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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