truth"
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E, peace and blessings,
I have discovered as a student of literature
that numerous persons can read a document and that each reader
has a different interpretation on what is the truth contained
therein. If your point is that there is such a thing as rumor
and that rumors can be "worse than what actually
happened," we sing the same tune and there is no gap in our
understanding of how the world works. I suspect where we diverge
is the larger interpretation of Carr's sentiments and
perspective.
From my view, our folks—black
people—suffered the most from the rumors propagated by
corporate media and sustained by numerous persons of their ilk.
That we suffered the most by this insidious activity can be
sustained by this quote from Carr's editorial:
| "I think that citizens of New Orleans
have been stigmatized in a way that is going to make it
difficult to be accepted wherever they go," said Jonathan
Simon, who teaches criminal law at the University of California,
Berkeley.
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These "citizens of New Orleans" are
black folk. So our folks (all over America) are the primary
victims of rumor—as looters, rapists, murderers. These
"urban myths" are the stuff of 6 o'clock news and
black weeklies. The criminal image is usually that of young
black males. So much so that everyone now fears "black
boys." And these our brothers, uncles, fathers, sons have
been the victim object of "political spin,"
ritualistic murder, and "responsible governance."
This situation has been propagated not only by corporate
media, but also by persons in the highest seats of government
and society.
Wasn't it our 3rd President TJ who wrote
"scientifically" of our kinship to the orangutan:
matter of fact, there was an entire "science" that
rose in the 19th century from the best minds of America that
sustained Negro inferiority in every sphere of human existence.
And at this hour we still have a difficulty instituting
"black history" courses in our public schools to
counter the damage of these "urban myths" and
"rumors."
On another point we might also agree,
"accurate information [is still at a] premium."
We see it in the indecisiveness and ineptness of Mayor Nagin in
trying to repopulate the city. In a small matter like whether
there was a fire on Dillard's campus, we are unable to sustain
what is indeed the case, whether the Arts & Science building
burned. A friend as close as Baton Rouge does not know the
truth of the rumor. We black folks all still
suffer from the lack of information and a distrust of those in
high places.
And there is good cause for this lack of
trust, especially after the horror of the Superdome and the
Convention Center and the numerous
survivor stories that are
being collected by corporate media, web sites, and blogs. All of
this has been seared into our consciousness and that it will be
sometime before we get over this trauma, this wakeup call.
Government failed us. The wise guys caused
us great distress, insecurity, and terror.
So with this "brave new world" we
face I do not see it as my primary task to dispel rumor as
rumor. That is not the problem we face. From the time we
left the shores of Africa to the present hour, our problem is
one of power, more precisely, the lack of it. The quote from
Carr's which probably caught your eye and to which you really
want me to direct my attention is: "Web and talk radio
fueled these rumors."
But these outlets ("web" and
"talk radio") are dominated, not by us (you and me),
but rather by persons from white middle-class America, that is,
not from Black America. We are anthills up against great
mountains of power and power that does not have our interest first
and foremost.
That is, I'm not against rumor as rumor.
My force will be directed against rumor that does harm to
humanity, especially and particularly black humanity, which is
under severe humiliating attacks. The question before us, then,
is how do we counter these rumors that undermine and debilitate
us and how do we counter those individuals who now sustain them,
who do not have your humanistic sensibilities.
For me, those of us who have education,
training, skills, and instruments of power, we must speak the
truth as we know it and as forcefully as we can and consider
every rumor that is a potential threat against us and that might
have some truth of how we have been undermined and dispersed. If
we have the power to discover the truth or falsity of such
rumors, we should indeed dispel them. But if you suggest
rather that we who are in cyberspace should act as censors
of information, then you ask us to wage war with windmills. What
good is such a romantic adventure?
Well, I suppose wearing the mask of a
"non-partisan" is one way to go. But that's not for
me. I have no faith in "media objectivity." For media
serves power—its impetus is commercial. And he who pays the
piper calls the tune.
If you wish, however, to place on the
table—confer—on what is the proper role of blacks in
cyberspace, I am open for that discussion. I encourage you to
organize such a talk and conference or make it part of some
larger conference. Academics love this sort of thing and there
are probably businesses and foundations willing to finance such
an academic undertaking. I have no problem with that and would
probably be willing to attend it.
As ever and always, Rudy
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My hero, Rudy, rides again. Why do we
expect them to do other than their interests direct them to do?
Why do we ever expect them to tell the truth (and shame the Devil,
as the folks used to say")? Go see President Chavez's
interview on Democracy Now and what Jesse Jackson said
after that. The transcript is online. Hugo Chavez wailed—like
a brother singing the blues—he rightly condemned the rank
"individualism" of U.S. society that disregards the
needs of humanity.
"We" Africans can't be human
or they are inhumane in their treatment of us and those they
deem to be too near like us, which has always included some of
their own—from their slave born children—whom they sold to
the poor whites they have hated all along before they all left
Europe. Sociologically speaking rumors convey important
information to those who have ears. It's up to us to hear our
own ancestral voices through the noise.
I recommend that everybody read the Prologue to Armah's Two
Thousand Seasons.
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How have we come to be mere mirrors
to annihilation? For whom do we aspire to reflect our
people's death? For whose entertainment shall we sing
our agony? In what hopes? That the destroyers, aspiring
to extinguish us, will suffer conciliatory remorse at
the sight of their own fantastic success? The last
imbecile to dream such dreams is dead, killed by the
saviours of his dreams. Such idiot hopes come from a
territory far beyond rebirth.
Those utterly dead, never again to
wake, such is their muttering. Leave them in their
graves. Whatever waking form they wear, the stench of
death pours ceaseless from their mouths. . .The ears of
the hearers should listen far towards origins. . .A
people losing sight of origins are dead. A people deaf
to purposes are lost. . .The destroyed who retain the
desire to remake themselves and act upon that desire
will remake themselves.
The remade are pointers to the way,
the way of remembrance, the way knowing purpose. .
.Remember this: against all that destruction some yet
remained among us unforgetful of origins, dreaming
secret dreams, seeing yet to appear, hear, to utter and
to make . . . Leave the killers' spokesmen, the predators'
spokesmen, leave the destroyers' spokesmen to cast
contemptuous despair abroad. That is not our vocation.
That will not be our utterance.
—From
the Preface |
—Joyce
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Rudy, your letter is incisive and your points are very
well taken. I didn't read Carr's editorial, which I'll
have to do, or (apparently) Ethelbert's rebuttal. I was
somewhat concerned, I think it was with respect to the
allegation that the levees were sabotaged, when he responded
with something like "the Black community chases rumors like
a dog after fresh meat." You have challenged his
thinking with tact, kindness, and sensitivity—unlike
me with the tactless big mouth (smile).
I, too, am disgusted with Nagin, especially after I heard
about the meeting in Dallas with White businessmen to the
exclusion, for the most part, of representatives from the Black
community. On the other hand, you know what I'm afraid of—that
we in the community will begin attacking each other and picking
each other apart. I had to catch myself when I reacted
with "Yeah, that's right" when I read the article
attacking Black leadership cause that's the way I felt.
Then I found out that some of the people & organizations
that I was disappointed in were actually in the trenches and on
the battlefield.
I realized that we could easily be caught in a "divide
and conquer" game where, once more, we are the losers.
In retrospect, I regret what I said about that noted Black woman
singer, because she was there and in-spirited on behalf of the
evacuees. Sometimes we say things and criticize others
without thinking just because they have a different point of
view. Like I did with a dear friend when I told him:
"It's time to stop intellectualizing and theorizing;
we have to DO something." Well, that mind work is
important too and I should have given him space to contribute
his ideas to the dialogue. I guess hindsight is better
than nothing. —Miriam
posted 20 September 2005
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Lynchsong
By Lorraine Hansberry
I can hear Rosalee
See the eyes of Willie McGee
My mother told me about
Lynchings
My mother told me about
The dark nights
And dirt roads
And torch lights
And lynch robes
The
faces of men
Laughing white
Faces of men
Dead in the night
sorrow night
and a
sorrow night
1951
Source:
AmericanLynching /
Source:
https://Litigation-Essentials.LexisNexis
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Writer Lorraine Hansberry's
sober eulogy of the death of Willie McGee weighed heavy on the
hearts and minds of the American Left. On May 8, 1951, a crowd of
five hundred lingered outside the courthouse of Laurel, Mississippi,
to witness the execution of yet another black man convicted for
allegedly raping a white woman. His 1945 lightning trial resulted in
a guilty conviction delivered in less than two and a half minutes by
an all-white, male jury, setting off a heated five-year legal
struggle that drew national headlines. Despite an aggressive appeals
defense team who attempted every legal maneuver in the book, the US
Supreme Court ultimately chose not to intervene. With the legal
lynching of the Martinsville Seven in February, Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg's conviction in March, followed by the execution of McGee
in May, 1951 was a bad year for Left-leaning lawyers (Parrish 1979;
Rise 1995). Most discouraging, national news sources like the New
York Times and Life magazine red-baited the "Save Willie
McGee" campaign and—as Life reported—its "imported" lawyers (Popham
1951a; Life 1951). Few felt McGee's passing with as heavy a heart as
his chief counsel, thirty-one-year-old Bella Abzug.
Before Abzug became a representative in
Congress and a leader in the peace and women's movements, she confronted the
Southern political and legal system at the height of the early Cold War.
Retained in 1948 by the Civil Rights Congress (CRC)—a New York-headquartered
Popular Front legal defense organization—the novice labor lawyer honed her civil
rights . . .https://Litigation-Essentials.LexisNexis
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E. Ethelbert Miller:
The 5th Inning /
Fathering Words: The Making of An
African American Writer
Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
The Katrina Papers, by Jerry W.
Ward, Jr. $18.95 /
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008)
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 2 August 2008
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