Month: June 2020

In my quest for Black history, I’ve been listening and reading primary source material to know exactly what the authors and narrators are saying in their own words, and not through the filter of textbooks or orators who take snippets of the original out of context.

In Malcolm X’s famous April 12, 1964 speech, ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’, all we heard was the part about how ‘black nationalists’ are going to ‘allegedly’ start a war with white people if we are denied our rights to vote. When I listened to the whole 53 minute speech, this context was no where near the truth. I will be taking important clips out of this speech in upcoming posts, but I thought that this particular clip was very interesting because if one is familiar with the late Rev. Billy Graham, he was a so-called white christian who preached about Jesus Christ but did or say nothing about the plight of Black people during his tenure. Malcolm X called him out in this speech, and this is the actual speech.

This is a short video of how white people are using a word that was an identification of a dance among Black folk, and they are now using it for racist propaganda and deadly mischief. There is no shame in white american misappropriation of black/brown culture.

From the 1950s, until the late 1980s, Television stations signed off between 2am to 6am generally. They played a collage of American Exceptionalism and/or a glorification of our military, with the Star Spangled Banner played in the background. I used one of these collages and added the ‘real history’ behind several scenes shown to be ‘American History.’ The truth be told, these collages were nothing more than glorified white male american history….History that conveniently left out important people from the narrative due to racism. This was my attempt to point out some of those whitewashed moments. And for the record, I believe that the Star Spangled Banner should not be the National Anthem. It does not represent ALL Americans….the author of it said so himself. In this age of COVID 19 and the TV murder of George Floyd, I believe that this song will be next to be put into the museums and become a historical footnote in American History from here on.

This is another 1968 short clip from an interview conducted by Dick Cavett with the great James Baldwin. I would HIGHLY ENCOURAGE the reader to look up Baldwin’s writings, books and magazine articles, and full length videos of his speeches and dissertations on Race in America. Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to the ‘spiritual’ aspect of change in America, but Baldwin appealed to the intellectual and deeply historical aspect of American racism. This short clip is just a small taste.

This is a video clip of James Baldwin as a guest on the Dick Cavett Show in 1968. The other invited guest, Prof. Paul Weiss from Yale University was, I guess, the liberal point of view on racism at that time….Black people dwell on race and not on the individual.

Mr. Baldwin, in less than five minutes, schooled the professor, and at the same time, spoke truth about what is going on TODAY IN 2020.

I edited out my personal reasons for posting this video, and kept the relevant commentary on what happened to Mr. Floyd. This editing removed more than 5 minutes of the 8 min 46 sec., but remaining is video that may still be found disturbing to some. Listening to the audio without watching is advised for those who may find the footage disturbing.

It took this video to really rock me out of my comfort zone. Mr. Floyd being casually murdered in front everyone, by law enforcement. The difference between this video of a black man being killed by police, and all the other numerous videos that we’ve seen before, is this:

Mr. Floyd was strangled to death instead of shot. When a black man is shot by white people, it is not a big deal. It happens all the time. White people are used to seeing and hearing about Black men regularly getting killed by law enforcement, and they usually dismiss the incident as something that ‘the black man must have brought upon himself’….like ‘not listening to the police’…or ‘he should not have run away’….or…..’he must have been breaking the law’..

All excuses to justify the unjustifiable.

But it was different this time. It was a slow, painful, deliberate strangulation of a black man by law enforcement, and just like the days of old when lynching (strangulation) was sanctioned in this country….Oh, an anti-lynching Law STILL has not passed in Congress…we’ve been waiting since 1866, but that’s another story…..The police not only strangled him to death, they did not even flinch when cameras were rolling and people gathered and witnessed this murder. It was INSTITUTIONAL RACISM in its rawest form.

This is why I am posting the whole, unedited video of Mr. Floyd’s murder. Too many people have been sitting on the fence about this, and this video will make it clear as to WHY people are so outraged, and are still protesting, even three weeks after the murder, because…..The United States of America has got to change.