KAEPTAIN AMERICA, CIVIL WAR

When real nobility meets fake nobility, a fight ensues that creates that cautionary house divided.

Two years ago, Colin Kaepernick knelt during the singing of the national anthem. He did it because he wanted to protest the racial murders of unarmed Black people and the tyranny of a justice system that protected these murders.

Outrage was fast, going all the way to the President. Kaepernick was not supported by the players league and even had the most successful rapper in history undercut him to make a deal with his bosses in the NFL. 

Kaepernick was blackballed by the league, vilified by his former colleagues and shunned by so-called patriots. The powers that be had won.

Two years later, all hell has broken loose and we see Kaepernick was right.

George Floyd murdered on TV, Breonna Taylor shot in her home, Botham Jean killed in his own apartment and Jacob Blake shot seven times in the back on video, protests in London and all over Europe, people in every industry having open and hard discussions about race and racism, and as of today, every player in every major sport has walked off the job in solidarity with Kaepernick's cause.

The Civil War has begun.

All of the famous and non-famous people who refused to support Kaepernick's protest will forever have to wonder if many of the dead would be dead if all of us had joined him and turned our eyes to murderous injustice. Just think of this alternative timeline:

1. Kaepernick kneels.
2. The NFL supports him.
3. All other sports follow.
4. The cities where the teams play all join in solidarity, then state government, then federal.
5. Community organizations all join to apply pressure.
6. Police organizations cooperate under the threat of losing their funding and protections and help to root out the bad seeds.
7. The police never kill Floyd, Taylor, Jean or Blake.
8. Jay Z is still in my music collection.

Sadly, that did not happen but at least now all of America can see what murderous pigs some of these cops are and how we have a racist system that encourages brutality and targets Black people.

But we are also seeing that there is a segment of America that not only does not care about Black Lives, but wants to extinguish them. And I am not talking about just the openly racist Boogaloo assholes, I'm talking about the guy that lives down the street and around the corner, the coworker and that smiling face you see every day. Many white people have no idea the depth of their own racism and many Black people have no idea of the depth of our mental conditioning to accept racism and how this adds to the hate and violence against our brothers.

America has always pitted the races and the classes against one another and even though we know this and can talk and write about it (like I am doing right now) we never seem to do anything about it. 

Everybody wants change, but no one wants to change.

And so the Civil War continues only now the war of words, thoughts and ideas has turned into a war of chaos, fire and killing. Once again people demand the equality promised by the Constitution and once again, violence rises up to defeat that demand because as I said before, the nation's promise of freedom is a fraud, a lie and now that we know it, we can finally battle with the truth, and that truth is there are no dominate races, just people who are more evil, violent and willing to murder to live in the comfort of denial and privilege.

Our nation has given aid and comfort to domestic terrorist groups as long as their philosophies are based on race. Not even a Black President and a Black AG would put the Klan on the terrorist watch list. America's investment in violent racism is deep and now we all must pay this price. The men shot in Kenosha were white and their killer was white. 

Jay-Z famously said we're past kneeling and he was right, but the path beyond the protest is not a cure, but the fatal and violent consequence of never respecting the kneeling in the first place. 

The title of this piece is not just a clever play on words. The movie Captain America, Civil War offers us a metaphor that could not be more potent: In the film, Captain America splits the Avenger's into opposing factions because he refuses to denounce his old friend who has been turned into a murderous terrorist by evil forces. The film puts the comicbook fan in the middle of his own loyalties because this terrorist is a beloved character from the past. Captain America wants to forgive and take back his friend, while Iron man and others want him turned in to the government. 

In real life, we have a President who defends racism and racist killers and asks us to understand their motivations or just shut up and behave, and we respond just like Iron Man-- with war.

copyright©2020

TRANSFUTURISM

Many have tried to define the period in which we are living. Are we the Computer Age, the Information Age, Digital Age or post Industrial? 

Phones are the size of credit cards, credit cards have replaced cash and money itself is now more theory than substance, more deity than currency. Post soul, Millennial, Generation X, Y and Z, we struggle to put limits on the time, so that we can analyze it and we fail because it moves and changes even as we attempt to understand it.

Whenever the American economy has shifted, leaving people out of work and giving more to automation, we get fewer people owning more, and less hope for the future, families fall apart, marriage declines, racial strife rises and along with it comes violence.

The blind ambition of capitalism was fine when we were an agrarian economy and a manufacturing one. Greed fueled incentives and expansion brought opportunities. But in the computer age, innovation fueled by greed comes at the expense of human resources and leaves vast numbers of people without jobs, purpose and hope.

You can tell the worth of humanity in a society by how it lives-- and dies. Men used to farm the land by hand and then we used big machines to do it and now we genetically modify the very seeds that grow our food, effectively making Soylent Green a reality.

We used to be bound by communities and now we are separated by the vastness of digital life and social media which allows us to talk at each other but not with our fellow man.

And we used to crucify men, burn women at the stake, shoot bullets and drop bombs on enemies and then we gained the capacity to destroy the world if we wanted.

And now we use robots to kill.

We are in a state of transfuturism, the belief that we can live in the future in our present time by thinking and doing as one might in that supposed future.

But what is our future?

Will we really obliterate ourselves or is that just fear, the nightmare of a civilized mind, the anthesis of our instinct for self-preservation?

So if Klaatu from The Day The Earth Stood Still was wrong and we will not destroy ourselves, then what? Maybe our future is brighter. Maybe we will get past our petty animal aggression and embrace life for the sake of it, minimize strife and not live off the lives of others through fiat currency and artificial boundaries based on superficial theories.

The future world we see in movies and literature is taking shape right before our eyes. One by one, the tenets of individualism are falling, and we accept laws, rules and traditions born of a collective thought, framed and focused by social algorithms and limited in character length. But must we plunge into a dark dystopian world, or can we shift our progressive hunger toward humanity and love? This would make a terrible sci fi movie but a great world.

So, buy your cryptocurrency, sync your cell phone to your brainwave pattern and store your memories on thumb drives so you can relive them again and again but do it with a sense of hope because no matter how much we innovate, we are still carbon-based, fragile and subordinate to the laws of science and our capacity to love.

copyright 2018

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The Unbearable Lightness Of Blackness

Rachel Dolezal’s masquerade as a black woman is important but not for any of the reasons you are reading about. It’s important for the ones no one will say. That she can even pretend to be black is of course because “Black people” come in a variety of colors in this country. And that’s because of the widely held belief that we have “dominant” genes. This Dominant Gene Theory is really the Contaminant Gene Theory, in that Black genes contaminate another race's purity.

We all know that blackness in this nation is more than color. It’s culture, family, experience, knowledge and a host of other things which link any given black person with hundreds of years of history filled with triumph, pain, brilliance, oppression, and the unique situation as the descendants of American slaves.

You don’t get to be part of that with a wink and a hairstyle.

But we, the Black people, often devalue our culture and history for many reasons, none the least of which, is there is a tireless propaganda machine at work which exalts the majority race and denigrates and marginalizes all others.

Thus, we accept anyone who wants to be a part of our tribe, to bathe in the waters of negritude and enjoy our zest for life, our position as the soul and conscious of America, our food, music, style, swagger and language.

But should we? When you think of it, American Blackness is a pretty exclusive club, forty-two million out of eight billion people. And the price of admission is not money but the very essence of the human spirit. Why should we let these wannabes just walk in and be welcome?

We shouldn’t. In fact, we should be pissed about what Rachael Dolezal is doing. Just as pissed as we are when a Black person claims to be New Black, trying to run away from association with their race. But you see, dark skin don’t rub off and if the white gene were “dominant,” how many people who are now mixed race do you think would still claim blackness?

If it were up to me, people could be anything they wanted. I like to dream of a world where you could just say “I’m a woman” or “I’m Black” and society would respect that. But it’s not up to me and that dream is a long way off. So, for now, as funny as this woman is, her situation and the resulting internet phenomenon is yet another painful reminder of the heaviness of race in our damaged society, the privilege of the majority and the arrogance of those who continuously seek to appropriate the benefits of blackness but pay none of its toll.

©COPYRIGHT 2015

NIGGALECTUAL PROPERTY© OR HOW THE TITLE OF THIS BLOG IS ITSELF.

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2. Tamron Hall did a segment today on beauty and a woman's nails were referred to as being "on fleek." As soon as I heard the term, I knew it was a new slang word or phrase created by black folk that had crept into the mainstream.
   
   
   Why does this bother me? Because  I know that these terms are intellectual property
   
   

   Intellectual property (IP) is a legal term that refers to creations of the mind. Examples of intellectual property include music, literature, and other artistic works; discoveries and inventions; and words, phrases, symbols, and designs.

   
   
   But because they arise from a general culture that does not seem to know how clever it is, we (the black people) never seem to profit as we enrich American culture with our endless creativity. This is what I call Niggallectual Property© intellectual property created by black culture but it only has value when appropriated by white people.
   
   
   Like, diss, playa, twerk, hater and ratchet, I knew this on fleek was yet another cultural term that has been appropriated and will soon be used by corny politicians, pandering to the youth vote. 
   
   
   The comedian Bill Bellamy coined the term Booty Call, then someone made a movie using the title and then everyone in the world started saying it and doing it and he doesn’t get a royalty.
   
   
   Black folks created jazz, blues, rock and roll, soul disco and rap and we watched as each of these genres were taken, mainstreamed, blanded out and killed. And now we have a generation of kids who think glorified backup singers are actually good.
   
   Black folk, my people, are the kings of intellectual property but while IP in the digital age has value, much of our cultural IP is worthless-- until it is appropriated by others who see its value.
   
   
   We can stop this. All we have to do is be smart. Before you tweet or vine something clever, copyright it first and then when they steal it, you get paid. Or better yet, if we can stop discounting ourselves just because we live in a country that seems to place a small value on our lives, we can all get paid. By the way, this whole blog is totally on fleek.
   
   
   Copyright 2015
   
   
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