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May
19, 2003
The True State of
Black America
Toward a Just
and Peaceful World
by CYNTHIA McKINNEY
University of California at
Berkeley Graduation Ceremony, African Studies Department, Commencement
Address, May 17, 2003
Congratulations proud young graduates!
You have accomplished an important milestone
in your lives. Important for who you are and where you are.
You are young, gifted, and black. And
you are graduates of The University of California at Berkeley--America's
campus--with a legacy of informed action and deliberate dissent.
I want to ask each of you today to consider
the current state of America. Under President Bush the US has
turned its back on the United Nations and the entire international
community and has waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq; more potential
conflicts are threatened with nations like Iran, Syria, North
Korea, and even China. Here at home, unemployment is rising,
our economy is on its knees, and our national debt is threatening
to reach unprecedented levels. The word "deflation"
is whispered by many economists.
In better days students graduated from
college practically debt-free. No longer.
More families than ever before try to
relieve the mounting pressure by depleting their savings and
becoming more in debt. Yet, the President advocates more tax
cuts, not for poor America, but for the rich.
Only this week we learn that in this
country one million black children now live in poverty and that
one million black men and women are in prison. Every night on
the streets of America, over a quarter of a million veterans
sleep as our forgotten homeless. That's the thanks of a grateful
nation.
Special interests have taken control
of our nation's capital and are perverting it from the noble
traditions of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Kennedy, and
instead are using our precious national resources for personal
profit and personal needs.
In 1953 Dwight Eisenhower, warned of
failing to address the pressing social needs of the nation in
deference to an uncontrolled arms build up. He said:
"Every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a
theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold
and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money
alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of
its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way
of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it
is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
You, here today, graduate from an institution
with a long and noble history of fighting to protect the interests
of our nation.
In the early 1930s and '40s the issues
that sparked Berkeley's activism ranged from labor rights and
the Spanish Civil War to the draft. In the halcyon days of the
'60s and '70s the issues ranged from the right, itself, to dissent
on campus to the Vietnam War.
Whether the issues were near or far,
civil rights at home or human rights abroad, we, who lived in
other parts of the country where such activism couldn't easily
be expressed, could count on you at Berkeley to be there, to
speak for us. And sometimes even to think for us.
Above all, your graduation from Berkeley
is a signal to everyone around the world, that more than anything
else, you can think and are prepared to fight for what is right.
And so, no matter what you do or where
you go in life, let no one deny you the right to think for yourself.
And no wonder. In the face of the corporate
media package that is presented to us as "news," it
is now imperative that you learn to see the invisible, hear the
unspoken, and read the unwritten.
Or else, you will not know the truth.
Only this week we've learned from the
BBC News that the entire "Saving Private Lynch in Iraq"
episode was staged by the US military. On advice from PR spinmeisters,
the Pentagon ignored efforts by Iraqi doctors to return Private
Lynch in an Iraqi ambulance. Instead, according to the BBC, the
Pentagon fired on the ambulance so they could then stage a rescue
and stage a firefight at the hospital and remove Private Lynch.
This was all done to galvanize the American people to support
the war. If this BBC revelation is true, it shows us the extent
to which our government will lie to us.
But we should understand that the Bush
Administration is not alone in deceiving us.
I'm a parent.
And today, I put myself in the place
of all the parents, relatives, and friends who are in the audience
today. I am proud of you. I am one of you. But let me quickly
acknowledge that the achievements of these young people belong
very much to your, too. For it is seldom that we accomplish anything
significant in life, alone.
Parents, relatives, and friends, you
gave birth to this moment, with your profound nurturing and unconditional
love.
Forgive me if I shed a tear of joy myself.
This day signals to me that hope is not over and with each one
of you, a new day of opportunity dawns for all of us. And that
my son--and all black America's sons--still have a chance to
make it in our America.
It's a tough world out there. And America
is a tough neighborhood too. You've got to be strong.
Our president tells us that we are now
engaged in a war that will last for the rest of my life.
He says that for the next generation
or more, we Americans must be prepared to fight any foe who is
inclined to harm us. And for the Bush Administration, that means
conflicts with some 60 nations of the world.
He says that we must be prepared to invoke
this Bush Doctrine of preemptive strike and regime change whenever
and wherever we need it. And his Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld tells us that our military must be prepared to seize
foreign capitals and occupy them.
To accomplish this, according to the
Administration, we will need a larger military. That military
must have usable nuclear weapons and the billions it will take
to deploy a national missile defense must be spent. In addition,
some in the Administration insist that our military must control
space and cyberspace and that advanced technologies be utilized
for military applications.
The Bush Administration has a blueprint
for the world that will be of their making. But as an American,
it will be done with your blessing--and in your name.
For the first time since the founding
of our country, our nation's foreign policy blueprint calls for
global military domination--an "American Century."
Rebuilding America's Defenses, prepared
by the Project for the New American Century, listed 27 people
as having attended meetings or contributed papers in preparation
of the report. Significantly, among them are six who have key
positions in the George W. Bush Administration:
Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary
at the Pentagon; John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms
control and international security; Eliot Cohen, Defense Policy
Board; I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff; and
Dov Zakheim, chief financial officer for the Pentagon.
Upon a closer examination of the PNAC
documents, it is clear that a shift in US behavior of unimagined
proportions is taking place right before our very eyes.
John F. Kennedy had a similar choice
before him. Either launch a first strike against a much smaller,
poorer, neighboring country or negotiate a diplomatic resolution
to the Cuban Missile Crisis. As we now know, JFK, advised by
his brother Bobby, decided that America was not worthy of what
he called a "Pearl Harbor in reverse." Bobby Kennedy
felt that a first strike against Cuba was not consistent with
American values. He said, "For 175 years, we have not been
that kind of country."
In a subsequent speech at American University
on June 10, 1963, President John Kennedy revealed his thinking
on the place of the United States in the world and its role in
preserving world peace. Not arrogant and flush with power from
success in overcoming the Missile Crisis, he said, "What
kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek?
Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons
of war, not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.
I am talking about genuine peace--the kind of peace that makes
life on earth worth living--and the kind that enables men and
nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their
children--not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men
and women--not merely peace in our time but peace in all time."
Even George Washington, over a century
earlier, recommended that the United States conduct its foreign
policy as "our interest, guided by our justice" directs.
In his 1796 Farewell Address, offered specific advice to America
and its conduct in international affairs. He cautioned against
passionate attachments to foreign countries and warned against
militarism. Yet the very priorities as outlined by the current
advisors to our current President, go against the very cautions
and concerns that both George Washington and John F. Kennedy
expressed.
You no doubt are looking at the direction
in which your lives will now turn. Grad school, starting a business,
taking a year off to see the world, or your choice of jobs with
companies and organizations big and small: all this lies before
you.
But how can you navigate with conscience
a terrain that is littered with the remains of those who sacrificed
themselves before you, but who now seem like a distant memory?
In other words, how can you know the
direction of the elders unless you are fully connected to them?
As you may know, I dedicated my time
in Congress trying to understand and eliminate the fundamental
causes of the disparities that plague black America. But of course,
in order to eliminate them, it is first necessary to understand
them.
So I asked fundamental questions about
black America, America, Africa, and the world.
I wondered why it is that the African
American community lacked strong and forceful leadership that
could demand and negotiate on its behalf in the world of American
politics. And why was it that people who thought like me had
such a hard time and blacks who didn't care as much about our
community seemed to rise and be propelled throughout the political
system.
The answer to that question took me to
the Counterintelligence program of the FBI and its aim to destroy,
discredit, or otherwise neutralize black leadership in America.
Now, those aren't my words, they are the words of the FBI. From
there, It's just a short line to asking why Geronimo Pratt spent
27 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, rather than
in the US Congress where he could have made a better America
for all of us.
So I held a forum in the Congress on
COINTELPRO and US political prisoners.
After finding a CIA document that actually
mentions assassination and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., dated
May 11, 1965, some 3 years before his murder, I held a forum
in the Congress on The Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.
I wondered why Africa seemed to be in
turmoil, and so I began to investigate US involvement on the
Continent. That led me to the murder of Patrice Lumumba as a
model for the systematic destabilization of the Continent and
the theft of its resources by a small brigand of outlaws who
have legal and illegal weapons at their disposal to create so-called
rebel groups that materialize from out of nowhere and have instant
access to press conferences and international airwaves. So I
held a forum in Congress: Covert Action in Africa, Smoking Gun
in Washington, DC.
I wondered out loud why Tupac was murdered
and why we don't have any clues as to who did it.
But understanding how the Black Panthers
were targeted in their heyday, I wondered if the fact that Tupac's
mom was a Black Panther and his father figure a black activist
contributed to certain death threats against Tupac's life that
were being investigated by the FBI. So I decided to have a Hip
Hop event in Georgia and one in DC to explore these and other
issues of Hip Hop as a political movement--infiltrated and cut
short.
I wondered why it was that the statistics
could reflect worsening conditions for black America and very
few people actually know it. So I began to publicize the State
of Black America.
* that the AIDS infection rate for black
men is 5 times higher than for white men and 15 times higher
for black women than for white women;
* that African Americans now account
for 41% of all US AIDS cases;
* that despite the higher incidence of
breast cancer for white women, black women actually die at a
rate 69% higher that white women;
* that black women are at greater risk
of dying from every pregnancy-related cause of death reported
than white women;
* that the ratio of black men in prison
to those in higher education is 4 to 1. And between 1980 and
1995, the increase in incarceration for black men was 20 times
greater than their enrollments in colleges and universities.
Only this week, University of California
regents went on record in opposition to fellow regent Ward Connerly's
campaign to stop state and local agencies from collecting race
data. How can Ward Connerly defend such a position in the face
of these numbers?
And sadly, the majority of white Americans
questioned in a Harvard University Washington Post survey found
that in some cases, whites believed that blacks were actually
better off than them.
Even more disappointing, some black people
would have you and me be ashamed to talk about the true state
of black America. And if we don't talk about it, who will we
know about our conditions, and how will anyone who can help us
know that we need help or even how to help?
And believe me, there are people who
do want to help us.
So, given my desire to view these intractable
problems and their solutions, it wasn't difficult for me to see
that new legislation emanating from the White House would mean
a significant debasement of our hard-earned civil rights and
liberties.
And when the Armed Services Committee
voted to support legislation that funded the War on Terrorism,
but that also allowed US police and US military to work together,
I had to vote no and let the American people know that we were
drifting backwards toward the mistakes of COINTELPRO.
And finally, as I researched more and
more of the facts surrounding September 11th, it was incomprehensible
to me that an intelligence failure of such magnitude could result
in no one in the Bush Administration either being punished or
accepting responsibility for such a tragedy. Then I began to
delve into the information, some of which has become known today.
I learned from the Sydney Morning Herald, Ha'aretz, and even
<CNN.com> that much more was known about the tragic events
of September 11, and that's when I asked the question "What
did the Bush Administration know and when did it know it about
the events of September 11th?"
And because of the voting debacle in
Florida that robbed blacks and Latinos of their right to vote
and have that vote counted, it was clear that this Administration
had embarked on a path that constituted a fundamental shift of
epic proportions and was doing it on a foundation of questionable
and uncertain legitimacy.
I had no choice but to use publicly available
information and hold this Administration accountable.
However, in my last election, Republicans
recruited a black Republican to run in the Democratic Primary.
47,000 white Republicans then hijacked the Democratic Primary
and voted in it instead of in their own Primary. Democrats and
Blacks voted for me; whites and Republicans voted for my opponent.
My opponent now represents you in the
United States Congress.
There's so much I haven't mentioned to
you today. There's so much to know.
One thing we do know: This isn't the
America of my mother and father.
My father was arrested in South Carolina,
still in his Army uniform having just arrived from Europe at
the end of World War II, for drinking water from the white water
fountain. He and his buddies spent time in jail because they
dared to test at home the freedom that they had just won for
Europe.
Later, while pregnant with me, my mother
was nearly beaten by a rural Georgia sheriff who brought a bicycle
chain to teach the uppity black woman who would dare to ask to
use the public restroom at the local gas station a lesson.
Luckily my father brought a gun to that
fight and she used the restroom; the sheriff apologized for the
misunderstanding, and my parents went on their way.
This is not that America.
But this is an America where not a single
US Senator or Governor comes home to our community.
And where, in spite of Florida, important
provisions of the Voting Rights Act expire in 2007.
And I will end with this: On page 60
of The Project for a New Century report, Rebuilding America's
Defenses, the author writes:
"[A]dvanced forms of biological
warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological
warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool."
Now, I don't know what they meant by
that bit of advice. But I do know that such research has been
conducted already, according to news reports, in Israel and in
apartheid South Africa. At home, I do know that the US Government
has been sued by the son of Paul Robeson for Robeson's targeting
by the CIA's MK Ultra Program; and the Tuskegee Study which for
40 years targeted black men who thought they were being treated
by their government and who, instead, were being studied by it.
Steeped in the intergenerational dialog
that allows us all to be students in wonderment of how much we
can accomplish when we love one another, stand up for one another,
defy conventional wisdom with one another. A new possibility
can be created.
We've seen it happen before. From the
Africans who passed through that portal of no return, to the
Maroons who escaped slavery high in the Jamaican mountains, to
the workers on the South American latifundias. Our story has
been written by our resistance.
College students in Greensboro, North
Carolina wrote the page on sit-ins at lunch counters across the
South; they all contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights
Act.
Young black children facing dogs and
fire hoses began the chapter on harassment, threats, intimidation,
and death; four little girls blown to bits in church don't even
end that chapter; agitation for the right to vote contributed
to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Just imagine what America would have
been like if Sojourner Truth hadn't journeyed across America
and told the truth!
Suppose Fannie Lou Hamer had gotten sick
and tired of being sick and tired and just left the movement
to someone else?
Who among you will step forward and continue
the struggle against injustice?
And if no one here is willing to do it,
what kind of America will you inherit?
The new America that is being made right
now.
You, the young graduates of Berkeley,
must see the struggle of your parents, the commitment of our
fallen leaders, the principles of dissent that characterize your
wonderful institution; don't allow individual suffering to be
a stumbling block for doing what is right.
On December 3, 1963 Mario Savo, while
speaking at the Free Speech Movement Sit-In here at UC Berkeley,
said:
"There is a time when the operation
of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart,
that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part,
and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the
wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got
to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who
run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the
machine will be prevented from working at all!"
Congratulations young graduates. Go out
and make your impact on the world!
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John
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The Fine Print to Bush's Road Map
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Jonathan
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