2007 Lawn Jockey Award Comes to the Congressional Black Caucus Legislative Weekend, September 26
by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
On Wednesday, September 26, the opening
day of the Congressional Black Caucus's Annual Legislative Conference, Black Agenda Report and CBC Monitor will be in Washington
DC to issue the fall 2007 report card for members of the Black Caucus, and to hand out the first annual Lawn
Jockey Awards. It's time to restart, to reclaim and to redeem the
African American political conversation.
The Lawn Jockey Award commemorates the
1993 Emerge magazine cover in which Emerge Publisher and Editor
George Curry depicted US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as
“Uncle Thomas: Lawn Jockey for the Far Right”, touching off a true WMD,
a wave of mass discussion, clarifying black opinion on the uses to
which an earlier Bush administration had put its prominent black
faces. In that same spirit, the annual Lawn Jockey Awards establishes
a tradition in which the three or four worst performing members of the
Congressional Black Caucus will be singled out for the attention they
richly deserve. We are honored by the fact that George Curry himself
will be on hand September 26 to present the awards.
Reviving and reclaiming the African American political conversation,
our collective dialog about and among us is vitally important work. We
can expect no help from white corporate media beyond their standard
practices of denying the existence and the legitimacy of the black
political dialog at the same time they depict it as the self-serving
creation of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and a few of their chosen
targets. Black owned or black oriented corporate media like BET, Radio One and the rest of commercial black radio won't be of much use either. This is because black commercial radio and entities like TV One
view black communities purely as marketing contraptions. To them we
are only audiences to be targeted and delivered to sponsors, rather
than a people with collective aspirations and a political will arising
from our common history of struggle.
"The Lawn Jockey Award commemorates the
1993 Emerge magazine cover in which Emerge Publisher and Editor
George Curry depicted US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as
“Uncle Thomas: Lawn Jockey for the Far Right”
There will certainly be
those who will accuse us of a lack of respect for African American
political figures. They will be correct. Too much respect for
authority has always been the enemy of democracy, and ridicule will
always be a potent tool at the disposal of the people. The CBC Monitor
team does have a great respect for facts, and the CBC Monitor report
cards are based upon analyses of the legislative records of African
American members of congress through the lens of the historic Black
Consensus, the range of political views prevalent in African American
communities.
Too much of what has passed for black journalism in
recent years has been uncritical celebration of lifestyles and
celebrities. In our estimation, this is not journalism at all. Ida B.
Wells was a journalist. Frederick Douglass was a journalist. The job
of journalists is to equip ordinary citizens with the necessary information to understand what is
being done with their money and in their names. The job of journalism
as we understand it, is to speak truth to power
without fear or favor, especially when the powerful would rather not
hear it. We at Black Agenda Report and CBC Monitor intend to uphold
that proud tradition, to have some fun at the expense of the powerful,
and to unleash the weapon of mass discussion among our people as we
evaluate the performance of African American members of Congress.
We invite you to join us in person on the evening of September 26, or at other events during the CBC's Legislative Conference, or virtually in this space and others via the internet during and after the event as we begin to reclaim and revive the the African American political conversation and the public space in which it must be conducted.
Bruce Dixon can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com
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