As bad as things are in the USA—in particular, the killing of a young Black man named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri—what we Black Americans are enduring is “a cakewalk” by comparison to some of the tragedies that are currently taking place in India, parts of Africa, Iraq, Israel, and so many other places around the world. Yet, our current Black leadership has been conspicuously silent on so many of these international matters, including the excessive policies of Israel against an already displaced Palestinian people. Yet, Arab, Jewish, African, and African American women found enough of a unified voice to write a statement of solidarity with the Palestinian people. I wonder why they could do it, but not our elected officials. These women understand an important component of previous human rights struggles—including the Civil Rights and Freedom struggles that took place during the 1950s well into the 1970s in the United States—the international component.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X always placed Black American freedom struggles in an international context. If you do not believe me, then read or listen to Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grass Roots” and listen to him rattle off the names of those nations and peoples that too many of us frequently ignore. Listen to King speak poetically and prophetically against the Vietnam War. These are only a few examples, often scary examples. Yet, there are many others.
What happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri is going to resonate with other people in other parts of the world. When we lost Trayvon Martin, you found people across the globe putting on “hoodies” in solidarity. And, if it were not for the women of Nigeria taking full advantage of social media, most of us would never have known anything about the kidnapping of the Nigerian girls, who have still not been returned to their families. Yet, when was the last time you saw a massive movement of Black Americans speaking out against and lending assistance to anyone outside of the USA. Arguably, there has been no massive international activity on OUR part, at least not since the zenith of an internationally led movement that demanded that colleges and businesses divest from South Africa in protest of the country’s brutal and virulent social system known as apartheid, and that was in the late 1970s into the 1980s.
The question is when are we going to get our international legs back, and stop looking at what and who we are as if we are isolated in one country called the United States. Does it not matter that two teenage Indian girls were gang-raped, and then lynched just a few months ago in Bengal, India? Does it not matter that several hundred Nigerian girls were kidnapped and—sorry to say this—will probably never return to their families? Does it not matter that former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has stayed on top of the problem in Nigeria and spoken out about this problem of female trafficking in Nigeria and elsewhere, and more often than many Black American politicians and self-appointed pundits? You are damned right it matters.
I can count on one of my former English professors to regularly post articles and his own occasional eloquent outbursts on his page on Facebook about many of the atrocities that happen to women worldwide and, also what happens to Black Americans—He, however, was born in Pakistan. The Executive Director of Greenpeace International was born and raised in South Africa, and spent his teenage years in the anti-Apartheid movement. He regularly articulates how women’s oppression, the problems with the environment and human rights struggles are tied together. I knew something had become completely out-of-whack when the only men I could count on—with any real regularity—to lend their voices and support against sexism were men of color who were also NON-American. The difference is, they can and do connect the dots and see environmental problems, discrimination and the persecution of women, and battles to end racism and/or ethnic violence as connected problems in ways that so many Americans simply do not. Yet, a few Black Americans do connect the dots, but they are not part of what is traditional Black leadership, which is a good thing.
Ron Davis, the father of Jordan Davis—the Black teenage boy that was killed in Florida when a man shot into his vehicle over a quarrel about loud music—took his complaint about the senseless murders and expendability of young Black men to Geneva, Switzerland at the 85th annual meeting of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The talks in Geneva run from August 11 through August 29, 2014. This was a bold move by Mr. Davis, but proof positive that he was paying attention in the sixties and seventies when international opinion about the United States government’s slow response to discrimination and racial virulence damaged the USA’s image abroad. Both Mr. Davis and the women of all colors and nations who signed that Solidarity Pledge fully understand what Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to teach. We can hope that some citizens in Ferguson, Missouri are paying attention.
Now, thinking internationally or being concerned with tragedies or the well-being of people outside of the United States will not stop police officers from killing unarmed Black male teenagers. My interest and sadness over the senseless gang rape and lynching of two teenage girls in India several months ago will not stop the rape and abuse of women anywhere, neither will my continued anguish over the kidnapping of girls in Nigeria. Yet, to be a Black woman born and raised in the American South is to understand that racism and sexism come from all quarters of the country of my birth, and indeed all quarters of the world itself.
To fail to see the connections I have with peoples who may or may not speak my language or belong to the same racial and/or ethnic and/or gender group is to forget the real lessons of the Civil Rights Movement—that WE are not alone if WE will simply acknowledge that WE need allies, and international allies at that. Yet, WE will be alone if WE operate from the position that people in other parts of the world do not have anything to teach us. WE cannot afford to function from the position that because WE dwell in the United States that no one else’s problems or persecution matters as much as ours matter. If WE do, WE will have missed Martin and Malcolm’s most important lesson, namely that if WE labor alone, WE, and everybody else, will lose.
“If you plant it in the earth, give it just enough sunlight, just enough water, and just enough nurturing, it will yield something.” – Syble Wilson Allen Williams (1921 -2013)
Now, when I think of teaching, I think about my Mama’s gardens and the first time I read the quote by author Gail Godwin who said that, “Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.”
A while back, I did not exactly understand the connection between teaching and theatre or any connection to my Mama’s conceptualization of gardening. After all, was it not possible to be a gardener or agriculturalist without being an artist? Even further, when I thought of theatre or any performance art, I thought and continue to think of people trained to act, sing, dance (or all of the above), and who are on stage for the sole purpose of entertaining and enlightening a receptive audience.
The idea that a teacher and students were engaged in any kind of performance art escaped me until I stood in front of a classroom and gave a lecture without reading from any notes. My Mama, Syble Wilson Allen Williams, understood the performance element in teaching the first time she set foot in a classroom to teach.
Only after she died, however, did I begin to understand some other things about the “pure theatre” or the creativity of teaching that was not readily apparent to me when she was alive.
I remember how she would begin to count to ten in order to get her kindergarteners to take their seats. “One…Two…Three…” she would say slowly and deliberately. The objective was to have all of her students seated BEFORE she reached the number ten. They would scramble to their chairs, each one determined not to be the last child to make it to his or her seat.
Then there were Mama’s famous gold stars that she posted next to the names of those kids who ate all of their lunch—they were the fabulous members of the “Clean Plate Club.” Many children decided to sample a vegetable that they really did not want to eat in order to earn that gold star. Yet, she was at her most creative with her classroom gardens and her trips to the farm.
After Mama’s funeral service, our cousin James—who served as one of her pallbearers—told me that before her funeral began, four of her pallbearers were discussing their trips to farms and the gardens they helped to plant and tend when they were mere kindergarteners in her class.
Four of Mama’s pallbearers were her former kindergarten students. I remember when she made the switch from teaching third grade to kindergarten. I also recall her comments about children who grew up in the city. While she loved city life, she noted that children in cities rarely got much, if any, exposure to farm life.
Mama was born on a working farm in a tiny Georgia hamlet about forty minutes away by car from Atlanta. She lived there until she was about nine years old. Around her ninth birthday, her family migrated to Atlanta, as did so many Black rural families during and after the Great Depression. The beauty is that Mama’s appreciation for her agricultural roots ultimately became a wonderful lesson for her students.
Back in the 1970s when she started teaching kindergarten, she told me one day that too many of her students really did not know anything about where their food came from or the teamwork required to run a farm.
Eventually she located a nice man—whose name escapes me now—who had a small working farm in McDonough, Georgia complete with crops, chickens, pigs, and cows. I only remember him as a middle aged, brown-skinned man who seemed tickled to death that the work he did as a farmer had some intrinsic value to Mama and her young students.
Every year she taught kindergarten she included a trip to that farm in McDonough, Georgia so that “her children” could witness the interaction of farmer and crop and cows and chickens. The cows’ manure fertilized the soil that yielded the crops. It was all organic and interactive. Every year, she would have her five-year-olds plant a garden in their classroom.
She would gleefully remark how they would become mesmerized when they would see something that they had planted in the soil begin to grow. “Their eyes just light up at the first sight of the smallest bud,” she would say. For me, the strongest memory was her garden at our house and her household plants.
Each year she grew tomatoes, cabbage, collards, and squash on a strip of land in our backyard. I also recall one year she grew the hottest jalapeño peppers ever grown in the history of humankind—I remember it well; I ate one of those peppers and needed a couple of pitchers of ice water to cool the heat.
Then there was her endless sea of green plants that lined our porch and windowsills. She often noted that the tomatoes might not grow as big as you wished, but if you nurtured those seeds, you would still get tomatoes. This was her lesson to her kindergarteners and to me: you always get something back if you plant something and nurture it.
Mama’s gardens and farming adventures were lessons in sheer creativity. In these activities were a science lesson, another lesson that taught respect for animals’ contributions to our welfare and an appreciation for our natural environment, a lesson in how any one of us who had patience could nurture a plant from a seed or seedling to full bloom. Even further, when I think of how many people never want to revisit their childhoods, I am comforted.
Mama found beauty, resilience, and lifelong lessons in her own childhood, a childhood that she spent helping her parents and grandparents tend to plants and animals on the old family farm. Her students got a chance to share in a part of her upbringing.
On a nearly cloudless, sunny day in February of 2013, Mama had six pallbearers: one was a dear cousin, another was a family friend, and four were her former kindergarteners. These six dignified, hardworking, respectable, responsible, and well-educated Black men—all over the age of forty—donned white gloves, and hoisted Mama’s coffin and took her to her final place of rest in the soil—soil she respected.
Proudly, I watched them, as I am sure she did. And then I thought, “If you plant it in the earth, give it just enough sunlight, just enough water, and just enough nurturing, it will yield something.”
1. Do not spend one dime at anything owned or managed by Donald Trump. Trump is within his rights to dislike President Obama; he is within his rights to criticize President Obama’s policies. He should not be allowed, however, to disrespect the office of the president simply because the person who occupies that office is a person of African descent. He can call his behavior whatever he wants to call it, but if you are Black, you know exactly what Trump’s problem is. Do not spend your money with him or with any person or organization that does business with him. Here’s an extra history lesson on Donald Trump for you: When Trump filed for bankruptcy over a decade ago because his casinos lost money, he tried to blame federal and state laws that have little control over Native American casinos. Because Native American Nations are technically sovereign nations within the United States, states and the federal government have not exercised a high degree of regulation on these casinos when they are operated on lands owned by Native American Reservations. Trump voiced opposition to some states and the federal government’s lack of interference and regulation of Native American casinos because he wanted to monopolize the casino industry. What kind of a person would deny Native Americans—arguably the most oppressed group of people in the United States—a means of self-determination?
2. Boycott Florida. Keep your Black behinds off its beaches and out of its hotels. Stay out of Disneyland. Do not even buy Florida oranges and orange juice. Here’s another history lesson: In 1990 White Cubans in Miami and other Florida cities designated South African leader Nelson Mandela persona non grata because he dared praise Fidel Castro for supporting him when Mandela was fighting against an apartheid system that demoralized and murdered hundreds of thousands of South African Blacks. Do not misunderstand—White Cubans have the right to hate Fidel Castro. He stripped many of them and their ancestors of their property in the early days of the Cuban Revolution. Other individuals were imprisoned and brutalized. To diminish or disregard Castro’s persecution of them is not fair. However, many of these same White Cubans also persecuted and routinely discriminated against Afro-Cubans. Moreover, when any group of people suffer persecution—particularly as long and as virulently as Black South Africans—you would think that Mandela, a man wrongly imprisoned for 27 years, would receive some level of understanding and empathy from other persecuted individuals. Mandela did not receive that kind of consideration in Florida.
Florida has also had a lot of trouble with voting procedures. Remember the state needed federal and Supreme Court intervention to settle the 2000 presidential election. Florida is also the same state that spent much of 2012 trying to disenfranchise voters to the point where it angered so many voters that they came out in record numbers to vote in the presidential election. That number included entire communities of Latinx, African Americans, Jews, women, and etcetera. It also took the state three days to finish counting the votes.
This is also the state where in February 2012 Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Black boy, was killed walking home from a store, unarmed. We can grant George Zimmerman, his killer, the right to call the police and say that Martin looked suspicious. Yet, until he actually saw Martin do something, Zimmerman should have stayed in his car as the 911 Operator told him to do. Do you need me to keep going? Do not give Florida your money; and demand this boycott of Florida from all Black organizations, performance artists, politicians, clergy, you name it. We have earned the right to protect our interests.
3. Keep your money in your pocket and in your bank account as much as possible. Many of President Obama’s enemies think that WE Black folks only take handouts from the government rather than earning a combined $836 billion dollars a year working on a variety of jobs and in a variety of professions. So many of the President’s enemies do not know or believe that WE Black folks place a minimum of over $500 billion dollars (or more) back into the United States economy every year. Since so many folks assume WE contribute nothing, let us hold on to our money and spend it wisely and only with those businesses, corporations, and individuals that put something tangible back in our communities. If you want to know where our money goes, visit: Target Market Newsand read the best consumer and spending reports on Black Americans on the web.
4. Face the reality that we need to cut federal spending. Some social programs need a serious overhaul or elimination. For example, the Housing Voucher Program (formerly called “Section 8 housing”) demands that the people that qualify for such housing must have an income that is at least 50% less than the average income in the neighborhood where the house of their choice is located. Rental rates are based on the average rental rates in the neighborhood where the houses are located. Typically Housing voucher renters pay 30 per cent of that average rental rate, with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) paying the remaining 70 percent to the owner of the property. Occasionally renters’ portion of rents are raised should they begin to earn higher salaries. However, there is no time limit on how long an individual can remain in this kind of housing. There is no concrete incentive in this program for participants to seek higher-paying jobs and risk disqualification from participation in the program. Even worse, if property values suddenly go up in a neighborhood where some Housing Voucher renters live, these same renters have another risk: they might be priced out of the houses they currently rent and live in. Why continue to rent to a Housing Voucher Renter if you can acquire another renter that can afford the higher rents without the assistance of HUD? It is time to set some limits.
5. For that percentage of Black Americans who have problems with Latinos and other immigrants, remember that a considerable number of Latinos and other immigrants are also people with African ancestry (whether they admit it or not). While I have certainly met many folks who would rather die than highlight or admit any African ancestry, I have also met many more who freely acknowledge and embrace their African ancestry! Many of them have lived here in this country for a long time and many others who are recent arrivals are here to stay, so you would do well to build or continue building coalitions with them and find ways to work together.
6. Do not put up with racism, but do not hyperventilate about it either. Some White folks are not going to change. Stop wasting your time, efforts and energy trying to change them. And those White folks that you know that are always so nice to you, but who always try to look the other way when you or someone else brings up a racist incident; and when they can no longer ignore what happened they try to act like that kind of incident is so unusual—Be courteous to them, but keep them at arms length. No matter how seemingly innocuous and/or well-meaning and/or kind and/or generous they may be, any person or group of people that attempts to deny the obvious are part of the problem. It is not your job to teach them or fix them. No one can fix anything if one refuses to look at it for what it is.
7. Invest in Africa! Hell, the Chinese are already heavily invested and building in several developing African countries. You might as well join the effort.
8. Global Warming is not a joke; and we as a people contribute as much or more to the problem as anyone. Read everything you can from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) (I have been a member for 15 years). Study the reports on the household and cosmetic products you use at Environmental Working Group (EWG) Make sure you read their report “Pollution in Minority Newborns,” if you want to know how serious this is. Check out my old blog “Mercy, Mercy Me: Black, Clean and Green!” plugging a younger and progressive Black man who runs a business that offers products that help clean up the environment and save you money in the process.
9. Talk to people and listen to people who do some kind of work or express ideas that are different from the work you do and from the ideas you express and believe in. This is how new ideas are born and it is also the best way to find out what is truly going on with people you may someday have to rely on. I recently met a group of young academics that only socialized with each other. These same academics also wrote some of the most useless scholarly work I have ever read. I also have met many younger performance artists (35 and under) who do the same thing—they only interact with one another and still cannot figure out why no one comes to see the show! If you do not communicate with folks outside your profession and inadvertently imply that those other folks’ contributions are not as important as your own contributions, then you cannot expect them to follow you or support you. The current Republican Party and Mitt Romney’s failed presidential campaign provides a good lesson—They lost the election for a variety of reasons. Yet, they truly lost the bid for the presidency because they only talked to each other and they believed that their opinions were the only ones that mattered; everybody else had to have been wrong. Do not stay in the same kind of cocoon, that is unless you want to resemble the current Republican Party.
10. This line is for you to add your own personal goal. You know what you want to do. You know what you are capable of doing. Do it!
I am sure there is someone who saw the title of this blog and instantly thought of the late Marvin Gaye’s environmental anthem from 1971, “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology).” Well, this is not exactly about Marvin Gaye. Yet, music can trigger an entire series of memories. Music is as much a cultural and historical marker of the times in which we live and have lived through as anything else. However, I arrived at this title and this blog via a beautiful and talented woman named Freda Payne. If you recognize that name, then you probably remember her anti-Vietnam era song “Bring the Boys Home.” Freda sang “Bring the Boys Home” with a sense of urgency and longing that none of us who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s will ever forget. It is ironic, but no accident that Freda’s anti-war anthem and Marvin Gaye’s song bemoaning our poisoning of the environment were released in the same year. For those of you who are unfamiliar, you can do a quick Google or YouTube search and find all the information, beautiful music and pointed messages you need. Yet, this blog is not exactly about music.
Not long ago, I received a sweet and thoughtful message from Freda Payne, along with a request from her to tell folks about her son Gregory who is a partner with Clean Green Nation. Before I could even visit the website, I heard Freda’s song in my head, then I heard Marvin Gaye. These were songs from my childhood and adolescence. As the music played in my head, I looked up Clean Green Nation on the Internet. It specializes in environmentally sound and clean energy for your home, your business, and even your farm. I smiled as I clicked on one section of the website after another because one of the first things that struck me about the website was the same thing that struck me about Freda’s request.—Her request, like the website itself, was filled with a deep understanding about this nation’s need to reduce its dependence on foreign oil, and the need to reduce greenhouse gases so that everyone can breathe cleaner air. She is also a proud mother. Her son Gregory is one of a growing number of young Black Americans committed to this admirable and much needed goal.
I visited what has to be one of the very best websites and businesses for selling, installing, promoting, and explaining clean energy. The best part about what Gregory and Clean Green Nation are doing is that there is some item or service available there for every budget. Solar panels and wind turbines are available for homes and businesses. For under $20.00, you can purchase a variable flow showerhead that saves water; another nifty gadget that helps you to time and shorten your showers is available for $2.99. Importantly, Clean Green Nation has one of the best Learning Centers that I have ever seen. In clear language, visitors to the site find out exactly how solar and wind energy work. They learn about radiant barriers that keep heat out of a house in the summer and hold more heat in during the winter. A range of services and products are offered that will simultaneously save the customer money and help clean up the environment at the same time—I cannot stress the importance of these factors when it comes to marketing anything affiliated with that word “environment” to Black and other communities of color. There was a time when I would go to rallies and lectures about the environment and I could count the number of Black folks (including myself) in attendance on one hand.
The first time I told someone I was an environmentalist was over fifteen years ago. The man looked at me strangely, as I stood there with my cloth shopping bags. I went into one of my quick talks about how we should use “these bags” instead of the petroleum based plastic bags many stores continue to use. Once, I even got a manager at a local grocery store to start recycling these same petroleum based bags. However, for a long time there seemed to be a kind of disconnect about the whole concept of cleaning up the environment in many Black communities; and that is a shame because WE Black folks, and other peoples of color, are usually the first to suffer from environmental toxicity. It is no accident that toxic waste dumps are often located near or in poor communities, particularly poor Black communities. Yet, regardless of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, WE all bear responsibility and have the capacity to contribute to the fight to clean up the environment. I say this so that those folks who read this, who happen to be White or members of some other ethnic group, do not feel left out. My message in this blog, however, is deliberately directed at Black people because information about the environment has not always reached or been directed toward Black communities. This is where Clean Green Nation comes in.
While Gregory services the West Coast and West Hollywood specifically, anyone can order products and services from his website. Even more important, anyone can learn more about how to lower utility bills and help the environment! It is just that simple. I must add something important here: Gregory was not born when his mother sang that song that showed the human and personal costs to us as we lost one young man after another in the Vietnam War. The song was so potent that U. S. Armed Forces Radio banned it from its airwaves. Gregory was not born when Marvin Gaye sang a song with lyrics filled with sadness over the way we all had poisoned our natural environment. The tragedy is that both of these songs are still relevant some forty plus years later because the problems we were dealing with in 1971 are still with us today. I remember it well. Future generations do not so much need new songs as they need new songs with different themes. Now when I was a kid, James Brown taught us to chant, “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” Today I ask you to support a committed young man who drives a hybrid in a town that often prides itself on glamour; a young man trying to make an honest living and help clean up the planet at the same time. Say it with me now, “Let’s Be Black, Clean and Green.”
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Leslye Joy Allen 