The Uvalde Negro Trap

         

           The daughter of a friend of mine was stopped and searched for marijuana on her way to or from Garner State Park, the most popular Lone Star camping site. A short time later another friend also en route to Garner had a scary interaction with a state trooper in Leakey (pronounced “lakey”) in Real County (pronounced “re-al”) that borders Uvalde. Some small communities have mala fama for being speed traps, generating municipal revenue from fines for bogus tickets after bogus stops, including the infamous Mustang Ridge outside Austin. Doesn’t seem a far stretch that speed traps have been replaced by weed traps in which small town cops, recognizing that traffic is coming from our fair capital city—which has a reputation for a liberal attitude towards the sacred herb—might decide to push the limits of probable cause in order to make a bust. Or a seizure.

My first call was to Real County Sheriff Nathan Johnson and he pretty much put an end to that speculation. Sheriff Johnson runs a small shop, himself and four deputies, and he said that his primary concern is protecting life and property and the last time he even charged anyone with possession of pot, the individual was arrested for something else and the weed became an add-on. Looking at Sheriff Johnson's training transcript, on file with the State of Texas, he has a certificate in hypnotism—take that for what it’s worth. He said that the only way to know that a vehicle is not from his county is not by looking at the plate from behind but looking instead at the vehicle head on, and close, to see the inspection sticker, which can be difficult to do at a high closing speed like two cars approaching on a farm to market road. Which was not totally convincing because anyone who has ever lived in a small town knows that local cops know which vehicles they pass on the road belong to locals and which do not because they know the vehicles themselves. Be that as it may.

The sheriff seemed like a decent guy, he had used grant money, he said, to equip his deputies with body cameras, something there has been, one presumes, no rush to do in much of small-town Texas. He said that tourism is a big part of Real County’s economy with cabins that rent out along the bucolic Frio River—a body of water that also attracts campers to Garner State Park. 

Although he has a responsibility to enforce the law, Sheriff Johnson would not be a very popular elected official if he started arresting people coming to relax and spend money. During a pandemic. And this was crucial: he said that his seized asset account, which has made law enforcement a lot of money recently, again, especially in small-town Texas, is only about $6000, unchanged over the last few years. Besides that, Real County is literally an outlier, you might say—if you’re going to Garner State Park. Never having been there myself. Sheriff Johnson’s jurisdiction is on the scenic route to Garner State Park from Austin, along U.S. Highway 83 through Fredricksburg and Johnson City, where former President Johnson graduated high school, btw, then Junction and south to Leakey and finally Uvalde County. 

You don’t have to enter the city of Uvalde if you’re going to the park although many visitors do, to buy supplies. Most people going to the park don’t use this long route and, instead, just take I-35 south to San Antonio and U.S. Highway 90 west to Uvalde. Before talking further to the local authorities, about the possibility of a weed trap, it seemed prudent to check police profiling data regarding who is being stopped in that area of the State of Texas.

The Legislature has mandated that reports be submitted every year by sheriffs and police departments. Real County’s numbers were completely uninteresting but the jurisdiction that stopped my friend’s daughter, Uvalde P.D., showed a single incredible statistic. The profiling report released by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, which is custodian of the data, showed that in the years 2019 and 2020, Uvalde police stopped over 11,000 African American drivers total, more than whites or Latinos, in a part of South Texas, hard by the banks of the mighty Rio Grande, that is majority-Latino and where black people are few and far between. 11,188 to be exact. Hmmm. My next call was to Ruben Nolasco, just elected Sheriff of Uvalde County, Texas, by 60 votes. 

First his numbers: Sheriff Nolasco said that his county includes all of Garner State Park and has a population of about 26,000—90 percent are Latino, about 9 percent white and less than 1 percent black. He is especially familiar with the last demographic, he said, because his daughter is married to a black guy and the sheriff himself is Latino in a county where white men have long held sway over their brown brothers and sisters. Although Sheriff Nolasco, who is Republican, did not say that about white men holding sway. Nor did he say that he served as a deputy sheriff before being elected to the top job, but he did—he's from South Texas and he is unaware of any profiling in his jurisdiction and considers it unlikely for a couple of reasons, first being, as mentioned by the Real County sheriff, stopping people who are coming to spend money in your county would not be much liked by local businesspeople. He said that there is a problem on the roads of Uvalde but he described that as “I.A.’s” or illegal aliens who have crossed the border with the help of traffickers.

The sheriff said for example, during our chat, that a chase of a suspected trafficker had just been called off in Uvalde for fear of endangering the public or the people in the vehicle. His counterpart in Real County also mentioned this dynamic and said that state troopers, from the Texas Department of Public Safety, who are normally assigned to the 254 counties across the state, like his own, have been “pushed” to the Rio Grande to deal with the immigrant surge, leaving areas that don’t directly border Mexico understaffed by troopers. Putting pressure on understaffed sheriff offices. Some of Governor Abbott’s complaints about chaos at the border are valid, in other words, although Sheriff Nolasco didn’t say that either, but presumably would have, if asked. “Some people believe,” he told me, without indicating if he is one of some people, “that the I.A.’s are being allowed into Texas to vote for one particular party.” That aside he seemed like a decent guy too, like Sheriff Johnson, and his assertion that there is a lot going on in South Texas right now for law enforcement that does not involve black people seems, you know, credible.

There’s in fact too much going on in South Texas or Southwest Texas, or Proto-West Texas, wherever the fuck Uvalde is, and the idea that law enforcement is taking time out to stop black motorists, by the thousands, on U.S. Highway 90, seems far-fetched but not impossible. This is a Southern state.

Talking to NAACP officials is always helpful for context, if the subject involves Negritude. These guys and girls know the culture and the law, especially policing. Gary Bledsoe, president of the Texas NAACP, said that he had not heard of problems for black motorists in the Garner State Park area but he also recalled for me the case of the San Jacinto County Sheriff, in East Texas, back in the not too distant day, who was arrested by the FBI for stopping motorists on U.S. 59 and scamming them or filing false charges. 

Houston NAACP President James Douglas, who is a law professor, recalled his own experience in an East Texas speed trap where the posted highway speed suddenly changed to a lower residential one and “they give you about thirty yards to slow down.” He had not heard, he said, of any problems in the western part of the state although he noted that I-10, which goes through Houston, parallels U.S. 90 near Uvalde, and is often used by black families going to California to visit relatives. 

Richard Watkins who is a former prison warden from East Texas who also served as president of the NAACP in Huntsville, home of the state prison system, years ago raised a warning about a particular problem in his own Walker County and its pineywoods surroundings that may also be a concern now in the scrubland of Uvalde. The problem, per Warden Watkins, is that a major highway passes through Huntsville, something that speed traps often have in common. A highway is the setting for the crime, not the backwoods cracker-sheriff action you see in movies. He said that in many of the cases of minorities who are illegally pulled over on highways, you never hear about the bad stop because the drivers keep going and do not stay or spend the night to complain in the morning. Cops know that, that's the theory at least. It may be borne out by research as well. “The only hard and fast rule—don’t look at census data as a denominator. The people who drive in an area,” said Professor Geoffrey Alpert, who studies police profiling at the University of South Carolina’s Department of Criminology, “are not the ones who live there, except in small towns.” Which is Uvalde too. A small town.

Richard Watkins, the former prison warden, said that he used to hunt in Uvalde County, near the huge Briscoe Ranch, back in the day, and some of the worst racist rhetoric he has ever heard comes now from that part of the state, from native-born or native-bred Latinos bitching about refugees. The part of bigot was previously played by powerful white men in South Texas and the targets of their abuse were also Latinos. In fact, one of the last great patrónes in Lone Star history was from Uvalde, Dolph Briscoe, among the last Democrats to be governor before the Republican flood, you could call it, nearly half a century ago—except Ann Richards’ brief term in office. Governor Briscoe’s ranch in Uvalde is far far far bigger than Garner State Park, btw. Actually, Uvalde has a pretty piss poor reputation for civil rights, not to be judgmental, due to men like Dolph Briscoe, we won’t go into that here, but mostly due to white oppression & white exploitation. Call it white privilege. 

The park itself is named after Cactus Jack Garner, who started his political career as Uvalde County Judge and rose to be Vice President of the United States under FDR. Cactus Jack was a previous generation's Big Daddy in South Texas, like Dolph Briscoe. The incumbent Big Daddy appears to be a white guy named Bill Mitchell who is Uvalde County Judge and who has held the position since 1987, almost four decades, and just announced his plans to run for reelection in 2022. You couldn't make it up. This time, with Uvalde P.D., it would be Latinos trying to take advantage of the noble black man and noble black woman, however. Which would be hurtful if true. 

My feeling, knowing the police as only an African American male can, studying them from my earliest days of grade school cognition, during both wanted and unwanted interactions—cops, especially small town cops? Stopping black people systematically seems too much like work. Especially for Latinos which is a description of most of Uvalde P.D. Again not to stereotype or anything. Black cops might do the same thing but only if the money was really really really good.

White cops, no, you couldn’t say that because police work can be an extension of white privilege, not to go all Critical Theory on you or anything.

 Latinos—except when dealing with other Latinos, for example people coming across the Rio Grande without papers—are not into brown privilege or whatever, generically-speaking. Usually. Unless there’s something in it for the police department or for the individual officer, like a shakedown of some kind, which is not beyond the realm of possibility in Uvalde or anywhere else. There’s another reason to be careful about accepting the accuracy of a high number of black stops. Dr. Gregory Hudspeth, president of the San Antonio chapter of the NAACP said that it’s prudent first to review the Uvalde data for the possibility of software/data entry errors. He also said that I-10, on which many families—many African American as well as every other kind of family—journey to or from California, as mentioned by the Houston NAACP president, and which also passes through other heavily black communities like New Orleans and Tallahassee: Dr. Hudspeth said, well, “I just take I-10.”

Because taking U.S. 90 out of San Antonio instead of I-10, choosing in other words to pass through Uvalde, it’s a scenic route too, whether you’re going to Cali or to Houston, and not much used by black people. This is going to sound totally racist but actually has grounding in other stats. Not the police profiling kind. According to figures from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, which operates Garner State Park, blacks are the least likely ethnic group to use the campsites, at Garner apparently or anywhere else. You may say, well, U.S. 90 is still a more scenic way to go west, to Cali, but the problem with that theory is that 90 leads to Marfa where, having been there and not seen another black face—and Big Bend National Park which is just as unlikely to be popular with black people as Garner State Park—it’s just not a big attraction to the black peeps, you feel me? The scenic route as defined by white people.

Black people don't drive to Marfa to see the “Marfa Lights.” Black families don't just suddenly wake up on Saturday morning and decide to go camping either, it's a decision that would have to be discussed and voted upon in family councils months if not years in advance. Not the way white or Latino families apparently do, not to stereotype or anything. 

My doubt about Uvalde’s profiling numbers is therefore fundamental—not just doubting that Uvalde P.D. stopped 11,000 black motorists in the last two years but also questioning whether there have even been 11,000 black motorists passing through Uvalde to stop, on their way to or from Marfa or Garner State Park or Big Bend. My view—and, again this may sound totally racist, but only to the uninitiated. My view is that given our history of agricultural labor out-of-doors, and in the heat of day, back in the day, today the average black Texan would much prefer to spend his or her leisure time inside with the AC on. And if we’re going to Cali by car, we’re on I-10 because it’s faster and fuck Marfa and fuck “the Marfa Lights.” That means, coincidentally, giving Uvalde a miss too. 

My friend whose daughter was searched for weed is white, btw, and you know that because if she were black her daughter wouldn't be going camping at Garner. “I can guarantee you that it’s a data entry error,” said Mike Hernandez, who is former Uvalde P.D., presently a Uvalde school cop and was the Democrat who lost to Ruben Nolasco for Uvalde County Sheriff by those 60 votes. Lieutenant Hernandez said there’s a lot of other police action going on in South Texas right now that does not involve stopping black motorists. But it’s hard to ignore the numbers, especially since the Uvalde puercos, given opportunities to disavow the stats, did not.

 

Exile on Lavaca Street

         From my perch on Lavaca Street, across the street from the University of Texas campus, the pandemic is playing out on the sidewalk. There are all these middle-aged black men coming around the corner of my block, from a church and presumably a hot meal. They're wearing backpacks or carrying duffel bags. They don’t look healthy and the number of these gentlemen is growing. This perch or this window is an isolated view of downtown but revealing nonetheless. It has been occupied, by me, in the late afternoon, maybe three days a week for the past ten weeks. Almost exactly since the lockdown began. 

          This is not at all a scientific survey but my guess is that the number of destitute African-American men is growing. No women, or not many, and not to buttress City Hall’s denial that there is a problem, some of these brothers look like they could be small town folks, from Bastrop or even Milam County, somewhere rural. They're walking the big city sidewalk by circumstance not desire unless there is a part of old black East Austin that continued to resist, until recently, the onslaught of white Hipsters. Black people from an older era you might call them, when Afro-Texans had one foot in town and another in the country. A way of life that may have suddenly come to an end with the arrival of COVID-19 but was already disappearing due to gentrification. Anyway, seeing the homeless, it’s a hard decision to know who to give money to, actually. Most of these brothers appear equally needy and are, more or less, the age group of 40 to 65 and black male, a description that includes me. So, like, a white homeless guy asked me for money a couple of days ago. And my answer was no. 

The guy was kind of a jerk really, he got insistent, cracker privlidge, standing in front of my perch, you know how white people can be. He said that everyone he had asked that day for money lied and said they didn’t have any when clearly they did. He said my denial was a lie too which it was. He said that you can tell who has money and who doesn’t, he kind of got into a poor white revolutionary dialectic after that, which was kind of cool actually although he was not. This guy looked like a country boy too, btw, who had fucked up everything he touched in his entire life but it was always somebody else’s fault.

With an attitude too, not to be judgmental on my part. This white boy was maybe from some small-town East Texas pisspot, like the brothers on the sidewalk maybe were too. But the brothers were noble in their demeanor while he was not. Maybe people in pandemic are blowing west, like during the Dust Bowel, onward to Cali like during the Great Depression or some historic shit like that? 

There must be a migration going on because it’s always different guys blowing by, at least on Lavaca Street, here in this bucolic River City. They're mostly black and my age group which is doubly concerning, you know? So, like, regarding charity, my feeling as an African American is that if my budget allows five dollars that day as a direct donation to the poor, or the dispossessed, it’s not going to a white guy from Butt Fucking Texas, B.F.T., the five dollars is going to the black guy or black girl from B.F.T. Call that racist if you will. Because the white guy calling me a liar was born to privilege, you might say, no matter how hard his life may have been since then. White women are my second least likely awardees after white guys, to be honest, although she gets extra points for being a woman because it's harder to be a woman, especially a homeless woman. Most of my giving is to people of color, men as well as women. That's my revolutionary dialectic, actually. But the white homeless guy had a point too. Times have changed. So, like, feeling guilty about what he said, even if he suffered from white privilege—a few days later—just after sitting down on my perch, actually—well, a homeless brother came by, across the street, carrying all his shit, all his worldly goods, or whatever, on a pack on his back. Me running after him and calling out, “Do you need help?” like he was on fire? Which was not cool. And he was startled and turned around and said sure, yeah, and he got $6, all ones, and gave me a smile.

            During the next ten minutes there were like seven or eight more brothers, coming from the direction of the church, and two stragglers, a white lady and a white guy, but the vast majority black men of a certain age. Which was not a good sign, frankly, from my point of view. And it’s the last of these brothers who will be called to your attention now. He was on my side of the sidewalk and moving south towards the river. To set the scene. He looked literally like death incarnate, worn-out and in a non-sustainable state, actually. Like, all you would have to do is close his eyes and he’d be gone. But he was still trucking along, with his shit, moving at a pretty good pace, actually, they all are, like they’re on their way somewhere important, just came to the university for the food. And he smiled and he said hello to me. Whatever’s going on, however hard times are, you have to have reverence for human spirit. 

           But there also need to be consequences, you feel me, not for the guys on the street but for the people who put them there. 

           Someone needs to take responsibility for what has happened and is happening to African-Americans in this city during the pandemic. My favorite candidate is Spencer Cronk and he’s the city manager, actually. Mr. Cronk's pigeons need to come home to roost, you feel me?

He came from Minneapolis, a city recently much in the news and in a bad way, that has a strong-mayor system of government, unlike our own that has a strong city manager. To set the scene again. And since arriving on the scene here in the Live Music Capital of the World, Mr. Cronk has struggled to establish better outcomes for minorities, especially regarding the police and use of violence against the black and brown communities. More recently in the fight against COVID his efforts towards equity have also fallen short and the result is worse healthcare outcomes for black people—especially Latinos, in this enlightened capital city of the Lone Star State. Spencer Cronk has been at City Hall for two years now, which is long enough to own what happens here. 

Yet according to the City Attorney’s office, in that time the city manager has not received a performance evaluation. So, like, it’s interesting that of the two most problematic public officials for black people in Austin, Texas, the two guys most responsible for minority disenfranchisement in River City, although there's competition for that honor—best in minority endangerment, you could call it. Are the police chief and his boss, the city manager. Neither has had a performance evaluation in two years, according to the City Attorney. There's nothing on paper in other words. But it’s likely that, just in the last few weeks, the city manager has actually killed more people of color through inaction and through incompetence, than Police Chief Brian Manley’s troops have shot, actually, in ten years. This is not a new issue by any means. According to the Times, 60% of the victims of Minneapolis police shootings, in the last ten years, a period that includes Spencer Cronk’s three-year tenure in Minneapolis as City Coordinator—as Minneapolis’ chief administrative officer, in other words. 60% were black victims in a municipality that is only 20% black. 

Unless he was deaf and blind Mr. Cronk was aware of bad practices during his time in the Midwest, both the police force’s reputation and the deadly reality. Indeed in an interview at the time of his hiring in Minneapolis, in 2014, describing his duties as city coordinator in Minneapolis, he said, speaking of the city fathers, “They were intentional about that word ‘coordinator’ because they really wanted to allow somebody to work with the different city department heads — police, health, civil rights—to coordinate their efforts.” Police, health and civil rights, those are the three areas he has been least successful in Austin too 

In health care, to continue, regarding the coming of the virus, Spencer Cronk had time that other leaders did not. He saw what was happening on the coasts of the United States at the beginning of the pandemic and did nothing to prepare for an eventuality that he was supposed to know would affect minorities most. Our health is already worse than whites' in this city and nationwide. He's been here two years, in a big, rich, increasingly wired (not weird) metropolis, where the minority population has not received equitable treatment in the past, including health care, schools and infrastructure. To say nothing of the courts and the pigs.

Yet warnings about the lack of COVID testing in poor and minority neighborhoods are unheeded. Warnings that data on differential effects of the pandemic on the poor and minorities in Austin were not tracked or the results were buried. Warnings about especially worse outcomes in black and Latino communities were not provided to the public until relatively recently, after dozens of deaths and thousands of cases. In other words the city manager has a record, whether his performance has been evaluated by the mayor and City Council or not. Spencer Cronk knew in Minneapolis what was really happening with police, just as he knows what's really happening here in public health. And what are the chances he's going to make any more of a difference in Austin than he did in Minneapolis?

         He is used to seeing minorities in a dependent and disadvantaged position, in other words. Whether from police actions, land use rewrites or even in the realm of health care. And he does nothing. He is a white male, this would be my sociological argument, as seen thru a psychosocial lens, who was brought up in circumstances of white male privilege and who lacks empathy for those unlike himself. He also lacks the cognitive ability to serve the poor. Every time those gentleman pass my perch, on Lavaca Street, me reaching into my pocket for a few bills, my anger turns on Mr. Cronk and what he has not done and is not doing.

 

 

 

Talking Black and Sleeping White

              Christine Nix is a criminal justice professor but in another life she was the first black female Texas Ranger. In that position as a member of Company F stationed in Waco—she did a variety of investigations. From old-fashioned murder to political corruption to God-knows-what-else. She also served the State of Texas as a de facto Uncle Tom, not to be judgmental of her or her record. Yet. Accommodation in some way or shape or form—to the white power structure in Texas and elsewhere in these United States—aka, The Man—is a given of everyday life for black people. The question is not if, but how much? No matter how you slice it, Ranger Nix stepped over a proverbial line and became a “Tom”—although Uncle Tom is not actually the proper term for a black woman who allies herself with The Man. Males are Toms—not to be politically correct or anything, but officially and in precise terms of black liberation dogma, not to be dogmatic either. Ranger Nix was a badge-and-gun carrying Aunt Jemima, for the State, up in God’s country, Waco, McLennan County, Texas. 

             During a radio interview with In Black America a few years ago, for example, Ranger Nix claimed that she was never treated with anything but respect by her peers. Please. There are two things to know about that. The Associated Press reported, years before the radio interview, that two white male Rangers were disciplined for calling her a bitch and a nigger and for criticizing her marriage to a white man. If Ranger Nix didn’t know about any of that, she was the worst detective in the world. Second, the two white men in question continued in the Ranger Service, no problema, that's the kind of people the Rangers are. Not to be judgmental again. Ranger Nix said the highest praise another officer had given her was his willingness to go through a door, to serve a warrant, with her because he would know Christine Nix had his back. You can say that again.

           There were also her own efforts to brand herself as a traitor to the race and the overall goal of black liberation, however. She spoke to In Black America about her pride in having attempted, back, years before in Company F, to get a black male suspect sentenced to death, not because he was black but because he was guilty. His color in a racially-challenged Southern court system being, apparently, immaterial to her consideration of his crime. She recalled in the interview that she was unsuccessful in “getting him the needle,” as Ranger Nix so quaintly put it. 

             It was in Ranger Nix's best interests after her service to the State of Texas to protect the institution of the Texas Rangers, who have traditionally been the Lone Star race police, not just hunters and killers of Bonnie and Clyde but also of niggers and Mexicans. 

            The Rangers were the ones who did the State of Texas’s killing, especially of Native Americans, not that that’s an issue here. The Rangers are, actually, the North American continent’s oldest and most racially-challenged police agency, Christine Nix served 10 years among the same group of almost exclusively white men that used to shoot across the border at Mexican civilians just for the hell of it and has, rhetorically-speaking, killed almost as many black people as fried food. Nix’s identity as a Texas Ranger—the first black female, lest we forget—became more important to who she is today than her identity as a black woman in the South. Ditto the first black male Ranger who also claimed that he never experienced any racial animus in the agency and who, critically, later worked as a private investigator in Dallas, in his post-Ranger career, trading heavily on his identity as an elite detective and cowboy, not no ordinary nigger. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. 

           

             More recently there is David Armstrong—with Company B, outside Dallas. Company D is the most sketchy of the Ranger units, by the way. Each Ranger Company stationed across the state has its own personality, its own profile so to speak, its own rap sheet also. Company B in Garland, these were the guys—operating out of Garland then as today—running Jack Ruby, as a snitch, before the Kennedy assassination, and are considered more diabolical even than the guys in Headquarters Company of the Texas Rangers that covers Austin and keeps a protective eye on the Legislature and Governor. Anyway, Sergeant Armstrong of Company B is called in after controversial shootings of black people by police agencies, across the state, as an internal affairs service the Rangers provide to local law enforcement. As if David Armstrong’s presence at the scene assures a fair investigation from the State of Texas which it most certainly does not. 

            “I don’t believe that [the shooting] was reckless or criminally negligent,” Ranger Armstrong, following in Christine Nix's footsteps as the Rangers's house nigger, famously testified last year at the trial of white Dallas Police Officer Amber Guyger. Who shot dead an African-American man in his own home after she entered the wrong apartment and was surprised to find a Negro living there. Remember now? “Based on the totality of the investigation and the circumstances and facts,” Ranger Armstrong explained to the court, hoping to get Amber Guyger a walk. In other words, not to be rude but to be descriptive, he’s a Tom—because the State of Texas keeps Toms on the payroll, often wearing Ranger’s stars—in case of emergency. In the historical perspective, then, who is an Uncle Tom and who is not is particularly pertinent today, in these times of open revolt, after the murder of George Floyd. There is the officially designated other team, in this case The White Man and his mate, the recently-identified Karen, who has roamed amongst us unidentified lo these many years. But most to be feared are our own nominal allies, the race traitors who may look exactly like us but are pushing The Man's Agenda. Not to go all Critical Theory on you.

           These Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas undermine positive change because it’s in their best personal interests to do so, not because it's the right thing to do. As one might explain as part of a critical race dialectic. As a practical matter these Uncle Toms can be just as dangerous as the damn Klan. Race traitors—Fifth Columnists, as they were called in the Spanish Civil War, are the Tio Tacos and Jemimas today. You can also say banana, if you are of a mind to, yellow on the outside & white on the inside, don’t forget the damn bananas, that's my view. In this most recent conflict, terminology is as important as ideology. 

         Uncle Tom has been known by a number of names throughout post-Civil War history, including the unisex handkerchief head which is not much used today but is unusually descriptive. One assumes that the first Toms were descended from house niggers during actual slavery but there's no need to go there. House nigger technically—in contemporary revolutionary usage, in my modest view as a liberated black man—describes a different dynamic altogether. The term Tom arose after Emancipation and can be used by the uninitiated for a unisex handkerchief head-like condemnation. We are not picky as a race. There’s also oreo—like the cookie but not capitalized, please. Whose usage relates to the popular cookie’s famous structure—black on the outside and white on the inside? But you already knew that.

        Minority police officers like Ranger Nix and Ranger Armstrong are particularly prone to becoming Toms, that seems clear. That’s a premise of mine actually, that black cops easily rationalize their betrayal—because they don’t think they’re sleeping with the enemy, “sleeping white” in the vernacular, they think they’re sleeping blue, you feel me? We digress. Some of these pigs have transformed their primary identity as black men and black women into primarily being cops, you know? One also hears the more colloquial “pig,” a term that it is my thesis is not really pejorative or not nearly pejorative enough. With ideology and terminology accounted for, we can now turn to what, it also seems clear, is actually the most salient factor in race betrayal today—sex—love and marriage. First, we must dispose of perhaps the oldest and most racist trope in American history, that of the “pussyhound” black male, obsessed with bedding white women. We are occupied with bedding white women, that's true, but only for revolutionary reasons, clearly. Not merely to bust the proverbial nut, so to speak, but instead in aid of genuine revolutionary purpose. 

        

           The truth can now be told. Through this more accurate lens, heroic African-American men have risked their lives to take down white chicks as well as white men. As part of a critical race dialectic. 

   

           These brothers can now be celebrated for their willingness to attack The Man—who controls the police, the army and the political process, who has most of the money and all of the Ivy League and American academia at his command. To attack the man on the only front where white guys have been vulnerable, for the longest time—in the boudoir. Instead of being Uncle Toms, bowing before the superiority of white pussy—these so-called Sixty Minute Men have been called “unfaithful” or faithless by their own fine black women. Really?

           Only now can the African-American player be recognized by history for what he has done to white women in bed—endowed with a big dick and revolutionary purpose. 60 Minute Men have managed successfully to alienate white female affections from white men, denying The Man a chance to spread his seed. This heightened sexual response to white women, much maligned even by our own sisters—has never been about mere sexual gratification. Perish the fucking thought, you know? Instead it can now be revealed to be part of a larger effort to bind white DNA and deny procreative resources to Caucasian men. That is the ideological rationale in the mind of the liberated black male during a booty call with a white chick, married or unmarried, it’s like a reverse boycott and basically involves thrusting hips. Far from being Uncle Toms—talking black and sleeping white in the revolutionary vernacular—African-American men have actually used BBC to strike a blow for equality. 

              

            This leads, however, in terms of revolutionary orthodoxy and in the interests of gender equality, to an examination of what appears to be a growing tendency of black women to partner with white men. Like the aforementioned Ranger Nix of Company F. Are these sisters merely Aunt Jemimas? Are they race traitors too, just as so many faithless brothers have been accused?

        In the case of mixed couples in which the woman is black a revolutionary lens can be applied that allows us to identify the unfaithful, such as they are, just as women have said of black men, not to repeat myself. Not to say the word hypocrisy. Those who are more interested in achieving success by marrying it than in the progress of the black peeps, through The Struggle, you feel me? Not to lay a guilt trip on anyone but Toms and Jemimas must be identified and opprobrium heaped. What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose. The best example is taken from today’s headlines. Of the three black women who were seen as primary candidates for Vice President Joe Biden’s running mate, to be elected the next Vice President of the United States, none of the three chose in her personal life to pair with a black man. Which requires an examination of ideology, in the black liberation context, just as African-American men have undergone examination in the past for hitting all that white booty. 

           Would Barack Obama have been the Barack Obama we know if his wife was not Michelle Obama and instead a white chick? My premise is no. But Barack Obama belongs to a prior generation, though he is still a young man he’s kind of Old School, really, in this respect, what worked with him may not work now. Senator Kamala Harris and former National Security Advisor Susan Rice both married white men. Nothing in the professional history of the good Dr. Rice, whose ancestry is Caribbean, like Harris's—not North American slave descendants like Dr. King or Malcolm X. Yet no evidence leads to an accusation of race betrayal. 

             In the case of Senator Harris her history as a prosecutor combined with her choice for the marriage bed might lead to further scrutiny, come the revolution. Pairing with Caucasians is not a single all-powerful consideration in black revolutionary ideology but must be viewed in a wider context, through various racial lenses. Sometimes it takes a cracker, like the white male Rangers who criticized Ranger Nix, to point it out. Biology also plays a part. 

             While noble black men have been willing to risk the threats of white fathers, and even white husbands, in order to bind DNA from multiple white women—black chicks are often choosing one attractive white male candidate, to marry, and thus deny one or more Karens access to potential breeding stock. As seen through a critical race dialectic. Whether intended or not. Whether this stratagem is in the best interests of civil rights remains to be seen. Which brings us back to the noble black man. Among the top of the ticket candidates, there is Kanye West, who is also married to a Caucasian but has publicly expressed regret for his choice of a white wife. He has admitted ideological error which is the first step towards political rehabilitation, as we learned from Chairman Mao. The assumption that Kanye is ill does not mean he doesn't feel used by the capitalist corporation, Kardashian Inc. Nor can he be accused of talking black and sleeping white, which might be said, wrongly, of Senator Harris. In San Francisco, where she was district attorney, Kamala's rep was that she never met a black man she didn't want to send to prison. But that was before she married a white guy. The conservative Kanye is in fact talking white and sleeping white too. 

            Of the two greatest race traitors in American history, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, neither was talking black and sleeping white that we know. But the enormity of their crimes (General Powell for buying false intelligence and Secretary Rice for selling it) led to the deaths of tens of thousands of colored people and eclipsed anything except slavery that ordinary Toms have done here in the USA. It’s been policing however that has offered some of the most illustrative accusations of exploitation of people of color, by the pigs, like Ranger Nix, in exchange for advancement. But “talking black and sleeping white” is certainly not only a law and order phenomenon, or a recent one, in historical terms. In summary while the revolution must be a school of unfettered thought, as Fidel Castro told us, it cannot be a school of unfettered action. There must be consequences. Cancel culture is a good thing in other words. Because one has to take responsibility for one’s shit and keep one’s shit clean and aboveboard, or one might get cancelled tomorrow, if you’ve behaved as a counter-revolutionary or a racist running dog, to paraphrase Mao, or a Uncle Tom or Aunt Jemima or Tio Taco to quote everybody else. Self-criticism is always called for. Why did you sell out and what did you get out of it are legitimate questions, in the correct dialectic. What we’ve seen the last few months on America's streets, aka BLM protest, is just the warmup for what must come, if viewed through a revolutionary lens.

            Come the revolution—if the revolution comes—there must be revolutionary justice. Cancel Culture on steroids, you could say. Trials and sentences, perhaps time to spend in re-education in the countryside a la the Cultural Revolution or in Siberia a la Joe Stalin. You're not cancelling people for what they've done, you're outing them to make sure they don't do it again. Making sure that everyone knows they are responsible for their own shit, not to repeat myself. "Talking black and sleeping white"—should a defendant face such a serious charge before a revolutionary tribunal—we will allow what lawyers call an affirmative defense, a possible out. Those who are suspected of infidelity to the race can still claim radical purpose for sleeping with the enemy.