*As regards metro Atlanta politics, bureaucracy and Buckhead; while incompetence is better than corruption neither will keep the kingdom in your hands long. Slap the both of them together and you are doomed. *The current crop of Black and White politicians in Georgia and perhaps America are confused by the idea that what ‘merits’ a public servant is passing the background check or the credit score check. It’s ok that those ‘variables’ may keep you out of public service but the crime in American politics is that we think simply passing them means one has what it takes to be…
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As I reflect on the UGA National Championship win and the institution of football and football culture in the psyche of the deep south; it default and de facto is the last remnant of the antebellum southern Black/White structural dynamic of political economy. White leadership and control and Black labor for nearly majority White institutions of higher learning. Black labor and physicality and White leadership and everybody is happy. Black people and White people united in some kind of Elysian Fields of the old south like our provincial (if oft times brutal) southern institutions and methods of organization; that is…
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Many Americans watch reality shows but if you are in the Bluff long enough you are living a reality show except there aren’t any cameras (that you know of except police and security cameras) and you are not making any money. Just last week there were three incidents in the Bluff community that would have made Oprah, Dr. Phil and Iyanla (in no particular order Iyanla) salivate. They would feel like “it would be a good show to get inside your heads and see your past and pain and why you act the way you act”. It would make a…
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Lance-Bottoms off to a terrible start in the 2017 Mayoral Race (one from the Vaults that is apropos today and indeed one of reasons I write such good books) Months ago, I called Felicia Moore out on the disingenuity of having a “plan” to solve crime on Bankhead/Hollowell and related areas of urban Atlanta by hiring more police, equipping more police vehicles with license plate reading and other database technologies and putting up more cameras in the area. I argued then that any Republican could have come up with the same exact policies as he insisted on doing something about…
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The thing about the Haitian migrant ‘crisis’ is that of course White America (and not just White) thinks it’s a great crime and imposition on America that Haitians wash up on our shores and borders in rugged desperation. Indeed, the nerve. They even view it in a ‘Trumpian’ kind of ‘racism lite’ way; which is to say brownish or Black people from shit hole countries are a criminal, financial and disease ridden imposition on the good White taxpaying citizens of America that White folks don’t deserve. This is as if Haitian niggers washing up on the shores of America is…
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A few years ago in a critique of American post-modernity I argued that the sense of having or holding a professional trade for self-actualization reasons and purposes is gone and people would just as soon quit teaching, firefighting, policing and even doctoring if they could make enough money flipping houses or in some other get rich quick scheme you see on late night television infomercials. In America we assume about each other with straight faces that if I won the lotto, I’d not only quit my current job but damn near quit my current life and live the stereotypical life…
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I’m writing this morning because I couldn’t Youtube info on Brunhilda from Wagner operas. That is a bizarre segue into our topic for today; westerns and western themed dramas. I’m here because of late I have been interested in figures from Native American history. Yes, I’m over 50 and when I was growing up we got taught the white version of ‘how the west was won’. Honorable cowboys and homesteaders running off recalcitrant or unruly natives and such excitement and opportunities for white men to be heroic. I’m one of those generations of little Black boys siding with the Lone…
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Crime, the stain of the Negro and the surface reason white folk claim they don’t want you in their neighborhoods or our children going to their schools in too great a number. And now in the wake of George Floyd and BLM we walked right out and gave White folk the very bailiwick with which to hurl insults at us and make insinuations about our competence and even intelligence. Imagine our country assed Republican Governor Kemp lecturing urban Atlanta about its ‘crime problem’? And his logic that it’s because not only has the anti-police atmosphere created by BLM taken over…
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I’ll begin this essay with a crude story. Most of my readers know that I’m not averse to using other people’s or my own crude stories. This is because sanitized stories often lose their punch and instead of being food for thought it’s like going to a Tapas restaurant with 5 other niggers and noting there isn’t enough ‘tapas’. No one enjoys it because abundance is a full 1/2 of one’s sense of wellbeing. If it was not so prosperity preaching would not have told us so for the past 50 years. Oddly enough, America is worse off in nearly…
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I often tell people that my experiences in a mainline American Christian denomination were rougher than my experiences selling dope in the streets on the block. This is to argue in an around about way that the thugs I encountered in the church hierarchy were worse in many regards than the thugs I encountered on the streets of Atlanta and South Carolina where I hustled. Just when I thought I had put all that behind me, an article comes out in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about how the United Methodist Church is seizing Mt. Bethel UMC’s assets. Immediately I was…