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There isn't a Biggest Story for Today, yet.
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Racism Watch: Just Like Crack in the 80s, the Police State Thrives on Gun Hysteria
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By Glen Ford
February 17, 2013 - blackagendareport.com
“The presence of guns in Black inner cities is sufficient excuse to create a Constitution-free zone.”
From the moment it became known that 20 suburban, mostly white children had been massacred by a young white man in Connecticut, it was inevitable that Black America would pay the price. The nation’s reflexive response to crime and domestic mayhem – real or imagined, and regardless of the actual race of the perpetrators – is always to punish Black people. Whenever the symptoms of the national sickness – America’s endemic violence and alienation – become catastrophically acute, as in Newtown, the standard treatment is mass Black incarceration, by which huge proportions of the Black male population are expelled from the social body like foreign organisms.
The madness in a well-off town in Connecticut had nothing to do with Black inner city violence, which is overwhelmingly rooted in the absence of a legitimate economy, and a lack of social justice – and requires an economic and social justice response. But America is preprogrammed to treat violence as a Black phenomenon.
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Racism Watch: The Ultimate Logic of a Society Built on Mass Murder
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A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
January 07, 2012 - blackagendareport.com
“Mass murder is at the core of the American national religion.”
As a native-born American, I grew up watching cowboy and Indian shoot-em-ups in which the highlight of the movie was when the white guys in the circled wagon train shot the Indians off their horses until all the red men were dead, and very silent. Indians didn’t do a lot of screaming in pain when they were shot; they just expired. Same thing with buck-toothed Japanese, line after line of them, charging into U.S. machine guns, falling instantly silent and dead. It was somehow quite clean, almost antiseptic, these cinematic rituals of death, all staged for the broadest popular consumption to demonstrate the inevitability – and cosmic justice – of ultimate white victory over the darker races.
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Racism Watch: Why White People Get Mad
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By Margaret Kimberley
December 05, 2012 - blackagendareport.com
"The Mayflower's cultural heirs are programmed to find glory in their own depravity, and savagery in their most helpless victims, who can only redeem themselves by accepting the inherent goodness of white Americans." – Glen Ford
"Most white Americans can only think of themselves and their country as the pinnacle of enlightenment and civilization."
In 2003 my Black Agenda Report colleague Glen Ford wrote "The End of American Thanksgivings: A Cause for Universal Rejoicings," a brilliant piece of commentary which cast a spotlight on the horror which inspired the holiday that came to be known as Thanksgiving. Mr. Ford documented the genocide visited upon the original inhabitants of this country which is inextricably intertwined with the Thanksgiving myth that is so revered by most Americans. The facts that he presented are easily known to anyone who cares to seek them out. The celebration of the Thanksgiving holiday is not only a celebration of slaughter but it is used to this very day to keep all Americans secure in their love of white supremacy.
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Racism Watch: Justice, Not Drama, for Trayvon Martin
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By Margaret Kimberley
March 22, 2012 - blackagendareport.com
"Al Sharpton and Michael Baisden have announced that they will attend a rally in support of the Martin family."
The shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida has thankfully become a national news story. Martin was killed as he went about his daily business, under circumstances which usually don't result in death for anyone but black people. While Martin was returning to the home of a family friend in a gated community, a "neighborhood watchman," a trigger happy rent-a-cop, shot and killed the seventeen year old. The killer's assertion of "suspicious behavior" boils down to just one thing. Martin had a black face, and that has always served as reason enough to be deemed suspicious.
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Racism Watch: Hollywood and Race: Still Stuck in the 1950s
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By Rev. Jesse Jackson, Jr.
February 22, 2012 - counterpunch.org
This Sunday, nearly 40 million people are likely to tune in to see who captures an Oscar at the annual Academy Awards ceremonies. Winning the award can add millions to a film’s box office and supercharge the career of an actor, director, screenwriter or editor. According to the Academy’s 2009-10 fiscal year tax filing, the Oscars generated $81.3 million in revenue. This is a big deal.
It is avidly watched by the moviegoing population of this sprawling and diverse nation of more than 300 million people, and by millions more around the world. Hollywood sets styles, captures imaginations, touches dreams. Worldwide, movies provide people with much of what they think about America.
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Racism Watch: The Origins of Racism
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socialistworker.co.uk
July 08, 2011
Racism is so embedded in our society that many people assume it has always existed. But, says Yuri Prasad, it is really a modern phenomenon that developed with capitalism.
The plague of racism continues to scar the world that we live in, even though there is no scientific basis whatsoever for the division of society into races. Race is a social construct that benefits our rulers.
The idea that people with different skin colours have different ideas and interests is a common sense one. The implication of this for many people is that prejudice is natural, and that any attempt to get rid of it is doomed.
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Racism Watch: Afrika: The Other Side of The Coin
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The Caucasian international conquest of Africa in 1885 and in 2011 – the Great Deception.
By Udo W. Froese
April 19, 2011 - udofroese.wordpress.com
The most propagated, celebrated, defended and honoured deception in world history is that Caucasians, the international West and its Judeo-Christian civilisation and history, care for Africans, Orientals and Asians. The deceivers receive the ‘Nobel Peace Prize’ to honour such propaganda.
Such pathological propaganda bestows the Caucasian conquistadores with the absolute divine powers and self-righteous rights to enforce their perception of “democracy”, “human rights” and “free market economy” upon all those, who have been written off as “warlike, savage tribes, ravaged with tribalism, ethnicity, HIV Aids, ancestor worship and heathens” and are therefore “several steps lower on the ladder of evolution”.
On the second day of April 2011 the media in South Africa lead its news bulletins with the headline that the white-colonial, racist-fascist convicted murderer and former Afrikaaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) leader, the late Eugene TerreBlanche, was murdered a year ago. This is a clear demonstration of the importance South Africa’s media attaches to colonial racism and fascism. The same media wages its war-of-attrition against souvereign neighbouring countries such as Zimbabwe and Swaziland, using its airwaves to wonderingly ask, why there is no “civil unrest” similar to Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya.
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Racism Watch: Your House Is On Ground Zero (And Quite Without Permission)
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By Tim Wise
September 07, 2010 - timwise.org
In all the rancor over whether or not one group of Muslims should be allowed to build a cultural center and worship space near the site of the 9/11 attacks -- which were committed by a separate and totally unrelated group of Muslims --there is one thing above all else that no one appears anxious to point out: namely, that for any white Christian to say "Ground Zero" is off limits to anyone is possibly the most deliciously and yet grotesquely ironic thing ever suggested.
After all, there is scarcely a square foot of land upon which we tread that is not, for someone, Ground Zero. I am sitting atop one now: a killing field for Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Creek; a graveyard in which are buried the bones -- and if no longer the bones, then surely the dust -- of peoples whose evisceration occurred not so long ago, and is still remembered by those who have not the luxury of forgetting.
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Racism Watch: Michael Jackson - a man trapped behind a mask
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By Yuri Prasad
June 30, 2009 - socialistworker.co.uk
Despite his huge popularity, Michael Jackson embodied the contradictions of racism in the music industry
The words to Nina Simone’s song Young, Gifted and Black could have been written especially for the Jackson Five. When the group’s first single, I Want You Back, smashed its way to the top of the pop charts in 1969 the brothers seemed to some to epitomise the desire for black pride that emerged out of the movement for civil rights.
The Jacksons combined street credibility – a kind of ghetto chic derived from their working class upbringing in Indiana – with wholesome respectability. They dressed sharp, but not so sharp they couldn’t be copied, and the group wore their hair in the “natural” Afro style.
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Racism Watch: The State of Black America: From Oscar Grant to Barack Obama
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By Ron Jacobs
January 15, 2009
counterpunch.org
I was out in Oakland, CA. this past weekend for a friend's birthday. Naturally, I visited Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley--my old stomping grounds--while I was there. Things have changed there while remaining the same. The area is certainly much more ethnically diverse. Gentrification has slithered in, but its presence is quite minimal when compared to other sections of Berkeley, Oakland or San Francisco.
Peoples Park looks better than it has in years, with its native plant life dominating the east and west ends of that small piece of turf where so many battles have been fought. Doorways that used to shelter street people have been blocked off and some benches have been removed from areas where those same folks used to relax.
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Racism Watch: Reflections on Conservative Scapegoating
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Racism as Reflex
By Tim Wise
September 29, 2008
counterpunch.org
If hypocrisy were currency, conservatives would be able to single-handedly bail out the nation's free-falling financial system in less than a week, without the rest of us having to front so much as a penny.
So on the one hand, folks like this always tell others--especially the poor and people of color--to take "personal responsibility" for their lives, and not to blame outside factors (like racism, or the economic system) for their problems. But on the other hand, these same persons then demonstrate that their own ability to blame others for their personal setbacks, or the nation's problems, knows no rival.
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Racism Watch: Apart from the noose, this is an everyday story of modern America
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Jena Mayor Calls Song Inflammatory Oct 6 07
The Jena 6 Case is History Written in Lightning
By Trey Ellis
September 19, 2007
The first Sean Hannity heard about it was last night when Reverend Al was trying to bring it up and Hannity assumed he was talking about Megan Williams, the young black woman who was tortured and sexually assaulted by those crazy hillbillies in West Virginia. Cryptkeeper Colmes tried to explain but as usual Hannity didn't hear a word he said.
The Jena 6 case began last fall when a new black student to the mostly white, rural Louisiana town of Jena sat under the "white tree," so called because it was the place where the white kids at school congregated.
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Racism Watch: International slavery museum: a refreshing approach to history
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Dan Swain is impressed by a museum that unravels the links between Liverpool and the slave trade
August 28, 2007
socialistworker.co.uk
Dan Swain is impressed by a museum that unravels the links between Liverpool and the slave trade
The new International Slavery Museum in Liverpool quotes prominently the former slave William Prescott asking us to “remember not that we were freed, but that we fought”.
This is a refreshing change from much of the coverage of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, which has tended to focus on the actions of a few white abolitionists, relegating the slaves themselves to passive victims.
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Racism Watch: The legacy of Frantz Fanon
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Sheila McGregor looks back at the
life and work of the radical psychiatrist
May 22, 2007 : socialistworker.co.uk
The World Social Forum in Kenya earlier this year was marked by a resurgence of interest in the ideas of Frantz Fanon, a thinker whose works have for many years been neglected.
Fanon was a North African writer and psychiatrist who became famous in the 1960s for his radical critique of colonial racism and its impact on colonised people.
His devastating description of how racism destroyed people, not only physically, but also in terms of their mental and emotional lives, inspired leaders of the Black Power movement in US.
But Fanon's name was also inseparable from his most controversial and uncompromising stance – his defence of the right of colonised people to use violence in their fight for liberation.
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Racism Watch: Racism At Home and Abroad
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Don Imus, Tony Blair & Ann Coulter
Who In Our Society Is Permitted To Say What?
By Carl Bloice
BC Editorial Board
www.blackcommentator.com
April 19, 2007
Don Imus wasn't the only person to open his mouth and unleash a political storm on the subject of race. It went hardly mentioned in the major media of this country but as the Guardian (UK) put it, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, last week claimed a recent spate of knife and gun murders in London "was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive Black culture." Of course, Blair is no Imus but his comments elicited a similar reaction as the Imus affair, underscoring the ongoing effort to shift the responsibility for racism onto those most harmed by it.
While Blair spouted off in Cardiff, on this side of the pond, something strange – but not unexpected – was happening. What sparked African American anger and widespread public disgust was being turned into an attack on Black people. All of a sudden the "shock jock" ranting of someone who regularly engaged in crass racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia - and his audience's embrace of the practice - was said to pale by comparison with rap music. The objects of derision became in some quarters: "Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and other Black leaders" and their inability to clean up hip-hop lyrics.
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