African American Rhetoric

Thanks for a Great Semester

2010-04-28T17:54:00.000-07:00

Thanks for a good discussion today. It is great to see such enthusiasm for ideas on the last day of the semester.

As you may know this was the first time I have taught this class. For me, that was the exciting part. I am anxious to see your comments and suggestions on the evaluation sheets for how I can improve this course. You all seemed very engaged and I got some great feedback from you during the semester.

Nommo is real. Be careful of its power when you speak randomly and without sufficient forethought. But, make sure to use it, speak the world you want, tell others about it, get them to talk about it, and you will be amazed at the creative properties of this process.

Thank you again and I hope to see you in a future class of mine.

Obama, Black Nationalism and Dreaming Blackness

2010-04-28T09:02:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

MELANYE PRICE, DREAMING BLACKNESS: BLACK NATIONALISM AND AFRICAN AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION, 2009

“Black power? A note about Black Nationalism, Barack Obama, and the future of black politics”

Notes by Alfred Snider

2008 presidential election is a watershed for America; a descendant of Africa has been elected president of the nation. Whether this progress is symbolic or substantive remains to be seen.

Conclusions:

1. It is hard for black nationalism to thrive in an era of such racial mainstream success.

2. Conflict between group politics and deracialized campaigns.

3. The employment of black blame

4. Political constraints coming from the protest/protection impulse.

96% of African Americans voted for Obama.

Makes it difficult for black nationalism

Black nationalism thrives when there is continued marginalization by white power structure. Of course, one man in one office does not end marginalization, and black activists will need to work harder to keep the nationalist agenda alive.

Many say Obama’s race for the White House was race transcendent. He:

§ Avoided the use of civil right tropes

§ Got whites to vote for him because he focused on issues important to them, not just issues important to African Americans. Many successful black politicians now do this, like Deval Patrick of Massachusetts.

§ Never denies his African heritage and accepts that he is an African American, but tries to convince the public that this does not matter.

§ Race as an important issue was not featured in the campaign except for his speech about Jeremiah Wright.

§ Wright was a hangover from the previous era, not the new reality of race in America, where we can move beyond that (supposedly). This same anger hangover exists in many whites.

§ Merged class and race issues, which of course undermines the importance of why blacks were discriminated against vs. why underclass whites are discriminated against.

In her survey of African Americans, they gave two sources of blame for racial injustices:

1. Black blame: mistakes by the members of the community itself

2. System blame: the system is rigged against African Americans.

Black blame can be a problem when used by Black politicians:

§ Characterization of black poor as “pathological” something is wrong with them. This, when done by Obama, carries this harmful message of irresponsibility and lends credibility to the charge.

§ Example of getting children to eat: p. 177

§ Black audience loved it.

§ Part of a long tradition of black criticism and uplift efforts.

§ Survey participants did not use black blame for distancing from other blacks.

Black blame outside the black community is different:

§ It shows that these black politicians are not “in the pocket” of the black community, which whites find comforting.

§ American tradition: when you get into office, your group will benefit.

§ Because white voters fear that, black politicians who use black blame show their ability to evaluate members of their own group using prevailing social norms, but special affiliations.

§ Any black politician who explains racial inequality using any other narrative than the need for hard work is seen as making excuses for black failure.

The protest/protection impulse.

There is an impulse to protect those members of the black community who have reached considerable academic, financial or athletic success.

Yet, this need to protect someone like Obama can undermine the need to deal with problems that still face the black community.

They may refrain from making protest demands that would call for the upheaval of a status quo that has made him the president.

Rev Wright incident was an example of this. They were angry at an attack on their most cherished institution, the black church, but did not want the incident to hurt Obama’s candidacy.

This was seen in very negative feedback given to those black voices that criticize Obama.

Perhaps in the White House he will be even more difficult for blacks to criticize.

Perhaps a black president is less able to engineer reform of a racist system than a white president?

Tea Party - A Lesson in White Privilege

2010-04-27T08:17:00.000-07:00

From http://www.alternet.org/story/146616/what_if_the_tea_party_were_black

What If the Tea Party Were Black?

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters descended on DC armed with AK-47s. Would they be defended as patriotic Americans?

April 25, 2010 |

Photo Credit: Street Protest TV

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure - the ones who are driving the action - we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.
So let’s begin.
Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protesters — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.
Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.
Imagine that a rap artist were to say, in reference to a white president: “He’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Because that’s what rocker Ted Nugent said recently about President Obama.
Imagine that a prominent mainstream black political commentator had long employed an overt bigot as Executive Director of his organization, and that this bigot regularly participated in black separatist conferences, and once assaulted a white person while calling them by a racial slur. When that prominent black commentator and his sister — who also works for the organization — defended the bigot as a good guy who was misunderstood and “going through a tough time in his life” would anyone accept their excuse-making? Would that commentator still have a place on a mainstream network? Because that’s what happened in the real world, when Pat Buchanan employed as Executive Director of his group, America’s Cause, a blatant racist who did all these things, or at least their white equivalents: attending white separatist conferences and attacking a black woman while calling her the n-word.
Imagine that a black radio host were to suggest that the only way to get promoted in the administration of a white president is by “hating black people,” or that a prominent white person had only endorsed a white presidential candidate as an act of racial bonding, or blamed a white president for a fight on a school bus in which a black kid was jumped by two white kids, or said that he wouldn’t want to kill all conservatives, but rather, would like to leave just enough—“living fossils” as he called them—“so we will never forget what these people stood for.” After all, these are things that Rush Limbaugh has said, about Barack Obama’s administration, Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama, a fight on a school bus in Belleville, Illinois in which two black kids beat up a white kid, and about liberals, generally.
Imagine that a black pastor, formerly a member of the U.S. military, were to declare, as part of his opposition to a white president’s policies, that he was ready to “suit up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do.” This is, after all, what Pastor Stan Craig said recently at a Tea Party rally in Greenville, South Carolina.
Imagine a black radio talk show host gleefully predicting a revolution by people of color if the government continues to be dominated by the rich white men who have been “destroying” the country, or if said radio personality were to call Christians or Jews non-humans, or say that when it came to conservatives, the best solution would be to “hang ‘em high.” And what would happen to any congressional representative who praised that commentator for “speaking common sense” and likened his hate talk to “American values?” After all, those are among the things said by radio host and best-selling author Michael Savage, predicting white revolution in the face of multiculturalism, or said by Savage about Muslims and liberals, respectively. And it was Congressman Culbertson, from Texas, who praised Savage in that way, despite his hateful rhetoric.
Imagine a black political commentator suggesting that the only thing the guy who flew his plane into the Austin, Texas IRS building did wrong was not blowing up Fox News instead. This is, after all, what Anne Coulter said about Tim McVeigh, when she noted that his only mistake was not blowing up the New York Times.
Imagine that a popular black liberal website posted comments about the daughter of a white president, calling her “typical redneck trash,” or a “whore” whose mother entertains her by “making monkey sounds.” After all that’s comparable to what conservatives posted about Malia Obama on freerepublic.com last year, when they referred to her as “ghetto trash.”
Imagine that black protesters at a large political rally were walking around with signs calling for the lynching of their congressional enemies. Because that’s what white conservatives did last year, in reference to Democratic party leaders in Congress.
In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color. How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?
To ask any of these questions is to answer them. Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. Which is why Rush Limbaugh could say, this past week, that the Tea Parties are the first time since the Civil War that ordinary, common Americans stood up for their rights: a statement that erases the normalcy and “American-ness” of blacks in the civil rights struggle, not to mention women in the fight for suffrage and equality, working people in the fight for better working conditions, and LGBT folks as they struggle to be treated as full and equal human beings.
And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.
Game Over.

Obama Speeches

2010-04-26T08:39:00.000-07:00

Challenge of Jesse Jackson - Notes from Cornel West

2010-04-21T12:41:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Cornel West, “The Challenge of Jesse Jackson,” 1984

Notes and annotations by Alfred Snider

SETTING THE STAGE

America began as a liberal capitalist nation permeated with patriarchal and racial oppression.

American liberalism is not about opposing feudal systems, as in Europe, but on creating opportunities to accumulate private property, and thus at home with the domination of African descendants and women.

America embodied ideals of bourgeois freedom (property owning, accumulate capital, speak ones mind, and equal opportunity with racist and sexist constraints.

When the white male non-property owners got the vote without having to organize a mass movement for it, they became eternally in allegiance to the existing political order.

Extraordinary American productivity owing to technology, natural resources and the importation of labor (like slaves) enabled considerable upward social mobility for many. Lower classes subscribe to the “rags to riches” theory even though they may be excluded for racial and ethnic reasons.

HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN LEFT

The American left attempts to call into question the consensus of the liberal American ideology on behalf of the disenfranchised and disadvantaged.

There are seven historical elements of the American left:

Civic republicanism

Populism

Trade unionism

Communitarianism

Feminism

Socialism (including communism and anarchism)

And Black Radicalism

Civic Republicanism: Important mostly for its presence in political discourse, the idea of an ideal democracy where all citizens participate. Yearns for a utopian polis of equal citizens. Rarely surfaces in an organizational form, does not mobilize people to action and change.

Populism: Those who are oppressed and are a majority need to rise up to have their needs met. Examples: farmers, exploited tenant laborers, victimized workers. Focuses on centralization as an enemy and large institutions as villains. Chain stores and mail order crowd out local businesses, large corporations hurt small companies, etc. Huey Long & Father Coughlin. But it mostly tried top use federal power to stop these other centralized forces, which were inherently in league with them. Populism was weak because it also embraced xenophobia and isolationism, and feared “the other.”

Trade Unionism: was not class-consciousness as much as craft consciousness. It tried to mobilize workers, but focused on white male workers. It focused on large top-down organizations and bought into foreign policies that reflected xenophobia, especially fear of communism. New progress is being made by a focus on women and workers of color. The left probably cannot be regenerated in America without the contribution of labor.

Communitarianism: utopian radicalism that is proud of its utopianism. American society cannot be transformed, but we can build new communities around principles we embrace. These communities naturally presupposed ideological and cultural homogeneity.

Feminism: Most impressive contemporary movement in America. Rooted in abolitionist movement of 19th Century and the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. Biggest contribution is to show how taken for granted natural everyday affairs and language can be oppressive, in this case to women. This is deeply transformative to many. Although divided into different camps, it is highly able to influence the future of the American left.

Socialism: Not indigenous to America, but came over as a European import. Populist socialist movements like that of Eugene V. Debs thrived, but also resisted incorporating people of color early on. It was poisoned by the existence of the Soviet Union in the minds of many. The communist movement actually successful recruited many African Americans but still had the poison of Soviet linkage. The “rags to riches’ myth also undercut it substantially.

Black Radicalism: It has been bred in a unique black Christian culture, but is always seen as different from more European isms. Divided as integrationist, assimilationist, or nationalist has not helped. Opportunism (scrambling for crumbs) has often been its downfall, from Douglass to Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King.

CHALLENGE OF THE JACKSON FOR PRESIDENT CAMPAIGNS 1984-1988

In a time of political triumph by the right in the 1980’s, many in the left still held black radicalism at arm’s length. This was true of the Jackson campaign. He has the first really serious black candidate for president and gained well over 20% of the vote and showed well in polls, also attracting Latinos, Asians, Native Americans and whites. But the American left kept its distance.

African Americans finally had some political success in Chicago and in NYC (Adam Clayton Powell), but their strength remained in urban areas and in gaining some seats in congress. Jackson sought to go far beyond this, to have a national campaign, yet this effort was based on his ability to broker with democratic party elites. Jackson’s attempt to build new institutions such as the Rainbow Coalition were limited, because:

1. Jackson’s charismatic style accentuates enthusiastic attraction to him but not to creating enduring structures.

2. The black supporters that are the main pillar of his movement find it difficult to engage in prolonger political organization.

3. Allegiance to the democratic party diffuses energy that could be spent on political mobilization.

Jackson was very successful in the primaries. This is because his opponents had ceded much of the liberal left positions to him in a race to the middle of the American electorate.

He focused on updating New Deal programs to a post-industrial America.

In foreign policy he rejected knee-jerk anti-communism, demanded attention to the situation in South Africa (ignored by many), he sided with third world revolutionary movements and against US support for dictatorships.

More importantly, he rejected US favoritism towards Israel and called for recognition of the needs of Arab states and specifically the Palestinian people. Other candidates towed a pro-Israel line.

Jackson was damaged by his association with Louis Farrakhan and his unfortunate statement about NYC being “Hymietown.” These associations and policies were interpreted by the media and “Anti Israel, anti Jewish.”

The black political class would not endorse Jackson, thus ensuring that the more radical forces who did would stand out to others.

But, Jackson did create the broadest and largest political front of a Black nature since the days of Martin Luther King. His ability to harness the energies of Black Baptists was a good example of this.

The result is that although no one expected him to win, it was a coming of age for Black politics. If it could have caught on with other democrats, it could have made a huge difference and saved the waiting until Barack Obama in 2008.

Jesse Jackson Speeches

2010-04-20T12:47:00.000-07:00

PART TWO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MHZBbkFiog&feature=related

PART THREE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GukrBQ_TGbE&feature=related

PART FOUR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw0AFtZnRMM&feature=related

PART FIVE

PART SIX

PART SEVEN

PART EIGHT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Obhd16nBeUk&feature=related

Short Biography of Jesse Jackson

2010-04-20T07:20:00.000-07:00

Jesse Jackson

Also known as: Jesse Louis Jackson, Jesse L. Jackson, Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson

Birth: October 8, 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, United States
Nationality: American
Ethnicity: African American
Occupation: civil rights leader, politician, minister (religion)
Source: Contemporary Black Biography, Volume 27. Edited by Ashyia Henderson. Gale Group, 2001.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

Jesse Jackson has firmly established himself as one of the most dynamic forces for social and political action in both the national and international arenas. He has campaigned for economic justice, human rights, world peace, and the United States presidency. An inspirational speaker, committed activist, and tireless and confident campaigner, Jackson began his career as a foot soldier in the Civil Rights movement of the 196Os and has developed into a leader of millions of Americans--black and white--a "rainbow coalition" of the nation's dispossessed and disenfranchised.
Jackson has drawn upon his own early experience in Greenville, South Carolina, to relate to his constituency. He was born on October 8, 1941, to a seventeen-year-old unwed high school student and her older, comfortably middle-class neighbor, a married man. Jackson's ancestry includes black slaves, a Cherokee, and a white plantation owner. Although the young Jackson was quite aware of poverty and illegitimacy, his mother, grandmother, and stepfather were always able to attend to family needs. Even so, his knowledge of social inequities and of his more privileged half brothers affected him. As Barbara Reynolds wrote in her biography Jesse Jackson: America's David: "Every teacher Jesse came into contact with took note of his insecurities, masked by a stoic sense of superiority. They never perceived him as brilliant, but rather each saw him as a charmer, a spirited, fierce competitor with an almost uncanny drive to prove himself by always winning, always being number one in everything." At Sterling High School Jackson was elected president of his class, the honor society, and the student council, was named state officer of the Future Teachers of America, finished tenth in his class, and lettered in football, basketball, and baseball.
In 1959 Jackson left the South to attend the University of Illinois on an athletic scholarship. During his first year, however, he became dissatisfied with his treatment on campus and on the gridiron and decided to transfer to Greensboro's North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, a predominantly black institution. There he was quarterback, honor student, fraternity officer, and president of the student body. After receiving his B.A. in sociology he accepted a Rockefeller grant to attend the Chicago Theological Seminary, where he planned to train for the ministry. Jackson was ordained a Baptist minister in 1968, though he had not finished his course work at CTS, having instead left in 1966 to commit himself full-time to the Civil Rights movement.
Jackson first became involved in the Civil Rights movement while a student at North Carolina A&T. There he joined the Greensboro chapter of the Council on Racial Equality (CORE), an organization that had led early sit-ins to protest segregated lunch counters. In 1963 Jackson organized numerous marches, sit-ins, and mass arrests to press for the desegregation of local restaurants and theaters. His leadership in these events earned him recognition within the regional movement; he was chosen president of the North Carolina Intercollegiate Council on Human Rights, field director of CORE's southeastern operations, and in 1964 served as delegate to the Young Democrats National Convention. In Chicago in 1965 Jackson was a volunteer for the Coordinating Committee of Community Organizations and organized regular meetings of local black ministers and the faculty of the Chicago Theological Seminary.

Joined King and the SCLC in 1965

Jackson joined Martin Luther King, Jr., and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1965 during demonstrations in Selma, Alabama, pushing for expanded voting rights for blacks. When the SCLC launched the Chicago Freedom movement in 1966, Jackson was there to put his knowledge of the city and contacts within the black community to work for King. He organized local ministers to support the movement, marched through all-white neighborhoods to push for open housing, and began work on the SCLC's economic program, Operation Breadbasket. Drawing from successful campaigns in other cities, Operation Breadbasket organized the black community to use selective buying and boycotts to support black manufacturers and retailers and to pressure white-owned businesses to stock more of their products and hire more black workers. Jackson served as Operation Breadbasket's Chicago coordinator for one year and was then named its national director. Under Jackson's leadership the Chicago group won concessions from local dairies and supermarkets to hire more blacks and stock more products from black businesses. It encouraged deposits from businesses and the government for black-owned banks and organized a Black Christmas and a Black Expo to promote black-owned manufacturers.
In addition to his SCLC activities, Jackson led a number of other campaigns in his adopted home city and state. In 1969 and 1970 he gathered Illinois's malnourished and led them on a march to the state capital to raise consciousness of hunger. He led a similar event in Chicago. The state responded by increasing funding to school lunch programs, but Mayor Richard Daley's machine in Chicago was less cooperative. The mayor's power and resistance to change, as well as an Illinois law that raised difficult barriers to independent candidates, prompted Jackson to run for mayor of Chicago in 1971. He was not successful; some believe, however, that his efforts laid the foundation for Harold Washington's successful bid to become Chicago's first black mayor in 1983.
In 1971 Jackson resigned from the SCLC to found his own organization, People United to Save Humanity (PUSH). Because of his aggressive, impatient, and commanding personality, Jackson had long irritated SCLC leadership; and, in the three and a half years after King's assassination, he had offended others with his public antics to secure a role as leader of the Civil Rights movement and his feuds with Ralph D. Abernathy, King's successor as president of the SCLC, over leadership, policy, and funding.
Through PUSH Jackson continued to pursue the economic objectives of Operation Breadbasket and expand into areas of social and political development for blacks in Chicago and across the nation. The 197Os saw direct action campaigns, weekly radio broadcasts, and awards through which Jackson protected black homeowners, workers, and businesses, and honored prominent blacks in the U.S. and abroad. He also promoted education through
PUSH-Excel, a spin-off program that focused on keeping inner-city youths in school and providing them with job placement.

Ran for President

Jackson launched his first campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984. His appeals for social programs, voting rights, and affirmative action for those neglected by Reaganomics earned him strong showings in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, New York, Louisiana, and Washington, D.C. He received 3.5 million votes, enough to secure a measure of power and respect at the Democratic convention.
Jackson's 1988 campaign for the Democratic nomination was characterized by more organization and funding than his previous attempt. With the experience he gained from 1984 and new resources, Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition surprised the media and the political pundits. Initially written off as unelectable, Jackson emerged in the primary/caucus season as a serious contender for the nomination. He attracted over 6.9 million votes--from urban blacks and Hispanics, poor rural whites, farmers and factory workers, feminists and homosexuals, and from white progressives wanting to be part of a historic change. In his platform he called for homes for the homeless, comparable worth and day care for working women, a higher minimum wage, a commitment to the family farm, and an all-out war on drugs. "When we form a great quilt of unity and common ground" he told delegates at the party convention on July 19, 1988, "we'll have the power to bring about health care and housing and jobs and education and hope to our nation.
After early respectable losses in Iowa and New Hampshire, he won five southern states on Super Tuesday, March 8, 1988. On March 12 he won the caucus in his birth state of South Carolina and three days later finished second in his home state of Illinois. On March 26, 1988 Jackson stunned Dukakis and the rest of the nation in the Michigan caucus: Having won that northern industrial state with 55 percent of the vote, Jackson became the Democratic front-runner. Dukakis later recaptured the lead and the eventual nomination with strong showings in the second half of the primary season.
Jackson then exercised the power of his second-place finish to force his consideration as a vice-presidential running mate and to influence the nature of the Democratic Convention and the issues included on its platform. Although Jackson was not chosen as the vice-presidential running mate, he had succeeded in bringing Americans of all colors to consider a black man for the presidency and vice-presidency.
After the 1988 elections Jackson moved his home from Chicago to Washington, D.C. There he has campaigned against homelessness in the nation's capital. He was considered one of the top contenders to take over as the capital's mayor after Marion Berry was forced out of office by a drug scandal, but Jackson refused to run. Instead, he announced in July of 1990 that he would seek election as the District of Columbia's "statehood senator," a position recently established by the city government to push Congress to grant statehood to the district. He was elected in November and sworn into office in January of 1991. Jackson did not seek re-election after his six-year term as statehood senator ended in 1996, although he continued to advocate statehood for the nation's capital.

From D.C. to Wall Street

In 1997, Jackson shifted his focus from the nation's political capital to its financial capital. Seeing a need for a stronger minority presence on New York's Wall Street, Jackson founded the Wall Street Project. The organization lobbied companies to provide more business and employment opportunities for minorities. The Wall Street Project promoted conscientiousness among African American stockholders who may not realize the influence that they have as shareholders. As Jackson explained to Black Enterprise, "When you go into a meeting as a shareholder, you now have the right to the floor. Now you can walk into a board meeting and say 'Mr. Chairman, I'd like to see a list of our Board of Directors...a list of our employees so we can see where they fit into this company horizontally and vertically." A stockholder has the power to promote greater employment and business opportunities for African Americans.
Prior to founding the Wall Street Project, Jackson's strategy for influencing corporate behavior had been to organize protests. However, a pivotal event occurred in 1996 which helped Jackson decide to change his tactics. When charges had surfaced that Texaco employees had made racist comments, Jackson called New York State Comptroller H. Carl McCall, asking him to join him in picketing Texaco. McCall told Black Enterprise that he responded, "'Jesse, when you own a million shares you don't have to picket.'" Because McCall controlled New York state's investments, he had a great deal of influence with the companies the state had invested in.
With the Wall Street Project, Jackson hopes to give minorities the same influence McCall had with Texaco. Jackson told Black Enterprise. "We empower politically with our vote. Now we must empower economically with our dollar." But not just anyone can vote. Only stockholders have a real say in corporate operations. The purchase of just ten shares of stock, Jackson said, provides a shareholder with enough leverage to promote business opportunities for African Americans. As the stock's value increases, so too does the amount of influence a shareholder has. Jackson told Ebony, "So we have gone from sharecroppers to shareholders. We say to corporate America: We don't want to be just consumers and workers, but investors and partners."

Diplomatic Efforts

Throughout his career as a political and social activist, Jackson has also been a prominent figure in international diplomacy. In 1979 he traveled to South Africa to speak out against apartheid and to the Middle East to try to establish relations between Israel and the Palestinians. In January of 1984 he returned to the Middle East to negotiate the release of Lieutenant Robert Goodman, a black Navy pilot who had been shot down and taken hostage in the region. Later that year he traveled to Cuba to negotiate the release of several political prisoners held there and to Central America, where he spoke out for regional peace. In 1990 Jackson was the first American to bring hostages out of Iraq and Kuwait.
When three U.S. soldiers serving as part of NATO's forces in Yugoslavia were captured by the Yugoslav army in March of 1999, Jackson, along with an interfaith delegation, embarked on a diplomatic mission to negotiate their release. U.S. national security advisor Sandy Berger warned Jackson, as a private citizen, he did not have the authority to offer Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosovic any concessions on behalf of the United States. Berger also warned that Jackson's safety could not be guaranteed. Despite these warnings, Jackson, confident that he could persuade Milsocovic to release the prisoners as a gesture of goodwill, set off on his diplomatic mission. Jackson's confidence was not unfounded and when Jackson returned it was with the three soldiers at his side. The U.S. Senate recognized Jackson's efforts with a commendation.
In May of 1999, Jackson traveled to war-torn Sierra Leone, where he negotiated a cease-fire agreement between Tejan Kabbah, the country's president, and rebel Foday Sankoh. Jackson also negotiated for the release of more than two thousand prisoners of war. One year later, he returned to Sierra Leone to assist once more in the country's peace process.

Sought Answers in Suspicious Hanging Death

When teenager Raynard Johnson was found hanging by a belt from the pecan tree in front of his home in Kokomo Mississippi in 2000, suspicions arose immediately that his death may have been a lynching. Although medical examiners found no evidence of struggle, Johnson's parents could not believe that their son had committed suicide. Jackson did not believe the boy's death was a suicide either. He told Jet, "He had just gotten a computer. He was outgoing. He was in the Top 5 percentile on his test scores. He was very bright....A lot of signs point upwards. He was excited about life."
Jackson's Rainbow Coalition/PUSH launched its own investigation into Johnson's death. Jackson's investigators identified several people who could have been involved in the teenager's death and said that someone may have been angered by Johnson's friendship with two white girls. Authorities, however, said that Johnson's girlfriend had broken up with him shortly before his death and contended that all the evidence was consistent with suicide.
In 2000, Jackson, along with his son, Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., published It's About the Money!: How You Can Get Out of Debt, Build Wealth, and Achieve Your Financial Dreams! The book is a how-to guide for financial independence and security. Jackson explained to Mother Jones that economic self-sufficiency is a vital base for the struggle for freedom. "It costs to send children to college," Jackson said. "It costs to have health insurance." Yet, in a culture of credit card debt, so many Americans do not understand basic economics. With his book, Jackson hoped to change that.

Never Far From Controversy

Jackson has stirred both admiration and criticism. His behavior in the hours immediately following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., was a subject of controversy: Jackson claimed that he had held the dying leader, heard his last words, and had his shirt stained by King's blood. Other SCLC officers present at the murder have disputed those claims. As an organizer Jackson often overstepped his authority in SCLC matters and violated organization policy in a number of his Chicago campaigns. His economic boycotts were criticized by some businessmen as extortion and by some reformers for lacking follow-through. The management of PUSH's people and finances were the subject of close scrutiny and the freewheeling nature of the organization was regularly called into question. Jackson offended some Americans by negotiating with the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), Fidel Castro, and the Marxist Sandinista govenrment of Nicaragua. Jackson's connection with the Black Muslim leader and outspoken anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, as well as the candidate's reference to New York City as "Hymietown", outraged Jews.
However, the same driving ambition to achieve success that is the root of Jackson's weaknesses is also the source of his strength. He is a tireless worker who is fiercely committed to his causes, even when bedridden--Jackson suffers from sickle-cell trait. He is an intelligent, creative, and charismatic leader, and an inspirational speaker capable of archiving numerous details, then using them to encapsulate his agenda along with the aspirations of many Americans. He has a flair for the dramatic that infuses an increasingly tedious political process with life. And finally, Jackson acts while others talk of action. He has become the leading spokesman for Americans forgotten by the power brokers of the political process, especially blacks. In a 1996 speech, Jackson said, "If you go along and get along, you're a coward. Only by principled engagement can you be a force for change and hope." Jackson's life has been one of principled engagement.

Nommo in "Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry"

2010-04-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Make sure to do the reading at https://www.uvm.edu/~asnider/africanamerican/readings/week12/Walker_nommoindefpoetry_2005.pdf
It is UVM password protected.

From Wikipedia:

Def Poetry, also known as Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry or Def Poetry Jam, which was co-founded by Bruce George, Danny Simmons and Deborah Pointer, is an HBO television series produced by hip-hop music entrepreneur Russell Simmons. The series presents performances by established spoken word poets, as well as up-and-coming ones. Well-known actors and musicians will often surprise the audience by showing up to recite their own original poems. The show is hosted by Mos Def. Def Poetry is a spin-off of Def Comedy Jam. As he did on Def Comedy, Simmons appears at the end of every episode to thank the audience.
Though technically not a poetry slam, Def Poetry has become heavily associated with the poetry slam movement, and utilizes many of poetry slam's best known poets, including National Poetry Slam champions such as Beau Sia, Taylor Mali, Big Poppa E, Mayda del Valle, Mike Mcgee, Alix Olson and Rives, among others. Even poets who are critical of the poetry slam, such as John S. Hall, have acknowledged slam's influence on the show. In a 2005 interview, Hall was quoted as saying,

“

It's true that I was on Def Poetry even though I've never slammed. I'm probably the only person to be on there who hasn't slammed. And I think most people on Def Poetry have won slams or done well in slams. And, all of them, except the special guest stars, the celebrities, are writing slam poems and performing slam poems on Def Poetry, so to me, Def Poetry is still extremely slam-informed, and I think it will probably always be. What they say about Def Poetry is that it wants to bring an urban feel. And to me, they don't mean black or Latino, or non-white. What they really mean is, a rhythm of poetry that comes out of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, that came out of the slams.^[1]

”

In a 2005 interview, Bob Holman, who founded the Nuyorican Poets Cafe's poetry slam and appeared on Season 4 of the show, applauded Def Poetry, noting,

“

I'm real happy poetry is on television. My hat is off to Russell Simmons, who has found a way to get poems on HBO in a way that feeds his own business. It gives him the back credentials for his hip-hop label, and at the same time he's magnanimous towards the art of poetry, giving us a place like that. It's a great, great moment, just as Def Poetry Jam on Broadway was a great moment, too. Not since Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf has a poem like that been on the stage.^[2]

”

In November 2002, a live stage production, Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam opened on Broadway. The show feauted poets Jessica Care Moore, Beau Sia, Suheir Hammad, Staceyann Chin, Lemon, Mayda del Valle, Georgia Me, Black Ice, Poetri and Steve Coleman. The show ran on Broadway until May 2003, and won a 2003 Tony Award for Best Special Theatrical Event.^[3]. The show subsequently toured both nationally and internationally.
Def Poetry premiered on HBO in 2002 and the latest season to air (Season 6) premiered in February 2007. As of summer 2008, there has been no word about the possibility of a Season 7. Starting in 2008, producers of Def Poetry (including Simmons, Stan Lathan, and Kamilah Forbes) developed and broadcast the HBO poetry show Brave New Voices, which is stylistically similar to Def Poetry, with teenage poets competing and backstage scenes.^[4]

King Speeches & News

2010-04-07T08:00:00.000-07:00

Martin Luther King Memorial Project

2010-04-07T06:19:00.000-07:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The month of April marks the 42nd anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We are commemorating the life and work of Dr. King by creating a memorial in our nation's capital. The Washington, DC, Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial will honor his life and contributions to the world through non violent social change. I'm reaching out to ask if you and your readers would help spread the word by posting about this wonderful project on The Reggae Lunch.

I've put together this blogger-friendly micro-site to help get the message out - there are videos, photos, banners, and even a web toolbar that, when used, donates money to the creation of the memorial:

http://mlkmemorialnews.org

After years of fund raising, the memorial is now $14 million away from its $120 million goal. This will be more than a monument to a great humanitarian, the National Memorial will be a place for visitors from around the world to share the spirit of love, freedom, and peace. If you are able to post or tweet about this please let me know so I can share it with the team. If you have any questions please pop me an email. And if you are able to help, thank you so much.

Lowell

--
Lowell Dempsey,
BuildTheDream.org
Twitter @mlkmemorial
Facebook.com/MLKNationalMemorial

"An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity"
--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

MLK - "I Have a Dream"

2010-04-07T05:04:00.000-07:00

From http://www.mlkonline.net/video-i-have-a-dream-speech.html

I Have a Dream Speech

Full text (transcribed from audio)

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. *We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by a sign stating: "For Whites Only."* We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."¹

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest -- quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."²

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride,
From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of
Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!³

¹ Amos 5:24 (rendered precisely in The American Standard Version of the Holy Bible)

² Isaiah 40:4-5 (King James Version of the Holy Bible). Quotation marks are excluded from part of this moment in the text because King's rendering of Isaiah 40:4 does not precisely follow the KJV version from which he quotes (e.g., "hill" and "mountain" are reversed in the KJV). King's rendering of Isaiah 40:5, however, is precisely quoted from the KJV.

³ At: http://www.negrospirituals.com/news-song/free_at_last_from.htm

External Link: http://www.mlkmemorial.org/

External Link: http://www.thekingcenter.org/

Martin Luther King Jr. Short Biography

2010-04-07T04:59:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

From http://www.mlkonline.net/bio.html

Biography of Martin Luther King Jr.:

by Clayborne Carson

One of the world's best known advocates of non-violent social change strategies, Martin Luther King, Jr., synthesized ideas drawn from many different cultural traditions. Born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, King's roots were in the African-American Baptist church. He was the grandson of the Rev. A. D. Williams, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church and a founder of Atlanta's NAACP chapter, and the son of Martin Luther King, Sr., who succeeded Williams as Ebenezer's pastor and also became a civil rights leader. Although, from an early age, King resented religious emotionalism and questioned literal interpretations of scripture, he nevertheless greatly admired black social gospel proponents such as his father who saw the church as a instrument for improving the lives of African Americans. Morehouse College president Benjamin Mays and other proponents of Christian social activism influenced King's decision after his junior year at Morehouse to become a minister and thereby serve society. His continued skepticism, however, shaped his subsequent theological studies at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, and at Boston University, where he received a doctorate in systematic theology in 1955. Rejecting offers for academic positions, King decided while completing his Ph. D. requirements to return to the South and accepted the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

On December 5, 1955, five days after Montgomery civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to obey the city's rules mandating segregation on buses, black residents launched a bus boycott and elected King as president of the newly-formed Montgomery Improvement Association. As the boycott continued during 1956, King gained national prominence as a result of his exceptional oratorical skills and personal courage. His house was bombed and he was convicted along with other boycott leaders on charges of conspiring to interfere with the bus company's operations. Despite these attempts to suppress the movement, Montgomery bus were desegregated in December, 1956, after the United States Supreme Court declared Alabama's segregation laws unconstitutional.

In 1957, seeking to build upon the success of the Montgomery boycott movement, King and other southern black ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As SCLC's president, King emphasized the goal of black voting rights when he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial during the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. During 1958, he published his first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. The following year, he toured India, increased his understanding of Gandhian non-violent strategies. At the end of 1959, he resigned from Dexter and returned to Atlanta where the SCLC headquarters was located and where he also could assist his father as pastor of Ebenezer.

Although increasingly portrayed as the pre-eminent black spokesperson, King did not mobilize mass protest activity during the first five years after the Montgomery boycott ended. While King moved cautiously, southern black college students took the initiative, launching a wave of sit-in protests during the winter and spring of 1960. King sympathized with the student movement and spoke at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in April 1960, but he soon became the target of criticisms from SNCC activists determined to assert their independence. Even King's decision in October, 1960, to join a student sit-in in Atlanta did not allay the tensions, although presidential candidate John F. Kennedy's sympathetic telephone call to King's wife, Coretta Scott King, helped attract crucial black support for Kennedy's successful campaign. The 1961 "Freedom Rides," which sought to integrate southern transportation facilities, demonstrated that neither King nor Kennedy could control the expanding protest movement spearheaded by students. Conflicts between King and younger militants were also evident when both SCLC and SNCC assisted the Albany (Georgia) Movement's campaign of mass protests during December of 1961 and the summer of 1962.

After achieving few of his objectives in Albany, King recognized the need to organize a successful protest campaign free of conflicts with SNCC. During the spring of 1963, he and his staff guided mass demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, where local white police officials were known from their anti-black attitudes. Clashes between black demonstrators and police using police dogs and fire hoses generated newspaper headlines through the world. In June, President Kennedy reacted to the Birmingham protests and the obstinacy of segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace by agreed to submit broad civil rights legislation to Congress (which eventually passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964). Subsequent mass demonstrations in many communities culminated in a march on August 28, 1963, that attracted more than 250,000 protesters to Washington, D. C. Addressing the marchers from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" oration.

During the year following the March, King's renown grew as he became Time magazine's Man of the Year and, in December 1964, the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Despite fame and accolades, however, King faced many challenges to his leadership. Malcolm X's (1927-1965) message of self-defense and black nationalism expressed the discontent and anger of northern, urban blacks more effectively than did King's moderation. During the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march, King and his lieutenants were able to keep intra-movement conflicts sufficiently under control to bring about passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but while participating in a 1966 march through Mississippi, King encountered strong criticism from "Black Power" proponent Stokely Carmichael. Shortly afterward white counter-protesters in the Chicago area physically assaulted King in the Chicago area during an unsuccessful effort to transfer non-violent protest techniques to the urban North. Despite these leadership conflicts, King remained committed to the use of non-violent techniques. Early in 1968, he initiated a Poor Peoples campaign designed to confront economic problems that had not been addressed by early civil rights reforms.

King's effectiveness in achieving his objectives was limited not merely by divisions among blacks, however, but also by the increasing resistance he encountered from national political leaders. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's already extensive efforts to undermine King's leadership were intensified during 1967 as urban racial violence escalated and King criticized American intervention in the Vietnam war. King had lost the support of many white liberals, and his relations with the Lyndon Johnson administration were at a low point when he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, while seeking to assist a garbage workers' strike in Memphis. After his death, King remained a controversial symbol of the African-American civil rights struggle, revered by many for his martyrdom on behalf of non-violence and condemned by others for his militancy and insurgent views.

Things To Look For in African American Rhetoric

2010-04-01T06:14:00.000-07:00

THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN AFRICAN AMERICAN RHETORIC:

NOMMO – creative power of the word

GOALS – concerned not just with influencing or results, but process and values as well.

UNITY OF STYLE AND GOALS IN MAAT – good speech is true speech, with good results. Clever speech leading to bad results is not good speech.

THE SPEAKER – anyone, not just important people. Everyone should be the focus of good rhetoric.

SPIRITUAL AND SECULAR – no strict delineation between them.

FAME GOES WITH RIGHTEOUSNESS – no hate mongers are historically great speakers. Champions of righteousness get that title.

RHETORIC IS INCLUSIVE – speech, writing, poetry, song, drama, everything that communicates.

CLASSICAL KEMETIC CANONS: self control, timing, restraint, fluency, truthfulness.

VALUES: dignity and rights of the human person, well-being and flourishing of the community, integrity and value of the environment, reciprocal solidarity and cooperation of humanity.

RHETORIC IS AN ART: but is a part of everyday living.

ORAL RHETORIC IS: immediate and direct relationship, speaker and audience are one, common and everyday, spontaneous, improvised for purpose and situation, respects individuality within the group.

CHARACTERISTICS: indirect, language play, read between the lines, rhythm of speech, stylin’, lyrical use of language, improvisation, call and response, reliance on mythoforms, repetition, narrative style, rappin’/conversational style,

AFROCENTRIC WORLDVIEW: interconnectedness, collective identity (responsible), results are more important than intent, body-mind-spirit unity, spiritual focus, timing important, changes take time.

OTHER RHETORICAL APPROACHES

DRAMATISM: act, scene, agent, agency, purpose. Find most important 1 or 2 and see how they influence your understanding of the discourse. Kenneth Burke.

FANTASY THEME ANALYSIS: enduring fantasy themes are used to make the rhetoric work. Bormann.

HISTORICAL ANALYSIS: discourse follows a pattern and practice set by history.

MOVEMENT STUDY: rhetoric is part of an identifiable rhetorical movement. Griffin.

ARISTOTELIAN: use Aristotle’s canons to understand how discourse makes and proves arguments.

PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY: the psychological condition of the speaker is the critical element to understand.

Speeches by Malcolm X

2010-03-30T15:00:00.000-07:00

Videos of and about Malcolm X.

Black Nationalism
http://www.evtv1.com/player.aspx?itemnum=7250

Short Biography of Malcolm X

2010-03-30T08:58:00.000-07:00

Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. His mother, Louise Norton Little, was a homemaker occupied with the family's eight children. His father, Earl Little, was an outspoken Baptist minister and avid supporter of Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. Earl's civil rights activism prompted death threats from the white supremacist organization Black Legion, forcing the family to relocate twice before Malcolm's fourth birthday.

"When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Klu Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home... Brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out."

Regardless of the Little's efforts to elude the Legion, in 1929 their Lansing, Michigan home was burned to the ground. Two years later, Earl's body was found lying across the town's trolley tracks. Police ruled both incidents as accidents, but the Little's were certain that members of the Black Legion were responsible. Louise suffered emotional breakdown several years after the death of her husband and was committed to a mental institution. Her children were split up amongst various foster homes and orphanages.
Malcolm was a smart, focused student. He graduated from junior high at the top of his class. However, when a favorite teacher told Malcolm his dream of becoming a lawyer was "no realistic goal for a nigger," Malcolm lost interest in school. He dropped out, spent some time in Boston, Massachusetts working various odd jobs, and then traveled to Harlem, New York where he committed petty crimes. By 1942 Malcolm was coordinating various narcotics, prostitution and gambling rings.

"...Early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise."

Eventually Malcolm and his buddy, Malcolm "Shorty" Jarvis, moved back to Boston. In 1946 they were arrested and convicted on burglary charges, and Malcolm was sentenced to 10 years in prison. (He was paroled after serving seven years.) Recalling his days in school, he used the time to further his education. It was during this period of self-enlightenment that Malcolm's brother Reginald would visit and discuss his recent conversion to the Muslim religion. Reginald belonged to the religious organization the Nation of Islam (NOI).
Intrigued, Malcolm began to study the teachings of NOI leader Elijah Muhammad. Muhammad taught that white society actively worked to keep African-Americans from empowering themselves and achieving political, economic and social success. Among other goals, the NOI fought for a state of their own, separate from one inhabited by white people. By the time he was paroled in 1952, Malcolm was a devoted follower with the new surname "X." (He considered "Little" a slave name and chose the "X" to signify his lost tribal name.)

Intelligent and articulate, Malcolm was appointed as a minister and national spokesman for the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad also charged him with establishing new mosques in cities such as Detroit, Michigan and Harlem, New York. Malcolm utilized newspaper columns, as well as radio and television to communicate the NOI's message across the United States. His charisma, drive and conviction attracted an astounding number of new members. Malcolm was largely credited with increasing membership in the NOI from 500 in 1952 to 30,000 in 1963.
The crowds and controversy surrounding Malcolm made him a media magnet. He was featured in a week-long television special with Mike Wallace in 1959, called "The Hate That Hate Produced." The program explored the fundamentals of the NOI, and tracked Malcolm's emergence as one of its most important leaders. After the special, Malcolm was faced with the uncomfortable reality that his fame had eclipsed that of his mentor Elijah Muhammad.
Racial tensions ran increasingly high during the early 1960s. In addition to the media, Malcolm's vivid personality had captured the government's attention. As membership in the NOI continued to grow, FBI agents infiltrated the organization (one even acted as Malcolm's bodyguard) and secretly placed bugs, wiretaps, cameras and other surveillance equipment to monitor the group's activities.
Malcolm's faith was dealt a crushing blow at the height of the civil rights movement in 1963. He learned that his mentor and leader, Elijah Muhammad, was secretly having relations with as many as six women within the Nation of Islam organization. As if that were not enough, Malcolm found out that some of these relationships had resulted in children.

"I am not educated, nor am I an expert in any particular field... but I am sincere and my sincerity is my credential."

Since joining the NOI, Malcolm had strictly adhered to the teachings of Muhammad - which included remaining celibate until his marriage to Betty Shabazz in 1958. Malcolm refused Muhammad's request to help cover up the affairs and subsequent children. He was deeply hurt by the deception of Muhammad, whom he had considered a living prophet. Malcolm also felt guilty about the masses he had led to join the NOI, which he now felt was a fraudulent organization built on too many lies to ignore.
Shortly after his shocking discovery, Malcolm received criticism for a comment he made regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. "[Kennedy] never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon," said Malcolm. After the statement, Elijah Muhammad "silenced" Malcolm for 90 days. Malcolm, however, suspected he was silenced for another reason. In March 1964 Malcolm terminated his relationship with the NOI. Unable to look past Muhammad's deception, Malcolm decided to found his own religious organization, the Muslim Mosque, Inc.

That same year, Malcolm went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The trip proved life altering. For the first time, Malcolm shared his thoughts and beliefs with different cultures, and found the response to be overwhelmingly positive. When he returned, Malcolm said he had met "blonde-haired, blued-eyed men I could call my brothers." He returned to the United States with a new outlook on integration and a new hope for the future. This time when Malcolm spoke, instead of just preaching to African-Americans, he had a message for all races.

"Human rights are something you were born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations of this earth."

After Malcolm resigned his position in the Nation of Islam and renounced Elijah Muhammad, relations between the two had become increasingly volatile. FBI informants working undercover in the NOI warned officials that Malcolm had been marked for assassination. (One undercover officer had even been ordered to help plant a bomb in Malcolm's car).
After repeated attempts on his life, Malcolm rarely traveled anywhere without bodyguards. On February 14, 1965 the home where Malcolm, Betty and their four daughters lived in East Elmhurst, New York was firebombed. Luckily, the family escaped physical injury.
One week later, however, Malcolm's enemies were successful in their ruthless attempt. At a speaking engagement in the Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965 three gunmen rushed Malcolm onstage. They shot him 15 times at close range. The 39-year-old was pronounced dead on arrival at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

"Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression, because power, real power, comes from our conviction which produces action, uncompromising action."

Fifteen hundred people attended Malcolm's funeral in Harlem on February 27, 1965 at the Faith Temple Church of God in Christ (now Child's Memorial Temple Church of God in Christ). After the ceremony, friends took the shovels away from the waiting gravediggers and buried Malcolm themselves.
Later that year, Betty gave birth to their twin daughters.
Malcolm's assassins, Talmadge Hayer, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson were convicted of first-degree murder in March 1966. The three men were all members of the Nation of Islam.
The legacy of Malcolm X has moved through generations as the subject of numerous documentaries, books and movies. A tremendous resurgence of interest occurred in 1992 when director Spike Lee released the acclaimed movie, Malcolm X. The film received Oscar nominations for Best Actor (Denzel Washington) and Best Costume Design.
Malcolm X is buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.

Online Videos About African American Churches

2010-03-24T11:02:00.000-07:00

CHRISTIAN ARGUMENTS AGAINST SLAVERY

WHY CHRISTIAN FAITH DEMANDED EXCLUSION OF SLAVE OWNERS

http://vimeo.com/9411704

RURAL BLACK CHURCH SERVICE IN THE SOUTH 1968 2:16

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cJcICo2FpM

SONG – DONE MADE MY VOW TO THE LORD 2:18

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6opMYvm-go

DOCUMENTARY ABOUT BLACK CHURCHES – NOTES BY DOCUMENTARY MAKER (FUNKY) 3:06

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV6uGSiwL3c

MAJOR AFRICAN AMERICAN MINISTERS (TODAY)

GARDNER C. TAYLOR 2:04

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HSBQyRl0Mo

PASTOR E. V. HILL 9:36

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bucC9Kt0Nr8

CREFLO DOLLAR – AVOID MENTAL BLINDNESS 9:28

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jclJFoxV0s0

REVEREND IKE PREACHES ABOUT MONEY 6:33

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvpuTKxwwgQ

MODERN AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCHES AND SOCIETY

BLACK CHURCH IN CHICAGO POLITICS 10:15

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku43-luabd8

LET THE CHURCH SAY AMEN – A MODERN COMMUNITY CHURCH IN AN AFRICAN AMERICAN NEIGHBORHOOD 1:26:15

http://www.hulu.com/watch/118005/let-the-church-say-amen

SPIRITUAL GIFTS MUSICAL GROUP – CLEVELAND

http://flash.ulib.csuohio.edu/as/will/willab.html

PRAYING GROUNDS INTRO – BLACK CHURCHES IN CLEVELAND 21:56

http://www.clevelandmemory.org/pray/index.html

The Black Church - Lecture Notes

2010-03-24T10:53:00.000-07:00

THE BLACK CHURCH

MITCHELL, BLACK CHURCH BEGINNINGS

Many contended that all African religious traces were lost because of slavery in the USA.

Others, more recently, contend that Africans from diverse cultures and religious traditions, forcibly transported to America as slaves, retained many African customs even as they converted to Christianity.

The information existed all along but was ignored as the myth of “white deliverance of Africans” was accepted blindly.

Slave owners feared drum communication codes and the medical abilities of slave priests. Both were banned, but had to be banned because they were popular. Immunization against small pox was one example.

Funeral rights were an example of where African traditions were retained.

First stage African worship: not Christian, but identifiable.

“Ring shout,” was an example.

Second stage: Christian and African traditions mixed.

Groups that tried to suppress African elements grew more slowly than those that did not.

Conversion was an experience unknown to African descendants, so reports of Christian conversion were largely fictitious. To African Americans at this time, they would internalize what they experienced, but were not strictly “converted.”

Slave owners thought that converted slaves were more docile and easier to manage, which was also a myth.

Christian “conversion” did not change African worldviews, where there is a spiritual element to all things and creatures.

Third stage: the Great Awakening.

The heightened spiritual dimension of the Great Awakening made it more attractive to African Americans.

Surviving traditions:

Shouting, spirit possession.

Spiritual music: many lyrics, beats and tones from Africa.

Church as extended family, brothers and sisters in Christ. Trying to create extended family of the African village.

Keep elders in office until the end, learn from them. No retirement for the experienced.

Flowery speeches of praise for elders, an African tradition.

Many African religious beliefs were right at home with Christianity.

God is: omniscient, omnipotent, just, and providential.

Reap what you sow.

Selective interpretation and acceptance of the Bible, especially about the punishment of the wicked even if they worship. Slave masters beware.

African terms of the high god matched well with Old Testament conceptions.

God is providential a deliverer in times of need and dispenser of ultimate justice.

Three new elements: Jesus, hell, the Bible as the word of God.

African Americans could identify with Jesus because he had been oppressed and had suffered for others. He was also a means to approach the high god, a common concept in African religions.

The high god could not be approached directly, it was ineffable and incomprehensible. Thus, you needed a way to approach. Problems should be solved, but any problem might eventually be solved by the high god.

African Americans had no native idea of Hell. But when evil slave masters died peacefully, and in prosperity, they came to accept that they went to a terrible punishment. No matter your station in life, you go to the reward you have earned.

Bible: African American religious traditions have been oral and many were lost. But, they were open to learn more and discover more. In the Bible they found many parts that appealed to them, Moses and the opposition to slavery, the nobility of the humble and the generous, etc. Because they had great oral comprehension, once heard Bible tracts were often internalized.

1619-1750 The Silent Years

After a spirit is freed by the intervention of Christ, the bonds on the body still remain. This was often law, as in Virginia.

Slave spiritual gatherings were banned, because they naturally took place.

Reasons for no time for meetings:

1. More time for work

2. It might be a conspiracy

3. They might be hatching rebellion

In New England African Americans were not admitted to white churches because they would hade had to become full citizens, with voting and legal powers, since church and state were still united.

In the South the “invisible institutions” of African American religion paved the way for all future Black churches.

Christian conversions were very limited and small in number. Christian clergy did not want to be sent into the south, as there was little opportunity.

But, African Americans were interested in Christianity:

1. They were open to differences in belief, based on integration of different beliefs when in Africa. They were curious.

2. They found parts of the Bible that interested and attracted them.

3. The free expression of African culture mixed well with the spiritual expressions of the Great Awakening.

African Americans hid their meetings as best they could from slave masters.

When Christian influences were included, it did not mean a decline in African influences.

1750-1800 First Black Congregations

First Great Awakening brought an acceptable form of Christianity to many African Americans.

Because there was no national organization, many African American congregations were independent. Thus, they could develop on their own, or create partnerships with other nearby churches.

A strong of great black preachers arose, who were powerful members of the community and even appealed to whites. Some audiences were actually mixed. Visiting preachers were common.

The particularities of black worship became a bit concerning to whites, who wanted more formality and quiet. This caused the churches to remain separate.

1800-1900

Born free, freed, indentured servant, apprentice, etc.

Most Northern churches only elected those who were born free or freed.

White owners of slaves were not welcome at threes churches.

Because there were such barriers to literacy, literacy was often the key to leadership and organization.

But, those with outstanding verbal skills still could be great church leaders.

Congregations tended to organize along economic lines as well, especially in the North.

Major black denominations did not support female pastors.

1801-1840 Churches grow in the North.

Also huge growth in the South, but mostly invisible and underground.

1841-1865 Denominational bodies grow.

Denominations supported existing churches and created more.

They also formed bases for supporting abolition where they could.

Colored Methodist Episcopal

African Methodist Episcopal

AME Zion

Union Church of Africans

African Baptist Church

There was some limited cooperation between black and white churches, especially about abolition.

JIM CROW ERA

After the abolition of slavery the African American churches remain separate. All else was separate, so churches would be as well. Legal barriers were down, but it was still not fashionable to worship god together.

African American churches flourished during the early 20^th Century:

1. They were a place for community, replacing the village in that role.

2. They were a substitute for a government that did not want to include them.

3. They were a repository of traditional practice that maintained cultural integrity.

4. Respect for ancestors made people want to attend the same church their parents had attended.

5. It was a training ground for leadership that would spark the civil rights movement.

6. It was a tended garden where rhetorical traditions could grow and develop.

CUMMINGS & LATTA, SPIRITUALS AS LIVED EXPERIENCE

Assumptions about African American religion:

1. Religion helps shape worldview

2. Indigenous sacred music of African Americans is tightly woven in text and performance with the lived experience of individuals

3. Linguistic meanings and insights into cultural communities are produced through music

4. Pervasiveness of “nommo” permeates all aspects of African American life.

Black spirituals are rooted in the slave experience p. 59

African American spirituals:

1. Give comfort to the self

2. Coping with life’s difficulties

3. Conveying important messages to the group

4. Promise of relief after judgment

5. Send messages about escapes, rebellions and resistance

Features:

1. Not static, but changing

2. Often in their own vernacular language

3. Call and response allows participation with the community

4. Share personal experience with the community. Someone might pick a song as ask for it to be sung, or the preacher would pick an appropriate song.

5. Communicate self worth, belonging, and the inevitability of justice.

78% of all African Americans are churched. Most in the black church.

Black spirituals express a view of cosmology:

1. First name basis with god through Jesus.

2. They share experiences and suffering with Jesus

3. Experience builds to more intense level, where personal affirmation, confession and conversion can take place.

4. They sing of suffering all around

5. Binding connection with the past p. 6

Lecture: Garvey & Garveyism

2010-03-16T14:45:00.000-07:00

Image by howieluvzus via Flickr

Garvey and Garveyism

Marcus Garvey shared the Biblical cycle of enslavement, liberation and development. He borrowed from the concept of the Jewish enslavement in the Bible, and looked to that example in a search for identity, consolidation and development. However, his theory of natural rights comes not from the Bible, but from a lack of it. Christian rhetoric was used to gain the attention of church going Blacks.

SONS OF HAM: Cursed son of Noah, burned by the sun, bears that mark. An attempt by pro-slavery Christians to justify slavery with a Biblical explanation. In 1883 Crummel issued his response to these theories:

1. Curse was pronounced upon Canaan, not on Ham.

2. Curse fell upon Canaan, had effects, but not on Ham.

3. Neither Ham nor his three sons were involved in this curse.

4. Negro race is not descended from Canaan.

5. Slavery is not uniquely a condition of Negroes.

6. Canaan is obviously not Gabon, Ghana or the Congo

Maybe the only thing they got right was the burning by the sun, but not intergenerational affliction.

GARVEY’S BASIC TENETS:

IDENTITY: Who are we? Where do we come from? What is our past? What is our destiny?

CONSOLIDATION: All Negroes are of Africa and of one race. Africa for Africans at home and abroad.

DEVELOPMENT: Build the community, trade with each other, use and develop skills together, create business relationships within the community, create international African patterns of commerce.

BACK TO AFRICA: An outgrowth of work by Dubois and Blyden. Blyden had lectured in the West Indies about African repatriation in 1862 and he had influenced those who Garvey learned from. Africans came to English-speaking West Indies, gained skills through apprenticeships, then returned to West Africa.

EACH TO THEIR OWN: Races and cultures are different. They must make their own worlds. If they compete in the same realm there will be conflict.

p.135 top

p. 135 middle

p.135 bottom

NATURAL RIGHTS OF ALL PEOPLE:

African sense of social order was shattered by slavery.

There was no remaining God, but stolen gods of Jehovah, Allah and Yahweh.

There was no indication in history of rights and responsibilities.

African roots had been shattered by slavery.

So, in the absence of religion or ideology, and under the cruel influence of exile and slavery, a conception of the natural rights of all races was developed. P. 141

Marcus Garvey and Black Nationalism Resources

2010-03-10T07:55:00.000-08:00

Hear speeches by Garvey (only known recordings of his voice)

http://www.international.ucla.edu/africa/mgpp/sound.asp

Garvey speeches read by other voices

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey/sfeature/sf_words.html#

Website to accompany the video we will see in class.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey/index.html

Two new videos are available at the password protected website

https://www.uvm.edu/~asnider/africanamerican/

You will find them in the video category and they are labeled as "marcusgarvey" and are available for viewing by class members only.

New Videos Online - Sojourner Truth & Zinn's "People Speak"

2010-03-05T07:57:00.000-08:00

Cover via Amazon

A short video on the life of Sojourner Truth and a section (dealing with African American issues) of Howard Zinn's video The People Speak are both now available for limited viewing on the password protected website of class resources.

From http://www.howardzinn.org/default/index.php?Itemid=55&id=103&option=content&task=view

The People Speak . . . the documentary based on the live performances of Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove's Voices of a People's History of the United States
This year, a documentary based on Howard Zinn’s groundbreaking books A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States, featuring music by Eddie Vedder and performances by Viggo Mortensen, Sandra Oh, Sean Penn, Rosario Dawson, Don Cheadle, John Legend, and many other great performers, will air in TV and be released on a special DVD. The documentary, The People Speak, shows the rich history of dissent in our history, and explores why it is so relevant and urgent today.To view the trailer, click on the following link: http://howardzinn.org/video/thepeoplespeak.mov The People Speak is working with Voices of a People’s History of the United States, a nonprofit started by Howard Zinn that seeks to bring to light little known voices from U.S. history, including those of women, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and laborers. By giving public expression to rebels, dissenters, and visionaries from our past — and present — we work to educate and inspire a new generation of people working for social justice.The goal of Voices is to encourage civic engagement and to further history education by bringing the rich history of the United States to life through public readings of primary-source materials. Voices works to remind people of the eloquence of ordinary people, as well as extraordinary and well-known figures from our history.

Frederick Douglass and the Abolitionists

2010-03-03T08:46:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

Frederick Douglass Biography

http://www.biography.com/video.do?name=fullbioepisodes&bcpid=1896837674&bclid=10627691001&bctid=10623167001

original name Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey

(born February 1818?, Tuckahoe, Maryland, U.S.—died February 20, 1895, Washington, D.C.) African American who was one of the most eminent human-rights leaders of the 19th century. His oratorical and literary brilliance thrust him into the forefront of the U.S. abolition movement, and he became the first black citizen to hold high rank in the U.S. government.

Separated as an infant from his slave mother (he never knew his white father), Frederick lived with his grandmother on a Maryland plantation until, at age eight, his owner sent him to Baltimore to live as a house servant with the family of Hugh Auld, whose wife defied state law by teaching the boy to read. Auld, however, declared that learning would make him unfit for slavery, and Frederick was forced to continue his education surreptitiously with the aid of schoolboys in the street. Upon the death of his master, he was returned to the plantation as a field hand at 16. Later, he was hired out in Baltimore as a ship caulker. Frederick tried to escape with three others in 1833, but the plot was discovered before they could get away. Five years later, however, he fled to New York City and then to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he worked as a labourer for three years, eluding slave hunters by changing his surname to Douglass.

At a Nantucket, Massachusetts, antislavery convention in 1841, Douglass was invited to describe his feelings and experiences under slavery. These extemporaneous remarks were so poignant and naturally eloquent that he was unexpectedly catapulted into a new career as agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. From then on, despite heckling and mockery, insult, and violent personal attack, Douglass never flagged in his devotion to the abolitionist cause.

To counter skeptics who doubted that such an articulate spokesman could ever have been a slave, Douglass felt impelled to write his autobiography in 1845, revised and completed in 1882 as Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Douglass's account became a classic in American literature as well as a primary source about slavery from the bondsman's viewpoint. To avoid recapture by his former owner, whose name and location he had given in the narrative, Douglass left on a two-year speaking tour of Great Britain and Ireland. Abroad, Douglass helped to win many new friends for the abolition movement and to cement the bonds of humanitarian reform between the continents.

Bill Grimmette portrays Frederick Douglass during Chautauqua 2003 on the Germantown campus of Montgomery College.

Bill Grimmette is a living history interpreter, storyteller, actor, and motivational speaker who has performed throughout the United States and abroad. He has researched and performed the characters of Estevanico, Augustus Washington, Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. Du Bois, with appearances at the Smithsonian Institutions and on National Public Radio. As an actor, Grimmette has performed at the Kennedy Center, the Shakespeare Theater, and the National Theater of Washington, D.C., and on radio, television, and major motion pictures. He has an MA in psychology from the Catholic University of America, and has done post graduate work in education at George Mason University. Grimmette has portrayed W. E. B. Du Bois and Benjamin Banneker at previous Maryland Humanities Council Chautauquas.

Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree)

NAME: Isabella Baumfree (Sojourner Truth)

BIRTHDATE: 1797

BIRTHPLACE: Ulster County, New York

FAMILY BACKGROUND: Sojourner Truth was born in 1797 on the Colonel Johannes Hardenbergh estate in Swartekill, in Ulster County, a Dutch settlement in upstate New York. Her given name was Isabella Baumfree (also spelled Bomefree). She was one of 13 children born to Elizabeth and James Baumfree, also slaves on the Hardenbergh plantation. She spoke only Dutch until she was sold from her family around the age of nine. Because of the cruel treatment she suffered at the hands of a later master, she learned to speak English quickly, but had a Dutch accent for the rest of her life.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS: She was first sold around age 9 when her second master (Charles Hardenbergh) died in 1808. She was sold to John Neely, along with a herd of sheep, for $100. Neely's wife and family only spoke English and beat Isabella fiercely for the frequent miscommunications. She later said that Neely once whipped her with "a bundle of rods, prepared in the embers, and bound together with cords." It was during this time that she began to find refuge in religion -- beginning the habit of praying aloud when scared or hurt. When her father once came to visit, she pleaded with him to help her. Soon after, Martinus Schryver purchased her for $105. He owned a tavern and, although the atmosphere was crude and morally questionable, it was a safer haven for Isabella.

But a year and a half later, in 1810, she was sold again to John Dumont of New Paltz, New York. Isabella suffered many hardships at the hands of Mrs. Dumont, whom Isabella later described as cruel and harsh. Although she did not explain the reasons for this treatment in her later biography narrative, historians have surmised that the unspeakable things might have been sexual abuse or harassment (see the biography on Harriet Jacobs, the only former slave to write about such), or simply the daily humiliations that slaves endured.

Sometime around 1815, she fell in love with a fellow slave named Robert, who was owned by a man named Catlin or Catton. Robert's owner forbade the relationship because he did not want his slave having children with a slave he did not own (and therefore would not own the new 'property'). One night Robert visited Isabella, but was followed by his owner and son, who beat him savagely ("bruising and mangling his head and face"), bound him and dragged him away. Robert never returned. Isabella had a daughter shortly thereafter, named Diana. In 1817, forced to submit to the will of her owner Dumont, Isabella married an older slave named Thomas. They had four children: Peter (1822), James (who died young), Elizabeth (1825), and Sophia (1826).

The state of New York began in 1799 to legislate the gradual abolition of slaves, which was to happen July 4, 1827. Dumont had promised Isabella freedom a year before the state emancipation, "if she would do well and be faithful." However, he reneged on his promise, claiming a hand injury had made her less productive. She was infuriated, having understood fairness and duty as a hallmark of the master-slave relationship. She continued working until she felt she had done enough to satisfy her sense of obligation to him -- spinning 100 pounds of wool -- then escaped before dawn with her infant daughter, Sophia. She later said:

"I did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right."

Isabella wandered, not sure where she was going, and prayed for direction. She arrived at the home of Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen (Wagener?). Soon after, Dumont arrived, insisting she come back and threatening to take her baby when she refused. Isaac offered to buy her services for the remainder of the year (until the state's emancipation took effect), which Dumont accepted for $20. Isaac and Maria insisted Isabella not call them "master" and "mistress," but rather by their given names.

Isabella immediately set to work retrieving her young son Peter. He had recently been leased by Dumont to another slaveholder, who then illegally sold Peter to an owner in Alabama. Peter was five years old. First she appealed to the Dumonts, then the other slaveholder, to no avail. A friend directed her to activist Quakers, who helped her make an official complaint in court. After months of legal proceedings, Peter returned to her, scarred and abused.

During her time with the Van Wagenens, Isabella had a life-changing religious experience -- becoming "overwhelmed with the greatness of the Divine presence" and inspired to preach. She began devotedly attending the local Methodist church and, in 1829, left Ulster County with a white evangelical teacher named Miss Gear. She quickly became known as a remarkable preacher whose influence "was miraculous." She soon met Elijah Pierson, a religious reformer who advocated strict adherence to Old Testament laws for salvation. His house was sometimes called the "Kingdom," where he led a small group of followers. Isabella became the group's housekeeper. Elijah treated her as a spiritual equal and encouraged her to preach also. Soon after, Robert Matthias arrived, who apparently took over as the group's leader, with the activities becoming increasingly bizarre. In 1834, Pierson died with only the group's members attending. His family called the coroner and the group disbanded. The Folger family, whose house the group had moved into, accused Robert and Isabella of stealing their money and poisoning Elijah. They were eventually acquitted and Robert traveled west.

Isabella settled in New York City, but she had lost what savings and possessions she had had. She resolved to leave and make her way as a traveling preacher. On June 1, 1843, she changed her name to Sojourner Truth and told friends, "The Spirit calls me [East], and I must go." She wandered in relative obscurity, depending on the kindness of strangers. In 1844, still liking the utopian cooperative ideal, she joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts. This group of 210 members lived on 500 acres of farmland, raising livestock, running grist and saw mills, and operating a silk factory. Unlike the Kingdom, the Association was founded by abolitionists to promote cooperative and productive labor. They were strongly anti-slavery, religiously tolerant, women's rights supporters, and pacifist in principles. While there, she met and worked with abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and David Ruggles. Unfortunately, the community's silk-making was not profitable enough to support itself and it disbanded in 1846 amid debt.

Sojourner went to live with one of the Association's founders, George Benson, who had established a cotton mill. Shortly thereafter, she began dictating her memoirs to Olive Gilbert, another Association member. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave was published privately by William Lloyd Garrison in 1850. It gave her an income and increased her speaking engagements, where she sold copies of the book. She spoke about anti-slavery and women's rights, often giving personal testimony about her experiences as a slave. That same year, 1850, Benson's cotton mill failed and he left Northampton. Sojourner bought a home there for $300. In 1854, at the Ohio Woman's Rights Covention in Akron, Ohio, she gave her most famous speech -- with the legendary phrase, "Ain't I a Woman?" :

"That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place, and ain't I a woman? ... I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me -- and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear the lash as well -- and ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen most all sold off to slavery and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me -- and ain't I woman?"

Sojourner later became involved with the popular Spiritualism religious movement of the time, through a group called the Progressive Friends, an offshoot of the Quakers. The group believed in abolition, women's rights, non-violence, and communicating with spirits. In 1857, she sold her home in Northampton and bought one in Harmonia, Michigan (just west of Battle Creek), to live with this community. In 1858, at a meeting in Silver Lake, Indiana, someone in the audience accused her of being a man (she was very tall, towering around six feet) so she opened her blouse to reveal her breasts.

During the Civil War, she spoke on the Union's behalf, as well as for enlisting black troops for the cause and freeing slaves. Her grandson James Caldwell enlisted in the 54th Regiment, Massachusetts. In 1864, she worked among freed slaves at a government refugee camp on an island in Virginia and was employed by the National Freedman's Relief Association in Washington, D.C. She also met President Abraham Lincoln in October. (A famous painting, and subsequent photographs of it, depict President Lincoln showing Sojourner the 'Lincoln Bible,' given to him by the black people of Baltimore, Maryland.) In 1863, Harriet Beecher Stowe's article "The Libyan Sibyl" appeared in the Atlantic Monthly; a romanticized description of Sojourner. (The previous year, William Story's statue of the same title, inspired by the article, won an award at the London World Exhibition.) After the Civil War ended, she continued working to help the newly freed slaves through the Freedman's Relief Association, then the Freedman's Hospital in Washington. In 1867, she moved from Harmonia to Battle Creek, converting William Merritt's "barn" into a house, for which he gave her the deed four years later.

In 1870, she began campaigning for the federal government to provide former slaves with land in the "new West." She pursued this for seven years, with little success. In 1874, after touring with her grandson Sammy Banks, he fell ill and she developed ulcers on her leg. Sammy died after an operation. She was successfully treated by Dr. Orville Guiteau, veterinarian, and headed off on speaking tours again, but had to return home due to illness once more. She did continue touring as much as she could, still campaigning for free land for former slaves. In 1879, Sojourner was delighted as many freed slaves began migrating west and north on their own, many settling in Kansas. She spent a year there helping refugees and speaking in white and black churches trying to gain support for the "Exodusters" as they tried to build new lives for themselves. This was to be her last mission.

Sojourner made a few appearances around Michigan, speaking about temperance and against capital punishment. In July of 1883, with ulcers on her legs, she sought treatment through Dr. John Harvey Kellogg at his famous Battle Creek Sanitarium. It is said he grafted some of his own skin onto her leg. Sojourner returned home with her daughters Diana and Elizabeth, their husbands and children, and died there on November 26, 1883, at 86 years old. She was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery next to her grandson. In 1890, Frances Titus, who published the third edition of Sojourner's Narrative in 1875 and became Sojourner's traveling companion after Sammy died, collected money and erected a monument on the gravesite, inadvertently inscribing "aged about 105 years." She then commissioned artist Frank Courter to paint the meeting of Sojourner and President Lincoln.

Sojourner Truth has been posthumously honored in many ways over the years:

a memorial stone in the Stone History Tower in Monument Park, downtown Battle Creek (1935);
a new grave marker, by the Sojourner Truth Memorial Association (1946);
a historical marker commemorating members of her family buried with her in the cemetery (1961);
a portion of Michigan state highway M-66 designated the Sojourner Truth Memorial Highway (1976);
induction into the national Woman's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York (1981);
induction into the Michigan Woman's Hall of Fame in Lansing (1983);
a commemorative postage stamp (1986);
a Michigan Milestone Marker by the State Bar of Michigan for her contribution (three lawsuits she won) to the legal system (1987);
a marker erected by the Battle Creek Club of the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs (also 1987);
a Mars probe named for her (1997);
a community-wide, year-long celebration of the 200th anniversary of her birth in Battle Creek in 1997, plus a larger-than-life statue of her by artist Tina Allen; and
the First Black Woman Honored with a Bust in the U.S. Capitol (October, 2008)

DATE OF DEATH: November 26, 1883

PLACE OF DEATH: Battle Creek, Michigan

Jazz Series - Part One "Gumbo"

2010-02-25T06:38:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

Jazz music has a huge number of distinctly African traits and African Americans had a huge role to play in cultivating and inventing jazz. Yet, white musicians tried very hard to take all the credit. Look for a copy of Gumbo in the library and in our password protected video section.

From http://movies.amctv.com/movie/228574/Ken-Burns-Jazz-Episode-1-Gumbo-Beginnings-to/details

In a similar fashion to his other documentaries, The Civil War and Baseball, Ken Burns uses historical fact and personal accounts to illuminate the story of jazz and how it coincided with the maturation of America. Jazz roots itself in New Orleans for its first installment, Gumbo. One of the 19th century's most progressive cities, the "wide open" town was filled with gambling, prostitution, crime -- and music. Burns shows how African-American musicians combined Caribbean rhythms, opera, minstrel shows, and (most importantly) marching bands with ragtime and the blues to produce a music that would soon be called "jass," and later "jazz." The viewer is introduced to such legendary innovators of the music as Buddy Bolden -- the trumpet player who, although never recorded, is mythically touted as the first true jazz musician -- and pianist Jelly Roll Morton, who flamboyantly claimed to have invented jazz (he was the first to notate the music on paper). It is also made apparent how race played a large factor in the development of the music. In 1917, a group of white musicians calling themselves the Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded the first jazz record and quickly became a huge success -- at once polarizing black musicians and ringing in the "Jazz Age." by All Movie Guide

Beyond Speech - Museums, Body, Rap and Jazz

2010-02-25T06:30:00.000-08:00

Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

Here is my lecture for this week. The items may be in a different order than I presented them.

BEYOND SPEECH

MUSEUMS – Deborah Atwater & Sandra Herndon

National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN

MuseumAfrica, Johannesburg, South Africa

Public memory: A potential for a shared sense of the past, fashioned from symbolic resources of community, and subjected to its particular history, hierarchies and aspirations.

Share the past, as different groups have different conceptions of the past.

Remembering African American history has led to:

1. Loss of moral hegemony by whites

2. Loss of the myth of racial homogeneity by Blacks.

We may engage in recovery through a sharing of various narratives and being open to the liberating power of that experience.

Museums can serve these purposes, especially for African Americans. Museums are political, but they often present a variety of different messages based on their intent and design. Museums have been a powerful element for documenting and remembering the experience of African Americans and confronting visitors with various narratives.

NATIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS MUSEUM

Located at the site of MLK’s assassination.

Focused mostly on the civil rights movement.

Brutal depiction of segregation tries to shock visitors.

MUSEUMAFRICA

It tries to depict South Africa from the Stone Age to the space age. It attempts to make sure that native Africans are given credit and mentioned, as is their due.

A depiction of Johannesburg as a changing city focused on issues such as gold mining, workers rights, music and culture of the city, homelessness, shantytowns, the anti-apartheid struggle, the role of African women, the changes since independence.

COMMUNICATION, SPACE AND PLACE

Space and place communicates.

There is a language in display and arrangement, stories told, focus on issues, etc.

Both museums attempt to portray the role of disenfranchised and marginalized people and their struggle for equality.

Space is created and visitors put into it: in the back of a bus or in a shantytown home. Yet these are communal spaces and all are put in them, black or white.

But, the struggle is not over and at times the message is ion how far we have come not on how far we need to go. One can imagine Malcolm X’s reaction to the canonization of King at the Memphis museum.

SIMILARITIES BETWEEN SOUTH AFRICA AND THE USA

1. Both had formal laws of discrimination.

2. Both countries claim they discriminate no more.

3. Discrimination is now more subtle and difficult to alleviate

4. Very different outcomes, yet the slogan is, “no more racism here”

DIFFERENCES

1. Winner take all vs. parliamentary representation

2. “One drop” rule vs. black, brown, colored, white

3. Africans in South Africa will have major control, African Americans not.

FORGETTING

Milan Kundera: forgetting is a form of death ever present in life.

Museums try to combat that, no matter which story they tell. Jim Crow and apartheid still attempt to dominate the story.

Nietzsche says only that which continues to hurt remains in the memory.

But it also serves the need for catharsis and healing.

REMEMBERING..

Can be a very potent experience, as the authors indicate in their narratives about their visits to the two museums.

LEARTHEN DORSEY, AND ALL THAT JAZZ HAS AFRICAN ROOTS

ANGLO AMERICAN MUSIC:

Focus on melodies and melodic decoration

Elaborate harmony, but cannot harmonize without instructions

Highly developed poetic forms and good ballad tradition

White songs are largely solitary acts

White singers mostly interested in text

Borrowed African percussion

Mathematically and structurally conceived

AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSIC:

Improvising on a theme

Talented choral singers but a rudimentary system of harmony

Leader-chorus tradition allowing songs to be made up and involving everyone

Intended for and performed by joyful crowds

African American singers focus on movement and beat

Borrowed Anglo American instruments

Psychologically and symbolically conceived

PLUS, AFRICAN MUSICAL TRADITIONS BRING:

Polyphonic character, gapped heptatonic scale, dominance of percussion, parallel thirds, off beat phrasing of melodic accents, overlapping call and response, vocal and instrumental slurs and vibratos, bending improvised notes, syncopation.

Music infuses all parts of African life.

African languages tend to be more “musical,” so people are more sensitive to changes in tone and pitch.

Children make instruments at 3 or 4.

Patterns of complaint and social commentary that precedes blues.

Explore male-female relationships, ward off evil, and appease the gods.

Human bodies are an important source of music, hand clapping and foot stomping.

Music is kept below the level of consciousness, and so was immune to change during slavery.

All of this was preserved early on in slave songs and spirituals.

Blues emerged as a musical form out of these roots. It features lyrics of ridicule, social commentary, and the criticisms of black society and social practices. Blues originated as a form of work song, but soon took into itself elements of spirituals, work songs and field cries. Elements included call and response, slides, slurs, bends and dips. Voices can be moans, groans, and shouts to song-speech utterances.

Jazz emerged from New Orleans “hot music” and used a wide variety of African music forms. It contains improvisation, playing with notes ands textures, syncopation, surging percussion, call and response allowing for collective interaction. Polyrhythm’s change and allow an increase in musical tension as they develop.

Call and response are featured as one instrument may follow the other and try to do or outdo it. Themes get thrown back and forth and changed in entertaining ways.

LAURYN HILL By Celnisha Dangerfield

Slave songs often talked about troubles or were sung when the slaves were upset. They also told of coming breakouts and escapes. They also contained thoughts of inspiration during a difficult workday. They contained messages that the masters could not understand.

The lyrics are much more than catchy phrases of rhyming words. They represent sentiments, thoughts and emotions of a group of people who have known and continue to know struggle. Hip Hop music is a further example of this.

Hip-hop uses new technology and covers new themes, but is also quite traditional. Potter says:

The knowledge that rappers draw on is not only their own day-to-day experience, but also the entire recorded tradition of African American music .. which it re-reads and signifies though a complex blend of strategies, including samplin, cutting, pastiche, freestylin and improvisation.”

Just as slave songs were defiant, so now is hip-hop. It challenges the forces that would keep African Americans muted. But it appeals to a wider audience. It is as Dubois spoke of the minority who knows the majority better than it knows itself.

Lauryn Hill made a huge splash on the international musical stage in 1999, with 10 Grammy nominations. She wrote and produced her own songs.

Dangerfield takes five Hill songs and analyzes them using common themes of Afrocentric rhetorical study.

VALUES

Education, not necessarily formal but knowledge, not miseducation within an Anglo American context. Many African Americans have been educated with Eurocentric values erasing their more traditional beliefs. Hill has these sets of values dueling in her songs.

She also attacks values at work she disapproves of. The conflation of sex with money and the willingness of women to sell themselves for little gain. The value of money over all else, and the willingness to do what is immoral to gain money.

MYTHS

These can be thought of as master stories describing exceptional people doing exceptional things and serving as moral guides to proper action.

Many of Hill’s myths have a Biblical referent. Jesus, Judas, Cain and Abel. Many more.

FANTASY THEMES

Fantasy themes are much like myths. They can be thought of as abbreviated myths providing concrete manifestations of current values and hinting at some idealized vision of the future. They take up less space in the song but can carry a huge impact.

Hill’s two fantasy themes are the idea that Africans are God’s chosen people and the value of motherhood. The Israelites are the chosen people even while in slavery. Motherhood is used as a fantasy theme with the notion that it is a wonderful gift to be cherished and appreciated. Hill decided to bring her child to term even at the cost of her performing career. Giving the dominance of the discussion in African American affairs about responsibility for motherhood and fatherhood this is a powerful message, listen to your heart and do what is right, not the selfishness of your head.

HILL…

Called on African Americans and others not to believe what they are programmed, but to listen to their hearts and find their own destiny.

The duality called upon by Dubois in his concept of double consciousness is here as well. The work of Lauryn Hill involves the inherent dueling of these two consciousness forces.

The culture of African Americans cannot be separated from the work of Lauryn Hill. She and other hip hop artists pick up where MLK, Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey left off. It is still a message of uplift, strength and survival with ties to a past that cannot be eliminated.

“The genre of hip-hop is an innovative form of black rhetoric that has exposed the world to the powerful force that is African American rhetoric.”

DEATH NARRATIVES FROM THE KILLING FIELDS – TUPAC SHAKUR, CARLOS MORRISON

Gangsta rappers discuss life in the hood and full-time thugging.

Young African Americans co-construct this via music, language, dress, and graffiti, and so on to create a resistance to oppression, racism and poverty while living on the margins of society. Rap music is related to Black Nationalism, storytelling, spirituals and blues.

Criticisms have included the focus on violence, the rejection of mainstream economics and the female body as an object of subjugation and sexuality.

NARRATIVES AND DRAMATISM

Narratives:

They help us understand what an experience is about.

Establish a connection between the central action, various elements and our lives.

We judge narratives based on their completeness and consistency and find them adequate or lacking.

The focus is on the story and the telling of the story.

Major events are kernels

Minor elements are satellites

Theme – general idea illustrated by the narrative

The narrator – a central part or only the teller.

Audience the narrative is addressed to.

Dramatism: Kenneth Burke

Language is symbolic action. It is not motion as animals have. Humans are motivated to action by language and symbols.

Humans develop and present messages in the same way that a play is presented:

1. Act

2. Agent

3. Scene

4. Agency

5. Purpose

You identify the five elements in a rhetorical act, and then you choose the one or two that seem most important to understanding the rhetoric.

TUPAC SHAKUR

Born in Brooklyn, mother was a Black Panther leader, moved to Oakland. Dancer in Digital Underground, released an album, 2pocalypse Now. Starred in movie Juice in 1992. He played himself, a “G Nigga” who was grounded in nihilism and thus was willing to embrace killing and death. They care about true homies only.

Tupac represented the status of many African American youth. He was seen as hustler, actor, thug, realist, lover, hater, opportunist and more. He was all of these. He becomes a universal symbol of young African American manhood trapped in a rigged system. A contradiction that looks ugly and beautiful at the same time.

Tupac also had a strong black revolutionary background and teachings from his mother Afeni and father Mutulu. He was also influenced by criminal Legs who got his mother booked on crack, shaping Tupac’s “ride or die” mentality.

Tupac enjoyed life but seemed preoccupied with death.

The killing fields of America. Inner city turf with little or no opportunity, police repression and an absence of hope. Lack of hope breeds nihilism. Young men join gangs for protection and identification.

Gang warfare in LA (p. 196).

These streets are also a place of revenge and retaliation in case of the death of a friend, or homie.

There is a war and these young men are warriors. Tupac said in a 1996 interview:

p. 197

The showdown with death is the main event in the narratives of Tupac.

In terms of dramatistic elements:

ACTIONS:

Blaze weed and drink.

Ball (make money, court women)

Confronting the enemy.

No fear of death. It might actually be a release.

Their actions may be heinous, but they fit the setting of the killing fields. Slow motion genocide.

PURPOSE:

Retaliation against the enemy. This maintains juice respect with friends and enemies.

They use the agency of nihilism to act against reason and self-protection.

SCENE:

The dominant factor. It is the environment of the killing fields that triggers it all. Absent that, none of the other elements would make sense. The scene prescribes their actions – killing, revenge, ballin’.

Those who focus on scene tend to believe that the physical, social and psychological environment in which action occurs can be the cause of good or bad outcomes.

African American youths identified as an audience. They experienced many of the same things and Tupac would keep it real, facing death, but maintaining street credibility.

White youths identified with Tupac as an element of rebellion. They faced some of the same things but not to the same extent, and could vicariously explore that killing fiends experience through the music.

EVALUATION

Tupac’s rhetoric contains the absence of a love ethic. Without love, there is a place for nihilism to grow.

Cornel West has stated: nihilism is not overcome by arguments and analysis; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by the turning of one’s soul. This turning is done through the self-affirmation of ones worth – an affirmation fueled by the concern of others.”

Tupac enacts this reality of the killing fields by accepting death and seeing it as the warrior’s only savior. It will save the baller from further destruction in the killing fields. The killing fields drive one crazy through paranoia, losing touch with reality, as friends become enemies.

Tupac’s narratives are persuasive and contain narrative coherence and fidelity. The action is consistent and predictable. You believe that he believes the story he is telling.

If the scene is the crucial element, it educates us that the scene, the killing fields, must be changed.

BLACK HAIR AND BODY POLITICS – THE KINK FACTOR, Regina Spellers

The body is a sign emitting text. Even while not speaking, our bodies are communicating.

The social meanings of our bodies can influence our sense of inner self and feelings of inner worth.

Black women often focus on skin tone and hair texture.

Good is light skin, good is straight hair. Kink factor.

Womanism is a perspective where women make their own decisions and establish their own standards, not rely on those of others or society.

Comprehensive interviews were done with black women to determine how the kink factor influences them.

FINDINGS:

1. Kinky hair is a black thing. Straighter is better, lighter skin is more beautiful. In order to fit in often the body must be redesigned to fit other standards.

2. Kinky hair is nappy by nature. It is coiled. A lot of emphasis on straight hair. Women have been conditioned to see straight hair as beautiful. If you take care of it it will not be nappy, so if it is nappy you do not take care of yourself. Men often reject African American women with nappy hair, further sending the message.

3. Kinky hair is a state of mind/mine. African American women experiment with different kinds of hairstyles trying to find what is best for them. It may or may not be political or fashionable. An Afro may be a political statement or a conviction that one looks good with that style, or a fashionable fad. It may be a matter of convenience or a connection with Africa. It may involve the idea of what is beautiful – naturalness or artifice.

4. The path between conformity and resistance is a difficult one. Mothers play an important role in helping their daughters do this, but the final result is usually an individual one.

CONCLUSION: p. 240, last paragraph.

New Videos Now Available - Equiano & Cingue

2010-02-20T08:05:00.000-08:00

Two new videos are now available for download at the class readings website in the folder labeled "videos."

https://www.uvm.edu/~asnider/africanamerican/

Equiano, the African - 28 minutes

We saw this in class, but if you were not there you can catch up

Cinque, Freedom Fighter - 45 minutes

I was going to show this one but we did not have time. Very good look at the leader of the rebellion on the slave ship Amistad.

Legacy of Slavery - White Privilege

2010-02-18T10:33:00.000-08:00

From http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/whiteprivilege.htm

[This essay builds on the discussion of white privilege from Peggy McIntosh's essay "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies."]
Image via Wikipedia
by Robert Jensen
Here's what white privilege sounds like:
I am sitting in my University of Texas office, talking to a very bright and very conservative white student about affirmative action in college admissions, which he opposes and I support.
The student says he wants a level playing field with no unearned advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he thinks that in the United States being white has advantages. Have either of us, I ask, ever benefited from being white in a world run mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes, there is something real and tangible we could call white privilege.
So, if we live in a world of white privilege--unearned white privilege--how does that affect your notion of a level playing field? I ask.
He paused for a moment and said, "That really doesn't matter."
That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate white privilege: the privilege to acknowledge you have unearned privilege but ignore what it means.
That exchange led me to rethink the way I talk about race and racism with students. It drove home to me the importance of confronting the dirty secret that we white people carry around with us everyday: In a world of white privilege, some of what we have is unearned. I think much of both the fear and anger that comes up around discussions of affirmative action has its roots in that secret. So these days, my goal is to talk openly and honestly about white supremacy and white privilege.
White privilege, like any social phenomenon, is complex. In a white supremacist culture, all white people have privilege, whether or not they are overtly racist themselves. There are general patterns, but such privilege plays out differently depending on context and other aspects of one's identity (in my case, being male gives me other kinds of privilege). Rather than try to tell others how white privilege has played out in their lives, I talk about how it has affected me.
I am as white as white gets in this country. I am of northern European heritage and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the country. I grew up in a virtually all-white world surrounded by racism, both personal and institutional. Because I didn't live near a reservation, I didn't even have exposure to the state's only numerically significant non-white population, American Indians.
I have struggled to resist that racist training and the ongoing racism of my culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I "fix" myself, one thing never changes--I walk through the world with white privilege.
What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission to a university, apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don't look threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me for those things look like me--they are white. They see in me a reflection of themselves, and in a racist world that is an advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of them. I am not dangerous. Even when I voice critical opinions, I am cut some slack. After all, I'm white.
My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I am white. Some complain that affirmative action has meant the university is saddled with mediocre minority professors. I have no doubt there are minority faculty who are mediocre, though I don't know very many. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. once pointed out, if affirmative action policies were in place for the next hundred years, it's possible that at the end of that time the university could have as many mediocre minority professors as it has mediocre white professors. That isn't meant as an insult to anyone, but is a simple observation that white privilege has meant that scores of second-rate white professors have slid through the system because their flaws were overlooked out of solidarity based on race, as well as on gender, class and ideology.
Some people resist the assertions that the United States is still a bitterly racist society and that the racism has real effects on real people. But white folks have long cut other white folks a break. I know, because I am one of them.
I am not a genius--as I like to say, I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I have been teaching full-time for six years, and I've published a reasonable amount of scholarship. Some of it is the unexceptional stuff one churns out to get tenure, and some of it, I would argue, actually is worth reading. I work hard, and I like to think that I'm a fairly decent teacher. Every once in awhile, I leave my office at the end of the day feeling like I really accomplished something. When I cash my paycheck, I don't feel guilty.
But, all that said, I know I did not get where I am by merit alone. I benefited from, among other things, white privilege. That doesn't mean that I don't deserve my job, or that if I weren't white I would never have gotten the job. It means simply that all through my life, I have soaked up benefits for being white. I grew up in fertile farm country taken by force from non-white indigenous people. I was educated in a well-funded, virtually all-white public school system in which I learned that white people like me made this country great. There I also was taught a variety of skills, including how to take standardized tests written by and for white people.
All my life I have been hired for jobs by white people. I was accepted for graduate school by white people. And I was hired for a teaching position at the predominantly white University of Texas, which had a white president, in a college headed by a white dean and in a department with a white chairman that at the time had one non-white tenured professor.
There certainly is individual variation in experience. Some white people have had it easier than me, probably because they came from wealthy families that gave them even more privilege. Some white people have had it tougher than me because they came from poorer families. White women face discrimination I will never know. But, in the end, white people all have drawn on white privilege somewhere in their lives.
Like anyone, I have overcome certain hardships in my life. I have worked hard to get where I am, and I work hard to stay there. But to feel good about myself and my work, I do not have to believe that "merit," as defined by white people in a white country, alone got me here. I can acknowledge that in addition to all that hard work, I got a significant boost from white privilege, which continues to protect me every day of my life from certain hardships.
At one time in my life, I would not have been able to say that, because I needed to believe that my success in life was due solely to my individual talent and effort. I saw myself as the heroic American, the rugged individualist. I was so deeply seduced by the culture's mythology that I couldn't see the fear that was binding me to those myths. Like all white Americans, I was living with the fear that maybe I didn't really deserve my success, that maybe luck and privilege had more to do with it than brains and hard work. I was afraid I wasn't heroic or rugged, that I wasn't special.
I let go of some of that fear when I realized that, indeed, I wasn't special, but that I was still me. What I do well, I still can take pride in, even when I know that the rules under which I work in are stacked in my benefit. I believe that until we let go of the fiction that people have complete control over their fate--that we can will ourselves to be anything we choose--then we will live with that fear. Yes, we should all dream big and pursue our dreams and not let anyone or anything stop us. But we all are the product both of what we will ourselves to be and what the society in which we live lets us be.
White privilege is not something I get to decide whether or not I want to keep. Every time I walk into a store at the same time as a black man and the security guard follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am benefiting from white privilege. There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out in our daily lives, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased from this society.
Frankly, I don't think I will live to see that day; I am realistic about the scope of the task. However, I continue to have hope, to believe in the creative power of human beings to engage the world honestly and act morally. A first step for white people, I think, is to not be afraid to admit that we have benefited from white privilege. It doesn't mean we are frauds who have no claim to our success. It means we face a choice about what we do with our success.
Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism in the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

Olaudah Equiano

2010-02-18T10:25:00.000-08:00

Here is some information accompany the video we watched on 17 February 2010.

From http://www.brycchancarey.com/equiano/

Image via Wikipedia

According to his famous autobiography, written in 1789, Olaudah Equiano (c.1745-1797) was born in what is now Nigeria. Kidnapped and sold into slavery in childhood, he was taken as a slave to the New World. As a slave to a captain in the Royal Navy, and later to a Quaker merchant, he eventually earned the price of his own freedom by careful trading and saving. As a seaman, he travelled the world, including the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Atlantic and the Arctic, the latter in an abortive attempt to reach the North Pole. Coming to London, he became involved in the movement to abolish the slave trade, an involvement which led to him writing and publishing The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789) a strongly abolitionist autobiography. The book became a bestseller and, as well as furthering the anti-slavery cause, made Equiano a wealthy man.

Slavery and the Social Rupture

2010-02-18T10:14:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

Here are my lecture notes from 17 February 2010.

SLAVERY LECTURE

For African American Rhetoric

Thanks to Nathan Huggins for his research and thoughts.

LIFE IN AFRICA BEFORE SLAVERY

Mainly from West Africa and southwest Africa.

The village – a collection of family compounds.

Nature is at the heart of village life.

It is necessary to hold together to guarantee existence.

Isolation was unthinkable. “Outlaw”

Alone a person is nobody, because it was your place in reference to others.

A cowardly brother was shame to you

A glorious uncle was glory for you

What one was was the village, what pone would be was the village.

Elders were respected because they had knowledge. They could be called on to unravel knots of dispute.

When the family could not, manage or when it was one family against another the elders would be consulted.

The village can be thought of as the family writ large.

But some decisions were too big for the family: when to plant and harvest, when to cut and burn the fields, what crops to plant.

But most of that was kept within the family.

Family was an anchor to those set adrift by death. No orphans, no homeless, no abandoned old people.

There was little between families in terms of material possessions or standards of living. There were no extremes in wealth and want.

Your world is centered in your mother’s house with her other children.

There would be their wives and their children. There would be a senior wife.

Each wife had things that were hers – land, chickens, and goats. She received these when she agreed to become a wife to a husband. Any surplus belonged to the wife, and she could trade it for what she wanted.

She would go to market in the village to try and trade what she had for what she wanted. Clever wives could benefit the entire family in this way, as well as herself.

At the core of the universe is your father, wealth determined by children and land.

You are tied to those in the compound, beyond to the village and perhaps beyond to other villages.

Family compounds had other people as well. People may have been given to the family or taken refuge there. While called slaves they were not so in our current construct.

They were given status based on talents and character. They would merge into the family my marriage. They could not be sold, but belonged to the family.

The family was the economic unit. No one was surplus. Each member of the family gave what they could to increase the well being of all.

If you went to another village you would also know there a relative and a family link.

There was no assumption of equality.

You had a position in your family and the community.

Age, experience and resourcefulness could give you status.

Your character reflected your membership in an age group, clan and family.

You learned to appreciate patterns that had existed for centuries, they worked.

There was a rigid etiquette learned through ritual, routine and religion.

Little thought was given to innovation, as age-old problems of farming, health and warfare were solved by traditional means or remained unsolved.

The real meaning of the individual was that you existed and where you fit into relationships.

As a child you rose through the structures being cared for by others and caring for those younger than you.

Boys would go through rituals marking a transition into manhood, gaining knowledge of mysteries through special experiences.

As girls grew they became more involved with children and pregnancy of others and such until her own time came.

No important decision was really personal.

Marriage was too important to be left to you. Mating must serve the old and the young and those who would depend on the family.

Young man has collected bridal dues given to the family of the woman who was to be his wife.

The couple would establish their house near the bride or groom’s family to maintain contact.

If there was a disaster it was the village and the family that reacted.

One could never deny helplessness before the great surges and ebbs in life and history.

Te European would see evil as a part of moral corruption and sin. The African would see it as a natural part of the hand that was dealt. Evil comes to one as it comes to all in turn. The best defense was to respect and fulfill traditional obligations and remain strong in character.

The life force itself remained an unfathomable mystery.

Death was but punctuation in the story. It began before you and would last long after you.

It was held together by the oral history of the family and the village. All could find their place in it. One could share in the greatness of ones people because one really was a part of them.

There was a spiritual quality to all things. To you, to those around you, to all animals and plants and to the land itself.

The wood had a spirit as it came into the artisan’s hands and through cooperation was revealed in the carving.

Music, dance and celebration were united in all parts of the life cycle – birth, marriage, and death – lifting them to cosmic significance. None of us are irrelevant.

All worked together to link each and all to the world and the universe.

The drums pounded, dancers turned and twisted, libations and offerings invoked the ancestors, bells and beads tang together with flutes.

Some special person would be infused with a spirit, possessed, given some special knowledge, twirling and writhing, and then left spent and empty.

Yet, it was no paradise.

There were extremes of suffering and joy, perhaps greater because they were shared.

Droughts, floods and other events could spell total devastation, with resulting starvation and death for nearly everyone.

A community might make the wrong choice together and suffer collectively.

Any illness could be the threshold of death.

Senses were sharp and felt everything in a way that might be hard for us to understand.

THE RUPTURE AND THE ORDEAL

Community, identification, mutual support.

Then, all of a sudden, alone, isolated, lacking in any support.

The transatlantic slave trade was far outside of their experience of “slave” family members.

One went from being a person to a thing.

This was the true rupture, much greater than the simple cruelty and mistreatment that we often focus on.

First capture, suddenly and without warning.

You might hear of something like this happening in the region. You might prepare, but the goal was to steal people, not conquer or rule. Spears and knives were little use against guns and surprise.

Some decided to attack first when there were signs of slave traders in the area.

Others waited and were the victims for it.

p. 29

Some were simply disgorged by their communities as offerings to the Europeans. Non-conformists, element of evil forces, etc.

Captives might be held in a village to be gathered into larger groups. They might even work within a family group. But then, a march along a trail to nowhere might begin.

Tales of terrible fates at the hands of monsters, of the end of the world.

His name was meaningless, his connections useless. The young and strong were honored, not the elder and wise. The weak were not assisted but dropped and died, as they had less value.

They reached a market they could recognize but they were the goods to be bargained for and exchanged. It was not for the use of those who acquired them, but for their profit. The captive lost his intrinsic value. One was bound with others that spoke unknown tongues but all with the same fate.

Earlier pain experiences, such as circumcision and scarification had brought manhood, this pain meant the end of being a human being.

Many attempted or achieved suicide. But, the disorganization and disorientation made organized resistance difficult.

The Europeans called their handling and sorting points factories.

Questions of profits overruled all issues of ethics and morality. A $10 African man could yield $600 in the New World.

Packed into ships they were sent to a land to built an empire and create profit for others.

The ships were poorly designed and risky at best. The crews were the dregs of European society. They brought syphilis to the Africans, who brought yellow fever and malaria to the Europeans.

The ship[s were incubators of infection and parasites.

Rations were short and made things worse.

More tightly packed ships meant more losses but perhaps more results, while less packed ships would involve lower losses but perhaps lower rewards. In the end, it was seen as better to fill every possible space with human flesh.

There was dysentery and disease, poor hygiene, and many lie for months in their own filth.

The sea was an unknown element to most Africans. Shortage of air and light. Harsh seas and storms. Doldrums and calms. Rations could get shorter.

Those who died were gathered and thrown overboard in the morning. If one were too weak to be expected to survive, they would be thrown overboard to save on rations. Many simply died of shock, or gave up trying to live. Others might engage in resistance, by biting the legs of jailers as they walked by.

Trails of sharks would follow the ships.

The action against the slave trade in 1807 only increased suffering. The trips were longer and less healthy but more profitable.

Each station in the journey had been passed and never seen again. All knew it was a one-way journey.

There were slave mutinies. The rage and revenge was specific and targeted. But then what?

1. Who would sale the ship? White crews would try and fool the new captains and sale the ships back into captivity.

2. Where to go? If they reached land they faced almost immediate recapture. All Europeans were in solidarity with these sailors. They had a racial consciousness of working together against Africans that the Africans lacked.

3. A woman might seek escape through a sexual liaison. These were rarely successful, as they met only temporary needs.

4. A man might gain service to the slavers based on language skills or organizational abilities. They were often used once and then sold at a higher price.

As the journey neared its end things livened up. Rations increased, exercise was more common and an attempt was made to freshen up the freight. Weaknesses were covered up, bodies were rubbed with oil. Those who could not be made presentable for sale might be cast into the sea or left on the wharf to die.

Just before sale an African man would be sent amongst the captives to talk. It may have been the first encouraging voice in quite some time. The messages included:

The white man will not eat you

There are no evil spirits at work

You will be asked to work as you have always done

There will be many of you working there.

Hope you arte purchased by a rich man, not by a poor man. Look and act your best so that you might gain such a position.

Do not run away as there is no place to run.

If you look mean only mean men will want you.

If you act properly things might yet go well.

Then, the sale. Women were to become breeding stock along with men.

THE SLAVE COMMUNITY

Everything continued to work towards the destruction of the community they had been raised ion and hoped for.

Slaves were now the pawns of those who owned them, and they were fragile and not rooted to place and kin.

It was hard to create a community among themselves:

No meetings

No drums or dancing

No religious services or libations or offerings.

Families might be left together, but could be broken at any moment.

Times when men and women could be together were often strictly regulated.

Special ability might mean privilege, but would only increase the value as a slave. A craftsman would avoid field labor, but also the company of his fellows.

Managerial blacks had to serve the master, and were tolerated but never trusted by their fellows.

House slaves vs. field slaves. Malcolm X was right. Many were good people who were co-opted by the system. They often avoided personal and family tragedy by working against their fellow Africans. Negation and nihilism were multiplied.

Slaves could gain freedom by earning it from a master or by escape. Both were rare and very risky. Yet, in any slave state you were a slave as long as you were black. Slavery was a condition of race.

Some Africans gained authority of a spiritual kind. They held a rank unknown to the masters but clear among the slaves. Often this was used to soothe and comfort, but could also be used to victimize and tyrannize. Spells of protection were important. Slaves could not deal with anti-social elements in their midst, as all were simply property.

The family continued to be of high importance. Even in difficulty, there was an urge to belong and to regenerate. Yet, their work could not benefit the family. The family could not be extended. The family could not be a transmitter of history and values.

Slave masters assumed that without their supervision it would descend into anarchy. They believed that African families existed because of their support and tutelage. Even abolitionists believed this.

Slave families maintained many customs and beliefs, such as that cousins should not marry, whereas southern whites did this often. The bonds of families were still strong, because these intimate bonds were hard to see and hard to repress. Slave families were broken up like white families, but for different reasons. While families did not become extended because the young struck out on their own for new opportunities. In slave families they were sold off without consent.

The idea of family became more important to blacks than whites. The idea of marrying by choice, raising children, and watching them grow and develop was the central feature of freedom they dreamed of, while family for whites continued to degrade. When weddings did take place, sanctioned by the masters, they were a central element ion life. While whites got god’s blessing, the slaves only got the masters’ blessings. Many masters saw allowing slave families as a way to strengthen their slave worker population. When a man was married to a woman who did not conceive, he might be paired with another, hopefully more fertile. Whites, masters and their sons, might become sexual interlopers on a slave family.

Sexual relations among slaves were more open than among whites. Virginity was not a value and enjoying sex as not a sin. While white women were protected, black women were treated lie and worked like the men. Women often did more work than men, such as caring for cabins and preparing meals. But the slave cabins were not male dominated.

An African man felt great pride at being a father, but slave men were often denied this right. They were more easily separated from children than women. But, children were even more valuable because of high mortality, and men protected them and guided them when they could.

Children were guided by other children, with the older ones teaching, often through games. Small children had lighter tasks. By 12 and 134 it was heavier work for them. By 15 full work in the fields. White and black children played, but all too soon began playing their appointed roles. White children would be separated to learn reading and writing, and black children associated magical powers with the book and the script. In general it was forbidden to tech slaves to read and write, although some did learn. All black children were taught to stay in line or suffer.

At night families would gather around fires and stories would entertain. Stories about Africa. Stories that would not die. They also heard stories of free black men who lived wild and stole what they needed.

Slaves were often not Christianized because of the inherent contradictions in accepting slaves as fellow believers. Would Jesus have had slaves?

Slave Christianity became a tool of Black people to preserve their dignity and create their own fellowship. Often it had to be kept secret from masters.

The Bible stories of slaves of Babylon and Egypt being set free held a special fascination. God could deliver the faithful from almost anything. Christ was a special being, unknown to the powerful, who was the Son of God. And the oppressors killed him.

Black Christian spiritual leader adapted to the needs of their new flocks. The Black church became the most important institution for African Americans. It allowed them to transcend the role of victim and take their souls into their own hands.

Slaves faced character disintegration based on fear, deception and hatred, all easy to foment in a climate of slavery. But, the African spiritual experience operated against these threats. Not to fear, for their will be deliverance. Not to deceive, but to recognize the truth for what it is and celebrate it. Not to hate, for that violates the law of love. Oddly enough, it was in Black Christianity that many of the virtues of Africa were preserved.

Applying Afrocentric Rhetorical Theory to Specific Discourse

2010-02-09T09:17:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

WATCH THE LECTURE HERE:

http://www.uvm.edu/~debate/watch/afrocentrhetapplyto5.mov

Lecture - African American Rhetoric - Apply Afrocentric Rhetorical Theory from Alfred Snider on Vimeo.

The lecture above is the video of the notes that are contained below. The notes certainly are not complete, but might be appropriate for browsing.

APPLYING AFROCENTRIC RHETORICAL THEORY TO AFRICAN AMERICAN RHETORIC

We examine five works of rhetorical criticism here. These are all designed to examine and understand bits of human discourse that emerge from the African Diaspora on this continent.

The purpose of rhetorical criticism is to investigate a piece of discourse and understand it better as well as to understand its importance to us.

My contention is that the use of Afrocentric rhetorical theory should help us in understanding and appreciating African American rhetoric.

To do this, I have examined four pieces that have Afrocentricity as their core, as well as one that does not.

ELLA FORBES, RHETORIC OF RESISTANCE IN THE MID-19TH CENTURY

Whites wanted blacks to be seen as docile, but they were not, they were demanding.

Constant themes are: resistance, redemptive violence, and achievement of manhood.

Manhood = courage, self-determination, expression of civil rights, defense of self-esteem.

Difference between redemptive self-defense violence and the violence of whites, which was oppressive, not self-defense, offensive.

Organizations were founded to promote these values and to represent two points of view.

Garrison – moral suasion, not violence.

Garnet – resistance and redemptive violence.

Frederick Douglass was divided, but then switched to a more pro-resistance approach.

Examples of rhetoric are in the reading.

Pp. 168-169: Why whites prefer quiet resistance and fear redemptive violence.

WALKER, EXAMINING JOHNNIE COCHRAN’S CLOSING AT THE O.J. SIMPSON TRIAL

As an African American speaking to a largely African American jury, it is quite appropriate to use an Afrocentric method to examine this.

Factors at work:

1. Rhythm

2. Stylin’, way in which verbal and non-verbal cues are demonstrated to achieve a desired effect.

3. Narrative style.

4. Call and response.

5. Rappin’, an engaging lyrical presentation enwrapped in a natural conversation, it involves a distinctive personal flair.

6. Signifyin’, in which a speaker humorously puts down, talks about, needles some part of the listening audience.

Examples:

See article

Justification: p. 261

SHAUNTAE BROWN-WHITE, Emanuel Cleaver II

Double consciousness, in the words of W. E. B. Dubois:

“One ever feels his twines, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreonciled strivings.”

This is specifically true for African Americans in public life, where they have to speak to two audiences, black and white, on different occasions and often at the same time. How does one do that? And when one speaks to just one of those audiences, how does one adapt a change, to avoid the problem of speaking untruthfulness, and violating the tenets of Kemetic rhetoric?

Emanuel Cleaver had been a successful pastor, and then ran for office and became Mayor of KC. He was recognized for his gifted speaking ability. He served two four-year terms and was prevented by term limits from running again. He left office with a 71% approval rating.

Afrocentric theory:

Is culturally specific

BUT does not neglect the entire human family. All are important.

Liberation of all is important to the Afrocentric rhetorician.

It is also rhetoric of reconciliation, to reach out to those of all origins, it must transcend barriers.

The study contends that Cleaver’s rhetoric fulfilled these functions of AFROCENTRIC DISCOURSE while at the same time transcending barriers.

Three points in this study:

1. Afrocentric rhetoric can transcend cultural barriers

2. African American speakers can maintain their cultural integrity while appeal to those outside of his or her culture

3. Emanuel Cleaver is true to his African rhetoric roots no mater who his audience is.

25 texts of Cleaver speeches were used. 12 sermons and 13 political speeches. Transcriptions were created. There was minimal editing and the precise words that Cleaver spoke are in the transcript.

Three themes of interest to Afrocentric rhetorical scholars were clear:

1. Liberation: social justice and the exercise of agency and responsibility. Care and concern for everyone, Jewish audiences, Hispanics, etc.

2. Principle of community. We must not separate the I and the WE. Collective achievement is more important than individual achievement. Pride, selfishness and ingratitude are characteristics he opposes. People may be failures because they succeed, forgetting how they got there. Reconciling opposing views about Bill Clinton’s welfare policies and about Hilary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village. He calls on his personal experience to tell his story and prove what he is saying.

3. Relational ethics. This is a standard of conduct one should use to govern relationships with others. These include compassion, humility, gratitude and respect for the community. Many of these interrelate with #2. He indicts people who are cold, cold hearted, insensitive and self-absorbed. He has similar messages in a sermon in his church and in trying to defuse a police brutality situation against black citizens.

Cleaver succeeds in being legitimately African in his roots, while at the same time relating successfully to others, using Afrocentric themes.

FELICIA MIYAKAWA, 5% RAPPERS

Black nationalism is a historical theme in African American rhetoric. The notion is that there needs to be a black nation, an African nation for those taken from the homeland, or a new black nation here in North America.

It is a theme that comes back again and again, from the middle of the 19th century to Marcus Garvey and now into the ‘90’s and beyond.

Rap music is one example of this. “Conscious” rap uses Black Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Islamic doctrine.

Black nationalism has always been posed as a rhetoric to teach and inspire other African Americans to do the right things. It has consistently been an outreach and a teaching, a consciousness raising effort.

The 5% Nation rap movement hopes to educate African Americans into spiritual self-knowledge and awareness.

Content features:

Pan Africans – the fates of all African descended people are linked together.

Race pride and race solidarity. We stick together or we are going nowhere. There is a religious bent to this as well.

Afrocentric worldview that places African descendants at the center of history.

Many miss these teachings:

Many miss them totally.

Many hear them but cannot decode them.

Many decode them for their own purposes.

But the rap lyrics of today are based in African American traditions of the past. You understand them better when you know that.

CHARLES LARSON, TRUST ESTABLISHING FUNCTION OF THE RHETORIC OF BLACK POWER

This comes from a 1972 reader produced by Arthur L. Smith, who later changed his name to Molefi Keti Asante. It was selected and edited by him in his pre-Afrocentricity days. So, it does control for some variables there.

Larson takes the concept of trust from the work of interpersonal scholar Kim Giffin, someone I studied with and was one of my references. Trust is seen as being able to predict how people will act and what will happen. You can trust Malcolm X to resist oppression, for example. You can also trust Black Power advocates to do the same. By being able to predict what they will do, it helps whites understand what is going on and to take the rhetoric seriously but in a responsible way.

That is it. Whiles can now understand it better.

There are a number of problems with this approach:

1. This rhetoric was probably not constructed with that in mind. Stokely Carmichael did not conceive of his discourse because he wanted whites to understand. It may have had this effect, but I doubt the intention. I can’t be sure, but it is my belief.

2. There is no indication that this is how African descendants think of trust, but an imported notion from broader white society.

3. So what? What does it mean? It means that they want justice and will act to get it. What kind of keen insight is that? Anyone could have told you that. Chinese readers could have told you that. Why is it necessary to dress it up in white interpersonal communications theory so that we can understand it?

4. Perhaps because Eurocentric rhetorical scholars could not understand it on a scholarly level, or not tolerate it on a scholarly level, unless it was couched in their terms, brought to them on a plate of white scholarship.

When we look at Afrocentric investigations of Black Power we will see a lot more than can be discovered.

So, in conclusion:

1. We see how afrocentrict rhetorical theory can be applied to works of discourse.

2. We see history, language characteristics, and values and approaches used, just like the lists of rhetorical markers we have been examining.

3. We see how the rhetoric has been opened up for a fuller understanding.

4. We see how a purely Eurocentric focus does not.

Hopefully this will give you some guidelines for your papers.

Afrocentric Rhetorical Theory, Part 2

2010-02-03T10:35:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

Afrrocentric Rhetorical Theory Part 2

VOCABULARY

ONTOLOGY:

What it is to be a human, our theory of what human beings are. Organisms, spiritual, animals, computers, etc.

EPISTEMOLOGY

The theory of knowledge – data, problem solving, practical, spiritual, genetic, instinct, intuition.

METATHEORY

Metatheory is culturalized epistemology.

Metatheory is defined AS A FORMULATED PARADIGM THAT OUTLINES HOW A GIVEN SET OF THEORIES SHOULD BE STRUCTURED.

Mary John Smith:

The term metatheory refers to the beliefs about the nature of theory. Thus, metatheoretical assumptions address the types of theoretical explanations that are appropriate to human communication. Consistent with the hierarchically interrelated nature of paradigms, a researcher’s ontological and epistemological views will largely determine the sorts of theoretical explanations he or she deems suitable.

CULTURE AND RHETORIC

Every culture has its own unique perspective on rhetoric, the warrior in the struggle for human liberation is powerless without the armor of cultural consciousness.

Afrocentricity is a direct counter narrative to the most obvious and hegemonic grand narrative presupposing that all that is not of Europe is not of worth. “Classical” rhetoric is reserved for Greek and Roman rhetorical theories.

Chinese, Native American and African are examples.

Afrocentricity is one step in the demythologization of “classical” rhetoric.

It is a lot more than just classical speech acts.

BASIS OF AFROCENTRICITY

Assumptions underlying it:

1. Consciousness determines being

2. Ontology is communal

3. Epistemology validates reality by combining historical knowledge with intuitions

Afrocentric worldview:

1. Interconnectedness of all things – circularity, rejects the bi-polar of Marcuse: something is because of what it is not.

2. Collective identity. Reject the I-other distinction, because responsible to the same community, pairs that travel together.

3. Consequential morality. Speakers are judged by how they moved the audience, responsible for the impact of the communication, not so much the intent.

4. Oneness of body, mind, spirit. Western medicine is a contrast. Rhetoric can effect all three.

5. Spirituality. Spiritual focus to rhetoric, whether in a church spiritual, a civil rights speech, a ceremony for t=ancestors, or prayer for future generations.

6. Time. Timing and rhythm is important. Context is important. History is important.

Magara Principle:

Comes from the Bantu tradition. Magara is a system of operations where spirit force and material force are united in the production of life and meaning. It can be life strengthening or life weakening.

It helps us understand persuasion from an African perspective that is completely in tune with modern European understanding of persuasive processes. We do not “change” opinions, we “move” them through persuasion and its depiction of spirit and reality.

Ntu is the universal life force that represents itself in patterns and rhythms. It is fundamental to living. Let us illustrate in civil rights rhetoric.

1. Nomo operates within the context of ntu to engender magara within and across rhetorical communities. The generative power of speeches from the civil rights movement had a rhythm that catches people’s attention and strengthens their acceptance of full participation.

2. Nommodic rhetorical behaviors are evident in strategies and behaviors of particular communicators and other participants in rhetorical communities. Civil rights leaders actively used words to change the world. “Language is the last weapon left to the powerless.” Zora Neale Hurston.

3. Magara effects are observable in a rhetorical community’s responsiveness to rhetorical strategies and behaviors over time. People are strengthened or weakened towards ideas over time. Begin to accept full African American participation.

4. Rhetoric, as proscribed by ntu, is the evidence of rhythmic patterns urging shared meanings within and across rhetorical communities. “I have a dream.”

NOMMODIC RHETORICAL BEHAVIORS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN DISCOURSE, OFTEN IGNORED IN EUROCENTRIC RHETORICAL APPROACHES

1. Rhythm as a frame of mentality. Language and the flow of speech. Pauses, modulation of pitch, rate, loudness and other paralinguistic attributes reflect the important of rhythm. Much more of a focus in African American rhetoric.

2. Stylin’ out as a quality of oration. Mannerisms are used to influence the audience: gestures, posture, bodily movement, facial expressiveness, and other extra verbal behaviors. They communicate visual messages.

3. Soundin’ as verbal artifact. Vocal mannerisms that focus similarly to stylin’ out. The way you say certain words. Johnnie Cochran.

4. Lyrical approach to language. Used poetic language, insert poetic elements, rhyming is an example. Up with hope, down the dope.

5. Preference for improvisational delivery. Roll with the crowd. No totally set text. Take advantage of the situation as it evolves. Like jazz.

6. Call and response participation. Give the audience space to participate, to express themselves. Speaker gives a call, and the audience responds. Much more likely to be influenced by something they participate in.

7. Reliance on mythoforms. There are standard stories we use to understand our lives and our reality, as well as the past and the future. They should be shared and accepted forms.

8. Use of indirection. Circuitous approach to an issue. In a European style we state a claim and then follow it with logic and reasoning that demands acceptance of that claim. In African tradition, you view a thing from various angles before landing at a point to be made. This is the “stalking” of an issue. Malcolm X.

9. Repetition for intensification. Repeat essential ideas until saturation is reached. I have a dream. I am somebody. The clarity of a point is enhanced each time.

IS THERE AN AFRICAN WORLDVIEW?

Worldview vs. view of the world. Many European thinkers seem to embrace a worldview that would be consistent, such as Carl Jung. Chief Fela Sowande. As well, European theorists like Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have produced important work on the relationship of language to thinking, knowledge, power, discipline and the reproduction of systems of domination. Ivan Illich has spoken about the power of formal language to restrict modes of thought to ways preferred by those in power.

While theorizing about African rhetorical approaches should not be privileged to Europeans using European tools, thus we should not necessarily privilege Africans analyzing rhetoric using African tools. Sowande suggests that we need a global worldview that embraces and empowers all, and that integration of an Afrocentric approach will be essential to this, just as European approaches must not be universally rejected. Work by McPhail and Greeson on these issues has been largely invisible in the conflict of Afro vs. Euro.

The power of the Afrocentric perspective might be that it is integrative and inclusive as opposed to hegemonic. McPhail argues that we need to seek “dialogic coherence” as a capacity to integrate diverse conceptions of reality, culture and identity.

THE REALIST/SCIENTIFIC WORLDVIEW AND HOW IT FAILS US (Wright)

1. Objectivist ontology. Reality consists of objects or entities with fixed properties and relations, which re amenable to observation and description. NOT: We impose on what we observe what we know. Anthropologists impose their social order on those observed, we see what we know. Snow.

2. Essentialism. All entities have essential properties which make the thing what it is, and without which it would not be the thing that it is. Other properties are purely accidental. NOT: This creates a bi-polar structure, male or female, white or black. Things may lack essential characteristics of a category and still be within that category. Our identification of essential categories is in many ways arbitrary. Bamboozled Wayans character.

3. Objectivist categorization. All the entities that share a given property form a necessary category. The set of essential properties constitute the conditions that define the category. NOT: Same. Our needs determine which categories we deem essential.

4. Objectivist knowledge. Knowledge consists in correctly conceptualizing, categorizing and articulating the identified objects and relations that constitute the real world. NOT: Knowledge is different for all. What are the standards for “correctly” categorizing? Again, we impose our own ideas on what we observe.

5. Language isomorphism. Language is an adequate instrument for the formulation and communication of knowledge. Properly used, language is isomorphic in expression with the world that exists external to language (it shares the same characteristics). Language reflects reality. NOT: Loosely true, but only in intention. Many important things have no acceptable language equivalent. Many important things cannot be expressed in words.

Touchstones to understanding different perspectives:

Who are you?

* Eurocentric: I think, therefore I am.

* Afrocentric: I am relating and related to, therefore I am.

What do you want?

* Eurocentric: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

* Afrocentric: Do what is right so that others may also do.

What does rhetoric do?

* Eurocentric: It represents thoughts and ideas

* Afrocentric: It generates and creates reality

CRITICISMS OF AFROCENTRIC THEORY

Criticisms of afrocentric rhetorical theory:

* Anti-white

* Hostile takeover

* Debased through its use – KFC, etc.

* All good things come from Africa

* Ignores cultural hybridization

* Does not discover issues of class

* Retrograde views of women and homosexuals

* Mystical essence of blackness

* Essentialist criticism. Singular perspective

STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS AS A METATHEORY (Jackson)

Strengths:

1. Historically grounded and conditional

2. Culturally particular, contextual

3. Demarginalizes African descendants and recenters them as agents in human interaction

Weaknesses:

1. Does not deal with the element of economics as a liberation metatheory

2. It is not a full theory: understand, predict and control

3. Can be misunderstood as being essentialist and hegemonic due to over enthusiastic proponents.

Malcolm X - Speech to the Grass Roots

2010-02-03T10:29:00.000-08:00

Today we are going to look at a Malcolm X speech to try to see elements of African rhetorical techniques.

From http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=1145

Message to Grassroots
Image via Wikipedia

Malcolm X
October 10, 1963
We want to have just an off—the—cuff chat between you and me —— us. We want to talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand. We all agree tonight, all of the speakers have agreed, that America has a very serious problem. Not only does America have a very serious problem, but our people have a very serious problem. America’s problem is us. We’re her problem. The only reason she has a problem is she doesn’t want us here. And every time you look at yourself, be you black, brown, red, or yellow —— a so—called Negro —— you represent a person who poses such a serious problem for America because you’re not wanted. Once you face this as a fact, then you can start plotting a course that will make you appear intelligent, instead of unintelligent.
What you and I need to do is learn to forget our differences. When we come together, we don’t come together as Baptists or Methodists. You don’t catch hell ’cause you’re a Baptist, and you don’t catch hell ’cause you’re a Methodist. You don’t catch hell ’cause you’re a Methodist or Baptist. You don’t catch hell because you’re a Democrat or a Republican. You don’t catch hell because you’re a Mason or an Elk. And you sure don’t catch hell ’cause you’re an American; ’cause if you was an American, you wouldn’t catch no hell. You catch hell ’cause you’re a black man. You catch hell, all of us catch hell, for the same reason.
So we are all black people, so—called Negroes, second—class citizens, ex—slaves. You are nothing but a [sic] ex—slave. You don’t like to be told that. But what else are you? You are ex—slaves. You didn’t come here on the "Mayflower." You came here on a slave ship —— in chains, like a horse, or a cow, or a chicken. And you were brought here by the people who came here on the "Mayflower." You were brought here by the so—called Pilgrims, or Founding Fathers. They were the ones who brought you here.
We have a common enemy. We have this in common: We have a common oppressor, a common exploiter, and a common discriminator. But once we all realize that we have this common enemy, then we unite on the basis of what we have in common. And what we have foremost in common is that enemy —— the white man. He’s an enemy to all of us. I know some of you all think that some of them aren’t enemies. Time will tell.
In Bandung back in, I think, 1954, was the first unity meeting in centuries of black people. And once you study what happened at the Bandung conference, and the results of the Bandung conference, it actually serves as a model for the same procedure you and I can use to get our problems solved. At Bandung all the nations came together. Their were dark nations from Africa and Asia. Some of them were Buddhists. Some of them were Muslim. Some of them were Christians. Some of them were Confucianists; some were atheists. Despite their religious differences, they came together. Some were communists; some were socialists; some were capitalists. Despite their economic and political differences, they came together. All of them were black, brown, red, or yellow.
The number—one thing that was not allowed to attend the Bandung conference was the white man. He couldn’t come. Once they excluded the white man, they found that they could get together. Once they kept him out, everybody else fell right in and fell in line. This is the thing that you and I have to understand. And these people who came together didn’t have nuclear weapons; they didn’t have jet planes; they didn’t have all of the heavy armaments that the white man has. But they had unity.
They were able to submerge their little petty differences and agree on one thing: That though one African came from Kenya and was being colonized by the Englishman, and another African came from the Congo and was being colonized by the Belgian, and another African came from Guinea and was being colonized by the French, and another came from Angola and was being colonized by the Portuguese. When they came to the Bandung conference, they looked at the Portuguese, and at the Frenchman, and at the Englishman, and at the other —— Dutchman —— and learned or realized that the one thing that all of them had in common: they were all from Europe, they were all Europeans, blond, blue—eyed and white—skinned. They began to recognize who their enemy was. The same man that was colonizing our people in Kenya was colonizing our people in the Congo. The same one in the Congo was colonizing our people in South Africa, and in Southern Rhodesia, and in Burma, and in India, and in Afghanistan, and in Pakistan. They realized all over the world where the dark man was being oppressed, he was being oppressed by the white man; where the dark man was being exploited, he was being exploited by the white man. So they got together under this basis —— that they had a common enemy.
And when you and I here in Detroit and in Michigan and in America who have been awakened today look around us, we too realize here in America we all have a common enemy, whether he’s in Georgia or Michigan, whether he’s in California or New York. He’s the same man: blue eyes and blond hair and pale skin —— same man. So what we have to do is what they did. They agreed to stop quarreling among themselves. Any little spat that they had, they’d settle it among themselves, go into a huddle —— don’t let the enemy know that you got [sic] a disagreement.
Instead of us airing our differences in public, we have to realize we’re all the same family. And when you have a family squabble, you don’t get out on the sidewalk. If you do, everybody calls you uncouth, unrefined, uncivilized, savage. If you don’t make it at home, you settle it at home; you get in the closet —— argue it out behind closed doors. And then when you come out on the street, you pose a common front, a united front. And this is what we need to do in the community, and in the city, and in the state. We need to stop airing our differences in front of the white man. Put the white man out of our meetings, number one, and then sit down and talk shop with each other. [That’s] all you gotta do.
I would like to make a few comments concerning the difference between the black revolution and the Negro revolution. There’s a difference. Are they both the same? And if they’re not, what is the difference? What is the difference between a black revolution and a Negro revolution? First, what is a revolution? Sometimes I’m inclined to believe that many of our people are using this word "revolution" loosely, without taking careful consideration [of] what this word actually means, and what its historic characteristics are. When you study the historic nature of revolutions, the motive of a revolution, the objective of a revolution, and the result of a revolution, and the methods used in a revolution, you may change words. You may devise another program. You may change your goal and you may change your mind.
Look at the American Revolution in 1776. That revolution was for what? For land. Why did they want land? Independence. How was it carried out? Bloodshed. Number one, it was based on land, the basis of independence. And the only way they could get it was bloodshed. The French Revolution —— what was it based on? The land—less against the landlord. What was it for? Land. How did they get it? Bloodshed. Was no love lost; was no compromise; was no negotiation. I’m telling you, you don’t know what a revolution is. ’Cause when you find out what it is, you’ll get back in the alley; you’ll get out of the way. The Russian Revolution —— what was it based on? Land. The land—less against the landlord. How did they bring it about? Bloodshed. You haven’t got a revolution that doesn’t involve bloodshed. And you’re afraid to bleed. I said, you’re afraid to bleed.
[As] long as the white man sent you to Korea, you bled. He sent you to Germany, you bled. He sent you to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese, you bled. You bleed for white people. But when it comes time to seeing your own churches being bombed and little black girls be murdered, you haven’t got no blood. You bleed when the white man says bleed; you bite when the white man says bite; and you bark when the white man says bark. I hate to say this about us, but it’s true. How are you going to be nonviolent in Mississippi, as violent as you were in Korea? How can you justify being nonviolent in Mississippi and Alabama, when your churches are being bombed, and your little girls are being murdered, and at the same time you’re going to violent with Hitler, and Tojo, and somebody else that you don’t even know?
If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it’s wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it’s wrong for America to draft us and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.
The Chinese Revolution —— they wanted land. They threw the British out, along with the Uncle Tom Chinese. Yeah, they did. They set a good example. When I was in prison, I read an article —— don’t be shocked when I say I was in prison. You’re still in prison. That’s what America means: prison. When I was in prison, I read an article in Life magazine showing a little Chinese girl, nine years old; her father was on his hands and knees and she was pulling the trigger ’cause he was an Uncle Tom Chinaman, When they had the revolution over there, they took a whole generation of Uncle Toms —— just wiped them out. And within ten years that little girl become [sic] a full—grown woman. No more Toms in China. And today it’s one of the toughest, roughest, most feared countries on this earth —— by the white man. ’Cause there are no Uncle Toms over there.
Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you’ve got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. And once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight. There’s been a revolution, a black revolution, going on in Africa. In Kenya, the Mau Mau were revolutionaries; they were the ones who made the word " Uhuru" [Kenyan word for "freedom"]. They were the ones who brought it to the fore.The Mau Mau, they were revolutionaries. They believed in scorched earth. They knocked everything aside that got in their way, and their revolution also was based on land, a desire for land. In Algeria, the northern part of Africa, a revolution took place. The Algerians were revolutionists; they wanted land. France offered to let them be integrated into France. They told France: to hell with France. They wanted some land, not some France. And they engaged in a bloody battle.
So I cite these various revolutions, brothers and sisters, to show you —— you don’t have a peaceful revolution. You don’t have a turn—the—other—cheek revolution. There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. [The] only kind of revolution that’s nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution based on loving your enemy is the Negro revolution. The only revolution in which the goal is a desegregated lunch counter, a desegregated theater, a desegregated park, and a desegregated public toilet; you can sit down next to white folks on the toilet. That’s no revolution. Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.
The white man knows what a revolution is. He knows that the black revolution is world—wide in scope and in nature. The black revolution is sweeping Asia, sweeping Africa, is rearing its head in Latin America. The Cuban Revolution —— that’s a revolution. They overturned the system. Revolution is in Asia. Revolution is in Africa. And the white man is screaming because he sees revolution in Latin America. How do you think he’ll react to you when you learn what a real revolution is? You don’t know what a revolution is. If you did, you wouldn’t use that word.
A revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on the wall, saying, "I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me." No, you need a revolution. Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms, as Reverend Cleage was pointing out beautifully, singing "We Shall Overcome"? Just tell me. You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing; you’re too busy swinging. It’s based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation. These Negroes aren’t asking for no nation. They’re trying to crawl back on the plantation.
When you want a nation, that’s called nationalism. When the white man became involved in a revolution in this country against England, what was it for? He wanted this land so he could set up another white nation. That’s white nationalism. The American Revolution was white nationalism. The French Revolution was white nationalism. The Russian Revolution too —— yes, it was —— white nationalism. You don’t think so? Why [do] you think Khrushchev and Mao can’t get their heads together? White nationalism. All the revolutions that’s going on in Asia and Africa today are based on what? Black nationalism. A revolutionary is a black nationalist. He wants a nation. I was reading some beautiful words by Reverend Cleage, pointing out why he couldn’t get together with someone else here in the city because all of them were afraid of being identified with black nationalism. If you’re afraid of black nationalism, you’re afraid of revolution. And if you love revolution, you love black nationalism.
To understand this, you have to go back to what [the] young brother here referred to as the house Negro and the field Negro —— back during slavery. There was two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negroes — they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good ’cause they ate his food —— what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near the master; and they loved their master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master’s house quicker than the master would. The house Negro, if the master said, "We got a good house here," the house Negro would say, "Yeah, we got a good house here." Whenever the master said "we," he said "we." That’s how you can tell a house Negro.
If the master’s house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, "What’s the matter, boss, we sick?" We sick! He identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and said, "Let’s run away, let’s escape, let’s separate," the house Negro would look at you and say, "Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?" That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a "house nigger." And that’s what we call him today, because we’ve still got some house niggers running around here.
This modern house Negro loves his master. He wants to live near him. He’ll pay three times as much as the house is worth just to live near his master, and then brag about "I’m the only Negro out here." "I’m the only one on my job." "I’m the only one in this school." You’re nothing but a house Negro. And if someone comes to you right now and says, "Let’s separate," you say the same thing that the house Negro said on the plantation. "What you mean, separate? From America? This good white man? Where you going to get a better job than you get here?" I mean, this is what you say. "I ain’t left nothing in Africa," that’s what you say. Why, you left your mind in Africa.
On that same plantation, there was the field Negro. The field Negro —— those were the masses. There were always more Negroes in the field than there was Negroes in the house. The Negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. In the house they ate high up on the hog. The Negro in the field didn’t get nothing but what was left of the insides of the hog. They call ’em "chitt’lin’" nowadays. In those days they called them what they were: guts. That’s what you were —— a gut—eater. And some of you all still gut—eaters.
The field Negro was beaten from morning to night. He lived in a shack, in a hut; He wore old, castoff clothes. He hated his master. I say he hated his master. He was intelligent. That house Negro loved his master. But that field Negro —— remember, they were in the majority, and they hated the master. When the house caught on fire, he didn’t try and put it out; that field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze. When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he’d die. If someone come [sic] to the field Negro and said, "Let’s separate, let’s run," he didn’t say "Where we going?" He’d say, "Any place is better than here." You’ve got field Negroes in America today. I’m a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man’s house on fire, you don’t hear these little Negroes talking about "our government is in trouble." They say, "The government is in trouble." Imagine a Negro: "Our government"! I even heard one say "our astronauts." They won’t even let him near the plant —— and "our astronauts"! "Our Navy" —— that’s a Negro that’s out of his mind. That’s a Negro that’s out of his mind.
Just as the slavemaster of that day used Tom, the house Negro, to keep the field Negroes in check, the same old slavemaster today has Negroes who are nothing but modern Uncle Toms, 20th century Uncle Toms, to keep you and me in check, keep us under control, keep us passive and peaceful and nonviolent. That’s Tom making you nonviolent. It’s like when you go to the dentist, and the man’s going to take your tooth. You’re going to fight him when he starts pulling. So he squirts some stuff in your jaw called novocaine, to make you think they’re not doing anything to you. So you sit there and ’cause you’ve got all of that novocaine in your jaw, you suffer peacefully. Blood running all down your jaw, and you don’t know what’s happening. ’Cause someone has taught you to suffer —— peacefully.
The white man do the same thing to you in the street, when he want [sic] to put knots on your head and take advantage of you and don’t have to be afraid of your fighting back. To keep you from fighting back, he gets these old religious Uncle Toms to teach you and me, just like novocaine, suffer peacefully. Don’t stop suffering —— just suffer peacefully. As Reverend Cleage pointed out, "Let your blood flow In the streets." This is a shame. And you know he’s a Christian preacher. If it’s a shame to him, you know what it is to me.
There’s nothing in our book, the Quran —— you call it "Ko—ran" —— that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That’s a good religion. In fact, that’s that old—time religion. That’s the one that Ma and Pa used to talk about: an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, and a head for a head, and a life for a life: That’s a good religion. And doesn’t nobody resent that kind of religion being taught but a wolf, who intends to make you his meal.
This is the way it is with the white man in America. He’s a wolf and you’re sheep. Any time a shepherd, a pastor, teach [sic] you and me not to run from the white man and, at the same time, teach [sic] us not to fight the white man, he’s a traitor to you and me. Don’t lay down our life all by itself. No, preserve your life. it’s the best thing you got. And if you got to give it up, let it be even—steven.
The slavemaster took Tom and dressed him well, and fed him well, and even gave him a little education —— a little education; gave him a long coat and a top hat and made all the other slaves look up to him. Then he used Tom to control them. The same strategy that was used in those days is used today, by the same white man. He takes a Negro, a so—called Negro, and make [sic] him prominent, build [sic] him up, publicize [sic] him, make [sic] him a celebrity. And then he becomes a spokesman for Negroes —— and a Negro leader.
I would like to just mention just one other thing else quickly, and that is the method that the white man uses, how the white man uses these "big guns," or Negro leaders, against the black revolution. They are not a part of the black revolution. They’re used against the black revolution.
When Martin Luther King failed to desegregate Albany, Georgia, the civil—rights struggle in America reached its low point. King became bankrupt almost, as a leader. Plus, even financially, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was in financial trouble; plus it was in trouble, period, with the people when they failed to desegregate Albany, Georgia. Other Negro civil—rights leaders of so—called national stature became fallen idols. As they became fallen idols, began to lose their prestige and influence, local Negro leaders began to stir up the masses. In Cambridge, Maryland, Gloria Richardson; in Danville, Virginia, and other parts of the country, local leaders began to stir up our people at the grassroots level. This was never done by these Negroes, whom you recognize, of national stature. They controlled you, but they never incited you or excited you. They controlled you; they contained you; they kept you on the plantation.
As soon as King failed in Birmingham, Negroes took to the streets. King got out and went out to California to a big rally and raised about —— I don’t know how many thousands of dollars. [He] come [sic] to Detroit and had a march and raised some more thousands of dollars. And recall, right after that [Roy] Wilkins attacked King, accused King and the CORE [Congress Of Racial Equality] of starting trouble everywhere and then making the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] get them out of jail and spend a lot of money; and then they accused King and CORE of raising all the money and not paying it back. This happened; I’ve got it in documented evidence in the newspaper. Roy started attacking King, and King started attacking Roy, and Farmer started attacking both of them. And as these Negroes of national stature began to attack each other, they began to lose their control of the Negro masses.
And Negroes was [sic] out there in the streets. They was [sic] talking about [how] we was [sic] going to march on Washington. By the way, right at that time Birmingham had exploded, and the Negroes in Birmingham —— remember, they also exploded. They began to stab the crackers in the back and bust them up ’side their head —— yes, they did. That’s when Kennedy sent in the troops, down in Birmingham. So, and right after that, Kennedy got on the television and said "this is a moral issue." That’s when he said he was going to put out a civil—rights bill. And when he mentioned civil—rights bill and the Southern crackers started talking about [how] they were going to boycott or filibuster it, then the Negroes started talking —— about what? We’re going to march on Washington, march on the Senate, march on the White House, march on the Congress, and tie it up, bring it to a halt; don’t let the government proceed. They even said they was [sic] going out to the airport and lay down on the runway and don’t let no airplanes land. I’m telling you what they said. That was revolution. That was revolution. That was the black revolution.
It was the grass roots out there in the street. [It] scared the white man to death, scared the white power structure in Washington, D. C. to death; I was there. When they found out that this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital, they called in Wilkins; they called in Randolph; they called in these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, "Call it off." Kennedy said, "Look, you all letting this thing go too far." And Old Tom said, "Boss, I can’t stop it, because I didn’t start it." I’m telling you what they said. They said, "I’m not even in it, much less at the head of it." They said, "These Negroes are doing things on their own. They’re running ahead of us." And that old shrewd fox, he said, "Well If you all aren’t in it, I’ll put you in it. I’ll put you at the head of it. I’ll endorse it. I’ll welcome it. I’ll help it. I’ll join it."
A matter of hours went by. They had a meeting at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City. The Carlyle Hotel is owned by the Kennedy family; that’s the hotel Kennedy spent the night at, two nights ago; [it] belongs to his family. A philanthropic society headed by a white man named Stephen Currier called all the top civil—rights leaders together at the Carlyle Hotel. And he told them that, "By you all fighting each other, you are destroying the civil—rights movement. And since you’re fighting over money from white liberals, let us set up what is known as the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership. Let’s form this council, and all the civil—rights organizations will belong to it, and we’ll use it for fund—raising purposes." Let me show you how tricky the white man is. And as soon as they got it formed, they elected Whitney Young as the chairman, and who [do] you think became the co—chairman? Stephen Currier, the white man, a millionaire. Powell was talking about it down at the Cobo [Hall] today. This is what he was talking about. Powell knows it happened. Randolph knows it happened. Wilkins knows it happened. King knows it happened. Everyone of that so—called Big Six —— they know what happened.
Once they formed it, with the white man over it, he promised them and gave them $800,000 to split up between the Big Six; and told them that after the march was over they’d give them $700,000 more. A million and a half dollars —— split up between leaders that you’ve been following, going to jail for, crying crocodile tears for. And they’re nothing but Frank James and Jesse James and the what—do—you—call—’em brothers.
[As] soon as they got the setup organized, the white man made available to them top public relations experts; opened the news media across the country at their disposal; and then they begin [sic] to project these Big Six as the leaders of the march. Originally, they weren’t even in the march. You was [sic ] talking this march talk on Hastings Street —— Is Hastings Street still here? —— on Hasting Street. You was [sic] talking the march talk on Lenox Avenue, and out on —— What you call it? —— Fillmore Street, and Central Avenue, and 32nd Street and 63rd Street. That’s where the march talk was being talked. But the white man put the Big Six [at the] head of it; made them the march. They became the march. They took it over. And the first move they made after they took it over, they invited Walter Reuther, a white man; they invited a priest, a rabbi, and an old white preacher. Yes, an old white preacher. The same white element that put Kennedy in power —— labor, the Catholics, the Jews, and liberal Protestants; [the] same clique that put Kennedy in power, joined the march on Washington.
It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What you do? You integrate it with cream; you make it weak. If you pour too much cream in, you won’t even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it’ll put you to sleep. This is what they did with the march on Washington. They joined it. They didn’t integrate it; they infiltrated it. They joined it, became a part of it, took it over. And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. They ceased to be angry. They ceased to be hot. They ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all. You had one right here in Detroit —— I saw it on television —— with clowns leading it, white clowns and black clowns. I know you don’t like what I’m saying, but I’m going to tell you anyway. ’Cause I can prove what I’m saying. If you think I’m telling you wrong, you bring me Martin Luther King and A. Philip Randolph and James Farmer and those other three, and see if they’ll deny it over a microphone.
No, it was a sellout. It was a takeover. When James Baldwin came in from Paris, they wouldn’t let him talk, ’cause they couldn’t make him go by the script. Burt Lancaster read the speech that Baldwin was supposed to make; they wouldn’t let Baldwin get up there, ’cause they know Baldwin’s liable to say anything. They controlled it so tight —— they told those Negroes what time to hit town, how to come, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn’t make; and then told them to get out town by sundown. And everyone of those Toms was out of town by sundown. Now I know you don’t like my saying this. But I can back it up. It was a circus, a performance that beat anything Hollywood could ever do, the performance of the year. Reuther and those other three devils should get a Academy Award for the best actors ’cause they acted like they really loved Negroes and fooled a whole lot of Negroes. And the six Negro leaders should get an award too, for the best supporting cast.

Molefi Kete Asante Background Information

2010-01-28T01:40:00.000-08:00

From http://asante.net/biography/

Dr. Molefi Kete Asante is Professor, Department of African American Studies at Temple University. Considered by his peers to be one of the most distinguished contemporary scholars, Asante has published 70 books, among the most recent are Maulana Karenga: An Intellectual Portrait, An Afrocentric Manifesto, Encyclopedia of African Religion, co-edited with Ama Mazama, The History of Africa: The Quest for Eternal Harmony, Cheikh Anta Diop: An Intellectual Portrait, Handbook of Black Studies, co-edited with Maulana Karenga, Encyclopedia of Black Studies, co-edited with Ama Mazama, Race, Rhetoric, and Identity: The Architecton of Soul, Erasing Racism: The Survival of the American Nation, Ancient Egyptian Philosophers, Scattered to the Wind, Custom and Culture of Egypt, and 100 Greatest African Americans. The second edition of his high school text, African American History: Journey of Liberation, 2nd Edition, is used in more than 400 schools throughout North America. The comprehensive Encyclopedia of African Religion, co-edited with Ama Mazama, will be published by Sage Publications in December 2008.
Asante has been recognized as one of the ten most widely cited African Americans. In the 1990s, Black Issues in Higher Education recognized him as one of the most influential leaders in the decade. Molefi Kete Asante graduated from Oklahoma Christian College in l964. He entered Pepperdine soon afterwards and Asante completed his M.A. at Pepperdine University in l965. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA at the age of 26 in l968 and was appointed a full professor at the age of 30 at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He chaired the Communication Department at SUNY-Buffalo from l973-1980. He worked in Zimbabwe as a trainer of journalists from l980 to l982. In the Fall of l984 Dr. Asante became chair of the African American Studies Program at Temple University where he created the first Ph.D. Program in African American Studies in 1987. He has directed more than 140 Ph.D. dissertations. He has written more than 400 articles and essays for journals, books and magazines and is the founder of the theory of Afrocentricity.
Asante was born in Valdosta, Ga., one of sixteen children. He is a poet, dramatist, and a painter. His work on African culture and philosophy and African American education has been cited by journals such as the Matices, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Communication, American Scholar, Daedalus, Western Journal of Black Studies, and Africaological Perspectives. The Utne Reader called him one of the “100 Leading Thinkers” in America. In 2001, Transition Magazine said “Asante may be the most important professor in Black America.” He has appeared on Nightline, Nighttalk, BET, Macnell Lehrer News Hour, Today Show, the Tony Brown Show, Night Watch, Like It Is and 60 Minutes and more than one hundred local and international television shows. He has appeared in several movies including 500 Years Later, The Faces of Evil, and The Black Candle. In 2002 he received the distinguished Douglas Ehninger Award for Rhetorical Scholarship from the National Communication Association. The African Union cited him as one of the twelve top scholars of African descent when it invited him to give one of the keynote addresses at the Conference of Intellectuals of Africa and the Diaspora in Dakar in 2004. He was inducted into the Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent at the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University in 2004. Dr. Asante holds more than 100 awards for scholarship and teaching including the Fulbright, honorary doctorates from three universities, and is a guest professor at Zhejiang University.
In 1995 he was made a traditional king, Nana Okru Asante Peasah, Kyidomhene (Chee dom heni) of Tafo, Akyem, Ghana. Dr. Asante has been or is presently a consultant for a dozen school districts. He is the Chair of the United States Commission for FESMAN III to be held in Dakar, Senegal in 2011. He is the father of the filmmaker and writer, M. K. Asante, Jr., who teaches creative writing at Morgan State University. Asante was elected in September, 2009, by the Council of African Intellectuals as the Chair for the Diaspora Intellectuals in support of the United States of Africa. Molefi Kete Asante believes it is not enough to know, one must act to humanize the world.

Lecture - Introduction to African Rhetorical Theory Part 1

2010-01-27T17:48:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

Today I dedicated the first lecture of my African American Rhetoric class to my colleague Robert Branham, the one who wrote the Malcom X article as well as the editor of the leading reader on African American rhetoric. When he died, of prostate cancer, younger than me, smarter than me, funnier than me, I thanked him for being my friend since we were college debate opponents.

I had done some African American projects with him, and I promised that I would not let my discovery of the African American voice in public messages (but especially in debate) be neglected, but promised (along with Bill Newman of Emory) to continue this search and discovery. This is my own limited contribution to the effort, but I will try to do better as the semester goes along and beyond.

This one is for you, Bob. And for you, Neil.

Here is my lecture for today, given to my students:

INTRODUCTION TO AFRICAN AMERICAN RHETORICAL THEORY

Investigating concepts from Karenga, Alkebulan and Garner

Western rhetoric has been recently dominated by:

Consumerist approach to rhetoric pressed into the service of vulgar persuasion, advertisement, seduction and sales.

It has abandoned the classical Aristotelian rhetoric of deliberation and action in the interest of the polis, but has also ignored and denied contributions from other cultural traditions.

In this African conception of rhetoric it is a practice of communal deliberation, discourse and action oriented towards what is good for the community and for the world. This essence of community is both expressed in the goal of the rhetoric but also in the practice of the rhetoric. It is designed to help bring good into the world.

The Odu Ifa of Yoruba land claims: “Humans are divinely chosen to bring good into the world,” that is their mission and communication is the way that they do that. They are uniquely situated among living creatures to do this.

This is not to replace but to contrast and add to classical European and Greek approaches to rhetoric. Often this enterprise uses Kawaida philosophy, the consolidation of enduring African theory and practice in rhetoric.

Kawaida invites us to ask what Africa has to offer to the understanding of human communication in the interest of benefiting all humanity. We should engage in ancient and modern traditions, written and practiced, oral and other forms. It has traditionally been concerned with building community, affirming human dignity and enhancing the life of the people. More recently, it has been a rhetoric that concerns itself with struggles for liberation in the political, economic and cultural senses as well as a rhetoric of resistance.

It is not just about “tradition” in the way we usually mean it, but also in terms of Location, the continual reference to context and centeredness. It is about history as well as tradition.

It emphasizes communal discourse, deliberation and action. It is a rhetoric of resistance, formed in the crucible of struggle. It is not just about African people, but also about all of humanity. It is the rhetoric of reaffirmation, for African peoples as well as all of those who are not considered fully human. It is also a rhetoric of possibility, about what we can do that is new as well as what is traditional.

NOMMO

The historical cultural triumphs of ancient Egypt (Kemet) stands as one of the main modal periods for Africa. It was the first and one of the most developed societies in the world. It has been clouded over by European jealousy and attempts at outright theft.

• It was African, not European.

• It was not a huge slave society, free people who volunteered their work built the pyramids. Europeans needed it to be “slave” because of what they had done with slavery.

• It was the basis for much of so-called “western” civilization. The great works of law, medicine, and rhetoric began there, not in Greece thousands of years later. Hippocrates admits in his text that he is a servant to the great Kemetic healer Imhotep.

While the historic tragedy that was slavery and its results tried to erase these traditions, it could not be erased. African rhetorical traditions reappeared during the resistance of the 19th and 20th centuries, and especially in the rhetoric of the 1960’s, both “civil disobedience” and “by any means necessary.”

Nommo is the creative power of the word. While conceptually rooted in the rhetorical teachings of classical Kemet, the word itself comes from the traditions of the Dogon people of central Africa. The creator spirit sends Nommo to the world in the form of speech to assist humans in the forWard movement of history and the reorganization of the world. It is through the word that weaving, forging, cultivating, building family and community and making the world better, bringing good into the world. Nommo is the unity of water, earth and fire, and the unity between male and female.

It was not until the 20th century that western rhetorical theory began to fully understand the generative power of symbols, that they create a reality, that they shape our experience, as opposed to the more traditional view that they are just tools that we use to “get our way.” The rhetorical basis of Nommo puts African rhetorical theory ahead of Greece, Rome and Renaissance Europe in this way.

As Karenga puts it (p.8):

It is this sacred, indispensible, and creative character of the word, as an inherent and instrumental power to call into being, to mold, to bear infinite meanings, and to forge a world we all want and deserve to live in, that seizes the hearts and minds of the African American creative community and becomes a fundamental framework for developing, doing, and understanding rhetorical practice – both its oral and literary forms.

ASANTE

African American rhetorical scholar Molefi Kete Asante is largely responsible for this rebirth of traditional African rhetorical theories. His major early themes included:

• Africans brought a sophisticated oral style to the western hemisphere

• Africans brought with them a different rhetoric, not just a concern with influence and ends

• African American rhetorical tradition retained and further developed the concept of nommo, African Americans understand the transforming power of vocal expression.

• Because African Americans were denied reading and writing they learned to rely on the spoken word.

• The enslavement experience stands astride all discourse like colossus, whereas the discourse might be about discrimination or voting rights, but the slave experience is at its basis.

ANCIENT KEMETIC (EGYPT)

Kemetic rhetorical studies pre-date similar Greek activities. The Book of Ptahhotep offers guidelines and principles for good speech. For Kemetics, eloquence and good speech is a unity not just of techniques that are successful but also that lead to what is good for the community. The three standard Greek modes (logos, ethos, pathos) are brought together, so that if techniques are successful but lead to bad for the community, then it is not real eloquence.

Speech is conceived as an ethical activity, because it is a tremendous power that can be used for good or evil. For them, a “good” speech is not just effective, but is also ethically and morally good.

Maat is the Kemetic standard for what is “morally good.” In application to speech, Maat means that it is truthful speech. Truthful speech creates its own ethos and is in and of itself persuasive. This stands in contract to the artifice and dissimulation that is so important in modern western rhetoric that has been put to the service of seduction and sales.

The Book of Ptahhotep is also the major source for the understanding of Maat as an overall moral concept. The central focus of the book is a narrative about the calls petitions for justice from a normal peasant named Khaunanup. He makes a number of appeals to figures in power and these demonstrate the speech that is both “moral” and “effective.” The point here is that rhetorical eloquence is not necessarily that used by leaders and important people, but by all people – peasants, servants (and men and women) can be rhetorically eloquent, and are expected to be so. It is no surprise that the model orator in this Kemetic text is a farmer.

Humanity is seen as a spiritual force. In African rhetoric and African American rhetoric there is no line of demarcation between the spiritual and the secular. The speaker calls all of us to go to a higher place and improve ourselves not just as physical but as spiritual beings. Communication is the way that moral and spiritual ideas are transmitted.

If the greatest spiritual law is the law of love, then great communication events are examples of this. Asante has said that there are no speeches by hatemongers that have gone down in history as great speeches. There will never be any, because the overwhelming judgment of history is a moral one and the speaker who imperils the forward march of human dignity will not live in the minds of the future. It is the champion of righteousness who is the true victor in rhetorical traditions.

The African culture tends to be a very oral one, and thus rhetoric is paramount in its importance for the human spirit, for the benefit of human conditions and in the achievement of personal and social harmony.

African and African American rhetoric does not compartmentalize rhetoric, poetry, literature, prose and drama. All these forms are interwoven into a discourse designed to achieve important goals and ends.

ARISTOTLE RECONSIDERED

Aristotle might be a bit unfamiliar with modern rhetoric. He was clear that rhetoric had to have an ethical dimension, that truthful arguments were always stronger, and that rhetoric needs to serve the ethical dimensions of politics.

Today we see the dominance of technique in discourse, of the use of rhetoric to control, manipulate in a way that can be mapped out in advance. The fault may not lie with the extended vision of Aristotle, but with the basic definition of rhetoric, “the faculty for observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” This focus on persuasion through any available means has become the central tenet of current rhetorical practice.

Kemetic texts called “sebyt” are instruction manuals for how officials and others in important positions should conduct themselves, but it also contains advice on how communication should take place in family life and community life. The Kemetics viewed the unity of private and public lifer as important.

Fox has identified five important canons of ancient Kemetic rhetoric:

• Silence (self control)

• Good timing

• Restraint

• Fluency

• Truthfulness

The sebyt of Ptahhotep is the oldest complete text in the world. It is a set of instructions to his son about how to engage in public service.

Karenga indicates four ethical concerns of classical African rhetoric:

ONE: DIGNITY AND RIGHTS OF THE HUMAN PERSON

The ethical concern for the dignity of every human person is a fundamental aspect of rhetorical practice.

Be not arrogant because of your knowledge. Rather converse with the unlearned as well as the wise. For the limit of an art has not been reached and no artist has acquired full mastery of an art. Good speech is more hidden then emeralds and yet it is found among the women who gather at the grindstone.

In an example, Pharaoh is cautioned not to use people as experiments or for unnecessary reasons, in this case with a convicted prisoner. Each person is part of the “flock of God” and must be respected.

The petitions presented by Khunanup are all for common people, who should be respected just as much as the most famous. His appeals for justice are based on Maat, the equal dignity and rights that all should have. Maat needs to be in its rightful place, as a foundation for political, judicial and social practice.

Leadership is seshemet, as in “working out” or “proving” a problem in mathematics. This must be done through consultation and communication. The speaker is called on to not just speak to but also to speak with those concerned so that a proper conclusion can be reached. Thus, Kemetic rhetoric tends to be consultation as opposed to unidirectional.

TWO: WELL BEING AND FLOURISHING OF THE COMMUNITY

In the text Count Harkhuf explains why he feels he is worthy of respect. He locates himself in his community and his family, and then speaks about the way he did good for the people, especially the vulnerable. “I gave bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked and brought the boatless to land.”

Iti, the treasurer, says, “I am a worthy citizen who acts with his arm. I am a great pillar of the Theban district, a man of standing in the Southland.”

Lady Tahabet defines herself as not just a worthy daughter, but as a worthy citizen, when she says, “I was just and did not show partiality. I gave bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty and clothes to the naked. I was open-handed to everyone. I was honored by my father, praised by my mother, kind to my brothers and sisters and one who is united in heart with the people of her city.”

This is different from many of our western conceptions. In the west, “I think, therefore I am.” In a Kemetic sense, “I am related and relate to others, therefore I am.” I discover myself through being with, being of and being for others. Others listening are not merely audience, but co-agents and co-participants in creating and sustaining the just society and the good world.

THREE: THE INTEGRITY AND VALUE OF THE ENVIRONMENT

Moral obligation is related to all parts of life. As one has obligations to other people, one also has obligations to all of life – to nature. Maat requires worthiness before the Creator, nature and the people. If there is damage and degradation, there is an obligation to restore and repair. This obligation implies:

• To raise up and rebuild that which is in ruins

• To repair that which is damaged

• Te rejoin that which is severed

• To replenish that which is lacking

• To strengthen that which is weakened

• To set right that which is wrong

• To make flourish that which is insecure and underdeveloped

FOUR: RECIPROCAL SOLIDARITY AND COOPERATION OF HUMANITY

We have obligations to each other and we must cooperate through our communication. This is in conflict with the artificial eloquence, deceptive discourse and instrumental reasoning that may serve some but not all of humanity. Likewise, this questions the nature of the closed public square, saying that human communicative exchange should include all of humanity.

The Book of Ptathhotep, there are examples:

“He who does justice for all the people, he is truly the prime minister.”

Leaders and speakers must stand for and speak for all marginalized and oppressed people as well as those in the mainstream who are privileged.

Doing good leads to solidarity. “A good deed is remembered,” and also, “do to the doer that he may also do.” When Maat is a part of rhetoric, it leads to two kinds of solidarity:

• Solidarity of action

• Solidarity of understanding

These are both achieved through communication.

Lady Ta-Aset says: “Doing good is not difficult; just speaking good is a monument for one who does it. For those who do good for others are actually doing it for themselves.”

In the Dogon text, it is written that, “Doing good worldwide is the best example of character.”

AESTHETICS

For African people, language is art. Art is not for the purpose of artistic expression and creativity, but is always functional. In the west we separate art from life, but this is not the African conception. It is not the product of the artistic activity, but the process that is important. That process is always a part of living.

Art has the same ethical obligations as rhetoric. Rhetoric is an art.

Call and response is one example of aesthetics in rhetoric. One does not just listen to, but responds to and participates in discourse. The discourse is a living presence and the audience responds and becomes a part of it.

In African rhetorical tradition and specifically in African American rhetoric the audience engages in this way. In church, in meetings, in political speeches. The rhetorical event becomes a communal one.

Aristotle posed the concept of the enthymeme, an incomplete argument completed by the audience. This is effective because it allows audience participation that increased acceptance. The entirety of African American rhetoric already knows this. Knowles-Borishade puts it this way:

Responders (audience) are the community who come to participate in the speech event. They are secondary creators in the event, containing among them a vital part of the message. It is they who either sanction of reject the message – the word – based on the perceived morality and vision of the Caller (rhetor) and the relevance of the message. The notion of community or group sanction is the basis of the African call and response tradition.

We will examine many other aesthetic elements of African American rhetoric in the weeks to come.

STRIPPED OF AFRICANNESS

What signals a real African presence in a discourse? Some might be African American in appearance but not in substance. Danny Glover in Switchback or Morgan freeman in Shawshank Redemption. They are African American when they express a sensitivity to themes relevant to African Americans. There is no African American way to order a grilled cheese sandwich, but there is an African American way to discuss racial discrimination or white privilege, because it carries with it an energy and a perspective. A single phone call may offer multiple indicators of an African American presence: tone, rhythm, enunciation and metaphorical use.

ORALITY

The Harlem Renaissance writers were able to take elements of traditional African culture and apply them to modern African American culture through the legitimation of folklore and oral histories to written literature. An oral tradition achieves not only contact with the past but also is flexible in dealing with changing present and future.

Orality tends to be:

• Immediate and direct.

• Speaker and audience are one

• It is common and everyday, not isolated and elevated

• It is spontaneous and not rehearsed.

• It is improvised for the purpose and situation.

• It allows individuality to flourish in a group context.

Traditional rhetoric positions rationality and logic at the center.

African rhetoric positions ethics, critical thinking and personal logic at its core.

Traditional rhetoric tends to be direct and explicit.

African rhetoric sees this as crude and unimaginative. The African tradition talks around something in an exploratory way, and allows the audience to make its own decision instead of following orders that are justified logically. When discourse in daily life is too direct it creates problems in relationships. The more indirect methods allow people to structure the ideas in ways they wish and allow for consideration without an open confrontation.

African Americans are more likely to use language as a form of play. Of course, there is always a relationship between what is “play” and what is “real,” and that relationship allows the exploration of issues in a more indirect way as mentioned before. Play is entertainment, but it is also a symbolic exchange of each other.

Signifying is an example. There is an element of indirection, but the apparent significance of the statement may be different from the real significance. Shared knowledge helps the listener interpret the message properly. We call it “reading between the lines,” bur in African American rhetoric it is all important and almost ever-present. We do this through shared knowledge, and shared knowledge is cultural knowledge. Shared knowledge in the African American culture consists of those patterns of communication, behaviors, worldviews and philosophy as understood by the members of that community.

We often say that meaning is in people not in words. Yet, in an oral culture the meaning is often found in the cultural setting than in strictly an individual. Meanings may be ultimately in people, but in the oral tradition meanings are tempered by the text, the context and the pretext.

CONCLUSION

These concepts have been expressed through African American rhetoric, where the elements of African rhetorical theory can be seen. Frederick Douglass, said:

Great is the miracle of human speech – by it nations are enlightened and reformed; by it the cause of justice and liberty is defended; by it evils are exposed, ignorance dispelled, the path to duty made plain, and by it those who live today, are put into the possession of wisdom of ages gone by.

I thought you might want to see what I was doing today.

Best wishes,

Tuna

Alfred C. Snider aka Tuna

Edwin Lawrence Professor of Forensics

University of Vermont

Huber House, 475 Main Street, UVM, Burlington, VT 05405 USA

Lawrence Debate Union http://debate.uvm.edu/debateblog/LDU/

Global Debate Blog http://globaldebateblog.blogspot.com

Debate Central http://debate.uvm.edu

802-656-0097 office telephone

802-656-4275 office fax

Week One - John Henrik Clarke

2010-01-14T07:33:00.000-08:00

John Henrik Clarke - A Great and Mighty Walk
1:34:41
This video chronicles the life and times of the noted African-American historian, scholar and Pan-African activist John Henrik Clarke (1915-1998). Both a biography of Clarke himself and an overview of 5,000 years of African history, the film offers a provocative look at the past through the eyes of a leading proponent of an Afrocentric view of history. From ancient Egypt and Africa’s other great empires, Clarke moves through Mediterranean borrowings, the Atlantic slave trade, European colonization, the development of the Pan-African movement, and present-day African-American history.

Course Syllabus

2010-01-10T08:03:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

SPCH 096: AFRICAN AMERICAN RHETORIC

SPRING 2010 – PROF. ALFRED C. SNIDER

108 LAFAYETTE, 4:05-7 PM WEDNESDAYS

SCOPE OF THE COURSE

This course will utilize the practical tools of rhetorical criticism to examine, attempt to understand and analyze the advocacy and discourse of African Americans throughout USA history. The methods utilized will include classical and contemporary African rhetorical theories as well as classical and contemporary theories of rhetorical analysis better known to European and North American scholars. Students will choose specific speakers and engage in a rhetorical criticism of some element of the discourse of that speaker.

READINGS

A list of readings will be supplied. They will be disseminated to students based on procedures that are harmonious with current copyright regulations.

Most readings can be found on a password protected website. http://www.uvm.edu/~asnider/africanamerican

Videos and other materials will be at the class blog, which is http://africanamericanrhetoric.blogspot.com/

EDUCATIONAL METHOD

This class will utilize three primary educational methods.

1. A series of lectures given by the instructor. These will be reasonably brief and will highlight both material in the readings as well as new material.

2. The class will attempt to stage on-going discussions about class material. The lectures will often be punctuated with spots for class discussion to follow up on relevant ideas. Students are held responsible for contributing to these discussions.

3. Students will also be directly exposed to videotaped segments of discourse for discussion and study.

4, Students will engage in the act of rhetorical criticism of a specific piece of discourse of their choosing.

Education is incorrectly seen as a process where the "teacher" imparts unquestioned "knowledge" to the docile and merely recipient "students." To be meaningful in an educational sense students and teachers must together pursue answers to questions which neither may have a full advanced understanding of. In our discussions it is essential that students engage in a process of critical analysis, questioning points made by he instructor as well as presenting alternative viewpoints. There are few, if any, absolute truths in this field, and student input is necessary for all of us to understand the "probable truths" which we may take away from this experience as useful knowledge. It is the duty of each person in this class to take part as a critical, active participant, and to learn about rhetoric through direct experience and concerted inquiry.

ASSIGNMENTS:

CLASS PARTICIPATION: Students are required and expected to take part in the mutual education function of the class. This implies that students attend class, are familiar with the material assigned for that day, and volunteer opinions and perceptions about the content and process of class discussions. 10% of grade.

TESTS: Students are required to take three tests given during the semester. The tests will utilize a variety of formats and will cover the information in the readings, lectures and videos. 20% of grade for each test.

CRITICISM PAPER: Students will pick one of the main speakers in African American rhetoric and one specific piece of discourse by that speaker to make the focus of their paper. They will engage in a rhetorical criticism of that discourse using methods covered in the course. Students should be aware that the correct use of language in written work is assumed, expected, and required. Written work not meeting college-level writing standards will be returned without a grade. 30% of grade.

Students should be aware that the academic honesty policy of UVM is in force.

EVALUATION

Students will be evaluated on the basis of earned points only. No extra credit work is available. Each assignment has a given point value (adding up to 100) of which students will be awarded portions. Final grades will be awarded on the basis of natural breaks in the distribution of scores.

CONCLUSION

Please feel free to meet with me outside of class, either during my office hours or by appointment. I am often on campus, mostly in my office. This is a tentative class syllabus.

My calendar is at

http://debate.uvm.edu/tunacalendar.html

Alfred C. Snider "Tuna"

Professor

Office: 475 Main Street 656-0097

Home: 18 Clark #3 238-8345

alfred.snider@uvm.edu

How This Course Came To Be

2010-01-03T06:41:00.000-08:00

Image by New York Public Library via Flickr

As a person who has taught various courses in rhetorical analysis and criticism over by 35 years as an educator, I am always interested in teaching myself new things. I regularly teach a course in presidential campaign rhetoric, I often teach a course in the rhetorical approaches of Ivan Illich, I have several times taught a course in the rhetoric of television evangelism, during the Clinton impeachment days I taught a course in the rhetoric of impeachment, and I have a number of times taught a popular course entitled the rhetoric of Reggae music.

All of these interests have one thing in common besides rhetoric. I am struck by the power and force of these rhetorical genres, yet I do not immediately understand how and why they operate. Whether it is trying to understand why people send billions to television evangelists, why voters endorse one message over another or why a certain Reggae song has a profound effect on audiences, I sense that there is something that merits and deserves a deeper analysis in order to understand the discourse better. My desire to learn is stimulated and I take it from there.

I have been aware for quite some time that African American rhetoric is exciting, thrilling and often quite different from the normal discourse of white folks. I sensed this, but I desired to investigate it on a deeper level in order to understand why and how. Through the support of my colleagues and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont I was encouraged to design and implement this course.

In the Spring of 2010 I will be offering it for the first time. Although I have done considerable research and self-education on this subject, I fully intend to be learning along with my students as we embark on this journey into a fascinating rhetorical landscape that has considerable ability to help us understand the world we live in and where it came from.

I invite you to come along with us.