The 'Oops!' Factor by Mumia Abu-Jamal

* The 'Oops!' Factor ** {col. writ. 1/10/08}
**(c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal **

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As the race for presidential primaries and caucuses gains in speed and tempo, this current campaign has taught me at least one important lesson: "You can't rely on polls!"

Talking heads are sounding sillier by the day trying to explain how the junior senator from Illinois went from a double digit lead a day before the New Hampshire primaries, to losing by 2 percentage points by night's end.

I wrote a piece, but just like those talking heads, I got it wrong, and wrote as much. If I'm lucky, you'll never get to hear it.

(OOPS!)

I, too, was shocked by Sen. Hillary Clinton's win over Barack Obama (I bet you so was she!), but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what happened. In my view, it had absolutely nothing to do with Hillary's tears, nor any such nonsense.

It had everything to do with people walking into the booth, pulling a curtain, /and having second thoughts./

It had everything to do with what, to some, is still unimaginable: a Black president of the United States of America. I don't think people consciously lied to pollsters. I think they really believed what they said; but belief and action are two separate things.

Blacks have dreamed of the idea for more than 1/2 a century (if not longer), and past nominees, more often than not ran on third parties, or were 'favorite sons' of certain regions; yet, almost always, they were protest votes, safe alternatives, votes meant to show support, but not to elect.

Some of the names will doubtless ring a bell, but many won't elicit a bare ripple of recognition.

Rev. Channing Phillips of Washington, D.C., was nominated for President at the raucous Chicago Democratic National Convention on August 28, 1968, and received 67 1/2 votes from delegates. Throughout that year, two other Black men, Eldridge Cleaver (then Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party), and comedian turned civil rights activist, Dick Gregory, shared the presidential nominations of the Peace & Freedom Party. Cleaver was on the ballot in at least 5 states, while Gregory polled in at least 9 states. When the votes were tallied, Cleaver took roughly 10,000 votes, while Gregory garnered nearly 50,000.

In July , 1972, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm (N.Y.-Dem) received 151.95 votes on her presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Miami, out of 2,000 delegates' votes.

By 1988, Independent (New Alliance Party) Dr. Lenora Fulani, on the ballot in at least 35 states (and Washington, D.C.) netted over 218,159 votes. While seemingly impressive, it pales when one considers that 91.5 million people voted in the 1988 presidential elections (her share of the vote was thus 0.24%). Four years later (1992), with new laws in place restricting ballot access, she would pull perhaps a fourth of that number, as she had considerably fewer states (about 20) in which to find her party represented on the ballot.

It's virtually forgotten now that Rev. Jesse Jackson got over 7 million votes, won 13 primaries and caucuses, and controlled almost a third (29%) of the party delegates in his second run in 1988. Though Rev. Al Sharpton would try his hand in the 2000 and 2004 races, his campaign was widely regarded (at least by the corporate media, and through them, the predominantly white electorate), as a symbolic run, in the long tradition of protest candidacies. Indeed, one observer, law professor Kimerle W. Crenshaw has opined that Sharpton's July 2004 Democratic convention speech "electrified" the place, with his critique of the Bush administration's penchant for appointing right wing judges to the U.S. Supreme Court would whittle away rights won over long, hard struggles. Crenshaw noted:

Not only did journalists such as Wolf Blitzer and others perform a questionable disciplinary role in denouncing Sharpton as being "off message" -- CNN's Jeff Greenfield went further to declare that Sharpton delivered the most incendiary comment of the entire convention. [Fr.: Crenshaw, K.W., "Sharpton Sharpens the Challenge with an Overtime Victory," CommonDreams.org (July 30, 2004).]

In this context, the apparent fawning over Obama by many of these same media figures may owe more to his seeming nonracial presentation, than any real concern for Black political empowerment.

Politics is about more than strange bedfellows. It's ultimately about power, and that's why there are second thoughts.

--(c) '08 maj

The Madhouse Called 'Home' (Kenya)

* The Madhouse Called 'Home' (Kenya) *
* {col. writ. 1/12/08} (c) 08' Mumia Abu-Jamal *

The continuing carnage in Kenya (E. Africa) evokes feelings of confusion mixed with shame.

Confusion because if the cause of such infernal conflict is tribalism, the word has little meaning for U.S. Blacks, for the grandchildren of slaves were detribalized, or perhaps more accurately, compressed into a single national tribe of Blackness.

Shame, because Blacks still feel a kinship for (an idealized) Africa, and thus, their calamities seem like ours, and, since the relatively recent end of colonialism, many African countries have had more than their share of calamities.

Kenyan human rights activist and writer, Koigi wa Wamwere, in his 2003 book, Negative Ethnicity (Seven Stories Press/Open Media) records a harrowing event in 1998 Kenya, when a man named John Mwangi detailed what happened to him in the Makuru district of Kenya:

I am down, and around me a big fire rages. Our village is razed and destroyed. There are screams everywhere. They are hurt and down. I inhale smoke and smell burning flesh, food, and timber everywhere. I see a man coming with a flaming torch for burning houses and food stores, a spear to stab my heart and sword to slit my throat and kill me as they have others. I think this is the end, but not yet. Please, don't kill me, I plead with whatever breath I have left.

We are Africans. We are brothers. Without looking at me, he thrusts the spear into my side and cuts my throat. Die, die, you dirty louse, he says. I am not your brother. I am not your tribe. Tasting blood in my mouth, I slide into unconsciousness with that word ringing -- /tribe, tribe/ - until the world falls silent. When I wake up, I am in the hospital, wrapped in bandages from head to foot. A Good Samaritan picked me up and brought me here. Several months later, I go to my village, but it is no more. Both the new house and the land now belong to him who tried to kill me. Because I am from another ethnic community I am evicted from my home and land and cleansed from the Rift Valley Province where anyone who is not Kalenjin is called a foreigner. I cry and ask, Why? No one answers. [pp. 9-10]

Although the U.S. press has reported that the present tribal warfare was unprecedented in modern Kenya, in fact, such clashes happened as recent as a decade ago (1998), and nearly a decade before that (in 1992). Such clashes are usually manipulated by political leaders for communal ( read: 'tribal') support for a ruthless struggle for resources, cattle, and yes -- lebensraum (German for 'living room').

Wamwere put it pointedly when he recounted a quasi-joking between he and some other Gikuyu and Kalenjin friends. They joked about Kalenjin getting the best jobs, the best spots in school, or bank loans. The Kalenjin would retort, "Now is our time to eat. You Gikuyu had yours." (66)

For Wamwere, tribalism (or in his term, 'negative ethnicity') has been a powerful tool used by politicians to communicate the notion of 'it's our time to eat.'

Wamwere tells a classic and chilling tale of when Jomo Kenyatta came to power after colonialism, and his government slew one of its own ministers, Tom Mboya, a prominent Luo politician. Luo riots shook Nairobi and Kisumu. Wamwere recalls how Kenyatta responded by forcing Gikuyus to take a loyalty oath.

Those who didn't take it were beaten or killed. Wamwere explained that he too took the oath, partly in fear, and partly in fascination. This oath was against the Luos. This took place in 1969.

The notion of nation is a transient one; for nations come and go; tribe remains.

So, politicians run on the implicit promise that, 'if you elect me, we will eat.'

And while tribe fights tribe over crumbs, the whole socio-economic order serves to send the fat of the land into the kitchens and coffers of Europe and America, while politicians ship their excess wealth to Western banks to hold. For what are these countries but Western creations, with borders designed to preserve corrupt economic relations where the continent becomes a vast plantation, with Black overseers, who manage Black workers for Western profits and exploitation?

While millions of Africans suffer from malnutrition, millions of Americans and Europeans spend billions to try to manage their rampant obesity.

Tribalism? Negative Ethnicity? Or poor people fighting for scraps? --

(c) '08 maj

{Sources: Wamwere, Koigi wa, Negative Ethnicity: From Bias to Genocide (New York: Seven Stories Press/Open Media, 2003); Wamwere, Koigi wa, I Refuse to Die: My Journey for Freedom (New York: Seven Stories, 2002) (for the author's critique of the Moi dictatorship).}