Solidarity or More Lies, More Deaths!

He called it "a floating garbage can." In his first term, the president of the United States, flew to the U. S. Territory of Puerto Rico, mind you, after Hurricane Maria left 2, 975 dead. The survivors, citizens waiting on FEMA, witnessed a president throwing paper towel at a handful of residents present to great him. Cameras captured the scene.

Trump, according to the National Urban League, held back $20 billion in federal aid. President Biden's administration finally released those funds. During the later months of the 2024 presidential election where Kamala Harris ran against Trump, I heard no talk of challenging the latter from the Puerto Ricans in the Wisconsin town where I lived. Among blacks, we were critical of Harris' silence when Netanyahu's practice of genocide was the subject.

Among the Latino/a population, I recognized the white gaze!

Trump has referred to Mexicans as "rapists" and drug lords, as if we are back on the days of Jim Crow when, according to the southern narrative of chivalry, that is, innocence, only black men were rapists, never white men. When journalist and activist Ida B. Wells pointed out the history of white men raping "Negro girls and women, which began in slavery days, [and] still continued without let or hindrance, check or reproof from church, state or press," she was condemned, particularly from white men who who made it a ritual and a spectacle to lynch black men, often as a result of allegations of raping a white woman.

Criminal activity among the "other," diverts attention away from the lack of fund, for instance, or the Epstein files and Trump's alleged sexual assault of a minor. Someone like Stephen Miller, chief among those assigned the task of diverting American citizens' attention from the reality of the criminal and immoral to the fantasy of "exceptionalism" and white supremacy, feeds hard-working, naturalized citizens, immigrants from the Caribbean, Central American, and Mexico, into warehouse-detention. Some are deported to countries where they have never lived or left with parents as children. But "our America" is one in which children, toddlers, are arrested and detained.

Miller threatens, more to come!

We witness the cruelty, the utter disruption of lives forever altered. And yet, where is the solidarity?

All my adult life I've known of the ill-treatment of Palestinians. Since my teens, I have supported and continue to support Palestinian freedom from tyranny. I've support the protest against ICE for the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. I remember, in the 1980s, proudly visiting the Puerto Rican museum in Chicago with a friend, another fellow City of Chicago teacher. I remember too, further back, in my teens, as a member of Operation Breadbasket Chicago, the late Jesse Jackson Sr. bringing together the Latino/a community with the black community.

Later, as a doctoral student, I made it my business to read the "literatures of the Americas," which includes the works of the indigenous Americans, feminists, socialists poets and prose writers, and, of course, Jose Marti, the thinker who proclaimed that "our America," the America of once conquered and enslaved people exist, despite the authoritarian and fascist regimes that threaten to topple the idea of democracy.

"One must have faith in the best in men and distrust the worst. One must allow the best to be shown so that it reveals and prevails over the worst. Nations should have a pillory for whoever stirs useless hatred and another for whoever fails to tell them the truth in time... There can be no race (and mostly because there are no races)... Our America."

Marti knew there was a tradition of resistance and solidarity. Those leaders who followed knew too.

*

It's a history we should be familiar with regardless of whether or not we attended college. We can witness a man with Tourette syndrome voice the "N" word when presenters, Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo, at the BAFTA awards stepped on stage. What's not acknowledged is that he knew that particular word once he visibly noted the presence, on stage, of two black men. Yet, someone wanting to acknowledge support for Palestinian was silenced: edited out of the taped version of the awards show.

(Who is in control of that narrative of innocence?)

It's a history we should be aware of, one in which we expand our minds beyond our locale and, as human beings, consider the whole world, which consists of more than 16% of the planet. It's a history rich in lessons on surviving and resisting the worst of us. According to the PEW Research Center, 42% of Latino/as in 2024 pulled the level for Trump. It was a "record vote" gain, according to one headlines.

This for a man who has called for the death of innocence black youth, falsely incarcerated for the rape of a white woman jogger in Central Park and called for the birth certificate of Barack Obama. Trump and his father refused to rent to black applications. Recently, Trump used Elon Musk and a bunch of young white men, who, when testifying recently, haven't any idea why they were given "executive orders" to fire black federal workers. Trump's "executive order" ended Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Initiatives that similar to feminism benefited white women, as any black and Latina women in the early seventies spoke openly about and even, briefly, were allowed to teach, at least, to college students.

Universities and colleges are scrambling to appease the fascist regime. Of course! Over 25 years ago, I was hearing how I was anti-American from students who didn't want to hear the version of American history-- conquest, enslavement, imperialism-- from a black woman. Who needs to know that history to make money? To be successful? To be an American?

Certainly by 2024, most black Americans had know of Trump's record when it came to black people. They knew of his hatred for black people!

Black Americans were silenced-- by the Latino/a population in the US. Harris isn't the president! Trump received 45% of the Latino/a vote, a 15% increase from 2020. If a people unaware of who they are and would rather live in the ignorance of believing "whiteness" cleanses oneself of guilt or tarnish, then you have the results of the 2024 election. You have to think that whiteness is what some in the Latino/a population sought in the first place.

*

Bartolom e' de Las Casas, thanks to the Spanish conquest, arrives in what is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 1502, amasses a fortune and acquires land, and then has an-on-the-road-to Damascus experience. He becomes a Dominican priest in 1510, and soon has the opportunity to travel and see the world Spain is conquering.

I'm aware of professor Daniel Castro's argument ( Another Face of Empire ) making a hero of Las Casas. Castro is a Peruvian and knows his history. I agree with him to some extent. But I've noted that Las Casas is barely mentioned in the proverbial history books, and I have to ask why. I suspect his absence relates to his activism at the time. Las Casas could have continued on as a wealthy priest and land owner. Owner of enslaved indigenous.

And I will say that I was reluctant to mention Las Casas when I read in historian Greg Grandin's America, Ame'rica that after Las Casas' conversion, he proposed trafficking in Africans, enslaving Africans to do the work of creating Spain's empire. He quickly concluded that no living human being should be enslaved. He advocated against slavery as a member of the enslaving race! It's unfortunate that his message did reach the Spanish authorities, who, in turn, lingered with the thought of a race-based system exploiting Africans!

I recognize how Las Casas' name is also associated with this legacy of race-based slavery in the New World.

I'm looking at a human being who asks, who has the right to enslave another human being? When he recognizes that no one should be enslaved because slavery shouldn't exist! I'm looking at another human being who openly condemns the Spanish regime. A human being who decides to give up his wealth, land, and enslaved indigenous because he's come to identify not with whiteness, with the conquering race, but instead, with the indigenous. Las Casas associates his name, at least, with those few, at the time, who oppose the brutal system of exploiting other human beings.

Castro's observations about Las Casas have been valuable to me trying to access this man and what I have witnessed and experienced as a black in America. Was Las Casas still beholding to the Catholic Church? Did he think of converting ingenious for the Church? Did he believe in "soft diplomacy," the kind that is "non-violent" and, is, nevertheless, intended to convert the Indigenous to the ways of the Europeans? The destruction of indigenous religion and art didn't seem to bother Las Casas, according to Castro. Did Las Casas hope that in time the indigenous would come to appease whiteness and literally see in Span's brutal conquest of the indigenous and their world "innocence" and the conquerors themselves "saviors"?

As professors Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey note, Las Casas saw himself as a "protector" of indigenous people, yet he had no interest in learning "native languages."

Las Casa opposed genocide! The US engaged the practice of genocide against the indigenous. Israel today is engaging that practice as a means of acquiring land for the tech bros to create economic zones for the super wealthy to live and play.

Grandin points out that, for Las Casas, the "civilizing" mission of the Spanish were the massacres the witnessed to "pacify" Cuba. The indigenous were kneeling with their heads bowed, writes Grandin, citing Brevisima de la Destruccion de las Indigenous ( A Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies ), 1542, when Captain Pa'nfilo de Narva'ez and his men arrive. "The horses tower over them. All is quiet except for the shuffle of hooves-- There's a 'tense' calm. Then, suddenly, a soldier unsheathes his sword and starts slashing at those kneeling below him." Men, women, and children are "disemboweled."

Las Casas, Grandin adds, lived during "the middle of one of the most violent periods of human history" There were famines, pestilence, crusades, and war.'" He wrote of the "animal cruelty" on display and the sheer "indifference" to life in "a polemical style based not on revelation or appeals to authority but the power of personal witness."

And, yes, for all of that, he may still have identified with the wealthy and powerful, the cruel and indifferent.

But knowingly?

*

How convenient of Trump to begin a war in Iran to divert attention from the trafficking of girls and women, committed by Epstein and his powerful, wealthy friends. Talking about protectors, Trump has to silence investigations into Epstein and his friends, and his own involvement with those trafficked girls and women. Trump has already been convicted of sexual misbehavior. Oh, but the pedophiles, the venture capitalists, the tech bros, the warmongers, and war profiteers... Protection! Diversion! What's difficult to understand?

Thirteen US soldiers dead. So we are told. Over 200 injured. So we are told.

When Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. began to talk openly about the war of his time, the Vietnam war, he was faced with opposition from within the Baptist Church, from within his own activist community, including from SCLC, and from the President of the US, Lyndon Johnson. Sending poor blacks and whites to fight in Vietnam for the benefit of a wealthy class was wrong. Immoral.

After King speech, delivered at Riverside Church in NY, the Washington Post ran a headline in which it asked, "'What on earth can Dr. King be talking about?" Why can't King stay home and focus on civil rights and issues pertaining to black people, as if as if the soldiers putting on an American uniform were not from the urban areas of the US.

Professor Kehinde Andrews, in The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World, ask that we destroy that myth that the West "was founded on the three great revolutions of science, industry, and politics." It was founded, instead, "on genocide, slavery, and colonialism."

As a result, for King, well aware of the true foundation of Western civilization, advocated for justice. Over a thousand US soldiers were killed every week and countless Vietnamese were displaced or outright napalmed or bombed. Most of the over 7,000 dead black Americans who gave their lives in the Vietnam war, probably never met a Vietnamese. And why? Why continue this bloodshed? Why continue tell lies to our children?

Even Robert Kennedy Sr., assessing the situation King faced, agreed that war with the Vietnamese didn't help the people. Instead, it benefited war profiteers. As Taylor Branch cites in At Canaan's Edge: American in the King Year, 1965-1968, Kennedy referenced the insidiousness. "'It is we who live in abundance and send our young men out to die" it is our chemicals that scorch the children and our bombs that level the villages. We are all participants."

And Kennedy certainly wasn't always on King's side!

King held a meeting with Muhammad Ali who served time, after he was deprived of his boxing title, for refusing to fight a people who had done nothing to him. When King, emerged from the meeting, he was more determined than eve, as Branch writes, King told the press, "'My position on the draft is very clear... I'm against it.'"

*

The questions of the young black gang members King spoke with, resonated with him. He told the audience at Riverside on April 4, 1967 that "their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoke clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today-- my own government."

King, too, similar to Las Casas, cited the offenses. The US is poisoning the water and destroying acres of land where food is grown and killing trees. Thousands of children are left homeless, "running in packs on the streets like animals." These children, King continues, are "degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers."

King encourages protest against war. He, himself, must enter the anti-war struggle. But there is something deeper, King states. Asking the question, how did we get here, he realizes that the American spirit is in trouble. It's damaged. "The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy -and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation."

There must be a "significant and profound change in American life and policy."

We, today, can ask along with King, what are the "advisors" advising? With what in mind? The people or the profiteers? We are talking about narratives of innocence crafted and constantly tweaked to protect the gains acquired by violence, white violence. And do we, in the 21^st century, want to continue identifying with white supremacy and those who would want to see the US become a fascist state?

What side, huh?