Bruce Dixon

Because words are tools we use for expressing ourselves, and sometimes for getting at the truth, what we choose to call ourselves and the things around us is important. Look at the lasting damage to rational discussion that overt and covert white supremacists have done in the last forty years with terms like “reverse racism,”…

Corporations are immortal, amoral externalizing machines. They exist above and outside the laws of man and God to rake in profits while making sure someone else pays the cost. When insurance companies lose billions in the stock market, they raise premiums and are awarded government bailouts. When electric utilities squander their monopoly profits on dangerous…

By some time in the late 1950s, before I was ten years old and without knowing what most of the words meant, I had memorized my child’s version of Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat” song along with a couple others on his Calypso album. As many times as I heard those songs, I am certain my…

Real journalists, the way we used to hear it explained, are called to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. They provide citizens with the useful and empowering information needed to comprehend the world and stand up for their own interests. BC‘s own Margaret Kimberley is a real journalist. Her June 23 Freedom Rider column,…

In BC‘s quest to illuminate some of the unpleasant truths confronting black America, outrageous ridicule is a most potent weapon. Near the beginning of the Iraq war BC skewered the war pornography of the embedded press, dressed the already very scary Janice Rogers Brown in a Clarence Thomas fright wig, and echoed Amiri Baraka when…

The BC readers who take the time to write us sustain the dialogue essential to the maintenance of community, and we are always grateful for their contributions. Few questions vex our readership more than those revolving around the question of black leadership. Who elects or selects them? How do we evaluate their performance and ours?…

Near the end of his November 22 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Senator Barack Obama sagely noted that “Those of us in Washington are falling behind the debate that is taking place across America on Iraq. We are failing to provide leadership on this issue…” After 4,000 words of proving his own point,…