Written by: Marlon Aldridge, Sr.
12/31/2008 4:36 PM 

While listening to the Tom Joyner Morning Show one day, as I usually do, I anticipated Tom’s response to a caller’s refrain, who, I assumed, was an African American man, about the show’s consistent use of racial overtones and its perpetuation of racial ignorance. The hosts were talking about Tom Brady (quarterback for the New England Patriots) and his girlfriend reportedly having sex in the private section of an upscale restaurant while cameras were rolling. They were pointing out how Whites were allowed to get away with this type of behavior with little rebuke while Blacks, on the other hand, would have been condemned and rebuked harshly. Had Michael Vick committed the same act, so they said, he would have been severely criticized [my paraphrase]. Tom Joyner told the man that if he wanted him to defend his show for this type of behavior, he would not and that the man was entitled to his opinion. I took this to mean that Tom was confident in the way that his show portrayed reality and that reality was in fact “not” colorblind. I wondered also if he thought that the man was naïve.

This whole episode reminded me of a conversation I had with a Caucasian radio director. He talked about the alleged racial comments that Geraldine Ferrera made about Barack Obama, saying that “he [Barack] would not be where is he is had he not been Black [she said later that her remarks were taken out of context]”. The radio director went on to insist that “we [Whites I assumed] had gotten away from that” [judging people by the color of their skin]. I listened but had no response.

Benjamin Disraeli, former prime Minister of England during the 1800’s, said that “all is race…there is no other truth”. He was talking about “race” as in racial groups. Moreover, in the scholarly world, there are many scholars that study and write about race issues under the framework of critical race theory (or CRT). W.E.B. Dubois wrote from this framework. Also, Derrick Bell, an African American scholar, is one of its major proponents. He wrote in The Constitutional Contradiction, “that the framers of the U.S. Constitution chose the rewards of property over justice…that whites will promote racial advances for blacks only when they also promote white self-interest”. Finally, in The Price of Racial Remedies, Bell argued “that whites will not support civil rights policies that may threaten white social status”. I could go on and on about the many people (of all racial persuasions) that talk about race and mostly about race.

Many of us including myself would love to minimize the issue of race like the gentleman that criticized Tom Joyner but to do so would be a grave error because racial injustice would prevail. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. That is why I love the idea of Black Think Tanks especially the scholarly aspect of them. We are consistently overwhelmed by the many negative statistical reports that describe the demise of Black people. I had intended to include some here but will wait until a later date. What many people are unaware of is that statistics are only descriptive of particular events; they do not provide causes for the conditions indicated in such reports. More in depth studies are needed using qualitative methodologies like surveys, direct observations, and interviews conducted over extended periods of time. Statistics without causal explanations may have the effect of depressing some of us. I often think that is why the “Black versus White-type” reports are often reported in the media. Causal explanations can only come through the efforts of dedicated researchers like Derrick Bell, Robert Williams, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, and Vernellia R. Randall to name a few, who spend extended periods of time studying social matters via interviews, surveys, archival records, etc. What is left after the research has been done is for Black leadership to kick in and act upon our research to affect change for the betterment of all Americans. Read their works and act. 

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