The Best of Guest Commentators

We have amassed a host of Guest Commentators during our history of writing . It is very difficult for us to say who are our most significant contributors, but we do know who established us on the scene. Patrice Johnson, a freelance writer, lent her talents and insight to our columns in our initial issue, April 5, 2002. Her offering was titled, “Linguistic Profiling.” Ms. Johnson took a look at the people who call you up on the phone, and make race-based decisions, every day.

So, who’s screening out Black callers? Very likely people who are less educated and earn less money than those on the other end. In some instances a White person conducting business over the phone may be asked to practice linguistic profiling by his or her supervisor. Smith mentions a case in Alabama where a White apartment manager contacted the local Fair Housing group to report that the apartment owner told her if she suspected that a caller was Black, to tell him or her nothing was available. Smith also recalls a conversation she had with a White woman working for an employment services company, who had been instructed to get callers to say the word “ask.” If they pronounced it “ax,” that was one way of identifying them as African-American. (Baugh says that particular pronunciation is most commonly associated with Blacks.) Smith, who is White, says, “We get to hear these things all the time.”

Dr. Martin Kilson, the Harvard social scientist, joined our roster of guest commentators early on. Dr. Kilson first rocked the boat when he pointed out “How to Spot a Black Trojan Horse,” on May 8, 2002. Kilson was keen to stop the mayoral candidacy of Cory Booker, the Hard Right’s pretender for the mayoral spot in Newark, NJ. And we did stop Booker. (See “Hard Right Cash Defeated in Black City – This Time.”)

But we thought that Dr. Kilson’s most telling contribution was his July 17, 2003, piece, “The Pretense of Hip Hop Leadership.”

Tim Wise is a very wise man, and we are pleased to include him among our contributors. Wise did a work of brilliance on June 10, on the death of the aweful Ronald Reagan. Wise titled his article, “Reagan, Race, and Remembrance.”

Having to grapple with the real world is stressful, and people with relative power and privilege never know how to deal with stress very well. As such, they long for and applaud easy answers for the stress that occasionally manages to intrude upon their lives: so they blame people of color for high taxes, failing schools, crime, drugs, and jobs they didn’t get; they blame terrorism on “evil,” and the notion that they hate our freedoms: a belief one can only have if one really thinks one lives in a free country in the first place.

In other words, delusion is both the fuel that propels people like Ronald Reagan forward in political life, and then makes a rational assessment of his legacy impossible upon his death.