Are they Civil Rights or Human Rights?

Dear friends,

The ever-reactionary US government has, conveniently, diminished all movements, along with their activists, that oppose the actions of the aforementioned government to being in the same league as the sterile movement of the Sixties that died with Martin Luther King. For example, today, ridiculous media and other endorsed spokespeople, call the great revolutionary and Black Nationalist Malcolm X, a “civil tights” leader. Huh? To be sure, about that, Malcolm is rolling around in his grave.

But this diminishing the significance of our human rights just mentioned above can be seen in the inability of African Americans to drink from certain water fountains down South as being called a “civil right”. Being seated fairly on a bus may be a civil right. After all, at least you can get on the bus – or walk. However,  when, in fact, all humans must consume water/fluids in periodic intervals or they will succumb, it is a violation of one’s rights as a human being to not be able to drink from any particular public fountain. . This also applies to public toilets.

Liberation!

G. Djata Bumpus Read full post

Dr. Martin Luther King's manifesto - Letter from a Birmingham Jail

"Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world."

Dear friends,

While there have been many Black leaders, both male and female, who are deserving of a memorial statue, at least, one of those many is now finally being recognized. Moreover, while Dr. King's real views have been trivialized by a government- and corporate-controlled mainstream media and other North American cultural institutions as "A dream", the real work that was done by centuries of activism - and still goes on - has brought African Americans and many others to this point, and is captured in a letter that is, to me, Martin Luther King's manifesto. It appears on the link below. Cheers!

G. Djata Bumpus
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/resources/article/annotated_letter_from_birmingham Read full post

Is Miley Cyrus Racist?

Dear friends,

All of this brouhaha about Miley Cyrus is directly tied to the continued use and embrace of the moniker "white". That term only perpetuates racism. After all, many Latinos and Asians call themselves "white". The term white is nothing more than a mean-spirited claim that people make in order to be pot of an artificial "majority" group.

In fact, right here in America, before Adolf Hitler's sick fantasy about an Aryan race, Irish, Polish, Italians, and Jews were not even considered white. Still, the George Zimmerman privilege that people enjoy by calling themselves white is evident by the fact that those who call themselves white feel disempowered not to do so.. Again, they are just being mean-spirited!

Moreover, one of the major problems is: in a socially-stratified society such as ours, one can be a member of an oppressor group and an oppressed one simultaneously - the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill debacle proved that point quite adequately. Therefore, females who call themselves white, as well as homosexuals who do that, often blur the distinctions between those who are oppressed and those who oppress.

Yet, to me, all of the complaining about Miley Cyrus has little merit, since Tyler Perry movies and television productions, along with fake scholars like Michael Eric Dyson, and "jiggerboo" Jay-Z, because of the consistency of their attacks against African-American people, are far more harmful in terms of  both verbal and audio images for all youth, especially those of African descent.

G. Djata Bumpus
http://groupthink.jezebel.com/solidarity-is-for-miley-cyrus-1203666732 Read full post

Presidential Conventions of 2012 and Religion

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." - Karl Marx
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Dear friends,

It's interesting that ALL of the speakers at both of the political conventions 2012 ended their addresses with religious salutes. And so, while such gestures may bring warm feelings, temporarily, to many, at what point will humankind take responsibility for realizing our true essence and seeking to relate to each other and what we do, in a way that will bring genuine peace and happiness, without us havin

to engage in the drama of politics? 

In his often, deliberately, misquoted work called, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right - Introduction, the great Karl Marx offers, "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."

Finally, we cannot appreciate our true essence as a species, much less ever find real peace and happiness, as long as we obscure its existence through religious claims that do not reflect our behavior as species beings. Cheers!

G. Djata Bumpus

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