More than any other “famous” person her life, work and struggle has inspired me.

On her 60th Birthday I wish Assata health, happiness and patience. . .another year older, another year closer to being free, another year closer to seeing the U.S. again. . .a heroine’s welcome, a heroine’s welcome, a heroine’s welcome

Today is the 100th birthday of Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón –Frida Kahlo– artist, radical, inspiration.

Her birthday will be celebrated with the largest-ever exhibit of her paintings at the Museum of the Fine Arts Palace in Mexico. Now I need to save my pesos so that I can get there and pay my respects to one of the people that inspire me.

There is nothing more to say. Listen and learn. and then thank the universe for Mumia

(listen/download)

You kn ow that the Oscar people will not overlook Angelina’s “caucasian sacrificec”

from clutchmagonline.com

Angelina Jolie is the “new” black these days. From making Africa her new crusade to adopting an African daughter and talking about racial harmony on CNN, Jolie’s so-called altruism is her way to profit from the image of blackness. The new black is also white actors like Jolie in blackface. Jolie is currently starring in the biopic A Mighty Heart as Mariane Pearl, the widow of murdered Wall Street Journal writer Daniel Pearl. Jolie is white, and the real Mariane Pearl is of mixed heritage. (According to news reports, her father is Dutch-Jewish and her mother was Cuban-black-Hispanic-Chinese.) In the film, Jolie’s skin is darkened to appear more African and she is wearing a kinky wig.

Some people argue that since Pearl is of mixed heritage and not dark-skinned, Jolie is acceptable in the role. However, the symbolism of blackface is not about whether a white actor takes on a dark skin tone or light. It is the implicit message being sent that black women in Hollywood–which is slow to capitalize on the bankable quality of black female stars–can be replaced by white women. This certainly isn’t because of a lack of talent.

Movies aren’t just entertainment. There are cultural values embedded in the subtext of films. Movie stars are mythologies of hierarchy created by publicists, studios, and news media. The social constructions of the star-system archetype arose from the days of slavery. Hollywood’s consistent message is that black women are less profitable than white women. The standard by which North American women of all races are measured is the white female: feminine, beautiful, fragile, and perfect. By contrast, Queen Latifah’s mammy performance in the 2002 film Chicago as Matron Mama Morton and her 2003 Bringing Down the House role portray black women as aggressive, hostile, and unattractive.

The last major dramatic film for a black actress was the interracial drama Monster’s Ball. Although Halle Berry won an Oscar, it was degrading: Berry’s character, Leticia Musgrove, was depicted as sexually loose, the aggressor in the interracial sex scene, with the line “Make me feel good” delivered with a sneer. Such scenes shattered some of the respect the black community had for Berry. By contrast in A Mighty Heart, Angelina Jolie’s character is a pillar of strength, a woman demanding to know what happened to her husband. Since Hollywood is concerned about maximizing its profits, movies must be palatable to a mass market. Jolie was cast as A Mighty Heart’s female lead because she is considered an international draw, not for racial accuracy.

Black feminist bell hooks points out in Outlaw Culture, her groundbreaking book on films in pop culture, that we are controlled by a “White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy”. Hooks believes we must be “enlightened witnesses” and be cognizant that we are conditioned to accept whiteness as the centre of the universe. Black women have a long history of being typecast in film primarily as sex objects or maids. A Mighty Heart was the chance for a black actress to shine in a film that showcased the female lead as a three-dimensional person with complex emotions.

A more serious issue is the paucity of leading roles for black women in Hollywood. A Mighty Heart also tackles the rarely portrayed interracial relationship, in this case an interracial marriage between a black woman and a white man. Jolie’s presence in the film is a hindrance as it obscures and ultimately eliminates the real Mariane Pearl altogether. (Women have also asked why Mariane Pearl would allow a white woman to take the female lead in A Mighty Heart.)

Jolie consistently portrays herself as a Hollywood liberal who is against racism. Yet her superficial insensitivity to the plight of black women suggests an unwillingness to be challenged about her own values. What will she teach her daughter about white cultural domination?

i haven’t blogged in ages but today i am officially back in the game.

i’ve spent the last few months trying to live more and work less– yes this blog is work for me. so i’ve been evolving off line and outside my PC and email inboxes.

i don’t know if anyone reads this and missed me but i missed this.

Court to Review Cocaine Sentencing Case

MARK SHERMAN | June 11, 2007 03:47 PM EST |

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to review whether judges are required to impose dramatically longer sentences for crack cocaine than for cocaine powder, stepping into a long-running dispute with racial overtones.

Most crack cocaine offenders in federal courts are black.

The justices said they would hear the case of Derrick Kimbrough in the fall. Kimbrough, who is black and a veteran of the first war with Iraq in 1991, received a 15-year prison term for dealing both crack and powder cocaine, as well as possessing a firearm in Norfolk, Va.

That was shorter than the federal sentencing guidelines that called for a range of 19 to 22 years in prison.

At Kimbrough’s sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Raymond A. Jackson said the higher range was “ridiculous.”

“This case is another example of how the crack cocaine guidelines are driving the offense level to a point higher than is necessary to do justice in this case,” Jackson said.

The judge said the 15-year sentence “is clearly long enough under the circumstances. As a matter of fact, it’s the court’s view that it’s too long, but the court is bound by the mandatory minimums of 10 years on three of these counts.”

The government appealed the sentence. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond said judges are not free to impose sentences shorter than the guidelines “based on a disagreement with the sentencing disparity for crack and powder cocaine offenses.”

The Bush administration urged the high court to reject Kimbrough’s appeal. The administration also has opposed changes in crack sentencing laws, saying any changes should be part of a comprehensive look at sentencing issues.

Advocates for reducing the disparity point to crime statistics that show crack is more of an urban and minority drug while cocaine powder is used more often by the affluent. They say harsher penalties for crack cocaine unfairly punish blacks.

More than four-fifths of crack cocaine offenders in federal courts last year were black, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. By contrast, just over a quarter of those convicted of powder cocaine crimes last year were black, the commission said.

The issue grew out of a 1986 law that was passed in response to violent crimes committed to get money to feed crack habits. The law includes what critics have called the 100-to-1 disparity: Trafficking in 5 grams of cocaine carries a mandatory five-year prison sentence, but it takes 500 grams of cocaine powder to warrant the same sentence.

The sentencing commission, an independent agency within the U.S. judiciary, voted last month to reduce the recommended sentencing ranges for people convicted of crack possession, a step toward lessening the disparity. The recommendation will become effective Nov. 1 unless Congress acts.

At the same time, the commission urged Congress to repeal the mandatory prison term for simple possession and increase the amount of crack required to trigger obligatory five-year or more prison terms as a way to focus on major drug traffickers.

The issue was given a boost by the Supreme Court’s decision in 2005 to render the sentencing guidelines advisory instead of mandatory. The guidelines were adopted in the 1980s to ensure comparable sentences for similar crimes from courtroom to courtroom.

But the court ruled that a person’s constitutional right to a jury trial was violated when judges, acting alone, considered factors spelled out in the guidelines to add years to a prison sentence.

The court said sentences must be reasonable and left it to appeals courts to define that term. The vast majority of sentences remain within the guidelines.

The 4th Circuit said a sentence outside the guidelines range is presumed to be unreasonable when it is based on disagreement over the crack cocaine disparity.

Kimbrough’s case will allow the high court to consider a judge’s discretion in such cases. The case is Kimbrough v. U.S., 06-6330.

i will not be buried with your family

by me 

anticipation
is better still than the thing itself

the reality of our reality
is too much for you
is too real for me

the potential of things is sweeter
than the serious work of kanga clad reality  

you forget that labor and laughter live together
opt instead for potential filled places I have never been  

i remember how hard it is to love
you

alone

we both
wanting something else

. . . you more
a thing you can not share

with me

and I want only to be buried with your family

In 1925 Omaha, Nebraska Malcolm Little was born to Earl Little and Louise Helen Norton-Little.

Here as a link to a good article about Brother Malcolm, with whom I never had the pleasure of sharing the planet.

Love After Love

By Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door,
in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say,
sit here.
Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread.
Give back your heart to itself,
to the stranger who has loved you all your life,
whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.

Feast on your life.

snoop dogg on imus…

11Apr07

After radio talk show host Don Imus called the Rutgers University women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos” last week, many folks have been demanding that he be fired for his racist, sexist remarks.  Even Snoop Dogg had his say:

“It’s a completely different scenario, (Rappers) are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We’re talking about hoes that’s in the ‘hood that ain’t doing s**t, that’s trying to get a n**ga for his money. These are two separate things. … I will not let them muthaf**kas say we are in the same league as him. Kick him off the air forever.”

THIS WAS STOLEN SHAMELESSLY FROM K and NABIL’S DUBAI BLOG . . .

When They Think of Democracy They Think of Coca-Cola: Soda as politick
By Curtis Brown, as published in the latest Bidoun magazine.

http://www.bidoun.com/issues/issue_9/05_all.html#article

A teaser to get you interested and follow the link:

“Shortly after taking possession of the Golan Heights in June of 1967, Israeli Defense Forces entered the abandoned headquarters of the Syrian Army and in the flush of victory stripped down a Pepsi-Cola marquee-battered but still aloft-and hoisted a gleaming new Coca-Cola sign in its place. Regarded from today’s perspective, this seems like a gesture of inscrutable black humor or Warholesque non sequitur, a campy inside joke for which the reference has been lost. But to observers at the time, the merging of the cola wars and the Arab-Israeli conflict was a familiar story, and one to which the establishment of Coke’s “sovereignty” brought dramatic resolution.”

who said, “When Black Actors Play Bastards and Suckers They Give Us Oscars…

Think about it. - The Angryindian

But I would add:

They also give them when Black Actress:

1. play strung out troubled women who have violent, hateful sex with white men they also give us Oscars; remember Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball

2. play roles when their acting is not so great (i still love J-Hudson) to prove the affirmative action myth true

gotta love this one. . .

Disturbing Allegories by Kara Walker

The Invitation
–Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.

If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.

And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

In honor of this day i have released myself.

i have learned lately that:

1. i have been afraid to let go of some of the people in my life because of thier potential

2. the other half i have been looking for (classic gemini that i am) i already have. i am my other half

3. i sometimes allow people to occupy spaces in my life that are like weeds in the garden. . . flowering weeds. weeds that you don’t root out because you know they will be beautiful if your other plants don’t bloom. i just realized that the reason my others flowers don’t bloom is because the weeds are chocking them.

4. i can be the one to cut the cord and not feel guilty.

5. i want to thank all the people who have taken part in my journey with me; even the ones that brought pain, confusion and drama. i want them to know that i appreaciate there suppot. that, in the case of many of them, i see need and want that support but that i also know i can handle it from here on my own if they are busy.

It’s been a little while since i posted anything new.

I’ve been traveling and been busy growing

First, I was in Nairobi for the World Social Forum.

Nairobi, Baby! A city i really love. I got a lot of work done– networking and whatnot and was able to spend time with one of my girls, AfricanEye. So much nightlife (courtesy of hookah at Casablanca) and daylife (courtesy of the world’s anti-corporate globalization movements) and lots of letting go (the last days in person with my former partner).

So much to take in, do and see all against the backdrop of a great city.

I needed to get away. The US can really weigh on me and I must have been San or Roma in my last life because i can’t stay too long anywhere. Plus i LOVE rocking a tan in the middle of February.

I also have been working through the universal “round up your money time” at work. . .fund-raising and media are my new mantras. Funny, i didn’t get into the movement to beg for money and try to get the attention of the corporate media but here I am. I don’t know how I feel about it. I think now that i have weeded my proverbial personal life garden I need to get to work on the professional ish.

I have also been following the media- almost all Indy- about Josh Wolf the blogger who has been in jail since August 1, 2006 for trying to exercise his constitutional rights. read more here

After seven years (magical number of change and rebirth) of WSFs here we are:

• Anti-war activists and pacifists surrounded by soldiers
• Anti-corporate globalization and sponsored by Celtel and Kenya Airways
• Anti-capitalist without food and water because its too expensive for most to buy

Well at least the weather was warmer than Davos. . . .

DETERMINATION
by John Hendrik Clarke (may peace be upon him and is warrior spirit)
July 16, 1998

My feet have felt the sands
Of many nations,
I have drunk the water
Of many springs.
I am old.
Older than the pyramids,
I am older than the race
That oppresses me,
I will live on…
I will out-live oppression.
I will out-live oppressors.

So I am realizing that SARCASM doesn’t always translate in blogging. My short post from yesterday, which I thought needed NO explanation, might . . .

One of you in the cyberspace posted a comment about how “how heart breaking and right I was” or some ish which ’caused me to have to write again, in the middle of the work day, ’cause I am worried that people or, perhaps I, am misreading and not overstanding.

So, FOR THE RECORD, i need to be clear:
1. Madonna is an anglophile and a white supremacist of the highest order
2. NO ONE, i repeat, NO ONE needs to RESCUE little African babies
3. Poverty in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa is NO DIFFERENT from poverty in the US or the rest of the Americas; many people are poor (mostly working poor) and a few people are CRAZY wealthy because they exploit them. . . let me be clear boys and girls that Madonna is part of the exploiter class of folk.
4. The fact that she holds such views about the place where her “child” is from is PROOF that she is UNFIT to parent this child.

Brown Children are NOT an accessory. . .

that is all i will say on this issue. for more check out AfrikanEye’s blog (see to the right) as she wrote a wonderful article on the issue of westerns adopting African children.

WAKE THE F UP PEOPLE.

“There’s over a million orphans in Malawi, and in my opinion the laws need to change because these children need to be rescued,“. –Madonna, defending her recent “adoption”

it is a mystery. . . but it is on its way.

questions:
Where were you in 2001?
Where are you now?
Where will you be in 2012?

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space.

(S)He experiences self, thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

- Albert Einstein

–from the unapologetic Mexican

In March of last year, MIT named Cristian Arcega, Lorenzo Santillan, Oscar Vazquez and Luis Aranda as winners of the NASA sponsored Underwater Robotics contests. These four have been called, “The Smartest Kids in America.” Beating the well manned and funded team from MIT.

It turns out that they were undocumented immigrants, but NASA awarded them first prize anyway.

Now, that the dust has settled, reality sets in and we find these four exceptionally gifted youth resigning to the plight which is their destiny as is for many of the poor, ignored and persecuted members of our society.

Vazquez and Aranda graduated from Hayden last spring, but they’re not in college now because they’re undocumented immigrants and thus ineligible for student loans or low cost in-state tuition. Vazquez is hanging drywall and Aranda is filing papers at a Social Security office. Santillan and Arcega are still at Hayden; their chances for a college education are slim.

If these children were from Canada, Europe, or even Asia, they would probably have been assisted in becoming legal residents or been awarded college financial assistance, but with the current hostilities towards Mexicans in general, it is just luck that they have not been deported.

Have you seen the commercials for this new movie Freedom Writers starring Hilary Swank?

In my weekly hour of TV viewing last week I must have seen the commercial at least a dozen times . . . and each time I threw up a little in my mouth.

Didn’t Michelle Pfeiffer already save Coolio and the ‘hood back in the late 90’s?

And I am pretty sure that Antonio Banderas made a movie last year where the ‘hood was saved through dance although that movie was a hybrid as the teacher wasn’t “technically” white or female– Antonio is from Spain (read EUROPE/ read White) but has an accent like brown folks to the untrained ear and with the dance moves this movie sits on the fence of “white people saving the ‘hood” and “misunderstood white youth gains acceptance and street ‘cred’ through dance” but I digress. . .

I just want to know how many times they are going to make this movie?

It seems like every couple years some white chick must find herself, find the hood, learn about economic inequality, the education system that trains brown kids for jail and structural violence. Then, as she learns and translate the slang for you, the viewer, she will risk danger (usually not to herself just to the brown students –’cause brown folks are expendable in our U.S. cultural gaze) and help gang bangers find their inner personhood. . .

I almost threw up in my mouth a little again just typing that.

I am about through with this tired movie trope . . . it is COMPLETELY out of whack with the real world were:

1. 100 if not 1000s of teachers of all ethnic backgrounds work there asses off to nourish and educate their students to help them survive the world that see them as having more valuable playing with a ball, in lockdown or strung out.
2. Brown people are forced to show Europeans (especially those who are economically advantaged) that humanity looks like
3. little Black and Brown children are building a life together that defies that we have known– a world that is not based on racial difference, claiming ‘hoods, or warring with one another.

This movie is also an example of our fascination with people of color waging war against one another. . .

they aren’t making movies about the teachers who work in schools in Portland or Omaha (the U.S.’s whitest major cities) who witness their young white men shooting their fellow students a la Columbine ’cause that wouldn’t do.

. . .couldn’t market that.

People; “Americans” (read U.S. Americans, read white, read mostly middle class) don’t want to see that.

I’ma call on all my Euro-descendant friends and allies who aren’t buying the marketing and lies being promoted for there entertainment to protest this ish and boycott this movie.

You Bill Cosby colored folks too. . .

Don’t be like Oprah, don’t believe the hype.

Oh, and I can hear you already. . .”but isn’t it a true story?”
to that i will say, it doesn’t make the hollywood-ization of it cool. Clarence Thomas’s life is a true story and still deeply problematic.

Ms Fahima, 30, was released from jail on Wednesday after serving almost 30 months in jail for travelling to the West Bank, meeting an enemy agent and translating a simple army document.

“My first crime was that I refused to work with Shin Bet, the second was that I insisted on going to see the Palestinians and the third was that I protested against the Israeli policy of assassination,” Ms Fahima told the Guardian in her first interview since her release

For nine months of her incarceration she was kept in isolation, without access to any distractions such as books or television. “I used to lie on my bed and think about Jenin, the people I met and wonder how things were going there. I never get bored on my own,” she said.

Eventually, Ms Fahima was persuaded by her lawyer to agree to a plea bargain which would mean her serving only 10 months more than the 19 she had already served. It could take as long as a year to be found innocent, she was advised.

She is unbowed by her experience. “I learnt about the nature of Shin Bet, how they terrorise us, both the Israelis and Palestinians. I learnt about the nature of the government, how they do not want us to see what is going on in our name,” she said.

Ms Fahima had been an apathetic legal secretary who voted for the rightwing Likud party and carried Israeli prejudices about Palestinians until in 2003 she decided she wanted to understand why the Palestinians were attacking Israel.

She began making regular visits to Jenin, which had been devastated in an Israeli raid earlier that year. She talked to hundreds of people including Palestinian militants and for the first time heard the Palestinian view of the intifada and the difficulty of life under Israeli occupation.

Her meetings with one militant, Zakaria Zubeidi, stood out. Zubeidi was the leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin whose mother and brother had been killed by the Israelis that year. In countless interviews with journalists, including Israelis, he described how he and his mother had been involved in an Israeli-Palestinian theatre project which was the basis of an internationally-acclaimed Israeli documentary, Arna’s Children.

A week before Ms Fahima was arrested in August 2004 she received a phone call from a Shin Bet agent who inquired how she was finding life without work before inviting her to a meeting at her local police station in Kiryat Gat in the south of Israel. She decided not to go. In the month-long interrogation that followed her arrest she was questioned about the people she had met and asked for information which Ms Fahima said she did not have. During this period Shin Bet agents briefed Israeli journalists she had been having an affair with Zubeidi, who was well known to Israelis from newspaper interviews.

“It was a Shin Bet tactic to make me and him seem bad and to delegitimise us both,” she said, adding that while it was obvious to some that it was malicious, many, including friends, believed it.

When she was finally charged she was accused of translating an army document which apparently detailed an arrest operation that was due to take place.

“In the wake of the explanations of the accused,” read the charge sheet, “Zubeidi later ordered the wanted persons to hide until the conclusion of the military operation and the wanted persons, who carried out Zubeidi’s directive and hid, were not detained.”

The document contains three aerial maps of Jenin, and four photographs of wanted men, including Zubeidi, with a short description of each. Zubeidi speaks and reads Hebrew after years of work and imprisonment in Israel.

Timeline:
August 8 2004 Tali Fahima arrested

September 2004 Placed under administrative detention

December 2004 Charged with “assistance to the enemy at time of war”

January 2005 Tel Aviv district rules Ms Fahima should be placed under house arrest during the trial

January 2005 Jerusalem’s high court overrules district court saying she “identifies with an ideological goal”

December 2005 Ms Fahima pleads guilty to meeting and aiding an enemy agent and entering Palestinian territory

January 2006 Ms Fahima released

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

George the II signed the new postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20 and then issued a “signing statement” that declared his right to open people’s mail under emergency conditions. That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed. but no matter it more of the same from W– he did all this during the winter congressional recess before the new members of congress had been sworen it and got down to business and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed.

He just gave himself the potentail to have authority beyond anything we’ve ever known from the Executive Office because apparently he wants to “protect human life and safety against hazardous materials and the need for physical searches specifically authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection.”

Um, isn’t that why we have search warrants? I guess W can’t trust any judge he didn’t appoint himself.

the craziness and the lack of media coverage

I can’t help it. There is just so much ish out there that needs to be shared.

From overheardinnewyork.com:

“Middle-aged Long Island lady thumbing through magazine: Look, there’s Stephen Colbert.

Husband: Who’s that?
Middle-aged Long Island lady: He’s a terrific Republican reporter on TV. You should watch him. He’s really great. Puts the liberals in their place.”

–JFK, overheard by: djeremy

exploration
sometimes
I feel like
inviting you
to just
wander off
to some quiet
quite
undiscovered
corner of the world
to simply
e x p l o r e

. . .because as Nana Kobina Nketsia IV (paramount Chief of Segundi-Tagrati, revolutionary, Guinean nationalist, cabinet member under Ahmed Sekou Toure, and Oxfordite) stated so eloquently in a co