ISIS And A Black Caliphate - The African American Diaspora Gets Radicalized Or Sort Of

Pharoah Washington was an admirer of ISIS.  Those Arabs knew what they were doing, he said, admiring the way Muslims had organized behind Allah, and set their standards high.  Nothing less than an Islamic caliphate from East to West would satisfy them, and they would take no prisoners in their march across the continents of Europe and Asia.  

 

They were brutal, insistent, and unstoppable.  Although they suffered some reverses in Syria, they continued to terrorize Africa, toppling secular regimes and installing holy regimes across North Africa and the Sahel. Islam was the central, unifying, ethos of the movement.  Syrians, Iraqis, Palestinians, and Malians united in a militancy not seen since the days of Muhammed when he and his crusaders marched out of Arabia, across the Maghreb, and through Jordan to Jerusalem. 

Pharoah looked out the window of the Arthur P Jones public housing project, one of Anacostia's worst, a nasty vertical slum of rape, drug abuse, assault, and murder.  DC Police in a new initiative to address the issue of violent crime in the neighborhood, applied more tolerant participatory approaches to the problem, involving the community in decision-making, made a few sallies into the projects, but were turned away by automatic rifle gunfire, and buckets of boiling oil catapulted into the phalanxes of blue, scattering and chasing them back to their barracks. 

 

The police, under strict orders to hold their fire for fear of hitting innocent civilians, took the fusillade behind poorly armored vehicles, and then ran.  Ghetto rules! were the signs, banners, and placards that hung from windows and were posted in the yards of the projects. 

Now, thought Pharoah, if some of that determination could be marshalled and organized into a serious movement, then white America - like Christian Europe - would have something to think about.  No more Black Lives Matter, Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy Gandhian non-violence. The African diaspora would have to rise up, organize, and with the fury of Genghis Khan establish an American Black Caliphate. 

The Black Panthers almost did it, Pharoah remembered, Stokely Carmichael, and Rap Brown; and Louis Farrakhan and the Black Muslims put some ISIS punch in his message.  The lot of black people was foreordained, destined, righteous, and certain.  So why couldn't these initiatives, so promising but so short-lived, be revitalized, returned, and reincarnated into a much more universal movement? 

As Pharoah walked down the piss-stained stairwell into the litter-strewn, garbage dump of an open space between Block A and Block B of the projects, he had his doubts. On stoops, fences, and broken playground swings black folk were smoking dope, shooting up, nodding and stooping on Fentanyl and when not stoned silly were popping caps in the asses of brothers and sisters all up and down Arizona Avenue.

'Racism', he immediately thought. The white man, the oppressor, the ugly face of enslavement, Jim Crow and George Wallace! Because of the Massa we down here still in poverty and diminished means.

But Pharoah, despite the cant and fury of the politicized, knew that there had to be something more to it than whitey.  Why, these projects had been down here since the civil rights era more than sixty years ago, as nasty as ever, worse in fact, and looking more like a Lagos slum than anything American, and as much as he hated to admit it, a sinkhole of human detritus who flicked their cigarette butts wherever, pissed in the street, drove beaters, and pimped and whored like there was no tomorrow. 

Letitia whatever, the head of Black Lives Matter did a ghetto thing, whooped up the cause of the black man and ran off with the cash, just like the rest of us, Pharoah thought.  That cunt was a star, a monumental black Bernie Madoff, the embodiment of black enterprise and opportunity; and a hundred home boys in the projects looked up to her for robbing the white man blind; or Felicia Brown the former head of the Teachers Union who skimmed thousands off the pension fund to buy wigs and nail extensions.  A real tart, an inconsequential black prima donna. 

The worst dope in the 'hood was the white man's money - entitlement cash that came down the sluice via the city council, white Ward 3 money turned into walkin' around money, 'investments' in pre-school, after-school, in-school education that never found its way home, up the crack pipe and gone.  As long as as those Franklins were coming down up into here, no needed to get fussed, organized, and militant. 

ISIS had Allah and Muhammed.  What did the ghetto have?  No center, no militant ethos, no sense of collective destiny, and no ambition.  Even Malcolm X couldn't do more than light a few brush fires, get black folk riled up about oppression, white privilege, and the legacy of slavery.  What is wrong with us?

Pharoah had occasion to visit Africa, the homeland, the land of return; but after being hustled, beaten, and robbed in Lagos, mugged and assaulted in Kinshasa, and bedridden with malaria and amoebic dysentery, broke and abandoned, the dysfunction of the diaspora came to him in a moment of clarity.  Africa was as pestilential, corrupt, and badly ruled as any American ghetto.  There were no white men here to enforce poverty, disenfranchisement, and dishonor. Black men were doing it to themselves.  Deby, Amin, Mobutu and a hundred others ruled as despots, arrogant dictators with millions in offshore accounts and nothing to show for billions in foreign aid. 

Did we bring it with us when we were herded aboard Portuguese slave ships? Was there something endemic in African culture? Had we still not abandoned primitivism, tribalism, and totemism?

Pharoah heard gunfire near the river and it was only nine in the morning.  A desultory police siren or two, then quiet.  He walked down Alabama Avenue where storefronts were boarded or broken, the doors of the A&P were swinging on their hinges, exposing aisles of empty shelves, dirt, and ordure, a wheelless shopping cart or two by the checkout.  An old whore, tarted up and stoned, motioned to him from an alleyway. A generator popped and clanked and then stopped. 

ISIS would never allow this! Pharoah said to himself, never in a million years.  Militancy meant order, discipline, regimentation, obedience; and as quickly as his dream of an African American caliphate occurred to him, it disappeared, gone in a flash. 

It was early but the liquor stores down here opened at the crack of dawn, and Pharoah stopped in one for a six pack of malt and a pack of Kools.  He cracked one open, sat on a stoop, and lit a cigarette. He had nowhere to go, no one to see, rent check due and welfare check in the mail.  

If you walked up Alabama Avenue far enough you could get a glimpse of the Capitol building, the great monument to white power and authority.  Yes, there were a few black faces there, and just about every city did the right white thing and elected a member of an oppressed community; but Ghetto Rule was still the operative term. 

Pharoah finished his beer, tossed the can into the street, took a last drag on his Kool, and went back to the projects.