|
|
|
Life, the song tells us, is hard out here for
a pimp. And why shouldn't it be? The pimp sells something
of great value that's not even his. By that definition, Newark
mayoral candidate Cory Booker, poised to hand over the city's
schools and the remnants of its public sector over to privatizers
and the right wing social engineers of the Manhattan Institute,
is one pimp to watch.
Last week BC Senior Commentator
Margaret Kimberley incisively skewered
Booker along with incumbent Mayor Sharpe James, whose late withdrawal
from the race may have paved the way to a Booker victory. This
week, BC readers weigh in:
Carl Fletcher heard Booker on the radio and writes
us:
Ms. Kimberley,
I really appreciated this article. Last month
Booker was on Air America's Rachel Maddow Show and WNYC's
Brian Lehrer Show. The obsequiousness of the so-called interviews
was sickening. The liberal establishment has its set of favorites:
Barack Obama, Arthur Davis .... I've never heard Terry Gross
mention let alone interview Charlie Rangel, Maxine Waters
and other leaders of the CBC. It's as though they've decided
the only black people that they like are the pseudo intellectuals
who write books about the end of race. Democratic and Republican
leadership both want to de-emphasize race so they can go after
the treasured suburban upscale white male and females. Howard
Dean may be an exception. I wonder if Barack Obama will be
seduced by the establishment and begin to play it's game.
The signs are ominous.
The
Howard Dean who ran for president in 2004, and who was independent
of most of the Democratic party's corporate funders was a very
different man from the Howard Dean of today. Party leaders
are not chosen for their big or original ideas or for their
grand and inspiring visions of how society ought to work. They
are fundraisers. Appointing Dean the chief fundraiser of the
Democratic party seems in retrospect to have been a brilliantly
effective means of silencing his voice, and those of his original
supporters, the Democratic party's base voters, who resolutely
oppose the war and favor universal health care, impeachment
of the president, and other stands which are anathema to corporate
media and corporate contributors.
Nowadays Job One for Dr. Dean is to keep the contributions,
overwhelmingly from wealthy individuals and corporations, flowing.
As public financing for campaigns is off the table, and as long
as Americans are legally restricted to a two-party system with
no alternatives to the left of Democrats, the Democratic base
voters - and that means black voters - will be mere passengers
on the bus driven by the party's contributors and their lobbyists.
We once had high hopes for Senator Obama too.
But that was a while ago. The Obama of today
seems to value his friendship with party financiers like Warren
Buffet more than he does the principles and aspirations
of the Democratic party's base voters who launched his political
career.
As for softball questions, everybody who's "media"
is not a journalist. The job of journalism is to monitor the
centers of power and inform the public. On the individual level,
too many media personalities and self-described journalists
would rather be friends of power than speak truth to it. And
on the institutional level the media and human resources directed
to original news gathering are shrinking, according to the annual
State
of the Media report from Columbia University's center for
Excellence in Journalism. It's no surprise therefore, that
the few big "media personalities" with microphones
are asking the same few official spokespeople the same lame
questions.
An optimistic BC reader and frequent
correspondent J. Hutton writes:
Ms. Kimberley:
Cory Booker does not have an insurmountable
lead; no lead is insurmountable. Ronald Rice should have
seen the handwriting on the wall. I am not at all surprised
at James' actions. He doesn't want any subordinates taking
over after himself, doing better, thus making him look bad.
Booker "defines" public education as
the use of public funds, etc., etc. This is crap! Public
education is not as Booker defined it. Yet, who challenged him?
I guarantee you that if you attack Booker strongly, unrelentingly,
Booker will fade.
It's indeed late in Newark, but we think Mr. Hutton
is on to something. We hope Ron Rice and the forces allied
with him can define the issues and define Booker in a way that
will keep George F. Will and the Manhattan Institute from naming
black Newark's next mayor, or providing Booker with a stepping
stone to higher office. Time will tell. There just isn't that
much time left.
While Corey Booker attempts to pimp a city's public
sector, another ambitious member of the black political class
chose to pimp the reputation of his own family - his own grandmother.
It's not as though BC didn't get reader email
defending the execrable congressman from Memphis, Harold Ford,
Jr. It's just that so little of it was coherent or printable.
Without radically changing the character of what was written,
the following misguided comment by reader Rob Harris Jr. was
the only email of its kind we could print.
Just when I thought I had finally found an objective
source of information of interest to me and my community, instead
I now find a nuclear-powered spin machine for the GOP. What
a waste.
The notion that honest criticism of black political
figures somehow helps Republicans betrays a deep bankruptcy
of principle. If we can't criticize leaders and pretenders
to leadership we are all passengers on a bus to nowhere.
When
a movie wins the academy award for "best picture"
that's big stuff, big business and big culture. In BC's
case, it was big enough to follow Derik Smith's March 16 Guest
Commentary, "Investigating
the Crash Scene" with a March 23 ThinkPiece,
by Robert Jensen and Robert Wosnitzer, "Crash and the Self-Indulgence
of White America." The movie's publicists and many critics
have advanced the claim that "Crash" tells us something
about race "as it's lived in America" that we knew
all the time, but have not dared acknowledge. The trouble is,
what "Crash" tells us isn't true, and excuses white
privilege and white supremacy.
Joseph Anderson of Berkeley CA wrote us this note,
to pass on to the authors:
Dear Professors Jensen & Wosnitzer,
It is amazing, though understandable how white people want
to avoid racism and white-supremacy as a system of power.
Racism is not merely just a matter of individual personal
sentiment that "we all have." That position helps
whites to evade moral responsibility to eliminate a structure
that they happily, if unfairly, benefit from. It's probably
beyond any white American movie-makers to involve the questions
of class and white privilege analysis in a movie.
Yet, so many people just "loved" this
movie.
Culture is the lens through which humans view
each other and the world. Expecting corporate culture to challenge,
or even to illuminate corporate rule is really asking quite
a lot. Sometimes rogue elements of authentically empowering
culture do slip through the corporate filters. That, Chuck
D explained
in a recent interview with Free Mix Radio's Dr. Jared Ball,
is how Public
Enemy initially slipped past the gatekeepers and into the
spotlight. But it doesn't happen often.
"Crash" reached the mass market, and
received the "best picture" award not because it disagreed
in any fundamental way with the white establishment take on
"how race is lived in America" but because it reassured
white America that racism was about individuals, not institutions,
and that blacks and Asians and everybody else was probably just
as "racist" as they were.
Restricting the definition of racism to the actions
and attitudes of individuals, and denying the existence of institutional
racism is a major project of conservative "thought"
in America. If racism is either bad manners or just an individual
thing that happens inside people's heads, government can do
nothing about it because of course government has no business
regulating manners or poking around inside anyone's head.
Reader Bennie Barton wrote BC
to offer suggestions on African Americans and the immigration
issue:
First off, thank you for giving this discussion
the focus that it deserves. I whole heartedly agreed
with everything in the article. Our collaboration with
our Latino kinsmen is no more important than it is right now
at this juncture in history. All of our struggles are
related. As Dr. King said, "injustice anywhere
is a threat to justice anywhere."
I really believe that the anti-immigrant rhetoric
we hear from some African Americans is the result of the lack
of understanding of too many of our people in regards to understanding
the global nature and scope of our oppression. What
I believe we need right now is an education movement.
Not education in the sense of going to school, but education
in the sense of establishing study groups nationwide where
we seek to develop a comprehensive understanding and analysis
of our plight here and in the Diaspora and the various other
related issues such as feminism, globalization, etc.
As we point out elsewhere in this issue, the immigration
issue, for African Americans is about labor market competition,
and the labor market is a global one. What happens here profoundly
affects people over the horizon, and soon afterward, what they
do over the horizon will have repercussions in your neighborhood.
Those who imagine we can understand the labor market crises
affecting black America without comprehending the US role in
depressing the labor markets of countries whose citizens are
now forced to come here to find work to keep their families
alive are being fooled or are fooling themselves.
Undocumented
immigrants in the US, at least 60% of whom are Mexican, are
children of NAFTA. The US business class, spearheaded by the
Republican party but massively aided by Democratic President
and former DLC head Bill Clinton passed NAFTA
into law over the objections of most congressional Democrats
in 1993. NAFTA spent US taxpayers' money to aid and encourage
businesses to relocate their investments first to Mexico, then
to wherever on the planet wages were driven lowest that year.
NAFTA allowed taxpayer-subsidized US agribusiness companies
to devour what used to be the market for locally produced agricultural
products in Mexico. It drove farmers in Mexico and elsewhere
off the land into the cities, and subverted the food
sovereignty of those nations. The latest economic and political
repercussions of NAFTA are immigrant workers here in the US.
The chain of causality isn't hard to follow, but we won't get
any help from the mainstream media or from many of our so-called
leaders.
Finally, by now BC readers will
have heard that last week Georgia's Cynthia McKinney was manhandled
by a Capitol Hill police officer at a security checkpoint when
hurrying to a floor vote. Amazingly, with only 14 black women
in Congress, it seems that the Capitol Police were unable to
remember McKinney's face. The whole incident reeks of racial
profiling. Farfectched? The following Monday on the Wolf Blitzer
show, McKinney related the story of a lesser known, but related
incident.
During the Atlanta funeral of Coretta Scott King,
when she lay in state under the golden dome of the Georgia state
capitol, in McKinney's words "...the Georgia legislative
black caucus was not allowed into the building to form a part
of the procession. Why? .... the security at the Georgia capitol
did not recognize them as duly elected members..."
On April 4th Democracy
Now Atlanta Democratic state representative "Able Mabel"
Thomas confirms McKinney's story.
For us [Georgia's black legislators] to have
to not be allowed to go on what we call the second floor,
which is where the rotunda is in the state Capitol, and basically
be told that we had to wait upstairs, which is on the third
floor where our chamber is, we think it was just really -
it was just unheard of that we would be treated that way.
And basically what we did as legislators is
we followed the protocol, because it was a sacred ceremony
and we did not want to have the news coverage be about us,
because we knew the news coverage was about the passing of
a gentle and a strong warrior for our people. And so we know
that, not only just in Washington, D.C., but in Georgia and
probably throughout this nation, those persons, black elected
officials, have not been treated with the type of dignity
that they have been given by our constituents when they vote
for us. But we have sort of had to bear it and just go along
and get along, because we are trying to not be the news story.
We're trying to impact our communities.
It seems that racial profiling impacts our communities
every day, whether we are teenagers walking down a street, or
properly suited and booted members of Congress or state legislatures.
We welcome the comments of BC
readers. We try to answer all our email, and sometimes succeed.
We print some of it in this column weekly. Send us your best,
or the rest at [email protected].
|
Home |
|
|
|
Your comments are always welcome.
Visit the Contact
Us page to send e-Mail or Feedback
or Click
here to send e-Mail to [email protected]
If you send us an e-Mail message
we may publish all or part of it, unless you tell us it
is not for publication. You may also request that we withhold
your name.
Thank you very much for your readership.
|
|
|