
Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney at the GOP debate for presidential in November. Credit:AP Photo/Paul Sancy
Les Payne
December 12, 2011
The eyes of Newt went devilish at the GOP debate Saturday when the former Speaker of the House slashed at Mitt Romney's tiresome and not-quite-accurate boast that he's spent his entire career in the private sector.
Slamming Newt Gingrich as a career politician, Romney claimed with his straight missionary face that "our real difference is our backgrounds. I spent my life in the private sector." This night, however, first-place Gingrich was taking none of this from his key challenger.
It has been duly noted that 68-year old Gingrich has the visage of a real-life "Chucky" of the Child's Play movie fame, and the senior citizen displays the same devilish tendency to wreck havoc. When the fit comes over him, as it did with Romney's "career" attack, Newt's eyes roll into a scowl and his face goes full Chucky.
"The only reason you didn't become a career politician," Gingrich shot back, "is because you lost to Ted Kennedy in 1994." He did indeed. And in something of a precursor, Romney's opponent nailed him for flip-flopping on abortion.
"I'm pro-choice," Sen. Kennedy said famously, "my opponent is multiple choice.”
So successfully had Romney been running his "career" fib past the assembled GOP debaters' week-after-week that the slashing from Gingrich caught him off guard. Once again, however, all that field work paid off for the former missionary who, in due course, recovered sufficiently to pump air back into his half-deflated white lie.
"If I had been able to get in the NFL as a kid," Romney said, "I would have been a football star, too. But I spent my life in the private sector.”
Well, not exactly.
Some nine years after losing that

This photo is from the show entitled TAVIS SMILEY which airs on PBS and is produced by The Smiley Group, Inc./TS Media, Inc. in association with WNET/New York.
Bristling in the face of the calm scholar, Tavis Smiley was having none of the lesson that Randall Kennedy was teaching on Smiley's TV show originally aired on Thursday, Sept. 1, 2011. So the Harvard Law professor contented himself with taking PBS viewers to school on the complex relationship between the first black U.S. President and his African-American constituency.
Kennedy weighed in with the scholarship of his new book, The Persistence of the Color Line, noting that President Barack Obama has mastered the dual audience so troubling to black seekers of high office. African-American voters broke for him in the ’08 primary after largely white voters in Iowa favored him over John Edwards and Hillary Clinton.
Already, Kennedy argued, Obama was overcoming skepticism among grassroots blacks wary about his upbringing by a white mother and her parents. He heaped praise upon Dr. King and other civil rights leaders and displayed the requisite level of "comfort with black history, black culture, black rhythms, black colloquialisms." And whereas Obama did not choose his parents, the young politician had chosen a "very distinguished black woman, Michelle Robinson" as his wife.
None of this swayed host Smiley. Nor did it sway many prominent black political and church leaders at the time, including Rep. Maxine Waters and half of the Congressional Black Caucus where Obama was a card-carrying member. All favored Sen. Hillary Clinton over Obama. Indeed, Rep. Charles Rangel, then the most powerful African-American in Congress, had projected that one of his top career achievements would be the election of Hillary, who happens to be white, as the first, woman president of the United States.
One of the overlooked intrigues of American politics is how securely the Clinton’s have....
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Vice President Joe Biden meets with
Les Payne
April 28, 2011
"You will not find one white South African today who supported apartheid—not one," said Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe during his recent visit to increase trade between the U.S. and his post-apartheid country.
Such denials are common among the privileged that are cursed with former victims who rise to power or prominence. Where, for example, are those white Americans who despised the brash Cassius Clay when he refused the military draft as Muhammad Ali? Bring me the Germans who hated the Jews. Frog-march out of the bleachers those Old Geezers who used to race-jeer Jackie Robinson for desegregating Major League Baseball.
Once these bigots were everywhere; now they never existed.
Retreating from their victims to a state of denial, a growing number of privileged whites in South Africa are hard-pressed to recall their bloody devotion to apartheid. Indeed, some beneficiaries of this brutal, national system of racist exploitation are rising up nowadays to oppose the government's corrective "affirmative action," as an "immoral" tactic affording blacks unfair advantage over whites in the workplace.
And this in the country where a few short years ago, the law kept Africans from supervising any European working in the republic; and where all middle-class, skill jobs were set aside expressly for whites under a nasty little measure called the "Job Reservation Act."
Additionally, some 350 pieces of apartheid legislation disallowed Africans to vote, own land, join labor unions, or even apply the final coat of paint on a wall. Government buildings were officially segregated, as were private homes, theaters, bus terminals, toilets, hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, hospitals, soccer fields, mortuaries and cemeteries.
When a white South African rose at the New York University forum Monday to imply that the post-apartheid government is not committed to a "non-racial society," Deputy President Motlanthe worked diplomatically to jog her memory.
He reminded the questioner that the founding, 1955 "Freedom Charter," the core principles governing the now ruling ANC party, is totally committed to a...
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Kevin Best and Les Payne; Kevin Best and dancers performing at the Emily Lowe gallery at Hofstra University

Ten members of the Monroe Trotter Group met with President Obama for an hour on Oct. 15, 2010, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House
as part of a White House outreach effort before the Nov. 2 midterm
elections. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)
Les Payne
November 10, 2010
Sitting across the table from President Barack Obama, I
pondered what the presidency was like for the two
The thought occurred in the Roosevelt Room recently where 10
columnists from the Monroe Trotter Group were hosted in this chamber named for
the two presidents that were fifth-cousins. The windowless conference space across
from the Oval Office of the White House has a false skylight and is dominated
by an oblong table flanked by portraits of the two
"Teddy" gazes from his galloping steed in a Tade Styka oil painting hanging over the mantel on the east wall.
Lest this equestrian be taken simply as the "Rough
Rider," his 1906 Nobel Peace Prize, the first ever awarded to an American,
is displayed with a ribbon in a case on the north wall. This 26th president who
made it to
Cousin Franklin Delano was the lesser athlete and his portrait painter arrayed him at his desk and cleverly disguises the crippling effect of FDR’s debilitating disease. Both ruling-class politicians were Anglican, though cousin "Teddy’s" Episcopalianism was tainted somewhat by his practice of the Dutch Reform religion that, if nothing else, enhanced his frontier image.
Had Gutzon Borglum started blasting away at that
President Obama, of course, has inherited a modern version of this double plague: a great economic collapse along with two foreign wars. And he must await the judgment of history under quite different circumstances of fear and loathing.
Peering warily at our group of newspaper columnists
recently, this 44th U.S. President, unlike the two

President Barack Obama signs the Fair Sentencing Act in
the Oval Office, Aug. 3, 2010. Joining the President are, from left, Gil
Kerlikowske,
Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy,
Attorney General Eric Holder, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Rep. Bobby Scott,
D-Va.,
Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, of Ill., Sen. Jeff
Sessions, R-Ala., Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee,
D-Texas,
and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC. (Official White House
Photo by Pete Souza)
Les Payne
August 5, 2010
When signing into law that bill reducing disparity in penalties for crack and powder cocaine offenses, President Barack Obama narrowed the “racial” gap in drug sentencing Tuesday by some 82 percent. Yet, he did not close it.
Civil rights leaders struggling mightily for parity under this unjust federal policy filling the prisons overwhelmingly with blacks are premature in celebrating the bill as a total victory. While an improvement, this new legislation now punishes crack cocaine offenders—that cops racially target among black users and sellers in the first instance—by a ratio of 18:1, as compared with those abusing powder cocaine.
On the presidential level, this achievement, as with the health care bill, is another example of Obama surpassing Bill Clinton’s failed efforts, this time in the crucial, criminal-justice area affecting mainly African-Americans. As such, unlike with the health care bill affecting all Americans, the first black president, it was duly noted, made absolutely no public comment during the bill signing.
The savvy political observer understands Obama’s public reticence on such controversial matters given white denial about racism. However, it allows his critics, black and white, to down-play this break-through and continue harping about his alleged lack of sensitivity, especially in wake of the Shirley Sherrod affair.
In a rare show of bi-partisanship, the Fair Sentencing Act was passed by a Congress that the president and his attorney general managed at least to tilt toward fair sentencing. The bill revokes a five-year mandatory sentence for first offenders; and, instead of five grams of crack drawing the same mandatory sentence as 500 grams of powdered cocaine, the new minimum for rock has been set at 28 grams.
The Draconian 100:1 ratio of crack to powder has thus been reduced to a less cruel but still unjust bias of 18:1. Once again, the promise of equal justice remains evasive under the peculiar legislative-judicial system that moves like a glacier when it comes to dispensing parity between white and black citizens.
Race crept into this drug equation at the very inception of the disparate sentencing law in 1986, when, during the drug scourge, lawmakers prosecuted crack cases as....
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Les Payne
July 20, 2010
.0005!
That’s the batting average of the mayor and his police
commissioner patrolling
New Yorkers, to their credit, tried to fire their mayor by twice voting to limit his terms. He overrode this popular will, however with the rubberstamp consent of the City Council and continues to reign as Papa Doc Bloomberg, mayor, perhaps, for life.
As for the NYPD batting average, the New York
Times reported the city’s shameful performance in an eight-block stretch
of
The city-wide program, according to the Times, is “most urgently meant to get guns off the streets.” Yet, “the arrest rate is less than one percent…in the more than 50,000 stops since 2006, the police recovered 25 guns.” The Times’ estimate of “less than 1 percent” understates the statistical rate of gun detection by a factor of more than a thousand!
Recovering a single gun in
So why in a supposedly open society promising all residents civil liberties are Bloomberg and Commissioner
Raymond Kelly violating the rights of innocent citizens to move freely about?...
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GETTY IMAGES
Les Payne
July 15, 2010
George Steinbrenner was saluted in death by a “recovering” drug addict, one Rush Limbaugh, as a “cracker” who made black players rich while firing “a bunch of white guys as managers left and right.”
The Limbaugh eulogy seems a sure sign that the illicit OxyContin addiction that likely made him deaf has clearly numbed him to shame. The penchant for lying, however, is a preexisting condition.
Gloating inaccuracies about the departed owner of the New York Yankees moved me to violate one of my rules of commentary: never kick a dog even when he’s up, especially a mangy one frothing at the mouth.
Unfortunately, Limbaugh’s untimely comment deserves attention this time because the base sentiment is deeply held by millions of Americans who swoon on every word that falleth from the Talkmeister’s lips.
First off, Limbaugh was born in
As for black players, the Yankees owner did not make them millionaires. Steinbrenner earned his billions, and his teams won 7 World championships along the way, by paying the going rate for “free agents.” And if anyone, along with the players’ marketable skills, made this value assessment a reality—it was....
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GETTY IMAGES
As posted on TheRoot.com
Les Payne
July 12, 2010
As the dirt settles on Robert Byrd's grave, let us reflect
on the wisdom of a former
''They mention that he once had a fleeting association with
the Ku Klux Klan, and what does that mean?''
Byrd was hardly just "trying to get elected.'' First off, he recruited dozens of terrorists for the Klan over a rather lengthy span in his 20s and into his 30s. Furthermore, one did not attain the key ranks of Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops in this lynching bee with a mere ''fleeting association.''
Notwithstanding the racism of Byrd's era,
Was this wrong? Bill Clinton is not quite sure. ''And maybe he did something wrong,'' the former president hedged during his eulogy. It depends, I suppose, on what your definition of ....
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President Barack Obama meets with Army Gen. Stanley
McChrystal, the Commander of
Air Force One in
as broadcast on WBAI 99.5
FM in N.Y.C.
Earl Caldwell and Les Payne have a discussion about
journalism, the military and President Barack Obama's replacing Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the Commander of
U.S. Forces in

Photographs
by Joan Marcus
Les Payne
June 22, 2010
The performance of Denzel Washington is so
insightful in August
Authenticity usually gets the black artist nowhere with top awards judges soaked in what passes for white culture. Such shameless, self-absorption leaves little room for fair judgment especially of those considered outsiders. Such actors, starting with Hattie McDaniel, Oscar winner for "Gone With the Wind” and running with few exceptions down through Halle Berry and “Precious” Mo’Nique; the strong black actor is expected to play the demeaned character then crawl into the judgment hall hopefully to get rewarded.
Denzel Washington was skipped over, accordingly, for his
authentic portrayal of Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, a twice-convicted boxer so
convinced of his innocence that he bedazzled everyone who listened. Instead of
rewarding that brilliant interpretation of a black man in full,
In the current Broadway run of “Fences,” Denzel returns to
his “first love” in a role made famous by one of his stage heroes. Nonetheless,
he probes a rich vein of
In the ‘80’s version, the roar-voice power of James Earl
Jones amplified the athletic drive of the main character at the expense of his
other prowess, leaving Troy Maxson as a washed-up baseball player, chiefly.
However, in the current version, when Denzel’s

Les Payne
June 15, 2010
At about 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, June 16th,
On the morning of that day of protest 34 years ago, as Soweto students massed in an open field—an agitated policeman fired a single shot that sent 13-year old Pieterson sprawling in his own blood. He was in the book of martyrs before he hit the ground.
As his buddy in overalls went screaming down the field with
Pieterson’s body, the children of
But on June 16th, some 20,000 unarmed students stepped forth to challenge the Europeans who stole their land and looted its mineral wealth. Initially, they protested the use of the Boers’ narrow, Afrikaans language as a medium of instruction. The killing of Pieterson ignited the Soweto Uprising that brought in adults and targeted the entire superstructure of racist apartheid.
The Boers exacted a terrible toll in blood as police gunned
down hundreds of unarmed African men, women and children who dared rise up
against tyranny and barbarism. Blood diamonds, minerals and Krugerrands bought
needed
Heroic American students of that era ...
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Artur Davis - Eric Schultz / The
Les Payne
June 7, 2010
When pondering the recent defeat of Artur Davis, I
puzzle not so much over the politics of my home-state, as over the compromise
of this Democrat vying to become the first black governor of
Didn’t
In addition to showing black candidates how to win,
generally, Obama blazed a specific, Democratic trail for his fellow Harvard
alum to win on in
With the nomination his for the running,
And in a bold, public turning of his coat, Rep. Davis tauntingly voted against Obama’s national health care bill. Already local, black politicians had smelled enough. The Davis stench drove Birmingham’s first black mayor, Richard Arrington, for example, to endorse ....
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Lt. Les Payne accepts
"Best Battery" honors from
Les Payne
May 29, 2010
As a
Running for a senate seat in
Draft avoidance was common, back then, among patriots immune
to shame and irony. These middle-class heroes got the jobs and a career leg up
on their brethren who leaped to the cannon roar. Two such opportunists became
two-term,
Blumenthal’s public boast about
Thus, I was caught off guard, when at the recent funeral
of Lena Horne; a fellow
Perhaps, it was the moving tribute paid to
I told my fellow veteran on the steps of St. Ignatius Cathedral that....
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United States Senate candidate Rand Paul, at a press
conference in Frankfort,
Gage Skidmore 12/30/09
Les Payne
May 24, 2010
Far too much is being made of Rand Paul; and at the expense of the greater threat to civil liberties that African-Americans won on paper only during the mid-1960’s.
Granted, the Republican senate nominee from
However, the bedeviling detail in the pursuit of Rand Paul has the media chase making him something of a scapegoat. Driving out this straight-talking libertarian would not get at the more organized, entrenched, white-racist forces bent on “retaking our country” with stealth.
The little-or-no-government Libertarian Party has
long enjoyed a kook license to crack its pots in obscurity. It has been
dragged out into the light of day now, as Rand Paul’s distaste for federal
action--even against state-sanctioned racism--has intersected with the
Tea-Party’s drive to make the first black
Unable, or unwilling, to expose the Tea Baggers’ racism by euphemisms, the corporate media could not ignore the blunt spoken bigotry of Rand Paul the libertarian.
Even here, it took the counter-cultured Rachel Maddow, of the somewhat irregular MSNBC, to nail Paul with his own words Wednesday night. By the weekend, much of corporate media, including the New York Times, had confirmed in the Tea Party what had been exposed under the smirk and glower of Rachel Maddow.
This racial defect clearly had been a key, motivating factor for...
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A panel of experts on Ethiopian
visual arts will discuss aspects of the cultural, political, social, and
economic forces that have influenced its people and the evolution of their
unique art.
Noted scholar, Achamyeleh Debela, an
artist himself with a brilliant international reputation, will participate,
along with professor Yemane Demissie, of NYU, and Bill Karg, a local art
dealer. Filmmaker Haile Gerima, whose latest work, “Teza, is currently running
in selected theaters, has also been invited.
An exhibit of some 60 ETHIOPIAN
paintings from
TIME: Saturday, May 8, 1pm-2:30pm
PLACE: Theater,
Panelists: Achamyeleh Debela, PhD,
Professor Yemane Demissie, of
NYU
Bill Karg,

Les Payne
April 19, 2010
The “overwhelming majority of supporters” of the Tea Party reveal themselves as likely racist, according to data in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
This point was not made in the Times headlines saluting the supporters as simply “wealthier and more educated” than the general public. Nor did the story draw such a conclusion. However, the “detailed look at the profiles and attitudes” of the tea baggers went beyond anecdotal musings to indicate that their total dismissal of the 44th U.S. President has less to do with policy than with his race.
Nailing this broad-based sentiment among whites in deep denial about race is never easy. However, poll questions have been designed to detect a prevalence of racism among respondents.
Newsday once subjected white Long Islanders to
the
The
A recent Tea Party rally at the state office building in
Question #47 put to the tea-baggers about President Obama is a variation of the standard poll query used to test white respondents for racism:
“Do you think Barack Obama shares the values most Americans try to live by, or doesn’t?”
Some 75 percent of the Tea Party supporters--with little to go on other than that Obama is black--slammed the duly-elected U.S. President as living by a different....
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Les Payne
April 11, 2010
When the editor of Newsday phoned to say that I had not won the international Pulitzer Prize for my reporting from South Africa, I snubbed it off until he explained that the ’78 “selection committee” had indeed selected me as the winner.
Thus, I had lost the Pulitzer Prize.
The Advisory Board, headed by the President of Columbia University—which had been the target of determined anti-apartheid student demonstrations--gave no reason for taking away my Pulitzer for reporting on the Soweto uprising. Not surprisingly, this ruling clique gave it to the New York Times, a heavy contributor to the Pulitzer operation in terms both of finance and manpower. (The day may yet arrive when the Times get hauled in under the RICO statute for acting in concert with the Pulitzer Board.)
I recovered sufficiently to tell Editor Tony Insolia on the
phone that my Rhodesia-Zimbabwe series, which Newsday had just published in
’78, was even stronger than the 11-part
Meanwhile, the Pulitzer selection committee, led by Chairman William E. Chilton, III, got angry at being over-ruled and went public—about my lost Pulitzer. It was by no means the first over-turn, there had been others that year; however, Chilton III was the first panelist to dare ignite a scandal over the issue.
The outcry of the International panel held that, as with other committees, the four editors drawn from across the country had been led to believe that they were indeed judging the 60 foreign entries to select a winner. They laid the deception at the feet of the Pulitzer Board.
Newsday loosed its intrepid media specialist onto the scandal and gained access to the Pulitzer Archives. The resulting series of Tom Collins’ reporting didn’t relieve me of my notions about the corrupt practices of the Board and the New York Times. It did, however, inspire certain reforms.
What I did not discover until recently was that my judgment
to the editor about the strength of my

President Barack Obama signs landmark health care
legislation into law Tuesday, March 23. White House Photo, Pete Souza, 3/23/10
Les Payne
March 24, 2010
The president who campaigns with the big speech used 22 pens Tuesday in signing the historic health care bill that proved he can govern with the outreach as well as the arm twist.
Applying torque at the last minute to reluctant members of
his own party, President Obama eclipsed the 216 House votes needed to sign into
law what some call the most sweeping health overhaul since Medicare. The
controversy became reality without a single GOP vote, and this after
Obama exhausted all means to reason with the party—even trekking in January to
the caves of the House Republicans' retreat in
Some have long considered Obama’s outreach to the GOP a fool’s errand; but it has now exposed the opposition party as foregoing all claims to common decency. Opting out of the etiquette of patriotism, the Republicans, not unlike Fox interviewer Bret Baier, flatly refuse to extend the minimum courtesies traditionally accorded Obama’s 43 predecessors to the office of the presidency.
It remains to be seen what Obama will make of this total rejection by the GOP; but his dramatic success with health care seems to have narrowed the gap with the progressive wing of his own party. Some Democrats were brought around with promises. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the reluctant radical with no known, sell-out price, had to be walked to the precipice and made to peer over into the abyss.
The
Last week the dissenting Kucinich was visited by President
Obama who staged public rallies in
In the White House parlance, this is called....
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