by BAR Editor and Senior Columnist Margaret Kimberley

The leopard never changes his spots. Such is the case with
Harold Ford, Jr., the darling of the corporate media and the rightwing of the
Democratic Party, who was rewarded for his fawning dedication to white
supremacy with a corporate-financed appointment as chairman of the Democratic
Leadership Council (DLC). The DLC was created in the mid-Eighties by white
southern Democrats to suppress the growing power of Black voters in the South.
In former Memphis congressman Harold Ford, they have found a champion - the
quintessential enemy of African Americans, in blackface.

by
Richard Muhammad

In a horrific display of racist solidarity,
white media men have circled their wagons around Don Imus, the career broadcast
bigot who called the Rutgers women's basketball team a bunch of "nappy headed
hos." All is forgiven, because "Imus is us," say his defensemen. And they are
right: Imus is them, irredeemably racist children of white privilege who
believe their casual slandering of other races and genders are of no more
concern than getting drunk at a frat party. The most important element of the
tale is not Imus' putrid outbursts, but the reflexive defense of him by his
co-racists, who have "outed" themselves in the process.

by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon

Why would the Congressional Black Caucus co-sponsor presidential debates with Fox News?  How much does it really cost to rent the CBC Institute?  What else is for sale?  How much worse than the rest of mainstream media is Fox News?  And what does the CBC-Fox News scandal tell us about present-day corporate funded black leadership?   

by Aijaz Ahmad

The sun is clearly setting on the American
Empire - but that doesn't mean the would-be world rulers are going to give up
easily. Although packing more arms than the rest of the planet, combined, the
U.S. economic and political situation is in a dramatic spiral that cannot be
reversed. Iraq, which was to have been the stepping stone to total global U.S.
hegemony, has become the graveyard of American imperial dreams. Globalization,
which U.S. corporations believed would inevitably ensure their supremacy, has
turned on the master, creating new polarities of power.

by Dr. Robert D. Bullard

Back in 1987, the environmental racism movement
won its first significant victory. Twenty years later, a cadre of Black and
progressive scientists are calibrating the methodical harm that has been done
to Black communities by a society that treats people of color as wasted human
flesh. The Bush administration has done everything in its power to silence this
growing environmental-racism resistance, cutting off funding to programs that
could uncover crimes against whole communities perched on the cusp of disaster
- chemical death.

by Laurent Dubois

How does a freed man become truly free - fully
emancipated from the master? It's not so simple, even for a gifted leader such
as Toussaint Louverture, the hero who led the Haitian people to the brink of
freedom, but died in a nameless French grave. Scholar Laurent Dubois explores
the limits of freedom, through the life of one of the Haitian nation's icons -
who, according to Dubois, tried to reconcile the plantation system with an
overarching Euro-supremacist culture. His reward was an unknown place of dirt
in the cold recesses of France.