The Black agenda

The Black agenda

Glen Ford, -2021

Book - 2022

Over the past forty years, no commentator has been as deeply insightful about the paradoxes and personalities of Black American public life as the journalist and radio host Glen Ford. In this stunning overview, Ford draws from his work for Black Agenda Report, one of the most incisive and perceptive publications of the progressive left, to examine competing struggles for class power and identity in the Black movement. In a survey stretching from the violent gentrification of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, through the engineered bankruptcy of Detroit, to the "more effective evil" of the Obama presidency, Ford casts a caustic eye on the empty posturing and corruption of the Democratic Party. This, he insists, depends ...on a Black constituency for electoral success, while using a co-opted "Black misleadership class" to sell out working people's interests. Profiling along the way storied Black leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Brown (for whom Ford once worked), The Black Agenda looks, too, beyond American shores, at US intervention in Libya, the Congo and the Middle East, showing how these are imbricated with racism at home. Ford concludes with a discussion of the Black Lives Matter movement, setting out both its pitfalls and potentialities.

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Subjects
African Americans > Civil rights.
African Americans > Politics and government.
Black lives matter movement.
Gentrification.
Published
New York : OR Books [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Glen Ford, -2021 (author)
Other Authors
Margaret Kimberley (writer of preface)
Physical Description
xxi, 326 pages ; 23 cm
ISBN
9781682192900
9781682193174
  • Glen Ford's Irreplaceable Journalism
  • Introduction
  • Part I. Thanksgiving
  • No More American Thanksgivings (November 27, 2003)
  • Part II. Bush and Katrina
  • They Have Reached Too Far: Bush's Road Leads to Ruin for Himself and His Pirates (March 20, 2003)
  • No Black Plan for the Cities, Despite the Lessons of Katrina (May 9, 2007)
  • The Age of Katrina-Not Obama (August 26, 2008)
  • Part III. DLC and Black Misleadership
  • Katrina, War, Impeachment, and the Black Gulag (August 22, 2007)
  • The "Obscene Fourteen" House NSA Negroes (July 13, 2013)
  • Detroit Is the Nexus of the New American Apartheid (September 18, 2013)
  • The Siege of Detroit: A War of Black Urban Renewal (July 23, 2014)
  • The Democratic Road to Black Ruin (March 23, 2016)
  • The Validity and Usefulness of the Term "Black Misleadership Class" (January 4, 2018)
  • Part IV. Duopoly
  • Both Major U.S. Parties Are Plagues on Humanity (July 1, 2015)
  • Vector of Fear: Blacks and the Democratic Party (February 3, 2016)
  • Throw Off the Dead Weight of the Democratic Party (February 11, 2016)
  • Hillary Stuffs Entire U.S. Ruling Class Into Her Big, Nasty Tent (August 10, 2016)
  • Clinton's Basket of Deplorables (September 14, 2016)
  • Fascism with a Democratic Party Face (November 30, 2016)
  • Facebook Is Not Your Friend (October 17, 2018)
  • Part V. Obama
  • The Great Black Hajj of 2009 (January 27, 2009)
  • Obama's Emerging Legacy: Wars, Bankers, and For-Profit Healthcare (June 24, 2009)
  • What Part of "We Needs Jobs" Does Obama Not Get? (December 22, 2009)
  • First Black Presidency Has Driven Many African Americans Insane (July 6, 2010)
  • Gridlock Is a Blessing: To Hell with Obama and his Van Joneses (November 23, 2011)
  • Why Barack Obama Is the More Effective Evil (March 2012)
  • Fletcherism and Fakery: Guarding Obama's Left Flank (August 22 2012)
  • What Obama Has Wrought (September 5, 2012)
  • Angela Davis Has Lost Her Mind Over Obama (March 28, 2012)
  • Black America More Pro-War Than Ever (September 18, 2013)
  • Black Madness Under Obama: African Americans More Pro-NSA, Anti-Snowden Than Whites and Hispanics (January 22, 2014)
  • Gridlock (Once Again) Rescues Social Security from Obama and the GOP (February 26, 2014)
  • Obama's Last Presidential Lies (January 1 2017)
  • The Obama Legacy (January 19, 2017)
  • Part VI. Wars in Africa and the Middle East
  • The Shrinking American Empire (July 8, 2009)
  • Race and Arab Nationalism in Libya (March 9, 2011)
  • Western Mercenaries and Corporations Pouring Into Libya (November 1, 2011)
  • A Second Wave of Genocide Looms in the Congo, with Susan Rice on Point (November 28, 2012)
  • Obama's Humiliating Defeat (September 11, 2013)
  • Rwanda's Formula For Success: Murder Your Neighbors and Steal Their Wealth (March 26 2014)
  • There Is No U.S. War Against ISIS; Instead, Obama Is Protecting His "Assets" (June 2 2016)
  • Yes, Obama and Clinton Created ISIS-Too Bad Trump Can't Explain How It Happened (August 17, 2016)
  • Part VII. Foundational Leaders: James Brown, Malcolm X, and MLK
  • James Brown: The Man Who Named a People (January 10, 2007)
  • Dragging Malcolm X to Obamaland (April 27, 2011)
  • MLK and Obama: Two Diametrically Opposed Legacies (April 5, 2017)
  • Part VIII. Today's Leaders: Trump, Biden, Sanders
  • None of Them Has Ever Been My President (November 16, 2016)
  • Criminal Nation: Obama and Trump Should Both Be Jailed for War Crimes (May 10, 2017)
  • Bernie Sanders Can't Shake His Imperial Piggishness (September 28, 2017)
  • How Donald Trump Rode in on "Dark Money" (January 31, 2018)
  • Mass Manufacturers of Slander and Lies (April 3, 2019)
  • Sanders vs. the Endless Austerity Regime (July 10, 2019)
  • The Issue-Less Impeachment: The Corporate Democrats Stand for Nothing, So They Impeach for Nothing (December 11, 2019)
  • The Corporate Democrats' (and Alicia Garza's) Get-Sanders Slanders (October 2, 2019)
  • Trump Is a Criminal but the Democrats Belong to the Same Mafia (January 9, 2020)
  • Shaky Joe Biden, Billionaire Bloomberg, and the Global Race to the Bottom (January 23, 2020)
  • Fear Pervades Black Politics, and Makes Us Agents of Our Own Oppression (March 4, 2020)
  • Part IX. COVID-19 and Lockdown
  • Time of Plague and Meltdown: Mass Murder by Corporate Duopoly (March 25, 2020)
  • Resistance Growing to COVID-Capitalism (April 8, 2020)
  • Indict and Punish the Perpetrators of COVID Mass Death (May 20, 2020)
  • Part X. Black Lives Matter, Reparations, and a New, Authentic Left
  • The Black-Latino Future: Finding a Way to Solidarity (October 25, 2006)
  • Occupy Wall Street Joins Occupy the Dream: Is it Co-optation, or Growing the Movement? (January 11, 2012)
  • #BlackLivesMatter and the Democrats: How Disruption Can Lead to Collaboration (August 12, 2015)
  • #BlackLivesMatter Performs a Self-Humiliation at Hillary Clinton's Hands (August 19, 2015)
  • #BlackLivesMatter Hurts Democrats' Feelings (September 2, 2015)
  • Garza vs. Mckesson: The Great Debate Over How the Democratic Party Will Liberate Black People (October 30, 2015)
  • "Black Lives Matter" Groups Hoping for a Big Payday (November 18, 2015)
  • Nationalizing the Banks Is a Popular Demand, So Let's Demand It (June 6, 2018)
  • Black Lives Matter Founder Launches Huge Project to Shrink Black Lives (June 5, 2019)
  • We Are Already Late to the Great Black Reparations Debate (June 25, 2019)
  • Community Control of the Police-And a Whole Lot More (June 17, 2020)

The Black Radical Tradition is real and enduring, but it is not expressed through participation in the Democratic Party. Rather, entrapment in the Democratic Party enclosure (within the larger Rich Man's duopoly) grotesquely warps Black political behavior. This distortion profoundly diminishes the prospects for progressive electoral activity in the United States. More directly, the Black electoral imperative to seek protection from the Republican/White Man's Party reduces African Americans to an appendage of the Democratic Party apparatus and, thus, of the capitalists that fund and control the Party. It subverts the essentially progressive nature of the Black polity, objectively enfeebling Black America, even as rich white Democrats pander to Black voters as the 'soul' of the party. It is true that the Democrats would collapse were it not for the Black core of the party. It is also probable that that would be a good thing. What is certain is that the Democratic Party oozes out of every orifice of Black civic society like a stinking pus, sapping the self-determinist vitality of the people and transforming every Black social structure and project into a Democratic Party asset. Black people--massed, organized, and fearless--shook this nation to its bones in the 1960s, before the Democratic Party achieved political hegemony in Black America, when there were less than two handfuls of Black congressional representatives and only some hundreds of Black Democratic officeholders to hold us back. Today, Democratic operatives attempt to smother the incipient Black grassroots movement in their lethal embrace--and some elements of that movement have eagerly hugged them back. The task of Black activists and their allies is to ensure that our first and last hope--movement politics--once again becomes central to the struggle, so that we can, as Dr. Cornel West puts it, "break the back of fear." This will require the most intense internal struggle among Black Americans to break the chains that bind us to that vector of fear, the Democratic Party. Excerpted from The Black Agenda by Glen Ford All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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