Interesting, and bell hooks has something to say

about the Djangos of the world (whom i admit i was surprised when i saw his sig pic ostensibly celebrating DREDS on a boy! Wow, seems awfully misleading!). In her book 'salvation: Black People and Love' bell hooks (exactly how she spelled it) gives us some light to this phenomenon (and i think it is true of all oppressed groups). The following quotes come from pages 215-217, 219 and 220: "While privileged classes of black people assuaged their feelings of loss by swift assimilation into the values of the dominant white mainstream, the black masses were left emotionally stuck. Following the path chosen by their privileged counterparts, holding to suspicion and hostility, they nevertheless began to embrace the values of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. This created an unprecedented context for collusion in their own oppression and exploitation. It set the stage for the takeover of poor black communities by a drug economy which brought in its wake a hedonistic ethos of violence, consumerism, and amoral pursuit of pleasure powerful enough to usurp and destroy the foundations of [ancient Black] communalism, a love ethic, and a belief in the healing power of forgiveness, faith, and compassion." [This all in the context of BOTH the main voices of Black 'civil rights', MLK,Jr and Malcolm X being murdered by the State. Plus, the old 'divide and conquer' trick of House Black vs Field Black continuing up to today.--my comment] (...) "Since so many privileged-class black individuals live far away from these 'war zones', there is no sense of accountability to the lifestyles of those black folks who are stuck in lower-middle-class or poor neighborhoods ravaged by predators. The indifference of the conservative black professional class finds extreme expression in critics like Stanley Crouch [like Bill Cosby --ed] who advocate full-scale legalized slaughter and/or a legalized death penalty for the predatory individuals who make these neighborhoods mini-empires where they exercise autocratic rule. (...) "Evidently [black male leaders of privilege] see no moral conflict between their critique and disavowal of connection to those black males who in the service of the nation prey on disadvantaged communities globally. P.217 to 218: "As long as black leaders wrongly encourage black men, and all black people, to believe our collective wounds can be healed by the establishment of black patriarchal rule, we are doomed. For embracing patriarchy has different consequences for the black male who sits in a boardroom and the black man who must prove his masculinity on embattled ghetto streets or in the war zone of contemporary prisons." P.219: "To a grave extent, contemporary demonization of all white people by individual black leaders is psychoanalytically an inversion of racialized self-hatred. The evidence supporting this fact lies with the fate of many militant black leaders, like Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, who showed by their confused allegiances that they had not fully decolonized their minds. A black person who is mired in self-hatred will not be able to see the differences between a hardened white supremacist and a progressive anti-racist white person who opposes domination in ALL its forms." P.220: "No black male leader has ever made ending black self-hatred a primary agenda of the black liberation struggle. More often than not King highlighted the importance of loving our enemies when he placed love on the agenda. He did this in part because he had the foresight to realize that white supremacy would never be eradicated unless white people experienced a conversion experience which would show them what it meant to be just in one's actions. (...) "Even tho many progressive young black people grew to be suspicious of King's focus on forgiving our enemies (and I was one of them) because he did not talk about self-determination and self-love, we did not abandon our understanding of the reality that one gained insight through redemptive suffering, that one of the primary gains for black people lay in the practice of compassion. (...) [a good lesson for all of us, i say!] "In [ML King's] short life he did not seem to fully grasp the depths of the black colonized mind, of black self-hatred." My only additional comment is this: But how could it be different? I say, by diving DEEP into forbidden knowledge! Like that knowledge which truly liberates, not merely bringing us newish re-designs of old meta-games! "Alien values are implanted into the lives of the people, precisely through the children; alien, not merely in the sense of foreign or exotic, but alien to humanity: a commerciogenic identity is formed. At first it was partly resisted, but with time, it became more and more acceptable, until it has now become a major determinant on the lives of the young, displacing all earlier forms of acculturation, other ways of answering need, other ways of being in the world. This process of forgetting, beyond recall, but perhaps not quite beyond reclamation, is a form of colonialism far more effective than that which held so much of the world in thrall in an earlier empire." ----Jeremy Seabrook in 'The Metamorphoses of Colonialsm'