10 White Privilege Commandments

10 White Privilege Commandments:

1. Thou shalt not assume your experience or your feelings about your experience is equal or greater than the experience of those most affected by racism.
2. Thou shalt not shame or publicly deride “people of color” for speaking out against racism, enlarging your awareness or history and identifying your privilege.
3. Thou shalt not (mis)appropriate the material, intellectual or spiritual culture of others.
4. Thou shalt not ask stupid questions.
5. Thou shalt not arrogantly assume you can touch the bodies, hair, clothing or personal effects of people who you deem as “Other” or “exotic”.
6. Thou shalt not NOT listen actively and reflect inwardly about what you heard from people not of your culture.
7. Thou shalt not assume that your particular cultural content is the best in the world or that it is the best way to see the world
8. Thou shalt not be required to like the sins (or colonies or nations or political systems) of your fathers (and mothers)….nor is anyone else.
9. Thou shalt not assume that your god can beat other peoples’ goddesses/gods or spiritual entities nor should that god eclipse the presence of others or be used as a battering ram to support your privilege.
10. Thou shalt not knowingly (or unknowingly)  participate in, aid or abet the structural and systemic elements of racism.
11. Thou shalt not assume that ten commandments is enough to deal with racism and European/white privilege...let alone everything else pathological or out of balance in the world.

Bookmarking Cultural Genocide

It was interesting…and troubling… to listen to author Matthew Bunson ("St. Kateri: Lily of the Mohawks") talking to Doug Keck, Executive Director of Eternal Word Television Network and host of EWTN roamin catholic television's "Bookmark" (July 13, 2015) on the history of catholicism on Turtle Island. I observed them privileging the work of catholic missionaries above the colonial exploitation of the Spanish, British and French as if they were the singular light of redemption of that time in that place.  Talking romantically about the "black robes" as the "highly educated" Jesuit priests were called, they bantered about the Jesuits having set up a settlement so that they could "practice their faith" and "protect themselves", (gently) castigating the Iroquois for their "xenophobia" and for their concern of the encroachment of European settlers in their Ancestral lands. 

The casual nature of their conversation more than belied the brutality and genocide against First Nations, Original and Native American peoples on Turtle Island, recently brought to light and news headlines by an apology stated by the pope.  It submerged the voice, struggle and resistance of indigenous peoples against European colonialism, made more negatively profound by the work of predatory missionaries projecting foreign and unnecessary religious and cultural concepts into indigenous nations, tribes and bands, enacting, in essence and action, cultural genocide, none of which was brought into the conversation with any substance by Bunson or Keck.  Actually, their discussion was more a shaming of those who might dare to suggest that somehow the catholic church was involved in any negative way in the destruction of indigenous cultural, political and/or spiritual sovereignty, seemingly negating the sense of openness, at least in word only, that the pope created by his apology and his statements of the importance of indigenous peoples and their stewardship of the earth in the recent environmental encyclical, "Laudato Si".

 

This interview harked back to narrow and colonial ways of referring to indigenous peoples and resistance to the European holocaust on Turtle Island and beyond.  Its casual air was, again, troubling, as they reaffirmed a cultural arrogance, a matter-of-factness of religious and colonial privilege that stated strongly that being "saved" in the particular European derivation of christianity was and is required for their conception of redemption to become real and that that was still their conception about how the world should be engaged.  This kind of conversation is no different than the nature of the original vatican papal bulls of the 1400's that gave catholic and christian conquerors the blessing of the church to subjugate peoples and lands in the interest of saving souls and emboldening the colonial force of christendom across the planet.  This, again, seems contradictory to the recent statements by the roamin catholic pope himself, suggesting that there may yet be a currently silent rift or at least an important learning curve yet ahead in the catholic church's 1.2 billion members if the words of the pope are going to be taken seriously in the light…or shadow…of the recent encyclical and apology for the sins of the church against indigenous peoples.

A Beating in Baltimore

You might not know his name, but you now know of his parent, who has been lauded as a hero and paraded around media and Washington DC as a model mother.  I acknowledge her impulses of deep love for her child, for his protection. I will not accept that without acknowledging that he was right to be motivated and then to act, even if we don't like his tactics. 

We melodramatically applaud women and men with guns pointed at "foreign brown people" daily, telling stories of patriotic fantasies of freedom and democracy in places that would rather not see our faces...or our bullets.  And along comes a young man, from a population of people of an age that most of the country stereotypes into apathy, indolence, ignorance and criminality. 

From an interview, he revealed being there because he saw his friends and loved ones around him being targeted, brutalized, harassed and killed.  That was his motivation.  THAT was his motivation.  So now he gets dragged along, showing great respect and deference to his loving mother, to be the mediated white-privilege-anti-cultural whipping boy for being some kind of unruly punk unthinking thug kid who clearly deserved to be popped upside his head by a mother who was understandably afraid for his life and safety. 

Stop for a moment in our revelry around the performance of corporal punishment on a "deserving" black body no matter who it came from...but from his mother?...even more colonially poetic. Shades of Willie Lynch and internalized racism have been called up by some observers.  But let's, just for a moment, act like we actually trust that within African youth here on Turtle Island lies the love and compassion and empathy and heart-driven political acuity to actually break through our limitations, our low expectations for them and that we actually believe the usual hype that we love everyone in this country (let alone on it's Bantustans/reservations or the rest of the world) equally.  Remember the ages of the young people who integrated lunch counters or boycotted buses, spent time in Birmingham jails, participated in freedom rides or got blown into the realm of the Ancestors by bombs set off in Birmingham churches.

Let's, for a moment, make believe we remember that youth have led (or followed in sharp principled

fashion) us through some of the most important socio-political moments in this settler-colony and around the world at least in the last 75 years. Let's take into consideration that in a few weeks we will smatter our graduating youth from crumbling Camden, NJ to desertifying California with smarmy platitudes about how they are the future, the leaders of tomorrow and that they must take responsibility for our world (that we adults have so royally jacked up for them).  And let's take into consideration that we sing songs and write books about genocidal Boston Tea Party Europeans in red-face, glorify the real and sin-ematic USAmerican cavalry that ran roughshod over indigenous people across a land "we" would later and currently nearly destroy because "G-O-D" blessed America just that much and that we believe so fully in the bogus oil and water wars in Iraq and in the corporate-bought con-gress that created them. 

Think, just for a moment, that this one young man's impulse was maybe about 75 feet (maybe the height of a slave ship mast) above that of those aforementioned others, that his impulse to take to the street was driven by love, by familial and communal protection and by the real understanding of the value of human life..and that for him, Black Lives actually Matter...as opposed to the adherence to a genocidal imperative or complicity with colonial imperialism.  And armed with what? His heart, his body and maybe some rocks....knowing full well the weight of the commitment to facing down the militarized presence of the same authoritative political police/military apparatus that walks with impunity into cities and nations that will then resist often with the same weaponry he carried that day and with a much deeper ethical footing than their invading enemy.

 So, then, for a moment, just one moment, let's consider that what is happening to this young man is not the righteous spanking that our privileged and age-ist minds are assuming this 15 minutes of faux-maternal fame is.  Let us not in any way, though, besmirch the impulses of an African mother in a colonial nation built almost solely on chattel enslavement, indigenous holocaust and international plunder for the beloved life born of her sacred and Ancestrally-charged womb.  But let us not dare to sublimate the fact that, at least on that mediatedly fateful day, he had rallied for the rightest reasons we can remember, even though most of us still love his Goliath much more than the spirit of his Davidism.

His name is Michael Singleton.

(FYI, in about a day or so, a bunch of us will be training our attentions on the sanctioned battle between two men of color in a boxing ring...a sanctioned fight, a gladiatorial spectacle, because someone is due to make a...killing...(sorry)..from it.)


ABC's "The View" interview of Michael and his mother:
http://abc.go.com/shows/the-view/video/pl5554876/vdka0_91j7ckao

[The above link is no longer active, availablr. Please visit linked article below for commentary on Michael Singleton and the mediated beating that sparked this writing]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/uppitynegronetwork.com/2015/05/04/who-speaks-for-michael-singleton/amp/

Personal History

History is personal. It's not particularly about you or me, but it affects US...all of US, all our relations, the family of All That Is.  History is to be taken personally.  We are part of the making of it right now...right now.  It is the history of the Earth.

Energetics is...

Emergetics is a context (container, repository) of multidimensional temporoexpansive awhereness.

It is the unlimted scope given rise by the naturo-spiritual dynamic inherent in the juncture between and within humanity and the Other World (of Spirit) and all tje systems and processes engendered by it.

A People Subjected to Trauma...

A person subjected to trauma, like physical violence, emotional abuse or rape, by another person will never seek or find empowerment and liberation from that trauma by staying in the ideological or even the physical context of that other person.  Likewise, one would think that Africans would not look to or provide sustenance to the colonial system, European conceptions of divinity or exploitative, but normalized relationships with nature.

Land, Culture and Settler Consciousness

People's culture and strength is tied to land. Native American cultural strength is tied to Turtle Island/North America. European cultural strength is not tied to North America as it is an oppressive presence, not one of oneness with the earth or nature OR the original people here. Remember, Europeans were originally welcomed here, but they forsook that welcome because they came as christian dominators, not allies or humble tenants. They systematized genocide and holocaust in North and South America and Africa and beyond. So how can their children, who still benefit wildly from that original oppressive crime wave, claim to have some ethical, political, social connection to this land? The math doesn't add up unless you steep yourself in the groundless fantasy of christian Manifest Destiny/Doctrine of Discovery, "cowboys and Indians/western movie narratives and bulls**t "American exceptionalism" fantasies. On another level, settler colonists, most of the people living in USAmerica/Canada are leeching off the death, genocide and current oppression of First Nations/Native American peoples....real humans that are alive now who still remember their Ancestors who were terrorized to death then in true ruthless fashion....by people with bibles and crosses. The only way forward is to decolonize, to engage in anti-colonial social change and act like real, intelligent, informed ethical adults. Part of this transformation will be the shift of non-Native populations and individuals from settler-colonists to settlers. Settler-colonists live in privilege based on the historical and current theft of land, indigenous cultural destruction and rampant, destructive exploitation of land, nature and resources. A major element of the oppressive settler-colonial presence is the sustenance of dominator, colonizer ideology most currently expressed in the concepts of "patriotism", "american exceptionalism" and "christian religious privilege", the presumptive diminance of "G-O-D" and the culture from which the dominant ideas about that mythological deity emanate. Settlers consciousness comes into play in a much more ethical and intelligent way, defining a new egalitarian, respectful relationship with the indigenous nations, their members and the political and cultural endeavors and aspirations of those nations, including the honoring of treaties made between these indigenous nations and the settler-colonial governments of Canada and the United States of America. Becoming a settler is a radical project, challenges many, if not most of the ideological tenets of industrial corporatocracy and is absolutely necessary to the idea and work of living in correct relationship to Mother/Father Earth, nature and all its now fleeting tenants.

"The Great Forgetting"

Core thoughts relating to my concepts of Disintegrated Indigeny and Devolutionary Energetics.

http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/have-you-heard-of-the-great-forgetting/

Otherness and Unity: One Earth, One Humanity

One of the key premises of this work is the principled dissollution of "otherness" of indigenous peoples in the minds and actions of "disintegrated", digitized, industrialized, mechanized modern citizens while holding the delicate balance of respect, validation and allyship without the domination ethics of (mis)appropriation and cultural theft.  It is the firm belief and experience of this writer that every disintegrated [1] human has a direct path back and forward to their own indigeny, true sense of identity and profound sense of purpose as a spiritual energetic embodied in human form.  This innerstanding also gives rise to a fundamental and profound awareness that inherent in this premise, this meta-cultural context is a key to conceptualizing and manifesting a (possibly) new conception of global unity and harmonious life based upon the work and sense of unity and real solidarity within the worldwide organization and organizations and organizing of indigenous peoples and nations, work that it is strongly suggested represents a basic and necessary model for universal human and cultural interelationship, sustained working relationships with Mother/Father Earth and Her/His profound gifts (natural resources) to Her/His children (human and otherwise) and the path back and forward to a global cultural production that is based on a fundamental and informed understanding and embrace of the material and energetic realities that have come into human awareness over the last 3 to 6 million years (no small thing).

[1] Disintegrated is one of the terms used to describe privileged modern, industrial people generally living in cities (but not limited to that environment) in colonial or settler-colonial countries (I.e., USAmerica, Canada, England).  This term refers to the dangerous level to which these people have been dis-integrated from their Ancestral cultural roots and their historical indigenous heritage which generally for most peoples included a close and functional integration with nature and Spirit.

Humanity, the most "successful species"?

If we are living in balance with nature, then we are simply as successful as the worm, the vulture, the fish or the tree. We deserve no more accolade than that...and that is enough. 

(Excerpted from a reply to post in ANU HERITAGE ZIMBABWE group on facebook, 9/6/13)

An extremely important film...

...in the context of African liberation, cultural revitalization, spiritual redemption and the necessary redemption of the indigenous soul.

500 YEARS LATER -The Official Movie Website