Ma'at was the Egyptian Goddess of Truth, Justice and Order. Her headdress ostrich feather served as the ultimate arbiter of the goodness of a man's life, and was balanced against a newly deceased person's heart on the scales of justice as a precondition of being permitted to pass into the Afterlife. Those whose hearts were heavy with wicked deeds had their souls devoured immediately by the demigod Ammin. Only those whose were lighter than Ma'at's feather were permitted to pass through into immortality with the Gods.
Poll
Are Things Getting Better or Worse for Black Folks?
I passed over not a word -- not even the Ibids in the extensive footnotes and bibliography section. Even that ostensibly dry and academic denouement had its horrors, however. I encountered citation upon citation of Congressional and federal records marking the infuriating inaction of the risibly defined protectors and defenders of the Constitution that exposed the Emancipation Proclamation (and subsequent Amendments to the Constitution regarding slavery and the role of African Americans in the United States) as the cruel joke it turned out to be for nearly a century after the ostensible "freeing of the slaves."
Nothing related to race, African Americans, American history, political "facts" or sociological issues in America will ever be the same again for me.
Perhaps I should rejoice in the fact that I am capable of being educated and instructed, of absorbing wholly new information at my advanced age of 40...
But I feel a weight upon me just now, so heavy it seems it will never be lifted; and perhaps that's as it should be. Self-congratulation for finally having attempted to learn something I ought to have sought out long ago wouldn't simply be unseemly; it would only be mildly less grotesque than that same attitude expressed by innumerable whites who still see nothing solecistic in claiming "We" fought the Civil War to end slavery, freed Europe from Hitler, defeated communism, marched for civil rights and so on.
I used to assure myself, privately, that despite the obvious shared ancestral shame of so many white Americans, my ancestors had nothing to do with that ugliness. After all, they were Irish and Scots -- northerners all, poor or working class until my mother's generation. Aside from the admittedly insidious and long-lived spectre of inveterate racism in their attitudes (which persists to this day, albeit in a milder and assuredly less overt form, in some of my mother's brothers and cousins), what evil deeds could they -- shunned and discriminated against themselves -- have perpetrated, after all? Surely my relatives and I share only the merest, microscopic percentage of the collective taint befouling all whites in America born second generation or earlier?
The NYPD officers who riddled Sean Bell with 50 bullets on the eve of his wedding have been acquitted of all charges following a bench trial. A bench trial in which the judge said, pretty much point blank in comments that were uncalled for and evince a certain mindset in a so-called objective judicial officer, that the prosecution witnesses were simply "not believable."
The most surprising part is how utterly unsurprising the verdict was. And how utterly unsurprising the majority of reactions at NYTimes.com reader's comment page have been, so far - aka Sean Bell got what was coming to him. They mirror the mindset of the judge, truthfully.
Since we all know that Black folks don't get murdered by the police, no matter what color hte police are. Never. No matter what.
I know differently, having now lived a long time. Black men's lives in America continue to be worth not the spit that the cops drop when they blow them away. I wish that we'd just own up to it, frankly - because I grow weary of pretending that there will ever be an unjustified killing of a black person by police in the US where someone actually goes to jail.
And yet folks still appear clueless about why so many of us are so damned angry, all the time.
I noticed a depressingly-interesting trend when I was going over results from SuperDuperWhooper Tuesday and previously at the Election Center run by cnn.com:
Through devotion
Blessed are the children
Praise the teacher
That brings true love to many
Your devotion
Opens all life's treasures
And deliverance from the fruits of evil.
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Evil, runnin' through our brain,
we and evil's about the same.
Bad blood, through our body flows,
Where's the love? Nobody knows.
Beauty in our face you see,
tryin' to hide all our misery, but
Evil, runnin' through my brain,
Me and evil are about the same.
Evil... in our life
Evil... causin' strife
Lookin for a place to gild a little light
in our souls and minds
Maybe if we learn to pray
life would lend us sunshiny days.
And evil, runnnin' thru our brains
will turn to love, and won't be the blame.
For those voters who are particularly concerned with the issues that disproportionately affect Black folks in America, knowing exactly where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton stand is crucial. Debates do not serve that function well - personal charisma and our innate biases towards how folks look (instead of towards what they say) mesh with the 30-second soundbite and make it very hard to think things through.
Fortunately, the NAACP - that lamented organization that really could do with a history reminder - has made it a bit easier.
OK, technically, it's called "Black History Month" but since you cannot cover the history of our people in a month, and since all our of children are going to get spoonfed the biographies of the same 5-10 people in school yet again, I figured it really needed a new name.
I'm still actively preparing for trial and thus still not blogging. But I could not let the day pass without honoring the great Carter G. Woodson, father of Negro History, and the idea -- even if not the current methods of execution -- of a time to celebrate Black history.
(against my better judgment perhaps, but--in the spirit of the German motto "wenn schon, denn schon....", comment cum full-blown post: and on the FP no less. Why? Because I can ;-))....
I haven't paid much mind to the feeding frenzy surrounding Barack Obama in the white liberal (or otherwise) world: I've seen this animal in action before, mostly in the context of white Americans who love, love, love Africans from Africa, but dread, dread, dread African Americans, in a phenomenon that has a lot in common with the way white liberal America boarded the "¡Sí, Se Puede!"--bandwagon with all the gusto of stampeding elephants on a safari in Kenya: Better to build a school for poor children in Africa than provide Black schools in America with basic supplies, like toilet paper. More "comfortable" in any case.
(This was written today as what was originally intended to be just a comment on DailyKOS in response to a quite honest diary which crystallized a lot of my mixed feelings as I watch what is happening -- particularly post-Iowa -- in America as it relates to the campaign of Barack Obama. I felt funny not cross-posting it to my own blog, so here it is. Ignore that it is written to a different audience!)
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There is a recommended diary right now, Coffee with Dad that I wrote a comment to.
Well, it started out as a comment. But it didn't stop there, because it couldn't. So I kept writing, since my need to try and help the author understand where I'm coming from kept getting in the way of succinctness and brevity. Suffice it to say that I could not accept the author's apologies -- of which there were several -- about her father's words. But my inability to do so is not because of her father's words.
Assuming that anyone even still occasionally visits this site, I felt that I needed to explain my month and a half long absence from writing.
It boils down to three things:
a) Trials. I have them in my immediate future. As those who know lawyers will understand, preparation for a trial is the temporal equivalent of preparing for a marathon. 12-15 hour work days are part of the process. Thus, I simply have no brain power left to write. I'm lucky I even get to read, right now. And when I read, the issues sometimes are of such magnitude that I become paralyzed in writing because I cannot give them the serious thought and energy and research necessary to do them justice.
b) Real Life. As we all know, it's a bitch sometimes. With a grandchild coming in 4-5 weeks, work unrelated to my trials, and my community work in which I now again sit on two boards -- one as a public official -- blogging seems comparatively unimportant when one also needs sleep and rest and to clean the house. I am one tired puppy.
c) Emotional State: Bluntly, I have been quite reflective about blogs and blogging as of late. Flamefests, ego-trips so large that all the air is being sucked out of the rarified atmosphere, and outright dysfunctional folks successfully commandeering all dialogue at what are otherwise sites and movements with great promise, has truthfully ennervated me to the point where it is difficult at times to even read any of my favorite blogs right now. I do so as best I can to keep informed, but (given my time constraints) but bluntly the nexus between "successful blogs" and the handiwork of disturbed personality types really fucks with me. It really does.
It does so because it is a pattern. Long before I engaged in political blogging, I was a participant in bulletin boards, most having nothing to do with politics. Yet sooner or later, despite having nothing to do with politics, they all nonetheless all evinced the same types of group psychosis over time, as they matured. Examples will have to wait for time I do not have right now. Suffice it to say that with the latest round, I now question greatly what real value collective internet blogs and communal spaces have left the world, other than lightning speed in information transfer and folks forgetting any semblance of decency in dialogue, when no matter what type of blog you visit, if it has any meaningful audience or back and forth, at some point it has been paralyzed and rended by high school drama.
Maybe it's just that I fucking hate drama.
Either way, I will be scarce for a while longer, as I ponder things including my cases, my blogs, and whether I am going to abandon blogging altogether or go back to what my original hope was - providing a space for my thoughts, for my writing, without regard to all the other stuff.
I'm not taking Maat's Feather down, however, because the purpose of this site was to be a place where Black folks could post essays about Black issues and I'm just one Black person. It becoming what I wanted it to be did not turn out as I'd hoped, obviously. I suspect there are several explanations for that, and that at least some of it indeed relates to the very drama and ego-tripping I abhor. But some of it may relate more to the fact that being a "successful blogger" and having a "successful blog" is inherently like being a successful drug dealer: you have to commit to getting your client hooked by your product (near daily missives/pondering/bloviating even if you have absolutely nothing new to say and even if you put no real research or thought into what you say) and have a bit of a narcissitic streak as well, where the impact you may, or may not, have on folks with your words and your work actually matters to you more and drives your output than the work itself. I have neither of those qualities within myself, not really. I'm just a person who reads, who writes, who thinks, who studies and who prays.
So maybe being a blogger is not for me. I don't know. But given some of the things I've witnessed and experienced personally, including at least two foul libels directed at me personally over the last 12 months, and the impact on my mindset and prediliction for being in the blogosphere at all if the condition for that is experiencing what I genuinely believe is destructive behavior, I need some time to figure it out.
I'm likely not gone forever. My keyboard mouth is not known to stop running for too long.
After reading about the following case, I know that it is going to elicit emotional responses from many different quarters with many different agendas. While I support the right of all citizens to protect their homes and their lives what occurred in this case does appear to support that doctrine. There were numerous forces at work that day in this neighborhood that all came to a head in the fatal shooting of two men. The case revolves around Joe Horn, a 61 year old retiree who happened to witness the burglary of a neighbor's house. Mr. Horn did the neighborly thing and contacted 911 to report the crime in progress. So far so good, neighborhood watch is working. However, it is at this point where the story takes a tragic and bizarre twist.
In what can surely be called unusual and frightening, it appears that black wealth cannot be transferred between generations. In a recent study done by the Economic Mobility Project, which was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a non-partisan think-tank; a staggering 45% of children whose parents were solidly middle-class have fallen completely to the bottom rung of the economic ladder. These were children who were raised middle-class; they went to the better schools and enjoyed the trappings of middle-America. So what happened?
In case there were any people left who were not sure about the racist and class objectives of the Republican Party, I think this should clear up any more doubt. The state of Mississippi and its Republican Governor Haley Barbour has decided to take money earmarked for rebuilding the Gulf Coast region which was damaged by Katrina and use it to provide relief and redevelopment money for the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Mississippi was the only state that requested and the only state granted the waiver to override the provision that atleast 50% of the Community Block Grants be spent on low income projects. In creating the program Congress wanted to insure that the low income population in the affected states would not be left out of the redevelopment funds.
The newest survival tip to young non-white male persons who encounter law enforcement (since even in these circumstances, they're disproportionately male and disproportionately Black or Latino) is to avoid carrying your hairbrush with you, especially if you are not 100% sane.
This appears to be the early lesson we're learning from the death of yet another non-white teenager, 18-year old Khiel Coppin, last night in my old neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York. The early reports are that New York's finest believed he had a gatt when in fact he was carrying a Goody.
The news of young Mr. Coppin's death is still pretty hot off the presses less than 24 hours after the event. So, of course, as is always the case when a completely unarmed person gets shot and killed by the police, the stories about what happened are still all over the map. You have those witnesses who claim that that Mr. Coppin asserted that he had a gun, or that his mother said to police he had a gun, in person or on the phone -- take your pick. You have witnesses who say it was clear this teenager was unarmed, that the police knew it because he put up his hands, and even that one of the officers even confronted his colleague about why he shot Mr. Coppin. Right now there's not even agreement about whether he was killed by 13 shots or all 20 hit him (not that this detail really means all that much, except to reinforce that the NYPD still hasn't figured out despite Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell that Black men don't need to have multiple weapons emptied into them just to kill them; they die just as quick as white men do with one or two well-placed shots -- which to me begs the question of why multiple cops are wedded to the habit of emptying their weapons routinely when Black suspects are involved, rather than shoot to disable.)
