All about me
It’s all about Me
Darrell Smith has 25+ yr. experience as a behavioral modification specialist and lifestyle mentor for urban communities in New York, San Diego and Riverside California. Combined with his lifelong experience as a community organizer, he has developed a program specifically designed to empower local community organizations, institutions and individuals to effectively modify anti-social behavior in their community
It was January 1957 when I began my human adventure in America. My birth certificate states that I am colored whatever that is, I look and feel like a dark skinned human being. I long for my mother but I don’t feel her anywhere just strange detached humans. I would later learn that I was taken from my mother and placed in a general baby ward waiting to be claimed. Now this practice has been in effect since my ancestors were first forced to live here. A lighter skinned human along with two of my brothers eventually claimed me.
I came to being at a very pivotal time in human history, all around the globe other oppressed humans were fighting so I may grow to continue the fight against human suffering. I am a member of the Negro race of Africa whose DNA can be found in Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, England, Ireland, Honduras, Mexico and wherever the Atlantic slave trade took them. With this understanding I know that as a Human my allegiance is to Humanity first and foremost, not one particular country or race.
My first recollection of a family unit in my life was greeting my foster father as he was coming home from work. We lived at 401 Edgecombe Ave in Harlem. This was when Harlem was still very working class and a cultural Mecca for forward thinking humans. I only lived there a short while then we moved to Yonkers and the first upper-middle class suburb for Negroes in the area. It was called Nepperhan; later it became Runyon Heights.
When I was 4yrs I was able to read and comprehend news articles in the daily newspaper, so when I started kindergarten I was already prepared to grow and develop intellectually. But this is America in 1962 so as a dark skinned Negro youth my reward was to be removed from class, brought to the principal’s office to watch my foster mother being scolded for teaching me to read. Ironically she was semi-illiterate and did not teach me. This experience taught me to never let the state know how intelligent you really are. It wasn’t until I was in 6th grade that everything became clear and my life as a human begun to make since.
One day while I was looking for something to read inside the school systems mobile library called “The Bookmobile”. I came across a book on Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association and my eyes and mind were finally opened. This is when I discovered that I am a Human Being who ancestors were enslaved physically and intellectually for economic reasons. Studying Garvey’s philosophy Showed me that I had to analyze life historically and scientifically. The Negroes in America are divided by class and color, to justify capitalism’s exploitation of Negroes it was universally taught that the darker races were inferior and therefore needed help in their development. In the neighborhood where I grew up everyone lived like the “Huxtables” and the playground chant was “ If you’re Light you’re alright, If you’re Brown stick around, If you’re Black get back”. As a child I experienced the most personal racism from the colored elite than from society in general. One of the most lucrative business during slavery was breeding of human beings. So within the cultural thinking of America the lighter the Negro the better they are treated, so naturally class division was developed based on color. This is why a light skinned man who has no connection to my history is touted as a success for the “Black” people of America and the leaders of all the so called “Black” organizations are of the same shade.
My political development began when I was very young, while waiting to get my hair cut at a Harlem barbershop. I would always read the latest issues of Muhammad Speaks and The Black Panther Newspaper there and listen to the men discuss the current issues. At home my foster father introduced me to Malcolm X and Paul Robison. Contrary to popular belief Martin Luther King was not even talked about because his whole speech was really irrelevant to me, I was already holding hand with little white kids in school and also knew that freedom for a human has nothing to do with using the same water fountain or toilet. If you needed a lunch counter create your own that would be freedom.
In seventh grade I was suspended from school for handing out flyer saying “Wanted for murder, Nelson
Rockefeller, Butcher of Attica”. My political development hit a crossroad in 1977 when I was attending Moses Brown Prep school in Providence, RI. I had received a scholarship from A Better Chance program and was for the first time exposed to the real America. The one the privileged lived in and that I were supposed to strive to be a part of. This did not sit well with me, because I was already aware that material possessions and wealth did not make you a positive human being. Quite the contrary, you cannot achieve wealth without creating twice as much poverty and as a universal Negro I cannot do harm to other human beings. When I entered the University of Rhode Island my political eyes were wide open and I was seeking direction and clarity. I became president of the Black student union and was able to bring speakers to the campus. I was able to personally talk with Bobby Seale, Eldredge Cleaver, Dick Gregory and later on I met and worked with Kwame Ture [Stokely Carmichael] as a member of the All African Peoples Revolutionary Party. When it comes to understanding the political struggles of the Negro people in America I have done my homework.
It is because of this development that I had no other choice but to create,
The Stop Pimping Alliance.
Contrary to popular belief pimping is not a "black thing". Lets be perfectly clear, Pimping in any form is an abomination to society and is the number one crime against humanity and should be denounced by anyone who claims to support human rights. There is nothing cool, hip or mildly humorous about pimping or pimps.
Our goal is to provide the information and the tools to confront and challenge this lifestyle and drive it from our communities, our vocabulary and culture in general.
The Stop Pimping Alliance believes that the basis for the myriad of social problems in our communities stems from the acceptance of the abuse of power. Thworkplacethe community will be able to reach out to a greater sector of society.
To achieve this goal we have partnered with several community organizations to develop a program for educational institutions, the private sector and social service organizations. By working together we can establish a community based behavioral institute that is rooted in the already established federal law against the abuse of power in the
e 1964 civil rights act speaks directly to this issue in the workplace. By combining this training with community based training [domestic violence, human trafficking, prostitution, and violence]
"No one shall be held in
Slavery or servitude; slavery
And the slave trade shall be
Prohibited in all their forms."
Article 4, Universal Declaration
Of Human Rights, 1948
As 21st century abolitionists, it deeply disturbs us that the country we live in, the United States, has not yet officially and/or publicly apologized to African Americans in particular... and to the world in general, for its participation in one of the greatest human tragedies - holocausts - in modern history:
The Atlantic Slave Trade. (1600 to Present.)
It's an unfortunate, but undeniable fact that the human trafficking (children, women, and men), for the purpose of forced labor and exploitation, continues along this infamous route, and many other routes like it, to this very day. This dirty "secret" operates throughout the country and victimizes people from all corners
of the World.
The United States government purports to be the world's foremost democratic leader and champion of Human rights yet history clearly and thoroughly proves otherwise.
It’s our belief that we must speak truth to power. And we, the U.S. people, cannot truly move forward if "our" govt., the U.S. government, continues to ignore and sweep its historic crimes against humanity under a bloody rug. We must demand clarity and transparency from "our" government, or it’ll remain business as usual in Washington D.C. and Wall St.
If the U.S. government is incapable of acknowledging its past crimes, it ensures the inevitability of committing future crimes. Our U.S. collective history, long past and recent, both domestic and foreign, is plain evidence of a country in desperate need of a moral compass. We've never had a true moral compass in the U.S government, and have paid a painful and deadly price for ignoring justice and truth.
"Those that don't evaluate their history are doomed to repeat it."
Not one presidential administration in U.S history has had the courage and wisdom to recognize and apologize for the major role this country has played in the indefensible practice of the oppression and genocide of slavery. And consequently its abhorrent vicious cycle has been repeated over and over again, and still exists today.
Impunity is the word that best sums up our history and "our" government and we must demand
A change in ourselves, in "our" government, and in our collective political direction. The time for justice and accountability is always now, not later. We need to shift our behavior and build human cooperation, and consistently expose, denounce, and stop the exploitation of human beings.
We call on this new administration to recognize and seize the moment to move this country forward by accounting for this country's past. And want this administration to understand that this apology is long over due, and not only owed to African Americans... but to Humanity in general. This is not simply a symbolic gesture in the spirit of truth, fairness, and social responsibility, but absolutely necessary for genuine unity and a democratic re-construction of our society. This opportunity is in our hands; we must demand action,
The Stop Pimping Alliance asks that all believers in human rights and the total eradication of slavery to his horrendous violation against mankind. And commit to the Continued struggle for its absolute eradication... the elimination of slavery in all forms.
The glorification of pimping, with all its violence & abusive behavior, by corrupt elements in the media, music, & entertainment industry, needs to be challenged & those involved, be held accountable for degenerating our cultural & social standards. A small but effective tool we have at our disposal to counter media that promotes the pimp/gangster lifestyle is to organize community-wide “edutainment” programs/seminars that motivate respectful behavior & can hopefully produce some long term impact on youth, parents, teachers, & society as a whole.please sign this petition calling for the Obama administration to politically recognize and denounce the United States' role in t
Pimping is Slavery
The practice of slavery has been around since the beginning of time and so have pimps.
The African kings who sold my ancestors into slavery are no different then the record producers and hip hop moguls of today. They both exploited their community for their own personal wealth. Let’s be very clear, slavery is not about race or color it is the exploitation of labor of the many for the benefit of the few. And just like before there were humans of the Negro race who became wealthy from their exploitation of not just other Negroes but European indentured servant whose as well, so they were slaves too. The institution of white servitude, however, had grave disadvantages. Postlethwayt, a rigid mercantilist, argued that white laborers in the colonies would tend to create rivalry with the mother country in manufacturing. Better black slaves on plantations than white servants in industry, which would encourage aspirations to
independence. The supply moreover was becoming increasingly difficult, and the need of the plantations outstripped the English convictions. In addition, merchants were involved in many vexations and costly proceedings arising from people agreeing to emigrate, accepting food and clothes in advance, and then suing for unlawful detention. On the plantation, escape was easy for the white servant, less easy for the Negro who, if freed, tended, in self-defense, to stay in his locality where he was well known and less likely to be apprehended as a vagrant or runaway slave. The servant expected land at the end of his contract, the Negro, in a strange environment, conspicuous by his color and features, and ignorant of the white man’s language and ways, could be kept permanently divorced from the land. Racial differences made it easier to justify and rationalize Negro slavery, to exact the mechanical obedience of a plough-ox or a carthorse, to demand that resignation and that complete moral and intellectual subjection, which alone make slave labor possible. Finally, and this was the, decisive factor, the Negro slave was cheaper. The money, which procured a white man’s services for ten years, could buy a Negro for life.
But the experience with white servitude had been invaluable. Kidnapping in Africa encountered no such difficulties as were encountered in England. Captains and ships had the experience of the one trade to guide the other. Bristol, the center of the servant trade, became one of the centers of the slave trade. Capital accumulated from the one financed the other. White servitude was the historic base upon which Negro slavery was constructed. The felon-drivers in the plantations became without effort slave drivers. “In significant numbers,” writes Professor Phillips, “the Africans were latecomers fitted into a system already developed.”
So this information refutes what President Barrack Obama stated on his visit to a slave prison, “On the one hand this is where history took a cruel turn, on the other, this is where the African-American got their start.” To put any type of positive spin on this crime against humanity is a crime in itself.
Her, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor. As compared with Indian and white labor, Negro slavery was eminently superior. “In each case,” writes Bassett, discussing North Carolina, “it was a survival of the fittest. Both Indian slavery and white servitude were to go down before the black man’s superior endurance, docility, and labor capacity.” The features of the man, his hair, color and dentrifice, his “sub-human” characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact: that the colonies need labor and resorted to Negro labor because it was cheapest and best. This was not a theory; it was a practical conclusion deduced from the personal experience of the planter. He would have gone to the, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn was to come.
Just like the healthcare industry of today, everything connected to slavery was done for profit, no matter how inhuman. President Obama believes that the people who commit these crimes against humanity “are not evil, they just want to make a profit.”
Politics and morals in the abstract make no sense. We find American politician and journalists defending reform today, denouncing reform tomorrow, and defending reform the day after. Today they are imperialist, the next day anti-imperialist, and equally pro-imperialist a generation after. And always with the same vehemence. The defense or attack always on the high moral or political plane. The thing defended or attacked is always something you can touch and see, to be measured in dollars and cents or human suffering. When you understand that there was a wage system in place during slavery, as well as, a standard of living. So, when chattel slavery was so called abolished, the lowest paid workers became the new free slaves.
When you examine the differences between a free human and an enslaved one, you can clearly see that neither the white servant nor the Negro slave has achieved freedom.
Freedom is based on land and the unconditional use of its resources, by and for the indigenous inhabitants. So being allowed to participate in a system established on stolen land is by no mean freedom.
What made Negro slavery different from white servitude was the systematic dehumanization of an entire race. In America like in the rest of the colonized world everything “black” is considered ugly and unwanted, this is why you have racism based on the darkness of a person’s skin throughout the Americas. Recently, we heard and saw pictures of baseball star Sammy Sosa with a lighter skin tone. This is simply because he knows he will be more marketable if he appears to be white. In America the biggest crime against the slave class was the denial of the basic right to have an independent thought on anything. The
slaves were taught to hate every aspect of their humanity and to love the value system of capitalism. This is evident when you examine the two sides of the abolitionist movement, which is commonly called the civil right movement. The mass labor movement that followed reconstruction was in fact just a continuation of the fight to end chattel slavery. Remember that slavery was and always will be about labor. Class division is the main reason there were two sides to the struggle. The field slaves hated everything about their experience as slaves in America, while, the house slaves may have despised being slaves they enjoyed the privilege of being considered better than the other slaves, due to their mixed blood are. This is why the Universal Negro Improvement Association was so roundly attacked by the NAACP. The privileged “colored people” would lose their status if the masses of Negroes organized as one people and united with the working poor of all races. This was the people’s true dream after the march on Washington, to organize and build a political party outside of the established two parties. One representing all of the poor peoples of this country, in particular and the world in general. The leadership of the Washington approved community organizations had different ideas about what was best for them personally and what was needed for the masses. By aligning themselves with the Democratic Party they all but assured that the poor people would never receive any justice. The field slaves had a different plan, one that called for the people to establish their own community institutions. So their children would be educated to serve the community not the corporations. Healthcare would be available and equal for all poor people. Public safety would be in the hands of the people. All pimps, criminals, drug dealers and abusive public servants would be held accountable for their behavior. This was the social and cultural philosophy of the so-called “hood” during the 60’s and 70’s. Beginning in the 1980’s the community was being led by a small group of colored organizations who only solution was economic empowerment, in other word pimping.
You see, organizations like the NAACP, the Urban League and the Nation of Islam only offered the accumulation of wealth as the only solution to the myriad of social problems confronting the poor. We know now that this was an extremely shortsighted and misguided plan. Capitalism is all-inclusive when it comes to exploitation; there can never be such a thing as compassionate capitalism without social and cultural change first. A community that has been de humanized must first fined its humanity on a social and cultural level before they can concern themselves with economic development.
This is what John Brown, Nat Turner and Marcus Garvey understood.
This is what Fannie Lou Hamer, Queen Mother Moore and Malcolm X taught.
Fidel Castro teaches us that “it was the very people – illiterate or semi-illiterate at the beginning- who had to start by teaching many of its children to read and write. The same people that out of love for liberty and yearning for justice had overthrown the tyranny and carried out, and heroically defended, the most profound social revolution in this hemisphere. In 1961, only two years after the triumph, with the support of young students working as teachers, about 1 million people learned how to read and write. They went to the countryside, to the mountains, the remotest places and they taught people that were even 80 years old how to read and write. Later on, there were follow-up courses and the necessary steps were taken in a constant effort to attain what we have today.
A revolution can only be born from culture and ideas.”
Hip-Hop is a sociopath culture that has no place in human society without an infusion of revolutionary ideas.
Like pimps, planters denied any type of independent development by their slaves/prostitutes. While also brainwashing them to believe they are incapable of being on their own. Today just like then, the government supported the pimps/planters by having a system that denies access to the basic means of survival to the poor. For this reason alone any association between the people’s movement of the 60’s and Hip-Hop culture is a contradiction and a lie. No matter what group you followed or what belief you had, the one philosophy we all held dear was “Do no harm” to your community and denounce all who do harm. The glorification of pimping and the thug life would not have been allowed no matter how much money was being made. The leadership of government funded national community organizations in conjunction with the Democratic Party, systematically destroyed the community-based organizations built by the
people, but more tragically they replaced them with the Bloods and the Crips. This process was financed by the spoils from the Iran Contra scandal that was led by Gen. Colin Powell, who could legitimately called the “czar of crack”. We can only solve the problems of our urban communities through honest and scientific analyst of history. All the concerns the poor people have can be traced to a beginning point. Amilcar Cabral taught us to “Return to the Source” for solutions to humanities problems. The elder community organizers taught others and me that we had to take a different approach to how we view our life and the life of our community. The cultural and social value system that is being presented in the media a being “black” or “urban” has no historical connection to the struggles of the 60’s and 70’s, but directly connected to the “me generation” of the 1980’s. The main reason grassroots organizers supported affirmative action was the belief that those privileged colored people would return to the community and build the social and cultural infrastructure that the poor people needed. Instead, these “ petty B” Negroes put their individual wants before the people’s need. After Adam Clayton Powell was caught cheating on taxes, my foster father taught me, “ if you are going to work in the system you can’t do as they do, you’re there to serve the people”. It is very obvious to anyone who is honest and intelligent, the “I have a Dream” philosophy of community organizing is a complete failure and it appears to me that it was designed to fail. If you examine the behavior of the current Negro leadership in America for the past 30 years, you would see a pattern of self-serving actions, that, due to their reactionary nature, caused more harm than good for the communities.
Prostitution/slavery operates on all class levels; you have pimps/planters providing “high class/house” prostitutes/slaves for people like Tiger Woods and street walkers/field prostitute/slaves for the working class. American capitalist culture teaches us to worship privilege and wealth, which has always been demonstrated through exploitation of another human being without consequences and for their own pleasure. The more decadent the more the people are supposed to admire. This is truly manifested in the fact that there has never been any true unsolicited remorse for slavery in this country
America still teaches its children that the Monroe doctrine is a great document, when it is in fact the most racist philosophy ever produced in human history. The belief that you have the right to control another human is criminal in itself, but when you justify this behavior with a theory that the victim exists for this purpose is sociopathic. The undocumented worker in America represents the slave class of today and the minimum wage worker represents the servant class. Women have suffered the most under this economic system socially and culturally. Because slavery/pimping causes the underdevelopment of humans on a behavioral bases effecting social and cultural interactions amongst all sectors of its society. The adolescent male in slavery based America was introduced to sex by being able to rape any prostitute/slave at will, this reality caused his female peers to focus on their sexuality in order to gain their attention. The results of that cultural reality can be seen throuhout all forms of America’s mass media , consumer based culture. The story is not over folks we have just begun I am going to take the previous mishmash of words and put them together.This is going to be a wonderful experience to write about traveling to Botswana my whole new life my whole world.
