“It Ain’t My Fault”
Tag Archives: The American Left
Ishmael Reed on Henry Louis Gates
How Henry Louis Gates Got Ordained as the Nation’s “Leading Black Intellectual”
Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism
By ISHMAEL REED
Now that Henry Louis Gates’ Jr. has gotten a tiny taste of what “the underclass” undergo each day, do you think that he will go easier on them? Lighten up on the tough love lectures? Even during his encounter with the police, he was given some slack. If a black man in an inner city neighborhood had hesitated to identify himself, or given the police some lip, the police would have called SWAT. When Oscar Grant, an apprentice butcher, talked back to a BART policeman in Oakland, he was shot!
Given the position that Gates has pronounced since the late eighties, if I had been the arresting officer and post-race spokesperson Gates accused me of racism, I would have given him a sample of his own medicine. I would have replied that “race is a social construct”–the line that he and his friends have been pushing over the last couple of decades.
After this experience, will Gates stop attributing the problems of those inner city dwellers to the behavior of “thirty five-year-old grandmothers living in the projects?” (Gates says that when he became a tough lover he was following the example of his mentor Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka as though his and Soyinka’s situations were the same. As a result of Soyinka’s criticisms of a Nigerian dictator, he was jailed and his life constantly threatened.)
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Robert Pollin | Forum on the Financial Crisis 2008 | 1&2
Robert Pollin
Co-director and Professor of Economics
POLLIN
Pollin is Professor of Economics and founding Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research centers on macroeconomics, conditions for low-wage workers in the U.S. and globally, the analysis of financial markets, and the economics of building a clean-energy economy in the U.S. His books include A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United States (co-authored, 2008); An Employment-Targeted Economic Program for Kenya (co-authored, 2008); An Employment-Targeted Economic Program for South Africa (co-authored, 2007); Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the 
Landscape of Global Austerity (2003); and The Living Wage: Building A Fair Economy (co-authored, 1998); and the edited volumes Human Development in the Era of Globalization (co-edited, 2006); Globalization and Progressive Economic Policy (co-edited, 1998); The Macroeconomics of Saving, Finance, and Investment (1997); and Transforming the U.S. Financial System (co-edited, 1993). Most recently, he co-authored the reports “Job Opportunities for the Green Economy” (June 2008) and “Green Recovery” (September 2008), exploring the broader economic benefits of large-scale investments in a clean-energy economy in the U.S. He has worked with the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Economic Commission on 
Africa on policies to promote to promote decent employment expansion and poverty reduction in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. He has also worked with the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress and as a member of the Capital Formation Subcouncil of the U.S. Competiveness Policy Council.
Carl Dix | Response to Obama’s “No Excuses” speech at NAACP Convention | 1&2
Carl Dix | National spokesperson for the Revolutionary Communist Party,USA Response to Obama’s “No Excuses” speech at NAACP convention by Carl Dix speaking at “The Ascendancy of Obama…and the continued Need for Resistance and Liberation: a Dialogue between Cornel West & Carl Dix” This program was presented by Revolution Books on July 14, 2009. It was held at the Harlem Stage of Aaron Davis Hall in New York .
