Monroe Anderson

Straight talk expressed on sounding racist

    Here’s some solid advice on how to tell people they sound racist from Jay Smooth, host of the hip hop video blog, Ill Doctrine, and founder of New York’s longest running hip-hop radio show, WBAI’s Underground Railroad.   
    In this political season where race is the 800 pound, tired-ass gorilla in the room, it's difficult not to get pissed off and call it like it is. To yell out a bunch of "racist" mfs before you start taking off your jacket and removing your ice.
    But Jay says no way.
    He wisely warns against calling someone a racist, no matter what you believe, but rather, pointing out to them how what they said sounds racist.  Check it out. What he says is bulletproof logic that we all should take to heart--Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and all the other usual suspects not withstanding.

Let's have all Wright all the time

    After being caricatured into a racist, hate-filled, anti-American nut job, Rev. Jeremiah Wright is emerging from his self-imposed public exile.
    Barack Obama’s former pastor appeared on Bill Moyer’s Journal on Friday, was the keynote speaker at the Detroit Branch NAACP's 53rd annual Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner on Sunday and  continued his message that different is not divisive in a speech and Q and A  at the National Press Club in D.C. this morning.
    Great. In this 24/7 news cycle world, we need all Wright all the time.
    I know this is counterintuitive, but I think it will serve the Democratic Party’s presidential frontrunner well if we see more Wright—much, much more Wright. 
    The conventional wisdom is that Wright’s return to the national scene is not doing Obama any favors. You hear that the Protestant pastor should have remained MIA until shortly before Thanksgiving—if not for eternity. You read that any time Wright speaks he only serves to stoke the passions of righteous Americans who have taken to heart the hard knock words they’ve heard out of context. You know that the running rap has Rev. Wright as a big-time blight hampering the Obama campaign from closing the deal.
    I say it ain’t necessarily so.   
    Since the manufactured controversy erupted last month, Wright gives certain American voters, as Chris Matthews describes it, a “permission slip” to not vote for Obama. The former Trinity United Church of Christ pastor gives them cover to continue voting whites only.
    Wright, however, doesn’t have to remain the blunt instrument the rightwing clinches to beat Obama down from here to November. With the exception of the conservative whites that aren’t going to vote for what could be America’s first black president for any reason at any time, a Wright P.R. blitz can shrink the mountain back to a molehill.
     Let’s begin with the obvious: Rev. Wright disappeared after misleading snippets began endlessly looping because a fair amount of his life’s work has been dedicated to social justice. Witnessing the very real possibility that this great nation may finally break its bad habit of electing one white man after the next to its highest office has to be as exhilarating to him as it is to me and millions of other Americans.
    But then, the situation got way out of hand. Rev. Wright’s four-decade legacy went to hell.  He had to flesh out the cartoon villain the viral videos have transformed him into. He needed to explain and defend his church’s black liberation theology, which has been so unfairly misrepresented. He’ll have to do it some more and then some more again.
    “I’m distressed by white people, out of a very different religious, cultural, racial, theological/ecclesiastical experience, presuming to judge African American faith practices and religious expression and preaching,” Rev. John Buchanan, who is white, said last month to his congregation.
    I found no evidence that Rev. Buchanan is related to that other Buchanan, Pat, a member of Sons of Confederate Veterans and rightwing agent provocateur who plays a political analyst on TV.  John Buchanan is the pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. His Gothic-architecture church was the setting where Carmen Diaz got married in “My Best Friend’s Wedding.” In real-life, Fourth’s flock is just like in the movie. Its congregation is largely white and rich and powerful.
     “Senator Obama’s critics wonder how the senator could have remained in Wright’s congregation and under his leadership for twenty years,” Rev. Buchanan said in his week-after-Easter sermon. “The answer is that Wright didn’t say ‘God damn America’ every Sunday. In fact, Wright’s sermons were biblically based, relevant, literate, and eloquent, week after week. When the preachers of the land decide whose sermons and lectures or preaching they want to hear, Jeremiah Wright’s are near the top of the list.”
    Of course, you’d never imagine that by watching Fox Cable News or from any of the other ongoing outlets for the rightwing propaganda machine. Last week, the North Carolina Republican Party unveiled an ad using Rev. Wright to attack Obama as “too extreme.”
    Without question, that’s just an early cheap shot the rightwing is preparing to sling. The Republicans believes Wright will be their WMD. And that’s why he should saturate the media with his intelligence, conviction and reason. He should religiously make the media rounds from “Meet the Press” to “This Week” to “20/20” to “Countdown” to “The O’Reilly Factor” to “The Colbert Report” to “Nightline” to “Saturday Night Live.” He should go on Oprah, Ellen and "The View," too.
    Should he make those rounds, before long, the fickle American media with its attention-deficit audience will decide that what was once “shocking and stunning” is really basic and boring. Old news is no news.
    And for Wright, Obama and the nation at large, no news will be good news.

(You can also see this post on ebonyjet.com. It ran on Tuesday under the headline, "Wright Here, Wright Now."  Check it out to see the comments. There are a lot more there than here. Also there are many other interesting posts on the website.)

Buchanan's got his rant down pat

    Hollywood’s prolonged writers' strike had one profoundly positive impact: It changed the TV viewing patterns of many Americans, me among them.
    Rather than wasting my time watching reruns of network sitcoms and dramas, I turned almost exclusively to the cable networks where I witnessed real-life drama and comic situations.
    Day in and day out, I’ve been glued to the tube, watching the political news shows and listening to the talking heads share their opinions. Of late, one of the most notorious talking heads, Pat Buchanan has been in overdrive. He’s been all over MSNBC and on the McLaughlin Group judging why Barack Obama’s brilliant speech on Race and Politics wasn’t good enough. Buchanan (and to a lesser degree, his right-wing sister, Babe Buchanan) has been chastising Obama for having the audacity to sit in Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ for 20 years and listen to the sermons without giving Rev. Jeremiah Wright a tongue-lashing for his “hateful” messages before never setting foot in the church again.
    Well, while we’re in the looking-back-on-20-years mode, let’s take a look at Buchanan. He’s a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He admires the Confederate General Robert E. Lee. And, over the years, he’s said a hateful thing or two about African Americans.
    Although right wing radicals like Buchanan have no use for it, I’m feeling pretty PC on this particular day so I’ll say that Pat is racially insensitive rather than just out and out call him a racist.
    Fortunately, AgentX on the African American Opinion blog said it for me–and said it better than I might have. Here’s how he kicked it off on the blog (For clarity, I'm putting AgentX's words in blue font and Buchanan's in red):
 
Notorious racist ranter Pat Buchanan asks "Where's the Gratitude?" from Blacks.

Get ready to get pissed off. Even if you are not black, this will piss you off.

First, some context. Pat Buchanan is a paleo-conservative former presidential candidate who is now an author and MSNBC political analyst. In the past he has made numerous racist statements, as documented by many sources, including Media Matters. Did you think he would stop since his last shameful incident? I didn't either.

On the 21st, he released this shameful, inaccurate, and downright racist rant (called "A Brief For Whitey") against Obama, Pastor Wright, and the entire Black community, with some splash damage on poor Whites, Native Americans, Asians and especially Latinos.

Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.

    Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.

    This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:

 First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

    Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

    Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

    Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks - with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas -- to advance black applicants over white applicants.

    Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.

    We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

    Barack talks about new “ladders of opportunity” for blacks.

    Let him go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for “deserving” white kids.

    Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?

    Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?

    As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?

    Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?

    We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena. And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.

    Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago.

I don't have all night to debunk this entire sack of crap, so I'm gonna touch up on a few issues.

    Click here to see how AgentX touched on the issues.
    And, in the meantime, as you watch Buchanan pretending to speak for the angry white man, remember he’s actually speaking to him. He’s giving him talking points to perpetuate the politics of old. Buchanan's script is not written for us.

Sermon snippets this Easter Sunday that should put Rev. Wright's to shame

    On this Easter Sunday, I thought it might be appropriate to post a couple of sermon snippets from two preachers who have their own favorite candidates--the reverends Rod Parsley and James David Manning.
    John McCain has called Rev. Parsley his "spiritual guide." Rev. Parsley has called Islam a false religion and called on Christians to wage war against it. Rev. Manning believe Barack Obama to be the anti-candidate. He rants about Obama Girl's "54 double D" boobs, about Obama's mixed-race pedigree and about blacks for not appreciating all the good things President Bill Clinton did for them.

    Since we're now into vetting preachers and what they have to say about their favorite presidential candidate, I thought I should bring these two righteous ministers into the mix. Let's see if they make the cable news and talk shows. I find their sermons much more outrageous than anything Rev. Jeremiah Wright has said.

    Happy Easter!

    Here's Rev. Parsley sermonizing on pro-choice and black genocide.

    And here's Rev. Manning damning MacDaddy Obama and praising himself.