Category: Commentary

It was not the kind of picture the Bush crowd likes to see. There was South African President Thabo Mbeki, yukking it up with Cuba’s Fidel Castro, standing near Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, all celebrating the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – “Lula” – leader of Brazil’s Workers Party. Off to the…

This article first appeared in Znet magazine The most disturbing aspect of the recent national melodrama over Senate Majority Leaders Trent Lott’s offensive declaration of retrospective support for the race-segregationist 1948 Presidential campaign of Strom Thurmond is not the content of Lott’s remarks. The really depressing thing is what the entire episode says about the…

The interim between Christmas and New Year’s Day is a time for reassessment, a lull in life’s short march during which we resolve to patch up what has gone wrong, and make more permanent that which has gone right. Symbols help us in our contemplations. For the evaluative purposes of this essay, we will employ…

This article was first published in the Winter edition of ColorLines magazine, now on newsstands. The historical foes of Black America are engaged in a new and multi-layered strategy to subvert the general political consensus that has prevailed among Blacks since the dramatic death rattles of official Jim Crow, in the mid and late Sixties.…

Poor Trent Lott – disowned. The GOP has wrapped him in his own soiled blanket and dropped the orphan in the back alleyways of history, claiming they never knew the boy. Trent, who? say Republicans, as they wave a dirty rag, claiming to have wiped the slate clean. The GOP’s faith-based funding juggernaut will resume…

The only thing black George Bush wants to deal with in January is Iraqi oil. What with his Trent Lott troubles, Bush is all Blacked-out. That’s the general assessment of Africa Action executive director Salih Booker, responding to the White House decision to postpone the President’s January 10 – 17 trip to Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya,…

This article appeared in the Venezuela and Chavez Watch page of Trinicenter.com. This month, for the first time in history, Venezuelan people of African descent have total control of their historic Black university, the Instituto Universitario Barlovento. They are already planning a university administered hotel and a restaurant for students, faculty and the community. This…

There is poetry in the flow of human events, if one can only figure out where the verse begins and, thereby, catch the rhythm of it all. For months, publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble delayed completion of their commentary, “America’s Black Rightwing Forum: The grotesque devolution of a Black news program.” Created by Ford…

The actual character of the Bush regime, how relentlessly its component corporate parts pursue their ideological and practical agenda, is revealed in the administration’s intention to repeal a little known and never financed family leave benefit. The Clinton administration issued a regulation allowing states to provide unemployment benefits to workers who take time off to…

The Black Commentator views the article reprinted below, written in 1996, as an intriguing, many-layered piece of sociology. We believe the story speaks as much to conditions and behaviors in the Black community of an earlier era, as it does to the insane world of white racists. The article is also posted at http://www.thoughtcrimes.org/. Strom’s…