The Newtons – Cam, Huey and Isaac – and why you and Cam should boycott the Super Bowl

by Paradise, the poet

Cam-Newton-300x200, The Newtons - Cam, Huey and Isaac - and why you and Cam should boycott the Super Bowl, Culture Currents
Cam Newton

An amazing story is about to unfold. I don’t know how it’s going to happen or play out exactly, but it’s going to be a doozy! The ancestors have something up their sleeves and I’m inclined to believe this joker is going to be wild! Do you think this is a coincidence?

Cam NEWTON is playing for the Carolina PANTHERS in Super Bowl 50, in the greater Oakland San Francisco Bay Area. Huey NEWTON cofounded the Black PANTHERS 50 years ago in the greater Oakland San Francisco Bay Area. Huey Newton was born Feb. 17, 1942; he passed Aug. 22, 1989. Cam Newton was born in 1989, the same year Dr. Huey P. Newton passed. Hahaha!

Who made this cosmic arrangement? What universal world traffic controller was involved? Isn’t it amazing that this is the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party and the 50th anniversary of the Super Bowl, and one of the quarterbacks in the game is considered a radical Black buck named Cam Newton, who plays for a team called the Panthers? So we get to talk about Huey Newton and the Black Panthers and politics and sports in the same breath! And stir interest in people who might not otherwise be interested?

Is Cam Newton related to Huey Newton? He might be. Huey’s folks come from Monroe, Louisiana; Cam’s folks come from Savannah, Georgia, less than 500 miles away. Huey Percy Newton was named after the radically democratic, former governor of Louisiana, Huey P. Long, who believed there should be a chicken in every pot and every man, Black or white, deserved the opportunity to house and feed his family.

Every man a king, but no one wears the crown, he used to say. The people loved him and the only thing that stopped him from becoming president was a bullet! Similarly, the owner of the Carolina Panthers is considered a good “white dude” and is disliked by other NFL owners because of his democratic ideals, fairness and being broad minded enough to have a Black quarterback and Puerto Rican head coach!

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Huey Newton

Now here’s a strange new kinky twist: Could Cam and Huey Newton be related to Sir Isaac Newton? Cam Newton joined the Carolina Panthers when he was 22 years old. Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity when he was 23 years old. Huey P. Newton cofounded the Black Panthers when he was 24 years old.

Isaac Newton discovered the Universal Laws of Gravitation and Motion in 1666. Exactly 300 years later, in 1966, Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense! Now, 350 years later, Cam Newton of the Carolina Panthers, in Panther Country (Dr. Huey P. Newton’s old stomping grounds), is getting ready to play in the Super Bowl, using his extraordinary ability to pass the ball, scientifically, against the forces of gravity, at a precise velocity so that his receivers can catch the ball in motion and score touchdowns! Whew!

Haven’t you heard? The ancestors are calling! Now here’s the Big Question that the times are posing: Should Cam Newton play for the Super Bowl title and entertain the oppressive, rich, gansta elite; or should YOU, Newton and the Black players boycott the game to show that Black lives matter to the one billion people who will be watching from around the world?

Let me post some of the answers that I got when I posed this question to Black folks on social media, and then respond to them. Most of the responses I got were disappointingly materialistic and surprisingly mundane!

“No, Cam Newton should not boycott the game; he should play. He needs to get that paper. He deserves to get paid. It’s his career, his job. Are you going to give him a job when he loses it and put food on his family’s table? He’s worked too hard to fulfill his dream to quit now. White people already hate him, why make it worse? What kind of message would that send? What good would it do? It would not change white supremacy one bit! Let him kick their butts instead, and become the second Black quarterback to win the Super Bowl!”

My response is: Wow! Haven’t you heard? Man does not live by bread alone. How many hamburgers can you eat? We are not quadrupeds who must always look down to the ground for sustenance. How long before we look to the sky to and for loftier things, goals and dreams? What about self-sacrifice for bigger, better, grander things – for your people, humanity? Our ancestors risked much more than their jobs to get us here – this far!

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Isaac Newton

Haven’t you heard? They say the NFL is a bunch of millionaires playing for billionaires. Cam Newton is set for life. He makes enough money in a year than most humans will make in a lifetime. Caucasians represent but a handful of the population on this planet; let them hate. But stand up on the world’s biggest stage and make a statement for the poor and oppressed people of this world, against the minority who are oppressing them, and you will win the hearts of over 6 billion people of color beyond your wildest dreams – a status comparable to the heyday of Muhammad Ali, not to mention the favor and adoration of the ancestors!

The kind of message you will send is that you are against and will no longer tolerate the slaughter, exploitation and mass incarceration of Black people, poor people and people of color. You oppose the poisoning of our air, our water, our food and our minds – the very future of every person on this planet! The message you will be sending is that you have not forgotten Flint, Michigan, Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston, Oakland, Kenya, the Kongo or even Paris! And you will no longer tolerate 1,500 Black people being killed by police last year and little Black girls being tossed around classrooms by grown men in uniforms as if their lives didn’t matter! This is the message that needs to be sent!

One of Huey Newton’s favorite community mantras was: “What is your program, brother?” The Last Poets used to sing, “Oppression is worse than the grave! Better to die for a noble cause than to live and die a slave!” And Bobbie Seale suggested that we SEIZE THE TIME!

Watch the game, not the hand in your pocket?

Dr. Frances Cress Welsing tried to enlighten us about the American sports juggernaut and her fascination with balls, black, brown and white. And the Last Poets, with their poem about Black athletes in America, “Run, Nigger,” often talked about how, while we were playing with balls, we were having our balls cut off!

I can’t say I regret almost exhausting my youth with sports, because they helped to give me the physique and mental toughness of a warrior! But I was one of those millions of youth with pie in the sky pipe dreams that I would become one of the millions who sought to get one of the 300 or so jobs in the NBA, not to mention the NFL and MLB. There are so many other things I could have, would have been doing if I had known better or was afforded more opportunities – other than that GRAND ILLUSION, the sports juggernaut which apparently most Americans are still hypnotized and mesmerized by.

Perhaps even sadder, brothers in our communities are hard pressed to even speak to each other unless they are talking about sports! Then they get a chance to show they have talent and expertise in something. But few talk about what’s going on in the community – our needs, how to collectively uplift and protect our women and children, organizing, starting business ventures etc.

This is one of the reasons we so loved and love the Panthers! While other Black youth see their communities in need and the Black House on fire and are advised or decide that the solution to the problem is to go to college and learn how to put out a fire, the Black Panthers rolled up their sleeves, picked up water hoses and took direct action. They made their communities their universities and earned their master’s degrees and PhDs by serving the needs of the people and the world!

The Great White Hope vs. the Great Black Hope and why you should boycott Super Bowl 50

The Super Bowl is America’s second biggest game – the first is racism – and the Super Bowl is America’s biggest cash cow party for it. Everywhere the Super Bowl goes, that city’s streets are sure to be cleaned up and the homeless swept out of sight for the visiting, gold card carrying, patron tourists. And once again this year the backstory of the Super Bowl will be a Great White Hope, Peyton Manning, versus a Great Black Hope, Cam Newton. Most of Black America will be rooting for Cam and the Panthers, while most of White America will be rooting for Peyton and the Broncos. The Huey Newton-like radical, young buck quarterback versus the good old Southern boy, and one of the last of a dying breed quarterback. Both quarterbacks are great and shouldn’t have to be subjected to such vile racial interpretations, but that’s America.

The Super Bowl is America’s second biggest game – the first is racism – and the Super Bowl is America’s biggest cash cow party for it.

Racists can have very skewered points of views. For example I noticed this one Facebook page was full of friends’ comments, bemoaning the fact that they hated to see that nggr Cam Newton in the Super Bowl! This is very peculiar, because if they are referring to Black people, more Black people have played in the Super Bowl than so-called white people. And the NFL is the second blackest league in sports behind the NBA!

Poor racist Caucasian sports fans – Peyton Manning is one of their last hopes. He and Tom Brady are two of the last immobile quarterbacks in the game. The quarterback position has been Custer’s Last Stand, the one position in the league where the white boys could rule and claim superiority at the game’s key position. But now here comes those great nggrs to take over that position also.

I say give them what they want this game; let them have their Stupor Bowl! Let all the Black players drop out in protest of this country’s murderous racial hatred and let the world see a For Whites Only, No Coloreds Allowed, Vanilla Bowl! Then let them see how many TV sets would be turned off and channels changed. Let the Caucazoid look at himself in the mirror without the Black man as a prop!

I’ve read where a couple of people argued that Cam Newton should play the game to be the second Black quarterback to win the Super Bowl, which is very telling because Cam Newton would actually be the third Black quarterback to win the Super Bowl, all against the Snow White Hope Denver Broncos. Russell Wilson of the Seattle Seahawks led his team to victory in 2014. But Doug Williams of the Washington Redskins, the first Black quarterback to win a Super Bowl – in 1988 – has already been forgotten!?!

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Take an umbrella like this to the game if you must go. This photo was taken outside Marcus Book Store in Oakland, where Black lives always matter.

I don’t know what medicine people need, but a win by Peyton Manning won’t stop a racist white person’s need to feel superior. And a win by Cam Newton won’t stop Black people’s need to disprove they are inferior. Self-esteem has to come from within. We’ve been going through this quest for racial supremacy through sports for hundreds of years, since before Jack Johnson became the first Black heavyweight champion of the world – and was knocking out white boys left and right as our Great Black Hope. And yet we still, today, need a Black quarterback to win a game for us?

I say #$&#@ the game. Stop fueling and funding oppression and take a stand for Black people, children and human decency worldwide. Will a boycott of such magnitude squash so called white supremacy? Probably not, but it will put a heck of a dent in it and, more importantly, Blacks and other people of color worldwide would be forced to reexamine their priorities and addictions to The Cystem!

However, if you must go to the game, don’t forget to bring your Black Lives Matter umbrellas because it’s going to rain, rain, rain!

Paradise is currently in the process of recording his underground hip hop, spoken word classic on the unspoken motives of racial prejudice, “I Love Everything About You, But You!” And he is also seeking funding for his newly founded Black Elders of Oakland Fund, which will support local Black elders in need. For updates and donations, Paradise may be reached at www.2016worldsfair.wordpress.com, www.trueviberecords.com and oaklandworldsfair@yahoo.com.