Best of our Guest Commentators

During more than three years of publication, BC has gathered around it a truly talented band of writers, who are kind enough to contribute their brilliance to our humble publication. These ladies and gentlemen have allowed us to fulfill our mission: to define and refine progressive thought in the United States. Not all of them are Black. We at BC believe that African Americans – and our non-Black allies – deserve the best insights and knowledge that is available, and that the authors’ race is secondary to their contribution to our understanding of the world.

We have not included all of our esteemed colleagues in the following review, because they have become so numerous. To those who have been left out of this yearly review, we apologize. Blame it on the heat, and the failings of the Publishers, Glen Ford and Peter Gamble.

Patrice D. Johnson, one of our original contributors, warned that the bogus “war on terror” had targeted non-profit organizations that, in the warped minds of the Bush people, might have connections to individuals on an enemies list. The list is arbitrary and capricious, but might embroil innocent givers and charities in the national security network, as Ms. Johnson wrote in her September 2, 2004 article, “Charity and Homeland Security.”

That audience remains woefully uninformed. The Haitian people will have to teach them a lesson, once again.

Unsettling the mind – is a good thing

“The Color of Justice” in the United States is white, as Ryan Paul Haygood, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, wrote for BC on September 30, 2004. For the rest of us, there exists a predatory system of mass incarceration:

Our comrade and co-upsetter Dr. Edward Rhymes, a gifted educator, tackled the quandary of integration vs. segregation in an illuminating October 7, 2004 piece. The problem is, as Dr. Rhymes points out, the Jim Crow system was never really dismantled. In the phony process that passed for desegregation, about half of Black teachers lost their jobs, but in most districts no meaningful integration took place:

Dr. Marcellus Andrews, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, dared to emit the unspeakable: Would middle class Blacks break with their poorer brethren? And what would be the consequences?

Dr. Andrews’ November 4, 2004 article, “No Exit in Black: Trapped by the Economy and Politics,” opened a new portal on Black political discussion.

BC has many friends, from diverse disciplines. Dr. Alvin Walker, a psychologist from Louisiana now based in Manhattan, is an expert in the psychoses of the rich and powerful. In the wake of the Republican victory last fall, Dr. Walker graced our pages on November 18, 2004 with his compelling piece, “The 2004 Presidential Election: Another Pyrrhic Victory for White Supremacy.”

”Do you really think that the God of Christianity as revealed in the Bible is unconcerned about the environment, or war and peace, and injustice and poverty? Does God want 45 million Americans to be without healthcare and does God support the racist exclusion of people of color and other out groups?

”So we see that the deeply ubiquitous ideology of Euro-American supremacy trumps class interests and, in this instance, leads to a tragic, dangerous, and irrational choice, the election of an overtly racist, war criminal hell bent on destroying the last tattered remnants of the social safety net and seems intent on attempting to remake the world in accord with his own destructive, anti-democratic, white supremacist vision: George Walker Bush.”

BC believes that history is the fountainhead of the present. One of our mentors is Dr. Martin Kilson, the first Black tenured professor at Harvard University, and an inspiration to hundreds – maybe thousands – of Blacks seeking knowledge. On December 16, 2004, Dr. Kilson explained the corrupt and convoluted logic of the peculiar brand of American white racism in his grand piece, “Notes on the Democratic Defeat: Conservative Christian Atavism Ethos or ‘Christians from Hell’”:

Black culture and politics are inseparable

Although a thoroughly political magazine, BC understands that culture is also nurtured in politics, and that Black icons must be remembered and revered by ourselves – since nobody else will. Our favorite expatriate African American in Toronto, Canada, Norman (Otis) Richmond, paid homage to the late, great Sam Cooke, on December 23, 2004.

Richmond’s article was titled, “Sam Cooke Still Resonates.”

James Forman’s voice continues to resonate, as well. The civil rights leader and visionary died early this year, and was saluted by our colleague David Swanson, on January 20, 2005, in an homage called, “Jim Forman and the Liberal Labor Syndrome.”

BC is dedicated to the proposition that Black people must not be required to reinvent the wheels of progress every generation, for lack of memory. David Swanson is one of those who keep our memories intact.

A major mind from the Greater Antilles

John Maxwell, the venerable and distinguished professor at the University of the West Indies, in Kingston, and columnist for the Jamaica Observer, is a special friend of BC. He allows us to borrow his articles, and refresh our minds. We were especially impressed with the wit and incisive analysis of his February 10, 2005 piece, “The Silence of the Blonds.”

”When Hitler was busy turning Jews into handbags, lampshades and black smoke, his reason was that the world needed to be rid of them (and of blacks, homosexuals, Gypsies and others) because they threatened the purity of the Aryan master archetype. This archetype was a blue eyed, blond superman with no resemblance to Hitler himself or to most of his main assassins. They, I now realize, were a new species, Geopolitically Modified Humans – GMH – Officially Blond. Looking at them you wouldn’t know it. Some people even said that Hitler himself “looked Jewish” – whatever that meant, obviously missing his essential blondness which gave him the right to talk nonsense and murder as many people as he wished.

”What I realized this week is that the Congo’s Muzungo was not crazy, simply blond. And when this thought occurred to me it cleared up a host of misconceptions in my mind.

“I had been asking myself how could Africans like Kofi Annan and Afro-Americans like Colin Powell , Canadians like Prime Minister Paul Martin, and Haitians like Gerard LaTortue not understand the appalling wickedness which their policies have created in Haiti? Or how did Tony Blair, George Bush and Malcolm Fraser of Australia not understand the primeval wickedness they had let loose in Iraq? The answer was simple.

“Like Adolph Hitler, they are GMH-Blonds and are therefore exempted from normal human feelings, duties and responsibilities. They are expected to giggle helplessly when confronted with murdered children and dismembered teenagers, with tortured Arabs and raped Haitian women. Like the good Germans in Tom Paxton’s 1960s song – ‘We didn’t know a thing.’”

What exquisite sarcasm! Our hats off to Prof. Maxwell, a jewel of the Caribbean.

Our guy in Chicago is Paul Street, the vice president for research at the Chicago Urban League, and a prodigious writer and thinker. Street points out the dangerous irony of high profile Black success stories that are taken as proof, by many whites, that racial equality is a reality in the United States. He calls this wishful phenomenon “The Full-Blown Oprah Effect: Reflections on Color, Class, and New Age Racism.” Street’s February 24, 2005 article states:

“For a considerable portion of whites in ‘post-Civil Rights’ America, black-white integration and racial equality are more than just accepted ideals. They are also, many believe, accomplished realities, showing that we have overcome racial disparity. According to a survey conducted by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, and Harvard University in the spring of 2001, more than 4 in 10 white Americans believe that blacks are ‘as well off as whites in terms of their jobs, incomes, schools, and health care.’

”The 2000 US Census numbers that were being crunched as this poll was taken did not support this belief. More than three and a half decades after the historic victories of the black Civil Rights Movement, the census showed, equality remained a highly elusive goal for African-Americans. In a society that possesses the highest poverty rate and the largest gaps between rich and poor in the industrialized world, blacks are considerably poorer than whites and other racial and ethnic groups.”

In a society that tends less and less to document facts, but to obscure them with electronic rhetoric based on racist assumptions, we need folks like Paul Street.

Going into labor

BC dived into the Great American Labor Debate with all four feet. We got strategic assistance and trenchant analysis from Dwight Kirk, a Washington, DC-based activist, writer, consultant, and intellect. On February 24, 2005, Kirk posed the question, “Can Labor Go Beyond Diversity Lite?”

”55 percent (or 168,000) of the union jobs lost in 2004 were held by black workers, even though they represented only 13 percent of total union membership.

”More stunningly, African American women accounted for 70 percent of the union jobs lost by women in 2004. Yes, 100,000 black union women – many the sole or primary breadwinner in their households – lost their paychecks, their job security, medical insurance for their families and their retirement nest eggs in just one year. Gone!

”Compounding the disproportionate loss of union jobs in black households – especially those headed by women – are the shrinking paychecks of black union members. In 2004, federal income data ranked African American union workers last among all the major worker groups in median weekly earnings….

”The AFL-CIO’s cosmetic embrace of diversity may have sensitized to some extent, but it hardly uprooted, the white male power structure that has shaped the federation’s internal culture and dictated its policies since the merger of the AF of L and the CIO 50 years ago. In fact, many black labor leaders and union staff workers quietly chafe in the yoke of ‘official’ diversity, which merely colorizes labor solidarity within a non-inclusive framework of power relations. Or to give it a brand name, call it ‘Diversity Lite: more color, less flava.’”

That’s tellin’ it, brother.

Troy Peters, also based in DC, as a Senior Fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, warns that the GOP’s attempt to bribe and subvert Black preachers and their congregations is abetted by white Democrats’ arrogance and ignorance. Peters’ March 24, 2005 article was titled, “Beware Republicans Bearing Gifts.”

Our contributors are deep thinkers, and active movers and shakers. Prominent among them is Rev. Reynard Blake, Jr., of Michigan. On April 7, 2005, in the farcical wake of the congressional crusade to preserve the life-support of a white woman in a persistent vegetative state, Rev. Blake put forward “The Riddle for Black Conservatives: What Would Happen If Terri Was Toya?”

”If Terri Schiavo was a black woman named Toya Brown would she receive the same concern from white conservatives or members of the ‘pro-life’ movement? For black conservatives and government grant-hungry black religious leaders concerned with gay marriage and school vouchers the answer would be “yes.” Fortunately, those of us that live reality-based lives know that this is far from the case….

”Bush and his fellow ‘Compassionate Conservatives’ would do to well to realize that if they were truly ‘pro-life’ they would be concerned about the totality of life for all people, from birth to death. This means that they would be about the business of creating more jobs. Tax breaks for the wealthy are not a solution.”

Such irony is lost on the racist Right. But not on readers of The Black Commentator.

No excuses for racist behavior