By Ajamu Baraka — As an African American, I have been confused, frustrated, enraged and mystified by what is now referred to as the “Obama phenomenon” among African Americans. And…
We are shocked and saddened by the massacre in Aurora, Colo. But Aurora is part of a pattern, not an isolated incident. Two days earlier, 17 were hurt outside a bar in Tuscaloosa, Ala., when a gunman opened fire.
It is a revealing measure of the meaning and importance that our ancestors in the classical African civilization of ancient Egypt placed on knowledge, teaching and learning that they called their educational institutions, per-ankh, the house of life.
I recently had the privilege of participating in George Fraser’s Power Networking Conference (PNC) in Dallas. Sponsored by FraserNet, the Conference is one of the most amazing gatherings of Black people that occurs in Black America — annually attracting thousands of Black professionals eager to embrace George’s vision/mission of “creating wealth that can be passed on inter-generationally and making Black people the number one employers of Black people in the 21st Century.” Once again this year I had the honor of conducting the Libation Ceremony along with Kwa David Whitaker, a longtime friend and mentor of George. I was also a Panelist for the Town Hall Meeting.
Passed by large majorities of both Democrats and Republicans, the act reflected the overwhelming consensus in America that had been finally forged on Alabama’s Edmund Pettus Bridge during the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.
In his classic work, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon laid out an extensive explanation of how an oppressed people, which does not fight fiercely and self-consciously against its own oppression, will witness the emergence of those who turn the pent-up anger, disdain and righteous rage they have for their oppressor…
For years, a debate simmered around President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (the ACA). Lawsuits challenged mandated healthcare as an unconstitutional intrusion by Congress on individual liberties. States challenged the ACA’s required expansion of Medicaid roles as an intrusion on their sovereignty.
African Americans and Latinos have suffered the most in the Great Recession. They were the first to lose jobs, and the last to find new jobs. They struggle with the highest unemployment, the greatest loss of personal wealth, the highest percentage of families losing their homes.
When Rodney King was snatched up into the whip and whirl of the winds of racial history in this country thru his savage beating in 1991 and the resultant revolt in 1992, it was an invitation of history he had no idea would come, no interest at first in accepting and ultimately, no way to engage it except as the man he was and tried to be.
When young Americans come alive, they transform the possible. We saw that in 2008 when young Americans — the millennial generation of 18- to 29-year-olds — voted in large numbers (larger than the aging baby boomers), and overwhelmingly for Barack Obama.
With all due respect to the eminence and awesome insightfulness of W.E.B. Du- Bois, it is not only de-centered and dislocated Blacks who suffer a “double-consciousness,” but also self-centered and supremacy-committed Whites …
There is a real drug war being waged on our border with Mexico. Drug cartels are clashing, U.S. agents on this side are struggling to keep the violence out of America, often without success, and the innocent are dying.