11 March 2015 — Black Agenda Report
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
No matter how many Black people are shot down in the streets by cops, no matter how far Black people fall relative to whites in the economy, Barack Obama has always denied that racism is endemic to the United States. He amended that slightly, in Selma this weekend. “Obama now admits that racism had once been endemic to the country, but that it is now limited to Ferguson-like localities.”
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Chicago could become Detroit, an Illinois Senator threatened on March 2, if Chicago fails to re-elect Rahm Emanuel. Staring down this threat tells us a lot about how the game of municipal finance is and ought to be played, if the people really mattered.
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder bestowed impunity on the killers of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, and then journeyed to Selma, Alabama, to explain how great it is to have Black faces in such high places. Half a century has passed since “Bloody Sunday,” yet Black people’s life prospects remain irrelevant to the powers-that-be.
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford
No sooner does Obama break the ice with Cuban, than he turns up the imperial heat on Venezuela, the other openly socialist government in the hemisphere. “Obama’s assertion that Venezuela is a danger to U.S. national security ranks just short of a declaration of war.”
Barack Obama journeyed to Selma, Alabama, one of the poorest places in a very poor state, to urge Black people to reflect on how much progress has been made over the past 50 years. If they had actually done so, they might have run the president out of town, along with the “Black Misleadership roosters” who “strutted their egos across Edmund Pettus Bridge and crowed about THEIR accomplishments.”
by BAR poet-in-residence Raymond Nat Turner
Why, dey otta hab logos on dey suits
Tellin’ de wurl how deys in cahoots—
Maybe den dem lil’ Negroz unnerstan
Dat logo leaduhs is workin’ fo’ de ‘man?’
by Anthony Monteiro
As an essayist, James Baldwin had no peer. He was a revolutionary of the highest order, refusing “to think from within the language of the positionality or intellectual geography of the oppressor.” Baldwin warned that “whiteness, while emerging within the specific time/space continuum of modern capitalism, nonetheless can outlive it, producing post modern and even post capitalist white supremacist realities.”
by Paul Street
At the heart of American history lies an essential truth: the U.S. became an economic superpower based on the super-exploitation of Black slaves, to whom it owes reparations. In his new book, Edward Baptist calculates that “nearly half the nation’s economy activity derived directly and indirectly from the roughly one million Black slaves.” There was nothing quaint or “peculiar” about the system. America became “great” through “a highly cost-efficient method for extracting surplus value from human beings.”
by Bryan K. Bullock
The movement against environmental racism lost its way when it was subsumed into environmental “justice.” Racism remains paramount. “African descendant people are burdened by environmental issues unequally compared to their white counterparts.” The struggle demands a human rights approach. “We must recognize that although we are separated by land, sea and language, we are united in our desire to be reclaim and maintain our basic humanity.”
The giddy, patriotic TV commentators and talking heads who brought the celebrations around the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday to us don’t say much about the uniformed terrorists on the public payroll who beat down and killed nonviolent protestors 50 years ago, just as they have little to say on those who kill and maim with impunity today. But then as now, this is just what police DO.
by Danny Haiphong
Socialism was knocked down, but not out, when the Soviet Union collapsed. That did not, however, change the fact that capitalism is in its late stages. “The choice for any movement that arises in this period is to chart a revolutionary path or be consumed into the reactionary politics of the neo-liberal order.”
Ferguson Activist: Holder Should “Go Quietly Into the Dark”
A U.S. Justice Department report accepts the St. Louis County prosecutor’s conclusion that Michael Brown didn’t put his hands up before officer Darren Wilson put a bullet in Brown’s brain – and, therefore, Wilson cannot be indicted on civil rights charges. Only a “perfect murder” would convince Holder to act, said Taurean Russell, a leader of Hands Up United, in Ferguson, Missouri. “They want a perfect victim. His hands have to be all the way up – a perfect death, a perfect killing, and you’re never gonna get that,” said Russell. What about outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder’s legacy? “He should go quietly off into the dark.”
New Yorkers Need Less Law Enforcement
Bill Bratton, New York City’s police commissioner, wants to hire 1,000 more officers. But there are already too many cops busying themselves arresting Black and brown people for minor offenses, said Josmar Trujillo, of New Yorkers Against Bratton, which favors redirecting resources to improving conditions in poor neighborhoods. Police are “harassing and ticketing us, they’re criminalizing us en masse,” said Trujillo, “We don’t want more copse, we want to move away from law enforcement” under the slogan, “Strong Communities Make Police Obsolete.”
Robert Gangi, of New York’s Police Reform Organizing Project, called Bratton’s “Broken Windows” policing philosophy “a brazenly racist practice.” Individual rogue cops are not the problem, he said: “It’s the system.”
Voices from the Gulag
Lawyers for Mumia Abu Jamal and other Pennsylvania prison inmates won the right to pursue their challenge to the state’s so-called Revictimization Relief Act, which would effectively silence the voices of those who make crime victims feel “mental anguish.” If allowed to prevail, the law could shut down Prison Radio and its roster of inmate correspondents. “We cannot cover the prison story, which is one of the biggest stories in America, without those first-person, on-the-ground voices,” said Prison Radio director Noelle Hanrahan.
Mumia: Americans “Feed on Fear”
Since 9/ll, “a kind of madness erupted in the country,” said political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal, in a commentary for Prison Radio. “Newscasts have become fearcasts, as government and media converge to sow dragons’ teeth of fear into the minds of millions. It grows, eating us, as we eat it – and we are still not full.”
Dubois Blacklisted at Temple African American Studies
The model for liberatory Black Studies was created by W.E.B. Dubois at the turn of the 20th century, said Duboisian scholar and activist Dr. Tony Monteiro. However, under chairman Molefi Asante, Temple University’s African American Studies Department no longer teaches Dubois’ works, on the grounds that “he was not Afro-centric, he was a Marxist,” said Monteiro. Asante fired Monteiro last year, and wants to change the program’s name to Department of Africology.
The New Dark Age 
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