The forbidden word, revealed – e-MailBox – Issue 40

The Black Commentator has been dogging Condoleezza Rice for almost the entire life of this publication, beginning with our backhanded salutes to NAACP Image Award winner Rice and Latino media luminary Geraldo Rivera as “credits to their race.” (“Condoleezza and Geraldo – A fine pair,” May 8, 2002.) We mean her no good, just as she means no good to anyone or any thing but her own career as a first-rank Pirate.

Rice learned to speak Russian in order to soldier in the Cold War and learned to talk oil to navigate her way to the inner circles of the military-energy-political complex. Along the way, she gave skin-color credibility to Black America’s most dangerous enemies, most recently as prime apologist for George Bush’s MLK-week incitement against affirmative action. We don’t mind at all when poet Amiri Baraka calls her a “skeeza.” In a more righteous world, Rice would be forced to reside in her Chevron oil tanker namesake three miles offshore to avoid the catcalls of an outraged African American community.

has provoked anger among Condoleezza defenders, mainly people who crave any form of recognition of Black talent by Power, including the approbation of Lucifer, himself. (That’s why we dubbed Rice “The Devil’s Handmaiden.”) Two weeks ago, we crossed an invisible line, in Khalil Bendib’s caricature of Rice as Gatekeeper to George Bush’s inner sanctum. Sexual conclusions might easily have been drawn from the cartoon. Mattie Weiss wrote to, literally, curse us out for making “the same tired stab that is always made against women in power (i.e. that she sleeps around to get where she is) ….”

Sheryll Durrant read the same issue of , and came away with quite a different impression.

As Ms. Durrant sees clearly, standards of correctness are not universal – enemies are fair game for the full range of contemptuous expression. However, we believe that Ms. Weiss has jumped to a conclusion that is, itself, quite chauvinist. Why can’t she imagine that Ms. Rice and George Bush might fall head over heels in love? Our cartoon only implied intimacy, not that Rice had slept her way to the top. Does Ms. Weiss rule out the possibility that two people – similar in age, both purportedly physically fit, working in close quarters on matters known only to them and a few other, privileged human beings in the world – might find themselves drawn together. Must Condoleezza play the hussy, in this scenario? Is this not a racist and sexist assumption?

Even scorpions mate.

Steal the whole day

The entire white Democratic power structure is trying to figure out how to marginalize Rev. Al Sharpton and, thereby, remove from political discussion the concerns of the party’s most important and loyal constituency, African Americans. Although inept in fashioning alternatives to George Bush, party regulars study alchemy into the wee hours in search of a formula to make Sharpton disappear from the primaries.

Victoria, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, thinks the Democrats are getting all worked up about a game that will be cancelled.

How Lady Liberty looks from Chicago

Economists use the term “discouraged workers” to denote people who have given up looking for employment and, consequently, do not show up in the monthly jobless figures. This permanently jobless cohort has long been a fixture of African American society, and grows steadily, even as the official unemployment rolls lengthen. To that number should also be added prison inmates, comprising on any given day 12 percent of Black males in their twenties and early thirties.

In his May 1 Cover Story, “How You Gonna Export Something You Ain’t Even Got At Home?” Chicago Urban League Vice President Paul Street confronted the impact of what he calls “deep racism” in America, realities hidden by “artificial suppression of the true black male unemployment rate, which stood at 39 percent in the mid-1990s when prisoners were factored in.”

In some cases, the pervasive effects of “deep racism” overwhelm indices of Black progress. For example, “there were more black males in the state’s correctional facilities just on drug charges than the total number of black males enrolled in undergraduate degree programs in Illinois state universities,” wrote Street.

David Comdico finds “deep racism” lurking in the Bush men’s media message.

Witness the latest photo-op aboard, gasp, the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln (what a vicious sense of humor the neo-conmen have): witness a sea of white faces. At the onset of hostilities, Bush was careful to stage a multi-ethnic backdrop, to communicate some notion of international solidarity where none existed. But the victory, as subtly communicated in these recent images, was clearly for White America.

William Bowles writes from Britain, the place that former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young said “practically invented racism” – a statement that may have cost Young his job. Mr. Bowles sees racism deep in the societal marrow on both sides of the Atlantic.

“How,” Tony asked me, “you gonna export something you ain’t even got at home?”

And of course, Tony’s experience is not a new one. Black Americans during WWII denied the right to carry arms, segregated even as ‘we’ fought to defeat Fascism.

But the ruling class having learnt its lessons, now recruits from the poor Black and Latino communities with promises of an education denied to them in their communities. And the lack of understanding shows in the behavior of these ‘cannon fodder’ in Iraq which I think contrasts sharply with the Black and Latino generation who fought in Vietnam (although mostly conscripts).

Yet how does one overcome a system which as a matter of course, rewrites and obliterates history and as a result, each generation has to relearn the experiences of the past, rather than inherit and learn from them? A system which moreover, murders those leaders as a matter of course (ML King, Malcolm X, George Jackson et al) who are able to articulate and express the desires of the oppressed. And where it can’t eliminate, co-opt.

And not only do we have to learn the difference between overt and covert racism, critically we have to understand that racism is an ideology, at least three centuries old, and utterly institutionalized into virtually every aspect of ‘our’ culture, whether it be science, history, the arts, economics, sociology or politics.

Here in the UK, a spokeswoman for the police on community relations when tackled over the institutional nature of racism in the police, which four years after the Lawrence Report (on the death of a young Black man, and the third commission convened after the failure of the first two to even name it!) admitted that she thought that “that institutional racism in the police was impossible to remove”.

Now there’s very little I can do about what a person thinks about me (hopefully, they’ll keep it to themselves) but for sure I can tackle the institutions no matter how small my contribution is. And above all, I can pass on as I remember those who taught me.

The unwelcome mat

Our readers are usually quite kind to us, even in noting our shortcomings. So it is with Leila Mouammar, who points out our dearth of coverage of the escalating war against immigrants and refugees.

Ms. Mouammar is substantially correct – we have not given the subject sufficient coverage. Racism against immigrants unleashes forces identical to those that threaten African American citizens and the rule of law, itself.

Conspiracies and glitches

Two unrelated events affected the content of this week’s EmailBox column. First, a computer glitch erased a big chunk of the opened and unopened mail. Our regrets to the affected writers, whom we hope to hear from, again. In addition, an unusual number of letters arrived from outside the U.S., some of which survived the glitch.

Canadian Eric Walberg responded to our April 24 Cover Story, “Conspiracy Theories 2: The Great Unraveling of U.S. Global Power.” maintains that the Pirates have unintentionally accelerated a global withdrawal from entanglements with a grasping United States.

The real bomb ticks under America’s porch, and will devastate the dollar in a spasm of millions of individual and institutional decisions to run in the other direction.

Mr. Walberg says the world is fed up with playing a rigged game using U.S. monopoly money.

Guess who’s financing the Iraq invasion? Not the US government. WE (the rest-of-the-world) ARE! What a clever international financial system the US has going for it. It has no intention of ever paying back its monster foreign trade debt. It simply prints its dollars, and we the gullible rest-of-the-world take them in exchange for our goods, directly financing even their most criminal actions.

How breath-taking, and how bald the lie.

A Swiss reader named Moritz, who describes himself as a “student of Afro-American culture,” writes of dramatic changes in European views of the U.S.

You won’t believe how public opinion, as reflected by the media, has changed against the US within the last two months. Sometimes I sat in front of the TV and couldn’t believe how this historical transition period was taking place, right here in front of my eyes. Let there be no doubt about it: the rupture between Germany (actually German speaking countries, including Austria and Switzerland, too) and Amerikkka is irreversible. To me as a longtime-observer this gives me a lot of hope. I’m convinced that if we as Europeans stick together we can help the world bring these pirates down faster than anyone.

Mr. Moritz seemed to almost slip into a minor Anschluss, for a second, assembling a Greater Germany from his outpost in Switzerland. But, perhaps we are too sensitive to these things.

To paraphrase Andrew Young, Europeans practically invented piracy. We shall see how they respond to the U.S. offensive-against-all.

Australian Christopher Skinner shares an observation he’s made of his countrymen, regarding race.

Offensive language

Finally, we got a letter from Harvard University, concerning language employed by Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich. In a campaign message published in last week’s , Kucinich said:

Susan Klimczak took offense and, in the process, drew our attention to an interesting story about Haiti.

You are usually so precise in being both strongly critical and critically sensitive in your language, so I think perhaps there might be something I don’t understand.

Here’s what I understand now:

One of my spiritual sisters practices Vodou and every time I hear “voodoo” used as a putdown, usually meaning “misleading” or “not real” my heart hurts for and with her heart. Considering the historical role that Vodou played in the liberation of the Haitian people, I believe that when discourse puts down Vodou, an important historical and present-day tool used in working for liberation of all peoples is put down.

(I also think it could have been a wonderful opportunity to point out that this month Jean-Bertrand Aristide, president of Haiti issued an executive decree declaring Vodou to be an officially sanctioned religion in Haiti. This is a great moment of acknowledgement and respect for a very powerful spiritual tradition.

Thank you. I continue to look forward to your journal each week!

Having no defense, we offered none.

Keep writing.

gratefully acknowledges the following organizations for sending visitors our way during the past week:

Black Planet.com

Black Electorate

WhatReallyHappened.com

Information Clearinghouse.com

Democratic Underground.com

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

BuzzFlash.com

Smirking Chimp.com

Cursor.com