Category Archives: Uncategorized

A relative died two weeks ago. I know what you are thinking: Was it the coronavirus? How old? Sad.

A month ago, no one would have thought to guess of a specific cause of death, at least, not as their first question. It was not Coronavirus. We knew it was coming. But she was 48. And yes, it was very sad.

When you have clients or a lot of social media friends, someone in your circle of circles dies nearly every day. But it’s supposed to be an octogenarian. Not a woman with one in college and another in high school.

She wasn’t remarkable in that she was financially successful or politically important. An internet search yields hardly anything. She was just a regular person. Yet, she had extraordinary relationships in family, in life. You know people that seem to get along with everyone? Well I don’t. Few people in my life get along with everyone, and everyone likes them. No controversies, no drama. I have the shit starter gene, and well, birds of a feather….For someone who kept battling back from cancer, for decades, beating it in one area when it resurfaced more virulently in another, you’d never know how much she suffered. I was in awe of her. We were together for last time at the homegoing celebration of our aunt almost a year ago. At the memorial, she pulled me aside to get my professional opinion about her retirement plan. She said, I have this money saved up, but I think that I should spend it now, and enjoy myself, because I don’t think that I will live that long. Financial Planners are trained to think about long term growth and leaving things behind for dependents, possible healthcare needs, etc. Yet I am hearing my cousin telling me in her own way that she was going to die, and did I think it was ok for her to spend the money. She was telling me her truth with the conviction of a, well, I don’t know what. Regular people make extraordinary acts of valor happen every day, and this was courageous.

While she was talking, I had to turn away and look to everyone else. I wanted to make sure that our conversation was private, but most, I was afraid I’d start crying if I made eye contact. I’ve had clients tell me they were sick, dying or with HIV; I had one that I could not talk out of committing suicide. I have seen and heard stuff with stoicism; visage revealing nothing. But I didn’t have the strength to match her courage. As I looked around the room, I thought about how she felt seeing folk talk about her aunt; I wondered if she thought if we would soon be assembling, to give recollections about her. I couldn’t recall everything she was saying because I couldn’t concentrate and shake that sensation. “So, what do you think?” I looked at her, and resigned, “I think you’re right.”

Over these last two weeks, her husband has been sharing about her, and I’m proud of him, big brother proud, peer proud, proud in the way you are when you feel you can be led by someone your age, because you trust in their maturity; kinda like the first time you let a kid doctor or dentist work on you. Her story needs to be told; she needs to be remembered. We owe her—and her children–the history of her legacy, and he gets that. In the midst of his private agony he has gone public. He has old man strength. No wonder she married him….birds of a feather.

When times are tough and we come through on the other side, its almost a given that we won’t talk about it. We treat catastrophes as things that can be left unsaid. I recall flying 7 days after September 11th, the plane was 75-80% empty. Everyone was surprisingly quiet, yet joyful to see me, smiling and waving like we were one family at reunion. Is that how white people feel when they are happy to see you, I wondered. A brother on the plane in the back row, no less, saw me enter, and as our eyes met, we gave the head nod; you know, as if we were prepared to kick ass if something happened, each of us having the others’ back. I’ve never talked about 9-11 with my kids; I haven’t reminisced about it in two decades. Why is that? Over 100 years ago, the world’s pandemic killed 50 million. Did you know much about the Spanish Flu before eight weeks ago? You did? Recall someone who led to its eradication in America? Tell me what the President said or did? Who in your family talked about it? I fancy myself an historian, yet I read nothing past a paragraph in 40 years before February 2020.

My grandmother, who left me with a continuous lineage to her paternal family history tracing back to the 1750’s, uniting the first slave with the first Irishman, never told me anything about her mother. The only thing she ever mentioned about childhood was that her Oakland elementary school collapsed during an earthquake, and her grandfather was a nomadic Choctaw and told her he had seen “both oceans.” On her 22nd birthday, at the breaking point of WWII, I assume she was celebrating in the new home that she and my grandfather bought—exactly twenty-two miles from the Port Chicago Highway explosion, where simultaneously, 300 men, mostly black, were vaporized while loading ammunition on military ships. The blast was heard in Oakland. My grandparents never talked about it. My great grandfather (her father) was the last person I knew lived through that 1918 pandemic; he was 17 in Los Angeles at the outbreak. When I was 19; I spent a week with him in LA one summer, which felt like a month with an 87 year old. He also never told me about my great grandmother, his ex, or anything else of substance in personal family history. I would be nearly 50 before I realized that his father was murdered when he was about five. I was close to 45 when I found out my grandfather’s father was murdered when he was nearly seven, the same age as I was when my father—his son–was killed.

They aren’t outliers: I knew all my grandparents; the last one died almost six years ago, and most of them didn’t say anything. The last one lived the healthiest the longest, and even she didn’t fess up to Chinese heritage until a year before she died, and it was only because my mother challenged her in a Thanksgiving argument and she let it slip…. What my 2nd grandmother saw as a shameful past, I see as perseverance. Age was a census year, I watched Roots II and I was excited about out my genealogy, and I asked her if she was Asian, you couldn’t deny it in her face—she looked like she could’ve disappeared in Chinatown and nobody would trip. I vividly remember that conversation, so now It is clear she lied to me; “No, just black and some Cherokee Indian; your Paw Paw (my other grandfather, her ex) has Cherokee and Blackfoot…,” clearly trying to divert the conversation to someone else. And we don’t even want to go there with that someone else; there is strong chance that he had a half white ancestry too. But he died the following year, the first of the grands to go. And he would have held onto his history until death of he faced that choice; I didn’t dare ask him anything.

My God I wish they talked to me; I wished they told me how they survived through it all; I wished they told me who didn’t. Sitting at home now, knowing a half dozen people with coronavirus, listening to a madman ramble through all of this, examining my own mortality and questioning my role in bringing three other people onto this planet, I have this enormous feeling of loss, as if I should know better, as if I should have learned from my ancestors’ trials. I want to take strength now from them, yet I have none of the elixir. In ways, they showed me how to survive through example, but they didn’t tell me anything.

I bet they never asked either. It’s one thing to be told by an elder; it’s quite another to ask. Black people were never allowed to ask. It implied too much. I have never asked how my father drowned; I mean specifically. I only found out the name of the lake where he passed in the last couple of years, when I was going through old boxes. No one told me, so I didn’t bother to ask. It was just one of those things that went unsaid. At first, you don’t know how to ask, for you know it hurts them to answer; later you don’t know how to ask because it hurts you to hear. With the days ahead at best equaling the days behind, I should ask. As there are fewer and fewer people from which to get the answers, I can still see the pain at the remembering seems to be greatest in the ones who are left. They say the pain goes away, gets easier; I think pain is like ocean waves; sooner or later the big ones come back to shore.

I understand why people didn’t press; in the case of my grandmother, how does she ask her grandmother what slavery was like? How does her grandmother dance around the likelihood that her father was a slave master that raped her mother? How can you explain being in bondage to another?

You just do. You have to tell. We all are these grown children just beckoning someone to tell us who we are. The previous generation left us to our own imaginations, and our thoughts are leveling us. So many are incensed about the perpetuation of racism, how so many people are blind to inequity. We think THEY should know, we think they should change. They don’t know. Its too painful for them to know, so they don’t ask. They make the Wild West, American exceptionalism, an honorable South, for it is the only means they can survive. Again, how do they ask their grandmother what she was doing in the era of slavery, of Jim Crow Segregation, of Donald Trump? How does your father tell you his grandfather lynched a man, or denied him a job, or got him falsely arrested, or swindled him out of his property, or abused his power as an officer, or turned his back on truth?

You cannot pretend as if nothing happened. You can’t avoid those terrible times and expect us to know you, to understand why you are afraid. How can you ask us to forgive when we have none of the examples? We don’t understand the dismissals: us going to retire in the South, marrying someone not like us, going to college, working in a certain place. How can we understand your angst, your paranoia?

We all know things are wrong, this is the easiest period to recognize it. Hell, even your animals know things aren’t right; they sense your spirit, and they know that when they see you at home now, all day, everyday, something isn’t right. Nobody has shown me a picture of their animals playing and excited to see them. Yet I see a ton of pictures with dogs on people’s laps or in their beds, as if they’re comforting the humans instead of the other way around. I don’t have cats anymore, but there is a fish in my tank that just watches me, as If it knows something. But when this is over, how will we remember it, and us? How will we tell people how we got through this wrong period in our history?
What happens to a people that grow up and no one tells them anything?

They become us.

I tell my kids stories like I am an old man In no hurry. Repeatedly and drawn out. No, I am not losing it yet, but I want to make sure the words sink in. They know why daddy is afraid of roller coasters, but they know that they need to ride them; they know why I really needed them to learn how to swim. They know that the scar in my eyebrow comes from running from a girlfriend who tricked me into coming into the girl’s bathroom, only to find a whole bunch of girls in an ambush to give me cooties, and I ran into the boy’s bathroom to get away, slipped and knocked myself unconscious against the wall…

They know about my parents, and my grandparents, as much as I can tell, in as much as their level of maturity will handle it. I tell them things that as a middle-aged man, what I would have wanted to know about my parents.
This ‘thing’ has given us something….a pause. For many, sadly the pause will not be reset. For others, it’s the world taking a break at the same time. This breather, this daily series of Sundays; we are giving our kids a chance to reconnect with each other and ourselves. One in high school, another going to high school, and a 2nd grader. Yesterday, I saw the high schooler and the 2nd grader swinging together in the back yard. We must retell these stories, that even in the challenging of days, there was still humanity.

I would do anything to hear my father’s voice on anything. My mother was a child bride, a child mother, and died before most people retire. She was taken too soon. Yet I wouldn’t want her here; she talked too much in person, loved too much the groups, and was in bad health. The situation of not communing with the state of her health would have surely killed her. But I am looking for videos of her this weekend, I want to hear her laugh. I want my kids to hear her laugh.

If you have children; tell them about your parents, even if they’re still alive. If you don’t have kids, tell your nieces and nephews about their parents and grandparents. You don’t have that; call your cousins; you don’t have that, call your friends. Tell them about your family, so they can recall your antics with smiles; call their kids. Let them know about you. Write it down, say it on video. Call a friend’s kid and tell them a story about their parent. Imagine how important it is for a child to hear about the parent they never knew? The aunt who died looked at my youngest and said, he looks just like your father….I was like “no, he looks more like his sister…” two years later, after she passed, I saw it, and it was chilling. I told the story to my wife, and she said “your aunt spent a lot more time with your father than you did; she knew him when he was younger…” give someone that gift. You matter. Your history matters. Your triumphs matter. Always remember that.

The older I get, I am more surprised at how people have been able to suppress American history on a wide scale and be fine with it.  No, it’s not just the fact that about 25%-33% of all cowboys were black, and the term Cowboy might have been coined to describe black men, but 99% of all photos and paintings and movies and TV westerns never included up to 1/3 of the population.  No, I am not shocked about how many patents and inventions were created by blacks but were stolen or never acknowledged, like Jim Beam’s Whiskey, or George Washington Carver’s contribution to the assembly line, or Louis Latimer’s development of the filament which made the light go for Edison.  I am not even disturbed that its likely 20% of slave owners were white women–let alone those who co-owned with their husbands–and were just as brutal as their male counterparts to their slaves.

What I wanna know is, where are those damn hoods?  The KKK started after the Civil War ended, and there have been millions of members in America over the last 154 years.  But have you ever seen a KKK uniform outside of a museum, a rally or some freak sitting on the Donahue or Jerry Springer Show?

It’s not like you seem them in the trash cans or landfills.  You ever see one for sale in an antique shop?  The government didn’t confiscate them.  So, where are these robes?  Where are the hoods?  I don’t even want to get into who made them, or who is still making them….and everybody white I speak to surprisingly has never seen a KKK uniform up close either.   Again, there have been as many as 6 millon KKK members at one time, but nobody’s seen nuthin’. Well played white people, well played, but that is another story….

Because of America’s penchant for hiding the truth, and getting mired in “fake news,” it is imperative that we go after the Concealer in Chief.  Go after the head, and the body will follow.

For those of you that want to get him out of power, you cannot do it with showcasing old men in a neutral battleground like you did with Mueller yesterday.  Mueller was the kid who saw his father beat his mother half to death, but didn’t want to cause any waves at the family court hearing, because he hangs out with his father’s side of the family.   You gotta do better than that to knock out the champion prevaricator.

You must challenge him on EVERY lie.

If you don’t challenge him, you look weak.  If you don’t press him after you challenge him, you look weak.  You must keep it up, you cannot relent.  As you keep digging at him with facts, challenging his lack of manhood, he’ll leave you alone.

Go after his character, even if it makes you uncomfortable.  Mommy can’t always be right; if you don’t have anything nice to say, say it louder and more often.

Since Trump baits everyone, call him a Master Baiter.

Call him a liar, every day. Every. Single. Day.  Look what he did to media?  And to truth?

Where is the Lie-O-Meter?  The Lie Of The Day? Where is the Democratic website dedicated to explaining his lies and the dates they occur? You have all these rich people, and no left leaning network?  No, CNN pays Republicans to lie about the President, and Rachel Maddow hasn’t recovered on MSNBC for exposing inconclusively weak portion of tax returns like Geraldo Rivera opened up an empty Al Copone’s safe….there are no one sided counterparts to FOX, the Oklahoma legislature, or the 700 Club.

You must mock him; it is not enough to point out his lies, you must make fun of his shortcomings, and make it funny.  There is a lot funny with this man, but you are too angry to exploit it.  When you speak of him, you never lower your brow, never scowl, and never shout.

Whenever Trump or his allies make a statement, you automatically know it’s a lie, so you just have to check him and them on the statement; each statement.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator McConnell and Mike Pence have said that Trump isn’t a misogynist or a racist.  Really?

Vice President Pence, can you tell me what a racist is?  I mean, what does a racist do?  Who in fact is a racist?  Please give examples.  Who is the most raciest racist there is in America?  Why haven’t you advocated sending them to deprogramming camps?

Senator Graham should every day be hearing how he called Donald Trump a racist in 2015, and ask him why he changed his mind?  Do you think that your gay friends are ok with Trump’s racism?  Yeah, you know where I’m going there, don’t you…?

Senator McConnell, are you an authority on racism?  I mean, you’ve been a judge and now you are one of the most powerful people in America, and we expect you to fully understand the impact of racism in America, given your important positions.  Tell me, what qualifies you to speak on race?  What articles, essays, books have you read, written, or debated?  Have you consulted with people to discuss racism?  Who have you consulted?  I believe that Congressman John Lewis, who was beaten during a civil rights march as a college student and was kicked out of a department store for being colored, knows what racism is.   Congressman Lewis is an in fact, an expert on racism, one of the best and the brightest on this subject in America, and certainly in Congress on the history and impact of US racism.  He is supremely qualified to speak about racism. Now Congressman Lewis says that Trump is a racist.  Are you calling Congressman Lewis a liar?  Are you saying that you know more about the black experience and racism than Congressman Lewis?  Can you be trusted to discuss any issues which involve race?  How can you be trusted to be fair, since your party has acknowledged a deep state of Alt Right and racists in the party who openly support you and the Republicans?

Trump calls people Anti-Semitic?  That’s pretty much the biggest word I’ve ever heard Trump use, so I’d call him on it, kinda like a 5^th grader using Cliff’s Notes to write a term paper and just dropped existentialism.  President Trump, what do you mean?  Who taught you about anti-Semitism, your dad?   Is it anti-Semitic to ask for your ‘Jew lawyer?’ Make him explain himself, so we’re not confused.

Every. Day.  Don’t move on to different issues; continue the Twit’s threat until his fingers bleed.

When they say that they aren’t putting people into concentration camps along the border, host a contest for citizens to create a new name for what the housing crisis should be called.

Ask Trump where his father’s hood is.  Oh, for those of you that don’t know, Donald Trump’s father was arrested in New York City in 1927 during a “near-riot” in a KKK altercation. What happened is for conjecture, but when 1,000 KKK members march because they want to fight/protest/quell Roman Catholic police, logic tells us that you cannot be caught in the midst of a KKK rally to challenge cops unless you’re a participant.

I want a t-shirt that says:  (and no item can be reproduced or use the following phrases without permission of Harold Lowe)

‘Emails?  Please, I want the hood.’

‘Where is the Hood?’

‘Fight the Power, Fred Trump and KKK 1927’

‘Illegal Immigrant Bootlegger to KKK rioter and federal housing cheat to President in 3 generations.’

‘Making America Hate Again, just like 1927’

Ask Trump is he saying that there are many fine people on the ALT Right/KKK side because of his father?

When Trump says that the economy has more black people working that ever, remind him that there was 100% employment during slavery, but even then, people only had one job to make ends meet.  Ask him about how many jobs created under him are full time?  Ask him how many people have more than one job?  Ask him when is he going to fix middle America?  When is he going to fix the opioid crisis?

Tell what he hasn’t done, every day.

When they say the Mueller report was a witch hunt, ask him how Michael Cohen is doing? Ask him if he’s afraid they’ll lock him up?

When they chant send her back, you tell him “Your wife first, your wife first..”

What I am trying to say is that Democrats must stop pretending that they’re too cute to wrestle. If you are too cute, then sit down, shut up, and Let America Down Again.

I don’t care that you go after each other; I care that you don’t have the courage to go after Trump on his own turf.  He constantly goes after people, because he doesn’t let you define the narrative. You let him define himself, and you let him define you.

You give in because its like listening to a spoiled child, and you just want the whining to stop…but it doesn’t.  I saw a video of a child screaming, punching, and running for 12 hours during a flight from Europe to America, and the mother did next to nothing to minimize the child’s rage.  What she failed to recognize was that by not taking serious action, that kid’s actions affected everyone else on the plane.  Life is tenuous enough; compound the hazards of flying and doing so with an out of control tyrant, and all suffer.  Moreover, I now hate that kids’ mom, and I’ve never met her.  It is human nature to be angry and despise those that fail to protect us, even enabling others to inflict damage on us.  You are already getting America to hate you, even before a primary has taken place.  You’re starting to look like the people who live with the hoods, and instead of challenging the wearer, you fold the hoods neatly in the attic.

You Democrats better get it together and learn how to fight.

I have been in the car a fair bit and I’ve read a lot today. I hadn’t heard much about the 50 year anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch to the moon, but I have been reading and hearing about the President and the backlash. We all know that the President told four Congresswomen to go back to the countries where they came from. We all know that he called them haters of America. If you just read the statement, you would have thought that a Nazi, or a Klansman said that.

This wasn’t some one-off; decades ago, he went after the Central Park Five, demanding for a death penalty. This wasn’t some guy who is mad about losing his Secretary of Labor or losing his case in trying to put the citizenship question on the census, or mad about the Mueller upcoming testimony to Congress. This was Trump being himself, feeling completely comfortable in his own white skin.

White men don’t suffer for telling people to leave America. White men don’t suffer for telling people to do what he says or they need to get out. If your Congressional Representative is one of the 187 that voted against condemning the man’s tweets as racist, then you know where you stand. The fact that only 4 Republicans voted to condemn should let us all know where we stand. It wasn’t worth condemnation. Following and subscribing to racism doesn’t mean that you are always a part of the ruling class either; some of the best perpetrators of racism are people that can also be the victims. How can a black Republican be standing now when they’ve stood so silent on everything else.
While I am not demanding regular Republican voters voice public opposition, I must say that my friends who are quick to tell me how stupid they think A.O.C. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) is, or how much of a socialist Bernie is, or how far left the Dems are, or how much they thought Obama wasn’t Presidential are church mice today. Are you quiet because you think what Trump said was ok, or are you quiet because you’re afraid of the backlash you’ll get for breaking ranks among your Conservative tribe?

I think people, no let me be specific; white people have the wrong impression of people of color when they complain about racism. I think white people mistakenly think of it as a cry about someone not liking us, or us being too soft to take some harsh words being levied at us. If that’s all it is, baby, I could come back on you and make your momma cry with words of venom.  As much as the safe space kids have misinterpreted it, racism isn’t about trigger (yes, I said trigger) words that people say to hurt you. Racism isn’t about a small man spewing small words; to think such falls into the trap. We all say small words; many of us say them in jest, in anger, in explanation of our truth. That’s not racism on its own.

There are several levels of intolerance, and while I will discuss this another day, this is essential:

Preference—a choice you lean to based on what’s available; now we may have a lot of reasons why we lean one way or another, favorite color, food; but usually having a preference doesn’t mean you exclude others. You can like chocolate AND vanilla ice cream, or cake and pie.

Prejudice—a strong preference for one versus the other, and we make these choices and harbor our preferences based in predetermined beliefs about the other. Again, you can be prejudiced against blondes AND still find a blonde attractive, or dye your hair blond. Sometimes these are those things driven out of survival; don’t go down the street in a bad neighborhood, don’t date someone who isn’t the same religion as you. You don’t generally like black people, but _________ is ok…..

Bigotry—most people probably fall into this camp for their level of discomfort. This is a strong dislike which allows us to be misled about the object of the bigotry. Much of this is ingrained ignorance; disliking someone from another background but never quite knowing a sample size large enough to make an informed decision; i.e. I met this one _______________ and he/she was____________. This is also were a lot of people of color land, particularly in the age of Trump. When I was a kid, tribes were for Jews, Native Americans, and Africans. Now, conservatives get on TV and talk about how America has gone ‘tribal’. The President says that Democrats hate America. I’m gonna let white folks in on a secret; people of color have a lot of distrust of white people, especially the ones who call themselves liberals; we’re just waiting for your hood to drop off. I know a lot of us struggle everyday with not categorizing all white people into some batch heap of deplorables, and I’ve seen people struggle with maintaining friendships. It’s hard to work from a position of equity in a relationship when you don’t think your friends see you as equals. When I first became an African American Studies major, I’d see all these professors who were very cool with white people, and I couldn’t understand how you could know the history, teach about the atrocities and be as accepting as that. By the time I hit my senior year, I got it, and as much as Trump tries to take it out of me, I will understand and defend and believe in and love the humanity of my white brethren.

“You see, their problem is…”
“I wish they weren’t so….”
“I can’t understand those people…”

Racism—this one goes hand in hand with hate. Whenever you hate something, you usually make attempts to eradicate it. This is the reason why many people of color argue that they cannot be racists; I agree. It isn’t that they can’t be filled with hate and bigotry; they just haven’t created a system to exploit it. Hence, hating people enough to eliminate or minimize an entire group of people to the point of giving them a subhuman status is the goal. What also follows is a strategic, planned goal to separate people into distinct groups, for the purpose of elevating some and lowering and leveling others. The fact that we have a President that has for decades proven that if given the opportunity, he would use his efforts to do just that.

Being a racist isn’t about being a mean person, or being old fashioned, or being some sort of traditionalist. A white person who Is racist is like me hating mosquitoes; I hate their existence, I don’t think they have much value, and the only thing those blood suckers are worth is serving as food for bats, spiders and birds; I kill them when I get the chance, and if I do something that hurts them I have zero care…and don’t even ask me what the value a flea or tick has…

The fact that the most powerful person on the planet has been given the power and influence over people and policy to enact this is frightening, and most white people cannot or will not understand racism in this form. People suggesting racism are reduced. Once you understand racist behavior, you don’t have a hard time understanding how people can be housed in kennels at the border, or how an ICE raid focuses on Latinos and not the Canadians or Greeks or any others who have higher rates of illegal presence in the US. Framing suspects, owning or raping or torturing people are easy things to get, once you understand racism. When you don’t understand racism, you say things like:

‘Maybe he says the wrong things, but…’
‘Yes, he went too far…’
‘I just wish he wouldn’t say things like that…’
‘The other people are taking this out of context…’
‘We all say things like that…’

First, we all don’t say things like that. Even if you feel it in your heart in a fit of road rage, it’s pretty difficult to be an adult and come to the conclusion that it’s ok to openly voice this opinion. Second; he’s the President of the United States. Third; he’s the President of the United States. 435th; he is the President of the United States; you cannot utter these things, it just is wrong. Why? Aside from the façade that we expect our leaders to not think that way; the way they feel–as they show it– has power. When Ronald Reagan said he loved Jelly Bellies, their sales catapulted and they moved out of 61st and Lowell warehouse one block from me to a facility 100 times larger in Fairfield, two years later. Words matter; when a President utters racism, people die, pure and simple. Cops feel less compelled to see all people as humans, educators see some people as intellectually incapable, business leaders see some groups as less talented; and politicians make policies to make life harder on those people to fully participate in society. And there are people out there that see these comments as confirmation that their hate is justified, and should be acted upon for the sake of their beliefs and values, their country and their God.

What I have heard is that Democrats, or the media have attacked Trump’s words, and people are calling them a ‘dog whistle’ to his base.

Let’s examine this.

We human beings cannot hear dog whistles because the frequency is blown at a level to which we cannot pick it up. Are people saying that most humans cannot hear what Trump is saying because he is speaking in a manner that most of us cannot understand?
Dog whistles are used to bring the dogs to a certain point; are we saying that Trump supporters need to be led? Are we saying that they can unconditionally be led to a certain point, without the ability to act independently? Keep in mind that polls have shown for the last 2 years that the rabid fringes of the Right have never left Trump, and he has held onto most of the Republican Party during this time as well. Does he think that there are more of us who can hear him?
We do know that the more racist the language, the likelihood that those nonwhite Republicans are jumping off the ship. Are those people who are speaking about the dog whistles also telling those minority folk that they need to step back?
Moreover, what does it say about the white population, when it is more than implied—it is stated by the Democratic Party and the media, that they are worried that if a person speaks vile, racist language about people of color, that eventually white people are going to lap it up and buy the rhetoric? What does it mean to be white and be told that you don’t have the ability to hear racism without joining the pack?
Are we calling Trump supporters animals? I mean, you cannot blow a dog whistle and get people to listen unless they’re dogs in the first place……
Now, does the President really despise immigrants?
Trump’s momma: Immigrant Trump’s Daddy’s Daddy: An Immigrant.
Trump’s current and his first wife: Immigrants. Trump’s current in-laws: Immigrants
Keep in mind half of these people could be considered illegal immigrants, depending on the definition and to when they came to America; so Trump certainly hasn’t proven he hates illegal immigration.

He hates nonwhite people immigration; that’s what it proves.

I will never vote with a Party that stands behind this crap, but he knows that. He is banking on my white friends to break ranks with me. If you tolerate his act, and you let him continue to lash out, then what does that say about your ability to love America, and how can you possibly be looking forward to this country having any semblance of unity?
Now some of those people will argue that the resolution wasn’t perfect…really? Is that why they haven’t been doing their jobs over the last, well, forever? None of the bills, resolutions presented are perfect? None of the things they’ve introduced to Congress are perfect either? I thought the goal was to form a more perfect union, not to wait until we could form THE perfect union.
Speaking of union, I wonder how our grandparents would feel about us today, on the 50th anniversary of an event that united all of America, the culmination of a promise made by a President who sought to make us united through civil rights, the promise continued after Kennedy was gunned down by President Johnson, who after coming from a conservative state, frequently using ‘nigger’ in his private speech, making the added efforts to right the wrongs of the past and to push for civil rights in a decade where every person dedicated to equity was gunned down. They were not perfect, yet they did not wait to make change.
Today, we are hearkening back to both the economic prosperity and the racial depravity of the 60’s, but there is no unifying band at the end of this decade. We started this decade with fear, and we’re ending it with anger; the whole decade wasn’t a total loss, however. We made some small steps for health, for diversity; but I fear that the only way we find something to rally is going to be evil. We have enough to worry about; the environment should take all of our efforts—we need a 5 trillion tree planting or a 100% effort to remove all trash from the Pacific Ocean and our rivers. We need to have something larger than ourselves.
It takes courage to give up hate and fear, something we lack so much of today. This week, let’s look for the Right Stuff in each of us.

We make an easy assumption that Memorial Day is for those enlisted men and women who fought on behest of the military and died in action.  The belief is that: they must be military, and they died because they were protecting our way of life.

I understand the sentiment; I was listening to Mike O’Meara Show podcast and I heard Mike give a chilling recollection of his mother’s first husband’s death in battle, and how the military came by to inform her of the news.  He annually gives a shot out to this fallen soldier and all the others as a testament to their sacrifice.

I don’t think the founders of Memorial Day, those South Carolina black slaves, felt the same way, and neither do I.  Lately my heart has been with those left behind, and those that like the slaves, made the effort to promote dignity in a space where those that passed may not have deserved it.

You can read it for yourself; several slaves created a solemn ceremony to honor the soldiers who fought on both sides during the Civil War, and in a sense, to pray for the time when no such wars could take place, for no such slaves could exist in America.

I’ve always felt uneasy about the aspect that today is just for enlisted soldiers.  One of my favorite clients also happens to be one of my favorite human beings on the planet, and he is a retired Richmond firefighter.  He never carried a gun in his line of work (at least he wasn’t supposed to); he was never a threat to take out any life; his job was exactly the opposite, he was there to preserve life as best as he could, and to go into harm’s way to do so. Thank God he isn’t dead; but he saw death on the job, and he cared for people during his career, and for those of his comrades who fell before him, I would say that theirs was an even more noblesse oblige than others who came from privilege and never had the stain of racism and prejudice to stifle them.

My mother had a Vietnam vet friend who came to visit every now and then, usually to drink and cut up. I remember a time he stated how he killed 129 Vietnamese, and he was waiting to get the 130^th, while he stared me down.  He wasn’t bragging; to me he was speaking as if he had some unfinished business, and he was as serious as I had ever seen him.  As a 9-10 year old, the only thing I could think was “I don’t have any Vietnamese in me; only some Chinese and it’s not that much man…” I never thought of him as a hero, or someone to be memorialized.  I never asked him what type of Vietnamese people he killed, because I didn’t want to know the answer—I had a feeling that some were women and children.  Again, he did not die in battle, yet I am sure that many of his ilk did, and I would hate to think that deserves my respect.  Some people in the military and on the police forces in America simply want a gun and to kick ass, and we shouldn’t let the spinning of this day lead us down that path into thinking anything else.  I see our honoring of these men and women as aspirational; I mean, there is a point where people of color, particularly blacks and Native Nations understand far too well that these are the same people who fought to keep us in chains. We’re not asked to pick the decade when we want to honor the fallen; it is a mixed bag of mixed emotions.

On that Memorial Day in South Carolina, all of the dead, on both sides, were buried by blacks.  During every big and small battle in the Civil War, the bulk of the handling of the corpses was done either by black slaves, or black soldiers.  In places like Gettysburg, after the fighting was over, blacks had to go in and clean up the dead, confronting all what decaying truly means.  When you go to an old military cemetery, (certainly most everything before the Korean War) remember that those bodies were killed and remained out in the open to decay, buried to avoid decay, then exhumed, then prepared for transport, then unpacked, then reburied again by blacks.

My grandmother (with her Chinese grandfather represented the largest part of my Chinese ancestry), had a mother who purposely did not raise her, was now the caretaker of this woman for the last two years of her life as she battled cancer with one arm that usually held a cup for spitting tobacco.  That woman, my great grandmother, was abusive, rude, condescending, vulgar and hateful.  I vividly recall frequently saying hello to her, and having her slam the bedroom door, sometimes inches from my face. My grandmother would not allow me to retaliate in any way, and told me to maintain myself in my attitude with her.  I was in the house that day; you know, that day of reckoning, and my grandmother called me back into the room.  She said “I need you to help me turn momma over…”

I was the only one in the home with my grandmother, when she had to wrap this dead woman and prepare her for the coroner for removal. I was 16.  For a moment I was scared, but then I came back to me, and I was angry. Very angry.  I hated her in death and I felt I should now be allowed to hate; I hated what she did to my grandmother all those years and how she never showed compassion, or grace, and how I continued to have to, even while she was gone.  My grandmother lived until 90, but I swear that her mother took a decade off her life, and ruined the last decade she had.  In the thirty years that followed my great grandmother’s death, my grandmother never complained about her mother, even when I mustered up the courage to do so in adulthood.

Saturday, I went to the Port Chicago military base, with 18 people, most of them our Boy Scouts. I had been trying to arrange this for our troop for months.  After taking scouts to two other National Parks in early Spring, I asked around how to get into Port Chicago, and I met the lead guy who made it happen.  I wanted these scouts to learn about how the WWII explosion that killed over 300 men, (more than 200 were black) was in our backyard, and how the incident said more about heroism in the states than any bravery in a battle overseas ever could.

The rangers were also honoring the one year anniversary of a fallen ranger; no, he did not die in the act of duty—but his dedication to making Rosie the Riveter Park a reality and making Port Chicago’s story known and accessible to the masses of Americans was in itself an uncommon act of bravery in the line of duty.  And to top it off, he is the nephew of Betty Reid Soskin, a lecturer and the oldest National Park Ranger in America, and she is based in Richmond.  And she is the most articulate person I have ever heard speak, and it’s not even close.  It is because of the sacrifice of her family that we have a Rosie the Riveter National Park.  None of them died at the hands of the enemy so we honor them not.

The enemy.

It is a strange term; for most of the American experience, the dominant culture has always attributed the enemy as to a foreign power seeking to infiltrate and destroy Americans and our interests.  However, for the nonwhite of us, we have been fighting battles on two fronts most of our existence, most of the time with home grown enemies.  The soldiers at Port Chicago were responsible for handling all ammunition being stowed on ships headed for the Pacific.  All soldiers handling the ammunition were black; all the officers were white.  Everyone knew this; so when the ammunition was being made, before it arrived to Port Chicago, soldiers along its path would write messages on the bullets; in the movies, we hear that these tough Americans would write things like “take that Japanese, Bye Bye Hitler,” or something to the effect that this one is for the enemy.  In reality, much of the messaging was sent to black soldiers, and it included all of the taunting and despicable language all of these black soldiers heard being levied at them by racist whites.  Now, they are the only line of defense between getting this precious cargo on ships, and they are defending a country which has shown a heavy disregard for them.  I can’t imagine loading a ship to protect soldiers downstream, while upstream the other soldiers are etching the words ‘boy’ and ‘nigger’ on the machinery I receive.  And their military wardens were no different, abusing them while they worked in the hot sun, lack of training, considering them ignorant and lazy and disregarding even the basic of human dignities afforded prisoners of war.

There is no record of these soldiers ever rising up or retaliating; they did their jobs.  One day, without a clear record of the actions which led to the tragedy, two blasts, six seconds apart created shocks so strong that most of the soldiers, the ships, and the docks were vaporized.  My grandfather told me that he heard the blast in Oakland.  He never told me that it happened on my grandmother’s 22^nd birthday…

No one had a clue as to what happened; for all they knew, it was the Japanese bombing the Bay Area.  I have no idea of what they felt and when they were ‘relieved’ to know that only 300 people were killed.  After the blast, the ships in the Pacific still needed the ammunition, so the work quickly resumed, for some.  The white workers were given bereavement time off; 3-4 weeks to get their heads straight—while the black soldiers went back to work immediately; this time, in addition to loading the ammunition on the ships, they needed to clean up the debris–including the dead men’s body parts.  When the 300 objected, because no one knew what caused the explosion or how to prevent it from happening again, they were punished—over 50 were convicted and sentenced to jail for 8-15 years, and the other 250 went back to work, while knowingly receiving bad conduct discharges at the war’s end.  Fortunately for the court martialed, they only served time through the end of the war and were released; all received permanent stains on their records, and to this day, Congress has never fully exonerated them.

The ranger stated that these reprimanded and court tried black soldiers, through a variety of acts, opened the doors for an integrated military, and ultimately paved the way for women to participate in our military without having to be forced into specific positions, such as secretary or nursing.  Our guide said that she was able to serve in an intelligence capacity, and as her voice cracked, she said that these men paid a debt that can never be repaid.

When these tours began, only 300-350 people a year were able to participate.  We learned that the numbers have only tripled since then; 900 or so people a year, in an area that serves 9 million have ever been able to tour the site.

I asked the scouts not to wear their uniforms for the tour.  I hadn’t figured that we would be participating in any meaningful way, and I wanted to avoid the look-at-me syndrome that seems to frequent our culture all too often these days.  You know, when you’re a child and having the ability to talk in sentences, the first thing you’ll do is ask mommy or daddy to come over…’look at me mommy, look what I can do’.  Nothing wrong with that, kids need affirmation for everything they do.  But there is something lost in us when adults crave attention at all times, begging, pleading, demanding to be heard.  Over the last couple of weeks, I have watched and read about people asking for a litany of things: the president demanding that an opposition stop opposing before he decides to work with them on behalf of America; that Harriet Tubman deserves less to be on a $20 than a past president who fought for slavery and relocated nations of Natives to live and die on reservations; an actor faking an assault in order to get attention and presumably sympathy to spark a salary increase; a series of blogs from kids and younger adults demanding that older adults turn over the reins of responsibility, tutelage and admiration to them, without any action of responsibility to be enacted, and then there are the rumblings of the upcoming seasons of “Real” housewives…

I’m torn because intellectually I get it; people paid a price.  People went into harms way and never came back. At the same time, I know emotionally that the people who have paved the road of America for me are likely not those people wearing uniforms.  The people who have fought the enemy for me wore tattered rags and blue jeans and hand me downs, lived in slave shacks and underground safe homes and maid’s quarters and ghettos and reservations and Chinatowns and Japanese concentration camps.  They weren’t military trained, they didn’t get guns, and they never earned pensions.  They were spat on literally and figuratively by America, and they didn’t get the luxury of dying; they had to live with that, day after day, for the rest of their lives.  They are more real and more relevant to me than any PT Captain or any bombardier, and they’ll never get Freedom Fighter Holiday.

While we look to honor our fighting forces for their strength in times of distress at the cost of life, please don’t ignore those who did all the dirty work for the people we argue have done the dirty work at the cost of liberty while protecting their lives.

My just happened experience is giving me this stream of consciousness, so I hope it makes sense to you.

I went into the polling station armored to do battle at the ballot box, with headphones and Pandora.  When I handed my completed ballot to the operator and began walking out, the song playing was My Prerogative.  I’m not kidding.

This election season, I am not telling anyone to vote for anyone.  I will say this; if you chose to vote for someone out of anger over another candidate or official, you’re no different than the other side.

My election record is in tact; I have never missed an election since I was 18.  And it looks like the people at my polling booth didn’t miss out either, because that sucker was so full, I had to fill out my ballot (and yes, Oakland has paper ballots) bending over a chair.

I cannot tell people this season to vote for anyone, because at this point, I am tired of telling people how stupid they are for not voting.  Blacks, when not banned from voting due to slave status, were excluded by a myriad of laws and regulations which followed. When not officially being barred from voting, were rejected with little tricks like, say, moving the polling places.  If that isn’t enough to get you out of the home, knowing that people have been threatened with violence, incarceration, physical intimidation, assault, and have been murdered to curb their right to vote, and you dumb asses find some inane, obscure, phony, piece of crap circular barbershop armchair chat room analysis to nullify the process  is beyond me.  And you don’t even need to leave your home anymore; just mail in the sucker….

You’re simply too stupid to have a conversation with, at any level, about governance and social responsibility.  You are the people that drop your kids off to school late, with no breakfast, ill prepared for class, and then expect someone else to develop your kid.

As I walked to the polling place, I could see people walking upstream; a black woman who appeared to be in her 70’s, looked at me and yelled through the sounds of my headset, “go vote.”  Now I said I have never missed an election; I have advised people in every election over the last 25 years about policy, or message, or voter strategy; I have volunteered since I was 18, and I have run for office.  Never. Missed. A. One. Person. Special. Primary.  Yet, when this person who appeared to have that history of activism and a wealth of intellect—you know when you run into someone and you now they can regale you with institutional history for hours—told me what to do without having any sense of where I was coming from; it made me angry for a brief moment.  I figured out that the anger I had was stored in a place in which I felt that she was assuming that I wouldn’t do the right thing, that she had to tell me how to act.  It was like that feeling when someone is following you around in the store, when the most expensive thing is $40, and you have $1,000 in your pocket.

I then started to wonder if voting this season was in vogue, kinda like, “hey man, you know you need to go check out that movie________ or you’re not really black…”  I felt as if she was questioning something about me, and I didn’t think she earned the right to check me.  I smiled halfheartedly and kept moving.  I went to the voting station, and I saw a ton of people in my neighborhood that made me think I was living in Marin County.  It was WHITE, and that goofy white (I know you all know what I mean, even white people), and they were unorganized and disheveled and didn’t know exactly where to stand or what to do, and all I could do was look at them, turn up the sound on my phone, find a special place in my heart and start voting.  It was like like they were on a company work lunch and they all were ordering soul food for the first time, and they couldn’t read the menu, yet they were excited and confused all at the same time, and they were keeping me away from getting my oxtail order, and I was afraid that they might slip up and get the last one by mistake ahead of me.

I will say this; I have never seen a more sadly sponsored ballot with the least qualified candidates for office in my life.  I have seen more quality in elections at Montera, when it was a Junior High School, and far superior at Oakland Tech and UC Berkeley.  And I mean that from Governor on down; there are so many ill prepared people to manage the affairs of the 21^st century, including the incumbents.  We can’t even be sure that they will surround themselves with smart people.  It’s like The Little Rascals or The Three Stooges, where the most intelligent goof, if elected, is going to be layered with incompetents.  I cannot in good conscience truly demand that people check the box of the brightest dullard.

But it still matters; it matters in a way that it perhaps has never mattered before, and that’s the scariest part of it all.  We need the right people in now.

We have an intolerant nation.    We have had a prosperous Nation.

But never had we had both at the same time.

In the 1850’s America was more intolerant than it is now; white people were willing to wage war with their white relatives for the right to own black people.  In the 1860’s, they did.  But in our worse examples of inhumanity in this country, there was always some excuse that we needed to be cruel because it was about saving ourselves first.  It was kill or be killed.  Even in the worst human atrocity of the 20^th century in Germany, Hitler was able to take a depression and hyperinflation and turn it into scapegoating and almost massacre an entire ethnicity in Jews.  But what is our ‘excuse?’  Why is it that people are making money now, that they have jobs, they have everything they wanted on their side:  President, Congress, Supreme Court, Big Church, Big Business; but they are angry, selfish, and afraid?

We once wanted your tired and poor and huddled masses yearning to break free. Two years ago, we didn’t want bad Mexicans or any Muslims.  Last year, we didn’t want shithole country blacks.  Now, we don’t want anybody.  They are coming to take our money and our white women.  Ok, there have been times in America when we didn’t want people—those people—to come to this nation. Benjamin Franklin wanted this country to only include the whites and the lovely reds, with the exclusion of the ‘tawnys’ from Mediterranean Europe; The Irish Potato Famine, Chinese Exclusion Act, the Red Scare are examples.  But I don’t recall in any other period that we were as needy as we are of labor, while rejecting everyone else at the boarders.  And why the hate?

We also have abandoned, for the first time in the 9 decades after WWII, the goal of working to improve the conditions of other nations around the world, even if the reasons were selfish to America: to improve their ability to be our trading partners, and to make their countries stable enough to keep their citizens from trying to move to ours.  Forget those other reasons like being a world leader, to prevent war, to keep people from being radicalized or rejecting democratic values, etc.  Sometimes it was just smart to make sure that your neighbor could eat too.

That is all gone.  America doesn’t care anymore.

No infrastructure plans.

No plans for investment.

No plans for conservation.

No plans for development.

No long-range plans for improvement of any kind.

No international mission.

No humanitarian plans.

No immigration reforms planned in Congress.

As much as I wanted to stay home, because as a policy snob, this is truly a horrific scene, like going to Coppola’s winery and pretending that the people around you have good taste, when you understand that they are there drinking and loving the wines because it’s a celebrity winery rather than a good one, and; I digress…..if you feel like the Niles Crane of the election season, don’t feel bad, you have a Frasier in me shaking my head in contempt back in your direction at these simpletons.  Snobbery aside, this is perhaps why today is so important; THEY have made it unappetizing to vote.  If they make it as ugly as possible, you will simply swipe right your freedoms away.  Do not fall for it; of the 40 things on the ballot, if you get just a handful right, it will have made the difference.

The next song that played on my Pandora was The Police’s Wrapped Around Your Finger.

Big Brother Pandora is a genius.

If diplomacy is the act of telling a man to go to hell in such a way that he looks forward to the trip, then Black Panther is the Ofay and the Sally Ann of the 21^st century.

Black Panther is the most complete illustration of complexities in courage, challenge and race in a very long time, perhaps since ‘A Soldier’s Story’…no wait, Rod Serling’s ‘Planet of the Apes’, as it expresses on different levels with a decidedly much deeper effect than even those Pixar movies you take your kids to; while they see talking toys, you see your kid leaving you for college and adulthood.  And don’t come for me because its Planet of the Apes and you want to assume some stereotype in my reference.  Black Panther captures the multi-dimensional character development that comes from comic books.

It was too well written a movie to not get censored by the studio—too many shots at dominant culture.  Perhaps because they didn’t get the references, that itself is a byproduct of living in racism.  You get so used to it, that you cannot recognize what it is like to step out of it.  White people think blacks love the movie only because there are black superheroes; black people are enamored with Black Panther for the Wakandans fully understand racism but thrive in spite of it by living life out of its influences.  The notion that black people want to live without white influence is such a revolutionary construct, that racism blinds white folk to it…they cannot imagine black people wanting to live without white people, yet, not fully assessing what life with white people has meant.  A professor told me if she had children, she would keep them away from white people for their first twelve years.  It was not that she despised white people, but she understood the impact of dominant imagery and the social impact of racism on young souls, and she wanted to incubate them from that damage.  Black Panther was a two-hour incubation, in the way that movies are supposed to be: a feel good release from the norm.  Black people finally felt what it was like to be Luke and Leia.

Criticisms I’ve read over the last two weeks that made no sense: (these are reasonable ones; I am not getting into others like why weren’t light skinned or LGBTQ people represented—in the former they were there, and in the latter you don’t know if they were, because the movie wasn’t about pointing out what made us different–and that is the real point of diaspora inclusiveness, isn’t it?)

• The technological advancements in Africa are far-fetched.

That was such a bigoted position that it supports the imagery of Africa being incapable of intellectual achievements.  And every movie with white people outrunning fire, dodging volcano eruptions, escaping earthquakes, surviving ice ages, outliving apocalyptic breakdowns, and having teen age suburban girls save the planet is fine, right?  All Marvel comics include the same fantastic technology and superpower scenarios.  Why would this be any different?

• Why didn’t Black Panther fill in the holes of arcs of other villains or story lines (i.e., when did so and so get his technology?)

That’s why they have more movies; if someone created a perfect movie, there would be no need for a sequel.  I don’t think it was Black Panther’s role to explain the other movies in the series.

• What was going to happen to these powerful women? Why didn’t we see their story?

The roles were written in a manner that the franchise can go with several spinoffs about the strong female leads.  It was already 2 hours…I guess folks wanted a 10-hour miniseries…

The Technology Premise

I won’t get into the weeds looking at the origins, discussing what the metal could or could not do.  The real reason vibranium allowed them to advance was not because it is a precious metal—it was that they were smart and disciplined enough to see the value in it—it’s articulated on two levels:  vibranium has properties that when manipulated, creates incredible results in healing, cultivation and power.  So, it wasn’t the Africans that really managed it; anyone could have done it, had they the vibranium.  Safe explanation, first world-maintained hegemony, doesn’t paint the Africans as being smarter than anyone else type of storyline.  That’s the official line carried in the film.

The real narrative was that white people had in real life a sort of vibranium; call it clippers or iron or coal—yet they used it to wage war, to enslave people and to damage the environment.  Indo China made powder, Africa harnessed iron, Europeans merged these, making guns to conquer them both.  Instead of using their powers for good, they used them to colonize and to hoard the world’s resources.  A host of arguments imply the outside world–white people—cannot be allowed to have a more advanced gun.  This premise led the ancestors into understanding that no matter what, we cannot share the resources, we cannot negotiate with…surprise, surprise… terrorists (like Klaw).  It also made me wonder if they thought that it better for the world to implode, and then start over? It was never explored, even by Kilmonger. This recurring interventionist theme manifests itself with Thor and Wonder Woman, and in true comic book-ese,  Black Panther faces this conflict.

Make no mistake, the movie is about the impact of technology and what should be done with it, giving us a glimpse that even if the people who look like you wielded it, that doesn’t mean that they would have performed any better, without the traditions and culture of the Wakandan.

The Other

Not all oppressors are white, or colonizers.  The other was also on the mother continent, and they dispatched of the kidnapper soldiers in the same manner as anyone else.

Kilmonger was an outsider because he never fit into the humanity of Africans.  He never understood the Wakandan way; in effect, he never understood the black way either, and the movie was clear to illustrate.  Before he did away with his partner, Klaw called the Wakandans ‘savages’, saying they would never accept him, with the inference that Kilmonger was just like the Europeans.  Not allowing the viewer to believe that being CIA/military trained and developed showed his positive abilities for leadership and character, the movie skillfully positioned it to illustrate his lack of civility and offering a reason for his penchant for annihilation.  Usual movies view military training as a positive, unless that agent goes rogue by attacking his leadership…Kilmonger attacked the people he was trained to attack.

To know why Wakadans considered Kilmonger (and his father) wrong and warped in his views was to understand the meaning of black independence.  Black people rising up has never been with the aim of world domination; it was and is always about self-determination and personal freedoms.  Reference to slavery never matched to freedom; only to retribution or absolute rule.  This is the brilliance of the argument, yet most people I’ve heard argue about attacking the European systems seem to not just sympathize with Kilmonger, but are absolutely in line with his logic, and most of these folk need to see the movie at least twice to discern the difference.  Kilmonger saw the world through his oppression, seeing the solution to the tyranny in a zero-sum game through the values of the oppressor; that is, he only saw that the solution to being the victim was to become the victimizer. In the age of Trump, I especially enjoyed how it illustrated that even in the most prosperous of societies, factions could be split and willing to turn on each other very quickly, the result of outside agitation.

Unfortunately, there was a minimization for contributions made by blacks in the ‘Oaklands’ of the world.  Kilmonger almost took over the mightiest empire on the planet within days yet thought of himself as just a kid from Oakland.  The narrative suggested a futility of black effort across the world unless someone else stepped in, negating the resistance, rebellion, stewardship of those left out of Wakanda, and no one spoke to our strength as a people.  Again, our situation was seen through an oppressor’s eyes, where one can see the minimization of the African diaspora…it needed to have one Wakandan say something to the effect that “I see greatness in them; or they can accomplish much on their own, but they can be much greater with us.’  To be affected by the city of the birthplace of the Black Panthers, there must be an acknowledgment of our ancestors as well.  We saw no black adults in America, and there was no impact of blacks outside of Wakanda, and that was the only place that missed the mark.

T’Challa realized his people promoted an intractable caste hierarchy; Wakandans, outsiders, oppressed, and colonizers, in the same manner of Spanish rule—you can serve with us but you cannot be as us–and this was evidenced in the fact that T’Chaka did not bring Klimonger back when his father was killed.  It wasn’t because of the death of the father, but somehow the offspring of an outsider seemed too much to absorb, even as the father said that he thought his son would always be seen as lost, or an outsider.  That was a hell of an indictment on African-African American relationships.  A side note: I’ve always wondered why we couldn’t get dual African citizenship in all but one country……

Isolationism

Was T’Challa’s first mission in the movie a mistake, in the sense that he interfered with a known attack, or was it his plan all along to participate?  It seems as if it was the latter.  When he took care of the kidnappers, his ex was in disguise, telling him that he messed up her stakeout.  It left the impression that the Wakandas reluctantly intervene for intra-African conflict but not when anyone else is affected.

Korea

With a nod to Koreans for participation in making the movie, it looked as if the scenes were to show off Korea’s technology, beauty, and rising presence of Asian power, luring all parties to mystery and mayhem.  Twenty years earlier, the setting surely would have been Hong Kong (Rush Hour 2, anyone?) The African had to beg for forgiveness to enter, while the white criminal was greeted with a hug and a welcomed kiss.

But the most important thing about being in Korea was the general in that wig.  Black beauty products are a $15 billion industry in America, with over 90% of the stores owned by the Korean community, they control the manufacturing, distribution and retail sale of hair extension products—the center of the beauty market—and blacks are excluded from the supply chain.  I don’t think it was any accident that General Okoye hated her wig in Korea and commented about how unnatural it was to be wearing it.

Black Women

The closest advisers to T’Challa and Kilmonger; they also happened to be the only people in the movie that never wavered in their support even as death was imminent.  Superhero movies are the best sources of gender equality, but Black Panther took it to a new level.  They saved lives, were decision makers, they counseled, they fought side by side with the men and each other.  And to say that we’ve never seen this many black powerful people in a movie is a misnomer—we have never seen this many powerful black women in any movie before.  They could kick your ass, tell you why they’re doing it, fix you up, and then kick your ass again…..and I couldn’t think of any movie where women were more sexy at the same time.

Religious Overtones

I wanted to call this article Wakanda and Ben Carson, but that is for another article….

Be in this world but not of the world.

I was raised in a ‘superior’ religion.  We were most spiritual as we had the best grasp on what it meant to be a Christian.  We didn’t follow average religious goers, black or white, harbored sentiment that they were the others, backward; we did not use our superior religious standing to help others unless they came to us.  We were taught to be in the world with everyone else, to respect them as creatures of the creator, but keep it moving.  Remain separate and do not mix with their kind.  We were not alone; there are faiths in which people don’t vote, for voting is man’s construct (even though nation states and college degrees and driver’s licenses are forms of a human’s system to be honored and accessed), voting is akin to gambling.  And what about inoculations?  Technology? Interracial marriage? Minority rights?

Where we you in the time of slavery, Christian..er Wakandan? Where were you during the Civil Rights Era?  Where were you when it was time to take a stand?  These are powerful arguments woven into the rhetoric of Kilmonger, who has disdain for those who sat back while calamity engulfed a continent.

Last week, Reverend Billy Graham, America’s Evangelical Pope, was placed in rest.  Though Graham proselytized in Africa and included blacks in teachings in the US, he was not a friend of Africans or black Americans.  Whether it was civil war erupting in Africa with blacks fighting for independence from European rule or seeing the bombings and lynching and freedom marches in America over Civil Rights, history shows in Graham’s own words he believed that faith leaders needed to stay out of politics, essentially telling the flock to let the vulnerable fight their own battles.  While the world crumbled around him, he gave whites the false impression that faith without works for the oppressed was ok.  If Blacks have no friends among white evangelicals to support them, why show them any mercy?

African culture (and Latinos in Coco) illustrate in death a reverence to the ancestors before us, and a reckoning of those to follow.  Believing the dead are watching our actions, and ready to embrace us in afterlife if we maintain the character and the traditions, meanwhile, banishment or erasing us out of existence when we do not, is a concept lost on the dominant culture.  If Wakanda was Eden, then the rest of the world was cast out…who do you think the serpent was?

Who Was the Real Oppressor?

Kilmonger was trading one subjugation for another.  And while you might have thought it included black folk at the top of the pyramid, he made it clear that it was about putting the people at the head who supported him, and those that valued the other T’Challa’s form of leadership in the dirt.

In a week where Trump allowed another dictator to go unfettered for his comments, heck, Vladimir Putin’s video showing how he could destroy America with weapons and it would be incapable of stopping him, is juxtaposed against the man that many people supported, overnight, without real insight to his temperament, his intellect, his purpose.  Kilmonger came to Wakanda, and with the support of a few angry men who wanted to tear up shit around the planet, was on the verge of war before anyone sat down and figured out what the hell happened.

Kilmonger is seen as being American; not African, not Wakandan; it feels as if the black folk in America are viewed as lacking an African sense of self as well.  That lack of awareness makes them untrainable and tainted.  It is an oppressor’s perspective on the slave and does feel like an African perception of us.

Kilmonger and his father didn’t debate the issue of when or how or even why to engage who they considered to be the enemy.  T’Chaka saw this as being radicalized by America.  A poignant statement on US cowboy diplomacy over the last 150 years.  No reason to flush out an argument, no reason to have mutual targets or goals.  No reason to talk with others; kick ass and take prisoners.  Neither father or son worked with community yet they spoke for the lives of others.

Love

The Wakandan women were willing to end their love relationships in favor for protecting community; in fact, they were protecting their community from their men.

The men never assumed that the women would leave their sides, despite their actions.

Kilmonger had no mother and was lighter than the rest of his Wakandan family, perhaps because of his American ancestry; it allowed for the audience to wonder if his mother was black or not; in the end, the mother’s background only mattered because she was not there to give him compassion.  Wakandan men derived their humanness from the women, especially when challenged to make a moral choice.

We Can Save You

With the FBI agent at the stages of death, T’Challa argues that they can save him. Facing the implication of bringing in an outsider, knowing the risk of the outsider reporting what he saw.

When Kilmonger is on the throws of death, T’Challa says, “I think we can save you…”

In both cases, the saving was more than the simply the body—it was about saving the soul of the man; the former had no choice in the matter, he was chosen because his actions deemed him worthy.  The latter’s actions should have deemed him unworthy, yet he was given choice.  The path he chose was replete with a legacy of anger and violence that made him incapable of accepting redemption.

Speaking of redemption, watch Hollywood mess it up and fire the producer, switch to a suburban writing team, and make T’Ckalla fall in love with Princess Elsa….

10. Even Pixar wants to feature black people in a cartoon now.  Problem is, being three blocks from Oakland, (and aside from Samuel L. Jackson), they aren’t used to actually talking to black people.

9. The gold diggers in LA are going to have a lot of work to put in; since most will be at the movies and not attending All Star Game weekend.

8. Don’t be surprised when your busted cousin who was kicked out of the BPP Chapter he started in New Rochelle sues Disney for reparations, er, profits to be sent back to the black community.

7. The last time you read a non-pornographic comic was at age 17; if you are a woman—never.  Why are you so hyped on this?  It is still a comic book people.  (Yes, I want to see it too)

6. I’m guessing that the first place a white guy wants to take a black date this week is Black Panther; I’m also guessing that the last place a black guy wants to take a white date this week is Black Panther…

5. It was too late to break up before Valentine’s Day, you should have broken up before pre-sales of Black Panther tickets.

4. There are 646 people credited under Visual Artist.  The only names missing from the list were Uncle Fred and Pookie.

3. Wakanda was based on Baldwin Hills in the 1980’s.

2. Nothing says blackness like an actor named Chadwick.

1b. Stan Lee could walk down the street on MLK and shoot somebody, and still get elected Mayor of Watts or Detroit today.  Stan Lee is going to make so much money and cast so many black people, he could rent out Africa—or Mira Lago—for his cast party.

1a. Conspiracies

–NBC hasn’t supported a black show since Cosby.  NBC is going to experience bad ratings for the Olympics, and they were set up by ABC….

–This is black people’s revenge for Winter Olympics.  Y’all folk better fast track everything before Friday—because this is the pinnacle of Black History Month, and your viewership after Thursday is gonna sink like the President’s ratings.  In 2022, there will be a remake of Coffy and the same thing will happen then.

–You will know it’s been a long time for black people attending theaters when they don’t find “Red” flavor.  The theaters are setting up people for riots when they run out of grape and orange soda.

–The Black Panther…..it’s a cookbook!

–Walt Disney Company=Walt Disney Studios=Marvel Studios=ABC=Blackish=Laurence Fishburne=Morephus=The Matrix.  Walt Disney is putting black people in the Matrix…..