XicanoPwr in Tribute to Oscar Zeta Acosta

I haven't read XicanoPwr's blog in quite some time because I've been very busy with my work and school. However reading this blog right here reminds me of how great this blog truly is:

I originally wrote this post on Scholars and Rogues as part of the Scholars and Rogues’ Scrogues Gallery. When I was asked to do a write-up for Oscar Zeta Acosta, I was happy to do it. As I was doing my research on Oscar, something mystical came over me. It was like I was meant to write his story. I like most people who hear Oscar’s name, know him for his literary works, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) and The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973). What I never realized was that Oscar was not only an author but a legendary and compelling figure in the Chicano movement in the late 1960s. Oscar never really received his due in Chicano history - a history that not remains only in the shadows of the general American culture, but hardly ever mentioned among the younger generation of the Latina/o community. This is my tribute to Oscar Zeta Acosta, “The Brown Buffalo,” and hopefully I am able to shine a light to a man who not only help change contemporary literature along with his good friend Hunter S. Thompson but also put his mark on case law and his role in the Chicano movement. Here is to you Brown Buffalo, wherever you are.

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Para Justicia y Libertad

Short Announcement

Cross-posted from The Ghost of Tom Joad.

I haven't been blogging lately because I injured my back at work. Not a serious injury, just a back sprain. I'll blog more on that latter. In the mean time, some workplace safety issues I just read up on regarding miners. UPS has a lot of safety issues itself and I should know since I'm the union representative on the local safety committee. More on all of that latter though:

The Mine Safety and Health Administration’s (MSHA’s) foot-dragging on developing new mine safety rules mandated by the 2006 MINER Act and other legislation has caught up with it. Now, the agency is begging for help.

Sundown Towns

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Ann blogs about the history of sundown towns and their continued existence today:

Many Americans ask themselves why is that black citizens remain the outsiders in this supposed moral society that rewards hard work. Many people wonder why black citizens have made so little progress in the following 143 years after the abolition of slavery. What they do not know is that there was a time when black Americans lived in better more racially diverse conditions during the 1870s and the earlier 1880s, when Reconstruction was struggling to avoid the vise-like death grip that burgeoning white supremacy had caught it in. Many Americans do not realize that de jure residential segregation grew progressivly worse until around 1968, and that it did not start to somewhat decrease until the 1970s, 1980s, well after the Civil Rights Movement had ended.

The Heart of Whiteness

I've been reading this book these past couple of weeks entitled The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege by University of Texas at Austin professor Robert Jensen. It's a nice, short read (approx. 96 pages) about the mechanics of racism and white privilege, and how whites maintain the racial hierarchy through their unwillingness to address the fact that we live in a white supremacist society. Rather than merely examining the affects of racism on people of color, the book turns its attention to whiteness and how a system of white privilege, supported and perpetuated by whites, also damages whites by inhibiting them from making meaningful connections with other human beings.

In one of the later chapters Professor Jensen also offers some pretty sound advice on organizing people around the various forms of inequality that exist:

If I were to attempt any statement about solutions, it is that progressive social change requires one to go forward with passion and a sense of commitment in what one is fighting for, while at the same time being realistic about just how much one really understands a complex world. Those two things often are in conflict. To find the courage and energy it takes to stand against power, one has to believe deeply in the cause. There are few traditional rewards of status or material wealth to be gained in movements for progressive social change, and the more radical the movement, the fewer the rewards. So, the motivation for most people is passion and a belief that we are right. But at the same time, we have to retain an understanding that while we may be right in some sense about the quest for justice, our specific analysis at any given moment may be slightly off, or maybe even drastically wrong. If we are not open intellectual and moral humility, we are more likely to make mistakes, possibly quite serious mistakes, at some point. This is especially true of people in the more privileged sectors of society... One general principle can help guide us in these endeavors: As we struggle with how to confront these systems of power and privilege, we should go toward that which most frightens us... When we are dealing with issues of oppression, we are most likely to make progress when we face the things that we wish we did not have to face (85, 86).

With this in mind, it's important to realize that many of the significant social, political, gains made throughout history didn't simply come about through people rigorously lobbying or "getting out the vote." "The powers that be" didn't simply hand over the eight-hour work day, give women the right to vote, or end Jim Crow segregation out of the goodness of their hearts. Those things were a result of struggle -- of people out in the streets getting their heads cracked open by the police and/or military. Some of what Jensen states above reminds me of that one Mao Zedong quote:

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

The road to equality may not be pleasant one, but as Jensen suggests in his book, if we are earnest about creating a fair and just society than we (particularly those of us with privilege) have to accept that it does not come without costs. Part of the struggle entails that we realize and give up our privilege. It will be painful -- not as painful as the pain that the more oppressed experience, but it is a necessary pain that we must endure we if wish to recognize the truth and to eradicate the various "-isms" that inhibit us from realizing our full human potential.


If you're interested in reading excerpts from the The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege you can check them out here at the author's homepage.

Average Asian

Just saw this on my friend Holly Bun's blog Three Girl Rhumba.

sunday night jam sessions

on the menu tonight:
dj drez feat rocky dawuni
saul williams
sade
ky-mani marley
wax poetic

chill out before the hectic week ahead.
always conscious lyrics
sunday night jam sessions

The Struggle Against the Brahmin/The Struggle Against the White Man: Inter-Connectivity Between India/U.S. Struggles

Cross-posted from Blogbharti.

I was recently invited by my (blogger) friend Kuffir to blog for Blogbharti in their Spotlight Series, an Indian blog aggregator, whose stated mission is to make sure that "all voices from the Indian blogosphere are properly heard." Kuffir, from Hyderabad, India, is an editor at Blogbharti and also blogs here. I was very honored he invited me (along with others) to blog about a topic of my liking. So I decided to blog about the similarities between the Dalit struggle and the struggles of people of color in the United States; as well as on the privileges and ignorances of whites and Brahmins in the United States and India and the system that keeps them up and keeps "the other" down. For those of you in America and abroad you can read more about Dalit issues on my blog here and here and as well as clicking on the "Dalit" tag and "Caste" tag at Blogbharti.

Trying to jog my brain on what to write I decided to flip back to my old posts on caste, especially my two posts on Dalits and Hinduism. One thing that struck me was the similarities of caste and whiteness; specifically on not seeing one's own privilege as an upper caste Hindu or as a white person. One thing whites have done in America is try to co-opt movements from people of color and try to make them their own or try to co-opt them by trying to enfold certain leaders from communities of color into the mainstream political fold so only cosmetic changes are done and no real change happens. The main political parties are still run by white males with their token people of color mixed in but the reality is, is that these parties are still guided by white elites and essentially only represent the interests of white elites; which in turn shows us why there was never really any big change in the American racial landscape after the civil rights bills of the 1960s.

So too for the Congress Party of India, which for a long time was really the only political party that had control of the Indian government. While Gahndi and the Congress Party claimed to represent the interests of India and to be for all Indians in reality the Congress Party was actually run by upper caste men; while, even though many of whom were more "liberal" minded when it came to religion, they still enjoyed the benefits of caste. Many in the Congress Party, including the bourgeois and upper caste Gandhi, were unaware of the caste privilege and in fact even lauded the caste system as divinely inspired. This was meet with severe and harsh criticism by Dalit leaders such as Ambedkar (one just need look at the title of Ambedkar's book What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables).

Another similarity between caste and white supremacy is that both of these systems and institutions have been meet with both mainstream and more radical and militant resistance. In the United States (early one) in the civil righs movement whites and Blacks united to fight against Jim Crow laws, yet when it came time to really institute change in the U.S. many whites decided to back out and not confront their own white privilege; to them the civil rights legislation was enough and if Blacks couldn't make it then it was "their own damn fault." Liberal whites could "feel good" about helping their Black "brothers and sisters" but that didn't mean they actually viewed them as their equals. Instead those who called for radical change in the corrupt and unjust white supremacist system were Blacks and other people of color. They formed radical organizations that confronted whiteness and white supremacy, such as the Black Panthers and Brown Berets. It was people of color, not whites, who organized their communities and demanded real change and took militant stances in demanding equality for all and access to the vast abundance of wealth that was horded by the elite.

As in India it was not the Brahmins and upper cast Hindus who led for genuine reform, it was the Dalits. While many upper caste Hindus did seek to abolish "caste discrimination" they did not seek to abolish the caste system itself, just as whites were comfortable with seeking to ban Jim Crow laws but not white privilege itself. Ambedkar, who was a Dalit, was able to see in Gandhi and the Congress Party what they could not see in themselves because they were blind by their privilege. “Examine the Gandhian attitude to strikes,” stated Ambedkar, “the Gandhian reverence for caste and the Gandhian doctrine of Trusteeship of the rich…Gandhism is the philosophy of the well-to-do and leisured class.” Also it was radical Dalits in India who created the Dalit Panthers, in direct connection with the Black Panthers, and tackled the problem of caste head on and with no regrets.

So what does this mean for those in America who fight against white privilege and those in India who fight against the caste system and upper caste reactionaries? For one, in this highly globalized and technological world both sides can view each others triumphs, failures, writings, and thought in order to better themselves and their own struggles and in turn open up lines of communication between each other and two it meas Dalits and people of color can align themselves in a shared common struggle against capitalism and of destructive social systems so ingrained in each society that it is nearly impossible to think of said society without thinking of caste or white privilege and racism. Not only will it be beneficial to study both movements mutually, but in this globalized world both systems collide with each other and play out in other countries and spill over amongst themselves. One can't separate America's goal for domination of the globalized world with that of white supremacy and one can't deny that it is the elites in both countries (which Anand Patwardhan captured so well in his documentary War and Peace) who benefit from globalism and capitalism. Thus there is an inter-connectivity between privileged white males in Europe and America and privileged upper caste males in India. Thus there too must also be an inter-connectivity between people of color and immigrants in Europe and America and the Dalits, Shudras, and OBCs in India in order to combat this new conflation of oppression were both lower classes are left behind in the dust and left to suffer for the "betterment of the 'whole' society."