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Volume 3 Issue 7…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race… February 25, 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) 244-6023 or email us at icim@bellsouth.net. The DISH © 2000

by John Burl Smith

Map of the past, history projects the future based on previous behavior. Lacking such crucial knowledge, confusion about proper responses results in erratic actions. Today's American history books reprint myths, stereotypes and inaccuracies published in 1900. In most cases, better information is available, established facts exist and faulty interpretations have been repudiated. Nonetheless, publishers continue disseminating erroneous information, while omitting vital contributions by African Americans. Producing Millennium, CNN's Pat Mitchell completely ignored slavery as a major factor in civilization from the 14^th century to today.

Connecting dots along history's time line, one can assess impacts, affects and future trends. American History 101 omits discussion of relative disparities between whites and blacks. Hence, students are left to conclude slave descendants had the same opportunity as whites to advance but were held back by their lack of intelligence, leadership, attitude and laziness. Presently, everyone pretends that at some unspecified point and through some unidentified mechanism, African Americans roared back from slavery and segregation to achieve equality. Consequently, any blacks still trapped in the chasm of inequality, has personal problems.

Conversely, the record shows former slaves, while struggling to overcome tremendous obstacles, succeeded; many blacks repeated the process in the first quarter of the 19^th century. Following the Great Depression, beginning again, many blacks rose from sharecroppers to entrepreneurs in one generation. Driven by such volition, what happened to stop African American progress and necessitate starting over from scratch three times in less than one hundred years? Whites have never started over; they never lost power. If African Americans are truly free citizens, what did the federal government do specifically to protect their rights to own property?

Barriers preventing slave descendants from achieving stable economic progress began with the end of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, community massacres like Greenwood, OK and Rosewood, FL, diabolical experiments like Tuskegee's, sharecropping debts and segregation's iron grip. History's lesson is clear, news reports, government agents and white perceptions shaped history. In total, society, the media in particular, wrote African Americans real story out of history. Education is one big cover-up and a wink. America is an instant replay of Germany during and after the Holocaust. The slave master mind-set determining history is at work in the Congress, the White House, Supreme Court, Coca-Cola, CNN, Microsoft, Campaign 2000 and the Amadou Diallo trial. The re-segregation of America will define black progress in terms of institutionalized racism. The best African Americans can expect is to move forward by going backwards. John 2000

Disgruntled says: When G. W. Bush says McCain says one thing and does another, we get a flaming hypocrite calling another hypocrite a hypocrite while being a hypocrite.

Disgruntled wants to know: DeKalb and Fulton Counties' taxpayers pay a MARTA sales tax, yet the benefits of MARTA service afforded by this tax revenue go to counties where no such tax is imposed. Is this what our "noble" founders meant when they charged Great Britain with "taxation without representation?!"

Disgruntled feels: Born in the year of the canine, Bush is bound and determined to be one!

Bits of History

"History is an integral part of who and what we are today; it is foolish to ignore the past and hypocritical to pretend it never happened." Disgruntled 2000

Adopted July 16, 1787, the Great Compromise resolved representation and taxation issues that had divided America's founding fathers and prevented agreement on the U.S. Constitution's specifics. According to the agreement, each state would have two members, giving states equal representation in the Senate or upper chamber of Congress. In the lower- house, the Compromise called for representation based on each state's population, which would include 3/5ths of the slave population for both direct taxation and representation. Legalizing the agreement meant accepting the notion that a slave's contribution to national wealth is three-fifths the value of free men.

Apologists and the ignorant scoff at the assertion that the founding fathers' decision to codify slavery plays a role in contemporary America's political economy. Naturally, they ignore any scientific evidence that shows the compromise did not die; it survived the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement and thrives in the dominant mind-set, which drives America's marketplace for goods and services. Closely observe the presidential primary process Y2K. See if you can discern the Great Compromise in practice.

"The Lord has a way of revealing those of us who really know Him, and those that don't!!! THINC about it! Al Gore gave a big speech this week about how his faith is so "important" to him. In this attempt to convince the American people that we should consider him for President, he announced that his favorite Bible verse is John 16:3. Of course, the speechwriter meant John 3:16, but nobody in the Gore camp was familiar enough with scripture to catch the error. And do you know what John 16:3 says? "And they will do this because they have not known the Father nor Me." The Holy Spirit works in strange ways!" These observations were provided by d-sibley1@ti.com.

Where's Democracy?

African Americans need a reformer to put the democratic principles of the Declaration of Independence into the U.S. Constitution. African Americans are desperate for a President willing to fight for a "one-man, one-vote" democracy. S.C.'s presidential primary showed us this principle does not currently exist, nor is there any evidence it ever did. To the contrary, all available evidence suggests just the opposite.

By closing polling places in predominantly African American precincts, the Republican Party suppressed their participation in the party's presidential nomination process. The Democratic Party dispensed with the pretense of giving them a voice in selecting its party's presidential nominee. Neither of the Democratic candidates opposes a "closed process" for choosing delegates to the national Democratic Party convention.

None of the candidates are concerned that participation in the selection process is limited, since those left out are predominantly African Americans. With a whole segment of the population excluded from the selection process, America fails to practice what it preaches; its noble democratic principle of one-man, one-vote does not include those historically excluded from full participation. Media pundits are silent on this aspect of the Great Compromise as practiced in 2000. None ask about the state of democracy in the world's premier democratic society.

Hood Notes

On Saturday, February 19^th, the day of the South Carolina Republican Presidential primary, an elderly African American viewer called into C-Span's Washington Journal. She commented on the contest between Bush and McCain and stated S.C. should continue flying the Confederate flag.

Some folks may not understand what she meant; her meaning is crystal clear to the conscious among us. Why remove the symbol when what it represents remains unchanged? With the flag flying high, one recognizes blatant racism; people are less likely to be complacent about discrimination. South Carolinians are well versed in its intricacies, whereas people in northern cities accept racism, because it wears the politically correct mask of "diversity," a clever disguise to beguile the unconscious and lull to sleep the ignorant.

by Junious Ricardo Stanton

"People who are ahistorical, who have little knowledge of history, are people who are more gullible, more easily manipulated and people who can be more easily adapted to the capitalistic machine than people who are historically knowledgeable. History can become a basis for self-criticism, a basis for self- understanding and more importantly, the basis for the understanding of the motives and the psychology of others." Dr. Amos Wilson

We should not relegate our interest in our history, which in its fullest sense is world history, to only one month of the year. Since most evidence points to the fact that the first humans were Africans, we are the people with the longest, most storied chronicle of existence on this planet. Studying history provides us with countless examples, lessons, insights and blueprints for self-discovery, development and self-actualization.

When I advocate studying our history, I am not encouraging the Western pedagogical paradigm where we study isolated dates, facts and events as if they occurred in a vacuum unaffected by events elsewhere in the world. World history is the history of the world's people. We study history to get better perspectives. Studying the world in a panoramic fashion allows us to compare and analyze conditions within a given time frame. For example, using a global paradigm allows us to see that when human settlements and high culture were being built in Africa, Mesopotamia, India, China and the Pacific Islands, Caucasoid Cro-Magnons had not yet made their appearance in Southern Europe. When black humans in ancient Egypt and the Indus Valley flourished in well-established centers of high culture, Caucasoids and Mongoloids living in the Steppes struggled just to eke out a meager existence. I could go on and on, but the idea is to look at our historical experiences and glean insights, inspiration and use the information as a foundation for our continued development as a people.

Given the fact that the first humans were black and brown, black /African history is world history; most serious anthropologists and historians acknowledge human life emerged and developed in Africa. We have nothing to be ashamed of. We come from profound, proficiently productive people. Our challenge is to replicate and surpass their achievements and forge a better world. How can we learn about our glorious past given our enemies have chosen to withhold, distort, obfuscate and take credit for black African accomplishments? With access to the latest technology, libraries and the works of dedicated scholars and researchers, there is a wealth of information at our disposal. We have to realize that an informed, self-loving, conscious and aware people are the last thing our enemies want to deal with.

Because our psyches have been so brutalized and damaged by the lies of white supremacist Eurocentric propaganda, we need something of our own to help us feel good about ourselves. History best serves to help us engage in self-criticism, assess our situation and enable us to formulate ways to deal with it. Moreover by studying history, we learn to discern the motives, psychology and methodology of others. Our adversaries have their own agendas. They have seen fit to lie about our history and theirs.

We alone must control our story, if we are to effectively pass what we've learned from our historical experiences to future generations. Much more than isolated dates and facts, history allows us to see trends, proclivities, patterns, habits, causes and effects. Once we discern these, it becomes easier to predict future behavior. History helps us appreciate the experiences, struggles and accomplishments of our ancestors. Studying history is the one endeavor that will prevent us from repeating the same mistakes generation after generation. History is a confidence builder, a dependable teacher and guide, if we use it correctly. George Santayana once said succinctly, "those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them."

Soul Vegetarian's Righteous Vibes (2-21-00) presented an explosion of spoken word, music and dance hosted by Yohannes Sharriff. Featured guest, David Nelson founder of the Last Poets, has reemerged with a new group The First Poets. The DISH spoke with the legendary brother after the show about his vision for spoken word. "Its growth since 1996 has created a need for resource centers for young open mic-rockers and slammers traveling the underground seeking legal advice, job assistance, creative development, etc." David has organized The New World Poets Guild, a haven for positive growth and a rebirth of a collective spirit.

by Dot Smith

One necessitates a single consciousness; one is unity. To have a "one" anything, there must be some thing around which all those making up the body of one can agree. Governor Roy Barnes' One Georgia Authority is ostensibly designed to spur economic development in rural parts of the state, using one-third of the state's share of tobacco settlement money. A concept being considered in several southern states, the idea in theory is to use state revenues to close an economic development gap. In Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush's program aims to eliminate affirmative action in higher education and state contracting. While Florida legislators are challenging Bush's plan, Georgia's representatives are swallowing Barnes' proposal hook, line and sinker.

In both his One Georgia Authority and his education reform proposal, Barnes relies on Smith's chasm of inequality analysis. With any analysis, the nature of the problem under study must be clearly identified, before offering solutions to ameliorate and/or eradicate it. While the media has hyped the teacher tenure aspect of Barnes' education reform proposal, the real guts of his education reform, i.e., the new formula for allocating education dollars to supposedly close the gap between rich and poor school systems, goes unexplored by our legislators. DeKalb is slated to lose funding, but the county's representatives are mum on Capitol Hill. What is it? Don't they understand the mathematics?

At first glance, the Governor's proposals are awash in the same slight of hand, song and dance measures that have been used in every effort to "wipe out poverty" in the last half of the last century. Barnes' plan is more business credits, breaks and loans, which the poor cannot qualify for, and whose benefits seldom trickle down to affect the areas where poverty dates back to slavery. Remember all those urban development funds that aided white flight to suburbia? It's the same game in reverse, you idiots!

The governor claims to want to see a one Georgia, but his actions do not indicate a commitment to closing the gap between the rich and poor in Georgia. He will not open his eyes to reality, instead he will give the "big wink" to the neo-slavery practiced all over Georgia. Cogent examples of the things Barnes' One Georgia will not affect include the wage parity for Hispanics working in Georgia's agri-businesses making $7.00 per hour doing job whites will not do for $12.00 an hour. He will not address the $2.00 a day made by the very poor trapped in Webster Country where Brigett Stewart lives. Moreover, his desire for a One Georgia does not square with his silence on the Confederate battle emblem that adorns Georgia's flag.

Blah! Blah! Blah!

For years, DeKalb's legislative delegation has ignored important community concerns. Environmental racism is not on their radarscope, even though area soil and groundwater contaminants affect them, because their homes probably contain plastic plumbing pipes. To them, our concerns about MARTA rail service for growth and development, equal quality education access and environmental racism, "waste political capital." Yet, precious political capital is squandered to secure votes for more crime legislation, like "animal rights protection."

Historically, those most likely imprisoned for violating any law are blacks. For example, dog fighting is a popular, but criminal, Georgia "sport." Participants make millions of dollars, but only Antonio Carter, a black man, has been convicted and served time for this crime. Whether deliberate or not, our representatives' ignorance and inaction works against our best interests.

Our impotence on Capitol Hill is directly related to our elected representatives' inaction or ignorance. Most are simply mondo-dismos, the antithesis of heroes as defined in the film Romancing the Stone. Like President Bill Clinton, a slick Willie into short-cuts and trimming the edges, our representatives marginalize women and take advantage of the weak, poor, young and elderly for petty personal gain. In November, we will remember those who refused to put our issues on the front burner, thereby keeping us in a state of impotence.

Comments from the Bat Cave: The Batman-Dark Knight/White Ninja/Zorro avoids work as much as possible. When pressed into service, the Dark One/Ninja/Zorro is quick to fondly recall history by reminding us, "I did clean up my room that one time!"

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