The Ishmael Gradsdovic Papers, part forty-three


In part 43 of the papers, Ishmael Gradsdovic remembers a conversation he had at a table in the University Union at Cal Poly


"It's what they don't tell you in History 315. The Egyptians were black Africans. You can see it still on the Sphinx, it's a black man's facial features. You look at the filmstrips you saw at school and all the Pharoahs are white men with tans, but they were black Africans. Socrates, Mohammad, the Buddha -- you look at the hair in the statues of the Buddha -- they were all black men. Jesus was a black man, an African. It says so in the bible that he had hair like wool."

"I heard that Michael Jackson was a black man."

"Fuck you. Thomas Jefferson was a black man. Abraham Lincoln; three-quarters black. Dag Hammarskjold, a black man. Bob Marley, Trotsky, Mao, Cleopatra, Carl Lewis, Queen Victoria, Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chaplin, the Dalai Lama, Beethoven, Charles Nelson Riley, Rodney Allen Ripley, all black men."

"George Washington Carver."

"George Washington Carver, FUCK George Washington Carver. Every school in Amerikkka teaches you about this guy -- all they give us in history is peanuts. FUCK peanuts. The black man invented electricity, invented the calendar, blood transfusions, the automatic teller machine, the scientific method, the seven-day week, the graphic user interface, the zipper, the wristwatch, the pocket fisherman, velcro, the postcard, the driver-side airbag, cold fusion, the boxed set, the printing press, the butter knife, the Caps Lock key...

"We've been systematically written out of the white man's history. A black man wrote the U.S. Constitution, the Hippocratic Oath, 2/3ds of Nerdnosh, the FBI copyright warning on videotapes, The Old Man and The Sea, The Chronicles of Narnia, American Psycho, the Gettysburg Address, Beowolf, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the Miranda warning, the Schoolhouse Rock episode about conjunctions, the second and third commentaries on the I Ching, the lyrics to `Red River Valley,' the very first chain letter, Microsoft Windows, the complete works of Alex Haley..."

"Hey..."

"Hey what, man? You're not stupid, just ignorant. They don't teach you this stuff in school. Dick and Jane are white. The `flesh' colored crayon you used to color them in was white. You used white-out to whitewash your white lies on your white 8 1/2 by 11 paper. Archeologists have found clay tablets thousands of years old in Ghana that measured EXACTLY 8 1/2 by 11 inches. You could get thrown out of class if you used `colorful' language on the blackboard -- blackballed.

"It's like blackmail, blackout, black-hearted, the pot calling the kettle black, black sox..."

"In the black."

"Case in fucking point. Black & blue, et cetera et cetera. Darth Vader wore black and used the voice of a black man. The bad guys wear black. Purity and beauty is like the driven snow, Snow White. Who wrote this shit?"

"Someone told me it was some black guy."

"Where have you been? It's the ice people. Snow white is right. A bunch of genetic freaks hiding up in snow caves plotting to destroy the black man. AIDS was created in a white laboratory by white scientists. O.J. was framed by a white cop. When the space shuttle blew up there was a black astronaut on board -- bet you didn't know that?"

"I'll be damned."

"Three Mile Island: happened when the NAACP convention was in town. King and Malcolm, offed by the white man. Rodney King. Anwar Sadat. Nelson Mandela."

"I thought he was still alive."

"Yeah, sure, man, but they put him in the hole for decades. What, you think they've got to kill you to kill you? Rodney King's still alive, too, fool."

"Oh."

"The Tuskegee Experiment, there's another that's not in the history books, this was only about thirty years ago, they injected a bunch of black men with syph in this very country and just let them die. Just let them die so they could watch."

"No shit?"

"No shit. The black man was a slave in this country for generations. We were kidnapped from Africa and brought here in chains and worked our whole lives for people who bought and sold us like cattle. It says right in the Constitution that we only count for 3/5th of a person because we're black."

"C'mon."

"And today it just keeps going and going. They put chemicals in our food to make us sterile and put abortion clinics in our neighborhoods. It's like genocide in slow motion. When we're down to manageable numbers they're just going to ship us off to camps. The plans are already written up and approved by every president since Ford, written up by Henry Fucking Kissingjew. This is a war, and this time we're drafting ourselves."

"Wow."

"So, you want anything?"

"No, just looking."



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