BlackPerspective.net

A while back a message board discussion started about the “negative aspects of integration and the civil rights movement”.

A commenter that goes by the user handle dyvinesweetness said

My biggest gripe with integration is that it reinforces the idea that we need to have what white people have and be involved in white events/venues/etc. Instead of reinforcing the idea that we need to have our own shit and embrace the good of our culture and build on it.

(Regarding schools) I think the problem was we realized that “separate but equal” wasn’t accurate. Yet we chose to take issue with separate instead of equal. Had we focused more on making black schools better instead of telling little black kids that they needed to go to white schools, we might have seen a lot of different changes now.

To the point about the schools, my friend was just telling me the other day about how after the Brown V. Board of Education decision that Mississippi went to Medger Evers (latter slain Mississippi NAACP President) and offered him 30 million for black schools, and he said no deal, he wanted integration.

dyvinesweetness further went on to say “…assimilation requires losing your culture for the sake of the dominant culture. Black people will never be able to assimilate the way Jews, Irish, etc have so it’s a losing battle (as gal said). AND it’s ridiculous to even look at losing your heritage and culture as a positive thing.”

I added that, “Integration calls for Black people to give up all of whom we are - our heritage, culture, style, etc. and become imitations of white folk with dark skin. They’re not required to do anything but “tolerate” us.

I’ve always said that being around white people (ie being able to go to school with them) is no fucking prize. Most school funding is still based on property tax, and most blacks, particularly those without resources still go to schools in low property tax areas; leaving them with unequal funding, unequal access to education and hence, unequal opportunity.”

Another commenter, mizcheyenne,: said, “Another issue is that the Civil Rights Model dominates people’s perceptions of seeking equality, but there are people who want sovereignty rather than inclusion.”

Exactly, sovereignty and self-determination are my position. Hugging up on white folks neck does not enrich my life. Further, I don’t believe they will ever equally involve our culture, heritage and interest (certainly not in my life time) so we should have our own institutions and providence for our own benefit.

Simply tolerating me is not acceptable.

Malcolm X noted that the goal should be Human Rights not Civil rights, as civil rights are tied simply to a particular political system and what rights it deems you ought to have.

Ben Ammi asks in his book God the Black Man, and Truth, when have you ever known a people involved in revolution to be oppressed by a system, to call it an evil corrupt system, just to turn around and ask to join that system? [paraphrase, I haven’t read the book in like 6 years]

I’m going to do at least a 2 part series. We’ve identified the issue here, and will investigate some case study examples to illuminated it next.

What do you think about this subject? Was integration, per se, really the best thing for us? Or maybe was there a better way to do it?

As the Iraqi’s push through legislation that would end immunity for foriegn private security contractors, it’s revealed that Blackwater gangsters were offered immunity by the U.S. State Department.

By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer:
WASHINGTON - Democrats criticized the Bush administration Tuesday for giving immunity to Blackwater USA bodyguards, calling the move a failure to hold the security contractors responsible for the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, who sits on two Senate panels that oversee the State Department and the Justice Department, called the immunity deal an example of “the amnesty administration.”
news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071030/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/blackwater_prosecutions

As usual with the Bush Administration, the buck stops with the smallest scapegoat that they can find. According to an Associated Press video in that link, the AP was told by the State Department that no high ranking officials gave approval for the immunity. Then who did? You’re telling me run of the mill, middle managers can just handout immunities at will?

If they were given any official immunity there has to be documentation. Who’s signature is on it? Who gave that person authorization to do that?

We’ve talked here before about Blackwater basically being a mercinary army for hire. In furtherance of that view we have this:

Blackwater is building survallence planes now, “to support our troops”.

…Darfur to Dunbar Village

I’ve been holding in reserve this post for awhile waiting to be able to finish it. With my planned participation in the pending, Blogging For Justice To Protect Black Women From Rape on November 1st; I figured it was fitting that I go forth with it. The subject of this post also bridges last weeks Blogging Against Genocide to Thursdays action.

For the past four years the Janjaweed has systematically used rape as a weapon of war to destroy women and communities in Darfur.

The Janjaweed are Afro-Arab militia in Sudan, who’ve been on a brutal campaign against ethenic groups they wants to displace from Darfur for financial as well as ethno-centric reasons. They’ve chosen a method of utter demorilization, a shock and awe if you will, to accomplish this goal.

As I noted in my March 2007 post, A Million Miles Away the New York Times Described this campaign as being “…very different than opportunistic rape by individual criminals, this is policy rape.”

Watch the 3 minute Video Janjaweed in America…

…Then understand that the same thing in a sense is happening here. We have an out of control, sociopatic, criminal element that wants to terrorize the neighborhoods, or better yet, Petri dish concentration camps that the poor are often forced into; to establish a reign of preeminence over the area to do as they will.

This is happening in places like Dunbar Village. Dunbar Village is where the 35 year old West Palm beach woman was gang raped for 3 hours, and then forced to perform oral sex on her 12 year old son. This incident was actually just one of many in that area in a short period of time.

I previously wrote about Dunbar Village in Invisible Black Women Part 1 saying

“Despite a rash of rapes in the area, and other general violence, the city of West Palm Beach doesn’t want to bother to provided security in their run down projects (aka concentration camp) that are Dunbar Village.”

Rape is moving from the already horrible tool of self empowerment, and dehumanization and control over an individual to an even greater weapon of war against whole families and whole communities; and is largely going unchallenged by our national or world society.

Due to technical difficulties, this post has been moved to here: www.blackperspective.net/index.php/darfur-to-dunbar-village/

It’s very inspiring. I wasn’t really feeling the music the first time though I loved the video, because I was thinking I was going to hear some Bob Marley or Public Enemy; but now I can’t stop listening to it and singing the song in my head.

Plus, if you went to the march like I did, the video brings back to life sites and scenes from that day, especially when we left the court house to march to the school and we’re going down that steep hill and you could just see a beautiful bellowing sea of marchers.

It starts off saying “We Marched in the 60s, We Marched in the 80s , In 2007 God’s Truth Is Marching On”

(though they meant the 90s when they put 80s, because that’s the million man march in that part).

The Video: video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7253600219767288651

I’ve never been so proud of Negroes in my life time as I was, and continue to be, on that day.

We will fight, and we WILL win!

Villager says “To be clear, the brother is no angel. Group sex with a 15-year old isn’t something to be proud about. However, a 10-year jail sentence is cruel and unusual punishment. We knew that all along. ” I would add, nonetheless, the two were basically peers, and a 17 year old should not be criminally responsible, certainly not to the toon of 10 years, for a 15 year olds choosen sexual behavior. This is not the case of an older person preying on a child, or abusing a position of power for sex.

Chief Justice Sears put’s it this way in the majority decision statement:

“Although society has a significant interest in protecting children from premature sexual activity, we must acknowledge that Wilson’s crime does not rise to the level of culpability of adults who prey on children and that, for the law to punish Wilson as it would an adult, with the extraordinarily harsh punishment of ten years in prison without the possibility of probation or parole, appears to be grossly disproportionate to his crime,”

You can Find CNN Video analyis here: www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/10/26/dornin.genarlow.wilson.free.cnn

Post Release press confrence with Gernalow:
www.cnn.com/2007/US/law/10/26/wilson.freed/index.html?eref=ib_topstories#cnnSTCVideo

Supposedly Genarlow Wilson, the then 17 year old given 10 years for receiving consexual oral sex from a 15 year old; is supposed to get out soon. He’s 21 now.

Heard it on headline news, got no details.

I looked up his name in google and yahoo news searches, and got nothing about it.

Does anyone know anything about this?

Edited to add: Got it: hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/T/TEEN_SEX_CASE?SITE=WIJAN&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

In The End, Hillary’s Willing To Just Let Them Be Slaughtered

Her website touts a tapistry of all the bills she’s supported and nice statements she’s put behind ending the “crisis in Darfur; but when it comes down to it, if she were president, she wouldn’t put any muscle behind that hustle.

In the CNN youtube debate, this is what some of the candidates said:

Senator Joe Biden of Delaware said he would send 2,500 U.S. troops to Darfur to try to end the civil war there.

It took three tries to get Clinton to answer the same questions. She finally said American ground troops do not belong in the fight because they are overextended in Iraq. *

That’s a nice little argument, and someone could almost buy it (if they were brain dead, dumb, and stupid); but when you look at an example like Bush deciding he wanted to surge earlier this year; we were already “over-extended” by most every “progressive’s” estimation; yet some how we mustered up what, 20,000 more troops when we needed them.

We have enough troops to do whatever we want if we WANT to do it. Of course “want to” is the operative phrase here. Just like how there’s no money for health care, or increasing college loans or for head start, then out of the thin blue sky we come up with half a trillion dollars in 4 years, out side of the budget. I guess it just materialized out of the sky when Hillary and the legislature wished upon a falling star. Well, I wish Hillary would be strong in opposing genocide.

We can do what we want to do; we only can’t do when we don’t want to.

Contact Hillary, the White House and your Congressmen and let them know that they need to take decisive action now.

With other countries providing troops for the United Nations/African Union joint force we probably won’t even need to provide many if any troops; maybe only air support, money and supplies. But nonetheless, support troops should not be just summarily taken off the table as Hillary has done.

Bill Clinton apologized for Rwanda a couple of years ago. For what? If his wife became president, she’d just do it again; it being, uuuuhhhh pretty much nothing.

Maybe if I start spreading a rumor that Darfur has yellow cake uranium, then Hillary will be for military action like she was the last time that ridiculous rumor was spread.

*http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=470316&in_page_id=1770

You know what? I don’t have any great aggrandizing words today. I just want people to take a little bit of action that really doesn’t cost them much of anything to do.

If you’re just not familiar yet, you can read of the brutal systematic rape that leaves women incontent and unable to reproduce; the terror of never knowing when the men in your village, and even teenage boys might be rounded up or your village burnded to the ground, and indiscriminant killing of people in Darfur.

We need you to participate in contacting the White House and contacting your Congressmen over the next 3 days in this concerted national and international effort to bring pressure to bare for the nations of this world to act.

Further, if you could print off and postal mail this letter (or one of your own choosing)to your senator, representative or the president that would be even better than an email; especially in conjunction with a phone call.

This Day of Action on Darfur was put forth by Amnesty International to coincide with United Nations Day, which is today.

Yesterday Amnesty International USA released the following memo: Amnesty International today called on the government of Sudan to stop blocking the speedy deployment of the U.N. peacekeeping force to Darfur and urged key governments to immediately supply urgently-needed equipment, such as military helicopters, for the force.

In a short report released today, Obstruction and Delay: Peacekeepers Needed in Darfur Now, Amnesty International details obstructions and delays to the deployment of UNAMID, a joint United Nations and African Union force which is due to take over from the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) by the end of December 2007.
www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?lang=e&id=ENGUSA20071022001

Their story In Video

From The UltravioletUnderground
3 Reasons Darfur Threatens Humanity

1.Inflicted and unnecessary suffering anywhere threatens justice everywhere.
2.If we stand by and watch without action we have no right to ask for help in our time of need.
3.If the world governments can watch this with detachment, do not be so sure your own government would care or even take action if the people in your region were slaughtered, starved and raped on a daily basis. Remember Katrina, and research the matters surrounding Katrina that were not shared in mass media.

I would like to thank all those who’ve participated in todays net action, listed in the comment here: www.blackperspective.net/index.php/darfur-blogging-against-genocide/

Timothy Webber and Josh Dotts, along with two other friends came into down town Nashville from a surburb right out side of Nashville one night last year for the admited purpose of simply harrassing homeless.

They went through downtown physically attacking homeless, ending up on the water front of the Cumberland River, in Water Front Park. Then Webber on a “dare” from Dotts, rolled sleeping homeless woman, Tara Cole, off the banks into the river, to her death.

She hadn’t done anything to them. She hadn’t done anything to anyone. It was all for kicks. A prank, sort of like how hanging nooses is a prank for many in America these days.

32 year old Tara Cole’s body was found under a barge the next day.

Webber and Dotts plead guilty in court yesterday, receiving sentences of 17 and 8 years respectively.

Her parents were in court. After court they had a face to face, and excepted an apology from Webbers, and pronounced that they forgive him.

I talked to someone who knew the family of Tara a while back. He tells me she was bi-polar or something of the like, and actually had a decent amount of money in the bank at the time of her death. That it was mental disease that lead her to living on the streets. That her family would get her off for a while, but that she would go back.

Just goes to show that all homeless are not simply lazy bums not willing to work. Some are, but not all.

Government Harrassment of homeless in Nashville

It’s okay to clear out public property, but there was certainly a more judicious and humanitarian way of doing it rather than dumping the little bit of property in to the river that people who have nothing possess. And how bout providing more affordable housing so some people won’t be reduced to this?

There was another story in the news here last week about how homeless feeding program that had gone on for years was shut down by the city health department. Not only is government not willing to feed these folks; but somebody is hungry, someone is willing to feed them, and the government prevents them from doing so.

Original Tara Cole story article from last year:
tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071022/NEWS03/710220368/1017/NEWS