Two to Tango: Michael Jordan’s Sad Legacy as the Plutocrats’ Champ, and the Anti-Ali Five years ago on a bitterly cold day in February, I walked into a Bohemian coffee bar on Chicago's Westside to interview Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the husband-and-wife couple who helped found the Leftist organization of young white militants known [...]

Do Nothing Til You Hear From Me: As the Class War Heightens, the Media Muzzles America's Fiercest Class Warriors, Blacks 1931 cartoon in the communist periodical, the Daily Worker In late March of 2019, the liberal British daily newspaper, the Guardian, published an op/ed by one of its columnists, Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin [...]

Tell A Story, Shame the Devil: How Pundits, Tweets, and Listicles Destroyed American Journalism The cover story of the December 6th, 1993 issue of the New Yorker was akin to a thunderclap. Written by Mark Danner, the article entitled The Truth of El Mozote is a 22,000-word account of the My Lai-like massacre of nearly 1,000 villagers [...]

From Kobe to Cape Fear: When the Face of Sexual Menace is Black As I recall the incident some 20 years later, it was my second trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was sitting in the passenger seat of a midsized car alongside my driver, Pierre, and interpreter, Tom and we were returning [...]

Happy Birthday to the Most Beautiful Boogeyman Celebrating 55 Years of Life in a Country Long Dead Cuz every brotha man’s life Is like a roll of the dice, right? Public Enemy   I must’ve been about 9 or 10 when I accompanied my father to the Indianapolis farmers market on an Indian summer weekend [...]

The Last Kicks of a Dying Mule Adrift in a Decolonizing World, the White Settler Makes a Final, Furious Stand Adrift in a Decolonizing World, the White Settler Makes a Final, Furious Stand Anticipating a government plan to seize their farms for redistribution to landless blacks, white South Africans have begun shuttling ex-Israeli commandos into the [...]

400 Years a Slave From the Peculiar Institution to Subprime Debt, Black Serfdom and White Terror Remain the Signature Traits of American Kleptocracy Behind every great fortune, there is a crime. Honore de Balzac   Set in a small, Georgia town during the Eisenhower administration, Pete Dexter’s 1988 novel, Paris Trout, pivots on the fatal [...]

Building Community Through Murder 400 Years of Blameless Cops and Black Corpses The announcement last week by New York’s State Attorney General Leticia James that her office would not prosecute the police officers who fatally shot an African-American man armed only with a metal pipe, was not entirely unexpected. In New York City and across the [...]

Photo credit: Clive Power/London Photo credit: David Hunt/Warwickshire, UK Honky Talk: The Lingua Franca PHOTO CREDIT: Wikimedia of White Respectability Politics The one thing the people in power despise and hate the most is to be laughed at. Make sure that your strategy includes demeaning the oppressor, taking the clothes off him or her, making [...]

Damn, Damn, Damn! Killing the Black Father in America PHOTO CREDIT: Wikimedia About 20 years ago, when I was still a newspaper reporter, I traveled to Omaha, Nebraska to cover  some breaking story, and found myself at a press conference, standing between two locals, both black men like myself. We struck up a conversation, and [...]