Black Bird Press News & Review

Black August 2017-With Love to Bre' and Fidel!

We Who Like It Hot Call It ‘Black August’! The 2017 Update!

By ‘bro. zayid’

It is the month when our oppressors have nothing to celebrate.

It is the month where the nature of our oppression and the boldest expressions of our resistance to that oppression have been made most plain.

We who like it hot call it ‘Black August’…

As a concept of resistance, Black August has its beginnings in the mid 70’s with the prison justice movement. It was inspired by the courageous legacy of Black Panther prison organizer George Jackson, who was assassinated on August 21, 1971, one of the hallmark dates for the concept.

Originally, the concept concerned itself with and confined itself to those hallmark dates of repression and resistance for this month within the confines of these bloodsucking united states exclusively.

We revisit this concept here in a more comprehensive Pan-Afrikan manner to explore and to propose it having a broader Pan-Afrikan application.

Our ancestors first coming here ‘to work’…the ‘beginning of the end’ of their freedom…can arguably be traced back to August 20, 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia. Although those first ancestors were actually considered ‘indentured servants’ in that initial moment, with the growth of that colony and England’s new stranglehold on the slave trade in North America, the rights and privileges of Black indentured servants were legally stripped within a generation and chattel slavery would then emerge in full gear right from that citadel of settler colonialism! (There is some new evidence that indicates that the Portuguese in fact brought the first cargo of Afrikan slaves to what is now South Carolina in 1526).

In most recent times, and for the first time in decades since the bombing of the Congo in 1964 under the so-called liberal rule of Lyndon Baines Johnson, u.s. forces, demonstrating unchallenged New World Order military supremacy, bombed our Afrika when they bombed the Sudan, the land of the earth’s oldest civilizations, under the most bogus of pretenses, ‘CounterTerrorism,’ on August 20, 1998.

Ironic coincidence you think? This beast was trying to bomb us outta our land, outta our minds and outta our hearts!… on the anniversary that brought us here!...Hmmm!

Self-critically we should also acknowledge the recent betrayal of Pan-Afrikan potential in Central Afrika too. Just as were gearing up here for the heroic Million Youth March, the u.s. covertly sponsored an attack on the recently liberated Congo on August 2, 1998, using Rwanda and Uganda as proxy forces. To the honor of our ancestors, however, that betrayal has been checked and contained in a Pan-Afrikan manner by a courageous union of forces from Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia…

An important recently declassified FBI memo detailing the scope and the national coordination of a sinister covert operation, which would ultimately destroy the Black Liberation Movement known as COINTELPRO,or ‘the CounterIntelligence Program,’ was set in full ‘no holds barred’ motion against the Black nation on August 25, 1967.

Many conscious of our history know that COINTELPRO was not only illegal, immoral and absolutely off da hook in its making a mockery of democratic rights. But have we truly assessed ‘how’ successful it was in disabling the Black Liberation Movement? Have we truly assessed how that crippling of our movement left our community wide open for the unprecedented violent social disintegration we currently face, set off most insidiously by a heroin epidemic in the early 70’s and the hoodsplitting crack explosion blowing up in our faces in the awful 80s and the nasty 90s? The epic Million Man March was the beginning of an answer, we hoped,…an answer for our times , but it wasn’t enough. And with Black Panther/BLA political prisoners Albert ‘Nuh’ Washington, Teddy ‘Jah’ Heath and Bashir Hameed* recently dying in captivity after being locked down for decades virtually unknown to the community they sacrificed their lives trying to defend and with that same community in more disarray now than it was when they were captured in the early 70’s, we think not.

By the way, the first of two vicious attacks against those defiant, dreadlock-wearing pioneers of environmentalism, known to the world simply as MOVE, also took place in Black August. It was on August 9, 1978 that 500 of Philly’s finest laid siege to the MOVE home compound in Powelton Village in an attempted massacre. When it was over, the world saw Delbert Afrika being brutally beaten on national television while peaceably surrendering. He was beaten with a savagery that anticipated the videotaped beating of Rodney King. James Rapp, a Philadelphia police officer was killed from what we now call ‘friendly fire.’ Bro. Delbert and his surviving comrades are now going on their 38th year of prison facing sentences that go up 100 years for Rapp’s death!…Two of their comrades have died in prison, Merle Afrika in 1999 and Phil Afrika in 2015.

Lest we forget, it was on August 9, 1997 that Abner Louima was sodomized with a plunger up his rectum in a supreme expression of police brutality by New York City police.

Starting on August 29, 2005, we faced one of the greatest ordeals and calamities of this time. On that day, as the bewildering winds of Hurricane Katrina came barreling down on New Orleans, the world’s 1st Black cultural capital, the u.s.government decided to abandon the people of that great chocolate city because the majority of its victims were black and poor! This genocidal spectacle garnered international criticism and outrage abroad, but here at home, the national media order just accelerated what the late Charshee McIntyre called ‘the criminalizing of the race!’

It must be noted here though for the historical record, that just days later, while many among our people felt helpless about trying to do something directly, the New Black Panther Party, under the leadership of Attorney at War Malik Zulu Shabazz, dared to launch ‘Operation Rescue’! Defying curfews, roadblocks and government mandates, these brave men, armed with their God and their gun, rolled into New Orleans, went into the devastated 9th ward in particular and come out with several hundred of our people!**

Add the harrowing “Hands up! Don’t shoot” case of Ferguson, Missouri’s Michael Brown, killed by Officer Darren Wilson in cold blood August 9^th, 2014, to the litany of oppressive abuses particular to this month. Brown was then left on the streets dead for hours!...for hours!...as state forces sought to make a horrific example out of him. To their chagrin, however, Brown’s slaughter triggered instead an incredible surge in protest against police brutality all over the country! Three new words were added to our protest lexicon in that upsurge…‘Black Lives Matter’!

So we must also be very clear here…Black August is also a time of the most heroic resistance to the hottest hell we’ve faced!

On August 11, 1965, a pivotal, timemarking rebellion took place foreshadowing many more to come. It was the Watts section of Los Angeles that exploded. Black youth, tired of police brutality, boldly stepped off from their perceived limits of nonviolence and went off!… Although casualties in this uprising were high, after six days of supreme hellraizin, almost 1000 buildings were destroyed and most of those destroyed were white-owned businesses. Out of the blood and ashes of this rebellion emerged the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense! It is one of the hallmark dates of this concept in its origins.

The other of course is August 7, 1970!...On this day, an incredibly fearless young warrior chose not to wait on the white man’s courts for justice. He took it upon himself to liberate his comrades! On this day, the immortal Jonathan Jackson, George Jackson’s courageous little brother, walked into a Marin County Courthouse locked and loaded and announced that he was now in charge and he would be leaving with his comrades who were on trial! He also announced that the presiding judge would be coming also to secure their exit! He was 17 years old! 17! It foreshadowed the reemergence of the Underground Railroad in the collective persona known as the Black Liberation Army! You wanna know why you have to be searched when you go into a courtroom, you have pay homage to Jonathan for that!

On August 14, 1791, a fearless Afrikan warrior queen named Cecille called together all the field slaves of the French sugar plantation island of Haiti ( originally spelled ‘Ayiti ), to convene the launching of the most successful of all slave revolts just eight days later!…The Haitian Revolution!

A heartbreaking new Black August story must be told here too: On Sunday, August 14, 2016, Newark’s art and activist community lost one of its most beloved young voices. Breya ‘Blackberry Molasses’ Knight, died after losing a courageous battle with diabetes.

She was only 29 years old!

I loved Bre’ like she was my own. She shielded her pain from me many times. This last time was…so painful, it ultimately took her from us. Bre’ was an engaging multi-dimensional artist who loved her people, who loved our young and who loved her city, her Newark NJ! Best known as a young poet who challenged young people on the edge to figure this s*it out and to use art like she did help themselves, and who challenged her peers in performance to be about community and struggle too. She created a collective of young artists called ‘The Breathing Poets Society.’ She penned a book and a spoken word cd. She was also a brilliant graphic artist, loctitian, and entrepreneur! She cherished her political baptism from the Baraka family and political education from ol’ headz like me…

For all of her fire, and I must add that she was also born on the same day Nat Turner was born, Bre’ could be amazingly humble and respectful to those who have ‘put it down.’

So I know the ancestors blew her powder blue and pink mind with an incredible love and Alafia (Welcome dance)I know they greeted her with.

Born on October 2, 1987, the same day as the unconquerable Nat Turner, and left us on August 14^th, 2016, the same day that the ‘Aytian Revolution was launched…and it also happened to be this Black August baby’s birthday.

I will never know a ‘happy’ birthday ever again…

I could on for days…Just had to my chil’ a Black August shout out, because if there was ever a Black August child ever born, it was my Bre’…

Baba loves u, sweetheart…

Now speaking of Nat Turner…

On August 21, 1831, Rev. Nat Turner launched his own prophetic answer to the Haitian Revolution when he led a force of armed field slaves in Amerikkka’s most famous slave insurrection in Southampton, Virginia. Before his capture, dozens of the overseer and slave owner class were vanquished by those willing to pay the ultimate price for freedom!

Last year, saw a powerful film done on him by Nate Parker, a courageous film on several fronts…

First and foremost, the fact that it gone done and got in the movie houses was huge!...Even though this incredible uprising took place 186 years ago, it unnerved the Amerikkkan order of white supremecy like no other to this day! The fact that it got done and went that far without dehumanizing him was an incredible feat. This is not to say that there weren’t efforts to derail the project because there were. To be sure, Hollywood and the nat’l media order had no problem with the villification of the filmmaker…unearthing a terrible indiscretion that has its own problems and issues on its own terms that should be dismissed. But that story was an ‘old’ story, brought up here and now, not to condemn the damnable indiscretion…But to undermine the potential of the volatile content of the film.

Second, he took Hollywood’s racist racial legacy head on and turned it on its head when he dared name the film ‘Birth Of A Nation’! For those that don’t know, one of the most unique contributions to global white supremecy to come from these racist united states was the far-reaching, well choregraphed, racist, demeaning and projecting of our very worst stereotypes to promote the paramount value of segregation as a necessary tool of white privilege. The first, and still for many, Hollywood ‘model’ cinematic masterpiece was a film called ‘Birth Of A Nation’!...The film was done in 1915, and it demeaned Afrikan people like no other with all of the most ugly and grotesque stereotypes our people have faced, including necessarily, the worst of all of its cornerstone stereotypes, the perverted ‘Black Buck’! The ‘nigger’ with an unquenchable, savage appetite for white women!...It demolished one of the most democratic periods in Amerikkkan history…Reconstruction, and it glorified and further sanctioned the terrorism of the KuKlux Klan!...The Nat Turner film is not perfect…Many have some real problems with how it ended…But the way this young filmmaker dared to take on Hollywood’s racist legacy in service to our legacy of armed resistance with the making of the film is something I particularly appreciate…

This is not at all to diss or to minimize nonviolent direct action; For on August 9, 1956, 20,000 Afrikan women fearlessly took to the streets of Pretoria, South Afrika and defied the vicious ‘Passbook Act of 1956, which made aliens of Afrikans in their own land during the obscene racist reign of Apartheid. It is from this defiant act that we get the phrase “You have struck a rock.”

“Now you have attacked the women! You have struck a rock! You have dislodged a boulder! You will be crushed!” rings the phrase from this heroic expression of Afrikan women defying the bloody teeth of Apartheid.

The March On Washington of August 28, 1963 must also be acknowledged for Black August in spite of its obvious co-opted limitations. Not because it was a high point for the legacy of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement; We must acknowledge it here because we understand that the state saw that on its own terms, the scale of the mobilization made it too successful for their interests and then marked ‘The Drum Major For Justice’ for death! Declassified government documents are very clear. COINTELPRO operations escalated against our movement after that march and escalated against him in particular! Let the ‘Dreamers’ speak to that!…

On the eve of that march, the sun set on one of the immortal pioneers of PanAfrikanism. WEB DuBois died in Ghana at age 97 in service to Ghanaian independence and PanAfrikanism in Black August on August 27, 1963.

Another March on Washington note…Malcolm was not the only Black voice on the ‘national’ scene warning America of the limits of our people’s commitment to ‘Nonviolence.’ James Baldwin, who warned of The Fire Next Time, was banned from speaking by the white liberal overseers of the March after having been originally invited to do so!...Baldwin, another fearless legendary literary ‘son of Harlem,’is also a Black August baby, born on August 2, 1924.

We absolutely must also acknowledge why the date was chosen for that march. On August 28, 1955, a young man from Chicago visiting his family in Mississippi, was made missing and viciously lynched. His face and body was so savagely ravaged by his killers that his mother decreed to have her son’s funeral with the casket open so the whole world could see what lynching looks like! That young man was Emmitt Till. It was our people’s last straw under the terrorism of Jim Crow!

Fannie Lou Hamer bum rushes the ‘64 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, NJ with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and boldly and eloquently ‘questions’ Amerikkka on August 22, 1964!

On August 13, 1926, a man was born who would lead the most enduring revolution against u.s. imperialism to date! That man is Fidel Castro. That revolution of course is the heroic Cuban Revolution. No nation, anywhere in the world, has done more for Afrika, for the PanAfrikan idea, than the Cuban Revolution under the leadership of the ageless Fidel!

We would lose Fidel after 90 long, hot, heroic years on November 25^th!...

It was under Fidel’s stewardship that Cuba became, and still is, the world’s most generous and heroic nation. A country not rich in oil or any of the other precious raw materials to drive the machinery of an international order, Cuba’s wealth is and has always been its people and their legendary example of ‘internat’l human solidarity’! No other nation in the world has given the world more, especially the Afrikan world more, than the Cuban Revolution! From putting their entire stability and security on the line going ‘back to Afrika’ to fight in Southern Afrika against Afrika’s military superpower, the Apatheid Regime of South Afrika, to sending legions of doctors and medical professionals checking an Ebola epidemic just two years ago, from providing sanctuary to the oppressed resisting neo-colonial terror in their own countries from all over the world, to training over 10, 000 doctors from some of the poorest sectors of the world for ‘free’ in Cuba under the condition that they return to their countries to serve the most impoverished among their people, Fidel showed us all what ‘human solidarity’ looks like like no other!...

Que Viva, Fidel! Que Viva!...Que Viva, la Revolucion! Que Viva!...

On August 26, 1966, one of the most underappreciated recent people’s victories on the Afrikan continent was launched in earnest when SWAPO launched the armed struggle to rid Namibia of the dual scourge of Apartheid and colonialism!

We already mentioned George Jackson’s legacy and assassination. We must also acknowledge that he was also an original revolutionary thinker who also penned two classic seminal revolutionary works, The Soledad Brothers and Blood In My Eye.

For those of us who want to see Black August used in its fullest terms, the ceremonial and ideological center of Black August is, of course, the birth of Marcus Garvey on August 17, 1887 in Jamaica. On that same date in 1920, in a packed Madison Square Garden, Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association gave us our own flag!…A flag for all of us no matter where we be on this earth!…The Universal Afrikan Liberation Flag!…The Red, the Black, the Green!…

And you wonder why the state of Pennsylvania sought to execute Mumia Abu-Jamal on August 17, 1995?…Is it a coincidence that they used the birth date of the Black nation’s first modern political prisoner to attempt to stage this freedom fighter’s lynching?…We think not.

On August 16, 1959, underappreciated Garveyite Carlos Cooks convened a special Afrikan Peoples Conference in Harlem, which formally called on our people to drop the term ‘negro’ and to instead use either ‘Black’ or ‘Afrikan’ to refer to the race. How so many of at this late date are unable to see ourselves as being nothing more than ‘niggaz’ is a serious expression of how far we’ve been setback.

Several nations of the PanAfrikan world stepped forward in this month. Trinidad, Burkino Faso, Chad, Gabon and Cote ‘d’Voir, each stepped out on their own and declared their ‘independence’ in Black August.

He was just getting into another gear on the electoral front when his drum was sounded in ‘The Land of the Ancestors’ in 2014, but he lived and died always looking to break, fresh, new ground in struggle…Pioneering New Afrikan Independence Movement leader and Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, the now immortal Fannie Lou Hamer Democrat Chokwe Lumumba was also born on August 2, 1947.

Edward Wilmot Blyden, an important forerunner of critical Black nationalist thought who literally was the bridge between 19th and 20th century Afrikan nationalism, was born in Black August on August 3, 1832 in Virgin Islands as was Civil Rights legend, Reparations pioneer and champion of international human solidarity, the late Rev. Lucius Walker in 1930!

One of the important things to emerge from the recent renewed interest in Black August is practical support of our freedom fighters, our political prisoners, the real flesh and blood targets of COINTELPRO! One such freedom fighter, organizing legend Dr. Mutulu Shakur was born of August 8, 1950. Get his address from his website (www.mutulushakur.com) and send him some love! Another is of course the true ‘Maroon’! Russell ‘Maroon’ Shoatz is also a Black August baby! Born on August 23, 1943, this ‘Maroon’ of the Black Panther Party and the revolutionary underground had to endure 33 years in solitary confinement!...33 years!...Before winning his legal battle against being in solitary forever, this incredible man penned his searing, unapologetic memoir Maroon, The Implacable! In prison since 1975, the time has definitely come to free ‘Maroon and of his comrades! Go to his webpage (www.RussellMaroonShoats.Wordpress.com) and become a part of the call to free ‘Maroon and ‘free’m all!...

Speaking of political prisoners and solitary confinement, Hugo Pinell, the legendary Panther political prisoner, was assassinated on August 12, 2015, just after getting out of solitary confinement after 46 years!...46 years!...He was 71 years old!...He shouldn’t been locked up like that after all these years anyway!

There is no Panther in the land of the living or the land of the ancestors closer to me and my heart than the incredible Safiya Bukhari!... I am a proud ‘cub’ of this incredible Black woman!...Working onThe Black Panther Party Newspaper under her watch, yes, we had it back out in the early 90s, was my favorite ‘cub’ experience!...She left us for the Land of the Ancestors on August 24, 2003 after her ocean-sized heart gave out!

148 years after Gabriel Prosser was going to scorch plantations before being betrayed,

Black Panther organizing legend and martyr Fred Hampton was born on August 30, 1948.

Black Belt swingers Charlie Parker, Count Basie and Lester Young, giants of a music which brought us international respect, were all born in Black August.

May all of our Augusts be fiery hot and holy with resistance!

Keep marching!

All Power to the People! Black Power and Free The Land!

‘bro. zayid’ kazi angaza kikongo muhammad

*Since this was originally written, the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army lost two more political prisoners in captivity, Abdullah Majid and Mondo Wa Langa!

**Since this article first appeared, Malik Zulu Shabazz, to the disappointment of many, went delusional with his ego. He personally triggered an ugly split within the New Black Panther Party, trying to hijack their nat’l elections in order to impose his ‘crew’ on the nat’l body while still ‘calling the shots.’ He then unceremoniously ordered a physical attack on Black Panther legend Dhoruba Bin Wahad at their so-called ‘nat’l summit’ in August 2015, claiming he survived an ‘assassination attempt’ by Bin Wahad…

‘bro.zayid’ is the press officer for the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee, the media advocate for the Newark AntiViolence Coalition and a well known cub of the legendary New York chapter of the Black Panther Party…He can be reached at babazayid@yahoo.com... 973 202 0745..

Foreword

How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy

By Dr. Nathan Hare

Call him Dr. M, as I do, though I’ve known him by other names in other places and, like Diogenes, who went around holding up a lantern to the faces of the people he would meet in the streets of ancient Athens looking for an honest man, I have come to the realization that we as a people have been waiting and looking for somebody like Dr. M to come along for more than half a century, ever since America was stunned by The Mark of Oppression (the Jim Crow era book by two white liberal psychiatrists whose findings had brought them to the heartfelt conclusion that the race of people called “Negroes” was “crushed.”

In only four years after their epitaph was written, Negroes (now called “blacks,” “Blacks,” “Afro-Americans,” “African-Americans,” or as Dr. M sometimes calls them “American Africans”) had exploded in Montgomery with passive resistance. In four more years the “sit-in movement” broke out among the youth, followed like a one-two punch by the so-called “freedom riders” (roving bands of individuals who boarded and defied the segregation of interstate vehicles and included a future student of mine on spring break from Howard University by the name of Stokely Carmichael). Then came “Black Power,” in the context of which I first heard of a man who had metamorphosed from the slave-name Marvin Jackmon into a prominent “North American African poet” who went by the name of Marvin X (the X connoting “the unknown”).

While, despite the fact that I have known him through the intervening years, I cannot unravel every single quality of the brother, I can testify that Dr. M is a brand new Marvin, a Dr. Marvin, a social doctor, if you will, with a gift and a mission for a new black movement. I know this to be true because, aside from my Ph.D. and years of experience in the practice of clinical psychology, I specialized in the study of social movements for a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago. But more than that, I have watched a dedicated Dr. M, up close and clinically, going about his fearless work in the mean streets of San Francisco.

Over a period of many months, on many a dark and dreary sometimes rainy Wednesday night, I served as a consultant in clinical psychology to Dr. M’s “Black Reconstruction Group” (the pilot to his twelve-step model now unveiled in this important book on “How to Recover from Addiction to White Supremacy.” In the Recovery Theatre’s pilot groups, I sat with diverse and ad hoc coteries of men and women gathered impromptu in the austere basement of a Catholic church, St. Boniface, located in the heart of The Tenderloin, the highest crime district in San Francisco, just down a few blocks from the famous Glide Memorial Methodist Church. Many a night I marveled at the ease with which Dr. M and his talented co-facilitator, Suzette Celeste brought out trickles of lost and unleashed hope and inspiration in the minds of destitute and degraded street people as well as in the confused and empty psyches of invited members of the black bourgeoisie who, still trying to be unbroken, had come where not many “bourgies” would dare to tread.

On many an appointed night I stood by silently looking on while Dr. M and his collaborators sauntered out into the shadowy mysteries of dilapidated streets to solicit and harness hapless homeless men and a woman or two and bring them in to meet as equals with the anxious representatives of the black bourgeoisie who had dared to cross momentarily back over their tentative territorial and social boundaries. This of course is not recommended for the feeble or the fainthearted; because, until the revolution comes, or the proletariat triumphs, there will be difficulties and perils in chance encounters of the social classes. So I must hasten to explain that a security conscious Dr. M was operating within a safety net of collaborators competent in the martial arts; like Geoffrey Grier, who has been an international martial arts competitor and is a son of a black psychiatrist, Dr. William Grier, coauthor with Dr. Price Cobb of the late 1960s blockbuster, Black Rage.

At the moment when the oppressed have had enough, their rage will explode -- Fanon had warned us in The Wretched of the Earth -- and it is at that moment, at the very point of mental and spiritual coagulation and defeat, when they will come together and rise. Frantz Fanon went on to tell of a category of reconstruction groups called “’djemaas’ (village assemblies) of northern Africa or in the meetings of western Africa, tradition demands that the quarrels which occur in a village should be settled in public. It is communal self-criticism, of course, and with a note of humor, because everybody is relaxed, and because in the last resort we all want the same things. But the more the intellectual imbibes the atmosphere of the people, the more completely he abandons the habits of calculation, of unwonted silence, of mental reservations, and shakes the spirit of concealment. And it is true that already at that level we can say that it spreads its own light and its own reason.”

However, psychiatric authority for a self-help peer group focus on individual feelings (or addiction) in relation to white supremacy became available anew in the late 1960s, when Jeffrey Grier’s father, Dr. William H. Grier, and his collaborator, Dr. Price M. Cobbs, published Black Rage. Dr. Grier has also consulted with Dr. M and his Recovery Theatre around the time of the pilot trial run of the first “Black Reconstruction Groups.” According to Grier and Cobbs, in the “Introduction to the Paperback Edition” of Black Rage, “The most important aspect of therapy with blacks, we are convinced, is that racist mistreatment must be echoed and underlined as a fact, an unfortunate fact, but a most important fact – a part of reality. Dissatisfaction with such mistreatment is to be expected, and one’s resentment should be of appropriate dimensions” among black warriors who would exact retribution. “Psychiatry for such warriors,” Grier and Cobbs went on to explain, should aim to “keep them fit for the duty at hand and healthy enough to enjoy the victories” that are likely to emerge.

Fitness for duty is a pleasant but likely side effect of Dr. M’s “Black Reconstruction Groups” working to free the minds of persons addicted to white supremacy. This no doubt is no doubt why they do not limit themselves in their group sessions to expressions of resentment of racist mistreatment and dissatisfaction but also calmly allow its hidden effects, which often remain unconscious in the way in which the relentless karate chops of white supremacy have killed our dreams on a daily basis and shattered our ability to love, to feel loved, to love ourselves and therefore one another. I listened with much satisfaction as Dr. M and his assemblies delved into the depths of fractured feelings and emotions of the brokenhearted in order to help them come to terms with betrayal, jealousy and rage, in their moving endeavors to learn to love again.

And so it is that you will find many a reference to love in How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy. This includes, for instance, “Women Who Love” and the motivations of the men who love them.

Dr. M’s own fitness for duty is complex, unique and variegated. According to James W. Sweeney, "Marvin walked through the muck and mire of hell and came out clean as white fish and black as coal." Marvin can boast of “a Ph.D. in Negrology,” as he puts it,” the study of nigguhs” issued by the University of Hardknocks’s College of Hell), based on twelve years of research , independent study , and practicum in San Francisco's Tenderloin and other unlettered social laboratories throughout the United States.

There may still be hope, if it pleases you, for Dr. M to join the white man’s system of miseducation and mental health care, when we consider that psychologists, including one of my mentors, the late Dr. Carlton Goodlett, at first were “grandfathered” in when the licensure of psychologists was started in the state of California. Later came the oral exam (conversational, not dental), followed in time by an essay exam, before the boom in “standardized “ multiple choice tests for which workshops were offered to prepare you for a fee, causing excellent practitioners, especially black ones, to be blocked from licensure until they found out and forked over whopping workshop fees .

There is also a burgeoning market opening up in “clinical sociology” and “sociological practice” still cutting out its slice of the marketplace and finding its way in matters of licensure and credentialing in the field of sociology. But here it may be important to say that the self-help peer group does not require a sociological or a mental health professional, any more than the primordial AA groups from which the mental health profession has profited and learned. Dr. M is a social “doctor” (which etymologically means “teacher”) grappling with a social problem, white supremacy and its punishing residue in the minds of oppressed black individuals and white oppressors who have chosen to reject and come to places where their fathers lied. Oppressors pure and simple, who accept white supremacy, must be dealt with in a later context, as you will not very well be able to keep them in a Black Reconstruction or White Supremacy Destruction Group (or White Supremacy Deconstruction, if you will).

Much in the manner of Hegel in his essay on “Master and Slave,” Marvin senses that the oppressor distorts his own mind as well as the mind of the oppressed. Hence Type I and Type II White Supremacy Addiction. White sociologists and the late black psychologist, Bobby Wright, converged in their findings of pathological personality traits (“the authoritarian personality” and “the racial psychopathic personality,” as Bobby put it).

But if Hegel was correct in his notion that the oppressor cannot free the slave, that the slave must force the oppressor’s hand, then it is Type II White Supremacy Addiction which if not more resistant to cure, must occupy our primary focus. Type II White Supremacy may be seen as a kind of “niggeritis” or “Negrofication” growing out of an over-identification with the master, who is white. As in any disorder severity of symptoms may vary from mild to moderate or severe.

As Frantz Fanon put it when he spoke for the brother with jungle fever in Black Skin, White Mask: “I wish to be regarded as white. If I can be loved by the white woman who is loved by the white man, then I am white like the white man; I am a full human being.” In the twisted mental convolution of a brother in black skin behind a white mask, Fanon observed a “Negro dependency complex” independently chronicled in my own Black Anglo Saxons (black individuals with white minds in black bodies). They struggle to look, think, talk and walk white by day, then go to sleep at night and dream that they will wake up white. They refuse to realize that no matter what they may ever do they will never get out of the black race alive.

On the other hand, you are going to be seeing “nouveau blacks” and lesser Afrocentrics -- who faithfully and unquestionably follow twelve-month years and endeavor even to blackenize the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ -- jumping up to question Dr. M’s re-africanization of the “Twelve Steps” model for “using the Eurocentric twelve steps,” but they forget that the very effort to be practical and collective is the original African way. In any event, we must build on whites as whites have built on us, taking the best of the West and leaving the rest alone. But Dr. M has expressly and creatively added a thirteenth step; for his goal is not just recovery but discovery, his goal is not just to change the individual but to change the individual to get ready to change the world.

Meanwhile there is one thing on which we can all agree: in any serious attempt to solve the bitter mental ravages of white supremacy, we must face the unadulterated fact that we are limited when we look to the institutionalized “profession” and their professional “providers.” This of course is not to say that the institutionalized professionals cannot be helpful. Dr. M is quick to point out that a self-help peer group cannot cure all the diverse neuroses and psychoses that afflict us. Indeed he goes so far as to suggest that some of us “may need to be committed.”

The late Queen Mother Moore (who loved to boast that she had “gone as far as the fourth grade, and stayed in school too long to learn anything”) delighted in going around deconstructing our “slave mentalities” and saying somebody needs to “do some surgery on these Negro minds” – in which Queen Mother had diagnosed a chronic condition she called “oppression psychoneurosis.” Queen Mother Moore was basically joking, that is, laughing to keep from crying, but it is no joke that mental health professionals, operating under the medical model, think nothing of seeing a person suffering from a psychosocial problem and not only treating the victim instead of the problem but – much in the manner of any addict or drug pusher– use or apply chemicals and sometimes chemical abuse to deal with the inability of the “patient” to feel good in a bad place and thrive, to try to “have heart” in a heartless world. Many people are unaware to this very day that the practice once was rampant for psychiatrists to treat a person with chronic mental maladies by subjecting them to lobotomies cutting off a portion of their brains. Shock treatment was another method – you’re shocked by life, let’s shock your brain, Senator Eagleton (who later ran for the vice-presidency in the 1970s on the ticket with George McGovern).

It should never have been any surprise that the mental health profession would be of only partial help in reconstructing the psychic consequences of centuries of prolonged brainwashing and subjugation (this is not to mention “Sicko” and what we know of the crippling new effects of “managed care” on the medical profession). Many mental health experts, the overwhelming majority of them white, have long suggested that the “medical model” may be inappropriate in the treatment of the psychological, not to mention, sociological components of mental illness.

But you don’t have to be a mental health professional or a sociologist to know that we can no longer restrict our search for healing to professional shrinks, raring back in executive chairs and carpeted suites stocked with “psychometric instruments” standardized on the white middle class, far removed from the realities of the concrete social milieu of afflicted and homeless black “subjects” living lives of hardship and subjugation, with no assurance of available treatment.

Even when they are “insured they are limited to the care and treatment some insurance clerk is willing to “authorize.” In matters of mental health, this typically will include a few sessions of “fifty minute hours” of “talk therapy” before leaving with a prescription or chemical palliative to dull agony and the pain but not the punishment of life on the skids in a sick society.

The hour is up and time is running out, black people, but white supremacy is not. We are living now in the final and highest stage of racism and white supremacy. We’ve let our struggle slip back while sitting in classrooms and conferences crooning about “afrocentricity” and ancient African glories that have gone forever.

We have come now to a crossroads. We have lost control of our children’s minds, our future. We have lost their respect, and appear to be on a collision course to a war of words between the black generations, in which hip-hop youth disparage and mock our language, our music and our humanity with a creativity and a rime and a rhythm we can’t fathom, let alone equal in our pitifully fruitless endeavors to eliminate the “n-word” and box with the black-on-black random violence of dissocialized youth who have concluded that adults and their leaders cannot or will not fight the power. Who knows but it may be that Dr. M’s movement of recovery from addiction to and from white supremacy is offering us a final and effective chance to begin to “sit down together,” to get together and get our heads together.

THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 2011

Review of How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy

How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy
Peer mental health group cures 'addiction'

by Reginald James
Laney Tower
Laney College Newspaper,
Oakland CA
May 22, 2008

Author, playwright, and poet Dr. Marvin X is a modern theologian and philosopher sent to earth to help others find themselves. He's not a prophet, but is certainly beyond worthy of his Oakland bestowed title of "Plato" (Ishmael Reed).

His most recent book is, "How to recover from the addiction to white supremacy: A Pan African 12-Step Model for a mental health peer group."

Using a poetic and personal prose, Dr. M, as he is known, leads readers of all ethnicities and national origins on a journey to recover from what he terms the earth's most deadly disease: white supremacy.

"White supremacy can be any form of domination, whether stemming from religious mythology and ritual, or cultural mythology and ritual, such as tribal and caste relations," writes Dr. M. "White supremacy is finally a class phenomena, the rich against the poor,thus the process of recovery must include a redistribution of global wealth, for there is no doubt that the rich became rich by exploiting the poor, not by any natural inheritance or superior intelligence."

Dr. M, a founder of the Black Arts movement, uses his life experience with drug addiction to create a recovery model for others. Similar to the "12-step model" used by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the book reads like a personal narrative of not just one man's struggle to overcome a grafted sense of self-inferiority and a disillusioned projection of superiority in others, but a prayer of confidence that when others connect with their spirits, they will be able to overcome "stinking thinking," negative attitudes and self-destructive behavior.

After defining white supremacy in the introduction, the next chapter details how to detox and "rid the body and mind of the toxicity of decades under the influence of racist ideology of institutions that have rendered us into a state of drunkenness and denial."

After detoxification, patients are now ready to step into a new era. The first step to recovery is to "admit we are not powerless over self-hatred, racism and white supremacy thinking."

Dr. M's message of mental purification comes through strong in his accounts, and his vast historical knowledge of the experience of North American Africans" (so-called African Americans) encourages students to study. His vast literary references do not discriminate as he makes reference to Shakespeare and "classic" Greek tragedies as well.

"The Other White People," as he refers to them, "are an enigma to themselves, a conundrum of major proportions, transcending Shakespeare's Othello in tragic dimension, for their tragic flaw is lack of self knowledge."

"Such is the gracious gift of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism. It has produced a Pan African people in love with all things European: women, clothing, religion, education (what people in their right minds would send their children to the enemy to become educated, especially without a revolutionary agenda), political philosophy, social habits, dietary preferences, sexual mores, etc" writes Dr. M.

While he seeks to create a dialogue with all, the sexism ingrained in this society leaps out at you. He attempts to make amends by apologizing for his past instances of sexism and emotional, verbal, and physical abuse of women.

The most powerful aspect of the book is the encouragement to the reader to gain a working knowledge of self. When speaking to the need for patients to take a "moral inventory," Dr. M puts a mirror up to all people.

Breaking down dynamics of interracial relationships with the analytical perception of a sociologist or psychologist, including historical context of relationships between black women and white men and the taboo of white woman with a black man, Dr. M simplifies the frustration faced by women who date outside of their "race" and the reaction of those who feel their "natural partners" have been stolen.

"In this war with the white woman over the black man's sperm, the black woman, in desperation and denial, tries to mimic the white woman as much as possible, donning blond hair and continuing the tradition of bleaching cream throughout Pan Africa."

Equally healing is the emphasis on seeking forgiveness. When under the influence of substances or mind altering racist ideology, people often hurt people that are closest to them. Dr. M apologizes for his own shortcomings while under the influence of not just white supremacy, but while using crack cocaine. The prolific writer fell victim to the "ghost" for 12 years, and apologizes to his family and especially his daughters.

He also apologizes on behalf of the "Black Bourgeoisie,""Pan African Professors" he attacked because they were "not as radical and revolutionary as I believed they should, after all, white supremacy institutions are not about to allow a radical Pan African ideology and philosophy to flourish within its institutional framework," writes Dr. M.

Dr. M is able to weave not only events in his life which were symptomatic of white supremacy, but the thought process and actions of others.

While some may be quick to write Dr. M off as a Pan-African revolutionary (which he is), or a "reverse racist" (which he is not), his book benefits people of all ethnicities to come to grips with their preconceived notions about one another.

He successfully differentiates between white supremacy and "white people" for only a few handsomely reap the benefits of white supremacy, while others simply enjoy white privilege. He also emphasizes that white supremacy has not, and will not, flourish without disciples and co-conspirators.

"The white supremacy rulers have used poor whites and working class whites to delude whites into thinking the blacks are the cause of their misery and economic exploitation, just as capitalism is presently using immigrant labor to suggest they are the cause of middle and lower class white economic woes, while in fact it is the white supremacy global bandits who are outsourcing for cheap labor." Dr. M equates the assertion with the current immigration debate.

Ultimately, after completing the 12-step model, patients are encouraged to join the "cultural revolution." Harkening to the era of he 1960s, Dr. M suggests "linguistic transcendence" in which North American Africans reclaim a regal self-concept.

In the great tradition of indigenous healers, Dr. M pours love into patients inspiring hope for a cure for what others have deemed the only reality.

Like all scientists, Dr. M is experimenting, hoping that patients will actively involve themselves in their recovery. The "peer group mental health model" accompanies the book and allows the reader to form their own circle to undergo transformation with friends, family, or those people you haven't met yet. Starting a much needed dialogue, Dr. M brings forward "5000 watts" of shock therapy to awake people to their senses.

Dr. M obtained his PhD in Negrology from the University of Hell, USA. Formerly known as Marvin Jackmon, he was born in Fowler, CA and grew up in Fresno and Oakland. He attended Merritt College and San Francisco State University where he received a BA and MA in English. He has taught English, African American Literature, Drama, journalism, and more at Fresno State, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, San Francisco State University, University of Nevada, Reno, Mills, and Laney College. He was an professor at Fresno State University when then Governor Ronald Reagan found out Dr. M refused to serve in Vietnam--he was barred from teaching.

His other books include Love and War, poems, 1995, In the Crazy House Called America, essays, 2002, and his most recent Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality, 2007His books are available from Black Bird Press, 1222 Dwight Way, Berkeley, CA, 94702. $19.95 each. His Academy of da Corner is at 14th and Broadway, Northeast corner. He is presently organizing the Blackwell Institute of Art, Math and Science. How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy was used as a textbook at Berkeley City College and Oakland's Merritt College.