alias Bruce.

Racial torture, libraries, and poems.

This is National Poetry Month, a time when – like Black History Month and Earth Day – corporate culture blinks for a moment at realities it generally ignores. Still, a glimpse can reveal plenty. This month, in one of the main windows of the downtown public library in my town of Baltimore, the poem on display is "If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God" by Joseph Ross, which won the local Pratt Library system's 2012 poetry prize. The poem has to do with the 1955 torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. If you're sketchy on the details, here is Ross's explanation of how Emmett's mother, Mamie, electrified the world by displaying her son in an open casket:

Mamie Till’s decision to bury her son in a casket with a glass top was a momentous one. In her words, she wanted the world “to see what they did to my boy.” In 1955, Mamie Till sent her son Emmett to live with relatives in Mississippi for the summer. One night, he was dragged from his uncle’s house, beaten to death and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was found downriver some days later. The image of her son’s beaten and distorted body were broadcast around the world. In the view of some, this murder was seen as the beginning of the civil rights movement.

Emmett Till, as I've mentioned, was not only brutally beaten but tortured, including having one of his eyes gouged out. As it happens, a few years ago I met and interviewed Emmett Till's cousin, who was in the same bedroom with Till the night that white men burst into the house and took him away to murder him. I will never, ever forget it.

Here is a photo of how you'd see Joseph Ross's poem if you walked past the Baltimore downtown library this month:

Photo: Robert Waxman

At a time when today's American brown shirts want for government's sole job to be the killing of infidels and the punishing of scapegoats, it's good to see a public library acting like a public library. My thanks to my friend Rachel for pointing this out.

The Tulsa shootings. And a little deep background.

The Tulsa shootings have "hate crime" written all over them. This has yet to be established legally, but circumstantially it is generally agreed, for obvious reasons, that it's likely.

Two suspects are in custody and are expected to be indicted for murder and shooting with intent to kill. Local authorities, and black citizens, have so far been notably restrained in their public statements about two white men going on a murder rampage in a black community, which is interesting when you consider the likely public explosion if two black men were to drive through a white community and shoot five white strangers within a matter of minutes on Easter weekend.

Showing restraint under brutality, of course, is a learned trait in black communities that goes back to slavery and Jim Crow.

Tulsa, in fact, has a spectacularly bloody history when it comes to white attacks on black communities. Neither the CNN story nor the NYT account mentions this -- which is interesting in itself -- but Tulsa was the scene of one of the deadliest white-on-black racial mob massacres in American history in 1921. From Wiki:

The Tulsa Race Riot was a large-scale racially motivated conflict, May 31 - June 1, 1921, between the white and black communities of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which the wealthiest African-American community in the United States, the Greenwood District also known as 'The Negro Wall St' [1] was burned to the ground. Aerial fire bombing of black residential neighborhoods was reported. During the 16 hours of the assault, over 800 people were admitted to local hospitals with injuries, more than 6,000 Greenwood residents were arrested and detained at three local facilities.[2] An estimated 10,000 were left homeless, and 35 city blocks composed of 1,256 residences were destroyed by fire. The official count of the dead by the Oklahoma Department of Vital Statistics was 36, but other estimates of black fatalities have been up to about 300.[2]

The events of the riot were omitted from local and state history; "The Tulsa race riot of 1921 was rarely mentioned in history books, classrooms or even in private. Blacks and whites alike grew into middle age unaware of what had taken place." [3] In 1996, the state legislature commissioned a report, completed in 2001, to establish the historical record. It has approved some compensatory actions, such as scholarships for descendants of survivors, economic development of Greenwood, and a memorial park, dedicated in 2010, to the victims in Tulsa.

But don't make the mistake of thinking that today's horrible news about the shootings is just about Tulsa. The Tulsa murders draw together things that are going on at multiple levels in neighborhoods nationwide: White-panic Florida gun laws and the killings and hatred they let loose (see the armed neo-Nazis from Detroit who recently decided to patrol Sanford, Florida in proclaimed defense of white citizens); a corporate monarchy and its recession pummeling the brains of many whites into a paste of blind rage; a reactionary and fascist white "restore the homeland" movement (aka the Tea Party), with theocracy and vicious racism just beneath its surface, now being treated as a mainstream political force.

More soon.

The Jim Crow side of "cosmopolitan" Europe is showing more than ever these days,

as reflected, for instance, in an exchange of comments (including one by yours truly) in response to Steve Hynd's post at Agonist.org about the motivation underlying European treatment of North African boat people.

Many Europeans are showing their true colors about "those people" in a manner similar to that of the many white Americans for whom a Rick Santorum's hateful preachings offer self-destructive solace.

What goes unnoticed in both Europe and the United States – in addition to the sheer distractive value of demonizing poor brown people instead of CEOs and their hired political representatives – is the actual origin of the wave of northward immigration from Africa and Mexico: the dysfunction of neocolonial economies that starve their citizens for the benefit of European- and American-based commerce. Europe likes to forget that its colonial carving up of previously stable African nations and economies is the direct precursor to their current states of disaster. And the U.S. conveniently ignores the key role of dire Mexican poverty and political chaos in enabling American banks' benefits from the American-bound drug trade and American commerce's pleasing profits from Mexican maquiladoras and cheap illegal immigrant farm and service labor.

It's the same scheme on both sides of the Atlantic: diverting the anger of the working classes by encouraging them to kick the goose that lays the golden egg for the rich.

Here is the exchange from The Agonist, in which I have substituted the word "Person" for all names except my own: 

Germany When I lived in Munich in the 60s and 70s the Germans were extremely xenophobic. Munich had about a 15% Turkish population. They did all the grunt jobs the Germans wouldn't do - sound familiar? The Germans/Bavarians hated the Turks. I'm sure they would have sent them all back except they didn't want to do the shit jobs they did. Of course they could never become citizens of Germany but then neither could Americans. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:00pm

Probably still similar. I have a friend who recently moved to Germany. She is American, of German extraction, and speaks German. Blue eyes, blonde hair. She was still treated as an outsider at her first job in the countryside. She reports it's better in Munich. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:05pm

OK I too have blond hair and blue eyes and spoke German. I was treated very well in Munich. Of course I worked with the Bavarian State Police and many of them were friends so that might have had something to do with it. It was strange but the Bavarians had a fascination with black GIs and frequently befriended them. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:30pm

Anecdotally... To be African-American in Europe (France / Germany) is not the same as being African-American here. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:35pm

Damn straight. Ask Jack Johnson, Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, the Tuskegee Airmen (of whom my Dad was one), the entire generation of post-bop black jazz musicians, or virtually any black American artist who has spent time there. In my travels as an African American in France, Germany, and Italy some years ago, I found some fascination with me (one night when I walked into an arty Berlin bar an entire line of young hipster women stood and invited me to light their cigarettes for them, and it wasn't because I'm some irresistible hunk). I also found, though, that my American-ness counted (often negatively) more than my skin color. And, most tellingly, I saw an entirely different set of wickedly racist rules applying to Turks and North Africans. In Germany Turks were the niggers of the culture -- persecuted, abused, and ridiculed (it's the first place where I ever heard "Turk jokes"), and in France North Africans were widely hated and sometimes even killed by mobs. This was years ago, mind you, but if anything it appears that Europe's post-colonial race hate is showing more than ever now that the recession is slamming The Motherland. –Bruce A Jacobs March 14, 2012 - 10:01pm

Joy DeGruy did an interview

that I have been meaning to share with you since I learned of it months ago. It's a conversation she had with a reporter at City Newspaper in my hometown of Rochester, NY. And it is exactly on time – up to the minute, really – in spite of its having taken place in 2009.

Joy DeGruy, (formerly Joy DeGruy Leary), in case you don't know of her, is the social worker and psychologist whose book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing has brought the not-so-well-absorbed poisons of our racial history boiling up out of the national pores. What moves DeGruy's analysis beyond the usual arguments about American slavery and racism is that she had the brilliant insight to analyze slavery-based racial relations and their lingering aftermath not simply as brutal and wrong, but as clinical trauma. Suddenly we are not speaking the squishy language of "injustice" toward black Americans and "progress" toward fairness. We are speaking the more precise and clinically-understood language of traumatic-event-based loss of healthy psychological function – and methodologies for healing and regaining healthy function. On a personal and national level.

An excerpt from the interview with DeGruy will give you an idea of where this goes:

When I studied PTS [Post Traumatic Stress], what fascinated me most was that a person can be diagnosed with PTS as a result of a single trauma. And not only that, they can experience trauma indirectly. They can hear about something happening to a loved one and be traumatized to such a degree that they require assistance.

I looked at that construct and thought, O.K., if a person can conceivably be diagnosed with a stress-related mental illness by having heard about a trauma, what in the world must have occurred with people who not only experienced trauma directly, but those who experienced the trauma of all those around them? And this traumatic episode occurred over centuries. So what people have to understand when I say "post traumatic" is that I'm giving you an etiology of some of the things we passed along from generation to generation.

When you look at the symptoms of PTS, you're looking at hyper-vigilance, outbursts of anger, difficulties going to sleep and waking up a lot, thoughts of a foreshortened future, and it goes on and on. Now just imagine the people living in those environments with people with those symptoms. After a while, with it never being diagnosed, never being treated, and never given a chance to heal, what you have is a culture with broken behaviors.

That's just for starters. The entire interview is here.

Stormfront.org and Affordable Mental Health Care.

In doing some recent research I visited Stormfront,org, a self-described white nationalist site whose motto is "White Pride World Wide." It's a safe bet that a large proportion of Stormfront adherents are not thrilled with the movement for health care reform. Which is ironic, because affordable mental health therapy for chronic insecurity and delusional displaced rage could help many of these folks to gain the very self-esteem and sense of human power for which they so miserably yearn. Not to mention putting them in touch with the actual world.

The Stormfront site trembles with the wringing of hands about trampled and violated whiteness, e.g., a headline wailing, "Vladimir Putin's non-White girlfriend gives birth to his first son."

But my favorite of the posts I saw was from a contributor named Sean 0x1488, who wrote:

There was at one point in time, a pure stock white race, I want to know where we came from, and achieve purity again, we are far to perfect looking to be from monkeys, perhaps our design was based on the primate, but we are far from monkeys.

Spelling, punctuation, and description of evolutionary classification are quoted exactly as they were written by this specimen of perfection.