White America, history has its eyes on you
The underlining operating principle of cable television news is not to inform viewers but to attract viewers because basically they’re in the business of selling advertising and people who buy advertising are primarily concerned with the size of the viewing audience.
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On the last night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, Billy Porter reprised a song from the 1960s, “For What It’s Worth.” The song is better known by its iconic lyric, which seems to be as relevant at this moment as it was for the moment when it was recorded by Buffalo Springfield in…
I want to commend former state representative Joshua Peters for his commentary “Black politics in a time of revolution” in The St Louis American. Peters’ cogent insight into the emergence of new Black political leadership that will change the character of Black politics as an effect of the B…
Max Ehrmann reminds us in “Desiderata” (1927) that, whether or not it is clear to us, the universe is unfolding as it should. That thought came to mind when I saw that Joe Biden had selected U.S. Senator Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee for vice president of the United States. I di…
“This time feels different” might be the most repeated phase in America at this moment, and that’s because it’s true. This time does feel different.
America is obviously having a Man in the Mirror moment on the issue of race as the result of the police murder of George Floyd. In the ensuing three weeks we have seen multiethnic, multiracial mass protests against the system of American policing. These protests have not only touched every c…
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When dealing with the political establishment, always remember that whatever they say it is, it ain’t that. This has never been truer than when discussing policing in America.
Now that Joe Biden is the official unofficial Democratic nominee, all the other candidates have dropped out and endorsed him, and former President Barack Obama’s endorsement is seen as his official unofficial coronation, the question is: now what?
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In the iconic movie Casablanca, Captain Renault (Claude Raines) is forced by the Nazis to close down Rick’s Café (really a casino, where he’s been gambling). Rick (Humphrey Bogart) asks why he’s being shut down. Renault’s ironic response, as the dealer hands him his winnings, is now a classi…
How did this happen? How did we come to be in this place? Why are we so unprepared to deal with this?
I want to you to ask yourself a question. Take your favorite African-American pundits on your preferred cable news outlet and ask yourself when you’ve ever heard them discuss or analyze how any policy proposals by a Democratic candidate for president specifically relate to the condition of t…
I cast my first presidential vote in 1972, and I’ve never not voted. I’ve never consider voting for a Republican as a matter of principle: we believe completely different things about the role and purpose of government in civil society. It doesn’t mean we can’t coexist, as long as I have eno…
I began my governmental career in March 1977 when then St. Louis Mayor John Poelker appointed me to the Community Development Agency Commission. I was 28 years old. My governmental service officially ended January 27, 2020 when Missouri Governor Mike Parson appointed Pamela Westbrooks-Hodge …
What happens in the world has as much impact on African Americans as everyone else, yet there has always been an African-American school of thought that says foreign affairs is white folks’ business and we put our agenda at risk when we engage on that issue. Nothing could be more wrong.
For the last several months the columns I’ve written have had something to with the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary, and I’d now like to bring some closure to at least this part of that process. I referred to this part of process like preseason NFL football: it has nothing to do with wh…
I don’t believe history literally repeats itself, but humans regularly find themselves in circumstances that are similar to circumstances of the past. And since humans are slow to evolve and learn, they find themselves regularly surprised when confronting similar circumstances and regularly …
“These are times that try men’s souls.”
In 1849 U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun gave a speech in the United States Senate where he said the following: “With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but white and black, and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are res…
In the previous column I said a political philosophy is analogous to a religious faith and the advantage that the rich, privileged and powerful have is they practice politics the way average people practice their religion, as a matter of faith. I want to make a correction. Faith and religion…
If you use mass popular media as your primary source of information to make decisions then you’re severely limited in understanding what a presidential election is all about is. Mainstream media treat presidential politics like a high school race for student council president – basically, a …
“Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.”
Who is the premiere national politician of the post-Reagan era? For me, there is only one candidate. I’m talking about the Mother of Dragons, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, the leader of the House Democratic Caucus, the gentlewoman from California, U.S. Rep. Nancy Patricia…
If you’re black in America, you’re always faced with the same two political choices every four years: bad and worse. Approaching 2020, there’s no real discussion about the worse choice, Trump and his neo-fascist Republican Party. My advice to people of color and anti-racist white Americans f…
If you’re black in America, you’re always faced with the same two political choices every four years: bad and worse. Approaching 2020, there’s no real discussion about the worse choice, Trump and his neo-fascist Republican Party. My advice to people of color and anti-racist white Americans f…
If the United States was the country we pretend it to be, there would be no angst over the 2020 Presidential Election, because if the United States was that country, Donald Trump wouldn’t be president, because as the cliché goes, “we’re better than that.” The reality is Donald Trump is the p…
In “I Am Not Your Negro,” the Oscar-nominated documentary by filmmaker Raoul Peck about the work of the late James Baldwin, Baldwin makes the this observation: “What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, beca…
Reparation is making amends for a wrong one has done by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged. It’s this notion of financial compensation for the descendants of enslaved people of African descent that is usually the focus of the reparations debate.
In the epigraph to “The Godfather,” Mario Puzo quotes the 19th century French novelist Honore’ de Balzac: “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” There has never been a more accurate observation about the source of America’s collective wealth.
I made myself a promise not to follow or comment on the Democratic presidential campaign until October or November, primarily because it a pointless exercise that will have nothing to do with who will win the Democratic nomination and whether or not that person can successfully defeat Donald…
As Benjamin Franklin was leaving the Constitutional Convention he was approached by a woman who asked, “What have you given us, a monarchy or a republic? Franklin replied, ”A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
What drew St. Louis’ civic leadership and professional class to Better Together like moths to a flame? It’s their belief that the single biggest impediment to St. Louis’ ability to grow and prosper is its fragmented local government structure. The way St. Louis city and county are politicall…
In 1992 David Halberstam wrote a new introduction for the 20th anniversary edition of “The Best and the Brightest.” He wrote that his favorite passage of the book was a conversation between Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn.
The African-American response to Better Together’s proposal to merge St. Louis city and county
In the sixth chapter of Isaiah, God asks a profound compound question: “Who shall I send, who will go for us?”
The Latin phrase “Time Danasos et dona fermented” – which means “I fear the Greeks, even those bearing gifts” – has become the commonly used phrase “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” The phrase, from the Roman poet Virgil’s retelling of the Trojan War, refers to how the Greeks tricked the Tro…
February is Black History Month, and February 6 would have been the 89th birthday of Arthur “Chink” Washington. Chink’s active political career spanned 60 years and touched multiple generations of St. Louis and Missouri political actors, black and white.
This moment of inflection in America is not about political ideology or political competence, it’s about the lack of moral competence, whether you’re talking about the national political scene or the political condition of St. Louis.
Wesley Bell’s first three weeks as St. Louis County prosecuting attorney have been exceptional. He has taken command of the office and without apology and led with important initiatives that were pillars of his campaign and foundational to criminal justice reform. He has marked his territory…
The only thing more ridiculous than 17 Republicans running for president in 2016 will be the 20 -plus Democrats running for president in 2020. There will never be that many people in either party – or in both parties, taken together – at any time who ought to be seriously considered for the …
On November 6, 2018, Democrats propelled by the energy of a tentative progressive coalition overwhelmed Trump Republicans, winning 40 seats in the U.S. House, reclaiming 367 of the 1,000 state legislative seats lost during the Obama years and captured six governorships. All in all, a great n…
To win the World Series or an NBA championship requires a team to win four games in a seven-game series. All the games are important, but the most pivotal game in a seven-game series is game five. If the series is tied two games apiece, the winner of game five takes a one-game lead with two …
Why I keep writing about the centrality of race and politics from a historical perspective is best summed up by James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it has been faced. History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history w…
The legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 masterpiece “Rashomon” shows how four people recount different versions of the story of a man’s murder and rape of his wife. It reveals the complexity of people and the relative nature of truth when dealing with an objective reality. I re…
The importance of studying history is not just to know what happened in the past, but also to contextualize and understand the present. Because the United States of 2018 is a culmination of economic and political forces set in motion many decades before, an understanding of pre-Civil War Ame…
The results of the August 7 Democratic primary has St. Louis all atwitter (pardon the pun). There were historic victories that could change the political calculus of St. Louis, and while it was a great night, we need to put it in context. Getting the right players in the right positions is t…
During last year’s Democratic mayoral primary, I was regularly asked by a diverse cross-section of the black community, “Why can’t black politicians get behind one candidate in order to capture the Mayor’s Office?” A corollary question was always, Why can’t the black community come together?…
I have purposefully stayed away from commenting on local politics because local politics can be mean and vicious, and the reason it’s so mean and vicious is the stakes are usually so small. I also try not to be unnecessarily cruel, and if I wrote about the local political scene, I’d sound li…
The reaction to the recent resignation of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is being treated like a defining moment in American history. While I don’t think it rises to that level, I do think Vice President Joe Biden’s description of the signing of the Affordable Care Act would apply. Th…
Last Saturday, I did a brief phone interview with Keith Willis for his Saturday morning Community Connections program. I was surprised and pleased that the first thing he wanted to talk about was what going on at the border. It is Keith’s raising an issue that I’ve given some thought, but no…
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