What Of The Palestinian People?

There are certain realities in the hundred-year-OLD war THAT IS CURRENTLY being aired on the 24-hour news cycle between Israel and Hamas. First, American politics have, and for the foreseeable future, aligned itself with Israel. Hamas has refused to retract on its founding principles that Israel must be destroyed, and thus have been declared by America and the European Union, to be a terrorist organization. Hamas is the duly-elected representative of the Palestinian people as a result of fair and open elections. Israel and America responded to Hamas' election by imposing a smothering economic boycott of Gaza, that has had a devastating toll on the Palestinian people.

Finally, there have been atrocities committed by both sides that blur the meanings of words such as "terrorist."

President-elect Barack Obama said in Israel this summer, "If someone was raining rockets down on the house that my daughters slept in, I would do everything I could to stop it." Who could not agree with the President-elect on that statement? However, even the Israelis knew that Obama's words were an act of political pandering to the Jewish vote, in a hotly contested Democratic Primary election. It was also a simplistic response to a nuanced set of political realities. Clearly, someone who gave a complex speech on race just a few months earlier, knew that.

The MORE POIGNANT questions for the President-elect are "what if someone built a fence around the south side of Chicago and then imposed an airtight economic boycott of those caged inside?" "What if the people were not allowed to travel outside of that wall, and WERE subjected to what former President Jimmy Carter described as apartheid conditions?" "What if the sole purpose of this economic boycott was to force the elected representatives from power?" "Would the President-Elect simply sit in his living room and watch his daughters world slowly strangled?"

And it must be remembered that the Palestinian people did not turn to Hamas because of its political ideology. The Palestinians had lost faith in the corrupt Palestinian Authority and what they saw as the West's unwillingness to reign in Israel's expansion policies into Palestinian lands through illegal settlements and the building of a security wall –on Palestinian land.

There is no debate that Hamas' adherence to radical Islam is a major impediment to peace. Only despots carry on a war in the name of God. It is unrealistic to expect that the person sitting across the table from you would trust any agreement as long as you openly called for his destruction. Even the Arab governments in the region despise Hamas.

However, the Israelis raining high-tech weaponry down on one of the most densely populated centers on the planet, simply cannot go unchallenged by the moral world. This war was launched as much for internal politics as it was for attacking Hamas.

It has become too exhaustive to assign blame to this mess. What is clear is that the Israelis and the Palestinians cannot resolve this conflict on their own. The United States needs to be honest brokers. No other President has come to power with the goodwill of the world AND THE ABILITY TO force the TWO parties into a meaningful and lasting peace AGREEMENT MORE than Obama. Obama needs to speak to the world with the same moral complexities that he did on race. To the shock of the media, America appreciated HAVING A MATURE DIALOGUE on its original sin. I suspect the world is ready for the same nuanced analysis on the middle-east, too.

To speak of Israeli pain and not mention the pain that Palestinian people have lived with since the formation of Israel, can no longer be this country's policy. The fact is - the people who have suffered the most in THIS mess - are the Palestinians families, who want no more than anyone else –a future for their children. In poll after poll, residents of Gaza support a two state solution with Israel as a peaceful neighbor.

When Barack Obama speaks of this crisis as President, he must speak not only of Israel's security, but also, "what of the Palestinian people?"

Checkmate Blagojevich

In an earlier blog I wrote that true criminals are often brilliant, charming and delusional in how they see themselves and the world around them. Gov. Rod Blagojevich is a true criminal and naming Roland Burris, a former state attorney general, who has a fairly distinguished career as public servant is brilliant. Oh did I mention that Burris is African-American.

Now the ball is in the Democrats and Barack Obama's court. The Democrats have indicated they will not seat any appointment by Blagojevich. However, the Governor has the legal and constitutional authority to appoint the replacement for Obama.

The Senate has no legal or constitutional authority to deny the appointment. The United States Supreme court in Powell v. McCormack ruled that congress could not deny Harlem Democrat Adam Clayton Powell his seat in congress. Just two years earlier, the court in Bond v. Floyd enjoined the Georgia Legislator from denying Julian Bond a seat in that body.

Burris, on the other hand, has a legitimate claim to a United States Senate seat for the next two years. He is in no way implicated with Blagojevich's criminality. He rightly states that the citizens of Illinois have a constitutional right to two senators and he is answering the call for public service. And besides Burris is 70 years-old. What the hell does he care if Harry Reid is pissed off?

The problem that the Democrats have is that the reality of the white boy club called the United States Senate will now come into full view. The debate will move away from Blagojevich's sleaziness and possible criminality to 99 white men looking down their nose at an African-American from taking his senate seat.

You have to appreciate the move from that insane Governor in Illinois.

McNasty and McFilty

I had a lot of respect for John McCain. He always seemed to have a quiet dignity about him. Despite Biden’s “he’s no maverick”, McCain would often display political courage that was rare in the senate. I have watched with disappointment, as over the last 6 months, as McCain has transformed into McNasty. It was apparent that he had lost it when he picked McFilty as his running mate.

Last night’s debate performance was final devolution into angry bitter old man. You would have to believe that someone who has been through so many political wars would know that it is over and would not throw a 30 year reputation under the bus. McCain would not have, but McNasty did.

Then there’s McFilty. Her racist tinged rants of “palling around with terrorist” and he is not one of us is beneath any national figure in the closing days of a Presidential race. But McFilthy is no national figure, she is a small person, from small town. The words rolled off her lips easily as if they have been there before.

Do you know who has turned into a national embarrassment, who has sunk to levels of race baiting and divisive politics that has not been seen since the sixties in the south? Not Obama but “THAT ONE”

Play That Funky Music White Boys

The dichotomy between the Democrats and Republicans is striking. How can the Republican Party in the most diverse country in the world remain lily white? You almost expect during their convention they will break out an ancient Scottish Ritual and sacrifice a calf or heaven forbid a black man. That in belies their problem. They are not for American values, as much as they are for Anglo-American values.

This incessant need to remind us of “God and Country” gives them the psychological fortitude to keep in place a white supremacist legacy that to this day stifles America role in the world. The subliminal message is that God has blessed the white race and so if we want to say –invade a country without warrant- as long as that country is brown, God blesses us.

It is why the rest of the world seems so enthrall with Obama. After two hundred years, of the white boy club, we need change we can believe in.

The Revolution Will Be Televised?

This morning NAS held a press conference in front of Fox News headquarters in New York. He delivered over 600,000 signatures on a Color Of Change/Move On petition to FOX President Roger Ailes. The petition requested that FOX News stop airing racist propaganda. Ailes immediately rejected it.

FOX will say that NAS is just promoting his new album which is number one in the country. Fox will probably be right, but if you can make some change and still challenge corporate racism at its worst, then God Bless America.


NAS was pressured by his record label to change the name of his new album from “Nigger” because it was deemed to be too offensive. Art often offends. One might argue that one of Art’s major roles in society is to offend and therefore shake us from our vegative state and think. An artist should never compromise

If you hand a lot of poor kids a microphone, you get a lot of self-hatred shot back at you. But as the kids mature and get a conscience and figure out the game, you occasionally get some light.

Jessie Done Gone Nutty

First of all let me say that if anybody has earned to right to act a fool and ask for our forgiveness, it’s Jessie Jackson. Every person of color that owns a franchise in this country owes Jessie a great deal of gratitude. His historic run for President created the political infrastructure that allowed Obama to be successful. All of the high-tech wizardry that we are so enamored with from the Obama campaign is good, but it was the black vote turning out in overwhelming numbers in state after state that gave him the nomination. To win in politics you have to have a energized base, and the black vote was Obama’s base.

Obama has come under a lot of criticism lately. Obama should be rightly criticized for his shift on the FISA bill. His support of what many in the country rightly believe to be an unconstitutional law is troubling. But do you really want to live with some of theses white folks and not have a right to a gun? Now I am a committed non-violent person and have never owned a gun in my life, but our history in the land of the free has been too tenuous not have the right to own one.

Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court striking the death penalty for rape of a juvenile is understandable. I started my legal career opposed to the death penalty. But I have come to believe that there are crimes so heinous that you abdicate your right to live among us. There is evil that walks among us. I have sat and stared into its eyes and have been charmed by its charisma. I have fought with all of my legal skills to set it free, knowing that if I was successful, it would molest or rape again. In America even evil has a right to a fair trial. It is what makes us great.

Morally, if you rape a five-year old in every orfice of her body – then society has a moral justification to put you to sleep. Where I depart from Obama is the mechanism by which we decide the ultimate sentence, is so flawed by racism and class that the death penalty simply cannot be justified. That gives anti-death penalty advocates a strong case to criticize the next President of the United States.

Furthermore, Black leaders have as much right to criticize Obama as anyone. However, Jackson comments that Obama was speaking down to blacks is just wrong. As I have written on this blog, young male children being born and raised without fathers is the greatest threat facing black people in America today. Black America has got to start dealing with that fact. The first step is honest and open dialogue. Obama the product of a single mother and absent father is as good a person as any to lead it.

If Jackson critique was that Obama’s moral rhetoric was insufficient in that he did not challenge the greater society, particularly white folks, to own up for its behavior and to acknowledge that racism and classism plays an equal role to personal responsibility then he would have been justified to do so. However, to threatened the brother's nuts on the bases of his logic was just plain nutty.

Even more, it was sad. Jackson’s behavior throughout the campaign has been disappointing. Whenever he appeared on a news program as an Obama supporter, his defense of Obama has been half-hearted. For instance, after Bill Clinton’s racial interjections in South Carolina, I watched Jackson on McNeil Lehr introduced as a Obama supporter and then actually accuse Obama of raising race too. I thought damn Jessie, don’t do the brother any more favors by defending him. I always got the feeling that he really was with the Clintons but political necessity placed him unhappily in the Obama camp.

Some civil rights leaders seem particularly threatened by the new politics. Rather than basking in the results of their labor, they act like old lions whose time over the pride is waning. Julian Bond comments that young black leaders should have to rip the power away from the old guard makes you wonder why some of our leaders risked their lives and went to jail. If they were not doing it to make way for a new generation that was unencumbered by the social and mental limitations of Jim Crow, then why the hell bother.

At this moment in time in our history, Jackson should be the most proudest. It was his vision and ‘nuts” that paved the way for this brother. To see him act out before the world as a bitter old-man, hurt because the spotlight has moved away and chastised by his own son, is truly tragic. We love you brother but go home before you do yourself and us anymore harm.

Drug Laws And Slavery

I have two close relatives that have battled crack addiction for a number of years and consequently have cost great pain within my family. My old neighborhood has partly been devastated by the drug trade. Many of my childhood friends are either jailed for or have been consumed by drugs. I understand first hand the devastation that drugs cost in our society and within the family.

However, everyday I go to work in a criminal justice system that is devastating the African-American community. The country’s drug laws, in the shear size of incarceration that is being imposed on the black community, is having a more devastating impact than drugs ever have.

According to the Sentencing Project 32.2 percent of young black men between the ages twenty and twenty nine are either in prison, in jail, or on probation and parole. This is in comparison with 6.7 percent of young white men. A total of 827,440 young African-American men are under the supervision of the criminal justice system at a cost of 6 billion dollars a year. The bulk of these convictions are drug related.

Those young men lucky enough to escape prison are more likely than not given felonies, the 666 of the twenty-first century. In human terms let me explain. To be found in possession of a 10 dollar rock of cocaine is an automatic felony. It means that you cannot vote, you cannot apply for student loans and if you apply for any meaningful job the felony appears on routine background check, which decreases if not blocks your chance for gainful employment.

So in effect each year 32.2 percent of young African-American men are rendered incapacitated in their ability to navigate in a sophisticated global economy. Many are simply removed altogether. Each year thousands go through the door of no return called prison. Like the door of no return of Goree Island in which millions of Africans went through during the slave trade, these young men never come back. A multiple offender sentence at a minimum means 15 years in jail without benefit of probation or parole.

You would never know from the media and going down to drug court and looking at the defendants that the typical crack user is a white suburban teenager. Do you really believe that white America would tolerate 32.2 percent of its young men going to jail primarily for using and selling drugs? Race does matter.

The drug laws in this country are hypocritical and immoral. They have taken a social issue and criminalized it. Other than creating a Prison Industrial Complex these laws are having no impact on crime and drug use.

The African-American community should demand that the drug laws be reformed by decriminalizing all but the most dangerous drugs. I think we can all agree that getting a felony record for possession for marijuana serves no societal purpose.

I personally think that even cocaine should be decriminalized but at the least the penalties for its possession should be greatly reduced. Shifting the money we spend on prisons to drug treatment and education should be our priority moving forward.

Some People Can't Help Themselves

Some white folks just can’t help themselves. Fox News one of the most powerful media outlets in the world called Michelle Oboma, the likely next First Lady, a baby mama. Do you believe that Fox News would have called Cindy McCain a Stepford Wife? Where did that come from? It comes from the same place that Don Imus felt like he could call Rutgers players nappy headed whores. It comes from the arrogance of being in power and dominating a people decade after decade, generation after generation and you began to see them as less than you. In the end white folks feel like they can say anything about us.

You call a Princeton and Harvard educated lawyer, the wife of the nominee of the Democratic Party for President of the United States a baby mama (i.e. an unmarried promiscuous ghetto mol). You do it to put her, and us in our place. You do it to remind us that even though you might be months away from the Presidency, we are still in charge, and we can say anything we want.

Even though Fox News apologized they will do it again. They always do, old habits are hard to break.

However, it doesn’t affect us anymore. As has been shown over the last several months, we have as Bob Marley so eloquently sang” flowered in this generation.”

White Folks Are Something Else

What I would like understood as a black American is that black Americans loved and had faith in this country even when this country didn’t love and have faith in them, and that’s our legacy. Condoleezza Rice


The New York Times article “Where Whites Draw The Line” subtext is so blatantly racist that you would not expect it in America’s paper of record. The title and article suggest that white America has some built in right to determine how far blacks go in expressing their grievances. The Oppressor tells the Oppressed when and where it is appropriate to express himself. Even the pulpit on Sunday morning is now off limits.

But let’s not get it twisted. I reserve my right to continue to challenge the institutional racism that is ingrained in our system. White America does not dictate to black America when and where we state our grievances or when and how we petition for relief

What I found particularly troubling was Jessie Jackson Jr. comments that somehow our failure the last 40 years has been about language. Jackson insults his father by suggesting that between Martin Luther King and Barack Oboma, we have been deficient in how we communicate with white people. That only King and Oboma has figured it out.

First of all that is historically inaccurate. King died on a balcony despised by white America and abandoned by much of the black leadership. It was his language that had caused the rift. In condemning the Vietnam War King called America the “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. The New York Times that now seeks to recast King as a comforter of white folks, called his speech an “error.”

Only a slave would mute his right to demand equality in order to curve favor from the Slave master and we ain’t no slaves. Niki Giovanni said “we always need someone in society who will call a motherfucker a motherfucker.”

The nomination of Barack Oboma does not relieve America of its responsibility to resolve the continuing conflict between its founding principles and its behavior over the last 200 years. To his credit Oboma has consistently stated that his political career grants America no such pass.

I am proud of Barack Oboma. I am voting for him to be President of the United States, not to free black people, or codify our grievances. I understand that he is seeking to be President of all the people. He sees Martin Luther King’s American dream. Many black Americans see Malcolm’s American nightmare. As James Cone in Martin and Malcolm and American Dream or a Nightmare wrote, it is a vision of nuances not a chasm.

It is that duality in which our greatness has been defined but also our dysfunction.

IT IS WHAT IT IS

I continue to find the media’s election night commentary both puzzling and disingenuous. Chris Matthews put the racial element on the table by reporting that 2 out of 10 primary voters in Kentucky told exit polls that race was a major determination in their selection. Matthews went further and stated that a higher percentage of voters shared that view but would never state it to exit pollsters.

Not one commentator on MSNBC would admit that Matthews was correct. Even the African-American commentators like Harold Ford and Eugene Robinson danced around the issue. They acted as if to acknowledge that race is an undeniable trend in the democratic nomination process would cause them a Jerimiah Wright moment.

CNN was much better because of David Gergan, whose honesty and integrity in his analysis of race has been the most refreshing of the political season. He has often brought a clarity on issues of race that you would expect from African-American commentators, the exception being Roland Martin who has been brave in calling out some of the hypocrisy in the media.

I have to believe that the Oboma campaign has factored in that race will be a element in the general election. That is why they have thrown the 2004 democratic electoral strategy out the door. The fact that Oboma is on the verge of winning the democratic nomination says that racial voting among some voters is not fatal.

The greatest service that the media can do for the country is show the courage that Matthews did and just put it out there. This is an extraordinary opportunity for the country to own up to its racial history and its impact on our 21st century democratic process. To do so makes us no less in the eyes of the world. Hilary Clinton and Barack Oboma historic race has given us the moral basis to finally acknowledge our short comings, and despite them we remain the unique democratic experiment in the history of the world.

The Silencing Of Jerimiah Wright

I am contemplating the impact of Rev Jeremiah Wright on Barack Oboma's steady march toward the democratic nomination. The fact that Wright has become the latest racial boogey man of the “corporate owned media” as Wright righteously refers to them says more about America and the state of race relations than it does about Wrights’ controversial comments.

I was introduced to Rev Wright’s sermons over a decade ago. I immediately became a follower. His sermons represent the essence of the black theological tradition at its best. Wrights’ combination of intellect, showmanship and natural born talents to preach has no equal. His courage and willingness to speak truth to power, and most importantly put the teaching of Christ to practice in his south side neighborhood by helping ‘the least among us’ went against the trend of wealth theology, now so prominent in many of America’s black mega-churches.

Then a strange and wonderful thing happened. One of his members stood several hundred delegates from capturing the democratic nomination. But then that demented child called race that we keep locked up in our mental attics escaped, and all hell broke loose.

Wright became the Louis Farrakhan incarnate and most damaging he had polluted the mind of the wonder Negro Oboma, and his little brown children too.

What has been done to Wright by Fox News and right wing radio with the tacit complicity of the mainstream media is nothing less than criminal. A who man joined the marines when Dick Cheney and other neo-cons were hiding out at the academy, a man who put to sleep and woke up the President of the United States when he had surgery was painted as unpatriotic. A man who possesses two master degrees, a PHD from the most respected theological school in the world, speaks five languages, is a gifted musician and is one of America’s greatest living biblical scholars was redefined as a demagogue and crucified all because he dared to criticize Rome. The liberal paper of record New York Times called him a racist. Less we forget they called Martin King Vietnam speech a grave “error”

Barack Oboma is a politician. However, I believe him when he says he is outraged by some of Rev. Wright’s comments. I understand that after Wrights latest media tour he will be compelled to further distance himself from Wright. The truth is he should have distanced himself from Wright more forcefully when Wright first became a political issue.

However, Jeremiah Wright has every right to defend himself and his life work as forcefully as he sees fit no matter the cost to Oboma. Wright was in no way actively involved in the Oboma campaign. He was quietly moving toward retirement when the right-wing press drug him into a maelstrom.

Now the white media is telling Wright we can say any god damn thing we want about you and you are required to be silent. If Wright is allowed to be silenced it only reinforces the white supremacist notion that an indigenous black voice from the bottom of the well has no place in our civic discourse. African-American criticism of America’ foreign policy is now deemed to be both deficient and racist.

The call from the talking heads of the corporate media for Wright to stay invisible reeks of hypocrisy One need only to turn on talk radio and you will hear such racist and xenophobic spewing, that it makes one rethink the wisdom of the First Amendment. Never mind that some of America’s most prominent conservative politicians prize a 5 minute interview with the Hannitys and Limbaughs who communicate that filth. But silence reigns among a supposedly shocked corporate media as they participated in the skin game by failing to tell a complete picture of Wright, his good and bad.

No one wants Oboma to be elected President more than me, more than black people in this country. But if the price of electing a black President is the silencing of authentic indigenous voices like Wright then that price is to high.

Each one of us knew that at some point it was going to come to this. America was going to have to confront its racist tendencies. It always does. If not Wright, then it would be some other manufactured issue. But that is okay, to be free of our racist past we had to have our Jeremiah Wright moment.

Several months ago I wrote how hopeful I have become because of Oboma’s candidacy. That hope has only grown. Despite what the corporate media says, THIS RACE IS OVER. However, Oboma has been forced to do the unthinkable, campaign in every state and fight for every vote. Guam’s with just four delegates and its citizens unable to vote in the general election was coveted. This is truly remarkable in that a political party will finally produce a nominee that the whole country and its territories had a say in nominating. And with the whole world watching no less.

So my hope is not dampened by the race baiting of the Wright story. North Carolina and Indiana affirmed that hope. In the end I believe that fifty-one percent of us, of all races, religions, regions, genders, sexual orientation and political parties will choose a new way in the general election. I have hope.