"Letter to the editor" to the Philadelphia Daily News, published on Wednesday, June 18, 2014:
As it has been said, "Everyone wants to inherit property - not guilt." Stu Bykofsky's piece called "the case against reparations" in some ways appears to be well-meaning, even though he compares the issue of reparations for African-American people to "dirty laundry" that has been soiled so by our past sufferings and "remnants of racism today."
However, the "dirty laundry" that Bykofsky wants to bring before a South African-type Truth Commission shows his complete naivete regarding how one group retains power over another. In fact, the so-called Truth Commission was more about the arrogant apartheid government flexing its muscles at the South African people in order to remind the latter that the former would still be running things, long after the great Nelson Mandela had ceremoniously served in his position as president.
To be sure, Bykofsky does admit that African-Americans generally have a far longer history in this country than most European Americans or so-called whites. Yet, he conveniently fails to mention how boatloads of millions of European immigrants were brought here and ultimately evolved into being "working white people," when there were already millions of African-Americans here who were deliberately excluded from the burgeoning political economy of capitalism and, for the most part, remained in a state of peonage as sharecroppers on the same plantations of their former enslavers.
However, there is something much more pernicious about Bykofsky's platitudinous assault against the right of African-American people to express our well-deserved resentment and hostility toward centuries of white supremacy, euphemistically called racism, when he says, "What (white) Americans fear is being called racist every time that conversation starts."
How dare he!
The issue of reparations was settled long ago. Therefore, for the life of me, I can't understand why this topic still exists. For example, Gen. William Sherman, during the Civil War, was redistributing land that had once been owned by enslavers and giving it to freed African-Americans. Unfortunately, as he did with the first two Emancipation Proclamations, the first one by Gov. David Hunter of South Carolina and the second one by Gov. John Fremont of Missouri, President Abraham Lincoln rescinded Sherman's orders and the land was returned to the former slave owners.
And please let us not forget the Freedmen's Bureau that was specifically set up by the U.S. government to aid the former captive workers. Of course, in 1876, Republican Party presidential candidate Rutherford Hayes promised "white" Southerners that he would abolish the Freedmen's Bureau and withdraw federal troops that were protecting the gunless African-Americans, if the aforementioned Southern voters gave him their support. They did. He won, and was placed in office. And he kept his disgraceful promise.
Finally, Bykofsky claims that he wants to help. He even went as far as making an unauthorized offer, "I believe that most Americans, if given a sensible and effective way to make amends, would take it."
If he really means that, then he should stop calling himself "white" and urge his readers to do so as well.
Certainly, most of his fellows will not go for that. You see, claiming to be "white," regardless of one's social status, or cultural/historical past, not only makes a person part of an artificial "majority" group, but it also gives that person a sense of power. The brave words of freedom, equality and democracy that are constantly bandied about by U.S. politicians, newspaper columnists and others are only done so within their comfortable embrace of whiteness.
G. Djata Bumpus
Philadelphia
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Friday, June 20, 2014
Is Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson a One- trick Pony?
Dear friends,
The more that I listen to Neil Degrasse Tyson, the more that I see him as a one-trick pony. While he talks a good game about the stars, he never reflects upon human beings and how we even get access to appreciating science, especially African Americans and Latinos who are, unfortunately, for the most part, trapped as both individuals and groups by the narcissistic spirit of their own self-indulgence called "religion" (with its childish illusion about a world-ruling personality named "God").
Even worse, Tyson's very trite and unoriginal remarks about how he let(s) his kids explore - circumventing the question that was asked to him - also shows how little he has thought about making them aware of the relationships between themselves, their parents, other people, and non-human phenomena. For example, he makes absolutely no reference in the question about American children failing in science and mathematics to the role of education, generally, in perpetuating "the market" that thrives upon war and cares nothing about life, human or nonhuman, or for that which is inanimate.
G. Djata Bumpus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiOwqDmacJo Read full post
Thursday, June 19, 2014
About Erotic Relationships between African American Men and Women
Dear friends,
Prior to the Civil War, it was not uncommon for a free Black man who was in love with a woman who was held captive to sell himself to a slave master, whether that slave master was Black or white (and yes there were thousands of Black slave masters in the antebellum South), with the promise from the aforementioned slave master that he would free his female captive who that Black man wanted to marry, after a term of however long upon which they'd agreed.
After the Civil War the relationships between African American men and women remained fairly secure… However, especially starting with the first massive migration to the north (or here up South as opposed to down south), during WW1, the new northern African American male began taking on the traits of his European American counterparts. It became even worse after the second massive migration to the north (or here up South) during WW2 by African American males.
Still, the idea that females, regardless of skin color, are socialized from a very early age that their primary objective in life is to maintain the approval of boys and men, and having babies in order to "hook" a man, so that he will care for her for the rest of her life is the biggest problem. Of course, once most men - African or African American, Caribbean, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, European or European American, are able to get past their pathetic insecurities and inadequacies that have them needing to find self-worth at the expense of females, then they will do as I did, that is, raise their daughters to be independent yet cooperative, self-sufficient, competent, loving, caring, and prosperous adults. That will also have a huge affect on how boys are raised. But this will require that both males and females embrace value judgments that are not based upon using each other as means to ends so that they can collect as many trinkets and baubles as possible.
G. Djata Bumpus Read full post
Prior to the Civil War, it was not uncommon for a free Black man who was in love with a woman who was held captive to sell himself to a slave master, whether that slave master was Black or white (and yes there were thousands of Black slave masters in the antebellum South), with the promise from the aforementioned slave master that he would free his female captive who that Black man wanted to marry, after a term of however long upon which they'd agreed.
After the Civil War the relationships between African American men and women remained fairly secure… However, especially starting with the first massive migration to the north (or here up South as opposed to down south), during WW1, the new northern African American male began taking on the traits of his European American counterparts. It became even worse after the second massive migration to the north (or here up South) during WW2 by African American males.
Still, the idea that females, regardless of skin color, are socialized from a very early age that their primary objective in life is to maintain the approval of boys and men, and having babies in order to "hook" a man, so that he will care for her for the rest of her life is the biggest problem. Of course, once most men - African or African American, Caribbean, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, European or European American, are able to get past their pathetic insecurities and inadequacies that have them needing to find self-worth at the expense of females, then they will do as I did, that is, raise their daughters to be independent yet cooperative, self-sufficient, competent, loving, caring, and prosperous adults. That will also have a huge affect on how boys are raised. But this will require that both males and females embrace value judgments that are not based upon using each other as means to ends so that they can collect as many trinkets and baubles as possible.
G. Djata Bumpus Read full post
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