Articles
Down to the River Jordan: The World the Enslaved Made Print E-mail

210929132117 slaves virginia(The Truth Seeker September, 2023)

Before the Florida Department of Education issued its curriculum directive this past summer that slavery in the United States produced “personal benefits” for the enslaved in the form of a well-stocked resumé of trades, useful after Emancipation in 1863, the board members might have consulted a seminal document in the literature of the oppressed—Angela Davis’s 1971 essay, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.”

These days we’ve rightly exchanged the conditional designation, “slave,” for enslaved person. Fifty years ago, Davis prophesized this nominative shift; she cataloged how Black women resisted the shackles. Among the first scholars to gather the evidence, she argued that a woman (daughter, mother, wife) was equal to a man in undermining the slaveholder, surreptitiously and openly, at her peril. “If she was burned, hanged, broken on the wheel, her head paraded on poles before her brothers and sisters, she must have also felt the wedge of this counter-insurgence as a fact of her daily existence.”

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Once You Know Who They Are, You'll Know Who We Are Print E-mail

lyflyfyr(First published in Times of San Diego February 19, 2023)

The Negro is America’s metaphor. — Richard Wright

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In the latest volley, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his educational propagandists are hellbent on removing the “radical elements” of the College Board-approved AP course on African-American studies for high school seniors. They plan to eliminate “contemporary topics,” meaning “instruction in” Black Lives Matter, mass incarceration, reparations, and critical race theory. I’ve been meaning to punch back at such suppression sooner than now but I, a White American, have been busy studying one of my favorite writers, the great African-American music critic and autobiographer, Albert Murray.

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Will No One Rid Me of This Troublesome Orange Jesus? Print E-mail

Thinker Trump(First published in Times of San Diego October 2, 2022)

Now that I know that just thinking about classified documents will declassify them, my mind is being overtaken by thoughts I dare not think for fear that thinking them makes them come true.

Just the other day I was thinking about that famous line of Henry the Second, King of England, when in 1170 he supposedly said (though, remember, it’s not clear that he said it but perhaps only thought it and said later that he had said it), “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”

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Pro-Life? Not Exactly. More Like Pro-Birth. Life's Something Else. Print E-mail

D6xPCS3W4AAKXgf(Times of San Diego July 5, 2022)

Those who call themselves pro-life are, to say the least, a self-deceiving lot; they’ve been convinced — from without and from within — that all fetuses should go to term and be born, no matter the consequences to the safety of the woman, the child, the family, or the planet.

I wouldn’t call these people pro-life. They’re pro-birth. Better put, they’re pawns of politicians and so-called religious leaders, dominated by white Christian men, who use the pro-birth status to enforce outdated sexual mores and to handmaid women.

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What's in His Wallet? An Addendum to the Texas Abortion Law Print E-mail

6c4d22f7c2a14f7c1a701e281e06dc54(First published in Times of San Diego September 9, 2021, later revised)

Everyone knows—or should know—how burdensome a pregnancy is on a woman. It’s especially hard now if you live in Texas where a fetal heartbeat detected at six weeks means by law the woman cannot terminate her pregnancy; she must carry it to term. The burden of having a child, whether planned for or forced, is made worse by the financial responsibility of raising that offspring, for parents and families, through childhood and adolescence, the next eighteen years. Would any man argue that such a load, for poor women in particular, is among the toughest things she’ll ever face?

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Hal Holbrook and Clara Clemens Samossud Print E-mail

Hal Holbrook As Samuel Clemens As Mark Twain(Times of San Diego March 20, 2021)

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, among the greatest and most widely read authors in history, is known everywhere by his pen name, Mark Twain. This was the nom de plume Clemens adopted in 1863 as a frontier columnist for The Virginian, a Nevada newspaper. There, he wrote satires and caricatures, bald hoaxes and ironic stories of the wild pioneers he met and whose tales he embellished even further. His writerly persona came alive when he began lecturing and yarn spinning from a podium.

Over time, his lowkey delivery, his deft timing, coupled with the wizened bumptiousness of a country orator in a white linen suit, captivated audiences in America and Europe, and on world tours. No one has embodied America, in its feral enthusiasms and its institutional hypocrisies, better than Clemens. Dying at 74 in 1910, he played Twain—rather, he became him—for 47 years.

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I Assert the Right to Live Free from Disinformation Print E-mail

Covid a Lie(Times of San Diego January 28, 2021)

For those of us who classify ourselves as Nones—about 27 percent of the population, a broadminded, semi-coalition of nonreligious people—we must often remind the God-fearing that our goal is to live free from the fake martyrdom of those who say their right to worship and proselytize their faith is being denied. The allegation of censorship that many religions promulgate against the nonreligious has been a reliable untruth since the nation’s founding. But it seems never as hyped as it has been recently.

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