Dwane T. Hodges is a good friend of Bennett Blog, a frequent commenter and a class human being. He and I have engaged in deep and meaningful discussions here, at the Morris O’Kelly blog and at the New York Times. Many of our discussions share a common theme: public mis-perception regarding the experience of being a black man in the early twenty first century.

Based on a recent exchange, it became clear to me that Dwane has something to share that would do me and perhaps others a lot of good - he has a way of relating his experiences without bitterness or rancor. He really just wants us to understand.

I asked Dwane to author a guest post and he graciously agreed. What follow are his words, unedited an uncut.

Thank you Dwane, for taking the time.

- Walt Bennett

By Dwane T. Hodges

I always think about him at Christmas time.  And why not, Jonny was the man who first got me “interested” in Christ.  He was my number one hang-out buddy in college, and a man everyone knew as my “little brother”.  Jonny could party with the best of them; the brother could dance his behind off.  We even had a routine where we would take two girls on the dance floor, dance them over toward each other, then leave the girls and dance with each other.  We were silly, fun, and wanted to make the world a better place… me through social activism, Jonny through Jesus.  With his influence, I began to incorporate his way into mine.  Had I known that he was going to die at the hands of the police at such a young age, I would have listened a little more, and a little sooner.

Jonny Gammage.  For many, he is the symbol of Clarence Thomas’ high tech lynching in our modern times.  His death made all the major newspapers in the country.  His family was on Oprah.  He had organizations that fight police brutality formed in his name.  Yet, had he not been the cousin of pro football player Ray Seals, he would have been just another of the many guys who die in police custody each year where an “internal investigation” finds no fault.  Johnny was the first post-Rodney King police brutality case to receive national attention.  The difference between he and King was: whereas King was a man who had prior issues with the law, Jonny was a college grad and a businessman who had been the president of our college gospel choir, and was known to be a “choir boy” in most other ways.  He was a good looking man with pretty dark skin and wavy hair that women adored, yet he was always gentlemanly toward them.  He was an inch shorter and 10 lbs. heavier than I was, but at a small 5’7” and 140lbs., he still had a powerful presence.  But most of all, Jonny was a friend to many, and an enemy to none. 

So it’s Christmas, and Jonny is not here.  He was supposed to come visit that Christmas, since it coincided with my sons second birthday and he hadn’t seen him yet… but he died October 12, 1995.  My son turns 15 on December 23rd of this year, so it has been 13 years since Jonny has been gone… and I still miss him.  Not only do I still feel the pain of his passing, I still suffer from the memory of how it happened.  I still remember how my first wife feared that I would lose my mind from grief.  As I was still harassed by the cops in Buffalo on a regular basis, my tension grew to terror.  I never understood before how the KKK burning crosses could cause such fear in people, but now I knew first hand.  Every police car pulling up behind me, or next to me, could be the reason my sons grew up fatherless.  I remembered the time I was pulled out of my car at gunpoint while driving one of my students home because I “looked too young to be driving this car” (verbatim from the officer), and I realized how lucky I was then.  Klan hoods and police badges, or as KRS-one said, Over-seer and officer, it’s the same thing in a different time.  And now that my son is turning 15 years old, in the same way that fathers in the past had to warn their children about how to deal with the Klan, I have to teach my son how to deal with the police.  

It’s a rites(or rights)-of-passage that every Black father has to take his son through.  How to deal with being stopped for walking, running, driving, shopping, sight-seeing, or standing there thinking while Black.  The advanced course comes shortly afterward… how to deal with the police when stopped as a part of a group while Black.  In that case, you have to read the crowd, and adjust the rules from the first lesson accordingly to make sure that 1) you can save everyone in the group, or 2) if you can’t save everyone, save yourself.  Some folks say I am starting my training late.  This is true, but I did give him some basic instruction on simple things like shopping (if you pick up an item, put it in a cart if you plan to buy it.  Never walk out of the aisle with an item in your hand if possible… that can be construed as intention to steal for a Black man).  I found it interesting that Soledad O’Brien, in an interview after her CNN special on Blacks in America, said one of the most painful things she heard about in her research was “the talk”.  She said every man, from celebrities D.L. Hughley and Michael Eric Dyson, to the poorest working class fathers, all said that telling their sons how to “survive” an encounter with the police was a mandatory part of child rearing.  When a co-worker said that all parents need to teach their children how to behave when questioned by the police, she quickly corrected her.  She said its’ not how to behave, it’s how to survive… there is a difference.  Spoken like a woman with black male siblings.  

There is no denying the pain that’s felt by families of people who lose their loved ones in unjust ways by people who are supposed to represent justice.  Even when police self-reported that Jonny begged for his life before he died, no one was punished.  I am one of Barack Obama’s biggest supporters, but I would be a fool to believe that police brutality will disappear because there is a Black president or Attorney General.  Legislation can’t stop hatred, but I don’t care if you hate me… just don’t hit me.  Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., put it best:  “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and that’s pretty important.”  At the very least, Jonny’s killers should have received third degree manslaughter.  But they received nothing,., and those who knew Jonny, either directly through shared lives, or indirectly through shared race, received a reminder that it was still alright to kill a Black man in American if the authorities okayed it.  I’m not anti-police, I’m anti-abuse of authority, and anti-discrimination by authority.  When Fidel Castro came to New York, he made the claim that no White man had ever been convicted of raping a Black woman, and dared someone to find a case. They protested his visit, and attacked many of the things he said, but strangely, no one ever addressed that issue.  I know that none of the White men who raped my mother over the course of her life were even arrested.  No justice, no peace.  Like my mother, Jonny had no justice… and years after the deaths of both of them, I have no peace.  

Yes, its Christmas, and Jonny will be on my mind.  I won’t spoil his birthday or Christmas with finally telling my son how Dad’s friend in the photo album died.  But I will tell him soon afterward.  I hear and read how things have changed, and are changing.  We have a Black president, so that must mean that racism is over.  Black people have irrational fears, our country protects all its citizens equally.  There is no reason to pass on issues of the past to future generations… it’s a new day.  I understand how folks may believe those things… because it looks different.  But that’s the thing about perspective, depending on where “you” move, things always look different.  If your father was a White racist, and you have a mixed group of friends, things look different.  But they still look the same to your father.  And they look the same to your brother who chooses to keep all White friends, because he is a good kid and listened when his father taught him about “those people”.  And like any father, unless your brother changes what he believes before he has children, he will try to pass on his perspective to his children.  They told us back in college that things were different.  The Civil Rights Movement was 20 years in the past.  But ten years later Jonny died at age 31.  So I have to teach from my fears, because the worst fear is that something will happen to “my” son because I failed to teach him.  

Merry Christmas to all.  Happy birthday, son. I Miss you, Jonny.

If you took the time to enjoy your weekend away from the madness of the economic meltdown, let’s get you caught up.

Congress agreed to authorize the release of up tp $15 billion from a fund which was already earmarked to help U.S. Auto retool for cleaner vehicles. That money will now be used to provide lines of credit to keep the Big Three operational. The media is already referring to this as a “Democratic bailout of the auto industry.”

As if a Republican congress would have let them fold. Any takers for that theory?

Workers at a factory in Chicago staged a sit-in after the company announced on Tuesday that Friday would be the last day of operation, and that certain benefits which employees had accrued would not be paid, nor would they be offered severence pay. The workers expected to be arrested; instead, they have become celebrities. They ask the question that more and more workers will be asking: you bailed out the banks, you’re bailing out big business: where’s our bailout? What did we do wrong? Why are we being punished?
(more…)

Reuters

Reuters

I wonder if you heard those voices from the future the other day, when the Bureau Of Labor Statistics, destined to become the most well known government agency, released the latest employment numbers.

Did you hear those 533,000 voices saying “Our jobs are gone. They no longer exist.”? They joined the 723,000 voices from the jobless future who were heard in September and October, 1,256,000 voices in the last three months.

Did you hear 298,000 newly unemployed who expressed certainty that those jobs will never return? Two million such voices in the past year? Nearly 5 million overall, almost half of all the unemployed?

Did you hear the voices of the 277,000 who stopped looking for work because they believe there is no work to be found? They join the voices of 4,800,000 others who had already made that decision.

The government tells you that the new unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted, is 6.7%. They tell you that, adjusting for those who no longer look for work and those who want full time work but can only find part time work, the number is over 12%.

Those are numbers. Can you hear the voices?
(more…)

My heart has been sideways all week, ever since the new Britney Spears record came out.

I am a sucker for well done pop music, and I always have. Going back to my early days, when my mother engulfed me in pop music from the 50s on forward, I loved well made pop.

I morphed over time, and by the early 1980s I could not stomach pop music. By the time of “Don’t You Want Me” by Human League, pop had become pure factory music. I moved on, and had to drop former favorites one by one (Journey, Styx) as they sold out to the Market Gods.

The market, as it had from the beginning, also turned out its own favorites. If you had the right look and could sing a little, they would surround you with enough professionals to present you in the most marketable way. New Kids On The Block, Vanilla Ice, Backstreet Boys and many others were pre-packaged and sold more on the basis of style than musical merit.
(more…)

Today we delve into that microcosm of American society commonly known as the world of sports.

As we spin the globe we focus on the port city of New York, New York, home of the football Jets and Giants.

This past Friday, Plaxico Burress of the Giants shot himself in the leg with a gun in New York City, where you need a permit to carry a loaded gun or you are guilty of a felony with a three and a half year mandatory minimum sentence. Burress did not have a permit.

The team invited him back to their facility.

The team invited him back to their facility.

When the team doctor determined that Burress would not heal before season’s end, the team suspended him without pay. But first, they invited him back to their facility.

Saturday morning, while Burress was being treated, secretly, at a New York hospital, Sean Ellis of the Jets was racing to practice when he passed a police car while going too fast. When he was pulled over, the police officer later stated, Ellis was uncooperative. Eventually a search was conducted, which turned up marijuana and a pipe with which to smoke it.

He played on Sunday.

He played on Sunday.

This would seem to mean that the Jets did not have him piss into a cup and did not then test that piss to see if it came up positive for marijuana. This of course means that they did not wish to know.

Because the legal process takes time to unfold, and because the agreement between the players union and the league calls for no action to be taken until a case is resolved, the Jets and Giants knew that both players remained eligible to play.

That does not come close to explaining why either team would want any such thing as to let these players anywhere near the team.

In the middle of the playoff hunt, these men put their selfish interests ahead of a unit of over 50 men, who have sweated together and struggled together and lost together, and learned how to win together.

Burress stepped outside that circle, committed a felony and caused himself injury. He will no longer be around the team, but only because the wound was too severe. The Giants’ reaction was to welcome him back, and the team has gone on record stating that he will remain a Giant even after his conviction.

The Jets didn’t even announce Ellis’ arrest until 5 days later. We have no idea how this behavior affected Ellis’ preparation, or how much the incident disrupted his and the team’s concentration. We do know that the team was flat on Sunday and got spanked. Ellis was a non-factor, as was much of the defense and the entire offense. Certainly the players all knew what had happened and knew it would become a distraction.

See, one way to avoid the distraction is to send the man home. Let the 50 something other men carry on together.

If this seems harsh, then I say the world has become too soft. If it is harsh to make a man pay a stiff price for causing such harm to his team’s efforts, then I say we aren’t really all that serious about the team effort. And that is a terrible thing to tell those 50 something men, and the organization which supports them, and the thousands of fans who make the effort and pay the expense to see them on Sunday and spur them on, and to the many thousands more who tune in, wherever they are, and watch with pride as their men go to war.

It spits on that.

Today’s news: 509,000 newly minted unemployed workers, after 530,000 new unemployment claims the previous week. That’s 1,039,000 new unemployment claims in the last two weeks, as the Christmas shopping season gets underway. That number would rank as the tenth largest city in the country, just behind Dallas, Texas.

Ongoing claims are at 4,009,000, the highest since the early 1980s.

And remember: this thing is just getting started.

Today, AT&T announced a cut of 12,000 workers, four percent of its work force. Dupont announced a reduction of 2,500 workers. European job cuts are also beginning to mount.

Shadow President Obama’s promise to create or salvage 2,500,000 jobs, made only a few weeks ago, will, as I predicted, end up being dwarfed by the number of NEW jobless which occur. At the current pace, in the seven weeks between the announcement of Obama’s plan and his inauguration, 3.5 million jobs or more will have been lost.

This does not factor in the potential collapse of the U.S. auto industry, a very real possibility which would cause an intense cascade effect.

And there remain the 5,000,000 workers who are simply too discouraged to even seek employment anymore. That number will also surely grow, and you will read about it here. The government may choose to ignore these workers; I choose not to.

Obama’s plan is not enough. It’s not enough domestically, simply because it won’t even keep up with new jobless claims, let alone repair any of the existing damage. It’s not enough on a larger scale, because it does not address the root issues. Only an international, coordinated effort can do that.

Capitalism runs smack into Nationalism. In a time of crisis, it is every man, woman and child for themselves. We’ve seen it before and we are seeing it now.

We’ve discussed the rumblings coming from China. Russia is also becoming antagonistic. There is tremendous unrest in pockets of Europe, France particularly but not exclusively.

I’ve made this point before and I’ll make it again: watch for an increase in “crime” which is met, especially by the right, by cries for more “law and order”, more prisons, more mandatory jail terms.

Let me state this clearly: SURVIVAL IS NOT A CRIMINAL ACT.

Crime goes up during tough times because people are desperate. The crime is that they are placed in this position to begin with. Millions of displaced workers will be competing for the same low level jobs, competing on the basis of how little they are willing to work for. Those meager wages will not be sufficient to pay the bills. Food? Rent? Heat? Medicine? Too many paychecks will stop short of fulfilling all of those needs. Petty crimes will certainly rise. Violent crimes will invariably rise as well.

Do we excuse a man who sticks a gun in the ribs of another man and takes his money? No. Do we excuse a man who steals a bottle of cough syrup from the pharmacy? If I say “yes” to that, I am not advocating in favor of petty crime. Rather, I am advocating in favor of addressing, directly, the conditions which led to that crime.

If you are going to take up arms against your oppressor, you had better win. If you fall short, you will be crushed.

Start making up your mind now: do you defend this system no matter how much pain it causes? Will you abide the treatment of desperate people as criminals?

Or will you recognize yourself in the faces of the desperate? Will you understand that you are every bit as vulnerable, that your turn may soon come? If I lose my job, within a month I’ll be writing this column from a public library and sleeping on somebody’s couch; my family will be shattered.

Why? Because there is no way I will replicate my salary in a depressed job market. Not a chance. My world will unravel. I will have to give up my home. What will become of me? How will I repair and rebuild my life?

I’m 48. Starting over is not impossible, but it took 30 years to get to this level in my current line of work. It’s utterly unrealistic to expect to get paid a decent wage in any new line of work.

Such is the fate of millions of American workers, and many millions more across the globe.

Remember the old communist phrase? “Workers Of The World, Unite!”

Well? We know what’s coming. We know it for sure. We know it’s big and we know it has catastrophic potential.

Will we burn the whole thing down? It’s a very real possibility.

Atlantic Rhythm & Blues …

…Can I Change My Mind…

…I’m In Love…

…Too Weak To Fight…

Resistance is futile. Immerse yourself. There is no other way.

The big three made their pitch to Congress yesterday. They were all about appearances, too. Driving from Detroit in hybrids instead of flying in separate corporate jets, as they did several weeks ago. Promising to slash their own salaries to one dollar, and to cut executive pay and bonuses.

Just please, please, throw them this lifeline. And do it soon. Real soon. Is this week possible? Next week at the outside?

So, it’s the same pitch, only now several weeks more urgent. Each company is still bleeding red ink, still locked in a credit freeze, still unable to sell vehicles. GM lost over 40& of its sales in November, and other automakers, including venerable Toyota, all saw sales fall off a cliff.

Welcome to the latest chapter in this saga, where the government bails out an industry only to see it collapse further. First the financial sector, and now the manufacturing sector.

How long before steel, rubber, plastic and other manufacturers come running to Congress, begging that they be allowed to live,too?

The question remains the same: exactly when do these companies expect to become profitable again? This meltdown is months old; the recession is a year old, but sales did not drop sharply until the last couple of months. The meltdown is the disaster on top of the slowdown. Capitalism was already trying to grow its way out of the recession. A typical recession lasts 18 months, and they tend to begin and end months before they are recognized as such. Just another example of voodoo economics: they tell us that the recession started last November. They didn’t know that til now?

Of course Congress will cobble together some sort of rescue package, to keep these companies afloat through the spring. Come spring, when the economy is in even worse shape - far worse shape - than it is today, these three companies will be back on Capitol Hill, explaining that they have done everything that was asked of them, but these darn tough economic times just keep hammering away at them, and therefore Congress must, it simply must, extend the lifeline.

Between now and then, through one mechanism or another, they will destroy the compacts they have spent years building with their labor force and retirees. This will be an “at all costs” bailout, the object of which will be to make the case that a dead company is no use to any workers at all, so compromise is the only option.

Well, no.

This isn’t about compromise, it’s about capitulation. The workers are going to be expected to bear the pain of this inept attempt to salvage an industry that for too long lines its own pockets while stonewalling every effort to make them more accountable. More accountable for safety. More accountable for efficiency. More accountable for enviornmentalism.

All along the way, their paid lobbyists and paid Congressmen played hardball. Now, they come to the people’s house and dare to insist that they must be saved, at the expense of the workers who built the industry that they spent years undermining.

So, one option is to let the workers take over. The government assumes ownership of the industry, consolidates the not-so-big three into a single entity, and allows the workers to buy it from them. With financing, of course.

Who do you trust to right this industry: the fat cats who enriched themselves while the business model they created collapsed from beneath them? Or the workers who know that their livelihood depends on building cars that people want to buy?

Cheaper, more efficient cars. That would be a good start. Why was Japan able to see this need but the U.S. wasn’t? You already know the answer: SUVs made more profit than smaller vehicles. That is, until they couldn’t sell any more SUVs.

And showed up on the peoples’ doorstep.

…the new Britney! It’s called Circus and as of track 6, it’s the best album Gwen ever made.

Hey, at least she’s updating her style. Give the girl credit for stretching as an artist, even if it is directly up somebody else’s alley.

Well made formula is alright in my book, for what it’s worth. I can absolutely see her performing the shit out of these songs live. This record has a chance to break huge.

What do you think?

If you don’t have it yet, you can listen to the whole thing for free at her web site.

stop hatin and playin hard
i got a loaded bodygaurd
dont make him pull out the glock and pop

Uffie, “Pop The Glock”

Before this past weekend, had you ever heard of Plaxico Burress? If you are a follower of NFL football, then you have. You know him as a talented, eccentric pas receiver who caught the winning touchdown for the Giants in the Super Bowl last season.

Today you know him as the dude who shot himself in the thigh with his own gun.

He did this at a club in Manhattan, an upscale club in a fancy hotel. There is a strict law in New York City that makes it a felony to be in possession of a loaded firearm without a city-issued permit.

That’s a very difficult permit to get. New York does not recognize permits from other jurisdictions. Burress’ permit from Florida had expired in May, anyway.

Burress makes his home in New Jersey during the season. They have similar laws.

Burress is facing mandatory jail time. You may want to argue second amendment issues, but they are moot. The law is on the books, and Burress clearly broke it.

The case will take time to unwind; his next appearance is not until March. He will most likely resume his season with the Giants once the wound heals. He’s in the first year of a $35 million contract. The Giants want some performance for that money.

Here’s the issue: Why did Burress feel the need to carry a Glock to a club? What was he doing in a club where they let people carry guns? (The word is that they knew he had a gun and allowed him to bypass security.)

Was he prepared to shoot, you know, somebody else? Was he preparing for violence?

The man is a multi-millionaire. He can afford whatever level of security he deems necessary. He can do so WITHIN THE LAW. He can hire people who ARE permitted to carry concealed weapons in New York.

He can do all of those things. Why didn’t he?

Well, stupidity would certainly seem to be a good guess. But I suspect something deeper.

Since the early days of rap/hip hop, gun violence has been glorified. NWA, Ice-T, Snopp Doog and many others have all rapped about putting a bullet in somebody’s brain. There is a glorification of gun violence in the hip hop world. You don’t just pack, you pack the hottest, most lethal weapons you can. It proves that you can handle your business on the street.

It buys you cred.

My belief is that Burress was trying to swing with the hard boys. He wanted cred. He wanted to show off his lethal weapon and have others ooh and ah in awe. He wanted to be a Bad Dude.

Does any of this make the slightest sense? Not to me. How can you have street cred when you make $35 million? At some point in your success, you ain’t street no more. It’s just that simple.

Snoop now disavows violence, and has for years. Others have also spoken out.

Not enough, and frankly, too many still exploit this vein. Too many hip hop artists (and others of less renown, death metal and so forth) still glorify violence and especially gun violence.

If Burress had hit a major artery he’d likely be dead. If he had felt threatened and drawn his weapon, he might be facing a homicide charge. How was he better off for carrying this weapon?

It is past time for black artists and athletes to speak out against the glorification of gun violence. Most of these incidents are black on black. It serves nobody any useful purpose to continue to deny the abject destructiveness of this culture of violence.

Think of the kids. What are we teaching the kids?

Let’s do what’s right. Let’s please, please start speaking out and taking a firm stand.

You aren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer if you illegally possess a weapon.

Somebody please tell it like it is.

Update: After getting a look at his wound, team doctors determined that Burress would be unable to play again this season. The Giants then placed Burress on the non-football injury list, ending his season and relieving the Giants of the obligation to pay his remaining salary for the season. What this does to Burress’ financial situation will unfold over time. According to the New York Times:

Monday he was charged with two counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon; he faces a mandatory sentence of 3 ½ years in state prison, with a maximum of 15 years, on each count.

“Time Stand Still” by the Hooters.

How about you?

If credit is the oxygen that the financial sector of world capitalism requires for survival, then consumer spending is the oxygen that manufacturers require for their survival.

There are very few manufacturing sectors remaining inside the United States. Manufacturing is highly reliant on human labor, which is much cheaper elsewhere than it is in the United States.

For example, China. China’s port cities have boomed in the last 30 years as the country has flung open its borders to multi-national corporations who love the idea of making things cheap. Chinese manufacturing and shipping sectors have grown exponentially, fueling an overall rise in China’s economic output and making them the envy of the world.

Last year the Chinese economy grew at a rate of 12%. Growth rates in the west were in the one to two percent range for 2007. China is expected to grow at a rate of 7 percent for 2008. Good news, yes?

No.

That number actually represents a slowdown in the world of capitalism, where this years’ success is next year’s expectation, and then some. Investors are not prepared to accept slower growth and maintain the same price levels for those investments. Already, there are signs that investors are cooling on Chinese stocks. This means less capital for those industries.

Thus, the domino effect tags another victim.

The population of China hovers around 1.3 billlion people, 4 times the number of people in the United States. The vast majority of those people are peasants, living in the rural areas and making meager subsistence livings. In the last generation they have been encouraged to migrate to the cities, and tens of millions have done so. They continue to come, in search of promised opportunities in an ever expanding economy.

They are beginning to bump into each other. Shanghai alone has over 15 million inhabitants. The slightest slowdown in the growth of such regions has calamitous potential. Already, brand new factories and mills are being shut down before they can ramp up. Businesses are capsizing.

And this is only the beginning.

The United States is but one example of the problem. The U.S. is a major destination for Chinese goods. As consumers in the U.S. pull back on everything from TVs to automobiles to clothing to electronic gadgets, overseas manufacturers must adjust to the diminished demand. And just as the U.S. auto industry has no “Plan B” when sales dry up, nor does China.

From today’s New York Times:

President Hu Jintao of China warned at a government meeting over the weekend that the global financial crisis was threatening to undermine the country’s booming economy and that China could lose its competitive edge as trade growth slows.

“China is under growing tension from its large population, limited resources and environmental problems, and needs faster reform of its economic growth pattern to achieve sustainable development,” the president said.

Warnings of unrest in China are no small deal. When even a portion of a population of 1.3 billion gets angry, that can quickly add up to a lot of unrest.

As I noted last week, Shadow President Obama’s plan to restore the American economy to vitality is only a small piece of a very large, very complex puzzle.

We have seen belligerence from China before. They humiliated a new president when their own jet crippled a reconnaissance plane, which was forced to land on Chinese soil. These guys know how to play the nationalist card, know how to play the angry bear card, and know how important is their growth to the growth of the world economy.

And make no mistake: the only plan that capitalism has for repairing itself is to grow its way out of this trench.

Without cheap goods, there is no world economy. Without Chinese manufacturing there are no cheap goods, or at least far fewer of them.

All of this is a sure sign that spending will slow even more than it has, which will in turn put even more pressure on large cities with millions of idle workers.

Just something to keep in mind.