Saturday, May 04, 2013

ASSATA SHAKUR: WHY NOW?



This week the FBI put Assata Shakur on the Ten Most Wanted List.  Why now, you ask?  Theoretical Weekends presents one guy's answer.




I am Worried

Why did the FBI place Assata Shakur on its list of the Top 10 Most Wanted Terrorist and why did they refer to her as an “absolute threat to America?” What has Assata done to become the first woman ever placed in the top 10? Why at this moment in time? The answer is nothing. Assata has been in Cuba for years, and she has never engaged in “terrorist” activities, so what is the motivation of the U.S.A. government? This is the beginning of a demonization of the left movement and a reinterpretation of the Black Liberation Movement as a terrorist movement. There are grave consequences to this action. It means that friends of Assata can be arrested for concealing information or abetting her if they provide her or her friends with resources. The elevation of Assata to this status is a message that the War on Terror is expanding its definition of “terror” and expanding its definition of “enemies “of this country. This is a foreboding sign, and it is one that should be of deep concern to every America.

Friday, May 03, 2013

KIERA WILMOT: ON THE SCHOOL TO PRISON PIPELINE



The following story is almost unbelievable.  The "almost" is the problem.  In America today too many schools are more like prisons then schools and too many more just act as a gateway to get a kid into the justice system...and you can guess which group of kids gets targeted.  You can guess.

This whole society of ours has become one big mass of violence, jails, militarization, and national security.  The thin state is really the big State.  THEY may want to cut the budget when it comes to programs somehow related to the public good, but hold on bud, when it comes to whipping us all into line.  THEY will spend the bucks there, for sure.    

I was a bit of a troublemaker back in my high school days, but jeez, I was faced with "eighth hours", detentions, suspensions and the like.  The cops didn't grab me in the hallway and hall my ass off to jail, charge me with misdemeanors  and felonies, put me on trial, and ship me off to serve "my" time.

I find this  "police-ization" of our schools to be one of the more frightening aspects of life in the USA today.  I think you should as well.

What is happening to a sixteen year old African American girl in florida right now should send you into a rage.

The following for Scission Prison Fridays comes from Feministing.




The effects of unchecked criminalization: Teen charged with felony for science experiment


Kiera Wilmont, the young woman of color unfairly criminalized, smiles and does NOT look menacing. When we talk about the criminalization of communities and people of color, especially African Americans and Latinos in America, we often talk about the criminal justice system in America that disproportionately targets those communities.Schools are often the major accomplices in making this system run with the school to prison pipeline. Nothing exemplifies this more than what is happening to 16 year old Kiera Wilmot in Florida. According to the Miami New Times,

 ”7 a.m. on Monday, the 16 year-old mixed some common household chemicals in a small 8 oz water bottle on the grounds of Bartow High School in Bartow, Florida. The reaction caused a small explosion that caused the top to pop up and produced some smoke. No one was hurt and no damage was caused.

…Wilmot told police that she was merely conducting a science experiment. Though her teachers knew nothing of the specific project, her principal seems to agree.

‘She made a bad choice. Honestly, I don’t think she meant to ever hurt anyone,’ principal Ron Pritchard told the station. ‘She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did. Her mother is shocked, too.’

This sounds like a harmless instance of experimentation gone wrong. No harm, no foul right? Even the principle thinks it was simply a poor decision. A week of detention, maybe even suspension, was in order no doubt. So why did it go down like this?

“After the explosion Wilmot was taken into custody by a school resources officer and charged with possession/discharge of a weapon on school grounds and discharging a destructive device. She will be tried as an adult.

She was then taken to a juvenile assessment center. She was also expelled from school and will be forced to complete her diploma through an expulsion program.”

The school released the following statement:

“Anytime a student makes a bad choice it is disappointing to us. Unfortunately, the incident that occurred at Bartow High School yesterday was a serious breach of conduct. In order to maintain a safe and orderly learning environment, we simply must uphold our code of conduct rules. We urge our parents to join us in conveying the message that there are consequences to actions. We will not compromise the safety and security of our students and staff.”

I call bullshit. This is not about the “safety and security” of students and staff at Bartow High School. This was about setting an example, at the expense of Wilmot, and sending a message that even (mis)perceived threats will be dealt with swiftly and harshly. The unfortunate truth is that in America, those perceptions are heavily tied up in notions of race, class, and gender.

Those perceptions may have helped them come to the conclusion that Wilmot’s concoction was indeed a weapon. The code of conduct clearly states that “intention” is a factor in whether or not there has been a breach of that specific rule. But somehow the principal managed to defend the girls intentions but still expel and have her arrested.

Is the perceived threat to the safety of her classmates and teachers also the reason why Wilmot is being tried as an adult with a felony? A student with good grades and no behavioral problems to speak of should be followed with a felony because she was curious about a chemical reaction? She has been ushered into the criminal justice system with this decision. Access to employment, education, housing, etc. will all be limited to Wilmot with a felony on her record.

As a graduate of a Chicago Public School I am very familiar with teachers not being interested in nurturing the minds of students. Instead, they create a mindless generation that simply does what they’re told, no questions asked, all in the interest of maintaining an orderly “classroom”. Sending students to prisons is the solution for those who can’t be “controlled”. I have witnessed the policing that happens when school staff and administration fears its students, of color. Let me be clear, zero tolerance policies are not about keeping schools safe. They exist to keep school administrators from being held accountable for the environment they create in their institution and making contextual judgement calls.

I pray that all works out for Kiera Wilmot.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

NOTE: our friends at Prison Culture have some suggestions for you:
For those who want to speak up and take action to rectify this outrage. You can do a few concrete things:
1. Someone has launched a petition demanding that charges be dropped against Kiera and that she be re-instated at her school. You can sign here.

2. You can contact FL State Attorney Jerry Hill and tell him not to prosecute 16 year old Kiera Wilmot as an adult. Call him at 863-534-4800 or email his officehere.
I personally called the office this afternoon and spoke to a woman who said that the case is still under investigation and that the office would have no comments at this time. I let them know that the entire country is watching to see what they will do. I expressed my outrage that they would consider charging her with felonies and as an adult.

3. You can also call the school district’s Superintendent: Dr. John Stewart –(863) 534-0521 to ask that he intervene on Kiera’s behalf and ask law enforcement to drop the charges. Ask him to re-instate Kiera in school.

4. To learn more about the increasing criminalization of black girls at school, read Monique Morris report.
You should also read Sesali Bowen’s blog post published at Feministing today that addresses this incident & raises important points about the criminalization of youth in schools.

5. For those who are interested in reading in greater depth about the criminalization of black & brown youth in the U.S., I put together a short bibliography of articles to read a couple of years ago here.



Thursday, May 02, 2013

JOHN BROWN: WHITE PEOPLE THINK HE WAS CRAZY, BLACK PEOPLE KNOW HE WAS A HERO...AND I DO, TOO...

letters_1-050913.jpg




Okay, gonna do this a little different today.  Since John Brown is, in my opinion, pretty much the greatest white man who ever lived, and since Noel Ignatiev is an old comrade from STO days,  I decided earlier today I would run his response to a discussion between two people I do not know about a book on old John.  I then decided I would go ahead and put in the whole damn discussion and follow it with Noel's comments.  So up here in the intro section is the discussion and down below in the post section will be Noel's response.  

Like Noel and like Shields Greene, I believe I go with the old man.

From the New York Review of Books:


An Exchange on John Brown


David S. Reynolds, reply by Christopher Benfey


IN RESPONSE TO:

Terrorist or Martyr? from the March 7, 2013 issue      
                                            

John Brown, circa 1856
To the Editor:


In his review of John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd’s book The Tribunal [NYR, March 7], Christopher Benfey resurrects the John Brown of old-time history books—murderous, inept, politically marginal, probably insane—while ignoring the findings of several recent biographers and historians.


Curiously, Benfey devotes a sizable amount of his review to discussing Hawthorne, a masterly writer but a political doughface who had virtually nothing useful to say about John Brown or slavery (Hawthorne’s signing a petition against the Fugitive Slave Law was a standard gesture made by thousands at the time). As for Melville, also mentioned in Benfey’s review, his elliptical portraits of slavery in works like Moby-Dick and “The Meteor” add little to the political debate other than underscoring its complexity.


On the other hand, Emerson and Thoreau deserve far more space—and respect—than Benfey gives them. It is through Hawthorne’s jaundiced lens that Benfey presents Emerson’s stirring prophecy that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Thoreau becomes, in Benfey’s handling, a kind of detached spectator for whom Brown was high theater—an idea reinforced when Benfey quotes a jibe by the slaveholding Mary Boykin Chesnut that makes Emerson and Thoreau appear, in Benfey’s phrase, as “armchair warriors.”


Actually, Emerson and Thoreau, as arch-individualists, resisted joining movements—abolitionist, philosophical, utopian, or otherwise—and yet, as the nation’s foremost intellectuals, they had great cultural clout. When they spoke, people listened. Deeply opposed to slavery, they saw in John Brown a selfless martyr who gave his life for freedom. It was their bold, virtually solitary public support of John Brown that rescued Brown from infamy at a time when even Brown’s closest backers—several of them members of his so-called Secret Six—were hiding out, fleeing the country, or, in one case, checking into an asylum. In contrast, Emerson and Thoreau, erstwhile pacifists, came forward and swayed Northern opinion by wholeheartedly supporting John Brown, who just before his hanging wrote a note predicting that slavery would be eradicated only after “very much bloodshed.”

Brown’s words proved, alas, tragically accurate. Benfey toward the end of his review mentions recent commentators like Andrew Delbanco, David Goldfield, and Drew Faust, who suggest that the Civil War may have been “avertable,” a view that is supposedly sensible now that the culture wars have waned. Actually, this argument is a reworking of the old “needless war” doctrine of former generations of historians. More recent historians have pointed out that slavery was so deeply entrenched in America—by ideology, custom, law, and economics—that no amount of compromise or politicking was going to avert it. Indeed, all kinds of compromises were floated in the 1850s and early 1860s, but none could stave off a war that was, as time proved, inevitable once an antislavery Republican president was elected. If Spielberg and Kushner’s Lincoln shows, as Benfey notes, that political maneuvering contributed to the abolition of slavery, the film also reminds us, through reports of victories by Union armies, that total, scorched-earth war—“very much violence,” as Brown had predicted—had brought the South to its knees and had ruined its chances at the bargaining table.


Benfey makes no mention of several recent books on John Brown that forcefully challenge the timeworn view of Brown as an incompetent, fanatical fringe figure who had little effect on the main course of events. Louis A. DeCaro Jr.’s “Fire from the Midst of You”: A Religious Life of John Brown, Robert E. McGlone’sJohn Brown’s War Against Slavery, Evan Carton’s Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America, and my own John Brown, Abolitionist provide evidence that Brown was not insane, that he had a strong impact on mainstream politics, and that his plan for liberating slaves from mountain redoubts did not then appear implausible, especially in light of the precedent of successful slave revolts against overwhelming odds in places like Haiti and Jamaica.


In describing Brown’s slaying of proslavery settlers in Pottawatomie, Kansas, Benfey fails to contextualize that incident adequately. He doesn’t mention, for instance, that of the thirty-six politically related murders known to have been committed in Kansas between 1855 and 1858, twenty-eight were committed by theproslavery side, as compared with eight by the antislavery one. In addition, gun-wielding Border Ruffians were taking over polling booths in Kansas and electing fraudulent proslavery legislatures there. More generally, the slaveholding South was a violent culture where bloody feuds, duels of honor, and vigilante justice against free blacks and suspected abolitionists were appallingly common. John Brown, as a journalist of the time wrote, “brought Southern tactics to the Northern side.”


And, as Thoreau noted, Brown’s words turned out to be far more powerful than his guns. When Brown was imprisoned awaiting his execution, his interviews and letters were reprinted widely, advertising his sympathy for enslaved blacks to the world and winning converts among many who had been formerly indifferent to the antislavery cause.


David S. Reynolds
Distinguished Professor CUNY Graduate Center
New York City

Christopher Benfey replies:
David Reynolds has written a book about how John Brown “sparked the Civil War” and another book about how Harriet Beecher Stowe “ignited” it. I prefer to believe, as Lincoln did, that the slaveholding South started the war, and not these Yankee firebrands. His long letter covers ground so trampled that nothing good will probably ever grow there again. I will skip the name-calling (“doughface” and “old-time history books”) and briefly take up three points on which Reynolds says I don’t say enough. He believes, first of all, that Thoreau and Emerson deserve “far more space—and respect”—than I gave them.


The subtle men of Concord are uneasy allies in the canonization of John Brown. Thoreau was drawn to Brown primarily as a performer and a writer of blunt and pungent rhetoric. “The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.” Emerson’s hostility to what he dismissively called “New England Reformers” is well known, and received its classic expression in his famous tirade against giving money to the poor—“Are they my poor?”—in “Self-Reliance.” Emerson met Brown in Thoreau’s house in 1857, heard him speak in Concord, and called him “the rarest of heroes, a pure idealist,” by which he meant that Brown “believed in his ideas to that extent that he existed to put them all into action.” And yet, Emerson was dismayed by the raid on Harpers Ferry, confiding to his son that Brown “had lost his head there.”


For Emerson, whom Nietzsche so admired, Brown was notable principally as a man of will. Brown showed how “courage”—the subject of a speech Emerson gave in November 1859—is “a power of will superior to events.” Emerson had little to say about slavery in his praise of Brown, and his stirring words about how Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross” were, as Hawthorne suspected, adapted from someone else, a Kentucky abolitionist who said that the “gallows will be sacred as the cross.” What fascinated Emerson most about Brown in prison was the way in which he won the admiration of Governor Henry Wise of Virginia, apparently another man of will in Emerson’s eyes and not a mere “doting politician”: “Enemies become affectionate; become aware that they are nearer alike than any other.” It is true that Emerson called Brown “a new saint” and spoke of the glorious gallows; it’s also true, as John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd point out in an endnote, that “Emerson excised this paragraph about Brown when he published the speech” eleven years later.


Reynolds wants more said about the atrocities Brown committed at Pottawatomie: “In describing Brown’s slaying of proslavery settlers in Pottawatomie, Kansas, Benfey fails to contextualize that incident adequately.” Ah, contextualization, that magic wand by which so many bad deeds—the genteel word “slaying” is a giveaway—can be forgiven. Reynolds says the other side committed atrocities, too, committed more of them, and committed them first. That is always the defense for atrocities, in Srebrenica or Syria or, indeed, in the attacks on September 11. As Willie Lee Rose remarked dryly in these pages in 1971, in response to yet another “contextualization” of the slaughter at Pottawatomie:


The wickedness of the proslavery position and the guilt of its exponents in Kansas are generally understood, but it happens that none of those men of blood has ever been, at least to my knowledge, in the slightest danger of being canonized.


In his book on Brown, Reynolds concedes, twice, that “the Pottawatomie affair was indeed a crime, but it was a war crime….” Precisely what work, one wonders, is the word “but” doing in this sentence?


And finally, Reynolds thinks I ignore the “evidence that Brown was not insane” and view Brown instead as “an incompetent, fanatical fringe figure.” Readers may judge whether that’s how I describe Brown. I never claimed he was insane; I did suggest that it was bullying to argue that only a racist (or someone who had not read Reynolds’s book with all its “evidence”) could think that Brown was mentally unstable. “Fanatical” does sound right to me, and not only to me. “Reynolds spends considerable time, perhaps too much, in establishing Brown’s sanity,” Sean Wilentz wrote in his review of Reynolds’s book in The New Republic. “The really important point is that it is entirely possible to be sane and rational and also, like Brown, a fanatic.”


Brown’s contemporaries were able to make a distinction between admirable spiritual “ideals” and questionable physical means. It is a distinction preserved, perhaps, in the anonymous song about John Brown’s body moldering in the grave while “his soul goes marching on.” Are we, with our bludgeoning “contextualization,” incapable of such nuance?


What follows below is Noel's response and is taken 
from his blog at PM Press.


A Missing Voice



John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd edited a book called The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid. (Stauffer wrote The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race, which I found valuable although I disagreed with its argument.) Christopher Benfey reviewed The Tribunal in The New York Review of Books on March 7 of this year. David Reynolds wrote a letter in response to Benfey’s review, which was published in the May 9th issue. (Reynolds, in addition to Beneath the American Renaissance, a marvelous study of the popular sources of great American literature, wrote John Brown, Abolitionist, the only biography of Brown fit to stand alongside W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic.) Benfey replied to Reynolds. Their exchange is at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/may/09/exchange-john-brown/. I have read neither The Tribunal nor Benfey’s review. The following was written in response to the exchange between Benfey and Reynolds.


To the editors:

A voice missing from the exchange over John Brown (May 9) is that of Wendell Phillips, who, while not one of Brown’s inner circle, neither fled the country nor checked into a madhouse after Harpers Ferry but stood defiantly in a church in Brooklyn two weeks later and declared that “the lesson of the hour is insurrection.” “Connecticut,” he continued, “has sent out many a schoolmaster to the other thirty states, but never before so grand a teacher as that Litchfield-born schoolmaster at Harpers Ferry, writing as it were upon the Natural Bridge, in the face of nations, his simple copy, ‘Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.’”

A month later, in a speech at Brown’s graveside, Phillips predicted, “History will date Virginia Emancipation from Harpers Ferry. True, the slave is still there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine on your hills, it looks green for months – a year or two. Still, it is timber, not a tree.”

Benfey reminds us that the South started the Civil War. Phillips anticipated that, too. In the same speech he said that Brown had “startled the South into madness.”

A year later, after Lincoln’s election, Phillips said that “for the first time in our history the slave has chosen a President. John Brown was behind the curtain.”

The slave system bred rebellion, which brought repression, which forced black people to flee the South, which gave rise to a black community in the north, which was the basis of Abolitionism, which engendered John Brown, who provoked Southern retaliation, which compelled the north to resist, which led to Lincoln’s election… and the war came.

In a scene that has become familiar thanks to the PBS series “The Abolitionists,” Shields Greene, the escaped slave who was present when Brown tried to persuade Frederick Douglass to join him at Harpers Ferry, when Douglass stood up to go said, “I believe I go wid de old man.” As Lerone Bennett, who recounted the incident in his essay “Tea and Sympathy: Liberals and Other White Hopes” (included in The Black Mood), explained, Greene went with Brown not because he believed in Brown’s plan but because he believed in Brown. Some people will never understand that.

The most exquisite touch in Benfey’s reply to Reynolds is his quoting from “John Brown’s Body” to support his “nuanced” view. It is of a piece with his calling upon Sean Wilentz writing in The New Republic. Ah, The New Republic, where without sneering they teach the rest to sneer. Benfey’s references to Syria and Srebrenica demonstrate the truth of C.L.R. James’s adage that historical controversy is always contemporary. Russell Banks, asked why he chose to write a novel about Brown, explained that he was interested in the one figure all white people think was crazy and all black people regard as a hero, adding that if Brown was not crazy, it says a lot about the country. In any case, it was not for his madness that Brown was hung but for taking seriously the injunction to ”remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.”

I believe I go with the old man, and Phillips, and the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, and Du Bois, and Malcolm X, and Bennett and Banks, and Reynolds.



Noel Ignatiev (born 1940) is an American history professor at the Massachusetts College of Art. He is best known for his work on race and social class, and for his call to "abolish" the white race, which he defines as "white privilege and race identity". Ignatiev is the co-founder and co-editor of the journalRace Traitor and the New Abolitionist Society. He also has written a book on antebellum northern xenophobia against Irish immigrantsHow the Irish Became White. His publisher bills him as "one of America’s leading and most controversial historians".

Early life and career

Ignatiev, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, was raised in Philadelphia. He attended theUniversity of Pennsylvania but dropped out after three years.
Under the name Noel Ignatin, he joined the Communist Party USA in January 1958, but in August left (along with Theodore W. Allen and Harry Haywood) to help form the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (POC). He was expelled from the POC in 1966.
Later he became involved in the Students for a Democratic Society. When that organization fractured in the late 1960s, Ignatiev became part of the Third-worldist and Maoist New Communist Movement, forming the group Sojourner Truth Organization in 1970. Unlike other groups in the New Communist Movement, the STO and Ignatiev were also heavily influenced by the ideas of Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James.
For 20 years, Ignatiev worked in a Chicago steel mill in the manufacturing of farming equipment and electrical components. A Marxist activist, he was involved in strikes by the mostly-African-American laborers of the steel mill. In 1984, he was laid off from the steel mill, approximately a year after an arrest on charges of attacking a strike-breaker's car with a paint bomb.

Academic career

Ignatiev set up Marxist discussion groups in the early 1980s. In 1985, Ignatiev was accepted to the Harvard Graduate School of Education without an undergraduate degree. After earning his master's degree, he joined the Harvard faculty as a lecturer and worked toward a doctorate in U.S. history.
Ignatiev was a graduate student at Harvard University where he earned his Ph.D. in 1995. He taught courses there before moving to the Massachusetts College of Art, where he teaches as of 2012. His academic work is linked to his call to "abolish" the white race, a controversial slogan whose meaning is not always agreed upon by those who debate his work. His dissertation, published by Routledge as the book How the Irish Became White, was advised by prominent social historian of American race and ethnicity Stephan Thernstrom. Ignatiev is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor and the New Abolitionist Society.