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by Radio Raheem
G21 Staff Writer

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OAKLAND, CA, USA - When I pause to think about, I have to admit to myself and lament that we Black folk here in Amerika have a special burden all our own. At least once a week, on the job, in commerce, in the media, somewhere we have to deal with that special sense of non-personhood. We have to deal with simply being ignored, or rebuffed, or looked down upon only and because of our abundance of melanin. The darker you are, the closer to what some brothers and sisters call "blue-black" you are, the worse it gets. It is a form of injury, indeed of violence, that most other people -- perhaps with the exception of Native Americans and the Irish -- are never made to endure.

Because these folks don't have to deal with this, almost every day of their lives, as we do, they tend to discount its effects or complain when the subject is even broached. They say that we are complaining, even whining, and that we are too sensitive to slights that might not even exist.

But these slights and this injury does exist and this country and the world will never be healed until it acknowledges and confronts this great wrong against too many of God's children.

It is no accident and not simply a matter of happenstance that we are the poorest, most under-educated, most incarcerated, most under-employed, most uninsured of Americans. It is not an accident or a casual fact that more Black people down South have strokes than their white, brown and yellow compatriots, which one study recently released ties not only to their poor diets but also to their lack of access to health care. It is not an accident, as our Esteemed Editor mentioned in "News to Rod" during the U.S. Presidential election season, that both candidates were mush-mouthed in response to Public Broadcasting journalist Gwen Ifill's question about this government's non-effort in decreasing the horrific incidence of HIV/AIDS infection among Black women.

We are being washed away, we are being actively destroyed by a society that would have us gone after building itself on our broad backs at the beginning of its inception. The economy that became the world's most robust leader in textiles and thus became the great empire today was built through the institution of Black slavery and would soo ner forget than admit that. It wants us to forget this important economic reality as well and resents that we cannot.

And, at the same time, while seeking to destroy us and ignore our intellectual and creative contributions to its uber-consumerist society, it bequeaths us the special burden of being the most long-suffering, most forgiving, most tolerant people you can find anywhere in the world.

Black people, particularly Black church people, have turned the other cheek so many times that our faces are now numb from the pain.

This is something that we should talk about this Black History Month, this shortest month, here in Amerika.

While I commend our Esteemed Editor for going out in the Black community of New Orleans and trying to organize the people there to address issues of social justice, I must also ask if he is not becoming part of an effort that is little more than Poverty Pimphood. ACORN takes money from the poorest in society and provides them with what I believe to be false expectations rather than re-deploy the resources of the richest in society, who gained their wealth by means of preying on these poor folk, to ameliorate the effects of their corporate damage. I smell something foul and rotten in the organization's equation, for all the supposed good they have done in terms of issues of housing and a living wage. In my view, ACORN, like many businesses in America and like vacuum cleaner salesman, preys upon the very community it claims to represent and assist. By using an emotional and polarizing appeal, it gets the people it claims to help to invest in a permanent structure of White-run and White-benefit social activism. Niggaz just get the crumbs again.

And that, as W.E.B. DuBois points out nearly a hundred years ago, is the problem of race that Amerika must face before it can truly move forward to become the representative democracy that it claims to be on paper and in its self-congratulatory hype to the rest of the world.

The Black Man's Burden is that most White people, struggling desperately to hold onto their positions of power and privilege in this society and all of its institutions, don't want to have any kind of serious dialogue about these baldly glaring facts.

This Black History Month, we have the burden of moral responsibility to speak up and speak out, loudly, about these facts.

The ghosts of our matyrs, from Nat Turner to Emmett Till to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., insist -- nay! -- demand that we continue to holler about these facts.

It is not an historical accident or a matter of happenstance that Africa, the continent that science tells us spawned all of civilization and mankind, is the most neglected, impoverished and AIDS plagued continent on Earth today -- until Asia manages to catch up. And the bloody responsibility for the deaths of millions of Africans and the birth of many more AIDS babies falls squarely in the laps of the privileged peoples of Europe and North America. Let's talk about these proven and documented facts.

I ACCUSE.

This year, when the results of the American election have told the world that this country has repudiated republicanism and chosen empire, I drop the guantlet to my own Esteemed Editor here and GENERATOR 21 and also to all the media in this country to stand foursquare for the "least of these," as Jesus characterized us, the poor, the orphaned, the widowed, the oppressed and forgotten. This year, this Black History Month, I challenged this publication and all of the media to speak out boldly for social justice, for human rights, for human dignity. IF NOT NOW, WHEN? IF NOT US, WHO?

It should NOT only be the Black's Man's Burden to address an issue that burns to be quenched. It is NOT alone the Black's Man's Burden to insist that the hungry be fed, the homeless be housed, the sick be healed, the soul of the world be redeemed. It is for all of mankind that we must, this century, this month, this year holler to high Heaven that NOW is the time for Jubilee.

I suspect that that is what our Publisher meant by his headline "Satin Revolution." We want that revolution now. We can do it because the politicians have chosen their side, aligning themselves like the monarchs of old with the powerful and privileged in opposition to the lowly fellahin. We can do it because the future of our children, and I say this as my wife Tanya has begun to "show," depends upon us.

My Esteemed Editor once wrote that the mission of this World's Magazine was to "generate energy that would shape the 21st Century." He said that that was why he chose the name GENERATOR 21 for what he has wrought here.

Okay, Old Man, step up. Let's talk truth to power this month, this Black History Month, this year, this new century. You say, "Welcome to the Future." I say, Make the Future. My child is depending on us.

Peace Out.