"ASSATA SHAKUR IS NOT 'OUT OF STYLE'"

Whitney says to suck it up and post something (see post below), so I will.  I am miserable but sitting around doing nothing but feeling bad doesn't really accomplish anything.


I have long admired Assata Shakur.  I wish I had her strength.


I read this earlier today, and I thought it had something important to say.


It is from Prison Culture.

Why Assata Shakur Still Matters?

One of the reasons that I continue to believe in the potential of hip hop to educate and to help transform is because of cultural artifacts like Common’s “A Song for Assata.”

One of the young people who I have been mentoring for some years just discovered this song a few weeks ago. She reached out to me and wanted to discuss it.

“Ms. K, do you know about Assata Shakur?” she asked.

“Yes indeed I do know about her?” I answered

The young woman who I will call Brittany wanted to talk about Shakur’s escape from prison. “How did she get away?” she wanted to know. She also wondered if it was true that Assata was Tupac’s “aunt.” My answers to both questions respectively were “I don’t know” and “no, but she was his Godmother.”

For Christmas, I bought her a copy of Shakur’s autobiography “Assata.” Brittany e-mailed me in early January to say that she had read the autobiography and in her words thought it “was so so real.” She wondered why she hadn’t heard about Assata Shakur before and said that she was going to tell her social studies teacher about her discovery. According to Brittany, school “don’t teach us the important stuff.” Unfortunately, I have to agree.

This episode is another reminder to me that young black people will in fact read books (provided they are engaging and relevant to their experiences and interests). Brittany read over 250 pages in just a few days. This young woman is now scouring the internet for more information about Assata. I find myself smiling as I type this because I am always happy when our young people embrace reading and value literacy.

I have been thinking a lot lately about what Brittany finds so appealing in Shakur’s story. The theme of “escape” has traditionally been a potent one in African-American folklore. So perhaps her fascination in part stems from the fact that Shakur successfully “escaped” prison. Think of our general fascination with the Count of Monte Cristo for example if you doubt the power of such tales!

But I think that it is something more than this too.

“My name is Assata Shakur, and I am a 20th century escaped slave.” — These are the words that begin “An Open Letter” penned by Shakur in 1998.

Assata Shakur stands defiantly in opposition to her oppression and subjugation by the State. Joy James makes a salient point: “Shakur is singular because she is a recognizable female revolutionary, one not bound to a male persona (p.138).” She adds: “Along with Harriet Tubman, Shakur would become one of the few black female figures in the United States recognized as a leader in an organization that publicly advocated armed self-defense against racist violence(p.139).”

Joy James’ characterization of Assata Shakur provides a clue into what might be attractive to a young woman like Brittany. As a young black woman of 16 years old living in poverty, I think that it is easy to feel invisible, overlooked, and yet maligned. The singer Jill Scott lamented in an interview a few years ago that “black women are so out of style.” Yet in reading about Assata, Brittany could imagine a black woman being unapologetically black. Assata Shakur is not “out of style.” She has resisted being commodified like other leaders of the Black Panther Party or Black Freedom Movement. Her call for revolution still rings loudly.

In her autobiography, Assata recalls making tape of an essay that she wrote titled “To My People.” In it, she explains her role in the black revolutionary struggle. That statement ends with these powerful words:

It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.

These are still words to live by in the 21st century. They help to make Assata Shakur still relevant to a 16 years old girl living on the West Side of Chicago…

Update: It looks like my friends at the Black Youth Project also had Assata on their minds today. Here’s a post about her from them.

VERY UNHAPPY

I just want to lean on my readers shoulders for a minute.  It is possible my Greyhound friend Whitney may have bone cancer.  This is what we lost our last greyhound to.   It is unfortunately common amongst greyhounds.  We don't know for sure, but it is very distressing to me.  Those of you who are dog people will understand.  Anyway, I may take a break from here.  We'll see.


Thanks for listening.

SEGREGATION HITS LOWEST POINT IN A CENTURY, WELL, NOT EXACTLY

You may have read the report out last about how segregation in residential housing was coming down.  Maybe, you smiled and thought what a nice thing.  Maybe, you thought to yourself as I did, something is very wrong here.  Who knows, maybe you thought both things at once as you read that African Americans were moving to the suburbs and right on out of "ghetto."  


You just knew thought, way down deep in your heart, that something was rotten here...there was something they weren't telling us.


Guess what, there was.


Race-Talk tells us what.

The Myth of Desegregation

By MICHELLE ALEXANDER




A recent study claims segregation has hit the lowest point in a 
century. 


Here’s why it’s premature to celebrate

Early last week a bit of cheery news was reported by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank: black segregation has hit its lowest point in more than a century — declining in all 85 of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. In a stunning turn of events, we are told that “ghetto neighborhoods have witnessed profound population decline, as former residents decamp for the suburbs.”

The report dutifully acknowledges that we still have a long way to go. The study’s authors, Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser and Duke University professor Jacob Vigdor, explain that “[t]he typical urban African American lives in a housing market where more than half of the black population would need to move in order to achieve complete integration.” Nevertheless, the report is largely celebratory in tone, and it has been received in that fashion by much of the news media.

Before we break out the champagne, however, it may be wise to pause and reflect for a moment on who was excluded from the analysis.

Our nation’s prison population has more than quintupled (soaring from 300,000 in the mid-1970s to more than 2 million today), due to a “get tough” movement and a war on drugs that has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color. Studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites, but a fierce drug war has been waged nonetheless, and harsh mandatory minimum sentences passed, leading to a prison-building boom unprecedented in world history. Despite this sea change, prisoners continue to be treated as nonentities in much sociological and economic analysis.

(MORE: Adam Cohen: The New Battle over Voting Rights)

In the Manhattan Institute study, prisoners are not even mentioned, despite the fact that millions of poor people — overwhelmingly people of color — are removed from their communities and held in prisons, often hundreds of miles from home. Most new prison construction has occurred in predominately white, rural communities, and thus a new and bizarre form of segregation has emerged in recent years. Ghetto youth are transferred from their decrepit, underfunded, racially segregated schools to brand new, high-tech prisons located in white rural counties.

In a sense, mass incarceration has emerged as a far more extreme form of physical and residential segregation than Jim Crow segregation. Rather than merely shunting people of color to the other side of town, people are locked in literal cages — en masse. Bars and walls keep hundreds of thousands away from mainstream society — a form of apartheid unlike the world has even seen. If all of them suddenly returned, they would not be sprinkled evenly throughout the nation’s population. Instead they would return to a relatively small number of communities defined by race and class, greatly intensifying the levels of segregation we see today. The likelihood of many escaping their ghettoized communities and landing in racially integrated, well-manicured suburbs is slim, given that people labeled criminals and felons can be legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits — even denied food stamps. Although most people sent to prison are convicted of relatively minor, nonviolent crimes and drug offenses, they are treated as perpetual threats and locked in a permanent undercaste.

Those who imagine that the failure to account for prisoners can’t possibly affect the analysis would be wise to consider the distortion of unemployment figures in recent years. Because standard unemployment reports continue to exclude prisoners, we have been treated to a highly misleading picture of black unemployment. According to Harvard professor Bruce Western, standard unemployment figures underestimate the true jobless rate by as much as 24 percentage points for less educated black men. In fact, during the 1990s — the economic-boom years — noncollege black men were the only group that experienced a sharp increase in unemployment, a development directly traceable to the sudden explosion of the prison population. At the same time that unemployment rates were sinking to record low levels for the general population, the true jobless rate among noncollege black men soared to a staggering 42% (65% for black male drop outs.)

Prisoners do matter when analyzing the severity of racial inequality in the U.S. Yet because they are out of sight and out of mind, it is easy to imagine that we are making far more racial progress than we actually are. For now, let’s keep the cork in the bottle and pray that we will eventually awaken from our color-blind slumber to the persistent realities of race in America.

Alexander's book is The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer, advocate and legal scholar. She was the director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California and the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford University Law School. Alexander has appeared as a commentator on CNN and MSNBC, and she is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. Her book The New Jim Crow was published in February 2010.

NATO BACKED RACIST MILITIA ATTACKS, KILLS BLACKS IN LIBYAN REFUGEE CAMP

ONE OF THE WOUNDED

The NATO backed racist militias in Libya continue their campaign of murder and intimidation.  On Monday, a number of blacks were killed in a refuge camp just outside Libya's capital of Tripoli.


A Reuters report reads:

"Men from Misrata came to the camp at 10 o'clock. We knew they were from Misrata because it was written all over their cars," camp resident Huda Bel-Eid said at Tripoli Medical Hospital.

"Around 15 of them started shooting us. All the women escaped but the young men stayed. My brother was there and I went to help him because he was shot in the head and neck, then they shot me (in the leg)," she added.

Residents of the camp took to the streets to demonstrate against the racist attack and were themselves attacked by more militia fighters who were on the streets supposedly to preserve security and order. 


The camp is made filled with former residents of the town of Tawergha which has itself become little more than a ghost town.


The area around the camp was closed off during the attack, according to Libya 360, preventing any aid getting through to the camp residents.  Libya 360 adds:

The racist crimes committed by the Misrata Brigade against the town of Tawergha, which is mainly populated by Black Libyans, has been well documented by international human rights organisations and and the global mainstream media. They are infamous for scrawling on the walls on the road to Tawergha, that they, the Misrata brigade are “the brigade for the purging of the skins of slaves, Black skins.”

Under the protection of NATO bombing which obliterated any attempts by the Tawerghan people and Libyan military to defend themselves and the twon, the Misrata brigade racially cleansed the entire town of between 10-20,000 in Tawergha in line with their motto that “there is no Tawergha, only Misrata”. Indeed Tawergha as it historically was, no longer exists.

Camp residents are calling out to the world for help.


The following report comes from Black Star News.

Racist Militia Slaughter 12 "Black" Libyans

By Lizzie Phelan

The death toll from yesterday’s attack by the Misrata brigade on a refugee camp in Tripoli has reached 12.

Doctors and locals report that two of the dead were women and one elderly man. The exact number of injured is unknown although many videos have emerged online and in mainstream western and GCC media of wounded victims.

Inhabitants in the camp in the Janzour area are from the town of Tawergha, whose entire and predominantly Black Libyan population of about 35,000 were forced to flee from relentless attack by NATO and the Misrata rebels.

The attack began when a heavily armed rebel militia from Misrata entered the squalid camp situated in a naval base firing anti-aircraft guns mounted on pick up trucks in the air to scare the inhabitants. This was followed by some of the rebels opening fire  on the inhabitants.

Following the attack, Tawerghans took to the streets in protest. This could be seen on an Al Jazeera English video (which is now notated as "private.") However, the AJE report omits any mention of the inherent racism of the rebels that has been exposed by their systematic persecution of Black Libyans and migrants from other countries on the continent since the beginning of the crisis in Libya. It also omits that the channel has been at the forefront of aggravating racist attacks as a result of its relentless an unsubstantiated claims of a systematic policy by the Jamahiriyah government of hiring “African mercenaries” - racist terminology in itself which implies a separation between Libyans from Africa despite that the nation is African.

Reuters  reported that Abdelhafid Suleiman, head of the military council of Janzour, claimed that the inhabitants were armed with “sticks and knives”. But locals and doctors have insisted the inhabitants were unarmed and critics have stressed that this accusation contains racist language in line with the well documented racism of the Misrata rebels.

Elsewhere, reports have cited a statement released by locals in Janzour the Wershafana people of Libya pledging to arm the people of Tawergha so that they could defend themselves. 

ALL POWER TO SOVIET OF THE GENERAL HOSPITAL OF KILKIS, GREECE

THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

Workers at a Greek hospital have taken over their hospital and our running things with direct democracy of workers.  However, they are not stopping there.  Realizing that the class struggle is no longer confined to the workplace, be it a hospital or a factory, the workers the General Hospital of Kilkis, Greece are turning to and asking for solidarity from the wider community not just to save their hospital but to defend free public healthcare and to overthrow the neo liberal policies of the Greek Province of the Empire.


In a country where nearly half of those under 25 are unemployed, where homelessness has increased by 25% in less then two years,  where general strikes and protest marches are the order of the day, some hospital workers in a small industrial town in central Greece have taken a bold step forward, have organized themselves and have challenged global capital.


Contra Info reports: 

According to a statement (4-2/2012) released by the workers’ general assembly in the General Hospital of Kilkis, the doctors, nurses and other staff declare that the long-lasting problems of the National Health System (ESY) in the country cannot be solved through limited claims of the health services sector. Thus, workers at the General Hospital respond to the regime’s acceleration of fascism by occupying this public general hospital and putting it under their direct and complete control. The decision-making body for administrative matters will be the workers’ general assembly.

They also stress that the Greek government is not acquitted of its financial obligations towards the hospital. The workers will denounce all competent authorities to the public opinion and, if their demands are not met, turn to the municipalities, the local and the wider community, for support in every possible way of their efforts: to save the hospital and defend the free public health care, to overthrow the government and every neo-liberal policy.

On February 6th the workers will serve only hospital emergencies until full payment of their wages and recovery of their income in the pre-Troika level. However, being fully aware of their social mission and moral commitments associated with their professions, they will protect people’s health that come in to the hospital, providing free care to those in need.

Next general meeting of all employees will be held in the morning of February 13th. Their assembly will take place daily and will be the main body for any decision concerning the workers and the hospitals’ operation.

The workers call for factual solidarity from people and workers in all sectors, for the involvement of trade unions and progressive organizations, and for support by media of real information. They will also give a related press conference on February 15th, at 12.30. Among others, they invite their colleagues at other hospitals to take appropriate decisions, as well as employees of the public and private sector to act likewise.

This example of the multitude challenging Empire with direct action, with direct democracy, with autonomist power, I guarantee you will not go unnoticed by CAPITAL.  More importantly, it will not go unoticed by working class of Greece and beyond.


We live in a world where one small local act of resistance can be felt around the world.


ALL POWER TO THE SOVIET OF THE GENERAL HOSPITAL OF KILKIS, GREECE.


The following is from libcom.org.

Greek hospital now under workers' control

Health workers in Kilkis, Greece, have occupied their local hospital and have issued a statement saying it is now fully under workers control.

The general hospital of Kilkis in Greece is now under workers control. The workers at the hospital have declared that the long-lasting problems of the National Health System (ESY) cannot be resolved.

The workers have responded to the regime’s acceleration of fascism by occupying the hospital and outing it under direct and complete control by the workers. All decisions will be made by a ‘workers general assembly’.

The hospital has stated that. “The government is not acquitted of its financial responsibilities, and if their demands are not met, they will turn to the local and wider community for support in every possible way to save the hospital defend free public healthcare, to overthrow the government and every neo-liberal policy.”

From the 6th February, hospital workers will only deal with emergencies until their wages, and monies owed have been paid. They are also demanding a return to wage levels prior to the implementation of austerity measures.

The next general assembly will take place on the 13th, and a related press conference will be given on the 15th.

The following statement has been issued by the workers:

1. We recognize that the current and enduring problems of Ε.Σ.Υ (the national health system) and related organizations cannot be solved with specific and isolated demands or demands serving our special interests, since these problems are a product of a more general anti-popular governmental policy and of the bold global neoliberalism.

2. We recognize, as well, that by insisting in the promotion of that kind of demands we essentially participate in the game of the ruthless authority. That authority which, in order to face its enemy - i.e. the people- weakened and fragmented, wishes to prevent the creation of a universal labour and popular front on a national and global level with common interests and demands against the social impoverishment that the authority's policies bring.

3. For this reason, we place our special interests inside a general framework of political and economic demands that are posed by a huge portion of the Greek people that today is under the most brutal capitalist attack; demands that in order to be fruitful must be promoted until the end in cooperation with the middle and lower classes of our society.

4. The only way to achieve this is to question, in action, not only its political legitimacy, but also the legality of the arbitrary authoritarian and anti-popular power and hierarchy which is moving towards totalitarianism with accelerating pace.

5. The workers at the General Hospital of Kilkis answer to this totalitarianism with democracy. We occupy the public hospital and put it under our direct and absolute control. The Γ.N. of Kilkis will henceforth be self-governed and the only legitimate means of administrative decision making will be the General Assembly of its workers.

6. The government is not released of its economic obligations of staffing and supplying the hospital, but if they continue to ignore these obligations, we will be forced to inform the public of this and ask the local government but most importantly the society to support us in any way possible for: (a) the survival of our hospital (b) the overall support of the right for public and free healthcare (c) the overthrow, through a common popular struggle, of the current government and any other neoliberal policy, no matter where it comes from (d) a deep and substantial democratization, that is, one that will have society, rather than a third party, responsible for making decisions for its own future.

7. The labour union of the Γ.N. of Kilkis will begin, from 6 February, the retention of work, serving only emergency incidents in our hospital until the complete payment for the hours worked, and the rise of our income to the levels it was before the arrival of the troika (EU-ECB-IMF). Meanwhile, knowing fully well what our social mission and moral obligations are, we will protect the health of the citizens that come to the hospital by providing free healthcare to those in need, accommodating and calling the government to finally accept its responsibilities, overcoming even in the last minute its immoderate social ruthlessness.

8. We decide that a new general assembly will take place, on Monday 13 February in the assembly hall of the new building of the hospital at 11 am, in order to decide the procedures that are needed to efficiently implement the occupation of the administrative services and to successfully realise the self-governance of the hospital, which will start from that day. The general assemblies will take place daily and will be the paramount instrument for decision making regarding the employees and the operation of the hospital.

We ask for the solidarity of the people and workers from all fields, the collaboration of all workers' unions and progressive organizations, as well as the support from any media organization that chooses to tell the truth. We are determined to continue until the traitors that sell out our country and our people leave. It's either them or us!

The above decisions will be made public through a news conference to which all the Mass Media (local and national) will be invited on Wednesday 15/2/2012 at 12.30. Our daily assemblies begin on 13 February. We will inform the citizens about every important event taking place in our hospital by means of news releases and conferences. Furthermore, we will use any means available to publicise these events in order to make this mobilization successful.

We call

a) Our fellow citizens to show solidarity to our effort,

b) Every unfairly treated citizen of our country in contestation and opposition, with actions, against his'/her's oppressors,

c) Our fellow workers from other hospitals to make similar decisions,

d) the employees in other fields of the public and private sector and the participants in labour and progressive organizations to act likewise, in order to help our mobilization take the form of a universal labour and popular resistance and uprising, until our final victory against the economic and political elite that today oppresses our country and the whole world.