Rod Amis - Unbound

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NEW ORLEANS - ... Back to the Streets

NEW ORLEANS - 17 August, 2002: I should be on the streets of Washington, District of Columbia -- our disenfranchised national capital -- today, helping my people to send a message that Malcolm X encouraged us to send. As Malcolm said, if your family made their money two hundred years ago, you will still feel entitled to collect your inheritance today. If you were owed back wages, you would expect to get paid. Every court in the land would uphold your right to that money. Alan Dershowitz would be proud to be your attorney.

You can read a great perspective on this issue (by Adamma Ince) in this article in the 14 August edition of the Village Voice. Lots of my white American readers will have a hard time with that article and this "Glass House". I'm used to having my opinions called "controversial". I'm a damned Socialist, after all.

The Village Voice would be commended, in a world where real journalistic standards stood for anything, for giving a broad and deep analysis of this issue. In an article that preceded Ince's they candidly talked about the fact that this issue of reparations for Black Americans was one that had more currency with the intellectuals of our community (like myself) than it did with your average brother or sister on the street. A "talented tenth" kind of thing.

The fact that this march turned out to have a meagre crowd, mostly of activists from the various NGOs supporting reparations, points out how true that analysis was. Nonetheless, from my own investigation, one thing is clear: this event was both trivialized and marginalized by the Mouthpiece Media (MM). CNN, AP and C-Span gave estimates of "hundreds" of participants, while an Indy Media reporter gave a number of approximately 5,000.

Well, 5,000 people at a "Millions for Reparations" march -- as it was promoted by the organizers -- is ha-ha not funny. But to report it as hundreds rather than thousands is part of The Spin that anything to do with a minority or human rights issue gets too often in the MM from this country we Black people basically built.

I'll say it again: WE BUILT THIS COUNTRY.

We not only worked the fields. We raised the children, cooked the meals, laid the railroad tracks, built the homes and office buildings, paved the roads, smelted the ore, built the ships and factories, fought in ALL of the wars, cleaned up after all of ya'll.

And then we gave you the only homegrown music you ever had.

You're welcome.

The not-so-complex principle underpinning the idea of reparations is that Blacks provided the labor that built America and now we are suing for back wages. We did the work and now we expect payment for that work.

President Lincoln recognized this simple principle and made a covenant with Black Americans to provide 40 acres and mule for their services so that they would have some chance of making it in a nation whose laws are predicated on principles of property. He saw, as any reasonable person would, that no people could gain their economic independence, let alone social equality, without some nest-egg upon which to base their own progress.

Lincoln got shot. His sucessor, President Andrew Johnson, broke the covenant. The debt remains due and payable and, reasonably, has accrued interest. I fail to see why some fail to grasp that straight-forward principle.

As to why reparations is an issue for us, both Ince and Malcolm said it better than I ever could. So have a number of prominent scholars.

And let's not mince words about this: YOU ARE STILL RACISTS TODAY. This is not about something that you have gotten over, so why should we?

Beyond the very straight-forward economic principle, their is also the moral one. Basic to almost every faith their is the notion of atonement. Everyone understands this one: you take responsibility for grievous error by apologizing for your bad deeds and making amends. Many Americans don't even want to admit that a crime ocurred, let alone offer a simple apology. As the injured parties, Black Americans have the right and the duty to pursue redress of our grievances.

My grandmother used to sit me on her knee and tell me stories about her father killing the slave master's dogs that they would sic on him when he tried (multiple times) to escape the plantation. Slavery is NOT ancient history to me. Ancient history is Caesar and Alexander. It's not less than four generations away. Most of my life I had living relatives who remembered Slavery Time, as we call it. So White America wanting to forget, deny and trivialize that crime against humanity is bald-faced insulting to me.

The fact that there weren't hundreds of thousands of Black folk in Washington, D.C. this weekend shoving our collective anger in your face is saddening for me. Certainly, some of my people, like myself, were just too damned dirt poor to make that trip. They, like I, were busy with the basics of just surviving, worried about the next meal.

But others weren't there because

1. They can't even pronounce the word reparations, let alone wrap their minds around the concept, thanks to the wonderful educational system in this country that the evidence says disproportionately penalizes and underfunds Black students.
   
2. A lot of Blacks, especially males, are in the criminal justice gulag -- and ALWAYS, always, much longer than non-Blacks committing the EXACT SAME offences. (That's how damned fair you are!)
   
3. Racial profiling in general, you vermin! I don't think I should have to be paranoid about driving, walking or breathing while Black.
   
4. As another example of the failure of the Leftists in this country to organize anything beyond a colloquium, the people who would most benefit from reparations, the people in "the 'hood" never even heard about it. The Buppies and bougies were too busy congratulating themselves for finally getting around to doing something about Black human rights after two decades of sitting in the 'burbs polishing their Lexuses to bother to talk to a regular brother who might actually not be so goddamned scared of losing his 401K that he would get back on the streets

   Jesse Jackson was not in Washington this weekend. In fact, the only Black politicians who are taking this issue seriously at all are within the five boroughs of New York City.

   It's "too divisive" you see, for "mainstream" Americans who want to pretend that Black people have nothing to be mad as hell about. The same "mainstream" Americans who made sure that this government reneged on the forty acres and a mule and then instituted Jim Crowe.

I, for one, am not forgetting that there are still people out there who have postcards of lynchings and trade them like baseball cards! If you didn't see the exhibition of this atrocity in New York, you can get the 4-1-1 at this Web site. (The Without Sanctuary Project.)

I'll never forget the day, as a child, when my mother first explained to me what a nigger was and told me that White people in this country didn't want me here. I won't forget the bricks through our living room window saying, "Keep the niggers out of our schools." I won't forget that there was a valid reason, at least in her mind, that my mother never "naturalized" and moved out of this country as soon as my father died.

No one who is serious about this issue has ever said, "Hey, let's just mail Black people checks." That's the spurious argument of those hell-bent on resisting and belittling the issue. As is the issue of who is entitled to reparations. Those who are serious about finding a practical and practicable means of addressing the situation have proposed solutions that would benefit those most impacted by the legacy of slavery and provide the kind of basic institutions for the uplift of the Black community that have existed in other communities since the beginnings of the nation. In other words, that would provide the kind of economic foundation in modern terms that the 40 acres when the covenant was first presented.

We've had a lot of time to think about this issue. Reparations is not a concept that simply popped up like a mushroom in recent years, it's been one of the basic tenets of redress for the Black community ever since slavery. You just weren't listening. The basic notion is that you have to begin keeping your promises to us somewhere. You have to say you're sorry, but that's just recognition, not redress. Redress requires keeping all of the other social and moral commitments made at the end of the Civil War. Those include equal treatment and protections; full citizenship, educational and employment opportunity, not three-fifths, and; the same rights and privileges that other Americans have always expected.

So, as we did sixty years ago and forty years ago, we're getting back on the buses and back on the streets -- but also back in the court rooms and in front of the board rooms and legislative bodies. We're saying we won't mutely accept more abusive neglect. That's ancient history.

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19 August, 2002 - It was with great pleasure last week that I watched and read about various prominent Republicans -- some of them from the the foreign policy establishment like Brent Scowcroft, Lawrence Eagleburger and Henry Kissinger -- coming out to reinforce what I said in my (now notorious) rant of two weeks ago about the planned Bush League war with Iraq being not only wrong-headed but dead wrong.

His Fraudulency's basic tendency toward unilateralism simply flies in the face of today's world, its interdependencies and anything that this benighted country has learned about geopolitics. We not only cannot afford the planned October War -- and no one is stepping up to the plate to finance it the way they did with Desert Storm -- we have no legitimate national interest in fighting it. Further, it sends all the wrong messages to people in the Middle East, where we have a diplomatic and human rights meltdown going on.

But that's not all. One writer here asserted in a recent issue that Dick Cheney should resign because of his alleged corporate skullduggery. I would follow that with the fact that Condoleeza Rice should follow Dick out the door. Any national security advisor who would play the party line of the politcal wing while ignoring the best advice of State Department professionals, including the head of that department, Colin Powell, , should already be shopping his/her Curriculum Vitae around.

Powell, to his credit in this episode, has at least been working the back-channels, it's said, to ask how long the occupation of Iraq after a successful assault would be and what kind of government would be in place, and how soon, afterwards. It would be disloyal of him to also pursue the question of how necessary this proposed war really is and talk about the devastating effect it would have on our economy and the already tarnished reputation of this nation in the outside world.

Speaking of that reputation, I found this comment by an Indian journalist succinct and trenchant: "The United States of America does not actually have allies; it has 'interests'."

That statement was apropos of the potential India-Pakistan conflict over the Kashmiri issue, but it speaks volumes about the Ugly American foreign policy that we have pursued for decades, if not centuries. Let's call a spade a spade.

Like Mr. Bush's Waco economic summit last week, EVERYTHING he does seems geared toward the Andrew Card version of a second term, as opposed to facing the realities of this country and the world. I'm sure that this Mr. Bush has seen a supermarket scanner, if only when he was buying a six pack during his storied profligate youth before he had his conversation with Jesus. But it would appear that he still doesn't know the difference between the fictional Parador and the real Ecuador. He is Hell-bent, almost in the literal sense, to vindicate Daddy's memory and historical reality be damned. That's what you get when you elect a dimwit to the highest office in the world in a beauty contest, rather than having an involved citizenry carrying on a serious civic exercise.

Or that's what you get when you treat your politics like just another commodity in a hyper-capitalist society.

What you don't get, in this shallow trade-off, is leadership or statemanship.

But, "Good Morning, LA!", this is the nation where everything is a commodity. Even our souls.

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END NOTE - 20 August, 2002: Many of you have written, and in some cases even gone to the expense to telephone, to express your concern about the on-going dismal state of Life of Rod. It's been truly appreciated.

As I've responded, I'm trying to stay positive and continuing my efforts to dig my way out of the Black Hole of New Orleans. But, like the storied Calcutta hole, this one is rather crowded. I know some of you even question why I came here, considering how difficult the last year has been. I understand your legitimate worry, but ask you not to worry. Join me in the hope that things will work out.

As I said last week, I have a grand friend in Scott Salin who I met here. He has put a bit of comfort in my couch-surf by letting me house-sit for him these last few days and again in eight days after this issue launches. It's a relief. But, that's three different locations, while trying to job-hunt, in a three week period.

Yes, it wears on one. It creates a kind of psychological exhaustion that makes every effort akin to swimming in molasses. Still, without Scott's support, think how much more onerous my situation would be. As my parents might say, we must remember to thank God for small favors as well as the large.

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Search www.g21.net [ ] Our Link Partners the Web for

WHAT I WANT THIS WEEK

1. Completion on the Job Search.

2. Some idea of when this couch-surf will end.

3. A moment of clarity.

4. The scent of a woman. (You know!)

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Thanks for coming back this week.

"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching..."
Rod

ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was also a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was also principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.

This year he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. (Think: The Boy.) Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia. Right now he's in the unenviable position of looking for both a job AND a place to live. Couch-surfing sucks! He is not a happy camper. In his spare time, he chases women.

Rod lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, right now. This town is seducing him the way a spider seduces a fly. He wants to live somewhere civilized when he grows up. Wish him Luck.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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