What's the next step for Black Journalism and NABJ? (originally posted 8/8/11)

“Why is it that we shoud concentrate our writing on the experiences of African American people?”

Dear friends.

For a number of years, there’s been a lot of talk about the demise of Black journalism. The conference of NABJ (National Association of Black Journalists) that was held in Philadelphia last week shows that there is still an opportunity for African American writers in the government- and corporate-controlled media to move something forward. But about what should they write?

It’s interesting that the term journalist is bound to language or words. And as my old friend and colleague Professor Emeka Nwadiora of Temple University has insisted, “Language is thought”.

Of course, the words that we use not only represent our ideas or thoughts, but they also serve, for example, to establish purposive and legally-binding relationships (like two people saying, “I do.” at a marriage ceremony, for instance.)

Now, each cultural group develops its own language, based upon the real experiences of that particular group. For African Americans, our thoughts have been centered around a people who have been and still are attacked as a “marked” group, by another body of people of, mostly, European descent, who mean-spiritedly call themselves “white” in order to form an artificial “majority” group.

Yet, if these same European Americans called themselves by their cultural names - e.g., Italian American, Irish American, and so forth, African Americans wouldn’t be seen as such a marked group or “minority”.

Nevertheless, especially since the end of the North American Civil War, the newfound freedom of our African ancestors has led us to continue to fight for genuine liberation. The battle has taken basically two different forms. They are: 1) Resistance. 2) Accommodation.

Beginning in the 1950s, the latter of the two became acceptable to the artificial majority’s government- and corporate-controlled media, but, unfortunately, that “accommodating” Civil Rights Movement is now being used to represent all of the battles of African Americans in the history of this country. They are even calling a great warrior like Malcolm X a civil rights leader.

Even worse, due to the racist arrogance of the aforementioned artificial majority, a White Supremacist Movement called the Gay Rights Movement (as if anyone can claim such a staunch “identity” with something as precarious, if not frivolous, as the human sexual appetite) is now being clumped in with the African American Civil Rights Movement
(which itself only represented about 15 years of our centuries-long struggle for equality, dignity, and justice.) Huh? How do you place the centuries-long struggle of African American people in the same category as preponderantly European American men, claiming to be a “minority”, who, based upon power and sexual greed, identify themselves by their genitals, as they pierce other men’s anuses with their erections? “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” (where’s Tina Turner when you need her?)

Meanwhile, beginning with slave revolts on enslavers' ships, on the Atlantic Ocean, that caused the creation of maroon societies like the country of Surinam on the northern border of South America, to the slave revolts on the Southern plantations of North America led by folks with names like Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner, to name a few, to a warrior queen named Harriet Tubman, to tens of thousands of African American warriors who fought with guns and helped end slavery, as well as, later, another warrior queen named Ida B. Wells, to Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa" Movement, and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, to the Republic of New Africa, and the Black Panther Party, along with many, many more “resisters” of the Black Liberation Movement that began when the very first African was brought to these shores, not when Martin King became the voice of “civil rights”, there has continued to be a part of Our Movement that has been based upon a well-deserved hostility and resentment to our oppression.

During the past 50 years, there have been Black journalists who have worked solely for the government- and corporate-controlled media. However, the majority of Black journalists have worked for publications like Ebony Magazine, and nationally-distributed newspapers like Muhammad Speaks (followed by The Final Call) and the now defunct Black Panther. There have also been and are national, regional, and local publications that have featured the wisdom and work of Black journalists who have really tried to – and still do - inform and inspire African American people.

So where is the National Association of Black Journalists, as all this has been occurring? Why, they had a LOVE Party and a golf tournament in Philly. That’s very informative. On top of that, Eric Holder, Obama's chief Tom in law enforcement, gave a speech. That's crazy! This is the same Obama administration that boycotted the Durban Review Conference on Racism, but Holder can come and glad hand in Philly at the NABJ conference. Go figure.

Actually, NABJ grew out of the Black Consciousness Movement (@1965-85) – NOT the Civil Rights Movement that died with King. At any rate, we should never expect very much from mainstream media people, African American or European American.

To be sure, some will argue: Well, the market controls everything...We have to keep our jobs.

If that’s the case, then Black journalists, especially in the age of the Internet, may consider creating a market for African Americans that is based upon us controlling our own process of social reproduction or political economy, as opposed to allowing, as Professor Lloyd Hogan has said, “alien marauders” to continue controlling that aforesaid process, while oppressing and exploiting us.

Most of all, Black journalists, as a whole, must begin to inform and inspire African American people, by emphasizing the beauty that we have created and can continue making, as we begin to develop loving and prosperous communities that are filled with educated, industrious people.

“Liberation!” - Dr. Barbara Love

G. Djata Bumpus