Men's Multiple Women/ Black Folk's One White People

 

 The Art of Garin Baker

 
•   Maven Huggins: for the life of me I cant get over people's reactions to this story. that is so normal normal. I see it all about me. almost every married man have an outside woman and plenty fren'. I also see guys juggling girlfriends. while living with a woman/ what is remarkable to me in this story and i give this guy plenty props is that he was evidently taking care of these women, even if that meant, just sharing what he had. that is upper topper to me, cause from what I see, from men even supposedly those above his socioeconomic status is men just feeding and living off of women, getting money, car, housing, etc. I just see men living no where but either their mother's or their women, like this guy seemed to be doing, I eh know but at least he was saying, "here, hold this" that seems to be a lost art and protocol.
  
  so is it denial, deceit or dissonance that have people in such perpetrated shock? cause I just land here and this is all I see. from land to gentry

  
  
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• Dennis Allen: " there was a study done in the states...can't recall which city, but there were 18,000 kids fathered by 5,000 men on 11,000 women.
  work the math

  
  
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• Maven Huggins: i was googling but nothing coming...that is roughly two children per woman...we know there would be multiples in there.. but four children per man.. each man had two plus women. a wife/woman, girlfriend and side chick- she is the .2. smh.
  
  Yup. that is about how it is. Thanks Dennis.
  
  now what gets me..and i have lived in africa, the us, all parts, no where else in the black world, have i seen the level of hypermaledom as I observe here in trinidad. man have more woman than they can deal with. I literally walk around my daily life wondering how do women deal. when i watch the men, i just imagine the lines of women, and what type. I swear I am a bit obsessed with the phenomenon actually
  
  when i talk about it, the only thing i hear is how the woman...do too. but the numbers dont support that bs. not to the same extent. Anyway, I find it intriguing

  
  
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• Dennis Allen: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/.../Man-fathered-30-kids-11...
  

  
  

  
  

  

  
  

  Man who fathered THIRTY kids with 11 different women says he needs a break -...

  dailymail.co.uk

  
  
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• Dennis Allen: "theres another UNEMPLOYED man in TX with twenty-something kids. he says he's trying to be more supportive...by playing the lotto everyday. cause...hey...yuh never know?"

  
  
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• Maven Huggins:  if this guy is from the uk. did you see the one on iyanla? 34 children i think he has

  
  
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• Dennis Allen: "and there's that Brit guy too! yeah!
  lotta time these women have to take some blame too eh, cause really? some of these men???:

  
  
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• Maven Huggins: yeah. I read someone somewhere, think it might have been Iyanla...where it was explained that these women get trapped because they maintained the dream, believed in the dream, every time, every single baby , every single man that this was "the one" ""the man", " the relationship" that was going to be it.
  
  and I see it..it is the mechanism by which women end up with men: you "stick it out"...this is how women end up being married."holding onto the dream" I feel i am butchering this. and i am being sloppy/. but i think there is something profound in that

  
  women too cant take the blame if that (sex and body) is all they are selling and offering, and then asleep above, below and beyond all of that . what would it mean for women to wake up.
• 
  
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• Dennis Allen there is. we need to teach our daughters that the dream has to match their reality

  
  
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• Maven Huggins no. i was one of those daughters . filled with dreams and taught the privilege I can have dreams. and my world popped. my dream world. cause that is what it is ..a long time friend from grad school just wrote me the other day and said , "i know you want the fantasy, but that is not real" we need to teach our girldchildren how to think like men, and how not to have dreams. and how to build. and how to love self/ how to have an armour that is a highly sensitive bullshit meter
  
  and i guess we saying the same thing, except i think i am saying, there are no more dreams. there never was. what has happened is that the veil of lies, myths and delusions have burnt away . in these times

  
  
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• Maven Huggins dreams are all tv and disney. dreams is what have black people rioting in baltimore under curfew right now. y ou see now I am talking of things much bigger than ^^^

  
  
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• Dennis Allen: " Baltimore is more than just chasing dreams doh...to be fair.
  its also about fighting your way out of your living nightmare."

  
  
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Maven Huggins try to ride with me and get what i am saying. go back hundreds of years, to jim crow and civil rights. we bought into the dream that we were americans. that we could teach white people to like us, that white supremacy would be dismantled , that if we lived with white folk in their neighborhoods and in their schools, they would respect us.
So when we realize that the answer and truth to all that and more is no no and no, we riot and protest. ti is the same theme/ believing in dreams that are a lie and counter to reality

men for women, white people for black people
why and how are we trying to fight our way out of a living nightmare?
was it not because we forgot, or went to sleep, dreamt and dreaming and or never woke up?

if i am not able to convey my point I regret, but i see it so crystal clear. and I love the analogy and story if i may say so. If i look back on malcolm, martin, sojourner , mandela...the next line to teach and tell is we been sleeping and dreaming...and this is where it got us


 Dennis Allen: " i like how you're thinking
and that makes a lot of sense...but who sold the dream the black man bought?
the same man that brought him on the slave ship. the same man who took away their gods. the same man who raped his women and stole his children.
X and MLK are significantly different from Mandela in this respect, because Mandela did not use religion as the conduit to political power. in that respect Mandela was closer in his strategy to the oppressor—he TOOK political power by the threat of force. which is what is so scary about the Baltimore action. there is no moderate preacherman telling these angry slaves to cool it."


Maven Huggins:  Dennis, reading the thread over and my comments, i want to make clear, i am not a single parent, nor did i ever get jammed long term chasing these men dreams, my dreams were about who i thought i was in the world, what i could be and do, unstoppable, unimpeded...and that dream is what popped... I realized it could have been misconstrued

  
Dennis Allen: " nah, i think i read you correctly "


 
 Maven Huggins mandela was more dangerous and treacherous than the former two/ your last line is accurate. I wrote a post this evening that the soldiers were on the battle field with no generals
 

 
Dennis Allen : "the sad thing? the GANGS are the most organised, TRUELY representative organisations of black america. not even the universities and colleges support the black man in america—in every corner, every pocket and ever crevice—like the gangs do. and thats a sad truth to accept"


Maven Huggins: accurate on all counts. I wrote a post this evening alluding to gangs getting into the marijuana business to build economic power for the community, leveraging their truly wall street corporate skills.

Guest Post: Kevin Powell's Why Baltimore is Burning

Kevin Powell
 
Why Baltimore Is Burning
By Kevin Powell

I am from the ghetto. The first 13 years of my life I grew up in the worst slums of Jersey City, New Jersey, my hometown. If you came of age in one of America’s poor inner cities like I did then you know that we are good, decent people: in spite of no money, no resources, little to no services, run down schools, landpersons who only came around to collect rent, and madness and mayhem everywhere, amongst each other, from abusive police officers, and from corrupt politicians and crooked preachers, we still made a way out of no way. We worked hard, we partied hard, we laughed hard, we barbequed hard, we drank hard, we smoked hard, and we praised God, hard.

And we were segregated, hard, by a local power structure that did not want the ghetto to be seen nor heard from, and certainly not to bring its struggles out in plain sight for the world to see.

Indeed my entire world was the block I lived on and maybe five or six blocks north south east west. A long-distance trip was going to Downtown Jersey City on the first of each month so our mothers—our Black and Latina mothers—could cash their welfare checks, buy groceries with their food stamps and, if we were lucky, we got to eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken or some other fast food restaurant on that special day.

When I was about 15 I was badly beaten by a White police officer after me and a Puerto Rican kid had a typical boy fight on the bus. No guns, no knives, just our fists. The Puerto Rican kid, who had White skin to my Black skin, was escorted off the bus gingerly. I was thrown off the bus. Outraged, I said some things to the cop as I sat handcuffed in the back seat of a police car. He proceeded to smash me in the face with the full weight of his fist. Bloodied, terrified, broken in that moment, I would never again view most police officers as we had been taught as children: “Officer Friendly”—

Being poor meant I only was able to go to college because of a full financial aid package to Rutgers University. I did not get on a plane until I was 24-years-old because of that poverty and also because I did not know that was something I could do. These many years later I have visited every single state in America, every city big and small, and every ghetto community you can name. They all look the same.

Abandoned, burnt out buildings. Countless churches, funeral parlors, barber shops, beauty salons, check cashing places, furniture rental stores, fried chicken spots, and Chinese restaurants. Schools that look and feel more like prison holding cells for our youth than centers of learning. Playgrounds littered with broken glass, used condoms, and drug paraphernalia. Liquor stores here there everywhere. Corner stores that sell nothing but candy, cupcakes, potato chips, soda, every kind of beer you can name, loose cigarettes, rolling paper for marijuana, lottery tickets, and gum, lots and lots of gum.

Then there are also the local organizations that claim to serve the people, Black and Latino people. Some mean well, and are doing their best with meager resources. Others only come around when it is time to raise money, to generate some votes for one political candidate or another, or if the police have tragically killed someone.

Like Rekiya Boyd in Chicago. Like Miriam Carey in Washington, D.C. Like Tanisha Anderson in Cleveland. Like Yvette Smith in Texas. Like Aiyana Stanley Jones in Detroit. Like Eric Garner in New York City. Like Oscar Grant in Oakland. Like Walter Scott in South Carolina. Like Freddie Gray in Baltimore….

Yes, we have the first Black president in the White House but it feels like open season on Black folks in America once more. 100 years ago this year the Hollywood image machine was given a huge boost by a racist and evil film called “Birth of A Nation,” a movie so calculating in the way it depicted Black people it set the tone, quite literally, for how we were portrayed and treated in every form of media for decades to come. 100 years ago it was common to see photos of African Americans, males especially, lynched, hung from trees, as the local good White folks visibly enjoyed their entertainment of playing hangman.

100 years later “Birth of A Nation” has been replaced by a 24-hour news media cycle still obsessed with race, racism, racial strife, racial violence, but no solutions and no action steps whatsoever, just pure sensationalism and entertainment. 100 years later the lynching photos have been replaced by cellphones capturing video of Walter Scott running away from a police officer, like a slow-footed character in a video game, only to be shot in the back—pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop!

Except all of this is mad real, Black people in America—the self-proclaimed greatest democracy on earth—are being shot here there everywhere, by the police, in broad daylight, with witnesses, sometimes on video. And with very few exceptions nothing is happening to the cops who pulled the triggers. No indictments. No convictions. No prison time.

And every single instance one of these scenarios occurs, we are handed the same movie script: Person of color is shot and killed by local police. Local police immediately try to explain what happened, while placing most of the blame, without full investigation, on the person shot.

Police officer or officers who fired shots are placed on paid “administrative leave.” Media finds any and everything they can to denigrate the character of the dead person, to somehow justify why she or he is dead. Marches, protests, rallies, speeches. Local police show up in military-styled “riot gear.” Tensions escalate. Folks are arrested, people are agitated or provoked; all hell breaks loose. The attention has shifted from the police killing an innocent person to the violence of “thugs,” “gangstas,” “looters.” The community is told to be nonviolent and peaceful, but no one ever tells the police they should also be nonviolent and peaceful. Whites in power and “respectable Black voices” call for calm, but these are the same folks who never talk about the horrific conditions in America’s ghettoes that make any ‘hood a time bomb just waiting for a match to ignite the fury born of oppression, marginalization, containment, and invisibility. These are the same people who’ve been spent little to no time with the poor.
If you aren’t from the ghetto, if you have not spent significant time in the ghetto, then you would not understand the ghetto….

No matter. Big-time civil rights organizations, big-time civil rights spokespersons, and big-time church leaders are brought in to re-direct, control, and contain the energy from the people at the bottom. Started from the bottom now we here….

But they really cannot because the people have seen this movie a million times before.
They know it is madness to be told to let justice take its course. They know it is madness to wait out a legal system that rarely if ever indicts and convicts these police officers who’ve shot and killed members of their community. They know it is madness to be told to stay cool, to be cool, when they have no healthy outlets for their trauma, their pain, their rage. They know it is madness to hear pundits and talking heads of every stripe on television and radio and via blogs analyze who they are, without actually knowing who they are. They know it is madness when middle class or professional Black folks speak the language of the power structure and condemn the people in the streets instead of the system that created the conditions for why the people are in the streets. They know it is madness that so-called progressive, liberal, human rights, or social justice people of any race or culture have remained mightily silent as these police shootings have been going down coast to coast. And they know it is madness that most of these big-time leaders and big-time media only come around when there is a social explosion.

So they do explode, inside of themselves, and inside their communities. They would love to reach areas outside their ‘hoods but the local power structure blocks that from happening. So they destroy their own communities. I understand why. I am they and they are me. Any people with nothing to lose will destroy anything in their way. Like anything. Any people who feel as if their lives are not valued, like they are second-class citizens at best, will not be stopped until they’ve made their point. They, we, do not care if our communities have not rebounded from the last major American rebellions of the 1960s. We care that we have to live in squalor and misery and can be shot at any given moment by each other, or by the police, and no one seems to care. A rebellion, a riot, are pleas for help, for a plan, for a vision, for solutions, for action steps, for justice, for God, someone, anyone, to see our humanity, to do something.

Condemning them is condemning ourselves. Labeling the Baltimore situation a riot because it is mostly people of color is racist given we do not call White folks behaving violently after major sporting events rioters or thugs or gangstas, and Lord knows some White folks have destroyed much property in America, too. It ain’t a democracy if White people can wild out and it is all good; but let people of color wild out and it becomes a state of emergency with the National Guard dropping in, armed and ready.

Black lives matter, all lives matter, equally. I believe that, I believe deeply in peace and love and nonviolence. I believe in my heart that we’ve got to be human and compassionate and civil toward one another, as sisters and brothers, as one human race, as one human family. I believe that our communities and police forces everywhere have to sit down and talk and listen as equals, not as enemies, to figure out a way toward life and love, not toward death and hate; a way toward a shared community where we all feel safe and welcomed and human.

Yes, I love people, all people. But I also believe in justice, for all people. And I know that what has been happening in America these past few years not remotely close to any form of justice, or equality. Imagine, if you will, White folks being shot and murdered by the police like this, what the reactions would be? Imagine if George Zimmerman had gone vigilante on a White youth with a hoodie in that gated Florida complex. Imagine White parents having to teach their children how to conduct themselves if ever confronted by the police. Imagine that Aiyana Stanley Jones was a little 7-year-old White girl instead of a little 7-year-old Black girl, shot by the police as she slept on a sofa with her grandmother, in a botched raid? It would be a national outrage.

Baltimore is burning because America is burning with racism, with hate, with violence. Baltimore is burning because far too many of us are on the sidelines doing nothing to affect change, or have become numb as the abnormal has become normal. Baltimore is burning because very few of us are committed to real leadership, to a real agenda with consistent and real political, economic, and cultural strategies for those American communities most under siege, most vulnerable. Policing them to death is not the solution. Putting them in prison is not the solution. And, clearly, ignoring them is not the solution—


Kevin Powell is a cofounder of BK Nation, a new national organization and blog website. He is also an activist, public speaker, and author or editor of 11 books. His 12th book, The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey into Manhood, will be published by Atria/Simon & Schuster in November 2015. You can email him, kevin@kevinpowell.net, or follow him on twitter, @kevin_powell