Bruce Dixon

Life, the song tells us, is hard out here for a pimp. And why shouldn’t it be? The pimp sells something of great value that’s not even his. By that definition, Newark mayoral candidate Cory Booker, poised to hand over the city’s schools and the remnants of its public sector over to privatizers and the…

Last weekend in Los Angeles somewhere between half a million and two million legal and illegal immigrants and their supporters hit the streets protesting the same federal legislation that brought at least three hundred thousand into the streets of Chicago two weeks earlier, and smaller crowds in dozens of other cities. As this article is…

The man-made tragedies of the Gulf Coast and its mother city New Orleans are never far from our thoughts these days. The eyes of black America, though half blinded by the lack of mainstream news coverage, remain fixed on the unfolding spectacles of profiteering, privatization and ethnic cleansing. The wholesale displacement of black New Orleans…

Last Week’s BC cover story raised the subject of the relationship between African Americans and Latinos, blacks and browns. We singled a particularly contemptible maneuver by Kasim Reed, a black DLC Georgia state legislator from Atlanta who tried to outdo Republican viciousness when it came to proposing punitive measures against immigrants. Reed authored a bill…

Last week’s BC Guest Commentator Leutisha Stills hit a nerve with her contribution, “Why Is Tavis Smiling? And Why Are We Still Watching?” It seems that many engaged and astute BC readers were asking themselves the same questions as Ms. Stills. A fellow worthy of his name, rapper Wise Intelligent has some of the answers.…

We hear a lot about A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker and James Foreman and especially about Martin Luther King every February. The names of Malcolm X and Garvey and Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois are dusted off and thrown around, along with those of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland…

In last week’s Freedom Rider, BC‘s own Margaret Kimberly drew attention to the little-noticed news item that Halliburton had landed the no-bid contract to construct detention centers to be utilized in the event of what officials deem an “immigration emergency.” Reader Linda O’Brien writes Many thanks to the Black Commentator and Margaret Kimberley for writing…

Early 20th Century America had its minstrel shows and other depictions of grinning, red-lipped watermelon-eating pickaninnies; its Topsy and Sambo figures in print, advertising and elsewhere. They lent comforting affirmation to white supremacist fantasies of black degradation. At the dawn of the 21st century, we have another cohort of black public figures eager to please…