Posted by Epiphany Blog

I guess I didn’t get the memo, but when did the “noose” become the modern day symbol of racism? It seems as though every time I turn on the news or pull up my internet browser there is a new noose sighting. What’s really going on? Are “they” so threatened by “our” potential and our achieved successes that they have resorted to sending nooses? Are we getting too big for our britches and thus need to be brought back to reality???

News flash, we didn’t need a noose to know how they really felt about us! Anyone that has ever had even the most minor confrontation at work knows when someone is giving you the who does she think she is stare. Most of us will stare right back and take the I double dog dare you to call me out of my name so that I can kick your behind all up and through this camp, and then drag you to Human Resources to tell them what I did stance. I guess our refusal to cower and shuck and jive has made some of us targets. Read More

There are still a few people cooning it up at our jobs (you know the type, always making jokes at the wrong time and doing something to embarrass the rest of “us”). There are the “Renegades” (the ones that buck the system…come in when they want, leave when they want, and dare someone to say something). Then there are the “Rabble-rouser”, we ain’t goin for this crap no more types. I am going to guess that the renegades and the rabble rousers have somebody shaking in their boots. These crazy fools are really sending nooses in the mail. *shaking head*

Historically the noose was a tool used to kill us. We could see our people swinging from trees so that there would be no mistaking the fact that the powers that be meant business. The empty noose hanging from a tree was a reminder of what would be done to us if we “got out of line” or disobeyed. Now that it is 2007, does the noose hold the same meaning? If, God forbid, someone sent a noose to your inter-office mailbox, would you be afraid? Do you think the dude in the cube across from you might try to hang you up from a light fixture? Chances are he wouldn’t, but the people sending these nooses are trying to send some type of message.

If we look at the Jena 6, they lived in a racist town, and decided to sit under a whites only tree. Subsequently a noose was hung to send them a message. At first glance you might think, Jena is in the south, and there is still a huge racial divide, but this noose nonsense is much more widespread. A black professor of a racial justice class in New York had a noose hung on her door. Someone was trying to send her a message. A principal in Brooklyn received a noose in her mail, accompanied by a letter full of racial slurs. New York City is one of the most diverse places in the world, yet people are still hiding behind nooses. Someone hung a noose at the Nyumburu Cultural Center at the University of Maryland last month. What is that all about?

The reality is this: Racism is real. While we are some of the richest black people on the planet, and most of us will achieve successes our grandparents only dreamed of, we are still thought of by some as second class citizens. We can march all day and all night, they can pass legislation up the yin yang, but you can not take hate out of someone’s heart. There will always be a segment of the population that will despise us, and while they know they can’t destroy us, they will try to “beat” us into submission with scare tactics like this noose nonsense.

As offensive as the noose is, we need to seize the opportunity to turn it right back around on them. I do not know your personal stance on the “N” word, but many in my generation believe that by changing the spelling and using it as a term of endearment we took the sting out of the word. They could no longer “own” it as a means to degrade us, because we flipped it into what we wanted it to be. While I support the notion of legislation against the noose, I’m not holding my breath. I’d rather look at the noose as a reminder of what all we as a people survived. They hung us from trees, but at the end of the day, America would not be what it is today if not for the blood, sweat, and tears of those same people that the nooses were used to kill.

I am not condoning fighting, but the Jena 6 were determined not to go out like Emmett Till. I think it was a simple case of you wanna hang a noose, we got a trick for you! (Only my opinion, I was not there.) I am not saying we go beat up everyone that we think is responsible for sending the noose, but the fact of the matter is, only a coward sends a noose in the mail. Only a coward hangs a noose when no one is looking. A noose couldn’t break us then, and it won’t break us now. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but a noose in the mail makes me LAUGH AT YOU!

Read more!

Posted By Undercover Black Man
Black nationalism is an irrational ideology because it depends upon the gross exaggeration of white people’s wickedness... and black people’s nobility.

Consider a recent comment left on this blog by Michael Fisher. Regarding the two Nigerian newspaper columnists who have proclaimed that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, Fisher presents this rhetorical either-or:

“If the [Global System of White Supremacy] doesn't exist and black people have not been able to make a go of it in half a century all around the globe, clearly something must be wrong with them. ... [A]bsent an outside retarding influence it must be a problem of genetic inferiority.”

Fisher’s assertion that black Africans are either innately dumb or else victims of a sinister global conspiracy to keep them down... first of all, it’s shoddy reasoning. Couldn’t blacks be innately dumb and victims of a white-supremacist conspiracy? Read More

In other words, accepting Fisher’s premise that there is an effective Global System of White Supremacy [GSWS] does nothing to prove or disprove the proposition that blacks collectively are less intelligent as whites.

Indeed, if Fisher is correct when he declares – as in his current online debate with Cobb – that white supremacy is “the sole and overwhelming paradigm in humanity’s existence. [It] knows no borders, it knows no bounds, it rules directly and indirectly”... well, that raises a couple of questions:

What is necessary for a group of people to conceive, implement and maintain for centuries an effective system of world domination? Intelligence perhaps? Hello!

And what’s lacking in another group of people – those identified as “black,” who were architects of great ancient civilizations – that they now find themselves, everywhere on earth, utterly controlled by whites and their “supremacy system”? How’d they fall for the okey-doke?

This element of black-nationalist thought – ceaselessly overstating the impact of white racism – runs the risk of calling attention back to the old superior/inferior dialectic. This is a rhetorical problem. How can you say that Whitey rules everything around you... without giving Whitey the credit for being smarter?

The solution: White people must be evil.

The Nation of Islam, for example, constructed a full-blown demonology (complete with creation myth) to explain why the “white blue-eyed devil” is on top.

Afrocentric professor Leonard Jeffries popularized the notion of whites as “ice people,” evolutionarily inclined towards violence and cruelty, compared with melanin-endowed “sun people” who are warm and empathetic.

Michael Fisher, on his blog recently, wrote: “[W]hite racism/supremacy is nothing but a death cult. They worship death.

“... A dead white man nailed to an ancient torture/execution instrument hanging everywhere, the spending of hundreds of billions of dollars on wars.... The whole society is permeated with the stench of death and decay.”

Poet Haki Madhubuti, in the audio track I uploaded earlier today, makes his own reference to “the faces white with death.” White men as “the enemies of the world.”

Cruel, devilish, death-worshipping white folks, dominating the world and keeping the black man down. Don’t you hate that? Don’t you hate them?

But now, see... having constructed this monstrous white enemy and exaggerated its power and influence... damn, how can you fight that? How could you possibly defeat a system so vast, an enemy people so effective in their designs, so ruthless in their ambitions?

Shit, you know they invented AIDS and turned it loose on the world, right? What won’t the white supremacist do? What couldn’t he do? And you’re going to fight him with what... a poem? A blog? A guerrilla army? Whitey got nukes, bitch! Think he don’t?

In the end, black nationalists, for all the mental energy they’ve invested in researching and comprehending the Global System of White Supremacy, are left with one intangible asset: their hatred of white people. And a cheap asset it is.

Click here and listen to a 1970 poem titled “Kill” by Anthony Hamilton of the Watts Prophets.

(By the way, the Watts Prophets grew out of Watts Writers Workshop, which was founded by a white man, Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg, after the ’65 riots.) Read more!