GRANMA DAILY
September 1, 2004
If Malcolm X Were Still Alive...
By Pedro de la Hoz (Granma)

A CubaNews translation by Joseph Mutti
Edited by Walter Lippmann

Behind the angelical mask is an absent face. Words said without conviction - pure verbal artifice. In the auditorium, veiled smiles, efforts to retain composure - and in not a few hearts, repressed anger.

Especially when he says: “I know that the Republican Party has a lot to do.”

But for many their memories have not flagged. Barely a few weeks before, Bush refused to respond to an invitation from the NAACP to its annual convention on July 8. He was not willing to listen to voices of dissent.

Memory recalls the shamelessness of the President a year ago, endorsing the decision of the Supreme Court to support those who were against affirmative action at the University of Michigan, by means which Blacks and Latinos would have certain access quotas to higher education. Facts that prompted Jesse Jackson to affirm that Bush was “the president who has most moved away from civil rights in the last 50 years.”

Memories were fresh from the unanimity with which, between May 21 and 26 in San Francisco, the CBTU (Coalition of Black Trade Unionists) congress opened fire on the terrible social effects of Bushism, with the president of the coalition, William T. Lucy, recalling the loss of 2.4 million jobs (for Blacks, whites and Latinos) in the preceding 29 months.

And, referring to the topic of the war in Iraq, he pointed out how the White House had arranged to substitute Baghdad’s inexistent weapons of mass destruction for “weapons of mass distraction used to draw us into the war.”

Memories cannot obviate the growing rejection of the African American community to the war: in all the surveys carried out so far this year, the index oscillates between 70% to 75% who say that all the troops, without exception, should return home.

The situation of deterioration, marginality, poverty and lack of opportunity that the community suffers responds to a serious structural problem that goes beyond interim policies and presidential platitudes.

The deepest wrong resides in the inability of the same system to generate authentic social justice and to overcome old inequalities inculcated in the very formation of U.S. society.

When looking at the moment immediately prior to Bush's electoral robbery in 2000, historian Howard Zinn - one of the most lucid minds in the United States – warned that “the U.S. is the richest country in the world with 5% of the world’s population which consumes 30% of what the entire planet produces. The wealth is polarized, with 1% of the population owning 35% of the wealth...In their impoverished cities, children die at a higher percentage that in any other industrialized country. In one year, 1988, 40,000 babies died before the age of one, with an African American infant mortality rate twice as high as that of the white population. To be able to more or less reach equal opportunity would require a drastic redistribution of wealth and enormous investments for job creation, health, education and the environment.”

Obviously it is a major problem that escapes the sway of electoral years. While the establishment’s maxim is the optimization of corporate super-profits and the military industrial complex absorbs the enormous expenses of war to augment the infinite flow of dollars from its pockets, it is unthinkable to envisage even a minimally serious and responsible social calendar that contemplates the exercise of justice.

On May 19, in Columbia, at the headquarters for the commemoration of Malcolm X Day, Kevin Alexander Gray, a Black social activist, maintained: “This government protects the well-being and the privileged power of the few: of the Bushs and the Bin Ladens, of the Cheneys and the Kerrys...If Malcolm X still lived he would say that our country is a problem; that the United States and its government have always been interested in maintaining a racial, ethnic and sexually divided country, a nation that is not for all its people. If Malcolm X were still alive they would probably kill him again.”


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Article summary: http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/2004/09/01/interna/index.html But the link leads you to something else.