It's an historical fact that whites have murdered other whites in the millions and tens of millions...maybe more. Even before the carnage of WWI and WWII this went on in Europe. The Thirty Years War (1618--1648) alone reduced the population of Germany from about 22 millions to about 10 millions. Obviously the two world wars and the murderous tyranny of the dictators caused far greater carnage than that. So, yeah....Barros is right on that one.
-Savant
http://nyx.uky.edu/oh/render.php?cachefile=02OH108RPWCR03_King.xml
http://www.topix.com/forum/afam/TH2AUD38H6T9N3QEE#c7
http://isreview.org/issue/96/race-surveillance-and-empire
http://www.counterfire.org/articles/a-marxist-history-of-the-world/16105-a-marxist-history-of-the-world-part-98-the-vietnam-war
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I've just started reading once more THE FIRE NEXT TIME by James Baldwin. I am also reading FRANTZ FANON: A PORTRAIT and THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH by Frantz Fanon. Just finished reading GOING DOWN JERICHO ROAD: THE MEMPHIS STRIKE, MARTIN LUTHER KING'S LAST CAMPAIGN. Also, COLONIALISM AND NEOCOLONIALISM by Jean-Paul Sartre (my favorite white philosopher). Over spring break I will be revisiting Aime Cesaire's DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM since I'm discussing this with my students in class. Don't get me started. I'm bibliophile. I even carried one of James Baldwin's books in my coat pocket on the way to one of our "Black Lives Matter" demonstrations in Baltimore
-Savant
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In short, you were posing a rhetorical question. Now the facts: Some African Americans, duped by racist propaganda against Africa (also intended as a weapon against us), do try to distance themselves from African and believe themselves superior. Other African-Americans actually take pride in the African past, and the African beginnings of our own cultural self-formation. At higher levels of political consciousness, some African Americans actually feel and affirm solidarity with Africa and with Blacks in other parts of the world. In port cities like Baltimore, Black American dockworkers went on strike and refuse to lift chrome from Rhodesia during the 1070s or materials from Fascistic apartheid South AFrica. Some sought to fight as volunteers in support of Ethiopia during the Italian fascist invasion. And for some American Blacks Italy's rape of Ethiopia is what first incensed to the point of wanting to fight Fascism in Europe. Some Black members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteering to fight Franco stated they were initially motivated by the attack on Ethiopia. Black American churches, community organizations, trade unions and some businesses withdrew funds from institutions known to be investing in the apartheid regime. Black intellectuals used the power of the word, in both writing and speaking, to educate the public about struggles in southern Africa. (In the 1970s there was even an African Liberation Support Committee organized to raise funds for the liberation movements and public awareness in the USA). I was personally involved in some of this while still in high school during the 1970s, and continued into the 1980s and beyond. Black American churches raised funds for the education of South African youth who had to flee their country after the Soweto massacres. My mother's church was one of them. There were endless rallies, protests and sometimes arrests. The Black media, including the BALTIMORE AFRO-AMERICAN helped keep the issue alive. And our predecessors, folk like W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the original Black Panther Party kept the issue of African American/African solidarity on the front burner. (I even recall a mass rally at Fisk University in which some brothers who were Vietnam vets wanted to know if THEY couldn't go to South Africa to help fight the racist regime. I recall one vet who stood up and said: "We spent years, and some lost our lives fighting the yellow man for the white man. We need to fight our REAL enemies. And I'd like to know how well those f**king crackers shooting kids in Soweto can do against BLACK MEN with GUNS!" Which got a round of applause. But ANC spokesman said that building a movement in America was the best way to assist the struggle in South Africa). To make a long story short, brother, I think if you want to tell it like it is, you need to make sure you know FULLY how it is.
-Savant
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It has been said that in America, it is the Blacks who have most developed something like what one thinker calls the "tragic sense of life." Cornel West speaks of the "tragicomic sense of hope" that has been so eloquently expressed in the "blues sensibility" of AA culture. And then there is the prophetic tradition which is of ancient Hebrew origins, but most powerfully expressed in America in AA spirituals, gospels--in what Du Bois calls the "Sorrow Songs" of Black America. Each reveals a profound perception of the meaning of life. A sense of life's inexorable limitations, but also a sense of its inspiring possibilities. When I've time I may post more reflections on this...after midterm madness is over. Sgh.
-Savant
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Freddy the fool is worst than apolitical. He's politically REACTIONARY. An apolitical person would probably do nothing and say nothing of any significance. Freddy actively OPPOSES progressive Black thought and politics. In fact, he opposes progressive anything. He has ridiculed people involved in the protests against police terror, claiming that only "hoodr__" and ghetto thugs have problems with the police. (The obvious class biases aside for a moment, yell that to Skip Gates, Cornel West, and a couple AA--and one Latino- writer friend of mine who got jacked up by the police). The Black Panthers used to say the idiots like freddy were either pigs or fools. Who knows? He may be BOTH, but I know he's a fool)
-Savant
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