7.Black Hatred of Black Unity

Toward the Unity of North American Africans
7. Black Hatred of Black Unity

All classes of North American African society suffer the addiction to white supremacy, for sister Aeeshah Kokomon called blacks the "other white people." A friend of mind said my woman at the time who possessed several degrees from her European edumakation was not black but a white woman. He said that I should stop trying to hook up with an edumaked woman and get me one who was ignut and mentally ill. I don't know what made him think my edumaked woman wasn't mentally ill, even more so than the ignut woman he suggested.

I am trying to get to the root of our problem that transcends classes and even caste--though we must do a separate essay on caste, color and class unity.

What we want to examine here is the phenomenon of trans-class hatred of unity, whether black bourgeoisie or grass roots. There are those among us who would rather go into the gas chamber before they will come together to prevent such a black holocaust. And believe you, it is possible considering the level of white hatred against blacks that is yet prevalent in our society.

There are those who have every intention to put blacks back in slavery. The prison system of involuntary servitude under the US Constitution is the most clear example of the present and future condition of North American Africans. Two and half million of the incarcerated are mostly North American Africans and other ethnic poor.

The South finally figured out how to get those niggers back in chains, ball and chains, stripped suits and all, road gangs and all. Not that the North is any different, for we really have no idea how many of our people are incarcerated or under the control of the criminal justice system, but we know most black men, and lately women, are incarcerated in jail and/or prison, on probation or parole. There are very few who have no connection with the criminal justice system. A nigguh with no record is a rarity.

Instead of fighting for a general amnesty of all imprisoned, there are those blacks who say them nigguhs need to be in prison, except when they often are members of their own family, including bourgeoisie blacks who try to disclaim any relationship with the criminal elements in their families.

They will not offer a hand to their family members who are habitual criminals since it is a blot on their family pedigree, thus they may identify with their wife's relatives who may be of the uppity class, although upon examination these persons may have much if not many of the dysfunctional mental health issues of the grass roots relatives or in-laws.

So there is grand denial here and absolutely no attempt to unify with such negative elements. I don't have nothing to do with the nigguhs in my family. They low class, ignut. I don't want them nigguhs over my house for Thanksgiving, Xmas or no other holiday. Them nigguhs ain't getting drunk and tearing up my good furniture!

There is thus no family or community unity here, no desire for unity, nothing but the absolute desire to avoid those considered of lower class. And yet we know the golden handcuff syndrome of the black bourgeoisie, their conspicuous consumption lifestyle in their world of make believe, their gated estates wherein they suffer emotional, verbal and physical violence, yet refuse to leave because of the material comforts, though they are essentially prisoners of love, no better than the common nigguhs pushing a shopping cart down the street with theirj partner as they drink rot gut wine.

But let us be prescriptive. Let us go to the drug store to get our medication to ameliorate the condition in our mental apparatus. Why do you hate your brother, sister? Did your Mama and Daddy teach you this? No, on what occasion did they teach you to hate your blood? None, thus it is derived from some foreign source, yes, the White Man devil! As Aeeshah Kokomon said, you are the other white people! Her program is her Attitudinal Healing Center.

If you don't want to deal with my peer group to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, go see Aeeshah Kokomon. As Phavia says, do whatever is necessary to float yo boat!
Just don't remain stagnant in full blown denial, like you got it all together when you on the brink of suicide. Somebody better get a healing up in here!

You will, in the end, come together in the name of black unity. You may not want to, may not desire to, but you will be forced by circumstance to unite with those you hate and despise, once you find yourselves in the same holding cell. Your arrogance shall vanish, your humility shall appear. You will come to understand your brother and sister are all you have, and it shall hit you like a bomb in the head, cracking your brain cells like nothing you have experienced, all your edumakation shall go out the window, and you shall embrace your brother and sister with unconditional love that Mother and Father taught, and your memory shall be shattered into glass that you shall gather on your hands and feet, and you shall be glad you are on the floor crawling back to sanity!
--Marvin X
12/9/11


--Marvin X
12/9/10

Toward the Unity of North American Africans: 6. Internal and External Sources of Disunity

Toward the Unity of North American Africans
6. Internal and External Sources of Disunity

Bay Area writers and journalists came together to honor the memory of assassinated Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, a victim of Oakland politics, although Muslims were blamed. Chauncey was investigating police corruption and corruption in Mayor Jerry Brown's office. Jerry Brown is reported to have said, "I'm gonna get that nigguh from snooping around City Hall and the police department." Brown is now governor-elect of California.

The broad day light assassination of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey was but another project in the ongoing attempt to prolong the disunity of our community. The major benefactor
was not the Black Muslim Bakery brothers, the fall guys charged with his murder, but the political establishment, the police department and white supremacy America. Just as the USA benefited from the murder of Malcolm X, the political establishment in the Bay Area has driven a wedge between Muslims and the North American African community.

As per the bakery brothers, it is indeed ironic that Dr. Yusef Bey, founder of Your Black Muslim Bakery, and Chauncey Bailey were longtime associates and friends, especially at Soulbeat television where they both contributed to the station's success. Dr. Bey had a show, True Solutions, and Chauncey was the news director, so they had a long working relationship. But after Dr. Bey's transition, we are to believe that Bey's heirs considered Chauncey their mortal enemy because he was writings articles on their bankruptcy proceedings that were public information. This was a ruse instigated by the Oakland Police Department whose officer became the mentor and chief adviser of the bakery boys.

This officer was not only in charge of the crime scene, who refused to question an eye witness, brother Tony, but the officer led a raid on the bakery less than 24 hours of the assassination at 7:30 i the morning. The OPD raided the bakery and found the murder weapon and got a confession from a handy man. No murder in the history of Oakland has been solved so quickly, if we are dumb enough to believe the hype!

But are main concern is the divisiveness the police orchestrated murder caused in our community, especially in light of America's war against Islam. Christian blacks wanted nothing to do with Muslims, and blacks in general looked at Muslims with a jaundiced eye. Orthodox Muslims disassociated themselves from the Black Muslim Bakery brothers since they were not considered real Muslims in the first place. They were essentially followers of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad whose brand of Islam is not considered true Islam, just as Sunni Muslims do not consider Shia Muslims as real Muslims, or Ahmediahs as true.

Of course some of this bitter division is residue from the assassination of Malcolm X. Many North American Africans are suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome from the 1965 Cointelpro murder of Malcolm. Intellectuals are still traumatized and grieving over the tragic hit on Malcolm and blame the Nation of Islam, even though police agents were his bodyguards and some of the hit men were allowed to escape capture by the New York police.

The degree of hurt and unresolved grief is so severe that intellectuals and scholars cannot write narratives on our modern history without revisionism, skipping from Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X in their narrative, deleting Elijah Muhammad's contribution and his mentoring of Malcolm, along with Muhammad Ali, Farrakhan, Warith Din Muhammad, and thousands of others who came into black consciousness, including myself, due to Elijah's Message to the Black Man.

We know the FBI's mission was to stop the rise of a black messiah who could unify North American Africans, thus all black leaders were objects for elimination by the US government: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Kwame Toure (Stokeley), H. Rap Brown (Imam Jamil Alamin), Huey, Eldridge and Bobby of the Black Panthers. Who murdered Fred Hampton, Jr.? Who tracked Mumia Abu Jamal from the age of 14?

The last thing America wants is a unified community of North American Africans. Have no doubt, our unified vote is the primary reason that so-called Negro is in the White House. Our unity can and ultimately will change the history of the world. This is how powerful we are. One need only recall the powerful effect of the Million Man March. Imagine if those million men had pooled their resources and were able to develop an organization. We would have been a frightening force similar to that million man army in North Korea! We would then be able to call all shots in our community. Nothing would move until the million men gave their approval. No drugs, no prostitution, no wife beating, no rape, no disrespect of elders, no children dropping out of school because they were bright enough not to be duped by a white supremacy curriculum, since the million men would ban such from being taught, in colleges and universities as well.

We talked with a brother in Philly not long ago who has several Stake and Take restaurants. We asked the brother why is it so difficult for us to unite? He said if we united, all the guns of the white man would turn on us. My friend, elder, comrade and associate, Amiri Baraka puts it thusly, "In the end the Negro will be the terrorist!" Look who's being arrested for terrorism these days, who's being entrapped and conspired upon by the US government?

In spite of all the above dirty tricks, we are confident there shall be unity, even if as Elijah said, we must force black unity! Yes, just as sometimes we must force a husband and wife to stop fighting and come together, we must be proactive about unity in the community, although I have suggested there must be a program of detoxification and recovery from our trauma and unresolved grief. Otherwise we ain't going around the corner with each other. I don't trust you, Negro! You don't know me like that! I don't even trust myself! Elijah told you don't trust no one.
This is war, the enemy is pervasive with snitches everywhere, agent provocateurs, undercover agents.

Somehow, we must process our paranoia, our fears, lack of trust, lack of desire of forgiveness, especially when we have all done wrong and been wronged. He who is without sin cast the first stone, Jesus told you. So ain't no Holy Joe's up in here. We all got some funk on us--yeah, it's funky up in here. Ain't it funky now, JB said.

Malcolm told you to transcend your petty differences. The hatred we have for each other is a joke since no black person has done to us what the white man has, yet we love the white man and hate the black man. This is sick, insane, and we need to go somewhere to get a healing. Go to Africa, if it will help you, go to Jamaica, anywhere to heal, go to Mecca, Jerusalem, then come home ready to rock and roll like we did last summer!
--Marvin X
12/9/10

Parable of Shoes

Parable of Shoes


I got some nice shoes
my other woman bought me
to go on tour
my main woman hates them shoes
every time I wear them
she let's know
them shoes yo other bitch bought
ain't they?
I nod
cause they nice shoes.
ain't seven thousand dollar shoes
like Charlie Rangel's, King of Harlem shoes
but they nice
go wear them
no matter if my main woman don't like them.
both ladies left me
but I still got ma shoes.
--Marvin X

Does Obama Have a Backbone?

Does Obama Have a Backbone?


We must sadly forward this essay on Obama because it contains much truth about our brother in the White House who seems to love capitulation as his personal political policy. Yet, how can one defeat his opposition by constant capitulation?

We agree this man lacks backbone and we urge Mechelle to put her Gullah foot in his behind! Gul, hep yo boy/man! Boy need healin'. We compromise to get something, not nothing. We compromise yet maintain our dignity and basic philosophy. To give up everything is not compromise but capitulation, surrender to the enemy or opposition.
If he continues his trend, as the writer below predicts, he will likely be a one term president and the Democrats will be history in 2012.
--Marvin X

Robert Kuttner

Co-founder and co-edor of The American Prospect What Now for the Democrats?What Now for the Democrats?Let's imagine the political possibilities of the next two years and beyond. So far, President Obama's response to the drubbing of the mid-term has confirmed the progressive community's worst fears. Astonishingly, he still seems to believe the following:

Robert Kuttner

Co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect

What Now for the Democrats? Politics News

Let's imagine the political possibilities of the next two years and beyond. So far, President Obama's response to the drubbing of the mid-term has confirmed the progressive community's worst fears. Astonishingly, he still seems to believe the following:

The American people care more about bipartisan compromise and budget cuts than about ending the economic crisis.

If he just compromises a little more, the Republicans might still meet him halfway.
The recipe for economic recovery has something to do with reducing the short term federal deficit.

All three of these premises are disastrously wrong -- as politics and as economics.

Gestures like freezing federal pay levels and cutting the government workforce only play into the rightwing mantra that the government is the problem. Politically, they signal weakness.

This move makes no significant impact on the deficit, reduces employment and purchasing power; and, characteristically, Obama got nothing in return. The Democratic National Committee, disgracefully, even used the Organizing for America email list to try to drum up support for a Democratic president freezing worker pay during a deep recession.

The Bush tax cuts expire on December 31. Most Democrats are beating on the Republicans for refusing to spare 98 percent of Americans a tax hike, so that the top 2 percent can continue to get lower rates. Most Democrats are whacking the Republicans for letting unemployment insurance expire at a time of increased joblessness. But the message gets blurred because of Obama's mixed signals.

And instead of drawing a line in the sand and making clear that Democrats will not cut Social Security, Obama encouraged Democrats to support the scheme of the deficit commission, which was an anti-government, anti-social insurance blueprint that had very little public support and no constructive impact on the economic recovery that the country needs, and robbed Democrats of their most potent issue -- that Democrats defend Social Security and Republicans don't.

To add insult to injury, Obama just proposed yet another Bush-style trade deal with South Korea, which is likely to be a net job loser for the U.S. The widely expected appointment of investment banker and Robert Rubin protégé Roger Altman as Obama's chief economic adviser to succeed Larry Summers will continue the Wall Street dynasty at the White House.

The problem, however, is not Obama's advisers. It is the man who appointed them -- and his failure to know how to fight and lead as a progressive.

Let's stop pretending. Barack Obama is a disaster as a crisis president. He has taken an economic collapse that was the result of Republican ideology and Republican policies, and made it the Democrats' fault. And the more that he is pummeled, the more he bends over.

So what exactly are our prospects and alternatives?

Absent radically different policies, an economic depression will continue indefinitely. This is not a "Great Recession" in the New York Times' cute pun. It's a depression, made up of persistently high unemployment, reduced consumer purchasing power, damaged banks, and business unwillingness to invest, just like the 1930s. Unemployment is not quite as severe, but measured properly it is around 18 percent. And unlike in the 1930s, we don't have a strong Democratic president using activist government to dig our way out.

With Congress deadlocked, the second best course in these circumstances is to offer progressive policies that will cure the depression, and beat the stuffings out of the Republicans for blocking them. But that is simply not going to happen because that is not who Obama is. His style is not to draw bright lines, but to blur them.

Absent that kind of leadership, the Republicans going onto 2012 will succeed in blaming the continuing crisis on Obama and the Democrats. Obama is rapidly becoming our Herbert Hoover. As you will recall, Hoover's legacy was Democratic dominance of American politics for a generation.

The 2012 election is especially bleak because redistricting, with the increased Republican control of statehouses, gives the Republicans a likely pickup of ten to twenty House seats independent of other electoral trends. On the Senate side, just 10 Republican-held seats are up for re-election compared to 23 Democratic ones. The arithmetic alone suggests a Republican Congress.

So the choices boil down to these:

*Let Obama continue to undermine the economy, the real Democratic Party, and the New Deal-Great Society legacy.

*Do a ton of grass roots organizing to put pressure on the administration to change course and in the meantime to back real progressive leaders. The one time in recent memory that something like this worked was in the successful campaign to have Elizabeth Warren appointed interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The trouble is that the Warren appointment was something of a one-off. Though progressive pressure can produce an occasional decent appointment, it is not capable of compelling Obama to grow a spine.

*Run a progressive candidate against Obama in the 2012 primary. At a recent meeting of the Democracy Alliance, most of whose private donors and trade union backers were big Obama supporters, the two White House emissaries were ripped apart. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka was severe in his criticism of the White House failure to promote a real jobs and recovery program. Co-panelist Austan Goolsbee appeared weak and ineffectual, like his President.*

Since the mid-term rout, some progressive donors who were big Obama supporters in 2010, have been meeting on the issue of trying to topple Obama in favor of a Democrat who would be able to fight the 2012 election as an economic progressive with clean hands, challenging the failures of both Obama and of the Republicans. Names that have been mentioned include Howard Dean, Russ Feingold, and Byron Dorgan.

My initial reaction was that this idea is both premature and far-fetched. Ted Kennedy's run against Jimmy Carter in 1980 only softened up Carter for Ronald Reagan in the general election. On the other hand, toppling LBJ was the right thing to do. Had Bobby Kennedy not been murdered or had Hubert Humphrey displayed just a bit more nerve, the Democrats could well have held off Richard Nixon in 1968, and emerged as a more effective governing progressive party.

The labor movement is just disgusted with Obama. Young people who rallied to him are turned off. Progressives in Congress are seething. Obama could well head into 2012 with little of his base intact, save the African American community. A serious primary challenger could easily win Iowa, where it all began. And a primary fight is a terrific organizing tool. It could force the media to take note of a progressive message about the economy.

Even if this doesn't come to pass, it is salutary that serious conversations are occurring, because it gets the attention of the White House, and raises the possibility, however faint, of a more progressive Obama.

There is also the likelihood in 2012 of a centrist independent candidate, perhaps Michael Berlusconi -- oops, I mean Bloomberg -- the billionaire martinet mayor of New York. What -- is Obama not centrist enough? Do we really need three candidates from Wall Street?

If things proceed as they have been going, here is what's likely:

Republicans take both Houses in 2012. Obama may barely hold on to the presidency, in which case a continuing depression becomes even more of his responsibility and we have an eight-year Herbert Hoover that the Republicans can run against for a generation.

Alternatively, Obama loses in 2012, Republicans become the governing party, do incredible damage, but don't cure the depression. And there is a shot that a progressive Democrat wins in 2016.

We could be in for a period like the late 19th century, of festering economic and social problems, failed one-term presidencies, and partisan oscillation in Congress.

To be clear: I am not rooting for a wall-to-wall Republican win is 2012 on the faint hope that it will set the stage for a Democratic comeback for years later. I am too mindful of the pitiful slogan of German leftists in 1933 -- "After Hitler, Us." Palin is not Hitler, but there is never a good tactical reason to root for the far right.

Yet if we are to be spared an awful decade, both economically and politically, either Obama needs to grow a backbone; or some other Democrat could well challenge him in 2012. Either course will require the progressive community to stop crying in our beer and to get out and organize.

*Correction: A previous version of this post erroneously stated that Goolsbie left the Democracy Alliance panel. This line has been removed from the post.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His latest book is A President in Peril.

The Haves, Have Nots, Have Yachts

The Haves, the Have Nots and the Have Yachts

And he said, this will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. Luke 12:18.

As we continue to see searing unemployment among the rank and file of America’s working class, it is quite clear that corporate America seems content to increase their profit margins at the expense of not hiring people who need to work.

October’s unemployment remained at 9.6 percent, despite the government’s efforts to create capital pipelines to help stimulate job growth. The recent $600 billion dollar bond auction to help boost employment did not move the numbers.

The wealth gap remains gigantic and difficult to close. Last month’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showed that while firings had slowed, hiring hasn’t picked up. Job gains from new or expanding businesses were 6.1 million in the first quarter, the lowest quarterly increase since the recession ended. Job losses from closing or shrinking businesses fell to 6.4 million, the smallest on BLS records going back to 1992. So in spite of what we may hear, what we see is much different. Many families that celebrated Thanksgiving in their homes last year have lost those homes to foreclosure in a real estate market that is flippant, callous, insensitive and cannibalistic. The recent economic debacle has brought out the beast in some of the wealthy, in that while wealth has been eroded among many in this democratic landscape, private jet flights have increased significantly, yacht sales are making a comeback and the super wealthy are getting back to their Hampton type settings.

There are also those who are not as bad off as some, but they still gripe because they had to sell some of their vacation property.

And, we now have more homeless families than we have seen in more than half a century. I am not one who will suggest social programs are the cure-all for what is going on in this country, but some gleaning, or resources could be deliberately provided, to give the needy some dignity. Recently, two of the nation’s wealthiest, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, suggested that if you take everything from your source, and return nothing, that in the end, everyone will have nothing. Which is the main reason they said they wanted to return a significant portion of their wealth in order to help develop a new platform of growth. In an article in CNNmoney.com, Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett challenged the nation's billionaires to pledge to give at least half their net worth to charity, in their lifetimes or at death. Gates and Buffet campaign, if successful, could change the face of philanthropy. The Fortune 400 has a net worth of roughly $1.2 trillion dollars and the $600 billion would represent half of their total net worth. This alone would create a dynamic growth paradigm for future prospects. But I suspect that because of a lack of tolerance for the disenfranchised and institutionalized racism this may be a dream in a far away land that may never come to fruition. So just know that the rich don’t pay taxes, the middle class pay the taxes for the rich, which is why I maintain that being middle class is over rated. Why not go all the way, because the only real difference between the classes is money. And we all put our pants on the same way; one leg at a time.


Economic Growth versus Development


In the world of economics, growth is the primary metric. It's all about the numbers, and so we try to reach the sky with growth, quarterly, annually. As long as there is growth, we know we are on solid ground. The assumption is that growth is infinite, for there are infinite possibilities for growth if we search for new lands to exploit the labor, resources and addiction to consumerism or things we have programed people to desire, even beyond their needs.

As we look at the global economic crisis and the slowdown in growth, perhaps it is time to ponder this wanton desire for growth, especially when it propels people to spend beyond their means to satisfy the bloody capitalist swine who perpetuate

Two friends enjoying a moment in time, Marvin X and Fahizah.



the world of make believe, including the addiction to growth as the only barometer of successful economic policy.

But we know a child may grow but not develop, thus perhaps we should consider development as essential to economic policy. How many people were employed with jobs at a living wage in the last quarter? How many had health insurance coverage on the job. Did we reach wage parity with Black and white men, white men and white women? How many claimed they were happy on the job in the last quarter or last year? How many feel secure?

What does it really prove to have increased growth and profits? Well, it's all about profit, right?
It's all about making a profit with the cheapest labor and resources, even if we need to start wars to obtain such, even if we must remain on a permanent war footing to satisfy the bastards in the military/corporate/university complex who earn mega salaries with bonuses while the workers are rapidly slipping into poverty or require two salaried persons in the household to make it.

And because the workers have become addicted to things or conspicuous consumption, their lives suffer underdevelopment while the bosses drive them to increase the growth metric, no matter the development metric, especially the human development, after all, we are not talking of abstractions.

We are entering an era, especially here in the Americas, where Latin American or Indigenous peoples are discarding the blatant free market capitalism of the Europeans. The peoples of the Americas want an alternative to naked exploitation of labor and natural resources. Some rather keep their natural resources in the ground rather than give away for little or nothing. Bolivia is considering such with its new found lithium deposits that is needed for batteries and electronic devices. Other nations rather keep their oil in the ground, after all, it is exploited yet the people remain in poverty, ignorance and disease.

And so we are at the precipice of a new economic order. Progressive minded people are urgently seeking alternatives to solve the present global crisis brought about from pure greed and arrogance by the white supremacy bandits.

Is more better or less? Having more is no guarantee of happiness. In the US, workers have two and three cars, closets full of shoes and clothes, yet mates are estranged, suffering physical, verbal and emotional abuse, and of course many chose to remain prisoners of love because they enjoy the golden handcuffs of material security, neglecting to consider their spiritual security.

And so we suffer psychosomatic diseases from stress, cancer, stroke and heart attack, only then do people realize things are an illusion of the monkey mind. They are horrified when they see the poor people pushing shopping carts down the street, yet expressing happiness and joy, yes, while drinking their rot gut wine, but the couple is passionate with each other, laughing and joking as if they were in a palace.

Some economists, Robert Reich, for example, say we have reached the limit of growth, that the only thing possible now in order to have peace in the world is for the rich to share the wealth, yes, return some of the ill gotten gain to the wretched of the earth. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are the example of what must be done. They have given back or plan to give billions back to the people. They are encouraging other rich persons to do the same. Perhaps these men understand it is not about growth but development and the transformation of the human spirit beyond the material. Call it joy and happiness!
--Marvin X
12/4/10

Parable of the Man Who Desired to Return to the Box

Parable of the Man Who Desired to Return to the Box
Plato Negro arrived at his Academy of da Corner to be confronted by one of his very best student/teachers who obtained Plato Negro's latest book Notes on the Wisdom of Action or How to Jump Out the Box. The man purchased the book, demanded his teacher or rather chancellor autograph the book, which the chancellor promptly did. But the man, a very passionate student/teacher and videographer of Academy of da Corner, demanded his teacher perform a magic trick by putting him back into the box. He absolutely demanded Plato Negro get all the Negroes out the box so he could get into the box by himself!

Plato Negro was trying to enjoy the release of his book, for a book takes much work, even beyond the writing there is the printing and many changes may occur as the book is prepared for the printig process. Sometimes things do not go smoothly, there may be a sudden problem with the formatting and it is a cost issue, thus serious. And this happened with Notes on the Wisdom of Action or How to Jump Out of the Box.

So when Plato Negro was confronted by his student/teacher, he was slightly upset but tried not to show it since he loved his student/teacher and knew he was a sincere person who was under great stress from dealing with the people.

The student/teacher begged him to hurry up and get all the nigguhs out the box so he could get into the box. Plato Negro told him that he had spent 12 years in the box, trying to kill himself night after night so he could get back into the box but God wouldn't take him, no matter how hard he tried.

He didn't tell his student/teacher that he had stood in a pool of his own blood after he cut an artery so that he could get back into the box. Even if he did so unconsciously, it was surely an attempted suicide since even after he was rescued by a friend and the hotel manager, Plato Negro, after a ride to the hospital in an ambulance, returned to the scene to continue his self destruction. You don't hear me. Some body need a healing up in here! Let the Lord be praise. Let somebody say Ache!

The student/teacher was relentless is pressing his teacher/chancellor to get him back in the box. He was stressed to the max and his teacher/chancellor felt the stress and was very disturbed, for he could not enjoy the release of his book subtitled How to Jump Out of the Box.
After all, a Negro was shouting in his ear to get him back in the box.

He begged his student/teacher to take a chill pill, for he knew his student was stressed. And then a dancer arrived, Raynetta Rayzetta, who choreographed a dance to Plato's Parable of a Woman in the Box. Raynetta remembered that the student/teacher had videoed her performance at the San Francisco Theatre Festival. When she heard the student/teacher demanding to return to the box, she was pleasantly surprised, if not in total shock, since she only knew the student/teacher as videographer.

Now he was taking her parable that she had choreographed to another level, not to get the woman (or man) out of the box, but to return him/her to the box. This presented Raynetta with new possibilities and she looked at the student/teacher in wonder at the choreographic potential of his demand. "Nigguh are you crazy?"

After all, sir, Plato Negro has done all he can to get you out the box, yet you want to return. Why are you defying the mission of your teacher?

Plato Negro had talked earlier in the day about Jack in the box, describing how Jack had possibilities since he was knocked in the head but remained in a shallow grave, not six feet under, thus he had the possibility of recovery since he was only in a shallow grave, as in the Masonic mythology of Hiram Biff.

His student/teacher would have none of it! He wanted to return to the box, but only after Plato Negro had removed all the dead bodies! Only then would he enter the grave. There seemed to be some selfishness here, and Plato wanted none of it! We must continue to the end, no matter what! And after all, he told his student, the end is almost here, so don't get weary, hold on to the rope of God, the end is near!
--Marvin X
12/1/10
Academy of da Corner
14th and Broadway
Oakland

Parable of Ed Bullins, playwright of BAM

THE PLAY'S THE THING

After forty years of writing plays, Ed Bullins may soon see his name on a Broadway marquee for the first time. But his greatest reward? Knowing he’s connected with audiences, both large and small.

By Karen Feldscher

Ed Bullins has been called “one of the most powerful black voices in contemporary American theater.” “America’s greatest living playwright.” Prolific. Influential. Gifted. Legendary theater critic Clive Barnes has said he “writes like an angel.”

You’ve probably never heard of Ed Bullins.

But those who know something about African-American theater, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, surely have. They regard him as a founding father.

Bullins, who’s taught at Northeastern since 1995 and currently holds the title Distinguished Artist-in-Residence, has written more than a hundred plays, give or take. Don’t ask him to verify the number; even he can’t say for sure how many there are. Anyway, he considers only about thirty of them “real,” meaning they were written and produced to his satisfaction.

Though Bullins has written historical dramas, musicals, and absurdist pieces, his plays typically center around urban blacks living the dark side by the bucketful—drugs and drink, poverty, prostitution, violence, dashed hopes and dreams.

Longtime friend Mort Kaplan, a former Northeastern theatre professor and department chair who brought Bullins to Huntington Avenue, says this could be why the plays haven’t made it to Broadway. The Taking of Miss Janie, for example, which won Bullins two prestigious theater awards, features the title character’s onstage rape. “Broadway producers were afraid” of the plays’ rawness, Kaplan says.

Yet if all goes according to plan, by the time Bullins turns sixty-eight this July, he’ll be well on his way to mounting his first Broadway show, a musical called Hot Feet. It’s based on the life of Leonard Harper, a Harlem Renaissance director, dancer, showman, and all-round impresario at the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater.

Bullins wrote Hot Feet as a nonmusical play about a decade ago. It attracted little attention until producer Morris Berchard suggested turning it into a musical. Bullins rewrote the original treatment—fifteen times—to fit the new form.

His reaction to the prospect of finally seeing his name on the Great White Way? He quips, perhaps only half in jest, “I know some people who would say, ‘Bullins has sold out—he’s writing a musical. Not only a musical, but a Broadway musical!’”

Yet Bullins knows the play’s period and setting would be rich ground for any dramatist. “Hot Feet looks back at a time when many were despairing, while others had great opportunities,” he says. “It was adventurous. Groundbreaking. It’s good to tell that story.”

The Broadway show—Berchard says it’s in the “creative stage” and should open sometime during the next one to three years—isn’t the only recognition headed Bullins’s way. Between twenty and thirty of his plays, along with selections of his fiction and poetry, are being gathered into a book called The Ed Bullins Reader, to be published by the University of Michigan Press next year.

A healthy measure of accolades have already come to Bullins over his long career. A trilogy of plays—A Son, Come Home; The Electronic Nigger; and Clara’s Ole Man—earned him the 1968 Vernon Rice Drama Desk Award. In 1971, he earned an Obie and the Black Arts Alliance Award for both The Fabulous Miss Marie and In New England Winter. The Taking of Miss Janie garnered an Obie and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1975.

He’s received Guggenheim fellowships and playwriting grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and other funding organizations. A book titled Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography, by Samuel Hay, was published in 1997. The same year, Bullins’s 1969 play Goin’ a Buffalo was included in the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, coedited by Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“That is so major, to be picked as one of the examples of African-American literature,” says Kaplan, who believes The Taking of Miss Janie would have won a Tony or a Pulitzer if the New York production had been mounted at a Broadway theater, instead of at Lincoln Center. Such distinctions mattered in the 1970s. “If it had been produced today,” Kaplan says, “it would have won, hands down.”


In the trenches

Bullins’s powers of observation yield plays that are startlingly real. And he’s content to let the plays speak for themselves: Bullins is not a particularly chatty man.

Even Kaplan, who’s known him a long time, calls him “wary.” During a lull in a conversation, when someone else might leap to fill the void, Bullins allows the silence to simmer while he carefully considers his next point. He seems to be more comfortable observing than speaking, sizing up people and situations in his head rather than offering analysis.

His plays clearly grow out of personal experience. Bullins grew up in West and North Philadelphia, neighborhoods where you still see block after block of shabby row houses painted shades of brown, sidewalks littered with broken glass, graffiti-splattered walls, people hanging out outside the local bars. His mother, Bertha, who worked as a seamstress, raised him. He doesn’t know much about his father.

Bertha loved to read, and stressed the importance of education. “Early on, she gave me a book by Richard Wright, Black Boy,” Bullins recalls. The autobiographical novel about the struggles of a young writer in the Jim Crow South shook him. “It had a big impact on me. In fact, it scared the heck out of me. There were so many parallels to my own life.”

The youngster got another kind of education on North Philly’s rough streets. During junior high, he joined a street gang. As Bullins told writer Jervis Anderson, who wrote a profile of the playwright for the New Yorker in 1973, “If you passed through the territory of a rival gang, you got your butt kicked. Ferguson Junior High, where I went, was outside my territory, so most times I had to fight my way to school and fight my way back. You were always in danger of getting done in.”

Like other gang members, Bullins sold whiskey, ran numbers, and gambled. “In the black community, you survived by whatever means you could,” he told Anderson, adding, “What did I get out of the experience? I lived. I learned how to survive. I’m a street nigger.”

During one fight, Bullins was stabbed in the neck. He almost died. He had one of those classic near-death experiences, seeing a bright light and feeling as if he were outside his body. He took his recovery as a sign that he was brought back to do something important.

Starting in 1952, shortly after dropping out of high school, he spent three years in the Navy. During that time, Bullins started a program of self-education, reading everything he could get his hands on. After leaving the service, he spent three years in Philadelphia. He avoids saying much when questioned about that time, though he did tell Anderson, “There was nothing I could do in Philly. Today most of my friends from there are either winos, junkies, or dead.”

Bullins moved to Los Angeles, earned his GED, enrolled at Los Angeles Community College, and struggled to reconcile his interest in literature with his desire to make a decent living. He tried studying economics; when that didn’t hook him, he turned to electronics. “But I found myself writing poetry and a play in the electronics workshop,” he says, laughing.

“I didn’t think much of being an English major,” he says. “What kind of work could I do with English? But I had fallen in love with literature; I was trying to take every English class I could.”

The reluctant artist started a creative-writing club and a campus literary magazine, to which he contributed fiction, essays, and poetry. Inspired by a student production of Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s look at working-class hopelessness in England just after World War II, Bullins began to teach himself playwriting, reading two plays a week and seeing as many productions as he could.

In 1964, still shy of a degree, Bullins left Los Angeles for San Francisco. He continued to pursue an undergraduate degree at San Francisco State College, studying comparative literature and creative writing. Both in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Bullins had a mixed reaction to higher education, finding only a handful of teachers who offered support. One professor told him he’d never be a writer. It only stiffened his resolve.


Making his mark

Bullins started taking odd jobs in the theater business—stagehand, even floor sweeper. He wrote, mostly poetry and fiction. And then the plays began to come.

He showed three at San Francisco’s Firehouse Repertory Theatre in 1965: How Do You Do, Dialect Determinism (or The Rally), and Clara’s Ole Man. “I got them done, but it was a pretty harrowing experience,” he recalls. “I had to find people to put up the money, get a director and actors together. I’d never done it, but through force of will, and a lot of help from other people, and good luck, I did it. Then I was hooked on theater.”

Discouraged by his failure to interest producers in his work, Bullins regained his determination after seeing LeRoi Jones’s 1964 play Dutchman. Jones, who now goes by the name Amiri Baraka, was exploring the same kinds of social and racial issues Bullins was passionate about. He began to believe he was on to something.

Bullins and Baraka were key players in a group of African-American artists known as the Black Arts Movement, which, the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature says, “sought to transform the manner in which black Americans were represented or portrayed in literature and the arts.”

The anthology characterizes the plays authored by Baraka and Bullins as “conversational, black, slice-of-life,” challenging audiences “to bring to the theater a ready ear for discordant truths.”

Along with a young playwright named Marvin Jackmon (later known as Marvin X) and a few others, Bullins formed a group called Black Arts/West. They mounted a number of plays by Bullins, Jackmon, and Baraka, working with African-American students from San Francisco State. “We did a whole cultural explosion of plays and poetry,” recalls Bullins. “It was revolutionary, unifying, rallying.”

Bullins briefly got involved in San Francisco’s Black Panther movement. He and Jackmon were the cultural-arts wing of Black House, an organization whose political endeavors were run by Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and Huey Newton. A center for performance, theater, poetry, and music, Black House briefly served as Black Panther headquarters. But the cultural and political factions had a falling out, and “the political people had the guns, so they purged us,” Bullins says, able to laugh in hindsight.

Though Bullins and Jackmon tried to keep Black Arts/West afloat, funding was a problem. “We didn’t have the discipline, or the vision, or the commitment,” Bullins says. Once Black Arts/West folded, Bullins started looking for a new path.

And found it. In 1967, a New York agent put him in contact with Robert Macbeth, who was starting a theater in Harlem, the New Lafayette. Bullins became its playwright-in-residence, later its associate director. Bullins’s six years at the New Lafayette were one of his most prolific periods. He wrote or produced almost a dozen plays, and completed a novel.

In New York, Bullins resumed his affiliation with the Black Panthers after mending fences with Eldridge Cleaver during a San Francisco visit. He agreed to serve as the Panthers’ minister of culture and organize fundraisers. But Bullins was absorbed by his theater work, so the reunion was short-lived. “The political part just sort of fell away,” he says.

The New Lafayette mounted many Bullins works. Soon his plays were being produced at other New York venues, such as the American Place Theatre, La Mama Experimental Theatre, the Public Theatre, and Lincoln Center. From the late 1960s through the 1970s, reviews of his plays appeared frequently in such publications as the New York Times and the New Yorker. “I became a promising name,” Bullins says. “I had arrived.”

According to Samuel Hay, Bullins also mentored “a whole generation of young playwrights” in New York in the 1970s. Bullins, writes Hay, “helped to change the ‘kill-whitey’ rhetoric in Black Revolutionary drama and the cussing and fussing in Black Experience drama . . . [and] assisted the young writers not only by conducting workshops but also by publishing and producing their plays.”


Serenades of the streets

The action of Bullins’s plays, certainly his most important ones, are in and of the ghetto. Critic James Giles says the plays contain “a sense of once-glimpsed loyalty, sensitivity, and romance, which the ghetto reality of the setting makes impossible to attain. . . . [The message is] that the reality of Black life in America perverts and destroys human dreams—whether of pure romance or of economic independence—and makes personal loyalty all but obsolete.” All too frequently, Bullins’s characters face disillusionment and a profound sense of loss.

The plays “all but ignore the theme found in most of his contemporaries’ plays, that all whites are enemies of African Americans,” writes Hay. In fact, Bullins rejects political rhetoric and violent revolution. His themes, Hay says, “concern people’s needs for sexual satisfaction, safety, economic security, family, esteem, and self-improvement.”

The plays’ forms tend to be improvisational. Bullins has said he takes his cues from the rhythms of such jazz greats as Miles Davis and John Coltrane; actual music often figures in the plays, either from an onstage radio or a combo. The plays may be bracketed by prologues or monologues, invite audience participation reminiscent of the call-and-response tradition in the black church, include fantasy sequences, or move back and forth in time.

Some critics attack the structure of the plays, calling them “episodic” or “unfocused.” Bullins says he meant the plays to be unconventional. “I was trying to do something new every time,” he says. “It was experimental.”

Their strong language occasionally strikes a raw chord with critics. African-American critics, in particular, have complained the plays depict a black ghetto with no sense of community, no moral values. Asked about that, Bullins says, “It’s true that some plays don’t show many redeeming values. It’s [like] the on-ramp at Mass Ave. and Melnea Cass Boulevard—what redeeming values can you find there? People are going as fast as they can. People are trying to grab hold of a nickel or a quarter, or have some unsafe sex, or get a drug. I have a play called The Corner. That’s what happens on the corner.”

Other critics admire what Bullins does. Some see parallels with Chekhov in the plays’ meandering structure and the characters’ naturalistic aimlessness. Clive Barnes has called Bullins “a playwright with his hand on the jugular vein of the people. . . . [He] writes so easily and naturally that you watch the plays and you get the impression of overhearing them rather than seeing them.”

In the New Yorker, Jervis Anderson wrote that though the plays focus on society’s rough edges—ex-cons, weapons, hustlers, hookers, drugs, joblessness—Bullins describes that world with “a genuine compassion and gentleness and love, and an ear that captures the energy and poetry of the language of the streets.”

Bullins was gratified when his work began to be honored. But, he admits, “I didn’t even know what the awards were at first. I was so naïve. When I got the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, I thought, okay, what’s next? And the Obie—I didn’t know exactly what that was about. Then I started getting grants and fellowships that had money attached to them. Although my greatest award was having a wonderful audience that loved the play, it also helps to have money. I had a family, and I had to support them.”

Writing never made Bullins rich, so he taught writing classes at places like Fordham, Bronx Community College, and New York University. The teaching gigs were part-time, because he still didn’t have a degree. Besides, he didn’t want full-time teaching work. “Since I was doing plays, I felt it would have been selling out,” he says.

His commitment to Harlem theater even led him to turn down other writing offers, including a chance to pen the Lady Sings the Blues screenplay. “Of course, I looked back years later and said, ‘Wow, if only I had taken that!’ But then, I might have corrupted myself,” Bullins says. “I might have drunk too much good wine. You see people who get a lot of money too soon and burn up, like a moth before a candle.”

Bullins says the highlights of those years were when, after a performance of one of his plays, he’d walk anonymously with the audience as they left the theater, listening to what they had to say. He heard audience members who “were involved in the play; they were moved by it.” It’s a postperformance ritual he maintains today.


A “living legend”

Bullins worked with the New Lafayette until funding problems closed it in 1973, then became playwright-in-residence at the American Place Theatre.

Some have noted that Bullins’s creative output lessened after the 1970s. Bullins acknowledges ups and downs, saying, “At certain periods in my life, I seemed to disappear from public. I wasn’t in jail, but I do have people close to me who are or who have been in jail. I have a family ranging from scientists and artists, to other strata. You know, an all-American black family.”

At one point, Bullins was a single parent focused on his kids (he declines to say much about his immediate or extended family). “Sometimes I was busy with other things,” he says simply.

Bullins continued to make ends meet through teaching gigs and theater jobs that included everything from public relations to ticket sales. He led summer drama workshops. He taught playwriting and black theater on the East and West Coasts. He finally earned his elusive bachelor’s degree, from Antioch University in 1989, and in 1994 earned an MFA from San Francisco State University.

A year after that, he was hired as a theatre professor at Northeastern, and for a time was the acting director of the university’s Center for the Arts. In 1997, Bullins told a Boston Globe interviewer the Northeastern job had saved his life. “It was a reaffirmation of my worth,” he explains today. “It recognized the contribution I had made and gave me a foundation.”

Kaplan, who had brought Bullins to the university several times in the 1970s for artist-in-residence stints, was thrilled to help his friend get the full-time Northeastern position. Though Kaplan left the university in 1996, he and Bullins continue to work together. This summer, they hope to produce in Boston a play written by Shirley Timmreck—an eightysomething whose work Bullins discovered while serving as a judge at an annual theater conference in Alaska.

And Bullins’s own work is alive and well. His play Boy x Man (pronounced “boy times man”) was staged in North Carolina, New York, and Boston in the late 1990s. Dr. Geechee and the Blood Junkies, a 1985 play about drug dealers and cops, had a Boston production in 1998. And Bullins’s 1969 play, We Righteous Bombers, was produced at Northeastern in January.

Six years ago, Bullins was designated a “living legend” by the National Black Theater Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. At the time, he told the Boston Globe he hoped the designation didn’t mean “living fossil.”

That clearly isn’t the case. The man Kaplan calls “extraordinarily energetic” writes ten-minute plays for the annual Boston Theater Marathons, mentors local playwrights through a group called ACT Roxbury, works with another playwright through New York’s Cherry Lane Theater, and helps bring other African-American artists to Northeastern. As a professor, he teaches classes on the Black Arts Movement and the black theater’s history and culture.

And, of course, Bullins teaches playwriting. He shows students how to construct scenes and acts, gives them writing exercises, prods them to read their work aloud to “take their work off the page and make it a living thing,” he says, and to read and see as many plays as they can.

Now Bullins’s star may be about to shine brighter. Hot Feet producer Berchard—while acknowledging that even the most prestigious theater projects can be shelved “indefinitely,” usually for lack of funds—says he and executive

producer Donald Farber are “determined to work this one through. We’re going to take it to the Broadway stage.”

Berchard is determined because he thinks Bullins’s tale of Leonard Harper and the Harlem Renaissance is “a story that needs to be told.”

“People love the period,” he adds. “They love the jazz music, the intrigue around the involvement of the mob in the clubs of Harlem. And there’s going to be terrific dancing. It’s a show about an amazing tap dancer. Leonard Harper was a dancer, choreographer, and producer of stage shows. And yet very few people knew about him.”

Like Bullins himself, actually. A hard-working artist who, for one reason or another, hasn’t achieved widespread fame. Berchard says Harper “craved” fame. This has not been true of Bullins.

“I try to write the best play I can,” Bullins says. “I try to be one of the outstanding playwrights of my generation. I think by looking at some of my better plays, audiences will learn something. If nothing more, they’ll learn what a good play looks like.”

He pauses. “I hope my work is memorable and important, and worthy of the name of art.”