We have amassed a host of Guest Commentators during our history of
writing  . It is very difficult for us to say who are our most significant
contributors, but we do know who established us on the scene. Patrice
Johnson, a freelance writer, lent her talents and insight to our columns
in our initial issue, April 5, 2002. Her offering was titled, “Linguistic
Profiling.” Ms. Johnson took a look at the people who call you
up on the phone, and make race-based decisions, every day.
So, who's screening out Black callers? Very likely people
who are less educated and earn less money than those on the
other end. In some instances a White person conducting business
over
the phone may be asked to practice linguistic profiling by
his or her supervisor. Smith mentions a case in Alabama where
a White
apartment manager contacted the local Fair Housing group
to report that the apartment owner told her if she suspected
that
a caller
was Black, to tell him or her nothing was available. Smith
also recalls a conversation she had with a White woman working
for an
employment services company, who had been instructed to get
callers to say the word "ask." If they pronounced it "ax," that
was one way of identifying them as African-American. (Baugh says
that particular pronunciation is most commonly associated with
Blacks.) Smith, who is White, says, "We get to hear
these things all the time."
The only way to put a stop to linguistic profiling
is for those who know about it to report it and make the offenders
pay. No need
for Blacks to hire speech coaches. What's called for is not more
pear-shaped tones, but more organizational muscle, exercised by the
likes of the
NFHA and its local affiliates.
The fact of the matter is, there’s nothing whatever that’s seriously
radical or progressive about hip-hop ideas and values. It
is sad that there are university academics among us like Michael
Dyson and Todd Boyd (respectively at the University of Pennsylvania
and University of California) who fail to recognize the political
emptiness of most hip-hop expression. Hip-hop entertainers and its
entertainment modalities do not represent a “new worldview” for African
Americans. Quite the contrary, the “hip-hop worldview” is
nothing other than an updated face on the old-hat, crude,
anti-humanistic
values of hedonism and materialism.
Tim Wise is a very wise man, and we are pleased to include him
among our contributors. Wise did a work of brilliance on June
10, on the death of the aweful Ronald Reagan. Wise titled his
article, “Reagan,
Race, and Remembrance.”
Having to grapple with the real world is stressful,
and people with relative power and privilege never know how to
deal with stress very
well. As such, they long for and applaud easy answers for
the stress that occasionally manages to intrude upon their lives:
so they blame
people of color for high taxes, failing schools, crime,
drugs, and jobs they didn’t get; they blame terrorism on “evil,” and
the notion that they hate our freedoms: a belief one can only
have if one really thinks one lives in a free country in the first
place.
In other words, delusion is both the fuel that propels people
like Ronald Reagan forward in political life, and then makes a
rational
assessment of his legacy impossible upon his death.
I think this is why so many white people remember
him fondly, and are truly crestfallen at the thought of his physical
obsolescence:
simply put, much of white America needs Ronald Reagan; a father
figure to tell them everything is going to be O.K.; a kindly old Wizard
of Oz, to assure them that image and reality are one, even when the
more cerebral parts of our beings tend towards an opposite conclusion.
With Reagan gone, maintaining the illusion becomes more difficult.
But knowing white folks – I am after all one of them, and have been
surrounded by them all of my life – I have little doubt that where
there’s a will to remain in la-la land, we will surely find a way.
Reagan has been released from the lie, finally, and may his soul
find peace among the millions of dearly departed
victims of his policies around the world.
Paul Street gets down to the nitty gritty of urban analysis.
We are grateful that he has allowed us to publish his works,
most notably
Street’s September 11, 2003, Think Piece, “Everything
Changed?”
As researchers and activists pointed out long
before the jetliner attacks “changed everything,” the available stock of such housing in
Chicago is insufficient to absorb the displaced public housing population. That
population is “free” to be homeless, thanks to the working of economic
forces that carry social costs of secondary concern to local policymakers. Those
policymakers, including the Mayor, are beholden
to commercial and real estate property developers
seeking to remove poor black inner city
residents from choice urban investment locations.
We are grateful to all of our contributors, the best minds in America.
We're glad they work for us every once in a while.
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