MURDER

Bodies lay decomposing in the streets.

Buried under mounds of concrete rubble.

Tossed into mass graves like human landfill.

The aftermath of a major earthquake,

the devastation was no twist of fate,

or work of a supernatural devil

This is murder

Jackhammers and drills and rescue teams save another foreign visitor trapped in a collapsed building while desperate Haitians in another part of town claw with bare fingers to free neighbors and family members.

Doctors are told to abandon their patients and faux concern over mob violence is used as an all-purpose raison d’être for the agonizingly slow-motion rescue while the clock runs out on those in need.

Haitian children chosen by loving American adoptive parents are safely flown to the United States while loving Haitian parents fleeing with their children in boats will be stopped and turned back by the U.S. Coast Guard.

This is murder

Commentators offer partial explanations.

Enormous poverty and a weak government

A massively overcrowded city and insubstantial infrastructure

Flimsy homes unable to withstand a sudden shift in the earth’s plates

Facts presented like a list of self-evident ingredients

Without history

or reason

or context

that would indicate anything criminal occurred

Just another unfortunate nation who

through no fault of our own

(though perhaps due to their own inadequacies)

ended up on the wrong side of life’s bounties

But this is murder.

The evidence is not hidden.

The proof not buried among the countless dead.

It lies in plain sight.

One needs only recount just a few moments of centuries past and present during which the Haitian people were methodically stripped of their wealth, their sovereignty and even their very lives.

The French cities built by profits gained from slavery and the billions over decades that Haiti was forced to pay to France for the loss of their once profitable slave colony.

The clearing of Haiti’s forests to make room for rubber and sisal plantations and the massive corruption by the brutal and repressive U.S. backed Duvalier regimes.

The death squads trained by the CIA and the governments installed or removed during a hundred years of ongoing U.S. intervention and invasion.

The thousands upon thousands of ruined farmers and families driven into makeshift homes in the slums of Port-au-prince seeking a way to survive because they could not compete with the cheaper-priced government-subsidized American rice forced into Haitian markets.

The $1 million a week the Haitian government did not spend on hospitals or roads or communication but sent to the World Bank and other foreign creditors, while mothers earning $2 a day making t-shirts in sweatshops filled their children’s empty stomachs with cookies made of salt, oil … and clay.

The pound of Haitian flesh has been taken so many times over.

The coffers of wealthy nations filled with their sweat and blood.

Their institutions shaped or discarded to suit the needs of their powerful neighbor to the north….

And yet we are expected to look at the rows of corpses,

the rivers of tears,

the agony of the survivors,

and still call it an act of god.

This is murder.

LINKS FOR MORE INFORMATION AND TO ACT:

The Haitian People Need Emergency Assistance – NOT Suppression and Further Domination!, Revolution Online

10 Things the US Can and Should Do for Haiti – Bill Quigley, Black Agenda Report

No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain!, John Maxwell, Jamaica Observer

Fear of the poor is hampering Haiti rescue, Linda Polman, Times Online

The White Curse [Haiti] by Eduardo Galeano

Doctors Without Borders Cargo Plane With Full Hospital and Staff Blocked From Landing in Port-au-Prince

To Donate to Doctors Without Borders

NEW YEARS REFILL

Click here for more graphics

STRANGE FRUIT…. 2009

southern trees bear a strange fruit

blood on the leaves and blood at the root

black body swinging in the southern breeze

strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

pastoral scene of the gallant south

the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

scent of magnolia sweet and fresh

and the sudden smell of burning flesh!

here is a fruit for the crows to pluck

for the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

for the sun to rot, for a tree to drop

here is a strange and bitter crop.

["Strange Fruit" written by Abel Meerepol,
performed by Billy Holiday, Nina Simone, and many others]

[Click on picture for more images and information]

Serena and Kanye and the 10 Minute Hate

I’m sure by now that most people reading this have heard, if not seen, the now infamous “Kanye West Incident” at the Video Music Awards, and Serena Williams’ sudden meltdown at the U.S. Open. No doubt most of you have heard the veritable avalanche of criticism leveled against them. Some of you may have even weighed in on the matter.

I’ve seen the videos. Read articles and blogs and even a number of tweets. So having giving it some thought, and in light of the whole situation, I am calling for a boycott. No, not a boycott of Kanye West’s next release or Serena Williams’ fashion line. I am calling for a boycott of any further criticism of either Mr. West or Ms. Williams. This blog is now a criticism-free zone.

It’s not that I think a grown man interrupting a teenager’s acceptance speech is a particularly suave move. Nor would I suggest that promising to deposit a tennis ball down a line judge’s esophagus is the appropriate response for a bad call.

It’s just that there is something much more serious and uglier going on than bad celebrity behavior.

It’s not simply the double standards at play or the utter hypocrisy revealed in the uproar. A singer such as Frank Sinatra could hold the patent on rude and arrogant behavior, but still be spoken of in respectful terms as the “Chairman of the Board.” Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe – once the two “bad boys” of tennis – cussed and intimidated officials, smashed rackets and almost came to blows in the middle of a match – and yet are still praised for their competitive spirit and lauded for adding excitement to the game.

But the fact that white males have always been rewarded for their “bad behavior,” is not the main reason I have declared a boycott on criticism of Kanye West and Serena Williams.

It’s the tone of the comments. The tenor of the condemnation. It’s the “joke” by a guest comedian on a purportedly liberal news show about meeting Serena Williams in a dark alley. It’s the liberal use of the words “ghetto” and “thug” and the even more explicit racial epithets and death threats posted on blogs and tweeted. It’s the message, some times as subtext and other times stripped raw of any smug decoration, that Kanye West and Serena Williams have overstepped their bounds as Black people in white America and must be put back in their place. While the mob action is carried out via airwaves and electronics, and not with a rope and tree, a lynching is still a lynching.

Now some may dismiss all this as a gross exaggeration or simply crying racism to belittle and even justify outlandish and boorish behavior. But let’s get real for a moment.

I would be the first to agree that there is simply too much “thug” activity in this world. Just yesterday, a Black woman going shopping with her seven-year-old daughter in Morrow, Georgia, was kicked and beaten by an angry white man who evidently found offense in her mere existence. Last month, in the Illinois city of Rockford, two white police officers fatally shot an unarmed Black man – in his back, in a Church basement, in front of a group of children attending day care. Definitely “thug” behavior that demands the strongest of condemnation, the kind that still seems to be currently reserved only for Black people.

Yes, Serena Williams screamed and ranted a bit, and while not one of her finest moments, no one was hurt, bruised, scarred or permanently damaged. Though Taylor Swift may have been disappointed or upset by Kanye West’s politely-delivered-but-still-rude interruption, she still got her moment to shine later in the evening.

Yet judged by the level of hate and vitriol spewed, one would think they both committed unspeakable crimes against humanity. Then again, to the rabid minions, neither Kanye West or Serena Williams have any humanity. In their eyes, only white people do.

Boycott.

Professor Gates and the “Good Officer”:
Deconstructing a Teachable Moment

It’s been a little over a week since Malcolm X’s rhetorical question concerning what a Black man with a Ph.D. is called in America was answered by news reports that Professor Henry Louis Gates had been arrested on his own front porch by a white Cambridge police officer.

It’s a story filled with conflicting accounts and “expert” analysis arguing what was right and who was wrong and a President firmly weighing in on both sides of the issue.

In another world, this situation never would have happened.

In another world, a white woman would have looked over at two Black men on a porch trying to get the front door open and offered help to her neighbor having problems getting into his home.

In another world, a white police officer responding to a reported break-in would first ask the Black man who answered the door if everything was alright.

In another world, a Black man who committed no crime and had just returned home from an overseas trip would have ended the evening relaxing in his home and not cuffed, booked and cooling his heels in a local jail cell.

But this is not another world.

This is America.

Where a white woman who works for Harvard Magazine at an office located two houses from Professor Gates’ residence would fail to recognize one of the most prominent professors at Harvard University, a man who’s name often showed up in Harvard Magazine, who’s face frequented the Harvard University Gazette and who’s been noted by Time magazine as among the 25 most influential Americans.

Where two well-dressed Black men – one wearing a two-piece black suit, the other in a navy blue blazer with gray trousers – standing on a porch with a bunch of luggage and trying push in a jammed front door – were described as two criminals with backpacks attempting a break-in.

Where the truthfulness of the arresting officer’s version of events are taken as a given by those smugly pointing out the errors of Professor Gates’ ways.

Where a Black man in his own home who exercises his presumed constitutional right NOT to simply “step out on the porch,” and requests an officer’s identification is deemed “uncooperative.”

Where a Black man who complies with a police request for proof of identification, but fails to suffer indignities in silence is hauled off in a police car.

Where the President is pilloried for pointing out the obvious, but praised for backing down and affixing sufficient blame to the victim.

There is much that can be said concerning the events of July 16th on Ware Street in Cambridge.

That police officers actual can lie on the reports they file.

That all of the verbal remarks described in Sgt. Crowley’s report allegedly delivered by Professor Gates in his home and on his front porch – ranging from accusations of racism to a schoolyard crack on the officer’s mother – fell well short of the charges that Professor Gates was engaging in “tumultuous behavior” – words and actions more akin to provoking or engaging in violence and physical mayhem.

That racial profiling is not foreign to Black Harvard professors – as evidenced by the experience of veteran neuroscience professor Allen Counter, who in 2004 was stopped by campus police and threatened with arrest as a robbery suspect.

That just because Sgt. Crowley attempted to save the life of Reggie Lewis, a Black NBA Basketball star, doesn’t mean he can’t harbor racist views or have a problem with a Black professor he considers defiant and ungrateful.

That it seems odd that a police officer who has – as we’ve been repeatedly told – taught fellow officers about racial profiling for five years – would be at a total loss to understand why a prestigious Black professor would be less than amused to be treated as a burglary suspect in his own home.

But when all the information is digested, the views weighed and details boiled down, there remains one essential truth.

Professor Henry Louis Gates, a 58-year old Black man, who simply returned to his legal residence, objected to what he rightfully felt was discriminatory treatment by a police officer, and committed no crime, was arrested, humiliated, and locked up because a white police officer chose to do so.

All his hard work and learned books, brilliant accomplishments and well-earned prestige, his numerous awards and accolades – can’t erase the fact that in this world, in this America, being Black is still a crime.

A beer and chit-chat at the White House won’t make that reality go away.