Quincy Jones & Friends: Black Banshee to the Rescue
by Richard Oxman

“From the end of the Civil War to the 1890s as many as ten thousand black Americans were put to death in the South alone. That’s about 400 a year for 25 years. More than one a day! I’d say that Dr. Joyce DeGruy Leary’s ideas about Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, coupled with that fact and the ongoing abominations today… a case can and should be made for Reparations, not Obama’s apologetics.” — A Caucasian Los Gatos Surgeon (citing figures from scholar Philip Dray)

Quincy Jones, whose humanitarian heartbeats were honored at the recent Black Entertainment Awards Show, and his musical “colleagues” are welcome to back
Barack Obama — What can I do about it? — but someone should point out that those on whose shoulders they beat out a rhythm are turning over spastically in their graves.

From Basie to Blake…and Bessie, from Ellington to Waller, from Arna to Zora — my goodness! — if they were alive (as they should be in the bones of all concerned) they would beat out the truth for the unknowing. Would ask them to step back from a Black Pretender who

a. had Joe Leiberman as a mentor

b. supports the genocide in Palestine

c. threatens to broaden our overseas military abominations

d. fills his pockets and obligations vis-a-vis murderous Big Pharma

e. serves as an apologist for The Whitest of Takes on Reparations

I could go on, but I’ll put faith in the possibility that Rev. Wright (as a possible write-in), Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader will all be seen as representing much broader and deeper interests for Blacks than anything The Half Black Imperialist approximates.

As per my article “A Test on Something” http://oxtogrind.org/archive/245 , not a soul from the Harlem Renaissance (1919-early or mid-thirties) could vote — let alone campaign — for the Harvard Man even if he had appeared on the scene at the zenith of the Renaissance… when concerns/hysteria about lynching would have made Blacks very vulnerable to the obvious appeal of having a Black President. Not even with the desire on the part of many to assert their Americanism, to be embraced.

And if Langston or Countee or Claude or E. Franklin Frazier, Kelly Miller, Rayford Logan, Carter G. Woodson, Arthur A. Schomburg, Arthur Fauset, Alain Locke or W.E.B. himself were walking the streets today — knowing what’s come down since their time — they’d no more speak a kind word for Mr. Smiling Eloquence than they would for Bush or Clinton.

No, they would — to a one, with the late Martin — embrace Garvey long before they’d recite Obama praise by rote. And turn ashen in the face of Malcolm’s Ghost, ashamed.

James Weldon Johnson would force today’s actual Walking Dead Blacks to listen to a reading of Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint, and James’ The Fire Next Time Dwell in the House of Richard Wright’s Righteousness.

For all their talent and excellent intentions, their understandable reach… Ida B. Wells-Barnett, our nation’s first anti-lynching advocate, would breach all decorum with them, and screech like a Black Banshee:

“Memorize every word of Paul Street’s ‘If Obama Loses.’”

I’ll be honored to provide a copy/link to that definitive article… even if only Porgy and Bess comes to mind for the reader when Paul Robeson is named. Even if “Run It!” is all that plays in the head when the undead John Brown is mentioned.

Richard Oxman can be reached at headburg@yahoo.com. For hors d’ourves… in prep for The Street’s sweet piece… try Glen Ford’s Church of the Ascending Obama at http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=vie w&id=739&Itemid=1. The author means no disrespect for Mr. Jones or his colleagues, friends… but wants to underscore the importance of calling a spade a spade, as they say.