On Fri.,
Feb. 12 from 7 to 9 PM, come to Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, 430 E. Belvedere
Ave., Baltimore 21212 for a Black History Month program From Baltimore to
Chicago to the World -- One Struggle. Use the #8 bus line. Make a free
will offering.
What
do the murders of Laquan McDonald and Freddie Gray have in common? Civil
and Justice Rights activist Frank Chapman will discuss the role of police
violence in propping up an unjust social order here and abroad. Chapman
was wrongfully convicted of murder and armed robbery in 1961 and sentenced to
life and fifty years in the Missouri State Prison. His case was taken up by the
National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR) and after 14
years of imprisonment he was released in 1976. In 1983 he was elected
Executive Director of NAARPR. For the past three years he has been a leading
figure in the struggle in Chicago to stop police crimes, especially murder,
torture, beatings and racial profiling. He is presently Field Organizer
and Educational Director of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political
Repression.
There
will be performances by Lady Brion, Baltimore Grand Slam Champion, and the
Charm City Labor Chorus. Doors open at 5:30PM. Come early and enjoy
an exhibit of 20th century African-American Communist freedom fighters and a
dinner special, which includes a vegetarian dinner for a $10 donation. The
evening is sponsored by Maryland Friends of the Peoples World [go to www.peoplesworld.org] and the Communist Party
of Maryland [email md@cpusa.org].
Misunderstanding
blackfolks
BD
Portraits
E.R. Shipp
It is too
easy to view the verbal tirade of Ta-Nehisi Coates against
the radical bona fides of Bernie Sanders from
the perspective of Democratic presidential battle lines and, if you "feel
the Bern," to immediately decry Coates as a threat to Sanders successfully
wooing black voters.
Mind you, few people beyond Sanders and Hillary Clinton partisans,
political junkies and Coates fans even know about, much less care about, this
teacup kerfuffle. But the alarm—the sense of betrayal from the allied
camp—misses Coates' point while also insulting the intelligence of prospective
black voters.
Let me start with the notion that Coates singled
out Sanders while giving Clinton a pass. He did no such thing.
He is a writer and a thinker in the mode
of James Baldwin,
though more analytical, and as he has found his voice—and an audience—these
last few years through his writings in The Atlantic, he has demonstrated that
he is beholden to no political camp when he issues his pronouncements on the
state of the nation vis-à-vis black people. He revels in stirring the pot. He
also enjoys inviting his readers along on his intellectual roller-coaster
rides. And he can switch directions when he thinks the evidence requires that
he do so. Coates has been as critical of Clinton as of Sanders, as critical
of Democrats as
of Republicans. He operates in a rarefied sphere where "sometimes the
moral course lies within the politically possible, and sometimes the moral
course lies outside of the politically possible."
His treatise on reparations shook the reading
world nearly two years ago and provided intellectual heft to a black
nationalist demand that predates by decades the bill that Rep.John Conyers (D-Detroit)
has tried to get before Congress since 1989, a bill that would
"acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity
of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and
1865" and "establish a commission to examine the institution of
slavery, subsequently de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination
against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living
African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate
remedies, and for other purposes." So Coates thought that if any candidate
would embrace the case for reparations, it would be Sanders, the self-described
radical who is willing to do battle to shake up the status quo in the name of
social justice—except on the question dear to Coates' heart.
When asked at the Iowa Brown and Black
Presidential Forum whether he supported reparations, Sanders hardly paused
before saying no and offering two un-Sanders-like reasons: "First of all,
its likelihood of getting through Congress is nil. Second of all, I think it
would be divisive." I see why Coates leaped on that answer—and the
attention he could draw to the reparations cause. Since when, he rightly asked,
has Sanders limited his legislative imagination to what is doable and what does
not rock the boat?
It is because Coates expects more from Sanders
that he has borne down on him, perhaps thinking he would come around as quickly
as he did on criminal justice issues when rudely confronted by representatives
of the Black Lives Matter movement. But Clinton should not be sanguine. In
Coates' eyes, she "has no interest in being labeled radical, left-wing, or
even liberal." But Sanders, the guy who recorded an album called "We
Shall Overcome" in the 1960s, the man who embraces high unemployment among
black youth, mass incarceration, and income inequality as his issues—that man,
in Coates' eyes, must also embrace that which would address the root cause of
so much that has stunted the progress of blacks as a race in the United States:
a dismantling of white supremacy in all its forms and reparations for the
plunder of blacks on whose bodies the wealth of a nation was created.
This is Coates' message: "To destroy white
supremacy we must commit ourselves to the promotion of unpopular policy. To
commit ourselves solely to the promotion of popular policy means making peace
with white supremacy."
His argument is more complex than awarding every
black person the 21st-century equivalent of 40 acres and a mule promised at the
end of legal slavery, though sometimes jesters have fun with the notion.
(There's a question being bandied about in social media now: Would you take a
$250,000 reparation check on the condition that you leave America?") His
is a moral argument bound by neither pragmatism nor election cycles.
From the sidelines, it is rather funny to see
all the commotion Coates has caused, for it once again reminds me that even our
putative allies on the left do not quite understand blackfolks. Black voters,
like other voters, will decide for themselves which candidate is the best
choice among Democrats and Republicans based on immediate self-interest. They
will hardly be persuaded by anything that one writer, even one as mesmerizing
as Coates, has to say. To think otherwise is ignorant and condescending.
E.R. Shipp is a Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist and an associate professor at Morgan State
University's School of Global Journalism and Communication.
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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