Open Letter to SAE...

© 13 March 2015, the Griot Poet

Dear Sigma Alpha Epsilon (founded in the Deep South; University of Alabama; “true gentlemen”):

Some history: a mystery to you, I’m sure.

The “Divine Nine”: Alpha Phi Alpha (1906), Alpha Kappa Alpha (1908), Kappa Alpha Psi (1911), Omega Psi Phi (1911), Delta Sigma Theta (1913), Phi Beta Sigma (1914), Zeta Phi Beta (1920), Sigma Gamma Rho (1922) and Iota Phi Theta (1963)

Each were founded in the 20th Century,
Spanning the breath of Civil Rights history
From the lynching era, through Jim Crow to right before the Civil Rights (1964) and Voting Rights (1965) acts,
I know you lack the knowledge
As you and your kind spent your time in college
You had, and have had privileges, not frustrations
Without the threat of your rights being stretched at the neck
By a long noose,
Nor your women raped;
Nor your men burned and castrated;
Except by faux boogie men you created
In blockbuster “Birth of a Nation” silent movies
That shouted volumes of disdain at the freest labor
This nation has ever had
That would bankrupt it and the whole world system
If they ever tried to pay reparations

Many like my noble founders in Kappa Alpha Psi
Were the servants in your frat houses that waited your
Tables;
Scrubbed your bathrooms;
And cleaned your floors;
All the while planning their own version
Of Pan-Hellenism
Our founders knew
Education was our key
To uplift and prosperity

Our leaders were trained
In Robert’s Rules of Order
And parliamentary procedures
To eventually elevate some
To the front of the bus
And the front of movements
Like Rosa Parks (AKA); Dr. Maya Angelou (AKA); Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Alpha); Ralph Abernathy (Kappa); Jesse Jackson (Omega)
That would and still is changing America for the better…
Your little chant: you had decades of practice with that,
Rap music didn’t fuel the venom we all heard,
You’re sorry: because before I-phones and YouTube
You would have never been caught
Big brother isn’t just watching you,
That video came from a disgusted brother
Of Sigma Alpha Epsilon
That whatever “ideals” you once taught
You completely jettisoned
In a fortnight of utter error
For the pleasure
Of slapping every African American
Across the face,
Just like 47 senators sending punk letters to Iranian Mullahs
To openly disrespect and deplore a sitting president
In support of perpetual war
Please counter now with “you use it too!”
We’re aware of that,
But yet, when our founders formed,
Their Pan-Hellenic
Respectability wasn’t just “politics,”
It was survival,
So, we have no songs to rival
The casual poison you at least had
For an impressive instance

ON BEAT

So, I repeat:
The “Divine Nine”: Alpha Phi Alpha (1906), Alpha Kappa Alpha (1908), Kappa Alpha Psi (1911), Omega Psi Phi (1911), Delta Sigma Theta (1913), Phi Beta Sigma (1914), Zeta Phi Beta (1920), Sigma Gamma Rho (1922) and Iota Phi Theta (1963)

Each were founded in the 20th Century,
Spanning the breath of Civil Rights history
From the lynching era, through Jim Crow to right before the Civil Rights (1964) and Voting Rights (1965) acts,
I already know you’re “lawyered up,” and will likely escape
The fate that canned a broadcaster at Univision
For daring to reference our lovely “let’s move” FLOTUS and “Planet of the Apes,”
You’ll be careful; measure your words;
And hope to God you’ve never again have to publically recant
And, no other turncoat brother of yours
Is present at your next racist chant!

An ironic motto...

Cowards...

© 28 August 2014, the Griot Poet

I don’t hear Jay-Z
Or his soon-to-be-ex-wife Queen Bey
I don’t hear Nicky Minaj
Nor do I hear anything sobering from “Weezy”
And Kanye – nothing more brilliant than “George Bush don’t like black people”
In the “shock and awe” of Hurricane Katrina

Rhythm and Poetry – RAP
Was supposed to be the “CNN of the streets”
Telling you like Marvin Gaye “what’s going on”
To a hip-hop beat
Until the suits
From Wall Street
Started putting percentages
On how many
Times you called yourselves
Or our queens
Outside of our majestic names for a plantation profit

Giving us bullshit
Step-in-fetch minstrel lyrics
Pimping our ears
With destructive metaphors

Programming us to think
We can’t be scientists, engineers or educators

Programming us to think
We can’t be anything more than
Thugs and twerking video vixens

The blood of recent ancestors calling to us from the ground:
Trayvon Martin…Jordon Davis…Renisha McBride…Eric Garner…Michael Brown…

Yet,
Our so-called, from-the-hood “real deal”
Lyricists haven’t put paper or pen on first date
To comment on these public, serial lynching’s
And, like the NRA (which stands for “not responsible anytime”)
Who should have something to say about the “jack-booted, government Barney Fife thugs”
In Ferguson
Who after a nine-year-old girl
Blew the brains out of
Her Uzi instructor in Arizona
Just like them
I hear the same “substantive” refrain from our so-called rap artists:
.
.
.
Crickets!

Baal Out (Gangster Oligarchy)

© 26 October 2011, the Griot Poet

Children sacrificed
In “cremations of care” through
Moloch’s outstretched arms.

One percent increase
Two-hundred seventy-five,
Ninety-niners flat-line…

Jobs created go
To the children of Baal, or
Global slave labor…

Democracy to
Thrive beyond Thermopylae
Youth does it favor!

Inspired by Glenn Greenwald: WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR SOME: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful

Some Thoughts on a 40th Anniversary

I was 5 years old in Bethlehem Community Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on April 4, 1968.

We were "Bethlehem," the labeling by the United Methodist Church for day care services on our side of town. "Wesleyan" was reserved for West Winston-Salem.

Yes. We were segregated, and our lives reflected it visibly. Now, as I travel home, the signs are down, we no longer just go to the "Ritz" Movie Theater and anyone can ride on any part of the Metro they desire. East Winston is still segregated, de facto versus legal writ now. Economics, opportunity, education and globalization are the new fences, the new overseers. Bethlehem and Wesleyan are still community centers serving a new generation of the same constituents albeit interspersed with Hispanics now.

I remember April 3, 1968 sitting next to my dad as Dr. King preached a sermon. I asked him what he means by "I've been to the mountain top?" I, my teacher, my parents, my neighbors and that kindergarten class were soon to find out in the cruelest fashion.

We found out in that kindergarten class that life can be cruel, that flawed heroes can fall. We found out you can cry tears until your eyes burn and your gut hurts. We found out that our teachers hurt just as much as we did. We heard horns honking and saw rebel flags flying outside and later on the news: as we cried in agony, many celebrated our loss. I'm told by Vietnam veterans the scene was similar in country to the stress and detriment of soldiers of color. We graduated from kindergarten into a world without our Dr. King.

I appreciate the impact Martin Luther King had on our lives in that we understood our loss: usually at that age (as I recall), loss is not so personal even within the family unless it is a close, involved relative. He was like the uncle we’d never met and knew somehow his importance in our collective plight. We played, as kids are apt to after the midmorning nap. That was the only thing we could think to do.

Today, we are his legacy. And what we do with that legacy will be an interesting test of the democratic experiment known as America. Those that denigrate this commentary with simplistic, salacious epithets do not have the vocabulary or the intelligence to see their worldview other than that of a pie that is being subdivided to their disadvantage, that their culture and privilege somehow is threatened. Nothing could be further from the truth: no one registers culture, nationality or political party at the gas pump, in the supermarket, when your company has downsized you for cheaper labor overseas. We are all America.

John Donne said it best "All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”