...... Recall the story about the cop who cursed out the Uber driver. Turns out the cop has had 12 complaints from the public in his 15 years on the force. The obvious question? What were those complaints? Were they all for just verbal, and not physical, abuse? We are not told. And the press isn't [...]
Look at how myths, symbols, religion and power are intertwined. The ruler’s face is everywhere. Recall the stupendous statuary of the pharaohs, the massive carvings of the Romans and the Greeks and the statues of the European kings. They bore the faces of the rulers and the gods, and the two were interchangeable. In [...]
The police are not the problem, rather they are the symptom of the problem which is gross inequality. As in the movement toward equality that continued from the end of the Civil War (1865) to the end of the Civil Rights Movement (1965), it is Black Americans and the issues facing them that are [...]
Let's face it. At some point a police officer will be charged, and convicted, of killing a Black man. Just because someone wears a uniform or is acting in a police capacity does not mean they cannot be charged with homicide. However, until a police officer is convicted of killing a Black man, woman [...]
Reminder: You Have a Right to Record the Police T.C. Sottek, The Verge (THIS ARTICLE APPEARED ON YAHOO ON 8/8/14) (J.B. Forbes/Associated Press) A suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, has been under a dramatic siege since Saturday, when a police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown. In the wake of [...]
Many, if not most, African Americans are believed to be of partial Native American ancestry. William Loren Katz in Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage explored the roots of this Black and Native American admixture. Black contact with Native Americans goes back long before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth. In 1526, a large expedition left the [...]
At the 1895 South Carolina Constitutional Convention Congressman George Tillman declared, “It is a scientific fact that there is not one full blooded Caucasian on the floor of this convention. Every member has in him a certain mixture of….colored blood.” Nonetheless, the delegates proceeded to ratify a series of measures that denied Blacks [...]
What a writer produces comes from the depths of "the never-never land of the spirit, of imagination; and all the arrows point away from the here and now," said America’s most successful Black writer. His first published novel sold 500,000 copies within six months and more than a million before the year was out. [...]
On the eve of the Viet Nam War, Malcolm X declared, “[As] long as the white man sent you to Korea, you bled. He sent you to Germany, you bled. He sent you to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese, you bled. You bleed for white people. But when it comes time to [...]
Of course he existed. Of that there can be no question. But was Martin Luther King not a mythic figure? Around him there has grown quite a bit of lore. He was swaddled in myth and legend from the very day he was born. His namesake, Martin Luther, was a fantastic revolutionary who literally [...]