For some time now, every BC issue has showcased prints and visual works of art by a collection of artists including Margaret Warfield, Larry Richardson, Mwandishi Henry and others.  We urge our readers to click on over to the “art forms” page, to check out some of the stunning work these artists have made available, and to support these artists by purchasing some of their work.  Moved by the power of a recent illustration by the artist Fulani, reader Edith Bowles writes us:

Please tell me how I can follow up on the statement on the front page of Black Commentator:  "Afrika's children die for Fascist fools' greed on a world scale and no one cares," by Fulani.   Bravo for Fulani! 

This is a topic of grave concern to me and I would like to know how I can support a cause that would help spotlight the heartbreaking situation in Africa – where greedy, psychopathic black people kill other blacks with impunity and serve as henchmen and frontline troops for the world's greedy, power mad, corporate, globalized fascists and nobody cries out, including black Americans. 

Where is the black church?  Seemingly it is too busy running after mythical federal funding for "faith-based programs" and preaching an equally mythical "prosperity gospel" while blacks in the U.S. and Africa are ground under the heel of worldwide fascism.

How can the black church, and the black press, not scream out in pain at the horrors taking place in Africa?  And why are we not analyzing the geopolitical meaning of what is taking place?  Nigeria, Darfur, Chad, Rwanda, and millions dead in the Congo and Sudan are not isolated incidents!  They are part of a worldwide effort to reclaim and control Africa!  Whatever happened to the calls for black unity and the mood of solidarity with our African family that existed in the 1960s?

The reader raises a lot of questions here, perhaps too many for one editor in one column to tackle.  But oppression is always about money.  Our ancestors were not kidnapped, sold, resold and enslaved here because someone didn't like their looks.  Slavery was an economic relationship that benefited slave owners and traders.  It was big business, big money.  Then as today, the only thing that beats organized money is organized people.

Whites in Europe and America organized to limit and end slavery, and slaves resisted and rebelled when and wherever they could, and in many places where they could not.  Our responsibility here is to inform ourselves and organize our own churches and other formations to spread that knowledge wider.  We have to look for and to find opportunities to act, and take them.  We have to look for friends willing to explore this, to talk about it to others, and to act, and if we lack such friendships now, we need to make them.  To borrow and mangle Booker T. Washington's old maxim, we have to cast down buckets where we are, and come up with something.

Response from Ishmael Reed

No less than Ishmael Reed himself wrote BC's Margaret Kimberley recently to congratulate her on a recent Freedom Rider column which alleged that Bush's grandfather and other members of the Skull and Bones society may have been involved in the theft of Geronimo's mortal remains.

Nice work on the Bush family Nazi connections.  Here are some more Nazi connections. The Manhattan Institute's Eugenics program is derived from the German program.  If Giuliani is elected president, he can be expected to bring its policies to the nation.

John McWhorter is the most prominent spokesperson for the Institute and is a regular commentator on NPR where Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve" has admirers, including Nina Totenberg, a very influential player there.  When I debated John McWhorter last week on  Michael Eric Dyson's show, he showed himself not to be familiar with the Manhattan Institute's history, of its goals.  He's just being used and thinks that he gets on all of these networks and shows because he's smarter than other blacks.

Ward Connerly and Shelby Steele, on the other hand, know better. Both have received financial support from right wing organizations connected to the Eugenics movement,  Connerly from the Pioneer Fund. Shelby Steele from the Bradley foundation which awarded Charles Murray $119,000.00 for his work on "The Bell Curve."

Margaret responded.

Mr. Reed, 

Thank you for writing. I especially enjoyed your Counter Punch piece "The Colored Mind Doubles" which was reprinted in BC.

I do have to differ with you a bit, however. John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute knows precisely who he is working for. He knows what they want, and he knows their history. Of course he would plead ignorance when confronted. How could a black man, even a conservative, own up to being in bed with the racist eugenics movement?

Ward Connerly, Shelby Steele and the rest are all knowingly supporting white supremacy. As for Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, he has been the recipient of a lot more than $119,000 from the Bradley Foundation. He has in fact received $1 million from Bradley.

And if we mention the Bradley Foundation, we have to mention another successful supplicant from that group. Newark 's new Mayor, Cory Booker, has fed from the Bradley trough.

Into the quagmire

Margaret Kimberley has also written about the penchants of White House press secretary Tony Snow and his former employers, the Fox news network, for racist rhetoric.  But some subjects are too sticky to be easily let go, as BC reader Joy Matkowski reminds us:

I had some sympathy for Mr. Snow initially. Every few years I want to describe something I grabbed and then couldn't get rid of.  “Tar baby" fits that scenario so well. I have to agree with you that considering the source, naive, innocent usage is out of the question.  Although I'm a reasonably decent and unbigoted person, I had no idea that term was offensive. I guess I'll just have to avoid projects and responsibilities that might stick like glue when I try to get rid of them, that are like burrs on my britches, that are like chewing gum on my shoe – until I come up with a good substitute figure of speech.

We could wade into the quagmire with our reader, but it's best not to.

A Theory Disproved

Finally, upset about a widely rumored and long running affair between her husband and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, first lady Laura Bush has reportedly set up occasional housekeeping in Washington's Mayflower Hotel.  While this is news, it's not entirely new news, as BC reader Shirley Rish points out.

My guess is that in your April 2005 BC ThinkPiece, in which author Mark Fancher mischaracterizes George W. Bush's relationship with Condoleezzi Rice as "master and pet," with the pet being an eager "fetcher,” you got it wrong.  For a number of years, since Dr. Rice spoke of the President as her husband, the relationship has been described as sexual.

Over the last few years many of Bush's critics have therapeutically opined that presidential indulgence in certain kinds of recreational activities favored by past occupants of the Oval Office might somehow contribute to making the nation's current chief executive less edgy, more even tempered, and not as great a danger to humanity.  At first glance however, reports of a continuing dalliance between Bush and his Secretary of State seem to disprove the theory that such practices might in some measure mellow the president out.  It simply has not worked that way.  Despite the purported relationship, George Bush remains as unhinged from reality and as much a threat to the peace of the planet as ever.

BC and its readers, along with hosts of other virtual therapists, will continue to monitor events as they unfold.

Send us your virtual analyses of presidential behavior, your compliments and criticisms of what you see in BC.  We answer much of our email, and print some of it here weekly.

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is published every Thursday.