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Tavis Smiley’s Annual Black
"Radical" All-Star Game
By Jared A.
Ball, Ph.D.
“For every Louis
Farrakhan ‘testicular fortitude’ there was a Michael
Eric Dyson ‘ovarian audaciousness.’”
This week the
already blood soaked, broken and dead carcass of a
murdered Black radicalism was further kicked around,
then adorned, by Tavis Smiley and all those gathered
at his annual Black political All-Star Game. And it
truly was an all-star gathering where everyone came
to play on the big stage. It had all the political
ally-oops, 360 degree word play, dazzling no-look
Biblical references and behind the back, through the
legs, ankle-breaking alliterations.
Cornell West
looked spry prancing around the roundtable
cheerleading and for every Louis Farrakhan
“testicular fortitude” there was a Michael Eric
Dyson “ovarian audaciousness.” And all but one of
the attendees brought flashy Blacker-than-thou
critiques of the president, all in love, of course,
as was the theme Smiley laid down literally with a
so-labeled centerpiece placed dramatically mid
roundtable. But this truly was conservatism draped
in radicalism. None advocated breaks with the
established political parties, none adopted a
tradition of radical intra-racial socialized
economics and none called for mass protest or civil
disobedience. It was post-election criticism, calls
for conservative individualized self-help and
obedience to the established political order.
Smiley was
clear that he wanted his guests to answer for the
absence of an overt support of a Black agenda by the
president. So now, and only after his election,
Jesse Jackson wonders why it is only a Black agenda
that Obama ignores, and Farrakhan says Obama was
“selected not elected” and lords over the “White
House” for “white people,” and Dyson boldly
proclaims Obama to be “Pharaoh . . . not Moses . .
.” or even Dr. King. Dyson went on to say that he
has known Obama the longest and supported him first
as the political “Jackie Robinson” who might not be
the best but is best suited to be first. This
should, of course, be seen as an admission of
political ineptitude and the fact that neither Dyson
nor anyone else who appreciated that comparison
brought up the impact of Robinson on the death of
the Negro Leagues or use of him by the state to
speak against2 more radical Black
leaders like
Paul Robeson3, means that the real
power of that analogy went without discussion.
And other juicy
contradictions were all over the place. Like when
the sole youth representative, Raven Curling, asked
about the absence of mass protests, and Jackson
agreed we should not abandon such tactics, Smiley
would later say that he and his roundtable of
leaders couldn’t make such calls and that actions
should be “individual.” The economic equivalent of
the individual as power came from author Tom Burrell
who was first to shift blame of Black poverty to
Black spending habits with that favorite
myth of Black buying power4.
This sophomoric
economic analysis was championed again by Julianne
Malveaux and by Louis Farrakhan who took the myth to
even greater contradictory heights. The minister,
with calls of “do for self,” suggested separately
that America was declining and, therefore, was both
“for sale,” and leading toward a time when the U.S.
dollar would be “worthless.” Following this “logic”
we should use a mythological $1 trillion in buying
power to purchase equally mythological
wealth-building assets from a declining country
whose currency is soon to be worthless. With
confusion like this it is little wonder why there is
so much to lament in the condition of Black America.
There was
little more clarity in the arena of electoral
politics. Ron Walters twice called for a “Black
Party” but confusingly only as a bloc within the
Democratic Party. This kind of blind adherence to
the Democrats was further displayed when in response
to audience member Phil Huckleberry of the
Illinois Green Party5, who said that
his party was the only party with a real Black
agenda, all-star panelist Angela Blackwell actually
agreed but only that “green jobs” and a “green
economy,” not alternative political party
development, were part of a Black agenda. It is this
kind of confused analysis that led roundtable
participant and Civil Rights veteran
Dorothy Tillman6 to say that Black
“political empowerment” is as “diminished” today as
she has ever seen it and that this is a result of
the ascendancy of president Obama. But it is also
true that Obama’s ascendancy and that of the
gathered all-stars is also the result of a previous
murder of Black radicalism.
For Black Agenda Radio I’m
Jared Ball7. Online go to
BlackAgendaReport.
Links
1
Media.Libsyn.com
2
YouTube
3
FreedomArchives.org
4
Voxunion.com
5 Ilgp.org
6
TheHistoryMakers.com
7
Voxunion.com
Source:
BlackAgendaReport
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Tavis
Smiley on his “We Count!” Conference and why
America needs the Black Agenda
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Tavis Black Agenda Event in
Chicago
Letter
from Carl Dix
Friends,
I’ve had a
busy month, and I wanted to drop you a note
about one part of that month—Tavis Smiley’s “The
Black Agenda is the American Agenda” event in
Chicago. This event came out of a dispute
between Tavis and Rev Al Sharpton, among others,
over whether President Obama needed to have, or
even to address, a Black agenda. This event
focused on an important question, one that is up
for large numbers of people in this country.
That question is, how to assess Obama’s 1st year
plus in the White House? To be blunt, do we
need to give “the brother” more time to affect
the kind of changes needed, or is the oppression
of Black people runs so deep in this society
that Obama couldn’t do anything about it if he
wanted to? I’ll speak to this question in a
minute.
Tavis’
panel of 11 notable Black people contained an
array of divergent views. Angela
Blackwell-Glover felt that the Black agenda was
clear, and Obama was quietly working on it, tho’
she wished he’d be more vocal about that. From
the other end, Cornel West felt that the cabinet
and advisors Obama had surrounded himself with
and the failure to end the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan pointed to a failure to act for
change. Dorothy Tilghman urged people to get
active, “to mobilize people to speak out for the
things they need, just like other groups do.”
Julianne Malveux felt that the depth of the
conditions faced by Black people underscored the
urgent need for an approach directly geared to
these problems. Louis Farrakhan said that Obama
had been selected to sit in the White House to
represent white interests. Michael Eric Dyson
went so far as to say, “Obama is not Moses.
He’s Pharaoh!”
Despite
this diversity of views, there was an overall
framework that all the speakers stayed within,
and I think this framework is one that needs
to be broken out of. That framework was that
the way to work to end, or at least ease, the
oppression Black people face is within the
confines of this system. This approach limits
people to working to pressure those with the
power to do something about the problems they
face. The problem with this approach is that the
oppression of Black people and all the other
problems people face today around the world are
built into the very fabric of the imperialist
system we live under. Staying within the
confines of the system means putting up with
these problems and working to lessen them.
But things
don’t have to be this way! We could end the
oppression of Black people, the wars for empire,
the oppression of women, the starvation and
disease, everything foul people endure today
thru revolution. All this is why we in the
Revolutionary Communist Party are involved in a
campaign centered on broad distribution of the
statement, “The Revolution We Need . . . The
Leadership We Have.” The goals of this campaign
are to put revolution back on the map in this
country, introduce people to the leadership we
have for this revolution in Bob Avakian and to
mobilize a core of people who are clear on the
need for revolution and are determined to fight
for it.
Had I been
on this panel, all this would have been injected
into the discourse. The 4000 plus people who
attended this event, most of whom were in their
seats in the auditorium when it began at 8 AM
sharp, would’ve heard a radically different
alternative to staying within the channels the
system puts out there. Which is something I
think is critically needed today.
I’ll write
more on the other things that have taken me from
DC to LA to Chicago and back to NY soon. Anyone
who wants to get more info on Tavis’ event in
Chicago should go to the web site:
www.tavistalks.com.
Office of
Carl Dix, Revolutionary Communist Party, USA,
P.O. Box 941 Knickerbocker Station, New York NY
10002-0900, (866) 841-9139 x2670
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Tavis Smiley Questions
Minister Louis Farrakhan on President Barack
Obama:
Part 1,
Part 2, and
Part 3
Al Sharpton vs Tavis
Smiley pt1 Barack Obama & the Black Agenda:
Part 1,
Part 2, and
Part 3
Smiley vs. Sharpton:
A Potemkin Drama
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Wake Up,
Tavis Smiley—By Stanley Crouch—Neither Smiley
nor the rest of his panel showed any interest in
“speaking truth to power” when it came to
questioning or exposing this smiling stain on their
militant dinner dress. Caught up in the tomming
before a totalitarian, both were seen and heard
co-signing Farrakhan in a way as disgusting as it
was consistent.
Jesse Jackson
was there and, as I once said to him in Washington
when Al Gore brought a number of black people down
to dinners in which the color troubles of America
were discussed, “I am sure that you are aware of the
fact that the worst mistake you ever made was to
bring Louis Farrakhan out of the dark and onto
center stage when you were running for president in
1984.” Jackson had nothing to say.
Nor did anyone
else on Smiley’s recent panel go beyond mum's the
word because they have yet to understand the
difference between complete honesty as opposed to
profiting and gaining attention from their purported
victim status. That does not allow them to see and
understand the gravity of actual engagement through
real politics, not sweating us all down with
unending typhoons of hot air. The kinds of solutions
provided by the members of HEAF and all of the
others are right down there on the ground giving the
devil all of the trouble he can stand.
TheDailyBeast
Noam Chomsky: Obama Administration and US Foreign
Policy /
Chomsky talks about the secret US foreign policy
Chomsky talks about the secret US foreign policy 2
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Noam Chomsky—Interview w/ Israeli News 2010 2 of 3
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Hopes and Prospects
By Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger
In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of
American empire and class domination, at
home and abroad, Chomsky continues a
longstanding and crucial work of
elucidation and activism . . .the
writing remains unswervingly rational
and principled throughout, and lends
bracing impetus to the real alternatives
before us.—Publisher's
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
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posted 28 March 2010
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