Bruce’s Beat

Editors like to think they know their audiences, but it’s not always true. We were surprised by the volume of email answering Michel Martin’s open letter taking to task poet Ishmael Reed, the “Black left” in general and BC in particular for our alleged lack of civility.

Here’s what Janet Brown of Oakland CA had to say:

Or it might be “uncivil” to suggest that Martin herself could have engaged in actually substantive questioning of Cynthia McKinney, reviewing the facts of the case and what are the requirements or customary – or differential – treatment of Congresspersons rushing to cast votes. Martin could have mentioned the lawsuit that black Capitol Hill police have against racial profiling and harassment by white Capitol Hill police.

Louisiana’s Anthony Kennerson had these observations on Martin’s plea for civility:

It’s interesting to see Ms. Martin calling out Ishmael Reed, CounterPunch and BC for their alleged lack of civility. Ms. Martin seems to feel a need to throw accusations at blacks on the left while leaving those on the right alone.

Ms. Martin could not possibly have been unaware of the volume and virulence of vile and racist epithets slung in the direction of Georgia’s Representative Cynthia McKinney. Nothing that Ishmael Reed wrote on that article could even begin to approximate Neal Boortz’s “ghetto slut” smack – and that was among the more printable insults.

Where was our black guardian of “civility” then? Why didn’t we hear her voice telling how establishment media programs were selling a line about McKinney being nutty, almost slutty, dangerous and ultra-radical Black Leftist?

It seems that the definition of civility always depends on who does the defining and why. Ruling the term “Uncle Tom” out of our lexicon as “uncivil” as Martin seems to want to do, besides being in line with current right wing complaints about the dialog African Americans have with each other, is just plain wrong. Banning that highly useful term is a way of shutting down discussion and analysis, a way to deprive us of a potent, historically and politically loaded term to describe a kind of dangerous and politically loaded behavior.

Lana Floyd puts a cap on it like this:

More on Economic Advancement vs. Economic Development

How many times have we read in the media or heard it broadcast or from a pulpit that “black America is the eighth or ninth largest nation in the world in spending power” and that if we just harness all that to the engine of black businesses, most of our problems would go away. And how often is there anybody to counter that most of the gigantic but meaningless “spending power” is spent on mere survival – expenses like rent, food, diapers, health insurance, and gas to get to work. How often is it pointed out that a huge proportion of the “spending power” is actually consumer debt, like car notes, credit card bills and payday loans? Or that 1% of America’s population owns roughly 50% of all the stocks, bonds and financial instruments, and the next 5% have a substantial portion of the rest, leaving not much at all for the rest of us to throw around in the name of community economic development, whatever is meant by that term.

Good examples do not go unpunished, and Toussaint was imprisoned for several days in April as a message to labor unions that would stand up for the pensions, dignity and livelihoods of their members. BC published an open letter from Toussaint in last week’s issue, and received this note from regular reader Howard Gaffney, a transit worker himself.