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Charles Barkley: Ignorance Personified

By N Oji Mzilikazi

18 July 2016

On the heels of four off-duty Minneapolis police officers working security at a WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx game leaving their posts on account of the players’ wearing pregame warm-up jerseys that carried the message of change, the names of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling who were shot to death by the police, and Black Lives Matter, ESPN sports journalist Bomani Jones delivered commentary that deserves not just acclamation, but being tweeted and retweeted.

Jones made the point: “You are not obligated to speak simply because you are good at doing something with a ball. That can lead you into some disastrous places.”

Time and time again, we’ve been exposed to personalities and celebrities pontificating on subjects and issues in which their understanding borders on the ignorant. But in their mind, and given a platform, they have Solomonic insights. When those persons are Black, their diarrhoea of the mouth becomes hurdles for people of African descent, as well as ammunition for those bent on sustaining inequalities; denying empowerment and social justice for the race…

 

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Emancipation 2013: Field Negroes Needed

50th Anniversary of the March on Washington

Emancipation 2013: Field Negroes Needed

By N Oji Mzilikazi

Originally published in the Montreal Community Contact Volume 23, Number 17 August 22, 2013           

Won’t you help to sing

These songs of freedom

Cause all I’ve ever had redemption songs

All I’ve ever had redemption songs

These songs of freedom

Songs of freedom

— Redemption Song

— Bob Marley

August 28, 1963, was a momentous day in the history of America, and Black people everywhere. On that day, hundreds of thousands of people; men women, children, Blacks, whites, Jews, gays and lesbians, marched on Washington in the most significant protest of the civil rights era.

It was on that day, there in Washington; on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech, inarguable one of the greatest 20 Century speeches.

King’s speech prompted William Sullivan, the FBI’s assistant director of domestic intelligence, to recommend: “We must mark him [King] now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous negro of the future of this nation.”…