The name is Feuilleton Jones. It’s of French origin. Like New Orleans. Like Le Roi. It’s of black origin, like Jenkins and Jefferson. Yeah, my mama named me funny. Leastwise I don’t look funny. What’s your excuse? Don’t talk about my mama.
The name is Feuilleton Jones. It’s of French origin. Like New Orleans. Like Le Roi. It’s of black origin, like Jenkins and Jefferson. Yeah, my mama named me funny. Leastwise I don’t look funny. What’s your excuse? Don’t talk about my mama.
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It seems to me that Mexican immigrant workers like these in Houston, who dared to block the streets in front of the fanciest mall in the city (nearby is the posh River Oaks neighborhood, home of the late Ken Lay), are quite a significant source of struggle in the US recently. This Houston strike is an extension of the Justice for Janitors struggles, like the success in LA/Long Beach in 1999. Then there was the 2002-2003 supermarket strike in southern California, where the grocery workers were significantly (though not majority) Latino as well. And who can forget this spring’s national Day Without a Mexican, with the one-day near-general strike in meatpacking, hospitality, schools, etc? Perhaps it is some of the fighting spirit of the teacher’s union and popular assembly in Oaxaca, and the summer demonstrations for democratic rights violated in the election, and I would bet that there is some
such tradition in play, but whatever the source, it shows rapidly rising confidence on the part of these people.
I used to live in Houston. In fact, I lived there from 1982 to 1992, and in 1983, I lived in north Houston, where all the Mexicans stayed. We lived there so long that I even learned a little bit of Spanish. But later on, as I grew up, we moved away, and I only saw Mexicans at a distance, like the fellas in the backs of pickup trucks going to work construction. Like the guys who I used to see at the corner-convenience-store and Home Depot shape-ups every morning on the way to school. They didn’t strike me as particularly militant. Nor did the women I would see on the bus every day in 1995, me on my way to a job I really needed a car to get to, and them going quietly to the rich white neighborhoods to cook and clean during the day. Besides that, I don’t think I ever saw anyone handcuffing themselves across the streets in Houston, ever. But today…
The transition began sometime after civil rights, but by the 80s, in Houston, at least, Mexicans had almost completely replaced blacks in this sort of low-wage service job, like housekeeping, janitorial services, country club staff, etc., etc. “Intimate services.” So, for at least 20-odd years, this segment of the working class in the South/Southwest has been developing what it takes to produce actions like this. In one of the most hostile environments at that.
The SEIU has other interests than those of the workers, and I suspect that the broader political orientation of these heavily Mexican immigrant workers down in the South is still passionately contested. By the church and the Republican Party, for instance, or by middle class leaders of various sorts, etc. This could, for instance, turn into some sort of bolstered machine politics, or some other sort of “integration strategy.” But now, it looks like this segment of the US working class is ready to swing a big brown foot up the ass of the capitalist class. And I like that, holmes. I like that.
Nigger, please.
Eleven days when two Toms “ran our country” is the marker of a great new day? The “crowning moment in our history”? That niggers weren’t signing their hosannas means it’s time for the “ascended blacks” to cut the niggers loose?
I agree we have a nigger problem, and you’re part of it. That nigger problem is the result of long and well-studied efforts at oppression, lots of which has been internalized by craven, cringing, self-hating, mind-twisted niggers like yourself running around trying to sell this bullshit to white people. I can go down a long list of niggers like you, and their common denominator is precisely their lack of what you call accomplishment. You all never seem to last or contribute anything meaningful over the long term. Not even anything as meaningful or helpful as the cheapest, most exploitative of the civil rights relics. (Like you, I’m thinking of Al Sharpton here, always ready to back the Dems in a tight spot where race is concerned. But at least he’s still able to offer an insightful and realistic look race and class in America today, as he did during his 2004 presidential campaign.) Let alone anything requiring sustained “intellectual expansion and physical toil,” like, say, building a university, like the Booker T. Washington you would hold up as an example.
You should stick to making mass entertainments, because you’re a middle-class idiot and your “ascension” is bullshit.
What is the content of your ascension? American middle-class-hood? An overvalued mortgage? Two cars? Two-hour commute? Stultifying office work? Extortionate prep-school or college bills for the chillun, cause the public schools are shit? Or the hope of one day being a Rice-like apparatchik? This is hardly the stuff of life-saving dreams. It’s precisely the lack of worthy realistic ambitions that makes the illusions of the gangsta life or the NBA so fatal. The empty world you money-grubbing “ascenders” have helped to create is why life remains poor for us all—you included, let alone the poor black people. No, the kids don’t have any better ideas, and, like most human beings in limited and impoverished circumstances, usually lack the vision requisite to hitch one’s will to glorious endeavor in spite of all obstacles—but they envision very clearly the raw deal and unlikely prospects you and your Republican friends have contributed to causing over the past, say, 35 years of real-wage shrinkage, union-busting, flexibilization, religious fundamentalism, budget-cutting, deindustrialization, the nasty Ayn Randian atmosphere of brutality and selfishness, etc., etc. But I don’t see you writing about any of those things. No, of all the things to pick a fight about, you pick niggers.
After all your budget cuts, how many poor black kids really have a chance to “ascend” in the public school system, that being what it is? (This question is important only if you’re concerned with the inculcation of the best of the bourgeois virtues: science, critical thinking, art. I suspect your “ascension” has more to do with houses and cars, though.) People, especially kids, see this setup and they make bad decisions.
In any case, are there enough college places for a prospective army of ambitious high-achieving blacks? Enough middle-class jobs? Hell no. Kids figure that out, too. Especially the jobs part.
“Work hard, niggers, and one day you too can cover up crimes against humanity committed in imperialist wars like Vietnam, like that hero of the people, Colin Powell!” Fuck you.
You think your “ascension” means you’re not a nigger? Your boys and girls in the Bush Administration were perfectly willing to walk Powell out to the end of the branch on Iraq, and then hang him from it at the end of the first term. Ask him about it when you get off his dick. If he still has one.
Think on that, chump.
(That is, if this isn’t just a satire. ’Cause I’m ready to believe all kinds of crazy shit about niggers like you.)
Copyright © Amiri Kudura Barksdale 2006
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