freestyle on the fox and the hens
a quick political reflection off the dome
The fox is loose, in charge of the American hen house. But under this capitalism, the fox has been loose for a good ass while! Corporations and rich individuals been influenced and often times controlled the levers of this government.
When folks like me and mines attempted to bring this up, it was too often viewed as the problem of poor people who need "government protection" or Black people who are "corrupt" or "incompetent" and either deserve to be taken from political power or need aggressive corporate development to "improve" their community.
Detroiters for Tax Justice reports how hundreds of millions of dollars have been shifted via “tax caputes”: moneys designated for libraries, schools, special education and other services to spend instead on downtown development. This is done under mayoral control and even monies that were voted on by millages can be siphoned off in this way.
The current Mayor Mike Duggan "won" his first election as a Write In Candidate. There was an election review committee that investigated and found hundreds of write ins with identical signatures. The committee was unable to get political parties, media, or governmental bodies to address this great irregularity. Obviously, he continued on with his power as though he were elected. He now will run for governor of Michigan as an Independent. He was selected in Detroit to transition the city from the state takeover of municipal finances to a semblance of popular democracy. He served his terms to spread the narrative of the revitalization of the city. This entire time we have been having conversations about defending Black Detroit. Organizations such as Detroiters For Tax Justice are also important because their frame of the social situation highlights that these State-sponsored financial shenanigans have deep repercussions for the process of so-called Democracy.
The conversation about gentrification is so much more than just indvidual people moving into a neighborhood or city. These people, our new neighbors, moving in for a “fun,cool, creative urban experience” are pawns on the one hand, and perfect embodiments of the capitalist consumer narrative on the other hand. What we painfully learned in Detroit from this is that controlling “the narrative” is more important in the USA than the actual laws and rules written on sheets of paper. This narrative has always been supported by theft and threats of violence.
The fox is in charge of the hen house.
When I was a teen my parents gave me a book called The Eagle who thought he was a chicken. As Afrikans it is time, it been time for us to realize, as the old folks say, who we are … AND whose we are.
Afrikan thinkers describe fascism as the process by which the social processes experienced regularly by the colonized become forced upon those who previously enjoyed the position of the colonizer. When the theft that was normalized and ignored gets brutally turned on sections of people who previously were citizens. Check out the Nazi development in relationship to both German histories of colonization of Africa and US American histories of colonization of this continent.
Now we live among the active valorization of the wealthy, who wave their compensatory financial phalluses around and claim the immunity that they have been waving over Detroit, the US South, and immigrant communities for decades, if not centuries. They advertise to the working class and middle class men, teaching “you can be assholes just like us. Pay us to teach you how to become an "alpha male" and idolize, emulate us and our successes.”
That too, is a centuries-old technique of colonization, the missionary approach, to recruit the most anti-social, the most frustrated who can't abide by the demands of communal living to become the acolytes in the "church" of Western civilization, a servant institution to the army and colonizing corporations, an institution that preaches divine values as it normalizes abuse, manipulation, denial of the flesh, hierarchy, and exploitation of women and children.
The fox is loose once more in the hen house of Western civilization. It is frothing at the mouth, tearing down cages, gathering its packs, ready to feast. Defeated people look down at the ground. People caught in the trance of algorithms and data collection crane their necks downward in what looks to me like a posture of subservience. They tried to beat subservience, defeat, and quiet into us. Chickens peck the ground in repetitive moments. And say to themselves, “buck, buck, buck, buck, caw.” The chicken is domesticated and expects to be eaten, commodified and consumed by the owner of the hen house. The hens didn’t build the house but the industrialists and owners who build fences and cages named the house after its residents, more like a menu item than a naming of a home. Like the tech industry allows us to put our names and identities on '“our” social media pages so we identify with them even as they control and commodify the rules of engagement. El-hajj Malik el-Shabazz known as Malcolm X recalls that the House slave identifies with the “house” even as it burns. They say with concern, “Massa, our house is on fire.” The slave of the field keeps implements sharpened buried nearby. The slave of the field sneaks away to the river beneath impenetrable veils of sturdy brown and living green, to pray, to study, to be themselves when they can. The slave of the field knows the rhythms of the earth even when forced to be on the clock. The eagle has sharp talons and keep eye sight. It can both fly up into the sky, above the field and the house and swoop down with divine speed. I petition and pray that this message, written with my right hand from a dialysis chair while my blood circulates and folks around me bleed quietly and give and receiove care, in the vicinity of Detroit, still the Global Black Metropolis, the Anishinaabe aki, the motor that moves those who labor for a living, which holds ancestral healing consciousness and rebellion in its vibration, helps us to raise our heads and prepare to spread our wings.