This happened towards the end of his second term in 1984. The “MYTHICAL” Republican used the word NEGRO — a racist slur when referring to the ethnicity of African Americans, despite the fact that the term is still used in some contexts for historical reasons such as in the name of the United Negro College Fund.

Note: Reagan wasn’t a very bright man. His oratorical skills camouflaged this weakness quite effectively. The old man was as much a LYING WAR-MONGERING THUG as George Bush.

Ronald Reagan was a serially lying Republican with a heart of darkness who made Americans feel good about themselves. He supported and propped apartheid South Africa government, claiming in 1985 that the “reformist administration” of South Africa had “eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country.” In 1986, Reagan gave a speech where he said Mandela should be released but denounced sanctions with crocodile tears, claiming that they would hurt black workers, who were already ridiculously impoverished.

Reagan’s go-slow speech was denounced by Bishop Desmond Tutu, who said: “I found it quite nauseating. I think the West, for my part, can go to hell . . . Your president is the pits as far as blacks are concerned. He sits there like the great, big white chief of old.”

Later in 1986, Reagan made his greatest demonstration yet that black bodies were “expendable.” Congress had finally had enough of the carnage to vote for limited sanctions. Reagan vetoed them. Congress overrode the veto. Reagan proceeded to put no muscle behind the sanctions. Mandela remained in jail and at least 2000 political prisoners remained detained without trial.

In 1987, Reagan published a report that said additional sanctions “would not be helpful.” The gleeful South African foreign minister, Roelof Botha, said Reagan “and his administration have an understanding of the reality of South Africa.”

Reagan’s and Botha’s “reality” was rendered a fantasy by the force of world opinion and a more enlightened leadership inside South Africa.

Only a year after Reagan left office, Mandela was released. One can only wonder how much sooner he would have been released and how many lives would have been saved had Reagan not behaved like the white chief of old.

The Gipper was as EVIL as every Republican I have ever heard of. They ALL are …anyway! [ READ MORE ]

P/S — Reagan like Bush in Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of central Americans in the name of FREEDOM!

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   By: Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez
In Cambridge, Mass., a prominent African American professor gets arrested in his own home, and many conservatives — of all colors — are befuddled because they can’t seem to comprehend the outrage. More outraged is the fanatical right wing, which bristles at the thought that the president actually suggested that racism might still exist in the United States.

Ironically, in Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio is proof that racial profiling still takes place and that President Obama himself officially sanctions it. After the spectacle of the Sonia Sotomayor hearings in which southern senators questioned her integrity, we again have been treated to national theater where persons of color are supposed to apologize to unrepentant bigots.

Leading this charge are wealthy talk show hosts and wealthy talking heads that have little in common with the listeners that they herd around daily. They are the same ones that hold sacrosanct the Second Amendment and the idea that one’s home is one’s castle and that the Constitution permits homeowners to defend themselves and their home with lethal force, against anyone and everyone.

In regards to the particulars involving Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and Sergeant James M. Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department, it is true that no one should have rendered judgment before all the facts were known. However, because the president commented on the situation, this incident has helped to bring the topic of racial profiling to the fore.

Seemingly most conservative whites speak [on talk radio and the internet] with venom in regards to this topic, not simply denying the phenomenon, but also condoning it or redefining it when impossible to deny. Minimally, it has to be acknowledged that racial profiling has always been a problem in this country. Driving while black or brown is one thing, but to be arrested in one’s home — one’s sanctuary — touches a sensitive chord.

It has been surprising to hear the president speak up on the topic. On virtually everything else — such as illegal spying, transparent government, illegal wars, signing statements, etc, he has actually continued the Bush polices of the past eight years. However, in regards to racial profiling, he has actually weighed in, albeit clumsily. However, it has not been improper for him to point out that in general, anyone getting arrested in their own home, after identifying him or herself, is disturbing. Talking back or defending one’s dignity (as opposed to meekly complying) is not a punishable offense.

What is more disturbing about this topic is that the president has actually been complicit in greatly expanding programs that legalize and authorize racial profiling and other abuses nationwide. The primary program is the Bush-era federal 287G program that authorizes local police departments to carry out immigration enforcement duties.

Arizona’s Sheriff Arpaio — who believes it is an honor to be associated with the KKK (Nov 2007, on CNN’s Lou Dobb’s Program) and who actually pals around with racial extremists — is the face of this program. His well-publicized dragnet raids and checkpoints in Mexican/Latino neighborhoods have garnered national attention. His antics and practices have also been regularly denounced by Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon and by human rights organizations nationwide. The 287G program itself has been denounced by many of the nation’s police chiefs as an impediment to good law enforcement. Nationwide, this is but one program that permits practices unheard of anywhere else in the world; such as mass show trials (Operation Streamline in Tucson, Arizona) that last but one hour, trials in which migrants are charged with smuggling themselves and detention centers for children, run by private corporations (Corrections Corporation of America).

It is truly a mystery as to why the president has not denounced these Bush-era programs or Arpaio — the Bull Conner of this generation. While it is true that Arpaio is under federal investigation, it is also true that the Obama administration has greatly expanded, rather than suspended the 287G program nationwide.

This nation’s dirty little secret is that racial profiling has always been a major component of federal immigration enforcement; Cesar Chavez used to refer to the migra as the “Gestapo of the Mexican people.” It is only logical that as the 287G program expands to local jurisdictions nationwide, so too will racial profiling expand.

It is uncertain how the Gates-Crowley-Obama drama will end. Yet, systemic racial profiling policies — authorized by the president himself — can end, not by sharing a beer on the White House lawn, but through an immediate executive order. An end to apartheid practices can’t wait for the much-promised comprehensive immigration reform.

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Rodriguez columns appear at New America Media approximately the 1st and 15th of the month.

Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, can be reached at: XColumn@gmail.com

PO BOX 85476
Tucson, AZ 85754

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Contact: XColumn@gmail.com
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   By: Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez
The president’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court has come during a most awkward time in the history of U.S. journalism, which many analysts claim is in serious decline, if not on life support.

What her nomination clearly shows us is that what this nation needs is more incisive journalism, not less. Yet, to be sure, the rise of right-wing media, which include FOX News and virtually all the known right-wing radio talk show hosts, is the antithesis of journalism.

Their coverage of the Sotomayor nomination points to the need for honest debate, not simply on the issues of race, but on the right wing’s aversion to truth. It also points to the right wing’s pompous beliefs, on every topic, including affirmative action, that their positions are “American.”

Extremist politicos Newt Gingrich and Tom Tancredo, both of whom have zero credibility but are stars of right-wing media, have led the charge that Sotomayor is a racist. They have been joined by the usual wingnuts: Rush Limbaugh, Gordon Liddy, Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan, Lou Dobbs, to name a few. Even Juan Williams of NPR, has parroted the claim that Sotomayor’s (out-of-context) statements are racist. The fact that the nation’s discussion centers on whether she is a racist or not — or that she is an “affirmative action” pick (Buchanan) — points to both the power of the wingnuts and also to the virtual impotence, or complicity, of mainstream media.

Historically, mainstream journalists have been taught that critical analysis constitutes injecting subjectivity into their reporting.

All this brouhaha is based on the Sotomayor statement that the experiences of a Latina might allow her to make better judgment in court than a white male. Her detractors say that if a white male had made similar statements he would have been automatically disqualified.

They conveniently ignore the fact that the Supreme Court has been virtually all-white for most of the nation’s history. It also ignores the fact that throughout U.S. history, white males have generally not been subjected to apartheid discrimination and segregation, let alone extermination, slavery, forced removals, extra-legal brutality and false imprisonment.

The charges against Sotomayor have a familiar ring. Staunch segregationists used to charge that Martin Luther King, Jr. was both un-American and a racist. President Ronald Reagan institutionalized that kind of thinking in defense of South Africa’s apartheid regime. For him, Nelson Mandela was a terrorist, while the outlaw South African regime constituted a “democratic ally.”

Such thinking was also “normalized” during the affirmative action debate; those who attempted to dismantle the vestiges of racial discrimination were deemed “racists” or “reverse racists,” or communists by those working to maintain it (A reverse racist is precisely what Limbaugh labeled both Sotomayor and President Obama).

Those doing this labeling have well understood the nation’s changing political climate; they could no longer campaign as the defenders of white racial supremacy. Instead, they generally cloaked their views under the conservative-Republican mantle and wrapped themselves in the American flag.

They also knew that to win a debate required further subverting the nation’s political language. These same “patriots” began to reinterpret MLK Jr.’s quote about the dream of a color-blind society.

In public, they gladly accepted the “dream” without accepting the societal responsibility of dismantling and remedying centuries of institutional racism and discrimination in this country.

While the majority of Americans can see through the false arguments and the “clever” subversion of the political language by these so-called patriots, this does not hold true for the mainstream media.

As we are seeing with Sotomayor, all it takes is a handful of “extremists” to control and shape the media debate.

Perhaps the only upside is that Americans can now clearly see that the politics of Gingrich and Tancredo are the same as that of Limbaugh, Liddy, Beck, Buchanan and Dobbs. These pundits who daily rant against “illegal aliens,” and who daily clamor on the need to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border, are quoted as credible sources by the mainstream press. They are generally the same ones who promote the politics of fear and hate, who believe in the use of torture, and who also believe that the United States is endowed with the God-given right to conduct permanent war against the rest of the world.

Truthfully, who can discern a difference between these right-wing fanatics and the positions of mainline conservatives within the Republican Party?

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•    Rodriguez can be reached at: XColumn@gmail.com or PO BOX 85476 – Tucson, AZ 85754

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By: Okech Kendo

   Okech Kendo
Post-apartheid South Africa’s next president is certain to be an unlikely occupant of the office. And not just because Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, also known by his clan name Msholozi, lacks the stature or polish of Nelson Mandela, or the intellectual deceit and accomplishments of Thabo Mbeki.

Zuma falls much below their moral and intellectual par, yet he is ahead of many. This is probably because of coincidence or too frequently being underestimated because of his dismal formal education. The Zulu Boy – and Zuma is a child of that flamboyant, masculine and military community – counts Shaka, the empire destroyer, among his ancestors, if only through ethnic affinity. Indeed, a Zulu was always coming to be president of independent South Africa, given their numerical strength in the tribe-and-race-defined country.

But few would imagine the inheritor would be Zuma, in an age when the influence of western education is dominant. Zuma often thinks less of himself, almost in a self-deprecatory way, sometimes to spite others who think they are highbred.

While in South Africa early this month, I entered a bookshop at Oliver Tambo Airport in Johannesburg to buy a book I could not find in Nairobi. Michaela Wrong’s John Githongo-inspired It is Our Turn To Eat was priced at 270 Rand (about Sh2,700), so I picked a copy of Jeremy Gordin’s Zuma: A Biography instead.

A woman at the counter was baffled with my selection and my remark I wanted to read about “the next president of South Africa.” It was obvious she and her kind would stop a Zuma presidency if they could.

   Jacob Zuma, Left With Zulu Elders

Even with a history of sexual adventurism, a high profile case of like nature, and other related moral questions about the Zulu Boy, Zuma’s presidential stream is unstoppable. The majority of those who matter in a democracy are with him, so no rich Afrikaan racists can stop him. Not even the wealthy, powerful elite of his mentor Mbeki can stop him.

Minor river

Asked why he was not popular with writers, Zuma told Gordin: “Why should anyone write about me? I’m not an important person. I’m not from a politically famous or royal family. I am not an influential businessman. I’m just an ordinary person.”

Mandela is from a royal Xhosa family. Thabo Mbeki, his successor, is from a political family, son of Govan Mbeki, an ANC founder member. One of Zuma’s possible rivals in future is Cyril Ramaphosa, an ANC insider and successful entrepreneur who might have succeeded Mandela. (Ramaphosa, by the way, is the negotiator PNU rejected last year, claiming he could not assist Dr Kofi Annan because he is close to ODM leader Raila Odinga.)

In Khrushchev: The Man, His Era, William Taubman echoes the Zuma narrative, particularly his relationship with Mbeki.

The story goes: “‘Once upon a time,’ (Nikita) Khrushchev said, ‘there were three men in a prison: A social democrat, an anarchist and a humble little Jew – a half-educated fellow named Pinya. They decided to elect a cell leader to watch over the distribution of food, tea and tobacco.

“The anarchist, a big burly fellow, was against electing authority. To show his contempt for law and order, he proposed that the semi-educated Jew be elected.

“Things went well until they decided to escape. They realised that the first man to go through the tunnel would be shot at by the guard. They all turned to the big brave anarchist. But he was afraid to go.

Suddenly, poor little Pinya drew himself up and said: ‘Comrades, you elected me by a democratic process as your leader. Therefore, I will go first’.”

The moral: However humble a man’s beginning, he achieves the stature of the office to which he is elected. Pinya could be Zuma, the son of a KwaZulu Natal policeman and a maid. He never had formal education. The brutality of his boyhood saw him take up casual labour in Boer homes. His father died before Zuma, barely a baby, understood the cruelty around him. The brutality shaped his boyhood, and would lead him to detention in Robben Island for ten years.

His wedding with the ANC is the subject of legend. He enlisted at age 17. In 1991, when ANC was looking for someone to lead the party in talks with FW De Clerk’s National Party and Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party, it was a gesture from ANC president Oliver Tambo that did it. Tired and sick then, Tambo was seen to have pointed his stick at Zuma and no one wanted to contradict him.

When Mbeki picked Zuma as deputy president, he underrated his worth. He figured that Zuma would have no ambition for the highest office. How wrong he was: Zulu Boy is in after he ejected Mbeki from ANC!

Analysis — South Africa Elections

The Splintering Rainbow

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‘Township Jive‘

| Longer Version | More With Lady Smith Black Mambazo |

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About Paul Simon:

Paul Frederic Simon (born October 13, 1941) in Newark, New Jersey to Jewish Hungarian parents, is an American singer-songwriter and musician, perhaps best known for his partnership with Art Garfunkel in the duo Simon & Garfunkel. In 2006, Time magazine called him one of the 100 “people who shape our world.” As of 2007, he resides in New Canaan, Connecticut. [ READ MORE ] [ OFFICIAL PAUL SIMON WEBSITE ] [ More Music By PAUL SIMON ]

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About LadySmith Black Mambazo:

Ladysmith Black Mambazo is a male choral group from South Africa that sings in the vocal style of isicathamiya and mbube. They rose to worldwide prominence as a result of singing with Paul Simon on his album, Graceland and have won multiple awards, including three Grammy Awards. They were formed by Joseph Shabalala in 1960 and became one of South Africa’s prolific recording artists, with their releases receiving gold and platinum disc honours. The group has now become a mobile academy, teaching people about South Africa and its culture. [ READ MORE ] [ OFFICIAL MAMBAZO WEBSITE ] [ More Music By LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO ]

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NOTES:

1. Isicathamiya (with the ‘c’ pronounced as a dental click) is a singing style that originated from the South African Zulus. In European understanding, a cappella is also used to describe this form of singing. — [ MORE ]

2. Mbube — is a form of South African vocal music, made famous by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The word mbube means “lion” in Zulu. Traditionally performed a cappella, the style is sung in a powerful and loud way (see Mbube Roots, Rounder CD 5025). The members of the group are male, although quite a few groups often have a female singer (On Tiptoe: Gentle Steps to Freedom). However, since the formation of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the style has fallen in favour of softer singing, which is known as isicathamiya.

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About Hugh Masekela:

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Hugh Ramopolo Masekela (b. Witbank, South Africa, April 4, 1939) is a South African trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, and singer.

He began singing and playing piano as a child. At age 14, after seeing the film Young Man With a Horn (in which Kirk Douglas portrays American jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke), he took up playing the trumpet. His first trumpet was given to him by Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, the anti-apartheid chaplain at St. Peters Secondary School.

Huddleston asked the leader of the then Johannesburg “Native” Municipal Brass Band, Uncle Sauda, to teach Masekela the rudiments of trumpet playing. Masekela quickly mastered the instrument. Soon, some of Masekela’s schoolmates also became interested in playing instruments, leading to the formation of the Huddleston Jazz Band, South Africa’s very first youth orchestra. By 1956, after leading other ensembles, Masekela joined Alfred Herbert’s African Jazz Revue.

Since 1954, Masekela played music that closely reflected his life experience. The agony, conflict, and exploitation South Africa faced during 1950’s and 1960’s, inspired and influenced him to make music. He was an artist who in his music vividly portrayed the struggles and sorrows, as well as the joys and passions of his country. His music protested about apartheid, slavery, government; the hardships individuals were living. Masekela reached a large population of people that also felt oppressed due to the country situation.

Following a Manhattan Brothers tour of South Africa in 1958, Masekela wound up in the orchestra for the musical King Kong, written by Todd Matshikiza. King Kong was South Africa’s first blockbuster theatrical success, touring the country for a sold-out year with Miriam Makeba and the Manhattan Brothers’ Nathan Mdledle in the lead. The musical later went to London’s West End for two years. [ READ MORE ] [ More Music By HUGH MASEKELA ]

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