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Volume 3 Issue 34… Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race… September 1, 2000

Note: The DISH is based on themes from T.H.I.N.C. (Teaching Humanity In New Consciousness): The Chrysalis of Evolution. According to the President's Initiative on Race, "The issues that this book brings to the forefront are important in our efforts to achieve the goals set forth by the President for the Initiative. This work will serve as a solid resource for us as we begin to examine these critical issues." For your copy of T.H.I.N.C., The DISH or to submit comments, contact ICIM, Inc. at (404) 241-5942. Fax: (404) 244-6023 or email us at icim@bellsouth.net. The DISH © 2000

Lynching: Psychological Conditioning

"Normally rock solid, daddy's fingers trembled as he wrote his name, a major feat over the "X" he once put where the man told him to make his mark on pieces of paper he could not read at all. A sharecropper, daddy never learned to read; he depended on the skills of others. In his youth, reading was not healthy for a black man. For "being sassy" or "talking out of turn," blacks were beaten; they could be hanged for reading. They had to steal away to learn and hid their knowledge to avoid retribution." The House by Dot

America's history of educating slaves and their descendants is dismal. It closely conforms to the philosophy of lynching. Slaves were not allowed to read or write. Under penalty of death, a few learned. Many more were made horrible examples (lynched) for attempting to read. "Look at a book and die nigger," was the attitude that made black learning a crime. Death and/or dismemberment were possible punishments for those who broke the law. Not until 1954 in the Brown v Board of Education decision did the court acknowledge that the country provided different educational experiences for blacks and whites.

Lynching is part of the southern heritage of American black education. Today, some scientists believe this legacy of slavery is reflected in the restraining bolt, a mental barrier that must be overcome when teaching the children of slave descendants to read. In current discussions of black children's test scores, group performance assessments say nothing about the history of black education. Yet, any psychologist worth his salt rejects conclusions drawn by test gap studies that do not address the implications of past conditioning on contemporary group performance. Not surprisingly, the test score gap- between blacks and whites- is being used to advance arguments for school vouchers to fund private education. Some see this effort as a way to continue providing white children with better educational experiences than those provided blacks in public education; this conforms to the history of black education and lynching in America.

Peace My Brother

When the police beat the black brother in Philly on worldwide telly, the first things Philadelphia's blacks of consequence said were "we do not have all the facts" and "be calm." Looking foolish, these Toms did what is expected and played the same old tired game that has kept black Americans in relative slavery for centuries.

Implicit in "be calm" is the assumption that we spontaneously combust into violence. Black people have been trained to accept brutality from authority. So, what makes these "black leaders" assume we will resort to violence when another brother is brutalized? Is this what other people would do? For us, to do so would mean a change in conditioning that says we no longer follow the "traditional" brand of black leadership.

Police brutality and racial profiling are not new. They are basic ingredients in the apple pie of the American black experience. Caught in the glare of media attention, now they are popular issues for "black leaders" and other politicians. Calculated to change nothing, they propose we march and seek the passage of more crime legislation. With Toms leading, we will be calm, not because they asked, but because the situation is beyond token violent demonstrations that do not get it done.

by John Burl Smith

Remembering a friend gone from this earth over a year, Herbert "Cutlov" McNeail reminds me some lessons are worth teaching twice. The best Walnut Grove ever produced, he taught me the value of mental toughness. In 1966, returning to Memphis, TN a honorably discharged disabled Vietnam veteran, I was proud of having proven myself under fire. Point man on every number ten mission from Udorn, Thailand to Saigon, I learned how fear betrays the weak-minded.

Listening on radio to "Cutlov" playing a basketball game in Nashville, TN, I realized confidence is easily acquired when one has everything in one's favor. For the first time, I experienced someone on my level demonstrating what is necessary, if one is to face and defeat a favored opponent in his best element.

Dead but not in the grave, segregation finally gave way to black and white high schools competing in the same state tournaments. Riverside's George Washington Carver Cobras were trying to do what no black high school had done, get into the Championship round. Black schools reached this point several times. While they jumped out to big leads early, they ended up late in the fourth quarter with their best player on the bench in foul trouble. Never hitting their foul shots with the game on the line, commentators always blamed their collapse on "a lack of mental toughness."

"Cutlov" running the point changed this scenario. Cheering on the local favorite, the thunderous arena drowned out the commentators. Under five minutes to play, Carver still holding the lead and without any signs of wilting, "Cutlov" persevered almost flawlessly against double teams, the bump-and-grind and no whistles. Locked in what sounded like a knife fight in a dark alley, it was as though "Cut" was able to convince himself, they were really cheering the great performance he was giving. Most likely though, he zoned out back to Walnut Grove's dirt court. Amidst familiar sights and sounds, throwing up shots from just beyond the garbage can or making his move around the piece of stump at the edge of the ditch to get the baseline, "Cut" never missed a shot. Years later talking basketball, he remarked, "I always knew white boys feared competing head up against blacks. They feel they always need an edge. But when it's one on one and you have the skills, it's a mind game. You got to be mentally tough to win." (Vol. 5 No 34) John 2000

News You Use

Testing: Cup and Saucer

" In our house, there are no dainty cups and saucers. When I wondered why, who needs them was the only answer. Pass the jug, and hand me your jar! Momma, why do we celebrate the fourth of July? We aren't free anyhow." The House by Dot

"Cup and saucer" was the correct answer on an intelligence test given to public school children. Like so many other questions, this correct answer was not gleamed from experience. I knew it because I had read it. Fresh from sharecropping in Mississippi, my folks knew few standardized test answers. My mother charged me with learning them. Her "learn something new every day" made going to school on an empty stomach bearable; there was no lunch program for poor black children in the 1950s. We were poor, but compared to the duplex where my friend Marilyn lived, our shot-gun house was a castle. Regardless of our living condition, we were expected to do well on tests that contained social concepts foreign to our existence. We did not have cups and saucers; we were lucky to have jelly jars to hold our water, but we learned the right answers to questions that did not reflect our experience.

Learning to read is an important step in education; it tears down walls and broadens horizons. In enlightened societies, learning is viewed as a lifelong process that is neither restricted nor circumscribed by artificial barriers to education, such as standardized tests for college admissions. With answers like cup and saucer, these tests are too often biased and limited in what they say about potential human growth and development. The human is a work in progress (AWIP). In THINC, the holistic student gleams lessons to be learned from every experience, even an empty stomach in a home without cups and saucers.

Disgruntled wants to know: Growth hormones are used in the feed lots for food and dairy livestock. The government has no idea what impact this could have on humans. With people looking like beef on the hoof and puffy chickens, could the meat and drug industries' behavior be the same as big tobacco and Firestone?

Disgruntled feels: When imitated, an idea or work of art becomes worthless slop.

Disgruntled says: The monster behind the mask- America touts freedom and democracy as its core values, when in reality its laws make it an iron fist closed shut against equal opportunity. It is a hostile environment.

by John Burl Smith

Considering himself "a reasonably well-informed guy, who reads the newspaper daily," Leonard Pitts, Jr., columnist for the Miami Herald (8-24-00), castigated protesters at the WTO meetings in Seattle and Washington, DC and the two political conventions. Rattling off a truncated list of about twenty issues from free Mumia Abu Jamal to saving sea turtles, he declared, "I haven't a clue what their cause might be."

Pitts is a part of an ongoing media attack on free expression. Designed to paint dissidents as extremists or anarchists outside America's political main stream, their efforts bring to mind the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (Co-InTel-Pro) in 1968. FBI agents infiltrated and radicalized protest groups. The chaos diverted attention away from issues of poverty, economic injustice, discrimination and corporate control of the political process. Co-InTel-Pro changed American perception of protest from free speech to a matter of "law and order."

Those of Pitts' ilk overlook the fact that young people are fighting to change a nuclear world they inherited from people like him. Their generation has their parents' example to illustrate what happens when citizens trust government and corporations to run the world based on the profit motive. They see America's corporate culture of corruption and greed as an insatiable Hydra eating away America's basic values of freedom, justice and equality. Moreover, they view this fight as their last chance to create a sustainable environment for their children to inherit.

Today corporate sponsorship plays the same role as Co-InTel-Pro. Sponsors eliminate independence and challenges to the status quo. An excellent example is the so called "faith based community." Preachers and their churches are as concerned with losing corporate sponsors, as athletes and entertainers. Now that churches have joined corporate America, they are bellying up to the government subsidy trough. No longer holding the moral high ground, preachers are selling pie-in-the-sky salvation. Unlike Jesus, who chased the moneychangers out of God's temple, preachers have chased God out and invited in the merchants and moneychangers. Staunch supporters of the death penalty, Christians claim to be pro-life. Churches support criminalizing private behaviors, zero tolerance and longer mandatory minimum prison sentences. They ignore Jesus' admonition "suffer little children to come unto me." If churches do not speak truth and fight for the poor and powerless, protest is the last recourse for young people.

Protesters see America's government as a corporate support mechanism maintaining the status quo, and young people are sacrificial lambs on the altar of corporate profits. Building prisons to incarcerate young people is America's biggest growth industry for the 1990s. Keeping a ready supply of bodies to fill corporate prisons, America makes prevention and rehabilitation parts of the prison industry bottom line. The media, politicians, churches and their corporate sponsors are raping the Constitution, while pointing fingers at protesters as the ones destroying America. This generation of young people does not plan to bring children into the world to feed America's prison industry. If their voices fall silent, free speech is dead in America. John 2000

by Dot

Starring Tom Selleck, Laura San Giacomo and Alan Rickman, the movie Quigley Down Under is set in circa 1860's. This Australian western explores the vagaries of the continent's native/colonial heritage. Much like America's efforts to kill the buffalo, which destroyed the mainstay of the Native American lifestyle, Matthew Quigley (Selleck) an American, is hired to rid an outback rancher of dingos - dogs. Only the targets are not the four-legged canine Quigley expected, rather the real object of his sharp shooting prowess are humans, natives of the continent - the Aborigines.

Quigley Down Under is recommended viewing, especially for black Americans and other people of color headed to sunny Sidney to compete or otherwise participate in the 2000 Olympic games. Aborigines, victims of the "stolen lives project," are boycotting the games. Their plight intensified this week, when the Australian government moved to block visits from U.N. committees monitoring human rights violations. We wish athletes from around the world that cross their picket line will talk with protestors and become educated about the Aborigine struggle and support those in the Diaspora down under. We ask everyone to help U. N. monitors by passing on information to human rights activists. As people of color, we hope athletes and visitors connect and learn from each other.

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

by Langston Hughes (1926)

One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet - not a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want to write like a white poet"; meaning subconsciously, "I would like to be a white poet"; meaning behind that, "I would like to be white." And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America - this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.

...We young Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves."

About Me: Born in Missouri in 1902, Langston Hughes became the most prolific and versatile of the black writers during the 1920's Harlem Renaissance, earning him the nickname "Shakespeare in Harlem." (American History: A Survey, Current, Williams and Freidel)

Asked how he felt about the start of a new school year, the Dark Knight-Batman/Ninja/Zorro rolled his eyes in exasperation. Taking a deep breath, the Dark One/Ninja/Zorro exclaimed, "I can't explain, but going to school is a pain."

ICIM Boycotted People, Places & Things: Death penalty, New York City, Texas, Florida, Bush babies, MCI, IRS, Sinterklaas, milk, meat, Coke, Georgia Power, IBC, Georgia state flag and other Confederate symbols, police brutality, racial profiling, unscrupulous politicians, churches with fences, Ford cars, Bob Barr, Trent Lott and other weapons of mass destruction.

On Flying in Formation

by Dot

A while back, I got an email with a long poem dedicated to geese. Screaming "go along to get along," it detailed the beauty and precision of geese flying in formation. Author unknown, the poem is too long to publish here, but suffice it to say, it raved about the advantages of behaving like a loving family in which each one pulls another along.

For some time now, The DISH has sought to connect with others working to change the condition of slaves' descendants. While so-called "black" and "African American" groups profess to speak to our plight, they lack perspective and shun useful information. Slave descendants know the problem is the system; they also know it must be changed to alter our condition. Kudos to C-Span for providing two bird's-eye views of the "black intelligentsia." One was the re-enactment of the 1963 March on Washington and the other was "New Paradigms for African Americans in the New Millennium" held in Los Angeles during the Democratic Convention. Both showcased contemporary "black thinkers." These forums made it clear that these blacks do not understand the problem. Or, they will not speak forthrightly about it for fear of losing a sponsor.

At the LA forum, when Les Brown, "one of the finest minds in the country" according to Tavis Smiley, was asked his final thoughts on the black condition, Brown gave his five minutes to California Representative Maxine Waters. His silence spoke volumes.

The LA affair and the rhetoric heard at the re-enactment march screamed 1968! To follow these geese leaders is to continue along the flight path we have flown for centuries. A lynched people, we will continue to be slaves in the Booker T. Washington tradition, if we do not do something different. Devoid of new thinking, their recommendations for the new millennium doom us to the status quo! Given the sense of geese, in the age of information, one would think those leading us would see we need to change direction or face extinction.

Though geese are graceful flying in formation, those who THINC refuse to follow the same old set of flight instructions. Given new information, we realize following the same course to a destination that is a toxic waste site is tantamount to self-destruction.

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