by Wendell Griffen

In recent days we have witnessed unprecedented evidence of bigotry and violence. Bear with me while I mention some of the more obvious examples. 

Start with the abuse and disrespect Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson experienced this week from Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. She was called vile names. Her professional and personal integrity was demeaned. Her character and intelligence were questioned. What Judge Jackson experienced was intentional bigotry. 

She was the target of premeditated violence from Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Marsha Blackburn, and Charles Grassley.  Remember their names. Remember how they treated Judge Jackson.   Do not believe them if they eventually make predictably fake excuses, assertions of good faith, and other efforts to downplay their bigotry and violence. Those vicious politicians could not crack Judge Jackson. They could not break her spirit. 

Through it all, Judge Jackson did what Black women and girls have been taught to do for generations. 

She maintained her sense of personal dignity and worth. She did not abandon her moral high ground by trading insults with political clowns. Judge Jackson showed the world that she is smarter, more professional, and more courageous than all her attackers combined. I look forward to her being confirmed by the U.S. Senate in the coming weeks. I look forward to her joining the U.S. Supreme Court after she takes the oath of office.   

I am already envisioning the wonderful spirits of Constance Baker Motley, Shirley Chisholm, Harriett Tubman, Maya Angelou, Cicely Tyson, Coretta Scott King, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Barbara Jordan, and countless other women rising to salute Judge Jackson when she becomes Justice Jackson.   

Move now to the bigotry and violence the world has witnessed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the hypocrisy of the United States and other rich nations concerning the daily violence happening in that war. Western nations took almost no time to begin imposing economic sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine. 

The same nations, including the US, refuse to impose sanctions against the apartheid regime of Israel because of the daily violence, land theft, and discrimination it has perpetrated against Palestinians and other persons of color for generations. 

They have not said a word about imposing sanctions against Saudi Arabia for the violence it is carrying out in Yemen.  

Journalists are constantly talking about how Russian aggressors are committing war crimes against Ukrainians. Meanwhile, the media outlets for whom they report refuse to devote similar attention to atrocities and war crimes committed by the Israeli military against Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza. They are not talking about the daily theft of land, invasion of neighborhoods, and destruction of olive trees by Jewish settlors in Palestine.   

Now shift to the local scene. Reporters, politicians, and pundits are talking sorrowfully about gun violence in Dumas, Little Rock, Chicago, and elsewhere. But they typically do so by suggesting that violence is an inherent part of Black life. 

They refuse to mention the violence committed against Black people and communities every day by militarized police tactics, racial gerrymandering of voting districts, and deliberate measures to depopulate Black families and communities through mass incarceration, gentrification, and other forms of systemic violence.  

Do not let journalists forget how violence against persons of color by people in power is ignored, excused, and even validated. Do not believe flimsy excuses from journalists, politicians, preachers, and other so-called influence leaders for treating systemic violence against Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian-Pacific Island, immigrants, and LGBTQI persons as excusable, or worse yet, deserved.   

And do not forget Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s courage, exemplary calm, and unwavering reaction to what Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska termed “jackassery” during Judge Brown’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee.    

Remember it.  Teach and model it to young generations. Celebrate it.  

Live it.    

Can I get an "Amen"?  

Wendell Griffen is an ordained pastor, and published author. His latest work is The Fierce Urgency of Prophetic Hope (Judson Press, 2017)    

I’ve got something to say about “you people.”

That, as you may recall, was how I referred, in a recent column, to Mike Pence and others who have apparently sworn an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Florida taco bowl connoisseur who used to be president. It left a handful of readers well and truly irked. As one of them put it: “‘You people?’ How dare you lump all Trump voters like that.”

Well, dear reader, I cannot tell a lie. That objectifying language was no accident. Rather, it was designed to make a point. In order to understand that point, you have to understand something else:

I’m an American. By that, I don’t simply mean that I’m a U.S. citizen, though I am. But what I really mean is that I venerate the ideals on which this country was founded.

Unalienable rights. Life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Freedom of speech. Of faith. Of conscience. Government by consent of the governed. Equality before the law. Because of those ideals, America already was a revolution even before it won independence from England. Despite themselves, a band of slaveholding white men somehow founded a nation based on an aspirational, transformational declaration of fundamental human rights.

And then came the taco bowl connoisseur and his acolytes. Their values — more accurately, their lack of values — have coarsened the country, impoverished its spirit, debased what once was revered. Like something out of “It Can’t Happen Here,” Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel of a fascist takeover, our foundational ideals suddenly seem flimsy and insubstantial, thin tissues of fidelity in a hurricane of contempt.

Indeed, to witness politicians openly rigging the electoral process by installing loyalists to count votes, to watch them lionize insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol, to see them wheedle and rationalize rather than stand up for the country they purport to love and to know all of this happens while we, the people, watch TikToks, play Madden and otherwise go on with business as usual — as if the nation did not face a threat to its very existence — is to realize that not only can “it” happen here but that arguably, it already is.

It’s a realization that forces a choice: Shall we embrace fidelity or surrender to the storm? For some of us, that’s no choice at all. Hence, “you people” — less a call for division than a belated recognition that division has already come, that some of us have seceded from common cause, common ideals, common hope — and that the rest of us must recognize that, if only so that we can be clear-eyed about saving ourselves.

To put that another way: If I never see another cable-news reporter doing interviews in some red-state diner to help the rest of us “understand” the people there, it will be too soon. How about we send that reporter to a blue-state shopping mall to help the people in the diner understand the rest of us? What they will learn is they have no monopoly on frustration or anger.

You people don’t believe in freedom of speech. My people do.

You people don’t cherish the rule of law. My people do.

You people don’t support democratic ideals. My people do.

You people don’t value facts and reason. My people do.

You people don’t honor the aspirational and transformational ideas that made this country great. My people do.

For those reasons and more, you people are not my people.

My people are Americans.

(Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 3511 NW 91st Ave., Miami, Fla., 33172. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.) 

Written by Ann Brown

for the Moguldom Nation 

In 2010, veteran journalist Tavis Smiley gathered together a group of Black political, religious, educational, and business leaders to discuss the state of Black America and the lack of a Black agenda under President Barack Obama, who was then in the middle of serving his first term.

Rev. Jesse Jackson, Professor Cornel West, Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, and civil rights advocate Dorothy Tillman were among those included at the event, entitled “We Count: The Black Agenda Is the American Agenda.” The special media event was broadcast on C-Span on March 20, 2010.

Smiley, then a PBS talk show host, said felt was compelled to hold the event because of the public debate over whether Black leaders needed to press Obama on the Black agenda, according to KBLA Talk 1580 Los Angeles.

Also included in the discussion was advertising pioneer Tom Burrell, Professor Michael Eric Dyson, and Julianne Malveaux, who was then president of HBCU Bennett College. The Black Agenda panel discussion took place at Chicago State University. They discussed issues concerning the Black community, especially Obama’s policies. 

“Now the truth of the matter is President Obama is not addressing the Black agenda. President Obama has been told that is all right not to address our agenda. If you don’t address it, don’t worry about it because they gonna be quiet,” said Tillman, a former alderman of Chicago’s 3rd Ward who held that office from 1985 to 2007.

Dr. West said he gave Obama a grade of C minus on policies and priorities focused on poor and working people, saying, “He has really not come through in any substantial and significant way,” The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported.

“A Black agenda is jobs, jobs, jobs, quality education, investment in infrastructure and strong democratic regulation of corporations,” Dr. West told The New York Times. 

“The Black agenda, at its best, looks at America from the vantage point of the least of thee and asks what’s best for all.”

In Arkansas, are the lawmakers looking at the legislative agenda from the viewpoint of those who have the least?  Sadly, I think not.