Monroe Anderson

Black History Month is still not history

 

    Besides holding down her job as my wife and mother of my two sons, Scott and Kyle, Joyce Owens is an artist and a professor and curator at Chicago State University. When she's not eyeballs deep in one of those five jobs, she takes time out to curate an exhibition for Sapphire & Crystals, a collective of African American women artists here in Chicago.

Without fail, this is the time of the year when the S & C's can bank on an exhibition somewhere. Black History Month really is predictable. And without fail, this is the time of the year when I was a captive sounding board, forced to hear Joyce complain about how this was the only time of the year that it occurred to white galleries, universities and community centers that showing art by black women is a good thing to do.

I understand all too well.

Although I'm available year round, my best speaking engagement in 2009 was a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr./President Barack Obama Celebration for the City of Chicago Height, Illinois. Of course, Obama's Inauguration was a true historical moment. The King Holiday and Black History Month, on the other hand, have become as regular as a Gregorian Calendar.  The two African American observation's have sort of blended into Black History Season, which begins the day after Christmas for Kwanza and rolls on through the end of February. As for the rest of the year--forget about us.

I was reminded of this peculiarity when I read the latest post of my friend Jack White, Buckwheat's Black History Month Tour, on the Washington Post's black website, The Root. This visit to "the Home of Retired Racial Stereotypes" is a funny as Jack's drop in last April. Check it out and then tell me--if you can--why Black History Month shouldn't be integrated into American history, 24/7/52?

Here's Jack's post:

Buckwheat’s Black History Month Tour

By: Jack White

Posted: February 1, 2010 at 6:38 AM

Forget all the black public intellectuals. The Our Gang character has a few things to get off his chest. I came across Buckwheat packing a Kente cloth suitcase in his suite at the Home for Retired Racial Stereotypes. He was softly humming, “On the Road Again.”   

"Going somewhere?” I inquired.

“Course I is, White,” squeaked the famous Our Gang character. “It’s Feb’rary and that means it’s time for my annual Black His’try Month speakin’ tour.”

“Your what?” I responded. 

“My annual Black His’try Month speakin’ tour!” said my diminutive friend in a high-pitched voice as he carefully folded a colorful dashiki and placed it in the valise. 

“This the month when black public in-tee-leck-shals like me rakes in ‘nuf speakin’ fees to pay the bills the rest of the year when nobody wants to hear nothin’ we got to say,” said Buckwheat. “It’s kinda like bears eatin’ ‘nuf salmon durin’ the spawnin’ run to get them through the winter.”

“I never thought of it like that,” I observed.

“Where will you be chowing down … I meant, speaking?” “Oh, I’m booked solid,” said Buckwheat proudly. “I’m as pop’lar as Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Melissa Harris-Lacewell and Clarence Page put together. I got a Black His’try road show with a bus and everythin’! ”

“But how could you possibly compete with such a gallery of brilliant minds?” I asked, skeptically.

“All of them just talks ‘bout black his’try,” he ranted, his voice rising into higher and higher registers.

“I lives it. I don’t just talk about racial stereotypes—I IS one! Nobody can say ‘Here I is’ or ‘Otay’ like me! Those are MY trademarks!!! I is an icon!! I is an original!!! WHEN YOU SAY BUCKWHEAT, YOU SAY BLACK HIS’TRY!!!!!”

His tiny fists were pumping in the air, and he was shrieking at such a high pitch it fractured the crystal glasses in the dining room.

“Is that so,” I remarked.

“Yeah, and I got a book comin’ out to prove it. It’s called The Negro Squeaks of Rivers,” Buckwheat boasted. “PBS is plannin’ a 19-part series based on it. They think it could be bigger than Roots.”

Just then, I heard the growl of an engine and an enormous red, black and green touring bus pulled up at the door. It looked like the Kingfish was at the wheel.

“That’s my ride! Gotta go get paid!” shouted Buckwheat, lugging the bulging suitcase toward the door. “So long, White. Be seein’ you in March!”

I waved goodbye, shook my head and closed the door.

Jack White is a regular contributor to The Root.

This column has also been cross-posted on the African American Opinion.com website.

GOP did a heck of a job on Dems for Brownie

 
 

We saw what was to come a year ago when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. sworn in President Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. 

What should have been a smooth and seamless ceremony wasn't. Chief Justice Roberts got the words wrong. The new President had to go through the swearing-in later--one more time--in the Inaugural day to make sure everything was all right.

That omen to the chief from the chief would be replayed and replayed and replayed with different verses, but the same tune throughout Obama's first 365 days in office. While I seriously doubt that the swearing-in trip-up by Roberts, an activist conservative Supreme Court appointee, was designed to be an obstructionist gesture, it symbolizes what the activist, conservative Republican Party and its media movers and shakers had in store for Obama.

Since the double-dose Inaugural, day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, our nation and its chief executive have been bludgeoned by one Republican road block to the next in a right-wing plot to assure that Obama's promise for change goes nowhere fast.

Right off there was the Birthers. According to them, Obama was not born in the United States therefore wasn't a legal citizen therefore was ineligible to be president. A little more than six months into office, the first African American president was still in early attempts to get the health reform legislation he promised through Congress when GOP Sen. Jim DeMint declared if Republicans and conservatives stop Obama on health care reform, it would “break him” and be Obama’s “Waterloo.”

After DeMint's declarations, the Birthers were joined by the Deathers--those that claimed that the Healthcare Reform Bill was designed to let senior citizens die--and the tea-baggers who were mad as hell as not going to take it any more because Obama was a foreign-born, socialist who was out to kill the unborn, old folks and truth, justice and the American way.

All along, the Republicans voted no while providing no variable alternative to all they were rejecting. As we come to the end of Obama's first year, the Republicans have helped to assure that 177 of the White House's nominees have not been appointed--that's 107 more than the 70 Bush nominees that were still waiting after his first year in office and one heck of a way to make sure that Obama can't do a good job.

So when Massachusetts' Brownie became the first Republican to win a U.S. Senate seat since Edward Brooke retired in 1979, on cue the conservatives to healthcare. Following suit, many of the MSM reports failed to point out months before Scott Brown beat Democrat Martha Coakley that the majority of Americans were in favor of healthcare reform until the right-wingers nay-sayed it to its deathbed. Nor did enough MSM reports explain that Massachusetts already has a healthcare reform law in place so the voters in that state were either fearful that a national reform law may cost them more or were pretty much into a "I got mine, I could care less about yours" state of mind.

As if we didn't know, the main history we've learned in the past year is that negative works; that it's easier to tear down than to build up and that nice guys get to experience firsthand that old saw about if at first you don't succeed, then try, try, try again.

 
 

This column has been cross-posted on the Newsvine and the African American Opinion.com websites.

Obama should not take responsibility for Bush's 9/11 failure

    

    Watching today's commemorations of the eight anniversary of the 9/11 terrorists attacks, I am reminded of how badly the Bush Administration blew it. The most incompetent presidency in our nation's history presided over the worst failure in national security since Pearl Harbor.

    Keeping this in mind, I shake my head, then my fist, whenever Dick Cheney or his darling daughter show up on some TV news talk show bragging about how the Bush Administration's criminal torture practices kept us safe. This isn't just another exercise in tortured logic, it's a sputtering lurch of the right wing old fear trying to journey just a bit further on a road well traveled. The Cheneys, in presenting their mythology about keep us safe since 9/11 have never gotten around to telling us who kept us safe from February 26, 1993, when the World Trade Center was first bombed, until September 11, 2001, when the Towers were tragically toppled.

    That stretch of safety, by my count, was one days short of eight years, six months and two weeks. We're not there yet.

    I'm also reminded on this day that the Bush Administration failed to pull off the president's bullhorn braggadocio: "And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."

    Well, either Osama bin Laden was deaf or President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney substituted the bullhorn for the dog whistle. The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks never heard from the Bush Administration. Now it's President Obama's turn. He wants to send more troops to Afghanistan. He wants to shift our misguided war efforts from Iraq back to where they should have been concentrated all along.

    I'm afraid it's too little, too late. The Bushies had a chance to make a surgical strike right after 9/11. They let the cancer metastasize. They created more terrorists and gave bin Laden and his henchman a chance to slip into Pakistan. The Obama Administration has inherited a bad situation that can only get worse. Sending more of our young men and women into the land where Empires go to die is a losing proposition.

     I'm having trouble writing this, but I agree with George Will: We need to bring the troops home. President Obama should adapt the common sense sensitivities of State Senator Obama and apply them to Afghanistan. Should the Taliban regain power in Afghanistan and should al Qaeda crawl out of the caves in Pakistan, we've can always hit them again.

    We're very good at shock and awe--but not at all good at occupation.

This post was also published on the UK Progressive  and the African American Opinion.com websites.

My bittersweet Memorial Day memory of Leanita McClain

    Twenty five years ago today, I discovered that Leanita McClain, my friend and colleague, was dead. It was a suicide that came as no surprise to me. For more hours than I care to remember, I sat in her office at the Chicago Tribune joking, cajoling and questioning her repeated proclamation that she was going to kill herself.

    During these discussions, I'd asked why. "There are black women who'd give their right arm to be where you are," I'd argue.

    "But, I'm not happy," she'd counter.

    Although a young 32, Leanita was the first black and second woman on the editorial board at the Trib. She had her own signed op-ed page Perspective column and a loyal following of readers. She'd written a My Turn piece for Newsweek magazine, about the complications of being a middle class black, that launched her star as a journalist. Her 1983 freelance commentary for the Washington Post, "How Chicago Taught Me to Hate Whites," about the racially polarized mayor's race in Chicago, is a classic. Professionally, she was on top of the world. In the year of her death, she'd been named by Glamour, magazine as one of America's Top 10 career women. 

    None of that seemed to matter. Personally, she was in a lot of pain. She suffered from clinical depression. And, sometime during the Memorial Day weekend, it got the best of her.

    I'd hoped it wouldn't have come to such a tragic end. I'd convinced her to get professional help and nearly convinced myself that the psychiatrist was making a difference. 

    But on that fateful Memorial Day weekend, I knew something was wrong. I hadn't heard from Lea at all over the holiday weekend. This was out of character. For more than a year leading up to her suicide, we talked every day. I'd occasionally get a 3 o'clock in the morning call when she was stressed out.

    That weekend, I didn't hear from her and when I called her home, she didn't answer. The Tuesday after Memorial Day, I dropped by her office only to see it empty, with lights out and newspaper stacked in front of the doors.

    I called Clarence Page, her ex-husband, to see if he'd heard from her. He hadn't. Then I called one of our colleagues who lived in Hyde Park not far from her. Within a couple of hours, he called me with the bad news. She was gone. An overdose of pills.

    Our editor, Jack Fuller, asked me to write my next Perspective column eulogizing her. It was the most difficult piece I've ever written on deadline. At the time, I thought it was far too inadequate. After it ran, many of my readers called or wrote to tell me how much it had moved them.

    This is the first time I've read it in nearly 25 years. It's not as bad as I thought, although it could have been better. I'd like to share my bittersweet Memorial Day memory with you. Here's the column I wrote which ran on Friday, June 1, 1984.

A life cut short, a loss deeply felt

Whenever I had trouble saying what I wanted in a column, Leanita McClain came to my rescue.

"Let me see," Leanita, whose passion was collecting owls, the bird of wisdom, would say. Then she'd give a critical eye to what I'd written. "You're always too hard on yourself. The column's fine."

In short order, with a slight change of a sentence here and a quick word of encouragement there, she'd help me breathe verve into what had been a still life.

I wish she were here to help me with this one. I don't know what I want to say or how I should say whatever I should be saying. I'm not even sure of how I feel except for one thing: a deep loss.

On the day after Memorial Day was observed, the day Leanita, 32, was found in her Hyde Park home, an apparent suicide, I lost a friend, a colleague and a confidante. In addition to being a personal loss for me, Leanita's death was an irreplaceable loss for the profession of journalism and a tragic loss for the voice of reason in Chicago.

Over the last 11 years, both our social and professional lives repeatedly crossed paths as we went through one change after another. Although I first met Leanita at a meeting for black journalists held in the South Side apartment where I lived at the time, our friendship got its start when I left Ebony magazine to come to The Tribune in 1974.

Leanita and my first wife were close friends. Looking back, those days seem so carefree. She and her husband and my wife and I went to restaurants, discos, movies together. We even took a dream vacation to Acapulco together.

As fate would have it, though, it took the deaths of our marriages to change my friendship with Leanita into what if was to become. Leanita, who had been like a sister to my estranged wife, began acting like a mother hen to me.

"Are you eating properly?" she'd ask, by way of looking after my welfare. And that question was just one manifestation of her gentle concern for how I was coping.

Leanita's caring and giving, of course, extended far beyond me. She became involved in such charitable pursuits as tutoring children from the Cabrini-Green public housing project. She helped friends through this or that personal crisis.

At all times, she was concerned about the plight of black journalists in general and those at The Tribune in particular. She'd complain, in her own quiet way, about how few blacks there were in the business, and virtually none in management.

"Are things ever going to really change?" she'd ask during discussions about the lack of black editors at one newspaper, or the problems of a black reporter at another.

Finally, things did change for her. Leanita had worked as a reporter, a copy editor, a picture editor and Perspective editor before going on to become the first black and second woman appointed to The Tribune's editorial board.

As editor of Perspective, a section of opinion and analysis, one of her first acts was to recruit black writers to integrate thought. Her dream, like Dr. Martin Luther King's, was to see the Perspective section, the newsroom, the corporate offices, the city, the state, the nation all integrated. Ironically, many of her critics in recent months unwittingly attacked her as a racist, based on her Washington Post article about white resistance to Harold Washington's election as mayor.

Her writing, whether in the "My Turn" column she did for Newsweek magazine on "The Middle-Class Black's Burden," or her columns in The Tribune, consistently addressed the problems of race relations in this nation with fairness and compassion, offering an idealistic vision of how they might be worked out.

Whenever she came to me with a problem column of her own that she needed my advice on, I'd tell her, "Lea, you're equivocating too much on this one. Choose one side or the other."

Most of the time, though, she'd stick with both views, suggesting a moderating, mediating approach even though neither side seemed to listen.

Ending this was as hard as it was starting it or getting through the middle. If Leanita were around, we might be smoothing out some of the rough edges.

This column was cross-posted on the African American Opinion.com website.

GOP's stingy stance is not a cure-all at all for swine flu

    In the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, as far as the father of the bride was concerned, Windex was the miracle cure for anything from "psoriasis to poison ivy."

    In real life, among the dwindling membership of the Party of No, lower taxes is their Windex. 

    No matter what political, economic or social challenge confronting our nation, the GOP mantra calls for lowering taxes, cutting taxes or flatlining taxes. As individual American citizens, the Republicans tell us, we can spend our money much better than the bureaucrats in Washington. 

    So, right now, right here, we have a threatening crisis that could further cripple our sick economy and, btw, who knows kill how many of us along the way: the swine flu outbreak.

    At this moment, more than 100 have died in Mexico from the influenza virus, but so far there has been no fatalities in the United State. Should this public health emergency take a turn for the worst by developing into a pandemic that leaves tens of thousands or millions of Americans dead in its wake, the only measure that will outpace finger-pointing will be vaccination shots.

    Hopefully, we'll only need vaccination shots in limited regions throughout the states. In the meantime, allow me to be one of the first to point a finger: The Know-Nothing party thwarted one preventative measure, fearing it might lead to more taxes.

    In a post entitled, GOP Know-Nothings Fought Pandemic Preparedness on the website of The Nation, John Nichols reports:

    When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year's emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.

Obey and other advocates for the spending argued, correctly, that a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse -- with workers ordered to remain in their homes, workplaces shuttered to avoid the spread of disease, transportation systems grinding to a halt and demand for emergency services and public health interventions skyrocketing. Indeed, they suggested, pandemic preparation was essential to any responsible plan for renewing the U.S. economy.

But former White House political czar Karl Rove and key congressional Republicans -- led by Maine Senator Susan Collins -- aggressively attacked the notion that there was a connection between pandemic preparation and economic recovery.

    We don't know where this swine flu outbreak is going or how soon it will end. But the World Health Organization has been extremely concerned and vigilant since the outbreak has already crossed international borders.     

    In a special report to the GlobalPost, Christine Gorman writes: 

    Although no fatalities have been reported in the U.S., the latest reports from Mexico suggest that more than 100 people have died and at least 1,400 may have been infected with the never-before-seen flu.

 

On Sunday, Canadian health officials confirmed six cases of human swine flu — four in Nova Scotia  and two in British Columbia — while public health officials in New Zealand, Israel, France and Spain began testing several patients with flu-like illnesses who had recently traveled to Mexico to determine whether or not they also had swine flu.

 

Part of what concerns health officials is that most of the fatalities in Mexico have involved adults under the age of 60, which does not fit the usual profile of a seasonal flu outbreak. That pattern is, however, reminiscent of the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, in which the very young and the very old tended to be spared while most of the fatalities occurred in adults in their 20s to 50s.

    We've got to hope for the best here; hope that this flu virus does not mutate into something as virulent, Infectious and deadly as the 1918 flu pandemic, which resulted in more than 100 million dead worldwide, before it is over. But we've also got to hope that the mantra of the Johnny-one-note conservatives continue to ring false for more and more Americans.         

    I, like most of the rest of us, don't like paying taxes. But, besides paying for wars of aggression that I personally oppose, taxes pay for police and firemen, roads and bridges, and they help fund safety nets for those who may not be as fortunate as we are.        

    And, from time-to-time, money that we send to Washington comes back to us in a preventive measure that may be life saving for millions and therefore worth its weight in gold.

(This post was also published on the AgoraVox and the African American Opinion.com websites.)