Rootsie

By Amitabh Pal
October 2005  The Progressive  http://progressive.org/?q=mag_intv1005

Randall Robinson is a disillusioned man. So much so that he decided to leave the United States in 2001 and settle down in St. Kitts, where his wife is from. He has written a book, Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land, explaining the reasons for his relocation. Robinson hasn’t completely quit the United States, though. He still maintains a home in Virginia and comes back often for visits.

A lifelong activist, Robinson is best known as the founder of TransAfrica Forum, an organization he established in 1977 to push U.S. policy toward Africa and the Caribbean in a more progressive direction. He has also been in the forefront of the reparations debate, having written The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks.

Robinson was born in 1941 in segregated Richmond, Virginia. His father was a schoolteacher and coach. After dropping out of college for a brief stint in the army, Robinson graduated from Virginia Union University and then got accepted into Harvard Law School. When he finished, he went to Africa to support the liberation movements there. Upon returning, he worked for the next few years as a legal aid lawyer and community organizer in Boston. In September 1977, Robinson launched TransAfrica in Washington, D.C. Through his organization, Robinson lobbied against the white regime in South Africa and sought to end U.S. support for dictatorial governments elsewhere in Africa and the Caribbean. Among his actions: Robinson organized a sit-in of the South African embassy, went on a hunger strike to urge U.S. intervention to restore democracy in Haiti, and dumped a ton of bananas on the steps of the U.S. trade representative’s office to protest U.S. trade policy toward the Caribbean. Robinson finally announced his retirement from TransAfrica in December 2001.

I met Robinson in February at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, where he had come to participate in a conference on the role of the religious leadership in the African American community. We sat down at the hotel café and spoke for more than an hour.

Question: Why did you decide to leave the United States?

Randall Robinson: I was really worn down by an American society that is racist, smugly blind to it, and hugely self-satisfied. I wanted to live in a place where that wasn’t always a distorting weight. Black people in America have to, for their own protection, develop a defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of it. When you sustain that kind of affront, and sustain it and sustain it and sustain it, something happens to you. You try to steer a course in American society that’s not self-destructive. But America is a country that inflicts injury. It does not like to see anything that comes in response, and accuses one of anger as if it were an unnatural response. For anyone who is not white in America, the affronts are virtually across the board.

When we lived here, we accommodated ourselves to the most extraordinary things. I just didn’t think that was the way to live. I wanted to be in another place.

We also have a daughter who was eleven at the time. We wanted her to have a normal, fun adolescence, and it was just undoable. When we lived here and went to a shopping center or someplace, we’d tell our daughter, do not get out of our line of sight. Now she’s in a place where she can walk around at night and we don’t even have to think about that sort of thing.

I got a chance to be in a society where the barriers between classes—social and economic—are not insuperable, where money is not everything all the time. Americans have been manipulated into a space by those who profit from the arrangements of that system. People feel a conscious disease—a dis-ease or an unease—but I don’t think they know what causes it. We’ve been taught in America that big is best. That’s why people have to believe that they must live in the greatest country in the world, which is absolutely idiotic.

Q: Would you offer similar advice to progressives who feel beleaguered?

Robinson: A good many white Americans are leaving the country, too, moving to Canada. My book provoked a lot of mail, but it is the first time I have written a book where at least half the mail came from white Americans. So while the parts about race may not have resonated with them, the diagnosis of the culture did. Something is very, very wrong with American culture. The signs are everywhere. I think the country is in almost terminal descent. The business class is combined with the evangelicals. And I think the evangelicals want to provoke an immense global disaster to precipitate the second coming of Christ. So they are very happy about what we’re doing to Iraq—and the menace we present now for Syria and for Iran—because they think that the apocalypse is an important thing to get into so that they can see vindicated their most literal interpretation of the Bible.

Q: What do you make of the Iraq War and occupation?

Robinson: This enterprise in Iraq is coming a-cropper. This is an unwinnable situation. I don’t know of any situation except the Brits in Malaya—when they were fighting an insurgency that had no local support—no other event of an insurgency in the twentieth century that was suppressed. You cannot do it. They have learned to fight the giants, and they do it with a self-belief that is more important than one’s life. I don’t think this country was prepared for that because Americans don’t bother to notice anybody else in the world. It’s a part of this kind of arrogance that I was talking about, and it will cost us. Bush has done more to create passions for what they call terror than any other Administration in this nation’s history. I get rather afraid when the most powerful man in the world talks to, and gets answers back from, God.

At the same time, I think the business community knows that half the world’s oil reserves are gone. All the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and now there’s the scramble for what remains, and they are willing to do anything to take—as Henry Kissinger called it once—our oil. What they don’t talk about publicly is how they are prepared to use up lives of white and black poor to realize these ambitions. We are up against an anti-democratic foe that is prepared to do anything to preserve its position of avaricious privilege. I am not hopeful that anything could happen one way or the other without a good deal of tumult. And I’m aware that because America is so powerful—with its tentacles reaching out to the world—one doesn’t escape it by leaving. This is the most dangerous and disturbing time in my life.

Q: More than during Reagan’s or Nixon’s time?

Robinson: Those were Republicans. This is a different animal. Reagan was conservative, but he didn’t approach global management with an unbending religious zeal. Fear the zealots. Survival is at stake.

In an interior way, I am not as bleak as I sound. I’m a fairly happy human being. But am I in the short term optimistic? No. I search for reasons to be, and I’d be interested in you telling me what some might be, but I haven’t found anything in the short term. So I’m sorry, but I’m just not hopeful. And then there’s the collaboration or the accommodation of prominent blacks like Dorothy Haight and Andrew Young who stood up for Condoleezza Rice. One asks the question: Well, doesn’t one have to be something more than black to elicit your support?

Q: What’s your assessment of Rice and Powell?

Robinson: I think that they’re both dangerous people. What they did in Haiti is a good measure of it. They destroyed a democracy. They squelched loans that had been approved by the Inter-American Development Bank. They did everything behind the scenes, including arming the thugs that came to overrun the country. They’re frauds, every one of them. But Powell labored relatively more successfully under the guise of charm.

Q: You personally know Aristide. In fact, you accompanied him in his exile from the Central African Republic to Jamaica. Has that compromised your ability to objectively assess his record?

Robinson: I don’t think so. I’ve always thought I had pretty good instincts for people. There is a short list of people I’ve worked with over my career with whom I’ve not been able to distinguish easily between the public persona and the real private person. [Former Jamaican Prime Minister] Michael Manley was one case of a man that I had an enormous personal high regard for. I thought he was of impeccable integrity. Aristide is another. I don’t know many people I can say that about.

And I’ve never had any trouble opposing people I’ve been close to. I’ve never worried about offending or bothering people I feel strongly about. I’ve opposed black regimes and white regimes, leftist regimes and rightist regimes. I’m close to Aristide because I have respect for him, but all that is beside the point. There’s only one point that counts: Democracy requires that if you who don’t like the outcome of elections you have to tolerate it and then pursue your interest the next time around. Aristide said simply that we must learn in this nascent democracy to move from election to election. It was as simple as that. These people invaded and threw out 7,000 elected officials, and replaced them with [Gérard] Latortue, who had been all this time in Florida. A woefully unqualified fellow. I’m not suggesting that Aristide didn’t make mistakes. But he was put in a place by the United States where it was impossible for him to succeed. I don’t know of any situation where you’re going to have an officeholder in a country of eight million people who’s cut off at the knees by the most powerful force in this world and who can still make it fly.

Q: So you don’t buy the criticism that the 2000 elections in Haiti weren’t completely free and fair.

Robinson: There were only, I think, four or five disputed elections out of thousands, and Aristide’s party was willing to throw those out. It was a pretext. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was, the Bush people didn’t like him, and they never liked him. They didn’t like him because they don’t like democracy. They like you to have an election, but they like you to elect the people they want you to elect.

Q: Moving on to the subject you’ve been most closely associated with in the last few years: reparations for slavery. Why do you think that’s necessary?

Robinson: Let me give you some conditions that don’t get talked about. The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. The country with one-twentieth of the world’s population has one-fourth of those in prison. One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery. The whole future of America’s black community is at risk. One out of every three young black men in Washington, D.C., is under one arm or the other of the criminal justice system. These are the continuing consequences of slavery.

We have sustained so much psychic damage and so much loss of memory. Every people, in order to remain healthy and strong, has to have a grasp of its foundation story. Culture is a chrysalis—it is protective, it takes care of you. That’s what cultures are for. You cannot rob a people of language, culture, mother, father, the value of their labor—all of that—without doing vast damage to those people. People need their history like they need air and food. You deprive them of that for 246 years and follow that by 100 years of de jure discrimination, and then you say with the Voting Rights Act: It’s over, you just go take care of yourself!

Average people do not survive that. You plant twenty coconut trees over here, and twenty coconut trees over there, and you water this batch and don’t water that batch. Of the batch you water, nineteen will survive and one will die. Of the batch you don’t water, nineteen will die and one will survive. And then we have somebody like George Bush. I can’t think of a more mediocre human talent than George Bush. He obviously is a product of family advantage, and he’s the worst American President of all time.

Anyway, in my arguments for reparations, I’m not talking about writing checks to people. The word reparations means to repair. We’ve opened this gap in society between the two races. Whites have more than eleven times the net worth or wealth of African Americans. They make greater salaries. Our unemployment rate is twice theirs. You look at the prison system and who that’s chewing up. Now we’ve got the advent of AIDS. Fifty-four percent of new infections are inAfrican Americans. Many infected men are coming out of prison and infecting their women. So when I talk about reparations, I say there has to be a material component. It has to have a component of education that is compensatory. It has to have a component of economic development that’s compensatory. But in the last analysis the greater damage is here [points to his head]. So I’m not really talking about money. And I’m not really talking about the concerns of people who say, “I didn’t benefit from slavery.” Nobody said you did.

It’s important for white America to be able to face up. Far beyond its relations with the black community, it is important for white Americans. It’s important in helping us in our approaches to the rest of the world, and in being sensitive to Islam, and to look at the way other cultures handle their management of themselves, and to look at it with respect, with the possibility that you even might learn something. We’ve got a country that never takes any responsibility for anything. It forgets its role and makes everybody else forget what happened, too. And that it is not just dangerous for the victim, but also for the perpetrator.

Q: What was the formative experience that made you decide to become an activist?

Robinson: Segregation, surely. I never met a white person till I was a grown man. I never went to school with a white till I was twenty-six years old, at Harvard Law School. The insult of segregation was searing and unforgettable. It has left a great scar, and will be with me for the rest of my life. It causes you in terror to form reflexes of protection. It’s unnatural but necessary. So I decided a long time ago to join the social justice movement. It was salvaging. We all have to die, and I preferred to have just one death. It seems to me that to suffer insult without response is to die many deaths.

Q: Why did you turn down an honorary degree at Georgetown in the summer of 2003?

Robinson: Well, I knew the moment I saw that George Tenet had been given a similar honor just the day before that I couldn’t accept an honorary degree from Georgetown. Rejecting it caused me a great degree of discomfort. First, because the people who fought for Georgetown to confer the degree on me were occasioned a certain amount of discomfort by me. But I knew just no other way out. So I explained my situation to the dean. And if they were annoyed, they masked that. I think they understood why I took that position. I wouldn’t have come that far to receive an honorary degree if I didn’t think that it wasn’t an important thing. So I was vastly disappointed to read about Tenet. But from that point onward, the degree meant absolutely nothing.

Q: How involved are you with the day-to-day running of TransAfrica?

Robinson: Not at all. Twenty-five years. I thought it was time. I think people involved with institutions find it harder to know the time to go than the time to come. I thought it was time for me to go. I wanted to do other things. I wanted to write and think. Activism is a displacing kind of passion.

reprinted from:  http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=43&ItemID=8923
by Marie-Agnès Combesque  Le Monde diplomatique

**More than 100 inmates in high-security prisons in the United States demand the right to be treated as political prisoners, since they were jailed for acts related to anti-government activism.**
 
MUMIA Abu Jamal has been in a Pennsylvania prison since 3 July 1982 awaiting execution by lethal injection, cut off from the world of the living by a plexiglas screen (1). He is as good as dead to those who shut him up for the murder of a policeman. Yet Abu Jamal is a dead man who moves, fights and tells his visitors: "I am a political prisoner." Of all the prisoners on death row (2), he is the only one to claim that status.
 
Among the million and a half inmates of United States high-security prisons (3), there are more than a hundred who, like Abu Jamal, demand the right to be treated as political prisoners, if not prisoners of war. They are former activists of the Black Panther party (BPP), the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and the American Indian Movement (AIM), as well as Puerto Rican independence supporters and members of the white, radical left Weather Underground. Almost all have in common an initial involvement in the struggle against the Vietnam war in the mid-1960s. Opposition to that war, to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King in 1968, radicalised a generation of activists. But, like other western democracies, the US is not prepared to grant them the status of political prisoner or prisoner of war as defined in the Geneva Convention (4).
 
Geronimo Pratt (BPP) and Leonard Peltier (AIM) say they are combatants from minority peoples fighting a colonial regime for their right to self-determination. For the US to recognise that status would be to accept that their struggle is justified. This is unthinkable since all of them have been sentenced for crimes punishable under common law: murder, armed robbery or terrorist attacks. Police, prosecuting attorneys, judges and journalists have always described them as terrorists and criminals, and the authorities have used most means possible against them, from anti-mafia legislation to covert operations that Congress has since condemned as a threat to democracy (5).
 
The first victims of this range of repression were the Black Panthers, who are the largest group of political prisoners (around 50 of them). Their party, the BPP, was founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966 by two law students, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Partly inspired by the Marxist rhetoric of Malcolm X, the BPP sought to organise ghettos on the basis of a 10-point programme of political and social demands, under which it claimed the right of self-defence.
 
It saw itself as a revolutionary avant-garde with objectives that went beyond freeing blacks from repression: "In our view it is a class struggle between the massive proletarian working class and the small minority ruling class. Working class people of all colours must unite against the exploitative, oppressive ruling class . . . we believe our fight is a class struggle not a race struggle" (6).
 
The Panthers organised tenants' associations, canteens for ghetto children and the distribution of free clothing. They enlisted the most motivated and impressed others. While the BPP probably never had more than 5,000 active members from 1967 to 1971, its aura was much greater than its numerical strength in the disinherited inner cities of the US.
 
By the summer of 1967 the FBI was alarmed. It decided to concentrate its Cointelpro counter-intelligence programme (7) on the black nationalist movements, and declared: "The aim is to track, expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralise the activities of black nationalist organisations that preach hatred" (8). With the diligent assistance of local police forces, these instructions were carried out to the letter.
 
In an interview given to the New York Times on 8 September 1968, J Edgar Hoover described the BPP as "the real long-range threat to American society".
 
The next three years were devastating for the Black Panthers. Through Cointelpro, the FBI used its undercover methods (covert observation and tailing, phone tapping, anonymous letters, double agents), and also murder. In 1970, 38 activists were killed in raids by local police forces on BPP offices. On 4 December 1969 Fred Hampton, leader of the Black Panthers in Chicago, was shot dead in his bed. His bodyguard, William O'Neal (who subsequently committed suicide), had been recruited by the FBI two years earlier: he provided the police with the plan of the apartment, enabling them to hit the right target (9).
 
A few months later Geronimo Pratt, one of the most prominent members of the BPP in Los Angeles, was arrested for the murder of a white woman, committed in a Los Angeles suburb at a time when -- according to the testimony of many witnesses, confirmed by reports from infiltrated FBI agents -- he was attending a BPP meeting in Oakland. During the trial, the relevant files mysteriously disappeared. Pratt was sentenced to life imprisonment. He is still in gaol, although the representatives of the Californian judicial system all agree he was framed.
 
The quarrels and dissention fomented by Cointelpro within the BPP exacerbated internal differences arising from political confrontation between the party's "minister of defence", Huey Newton, and its "minister of information", Eldridge Cleaver, who ran the international section from exile in Algiers (10). At the end of 1970 black activists were divided among themselves and had less support from the white liberal left, which also suffered attacks from Cointelpro. They took to murdering each other.
 
At that point some of Cleaver's supporters founded the clandestine Black Liberation Army (BLA). By 1971 the BPP had been reduced by repression and its audience was shrinking fast. Its leaders decided to confine activities to their home base in Oakland and to participate in normal politics by supporting Democratic candidates in local elections. The most experienced BPP radical activists were either in exile or in prison. They were joined there by soldiers of the BLA, who were subjected to a new counter-intelligence operation codenamed Newkill (11), devised in the White House by President Richard Nixon, the Attorney General John Mitchell and Hoover, the irremovable director of the FBI. Anthony Jalil Bottom, Albert Nuh Washington and Herman Bell, all still serving life sentences in New York State high-security penitentiaries, were victims of that operation.
 
There was a second wave of repression at the beginning of the 1980s. Black nationalist activists were targeted again, as well as Puerto Rican independence supporters and white radicals. In 1981 BLA activists and white radicals from Weather Underground (12) attacked a Brinks armoured car in New York State to finance their struggle. The unsuccessful hold-up ended in a gunfight in which three police officers died. Afterwards a ferocious counter-intelligence operation led to the arrest of dozens of underground and public activists, some of whom were tried under the Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organisations Act (Rico) passed by Congress in 1970.
 
The Rico Act had been designed to combat organised crime. It gave public prosecutors the means to take action against members of criminal gangs accused of participating in at least two punishable acts within a given period, and provided for automatic sentences of 20 years' imprisonment. Under the Reagan administration, it was used several times against members of political organisations, notably after the Brinks attack. As a result, Sekou Odinga (BLA), David Gilbert (ex-SDS) and Marilyn Buck (ex-SDS-BLA) are serving extravagant prison terms with no possibility of parole: 80 years for Buck, 75 for Gilbert, and 45 for Odinga.
 
Besides the 20 years stipulated in the Rico Act, those involved in helping Assata Shakur to escape in 1979 (13) received even longer sentences. By comparison, an anti-abortion activist convicted in 1986 of a dozen bomb attacks on clinics was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment and released on parole after serving less than four years (14).
 
So black nationalist movements have borne the brunt of repression for more than 25 years, and continue to suffer from it. Cointelpro was officially ended in 1971 when its existence was discovered by students who had broken into an FBI office (15), but its effects are still felt. Hoover's orders of 25 March 1968 were carried out in full. Cointelpro had been instructed to "prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups . . . prevent the rise of a `messiah' who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement . . . The negro youth and moderate must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries."
 
A note, dated 3 April 1968, clarified the alternatives: "Is it not better to be a sports hero, a well-paid professional athlete or entertainer, a regularly paid white- or blue- collar worker . . . than a negro who may have got even with the establishment . . . and gained for him and all his people the hatred and distrust of the whites for years to come?"
 
Notes
 
(1) On 1 October 1990 the Supreme Court refused to review his sentence. On 1 June 1995 the governor of Pennsylvania signed the execution order for Mumia Abu Jamal.
 
(2) On 1 January 2005 there were 3,355 people under sentence of death in US prisons. California heads the list with 639, followed by Texas with 447, Florida 382 and Pennsylvania 231. Texas is way ahead when it comes to executions. After the election in the State of New York of a Republican governor, George Pataki, the state has just restored the death penalty, now in force in 38 out of 50 states.
 
(3) In June 2004 there were more than 2.1 million people in US federal, state or local prisons.
 
(4) Geneva Convention relative to the treatment of prisoners of war, adopted on 12 August 1949. Resolution 3103 of the UN general assembly.
 
(5) US Senate, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, US Government Printing Office, Washington, 1976 (known as the Church Report). Geronimo Pratt was released on 29 May 1997 after 27 years in gaol.
 
(6) Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: the Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P Newton, Hutchinson, London, 1970.
 
(7) From "counter intelligence program", set up in 1956 by Hoover (FBI director 1924-72) to monitor the activities of members and sympathisers of the US Communist party.
 
(8) Memo from director, FBI, 4 March 1968, "re: Counter Intelligence Program -- Black Nationalist Hate Groups -- Racial Intelligence (100-448006)".
 
(9) See Clayborne Carson et al, The Eyes on the Prize: Civil Rights Reader, Penguin Books, New York, 1991. See also the website of the documentary film based on this book (and various other resources), recently uncovered by veterans of the civil right movement and copyright activists. Copyright restrictions in regard to music and video clips used in the movie prevented it from being screened or released on video.
 
(10) Huey Newton was shot by a drug dealer in 1989. After Cleaver's return from Algiers, he joined the Moon sect, supported Reagan, and frequented Christian fundamentalist circles. On his revolutionary period, see William Klein's film Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther (1969).
 
(11) From the words "New York killings".
 
(12) The Weather Underground Organisation, also known as the Weathermen or Weatherpeople, was a splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that broke away at the 9th national convention of the SDS in Chicago in 1969. It advocated armed struggle and went underground. Among the leaders were Bernadine Dohrn, who remained in hiding until the early 1980s, and Kathy Boudin, who was released on 17 September 2003 after more than 20 years in gaol.
 
(13) Assata Shakur, BPP/BLA, was arrested on 2 May 1973 in New Jersey after a gunfight with the police and kept in preventive detention until her escape in 1979. She has since been living in Cuba as a refugee.
 
(14) Special international tribunal on the violation of human rights of political prisoners and prisoners of war in US prisons and jails, December 1990, Hunter College New York.
 
(15) On 8 March 1971 students from Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and carried off all the files. Some of the contents, concerning Cointelpro, were published in the campus newspaper, Phoenix, on 2 April 1971.
 
Translated by Barry Smerin