So this is where we’re at right now, black folks? Shoot, and here I thought the Love & Hip Hop Atlanta boycott petition on change.org was bad. Now Al Sharpton’s outfit is leading a boycott of the Django Unchained action figures being sold. Jesus Christ! Do we need another black kid armed with Skittles and Ice Tea to be shot because black rage is idle? But seriously, I could think of many other things to be pissed about as a person of color, other than some $299.00 collectibles being sold on Amazon. But hey, I suppose that’s just me being tired of being the angry black dude.

This from NewsOne:

Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network has been largely silent on the raging controversy surrounding Quentin Tarantino‘s ‘Django Unchained’ — until now.

In the wake of the release of action figures in the cast’s likeness, Rev. K.W. Tulloss, NAN’s president in Los Angeles, the progressive, civil rights organization called for a national boycott of the slavery toys which can be purchased for $299 on Amazon.com.

“Selling this doll is highly offensive to our ancestors and the African American community,” Rev. K.W. Tulloss, said to the NY Daily News. “The movie is for adults, but these are action figures that appeal to children. We don’t want other individuals to utilize them for their entertainment, to make a mockery of slavery.”

Now  yesterday I mentioned how this movie has made some of my “cousins” upset. And as I said then, some of them are probably more upset because the film was written and directed by Quentin Tarantino who happens to be white. I firmly believe that most are upset for no other reason than that fact. So, as far as the action figures go? Well, let’s just say that I don’t see them being packaged with chains, branding irons, or any of those ghastly iron masks used to torture slaves. That said, I really don’t see the big deal; because, it’s not like kids are running out to buy them.

It’s just standard movie marketing actually, and the National Action Network is doing a fine job by boosting sales with this frivolous attempt at a boycott of these dolls. Besides, it’s not like black folks are going to break their necks to drop #299.00 on Amazon to buy them anyway.

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So there’s a “Django” action figure being sold now; and, of course, some of my cousins are upset about it — yep, yet another reason yo hate this movie for some. The action figure isn’t actually a stocking stuffer, but I hope it doesn’t have a Kung Fu grip like G.I. Joe. Nope, no need to get Spike Lee any angrier about the movie than he already is at this point. Seriously, how much more disrespectful can they get with this thing? Oh well, it could have been worse. Yes, somebody could have had the bright idea to start selling a crack head action figure after the movie Do The Right Thing.

Oh, and speaking of “angry black men who hate white men with the audacity to make movies that illustrates what it was like for black folk back in 1853″. Did you hear what Tavis Smiley had to say about Tarantino and the movie Django Unchained? Well, like Spike Lee, he too hasn’t seen the movie nor intends to “pay to see it,” like he said in a recent interview featured on The Daily Beast. Like Lee, he too takes issue with a white movie director using his craft to bring to the big screen a film that revels in the painful but often avoided legacy of slavery. Responding to a question about his first reaction to the film, Smiley opens up the interview with the following:

Quentin Tarantino’s film, Django Unchained has as much to do with the history and culture of American descendants of African slaves as Dumbo has to do with the plight of Weimar Jewry. Spike Lee says that it disrespected his ancestors. It does not. It has nothing to do with them. It has everything to do with one white man’s fevered, second-hand vision of what it would be like to be something he probably can’t conceive. It’s like me attempting to write an intimate account of the pains of childbirth. I may have held a baby and changed a diaper, but one would doubt my authority on the subject.

Tarantino obviously knows black people, but only a white man in America could believe that this provides him with the authority to speak on the black American experience. Like 99.9999 percent of the white population, he has minimal intimacy with the culture of the descendants of American slaves. That culture, imbibed from birth by American blacks raised in black American households, involves an intimate, often subconscious acknowledgment of history, of a unique place in the American hierarchy, of a struggle against mainstream paradigms of who and what we are. These are intimacies of which whites are necessarily ignorant — they’re white. Just as I, as a male, have no intimate knowledge of birthing pains, whites have no knowledge of being black. They can gain an abstract conception, but that’s it.

Um, excuse me, I know Tarantino is white and all, but I sincerely doubt whether anyone alive today — including black folks — are able to have more than an abstract conception of what slavery was like. Yes, though many of its scars still run deep throughout the diaspora, to suggest that by virtue of one being charged with melanin comes with a certain esoteric knowledge of slavery even if we’re fifty years removed from Jim Crow. Which is funny because it’s as though being able to endure “the struggle” was woven into our cultural and biological DNA — it’s as if unlike any other race, we’re predisposed to endure any struggle. And thus, we’re exceptional or something.

Of course, Tarantino has every right to make a film on any subject he chooses, and he knows his audience well. The film has become the white literati’s preferred lens into the forbidden territory of black rage (a sort of reverse Uncle Tom’s Cabin). But when blacks discuss it as if this product of white Hollywood is a legitimate expression of our culture or our rage, we do ourselves a gross injustice; we follow the pattern of outsourcing our history and self-image to the majority; we marry ourselves into the grotesque self-images that their history has tried to stamp upon us.

Django Unchained is nothing more than one white Hollywood director’s fantasy of what black revenge would look like. It would be no more to us than another big screen cartoon if we dealt honestly and independently with our own history — a history white studios or directors would never touch. Such history puts the lie to the frames and simplifications with which Americans maintain our halo of historical innocence on matters related to race.

If we lavished similar imagination upon the history of the blacks who fought for the British during the American revolution to escape slavery, the German Coast uprising, the Prosser and Vesey rebellions, the ‘Crazy as St. Paul’ Nat Turner rebellion, the Black Seminole rebellion of 1835, the innumerable anecdotal tales of black resistance against slave-owners, perhaps we wouldn’t glom onto the work of a white director who (with his infantile insistence on his right to fling the word “nigger”) seems frightfully similar to the clueless character in Lou Reed’s infamous, “I Wanna be Black.” If we taught ourselves to regard the Civil War as “a failed war to protect and extend slavery,” and not “a war to free the slaves,” we would be less seduced by the siren song of second-hand revenge fantasy. If we debated among ourselves the virtues and vices of real old-west outlaws like the notorious Rufus Buck Gang, Cherokee Bill and Isom Dart, perhaps one white man’s notion of blacks in the old west would be less noteworthy. If we knew that black freedman populated Indian Territory and that a black lawman named Bass Reeves served as a Deputy U.S. Marshall for “Hanging Judge” Isaac Parker, we’d have a far richer, more complex view of our history than that promoted by the likes of Hollywood and Tarantino.

Yes, blacks are giving this film too much credence, but it’s our own fault. We have outsourced our history to the majority and failed to devise the means to teach our history to ourselves. In a country in which we have been historically subjugated and reviled, we accept instruction about our history and our place in it from those who subjugated and reviled us. That’s a bit insane. As long as we continue to do so, the likes of Django Unchained will rise from the level of mainstream curiosities from black-cultural dilettantes, to fake nipples mimicking the teat of cultural sustenance.

Listen: We can only imagine just what it must have been like for African slaves not just in America, but also those spread all throughout the new world; but even so, we have no earthly idea, despite the documented research, of just how bad it actually was. So what is the point to this post? That I can’t wait for Tarantino to do the sequel where Django and Madea try to bust John Brown the abolitionist, out of prison for killing white folks so everyone can be happy. Yep, let’s try to rescue a white man in the next one, since folk wanna act like he had Harriet Tubman giving lap dances in this one. as cathartic as this film isn’t for some, maybe my suggested sequel will be received with open arms only if a black guy produces, writes, and directs it. Because quite naturally, who else is there better to tell stories of the black struggle than black people, right? After all, last time I checked, black kids are still picking white dolls over black dolls; and, it ain’t like y’all Negroes supported Akeela And The Bee anyway.

So yeah, blame Tarantino for that too.

The post Slavery, Django Action Figures, & Why Tavis Smiley is Wrong appeared first on Madness & Reality.

I never realized what assimilation was or is. I never gave a thought about genocide or Manifest Destiny and I thought the holocaust only pertained to what Hitler did to the Jewish people. And it didn’t matter to me, because I never gave a thought about it. I was busy living life as I knew how, a Lakota woman. I was raised in our traditional ways but never taught all those things until I was older. I just thought life was about being traditional, with our ceremonies, songs, traditions, and ways. Sure, I went to a Christian church with my friends, went to Vacation Bible School for a popsicle, and I tested out other religions as if dipping my toes in cold lake water, but I never felt right about it. I didn’t feel wrong about it, I just felt as if it wasn’t my thing. And I made my way back to who I was and who I knew myself and my people to be. Lakota. That is where I belonged and where I feel centered.

The first time I realized that a child raised without their culture and forced into another way of life develops a huge hole in their soul was in college. I read an essay by a Vietnamese American student. She was adopted as a baby, from Vietnam, by white parents here in America. She was given a good life, she was raised with little blonde brothers and sisters and she had a suburban sounding name like Caitlyn or something. She did everything right and everything she was supposed to do in life, plus she won a scholarship to a college away from her family. It was her first time on her own and she discovered herself questioning who she was. She was drawn to other Asians and began hanging out with them. She learned of their likes, dislikes, cultures, foods, and she felt “at home and at peace.” Many of them were also adoptees, taken from their families and countries and grew up American. They were drawn to each other to fill a need in their souls. Yet she felt this with a great deal of guilt towards her American family. She loved her adopted family but felt at home, finally, with her friends, who in turn felt the same.

That is the first time I realized how taking the culture away from someone can be somewhat traumatic or really traumatic. How lost it makes that person feel. As I grew older and started seeing cases of this same thing happening with my own Native people and it was shocking. I remember the first time, was when I met a lady in her twenties. I saw her at the casino we both worked at and asked her what tribe she was from. She became angry and said “The lady that gave birth to me was from so and so reservation but I’m white. I grew up white. I was raised white, so don’t ever ask me that again.”

All I could say was “Whoa.” I stood there shocked. I never in my life met another Indian who hated being Indian, and she had to nerve to say she was white, when she was a few shades from midnight? That’s when someone told me she was raised in a foster home, who eventually adopted her.

I began then to understand what it meant to be assimilated and colonized. I began reading of our history and how children were taken by the US government from Native families once they were put on reservations. Children were forcefully taken out of their homes at the age of 5 and put in residential schools until the age of 18. They made handcuffs so small to detain these children. They were beaten for speaking their language, hair was cut, and all for the purpose of “Kill The Indian, Save The Man.”

This generation was our grandparents and great grandparents, who suffered physical, sexual,and emotional abuse in the residential schools. They were never given the chance to heal because these stories were never told. They were kept on the down low by the Catholic church and the government who ran the residential schools. Many of these boarding schools who are now in operation are now making monetary payments, now wanting to hear the stories of abuse and now trying to make amends. After a few were hit with class action lawsuits.

The next generations, also suffered and still suffer. By the foster care systems. Children were taken from their homes and given to white foster families to raise. The families receiving funding for every foster child, would often take on many foster children. The state holds the households they take the children from to the standards set by white society. Without ever listening to how we set family structures, how we take care of our own, or how we live with our traditions, they set everything up to fit a mold, that they live by.

Based on a 1976 study by the Association on American Indian Affairs found that 25 to 35% of all Indian children were being placed in out-of-home care. (Eighty-five percent of those children were being placed in non-Indian homes or institutions.) Congress then passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (25 U.S.C. § 1901) in 1978 in order to keep American Indian Children with American Indian families.

However, this is not being followed in South Dakota. Why? Because South Dakota has a dirty little secret. According to a wonderful and very thorough investigation by National Public Radio that inspired me to find my brother who was lost for 21 years due to failure of the fact that DSS didn’t follow ICWA regulations and place him with family. I was 19 years old when he was taken from his mother. I was employed and had my own place and he was 8 years old. When I asked them why they didn’t ask me, all they said was sorry and also ,sorry we can’t help you find him now. That is when I began to search for him and I also began to investigate why so many of our Indian children in South Dakota are taken from their homes and placed in Non-Native homes, this is when I found their dirty little secret.

South Dakota’s Department of Social Services receives money for Native children they take custody of. They receive more money than the non-Native children they take from their homes. Native children in South Dakota make up 15% of all the children of South Dakota, yet over half the children placed in foster care are Native. And only 13% of those children are placed in Native foster homes. While Native foster home sit empty for months. South Dakota removes children from their homes at a rate 3 time higher than any other state. But according to state figures, less than 12 percent of the children in foster care in South Dakota have been actually physically or sexually abused in their own homes. That’s less than the national average.

I still didn’t get to the dirty little secret yet. South Dakota, years ago, designated all Native children as “special needs.” Which means every Indian child in every school benefits that school with more funding and it also means that every Indian child taken from their home by DSS benefits South Dakota more than non-Native children. And although the state says they match all the money coming in from the feds dollar for dollar, the match is not exact. According

to records from 2010, the feds reimbursed the state three quarters for what it spent on the children they removed from their homes. There is also an adoption incentive program nobody hears about. The federal government gives the states $4,000 for each child who is placed into adoption from foster care. That amount is $12,000 for “special needs” children. And of course over half the children removed from homes in South Dakota are Indian children, who, you guessed it, are designated by the state as “special needs” just for being American Indian. The state has made almost a million dollars in the last ten years off of our most precious resource. Our children. They moved us to dry, barren lands that cannot be farmed, the took the gold and every resource from the lands they stole. And now they are after our children.

Why is this not making a splash? Why is it not news? Especially , in South Dakota? Because they will go to any length to cover up what they do to take our children away. Even as our children are being violated in the homes they are placed in. Here is one case that will blow anyone’s mind and still has yet to reach the media in South Dakota.

Former assistant state attorney Brandon Taliaferro and court appointed child advocate Shirley Schwab go to trial tomorrow, January 7, 2013 for crimes they didn’t commit. Mr. Taliaferro and Ms. Schwab have been indicted by SD Attorney General Martin Jackley with witness tampering and disclosure of confidential, Department of Social Services information. They are being accused of these crimes for encouraging two teenage Lakota foster girls to tell the truth about being molested by their non-Native foster parent, who is now serving a 15 year prison sentence for rape of a child under 10.

According to the Daily Kos: Mr. Taliaferro and Ms. Schwab now assert that South Dakota is engaged in a criminal conspiracy to discriminate against Lakota foster children and their mothers, fathers, grandparents and relatives. “It is financially beneficial for the DSS to remove American Indian children from their homes and place them in [white] foster homes,” said Attorney Taliaferro to the Aberdeen News on December 19, 2011. “[Had I followed] the orders of [my boss with respect to the Mette investigation, it] would have required [me] to violate the law, and ethical rules that govern attorney conduct.” Mr. Taliaferro asserts that in 2011 he refused to participate in “a cover-up of misconduct” by the DSS.

The charges are believed to be a direct response to Mr. Taliaferro and Ms. Scwab for criticizing the state’s payroll during the NPR investigation. According to reporter Stephanie Woodard in her article for 100 Reporters “Rough Justice In Indian Child Welfare” where two state Department of Criminal Investigation agents are seen on a Youtube video planning the cover-up by the state against Mr. Taliaferro and Ms. Schwab. They are unaware, that though they are off camera, they left their microphones on.

This is all dirty, low down, Gestapo like tactics used by the Department of Social Services . And it shows how far the state will bend, how low they will go, to keep the millions of dollars they have coming in by stealing yet again from the Indigenous people of this land. Instead they don’t take from the land, they take from the womb.

They won’t get away with this much longer. Something has to be done.

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Remember that iconic photo of Malcolm X peeking out the window while holding gun with what’s known on the streets as a banana clip? as I think of this week’s ongoing gun control debate, I’ve come to rest on that very picture probably being the biggest reason why I’m opposed o an assault weapon ban. I can provide numbers to support the argument that an assault weapon ban will do very little as a solution to America’s gun violence problem. But being a black man, that very photo says it all. Not that I’m paranoid or afraid of “the man” coming after me like they did Malcolm — nope, never that. You see, I’m reminded of the fact that at one point in this country’s history, it was against the law for anyone black to own a gun. And in so many ways, the existence of that law further enabled “certain people” when it came to terrorizing the lives of black folks in America.

Here’s a stupid conversation on gun control:

Any gun control we enact will have a limited effect. But this should not be cause for despair. Much of the recent hysteria over gun deaths is misplaced.

A lot of people have been citing a recent report, “American Gun Deaths to Exceed Traffic Fatalities by 2015.” The article shows that gun deaths in America are slowly rising, and now stand at 32,000 per year — a staggering toll. Now, 32,000 deaths per year is a lot of death, and I’d never minimize that. But what the article’s authors fail to mention is that gun murders comprise less than a third of that total — about 9,000 per year in recent years. With accidental gun deaths steady at around 500-600 per year, the bulk of those 32,000 “gun deaths” are suicides.

In fact, murder by gun has been falling steadily since the early 1990s. Some of that is due to improvements in emergency medicine, but most is a result of the overall decline in violent crime that America has enjoyed over the last two decades. The fact that overall gun deaths has risen since 2000, despite the fall in murders, suggests that increased gun suicide has accounted for more than 100% of the increase in gun deaths. Obviously, suicide is a tragedy, and I don’t want to minimize it. But people aren’t panicking over suicide, they’re panicking over murder, and gun-related murder is on the way down.

Of course, 9,000 gun deaths a year is still a lot. Still more than other rich countries, still a disgrace, still far too many! But people who have been watching the round-the-clock coverage of the Newtown massacre need to understand that “mass killings” of the Newtown type account for a very small percent of that 9,000. Most of those 9,000 gun murders are of the more mundane, but no less deadly variety — drive-by shootings, gang wars, personal quarrels, and other easily comprehensible crimes.

And if we really care about those 9,000 souls who are shot to death each year, there is an extremely effective policy that we could enact right now that would probably save many of them.

I’m talking about ending the drug war.

Now I can think of many reasons to end Americas 40-year-long failed War on Drugs; and, I’m sure we can have a debate on just that. However, since we’re all up in arms about guns since last month’s tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut. Given the many ill-formed opinions and positions posited by more than the NRA’s Wayne La Pierre. Again, in the interest of public safety, isn’t it time we treat drug use, abuse, as well as gun violence like a public health crisis much like we did with HIV/AIDS in America and abroad? No seriously, think about that for a second. Yes, think about how a necessary paradigm shift — that is, decriminalizing illicit drugs — as far as policy can produce the desired results for the greater good.

Reliable statistics on the number of drug-related murders in the United States are hard to come by. A 1994 Department of Justice report suggested that between a third and a half of U.S. homicides were drug-related, while a recent Center for Disease Control study found that the rate varied between 5% and 25% (a 2002 Bureau of Justice report splits the difference). Part of this variance is that “drug-related” murders are hard to define. There are murders committed by people on drugs, murders committed by addicts to get money for drugs, turf-war murders by drug suppliers, and murders committed by gangs whose principal source of income is drug sales.

But very few would argue that the illegal drug trade is a significant cause of murders. This is a straightforward result of America’s three-decade-long “drug war.” Legal bans on drug sales lead to a vacuum in legal regulation; instead of going to court, drug suppliers settle their disputes by shooting each other. Meanwhile, interdiction efforts raise the price of drugs by curbing supply, making local drug supply monopolies (i.e., gang turf) a rich prize to be fought over. And stuffing our overcrowded prisons full of harmless, hapless drug addicts forces us to give accelerated parole to hardened killers.

Ending the drug war would involve reducing all of these incentives to murder. Treating addicts in hospitals and rehab centers, instead of sticking them in prisons, would reduce demand for drugs, lowering the price and starving gangs of income while reducing their incentive to wage turf wars. Decriminalization would relieve pressure on our prison system, allowing us to focus on keeping violent people off the streets instead of pointlessly punishing drug users for destroying their own health. And full legalization of recreational marijuana — which is already proceeding quickly among the states, but is still foolishly opposed by the Obama administration — is an obvious first step.

In other words, yes, gun control is good. BUT don’t expect it to be a panacea for America’s gun violence problem. If we really want to save some of those 9,000 people, we need to end the self-destructive, failed drug policies that have turned us into a prison state and turned many of our cities into war zones. (source)

Now, does this sound crazy, or what? Of course to some of you it does; however, alcohol is considered a drug, yet I don’t see Mexican drug cartels murdering people by the thousands each year to be able to control the market for alcohol. Nope, you don’t hear about headless bodies being found in deserts along the southern border because of alcohol. Which is really funny because more people die annually because of alcohol than they do because of guns. So if we’re really serious about doing something about gun violence in America, why not start with drug legalization? After all, if that were to happen, what’s the worse that can happen other than a reduction in gun crimes in cities in Chicago? A city that had 506 homicides in 2012, with 80% of them being gun-related; with only 4% of the guns used being assault weapons. This makes sense in my head, but what about you?

After all, like “Nino Brown” said, “Ain’t no Uzis made up in Harlem,” which they might not be. But, it’s undeniable that more money is made by the presence of guns and drugs in our neighborhoods by the folks responsible for the task of keeping them out, than the ones engaged in the trade.

Although the overall U.S. prison population declined slightly in 2011, the federal prison population continued to rise, with rates of drug and immigration offenders that eclipse those held for violent crimes. While only 8 percent of federal prisoners were sentenced for violent crimes in 2011, almost half of federal inmates – 48 percent – were in prison for drug crimes, according to Department of Justice statistics. Another 11 percent were held for immigration offenses – one of the largest-growing segments of the prison population.

These numbers reflect the impact of the aggressive U.S. “War on Drugs,” a major contributor to the United States’ standing as the number one jailer in the world. Overall declines in U.S. prisons of 0.9 percent are attributable to state prisons, as some states have been moved by budget crises to adopt innovative reforms, and some jurisdictions have moved toward decriminalizing minor drug offenses.

But federal drug law remains draconian, with harsh mandatory minimum sentences for sometimes minor nonviolent roles in drug deals. What’s more, one of the major causes of the state prison population decrease was the 2011 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that California state prisons are cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment. A drastic decrease in California’s prison population has resulted from what is known as realignment, in which prisoners are moved from state prisons to county jails, where local sheriffs have greater discretion over how to deal with offenders – for better or for worse — and may send them to mental health treatment, home surveillance, or community service rather than hold them behind bars. The California shift accounts for more than half of the decrease in the U.S. prison population, and overall state spending on prisons continues to be the fastest-growing budgetary item after Medicaid. (source)

Now watch the following video and ask yourself: What would change if drugs were made legal in America?

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Hollywood has again deigned to allocate space for a movie set during slavery to be disseminated for public consumption. It has debuted to mostly positive reviews and a massive PR machine is doing its best to make sure everyone takes in the movie for the “holidays”.  Which is what they should do because its a business venture and the priority is to make money.  Making money is all well and good, retelling accurate portrayals of history, in this country with each day becomes more crucially important.

Post-Racial America – NOT

This last year especially has shown the ugliness of racism rear its ugly head during one of the most contentious presidential elections in recorded history.  We were able to bear witness to how, one demographic group willfully could and would ignore any information based on facts, and instead opt to create whatever facts would suit their beliefs and position.While on the one hand this country had managed to get to the point of electing, and re-electing a black man to hold the highest office in the land, the journey to get there has been hallmarked by a serious uptick in intolerance coupled with an astonishing show of ignorance and bigotry that has not been seen in this country for quite some time.

This would not be of much significance if it weren’t for the fact that this has manifested in attempts to change what is put into the textbooks that our children use in schools. It really wouldn’t matter much if there were not people like GOP Rep  John Hubbard from Arkansas - who reiterated a theme that has been getting a lot of airtime in conservative circles of late – “slavery was good for black people”.

Letting Others Tell Our Story Has Consequences

Folks are up in arms about Quentin Tarantino’s(Django Unchained) comments regarding “Roots”which was just run in its entirety on BET. His comment was that “Roots” was not an authentic representation or telling of slavery. Basically he’s right. There was no way in this universe that the TV network back then could have aired an accurate telling of slavery – it would never have made it past the network censors.  Additionally, one can argue that many are still not ready to hear the awful truth or brutality that was a common component of slavery. There was nothing pretty about slavery in this country.  There are many “authentic” stories that are available to read if one so chooses.  What is amazing is that people would get upset with Tarantino for making this statement. He made a movie. His purpose was not to provide an authentic retelling of slavery. His purpose was to make a movie to make MONEY – period. I don’t see too many people upset with the notion that he choose to make money by making an “entertaining” movie about the slave trade. Then again I don’t see too many getting upset with the portrayals of blacks in the entertainment business much anyway. That whole – well they are making money, they are making a living, they are providing for their families etc. with a nice dose of calling haterade just is way overworked.

I have seen this line of reasoning used to justify the upcoming “reality” series that is based on a“rapper” who has 10 baby mama’s and loads of kids which is being brought forth by Oxygen network  – really ??

When you entrust a vital part of your history to be retold by those who have no vested interest in accuracy and who’s sole motive is to make money, what exactly do you expect?  If  a Nazi decided to do a movie about the Holocaust with an “entertaining” spin to it – there would be all kinds of hell to pay if it ever even got released or distributed in the first place. It is not a false equivalency, but an apt comparison of a period in history where an entire ethnic group was subjected to horrors which included extermination and that continues to impact the group to this day. The major difference being the need in the black community to find a way to make slavery entertaining instead of accurate.

Don’t Get Mad – Get Busy

I don’t see why anyone should get mad at Tarantino, especially the black community. When there are large numbers of us watching shows that depict black women acting in ways that perpetuate negative stereotypes, and WE spend money on “entertainment” that continues to perpetuate negative stereotypical behavior – why get mad?  Getting mad at Spike Lee for publicly saying he would not go to see THIS movie accomplishes what exactly?  All this energy expended in pointless action – how about asking  Spike or some of the other directors when they are going to do a movie based on “Incident’s In the Life of a Slave Girl”.  Where is the “petition” asking Oprah when she is going to back a movie production of the Tademy Family saga – Cane River and Red River. Both of which are REAL stories based on the lives of real individuals.  For entertainment, get a director to do Some Sing, Some Cry, which is fiction but is based on the REALITY of the times it takes place in.

The money we spend on supporting negative imagery could just as easily be spent in supporting directors, producers, and programming that at the very least is not always based on the least common denominators in our community.  The expectation of moral conscience being expressed by network executives and any other profit driven entities is completely ridiculous. Placing blame on them for airing these shows is misdirected – REALTALK – they only air what people WATCH. IF we were not watching this stuff  and spending our money supporting advertisers who buy ad space on these shows – they would never see the light of day.

The time and effort spent going back and forth on this could be better spent in trying to get some of this stuff actually done. Which is what I plan to do by working on a compilation of African American Art and making it available via mobile devices.

Ya’ll have fun with the arguing and debating back and forth.

The post Django Unchained: No Thanks, I’ll Pass appeared first on Madness & Reality.

OK, let’s get something straight: Django Unchained is not about Martin Luther King Jr, nor is it the black version of the epic The Birth Of A Nation. However, it’s a very timely film.

I doubt very seriously whether it was Quenten Tarrantiino’s intent to spark a conversation on race. But with his new movie Django Unchauined, boy did he ever. Having said that, I’m just going to go on record and say that if Jammie Foxx wins an Oscar for his role as Django, that’s when I’m going to start believing all this post-racial talk I’ve been hearing for the last four years. Now, about the movie, I’m not offended that the word “nigger,” is used 110 times. I have yet to see the movie, so I’m not sure why this may be offensive to some.What offends me, however, is that Django has excellent command of the English. No diss to my ancestors, but I’m having a hard time accepting the fact that a slave in the 1950s is able to understand that the ‘D’ in his name is silent. But hey, maybe I shouldn’t complain; yep, at least they didn’t make him come off a bit Green Mile-ish when there are black folks today who you’d swear they’re looking for Harriet Tubman when you hear them speak.

Now of course this movie has seen it’s share of controversy even before its Christmas Day release. In fact, I blogged about how “certain people” were a bit put off by a joke told by Jamie Foxx while hosting Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago. Yes, and apparently it’s beyond reason for an enslaved African with a gun to “kill all the white people,” like Foxx does in this movie. I suppose, to some, the notion of a slave murdering the un-melanined seems to be bad for race relations in America. Of course this was all bullshit, as I’ve already pointed out. That said, you can imagine my surprise when I heard that there were more than a few black folks who took issue with a few things in the movie. Not surprising, however, was the critique that came from my man Spike Lee, who believes the film is “disrespectful,” to his ancestors who were slaves.

This from Rolling Stone:

Although he hasn’t seen the movie, director Spike Lee tells Vibe that Quentin Tarantino’s new Civil War-era Western Django Unchained is “disrespectful to my ancestors.”

Lee, whose latest film Red Hook Summer deals with race and class in the South Brooklyn neighborhood, said he has no plans to see Django Unchained. He elaborated on his dissatisfaction on Twitter, writing, “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them.”

This isn’t the first time Lee has taken issue with Tarantino’s films, particularly when it comes to the use of a racial epithet that is used myriad times in Django and appeared frequently in Tarantino’s 1997 film Jackie Brown.

Lee spoke out about the film after apparently telling Django star Jamie Foxx that he wasn’t going to. In a separate interview withVibe, Foxx recalled an encounter with Lee at the BET awards saying, “You know Spike, he’ll let you have it whether it’s good, bad or ugly. And he said, ‘I’m not going to say anything bad about this film. It looks like y’all are getting it.’”

Now I respect Spike Lee, and I’m a huge fan — hell, can’t you tell from the banner above? — and he is of course entitled to his opinion. However, I don’t agree with his assertion. Why? Well, maybe I’m wrong, but I’d like to think that African slaves had more important things to worry about other than being called “niggers.” Was it degrading to them? Assuming that they had a grasp of the English language like “Django,” I’m sure it was. However, I’d like to think that they were more concerned about escaping the horror that was slavery, and maybe even trying to get a paycheck. The way I see it: What better way is there to “honor” our ancestors than to use a film to illustrate just what they endured for a very long time? Sorry, Spike, you’re my man and all, and like you I love the Knicks; but, until Kunta Kinte comes forward and says he feels “disrespected,” I’m not hearing you, bro. But Spike isn’t the only one, as I found out while watching Melissa Harris-Perry last weekend

Case in point, check out this from Melissa Harris-Perry:

So, for Melber who writes:

Django is fighting for his life against slavery, torture, rape, and murder, arming him with a moral clearance to go on a killing spree…

[...] The spectacle is more like pornographic violence than a dénouement, and even if the corpses are not total innocents, the nation’s tolerance for wanton, mass shootings is quite low right now.

[...] There is nothing to be gained from sanitizing our nation’s violent, racist history, to be sure, but Tarantino has shown that sensationalizing it is not worthwhile, either. That is unfortunate, because Django Unchained ultimately boils down to a tragedy in search of a point.

I suppose for him and others who share his opinion, the fact that a black man is doing the this killing makes them a little uneasy. I mean, lord forbid if someone makes a movie about John Brown, the white abolitionist who enacted his “vengeance” upon white men for no reason. Yep, for some, it’s as though Django should have employed Martin Luther King Jr’s strategy of non-violence. Because we all know how well that worked out for black folks during slavery. I’m sorry, but something tells me that Dr. King wouldn’t be above bussin’ a cap in more than a few asses to get back to Coretta.

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Way back in the day, well before we were known as Niggers, Negroes, and subsequently African-Americans, we were known as Spearchuckers. It was meant as a derogatory term as did most other terms used to describe Blacks of African descent in America. But you know what? I do not think Spearchucker is a bad term. Actually, I wish we were Spearchuckers today, or rightfully called that in a literal sorta way.

Ok, bear with me as I explain. You see, way back when, when Africans lived on that other planet called Africa, we carried spears as a weapon, right? I was not there, but I suspect, that back in the day in Africa, a Black man without a spear was as worthless as a Black man without a job and unable to pay his child support today. Yup, possessing a spear was important, without it, there was no food, or means of defending the homies in your crew from some other crew that claimed to either be a Crips or Bloods, or whatever. Plus, I seriously doubt the chicks took a Black man without a spear seriously. I mean, why would she if he cannot even bring home a rhino or elephant periodically, right?

Some where along the line, some White guy decided to show up in his space ship on planet Africa. Being from another world, and not knowing what he would run into, he carried with him what was known as a gun. And you know what happened? The White guy being forever the forward thinker, decided to trade his guns for a few Africans (who were sitting in the county jail) to give them their freedom to come help said White guys tend to his flower garden. Was not that so nice of the White guy who landed on planet Africa? Of course the ever so curious African do-gooders accepted the guns as bail money. Yup, and the rest is history as they say.

This is why I always say that the gun, is worst invention known to man. Yup, Africans got guns in exchange for other Africans. Then, they put down their spears, (which made it even easier to be kidnapped) and now White people are using spears in an Olympic sport called the Javelin. Ain’t that a bitch? And now here we are centuries later, Black people here in America are killing one another in record numbers every year by using a guns.

If we Black people of African descent here in America had spears, there would more than likely be less murders or Black on Black crime. I mean lets face it, the Bloods & Crips in Africa never really ran around doing throw bye’s, and killing innocent bystanders like they used to do out in L.A. back in the 90′s did they? Seewhumsayin? I mean, just keeping it real, a spear is kinda hard to hide and tuck into the small of your back under a jacket.

Seriously, I think it would be quite uncomfortable to carry a concealed spear. Yeah, you just cannot expect to sneak a spear up in the club, and shit just like that. Are you crazy? And what would that mean for the Black community? Less Black on Black crime, or in particular murders. Not just that, but less cops harassing Blacks like they do looking for guns. Yup, no more racial profiling and all of that racial shit, and we would all be able to live in peace and harmony. Yes, life in America would be different for us folks of African descent if they had just left their guns at home. Now all we have to do is figure out how all these guns get onto our streets everyday.

Can you take a guess how they do?

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But seriously, how dare a slave with a gun “Kill all the White people,” in a movie? A few days ago, Sean Hannity had a huge problem with Janie Foxx and his Saturday Night Live opening monologue last weekend. As you may know by now, in the upcoming film Django Unchained, Jamie plays a slave with an itchy trigger finger — imagine that, a slave with a gun. Yep, leave it to Jamie Foxx to play the first slave with a gun in a movie, who doesn’t start a revolution, right? Yeah, how’s that for Black History? I’m sure Nat Turner would be so proud.

In his monologue, Jamie most pleasurably jokingly mentioned that he kills all the white people in the movie. Now I’m no fan of Jamie Foxx, but even I — though I struggled — had to laugh because it was pretty funny. I mean, if you’re a slave with a gun in the 1850s, um, what else are you supposed to do? Exactly! It’s really a no brainer, right? But no, don’t tell that to Sean Hannity. Forever in search of the elusive Black Bogeyman, Hannity took offense and found Foxx to be racially offensive. Um, isn’t it hilariously funny how a host on Fox thinks that Foxx was racist.

JAMIE FOXX: My name is Jamie Foxx. Give it up, give it up, New York City, Saturday Night Live. Come on, make some noise, man. New York City, New York City, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens, it’s crazy. I’m black, and I’m dressed all black cause it’s good to be black. Black is the new white. I’m telling you, how black is this right here? Nice fly, I’m saying. You know how I know black is in right now? Cause the Nets moved to Brooklyn. How black is that? They got black jerseys, black court. I mean, how black is that? And Jay-z is the owner, a rapper. How black is that? And Jay-z only own about this much of the team. But he act like he own all of New York. How black is that?

And I got a movie coming out, “Django,” check it out. Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson. “Django Unchained” I play a slave. How black is that? And in the movie I had to wear chains. How whack is that? But don’t be worried about it because I get out the chains, I get free, I save my wife, and I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that? And how black is that?

And of course, Hannity found two not-so-unchained folks to have a discussion:

How does it help race relations in this country when a black actor jokes on national television about killing white people?

One has to believe that his opening monologue was approved by SNL’s writers, meaning they were in on it.

Imagine the uproar if a white actor joked about killing all the black people in a new film he was starring in.

That would probably be the end of his career.

By contrast, for Foxx, this will probably win him another Oscar.

It’s a grave new world isn’t it?

Yes, it is a “grave new world,” indeed; but, obviously not much has changed since there’s a black family living in the White House. The truth is that neither Sheppard nor Hannity are interested in helping race relations in this country. If anything, what we’ve seen for the last four years especially, is that black is not the new white as Jamie Foxx suggested. But that may be my penchant for the tragicomic coupled with my ever-present Negro cynicism coming through. Forgive my pessimism, but when I look at the right-wing’s new black fetish, and how they rarely miss any opportunity to demonize people of color. Let’s just say that though it has been four years, I’m not feeling very post-racial. Case in point, check out the following video. Maybe it’s me, but the obvious appeal to the racial sensitivities of “certain people” in America, is blatantly obvious.

Yep, whether in movies or real life, black folks have done a lot of things in America since slavery. Hell, we’ve even been to space for crying out loud. That said, is it too hard to imagine or accept that we’re at a place in history where a black person can simultaneously be president of the United States, while another one uses a gun to “kill all the White people,” in a movie? Or is that, like truth, too much too fast for some to accept? Sorry, but the days of Blazing Saddles are long gone.

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Oh, so you think unions are bad for business and workers. OK, here’s one reason why you’re wrong. Yep, and I’ll give it to you in one word. Are you ready? Here it goes: slavery. Yeah, marinate on that one for a few and get back to me.

But don’t tell that to Michigan’s Republican governor Rick Snyder, who in a Wednesday morning appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe argued that their new anti-union law was beneficial to the state. According to Snyder, the states new right-to-work law could protect and strengthen unions by encouraging them to show more value to workers. Wow! So, reducing the influence and power of labor unions to act in the best interest of the Michigan worker when it comes to protecting and securing their rights, actually turns out to be “pro-worker.”

This from Think Progress:

Snyder appeared on the show less than 12 hours after signing two separate bills allowing public and private union members to opt out of paying union dues, while benefiting from union contracts, and defended the controversial measures. He characterized the law as benefiting workers and unions become more valuable.

The answer shocked the Morning Joe crew and led MSNBC contributor Richard Wolffe to interrupt the governor in mid-answer. Even Joe Scarborough grew incredulous and the Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein sighed heavily as Snyder spoke:

SNYDER: I’ve never said that unions are bad for business. And I don’t believe this is actually anti-union. If you look at it, I believe this is pro-worker, because the way I view it is, is workers now have freedom to choose …

WOLFFE: Hang on. Hang on a second. Are you serious? Are you serious? This is not anti-unions? This actually, at its core undermines the ability for unions to organize. So you can make any argument you like, but saying it’s not …

SNYDER: Unions have to be in a position to present a good value proposition… And if they don’t provide value, people shouldn’t be forced to pay for something they don’t see any value in. So again, this should make unions more effective in terms of having to put a value proposition to workers.

SCARBOROUGH: Governor, while I made a similar argument earlier that workers shouldn’t be compelled to have to pay from their salary to a union with whom they disagree, I would not go so far as to say what you’ve just said, which is that this helps unions. I mean, it undermines unions’ ability to stay vibrant, right?

BERNSTEIN: Absolutely!

SNYDER: It really leaves it up to the union to decide and innovate as to what their value proposition is….

BERNSTEIN: Come on!

Gee, who knew?

Listen, Rick Snyder (and the GOP as a whole) firmly believes that Michigan workers (and the rest of us) were born last night. The truth is that Michigan has been ground zero for the GOP’s agenda since 2010′s midterm election. Yep, this is the same state government that produced Emergency Managers who were responsible for not only firing teachers and shutting down public schools while being on the payroll of a corporate-funded organization that promoted privatization and charter schools. This is the same state government that used yet another Emergency Manager to take away the legislative power of elected officials in a predominantly African-American city called Benton Harbor, to be able to build a luxury golf resort for the wealthy.

Snyder and company has done a lot more than this, but I’ll stop there because hopefully you get the point. A lot of what has been done by Snyder and company, comes right out of the ALEC playbook; and, it is in fact an example of how the partnership between corporations and government aren’t always pro-worker, or even pro-democracy as it should be. instead, it can be very pro-slavery.

Now watch the following to understand:

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So I just found out that the world is coming to an end on December 21st, 2013. Yeah I know, we’re not gonna even have Christmas this year. Even worse is the fact that there will be no inauguration to attend in January. It really sucks because, even as historic as the last one was, I missed it. This being the last time they’d ever let a black man swear an oath to being POTUS, I was damn sure I wasn’t going to miss this one. But, none of you people told me about the world ending before now, so I suppose that’s not going to happen. Hell, who knew the Mayans were Republicans?

But anyway, speaking of end of times and apocalyptic events. Did you hear that Tea Party darling and slave-catcher extraordinaire, Allen West, lost his Congressional seat in November? Yep, fortunately for us, we won’t have to be assaulted with his ignorance in the next Congress. And of course after losing a requested ballot recount, West is now asserting that his loss was due to his opponent cheating – yeah, like all Democrats are obviously known to do.

Appearing on Mark Levin’s radio show last Thursday, West accused his challenger Patrick Murphy, of cheating: “I’m not going away just because of a congressional race where he seems to have to cheat to beat me.” Of course being no stranger to controversial statements, West never offered an explanation of how Murphy cheated. But in true self-aggrandizing albeit narcissistic fashion, West chose to beat his chest in defeat like the deranged “warrior,” and deluded nutjob that he is.

Check it out:

LEVIN: You are a national treasure. You are way too important to have something like this to happen and off you go. That can’t happen. So I’m really curious to know. Do you have further public service in mind, potentially?

WEST: The most important thing everyone has to understand is my voice is not going to be lost. We’ve gotten a lot of opportunities, a lot of offers, and we’re going to make sure we continue to have that platform. [...] I’m a warrior and I’m a statesman and I’m a servant of this republic. I’m not going away just because of a congressional race where he seems to have to cheat to beat me.

LEVIN: He sure as hell did. It’s disgusting.

Allen West suggesting that he lost his Congressional seat because his opponent cheated, sounds eerily like Marion Barry’s, “The bitch set me up,” line. Negro, you lost because you GOP pals through redistricting put you at an electoral disadvantage. Nope, they didn’t give a damn about your black ass. So, go sit’cho ass down somewhere and have a hot cup of STFU, with a “Nigga Please,” shit sandwich on the side. Of curse I have to give West credit for not blaming his loss on an Obama-created Mayan conspiracy with help from the Kenyan Mafia, and those Chicago gangsters.

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