The Meaning of the 4th of July bu Frederick Douglas

Dear friends,

Frederick Douglass was a genuine leader of African American people, as well as the United States of America. The recording on the link below is a verbatim read of Douglass' accurate and informative account of both the suffering of Our ancestors as well as the greed and hypocrisy of the founders of this country.

Liberation!

G. Djata Bumpus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kkzmn6UyaSA Read full post

Humans are Political Animals!

Dear friends,

Many academic disciplines analyze people as if We are talking insects. We are not! In other words, whether you place, for example, an ant or a bee either in the Sahel of Africa or on the North Pole, it will be the same creature and exhibit the exact same behavior. Again, people are not talking insects , because just the physical, intellectual, and emotional resources needed and interactions made to help us survive in different climates changes both our behavior and habits a great deal.

Consequently, humans are political animals (or as Aristotle put it "politikon zoon"). That is, We all either need or want whatever it is that We need or want; however, We must behave (speak and act) according to the circumstances in which We find Ourselves, due to the social interactions that will necessarily have to happen in order for Us to get what We either need or want from another person or nonhuman animal.

And this is where the political relations begin. In other words, since few of Us grow Our own food or make Our own clothes, and so forth, at the bare minimum, We must have contact with others who have what we need or want, and behave in a way that is favorable to the party who has what We need or want, in order to acquire whatever it is that We need or want. Ants and bees, for instance, do not have that need for social adaptation. Moreover, a person is being dishonest with herself/himself when s/he claims, "I am not political." Obviously, and unfortunately, even in erotic relationships this happens. Humans are political animals.Period!

G. Djata Bumpus
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Africans and African Americans Must Unite!!!

""The size of your dreams must always exceed your current capacity to achieve them. If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.” — President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf , the 24th and current President of Liberia

Fear friends,

Starting back in the 1960s, young people of African descent began shedding the forms of identity that had been placed upon us like "Negro" and "colored". The term "Black" became the most popular moniker, while "Afro-American" and "African American" were used to some extent as well, as some of us were beginning to embrace both our historical roots and cultural evolution. Also and unfortunately to a smaller extent, a few of us, in the spirit of Marcus Garvey and Dr. W E.B. Dubois, began and have continued to insist upon the necessity of all people of African descent worldwide to see, think, and act in a way that will promote love and prosperity among us (called Pan Africanism).

Note: By the way, there are some of us who now refuse to use the term "African-American" for self-description. Of course, these are the exact same people who along with some of their brainwashed descendents refused to use "Black" as a way of identifying themselves well into the 90s. I have even recently been told that there is an entire Facebook page/club dedicated to those who claim that they are not African American, although the silly people who relate to that page are unaware of the possibility that someone from the Ku Klux Klan, for example, probably created that page. And unfortunately, at least in one instance, I met a seemingly educated African-American woman who calls herself a Negro, refusing to identify herself as either Black or African American.

In any case, during the past decade or so, usage of "African American" has gained far more prominence in our society than it once had. This is a good thing! However, simply calling ourselves that means little, at least to me, if we are unwilling as a people to strip away all of the vicious and decadent behavior to which we have been exposed by the Europeans and their offshoots in the Americas.

To be sure, many of us have been battling for decades, and in recent years many have joined us. Let us continue to move forward!

G. Djata Bumpus Read full post

A personal letter from Dr. Barbara Love about Nelson Mandela's passing

Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2013 23:18:28 -0500 Subject: Nelson Mandela Is Dead

Dear Djata,

I danced in Trafalgar Square the day Nelson Mandela was released from Robben Island.

After twenty seven years in prison, much of that time in solitary confinement, Nelson Mandela was released. The whole world rejoiced, and watched.

In prison, Mandela was a symbol of resistance to tyranny. His life was a statement of willingness to sacrifice everything, personal freedom along with access to open air and sky, to state to the world how precious he thought freedom, and how deep was his desire to obtain it for himself and his people.

In freedom, Mandela became ‘The Madiba’. His name, Mandela, became synonymous with “one who fights for liberation”, not only ‘one who resists oppression’. He became a living mandate for freedom and for peace, for himself, and for the whole world which had become his people.

After twenty-seven years of unjust, sometimes inhumane confinement, he called for truth and reconciliation. He called for humans, in South Africa and everywhere else, to reclaim their inherent love, care and connection. He became a living embodiment of humanity’s hopes and aspirations for a more just, peaceful world.

I was proud to proclaim my love for Mandela every chance I got. It gave me a chance to reach toward the spirit and essence of who he was, and to see what parts of my own soul could try to be like him. Mandela is dead. The Madiba lives. Forever, The Madiba Lives.

Dr. Barbara J. Love
Professor Emeritus, SJE, SOE, UMASS-Amherst
http://about.me/bjlove/#
The AKAR Institute LiberationWorks Read full post

Is the Government to Blame for Our Problems?

Dear friends,

It's not the government that's controlling the people. After all, the government is run by human beings… Nevertheless, we live in a market-driven, possession-oriented society, so our "values" are controlled by "the market". Moreover the corporations that control this market also control the government and the rest of society - and the way that we think and act.

Therefore, our energies are focused on "what we have" as opposed to "who we are". That means that our government is more of an illusion that we have about some kind of order to our society, when reality, we are all agents of the system whose values are based upon randomly using each other as means to ends, showing no empathy to anyone, be it personally or professionally.

G. Djata Bumpus
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Tavis Smiley interviews Cornel West about Success and Spirituality

Dear friends,

On the link below is a 5 minutes-long video of an interview done by Tavis Smiley with my longtime, dear friend and colleague Dr. Cornel West. In his usual smooth and intellectually powerful voice, Cornel points out the difference between loving one's self by being narcissistic, and loving one's self within the context of sharing love with others both emotionally and spiritually. Please take a listen.

Peace & Love,
G. Djata Bumpus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAfxFEGF-wY Read full post

Obama and African American Spirituality

"Please remember that our spirituality should be a vitamin - not a drug."
(originally posted 9/14/08)



Dear friends,

According to almost all of the agencies of the mass communications media, if he is successful, which I believe he will be, Senator Barack Obama will become our nation's "first Black president". I do not like that moniker though. I find that notion bothersome, because, at least to me, it trivializes both the historical and present contributions made by African Americans to both the development and continued proliferation of the United States as an advanced world power.

In other words, to imply that Barack Obama winning this election is the greatest achievement of our cultural group, ignores the fact that the active protestations of African Americans have been at the lead, in enhancing both freedom and democracy, at every historical stage in this country, for all citizens. This includes the time when a "6-2' mulatto" man named Crispus Attucks, standing in the front of a group of English colonists, against British troops, on the Boston Commons, was the first one shot and killed that special day. That confrontation, of course, was the catalyst for the official start of the War of Independence that turned thirteen colonies into the nation in which we now live - and love.

African Americans are an African people, from many different African cities and villages, who were forcibly made part of an enterprise that initially began amongst Arabs and Eastern Europeans (from where the word "slave" came), about a thousand years or forty generations ago as the International Slave Trade. However, it deteriorated into being what Dr. W.E.B. DuBois described as the "hunting of black skins" not long after Christopher Columbus' famed voyage across the Ocean Sea, renaming that enterprise the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Yet, the institution now known as the "Black Church" did not begin when European enslavers used red-hot iron brands and scarred captive African workers, so-called slaves, while reading the latter verses from the Holy Bible, in a process called seasoning. Rather, the Black Church started in the holds of the aforementioned enslavers' hideous vessels. Again, people from different cities and villages, speaking different languages and having varied customs, were now forced to embrace that which they shared as Africans - their religiosity.

But when we talk about our "souls"/spirituality it seems to mean different things to different people. And so, in his work called After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Aldous Huxley offered, "Our 'souls' are so little 'us' that we cannot even form the remotest conception how 'we' should react to the universe, if we were ignorant of language, or even of our own language. The nature of our 'souls' and of the world they inhabit would be entirely different from what it is, if we had never learnt to talk, or if we had learnt to talk Eskimo instead of English. Madness consists, among other things, in imagining that our 'soul' exists apart from the language our nurses happen to have taught us."

Huxley makes an observation here that helps to explain the photo above, which shows Senator Barack Obama, literally, surrounded, in a very private situation , by a group of fellow African Americans - engaging in a group prayer. To be sure, they are not concerned with whether or not he belongs to a particular religious denomination. There is something much deeper happening there. For African peoples have appreciated their spirituality, long before they had ever heard of Europeans, or even Asians, for that matter.

In his book African Religions and Philosophies, John Mbiti reveals, “Wherever the African is, there is his religion: he carries it to the fields where he is sowing seeds or harvesting a new crop; he takes it with him to the beer party or to attend a funeral ceremony; and if he is educated, he takes religion with him to the examination room at school or in the university...Traditional religions are not primarily for the individual, but for his community of which he is a part...What people do is motivated by what they believe, and what they believe springs from what they do and experience. So then, belief and action in African traditional society cannot be separated: they belong to a single whole.”

Up until the end of 19th Century America, religious institutions were largely community-oriented, among both African Americans and European Americans. Today, however, for the most part, in this possession-oriented society, the individual as a "believer", as opposed to his or her membership in a community of believers, is what is promoted as the greatest importance to the commonweal.

Still, the congregants of Black churches have always been at the forefront of our cultural group's social progress, by engaging in activities that deal with our outer as well as our inner liberation, such as church folks helping to free captive workers (so-called slaves) during the period of chattel slavery to organizing then leading protest marches and providing facilities for breakfast programs for school children, as they did in the Sixties and Seventies - to helping to lead the fight against apartheid in South Africa, during the Eighties.

Unfortunately, too often today, a lot of concentration is on “being saved” and using the word “God” in every other sentence as some type of password to have membership in "the herd". Many folks are even using religion as a narcotic - like heroin or cocaine; a common refrain from them is: "I'm high on Jesus!".

Also, having “fellowship” is another term that is being bandied about these days. I went to a church, quite recently, whose Sunday program sheet read at the bottom, after the hymns and prayers listed: Worship ends, Service begins. Unfortunately, and shamefully, this was NOT in a Black church.

Black preachers must imitate the life of the historical Jesus who fed the hungry and healed the sick - physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. The latter did not just sit around and pray. S/he "worked" for change. During 1963, in his now famous Letter From a Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King wrote, in part:

"There was a time when the church was very powerful in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators"' But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide. and gladiatorial contests.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an arch-defender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

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. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom, They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets..."

While Dr. King's "letter" was largely directed towards "white" clergy, today, these words, very much, apply to most African American clerics across the nation, as well. That is a fact that should bring a feeling of shame to many who call themselves ecclesiastics. The Black Church has the power to change things! It is not up to "God" to make this world better. After all, if it is, then why does "He" need clerics?

Finally, to be sure, African peoples of the Americas, have a lengthy history of identifying with spiritual things. Had we not, then there would have been no way for us to have endured the long voyages crunched up beside - and stacked up on top of - one another in our mutual stench, for months at a time, much less being able to sustain ourselves, for centuries, in chattel slavery, as well as the continued impropriety directed towards us, even at this present date, by many of our fellows citizens, at all levels of society. Therefore, the real "spirit" of African American people is reflected in our legacy - a lengthy struggle for equality, dignity and justice. Friends, the power of love and its goodness will overcome the weakness of greed and injustice.

Moreover, please remember that our spirituality should be a vitamin - not a drug.

One Love, One Heart, One Spirit,
G. Djata Bumpus Read full post