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Category Archives: Activism

The Tim Wise Hustle

28 Saturday Sep 2013

Posted by asabagna in Activism, AfroSpear, AfroSphere, Tim Wise, White Guilt, White privilege, White Supremacy Ideology

≈ 1 Comment

I’ve never been down with Tim Wise. Unlike a lot of African-American commentators who considered him an ally and raised him upon the pedestal of the “good white man”, I found nothing in his self declared white anti-racist mission hustle that I considered sincere. I saw him and it for what it was: exploiting, appropriating and profiting from the oppression and injustices faced by Black people, while making White people feel good about themselves via the privilege of their white guilt complex. I previously laid this all out here: Tim Wise and The Privilege of White Guilt.

It appears that the dazzlement is beginning to dim and more and more of my African-American brothers and sisters are beginning to see his true light. When I read these two articles at Black Agenda Report, here and here, I saw that the shine was indeed starting to come off Mr. Wise. Then I read this recent article at gradient lair, including the links within the article pertaining to Mr. Wise. I recommend you read them all… eye opening!

A former friend of mine once stated: “time takes time”. Time is certainly catching up with Tim Wise… and his hustle, like all fads… is getting old.

Sunday Inspirations: The Deacons for Defense and Justice

08 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by asabagna in Activism, African Diaspora, African-Americans, AfroSpear, AfroSphere, History, Sunday Inspirations, The Deacons for Defense and Justice

≈ 5 Comments

Hat tip to Ray Winbush for sharing this!

Self-Defense Organizations in the Afrikan Community

From the Wikipedia

The Deacons for Defense and Justice was an armed self-defense African-American civil rights organization in the U.S. Southern states during the 1960s. Historically, the organization practiced self-defense methods in the face of racist oppression that was carried out under the Jim Crow Laws by local/state government officials and racist vigilantes. Many times the Deacons are not written about or cited when speaking of the Civil Rights Movement because their agenda of self-defense – in this case, using violence, if necessary – did not fit the image of strict non-violence that leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. espoused. Yet, there has been a recent debate over the crucial role the Deacons and other lesser known militant organizations played on local levels throughout much of the rural South. Many times in these areas the Federal government did not always have complete control over to enforce such laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Deacons were a driving force of Black Power that Stokely Carmichael echoed. Carmichael speaks about the Deacons when he writes, “Here is a group which realized that the ‘law’ and law enforcement agencies would not protect people, so they had to do it themselves…The Deacons and all other blacks who resort to self-defense represent a simple answer to a simple question: what man would not defend his family and home from attack?” The Deacons, according to Carmichael and many others, were the protection that the Civil Rights needed on local levels, as well as, the ones who intervened in places that the state and federal government fell short.

History

The Deacons were not the first champions of armed-defense during the Civil Rights Movement. Many activists and other proponents of non-violence protected themselves with guns. Fannie Lou Hamer, the eloquently blunt Mississippi militant who outraged Lyndon B. Johnson at the 1964 Democratic Convention, confessed that she kept several loaded guns under her bed. Others such as Robert F. Williams also practiced self-defense. Williams transformed his local NAACP branch into an armed self-defense unit, for which transgression he was denounced by the NAACP and hounded by the federal government (he found asylum in Cuba).

In many areas of the “Deep South” the federal and state governments had no control of local authorities and groups that did not want to follow the laws enacted. One such group, the Ku Klux Klan, is the most widely known organization that openly practiced acts of violence and segregation based on race. As part of their strategy to intimidate this community [African Americans], the Ku Klux Klan initiated a “campaign of terror” that included harassment, the burning of crosses on the lawns of African-American voters, the destruction by fire of five churches, a Masonic hall, a Baptist center, and murder. These incidents were not isolated since a significant amount of victimization of African Americans occurred in Jonesboro, Louisiana in 1964.

The African-American community felt that a response of action was crucial in curbing this terrorism given the lack of support and protection by State and Federal authorities. A group of African-American men in Jonesboro in Jackson Parish in north Louisiana, led by Earnest “Chilly Willy” Thomas and Frederick Douglas Kirkpatrick, founded the group in November 1964 to protect civil rights workers, their communities and their families against the Klan. Most of the Deacons were war veterans with combat experience from the Korean War and World War II. The Jonesboro chapter later organized a Deacons chapter in Bogalusa, Louisiana, led by Charles Sims, A. Z. Young and Robert Hicks. The Jonesboro chapter initiated a regional organizing campaign and eventually formed 21 chapters in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The militant Deacons’ confrontation with the Klan in Bogalusa was instrumental in forcing the federal government to invervene on behalf of the black community and enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act and neutralize the Klan.

Earnest “Chilly Willy” Thomas was born in Jonesboro, Louisiana, on November 20, 1935, in a time of extreme segregation. He believed that political reforms could be secured by force rather than moral appeal. The CORE had a freedom house in Jonesboro that became the target of the Klan. The practice referred to as “nigger knocking” was a time-honored tradition among whites in the rural South.

Because of repeated attacks on the Freedom House, the Black community responded. Earnest Thomas was one of the first volunteers to guard the house. According to Lance Hill, “Thomas was eager to work with CORE, but he had reservations about the nonviolent terms imposed by the young activists.” Thomas, who had military training, quickly emerged as the leader of this budding defense organization that would guard the Jonesboro community in the day with their guns concealed and carried their guns openly during the cover of night to discourage any Klan activity.

There are many accounts of how the group’s name came about, but according to Lance Hill the most plausible explanation is: “the name was a portmanteau that evolved over a period of time, combining the CORE staff’s first appellation of ‘deacons’ with the tentative name chosen in November 1964: ‘Justice and Defense Club’. By January 1965 the group had arrived at is permanent name, ‘Deacons for Defense and Justice.” The organization wanted to maintain a level of respectability and identify with traditionally accepted symbols of peace and moral values. As one ex-Deacon wrote in a lyric of a song, “the term ‘deacons’ was selected to beguile local whites by portraying the organization as an innocent church group….”

The Deacons are the subject of a 2003 television movie, Deacons for Defense.
Produced by Showtime starring academy-award winner Forest Whitaker, Ossie Davis, and Jonathan Silverman, the film is based on the struggle of the actual Deacons for Defense against the Jim Crow South in a powerful area of Louisiana controlled by the Ku Klux Klan. Using the story on a white-owned factory that controls the economy of the local society and the effects of racism and intimidation on the lives of the African-American community, the film follows the psychological transition of a family and
community members from belief in a strict non-violent stance to belief in self-defense.

Role

The Deacons were instrumental in many campaigns led by the Civil Rights Movement. A good example is the June 1966 March Against Fear, which went from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. The March Against Fear signified a shift in character and power in the southern civil rights movement and was an event in which the Deacons participated.

The Deacons had a relationship with other civil rights groups that advocated and practiced non-violence: the willingness of the Deacons to provide low-key armed guards facilitated the ability of groups such as the NAACP and CORE to stay, at least formally, within their own parameters of non-violence. Although many local chapters felt it was necessary to maintain a level of security by either practicing self-defense as some CORE, SNCC, and NAACP local chapters did, the national level of all these organizations still maintained the idea of non-violence to achieve civil rights. Nonetheless, in some cases, their willingness to respond to violence with violence led to tension between the Deacons and the nonviolent civil rights workers whom they sought to protect.

According to Hill, this is the true resistance that enforced civil rights in areas of the Deep South. Often it was local (armed) communities that laid the foundation for equal opportunities to be attained by African Americans. National organizations played their role, exposing the problems, but it was local organizations and individuals who implemented these rights and were not fearful of reactionary Whites who wanted to keep segregation alive. Without these local organizations pushing for their rights and, many times, using self-defense tactics, not much would have changed, according to Hill.

An example of the need for self-defense to enable substantial change in the Deep South took place in early 1965. Black students picketing the local high school were confronted by hostile police and fire trucks with hoses. A car of four Deacons emerged and, in view of the police, calmly loaded their shotguns. The police ordered the fire truck to withdraw. This was the first time in the 20th century, as Lance Hill observes, “an armed black organization had successfully used weapons to defend a lawful protest against an attack by law enforcement.”[2] Hill gives as another example: “In Jonesboro, the Deacons made history when they compelled Louisiana governor John McKeithen to intervene in the city’s civil rights crisis and require a compromise with city leaders — the first capitulation to the civil rights movement by a Deep South governor.”

The history of the Civil Rights Movement focuses little on organizations such as the Deacons for a number of reasons. First, the dominant ideology of the Movement was one of practicing non-violence and this overarching view has been the accepted way to characterize the Civil Rights Movement. Second, threats to the lives of Deacons’ members required that secrecy be maintained to avoid terrorist attacks on their supporters, and they recruited mature and male members, in contrast to other more informal self-defense efforts in which women and teenagers also played a role. Finally, with the shift to Northern Black plight and the idea of Black Power emerging in major cities across America, the Deacons became yesterday’s news and organizations such as The Black Panther Party gained notoriety and became the publicized militant Black organization.

The tactics of the Deacons attracted the attention and concern of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Investigating the group over the years, the Bureau produced more than 1,500 pages of comprehensive and relatively accurate records on the Deacons, activities, largely through numerous informants close to or even inside the organization. Members of the Deacons were repeatedly questioned and intimidated by F.B.I. agents. One member, Harvie Johnson (the last surviving original member of the Deacons for Defense and Justice), was “interviewed” by two agents who asked only how the Deacons obtained their weapons, with no questions about Klan activity or police brutality ever asked. In February 1965, after a New York Times article about the Deacons, J. Edgar Hoover became interested in the group. Lance Hill offers Hoover’s reaction, which was sent to the field offices of the Bureau in Louisiana: “Because of the potential for violence indicated, you are instructed to immediately initiate an investigation of the DDJ [Deacons for Defense and Justice].” As was eventually exposed in the late 1970s, under its COINTELPRO program, the FBI was involved in many illegal activities to spy on and undermine organizations it deemed “a threat to the American way”. However, with the advent of other militant Black Power organizations, and the Black Power Movement becoming the more visible movement towards the latter 1960s, the involvement of the Deacons in the civil rights movement declined (as did FBI interference with them), with the presence of the Deacons all but vanishing by 1968.

Roy Innis has said that the Deacons “forced the Klan to re-evaluate their actions and often change their undergarments”, according to Ken Blackwell.

Sunday Inspirations: Two African Students Develop Anti-Malaria Soap

02 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by asabagna in Activism, Africa, Afro-Futurism, AfroSpear, AfroSphere, Sunday Inspirations

≈ Leave a comment

2 men

In 2010, 219 million people were affected with malaria, and out of that number over 600,000 died. Malaria is also one of the leading causes of death in Central Africa.

Two students in Burkina Faso, pulled their science knowledge and resources together to invent a mosquito repelling soap in order to prevent malaria. Gérard Niyondiko and Moctar Dembélé, both students at Intsitut International de l’Eau et de l’Envirronement de Ouagadougou (International Institute of water and environment) in Burkina Faso, were awarded this year’s Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC) $25,000 Grand Prize. The GSVC is the only international competition of Social Business Plans, dedicated to students, young graduates, and entrepreneurs with high social and/or environmental startups. They are also the first student team from Africa to ever win the Grand Prize.

“The soap will be available first here, and then given to NGO”, Gerard Niyondiko, Technical Manager of Faso soap said in a video that was posted online today.

Their invention, called Faso Soap, is made from karate citronella, and other herbs found locally in Burkina Faso, that are still a secret.

“We want a simple solution, because everyone uses soaps, even in the very poor communities”, Moktar Dembélé, General Manager of Faso soap said.

Sunday Inspirations

27 Sunday Jan 2013

Posted by asabagna in Activism, AfroSpear, AfroSphere, Empowerment, Sunday Inspirations

≈ Leave a comment

The Miseducation of the Negro Pseudo-intellectual

14 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by asabagna in Activism, African Diaspora, African-Americans, AfroSpear, AfroSphere, Critical Thinking, Life, Negro Pseudo-intellectualism, Social Media

≈ 2 Comments

“I stated that Kony 2012 is pro-imperialism, pro-militarism propaganda.  Again, here is the link to the article explaining my position.  http://new-possibilities.blogspot.com/2012/03/kony-2012-is-imperialistic-propaganda.html

Most of you have not provided any logical arguments refuting that assertion.  Instead, many of you have resorted to ad hominem attacks. It is easy to call me “Negro pseudo intellectual”  and “only a mouth”, question my level of activism and make disparaging remarks about African Americans.  It is far more difficult to challenge my argument.  I challenge you to debate me on substance.”

@Ana..I did not “deny that some blacks have been and are the enemies of other black people”.  In my article, I condemned Joseph Kony and called for him to be brought to justice. All groups, including black people, have their traitors. I never said or implied that the victims should wait. I said that Africans should and can solve their own problems. Anson Asaka

Brother Anson,

First, I had made it quite clear in my previous post that the article and term “Negro pseudo-intellectual” wasn’t directed at nor a personal attack against you. I also directed you to analyze my definition and clearly stated: “My definition is above and if you personally don’t fit into that category, then it doesn’t apply to you.” However from your above statement: “It is easy to call me “Negro pseudo intellectual”,  I can only surmise that you did analyze my definition and have determined that you do fit into that category. I will therefore defer to the substance of your superior logical argument and surrender that point to you.

Secondly, I did read your well written and well researched article explaining your position. Interestingly, I found it ironic that all the sources you used as the substance of your logical arguments were taken from “western organizations”, as you previously branded Invisible Children. You freely quote Wikipedia, ABC News, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Council of Foreign Affairs, Amnesty International and the Wall Street Journal. You are correct that I didn’t challenge or debate you on the substance of your argument. However, if I ever do wish to challenge or debate the substance of logical arguments based on an eurocentric point of view, I’ll find a white man to debate with… and not one of his black surrogates.

Thirdly, I have observed that when those of African descent outside of the USA, don’t conform to the narrow-minded beliefs, opinions and logical arguments of our African-American brothers and sisters… and have the audacity to be critical of your arrogant view of the world, you make accusations that we “make disparaging remarks about African Americans.” I have discussed this attitude before in my post and adjoining comments: “African-American Arrogance”. I invite you read the post. You may learn something about people of African descent who are not African-Americans. You may also learn something about yourself.

Finally, your above comment has inspired me to analyze the issue of the miseducated Negro pseudo-intellectual. I observed on your blog that you proudly disclose all your educational achievements. It’s impressive and I sincerely congratulate your academic successes. I am constantly teaching my son that education is certainly a powerful and invaluable tool for our people… if it is utilized as the foundation for action and enlightenment! However for the miseducated Negro pseudo-intellectual, education is the basis for inaction and narrow-minded thinking. For the miseducated Negro pseudo-intellectual, education is ghetto-ized into a quest for the debate of logical arguments to quench the thirst of the eurocentric fed ego. For the miseducated Negro pseudo-intellectual, education is not seen as a resource to turn viral awareness via social media into action, but as a tool to be wasted in another viral bitch session.

The Negro Pseudo-intellectual and Social Media Activism

10 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by asabagna in Activism, AfroSpear, AfroSphere, Critical Thinking, Joseph Kony, Negro Pseudo-intellectualism, News, Social Media

≈ 19 Comments

“That Kony2012 video is one of the most effective pro-imperialism, pro-militarism pieces of propaganda ever produced.” Anson Asaka

“It’s a sad commentary on affairs when white people are the ones constantly and consistently advocating for the safety and security of African children and all “Negroes” can do is criticize their efforts. Instead of having and sprouting pseudo-intellectual and hyper-moralistic political rhetoric, why don’t Black people take the lead, especially African-Americans, and do the leg work to take on this challenge themselves? You do have an African-American” president in the White House don’t you? You could have also utilized social media to bring attention to this issue in an “anti-imperialist” and “anti-militaristic” way. I know, I know… that would mean that you wouldn’t be able to use your time and attention on the latest Chris Brown and Rihanna saga, the Kardashians, the Real Housewives of Atlanta, NCAA March Madness, as well as spend your money on jewelry, booze, drugs, ipads, clothes and other materialistic trinkets. SMH!” Asabagna Alatentou

Above is a conversation I had on the Facebook page of Anson Asaka today, regarding the Kony 2012 social media campaigned by the organization Invisible Children.

First let me define the term “Negro Pseudo-intellectual” as I see it. These are primarily African-Americans who use their time and energy to talk about (i.e. criticize) what other people are doing, especially “White” people, but do nothing themselves. They have no alternate plan. They cannot and do not offer involvement in an alternate campaign. They talk a big game, use big words and sprout the usual rhetoric to appear enlightened. However, they deliver nothing concrete of substantial value. They are talkers, not doers of the word!

When I first heard of the Kony 2012 social media campaign, I was not surprised that it was being spearheaded by someone “white”. I also was not surprised by the fierce backlash from the Negro Pseudo-intellectual. In fact, I was expecting it. Social media is their playfield. This is the arena they dominate because it’s where they can easily find an audience of like-minded arrogant ideologues, who views social media as a vehicle to be critical of what others are doing. They would never think of utilizing it as a springboard to social activism. The primary objective of social media for the Negro Pseudo-intellectual is to sprout pseudo-intellectual and hyper-moralistic political rhetoric, as well regurgitate their played out 60’s Black revolutionary conspiracy theories, so as to appear intelligent and enlightened. It’s not to utilize social media as a tool to ushering in social change today for the benefit of others, especially African children.

I do acknowledge that social media can be used to educate and enlighten… and that’s a good thing. Furthermore it can be an effective tool to scrutinize any social campaign and vigorously probe the integrity of any organization, especially those which purport to be for our benefit. Particularly when it’s being organized and led by someone from the dominant culture.

I don’t intimately know the people behind the organization Invisible Children and I can’t speak to the sincerity of their effort or the integrity of their intentions. However, I applaud their idea to utilize social media for this campaign. I may not agree that further militarization of Africa by the U.S. military via  AFRICOM is the ideal method to deal with Joseph Kony and the LRA. However unless I can present an alternate plan, I don’t support putting all my efforts into criticizing those who are trying to deal with this issue in their own way. I’m also not going to advocate the various ridiculous conspiracy theories about the origins of the campaign.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt

Interestingly, after I posted my above response to Anson’s post, his reply was to remove it. Another aspect of Negro Pseudo-intellectualism is to censure any opposing viewpoints and opinions. Sounds familiar?

Save The Children East Africa Appeal

09 Tuesday Aug 2011

Posted by asabagna in Activism, Africa, AfroSpear, AfroSphere, Bob Marley, Compassion, Famine, Hunger, News, Save The Children, Somalia

≈ 5 Comments

Donate here

Voodoo and Vaccines in Benin, Africa

22 Wednesday Jun 2011

Posted by asabagna in Activism, Africa, AfroSpear, AfroSphere, Children, Health Care, Life, Vaccinations, Voodoo

≈ 4 Comments

One.org: Save 4 million children’s lives in 5 years

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