Global Social Movements in Dakar to Forge Unity & Political Path

• • Africa, capitalism, racism, slavery, social change, social movements, white privilege, white racial frame



The World Social Forum (WSF) gathered in Dakar, Senegal February 6-11, 2011 as the systemic crisis of global capitalism intensified and popular uprisings were sweeping North Africa and the Arab world. The social forum was a powerful and inspiring convergence of peoples’ struggles and social movements from below, bringing together about 75,000 participants from all corners of Africa and the world to deepen relationships, to vision another world, and to chart a political path forward.

Goree Island, the strategic site of the Door of No Return through which at least 30 million African women, men, and children were forced into the genocidal violence and terror of the transatlantic slave trade, many destined for the United States, is a short ferry ride from the port of Dakar. This vividly contextualized the significance of the WSF focus on Africa and the Diaspora and the centuries of white supremacy and racism inextricably intertwined with systems of colonialism, neocolonialism, and capitalism on a global scale.

Social movement organizations – Grassroots Global Justice, World March of Women, La Via Campesina, International Alliance of Inhabitants, among many others – came together in the Social Movements Assembly to confront the 21st century realities of global capitalism, poverty, racism, patriarchy, war, and climate destruction and to put forth a declaration of unity of action. It lifts up the “new universality” of humanity in all our diversity – as both objects of capitalist exploitation and oppression, and as political agents of our history, our liberation, and our future.

The Declaration of the Social Movements Assembly, crafted to guide our struggles, declares:

“… [W]e are gathered here to affirm the fundamental contribution of Africa and its peoples in the construction of human civilization. Together, the peoples of all the continents are struggling mightily to oppose the domination of capital, hidden behind illusory promises of economic progress and political stability. Complete decolonization for oppressed peoples remains for us, the social movements of the world, a challenge of the greatest importance. …

We affirm our support for and our active solidarity with the people of Tunisia, Egypt and the Arab world who have risen up to demand a true democracy and build the people´s power. …

Capitalism´s destructive force impacts every aspect of life itself, for all the peoples of the world. Yet each day we see new movements rise, struggling to reverse the ravages of colonialism and to achieve well-being and dignity for all. We declare that we, the people, will no longer bear the costs of their crisis and that, within capitalism, there is no escape from this crisis. This only reaffirms the need for us, as social movements, to come together to forge a common strategy to guide our struggles against capitalism. …

We fight against transnational corporations because they support the capitalist system, privatize life, public services and common goods such as water, air, land, seeds and mineral resources. Transnational corporations promote wars through their contracts with private corporations and mercenaries …

We will continue to mobilize to ask for the unconditional abolition of public debt in all the countries in the South. We also denounce, in the countries of the North, the use of public debt to impose unfair policies that degrade the social welfare state.

When the G8 and G20 hold their meetings, let us mobilize across the world to tell them, No! We are not commodities! We will not be traded! …

We defend the food sovereignty and the agreement reached during the Peoples’ Summit against Climate Change, held in Cochabamba, where true alternatives to face the climate crisis were built with the social movements and organizations worldwide. …

We call on everyone to mobilize together, everywhere in the world, against violence against women. We defend sexual diversity, the right to gender self-determination and we oppose all homophobia and sexist violence. …

We fight for peace and against war, colonialism, occupations and the militarization of our lands. …

Inspired by the struggles of the peoples of Tunisia and Egypt, we call for March 20th to be made a day of international solidarity with the uprisings of the Arab and African people, whose every advance supports the struggles of all peoples: the resistance of the Palestinian and Saharian peoples; European, Asian and African mobilizations against debt and structural adjustment plans; and all the processes of change underway in Latin America.

We also call for a Global Day of Action Against Capitalism on October 12th, when we express in myriad ways our rejection of a system that is destroying everything in its path.

Social movements of the world, let us advance towards a global unity to shatter the capitalist system! We shall prevail!”

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Absence of Revolution in 21st-Century USA?

• • Africa, politics, poverty, protests, slavery, social change, social networking sites



Where is my revolution? Where is our lucid, incensed, uncompromising voice of change? Why are the streets absent of straight-faced people marching with signs bearing rhymes of discontent for injustice, inequality, and oppression? Around the globe, people see Egypt stands in the midst of revolt. Egypt was inspired by the Tunisian Revolution in December 2010, where demonstrators allied together to protest their government’s level of corruption, the present stranglehold on freedom of speech, state of unemployment, food inflation, and disastrous living conditions. Egypt citizens then committed themselves to at times peaceful rallies, marches, and civil disobedience. Revolution is alive in the streets of Cairo, Suez, and northern Sinai area of Sheik Zuweid.

Social networking sites such as Facebook have helped to organize thousands as they protect against a ruling government viewed as corrupt and ignoring the plights of the poor. Like dominos, other countries in the Middle East have risen up to demand change. The U.S. allied autocratic President Hosni Mubarak is currently feeling the pressure of demonstrators who are demanding that he step down from the presidency. In the reported repressive country of Sudan, requests over Facebook, by a group called Youth for Change, in the past two weeks have asked thousands of young Sudanese to come together in order to peacefully protest against the overall “political repression” and rising prices of sugar and fuel.

This increasing demand for governmental upheaval is nothing new to the world. For God’s sake, this country’s budge to become free of the British Empire during the American Revolution sparked the French Revolution of 1848. Within the U.S., history has witnessed numerous accounts of revolt. Social and economic based battles over the directions of government, their rules of law, and treatment toward their citizens have been fought in 1775 in Lexington and Concord, 1831 with Nat Turner, 1863 in Gettysburg, 1965 in Selma, 1970 at Kent State, in 1967 within the streets of Detroit, and on the democratic battlefields of Chicago in 1968.

That was then, what about now? Is everything so good in this country? Has Sir Thomas More’s fictional land Utopia become a reality? If I did not know any better, and under the influence of heavy narcotics, I would assume that 36.5% of children are not living below the poverty line. Maybe racism does not exist within the ever-increasing prison industrial complex that exercises modern day slavery for companies like Nordstrom, IBM, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Boeing, and Revlon in order to turn a profit. Maybe nothing is wrong with the increasing profit international gas companies are taking from people like you, your friends, and loved ones who losing jobs.

I must be wrong to think that something is amiss when it is cheaper to eat food that kills you than natural food free of toxins, hormones, and preservatives. I shutter to even broach the topic of increased state taxes from corrupt state governments (thank you Illinois) who are not even able to pay teachers, universities, and hospitals. But on the other dirty hand, they are able to look out for the business interests of the rich. Am I wrong to see these and other issues of concern that pull at my heart as worthy of discontent? Are they worthy of your anger? Are they enough for you to get out there and demonstrate for days at a time that require you to miss a few hours from texting? Please do not take my call to arms as a call to violence, looting, destruction of property, or beating up poor Anderson Cooper in the streets as done in Egypt.

I am calling for “Us” to step away from the new episodes of American Idol and the latest booty-shaking videos to tune in. I am calling for the so-called highbrow academics to not only write about injustice, but to organize. Volunteer with a group attempting to make a blow for social justice. Tune into the issues that plague our society and take a stance for I feel cheated. My parents had the 60s and 70s. What do I have? The Jersey Shores?

Jim Crow Totalitarianism: The Green Book

• • African Americans, civil rights, Jim Crow Segregation, slavery, social change

The U.S. is a nation of many illusions–political, economic, and historical. We live by myths taught us by many political, economic, educational leaders. Historically, the leaders at the top have virtually all been elite white men, and today most are still elite white men. By various means they regularly try to tell us, their public, what to think about the most important contours and realities of this society, in regard to its past and present. Among many other strategies, they encourage much ignorance about our real racial history, indeed about much of our history.

RR Moton High School Marker

(Creative Commons License photo credit: jimmywayne)

Recently, significant attention has been paid in some in the liberal/left media to the The Negro Motorist Green Book, a publication that guided African American travelers to the relatively few places they could comfortably eat, sleep at, or make gas/pit stops across the country in the Jim Crow segregation era. Wendell Alston writes in the 1949 edition of this important guide:

“The Negro traveler’s inconveniences are many and they are increasing because today so many more are traveling, individually and in groups.”

From 1936 to 1964, Victor H. Green, the publisher, a postal clerk (the much-maligned public employee today) who put out some 15,000 copies of the guide to dealing with Jim Crow segregation. We as a country have forgotten just how extreme this white-generated totalitarianism of Jim Crow actually was. Many Black travelers would travel across the South, daring not to stop in most places — at all, for any reason. Too dangerous.

This totalitarianism also covered all major aspects of African American lives practices in our southern and border states, and numerous northern areas, for many decades before 1936–and in the extreme totalitarian slavery system before that.

Jim Crow also did not die everywhere until the 1970s. And then it was followed by other types of everyday discrimination in public accommodations and many other areas.

For NPR, civil rights leader and former NAACP chair Julian Bond remembered this:

Bond tells NPR’s Neal Conan that he remembers his family using the Green Book to travel in the South, to find out where we could stop to eat, where we could spend the night in a hotel or in somebody’s home.

Few Americans today know this history. And that recalls the comment that those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it. Is this still true?

Mapping Slavery’s Extent: 1860 Demographic Map

• • African Americans, demography, government action, slavery, social change



Susan Schulten, University of Denver history professor, has an interesting piece in the New York Times (online) on the last map prepared of the U.S. enslaved population (1860). Here is a small version of the map:

This map was prepared by the Coastal Survey from 1860 census data, and the source is “Map Courtesy of Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.” You can see Schulten’s very useful interactive and larger-annotated map here. This should be useful for classes dealing with the background and demography of slavery just at the beginning of the Civil War.

Schulten makes some interesting points about the map:

The map reaffirmed the belief of many in the Union that secession was driven not by a notion of “state rights,” but by the defense of a labor system. . . . the map measured each state’s slave population, and contemporaries would have immediately noticed that this corresponded closely to the order of secession. South Carolina, which led the rebellion, was one of two states which enslaved a majority of its population. . . . the map [also] illustrated the degree to which entire regions—like eastern Tennessee and western Virginia—were virtually devoid of slavery, and thus potential sources of resistance to secession.

President Abraham Lincoln loved the map (as did many in the Union’s public) and apparently used it in his own planning and thinking about the Civil War. It likely supported his

belief that secession was animated by a minority and could be reversed if Southern Unionists were given sufficient time and support. . . . The map gave a clear picture of what the Union was up against, and allowed Northerners to follow the progress of the war and the liberation of slave populations.

She points out that this map enabled Lincoln to focus on a key feature of the secessionist states—their slavery system of labor. For the views of those enslaved in this system of labor see the first part of this book.

John Brown was Hung on December 2

• • African Americans, history, slavery, whites

This is the day they hung John Brown for his failed raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry.

As one history website puts it:

In the mid-1850s, abolitionist John Brown went to Kansas Territory to fight against the spread of slavery. Then in 1859, he came east to Virginia, hoping to liberate slaves. On October 16, he and a small group of militants seized the federal armory in Harper’s Ferry and its weapons, but waited in vain for the uprising they hoped would follow. The next day, U.S. Army officers Robert E. Lee and J. E. B. Stuart brought in a company of marines and stormed the fire-engine house where Brown had retreated. They captured him and his band, and killed two of his sons. Brown was hanged, along with six other conspirators. In death he became a martyr for abolitionists. “I am worth inconceivably more to hang,” he said, “than for any other purpose.”

His little band had both white and black conspirators, and significant financial support from white and black abolitionists. Still, not only did white conservatives react negatively and in the extreme to his raid after it happened, but some African American leaders also feared it would make things worse for the abolition cause — and that Brown as a white man had ignored black dissenting voices on the matter. There was much discussion over the issue of black people needing black, not white, leaders of resistance to their racial oppression.

David Brion Davis on Slavery and Abolition: Impact on US Wealth

• • African Americans, protests, resistance, slavery



Here is a very good 2009 video lecture (at Emory U.) by a leading scholar of slavery and its economic impact, as well as the resistance to it–Dr. David Brion Davis, of Yale University.

This one is called “American and British Slave Trade Abolition in Perspective.” This would be very good for use in a course on U.S. history, and/or racism/slavery. It is in six parts, and here are the summaries:

The historical contexts of African slavery in the Americas and the relationship with free market forces and the “New World” global economy.

The connections between enslaved African labor, trans-Atlantic trade, and the increasing availability of luxury goods for mass market consumption. How did anti-slavery movements arise in this growing market context?

Three major factors led to the U.S. and British decisions to abolish the trade of enslaved Africans: revolutionary changes in moral perceptions of slavery, Anglo American antipathy towards a growing African American population, and the population growth rate of enslaved African Americans in North America.

The North American “moral luxury” of condemning the trade of enslaved Africans while supporting domestic slavery; the increasing political enthusiasm for white immigration over black enslaved labor; the impacts of the French and Haitian Revolutions on trade abolition developments.

The political and moral debates between delegates from northern states and southern slaveholding states after the Revolutionary War that led to U.S. abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808.

A comparison of the impacts of the U.S. and British decisions to abolish the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the debates over what to do with the “contraband” of enslaved Africans intercepted in the newly illegal trade.

Highly recommended.

Frederick Douglass: On the Meaning of the 4th of July

• • African Americans, slavery

On this Independence day it is well to remember a speech, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” given by the formerly enslaved and probably greatest 19th century American, Frederick Douglass, at Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, at the peak of North America slavery (indeed, about 230 years into that era).

In this era Black Americans were usually not allowed at 4th of July celebrations in the slaveholding South, apparently because many slaveholders feared that they might get an idea of freedom from such events (as if they did not already have such an idea!). Also, Black residents were often discouraged from attending such festivities in the North.

It is in this very dangerous and hostile national racial climate that the great Douglass–increasingly, a leading intellectual of his day and the first Black American to receive a roll-call vote for US President (later on, at the 1888 Republican national convention!)–was asked by leading citizens of Rochester to give an address at their Fourth of July celebrations. He gave them this stinging indictment of racial oppression:

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too-great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.

But later adds:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Take the American slave-trade, which we are told by the papers, is especially prosperous just now. Ex-Senator Benton tells us that the price of men was never higher than now. He mentions the fact to show that slavery is in no danger. This trade is one of the peculiarities of American institutions. It is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one-half of this confederacy; and millions are pocketed every year by dealers in this horrid traffic. In several states this trade is a chief source of wealth. It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) “the internal slave-trade.” It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. That trade has long since been denounced by this government as piracy. It has been denounced with burning words from the high places of the nation as an execrable traffic. To arrest it, to put an end to it, this nation keeps a squadron, at immense cost, on the coast of Africa. Everywhere, in this country, it is safe to speak of this foreign slave-trade as a most inhuman traffic, opposed alike to the Jaws of God and of man. The duty to extirpate and destroy it, is admitted even by our doctors of divinity. In order to put an end to it, some of these last have consented that their colored brethren (nominally free) should leave this country, and establish them selves on the western coast of Africa! It is, however, a notable fact that, while so much execration is poured out by Americans upon all those engaged in the foreign slave-trade, the men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass with out condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable.

Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and American religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh jobbers, armed with pistol, whip, and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-curdling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the centre of your soul The crack you heard was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow this drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me, citizens, where, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.

And then concludes with this:

Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from oppression in your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot, and kill.

The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God.” In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:

God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o’er!
When from their galling chains set free,
Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,

And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom’s reign.
To man his plundered rights again
Restore.

Sadly, our system of racial oppression still persists, even as most white Americans are in denial about its deep and foundational reality. Yet, there remain many people like Frederick Douglass today who still fight to remove this “yoke of tyranny” from us all. May they flourish and prosper. We should remember those now and from the past who fought racism most on this day to celebrate freedom.

ADDENDUM
Some forty-two years later, in the last speech (“Lessons of the Hour”) he gave before his death—at an AME Church in DC, on January 9th, 1894—Douglass made these comments as he watched southern and border states hurtle toward bloody Jim Crow segregation, the new neo-slavery system:

We claim to be a Christian country and a highly civilized nation, yet, I fearlessly affirm that there is nothing in the history of savages to surpass the blood chilling horrors and fiendish excesses perpetrated against the colored people by the so-called enlightened and Christian people of the South. It is commonly thought that only the lowest and most disgusting birds and beasts, such as buzzards, vultures and hyenas, will gloat over and prey dead bodies, but the Southern mob in its rage feeds its vengeance by shooting, stabbing and burning when their victims are dead. I repeat, and my contention is, that this “Negro problem” formula lays the fault at the door of the Negro, and removes it from the door of the white man, shields the guilty, and blames the innocent. Makes the Negro responsible and not the nation….. Now the real problem is, and ought to be regarded by the American people, a great national problem. It involves the question, whether, after all, with our Declaration of Independence, with our glorious free constitution, whether with our sublime Christianity, there is enough of national virtue in this great nation to solve this problem, in accordance with wisdom and justice.

He concluded thus, his very last words ever spoken in public:

But could I be heard by this great nation, I would call to to mind the sublime and glorious truths with which, at its birth, it saluted a listening world. Its voice then, was as the tramp of an archangel, summoning hoary forms of oppression and time honored tyranny, to judgment. Crowned heads heard it and shrieked. Toiling millions heard it and clapped their hands for joy. It announced the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality. Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages. Apply these sublime and glorious truths to the situation now before you. Put away your race prejudice. Banish the idea that one class must rule over another. Recognize the fact that the rights of the humblest citizen are as worthy of protection as are those of the highest, and your problem will be solved; and, whatever may be in store for it in the future, whether prosperity, or adversity; whether it shall have foes without, or foes within, whether there shall be peace, or war; based upon the eternal principles of truth, justice and humanity, and with no class having any cause of compliant or grievance, your Republic will stand and flourish forever.

Happy Juneteenth!

• • African Americans, slavery, social change

[from the archive – originally posted June 19, 2009]

This is an African American holiday started in Texas, for obvious reasons. Wikipedia has a nice summary of key info:

Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, commemorates the announcement of the abolition of slavery in the U.S. State of Texas in 1865. Celebrated on June 19, the term is a portmanteau of June and nineteenth, and is recognized as a state holiday in 31 of the United States.

That is, word of President Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation of January 1863 reached Texas only in June 1865:

The holiday originated in Galveston, Texas; for more than a century, the state of Texas was the primary home of Juneteenth celebrations. Since 1980, Juneteenth has been an official state holiday in Texas. It is considered a “partial staffing holiday” meaning that state offices do not close but some employees will be using a floating holiday to take the day off. Twelve other states list it as an official holiday, including Arkansas, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Alaska and California, where Governor Schwarzenegger proclaimed the day “Juneteenth” on June 19, 2005. Connecticut, however, does not consider it a legal holiday or close government offices in observance of the occasion. Its informal observance has spread to some other states, with a few celebrations even taking place in other countries.

As of May 2009, 31 states and the District of Columbia have recognized Juneteenth as either a state holiday or state holiday observance; these include Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wyoming.

This is also a day to remember the 500,000 African Americans, who as soldiers and support troops, many of them formerly enslaved, volunteered for the Union Army at its low point, and who thus played a (the?) key role in winning the Civil War. This is an ironic day, too, given the very weak apology for slavery voted on this week in the mostly white US Senate. A bit late.

Prof. Henry Louis Gates Whitewashes Enslavement History

• • academic, Africa, African Americans, global racism, Jim Crow Segregation, slavery, whites



Colorlines has a good critique of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s recent oped piece (“Ending the Slavery Blame-Game”) in the New York Times by historian Barbara Ransby, Director of Gender and Women’s Studies Program at U. Illinois-Chicago. In his oped Gates makes a whitewashed argument about U.S. slavery and the slave trade being substantially the responsibility of both African elite leaders and North American whites, about this reality changing the black reparations debate, and about President Obama being uniquely able to deal with this reality. The part about the African elites is similar to arguments often made by conservative whites against reparations for black enslavement. Gates concludes his oped thus:

In President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization. And reaching that understanding is a vital precursor to any just and lasting agreement on the divisive issue of slavery reparations.

Professor Ransby, however, strongly takes issue with this. She summarizes and critiques Gates:

Black and white people in the United States should now “get over” slavery because as we all know, this was not a racial thing but an economic thing. Since both Blacks and whites were culpable, the call for reparations is indeed meaningless and bereft of any moral weight. If we take Gates’ argument to its full conclusion, we might claim that it is not America or Europe, but the long suffering, impoverished, and debt-ridden nations of Africa, that should really pay reparations to Black Americans.

She then nail the central culprits:

Even though African monarchs did collaborate in the selling of Blacks bodies into slavery, what happened after that was the establishment of a heinous and brutal system that rested squarely on the dual pillars of White supremacy and ruthless capitalist greed. There was nothing African-inspired about it.

This is of course the main point, which Gates slights in his piece. The 246 years of African Americans’ North America enslavement was totally under white control, principally elite white control. The Atlantic slave trade supplying the Americas was set up and controlled entirely by Europeans. No African elites sailed boats to the Americas, nor did they profit from the 246 years of slavery-extracted labor within North America. Most from whom labor was stolen had never seen Africa, for they were born in North America. Reparations are due to African Americans mainly from this extorted and stolen labor within North America.

In addition, in my view, the place to start in making reparations to African Americans is with the nearly 100 years of Jim Crow segregation. The reason: there are a great many living African Americans who were directly harmed by the extensive, totalitarian type of Jim Crow oppression so central to the U.S. economy and polity for so many decades. In the South and some of the North.

Many of these African Americans can name who their oppressors were, and indeed give some idea of the costs, personal and monetary, that they suffered. They can name the exploitative white employers, brutal white police officers, whites in lynch mobs, and white rapists who were central to this extreme oppression. Gates does not mention reparations for Jim Crow, which is an odd and major oversight. After we calculate reasonable reparations for the damage done to many African Americans under Jim Crow, and their children and grandchildren, then we can move back to calculate the trillions in dollars and other reparations that are due to the descendants of those so extremely oppressed by the whites who ran the slavery system in North America.

Ransby minces no words at the end of her indictment of Professor Gates:

The lessons are about the self-serving role of certain Black elites, who in slavery times and now, will sell (or sell out) other Black bodies for their own gain and advancement. African royalty did it in the 1600s and 1700s. Comprador elites did it in colonial and postcolonial settings through the Global South. And certain public figures, in political, cultural and academic circles, do so today, with a kind of moral blindness and impunity that rivals the slave sellers of old. As we know, ideas have consequences.

The South Will Rise Again?: Virginia and the Declaration of Confederate History Month

• • African Americans, politics, slavery, war, white privilege, white racial frame, whites



As the empire strikes back within the Great Age of Obama in order to strengthen the Republican, tea party, and overall conservative base, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, with a push from the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, has declared that the month of April will be Confederate History Month in Virginia. McDonnell not only desires to increase tourism in the state, but also to show citizens of Virginia the importance

to reflect upon [their] Commonwealth’s shared history, to understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers, and citizens during the period of the Civil War…

The declaration has angered many due to the oversight of slavery. On Wednesday, April 7, 2010, McDonnell announced his mistake calling it a “major omission.” Since the controversy has caught nation’s attention, the governor has revised his proclamation for the celebration by noting that

It is important for all Virginians to understand that the institution of slavery led to this war and was an evil and inhumane practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights and all Virginians are thankful for its permanent eradication from our borders, and the study of this time period should reflect upon and learn from his painful part of our history….

A little too late governor, don’t you think? Well maybe the governor and groups such as the Sons of the Confederate Veterans see the history of slavery as inconsequential.

I have to ask myself; slavery…inconsequential? A system supported by the White racial frame, unlike anywhere in the world gave roots to theories that African men and women were noted to have oversized sexual organs, indolence, and deceptiveness, and a low level of intelligence.

A system that allowed Influential historical figures, and heroes that are celebrated today, such as Thomas Jefferson, Immanuel Kant, Carl von Linne (Carolus Linnaeus), George Mason, and Louis Agassiz utilized the field of science to suggest a hierarchy of humanity where Blacks were placed at the bottom of the ladder while Whites stood atop.

Slavery, a system that gave allowances for the horrific scientific and medical treatment and experimentation done on Blacks from the slave era to today in the area of the prison industrial complex, contraception for females, and etc.

Inconsequential? A system that gave birth to one of the first acts of terrorism within our country that targeted Blacks through the institutionalized method of lynching. All of which was used to maintain white supremacy.

Slavery…a system that gave way to cutting Blacks out of equal financial endeavors that were allotted to Whites.

Slavery…a system whose effects today have handcuffed and placed Blacks on the revolving and tilted playing field of educational opportunities designed by the dominant White majority which consciously and subconsciously reproduces subjugation and control.

Inconsequential? Slavery…a system that continues to this day which pulls back the ancestral scabs upon my soul when I am confronted with the overt and covert eyes of racism and hate. This is not to mention the effects upon Whites and other non-Blacks that are forced to ingest the elixir of the White racial frame that supported the foundation of slavery.

Ask your self…Inconsequential?