Lies and Legacy: A Conversation on Fidel Castro

By Brenan Daniels

This is a recent email interview I did with Patxi Ariet, the son of Cuban immigrants to the US who supported Fidel Castro, about Castro, Cuba, the US media coverage of Cuba/Castro, and Cuba's future.

What are your thoughts on Castro's death and the media's reaction?

The death of Fidel Castro marks the end of an era in the history of Cuba. To me it marks the end of the 20th century and the Cold War era and moves Cuba into the 21st century and makes room for the youth of Cuba to continue the revolution in the spirit of Fidel Castro. As to the media coverage, I feel that it was highly choreographed as to what was said. At first Fidel was referred to as the "Leader of the Cuban people," when the news first broke about his death. As the day went on, however, he went from leader to Dictator.

We saw the political line of the American government come out through all media sources in the United States. Whether this was print or broadcast, the line was the same. There was also very little attention to given to Cubans in the island. The emphasis was on the Cuban exiles and their story out of Miami. Showing people living in Key Biscayne, which is one of the most exclusive and wealthiest parts of Miami, to get their take on the death of Fidel and of course to through some punches at his legacy. This was to be expected though, every emperor rejoices in the death of their enemy.

Tell us about your life and growing up as a Cuban whose parents supported the revolution? Why did your parents support the revolution?

To say the least, I did not fit in with the other children that came from staunch Anti-Castro, Republican homes. I would listen to the stories they have heard from their parents and I would tell mine. My family supported the revolution because they remembered and were not blind to the abuses of the Batista government. They saw the need for a total change in Cuba and its relationship with the United States. I would hear about how Havana was controlled by the Mafia and American corporate interests. They would tell me the stories about the "Saca Uñas," the Nail Pullers.

These were special secret police that would kidnap, interrogate, imprison, even kill Anti-Batista Cubans, or just those that did not do what the secret police told them to do. My own great grandfather who was Captain of the Police force in Havana was forced to resign his post when he refused to assassinate people for the government. These were stories that many Cubans in Miami would never talk about or allow their children to hear. Along with the corruption my family remembered the poverty and injustice outside of Havana.

How people could just be thrown off their land by the whim of the foreign land lords. My own grandfather used to deliver medicine for free and provide medical care for free in these areas because they did not have any money for food much less healthcare. This is why the revolution was necessary in their eyes.

How have people received your support for Castro? Have you been shunned by members of the Cuban community?

Depends on who I am talking to. An American will sit with me and discuss the Cuban missile crisis and Bay of Pigs, of course from the American perspective. These conversations usually end with, "Huh, I didn't know that", from the person I'm speaking to. As far as the Cuban community, the reaction is a bit different. I never try to disrespect or put down the experiences of those Cubans that I'm speaking to that lived through the early days of the revolution. I know that any revolution is a difficult thing to live through, change is always a painful process and I try to sympathize with what they went through. For the most part I am either kicked out of where I am by the Anti-Castro supporter, or I am drawn into a long conversation about the horrors of Fidel and then kicked out.

There is a type of shunning that comes with being a Pro-Castro Cuban in Miami. People automatically know your name, recognize your face. Create elaborate stories about you, about how you are a spy for the Cuban government, how you must have killed 100 political dissidents to get to where you are. This is the basis of the Anti-Castro propaganda, lies and exaggerations. I remember once I was at a schoolmate's house doing a project for school.

My parents struggled to send me to La Salle high school in Miami, one of the two obligatory schools Cuban exile children chose from to attend. I was doing a project at the house of a class mate whose mother was Anti-Castro, gun-ho republican. She was speaking to me about President George W. Bush's policy towards Cuba. She went on and on, when she finished all I said was, "The embargo is the reason for the shape Cuba is in, but Fidel and the revolution has still managed to help the people of Cuba." I was immediately told to leave. This is normal and you learn to keep your mouth shut in certain areas. I am much more well-received in American areas

There are some who would argue mistakes were made by Castro, Talk about those mistakes, but also how the media seems to ignore anything positive Castro has done.

Every government makes mistakes. To err is human. Unfortunately, when the leader of a country makes mistakes, some people suffer from it and it becomes the focal point of propaganda. In my humble opinion I feel Fidel could have done more in the way of "Socializing" industry and not just Nationalizing them. Industry should have been for the benefit of every Cuban and controlled by the workers of those industries. I see this as a major flaw to an exact Socialist state. This mistake, however, I do not even hold to much against Castro. I was never in his position and I trust he did what he thought was best to maintain the revolution in Cuba and make sure it was in the best interest of the Cuban people in the long run. I also know that there is scarcity due to the embargo so this could also be a reason to nationalize all industry, to make sure that enough is produced and distributed among the people.

However, the media looks at these "flaws" as evidence of an Evil dictator that refuses to adequately feed his people. Of course, they don't mention the free healthcare and education systems across the islands, nor how Cuba send doctors all over the world to help those in need that cannot afford medical care. They don't mention how every Cuban has a job, can read and write, has housing.

You never hear about the low infant mortality rate that is even lower than in the US. You don't hear the fact that no one starves to death on the Island. There is scarcity, yes, but everyone eats and no one is starving to death. The western media ignores these facts and make Cuba look like a prison.

They distort why some people are in jail, they distort the numbers of people in jail, yet fail to mention that the US has the highest prison population in the world! How the prison system in the US is used as a modern day slave system to contract inmates, mostly of color, out to companies to do jobs for little or no pay. This is never brought up, yet the few small incidences in Cuba are blown out of proportion to be used as propaganda. It is disgusting.

What would you say is the impact Castro has had over the years and the impact he is still having?

Over the years Castro has impacted millions of lives. To begin with, in Cuba has impacted every single Cuban those who love him and those who hate him see this man as the one that changed their lives. Around the world he has impacted many, many others over the years. From his stance against the Belgians in the Congo during their fight for independence. Him sending troops to Angola to defeat the apartheid soldiers sent in from South Africa, which were supported by the US.

To the peoples of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador who looked to Fidel Castro as well as Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos as an inspiration to overthrow those in their countries that wanted to use them as slaved to continue making money and who have repeatedly sold them out to the United States so they can further their own economic interests. Even after his death he is impacting and will continue to impact millions of people daily.

He has become the symbol of revolution, the symbol of fighting for what you believe in and fighting for the right of your country and your people to be free. He stood up to the biggest empire this world has ever known and lived to be an old man. That is inspiring. His actions will never be forgotten and it is because of his action that his words and his legacy will be immortal. History has truly absolved him.

If possible, have you been in contact with anyone in Cuba who can speak to how the Cuban people are feeling?

I have a few friends of mine that are from Cuba and travel to Cuba quite frequently. None, unfortunately, that have visited the island after the death of Fidel. I can speak to how he was spoken about while he was alive. I have heard some say he was like a grandfather. Others who criticized him for not giving in to the Americans so they can have more things. Overall though the people of Cuba do not regret the revolution nor do they wish for the state to be overthrown.

As any patriotic citizen of their country, they feel that Cuba can be better, and it is exactly that feeling that Fidel Castro inspired in people and that is why Cuba will be better. Notice that those that have criticized Fidel were not harassed, nor put into prison. They criticized him openly and without fear of the state.

What do you think the future hold for Cuba, especially with regards to its relations with the US?

I think Cuba will continue to grow and move towards Socialism. With the next generation preparing to take the helm of the country I am excited to see what happens. When it comes to relations with the US. I am afraid that under President Donald Trump, the doors of diplomacy will be closed once again and the Cold War with Cuba will continue. I do not see Cuba giving in to the demands of a demagogue like Trump. I feel optimistic, however, that this will not limit Cuba's interaction with the international community and that Cuba will continue to grow economically in the world despite the attempts of Mr. Trump to strangle it.

Media Monsters: Militarism, Violence, and Cruelty in Children's Culture

By Heidi Tilney Kramer

"10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction." 

- Susan Sontag

Who ever thought there would be torture scenes in G and PG rated American children's films or that a video game would allow one to feel the rush of killing? Who would have imagined in their worst nightmare that the Disney corporation would try to trademark "SEAL Team 6," especially right after this elite military group killed Osama bin Laden, so they could use it for toys, Christmas stockings, and snow globes? Or that a child would write a few loving words on her desk and be arrested in front of her classmates? Who could have believed that the U.S. would torture real children in the "war on terror" campaign?

Consider that there are now only five big media conglomerates controlling over 90% of everything seen and heard. Media in the U.S. is engaging in post-9/11 rhetoric even in the world of children. Seeing little Boo, the toddler who can barely speak in Monsters, Inc., strapped in the torture chair - equipped with holes in the seat's bottom like electric chairs have for drainage of bodily fluids - convinces us to look closer at what American kids and children the world over are watching as their purported entertainment.

As cartoon images of militarism and prison fill children's heads, the school-to-prison pipeline is active in the schools of poor neighborhoods and those of color mimicking the prison system - and these children have largely been slated for a life in prison or the military. Pushing students out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system - often for minor offenses such as getting behind in their homework! - is as disturbing as the JROTC instituting programs on the middle school level as a way of getting especially inner-city, racially targeted recruits.

This is against the U.N.'s Convention on the Rights of the Child's (C.R.C.) Article 38: "Children under 15 should not be forced or recruited to take part in a war or join the armed forces...The Convention's Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict further develops this right, raising the age for direct participation in armed conflict to 18 and establishing a ban on compulsory recruitment for children under 18." The United States, along with Somalia and South Sudan, refuses to ratify this document under the guise of parental rights, but that decision allows the following problems: 21% of U.S. children are living in poverty; the U.S. is the only high-income country not to grant paid maternal leave; and the U.S. is the only country in the world sentencing under-18-year-olds to life without parole. These infractions are all against the C.R.C. Over twenty-five years old, the document will never be ratified by the United States because it interferes with business as usual, and Michael P. Farris, president of Parental Rights, actively fights the treaty. His group fears that, if instituted, "[a nation] would have to spend more on children's welfare than national defense." As the old saying goes, "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." The grand total in 2013 for U.S. Homeland Security and National Defense was an astounding $931 billion, or nearly $1 trillion, and part of the funding has come from cutting the school-lunch program. China has the next largest military budget, estimated at $136 billion.

Yet the propaganda continues...The Incredibles shows the 9/11 trope of a plane bent on destruction heading toward a U.S. city while the entire family ends up on the torture rack; the film also shows Mr. Incredible blasted by viscous bubbles similar to new, real-life (theoretically) less-than-lethal incapacitant sticky foam weapons being proposed for crowd control in the U.S. and abroad. And what are the children to think when their beloved Buzz Lightyear - a friend to all for two of the three films - is tortured, his personality changed, and he becomes, in Toy Story 3, prison guard for the cruel overlord in the surveillance-laden dystopia?

Children's beliefs about others are molded from a young age - just think how characters in Aladdin contributed to persuasion for the first Gulf War as even children came to see the Arabic world as mean-spirited. Henry A. Giroux explains that Disney not only included offensive language toward the region in this (and its follow-up) film, it didn't even bother to write actual Arabic where it was called for in the film, instead choosing to scribble the substitute of nonsensical scrawl.

In addition to death language, war scenes, and general barbarism, there are other disturbing depictions in G and PG rated children's movies. Nearly all African-American characters have an inner-city vibe as we see in Turbo. Often Spanish-speaking characters are presented as poor and lazy or loud as observed in the aforementioned and in Open Season. Women are shown as either "bitchy" or subservient. If you want evidence, just watch Beauty and the Beast - it's a primer for women to learn how to endure an abusive relationship (as in, "If I'm just nice enough, he'll come around"). Or watch how Ratatouille presents a woman as psychotic. Native Americans are depicted as mysterious and speak monosyllabically, as seen in Rango. Children themselves are presented as either endangered or as monsters, sometimes both, as is the case in both Toy Story and Nanny McPhee. Guns, cruelty, and bullying are in just about every kids' film in the U.S., but the Motion Picture Association of America doesn't care that the violence component is through the roof as long as no one hears cursing or sees drugs or alternative lifestyles.

How are people affected by that last one? Ritual ridicule in a brutal gender binary system is largely responsible for the mass school shootings. Our definitions of what it means to "be a man" are injected early on. Seeing Ken - depicted as supposedly effeminate - bullied and threatened by Barbie in Toy Story 3 tells boys to be wary of having nice hand-writing or any other purportedly feminine behavior. There are many, many examples of gender policing in American kids' films - take how the minion is teased for wanting affection in Despicable Me as just one example.

Meanwhile, over 6,000 were killed from the U.S. drone assassination program in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine in 2015 alone - some of the victims are children and 90% of victims are innocent bystanders. You won't see this on American TV or in the country's films. The U.S. veteran homelessness rate is appalling - and suicide rates among armed services veterans and active duty personnel have sky-rocketed. You won't see this either. The world is grappling with how to handle refugees from the fashionably long-lasting wars amid - and aiming specifically for - civilians. You'll see the refugees but no coverage of why these victims are fleeing. You won't hear the name Omar Khadr, a 15-year old Canadian citizen tortured by the U.S. or that of 14-year old Chad-citizen Mohammed El-Gharani who suffered the same fate. You won't see coverage detailing that those of Arabic/Islamic origin or background rounded up in the U.S. after 9/11 were ALL found innocent. Instead, you will see over 900 mostly Hollywood films vilifying these groups over the past century so the military-industrial complex has an eternal "enemy."

U.S. children are busy at school being patted down and going into lockdown mode, learning how to kill from video games, repeating cruelties learned from their films, and watching playground fights on YouTube, while American tax dollars are hard at work being used for nationalistic ceremonies at pro sports events and censoring directors who don't promote "patriotism." That citizens shudder at fellow hijab wearing citizens shows how the U.S. public has been sucker-punched.

We are undergoing a paradigm shift of monumental proportions wherein some are awakening to possibilities on a dimming horizon. Doing so has never been more imperative because our very survival depends on seeing what is true: that we are more alike than we are different and that the "have nots" have a my-voice-matters stake in which way life proceeds. It is time for us, "the 99%," to stand against the media and political giants engaged in separating us from one another. God bless the whole world: NO EXCEPTIONS.

"Of course the people don't want war...That is understood...But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

- Hermann Goering (at the Nuremberg trials)

Heidi Tilney Kramer is a mom and independent scholar focusing on Critical Children's Studies and U.S. Media. She has written two theses: "Visionary of Control: The efficiency, expertise, and exclusion of Alexander James Inglis," which reviews elitist changes made to the U.S. education system during the Progressive era in order to ensure a stable workforce - said changes resulted in sexist, racist, and classist policies which continue in the modern world; "Monsters Under the Bed: An Analysis of Torture Scenes in Three Pixar Films" highlights the ways in which torture is framed in G and PG rated films - as state/corporate control in Monsters, Inc., the prison/concentration camp theme of Toy Story 3, and the 1960s spy thriller trope used in The Incredibles. She lectures and teaches about childhood in the U.S. Her recently released book, Media Monsters: Militarism, Violence, and Cruelty in Children's Culture, available through Amazon, explores the history of propaganda and exposes the powerful forces pouring billions into influencing children with militaristic, violent, and cruel images at increasingly younger ages. Her quest is two-fold: 1) to identify negative messages children are receiving in their formal training and entertainment (and she would love for you to send her any examples you find), and 2) to uncover the ramifications of being conditioned to accept cruelty. Her latest project is the analysis and categorization of the entirety of American children's films. There is a Facebook page, Media Monsters R Against Kids, as well as a website, mediamonsters.us. She can be reached at: megamediamonsters@gmail.com or mediamonsters2016@gmail.com.

ESPN'S Journal of Black Respectability Politics: The Undefeated, and the Surrender of the Black Middle Class

By Jon Jeter

". . . before you know it, we'll have Negro Imperialists."

- Fred Hampton

In a June 1st article for ESPN's new African-American focused property, the Undefeated, celebrity intellectual Michael Eric Dyson takes darker-skinned blacks to task for their begrudging refusal to exalt in the accomplishments of lighter-skinned blacks such as the National Basketball Association's two-time Most Valuable Player, Steph Curry.

"The resentment by darker blacks of the perceived and quite real advantages accorded to lighter blacks has sometimes led to a wholesale repudiation of all fairer-skinned blacks. There is, however, a big difference between asking for racial transparency in light privilege, and the unvarying treatment of fairer-skinned blacks as automatically guilty of exploiting their status."

As a work of either reportage or critical inquiry, Dyson's 2,000-word essay is an abysmal failure. Didactic, artless and populated with misshapen straw-men, it fails to identify a single African American who articulates anything resembling envy or disdain for Curry, let alone anyone whose resentment is grounded in his fair complexion. In fact, the two African Americans who Dyson quotes at length, current NBA player Kevin Durant, and the retired Hall-of-Famer Allen Iverson, are effusive in their praise of Curry.

But as a written reprimand to blackness, or a textbook example of how a feckless Black elite has corroborated the white settler state's attempt to alibi its criminal enterprise by manufacturing the Other, Dyson's critique is a singular achievement.

Consider that at no point in his polemic does Dyson mention the word "rape," for doing so would be tantamount to handing up an indictment for a 500-year-old crime spree that is unlike anything the world has ever seen. Virtually from the moment they alighted in the Americas, European expatriates set upon indigenous and African women, creating, from whole cloth, a language of sexual defilement - -mulattoes, octoroons, quadroons and Latinos - and giving birth, quite literally to the New World, and the Steph Currys that populate it.

"God, forgive us," writes a Civil-War era diarist wed to a South Carolina planter, "but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an inequity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattos one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all mulatto children in everybody's household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds."

It is unfathomable that the Ivy-League educated and employed Dyson, is unfamiliar with this history, or unaware that skin-tone has played no discernible role in the radical black political movements that are the sine qua non of liberal democracy in the US. Hence, the reddish-colored, first black mayor of Dyson's hometown of Detroit, the late Coleman Alexander Young, is as revered by African Americans in the Motor City as much - if not more - than the blue-black former mayor of Washington DC, Marion Barry.

Dyson's cognitive dissonance is hardly accidental and these clumsy but willful misrepresentations are a staple of the Undefeated, which is not an online chronicle of the African American experience so much as a literary journal of black respectability politics, or better yet, a declassified dossier of tribal dysfunction. Since it debuted in mid-May, the Undefeated´s virtually-all black staff has consistently trafficked in narratives in which history is inert, racism exists only inasmuch as it vexes Obama, and no injustice is so grave that it cannot be resolved by black folks pulling up their pants.

In his groundbreaking 1978 book, the late Edward Said posited that the West has historically sought to qualify its imperialism by assigning men of science and letters the exercise of shifting the blame for colonialism, from the colonizer, to the colonized.

Said named this brand of racist pseudo-science for the unfortunate term coined by the West to describe the Arab world to its East - - Orientalism - -and dated its practice as far back as France's 1798 invasion of Egypt, when Napoleon encouraged artists, writers, and anthropologists to re-imagine the Nile's inhabitants, or to Orientalize the Orient.

Of the famed French novelist's depiction of a 19th-century dancer, Said writes:

Flaubert's encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess (her) physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was "typically Oriental."

It does not require a postcolonial scholar to recognize the elasticity of Said's theory and how it provides a framework for contextualizing Rudyard Kipling's poetry, DW Griffith's landmark 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, King Baudouin extolling the civilizing virtues of Belgian colonialism on the eve of Congo's liberation in 1960, or the 2009 Sandra Bullock vehicle, the Blind Side. Orientalism even explains the 2003 remarks made by former Harvard College President Lawrence Summers when he sought to exorcise patriarchy from the body politic by wondering aloud if women aren't underrepresented in American laboratories because they lack the "aptitude" to succeed in math and science professions.

They do not, and the scientific consensus had said so for nearly 50 years.

Yet, if scholars define Orientalism as white people writing about people of color for white people, then the rise of a Black Jacobin class that is all-too-eager to validate a hierarchy in which they are invested has reformulated the colonial syntax. With the American Empire at its nadir and seeking both absolution and scapegoats, black journalists, academics, police, filmmakers and philanthropists in the Obama age are increasingly charged with Niggerizing the Nigger.

Orientalism is the new Black.

A May 18 Undefeated profile of the African American quarterback Robert Griffin III practically rebukes readers for believing their lying eyes. In 2012, Griffin set NFL rookie records for passer rating, and led the league in rushing yards-per carry. But his play tailed off sharply after the Washington Redskins' January 6, 2013 playoff loss when even a casual fan could plainly see that the rookie was hobbled and playing on an injured knee. And yet the veteran coach, Mike Shanahan - who once suggested in an interview that an All-Pro black quarterback was too dumb to understand the playbook - - refused to substitute for him until late in the contest.

"Look at his face, Daddy," former Washington Wizards center Etan Thomas quoted his seven-year old son, Malcolm, asking him in a Washington Post editorial published the day after the playoff game. "Why is he still playing if he is in that much pain?"

Seemingly intent on helping Shanahan land another coaching job, however, the Undefeated posited that Griffin is the real villain in this sporting drama, because, he's, well, uppity.

"Talk to people who worked with Griffin in Washington, and most will tell you he had chances - too many - to salvage his starting position and that many of his problems started with him. Griffin was too focused on his endorsements. He overindulged in social media. He alienated teammates by deflecting blame for his poor performances and ran his mouth too much in interviews. He should have spent more time in the film room and less on enhancing the cult of RG3."

Why would African-Americans traffic in such seditious caricatures, particularly at a moment when dehumanizing stereotypes conspire with wrenching austerity policies to produce material circumstances reminiscent of 1930s Germany when a demagogue blamed that country's immiseration on a population he categorized as nonwhite?

I was first confronted with the notion of black Orientalists when I read a fawning 2005 New York Times profile of Harvard Economist Roland J. Fryer, whose research explores genetics as a critical factor in racial disparities in intelligence. That no such disparities exist did little to discourage former New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein from hiring the African American Fryer as a consultant to help untangle the student achievement gap.

Fryer was followed in quick succession by the likes of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, Dyson, and most recently, the historical illiteracy of Ta-nehisi Coates who asserts that Obama is the heir to Malcolm X's political legacy, and that blacks should eschew the game-changing traditions of political resistance for a monthly reparationscheck, cut by the US Treasury.

To be sure, financial remuneration partly explains the phenomena of Black Orientalists, but more than anything, the defection of the Black Vichy class is grounded in the twilight of the American century, and the post-industrial epoch that Gramsci refers to as the interregnum, in which the "old is dying, and the new cannot be born."

This was also the case a century ago when a precarious new economy and social order was beginning to take shape and mobs of alienated white youths terrorized the country in waves, climaxing in 1919 when racial violence washed over the country like a foamy, heaving sea.

Atlanta's Black unwashed rescued the city's Black elite from marauding white mobs in 1906, dutifully patrolling segregated neighborhoods with pistols and shotguns a-ready. When the smoke cleared, Atlanta's Urban League sought to reassure their white patrons of their fealty by organizing neighborhood clubs to teach "better housekeeping" practices to black maids and washerwomen, Karen Ferguson wrote in her book, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta.

The domestics complied initially, listening intently to lectures on cleanliness and punctuality. But when, they began to wonder, would the forum address the subject of pay raises for making an extra effort? Told that no pay raises would be forthcoming, the black domestics bolted, giving their Urban League sisters the side-eye as they left.

Similarly, an effort to organize black workers at the cigarette-maker RJ Reynolds in 1919, was met with opprobrium by Black mercantilists in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. According to Robert Rodgers Korstad, author of Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South, one Black banker, J.H. Hill, implored "my people" not to be tempted by "strangers. . . There is no need for a poor laboring class of people to try to make demands on any rich corporations. We are dependent upon these corporations for employment"

Underwhelmed, black tobacco workers boycotted stores that did not support the union, and threatened to withdraw their money from Hill's bank if he didn't relent. Conversely, Reynolds management tried to slow the employees' momentum by proposing a company or "yellow dog" union, recruiting another black merchant, Simon Atkins, to champion its advantages at a meeting with workers. But, Rodgers Korstad wrote, "Black workers. . .did not look to the middle class for their cues" and responded with "hoots and jeers."

Blacks' frustration with what W.E.B. DuBois famously heralded as the Negro's most "talented tenth" detonated following the 1931 arrest of nine black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight car just outside of Scottsboro, Alabama. The NAACP's timid, ineffective legal defense paled in comparison to that of the Communist Party who hoped to make inroads in the country by defiantly putting American racism itself on trial, organizing rallies as far away as Chicago, New York, London, Moscow and Johannesburg, and featuring as actors rather than victims, the plain-spoken but sympathetic mothers of the accused teenagers.

Initially reluctant to even accept the case for fear of tarnishing their brand, the NAACP's attitude towards the mothers was one of condescension; they soon withdrew from the case, leaving the Communists' to eventually win the release of all 9 accused.

Six days after excoriating Griffin, the Undefeated published an article by the veteran sportswriter Michael Wilbon that parrots the NAACP's gradualist approach in the Scottsboro case. Too clever by half, Wilbon's essay laments black indifference to the the new analytics methodology that is all the rage in NBA front offices. Wilbon dismisses out-of-hand the trope that blacks are incapable of understanding mathematical concepts, and while he stipulates that there is no demonstrable value-added to analytics in evaluating players, he still urges blacks to assimilate.

"For more than a few moments I felt guilty as hell for hating the intrusion of advanced analytics as much as I generally do. Because even though the reliance on this stuff seems to be a new safe haven for a new "Old Boy Network" of Ivy Leaguers who can hire each other and justify passing on people not given to their analytic philosophies, an entire group of people can't simply refuse to participate in something as important as this phenomenon. The cynical me can easily make the argument this is a new path to exclusion, intentional or not. Or is it creating an entirely new way of approaching sports that's reserved for the few?"

In Ferguson's book, Black Atlanta professionals wrote to New Deal bureaucrats to offer their services as race interlocutors in an effort to "help the Negro masses to adjust themselves to the type or world in which they must live."

The problem is that the Negro masses had no intention of living in such an immutable world, and in the days, months and years following the Scottsboro Boys' arrest, began to join Communists, and other working-class white allies to turn bad jobs into good ones, democratize the state, and create the singular achievement of the Industrial Age: the American middle class.

During World War 2, the Black RJ Reynolds employees who the Winston Salem elite had earlier scolded, collaborated with their white co-workers to integrate the union, but they didn't stop there, using the reconstituted collective as a springboard to produce what is likely the closest iteration this country has ever seen to the Paris commune. Led by an African-American, lesbian Marxist named Moranda Smith, Local 22 promptly proceeded to register thousands of African American voters, who in turn helped elect a black minister to the City Council, the first since Reconstruction to win an election in the Deep South against a white candidate. With their proxies at City Hall, Local 22 spearheaded efforts to build public housing, adopt price controls, improve schools, and expand bus service and jobless benefits.

Wilbon's call for black acquiesce mirrors that of his antecedents in Atlanta, North Carolina and Scottsboro, and like the Undefeated itself, does not account for the laboring classes' cycle of resistance, triumph, reversal, replayed endlessly as if on loop.

In the Orientalist war of narratives, the Undefeated, ironically enough, views African Americans as a thoroughly defeated people, and the Black elite as a kind of advance squadron trapped behind enemy lines, its reportage a kind of Morse code, tapped out daily on fiber-optic cables to warn the rear encampments that we are hopelessly outgunned.

"Do-Stop-Not-Stop-Attempt-Stop-A-Stop-Counteroffensive-Stop."

But Wilbon, the staff of the Undefeated, and the Black middle class writ large would be wise to revisit the words of an African American named William H. Crogman, who in the days following the 1906 Atlanta riots, wrote a letter to a northern white liberal crediting the Black proletariat-lumpen and otherwise- for coming to the defense of the black elites who lived in an aspirational neighborhood known as Dark Town.

"Here we have worked and prayed and tried to make good men and women of our colored population, and at our very doorstep the whites kill these good men," wrote Crogman, who would go on to become president of Clark College. "But the lawless element in our population, the element we have condemned fights back, and it is to these people that we owe our lives."

This was originally posted on Jon's personal blog.

Jon Jeter is the author of 'Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People,' and the co-author of 'A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama's Postracial America.' He is a former Washington Post Bureau Chief in southern Africa and South America, a former producer for This American Life, and twice a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

In Defense of Looting: Turning the White-Supremacist Narrative Upside Down

By Willie Osterweil

Originally published at New Inquiry.

As protests in Ferguson continued unabated one week after the police killing of Michael Brown, Jr., zones of Twitter and the left media predominantly sympathetic to the protesters began angrily criticizing looters. Some claimed that white protesters were the ones doing all of the looting and property destruction, while others worried about the stereotypical and damaging media representation that would emerge. It also seems that there were as many protesters (if not more) in the streets of Ferguson working to prevent looting as there were people going about it. While I disagree with this tactic, I understand that they acted out of care for the struggle, and I want to honor all the brave and inspiring actions they've taken over the last weeks.

Some politicians on the ground in Ferguson, like alderman Antonio French and members of the New Black Panther Party, block looting specifically in order to maintain leadership for themselves and dampen resistance, but there are many more who do so out of a commitment to advancing the ethical and politically advantageous position. It is in solidarity with these latter protesters-along with those who loot-and against politicians and de-escalators everywhere that I offer this critique, as a way of invigorating discussion amongst those engaged in anti-oppression struggle, in Ferguson and anywhere else the police violently perpetuate white supremacy and settler colonialism. In other words, anywhere in America.

The dominant media is itself a tool of white supremacy: it repeats what the police deliver nearly verbatim and uncritically, even when the police story changes upwards of nine times, as it has thus far in the Brown killing. The media use phrases like "officer-involved shooting" and will switch to passive voice when a black man is shot by a white vigilante or a police officer ("shots were fired"). Journalists claim that "you have to hear both sides" in order to privilege the obfuscating reports of the state over the clear voices and testimony of an entire community, members of which witnessed the police murder a teenager in cold blood. The media are more respectful to white serial killers and mass murderers than to unarmed black victims of murder.

And yet, many of the people who perform this critique day-in, day-out can get jammed up by media perceptions of protesters. They want to correct the media's assertion that protesters were all looters for good reason: the idea of black people looting a store is one of the most racially charged images in the white imaginary. When protesters proclaim that "not all protesters were looters, in fact, most of the looters weren't part of the protest!" or words to that effect, they are trying to fight a horrifically racist history of black people depicted in American culture as robbers and thieves: Precisely the image that the Ferguson police tried to evoke to assassinate Michael Brown's character and justify his killing post facto. It is a completely righteous and understandable position.

However, in trying to correct this media image-in making a strong division between Good Protesters and Bad Rioters, or between ethical non-violence practitioners and supposedly violent looters-the narrative of the criminalization of black youth is reproduced. This time it delineates certain kinds of black youth-those who loot versus those who protest. The effect of this discourse is hardening a permanent category of criminality on black subjects who produce a supposed crime within the context of a protest. It reproduces racist and white supremacist ideologies (including the tactic of divide-and-conquer), deeming some unworthy of our solidarity and protection, marking them, subtly, as legitimate targets of police violence. These days, the police, whose public-facing racism is much more manicured, if no less virulent, argue that "outside agitators" engage in rioting and looting. Meanwhile, police will consistently praise "non-violent" demonstrators, and claim that they want to keep those demonstrators safe.

In working to correct the white-supremacist media narrative we can end up reproducing police tactics of isolating the individuals who attack property at protests. Despite the fact that if it were not for those individuals the media might pay no attention at all. If protesters hadn't looted and burnt down that QuikTrip on the second day of protests, would Ferguson be a point of worldwide attention? It's impossible to know, but all the non-violent protests against police killings across the country that go unreported seem to indicate the answer is no. It was the looting of a Duane Reade after a vigil that brought widespread attention to the murder of Kimani Gray in New York City. The media's own warped procedure instructs that riots and looting are more effective at attracting attention to a cause.

But of course, the goal is not merely the attention of dominant media. Nor is the goal a certain kind of media attention: no matter how peaceful and well-behaved a protest is, the dominant media will always push the police talking points and the white-supremacist agenda. The goal is justice. Here, we have to briefly grapple with the legacy of social justice being won in America: namely that of non-violence and the civil rights movement. And that means correcting a more pervasive and totalizing media and historical narrative about the civil rights movement: that it was non-violent, that it claimed significant wins because it was non-violent, and that it overcame racial injustice altogether.

In the 400 years of barbaric, white supremacist, colonial and genocidal history known as the United States, the civil rights movement stands out as a bright, beautiful, all-too-brief moment of hope and struggle. We still live in the shadow of the leaders, theory, and images that emerged from those years, and any struggle in America that overlooks the work (both philosophical and organizational) produced in those decades does so at its own peril. However, why is it drilled into our heads, from grade school onward, in every single venue, by presidents, professors and police chiefs alike, that the civil rights movement was victorious because it was non-violent? Surely we should be suspicious of any narrative that the entire white establishment agrees is of the utmost importance.

The civil rights movement was not purely non-violent. Some of its bravest, most inspiring activists worked within the framework of disciplined non-violence. Many of its bravest, most inspiring activists did not. It took months of largely non-violent campaigning in Birmingham, Alabama to force JFK to give his speech calling for a civil rights act. But in the month before he did so, the campaign in Birmingham had become decidedly not-non-violent [1]: protesters had started fighting back against the police and Eugene "Bull" Conner, throwing rocks, and breaking windows. Robert Kennedy, afraid that the increasingly riotous atmosphere in Birmingham would spread across Alabama and the South, convinced John to deliver the famous speech and begin moving towards civil rights legislation.

This would have been impossible without the previous months of courageous and tireless non-violent activism. But it is also the emergent threat of rioting that forced JFK's hand. Both Malcolm X and MLK had armed bodyguards. Throughout the civil rights era, massive non-violent civil disobedience campaigns were matched with massive riots. The most famous of these was the Watts rebellion of 1965 but they occurred in dozens of cities across the country. To argue that the movement achieved what it did in spite of rather than as a result of the mixture of not-non-violent and non-violent action is spurious at best. And, lest we forget, Martin Luther King Jr., the man who embodied the respectable non-violent voice that the white power structure claims they would listen to today, was murdered by that same white power structure anyway.

Though the Civil Rights movement won many battles, it lost the war. Mass incarceration, the fact that black wealth and black-white inequality are at the same place they were at the start of the civil rights movement, that many US cities are more segregated now than they were in the sixties: no matter what "colorblind" liberals would say, racial justice has not been won, white supremacy has not been overturned, racism is not over. In fact, anti-black racism remains the foundational organizing principle of this country. That is because this country is built on the right to property, and there is no property, no wealth in the USA without the exploitation, appropriation, murder, and enslavement of black people.

As Raven Rakia puts it, "In America, property is racial. It always has been." Indeed, the idea of blackness was invented simultaneously with American conceptions of property: via slavery. In the early days of colonial America, chattel slavery was much less common than indentured servitude-though the difference between the two was not always significant-and there were Irish, French, German and English immigrants among these populations. But while there had always been and continued to be some black freedmen, over the course of the 17th century light-skinned European people stopped being indentured servants and slaves. This is partially because production exploded in the colonies much faster than a working population could form to do the work-either from reproduction or voluntary immigration-and so the cost of hired labor went through the roof. Even a very poor and desperate European became much more expensive than an African bought from the increasingly rationalized transatlantic slave trade.

The distinction between white and black was thus eventually forged as a way of distinguishing between who could be enslaved and who could not. The earliest working definition of blackness may well have been "those who could be property". Someone who organized a mob to violently free slaves, then, would surely be considered a looter (had the word come into common usage by then, John Brown and Nat Turner would have been slandered with it). This is not to draw some absurd ethical equivalence between freeing a slave and grabbing a flat screen in a riot. The point, rather, is that for most of America's history, one of the most righteous anti-white supremacist tactics available was looting. The specter of slaves freeing themselves could be seen as American history's first image of black looters.

On Twitter, a tongue-in-cheek political hashtag sprang up, #suspectedlooters, which was filled with images of colonial Europeans, slave owners, cowboys and white cultural appropriators. Similarly, many have pointed out that, had Africa not been looted, there wouldn't even be any black people in America. These are powerful correctives to arguments around looting, and the rhetorical point-that when people of color loot a store, they are taking back a miniscule proportion of what has been historically stolen from them, from their ancestral history and language to the basic safety of their children on the street today-is absolutely essential. But purely for the purposes of this argument-because I agree wholeheartedly with the political project of these campaigns-I want to claim that what white settlers and slave traders did wasn't mere looting.

It was genocide, theft, and barbarism of the lowest order. But part of how slavery and colonialism functioned was to introduce new territories and categories to the purview of ownership, of property. Not only did they steal the land from native peoples, but they also produced a system under which the land itself could be stolen, owned by legal fiat through force of arms. Not only did they take away Africans' lives, history, culture, and freedom, but they also transformed people into property and labor-power into a saleable commodity. Chattel slavery is the most barbaric and violent form of work coercion-but as the last 150 years has shown, you can dominate an entire people through law, violence, and wages pretty well.

Recently an Instagram video circulated of a Ferguson protester discussing the looting and burning of the QuikTrip convenience store. He retorts the all too common accusation thrown at rioters: "People wanna say we destroying our own neighborhoods. We don't own nothing out here!" This is the crux of the matter, and could be said of most majority black neighborhoods in America, which have much higher concentrations of chain stores and fast food restaurants than non-black neighborhoods. The average per capita income in Ferguson, MO is less than $21,000, and that number almost certainly gets lower if you remove the 35% white population of Ferguson from the equation. How could the average Ferguson resident really say it's "our QuikTrip"? Indeed, although you might hang out in it, how can a chain convenience store or corporate restaurant earnestly be part of anyone's neighborhood? The same white liberals who inveigh against corporations for destroying local communities are aghast when rioters take their critique to its actual material conclusion.

The mystifying ideological claim that looting is violent and non-political is one that has been carefully produced by the ruling class because it is precisely the violent maintenance of property which is both the basis and end of their power. Looting is extremely dangerous to the rich (and most white people) because it reveals, with an immediacy that has to be moralized away, that the idea of private property is just that: an idea, a tenuous and contingent structure of consent, backed up by the lethal force of the state. When rioters take territory and loot, they are revealing precisely how, in a space without cops, property relations can be destroyed and things can be had for free.

On a less abstract level there is a practical and tactical benefit to looting. Whenever people worry about looting, there is an implicit sense that the looter must necessarily be acting selfishly, "opportunistically," and in excess. But why is it bad to grab an opportunity to improve well-being, to make life better, easier, or more comfortable? Or, as Hannah Black put it on Twitter: "Cops exist so people can't loot ie have nice things for free so idk why it's so confusing that people loot when they protest against cops" [sic]. Only if you believe that having nice things for free is amoral, if you believe, in short, that the current (white-supremacist, settler-colonialist) regime of property is just, can you believe that looting is amoral in itself.

White people deploy the idea of looting in a way that implies people of color are greedy and lazy, but it is just the opposite: looting is a hard-won and dangerous act with potentially terrible consequences, and looters are only stealing from the rich owners' profit margins. Those owners, meanwhile, especially if they own a chain like QuikTrip, steal forty hours every week from thousands of employees who in return get the privilege of not dying for another seven days.

And the further assumption that the looter isn't sharing her loot is just as racist and ideological. We know that poor communities and communities of color practice more mutual aid and support than do wealthy white communities-partially because they have to. The person looting might be someone who has to hustle everyday to get by, someone who, by grabbing something of value, can afford to spend the rest of the week "non-violently" protesting. They might be feeding their family, or older people in their community who barely survive on Social Security and can't work (or loot) themselves. They might just be expropriating what they would otherwise buy-liquor, for example-but it still represents a material way that riots and protests help the community: by providing a way for people to solve some of the immediate problems of poverty and by creating a space for people to freely reproduce their lives rather than doing so through wage labor.

Modern American police forces evolved out of fugitive slave patrols, working to literally keep property from escaping its owners. The history of the police in America is the history of black people being violently prevented from threatening white people's property rights. When, in the midst of an anti-police protest movement, people loot, they aren't acting non-politically, they aren't distracting from the issue of police violence and domination, nor are they fanning the flames of an always-already racist media discourse. Instead, they are getting straight to the heart of the problem of the police, property, and white supremacy.

Solidarity with all Ferguson rebels! Justice for Mike Brown!

Notes

[1] I use the rather clunky phrase not-non-violent purposely. For some non-violence ideologues breaking windows, lighting trash on fire or even building barricades in the street is "violent". I once watched a group of black teens chanting "Fuck the Police" get shouted at for "being violent" by a white protester. Though there are more forms of violence than just literal physical blows to a human body, I don't believe a conception of "violence" which encompasses both throwing trash in the street and the murder of Michael Brown is remotely helpful. Frustratingly, in protest situations violence tends to be defined as "whatever the nearest cop or non-violence practitioner says it is." Calling breaking a window "violent" reproduces this useless definition and places the whole argument within the rhetorical structure of non-violence ideology. Not-non-violent, then, becomes the more useful term.