Re: [Marxism] Black Commentator: Another Side to Race and Immigration

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In addition to Nestor's comments, interested people 
can check out the following books on the same topic.

Noel Ignatin: How the Irish Became White (1970)
Karen Brodkin: How the Jews Became White Folks (1999)

Racism is so central to the cultural superstructure
of the United States that it has to be assumed as the
default setting in the culture of this country. It's
one of the reasons why Malcolm X was attracted to the
religion of Islam, and why he later left the group to
which he recruited, because of the centrality of this
matter of racism in the United States of America. 

It's also one of the reasons it's so troubling to see
so many people who just happen to be white lambasting
certain African governments. It's not as if these or
any governments don't have flaws, problems, conflicts
and internal contradictions. Every government on the
African continent is capitalist, but only some among
them get singled out for special revilementations by
these people. You'd think they might stop and wonder
why it is that they're so focused on these specific
governments? 

Micheal Warshawski on perfectionism among left-Zionists:
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs373.html 

Finally, as if it weren't enough, a look at my local
newspaper today brings even more of the same kinds of
things. Though I don't usually pay much attention to
professional sports, the media campaign against the
man, the BLACK man, who's on the verge of hitting the
top record in baseball, Barry Bonds, has reached such
a fever pitch that even I find myself reading about it:

Bill Plaschke: To boo or not to boo? [WALTER: it makes me want to puke]
<http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-plaschke27jul27,1,4380755,full.column?coll=la-headlines-sports>

Another article focusing on attacking a Black activist:

The subhead, not shown on the web version, reads:
"Houston's Quannell X, once  a street kid selling
crack, now makes his case on TV as a self-appointed
spokesman for the black underclass."

(In other words, he's someone the reader should
assume is still a crooks and a hustler.)

COLUMN ONE
Prime time for activist
By Miguel Bustillo, Times Staff Writer
July 27, 2007 
Houston â QUANELL X stared confidently into the television camera and
told a heart-tugging tale about the frail man sitting by his side:

Dennis Garnier was roughed up and disrespected, all because police
didn't have their facts straight. A SWAT team burst into his house
and hogtied him. It had the wrong address; the drug dealer lived a
few doors down.

Garnier has suffered memory loss and has become so scared of guns
that he can't work as a security guard anymore. Yet police sent him a
letter saying that an internal probe found nothing wrong. Houston
Mayor Bill White should apologize. The city should also cut Garnier a
check.

"The message this sends to all black people is that at the end of the
day, you are still a black man in America!" Quanell X shouted into
the camera, his indignation mounting. "When the chips are down, the
system will show you."

Another camera crew stepped up, and when it was satisfied, Garnier,
58, muttered his thanks to Quanell X for taking his injustice to
thousands of Texans through Fox and CBS newscasts. Houston's most
televised activist then told the reporters he'd be in touch. He'd
heard about an even bigger outrage, and the story might be ripe soon.

Quanell X was once just Quanell Evans, a Houston street urchin from a
shattered home who was slinging crack and staring at a future he knew
would put him in prison or a coffin before age 25.

He sought a new start through the Nation of Islam, but his
hate-filled diatribes against white America â which have included
anti-Semitic remarks and exhortations to "mug you some good white
folks" â proved too much even for a black Muslim organization used to
helping angry hoodlums out of the gutter.

<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-quanellx27jul27,0,767244.story?coll=la-home-center>


MALCOLM X on the meaning of whiteness:

But when you just judge a man because of the color of his skin, then
you're committing a crime, because that's the worst kind of judgment.
If you judged him just because he was a Jew, that's not as bad as
judging him because he's Black. Because a Jew can hide his religion.

He can say he's something else -- and which a lot of them do that,
they say they're something else. But the Black man can't hide. 
When they start indicting us because of our color that means we're
indicted before we're born, which is the worst kind of crime that can
be committed. The Muslim religion has eliminated all tendencies to
judge a man according to the color of his skin, but rather the
judgment is based upon his deeds.

And when, prior to going into the Muslim world, I didn't have any --
Elijah Muhammad had taught us that the white man could not enter into
Makkah in Arabia, and all of us who followed him, we believed it. And
he said the reason he couldn't enter was because he's white and
inherently evil, it's impossible to change him. And the only thing
that would change him is Islam, and he can't accept Islam because by
nature he's evil. And therefore by not being able to accept Islam and
become a Muslim, he could never enter Makkah. This is how he taught
us, you know.

So when I got over there and went to Makkah and saw these people who
were blond and blue-eyed and pale-skinned and all those things, I
said, "Well!" But I watched them closely. And I noticed that though
they were white, and they would call themselves white, there was a
difference between them and the white one over here. And that basic
difference was this: in Asia or the Arab world or in Africa, where
the Muslims are, if you find one who says he's white, all he's doing
is using an adjective to describe something that's incidental about
him, one of his incidental characteristics; so there's nothing else
to it, he's just white.

But when you get the white man over here in America and he says he's
white, he means something else. You can listen to the sound of his
voice -- when he says he's white, he means he's a boss. That's right.
That's what "white" means in this language. You know the expression,
"free, white, and twenty-one." He made that up. He's letting you know
all of them mean the same. "White" means free, boss. He's up there.
So that when he says he's white he has a little different sound in
his voice. I know you know what I'm talking about.

This was what I saw was missing in the Muslim world. If they said
they were white, it was incidental. White, black, brown, red, yellow,
doesn't make any difference what color you are. So this was the
religion that I had accepted and had gone there to get a better
knowledge of it.

But despite the fact that I saw that Islam was a religion of
brotherhood, I also had to face reality. And when I got back into
this American society, I'm not in a society that practices
brotherhood. I'm in a society that might preach it on Sunday, but
they don't practice it on no day -- on any day. And so, since I could
see that America itself is a society where there is no brotherhood
and that this society is controlled primarily by racists and
segregationists -- and it is -- who are in Washington, D.C., in
positions of power. And from Washington, D.C., they exercise the same
forms of brutal oppression against dark-skinned people in South and
North Vietnam, or in the Congo, or in Cuba, or in any other place on
this earth where they're trying to exploit and oppress. This is a
society whose government doesn't hesitate to inflict the most brutal
form of punishment and oppression upon dark-skinned people all over
the world.

FULL:
http://www.malcolm-x.org/speeches/spc_021465.htm



Walter Lippmann
Los Angeles, California











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================================
WALTER LIPPMANN
Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
writer - photographer - activist
http://www.walterlippmann.com
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