Los Angeles, Cali.
savage (noun)
1. vicious or violent person somebody who enjoys treating other people and animals in a cruel and violent way
2. offensive term an offensive term for a member of a people considered inferior or not as advanced as your own groupPeace to Encarta the Linguists across North America thank you.
Either the administrators of New York City’s Public School 34 aren’t hip to semantics, or their most recent interpretation and application of the term “savage” is entirely incongruent to the discourse of White-patriarchal-privilege, and most specifically here, the hastening assault against the Haitian Global Community by a myriad selection of American society. For further elaboration, please see the following.
As a seasoned and rather proud cynic, there are few displays of barbarism that tweak the nerves, bring about a spat of fury, a vitriolic spasm, and what have you. Forget that last bit of deceit. In reality, all too often, I do succumb to the sexy red temptress of rage. The latest chapter of rancor and virulence proliferated by New York Public School 34’s Assistant Principle Nancy Miller and Principle Pauline Shakespeare has my bowels in fits.
“While all my city is heavy I drop elephant shit
Smeared the face of the fascist priest’s pulpit”Zach De La Rocha
Yup.
New York’s cultural cabal stays heavy, dropping fecal matter from the fuselage of pig despotism, late-night blackface, mayoral-Mussolinism and the like; Stuka war eagles razing the Black, Brown and Migrant communities like the Ho Chi Minh trail. For the Haitian Community, Operation Phoenix leapt through McNamara’s porthole of kill-tha-gook and embedded itself within the psyche of city-commandants. Nou tout Viet Cong We are all Viet Cong. Savages, in short.
Thirteen fourth grade students on public trial. The jury PS34 populace. The courtroom school cafeteria. The crime being Haitian. In response to a classroom conflict involving two students, educational hack Nancy Miller, as white-cloaked-judge in de facto robe, sentenced the youths to public humiliation and ethnic degradation. As punishment for acting in the universal vein of childhood, she sat the children on the cafeteria floor before the student-jury, forced them to eat their lunch of rice and chicken with bare hands, subjecting them to a primary-educational-stoning, equipped with demeaning glances and ridicule per their peers. According to the “guilty” parties, Miller’s articulation was as such: “In Haiti, they treat you like animals, and I will treat you the same way here.” Yes Ms. Miller, in Haiti, they, Blancs yo (Whites / foreigners / outsiders, aka UN, U$, France, Canada, USAID, OAS, CIA, 184, Haitian Elite) do treat us as inferior peoples, acting as only savages can. We expect no less from you, you studious apprentice. Only through the lens of a dysfunctional clique of negrophobes could such a valiant people be “considered inferior.” If time travel were possible, now would be an excellent time to send message to General Le Clerc and Napoleon Bonaparte. The query: How humiliating was the serving, guerilla style in 1804?
The plot thickens. Principle Pauline Shakespeare, a sister no less pause for dramatic effect, a fucking sister exemplified the role of house-hand, Sanbo, McWhorter, Watts, Powell, Condoskeeza, Cosby, Blackwell; attempted a cover up, in doing so, efforting to bribe the gesticulating “savages,” rather “animals,” with ice cream. Shit, you know tha ghetto’s got sweet teeth. Miller and Shakespeare promoted the stereotype to the wrong community. In Haiti, we sharpen sugar cane stalks to pierce United Nations APV’s.
Mucho Kudos to Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News for breaking a story, previously solely known to the listener ship of New York and East Coast Haitian Radio. I’ll go on the offensive here. Those who are morally outraged and shocked require a crash-course in Jim Crow history. For extra credit, do rent Jerry Bruckheimer’s amateurish, over-budgeted, over-hyped, vituperative, virulent Hollywood concoction, Bad Boys II, from your neighborhood dope dealer (Hollyhood Video the pointy cap, sorcerer type of hood of “lynch a nigga by his toe”, as opposed to “Boys in tha Hood”). Will Smith’s gloves are as white as bleach, lips as red as Porsche during the many scenes in which Haitian’s are demeaned, vilified, dehumanized and slandered with a belligerence not bettered by Jesse Helms. Or, find a copy of Rockstar’s video-gaming filth, Vice City. Deconstruct the argumentation of genocide: “I hate those Haitians. We’ll take them out, we’ll take these Haitians down,” uncannily similar logic permeating the above shoot-em-up pornography (that’s how Bruckheimer does it, PS2’s fo real!). Arsenio and Whoopi cooning to Middle America circa 1990’s with limericks about AIDS and Haitians; Abner Louima, toilet plunger, need I say more? And the savages are?
That the latest colonization, pillage and genocide of the Haitian People (presidential kidnapping and coup d’etat, February 29th 2004, 10,000+ murdered since, countless internally and externally exiled, Apartheid on the rise) be ample ammunition to spark the carbines of dissent is understood. Yeah, the PS34 investigation ensues, bureaucratic double-speak tight-lipped replies to independent media intrigues. This drama was authored centuries past by an ancestor by way of slave-ownership of school Principal Ms. Pauline, The Shakespeare, William precisely. Moral outrage is the director’s cue. Appealing to the collective conscience of that class history has proven have none, is no more than propagating a lineage of perfunctory reforms increasingly insulting to the victims of injustice. Revolution or Reform? Revolution in the Revolution? My peoples Rosa and Regis, where tha hell you at?
JG is of the best-known and most recognizable Independent Hip Hop artists nationally. His music deals exclusively with the plight of disenfranchised communities, most specifically, that of the Haitian Global Village. His most recent release, Boomerang Politick, which protests the most recent occupation of Haiti, is available for purchase at his website: www.insurgentjg.com and at IMIX Bookstore in Los Angeles California.
