What's Going On With Michael Vick?
By: Alton Maddox,
Amsterdam News
Michael Vick must be asking “What’s going on?” No Black person in the United States, with at least one working brain cell, has failed to ask this question. The question first arose in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. Enslaved Africans were neither classified as humans nor animals under slave codes. They were “heathens.”
Recent events prove that this classification system is still in effect. Whites felt nothing when Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell were gunned down in a fusillade of bullets by state-sponsored terrorists. If dogs had been assassinated, in a similar fashion, the assassins would be subject to cruel and unusual punishment.
The Atlanta Falcons drafted Vick out of Virginia Tech and made him its number one pick as a quarterback. Historically, this has been a white man’s position because it requires “brains.” No headless Black man, according to white supremacy, should be steering a white man’s ship.
The preferred quarterbacks in the NFL are Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisberger, and Bart Starr. You get the picture. They are great role models for young white boys. Vick is not a positive role model for white youth although he is a talented quarterback. A Eurocentric image is important.
Before Brown v. Board of Education, Vick would have never starred at Virginia Tech. He may have received honorable mention in Blacksburg for being adept at handling a broom. When Virginia Tech finally opened its doors to Blacks, sports dollars was the motive.
Vick should give great deference to attorney Oliver Hill, who died this past Sunday, for his pioneering work in civil rights in Virginia. He should also give thanks to the niece of Rev. Vernon Johns for organizing Black high school students in Farmville, Virginia in the early 1950’s. The dilapidated school buildings and buses in Virginia were subjects of this landmark decision.
History has proven, however, that an inferior education for Blacks was of no concern to the United States in 1954. If it had been a concern, this protracted problem of inequality in education based on race would have been remedied by now. It is abnormal, psychologically, for whites to educate “heathens.”
The United States was fighting the Cold War in 1954. Jim Crow was sticking out like a sore thumb. Communists were more proficient at driving this point home to the “Third World” than John Henry was at driving a spike in a railroad track. In an amicus curiae brief, the United States urged the Supreme Court to outlaw de facto Jim Crow education.
Given the fact that the United States had no way of disposing of more than twenty million Blacks, without detection, assimilation was the only viable alternative. As Steven Biko asserted, “The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the minds of the oppressed.” Today, most Blacks have been thoroughly brainwashed through misinformation and disinformation.
Vick is the unwitting version of Jack Johnson. He is not an assimilationist. No one can mistake Vick for Tiger Woods. In sports, they are both performing a “white man’s job.” Vick, however, is doing it on the Black side. This is like a Black man rubbing salt in the white man’s wound.
Jack Johnson had a way of rubbing salt in a white man’s wound. He became the first Black heavyweight champion and he did it with Black style. Johnson used his championship belt to take a swipe at white supremacy. As a champion, he commanded media attention and the media did not disappoint its racist readership.
Johnson’s forte was displaying white women by his side even though miscegenation laws were the sine qua non of white supremacy. It would take the Supreme Court case of Virginia v. Loving in 1967 to outlaw the ban on interracial marriages. A Black woman and a white man went to the District of Columbia to get married and the Lovings returned to Virginia to live. They both had to hit the road.
Although marriage is a matter of state concern, Congress passed the Mann Act to go after Johnson. After the enactment of the Mann Act, Johnson was prohibited from taking white women across state lines. The Commerce Clause is the most important proviso in the U.S. Constitution.
No law was going to stop Johnson from transporting white women across state lines in his expensive chariots. This was enough for Uncle Sam to run Johnson out of the United States. In order to split, however, Johnson had to do a “Houdini.” Federal agents were left tongue-tied with egg on their faces.
Vick should be getting a valuable lesson in white supremacy. History repeats itself because white supremacy is based on rules and Blacks refuse to learn them. This means that legal and political forecasting in the Black community is non-existent.
These rules are racially oriented and they are designed to keep the white man number one. In the end, white supremacy is calculating and emotionless. Blacks will never be able to persuade the white ruling class to abandon a winning formula. White supremacy undergirds a kleptocracy.
Dog-fighting, like boxing, is actually a matter of state concern. States, and not the federal government, regulate boxing. The Iroquois Confederacy, comprised of “savages,” conceived the doctrine of federalism and the “Founding Fathers” patented it.
Since the dog is “man’s best friend,” it apparently enjoys a special preference in the law. During Reconstruction, Congress said that only Blacks must enjoy a special preference in the law. Today, dogs enjoy constitutional rights while “no Negro has any rights that whites are bound to respect.”
President-select George Bush made it official this past May. He signed legislation making it a federal crime to transport dogs across state lines to promote dog-fighting. This opened the door for the federal government to indict Vick despite Virginia’s penchant for states’ rights. This federal law also retired the Black state prosecutor.
If Vick had hired a legal and political forecaster, when he signed a megabuck contract with the Falcons, he may have been advised to proceed with caution. Wittingly or unwittingly, Vick is a “race man” in the eyes of whites. Now, he must do the “Ali shuffle” in the courtroom.
United African Movement will host its next UAM Forum on Wednesday, September 5, 2007 at 7:00 p.m. at the Elks Plaza, 1068 Harriet Tubman (Fulton Street) (nr. Classon Ave. in Brooklyn). Take the “C” train to Franklin Ave. In the interim, UAM’s membership is formulating a twelve-month program.
The appeal in Maddox v. Prudenti et al. will be heard in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit “as early as the week of 9/24/07.”
See: www.reinstatealtonmaddox.net for “Has Viola Plummer Gone Mad?”; “Black Lawyer Treated Worse Than Common Criminal”; and “An Anatomy of Maddox's Ordeal."