Category: Uncategorized

By Greg

Moses

CounterPunch

Winter takes the

color away, but people put up lights. In my own cul de sac of the global village, the light show this

year is fantastic. We have colors like I’ve never seen, electric deer that raise their lit-up heads,

candy canes, icicles, y mas santas. At night the frozen ground glows in magical grace. With hope, we

have electrified a dying world.

Where does this spirit come from? If you think it

comes from Jesus, I get it. If you prefer a pagan yule tide, I get that, too. My own favorite story

for this season of lights belongs to Africa, where the Nile River once rose and fell. By x-mas time

each year, the water had fallen low, but the low ebb of the river was matched by the high hope of

Horus, the baby born of Holy Mother Isis and Green God Osiris, each and every December

25.

Whether the water is low or the snow is high, x-mas in El Norte finds us asking

metaphysical questions. Will we believe in the returns of Spring? Stake our cheer on nothing but the

future? Or feed our fear on everything we see around us?

For Ramsey Muniz on x-mas, it

is neither low water nor high snow. For Ramsey, and so many with him, it is thick walls that must be

hoped through. If he had to do it all over again, says Ramsey in an interview with Rolando Garza,

he’d rather not run for Governor of Texas. He’d rather serve as minister of cultura for his beloved

party, La Raza Unida.

Cultura. Familia. And most important, says Ramsey, is

Love.

“Let us celebrate the birth of this historic spiritual man whose destiny was to

change the entire world,” writes Ramsey from Leavenworth prison. The email comes from his esposa,

Irma. “It is not about a white Christmas. It is about accepting the truth of faith, charity, love,

forgiveness, and spirituality. We are in the midst of a world spiritual evolution and those who open

their hearts with patience and understanding will witness the resurrection of spiritual power which is

greater than any other power in the world.”

Although he says nothing directly about her

in this message, Ramsey’s voice reminds me who else is looking out. The Lady of Guadalupe, her

resplendent image watching from the East. She is mother to all the children of Aztlan, and it would

take a soul made from dry husk not to thank her that you live at this glowing cul de sac while Ramsey

Muniz is locked up in Leavenworth.

If the best things come from prison, as Ramsey says,

then in what way do the best things exist, and why do the power-fools of this earth lock the best

things away? In solitary confinement, Ramsey encountered a vision of Ricardo Flores Magón, and, having

nothing more urgent at hand, they talked. Was it the same cell where Magon had been beaten to death in

1922, four years into his fourth imprisonment? Magon had coined the slogan, “Land and Liberty.” In

his journal, Regeneration, he reminded Mechika readers that “emancipation of the workers must be the

work of the workers themselves.”

At the Irish anarchist website, struggle, they say “No

Gods, No Masters.” If you think the spirit belongs to this slogan, I get that, too. On x-mas day,

the point is never to be caught without the spirit that takes you through the low water

times.

The A&M chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas’ recent affirmative action bake

sale has created a mass of heated correspondence between the organization and school officials about

diversity.

Source:
thebatt.com
http://www.thebatt.com
/news/575093.html

Texas A&M Regents Say Nothing in Writing
About Race or Affirmative

Action

Texas A&M Regents were widely reported as rejecting affirmative action in

admissions. However, an examination of the four sheets of paper considered by the Regents shows that

they said nothing in writing about affirmative action policy. By making no mention of affirmative

action, the Regents simply extended the Hopwood prohibition. But the Hopwood prohibition had once upon

a time interrupted their own ‘good faith’ policy of affirmative action.

If the Regents

adopted affirmative action as a sign of ‘good faith’ in 1980, and if it was revoked by outside forces

in the meanwhile, shouldn’t they resume the practice at their first opportunity, or offer a quite

serious explanation why not?

The Grutter decision of the Summer of 2003 had restored

affirmative action to the Regents, yet they met and voted unanimously to take no notice. This is not

‘good faith.’

By doing nothing to restore affirmative action in 2003, by simply

extending the Hopwood revocation, and by offering no written explanation, the Regents have effected a

kind of ‘pocket veto’ of the Supreme Court.

When a peculiar ‘civil rights’ path has

been chosen by administrative elites, deep in the heart of Texas, without any documentation whatsoever,

and having the effect of sustaining a dead law, one feels a shudder of recognition, that this is what

‘bad faith’ looks like up close.

Philosopher Lewis Gordon could not have been more

correct when he called racism ‘Bad Faith.’

By Greg Moses
Jan. 30, 2004

Published by Counterpunch, Jan. 14,

2004
http://www.counterpunch.com/moses01142004.html
also distributed via

Portside

To Write Off the South
is to Surrender to Bigots

By Greg

Moses

It is the day before Martin Luther King’s birthday, 2004, and I am reading with

great sadness reports of a recent political analysis that says to Democratic candidates for president,

“forget the South, white voters will not be coming back to you.” From my home base in Texas, I

cannot disagree with the report. I have watched the new racism and the new Repulbicanism rise together

in close collaboration for the past twenty years. I have seen it up close.

I was there

in a small Texas town 20 years ago when a rising political star told a frail and elderly black woman to

get herself a new husband. And I was in that room when the room burst into laughter. The paradigm of

racist Republicanism was born that day, and it has been winning votes ever since.

For

me, the culmination of the process was exemplified by December’s announcement that Texas A&M

University would drop its 23-year-old commitment to affirmative action. The major players in the

decision have solid credentials in the Republican establishment, including the corporate leader of

Clear Channel who acts as chairman of the board of regents, the former director of the CIA who serves

as president of the university, and a Republican Governor who quietly sits and watches this experiment

in backlash, without saying anything at all.

Not to mention a president, whose

influence over federal civil rights policy can be palpably felt by the absolute silence from the Office

for Civil Rights. According to promises that George W. Bush himself made in writing, when he was

Governor of Texas in the Summer of 2000, the OCR is supposed to be an active partner in the civil

rights policies of Texas higher education, but OCR looks more like a silent partner these

days.

All this is sad enough for the South that produced the great Civil Rights

revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, but it is doubly sad during these days of national tribute to

King.

There are white voters who have not gone over to Republican racism. For this

reason, we do find some relatively progressive representatives such as Lloyd Doggett or Martin Frost.

But these progressive white voices have been deliberately targeted for removal by a redistricting

battle that proved the Republican Governor could speak quite a lot when he wanted to.

Where white, anti-racist voters are supposed to find a future in this mess is a

question as nasty as the recent political analysis indicates.

Yet, during this

commemoration of King’s birthday, we can review what he said in his chapter about “Racism and the

White Backlash” when he wrote his final book in 1967.

In Where Do We Go from Here:

Chaos or Community? King argued that, “we must turn to the white man’s problem.” That problem,

argued King, could be diagnosed in a contradictory personality that always takes something back for

everything it gives.

The Texas A&M decision would be a classic illustration of this

“strange indecisiveness and ambivalence”. The university president promises to add new resources for

marketing and recruitment. But since something has been given, something else must be taken away.

Gone now is affirmative action in admissions.

Backlash in America, King reminds us, is

the norm rather than the exception. The Civil Rights Movement was the exception in American history,

so far as white America is concerned.

Not all white America, of course. But white

America as a whole has a predictable pattern of behaving as if white America as a whole were the most

important people in history.

King’s frankness about white racism is eloquent. “Racism

is a philosophy based on a contempt for life…. Racism is total estrangement…. Inevitably it

descends to inflicting spiritual or physical homicide upon the out-group.”

Today, you

can hear the pain of Texas leaders who stand bewildered before the Texas A&M decision. Leaders who

were never consulted, advised, or warned about the surprising turn of policy, because why? Because

they were not enough respected. And in the aftermath of their well-organized and collective complaint,

they are greeted with an implacable silence. The voices that THEY represent need not be heard by the

rulers who now run Texas A&M.

In light of President Bush’s recent declarations that we

must return to outer space with gusto, we may note what King wrote in 1967, that the nation’s

enthusiasm for solving great problems was curiously selective. No problem is too great for NASA to

solve. Yet, “No such fervor or exhilaration attends the war on poverty.”

Or in light

of the billions that have been budgeted for global war, we might again attend to King’s observations,

“In the wasteland of war, the expenditure of resources knows no restraints; here our abundance is

fully recognized and enthusiastically squandered.” King was talking about war budget that amounted to

a mere $10 billion per year.

As we drift in the direction of Republican racism, outer

space enthusiasm, and big bucks for war, it would serve us well to consider what our great national

philosopher counseled us in 1967. American progress has always been in the hands of dedicated

minorities who resisted that drift.

“That creative minority of whites absolutely

committed to civil rights can make it clear to the larger society that vacillation and procrastination

on the question of racial justice can no longer be tolerated.” What we can do is never give up,

especially if we’re white and Southern.