LitGriot.com

Jermaine Stewart Word is Out video

2012-01-29T00:35:00.000+05:30

Fairy Tails: It's clear that "The Word' was that Jermaine slept with that rich woman's husband - the man who the song addresses, and accuses of being loose-mouthed. There was no sexual tension between Jermaine and that older, wealthy white woman, who at best approximated a sugar daddy (again gender bending, but we all know how folks like to capture fairies as pets).

He went to dance rehearsal and stomped-out the scandal with his team, who had seen all the brash tabloids. The kept looking at him like: Whatcha gon' do! Then, they went to earn their keep, dressed up in suits - like many other working people dress up in some garb - and they played straight.

It was sensational when that rich broad walked in with her fur, giving him the evil eye. The question is, the open question left in the video/song is what now? What do you do with what seems to be an emotional roller coaster, concerning a figure, a man in this triangle, who is not even seen in the video. The lover, the husband of that rich woman, is not seen at all on screen despite having the finger pointed right at him, though metaphorically we see him at least once. The absent phallic figure contested here between Jermaine and the woman giving him the evil eye. And where'd she get her money anyway? He appears in abstentia in the scene when Jermaine walks down the Champs-Élysées. He walks forward, addressing the camera face-to-face, while looming overhead is the grand Arc de Triomphe hovering wide behind him. Sitting next to the lyrics "," the phallocentric structure framed both the star and their triangle's relationship. Watch and enjoy. You betta work!

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

VOTE 2012: The take-home message from the Iowa caucus is as clear as the Gulf is cloudy.

2012-01-05T09:40:00.002+05:30

The Republican heavy weights are waiting this one out. The president's base is firm, despite the media attention towards people's movements this year alone. In fact, they know - some implicitly and others explicitly - that America's work of electing Barack Obama is not nearly done, some of which can only come with a full eight years. I suspect that even Gen. Colin Powell knows that.

The Barack Obama that America elected in 2008 is more like a second-term president. It is only with a second-term that Americans begin to unite under leadership- he's tested and we're tested. Then we can actually see policy unfold, despite the tirades of 'the party of NO'. Since we refused to stand up and demand greatness of presidential leadership.It is only recently that we see any genuine attempts to change the political conversation, as exemplified by the Occupy Movements (and early aspects of the TEA party).

The Occupy Movement followed the Arab Spring, which may meet another rainy season if the violence continues in places like Syria and still in Egypt. None of the current Republican candidacy have demonstrated the ability to even hold a public dialogue about how any of these matters are inter-related and what that has to do with the American people. Like it or not, the world is a bit complex - not complicated, but full of diverse ways of life, which requires dialogue to resolve inevitable conflicts. The Republican side uses sloganeering to stigmatize so-called 'Liberals' as having some agenda that likens itself to land-grabbing or some other odd socialist scare propaganda. That's odd, too, considering the very real grabbing of natural resources to the detriment of public health and public wealth. Petroleum and war are seemingly inevitably intertwined in that petrol-based/commodities unfettered capitalist economy, which is as clear as the Gulf is cloudy! No, all of these candidates, with all due respect to their careers, have demonstrated a mere ability to dumb-down this historical moment into policy slogans, whereas the Obama/Biden '08 campaign's 'Change We Can Believe in' galvanized masses. Just think if Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan, or Michelle Bachman's slogan to make "Barack Obama a one-term president!" She full-well understands the sadistic mongering

Look at this, Republican voters: $12 is the minimum wage in England, but the first-year college student working at the local Walmart in Alabama is happy with her $7.70 per hour. With social media, this young lady can know that more easily, and see past the 'Obamacare' slight used to diss the sorts of healthcare systems enjoyed in many parts of the world, especially England, where I currently reside received government coverage within days of moving there. I was shocked at the level of coverage I received while spending junior year abroad in France years ago. No, America is not really THE best at all we claim, which is sad because only of polarization holds us back.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Happy birthday Jesus, sorry about Xmas.

2011-12-22T20:59:00.000+05:30

Happy birthday Jesus.

Whether you are a messiah or just an enlightened and courageous messenger- or both- I am genuinely sorry that we warped your message and disfigured your image.

Sorry that charity and philanthropy have replaced solidarity and governance.

Happy birthday Jesus. Sorry that genuine kindness and quality have been replaced by materialism and competition.

Sorry that people have lost faith in humanity, and instead turn towards your divinity for the sake of our own.

Sorry that we’re blinded by your greatness and therefore ignorant of our own. I know that you tried to teach us the opposite; may we one day come full circle.

Sorry that our trust in you has supplanted all faith in humanity.

Most of us fail to see the godliness in one another, and instead spend time fighting over who knows you more. Sorry about that.

No, Jesus, these Christians cannot be the sons and daughters of God because they treat strangers like devils and difference with suspicion.

I am sorry for all the nations who’ve waged war in your name

Sorry for all the soldiers who’ve died playing this game.

Happy birthday Jesus, may humanity one day speak of the peace you tried to usher,

And may we one day start to believe again in our own greatness.

May we uncloak vengeance as weakness, and our savagery as fear.

May we realize that peace is won by the courage of compassion and hatred relieved by the strength to love.

May we one day know that peace is not a dream just because war is our everyday reality.

May people of all genders one day know equality, and realize that God is above any single sex.

May pacifists’ cause regain your claim, and may we line up for the battle of hearts so that we may rescue the world and end the genocide against humankind.

May those who covet your name in vain remove the stain and pain of hate, replace their fear of eternity with the joy of today.

Happy birthday Jesus, sorry that Christmas is hardly a day of reflection.

Sorry that Satan is winning.

Will the real Christians please stand up.

22 December 2011

Hilton Head Island, USA.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Suppressing Nonviolent Dissent | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

2011-11-22T17:38:00.000+05:30

Suppressing Nonviolent Dissent | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

Veterans assaulted with truncheons, women dragged through the streets by their hair, grandmothers pepper sprayed in the face, peaceful protestors bludgeoned while sitting. Sound like something authorities in Egypt, Tunisia or Syria would order and condone? Think again. It's happening here in the US. [click the link to read more]

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time - VideoBooks Series

2011-10-13T23:52:00.002+05:30

My Dungeon Shook, first part of James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time, from the first Penguin UK edition, 1964. This text weaves the mentor/mentee relationship, both Baldwin's relationship to a world of writers and careful observers of life, but also a conversation between Black men, about Black masculinity, in a time and place where our bodies sustain the popular gaze. Like the working class body that is exploited for its image, but abandoned by society. So, are we the pulse of the heartland. Take back America, dear patriots, let the people occupy the nation.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

From Humiliation to Humility

2011-08-02T11:28:00.005+05:30

A recent story on NPR's Talk of the Nation really touched me. The subject: Humiliation and why we revel in it, with guest, Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Humiliation. Host Tony Cox handled the conversation extremely well. I have been humiliated a great deal because of my sexuality- or more so, because I am an effeminate male. I was fired from the American Embassy School in Delhi for speaking about homosexuality in class, ad was told that the issue would be kept hushed. Years later, I still feel humiliated because of the implicit assumption that I acted inappropriately with children. To add to the humiliation, I had to be escorted on campus to receive my last pay. AES acted with impunity. This whole situation still haunts me, and I am no longer ashamed to admit that, too. What I do want folks to understand, however, is that I am a victim of implicit homophobia, but also a survivor and warrior for the rights of us all.

Excerpt from Wayne Koestenbaum’s comments on humiliation to humility:

…the one whose humiliation maybe is unrecognized but still exists is the boy, who is committing an act of cruelty, that seems to reflect prior humiliations of his own.

It seems, now hearing this tale, that he's caught in this kind of hall of mirrors of abuse and humiliation, and, you know, seems like a trapped insect....

...earlier in life that somebody would specialize in emotional cruelty of that kind is clearly somebody who has been damaged by love and life and probably to this day is still doing it or having it being done to him.

Though I realized even then that I correctly dealt with the gay bullying that had prompted me to speak about homosexuality in class- an issue the school was unprepared to tackle - the situation also reminded me of several instances as a kid where I was bullied for being effeminate (with the assumption that I was a gay kid). No adults protected me, and none reached out to me. Because of that, perhaps, I take no please in witnessing humiliation, and refuse to sit idly when all it takes is one firm, contradictory voice to stop it. I also refuse to keep quiet about my own pain, because, like this episode's guest alluded to, I've turned humiliation into humility and greater respect for the fact that abusers have learned to abuse first hand- they were also humiliated.

I've learned that children must learn to speak about sexuality outside of the context of humiliation. I've learned that it's much better to speak about homosexuality before an incidence of bullying occurs- that we must disarm bullies with compassion, not return that harshness and hate they've come to expect. I've learned that many folks identify with cruelty towards others because of the sadomasochistic cycle of pain too often taught at home through emotional or physical abuse. This can also be described as schadenfreude. I've learned that we are too tolerant of pleasure in the pain of others. As a society, we seem more familiar with sadomasochistic behavior, and claiming NOT to care, than with sheer love and allowing ourselves to be penetrated. If we cannot recognize our pain, then not only do we deny a full recognition of pleasure, we also breed cynicism, nihilism and cultivate a culture of abusers. In that way, love is revolutionary. Run tell that.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

It's not about the PRICE TAG. Happiness is free. Love is plentiful. Share your smile today, and get 10 in return.

2011-07-30T17:14:00.000+05:30

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Angela Yvonne Davis - Spring 2011 @ Delhi University, pt.1

2011-07-02T23:32:00.000+05:30

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Tim Wise - The Pathology of White Privililedge

2011-06-15T12:28:00.000+05:30

Dropping some SERIOUS knowledge

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Fair and Lovely, Dark and Ugly!?! WTF!

2011-05-26T19:27:00.001+05:30

'Rise dark girls'. Rise.

Click the link to watch a snippet of the chilling film of testimonials of chocolate-colored girls learning to detest their flesh in America.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

The first Black sissy I ever saw on TV

2011-05-26T18:32:00.001+05:30

I LOVE Jermaine Stewart. He was the first Black sissy I ever saw on TV and it made me feel really good to see that. Too bad our community is still too conservative to just accept us as we are even though folks will eat up our images and music, and then say that 'hate the sin, love the sinner' business. This duplicity sends mixed messages and just gives kids and adults permission to bully us to death -literally- either physically, or soul murder (the latter leading many to NOT protect themselves and abuse their bodies through sex, drugs, alcohol, toxic relationships, etc).

Enjoy Donny Simpson's interview posted above, and check out the video, The Word is Out, which to me, always felt like a coming out anthem, as in the word of the day is 'out' in the way that Black vernacular uses the phrase 'the word'. Of course, the artist passed of AIDS-related complications in 1997 and is neither here to defend nor define himself. This right here is just a fan talking. Back in the early 80's when Jermaine's videos dropped on Video Soul, I recall one of my uncles saying "Now, who's this sissy." I for sure kept my mouth wide-closed, and hoped no one pointed at me. Luckily, I could point my eyes at the screen and maintain the hope that one day I'd be able to come out.

Needless to say, this is why it's so important for people to come out, and for us to be able to actually see/feel/touch/know actual sissies and dykes who embrace themselves in love and reject the hate associated with those labels- yes, those labels hurled at us by kids who hear them in homes where folks say empty crap like 'hate the sin, love the sinner'. There's no love in that, and just painful to hear Christians, actual living, breathing, so-called God-fearing folks advocating any sort of hate. Needless to say, like Jermaine, I made my life far, far away from home, those words, and even those people who love me but just didn't know how to help me 'out'.

In case you didn't catch that, no one wants to live love behind closed doors:

You had to be the one to say it
You couldn't keep it
Our secret, oh, no
...
I can't stand the gossip
Out on the streets now
How could they see us
Behind closed doors
...
Why did you have to tell them
I told you not to say a word
Why did you have to say it
We were never seen (never seen)
Now I can't believe the word is out

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Black people are REALLY homophobic?

2011-05-22T05:22:00.002+05:30

CNN's charming anchor Don Lemon's coming out AND Black homophobia

The fact is, when I hear the host of homophobic slurs hurled at me, it's perpetrated by people who are Black like me. it's Black boys, girls, men, and -to a noticeably lesser extent- women. Sure, from what I can see, PC-culture has made it implausible in most circumstances for whites to hurl any slurs at me, save for when they are in mobs. Of course there are the slurs we never hear, which might easily convince us that whites are more liberal when it comes to gender and sexual differences. So, that skews the imagine and makes it appear to Black queer people that other Black people are more homophobic than other communities, just as Mr. Lemon implied. While I take the author's point about the 'It Gets Better' project directed at the wider/whiter community as reflective of their homophobia (not to mention the CONGRESS and ALL pre-Obama presidents!), we must also recall the numerous ways of soul murder in our society, and in our community in particular. This includes that slow death that leads to all manner of self-destructive behavior like unprotected sex, criminality, drug abuse, toxic relationships, and the general disillusionment that leads to rage. No, these are NOT Black issues, but as Black queer people, it does seem that we too often take the fall on the level of pedophiles, to whom we are still implicitly and explicitly compared, regardless of the fact that in our families we can all point to a queer relative who shares more than their share of care.

This post was prepared in response to an interestingly reflective article on the Root.com, Did Don Lemon Throw Black People Under the Bus, in response to comments made by CNN anchor Don Lemon upon his coming out. In case you missed the basic point: YES, it matters that folks come out. In some ways, it really, really matters that public figures come out if only to provide families an external stimulus to consider and discuss homophobia and other impediments to developing a positive view of the gay self. Hate feeds on our fears, and nothing fuels those better than isolation. Unlike growing up Black, I did not grow up in a 'gay' family, full of folks dealing with their racialized identity in various ways, accompanied by the healing language we learn to distance our internal selves from the external racism we almost inevitably encounter in life. No matter how loving, few southern Black families specifically teach a positive queer identity to adolescents in the very basic ways that we prepare youth to deal with a world that bluntly rejects blackness. And often the least homophobic voices are drowned out by the vocal minority of staunch homophobes, not to mention the self-hating homosexuals who turn into predators who indulge in all manner of hypocritical and self-defeating behavior leading to soul murder. Coming out is a matter of life or death. hence coming out is a gesture of love, something we all need in abundance.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Public Werks: A Montage on Male Work in Delhi

2011-05-16T18:40:00.000+05:30

BY: Diepiriye Kuku, for Sunil Gupta's photography workshop as a part of Nigah's Queerfest 2010

MUSIC: It's a Man's World by James Brown, performed by Christina Aguilera at the 2007 Grammy Awards.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Fair & Lovely, Dark & Ugly - I guess!

2011-05-05T14:24:00.003+05:30

YouTube USER COMMENTS:

I get the feeling that the Third Reich would have creamed themselves over this.

midgysamurai15 1 week ago

@midgysamurai15 THAT's it! And you might be interested to know that Hilter's Mein Kampf is sold by every bookseller in Delhi either on roads or in shops, it flies off the shelves. And people say Blacks are whining when we complain about the hateful treatment we receive at the hands and peering eyes of the Delhi public -perhaps because they know that we know that this is a load of crap ('cause we been there and done that, too, but cannot accept it so blindly)!

diepiriye 7 minutes ago

Notice how she's all excited to be mistaken for a "foreigner" which means white, BTW, and nothing else. Imagine if she'd been mistaken for what people call a negro!?! AND, don't get me started on the so-called 'Fairness Meter'.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

The President of the United States of America vs. the HNIC

2011-04-28T14:09:00.003+05:30

President Obama released his birth certificate today to prove his right just to be in the room. For the uninitiated, THIS issue demonstrates the state of race in America. The wider, whiter public has likely turned away from this 'silliness' but just see how it festered. Those of us in Black America who have been charged with integrating the nation- from Little Rock Central High to the Oval Office- have always faced the implicit questioning of our legitimacy, and doubts about our competence. All the while, liberals have pretended not to understand the implicit nature of racial bias- the most liberal whites can be the most racist because they fail to question their implicit ideas about the 'Other'. So, here it is for all of us to see. The 'big guy' still have to prove his right just to be here, let alone deal with doubts over his intelligence (remember the surprise that Collin Powell could speak Standard English). That's all to say that we still have to work twice as hard to get half as far. Obama has worked triple as much as most all his predecessors, including communicating directly with the public. Yes, we know tons more about Obama than any other White House occupant. We must know, because like the poll taxes during Jim Crow, and like having to show two-ID's to get in a club in the half century since, this issue is unlikely to die here. This is what it means to be the HNIC. If you don't know what that means, you betta ask somebody.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Open Query to the Peace Corps Training Materials Development Leader

2011-04-02T12:21:00.001+05:30

Dear training tool developers,

Bankass, région de Mopti, 1999

I am an RPCV from Mali ('97-'99, Farafina nyenafin be n na) and am wondering what concrete steps have been taken to genuinely include and retain non-white, and/or non-heterosexual PCVs? For instance, little in our training addressed 'race' in Africa and made it so invisible that actual white American volunteers began using language that equated American with 'white', even to the faces of their non-white PCVs. Worse, the official training material discouraged queer PCVs from coming out, and warned that we could be endangering ourselves. As a PCV then, and as a social researcher now, that official rhetoric was inappropriate, flat and incorrect. So those are just two instances and institutional failure, while there are examples of success. For example, one PCV from our era organized and got support for a Black-American summit with Malian students and teachers. The local office itself, and it seems the Peace Corps in general, still had not learned to institutionalize diversity beyond tokenism. At this most crucial time when the US administration acts favorably toward the Peace Corps, while our nation engages in battle on three fronts abroad, and while xenophobia grows at home, the role of this organization is ever more pressing and central to building peace. So, in what concrete ways has the Peace Corps become more inclusive, and is this change measurably reflected beyond the rainbow Facebook pix?

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Kids love fags

2011-03-31T14:55:00.000+05:30

Kids love fags

Fascinated by dykes

Amazed at queens

Satiated by sissies

Entertained by our antics

Attuned to our fortitude

Transparent and just real.

It’s adults who teach kids to hate.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

There’s a Hole in my Crown (for Anish)

2011-03-21T21:12:00.001+05:30

There’s a hole in my crown

In fact, there are two.

One, a minor wound

That might otherwise be passed off for jewels.

The other is rather an abyss.

And I’m already starting to feel the ache- warrant the pain.

There’s a hole in my crown

In fact, there are two, which means there are probably more,

Others that I have yet to see.

Today, Just this morning, I decided not to look.

Last night, I decided that the pain would soon go away.

We all know how that goes:

We get used to the pain.

We learn to ignore.

We stop in excruciating back pain,

And pretend like nothing’s wrong till we’re broken.

We’ve walked around tender-footed

As if everyone experiences this pain.

Some even starve or gorge themselves to death –

Literally to death.

Some people starve or gorge themselves on sweets

And pretend that it’s love.

Some people starve or gorge themselves on attention,

And usually get caught acting out.

Some people starve or gorge themselves on credit,

Just spending like anything,

Buying nothing fulfilling,

Never managing to keep that feeling of hunger at bay.

Perhaps they prove something to someone,

But they usually prove empty to themselves.

Me?

Of course I’ll get back to me since I’ve been pointing so many fingers.

I’m guilty of all these abuses –

I’ve ignored anger,

until it turned into rage;

Ignored pain till it turned to sickness.

I’ve stuffed myself on sweets and divine drinks,

I’ve pretended nothing was wrong,

Even when all my good senses cautioned me to pay attention,

To my castle.

Now, there’s a hole in my crown,

In fact there are two.

One is so tiny,

So miniscule

That you’d think it were a precious stone –

I also treat it as such –

It’s MY hole.

The other kept me awake last night –

I could not ignore the abyss.

I tried, but here I am, like usual

Figuring it all out through dance

[cut to sound, chorus from: Do you know the Way to San Jose by Dionne Warwick]

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Where’s Rosa. - Delhi Metro 2011

2011-03-21T00:24:00.000+05:30

Where’s Rosa/today, I stepped in front of a man, hurriedly

In the metro-security-line.

He was three times my age,

Three-fourth my height,

Thrice my weight, considering the three stuffed

Third World canvas bags in he balanced two in on arm,

As he struggled with the other,

Along with some other dangling bits and pieces on the other side.

He huddled along as I stood my ground,

and crept slowly forward in the line.

It progresses quickly,

Hardly anything to mind.

After the guard frisks me,

And inevitably rubs the tip of my dick,

I hurriedly step in front of a young woman in a hijab

And placed my bag before hers in the x-ray-conveyor-belt-line.

POW! I got in front of two people now, and that puts me ahead.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Debacle debating democracy in Libya

2011-02-26T18:06:00.001+05:30

THE African unionist needs the AU now

I am shocked and somewhat embarrassed that no one of on the NPR show Talk of the Nation even mentioned the African Union when discussing the current atrocities in Libya (24.02.2011). Finally, a caller from New Orleans suggested Nelson Mandela as an African with any sense of agency. Indeed, what I am suggesting is still this implicit perspective that 'Africa' and Africans are politically passive, and worse, the region entirely cannot be governed. It's Heart of Darkness mentality at play, and unsurprisingly this implicit bias often goes unquestioned on this show when discussing ‘native’ poor people whether in Haiti or under Mugabe’s heel – please refer to an All Things Considered conversation with Chinua Achebe a year or so back about Conrad's work. As if he/we didn't know Leopold was chopping off the people's hands for rubber! That was then. Now, do we intervene? Do we act in partnership with Africa or imperialistically? Do we act in accordance with global partnerships that respects every nation's autonomy at the expense of the people's fundamental human rights. And why not send our peace laureate in chief to Africa to help advocate for the cause of human rights in Libya. That's the least the people of America could do is to get Air Force One to the continent immediately.

THAT'S a state dinner worth attending - and all he’d have to do is call for Gaddafi to stop the brutalization. Not only that, we're legally obliged to defend the people. Advocacy at the highest level is the first step.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Dear Mr. Barack Obama, please go to Africa and appeal to the AU.

2011-02-26T13:20:00.000+05:30

Please meet with Gaddaffi’s strongest local allies to demonstrate and further support the people across north Africa who are rising up in a bid for democracy. The African Union seems the most logical local partner, so please do all that you can to make sure that the AU’s leaders act swiftly and with all needed resources. You, Mr. Obama, are uniquely positioned to incite the global community to finally demonstrate peace as a tool towards democracy, a new pattern for what our government did in response to many tyrannical regimes, including post-9-11. Here, we have the opportunity to build peace through dialogue between Mr. Obama and his African counterparts, rather than the military as our main negotiation tool. I urge you, Mr. Obama, to convene with the African Union leaders as quickly as possible- travel to the continent and facilitate that these women and men discuss democracy building with the certitude that the United States stands with the people. If peace-keeping troupes are needed, then please make sure that the African Union has all needed resources to make it happen ASAP. Let not another drop of blood be martyred for democracy. By standing with the people, not only the bullying between word leaders, but defending the right of the people to peaceful assembly would be a greater gesture of hope for the entire region. Who knows where democracy will rise tomorrow.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

More Tiger moms & dads on NPR

2011-02-24T11:09:00.001+05:30

Joe Jackson was obviously a Tiger dad, with a boat full of successful kids. Only Janet - one of the most successful recording artists ever- is explaining now how that damaged her soul. One part of Vietnamese-American Lac Su's interview on NPR about his new book about his tiger dad really touched me, too: "I didn't think that those three words sank in the first time I said it, so I said it again, making sure that he heard me. He got really angry and he slapped me a couple of times. He made me promise to never use those weak words to him ever again. Asian people, especially in his household, we do not use words to express affections. We express our love for each other through action. And, you know, for a long time after that episode, I was scared of using those three words." We know which three words. We also know how the senior Mr Jackson told his own kids not to call him dad, like Janet tried, but that he was Joseph, and they were scared to death of him. But successful nonetheless.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Founding (PATERNALISTIC SLAVEHOLDING) Fathers

2011-02-23T09:00:00.000+05:30

As a nation, we really need to unpack the African-American experience. We all need to understand the so-called founding fathers as slave-holders and unpack the legacy of that sort of relationship on our present day understanding of nationhood and citizenry. Without this complex understanding, we get TEA Party folks claiming to take back the country, yet we obviously don't have a clue about what we're taking it back to. We learn about this nation's history in such a white-washed way that we reduce historical characters to minstrels, all and present them as duplicitous- freedom on one hand and secret slavery on the other; democracy on one hand, and tyranny on the other. So, which aspects do we teach our kids and which aspects do we purport to take back? In fact, as your authors point out, inter-racial relations were at the forefront of their daily existences, an fact that, as I said, we must unpack in order to have any meaningful interracial dialogue today, beyond the uncivil yelling across the aisle.

Happy Presidents' Day and Happy Black History Month. The more those two sorts of identities are separate, the more duplicitous we will continue to be as a nation.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Pepsi's Black Mammy

2011-02-15T13:00:00.001+05:30

You have to be kidding. How dare that black wench knock out a decent white girl? Of course the two ran away together. In spite of all the domestic abuse that man has suffered, he knows that assaulting a white girls is far, far worse. No matter that this white girl is assaulted for allegedly checking out that big black buck, but it's the Shanaynay modern day Saffire character that upholds the black/white line, willing to hurl a soda can at her man in order to maintain the miscegeny that still pervades us today. It's actually a crime, whereas we can all laugh as his wife kicks him, smashes his face into a pie, stalks him in the bathroom and stuffs soap into his mouth like an ole time mammy!

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Millry, Alabama (white) dad's threatening (black) kids and texting across race!?!

2011-02-06T06:13:00.000+05:30

This past week, Local 15 TV, reported about an incident where a white dad marched into the school gym-where all the black boys hang out- and threatened to kill a group of black boys if they continued contact with his (white) daughter. As one of the boy's mother's mentioned in the news interview, had that been a black parent making such threats, his life and livelihood would already be in danger. As it stands, however, we get to debate whether or not a parent has the right to control their kids' friends, etc. Few will ask the more difficult questions about of implicit racial bias, or the continued endogamy in America where races are kept separate. Anyhow hadn't those boys heard of Emmet Till?!? Apparently, it's still dangerous to even text across race.

Nonetheless, from the TV report and ensuing NAACP involvement, it sounds like the boys and their parents understood the implicit message that black boys' bodies simply are not worth enforcing the law. Since when do we come close to tolerating a parent threatening to murder a child, let alone someone else's child associated with school? OK, to put this in perspective, we're also the nation that didn't want the president to come read books in schools to kids because, well, perhaps because he's black. But no one could admit this on the surface. Fearing black males after we hit puberty (we're cute until then), is a direct legacy of the plantation, and little has changed since those days when we were chattel. We became less valuable once we demanded wages for our labor, and that venomous anger has yet to be quelled in many parts of the nation and in many hearts. Black men are dangerous and black women are just available, as far as conventional wisdom goes - just turn on any channel and see. This Alabama parent was just acting like a good American citizen. All jokes aside, perhaps the digital media age is the only reason those Millry boys won't turn into Emmet Tills and countless black bodies swinging in the southern breeze. Now that's some strange fruit.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Lotte Lenya Singing "Seeräuber Jenny" (Pirate Jenny)

2011-02-05T01:47:00.002+05:30

I just performed tonight to Nina Simone's version of Pirate Jenny. It's very interesting the ways that we are introduced to this music. For me, Pirate Jenny represents the American dream - through seeing it's nightmare. The nightmare is that all those trampled-upon will eventually just rise up & start cuttin' people's throats. Think about how Nat Turner's revolt is portrayed. Remember Haiti. We're still paying for the Haitian revolution -those black bastards dared to fight back. Rebels are punished, because we know that our exuberant lifestyle - the America dream - has only flourished because we've annihilated native populations, exploited and enslaved labor, degraded the planet, etc. Indeed, there's a ship, a Black Freighter.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Alabama Christian Governor Robert Bentley violates 1st Amendment (Where's the TEA party?)

2011-01-30T02:58:00.001+05:30

In a secular nation, in a global-minded time, in a public space, on a civic day, the gubna of Alabama said:

"Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister and I want to be your brother."

And this was on the day marking Dr. King's death, so I guess the gubna killed King again. Can we not pretend that most Americans don't think this way. Just look at how difficult it is to protect gay people in America from discrimination. Rather than extending any sorts of civil rights to us, this brand of Christian thinking has amassed millions of dollars and political clout to fighting even the simplest hate-crimes protection ordinances, and plays dumb when we're bullied by kids and isolated from any thinking adult to the point of killing ourselves. Yes, that's it. That's the Tyler Clementi formula but we're capable of much worse. We're capable of much worse than a teen taking his life because of hate spewed from peers. We are a nation of cowards that would rather see a dead gay body than two married men. Military conscription is only one of the areas where Americans' true banal homophobia gets exposed. Frankly, the crust of it is that folks see us as sexually ill, and unable to not abuse men in communal showers. And for sure, no one trusts us around kids. That thinking never comes to the fore because of these same mega-implicit Christian values that this 'gubna' spewed from Dr. King's pulpit, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. It's just across from the State Capital, and just a few blocks away from the gay bar. And those gays know that we're not the gubnas sisters and brothers, no matter how many churches we attend. It's Montgomery, and decades after the boycott, but certain citizens are not even invited onto the bus, cain't even sit in the back of the bus. In subsequent interviews, and after interventions from local non-Christian religious leaders, the gubna tried to claim that he "wanted to" be the gubna for all Alabamians, but the won't really, will he. You know how implausible it is for him to respect others when he so easily and implicitly dismissed those who are not his Christian brethren. And that fact that he said this on MLK Day indicates that he don't know nothing 'bout black people. Perhaps he'd thought he'd cozy on up to the negro constituents by being ultra conservative. Hmm. Does he know a Jew wrote Strange Fruit!?! Does he know that Malcolm X was a Muslim!?! We love us some Malcolm X! Does he know the Dalia Lama is Buddhist- and er'body loves the Dalia Lama. C'mon dude. Duh! Like really- duh!

Dr. King wasn't just fighting for the rights of Christians, nor just blacks, nor capitalist, nor socialist, nor even just straights. Dr. King wasn't even just fighting a battle for Americans. His was a global victory, see by the fact that We Shall Overcome is the chant of global revolution. It's an American folk song from the plantations - not the big house. Its sang in Hindi and tribal languages throughout the subcontinent. It's sang in Ki-Swahili, Zulu, Spanish, who knows what. And it somehow found it's way into the movement- the one that taught Americans what Eleanor Roosevelt's human rights really meant.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Egyptian Revolution

2011-01-30T01:53:00.001+05:30

All asked to pray for peace. All hands on board. All minds on this ship. BBC - who gave the picture below- reports: "Egpyt in crisis." And it's not for them that we are all called upon top send a few moments of our day to extend an extra helping measure of peace towards Egypt. It for Egyptians. Revolutions have come on the backs of many, and blood shed need not reveal through our hearts. Let it be through peace that freedom rings. Let freedom ring. Let soldiers and civilians come together as brothers. Let mothers and daughters experience the will of the sun. And let that revolution show people's will. And let Egypt brand it's own democracy. And let all humanity know world peace, through individual happiness.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

"The Black Power Mixtape" - Danny Glover Discusses New Doc Featuring Rare Archival Footage of Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Stokely Carmichael

2011-01-26T10:23:00.001+05:30

"The Black Power Mixtape" - Danny Glover Discusses New Doc Featuring Rare Archival Footage of Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Stokely Carmichael

SWEDISH TV: Yeah.

ANGELA DAVIS: You ask me, you know, whether I approve of violence—I mean, that just doesn’t make any sense at all—whether I approve of guns. I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Some very, very good friends of mine were killed by bombs, bombs that were planted by racists. I remember—from the time I was very small, I remember the sounds of bombs exploding across the street, our house shaking. I remember my father having to have guns at his disposal at all times because of the fact that, at any moment, someone—we might expect to be attacked. The man who was at that time in complete control of the city government—his name was Bull Connor—would often get on the radio and make statements like "Niggers have moved into a white neighborhood; we better expect some bloodshed tonight." And sure enough, there would be bloodshed.

After the four young girls who were—who lived very—one of them lived next door to me. I was very good friends with the sister of another one. My sister was very good friends with all three of them. My mother taught one of them in her class. My mother—in fact, when the bombing occurred, one of the mothers of one of the young girls called my mother and said, "Can you take me down to the church to pick up Carole? You know, we heard about the bombing, and I don’t have my car." And they went down, and what did they find? They found limbs and heads strewn all over the place. And then, after that, in my neighborhood, all the men organized themselves into an armed patrol. They had to take their guns and patrol our community every night, because they did not want that to happen again. I mean, that’s why when someone asks me about violence, I just—I just find it incredible, because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Martin Luther King, Jr. HAPPY BIRTHDAY 15.01.11

2011-01-15T09:12:00.001+05:30

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Alex Haley Interviews Martin Luther King Jr.

2011-01-13T23:38:00.000+05:30

Alex Haley Interviews Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American clergyman, activist and prominent leader in the African-American civil rights movement. His main legacy was to secure progress on civil rights in the United States, and he has become a human rights icon. This 1965 interview with Haley was the longest interview he had ever granted to any publication.

Playboy, January 1965
A Candid Conversation With The Nobel Prize-Winning Leader of The Civil Rights Movement – Martin Luther King Jr.
Interviewed By Alex Haley

On December 5, 1955, to the amused annoyance of the white citizens of Montgomery, Alabama, an obscure young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., called a city-wide Negro boycott of its segregated bus system. To their consternation, however, it was almost 100 percent successful; it lasted for 381 days and nearly bankrupted the bus line. When King’s home was bombed during the siege, thousands of enraged Negroes were ready to riot, but the soft-spoken clergyman prevailed on them to channel their anger into nonviolent protest — and became world-renowned as a champion of Gandhi’s philosophy of passive resistance. Within a year the Supreme Court had ruled Jim Crow seating unlawful on Montgomery’s buses, and King found himself, at 27, on the front lines of a nonviolent Negro revolution against racial injustice.

Moving to Atlanta, he formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an alliance of church-affiliated civil rights organizations which joined such activist groups as CORE and SNCC in a widening campaign of sit-in demonstrations and freedom rides throughout the South. Dissatisfied with the slow pace of the protest movement, King decided to create a crisis in 1963 that would “dramatize the Negro plight and galvanize the national conscience.” He was abundantly successful, for his mass nonviolent demonstration in arch-segregationist Birmingham resulted in the arrest of more than 3300 Negroes, including King himself; and millions were outraged by front-page pictures of Negro demonstrators being brutalized by the billy sticks, police dogs and fire hoses of police chief Bull Connor.

In the months that followed, mass sit-ins and demonstrations erupted in 800 Southern cities; President Kennedy proposed a Civil Rights Bill aimed at the enforcement of voting rights, equal employment opportunities, and the desegregation of public facilities; and the now-famous march on Washington, 200,000 strong, was eloquently addressed by King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. By the end of that “long hot summer,” America’s Negroes had won more tangible gains than in any year since 1865 — and Martin Luther King had become their acknowledged leader and most respected spokesman.

He earned it the hard way: In the course of his civil rights work he has been jailed 14 times and stabbed once in the chest; his home has been bombed three times; and his daily mail brings a steady flow of death threats and obscenities. Undeterred, he works 20 hours a day, travels 325,000 miles and makes 450 speeches a year throughout the country on behalf of the Negro cause. Inundated by calls, callers and correspondence at his S.C.L.C. office in Atlanta, he also finds time somehow to preach, visit the sick and help the poor among his congregation at the city’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, of which he and his father are the pastors.

So heavy, in fact, were his commitments when we called him last summer for an interview, that two months elapsed before he was able to accept our request for an appointment. We kept it — only to spend a week in Atlanta waiting vainly for him to find a moment for more than an apology and a hurried handshake. A bit less pressed when we returned for a second visit, King was finally able to sandwich in a series of hour and half-hour conversations with us among the other demands of a grueling week. The resultant interview is the longest he has ever granted to any publication.

Though he spoke with heartfelt and often eloquent sincerity, his tone was one of businesslike detachment. And his mood, except for one or two flickering smiles of irony, was gravely serious — never more so than the moment, during a rare evening with his family on our first night in town, when his four children chided him affectionately for “not being home enough.” After dinner, we began the interview on this personal note.

Playboy: Dr. King, are your children old enough to be aware of the issues at stake in the civil rights movement, and of your role in it?

Martin Luther King: Yes, they are—especially my oldest child, Yolanda. Two years ago, I remember, I returned home after serving one of my terms in the Albany, Georgia, jail, and she asked me, “Daddy, why do you have to go to jail so much?” I told her that I was involved in a struggle to make conditions better for the colored people, and thus for all people. I explained that because things are as they are, someone has to take a stand, that it is necessary for someone to go to jail, because many Southern officials seek to maintain the barriers that have historically been erected to exclude the colored people. I tried to make her understand that someone had to do this to make the world better—for all children. She was only six at that time, but she was already aware of segregation because of an experience that we had had.

Playboy: Would you mind telling us about it?

Martin Luther King: Not at all. The family often used to ride with me to the Atlanta airport, and on our way, we always passed Funtown, a sort of miniature Disneyland with mechanical rides and that sort of thing. Yolanda would inevitably say, “I want to go to Funtown,” and I would always evade a direct reply. I really didn’t know how to explain to her why she couldn’t go. Then one day at home, she ran downstairs exclaiming that a TV commercial was urging people to come to Funtown. Then my wife and I had to sit down with her between us and try to explain it. I have won some applause as a speaker, but my tongue twisted and my speech stammered seeking to explain to my six-year-old daughter why the public invitation on television didn’t include her, and others like her. One of the most painful experiences I have ever faced was to see her tears when I told her that Funtown was closed to colored children, for I realized that at that moment the first dark cloud of inferiority had floated into her little mental sky, that at that moment her personality had begun to warp with that first unconscious bitterness toward white people. It was the first time that prejudice based upon skin color had been explained to her. But it was of paramount importance to me that she not grow up bitter. So I told her that although many white people were against her going to Funtown, there were many others who did want colored children to go. It helped somewhat. Pleasantly, word came to me later that Funtown had quietly desegregated, so I took Yolanda. A number of white persons there asked, “Aren’t you Dr. King, and isn’t this your daughter?” I said we were, and she heard them say how glad they were to see us there.

Playboy: As one who grew up in the economically comfortable, socially insulated environment of a middle-income home in Atlanta, can you recall when it was that you yourself first became painfully and personally aware of racial prejudice?

Martin Luther King: Very clearly. When I was 14, I had traveled from Atlanta to Dublin, Georgia, with a dear teacher of mine, Mrs. Bradley; she’s dead now. I had participated there in an oratorical contest sponsored by the Negro Elks. It turned out to be a memorable day, for I had succeeded in winning the contest. My subject, I recall, ironically enough, was “The Negro and the Constitution.” Anyway, that night, Mrs. Bradley and I were on a bus returning to Atlanta, and at a small town along the way, some white passengers boarded the bus, and the white driver ordered us to get up and give the whites our seats. We didn’t move quickly enough to suit him, so he began cursing us, calling us “black sons of bitches.” I intended to stay right in that seat, but Mrs. Bradley finally urged me up, saying we had to obey the law. And so we stood up in the aisle for the 90 miles to Atlanta. That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.

Playboy: Wasn’t it another such incident on a bus, years later, that thrust you into your present role as a civil rights leader?

Martin Luther King: Yes, it was—in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. E.D. Nixon, a Pullman porter long identified with the NAACP, telephoned me late one night to tell me that Mrs. Rosa Parks had been arrested around seven-thirty that evening when a bus driver demanded that she give up her seat, and she refused—because her feet hurt. Nixon had already bonded Mrs. Parks out of prison. He said, “It’s time this stops; we ought to boycott the buses.” I agreed and said, “Now.” The next night we called a meeting of Negro community leaders to discuss it, and on Saturday and Sunday we appealed to the Negro community, with leaflets and from the pulpits, to boycott the buses on Monday. We had in mind a one-day boycott, and we were banking on 60-percent success. But the boycott saw instantaneous 99-percent success. We were so pleasantly surprised and impressed that we continued, and for the next 381 days the boycott of Montgomery’s buses by Negroes was 99 9/10 successful.

Playboy: Were you sure you’d win?

Martin Luther King: There was one dark moment when we doubted it. We had been struggling to make the boycott a success when the city of Montgomery successfully obtained an injunction from the court to stop our car pool. I didn’t know what to say to our people. They had backed us up, and we had let them down. It was a desolate moment. I saw, all of us saw, that the court was leaning against us. I remember telling a group of those working closest with me to spread in the Negro community the message, “We must have the faith that things will work out somehow, that God will make a way for us when there seems no way.” It was about noontime, I remember, when Rex Thomas of the Associated Press rushed over to where I was sitting and told me of the news flash that the U.S. Supreme Court had declared that bus segregation in Montgomery was unconstitutional. It had literally been the darkest hour before the dawn.

Playboy: You and your followers were criticized, after your arrest for participating in the boycott, for accepting bail and leaving jail. Do you feel, in retrospect, that you did the right thing?

Martin Luther King: No; I think it was a mistake, a tactical error for me to have left jail, by accepting bail, after being indicted along with 125 others, mainly drivers of our car pool, under an old law of doubtful constitutionality, an “antiboycott” ordinance. I should have stayed in prison. It would have nationally dramatized and deepened our movement even earlier, and it would have more quickly aroused and keened America’s conscience.

Playboy: Do you feel you’ve been guilty of any comparable errors in judgment since then?

Martin Luther King: Yes, I do—in Albany, Georgia, in 1962. If I had that to do again, I would guide that community’s Negro leadership differently than I did. The mistake I made there was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it. Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair. It would have been much better to have concentrated upon integrating the buses or the lunch counters. One victory of this kind would have been symbolic, would have galvanized support and boosted morale. But I don’t mean that our work in Albany ended in failure. The Negro people there straightened up their bent backs: You can’t ride a man’s back unless it’s bent. Also, thousands of Negroes registered to vote who never had voted before, and because of the expanded Negro vote in the next election for governor of Georgia—which pitted a moderate candidate against a rabid segregationist—Georgia elected its first governor who had pledged to respect and enforce the law impartially. And what we learned from our mistakes in Albany helped our later campaigns in other cities to be more effective. We have never since scattered our efforts in a general attack on segregation, but have focused upon specific, symbolic objectives.

Playboy: Can you recall any other mistakes you’ve made in leading the movement?

Martin Luther King: Well, the most pervasive mistake I have made was in believing that because our cause was just, we could be sure that the white ministers of the South, once their Christian consciences were challenged, would rise to our aid. I felt that white ministers would take our cause to the white power structures. I ended up, of course, chastened and disillusioned. As our movement unfolded, and direct appeals were made to white ministers, most folded their hands—and some even took stands against us.

Playboy: Their stated reason for refusing to help was that it was not the proper role of the church to “intervene in secular affairs.” Do you disagree with this view?

Martin Luther King: Most emphatically. The essence of the Epistles of Paul is that Christians should rejoice at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believe. The projection of a social gospel, in my opinion, is the true witness of a Christian life. This is the meaning of the true ekklesia—the inner, spiritual church. The church once changed society. It was then a thermostat of society. But today I feel that too much of the church is merely a thermometer, which measures rather than molds popular opinion.

Playboy: Are you speaking of the church in general—or the white church in particular?

Martin Luther King: The white church, I’m sorry to say. Its leadership has greatly disappointed me. Let me hasten to say there are some outstanding exceptions. As one whose Christian roots go back through three generations of ministers—my father, grandfather and great-grandfather—I will remain true to the church as long as I live. But the laxity of the white church collectively has caused me to weep tears of love. There cannot be deep disappointment without deep love. Time and again in my travels, as I have seen the outward beauty of white churches, I have had to ask myself, “What kind of people worship there? Who is their God? Is their God the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and is their Savior the Savior who hung on the cross at Golgotha? Where were their voices when a black race took upon itself the cross of protest against man’s injustice to man? Where were their voices when defiance and hatred were called for by white men who sat in these very churches?”

As the Negro struggles against grave injustice, most white churchmen offer pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. As you say, they claim that the gospel of Christ should have no concern with social issues. Yet white churchgoers, who insist that they are Christians, practice segregation as rigidly in the house of God as they do in movie-houses. Too much of the white church is timid and ineffectual, and some of it is shrill in its defense of bigotry and prejudice. In most communities, the spirit of status quo is endorsed by the churches.

My personal disillusionment with the church began when I was thrust into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery. I was confident that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would prove strong allies in our just cause. But some became open adversaries, some cautiously shrank from the issue, and others hid behind silence. My optimism about help from the white church was shattered; and on too many occasions since, my hopes for the white church have been dashed. There are many signs that the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. Unless the early sacrificial spirit is recaptured, I am very much afraid that today’s Christian church will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and we will see the Christian church dismissed as a social club with no meaning or effectiveness for our time, as a form without substance, as salt without savor. The real tragedy, though, is not Martin Luther King’s disillusionment with the church—for I am sustained by its spiritual blessings as a minister of the gospel with a lifelong commitment: The tragedy is that in my travels, I meet young people of all races whose disenchantment with the church has soured into outright disgust.

Playboy: Do you feel that the Negro church has come any closer to “the projection of a social gospel” in its commitment to the cause?

Martin Luther King: I must say that when my Southern Christian Leadership Conference began its work in Birmingham, we encountered numerous Negro church reactions that had to be overcome. Negro ministers were among other Negro leaders who felt they were being pulled into something that they had not helped to organize. This is almost always a problem. Negro community unity was the first requisite if our goals were to be realized. I talked with many groups, including one group of 200 ministers, my theme to them being that a minister cannot preach the glories of heaven while ignoring social conditions in his own community that cause men an earthly hell. I stressed that the Negro minister had particular freedom and independence to provide strong, firm leadership, and I asked how the Negro would ever gain freedom without his minister’s guidance, support and inspiration. These ministers finally decided to entrust our movement with their support, and as a result, the role of the Negro church today, by and large, is a glorious example in the history of Christendom. For never in Christian history, within a Christian country, have Christian churches been on the receiving end of such naked brutality and violence as we are witnessing here in America today. Not since the days of the Christians in the catacombs has God’s house, as a symbol, weathered such attack as the Negro churches.

I shall never forget the grief and bitterness I felt on that terrible September morning when a bomb blew out the lives of those four little, innocent girls sitting in their Sunday-school class in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. I think of how a woman cried out, crunching through broken glass, “My God, we’re not even safe in church!” I think of how that explosion blew the face of Jesus Christ from a stained-glass window. It was symbolic of how sin and evil had blotted out the life of Christ. I can remember thinking that if men were this bestial, was it all worth it? Was there any hope? Was there any way out?

Playboy: Do you still feel this way?

Martin Luther King: No, time has healed the wounds—and buoyed me with the inspiration of another moment which I shall never forget: when I saw with my own eyes over 3000 young Negro boys and girls, totally unarmed, leave Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church to march to a prayer meeting—ready to pit nothing but the power of their bodies and souls against Bull Connor’s police dogs, clubs and fire hoses. When they refused Connor’s bellowed order to turn back, he whirled and shouted to his men to turn on the hoses. It was one of the most fantastic events of the Birmingham story that these Negroes, many of them on their knees, stared, unafraid and unmoving, at Connor’s men with the hose nozzles in their hands. Then, slowly the Negroes stood up and advanced, and Connor’s men fell back as though hypnotized, as the Negroes marched on past to hold their prayer meeting. I saw there, I felt there, for the first time, the pride and the power of nonviolence.

Another time I will never forget was one Saturday night, late, when my brother telephoned me in Atlanta from Birmingham—that city which some call “Bombingham”—which I had just left. He told me that a bomb had wrecked his home, and that another bomb, positioned to exert its maximum force upon the motel room in which I had been staying, had injured several people. My brother described the terror in the streets as Negroes, furious at the bombings, fought whites. Then, behind his voice, I heard a rising chorus of beautiful singing: “We shall overcome.” Tears came into my eyes that at such a tragic moment, my race still could sing its hope and faith.

Playboy: We Shall Overcome has become the unofficial song and slogan of the civil rights movement. Do you consider such inspirational anthems important to morale?

Martin Luther King: In a sense, songs are the soul of a movement. Consider, in World War Two, Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, and in World War One, Over There and Tipperary, and during the Civil War, Battle Hymn of the Republic and John Brown’s Body. A Negro song anthology would include sorrow songs, shouts for joy, battle hymns, anthems. Since slavery, the Negro has sung throughout his struggle in America. Steal Away and Go Down, Moses were the songs of faith and inspiration which were sung on the plantations. For the same reasons the slaves sang, Negroes today sing freedom songs, for we, too, are in bondage. We sing out our determination that “We shall overcome, black and white together, we shall overcome someday.” I should also mention a song parody that I enjoyed very much which the Negroes sang during our campaign in Albany, Georgia. It goes: “I’m comin’, I’m comin’ / And my head ain’t bendin’ low / I’m walkin’ tall, I’m talkin’ strong / I’m America’s New Black Joe.”

Playboy: Your detractors in the Negro community often refer to you snidely as “De Lawd” and “Booker T. King.” What’s your reaction to this sort of Uncle Tom label?

Martin Luther King: I hear some of those names, but my reaction to them is never emotional. I don’t think you can be in public life without being called bad names. As Lincoln said, “If I answered all criticism, I’d have time for nothing else.” But with regard to both of the names you mentioned, I’ve always tried to be what I call militantly nonviolent. I don’t believe that anyone could seriously accuse me of not being totally committed to the breakdown of segregation.

Playboy: What do you mean by “militantly nonviolent”?

Martin Luther King: I mean to say that a strong man must be militant as well as moderate. He must be a realist as well as an idealist. If I am to merit the trust invested in me by some of my race, I must be both of these things. This is why nonviolence is a powerful as well as a just weapon. If you confront a man who has long been cruelly misusing you, and say, “Punish me, if you will; I do not deserve it, but I will accept it, so that the world will know I am right and you are wrong,” then you wield a powerful and a just weapon. This man, your oppressor, is automatically morally defeated, and if he has any conscience, he is ashamed. Wherever this weapon is used in a manner that stirs a community’s, or a nation’s, anguished conscience, then the pressure of public opinion becomes an ally in your just cause.

Another of the major strengths of the nonviolent weapon is its strange power to transform and transmute the individuals who subordinate themselves to its disciplines, investing them with a cause that is larger than themselves. They become, for the first time, somebody, and they have, for the first time, the courage to be free. When the Negro finds the courage to be free, he faces dogs and guns and clubs and fire hoses totally unafraid, and the white men with those dogs, guns, clubs and fire hoses see that the Negro they have traditionally called “boy” has become a man.

We should not forget that, although nonviolent direct action did not originate in America, it found a natural home where it has been a revered tradition to rebel against injustice. This great weapon, which we first tried out in Montgomery during the bus boycott, has been further developed throughout the South over the past decade, until by today it has become instrumental in the greatest mass-action crusade for freedom that has occurred in America since the Revolutionary War. The effectiveness of this weapon’s ability to dramatize, in the world’s eyes, an oppressed people’s struggle for justice is evident in the fact that of 1963’s top ten news stories after the assassination of President Kennedy and the events immediately connected with it, nine stories dealt with one aspect or another of the Negro struggle.

Playboy: Several of those stories dealt with your own nonviolent campaigns against segregation in various Southern cities, where you and your followers have been branded “rabble-rousers” and “outside agitators.” Do you feel you’ve earned these labels?

Martin Luther King: Wherever the early Christians appeared, spreading Christ’s doctrine of love, the resident power structure accused them of being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.” But the small Christian band continued to teach and exemplify love, convinced that they were “a colony of heaven” on this earth who were missioned to obey not man but God. If those of us who employ nonviolent direct action today are dismissed by our white brothers as “rabble-rousers” and “outside agitators,” if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts and goals, we can be assured that the summer of 1965 will be no less long and hot than the summer of 1964.

Our white brothers must be made to understand that nonviolence is a weapon fabricated of love. It is a sword that heals. Our nonviolent direct-action program has as its objective not the creation of tensions, but the surfacing of tensions already present. We set out to precipitate a crisis situation that must open the door to negotiation. I am not afraid of the words “crisis” and “tension.” I deeply oppose violence, but constructive crisis and tension are necessary for growth. Innate in all life, and all growth, is tension. Only in death is there an absence of tension. To cure injustices, you must expose them before the light of human conscience and the bar of public opinion, regardless of whatever tensions that exposure generates. Injustices to the Negro must be brought out into the open where they cannot be evaded.

Playboy: Is this the sole aim of your Southern Christian Leadership Conference?

Martin Luther King: We have five aims: first, to stimulate nonviolent, direct, mass action to expose and remove the barriers of segregation and discrimination: second, to disseminate the creative philosophy and techniques of nonviolence through local and area workshops; third, to secure the right and unhampered use of the ballot for every citizen; fourth, to achieve full citizenship rights, and the total integration of the Negro into American life; and fifth, to reduce the cultural lag through our citizenship training program.

Playboy: How does S.C.L.C. select the cities where nonviolent campaigns and demonstrations are to be staged?

Martin Luther King: The operational area of S.C.L.C. is the entire South, where we have affiliated organizations in some 85 cities. Our major campaigns have been conducted only in cities where a request for our help comes from one of these affiliate organizations, and only when we feel that intolerable conditions in that community might be ameliorated with our help. I will give you an example. In Birmingham, one of our affiliate organizations is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which was organized by the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a most energetic and indomitable man. It was he who set out to end Birmingham’s racism, challenging the terrorist reign of Bull Connor. S.C.L.C. watched admiringly as the small Shuttlesworth-led organization fought in the Birmingham courts and with boycotts. Shuttlesworth was jailed several times, his home and church were bombed, and still he did not back down. His defiance of Birmingham’s racism inspired and encouraged Negroes throughout the South. Then, at a May 1962 board meeting of the S.C.L.C. in Chattanooga, the first discussions began that later led to our joining Shuttlesworth’s organization in a massive direct-action campaign to attack Birmingham’s segregation.

Playboy: One of the highlights of that campaign was your celebrated “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”—written during one of your jail terms for civil disobedience—an eloquent reply to eight Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergymen who had criticized your activities in Birmingham. Do you feel that subsequent events have justified the sentiments expressed in your letter?

Martin Luther King: I would say yes. Two or three important and constructive things have happened which can be at least partially attributed to that letter. By now, nearly a million copies of the letter have been widely circulated in churches of most of the major denominations. It helped to focus greater international attention upon what was happening in Birmingham. And I am sure that without Birmingham, the march on Washington wouldn’t have been called—which in my mind was one of the most creative steps the Negro struggle has taken. The march on Washington spurred and galvanized the consciences of millions. It gave the American Negro a new national and international stature. The press of the world recorded the story as nearly a quarter of a million Americans, white and black, assembled in grandeur as a testimonial to the Negro’s determination to achieve freedom in this generation.

It was also the image of Birmingham which, to a great extent, helped to bring the Civil Rights Bill into being in 1963. Previously, President Kennedy had decided not to propose it that year, feeling that it would so arouse the South that it would meet a bottleneck. But Birmingham, and subsequent developments, caused him to reorder his legislative priorities.

One of these decisive developments was our last major campaign before the enactment of the Civil Rights Act—in St. Augustine, Florida. We received a plea for help from Dr. Robert Hayling, the leader of the St. Augustine movement. St. Augustine, America’s oldest city, and one of the most segregated cities in America, was a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society. Such things had happened as Klansmen abducting four Negroes and beating them unconscious with clubs, brass knuckles, ax handles and pistol butts. Dr. Hayling’s home had been shot up with buckshot, three Negro homes had been bombed and several Negro night clubs shotgunned. A Negro’s car had been destroyed by fire because his child was one of the six Negro children permitted to attend white schools. And the homes of two of the Negro children in the white schools had been burned down. Many Negroes had been fired from jobs that some had worked on for 28 years because they were somehow connected with the demonstrations. Police had beaten and arrested Negroes for picketing, marching and singing freedom songs. Many Negroes had served up to 90 days in jail for demonstrating against segregation, and four teenagers had spent six months in jail for picketing. Then, on February seventh of last year, Dr. Hayling’s home was shotgunned a second time, with his pregnant wife and two children barely escaping death; the family dog was killed while standing behind the living-room door. So S.C.L.C. decided to join in last year’s celebration of St. Augustine’s gala 400th birthday as America’s oldest city—by converting it into a nonviolent battleground. This is just what we did.

Playboy: But isn’t it true, Dr. King, that during this and other “nonviolent” demonstrations, violence has occurred—sometimes resulting in hundreds of casualties on both sides?

Martin Luther King: Yes, in part that is true. But what is always overlooked is how few people, in ratio to the numbers involved, have been casualties. An army on maneuvers, against no enemy, suffers casualties, even fatalities. A minimum of whites have been casualties in demonstrations solely because our teaching of nonviolence disciplines our followers not to fight even if attacked. A minimum of Negroes are casualties for two reasons: Their white oppressors know that the world watches their actions, and for the first time they are being faced by Negroes who display no fear.

Playboy: It was shortly after your St. Augustine campaign last summer, as you mentioned, that the Civil Rights Bill was passed—outlawing many of the injustices against which you had been demonstrating. Throughout the South, predictably, it was promptly anathematized as unconstitutional and excessive in its concessions to Negro demands. How do you feel about it?

Martin Luther King: I don’t feel that the Civil Rights Act has gone far enough in some of its coverage. In the first place, it needs a stronger voting section. You will never have a true democracy until you can eliminate all restrictions. We need to do away with restrictive literacy tests. I’ve seen too much of native intelligence to accept the validity of these tests as a criterion for voting qualifications. Our nation needs a universal method of voter registration—one man, one vote, literally. Second, there is a pressing, urgent need to give the attorney general the right to initiate federal suits in any area of civil rights denial. Third, we need a strong and strongly enforced fair-housing section such as many states already have. President Kennedy initiated the present housing law, but it is not broad enough. Fourth, we need an extension of FEPC to grapple more effectively with the problems of poverty. Not only are millions of Negroes caught in the clutches of poverty, but millions of poor whites as well. And fifth, conclusive and effective measures must be taken immediately at the federal level to curb the worsening reign of terror in the South—which is aided and abetted, as everyone knows, by state and local law-enforcement agencies. It’s getting so that anybody can kill a Negro and get away with it in the South, as long as they go through the motions of a jury trial. There is very little chance of conviction from lily-white Southern jurors. It must be fixed so that in the case of interracial murder, the federal government can prosecute.

Playboy: Your dissatisfaction with the Civil Rights Act reflects that of most other Negro spokesmen. According to recent polls, however, many whites resent this attitude, calling the Negro “ungrateful” and “unrealistic” to press his demands for more.

Martin Luther King: This is a litany to those of us in this field. “What more will the Negro want?” “What will it take to make these demonstrations end?” Well, I would like to reply with another rhetorical question: Why do white people seem to find it so difficult to understand that the Negro is sick and tired of having reluctantly parceled out to him those rights and privileges which all others receive upon birth or entry in America? I never cease to wonder at the amazing presumption of much of white society, assuming that they have the right to bargain with the Negro for his freedom. This continued arrogant ladling out of pieces of the rights of citizenship has begun to generate a fury in the Negro. Even so, he is not pressing for revenge, or for conquest, or to gain spoils, or to enslave, or even to marry the sisters of those who have injured him. What the Negro wants—and will not stop until he gets—is absolute and unqualified freedom and equality here in this land of his birth, and not in Africa or in some imaginary state. The Negro no longer will be tolerant of anything less than his due right and heritage. He is pursuing only that which he knows is honorably his. He knows that he is right.

But every Negro leader since the turn of the century has been saying this in one form or another. It is because we have been so long and so conscientiously ignored by the dominant white society that the situation has now reached such crisis proportions. Few white people, even today, will face the clear fact that the very future and destiny of this country are tied up in what answer will be given to the Negro. And that answer must be given soon.

Playboy: Relatively few dispute the justness of the struggle to eradicate racial injustice, but many whites feel that the Negro should be more patient, that only the passage of time—perhaps generations—will bring about the sweeping changes he demands in traditional attitudes and customs. Do you think this is true?

Martin Luther King: No, I do not. I feel that the time is always right to do what is right. Where progress for the Negro in America is concerned, there is a tragic misconception of time among whites. They seem to cherish a strange, irrational notion that something in the very flow of time will cure all ills. In truth, time itself is only neutral. Increasingly, I feel that time has been used destructively by people of ill will much more than it has been used constructively by those of good will.

If I were to select a timetable for the equalization of human rights, it would be the intent of the “all deliberate speed” specified in the historic 1954 Supreme Court decision. But what has happened? A Supreme Court decision was met, and balked, with utter defiance. Ten years later, in most areas of the South, less than one percent of the Negro children have been integrated in schools, and in some of the deepest South, not even one tenth of one percent. Approximately 25 percent of employable Negro youth, for another example, are presently unemployed. Though many would prefer not to, we must face the fact that progress for the Negro—to which white “moderates” like to point in justifying gradualism—has been relatively insignificant, particularly in terms of the Negro masses. What little progress has been made—and that includes the Civil Rights Act—has applied primarily to the middle-class Negro. Among the masses, especially in the Northern ghettos, the situation remains about the same, and for some it is worse.

Playboy: It would seem that much could be done at the local, state and federal levels to remedy these inequities. In your own contact with them, have you found Government officials—in the North, if not in the South—to be generally sympathetic, understanding, and receptive to appeals for reform?

Martin Luther King: On the contrary, I have been dismayed at the degree to which abysmal ignorance seems to prevail among many state, city and even federal officials on the whole question of racial justice and injustice. Particularly, I have found that these men seriously—and dangerously—underestimate the explosive mood of the Negro and the gravity of the crisis. Even among those whom I would consider to be both sympathetic and sincerely intellectually committed, there is a lamentable lack of understanding. But this white failure to comprehend the depth and dimension of the Negro problem is far from being peculiar to Government officials. Apart from bigots and backlashers, it seems to be a malady even among those whites who like to regard themselves as “enlightened.” I would especially refer to those who counsel, “Wait!” and to those who say that they sympathize with our goals but cannot condone our methods of direct-action pursuit of those goals. I wonder at men who dare to feel that they have some paternalistic right to set the timetable for another man’s liberation. Over the past several years, I must say, I have been gravely disappointed with such white “moderates.” I am often inclined to think that they are more of a stumbling block to the Negro’s progress than the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner.

Playboy: Haven’t both of these segregationist societies been implicated in connection with plots against your life?

Martin Luther King: It’s difficult to trace the authorship of these death threats. I seldom go through a day without one. Some are telephoned anonymously to my office; others are sent—unsigned, of course—through the mails. Drew Pearson wrote not long ago about one group of unknown affiliation that was committed to assassinate not only me but also Chief Justice Warren and President Johnson. And not long ago, when I was about to visit in Mississippi, I received some very urgent calls from Negro leaders in Mobile, who had been told by a very reliable source that a sort of guerrilla group led by a retired major in the area of Lucyville, Mississippi, was plotting to take my life during the visit. I was strongly urged to cancel the trip, but when I thought about it, I decided that I had no alternative but to go on into Mississippi.

Playboy: Why?

Martin Luther King: Because I have a job to do. If I were constantly worried about death, I couldn’t function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility philosophically. I must face the fact, as all others in positions of leadership must do, that America today is an extremely sick nation, and that something could well happen to me at any time. I feel, though, that my cause is so right, so moral, that if I should lose my life, in some way it would aid the cause.

Playboy: That statement exemplifies the total dedication to the civil rights movement for which you are so widely admired—but also denounced as an “extremist” by such segregationist spokesmen as Alabama’s Governor Wallace. Do you accept this identification?

Martin Luther King: It disturbed me when I first heard it. But when I began to consider the true meaning of the word, I decided that perhaps I would like to think of myself as an extremist—in the light of the spirit which made Jesus an extremist for love. If it sounds as though I am comparing myself to the Savior, let me remind you that all who honor themselves with the claim of being “Christians” should compare themselves to Jesus. Thus I consider myself an extremist for that brotherhood of man which Paul so nobly expressed: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Love is the only force on earth that can be dispensed or received in an extreme manner, without any qualifications, without any harm to the giver or to the receiver.

Playboy: Perhaps. But the kind of extremism for which you’ve been criticized has to do not with love, but with your advocacy of willful disobedience of what you consider to be “unjust laws.” Do you feel you have the right to pass judgment on and defy the law—nonviolently or otherwise?

Martin Luther King: Yes—morally, if not legally. For there are two kinds of laws: man’s and God’s. A man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God, is a just law. But a man-made code that is inharmonious with the moral law is an unjust law. And an unjust law, as St. Augustine said, is no law at all. Thus a law that is unjust is morally null and void, and must be defied until it is legally null and void as well. Let us not forget, in the memories of 6,000,000 who died, that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal”, and that everything the Freedom Fighters in Hungary did was “illegal.” In spite of that, I am sure that I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers if I had lived in Germany during Hitler’s reign, as some Christian priests and ministers did do, often at the cost of their lives. And if I lived now in a Communist country where principles dear to the Christian’s faith are suppressed, I know that I would openly advocate defiance of that country’s anti-religious laws—again, just as some Christian priests and ministers are doing today behind the Iron Curtain. Right here in America today there are white ministers, priests and rabbis who have shed blood in the support of our struggle against a web of human injustice, much of which is supported by immoral man-made laws.

Playboy: Segregation laws?

Martin Luther King: Specifically, court injunctions. Though the rights of the First Amendment guarantee that any citizen or group of citizens may engage in peaceable assembly, the South has seized upon the device of invoking injunctions to block our direct-action civil rights demonstrations. When you get set to stage a nonviolent demonstration, the city simply secures an injunction to cease and desist. Southern courts are well known for “sitting on” this type of case; conceivably a two- or three-year delay could be incurred. At first we found this to be a highly effective subterfuge against us. We first experienced it in Montgomery when, during the bus boycott, our car pool was outlawed by an injunction. An injunction also destroyed the protest movement in Talladega, Alabama. Another injunction outlawed the oldest civil rights organization, the NAACP, from the whole state of Alabama. Still another injunction thwarted our organization’s efforts in Albany, Georgia. Then in Birmingham, we felt that we had to take a stand and disobey a court injunction against demonstrations, knowing the consequences and being prepared to meet them—or the unjust law would break our movement.

We did not take this step hastily or rashly. We gave the matter intense thought and prayer before deciding that the right thing was being done. And when we made our decision, I announced our plan to the press, making it clear that we were not anarchists advocating lawlessness, but that in good conscience we could not comply with a misuse of the judicial process in order to perpetuate injustice and segregation. When our plan was made known, it bewildered and immobilized our segregationist opponents. We felt that our decision had been morally as well as tactically right—in keeping with God’s law as well as with the spirit of our nonviolent direct-action program.

Playboy: If it’s morally right for supporters of civil rights to violate segregation laws which they consider unjust, why is it wrong for segregationists to resist the enforcement of integration laws which they consider unjust?

Martin Luther King: Because segregation, as even the segregationists know in their hearts, is morally wrong and sinful. If it weren’t, the white South would not be haunted as it is by a deep sense of guilt for what it has done to the Negro—guilt for patronizing him, degrading him, brutalizing him, depersonalizing him, thingifying him; guilt for lying to itself. This is the source of the schizophrenia that the South will suffer until it goes through its crisis of conscience.

Playboy: Is this crisis imminent?

Martin Luther King: It may not come next week or next year, but it is certainly more imminent in the South than in the North. If the South is honest with itself, it may well outdistance the North in the improvement of race relations.

Playboy: Why?

Martin Luther King: Well, the Northern white, having had little actual contact with the Negro, is devoted to an abstract principle of cordial interracial relations. The North has long considered, in a theoretical way, that it supported brotherhood and the equality of man, but the truth is that deep prejudices and discriminations exist in hidden and subtle and covert disguises. The South’s prejudice and discrimination, on the other hand, has been applied against the Negro in obvious, open, overt and glaring forms—which make the problem easier to get at. The Southern white man has the advantage of far more actual contact with Negroes than the Northerner. A major problem is that this contact has been paternalistic and poisoned by the myth of racial superiority.

Playboy: Many Southern whites, supported by the “research” of several Southern anthropologists, vow that white racial superiority—and Negro inferiority—are a biological fact.

Martin Luther King: You may remember that during the rise of Nazi Germany, a rash of books by respected German scientists appeared, supporting the master-race theory. This utterly ignorant fallacy has been so thoroughly refuted by the social scientists, as well as by medical science, that any individual who goes on believing it is standing in an absolutely misguided and diminishing circle. The American Anthropological Association has unanimously adopted a resolution repudiating statements that Negroes are biologically, in innate mental ability or in any other way inferior to whites. The collective weight and authority of world scientists are embodied in a Unesco report on races which flatly refutes the theory of innate superiority among any ethnic group. And as far as Negro “blood” is concerned, medical science finds the same four blood types in all race groups.

When the Southern white finally accepts this simple fact—as he eventually must—beautiful results will follow, for we will have come a long way toward transforming his master-servant perspective into a person-to-person perspective. The Southern white man, discovering the “nonmyth” Negro, exhibits all the passion of the new convert, seeing the black man as a man among men for the first time. The South, if it is to survive economically, must make dramatic changes, and these must include the Negro. People of good will in the South, who are the vast majority, have the challenge to be open and honest, and to turn a deaf ear to the shrill cries of the irresponsible few on the lunatic fringe. I think and pray they will.

Playboy: Whom do you include among “the irresponsible few”?

Martin Luther King: I include those who preach racism and commit violence; and those who, in various cities where we have sought to peacefully demonstrate, have sought to goad Negroes into violence as an excuse for violent mass reprisal. In Birmingham, for example, on the day it was flashed about the world that a “peace pact” had been signed between the moderate whites and the Negroes, Birmingham’s segregationist forces reacted with fury, swearing vengeance against the white businessmen who had “betrayed” them by negotiating with Negroes. On Saturday night, just outside of Birmingham, a Ku Klux Klan meeting was held, and that same night, as I mentioned earlier, a bomb ripped the home of my brother, the Reverend A.D. King, and another bomb was planted where it would have killed or seriously wounded anyone in the motel room which I had been occupying. Both bombings had been timed just as Birmingham’s bars closed on Saturday midnight, as the streets filled with thousands of Negroes who were not trained in nonviolence, and who had been drinking. Just as whoever planted the bombs had wanted to happen, fighting began, policemen were stoned by Negroes, cars were overturned and fires started.

Playboy: Were none of your S.C.L.C. workers involved?

Martin Luther King: If they had been, there would have been no riot, for we believe that only just means may be used in seeking a just end. We believe that lasting gains can be made—and they have been made—only by practicing what we preach: a policy of nonviolent, peaceful protest. The riots, North and South, have involved mobs—not the disciplined, nonviolent, direct-action demonstrators with whom I identify. We do not condone lawlessness, looting and violence committed by the racist or the reckless ofany color.

I must say, however, that riots such as have occurred do achieve at least one partially positive effect: They dramatically focus national attention upon the Negro’s discontent. Unfortunately, they also give the white majority an excuse, a provocation, to look away from the cause of the riots—the poverty and the deprivation and the degradation of the Negro, especially in the slums an ghettos where the riots occur—and to talk instead of looting, and of the breakdown of law and order. It is never circulated that some of the looters have been white people, similarly motivated by their own poverty. In one riot in a Northern city, aside from the Negroes and Puerto Ricans who were arrested, there were also 158 white people—including mothers stealing food, children’s shoes and other necessity items. The poor, white and black, were rebelling together against the establishment.

Playboy: Whom do you mean by “the establishment”?

Martin Luther King: I mean the white leadership—which I hold as responsible as anyone for the riots, for not removing the conditions that cause them. The deep frustration, the seething desperation of the Negro today is a product of slum housing, chronic poverty, woefully inadequate education and substandard schools. The Negro is trapped in a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign, caught in a vicious socioeconomic vise. And he is ostracized as is no other minority group in America by the evil of oppressive and constricting prejudice based solely upon his color. A righteous man has no alternative but to resist such an evil system. If he does not have the courage to resist nonviolently, then he runs the risk of a violent emotional explosion. As much as I deplore violence, there is one evil that is worse than violence, and that’s cowardice. It is still my basic article of faith that social justice can be achieved and democracy advanced only to the degree that there is firm adherence to nonviolent action and resistance in the pursuit of social justice. But America will be faced with the ever-present threat of violence, rioting and senseless crime as long as Negroes by the hundreds of thousands are packed into malodorous, rat-plagued ghettos; as long as Negroes remain smothered by poverty in the midst of an affluent society; as long as Negroes are made to feel like exiles in their own land; as long as Negroes continue to be dehumanized; as long as Negroes see their freedom endlessly delayed and diminished by the head winds of tokenism and small handouts from the white power structure. No nation can suffer any greater tragedy than to cause millions of its citizens to feel that they have no stake in their own society.

Understand that I am trying only to explain the reasons for violence and the threat of violence. Let me say again that by no means and under no circumstance do I condone outbreaks of looting and lawlessness. I feel that every responsible Negro leader must point out, with all possible vigor, that anyone who perpetrates and participates in a riot is immoral as well as impractical—that the use of immoral means will not achieve the moral end of racial justice.

Playboy: Whom do you consider the most responsible Negro leaders?

Martin Luther King: Well, I would say that Roy Wilkins of the NAACP has proved time and again to be a very articulate spokesman for the rights of Negroes. He is a most able administrator and a dedicated organization man with personal resources that have helped the whole struggle. Another outstanding man is Whitney Young Jr. of the National Urban League, an extremely able social scientist. He has developed a meaningful balance between militancy and moderation. James Farmer of CORE is another courageous, dedicated and thoughtful civil rights spokesman. I have always been impressed by how he maintains a freshness in his awareness of the meaning of the whole quest for freedom. And John Lewis of SNCC symbolizes the kind of strong militancy, courage and creativity that our youth have brought to the civil rights struggle. But I feel that the greatest leader of these times that the Negro has produced is A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, whose total integrity, depth of dedication and caliber of statesmanship set an example for us all.

Playboy: Many whites feel that last summer’s riots occurred because leadership is no longer being offered by the men you named.

Martin Luther King: The riots we have had are minute compared to what would have happened without their effective and restraining leadership. I am convinced that unless the nonviolent philosophy had emerged and taken hold among Negroes, North and South, by today the streets of dozens of American communities would have flowed with blood. Hundreds of cities might now be mourning countless dead, of both races, were it not for the nonviolent influence which has given political surgeons the time and opportunity to boldly and safely excise some aspects of the peril of violence that faced this nation in the summers of 1963 and 1964. The whole world has seen what happened in communities such as Harlem, Brooklyn, Rochester, Philadelphia, Newark, St. Petersburg and Birmingham, where this emergency operation was either botched or not performed at all.

Playboy: Still, doesn’t the very fact that riots have occurred tend to indicate that many Negroes are no longer heeding the counsels of nonviolence?

Martin Luther King: Not the majority, by any means. But it is true that some Negroes subscribe to a deep feeling that the tactic of nonviolence is not producing enough concrete victories. We have seen, in our experience, that nonviolence thrives best in a climate of justice. Violence grows to the degree that injustice prevails; the more injustice in a given community, the more violence, or potential violence, smolders in that community. I can give you a clear example. If you will notice, there have been fewer riots in the South. The reason for this is that the Negro in the South can see some visible, concrete victories in civil rights. Last year, the police would have been called if he sat down at a community lunch counter. This year, if he chooses to sit at that counter, he is served. More riots have occurred in the North because the fellow in Harlem, to name one Northern ghetto, can’t see any victories. He remains throttled, as he has always been, by vague, intangible economic and social deprivations. Until the concerned power structures begin to grapple creatively with these fundamental inequities, it will be difficult for violence to be eliminated. The longer our people see no progress, or halting progress, the easier it will be for them to yield to the counsels of hatred and demagoguery.

Playboy: The literature of the John Birch Society, accusing you of just such counsels, has branded you “a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”

Martin Luther King: As you know, they have sought to link many people with communism, including the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and a former President of the United States. So I’m in good company, at least. The Birchers thrive on sneer and smear, on the dissemination of half-truths and outright lies. It would be comfortable to dismiss them as the lunatic fringe—which, by and large, they are: But some priests and ministers have also shown themselves to be among them. They are a very dangerous group—and they could become even more dangerous if the public doesn’t reject the un-American travesty of patriotism that they espouse.

Playboy: Was there any basis in fact for the rumors, still circulating in some quarters, that last summer’s riots were fomented and stage-directed by Communist agitators?

Martin Luther King: I’m getting sick and tired of people saying that this movement has been infiltrated by Communists. There are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida. The FBI provided the best answer to this absurd rumor in its report to the President after a special investigation which he had requested. It stated that the riots were not caused or directed by any such groups, although they did try to capitalize upon and prolong the riots. All Negro leaders, including myself, were most happy with the publication of these findings, for the public whisperings had troubled us. We knew that it could prove vitally harmful to the Negro struggle if the riots had been catalyzed or manipulated by the Communists or some other extremist group. It would have sown the seed of doubt in the public’s mind that the Negro revolution is a genuine revolution, born from the same womb that produces all massive social upheavals—the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations.

Playboy: Is it destined to be a violent revolution?

Martin Luther King: God willing, no. But white Americans must be made to understand the basic motives underlying Negro demonstrations. Many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations are boiling inside the Negro, and he must release them. It is not a threat but a fact of history that if an oppressed people’s pent-up emotions are not nonviolently released, they will be violently released. So let the Negro march. Let him make pilgrimages to city hall. Let him go on freedom rides. And above all, make an effort to understand why he must do this. For if his frustration and despair are allowed to continue piling up, millions of Negroes will seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies. And this, inevitably, would lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Playboy: Among whites, the best-known and most feared of these militantly racist Negro sects is the Black Muslims. What is your estimation of its power and influence among the Negro masses?

Martin Luther King: Except in a few metropolitan ghettos, my experience has been that few Negroes have any interest at all in this organization, much less give any allegiance to its pessimistic doctrines. The Black Muslims are a quasi-religious, sociopolitical movement that has appealed to some Negroes who formerly were Christians. For the first time, the Negro was presented with a choice of a religion other than Christianity. What this appeal actually represented was an indictment of Christian failures to live up to Christianity’s precepts; for there is nothing in Christianity, nor in the Bible, that justifies racial segregation. But when the Negroes’ genuine fighting spirit rose during 1963, the appeal of the Muslims began to diminish.

Playboy: One of the basic precepts of black nationalism has been the attempt to engender a sense of communion between the American Negro and his African “brother,” a sense of identity between the emergence of black Africa and the Negro’s struggle for freedom in America. Do you feel that this is a constructive effort?

Martin Luther King: Yes, I do, in many ways. There is a distinct, significant and inevitable correlation. The Negro across America, looking at his television set, sees black statesmen voting in the United Nations on vital world issues, knowing that in many of America’s cities, he himself is not yet permitted to place his ballot. The Negro hears of black kings and potentates ruling in palaces, while he remains ghettoized in urban slums. It is only natural that Negroes would react to this extreme irony. Consciously or unconsciously, the American Negro has been caught up by the black Zeitgeist. He feels a deepening sense of identification with his black African brothers, and with his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean. With them he is moving with a sense of increasing urgency toward the promised land of racial justice.

Playboy: Do you feel that the African nations, in turn, should involve themselves more actively in American Negro affairs?

Martin Luther King: I do indeed. The world is now so small in terms of geographic proximity and mutual problems that no nation should stand idly by and watch another’s plight. I think that in every possible instance Africans should use the influence of their governments to make it clear that the struggle of their brothers in the U.S. is part of a worldwide struggle. In short, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, for we are tied together in a garment of mutuality. What happens in Johannesburg affects Birmingham, however indirectly. We are descendants of the Africans. Our heritage is Africa. We should never seek to break the ties, nor should the Africans.

Playboy: One of the most articulate champions of black Afro-American brotherhood has been Malcolm X, the former Black Muslim leader who recently renounced his racist past and converted to orthodox Mohammedanism. What is your opinion of him and his career?

Martin Luther King: I met Malcolm X once in Washington, but circumstances didn’t enable me to talk with him for more than a minute. He is very articulate, as you say, but I totally disagree with many of his political and philosophical views—at least insofar as I understand where he now stands. I don’t want to seem to sound self-righteous, or absolutist, or that I think I have the only truth, the only way. Maybe he does have some of the answer. I don’t know how he feels now, but I know that I have often wished that he would talk less of violence, because violence is not going to solve our problem. And in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice. Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief.

Playboy: For them or for whites?

Martin Luther King: For everyone, but mostly for them. Even the extremist leaders who preach revolution are invariably unwilling to lead what they know would certainly end in bloody, chaotic and total defeat; for in the event of a violent revolution, we would be sorely outnumbered. And when it was all over, the Negro would face the same unchanged conditions, the same squalor and deprivation—the only difference being that his bitterness would be even more intense, his disenchantment even more abject. Thus, in purely practical as well as moral terms, the American Negro has no rational alternative to nonviolence.

Playboy: You categorically reject violence as a tactical technique for social change. Can it not be argued, however, that violence, historically, has effected massive and sometimes constructive social change in some countries?

Martin Luther King: I’d be the first to say that some historical victories have been won by violence; the U.S. Revolution is certainly one of the foremost. But the Negro revolution is seeking integration, not independence. Those fighting for independence have the purpose to drive out the oppressors. But here in America, we’ve got to live together. We’ve got to find a way to reconcile ourselves to living in community, one group with the other. The struggle of the Negro in America, to be successful, must be waged with resolute efforts, but efforts that are kept strictly within the framework of our democratic society. This means reaching, educating and moving large enough groups of people of both races to stir the conscience of the nation.

Playboy: How do you propose to go about it?

Martin Luther King: Before we can make any progress, we must avoid retrogression—by doing everything in our power to avert further racial violence. To this end, there are three immediate steps that I would recommend. Firstly, it is mandatory that people of good will across America, particularly those who are in positions to wield influence and power, conduct honest, soul-searching analyses and evaluations of the environmental causes that spawn riots. All major industrial and ghetto areas should establish serious biracial discussions of community problems, and of ways to begin solving them. Instead of ambulance service, municipal leaders need to provide preventive medicine. Secondly, these communities should make serious efforts to provide work and training for unemployed youth, through job-and-training programs such as the HARYOU-ACT program in New York City. Thirdly, all cities concerned should make first-priority efforts to provide immediate quality education for Negro youth—instead of conducting studies for the next five years. Young boys and girls now in the ghettos must be enabled to feel that they count, that somebody cares about them; they must be able to feel hope. And on a longer-range basis, the physical ghetto itself must be eliminated, because these are the environmental conditions that germinate riots. It is both socially and morally suicidal to continue a pattern of deploring effects while failing to come to grips with the causes. Ultimately, law and order will be maintained only when justice and dignity are accorded impartially to all.

Playboy: Along with the other civil rights leaders, you have often proposed a massive program of economic aid, financed by the federal government, to improve the lot of the nation’s 20,000,000 Negroes. Just one of the projects you’ve mentioned, however—the HARYOU-ACT program to provide jobs for Negro youths—is expected to cost $141,000,000 over the next ten years, and that includes only Harlem. A nationwide program such as you propose would undoubtedly run into the billions.

Martin Luther King: About 50 billion, actually—which is less than one year of our present defense spending. It is my belief that with the expenditure of this amount, over a ten-year period, a genuine and dramatic transformation could be achieved in the conditions of Negro life in America. I am positive, moreover, that the money spent would be more than amply justified by the benefits that would accrue to the nation through a spectacular decline in school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting and other social evils.

Playboy: Do you think it’s realistic to hope that the Government would consider an appropriation of such magnitude other than for national defense?

Martin Luther King: I certainly do. This country has the resources to solve any problem once that problem is accepted as national policy. An example is aid to Appalachia, which has been made a policy of the federal government’s much touted war on poverty; one billion was proposed for its relief—without making the slightest dent in the defense budget. Another example is the fact that after World War Two, during the years when it became policy to build and maintain the largest military machine the world has ever known, America also took upon itself, through the Marshall Plan and other measures, the financial relief and rehabilitation of millions of European people. If America can afford to underwrite its allies and ex-enemies, it can certainly afford—and has a much greater obligation, as I see it—to do at least as well by its own no-less-needy countrymen.

Playboy: Do you feel it’s fair to request a multibillion-dollar program of preferential treatment for the Negro, or for any other minority group?

Martin Luther King: I do indeed. Can any fair-minded citizen deny that the Negro has been deprived? Few people reflect that for two centuries the Negro was enslaved, and robbed of any wages—potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation. It is an economic fact that a program such as I propose would certainly cost far less than any computation of two centuries of unpaid wages plus accumulated interest. In any case, I do not intend that this program of economic aid should apply only to the Negro; it should benefit the disadvantaged of all races.

Within common law, we have ample precedents for special compensatory programs, which are regarded as settlements. American Indians are still being paid for land in a settlement manner. Is not two centuries of labor, which helped to build this country, as real a commodity? Many other easily applicable precedents are readily at hand: our child labor laws, social security, unemployment compensation, man-power retraining programs. And you will remember that America adopted a policy of special treatment for her millions of veterans after the War—a program which cost far more than a policy of preferential treatment to rehabilitate the traditionally disadvantaged Negro would cost today.

The closest analogy is the GI Bill of Rights. Negro rehabilitation in America would require approximately the same breadth of program—which would not place an undue burden on our economy. Just as was the case with the returning soldier, such a bill for the disadvantaged and impoverished could enable them to buy homes without cash, at lower and easier repayment terms. They could negotiate loans from banks to launch businesses. They could receive, as did ex-GIs, special points to place them ahead in competition for civil service jobs. Under certain circumstances of physical disability, medical care and long-term financial grants could be made available. And together with these rights, a favorable social climate could be created to encourage the preferentialemployment of the disadvantaged, as was the case for so many years with veterans. During those years, it might be noted, there was no appreciable resentment of the preferential treatment being given to the special group. America was only compensating her veterans for their time lost from school or from business.

Playboy: If a nationwide program of preferential employment for Negroes were to be adopted, how would you propose to assuage the resentment of whites who already feel that their jobs are being jeopardized by the influx of Negroes resulting from desegregation?

Martin Luther King: We must develop a federal program of public works, retraining and jobs for all—so that none, white or black, will have cause to feel threatened. At the present time, thousands of jobs a week are disappearing in the wake of automation and other production efficiency techniques. Black and white, we will all be harmed unless something grand and imaginative is done. The unemployed, poverty-stricken white man must be made to realize that he is in the very same boat with the Negro. Together, they could exert massive pressure on the Government to get jobs for all. Together, they could form a grand alliance. Together, they could merge all people for the good of all.

Playboy: If Negroes are also granted preferential treatment in housing, as you propose, how would you allay the alarm with which many white homeowners, fearing property devaluation, greet the arrival of Negroes in hitherto all-white neighborhoods?

Martin Luther King: We must expunge from our society the myths and half-truths that engender such groundless fears as these. In the first place, there is no truth to the myth that Negroes depreciate property. The fact is that most Negroes are kept out of residential neighborhoods so long that when one of us is finally sold a home, it’s already depreciated. In the second place, we must dispel the negative and harmful atmosphere that has been created by avaricious and unprincipled realtors who engage in “blockbusting.” If we had in America really serious efforts to break down discrimination in housing and at the same time a concerted program of Government aid to improve housing for Negroes. I think that many white people would be surprised at how many Negroes would choose to live among themselves, exactly as Poles and Jews and other ethnic groups do.

Playboy: The B’nai B’rith, a prominent social-action organization which undertakes on behalf of the Jewish people many of the activities that you ask the Government to perform for Negroes, is generously financed by Jewish charities and private donations. All of the Negro civil rights groups, on the other hand—including your own—are perennially in financial straits and must rely heavily on white philanthropy in order to remain solvent. Why do they receive so little support from Negroes?

Martin Luther King: We have to face and live with the fact that the Negro has not developed a sense of stewardship. Slavery was so divisive and brutal, so molded to break up unity, that we never developed a sense of oneness, as in Judaism. Starting with the individual family unit, the Jewish people are closely knit into what is, in effect, one big family. But with the Negro, slavery separated families from families, and the pattern of disunity that we see among Negroes today derives directly from this cruel fact of history. It is also a cruel fact that the Negro, generally speaking, has not developed a responsible sense of financial values. The best economists say that your automobile shouldn’t cost more than half of your annual income, but we see many Negroes earning $7000 a year paying $5000 for a car. The home, it is said, should not cost more than twice the annual income, but we see many Negroes earning, say, $8000 a year living in a $30,000 home. Negroes, who amount to about 11 percent of the American population, are reported to consume over 40 percent of the Scotch whisky imported into the U.S., and to spend over $72,000,000 a year in jewelry stores. So when we come asking for civil rights donations, or help for the United Negro College Fund, most Negroes are trying to make ends meet.

Playboy: The widespread looting that took place during last summer’s riots would seem to prove your point. Do you agree with those who feel that this looting—much of which was directed against Jewish-owned stores—was anti-Semitic in motivation?

Martin Luther King: No, I do not believe that the riots could in any way be considered expressions of anti-Semitism. It’s true, as I was particularly pained to learn, that a large percentage of the looted stores were owned by our Jewish friends, but I do not feel that anti-Semitism was involved. A high percentage of the merchants serving most Negro communities simply happen to be Jewish. How could there be anti-Semitism among Negroes when our Jewish friends have demonstrated their commitment to the principle of tolerance and brotherhood not only in the form of sizable contributions, but in many other tangible ways, and often at great personal sacrifice? Can we ever express our appreciation to the rabbis who chose to give moral witness with us in St. Augustine during our recent protest against segregation in that unhappy city? Need I remind anyone of the awful beating suffered by Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld of Cleveland when he joined the civil rights workers there in Hattiesburg, Mississippi? And who can ever forget the sacrifice of two Jewish lives, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, in the swamps of Mississippi? It would be impossible to record the contribution that the Jewish people have made toward the Negro’s struggle for freedom—it has been so great.

Playboy: In conspicuous contrast, according to a recent poll conducted by Ebony, only one Negro in ten has ever participated physically in any form of social protest. Why?

Martin Luther King: It is not always sheer numbers that are the measure of public support. As I see it, every Negro who does participate represents the sympathy and the moral backing of thousands of others. Let us never forget how one photograph, of those Birmingham policemen with their knees on that Negro woman on the ground, touched something emotionally deep in most Negroes in America, no matter who they were. In city after city, where S.C.L.C. has helped to achieve sweeping social changes, it has been not only because of the quality of its members’ dedication and discipline, but because of the moral support of many Negroes who never took an active part. It’s significant, I think, that during each of our city struggles, the usual average of crimes committed by Negroes has dropped to almost nothing.

But it is true, undeniably, that there are many Negroes who will never fight for freedom—yet who will be eager enough to accept it when it comes. And there are millions of Negroes who have never known anything but oppression, who are so devoid of pride and self-respect that they have resigned themselves to segregation. Other Negroes, comfortable and complacent, consider that they areabove the struggle of the masses. And still others seek personal profit from segregation.

Playboy: Many Southern whites have accused you of being among those who exploit the race problem for private gain. You are widely believed throughout the South, in fact, to have amassed a vast personal fortune in the course of your civil rights activities.

Martin Luther King: Me wealthy? This is so utterly fallacious and erroneous that I often wonder where it got started. For the sixth straight year since I have been S.C.L.C.’s president, I have rejected our board’s insistent recommendation that I accept some salary beyond the one dollar a year which I receive, which entitles me to participate in our employees’ group insurance plan. I have rejected also our board’s offer of financial gifts as a measure and expression of appreciation. My only salary is from my church, $4000 a year, plus $2000 more a year for what is known as “pastoral care.” To earn a grand total of about $10,000 a year, I keep about $4000 to $5000 a year for myself from the honorariums that I receive from various speaking engagements. About 90 percent of my speaking is for S.C.L.C., and it brings into our treasury something around $200,000 a year. Additionally, I get a fairly sizable but fluctuating income in the form of royalties from my writings. But all of this, too. I give to my church, or to my alma mater, Morehouse College, here in Atlanta.

I believe as sincerely as I believe anything that the struggle for freedom in which S.C.L.C. is engaged is not one that should reward any participant with individual wealth and gain. I think I’d rise up in my grave if I died leaving two or three hundred thousand dollars. But people just don’t seem to believe that this is the way I feel about it. If I have any weaknesses, they are not in the area of coveting wealth. My wife knows this well; in fact, she feels that I overdo it. But the Internal Revenue people, they stay on me; they feel sure that one day they are going to find a fortune stashed in a mattress. To give you some idea of my reputed affluence, just last week I came in from a trip and learned that a television program had announced I was going to purchase an expensive home in an all-white neighborhood here in Atlanta. It was news to me!

Playboy: Your schedule of speaking engagements and civil rights commitments throughout the country is a punishing one—often 20 hours a day, seven days a week, according to reports. How much time do you get to spend at home?

Martin Luther King: Very little, indeed. I’ve averaged not more than two days a week at home here in Atlanta over the past year—or since Birmingham, actually. I’m away two and three weeks at a time, mostly working in communities across the South. Wherever I am, I try to be in a pulpit as many Sundays as possible. But every day when I’m at home, I break from the office for dinner and try to spend a few hours with the children before I return to the office for some night work. And on Tuesdays when I’m not out of town, I don’t go to the office. I keep this for my quiet day of reading and silence and meditation, and an entire evening with Mrs. King and the children.

Playboy: If you could have a week’s uninterrupted rest with no commitments whatever, how would you spend it?

Martin Luther King: It’s difficult to imagine such a thing, but if I had the luxury of an entire week, I would spend it meditating and reading, refreshing myself spiritually and intellectually. I have a deep nostalgia for the periods in the past that I was able to devote in this manner. Amidst the struggle, amidst the frustrations, amidst the endless work, I often reflect that I am forever giving—never pausing to take in. I feel urgently the need for even an hour of time to get away, to withdraw, to refuel. I need more time to think through what is being done, to take time out from the mechanics of the movement, to reflect on the meaning of the movement.

Playboy: If you were marooned on the proverbial desert island, and could have with you only one book—apart from the Bible—what would it be?

Martin Luther King: That’s tough. Let me think about it—one book, not the Bible. Well, I think I would have to pick Plato’s Republic. I feel that it brings together more of the insights of history than any other book. There is not a creative idea extant that is not discussed, in some way, in this work. Whatever realm of theology or philosophy is one’s interest—and I am deeply interested in both—somewhere along the way, in this book, you will find the matter explored.

Playboy: If you could send someone—anyone—to that desert island in your stead, who would it be?

Martin Luther King: That’s another tough one. Let me see, I guess I wouldn’t mind seeing Mr. Goldwater dispatched to a desert island. I hope they’d feed him and everything, of course. I am nonviolent, you know. Politically, though, he’s already on a desert island, so it may be unnecessary to send him there.

Playboy: We take it you weren’t overly distressed by his defeat in the Presidential race.

Martin Luther King: Until that defeat, Goldwater was the most dangerous man in America. He talked soft and nice, but he gave aid and comfort to the most vicious racists and the most extreme rightists in America. He gave respectability to views totally alien to the democratic process. Had he won, he would have led us down a fantastic path that would have totally destroyed America as we know it.

Playboy: Until his withdrawal from the race following Goldwater’s nomination, Alabama’s Governor Wallace was another candidate for the Presidency. What’s your opinion of his qualifications for that office?

Martin Luther King: Governor Wallace is a demagog with a capital D. He symbolizes in this country many of the evils that were alive in Hitler’s Germany. He is a merchant of racism, peddling hate under the guise of States’ rights. He wants to turn back the clock, for his own personal aggrandizement, and he will do literally anything to accomplish this. He represents the misuse, the corruption, the destruction of leadership. I am not sure that he believes all the poison that he preaches, but he is artful enough to convince others that he does. Instead of guiding people to new peaks of reasonableness, he intensifies misunderstanding, deepens suspicion and prejudice. He is perhaps the most dangerous racist in America today.

Playboy: One of the most controversial issues of the past year, apart from civil rights, was the question of school prayer, which has been ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court. Governor Wallace, among others, has denounced the decision. How do you feel about it?

Martin Luther King: I endorse it. I think it was correct. Contrary to what many have said, it sought to outlaw neither prayer nor belief in God. In a pluralistic society such as ours, who is to determine what prayer shall be spoken, and by whom? Legally, constitutionally or otherwise, the state certainly has no such right. I am strongly opposed to the efforts that have been made to nullify the decision. They have been motivated, I think, by little more than the wish to embarrass the Supreme Court. When I saw Brother Wallace going up to Washington to testify against the decision at the Congressional hearings, it only strengthened my conviction that the decision was right.

Playboy: Governor Wallace has intimated that President Johnson, in championing the cause of civil rights only since he became Vice-President, may be guilty of “insincerity.”

Martin Luther King: How President Johnson may or may not have felt about or voted on civil rights during his years in Congress is less relevant, at this point, than what he has said and done about it during his tenure as President of the United States. In my opinion, he has done a good job up to now. He is an extremely keen political man, and he has demonstrated his wisdom and his commitment in forth-rightly coming to grips with the problem. He does not tire of reminding the nation of the moral issues involved. My impression is that he will remain a strong President for civil rights.

Playboy: Late in 1963, you wrote, “As I look toward 1964, one fact is unmistakably clear: The thrust of the Negro toward full emancipation will increase rather than decrease.” As last summer’s riots testified, these words were unhappily prophetic. Do you foresee more violence in the year ahead?

Martin Luther King: To the degree that the Negro is not thwarted in his thrust forward, I believe that one can predict less violence. I am not saying that there will be no demonstrations. There assuredly will, for the Negro in America has not made one civil rights gain without tense legal and extralegal pressure. If the Constitution were today applied equally and impartially to all of America’s citizens, in every section of the country, in every court and code of law, there would be no need for any group of citizens to seek extra-legal redress.

Our task has been a difficult one, and will continue to be, for privileged groups, historically, have not volunteered to give up their privileges. As Reinhold Niebuhr has written, individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily abandon their unjust posture, but groups tend to be more immoral, and more intransigent, than individuals. Our nonviolent direct-action program, therefore—which has proved its strength and effectiveness in more than a thousand American cities where some baptism of fire has taken place—will continue to dramatize and demonstrate against local injustices to the Negro until the last of those who impose those injustices are forced to negotiate; until, finally, the Negro wins the protections of the Constitution that have been denied to him; until society, at long last, is stricken gloriously and incurably color-blind.

Playboy: In well-earned recognition of your dedication to and leadership of the struggle to achieve these goals, you became, in October of last year, the youngest man ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. What was your reaction to the news? MARTIN LUTHER KING: It made me feel very humble indeed. But I would like to think that the award is not a personal tribute, but a tribute to the entire freedom movement, and to the gallant people of both races who surround me in the drive for civil rights which will make the American dream a reality. I think that this internationally known award will call even more attention to our struggle, gain even greater sympathy and understanding for our cause, from people all over the world. I like to think that the award recognizes symbolically the gallantry, the courage and the amazing discipline of the Negro in America, for these things are to his eternal credit. Though we have had riots, the bloodshed that we would have known without the discipline of nonviolence would have been truly frightening. I know that many whites feel the civil rights movement is getting out of hand; this may reassure them. It may let them see that basically this is a disciplined struggle, let them appreciate the meaning of our struggle, let them see that a great struggle for human freedom can occur within the framework of a democratic society.

Playboy: Do you feel that this goal will be achieved within your lifetime?

Martin Luther King: I confess that I do not believe this day is around the corner. The concept of supremacy is so embedded in the white society that it will take many years for color to cease to be a judgmental factor. But it is certainly my hope and dream. Indeed, it is the keystone of my faith in the future that we will someday achieve a thoroughly integrated society. I believe that before the turn of the century, if trends continue to move and develop as presently, we will have moved a long, long way toward such a society.

Playboy: Do you intend to dedicate the rest of your life, then, to the Negro cause?

Martin Luther King: If need be, yes. But I dream of the day when the demands presently cast upon me will be greatly diminished. I would say that in the next five years, though, I can’t hope for much letup—either in the South or in the North. After that time, it is my hope that things will taper off a bit.

Playboy: If they do, what are your plans?

Martin Luther King: Well, at one time I dreamed of pastoring for a few years, and then of going to a university to teach theology. But I gave that up when I became deeply involved in the civil rights struggle. Perhaps, in five years or so, if the demands on me have lightened, I will have the chance to make that dream come true.

Playboy: In the meanwhile, you are now the universally acknowledged leader of the American civil rights movement, and chief spokesman for the nation’s 20,000,000 Negroes. Are there ever moments when you feel awed by this burden of responsibility, or inadequate to its demands?

Martin Luther King: One cannot be in my position, looked to by some for guidance, without being constantly reminded of the awesomeness of its responsibility. I live with one deep concern: Am I making the right decisions? Sometimes I am uncertain, and I must look to God for guidance. There was one morning I recall, when I was in the Birmingham jail, in solitary, with not even my lawyers permitted to visit, and I was in a nightmare of despair. The very future of our movement hung in the balance, depending upon capricious turns of events over which I could have no control there, incommunicado, in an utterly dark dungeon. This was about ten days after our Birmingham demonstrations began. Over 400 of our followers had gone to jail; some had been bailed out, but we had used up all of our money for bail, and about 300 remained in jail, and I felt personally responsible. It was then that President Kennedy telephoned my wife, Coretta. After that, my jail conditions were relaxed, and the following Sunday afternoon—it was Easter Sunday—two S.C.L.C. attorneys were permitted to visit me. The next day, word came to me from New York that Harry Belafonte had raised $50,000 that was available immediately for bail bonds, and if more was needed, he would raise that. I cannot express what I felt, but I knew at that moment that God’s presence had never left me, that He had been with me there in solitary.

I subject myself to self-purification and to endless self-analysis; I question and soul-search constantly into myself to be as certain as I can that I am fulfilling the true meaning of my work, that I am maintaining my sense of purpose, that I am holding fast to my ideals, that I am guiding my people in the right direction. But whatever my doubts, however heavy the burden, I feel that I must accept the task of helping to make this nation and this world a better place to live in—for all men, black and white alike.

I never will forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother. “What do you want?” the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked him straight in the eye and answered, “Fee-dom.” She couldn’t even pronounce it, but she knew. It was beautiful! Many times when I have been in sorely trying situations, the memory of that little one has come into my mind, and has buoyed me.

Similarly, not long ago, I toured in eight communities of the state of Mississippi. And I have carried with me ever since a visual image of the penniless and the unlettered, and of the expressions on their faces—of deep and courageous determination to cast off the imprint of the past and become free people. I welcome the opportunity to be a part of this great drama, for it is a drama that will determine America’s destiny. If the problem is not solved, America will be on the road to its self-destruction. But if it is solved, America will just as surely be on the high road to the fulfillment of the founding fathers’ dream, when they wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

What links social and economic conservatives? What say you?

2011-01-10T10:51:00.002+05:30

Can any of us explain what links social conservatives with economic conservatives. The last few times I checked, economic conservatism continues to produce elitism of the sort that excludes poor people regardless of their religion or race. Yet, we also cannot deny the undercurrent of Christian fundamentalism and white supremacy that binds right-wingers. And this is nothing new. Just look at the slave catchers, slave masters and slaves? Before you get defensive and think that you're being called a racist, read on, because slavery is a was long era in our collective history, and race is an entire body of knowledge that helps us think critically, not blindly.

So, the slaves were a poor undercaste, the slave-catchers made up of poor whites who almost never shifted up socially or economically, and the slave master who laughed all the way to the bank, and on the way to the seats of governments. How are things different today with working class whites pissed off at everybody, yet lining up behind wealthy economic conservatives rather than with immigrants and blacks who have always made more headway in shifting power - even in the days of union busting where working class whites were punished on the level of today's unemployment. Then, it took organized blacks to show America the power of unions (i.e. Pullman Porters), yet even today the groups are divided. Just look at the TEA party, and the slates of white terrorism after Emancipation, in defense of segregation, and now again with a biracial president who undoubtedly evokes images of the good anti-miscegenation fight fought in times gone by. What say you?

What say you of the fact that Joe the Plumber will never earn in the economic bracket that he so brashly defended during Obama's first presidential campaign? What say you about the Christian zealots who bomb, torture and maim then and now? For sure, those guys who bombed the 16 Street Church in Birmingham were Christians (not the mention Bull Conner), as were those guys who tied logging chains around James Byrd's ankles and drug him behind their pick-up truck. White working class Christians burn Korans and bomb government buildings, yet the rest of us are either foolish not to classify all whites as ridiculous, or we're just not willing to revisit that hate upon those who have benefitted from our oppression either directly or indirectly.

What say you about the elitism among the highest economic traders, the sort of group-think that lead to a vacuum of morality in the highest echelons of banking, on the order of financing the Middle Passage and/or profiting from the Holocaust? What say you about the wealthy medium sized company in Germany that leads innovations in it's industry, but started with a healthy endowment of contracts to melt down the gold teeth of those who 'perished' in concentration camps? Or what about the Lehman Bros who crossed to America from the north Atlantic, not the south, a fact that simply gave them the opportunity to trade in the abundance of cotton in Montgomery rather than be doomed to pick it? What say you? What say you about the irony of American freedom, that we espouse tolerance and 'diversity' while annihilating the native peoples and destroying the natural resources to the extent of blowing holes in the Earth's atmosphere? Who should care if we don't? What say you?

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Pink rupee - India's rise of gay spending power - BBC India Business Rep...

2011-01-07T10:15:00.000+05:30

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Dear CongressMEN Sessions and Shelby, and Representative Roby:

2011-01-06T11:22:00.000+05:30

The repeal of DADT has finally met with success. Even though you party did not support the repeal, and even though you think that there are sound moral arguments against it, I am still waiting for your response on how your moral arguments contribute to the stigma and ultimate slate of deaths among gay and lesbian teens. You cannot discuss your Christian values in a vacuum of the rising death toll due to the stigma against us, where kids in schools and at home are the victims.

DADT is a symbolic gesture towards all Americans to recognize our humanity and citizenship. Till now, gay and lesbian Americans have been comfortably treated as second class citizens, and our genitals have been used as a wedge issue. It's a metaphoric castration or genital mutilation to discuss our sex lives without discussion our personhood and humanity. We're uncles, aunts, mothers, fathers, teachers, preachers and congressmen just like you. We take care of family and friends. Yet, in public, conservatives only speak about what they THINK that we do with our genitals.

Moreover, your Alabama collegues wrote me a conciliatory letter just last year when I described one of many instances where I suffered humiliation at the hands of prejudice government employees in public spaces. I suffered all through school, too, because I was an effeminate child who many Christians could not see fit to treat like anything more than a dog. Are these the Christians with whom you share values? My great-grandparents started a church in Elmore county and it still stands as a hub of compassion-building and healing. Yet, such churches were targeted by white Christian terrorists for much of the last century. I wonder whose values they represented. And what ever happened to teaching and preaching respect for all Americans, including those who may not subscribe to a narrow interpretation of the Bible, for Jesus taught dialogue and respect, not one-upsmanship and annihilation of those who don't live by your Christian values.

I am reading Dr. Martin Luther King's 1963 'Why We Can't Wait' and am struck by how folks in Alabama have always been divided on Civil Rights - and these were all 'good' Christians, just like you, I suppose, because all the same churches still stand, and still stand divided and polarize our population. I am your constituent and I sincerely appeal to you to reconsider your heretofore black/white approach to gay rights. Where is the compromise?

Is it a compromise of your values to engage our administration in dialogue rather than pursuing a course of canceling all advances for your party's political gain? Is it a compromise for you to speak out against stigma BEFORE you are presented with the dead gay body of Tyler Clementi to name just one of the many untold stories. Your constituents lose in this crossfire, and that's the real story here. If speaking out against us is the only way to gain, then we all surely get shot. Please work with the administration to advance civil rights for all within these borders, and stand as a global beacon of justice, not just-us-conservatives. Please stand on the side of goodness, not just remain the party of no, and hate, masked under conservative values. There is far too much at stake for us all.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Early morning sugar in Delhi

2010-12-13T12:41:00.001+05:30

Early-to-rise house guests who demand sugar with their morning tea is too funny. Forget about the threats to sleep from the indoors, here I thought that I somehow needed to escape from the litany of folks that wake me up from outside my house: the fruit, vegetable, carpet, recycling, weaving and gardening wallas to name a few. Then there are the kids who live at the construction site at the end of the block. Playtime becomes their school, and their have no bones about play noise. At least kids' noise is pleasing to the ear (except for when they spot me on my balcony and decide to make a game of calling me Habshi, while my neighbors stand as mute witnesses. Neighbors are not so quiet when an allege Muslim comes around; the guy next door literally tried to ambush us for hosting a brown and bearded friend wearing a kurta. But what to say about neighbors who honk incessantly on a dead-end road?!? Or the ones who pace back and forth on the street, having a phone conversation that each of us is forced to follow from all the way inside our homes. Sugar is sweet compared to any of this.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Nina Simone - African mailman

2010-12-11T18:18:00.000+05:30

The story of Black music in America, or, the birth of a nation.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

An Open Letter to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in my hometown

2010-11-27T22:04:00.000+05:30

Dear Seminarians, attention Albert Mohler, president:

My name is Diepiriye and I grew up in Louisville, but now live in New Delhi, India. Some say that I left Louisville as soon as I finished high school, and left America as soon as I graduated from college, and never went back, because I am running away from something, an idea I used to reject. Yet, as I continue to look at the extreme level of hate directed towards me, I can no longer deny that I am running. I decided to leave Louisville as a child because of the bullying. That's exile, that's not pleasure travel, though I have made the best of it and have a happy life.

I am a sissy. To be clear, let's use the language that Christian kids taught me in school: "Sissy, faggot, girly, sugar in his pants." These are some of the terms that Christian kids used in our Christian town, and Christian adults stood by and watched. No one protected me. Other than rejecting hate as a basis of operation, perhaps the only reason that I do not hate Christians in return is that luckily many Christians, like my grandparents, are able to embrace Jesus' message of compassion, above the sentiment of judgement. I was loved whole heartedly at home, but the dominant ethos of Louisville is clearly one that is quite consistent with the Southern Baptist disdain for homosexuals; I never felt safe in my own hometown because of the justification for anti-homosexual rhetoric, which effectively invited bullying. At 16 I was fortunate enough to encounter a local gay youth support group. Interestingly, two peers in that group grew up in Southern Baptist homes, one was the son of a preacher. At sixteen years old, their parents became aware of their gayness and kicked the kids out of the house. Yes, I'd like to repeat that Southern Baptist parents kicked their sixteen year old children out of the house and initially cut all ties. How's that for following the life and teachings of Jesus? Kicking kids out, just like that, and back to church n SUnday to have their pastor validate their actions from the pulpit. No matter how much of hating the sin you preach, it's the sinners whose bodies lay their in the caskets at your mantles, should you even grant us a burial, since this, too is at your discretion.

I believe that your churches promotion of 'family values' valorizes the cruelty that sissies are subjected to as kids in schools and as professionals on jobs. I find this inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus, and am just curious as to how you cannot see how your devotion to heterosexualizing the Bible leaves room to spur on hate crimes, and here I include both the many Tyler Clementis, but also those who drop out of school because of the pressure, and end up walking the streets at night turning tricks for married men. Or how many get married and lead a double life? In your attempts to preach the gospel, you've made clear that it's OK to hate on homosexuals. By simplifying every sharp turns towards granting gay rights as anti-Christian, you provide Christian laypeople the ammunition to excuse themselves for their cruelty towards us, to excuse the cruelty they teach they kids to express in schools, and so naturally this carries over into policy and popular culture. How are voters mobilized by churches over gay rights as a wedge issue, yet, for example, poverty is a wider problem for all Americans, or our public schools are failing masses? There is no balance. There is no way to say 'hate the sin and love the sinner' in this socio-political climate. To be clear, it is not my aim to debate the nuances of Christian scripture, which is clearly an unsettled matter among your own ranks. I do, however, suggest that it is wholly inconsistent to preach intolerance when blood shed is the direct outcome. It is inconsistent with the life of Jesus, and seems to only focus on his death, his sacrifice, which seems a bit easy for your practitioners to not have to consider how Jesus actually lived in a world of contradictions. No one is called upon to build peace in your world, where again, the evidence on this matter are the numerous dead gay bodies piling up in America, and they are getting younger and younger. Yes, dead gay bodies are getting younger.

You are responsible and yet remain in the shadows, unaccountable. How many more dead gay bodies will you tolerate before compassion and genuine love of queer men and women takes a clear priority over whether not YOU and your faith agrees with our existence? Where's the Jesus that hung out with sinners and not just the self-righteous. Where's the theology that embraces diversity at the fundamental level instead of squashing, eliminating, segregating and scorning anything NOT just like you? Where's the fearlessness to not only confront change, but to accept that the way things were may not be the way things should be?

Until your church sincerely advocates for gay rights protections, including anti-discrimination legislation and intimate relationship and parenting parity, then you will continue to not only plant the seeds of hate and duplicity in your practitioners' hearts, but fertilize the next generation of leaders who, like some of the kids I encounter even now, simply cannot stand to be in the room with a sissy, cannot take a sissy seriously on any job, and finds each and any way to discredit us without even taking the opportunity to see our humanity. That's your preaching that's doing that and it's gone viral with a smile and heavy dose of entitlement that stinks of arrogance more than humility. From my perspective, that's pretty dehumanizing of a practice. Come back to the human side.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Marines Most Resistant To Openly Gay Troops

2010-11-27T21:02:00.001+05:30

It's true: Americans just don't trust homosexuals. No matter how cool people think we are on screens or on glossy pages or reality shows, we're not fit to teach kids, and certainly, as one Marine here put it, if you put two of us together, we're bound to date, break up and not ever get over it! No, regardless of how liberals some folks profess to be, few really sticks their necks out for us- it's the same sad ole American story where each group is left to fight and fend for themselves. And the reality STILL is that are second class citizens. No rights to marry, few protections from verbal and physical assault based on hate, biked and scorned in churches and administrations. Hence, just like all the analogies to racially integrating the military, it's not as if the nation - civilians or troops- will have some moral awakening one day and offer any reparations to the many dejected queer troops, or rise to any accountability for fueling a climate of hate that literally produces dead gay bodies!
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

"I wish to rain like a cloud," by Hoshang Merchant @ JNU Nov 2010

2010-11-22T18:08:00.000+05:30

Three short poems. Very thought provoking and meaningful.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

For Colored Girls, For the boy in Red: The Dead Gay Body

2010-11-21T20:50:00.000+05:30

A Low Down Dirty Shame

Two people

Sit here

Not side by side,

But back to back as usual,

Standing against one another.

They think that they ignore each other, but really they've just been ignoring themselves,

By never letting themselves be open,

They remained closed

And even didn’t trust themselves

Shhh, don’t tell nobody.

“How do you marry a women, ‘nd then turn around and let a man bend you over!?!”

“Ain't nobody bendin’ me over,” he quickly retorts.

“Oh, so…” she says

“So you da one doin’ da bendin’, issat what it is?”

Between them sits the dead gay body.

The gay body that the husband refuses to be,

The gay body the wife refuses to see in her own husband.

The promises,

The slights in words that reveal little but not a lot.

Hear the crowd,

The coos, the oohs, ahs and the ha-ha’s

The claps, the howls,

The sissy is dead.

Then the man says:

“I don’t wake up holding another man,

Walking down the street, holding some man’s hands

That’s gay

That ain’t me.”

That’s gay.

That's the dead gay body right there on the bed.

The boy in red who shall remain faceless,

Nameless,

Unseen,

Unsung,

Unheard,

Defeated by the tension the couple amassed between them.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Hottened Black Wench & Pearled White Lily

2010-11-17T16:15:00.004+05:30

In 1810,

Hottentot was displayed around galleries in London and Paris.

Locals came to see the spectacle.

And journalists spread news of the craze- the oddity made into a commodity.

Pictures of Hottentot and even her dead corps were preserved, venerated, dissected and studied.

A naked black wench,

Her flesh served up Hot,
Too hot to trot.

Like in today’s pole dancing,

Those who paid extra could tap that Hottentot ass.

And since they weren't touching her,

But her ass,

They could ignore the fact that they were reaching into a cage.

A brother from the Diaspora saw Hottentot on display and demanded that she be freed.

Naturally, the moral police of the day convinced the public that Hottentot desired to be caged and paraded around for whites to consume her flesh.

So Hottentot’s ass continued to tour Europe, and fans came,

But eventually dwindled.

To see her CAGED was not enough.

By 1814, men had tired of seeing her and demanded she fuck for pay,

Which the law allowed, and men devoured, much to white women’s chagrin.

I bet they lined up to screw her, men of all ages and stages in life.

Her black skin meant that it wasn’t really sex, just fucking.

Her black skin made her invisible

La Belle Hottentot

Her black skin closeted the spectacular parade of privilege encircling Ms. Baartman as she fended for her life in that northern jungle.

To say that she was a spectacle would defeat all of what Hottentot quickly came to iconicize: The cultured European.

Like a baby, nibbling too tightly on mommies sore tits, excited that there are these appendages spawning from tender gums,

The need to see thyself in the other is a basic form of narcissism.

At its most exaggerated, one paints the others ugliness as proof of they own beauty.

Hence, if Hottentot is odd,

White women were regular.

If Hottentot is grotesque

Then white women are definitively raffinesse

Where Hottentots’ protruding backside was vulgar,

A simply plump white woman’s arse is divine

Black is profane, and therefore

White is sacred.

Anything ‘white’ does to ‘black’ is by the grace of God.

Ms. Hottentot died a dejected whore on the streets of Paris

Her dead body caste and amputated

Studied and displayed

For a century of Parisians to see

Including those who portend to study power

Like Michel Foucault

Yet somehow

Don’t see the black body,

In any assessment,
Of how the white male body is punished,
And made a spectacle by the state.

It’s jarring how erasing race only closets race,
And protects power.

Oh sister, how your body has been abused.

Freed after decades of penal punishment for challenging the rule of explicit racism

-we still fight the IM-PLI-SHIIIT in most parts-

Mandela was able to repatriate Saarjite Baartman’s remains,

And offer her a proper Khosian burial,

Reaffirming her identity

As a human being.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

My Princess Boy

2010-11-02T09:46:00.000+05:30

AMAZING story. I am also a princess boy, and my folks had no idea how to deal, save for shower me with love. Still, the opportunity to explore this openly is way ahead of where most folks are today- and that's a statement about parenting NOT queer rights. I read a lot in the news each day, and it's rare that I see myself reflected in any way, let alone so positively. That's what's new in the age of Obama, and I predicted that two years ago. All bets are off and we get to change the conversation now that more Americans are actually paying attention and engaged in critical thinking about our society. Pluralism is NOT that plastic 'we're all the same' brand of multi-kulti that failed not only in Germany as Dr. Merkel recently stated shoring up her conservative base, but also from the perspective of those of us on the margins: Contemporary modern society is nowhere near liberal when kids are harassed to death at school- literally! Until that day...[insert Haile Sailasse's speech which Bob Marley turned into the song 'War']. Indeed, we fight everyday. Luckily, this kid won't have to fight at home, too.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

The Reason Why I Love Star Trek

2010-10-28T20:07:00.005+05:30

An episode in a clip. This is an incredibly beautiful birth of an alliance through peace and dialogue building. I truly love this franchise for always advocating that, and finally having one show that more fully reflects that. Just as Shran (the blue-skinned captain) calls people from Earth "Pink skins" Star Trek far too often confuses "human" society with middle class north American whiteness. This show at least puts that one central culture up against others, and not in the center as is the case with other Star Treks- maybe not DS9. Ironically, this episode is classic Star Trek, and represents the essence of my adoration for the series. Here, in the third series, of the last installment of the various television series, the dream of pluralism is for the first time actually reflected in both verse an action.

This clip also contains a prelude to the Federation of Planets - the NATO like conglomerate that the other Starships defend. Effectively, in setting the series prior to the era of even James Tiberius Kirk and Spock's ship, Enterprise has the unique opportunity in all of Star Trek to "boldly go where no man has gone before." Certainly the 2009 film build on that same generous advantage by setting up a new history to the Jim, Spock, Bones, Checkoff, Sulu, Uhura and Scotty. And yet few fans care to see the grave racial stereotypes imbedded in those characters. Luckily this latest film gave several glaring examples, including placing a Samurai sword in the Asian guy's hands. On that sixties trip, the racial diversity was supposed to represent a progressive Earth (read: America), one that had moved beyond the contemporary social turmoil hitting the newsstands each day during the original series run (1966-69).

What's significant about Enterprise is that it does consistently portray the nitty gritty of inter-stellular, inter-species cooperation and confrontation. Here's classic dialogue from this clip: Speaking on the Enterprise to Shran, the blue-skin captain, Captain Archer says, "We keep doing each other favors." Captain Shran responds: "Isn't that how alliances are born." The two captains toast on the Andorian captain's gift of his native ale that pretty much looks like that ultra blue 'thirst aid for that deep down body thirst'. Trekkies will think back to the entire previous two season where the blue-skin Andorians became intertwined in the naive explorations of our very first Starship Enterprise. Albino Andorians were even co-opted into battling Earth and it was again there that humans intervened on racism on somebody else's planet. In classic Star trek form, the captain feeds the audience a didactic rhetoric about how discrimination used to happen in Earth's distant past and this caused the apocalypse. When trying to raise social issues of discrimination throughout the franchise, Star Trek always relies on this 'distant past' narrative to relief modern fans of any real responsibility to take the lessons outside this fantasy context. I initially thought that the didactic rhetoric would make people think about social difference in our own lives and times. But, it seems that many are to stuck up on the fantasy.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

On ASSimilation: Sharron Angle tells Latino students they look Asian

2010-10-26T12:59:00.001+05:30

"So, that's what WE want is a secure and sovereign nation. I don't know that you all of you are Latino [she says waving her hands towards one section of the crowd] some of you look a little more Asian, to me, I don't know that ... and [as a white woman] I've been called the first Asian legislator [pause searching for words] in our Nevada State Assembly." BTW, Melting Pot = Stew or brew with some added spices for ethnic flare = ASSimilation. Walk like me, talk like me, think like me, and no matter what you look like, race don't count. Oh but it does. Why? Because "I don't know that you all of you are Latino," you could be anybody, and that scares me. it scares me so deeply that you'd better not show me how different you are, and we can go on and pretend that culture is only skin deep.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Sesame Street:Song: I Love My Hair

2010-10-19T09:56:00.000+05:30

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

I'm in the Urban Dictionary (through Clementi's back door):

2010-10-10T20:29:00.002+05:30

See if you can find the reference to LitGriot embedded in this AES student's blog. It's the B.O.M.B.

Below is the eloquent text by the anonymous young author, here is the screenshot:

1.	American Embassy School	25 up, 15 down
	buy american embassy school mugs, tshirts and magnets The American Embassy School (an international school in New Delhi, India) is comprised of a bunch of tools who like to wear converse and aviators(even indoors...yeah their douches) and listen to Bob Marley because for some reason everyone here believes that they are one of his lost sons. Outside excursions include shady bars such as Haze, RPM, Hookah, and The Gem because people here are too cheap and don't mind spending 30 rupees on shots that may or may not contain nuclear waste. You are either a hippie stoner, a nerdy stoner, a preppy stoner, or a Mormon. People are extremely diverse, we have one black person and we fire people for being gay. Popular lingo that travels around the hallways include: maan (like the way our best friend Bob Marley says it), fuck that shit, FML (because fmylife.com is trendy now), lets get fucked up! (every frikin day of the week). Don't worry, you'll probably develop an immunity to the smell of weed by the time you graduate. in the nurses office at the american embassy school on the morning of 420 nurse (looking at the huge line of students): boy, its seems like everyone needs eyedrops this morning. bob marley malcha marg aviators india international by naimonmarcus May 2, 2010 share this

Them belly full an' we hungry/A pot to cook, but the food not 'nough this Urban Dictionary posting seems to shout! Indeed, one can figure that the frustrations of the privileged and elite youth go just as deep to the heart as any other human's troubles, and that's perhaps what's so fascinating about this posting. As I read, I am confronted with the fact that it is freaky being an actual real live Black man in a place where black-masculinity is commercialized and attached to every manner of consumer good. For youth, both the Beastie Boys, and also the young people asserting themselves here in this South Delhi elite institution, all see Black masculinity as a means to both appear cool, but also transgressive. Iconography of Black men- the tie-dye Marley shirts, the B-Boy Break Dancing, the street jargon- these are all means for youth to distinguish themselves from the authorities in their lives, and no culture seems as transgressive as Negro culture. Whether outright black-face, or the white artists who literally stole Black music and moves for their own self-promotion, this is just a drag show. Worse, unlike the transgender drag shows in front of mostly gay audiences, these real life drag shows among youth have no embedded social critique. They are simply riding the tip of Black masculinity for brownie points with their elite friends. Isn't it erie that back on the plantation, having one's way with a Black slave wench was a rite of passage for the son's of land and slave-holding men. Today, the son's of land owning men only need to drag like Negroes, particularly when no one really wants us around in the flesh. Not here. If we were appreciated, there would be more. And those who were there would stay and spread the word. Instead, ...

In these spaces, it's rare to come across young minds such as the anonymous young author here, with such sharp critical thinking skills. Certainly, by white-washing the staff and reducing diversity to a Langston Hughes poem in English class, and an annual international food mela, then are we as educators presenting a genuine picture of a world that looks any different from what we have today. What we have today? Read the Urban Dictionary posting! I become distraught when the actions of adults feed cynicism in youth!

Riding Black masculinity for the cool factor must place a great deal of weight to represent upon the few Black males in that space. I was one, there WAS another. Otherwise there are REALLY but a hand few o' boys. At the school, there are no other Black men, and so few Black women that they hardly see one another in passing. Yet, our images are traded around us to signify someone else's hipness (again). Kids become more comfortable with their commercial image of Black people than an actual Black person. All this starts, perhaps, as a means for youth to disidentify with their parents. That's cool, that's typical to adolescent development. Yet, as this author points out, and I concur, there are several equally immature adults leading the American Embassy School in New Delhi. The recent events surrounding the spate of gay suicides among young people in America should prove as a wake-up call. You cannot fire educators for confronting homophobia in our schools. You cannot expect gay educators to remain the victims many were as kids, and as Clementi's example shows, unless we speak out, things won't just get better. Modern liberals are only as enlightened as they are forced to face the human condition- and that takes many liberals far outside the ivory gates and guards like those surrounding AES harassing anyone fitting that stereotype of being black, male and in an elite space. The guards, like many in liberal America, harbor such deep-seeded, implicit knowledge of black masculinity. There are too many folks fighting for their identities for any of us to stay silent about what it means to build peace and safety in schools, because clearly what we have is unsafe.

Gay kids come out now as early as some straight kids come out and identify with the layers of sexuality crafted upon young people's bodies as a normal part of growing up. The trouble is, that sort of crafting too often fails to match gay youth, and so the seamless social rejection in school is mirrored at home. There is no space of solace. Yet modernity, and the Internet in particular, have bridged the gap between gay youth and adults. The gap, as many have pointed out, is the normative homophobia even coded in the message here. There are gay educators world wide frightened of reaching out to the young Clementis. The fear is the the witch hunt that has been a normal part of American education, and is sustained in many parts of the country through a Christian right agenda. Yes, that agenda can be directly associated with the deaths of gay youth in America. The simple sort of pushing gay educators out of school that the Urban Dictionary posting describes is but one symptom of the deep-seeded tolerance for gay-bashing. Gay bodies, from childhood on, are somehow feasible targets for harassment from kids, and early on we learn that adults are not likely to intervene. Heck, adults may even join in, and then you have a real pow-wow.

Moreover, I love how the author puts these seemingly unrelated search words at the bottom. Marley and his lyrical messages, the hang-out area in Delhi for the young posers, and so on. Now, imagine if J.D. Salinger had access to the net in his younger years. BTW: "Share this."

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

"BED INTRUDER SONG"

2010-08-26T07:46:00.001+05:30

So, has anyone asked about his folks and how they are doing? Naw, that don't matter, this is just funny and entertaining.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Hitchcock, Zeal and the Velvet Rope

2010-06-19T01:24:00.000+05:30

Hitchcock, Zeal and the Velvet Rope

Opening scene: Midday in a comfortable white middle-class urban neighborhood. The stretch Oldsmobile tells us it’s era of prosperity immediately after the war. The scene freezes and a long list of credits plays against the melodic backdrop of a fluttering flute leading an orchestra. The credits finally slow down and stop with “Directed By ALFRED HITCHCOCK” plastered in the center of the screen. The frame then unfreezes, and a new busyness takes off. Slowly, the camera pans off center, to a ledge overlooking the otherwise docile scene. The flute fades and now we pause in front of a large parlor window whose curtains are suspiciously drawn tightly closed. A man yells from inside, and after a brief pause, the scene quickly switches to the inside of this fancy parlor where a handsome young blond man gasps out his last breath. One set of hands wrestles to hold down the victim’s arms, while the other tightens the rope around his neck. All three men wear fine suits, and now we catch a glimpse of the fine apartment, and the curiously large bay window.

(click to read the rest of the article at Popmatters.com)

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

2010-06-09T11:43:00.003+05:30

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Lt. Comdr. Stevie Wonder's Soul Power

2010-05-19T02:26:00.000+05:30

Wow, Jordi kissed the Enterprise. Enterprise's chief engineer literally conjured up a sexy holographic simulation. They did the whole 'Honeymooners' thing and fought like a couple, then saved the Enterprise by choosing to love humanity over anything that could block us from freedom. Lt. Com Stevie Wonder wasn't blinded by love. Thanks to his gift, he can actually see beyond the human spectrum.

In the end, the geeky Black nerd who can't get any girls, literally concedes to dig his tongue into his 'mission'- the sexy simulation that claimed to embody the ship. Wow! From now on, he'll jizz everytime he reconfigures the warp core. Exciting. He's first Black dude in the Star Trek franchise to be much more than the disposable away-mission crew-member. Dang! Is Black male sexuality really THAT threatening? I know he finally gets it on with a few light skinned chicks, but this has to be it. The next thing you know, he'll be sleeping with Data- his cyborg best pal! Yes, Lt Com Stevie Wonder CAN see in the darkness of space. He's got soul.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Bits about the 'War on Drugs' and American Untouchability.

2010-04-22T09:55:00.000+05:30

The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste
Monday 08 March 2010
by: Michelle Alexander

The following is a brief conversation about American Untouchability.

Alexander writes:
Most people don't like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the "era of colorblindness" there's a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have "moved beyond" race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste -- not class, caste -- permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

We should all be thanking Michelle Alexander for this piece. I an a gen-XY guy and so I was a child seeing all of this unfold. I am black and working class and have drug addiction in my family both from Viet Nam and from the chronic poverty/untouchability that you describe. I am also frustrated with dealing with a wider/whiter public that has been denied these facts and can only see 'crime' through Reagan's lenses and not even use their own critical thinking. I am frustrated because we live in a time when we still have a difficult time having mixed-race conversations that take into account the same set of facts. Most Americans are totally unaware of the comparisons you make to the slavery period, and have no idea that until Barack Obama, we had more representation in Reconstruction!

Though I am happy to be American and appreciate the liberty we have to express ourselves freely, I am also disgusted that such basic social inequality persists because, unlike many African nations aiming to repair social riffs, the United States has never had any real truth and reconciliation. And because of that, 'the war on drugs' can loop in the masses.

Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010).

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Bible Studies: 'Cop Out' joke- 2012, Taken, they made a movie outta this?

2010-04-19T19:42:00.000+05:30

This Hero-worship is some old rehashing of Bible stories- the absent omnipotent father who will act as the ultimate punisher, executioner and maker of the law, while still allowing the privilege kid to grow up in heavenly wealth and luxury.

It's age old western mythology told through the same bunch of modern consumerist stereotypical figures- the loud Negro side-kick, the estranged hard-working dad, the well-positioned step-father, the wife who still loves the guy...and his defeat of some random enemy that somehow proves his love for his daughter. How many times have we seen this movie? Ever notice how little agency women have in these films- just pawns.

BTW, why wasn't he man enough to accept the damn money from the rich freak! is his EGO really so grand as to need to 'give' away his daughter with his last penny, even if it kills him? This had nothing to do with daddy love- neither men had the child's welfare in mind, and the mom seemed to go where the money was. This had everything to do with a dick fight, and the women and children were the prizes. Seen 2012? Seen so many of these flicks, it's critical! This is some perverted Oedipus crap!

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Something about those Bangladeshis...

2010-04-16T21:48:00.001+05:30

This is incredible. It would take a 'foreigner' to speak about poverty and wealth in America in such a clear-headed way, free of the racialized discourse. In fact, notice how mute race is in this discussion, yet blatantly clear in the outcomes of poverty that this program targets. And it just rollls off Yunus mouth so easily: Ease credit rip-off, 500% payday loans-it was like watching Good TImes! The Nobel laureate even suggested that banks set-up outlets just to serve poor people-

Riz Khan - A second look at microfinance

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Gender Discrimination at PVR Priya Cinema, New Delhi (post IPC sec 377)

2010-04-04T17:06:00.000+05:30

'Fighting' for the right to see a dang-on movie. So, ladies can carry purse, but men cannot carry more than a wallet. There's a separate line for that. Is this really Twenty-ten or 1910? Though gender segregation may have been the case in the past, how wil this work in modern India? It would seem that some values clash like titans.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

India's fair skin ambassadors welcome commercial Hip-Hop’s new dark knight.

2010-03-29T19:04:00.004+05:30

India's fair skin ambassadors welcome Hip-Hop's new dark knight. And as a commercial rapper, Akon raps about women, but only the ones who strip and swing from poles. With global marketing deals as the spokesman for Fair and Handsome skin bleaching cream, Shahrukh Khan has appeared in TV commercials ridiculing skin half as dark as Akon's, telling these darkies that they'll never be successful in their careers or with women. What a match. Wow, I hope Shahrukh Khan does not try to get Akon to use Fair and Handsome. That would be sad, but perhaps it will work the other way around. Maybe Kareena & SRK will find Akon's chocolate skin so beautiful that they will stop promoting self-hate through self-destruction. Bleaching literally destroys the skin. Indeed, there's no questioning that skin bleaching physically damages the skin, but to that I would add that skin bleaching destroys the spirit and births and nourishes a false self).

In the welcoming ceremony, a real craft in modern publicity, Akon claims to have this long interest in India and her popular culture. Yet, as an exotic star (Blacks are popular in the Indian imagination and popular culture in a narrow range of stereotypical roles from blinged-out rappers, to cricketers, to criminality), he will likely continue to receive his local laudation and respect. Yet, like many other Africans who settle here in India and are confronted regularly with signs and symbols of India's color caste, how might this impact this deliciously chocolate global superstar? Will his exotic roots and international status trump his darkness here in India? Will Akon rap about the Indian color caste? Though we would all like to sit aback and enjoy this Afro-Indian love, we cannot and should not let Mr. Khan off scot-free, not when millions of individuals around the world revere him as an icon and worship him as an idol, and he chooses to earn money through self-promotion and damaging habits. This is nothing short of gross.

NB: Since Shahrukh Khan is showing Akon around, imagine that awkward moment when the two are out on the town and they encounter the Fair and Handsome chair, and Shahrukh Khan says to Akon, "I'd like you to meet my sponsor." For sheer viewing pleasure, see SRK's infamous Fair and handsome commercial here.

Finally, on the streets of Delhi, Akon has undoubtedly made his mark. Here, for example, Once I encountered a group of adolescent boys in a park in South Delhi. Perhaps it is my gender and Black skin that attracted the youth to me, announcing my admission into the global Hip-Hop corpus. The boys approached me as I sat quietly on a park bench one day, buffering my time spent at work, with the evening at home. At fourteen, the boys knew all the lyrics about girls swinging on poles. See for yourself:

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

The Tavis Smiley Show

2010-03-28T14:08:00.000+05:30

Tavis is bossy as hell, and YOU need to hear this community conversation- a family gathering.

The Tavis Smiley Show

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Heterosexual discharge. Ask and tell.

2010-03-23T05:51:00.001+05:30

Wow, other people's moral judgments just get sicker and sicker. Just goes to show that it never pays to ask a people to deny themselves. Arg! And here I was just sifting through the current news, looking for health care coverage, but got assaulted with this crap in the headlines. Caution, when I watched this clip on CNN.com it was preceded by a candy bar commercial where a family father ogles over a trio of teen girls in front of his wife who stands next to him struggling with their infant. The sweet confection gave the man time enough to think of an amenable excuse for checking out the prepubertal set of scantily clad young maidens: "I'm looking at potential babysitters." He was gonna exploit them one way or another- or both! But there was also another story about an announcement in a store in Jersey: "Attention Wal-Mart customers, all Black people leave the store now." So, this should all situate the following clip about a military service woman being granted a marriage license by one state, outed to her government employer by the police, and dropped by the sidelines by our society. Ask. Tell. And See this:

Civil Disobedience in Fatigues

But wait, it gets better. Lt. Dan Choi said, in the indelible words of Disco Diva Donna Summer in a classic queer collaboration with dame Barbara Streisand: Enough is Enough is Enough is Enough is Enough...I can't go on no more, naw! “Look how still he is," says the lame correspondent. Why should we have to stoop so low.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Enough is enough.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Rush Limbaugh Should Maybe Read Up On Costa Rican Health Care

2010-03-22T20:55:00.001+05:30

“I shut my fat a** up!” Wait, was that Oscar Award winning actress comedienne Mo’Nique in her ultimate penultimate scene in the 2010 movie Precious,or major league jack-arse Rush Limbaugh at the Clínica Burstin in San José seeing a proctologist!?!

Demonstrating that there is little “excellence” in his broadcasting he boasts of in his banner, Mr. Limbaugh refuses to leave the country, and instead chooses to remain a pariah on our system. Indeed, that’s how Mr. Limbaugh deems such gub’ment aid. Yet, since the measure has passed, so we pray he may never, ever need serious medical care. If so, he’d better 'shut his fat a** up' and get in line with the rest of us.

Being destructive to no end like Mr. Limbaugh is not dissention, nor does it forward democracy. It distracts the grown folks from taking care of business. One more thing: I’d suggest you take a listen to Rush raving on about Costa Rica, knowing nothing at all. But don’t! You have to sign up for his website to access the clips. Skip it.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

'Race' on NPR: TELL ME MORE vs. TALK OF THE NATION.....

2010-03-17T18:28:00.001+05:30

Free-styling to 'Everything is Everything'

2010-02-24T10:20:00.000+05:30

Following a dance installation, this is the introduction to my talk on the Black Aesthetic, Crossover music, representation, rage and solidarity.
Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Rev and Mrs. Haggard's pillow talk & other old world marriages

2010-02-07T09:47:00.001+05:30

NPR's Tell Me More host Michel Martin conducted an extremely powerful interview of newly published author Mrs. Gayle Haggard, who was banished from her gay-bashing congregation in Colorado Springs after revelations that her Evangelical pastor/husband was outted by his drug-selling, gay prostitute boy-toy. I deeply appreciate that Michel Martin pressed Mrs. Haggard on what she found sinful about the situation. I was really struck by the sense of empathy that these leaders developed as a result of their experience. She also acknowledged that the way this group chooses to practice their faith is ridden with hate because even as leaders it had not occurred to them to see the sin from the perspective of the sinner. Although Mrs. Haggard tried to fall back on childhood sexual abuse to defend her husband's infidelity, I know that sometime in the future, she will have to accept that her husband wanted it! She has not resolved 'the sin of homosexuality' in her head by blaming some pedophile for her husband's homosexuality. While sexual abuse might contribute to his issues with honesty and commitment, we should be clear that the majority of homosexuals on this planet are not physically sexually abused. We are, however, overwhelmingly emotionally sexually abused across human societies, especially by folks like the Haggards who may have emotionally punished any effeminate boy or butch girl in their families or parishes. Each time a child hears 'sinner' or other derogatory words about their gender identity, it is emotional sexual abuse. In every major city in America, there is a strip along a popular street where these dejected boys turn tricks and numb their pain through substance abuse. Mr. Haggard undoubtedly found one such boy (and new accusations from Grant Haas pictured here), and benefitted from finding both the illicit sex and drugs in one deal! Certainly, there are more recent revelations of Haggard having sex with boys from within his parish). What say these faith leaders?

Where's the disparity in other inappropriate consensual illicit relationships with powerful men?

John Edwards got a baby-mama. Had he embraced that relationship, we might be in a different space. Look at the Haggards, and the Clintons staying together after infidelity. Sure, I want to know about the kind of parent and partner of any candidate- not just Mrs. Palin. What family and kinship means in America is not the traditional husband/wife marriage. What about the blended families? And this is one of the roots of modern homophobia and bans on so-called gay marriage. Folks are scared that gay people will actually queer marriage, that we will actually provide the space for consenting adults to Ask and Tell, to negotiate and determine the terms of their relationship, and do so outside the 'normal' model. That seems to scare folks to death, and public response to the Edwards, Haggards and Clintons- whose marriage was made a national agenda complete with maddening public funding around the impeachment. Again, had Hilary written the sort of book Mrs. Haggard wrote, she might be signing her husband's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy out of commission, among other truly human-family, community-building initiatives to expand and not contract rights, based on the immoral judgements made by a few fundamentalist folks who long for the good ole days when women and Negroes stayed in their place, and the world seemed in order. Indeed, the intersection of race and marriage has its own story between the powerful and oppressed, demonstrating that where power disparities are involved, there is never consent.
Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

If Pat Robertson is right about Haiti...

2010-01-21T09:47:00.001+05:30

If Haitians made a pact with the devil, then N*ggers must have sold our hearts, minds and souls to get us where we are today. The chronic poverty, for example, that pervades Diasporic communities around the globe, and the under-development of Africa all indicate that Farafina mogo (black skin people) must have literally evoked the dEVIL- by this logic. Racism as an ideology, for example, was created to solidify Black servitude, and justify our systematic class exploitation in the hearts and minds of those who both oppress and live under oppression.

Kudos to the Haitian ambassador to the United States for sending that fool Robertson to school!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

PRECIOUS: Commentary on THE Mo'Nique scene (ROFLMAO, not suitable for minors)

2010-01-18T13:47:00.001+05:30

Die Heiligen Drei Könige (Three Wise Men) Epiphany

2010-01-06T14:53:00.003+05:30

Today is the day when we here in Germany are likely to see the harmony and cooperation across races that we still seek in other areas of our lives. Today is the day that Blackface is not a minstrel show, and jokes about Buckwheat being Obama won't hold any weight, like on other days. Today is the day when a Black child approaching a 'normal' German house will be greeted with open arms, and not suspicious glances. Today is the day in German speaking lands where the fellowship of humanity is observed above all that could separate us. Today is the day when we lay down our arms for armistice and at least pray for peace, for He is coming.

I am not a Christian, yet have a deep appreciation for the life of Jesus. Today is the day that we realize his birth, over and beyond his death. Today, I extend a hand to you, all of you who believe in the Prince of Peace, and that humanity must realize this dream, and that humanity can realize peace on Earth.

Happy 'Epiphany' to all my German Christian friends and family. Here's a sweet gift to you, building bridges of culture across the Atlantic.

Ubuntu- some thoughts as we move towards the new year.

2009-12-26T01:46:00.001+05:30

Reviewing comments for the video 'Black people in America hate immigrants?'

2009-12-17T09:48:00.000+05:30

@COLTCOMANDER "Lawdy I sho loves living on food stamps in America.............shut up nigger"- this commentor's user picture is President Obama in Blackface with a slice of watermelon.

I am quoting this to remind more people that we all have the capacity to be humane or cruel, kind or nasty, ignorant or mindful. It's all just a choice that we must each make individually, each day of our lives. Do we touch with with out kindness or lash out with our own ignorance & shame? You decide!

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

'Pimp of The Year' is a composite of today's best rappers

2009-11-10T21:57:00.001+05:30

Uh-uhn! Why did his fish bowl have to break. Is he not the composite of 50 Cent, Nellie and a whole bunch of other modern damn day thugs! Dreaming behind bars of a better day, and can't to nothing but rap about cash once they get out of the pen or the ghetto. "Bitch betta have all MY money. She betta have all my cash!" I really, really am gonna get you, sucka!

Good Hair: Tangled Identities

2009-11-10T08:51:00.001+05:30

"Who steal my bleaching," chants Fela, to which I add: Who steal my conk?

Advocate for the Public Option: Open Letter to my politicos: President Obama, Alabama Senators Sessions and Shelby

2009-11-09T11:16:00.000+05:30

Dear President Obama/Senators Sessions and Shelby:

Please advocate and vote for our government to provide a viable option for healthcare coverage. This universal participation, what some are calling a "public option" must become available to the people in my community, as the hurdles facing our access have not been addressed by much of the public debate in the media, but also by your public statements on the matter. Worse is the public confusion built over these terms, rather than the actual substance of a system that serves is 'all', period. Any 'conditions' placed on the health harms our people- our American people, our Alabamians, our rich, our poor, our privileged, our disenfranchised. Disease knows no bounds, yet too often preys upon us along socio-economic lines. This implies that there are very fundamental aspects about us- the American people- that stand in the way of our health. Indeed, it's making us- all of us, as Swine Flu shows- sick!

Like many other fundamental goods and services, we, the people, need not leave something so basic exclusively to our ability and pleasure in shopping. Working together, the American people could provide a phenomenal benchmark of service that would raise the stakes for any private option, while making genuine health care, and not just sick-care, accessible to any and every person here. You and I both know that plenty of other nations already do this better than ‘US’. We even have the benefit, no less, of examining several existing and operating forms of public health care systems spanning the globe, from wealthy to poor nations. Why is our government so feeble as not to believe that we can provide comprehensive healthcare that is simply fabulous?

Please join the swelling mass public support for a public option. Please speak with us in clear terms about the progress congress is making, and please discourage this partisan politicking and polarized public debate. Healthcare is not a political game, but a genuine social gain to large to be measured in money, or other existing tools of assessment. However, the losses in my own family due to tobacco related cancer and heart-disease, obesity, addiction and diabetes, demonstrate the urgency of this matter and the need for comprehensive reform that also works to improve our daily lives, including access to fresh food, air and water. Fresh food and regular check-ups are the cheapest means to significantly improve health, let alone stimulate a myriad of macro and micro-economies.

We might even bring back Home Economics to schools, as well as mandate physical education at all levels of schooling. Indeed, this is not a political game to be played out by pundits and politicians seeking their own fame, present company excluded, of course (smile). Comprehensive healthcare reform is one of the surest and easiest ways to quickly stimulate our economy and show marked improvement in our daily lives, which only a public/private hybrid system can achieve. Please insist upon the public option.

I would also like to share a video that I have made discussing this issue, and would greatly appreciate a response to both this letter and the video (it's the age of the Internet, so surely your staffers are engaged in video as a tool of communication).

Sincerely,

Diepiriye S. Kuku-Siemons

Registered Alabama voter and Democrat Abroad.

Here's also a link to my video: THE PUBLIC option(al): On Universalizing Healthcare

Click on the appropriate name to contact these reps: President Obama/Senators Sessions and Shelby

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

The Award for Best Slapstick still goes to the Evans Family.

2009-10-31T02:56:00.001+05:30

"I got $4 that I was saving to get my Fro together," has to be one of the best Sit-Com non-laugh lines ever!

Chris Rock On Tyra Banks Show October 08 Part 1: Come on out, Tyra.

2009-10-26T17:08:00.001+05:30

Listen at Tyra trying to weasel out of the reality that she still is decolonizing her mind. NO! It would not take five years. You could chop that conk out right now, just like Tyra had some other girl come on her show and have her boyfriend cut off the woman's feet-length hair. A week of new-growth and she's got a new do, but even Tyra won't do that. It's ok, we all understand it's a process. No, she's not coming up out that conk just yet.

A GAY HERO: Victim (1961)

2009-10-13T20:19:00.001+05:30

Wait: A gay hero? They are going to unmask the 'blacky' and solve the murder. But will all turn out dandy?

Pow! Boom! Crash! Crunch! No punches, just blows. This was 1961, and this scene at least was the birth of the gay hero. We see the people mourning over their losses, and folks belittling on others' debts- this is a real feel good flic with al the highs and lows of any melodrama. Instead of a red suit with emblems and tights, this hero wears his dignity and refusal to be silenced by shame.

Ask, tell: Gay or Straight, I'm still "the darker brother"

2009-10-12T09:44:00.000+05:30

I am a second class citizen. I am Black and grew up in the 80's/90's at a time when racial denial ("we're all the" same was the motto). I am gay, and saw how narrow people defined their sexualities- even narrower than their race and religion. I mind the government ushering a different set of rights for me than for others. Still the Human Rights' Campaign (HRC) doesn't represent me (but rest assured I'd take it rather than leave it; luckily our choices are not as polarized as our thinking).

The right to conscription and the right to marry do not make it safer for me to walk down the street, does not protect me from hateful kids and teachers in schools, does not diminish the fervor of hate-speech, won't comfort or compensate me when I loose my job, and won't allow me to sponsor my foreign partner. I don't live in any Gay Ghetto, and don't feel that urban America is more sophisticated that rural. Like healthcare, we must focus on quality of life, not just 'equality', for few Americas truly enjoy the fruits of our potential. Straight people have virtually ruined 'family' by replacing communal with 'mine', so couples fight over money, property, cats and kids, then do the same between societies through the military. In both instances, DIALOGUE is missing, mutuality is absent and self-respect is lost to consumer values (hence the Nobel). ASK Americans if they believe in second class citizenship. TELL other Americans about living as one.

"Gay/straight, Black/white! Same struggle. Same fight!" was this year's grand motto at the march. "The most important rights are federal, not state" says organizer Cleve Jones who has fought continuously for anti-discrimination measures on the local level for generations. We need numbers, he urges, in order to keep up the wider momentum around extending rights.

They keep on sayin': Go slow! And then they seamlessly continue to quickly send children into battle.

They keep on sayin': Go slow! But they block universal healthcare or any measure that would 'cover' everyone, even the least of us- and then they mock and chide the least of us, calling us lazy and without 'merit'.

They keep on sayin': Go slow! But they continue to expect less of him and more of her- mommy'll do it; she always does.

They keep on sayin': Go slow! But they preach peace and wage war.

They keep on sayin': Go slow! But kids who come to school hungry and tired already do too slow!

They keep on sayin': Go slow! But white collars steal and blue collars get a raw deal.

They keep on sayin': Go slow! But they actually still believe that 'merit' is the only factor determining our success.

They keep on sayin': Go slow! But no one really wants to talk, and fewer are interested in compromise.

They keep on sayin': Go slow! But that's just the trouble: Too slow!

"The only thing they're going to be putting pressure on is the grass," says America's first openly gay Congressperson Barney Frank. So, what will work? What will open Americans' hearts and minds to the daily struggle gay and lesbian people face? What will enlighten the masses about how we all create the closet through our assumptions and denials, our judgements and our trials? What will make Americans understand that rights don't diminish, but enhance the greater good by nearing us all to personhood?

I say: Come out! Be clear about who you are and what you stand for. And, importantly, listen. Consider other's views. If your position is so strong and so immensely forthright, then earnestly considering difference won't whitewash you, nor will extending rights diminish you. In fact, 'coming out' debases the voices of fundamentalists on any sides. Come out with what YOU mean by 'freedom' and 'peace'. Dr. King certainly said war is not the answer, only peace and dialogue create genuine and sustainable change.

Coming out is a moral disposition that asks us to consider exactly with what we stand, encourages us to sincerely listen to the position of others, thereby cultivating mutuality; it for brings us all closer to realizing those dreams. Queer people used to own 'Coming out' but the primary tenant of the concept is useful for us all: Be true to yourself.

Come out! Come out to your kids. If you're a 'liberal' minded person, come out to your kids and neighbors, and discuss the meaning of citizenship. Come out about the violence and hedonistic materialism we're exposed to in our daily lives- from hateful and demeaning speech on the streets, radio, TV and the net. Come out about your feelings surrounding the delegitimization of the administration, and the polarization of the media. Come out about what 'we' can do, not just what 'you' can do. Come out from under the systematic social inequality that has come to define America. Come out from cowardice and fear of 'the other'.

Click here for an NPR report on 2009's march, and here for coverage in the New York Times.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Nobel Peace Laureates

2009-10-09T21:07:00.000+05:30

Dr. Wangari Maathi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her efforts with the Green Belt Movement.
President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his efforts towards strengthening diplomacy and international dialogue. The two are seen speaking in Nairobi in 2006 when the then Senator Obama visited the motherland.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

Baller, author, 'Bama native Charles Barkley affirms 'race' matters in Alabama's race

2009-10-05T18:32:00.000+05:30

Barkley, former B-baller, and author of Who's Afraid of a Large Black Man?, among other titles listed on the Library of Congress' site, chimed in on our current state of affairs:

Click here to read the original article.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

A Different World: Mammy Dearest Part 3

2009-09-30T21:02:00.001+05:30

You just gotta see this.

Dodge Ball and Too Much Pressure on Str8 Couples

2009-09-30T09:29:00.000+05:30

NPR's Tell Me More recently reported on Hampton University's new National Center on African-American Marriages and Parenting, which opens this week with a summit on the so-called family. This so-called 'family' is inevitably anchored down to two people- the ideal American statistic. Here, host Michel Martin prompts Hampton University Professor and chair of Psychology, Dr. Linda Malone-Colon.

MARTIN: What about same sex marriages?
Prof. MALONE-COLON: I think that's a whole different issue that requires, I would say, maybe its own summit.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Prof. MALONE-COLON: But the masses of African-Americans are heterosexual and that's where we're seeing a real problem that's having an effect on our children. So that's where I choose to and where I've been called to, if you will, give my attention.

* * *

Dear Ms. Martin,

I truly wish that you had not let both guests off so easily with squirming out of answering for their homophobia. They dodged your question about gay marriage like champs, and that points to the greatest problem I had with what these folks are teaching about Black family. There is far too much pressure placed on the heterosexual couple. We preach that it takes a community, but we place marriage on such a pedestal, distance ourselves, and our child rearing more and more form our family and kin. Sure, this is exactly why so many Americans are so fascinated with the first family's constellation- of course grandparents, aunts, uncles, 1st, 2nd, 3rd cousins are welcome.

Professor Malone-Colon chucks up the Black family crisis to: "...increasing rates of divorce, separation, out of wedlock births, cohabitation." This is precisely my contention- far too much pressure is placed on people to live in a normative, heterosexual, monogamous, life-long committed relationship before God. The nuclear family is the problem with Black family in America today, too many folks feeling inadequate and dysfunctional simply because they do not fit the nuclear mold. If we'd embrace our difference, then we'd be more open and apt at embracing each other across culture, age, religion, class and sexual orientation. We'd expect everyone to parent- period.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

See this documentary: Color Adjustment part 2 of 8

2009-09-29T19:15:00.001+05:30

'Don't scare the white people into noticing you're a Negro'. Nat King Cole and a host of others represented back in the day. Here are some interesting musings on the above.

Tongues Untied - Dance My Ticket To

2009-09-29T08:34:00.002+05:30

Essex Hemphill reading his poem "In the Life" in Marlon Riggs' film 'Tongues Untied'. It's all that.

A Wise Latina and 1964's Black Like Me

2009-09-29T08:18:00.002+05:30

Unreported World-Nigeria: Fire in the Delta Part 2

2009-09-28T09:35:00.002+05:30

Unreported or 'under' reported, or perhaps all out mis-reported! I visited my family in the Delta, and apparently this perspective drives my view and sympathies. The journalist's smirk betrays the seriousness of polluting water around the delta people who have lived in harmony with the waters for several millennia. Global oil prices? Doesn't it matter that it's hard to fill up the tank in Port Harcourt?!? Oil analysts? Just put your hand in the water, slick!

USA's Afghan Strategy

2009-09-25T18:09:00.001+05:30

Where are the American insurgents?

Hitler, AIDS & other WMD

2009-09-10T10:41:00.002+05:30

"AIDS is a mass murder" on the highest scale. HIV/AIDS is a weapon of mass destruction. You'd better believe that unless you speak about sex with your partner(s)- including history, likes and dislikes- then you're a potential victim. Check out the video below.

Be proactive! Don't give disease a chance.
(racism is a disease)

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

The H-bomb gets new clothes

2009-09-07T02:17:00.001+05:30

Accused of elitism with promoting a new and expensive clothing line, Harvard University went out and rounded up its Asians for the photo shoot and even managed to find get one of the Negroes who, unsurprisingly, is apparently on an athletic scholarship!

It’s nothing new for the university to profit on branded clothing," writes New York Times reporter Michael M. Grynbaum in his September 2009 article on the matter. "Any tourist in Harvard Square can pick up a JanSport hoodie for $30 or so. But, given a history of wealth and exclusion, prep at Harvard comes with its own set of complex connotations." Well, athletic scholarship or not, anyone can look the part.

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

We the people can at least agree on raising our cholesterol (but screw universal healthcare)

2009-09-06T21:01:00.000+05:30

Indeed, we are the nation that makes complete fan-FAIR of deep fried butter, and at the same time conclude that pooling our population's health care needs is a bad idea. So, we can less agree on universal health care than eating ourselves into debt and death- because folks who eat friend butter tend to have expensive health care costs, and lower tax revenues because they die early and miss many days of work! Local economies are collapsing over lack of taxes, but, oh, let's fry some butter and 'tuck in' as the Brits say, dig right on in. We're quickly becoming the unhealthiest population on the planet and probably already would be if not for the number of immigrants who come- both they stay and have kids who quickly learn to eat as we do, and probably fried lard is next. Ain't that America.

CLICK HERE to read more at the NPR Health Blog

Diepiriye: Constructing Global Citizenry

American Healthcare: 1st hand experiences in the wealthiest nation

2009-09-06T16:53:00.001+05:30

"Most of the people that are out there are no better off than I am, protesting against healthcare...Humana determines...." too much!

In Living Color - The Black People's Awards

2009-09-02T16:46:00.001+05:30

This show hilarious when it aired in the 90's, and I watched it in high school. This episode is from October 1992- during season four of a total of five seasons.
Now, as an adult, disappointed that the Black Best Friend- also know as Magic Negro- is still a mainstay on big and small screens. "Sassy next door neighbor?" "Best scared brother?" These ARE the 'ca-tag-go-rees' that genuinely exist today. Indeed, the bit with Whoopi being the only Black actress in the entire category is a situation still mirrored today, where a handful of roles go to a handful of talents. In Living Color really got it right this time!

Which Way Is Up? - Full Movie, part 3

2009-08-31T21:15:00.001+05:30

What kind of sick, sadistic sh*t is this? He stalks her, accost her in the park, lies to her, falsifies information to win her, tramples upon her, attempts to rape her, cries after her as she runs away...and within a few magical flashes of silliness later, she's naked cooking for him, gives into his passive-aggressiveness, and makes him promise never to sleep with any other woman again, including his wife. What kind of sick fantasy is this? This is some stereotypical male fantasy world where women really do just submit.