Frank Joyce

Many are marking 2019 as the 400^th anniversary of the arrival of the first captured Africans in Jamestown. So, even more than usual, we will hear chattel slavery referred to as the nation’s original sin.

It isn’t.

That framing is itself a window into the white way of thinking. It’s meant to perpetuate the mythologies of Christianity That doctrine incorporates the belief that humans are flawed, weak and often badly behaved. And, since that’s God given, it will always be true.

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I have never talked with anyone knowledgeable about Harlem affairs who does not believe that Esther James, the woman who sued Adam Clayton Powell for libel, was a bag woman as the Congressman had called her.

The problem is that in order to prove it, since the defense against libel is the truth, Adam Clayton Powell would have had to produce witnesses willing to testify about corruption in the New York Police Department. Where is the policeman who is willing to admit that he took the payments from Esther James? Or that the N.Y. police department runs the numbers racket in Harlem? So when Esther James admitted on the witness stand, as she did that she was a police informer, that in itself was a tacit admission that she was a bag woman.

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As the story goes, Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the bestselling and game changing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “So,” he said, “you’re the little lady who started all the trouble.”

Historian Gerald Horne started some trouble too. His book, The Counter Revolution of 1776, published in 2014, brought into the light of day the long suppressed truth about the so called revolution. More recently, the 1619 Project featured in The New York Times expanded awareness of how much the commitment to enslavement drove the violent secession from British colonial rule.

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The August second primary was almost enough to send one to the political physicists with their slide rules and computers to find out what happened. Why was it such a disaster?

But then we don’t really need political physicists to tell us what happened. We know. Racism, confusion, manipulation, “apathy” and one-dimensional politics happened. What happened is the logical consequence of a political system which for too long has never provided any alternatives for people beyond bright shining faces and good family men. The result is that people did not know that in a few isolated cases there were alternatives or didn’t believe them when they saw them or for other, more complicated reasons, rejected them.

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The following are some random comments and recommendations on the upcoming August 2 primary election races.

It is entirely possible that Recorders Court is the worst criminal court in the United States. Its brand of “justice” has been discussed, exposed and documented in a number of reports, studies and editorials by the daily press.

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One doesn’t expect to read much about spectator sports in the Fifth Estate. The multi-underground nature of professional boxing today, however, makes it and perhaps cock-fighting, an apt subject for followers of deviant American culture. Moreover, there is something of a tradition of writers, self styled or otherwise, commenting at least on heavyweight championships.

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