Tonight!

You can get extra credit for attending this talk and writing a short (1-page) response paper.

Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor Lecture

"The Iraq Crisis and the Future of America"

Juan Cole, University of Michigan

Date: 02/28/2007 Time: 07:30pm
Location: Room 1505 , Seamans Center for the Engineering Arts & Sciences

more info here

The Legacy of Torture

On tomorrow's radio show, Nate and I will be interviewing Claude Marks, the director of the new documentary The Legacy of Torture: the War Against the Black Liberation Movement. In 1973, the men in the film were arrested in New Orleans, were beaten and stripped, had cattle prods applied to their necks and genitals, and were covered in blankets soaked in hot water with plastic bags wrapped around their heads. The charges against these former Black Panthers were dropped once this torture came to light, but the men were recently rearrested on similar charges (related to the shooting of a San Francisco police officer in 1971). They are now between the ages of 57 and 70. I've mentioned this case before, but you can read more about it here. One of the original torture victims in this case who is featured in the documentary, John Bowman, is now deceased. Two (Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim) have been in prison for over thirty years. Richard Brown, Richard O'Neal, Ray Boudreaux, and Hank Jones were arrested in California on January 3rd of this year. On the same day, Francisco Torres was arrested in New York, and Harold Taylor was arrested in Florida.

You can hear Walter Turner of "Africa Today" interviewing Claude Marks here and another interview on Hard Knock Radio (starts around 14:23 into the program).

"The same people who tried to kill me in 1973 are the same people who are here today, trying to destroy me. I mean it literally. I mean there were people from the forces of the San Francisco Police Department who participated in harassment, torture and my interrogation in 1973 ... none of these people have ever been brought to trial. None of these people have ever been charged with anything. None of these people have ever been questioned about that." -- John Bowman, former Black Panther

Cartoon by Khalil Bendib

Excused absences given for anyone who attends the following events in Chicago! Reports back mandatory!

(Click on the image to see a larger version.)

High School Visitor Update

I just got off the phone with one of our high school friends in Cedar Rapids. We decided to move their visit up to March 8th. Even though they were excited to meet Prof. Souaiaia, we decided the weather and their final exam schedule this week were good reasons to postpone the visit.
So, for March 8th, how about we plan on each group giving a short presentation on your assigned passage from Forced Passages? You can pull out the most important parts or the main arguments and tell us all what you think of what Dylan Rodriguez has to say. For the rest of class, I'll have some interesting material for us to watch and discuss, as well as another powerful activity. And anyone who'd like can join the kids and me for pizza dinner after class on the 8th.

A very special day ahead!

UI Islamic Studies Professor Ahmed Souaiaia will visit our class next week! He runs this fabulous blog! Feel free to get lost in that blog instead of working through Forced Passages for now. If you haven't already, please consider taking his Introduction to Islam course, which Nate highly recommends.

Before coming to class, don't forget to read "Aggression, the Spring of Perpetual Anguish" by Professor Souaiaia. Please also look at this short essay, which may remind you of some of the critiques of US political hypocrisy we encountered in the writings of Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton. We'll also want to take up Prof. Souaiaia's last point in that essay when we begin discussing the prison industrial complex.

Please do your best to watch the documentary Control Room, which you can check out (for free) at the UI Main Library’s Media Services, before coming to class. The call number is 16207 DVD. Several local video rental stores also have it. (Why not have a "Control Room" party?)

This documentary by Jehane Noujaim, an Egyptian American filmmaker, will give you a good sense of the politics of information from Al-Jazeera's perspective.

In addition to posting your thoughts and questions below, please bring your questions for Prof. Souaiaia to class. (Also feel free to comment on "Arna's Children," the film we watched today.)

Here are a variety of links to explore (as you like) before class. Feel free to share others.

Voices of the Middle East and North Africa (archived radio program from KPFA in Berkeley, California)

Robert Fisk's photo pages

Electronic Intifada ("News on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a Palestinian perspective")

Palestine Monitor

Haaretz (Israeli Daily News)

Dahr Jamail's site

If Americans Knew (Alison Weir's site on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict)

Middle East Children's Alliance

Nora in Palestine

The Angry Arab News Service (Prof. As'ad Abu-Khalil's blog)

Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s Report to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal

Ana Nogueira's reports from Lebanon

And don't forget we'll also have our high school guests from Cedar Rapids next week! It's going to be a really special class!

Extra Credit Opportunity

This Friday, Prof. Sonia Ryang of the UI will be giving a public lecture at noon! You can earn extra credit by attending and writing a short (1-2 page) response paper. Please don't summarize the talk. Write about YOUR responses to the talk. This is a good opportunity for those of you who have missed some blog posts. Here are the details:

Friday, February 23, 2007
Brownbag Seminar: "Gender, Self, Diaspora: Autobiographic Writings of Korean Women in Japan and the US." by Prof. Sonia Ryang, UI Dept. of Anthropology
12:00 Noon
302 Schaeffer Hall

Pictures from Huey's Birthday Party (Cupcakes by Heather)

Reminder

Forced Passages is a difficult book. It's also a very important book. That's why I'm giving you until March 8th to complete your assigned readings. In the email message I sent out over the weekend, you received your group assignments. Each group will have until March 8 to read your assigned sections plus pp.1-38. So that means everyone reads pp. 1-38 in addition to the assigned sections below. Each group will present the main points of their assigned section (along with their responses and questions for discussion) in class on March 8th. You have no additional readings this week. I'll take care of sharing material with you in class this week. And next week, you'll read the very short essay by Prof. Souaiaia, who will visit our class on March 1st. Please don't use this as a chance to procrastinate. I'm giving you the extra time with Forced Passages because you'll need it!

Group #1: Read pp. 39-74
Group #2: Read pp. 113-144
Group #3: Read pp. 145-184
Group #4: Read pp. 185-222
Group #5: Read pp. 223-255

Happy Birthday to Huey!

Huey would have been 65 today. I'm sure you all have thoughts and maybe questions about his writings that we didn't get to address in class. Before moving to our next topics, I want you to have a space to share any last comments you have. If there are passages that struck you as especialy important, confounding, interesting, or thought-provoking, tell us why. We might watch a movie about Huey on the last day of class if you decide that's what you want to do, but for now, I want you to have the space to say whatever else is on your mind from the readings.

Torture and Prison: "The Monster Post" for a Monstrous Issue

You're reading about Huey's experiences in "the hole," and you couldn't have watched the news over the past few years without encountering images of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison.

The torture of imprisoned people in the US and the torture of those held at Abu Ghraib are not unrelated.

For example, we know that one of the torturers at Abu Ghraib, Charles Graner, got his start working at a prison in Pennsylvania, SCI (State Correctional Institution) Greene, which happens to be the same prison where Mumia Abu Jamal is held. The image here shows Graner giving the "thumbs up" next to the corpse of an Iraqi torture victim. Graner likely "practiced" on Black prisoners at SCI Greene. Among the many abuses that have taken place at SCI Greene over the last decade were incidents involving guards beating Black prisoners and then writing "KKK" in the brutalized men's blood. Sexual humiliation of prisoners also took place. You can read articles related to Graner and SCI Greene at FreeMumia.com. Graner, who also had violently abused his wife, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the torture he supervised at Abu Ghraib.

But the connections between Abu Ghraib and prisons in the US go much further than the isolated case of one so-called "bad apple." As we will learn when we read Dylan Rodiguez's book Forced Passages, torture is an inextricable part of the US prison industrial complex. Torture is how it works. Even in Juvenile Halls, the use of wrist-twisting (or wrist-locks) and psychotropic medication (both of which can make the excessive use of force and abuse/torture harder to detect) are routine means of "controlling" juvenile prisoners. Some youth have died from staff-inflicted injuries. And until last year, kids held by the California Youth Authority were placed in actual cages to learn. The youth in the photo above are in the cages, and their teachers are sitting on the outside. That's "class." Life is even harder for youth sentenced to adult prison. Not only are they surrounded by adults, they enter an environment in which cattle-prods, shackles, chemical sprays, tasers, etc. might be used on prisoners.

While you won't see much about this issue on the news in the US, you can see the British documentary "Torture Inc.: America's Brutal Prisons" here. I would very much like you to watch that before coming to class on Thursday, but I'll warn you that it's rough viewing and will understand if you choose not to watch. We will watch a documentary on what happens to kids in the "correctional" system later this semester.

As some of you know, I am concerned about the recent arrest of 8 former Black Panthers. These men were tortured into confessing to the killing of a police officer in the 1970s. The torture involved stripping the men, beating them, covering them in blankets drenched in boiling water, and applying electric prods to their genitals. Now, they have been re-arrested for the same crime, for which charges were dropped thirty years ago. They are old men. And the officers sent to re-arrest some of these former Panthers (known as the San Francisco 8) were police who had tortured them back in 1971. Think about that. Why would the same men who tortured them be sent to re-arrest the Panthers decades later? Is that psychological torture? You can learn more here. Remind me to talk to you about one of the men, Jalil Muntaqim, in class. If you want to listen to information about the case while you study, a really good radio show that you can access online is Walter Turner's "Africa Today." You can try the 2nd half of last night's show.

This is a photo of the inmate uprising at Attica State Prison, which also happened in 1971. If you read about what these men wanted (toilet paper, for one), it'll remind you of Huey's writing. 29 of the inmates (as well as ten hostages) were killed when the state dropped tear gas and opened fire on the yard.

If you're like me, you're wanting to know even more at this point, so I'll also point you to George Jackson, a very important figure in the history of prison resistance and someone who meant a great deal to Huey. Here's a little trailer for Black August, The George Jackson Story to introduce you to him.


I know this has been a very heavy focus on men! Don't fret. We will get to the powerful voices of women like Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Shigenobu Fusako, Nagata Hiroko, and Mabel Williams, as well as more from Yuri Kochiyama.

I know at least one of you is struggling with a desire to do something, to act on what we're learning. That's a good thing. You might want to learn about Critical Resistance. Maybe you can start a chapter here. Also, you can learn so much and get ideas for action at the Data Center's Criminal Justice Program!!

I really like the conversations that are developing under the earlier blog posts below!!

Kiri Davis made this film when she was 16 yrs. old!

As a follow up to our conversation the other day, here is the film Amanda mentioned in class (and in her comment below).

Click here for more info on the director, Kiri Davis, and the film. While you are at the Media Matters site, check out some of the other films there.

Revised plan

In our next class, you'll sign up for groups for a 21-day reading and group presentation project. Each group will have until March 8 to read your assigned sections from Dylan Rodriguez’s book Forced Passages. (He'd be a great person to interview!)

EVERYONE must read pp.1-38 in Forced Passages and this interview in addition to the group readings listed below. Each group will present the main points of their chosen section (along with their responses and questions for disussion) in class on March 8th.

Group #1: Read pp. 39-74
Group #2: Read pp. 113-144
Group #3: Read pp. 145-184
Group #4: Read pp. 185-222
Group #5: Read pp. 223-255

You might want to look through the book ahead of time and indicate any advance preferences here on the blog.

February 22: Examples of Third World Solidarity
I will email you and post short readings for this week. (The email reading will be a PDF file.) The first half of class will be devoted to discussing Third World Solidarity in action, and the second half will involve preparing for next week.

March 1: The Spring of Perpetual Anguish and the King of Terror
Professor Ahmed Souaiaia will visit our class! Please watch the documentary Control Room, which you can check out (for free) at the UI Main Library’s Media Services before coming to class. The call number is 16207 DVD. Several local video rental stores also have it.

Before coming to class, read this essay by Professor Souaiaia.

Also read former Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s Report to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal.

Optional Readings:
Warning: The photos here are very disturbing. The reality they represent is horrific. But if you can, I think you should look at them.

Check out this site for frequently updated stories.

March 8: Prison Abolitionism: “What’s the Call? Free ‘em All”
Read pp. 127-150 in Passing it On by Yuri Kochiyama.

Group presentations and discussion on Forced Passages in class.

March 22: “The American Nightmare”
Read pp. 1-211 in Upside Down: a Primer for the Looking-Glass World by Eduardo Galeano and the poem “Somebody Blew Up America” by Amiri Baraka.

March 29: "The American Nightmare" Continued
Read pp. 215-337 in Upside Down: a Primer for the Looking-Glass World

April 5: Sexual Violence and White Supremacy
Read pp. 1-33 and 79-107 in Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide by Andrea Smith

April 12: Sexual Violence and White Supremacy Continued
Read pp. 109-91 in Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide

April 19: Radical Beginnings
Read pp. 3-106 and pp. 151-188 in Passing it On by Yuri Kochiyama

April 26: Special Guest ProfessorJames Fujii of the University of California-Irvine

Readings TBA

May 3: Last Day!
For our last day of class, we’ll watch A Huey P. Newton Story, The Battle of Algiers, or the movie of your choosing after our final discussion. You’ll receive a very short reading for this last day as well.

May 9: Final papers due by 9am.

What is the Third World anyway?

Just as a reminder, the plan for this coming Thursday is the same as what you have on your original syllabus, but there won't be any additional blog readings. Just read pp. 38-43 and 337-359 in the Huey Reader. I'll have the new plan for what follows posted very soon. It's going to be really good. Our next class will be all discussion (no film), so bring your book and be ready to engage a lot.

In the handout I gave you from Revolutionary Suicide, Huey writes (on pp. 6-7), "If scholars wish to carry their analysis further, they must come to terms with that four-fifths of the world which is bent on wiping out the power of the empire." Who makes up that four-fifths, and who makes up that empire? I'd also like you all to discuss ways in which we might understand what and who constitutes the "Third World" and the "First World"? What do you think of these designations? Are they helpful? Why and/or why not? For whom?

Keep writing about the movie below too!

Movie Post

What does it mean to love a community?

How would you describe Dan Freeman's feelings for his old girlfriend (who married the doctor) and Dawson (the cop)? How would you compare those feelings to his feelings for Stud, Pretty Willie, and the other Cobras (freedom fighters)?

(In case you're interested, the name of the guy who edited the film is Michael Kahn.)

I'll post the revised syllabus in a few days.

While we're on the subject ...

There are so, so many important texts and films I wanted to include in this class. Have any of you seen The Battle of Algiers by the late and great Gillo Pontecorvo? The Panthers watched it, and it certainly belongs in our class.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow's radio show will feature two interviews! In the first half of the show, Vernon interviews a local activist who is launching a group on campus to address the struggle in Darfur. In the second half of the show, VietUnity founding member and San Francisco Bay Area activist Hai Binh Nguyen will tell us what Third World Solidarity means to her. So don't forget to tune in at noon to KRUI 89.7 FM!

Thanks to Brand for the Eldgridge Cleaver link & to the rest of you who've been commenting. Really good stuff! We should talk in class about the blog though and how we want to use it.

Tomorrow we'll discuss the readings and watch the 1973 film The Spook Who Sat by the Door, which is based on the novel of the same name by Sam Greenlee.

Here are some links to reviews of the film.
*"Freedom Dues"
*"True Black Cinema"
*A blogger's review
*"Still Making a Statement"

The film features Paula Kelly and was directed by Ivan Dixon (pictured here).

Finally, in a few weeks we'll have a special guest, Professor Ahmed Souaiaia, visit our class. Before he joins us, he would like us to watch the film Control Room to think about the Iraq war coverage from the point of view of Al-Jazeera. How many of you have seen this documentary? Here is a trailer of the film.

Synergy & Third World Solidarity

Your readings for this week are really rich with topics for discussion, so I know we'll have a lot to sort through together on Thursday. This week's "Insurgency Hour" radio show will feature an interview Vernon is conducting with a friend who is starting a group here at the UI to address the ongoing struggle for survival in Darfur, the most western part of Sudan! If you have an idea for the following week, let me know so we can start planning and scheduling!

As promised, I'm also posting some information on Richard Aoki.

You can listen to the KPFA radio show APEX Express of Oct. 26, 2006 to hear Richard Aoki speak. You can fast-forward up to about 26 minutes into the program.

"Back in the Day" by Neela Banerjee

BPP alumni bio

"The struggle wasn't just black and white" by Momo Chang

You can also check out the "Yellow Panther" link to the right.

"What We Want/What We Believe"

Hi everyone!

I always love teaching, but I don't think I've ever felt anything close to this indescribable anticipation before. It's daunting and exciting, and I am going to do my best to serve you well in the process. I am so grateful to you all for being interested, being engaged, and bringing what you know and feel to the table. I'm really looking forward to getting to know more about what you all want and believe.

If there are questions or issues you'd like addressed in class, you can post them here, and we'll add them to the "to-do" list. I feel like we are just starting to scratch the surface, and I want us all to have a voice in the direction our future discussions take.

The video I showed today comes from this collection, the same series mentioned in the article Martha sent us. To understand the BPP, we'll need to think about the 10-Point platform and program ("What We Want/What We Believe"). We already discussed some of the issues that were on the minds of Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale when they formed the party and developed the 10-Point platform (especially points 7-9). But there's a lot left to say. You can read the platform on pp. 55-57 of your reader. Maybe you can think of what your 10-Point platform would be as you read. In fact, I'd love to see what yours would be. You can see the 1966 BPP platform here too.

The BPP has been in the news recently after 8 men (now in their 60s) were arrested on charges dating back to the 1970s. I posted about this on my own blog here and here.

Now that I've outted myself as invested in these issues even more by sharing that blog url, I might as well share some other links to VERY OPTIONAL (and informal) readings for those who are interested. Amanda mentioned the case of Professor Vershawn Young in class today, and you can read a bit about my take on the situation here. The data is a year old, but you can also read this post about why Iowa is the 2nd Worst Place to be Black in the US according to The Black Commentator. I've also written a bunch about Eddy Zheng. Here's one post that speaks to what I mentioned about my own motivations for teaching this class. Finally, since Vernon is from Florida, I thought I'd share a post about Martin Lee Anderson. Please feel very free to continue sharing any and all thoughts you may have, articles you'd like to share, etc.!

In a few days, I'll be posting some information about Richard Aoki, so keep checking back!