Volume 6 Issue 51…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…December 26, 2003

By Shabaka Tecumseh

Each day you remind us

Your innocence

Turn on the news

Listening to our own Music

Jazz, Rhythm N' Blues

When we walk down the street

Get coffee, something to eat

There you sit smiling discrete

Your mask of innocence complete

Expressing our cultural essence

You listen spiritual-less

Confusing devious resentment knowing we're powerless

to change your cultural insolence

Pushing vulture's culture to retain

White talons deep in our veins

Blacks accepting Jesus' control

Molding worlds Oreo's

Now innocence dominates

No choice but to relate

Relate to your way of seeing things

Mis-education

Destruction our ancestral themes

Yes, you are innocence

Lying in Caucasian unison

Words claim universality

Speaking "We" when you mean "Me"

Utters that insult African sensibility

We are trapped in a historical maze

Justifying innocent charades

Charades allow you to hide behind racist veils

Patriotic American pride

Pride that demands white culture rules

Making reparations seem to come from

Disgruntled Black Fools

So let's hold hands ...Pseudo friend

Until we unmask

Comprehend ...understand innocence

What it took

So we can regain

Fresh cultural outlooks

Ones that will set us free

From your blameless deceitful immorality

Driving While Black in Georgia

In 2003, an unknown number of unarmed black men died while in police custody. Beyond the extra-legal incidences in which police killed and beat blacks outright, black men were found hanging from trees in Florida and Washington, D.C. Several other deaths, ruled suicides, included black men hung in jail cells.

On December 10, a Muscogee County sheriff's deputy killed Kenneth Brown Walker, 39, a husband, father, and 15-year employee of Blue Cross and Blue Shield. According to the sheriff, the gray GMC Yukon Walker was driving fit the description of a vehicle suspected of involvement in illegal drug and arms' activity. No weapons or drugs was found at the scene.

Walker and his three companions were ordered out of the vehicle and forced onto the ground. Walker is alleged to have offered some resistance. The sheriff's deputy fired multiple shots, hitting Walker in the head. Walker later died. Already, the stage is being set to declare the deputy innocent. At a press conference, the sheriff said, "What I can tell you is that when he shot him, he did not try to shoot him in the head. I can't tell you what was in his head other than that it's a pure judgment call if he felt like his life was in danger."

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) has assumed control of the inquiry. However, if the script plays out as it has in just about every other incident in which an unarmed black man died following a traffic stop, the cop that killed Walker will walk. After all, cops make the judgement call, and cops always feel threatened when confronting unarmed black men.

By John Burl Smith

Physical endowments and environmental factors determine differences in acquisition and utilization of knowledge. Prior to Brown v Board of Education and so-called school desegregation, researchers studying differences between black and white students' achievement cited inferior ability and/or schools as the problem. Today genetics dispelled, they look for environmental factors such as stress, anxiety and depression among other things to explain deficits.

Assessing the value of education, applied psychologists study learning in actual situations. They believe the ability to demonstrate skills reflect the acquisition of knowledge. Accordingly, they theorize that when humans generalize knowledge gained in one situation to a totally new one, this indicates adaptability. Moreover, adaptability reflects a readiness to take advantage of experience. Such responsiveness increases an individual's probability of surviving. Coping strategies are functions of an individual's ability to learn and passed it on to the next generation through natural selection.

Experimental research has shown that hostile and inconsistent environments have detrimental impacts on learning. Some researchers theorize that public school desegregation produced a very hostile and inconsistent environment for most black students. They cite the fact that although white teachers and administrators were segregationists and supported "separate-but-equal" education, they remained in charge of public schools. Lacking empathy for black students' history and whites' ingrained belief that blacks could not learn, they continued their double standards. Moreover, whites refused to believe slavery and segregation had lasting impacts on blacks and attitudes toward each other.

Noted psychologist Martin Seligman theorized that confronted with great stress humans feel inadequate to cope, and their anxiety turns to depression. His experiments showed that dogs placed on electric grids and subjected to uncontrollable shock exhibited what he termed "learned helplessness." Treated in this manner, dogs accepted shocks as enviable and made no effort to escape. When researchers terminated shocks, after the animals made some irrelevant movement, dogs learned to make this movement as soon as the shock began. In doing so, their stress and anxiety levels dropped, given the illusion of control over an inconsistent environment. Inescapable shock seemed to produce a physiological deficiency that results in a behavioral deficit.

Researchers believe such a physiological process occurs in black students in public schools today. For many black students, school is very stressful and anxiety provoking. Researchers believe their hypercritical and inconsistent classroom environment produces "learned helplessness." Taught by white teachers from totally different environments with different standards and learning styles, black students react as animals in learned helplessness experiments that accept arbitrary control. Stressed and unsure as to what will satisfy vague and confusing criteria, like dogs on electric grids, their stress and anxiety turns to depression.

White teachers, like researchers in learned helplessness experiments, find irrelevant aspects or actions of black students (quiet, cute, light-skinned, amicable, etc.) to reward. Consequently, like dogs shocked no matter what they do, black students learn irrelevant responses, rather than acquiring real knowledge. Confused about the real purpose of education, they fail to gain a proper perspective on learning, adaptability and an appreciation for responsive coping strategies' relationship to survival.

On Fornicating While Black

By Dot

Basketball superstar Kobe Bryant is charged with raping a 19-year-old white employee at a Colorado resort. Married, Bryant characterizes it as "consensual sex." Like many black athletes, Bryant assumed athletic stardom and lots of money gave him access and special privileges denied his less fortunate brethren. First and most important is unfettered access to white women.

Bryant is now learning about racial profiling and the meaning of "lynching." He receives volumes of hate mail filled with threats and obscenities, hateful stares in public and his legal defense team recently confronted open racism in the Colorado prosecutor's office. Judge Terry Ruckriegle ordered the prosecutor to turn over the names of 78 people in his office and sheriff's department that ordered or tried to get T-shirts depicting a hanging stick figure on the front with the words "I'm not a rapist; I'm a cheater" on the back, a clear reference to Bryant.

The Bryant affair and others should serve as a wake-up call to black athletes and other blacks with money and access. They can choose to make a positive difference or settle for marrying white women.

The Early Days

Hip hop literature has finally arrived and no one is happier than Yohannes Sharriff, author of T.H.I.N.C. (Teaching Humanity In New Consciousness): The Chrysalis of Evolution. T.H.I.N.C., self-published in 1997, is Yohannes' cutting edge introspective view of the awakening of a young black man in a less than democratic society. Leaving home for Georgia Southern University in 1993, Yohannes was wrapped rather tightly. Unaware that life's court jester is chance, Yohannes exposed his incongruence hoping to reconcile the image he tried to project onto an unfamiliar reality. T.H.I.N.C. is Yohannes' poetic muse of the kind of wild and crazy times lived only once during a rite of passage.

T.H.I.N.C. is a literary portal through which to experience Yohannes' hip hop beat, as he uses dialogue and poetry in almost graffiti-like brush strokes across the mind. Sometimes surreal and awash with irony, he draws the reader into his mental struggle to understand emotions he had never experience. School shot, love dead and determined not to ask for money from home, Yohannes tries all the basic hustles. A work in progress, as his life slid slowly over the edge, he began the transformation into the conscious spirit he has become.

T.H.I.N.C. also presents a five stage thought process for those still searching for a clearer vision of Yohannes' hip hop world. Conscious hip hop literature is about finding ways to make positive moves, then taking it to the next level. Everyone will get a different message from T.H.I.N.C., because it speaks about the kind of life a non-gangster lives, while becoming one of the world's top spoken word artists. This book is about Yohannes and hip hop literature's emergence back in the day when hip hop was the "Wild Wild West."

Today: Open Auditions

Yohannes has agreed to take the lead role in "The Dance of Fatherhood," a stage performance. The ladies of Dilated Souls, Lady-J (Janean Hightower) and Lady- Mi (Mimi Williams), the play's producers, will begin filling the remaining roles January 8, 2004. Motivated actors, poets, and others are urged to try out and become part of this unique endeavor. Auditions will be held from 5 PM- 9 PM at Kyle Theatre at Avondale High School, which is located at 1192 Clarendon Road, Decatur, Georgia. For more information, log on to www.dilatedsouls.8m.com or call 770-808-3159.

Charles Lynch (1736-1796)

American planter and soldier, Charles Lynch was born at Chestnut Hill, Virginia in 1736. Lynch's mother, Sarah, was a Quaker, so he became affiliated with the Society of Friends. Quakers' religious beliefs negated holding public office, since it is wrong to make a solemn oath to anything or anyone other than God. Yet, at the age of 19, Lynch was one of the pioneers of Bedford County. In 1767, he was elected to the House of Burgesses and shunned by his fellow Quakers. He became justice of the peace in 1774.

Supporter of the revolution, which led to the war with Great Britain, Lynch is credited with influencing the Virginia delegation that went to Congress with instructions that culminated in the Declaration of Independence. He avoided active military service in the early part of the conflict, but recruited and equipped Virginia troops. In 1778, he became a militia colonel. On March 5, 1781, Colonel Lynch led a battalion of rifleman at the Battle of Guilford Court House.

Lynch lived on the Staunton River in Virginia where he joined Robert Adams and Thomas Calloway in punishing Tories, colonials loyal to Great Britain. As justice of the peace, he sentenced them to various terms of imprisonment to prevent them from acting against the interests of the revolution. According to folklore, a frequent punishment entailed suspending loyalists by their thumbs until they yelled "Liberty forever."

The summary acts of this self-appointed court are generally accepted as the origin of the term lynch law (from "Lynch's Law"). While the expression is currently used almost exclusively to refer to punishment by death, generally hanging, without legal authority, it does not appear that Lynch ever exacted the death penalty. After the surrender of Yorktown, Lynch returned to Bedford County. The Tories threatened to prosecute him for his activities against them that were in excess of his powers. Lynch appealed to the legislature, which branded his actions illegal. However, in view of the extenuating circumstances, the legislature exonerated him. Lynch died in 1796. (Sources: Encyclopedia Americana, www.yale.edu, and www.africana.com)

American Terrorism: Extra-Legal Executions

By John Burl Smith

The demand for docile submissive workers created a need for techniques to break the will of African slaves. An early experiment with "learned helplessness" can be found in a document attributed to one Willie Lynch called Let's Make A Slave. It begins, "If the nigger woman shows any sign of resistance, do not hesitate to use the bull whip on her to extract that last bit of bitch out of her. After that, she will train her offspring in the early years to submit readily to labor. In her natural uncivilized state she has a strong dependency on the uncivilized nigger male and a limited protectiveness toward her independent male offspring and will raise her female offspring to be dependent like her. Nature has provided for this type of balance; I have devised a way to reverse nature by showing her no nigger man can protect her.

When breaking an uncivilized nigger male, take the meanest and most restless nigger, strip him bear in front of the remaining niggers, females and infants. Tar and feather him, tie each leg to a different horse faced in opposite directions, set him afire and beat both horses to pull him apart. Next, take another nigger male bull whip him to the point of death. Don't kill him. Put the fear of God in him; he can be used for future breeding."

This training technique for breaking slaves' spirits is called lynching. The horses, tar and feathers were replaced with trees and ropes in the late 1800s. Although bond slavery ended following the Civil War (1865), lynching "to keep blacks in their place" continued. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, a book by James Allen, and its web site at www.lcc.gatech.edu provide a pictorial exposé of the applied psychology of terrorism practiced on blacks in America from the early 1900s through the 1960s. According to records compiled by Tuskegee Institute and Allen's photographs, thousands of blacks were lynched by mobs of cheering white people.

During lynching's heyday, black activists, such as Ida B. Wells, kept tract of these murders and debunked the main reasons given for these gruesome killings, i.e., rape and assault against white women. Today, no record of black deaths is maintained. Yet, blacks are still dying by extra-legal means. The clearest examples are police killings of unarmed black men or beatings for minor provocations or infractions. While the black community impotently engages in peaceful protests with admonitions by black leaders to remain calm, whites defend such police actions. Only blacks die in this fashion. It is time to maintain a database of these deaths and develop a course of action to end these extra-legal executions.

Disgruntled feels: Terrorized! Homeland Security raised the terror alert to orange, the second highest threat matrix. Supposedly, there is an elevated level of "chatter" among suspected terror networks. The experts assume terror attacks are in the works. Innocent potential victims are urged to be extra vigilant, but continue X-Mas shopping to keep the nation's economic engine humming. Personally, governments that subject the public to terrorism propaganda pose the greatest threat. To divert attention away from the objectionable things done in the public's name, the government keeps the people mentally terrorized, docile and ignorant.

Disgruntled says: Déjà vu Private Lynch affair! According to reports published in foreign newspapers, the US-led coalition forces in Iraq did not capture Saddam Hussein. Just like the hyped heroism of Private Jessica Lynch and her daring rescue by US Special Forces, Saddam was captured, drugged and left for US soldiers to pluck from his underground cell. The Kurdish Patriot Front is claiming responsibility for Saddam's capture as part of a blood feud. This ticklish little fact, like a heroic Lynch never firing a shot, will probably escape the "liberal" American press.

Disgruntled wants to know: It is pure myth that the US is a democracy; it is and always has been a republic, ruled by a wealthy elite. Indeed, written into its constitution are different values for the lives of its white and non-white citizens. Those different values are played out on a daily basis in America's marketplace for goods and services. Hence, we have "banking, walking, standing, and simply being while black," which translates into death warrants served by police or licenses to receive inferior goods and services at higher prices or be subjected to lower wages and higher unemployment rates. So, as we fight to bring democracy to the Middle East and scatter its blessings to people around the world, when will the US make a vote/life in rural Idaho equal to one in urban Georgia or some other metropolitan area that is home to a large black population?

THINC  || 2003 Issues || The DISH