The SeeingBlack.com 411
February 2005

Tsunamis and other African Disasters… Remembering James Forman… The Race Crisis in Oakland Schools… Fussing Over Racist T-Shirts…(And WGJ)

Compiled by the Red-Eye Crew
SeeingBlack.com Contributing Writers

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Within days of the tsunami in December, I started getting emails and phone calls from people I did not know. They were very similar in both content and form. The writer or caller would be a bit hesitant and wanted to make sure that they were not misunderstood. "It's not that I don't care about the people in Asia, because I do! It's just that...No one is talking about the impact of the tsunami on Africa."

The terrible tsunami of 2004 not only devastated Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, but swept over the east coast of the African continent. Little media attention has been given to the impact on Africa and it is fair to ask why this is the case. I would suggest that there are two main reasons. First, it is important that we understand that the impact of the tsunami on Africa paled in comparison to its impact on Asia. Rough estimates seem to indicate that somewhere between 300 and 400 people were killed in Africa. In Somalia, the country that seems to have been the most affected, somewhere around 50,000 people are homeless, with approximately 4,000 permanently displaced.

In contrast, Thailand lost approximately 5,000 people, India reported nearly 11,000 dead, Sri Lanka had at least 31,000 dead and Indonesia lost 110,000 people. [The death toll has since risen to more than 250,000] This does not include the wounded or homeless. So at one level, the scale is so entirely different, that this will affect attention.

If this was a just world, there would be attention to Africa, but there would also be greater attention to the heart of the disaster. This is not, however, a just world and this leads to the second reason for the lack of coverage. Africa is treated as if it is the world's basket case. We in the global North (Europe, Japan and North America) have become numb to the disasters that Africa faces. While at one level it is understandable that greater attention goes to Asia, it is fair to say that even if 110,000 people had been killed in East Africa because of the tsunami, there would have been little attention and outcry. It would have been treated as one more African disaster.

I am sure that someone will cry out that I am being paranoid or simply fixated on race, but consider the facts. Since 1997, somewhere between 3.5 million and 4 million people have died as a result of the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We all know that in 1994, 800,000 to 1 million people were butchered in the Rwanda genocide. We know that ethnic cleansing and genocide are being used in the Darfur region of the Sudan as a method of counter-insurgency, resulting in approximately 50,000 to 100,000 deaths. Yet, the world has not stopped and focused massive media attention and aid, except when prodded, as in the case of Darfur, or with much-belated attention, as in Rwanda.

We have to face the reality, and actually challenge this reality, that Black life is undervalued in the global North, and the disasters that affect Africa particularly are viewed as unfortunate but not critical, including the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The global North can look at the tsunami and its devastation and believe that they can help to address this rare occurrence. The global North does not have to strain to understand any dynamics or history, as it does when it comes to Africa. It especially does not have to examine its own culpability in the problems of the African continent. It can simply throw up its hands in frustration and mutter that nothing can be done.

The depth of the racial blind spot to the scope of Africa's challenges means that people who are concerned about Africa and the African world have to keep issues in front of the public, even at the risk of creating discomfort: actually, in order to encourage discomfort. Africa's challenges will never be addressed by Europe, Japan and North America as long as addressing these challenges is viewed as offering charity for a dysfunctional continent. Africa's challenges must be understood as the continuing effects of the slave trade, colonialism, the Cold War and structural adjustment. This does not mean that Africans are blameless for hideous actions, such as the Rwanda genocide. To the contrary, Africans must be held accountable for their decisions, but these decisions do not take place in the abstract, but in a context in which the rules of the game have been set by others who have no particular interest in our success. [If you are interested in offering assistance to African tsunami victims, please contact Africare at 440 R St., N.W., Washington, D.C, 20001-1935, 202-462-3614. www.africare.org]
– Bill Fletcher Jr., www.transafricaforum.org

Honoring James Forman, Freedom Fighter

James Forman was a Black Revolutionary, who spent the many years of his life in opposition to the Empire, White supremacy, and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and cops in the South during the Civil Rights Movement.

He was an important and central figure in the nonviolent Civil Rights movement as a leading member of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), the Black Nationalist movement, and was a founding member of the Black Economic Development Conference (BEDC), and briefly was a leading member of the Black Panther Party.

Whether he worked as a voting rights activist, an economic rights activist, a nationalist, an internationalist, an anti-imperialist, a writer, teacher or scholar, he contributed his strengths and his brilliance to the Freedom Movement.

James Forman recently passed away at the age of 76.

When an activist with SNCC, Forman's group tried, against great and dangerous odds, to register Black voters in repressive places like Mississippi. In September, 1962, two young people who worked with the voter registration drive there were wounded when someone fired shotgun blasts through a window in Ruleville. Forman spoke out on SNCC's behalf, demanding the U.S. president "convene a special White House Conference to discuss the wave of terror sweeping through the South, especially where SNCC is working on voter registration."

In his classic, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (1985), Forman wrote about the ideas behind SNCC's famous Mississippi Summer Project of 1964:

In SNCC we had often wondered, How do you make more people in this country share our experiences, understand what it is to look in the face of death because you're black, feel hatred for the federal government that always makes excuses for the brutality of Southern cops and state troopers? We often wondered: How can we find the strength to continue our work in the face of the poverty of our people, to do everything that shouts to be done in the absence of so many resources? The Mississippi Summer Project was an attempt to answer those questions... It is a highly dramatic story of black people in Mississippi and how almost a thousand volunteers — mostly white students — came to the state to help work on voter registration, the building of the new Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the setting up of "freedom schools." [p. 372]

SNCC's idea was brilliant, because it not only brought attention to the vicious brutality faced by people trying to register African-Americans to vote, it also provided some degree of protection for registrars, for white supremacists naturally regarded white life as more precious than Black life. In that sense, SNCC used white supremacy against itself. But it didn't last long. The violence historically reserved for Blacks began to be shared by white voter registration activists, and white terrorists attacked two white, and one Black member of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, beating, and then killing them.

By 1966, however, the era of Black Power had arrived, shouted as a slogan during a march to Meridian, Mississippi, by SNCC organizer, Willie "Mukassa" Ricks, and before long, the slogan would catch fire, energizing SNCC and other Black movements, and as Forman would later write, things would never be the same:

[A] whole new rhetoric and a new set of attitudes as well as policies emerged at this time. The phrase "civil rights movement," long moribund, died forever with the birth of Black Power. At the same time, recognition of the need for black people to organize themselves and conduct their own struggle— together with the need for whites to fight racism in white communities — led to an increasing emphasis on all-blackness in SNCC as well as other militant groups. [p. 458]

A year later, Forman, 'Rap' Brown (now known as Imam Jamil Al-Amin), and Stokeley Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) were 'drafted' into the Black Panther Party's Central Committee, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Justice and Prime Minister, respectively. Because of government interference however, this 'draft' was short-lived. Forman spent many years working for Black Reparations. His life and his work will long be remembered.—Mumia Abu-Jamal, www.mumia.org

Oakland’s War Against Schoolchildren

Several years ago, the great activist and prison abolitionist, Angela Davis, told me that California prison guards make more money than the state's college professors.

I was dumbfounded. But it told me all I wanted to know about how the State values its places of repression, and devalues places of education.

I thought of that conversation when I heard about the latest 'financial crisis' facing the Oakland Unified School District, the state's takeover by an undemocratic agency, and the subsequent threats of cuts, of cutbacks, and the ever-present lure of charter schools.

Oakland is far more than the city that gave birth to the Black Panther Party; it is far more than the popular projection of a poor city.

Oakland's Port is the 4th largest in the world. That port generates some $27 Billion annually in trade. It is home to the American President Lines (APL), the 5th largest shipping company in the world.

American business powerhouses like the Clorox Co., and Rolls-Royce Engines Services, call Oakland home. Golden West Financial/World Savings is located in Oakland. It has assets of over $68 billion. It's profits in 2003 were over $900 million. Clorox, by the way, did over $4 billion in sales, netting some $320 million in profits last year.

There's a very good reason why Forbes Magazine ranked Oakland as the 8th best city for business in the U.S. It's because Oakland isn't a poor town. Only some people in it are poor. For others, it's a gold mine.

So why, in a city so good for business, where billions are made annually, are the schools so fiscally challenged?

Why? Oakland teacher, Steven Miller explained why in a recent article, when he wrote:

Oakland is not a poor city. In fact, it's economy is the 20th largest metropolitan economy in the US and the 84th largest in the world. The city's Gross Metropolitan Product for 2001 was $99.46 billion, larger than San Jose, Denver, Pittsburgh, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Singapore, Malaysia and the Phillippines. This vast wealth comes from Oakland's port, the country's fourth largest. However, the port has been legally separated from the city government since the days of the Black Panthers. So none of its revenue "can be used for schools." Why? "It's the law!" The same scam of creating artificial legalisms to create artificial crisis is being used across the country. California's economy is the largest in the country and the fifth largest in the world. However we are told "the state is in debt." Under the "Governator," the state is destroying its community college system, once the best in the world, in the name of "fiscal accountability." This fall, half a million fewer students will go to college in the state than last year. However there will be no cuts for the country's largest prison system. [From: Steven Miller, "Oakland's Public Schools: The Coal Miner's Canary", *People's Tribune* (Online Edition), Vol. 31 No. 9/ Sept. '04, P.O. Box 3524, Chicago, IL 60654, http://www.lrna, org.]

There is no sane reason why the Oakland Unified School District should be in need. It's like being thirsty, but not allowed to drink from a river nearby. In a truly sane society, schools, where the young are taught how to live in tomorrow's world, there should be no need. What we have now, is unbridled greed. The corrosive logic of business has been pervading the nation's schools, and a public, social service is being managed as just another commodity. And kids are losing.

The business interests in this country want nothing public, and all things private, so that it can be owned, and exploited. These interests want nothing less than the extinction of the New Deal; the evisceration of social security; the 'public' removed from public schools. That's the objective of the right wing in this country, and under these madcap programs like No Child Left Behind, they are nearing their objective. Every time I hear that lying phrase, I think of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, where no child was left — alive.

Martin Luther King, Jr., if he were alive today, would be fighting for the children of Oakland, demanding resources from those who have them— the wealthy, downtown.
—Mumia Abu-Jamal, www.mumia.org

Arrest Black Babies

As of our deadline, all the Internet buzz has been over a White site that sells t-shirts and manages to draw controversy (and publicity and traffic to their site!) Their recent product is a t-shirt picturing a Black infant above the caption, "Arrest Black Babies Before They Become Criminals." Needless to say, the Black anti-defamation machinery has gone into motion, with calls for writing campaigns and boycotts. EUR web has said that they have even an “alert” concerning the shirts to “President George Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Maxine Waters, Diane Watson, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Tom Joyner, Tavis Smiley, Steve Harvey, Cathy Hughes, BET, The NAACP, The Urban League, The Brotherhood Crusade, Russell Simmons, Sean Combs, Magic Johnson, Johnny Cochran, Willie Gary, Michael Jordan, Don Barden, Earl Ofari Hutchinson and all other such national and local leaders.” EUR web also reports that the site, TshirtHell.com, has also drawn lawsuits from the Olsen Twins over the t-shirt "I F***** the Olsen Twins Before They Were Famous," as well as a shirt about buying Christopher Reeve's wheelchair on Ebay.

We Got Jokes: Too Many Drug Ads?

Apparently President George W. Bush isn’t immune to the barrage of TV ads for “male enhancement” products. In a recent press conference he said, "Who would have believed a year ago that tomorrow Iraq would have a fair erection, uhm, election."

(And remember, you should seek medical attention, or a Diebold machine, for erections lasting more than 4 hours.)

— Compiled February 7, 2005

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