In BC's April 6 Think Piece "Race, Place and Freedom", Professor Paul Street recounted what he called his most depressing classroom experience.

Every now and then you run across a simple, elegant unwrapping of a vexing social reality.  Having seen facts, common sense and morality bounce harmlessly off the "white discursive force field" again and again, we are all profoundly in Professor Street's debt for this apt descriptive term.  Both the phrase and Street's experience resonated with BC reader Jerel Shaw:

If the occasional contributions by Professor Street reprinted in BC aren't enough for you, and they shouldn't be, visit his regularly updated blog.  Street's 2002 publication, the "Vicious Circle, Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois and the Nation" remains an indispensable explication on the effects of racially selective mass incarceration on family relations, the job market and nearly every facet of black life in America.

Back in July of 2005 frequent BC contributor Edward Rhymes began his cover article "Acting White" thusly:

Reader Maria Phillips took the time to write us and disagree with Dr. Rhymes:

This editor has no experience as an academic researcher, classroom teacher, celebrity or ethnographer.  I have been a parent, step parent and foster parent.  I recall a discussion with my own eighth grade daughter in which I demanded an explanation for her lack of interest in trying to excel academically.

"I ain't tryin' to be white" she told me.

Eight years later, in 1999 or early 2000 I was the foster parent of another young lady.  Same age, same neighborhood, same Chicago public school, same conversation, and to my horror the same answer, almost word for word.

"I ain't even tryin' to be white".

So we respectfully disagree with Dr. Rhymes.  It appears to us that whether we like it or not, the phenomenon does seem to exist.  We can trace its causes and consequences, we can explore how it came to be and what we can do about it.  But like it or not, it appears to be part of life as it is being lived by some proportion of young African Americans.  So what ARE  we going to do about it?

Georgia's bold state legislators are into taking action on those crucial issues where the feds in Washington DC fear to tread.  Trouble is, not nearly enough of them are talking about repealing the state's anti-black voter ID law which the Bush Justice Department has OK'd anyway.  Few have been heard on the subjects of raising the minimum wage or restricting usury and predatory lending.  And so far, making Wal-Mart pay its fair share of Medicaid, which picks up the health care for many of its employees in the state remains a legislative non-starter.

Since the anti-gay marriage bullet has already been shot, the state's Republican legislators hoped to rally their forces this time by making the everyday activities of undocumented immigrants in Georgia into felonies.  BC recently exposed Atlanta state senator Kasim Reed, a demagogic attorney who practices employment discrimination law for discriminating employers and civil rights law for the corporations that violate civil rights for his echoing Republican strategies with ridiculously punitive proposals of his own.  With or without Reed's help, Georgia legislators this week did pass their own horrendous and unenforceable immigration bill, and even produced a fire-eating black Republican from suburban Atlanta to address an anti-immigrant crowd in the capital steps.

Just as white supremacy has engineered complex discursive "force fields" to insulate whites and some blacks and browns too, from reality, similar force fields of fake history, of disinforming and misleading notions have been constructed around the issues of so-called "free trade" and its consequent globalization of labor markets.  America experiences labor market globalization as a massive influx of foreign workers, with and without papers.  Black America, already last hired and first fired, experiences the sharp end of this process in ways that we will be working out for some time.

Hence it is no surprise that BC readers are continuing to write us about the immigration aspects of the Kasim Reed article, on Senior Commentator Margaret Kimberley's April 6 offering, "Immigration and America's Bad Karma," and the April 13 Radio BC: "Immigration Militancy, Black Malaise."

We got this thought from BC reader Tom Hodges:

From Tokyo, Doss Thane channels Republican leaders to tells us this:

The craven complicity of the Congressional Black Caucus in smearing Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney was the subject of last week's BC cover story, and of a good deal of reader correspondence.

BC reader Marjorie Hammock said:

And we got this from Victor Pate:

Alice Molloy agrees that McKinney was a target:

Four years ago, BC's very first issue exposed the connections of Newark mayoral candidate Cory Booker with elements of the hard right.  The plan was to elevate a new, corporate subservient brand of black leadership into elected office, and use the city as a showcase for efforts to privatize public education and what remains of Newark's public sector.  Although Booker obtained the unanimous endorsement of every print and broadcast outlet in the tri-state area virtually none of them except BC saw fit to mention Booker's connections to the Walton Family Foundation, his outspoken advocacy of vouchers and privatization, or his endorsement by the Manhattan Institute.

Booker is back again this year for another grab at Newark's City Hall.  His right wing connections have raised him more than $6 million for a campaign in a city with less than 300,000 inhabitants.  They have produced him a feature length propaganda film which makes the incredible and insulting claim that Newark rejected Booker four years ago simply because he was fair-skinned and educated.  While Booker remains the recipient of almost universally fawning and uncritical media praise, BC is happy to report that a whiff of the actual issues in play may occasionally reach the public through a most unlikely source:  The New York Times.

An April 17 Times article breaks the establishment media embargo on one of the campaign's real issues.  "Cory Booker...supports school vouchers", the article says.   "Last time his opponents successfully used the issue against him."   With that single sentence, the article sheds more light on the real issues of Newark's mayoral campaign than dozens of interviews and puff pieces.  The Times piece barely touches on other pressing concerns Newark residents have over Cory Booker, such as his connections with the rich and Right, or the likelihood that City Hall would be a brief stopover on the way to higher office.  And even though it repeats the bogus claim that growing numbers of African Americans are joining the corporate funded "voucher movement," we do have to call it progress, in a minor sort of way.

We try to answer as much of our reader email as possible, and we print a little of it in this space each week.  Do send us your best.

Write to Bruce Dixon at [email protected].