Cicerone, do not try to handle or correct me. What makes it a matter of what others can do FOR black people is the matter of what others are doing against black people. You cannot offset the effects of a negative force, with an equal and opposite force, unless you apply that opposite force to the same object class that is being impacted by the negative force. (hint hint: use common sense)
You need go give your crying out loud speech to those whites that engage in discrimination against black people to the point that you are successful at ending their behavior. Thus, without a negative force impeding black process, there will be no need for an equal and opposite positive force targeted at black people.
Furthermore, as I stated before, if you want to start a thread concerning the persecution and exploitation of another group of people, then go right ahead. But please respect the fact that this thread is specifically about oppression in black and white, your introduction of other oppressed people does nothing to legitimize or deligitimize the black struggle.
Noah The African wrote:Cicerone, do not try to handle or correct me. What makes it a matter of what others can do FOR black people is the matter of what others are doing against black people. You cannot offset the effects of a negative force, with an equal and opposite force, unless you apply that opposite force to the same object class that is being impacted by the negative force. (hint hint: use common sense)
You need go give your crying out loud speech to those whites that engage in discrimination against black people to the point that you are successful at ending their behavior. Thus, without a negative force impeding black process, there will be no need for an equal and opposite positive force targeted at black people.
Furthermore, as I stated before, if you want to start a thread concerning the persecution and exploitation of another group of people, then go right ahead. But please respect the fact that this thread is specifically about oppression in black and white, your introduction of other oppressed people does nothing to legitimize or deligitimize the black struggle.
As I said......I hate being right all the time......
Hugs AND Drugs....
Me tinks too many drugs and not enough hugs...what say YOU?
You go Noah....eventually you may get to a point. Now, of course, I'm not saying that because I'm racist, it's simply a point of semantics. Seeing as you clearly had the answers for us white devils before you even posted your thread, thank you for educating me. I'm off to lynch a few Klansmen now.
But seriously, Noah....given that the first world is dependent on the third, where exactly does the lack of power come from? American Whites, or shitty, despotic regimes in other countries, especially Africa? Do you really believe that slavery could have happened without the support of BLACK tribal leaders in Africa who sold out their people to the white man? Wake up.
Where were the tribal leaders during the Berlin Conference of 1894, a conference in which European powers divided up Africa and allocated it and its resources to the benefit of Europeans and the detriment of Africans? Any wealth that prisoner trading (the African tribes sold PRISONERS of wars…the Europeans turned them to slaves in the West…) earned to tribes was lost during colonization. Furthermore, much of the conflicts in Africa and even the Middle East are born from border issues created by European colonization and creation of nations without respect to indigenous homelands. Thus, these borders integrated tribes that had historical differences into nations allowing the European to pit one side against the other, while they ran away with the nations riches. The Belgium Congo and King Leopold is a prime example of the rape and plundering of Africa by Europeans. However, even after these nations won their pseudo freedom, they became victims of cold war policies of the USA trying to prevent the spread of communism, which threatened the spread of USA capitalism. Consequently, the USA, via the CIA, propped up and funded many brutal dictators in Africa who fought against elements and movements that were communist or socialist in their leanings. Patrice Lumaba was a revolutionary black leader in Africa, who was purported to be killed as a result of the CIA. The USA and the CIA is responsible for much destabilizing efforts in Africa, Central America, South America and indeed the entire developing world. So do not talk to me about Africa and Africans…because I am an African and my reason and interest in Africa is much grater than yours, which makes me more informed than you can ever be on a subject that you care little about.
Man you are way off base there, but it IS what you'd say, I'll agree with that.
Whoa there Noah, no need to be spiteful....if you have more history to share, maybe we would be better able to get back to your topic.
If you consider the facts of history spiteful...your mental state needs attention. If presenting the words and facts of history is so spiteful to whites...just think how painful it is for those who are left bear the effects of the actions that these words map to.
Bi-Polar Bear wrote:It is my opinion that Noah has revealed himself and his agenda from word one, and his new "reasonable" approach will lead to the same conclusion...whites are devils......
This is my opinion unless Noah has experienced the kind of epiphany he has stated that whites must experience to change.....did that happen this morning Noah?
If not, same old same old.....
sigh......I'm right on target again......it gets tiresome sometimes......
Actually, Noah, I didn't consider your facts on African history to be spiteful at all, just your assumption that none of us whiteys cared about the subject.
Why would you care enough to spend time researching the history of Africa, unless it was something you do as a profession to earn money?
Some people love to read history for its own sake. Which, by the way, generally gives even the untutored reader a better grasp on the meaning of events and cultures than the shallow, self-serving crapola you've been pouring out here.
YEs some people...but that does not imply that any of those some people are present on this forum
Noah The African wrote: As much as people like to talk about the individual being king of his or her destiny under the system, it is pure fallacy. If the individual was controller of his or her economic fate, then there would never be recession or depressions, for why would people choose to be unemployed or without means to support self and family?
Noah, I'm starting to think you have communist intentions, which is at odds with you obvious intelligence. Many people are self destructive, even suicidal and this can in no way be blamed on society at large, especially considering that the most successful are frequently the most self destructive. For the third time: Use your obvious intelligence to generate personal success and
you will have an affect on the ratios you find so repulsive.
Here, Noah, read this.
******************
Archie and the giant
BY MICHAEL VENTURA
New York City, 1950. I was 5 years old. I watched a group of boys my age kick another 5-year-old almost into unconsciousness.
The victim of the attack was called the Giant, because he was unnaturally large -- twice the size of most of us, he looked like a 10-year-old. The instigator and prime attacker was called Big Archie, a heavy, vicious bully. In those days, children were still supposed to be "seen but not heard," which in practical terms meant that after school and until sunset, kids ran in packs around our working-class neighborhoods unsupervised and largely unnoticed by adults. At dusk, we would each trudge reluctantly back to our apartments to take on whatever identity we assumed with our families; otherwise, we were feral creatures, left to ourselves. The Giant, however, was not feral. There was something quiet, reserved, and frightened about him. He was excluded by the others and sulked about on his own, in his own world. He wasn't retarded; he was just big. His isolation was no doubt why I felt an affinity with him, though I hadn't courage enough to befriend such a pariah, being something of a pariah myself. I was skinny, sickly, dreamy, and like the Giant usually excluded by the pack -- though unlike him I trailed after it, hoping for its favor. Now and then they suffered my company in their romps, like the time we kicked in an alley's worth of cellar windows or the time we demolished a glass phone booth with garbage-can covers.
Certainly there was something about the fragility of glass that attracted our violence -- we couldn't kick down the walls, but no windowpane was safe from us. How deeply, how unconsciously, how reflexively we hated the world we were born into, without even knowing that what we felt was hate. But what other motive could explain our incoherent need to attack?
Our behavior can't be blamed upon the media. Few had televisions, and TV was strictly family fare then; the movies were gentle by today's standards; the radio played lovesick Hit Parade pap (Perry Como!). Most of us went to church weekly. None of our parents had divorced yet. There were no drugs on the street (not for children anyway). The country was economically hopeful. Yet somehow we felt that the world was not somewhere to live but something to fight.
And we fought it as a pack. How I longed to be part of that pack. I remember the deeply frightening sense of exclusion -- how being an outsider meant that at any moment, for its amusement, the pack might seek you out, terrorize you, even (and it is not too strong a word) torture you. For it was always the pack's purpose to destroy something, someone.
(This may be why, later, history's atrocities shocked but never surprised me. I've learned only one bedrock truth about human nature: In the best and the worst sense, we're capable of anything. "Anything" is what we do. And that's the only thing about us that never changes.)
On this day in 1950 the pack, with me trailing after it, approached the Giant. With no provocation at all, Big Archie started punching him on the arm. The Giant didn't respond physically; he only said, "I can't hit you, you're smaller than me." Big Archie kept punching, first the Giant's arm and then the Giant's stomach. He and the pack taunted the Giant while the Giant kept repeating, "I can't hit you, you're smaller than me." That didn't stop the taunting and the punching. I realize now that the Giant's parents must have lived in fear of him accidentally injuring someone smaller in a fight; since we lived in a world where fighting was considered normal, his parents must have dinned into him that under no circumstances could he hit anyone smaller than himself. So the Giant repeated his mantra, even when doubled over by stomach punches: "I can't hit you, you're smaller than me." When he finally fell down, Big Archie took to kicking him. The others joined in. I remember clearly, but even now cannot fully describe, the depth of my horror as I stood aside and watched.
My horror took the form of a flood of simultaneous perceptions: an indelible vision of the raw cruelty of my kind; a paralyzing sense of my own utterly naked helplessness, magnified by the certainty that there was no one to whom I could turn for help; waves of acute, inarticulate shame; and a profound admiration for the Giant. I had then what I realized, much later as an adult, was the first independent thought of my life: "The Giant is very brave."
It may surprise you when I say that I've since considered this my first experience of soul -- that is, it was the first time I remember feeling viscerally, mentally, emotionally, and inescapably connected to everything and everyone around me, while feeling, at the same time, a sense of privacy so deep and unassailable that "loneliness" does not begin to describe it.
Of course at the age of 5 I had no words to articulate this sense of connection and its counterpart, my sense of profound isolation. But the sight of such terrible, unforgettable, and unprovoked cruelty made me both aware and afraid of something livid and voracious in my fellow creatures. My sense of helplessness (which I defined as cowardice) made me equally aware of something inescapably vulnerable in myself. My shame was, I realize now, partly rooted in a sense of responsibility -- for I was ashamed not only of the others but for the others, which meant they were not Other: Though I took no part, they were committing an action that stained me, too, a stain that I would have to find a way to redeem in my own behavior. And I was proud of the Giant -- his courage, his dedication to what can only be called a principle of fairness, his determination not to sink to Big Archie's level were beautiful to me. I remember that clearly ... the feeling that he was beautiful, a beautiful being.
It's no good telling me that 5-year-olds can't feel such subtleties. I felt them inarticulately, but I felt them. The indelibility of the memory, how it has stayed with me and instructed me all these years, testifies to my claim. The experience instigated in me a need to keep returning to it and to find its meaning -- the meaning that swelled out of the rich, roiling, inarticulate awareness that filled me in those moments. All of what I'm saying now was compressed for me then in the five simple words that came to me on the spot and have never left me: "The Giant is very brave."
As for feeling at the same time an almost dizzying sense of my own aloneness, privacy, and loneliness -- it is to say that feeling these Others so viscerally also made me feel, just as deeply, my Self. My sense of Self cohered for the first time through the experience of identifying so closely with these Others, the pack as well as the Giant. And this is where I go for, not a definition, but a conception of that troubling, thrilling word, "soul."
Every culture in every era has had a word that we translate as "soul," and each has had just as much trouble defining it as we do. But the word has been necessary because it describes not an entity but an experience: the experience of something deep within us that is unspeakably private and our own -- yet at the same time this feeling connects us to everything and everyone around us in the most concrete and unavoidable ways. It is the experience that leads us to posit, to believe in, the entity: soul. For the experience, though felt as intensely personal, feels larger than the realm of the personal. In an experience of soul we feel the Self as part of All. It is the experience of connecting what seems otherwise, in our innate isolation, unconnectable. In such an experience we feel larger and deeper and older than ourselves, than our persona, than our personality. For we are having an experience that can't be explained by the combination of all the little bits we know about ourselves, our personalities, our psychologies. And so we conceive of an entity within us that is larger, deeper, older -- the soul. Whether this entity has an independent existence, no one knows for sure; yet all cultures have needed to conceive of such an entity, as though our lives depended upon it.
Perhaps I owe even Big Archie a debt. For I would no longer trail after the pack, seek its favor, join its destructions -- though I would long carry its core conviction: that the world isn't somewhere to live but something to fight. I suppose I haven't shaken that conviction even now. But I had felt the experience of soul, which made one thing, at least, clear: If I had a task thereafter it was to let myself be haunted by my soul, haunted and instructed.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is the first of a three-part series, an expanded version of an article I published in September's Psychotherapy Networker.
cicerone imposter
Thank you for that post. Well worth the reading.
Phoenix..still think Noah is a reasonable guy who deserves to be listened to seriously?...just curious....
