[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Well said, Keith!
Amy
(Link to article is here:
http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2006/061105_mfe_December_06_Essay_1.html
Feedback to Esquire is here: http://www.esquire.com/talk/ )
This is the same John Ridley who's been accused by many of hating his own
color. The guy who did the movie "Undercover Brother", which I actually
loved. For years I'd heard that Ridley is a "sellout" who picks on his own
people. Indeed, I deferred seeing "Undercover Brother" in theatres because
I'd heard Ridley callously exposed our dirty laundry to white folks, and was
making fun of Black people. Still liked the movie...
But where do I start with this crap rant? First, aside from the utter
disrespect he shows for all Blacks by using "nigger" as brutally as any
Klansman could, his article is poorly written! It's as if he rammed together
two disparate articles, one a political piece dealing with Condi and Powell
supposedly running the country for eleven days. Then, light years away from
that, a diatribe about "niggers" trying to pull down successful Blacks they
should be uplifting. Each argument is unfocused, mean-spirited,
self-righteous, and unsupportable in its own right. But together, they form
a mish-mash piece that I could barely follow--and y'all know I can write
some long-butt sentences! I wonder if Esquire would have even printed this
poor piece of supposedly critical thought had Ridley not salted it with
"nigger", giving it the appearance of a bold and brave statement, when in
reality it's the ranting of someone whom I suspect has s ome self-hatred
issues.
On the political side: Condi and Powell didn't run sh**, for eleven days or
eleven minutes! If they had--if Powell had, especially--maybe we wouldn't be
in the quagmire that is Iraq. At best they gave advice that Bush took, but
big deal. When else has that happened? Powell went along with an invasion he
didn't agree with, gave a speech that will damn him for eternity, and then
was fired for still not being enough of a sycophant for Bush. Condie is
nearly as much a right wing hawk as the white boys. And Ridley needs to do
some reading: Condie is not just a loyal soldier, she's in *love* with Bush!
Don't believe me? Then watch the recording of a press interview she gave
where she clearly said "I was talking to my husband--I mean, President
Bush", and tell me she's not. Watch the TV One interview with Armstrong
Williams where she talks over and over about "what attracts me to the
President". Since when does a professional say that she's *attracted* to her
boss? Shouldn't that be "Wh
at I admire about the President"? Explain to me why this brilliant
capable women has taken so many of her vacations with the Bush family like a
wet nurse or nanny . What, she doesn't have a life? Rice is a zombie, a
parrot who says whatever Bush wants, who marches in lockstep to his
chest-thumping beat.
And as for Ridley trying to establish Condie's cred as a product of Civil
Rights, she barely knew what was going on. In her own words, Rice said her
parents made sure the world of the Civil Rights struggle didn't enter her
neighborhood or life. It's as if she was raised to be successful, and let
"those people" fight that battle over there. Even the Birmingham bombing
didn't intrude on her world as it did other Blacks. Hardly a shining
example of Black pride. Now, I ain't hatin' on her 'cause she didn't march
with the Panthers. That's her right. But just because I don't think she's
good for Black people in the main--or this country, for that matter--does
that make me a nigger too?
And I’m someone who likes Powell, who’s been in arguments with people
attacking me because I like Powell. But with him, too, gotta talk facts. He
ultimately supported and aided a corrupt, intractable administration that
has made our world worse than it was. I understand why he stayed as long as
he did, even respect him in some ways. But ultimately his silence caused
more harm than good. Am I a nigger for feeling that way? I'm a Black person
who'd be deemed fairly successful by others. I bear no ill will toward
anyone who makes it, ain't running around trying to act ghetto to maintain
some cred. Yet to hear Ridley talk, just because I don't like Rice I'm a
tool of the outdated liberals that is simply trying to pull down successful
Black people I should be supporting. That doesn't fly.
So Rice and Powell had some influence over one event for a few days. How did
that help Black people? Even if it did, the mess they helped make in Iraq
would more than compensate for any good they did. And yes, Mr. Ridley, I
*do* expect people of color to have more sense than to support unsupportable
aggressive actions against sovereign nations. I’d expect geniuses like Rice,
who ought to know the history of Western Anglo-Saxon aggression throughout
the world as well as I, to be as uncomfortable as I am at another attempt to
subjugate a country and make it like America.
As for the whole thing of Blacks not wanting to succeed, again, that’s
another article that has no place here. Suffice it to say that it’s too easy
and simple to lump all Blacks who are making bad choices into one category,
to dismiss them as not wanting to succeed. In that case every group that’s
failing, in every country that’s ever existed, deserves it. Poor people
deserve to be poor, all criminals are scum fit only for punishment, all
those working in menial jobs brought it on themselves. Such vitriol from a
Black man saddens me.
Scariest of all is that white folks listen to any Black person who says what
they think in their heart of hearts. Let a Brother or Sister start using
buzz words like “self-reliance” and “lack of responsibility”, and that
person will become the spokesperson for the whole damned ethnic group. I
fear that Ridley will hand many whites reading this article a bunch of
nonsense that they’ll nonetheless use to justify prejudices they already
have, and that’s a real pity.
Esquire - December 2006, Volume 146, Issue 6
The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger
By John Ridley
For eleven days in 2001, two blacks ran our country. It's their example and
their achievement—and not the culture of failure fomented by the leftovers
of the Movement—that must set a new agenda for black Americans.
Let me tell you something about niggers, the oppressed minority within our
minority. Always down. Always out. Always complaining that they can't catch
a break. Notoriously poor about doing for themselves. Constantly in need of
a leader but unable to follow in any direction that's navigated by hard
work, self-reliance. And though they spliff and drink and procreate their
way onto welfare doles and WIC lines, niggers will tell you their state of
being is no fault of their own. They are not responsible for their nearly 5
percent incarceration rate and their 9.2 percent unemployment rate. Not
responsible for the 11.8 percent rate at which they drop out of high school.
For the 69.3 percent of births they create out of wedlock.
Now, let me tell you something about my generation of black Americans. We
are the inheritors of "the Deal" forced upon the entrenched white social,
political, and legal establishment when my parents' generation won the
struggle for civil rights. The Deal: We (blacks) take what is rightfully
ours and you (the afore-described establishment) get citizens who will
invest the same energy and dedication into raising families and working hard
and being all around good people as was invested in snapping the neck of Jim
Crow.
In the forty years since the Deal was brokered, since the Voting Rights Act
was signed, there have been successes for blacks. But there are still too
many blacks in prison, too many kids aggrandizing the thug life, and way too
many African-Americans doing far too little with the opportunities others
earned for them.
If we as a race could win the centuries-long war against institutionalized
racism, why is it that so many of us cannot secure the advantage after
decades of freedom?
That which retards us is the worst of "us," those who disdain actual
ascendancy gained by way of intellectual expansion and physical toil—who
instead value the posture of an "urban," a "street," a "real" existence, no
matter that such a culture threatens to render them extinct.
"Them" being niggers.
I have no qualm about using the word nigger. It is a word. It is in the
English lexicon, and no amount of political correctness, no amputation into
"the n-word"—as if by the castration of a few letters we should then be able
to conceptualize its meaning without feeling its sting—will remove it from
reality.
So I say this: It's time for ascended blacks to wish niggers good luck. Just
as whites may be concerned with the good of all citizens but don't travel
their days worrying specifically about the well-being of hill billies from
Appalachia, we need to send niggers on their way. We need to start extolling
the most virtuous of ourselves. It is time to celebrate the New Black
Americans—those who have sealed the Deal, who aren't beholden to liberal
indulgence any more than they are to the disdain of the hard Right. It is
time to praise blacks who are merely undeniable in their individuality and
exemplary in their levels of achievement.
This, then, is how the praise begins. We need to burn into our collective
memory the event that marked the beginning of our new timeline: an event
from early in this millennium that seemed, for its moment in time,
auspicious but that is now all but forgotten. It was lost in the ash of
fires in Over-the-Rhine. Buried in the rubble of 9/11. But I for one will
not let it go, won't let it get dumped into a potter's field of U. S.
politics. It was too important. Far too significant. It was eleven days when
two blacks ran America.
If the situation were just slightly altered, Condoleezza Rice might have
been, and would have made, a better Mrs. George W. Bush than the current
Mrs. George W. Bush. Same as George, Condi's politics are right. Her
worldview is faith based, courtesy of her reverend pops. A protege of Brent
Scowcroft's, she served as a special assistant for national-security affairs
to George H. W. Bush, so she was preapproved by Dad. And should anyone posit
that a woman of color would not be welcome to Thanksgiving dinner in
Kennebunkport, well, Bush brother Jeb had married himself a minority, so
even that trail was previously blazed.
But for G. B. the second, much to his credit, his interest in Condi was less
about her being a woman, let alone a black woman, and more about her being
an accomplished individual.
And Dr. Condi is accomplished as hell: a Ph.D. in poli-sci from the
University of Denver. Former provost of Stanford. At thirty-five, barely a
kid in Washington years, she was a staffer at the National Security Council.
She came onto the foreign-policy train wreck that was the early days of G.
W. Bush's 2000 campaign. Helped mold his malapropism-afflicted worldview
into a demicoherent one. After the certification of Bush's election, Dr.
Condi got herself easily appointed as national security advisor.
Firsts all the way around.
Black America should have been singing hosannas.
But Condi was Republican. So never mind. Never mind she'd spent a lifetime
facing down racism. Born in Birmingham at the peak of race hate, Condi was a
schoolmate of Denise McNair, one of the "four little girls" bombed to death
in September of '63 at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Niggers and
old-school shines couldn't abide her. Same as with Clarence Thomas, they let
her politics obfuscate her accomplishments. They stamped her: Not Officially
Black. Loggers tagged her a "Sally Hemming for the Twenty-first Century."
Left-leaning pundits smeared her with the slurs "Aunt Jemima" and "brown
sugar." Julian Bond, reaching deep into the old-school bag of tricks, t
urned to rhyme to asperse Dr. Rice's authenticity: "Just because they are
your skin folks, doesn't mean they're your kinfolks."
Cute.
Then they went back to entertaining themselves with another Wayans-brothers
movie.
Anyway.
As NSA and confidante, Dr. Condi was with Bush and the real Mrs. Bush as
they took some time with an old Yale buddy at Camp David on the last weekend
in March of 2001.
Nine-fifteen P.M. on the thirty-first. They got the call. A U. S. EP-3E
signals recon plane had literally gotten into a tangle with a People's
Liberation Army (read that: Chinese) J-8 interceptor jet off the coast of
China. The Chinese jet got shredded by the EP-3E's prop. The American plane,
with a crew of twenty-four, was badly damaged. The Chinese jet went down,
the pilot most likely killed. The U. S. pilot did better. Managed to land
the FUBAR American plane. But he landed the plane on the island of Hanna.
Chinese territory. And the Chinese claimed that the Americans had been
spying over what were sovereig n waters. And the Chinese claimed the plane
had landed without permission.
And its taillights were out.
>From the get, this was stacking up to be a slightly dicey situation—China
being in possession of twenty-four American servicemen and women and one of
our top-tier surveillance planes (and the appropriate U.S. spokespeople went
out of their way to note that it was a surveillance plane, not a spy plane).
The People's Republic wasn't exactly our enemy, but it was hardly our close
bud, either. Coming into the White House, following the domestic
Chinese-spy-scandal scare of the late nineties, Bush had shifted the
rhetoric re: China. Had dropped the Clinton-era designation of China as a
"strategic partner" for the tough-talk appellation of "strategic
competitor." The actual meaning of "strategic competitor" no one in the
administration has ever tried to explain, but it struck the appropriately
tough-talk chord in the new president's neoconservative base. Though such
tough talk ignored the fact that China was a major trading partner that was
doing $116 billion in annual business with the
U. S., in millennium bucks.
So, then, here was the crux of Bochco's first international incident: Having
swung his meat at China, Bush now very much had to be diplomatically shrewd
while looking domestically strong in dealing with our strategic competitor.
This clearly required high-mindedness.
Bush turned the situation over to the highest mind on his team: Dr. Condi.
Made sense.
Condi was a Russia expert. Wasn't this—this "Hanna Incident"—just some
modern-day old-school commie-era nonsense?
But that decision, right and plain as it seemed, set up the real conflict of
the event. That conflict would not turn out to be the obvious one—U. S.
versus China. It would be "us," elevated blacks, versus "them," those who
not only hold little regard for people of color but who wish to make niggers
of us all.
Dick Cheney and Donald Rusted were, are, old-school relics. Political
leftovers of the Nixon-Ford years, they are the Retro Guard, sporting
metaphorical wide ties emblematic of the '72 landslide. To appease the base,
Bush had given such men seats at his otherwise progressive table. Wedging
them in created multiple fractures across the administration. From the jump,
it would be the old against the new. War hawks against moderates. Those who
thought the republic was best governed in secrecy and shadow against those
who recalled that the preamble to the Constitution is "We the People," not
"Us the Government." The administration was a case study in "unified
independence," a group working toward separate objectives rather than
individuals working as a team.
Cheney and Rusted fronted the hard line of the Hanna Incident—the cadre who
saw little to no value in talk and diplomacy and wanted to get with the
figurative nuclear option quick as possible. It was against such a mind-set
as much as the Chinese government that Condi would have to navigate.
But she would not have to wield her intellect solo.
Colin Powell was the undisputed superstar of American politics.
His bio was bulletproof.
His bona fides undeniable: service in 'Nam. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Part of the team that cruised to victory in Gulf War I. Author of the Powell
Doctrine, which states that overwhelming force makes an enemy your
bee-botch.
When he quit the military, real quick Powell became "the Get." Both parties
wanted to snag him, wag him from their standard.
Powell went right.
Predictably, niggers immediately abandoned him. How could any
self-respecting black man want to run from the Liberal Plantation? Never
mind that he was a self-made modern American hero who openly espoused the
value of affirmative action. Old-scholars tagged Powell with the usual
left-wing racist jabber.
Powell was a sellout.
A Tom.
In a particularly ugly rant, Harry Belafonte infamously alluded to Powell as
being a house nigger.
At every opportunity, Powell was hit up with the invectives reserved for
black men who succeed by way of intelligence and hard work. (How ironic that
while the Left attempted to subjugate Powell with the bullwhip of liberal
racism, Bush, who later would be accused by Kane West of hating blacks,
somehow managed to see in Powell a sovereign black man.)
As secretary of state in G. W. Ebb's first term, Powell would spearhead
communications with China during the Hanna Incident while Rice would be the
conduit through which all information would flow to the president.
Dr. Condi and Colin.
The administration went into the Hanna situation thinking the China incident
would go down like this: We make denials; they make demands. There's a
shadow deal that gets us back our boys and toys in exchange for some
tractors and a few bushels of wheat.
But this wasn't 1957. The Chinese weren't a superpower dying on the vine.
They were more concerned about getting their international prospers than
they were about quid pro quo. And respect had been a long time coming from
the U. S. Most Chinese citizens recalled G. H. W. Bush being an apologist
for the Deng regime after the Tiananmen Square crackdown. And then there was
us dropping a bomb right down the Chinese embassy's smokestack in Belgrade
during the air war over Kosovo.
And, you know, there was that strategic partner/strategic competitor thing.
But Dr. Condi and Colin strategize, surmised that all China was looking for
was some contrition. A little humility. Secure in the knowledge that
offering regret is different from taking blame, they figured they could show
some remorse for the Chinese pilot without turning all of America into a
weak sister weeping like she'd just messed her best Sunday dress. Just give
a "My bad" and get the crew home.
Dr. Condi and Colin would not immediately get the chance to test their
strategy Forty-eight hours after the American plane went down, after just
two days of silence from China, the far-right hard-liners lost whatever
patience they owne d. What little confidence they had that Rice and Powell
could end the situation quickly dissipated like a brief, bad smell.
Diplomacy was boring and time-consuming and rarely came with the requisite
display of machismo. Though delicatessen was the smarter play over
sanctions, all the Retro Guard cared about was keeping Bush, just twelve
weeks in Washington, from looking like Jimmy Carter on, say, day 239 of 444
of the Iranian-hostage thing.
Sabers got rattled. Tact got kicked to the curb. Cheney stomped around
Washington doing a public nix on expressing any regret. Insisted being
American meant never having to say you're sorry.
Illinois representative Henry Hyde—who is chairman of the House
International Relations Committee—referred to the U. S. crew as "hostages,"
which put an ugly public spin on the benign truth. Was consciously counter
to Powell's assessment that the crew was merely being detained.
Bush, feeling the pressure to back up all his reelection rhetoric, flinched.
Or "blinked," in the pop-culture sense of making a quick decision based on
suspect intelligence.
In a Rose Garden appearance, a hardened Bush excoriated the Chinese for not
doing "the right thing." Insisted that "now it is time for our servicemen
and women to return home."
These were, politically, cold assertions. The holdback was equally frosty.
A day later, Chinese president Kiang Zelman finally responded. Zelman wanted
nothing less than total kowtowing. Wanted the U. S. to "bear all
responsibilities" for the collision. Wanted an apology. Wanted concessions.
Wanted the U. S. to quit its spy flights along the China coast. Forever.
And it got real clear the circumstances might not now resolve themselves in
a timely manner.
Just a few words. A few words choreographed to create some tough-guy
theatrics from Bush and the situation had devolved from "incident" to
"standoff."
And the loud-voiced whispers as to whether Bush had what it took to be a
world leader began.
Diplomacy was needed. Smarts. Intellect and canny.
Bush made another decision. No "blink" involved. As The Washington Post
reported, the way forward was made emphatic to all concerned: No more
useless posturing. No more Independent Unity. Cheney was sent out to stump
for the tax cuts Bush was shilling. And while Rusted claimed to support the
shift toward diplomacy, truthfully he was flatly told to butt out.
Dr. Condi and Colin would be given free rein.
We, collectively—not just black America but all of America that truly bought
into the bromides of liberty and justice for all—we had risen.
The accomplishment was unmistakable. For seven days running, in the written
press and the international media, and doing the rounds in the 24/7
cable-news meat grinder, it was Condi and Colin. They pulled the
administration out of a Retro Guard–dug hole. Projected calm and
rationality, where just prior there was only ego. Sticking with their game
plan to double-team with poise and savoir faire, they expressed "regret"
over the loss of the Chinese pilot. Powell followed up his public statements
with an international "sympathy card" sent to the Chinese: a regret letter
of his own.
Simultaneously, Condi counseled the president to display some humanity. Bush
made a public statement that he was sending his prayers to the dead Chinese
pilot and his family.
Little gestures.
Big results.
By Thursday, April 5, the Chinese foreign ministry, if not quite ready to
sing kumbayas, acknowledged the U. Esq.'s new moves were a "step in the
right direction."
At the same time, Powell came with another, stronger statement of lament re:
the Chinese pilot's death. And contrary to the hawks' beliefs, the heavens
didn't open and the stock market didn't drop and the commies weren't turning
our wives and daughters into pleasure girls. But twenty-four servicemen and
women were that much closer to coming home.
So close the scavengers could pick up the stink of imminent triumph. Around
they came, real late in the game, looking to gain some stature by glomming
on to the accomplishments of others.
Jesse Jackson came knocking.
Jesse Jackson, who is president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. He put in a
call to Powell offering help. Offering to add an "ecumenical religious
component" to Powell's efforts.
It was really just Jesse looking to shine up his image. It'd been just
months since he'd been outed as having fathered a kid with the former head
of the Rainbow Coalition's Washington, D. C., office, then given the girl
tens of thousands of dollars from the Rainbow PUSH coffers as "shut up/go
away" money.
Not sure if that's the ecumenical religious component Jesse had wanted to
add to the standoff.
Powell smartly gave Jesse the go-by. Jesse and his old-school ways, even if
they hadn't been offered belatedly and with self-service, were of no use to
the New Black American.
Victory was at hand. The U. S. crewmen were just days and an official letter
of regret to the Chinese government away from returning home. And you know
that homecoming would have been filled with hoopla and pageantry. The Retro
Guard would have to kneel before the superior intellect of the ascended
black. Likewise, the Old-School Negroes and their liberal massas would be
forced to acknowledge the evolutionary brother and sister. When the images
of the homecoming were played and played and played from the morning
empty-chat shows through the nightly news to Larry King and his first
exclusive primetime interview (with call-ins!) of the crew, all of America
would see freedom was won by a black man, a black woman.
They would have seen all that.
Except.
Niggers fucked it up.
The last thing recorded by the dash-mounted camera in the police cruiser was
officer Stephen Roach running across an intersection off Republic Street in
Cincinnati. Then he enters an alley.
Then you can hear a shot being fired.
Beyond that, all you can do is speculate. And/or take Roach's statements as
to what led to Timothy Thomas's shooting death.
What we know:
White cop.
Black kid. Nineteen years old. Troubles with the law. Fourteen outstanding
warrants. All misdemeanors.
In the early-morning hours of April 7, 2001, Thomas was confronted by some
cops looking to pop him for those warrants. Thomas ran. Same as he'd run
twice before when cops were trying to pop him. Backup got called in. Roach
was among them. Thomas wasn't armed. Roach had no way of knowing. All the
cop knew was that he was doing a foot pursuit in what's plainly one of the
most dangerous sections of Cincinnati: Over-the-Rhine.
Thomas headed down that dark alley. Ordered to stop, he complied. Made a
sudden move for his waistband. Roach fired. Thomas took a single slug to the
chest. Died.
"Fifteen since '95" was the cry. Timothy Thomas being the fifteenth
Cincinnati black man to die during an arrest or shortly after being
apprehended by the cops. "Fifteen since '95" was heard from local
Blacktivists hot for justice, for whom vengeance by way of legal recourse
would not do: the New Black Panthers. Some outfit called the Special Forces.
Only things special about them were the white-hatin', Jew-hatin' rants they
could call up at a moment's notice. And did so at a city-council meeting
they crashed the day after Thomas got shot. Crashed it along with Thomas's
moms. And a couple hundred more whipped-up locals of color. They showed up
to "talk" with city officials.
There was some white-hatin'. Some Jew-hatin'. Precious little talking.
After three hours of contained ranting, the hatin' spilled out into the
streets. Another thousand or so protesters got whipped up and swept along as
the Blacktivists made their way to the Cinci police HQ. More screaming! More
hatin'! Through the evening and into the night.
"Fifteen since '95!"
Rocks thrown. Bottles thrown. Broken glass was hurled at cops.
"Fifteen since '95!"
By 1:00 A.M. on Monday, April 9, while Powell and Rice were working to free
detained Americans, the Blacktivists had achieved what they were pushing
for, the typical post-civil-rights-era expression of urban rage when it
unilaterally deems itself wronged: burning of businesses. Looting of
businesses. Indiscriminate violence against whites and nonblacks; yanked
from cars. Beaten near to death.
Simply, rioting.
If a gang of whites had done the same, the screams from the Blacktivists
would've been of a roving racist pack. They, the whites, would've been
called a lynch mob.
But the rioters were of color.
What was begging to be heard by the rampaging mob was some tacit approval
from the self-appointed HNICs that burning and beating and stealing were the
way to go.
Approval was given.
Kweisi Mfume (real name Frizzell Gray), who was the president and CEO of the
NAACP, ranted that Cinci was the "belly of the whale."
Al Sharpton—he who is the high self-appointed HNIC of a constituency that no
longer exists—demanded the feds take control of Cinci's police. Of all
America's cops!
The Big House of the Liberal Plantation, The New York Times, opined that
economic discrimination was at the heart of the riot (though it failed to
explain why poor whites rarely did the same).
The Blacktivists of Cinci got what they wanted: some old-school R-Card
shysters doing some fire fueling with platitudes and the war cry:
"Fifteen since '95."
On the surface the numbers held up; at the hands of the police, fifteen
black men had died since '95. But the stats didn't reflect fact. Have you
had a chance to meet some of the fifteen poster kids of cop abuse in
Cincinnati?
Say hey to Harvey Price, who hacked up his girlfriend's daughter with an ax.
She was fifteen. Harvey got shot when he refused to surrender peaceably.
Went at tactical cops with a knife.
Give a yo to Mr. Jeffrey Irons. Confronted for stealing a few bucks in
toiletries, Irons responded by grabbing a cop's gun. Shooting the officer in
the hand. Another officer, options up, looking to avoid worse, shot and
killed Irons.
Can I get a what-up for Daniel Williams? In February of '98 Danny flagged
down officer Kathleen Conway's cop car. Then he punched her in the face.
Then shot her. Four times, .357 Magnum. After all that, Conway managed to
fire back—I would safely say in self-defense—killing Williams.
The final count of those "fifteen since '95"? Twelve had threatened
arresting officers' lives with some type of weapon before they were killed.
Seven of those twelve threatened cops with guns. Four cops were killed or
wounded in making those arrests (in a period when three Cinci cops had been
killed in three years).
But facts don't serve the cause. And "a couple since '95" doesn't make for
much of a war cry.
Three days of chaos. Nearly $4 million in damage to the city, most of it in
predominantly black areas that could ill afford economic downturn. Record
levels of homicides, particularly among blacks, as the police, hamstrung by
new rules of engagement, could no longer effectively protect the very people
who had demonized them.
It was a mess.
The Blacktivists, they would call it victory.
The night of 4/11/01 was the worst of the rioting in Over-the-Rhine.
Lowlights included a cop shot, a state of emergency declared.
The next day, 4/12/01, while Cinci was still calming down, the detained U.
S. crew got loaded onto a commandeered Continental Airlines jet. Were flown
from Hanna to Guam, Guam to Hawaii. The patience, the intelligence, of two
blacks had set them free. But for Powell and Rice there was no reaction from
the greater—or lesser—black community. None from lefty America. Energy
drained by the orgy of appeasement it had been forced to offer up over
Cincinnati, the best the black establishment and the national media could or
would toss Dr. Condi and Colin was a collective shrug. A dismissive act, the
eff ect of which was to minify the significance of their accomplishment.
And maybe in early 2001 it didn't matter so much. After averting crisis,
there were sure to be other achievements. But, you know, things change.
Nine-eleven. The towers came down. The Pentagon got opened up. A hole was
made in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The war in Afghanistan. The
war in Iraq.
And Hanna was officially forgotten.
NO MORE.
No more can we allow the crowning moment in our history to live in shadow,
just as we cannot allow the deeds of our most accomplished to be
overshadowed by the antics of our least ambitious. Near the end of his
mortal existence, Dr. Martin Luther King famously queried, "Where do we go
from here: chaos or community?"
Over-the-Rhine was chaos. Is this what we choose for ourselves? To continue
as the ungodly construct of victim and aggressor?
I say there is only one direction for us to travel, the path already set.
Dr. Condi and Colin are exceptional but not unique. Empirically, Hanna
wasn't a one-off. With the pair as way points by which to plot a course, our
collective ascension will be assured.
Undoubtedly, knees will jerk over this contention. The Reverends Al and
Jesse and all those who judge actions by the single criterion of how they
affect the remnants of the Movement will ask: These? These two are your ne
plus ultra blacks? These two who caved to the will of the Right? Powell,
whose dog-and-pony show at the UN revealed his true bent? Rice, whose "Why
We Know Iraq Is Lying" for The New York Times showed her lack of spine?
These two who sent America off to folly in Iraq?
I say yes.
Black America must look to that lost moment and realize that, short of a
brother or sister actually being elected president, Hanna was the high-water
mark of black political power. And whether Operation Iraqi Freedom is
ultimately good and right and just, or if it is lousily named and uniformly
disastrous, what is essential is that Dr. Condi and Colin earned for
themselves positions from which to sway public debate.
That is, power.
Dr. Condi and Colin personify what niggers have forgotten: All that matters
is accomplishment. The very pinnacle of ascendancy is the ability to live
and work without regard for the sentiments of others and with, as Sister
Rand would tell us, a selfish virtue.
We came up from slavery to freedom without regard for the Constitution,
which gave us nothing, and the plantation masters, who gave us the whip. We
came up from oppression to civil rights without regard for hurled bricks and
sicced police dogs. Water hoses. The word nigger.
This, then, is my directive: Let us achieve with equal disregard for the
limitations of racism and the weight of those of us who threaten to drag all
of us down with the clinging nature of their eternal victimization. Our
preservation is too essential to be stunted by those unwilling to advance.
And in my heart I don't believe all blacks cannot achieve in the absence of
aid any more than I believe the best way to teach a child to run is by
forcing him to spend a lifetime on his knees.
As long as we remain committed to holding high our individuals of supreme
finish, others will be inspired to loose themselves of the gravity of the
waywards and downtroddens.
Once free, they will rise. They will drift high toward the attainments of
which we are invariably capable; being better fathers and husbands and
lovers. Better mothers and daughters, sisters and best friends. We will rise
to the simple obligation of taking care of our own with the same dedication
we will give to improving our community and country and our world. Yes, our
influence will extend so.
Where do we go from here?
The only direction we can.
The New Black America will ascend.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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