Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Hands that hold the world or thoughts on white supremacy, our schools and the evermore emerging police state as evidenced by Edward Snowden, its all connected


You know my friend white supremacy is infused in every facet of relationship and life experience.                                                                       

                                                                                                  Conversations at a Restaurant

So, I was on the web one day looking for a photo or picture with black hands holding the earth, you know, a ball in two hands cupped like in the picture. Well, I looked and looked but no luck. Later in the evening I went out with my good friend and mentor and told of my frustration and we had a good laugh. Would you believe it not one photo of black hands holding the earth?  I guess I'll have to take my own picture. Please let me know if you find a picture such as this. As of now the only hands I see holding the earth are white, yes, white and typically male. Hmm how does that work.  This experience becomes the ground of this blog post.

So, while I don’t want or need to be cynical about the whole matter I must at least present my point regarding this image.  My point, based on my interpretation of the above image is that white supremacy utilizes various tools to normalize a police state necessarily sequestering any imagination that is beyond or counter to its imagination.   As a matter of clarification my point is not that the rest of us don't have an imagination but that the imagination we do have is shaped by white supremacy necessarily compelling us to focus our imaginations in and on places that have been created and developed for us by the normalizing agents/partners of white supremacy, i.e. Google, Apple, and Facebook just to name a few, ensuring the continued domination of white supremacy.

In the context of this blog Normalizing Agents/Partners are strategies of white supremacy. They are the relationships, tools, systems, and narratives that maintain materialist notions of desire.  In this sense, desire for material becomes an important oppressive aspect of white supremacy, for me, as evidenced by the rampant consumerism in the United States.   Any imagination beyond these agents developed by/partnered with white supremacy becomes problematic and must be eradicated in the name of making the world safe for white supremacy or the “Global War on Terror”.  Those normalizing agents which I suggest here are wars and rumors of wars, i.e., the military industrial complex, economic melt downs, prison industrial complex, poverty, religion, entertainment/consumerism, nationalism parading as “faith” and the like, they are the embodiment of of white supremacy.  In this I think Marcus Garvey, Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West, Gabriella Lettini, Ibrahim Farajaje, Tim Wise, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr. and even Ella Baker might agree.

Reading Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, published by New Press, 2010, I am reminded of the strategies employed by white supremacy and its normalizing agents/partners to maintain power over people who don’t represent or agree with the agenda of white supremacy, as I am reminded by news reports that the largest budget in my beloved state of California is the one for prisons when programs which are focused on children should have the largest budget.  I think the obvious question on this matter is, “who or what is the criminal here and what are their priorities?”  It is a question that each of us must seriously engage, to be honest about the whole matter.  I say this as I read an article in the Huffington Post (Feb 20, 2013 edition) about the school to jailhouse pipeline system.  The article tells how the school systems now employ the police, and the criminal justice system, i.e. agents/partners of white supremacy to discipline children for stuff, formerly issues handled at the teacher/principal level such as temper tantrums, etc., now handled by the local police necessarily making the school a quasi police state, this according to the Huffington Post article. 

Living in the flat lands of Richmond CA. I experience the effects of white supremacy, i.e. poverty, food deserts, housing crisis, slum lords, money lending/laundering companies that play on the impoverished like vultures in the desert and schools with seemingly as many police as there are students, in this sense ensuring the normalization of a police state with generational implications.  In this context as I think on these hands this image becomes more and more sinister.   Now I want to suggest here that the quasi police state, the flatlands of Richmond, CA, the sequester of the any imagination over and beyond white supremacy and the actions of Edward Snowden in regard to the NSA leaks are ultimately and intimately connected as white supremacy, in its efforts to maintain power over, has become the real criminal, the enemy, the real evil as it oppresses an American public that appears to be asleep at the proverbial wheel of this republic being directed toward "cultural issues of juvenile import" that are not the real argument at all.  What do votes mean when the voter is actually asleep at the wheel clueless of the real underlying issues.  Of course this is the goal of white supremacy.

I must admit that I am of the mind to pardon Mr. Snowden mainly because his actions reveal a vast police state that maintains ever more control over a population enslaved to desires for materiality.   That said, those of us who have awakened must begin to see ourselves as the "awakened ones", developing strategies to sustain ourselves over and beyond white supremacy.  My hat is off to Mr. Snowden and other activist that stand against all forms of white supremacy.

 

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