The Best of Cover Stories

Journalists take a snapshot of history, and present it as a defining reality. Political commentators speak off the cuff, on the moment, and attempt to present a broad picture of the world based on the day’s “news.” It is only when one looks back on the body of work of journalism – did we make the right call, did we see the essential truth? – that we can assess our usefulness to society.

The Black Commentator has been useful. In the hot days of August the staff of The Black Commentator reviewed itself – our body of work – and found it good, and useful to society, and a resource for Black people’s mission in the world. We present to you what we believe are our best ideas, our commentaries on the life we share on this planet.

The War

We must begin with War. War is organized killing. Why did the United States declare war on a huge section of the world, and how was that made acceptable to the populace?

This magazine saw the war coming, and understood the social mechanisms that had long been in place to sustain the aggression. Two months before the Iraq war began, we scoped the moves of the dance of death: The title was, “The Mother of All War Shows,” January 30, 2003

The real show is in the show, itself. The people who created George Bush’s ridiculous War Face are not just playing crazy to gain transient advantage over Frenchmen and Russians. They are Hell-bent on proving to the natives (all of us) that they are capable of unimaginable destruction. We must see it to believe it – which is why this war is all but inevitable. In the aftermath of horror, the world will become malleable, ready for reshaping in the not-yet-defined New Order.

That’s the plan. The pirates are confident they can improvise the post war details at their leisure, later. What we are witnessing is essentially the buildup to a global consciousness-searing U.S. military demonstration – the Mother of All War Shows. If we search for the military or economic objectives of the conflict on anything so crude as a map, we have missed the point.

We wrote these words before the war. The Black Commentator understood that a Master Plan was in motion – although not a very good plan. It has since come asunder, which is good for humanity.

What keeps this machinery of death moving? Racism. That’s what gets the white majority excited. It is what motivates them to kill other people on a global scale, and it is what John Kerry still calls forth with his militaristic image-making.

In the days before the first U.S. troops crossed the Kuwait border, The Black Commentator saw the racist war-making scenario unfolding, yet again. The aggression against world order was framed as a defense of civilization – but nobody was buying into that package except the white U.S. audience. On March 13, the week before Shock and Awe unfolded, we connected the impending atrocity to its historical progenitors. The result was one of the most important articles we have ever published: “Racism & War: Perfect Together.”

This may be the last pre-Event commentary from . Since there is no doubt that Shock and Awe will, in fact, forever alter global consciousness, it is important that we avail ourselves of these moments before the cataclysm to state a fact that is obvious to most people on Earth: Next week, or the week after, the American people as a whole will be rightfully judged guilty of premeditated crimes against human civilization.

But they made war against our wishes. Black people were near-universally against this war, and would have been more obviously and vociferously so, if we had been asked the right questions. However, they didn’t ask us for permission to launch this racist crusade. Now, they will reap the whirlwind, a global rebuff, as we foresaw in our article of March 20, 2003, “They Have Reached Too Far: Bush’s Road Leads to Ruin for Himself and His Pirates.”

No one can predict the specific ways in which nations and movements will resist Bush’s aggression against civilization. What is certain is that the Pirates have succeeded in arraying important sectors of every other nation on the planet in opposition to Washington’s hegemony. Bush has made the name that is our patrimony – “America” – a curse on the lips of much of the world.

If Shock and Awe is essentially a horrific psychological warfare exercise – and it is – the assault on humanity’s collective sensibilities has already had disastrous, unintended effects.

At The Black Commentator, we thought hard and long about the historical juncture at which we had arrived. The task was made far more difficult by the corporate media, who had totally abandoned every ethic and principle of journalism. We could not believe what we heard, or saw. They had reshaped reality to fit the racist mission. They were on a crusade to confuse the public – and they were also confused, themselves.

The corporate media were embedded. They were on mission, in a Race War, as we wrote about in, “Onward Embedded Soldiers: The Corporate Media’s Deputized War Coverage,” on March 27, 2003

Instead of the meticulously calibrated, rolling advance under and through the smoke and hellfire of Shock and Awe, the Americans and Brits lurched into war, like a driver who can’t handle a stick shift.

And so it has also been crazy to us at The Black Commentator, who try to make sense of it all. War is organized madness, the deliberate infliction of the unthinkable and unspeakable, which must somehow be made palatable to the masses, who will have to die for the idea. It became clear to us at that the Bush men were organizing a War Society, against our will.

We called on the wisdom of W.E.B. Dubois, who had some very good advice, which we transmitted on May 22, 2003, in a piece called “Permanent War and the ‘Color Line: Iraq on the 100th Anniversary of ‘The Souls of Black Folk.”

Dubois would immediately recognize the white supremacist character of the Bush men’s New American Century. Although only a relatively small group of rich and venal men stand to profit from the present day Pirates’ policy of Permanent War, the project requires the assent of an imperial-minded majority of white people, collectively demanding their entitlement: dominion….

The Bush Pirates took an historic gamble, betting that they could rearrange the political geography of the world by imposing a planetary U.S. military dictatorship – starting in Iraq. However, the U.S. project would require the collaboration of the Iraqi people. The core, essential racism of the Bush regime rendered them incompetent for the task, as we explained in our June 19, 2003 article, “The Pirates’ Blunt, Useless Instruments: The Iraq Occupation Cannot Possibly Succeed.”

Racism is the mental illness that will bring low the superpower, which is ruled by men who are incapable of understanding other human beings.

The Obama Drama

The entire nation now knows the name, Barack Obama, keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention and, we hope, the next Black U.S. Senator from Illinois. State Senator Obama is familiar to us through Associate Editor Bruce Dixon, a Chicagoan who worked with Obama in the massive voter registration drive that resulted in Carol Moseley-Braun’s election to the Senate, in 1992.

We were overjoyed to learn that Obama, whose progressive credentials are impeccable, was making a bid for the Senate. Imagine our consternation, then, to discover his name posted on the on-line list of members of the Democratic Leadership Council, the corporate-funded virus infecting the Democratic Party. On June 5 of last year, Bruce Dixon initiated a dialogue with the candidate, in a piece titled, “In Search of the Real Barack Obama: Can a Black Senate Candidate Resist the DLC?” Dixon noted that, “Somebody else’s brand of politics appears to have intruded on Obama’s campaign.”

Obama responded to our article and phone calls, claiming, as we reported on June 19 2003, that “neither my staff nor I have had any direct contact with anybody at DLC since I began this campaign a year ago.” He continued:

Wrong answer. We know Obama to be a person of high intelligence, who understood precisely what his filling out of the forms meant: he was giving the DLC permission to advertise him as one of their own. Is that sleeping with the enemy? We thought so. The fact of the matter is, the DLC is where the money is in the Democratic Party. Obama took the route of least resistance, and allowed his name to be used by people with whom he has no political connection – the powerful, rich faction of the Democratic Party that opposes everything that Obama stands for. So, we called him on it.

We did not want to harm a progressive Black politician, but we were determined that there must be a penalty for sleeping with the enemy – or even dozing with the enemy. We took what we believed was the principled approach: to ask the candidate to define himself.

On June 26, 2003, we reported on the results of our dialogue with Barack Obama. The story was called, “Obama to Have Name Removed from DLC List: Says ‘New Democrats’ acted ‘without my knowledge.’”

was shocked to find Obama’s name associated with the New Democratic Movement, an affiliate of what Bruce Dixon calls the “Republican Trojan Horse in the bowels of the Democratic machinery” – the DLC. In a June 19 Cover Story that included a letter from Obama, posed three “bright line” questions to the candidate, “that should determine whether you belong in the DLC, or not.”

1. Do you favor the withdrawal of the United States from NAFTA? Will you in the Senate introduce or sponsor legislation toward that end?

2. Do you favor the adoption of a single payer system of universal health care to extend the availability of quality health care to all persons in this country? Will you in the Senate introduce or sponsor legislation toward that end?

3. Would you have voted against the October 10 congressional resolution allowing the president to use unilateral force against Iraq?

We thought that the “bright line” questioning was necessary and useful. Barack Obama agreed – as we fully expected he would – to all three items, and also categorically stated that he would no longer allow the DLC to play games with his name:

The next week, Obama’s name was gone from the DLC list.

Mass Black Incarceration: The most critical problem

The Gulag has become an overwhelming fact of life in Black America, affecting every aspect of African American existence. Mass incarceration is the largest reality that we confront – shaping and accenting issues of employment, education, voting, and the creation of family units.

The statistics assault us annually: nearly a million Black people are in custody at any given time, and majorities of inner city males between the ages of 20 and 30 are under some form of state supervision – not a good social mix in which to make families.

This did not happen by accident. Putting massive numbers of Black people in jail is national policy, and has been so since the mid-Seventies. has explored the issue many times, most recently in our June 17, 2004 Cover Story, “Mass Incarceration and Rape: The Savaging of Black America.”

Mass incarceration is by far the greatest crisis facing Black America, ultimately eclipsing all others. It is an overarching reality that colors and distorts every aspect of African American political, economic and cultural life, smothering the human – and humane – aspirations of the community. Even the boundless creativity of youth cannot escape the chains that stretch from the Gulag into virtually every Black social space. We hear prison, talk prison, wear prison and – to a horrific degree – have become inured to the all-enveloping presence of prison in virtually every Black neighborhood and extended family.

After more than three decades of mass Black incarceration as national policy, Black America teeters at the edge of an abyss, unable to muster more than a small fraction of its collective energies to advance its agenda in housing, employment and education. The community has been poisoned by massive, ever increasing infusions of the prison experience – a debasement that now permeates much of the fabric of Black life.

The policy of massive incarceration of African Americans is implemented methodically, with such uniformity and intensity that it is perceived as a fact of life – Black folks go to jail. After 30 years, it has become so central a theme of national life that the legitimate basis of the crime against a whole people is not even questioned – we must deserve to go to jail in huge numbers. Even we believe it.

In fact, a great crime has been committed against Black Americans, as we explored in our March 18, 2004, article, “Mass Black Incarceration is White Societal Aggression.”

Let’s Affirm Some Action

Affirmative action, as originally conceived by the civil rights movement and made into law by President Lyndon Johnson, has not existed since the 1978 Supreme Court Bakke decision. Much of Black leadership has been pretending otherwise, and hoping that nobody would know the difference. The Harvard Civil Rights Project tried to continue the fiction, after the High Court gave its blessing to the University of Michigan Law School’s diversity program, last year. “Affirmative action is alive and well,” they said – when, in fact, it had been dead for a long time.

does not believe that a movement can be based on wishful thinking. So we tried to set the record straight, with our article of July 3, 2003, “The Slow and Tortured Death of Affirmative Action: Redress of Racial Wrongs No Longer Public Policy.”

“You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: ‘now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.’ You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair…. This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity – not just legal equity but human ability – not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.”

Johnson’s words were a direct response to the demands of the civil rights movement. He employed the same metaphor as did Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1964 book, “Why We Can’t Wait”:

LBJ and MLK were engaged in an historical dialogue, culminating in the President’s Howard University address, marking the definitive beginning of affirmative action as public policy.

That policy remained in force until 1978, when it was eviscerated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bakke Decision. Those who believe that all that is required in terms of justice from the United States is a concern for diversity, rather than redress of Black people’s specific historical grievances, clung to Bakke like a life raft. Certainly, it was better than nothing, but it was a reversal of the nation’s commitment to make the daughters and sons of slaves whole. A new law of the land was laid down:

Which means that white folks are free to play at diversity and use race as a factor, as long as the rules don’t address racial injustice or demand results.