Great Words

As a Black American with a global and Pan-African perspective, I can only say that Blacks here and in the Motherland will all be better off when we learn cooperation and solidarity rather than division and competition. Why don't people start intelligent and progressive threads talking about our common challenges and interests instead of pitting one against the other? Malcolm, Martin, Paul Robeson & W.E.B Du Bois taught us better than that. They taught us solidarity. Similarly, Amilcar Cabral, Nkrumah, Lumumba and others taught solidarity from their base in the Motherland. I know it's pretty late in the day, but it's time we learned those lessons 

-Savant

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 Why would T-BOS think that contemporary Blacks would try to make a Nat Turner type rebellion? As chattel slavery is no more it would hardly make sense to launch a slave revolt. Duh...Nowadays what's happening in Ferguson, MO and the Moral Mondays Movement led by Rev. William Barber is a more relevant topic of discussion if we're thinking about contemporary revolt or resistance to oppression.....wel l, at least in the REAL world. Unfortunately, T-BOS is allergic to reality and reason.

 -Savant

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At least part of the blame belong at the doorstep of the BLACK BOURGEOISIE (to which Cosby belongs) who betrayed the Movement. While Youtube is mainly trash--I'd prefer you studied real scholarly literature--I would recommend folk take a look at a Youtube clip called "The BLACK ELITE and the Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.". We were being warned of the dangers of elite betrayal way back in the 30s & 40s by Du Bois and Paul Robeson. Robert Allen tried to warn us in 1969 with his book BLACK AWAKENING IN CAPITALIST AMERICA. And while I have my differences with Manning Marable, some of his works were also a warning: FROM THE GRASSROOTS, BLACKWATER, HOW CAPITALISM UNDERDEVELOPED BLACK AMERICA, and an ESSAY which I believed was titled "Black Nationalism in the 1970s." Bell Hooks tried to clue us in with her short volume called CLASS MATTERS: WHERE WE STAND. And I can go on and on. The disruption of Black communal life which Cosby b____ about (but which his class helped bring about) is due to changing economic forces, the betrayal of the Struggle by the elite, the suppression of the most visionary and committed Black leaders and organizers by the government (especially through COINTELPRO), and the flooding of our disorganized and beleaguered communities by the poisonous consumerist values of a decadent capitalist society and culture.. So, it's not SIMPLY a matter of bad white people pushing us around, nor (as Carson or Cosby believes) reprobate Black folk who just won't act right. It is the entire social order that is obscene, corrupt, racist and tyrannical. It must be RADICALLY TRANSFORMED f rom the bottom up. Transformed or destroyed, pick your choice.

-Savant

http://diallokenyatta.tumblr.com/post/100113847726/advice-to-black-capitalist-from-a-pan-african

http://diallokenyatta.tumblr.com/post/101458770766/media-propaganda-and-the-build-up-to-genocide
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Il est possible que les Repulicans gagne le Senate a Mardi. Perhaps notre Resistance must be against the entire state, the corporate state. -Savant


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Amandla! First of all, let me say that I have the greatest respect and admiration for the courageous struggles of the people of South Africa. And probably no struggle outside the USA has been more inspirational to African Americans than the heroic resistance of the Black people of South Africa. Our poets have written in praise of Mandela, of the courageous children of Soweto who pit their lives against the murderous fascist behemoth of apartheid. The problem is not, nor did I suggest, one of South Africa being a war torn country, or a "barbaric" land. The problem seems to be that the inequalities of the colonialist white dictatorship has continued even after the formal dismantling of apartheid. The dissolution of a fascist regime and its replacement by a parliamentary democracy is an accomplishment of no mean importance. But without fundamental democratic transformation of the socio-economic order, the new civil liberties are severely weakened and rendered largely abstract and ineffective--at least for the masses. That is a lesson that many of us have had to learn the hard way in the USA after the great battles of the 1960s.

Fanon warned that exploitation can wear a Black face as well as a white one. My concern now is whether the new order in South Africa will be one of growing social democracy---which seemed to be implied by the ANC FREEDOM CHARTER--a democracy which empowers the common people, or whether we will have a new order which privileged the few at the expense of the many--an order in which perhaps the police (though now African) will be compelled to behave has they did under apartheid. What measures are being taken to undo the radical economic inequalities and exploitation engendered by the Native Land Act? Is at least partial nationalization part of the current agenda of the ANC government? I seem to have read the support for the ANC among mine workers has diminished. The winning of parliamentary democracy ought not be an endgame but a step toward the full democratization of society. I hope that this is what's under way Only thus can it be said that the thousands who died to win South African freedom did not die in vain.


-Savant