brotherpeacemaker

Orthodox perspectives of ancient African spirituality say that in order for people to communicate with the Orisa Baba Orunmila, one must be initiated to Ifa. Traditionally speaking this is very important in order to gain the ability to perform divination or readings for others. For many people, the spiritual readings consist of little more than fortune telling. People will try to get a reading to determine who they should marry or where they should live or what kind of car they should buy. Marry the person who best reflects your goals in life. Live where you can afford and is most convenient to your lifestyle. Buy a car you can afford. No one needs divination for such rudimentary questions. And Orunmila, assistant to the Supreme Being Olodumare, doesn’t have time to spoon feed people answers for things that really don’t matter.

The objective of any true reading from Orunmila is to help an individual develop his or her spirituality. The development of spirituality is paramount to our time here on Earth. Spirituality helps prepare us for the next phase of our existence that comes when we pass away and lose our grip on this thing we call life. To not properly prepare means that we cannot advance. We will flunk. And when we fail to develop, like in grade school we are held back and will have to take another stab at this level of existence again and again until we get it right. Readings are how we get instructions to make improvements in our character where we are lacking. Readings are important in this day and age where there is so much pressure to conform to the materialism of the modern day world. Divination and readings are very important.

The people who perform these readings, the diviners, have a very important role to fill. The diviner’s main concern is supposed to be to help guide people along their path of spiritual development. But many times the diviner can get distracted. The client that comes in for a reading is going to pay good money for their reading. If a diviner doesn’t meet the client’s expectations they just might take their business elsewhere. If a client wants to contact Orunmila to find out if it will be okay to buy that Escalade with the twenty two inch chromed wheels then take the money and tell them they have the blessing from Ifa. Obviously, in order to develop spirituality, the client must see the folly of chasing material goods. No real divination is needed to answer that question. But there are diviners who take their ability much more seriously. And there are clients who take the opportunity for divination a lot more seriously as well.

Traditionally speaking the person who becomes a diviner must be initiated to Ifa. The person who wants to be a diviner must be initiated as a child of Orunmila. There are a number of steps and prerequisites that must be satisfied in order to reach this level of spiritual development. But it culminates in somebody who has already been initiated getting paid handsomely to perform an initiation ceremony for the client. The entire process can take a seriously long time and cost a good sized fortune. Ask just about anyone who studies the old school ways of Ifa and they’ll tell you that only people who pay for the initiation ceremony and jumps through these hoops will be able to communicate with Orunmila and learn the secrets to divination. And the way the vast majority of people practice divination is that they get out a special tray or some obi or some ikin or an opele chain or some other medium where they can throw trinkets like dice on a craps table.

The problem with this line of thinking is that if Orunmila wanted to communicate with somebody today, he may not be in the mood to wait for somebody to study all the teachings that other people say must be studied and pay all the money that other people say must be paid in order to get some initiation ceremony performed. If Baba Orunmila wants to communicate with you, chances are he’s got what it takes to bypass all the human trappings that people say must be done. And if Orunmila really wanted to bad enough he wouldn’t wait for the individual to find his dice to make a roll. Orunmila has so many ways to at his disposal to make an appearance to an individual’s consciousness that it boggles the mind. Orunmila is the assistant to the Supreme Being for god’s sake (pun intended). He is the master of fate. He isn’t limited to the rules of communication that we apply to ourselves. And to be honest, we are not limited to the rules we place on each other either.

Conversely, simply because we’ve gone through all the hoops that the community of Ifa worshippers says are necessary in order to become a diviner doesn’t automatically make us a diviner. A person can study odu verses and spiritual text from now until the end of time. However, if the individual s not right in his or her relationship with Orunmila, if they do not embrace social consciousness, if the person does not practice personal integrity, Orunmila would not trust that individual to be his manifestation of spiritual instruction. It wouldn’t matter of the individual had the biggest Orisa pots, the shiniest opele chain, or the biggest Orisa shrine, Orunmila would only be wasting his time with the person who manipulates others in the name of Ifa. And while these people think they are getting over, Orunmila is not a fool. Only people with the fortitude to maintain their good character will have his trust to guide others. And those that are diviners for their own selfish purposes will have to account for their actions.

Like most of the rules we’ve learned about African based spirituality, the limitations we put on ourselves are not based on spiritual fact but on the opinions or ideas that somebody with a little clout got in their head a long time ago and managed to push onto others until it become accepted as law. We have been hoodwinked into thinking that we have to live by each others rules. We have been duped into thinking that the Orisas are limited by our rules. Students of Ifa need to unlearn the box of boundaries we have put on our selves for it is not a natural construct of our relationship with the spiritual world.

I missed my deadline by a week. In the twenty plus years I’ve been working on databases applications I have never missed a deadline. Well, almost never. If I’m given a clear set of specifications it’s a piece of cake.  But usually, normally, the client is constantly making adjustments and modifications that expand the scope of the project.  I can’t be held responsible for a missed moving target. Technically, the specifications for my latest project kept getting updated and I remained confident that I could hit this target. But one of the fundamental requirements, that the data get pulled out of the database correctly, didn’t work. My deadline was a Monday and I didn’t get it working properly until the following Monday. I missed my deadline by a week.

Normally it would be no big deal. People miss deadlines. But I am a black contractor and for some reason my work place mistakes are somehow magnified.

Early in my career I was working on a project for one of the big oil companies. I was working on a relatively minor database application when I ran an update in the production environment before it was ready. The data was corrupted and we had to pull information from the backup copy. We were out of commission for all of about fifteen minutes. It happened before. People were constantly tinkering with the production data and making corrections on a regular basis. We were working on a Digital Equipment Corporation VAX machine using VAX BASIC as a programming language. Everything was developed in house. The database contained sales information for various big diesel contracts. I made a copy of the production data in the test environment but made the mistake of working in production. The production machine ran in parallel with a backup and we simply copied the backup to production.

I worked with a team of about a dozen programmers. We were an even mixture of consultants and employees.  We all had our areas of expertise and worked to help each other out. My primary area of concern was accounts payables and receivables. But I was helping someone else with some inventory programs.

The day after my mistake was made, I walked into the office and discovered my access rights to all production databases were revoked. I didn’t even have access to the accounts payables and receivables. I had to get my project manager to manage the data transfers. This wouldn’t bother me so much except for the fact that people who have done far more damage to the production database and its corresponding applications were never curtailed. And I would have understood if I didn’t have any working experience with my client at the time. But I had a solid record of successes and finding problems within the data that saved the company millions of dollars. One of the things that I was most proud of was the fact that I had discovered a huge problem with the company’s tax calculation software that caused it not to work properly. We were headed for an audit and didn’t know it until I discovered the error. The company had been using the incorrect procedure for months. It was developed prior to me starting.

But my record of success was thrown out the window at my first mistake. I realized then that the yardstick used to measure my effectiveness for the company is somewhat more severe than the yardstick of my colleagues. And this isn’t the only experience. At another company I was given a bad review because of a misunderstanding. Even though the misunderstanding was ironed out relatively quickly it was a bad mark on my record and it became the only thing that mattered at year end. At another company my manager manufactured things to put on my record. I was on record wearing jeans in the office when I had taken the day off to attend a funeral. My mistakes are somehow the only things that appear in my career.

So now that I missed this deadline I’m sure my manager and my clients will be looking at my work a lot more closely with a much more cynical eye.

The department that I was trying to develop the report for contacted my manager’s manager when the data didn’t come out correctly. My manager’s manager contacted my manager and a couple other people in the department.  I wasn’t included in the email distribution list. The next morning my manager sent me an email saying that a coworker with a couple of years experience in the company will be assisting me in the development of the extract procedure. The coworker and I sat down for about forty five minutes trying to hammer out the problem. Believe it or not there is no documentation about the structure of the database that we are using. The database comes from a vendor who is not obligated to provide any detail about its inner workings. We make educated guesses as to where the data we need can be found and its relation to other tables in the database.

It took less than an hour to come up with a theory as to what the extract needed. The coworker could see that I was somewhat nervous about the data problem. She assured me it’s no big deal. But she has no idea what my experience has been like. When we figured out what the extract needed I had to update the SQL to get the correct data. Unfortunately, we hadn’t accounted for multiple corresponding records when there should have been a single record returned. I had to figure out how to obtain the correct single record. I worked late on Friday and a little over the weekend. I pulled the data extract into a small Microsoft Access database to verify the data. Out of ninety thousand records about a hundred failed. But the failed records were outside the scope of the extract. I had the extract perfectly.

This morning I had an email from my manager in my in box. My manager wanted an update of the project. His email was sent last night just a few minutes from midnight. I really do feel bad about not hitting my target. But after being here almost four months this is the first missed deadline out of about a dozen projects. That it isn’t important though. I really messed up this time. Nothing else matters.

In the spiritual tradition of Ifa, the calendar year is usually associated with an Orisa that would take the focus or priority for the year’s happenings from our human perspectives. In practical terms from the Orisa perspective, no Orisa takes priority over another. Yemonja would never be more or less important than Obatala. Each Orisa has his or her job to do in the natural environment and the absence of one would be a serious detriment to the whole.

But it is human nature to setup hierarchy and priority in order to satisfy our human need for some type of order. In order to help us establish our relationship with nature, we will be given various priorities for nature using Orisa. This is truly an oversimplification for the definition of this relationship between humanity and nature. An entire volume can be written to help define this phenomenon. This definition, although true, barely scratches the surface of the complexities of this relationship.

According to the year’s reading given to me by Baba Orunmila, 2008 is the year of Olodumare, for all practical purposes, the Supreme Being in Ifa spirituality. Olodumare, the Supreme Being, is not an Orisa. He is not one of the more common manifestation of nature, but the founder and top manager of these manifestations at this level of existence throughout the universe. So in essence, 2008 is the year humanity should be focused on its relationship with the Supreme Being. We have caught his attention and he is now taking notice.

When I first heard this bit of news, my heart skipped a beat. I kind of felt like one of the guy who works down in the mailroom of a world wide conglomerate and word gets out that the chief executive officer in another city is now paying attention to what’s happening in our mailroom. What in the world would draw his or her attention here? Certainly the CEO’s time would be much better spent studying other aspects of the business. What in the world could be happening that would draw top management’s attention? Suddenly, I would be much more self conscious about the way we went about our business. The only problem is that nobody else in the mailroom is listening or believes the news. So it is business as usual.

A few days ago, I asked Baba Orunmila about Olodumare’s year. I told Baba that I expected this year to be a time of significant impact to humanity. Orunmila laughed and asked if I had not been paying attention. Orunmila knows I’m not the deepest oar in the ocean. My paddle barely reaches the water from the row boat. So he didn’t wait very long to break it down for me.

One thing we must remember about Olodumare is that he doesn’t move like he is the Supreme Being. He doesn’t have to. It is human nature to expect the person in charge to manifest a personality that can command attention at the drop of a dime. The CEO of a multinational can walk in the room and people will notice a change in the air. Everyone in the room will turn and face him or her. People will drop their conversations to hear what he or she has to say.

But the realm of Orisa doesn’t operate on such superficial principles. While some Orisas have a very commanding presence, the ladies man Baba Sango quickly comes to mind, other Orisas are more comfortable with the attention being elsewhere, like Baba Osanyin. But, everybody has their job to do. Regardless of his size or his ability to command attention, Olodumare is Olodumare. Everybody knows who he is without him having to throw weight. More importantly Olodumare knows who he is without having to command submissiveness or subservience from the Orisas.

Olodumare doesn’t do things in a big kind of way. He is very subtle. He doesn’t beg for attention. This year has seen more pressure for change than I give it credit for. Throughout the Midwest and southwest portion of the nation tornadoes have been scouring the landscape almost on a daily basis. The tornadoes started early and have come often. Entire towns have been changed. The winds of Oya have been extremely busy. The rains of Yemonja have deluged other parts of the nation that were already trying to cope with extraordinary snowfall. Parts of the northwest were inundated with ten inches of snow in the first week of May. This was on top of a particularly snowy winter. Fires have returned to the west. And there was a good sized earthquake of a magnitude 5.2 on the Richter scale in Illinois along what used to be considered a stable fault line. And there have been subsequent earthquakes in Missouri along the New Madrid fault line where the big one, a magnitude seven plus, could come any day now.

On the global perspective, Marynmar has been hit with a cyclone that was initially estimated to have killed four thousand. However the latest estimate now says that more than a hundred thousand people have perished. The government of Marynmar has been slow to respond to the crisis and it is just a matter of time before Babalu Aye, the orisa of health, lets loose with a barrage of diseases on the devastated population. And this morning, China was hit with a massive earthquake estimated on the Richter scale to have a magnitude 7.8. The initial death toll in China was estimated to be about four thousand. But if Marynmar is any indication that death toll will rise high very quickly. lt has already been adjusted to upwards of twelve thousand.

And how do we respond as a people to these incidents? The price of fuel has skyrocketed. A relatively small pool of people have actually benefited from the inflation of petroleum. The vast majority of people have been forced to deal with lining the pockets of people already wealthy. The extra cost of fuel has rippled through the economy driving up the price of food. People already trying to cope with budgets devastated by housing costs are now dealing with the elevated costs of everything else. Like most things in life, there is an opportunity for somebody to make a profit and the opportunity to make money has a knock too strong for most people to ignore. It is business as usual for most people.

We are barely into the second trimester of the year. We have a long way to go to get to December. And there will be far more subtle changes in weather and the rest of nature to come our way that will have a significant impact to humanity and challenge our ability to cope. We can take all the changes coming our way and dismiss them as little more than the cost of doing life on this planet. Natural disasters are natural after all. Tornadoes will spin. Rain will fall. Droughts will be where the rain refuses to fall. Forest will burn. Earthquakes will rumble. Mountains will slide. Some of us are bound to suffer extraordinarily. But some of us will figure out a way to take advantage and profit handsomely. There is nothing wrong with our collective sense of socialism. And what’s the harm of a little profit between friends?

We should be more aware of what is going on in the environment. We should be practicing a much more socially oriented consciousness. But that would be business unusual for a world so focused on the global economy. Like the pharaoh of Egypt that famously refused to exercise some kind of social responsibility and let go of his preconceived notions of irresponsible entitlement, we won’t have a change of heart until the disasters have us all on our knees. We won’t ever change our attitude until we all lose big.

I was listening to one of the programs on National Public Radio that was discussing the condition of the presidential race and taking questions and input from callers. Like most discussions on this topic these days, the conversation rather quickly turned to the feud between Barack Obama and his former pastor, and one might consider former friend if they heard Mr. Obama’s latest comments on their relationship, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It didn’t take long for a question to come from the listening audience, why doesn’t Jeremiah Wright leave this country if he’s so unhappy with what’s happening here? The guest on the show, I apologize because I cannot recall his name, hesitated for a brief second and replied, maybe he’s just trying to make this country a better place.

What a novel concept. A lot of people have the impression that patriotism means never uttering a critical word. Or when we hear someone criticizing our country we need to escort them to the south side of the Mexican border. We are supposed to believe that everything is perfect in all of our personal space of America and the person who has something negative to say is an American aberration. Although the conservative approach is to keep things status quo in order to prevent things from getting any worse, or any better for that matter, one of the first step in making things better is to acknowledge that there is a problem.

Last year, when the altercation in Jena, Louisiana had reached a crescendo and had garnered the collective attention of the nation, CNN went to the town to interview the people who lived there. When the reporter interviewed the white residents of Jena, each and every one of them said that there was no racial problem in Jena and the media was just blowing things out of proportion. Every white resident thought black people and white people got along fine and nothing needed changing. However, the black residents were full of criticism about the racial disparity in the town. The black residents wanted and needed change. According to many people, the black people who were criticizing the town of Jena were just making trouble and should have been asked to leave. Yet, if someone had said something sooner then maybe the whole flap over nooses could have been avoided?

Not really! I’m not so naïve to think that the white residents would have listened and addressed the concerns of the black residents. If black people were to say something white people would have just dismissed them as uppity ungrateful negroes. Kind of like what they did and are doing to Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Kind of like what Pat Buchanan says about the black community in general (click here to hear what Pat Buchanan has to say to the black community).

Relative to the national population numbers, not too many people were familiar with Reverend Wright prior to the release of the sixty seconds of video that has become the national rage. And yet, virtually overnight, he has become one of the most vilified and racist persons in America. In the past couple of years we have had white politician stand on stage and call a black person in his audience maccaca, a white comedian goes into a racist rant asking somebody to get him a rope so he can hang some niggers, a white television personality is recorded telling his son to dump his nigger girlfriend if he wants to participate in the family business. Barack Obama can ask for racial healing and Mr. Buchanan complains that the black community needs to shut up and get on our collective knees. Why isn’t somebody telling him to get his racist ass out of the country? Probably because most white people think black people on their knees before white people would make America a better place.

White people are free to say whatever they want to say about the black community and nobody thinks anything of it. It’s just a rant behind closed doors or a frustration expressed after a bad day or whatever. But let a black man saying something about the dominant community and people stand in line to buy him a ticket to hell. Jeremiah Wright isn’t alone. Mr. Obama can say his grandmother was typical of many white people and white people want to grab their pitch forks and two by fours with protruding nails. Mr. Obama can say that small town America is bitter about the condition of the country and looking to their religion and guns for comfort and you’d think he had thrown a rock at a hive of killer bees with NRA memberships. The dominant class is outraged at the audacity of a black man who would say that small town America is bitter. They will grab their bibles and pray that Mr. Obama drops dead. They would grab their guns but they know that the chances of getting past the Secret Service detail would be slim to none.

There is a disconnect the size of the deepest chasm on Earth between the black community and the white community. The white community is America. The black community is dirty leftovers that is swept under the national rug. A criticism of the black community is not a criticism against America. It’s just a joke or some manifestation of white people’s frustration. But a criticism against the white community by someone outside the white community, for example a black person, is an unpatriotic rant against all things wholesome that America, that is white people, hold dear.

The criticism that people from the black community make against America shouldn’t be considered automatic permission to invite any of us to leave. Even the constitution guarantees our right to stay here and voice our concerns. Some of the most patriotic Americans were the ones who spoke up and openly criticized the way things are. In fact, to deny black people our right to criticize the nation is downright unpatriotic. So to people who are so intent to tell black people to quit bad mouthing America and grab a flag and start waving like our lives depend on it, I say shut up and listen.

America is a sentimental country always ready to embrace its past. As a nation, we have memorials to just about everything and everyone under the sun. Our public memorials run the gamut ranging from the simple white cross seen on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere as one drives down the highway, no doubt a makeshift memorial to someone who must died in a local traffic accident, to the elaborate marble cathedrals dedicated to fallen presidents in the nation’s capital. And there is plenty that fall in between these two extremes. Not too long ago I heard someone promoting the dedication of a memorial to the spouses of veterans. Our memorials run the spectrum indeed.

America is a nation that embraces its history. Every year cities within the nation compete to host the largest and most festive Independence Day celebration. The rhetoric is that an American just isn’t an American if he or she doesn’t don their red white and blue uniform and fervently wave the stars and stripes on this illustrious holiday. We are proud of the fact that our forefathers had the gumption to stand up to the British monarchy. We love our Memorial Day and our Labor Day. We celebrate holidays based on religious history. The so called birth and death of Jesus are two of the most popular holidays known to traditional America. The idea of having Jesus’ birthday competing with other religions trying to get a little recognition for what they feel is important is a bit too sacrilegious for many vocal Americans. We love to celebrate our history.

We love our past and we love our monuments to days gone by. The Golden Gate and the Brooklyn bridges are held in high regard despite the fact that their engineering achievements have been eclipsed decades ago. Buildings from a long bygone era are protected as museums of architecture and enjoy must be preserved at all cost status. We collectively mourn the death of actors and celebrities that have not made a public appearance in decades. Antiques from the past in pristine condition enjoy value that dwarfs the national treasure of some countries. Some antique cars can be sold for tens of millions of dollars. It would not be surprising to see an antique tin can with its label intact fetching a sum north of a million dollars. And it would not be surprising to learn that the product originally sold by the case for just a penny. Our history, and the symbols of our history, are precious to us.

But, one area of America’s past that is avoided like the plague is America’s relationship with its black community. Any time any body brings up a reference to slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, or affirmative action, the wayward armchair historian is attacked as if he or she is a history terrorist. Some people will go so far as to say that these eras of institutionalized racial discrimination are simply too painful and too divisive a time in our history to bear scrutiny. Any one who insists on trying to learn something from these periods of history are simply trying to exert some kind of leverage against the dominant community for the sins of their ancestors and elders. Arguably, any weight the study of the history of racial disparity may have on the collective white community is trivial at best, but more than likely it is nonexistent.

Interestingly, a number of Americans from the racially generic dominant class that just so happens to be predominantly white, refer to any attention devoted to the study of America’s sordid past of institutionalized slavery or any instance where the norm consisted of the black community being abused and/or neglected, as a desperate effort to cling to a victim mentality and blame everyone for the black community’s failures but the black community. The idea that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it is thrown out the window like the proverbial baby and bathwater. And, low and behold, America is repeating its past as if by script.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, while the dominant community was doing its thing to deny black people the right to be human, the right to vote, the right to an education, the right to own property, the right to dignity, and the right to just about everything else, some black people were painting the majority of the black community as waiting for handouts and for outside assistance, the type of assistance that was considered an entitlement by members of the dominant community. Black people needed to stop playing the victim and get an education. But for some reason, it was okay that black people were not entitled to the same tools to obtain an education that was regularly offered to the dominant community. Black people wanted jobs. But somehow, black people were not entitled to the same jobs offered to non blacks but to the more menial jobs that paid poorly and few people wanted.

Booker T. Washington was most apologetic to the dominant community. At the beginning of the twentieth century Mr. Washington was quick to suggest that the black community could best defend itself from the racism of white America when we quit expecting anything from the white community. The white community is more than welcome to black labor but didn’t have to fully compensate our ancestor’s for it. And interestingly enough, Mr. Washington was heralded as the respectable leader of the black community by the dominant community. The black community must adapt itself in order to become a respectable component of the dominant community. The black community must contort itself into a social reform that more closely emulates behavior that the dominant society will find respectable and tolerant worthy.

The same holds true today. The vast numbers of respectable black people regularly promoted on television are the type of people who will be quick to tell people in the black community to exercise some kind of personal responsibility. We are regularly told to quit being lazy and give up the victim mentality. If somebody doesn’t want to hire us then we need to find someone else who will. If somebody doesn’t want to educate us we simply need to find somebody else who will. And while we play a game akin to looking for an opportunity in a haystack most white Americans will find their opportunities without the impediments that hinder black people. But ask the people in the dominant community and the problem isn’t the insidious social racism that limits opportunities for black people. The problem is that black people don’t do what is necessary to step up to the plate and find their opportunities despite the fact that white people are afraid or simply refuse to engage us.

Yes, it is very true that black people need to step up to the plate. We cannot wait for a handout from the dominant controllers or from our black brothers and sisters who have done well. Black people have no choice but to look high and low, far and wide, in and out, up and down for our opportunities. The hurdles against us require us to jump through hoops of fire in order to find what others simply walk up to or just wake up and find in their lap. Unfortunately, when blacks do find the opportunities that allows them to succeed and prosper, instead of doing everything we can to help make things a little easier for the next black person, we are more likely to hold back with the standard rhetoric of work hard and you too can make it.

Some black conservatives who have achieved their success with the help of programs along the lines of affirmative action want to turn around and dismantle these programs to prevent other blacks from taking advantage of them. Some say that affirmative action prevents black people from achieving their best and gives black people the impression that they cannot compete with other races. Again, the problem isn’t the racial discrimination that excludes black people from taking advantage of certain opportunities. The problem is the black people who expect an equal and fair shot at opportunities. These people actually promote the idea that the institution that doesn’t freely give opportunities to the black community isn’t the problem, the institution that assures a racially diverse population of people taking advantage of their opportunities they offer is the problem facing society. The last thing we need is someone trying to do something for the black community. Discrimination isn’t the problem. Reverse discrimination is the real problem.

Black people need to learn to expect nothing from the dominant community. Nobody owes us a handout. And to that tidbit of information we can add the fact that nobody owes us a fair shot at anything. And if that isn’t enough, it appears that some successful black people are intent on making it their responsibility to make sure that the black community doesn’t forget that the black culture that is our birthright is best left behind and forgotten in order to help the dominant community to perpetuate the coincidence of racial disparity that always find the black community at the shitty end of the measuring stick. If our so called black role models have their way black history will be forgotten and we will repeat the past as if by script.

I have always had an unnatural attraction to cars. When I was little my favorite toys were Hot Wheels, Matchboxes, and Johnny Lightenings. I had so many cars I could never keep them in one of those carrying cases. It never occurred to me to keep them in their original container untouched to accumulate value. If I was with my mom when she made the purchase that package would be opened and the car would be rolling across the counter before the cashier could lift her finger off the buttons that rang up the purchase. I remember getting one or two of the race track sets, but they never came with enough tracks to make the type of layout I wanted to build. A figure eight is okay for the other kids. I needed something that resembled the intersection of various highway ramps through downtown Los Angeles, Houston, and Miami combined and then boosted with more highway construction steroids. I would grab all the books off the bookshelf and use them to make elaborate buildings for my cars to drive through. Honestly, I invented a model of the high tech city in the movie Minority Report when I was still in diapers. I love cars. All ways have. All ways will.

So when I discovered the cartoon Speed Racer I was in animation heaven. It was a cartoon that spoke to me. It was as if some guy over in Japan was actually thinking, there is a kid in America who loves cars and we need to create a cartoon just for him! Speed Racer was that cartoon. The Mach 5 was the coolest Hot Wheel I had ever seen. Speed Racer got to drive as fast as he wanted, as fast as he could, the most powerful car in the world. He had a father that had his own garage and could build cars like the Mach 5 from scratch. How cool was that? He had a plane jane girlfriend who lived in the neighborhood and had her own helicopter. But he constantly found the one woman in every episode that needed help. He had to fight off every woman in every race he ever entered. And he had a really cool theme song!

Here he comes! Here comes Speed Racer! He’s a demon on wheels!

There was the episode with the Mammoth Car. The episode where Speed had to race the Gang of the Assassins. There was the episode where Speed and his mechanic friend Sparky had a fight just when the Mach 5 was in the middle of a rebuild and Speed had to finish the job himself, stayed up all night to do it, managed to make it to the race only to have the steering wheel fell off or something stupid like that and Sparky came back to do the repair in the middle of the race and Speed won! It was one of those famous races around the world so there was plenty of time to get back into the race to eek out a win. That was an entire generation ago. I haven’t seen a Speed Racer episode since I went off to college. Yes, I really did faithfully watch that cartoon for that long.

The release of the new Speed Racer movie brought all kinds of distant memories to the surface of my conscious brain. And with a better appreciation of the social programming that I was subjected to as a kid I now look at the Racer family and friends with a totally different perspective. Speed Racer, like just about every cartoon developed in the sixties and prior, didn’t have much regard for black people. The cartoon was developed in Japan with the American market in mind.  And in the sixties, black people were not even remotely considered an equal part in the American equation.  It is no accident that Speed Racer looked a lot like an anime version of Elvis Presley with exaggerated, huge doe eyes. By any measure Mr. Presley became an icon of American sixties culture with such movies as Girl Happy, Spinout, and Viva Las Vegas. I think the only movie he appeared in where a black person had any kind of role was Change Of Habit when Barbara McNair played Sister Irene Hawkins. I don’t think I ever saw an African based character in any type of significant role in a Speed Racer episode. And I never thought anything of it. I accepted the world of racing animation void of black people. I accepted the conditioning that white people belong everywhere, white people are truthful, white people are the heroes, white people have integrity, and black people do not exist on any significant level. It took a long time for me to recognize that very subtle but nevertheless powerful social conditioning with racial implications.

And now that I can see the programming I can actually take the steps necessary to start expunging that conditioning from my brain as well as do what I can to keep it from infecting the young impressionable people in my life circle. Hopefully, my son will never know anything about the world of Speed Racer. I have to confess to a bit of nostalgia when I think of myself watching the original Speed Racer cartoon all those years ago. I fondly remember rushing home after school so I could watch the program and sing the songs and not give a damn about the physics of the Mach 5, a car that could drive up walls, chop down trees in a fraction of a second with a rotating blade that popped out of the front air intake, and turn into a submarine. Speed Racer could do anything with the possible lone exception of appearing in an episode with a memorable black person.

This morning the news reported that Lambert Field, the international airport serving Saint Louis, Missouri, had a security breach when a homeless man managed to walk through a service gate when guards were distracted searching a vehicle, and wandered onto the field. The homeless man was discovered sleeping on a waiting plane during a routine security check. Thank god the public safety is being safeguarded with all the new high technology, high security, no liquids outside of a clear zip lock bag, remove your shoes, walk through this machine, surrender to the hand wand search, got to go through your luggage, got to confiscate your lip balm, prove this is breast milk, get out that wheelchair granny so we can pat you down, code blue, agent orange, red alert, shields up, show two forms of identification, have your ticket ready, where’s your boarding pass, what we have here is a failure to communicate, how come your last name sounds Middle Eastern, turn on your laptop, turn off your MP3 player, why are you making eye contact with me, scrutiny at the security gate.

The last time I went through the airport, I had to go through a winding line of removable turnstiles that resembled the queue at the latest, greatest roller coaster on opening day at the amusement park. Nobody moves with any alacrity. Nobody is making any effort to remember that the people going through their machines are actually people and not just livestock on the way to an aluminum tube cattle car with wings. Everybody is so focused on making sure everybody is equally inspected and examined at the front door that nobody realizes that the back door is hanging off its hinges.

The last time I stood in that line waiting impatiently for my turn for “the treatment”, I saw various airport employees come to the gate, flash their identification card, and walk through a separate gate free from X rays, magnetic rays, cosmic rays, and gamma rays designed to find the slightest trace of a fingernail clipper. Some of these people looked like members of flight crews. Other people looked like they might be workers in one of the concession stands or restaurants or bars on the other side. No doubt that these people had legitimate business on the other side. But so do I. I had to wonder why are these people trusted not to be somebody wanting to do harm to the public and everybody else is assumed prime candidates for “the treatment”. There are stories of flight crews falling asleep in the cabin and letting the auto pilot fly past their destination, flight crews working while drunk, and flight crews so unwelcoming to their passengers that they would be willing to detour a plane to the nearest runway to evict a mother for breast feeding a baby. Some of these people are so hostile they would make ideal terrorist.

If I was planning some kind of terrorism against air travelers, the last thing I would do is try to take the tools of my trade though the front door. I’d get one of these trusted airport employees or flight crew members to take my tools for me. I would recruit one of those guards too busy to catch a homeless man. Then again, I’d go through that back door so broken that a homeless man can walk through hell bent on finding someplace to sleep. Imagine what he could have done if he had some nefarious intent. And yet, I’m sure he was, or soon will be, poked and prodded, and interrogated to the nth degree. I’m surprised that the office of homeland security didn’t claim him to be the latest terrorist ringleader that so skillfully broke through the layers of airport security that he has got to be O’s number two man. There are so many holes in the entire system that it just barely has more integrity than the seven hundred miles of fencing being used to protect our two thousand mile long Mexican border.

I’m sure the Federal Aviation Administration has its reasoning for airport security being so draconian for the average traveler. I’m just not sure if it is good reasoning. With all the no warrant wiretapping and secret searches of people’s property and the seizure of business and data records from any and every institution throughout the country, I have no doubt that a federal agent of even modest analytical skills can find a terrorist operating here in the states if he or she really wanted to. The terrorist watch list is pretty useless when the list covers half the population. Having everybody stand at the gate waiting for their turn to be given “the treatment” while homeless people are walking up and sleeping on planes really doesn’t instill me with much faith in the system. It is a tremendous high profile waste of time and money to give the public the impression our government is doing what it can to make us feel safe.

We constantly hear stories about how some government agent tested an airport check point by sneaking a loaded .44 Magnum or the components for a neutron bomb through a detector and through the crackpot nine dollars an hour Transportation Security Agency personnel that run the cattle operation at the “treatment” station. Again, more evidence that this system is totally inept at what we believe their primary job to be. But anyone who really pays close attention will see that their primary job is not to make us safer, but only to make us feel safer. Trust me, the next time somebody manages to take down another plane, the body cavity search will be applied to that half of the population that appears on the watch list.

Fifteen police officers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania were captured on video beating the shit out of three black men pulled out of a car after a traffic stop on Monday night. The fifteen police officers have been removed from street duty. The beating looked similar to some kind of gang activity where the victim is overwhelmed by multiple gang members waylaying in on his or her ass. The three black men have been charged with criminal conspiracy, aggravated assault, simple assault and reckless endangerment, according to court officials. But that really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if the police officers are right or wrong. People throughout the community will come from far and wide to defend the actions of a little street justice from this badge wearing posse.

On Wednesday, Doug Oliver, a spokesman for Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter made the statement, “At a glance it does appear to be a bit beyond the pale…Officers are not allowed to operate outside of the law…We are not going to prejudge the situation based on the video…We all saw the video, but none of us was there.”

No doubt there will be some claim of some kind of investigation. These police will simply say that they were in fear of their life and were trying to defend themselves. The police will claim that these suspects were trying to break the officer’s feet when the officers were kicking the suspects in the head as they were lying face down on the ground. The police will claim that they had to beat the suspects because the suspects didn’t respond to police commands fast enough. They will say that they were suffering from some derivative of contagious shooting called contagious beating the shit out of somebody or contagious smack down. They will go before a judge and the esteemed Honor will say something totally unbelievable but perfectly legal like there isn’t enough evidence here to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the suspects’ civil rights were violated while cops were kicking their ass. The dominant community will support their police far beyond any shadow of a reasonable doubt whether they were right or wrong.

In the individual dealings with the black community the support the dominant community gives its representatives is overwhelming. Had this beating not been caught by the WTXF-TV helicopter that just so happened to be in the vicinity, the suspects would have showed up at the police station bloodied and battered and in need of immediate medical attention, the police would have simply said that the suspects fell as they were getting out of the squad car. The infamous police code of silence and blind support for fellow officers would not require any investigation to the contrary.

But now that there is a video made public, reluctantly, an investigation must ensue. Witnesses will be collected and if their testimony will be damaging to the police officers it will be dismissed because the police will be assumed to have more integrity than the black suspects. Few people from the dominant community will contest such an assumption. Most people will support that assumption even though they would never tolerate it being applied to themselves. If these people don’t stand behind each other, the dominant community would have a great deal to lose.

The dominant community will support their own. A radio host, fired for demeaning and humiliating black women, will be supported to the point that, not only does he get his job back, he will get a ten million dollar settlement for his troubles. Boot camp guards caught on camera murdering a black teenager too exhausted to continue his calisthenics are acquitted of murder. Police who kill a black man on his way to his wedding are acquitted of any wrong doing. Senators running for reelection will point to a black man in the audience and tell the crowd to say hello to macaca, a racially derogatory term, and people still voted for him. A local district attorney charge black high school students of second degree attempted murder for fighting with white high school students who aren’t charged with anything. When the district attorney is investigated by federal agents, there isn’t enough evidence to warrant charges. A comedian stands on stage and uses numerous racial epithets against black people in the audience and video sales of the television show he appeared in skyrocket over the following week. And the number of racist who consistently make blatant derogatory remarks against the black community reads like a who’s who in network news.

If only the black community could garner such support from our own. When the radio host made his remarks about black women, half the black community was pointing the finger at the other half of the black community. Somehow, we had brought this upon ourselves by allowing gangsta rap music thrive in the black community. The fact that gangsta rap is a product of a music industry ultimately controlled by the dominant community and the fact that the white community is responsible for seventy percent of gangsta rap purchases never registers to half of the black community. If black people would not tolerate our women being degraded through gangsta rap music maybe white radio hosts wouldn’t think it was acceptable to degrade black women.

Black comedians stand in front of white people and deride poor blacks for the condition of the black community. Black celebrities advocate the abandonment of the black community in order to truly feel free. Black celebrities will do their best to market themselves as a single person rainbow coalition with every ethnicity in the spectrum in their family lineage with their African ancestry pulling up the rear. Famous black men advertise the fact that they don’t date black women. Famous black women return the favor and eschew dating black men. Black entrepreneurs want to hire white people as their sales force and keep their black employees in supporting roles.

When a black preacher has the audacity to say that the dominant community has played a significant role in keeping the black community in a condition of perpetual substandard existence, the black community will question his motives and accuse him of trying to sabotage another black man’s bid for the white house. We want to hush the man with the courage to be vocal in his call for the recognition of our condition. White people won’t want to hear that shit. If that fool doesn’t keep quiet the black community will lose any hope of putting one of our own in the white house.

And? A single black man in the white house isn’t going to change the conditions of the black community if we have to get him there under some subterfuge that everything is hunky dory. Equality and fairness isn’t going to trickle down through the public simply because we have a black president. Illinois had its first black Senator in forever and has conditions in Illinois change for its black population? It may be true that there have been some improvements but the racial status quo remains squarely intact.

The black community has produced our share of judges, police, doctors, legislators, lawyers, philosophers, historians, explorers, engineers, actors, singers, athletes, scientist, teachers, entrepreneurs, dreamers, bureaucrats, inventors, poets, entertainers, authors, administrators, astronomers, astrologers, astronauts, mathematicians, metallurgist, farmers, marketers, and any and every profession you can think of. What will be one more? What will change for the black community if one of our own was to become president? If the only black man that sits on the Supreme Court is any indication, it won’t mean a thing if that black person does not have a full appreciation of what it means to support the black community.

Like many people, I believe it will be a significant achievement when a black person becomes President of the United States. But I’m not ready to sacrifice black people who speak the truth about racial disparity in order to achieve that goal. I support the black man or woman who wants to be president. I support them with all of my heart. But more importantly, I will support the black community. And that includes the black person who has the courage to stand up and says that there is something wrong with this country that tolerates so much racial inequality.

“Why is the United Negro College Fund able to single out race when education in this country is supposed to be non-discriminatory? And why do people accept this as ok?” – Kelly Train

Why indeed.

For years the black community was denied an education. We worked without payment, our labor stolen without recompense by slave holders. Ignorance was forced on the black community while white people were free to go to school and the white community was provided an education at the expense of the tax payer. When the white community no longer had the institution of slavery to keep black people in their subservient roles, it took advantage of the ambivalence of the general population to ravage black people who attempted to make something of themselves instead of keeping in the dominant culture imposed subservient position. The dominant culture used the concept of separate but equal to keep the status quo between black people and white people as wide as possible. Black people were denied an education by the dominant community for generations. It was through the efforts of institutions like the United Negro College Fund that some black people were able to buck the trend of imposed ignorance and obtained an education.

Now, in the twenty first century, thanks to a concerted effort by people who want to thwart any attempt to correct the generations of exclusion that has significantly damaged the black community in its effort to put racial discrimination behind us, black people are told that they should not expect any special treatment to compensate for the special treatment that white people have been receiving for centuries. Black people are forced to compete with white people who are more likely to come from schools much better equipped to provide a higher quality education than the schools in the traditional black neighborhood. In essence, the black community is on its own.

There are white communities across the nation that do their best to support their development. There are communities that do some of the little things like having bake sales to help their local school buy whatever they need. There are people leaving their entire fortunes to the school of their choice. The other day I saw an article on Sixty Minutes where a retired bachelor who never bought anything new for himself donated a million dollars to the local school so the children could have an Olympic sized pool for their swim team. I guess the old pool was too inadequate. Nobody is challenging these estates and asking what are they doing for black schools. Nobody is saying that half that money needs to go to the black community. White people have so many different venues available to them to financially support the education of other white people that it boggles the mind.

Who is helping the black community gain a foothold in the American dream? After so many years of black people being neglected and left to his or her devices in order to secure some kind of education the idea of a UNCF rubs some people the wrong way. It would be wonderful if this institution that was created to help young black people receive an education when virtually nobody else would was no longer needed. It would be nice if people all across America remembered to give a certain portion of the donation they make to white institutions of education to the black institution. But like most things that fall along racial lines, the financial donations to black institutions pales in comparison to donations to the ivy, or ivory, league schools.

People in the dominant community now want to point to the UNCF as proof of black people’s continued discrimination against white people. But this institution is not some nefarious organization designed to keep white people from gaining education. This is just one institution that is doing what it can to bring some kind of balance to an arrangement that is stacked to prevent young blacks from being able to succeed. Many people will argue that money should not keep black people who have the talent and the will to succeed from obtaining an education simply because their parents are unable to pay for their education or they don’t quite qualify for enough scholarships or grants or loans to cover the bill.

The UNCF is supposed to help meet the needs of black people to succeed. It is one of the few organizations that makes strengthening the black community a priority. It would be good to see for a fact that this organization is no longer needed. It would be good to believe that all things are truly equal. It would be good to believe that the institutions that make the funding of the white community’s education a priority would give the black community’s education a comparable share of their donations. But until then the black community needs as many institutions as it can that are focused on its educational needs.

A couple of weeks ago the family was going out for Sunday dinner. It has been a long time. The last time the entire family ate out was late last year when my mom, baby boy’s grandmother, had a good day at the casino and decided to share a piece of her fortune. The fact that she had a coupon to one of her favorite restaurants and it was about to expire was a big factor as well. So it had been a while and we were long overdue. The problem was all of us wouldn’t fit in a single car. The baby’s high dollar car seat with its luxury upholstery and its own roll bar and safety features took up half the car’s back seat and there were four adults. We had no choice but to take two cars. We knew this day was coming. If we wanted to move as a complete family unit and save gas in the process then the minivan needed to bubble up to the top of the priority list.

Two days later I was driving back to the office from a meeting at one of the company’s client locations when I saw a sweet looking Ford Freestar SEL minivan. It was white with a tan secondary color around the bottom. It was a small mom and pop used car lot. I caught a glimpse of the car out the corner of my eye as I drove by. I took a trip around the block for a second look. I decided to park and take an even closer look. The van had tan leather seats. Baby boy won’t be the only one riding in luxury. It was a 2002 with sixty three thousand miles. I went into the office to ask the price. The gentleman inside pulled his price list from his pocket and told me $8999. Want to take a closer look? I got the keys right here. No thanks! It’s too much for my wallet. I walked away. But, later than night I actually found the minivan on the AutoTrader website at the mom and pop dealership. The minivan was actually going for $7999. I hate bastards. But it was still too expensive. Regardless, I would be an idiot to trust this dealership after the guy tried to gouge me for an extra grand.

But I did find another 2002 Freestar LX with sixty seven thousand miles on eBay. I made a bid of fifty two hundred and managed to win the auction with a final price of five grand. It was being sold at a local Chrysler Dodge Jeep dealership and so a partial family unit loaded up in the car to go see it. We took the minivan for a drive and it was one of the biggest turds I ever had the displeasure to test drive. The van’s motor was extremely coarse. It’s like Ford didn’t have a clue about balance shafts and smoothness. You would’ve thought we were driving a four cylinder with a fouled spark plugs or something. When we got back to the dealership I had to tell the man that there is no way in hell I would buy the car. You won the auction! You’re obligated. I don’t care if I won it as a door prize I’m not parking that POS in my driveway. Well what about this?

The salesman showed us a 2005 Chrysler Town & Country LX. It was the short, entry level version with sixty six thousand miles. It was a Dodge certified used automobile. The engine was as smooth as a Honda. It had cloth seats for the baby to grind food and stuff into. Seat covers would be a wise investment. The car was going for more than seven grand. It was another budget buster. We liked the van and we think it will meet our needs but two thousand dollar difference is pretty substantial when you don’t have it. And financing is not an option. Not that we can’t qualify. Five thousand dollars down and financing two grand on a seven thousand dollar automobile is a no brainer. But I refuse to pay a dime for financing and I refuse to pay for the extra insurance coverage. It’s either cash or no deal. I went home and found the van on the internet. They’re asking ten grand. Even at seven grand it would be a deal. The pictures on the net showed the van with a thin layer of snow on top so they’ve had it for a while. We’re still in negotiations. Wish me luck.

But while we were standing at the dealership and walking through the new cars and the used cars, I saw something that seriously bothered me. The dealership was busy. It had a customer clientele that would be the envy of just about any other automobile dealership. A lot of customers were black and a lot of customers were white. Everybody was being well taken care of. The dealership was very professional and I will recommend them to everyone, as long as I get my minivan.

The problem I had was that a number of their black customers were testing brand new Dodge Charger R/Ts, the highline model with the V8 motor. That’s a thirty grand automobile. And then there was another couple looking at a brand new Chrysler Aspen, the big sport utility vehicle Chrysler made to compete with the likes of the Chevrolet/GMC Suburban and the Ford Expedition/Excursion. There was another black family there looking at a used sport utility vehicle with a big V8. I didn’t see any black customers looking at anything with economy in mind. I wanted to go up to each one and ask them were they aware that gas is knocking on four dollars’ door and that it’s bound to keep going all the way to five dollars before the end of summer. I wanted to ask these people were they aware that the economy was slowing down and that a number of companies are feeling the pinch and ask how did they feel about their long term employment situation. I wanted to ask about their budgets and weren’t they being squeezed by the increase price of food and the increase price of energy to heat and cool their homes and the extra cost of insurance for their vehicle and such.

I’m pretty sure that these people weren’t paying cash for these cars. Chances were pretty good that they would be taking on a new car note. What kind of financing were they planning to take? What would be the impact to their insurance? My insurance will actually drop by going with a newer model automobile. Even though I’m signing up for just liability insurance, buying a more car with an alarm and airbags actually gives me a break. Have they bothered to talk with their insurance agent? Have they considered maintenance costs? Have they thought their purchase completely through?

I didn’t know anything about these people other than the color of their skin. For all I know they could’ve been lottery winners, self employed entrepreneurs, the inventor of the machine that could make gas from water, and business executives. They could’ve been saving all their lives to make these particular purchases. It was not my place to judge their finances or to make assumptions about their finances. They know exactly their financial position much better than I did. But I still felt bad because all I could do is imagine the worse. Still, you can lead a horse to water but it’s virtually impossible to make it drink. If those people had their heart set on that R/T or the Aspen then all I could do is wish them luck. If they wanted my advice they would have asked.