Independent since 2002 Issue No. 1102 Week of November 7, 2026 Get the free email dispatch →

Editorial Board

Dr. Lenore Daniels, PhD

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Dr. Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Contact Dr. Daniels and BC.

103 pieces

Commentary

The Old Colossus

By Dr. Lenore Daniels, PhD Editorial Board

Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge,” uttered by none other than a descendant of Italians and Irish, the Principle Deputy Director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Ken Cuccinelli.

‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to…

Continue reading 11 min

Commentary

Where Are Your Scars?

By Dr. Lenore Daniels, PhD Editorial Board

The image of the black church singing and preaching is salable whereas the image of a black community that leans socialist threatens the interests of the powerful—no matter how corrupt, how vile and mean-spirited.

The greatest irony and tragedy of all is that our nation, which initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world, is now cast…

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Commentary

Race for Profit

By Dr. Lenore Daniels, PhD Editorial Board

The right to property meant something different for a people who had once been property. To own meant being a human being. African Americans faced obstacles to the purchase of a home—until the 1970s.

Angela Davis, “Underexposed: Photography and Afro-American History,” Century of Black Photographers, 1840-1960 [T]he underlying cause of urban slums is that the residents are too poor to…

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Commentary

What Kind of World Do We Want To See? Depends On Who’s Doing the Envisioning

By Dr. Lenore Daniels, PhD Editorial Board

on the floor of any Amazon warehouse these days, employees watch as Bezos rises, ascends into the ether, for all practical purposes, Bezos doesn’t live on the ground on which they walk.

The phrase, gnothi seauton (know thyself), which later became the motto of the classical Greeks of the Golden Age of Athens, would have been virtually meaningless…

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Commentary

Toni Morrison: Writing the Memory of Her story, America’s Story of Struggle

By Dr. Lenore Daniels, PhD Editorial Board

What is not recognized in American society or in our educational institutions is just how few white professors, with PhD.’s, holding tenured positions are familiar with narratives written by the majority of the world’s humanity.

...[T]hat the writer has no more right than anyone else not to take a stand against the inhumanity of the world today… Talent and genius cannot…

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Commentary

We the People: Flaunting the Power to Be Cruel and Abusive

By Dr. Lenore Daniels, PhD Editorial Board

With money comes beautiful women that both Epstein and Trump can abuse while federal prosecutors, lawyers, tabloid publishers, and politicians (admirers of the great men) whisk away any pesky women or girls who object to being treated as another purchase in the lifestyle of the rich and famous.

I was a little mystified at how benignly he responded to my questions about his business activities. Now, when I look at my meticulous notes, I…

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Cover Story

Achieving the Moon and Losing the Principled: So the US Cages Children 50 Years Later

By Dr. Lenore Daniels, PhD Editorial Board

We did something back in the 1960s without the equipment and technology. Without even knowing what we would need to put a human on the Moon. It wasn’t about left or right, liberal or conservative. No one cared about asking Gene Kranz or Katherine Johnson or John Glenn or Jim Lovell or Neil Armstrong what political affiliation did they support. For it was clear these were people who lived by principles—something we lack today.

The first mission by people on Earth through space to another planetary body are unlikely ever to be lost to history, to memory, or to storytelling.…

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Commentary

Dehumanizing Children at the Border: What Does This Say about Ordinary Americans?

By Dr. Lenore Daniels, PhD Editorial Board

Too many Americans, ordinary citizens, adults have given in to perpetuating violence against the little ones! The visibly deplorable conditions at Clint best represents not the children’s state of mind but rather how the process of dehumanizing ordinary Americans is what’s really going on at the detention center in Clint, Texas.

The assault on the system of women power requires the replacing of a peaceful, nonpunitive, nonauthoritian social system wherein women wield power by making social life…

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Commentary

Reparations: Ta-Nehisi Coates Testifies in Washington DC

By Dr. Lenore Daniels, PhD Editorial Board

For too many white Americans of whatever political affiliation, there’s a wish to see blacks disappear rather than racism. Just ignore black people and maybe the problem of racism, of white supremacy, of that ugly history we’d rather not confront will disappear.

As historian Ed Baptist has written, enslavement ‘shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics’ of America, so that by 1836 more than $600 million,…

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