On Saturday, January 30, 6pm @ Urban Network Bookstore (5740 Grand River), Yusef and the Inca of the Greensboro Almighty Latin King & Queen Nation chapter will be co-hosting a conversation on “outsiders.” In 1963, James Boggs wrote in the American Revolution that a generation of “outsiders,” those marginalized by the introduction of automation, would create a new conversation around community and society. Today, we experience yet again another generation of outsiders taking form in many ways; Yusef and King J will update this conversation as they discuss the experiences of the ALKQN in Greensboro, community building in Zone 8, a “war zones to peace zones” summit, and much more. This will truly be an inspiring event. We hope to see you there!
THINKING FOR OURSELVES
A New Beginning
By Shea Howell
Michigan Citizen, Jan 17, 2009
The new Detroit Mayor and City Council got down to work this week. At the ceremonial inauguration at the Fox Theater, Mayor Dave Bing pledged, “We will no longer be defined by the failures, divisiveness and self-serving actions of the past.” Incoming Council President Charles Pugh brought down the house with his comment: “On behalf of all my colleagues, let me boldly say all the madness of the past ends today.”
In spite of all the problems facing our city, the desire for effective, adult, ethical government is palpable. After years of dysfunction and disappointment, Detroiters are looking forward to a new beginning. Many of us are putting our hopes in the City Council.
Given the last few years, it is easy to forget that the Detroit City Council has often been one of the most imaginative, far thinking and humane government bodies anywhere in the country. In our effort to distance ourselves from the most recent embarrassment, we should remind the new council that they are capable of more than civility and finding unity. The recent passing of Erma Henderson has helped remind all Detroiters of the kind of dignity and heart that was once characteristic of much of our council.
With the election of Coleman Young in the wake of emerging Black Power, Detroiters voted in a succession of city councils that helped create a vibrant civic life. Council President Henderson was able to translate her tremendous heart into concrete policies and programs. In 1975 she took on the racism and greed of banks and helped forge the state’s anti red-lining law, one of the most advanced in the country.
More importantly, she used her office and public profile to develop the people of the city. Her Women’s Conference of Concerns touched the lives of more than 250,000 women, emphasizing ideas, discussions and social action. Her work, and that of many of her colleagues on the council, including Maryann Mahaffey, Ken Cockrel Sr., Mel Ravitz, Nicholas Hood II, Carl Levin and Clyde Cleveland, often resulted in policies that addressed the concerns of the most vulnerable among us. And they stretched our vision beyond the city to struggles against apartheid in South Africa, Nuclear Disarmament, and the global condition of women.
One of the most striking elements of earlier councils was their imagination. Facing a city of abandoned houses and vacant lots, council members created a program to allow neighbors to acquire adjacent properties for a dollar. As cold weather endangered the lives of citizens, they established a moratorium on shutoffs. These measures not only made an immediate difference in the lives of people; they helped the whole city think about our obligations to one another.
We hope this new City Council can draw on some of this spirit. Today, as Detroiters are dying in homes made vulnerable by shutoffs, it seems time to establish that heat and water are basic human rights to be protected and provided to all. As we see almost 1/3 of the city abandoned, engaging neighborhood groups and non-profit organizations in dismantling abandoned homes would be a vehicle to revitalize neighbors and neighborhoods instead of putting monies and materials in the hands of suburban demolition companies. Expanding our efforts to sister cities in Michigan could help set a model for respectful international relationships that other governments could follow.
In these ways, large and small, many Detroiters, including the more than 200 who ran for City Council and Charter Commission, can all contribute ideas that combine imagination with concern for our future.
We welcome the new City Council and Mayor and hope they will take this opportunity to create new ways to re-engage the people of our city in solving our problems together.
LIVING FOR CHANGE
Ringing In A New Decade
By Rochelle Taylor (Guest Columnist)
Michigan Citizen, Jan 17, 2010
I am often asked why I am so confident that “Another America is Possible.” This article is one answer. A former Detroiter, Rochelle Taylor is President and CEO of the National Youth Sports Program Foundation in Columbia, South Carolina. We met for the first time when Kim Sherobbi brought her by during the holidays. –GLB
I celebrated the ringing in of the New Year and felt the hope and promise that the mere turning of a calendar page could make a huge difference in my life. As I began this New Year, I reflected on everything I dealt with in 2009.
I struggled with an economy that made it harder to do more with less. I watched family members face salary cuts and lay-offs. I spent too much time in my personal daily grind, and consequently my circle of support dwindled. I cautiously looked at my own mortality as I face an aging society and dealt with elder care in my family.
Despite the struggles, or maybe because of them, I measured my success and happiness differently last year. When I was selected to travel to Africa to share my expertise in youth sports program development, I realized what a tremendous impact we all can make on the lives of others by giving of our time and our talents. I recognized that what mattered most to me growing up – the things that shaped me and define me as an adult – had little to do with economics or age and had everything to do with positive contributions in our communities.
In 1969, as a member of the Motor City Track Club, I had many successes: All-America honors on the interscholastic and intercollegiate levels. But my biggest successes weren’t on the track field. My biggest successes were the lessons I learned about working hard, about being a team member, learning from my triumphs as well as my defeats. Not giving up. Respecting the competitors and the coaches. Not making excuses. Accomplishing a goal. These lessons were so important that I made Youth Sports Administration my life’s work.
In 2010, I am re-committing my efforts to revitalize development of young people through sports participation.
To revitalize is simply to give something a new life. So many times we look for the next best thing to take us to another level. Sometimes it’s the tried and true method that will take us and keep us there.
For many years, the National Youth Sports Program (NYSP) operated during the summer months in the Detroit-area to teach young people ages 10 to 16 about sports, education and life. NYSP provided a safe haven to keep kids off the streets, daily meals, and great sports instruction and competition.
As a youth I attended the program at the University of Detroit, but programs also ran at Wayne State University, Wayne County Community College and in Flint and Albion. The lessons I learned in NYSP about being a good sport, about conducting myself with decency and honesty, and about always doing my best stuck with me long after the program was over. And thanks to programs like NYSP, more than 2 million kids nationwide believe this too.
My commitment to 2010 is the revitalizing of NYSP — not just in the Detroit-area, but in 100 communities across the country. The NYSP is counting on the tried and true to help this generation of youth learn about sports, education and, most importantly, about themselves. Participation in NYSP enforces health and personal fitness needed to combat our increasingly overweight society. It reinforces math and science skills, reading and writing skills, and promotes a respect for higher education. We at NYSP help young people understand about the decisions and consequences they make, about becoming productive citizens, and about community service.
What can you revitalize in 2010 that will make a difference in someone’s life, even in your own? We all need the tried and true in 2010.
How to Think About China
by Immanuel Wallerstein
Agence Global, Jan 15, 2009
If one asks throughout the world the question, what do you think of the United States as a country and a world power, you will get very clear answers. Everyone has an opinion — North and South, rich and poor, men and women, politically on the right or the left, young and old. The opinions vary enormously from extremely favorable to extremely hostile. But people do feel they know how to think about the United States.
Thirty years ago, the same was probably true about China. But it is no longer true. Many people, perhaps even most people, around the world are no longer sure what they think about China as a country or as a world power. Indeed, it is a subject not only of uncertainty but of sharp debate. It is useful perhaps to review which issues people outside of China tend to debate when they discuss China. There are three principal ones.
The first and perhaps the most well-known debate is whether to think of China as essentially a socialist country or as essentially a capitalist one. China of course still proclaims itself to be socialist. China continues to be governed by the Communist Party. On the other hand, China seems to be basing the actual operations of its internal economic operations, and certainly its world trade, on market principles.
Views on the world political left and the world political right are not at all unified on this issue. There are those on the right who insist that the market operations are a mere facade for what continues to be a government intent on pursuing the historic objectives of a traditional Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong ideology. But there are many on the political right who see a country in “transition” to a fully market-based economy and regard the ideology, not the market operations, as the facade.
The same is true on the left. There are those who see China as still governed by the same socialist objectives and see the “market” operations as either a tactical retreat or as the facade. But there are others on the left who are either cynical about China’s current policies or openly disillusioned.
The next issue that divides opinion is whether China is still part of the South or has now become part of the North. Thirty years ago, there was no doubt. China attended the Afro-Asian conference in Bandung in 1955. China presented itself everywhere as a militant promoter of the geopolitical views and interests of the South. But today, China is classified as the strongest of the “emergent” nations and the second strongest economy in the world. The world press speaks of the G-2 (the United States and China), who in effect share world power. How different from the late 1960’s when China spoke of the United States and the Soviet Union as the “two superpowers” against whom everyone else should unite.
So there are many in both the North and the South who today regard China as essentially part of the North. But there are also others, in both the North and the South, who continue to consider China as a leading voice of the South. After all, they say, a very large part of the population of China still live at a quite low economic level.
Finally, the perhaps most controversial question is whether to continue to think of China as a leading anti-imperialist power or to think of China as itself an imperialist power. This is less debated in the North than in the South. There are many who insist that China continues to play a crucial role in undoing U.S. imperialism, which they say continues to be the major imperialist force in the world.
Furthermore, they point to the ways in which Chinese economic assistance to countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America is given without the strings that U.S. and European aid is normally given. The Chinese, they say, offer much needed economic leverage for countries in the South — a prime example of socialist cooperation.
But there are others in the South who see Chinese aid as a mode of guaranteeing access to key raw materials in ways that do not necessarily meet the optimal needs of these countries. And there are some who are disturbed by the outflow of small Chinese merchants to these countries, asserting that their activities undermine small local merchants, and constitute a form of settler colonization.
Today the debate is murky and the dividing lines uncertain. This is unlikely to continue for too long. Probably ten years from now, certainly twenty years from now, everyone will know once again how to think about China. Opinions (pro and con) will become firm once again.
Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).
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THINKING FOR OURSELVES
Acting For Peace
By Shea Howell
Michigan Citizen, Jan 10, 2009
During the New Year’s holiday the attention of people throughout Europe and the Middle East was focused on the Gaza Freedom March. The March, organized by more than 1000 people from 43 different countries, began with arriving in Egypt with the aim of crossing the border into Gaza to walk with Palestinians to mark the one year anniversary of the Israeli military assault on Gaza.
The 2007 22 day military assault had left 1400 Palestinians dead, mostly civilians, and 100,000 Gaza residents homeless. Thirteen Israelis were killed.
It has been investigated by the United Nations which issued the Goldstone Report, calling on both Israel and Hamas to investigate accusations of war crimes. Israel has been the primary focus for criticism because of its overwhelming military strength and the huge differences in the death tolls. The Goldstone Report concluded that Israel had used disproportionate force and had deliberately targeted Gaza civilians, using them as human shields, while destroying the infrastructure of their communities.
Over the last year international activists have been attempting to challenge the Israeli blockade, sending in boats loaded with supplies. The demonstration over New Year’s was designed to bring world attention to the plight of Palestinians.
Human Rights groups have universally condemned the Gaza blockade by Israel and Egypt. Amnesty International called it a “form of collective punishment of the entire population of Gaza, a flagrant violation of Israel’s obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention.” Human Rights Watch calls it a “serious violation of international law” and the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights condemned the siege as a “crime against humanity.”
Of the 1300 activists gathered in Cairo, only about 90 were actually allowed to make crossing from Egypt into Gaza which has been closed since the summer of 2007. At first the decision by the Egyptian government to allow 100 people through the Rafah crossing seemed like a victory because it was the result of pressures on the Egyptian government through protests at the French Embassy, civil disobedience and a hunger strike on the steps of the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate.
Only the hunger strike drew much attention in the U.S. because one of the strikers was 85 year old Hedy Epstein, a Holocaust survivor. She said she was on the March because she wanted “world governments to wake up and treat Israel like they treat any other country and not to be afraid to reprimand and criticize Israel for its violent policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians.”
The Gaza Freedom Marchers were not able to achieve their goal of walking and bearing witness in Gaza. But their resolve is shifting the attention of the world toward Palestine. Already Egypt has agreed to open the Rafah crossing, at least for a few days. Organizers of the March are committed to developing a campaign, including speaking tours of Palestinian and South African activists, to support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. They are also creating citizen’s arrest bureaus to prosecute war crimes committed during the invasion.
At a final New Year’s Day meeting in Tahrir Square, delegates summed up the accomplishments of the New Year’s struggles. Ehab Lotayef, one of the organizers, said, “We are here because we worked really hard for something we really believed in…Our work will not end tonight. It will not end tomorrow or this week. It is our responsibility to carry the energy that we created from the time we came here with the goal of lifting the blockade of Gaza. But that’s only a partial goal. The goal is justice and freedom for the people of Palestine!”
Direct actions such as these, taken by people committed to creating peace, are making our world anew.
LIVING FOR CHANGE
Is Another America Possible?
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, Jan 10, 2010
Over the holidays I re-read The Middle Passage, the award-winning novel by Charles Johnson, the African American English professor and MacArthur genius who describes himself as “first and foremost, a writer of philosophic fiction.”
I first read The Middle Passage shortly after its publication in 1990. But I got a lot more out of it this time because we are at the end of a decade during which the United States, beginning with a fraudulent presidential election in 2000, soon followed by 9/11, has been coming apart at the seams, raising the question of whether “Another America is possible.”
The novel is the story of the apocalyptic voyage of the Republic, a slave ship carrying 40 Allmuseri tribespeople from Africa to be sold in New Orleans. Just as some of the crew members are preparing a mutiny against the mad Captain, the slaves themselves revolt and take control of the ship. Conditions worsen; the ship runs out of food and water, diseases run rampant, survivors resort to cannibalism. Then there is a terrible storm and the ship falls apart, spilling everyone into the ocean.
Fortunately a few survivors are picked up by Juno, a nearby floating casino. They include Rutherford, the young newly-emancipated African American who had stowed away on the Republic to avoid marrying the schoolteacher, Isadora; a few Allmuseri children; and Squibb, the alcoholic who has been transformed both by his work as the ship’s cook and by the disaster.
On board the Juno, fortuitously, is Papa Zeringue, a black man who is one of the slave ship’s owners and is intent on marrying Isadora who is also on board. However, he is thwarted by Rutherford, who, having been transformed by the catastrophe, has adopted one of the Allmuseri children, and has decided that he is ready to settle down and create a family with Isadora.
The novel thus ends in the creation of family and community, and what had been a tragedy is transformed into a comedy.
The Middle Passage was obviously inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick which was first published in 1851. Countless studies of Moby Dick over the years are evidence that a sea voyage is the perfect locale for imaginative writers to project their view of our society’s contradictions and prospects.
The Middle Passage illuminates the profound changes that have taken place in American society in the century and a half since Moby Dick. Melville’s Pequod, the whaler which was the symbol of industry in 19th America, has become the Republic, a slave ship which is only a money maker. Ahab, the one-legged captain who was obsessed with pursuing the white whale, has become Captain Falcon, a dwarf who dreams of becoming an emperor. Ishmael, the white intellectual, is now Rutherford, a newly-emancipated African American. The revolt of the Allmuseri slaves is now the catalyst which leads to catastrophe. One of the slave ship’s owners is a black man, Papa Zeringue.
Moreover, even though the Republic falls apart, a few survive decide to build family and community. They are the ones, Johnson has explained, “who are capable of change.”
Thus, a century and a half after Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Charles Johnson, an African American philosophic novelist, is using the story of a sea voyage to portray the United States as both Apocalypse and Creation, both the end of one epoch and the beginning of another.
The Middle Passage is an instructive example of what Johnson has described as “The End of the Black American Narrative” in his landmark 2008 American Scholar article. With the emergence of Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell and Barack Obama, Johnson insists, we can no longer remain stuck in the portrayal of blacks as victims which has for so long dominated the work of black novelists and historians. Our reality has become much more complex.
READ AND ADD COMMENTS.
The New York Times reports on some of the new small businesses opening up in Detroit.
…this adventure in entrepreneurship was never completely about making money. It was also about creating a more livable community.
This is a very penetrating analysis by Vijay Prashad on the shift from armed struggle to popular organizing in Latin America.
The Long March in Latin America: The Future of Bolivarism
By VIJAY PRASHADIn mid-2008, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) came under strong criticism from both Brazil’s Lula and Venezuela’s Chavez. Lula said, “The waging of armed struggle as a means of achieving power should end in Latin America. The belief that armed struggle can solve anything is out of date.” Chavez mirrored these views, saying, “The guerrilla war is history. At this moment in Latin America, an armed guerrilla movement is out of place.”
Chavez is no stranger to the armed road. His brother Adan, now a leading Chavista, was a member of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organization, and later with the Party of the Venezuelan Revolution, an urban underground organization affiliated with the former guerrilla commander Douglas Bravo.
Grace Lee Boggs and Shea Howell shared their reflections on the 00’s in this new year issue of the Metro Times.
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NOW AVAILABLE AT THE BOGGS CENTER STOREThe American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (2009 edition)
Revolution & Evolution in the Twentieth Century (2008 edition)
Living for Change (Signed by Grace Lee Boggs)
Conversations in Maine: Exploring Our Nations Future
Let's Talk About Malcolm & Martin
