Marching for Justice With #BLMCHIYOUTH

Leaving the house sometimes, I imagine what it would be like if I never came back. What if the run of good luck that has kept me from the fate of so many Black men and women who meet guns or bullets or chokeholds or night sticks runs out? All of those awful possibilities came rushing back to me last Sunday as I got ready to go to the #BLMChiYouth protest against the police shooting of Paul O’Neal.

I said goodbye to my five year-old daughter, Lucy. She was cross-legged on her bed looking at a book. I gave her a hug. She asked me where I was going. I told her about the Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Chicago.

“Are there going to be police there?” she said. She brushed a strand long brown hair away from her forehead.

“I guess so,” I said.

“You’re not going to get arrested, are you?” she said. I still couldn’t get the image of all those police officers standing around, slapping fives, checking themselves for injuries, while the life ebbed out of the young man at their feet, his hands shackled behind him. What a terrible way to die.

“No, baby,” I said. I gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I’m not planning on getting arrested.”

After navigating traffic and finding a parking spot, I got to Wrigley Square about thirty minutes late for the protest. The sun was still high in the sky, and people were crowding the sidewalks, enjoying the last moments of the weekend. On the square there were about 200 or so people sitting on two sides of a grassy field. The crowd skewed younger and whiter, but there was a good presence of black and brown faces as well. Across the street, lines of police were arrayed along Michigan avenue.

The protest organizers stood in a circle at the fountain nearby. Eva Lewis, a young black woman with long black and purple braids, thick glasses, and yellow ankh earrings was earnestly reading a long list of names over a bullhorn. The names were all people who had been killed by police.

I walked around the perimeter of the square so I could get a lay of the land and get a sense of the group’s vibe. Despite the fact that I grew up in Berkeley, California, where demonstrations are an unofficial part of the curriculum, large gatherings always make me nervous, especially when they involve interactions with police. The Dallas shootings at a BLM rally last month added yet another layer of gruesome possibility. But despite my discomfort, there is something deeply satisfying about getting with a bunch of like-minded people to draw attention to an injustice that should not be ignored. Exercising the right to free public assembly and speech makes me feel most American, I suppose.

I immediately noticed the white guy with dirty blonde hair and a large green backpack walking near the crowd’s edge, muttering about something Eva had said.

“Did she just say that America was created to protect white men?” he said. He repeated the question over and over, shaking his head and laughing. I moved away so I could keep an eye on him and the nearest exit. From the way some of the black people in the crowd were stealing glances at him, I wasn’t the only one wary of his disbelief.

On the other side, I noticed a light-skinned brother taking deep draws on a cigarette, also muttering about the proceedings. He had a blue baseball cap tipped forward at a jaunty angle. He was skinny, but tall and tense. He surveyed the crowd with disgust, his eyes light green and googly.

“This shit weak,” he hissed and shook his head. “This shit lame.”

He didn’t appear to be talking to anyone in particular, but a woman with a notepad sidled up to him and identified herself as a reporter. His face brightened a little as he talked and she scribbled.

Honestly, I had some concerns, too. Having white allies is important to any stand against white supremacy, but I can’t help but have Malcolm X’s Message to the Grassroots speech in my head, where he complains about white influence making the March on Washington whiter and more palatable. Like cold cream in hot black coffee was the analogy he used. Being black often means occupying spaces designed with the comfort of white people in mind. I didn’t want to protest with knuckleheads, but I also didn’t want this to be about making white people feel comfy.

After a moment or two, Eva came back out and made a shocking statement about what we were going to do: the goal of the march was to shut the streets down, but not get arrested.

I’ve been to a lot of protests and before an event gets started, usually you’ll get advice about what to do if you got arrested, but can’t recall anyone ever saying the goal was to avoid arrest. Protester street cred is supposed to come from getting locked up. Throwing your body against the gears of the machine, and all that. But this new approach felt oddly subversive.

“If you a CPS student, I know you not trying to get arrested,” she said. “Because I know I ain’t.”

It was startling to hear a young activist pragmatically consider what a clash with the police might mean for her and all the people gathered together. There are times when an effective protest may require people sacrificing their freedom, but she was letting us know that this wasn’t that kind of party. (Besides, there's ample evidence that mass arrests are a tactic being used to dismantle BLM movements around the country) I had already promised Lucy I was going to be coming home that night, but hearing Eva say this made me not feel like I had to carry the promise like a secret.

As a teacher, I admired her classroom management acumen as she made everyone repeat several times that no one was going to get arrested. She also said that we needed to stick together. If we were by ourselves, we should find a “protest buddy” who could look out for us. We shouldn’t put our hands on anyone. We shouldn’t cuss at police. We should not do things that would get us arrested. We should listen to instructions from the organizers. Racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia were all unacceptable.

Everyone was smiling and looking ready to go. The gaggle of young women and men who were organizing the event were holding a powwow on the side to go over the final details, and Green Eyes came over. He moved his hands wildly, but seemed mostly calm as he mansplained how “weak” and “lame” the nascent protest was and detailed his idea for making it less so. They tried to placate him by listening, but he stomped away when he didn’t get the reception he wanted. He walked to the center of the still-seated crowd.

“You see those motherfuckers over there?” he said, pointing to the police lining the sidewalk on the other side of Michigan Avenue. “They taking this shit for a joke. I’m tired of this bullshit”

Eva grabbed a bullhorn and yelled back.

“If you have any respect for the black girls who are putting this together, you will stop.”

But Green Eyes was in his own world, at the center of everyone’s attention. He was a model of righteous black fury. Cursing and jabbing at the air. The crowd fidgeted and news cameras were hoisted on shoulders. I felt the impulse to pull away from the spectacle, but an older brother with a black beret and a large black liberation flag stepped in front of the young brother. And then another one of the young poets, and another, and another. Nobody was being overly aggressive, just letting him know what he’s doing is not acceptable. They surrounded him like bullshit antibodies.

It was tense for a moment as he yelped, “Get your goddamn hands off me,” but then the organizers told everyone to stand up and we were on our way. Crisis averted. As we marched down Michigan, a chant starts, “No justice, no peace, no racist police.”

Green Eyes approved.

“See, that’s what the fuck I was talking about,” he beamed.

Walking down State, the organizers tell everyone to link arms and come in tight. I’m hesitant because I don’t know anyone, but I guess that’s the point. They encourage us to share names with one another (Two college-aged white kids, Elaine and Kareem, are on either side of me) just in case anything happens. As we’re marching and yelling, I’m a little surprised at how connected and strong I feel amidst the tall buildings and roaring traffic.

Side note: Participating in public protest nowadays means being ready to not only confront the stares of bystanders, but also their cameras. A protest should disrupt the normal flow of people and capital so the public is forced to consider the injustice. Disagree with the cause or not, people are forced to think about what they think, even if what they “think” is just a product of brainwashed thinking. The thing that’s complicated now is that people insulate themselves from thinking by holding their phones up. When thought and emotion get too intense, people feel the impulse to point their cameras at it. I notice the wry smiles on people’s lips as they stare at their screens as we pass. I wonder are they thinking about police brutality or how many likes their footage will earn them. Hashtags in their eyes.

As someone participating in protest, this raises the stakes because at any moment, anything could happen that could be beamed to screens all over the world. Don’t trip over your shoe. Don’t throw a rock. Don’t say the wrong thing. Really, the police don’t need to patrol a crowd that’s being recorded, and recording itself.

But I also get it. The young ladies who organized the protest had put the whole thing together online and were very aware of how to use it to their benefit. They encouraged people to take out phones and take pictures of them and tweet about the event. After all, that’s how I heard about the event. So it can be an important tool, but you wonder when the effort to encourage awareness mutates into a performance of “wokeness”.

I saw the scruffy white guy from earlier as we walked up State. He had a friend with him and they were both sipping cans of Milwaukee’s Best. The crowd was chanting  “Black lives, what? Black Lives Matter!” and these guys are chanting “All lives matter!” Some people around me hear it and yell at them, but they just flash silly grins and keep chanting. I leaned over to one of the guys.

“Why are you doing that?” I said.

“Well, because they do matter,” he said, matter-of-factly.

I agreed that all human life is significant, but that wasn’t the question that Black people have had to answer in this country. The question of valuing the lives of Black people is the question that Paul O’Neal faced as he scrambled over that backyard gate, heavy with breath, school backpack jangling with nothing but a screwdriver inside. (By the way, why was he so committed to that little backpack? He was either driving around in a brand-new stolen Jaguar with the backpack pressed uncomfortably against his seat or he grabbed it in and put it on after he crashed his car and fled the police gunfire. Something about it was important to him. He’ll never be able to tell us why.) Black Lives Matter is necessary because it’s an answer to a question that this country has not yet set itself to come to terms with.

I didn’t say all that too him, but basically I fussed at him like I would fuss at a student who was being disruptive during class presentations. He got the point and apologized. I told him I was glad he was there and how important it was for guys like him to represent, but I restrained the impulse to share my name with him and I walked away.

My adrenaline had gotten going talking to Milwaukee's Best and within a few steps I felt like I had been running wind sprints. The sadness came all of a sudden and the weight of why we were marching put lead in my feet. I stopped chanting and just concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, just being a part of the crowd. Just being a vessel for someone to use for good purpose.

I credit the organizers for that moment. Not only did those young ladies take ownership of the event, providing a very clear vision of what they wanted to happen, they also did little things that made me feel cared for, like encouraging those who had come on their own to link up, like pausing the march to have people share hugs with people they didn't know, to adopting chants the crowd contributed. All stuff that made me feel cared for. Stuff that made it easier to just breathe and be present.

And maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Black women have always done this kind of organizing, it’s just patriarchal nonsense that has kept some of our best and brightest leaders on the sideline. I noted the young brothers who formed a line of security and consulted often with the main organizers. The love and respect that they showed was a model for everyone there.

I had to leave the march early to keep my bedtime appointment with my two year-old, but I felt a bit of catharsis as I drove home. I didn’t leave the rally feeling like I had ended police brutality or the state-sanctioned murder of black people in America, but it certainly left me with a vision of the type of leadership that will move us there. That will move my children there. Thank God for that.

What we talk about when we talk about Yo White Daddy...

Yo Daddy is so White, that all his slave ships were zero emission.

Okay, so in the past year or so, I've been tormented by a stream of White Daddy jokes. I'm not sure exactly where it came from, but I was always really fascinated and horrified by the specific genre of Mama joke that has to do with Blackness. You know: "Your mama so black she...followed by something hella racist about her blackness." If you need a reference, Google it.

Anyway, I started tweeting them to my friend Ross and we went back and forth with it. But then I couldn't stop because they kept coming to me. And I tried to tweet a few out, but it was around the time I was looking for a job and that didn't seem to be helping things, and plus it didn't seem like people really got them. Maybe they still won't; I don't know. In some ways I don't really get them.

But hopefully people get that a good Yo Daddy So White joke has nothing to do with actual skin color, but the color of a certain type of perception, a white supremacist perception. A perception that actual White people don't even have a monopoly on. A perception that dictates so much of our inner discourse, whatever your race.

The homie, Rion Amilcar Scott, published them on Queensmob, so check them out now before I have to issue my public apology and go into a racism treatment program.  

You need Death in your life...

If you haven't heard the proto-punk band Death from Detroit, you need to remedy that. If you haven't seen the excellent documentary about these brothers, A Band Called Death, you also need to handle that as well (it's on Netflix). 

The 5 Stages of Grading

Another winter break is drawing to a close, and this is the time when I get most misty-eyed about my life as a teacher. A time for reflection on the beauty and majesty of the profession I've been called to.

It's also the time when I've got a lot of grading to do. The kids cheered when I said I wasn't going to give homework, and I felt good for them. But with the school bell echoing in my ear, and the students sprinting off towards their break, I started to enter my stages of grading.

Step 1: Denial and Isolation

Looking at your inbox stacked high with papers needing to be graded, you'll look at them, take a deep breath and mouthfart something about a teacher's work never being done. Besides, grading all of your students projects at once couldn't be that difficult. It might even be fun. You grin through your lying teeth and isolate yourself from the papers.

If you live alone, you drop them heavily in your empty house, giving added pathos to your Ikea coffee table. If you have a family, you drop them heavily on the dining room table or some other very public place. Everyone should know about all the fun you're going to have grading awesome awesome papers at home instead of relaxing.

So yeah, you're feeling a little confrontational. And that's why it's a good thing that you just want to isolate yourself. Any conversation you have with a member of your family is going to involve that cue of student essays. No one wants to be around you because you're denial is wearing off. You stink of resentment. You are starting to realize that you are going to spend hours and hours grading. The suck.


Step 2: Anger

Now you're starting to get pissed off. You sit down to see what the papers look like and you are angry. How dare you have to spend all this time reading the thoughts of these pipsqueaks, these ne'er d'wells, these cusses! What they need is for you to go Joe Clark on them! And so what, almost all of them completed it! They didn't do it good enough! And that's because they weren't paying attention in class and didn't take the learning seriously! You're so angry that it starts to feel good. 

Step 3: Bargaining

Well, perhaps things are not that bad, you think. Perhaps there's a way to keep the whole class from failing with their terrible, terrible papers. Perhaps there are a complex series of algorithms that will help drag them up from the depths to which they have fallen. You start looking at the grades and seeing what happens if you increase the value of the signed syllabus assignment to 1000 points.

But looking at your students in this way makes you feel unlike yourself.  You've become a pencil pusher. An accountant. A box checker. You're Ben Stein reading the roll. Beueller. Beueller. Beueller. You feel like a phony.

Step 4: Depression

You are a goddamn phony. This whole time, you thought you could teach, but instead you're just really good at sucking. And look what you've done. You've gone ahead and warped the minds of scores of children. You haven't been teaching them anything, and on top of that, anything they did learn, they learned it wrong. Their minds will be forever misaligned like stripped screws. Ruined by a charlatan.

This is the point where whatever coping mechanisms you've developed over your lifetime start to kick in. Whether it's your family or your religion or your cat, or even a 1/2 gallon of ice cream, you're going to need them. Teaching clarifies the soul, it doesn't tend it. Not in this context anyway. You need a way to renew yourself to be effective. And more importantly to be human. So handle that.

Step 5: Acceptance

You're buoyed by the positive lift you got from your renewal source. You pull out the papers and you take things from a different approach. Flipping through the papers, you stop seeing them as a mass of work, further documentation of your horrible teaching. Instead, you listen to the voices behind them. You read them with the ear of someone who is actually trying to hear what the author is saying, instead of just waiting for the right moment to interject a critical remark. Even in the most garbled writing, if you listen closely, you can hear the voice that wants to be heard.

Hopefully as you hear the child's voice, you don't let yourself get sucked into your comfortable role as evaluator. If you do, you'll probably go all the way back to Step 2. But if you can, just pull back for a minute and realize that the world of this child is bigger than you could ever imagine. Your class, your teaching, occupies space, but you are just one of many teachers. Your job is not to judge who they are as people, but help them be qualified to judge it for themselves. 

But, you also have to assign a grade to the daggone things. In the end, the integrity of the learning requires transparency. A kid deserves to know where they stand, no matter the education they've received. The barber should not hesitate with the mirror. So, you grade them and make as many helpful comments as you can. Re-articulate the objectives for the assignment, and just as importantly, find something in their thinking to praise. Even if it takes a while.

Finally, you will need to frame the experience for your students. After they get their papers back, they need to hear what you heard in their work and how that will affect the learning from here on out. All of this takes time.Time you don't have because you got so good at Step 5, and its resultant insight, that you thought it best to write about grading the assignment, instead of grading the actual assignment.

You might say that's a new level of Stage 1 Denial, but we all know a teacher's work is never done. 

The Violence Monopoly

This is the Cuomo:

It's named after Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York, who is pushing a ban on extended clips for  semi-automatics. It's plastic. It's the product of a 3D printer. It works. You can find the specs for it online.

Although it may seem like a gun control story, it gets at a much bigger issue: the true power to deter a tyrannical corporate state is going to be based in technology, not guns.

Those that think they're standing up for "freedom" or "rights" are a century behind the times. If you don't have access to technology than a gun will never protect you in the world that's taking shape around us. 

Sooner than you think, there will be plastic guns that can be printed and immediately put to use. The right to bear arms will immediately be redundant because guns will be produced so cheaply and with innocuous materials. The plastic guns will be everywhere, kind of like the way the metal ones are in my neighborhood.

That scenario is untenable for a number of obvious reasons, but also because our government needs to have a monopoly on violence. And a monopoly on making money off the mechanisms of violence. So, now the government has a serious question to consider: who can and cannot have a 3D printer? If you want to protect the liberty of your children, you better be less worried about oiling up your Bushmaster and more worried about what happens when they move to seize the internet.

In the words of Andre 3000, "While you running around rantin and ravin about gats, nigga they made them gats, they got some shit to blow out our backs, from where they stay at"

Side note: What is so 3000 about being in a Gillette commercial?

But woe to my community when these guns become more widespread. I doubt we'll get 3D printers in the hood any time soon, but I'm sure there will be a lot of bright eyed entrepreneurs looking to sell our shorties plastic shotties. 

Mr. Kid President, will you please be my mayor..?

If you haven't seen this kid already, you gotsta catch up. Another bit of brilliance from Kid President. 

Do you think a young brother could really play a role like this before NeO? Wouldn't  it have come off strange? Tragic?

But not now. You can allow yourself to feel the hope that's embodied in this very slickly produced movie because it's documenting demonstrated truth. The order has changed. Even if Obama's a bioengeneered robot, the narrative he is creating is going to produce a lot more little brothers like the one in this video. I feel pepped.  

The Grey: A Screen Shot Collage

Through an unfortunate series of events, Misstraknowitall finds himself home alone. Instead of fixing my leaky shower or grading a desk full of student essays, I delved into my Netflix queue and finally watched The Grey. Maybe it was missing my ladies at the beginning of a new year, but something about Liam Neeson's battle against wolves and his fear of mortality grabbed me. So, I used screen caps to make a collage about it. The words are all captions from the film. Wannaseeithereitgo. 

  

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Using Both Hands in My Land

If you're going to have any kind of productive dialog on any issue, you have to concede that people with opposing viewpoints are not disagreeing because they're evil, dishonest, or stupid (not to rule it out), but work under the assumption that they're just coming from a different place. So, although the right wing response to the slaughter of children has been mystifying, you have to hope they're being sincere when they say that fortifying our schools with semi-automatic weapons is going to make our children safer.

But with all due respect to these perspectives, they don't know what it's like to work in a school that has armed guards. People who suggest such things don't understand that many urban schools are already fortified like military camps. And in the end you may gain a measure of security, but you lose a lot in terms of what it means to have school.

Working in Baltimore, we had a policeman in the school. One day I turned the corner and their was a big cop with his finger in the chest of a 4th grader, warning him to not "act tough". I've never been arrested, but police have always made me nervous. I guess you could call it a Black male tic/survival mechanism. When you bring in men with guns, you bring in the energy of men with guns, which is generally an inhibiting force when it comes to free expression and learning. Nothing against the men with guns, Machiavelli knew what he was talking about when he said the unarmed prophet comes to grief, but arming the schools is not the answer.

Urban schools have had metal detectors for a couple decades now and our kids are still getting killed. The children that die in our community don't die because of one lone psychopath with access to high power fire arms. We've got plenty of psychos with fire power. Indiscriminate killing happens every month. Every week. And some days it seems like every damn day. Kids all over Chicago getting killed with weapons that people make money selling. The real psychopaths are the corporations that drain so much human resource, so much humanity, in the cause of increasing revenue.

Walmart had to know they were going to have trouble with this whole Bushmaster thing. You know, how you can find the incredibly powerful semi-automatic on their website. How people can really buy this damn thing and they make a lot of money off it. How this practice can be traced directly to what happened in Connecticut. In the hours and days after the killing, it would make sense to withdraw momentarily from the arms market so as to not draw undue attention. Instead, they waited. And why did they wait? Why not come right out and say you were suspending sales? Because they know that gun sales go through the roof after one of these mass killings. And that's what happened. They cashed in during the days after the tragedy and then finally took the Bushmaster off of their website only after the media reported on it. That's psychopathic behavior.

We do need to be the good guys on this one. Although conservatives are right when they say that this is a soul issue, their only problem is that they don't have a solution that doesn't involve excluding someone or bombing someplace. There is soul problem, but it's also inextricably linked to the economic issue. 
Instead of framing the conversation about firearms all around the crazy fringe who won't budge on gun rights, why don't we focus more on the corporations who stand to gain so much if gun policy doesn't change?

There are psychopaths out there with business suits and power ties. If we're serious about gun control, we have to let everyone know about the economics of the issue. I wonder if some of the 2nd amendment conservatives would be so willing to take arms for corporate rights, especially when corporations infringe upon the civil and economic liberties of their communities. People have to become more aware that someone is making some serious money selling misery.  This isn't about rights, it's about greed.

Every discussion that involves guns should mention that although the second amendment gives people rights, it doesn't cover corporations (even though Mitt tried to tell you that corporations are people to) and it doesn't state anyone has the right to sell death mechanisms unregulated. The production of firearms in this country needs to be more tightly monitored. We would demand accountability with any other consumer product. The things they sell are literally thousands of Americans every year. This is not a second amendment, it's a national security issue. And really it's a world security issue.

Not only are our psychopath corporations selling death mechanisms to kill Americans, they're making even more selling them around the world. Although I'm sure the world feels the pain of Newtown, unspeakable gun violence done to and by children is really nothing new to many places in the world. 

The UN proposed an international treaty regulating fire arm sales. According to Wikipedia, the treaty would have prevented sales if weapons were reasonably suspected to:

• be used in serious violations of international human rights or humanitarian law, or acts of genocide or crimes against humanity;
• facilitate terrorist attacks, a pattern of gender-based violence, violent crime or organized crime;
• violate United Nations Charter obligations, including UN arms embargoes;
• be diverted from its stated recipient;
• adversely affect regional security; or seriously impair poverty reduction or socioeconomic development.

The Obama administration reversed the Bush position and came out for the treaty, but they faced stiff opposition from some "rogue" international states who were more concerned with how the treaty might limit their access to sell and buy guns. Venezuela, Cuba, Egypt, and Iran. However, the most effective opposition came from another rogue state, the gun lobby. You would think Republicans would be a bit concerned aligning themselves with the interest of these despotic regimes, but they successfully stalled discussion of the treaty until March.

So our job is not just to make Americans more safe from guns. We need to make the world more safe from these death mechanisms. And we have to admit that their presence in the American psyche has more to do with fear and containment than freedom and liberty. Without this realization, and the action it should herald, our children will never be safe, no matter how many guards we post.

Ten Amazing Obama Facts

Amazing Fact #1. In order for President Obama to be defeated, someone must beat him.

With his poll numbers flat-lining, the economy in the tank, and the government on the verge of shutdown, things look rather bleak for NeO. But before Rethugs get too happy, to paraphrase Guru from Gangstarr: Who's going to take the weight? After all the speculation and punditry, someone's got to step to the podium against this dude. Who is going to be able to not get blowed away? This fact segues nicely into the next...

Amazing Fact #2: People who bet against NeO tend to lose their money.

Jack Ryan

John McCain
Alan Keyes
Clark Kellog

Jesse Jackson
Hillary Clinton
Somali Pirates

Bill Clinton
Donald Trump

Jim Demint
Osama Bin Laden

Questions?

Amazing Fact #3: Incumbent presidents hardly ever lose.

Not only do they have access to the full resources of the United States government, they also have considerable power in shaping the national conversation. Plus, if the President is serving the interests of the rich elite, they are going to give him their economic support instead of supporting an unknown quantity. Tax rates are lower than ever. Corporate profits are at near-record levels. The war business is booming. Isn't this the change that the economic elite believe in?

Amazing Fact #4: Killing Bin Laden will not get Obama reelected.

As much as people imagined that Osama Bin Laden's death would ensure President Obama's reelection, they fail to realize that NeO won't get credit for it because it doesn't fit the narrative we have for him. Dubya was the cowboy, busting his guns, scalping Injuns. In the last act of his presidency, after billions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, he was supposed to be able to bring Bin Laden's head home for the wall collection. Instead, the more he tried, the more the terrorists laughed and called him a dumbass.

Frankly, by the end of his term I just felt kind of bad for the guy--in that Tiki Barber/John Edwards/slow-motion-car-crash kind of way. Bin Laden (and Bin Laden's colleagues at the CIA) so obviously outsmartted Dubya that it didn't seem fair, cruel even. The American people were ready to move on in some respect. New movie, please.

Obama killing Bin Laden is kind of like Superman killing the Joker. There's no emotional subtext to the thing. I mean, thanks and all, but what does Seal Team 6 have to do with Dreams From My Father?

Amazing Fact #4: Osama Bin Laden was assassinated, and we're all cool with that. 

According to dictionary.com, "assassination" is to kill suddenly or secretively, especially a politically prominent person. But assassinate is such an icky word, right? It doesn't seem appropriate. An assassination has a "victim," and a "perpetrator". Bin Laden was evil, so he couldn't have been a victim. America was in the right, so we couldn't have been perpetrators. So, instead, we'll just call it a "military action." Ah, that's better.

The first accounts of the military action had Bin Laden going out like Tony Montana, guns blazing. And then it turned out he was unarmed, but was "going for something." And then one of his wives said that he was actually in custody when he was shot. And then finally the military said they weren't going to comment further. It's amazing that Bin Laden didn't know better than to listen when the Navy Seals asked him to take out his license and registration. They been getting brothers like that for years. Word to Diallo.

But when you get right down to it, this amounted to nothing more than another instance of CIA downsizing; a former employee got cut from the payroll. Bin Laden joins a long line of other former employees who have suffered similar fates: Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Pablo Escobar, Freeway Ricky Ross, Rafael Trujillo. All given similar pink slips. Don't call us, we'll call you.

Amazing Fact #5. The President is a blues comic.

I saw the Obama impersonator who got pulled off stage at the Republican Leadership Conference and I was impressed. The President can be a bit stoic sometimes, so it's understandable that a lot of impressions are overly wooden, but this guy was putting on that Barack Bright Boy comedy swag. Although the audience was initially uncomfortable with the racial themes of some of the jokes, the loud guffaws reflected the reckless abandon one might enjoy at a Republican event, free of the harsh gaze of sensitive Negroes.

Even though the jokes (Barack celebrates half of Black history month; Barack's mom loved a Black man, but her name wasn't Kardashian; Barack and Michelle as Esther and Fred from Sanford and Son) weren't the most clever in the world, they were cringe-inducing like the best of NeO humor. He has a way of implicating his audience in a joke. Kind of like Richard Pryor in Live on the Sunset Strip, joking about the jokes people told after he caught himself on fire freebasing. He tells the joke to not only make you laugh, but also shine a light on what you're willing to laugh at. I think that's also called the blues.

What's that? Richard Pryor running down the street.

Remember the time he went on national TV, called a policeman stupid, and joked that the Secret Service would shoot him down if they thought he was trying to break into the White House?

Remember his first presidential press conference when he called himself a mutt?

And who can forget his "I-don't-come-to-your-job-kicking-****s-out-of-your-mouth" moment at the White House Correspondents dinner? Trumpwnd. 

***BONUS***

This Chinese ad for KFC is not only fantastic because it features the President getting squashed by a fried chicken sandwich, it also shows Americans having more enthusiasm for the offending sandwich. And although it's probably racist (having the first Black President assassinated by a piece of chicken is all types of messed up) it seems more like a scathing critique of how dumb Americans are. Good one, China. Oh wait, isn't Kentucky Fried Chicken an American company?

Amazing Fact #6: Lupe was right.

Lupe Fiasco recently called NeO a terrorist. Actually, he said that President Obama and all the past and future presidents of the United States have used and will use terrorism to advance American interests. This statement may be shocking to some, but in the words of Gil Scott-Heron: "America leads the world in shocks. Unfortunately America does not lead the world in deciphering the causes of shocks."

Although he is the first Black President, Obama is beholden and controlled by interests that continue to deploy terrorism to achieve their aims. I think we're sadly learning that the adjective (Black) hasn't done much to modify the noun (President).

Amazing Fact #7: Being an Obama supporter ain't what it used to be.

So, refresh my memory. What does it mean to be an "Obama supporter" nowadays? What exactly are you supporting? I've been thinking about that a lot lately. I had an earlier post about how NeO was encountering the "Presidential" narrative, which is pretty much like the Western Cowboy narrative. Swagger into town, kill some brown skins, and save the day. These days the Obama doctrine sounds more like an OutKast remix: Bombs over Baghdad. Bombs over Waziristan. Bombs over Sana'a. Bombs over Helmand Province. Bombs over Tripoli. Is he going for the record of brown people bombed at the same time? Sad to say, but I think he's got W beat already.

Of course there are reasonable justifications for every one of those conflicts. Something about democracy. Something about terrorist infrastructure. Something about protecting civilians. Something about surgical strikes. Something about insurgents. Something about rebels. Something about regime change. To paraphrase Zora Neale Hurston, these are just "words walking without masters, all together like harmony in a song." However you sing it, the song is about the control of natural resources at the expense of human life.

 Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you

The depressing fact about our President is that he's good at his job. What other human on the planet would be capable of coping with the kind of crisis that this brother has dealt with? He's phenomenal at his job, but the job is imperial in nature. John Wayne had to bust guns to be John Wayne. And somebody's got to be at the end of that gun. That works for the movies, but it has little to do with ensuring democracy or human rights. So even though a part of me really loves the brother and wants his narrative to keep on teaching and inspiring me, there's an ugly element to this narrative that's more troubling by the day.  




Amazing Fact #8: The President, for one, welcomes our robot overlords.

Did we really need to reauthorize the Patriot Act by robot? Has everyone forgotten that Skynet went operational on April 19th and by now is well on its way to annihilating human civilization? As if we didn't have enough to worry about.

Today's Word: Judgment Day

Amazing Fact #9: NeO can still save America.

The health of American democracy depends on the balance of powers. NeO has failed so far to reign in the executive branch. We've got more secrets. More wire taps. More restrictions on civil liberties. Less transparency. This type of environment lends itself to the type of efficiency that is attractive in times of crisis. However, this type of environment serves to weaken democratic institutions in the long run, and it ironically foments more times of crisis. Whatever you may think of NeO, you have to concede that it could always get much worse. If he doesn't work to restrain executive power we'll be destined to have a crazy president with immense, unchecked power. Need an illustration? Three words: President Michelle Bachman.

In related news...

Amazing Fact #10: He's probably not going to do that thing that you thought he was going to do.

Remember that thing that you were really hoping NeO would change way back on election day in 2008? If he hasn't done anything on it in his first term, it's probably not going to happen in the second term either. Just so you know.

Amazing Fact #11: If he doesn't do it, we have to do it ourselves. 


As true today as it was in 2008 or 1908 or 1808.