Someday, soon I hope, through enlightened private and public funding, we will carve out of some hills in Mississippi or Alabama, an obsidian panoply of American black heroes. There will, I’m certain, be many more than four faces. It will be called Mt Blackmore.

The short list of candidates should include Marcus Garvey, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Booker T Washington, Sojourner Truth, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Jackie Robinson, John Coltrane, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammed, Minister Louis Farrakhan, H Rap Brown, Shirley Chisolm, Ron Dellums, and Muhammed Ali.

One of the reasons that I have the “Help Wanted” ad at the top of the page at P! is that I have a sense that freedom, integrity, and justice in America is more likely to be achieved by a coalition of citizens and legislators other than white males.

I recently in these pages decried what I have seen as a chasm between the white male-dominated Left and other politically leftist groups. I’m looking harder at that and I’ve grown a bit. Maybe that chasm is a positive phenomenon. Perhaps advocating integration and unity is not such a good idea, because the strength and power of the non-white-male left might be forced to compromise beliefs and programs/policies that are essential to a radical revolution. Barak Obama, I venture, is an exceptionally noticeable result of such integration. Colin Powell and Condi “They Named a Damn Oil Tanker After Me” Rice are the most egregious and nauseating outcomes. (Heh … I’ve been working on a whole hip-hop riff about “CondiMints” that will likely not make it through to these pages - but yuh know … y’know?).  Read more 

Sundown towns. Excellent MLK Day reading. I’d make the point that people often forget that this whole “give them a middle class!” thing has been tried before; white folks tend to get twitchy with the guns and torches when middle class communities of color get “too big.” Progressives should never forget that the more recent history of white oppression is just as ugly as the antebellum version.  Read more