I know a lot of great actors and Henry G. Sanders is one of them. I have watched him perform for over 50 years from “The Killer of Sheep” to “Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman” to “Selma” and beyond. His most recent and notable role has been the character “Prosper Denton” on Ava DuVernay’s “QUEEN SUGAR.”
Yesterday I was relieved when Henry, who lives in Altadena, California, texted me to let me know that he and his family were okay, but “We lost the house.”
It hurt to think of this gracious man, at age 82, having to rebuild. And contrary to popular belief most actors are not rich. The stories about how Henry and his wife have taken in so many struggling young people are too numerous to mention in a single blog. His generosity with his time to me will never be forgotten.
In this current political climate in the United States, there is something that every member of the Left/Resistance needs to remember: People that only respect violence and who cheer violence will typically have to be dealt with violently. They don’t respond to reason or kindness or common sense. You will not write them away or blog them away. Calling them names won’t work either.
You’re going to have to accept that they are monsters. You don’t reason with monsters anymore than you reason with poisonous snakes. This is what you need to remember about MAGA supporters and those nuts that stormed the capital on January 6, 2021.
I am not going to teach a full history lesson in this blog. Yet, it would help you to review the French Revolution (1789-1799) where crops failed and the economy tanked while the nobility and the clergy paid almost no taxes as commoners bore the brunt of taxation and starvation while Louis XVI kept spending on himself.
You also would do well to study France’s Maquis (“the underbrush”) which was its underground guerilla movement that fought against the Nazis during World War II. In some instances they were successful; in others they were not. Yet, you better recognize that American insularity and that feeling we tend to embrace that says, “We will be okay as long as we protest and go through the courts,” will not necessarily save us.
In the next four years we may have no other choice but to get our hands dirty. Even worse, our obsession with the internet, and the attention we receive from it, may eventually work against us. Some strategies do not need publicity. We need more face-to-face private conversations whenever possible.
So, here’s a few good articles about the Maquis, including its African and Afro-Muslim participants, and the current research historians are still working on.
When I started to hear negative commentary about Kamala Harris’ racial and ethnic background, I started reevaluating how “White Supremacy” works again.
Many people are completely unaware that when the Greek explorer Herodotus named the continent “Αἰθιοπία” (romanized as “Aithiopía”), his definition included the continents of Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. Herodotus’ term literally means “Land of Burnt Faces.”
Those kinds of cross-cultural connections and collaborations do not help white supremacy to flourish which is why you rarely hear anything about them. The objective of white supremacy is to make certain that peoples of color look to white folk, and white men specifically, for acceptance, guidance, deliverance, and redemption, but not to each other. Sexism works exactly the same way. A man, not a woman, may rule you and grant you favor in some screwed up patriarchal world as sexists imagine it.
African-American scholar W. E. B. DuBois’ heir apparent Vijay Prashad noted that many Indian men arrived in the USA in the late 18th and 19th centuries, married Black American women and disappeared from most histories. Suraj Yengde, both in his books and in his portrayal of himself in Ava DuVernay’s masterpiece film “ORIGIN,” noted that we must find reconnections with each other. His research on Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar is fascinating.
Ambedkar was a Dalit, or as he was once called, an “Untouchable.” He wrote India’s constitution. He earned two doctorate degrees and when he came to the United States he wanted to meet his fellow American untouchables. So, he visited Harlem where the Black folks lived. (FYI: Martin Luther King, Jr. was introduced as a fellow “untouchable” when he visited India.)
This is exactly what Shyamala Gopolan-Harris did when she left India to go to school in the United States. She gravitated toward communities where she was less likely to be mistreated. So, she headed to Berkeley, California which was a hotbed of activism—there were Civil Rights protests, anti-Vietnam protests, the Free Speech Movement and the work of the Black Panther Party in nearby Oakland was the world that her daughter Kamala Harris grew up in.
I bring this up because we know so little about our early histories and connections. I don’t bring this up with any foolish idea that everyone is going to suddenly start singing “Kumbaya” and start getting along all the time. Yet, we know more about what Prashad accurately identified as white power structures that, during the late 20th century, deliberately created the myth that “Southeast Asians” were a model minority, a minority he emphasized that was designed as a weapon against Black Americans.
Felon 47 and his minions have lined up a small cadre of Southeast Asians to serve in his administration to do two things: 1) make the administration look less racist than it is and, 2) to also entice India, which now has a larger population than China, that its population is seen somehow as superior. South Africa did damned near the same thing during apartheid.
When Black Americans visited South Africa during its apartheid era, Black American visitors were given passes written in Afrikaans that translated into English as “Honorary White Person.”
Now, the fact that I personally know at least seven Southeast Asians who identify quite accurately as “Black,” does not matter. The fact that so many folks on the continents of Africa and Southeast Asia have near identical DNA doesn’t matter either. When I read the book “A Passage to India,” I noted that an Indian character in the book was described as a “little Black man.” It was the first time I ever saw such a description of anyone outside of a specifically African or African American context. My point, however, is much simpler.
We Black Americans can continue to roll our eyes at the brown guy wearing the turban at the local gas station and vice-versa OR we can recognize and identify our participation in upholding white supremacy while its foot remains situated on both our necks. Before you bother to tell me about the guy at the gas station that you don’t like, remember that he is an employee and all you are is someone pumping gas. White supremacy makes all of us its pawns.
If you are honest, you also remember that moment when you got bad service at a Black-owned business and thought to yourself that you got bad service because the business was Black-owned. The fact that there are, were, and will be folks who simply are not good at customer service regardless of their race or ethnicity or nationality did not enter your mind. That kind of thinking is white supremacy in action too.
Kamala Harris knows this better than anyone. She knows who she is and she didn’t need anyone to tell her who she is. The fact that anyone dared define her speaks not only to their arrogance, but also to their presumptions that they actually have such a right to do so.
She was perceived by some folks as a contradiction and by some folks as having split loyalties. The only thing that actually requires split loyalties is white supremacy. It cannot thrive or survive without its clear contradictions. Let me write that again—It cannot survive or thrive without its clear contradictions. It functions with the assistance of the people who it is designed to either oppress and/or control and/or regulate. Repeat that until you get it. So, no contradictions.
Dr. Suraj Yengde (as “himself”), Dr. Gaurav J. Pathania (as “Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar”) and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (as “Isabel Wilkerson”) in Ava DuVernay’s film “ORIGIN.”
I was nearing 12 years old when Barbara Lee’s mentor Shirley Chisholm ran for president. The young Barbara Lee was in college then and a single mother when she worked on Chisholm’s campaign. Kamala Harris was nearing 8 years old.
Shirley Chisholm knew that as a Black American woman with roots in the West Indies that she was not likely to win the nomination for president from the DemocraticParty.
Yet, Chisholm knew that if we Black Democrats stuck together we could put some real teeth in the Democratic Party platform that ultimately nominated George McGovern, who lost.
Black Congressmen like Walter Fauntroy and Ronald Dellums cut back room deals and ultimately sold Shirley Chisholm out in order to win and/or maintain favor with white men who ran the Democratic Party. Do not bother to be surprised.
When Black American men have access to white men with power, they rarely give up that access in order to stand with any Black woman…and ALL Black women know this by instinct and from experience.
Chisholm ultimately forgave Dellums’ betrayal; and then Dellums gave Barbara Lee an internship in his office which she parlayed into a successful congressional run for Dellums’ old district which was once California’s 9th, now the 12th District.
Much later, I remembered Congresswoman Lee as being the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) that voted against giving then-president George W. Bush the right to invade Iraq shortly after this country endured the tragedy of 9/11.
Lee knew, like most folks with any degree of sense, that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the terrorists that struck the Twin Towers on 9/11.
One of the ugliest confrontations I ever had with my then-Congressman John Lewis occurred not long after he, along with the rest of the CBC, voted to grant Bush the power to invade Iraq. I called Lewis a traitor to his face and accused him of violating every principle Martin Luther King, Jr. ever taught him.
“You didn’t even bother to ask for a vote on this!,” I said. I love/d the late John Lewis, but he and the rest of the CBC, were dead wrong for abdicating their duties as representatives in order to grant a sitting president the right to invade another country. The next time I saw him, we hugged. He was feeble. Soon after that last hug, he was gone.
I remember that Congresswoman Barbara Lee had to have extra security because she did not vote in favor of such an invasion in a climate where Americans wanted to feel like we were going after our real enemies.
Instead, Lee used her conscience and common sense, knowing full well that she would be re-elected to her district no matter how she voted. Just imagine if our representatives had enough of a spine to hold on to their principles and to the knowledge that their constituents are in their corner?
Back when Lee took this stand, I was working part-time at my alma mater Agnes Scott College. As the nation was bracing for the possibility of sending US Troops to Iraq, the Agnes Scott College community was having regular talks about the potential for war.
When a faculty member worried that we were heading to war and that there was nothing we could do, I just couldn’t stand that phrase “there’s nothing we can do.”
I said, “You can send a letter of support to California Congresswoman Barbara Lee.”
My late mother struggled with infertility for 13 years before I was born. She told me that not only did doctors test my father’s sperm, but that she had her Fallopian tubes blown out with hot water. Many times she was in so much pain from the treatments that she couldn’t bend down to tie her shoes.
When I was born, my parents were 3 and 4 months away from turning ages 40 and 41, respectively. Mama and Daddy decided on the name “Leslye” because it was gender-neutral and also because my father did not particularly care for the practice of men naming sons after themselves.
“A boy either has a reputation to live up to or one to live down,” Daddy used to say. Anyhow, my name, had I been born a boy, would have been “Leslye Charles Allen” which would have included only my father’s middle name.
My late mother discovered the spelling of “Leslye” in a Reader’s Digest article where a young woman with that name and spelling was being sent on a tour of Europe as her graduation present from her parents.
When Mama brought the name and spelling of “Leslye” up to her good friend Esther Flournoy, my Aunt Esther said, “Cooter (their nickname for each other), what will be the middle name if your baby is a girl?”
Mama told me that she honestly did not know. At that moment, Aunt Esther said, “I like names like ‘Faith,’ ‘Hope,’ and ‘Joy.’”
Mama tried all combinations of these names until she arrived with “Leslye Joy.”
The hilarious and thought provoking book “Children’s Letters to God,” first published in 1966, was the very first book given to me by someone other than my parents.
It was given to me by the woman responsible for my middle name. Most of my classmates from Saint Paul of the Cross Elementary School and Saint Joseph High School never knew my first name was “Leslye” until long after we graduated.
Yet, I have had college professors, most notably Dr. Waqas Khwaja, and those wonderful women who cooked and fed me while I was a student at Agnes Scott College, just simply start calling me by my middle name “Joy” as if they all automatically knew that my middle name was the one that had the most love and history behind it. I was and remain warmed by that.
Leslye Joy Allen 