Re: politically insane

From: Scott Chase (ecphoric@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed 10 Sep 2003 - 03:06:53 GMT

  • Next message: Brad Jensen: "RE: politically insane"

    >From: Douglas Brooker <dbrooker@clara.co.uk>
    >Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    >To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    >Subject: Re: politically insane
    >Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2003 19:10:36 +0100
    >
    >
    >
    >Jonathan Davis wrote:
    >
    > > [Jonathan 2] That African-Americans are a deeply troubled group is
    > > obvious. Regarding education versus crime fighting budgets, it is
    > > possible, given the scale of Afro-American criminality and the crisis in
    > > education of Afro-American males, that they overlap. I do not think this
    > > significant, just a sad indication of the state of that community.
    >
    >you speak like a white person - do I guess right?
    >
    >are there any black people on this list with something to say here?
    >
    >
    I hope so.

    Though not black, I'd point out that we should add some historical context of what African Americans have had to put up with from a largely white and Eurocentrized society. Not only are a good portion of them descended from ancestors that didn't voluntarily immigrate to the land of the "free" and home of the brave, they have been treated historically as untermenschen whether it be as "subhuman" slaves for several centuries or "separate but equal" under atrocious Jim Crow segregation.

    One of the relatively unknown pioneers of civil rights, Harry Moore, was
    *killed* by a bomb in 1951 not far from where I live a little before Parks and King made themselves be known. The civil rights movement helped turn things around for the better, but occupies just a small portion of the American historical timeline since slaves were brought over from Africa. An eyeblink really.

    Britain freed her slaves (eg- in Jamaica) well before the American Civil War and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, but even somebody coming of age much later such as Marcus Garvey wasn't too fond of the Brits and their historic foothold in Jamaica. That nation has suffered the legacy of slavery just as African American's have in the United States. Garveyism had influence not only on Rastafrianism, but also black militancy in the States. Malcolm X's dad was a Garveyite.

    Strange that the Rastas would revere Haile Selassie as divine as foretold by Marcus Garvey (an historic fiction) when Garvey himself was rather critical of Selassie for not training the Ethiopian military well enough so that Italian forces wouldn't have had such easy pickings in that country.

    IIRC Garvey and the great African American leader DuBois weren't all that keen on each other, as they represented two polar opposites in black political movements, Garvey as Back to Africa separatist, not unlike the Black Muslims, and DuBois an integrationist.

    Even in the early days of abolitionism and freedom there were pioneers for the African American cause such as Frederick Douglass (writing a famous slave narrative that brought the horrors of slavery first hand to a shocked public). And for those who might think of blacks as ignorant they should read some accounts of the ingenious ways in which runaway slaves made their way north, with direction via spirituals such as "Follow the Drinking Gourd" and intelligence agents such as Harriet Tubman leading the way. The plantation owners were the ignorant ones as the slaves were able to transmit or receive messages coded in seemingly innocuous songs with co-opted Biblical references and even some quilt patterns, with the slave-owners relatively clueless as to what was going on as folks were running north, sometimes as far as Canada.

    Further south runaway blacks were helping Seminole allies fight a guerilla war in Florida, the likes of which wouldn't be seen again until Vietnam.

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