Jesus Was Divisive: A Black Pastor’s Message To White Christians by Isabella Rosario

  

Source: Code Switch

More than 90% of U.S. churches were closed at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. But since mid-April, mostly white faith leaders have pushed to fill their pews again, suing governors over bans on large gatherings and joining “reopen” protests at state capitols. President Trump threatened to override governors who did not allow “essential places of faith to open right now,” flying in the face of black pastors urging caution. African American deaths from COVID-19 are nearly twice as high as would be expected based on their share of the population.

The Rev. Lenny Duncan is a black preacher in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, one of the nation’s whitest Christian denominations. As nationwide protests have forced white Americans to talk about race, Duncan’s longtime advocacy within the church has become all the more relevant.

Formerly incarcerated and homeless, Duncan was attracted to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s welcoming message of grace. But he believes the denomination — and the broader mainline Christian community — have failed to answer the call to fight for racial justice and address the church’s inherent white supremacy. (Slaveholders justified slavery with Bible verses. The Ku Klux Klan staged parades with banners saying, “One God/One Country/One Flag.” Segregated Christian schools thrived under the guise of religious freedom.)

In his book Dear Church: A Love Letter From a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US, Duncan writes: “Jesus is Trayvon Martin, armed only with a bag of Skittles and an iced tea against an entire world that would rather hang him from a tree than love him. Until we see this, we are lost.”

I talked to Duncan about his book, the “demonic” force of white supremacy and the church’s role in society during a time of social distancing, social unrest and religious decline.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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There’s a growing movement among white evangelical faith leaders to hold in-person services again, and the president has supported these calls to reopen. What are your thoughts on this, considering how COVID-19 has ravaged communities of color?

We shouldn’t be surprised that white Christianity is willing to sacrifice black and brown bodies for the cause of their own personal salvation and relationship with Jesus Christ. That has been part of the history of the American church experience. Of course, they are willing to sacrifice black and brown bodies to hear a full-throated hymn. Of course, they are willing to sacrifice our communities for tithes and offerings. Of course, they are willing to sacrifice the people I grew up with and call that patriotism. And some of them are even going a step further and calling it biblical.

These pastors have completely aligned themselves with empire, the antithesis of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And it’s mostly fueled by white supremacy. As soon as they heard that their communities were not going to bear the brunt of this pandemic, then they didn’t care anymore. Before this pandemic, many of us have already been incredibly aware of the way that our health care system is a disaster for black communities. We’ve already been calling out how white evangelical Christians have not loved their neighbor or cared about the cause of racial justice in this country.

Your book Dear Church was published almost a year ago today. What has the response been like?

The book had a discernible impact upon the denomination as a whole. There have been shifts. One of the things I talk about in the book is [the symbolism of Advent] — painting blackness as always in darkness, always as evil and bad, further away from the light of God and all that kind of language we use in our worship. There’s been a big movement around pastors not wearing white robes, which is a silly thing that really resonated with people — like, oh, I’m a white person wearing a white robe with a hood.

I believe that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America wants to be better. They just don’t know how. One of the things that we often underestimate with the power of white supremacy is that the people who are the sickest from it, often do not know that they are infected with it. They can’t recognize the cage around me as a black, queer person in this country, and they can’t see the gilded one around themselves. That’s why in the book, I diagnosed it as something that is demonic and otherworldly because of the way it seems to have malevolence and intelligence above and beyond some of the convenient fools. Our president is a convenient fool for white supremacy.

You said the people who are the sickest from white supremacy often don’t know that they are infected with it. Even if white pastors are disregarding the impact of COVID-19 on people of color, white Americans comprise nearly half of COVID-19 deaths.

That’s the cunning thing about white supremacy is that not only does it always find a scapegoat, but it always finds someone who’s doing worse off than you. And it creates a narrative of white American invulnerability to what’s happening globally. We’ve always been able to weather this storm because America is so exceptional and it’s the city on the hill, it’s blessed and ordained by God. All of that is bulls***. The truth is that we have refused to engage in the global community as a country and our churches have refused to engage the local communities on the issues that Jesus actually cares about. If the Christian church in the 21st century does not dismantle white supremacy, there will be no Christian witness in 50 years in this country. Every church will close.

“We’re all in this together” has become a clichéd phrase during the pandemic, and among Christians, there’s a similar desire for unity. A recent article called “Church, Don’t Let Coronavirus Divide You” encourages Christians who disagree about masks and social distancing to not judge one another. But in your book, you write that Jesus was divisive.

There’s a lot of bulls*** in the name of Christian unity, where people will set aside the agenda of God in the name of Christian niceness. Christian niceness is a product of whiteness, and it’s just as deadly as any of the other manifestations of white supremacy.

The most compassionate action right now is intentional social distancing. That’s what Jesus would be telling us to do if we were gathering. Jesus was a man of color who was murdered by law enforcement and state-sanctioned violence for insurrection against the Roman Empire. That’s not the average pastor in America. The average pastor in America placates the comforted and does nothing for the afflicted when we’re actually called to afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted.

What should the role of the church be — specifically very white denominations like the ELCA — in addressing killings of black Americans by police?

The last couple days have been incredibly traumatizing for black Americans. I spent most of the last 72 hours in my garden, planting flowers, listening to hymns and bursting into tears. Because I’m tired of Jesus literally saying, “I can’t breathe,” on the streets of America while everyone turns their back on him.

White denominations need to show up, share their wealth and let people of color and street activists lead. They need to get connected to leaders on the ground and pour all their resources into bail funds and providing food and water. The church has lost our place in society and given up our opportunity to be leaders. But we can be chaplains to the revolution. We can offer spiritual care and comfort to those who are going to change this country and who I truly believe are sent by God. We can show up as white churches to serve those people and get the hell out of their way.

Given Christianity’s role in enabling white supremacy in this country, what steps can the church take going forward to ameliorate those sins?

American Christianity needs a revival. I mean, it’s mostly a whitewashed tomb with the ghost of Christianity haunting our churches. It’s a group of people who get together and like to think about how they used to take down empires with the power of God and make sure the marginalized are centered and offered salvation, mercy and grace. We tell stories of people who did those things, but we hardly ever do them ourselves anymore.

We need to acknowledge that a large portion of the American Christian world will never commit to the task of dismantling white supremacy. The rest of us have to start this work with or without them, because the entire republic is on the line. And beyond the republic — perhaps the world and ourselves. The church is a spiritual body beyond time and space that has lasted 2,000 years and has watched the rise and fall of empires. We will survive this empire. And we will have to be accountable for the actions we took as it fell.

Black Masculinity Under Racial Capitalism by Jordanna Matlon

                                                             Branded Head, Hank Willis Thomas

 

Source: Boston Review

In the photograph Branded Head (2003), the shape of a black man’s clean-shaven head gracefully curves against a plain white background. The subject’s face—and with it all the features that might have identified him—is outside of the frame. The viewer’s attention is drawn instead to a keloid several inches above his ear in the shape of the Nike swoosh. The man is branded.

The portrait is a searing critique of what its creator, artist Hank Willis Thomas, calls a commodifiable blackness. “Young African American men especially,” Thomas observes, “have been known to pay to become the best advertisers anyone could ask for.” Without the Nike swoosh, Thomas’s subject would be entirely anonymous, a faceless black body. Branded, he becomes recognizable—yet in a way that accepts commodification as the source of his identity.

For Thomas, Branded Head speaks to how little has changed across the different eras of racial capitalism. “Slaves,” he explains, “were branded as a sign of ownership and. . . today so many of us brand ourselves.” In the first instance, branding was a mark of lost agency, a conversion of the body into a commodity object. Now branding—commodification—ironically restores value, in a postindustrial era that so often construes the black body as lacking any intrinsic value.

It is undeniable that our culture’s obsession with branding cuts across race and gender. Nonetheless there is something unique about how black men participate in it, and that speaks to their location within the structure of racial capitalism. For much of capitalism’s history, after all, its protagonists—the property owners and wage laborers who, as Marx would say, were destined to “make history”—were all white men. This legacy of entitlement persists in the inequalities we see today, which so often render black and male as inherently contradictory, the fact of black abjection set irreconcilably against the anticipation of male privilege. This contradiction should be an opening to critique capitalism’s persuasive ideology that reduces individual worth to monetary value. But as Branded Head implies, hegemony is in effect: even for men inhibited from achieving normative masculinities rooted in work, economic agency remains integral to their identities. Consumerism and commodification—brands and branding—thus become occult expressions of capitalist success that emerge as alternatives to conventional success within the labor economy. Through them, black men paradoxically are transformed into iconic figures of success within the fantasy of late capitalism.

The european transition to industrial capitalism established a division of labor that assigned men dominant roles as “productive” wage laborers and left women to reproductive activities outside of the new market economy. Men’s wages, in turn, enabled them to become providers—breadwinners in patriarchal, heteronormative households.

But while capitalism defined the laboring body as male, race placed black men at the intersection of male privilege and racial exclusion. To be black, as Cedric Robinson wrote in Black Marxism (1983), was to have “no civilization, no cultures, no religions, no history, no place, and finally no humanity that might command consideration.” Black men had to navigate a contested terrain, struggling to assert their limited economic agency. Within the world capitalist system, then, black men were cast in three distinct but imbricated roles: as commodified bodies, as devalued laborers, and as fraught consumers.

In the slave economy, the black body was commodified both as labor (to produce value) and as capital (property itself). Blackness, in other words, was valued both as capital and subhuman capital-generator. Upon manumission, the symbolic weight of blackness did not just evaporate: black bodies continued to be subjected to the exploitations of the most degraded forms of capitalist labor, while the status of their humanity remained, for their white employers and coworkers, a question mark. Black men struggled to be paid wages equivalent to white workers and were frequently emasculated as “boys” at denigrating workplaces. And because this meant that black men did not center their identities around work, these jobs for the most part did not present themselves as obvious sites for black “working”-class struggle. Instead, as Robin D. G. Kelley shows in Race Rebels (1994), leisure, social spaces, and sartorial expression “enabled African Americans to take back their bodies for their own pleasure rather than another’s profit.” Unable to enjoy the social status of the (white) working man, black men survived and garnered status outside of the boundaries circumscribing “good” or “dignified” work. Within the world capitalist system, black men were cast in three distinct but imbricated roles: as commodified bodies, as devalued laborers, and as fraught consumers. Opposition to economic and racial oppression on the job, in other words, centered performative expressions of black masculinity, and positioned black cultural forms such as music and style as important arenas of protest. Kelley illustrates this when he considers the political implications of Malcolm X’s zoot suit. So, too, do Theresa Runstedtler in Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner (2012), her study of early twentieth-century world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson and his cars and furs, and Mark Anthony Neal in Looking for Leroy (2013), his analysis of Jay-Z’s self-branding as an “elite ‘product’.”

Naturalizing the masculine, and by extension white, character of virtuous labor was a hegemonic project, the ideological axis of economic domination. The theory of hegemony, developed by twentieth-century Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, explained how dominant group ideology transcends class to appear as common-sense understandings of the world and thus generate consent to domination. Stuart Hall adapted Gramsci’s theory to describe how identity construction becomes “the ‘trenches’ and the permanent fortifications” of ideological struggle. Because various aspects of identity do not always align, they generate “contradictory forms of ‘common sense.’” Hall was concerned with the clash of class and race in particular, a clash seen, for example, in white nationalist ideologies that produce antipathy to black and immigrant struggles, thus inhibiting the formation of a potentially formidable interracial working-class coalition.

But Hall’s interpretation also illustrates the contradictions of black masculinity, an identity situated at the intersection of masculine entitlement and devalued blackness. Patriarchy, as a “common-sense” ideology, is a powerful incentive for black men to remain committed to tenets of masculine worth rooted in economic value—even when their devalued participation in the labor market means they are unable to achieve dominant masculinities themselves.

Striving to achieve economic value presents the aforementioned alternatives to labor: commodification and consumerism, branding and brands. Blackness, with its legacy of double commodification, is particularly susceptible to disembodied market value. Tokenism and cultural appropriation—valuable blackness coupled with the near or total absence of black people—exemplify the marginal position occupied by blacks in the marketplace. So while black laboring bodies in many instances have become redundant, the social registers of blackness have been converted into cultural capital and remain highly significant. Greg Tate writes in Everything But the Burden (2003) that, as capitalism’s original fetish object, “the Black body, and subsequently Black culture, has become a hungered-after taboo item and a nightmarish bugbear in the badlands of the American racial imagination.” The ubiquitous image of a dunking Michael Jordan hints at how iconic the black male body is in popular culture. Yet Jordan’s repurposing as a commodity—one aimed at compelling consumption by other black men—renders his remarkable athleticism secondary to his power as a commercial object. Tokenism and cultural appropriation—valuable blackness coupled with the near or total absence of black people—exemplify the marginal position occupied by blacks in the marketplace. This commodification of Jordan dramatizes the degree to which black manhood, so far as the market is concerned, has value mainly as a trope. Tropes, in this sense, are not only personifications of a stereotype. They are performing commodities that embody extreme expressions of livelihoods—whether celebrity or criminal—that are outside of wage labor and that are rooted in conspicuous consumption. For black men excluded from the labor market, such tropes stand in as promises of success in the capitalist world system. Indeed, for many they suggest an alternative to market fundamentalism: if conventional routes to masculine worth via virtuous breadwinning are unavailable, the freedom to make money any way possible and spend it with abandon emerges as a generalizable expression of manhood.

Like a blinged-out Horatio Alger, the black male trope is many things at once: as Tate maintains, the “ultimate outsider,” yes, but also, as Nicole Fleetwood contends, “an ultra-stylish thug and the ultimate American citizen.” In his essay “NIGGA: The 21st-Century Theoretical Superhero” (2013), Neal explains, “basic tropes of ‘blackness’—black culture, black identity, black institutions—have been distorted, remixed, and undermined by the logic of the current global economy.” This distorted blackness enables a “stake in transnational capitalism” but at the expense of being “posited and circulated as a buffer against white supremacy, political disenfranchisement, slavery, Jim Crow segregation and the collusion of racist imaginations and commercial culture.” The commodification of blackness during a time when an ever-increasing number of the world’s laborers are insecure, contingent, or chronically unemployed thus has the perverse effect of extolling blackness within the very system that objectifies it.

While blackness was initially subjected to what Aimé Césaire referred to in 1955 as thingification in service to capitalism, tropes of blackness now personify the ideals of making and spending—the basic freedoms of late capitalism. Even for black men who are never able to attain normative, producer-provider masculinities, the seduction of patriarchal privilege is a powerful driver. With their masculinities at stake, many seek out alternative means to demonstrate their economic agency. They achieve this by locating black value in its commodity form—paying to advertise, as Thomas aphorizes. Doing so enables black men to overwrite the dominant narrative of labor market exclusion.

Yet by accepting commodification as a source of black value, these strategies also perpetuate capitalist hegemony. The trope accepts the fundamental association of blackness with commodification as the cost of admission to the patriarchal political economic order. Just as the incorporation of blackness in the world capitalist economy reduced it to object status, black value thus recuperated is still—the more so, even—a product of racial capitalism. Resisting the denigrations of racial capitalism has become the means of its preservation.

In 1961 Frantz Fanon wrote: “The economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.” We might also add that you are a man because you have money, and you have money because you are a man. It is in this context of unequal access to productive, remunerative labor that consumerism and commodification have become so pervasive to the public personas of black masculinity. From slavery on, the fact of blackness being the cause and consequence of economic devaluation has made patriarchal capitalist inclusion especially appealing for black men, like winning a rigged game against all odds. But in doing so, the terms of black liberation are collapsed into patriarchal entitlement and participation in capitalism, rather than being framed as a more ambitious anti-capitalist critique.

As a result of their structural position and the perspective it has given them, black Americans are in a privileged position to critique racial capitalism. But that is a potentiality, not a foregone fact. The risk of essentializing blackness, Hall warns, is that “we are tempted to use ‘black’ as sufficient in itself to guarantee the progressive character of the politics we fight under the banner.” The cause may appear the consequence, such that all utterances celebrating blackness are treated as oppositions to racial capitalism. Among other things, this threatens to mistake consumer choice for social justice and branding for black power. A recent example is the controversy surrounding Colin Kaepernick’s Nike contract, in which the terrain of struggle was in some senses transformed into one of brand visibility and consumer allegiance. Meanwhile Kaepernick’s endorsement, embraced as a victory, overshadows the fact that his appointment as a Nike spokesperson in no way altered the fragility of black life in the United States—not to mention the debased conditions of Nike’s sweatshop laborers abroad. Highly visible expressions of black masculinity—specious substitutes for revolutionary potential—thus become but a selling point for disposable bodies in the market of disposable consumerism.

At the same time that commercial culture converts black men into tropes, black men’s purported deviances (as drug dealers, say) or deficiencies (as absent fathers) vis-à-vis the breadwinning masculine ideal are made— with equal parts disgust and fascination—the subject of exposés, white papers, and government programs. Initiatives such as Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper—which proposes that better mentorship, rather than structural change, is the key to black men’s success—underscore the emphasis black respectability politics places on the right kind of remunerative strategies and consumption practices as the way to achieve black uplift. Such approaches have identified black capitalism as the source of black liberation. Beholden to the system, perhaps it is.

Yet for black people, “buying in rather than dropping out” acquiesces to “the link between commodities and identities,” as Paul Gilroy observed. In other words, not all proposed routes to black liberation lead to the same place. Black thingification has the potential to be a powerful counterhegemonic force against the degradations of racial capitalism. The black radical tradition that Robinson outlined in Black Marxism understands anti-capitalism as an abolitionist politics—one that has the potential to benefit not only blacks but everyone ensnared by a global system of labor market exclusion and environmental devastation that will immiserate and finally destroy us all.

In the welcome resurgence of writing about racial capitalism, the integral role of patriarchy in upholding ideological and economic domination is often missed. But a truly radical counterhegemony can only be realized by disassociating both blackness and manhood from capitalist registers of worth. The original construction of the black body as a commodity object, after all, uniquely positions it to critique the commodity fetish. And likewise the contradictory location of black masculinity uniquely positions it to critique the patriarchal, heteronormative ideals of male economic entitlement.

Yet the trope—as the ultimate performance of black masculinity—has proven a ready proponent of capital. In Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), bell hooks asks, “And what does it say about the future of black liberation struggles if the phrase ‘it’s a dick thing’ is transposed and becomes ‘it’s a black thing?’” If this is the case, she warns, “black people are in serious trouble.” True black liberation is rather, as Tate suggests, “divestment in the performance of ‘Blackness.’”

Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore

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Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY Graduate Center. A co-founder of California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, she is author of the prize-winning book Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.

In this impressive clip of this towering intellectual & visionary, Ruth unpacks and explores the intersection of race and capitalism.

The Surrealism of the Information War by Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

The flow of knowledge and information is commonly considered the main vector of humanity’s progress through history. One would think that in our era, which is rightly called the time of the information super-highway, the sheer mass of information available to all humans, anywhere at any given time, would have exponentially increased our understanding of our world and each other. This is, however, not the case. As a matter of fact, paradoxically, one can easily argue that an overload of information has made the majority of people not more but less knowledgeable, less critical, more isolated, and more alienated from themselves and each other. The control and manipulation of narrative in the era of the information war has created a universal malaise that reaches even basic human issues such as masculine-feminine identities.

Well-compensated propagandists package information and ideas like products for mass consumption. The advance of technology was supposed to free mankind; instead it has created invisible chains. The fact of being constantly wired is an assault on our free will and cognitive functions, which behavioral information warriors study and harvest, to put them in giant blenders where all comes out inoffensive and predictable. The goal is to turn the rich and diverse human experience into a tasteless and colorless intellectual mush, and then make it palatable with artificial additives. Foie gras is considered a French gastronomic delicacy. It is nevertheless a form of cultural perversity. In the process, the geese are force-fed, to provoke a cirrhosis of their liver. In many ways, the gatekeepers of mainstream information use the same force feeding technique with people’s brains.

Unless people tightly lock themselves mentally into the delusions of dogmas, either religious or ideological, and seek comfort in a universe of magical thinking, the truth is never an absolute. This being said, in order to allow an acceptable level of conviviality in human society, thinkers should seek truth in the subjective reality while knowing that the holy grail of pure truth is the ultimate lie. If one would be so naive or foolish enough to think he has found the absolute truth, looking at it would be like staring straight into the sun at midday, without shields and with eyes wide open, for a full hour. In the process, the believer of absolute truth would go blind.

For anyone who is neither blind nor fully color blind, the distinction between a red object and a green one is not only instantaneous but also unquestionable. The difference between green and red is not open to interpretation or debate. It is in the rare realm of tangible facts.

Staying in the field of the color spectrum: all hues of green in the natural world are a secondary color that can be obtained by mixing the primary colors yellow and blue. Green can be argued endlessly to contain more yellow than blue, or vice versa, as well as a fraction of black, white, or brown to alter the shades and tones. In nature or on an artist’s palette, there are countless shades of green and our perception of these shades, while it can be analyzed and quantified scientifically, is largely subjective.

Colors, just like words, have an emotional impact. Hospital walls and other medical facilities are often painted in light tones of greenish-blue, for their soothing effect on people. Bright red has the opposite impact. It is used to attract maximum attention either from traffic lights, bull fights or firetrucks. And so greens are the calming hues of nature and relaxation, whereas reds are synonymous with alarm, blood, excitement, and sometimes the anger and urgency of an adrenaline rush, as illustrated by the popular expression “seeing red.”

The near-infinite range of the color spectrum is similar to the countless narratives expressed by languages. In linguistics, words and their clumsy or astute associations are used to convey information or emotions. Like colors, words carry messages, fragments of information that impact people differently and cannot be objectively quantified. It’s all “in the eye of the beholder.”

One can make an analogy between the false notion of an absolute truth and the vanishing point in a perspective drawing. A vanishing point is an optical illusion, just like the concept of pure truth is a cognitive illusion. In our surreal predicament of fake-news for some, which are true-news for others, it is as if we have moved into an absurd and nightmarish three-dimensional drawing with a multitude of vanishing points designed by the generals of the global information wars.

The people who conduct the information war are numerous. They can be the global media moguls like Rupert Murdoch; the journalists employed by corporate entities or governments; the policymakers who build a considerable influence within countless so-called think-tanks; the elected politicians and their cohorts of advisers and lobbyists; the super-rich businessmen, philanthropists in their own eyes, such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Bob Mercer, George Soros and Pierre Omidyar, who want to impact world affairs; and even show-business celebrities. All have deep pockets and want maximum impact in the fight to shape the discourse and steer public opinion, often globally, in the directions that suit their specific needs.

Unless they are ideologues, the information warriors are mercenaries. Therefore it is money that shapes the global mainstream discourse in television, radio, newspapers and social media. Independent or dissident narratives are generally squashed by a lack of public exposure. The money talks and writes as the viewer-readers, hypnotized by a multitude of screens, become mere consumers to be sold, convinced, or subliminally seduced into a specific mindset. The job of the information warriors is to observe, condition, and predict behaviors. In this massive brainwash of the public, big money is at the same time the washing machine and laundry detergent.

Gates and Soros openly sponsor the prime fake-left publication, The Guardian; Bezos owns The Washington Post; and the Murdoch press empire’s crown jewel is Fox News. Other information warriors who claim to know the truth are on the fringe, at least in appearance. This is the case for media provocateur Alex Jones, who has claimed in court to be a performance artist, but who is nonetheless adulated by millions worldwide and treated like a Guru of truthful information. Jones runs, with his trademark manic energy, the raucous populist far-right conspiracy-theory laced Infowars. Mercer’s money gave birth to the populist far-right site Breitbart. Meanwhile Omidyar sponsors the soft-left, so-called progressive publication, The Intercept. All these lead information warriors want to take as many people as will follow them to their own vanishing points, on a journey towards their illusionary truth.

In their confusion and thirst for truth, people get caught like flies on tasty propaganda glue. The intricate labyrinths built by the information warriors prevent the real discourse, which should be about how to survive the imminent systemic collapse of global capitalism. It cannot be otherwise when global corporate imperialism itself controls the discourse worldwide. Hypnotized by a myriad of vanishing points, humans might be on a course to vanish.

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Editor’s Notes: Gilbert Mercier is the author of the classic  The Orwellian Empire.

Musings

The Dark Triad (..think of Trump & his wriecking crew...)

Source: NBC NEWS (AU)

The research defines the D-factor as: “The general tendency to maximize one’s individual utility — disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others — accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications.”

Simply put, these people have a tendency to put themselves first, even at a detriment to others, and they often have an accompanying justification that removes any feelings of guilt or shame.

Determining to what extent a person exhibits the D-factor can be done using a similar method applied by psychologist Charles Spearman about 100 years ago when testing a person’s level of intelligence.

Spearman found that people who scored highly on a certain type of intelligence test were likely to do well in others due to a “general factor of intelligence.”

“In the same way, the dark aspects of human personality also have a common denominator, which means that — similar to intelligence — one can say that they are all an expression of the same dispositional tendency,” Professor of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen, Ingo Zettler, said.

“For example, in a given person, the D-factor can mostly manifest itself as narcissism, psychopathy or one of the other dark traits, or a combination of these.”

“But with our mapping of the common denominator of the various dark personality traits, one can simply ascertain that the person has a high D-factor.”

The higher the D-factor the more likely a person will show a particular dark behavior, like humiliating others, which will then lead to a higher likelihood of engaging in other malevolent activities like lying, cheating or stealing.

It is still worth noting that there are key differences between dark personality traits, which is why they don’t always result in the same behavior.

But even though on the surface they may seem vastly different, they have more in common than most would think.

Zettler said understanding a person’s D-factor may be useful when assessing how likely a person is to engage in harmful behavior.

In Conversation: Chauncey DeVega & Mike Davis - COV-19 As The First of Many Disasters That Will Change The World As We Know It

LISTEN: Chauncey DeVega & Mike Davis

Mike Davis is a historian, political activist, and writer. He is the author of many books includingCity of Quartz, Buda’s Wagon, and Planet of Slums. Davis has also written for The Nation and The New Statesman among other magazines and publications. Davis is also an editor of the New Left Review. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. Davis is also a Distinguished Emeritus Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Mike Davis warns that the pandemic is only the first in a series of disasters which will include food and fresh water shortages, loss of jobs to AI, robotics and other new technologies, global climate change, and growing income and wealth inequality which change the world as we know it. Mike Davis also explains how if the Republicans lose control of the United States Congress, presidency, and other ruling bodies that there will likely be civil unrest as right-wing paramilitaries join together with White Americans en masse to fight a low intensity conflict modeled on the Jim Crow South’s “massive resistance” against the civil rights movement. And Professor Davis warns that the Republican Party in the Age of Trump may represent the single greatest threat to human civilization in the world today.

Poet's Nook: "Poems of Shape and Motion" by Linton Kwesi Johnson

I was wondering if I could shape this passion
Just as I wanted in solid fire.
I was wondering if the strange combustion of my days
The tension of the world inside of me
And the strength of my heart were enough.
I was wondering if I could stand as tall,
While the tide of the sea rose and fell.
If the sky would recede as I went,
Or the earth would emerge as I came
To the door of the morning, locked against the sun.

I was wondering if I could make myself
Nothing but fire, pure and incorruptible.
The wound of the wind on my face
Would be healed by the work of my life
Or the growth of the pain in my sleep
Would be stopped in the strife of my days.

I am wondering if the agony of years
Could be traced to the seed of an hour.
If the roots that spread out in the swamp
Ran too deep for the issuing flower.
I was wondering if I could find myself
All that I am in all that I could be.
If all the population of stars
Would be less than the things I could utter
And the challenge of space in my soul
Be filled by the shape I become.

I walk slowly in the wind,
Watching myself in things I did not make;
In jumping shadows and in limping cripples
Dust on earth and houses tight with sickness
Deep constant pain, the dream without sleep.

I walk slowly in the wind,
Hearing myself in the loneliness of a child
In woman's grief, which is not understood
In coughing dogs when midnight lingers long
On stones, on streets and then on echoing stars,
That burn all night and suddenly go out.

I walk slowly in the wind
Knowing myself in every moving thing
In years and days and words that mean so much
Strong hands that shake, long roads that walk
And deeds that do themselves.
And all this world and all these lives to live.

I walk slowly in the wind,
Remembering scorn and naked men in darkness
And huts of iron rivetted to earth.
Cold huts of iron stand upon this earth
Like rusting prisons
Each is well marked and each wide roof is spread
Like some dark wing
Casting a shadow or living a curse.

I walk slowly in the wind
To lifted sunset red and gold and dim
A long brown river slanting to an ocean
A fishing boat, a man who cannot drown.

I walk slowly in the wind
And birds are swift, the sky is blue like silk.
From the big sweeping ocean of water
An iron ship rusted and brown achors itself.
And the long river runs like a snake
Silent and smooth.

I walk slowly in the wind.
I hear my footsteps echoing down the tide
Echoing like a wave on the sand or a wing on the wind
Echoing echoing
A voice in the soul, a laugh in the funny silence.

I walk slowly in the wind
I walk because I cannot crawl or fly.

Time Now to Get Back to Ourselves? by Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Desultory Heroics

‘And the Old Ones say:

look outward seriously
look inward intently
look outward carefully
look inward diligently
look outward respectfully
look inward humbly’

--Jack Forbes

As human beings we seek the beautiful, and this gives us joy. But our lives have made everything complicated. We make ourselves complicated – life is being played around us like a game. This may not sound comfortable, or even correct, to some people. If it’s a game, then why is there so much sorrow and pain? This is the perennial question. Yet like a game, we have choices, and we make our moves. And there are players and gameplays going on all around us. And it seems that the game is rigged. One person who knew this well was Alan Watts. He often spoke about how life should not be lived as a fast journey and that existence in the universe should be recognized as being basically playful. Life is more like music, Watts used to say. And we play music – we don’t ‘work’ music. And in music, the end of the composition is not the point of the composition; otherwise, all conductors would play fast; or some composers would choose only to write the finales. We don’t go to concerts just to hear the final chord being played. We don’t engage in a dance in order to end it (unless we got tricked into it!). And yet, as Alan Watts was so keen in observing, our social systems condition us into grading our lives. Our schooling compels us into chasing grades and making our quotas and then paying our bills. And we keep believing, hoping, wishing, for the ‘great thing’ in life to come whilst we are rushing through our lives with hardly a notice of what we’re leaving behind in our rear-view mirrors. We end up living to retire. And when we retire, we imagine we have ‘finally arrived.’ And yet to where? Do we feel any different? We have a small pot of savings and almost no energy. And then we are told to wait it out. Until what? When? The final curtain? Perhaps only when it is too late do we realize that we were cheated down the whole line. And yet we followed it. We kept racing along in order to keep up or to hold onto what we were told was success. And yet – was it ever ‘our’ success? Did we miss the whole point?

Being human is about trying to create meaning for ourselves – and to enjoy it as much as possible along the way. The life we have is where we have arrived by ourselves and the steps and choices we made. We should not let ‘another mind’ make those choices for us. And most of all, we should not allow ourselves to be played for victims. We may be under the sway of other forces, yet only to the point that we are ignorant of them. Our power comes through recognizing and identifying those other forces that seek to influence and control our thoughts and actions. We need to optimize our lives by optimizing our perspective and understanding. Ignorance may seem to be a social requirement yet knowledge, understanding, creativity, and wisdom are the truer imperatives. Despite what may appear to the contrary at times, there is incredible capacity for goodness within the human race.

The majority of people in the world are good people. They wish for peace and to not do harm to others. There are many sympathetic, caring, and courageous people in the world. Unfortunately, our systems are run by the minority, and these systems are largely corrupt; and the decent people within these systems become corrupted by association or exposure. The main issue is that most of us do not look after our minds. We don’t think it is necessary. We are not aware of the malicious impacts that infiltrate and influence us on an almost daily basis. This unawareness – or ignorance – leaves people open and vulnerable. Many people have become alienated from their own minds. This is where manipulations creep in, such as mob mentality and crowd behavior. Only a large body of people with ‘alienated minds’ can become so influenced by political propaganda, consumerist advertising, and social management. Mass psychosis is only possible through a collective mindset that has become alienated from a transcendental source. In this state, we are prisoners to the impulses that steer our unconscious. We are susceptible to neuroses and psychic illness. We may believe we have freedom when we do not. The forces of bondage are subtle and often insidious. It is a necessity that human civilization returns to the fundamental recognition of the person as a human being.

Being human is about being simple. Or rather, it is about recognizing the essential things. Yet this is no simple thing to do. We are needing to get back to ourselves in so many ways. To begin, we must learn not to take things personally. There are so many ways that life attempts to get us to engage with external strife. It tries to pull us out of ourselves. When, for example, we are criticized or insulted we tend to lash out. We are conditioned to attack in order to defend. Is not a well-known aphorism, ‘Attack is the best line of defense?’ Sometimes this is phrased as – the best defense is a good offense. Yet long before these catchy phrases got circulated through our systems there was a better truism: turn the other cheek. Retaliation feeds the psychosis within the individual and the collective. If we give away our emotional and psychic energy, then we also give away our freedom. The ego must be reined in, yet not abolished. It is through the form of the ego that we can find the realm of the essential self. The ego exists as a signpost that the essential inner self is also there. As Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says – ‘If love exists, there are other things that exist also. There is ignorance, there is violence, there is craving.’ These external ‘other things’ – the violence and the suffering – can be, and are, manipulated and exacerbated. Yet the essential inner self remains as a pure, undiluted and uncorrupted form. We should allow it to speak to us and manifest in our lives. This is the human question.

Morality and meaning only have significance when they come from a genuine source. Otherwise it is a ‘projected’ form, created from social mores and cultural biases. We are the ultimate touchstone for our sense of reality. We need to have a clean lens and clear vision. And we should begin from the basics – the simple human things. There is a story which tells of a spiritual seeker who after some time comes upon a spiritual master that she feels is genuine and whom she wishes to learn from. The seeker asks the master if he will accept her as a pupil.

‘Why do you seek a spiritual path?’ asks the teacher.

‘Because I wish to be a generous and virtuous person; I wish to be balanced, mindful, caring, and to be in service for humanity. This is my goal’ said the seeker.

‘Well,’ replied the teacher, ‘these are not goals on the spiritual path; these are the very basics of being human which we need before we even begin to learn.’

What people may consider to be ‘spiritual’ is often none other than necessary human nutrition – a daily requirement for living. Yet like our other nutrition, eating, it has to be correctly integrated into our lives without making a song and dance about it. And, of course, not forgetting the saying that goes – ‘If you insist on buying poor food, you must be prepared to dislike it at the serving.’

It often feels like we spend our days trying to grasp at life, trying to understand it, with ways that are not adequate. It is like trying to capture the ocean with a bucket. The ocean stands magnificently before us, and yet our modern societies teach us to run through our lives anxiously as if with empty buckets in our hands. Personal fulfilment is not only about accomplishment; it is also a question of what we can give through each of our individual imperfections.

Here is a story that helps to illustrate this:

A man had two large pots, each hung on an end of a pole which he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, and while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water at the end of the long walk from the stream to his house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.

For a full two years this went on daily, with the man delivering only one and a half pots full of water to his house. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments, feeling accepted and appreciated. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it was able to accomplish only half of what it had been made to do. After two years of what it perceived to be a bitter failure, it spoke to the man one day by the stream.

“I am ashamed of myself, and I want to apologize to you.”

“Why?” asked the man. “What are you ashamed of?”

“I have been able, for these past two years, to deliver only half my load because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house. Because of my flaws, you have to do all of this work, and you don’t get full value from your efforts,” the pot said.

The man felt sorry for the old cracked pot, and in his compassion, he said, “As we return to my house, I want you to look at the beautiful flowers along the path. It will make you feel better.”

Indeed, as they went up the hill, the old cracked pot took notice of the sun warming the beautiful wild flowers on the side of the path, and this made it feel a little happier. But at the end of the path, it still felt bad because it had leaked out half its load, and so again the Pot apologized to the man for its failure.

The man said to the pot, “Did you notice that there were flowers only on your side of your path, but not on the other pot’s side? That’s because I have always known about your flaw, and I took advantage of it. I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back from the stream, you’ve been watering them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to take home to my wife. With you being just the way you are, you have given beauty and meaning to me every day.”

On Black Rage by Cornel West

Source: The Village Voice

(This was written in 1991 but tragically, still applicable in 2020)

American culture seems to lack two ele­ments basic to race relations: a deep sense of the tragic and a genuine grasp of the unadulterated rage directed at American society. The chronic refusal of most Ameri­cans to understand the sheer absurdity that confronts human beings of African descent in this country — the incessant assaults on black intelligence, beauty, character, and possibility — is not simply a matter of de­fending white-skin privilege. It also bespeaks a reluctance to look squarely at the brutal side and tragic dimension of the American past and present. Such a long and hard look would lead this nation of undeni­able opportunities and freedom-loving peo­ple to acknowledge its legacy of unspeak­able crimes committed against other human beings, especially black people.

Unfortunately, this fact has become trivi­alized — partly by black middle-class oppor­tunists — into a cynical move in a career game of upmanship that reinforces white guilt and paralysis. Yet, as our great artists like Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Lil­lian Smith, and Toni Morrison have shown, the tragic plight and brutal treatment of black people is a constitutive element — not a mere moral mistake — of American civili­zation. To put it crudely, America would not exist without 244 years of black slavery, 85 years of Jim and Jane Crow (including the lynching of a black man, woman, or child every three days for a quarter of a century), and now, one of two black kids caught in a violence-infested life of poverty.

Black responses to this unique American experience have been shot through with rage — just as were Jewish responses to at­tacks, assaults, and pogroms in anti-Semitic Russia and Eastern Europe at the turn of the century. Yet xenophobic czars and au­thorities were not surprised at Jewish rage. Wouldn’t any vicious tyrants expect this response from their victims? In stark con­trast, most American elites, owing to nar­row, self-serving notions of freedom and justice, have been flabbergasted at the ex­pression of black rage. This is so even though most black rage has not been direct­ed at American elites, but rather at other black people (especially women), Italian shopkeepers, Korean grocers, gays and les­bians, and Jewish entrepreneurs. These tar­geted expressions of black rage, though of­ten downright cowardly and petty, signify the social invisibility and relative power­lessness of a people toward whom Ameri­can elites have been and are indifferent.

The ’60s was a watershed period because black rage came out of the closet. As white institutional terrorism was challenged, black rage surfaced with a power and a potency never seen in American history. In fact, it threatened the very social order and stability of the country. The major Ameri­can-elite response to this threat was to re­duce tragic black persons into pathetic black victims and to redirect the channels of black rage in and to black working-class and poor communities. The reduction was done by making black poor people clients of a welfare system that both sustained and degraded them; by viewing black middle­-class people as questionable and stigmatized beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs that fueled their identity crises; and by rendering black working people (the majority of black people!) as nearly nonex­istent, even as their standard and quality of living significantly declined.

The high social costs borne by much of black America during the Republican years of recession and “recovery” have been dev­astating. Measured in terms of housing, education, jobs, health care, and, above all, the massive social and moral breakdown in nurturing black youth, we may be at a point of no return. And yet the chickens now coming home to roost are not the ones we expected. Instead of a focus on the funda­mental sources of black social misery — the maldistribution of wealth and power fil­tered through our corporate, financial, and political elites, we find black rage directed at racist ethnic individuals and communi­ties, mere small players in the larger game of power in the city, state, and country.

Some of the blame can be laid at the feet of black leadership. In New York, Mayor David Dinkins, a decent man in a desper­ate situation, has failed to make the requi­site symbolic gestures to the black commu­nity in his efforts to disarm white charges of personal bias and racial favoritism. This strategy has backfired. Community spokes­people, like Reverend Al Sharpton and Reverend Herben Daughtry, two steadfast and courageous activists locked into an endless cycle of immediate reaction to events, are, at times and out of frustration, swept into a rhetoric that embraces the lowest common denominator of black rage. The slide from demands of justice and due process to those of vengeance and vigilan­tism is a short one for an abused and en­raged people. Yet, as reverends Sharpton and Daughtry at their best recognize, this slide is neither morally right nor politically effective.

Elijah Muhammad and Martin Luther King Jr. understood one fundamental truth about black rage: It must be neither ignored nor ignited. This is what separates them from the great Malcolm X. Malcolm indeed articulated black rage in an unprecedented manner in American history; yet his broad black nationalist platforms were too vague to give this black rage any concrete direc­tion. Elijah and Martin knew how to work with black rage in a constructive manner: shape it through moral discipline, channel it into political organization, and guide it by visionary leadership. Black rage is as American as apple pie. That is why the future of our city, state, and country de­pend, in large part, on whether we acknowl­edge it, how we respond to it, and the manner in which bold and wise leaders direct it.

Musings

This little guy 🤗 😍pic.twitter.com/h8PHPlpIw0

— Ann is still european & in lockdown 😷 (@56blackcat) June 22, 2020

“For kids are innocent and love justice, while most of us are evil and naturally prefer mercy.”~~-G.K Chesterton

“Kids make you want to start life over”~~-Muhammad Ali

“Every child comes with a message that God is not yet discouraged of man.”~~Rabindranath Tagore

“We should all be inspired by children; they don’t care about fear or mistakes.”~~Maxime Legace

“For in every adult there resides the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be”~~-John Connolly

“Innocence is so much more powerful than experience.”~~-Alejandro Gonzalez

“There are no seven wonders in the world in the eyes of children; there are seven million.”~~-Walt Streightiff

“The innocence of children is what makes them stand out as a shining example to the rest of the world.”~~-Kurt Chambers

“Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven.”~~-Henry Ward Beecher

"Children learn more from what you are, than what you teach."~~ W.E.B. Du Bois

In Conversation: Chauncey DeVega & Rev. William Barber II - America's Moral Reckoning in the Absurdism of the Trump Age

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is the President & Senior Lecturer of Repairers of the Breach and Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral Revival. He is also the architect of the Forward Together Moral Movement. He is the author of several books including We Are Called to Be a Movement; Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing; The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement Is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear; andForward Together: A Moral Message for the Nation.

Rev. Barber is helping to convene and is a featured speaker at The Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington which is being held this upcoming Saturday, June 20, 2020.

In this episode of The Truth Report, Rev. Barber reflects on America’s culture of death and its connections to the police murder of George Floyd. He also explains how Donald Trump is a symptom of a much deeper moral crisis in America that is a function of racism, militarism, greed, right-wing religious nationalism, and social inequality and injustice more broadly. Towards the end, he offers wisdom and advice about sustaining the long struggle and people’s uprising that was sparked by the police murder of George Floyd and how we can move from outrage to substantive policy reform and societal progress.

Musings