Introduction

As a historical entity, the Black press was the critical commentary and political critique of not only the sempiternal racism of the modern world, but the corrective to how white newspapers, opinion-makers, legislators, and most importantly the white public sought to justify their complacency and support for the racism and sexual brutalization of Black men, women, and children. Today, however, the post-Obama lullabies of racial détente and progressive liberal passivity of Black intellectuals have allowed the structural and ideological manifestations of white supremacy remained unquestioned in their persistence despite the growing realities of Black death. Trayvon Martin was killed and Melissa Harris Perry thought it prudent to use the tragedy as a moment to “teach” white folks how to talk about Black death—she literally created a checklist for whites rather than deal with the horrors facing young Black men and boys in their communities.

Currently, the post-racial idea has contoured Black news into a narrow political progressive ideology that allows Black academics to retreat into their ideological predetermined blog’s rendering of “Black” events, while the Black public is misinformed by the political interests various networks have in de-radicalizing and normalizing Black deaths, specifically the death of Black men, as having nothing to do with racism and accidental rather than systemic. As I have argued previously, Black academics and news personalities are rewarded for pimping out “the delusion of hope” to Black people while racism increases alongside the normalization of their death, incarceration, and poverty.

Has the Black Press Lost Its Way?

Since slavery, Black abolitionists, ministers, and revolutionaries understood the need for “Black perspectives,” on the racist evil that plagues America. The Christian theology that justified the horrors of slavery was indicted, and the white Christian, the earliest imperialist, was not held to be the savior of civilization but its greatest detractor whose abuse and degradation of Blacks was rooted in their imperial lust for power and profit and the manipulation of Christian faith. As David Walker says in Article I of The Appeal

“I have been for years troubling the pages of historians, to find out what our fathers have done to the white Christians of America, to merit such condign punishment as they have inflicted on them, and do continue to inflict on us their children. But I must aver, that my researches have hitherto been to no effect. I have therefore, come to the immoveable conclusion, that they (Americans) have, and do continue to punish us for nothing else, but for enriching them and their country. For I cannot conceive of anything else”

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With the rise of Freedom’s Journal, the Black press took on the radical mission of liberation that up to that point was confined to pamphlets, and the now revered slave narrative. The Black press, its editors and writers, were among the most notable Black thinkers of the 1800’s and beyond. T.Thomas Fortune’s (1856-1928) The New York Age was the training ground for no less an intellectual than W.E.B. DuBois. It was a publication where Fortune’s radicality for Black self-determination and security, even by armed resistance if necessary, was center stage. It not only gained him notoriety among Black journalists but earned him the admiration of the young Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) who would continue to develop his political philosophy of agitation and help build the first civil rights organization for Black rights; the Afro-American League. This radicality was present in most of the Black journalists at the turn of the century. Henry McNeal Turner and John Edward Bruce exemplified a political tone that was only matched by the radicality of the 1960’s and 1970’s in the founding and growth of the Black Panther Party and the journalistic accounts of the Black Power Movement. As my student, Ms. Judith Bohr, points out in her master’s thesis “A People’s History of Philosophy: The Development and Ideological Segregation of Black Nationalism,” the violence against Blacks in society, be it at the hands of police state militarism or the prison industrial complex, necessitates a compliant and complacent account of reality. As she states,

“The media assists in this erasure of police violence through their portrayals of African Americans as a danger to society…Whites’ fear, however, is for their privilege and not for their safety…Propaganda in the media functions through erasure and through distortions of the state’s as well as the public’s motivations for racial violence” (Bohr 2011, 30).

Thus, the de-radicalization of Black news and the complacency of the Black journalistic endeavor—its commodification as into the predetermined categories of academic currency driving by political interest—does little to inform much less improve the conditions of Black people. The silence of mainstream Black news on the systemic political and economic divisions made necessary by the militaristic racist endeavor of the U.S. government, even under a Black Obama administration, is necessary for engaging the concrete American condition for Blacks, immigrants, and the poor.

Most recently, SiriusXM decided to change Sirius 128—The Power to urban driven programing under the new title of the Urban View. In doing so Sirius eliminated ReddingNewsReview, an independent Black political commentary dedicated to exposing the contradiction between Black political representation in Obama and Black political exploitation under Obama. The change in the lineup effectively changed the Power 128 from the “News and Issues” category to the Urban View 110 a “African American Talk and Entertainment” channel. Reacting to this change, Wade Simmon’s editorial earnestly asked “Is SiriusXM Trying to Undermine Black Power?” The effect of this censorship could be isolated, but it again begs the question as to why independent Black radio and press that dares to question the status quo of America’s race problem is so easily overshadowed by liberal reformist agendas that take Obama’s symbolism to be of more importance than the actual economic and political viability of Black en masse agendas.

Despite the criticisms one may make of Redding, the reality is that there lacks any non-partisan interpretation of the Black condition that does not revert to the ideologies of the blogosphere, where select academics, married to predetermined paradigms of reading Blackness, meet and greet. The Black public is usually deemed irrelevant in these conversations from the outset. They are to be “spoken about” authoritatively, but rarely “spoken from,” since these Black people are outside the academy. Independent Black radio, reaching back to the Ralph “Petey” Greene and radicals like Robert F. Williams, sought transgressive messages against empire and racism, whereas today, many Black elites, like the Melissa Harris Perry’s of the world, confine racism to their specific opportunities to gain social capital and recognition ignoring both the material consequences of the liberal agenda for Black at home and its militaristic program against darker peoples abroad. ReddingNewsReview, like that of Voxunion, disrupted that narrative.

The same way Ida B. Wells-Barnett decided to report the horrors of Black reality, anti-Black violence through lynching, and the weakness of Black leadership in the 1890’s, so too did Redding in the 21st century. At the very bottom of Black politics, there is a need to recognize that the manipulation of Black media—the Black press and radio—to further the political agendas and social legitimacy of specific parties, namely the democratic party’s claim that they represent the Black/Browning of America, does nothing to arrest the imperial agendas this presidency like all presidencies before it continue to engage in the world over. As Dr. Jared Ball argues in his talk on “Colonialism and Media Psychological Warfare,” media, or rather propaganda, is at the heart of America’s white supremacist empire.

Conclusion:

Race-crits, critical sociologists, and Black, Brown, and Indigenous scholars cannot continue embrace the symbolism of progress without making those symbols resonate with the actual economic, political, and extra-legal conditions of Black existence. There is a very real contradiction between the symbolism of Obama’s reign and the worsening plight of Blacks under Obama’s reign. Rather than being at odds with the type of progressivism that perpetuates the poverty, the apparati of state sponsored violence, and social repression, the Black press has taken to excusing it—pointing out the extraordinary cases of violence that shock us most, but leaving the racist narrative written into the foundation of America’s democracy, militarism, imperialism, and capitalist lust untouched.