Saturday Beats: Learning and the First Time

Was a day late on this one, sorry. From the latest issue of The Beat Within.

What Is Writing?
When I was growing up,
I learned how to smoke and drink.
I learned how to smoke blunts and mix drinks.
I learned how to bag up weed and crack
I learned how to load, carry, aim, and shoot a gun.
I learned how to cook.
I learned how to cut hair.
I learned how to cut hair.
I learned how to survive on the streets.

I want to learn
how to select the right house in the right neighborhood
for my family and me.
I want to learn how to pay my bills.
I want to learn how to go grocery shopping monthly.
I want to learn to be a good husband and father
and a role model for my family.
-By Vernelle

My First Time

I came into juvi for the first time yesterday. Thrown into shower when it shut off before I got my clothes off.

Then a small courtroom. I shivered with cloths, hair and body on the cold hard square of cement I had to sit on. They take my things and take a piccture there. And TB test me.
Next thing I know my dad's on the phone with me and my moms too, they're telling me not to be sad and how I'll be out soon. That was over 24 hours ago.

How I remember being snatched away from home and my wonderful beautiful girlfriend. They cuffed me and sent me into the big black cop Durango without a good bye or anything. She probably thought I'd come right out after talking with the cops, well so did I.

I still haven't got my charges or any reason why I'm here and I feel so hopeless and helpless.
Its the first night in almost eight months when I couldn't tell my baby goodnight. When I couldn't cover up my brother as he's falling asleep before he hits the pillow couldn't hassle mom or dad couldn't do anything really, but cry. I did cry a lot. My eyes are red from crying. I'm sitting in this room seeing the other's pass by.
-By Michael.

Read Young Man... READ

New ways of getting young urban males to read.

Great blog

Urban Horrors

A Concise History of Race Relations in the U.S.

Found this great cartoon over at the blog Why Am I Not Surprised?

The International Committee for Black Authenticity... and learning to self actualize

Hello. My name is Macha and I feel like asking the asking the question (and maybe ranting a little), about who decides who is and isn’t Black. Originally I thought it was meant to personal choice of self identification. Something that your family shares with you about your heritage and past. Sometimes, I’ll admit, it is based on varying shades of skin color.

I watched the movie Gandhi the other day, and Mohandas Gandhi was thrown off a train in South Africa for being Black in first class. The republican party has made an executive decision that Barack Obama doesn’t count as Black because he’s actually “hafrican". Although somehow he was Black enough for Rush Limbaugh to sing “Barack the magic Negro”. How confusing. Once at work I was told I only count as half, not a whole Black person, (they never bothered to ask what my ‘make-up was’ they just assumed because I am light) and yet I endure all the “you’re Black, you understand…” comments. A friend of mine, Joey, received an award in 8th grade, it was given to him with great intentions I’m sure, but Joey received The Gift of Blackness. It came complete on a plaque, from the hands of White school administrators. Maybe it was just in case he forgot.

As a scientist it’s hard for me to understand how being Black is quantitative, yet it is. Early in my life, like grade school, I was taught that Black was something you were born as hence skin color, and no matter the shade any pigmentation you had labeled you Black. I was ok with this, as it makes logical sense. As I grew into a teen, I learned from both Blacks and Whites, that there was such a thing as Not-Black-Enough or Too-Black. This is a bit perplexing when you’re at a self defining age. This Black Authenticity wasn’t solely based on skin color, although at first it was, the lighter you were the less Black you were, but then it morphed into a social standard. This is when I started asking myself who set this social standard and what was its purpose. In my mid teens not being Black enough meant that you were probably light, listened to music other than rap, had at least a few non-Black friends, strait hair, and in my case, God forbid, a vegetarian. Too-Black was a caricature of what White people think Blacks are; Dark skin, kinky hair, opinionated, loud, intimidating, only associate with other Blacks and you blamed everything on the man. In this world there is no middle ground. Do you see my dilemma? This definition of what was authentically Black (‘Too-Black’ or ‘Not-Black-Enough) does nothing but cause infighting and confusion. And worse, it makes us blind to the image that we hold in the world in general. We can become so absorbed in being enough or too much that we fail to realize that we still stand as a whole body. It’s the ultimate weapon against Black people as a whole. United we fight, divided we fall.

I realized one day not only was I being played, thinking maybe I wasn’t Black enough, I had let someone else define what being Black meant to me. Blasphemy! It wasn’t even Blacks who defined it. My parents did a great job, but they were competing with millions of media messages and the day to day of, well... White people. I said to myself one day, Do you see how stupid this is? Someone else has defined Blackness for you. I continued with questions like, who decides this? Is there a committee somewhere in the world that defines Blackness? How come I’m not on it? Are Black people making this decision, or are our decisions being influenced without us even realizing it since birth? Is this why from the time we’re little we’re told to straiten our hair? Is this why there are no dark haired Black women in pop music or television? Maybe that's why every light skinned girl on American Idol has to press her hair by the end of the show. How come we’re so quick to throw on a blonde weave and contacts? Why do we think rapping about bitches and drugs is ok when we can walk outside and see what that music is doing to the self esteem of our brothers and sisters? Why is R. Kelly ok and Michael Jackson is not? Why is this message SO important for me to hear and WHO is sending it to me? And it’s not just true for us, it’s everywhere.

Maybe you sitting there, you’re not Mexican enough, Chinese enough, Persian enough, hey maybe not even Irish enough. Did you let someone else define your identity? Did you even realize you let them? My parents taught me that you never have to explain yourself to anyone but yourself, and it took a lot of self actualizing to wash all the media versions of myself out of my head. We live in a world where ‘the one drop rule’ is very much in effect, to ignore it is to ignore the sun in the morning sky. How can we let a person or media question who we are at the core and not say anything? How can we not arrive at our own conclusions? We have to say something, and by saying something we are defining who we are. We are in control of the self definition we want in the world, and we all as individuals need to take these steps. Being Black to me is much more than listening to Beyonce, perming my hair and eating pork rinds. If that sounds insulting to you it should, but think about it. You define you, no one else.

Peace.
Macha H.

State Moves to Close East Oakland Community High School

I read a disturbing article in the Chronicle today about the closing down of the East Oakland Community High School. The article's lede opened up with:

Failing to follow the rules in a public school system can result in expulsion, and the rules apply to everyone: students, teachers, administrators and -- in Oakland -- even the schools themselves.

The most recent expulsions in the state-run Oakland Unified School District are East Oakland Community High School and nine teachers who walked off campus with students in tow last Monday to protest a district decision to close the school. They held "Freedom School" classes at a nearby church.

I remember late in 2006 going to East Oakland Community High School to see my girlfriend's niece perform in a play that her church was involved in and the play involved kids from her church and the school since one of the pastors at my girlfriend's church was a music teacher at the middle school section of the East Oakland Community High School.

Walking into that school was a real pleasure. All over the walls in the gym and in the school's hallways were posters of Black Panthers and civil rights leaders: Cesar Chavez, Huey P., Angela Davis, etc. There were student drawn posters of people of color uniting to fight oppression, poetry on Black and Brown power, history display cases on revolutionary movements within the U.S., past and present. It was quite the invigorating experience.

I turned to my girlfriend saying. "Wow, this is definitely a school I would love to teach at in the future."

This wasn't the typical white-bred curriculum and mindless memorization of history "facts" and numbers. It was a school that seemed to actually want to jog the mind of it's students and teach them their history as well as empower them to make a difference.

So, what was the crime of this school? Well, for those of us steeped in the history (or even a casual observer of race in America) of racism and white supremacy it's not hard to see why this school was shutdown only three years after its inception.

The report went on to say:

"The district accidentally found out school administrators had submitted a master curriculum, and none of the classes they held were on the district's required list of classes," said Alice Spearman, the school board member who represents the district. "The school didn't offer physical education classes, and that's state law. They had an after-school program that was integrated into daily classes and had people teaching there who weren't employed by the district," she added. "If any school ever needed to be closed, it was this school."

Oh sweet Jesus! No physical education programs! Oh for shame East Oakland Community High School! For shame indeed! And outsiders teaching children! Oh the humanity!

Dramatics aside that list seems a pretty pathetic excuse to shut down a school, especially when other high school and middle schools in the same district have much worse problems than no PE program (and those schools haven't been shutdown).

Of course, that's not to say there weren't any problems at that school. I'm sure there were. As 17-year-old Glenda Frost can attest too:

"We weren't getting required classes, teachers didn't use textbooks, and I felt like if I took the state test, I don't think I could pass it because we weren't learning what we needed to pass that test. We'd learn about the Black Panthers, Cesar Chavez, and it seemed like we were just learning the stuff over and over again," said Glenda, now a senior at Skyline High School. "In ninth-grade humanities, we learned about the Black Panthers and in 10th grade, we learned about it again."

There's much more to a radical take on history than learning about the Black Panthers and Cesar Chavez. And to relearn about them two years in a row? That's just bad research and shows how some (maybe not all) teachers aren't critically engaging their students as they claim. But, again, this school is only three years old, hell, schools that have been around in this district for 50 years still have problems!

But Frost went on to say this:

"I had a teacher who told students to pull out a history book and find Malcolm X and Cesar Chavez, and when they didn't find them, he said the books were biased and full of lies. And that was the last time we opened the history books."

Now, in my mind that's a good thing. To have a teacher tell it like it is about state approved history books is a fresh of breath air from the norm; which is teachers just forcing their kids to open up those books and to force feed them lies and to make them memorize the "facts" in those books instead of critically engaging in them (and yes, I do know how hard it is to get teenagers to critically engage in anything, but that's why you're a teacher).

Also, the fact that this was the only student they quoted and this story didn't include any defenders of the school or quotes from students and parents who loved the school shows the bias of the story as well as the utter lack of critical reporting that I've learned to undertake in my four years of schooling on the subject (I'm a journalism major).

The article went on:

"The program was not delivering the type of instruction our kids need," said Alex Katz, a school district spokesman. "They had the largest drop in test scores in the district, and possibly the largest drop ever, and they didn't attract the numbers they needed to stay open. They had classes listed on the schedule, but we found no evidence those classes actually existed."

Test scores are low in almost any area were there are people of color because of the way the school system creates their test as well as teachers their own kids. While this high school may have been good it's very hard to erase eight years of previous education from a school system that is steeped in white supremacy. Also, does low test scores actually equal low intelligence? And low IQ? Plus, many opponents of IQ state that IQ tests are culturally biased as well as irrelevant to many people. Could it be the case that this high school refused to force it's kids to memorize mindless facts and numbers in order to be good test takers and instead taught it's kids history relevant to themselves as well as empowering them. What's more important? Study machines or critically engaged citizens? To the Oakland Unified School District and the state it's study machines. Which gives us a window of opportunity to see white supremacy in action and what they view as "smart" and "success."

This is just another example of how when well meaning teachers and parents and community leaders try to teach their children empowerment and the truth and try to make them critically engaged human beings the system shuts it down and puts it to a halt. It doesn't matter that Oakland Unified School District has a majority of people of color on it's board, all that matters is, is that the institutional racism is so embedded in the school system that whenever someone tries to actually teach the students something that is based on reality and in exposing white supremacy and racism they get halted and cries come out that they are deviating from the norm and not "teaching."

The article ends with Frost:

"I felt like I was wasting my time at that school, talking about revolutionary stuff and saving our kids, but not teaching us anything," Glenda said.

Now that's just sad.

Image From:
This East Oakland Life

Secret Asian Man

While working on a Race & Stereotypes project for one of my Asian American Studies classes, one of my group mates forwarded me some samples of the Secret Asian Man comic strip to use for our presentation. The description of the the strip from the official site reads:

Secret Asian Man is a weekly comic strip that is currently printed across the country in cities such as Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta as well as in papers in Silicon Valley, Northern California and several national ethnic media papers. The comic strip is an often brutally honest commentary on the state of race relations in America.

They're pretty damn funny. Check 'em out whenever you have the chance.

Knowing Our History

Professor Black Woman recently posted a blog stating:

Miss Profe recently suggested we post books that help us all develop a more historical sense of oppression across cultures and stand in solidarity with one another

So, here is my list of books that I think would help in our fight against racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression in our everyday lives.

For books on race please check our Book section in the right hand column on our web page. For other books and journal articles:

Economics and Class Studies

Ambedkar, B. R. Annihilation of Caste. Bhim Patrika Publications, 1936.

Black, William K. The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry. University of Texas Press, 2005.

Chalcraft, John T. The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863-1914. State University of New York Press, 2004.

Chalermsripinyorat, Rungrawee. “Politics of Representation: A Case Study of Thailand’s Assembly of the Poor.” Critical Asian Studies 36, no. 4 (2004): 541-566.

Darlington, Ralph. “There is no Alternative: Exploring the Options in the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike.” Capital & Class no. 87 (Autumn 2005):71-95.

Ghose, Sagarika. “The Dalit in India.” Social Research 70, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 83-109.

Grey, Mary. “Dalit Women and the Struggle for Justice in a World of Global Capitalism.” Feminist Theology: The Journal of Britain & Ireland School of Feminist Theology 14, no. 1 (Sept. 2005): 127-149.

Gutman, Huck. “Capitalism as a World Economy.” Monthly Review 55, no. 4 (Sept. 2003): 1-13.

Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. MIT Press, 1972.

Meera, Nanda. “A ‘Broken People’ Defend Science: Reconstructing the Deweyan Buddha of India’s Dalits.” Social Epistemology 15, no. 4 (Oct. 2001): 335-365.

Perelman, Michael. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secrete History of Primitive Accumulation. Duke University Press, 2000.

Reiman, Jeffery. The Rich Get Rich The Poor Get Prison, Eighth Edition. Allyn & Bacon, 2006.

Rourke, Thomas R. “Michael Novak and Yves R. Simon on the Common Good and Capitalism.”
Review of Politics 58, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 229-258.

Sharma, Arvind. “Dr. B. R. Ambedkar on the Aryan Invasion and the Emergence of the Caste
System in India.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73, no. 3 (Sept. 2005): 843-870.

Shipler, David K. The Working Poor: Invisible in America. Knopf, 2004.

Jondhale, Surendra and Johannes Beltz, eds. Reconstructing the World: B. R. Ambedkar and Buddhism in India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Weil, Robert. “Conditions of the Working Classes in China.” Monthly Review 58, no. 2 (June
2006): 25-48.

Woods, Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. Verso, 2002.

Marxian/Marxist Thought

Foster, John B. Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature. Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Hinkelammert, Franz J. The Ideological Weapons of Death: A Theological Critique of Capitalism. Orbis Books, 1986.

Llorente, Renzo. “Analytical Marxism and the Division of Labor.” Science & Society 70, no. 2
(2006): 232-251.

Mandel, Ernest. An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory. Pathfinder Press, 1974.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes.
London: Pelican Books, 1976. Reprint, Penguin Classics, 1990.

Tucker, Robert C. The Marx-Engels Reader. W. W. Norton & Company, 1978.

Wayne, Mike. "Fetishism and Ideology: A Reply to Dimoulis and Milious." Historical Materialism 13, no. 3 (2005: 193-218.

Wood, Elisabeth Jean. Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Politics and International Relations

Achcar, Gilbert. “U.S. Imperial Strategy in the Middle East.” Monthly Review 55, no. 9 (Feb.
2004): 23-36.

Achar, Gilbert. Eastern Cauldron: Islam, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq in the Marxist Mirror. Monthly Review Press, 2003.

Davis, Michael. “Human Rights and the War in Iraq.” Journal of Human Rights 4, no. 1 (January- March 2005): 37-44.

Dean, John W. Worse the Watergate: The Secrete Presidency of George W. Bush. Little, Brown and Company, 2004.

Dorrien, Gary. “Consolidating the Empire: Neoconservatism and the Politics of American
Dominion.” Political Theology 6, no. 4 (Oct. 2005): 409-428.

FitzGerald, Francis. Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. Back Bay Books, 2002.

Friedman, Thomas L. From Beirut to Jerusalem. Anchor, 1990.

Karp, Walter. The Politics of War: Two Wars Which Forever Altered The Political Life of the American Republic, 1890-1920. Moyer Bell, 2003.

Kinzer, Stephen. All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Wiley, 2003.

Mann, Michael. Incoherent Empire. Verso, 2003.

Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Mayer, Jane. “The Hidden Power: The Legal Mind Behind the White House’s War on Terror.” New Yorker 82, no. 20 (July 3, 2006).

Power, Samantha. A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide. Basic Books, 2002.

Roseman, Nils. “Privatized War and Corporate Impunity.” Peace Review 17, no. 2 & 3 (April-Sept. 2005): 273-287.

Silverstein, Ken. “The Minister of Civil War: Bayan Jabr, Paul Bremer, and the Rise of the Iraqi
Death Squads.” Harper’s Magazine 313, no. 1875 (August, 2006): 67-73.

Sluka, Jeffery A. Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1999.

Queer Studies (I need to work on reading more on this)

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vintage, 1990.

Valocchi, Stephen and Robert J. Corber, eds. Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Blackwell Publishing Limited, 2003.

Wilchins, Riki. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer. Alyson Books, 2004.

Race (Not covered in Book section)

Aguilar Jr., Filomeno. “Tracing Origins: Ilustrado Nationalism and the Racial Science of Migration Waves.” Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 3 (Aug. 2005): 605-637.

Blum, Edward J. “‘There Won’t Be Any Rich People In Heaven’: The Black Christ, White
Hypocrisy, and The Gospel According To W. E. B. Du Bois.” The Journal of African American
History 90, no. 4 (2005): 368-386.

Blum, Edward J. W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Charles, Camille Zubrinsky. “The Dynamics of Racial Residential Segregation.” Annual Review of Sociology 29, no. 1 (2003): 167-207.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2000.

Gichaara, Jonathan. “Issues in African Liberation Theology.” Black Theology: An International
Journal 3, no. 1 (Jan. 2005): 75-85.

Jalata, Asafa. “Revisiting the Black Struggles: Lessons for the 21 Century.” Journal of Black Studies 33, no. 1 (Sept. 2002): 86-116.

Kawai, Yuko. “Stereotyping Asian Americans: The Dialectic of the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril.” Howard Journal of Communications 16, no. 2 (April/June 2005): 109-130.

Li, David. “On Ascriptive and Acquisitional Americanness: The Accidental Asian and The Illogic of Assimilation.” Contemporary Literature 45, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 106-134.

Min Zhou and Yang Sao Xiong "The Multifaceted American Experiences of the Children of Asian Immigrants: Leassons for Segmented Assimilation." Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 6 (Nov. 2005): 1119-1152.

Neville, Helen A., et. al. “Color-Blind Racial Ideology and Psychological False Consciousness
Among African Americans.” Journal of Black Psychology 31, no. 1 (2005): 27-45.

West, Cornel. The Cornel West Reader. Basic Civitas Books, 2000.

Wing, Bob. “Harry Chang: A Seminal Theorist of Racial Justice.” Monthly Review 58, no. 8 (Jan. 2006): 23-31.

History and Religion

Bastone, David, et. al, eds. Liberation Theology, Postmodernity and the Americas. Routledge, 1997.

Brown, Robert McAfee. Liberation Theology: An Introductory Guide. Westminster John Knox Press, 1993.

Burleigh, Michael. Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War. Harper Collins, 2006.

Campbell Tracy. Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, An American Tradition, 1742-2004. Carroll & Graf, 2005.

Cone, James H. A Black Theology of Liberation. Orbis Books, 1990.

Van Cott, Donna Lee. From Movements to Parties in Latin America: The Evolution of Ethnic Politics. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Feldman, Allen. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. Herder & Herder, 1994.

Grandin, Greg. The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation. Duke University Press, 2000.

Gutierrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation. Orbis Books, 1988.

MacFarquhar, Roderick and Michael Schoenhals. Mao's Last Revolution. Belknap Press, 2006.

Marsden, George. Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism. Oxford University Press, 1982.

Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Nadeau, Kathleen. Liberation Theology in the Philippines: Faith in a Revolution. Praeger Publishers, 2001.

Saxton, Alexander. Religion and the Human Prospect. Monthly Review Press, 2006.

Yaqub, Salim. Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East. The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present. Harper Perennial, 2003.