We must not respond to the duplicity of “liberals” by aligning with the intolerance and exploitation of “conservatives”

NNPA columnist Raynard Jackson (Black Leaders have Sold Out, Atlanta Daily World, April 25, 2013) has put forth an old argument that uses the furor over immigration reform (with a nod to the gay marriage debate thrown in for good measure) to argue for people of Afrikan descent to take their support away from the “liberal” Democratic Party and its anointed Black leaders and throw it behind the “conservative” Republican Party.  While I agree with Mr. Jackson that we should not mindlessly follow Democratic Party ideology and every media-sponsored, corporate-influenced “leader” hook-line-and-sinker, to then propose a solution of allegiance to the Republican Party is completely nonsensical and would amount to the cultural (and some would say actual) suicide of Afrikan people.

Mr. Jackson bemoans the lack of inclusion of the Afrikan Descendant (he says “Black”) community in the gay marriage and immigration debates, noting that the “liberal” organizations such as the NAACP, Urban League and Congressional Black Caucus expend so much energy supporting “homosexual marriage and amnesty for illegals” while we receive no support from the immigration and gay lobbies for our issues, citing the Trayvon Martin case as an example.  Specifically with regard to immigration, he cites the unemployment rate among people of Afrikan descent and notes that “Blacks will be hurt the most by giving amnesty to these 11 million illegals and yet there has not been one town hall meeting with the Black community to discuss how this issue will negatively impact the Black community’s high unemployment rate.”

He specifically makes reference to polls that suggest that, contrary to the beliefs of many, the US population in general, and the Black population in particular, is opposed to both gay marriage and “amnesty for illegals”.  He blames Ben Jealous of the NAACP, Marc Morial of the Urban League, MSNBC commentator Rev. Al Sharpton and Ohio Representative and Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Marcia Fudge in particular for attempting to hijack the interests of the Black community to curry favor with the Democratic Party and the Obama Administration.

Then he lets the other shoe drop as he hints at his solution: the Republican Party, which has fought against “the illegals” (and the homosexuals) for decades.  Apparently, Mr. Jackson believes that the occasional conflicts between Latinos and Afrikan-Americans, and the moral opposition of many in our community to homosexuality indicates that we should all become Republicans.  Perhaps we should go Tea-Partying with the right-wingers and join in on some occasional Stars-and-Bars romanticizing about the Good Ol’ Days of the Confederacy for good measure.

This entire join-the-GOP argument has been proposed a number of times before, by Black commentators working for White newspapers and a surprising number of Black papers as well.  It’s a classic case of Black intellectuals proposing, over and over again, the same shockingly simplistic and counter-intuitive analysis in an effort to sound “forward-thinking”, or at least smarter than the rest of us.  Because the Democratic “liberals” ignore us and take us for granted, we should turn to the Republican “conservatives”.  In their apparent zeal to literally save us all from ourselves, our conservative Black intellectuals careen right past what should be obvious on a breakneck course into the arms of our historic oppressors, who want nothing more than to relegate us all back to a modern-day plantation.

First, let’s deal with this whole concept of “illegals”.  The largely-Mexican immigrants who are so often derided by flag-waving Americans are the descendants of the people of Old Mexico, which, by the way, included not just present-day Mexico, but also Texas, New Mexico (ever wonder where that name came from?), Arizona, California, and even parts of Nevada and, I believe, Colorado.  These territories were all systematically seized (some would say stolen) from Mexico by the US through the instigation of hostilities (“Remember the Alamo!”) and then the annexation of land as part of the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo, all in service to the US doctrine of Manifest Destiny.  Thus, the frequent refrain from many Mexican and Central and South American immigrants today: “We didn’t cross the border.  The border crossed us.”

(If we want to blame someone for our high unemployment numbers, maybe we shouldn’t take in the politics of misdirection by attacking another group of exploited and oppressed people in some silly fight over the crumbs left over by the “One Percent”.  Perhaps a more suitable target would be those officials who railroaded our once-public institutions such as schools, libraries, recreation centers and adult education centers into either privatization or outright economic oblivion so their buddies could profit from building more prisons.  Perhaps we should look at those politicians who have presided over what may be the largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the United States.  Perhaps we should point the finger at the opponents of a living wage, trade unions, comprehensive jobs programs or even enforcement of current anti-discrimination laws.  Who might those people be?)

Next, let’s look at who our Black conservative would-be saviors would have us join forces with.  The Republicans?  Are you kidding me?  Because the Democrats take us for granted and ignore us, we should leave them and run to those who beat us every day?  Racial profiling, political imprisonment, the death penalty, the de-funding of schools, opposition to affirmative action, opposition to a living wage, upward redistribution of wealth, the increased criminalization of our youth, privatization of prisons, deregulation of the same banksters who plunged the US into a mini-Depression, support of the worst corporate polluters on the planet as they pursue dirtier and dirtier methods of resource extraction, the Monsanto-ization of our food supply, voter intimidation, the support of corporate murderers and thieves who pillage Afrika and South America on the regular while they overthrow and sometimes assassinate heads of state, the doctrine of perpetual war to maintain the US’s status as the biggest bully on the block – while both political parties are guilty of most of these sins, the Republicans commit these crimes “in spades” (Pardon the politically-incorrect pun).  They are still light years ahead of the Democrats in their baldface attempts to impose a global military-police state upon everyone else, especially our ancestral home, Afrika.  The simplistic and insulting tactics of ideological deception, acrimony and fear employed by so many conservatives, especially Black conservatives, should turn the stomach of any self-respecting Afrikan.

Finally, in this mad dash from the so-called “liberal left” to the so-called “conservative” right, who are our corporate-influenced intellectual pundits ignoring?  First of all, I don’t expect them to talk about the Greens, who are seen as more “liberal” than the “liberals” for whom they have such disdain.  The Greens are more passionate about gay rights and a path to citizenship for the “illegals” than the Democrats are, so it’s no surprise to me that they are not mentioned as an option.  Plus, the Greens tend to be fiercely pro-environment and anti-war, again not in line with the so-called “conservative” agenda.  And the Libertarians, from my personal experience, appear to be basically Republicans “in disguise” (much like Ancestor Malcolm X said about Dixiecrats and Democrats back in the ‘60s).

But there are others in the political arena whom the conservative Black intellectuals refuse to discuss.  I know many of us suffer allergic reactions to Socialist arguments, but how many of us really understand what Socialism is?  I’d bet very few, if any of us.  Why?  Because we are conditioned from early childhood to fear Socialism as a synonym for Communism (which we also don’t understand for the most part).  Thus, Americans supported the war crime the US committed on September 11, 1973 when it overthrew and assassinated Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, because the US wanted Chile’s copper and other resources and Allende was standing in the way.  This atrocity, which plunged Chile into a 17-plus-year reign of terror and gave rise to one of the most despicable dictators in world history (Augusto Pinochet) was justified, however, because Allende was a Socialist.  Similar arguments were made for the multiple attempts to overthrow Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, much as they were used to justify the assassination of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in the 1960s and the support of the racist apartheid regime in South Africa (Yes, we celebrate Nelson Mandela now, but America vilified him while he was imprisoned for 27 years).  The lies that led to the genocide of the Vietnam War were easily swallowed by loyal Americans because of the fear of Communism that we were all brought up with.  Thus, any organization that promotes an ideology based on Socialism in any form, such as the All-Afrikan People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) or the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM), must be condemned and dismissed without so much as a second thought, and certainly without any real analysis or discussion that would give us the chance to see that these, after all, are human beings too.  (And I am not a member of either organization, not that it should matter here.)

But, if we are so afraid of the “hard-left” Socialism and Communism, that doesn’t mean that we must rush to embrace the harder-right Capitalism that the Republican Party would have us endure.  First of all, there are hybrids of these systems that have been used successfully in countries in Latin America, Central America and Europe (and, in fact, to a very limited and inadequate degree here in the United States).  Better yet, we can develop our own system based upon the best of ancient Afrikan communitarian culture.  The problem with these options, though, is that in order to adopt and practice these ways of living, we actually would have to study and learn something.  And we don’t have time for all that, do we?  After all, the playoff game is on TV, or we must keep up with the Khardashians, and we all have to go update our status on Facebook.  And anyway, after we do our study, we would then have to do some real work.  We would have to organize our people ourselves instead of waiting for the Great White Father to do it for us.  We would have to hold public Town Hall Meetings based on our Afrikan culture and identity, where members of our community would actually come together at the grassroots level and develop our own set of “national” priorities, first at the local or state level, then at the national level, and finally at the global Diaspora level, to craft a comprehensive Pan-Afrikan Agenda that might answer the centuries of abuse, mis-education, exploitation and oppression that Afrikan people have been forced to endure, once and for all.  And even though there is already an organization that has done much of the initial heavy lifting to get exactly this type of process started (the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus, http://www.srdcinternational,org), we still don’t have time to get involved in such silly pursuits because we have to get busy showing everyone just how patriotic we are to a nation that built itself on the enslavement of our ancestors, clearly a much more worthy expenditure of our time and energy, no?

I remember a time when Rev. Jesse Jackson actually made me proud of him.  He, conservative economist Ron Woodson and the late lawyer Johnnie Cochran were guests on Meet the Press just before the Million Man March.  The late Tim Russert, the then-host, asked the three men: “Is the Million Man March about separatism or about inclusion?”  First, Mr. Cochran, the skilled lawyer who should have seen the flim-flam coming, answered hopefully.  “I think it’s about inclusion, Tim,” he said, and he went on to explain about the principle of Black men coming together to not only embrace each other but also to apologize and atone for their misdeeds and to resolve to be better men and better citizens.  Mr. Woodson replied in classic conservative-Black-intellectual style: “Tim, I’m sorry to say it’s about separatism,” he sighed, and spoke about the Black-only, male-only theme of the March in a voice tinged with regret.  Rev. Jackson was the only one who saw through the trap.  “I cannot answer that question, Tim, because you have presented a false dichotomy,” he replied assertively.  Rev. Jackson had seen that the question was designed to manipulate us into choosing between “A” and “B”, when the alphabet actually gives us 26 letters (in some countries more) for us to choose from, and the truth was that the Million Man March was about neither of those things.

I see that our conservative Black intellectuals are still using that same tactic today.  What that tells me is this: They aren’t really interested in freeing us from Democratic Party or “liberal” control; what they want is to place us under “conservative” Republican control.  Which, frankly, isn’t all that different.

Yes, it’s time for us to look somewhere other than at the media-supported, government-approved leaders for Afrikan people.  Yes, we are often sold out by many of them (but not all: witness Cynthia McKinney) because we don’t realize who they really work for (and it usually ain’t us).  But trading a “Black leader” who parrots the Democratic Party line for one who parrots the Republican Party line amounts to nothing more than jumping out of the frying pan into the skillet.  Come on, Black People.  Our ancestors created the first great civilization, our moral code of Ma’at carried the seeds of the Ten Commandments before there were Ten Commandments, and our resilience as a people has kept us here on this planet despite perhaps the most persistent global genocide ever committed over at least the last half-millennium.  Stop resorting to the easy, mindless pseudo-intellectual pablum that is fed to us regularly by the flag-waving, corporate-influenced right wing of the US (which now includes many of the Democrats anyway) and the western world.  Drop your collective Bwana Complex and start organizing, mobilizing and ruling yourselves as Afrikan People.