Category: Guest Commentary

Let me get this out of the way: is sexism present in every major society and culture? Yes. But, Black male-bashing – especially about violence and gender issues – is a perennial American sport that never seems to wane in popularity. We expect such anti-Black male behavior as a matter of course from white media…

Invocation of the words, “weapons of mass destruction” has become key to Bushspeak. The President and his lieutenants hurl the term with Biblical inflection as blanket justification for all manner of foreign military adventures or domestic political repression. In the mouths of Pirates, the acronym “WMD” can mean a global plague that might kill millions…

My father was over 40 years old when he took and passed an entrance exam, and matriculated at Morris College in 1941. He excelled as a student but was not allowed to enter his senior year because he had not provided proof of having graduated high school. He had not because he could not. My…

Whether or not Jayson Blair’s ascent at the Times was due to race is the latest post-911 media preoccupation. To be sure, the theory that race was responsible for his rise was buttressed by executive editor Howell Raines, who suggested that his southern white guilt may have been a factor in his willingness to forgive…

The Jayson Blair debacle has race all in it, but not in the simplistic sense recently suggested by anti-civil rights types such as William McGowan or liberals who choose to ignore the racial subplot. If we are willing to face the fact that Mr. Blair was taking the place of another qualified journalist – whether…

In 1996 while doing some research about 1940s Cuthbert, Georgia, I ran across some information about Lena Baker. At that time, the ordeal and execution of Lena Baker was one of the best kept secrets in town. After reading the Superior Court Minutes of her trial, I knew that Lena needed a voice. Almost sixty…

A bloodless coup, led by the world’s richest and most powerful nations, is taking place in Haiti. For two years now, the world’s wealthiest nations and the Bretton Woods institutions they control have maintained a crushing international financial embargo on eight million Haitians. They have done this “to protest an electoral dispute stemming from Haiti’s…

Several grassroots political activists from Haiti’s Lavalas movement recently sat in a small room watching television on the first day of the Bush administration’s war against Iraq. For about half an hour they shifted between Canada’s RDI and France’s RFI Caribbean broadcasts in French. The room suddenly broke into excited chatter as images of thousands…

There’s been a lot of talk in the progressive community, that is, in the mostly white progressive community, that Black people are not pulling their weight in opposing Bush’s war on Iraq. I hear these thoughts on KPFK radio in Los Angeles. I heard them recently at the Socialist Scholar’s Conference in New York where…

Cover Story They have reached too far Bush’s road leads to ruin – for himself and his Pirates 3 Guest Commentators 3 Faces of Shock, Awe and Death 1 – Jimmy Mack, When Are You Comin’ Back? – The real price of war – By Jorge Mariscal 2 – Colin Powell: A hawk with smooth…