Publish to Newswire
Add an EventFrom the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature
No Palestinian Called Me a Nigger
lorenzo komboa ervin's the rest of the news
NO PALESTINIAN CALLED ME A NIGGER! SUPPORT CHRIS GATEWOOD!
by Lorenzo komboa Ervin
Chris Gatewood is the outspoken leader of the Durham, North Carolina branch of the National Asociation Advancement of Colored Peoples. He recently made \"controversial\", though truthful and courageous remarks denouncing the United States government for planning military retaliation for the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks, and the use of Black males as cannon fodder and mercenaries in any front line attack.
At a September 15th monthly local NAACP meeting, he said that African Americans should not have to fight in any military action, and that a violent U.S. counterattack would be wrong. \"Black males can no longer be used as sacrificial lambs at the time of war,\" he said in his three-page statement.
\"Those black males who make it back home alive from war are likely to come home and be discriminated against by the [very] people whose businesses were headquartered in the World Trade Center, racially abused/profiled by an American police officer, killed on the streets in their crime-infested neighborhoods\", or harmed by Bush administration policies, he said.
He also said that the U.S. government has oppressed Africans, Middle Easterners, and other people of color worldwide. Because Bush was selected president by a \"right-wing Supreme Court\", he said, the attacks were *not* \"an attack on freedom\".
Media reports of the remarks sparked threatening phone calls to the NAACP offices, according to an NAACP officer, Anita Keith-Foust. It also caused NAACP national President, Kweisi Mfume, to denounce the remarks and to apparently silence him from making other such comments in the future, similar to the fashion former Nation of Islam spokesperson Malcolm X was silenced by NOI leader Elijah Muhammad in 1963, when he spoke out about the assassination of President John Kennedy, calling it a case of \"chickens coming home to roost\"...
What should we make of all this? These comments by Gatewood certainly echoed my own, and I am sure those of many other Black people. We are supposed to, as Malcolm X put it over 35 years ago...bark when the white man says bark, and bite when the white man says bite!\" He was referring to our being used as troops all over the world. Now we are supposed to fight and die for a racist corrupt government in yet another imperialist war, when it is the USA which has clearly brought on this attack. We are supposed to fight for a country where we still have limted social, economic and political rights, and where we are still subject to death by any racist cop or citizen, where there is widespread poverty, mass imprisonment of the youth, and massive unemployment concentrated in the Black community. The obvious question is what the hell are we fighting for? To avenge America? To mourn America? Why, we don\'t owe this country anything, and what we do owe them, they don\'t want! They have killed and enslaved generations of our people, down to the present day. They have yet to pay reparations for those crimes they have committed against our people; they refuse to even discuss the matter at the recent World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.
Our fight is *in America* and *with America* for full human rights and liberation, not in Kabul, Pakistan, Khandahar, islamabad, Algiers, or hundreds of places we know nothing about and have no beef with their people. It is this country which is *our* enemy, and which is depriving us of our human rights. This hypocritical country, which is bleeding us dry and subjecting us to continued oppression and servitude in numerous forms. We ain\'t got this situation straight yet, and now we are supposed to go galavanting across the globe to fight for this white racist government. Colin Powell may be a dog for Bush, but it don\'t mean the rest of us have to be!
Chris Gatewood just said something that all of us should be saying. We need an *independent political stance* away from military intervention, and to say *no you cannot just use Black kids for the next Vietnam.* However, shamefully, most of the Left, Liberal, and Black organizations (even so-called \"radical\", or \"nationalist\" groups) did not follow the lead of this courageous man, instead they mourned with America.
Well, our time of mourning has to be tempered with the cold understand that we have to look out for *our interest*, not the Pentagon\'s or Wall Street\'s. We regret the thousands of deaths of people who died in the process at the WTC, but we know it is Washington\'s fault this happened. We also know that if this happened in the Middle East by Israel or the US Army, hardly anybody in this country would say anything.
Clearly this country is not the \"peace-loving, innocent country\" that George W. Bush claims it is. This is the biggest gun runner in the world, and the biggest instigator of wars. This is a government of thieves and enslavers, and they have dominated the peoples of color of the world with military and economic force ever since its creation. We cannot jump like dogs to defend these people.
It is not the people in the Middle East or Africa who call us nigger, and keep us oppressed, it is the white government in America. If anyone on the face of the earth attacks the slavemaster\'s plantation, I ain\'t going to be standing out front growling to stop them from setting his house on fire. That his problem, and you reap what you sow. The real terrorists are in the Pentagon, the executive boardrooms on Wall Street, and in the White House, where they have always been. Hell, the United States secret intelligence services (CIA, military intelligence, DEA and others) created the Taliban as a government and Osama Bin Laden as a terrorist, if that is what he is. Do we now want to die and kill others over this cynical reality [?], don\'t be fooled by right-wing partiotism, which is nothing but American fascism.
So we should support Chris Gatewood, hold him up as an outspoken hero. We need to ask why all of the other Black and progressive organizations have not been as forceful in their comments, and we need to ask why they are not building an anti-war response to this military retaliation planned by Bush.
We need to all start to speak the truth to our people, and not curry favor for jobs or social approval. We need to do things which are considered unpopular in a hysterical climate, but have to be said and done nevertheless. George W. Bush is not our friend, Colin Powell is not our brother. They want to kill us off, either in war, in prison, or with a policeman\'s gun. We face genocide from this government, always have. Now we need to get organized to build a movement which can put forth a progressive agenda on how to use military spending, so that money that they want to squander on war can be used for schools, hospitals, and to rebuild the inner cities of this countries which look like bombed out cities already.
Whatever organization you belong to, start to push them to come out against the war and to actively campaign against war in the Middle East or anywhere else. We have got to get our kids to say \"hell no, we won\'t go!\" and \"no Viet Cong called me a Nigger\" just like they did during the Vietnam war of the 1960\'s.
by Lorenzo komboa Ervin
Chris Gatewood is the outspoken leader of the Durham, North Carolina branch of the National Asociation Advancement of Colored Peoples. He recently made \"controversial\", though truthful and courageous remarks denouncing the United States government for planning military retaliation for the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks, and the use of Black males as cannon fodder and mercenaries in any front line attack.
At a September 15th monthly local NAACP meeting, he said that African Americans should not have to fight in any military action, and that a violent U.S. counterattack would be wrong. \"Black males can no longer be used as sacrificial lambs at the time of war,\" he said in his three-page statement.
\"Those black males who make it back home alive from war are likely to come home and be discriminated against by the [very] people whose businesses were headquartered in the World Trade Center, racially abused/profiled by an American police officer, killed on the streets in their crime-infested neighborhoods\", or harmed by Bush administration policies, he said.
He also said that the U.S. government has oppressed Africans, Middle Easterners, and other people of color worldwide. Because Bush was selected president by a \"right-wing Supreme Court\", he said, the attacks were *not* \"an attack on freedom\".
Media reports of the remarks sparked threatening phone calls to the NAACP offices, according to an NAACP officer, Anita Keith-Foust. It also caused NAACP national President, Kweisi Mfume, to denounce the remarks and to apparently silence him from making other such comments in the future, similar to the fashion former Nation of Islam spokesperson Malcolm X was silenced by NOI leader Elijah Muhammad in 1963, when he spoke out about the assassination of President John Kennedy, calling it a case of \"chickens coming home to roost\"...
What should we make of all this? These comments by Gatewood certainly echoed my own, and I am sure those of many other Black people. We are supposed to, as Malcolm X put it over 35 years ago...bark when the white man says bark, and bite when the white man says bite!\" He was referring to our being used as troops all over the world. Now we are supposed to fight and die for a racist corrupt government in yet another imperialist war, when it is the USA which has clearly brought on this attack. We are supposed to fight for a country where we still have limted social, economic and political rights, and where we are still subject to death by any racist cop or citizen, where there is widespread poverty, mass imprisonment of the youth, and massive unemployment concentrated in the Black community. The obvious question is what the hell are we fighting for? To avenge America? To mourn America? Why, we don\'t owe this country anything, and what we do owe them, they don\'t want! They have killed and enslaved generations of our people, down to the present day. They have yet to pay reparations for those crimes they have committed against our people; they refuse to even discuss the matter at the recent World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.
Our fight is *in America* and *with America* for full human rights and liberation, not in Kabul, Pakistan, Khandahar, islamabad, Algiers, or hundreds of places we know nothing about and have no beef with their people. It is this country which is *our* enemy, and which is depriving us of our human rights. This hypocritical country, which is bleeding us dry and subjecting us to continued oppression and servitude in numerous forms. We ain\'t got this situation straight yet, and now we are supposed to go galavanting across the globe to fight for this white racist government. Colin Powell may be a dog for Bush, but it don\'t mean the rest of us have to be!
Chris Gatewood just said something that all of us should be saying. We need an *independent political stance* away from military intervention, and to say *no you cannot just use Black kids for the next Vietnam.* However, shamefully, most of the Left, Liberal, and Black organizations (even so-called \"radical\", or \"nationalist\" groups) did not follow the lead of this courageous man, instead they mourned with America.
Well, our time of mourning has to be tempered with the cold understand that we have to look out for *our interest*, not the Pentagon\'s or Wall Street\'s. We regret the thousands of deaths of people who died in the process at the WTC, but we know it is Washington\'s fault this happened. We also know that if this happened in the Middle East by Israel or the US Army, hardly anybody in this country would say anything.
Clearly this country is not the \"peace-loving, innocent country\" that George W. Bush claims it is. This is the biggest gun runner in the world, and the biggest instigator of wars. This is a government of thieves and enslavers, and they have dominated the peoples of color of the world with military and economic force ever since its creation. We cannot jump like dogs to defend these people.
It is not the people in the Middle East or Africa who call us nigger, and keep us oppressed, it is the white government in America. If anyone on the face of the earth attacks the slavemaster\'s plantation, I ain\'t going to be standing out front growling to stop them from setting his house on fire. That his problem, and you reap what you sow. The real terrorists are in the Pentagon, the executive boardrooms on Wall Street, and in the White House, where they have always been. Hell, the United States secret intelligence services (CIA, military intelligence, DEA and others) created the Taliban as a government and Osama Bin Laden as a terrorist, if that is what he is. Do we now want to die and kill others over this cynical reality [?], don\'t be fooled by right-wing partiotism, which is nothing but American fascism.
So we should support Chris Gatewood, hold him up as an outspoken hero. We need to ask why all of the other Black and progressive organizations have not been as forceful in their comments, and we need to ask why they are not building an anti-war response to this military retaliation planned by Bush.
We need to all start to speak the truth to our people, and not curry favor for jobs or social approval. We need to do things which are considered unpopular in a hysterical climate, but have to be said and done nevertheless. George W. Bush is not our friend, Colin Powell is not our brother. They want to kill us off, either in war, in prison, or with a policeman\'s gun. We face genocide from this government, always have. Now we need to get organized to build a movement which can put forth a progressive agenda on how to use military spending, so that money that they want to squander on war can be used for schools, hospitals, and to rebuild the inner cities of this countries which look like bombed out cities already.
Whatever organization you belong to, start to push them to come out against the war and to actively campaign against war in the Middle East or anywhere else. We have got to get our kids to say \"hell no, we won\'t go!\" and \"no Viet Cong called me a Nigger\" just like they did during the Vietnam war of the 1960\'s.
For more information:
http://www.indybay.org/antiwar/
We are 100% volunteer and depend on your participation to sustain our efforts!
Donate
$115.00 donated
in the past month
Get Involved
If you'd like to help with maintaining or developing the website, contact us.
Publish
Publish your stories and upcoming events on Indybay.
Topics
More
Search Indybay's Archives
Advanced Search
►
▼
IMC Network
simon
This war has nothing to do with putting a pipeline through Afganistan, only an uneduacted opinion would cook up that paranoid fantasy. The charge that black and Latino communities are playing the price for this war is all horse shit. It is another baseless charge by a resentful band of bigots who can't stand to see Americans stand up for their rights. May I come to your house and rape your wife, slash your throat, and eat your dog? Would a pussy like you stop me?
LOTS OF LOVE
TAKE CARE
You have no right to say that the "LEADERS" of our country are cowards who let "POOR PEEPS" do their fighting for them. A chain of command is necessary for any operation or project, someone must be the leader calling the shots, and at the bottom are the brave grunts whose duty it is to execute the orders. What would you have the military do; everyone run into Afghanistan holding hands, without a clear goal? Oh, that's right, you'd rather get rid of the military altogether, so that we'd be a sitting duck, allowing every desperate tyrant on Earth the ability to row over here to steal our stuff and rape our kids.
Power to the People!
Hypocrite.
Where did you get this "hypocrite" shit from? Because I support minorities staying out of the military means that I'm for slavery? Where did you get that illogical crap? I sure hope you're not bell hooks, because I own a two of your books and I'd be sorely disappointed if it turned out you're totally irrational.
Arabs were absolutely critical to the slave trade.
Middle eastern nations had more slaves than the west - and they tended to castrate their slaves.
Islamic North Africans have historically advanced south, not black africans north. This move south has been both by racial moslems displacing the local blacks and with islamic blacks displacing blacks of local or other religions.
Currently, it is northern african islamic countries that still run a slave economy and it is moslems such as in Northern Nigeria or in Ethiopia that appear to be the aggressors today.
This is all fact.
I'm not writing this to say that western oppresion is better or worse - that is a stupid game and I have little respect for those who play it. I just think its important to note that black africans have been screwed by many people.
I guess I could understand black africans turning to islam because believe in the truth of its message but to turn to it because somehow its been a friend to black africans flies in the face of history.
US out of north america!
US out of north america!
US out of north america!