Black Lives Matter (But not in The Congo)
This article is a response to the article written at Medium.com by Mr. John Gorman, entitled, Then They Came for the White Men and Boys: And there were too many left to speak for us. Most of them were wrong.
Hmmmmm. Let’s see…….Okay, while, at first glance, Mr. Gorman’s (John’s) perspective might appear (to many) to be “factually” incorrect, as he slices away at those accepted, virtually, religious, and immutable doctrines that currently “guide” American culture, I’m forced to chime in with my perspective which might appear (and probably does) to chime with his perspective. I’m not sure, but I think so.
Now, ya’ll gone have to hold tight on this one, because it’s gonna be “unnecessarily” long. But, I don’t know how to address this subject in a short manner.
I was raised, in Chicago, during the 1950s. My “uneducated” grandmother, Emma Chism, aka, Sugarbaby, managed to somehow purchase our huge family home, in the Princeton Park area of Chicago, at 9201 S. Perry [See page 135 of my free book, Uncle Tom’s Uncle, Second Edition, at Academia.edu.]
Princeton Park, Chatham Village, and Pill Hill were areas of Chicago where either working class Black folks lived, or “bourgie-assed Negroes” lived. There were other working-class areas of the south side of Chicago, such as the Washington Park area. Pill Hill, by the way, bore that name because that was the area were Black doctors, Black dentists, and Black anyone expertly involved in a professional healthcare practice lived.
Huh?! What?! You didn’t know that Black folks, pre-1960s, weren’t living in shacks? Weren’t, during segregation, constantly hollering and complaining about “White supremacy!!!!!!” all f*cking day, as young Black writers holler these days, as I’ve witnessed? Well, read my book. Also, view two recent and very important film documentaries, produced by Larry Elder and his associates: Uncle Tom (2020) and Uncle Tom II (2022).
My black-as-coal dad, Nathaniel Spain Chism, was a professional carpenter and a full-fledged member of the Chicago Carpenter’s Union, from which he successfully retired and received a good pension. Dad kept work. We wanted for nothing.
He’d leave a ton of quarters in his sports coat that hung in the closet, and told my big brother and I, “If ya’ll want to go to the show [the theatre], or to Riverview [then, the largest amusement park on earth], take some money and go.” He raised us alone, because he and my mom divorced when I was five years old and my big brother was thirteen. He got custody of us.
So, he was a single-parent, with a single source of income, yet we were doing just fine, and better. He even gave my big brother some dough to purchase, for my birthday, a yellow, remote-controlled, model airplane that I’d take to Washington Park to fly. Dad had also purchased a Lionel Train set for my big brother, the very most special gift that any American boy, anywhere, could hope to receive back then.
My friend Jimmy’s father worked in the stock yards, pulling down some sho NUF good scratch, and Jimmy also owned a Lionel Train set, purchased by his dad. Jobs for Black men were plentiful in the Chicago suburbs where the factories were located. Yeah, it took a bit of a drive to get to work, but the dough was great.
Our all-Black neighborhood, as I’m fond of sharing in my writings, was self-sufficient and contained the following Black institutions:
Two hospitals, Provident and Ida Mae Scott, Black-founded, Black-owned, and Black operated.
Doctors offices, Black-owned and operated [We never left the hood to obtain our physical check-ups]
Dental offices, Black-owned and operated [ditto]
A bank, Black-owned and operated. My mom banked there.
An insurance company, Black-owned and operated
Two mini-supermarkets, Black-owned and operated
Mom and Pop stores, Black-owned and operated
Live poultry shops, Black-owned and operated
Butcher shops, Black-owned and operated
Two taxi-cabs companies, Black-owned and operated
TV repair shops, Black-owned and operated
Two-parent families
Rare divorce
NO GUN VIOLENCE
So, what happened? How did the south side of Chicago morph from stability, relative prosperity, and independence, to now possessing the internationally-known reputation, these days, of being a “murder capital?” Oh!!! I know!!! THE WHITE MAN!!!!
It was the WHITE MAN’S FAULT!!! Yeah…That’s right!! It was because of WHITE SUPREMACY!!! It was those WHITE-ASSED, RACIST MOTHERF*CKERS WHO DESTROYED THE BLACK COMMUNITY!!!!” Uhhhhhhhh. Right?
Hmmmm. Lemme think a minute…Well…..
In 1968, the year I graduated from high-school, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, were all on TV “explaining” to me [I was 18 years old] that “We gone kill that honkey….The white boy is our enemy!!! He put us in slavery!!!! He’s the devil incarnate!!”
I was a teenager, filled with all that that sh*t means, including pouty-faced anger about every motherf*cking thing imaginable. And now — finally — my anger was being “explained” to me. It’s the white man’s fault. Case closed.
So, as I sat on my grandmother’s roof [go look, again, at the picture of our family home that I mentioned above], reading Franz Fanon’s, The Wretched of the Earth, “learning” why everything was so f*cked up for Black people, as I was being told was the case on TV, I decided to take a break and go inside to “explain” to my patient dad, who was relaxing on the couch, why he’s “oppressed” — in Princeton Park. I’d hoped beyond hope that, as I left to go back up on the roof, I wouldn’t yet again hear him mumble to himself, “The boy done lost his damned mind”
The jobs that would later begin to be lost by Black men — jobs that paid well enough for Black folks to raise a family on one income — would gradually and mysteriously disappear. You know, those good-paying factory jobs that had helped make it possible for Black folks to support independent, local Black businesses so that money circulated within the Black community a number of times before going out. Yeah, those jobs.
But wait!!! No, it wasn’t that. I knew what the real deal was. It was because of the usual: the White man. It’s always the White man (Isn’t it?)
So, by the end of the summer of 1968, I’d become a Black revolutionary, “down with the game,” i.e., very serious and very committed. Then I graduated to the status of Black nationalist. Unfortunately [or fortunately], I never graduated to the next “higher” level: Pan-Africanist. But, that’s okay! I now had more than enough tools to “explain” slavery, Jim Crow, prejudice, racism, discrimination, marginalization, segregation [We didn’t know about “microaggressions” yet. I don’t think they’d been invented yet], and to “solve” a problem that, strangely, as it turned out, I was never able to solve……until I found out about something that challenged, if not pulled down the doctrines of my revolutionary religion: It’s the money.
“It’s the economy, stupid,” as someone decades later would recite.
“No! It’s the White Man!!!”
Uh……Noooooo……It’s the economy, stupid, at least in large part. My dad, way back in the 1950s, had always told my brother and I that same thing that James Carville would say decades later, but Daddy Cheese (the nickname of my dad) said it a little differently, especially when Marcus and I both got caught up in ‘The Revolution’. “Boys,” dad would say, “When did I ever teach you to hate someone? Don’t hate the White man. Just learn how he makes that money.” It’s the economy, stupid.
If you’re oppressed, or feel that you’re oppressed; if you’re working, as they say in China, 9–9–6 (9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., 6 days a week), and still can’t make ends meet, then it ain’t the subjects of the explanations offered by the ideology or by the well-crafted, doctrinally-inspired narratives that are the problems. It’s the economy, stupid!!!
My life went on. I continued obtaining work, while at the same time accusing “The White Man,” who continued hiring me, of having created everything bad under the sun.
It was very strange. It’s truly amazing how a picture that is lodged in your mind — as I like to say, “behind the eyes” — will create your [false] “reality,” even though the real sh*t that’s happening is right in front of you. But, see, it’s hidden behind a sh*t load of well-oiled, doctrines that, if you question them, will land you in ideological prison, shunned by eebody and dey mamma, to borrow an old expression from the hood. (See my article, entitled Wanted, Dead (preferably) or Alive (depends): Narrative and Perspective. The charge: First-degree murder.)
Well, in 1975, I first began to finally wake up to the fact that there was something even worse than “The White Man”: Power and money, both of which are super great motivators for big shots to f*ck over the REST of us, in their attempt to monopolize both power and money, and at our expense. I’m just giving you my perspective. I ain’t the Infallible Pope. [He ain’t either.]
The picture behind the eyes really disintegrated when I paused, one day, to review my work life and noticed something: Out of all the jobs I had had in my 53 years in the American work force, I’d gotten fired only once. And guess who fired me? A coal-Black African from the Congo — my “Black brother,” who was from “The Mother Land.” I had never been fired by “The White Man” in my entire Black-ass life. But the picture I had had in my mind had “informed” me of The Truth: The White Man is the Number One Problem for all of humanity, “forever and EVEN forever,” as the Bible says [somewhere].
The one time I’d been fired was not for being Black. I’d been fired for reasons connected with one of those two things that motivate a**hole big shots: money. Yep!! Mulopo — a coal-Black African man — had come all the way from the f*ck’n CONGO, just to fire ME, his long-lost “Black brother” from Chicago. Clearly, The Democratic Republic of The Congo hadn’t gotten the message yet:
Black Lives Matter (But not in The Congo)