Journalists take a snapshot of history, and
present it as a defining reality. Political commentators speak
off the cuff, on
the moment, and attempt to present a broad picture of the world
based on the day’s “news.” It is only when one looks back on the
body of work of journalism – did we make the right call, did we
see the essential truth? – that we can assess our usefulness to
society. The Black Commentator has been useful. In the
hot days of August the staff of The Black Commentator reviewed
itself – our body of
work – and found it good, and useful to society, and a resource
for Black people’s mission in the world. We present to you what
we believe are our best ideas, our commentaries on the life we
share on this planet.
The War
We must begin with War. War is organized killing. Why did
the United States declare war on a huge section of the world,
and how was that made acceptable to the populace?
This magazine saw the war coming, and understood
the social mechanisms that had long been in place to sustain
the aggression.
Two months before the Iraq war began, we scoped the moves of
the dance of death: The title was, “The
Mother of All War Shows,” January 30, 2003
The real show is in the show, itself. The people who created
George Bush's ridiculous War Face are not just playing crazy
to gain transient advantage over Frenchmen and Russians.
They are Hell-bent on proving to the natives (all
of us) that they are capable of unimaginable destruction.
We must see it to believe it – which is why this war is all
but inevitable. In the aftermath of horror, the world will
become malleable, ready for reshaping in the not-yet-defined
New Order.
That's the plan. The pirates are confident they can improvise
the post war details at their leisure, later. What we are
witnessing is essentially the buildup to a global consciousness-searing
U.S. military demonstration - the Mother of All War Shows.
If we search for the military or economic objectives of the
conflict on anything so crude as a map, we have missed the
point.
We wrote these words before the war. The Black Commentator
understood that a Master Plan was in motion – although not
a very good plan. It has since come asunder, which is good
for humanity.
What keeps this machinery of death moving?
Racism. That’s
what gets the white majority excited. It is what motivates
them to kill other people on a global scale, and it is what
John Kerry still calls forth with his militaristic image-making.
In the days before the first U.S. troops
crossed the Kuwait border, The Black Commentator saw the
racist war-making scenario
unfolding, yet again. The aggression against world order was
framed as a defense of civilization – but nobody was buying
into that package except the white U.S. audience. On March
13, the week before Shock and Awe unfolded, we connected the
impending atrocity to its historical progenitors. The result
was one of the most important articles we have ever published: “Racism & War:
Perfect Together.”
This may be the last pre-Event commentary from  .
Since there is no doubt that Shock and Awe will, in fact,
forever alter global consciousness, it is important that
we avail ourselves of these moments before the cataclysm
to state a fact that is obvious to most people on Earth:
Next week, or the week after, the American people as a whole
will be rightfully judged guilty of premeditated crimes against
human civilization.
We do not say this for
rhetorical effect, nor are we referring to any religious
notions of collective
guilt. The criminal enterprise on which the United States is
embarked – the ghastly equivalent of a live-fire, multi-megaton
Fourth of July celebration of the New American Century – is
the end product of a society shaped by genocide and slavery.
White America sees the world through the eyes of the mass murderer
and slaveholder. Were it not so, there would not exist the
grotesque disconnect between white American public opinion
and the opinions of mankind, shared generally by Black America.
Bush would not be possible.
But they made war against our wishes. Black
people were near-universally against this war, and would
have been more obviously and vociferously
so, if we had been asked the right questions. However, they
didn’t ask us for permission to launch this racist crusade.
Now, they will reap the whirlwind, a global rebuff, as we foresaw
in our article of March 20, 2003, “They
Have Reached Too Far: Bush’s Road Leads to Ruin for Himself
and His Pirates.”
No one can predict the specific ways in which
nations and movements will resist Bush's aggression against
civilization.
What is certain is that the Pirates have succeeded in
arraying important sectors of every other nation on the
planet in opposition to Washington's hegemony. Bush has
made the name that is our patrimony – "America" – a
curse on the lips of much of the world.
If Shock and Awe is essentially a horrific
psychological warfare exercise – and it is – the assault
on humanity's collective sensibilities has already had disastrous,
unintended effects.
Although they are incapable of realizing it,
the Bush men have revealed themselves to the world – the audience for
Shock and Awe – as grotesquely ugly, brutish, irredeemably
repugnant human beings whose touch must be avoided under
all circumstances. Every plan and project of individuals
and nations will be shaped by having witnessed a racist
America raining fire on a weaker people – and reveling
in the crime.
Bush's plan for world domination was doomed
before the burning, blasting, thundering, screaming display.
The Pirates have accelerated the processes of their own ruin.
At The Black Commentator, we thought hard
and long about the historical juncture at which we had arrived.
The task was made
far more difficult by the corporate media, who had totally
abandoned every ethic and principle of journalism. We could
not believe what we heard, or saw. They had reshaped reality
to fit the racist mission. They were on a crusade to confuse
the public – and they were also confused, themselves.
The corporate media were embedded. They
were on mission, in a Race War, as we wrote about in, “Onward
Embedded Soldiers: The Corporate Media’s Deputized War
Coverage,” on March 27, 2003
We understand racist behavior largely through
the repetitive patterns of the pathology – how "white folks act." To
venture into the emotional depths of the delusion, we
imagine, must be like a visit to hell. It is safer to
watch from a distance as the racist reacts to invisible
threats, lashes out at inoffensive people, or celebrates
victories against imagined adversaries – in a way, like
trying to figure out what a very aggressive mime "sees."
Instead of the meticulously calibrated, rolling advance
under and through the smoke and hellfire of Shock and Awe,
the Americans and Brits lurched into war, like a driver who
can't handle a stick shift.
At these perilous times for the planet, and for those who
are thought of as domestic enemies, we must never forget
that the adversary is not only powerful, he is crazy.
And so it has also been crazy to us at
The Black Commentator, who try to make sense of it all. War
is organized madness, the deliberate infliction of the unthinkable
and unspeakable,
which must somehow be made palatable to the masses, who will
have to die for the idea. It became clear to us at that
the Bush men were organizing a War Society, against our will.
We called on the wisdom of W.E.B. Dubois,
who had some very good advice, which we transmitted on May
22, 2003, in a piece
called “Permanent
War and the ‘Color Line: Iraq on the 100th Anniversary
of ‘The Souls of Black Folk.”
Dubois would immediately recognize the white
supremacist character of the Bush men's New American Century.
Although
only a relatively small group of rich and venal men stand
to profit from the present day Pirates' policy of Permanent
War, the project requires the assent of an imperial-minded
majority of white people, collectively demanding their
entitlement: dominion….
So we see that the conversation
between the Pirates and their public reinforces delusions
of white supremacy
and goodness, while thoroughly niggerizing Iraqis. The Bush
men, sharing the unworldly view of their audience, then find
themselves attempting to organize friendly Iraqi factions to
supervise the society on their behalf. Yet they cannot tell
Iraqis apart from one another, and make more enemies every
day as they stumble through a country that is in no respect
the one they imagined. The Americans sit in the middle of Mesopotamia
and Kurdistan, armed, dangerous – and lost.
The Bush Pirates took an historic gamble,
betting that they could rearrange the political geography
of the world by imposing
a planetary U.S. military dictatorship – starting in Iraq.
However, the U.S. project would require the collaboration of
the Iraqi people. The core, essential racism of the Bush regime
rendered them incompetent for the task, as we explained in
our June 19, 2003 article, “The
Pirates’ Blunt, Useless Instruments: The Iraq Occupation
Cannot Possibly Succeed.”
It is, of course, the
Iraqi people themselves who are steadily making the U.S.
position untenable. The Americans
will be forced to place the entire country on lockdown, or
retreat to bastions of remote operations. The farce of "liberation" was
doomed from the start, because the Americans are incapable
of recognizing and dealing with non-whites as full human beings.
Their racist delusions prevent them from undertaking the most
basic tasks necessary to construct a minimally effective Iraqi
proxy from among the human material at hand.
Racism is the mental illness that will bring low the superpower,
which is ruled by men who are incapable of understanding other
human beings.
The Obama Drama
The entire nation now knows the name, Barack Obama, keynote
speaker at the Democratic National Convention and, we hope, the
next Black U.S. Senator from Illinois. State Senator Obama is
familiar to us through Associate
Editor Bruce Dixon, a Chicagoan who worked with Obama in the
massive voter registration drive that resulted in Carol Moseley-Braun’s
election to the Senate, in 1992.
We were overjoyed to learn that Obama, whose
progressive credentials are impeccable, was making a bid for
the Senate. Imagine our
consternation, then, to discover his name posted on the on-line
list of members of the Democratic Leadership Council, the corporate-funded
virus infecting the Democratic Party. On June 5 of last year,
Bruce Dixon initiated a dialogue with the candidate, in a piece
titled, “In Search
of the Real Barack Obama: Can a Black Senate Candidate Resist
the DLC?” Dixon noted that, “Somebody else's brand of politics
appears to have intruded on Obama's campaign.”
Obama responded to our article and phone calls, claiming, as
we reported on June
19 2003, that “neither my staff nor I have had any direct
contact with anybody at DLC since I began this campaign a year
ago.” He continued:
“I don't know who nominated me for the DLC list of 100 rising
stars, nor did I expend any effort to be included on the list
beyond filling out a three line questionnaire asking me
to describe my current political office, my proudest accomplishment, and my
cardinal rules of politics. Since my mother taught me not
to reject a compliment when it's offered, I didn't object
to the DLC's inclusion of my name on their list. I certainly
did not view such inclusion as an endorsement on my part of the
DLC platform.”
Wrong answer. We know Obama to be a person of high intelligence,
who understood precisely what his filling out of the forms meant:
he was giving the DLC permission to advertise him as one of their
own. Is that sleeping with the enemy? We thought so. The fact
of the matter is, the DLC is where the money is in the
Democratic Party. Obama took the route of least resistance, and
allowed his name to be used by people with whom he has no political
connection – the powerful, rich faction of the Democratic
Party that opposes everything that Obama stands for. So, we called
him on it.
We did not want to harm a progressive Black
politician, but we were determined that there must be a penalty
for sleeping
with the enemy – or even dozing with the enemy. We took what
we believed was the principled approach: to ask the candidate
to define himself.
On June 26, 2003, we reported on the results
of our dialogue with Barack Obama. The story was called, “Obama
to Have Name Removed from DLC List: Says ‘New Democrats’ acted ‘without
my knowledge.’”
was
shocked to find Obama’s name associated with the New Democratic
Movement, an affiliate of what Bruce Dixon calls the “Republican
Trojan Horse in the bowels of the Democratic machinery” – the
DLC. In a June 19 Cover Story that included a letter from Obama, posed
three “bright line” questions to the candidate, “that should
determine whether you belong in the DLC, or not.”
1. Do you favor the withdrawal of the United
States from NAFTA? Will
you in the Senate introduce or sponsor legislation toward that
end?
2. Do you favor the adoption of a single
payer system of universal health care to extend the availability
of quality health care
to all persons in this country? Will you in the Senate introduce
or sponsor legislation toward that end?
3. Would you have voted against the October
10 congressional resolution allowing the president to use
unilateral force against
Iraq?
asserted
that a “Yes” answer to all three questions would be “anathema” to
the DLC, whose leadership “has been unequivocal in their support
of NAFTA, opposition to anything resembling national health insurance,
and fervently in support of the Iraq war – basic issues of war
and peace, life and death, and livelihood.”
We thought that the “bright line” questioning was necessary
and useful. Barack Obama agreed – as we fully expected he would – to
all three items, and also categorically stated that he would
no longer allow the DLC to play games with his name:
“It does appear that, without my knowledge, the DLC…listed
me in their ‘New Democrat’ directory,” Obama continued. “Because
I agree that such a directory implies membership, I will be calling
the DLC to have my name removed, and appreciate your having brought
this fact to my attention.”
The next week, Obama’s name was gone from
the DLC list.
Mass Black Incarceration: The most critical problem
The Gulag has become an overwhelming fact
of life in Black America, affecting every aspect of African
American existence. Mass incarceration
is the largest reality that we confront – shaping and accenting
issues of employment, education, voting, and the creation of
family units.
The statistics assault us annually: nearly
a million Black people are in custody at any given time, and
majorities of inner city
males between the ages of 20 and 30 are under some form of state
supervision – not a good social mix in which to make families.
This did not happen by accident. Putting massive numbers of
Black people in jail is national policy, and has been so since
the mid-Seventies. has
explored the issue many times, most recently in our June 17,
2004 Cover Story, “Mass
Incarceration and Rape: The Savaging of Black America.”
Mass incarceration is by far the greatest
crisis facing Black America, ultimately eclipsing all others. It is an overarching
reality that colors and distorts every aspect of African American
political, economic and cultural life, smothering the human – and
humane – aspirations of the community. Even the boundless creativity
of youth cannot escape the chains that stretch from the Gulag
into virtually every Black social space. We hear prison, talk
prison, wear prison and – to a horrific degree – have become
inured to the all-enveloping presence of prison in virtually
every Black neighborhood and extended family.
After more than three decades of mass Black
incarceration as national policy, Black America teeters at
the edge of an
abyss, unable to muster more than a small fraction of its collective
energies to advance its agenda in housing, employment and education.
The community has been poisoned by massive, ever increasing
infusions of the prison experience – a debasement that now
permeates much of the fabric of Black life.
The policy of massive incarceration of African
Americans is implemented methodically, with such uniformity
and intensity
that it is perceived as a fact of life – Black folks go to jail.
After 30 years, it has become so central a theme of national
life that the legitimate basis of the crime against a whole people
is not even questioned – we must deserve to go to jail in huge
numbers. Even we believe it.
In fact, a great crime has been committed
against Black Americans, as we explored in our March 18, 2004,
article, “Mass
Black Incarceration is White Societal Aggression.”
In the United States, mass incarceration
of Blacks is national policy. This is an obvious and provable
fact – otherwise there
would not be such uniformity of practice throughout this vast
country. The disparity-creating process begins with the intake
system, which instructs police to observe, stop and interrogate
Black people with far greater frequency and intensity than whites.
Those whites unfortunate enough to brush up against the criminal
justice system intake machinery, are disproportionately spit
back out without being charged with an offense. The pool Blackens,
as police attach more severe and numerous crimes to the Black “offenders” in
custody. Prosecutors further cull wayward whites from the herd
through lenient application of statutes, and by pursuing less
harsh penalties for the charges brought. Judges lend their hands
to the racial distillation process, using whatever discretion
they are allowed to favor whites in sentencing and conditions
of confinement.
Let’s Affirm Some Action
Affirmative action, as originally conceived by the civil rights
movement and made into law by President Lyndon Johnson, has not
existed since the 1978 Supreme Court Bakke decision. Much of
Black leadership has been pretending otherwise, and hoping that
nobody would know the difference. The Harvard
Civil Rights Project tried to continue the fiction, after
the High Court gave its blessing to the University of Michigan
Law School’s diversity program, last year. “Affirmative action
is alive and well,” they said – when, in fact, it had been dead
for a long time.
does
not believe that a movement can be based on wishful thinking.
So we tried to set the record straight, with our article of July
3, 2003, “The Slow
and Tortured Death of Affirmative Action: Redress of Racial
Wrongs No Longer Public Policy.”
As public policy, affirmative action can
be dated to President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s June
4, 1965, address to the graduating class of Howard University.
LBJ intended this speech as his own Civil Rights Proclamation.
He chose his words carefully, with an eye towards posterity:
"You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying:
'now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire,
and choose the leaders you please.' You do not take a man who
for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him
to the starting line of a race, saying, 'you are free to compete
with all the others,' and still justly believe you have been
completely fair…. This is the next and more profound stage
of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but
opportunity - not just legal equity but human ability - not
just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact
and as a result."
Johnson’s meaning was unmistakable. The power of the government
of the United States would be harnessed to redress the historical
grievances of, and harms done to, a specific people: African
Americans. Public policy would affirmatively address the legacy
(“chains”) of slavery, by instituting programs designed to achieve
equality for Black people “as a result.”
Johnson’s words were a direct response
to the demands of the civil rights movement. He employed
the same metaphor as did
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1964 book, “Why
We Can’t Wait”:
“Whenever this issue of compensatory or
preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our
friends recoil in horror.
The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should
ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable,
but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man is
entering the starting line in a race 300 years after another
man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in
order to catch up with his fellow runner.”
LBJ and MLK were engaged in an historical
dialogue, culminating in the President’s Howard University
address, marking the definitive beginning of affirmative
action as public policy.
That policy remained in force until 1978,
when it was eviscerated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bakke Decision. Those who believe
that all that is required in terms of justice from the United
States is a concern for diversity, rather than redress of Black
people’s specific historical grievances, clung to Bakke like
a life raft. Certainly, it was better than nothing, but it was
a reversal of the nation’s commitment to make the daughters and
sons of slaves whole. A new law of the land was laid down:
What has definitively replaced affirmative
action is a kind of soccer mom diversity consensus. "Effective participation
by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civic life
of our nation is essential if the dream of one nation, indivisible,
is to be realized," wrote Sandra Day O’Connor. Nothing in
there about justice for the descendants of the slaves. Instead,
government is deemed to have a compelling interest in running
itself and society more effectively. Diversity is good for the
country, just as it’s nice to look out on the soccer field and
see kids from various ethnicities playing together.
Which means that white folks are free to
play at diversity and use race as a factor, as long as the
rules don’t address
racial injustice or demand results.
What Sandra Day O’Connor and her four colleagues affirmed is
that America does not recognize its specific crimes against Black
people, but will try to “diversify” as white people see fit.
The Cartoon Furor
The Bush regime has its little menagerie
of Black pets, unimportant people who become media names because
the rich and powerful display
them. Such was, and is, Janice Brown, a very nutty woman from
California who has embraced the full program of the super-rich – a
fascist worldview. We were supposed to accept her as one of our
own, when she was nominated to the federal appellate bench. Black
faces in high places, and all that rot.
was
introduced to Judge Janice Rogers Brown through an August 28,
2003 press
release from People for the American Way and the NAACP. We
didn’t know the woman, but she smelled funky. The NAACP and PFAW
said:
"Janice Rogers Brown has a record of hostility to fundamental
civil and constitutional rights principles, and she is committed
to using her power as a judge to twist the law in ways that
undermine those principles, said Hilary Shelton, director,
NAACP Washington Bureau. "For the administration
to bring forward a nominee with this record and hope to get
some kind of credit because she is the first African American
woman nominated to the DC Circuit is one more sign of the administration's
political cynicism."
The report, "Loose Cannon," notes that when Brown
was nominated to the state supreme court in 1996, she was found
unqualified by the state bar evaluation committee, based not
only on her relative inexperience but also because she was "prone
to inserting conservative political views into her appellate
opinions" and based on complaints that she was "insensitive
to established precedent."
The NAACP and PFAW both seemed to think that
Janice Brown was a new Clarence Thomas. So we played it that
way, with an article
titled, “A Female Clarence Thomas in the DC Federal Court? A
Statement by People for the American Way and the NAACP.” In fact,
we just ran the press release along with a cartoon inspired by
the words:
"Janice Rogers Brown is the far right's dream judge," said
People For the American Way President Ralph G. Neas. "She
embodies Clarence Thomas's ideological extremism and Antonin
Scalia's abrasiveness and right-wing activism. Giving her
a powerful seat on the DC Circuit Court would be a disaster."
We put Clarence Thomas in drag, and added a fright wig, and
called it Janice Brown.
Click
here to see September 4, 2003 cartoon.
We didn’t realize that the Hard Right was
looking for a way to smear the PFAW and the NAACP. Orrin Hatch,
the Hard Right
chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, decided to make our
cartoon the centerpiece of his hearings. We responded to the
attack, in our October 30, 2003, edition, titled “Testi-Lying
to the Senate and the People: The Janice Brown-Orrin Hatch
Cartoon Furor.”
The Black Commentator was the surprise
witness in the hearing room – our cartoon, exhibit A. made
out quite well in the madness, by our reckoning, but that was
collateral, unintended fallout. Hatch grossly abused his chairmanship,
mangled the rules and protocols of the Body – and got away with
it. In the face of this assault against institutional norms,
all that his Democratic victims and the press found to criticize
was a cartoon by Khalil Bendib. Very few among the media even
got that part right. As we wrote:
A drawing by an immigrant artist, commissioned by men representing
no one but their own publication, an item of absolutely no
relevance to the business before the committee, was made to
dominate a critical process of the United States Senate: its
duty to advise and consent.
’s
publishers are glad for the publicity. Unwanted visitors sent
to our site will weed themselves out, leaving a much larger audience
of sane, progressive persons from our target demographic. We
win. But something is very wrong when a Senate committee chairman
is permitted to turn a nomination hearing into a theatrical production
with impunity.
More interestingly, the White Hard Right succeeded in convincing
the national media that had
somehow committed a great slander against African American womanhood,
when all we had done was put a fright wig on a man.
The Republican’s purpose in making a fetish of the cartoon
was to disrupt the hearing, itself. Orrin Hatch staged an utterly
cynical, perverse assault on a nomination process that occasionally
frustrates the GOP’s relentless packing of the judiciary with
Hard Right lawyers. So deep is Hatch’s contempt for constitutional
processes, that he gleefully sabotaged his committee’s lawful
mission by imposing on it ’s irrelevant cartoon.
Hatch thrust a handful of politically opinionated people with
a web site and a drawing pencil into the gears of the constitution,
then cried out that these private citizens acting in concert
with shadowy others had broken the machinery. A fantastic performance
by a morally depraved man, made all the more amazing by its effectiveness.
Senator Ted Kennedy was knocked into state
of pitiful incoherence: “As
others have stated, the kind of cartoon that is displayed here
and all that it suggests, and that, obviously, I have been
on this committee for some number of years, and we have really
been free from, uh, this kind of activity, suggestion. In more
recent times some of the suggestions have been raised but,
uh, it has no place, anyplace in our society, particularly
not here.”
What the hell did that mean? We recognize
the obligatory denunciation at the end of the string of words,
but what kind of “activity” and “suggestion” has
the committee been free from for “some number of years?” Did
Kennedy mean that in past years no chairman had foisted “offensive” cartoons
on the committee? Was this a mumbled complaint against Hatch?
Or did he mean that he had not seen such a cartoon in years?
It doesn’t matter. Hatch had neutralized Kennedy.
We were deluged with mail, much of it generated
by the Orrin Hatch’s summons to the Hard Right to send a message to “Black…Commentator…dot…com,” a
command he uttered repeatedly during the hearing. But most of
our mail was positive, and our base of readers increased at least
30 percent after that week. Thank you, Orrin Hatch.
Basic Math: Black Folks are on the Left
The corporate media entertain the blatant
lies of the Right, and have allowed the verifiable falsehood
of Black folks’ rightward
drift to become part of the political conversation. Much of the
propaganda cites the November, 2002 survey conducted by the Joint
Center for Political and Economic Studies, which found that
younger African Americans were less connected to the Democratic
Party than older Blacks.
When the survey was released, it became immediately
clear that it provided food for the enemy. It was, in fact,
a very flawed survey of Black political thought, which nonetheless
revealed
exactly the opposite conclusions that rightwing foundations and
operatives have promulgated. We answered the cacophony from the
corporate Right, on November 21, 2002. It was a very thorough
analysis, under the heading, “Poll
Shows Black Political Consensus Strong: Analysis of JCPES
Survey Reveals Consistent Race, Gender, Age Agreement.”
Despite blatant misuse and distortions
of the JCPES survey by the Right and corporate media, the
survey reveals very little
political space for conservative inroads among the ranks of
African Americans. However, the JCPES survey, based on comparisons
of white and Black answers to the same questions, and about
issues and personalities given daily weight in the corporate
media, has built-in limitations, of which the center's researchers
are aware….
What we are much more likely seeing is a deepening disappointment with
the Democratic Party among Blacks. Often, such emotional feelings are
all that polling questions that call for self-description can
evoke. The survey asked, "Do you consider yourself a Democrat,
a Republican, or an independent?" The question actually
allows the responder to choose among a wide range of options,
not just three….
What can we make of the slippage in Black
identification with the Democrats in 2002? Nothing that favors
Republicans or conservatives
of any stripe. Enough Blacks were disappointed with the party
this mid-term election season to eliminate the word Democrat
from their personal self-description. But they voted for the
party, anyway, in the usual numbers, because their disappointment
was from the Left, and because the Right – the Republican Party – was
no alternative at all.
We can expect that our political behavior
will be the same in 2004. Black people will vote overwhelmingly
Democratic, because
they have no other alternative. At heart, Black voters are what
Harvard’s Black Professor Michael Dawson calls, “Swedish Social
Democrats” – who don’t have a Social Democratic Party to vote
for. They ain’t Republicans.
The Money Monster
Wal-Mart is run by a family from Bentonville,
Arkansas. The Walton siblings are the most aggressively political
rich folks
in the land. They are the moneybags behind the school vouchers “movement,” which
is only a manifestation of their bankrolls. However, these pockets
are huge, and can create the impression of a Black conservative “movement” that
does not exist.
On April 8, 2004, let
the progressive world know that we were decisively outgunned.
The Waltons were preparing to transfer $20 billion from the personal
accounts, to the Walton Family Foundation, their political pocket.
At 5 percent yield, that means $1 billion dollars a year, far
more than the “movement” can possibly muster. In These Times
first published our article, by Co-Publishers Glen Ford and Peter
Gamble. We published it the next week, under the title, “Wal-Mart
Prepares to Bury the Left Under a Mountain of Money.”
How much traction can a billion dollars a year buy? Nobody
in Black America has ever seen the kind of money that the Walton
Foundation will have at its disposal once the $20 billion stock
transfer is completed. The prospect is, in a word, terrifying.
Progressives are hard pressed, as it is.
The two principal advocacy organizations opposed to vouchers
are People for the
American Way (PFAW) and the NAACP, with annual budgets of about
$15 million and $30 million, respectively. The teachers unions – the
National Education Association (NEA, 2.7 million members) and
the American Federation of Teachers (AFT, one million members)
spend about $350 million a year combined, for all purposes.
Only a tiny fraction of these organizations’ resources can
be spared for the anti-voucher fight, while rightwing foundations
and the Bush Education Department lavish tens of millions on
voucher propaganda, recruitment, cooptation and institution-building.
If the Waltons continue their policy of
allocating about 80 percent of their grants to education, and
if only half of that
amount is targeted to “reform” – privatization in one guise or
the other – their yearly “choice” war chest would be larger than
the combined budgets of the NEA, the AFT, the NAACP and PFAW.
That’s overkill.
Our voices will always be less publicized than the moneyed class.
But they must be louder in other ways.
Handmaidens and Trojans
It is an insult to Black people to be presented
with a “leadership” that
is wholly appointed by the enemy. Yet, that is what we have been
forced to confront: a phony front of hirelings who call themselves
leaders. Like Condoleezza Rice, who got an award from the NAACP
in 2002 for – what? – having a high-paid job whose description
is to undermine the rest of Black America? Why do we collaborate
with that?
Condoleezza Rice is the greatest example
of trickster politics that we can imagine. She represents ExxonMobil,
her employers,
and George Bush, the apparent love of her life. We spent very
little time dealing with Condoleezza, who is not a creation of
the Black body politic, but of our enemies. However, a response
to her presence had to be made. Here is what we said about the
master’s woman, following her disastrous behavior during Martin
Luther King Week, 2003, when her boss signaled the racists that
he was on their side in the affirmative action battle, headed
for the U.S. Supreme Court. The title of the article was, “Condoleezza
Rice: The Devil’s Handmaiden.”
The old, reflexive Black applause for members
of the race who are chosen for high office, now works against
us with a vengeance.
The GOP understands the game and, with the enthusiastic connivance
of corporate media, plays it with increasing skill. Authentic
Black opinion, sensibilities and leadership are relentlessly
devalued….
Instead of a national discussion on affirmative
action, or the merits of the case that is headed to the U.S.
Supreme Court,
attention was focused on the opinions of a woman who represents
no one besides her patrons. Better the old days, back in the
Forties, when Joe Louis was asked to speak for Black America.
At least he fought his own battles in the boxing ring. Rice,
the foreign policy servant, was treated like an authentic Black
leader – a triumph of the GOP's Black appointive strategy,
and a collective insult to every African American.
The Here and Now
We began our journal on April
5, 2002, at the height of a political battle in which Cory
Booker, the national front Negro for the Bradley Foundation,
challenged the incumbent Black mayor of Newark, New Jersey.
We examined the political landscape of Newark, New Jersey, which
had been invaded by right-wingers from around the country, in
the service of the Booker campaign. Booker would outspend the
incumbent by about two-to-one, and enlist the services of no
less a celebrity of the Right than George F. Will, who thought
he was doing Booker a favor by saying:
"Booker's plans for Newark's renaissance
are drawn from thinkers at the Democratic Leadership Council
and the Manhattan
Institute think tank, and from the experiences of others such
as Stephen Goldsmith, former Republican mayor of Indianapolis,
a pioneer of privatization and faith-based delivery of some government
services, and John Norquist, current Democratic mayor of Milwaukee,
which has one of the nation's most successful school-choice programs."
George F. Will gave Booker’s whole game plan away. It appears
that white conservatives have no shame, and don’t mind unmasking
their Black henchmen, like Cory Booker.
Well, Lordy! George F. Will spoke the truth,
for once – kind
of. All of Booker's ideas are scripted in the Republican Party
and its affiliated think tanks. They also circulate among the
right-leaning members of the Democratic Leadership Council,
whose roots are in the southern branch of the party.
We already know who fertilizes these brilliant ideas, designed
for the sole purpose of producing a bounteous harvest for the
rich.
Yet, in the same city that the Republicans
thought they were about to capture, the Hip Hop National Political
Convention occurred,
June of 2004. We believe that the future resides with them – the
activists born after 1965. They will defeat the front men, like
Cory Booker. As we wrote in our Cover Story for July 1, “Hip
Hop Generation Agenda: ‘More than music and style.’”
The 3,000 young people who attended the National Hip Hop Political
Convention in Newark, New Jersey, June 16-20, were determined
to define themselves through a politics of struggle – to
begin to redraw the map of the world through the prisms of their
own experience.
“We are here today as young people under the hip hop umbrella,” said
Ras Baraka, the 34-year-old Deputy Mayor of Newark, New Jersey,
and one of the organizers of the event. “Politics is about
the seizure of power,” Baraka told the crowd.
We must always keep our eyes on the prize,
which is the seizure of power.
Glen Ford and Peter Gamble,
Co-Publishers, The Black Commentator
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