This is the second of the two lessons I created for the Omega Dr. Carter G. Woodson Academy on Assata Shakur (light to her spirit) as part of our class on Black nationalism. This lesson is based on Chapter 1, which includes the initial shootout with the police, being shot, arrested, and detained in the hospital. The file of images contains a jarring image of Assata Shakur hospitalized and injured. This lesson is also for ages 10-14 and can be modified.

Some years ago, for the Omega Dr. Carter G. Woodson program, organized by the Iota Phi Chapter of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, I taught a couple of lessons on Assata Shakur as part of a course on Black nationalism. In honor of Sis Assata’s recent passing, light to her spirit, I want to share a couple of these lesson plans that people can use with in schools, out-of-school-time programs, families, or for the youth section of a larger event. The lessons include images that can be seen using the links below. I will post the second lesson next week. This lesson is based on chapter 2 of “Assata: An Autobiography” by Assata Shakur

In his 1983 book, Settlers: The Myth of the White Proletariat, J. Sakai provides excellent insight into the nature of racism, the White left, and the position of Black and other oppressed people in the U.S. To help us understand these domains, Sakai breaks down settler colonialism more broadly, including the U.S. as a settler-colonial state, White people as settlers, and the rest of us as people of oppressed nationalities within this settler-colonial state. The roots of this system lie in Europe’s parasitic and patriarchal ruling class, which, in its stunted mental state, disrupted societies’ inclination to consider the needs of the broad community, including the environment, and consistently placed its desire for power over others over societies’ long-term health and perpetuation.

Completed! This book sat on a shelf for two decades. Feels like completing Marx’s “Capital”, it’s that conceptually unrelenting, that much of a paradigm shifter/attacker. Though, i would like to talk to Dr. Ani about how the core contention that the very seed of European culture i.e. “the asili” is the embodiment of a despirtualized violence, seems undermined by a depiction of Homer as expressing a worldview prior to Plato that could have proffered another kind of Western culture, “Yurugu”, turning anthropology on its head and using it to look closely at all things Western from capitalism to imperialism to the environment and creating an African centered schematic to explain Europe, is that book. With chapters on aesthetics, religion, the image of self (Europeans) the image of others, you can look at sections of it, you can read the intro and sections.

Dr. Oyeronke Oyewumi’s 1994, “The Invention of Women: Making An African Sense of Western Gender Discourse,” is a book well worth your time and provides great insight into the nuances of European domination through her critique of the geographical origins of gender. If it doesn’t make this claim outright, “The Invention of Women” essentially argues that gender has been as important in the colonizing of the Oyo people (a people in the area today known as “Nigeria” and the people of Oyewumi) as Whiteness and, by extension, the colonizing of the African mind. Using linguistic evidence, several key interviews, and extensive reading of African and Western sources, Oyewumi explains gender as a Greco-European notion of a biologically rooted, distinct way of being in which those who are anatomically “woman” are an inferior version of the normal way of being human, which is “man.” In this way, gender is critical to the colonization of the Oyo people because it left behind a dividing hierarchy and a devastating theft of power and position of “woman.”

Dr. Ibram Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist” is intended to be a relatively simple and straightforward book, which is both its strength and weakness. The book begins with a number of definitions: “antiracism”: ideas, policies, and practices that counteract racist ideas, policies, and practices; and racism: ideas, policies, and practices that create or maintain disparities between races. A nuance that Kendi brings, is the important addition to the analysis of part of the reason people who appear to be of 100% European descent continue to be in a position to have an undue impact on our lives as Black people, i.e. racism, is that racism creates these disparities by expressing itself in two different forms: segregationist racism and assimilationist racism.

I read these electronically but they are so good I wanted the actual copies. Beginning in Vol 1 and showing how the British further developed the idea and use of “race” in their “planting” of British people in Ireland in the 12th-13th century colonializing process (where we in the U.S. got “plantation”). Allen details a strategy refined in England that creates a positively racialized buffer class that then protects the ruling class from the negatively racialized group at the bottom of the society, which in the above-mentioned case was the Irish. In the U.S., this group would be Black people and other non-White people. This oppression then allows the class oppression of the positively racialized group (British Protestants in this case) and, in Allen’s framework, becomes the way in which the racial oppression of the negatively racialized group intersects with the national oppression of the positively racialized group.

A Strategy For Labor: A Radical Proposal by Andre Gorz (1965)- The idea of the “non-reformist reform” or “structural reform” has helped me see a way to think about projects such that we could shape them as Afro-Socialist even though they are being formed in the middle of capitalist organizations and structures. Gorz wanted to create a middle step for socialism between (1) programs that don’t fundamentally challenge the main ideas of Cedric Robinson called “racial capitalism” and (2) full out armed revolution or waiting for capitalism to fall in on itself. Option (a) is essentially more of the same, a treadmill, and option (b) in the militarized state of the 60’s, let alone today, was not possible. So, Gorz had this idea of creating projects that contained the elements that if they were to be implemented at a grander scale would dramatically shift a society away from capitalism and towards socialism. Strategy for Labor poses all critiques of capitalism that are intended to make it a more socially beneficial society as essentially socialist, which offers us a path to imagine what it might mean to be a socialist in the current moment, although that expansive definition could capture people as socialist who do not want to be defined as such. However, A Strategy for Labor has the limits of European Socialism…

bell hooks is the person I associate with connecting how capital, whiteness and masculinity act in reinforcing ways and I’m getting better at sussing that out…

This is my current reading project. My eldest son, Kufere, gave it to me for Christmas at my request. And boyeeeeee: Long sentences. Long paragraphs. 19th century economics…

Very excited about The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council forming a Learning and Leadership Committee to study issues of equity…

Before U.S. Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, was Betsy DeVos, she was Elisabeth Prince, older sister to Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, the private security (military) company…

As President Obama leaves office, it was a strange walk down memory lane to read Slavoj Zizek's "First As Tragedy, Then As Farce", a 160 page…

So, I like to cook a little bit and after seeing the film Forks over Knives at the behest of my DP and good friend, Chappale Burton, I've been on a vegan diet.

Thanksgiving Day and sickened and angry about the physical, cultural, economic violence being perpetrated by Energy Transfer Partners against the #StandingRock Sioux Tribe and…

In 2012, after the 2nd election of President Obama, I posted he had lost Hill District votes since 2008  and in reviewing Hill District voting data from the Allegheny County Elections Division…

I wrote this piece in response to a NYTimes article which examines a current Supreme Court case which argues Detroit Public Schools are unconstitutional…

Digging this view coming down Wylie Ave. Bomani Howze was the person I knew who really campaigned to connect…

Just met Chef Hassan Davis, owner of Affordable Elegance Catering/Cafe/Bakery who has opened up a pop up cafe…

Writing or thinking about some question on equity recently that involved the need to think about history, the “equality/equity” slide above flashed to my mind…