Notes From The Riverside - Endemic Official Violence

Notes from the Riverside – Endemic Official Violence

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

BY LANGSTON HUGHES

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Copyright © 2002 by Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates, Inc.

Notes from the Riverside, is my byline for the Eugene Weekly publication.

I’ve been writing for some form of the Weekly for more than 20 years. Notes from the Riverside, refers to the Willamette and McKenzie Rivers, which flow through Lane County, and Eugene and Springfield.

(Parenthesized comments are only published in the blog version)

“Safe” at home, I’ve been watching a pandemic, wrapped in a depression, with tales told by an idiot genius, hoping things will return to a new normal. Except the old normal wasn’t or isn’t so great for a lot of people. To be sure, this isn’t the first pandemic to strike this continent. The common cold, flu, syphilis, gonorrhea, small pox, devasted Indigenous populations.  Healthy doses of the memes justifying colonialism, and white supremacist Manifest Destiny, accompanied the germs, and helped establishing endemic underlying conditions of a new normal. Intersectional discrimination became the new normal. Primary symptoms of this infection, is an inability to remember what came before, especially that which you are doomed to repeat.

Recalling the ’92 Rebellion in Los Angeles (Riots are spontaneous, Rebellions are planned), two-thirds of the arrestees were not Black. Meaning, more people are suffering American inequities than Black people, though we are a sort of very visible indicator species. What was once done to us because of race, is now being done to others for the money. Dogs and firehoses in the 50’s, turn to peppergas and bean bag rounds, drone surveillance in the 21st Century.

 Even in Eugene, where the white anarchists, white supremacists, white vandals, outnumber the BIPOC peaceful protesters, that seemed to reflect a national trend. What happened to Rodney King, was a well known, commonplace experience in communities of color. So, nobody believes us, until a white man video tapes the beating?

Still the cops are acquitted, because ‘Strange Fruit” is always in season, not just in the South.  Training officer Derek Chauvin, even while being videotaped using a known kill move, on a suspected fake $20 bill passer, didn’t feel there were going to be any negative consequences for his actions, even lying on his report of the incident. He was setting an example for the cops of color, witnessing Floyd’s death: This is the expected behavior because the only color you need to see is Blue. (In the Just Us System, only Blue and White Lives Matter)

While I am heartened by the condemnation by the law enforcement and legal community, I am sobered by my long career as a mandatory reporter. How do you abolish the police, and still provide protection for kids facing sex slavery, child abuse, and other common horrors? I’m not aware of any civilization reaching our level of urban complexity, that hasn’t had some body, enforcing the behavioral norms of society, especially when those norms were unjust. When it was the law that it was illegal for people of color to be on Eugene streets after dark, because it was also illegal for them to live within the city limits, I’m sure the cops, sheriffs, banks, chamber of commerce, and many citizens, enforced those behavioral and legal norms. The resulting low ethnic minorities in the city, state, and county, was an intentional feature of the permanence of racism. So, breaking the windows of businesses, does nothing to dissolve the bedrock of systemic discrimination.

Renaming Deady Hall by itself, does nothing to the curriculum taught inside those walls, nor racist attitudes of math teachers. (A monolingual English speaking White PhD math graduate of Deady Hall, who taught at Lane Community College, opposed the implementation of a nationally known math literacy program: The Algebra Project. Suggested by the first and only Black Dean of LCC’s Math Department, it was rejected because “he was Black”. Never mind that the Black Dean had dual degrees in Math and Nuclear Physics, spoke 9 languages, was adding Spanish and ASL to his 9 languages, and was proposing an intervention designed by a Black Harvard trained mathematician, who framed Algebra as a Civil Rights Issue. The program was intended to benefit largely white students at LCC. The Black Dean left, the white faculty member got promoted to an Assistant Vice President at Lane).

No more than tearing down pioneer statuary, changes neither the urbane, nor the bucolic expressions and manifestations of institutional racism within the University, or the city, county, and state, within which it resides.  Its progress to switch the name of a dorm, from Eugene Klan #3 Exalted Cyclops Frederick Dunn, to Black Architect DeNorval Unthank, and I supported that. But Dee’s future wife had a cross burned in front of her sorority,  and was ejected from that sorority because she was dating a Black man. Her ejection was supported by a woman whose family name graces another prominent building at the University.  (In other words the Erb Memorial Union) https://around.uoregon.edu/oq/cross-burning-at-gamma-phi-beta

I wish the math department in Deady Hall could find a way to mathematically measure, therefore predict, the degree of racist meme infection, a sort of memetic viral load, to assess the degree of feverish delusional supremacy someone labors under. Apply quarantine, isolation, social distancing, before they infect others with their deadly strain. Perhaps they could partner with the Psychology Department, which could be part of the movement within that field to declare how racism might affect and infect people emotionally and psychologically: Ethnic Identity Dysphoria. Devise at least a talking cure.

The utility of such mathematical precision, and psychological healing could be useful, to prevent needless injury and death. What strain of racist meme infected Dylan Roof to commit racist mass murder in a church, and then have the arresting officers take him to Burger King, on the way to jail?

What strain of racist meme prevented officers from simply taking a drunk Black man home, to sleep it off, rather than illegally shooting him in the back, when he ran away, still drunk, in fear, apparently justifiably so? What anti-racist vaccine can increase our common humanity, and compassion, and help reduce the impact of the disasters we find ourselves in. I think I remember, the cure.

(Human Unity is a cure for White Supremacy)

Independence Day Eve 2020

In this Black Lives Matter moment, on the eve of the two hundred and forty-fourth, celebration of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, in the year of their Lord July 3, 2020. Transformed from being a colony of Great Britain, while I could do, like NPR did, I’ll just include the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBe5qbnkqoM

When I identify as a Maroon, of Black Liberation Theologist Cultural Recovery orientation, I’m positioning myself in the traditions of Crispus Attucks, Frederick Douglass, John Horse, and other of maroon heritage. But to remember Fred’s words on the subject of religiosity…

“I find, since reading over the foregoing Narrative, that I have, in several instances, spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion. To remove the liability of such misapprehension, I deem it proper to append the following brief explanation. “

What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference--so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Frederick Douglass

The Nation of Israel, had been conquered 5 times, the fifth time by the Roman Empire. As they hunted and killed his cousin Yocanon (John the Baptist), the Romans hunted Ieshua during the 3 years of his ministry, persecuted his followers, crucifying them, feeding them to lions, for sport and entertainment, and then hijacked Ieshua’s religion. Then, after crumbling as an empire, that disintegration initiated the Dark Ages, in Europe. To be sure, the rest of the civilized world, in Africa, China, Asia, Turtle Island, didn’t experience a Dark Ages… all those places experiencing complex, urban civilizations, populated by communities of color, as we call them today, in a temporarily majority white cultural context, as if that was normal.

The so-called Western World, by which it is meant, White Western world, then, using a reconstituted weaponize form of Christianity (Christian Soldiers, Crusades, Colonization. Cavalry, Ku Klux Klan, Nazism, White Supremacy), proceeded from attempting to liberate the Holy Land, to spreading the word of a Caucasianized Jesus.

They were clear about what they were doing, all non-white people, practicing their indigenous spirituality, were enemies of Christ. This included the non-white Christians in Africa, and Asia, who had also participated in the Council of Nicea.

Never mind, that the oldest book in the world was a Bible (The Peshitta), written in the year 450 AD, in Aramaic. The oldest physical Christian churches in the world, being in Ethiopia, where there is a Christian majority to this day. It can be reasonably argued that Christianity has African, non-White Supremacist, roots. Aramaic Christians have never led wars of conquest, never had slaves or trafficked in slavery, never burned women at the stake as witches, never had Inquisitions, or ethnically cleansed continents.

Yeah, I’m going to have to side with Frederick Douglass on this one: I’m going to have to love the egalitarian, Sacred Feminine, socially just and active, meditative, nature loving, practical, and humorous, Christianity of Christ. “Love your Enemies”, which in his Aramaic tongue (Ahebw Labwheldbhaybhaykhun) is instructions on how to do it.  Those instructions require breathwork, and meditative skill, which then drives your action in the world. It means you create a better world, rather than emoting, protesting, destroying.

When Ieshua was asked why do people suffer, and he says, “You Suffer Because You Love What Deceives You – Acquire My Peace Within You, The Child of True Humanity Lives Within You. Seek It You Will Find It. Birthing that Child of True Humanity, is achieved by united your inner feminine, with your inner masculine, and creating that Child of True Humanity. You love your enemy, by seeing, and healing, and realizing the truths they don’t want to face out of fear.

I can draw a clear line from the White Roman soldiers who first beat him without mercy, gave him a crown of thorns to wear, then gave African Yeshua vinegar when he thirsted on the cross, finally drove a spear into his side, to the kneeling of Derek Chauvin, on the back of George Floyd.    

Rome is cruelty.

America combines the mind games of Egypt, with the cruelty of Rome. Making you think, there is something wrong with you, for wanting freedom. “That’s not a chip on my shoulder, that’s your foot (or knee) on my neck”. – Malcolm X, another maroon, who loved freedom.

If I love this country, but it doesn’t always love me back, as the Delaney sisters reminded us, then as experts in creating multiracial complex urban civilizations, we must love America.

“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” ― James Baldwin

Flight of the Secretary Bird

Flight of the Secretary Bird Blog Entry

A secretary bird is like an eagle on stilts. The National Bird of Post-Apartheid South Africa, it hunts snakes in the grass. There are scores of poisonous snakes in Africa. There are many snakes in the grass, in America. One must watch for them, calmly, neutralize their venom, and extract what nourishing knowledge you can from the experience.

I was raised in a form of Afrocentrity that held that Christianity was an African religion, devised under a time of Roman occupation, therefore European domination. Ieshua conceived of a practical every day response to Roman oppression. One might consider contemporary America to be a combination of the cruelty of Rome, with the technology of Egypt. The capacity for mind games mostly.

An indigenous African response integrating the Sacred Feminine, natural world, with the spiritual one, was part of that original Christianity before the Romans got ahold of it.

Not Dominating the natural and human worlds with exploitive extractive oppression.

That is, preserve the natural world, your breathing air, your drinking water, the health of your body, your mental, emotional and spiritual health, and that of your relatives.

Rather than extracting profit for a few, while polluting the drinking water and air of the many: Environmental Justice.

The secretary bird doesn’t just concern itself with visible snakes in the grass, but the invisible one’s as well. You suffer because you love what deceives you, and the snakes are poisoning you with their venom, while you are unaware. Why not have zero emission factories, as well as cars, as the standard? Why not promote Skills of Self Healing, rather than Pills. One could be angry, but “Seek Knowledge Before Vengeance”. Let’s Begin.