Maestro Marvin X and the Black Arts Movement Poets Choir and Arkestra at the Malcolm X
Jazz/Art Festival, Oakland, 2014
photo collage Adam Turner
Of course it is a gross generalization to say all police are pigs. Phenomena has contradictions or let us say no phenomena is without a positive and negative component, a male and female, yen and yang energy. Human beings can be good as well as evil. Herbs can be therapeutic and also toxic. Socrates chose to drink the poison herb Hemlock to stand firm for truth, willing to die for truth. So truth is good for some, death for others. How many prophets have given their lives for truth, thus truth was good and bad, for truth is often a toxin when presented to kings, queens, politicians, preachers, teachers whose agenda are lies. Alas, when I taught English at the University of Nevada, Reno and said to the students my agenda was truth, they were aghast, "Teach, what do you mean by truth? We have no knowledge of truth."
As per Black people, one of my mostly white students said the only truth she knew about blacks was that her parents (and her father was a professor at UNR) taught her "Niggers are bad news." Once she began dating the black athletes, she no longer accepted the truth of her parents. She discovered sex with the black athletes was very good news! So the adage says one man's poison is another man's treat.
Imagine the fallacy of racial myths such as the one above taught by the parents of my student. The dialectical confusion can be overwhelming thus transcending a synthesis, causing the student to become lost in a conundrum unresolvable.
So, as per police as pigs, we know it is faulty logic is presume or declare all police are pigs since we know there are good pigs and bad pigs. I can give antidotal evidence of the good pig. I draw from the time I boarded the Amtrak train to the Central Valley of California and a black Oakland Police officer came on behind me and came directly to my seat and said loudly, "I see we have a celebrity on board this morning. Have a nice trip, Mr. Celebrity!" and he continued on his way. I wanted to find out how he knew who I was but since I was "riding dirty" I said nothing but a few weeks later when I bought a ticket for another trip to the valley, the Amtrak clerk, a friend of mine, informed me the officer I described to him was a conscious black policeman and he did indeed know who I was, and should not consider him the enemy.
Further, a few months after the above incident, I was on an east coast book tour that began at Duke University, North Carolina, then up the coast to Philly, Newark and New York. The citizens of Newark blew my mind with the consensus that for the first time in their lives they did not feel negative pressure from the police as a result of Mayor Ras Baraka's administration that is now in its second term without any police murder under the color of law. Mayor Baraka ordered the police to walk the hood and greet the people with smiles. My dear friend, Amina Baraka, mother of the Mayor and his brother who is Chief of Staff, said she didn't know how to act with police walking through the hood smiling! FYI, after the George Floyd murder under the color of law, Newark NJ did not explode with protests and looting. There was no need, Mayor Baraka has issued his orders and also gave the gang bangers employment as security officers and gave them the opportunity for employment for the first time in their lives. For some of the brothers it was the first time they'd received a paycheck.
Ironically, the Newark story has not made the news but the fake media narrative is that pigs will be pigs and will never serve and protect the people. Clearly, Mayor Baraka and his Chief of Staff, Amiri Baraka, Jr., have defied the myth that police are totally uncontrollable and must be abolished. In my interview with the Mayor and his brother, aka, Middy, Middy said, "My brother has an elected position, I do not. If the police don't act right, I can chop heads!" Why is the Newark model not emulated throughout this land? We think there are people who rather dwell on problems not solutions. Problems often pay more money than solutions. Consider this last antidote of a correctional officer at Alameda County Jail here in Oakland who supposedly told a departing inmate, "Keep coming back. I got myself a yacht, now I want to get one for my son, so I want you niggers to keep coming back!"
Do you think this officer wants problems or solutions? And consider this: the California Correctional Officers Union is the most powerful union in California. Do you suppose the union wants problems or solutions? After all, if crime was solved they would be unemployed, right?
Why do many question the structural and systemic nature of racism and white supremacy. The police and other institutions, including businesses and academia, along with high tech and the military, are guilty of pervasive racism that is so problematic it will take not decades but centuries to extricate and, yes, to adjudicate especially as per equity and justice. The timeline for economic equity is two hundred and forty years for blacks to equal whites in wealth.
In our good pig, bad pig paradigm, perhaps if we say capitalism is the blood sucker of the poor and must therefore be abolished and the police are the guardian of the capitalist blood suckers of the poor, then maybe the entire system must be destroyed, for sure, can there be a good blood sucker of the poor or only bad ones? We think there are no good bloodsuckers of the poor, no capitalist who want to exist without wage slaves and the cheapest price for materials of production.
Have I contradicted myself with talk of good cops? Reality begs us to consider the Newark Model, thus there is a semblance of hope, yet when we extend such hope to other capitalist institutions, e.g., the educational institutions, we see our hope shattered because we know in the deep structure of such institutions is the undergirding motivation of capitalist greed with the corresponding necessity to perpetuate the world of make believe as delineated in Dr. Frazier's classic Black Bourgeoisie. Recall the absence of truth is the minds of my English students at the University of Nevada, Reno. Yet, they possessed the mythic "truth" that blacks are bad news!
Should we dismiss talk of dialectics, paradigms, structural and systemic conundrums and strike the bull's jugular vain to announce we are trying to unravel a toxic notion so pervasive in the cultural and economic matrix that we are doomed to settle for a few more centuries to reach the final solution to the Negro Problem.
I have written before that W.E.B. DuBois was wrong when he asked how does it feel to be real estate? As a son of parents who were real estate brokers, I do know the difference between real estate (land, buildings) and chattel real
(personal property) that defined North American Africans. One may say what difference does it make whether we are real estate or chattel real, i.e., personal property? Well, we know there are those of us who want and do challenge our status purely on legal terms. Are we real estate, chattel or sovereign?
If we are sovereign, our rights transcend the US constitution, 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments. After all, we had no vote in the matter of morphing from chattel slaves to wage slaves. In this dialectic, we advanced from bad slaves to good slaves, yet slaves none the less. President Donald Trump declared he advanced us to wage slavery that made us and America great again since under his regime we gained more employment than we've enjoyed since slavery.
I ask President Trump to give us the stats on wages, especially in the dirty south where many of us work three minimum wage jobs to survive.
Finally, shall this quagmire be resolved peacefully or violently? For sure, the essential question is not wages but land! Aw, yes, those undelivered 40 acres and mules that were aborted after the assassination of President Lincoln.
If we came here for labor and after our labor under the sun, yet find ourselves lost and turned out on the way to Granny's house (Whispers), and our children question why they have no inheritance like "other Americans", how can we answer them except to say we have been hoodwinked and bamboozled and ask their apology as my dear elder poet/revolutionary Askia Toure asked students during his lecture at University of California, Merced.
I challenged Elder Toure' by saying our liberation was aborted by the overwhelming military power of the State, i.e., police, national guard, army, navy, marines, c.i.a., f.b.i, snitches, agent provocateurs, uncle toms, the ignut and mentally ill, not to dismiss our mistakes as revolutionaries that included drug, alcohol and sexual abuse of our women comrades in revolution.
Surely, we now understand the contradictions in the dialectics of our liberation. We were thus good revolutionaries and bad, we had foibles and critical character flaws Shakespeare described in his classic tragedies.
We suggest the coming generation study the writings of Cheikh Anta Diop on the North Cradle and Southern Cradle and the matter of comedy and tragedy. Of course the prototypical drama is the Kemetic resurrection of Osiris and Isis that symbolized the annual ebb and flow of the Nile or Hapi River, thus in this primordial African drama no tragedy exists, only comedy as symbolized in the annual resurrection of the Nile/Hapi River concomitant with the Osiris, god of resurrection. See Kersey Graves, The Sixteen Crucified Saviors Before Christ, also Man, God, Civilization, John G. Jackson; Dr. Ben, African Origin of the Major World Religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam.
Resurrection is the essential myth/ritual of African lives, and shall be for generations to come. The resurrection myth/ritual synchronizes us with the ebb and flow of nature that is not gloom and doom but as Frankie Beverly said Sunshine, Rain, Joy Pain. If you must, call our essential narrative How I Got Ovah, the essential theme in the totality of our literature, i.e., how we survived and went on to thrive under the worse circumstances afforded any human beings on the planet earth. Thus we shall never accept defeat, never shall we succumb to a modicum of the slavery paradigm, not for a nano second. Elder Ed Howard gave a linguistic upgrade when he said, "We are not African slaves, we are African victims of the American slave system." Ancestor James Baldwin told me in my 1968 interview at his New York apartment, "Nothing else happened here but us, nothing else. For a black father to raise a black son under these circumstances is a miracle, but we did it generation after generation."
We must teach our children their heritage is national liberation and independence in the grandest manner of Haiti, total independence, no matter the concomitant sufferings down to this moment. We only know one thing about Haiti and ourselves: one day we shall be free.
Just know this: the enemy will not tell you when you are winning. Remember the Congo, they only released Lumumba moments before Belgium submitted to an independent Congo although the struggle continues. Lumumba told us before his assassination by Tshombe and Mobutu at the request of the West, it would take fifty years for the Congo to be free. We yet await that moment throughout Africa, Middle East and the Americas. Tragedy is not our dialectic, only freedom in all its vicissitudes.
--Marvin X
12/3/20