Politicized Prisoners of Conscious Perspectives: She's Right 'Cha Know!

Been born a Black male of dual socio-economic and ethnic heritage in amerika, meaning my mother is a self-skilled Black woman who struggled tooth and nail to maintain the deed on the little two bedroom house she raised my brother and me in, praying to one day leave it to us, but out of necessity mortgaged so much of that little gingerbread house that eventually she lost it to the finance company. My father being a self-skilled white man who undoubtedly due to his own ingenuity (what we call hustle) and the privilege of skin was able to own several pieces of property, a successful business and other ventures which afforded him the ability to purchase all his cars and the other trinkets boys in amerika supposedly need.

This is by no means an indictment of who was richer or poorer. I can tell you empirically, material possessions are no true gauge of wealth. My father passed away in 1999, broken hearted and remorse filled, and my mother - who at one time seemed the warm, bright day in a world of cold, gloomy days, especially when we were at our financial wits end - has become just as gloomy and cold as the world around her. Two sides of the same coin, my inheritance. But I digress...that's another story for another day!

My point here is to simply elucidate the fact that having been born into this duality - the gray haze that lies between amerika's socio-economic color consciousness in every possible way - i am intimately familiar with the role of 'outsider' and being/feeling as if your existence is somehow on the fringes of acceptance even amongst those who you most sincerely identify with. "I am the lone wolf, devoted member of the pack by right of birth, no less or more than any other...yet, alone nonetheless!"

So when i read Jasmyne A. Cannick's essay "Where's the Outrage?" (Los Angeles Sentinel 11-23/29-2006 - JasmyneCannick.com) calling all of us to task for our failure to defend and stand up for the preciousness of Black life in general, but specifically as it unfolded in the prison of a 29 year old Michael Sandy of New York. I was moved to do what little i can from this cage, my enclosure on the fringes of society!

As Jasmyne tells it, "Michael was brutally attacked by a group of white men who intentionally lured him to a parking lot to rob him and ended up killing him." Keep that in mind because it is the only factual truth we will probably ever know in regards to yet another purposeful murder of an Afrikan by amerikan settlers, whether police or civilian.

Jasmyne goes on to report that "according to police, on October 8, John Fox, 19, and Ilya Shuror, 20, posed as gay on an internet chat room for gay men looking for a person to rob. They lured Michael Sandy to a parking lot near Sheepsheard Bay with that in mind" and that "Sandy was robbed and beaten by four men. He managed to break free but was chased onto the Belt Parkway where he was struck by a car and severely injured. He never regained consciousness from his injuries and died after family decided to remove him from a life support respirator that had kept him alive since his attack."

She goes on to inform us that "Anthony Fortunato, 20, one of the four suspects arrested has already been released." No surprise three, and that "all of Sandy's attackers were white and it is still unclear if he was also targeted because of his racial identity."

Well I won't even address the absolute stupidity of even questioning whether Michael Sandy was targeted because he was a Black man - that would be like arguing whether water is wet, because it's water! The absolute reality is that Michael Sandy was murdered. Michael Sandy was a Black man who was murdered by white men who chose him to bait and trap for the purpose of murdering a Black man, knowing, subconsciously at least, that hunting Black men is amerika's true favorite pastime. Not baseball, or the 'war on terror.' That because Michael Sandy was a homosexual who they stalked and locked onto like blood thirsty spiders via the web, they could count on his being an easier and safer target with less backlash and outrage from the Afrikan community, because everyone knows we are, if nothing else, famously tight-lipped about our 'embarrassing' kinsfolk and shortcomings.

To even suggest that the murder of a Black man by four white settler youth is anything other than them acting out their historic socio-political class role is to bury our heads in a melting-pot of amerikan dung!

Jasmyne Cannick is absolutely right..." Michael Sandy could have been any one of us, and yet he was us. He was a Black, he was a Black male, and he was a Black gay male.

However, i am not interested in how Michael Sandy chose to indulge his lust or who he chose to sleep with. Just as i am not interested in how a heterosexual person chooses to do so. Those are questions we as a community, as a people, must iron out in our own homes. What does concern me as a captive, as someone who for all intents and purposes has been buried alive and prematurely taken away from his people and community by the hands of amerikan injustice - just as the murdered Sandy was - is that we continue to collectively engage in behavior patterns that are conducive to our being subjacent to and subjugated by a culture and people who have demonstrated through action/inaction their absolute willingness and desire to have Black necks and backs to step on as they reach over the proverbial rainbow for their pots of gold!

Two such acts i want to address in support of Jasmyne's call to action are, 1) Our passive acceptance of and failure to purge ourselves of those whom would falsely position themselves as leaders of our people and their antiquated useless ideologies, theories, and practices, which only serve them and their masters and keep the masses entangled in a web of fits and false starts. Jasmyne attempts to do so, but in my opinion falls a bit short of the mark as she states, "If Michael Sandy would have been heterosexual, would that have brought our the Rev. Jesse Jackson's and the Rev. Al Sharptons of Black America? Would that have made it okay for the NAACP to get involved and for other Black civil rights groups to take notice?"

Undoubtedly, it would not have! What we tend to know in our hearts of hearts but do not address in all our self-deprecating politesse is that Rev. Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons and the NAACPs of amerika know what side their bread is buttered on...they know who manufactures and supplies the activator for their perms and s. curls and puts them on tv to look good for the 'people'; who owns the runways their private jets take off from, and who owns the high-rise office buildings their corporate organizations are housed in. They know that the idea of civil rights is a minstrel show, complete with its starts and bit players. And they know their role.

They know Blacks throughout the diaspora are human beings, that the crimes committed against us have never been a matter of isolated civil incidents. We are not and have never been simply the poor disenfranchised 'citizens' of this or that capitalist nation. They preach integration and assimilation, yet practice segregation and isolation when it comes to defending the lives of the least of our communities or united with and defending all Afrikans throughout the diaspora as one people, one nation, one blood.

They know Malcolm X spoke truth when he asserted "they key to our success lies in United Action. As long as the freedom struggle of the twenty-two million Afro-Amerikans is labeled a 'civil rights' issue, it remains a domestic problem under the jurisdiction of the United States. But, once our struggle is lifted to the level of human rights, our freedom struggle has then become internalized...we assert that in those areas where the government is either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property of our people, that our people are within their rights to protect themselves by whatever means necessary."

They know by virtue of their status as the 'talented tenth' that we did not simply fall upon these unfortunate circumstances due to an oversight of civil amerika to afford its former slaves civil rights. They know we were never slaves, but the victims of a purposeful genocide and that we were never meant to survive our captivity, much less meant to still identify as Afrikans and influence the world as we do.

They know that those founding fathers of amerika and the NAACP recognized in our refusal to be annihilated, the need to compromise on their intended destruction of our people and began a very systematic and complete plan of creating oppo-same organizations and leaders who would keep the disjoined Afrikan Nation from coalescence on an international scale as one people and from addressing the real issues we face such as human rights, war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, the freeing of our political prisoners and prisoners of war, substandard education, HIV/AIDS, etc. etc.

Jasmyne, they know just as i am sure you too know there is nothing civil about amerika, or being an amerikan again. Our Malcolm said it best, "we have to get together and eliminate the vices, alcoholism and other evils that are destroying the moral fiber of our community; we ourselves have to lift the level of our community. Make our own society beautiful, so that we will be satisfied in our own social circles. Don't change the white man's mind. You can't change the white man's mind, and that whole thing about appealing to the moral conscience of America - America's conscience is bankrupt, so it's not necessary to change the white man's mind. We have to change our own mind."

Furthermore, they know the issue of Michael Sandy's sexual preference doesn't outweigh the socio-political, historical, cultural, and spiritual need our people have for reciprocity. They know to not act is to tell the world Black life is worthless. They know Michael's mother is still his mother, like my mother is still my mother and their mothers are still their mothers and all mothers deserve the comfort of knowing the life they created had value and their child's murder didn't go unanswered by her own people. No Jasmyne...it's not a matter of sexuality, it's a matter of puppet and puppeteer.

However, that is not the whole issue. Fact of the matter is those are not the leaders of our people or community. They are the hired mouth pieces of corporate amerika and the useless rhetoric they dribble is as stale and offending as the minstrels they perform. The world has been taught 'action speaks louder than words,' therefore we must purge ourselves of them along with this backwards idea that pomp and ceremonious displays of our outrage are taken seriously by anyone other than our well meaning selves.

Allow me to expound. The second act we need to address is the fantasy that we as amerika's 'permanent slave class' can find justice and equality in master's mansion under master's rules and this idea of allowing amerika to dictate what our issues are and who we will defend and raise to the position of honored spokespersons.

The reality is even if any of those who Jasmyne is calling out were to speak up, what good would it do, besides firing up a few tempers and letting off a bit of steam? We could write entire encyclopedic volumes covering the names of Blacks who've been murdered in cold blood by amerikan settlers and the corresponding marches and committees of this or that government body, yet still we are being hunted, trapped, and shutdown in the streets of amerika on a daily basis, and no matter what the state sponsored statistics report, the reality is government hired hands and civilian white settlers murder more blacks per year than Blacks with far more damaging psychological effects (point in fact, as i am writing this, the NYPD has just murdered 23 year old Sean Bell, filling his car with 50 some odd bullets!)

The amerikan court system and its so-called justice is a sham. Let's look at their own statistics and see..."A study published in the May 2006 issue of psychological science, the journal of the association for psychological science has proven that Black defendants in capital cases receive the death sentence more frequently than white defendants." "In Maryland alone, 60% of all homicide victims are Black, yet there is only one person currently on death row for the killing of a Black person" according to David Eillout of the NCADP. "Between 1976 and April 2006, Texas executed 78 Black defendants for the killing of a white victim, adn has executed only two white defendants for the killing of victims of mixed race" according to the 2006 quarterly report by the NAACP legal and educational defense fund."

"Three in every four men in prison (here in California) are nonwhite, 38% are latino, 29% are African American, and 6% are 'other.' Adult Afrikan American men are 7 times as likely as white men, and 4.5 times as likely as latino men to be incarcerated. The prison population is aging and currently the share of prisoners aged 50 and older is 11%, up from 4% in 1990." This in particular is very important because it's indicative of a class of prisoners who were captured in between the late 60s and early 80s. Men and women who unselfishly took it upon themselves to defend and define Blackness by fighting for our right to self-determination and a meaningful existence. More times than not, they were sold out and convicted in show trials complete with fabricated evidence and total disregard for the amerikan constitution and international law. Many of these men and women who now make up the 11% of captives aged 50 and older were from unskilled, unemployable classes and joined the movement and its formations toward liberation as enlisted men and women carrying out the difficult and monotonous daily tasks of a people getting together and lifting the level of our community and for their undying commitment to acting on the outrage Jasmyne is in search of, have been purposely neglected and written out of our collective memory by the Rev. Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons and NAACPs, who continue to parasitically relish in their status as political prisoners, prisoners of war, and politicized prisoners of conscious, because they know that with the true leaders, defenders, and honored spokespersons of our community sold into slavery and locked under hatches, they can safely continue as starts of the amerikan minstrel show.

In practical terms, what do all the numbers and words mean? Simply this...no matter what courtroom in amerika the white settler youths who murdered Michael Sandy are tried, if they ever are, there will be no justice for Michael Sandy's family or the Black community in general, because the amerikan jurisprudence is just as the tree and rope were 50 some odd years ago...tools in the psychological campaign of terror against Blacks. Michael Sandy will be portrayed, if not outwardly in the media, then in the minds of every juror and judge as having committed some crime and in some way brought this on himself...the story will go..."the poor white boys who unfortunately got caught up in his rage when their 'innocent' prank turned deadly are the true victims, because everybody knows Black men are naturally aggressive and violently irrational!" So, in answering the question, 'Where's the outrage?' I say it's here slammed down in amerika's new styled plantations, along with the elders who can and have organized and acted on that outrage in the past, had we not allowed them to be falsely convicted to begin with or not allowed them to languish in prisons throughout amerika over the last 35 years without our collective support through direct action, to insure they were brought home and not forgotten. I doubt if Michael Sandy or any other Black in amerika would still be victims of these types of killings. I know for sure, there would not be silence!

In closing, Jasmyne you write, "Tomorrow isn't guaranteed to any of us. The least we can do is make sure that we don't encourage these types of murderous acts by our silence." However, i have to respectfully disagree with your underlying premise. Real outrage, real healing, real reciprocity and the real discouraging of such 'murderous acts' will not come through marches and ostentatious soliloquist locking to capitalize politically or financially off the murder of Michael Sandy and the people's pain. We can only protect ourselves from amerika's historical addiction to murdering Black people. We can only heal our community and discourage these murderous acts by first freeing all political prisoners, prisoners of war, and politicized prisoners of consciousness who have proven their worth and love through action and deed, putting all puppets and poverty pimps on notice that we will no longer tolerate their kind, employing our own cultural means of justice and adjudicating crimes against our community, and finally by heeding and living up to the prophetic words of Marcus Garvey: "In the next few months we will be so organized that when they lynch a negro below the Mason and Dixion line, if we cannot lynch a white man there and since it is not safe to lynch a white man in any part of america, we shall press the button and lynch him in the Great Continent of Afrika!"

Do you care enough to help release the outrage?