Your editor passed on C. Leigh McInnes’ “Letter” to Charles Keil, who has long grasped imperatives of African American nationists. Keil responded with his own letter…
read the “Like most of y’all, my wife Monica is livid about the murder of George Floyd . . . . .” and those two big paragraphs by Prof. C. Liegh McInnis from JSU could be speaking for me, IF I were black. I’ve copied and pasted that text up to and including “. . . because we have failed to learn and love ourselves.”
Unfortunately, I’ve learned to love my Hessian-Yankee-Yalie self too damn well. I am on fairly solid scientific ground when I state my ethnic or cultural identity as a hyphenated H-Y-Y&U of Chi Anthro person because that’s where I started learning the values and principles that I still try to live by at age 80. It was to Yale and to University of Chicago audiences that I invited Malcolm X to speak in 1960-62 roughly 60 years ago. Those 3 speeches on the theme of separation, or “black zionism” if you prefer, articulated a position very similar to that of Prof. C. Liegh McInnis. Let me add that I am on very solid scientific ground when I state that we humans are all one “race” and one species (I chose to Latinize as humo ludens collaborans) coming out of Africa in different times and phases over many millenia to populate the globe. In the opening pages of Urban Blues (1966/1991) I argued that it was nonsense and counter productive to talk about racial equality, racial justice, race relations, race riots, etc. etc. etc. when ‘gene-pools’ don’t relate or riot, . . and when we are all one intermarrying ‘race’/species and have been for tens of thousands of years . . . , and when we could be talking about freedom, justice, equality for ALL like it says in the Declaration & Constitution.
I’m not pessimistic about us American humans being stuck in the same “racial” reifications and misunderstandings for the 60 plus years that I’ve been witnessing. I got two books in the mail just a few days ago that tell me we are leaving capitalism/imperialism/racism and the climactic irrational deathtrips called “fascism” behind, once AND FOR ALL. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons by Silvia Federici (PM Press 2019) and Building Free Life: Dialogues with Ocalan (Kairos and PM Press 2020) are arriving at demilitarizing and decentralizing the world to make it safe for “democratic confederalism,” and “transition to local peace economies”. Bernie Sanders calls it “democratic socialism” and Yanni Varufakis calls it “libertarian Marxism”. It’s all in the same direction and a Global Organization Of Democracies (GOOD) meeting year-round, coupled with a meeting year-round Women’s Forum for Peace and Ecoequilibrio could get it started tomorrow, or the day after, with just a few phone calls to all the small democracy embassies in Athens, and/or Berlin, and/or Tokyo. These two institutions springing up can save the world trillions of dollars, pounds, francs, marks and fifty other currently threatened currencies. And a few strict GOOD regulations could stop the pandemics by saving, maintaining, and containing the greatest possible diversity of species in the world’s rainforests and by shouting down and/or boycotting the countries protecting the world’s “wet markets.”
A simple anecdote. Yesterday at the local peace demo I put up my little “XR” sign and we played all the tunes we know for sousaphone and tibetan cymbals. One of Ralph Nader’s all-time favorite organizers came up and asked if that sign meant “crossing out racism”. I immediately said “Yes, for sure! But it also stands for ‘EXtinction Rebellion’.” And I thought to myself, the murder of one person with three other cops and many witnesses looking on for 7 minutes is a lot like millions of us understanding that many species disappear each day never to be “known” or studied, never to be replaced, and yet we are not shouting and protesting each and every day, not civily disobeying in 100s of different ways.
I can barely understand why some humans might want to extinct our species, rather than let peoples and persons self-determine at the expense of other species. What I don’t understand is why we don’t want to slow up & think deeply about the day to day joys of Live and Let Live!
Peace, Charlie