The hand that once had the right to pick a president can now get back to picking cotton!

By Malik Sekou OSEI and William PLEASANT


“The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do.”--Joseph Stalin


July 15, 2012


Perhaps Pres. Barack Obama's most freakish stage routine today is his leading role in de jure disenfranchisement of Blacks and the poor in general. Ironic? Actually, it is quite lawful at this historical juncture characterized by growing convulsive class antagonisms that are sweeping the world. How can it be that the Obama regime at once crows that it is passionately commited to expanding the voter pool of the US and ready-willing-able to mobilize the traditional Democratic Party base--Blacks, Latinos, labor unionists, the elderly and progressive whites--and at the same collaborate in the Republican Party's quite transparent nationwide campaign to drive the poor and the left from the ballot box?


The answer is political. Obama has side-stepped the fundamental issue of democratic rights and equality by engaging the pinata of Voter ID laws under the now moribund 1965 Voting Rights Act.


In the state of Texas there a was week-long trial on a new voter ID law that concluded with members of a three-judge federal court panel indicating they would uphold the federal Department of Justice and block the implementation of the law on the grounds that it has a discriminatory effect on minorities.


Obama's Justice Department presented a compelling 1965 Voting Rights Act case proving that Black people (the poor in general) are far more likely to lack the government-issued photo identification required to vote under the Texas law. One expert witness testified that 11-percent of white registered voters lacked the required ID, compared to 18-percent of Hispanic registered voters and 21-percent of black registered voters. A total of 1.5 million people of all races could have been denied the right to vote under the new Texas law.


Attorneys representing the Texas state government argued that the law would not have a “disproportionate” impact on Latino and African American voters and claimed that “only” 167,000 current voters would be disenfranchised by the new ID requirements. Predictably, the Texas legal team never bothered to bring a single state legislator nor executive official (overwhelmingly right wing Republicans) to the witness stand The reason was simple: They would be subjected to cross-examination by the federal lawyers. That would have of course put the Texans on the record stating that their reasons for snatching the ballot from minorities and the poor was purely a political ploy to keep non-whites from voting AGAINST REPUBLICANS, not preventing voter fraud, as the Lone Star ballot bandits pleaded.


The Texans did not challenge evidence that 80 of the state’s 200 counties have no location where photo IDs can be obtained, and that many residents would have to drive more than 120 miles (one way) to get such an identification card. They also went mum when it was pointed out that the IDs runs at least $22, a hardship,  particularly onerous to the elderly and the poor. 


At one point, Mr. Robert Hughes, one of the Texas state attorneys, stated that he also regarded literacy tests as permissible, although they were one of the primary KKK-driven tactics for excluding Black people from the ballot box for 90 years!. Literacy tests and poll taxes were supposedly permanently barred by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In other words, for the Texas Attorney General--circa 2012, "The hand that once had the right to pick a president can now get back to picking cotton!"


The Texan's case was so tranparently threadbare that it immdiately exposed the underlying national strategy of the Republican Party, namely to force an appeal in the US Supreme Court aimed at obliterating the 1965 Voting Rights Act altogether. Texas is one of 16 states required under the Voting Rights Act to obtain “clearance” by the federal Justice Department before any significant changes can be made to statewide or even county-level voting protocols.

The heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was to address particular counties where there had existed a historical pattern of de jure measures employed to virtually outlaw Black and Latino participation in the electoral process. These, of course, were augmented by sheer terrorism led by a coalition of local law enforcement officials and KKK death squads.


Texas is not the only Republican-run state to have recently enacted voter ID requirements and other measures aimed at curbing voter registration and reducing the number of people able to vote, in the name of a fight against “vote fraud.” Voter fraud is merely a euphemism for the strong tendency for non-whites and their allies to reject Republican Party candidates. It is a very WHITE ELEPHANT, since there have been no significant nor documented patterns of voter impersonation, the type of fraud that could be forestalled by a photo ID requirement. For example: not a single person has been convicted in Texas for such an offense. The song remains the same in the other states that have pushed for voter supression.


In Michigan, according to a report by the Republican Secretary of State, out of nearly 1.2 million ballots cast in the February 28, 2012 presidential primary, there were half a dozen believed to have been ineligible to vote.


In Florida, where the state attempted to purge 182,000 people from the voter rolls by employing a dubious list of supposed “illegal aliens,” the number was first whittled down to 2,600, then to only 47, after press revelations that the “illegals” on the list included such individuals as the state’s former Republican governor, Rick Scott, a principal sponsor of the law, and a 91-year-old decorated veteran of World War II's Battle of the Bulge.


Since a reactionary 2008 US Supreme Court decree upholding a photo ID requirement for voting in Indiana, such measures have been adopted in a total of 17 states. The Justice Department has blocked implementation of these laws in Texas, Florida and South Carolina, relying on its powers under the Voting Rights Act. But in states that lie out side the jurisdiction of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, legal disenfranchisement of non-white voters is in full swing. By one estimate, as many as five million voters could be summarily driven from the polls by such laws on Election Day 2012..


For example: Pennsylvania's voter ID law takes effect for the first time in November. According to state officials, some 750,000 people, or nine percent of the state’s 8.2 million voters, do not have an acceptable ID card. In Philadelphia, the state’s largest city, which has a Black majority, that figure rises to 18-percent!    


Pennsylvania's Republican House Majority Leader Mike Turzai openly confessed to the political purpose of the bill, declaring that voter ID “[I]s gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”


The clear intent of these laws is to speed up the “vote suppression” tactics applied by the Republican Party in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, which included massive purges of Black and Latino voters from the registration lists in the name of eliminating felons and undocumented workers. The vast majority of those removed were, in fact, US citizens eligible to vote, whose democratic rights were denied in order to obtain an electoral advantage for the Republican Party's candidates..


Of course, the most egregious case of “vote fraud” in recent years was the stolen election of 2000, when Republican state officials in Florida intentionally suppressed turnout in African American precincts and then declared George W. Bush the victor by a 537-vote margin. When the Florida state Supreme Court ordered a full recount that threatened Bush’s supposed victory, the US Supreme Court intervened with its notorious Bush v. Gore decision.This crippled the vote re-count and the installed Bush in the White House. The Democratic Party surrendered to this attack on democratic rights, setting the stage for the anti-working class onslaught that has followed.


We have noted in earlier articles that the 2000 Supreme Court action and the decision by Democratic candidate Al Gore and the Democratic Party to accept the virtual coronation of Bush--who had actually lost the popular vote by a margin of nearly one million--demonstrated that there was no longer any significant constituency within the US ruling stratum for the defense of democratic rights.


Likewise, there is really no substance to the Obama regime's opposition to the voter supression campaign. Why did not the Justice Department subpoena the
Republican masterminds behind Texas disenfranchisement last week? Why did Obama's legal eagles merely argue against the Texas voter ID law on the basis of the 1965
Voting Rights Act--which applies almost exclusively to the former Confederacy--when voter supression is a nationwide phenomenon in 2012? It should be plainly clear that the 1965 Voting Rights Act is pathetically obsolete today. Doesn't the 19th Amendment of the US Constitution (1920), which granted euqal voting righs to males and females by extension grant the federal executive and legislative branches the absolute power to protect access to the ballot? It reads: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." 


Substitute "race" or "income level" or "geographic location" or "party affiliation" for "sex" and you can see our point. Does Obama support equal democratic rights for minorities and the poor. His Justice Department's performance in Texas leaves strong evidence that he is at most indifferent.



While the Democrats, for short-term electoral purposes, oppose the Republican attacks on voter turnout in minority areas, the Obama administration has in every other respect continued and accelerated the attacks on democratic rights carried out by the Bush administration, including stepped-up political surveillence on the American. Obama has effectively politically disarmed Blacks and other people of color through a highly sophisticate campaign by which the demands of minorities and poor are submerged in the politically neutral jargon of "Middle Class" shared self-interests. This bourgeois populism, propelled by the cultural nationalistic placebo of "Black faces in high places"   has rendered Black political resistance to a mush of apologies for Obama's very open disdain for anything approaching a pro-Black or pro-working class political agenda, even of the mildest reformist specie.


Now is the time for a profound reality check:
 “What” are the material and political interests of the Black community and the larger working class community?


Can Pres. Buckwheat, a representative of the American capitalist/imperialist system really have the same interests as the Black community and the working poor? There is, of course, the argument that we need to support the lesser (Obama) of the two evils. But where in Buckwheat's historical practice of the last four years have we seen him as anything other than evil? Buckwheat was simply the more efficient of the two evils.Let that sink in.
        
For Black people and the 99-percent in the US, history is on their side, but not time.


--30--

A PIMPER'S PARADISE: Obama and the unions...

By William PLEASANT

When Barack Obama promised CHANGE during his 2008 presidential campaign he was definitely not talking about changing the traditional post-war relationship between organized labor and the Democratic Party.

The June 5th Wisconsin gubenatorial recall election should have made this point emphatic to all. Pres. Buckwheat and his DP minions allowed the Republican Party to stomp organized labor's passionate attempt to unseat the reactionary incumbent Gov. Scott Walker and install the liberal Democratic Mayor of Milwaukee Tom Barrett. Despite millions of man-hours spent collecting recall petition signatures and millions more spent on canvassing and get-out-the-vote campaigns, organized labor was undone at the hands of the Republicans, with the tacit assistance of the Obama regime and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

(Walker raised more than $30 million--mostly from out-of-state corporate donors and the Republican National Committee. Barrett's campaign ran on less than $4 million--mostly from unions and small private donors.)

Obama and the DNC offered next to no concrete support to the recall drive (less than $500K), which began over a year ago when Gov. Walker rammed a bill through the Wisconsin legislature that effectively outlawed collective bargaining rights for state employees.

Walker, a wannabe Republican Party bigwig, is actually the cat's paw of the infamous KOCH BROTHER. These are the folks who brought us the maniacally racist TEA PARTY movement. The pedigree of their politics and enormous wealth goes back to the birth of Germany's Third Reich. To call the KOCH BROTHERS fascists would be an understatement. Their ideological vision encompasses no less than the total political annihilation of any social sector--especially organized labor--that can possibly raise opposition to the dictatorship of the rich.

Scott Walker's anti-union antics in Wisconsin were a KOCH-financed experiment to see how much union-busting would be tolerated under the Obama regime. The KOCH BROTHER'S hypothesis was proven: Obama and the Democratic Party establishment did not support organized labor. In short, organized labor and its supporters in the liberal/progressive camps were actually politically disarmed by their material relationship to the Democratic Party.

The same can be said for the Black, Latino, Asian, Native social sectors. They are all political sitting ducks. The KOCH BROTHERS and fellow supporters of a fascistic AMERIKKAN SPRING are licking their chops now, as they prepare for a multi-state coupe de grace to public
sector collective bargaining rights.

Liberal post-recall pundits now scratch their heads and ask: "What if President Obama had campaigned for Tom Barrett? (Though Obama made fund-raising trips to nearby Minneapolis and Chicago last week, the president declined to make even a brief detour to campaign for his fellow Democrat.) The most Obama & Co. had to offer Barrett (i.e., organized labor) was a single TWEET of support on election eve!!!! Vice President Joe Biden didn't even TWEET.

The truth of the matter is that an Obama appearance in Wisconsin would still have been too late and too little. The political substance of Pres. Buckwheat and his party's support for labor had already been exposed over a year ago. When Wisconsin labor unionists occupied the state capitol in protest to Scott Walker's anti-union legislation, the Obama crew went AWOL. Obama and Biden were conspicuous no-shows.

Marxists are not scratching their heads in the wake of the Wisconsin debacle. Organized labor, like other resisting social sectors, has been double teamed by Democrats and Republicans since the 1980s. When then-president Ronald Reagan crushed the Air Traffic Controllers Union, without even a whimper from the Democratic Party, the ideological Right was given the historical high sign that the organized labor sector was political fair game. With military precision, the Right pushed through right-to-work laws and a string of roll-backs of 30 years of worker shop-floor gains.

Purged of its socialist and communist leadership during the 1950s and 60s, and ideologically misled by social democratic opportunists, organized labor ( especially its militants) were grazed silly on the notion that the Democratic Party was the party of labor. Labor's advance was equated with the fortunes of the Democratic Party, which was at least the "lesser-of-two-evils." The organized labor movement's social policy agenda became structurally chained to the Democratic Party. In the name of unity with the only mainstream political institution that would tolerate its social presence, organized labor again and again kow-towed to the whims of the Democratic Party leadership.

In this arrangement, the establishment of an independent, pro-labor party was impossible. That would mean that labor would need go into strategic opposition to the Democratic Party. This is the historical essence of Barack Obama's pimp game against US labor. In short, Obama correctly surmises that it would be absurd to pay for what he and only he can get for free--i.e., the money and slavish support of organized labor's leadership, and the disciplined activism of the rank-n-file.

Obama flashed his rear-end to labor and progressive voters in Wisconsin this week because he knows that come November 2012 they will stampede to the polls on his behalf, come hell or high water. His strategy is highly similar in respect Black and Latino voters.

As far as Obama is concerned, his streetwalkers have already officially lined up to pleasure him. Despite three years of deliberate neglect and disrespect at the hands of the Obama regime, labor unions have rushed to endorse the incumbent, starting a year before his party offers even a crumb of political concession and before the national convention!

National Education Association (NEA) – July 4, 2011

United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) – October 20, 2011

National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) – November 16, 2011

Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) – November 17, 2011

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) – November 19, 2011

American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) – December 6, 2011

Communications Workers of America (CWA) – February 2, 2012

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) – February 7, 2012

International Association of Machinists (IAM) – February 24, 2012

United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry (UA) – March 1, 2012

United Steel Workers (USW) – March 4, 2012

Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) – March 8, 2012

AFL-CIO – March 13, 2012...

This list continues to grow week by week. Meanwhile, rank-n-file labor unionists groan under the political boot of a presidential candidate who promised in 2008 that if “American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I’ll walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America.”

--30--

THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE: Just like mom, apple pie and Chevrolet...

By William PLEASANT

The Atlanta-based Center for Disease Control (CDC} "does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),” agency spokesperson David Daigle declared last Friday. Zombie-mania has seized US pop consciousness. It all began May 26 in Florida after 31-year-old Miami resident Rudy Eugene stripped off all his clothes, attacked a homeless man and attempted to chew off his face. Eugene, naked and growling, only ceased his attack after police shot him several times, according to eyewitnesses. A day later, a New Jersey man stabbed himself 50 times, cut out his own intestines and threw them at police. By the end of the week a Seattle man had killed six people, including himself, in a shooting spree that started in a local cafe.

Meanwhile in Baltimore, .Alexander Kinyua, a 21-year-old Morgan State University student, allegedly confessed to killing and dismembering his housemate, fellow Morgan State student. Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie. Kinyua , a son aof a Morgan State physics professor, also claimed that he ate his victim's heart and portions of his brain. Baltimore police found the remainder of Agyei-Kodie's body in the dumpster of a neighborhood church.

Luka Rocco Magnotta, the Canadian porn actor accused of killing and dismembering a man and mailing body parts to politicians and several schools, will not fight extradition following his arrest in Germany, a Berlin police official said Tuesday. Magnotta told a Berlin magistrate that he will return voluntarily to stand trial for the ritual murder of Jun Lin, a Chinese student at Canada's Concordia University. Canadian authorities accuse Magnotta of dismembering Lin, mailing one of his hands and one of his feet to Canadian politicians and posting a video of the grisly act on the Internet...A Florida couple allegedly kills a young girl,then goes on Facebook to brag about partying and argue about disposal of the body....A 14-year-old boy has been charged with murder in the death of his 9-year-old half-sister, whose body was found attached to a rope hanging from a tree, Alabama authorities said Friday....T.J. Lane, a 17-year-old has been charged with three counts of aggravated murder in the school shooting deaths of three students and the wounding of three others, according to an indictment released Tuesday. A psychiatrist who examined Lane testified earlier that that Lane sometimes loses touch with reality and suffers from hallucinations, psychosis and fantasies. Lane has admitted taking a .22-caliber pistol and a knife to the high school and firing 10 shots at a group of students sitting at a cafeteria table at the start of the school day....Police say a Nebraska mom who disappeared last month with her son strangled the 10-year-old boy before strangling herself in the woods of an Iowa state park. Council Bluffs police said Monday that Charlotte Schilling, 41, of Plattsmouth, Neb. and her son, Owen, both died with plastic zip ties around their necks in a murder-suicide. The Schillings were missing from May 10 until their bodies were found May 20 in Lake Manawa State Park, south of Council Bluffs in western Iowa, about 20 miles north of Plattsmouth. Council Bluff's police say Charlotte Schilling tried to commit suicide with a plastic zip tie in November, but a family member intervened then. Once a zip tie is tightened, the only way to loosen it is to cut it off, so police said after Schilling tightened one around her own neck enough to restrict breathing it would have been difficult for her to remove it......And the litany of bizarre murders and gratuitous violence grows day by day, it seems.

America is terrified. Is the ZOMBIE APPOCALYPSE UPON US?

The internet conspiracy mill has kicked into full gear over the last three weeks. There must be some hidden hand behind this string of atrocities. Is, as the fundamentalist Christians readily assert, THE END TIME at hand? Has Satan loosed his minions on a an unrepentent USA? Some internauts have even called the CDC dismissal of a zombie epidemic a massive government cover-up that denies the real cause of zombification, namely cat feces. As one theory goes, the US is experiencing an outbreak of taxoplasmosis, a disease caused by the single-cell parasite Taxoplasma gondii that can be found in the poop of the average American house cat. "The Toxoplasma, when living inside humans, is linked to causing significant changes in behavior, including neuroticism, increased aggression and schizophrenia. Mamalian studies of Toxoplasma infections have demonstrated that this organism affects levels of dopamine, norepinephrine, and other neurotransmitters, which are well known to be affected in persons with schizophrenia,” according to a 2003 article in the CDC’s “Emerging Infectious Diseases” publication. Is the kitty litter industry behind the CDC cover-up? It would have the most to lose if the truth got out. Right?

Well, let's blame US social debauchery on Puss 'n Boots.

Half-baked biological theories and religion-driven superstitions just won't do for marxists. Far from spook-show fixtures, ZOMBIES in America are real and actually symptomatic of decadent material conditions coupled with bi-partisan ruling class policy.

A quick review of the cases of wilding cited above will reveal one common factor. Each of the alleged perpetrators had a history of mental health problems. They exhibited anti-social behaviors days, weeks or even years before their alleged acts of violence. They were sick. In the case of Baltimore's Alexander Kunya, the student was well known for eccentric behavior. Par ex: He regularly walked through the Morgan State campus sporting camouflage face paint and brandishing a machete!!!!

Nobody paid attention. Nobody intervened. All the signs of impending horror were present. But as monopoly capitalism goes through its terminal decay, it is no longer capable of monitoring nor treating mental illness. The institutions in American society charged with mental health maintenance have always been weak, to say the least. Today, in the wake of growing social and economic destabilization and displacement experienced by vast sectors of society, they are literally disintegrating—as a matter of deliberate policy..

Poor people are much more likely to experience mental illness and to stay crazy for longer periods than those who are not sociologically defined as poor. That is a well known fact. Sociologists who look at inequality as an issue in mental health/psychiatric research are divided in their views as to whether people become poor because they are mentally ill and thus unable to function (social selection) or they become mentally ill because of being poor (social causation). In 2012, no theorizing is required. People are becoming increasingly pauperized and increasingly insane in the USA. On a daily basis, the legion of Zombies grows.

According to a 2011 National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) report: “One in 17 people in America lives with a serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, major depression, or bipolar disorder. About one in 10 children live with a serious mental disorder. In recent years, the worst recession in the U.S. since the Great Depression has dramatically impacted an already inadequate public mental health system.

“From 2009 to 2011, massive cuts to

non-Medicaid state mental health spending totaled nearly $1.6 billion dollars. And, deeper cuts are projected in 2011 and 2012. States have cut vital services for tens of thousands of youth and adults living with the most serious mental illness. These services include community and hospital based psychiatric care, housing and access to medications. To make matters worse, Medicaid funding of mental health services is also potentially on the chopping block in 2011. The temporary increase in federal funding of Medicaid through the stimulus package will end on June 30, 2011. Medicaid is the most important source of funding of public mental health services for youth and adults, leaving people with mental illness facing the real threat of being cut off from life-saving services. Communities pay a high price for cuts of this magnitude. Rather than saving states and communities money, these cuts to services simply shift financial responsibility to emergency rooms, community hospitals, law enforcement agencies, correctional facilities and homeless shelters.”

Moreover, “As most people know, mental health care services are not covered by health insurance packages and health plans to the same degree as physical health care services. Not only are there usually more services excluded as covered benefits, but those services that are covered are often subject to higher co-pays and are capped at a maximum number of covered treatments."

That is the best that working people with insurance can expect.

"Less well known is the fact that those with severe mental illness (SMI) are less likely to have health insurance coverage of any kind. McAlpine and Mechanic (1999) estimate that while 11.4% of those with no measured mental disorders lack health insurance coverage, 20.4% of those with SMI and 18.2% with less severe mental disorders lack coverage.” Delays in Treatment for Mental Disorders and Health Insurance Coverage

by Catherine G McLaughlin, Ph.D, Senior Associate Editor (2004)

SAMHSA= Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration

A MEMORIAL DAY for murderers--past and present?

By William PLEASANT

Today, the US secular religious cult celebrated Memorial Day.
We were urged to give thanks--apolitically--to the US military personnel
who "died for our freedoms". The day was marked with military parades and
mountainous steaming piles of sentimental oratory. President Buckwheat Obama stood on the altar of US imperialism and called forth a deluge of crocodile tears.
Meanwhile, retail outlets badgered the appropriately mournful patriotic masses to soothe their bereavement with the purchase of a new car or sofa. That was the holiday. That was Memorial Day 2012, America's secular Easter--death and resurrection symbolized by the custom of lowering the flag to half-mast at dawn and then raising it at noon.

As marxists, we understand the political and cultural function of holidays. Aside from their transparent commercial utility, holidays serve a specific political use for the ruling stratum.

Karl Marx wrote:"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the
heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people."

The US secular religion is no less a narcotic. The CHURCH USA, as I style it, holds that every military escapade, past and present, is the work of an omniscient and benevolent god tasked with spreading his bounty--mainly consumer good, armaments and crass materialism--around the globe. The daily slaughter of civilians and military personnel is a necessary good for the glory of god who resides everywhere except in the political, social and financial agenda of the ruling class. One knows not where wars come from, but they are the will of the invisible god of America. Memorial Day serves to keep that god under wraps.

HIROSHIMA

　
Today, President Obama, the Pope of the CHURCH USA, in his Washington DC Memorial Day sermon, used the occasion to do a little historical revision on the 50th anniversary of the start of the Vietnam War. At the Vietnam war monument, he chastised past sinners for their apparent maltreatment of Vietnam War-era military personnel upon their return to the US. (Click here for complete text.)

"It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened.
"That's why here today we resolve that it will not happen again," Obama told veterans and their families gathered on the national mall.

"You were often blamed for a war you didn't start when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor."

VIET NAM

 Indeed, returning members of the military were the target of national outrage over the illegal war in Vietnam. As operatives of a policy that was rejected by huge sectors of the population, they suffered the same repudiation as their civilian and military superiors. They were reviled for clear cut political reasons. Why did people throw garbage at returning soldiers? Namely, because military personnel committed atrocities against the Vietnamese people in the name of propping up the appallingly corrupt, neo-colonial clique known as the Republic of Vietnam. Most American people, particularly youths and non-whites, detested the war policy. They acted out on their political opposition. As Obama pointed out, that was a sin and the American people should sin no more.

GRENADA

But why shouldn't the gunslingers of US imperialism in Vietnam have been subjected to criticism and rebuke? Why, in a like manner, the marauding assassins who today operate in Afghanistan and Iraq not be called to task for their role in barbarizing the people in those countries?

PANAMA

Isn't a hitman as guilty of murder as is his employer?
　
The CHURCH USA requires a yearly mass supplication called Memorial Day to ward off the rather transparent fact that US military policy makers and their minions in the trenches are equally guilty of ongoing crimes against humanity. Memorial Day is merely a ploy to deflect political criticism of imperialistic military aggression by but again exploiting the cannonfodder class--dead and alive--as poster children. They bravely served the country, so they are worthy of our mourning and sympathy, correct? "The country" is really a myth. The military serves its paymaster, the ruling stratum. They kill for the ruling stratum. They occupy countries for the ruling stratum. And they make money, in the productive process of war manufacture, for the ruling stratum. Memorial Day is supposed to blind us with tears to the extent that we cannot discern the obvious.

IRAQ

　
The truth of the matter is that the holiday that we now call Memorial Day was invented by Black people in Charleston, SC. It was a political celebration based upon honoring dead Union Soldiers in the aftermath of the Civil War.

According to historian David Blight:

"During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters' horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some 28 black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, "Martyrs of the Race Course."

"Then, [B]lack Charlestonians, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders' race course. [May 1, 1865--Ed.]. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy's horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freed people. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event and described, "a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before."

This holiday--originally called DECORATION DAY-- caught on throughout the Unionist states. But its political meaning was quickly transformed by the bourgeoisie in the 1870s. Disdainful of freed Blacks and in opposition to radical Reconstructionists/progressives who saw Decoration Day as a celebration of Black emancipation and the victory of social progress, Decoration Day was quickly transformed into a spectacle of national mourning for ALL deceased US military personnel from ALL wars--including dead Confederate soldiers from the Civil War!!!! This was quite convenient, since the northern ruling stratum had grown weary of Reconstruction and was eager to get on with making money with the assistance of the previously defeated Southern aristocracy. Reconstruction was abandoned in 1876, with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. The former rebel slave-owners were freed to initiate a reign of terror against the emancipated slaves and their white supporters. Blood flowed in the streets of the South. Meanwhile, a myth of national unity was anchored in all-embracing holiday of reconciliation between white men of the North and South. Modern Memorial Day was born.

PALESTINE BY PROXY

Through the years and until the end of World War II, Decoration Day--renamed Memorial Day--served the task of inculcating the myth of US national unity--actually a unity of cadavers who had previously engaged in corporatized ultra-violence. But as US imperialism went into over-drive following WWII, leading to dozens of military adventures of at best dubious justifications, the theme of national unity was supplanted with a theme of worshiping the act of war making and its executioner. That was, in fact, the substance of Obama's sermon today. According to Pres. Buckwheat, we were supposed to reward mass murderers with praise as a reflex of patriotism .

--30--

That black, shiny thing...

By William PLEASANT
(c) 2012 Thunder Publications, Inc.

[The bodies of FLEET and FLANNERY O’Connor are brought into the
theatre or cathedral or county courthouse on a single hospital gurney
by two pallbearers. Filthy white sheets cover the two cadavers.

The ARCHBISHOP leads the procession. Once the gurney is hidden in a "secret garden" the two pallbearers leave the page and take seats
beside the reader. They smoke and discuss trashy tabloid magazines,
as if OBLIVIOUS to the remainder of the poem...The ARCHBISOP (of Savannah?)
addresses the reader. As he speaks, FLEET and FLANNERY copulate
and slowly emerge from their blood-splattered shrouds. [This is a book you are reading.]　

ARCHBISHOP
Lo! A nightingale of paradise singeth upon a twig of the tree of
paradise in a clear voice, proclaiming, the gladtidings of our nearness
to god.

(PAUSE HERE)

GOD!
GOD!
GOD?
Here lies the great southern author FLANNERY O’Connor and her
nigger lover, who took himself and her from this earth.

Double suicide!

As wicked as the lust between them.
FLANNERY, my sister.
The nigger FLEET, sullen bastard too good to be a nigger.
The perfect Nigger FLEET.
The nigger with one, two, three degrees, eight modern languages--
Greek, Latin and Hebrew, too.
Nigger genius FLEET!

Let me tell you about FLEET.
Let me tell you that I warned Daddy the day he brought that rascal
out to the house to drive our car.

I say: "Daddy, you see the way that nigra walks, the way he breathes?
Look at his hands, Daddy, how slender and smooth they are? Look at
the way his jaw is set. That is the face of a Messiah or a murderer.
Either way, he’s out to turn our world upside down."

Daddy, he say,
that be Merriett--that’s his real name--Dr. Merriett Cuffe--be Lula’s boy
and he’d promised Lula that once Merriett finished his schooling he’d
give him a job where her son wouldn’t get his hands dirty.

Those hands!
Lawd-a-mercy.
They plucked a piano or violin as effortlessly as
one could PULL A TRIGGER.

(PAUSE HERE)

He sang, too, in a satin tenor.
GODDAMN you, FLEET!
GODDAMN you.

(On knees, in supplication and remorse)

I named him FLEET after
Daddy’s big car--Fleetwood.
FLEET, get it? Fleetwood
Cadillac, the finest car MADE.

And I remember the first day
I called him that, he just held
his head low and sighed, as
though I had said something
inevitable, as if I had
disappointed him.

He never spoke a word to me again
after that. He only did whatever I told him to do.

And Daddy took up calling him FLEET, too.
He thought it was funny, a fitting name
for a Cadillac-quality darky,
That black shiny thing.

(PAUSE HERE)

FLANNERY vacillated some days:  it was FLEET and others it was
Merriett. No telling what name she moaned as she clasped him under the
sheets, on the backseat of Daddy’s car.
Wicked!
Wicked!

BUT. YET.
FLEET stood so straight, like a pole was jabbed up his behind.
His muscles?
I saw him on the days he’d strip to the waist to wash Daddy’s big
black car.

The day they buried Daddy, he was there--FLEET--his skin as smooth
and hairless as the body of that glistening car, molded or chisled from
iron or some unearthly stone.
I wanted to touch him.
I wanted to glide my fingertips across the lips of the wounds I gave
him--I called him FLEET first.
To name is the first act in murder’s drama.
I was the ROMAN soldier: my tongue was the spear that pierced him
out of the same dumb fate that placed a brilliant BLACK man as my
handservant and between FLANNERY’S hungry thighs.
WICKED!
WICKED!

In this "secret garden" rooted in black and white and blood,
And creamy dew-drops congealed around a shaft of gold hunger,
Then frozen in hatred as facile as the tautology X=X,
Terminology Almighty, this mean mathematics.

Variables? DEFEAT. INSANITY. SEX.

Or our DIXIE TRINITY,
strung along lynchrope syllogisms, blazing in the night sky
from mountaintops dotted with failed ghosts,
clutching their pricks and their yellow-haired women,
while they could be instead holding FLEET to their breasts,
His richness and perfection.

FLEET!

[Close the book now.]

--30--

PSU & Saint Joe

OOOOOPPPPSSSS!!! (click here)

Blacks & Chinese in AmeriKKKa: How strangers are manufactured

By William PLEASANT

(c) 2011 Thunder Publications, Inc.

Unknown to most, Black people and Chinese people once enjoyed an intimate social relationship in the United States dating from the pre-Civil War era. Since then, China–the perennial "sick man of Asia"– has miraculously emerged as one of the pre-eminent political and economic powers on Earth. The fortunes of humankind in the 21st century may rest on the success to which traditional European powers, especially the United States, cultivate respectful and mutually beneficial relationships with the rising Red Dragon and its billion-plus population. If the superficial ethnic identity of US Pres. Barack Obama is to have any positive value in the coming critical economic and political dialogues between the governments of the United States and the People’s Republic of China, then there must be firstly a rudimentary historical understanding of the relationship between Black and Yellow when the two peoples were neither separated by ideology nor the Pacific Ocean. They were not strangers.

The case of Blacks and Chinese in Mississippi offers a compelling example of how the two communities once came together as allies and were, under the ferocious regimen of Jim Crow repression, ultimately torn apart. In short, Black people came to be rejected by their Chinese neighbors–and often family members– in an unique application of the "one drop" or hypo-descent rule of racial categorization in the United States.

The historical record of the Mississippi Chinese and their racially mixed descendents (Sino-Africans) demonstrates the extent to which racial categorization is manufactured and manipulated to bolster white supremacy. Chinese and Blacks once worked together in the cotton fields as sharecroppers in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. According to Vivian Wu Wong (Somewhere Between White and Black: The Chinese in Mississippi, Magazine of History, Volume 10, No 4, Summer 1996), "The majority of the Chinese who settled in the Mississippi Delta arrived between the years 1910 and 1930. However, questions concerning the social, economic, and political future of the Chinese in Mississippi began much earlier, starting in the mid-1800s when a number of Chinese ‘coolies’ (indentured laborers) from Cuba were brought to the American South as a substitute for [B]lack labor."

Needless to say, the Chinese workers who found themselves in the Deep South’s color-coded society were at once mystified and the source of mystery to the Black and white inhabitants. "A vast social and economic gulf yawn[ed] between the dominant white and subordinate [B]lack. Yet one group in Mississippi, a ‘third race,’ the Chinese…managed to leap that chasm. Negroes [did not] consider them exactly white; Caucasians [did not] consider them [B]lack. They [were] privileged and burdened with an ambiguous racial identity ."[1]

This situation allowed the Mississippi Chinese the opportunity to employ racial identity to their advantage. To Blacks, they were "brothers". To whites, they were "not nigras". To the Chinese themselves, they were just in HELL. Make no mistake, racial identity was and remains the cultural, social and juridical property of the white master race–i.e., herrenvolk stratum. This meta-aristocracy ultimately and murderously determined its own membership requirements. Within the strict matrix of manners and terror that gripped post-Reconstruction Mississippi, the Chinese simply learned to navigate to their best advantage, given the situation.

Special Case Chinese

The Mississippi Chinese bear little resemblance to the Chinese who migrated to the Pacific Coast of the U.S. West Coast Chinese were relegated to the bottom of the social hierarchy, mere millimeters above the surviving Native Americans and the Mexicans. They were the target of fierce anti-immigrant sentiment on the part of whites. White laborers flew into a rage as Chinese were recruited as low wage union busters. Pogroms against Chinese and other Asian immigrant groups were not uncommon. As pawns in the labor-capital clash, the Chinese of the West inevitably found themselves socially and culturally isolated, corralled in so-called Chinatowns.

In the U.S. South, the story was quite different. The original, ante bellum Chinese population spoke Spanish, an European language, so they were not entirely alien.[2] But more importantly, The South already had a permanent racial underclass, namely the descendants of the African slaves. Nobody, for very profound social and cultural reasons, could ever vie for the African American’s station at the bottom of the racial inferno. Thus, Mississippi’s Chinese enjoyed an unique social mobility, relative to race and class.

The United States Census of 1880 listed 51 Chinese in Mississippi, mostly in Washington County. Like most Chinese immigrants to the United States, those coming to Mississippi were mainly from relatively commercially sophisticated Guandong, a province in South China. Immigrants from there were likely from the peasant and artisan classes. Traditionally, young males from that area sought work elsewhere to supplement the family income. The Chinese did not come to settle in Mississippi but to make money and expatriate it home. By 1960, the U.S. Census recorded that 14 Delta counties accounted for over ninety percent of Mississippi’s Chinese population. The Delta had the largest concentration of Chinese in the entire South. The 2010 U.S. Census found that roughly 4,500 Chinese lived in Mississippi, out of a statewide Pacific Asian population of 18,626. Despite the 50-year trend of Mississippi Delta depopulation, the Chines population there is actually growing! (Lynn Woo, et al., University of Mississippi Center for Population Studies-September 2011).

In Mississippi, the development of the Chinese Baptist Church, the presence of relatively more Chinese females, and the absence of clans, clubs and quasi-criminal gangs made the Chinese there more acceptable to Mississippi whites than their West Coast counterparts. The Chinatowns of the West Coast afforded Chinese immigrants a sort of social/cultural oasis. But Mississippi was as sterile as the moon for its Chinese. Consequently, the Chinese hatched their own society, what Loewen calls ‘parallel institutions,’ social organizations which were structured to replicate those of the dominant white society. These institutions, particularly the Chinese churches, showed the white community that the Chinese man ‘was already perhaps beginning to believe that American ways [were] better’ .[3]

Why Mississippi and why Chinese?

The Chinese people, primarily men, who landed in Mississippi either from Cuba, the West Coast or directly from China began as laborers, specifically "colored" laborers. They were, like their Black neighbors, sharecroppers. The Chinese relationship to the existing Black laboring masses was actually pivotal to their racial identity as Chinese in the South and the evolution of their socio-economic strategy for holding their own, and sometimes even prospering in Mississippi.

Before the Civil War, Chinese workers were merely viewed as answers to the labor shortage created by the U.S. ban on African slave importation and the relatively high cost of purchasing and maintaining Black slaves from the existing national stocks. After the war, Chinese workers were imported to Mississippi based upon a notion among some elements of the white aristocracy that somehow they would undermine the political and evolving economic power of native freed Blacks. The Chinese were employed as an instrument of white supremacy. Black people could vote. Chinese could not. In fact, the white elite believed that even if Chinese were enfranchised, then they still would not vote. There was another dollar and cents argument, namely that Chinese coolies would accept wages that the newly freed Black slaves would spit upon. [4] Chinese importation quite simply targeted ornery Black labor. Railway construction, agricultural production–cotton and rice–were the central pillars of post-Civil War southern economy, and these industries were dominated by restive Black workers. Something had to be done about that, since Blacks, recently released from chattel status, necessarily had a racial/political chip on their shoulders. Chinese were seen as the answer by many, but not by all among the white elites. Some would argue that re-introduction of the African slave trade would be preferable to bringing in the "yellow peril" to meet the labor shortage at the outbreak of the Civil War [Gen. William H. Chase, 1857].

On the other hand, another white faction–railroaders and factory owners– welcomed imported Chinese based upon reports from Cuba, Peru and elsewhere in Latin America where they were described as hardworking and law-abiding. This group was, of course, shouted down by the pro-Black faction–large agriculturalists– who argued that negroes, though troublesome at times, worked hard, too. But more importantly, they–southern whites–had several centuries of experience in exploiting Black labor. For these whites, when all was said and done, a free Black laborer could be easily terrorized by the Klan and robbed by the landowner at the commissary store–after all, the law was literally on the side of the nightriders and thieves. That was a fact. Chinese workers in the agricultural sector were just not trusted to endure that kind of abuse.

In the end, both arguments became moot. Chinese workers proved to be as costly as Black workers, especially when they were brought from China. Likewise, as the West industrially expanded it demanded more Chinese laborers, and lured them with higher wages. The campaign to break the political and economic power of Black people with Chinese coolies fell flat on its face. Chinese never became a significant demographic factor in Mississippi nor anywhere in the South, as a consequence. But their significance on the landscape of Mississippi racial politics was never a mere reflection of their numbers.

Neither Black nor White, but definitely not poor.

Like most southern folks, the Chinese of Mississippi drifted away from plantation life. King Cotton was on his deathbed by the late 1880s, bludgeoned by competition from Egyptian and Sudanese crops that were cheaper. Likewise, over-cultivation of a single cash crop had ruined the region’s soil. Black farm people began the slow migration to urban areas as a consequence. The Chinese pursued a different strategy. They became small, rural shop owners.

There is some heated debate over why Black sharecroppers failed to follow the same course. One would assume that the level of capital accumulation and access afforded Chinese and Black agrarians would be relatively the same. Loewen argues that Black were simply too underdeveloped and devastated by the slavery experience to enter commerce, even micro-commerce. But there is a rather simple and compelling counter-argument. Blacks did not thrive as small business people just because they were Black. A Black commercial stratum never developed in the Mississippi Delta because whites would not allow it to develop. White wholesalers would not extend credit to Blacks. White banks would not extend credit to Blacks. White shippers would not ship to Blacks. And in the end, Blacks who sought to circumvent this stranglehold of naked racism were simply run out of town by the nightriders. There is little evidence that the nascent Chinese merchants faced these sorts of obstacles.

By the early to mid-twentieth century, close to 80% of the Mississippi Chinese were grocers. They were able to establish stores in the vicinity of the plantations and in the Black quarters of the Delta towns. In Mississippi–as in the rest of the South–there were no Chinatowns. But there was always a "China-mans" around, a small general store where can goods, toiletries, ammunition and remedies could be purchased. Chinese simply filled the commercial void created by the race-driven economic exclusion of Blacks. The Chinese groceries prospered for several reasons:

*1.) Chinese enjoyed virtual monopoly on retail sales to Blacks. White shops often refused to serve Black customers, and when they did the Black customer more often than not exited white establishments sans money and personal dignity.
*2.) The Blacks developed a genuine affinity for the Chinese merchants because they almost always lived in Black neighborhoods–often in a back room of their stores.
*3.) The Chinese were perceived by Blacks as sharing the same burden of racial discrimination at the hands of whites. Genuine solidarity developed between the two lower-strata communities.

Chinese commercial success commanded the respect of Mississippi whites. The Chinese managed to create a sort of structural independence from the wealth they accumulated from the Black community. To the white racists they were still "colored," but coloreds with their own money. Chinese became the "middle men" that white racism begat in Mississippi, and a relatively well-heeled market for local white merchants and banks.

The social birth and political murder of the Mississippi Sino-African.

"If the Delta Chinese sometimes fell through the cracks of segregation, those who started families outside the Chinese fold fell away from the community. With immigration laws making it extremely difficult for Chinese men to bring their wives to the United States, it was not uncommon for a Chinese man in the Delta to have a common-law wife, either [B]lack or white." [5]

The close social intercourse between Blacks and Chinese in Mississippi inevitably led to sexual intercourse and a slew of Black/Chinese children. Chinese sharecroppers were almost exclusively single men. So barring liaison with white women, their pool of possible mates was invariably Black women. The offspring of Chinese males and white females never raised much of a social issue--if there were any hackles, then they were thoroughly muted. But at one point as many as 25% of the Mississippi Delta Chinese were married to Black women. [6] This fact, of course, raised problems for both the white racists and those Chinese bent upon using their new wealth to fuel social assimilation with the herrenvolk–to essentially cement their immunity to the Jim Crow laws. Chinese as Chinese were easy to discern as middle men. But what about the Black Chinese? Would Sino-Africans be afforded the same relative privileges as "full-blooded" Chinese?

Mississippi’s Jim Crow statutes were specifically spawned to socially and economically ostracize Black people. They were never meant to apply to the economically useful Chinese. Likewise, for upwardly mobile Mississippi Chinese eager to ingratiate themselves to polite (white) society, the stain of Blackness in the family was anathema. If Chinese wanted to be honorary whites (by Mississippi legislation), then they had to stiff-arm their Black friends and the demi-Blacks in their families. Whites demanded this. The Mississippi Chinese bowed to the racist dictate.

Writes Zhou Yao Kuan (Bobby Joe Moon), a native of Boyle, of the social upheaval affecting Mississippi Chinese: "Racial climate: We could sense the growing tension between Blacks and whites as we were growing up in the late '50s and early '60s leading up to the Civil Rights Freedom Marches. Being in the white world for public schools, our parents had to donate money to the White Citizens' Council [the public arm of the Klu Klux Klan–Ed.] and yet try to be supportive of the Blacks from whom they were making their livelihoods. Again, this was very confusing for us. We were taught to hate the Blacks by being in the White world. We were taught that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Communist. I thought the South was going to have a Civil War between the Blacks and whites when Emmitt Till was lynched." [7]

Nine years before the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Topeka ruling outlawing racial segregation in public schools, Mississippi lawmakers made their move. Chinese were declared white by statute, meaning that Chinese children could attend school with white students. Mississippi could crow that its schools were already "integrated". Moreover, politically speaking, the caucasianization of the Chinese assured that Mississippi’s Blacks could not rely upon their old friends as allies in the burgeoning fight against Jim Crow.

The task of "cleansing" the Chinese of Black blood was given to the Chinese themselves. This fact makes the case of Mississippi unique. Upwardly mobile Chinese pulled the trigger on their own people, with abandon. Wong writes, Mississippi’s Chinese were stampeded away from their old Black friends by the pro-assimilationist camp "pressuring Chinese men to end their relationships with [B]lack women and to abandon their bi-racial children, or forcing [B]lack-Chinese American families to leave the community." Put simply, Chinese who persisted in hanging out with Black folks forfeited their right to be Chinese.

Reverend Ted Shepherd, the white pastor of Greenville’s Chinese Mission Baptist Church recounts how severe the post-WWII racial rift within the Chinese community had become.

"Let me give you an example, "explained Shepherd to Emilee Erwin during a 1999 interview for the Mississippi Oral History Program (F341.5 .M57 vol. 748, pt. 2) "Arlee Hen was an elderly Chinese woman in Greenville who was half Chinese and half [B]lack. A very wonderful person. I enjoyed talking with her a great deal. Her husband was J. S. Hen, a pure-blood Chinese. And because he had married a half Chinese, half black, this is what they did at his funeral. Joe Ting handled the whole thing. And he went to the police department and got six policemen to carry that man's casket. And brought his casket there and placed it under the tent. And they allowed Arlee Hen to come in and sit. But Joe Ting would not [quote] ‘disgrace any Chinese men by asking them to be pallbearers of one who had married a half Chinese and half [B]lack’ [ unquote]"


In this regard and maybe thousands of other incidents of rejection, a new inter-cultural, interracial ethnicity was literally strangled in its cradle. The Sino-Africans of Mississippi vanished.

CONCLUSION

The story of the Mississippi Chinese demonstrates that formal ethnicities, as defined by culture and statute, are little more than political playthings of the white elite. As long as the Mississippi Chinese kept their places as the commercial middle men in the rural economy they were accorded certain liberties afforded only whites. The Chinese never bucked the system, except to insist that they were constitutionally entitled to enjoy the same backwards relationship to Black people as white Mississippians. In the U.S. Supreme Court case of Lum vs. Rice , the Chinese plaintiff, a girl barred from a white school simply because she was non-white, argued, "If there is danger in the association [with Negroes], it is a danger from which one race is entitled to protection just the same as another…The white race creates for itself a privilege that it denies to other races; exposes the children of other races to risks and dangers to which it would not expose its own children. This is discrimination." [Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78, 80 (1927)]

In LUM v. Rice, the Mississippi Chinese were inclined to invoke the 14th Amendment to argue that if, under the Mississippi Constitution, schools were segregated to protect white children from the threat of Black children, then Chinese children deserved equal protection from that threat! It was one of the most heartbreaking moments in the modern civil rights movement. Why? Because, under the Mississippi Constitution, Chinese children had absolutely no right to public education until 1944. (They could not attend white designated schools nor Black designated schools because Mississippi schools were ONLY for white or Black students). LUM ( Martha Lum [age 9], daughter of Gong Lum) could have argued against that, but she argued that she should have white privilege. 

But Blacks did rebel, demanding an end to the Jim Crow horror and equal justice under the law. This political challenge forced a re-organization of the Chinese socio-political status in Mississippi. In the heat of the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century there could be no "middle men". The majority of Mississippi’s Chinese clearly chose sides in the battle for Jim Crow’s survival. They chose the losers.

This article merely scratches the surface of the Black/Chinese relationship in Mississippi and elsewhere in the U.S. South. Hopefully, future writers will more thoroughly explore the narrative contours of what it meant for Blacks and Chinese to literally part ways on the social landscape. For example, what did it really look like for a Chinese father to abandon his children? What became of the Black women and these children? How did Chinese impose de jure whiteness on their community? Who led this movement in the Chinese community? These are potentially explosive questions that must be answered in order to get to the feverish heart of U.S. racism and its psycho-cultural maiming of all social strata.

When President Barack Obama walks into the conference room with the leaders of China, he must necessarily carry, among other things, the story of Mississippi–Black and Yellow–in his vest pocket.

[This article is partially excerpted from William Pleasant’s upcoming book, Mélange: The social contours of interracial coupling in America. It is scheduled for release in August 2012.]

NOTES
1. James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 2.
2. Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in the Post-Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1984), 57.
3. Loewen, Mississippi Chinese, 84.
4. Shih-shan Henry Tsai, The Chinese Experience in America (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986), 56.
5. Somini Sengupta. Published: November 1, 2000, New York Times.
6. Loewen, Mississippi Chinese, 74.
7. Zhou Yao Kuan (Bobby Joe Moon). USADEEPSOUTH.COM (http://usads.ms11.net/bjm.html) 2004.

--30--