Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
Rachel is 100% correct to call the President out on this ridiculous policy. It's a fundamental issue of human and civil rights and there can be NO EXCUSES whatsoever for not protecting and safeguarding the humanity and basic rights of citizens who are being openly discriminated against because of their sexuality. Maddow--who happens to be gay--is also one of the finest and most progressive news journalists and broadcasters working today in this country and everything she says here can't possibly be rationally refuted or dismissed on any level. With the striking down this week by a Federal judge of the notorious and unconstitutional Prop 8 measure here in California banning gay marriage as well as many other public commentators on this and other important related issues-- maybe we can finally begin to completely destroy the many oppressive and heinous vestiges of homophobia in American life and culture...
Kofi
Rachel Maddow Challenges Obama On Don't Ask, Don't Tell: 'Stand Up For What Is Right' (VIDEO) August 12, 2010 Huffington Post
Rachel Maddow challenged President Obama Wednesday night, urging him to "[stand] up for what is right" on Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
Maddow made the appeal personal, highlighting three soldiers "whose military careers are being ended because of Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
"As we take our time winding down this policy that everyone says will be ending, as we shamble toward justice, we as a country are continuing to put the lives of these individuals through the meat grinder every day," she said. "Why are we kicking people out now, in the meantime, while we are waiting for the views of the commander-in-chief and the defense secretary and the chairman of the joint chiefs-of-staff to be implemented?"
Maddow said that the reason Obama isn't stopping enforcement of DADT now is because "that would take some political capital, that would take some guts."
And she argued that Obama should appeal to his base not just by pointing out the difference between Democrats and Republicans, but by giving Democratic supporters something they can support:
"One less soul-sucking way to motivate your base and to win an election and to keep winning elections and to, frankly, have history look kindly upon you is to get your base to cheer for you -- not just to cheer against someone else, but to see you standing up, not just to bad guys with worse ideas than you, but you standing up for what is right because you know it is right, because we know you know it's right, even though you also know standing up for it is hard.
That is how you regain the enthusiasm of your base. That is how you win the respect of your base. That is how you win the respect of the country. And admit it: that is how you win your own self-respect, too."
"If Don't Ask, Don't Tell is going to end," she concluded, "the president could stop enforcement of the policy pending that change. Why isn't he?"
The following article was written exactly 6 months ago by David Finkel who is a prominent Detroit-based community organizer, writer, and editor of the socialist political magazine Solidarity. David's prescient analysis is right on target and of course the general political and economic situation in this country as well as the overall response of Obama's seriously misguided and inept administration has only gotten worse since these remarks were made in February. Check it out...
Kofi
One Year of Obama and the Democrats’ Debacle
by David Finkel
Delivered to the Solidarity National Committee in February 2010
WHEN BARACK OBAMA was elected in November 2008, we understood that he was propelled both from below, by mass revulsion against the disasters of the Bush regime, and from above, by the corporate elites’ fears that a continuation of Bush-Cheney policies under McCain and Palin would produce a global financial meltdown and a collapse of U.S. prestige and power.
Last fall, in the NC discussion that produced our analysis of “Obama After 200 Days,” we said it would be premature to speak of a “crisis” for the administration. A year after the euphoric 2009 inauguration, it no longer looks premature. People who looked to Obama and the Democrats for leadership are bitterly disappointed, and a very peculiar brand of rightwing politics has seized the initiative. It doesn’t have an enormous mass base – a turnout of 500 people to the Tea Party Convention, with all the funding and advance publicity it received, is not overwhelming – but it has the power to set much of the agenda. It has particularly succeeded in branding Barack Obama and his policies as radical leftist – while the real Obama, as we know, is far from the “left wing” of the Democratic Party let alone the socialist left.
The Massachusetts voters weren’t necessarily thinking Scripturally on January 19, but they certainly acted out the meaning of that Biblical verse: “Because you are lukewarm I will vomit you from my mouth.” (Thanks to Dianne for reminding me.) We’ve all seen the various polls and analyses: The Democrats lost their safest Senate seat because the Democratic campaign was complacent and arrogant, and more broadly because people are demoralized and sickened by the vacuum of the “change” they voted for, by the bank and Wall Street bailouts while unemployment grows, and by their general sense that their own lives as well as the country are stuck in the mud, from the economy to health care to Afghanistan.
The electorate hasn’t turned dramatically right, hence a resurgence of the Republicans doesn’t imply a huge wave of social reaction. But it’s a serious mistake to understate the significance of this event and other recent developments. There is a new political situation, and it’s not a favorable one. We don’t want to project a sense of unrelieved pessimism, obviously – the eruption of activism around the California education crisis, for example, is hugely significant. There’s also, if less visible, reform and rank and file labor activism we need to closely follow. The focus here, however, will be how and why the administration and Congressional Democrats fumbled so badly.
What follows is a preliminary view of the elements of the new political situation, in which I’ll try to address the Democrats’ failures, the monstrous growth of corporate power, and the politics of fear. There’s another issue I want to raise, which I certainly don’t want to over-theorize but I think we should think about, having to do with the nature of “capitalist discipline” over politics.
How Democrats’ Agenda Failed
To start with what’s most visible, the Democrats as presently constituted have proven to be the most bumbling and incompetent governing party in the recent history of any major bourgeois democracy. It’s not that the Democratic Congress and Obama administration failed to implement a genuinely progressive social agenda – to end the current imperialist wars, fight for single-payer national health insurance, implement the Employee Free Choice Act, etc. The Democrats never had such an agenda, of course, and the notion that they had any serious elements of one is part of the left’s self-delusion.
The point, rather, is that the Democrats’ own centrist corporate agenda has blown up in their face: They succeeded in the bailouts and subsidies to corporate America and the financial sector – the ruling class’s option for stopping a complete economic meltdown – but failed to deliver changes that would give people hope for improvements in their own lives, especially jobs. (When president Obama came out with his too-late quasi-populist rhetoric demanding major banking reform – which from the beginning obviously should have been tied to the emergency bailouts – the stock market responded with a 500-point decline, which probably dooms that effort.)
The Democrats deserve all the contempt and ridicule they get, but we should try to go a little deeper. Part of their crisis, I think, relates to a peculiar and ironic weakening of the “capitalist discipline” I just mentioned, the discipline that safeguards the interests of capital – at least, U.S. capital – as a whole. As examples of this discipline, recall the North American Free Trade debate of 1993. NAFTA was very unpopular with the voting base of Republicans and Democrats, and disliked by most of the Congressional politicians, but it was pushed through by overwhelming ruling class pressure. More recently of course there was the Wall Street and banking bailout – “we all hated it but we voted for it,” as the president reminded Congress in the recent State of the Union speech.
A really good example is Bernanke’s reappointment as Federal Reserve chair. There were rumblings against him from both right and left, but when the possibility arose that he might be defeated led to severe tremors in the European banks and in the markets, the opposition to Bernanke quickly receded. In the end 30 Senators could vote against him, perfectly confident that the confirmation was safe.
Despite these examples, however, it strikes me that the spectacular power of corporate money in politics – now ratified and accelerated by the Supreme Court – may actually be weakening the systemic “capitalist discipline.” The Democrats’ success as a governing party depends on channeling the aspirations of their voting base, especially of course labor, into policies that protect the system as a whole. The Democrats are trying to act out that script (that’s the appeal for “bipartisanship”) but the Republicans currently are not.
I don’t want to overstate the case. There is bipartisanship on some issues, such as the drive to charterize public education and cripple teacher unionism. On Iraq, Afghanistan and the Iranian nuclear issue, Obama is pursuing the same goals as Bush with less foolish reliance on overwhelming U.S. firepower alone. (A few remarks on Palestine will be offered in conclusion below.) We will see “consensus” manufactured in the next few years on cuts in social security and other social programs.
But the current crisis of the U.S. political system is not just normal “partisanship.”
The gridlock of the health care bill illustrates both the Democrats’ disaster and the growing dysfunction of the political system.The congressional Democrats as well as president Obama obviously have a huge crisis on the health care bill, largely of their own making – and neither the House or Senate bills are remotely supportable from the standpoint of what people really need. The insurance industry, knowing after all how “insurance” works, simultaneously financed the Tea Party town hall mobs and wrote the “reform” bills in the Congress. Call this an “inside-outside” strategy that works.
But U.S. capitalism needs reform of some sort, to prevent health care costs from virtually eating up the economy all by themselves. There’s been an absence of “discipline” to put the needs of the system ahead of the sectoral greed of the insurance industry. It’s true that there is an alternative for capitalism, as some comrades have pointed out here – to let employer-covered health care erode so that people are pretty much on their own and those without money simply go uncovered – but the potential public health implications are fairly catastrophic. The combination of the Republican filibuster and the power of the insurance lobby over both parties (and the “independent” Senator Joseph Lieberman) has created a total blockage.
Because of the enormous stakes that the administration and the Congressional Democrats put on the health care effort, and because of what it portends for any other initiatives, this has become a monumental debacle for the Democrats and Obama. It has helped trigger a rush for the exits by some cowardly Democratic politicians who see a possible midterm election bloodbath. The possible maneuvers that were floated to bypass the Republican Senate filibuster – trying to get the House to pass the Senate bill, or using the “budget reconciliation” ploy to force a vote on whatever emerges from the House-Senate conference – are in the former case politically very risky, and in the latter of dubious legality, and anyway seem to be off the table.
(Speaking of legality, I suspect that the Senate bill’s “individual mandate” requiring people to purchase private insurance may be subject to Constitutional challenges from both the right and left, but leave that aside here.)
The Pelosi-Reid leadership has been strong and resolute only when it comes to suppressing their left wing, such as it is. Advocates of single-payer national health insurance were pretty much blocked from even presenting their case. Rather than waging and losing an honorable fight for real health reform, thus possibly leaving some mark on the legislative end product and certainly building potential for future struggle, they were mostly forced to shut up in the name of “political realism” (with some honorable but maverick exceptions like Dennis Kucinich). The result of all this is only to empower the mangy “Blue Dog” rightwing Democrats who oppose everything from the public option to women’s right to abortion -- many of whom were recruited to run by the miserable party chairman Howard Dean in what was thought to be a clever political move at the time.
Problematic Implications
However, this gridlock is not only a Democratic disaster. A severely weakened presidency, just one year in, cannot be a good thing for U.S. capitalism as a whole, at a time when the economic recovery and the global financial system are still extremely fragile, when the budget deficits of the next two decades look terrifying, when the country’s physical infrastructure is severely deteriorated and when there are major international challenges -- relations with China and Russia, multiple ongoing wars, the scale of the environmental crisis which is recognized almost everywhere except in the USA -- that threaten U.S. supremacy and “leadership.” (Various political commentators – Paul Krugman on economic policy, Bob Herbert on the social catastrophe, Thomas Friedman in his own dishonest and sleazy fashion – are pointing to the crisis caused by the political system being overwhelmed by short-term narrow interests. The rightwing pundits like to spin vapid theories that it’s some kind of cultural problem, generally tracing back to the fact that WASP males aren’t in charge anymore. That’s for another discussion.)
There are serious international implications if the weakening of Obama develops into a full-fledged crisis of his presidency. Before turning to those, it’s important even though obvious that the shattered state of organized labor is a big factor in politics. Juxtaposed with of overwhelming corporate influence, the Bureau of Labor Statistics just reported that for the first time, a majority of unionized workers are in the public sector – so great is the decline in manufacturing and other private-sector unionism. And as one comrade has put it in this discussion – contrary to our previous assumptions – “facing the choice between struggle and going out of existence, much of the top labor leadership will choose nonexistence, at least if their own retirement is preserved.”
A positive though limited sign of hope is that the Congressional Black Caucus is finally showing some serious anger over how little has trickled down for African Americans from the Obama presidency – not because they expected the president to be a crusader for Black Power or anything of the sort, but simply because the African American economic and social emergency is so terrifying. The reality of “race matters” is as powerful as ever in American politics today. While the official ideology of white supremacy is gone, and African Americans have obviously made huge advances in various professions, the bedrock of Black economic progress has always been in two key areas: manufacturing and public employment. Those are the sectors hit most severely by the Great Recession and the fiscal crisis of the state. (The Post Office wasn’t getting downsized when it employed almost all white people.) And at the same time, substantial layers of white people hit by the crisis, the failure of reform and the nearly-jobless “recovery” are turning toward the kind of lunatic rightwing answers that they rejected in the 2008 election – not all white people, obviously, but enough to change the political momentum.
At the January 23 national autoworker gathering in Detroit, John Conyers requested to speak and told the meeting that he would continue the single-payer struggle, even though president Obama had personally lobbied him to get on board with the administration’s program. All this categorically does not mean that the Caucus or the African American community will “break with Obama.” They will remain fiercely loyal, but will no longer remain silent and subordinate.
Politics of Fear
Another major factor in the political climate is a kind of generalized insecurity that amalgamates the fear of joblessness, decay, decline – and yes, the fear of a Black president whose father was (nominally) Muslim – that contributes to what is mainly a white flight to irrational reactionary politics.
Suppose we pose the following question. There are now 45-50 million people in the United States who lack health insurance. Millions more will lose their insurance through job loss. What is the greater threat to them: a medical crisis that financially wipes out them and their families – or being hit by a terrorist attack?
Both threats exist, including the “terrorist” one so long as it is kept in proper perspective. But no rational person will seriously think that terrorism is the greater threat to people who don’t have or may lose health insurance. For that matter, no informed person will rationally calculate that terrorism is a greater danger to her/himself than driving over thousands of bridges in this country that are in urgent or critical need of repair. (And the incidence of “international terrorism” on U.S. soil is considerably lower than that of violent assaults on abortion clinics and providers, hate crimes against gay and transgendered people, and racially motivated murders.)
But such questions are hardly ever posed in rational real-life terms. Quite the contrary, the “threat of extremist attacks on America” is the Obama team’s pretext for escalating the war in Afghanistan, which no serious person – military or civilian, whether left, right or center – thinks can be “won;” for launching a new military intervention in the three-way civil war in Yemen; for declaring permanent detention without trial of 47 prisoners at the Guantanamo prison that the new president had boldly promised would be closed by now, not to mention others held beyond the reach of law at Bagram and other semi-secret facilities; and for continuing the cynical and criminal siege of Gaza and the brutalities of the Israeli occupation.
Close to 90 Yemeni prisoners, already checked and cleared for release from Guantanamo, have had their release suspended because of the alleged that some “might return to the battlefield.” So much for “restoring human rights and the rule of law.” All these policies simply embolden the militarist right wing, while demoralizing the Democrats’ popular base and especially Obama’s army of young supporters in particular, and generally weaken the administration both morally and politically.
As suggested above, a weakened or crippled Obama presidency has global implications that feed back into the U.S. political system as well. From the outset, much of the elite support for Obama came because the Bush gang had been so completely discredited in the world. Obama came in with such enormous international authority and credibility that he received the Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing at all.
Obama’s weakened position at home certainly affects the chances of strongarming allies into extending their commitments in Afghanistan. It affects the complex problems of relations with China, where U.S. imperialism simultaneously needs to enlist Chinese assistance in dealing with Iran, pressure the Chinese to revalue their currency, but also resist domestic U.S. pressure for protectionist measures that would have disastrous consequences. Obama’s standing also affects U.S. dealings with Russia and Iran. The U.S. ruling class cannot afford a crippled presidency, but at the same time it will withdraw its support if his position seems to be unsalvageable.
Implications for 2010
Leaving aside unpredictable events such as a major terrorist attack, a Middle East or India-Pakistan war, a sudden massive economic shock, etc. – any of which are possible but not calculable in advance – we can broadly guess where the political situation will lead The Democrats’ hopes for the midterm election depend first and foremost on the economic recovery, but the change in political momentum makes it very difficult to enact the second stimulus that’s needed to avert the double-dip-recession danger and particularly to prop up public employment by helping stabilize many states’ budget crises.
Obama’s initial response to the Massachusetts defeat was to “promise to fight” for this, that and the other (health care, banking reform, etc.) This has come across as stilted and forced, but the president can probably improve his rhetorical delivery. What he can’t improve are the prospects for political success: The threat of a market meltdown or bankers’ strike in response to reform legislation is terrifying to the Democrats. The bankers could have been forced to accept reform and re-regulation when they were on government life support, but that opportunity was essentially lost.
Obama’s other response has been a “bipartisan commission” (seeing how well that approach has worked already) to tackle the budget deficit. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong priority: This process is likely to reopen corporate America’s dream of killing social security by privatizing much of it and leaving behind a weak means-tested public system that can then be destroyed. This can only be done through “bipartisanship,” as any political party killing social security on its own would be finished. In any case, the real budget crisis cannot be seriously addressed without restoring a progressive tax system and slashing military spending – neither of which are remotely contemplated.
It’s also difficult to see how meaningful climate change or “green jobs” stimulus legislation can be advanced now – not because the Democrats don’t have a big majority, but because they are afraid to use it (not to mention how many of them depend on the existing petro-industrial complex). This, however, is not only a domestic issue but also has global political implications, to say nothing of the threat to the survival of human civilization. President Obama’s international standing depends on the perception that he can meet the commitments (weak as they are) that he made at Copenhagen. Failure to do so will damage the administration’s global credibility -- which is, at the same time, a big part of his political value to domestic elites.
The Republican party at this point is not exactly “fit to rule” for the ruling class – but it doesn’t yet need to be. A tea-party takeover with unpredictable policies isn’t the kind of political dispensation that’s useful at a time of continuing deep uncertainty in the global financial system. But if the irrationalist-populist fuel at the base can be contained with a leadership that’s ultimately “responsible” to the economic powers that really run the world, the Republicans might be rehabilitated as a party of savage budget-cutting sooner than we had anticipated.
The Democrats’ legislative emphasis is likely to be on a second jobs-and-stimulus bill – inadequate, but a political necessity – and salvaging some kind of stripped-down health insurance reform. There is no reason to expect the Republicans to suddenly become all reasonable, compromising and bipartisan now (except when the ruling class speaks really loudly, as on the Bernanke renomination). If the Democrats are not prepared to wage real political war against the Senate filibuster, they will suffer one blockage after another – with devastating consequences for them in November, and just possibly, a real backlash among African Americans who see the white Democratic leadership feeding Obama to the Blue Dogs and the wolves.
Socialists of course already knew that real answers will not come from the morass of the two capitalist parties. Our challenge is to help the movements at large face that reality and its implications.
I wanted to say a few concluding words on Palestine, because it’s an issue that matters intensely to us. It’s clear that the fate of Palestine matters very little to the ruling class except as it may relate to incorporating Arab regimes into the anti-Iran coalition. We can see here an example of true bipartisanship at its most destructive – on condemning the Goldstone Report, on the starvation of Gaza and authorizing the Egyptian regime’s blockage of the Gaza Freedom March.
Whether the Obama administration’s early, feeble attempts to stop Israeli settlement construction and demolition of Palestinian homes were intended seriously is not clear, but it no longer matters – it is now too weakened at home to exert real pressure on Israel even if it wanted to. The policy on Palestine now is simply the Iron Fist, made worse by the cynical cover of meaningless rhetoric about “renewing the peace process.” Nothing of substance will change until Israel’s status as an imperial asset is degraded by international isolation. This is why the BDS (“boycott/divestment/sanctions”) campaign in all its diversity, internationally and here, is now so important as a focus for Palestine solidarity activism.
Frank Rich is by far my favorite 'mainstream' op-ed journalist in this country and as I've said many times before I also think he is the best damn WRITER to be found in all of American politics today. The following article brilliantly demonstrates once again exactly why I feel the way I do...
Kofi
July 24, 2010
There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin’ By FRANK RICH New York Times
THE glittering young blonde in a low-cut gown is sipping champagne in a swank Manhattan restaurant back in the day when things were still swank. She is on a first date with an advertising man as dashing as his name, Don Draper. So you don’t really expect her to break the ice by talking about bad news. “The world is so dark right now,” she says. “One of the boys killed in Mississippi, Andrew Goodman — he’s from here. A girlfriend of mine knew him from summer camp.” Her date is too busy studying her décolletage, so she fills in the dead air. “Is that what it takes to change things?” she asks. He ventures no answer.
This is just one arresting moment — no others will be mentioned here — in the first episode of the new “Mad Men” season premiering tonight. Like much in this landmark television series, the scene haunts you in part because of what people don’t say and can’t say. “Mad Men” is about placid postwar America before it went smash. We know from the young woman’s reference to Goodman — one of the three civil rights activists murdered in Philadelphia, Miss., in June 1964 — that the crackup is on its way. But the characters can’t imagine the full brunt of what’s to come, and so a viewer in 2010 is left to contemplate how none of us, then or now, can see around the corner and know what history will bring.
This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we reached a new low last week. What does it say about America now, and where it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the N.A.A.C.P. and the news media were all soiled by this episode. Meanwhile, the majority of Americans, who believe in fundamental fairness for all, grapple with the poisonous residue left behind by the many powerful people of all stripes who served as accessories to a high-tech lynching.
Even though the egregiously misleading excerpt from Shirley Sherrod’s 43-minute speech came from Andrew Breitbart, the dirty trickster notorious for hustling skewed partisan videos on Fox News, few questioned its validity. That the speech had been given at an N.A.A.C.P. event, with N.A.A.C.P. officials as witnesses, did not prevent even the N.A.A.C.P. from immediately condemning Sherrod for “shameful” actions. As the world knows now, her talk (flogged by Fox as “what racism looks like”) was an uplifting parable about how she had risen above her own trials in the Jim Crow South to aid poor people of every race during her long career in rural development.
The smear might well have stuck if the white octogenarian farmer saved by Sherrod 24 years ago was no longer alive and if he didn’t look like a Norman Rockwell archetype. Only his and his wife’s testimony to her good deeds on CNN could halt the lynching party. Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture who fired Sherrod without questioning the video’s patently spurious provenance, was far slower to reverse himself than the N.A.A.C.P. Good for him that he seemed genuinely chagrined once he did apologize. But an executive so easily bullied by Fox News has no more business running a government department than Ken Salazar, the secretary of interior who let oil companies run wild on deepwater drilling until disaster struck. That the White House sat back while Vilsack capitulated to a mob is a disgraceful commentary on both its guts and competence. This wasn’t a failure of due diligence — there was no diligence.
Even now, I wonder if many of those who have since backtracked from the Sherrod smear — including some in the news business who reported on the video without vetting it — have watched her entire speech. What’s important is not the exculpatory evidence that clears her of a trumped-up crime. What matters is Sherrod’s own story.
She was making the speech in Georgia, her home state, on March 27, the 45th anniversary of her father’s funeral. He had been murdered when she was 17, leaving behind five children and a wife who was pregnant with a sixth. Sherrod had grown up in Baker County, a jurisdiction ruled by a notorious racist sheriff, L. Warren Johnson, who was nicknamed “Gator” for a reason. Black men were routinely murdered there but the guilty were never brought to justice. As Sherrod recounted, not even three witnesses to her father’s murder could persuade the grand jury to indict the white suspect.
Sherrod had long thought she’d flee the South, but had an epiphany on the night of her father’s death. “I couldn’t just let his death go without doing something in answer to what happened,” she said. So she made the commitment to stay and devote her life to “working for change.” She later married Charles Sherrod, a minister and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose heroic efforts to advance desegregation, including his imprisonment, can be found in any standard history of the civil rights movement.
None of this legacy, much of it accessible to anyone who wanted to look (or ask), prevented the tarring of Shirley Sherrod last week. And it all unfolded while the country was ostentatiously marking the 50th anniversary of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
If we are to learn anything from this travesty, it might help to retrace the racial soap opera that immediately preceded and provoked it. That story began on July 13, when the N.A.A.C.P. passed a resolution calling on the Tea Party to expel “racist elements” in its ranks. No sooner had Tea Party adherents and defenders angrily denied that such elements amounted to anything more than a few fringe nuts than Mark Williams, the spokesman and past chairman of the Tea Party Express, piped up. He slapped a “parody” on the Web — a letter from “colored people” to Abraham Lincoln berating him as “the greatest racist ever” and complaining about “that whole emancipation thing” because “freedom means having to work for real.”
Williams had hurled similar slurs for months, but now that the N.A.A.C.P. had cast a spotlight on the Tea Party’s racist elements, he was belatedly excommunicated by the leader of another Tea Party organization. In truth, it’s not clear that any group in this scattered movement has authority over any other. But one thing was certain: the N.A.A.C.P. was wrong to demand that the Tea Party disown its racist fringe. It should have made that demand of the G.O.P. instead.
The Tea Party Express fronted by Williams is an indisputable Republican subsidiary. It was created by prominent G.O.P. political consultants in California and raises money for G.O.P. candidates, including Sharron Angle, Harry Reid’s Senate opponent in Nevada. But Republican leaders, presiding over a Congressional delegation with no blacks and a party that nearly mirrors it, remain in hiding whenever racial controversies break out under their tent. “I am not interested in getting into that debate,” said Mitch McConnell last week.
Once Williams was disowned by other Tea Partiers, Breitbart posted the bogus Sherrod video as revenge under the headline “Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism.” To portray whites as the victims of racist blacks has been a weapon of the right from the moment desegregation started to empower previously subjugated minorities in the 1960s. But its deployment has accelerated with the ascent of a black president. The pace is set by right-wing stars like Glenn Beck, who on Fox branded Barack Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” and the ever-opportunistic Newt Gingrich, who on Twitter maligned Sonia Sotomayor as a “Latina woman racist.”
Even the civil rights hero John Lewis has been slimed by these vigilantes. Lewis was nearly beaten to death by state troopers bearing nightsticks and whips in Selma, Ala., just three weeks before Sherrod’s father was murdered 200 miles away in 1965. This year, as a member of Congress, he was pelted with racial epithets while walking past protesters on the Capitol grounds during the final weekend of the health care debate. Breitbart charged Lewis with lying — never mind that the melee had hundreds of eyewitnesses — and tried to prove it with a video so manifestly bogus that even Fox didn’t push it. But he wasn’t deterred then, and he and others like him won’t be deterred by the Sherrod saga’s “happy ending” as long as the McConnells of the conservative establishment look the other way and Fox pumps racial rage into the media bloodstream 24/7.
“You think we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this country, but we keep going backwards,” Sherrod told Joe Strupp of Media Matters last week. She speaks with hard-won authority. While America’s progress on race has been epic since the days when Sherrod’s father could be murdered with impunity, we have been going backward since Election Day 2008.
We don’t know what history will bring next. But we might at least address the chilling question prompted in “Mad Men” by the horrific events of 46 summers ago — “Is that what it takes to change things?” — before our own summer comes to a boil again.
The more Obama tries to avoid this issue in general the more he will be forced to deal with it. It's called SOCIAL REALITY and it ain't going away--no matter what he or his scared advisors think...A real leader must LEAD--not run away when things get tough or uncomfortable. Until Barack learns that essential and fundamental lesson he and his administration will continue to be haunted and manipulated by the poisonous legacy of American racism and the lethal doctrine of white supremacy...
Kofi
WHITE HOUSE MEMO
Persistent Issue of Race Is in the Spotlight, Again
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG July 22, 2010 New York Times
WASHINGTON — It was exactly one year ago on Thursday that President Obama plunged into a thicket of racial politics by declaring that a white police officer in Cambridge, Mass., had “acted stupidly” in arresting a black Harvard University professor in his own home. Suddenly, the president whose election suggested the promise of a postracial future was thrust into the wounds of the past.
Not much has changed.
Mr. Obama sought Thursday to tamp down yet another racial uproar, this one over his administration’s mishandling of the case of Shirley Sherrod, a black Agriculture Department official who was dismissed based on a video clip of remarks — taken out of context — that appeared to suggest she had discriminated against white farmers. One day after Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized profusely to Ms. Sherrod and offered her a new job working on race relations for the agency, Mr. Obama offered his own apology.
During a seven-minute telephone call, White House officials said, the president shared some of his own personal experiences, and urged Ms. Sherrod to “continue her hard work on behalf of those in need.”
Later, in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Mr. Obama weighed in publicly for the first time. “He jumped the gun,” the president said, referring to Mr. Vilsack, “partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.”
That, however, is unlikely to be the end of it for Mr. Obama, who has struggled since the beginning of his presidency with whether, when and how to deal with volatile matters of race. No matter how hard his White House tries to keep the issue from defining his presidency, it keeps popping back up, fueled in part by high expectations from the left for the first black president, and in part by tactical opposition politics on the right.
The Sherrod flap spotlighted how Mr. Obama is caught between these competing political forces, and renewed criticism from some of his supporters, especially prominent African-Americans, that he has been too defensive in dealing with matters of race — and too quick to react to criticism from the right.
For many liberals, Ms. Sherrod’s hasty dismissal carried strong echoes of the ouster of Van Jones, an environmental adviser to the president who was forced to resign after Fox News focused attention on some of his past work and statements, and his decision to sign a petition in 2004 questioning whether the Bush administration had allowed the terrorist attacks of September 2001 to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East.
“I think what you see in this White House is a hypersensitivity about issues of race, that has them often leaning too far to avoid confronting these issues, and in so doing lays the foundation for the very problem they would like to avoid,” said Wade Henderson, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an advocacy group here.
It is not as if Mr. Obama does not have expertise in the matter. While he was running for president he made what even his critics acknowledged was a serious and thoughtful effort to address race relations, during a speech in Philadelphia in March 2008. It followed a storm of controversy about racially inflammatory statements made by his pastor.
And as Michael Eric Dyson, a sociology professor at Georgetown University, notes, Mr. Obama wrote an entire book on race: “Dreams From My Father,” in which he dealt with his own complicated biracial history and struggle to fit into a country that sees things in black and white. Professor Dyson, who is working on a book about Mr. Obama and race called “Presidential Race,” says the president at times seems either unable or unwilling to talk about it.
“You’ve got one of the great intellects on race in the presidency, and yet he is hamstrung, there’s a gag order,” he said. “Now some of that gag order is self-imposed, and some of it is at the behest of nervous white Americans who are fearful that Mr. Obama may racialize the presidency, so he’s got a legitimate concern that he doesn’t get pigeonholed. But the tragedy is that we need his leadership.”
The White House rejected the notion that he has not provided leadership, or is avoiding a conversation on race. “I don’t think anyone has confronted this issue more directly than the president,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser.
Still, the Sherrod controversy has renewed calls for Mr. Obama to tackle race head-on. After the Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., was arrested last summer, Mr. Obama convened a much-publicized “beer summit” at the White House — a moment of reconciliation for Mr. Gates and the arresting officer.
In interviews, both Mr. Henderson and Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard law professor who represented Mr. Gates, suggested the president should now convene a national conference on race relations. Ward Connerly, a black conservative who leads an institute devoted to fighting racial preferences, endorsed the idea.
“This president has never wanted to have his fingerprints on the issue of race, and I can understand why — if you’re a self-identified black man and you’re running for president, you know how treacherous the waters can be,” Mr. Connerly said. “But I think the president can, if he’s masterful — and he certainly is — introduce this subject in a way that he’s doing it as our leader, not as our black leader.”
Mr. Axelrod, though, threw cold water on the notion, saying Mr. Obama has “pressing matters that are significant to all Americans,” like the economy.
On Thursday, Ms. Sherrod stuck to her assertion that the White House had played a role in her ouster, even as Mr. Obama’s advisers said that was not the case. The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was once again peppered with questions about whether the Sherrod controversy was “a teachable moment,” and if so, what the lesson was and whether Mr. Obama should be the teacher.
“I don’t think you have to have a teacher,” Mr. Gibbs replied, “for this to be a teachable moment.”
This article was reported by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Shaila Dewan and Brian Stelter and was written by Ms. Stolberg.
This Court is extremely dangerous and filled with some of the absolute worst and most intolerant judges in American history (and that's saying a great deal)...
Kofi
Court Under Roberts Is Most Conservative in Decades By ADAM LIPTAK July 24, 2010 New York Times
WASHINGTON — When Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and his colleagues on the Supreme Court left for their summer break at the end of June, they marked a milestone: the Roberts court had just completed its fifth term. Doug Mills/The New York Times
Analysts believe that the Roberts court is unlikely to be swayed from its conservative trend by new members.
In those five years, the court not only moved to the right but also became the most conservative one in living memory, based on an analysis of four sets of political science data.
And for all the public debate about the confirmation of Elena Kagan or the addition last year of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, there is no reason to think they will make a difference in the court’s ideological balance. Indeed, the data show that only one recent replacement altered its direction, that of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 2006, pulling the court to the right.
There is no similar switch on the horizon. That means that Chief Justice Roberts, 55, is settling in for what is likely to be a very long tenure at the head of a court that seems to be entering a period of stability.
If the Roberts court continues on the course suggested by its first five years, it is likely to allow a greater role for religion in public life, to permit more participation by unions and corporations in elections and to elaborate further on the scope of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Abortion rights are likely to be curtailed, as are affirmative action and protections for people accused of crimes.
The recent shift to the right is modest. And the court’s decisions have hardly been uniformly conservative. The justices have, for instance, limited the use of the death penalty and rejected broad claims of executive power in the government’s efforts to combat terrorism.
But scholars who look at overall trends rather than individual decisions say that widely accepted political science data tell an unmistakable story about a notably conservative court.
Almost all judicial decisions, they say, can be assigned an ideological value. Those favoring, say, prosecutors and employers are said to be conservative, while those favoring criminal defendants and people claiming discrimination are said to be liberal.
Analyses of databases coding Supreme Court decisions and justices’ votes along these lines, one going back to 1953 and another to 1937, show that the Roberts court has staked out territory to the right of the two conservative courts that immediately preceded it by four distinct measures:
¶In its first five years, the Roberts court issued conservative decisions 58 percent of the time. And in the term ending a year ago, the rate rose to 65 percent, the highest number in any year since at least 1953.
The courts led by Chief Justices Warren E. Burger, from 1969 to 1986, and William H. Rehnquist, from 1986 to 2005, issued conservative decisions at an almost indistinguishable rate — 55 percent of the time.
That was a sharp break from the court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, from 1953 to 1969, in what liberals consider the Supreme Court’s golden age and conservatives portray as the height of inappropriate judicial meddling. That court issued conservative decisions 34 percent of the time.
¶Four of the six most conservative justices of the 44 who have sat on the court since 1937 are serving now: Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Antonin Scalia and, most conservative of all, Clarence Thomas. (The other two were Chief Justices Burger and Rehnquist.) Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the swing justice on the current court, is in the top 10.
¶The Roberts court is finding laws unconstitutional and reversing precedent — two measures of activism — no more often than earlier courts. But the ideological direction of the court’s activism has undergone a marked change toward conservative results.
¶Until she retired in 2006, Justice O’Connor was very often the court’s swing vote, and in her later years she had drifted to the center-left. These days, Justice Kennedy has assumed that crucial role at the court’s center, moving the court to the right.
Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired in June, had his own way of tallying the court’s direction. In an interview in his chambers in April, he said that every one of the 11 justices who had joined the court since 1975, including himself, was more conservative than his or her predecessor, with the possible exceptions of Justices Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The numbers largely bear this out, though Chief Justice Roberts is slightly more liberal than his predecessor, Chief Justice Rehnquist, at least if all of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s 33 years on the court, 14 of them as an associate justice, are considered. (In later years, some of his views softened.)
But Justice Stevens did not consider the question difficult. Asked if the replacement of Chief Justice Rehnquist by Chief Justice Roberts had moved the court to the right, he did not hesitate.
“Oh, yes,” Justice Stevens said.
The Most Significant Change
“Gosh,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said at a law school forum in January a few days after the Supreme Court undid one of her major achievements by reversing a decision on campaign spending limits. “I step away for a couple of years and there’s no telling what’s going to happen.”
When Justice O’Connor announced her retirement in 2005, the membership of the Rehnquist court had been stable for 11 years, the second-longest stretch without a new justice in American history.
Since then, the pace of change has been dizzying, and several justices have said they found it disorienting. But in an analysis of the court’s direction, some changes matter much more than others. Chief Justice Rehnquist died soon after Justice O’Connor announced that she was stepping down. He was replaced by Chief Justice Roberts, his former law clerk. Justice David H. Souter retired in 2009 and was succeeded by Justice Sotomayor. Justice Stevens followed Justice Souter this year, and he is likely to be succeeded by Elena Kagan.
But not one of those three replacements seems likely to affect the fundamental ideological alignment of the court. Chief Justice Rehnquist, a conservative, was replaced by a conservative. Justices Souter and Stevens, both liberals, have been or are likely to be succeeded by liberals.
Justices’ views can shift over time. Even if they do not, a justice’s place in the court’s ideological spectrum can move as new justices arrive. And chief justices may be able to affect the overall direction of the court, notably by using the power to determine who writes the opinion for the court when they are in the majority. Chief Justice Roberts is certainly widely viewed as a canny tactician.
But only one change — Justice Alito’s replacement of Justice O’Connor — really mattered. That move defines the Roberts court. “That’s a real switch in terms of ideology and a switch in terms of outlook,” said Lee Epstein, who teaches law and political science at Northwestern University and is a leading curator and analyst of empirical data about the Supreme Court.
The point is not that Justice Alito has turned out to be exceptionally conservative, though he has: he is the third-most conservative justice to serve on the court since 1937, behind only Justice Thomas and Chief Justice Rehnquist. It is that he replaced the more liberal justice who was at the ideological center of the court.
Though Chief Justice Roberts gets all the attention, Justice Alito may thus be the lasting triumph of the administration of President George W. Bush. He thrust Justice Kennedy to the court’s center and has reshaped the future of American law.
It is easy to forget that Justice Alito was Mr. Bush’s second choice. Had his first nominee, the apparently less conservative Harriet E. Miers, not withdrawn after a rebellion from Mr. Bush’s conservative base, the nature of the Roberts court might have been entirely different.
By the end of her almost quarter-century on the court, Justice O’Connor was without question the justice who controlled the result in ideologically divided cases.
“On virtually all conceptual and empirical definitions, O’Connor is the court’s center — the median, the key, the critical and the swing justice,” Andrew D. Martin and two colleagues wrote in a study published in 2005 in The North Carolina Law Review shortly before Justice O’Connor’s retirement.
With Justice Alito joining the court’s more conservative wing, Justice Kennedy has now unambiguously taken on the role of the justice at the center of the court, and the ideological daylight between him and Justice O’Connor is a measure of the Roberts court’s shift to the right.
Justice O’Connor, for her part, does not name names but has expressed misgivings about the direction of the court.
“If you think you’ve been helpful, and then it’s dismantled, you think, ‘Oh, dear,’ ” she said at William & Mary Law School in October in her usual crisp and no-nonsense fashion. “But life goes on. It’s not always positive.”
Justice O’Connor was one of the authors of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, a 2003 decision that, among other things, upheld restrictions on campaign spending by businesses and unions. It was reversed on that point in the Citizens United decision.
Asked at the law school forum in January how she felt about the later decision, she responded obliquely. But there was no mistaking her meaning.
“If you want my legal opinion” about Citizens United, Justice O’Connor said, “you can go read” McConnell.
The Court Without O’Connor
The shift resulting from Justice O’Connor’s departure was more than ideological. She brought with her qualities that are no longer represented on the court. She was raised and educated in the West, and she served in all three branches of Arizona’s government, including as a government lawyer, majority leader of the State Senate, an elected trial judge and an appeals court judge.
Those experiences informed Justice O’Connor’s sensitivity to states’ rights and her frequent deference to political judgments. Her rulings were often pragmatic and narrow, and her critics said she engaged in split-the-difference jurisprudence.
Justice Alito’s background is more limited than Justice O’Connor’s — he worked in the Justice Department and then as a federal appeals court judge — and his rulings are often more muscular.
Since they never sat on the court together, trying to say how Justice O’Connor would have voted in the cases heard by Justice Alito generally involves extrapolation and speculation. In some, though, it seems plain that she would have voted differently from him.
Just weeks before she left the court, for instance, Justice O’Connor heard arguments in Hudson v. Michigan, a case about whether evidence should be suppressed because it was found after Detroit police officers stormed a home without announcing themselves.
“Is there no policy protecting the homeowner a little bit and the sanctity of the home from this immediate entry?” Justice O’Connor asked a government lawyer. David A. Moran, a lawyer for the defendant, Booker T. Hudson, said the questioning left him confident that he had Justice O’Connor’s crucial vote.
Three months later, the court called for reargument, signaling a 4-to-4 deadlock after Justice O’Connor’s departure. When the 5-to-4 decision was announced in June, the court not only ruled that violations of the knock-and-announce rule do not require the suppression of evidence, but also called into question the exclusionary rule itself.
The shift had taken place. Justice Alito was in the majority.
“My 5-4 loss in Hudson v. Michigan,” Mr. Moran wrote in 2006 in Cato Supreme Court Review, “signals the end of the Fourth Amendment” — protecting against unreasonable searches — “as we know it.”
The departure of Justice O’Connor very likely affected the outcomes in two other contentious areas: abortion and race.
In 2000, the court struck down a Nebraska law banning an abortion procedure by a vote of 5 to 4, with Justice O’Connor in the majority. Seven years later, the court upheld a similar federal law, the Partial-Birth Abortion Act, by the same vote.
“The key to the case was not in the difference in wording between the federal law and the Nebraska act,” Erwin Chemerinsky wrote in 2007 in The Green Bag, a law journal. “It was Justice Alito having replaced Justice O’Connor.”
In 2003, Justice O’Connor wrote the majority opinion in a 5-to-4 decision allowing public universities to take account of race in admissions decisions. And a month before her retirement in 2006, the court refused to hear a case challenging the use of race to achieve integration in public schools.
Almost as soon as she left, the court reversed course. A 2007 decision limited the use of race for such a purpose, also on a 5-to-4 vote.
There were, to be sure, issues on which Justice Kennedy was to the left of Justice O’Connor. In a 5-to-4 decision in 2005 overturning the juvenile death penalty, Justice Kennedy was in the majority and Justice O’Connor was not.
But changing swing justices in 2006 had an unmistakable effect across a broad range of cases. “O’Connor at the end was quite a bit more liberal than Kennedy is now,” Professor Epstein said.
The numbers bear this out.
The Rehnquist court had trended left in its later years, issuing conservative rulings less than half the time in its last two years in divided cases, a phenomenon not seen since 1981. The first term of the Roberts court was a sharp jolt to the right. It issued conservative rulings in 71 percent of divided cases, the highest rate in any year since the beginning of the Warren court in 1953.
Judging by the Numbers
Chief Justice Roberts has not served nearly as long as his three most recent predecessors. The court he leads has been in flux. But five years of data are now available, and they point almost uniformly in one direction: to the right.
Scholars quarrel about some of the methodological choices made by political scientists who assign a conservative or liberal label to Supreme Court decisions and the votes of individual justices. But most of those arguments are at the margins, and the measures are generally accepted in the political science literature.
The leading database, created by Harold J. Spaeth with the support of the National Science Foundation about 20 years ago, has served as the basis for a great deal of empirical research on the contemporary Supreme Court and its members. In the database, votes favoring criminal defendants, unions, people claiming discrimination or violation of their civil rights are, for instance, said to be liberal. Decisions striking down economic regulations and favoring prosecutors, employers and the government are said to be conservative.
About 1 percent of cases have no ideological valence, as in a boundary dispute between two states. And some concern multiple issues or contain ideological cross-currents.
But while it is easy to identify the occasional case for which ideological coding makes no sense, the vast majority fit pretty well. They also tend to align with the votes of the justices usually said to be liberal or conservative.
Still, such coding is a blunt instrument. It does not take account of the precedential and other constraints that are in play or how much a decision moves the law in a conservative or liberal direction. The mix of cases has changed over time. And the database treats every decision, monumental or trivial, as a single unit.
“It’s crazy to count each case as one,” said Frank B. Cross, a law and business professor at the University of Texas. “But the problem of counting each case as one is reduced by the fact that the less-important ones tend to be unanimous.”
Some judges find the entire enterprise offensive.
“Supreme Court justices do not acknowledge that any of their decisions are influenced by ideology rather than by neutral legal analysis,” William M. Landes, an economist at the University of Chicago, and Richard A. Posner, a federal appeals court judge, wrote last year in The Journal of Legal Analysis. But if that were true, they continued, knowing the political party of the president who appointed a given justice would tell you nothing about how the justice was likely to vote in ideologically charged cases.
In fact, the correlation between the political party of appointing presidents and the ideological direction of the rulings of the judges they appoint is quite strong.
Here, too, there are exceptions. Justices Stevens and Souter were appointed by Republican presidents and ended up voting with the court’s liberal wing. But they are gone. If Ms. Kagan wins Senate confirmation, all of the justices on the court may be expected to align themselves across the ideological spectrum in sync with the party of the president who appointed them.
The proposition that the Roberts court is to the right of even the quite conservative courts that preceded it thus seems fairly well established. But it is subject to qualifications.
First, the rightward shift is modest.
Second, the data do not take popular attitudes into account. While the court is quite conservative by historical standards, it is less so by contemporary ones. Public opinion polls suggest that about 30 percent of Americans think the current court is too liberal, and almost half think it is about right.
On given legal issues, too, the court’s decisions are often closely aligned with or more liberal than public opinion, according to studies collected in 2008 in “Public Opinion and Constitutional Controversy” (Oxford University Press).
The public is largely in sync with the court, for instance, in its attitude toward abortion — in favor of a right to abortion but sympathetic to many restrictions on that right.
“Solid majorities want the court to uphold Roe v. Wade and are in favor of abortion rights in the abstract,” one of the studies concluded. “However, equally substantial majorities favor procedural and other restrictions, including waiting periods, parental consent, spousal notification and bans on ‘partial birth’ abortion.”
Similarly, the public is roughly aligned with the court in questioning affirmative action plans that use numerical standards or preferences while approving those that allow race to be considered in less definitive ways.
The Roberts court has not yet decided a major religion case, but the public has not always approved of earlier rulings in this area. For instance, another study in the 2008 book found that “public opinion has remained solidly against the court’s landmark decisions declaring school prayer unconstitutional.”
In some ways, the Roberts court is more cautious than earlier ones. The Rehnquist court struck down about 120 laws, or about six a year, according to an analysis by Professor Epstein. The Roberts court, which on average hears fewer cases than the Rehnquist court did, has struck down fewer laws — 15 in its first five years, or three a year.
It is the ideological direction of the decisions that has changed. When the Rehnquist court struck down laws, it reached a liberal result more than 70 percent of the time. The Roberts court has tilted strongly in the opposite direction, reaching a conservative result 60 percent of the time.
The Rehnquist court overruled 45 precedents over 19 years. Sixty percent of those decisions reached a conservative result. The Roberts court overruled eight precedents in its first five years, a slightly lower annual rate. All but one reached a conservative result.
Henry Geldzahler: What is the subject matter of your work?
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Royalty, Heroism, and the streets
--From 1982 interview--Age 22
All,
I see the voracious media and "art" vultures are still trying to pick at and greedily gnaw on the elusive bones of Basquiat's magic carcass (I started to say CANVAS). Venal carnivorous beasts must EAT I suppose. So it's a good thing that JMB "himselves" is long gone from this rotten vale of tears and like his mighty paintings has split to a zone where he can no longer be confiscated and consumed. In other words: See this movie and watch his laughing ghosts jump off and escape the screen no matter how much his "image" is seemingly contained/tamed by the eternal vagaries of memory, envy, and commodification. After all like Bird, Pres, LadyDay, Marvin G. and Hendrix even Jean's demons were finally defeated by his majestic WORKS in the end... Or as Marlene Dietrich put it at the end of Orson's last major Hollyweird film "Touch of Evil" (1958) before the "blacklist" took him down: "He was some kind of man. What does it matter what you say about people?" Continue to RIP anyway Brother B...
Kofi
(NOTE: See my own "review" of an earlier Basquiat graverobber (from 1999!) in the essay directly following the film review below)...
MOVIE REVIEW
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2010) NYT Critics' Pick
This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The New York Times.
Lee Jaffe/Arthouse Films The subject of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child.”
A Friend, an Artist and a Personal Interview
By STEPHEN HOLDER July 20, 2010 New York Times
“Nobody loves a genius child.” Those are words from Langston Hughes’s poem “Genius Child,” used as the hyperbolic epigraph in Tamra Davis’s worshipful documentary portrait, “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child.”
But after watching this homage to an artistic wunderkind, constructed around a rare question-and-answer interview with Basquiat that Ms. Davis filmed in 1985 (their mutual friend Becky Johnson asked the questions), then put in a drawer, you might revise Hughes’s declaration to read, “Nobody knows the genius child, least of all himself.” Some might even question the use of the word “genius.”
Basquiat, at the height of his fame in the 1980s, was undoubtedly loved in the way that charismatic celebrities are loved and envied. One of his admirers was Andy Warhol, who, if not in love with Basquiat, certainly desired him, and was his champion at a crucial moment in Basquiat’s ascendance. But when the two collaborated on canvases, the critic Vivien Raynor, writing in The New York Times in 1985, expressed skepticism about this superstar match:
“Last year, I wrote of Jean-Michel Basquiat that he had a chance of becoming a very good painter, providing he didn’t succumb to the forces that would make him an art world mascot. This year, it appears that those forces have prevailed.”
The film’s romantic depiction of Basquiat is an old story. An artistically driven, voraciously ambitious, devastatingly charming wild child, he was devoured by the fame he craved and died of a drug overdose in 1988 at 27. The movie does not go into the gory details of his dissipation and addiction. Although sophisticated in its blasé acceptance of art-world wheeling and dealing and the temptations that accompany sudden fame and wealth, it is also tenderly protective of its subject.
Basquiat comes across in the interview as elusive and seductive in much the same way that the early Bob Dylan did, but without the defense of language. His verbal talent found its expression in his Neo-Expressionist graffiti art, with its scrawled cryptograms and crossed-out words. Such deletions, he said, made their meanings all the more tempting to decode.
“The Radiant Child” begins by directly connecting Basquiat’s art to New York City’s blight in the 1970s, then widens its perspective to portray Basquiat as someone whose acute attunement to art history and popular culture found its way onto his savagely energetic canvases. He imprinted himself on the landscape with his graffiti, executed under the name SAMO; as an underground star, he became a regular guest on “TV Party,” a public-access show hosted by his friend Glenn O’Brien, one of the film’s more articulate talking heads.
Other commentators include the artist’s friend Julian Schnabel, who directed the 1996 biographical film “Basquiat” (starring Jeffrey Wright as Basquiat, and David Bowie as Warhol), and the rapper, hip-hop historian and graffitist Fab 5 Freddy. The closest we get to Basquiat is in the recollections of the gallery owner Annina Nosei, in whose basement he painted, and Suzanne Mallouk, a girlfriend who took him in when he was still poor.
Some of the interview’s most fascinating moments are Basquiat’s memories of his hand-to-mouth existence after running away from home as a teenager. Born to parents who were of Haitian (his father) and Puerto Rican (his mother) descent, he rebelled against a middle-class background for reasons that remain unclear. A seemingly embattled relationship with his father, an accountant, is referred to but not explored. The film takes the heady view that his flight from home was the necessary odyssey of an unstoppable Rimbaud-like visionary.
This is not to say that “The Radiant Child” isn’t a valuable film. It places Basquiat’s art in a cultural context with an enthusiasm and zest that make the many pictures shown come blazingly alive. His bitter contemplations of black history, in particular, have an epic, historical dimension, while also reflecting his own insecurity about being treated as an exotic, token black star in a predominantly white art world. One tantalizing anecdote tells of his disgust at a patron who asked him to color-coordinate a painting to her living room.
Basquiat was an ardent fan of bebop, and the frenetically edited scenes of his paintings with jazz accompaniment evoke an artist who worked quickly and needed intense music for creative stimulation. Once Basquiat became rich, his loft became party central; wads of cash were casually stuffed in the furniture.
If “The Radiant Child” embellishes the legend in a hundred small ways, its cleverest maneuver is to keep its subject at enough of a remove to enhance his mystique. It should help push the prices of his work higher.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Tamra Davis; di- rectors of photography, Ms. Davis, David Koh and Harry Geller; edited by Alexis Manya Spraic; music by J. Ralph, Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond; produced by Ms. Davis, Mr. Koh, Lilly Bright, Stan- ley Buchthal and Ms. Spraic; released by Arthouse Films. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. This film is not rated.
A version of this review appeared in print on July 21, 2010,
Book Review
Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art by Phoebe Hoban Viking, 1999
How to Lynch a (Black) Painter by Kofi Natambu
It never fails. Become a well-known or respected pioneering African American male artist and watch the deluge of racist fear, envy, spite, condescension, and hostility rain down upon you. Become everyone’s favorite or most feared pinup/mascot/strawman. Have everyone else’s unexamined and reductive banalities and stereotypes dumped on your nappy head: wild child, primitive, paranoid, naif, stud, freak. When no one can figure you out or you ‘appear’ to be much-too-complex- to-be-true watch the frustrated and envious ones accuse you of being inexplicably both “white” (as in witty, urbane, sophisticated, perceptive, intelligent and “modern/postmodern”) and “black” (as in cunning, childlike, violent, paranoid, gauche, sullen and dumb) at the same time. Then be told that these “racial” differences are the result of (gasp) CULTURE. Watch in astonishment and horror as you and your work are reduced to an unknowing and unknowable essence/cipher while your ‘intriguing’ and charismatic, yet transparent, ‘personality’ is deciphered “Rorschach style” by any silly dilettante who comes along and deigns to project onto you their own inane “dollar book Freudianisms” (as the legendary Orson Welles once deemed such behavior in another context).
No brothers and sisters you can’t win and what’s worse no one wants you to try. Persist and excel anyway and watch your legacy and great achievements patronized, ignored, neglected, and derided by nearly all the so-called experts (more judgmental white people of course). Yes, it’s true. This is the real cost of “greatness” if you happen to be an African American male innovator and it ain’t got nothing to do with whether you agree or believe it or not. It’s called history.
Now that I’ve gotten all that off my chest it should be obvious that I did not enjoy reading a new outlandish travesty of a biography about the late black painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of a drug overdose in August, 1988 at the age of 27. This book entitled Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Artby a former New York Times journalist named Phoebe Hoban should actually be called Nigger Artist: A Quick Killing in Biography, crammed as it is with relentlessly racist gossip, analytical shallowness and predictably tabloid stained sensationalism. In fact, Hoban is so far out of her depth here that it almost makes one wonder why this manuscript even saw the light of day. Unfortunately part of the cost of becoming a pioneering African American male figure in the United States is to be endlessly slandered and held up to public ridicule if not violent attack. In this book we find that Basquiat is no exception.
After all what does one say about a biographer of an innovative black artist who knows next to nothing about modern painting, cultural history, aesthetic theory or the byzantine politics and endlessly cruel absurdities of being “black in America”? How does one take seriously a biography in which three times as much space is allotted to that artist’s sexual affairs and activity as it is to that individual’s aesthetic production? Or where nearly one fourth of the entire book is spent talking about the artist’s various drug deals, addictions and escapades? How about a book where whole chapters are devoted to various girlfriends of the artist? Well you get the picture...
What’s even stranger is that Hoban seems to know a great deal more about both the public and clandestine machinations of international art dealers, collectors, Wall Street and Soho-based economic investors, patrons and jetset groupies/hustlers during the 1980s. Frankly if she had pursued this angle of investigation as the major theme of her book she could have spared us the cynical, exploitive, and manipulative airing of Basquiat’s dirty laundry, and thus left the still necessary task of doing a serious and critical examination of what made Basquiat such an important painter and cultural figure to a real art critic/cultural historian/biographer. As it is, Hoban (despite her transparent attempts at being simultaneously condescending and hyperbolic in her ‘assessment’ of Basquiat’s oeuvre) winds up doing a disservice to both her general and individual areas of interest by focusing on the superfluous and melodramatic aspects of Basquiat’s public fame and subsequent demise. In so doing Hoban is able to skirt any personal or intellectual responsibility for her ‘Vanity Fair meets the National Enquirer’ prose style by pretending that ‘the life’ (however buried and distorted by the routinely tawdry and gossipy testimony of Basquiat’s “friends”, enemies, and competitors in the art world) is ‘more important’ than the art. In this way Hoban doesn’t have to explore the complex narrative of a very talented and conflicted man who was forced to deal with fierce inner and outer demons in his everyday existence, yet still found enough energy, discipline, intelligence, love, courage and dedication to leave a profound legacy of hundreds of extraordinary paintings. Needless to say a great book could have been written about the real Basquiat contending with the neurotically competitive New York artworld in all of its frenzy, decadence, greed, jealousy, racism and fear. But then Hoban would have had to deal with the fact that, despite whatever personal problems Basquiat had, he was a serious artist who worked for, and deserved, respect for his work. But that would have required Hoban to acknowledge Basquiat’s humanity. Clearly that acknowledgement is a tricky thing for many white journalists and critics when the subject is an African American male who absolutely refuses to kowtow to anyone’s either ‘liberal’ or ‘reactionary’ expectations of him.
However one day someone will be both perceptive and knowledgeable enough to do justice to who Basquiat was and wasn’t in terms of the historical and creative universe of Western art. Unfortunately that day is still not here a decade after his death. But if Basquiat can wait (something he found impossible to do while still alive) we all can. In the meantime we still have his paintings rather than this execrable book to remind us all why he was so worthy of a biography in the first place. Jean-Michel would have appreciated and celebrated the difference.
Konch Oakland, California
May, 2000 FOR JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT Like God some people are put here to change EVERYTHING & disappear leaving us with our silly gossip & halfwritten holybooks staring into the endless blue chasm of our own desire wondering why you could laugh & cry at the same damn time all the Time painting thousands of horizons that others never see while you wave at us from the bright red edge of the canvas we call life & you deem just another stroke of yr wandering brush with death's hohum regime
That crown you wear is so stunning that T Monk wrote a song about it A sound painting called "Ugly Beauty" a wonderful dimension you could always appreciate even in the midst of all those words & images you painted on EVERYTHING you saw touched smelled heard & tasted.
It's true: Art is just another pretty blacknigger from Brooklyn afterall Like Ishmael said: "Genius is Common"
by Kofi Natambu (c) 2008
http://www.basquiatbiography.com/jean-michel-basquiat-a-biographyBASQUIAT BIOGRAPHY Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Biography The book Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Biography, by Eric Fretz, was published by Greenwood Press in March, 2010. Jean-Michel Basquiat was barely out of his teens when he rocketed to the center of New York's art scene. He was 27 when he died of a heroin overdose. Always controversial, Basquiat is now established as a major contemporary painter whose unique work continues to enthrall. Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Biographycovers the artist's Brooklyn childhood, his teenage years as a homeless graffiti painter, and his rise through the art world. Along with discussion of his life and work, including his use of Afrocentric themes, the book offers background on related contemporary art movements. The text gives a vivid flavor of the various milieus that Basquiat passed through in his life. Special attention is given to Basquiat's friendship with Keith Haring and collaborations with Andy Warhol. The book also explores Basquiat's difficult relations with gallery owners and other authority figures, his problems with drug use, and his early death. A final chapter covers his continuing relevance and ongoing influence. The book also contains a chronology of his life, a selected bibliography, list of works cited, index, and photographs showing Basquiat at various times in his career, including shots in his studio surrounded by his work. The distinguished Greenwood Biography series was developed specifically for student use. Prepared by field experts and professionals, these engaging biographies are tailored for high school students who need challenging yet accessible biographies. Although the emphasis is on fact, not glorification, the books are meant to be fun to read. Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Biography is supported by this website, which gives links to where the works discussed in the book can be viewed in full color, and suggested lesson plans for using the book in schools. 192 pages. Hardcover, library binding, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, $35.00. Available from Greenwood Press, Barnes and Noble, Amazon US, and Amazon UK. Librarians: download Book Flyer. The book will also be available on the Web as an eBook, see www.abc-clio.com for details.
Of all the endlessly embarrassing, incredibly egregious, yet utterly predictable 'racial incidents' to befall the Obama administration this has got to be one of the absolute worst. It serves the President right that he and his administration has become so 'spooked' by the typically vicious dirty tricks hijinks of the racist rightwing in this country that they would wind up being exposed as incompetent COWARDS for not even having the decency to actually find out what happened in Sherrod's situation before immediately passing a negative judgment on and firing her without any hearing or investigation of the facts whatsoever. Once again as in the equally cowardly dismissals of other black activists and officials over the past year by Obama like Van Jones, Desiree Rogers, and the ACORN organization (as well as the ludicrous 'beer summit' at the White House after Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates was racially profiled and arrested in his own home), his administration has stupidly relied on the blatant racist lies, distortions, and deadly con games of the far right wing media to determine their course of action whenever an African American is falsely accused in public by the cretinous likes of such hysterically racist and brazen reactionary assholes as Andrew Breitbart, Bill O' Reilly, and Glenn Beck et al. The President should have the common decency to call a press conference and publically apologize himself for allowing his Secretary of Agriculture to unjustly fire Ms. Sherrod in the first place. He should but I don't think he has the GUTS to do so...Just pathetic...
This is what always happens when black folks fail to protect themselves and their people from the machinations of their/our many enemies. You would think that Obama would clearly understand all that by now. But if you don't have the sense and courage to stand on principle and FIGHT BACK this is what inevitably happens...
(Please note: Ms. Sherrod also happens to be the wife of the legendary civil rights activist and brilliant SNCC organizer Charles Sherrod)
Kofi
Meanwhile...
THE GREAT KEITH OLBERMANN TYPICALLY LAYS DOWN THE LAW AND TELLS THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT ABOUT THIS DISGRACEFUL EPISODE AND WHAT IT REALLY MEANS. THANK YOU KEITH FOR ELOQUENTLY SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER NO MATTER WHAT. IF ONLY THERE WERE MANY MORE LIKE YOU IN THE NATIONAL MEDIA AND AMERICAN SOCIETY GENERALLY...
ARE YOU LISTENING BARACK? WAKE UP!! DADDY HUBRIS AND MAMA RACISM ARE GONNA GET YOU IF YOU DON'T...
July 21, 2010
With Apology, Fired Official Is Offered a New Job
From left: USDA, via Associated Press; Johnny Clark/APTV; Stephen Crowley/The New York Times; Alex Wong/Getty Images
Shirley Sherrod’s story about her work with Roger Spooner, second from left, was the subject of a post on the Web site of Andrew Breitbart, third from left, that led to Ms. Sherrod’s dismissal by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who has offered her a new job.
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, SHAILA DEWAN and BRIAN STELTER July 21, 2010 New York Times
This article was reported by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Shaila Dewan and Brian Stelter and was written by Ms. Stolberg.
WASHINGTON — The White House and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized profusely and repeatedly on Wednesday to a black midlevel official for the way she had been humiliated and forced to resign her Agriculture Department job after a conservative blogger put out a misleading video clip that seemed to show her admitting antipathy toward a white farmer.
By the end of the day, the official, Shirley Sherrod, had gained instant fame and emerged as the heroine of a compelling story about race and redemption.
Pretty much everyone else had egg on his face — from the conservative bloggers and pundits who first pushed the inaccurate story to Mr. Vilsack, who looked stricken as he told reporters he had offered Ms. Sherrod, until Monday the Agriculture Department’s rural development director in Georgia, a new job that would give her a “unique opportunity” to help the agency move past its checkered civil rights history. She told him she would think about it.
“This is a good woman, she’s been put through hell and I could have and should have done a better job,” Mr. Vilsack said, as he conceded that he had ordered Ms. Sherrod’s firing in haste, without knowing that the video clip, from a speech she gave to the N.A.A.C.P., had been taken out of context. He said that he had acted on his own, and that there was “no pressure from the White House.”
Mr. Vilsack’s late-afternoon appearance capped a humiliating and fast-paced few days not only for the White House, but also for the N.A.A.C.P. and the national news media, especially the Fox News Channel and its hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, all of whom played a role in promoting the story about Ms. Sherrod.
The controversy illustrates the influence of right-wing Web sites like the one run by Andrew Breitbart, the blogger who initially posted the misleading and highly edited video, which he later said had been sent to him already edited. (Similarly, Mr. Breitbart used edited videos to go after Acorn, the community organizing group.) Politically charged stories often take root online before being shared with a much wider audience on Fox. The television coverage, in turn, puts pressure on other news media outlets to follow up.
The full video of Ms. Sherrod’s March speech to an N.A.A.C.P. gathering in Douglas, Ga., shows that it was a consciousness-raising story. Ms. Sherrod’s father was murdered in 1965 by white men who were never indicted; she spoke about how in response, she vowed to stay in the South and work for change. She married the Rev. Charles Sherrod, a civil rights leader and cofounder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Later, as director of a nonprofit group in Georgia formed to help black farmers, long before she went to work for the Agriculture Department, Ms. Sherrod received a request to help a white farm couple, Roger and Eloise Spooner, and she confessed in the speech that the request had given her pause. She did help them, however, and as the fracas over her firing became public this week, the Spooners came to her defense, saying Ms. Sherrod had gone out of her way to accompany them to see a lawyer and, in effect, had helped them save their farm.
“If we hadn’t have found her, we would have lost everything, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Spooner, 82, said in a telephone interview.
Fox News began its pursuit of Ms. Sherrod in prime time on Monday night on three successive opinion shows that reached at least three million people. Leading off, Mr. O’Reilly asked on his top-rated program, “Is there racism in the Department of Agriculture?” He discussed the tape, plugged Mr. Breitbart’s Web site and demanded that Ms. Sherrod resign immediately.
By the time Mr. O’Reilly’s remarks, which were taped in the afternoon, were broadcast, Ms. Sherrod had indeed resigned, a development that Fox’s next host, Mr. Hannity, treated as breaking news at the beginning of his show. He played a short part of what he called the “shocking” video from Mr. Breitbart, and later discussed the development with a panel of guests, mentioning the N.A.A.C.P.’s recent accusations of racism within the conservative Tea Party movement.
“It is interesting they just lectured the Tea Party movement last week,” Mr. Hannity said, telegraphing a talking point that would come up repeatedly on other shows.
Fox’s 10 p.m. show also covered the resignation as breaking news. Ms. Sherrod later said Fox had not tried to contact her before running the video clip repeatedly on Monday. (A Fox spokeswoman said the O’Reilly program had contacted the Agriculture Department for comment. On Wednesday, Mr. O’Reilly said he owed Ms. Sherrod an apology “for not doing my homework.”)
By Tuesday, Ms. Sherrod’s forced resignation was the talk of cable television news, and it was becoming clear that the Breitbart video clip had been taken out of context. After seeing the full video, the N.A.A.C.P., which had initially applauded Ms. Sherrod’s resignation, had reversed itself, saying it had been “snookered” into believing she had been acting with racial bias.
Still, Mr. Vilsack stood his ground on Tuesday, insisting that the Agriculture Department had a “zero tolerance” policy for discrimination. The department has for years been embroiled in lawsuits over accusations of discrimination against black farmers, and Mr. Vilsack said he had been working hard to “turn the page on the sordid civil rights record as U.S.D.A.”
By Tuesday night, however, the White House had intervened, a senior official said, and sent word to the Agriculture Department that Mr. Vilsack needed to reconsider.
The official said President Obama had not spoken personally to Mr. Vilsack, but questions swirled around the White House on Wednesday over just how involved the president and his aides were.
Mr. Obama has shied from making race relations a major theme of his presidency, yet somehow racially charged controversies keep cropping up — as was the case last year, when the president said the Cambridge, Mass., police had “acted stupidly” in arresting a black Harvard University professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr. The upshot of that was the White House “beer summit,” in which Mr. Gates and the white arresting officer shared some cold beverages with Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
In an interview Wednesday afternoon, shortly after Mr. Vilsack extended his public apology, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said Mr. Obama should hold another summit with Ms. Sherrod and the Spooners.
“In the end, it’s such a redemptive storybook ending,” said Mr. Jackson, who has known Charles Sherrod for decades. “I wish that Shirley Sherrod and the Spooner family could be invited to the White House and give them the credit that they’re due, because it is a great American story. A rural white family in Georgia and a black woman, overcoming years of segregation. It would be great if the president were to seize this moment.”
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .
Angela Davis (b. 1944)
"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ella Baker (1903-1986)
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
Paul Robeson (1898-1976)
"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."
C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."
Edward Said (1935-2003)
“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
